Been a while since I read it, but the modern progressive reminds me of Hazel Motes in WiseBlood with his "Holy Church of Christ Without Christ,". You see this with Harry Potter, who love all the trappings of historical Britain while simultaneously wanting to tear it all down. It's like arguing a person will be more complete once we rip his pesky heart out of his body.
Great post and great to have you back Dave, hope all well. Summarises both Harry Potter and where we are in discourse with the left right now extremely well
With the exception of midwit libs and suburbanites, the public is losing faith in authority and institutions. So when your Professor resorts to arguments from authority he is remodeling a house on a foundation already destroyed.
Thank you for the post. My wife is a Harry Potter fan and it's sometikes important to serve these arguments in a way that's palatable to normie millenials.
"the imperative of love. Here, I don’t just mean love for each other and our families, but love for higher things, chief among them Truth, the virtue of sincere curiosity"
Is this conclusion not an endorsement of the Rowling perspective? Is it substantially different than "love conquers all?" HP is a woo-woo Boomer-ish take on Christianity with evil conceived of as Promethean ambition (immortality & absolute dominion). Rowling for some inexplicable reason (presumably just the default of her worldview) associates this evil with late 20th century American liberal ideas about racism. I think this is more superficial to the books moral perspective, which is why the Malfoy redemption arc is quite easy to identify and why he and Slytherin house are acceptable in the end.
I've interacted with McManus and was less than impressed. It is evident to me that he's not particularly interested in truth at least not publicly. To me, he argued that America's economic growth was more owed to public schooling promoting literacy than market dynamics (literacy was seeded and spread in the Anglosphere by the Protestant Reformation), and also was attempting to make arguments about political economy predicated on the labor theory of value.
I feel like Twilight deserves mention as well. Also, didn't it have a little bit of a red state fan base? I definitely remember that being a thing. It'd be neat to know how that affected a bunch of North Dakota Bellas. Also, I think Hunger Games has a lot in common with right wing ideas of rebellion, specifically how easy it's supposed to be to show those effete snobs in the capital. I realize neither had anything like the staying power of Harry Potter, but I'd love to hear what you have to say on them.
The YA sewer is your best beat, Dave. I love all your commentary, but I save and rewatch/reread all your stuff on 2000's culture rot.
Seems to me everyone is walking away from the ending with one of two conclusions.
1. Dave is saying that dissidents need to move away from racial politics.
2. Dave is tacitly endorsing Slytherin's goals.
There's a rather telling youtube comment about how the based thing about House Elves is that they like being slaves. Option 2 seems to be what most of Dave's non-lurker followers see, or want to see, in Dave.
Personally I prefer option 1, but I don't think I can really tell which one he is actually going for, and this is what bugs me about the dissident right. Other than wingnats, no one wants to put all their cards on the table, because we all know there are a lot of visions on the right regarding race, and many of them would result in incompatible worlds doomed to fight each other. Lots of people want to talk about race realism, but not really say exactly what they think that is or what they want to do about it. Not because we're really worried about being censored, but because it's a scissor which creates a clear friend enemy distinction.
Frankly I think whichever way Dave leans his followers would be better served by him showing his hand a little less subtly.
I suspect but can't prove that Dave is really trying to say that he acknowledges the reasons people by into indentarian politics but that the old identies are dead and new ones will have to be forged. Having based minorities means having allies, not slaves. That the minorities aren't the Left's allies but their slaves. However, even if this is what Dave means or something similar, I doubt the "racepilled" sorts are usually capable of understanding this line of reasoning.
"Indeed, progressives are experiencing a real emotional reaction that tells them that these ideas are evil. But they misidentify the source of this reaction as a new development on the right, when really it is a new development on the left. Progressives are experiencing a metastization of their own leftist worldview from its considerate liberal origins to a revolutionary puritanical hysteria. And now, as the new attitude of the left creeps forward, it identifies ever more broad elements of human thought to be heretical and morally unacceptable."
This may be true, but I find some faults with much of what you say in this article, and I believe most of these faults have their origin in a misunderstanding regarding how this shift occurred. I cannot find much within what you wrote that points to how the open-minded and liberal left transitioned to a dogmatic and seemingly irrational force, but the work you do in approaching or hovering over this question seems to get everything backwards. You argue that the religious and intolerant nature of today's institutional left has led to the mismanagement of many political and social issues since they have blinded themselves to their ability to be wrong and their adversaries to be right. I believe the opposite is the case.
The key factor to consider here is frankly the internet. It has been credited with polarization due to people's ability to dive deep within an echo-chamber until the light of honest discourse never reaches them. In reality, the internet has allowed for large swaths of people to encounter a multitude of bursts of information they would have never seen before. People are becoming more aware of the problems that beset our nations and many are starting to investigate how these problems came to be. The modern left has to insulate itself from this process of observation and diagnosis by quadrupling down on some shared and immutable set of beliefs which acts as their only salvation from the various boogeymen of "racism," "colonialism," "sexism," transphobia," etc.
Those who want to attain and maintain power always work with inflexible terminal values but flexible instrumental values. They will transition to having an open and enlightened message to an authoritarian and narrow message if it suits the same ultimate goals, and this new approach of cultivating a steadfast base of often insane footsoldiers is certainly the best option they have left. When the average person is faced with the realities of the world rejecting their nation's influence, stagnation within the sciences, the hollowing out of art, the breakdown of their communities, rising deaths due to despair and violence, less money in their account every year, etc. they must either face these truths on their own grounds or retreat into the glow of some pseudo-spiritual rapture which blinds them to the patently obvious.
As a side-note, I find that reactionaries too often reverse this scheme: they have inflexible instrumental values while constantly re-evaluating terminal values. They way they approach ideas, conversations, politics, personal action, etc. are always the same regardless of how this ultimately affects their lives or how the world changes around them. However, whether or not the reactionary will be a Tradcath tomorrow, orthodox the next, perhaps Nietzschean next week, or even Sufi further into the future is anyone's guess.
Now, returning to the prior idea, I must also explain the context I place this whole internet phenomenon in. Before the internet, one's world and life were rather small affairs for the average person. The problems slowly chipping away at our civilization were less noticeable, and if he/she did notice one or two of those problems they could be easily dismissed as rare or endemic to your place and time. One certainly didn't feel to strong of a need to throw themselves into a cult to make sense of or ignore the realities he or she was exposed to. The internet has allowed for an awareness of the continuity and holism of events that happen both locally and globally that's almost impossible to imagine without it. Countless texts, news stories, studies, conversations, etc. can be explored with this tool. Our worlds are bigger and it's nearly impossible for anything to hide from us for too long. Those in power can't fully hide the crime, the lowering of the standard of living, the decline of our culture, the almost impressive drop in our global appeal.
This leads to my primary criticism of this piece: what you (somewhat vaguely) suggest the reader do. Given my view that the widespread dissemination of information has allowed for people to break out of their small bubbles and challenge power in a way previously unthinkable, your call to turn away and inwards strikes me as possibly the worst course of action to take. The weakening of the current power structure has only been made possible by doing the exact opposite. Taking this to a more meta level, I'm not surprised that the mostly "free speech" platform of Substack will allow for reactionary, edgy, HBD, and similar material but will immediately ban figures like Joseph Jordan who actually advocate for putting our knowledge to use in the real world through the means of political organization. What is needed now is for people to band together and directly challenge those in power and their structures which have made most people's lives worse. I know you may say that this strategy is not a solution to the spiritual problem you often write and talk about, but as long as you put political problems on the table for discussion I'll analyze them from a political lens.
To make a crass summary of your third part: those who are of Malfoys kin should commit to crossing the Red Sea, establish the laws of Leviticus to create a new proper culture, and prepare for a generational Desert Wandering until the people are ready to embrace to this new Order.
I think this analysis gives the "New Right" too much leeway and we should hold ourselves to a higher standard. It is difficult to condemn liberals for failing to have solutions to modern problems and then end with a call for the "New Right" to develop solutions. If the New Right doesn't have solutions, what right do we have to criticize?
So let's use the example of African-American racial issues. I think it's fair to critique post-Obama liberals for not really having a solution. Obama wasn't everything MLK promised but it's very hard to square that achievement with widespread BLM riots more than a decade later in the liberal worldview. Fair enough. What's the New Right's solution?
Because I get the feeling there will be some general handwaving about a return to religion, return to the family, and I agree with the theory, but is any of it practical or actionable? There's no US Department of the Family, there's not really specific laws besides handwaving at divorce laws which would a....significant political challenge. There's definitely room for discussion of media and culture but...is anything actionable short of a radical change in the ownership structure of all media or a widespread religious revival? And, even given the most radical powers, bringing the entire US into the Catholic church, do you honestly feel this church, this pope, with this history, is in a position to credibly solve the social and spiritual ills of 300+ million people?
Because that's not the vibe I get. You're not ending on a note of having the right answers, your ending on a note of exploration, of experimentation, of preserving what's good of the past and mixing it with new innovations. If you're struggling to find answers, and I think we are, that's fine, but it's unfair to critique liberals for not having answers you or we ourselves don't have.
But the thing I'm most concerned about is you having a debate with McManus both laying out your positions and issues and then not really addressing the other's position. For example, I think it would be fair to say "Here are the three big concerns of the New Right, do liberals have any credible solution?" And I don't think they do and I think it's very worth holding that ground and pointing out that they have no solutions to what you value. But at some point, McManus gets to say "Here are the three big concerns of the liberals and/or left, does the New Right have any credible solution?" And if you and/or the New Right don't, your criticism falls kinda flat.
Been a while since I read it, but the modern progressive reminds me of Hazel Motes in WiseBlood with his "Holy Church of Christ Without Christ,". You see this with Harry Potter, who love all the trappings of historical Britain while simultaneously wanting to tear it all down. It's like arguing a person will be more complete once we rip his pesky heart out of his body.
Great post and great to have you back Dave, hope all well. Summarises both Harry Potter and where we are in discourse with the left right now extremely well
With the exception of midwit libs and suburbanites, the public is losing faith in authority and institutions. So when your Professor resorts to arguments from authority he is remodeling a house on a foundation already destroyed.
Thank you for the post. My wife is a Harry Potter fan and it's sometikes important to serve these arguments in a way that's palatable to normie millenials.
"the imperative of love. Here, I don’t just mean love for each other and our families, but love for higher things, chief among them Truth, the virtue of sincere curiosity"
Is this conclusion not an endorsement of the Rowling perspective? Is it substantially different than "love conquers all?" HP is a woo-woo Boomer-ish take on Christianity with evil conceived of as Promethean ambition (immortality & absolute dominion). Rowling for some inexplicable reason (presumably just the default of her worldview) associates this evil with late 20th century American liberal ideas about racism. I think this is more superficial to the books moral perspective, which is why the Malfoy redemption arc is quite easy to identify and why he and Slytherin house are acceptable in the end.
I've interacted with McManus and was less than impressed. It is evident to me that he's not particularly interested in truth at least not publicly. To me, he argued that America's economic growth was more owed to public schooling promoting literacy than market dynamics (literacy was seeded and spread in the Anglosphere by the Protestant Reformation), and also was attempting to make arguments about political economy predicated on the labor theory of value.
I feel like Twilight deserves mention as well. Also, didn't it have a little bit of a red state fan base? I definitely remember that being a thing. It'd be neat to know how that affected a bunch of North Dakota Bellas. Also, I think Hunger Games has a lot in common with right wing ideas of rebellion, specifically how easy it's supposed to be to show those effete snobs in the capital. I realize neither had anything like the staying power of Harry Potter, but I'd love to hear what you have to say on them.
The YA sewer is your best beat, Dave. I love all your commentary, but I save and rewatch/reread all your stuff on 2000's culture rot.
Seems to me everyone is walking away from the ending with one of two conclusions.
1. Dave is saying that dissidents need to move away from racial politics.
2. Dave is tacitly endorsing Slytherin's goals.
There's a rather telling youtube comment about how the based thing about House Elves is that they like being slaves. Option 2 seems to be what most of Dave's non-lurker followers see, or want to see, in Dave.
Personally I prefer option 1, but I don't think I can really tell which one he is actually going for, and this is what bugs me about the dissident right. Other than wingnats, no one wants to put all their cards on the table, because we all know there are a lot of visions on the right regarding race, and many of them would result in incompatible worlds doomed to fight each other. Lots of people want to talk about race realism, but not really say exactly what they think that is or what they want to do about it. Not because we're really worried about being censored, but because it's a scissor which creates a clear friend enemy distinction.
Frankly I think whichever way Dave leans his followers would be better served by him showing his hand a little less subtly.
I suspect but can't prove that Dave is really trying to say that he acknowledges the reasons people by into indentarian politics but that the old identies are dead and new ones will have to be forged. Having based minorities means having allies, not slaves. That the minorities aren't the Left's allies but their slaves. However, even if this is what Dave means or something similar, I doubt the "racepilled" sorts are usually capable of understanding this line of reasoning.
Thank-you! This provides a clear analysis of our time and points to a realistic path forward. Hopeful. I'll be sharing this.
"Indeed, progressives are experiencing a real emotional reaction that tells them that these ideas are evil. But they misidentify the source of this reaction as a new development on the right, when really it is a new development on the left. Progressives are experiencing a metastization of their own leftist worldview from its considerate liberal origins to a revolutionary puritanical hysteria. And now, as the new attitude of the left creeps forward, it identifies ever more broad elements of human thought to be heretical and morally unacceptable."
This may be true, but I find some faults with much of what you say in this article, and I believe most of these faults have their origin in a misunderstanding regarding how this shift occurred. I cannot find much within what you wrote that points to how the open-minded and liberal left transitioned to a dogmatic and seemingly irrational force, but the work you do in approaching or hovering over this question seems to get everything backwards. You argue that the religious and intolerant nature of today's institutional left has led to the mismanagement of many political and social issues since they have blinded themselves to their ability to be wrong and their adversaries to be right. I believe the opposite is the case.
The key factor to consider here is frankly the internet. It has been credited with polarization due to people's ability to dive deep within an echo-chamber until the light of honest discourse never reaches them. In reality, the internet has allowed for large swaths of people to encounter a multitude of bursts of information they would have never seen before. People are becoming more aware of the problems that beset our nations and many are starting to investigate how these problems came to be. The modern left has to insulate itself from this process of observation and diagnosis by quadrupling down on some shared and immutable set of beliefs which acts as their only salvation from the various boogeymen of "racism," "colonialism," "sexism," transphobia," etc.
Those who want to attain and maintain power always work with inflexible terminal values but flexible instrumental values. They will transition to having an open and enlightened message to an authoritarian and narrow message if it suits the same ultimate goals, and this new approach of cultivating a steadfast base of often insane footsoldiers is certainly the best option they have left. When the average person is faced with the realities of the world rejecting their nation's influence, stagnation within the sciences, the hollowing out of art, the breakdown of their communities, rising deaths due to despair and violence, less money in their account every year, etc. they must either face these truths on their own grounds or retreat into the glow of some pseudo-spiritual rapture which blinds them to the patently obvious.
As a side-note, I find that reactionaries too often reverse this scheme: they have inflexible instrumental values while constantly re-evaluating terminal values. They way they approach ideas, conversations, politics, personal action, etc. are always the same regardless of how this ultimately affects their lives or how the world changes around them. However, whether or not the reactionary will be a Tradcath tomorrow, orthodox the next, perhaps Nietzschean next week, or even Sufi further into the future is anyone's guess.
Now, returning to the prior idea, I must also explain the context I place this whole internet phenomenon in. Before the internet, one's world and life were rather small affairs for the average person. The problems slowly chipping away at our civilization were less noticeable, and if he/she did notice one or two of those problems they could be easily dismissed as rare or endemic to your place and time. One certainly didn't feel to strong of a need to throw themselves into a cult to make sense of or ignore the realities he or she was exposed to. The internet has allowed for an awareness of the continuity and holism of events that happen both locally and globally that's almost impossible to imagine without it. Countless texts, news stories, studies, conversations, etc. can be explored with this tool. Our worlds are bigger and it's nearly impossible for anything to hide from us for too long. Those in power can't fully hide the crime, the lowering of the standard of living, the decline of our culture, the almost impressive drop in our global appeal.
This leads to my primary criticism of this piece: what you (somewhat vaguely) suggest the reader do. Given my view that the widespread dissemination of information has allowed for people to break out of their small bubbles and challenge power in a way previously unthinkable, your call to turn away and inwards strikes me as possibly the worst course of action to take. The weakening of the current power structure has only been made possible by doing the exact opposite. Taking this to a more meta level, I'm not surprised that the mostly "free speech" platform of Substack will allow for reactionary, edgy, HBD, and similar material but will immediately ban figures like Joseph Jordan who actually advocate for putting our knowledge to use in the real world through the means of political organization. What is needed now is for people to band together and directly challenge those in power and their structures which have made most people's lives worse. I know you may say that this strategy is not a solution to the spiritual problem you often write and talk about, but as long as you put political problems on the table for discussion I'll analyze them from a political lens.
This was the most intellectually-stimulating thing I've read in a fair while. Thank you.
To make a crass summary of your third part: those who are of Malfoys kin should commit to crossing the Red Sea, establish the laws of Leviticus to create a new proper culture, and prepare for a generational Desert Wandering until the people are ready to embrace to this new Order.
I think this analysis gives the "New Right" too much leeway and we should hold ourselves to a higher standard. It is difficult to condemn liberals for failing to have solutions to modern problems and then end with a call for the "New Right" to develop solutions. If the New Right doesn't have solutions, what right do we have to criticize?
So let's use the example of African-American racial issues. I think it's fair to critique post-Obama liberals for not really having a solution. Obama wasn't everything MLK promised but it's very hard to square that achievement with widespread BLM riots more than a decade later in the liberal worldview. Fair enough. What's the New Right's solution?
Because I get the feeling there will be some general handwaving about a return to religion, return to the family, and I agree with the theory, but is any of it practical or actionable? There's no US Department of the Family, there's not really specific laws besides handwaving at divorce laws which would a....significant political challenge. There's definitely room for discussion of media and culture but...is anything actionable short of a radical change in the ownership structure of all media or a widespread religious revival? And, even given the most radical powers, bringing the entire US into the Catholic church, do you honestly feel this church, this pope, with this history, is in a position to credibly solve the social and spiritual ills of 300+ million people?
Because that's not the vibe I get. You're not ending on a note of having the right answers, your ending on a note of exploration, of experimentation, of preserving what's good of the past and mixing it with new innovations. If you're struggling to find answers, and I think we are, that's fine, but it's unfair to critique liberals for not having answers you or we ourselves don't have.
But the thing I'm most concerned about is you having a debate with McManus both laying out your positions and issues and then not really addressing the other's position. For example, I think it would be fair to say "Here are the three big concerns of the New Right, do liberals have any credible solution?" And I don't think they do and I think it's very worth holding that ground and pointing out that they have no solutions to what you value. But at some point, McManus gets to say "Here are the three big concerns of the liberals and/or left, does the New Right have any credible solution?" And if you and/or the New Right don't, your criticism falls kinda flat.