What would progressives do if they won? Go back to their homes, raise families, work hard—all the normal activities of soldiers returning from war? It’s an instructive question to ask the progressive. Suppose weight, as just one example, no longer is a societal issue at all, or rather that fatness is even lauded.
What then? When the ring is cast into Mount Doom, do you go back to the Shire to live out your days in peace and productive work, or do you invent another ring, and another Mount Doom?
There is no return to the Shire for progressives. The Shire never existed. Imagine that progressives aren’t from the Shire. Instead, imagine that they’re from Mordor. Perpetual war is what they’re made for. That’s why they never win, even though they’ve already won.
And even though they say they just want One More Thing, and then they’ll be happy, it’s really just not true. They won’t all go home. They won’t let you alone. They won’t stop calling you a bigot.
Politics is a gritty business, and there’s little validation to be gained if progressives trumpet their love for change and conflict for their own sake. Change and conflict is supposed to be for something, and then normal people will mildly support it or turn a blind eye. Shire folks just want to get on with their lives; they don’t want trouble.
The left cannot abide the existence of a Shire. It has to be transformed into metal, into steel. What the left wants is for Bilbo to have gay sex and to teach about white privilege in Hobbiton schools.
But when this generation of SJWers loses its steam, as the hippies of the 60s did, this time, it won’t be to a borrowed middle class existence. SJWers are saddled with debt, so they’ll be condemned to restless wandering, competing for a pool of diminishing middle class job titles.
Why did the sixties end? Well, they never really did—radicalist forms morphed, women entered the labor force en masse, and so they transitioned from bizarre, New Age rituals to the drudgery of office work, whether in the corporate world or in academia. But the values never left them, evidenced by the Zeitgeist lurching forward to liberalism-as-a-whole-new-creature in the 1990s, which laid the groundwork for orgs like FCKH8 to even exist. The one interesting difference here is that boomers could afford to waste their youth and fully expect to be integrated to a comfortable, middle class existence.
This is not the case today.
Today, people who frit about their youth will be relegated to useless jobs. The ones who work very hard will be able to achieve the dream of a salary in the 20-25k range for most of their twenties, if not longer—for the privilege of slaving away at Gawker, while being abused by Denton & Co. But at least they’ll have status in their community. As material conditions hollow out middle class job titles, social tech will morph alongside to make living at home into one’s late twenties and early thirties socially acceptable.
Some will leap and make it into the upper classes, but inertia will be punished by suction effects—down, down they go to the lower classes, perhaps not in demeanor and character. In lifestyle. And being subsumed into the lower class mindset is easier if you can’t escape the lumpenproles. Still, they’ll restlessly wander because no matter how much they love diversity, they hate the diverse neighborhoods not subject to the effects of gentrification. Gentrification is the attempt by low-income but middle/Brahmin status-ers to lead a middle class lifestyle by invading impoverished and diverse neighborhoods for the purpose of plundering them of their low property values. And gentrification will continue to ramp up because the suburbs are simply too expensive for student loaners.
For the rest, staying in the nest too long leads to pathologies, a perfect breeding environment for leftism—this itself is another essay. What becomes of millions of youth filled with envy at their lot in life? Supposing Charles Murray’s Coming Apart scenario continues to play out, Occupy will be back, demotism will be back, since these movements will be sustained by nest dwellers with too much time on their hands and the need to find themselves through dedication to a cause greater than themselves, to almighty liberalism well into their thirties.
The point of leftist politics is perpetual warfare. It’s about restructuring all of society to rip the way of life away from one group and present it as burnt sacrifice to the other. So when will society have finally progressed enough? Not when X policy comes into play. Not when Y person comes into power, and not even when there’s equal representation. Too many times we’ve seen folks like Ruth Bader Ginsburg not just wanting equal representation on the Supreme Court, but full supremacy. Her quotes have been cycled about in the last 24 hours, for those on the news cycle. In reality, she’s held this exact position for years.
“So now the perception is, yes, women are here to stay. And when I’m sometimes asked when will there be enough [women on the Supreme Court]? And I say when there are nine, people are shocked. But there’d been nine men, and nobody’s ever raised a question about that,” Ginsburg said in 2012 at the 10th Circuit Bench and Bar Conference.
Supremacy is cloaked in the doctrine of restitution.
When will there be enough restitution? When is enough, enough? That’s missing the point. Restitution will be thrown out the window when the next rung on the ladder is climbed. But it’s sufficient for now. It does the work it’s supposed to.
Besides, patriarchy seems so sticky and internalized that the only way we’ll ever be able to guarantee true equality is with sex-selective abortions. Root out the males; it’s the moral thing to do. Show your feminist credentials.
“That’s absurd, that’s just a slippery slope,” said a milquetoast liberal whose memory doesn’t extend beyond a single year’s worth of New York Times articles, as he jerked off a dolphin.
Cue the conservatives (and even libertarians) who trumpet the delusion that the arguments just have to be phrased in the right way, and then, only then, will their normative force be respected. People will conform to Reason, for I am a fedora, I tip my hat, and I conform to Reason when I am shown the error of my ways.
And besides, leftist authoritarian tactics are ungodly, even though they work, so it’s apparent we should love our enemies and decline from using deceitful tactics.
Wrong. Thede preservation is godly. Reframe in just war rhetoric with a healthy dose of the doctrine of double effect and other consequentialist reasoning glued onto deontological foundations.
If your theology departs from Gnon, get new theology.
But the arguments don’t matter to the other side—the arguments matter insofar as they constitute weaponry for your own side and frame control to siphon off the vulnerables who stray from the leftist pack. Whether there’s a strong normative foundation for a position clearly doesn’t matter, since the left frenetically adopts and discards positions as if the day of Gnon were imminent. They then bury inconvenient, open-faced hands in mountains of new media cycles. Gnon rewards ruthlessness, good faith is cast aside in the rubble pile of history, especially when the other side repeatedly operates—and even states—that they’ll discard ‘principle’ on a whim to further their ends. Projecting sincerity is death. Chameleons are of the left.
Burying history works if the Press is captured. And if isn’t, everyone will remember that abortion clinic bombing from 1984. Capture the Press and work around the Press at the same time. Delegitimize the Press for partisanship, and when HR requirements drop, infiltrate.
At the end of the day, it’s just as much a battle of intellect as it is of aesthetics and of thede dynamics. And perhaps the intellect is reducible down to An Aesthetic Which Captures The Attention Of Elites. There’s something to be said about mass movements operating by the select, by frame control, by inescapable aesthetics. Demotism is not an option, but bare assent by the masses is required.
The question, at the end of the day, is: Whose thede triumphs? For progs, no concession is ever enough, it’s always Never Enough. Once the struggle for material subsistence is over—and it is over in North America—the never-ending struggle for values takes over.
Back to material existence. Ignore government intrusions and largesse. It is possible to live in incredible comfort and little to no material threat if you put the barest amount of effort in to live within means. Think about this seriously: the wealth distribution now is such that with just a few years of hard work, you can live well as a single person in the most prosperous nation in the history of the world. Maybe not in New York City, but so what? But it’s never enough for the voracious, because at the end of the day, they don’t actually know what they want. They’d complain if you hung them with new rope. So hang them with old rope.
They only think they know what they want. Traditional structures fill the void, but traditional structures don’t work if people possess the autonomy to subvert it. And autonomy comes through capital. God is dead, but only very few benefit from more autonomy–only a few have the frame to define their own values. Nietzschean superhumanery is more about flourishing through self-defined values, and less about physical strength.
Too much material wealth has the unfortunate side effect of degeneration and destruction of tradition. Capitalism means that everyone is now, in effect, a lottery winner. And this breeds depression, weakness, apathy. Too much autonomy in the wrong hands is a disaster for tradition, and so a disaster for average folk. Capital gives them the ability to give the finger to social structures, even though in the long run, they’re far better off under those structures. They defect for short term gain, and of course, one by one as they fall, another notch is added to the societal entropy ledger.
Unless, of course, this is but a trick of the mind, and capitalism’s way of eating the unworthy.
The disaffected then look for an enemy, or more accurately, are sought out by political entrepreneurs and weaponized against the already-losing-thede. America is already a communist country, and the communists are intent on driving a stake in an already dead body.
This means that the idea of a single, hateful social conservative somewhere in San Francisco will keep them awake at night, and they’ll never sleep until they know that Justice Has Been Served In Timbuktu.
Once North America is taken, and as it is being taken, NGOs carry the torch of liberalism, burning opposition at the stake.
For progs, and the war is never over until your thede is down and out. Use any means necessary.
The only morality is civilization.
