TERFs: Executed via Circular Firing Squad

"Under Thatcher and then Blair and continuing up until our contemporary moment, the working class has seen its culture slowly and progressively destroyed," Deirdre O'Neill writes in this Medium article, and she's not happy about it. I can't say I blame her so far. I'm not happy about it either.

One of the consequences of the massive changes that have taken place in working class life over the last forty years of neo liberalism has been the erasure of class-consciousness and the loss of the language of class as an analytical framework within which to articulate and make sense of those changes.

Couldn't agree more. The article gives an account of how the left abandoned material, working class concerns in favor of cultural and identity based issues of greater concern to a careerist academic middle class that is generally accurate. It's also worth noting, however, that there was not, for a time, much choice of which way the leftist parties of the developed world should go. This was a long, painful and complicated process, so it's worth going over it again, in point form:

• Disillusion with Marxian socialism and materialism setting in on the post WW2 left, as the tyrannical nature of Stalin's U.S.S.R becomes known.
• The emergence of critical theory and the new left. The third world abroad and minorities at home are cast in the role once reserved for the industrial proletariat.
• The increasingly international business environment leading to what we came to call globalization. Mid to low skill level jobs that depended on union representation and a sophisticated regulatory welfare state to maintain a middle class lifestyle were among the first to be lost to the third world.
• Automation also proceeded apace in this time.
• Resulting in a decline in the political clout exercised by the unionized blue collar working class, itself became more conservative as a result of attaining a middle class level of existence after WW2. 
• These factors allowed the likes of Reagan and Thatcher to come to power in the US and UK, and they adopted policies that further weakened the power of organized labor. 
• Leftist governments such as those of François Mitterrand in France were forced to backpedal on social democratic reform due to the threat of capital flight and investment strike, which were becoming bigger clubs in the hands of the rich and powerful, and this trend would only increase into the internet age.
• Corporate media would lay the blame for this investment strike and capital flight on the flawed and anachronistic ideologies of the center left parties, and whip up popular backlash against social democratic ideas. Electorates now do corporate power's dirty work for it, urging leftist parties to get with the program and enact business friendly neoliberal policies, and in so doing giving those neoliberal policies a thin but very useful veneer of democratic legitimacy. 
• Communism unraveling in the U.S.S.R and its satellites, and the People's Republic of China embracing market reforms, discrediting socialism in the mainstream.
• New social movements emphasizing identity gradually becoming more mainstream in the late 20th century.
• Declining birth rates resulting in western governments relying on increased levels of immigration to top up population growth.
• Large numbers of women, people of color and immigrants entering the workforce swelling its numbers, further weakening labor's bargaining power, but also serving as a new basis of support for center left political parties.
• The shift to a more managerial role in the global economy results in increased emphasis on higher education in the western world as the key to a middle class lifestyle, while blue collar labor declines. A university degree, once the pedigree of the upper crust, now becomes the mainstay of the middle class.
• Concomitant with this is the identity based new social movements finding their stronghold in academia, concluding a long shift away from economics and towards culture in a western left disillusioned with the obvious flaws and failings of the so-called communist world.
• Abandoned by the "left", the working class becomes vulnerable to political exploitation from the right, which appeals to their resentments towards cultural elites but shifts their anger towards scapegoats - immigrants, minorities and the like, to gain their votes. Once in office, the right then abandons cultural populism in favor of economic neoliberalism. 

The upshot of all of this is that the leftist political parties of the first world shifted from the unionized blue collar working class to educated cosmopolitan urban knowledge workers as their basis of support, and they really didn't have much choice if they wanted to stay relevant in electoral politics. From the early 1980s onward, it simply wasn't possible to win an election on a socialist or social democratic platform in most developed nations. It's as simple as that. Sorry. I don't like it either, but that's the way it was, and in many places continues to be. Social democracy is struggling world wide, with few exceptions. One of these exceptions being, of all places, the USA, where Bernie Sanders has galvanized considerable support for a social democratic platform. 

Did the moneyed classes capitalize on their newfound advantages over the working class? Certainly. But was it all part of a conspiracy to destroy the working class right from the get go? I doubt it. In a way, that's really the damning thing about capitalism. It's destructiveness is so unintentional. Capital follows the path of least resistance and maximal profit by its nature. Conspiracy is not only unnecessary, but often counterproductive.

Which brings us to the second thrust of Deirdre's article, summed up in this passage:

In the light of this its difficult not to consider the rapid rise of transgender ideology and its concomitant activism enthusiastically embraced by the middle class left, to be connected to the dismantling of radical politics over the last 40 years and the demoralization and feelings of defeat it has engendered.

From here, the article veers into "TERF" or trans-exclusionary radical feminist territory. While I sympathize with some if its criticisms of "transgender ideology" the problem I see with the older 2nd wave TERF brand of radical / socialist feminism is that they opened the door to all of the metapolitical tactics that the transgender ideologues are now using on them. That the intersectional transgender movement would upset the TERFs has more than a whiff of karmic justice to it. The transgender activists have not only beaten the TERFs at their own game, they've beaten the TERFs at the very game the TERFs wrote the rules for.

That's gotta hurt.

Let's take a closer look.

Transgender activism has presented the privileged with an opportunity to ignore questions of class inequality while at the same time allowing some the opportunity to perform a superficial radicalism and progressiveness.

This was radical feminism from the 1960s onwards. Shooting down the romantic overtures of the male of the species took on the moral and cultural gravitas of a revolutionary act against tyrannical power in the ego drenched minds of pseudo intellectual women and their male lapdogs from the 1980s onwards, at least as far as most mainstream media was concerned. A lot easier than unionizing the local supermarket, I suppose. If society is going to legitimize any demographic's favorite activity as an act of glorified transgression against supposedly illegitimate power structures, who wouldn't jump at the chance if it was their group that would be so privileged?

The transgender movement demands a rejection of biological reality. There is something very terrifyingly fragile about our commitment to reasoned debate if we can so nonchalantly cast aside facts such as our biological constitution.

TERFs were looking on much of gender as being no more than a social construct going back to the 1960s. Many such feminists went as far as to claim that heterosexuality itself was little more than a creation of the patriarchy designed to objectify and oppress women, and would dismiss all arguments to the contrary appealing to evolution and biology as mere apologetics for male power and privilege.

Funny how it's okay to handwave realities we don't like when we're the ones in the privileged position of being able to call others out on their privilege. When it's us who are supposedly privileged, that's when it's different. That's when the Anita Sarkeesians of this world suddenly start understanding where the Carl Benjamins of this world have been coming from all this time.

There has been a glaring refusal on the part of the left to come to terms with the question of transgenderism and its impact on women and by women I mean people who belong to the sex class that has ovaries and is able to give birth.

There has been a glaring refusal on the part of the left to come to terms with the twin and intersecting questions of feminism and neoliberalism and their impact on men and by men I mean people who belong to the sex that has testicles and are able to impregnate women. A "left" consisting of a bunch of infighting identity based movements drawing their lines of concern only up to the point where their own "marginalized" identities can be deployed for political and social advantage is not a left that can successfully push back against global neoliberal hegemony.

The levels of groupthink necessary to keep this ship afloat, the self censorship, the intimidation, the blatant dishonesty, the denial of debate with howls of ‘transphobia’ point to a left in deep crisis.

You don't say! Just replace howls of transphobia with howls of racism and howls of misogyny and I think you get the picture. Back in the 1990s, liberal feminists along the lines of Christina Hoff Sommers, Camille Paglia and Cathy Young were describing the radical feminist women's studies classrooms in very similar terms. You can guess how well they were, and continue to be, received in feminist circles.

Are we starting to notice a pattern here?

The middle class dominated left has abandoned its obligation to critically engage, to clarify and to lead on the political issues of the day. Instead it has simply accepted the terms of the debate put forward by the trans militants (including their really basic conflation of sex and gender). This failure is rooted in the left’s acceptance of identity politics with its assumption that how a group (or the primary definers within a group) articulates its oppression is the last word in the matter.

This is called Standpoint theory and was a central element in radical feminist ideology almost right from its inception, and the source of much of its authoritarian and antinomian character. Implicitly up into the 1980s, explicitly since then.  Related to this is the notion of a vanguard party or movement taking it upon itself to define who is and isn't part of the charmed circle they've taken it upon themselves to represent, and decide unilaterally what the group's interests are, on behalf of the entire group. This has been standard practice on the regressive authoritarian left going all the way back to Lenin.

The decision of liberal academia to acquiesce to the demands of the standpoint feminists and deligitimize any and all criticism of women's studies as misogyny, criticism of critical race theory/black studies as racism and so on has been a dagger to the heart of every good and noble aspiration that the political left has had over the last several decades. Centuries even. The damage that this has done has been absolutely incalculable. At the very least, it's laid the foundations for all of the excesses of current year SJW culture. And it wasn't done to appease the transgender activists. It was done to appease the second wave feminists in academia during the 1970s and 80s.

The closing down of the complexities of this discussion with the mantra ‘transwomen are women’ is profoundly undemocratic. In a properly functioning democracy the concerns of everyone would be included in an open and transparent discussion.

The concerns of everyone would be included in an open, transparent discussion? Would this include men's rights activists, typically brushed off as misogynists? Would this include that segment of the working class opposed to high levels of immigration, typically handwaved as racists? Would this include feminists who are not women of color? Typically brushed off as white feminists? Would this include cisgender heterosexual black males, sometimes brushed off as "hoteps" or as "the white people of black people?" Would this include white cisgender homosexual males, who are branded as misogynistic for doing exactly what TERFs think white cisgender females should be doing: rejecting the opposite sex for sexual and romantic partnership? Does it include the white male class conscious working class, the "brocialists" so called?  Does it include the original alt-left; race conscious white socialists? We wouldn't want to leave anybody out now, would we?

I think we all know what Deirdre's answer to all of those questions would be.

While I agree that stratifying people in accordance to how "marginalized" they are is incredibly counterproductive and completely contrary to the notions of inclusivity and equality that the social justice crowd so loves to pay lip service to, once again we can hardly lay the blame for this at the feet of the recent wave of transgender activism. Welcome to the world non-black, non-women and non-queer leftists have been living in ever since the summer of love, Deirdre. I'm pretty sure I can guess your response. Some sort of sneer about really giving a shit about the privileged class. Well then, forgive me if I don't give a shit about whatever frustrations you've suffered at the hands of the transgender activists. So much for solidarity, or an injury to one being an injury to all, I guess.

Instead, critical thinking is relabeled ‘transphobia’, even basic facts are now apparently a sign of Trump leaning tendencies (thereby ensuring that the Right will own this issue, because the left cannot sensibly discuss it). Rather than fighting for us all to transition to a fairer more equal society, the social justice warriors focus on the right of men to adopt the stereotypes that most women have long ago rejected.

Once again, this pandora's box was flung open by the 1960s and 70s wave of radical feminism, and this now apparent sense of indignity and having been cheated by transgender activists utilizing all the same methods reveals just how arrogant and bloated with a sense of entitlement feminism's 2nd wave really was. Who decided what "stereotypes" were "outdated" and that any defense of traditional notions of femininity and masculinity, even if voluntarily adopted instead of socially mandated - was indicative of far right politicial leaning? What are we to make of women who are frustrated with being shamed out of activities deemed too traditionally feminine, such as being stay at home moms, getting married or having romantic relationships with men? Your frustration with being silenced by transgender activists is understandable, Deirdre, but what about all the people who had to be silenced so that your brand of misandrist radical feminism could become hegemonic in academia and most media?

Contrary to current year perspectives, the academy of the mid 1970s onward wasn't some stronghold of ideological pluralism and sexual license that we've only very recently lost. Rather, it was the anti heterosex radical feminists who had seized the commanding heights of politically correct discussion, and they were saying to male liberals all the same things this article accuses transgender activists of saying to TERFs. A decade prior, the 2nd wave radfems had done the same thing to the 1960s new left. When the male radicals of the time accused the feminists of distracting from and derailing class based politics, I'm sure we can all guess how sympathetic the radfems of the time were.

Welcome to the Revolution

Hell, it may not even have really begun there. The new left had supplanted the old by sidelining the blue collar proletariat in favor of the third world and ethnic minorities. The old left had supplanted the classical liberals by sidelining the property owning bourgeoisie in favor of the industrial workers, the classical liberals sidelined the aristocracy and the clergy, and so on. With but little exaggeration, we can trace this back all the way to the signing of the Magna Carta.

All of this points to the fatal flaw at the heart of the direction the left has gone in almost since its inception. A politics based on the oppression olympics, so called, is doomed to fail. Sooner or later, you meet someone more oppressed than you, and the moral force with which you've been pressing your claims against those higher up the social hierarchy than yourself now compel you to yield to those pressing claims against you from below.  We need a better approach. We need a comprehensive theory of liberation applicable to all, rather than a ceaseless dialectic of oppressed and oppressor, a dialectic that promises revolution, but only seems to deliver a circular firing squad.

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Why the Left is Winning the Culture War: Hard Right

Previously, I wrote of the common notion that the progressives were winning the culture war, a brief and by no means complete survey of reactionary thought on the matter and proposed a number of explanations for and caveats to that idea. Now, I begin to look at the deeper reasons why the right, the reactionaries especially, have a difficult time even maintaining the status quo, let alone in turning back the clock, in modern civilization.

The right wing political message is harder. By harder, I mean that right wing political thought trades in both foundational principles and policy proposals that are less likely to be widely popular. Conservatives have always been the "party of no", the party-poopers of the political scene. They claim that we cannot achieve all of our legislative goals without punishing levels of taxation and government overreach.

Central to conservative thought as far back as Edmund Burke is the notion that human nature is not fundamentally perfectible, and indeed it's an uphill battle to improve it at all. Humanity is in need of some kind of higher set of moral and philosophical principles beyond the reach of his will to power in order to keep him on the right track. Religion is often touted as the source of this.

Overall, this is a less popular message than that peddled by reformist politicians and ideologies of boundless optimism. First classical liberalism, then socialism and today feminism promise if not utopia, at least a greatly improved way of life over what we have now. This is naturally a more attractive message. It is more attractive to believe that pressing social problems can be solved, than to view them as intractable and that trying to solve them will simply squander limited and valuable resources. We feel better about the left's message of a brighter future. It flatters our egos. We don't like being told that we have a naturally debased nature that makes social progress very difficult and even dangerous.

The left has a long history of offering up ideal classes of people: the proletariat, the 3rd world, women, the poor and marginalized, who if they were just given the reins of power, would guide us into a world free of exploitation, poverty and war. Being the sober voice in a climate of excitement and enthusiasm doesn't win popularity contests. And don't expect to be exonerated in hindsight when the project truly does go awry, just as you predicted it would, either. Of course, the right does sometimes enter its own politics of fervent hope and even utopianism, but these incidences occur in spite of, rather than because of, the underlying nature of conservative thought.

It is not that the left does not posit the need to make sacrifices for the achievement of its goals. But the left tends to ask more of those who are, at least according to leftist bodies of thought, able to give up more. Moreover, leftism offers hope of societal improvement when all is said and done. The sacrifices demanded by reactionaries, on the other hand, are mainly to stop things getting worse than they already are, and more often fall on those already on the less fortunate end of the social spectrum. This is in contrast to the deeply rooted Christian ethic otherwise so much touted on at least some segments of the left, which generally extols charity and concern for the less fortunate.

It is not that right leaning people are unwilling to be charitable. But they're far more likely to balk at the encoding of charity into our political, economic and social structures in the way that leftist calls for reform advocate for. Rightism would prefer that charity be a private, individual decision, and don't like the notion that there are structural inequities and injustices in the way that wealth and resources end up being distributed. Most people know, or at least suspect how inadequate this will be in the face of the real need out there. Right wing people may sneer at how easy it is to be generous and charitable with other people's money, and that's precisely the point. It is easier. It is easier to at least advocate for redistributive taxation and social spending, even if the threat of capital flight and investment strike make those programs tricky to implement.

Up until very recently, the right was seen as the side of the prudish, the censorious and the puritanical. Say no to drugs. No sex until marriage. Abstinence only. Contraception and abortion are bad, murder even. Every sperm is sacred. Sex, drugs and rock and roll were seen as the gateway to Sodom and Gomorrah. Not among all right leaning people, but those who thought that way did lean right.

That is not the path of least resistance to which people are naturally inclined. While we can hew to very straight and narrow lifestyles in times of shortage and hardship, or else when in tight knit social environments that share the same values, once modern levels of affluence and technological development made less stringent ways of life attainable with reduced social costs, that's naturally what most people did. Who would naturally deal with the shortage and hardship of marrying young and having a mess of children once this ceased to be economically necessary or socially mandated? If there's no real reason not to enjoy sex, drugs and rock and roll once we stop believing that they'll make the baby Jesus cry and your parents, boss and neighbors won't object to it, it's easier to do so than not to, however real the very real problems of addiction and abuse are, at least for some people.

Over the last decade or so, the cultural left has introduced its own culture of austerity, with privilege checking, broadening definitions of sexual harassment and rape, speech codes, avoidance of bad words that might trigger someone with a marginalized identity, deconstruction and critique of movies, music, video games and so on for sexist and racist content and so on. This goes back a bit further on college campuses, to the late 1980s approximately. And even here, they are not so much suggesting that we "just say no" but rather that we merely get informed, enthusiastic and affirmative consent. In triplicate, and you'd better cross all the t's and dot all the i's. And still hope that no one cries rape or harassment, since the zeitgeist demands that the accuser be given the benefit of the doubt. Moreover, this new stringency doesn't seem to apply to historically "marginalized" groups: women, ethnic minorities, trans folks etc.

Still and all, this is an altogether different message than abstinence only, at least until marriage. An option that is increasingly beyond many people's price range, and not likely to be entered into until after the long period of education and preparation needed to secure the kinds of middle class jobs you can raise a family on. Whatever flaws exist in hook-up culture so called, and there are many, people will simply not revert back to the sexual morality that prevailed in agricultural societies where for all intents and purposes, you were an adult at fifteen.

So while not completely equivalent, the emergent social justice warrior (SJW) is sometimes mentioned as the leftist counterpart to the stuffy Christian conservative. Hard leftists - Marxists, Stalinists and Maoists and the like, have had a similar sort of tough mindedness, but these have never been significant even on what's considered left wing in the 1st world. What's relevant here is that the last few decades wherein second wave feminism gradually gave way to the SJWs are a wink of an eye in the face of the history of western civilization overall, wherein it has been religion and conservatism that has eschewed creature comforts in favor of stoicism and stern morality.

Moreover, reactionaries propose some genuinely harsh measures. Who is going to tell women - the majority of the population and currently united and galvanized by feminist ideology - that their place is at home, barefoot and pregnant after all? This seems like political suicide, and so not surprisingly is backed away from even by those on the right who actually do think this way. In a similar vein, it is the right wing that is proposing that worker's rights be curtailed or even done away with entirely, and employment for mid to low skill workers with little bargaining power reduced to something comparable to serfdom. It is the right wing that proposes that much of the populace lose access to health care, public education, or a social safety net in times of need. Outside the United States, these messages unsurprisingly do not resonate with working and middle class people. And conservatives within America must go to great lengths and expense to gain working class buy-in for their frankly sado-masochistic kinds of policies.

So it is that the right wing presents a harder path for individuals and societies to follow, and not always with a long term payoff to make it worthwhile, other than the suggestion that the left will lead us to a still worse place. This is a handicap for the right. As a reason for progressive dominance in the culture war, I'd say it's relevant, significant even but not central.

For one thing, the right's message of austerity doesn't always fail to resonate. While they haven't convinced most to just say no or wait for marriage, they've convinced many more, particularly in the English speaking world, that harsh cutbacks to social services, infrastructure and the like, along with weakening the power of the unions and the state to affect wages and working conditions were necessary to preserve the long term economic health of the 1st world nations.

The message resonated deeply with many of the people who had the most to lose from it, because it appealed to a sense of heroic mission and sacrifice, as well as to a sense of individualistic masculine pride. The aforementioned Robert Conquest and John O'Sullivan, they who believed leftward drift inevitable in any but explicitly right wing institutions, would have been quite surprised by the direction that Tony Blair would take the British Labour party, and how this was the rule and not the exception in social democratic parties across the western world.

In my own jurisdiction of the province of Alberta in western Canada, it's very hard to win an election if one isn't running on a platform of economic austerity. The deep cuts to social spending implemented in the 1990s by then Premier Ralph Klein make him one of the best remembered premiers in provincial history among Albertans, and they elected United Conservative leader Jason Kenney as premier in April of 2019 in the hopes that he can repeat Klein's performance.

The trick to pulling this off, though, is that a LOT of long term investment into policy institutes, think tanks, alternative media and similar kinds of capital intensive ideological infrastructure was necessary to eventually gain mainstream buy-in. Not just investment, but long term strategic thinking that boiled down the message of austerity to three to four word sound bite slogans with which a compliant media could saturation bomb the public, until massive cut backs and privatization just became common sense.

Another example: to this date, the late David Koch and his brother Charles have financed libertarian minded organizations, with highly successful online outreach and thus right-libertarianism has a notable following among post-boomer generations, particularly of white males who've been excluded from the mainstream narrative of privilege and social justice, themselves rather infamously funded by rival billionaire "philanthropists" such as George Soros. While libertarianism has been, for reasons soon to be discussed, less successful than social justice overall, it does show that the more dour nature of right wing thought is not an insurmountable weakness, provided there's sufficient resources and organization behind it. Which there often isn't, for reasons to be discussed in future installments of this series.

Another weakness of leftism is that it's ideologies are more complex and systemic. The core of right wing thought can be boiled down to the idea that some people are naturally more gifted than others, or that good and/or smart people do good and/or smart things, and so succeed. When society goes astray, it's because bad people are gaining the reins of state power and implementing redistributionist policies. These ideas can range from relatively reasonable criticisms of center left politicians to bizarre conspiracy theories implicating the Illuminati, Elders of Zion or even reptilian space aliens.  As naive as these views are, they are also simpler and easier to understand for the uninitiated.

Leftist theories, by contrast, posit deeper, more complex, abstract and systemic views of the world, and come up with their own unsettling sorts of ideological claims. Leftist explanations of poverty and steep levels of inequality are systemic and therefore not as easy to grasp. They're also easier for the right to straw-man: "leftists are just jealous of people who are better than them and want to take their wealth and resources for themselves" or similar nonsense.

Moreover, leftist claims posit their own challenges that no shortage of people would like to duck or deny. If poverty and hardship have systemic causes and could happen to anyone, does this not then place a burden of responsibility upon the polity and its citizens? Should we not be willing to pony up more in taxes to help the poor, raise the minimum wage or even be prepared to roll up our sleeves and take to the streets because, after all, the means of production aren't going to seize themselves? Is it not easier to simply suggest that the poor are just stupid and lazy and leave the tough job of managing the economy and the polity to the smart fellas willing to put in the time and effort to do it? And if they get paid a lot more money to do so, aren't they deserving of it? This isn't so easy a line of argument to refute as the left would like it to be. It's not completely and entirely untrue either.

Of course, the outcomes of this kind of thinking don't always rebound to the benefit of the right, as "woke" dominance in cultural spheres imposed by incorporated cultural institutions make clear. Cultural leftists did an effective job of organizing and strategizing in order to increase their influence in academia and the media, as any paleoconservative willing to talk about "cultural Marxism" would be only happy to tell you. The thing is, the whole "long march through the institutions" thing isn't simply a right wing conspiracy theory. There's something to it and it goes a long way towards explaining current progressive cultural dominance in cultural spheres, because the right was so poorly equipped to deal with it.

So the right's core political message is tougher overall to accept, though there's plenty of qualifications and exceptions to this. This is one reason for progressive dominance in the current culture war, but by no means the most significant one.

Continued in Part 3: Left Alone

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Why the Left is Winning the Culture War: An Introduction to and Rejection of that Fundamental Premise

I must confess here and now that listening to conservative and reactionary YouTubers is a guilty pleasure of mine. They do, believe it or not, have their admirable traits. On average they come across as more reasonable than their woke counterparts, though this is a fairly recent phenomena. It is, sadly to say, easier to have a conversation with a conservative intellectual than a leftist college activist these days. Would that the former were a bit more numerous and the later a good bit less so. Of course, reasonable leftists would be best of all.

A common lament among the more astute and honest people on the right (yes, they do exist) is the long defeat they've been waging against emergent progressive culture. A good recent example of this is a video posted to YouTube by the Heritage Foundation of a moderated panel discussion hosted by the Claremont Institute entitled America's Cold Civil War. The panelists engage in a familiar refrain: why does the strategic initiative in America's long running culture war now most certainly reside on the left?

The answers that they come up with should be familiar to anyone at all versed in conservative and reactionary thought. It's attributed mostly to the emergence of the new left in the 1960s and their capture of academia and radicalization of the democratic party shortly thereafter. This is not entirely untrue, nor even insignificant. In fact, so not insignificant is it that I've even done a blog series about it, and said series has even been cited as a "foundational text" for reform of the current year social justice movement! But enough plugging out of me. The point being is that many right wing thinkers, ranging from Patrick Buchanan to the more moderate David Brooks to conservative mainstays such as Dinesh D'Souza, Sean Hannity and just about any Fox News commenter you can name lay the blame for the current climate of moral laxity and political correctness at the feet of the new social movements that arose in the 1960s and after.

Some reactionary thinkers trace progressive dominance back much farther than that, and lay it at the feet of the enlightenment itself. This is the premise of the infamous Dark Enlightenment outlook. This being the big N neoreaction, abbreviated NRx and exemplified by thinkers such as Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug) and Nick Land.

Progressive triumph and concomitant civilizational decline is such a prevalent theme in neoreactionary work that it's become one of their axiomatic philosophical claims. NRx refers to the current dominance of progressive thought and values as "the Cathedral" and compare it to the dominance of the Catholic Church over medieval culture. They regard mainstream conservative political parties as little more than severely compromised and controlled opposition. A common observation they make is that "any institution not explicitly right wing will gradually drift left," a law of politics they often cite. It is one of three of Robert Conquest's laws of politics, and John O'Sullivan's first law states something very similar. Discussions of the Cathedral and the long term prospects for western civilization are common in neoreactionary spaces, and the mood is not a positive one. Democracy and egalitarianism have triumphed, in their view, and civilization is doomed now that the riffraff are at the helm.

It's interesting to note that neoreaction's criticism of the enlightenment and its views on left wing cultural hegemony place them in a curious and ironic kind of kinship with the very "cultural Marxists" they're otherwise so critical of: the Frankfurt School, the French post-structuralists and even Italian communist leader Antonio Gramsci's theories of cultural hegemony. This blog features a discussion of neoreaction as actually being the right's embrace of postmodernism.

Neoreactionary thinkers have spawned an entire underground of bloggers and YouTube commentators. One notable neoreactionary YouTuber who tackles these questions frequently is a trad-Catholic who calls himself The Distributist. I mention him specifically because he's put out some very deep and thought provoking material on this subject that would be well worth looking at. This includes a multi-video series asking What's Wrong with the Alt-Right, a near two hour long video (combining several shorter episodes) on Resisting Progressive Institutions, a video called Sargon, storytelling, Patreon, and power (why the left is winning the culture war) - the name says it all, and a noteworthy video discussing the left as being antifragile. The Distributist is by no means alone in holding these views, but is noteworthy because he articulates them especially well, and his videos are worth a watch if a long view, as in a civilizational level view of the ongoing culture war interests you.

And of course, no discussion of this subject would be complete without a mention of the brilliant Decline of the West, opus of the German philosopher of history Oswald Spengler, published in two parts, one in 1918 and one in 1921. Spengler's influence on reactionary thought would be hard to understate. Basically, he proposes that civilizations go through life-cycles, and he uses seasonal cycles as a kind of metaphor to outline this. Spengler calls western civilization "Faustian" and that its primary cultural motif or "ur-symbol" is a striving for an unattainable infinity, thus lending it a tragic character. The premise of the work is that Faustian civilization is entering its "winter" phase.

This phase is marked by a rise in materialism and primarily economic and world-power concerns and a concomitant loss of connection to its foundational culture. For Spengler, ideas we would term "progressive" - democracy, emphasis on economics, secularism and the like, exemplify the decoupling of civilization from the culture that initially galvanized it. While deep and thought provoking, Decline of the West is a very ponderous and dense work. Spengler's core ideas are also outlined in this 63 video series outlining the work. Yes, 63 videos, and I would recommend you watch them all. I would name only Karl Marx as a thinker that's been more influential to me personally long term than Oswald Spengler.

I would not necessarily call Spengler a reactionary, and in some ways he had an influence on the eventual emergence of the cultural relativism that today's right so despises. This is because he doesn't believe that a culture or civilization can be rightly understood in the terms established by another culture or civilization. Moreover, he doesn't seem to think that civilizational decline can even be reversed. Attempts to recapture lost glory are part-and-parcel of what the decline, or winter phase is all about. In short, reactionary thinking is a symptom of, rather than an antidote to, civilizational decline.

Moreover, his analysis of western civilization seems to make a progressive orientation practically inherent to its very nature. For Spengler, Faustian civilization is a "historical" as opposed to an "ahistorical" civilization. Historical civilizations see themselves as having a wider sense of involvement in the unfolding direction taken by the human race as a whole, and mark the passage of time and significant events in the civilization's history. This naturally lends itself to a progressive as opposed to a conservative or reactionary view. This underlies much of Spengler's apparent pessimism concerning western civilizational decline.

While Spengler's work was generally regarded as reactionary - he considered "blood" the only force capable of overthrowing the power of money (though he does conceive of race in very different terms than the Nazis and fascists did, and was therefore critical of them) - he did attract some progressive and even radical attention. Frankfurt theorist Theodore Adorno published an analysis of Decline in 1950, which while frequently critical, also hoped that Spengler's reactionary ideas could be turned towards progressive ends. Adorno is a man after my heart, it would seem.

Pessimism pervades classical conservative and neoreactionary thought on cultural matters. Leftism has triumphed, and there's nothing for it now except to observe the long descent into destructive anarchy, from which a culture rooted in strong and sustainable cultural and social norms may eventually reemerge. Or not. According to the reactionary narrative, liberal social norms lead to falling birth rates, which cast the economic and even military advantage of the west into long term doubt, or else necessitate high levels of immigration from nations with very different cultural traditions. Cultural traditions not afflicted by the postmodern malaise and atomistic individualism of the west. It is only a matter of time, therefore, before we all end up having to face Mecca five times a day, whether we wish it or no. Already the cities of western Europe have "no go zones" wherein immigrant communities essentially rule and conduct their affairs in accordance with their own indigenous traditions.

Worse yet, this defeatism underlies much of the nihilism and bitterness one encounters on the fringe right, including that nihilism and bitterness that can drive them to kill. As such, this is a more serious issue than it may at first appear. The manifestos of many an apparently deranged far right terrorist or mass shooter highlight this sense of impending civilizational doom. Feeling like there's nothing left to lose, domestic terrorists such as Anders Breivik and Brenton Tarrant go on murderous rampages bent on taking as many leftists and Muslims down with them as they can. As such, this is an issue of concern to us all. Now, before you all start barking, I should note that comparable motives such as disdain for the decadent materialism and sexual laxity of the west also underlie a lot of Jihadist militancy and terrorism.

What I want to propose, and what I will explore in further installments of this series is that while this pessimism is not entirely baseless, it's also far from being completely warranted.

Of course there are certain very real advantages that the left enjoys, especially at present and on cultural and social issues. Some of these advantages are "merely" temporal and institutional, such as dominance in mainstream media and academia. Others of these advantages are deeper and more fundamental to the way the progressive vs the reactionary political mind works on a deep level, and each side's views on and resulting forms of political activity.

However, the right wing also has and continues to have its own advantages, and I doubt that the victory of the progressive left in the culture war was ever certain and need not have even been likely. A different kind of right wing could have gotten a different kind of result. Moreover, there are presently very real areas of right wing ideological dominance, and for several decades, hegemony even. What this shows us is that rather than leftist victory being inevitable, both the left and right have been successful in those areas in which each has invested the greatest measure of importance, and thereby activist vigor.

Finally, I ask whether or not what has triumphed in the zeitgeist of the current year really does constitute leftism at all? Are the neoreactionaries correct in that equality, democracy, liberalism and socialism are essentially triumphant, and all that remains now is to watch this unsustainable faux egalitarianism bring about societal collapse? This is a highly questionable proposition. While social equality across certain lines; race, gender and sexuality especially, are currently vigorous and popular notions, in other ways we've never been more unequal and under the thumb of forces and institutions completely lacking in any kind of transparency or democratic legitimacy and accountability than we are now, and this has repercussions for the authenticity of such democracy and egalitarianism as we now have in the west.

Continued in part 2: The Hard Right

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