The word “reactionary” has become synonymous with the Right entirely due to the Left applying it to anyone they hate. The Left does not use it much anymore, as new abracadabra phrases have taken its place. Read radical writings of the 60’s and the word turns up all over the place. The claim is that the opponents of the Left are not working from a basis of facts and reason. Instead, they are merely reacting from emotion and therefore they can be dismissed.
It is why I tend to think the people embracing the label, calling themselves neo-reactionaries, are making a critical mistake. They are dismissing their own thoughts as nothing more than a hysterical reaction to the prevailing liberal orthodoxy. That is not their intention. They are reaching back to an older definition, but that is not how anyone outside their movement is going to take it. Like it or not, the Left controls the language, or at least they have for a long time, so they get to define the terms.
It is just another example of the dominance of the Cult of Modern Liberalism in American life. Everything, even the thoughts of its adversaries, has been warped by it. Vast bits of history have either been lost or retconned to the point where they tell a story in direct contradiction to the facts. The reactionaries used to be the people in charge, facing down the rebels of the radical Left. Today, reactionary conjures an image of a thoughtless old man unwilling to change with the times.
Thinking of the Left as the establishment is hard because the narrative of the Left always features them as the plucky underdog, facing off against the reactionary philistine. The concept of the struggle is integral to the creation myths of liberalism, as well as to the ongoing narrative of the faith. Like all cults, Liberalism can function without a leader, but it must always have a devil. As a result, even the harshest of critics can be forgiven for failing to appreciate the Left’s hold on society.
This altered reality obscures the fact that as an intellectual construct, the Progressive project in America has collapsed. That is evident in the Democratic primary for President. Bernie Sanders ran on the old time theme of economic equality and sounded like a stock character from the 1950’s filmstrip on the Red Menace. It was not what he said, but how ridiculously out of place it sounded compared to modern Progressive rhetoric.
Clinton, in contrast, chants the slogans of identity politics, which are all just in-group signaling. Her campaign to run as a slightly-out-of-the-closet lesbian is what liberalism is today. Talk to a modern liberal and ask them why they are supporting Clinton. Most likely they will change the subject, saying something about Trump. Otherwise, you get a shrug because they do not know. It is just what they do. It is what they are supposed to do.
Something else that has been obscured by the howling from the Left is that it is an entirely reactionary movement now. With nothing to offer a modern technocratic society, other than a post-modern form of nostalgia for the glory days of the Cult, the Left is mostly focused on stamping out bogeymen, real and imaginary, past and present. Listen to a liberal today and what you hear is a litany of things they oppose and those things are more often than not fictional.
It is why the college campus is so weird now. They are dominated by liberal women and minorities, yet they are engaged in endless witch hunts for dangerous white males. The Rolling Stone rape hoax featured a guy named Haven Monahan, a name intended to conjure an image of a toothy, horse faced WASP brimming with entitlement. College has become live action role playing for paranoid Progressives, with the quests set as morality tales based on Progressive piety.
It is what critics of Obama miss when railing about his refusal to say, “radical Islam.” They assume it belies a hidden agenda or a naive ignorance. It is neither. Obama is a reactionary. Whatever his adversaries are for, he is against. His reactionary instincts are mostly just a moldy form of anti-colonialism that was popular with his parent’s generation, but still exists in Afrocentric circles. Obama is defined by what he hates, not what he loves.
It is why his first act as President was to have the bust of Churchill removed. African anti-colonials hated Churchill, seeing him as the symbol of British imperialism. Right out of the gate, Obama was showing us he was a man defined by his hatreds. He was for nothing and against just about everything. In this regard, he is the quintessential reactionary. His only interest is in maintaining the Progressive order. Whether or not it is good for the country is irrelevant.
The entirely of Obama’s presidency can be explained in the reactionary framework. Like most successful blacks in America, he is consumed with a hatred for whites so a lot of what he does is just spite against the honkies. The more substantive acts read like a laundry list of Progressive revenge fantasies. His rapprochement with Russia was styled to be a rebuke of Reaganism, not a diplomatic strategy. It is why it failed. After the point was made, he and his flunkies laughed and move onto other topics.
The big health care push was never about health care. Instead, it was about revisiting the liberal defeat in the early 90’s. That is why it quickly devolved into score settling over issues like abortion and religious liberty. The Left has not the foggiest idea how to reform health care and they are not interested in it. They just wanted to exact some revenge against Christians and the middle-class. The point of that is to remind everyone they are in charge and it is the natural order.
Obama’s refusal to take obvious steps to address the Muslim problem is just a form of trolling. He knows it pisses off the squares and that is why he does it. It is not that he is a secret Muslim or that he has a secret agenda of some sort. The truth is the opposite. He as no plans and not interest in forming a plan. What consumes him is poking a stick in the eye of the people he detests, which so happens to be normal Americans. In this regard, he is our first foreign President, but he mostly just a reactionary President.
Ultimately, reaction cannot exist as an intellectual force on its own, as a simple matter of logic. Just as Buckley Conservatism curdled into a weird Corporate Libertarianism without the menace of Soviet communism, the Left has evolved in reaction to the void where it is old enemy once existed. The radical project was always based on the assumption of scarcity, a zero sum game where some had extra and some went without. It is why communist states never try to arrest scarcity. They need to survive.
Today, no one goes without, as a practical matter. It may be an illusion build on credit money, but a whole generation has grown up with too much of everything. When the poor are suffering from obesity, scarcity is no longer a problem. Instead of promising a future where poverty and inequality are banished, the Left is now a paranoid power cult lashing out indiscriminately in a vain quest to hold power. They are like meth addicts fighting the imaginary spiders, except they wield real power and do real damage.
America, like the rest of the West is entering a crisis of legitimacy due largely to the fact the Left decimated the intellectual battlefield. In the zeal to pull down all competing social constructs, they forgot to build one of their own that can hold up in a modern technological society. What passes for mainstream moral philosophy today is a vast moonscape littered with the remnants of old ideas. The Left is reduced to settling old scores and lashing out at imaginary bogeymen. This is the age of Liberal Reaction.
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Very nice essay; I disagree about Obama’s “faith” or lack thereof, however.
Obama’s father was Muslim; his stepfather also Muslim; he was enrolled as a Muslim student at his school in Indonesia.
Therefore regardless of how we in the West see it, to the vast majority of Muslims world-wide, Obama is indeed a Muslim. One of the tenets of Islam is taqiyya, which allows Muslims to engage in forbidden acts- including lying like a rug- to advance Islam. We know that lying is a constant practice with him, and that nothing he says can be trusted.
That does NOT mean that he actually believes in any of the tenets of the faith. I have doubts whether any of the Muslim dictators actually believe in what the Koran says, but I’m very sure that they know how to use the Koran to stir up their followers against any threat to their power and position, and to advance their cause. This would fit right in with Obama’s apparent agenda; he hates this country, wants to destabilize/ruin it, and it matters not (in practice) whether he is or isn’t an actual Muslim. If he isn’t- what would he be doing differently?
That’s my only quibble with an excellent essay!
Obama may not believe in anything but he does think of himself as a Muslim. That’s why he was so happy with Rev. Wright’s “church” where Wright explained he would not have to repudiate Islam. Obama doesn’t want to give up that identification, secret as it is – it’s important to him. He was listed as a Muslim at that Muslim school he went to in Indonesia and I’m sure he has recited the declaration of faith, as he has demonstrated he can sing the prayers. I believe his education was paid for with Saudi money. His election showed that the American public and the fake opposition party were under control and the time was right for the final changes. His 7 years in office have proved it. That’s why he gets so angry at the one thing he hasn’t gotten done – stripping the power of self-defense from the individuals in the herd.
OK, I’ll grant you that this one is a good essay. You have got substantive, intelligent criticisms of the Left, even if you continually talk rot about Republicans and the Conservative Movement.
Standard operating procedure of cultural marxist scum, Alynski 101, accuse and declare you potential adversaries of what your guilty of doing and being, never let up, change the meme constantly, keep your enemies off balance.
After a while that lefttard crap begins to get really old, it becomes so transparent it is ridiculous. Like all the false flag crisis’s as a means, real convenient. #1 Rule of the dirt people, never trust anything a politician, presstitute, fed thug, or statist, (sorry about repeating myself), says, proclaims, or does. It’s like pushing the easy button. Never take anything any of them say for granted. Dollars to donuts the moment you trust nothing, the truth is perfectly clear. Cognitive bullshit and dissimulation. Costs nothing to doubt everything the sonofabitches say or do. Once you make it a good habit, everything is apparent. All the lies, all the corruption. Most of all, they become total jackass’s. You see right thru the facade.
Part of the Kulturkampf is taking back the language. We must own the word reactionary just like blacks have owned nigger.
Indeed. I have noticed that Alt-Righters, when called “reactionary,” tend to respond with: “So what?”
Neo-reactionary? Sounds like a good idea. I think it’s only proper to put them on notice that they’re really starting to piss me off.
Zman – once again I think you’re right on target. I’ve read a lot of analysis and conjecture about who Obama is and what he believes, but this is probably the best. Another way to put it is an attempt to rescue socialism from failure and reverse history’s verdict on the cold war; no new ideas, just spiteful revenge on the winners.
Obama is not a Muslim, because he seeks to identify “good” Muslims and “bad” Muslims. A real Muslim would not and cannot do that, because to question any element of the Muslim experience and actions is to question the will of God. Which equals apostasy and requires being put to death.
Liberals stand for nothing, because any genuine examination of our society would require a dispassionate look at differing IQs by culture and race, the merits and demerits of tribalism, the social benefits of family and community, and the basic fact that life is never fair. Instead they would rather drown in a cacophony of identity politics, virtue signaling, and the relative rankings of societal victimhood. (Hint: LGBQT is in danger of losing its special status, because it is largely a white male phenomenon, outranked by duskiness and Muslimness.). It is rather astonishing to watch the global freak-out of the species. One wonders where all of this will take us.
Excuse me but you forget one of the most important “tools” of the Muslim … taqiyya.
http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/pages/quran/taqiyya.aspx
As for your take on liberals standing for nothing and your analysis of them, all I can say is you are comparing apples and oranges when you talk about “… taking a dispassionate look at …” well, anything. Liberalism is a mental disorder and cannot be reasoned with.
“Reactionary” evokes an image of an amoeba – a thing with no mind – reflexively recoiling from whatever stimulus assails it.
I’m no longer a reactionary, or a conservative. I’m not sure about the altRight yet; the anti-Semitic undertow is a deal-breaker for me, but it may be a temporary thing that gets sidelined. I’ve got my own label: I’m a restorationist. It’s an old term that was used to describe a movement of Christians who wanted to get back to the ways of the early church. The term is defunct now, I suppose it’s been replaced by “fundamentalist”, so I figure I can use it for myself.
I want to restore the world to the way it was before Progressivism wrecked everything. And since once of my pastimes is restoring old things like sewing machines, I have a sense of all the work of cleaning and rebuilding that is required.
You can restore something that is taken by force; you cannot restore what is voluntarily surrendered. This form of government is supremely suited to surrender. and it’s people are increasingly genetically ill-suited to wringing out what good can flow from it.
That is a very salient point James. It goes along with taking away the action of choice. Life really is about choice if it is one thing. Self determination, self sufficiency. independence of mind, thought, perspective. Of reason. Reason is what created the West. Cultural marxist’, Fabianism, is about group think, the collective, the hive. “Diversity”, “Multi Culturalism”, empowerment not of the individual, hence restraining one of rising ones bar, but the group or class or race, those social euphemisms, as in “social Justice”, is to rob people of their individual diversity, their culture,, and in doing so individuals no longer think and act for themselves, they become useful dupes, their souls are ruled, they can see nothing past the warm fetid embrace of the herd and hive. It is insidious, it is ignorance and the rule of the lowest common denominator writ large, it is the dynamics of the human extinction movement. We even have a president who is one of the collective.
And they hate and fear any person and our culture where people have the courage to self determine, of their convictions, who let not fear, but opportunity and venture guide them, and learn from mistakes naturally made along the journey, in spite of, regardless of, status quo, or insipid conventions of group conformity of and in worship of the human extinction movement. They don’t have a culture war, they are waging war on culture outside the collective. It is bigotry on scales of magnitude, it is the true racism, it is people who psychopathically bullshit themselves and each other, and bath in a wallow of hubris. Left to their actions unimpeded eventually this statism leads to pogrom and genocide, for their is no other end game, that is the end game. They are a cult of crybabies and arrogant meddlers, nothing is good enough, nothing satiates that addiction to self delusion, and the deeper the cult goes, the bigger the required fix to satisfy the dis-satisfaction of the souls they sold in their faustian bargain to cultural marxism.
Amen Brother!
Amen Brother.
Hey, let me run this by you… Know what a bill of attainder is?
Well, lot of people talk about the 1st and 2nd Amendments and the assault on them by the statists right? Bill of Attainder is in some ways a far more critical a clause that the 1st and second, and that the entire system of federal government, and many states to some extent, are governments of Attainder. Look at the connections and parallels, how they dovetail with cultural marxism, sharia law, and the transformation of amerika.
Bill of Attainder
Definition: A legislative act that singles out an individual or group for punishment without a trial.
The Constitution of the United States, Article I, Section 9, paragraph 3 provides that: “No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law will be passed.”
“The Bill of Attainder Clause was intended not as a narrow, technical (and therefore soon to be outmoded) prohibition, but rather as an implementation of the separation of powers, a general safeguard against legislative exercise of the judicial function or more simply – trial by legislature.” U.S. v. Brown, 381 U.S. 437, 440 (1965).
“These clauses of the Constitution are not of the broad, general nature of the Due Process Clause, but refer to rather precise legal terms which had a meaning under English law at the time the Constitution was adopted. A bill of attainder was a legislative act that singled out one or more persons and imposed punishment on them, without benefit of trial. Such actions were regarded as odious by the framers of the Constitution because it was the traditional role of a court, judging an individual case, to impose punishment.” William H. Rehnquist, The Supreme Court, page 166.
“Bills of attainder, ex post facto laws, and laws impairing the obligations of contracts, are contrary to the first principles of the social compact, and to every principle of sound legislation. … The sober people of America are weary of the fluctuating policy which has directed the public councils. They have seen with regret and indignation that sudden changes and legislative interferences, in cases affecting personal rights, become jobs in the hands of enterprising and influential speculators, and snares to the more-industrious and less-informed part of the community.” James Madison, Federalist Number 44, 1788.
Like treadles? I have one that was stored in a barn. The base was in rough shape, there was rust to deal with, but it works. It is amazing to take a machine from the 1800s and see that it still does the job it was designed for. Perhaps there is a blog post about the disposability of the things in our lives.
Yes, I love treadles! And I’ve no special training; I just followed tutorials on sewing machine forums, where they describe everything you have to do to fix them. I’ve just finished restoring the cabinet on a Singer 27, built in 1904. Same deal as yours: rust on the base, and over the machine, not to mention 100 years of dirt and mouse poop inside the desk. But they were built to last, to be repaired and put back into service. I cleaned the machine, stripped, stained, shellacked and waxed the cabinet, and scrubbed off the rust and repainted the base with black enamel. And now, all oiled and polished, it moves as lightly as a butterfly. Don’t throw out that old machine!
I have two Singer 27s. One is 1891 and one 1910. I have a White and a Wheeler Wilcox too. And I have typewriters. Not only do these things work well, they were designed for beauty.
Pictures of my old treadle at
http://notsothoreau.com/blog/?p=850
Beautiful! I love that rose decal – never seen one in real life, but I hope to come across one some day. I go to country auctions, and it’s not unusual to see a treadle machine that’s been stored in a barn for over 50 years. They were designed for beauty, as you say – the modern ones aren’t. They can do wonderful things, of course, but their plastic bodies are just functional. The old sewing machines were designed the way cars were – to make you happy just to see them. I’ll have to put some pictures of my own machines on my blog. I don’t have typewriters, but I do have grinders: meat, coffee, grain, you name it. I remember once some guy telling me that he started dating a girl, but was put off when he visited her apartment and found she collected vintage eggbeaters – she had them displayed all over the wall! I said it’s a good thing I started my collecting AFTER I was married; I don’t know how much success a girl would have dating if she brought a guy home and said, “Oh, this? This is my collection of meat grinders.”
The folks demonizing an defining who is and who isn’t alt-right to me, are like those that tell me who is in the tea Party. I have a Gadsen flag, donated to this or that, outraged at GOP and Democrats who sell us out… and yet my friends will regale me with who’s in the tea party and what those rubes stand for and who leads them. Pffft. Then I tell them about me and am told I’m an outlier.
To my point: I too am uncomfortable with some of the alt-right antisemitic writings and white-power -ish, and then I stop myself and say… these guys aren’t labeling themselves as alt-right… it’s others that are. And some of the sites have multiple writers, 7 out of 8 are good to go with one borderline iffy. So I’m thinking it’s like that with alt-right. I can’t throw the clarity of a lot of the alt-right out of the bathtub with the idiotic writing of one or two or the comment section they might attract , nor the finger pointing by those circles that are active critics of the movement and wish to make them or their ideas taboo and “other”.
If you want to know what your country will look like if Ms. Clinton gains office, you need look no further than Europe; feminized, liberalized and neutered to the point that invasion and colonization is inevitable.Yes, there are men in Brussels, but that only goes as far as their XY chromosomes.
I agree, you’ve nailed it.
Best thing you’ve said in quite a long time.
Good to see some clear thinking.
Maybe without Trump, but to a lot of America, the jig is up. For Hillary to win, that means Trump lost and Hillary got away with many crimes. She will have won by slim margin. No mandate since she is running as not-scary Trump, the Hitler. She will not enjoy the support to achieve the revenge she wishes to enact…. and those that Trump’s anti-PC movement has awoken will not just sit on their hands and say oh well. I think it’s safe to saw, if she somehow “wins”, it will be a very turbulent time for America. BUT, she’s not going to . Trump in a landslide. That’s why the msm is skewing the polls right now ( and the GOP #nevertrump crowd). A lot of phony-baloney jobs are on the line.
It is the One World Order bitchez. And you dirt people have no say in the matter. So shut up, all your prosperity, property, and liberty belong to us.
I am led to believe that three of western Europe’s defence ministers are female. Certainly the Liebore party in the UK have a female shadow defence minister, so if they get power a woman who not only dislikes men but hates war (or more accurately, the need to be prepared for conflict) will be in charge of what is left the British armed forces. As the main body of the Liebore party don’t understand the need for a strong armed force standing ready, you can see where this is going, can’t you?
This pretty much says it all. The only question is, where is it going? This may sound absurd, but eventually the individual may end up being the final identity victim, which might bring us full circle. ( I did say it might sound absurd).
There’s an old commie word that needs revival: “Stakhanovite.” What is Socialism? To fulfill the Five Year Plan! Who, then is the best Socialist? He who devotes all his life to over-fulfilling the Five Year Plan, i.e. the Stakhanovite. And what, comrade, is the point of the Five Year Plan? To build Socialism! And what is Socialism? The fulfillment of the Five Year Plan! Etc. etc. That’s what we have now, the Stakhanovite Left. They judge each other by how far over quota they are in the Five Year Plan. He who over-fulfills the Five Year Plan the least gets sent to the gulag. He who questions the Five Year Plan….