The events of 2020 proved disruptive to the worldviews of a substantial fraction of the public. Constitutional protections that seemed foundational to this country’s identity were discarded with widespread alacrity, and with nary a whimper from most of us.
The implications of the 2020 Crisis for the progressive left were particularly astonishing. During the early Trudeau years, it was difficult to process the left abandoning its commitment to bodily autonomy, to free speech, and to the prosperity of the working class; all of which were mercilessly crushed by a series of unconstitutional lockdowns and riotous pillaging.
The political whiplash from these Ribbentrop-tier reversals arises from the fact that ultimately, progressivism adheres not to any stable set of principles, but rather to a particular conception of the ethical. The progressive sees ethics as a process of emancipation from tradition and history. They reject appeal to any particular tradition as grounds for enforceable normative claims in furtherance of a determinate vision of the ‘good society’. The progressive proposition is to eliminate the purview of tradition upon state-enforced value claims and produce morally autonomous beings, whose relations are governed not by shared moral codes—which are deemed archaic and oppressive—but by universally feasible dictates of ‘Reason and Compassion’. In the meantime, normative claims that are not manifested through pure reason but are left to private conscience. Demonstrable ones are codified into law and ideologically prosecuted.
The flaws in the progressive proposition manifest clearly in real questions of politics, where actors are presented with choices between conflicting ‘goods’. Progressive discourse is notorious for its tendency toward grandstanding, presenting political conflict as contests between pure Good & Evil. This is not so much due to the sanctimony of its individual adherents as to the impossibility within the progressive framework of dealing with moral trade offs between conflicting values.
Successfully navigating a moral trade-off requires access to a moral hierarchy establishing a coherent structure to what are otherwise a chaotic panoply of competing value claims. Such structure is required to generate distinctions between higher and lower order values, beginning with matters of prudence, through the righteous, and culminating with the sacred. Such a hierarchy manifests only through a determinative vision of the good. The classic trade-offs between liberty and equality, the tension between independence and security, and the proper distribution of social responsibility among the individual, family, community, and state, cannot be settled merely by appeal to uninstructed, culturally neutered “Reason and Compassion”; the proposed solutions would encompass every conceivable combination of human preference.
Such conflicts can be arbitrated coherently only via a broad consensus within such a collective consciousness—call it an ethos—not so much on exact solutions to these dilemmas as to where the reasonable limits of such discourses lie. We can dispute whether a burglar should receive two years in prison or twenty; but when the alternatives range from offering said burglar reparations to chopping off his hand, there is no longer an arena for rational discourse. The competing values at stake—justice, mercy, moral responsibility, rejection vs sanctioning vs sanctity of private property, retribution, and public safety—are simply structured irreconcilably in different ethical frames.
The COVID response demonstrated the extremities raw human preference could reach when our deracinated, culturally neutered faculties of “Reason and Compassion” are beset with a relentless campaign of saturation propaganda. More than any other faction, progressives advocated for harsh restrictions, family separation, authoritarian lockdowns, information censorship, and mandated therapies, in direct violation of their once-vaunted commitments to principles of bodily autonomy, free speech and due process.
This is the inevitable consequence of ‘emancipation’ from a prescriptive public ethos. Absent a determinate vision of the good society, progressives default to vague Utopian delusions; they crave a world of perfect safety, perfect liberty, perfect equality, and so forth, all at once. The progressive disavowal of the sacred frees them of any obligation to sustain moral commitment through times of adversity. The absence of foundational strictures that must be upheld or at least remembered in all circumstances—regardless of the cost—renders all values negotiable, contingent, and ultimately relative. In praxis, these two dynamics reinforce each other to engender a sort of Borderline Ideology Disorder, whereby progressives lurch from one absolutist phantasm to another, minimizing their degradation of competing values as ‘breaking a few eggs’—an arch-Leninist phrase that translates, in Covidian, to ‘forsaking haircuts’.
This pattern was vividly on display when progressives, mere months after vitiating democratic principles in fanatical pursuit of perfect insulation from an existential health risk, discarded their obsession with safety to back media sponsored Covidian outdoor political protests. Without recourse to a determinate moral vision, one that could harmonize and structure competing values, progressives had no recourse by which to resolve the conflict between civil liberties vs. public health awareness—and thus claimed an absurd ad hoc exception to their previous hysteria.
The borderline pattern of itinerantly exalting and degrading any given ethical stricture comes from the need to protect the fundamental progressive proposition. If ‘reason and compassion’ alone are sufficient to generate all enforceable normative claims, then real normative claims must be presented as unreasonable and malevolent. Lending validity to any rival claim would undermine their sacred postulate: that which privileges progressive claims—which change daily—by identifying them with reason and compassion, or with progress itself.
It was up to we conservatives to think through how the trade offs between liberty and safety should be managed in the prevailing circumstances, to consider what checks the government would be subject to when unilaterally arrogating powers not constitutionally vested in itself; to determine whether the young should bear burdens to protect the elderly; to decide what risks should be reasonably incurred so that our society did not collapse into a totalitarian sinkhole. There were sacred matters at stake for us, but which the left simply ignored.
So apart from warping reality and destroying Western culture, which is what it does, why does the left exist, anyway?
It did not always exist. There was no left in ancient or medieval politics, or anywhere outside the West until modern times. In fact, there were once no ideologies and no revolutions.
Some might also wonder why the right exists, but explaining the left also explains the right, which followed the birth of the left and has been following it ever since. The question is imperative now, since over the past four years the left has taken control, almost unchallenged, in Western democracies.
But why? We can hardly confront the left’s power or dislodge its hegemony over us if we do not first know what it is and why it exists at all.
Conventional wisdom dates political radicalism from the French Revolution (1789-99). That was the first secular revolution; but this does not explain the emergence of a wholly new kind of politics. In any case, the French Revolution was not the first. The inaugural one was in England in the 17th century, and it was not secular at all. It was driven by religious ideology.
Leftist ideology is sometimes depicted as a secular religion, replete with its own dogmas, heresies, and inquisitors. An historical reality undergirds this characterization, since religious radicalism begat its secular offspring.
Westerners do not understand radical religion, even though we spawned it. It was English Calvinists who first carried religious dissent to the point of inventing the modern revolution. Some Americans are uncomfortable with the thought that religious radicals founded what became the United States—a blind spot that seriously impairs their understanding of its origins. Puritans began populating New England just as their comrades back in jolly old England were perpetrating the world’s first revolution. Their successors then agitated for the world’s next revolution in America, far surpassing in numbers and influence the Enlightenment figures venerated as “Founding Fathers”.
Here a conspiracy of silence operates between modern left and rights, neither of whom wishes to acknowledge any of this. The left wants to forget its religious pedigree, and the right is reluctant to accept Christianity’s radical past and its role in founding and fomenting political revolution; but this perspective changes the equation fundamentally. It suggests that the content of leftist ideology—which has changed to the point where it would be unrecognizable to its inventors—may be less important than the style of politics it created. It suggests that the left exists not because it is necessarily right. The left may exist because it devised political methods that have other advantages beyond its actual grievances. Perhaps those methods achieve it aims more effectively; perhaps it satisfies emotional and psychological needs not served by traditional politics. Different explanations are possible.
By the same token, it opens the possibility that some leftist concerns may not be meritless, but that the political means they adopt to address them have consequences unforeseen or unintended. Finally, it presents another possibility: if the left did not always exist, then possibly the day may come when it will vanish utterly.
The few progressives who bother to examine the agenda of their progenitors, the Puritan revolutionaries, are hard pressed to understand and sympathize with it—any more than they do with today’s radical Islamists. Conservatives are hardly more empathetic in coming to grips with what were once called their ‘Puritan Fathers’. One lesson to be drawn from the Puritans is that progressivism thrives upon resentment. It does not necessarily encourage resentment, nor is it always fair to blame leftists for its existence. Every society has multiple sources of friction and resentment, many of which are never politicized. Moreover, the Puritans expended considerable energy trying to repress it. But progressivism takes resentment that already exists and—sometimes in the dry process of repressing it—also controls, disciplines, and channels it for its own own purposes.
It is undeniable that some resentments are justified; nor can we say that all purposes into which progressives divert it are necessarily bad. But merits of the grievances are of secondary importance. What is critical are the methods. The left harnesses and organizes resentments into ideologies, revolutions, and similar means to achieve its aims.
The right rejects the progressive agenda and claims to resist it; but it often imitates their techniques. The result is a kind of de facto collusion, whereby leftist assumptions worm their way into politics and culture without our being fully aware that it is happening. The left has changed forms and reinvented itself many times over the centuries—from religious to republican, nationalist, socialist, anarchist, communist, and most recently—sexual. Certainly the left has had success, some of which is deserved.
But it is also skilled at surviving failures. Thus grievances are constantly updated, and failure leaves it undeterred. If we cannot reform church government and eliminate idolatry, then perhaps we can eradicate poverty. If that does not work, then we can liberate women and people with fetishes. Some are always ready to declare that designations of left and right are obsolete, and that we have reached ‘the end of ideology’. Such declarations are always premature. Certainly, there are often elements on both left and right that are ready to forget their principles and collude with each other; but that is not the same as rendering those principles obsolete. Perhaps what is happening today is best understood not as the end of ideology, but rather as another collusion between the two. This collusion is however asymmetrical; invariably, the left still leads as the right follows.
Progressives thrive in opposition and adhere fiercely to their principles when engaged in the romantic Hegelian dialectical struggle. When they are most likely to jettison those principles is also when they sense the sweet smell of success and assume power, as George Orwell depicted with the pigs of his Animal Farm. We see it vividly today, as leftists become the Plutocrats and militarists and even racists they once despised.
Conversely, the right finds opposition distasteful and seldom does it well. Those on the right prefer to be in charge, and their most prominent leaders usually enjoy power and wealth. They are most likely to abandon their principles not when they are successful, but when they are flailing, as they are presently. When the left is winning, the right becomes diffident and weak and envies the left’s success, which it finds any excuse to do. The right then—especially the establishment right retaining a measure of power within the organizational fiefdoms it has created—looks for opportunities to ingratiate itself among leftist elites and to compromise its principles.
When the right dominates, then both left and right are most likely to act out of principle. This is the default position in which we have existed for most of modern history; a state of at least apparent and relative stability. When the left dominates, both sides are most likely to sell out their principles in order to enjoy the intoxication of power. This is the slippery slope down which we are now sliding into tyranny and destruction. We show no signs of knowing how to reverse this progression.
There can be little doubt that leftist ideology persists over the centuries because it is constantly fed from the ranks of the young. Coupled with larger trends whereby the young progressively increase their presence in society and influence in politics, it might seem that the triumph of the left is what the Puritans said it was—predestined.
The appeal of rebellious politics to youth hardly needs explanation. What does demand understanding is that we have now entered a new phase marking the logical inclusions of leftist and modern politics. In this phase, not only the rebellious style of leftist politics but also its content militates toward enlisting youth. This involves domination of the left by the politics of sexuality, whereby families and children are intentionally politicized to liberate and empower women and pseudo-women like homosexuals and transsexuals, and then children themselves.
It can hardly be denied that the most significant ideological innovation of our time is the shift from social and economic grievances to sexual ones at the vanguard of the radical left. It is also the most difficult to understand. The bottom line is that massive numbers of children now grow up without fathers and effectively without any parental authority or family structure to civilize, discipline, and acculturate them into a stable social and civic order. Given that rebelliousness and sexuality tend to emerge at roughly the same age, it is hardly surprising that sexual politics present an especially alluring and explosive combination for adolescents to rage out of all control. Their susceptibility to the most extreme leftist ideology renders them eager to destroy every pillar of the civilized order, as well as themselves, mutilating their own bodies for the cause of progressivism.
The government they have ushered into power is rooted in this ideology and urges self- destruction. But most debilitating is that even the opposition—the Republicans in the U.S. and the CPC in Canada, conservative pressure groups, law firms, think-tanks, media, universities—all show no understanding of how to oppose this. Most are too cowardly to try. Remarkably, for the reasons stated, some even add their own voices in advancing the enemy. More than any previous leftist agenda, sexual radicalism neuters its own opposition. It feminizes and infantilizes even those most intent upon extolling ‘manhood’.
Next to this, leftist campaigns to recycle racial or class politics are insignificant. Today’s ostensible racial militancy is largely a facade; a flanking operation diverting attention from a progressive cutting-edge agenda, which is sexual. BLM is, after all, the creation and operation of black feminists. Persistent demands for welfare, affirmative action, and reparations do not benefit black men whatsoever. They instead empower black women to emasculate men via government ‘assistance’, depriving them of their roles as providers, protectors, and leaders.
The sexual left has fought us to the reductio ad absurdum of ideological politics. It targets working class men and lower middle class families as ‘oppressors’ and condones the physical exploitation and mutilation of children. Yet more variations may come, but we have already seen enough to realize that civilizational survival requires that we undertake to fully renounce ideological politics.
This cannot be done until we venture forth from our comfort zone, discard our reassuring illusions, and stop trying to extricate ourselves from the grip of the far left by following the same foolish habits and feckless leaders that betrayed us to it, beginning in the final decade of the last century.
It was the time of trials. The 20th century tested the strength of civilization to the limit. As Westerners indebted to Roman law and Erasmus of Rotterdam humanism, we barely survived the mortal challenges of Bolshevism and Naziism. Like the ancient Greeks, the founders of democracy who had to war with the Persians time and time again, we faced the threat of final annihilation. It was touch and go.
Before WWI, only the most tormented misanthropes could have foreseen the extent of manufactured disasters awaiting humanity. Bastards of the war, the twin ideologies of Soviet communism and national socialism—rivals unto death—marked the painful transition to modernity. Moving far beyond Christian ethics, observing the transgressive standards of deception and violence that characterize totalitarianism, they preached group hatred (class and race war, respectively) and rebellion. In a setting of Utopian hypocrisy (i.e. revolution), they were on the verge of overthrowing the West. In pursuit of unilateral dominance— including over history, just like the modern WOKE mob—they created general unrest, organized sabotage against social institutions, and worked to destroy the trust of civil society. Fortunately, they initially failed to succeed in their malignant misadventure. That is the reason why we have so far been able to reflect on the course of history without academic boundaries. Self-censorship never seriously distorted the public debate until the breakthrough of second-generation Marxism, the so-called “Wokeism” threatening ‘cancellation’, if not physical incapacitation.
The Bolshevik fratricide of Naziism was an immense relief to the enlightened part of humanity, considering the unspeakable atrocities uncovered in the heart of Europe. Systematic euthanasia in the German Vaterland before the outbreak of war became industrialized mass murder of Jews in distant extermination camps. The rival ideologies shared the same murderous view of people as objects rather than subjects. In the aftermath of the war, the Bolsheviks took over the Nazi anti-Western and anti-Semitic alliances in the Third World. Western Civilization is technologically, aesthetically, and ethically refined, based as it is on a mixture of Hellenistic-Roman and Judeo-Christian traditions. It is truly unique and without any claim to moral universalism. It staggered for awhile back then under combined Bolshevik and Nazi forces, but ultimately regained its footing.
This time, however, we may have finally had it. The threat to survival of our civilization now comes from all sides. It may indeed be suspected that enemies of the West have been making their secret preparations for a long time. Enemies of openness and freedom, the totalitarian forces preferably work under the cover of darkness because their long-term vision conflicts with tenets of a democratic social order and the rule of law.
The balance of power in the world is changing. The West, once the cradle and sanctuary of freedom, is yielding to the dark forces of totalitarianism. The light of hope that spread globally post collapse of the Soviet empire is once again giving way to darkness. The enemy is as confident as ever, sensing weakness like any other predator; allied shock troops from near and far are on the move, preparing for the final push. While we are being eaten up from within by the peacefully disguised enemy—who has infiltrated and demoralized us since the end of WWII, gradually displacing our fundamental principles of freedom and undermining our societal cohesion—we are threatened at gunpoint from without by their co-conspirators.
Bolsheviks and Nazis, co-exemplars of political thuggery, once conspired with each other against the power structures. Re-distribution of land, population centres, and natural resources after WWI divided the spoils from coordinated wars of conquest like the Polish partition. Their criminal alliance, which also included trade in oil and weapons, held until one side cheated the other via Operation Barbarossa. That is what inevitably happens in the relationship between habitual criminals. Like psychopaths remorselessly harming others, the zealous servants of totalitarianism cannot plead ignorance or misguided benevolence—they are at bottom black-hearted.
The contemporary alliance facing the West consists of Eastern European revanchists, Middle Eastern Islamists, and Far Eastern Communists. Although a trio of widely disparate foes, they are the united enemies of the ‘open society’. They are united by the fight against a common enemy more than anything else. They form a fearsome criminal cartel, all the same.
How then do we deal with the situation that could herald our impending doom?
Many of us refuse to face the danger, but prefer to trivialize it and indulge in superficial diversions as if nothing had happened. That is denial. Others covertly serve the enemy and attack anyone who warns of the danger and demands timely countermeasures. That is treachery. However, such denial and treachery might well stem from cowardice; the cowards do not believe that the West can win this time. They consider resistance utterly futile and are only trying to save themselves.
The conservative skeptic, urging moderation and reflection, may find it difficult to get through with their measures in the cacophony of social-media nonsense and political announcements without insight and determination. On the whole, it seems to be a minority of us who actually realize danger and are willing to do something about it. Heroism is in short supply these days. Most do not value the freedom they inherited and thus take it for granted, but are sadly distracted by the endless temptations of consumerism.
The will to survive has become like a distant motif in our collective memory. We refuse to be in touch with our own past as Westerners and to learn from our hard-earned experiences. Long forgotten is the resilient spirit of the Spartans, outnumbered by the Persians, who fought bravely at Thermopylae, though betrayed by one of their own in the end. Similarly, nobody cares about the victory of the Athenians at the Battle of Marathon, allegedly a turning point in the wars between the founders of Western civilization and Oriental tyrants.
Our civilization, truly second to none, rule-based and humanistic, imbued with Judaeo- Christian morality, is now being challenged by hostile countercultures. Insidious signs of moral decay abound. There is no one to save us but ourselves. Under and above the dramatic clash of cultures, the laws of nature are hard at work. Whereas our Third World invaders and colonizers multiply rapidly, our numbers dwindle. Time is on their side, and they know it. They are storming an open city whose ramparts are unguarded.
Western civilization is doomed unless we are actually willing to fight for it. Human nature does not allow us to rest and turn our backs on the world. Implacable enemies of freedom appear wherever society reveals indecision and weakness; they are ever prepared to band together, exploiting or destroying the ‘open society’. Accordingly, the institutions that support civilization require ongoing maintenance. Put simply—we must man the walls.
Like the ancient Greeks, we can ill afford to lay down our weapons and armor. We must keep ready for battle if we hope to have any loyalty to ourselves and our kindred. History is sure to erase us in case of moral decay and pusillanimity. The same fate has befallen many other peoples before us, including the Hittites, Babylonians, and Harappans.
The Greeks were giants. What about us?
Are we already beaten?
Or might we shock history and rise once again? Melancholic self-abandonment, bordering on the masochistic, hysterical death drive, and post-Christian secularism are truly our greatest enemy in the West. If we are to defeat the chaos being imposed by our foes, we must first restore moral order to ourselves. There is no other path to our salvation.
