Drawing a line in the (quick)sand
Progressivism is the train with no brakes. Rather than just observing this, we need to understand why it is, so we don't accidentally climb aboard as conservatives do.
“The left eats itself” is a common phrase you’ll hear among Conservative Inc. grifters with no further elaboration. It is true, but all they accomplish in pointing it out is proving that they have eyes to see. I wouldn’t call that an achievement. Without a deconstructive look at what it is about leftism in the modern day which causes this, they’re telling you ‘cow goes moo’ and expecting a round of applause. The terrible problem is that they get exactly what they expect.
Why have I started off an essay about progressivism by attacking conservatives? Because there is no fundamental difference between them.
The form of Puritan hysteria which drives the politics of the modern Globalist American Empire (GAE, fittingly) is one of a permanent revolution. The goalposts are forever shifting. What seemed unthinkable to the average Democrat or Labour Party voter 10 years ago is now enshrined doctrine in their secular theocracy, and if you even raise an eyebrow at it, you risk being branded as a heretic. Don’t think that the images of stake-burning which come to mind are overblown - this ride is far from over. An autocannibalistic political system seems, at first, like something that must be unsustainable. Surely once The People™ wake up to this lunacy and take action, all will be well in the world. But if there’s one thing we’ve learnt since the progressive era began a century ago, it’s that autocannibalism is an extremely lucrative and resilient strategy for democratic institutions.
A picture-perfect example of liberal autocannibalism are the case studies of J.K. Rowling and Kathleen Stock. You know the case of J.K. Rowling: in the high era of online ‘feminazis’ and the ‘anti-SJW’ response, she was making sure at every possible moment to say that Hermione was actually black, there were Jewish students at Hogwarts (despite never making an appearance), at all times generally doing her best to sacrifice the integrity of her life’s work to the revolution. But then the revolt came for women. Up until that moment the revolt was perfect, it’s every attack justified and each blow landing exactly where it should have. The top brass then said women don’t actually exist. I completely understand why this would make our feminists angry; they fought for the rights of women, don’t you know? Now what it means to be a woman is to have long hair and wear dresses - the exact stereotype they hoped to dismantle. The snake had been eating it’s own tail this whole time, but now it reached the point that they were firmly standing on, and these dedicated revolutionaries were completely dumbfounded.
They tried to draw a line in quicksand. Progressivism is designed to do exactly what it did, which saw Rowling entirely expunged from the reputation of Harry Potter, and Stock hounded from her professorship at Sussex University. A feature of the Party Line is that the Party Line is always changing. If you decide to plant your flag at any point and do not change with it, then in 5 years you’ll find yourself pressed up against the Overton window, crying out in a last stand that they are the real bigots.
The image above is of two men in women’s clothing. These men are in charge of institutions in the most powerful country in the world. This is insane. The naïve but still sane person will think that, due to the obvious insanity, it won’t last much longer; nature will run it’s course somehow until we’re back to normal. The fact that it came to this in the first place should debunk that. If the trajectory of our society within the immediate history of the GAE has taken us here, then how far back do you have to regress to undo the problem? These men were not in their offices 10 years ago, so should we go back a decade and relive the middle of the ‘Obama admin glory days’? You see how ineffective that would be. 10 years ago we were on the exact same road, just further back.
Steven Crowder was graceful enough to share this piece of wisdom with us:
And Dave Rubin recently said that our societal problems started around 10 years ago. Presumably, then, we can ‘conserve’ our way back to where we were 11 years ago and everything would be swell. When “the problems” start to appear we can just nip them in the bud with facts and logic. Problems avoided.
My sarcasm is lathered on so thick that you can taste it, but can you call it unwarranted? What actual difference is there between Rowling and Rubin? Progressivism and Conservatism Inc. are on the same train, just different carriages.
What actually is the problem, then?
Well, everything. Everything that the GAE calls it’s ‘values’. The chief one - that being the one which most of all keeps the revolution permanent - is equality. Equality in legal terms is great, but if you think equality is such a deeply important value that it should come at the cost of all others, you’re a Dave Rubin. Equality, when enshrined as a value, will never be constrained for long to just mean what you want it to. It will come to mean in pay, in treatment, in opportunity, in compulsory association, in the way you smile at people, in denying objective truth to appease people’s feelings, until it fishtails right back onto you just as it did with Rowling, leaving you lying in the road with a broken neck.
This is because any enshrined value will be used by those in power to further their power. If the value is not watertight it will turn your society into the Titanic. That’s where we are now, and the lifeboats are leaving with nowhere to go. All governments function like theocracies, if you don’t understand that then you didn’t follow my advice from my previous article to read The Populist Delusion. The only thing you can hope for is that the doctrines which sustain your government are ones which make it unprofitable to be insane. It does not matter one bit if equality in some respect or another actually is good. Equality is a cow that can be milked for power and never run dry.
Equality allows those in power, particular in democratic institutions, to create more power - both for themselves and their friends. Put “diversity” in a job search site (on an incognito tab so it doesn’t show jobs you’re actually qualified for) and see the salaries. Insane. But why are they there? It’s certainly not to meet any sort of end-user demand. They are there due to a self-sustaining cycle of managerial power where it pays for you to call yourself a solver of a particular problem, so you fabricate instances of this problem - so many that you’ve become an expert who can demand great sums of money, and you just so happen to be an expert in a critical field which never runs out of problems to solve. The revolution needs to be permanent, because the people who lead it also get paid to put out the fires it causes. Racism must always be on the rise in order for these jobs to keep the demand for these skills - along with the salaries and power they can collect - rising.
Where is the line, then?
The line can only be drawn before these values of the GAE were even conceived. Before liberalism, which means before the enlightenment, which means before the protestant reformation. This is the time when the West was a loose association between hundreds of micro-states and even it’s large states were fair and decentralised for the most part. They lived in greater peace than we do, and with a steady growth of prosperity. Their values were Faith, Family, and Virtue - which are very hard to corrupt - unlike Equality, Democracy, and Tolerance. NRx writers like Moldbug who lay the blame of the West’s modern woes at the feet of Puritans are exactly right.
There are no brakes on the progressive train as there are no stops on it’s line. This is deliberate. It is a self-perpetuating beauracratic power orgy that is meant to never end. Once you’re on board the only means of getting off is to jump off, but that gives you a better chance of survival than staying with it over the cliff. The modern world is so severely screwed up because it is built on lies and has been for centuries. If you realise this, you must want to revive the values of a past era. But if that era isn’t before those centuries of building the lie, you achieve nothing. What good is it to go back to the 1980s if in another 40 years you’ll be back at square one?
The West was best when it was strong, familial, and Catholic, so why aren’t you?