Another thing to remember is that most American ‘conservatives’ are, in fact, liberals. America was founded and defined by people imbued with Classical Enlightenment Liberal ideals. Republicans and Libertarians are just an older version of liberal.
But the reverse is also true: most of today’s leftists, and especially the woke left, are decidedly illiberal in their views on free speech, minority civil rights (freedom from government interference), skepticism of authority, freedom of choice (on anything other than reproduction)…
Today’s “conservatives” would be terrified and disgusted by real conservatism, which at least since the Protestant Revolt and then French Revolution is nothing other than counter-revolutionary. Real conservatives—that is, counter-revolutionaries—reject religious freedom, freedom of speech, democracy, equality, free markets…. In short, real conservatives are what is now known—since the Judas Council of Vatican II—as “traditional” Catholics. In other words, they’re actual Catholics. Thus, in addition to all of the above and more, they reject Antipope Francis and the Novus Ordo Antichurch he leads.
White Identity Nationalism is the whitepill in your darkified scenario.
Populism will succeed succeed in the US in the short run because populism always succeeds in the US in the short run. Over the long haul, these short-term victories embed deep changes in the body politic that create a barrier to further incursions. The legibility of populist movements are not where their real power lie. The real power of populism lies in its opacity to central power, to the perpetuation and expansion of a culture that is outside any authority that is not *earned*. Before you give up on 'populism', I suggest you apprise yourself of the insights on 'the masses' in Jean Baudrillard's 'In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities'.
In the long run, elites do not control history, the masses do. They just don't do so in a way that is legible to the elite.
'Conservatives' are just as 'liberal' as liberals/leftists/progressives. They share 99% of the same political DNA. The only genuinely different politics is what is called 'identity politics' but is actually racial politics by another name. The 'identity' part only comes in when Whites negate their interest for non-Whites in the form of 'White allies' and other assorted perverts.
The only thing that deserves to be 'conserved' is the Folk.
The only thing 'liberalism' the Folk can afford is 'liberalism' within itself.
The age of abstract loyalties is dead.
The corpse is simply twitching out its last bits of electricity before shutting down completely.
It's a time-honored technique to pick an 'enemy' and then dump all the 'bad stuff' into the 'enemy' bin and act as if all the 'good stuff' belongs to one's own. Which, of course, is always on the side of the gods etc.
I try not operate on so transparently a one-sided paradigm. But, for the purposes of polemics and trying to 'reorient' the direction of our culture, sometimes you have to take the extreme position.
If our sole goal is to 'conform to nature' than we don't need to do anything. The disaster that's coming will be 'natural' so far as it goes and the catastrophic aftermath will be 'natural so far as it goes.
I try not to embrace an ideology that is simply a mask for impotence and pretend I'm the hero of the story I'm telling.
As for trying to stop people from doing something you have good reason to believe is likely to end in suffering, history suggests that the best way to do that is not to harangue them, but to listen to them and only then help guide them to better choices.
If you make a disagreement into a struggle of wills, you'll always lose the act of persuasion.
The alternatives are the same alternatives that have always existed in the shadow of totalitarian 'Christianity': the fruits of direct experience of 'the spiritual'.
'Christianity' has been replaced by 'civil rights' and 'human rights'.
For a long time now, 'Jesus Christ' has just been a facade for 'human rights'.
And Wokeianity just drops that facade.
Christians forget that the only way the made any significant headway as a religion was because the ruling class of Rome took it up as a cause for their own manipulative purposes.
Without elite patronage, 'Christianity' will be just another rustic belief that the ruling class mocks.
Wokeanity is replacing 'Christianity' as the religion of the ruling class.
And, because rustic Christianity cannot vomit out the poison of universalism, it cannot resist Wokeanity and, as is already happening, will be absorbed by it.
Name me any large Christian Synod or ecclessia that doesn't support 'human rights' including homosexual rights and trannsexual rights.
Name me a single major congregation that doesn't support 'drag'.
You can't.
Deep down, most people cannot face reality without lying to themselves to make themselves the 'hero' of their own stories.
My guess is that the religion of the future is some kind of hard-ass Buddhism combined with racial identity.
The idea that 'elites' are command of culture is an idea promulgated by elites. The masses don't need to be 'engines' of social and political change because they are the foundation of all enacted culture.
The elites are largely irrelevant people. They give each other awards and airtime.
Their import is an illusion.
They claim attention, that's all.
They create virtually nothing of value.
Did they create the plow? How to start a fire? Did they create the art of telling stories?
They're parasites on the creations of the anonymous creative members of the masses.
If the elites disappeared tomorrow, no one would miss them.
The elites have influence only so long as the masses care about what the elites care about. When that game stops, the elite have nothing and the masses continue their historic trajectory.
America can’t be saved as it exists nor should it be. All of us here are ‘in the herd’ since none of us are remotely close to being part of any ruling elite.
It's true about populism, but that doesn't mean the "men of history" are on the left, and it doesn't mean populism is dead (it just means it will fail). The left is already dead. It still has momentum and institutional power, but it's all frozen in an absurd trajectory, because ... it's dead, coasting. That much mass and momentum doesn't just come to an instant stop, it takes time. It plows through and breaks things before the energy is expended. But all genius is gone out of it, and eventually it breaks up on the rocks.
The men of history don't do politics anymore, it's beneath them, but they still build empires. As for populism, America is beginning a long love affair with a kind of Peronism, and it won't end well; it hasn't even started well. It'll probably never go very well, although I wouldn't be surprised if there's a genuinely good decade in it, out of six or seven bad ones. This is what decline looks like.
It's worth noting Christ said the "meek shall inherit the earth", none of us need the left / right elites to win for America to flourish. They will annihilate one another, and those without any ambition, other than to worship Christ, will inherit America. It is very simple.
The Alt/Dissident Right as active in the last 10 years, with its anti-blank slate, human biodiversity-infused view of humanity, its virulent rejection of post-modernism (ubiquitous irony, anomie, vapid mass consumerism elevated as status symbol) in favour of transcendental values (of the most disparate kind) is the kind of anti-liberal movement you are looking for. What's best than Vertigo Politix videos if you wanna reject modernity?
Black pilling if true. But there is a Promethean demographic, small but growing, inspired to have found great men such as Jason Köhne, author of Prometheus Rising. See https://NoWhiteGuilt.org for an introduction to his work. It's the best hope I've yet found.
I would agree but it is elites who define social and cultural parameters and not the masses. The masses are only as good as their leaders. The capitalist ethos in general by nature is anti-aristocratic. Perhaps we need an Aristocratic version of socialism or integralism as an alternative .
You're wrong. The masses are the only actual bearers of culture. The elites play with such things and posture for attention, but the instant the masses turn their attention away, they're nothing. The aristocratic elites are the original thots.
'Aristocracy' simply means 'rule by the best'. It doesn't specify what the measure of 'the best' is. In the case of capitalism, 'the best' are those most adept and manipulating and exploiting humans and nature in such a way as to assimilate all good value to themselves while externalizing all 'waste' outside the enterprise.
'Integralism' is just 'Christianity' trying to save itself from irrelevance as White people gradually lose faith in the utility of abstract loyalties and demand actual value for their faith.
'Socialism' is any system that does not prioritize the interests of the owners of the resources of production over all other groups in the political-economy. Capitalism cannot work without the illusion of socialism. As the illusions of 'socialism' fade under Woke Capital, genuine socialism - folk socialism - will become more legible and more relevant.
The masses don’t control media and entertainment industries. Elites control and direct them. Integralism while based on Catholic Social Teaching, is not necessarily synonymous with Christianity, not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Media and entertainment industries and educational institutions are not 'culture'. They are - at their best - a concentration of distillation of the culture of the masses. 'Culture' is not something *consumed*, it's something *enacted*. The elite does not control culture. A good example of this is how poorly 'woke culture' is being received outside those institutions most directly dependent upon elite patronage. But outside those direct relations, 'woke' has been either resisted or never been allowed to take root at all.
'Integralism' is more than just inspired by Catholic Social Teaching, it's an approach that depends upon it. And, to my mind, any contemporary talk of 'Integralism' is an attempt to make the worn-out abstract loyalties of 'Christianity' relevant again.
On the other hand, Distributism takes the same concepts as Rerum Novarum (Pope Leo XIII, 1891) and Quadragesimo Anno (Pope Pius XI, 1931) and applies them without the baggage of trying to resuscitate Catholicism.
Media and entertainment are indeed ‘culture’ for the masses. The masses are not the engines of political and social changes in society. Elites push these things institutionally and via popular culture.
Christianity is hardly ‘worn-out’ though am not much of a believer personally. It is still the dominant spiritual expression. Of Western Culture. What are the spiritual alternatives? Wicca, Odinism, California Hot Tub Buddhism?
You'd have to believe in a supernatural world in the first place. You'd need to think in terms of daimons (some good, some bad) and forces beyond our control. You'd come to the conclusion that the universe and life in general is a great mystery but nevertheless has some kind of order. You'd need to ask what's beauty and why is it so hard to create beautiful things compared to making ugly things. Stuff like that.
I read your comments. I think you're mostly right. Yes, the dumb herd animals are in control, and always have been. Problem is, anomalies are not recognized by the herd in their own time, they are rejected and hated by the herd. When the herd is under stress and starving, maybe they will take notice. Nietzsche hardly sold any books at all when alive. How many great men have gone unnoticed over the millennia? Legion. I place no hope in well-fed and happy dumb herd animals. A collapse is our only hope.
It really depends upon what the 'anomalies' want to do. If their innovations make life better for the masses, they embrace their innovations and, often, forget where the innovations come from. Nietzsche is not the person who invented the plow or how to create a spark or the saddle or the stirrup. I love Nietzsche, but his arguments for the importance of the 'ubermench' are all self-serving. It's painful to hear, but no one needs 'high culture' except misfits. When the time comes, you'll trade every painting in the Louvre for the tools and methods that allow one to make plastic from soybeans.
Socrates deserved what he got. He could have escaped his fate but refused to do so. As for 'Jesus', such person does not appear to have ever existed outside the fevered imaginations of some Hellenized Jews who wanted to steal the thunder of the great cults of Rome and Greece to serve their narrow ethnic interests. Jesus, too, could have escaped his fate but refused to do so. Is part of the Christian Hangover that automatically assumes that martyrs must be right.
The great masses do no like to see 'great men' destroyed. That's just the 'minority theory' of history presented as fact. It's not. Throughout history, persons who exemplified the aspirations of the masses of people have been supported and honored by them.
It's those anomalies who attack the virtues of the masses who suffer rejection. And deservedly so.
Like I said. You're "mostly right." The masses indeed don't "need" what makes life meaningful and interesting and purposeful. They are satisfied with eating and breeding and have a limitless appetite with no concern for the future. They are the ones content to stay behind when greater men explored and tamed our many frontiers, only following when it was easy and safe to do so. The current abundant prosperity that allows the few to pursue meaning and purpose and adventure is threatened by the dumb herd animals, stampeding from feast to famine and destroying everything in their path. Thus the cycle of history. If this reality is just about survival and full bellies, it would be better if the curse of consciousness just ceased to exist. For now, I refuse to accept that.
Another thing to remember is that most American ‘conservatives’ are, in fact, liberals. America was founded and defined by people imbued with Classical Enlightenment Liberal ideals. Republicans and Libertarians are just an older version of liberal.
But the reverse is also true: most of today’s leftists, and especially the woke left, are decidedly illiberal in their views on free speech, minority civil rights (freedom from government interference), skepticism of authority, freedom of choice (on anything other than reproduction)…
Today’s “conservatives” would be terrified and disgusted by real conservatism, which at least since the Protestant Revolt and then French Revolution is nothing other than counter-revolutionary. Real conservatives—that is, counter-revolutionaries—reject religious freedom, freedom of speech, democracy, equality, free markets…. In short, real conservatives are what is now known—since the Judas Council of Vatican II—as “traditional” Catholics. In other words, they’re actual Catholics. Thus, in addition to all of the above and more, they reject Antipope Francis and the Novus Ordo Antichurch he leads.
crucial point
White Identity Nationalism is the whitepill in your darkified scenario.
Populism will succeed succeed in the US in the short run because populism always succeeds in the US in the short run. Over the long haul, these short-term victories embed deep changes in the body politic that create a barrier to further incursions. The legibility of populist movements are not where their real power lie. The real power of populism lies in its opacity to central power, to the perpetuation and expansion of a culture that is outside any authority that is not *earned*. Before you give up on 'populism', I suggest you apprise yourself of the insights on 'the masses' in Jean Baudrillard's 'In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities'.
In the long run, elites do not control history, the masses do. They just don't do so in a way that is legible to the elite.
'Conservatives' are just as 'liberal' as liberals/leftists/progressives. They share 99% of the same political DNA. The only genuinely different politics is what is called 'identity politics' but is actually racial politics by another name. The 'identity' part only comes in when Whites negate their interest for non-Whites in the form of 'White allies' and other assorted perverts.
The only thing that deserves to be 'conserved' is the Folk.
The only thing 'liberalism' the Folk can afford is 'liberalism' within itself.
The age of abstract loyalties is dead.
The corpse is simply twitching out its last bits of electricity before shutting down completely.
There is a certain 'genius' about her. Her work speaks to a wide swath of (White) females. We'll see what kind of staying power she has.
It's a time-honored technique to pick an 'enemy' and then dump all the 'bad stuff' into the 'enemy' bin and act as if all the 'good stuff' belongs to one's own. Which, of course, is always on the side of the gods etc.
I try not operate on so transparently a one-sided paradigm. But, for the purposes of polemics and trying to 'reorient' the direction of our culture, sometimes you have to take the extreme position.
If our sole goal is to 'conform to nature' than we don't need to do anything. The disaster that's coming will be 'natural' so far as it goes and the catastrophic aftermath will be 'natural so far as it goes.
I try not to embrace an ideology that is simply a mask for impotence and pretend I'm the hero of the story I'm telling.
As for trying to stop people from doing something you have good reason to believe is likely to end in suffering, history suggests that the best way to do that is not to harangue them, but to listen to them and only then help guide them to better choices.
If you make a disagreement into a struggle of wills, you'll always lose the act of persuasion.
The alternatives are the same alternatives that have always existed in the shadow of totalitarian 'Christianity': the fruits of direct experience of 'the spiritual'.
'Christianity' has been replaced by 'civil rights' and 'human rights'.
For a long time now, 'Jesus Christ' has just been a facade for 'human rights'.
And Wokeianity just drops that facade.
Christians forget that the only way the made any significant headway as a religion was because the ruling class of Rome took it up as a cause for their own manipulative purposes.
Without elite patronage, 'Christianity' will be just another rustic belief that the ruling class mocks.
Wokeanity is replacing 'Christianity' as the religion of the ruling class.
And, because rustic Christianity cannot vomit out the poison of universalism, it cannot resist Wokeanity and, as is already happening, will be absorbed by it.
Name me any large Christian Synod or ecclessia that doesn't support 'human rights' including homosexual rights and trannsexual rights.
Name me a single major congregation that doesn't support 'drag'.
You can't.
Deep down, most people cannot face reality without lying to themselves to make themselves the 'hero' of their own stories.
My guess is that the religion of the future is some kind of hard-ass Buddhism combined with racial identity.
The idea that 'elites' are command of culture is an idea promulgated by elites. The masses don't need to be 'engines' of social and political change because they are the foundation of all enacted culture.
The elites are largely irrelevant people. They give each other awards and airtime.
Their import is an illusion.
They claim attention, that's all.
They create virtually nothing of value.
Did they create the plow? How to start a fire? Did they create the art of telling stories?
They're parasites on the creations of the anonymous creative members of the masses.
If the elites disappeared tomorrow, no one would miss them.
The elites have influence only so long as the masses care about what the elites care about. When that game stops, the elite have nothing and the masses continue their historic trajectory.
America can’t be saved as it exists nor should it be. All of us here are ‘in the herd’ since none of us are remotely close to being part of any ruling elite.
It's true about populism, but that doesn't mean the "men of history" are on the left, and it doesn't mean populism is dead (it just means it will fail). The left is already dead. It still has momentum and institutional power, but it's all frozen in an absurd trajectory, because ... it's dead, coasting. That much mass and momentum doesn't just come to an instant stop, it takes time. It plows through and breaks things before the energy is expended. But all genius is gone out of it, and eventually it breaks up on the rocks.
The men of history don't do politics anymore, it's beneath them, but they still build empires. As for populism, America is beginning a long love affair with a kind of Peronism, and it won't end well; it hasn't even started well. It'll probably never go very well, although I wouldn't be surprised if there's a genuinely good decade in it, out of six or seven bad ones. This is what decline looks like.
It's worth noting Christ said the "meek shall inherit the earth", none of us need the left / right elites to win for America to flourish. They will annihilate one another, and those without any ambition, other than to worship Christ, will inherit America. It is very simple.
The Alt/Dissident Right as active in the last 10 years, with its anti-blank slate, human biodiversity-infused view of humanity, its virulent rejection of post-modernism (ubiquitous irony, anomie, vapid mass consumerism elevated as status symbol) in favour of transcendental values (of the most disparate kind) is the kind of anti-liberal movement you are looking for. What's best than Vertigo Politix videos if you wanna reject modernity?
Black pilling if true. But there is a Promethean demographic, small but growing, inspired to have found great men such as Jason Köhne, author of Prometheus Rising. See https://NoWhiteGuilt.org for an introduction to his work. It's the best hope I've yet found.
I would agree but it is elites who define social and cultural parameters and not the masses. The masses are only as good as their leaders. The capitalist ethos in general by nature is anti-aristocratic. Perhaps we need an Aristocratic version of socialism or integralism as an alternative .
You're wrong. The masses are the only actual bearers of culture. The elites play with such things and posture for attention, but the instant the masses turn their attention away, they're nothing. The aristocratic elites are the original thots.
'Aristocracy' simply means 'rule by the best'. It doesn't specify what the measure of 'the best' is. In the case of capitalism, 'the best' are those most adept and manipulating and exploiting humans and nature in such a way as to assimilate all good value to themselves while externalizing all 'waste' outside the enterprise.
'Integralism' is just 'Christianity' trying to save itself from irrelevance as White people gradually lose faith in the utility of abstract loyalties and demand actual value for their faith.
'Socialism' is any system that does not prioritize the interests of the owners of the resources of production over all other groups in the political-economy. Capitalism cannot work without the illusion of socialism. As the illusions of 'socialism' fade under Woke Capital, genuine socialism - folk socialism - will become more legible and more relevant.
The Center does not hold.
And that's a good thing.
There is no growth without death.
There is no renewal without a withering.
The masses don’t control media and entertainment industries. Elites control and direct them. Integralism while based on Catholic Social Teaching, is not necessarily synonymous with Christianity, not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Media and entertainment industries and educational institutions are not 'culture'. They are - at their best - a concentration of distillation of the culture of the masses. 'Culture' is not something *consumed*, it's something *enacted*. The elite does not control culture. A good example of this is how poorly 'woke culture' is being received outside those institutions most directly dependent upon elite patronage. But outside those direct relations, 'woke' has been either resisted or never been allowed to take root at all.
'Integralism' is more than just inspired by Catholic Social Teaching, it's an approach that depends upon it. And, to my mind, any contemporary talk of 'Integralism' is an attempt to make the worn-out abstract loyalties of 'Christianity' relevant again.
On the other hand, Distributism takes the same concepts as Rerum Novarum (Pope Leo XIII, 1891) and Quadragesimo Anno (Pope Pius XI, 1931) and applies them without the baggage of trying to resuscitate Catholicism.
Media and entertainment are indeed ‘culture’ for the masses. The masses are not the engines of political and social changes in society. Elites push these things institutionally and via popular culture.
Christianity is hardly ‘worn-out’ though am not much of a believer personally. It is still the dominant spiritual expression. Of Western Culture. What are the spiritual alternatives? Wicca, Odinism, California Hot Tub Buddhism?
You'd have to believe in a supernatural world in the first place. You'd need to think in terms of daimons (some good, some bad) and forces beyond our control. You'd come to the conclusion that the universe and life in general is a great mystery but nevertheless has some kind of order. You'd need to ask what's beauty and why is it so hard to create beautiful things compared to making ugly things. Stuff like that.
I read your comments. I think you're mostly right. Yes, the dumb herd animals are in control, and always have been. Problem is, anomalies are not recognized by the herd in their own time, they are rejected and hated by the herd. When the herd is under stress and starving, maybe they will take notice. Nietzsche hardly sold any books at all when alive. How many great men have gone unnoticed over the millennia? Legion. I place no hope in well-fed and happy dumb herd animals. A collapse is our only hope.
It really depends upon what the 'anomalies' want to do. If their innovations make life better for the masses, they embrace their innovations and, often, forget where the innovations come from. Nietzsche is not the person who invented the plow or how to create a spark or the saddle or the stirrup. I love Nietzsche, but his arguments for the importance of the 'ubermench' are all self-serving. It's painful to hear, but no one needs 'high culture' except misfits. When the time comes, you'll trade every painting in the Louvre for the tools and methods that allow one to make plastic from soybeans.
The anomalies must bow before the herd, first and foremost. The herd killed both Socrates and Jesus. The herd loves to see great men destroyed.
Socrates deserved what he got. He could have escaped his fate but refused to do so. As for 'Jesus', such person does not appear to have ever existed outside the fevered imaginations of some Hellenized Jews who wanted to steal the thunder of the great cults of Rome and Greece to serve their narrow ethnic interests. Jesus, too, could have escaped his fate but refused to do so. Is part of the Christian Hangover that automatically assumes that martyrs must be right.
The great masses do no like to see 'great men' destroyed. That's just the 'minority theory' of history presented as fact. It's not. Throughout history, persons who exemplified the aspirations of the masses of people have been supported and honored by them.
It's those anomalies who attack the virtues of the masses who suffer rejection. And deservedly so.
Like I said. You're "mostly right." The masses indeed don't "need" what makes life meaningful and interesting and purposeful. They are satisfied with eating and breeding and have a limitless appetite with no concern for the future. They are the ones content to stay behind when greater men explored and tamed our many frontiers, only following when it was easy and safe to do so. The current abundant prosperity that allows the few to pursue meaning and purpose and adventure is threatened by the dumb herd animals, stampeding from feast to famine and destroying everything in their path. Thus the cycle of history. If this reality is just about survival and full bellies, it would be better if the curse of consciousness just ceased to exist. For now, I refuse to accept that.
Why would you describe capitalism as anti-aristocratic, per se?
Yes. Capitalism places Merchants and Bankers above Aristocrats in the social and economic pecking order.