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Over the last thirty years, many people have noticed that all moral claims within the public policy sphere can be reduced to a few time periods. In the realm of foreign policy, it is always about 1938 and the events around that time. If it is a domestic issue in the United States, then it is always 1968. Perhaps the slow Progressives will try to make it about the 1980’s when their hero was president. For Americans, public policy is trapped in one of three historical frameworks.
On the foreign policy side, it is easy to see how this works. There have been so many new Hitlers on the stage, no one can keep count. Every foolish and destructive misadventure by Washington involves a Hitler figure. They are not just a generic bad guy in the propaganda sense of it, but they represent the re-emergence of the timeless enemy and the timeless struggle. Everything about American foreign policy since the Cold War is about preventing an imaginary past.
This cognitive defect has made its way across the ocean to Europe. Whenever there is a meeting of the local satraps of the American empire, they take turns looking worried in front of the cameras, talking about the possible reemergence of you know who and the danger of resembling Neville Chamberlain. This moral framework is so powerful that they were unable to notice the irony of the Ukrainians using German tanks to attack the Russians in the Kursk region.
In the United States, the other great moral framework is the Civil Rights movement, into which every local issue is jammed. Every black politician imagines herself as the you-go-girl version of Martin Luther King, which means even mundane issues like maintaining the roads is a civil rights issue. Every man in a dress not being called “ma’am” by the clerk is Rosa Parks. This framing has gone so far that nonwhites are routinely called white supremacists.
One of the features of those who have crossed the great divide is that they see the past as the past, not as an emotional support framework. Whatever lessons can be learned from the past in order to navigate the future are studied, but otherwise, the modern dissident accepts that tomorrow does not lie in yesterday. For those trapped in the 20th century, it is an endless singing of “Tomorrow Belongs To Me” and morality tales where they are the hero.
This irrational attachment to the past is ironic, in that the whole point of the Progressive ideology was to advance human society forward, with forward defined as an advanced state of moral existence. While Progressives of the past often focused on material improvement, the spring has always been eschatological. Better stuff was proof of better living and better living was always a normative issue. It is why they continue to see themselves as the Elect.
The thing about ideology is that it tries to replace something that the Christian West eventually took for granted. Within Christianity there is an assumed point to living within the bounds of Christian ethics. Live a Christian life and your reward is eternal life at the feet of God. Ideology cannot offer this because ideology rejects God as the moral authority, so there must be some other reason to follow the moral demands of the ideology, which becomes the project of the ideology.
Marx probably understood this when he described life in a socialist society as a world of men able “to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner.” He was criticizing specialization and its dehumanizing qualities, but he was also describing a world where men were liberated from the human condition, free to be what they chose. Communism always imagined an end point that recreated heaven on earth.
At some point, every ideology must at least imply a vision of the future as a reason to continue to live within and fight for the moral claims of the ideology. If the point of the ideology is more of the same, then why bother? Therefore, central to every ideology is a point to the struggle, a destination that promises to liberate people from whatever vexes the ideology. Therein lies the reason why the modern Progressive remain trapped in and obsessed with past struggles.
Progressivism was always a weird hybrid of Protestantism and liberalism, so it could leave unsaid the promise of Christianity, while refashioning the ethics of Christianity around claims to universalism, egalitarianism and eventually the blank slate. At its peak, it was a restatement of Winthrop’s sermon “A Model of Christian Charity,” but stripped of all Scriptural references. It resonated with an audience that continued to be informed by the vestigial Christianity they inherited.
The implied destination of Progressivism no longer works on an audience lacking even a basic Christian frame of reference. This void has been filled with a circular version of history in which events of today are recast as versions of the old glorious struggles of the past, where the good guys won, and the bad guys were sent fleeing. The Elect in this arrangement are those who can imagine themselves wearing the white rose of resistance or riding a bus in the Jim Crow South.
In this regard, Progressivism has become a hive without a queen. The queen is the promised land, and the hive is the habits of mind that form the ideology. They are the Christian zealots with no conception of God and only a vague understanding of what lies after this moment in time. This void is filled with anger, which is why they have become so vicious in defense of the absurd. The source of their rage is their spiritual death, which they cannot comprehend.
This obsession over 1938 and 1968 is not just a way to solve the pointlessness of Progressivism, but also a way to escape present reality. Every Progressive, whether of the fast or slow variety, is a version of Blanche DuBois, saddling the next generations with themselves and their stories of the past. The rest of us are now struggling to figure out what to do with them. They are an unwanted and useless presence to the people of the present, trying to move into the future.
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Reminds of a theme that I see on ‘X’ where a leftist gloats about some economic number going down with critics noting that if “number goes up” means more of what Biden was doing then it’d be better if it went down.
I wonder if the ongoing stovepiping of Social Media might solve, or at least amelioriate, that problem. I enjoy reading the Leftist fever swamp sites like Salon from time to time, and they have an elaborate “delusion architecture,” as I think the shrink jargon has it. It’s this entirely self-referential world — all their articles are dripping with hyperlinks, but they only ever go to other articles on their site (or a few on likeminded sites). It’s hilariously cattywampus to reality, but it seems to work for them. The problem is that the Democrats actually listen to these people, but… Read more »
I don’t know how you can stomach it, my friend. Maybe it’s my lack of intellectual capacity or my raging hatred of these mutants that clouds my ability to even glance at their trash. Kudos to you for being able to do it.
I used to work in academia. Compared to the everyday lunacy of the ivory tower, it’s nothing. Plus, these days they’re really suffering, and that warms my heart.
I know that “true believer vs. cynical opportunist” is often debated when it comes to the other side, but I think the debate is over. The Democrats don’t listen to these people because they have to. They’re under the same delusion architecture. That should have been made obvious the past few years, especially with Project Ukraine. Look at how the Democrats behaved during the speech last night. Look at that forum that CNN hosted a month or two ago. They’re all the same. They believe in the things they say. I don’t know how you make a true believer stop… Read more »
The modern leftard is absolutely useless and unwanted. Their refusal to move forward without all of the decades old slogan chanting use to be merely annoying – now it’s something even they will likely come to regret. They need to be walled off, at least figuratively, until something more permanent and worse for them is figured out.
The fact that almost half of America has crossed the event horizon into gibbering psychosis is an invincible argument against the democratic process. What else could it be? The proposition that sanity and survival must be put on the line every four years is itself insane. If debating with the Left is pointless, then giving them the chance to retake control is something beyond that.
Watched the State of the Union last night. Saw the ghetto congressman punch the air with his cane like a pimp. Saw the ghetto congresswoman Crockett call Trump a bitch and Putin’s ho. Recalled what it was like not 40 years ago in the US in terms of public decorum — even after the horrors of the hippies and the 1960s and 1970s cultural breakdown. I really struggle mentally with why a people would do this to themselves. Why the people around me would, in fact. The still living. The ones who believe in this, who see nothing wrong with… Read more »
There is a practical side to progressives living in the past while dreaming of the future. Normies have already been sold on the idea that Nazis, Jim Crow and black slavery were the worst things to have ever happened. Since leftist women, Jews and soy boys love hysteria, it is an easy way to energize the troops. Focusing on those agreed upon evils has worked to silence opposition and provides great cover for the left’s carrying water for wealthy globalists now. White men were in charge during those evil times so now that they are working on making real the… Read more »
For some time I noticed I tended to refer to similar particular years in my (reading/film-watching) interests: 1936-38 for pulp adventures, 1957 for atomic age sci-fi and horror, 1986 for comic books, maybe 1968 for counter-culture. While these years may not be the actual ‘high points’ of their cultural markers they are what I always think of. Perhaps it is just a function of my particular age.
Today’s progressives are malignant narcissists. The problem for them is that they suddenly are easily ignored and dismissed, and, worst of all from their perspective, boring, dreary and uninteresting. The last bit is particularly painful for a narcissist. The “Right” is actually exercising power for the first time in our lifetimes, and we understandably train our focus there, but from the perspective of the progressive, the marginalization is the worst aspect. Extreme violence certainly is possible as they fade into dreary irrelevance, but they also are prone to curl into the fetal position if their clanking of pans doesn’t get… Read more »
That’s the thing that is driving the Democrats insane right now. Trump and his movement have become fashionable, and the Left have become politically and culturally unfashionable, as well as personally repellent. For years, the Left has also banked on their Vichy “opponents” being as void of likable human characteristics as they are. That is no longer the case.
For years, the Left has been attempting to forge a cult of personality around leaders with none. Last night Trump showed that he still has that charisma and it eats them with hatred.
I noticed this a few years ago. Leftism became horribly uncool and the place for bossy scolds and obnoxious black women. Imagine being a young zoomer going to school and your teacher put up pride flags everywhere. Who wants to be a leftist? It doesn’t even get you chicks anymore. Democrats have nothing to offer men in general but especially White men. We saw that with Kamala where she said she would help black guys get weed and welfare. it was hilarious but no surprise black guys had no interest. Conservacucks are horribly lame, make no mistake. But Andrew Tate… Read more »
We need to end our post ww2 mythology. It has led to all stupid decisions since including the ukraine and civil rights nonsense. Back to basics of what is in it for me and my kin and countrymen. Enough of the theft for dumbass projects at home and abroad.
The period from 1938 to 1968 was essentially the Third American Revolution, after the first two revolutions 1776 and 1865. The government finally slipped the constitutional leash of limited and enumerated powers, and created a welfare/warfare Leviathan for which anything and everything was justified in the name of “democracy,” “civil rights,” “social security,” and so on. The Four Freedoms replaced the Bill of Rights — Roosevelt specifically stated that the Four Freedoms should be available “everywhere in the world,” thereby launching the Global American Empire on an endless and impossible quest to stamp out “Fear” and “Want” “everywhere in the… Read more »
“Every Progressive, whether of the fast or slow variety, is a version of Blanche DuBois, saddling the next generations with themselves and their stories of the past.”
Yes. Also like Blanche DuBois, they depend on the kindness of strangers. Someone else always has to pay for their dreams.
This moral framework is so powerful that they were unable to notice the irony of the Ukrainians using German tanks to attack the Russians in the Kursk region. A failed armored attack in Kursk? Well I never expected that! (First time as tragedy, second time as farce, eh?) This obsession over 1938 and 1968 is not just a way to solve the pointlessness of Progressivism, but also a way to escape present reality You get the mindset of the people in power who lived through 1936 – 1939, but that’s a hard thing to square with people (like ourselves) who… Read more »
It’s not that “progressivism” lacks a vision for the future. It very much has one, in a general sense, perhaps ill defined around the edges. Their problem is that, despite all the rigging, they still need a baseline number of votes to make it happen. And their vision of brown replacement + degeneracy isn’t a winning platform for getting them. Yet. Because it’s not far enough along. So they do have a vision, they just can’t tell you what it is. They have to pretend they want something else. These rallying cries to the standards of a glorious past are… Read more »
“Marx…described life in a socialist society as a world of men able “to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner.”
In the West today, that’s become “to be queer in the morning, gay in the afternoon, trans in the evening, and have an abortion after dinner.”
While it’s always 1938 and 1968 with the Progressives, I can’t seem to shake 1917, especially with Whites rapidly becoming outnumbered.
Progressivism, Communism, Fascism. Protestant, Jewish, Catholic. + liberalism = modernity.
Tempting thought.
It’s not just the loss of the Christian framework. It’s also just the loss of any personal connection to those past dates. A 25-year-old was born 30+ years after 1968. What resonance does that have to him or her. The story is too distant for them to put themselves into it. (Some young blacks and Jews still try, but even they are stretching it.)
As to the 1938, it might as well be 1066 for all they care.
“The source of their rage is their spiritual death, which they cannot comprehend.”
Talk about distilling matters to their essence! That single line succinctly captures much of the problem in this cushy but frustrated (and frustrating) age.
Zman’s last couple of essays have been exceptional — even by the daunting standard he set for himself long ago. Really outstanding material!
‘This void is filled with anger, which is why they have become so vicious in defense of the absurd. The source of their rage is their spiritual death, which they cannot comprehend’ Oh, they’ll be ‘comprehending’ it in due time. Very insightful writing, however. They fill the void inside left by their rejection and hatred of (that evil mean patriarchal) God and His Scripture as guide in life. God the FATHER is replaced with their self-serving ideology, and it ain’t no coincidence that feminism is the leading entrenchment and profitable delusion. Amerika is a nation saturated by the occult, and… Read more »