🗨 Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views. ~~William F Buckley
↑↑ Didn't age admirably well: the leftist hegemon no longer even pretends to claim to want ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The main point of real-world political argument is to draw people out, to identify enemies and friends and to edify supporters. It is useful to understand how to argue, but essential to know that arguments need to be addressed towards those who are capable of changing sides.
The Right now largely exists as a foil for the Left and a safe-space for dissenters to harmlessly expend energy that might otherwise disrupt the system. Should the regime fail, the legacy of the existing Right will be raided to provide ideological props for whatever comes next, but the successor regime will owe a great deal to the current one.
Few of today's dissenters can expect vindication, even fewer empowerment of any kind. History is not an exam. The fact that we have gotten some things right will not necessarily confer any political advantage in the future. The dissidents in the old USSR did not end up running post-Soviet Russia. There is no reason to believe that American dissidents will fare any differently.
💬 The dissidents in the old USSR did not end up running post-Soviet Russia.
Yeah sure no doubt—yet Czech[oslovakia] & Poland are happy to provide a counterexample 😉 And this double whammy of Václav Havel & Lech Wałęsa is not exhaustive by any means in post-soviet space 🤷
As I understand it, Vaclav Havel was a token figure. He played a ceremonial role in politics. Re Poland, plenty of Soldarity members did indeed end up running things, so you are 100% right. But the Czech Republic and Poland are political sideshows...the main game is in the former USSR (strategic centres like Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan especially), which is why I was referring to the USSR and not the Warsaw Bloc as a whole. And in Russia the ex-dissidents played no appreciable role in mass politics.
My point is that dissenters and dissidents who are prepping for post-regime careers as saviours of humanity are in for a shock. I think this is worth making.
Ideological dissidence is almost never a path to power for those engaging in it, although it can be - Vaclav Havel comes to mind. That's much more exception than rule.
What it can do, in the longer term, is affect the ideological direction of society indirectly. What matter who holds power now, when their grandchildren's hearts will be inspired not by them, but by the dissidents of today? Historically that happens remarkably often.
I am not sure that I'd want to be governed by any of today's dissidents, even the ones I agree with. The best that can be said for any of us is that we were (or are) ill-adapted to Leviathan's needs. This is not enough to secure the Mandate of Heaven and it won't necessarily inspire later generations.
The ideological direction is in the gift of the future. It is unknowable, though we can always speculate. As for grandchildren, the birth dearth takes many of them out of the equation.
The great role of today's dissidents IMO is to chose wisely over what we seek to preserve and to disrupt Leviathan by encouraging people to develop expectations that suit their own needs. Developing capacity and forming the nuclei of the tribes and nations of the future. Marriages, children, friendships will (and should) be more important than pamphleteering or winning arguments. Teaching kids how to play a musical instrument or perfect a craft skill should take priority over any ideology. The emergent tribes/nations may very well be quite unlike the ones we know now.
"I am not sure that I'd want to be governed by any of today's dissidents, even the ones I agree with."
This of course is why there tends to be relatively little turnover in the bureaucracy, even after a revolution. Most of them aren't really ideologues, they're administrators, and this is a very different skillset.
I see our function as primarily scholarly and artistic, rather than mainly political.
I'd be interested in an update on this perspective. Has anything changed in the years since you wrote this analysis? From where I'm sitting, I think the right has gotten much better at rhetorical warfare, while at the same time the left has gotten worse at it (woke Hollywood is shit propaganda, for instance), and yet their grip on institutional power has become all the tighter and more rabid. Things have, in other words, intensified from where they were were a few years ago. Or so it seems to me.
"But what many people on our side don’t realise is how fragile this hold really is. However, the Left does. That is why they work so assiduously to suppress the genuine Right."
This reminds me of what a certain German party leader observed in the 1920s:
---------------------------
If Social Democracy is opposed by a doctrine of greater truth, but equal brutality of methods, the latter will conquer, though this may require the bitterest struggle.
I understood the infamous spiritual terror which this movement exerts, particularly on the bourgeoisie, which is neither morally nor mentally equal to such attacks; at a given sign it unleashes a veritable barrage of lies and slanders against whatever adversary seems most dangerous, until the nerves of the attacked persons break down and, just to have peace again, they sacrifice the hated individual.
Since the Social Democrats best know the value of force from their own experience, they most violently attack those in whose nature they detect any of this substance which is so rare. Conversely, they praise every weakling on the opposing side, sometimes cautiously, sometimes loudly, depending on the real or supposed quality of his intelligence.
They know how to create the illusion that this is the only way of preserving the peace, and at the same time, stealthily but steadily, they conquer one position after another, sometimes by silent blackmail, sometimes by actual theft, at moments when the general attention is directed toward other matters, and either does not want to be disturbed or considers the matter too small to raise a stir about, thus again irritating the vicious antagonist.
This is a tactic based on precise calculation of all human weaknesses, and its result will lead to success with almost mathematical certainty unless the opposing side learns to combat poison gas with poison gas.
It is our duty to inform all weaklings that this is a question of to be or not to be.
Terror at the place of employment, in the factory, in the meeting hall, and on the occasion of mass demonstrations will always be successful unless opposed by equal terror.
I didn't post the whole quote I see, here is the rest. You can see all this in our own time. Especially how they single out some men on the Right for attack, until the rest of the Right drops them in the hope of gaining peace. They always single out those men who understand what it is the Left is doing.
---------------------------
Terror at the place of employment, in the factory, in the meeting hall, and on the occasion of mass demonstrations will always be successful unless opposed by equal terror.
Then of course the Party will raise a horrified outcry, yelling blue murder and appealing to the authority of the State, which they have just repudiated. In doing this their aim generally is to add to the general confusion, so that they may have a better opportunity of reaching their own goal unobserved. Their idea is to find among the higher government officials some bovine creature who, in the stupid hope that he may win the good graces of these awe-inspiring opponents so that they may remember him in case of future eventualities, will help them now to break all those who may oppose this world pest.
The impression which such successful tactics make on the minds of the broad masses, whether they be adherents or opponents, can be estimated only by one who knows the popular mind, not from books but from practical life. For the successes which are thus obtained are taken by the adherents of Social Democracy as a triumphant symbol of the righteousness of their own cause; on the other hand the beaten opponent very often loses faith in the effectiveness of any further resistance.
The more I understood the methods of physical intimidation that were employed, the more sympathy I had for the multitude that had succumbed to it.
Reminds me of what someone wrote about the early socialism: When industrialism came (thanks to Western technology, you're welcome), so that people could produce more than just subsistence level, the socialists said that everything above subsistence level should be distributed by the government. But they couldn't find a way to make this work without taking away all incentive to produce more than you yourself need, and it would completely destroy competition. So they had lost the argument. Then Marx came along and declared that no argument was necessary, because the opponents were The Enemy and needed to be destroyed, not argued with.
The Right is focused on building, the Left is focused on taking. This explains everything. It is why the Right wants the right measurements of things, including of individuals and groups of people. The Left will hide the right measurements precisely to get the votes of those individuals and groups. That flatters them. And it provides an excuse: Your failures are not due to your own laziness and characteristics, since all are equal. So your failures can only be because of oppression. That justifies our taking from the oppressors.
Socialism is a method for exploiting elections. Vote for us so we get the well-paid seats, and we'll give you as much free money and reduced work as possible. (The Left is by definition called socialism, and always has been. Americans wrongly call this "liberalism" because the U.S. Left hijacked that right-wing word after WWII, and Americans just go along with what the media tell them.)
Also relevant, we live in a surveillance state where the NSA is tapping every digital communication. Any effective underground action would be retroactively traced by the Panopticon.
That's the current status quo — but as poverty and desperation rises, the calculus will change.
Essentially conservatives are running out of territory where they can retreat. You have Antifa in black ski masks holding rifles in small towns in Texas, guarding drag queen shows for children. That kind of provocation can only go on so long... this is a temporary social phase state before a new equilibrium is reached.
I think we spend to much time focused on trying to win arguments with people to far gone into the progressive mindset while ignoring those folks wandering around in the middle and those who are already ideologically allied with us.
Even those on our side who think of themselves as conservatives practice behavior that is detrimental to our cause. Conservatives who would readily agree that China and progressive billionaires like Jeff Bezos are threats to us still have Amazon packages full of cheap Chinese products showing up on their doorsteps 1-7 days a week. They still employ Amazon Web Services to run their websites.
Conservatives are still spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to send their kids off to let college professors give their brains a good scrub down so they can return home loathing their evil Trump loving parents.
Many local school boards across the vast red areas in our country are controlled by deep blue insurgents who are focused on corrupting our youth. The progressives will never have to contend with any arguments from the leftist-tainted child of the conservative parent. Perhaps we are screwed on national level voting but drumming out the groomers from our local school boards shouldn't be too difficult but somehow it is.
I'm in deep red Montana where we hold elections for school board and levies at times of the year when no one is paying attention. This has been a disaster which has inevitably resulted in transgender bathrooms at the local middle school in an area where most people don't want it. We don't need to win a difficult argument with a whackjob progressive who is immune to logic to correct the problem. We just have to spend a little more time convincing those on our side and those in the middle.
We have been conditioned to believe that it is impolite to talk about politics or religion so have abstained from level headed discourse with level headed people on those subjects. I don't think it is an accident that our country has declined in those areas with that mindset being in wide acceptance. We need to stop being the silent majority.
Conservatives who would readily agree that China and progressive billionaires like Jeff Bezos are threats to us still have Amazon packages full of cheap Chinese products showing up on their doorsteps 1-7 days a week. They still employ Amazon Web Services to run their websites.
In my experience, most conservatives love to run their mouth but will do anything to avoid changing their comfortable lifestyle. Politics is derived from culture, and culture is derived from the sum of many individual actions. Unless people are prepared to make sacrifices in their day to day lives (if you can even call quitting Amazon a sacrifice), nothing will change.
The Alternative Intelligence wraps itself in neo-leftism, but it’s the fist pure and simple that we must face. There can be no argument because it destroys meaning and language and truth at every turn. And it can’t be resisted by force. There is only non-engagement. The old beliefs, the old paradigms, with which we’ve been programmed, need to be let go of. Only a pure and simple truth need be spoken and lived.
Progressivism has more in common with militant Jihad than liberalism. Deconstruction to the point of "you will own nothing, and we will tell you what you can eat, what you can wear and how you will live."
🗨 Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views. ~~William F Buckley
↑↑ Didn't age admirably well: the leftist hegemon no longer even pretends to claim to want ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
--
ETA Speaking of unfortunate ageing, check out what woke/wokeness stand in for in linked neociceroniantimes.wordpress.com/2017/08/15/charlottesville-was-a-massive-4gw-failure 😂 Half a dozen years feel like aeons 😔
Man. I remember when woke was used in that way. How time flies in our accelerated age.
The main point of real-world political argument is to draw people out, to identify enemies and friends and to edify supporters. It is useful to understand how to argue, but essential to know that arguments need to be addressed towards those who are capable of changing sides.
The Right now largely exists as a foil for the Left and a safe-space for dissenters to harmlessly expend energy that might otherwise disrupt the system. Should the regime fail, the legacy of the existing Right will be raided to provide ideological props for whatever comes next, but the successor regime will owe a great deal to the current one.
Few of today's dissenters can expect vindication, even fewer empowerment of any kind. History is not an exam. The fact that we have gotten some things right will not necessarily confer any political advantage in the future. The dissidents in the old USSR did not end up running post-Soviet Russia. There is no reason to believe that American dissidents will fare any differently.
💬 The dissidents in the old USSR did not end up running post-Soviet Russia.
Yeah sure no doubt—yet Czech[oslovakia] & Poland are happy to provide a counterexample 😉 And this double whammy of Václav Havel & Lech Wałęsa is not exhaustive by any means in post-soviet space 🤷
As I understand it, Vaclav Havel was a token figure. He played a ceremonial role in politics. Re Poland, plenty of Soldarity members did indeed end up running things, so you are 100% right. But the Czech Republic and Poland are political sideshows...the main game is in the former USSR (strategic centres like Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan especially), which is why I was referring to the USSR and not the Warsaw Bloc as a whole. And in Russia the ex-dissidents played no appreciable role in mass politics.
My point is that dissenters and dissidents who are prepping for post-regime careers as saviours of humanity are in for a shock. I think this is worth making.
Ideological dissidence is almost never a path to power for those engaging in it, although it can be - Vaclav Havel comes to mind. That's much more exception than rule.
What it can do, in the longer term, is affect the ideological direction of society indirectly. What matter who holds power now, when their grandchildren's hearts will be inspired not by them, but by the dissidents of today? Historically that happens remarkably often.
I am not sure that I'd want to be governed by any of today's dissidents, even the ones I agree with. The best that can be said for any of us is that we were (or are) ill-adapted to Leviathan's needs. This is not enough to secure the Mandate of Heaven and it won't necessarily inspire later generations.
The ideological direction is in the gift of the future. It is unknowable, though we can always speculate. As for grandchildren, the birth dearth takes many of them out of the equation.
The great role of today's dissidents IMO is to chose wisely over what we seek to preserve and to disrupt Leviathan by encouraging people to develop expectations that suit their own needs. Developing capacity and forming the nuclei of the tribes and nations of the future. Marriages, children, friendships will (and should) be more important than pamphleteering or winning arguments. Teaching kids how to play a musical instrument or perfect a craft skill should take priority over any ideology. The emergent tribes/nations may very well be quite unlike the ones we know now.
"I am not sure that I'd want to be governed by any of today's dissidents, even the ones I agree with."
This of course is why there tends to be relatively little turnover in the bureaucracy, even after a revolution. Most of them aren't really ideologues, they're administrators, and this is a very different skillset.
I see our function as primarily scholarly and artistic, rather than mainly political.
I'd be interested in an update on this perspective. Has anything changed in the years since you wrote this analysis? From where I'm sitting, I think the right has gotten much better at rhetorical warfare, while at the same time the left has gotten worse at it (woke Hollywood is shit propaganda, for instance), and yet their grip on institutional power has become all the tighter and more rabid. Things have, in other words, intensified from where they were were a few years ago. Or so it seems to me.
This is my third most popular post. Conservatives need to build a counter-revolution, because the woke revolution is one, by any means necessary.
https://williamhunterduncan.substack.com/p/a-conservative-counter-revolution
"But what many people on our side don’t realise is how fragile this hold really is. However, the Left does. That is why they work so assiduously to suppress the genuine Right."
This reminds me of what a certain German party leader observed in the 1920s:
---------------------------
If Social Democracy is opposed by a doctrine of greater truth, but equal brutality of methods, the latter will conquer, though this may require the bitterest struggle.
I understood the infamous spiritual terror which this movement exerts, particularly on the bourgeoisie, which is neither morally nor mentally equal to such attacks; at a given sign it unleashes a veritable barrage of lies and slanders against whatever adversary seems most dangerous, until the nerves of the attacked persons break down and, just to have peace again, they sacrifice the hated individual.
Since the Social Democrats best know the value of force from their own experience, they most violently attack those in whose nature they detect any of this substance which is so rare. Conversely, they praise every weakling on the opposing side, sometimes cautiously, sometimes loudly, depending on the real or supposed quality of his intelligence.
They know how to create the illusion that this is the only way of preserving the peace, and at the same time, stealthily but steadily, they conquer one position after another, sometimes by silent blackmail, sometimes by actual theft, at moments when the general attention is directed toward other matters, and either does not want to be disturbed or considers the matter too small to raise a stir about, thus again irritating the vicious antagonist.
This is a tactic based on precise calculation of all human weaknesses, and its result will lead to success with almost mathematical certainty unless the opposing side learns to combat poison gas with poison gas.
It is our duty to inform all weaklings that this is a question of to be or not to be.
Terror at the place of employment, in the factory, in the meeting hall, and on the occasion of mass demonstrations will always be successful unless opposed by equal terror.
I didn't post the whole quote I see, here is the rest. You can see all this in our own time. Especially how they single out some men on the Right for attack, until the rest of the Right drops them in the hope of gaining peace. They always single out those men who understand what it is the Left is doing.
---------------------------
Terror at the place of employment, in the factory, in the meeting hall, and on the occasion of mass demonstrations will always be successful unless opposed by equal terror.
Then of course the Party will raise a horrified outcry, yelling blue murder and appealing to the authority of the State, which they have just repudiated. In doing this their aim generally is to add to the general confusion, so that they may have a better opportunity of reaching their own goal unobserved. Their idea is to find among the higher government officials some bovine creature who, in the stupid hope that he may win the good graces of these awe-inspiring opponents so that they may remember him in case of future eventualities, will help them now to break all those who may oppose this world pest.
The impression which such successful tactics make on the minds of the broad masses, whether they be adherents or opponents, can be estimated only by one who knows the popular mind, not from books but from practical life. For the successes which are thus obtained are taken by the adherents of Social Democracy as a triumphant symbol of the righteousness of their own cause; on the other hand the beaten opponent very often loses faith in the effectiveness of any further resistance.
The more I understood the methods of physical intimidation that were employed, the more sympathy I had for the multitude that had succumbed to it.
Reminds me of what someone wrote about the early socialism: When industrialism came (thanks to Western technology, you're welcome), so that people could produce more than just subsistence level, the socialists said that everything above subsistence level should be distributed by the government. But they couldn't find a way to make this work without taking away all incentive to produce more than you yourself need, and it would completely destroy competition. So they had lost the argument. Then Marx came along and declared that no argument was necessary, because the opponents were The Enemy and needed to be destroyed, not argued with.
The Right is focused on building, the Left is focused on taking. This explains everything. It is why the Right wants the right measurements of things, including of individuals and groups of people. The Left will hide the right measurements precisely to get the votes of those individuals and groups. That flatters them. And it provides an excuse: Your failures are not due to your own laziness and characteristics, since all are equal. So your failures can only be because of oppression. That justifies our taking from the oppressors.
Socialism is a method for exploiting elections. Vote for us so we get the well-paid seats, and we'll give you as much free money and reduced work as possible. (The Left is by definition called socialism, and always has been. Americans wrongly call this "liberalism" because the U.S. Left hijacked that right-wing word after WWII, and Americans just go along with what the media tell them.)
Factor in that the US government is spending $500 million per year on FBI informants.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/11/18/fbi-and-other-agencies-paid-informants-548-million-in-recent-years-with-many-committing-authorized-crimes/?sh=2fb982e9f4dd
Also relevant, we live in a surveillance state where the NSA is tapping every digital communication. Any effective underground action would be retroactively traced by the Panopticon.
That's the current status quo — but as poverty and desperation rises, the calculus will change.
Essentially conservatives are running out of territory where they can retreat. You have Antifa in black ski masks holding rifles in small towns in Texas, guarding drag queen shows for children. That kind of provocation can only go on so long... this is a temporary social phase state before a new equilibrium is reached.
I think we spend to much time focused on trying to win arguments with people to far gone into the progressive mindset while ignoring those folks wandering around in the middle and those who are already ideologically allied with us.
Even those on our side who think of themselves as conservatives practice behavior that is detrimental to our cause. Conservatives who would readily agree that China and progressive billionaires like Jeff Bezos are threats to us still have Amazon packages full of cheap Chinese products showing up on their doorsteps 1-7 days a week. They still employ Amazon Web Services to run their websites.
Conservatives are still spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to send their kids off to let college professors give their brains a good scrub down so they can return home loathing their evil Trump loving parents.
Many local school boards across the vast red areas in our country are controlled by deep blue insurgents who are focused on corrupting our youth. The progressives will never have to contend with any arguments from the leftist-tainted child of the conservative parent. Perhaps we are screwed on national level voting but drumming out the groomers from our local school boards shouldn't be too difficult but somehow it is.
I'm in deep red Montana where we hold elections for school board and levies at times of the year when no one is paying attention. This has been a disaster which has inevitably resulted in transgender bathrooms at the local middle school in an area where most people don't want it. We don't need to win a difficult argument with a whackjob progressive who is immune to logic to correct the problem. We just have to spend a little more time convincing those on our side and those in the middle.
We have been conditioned to believe that it is impolite to talk about politics or religion so have abstained from level headed discourse with level headed people on those subjects. I don't think it is an accident that our country has declined in those areas with that mindset being in wide acceptance. We need to stop being the silent majority.
Conservatives who would readily agree that China and progressive billionaires like Jeff Bezos are threats to us still have Amazon packages full of cheap Chinese products showing up on their doorsteps 1-7 days a week. They still employ Amazon Web Services to run their websites.
In my experience, most conservatives love to run their mouth but will do anything to avoid changing their comfortable lifestyle. Politics is derived from culture, and culture is derived from the sum of many individual actions. Unless people are prepared to make sacrifices in their day to day lives (if you can even call quitting Amazon a sacrifice), nothing will change.
The Alternative Intelligence wraps itself in neo-leftism, but it’s the fist pure and simple that we must face. There can be no argument because it destroys meaning and language and truth at every turn. And it can’t be resisted by force. There is only non-engagement. The old beliefs, the old paradigms, with which we’ve been programmed, need to be let go of. Only a pure and simple truth need be spoken and lived.
Progressivism has more in common with militant Jihad than liberalism. Deconstruction to the point of "you will own nothing, and we will tell you what you can eat, what you can wear and how you will live."