Delirium
Conceptualizing the far-right as leftists
The Antileftist Frame
Long-time readers will know that I began this newsletter discussing my personal experiences with transgenderism and detransition. As I moved away from a social psychological analysis of the phenomenon, I began to discuss transgenderism as its own political movement and as an ideological weapon of American empire, which is today the embodiment and primary arbiter of our liberal world order. Given that I was still recovering from those experiences, it became an obsession of mine to unravel transgenderism’s place within global networks of power, as I knew that my adoption of it was not inherent to my person. My experiences with it began as an internet-mediated social contagion within a left-wing extremist political frame, this frame also having largely been adopted via online interactions. After dalliances with right-wing critique of the left which left my crisis in faith unsatisfied, I settled on an antileftist worldview, identifying transgenderism as the primary vanguard of the liberal project.
Antileftism is not the same as reflexive anticommunism or reactionary politics (here I do not use reactionary as a pejorative but as a descriptor). The antileftist analysis I adopted and maintain is inspired by Karl Marx himself, as elaborated his critiques of utopian and reactionary socialists in The Communist Manifesto, inspired also in part by the work of “Benedict Cryptofash” and Alvin W. Gouldner (himself also a Marxist). The position maintained by these thinkers and by myself is that though the Western Marxist movements hardly represent the interests of the proletariat they claim as a revolutionary agent, they share an unbroken intellectual tradition from the very beginnings of the communist movement in the 19th century—a tradition which has always been predominantly comprised of intellectuals, reflecting a uniquely intellectual, rather than proletarian, character. At the same time, however, the analytical framework established by Marx allows for a critique of Marxism on these grounds premised on a robust analysis of the new political economies which emerged beginning in the 19th century. This analysis and critique is the basis of the antileftist position.
“But if the designing of the future and the proclamation of ready-made solutions for all time is not our affair, then we realize all the more clearly what we have to accomplish in the present—I am speaking of a ruthless criticism of everything existing, ruthless in two senses: The criticism must not be afraid of its own conclusions, nor of conflict with the powers that be.”
— Karl Marx in an open letter to Arnold Ruge, 1843.
Why then, I anticipate the question, is antileftism called antileftism if it still derives its analytical framework from Marxists? The terms “left” and “right” emerged during the liberal French Revolution, where the radical Jacobins sat on the left of the National Assembly while the conservative Girondins sat on the right. The leftist Jacobins wished to do away with the king and impose their own extremist liberal vision, while the Girondins sought to preserve the monarchy and its aristocracy while still retaining some of the powers the Third Estate had seized for itself.
Within the antileftist framework, “the left” refers to the cutting edge of modern-day liberalism. It is not a subversive current operating outside of liberalism but is in fact its most ardent defenders, albeit under banners which profess a desire to destroy it, banners which ironically are printed using funds donated by the elite of liberal democratic societies. Within the antileftist frame, a leftist is not necessarily one who holds fast to communist dogmas—although many do—but someone who works to advance liberalism into its next stages, aiding in the many cultural, political, and economic shifts which continually occur. This is the left as it “actually exists,” i.e., as a material political force, rather than as a vague collection of shared identities, ideals, utopian visions, and ressentiments.
Confusing Left for Right
Many “right-wing” dissident circles can also be considered leftist within this framework as they embody the same vanguardist ethos, positioned as “the right” only because they disagree with “the left” on the specific liberal ideals they seek to elevate. For instance, where the radical left is antiracist, the radical right is eugenicist; however, both of these ideals have their roots in the actually-existing progressive movements of the 19th century and the actual execution of these ideals have seen their fair share of moderation, in ebbs and flows, since their inception.
These positions have survived while the original reactionary conservative movements and social structures they once agitated against have largely fallen away, the American South’s quasi-aristocratic society being among the most visible example. While still impressively racist, the Northern progressives who embraced eugenics did so via an embrace of Darwin’s theory of evolution, a theory which evangelical Southerners dismissed as heretical and socially dangerous despite themselves believing in their own theories on racial hierarchies and the stages of civilizational development. Despite sharing somewhat similar ideals in one respect, those progressives still sought to reorder Southern society, characterizing it as provincial and backward, much preferring the new social values of the Robber Barons who had also utilized Darwin’s theories as an explanation for their success and a justification for their continued reign.
While those families of original English aristocratic lineage still largely dominate Southern politics today despite the massive losses incurred during the Civil War and Reconstruction, their rituals and social values only superficially resemble the American quasi-aristocracy which existed before. What emerged was a new stage of liberalism which championed the dominance of industrial and financial interests over agricultural interests, while simultaneously embracing broad-based egalitarian values.
These egalitarian values emergent on the left-wing of the progressive movement primarily served not as mechanisms for liberation, but as a means of breaking apart the old social hierarchies of the South and the immigrants coming in from the Old World so as to better homogenize them into one large (and precarious) proletariat. The concessions given to militant workers during this era served as a means of quelling their militancy, giving them a means of negotiating their conditions within liberalism without giving them direct control of it. Meanwhile, the right-wing progressive eugenicists’ conception of the world formed the foundation for the actual governing of this simultaneously egalitarian and meritocratic society, wherein the state and business were to be led by the bourgeois cream of the crop who had to prove themselves as such, the lumpenproletariat were to be hounded in the daylight and used as paramilitaries in the moonlight, the proletariat were to be the fuel that kept the machinery of capital going, while the petit bourgeoisie provided the service of facilitating the many constant transitions taking place in such a dynamic system. Here, it becomes obvious that the tension between the two wings held the entire system together; that both were necessarily progressive, that both worked to carry liberalism into the future as the old world withered and died at their feet.
As mentioned above, aristocratic lineages still retain immense power in today’s world but they are simply no longer aristocrats, that old class’s ideals and values no longer the ruling ideals and values of the world today. For a much more recent example, one need only look to China. Though Maoist radicals pursued a permanent and intrinsically eugenicist campaign of social reorganization, families of aristocratic lineage who had decisively lost all their holdings began to rise in influence once again under Deng Xiaoping’s reforms. Today, as the well-educated intellectual vanguard of the new CCP, they have expanded that influence even further. However, though they may have regained their influence, they no longer remotely resemble their forebears nor does the polity they serve resemble the feudal state they once managed.
This is why antileftism should not be confused with reactionary politics. The old reactionaries were entirely destroyed; there is nothing left of their world to preserve. In this way, American progressives and Chinese communists alike were successful. Likewise, the reactionary anticommunist forces which emerged in the 20th century have been just as instrumental in advancing liberalism to its present development as those considered “leftist” in common parlance. Those movements (Italian Fascism in particular) were often themselves developed by former socialists and communists, their goals just as revolutionary and forward-thinking as those communists they now despised. Hitler and Mussolini were just as concerned with smashing the remnants of the old world’s structures as they were with destroying communist influence. After all, it was the rotting social system of the old aristocrats which had proved itself too weakened to stand up to the forces allegedly destroying Germany and Italy from the inside.
Certain niche strains of the dissident right may speak of re-imposing aristocratic values, but the people most often speaking on this alleged necessity are not themselves of aristocratic origin. Despite there being no base upon which to build aristocratic values, neither within their lineage nor their daily lives, they believe themselves to hold such aristocratic values. However, this particular delusional sect is a very small collection of individuals. The vast majority of dissident right-wingers are instead fanatical populists, concerned that the left and its handlers have abandoned all the liberal ideals they still hold sacred. They go so far in their defense of free speech, property rights, and rationalism that they are willing to suspend their own supposed faith in these concepts when it comes to attacking the left, seeking a permanent state of exception for leftists.
This is only a revanchist reaction to the actions of the left. The left, for its part, originated the state of exception for (modern) conservatives, creating in the 2010s the specter of an emergent fascist threat where none existed. Now they each hold each other in contempt, a contempt which itself holds the entire political economy of the West in tension as non-ideological power players use these radicals as pawns to push forward their own agendas, agendas which explicitly advance liberalism into the 21st century.
The liberalism of today is decidedly not the liberalism of yesteryear, even within my short lifetime; many traditional liberal freedoms have been lost or given up in the name of security, equality, and ironically, democracy. At the same time as more groups than ever have been enfranchised by the spread of liberal democracy, the overwhelming majority of society feels ever more disenfranchised, more surveilled, and less in control of their own destinies than in decades past. It is not only the political left which is to blame for this, but the right as well, as each seeks to subvert the other using mass politics, in the end subverting the masses in general. This is why both can be considered “leftist,” as they both demand the power to radically reshape existing society as they see fit.
What consists of a conservative movement today are mere liberal moderates, those on the center-left and center-right. Moderates prefer a stable status quo over a raucous long march. They may look to older forms of liberalism in the recent past as a high point, but not as a destination. The most savvy among them recognize that the past is in the past for a reason, and that it cannot be returned to. This makes them the perpetual rearguard of liberalism; they will always shore up the gains of older vanguards which were in tension not long ago. They do not harken back to the aristocratic age, nor do they have deep-seated ressentiments and utopian visions. They merely wish to preserve the best that liberalism has to offer while purging it of its more dysfunctional elements. As such, the march of liberalism continues forward, even when political moderates manage to regain control.
Changing of the Vanguard
Though it is the view of some antileftist commentators that the dissident right as a nascent political movement is dead on arrival, I posit otherwise. The populist wing of these dissidents is becoming an ever more powerful force within Western democracies, beginning to form a headless swarm not unlike that of the left in the 2010s. The left has lost a dramatic amount of cultural cachet since the pandemic, in large part due to their anti-elitist posturing, all the while pressing forward with the most egregious measures pandemic measures. This by itself caused a major crisis in faith for many leftists (myself at the time as well), leading many recent ex-leftists to join the dissident right bandwagon, eventually becoming figureheads within their online spheres. More on this later.
2020 also led many otherwise ordinary moderates to become associated with the mere concept of “dissidence,” owing to the fact that they spoke out against the most egregious leftist excesses as they were occurring. As time went on, even those who participated in one or more of the paranoid social disruptions began to regret their participation and began calling for moderation themselves. The result was an emergent consensus that some things with which the radical right had concerned itself—or those who were merely labelled as belonging to the far-right due to their denunciation of the radical left—were in fact true. In fact, more than true; each issue raised connected to the next as leftists deprogramming themselves became more conscious of the actual makeup of their own political networks. By leaving behind left-wing shibboleths, they sought new ones, readymade by the cultural incubators on the radical right. The neurotic disaffection which made them leftists in the first place never dissipated, only the direction of their latent utopian/revanchist energies. This shift raised the radical right to a degree of cultural and political prominence not seen in the last decade, especially in Europe.
The left also initially rose to prominence in the wake of similar reasonable concerns over the economic situation in 2008. Good liberals of many different persuasions were induced to believe that the economy was rigged against them, and that the existing political parties were working on behalf of bankers and not on behalf of the overwhelming mass of society. New left-wing parties positioning themselves as outsiders emerged across Europe, while the Democratic Party in the US leaned in to left-wing economic populist rhetoric.
Once in power though, they largely kept the existing ship steady, and what little major changes they did succeed in facilitating were compromised, ultimately backfiring (for a specific case study on exactly this, see Syriza in Greece). The Democrats, under President Obama, did virtually nothing for the disaffected blue collar Rust Belt which propelled them into office; lost jobs did not return, new jobs created in their wake were mostly outside the affected localities (thereby accelerating population decline and brain drain), and those new jobs were largely in the services sector, to be managed by tech startups openly vying for monopoly status.
Thus, in a bid to stay in power, their strategy shifted from trying to attract disaffected blue collars to agitating the big winners in the new knowledge economy. As Chuck Schumer put it in 2016, “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia.” They pressed hard on the cultural divisions within the Republican Party raised by Trump’s insurgent campaign and kept Bernie Sanders in the primary race long enough to fool themselves into believing that all of Sanders’s votes would translate to key swing-state votes for Clinton.
At the same time that the Democrats sought to peel off moderate Republicans who did not like Trump’s “insurgent” campaign, many who supported Obama’s bid for president could no longer associate themselves with him because of his disappointing performance as a leftist media darling. The existing radicals then doubled down on their radicalism, with many otherwise moderate disaffecteds following them down the rabbit-hole straight towards communist dogma. As Trump took up the mantle of economic populism, the Democrats fully shifted gears towards focusing on cultural issues, keeping their bratty but ultimately loyal activist networks as engaged and as disruptive as possible throughout Trump’s term in office, the rational concerns raised at the beginning of their ascendancy now fully giving way to schizophrenic hysteria.
The global right appears to be going through a similar process. After a series of victories by right-wing darlings such as Giorgia Meloni and Geert Wilders, the disappointment with their performances is already setting in, giving way to further radicalization.
For an actual political struggle to take place, there must be organization: an agenda, a leadership structure, a coalition, a list of tasks, milestones, delegation; the masses on the right the world over have none of these, not really. These people, much like the American leftists who eschew any form of leadership in order for them to live out their wildest nihilistic desires, balk at the idea of actually coming to power because coming to power means making deals with the devil. It inherently means selling out some of your supporters to gain others, it means making pragmatic decisions which conflict with the ideal outcome, it means no longer thinking like a radical and beginning to think like a statesman, whether under the existing structure or a wholly new one. This is the nature of real politics: To take power means dealing with greater powers, whether they be human or natural.
Growing resentment against the left is taking an ever more warlike stance even as the left begins to moderate itself, its recent gains crystallizing as history. Rather than this coming from a place of strength, it comes from sniveling neurotics as resentment always does. Those that appear to be strong in this new scene only appear so because they have positioned themselves as figureheads, but their face being plastered on a screen says nothing about their actual character, vigor, or organism.
Emmanuel Macron, despite his role as little more than an instrument of the European cartel, still looms larger than anyone in his right-wing or left-wing opposition. His is a position of strength, like it or not. Despite all of the populist fervor aimed directly at him and what he stands for, both before and after the pandemic, he still won reelection in 2022 and the party he founded back in 2017, today called Renaissance, is still the largest in France. Likewise, with the exit of Angela Merkel, he has taken over as spiritual leader of the EU, plotting a serious course for European sovereignty. What that will actually entail is anyone’s guess, but it is a vision, it is a plan, and it is being organized. The bratty subversives who fill the ranks of the nominal left and right will never accomplish anything such as this. They may act as functionaries for a Macron-like figure, i.e., an institutionally-connected leading man, but this is the furthest it will go. Below is an American example which is currently unfolding.
The Basilian Inquisition of Pariah the Doll
Preliminary Self-Criticism
While many of the positions taken by the dissident right are amenable to me (trans being first and foremost), I must perform a self-critique of my own pursuance of the TQ before I critique the Basilian clique. As mentioned in the introductory paragraphs, my detransition spurred an obsession with purging transgenderism from society. I made this newsletter in hopes of demystifying the growing discourse surrounding the issue—primarily the critical elements, which I find too permissive—and to pursue its annihilation as a political movement. I still hold that transgenderism is the primary vanguard of liberalism today, that it is the present apotheosis of leftism, and that it is the single most politically salient and contentious issue of our time. At the same time, I went about it reflexively; this goal of annihilation illusory, not backed by any kind of clear strategy for how to achieve it. It was in reality an attempt at fulfilling the void left by having experienced transgenderism for myself. Forming rationalizations and creating long-winded intellectual arguments for why it must be destroyed was a cope for me, not really backed by any actual ambition outside my own revanchist sentiments. Though the vast majority of dissidents did not have this specific experience, I suspect that many of them are approaching this inquisition in the same way I once did, motivated by a similar confusion without an ultimate goal in mind.
Background Summary
Pariah or Salomé is an effeminate homosexual who “transitioned” as a teenager and has been involved in right-wing spaces for many years. He now claims to regret his transition owing to the myriad health and identity issues his chemical castration has caused him. During the pandemic, he attempted to “detransition,” but this was an abortive attempt. Since 2020, he has gained prominence in the “Dimes Square” scene, a circle of self-obsessed right-wing hipsters who regularly congregate in lower Manhattan.
Key figures in this scene include Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova, the hosts of the Red Scare podcast, which was once considered an edgier left-wing media outlet. They themselves made a transition over to the right (though they deny this) during 2020, as they felt the left had lost whatever cultural cachet it once had. For the most part, the podcast concerns itself with cultural issues, but it should not be described as wholly apolitical. Culture war is the stuff of politics these days, and while it was but one feature of politics in the recent past, it is almost the entirety of political discourse today. Regular endorsements of these women by the long-influential right-wing figure “Bronze Age Pervert” (BAP) has propelled them to celebrity status within this particular sphere of the internet.
The ongoing weeks-old flame war also involves the Twitter personality known as Basil (@NeoBactrian), who made note of Pariah’s appearance in a BAP/Red Scare-affiliated magazine known as Men’s World. Disclosure: I have appeared on Basil’s podcast BareBactrian twice; he and I have been long-time Twitter mutuals and see eye-to-eye on the Trans Question (TQ). This critique is not a defense of Pariah or his handlers, nor should it be taken as a countersignal against Basil. I am staunchly in support of Basil’s crusade against this clique and I hope he is successful. All the same, as a largely inactive observer only tangentially associated with this sphere, I still have critical observations of this widening schism from an antileft perspective.
Present State of Play
It was not Pariah’s mere appearance in Men’s World which spurred Basil and his supporters to action, but Pariah’s insistence on highlighting his involvement on Twitter. He was the one who initially brought attention to his appearance in a dimly-lit and grungy photo spread with an actual woman. I mentioned before that Pariah had an abortive “detransition” attempt; my implication in describing that attempt in this fashion is that he still presents himself as a woman. Additionally, Pariah is not well. On his accounts, which were public until just a few days ago, he routinely spoke of suffering from eating disorders and wandering in and out of psych wards. This is not uncommon among transsexuals that continue to suffer the second-order effects of having subjected themselves to experimentation and who still have not discovered a route to recovery.
It was while Pariah was especially unwell and still indecisive about detransition that he was scouted by the Red Scare clique as an “interesting” interview subject. What they find “interesting” about him is that he is a self-avowed transsexual who professes to countersignal transgenderism. He at times acknowledges that he is really a man, but does so in a coyly. His introduction to this sphere is similar to the introduction of transsexuals like Buck Angel and Blaire White within mainstream conservative media. Their conceit, like Pariah’s, is that though they have not exorcised transgenderism within themselves, they speak at length about the dangers of child transition and the “crazy” trans people in the movement (in quotes because all of them are crazy regardless of the level of their self-awareness).
The critique formed by the Basilian Twitter sphere is that these “conservative” transgender interlopers only serve to advance the interests of transgenderism in the long-term. They provide an “acceptable” veneer for the transgender vanguard, positioning themselves as “real” transsexuals, with “real” gender dysphoria, as opposed to the crazies and the predators they farm for content. While they openly discuss the evils of child transition, they simultaneously pay lip service to the existence of trans as an innate phenomenon, and as such, intend to make the actual political gains of this vanguard a sacred cow of American culture.
Pariah’s maneuvering follows their shtick, adopting the visual language and written culture of this niche circle so as to become a celebrity within it, and for the same reasons. He has run the gamut of dissident right-wing veneers, from the traditionalist Catholic LARP to the esoteric Hyperborean Aryanism of the BAPists. Just as he has altered his appearance to appear as a woman, he has adopted their aesthetic so as to be accepted as one of them. Though he “acknowledges” that he is male, his handlers still refer to him as a woman, which not-so-subtly betrays the real intent of the project. This occurs, as Basil has noted repeatedly, at the same time as this particular media sphere makes a play for mainstream media acceptance via contacts within HBO. There is also the matter of their affiliation with “Brianna Wu” (John Walker Flynt), another transgender individual who is most famous for fanning the flame war for the feminist faction of the GamerGate controversy, an ascendant leftist movement of the era.
The schism began because, as one would expect, this amalgamation of far-right media personalities contains within them a large contingent who are openly hostile to transgenderism and refuse any attempt to have it shoved down their throats. Basil’s contingent is made up precisely of this type. On the other side, there are those who probably have their own reservations but can no longer afford to speak out as a result of their close affiliation with BAP and the Red Scare hosts, as well as others who have actually deluded themselves into thinking that just because a skinwalker skinwalks as one of them, this means he is actually “based.”
I fall in league with Basil despite having no personal loyalty of my own to the dissident right because he is correct in asserting that the TQ is the primary political question of our time. In order for transgenderism to be combatted, it must be combatted in every sphere tainted by it. Whatever Pariah does in his private life is not at issue; what is at issue is that he continues to advance an explicitly leftist cause which will entrench the social control of the liberal world order’s actual leaders. That Pariah and his handlers believe this will go down smoothly in a far-right media market highlights the degree to which transgenderism’s infiltration of every social, political, legal, and economic sphere is a coordinated project advancing liberalism into yet another new stage.
A Critique of the Basilian Inquisitors
The only reason Pariah is able to gain any ground within dissident right spheres is because the dissident right by its own accord already behaves as a leftist swarm (here using the antileftist definition: People who are radical liberals propelling liberalism forward). The far-right memes, images, and slogans, the over-the-top racism and sexism, the genocidal rhetoric, the aestheticized faux-masculinity, even their professed rejection of liberalism are all examples of their leftist bona fides. They only exist in this form as a perfect mirror of the overly egalitarian, equally genocidal, and overly-feminine nature of the communists they intend to displace.
This swarm lacks the robust political network of the radical left and is eager to follow their favorite parasocial talking heads (who do have institutional connections) off a cliff. The “dissident right” serves less as a cogent political movement with actual aims and more as a media platform, much like the college students populating left-wing NGO networks who primarily serve as latent social disruptors to generate popular support for the agendas of their handlers. To the extent that they do act in politically meaningful ways, it is almost along the same lines as dissidents in Europe: Working within the liberal democratic system to get “/their guy/” elected, then upon seeing what a disappointment they are, going back to whatever discursive topics will farm the most engagement, usually entrenching their radicalism in the process.
As such, even if Basil is to be successful in purging this media sphere of transgender influence, this subculture will continue to work to push liberalism forward, providing an outlet for popular dissent while the left is in charge, then switching gears to provide ideological justifications for new forms of liberal statecraft once “/their guys/” (who aren’t really “theirs” at all) assume power. The left will then become dissidents again within this new arrangement.
Likewise, this sphere is virtually unknown to the mainstream, and to the extent that it will become mainstream—which it has the capacity to do, as Andrew Tate’s rapid rise in popularity suggests—it will be just as unpopular and distasteful to ordinary people as the communists who attached themselves to and recruited from the ranks of the mainstream Democratic Party. They will always remain the most radical fringe of the right-wing, not as social conservatives (in the common parlance), but as progressive futurists who are only called “right-wing” because they are a pure reflection of the communists they oppose.
This is not to say they will always lack influence over politics. It is well-known that many of the more influential voices within the dissident right are already influential in the tech world and academia, albeit under pseudonyms which are occasionally leaked to the public. Some are even institutional players in the Republican Party, and they intend on growing their reach. They are obviously not liked among leftist ideologues, but those who actually hold power in our world today are fairly non-ideological; they only fund and disseminate ideological messages which advance their near-term interests.
Right now, the calculus still remains that left-coded messages are the most useful in advancing those interests, but savvy right-wingers are making a play to replace them. The petty squabbling between left and right amounts only to a changing of the vanguard. The Red Scare girls were able to make the change from niche leftist darlings to niche right-wing darlings, but it’s not likely that those currently employed by NPR, the New York Times, or other large institutions will be able to make the same transition. For the dissident right to be find that level of cultural influence, these left-wing voices will have to be replaced by true believers of another type, assuming that broader transition does in fact take place.
Lastly, even if the anti-trans camps present in every social sphere from left-wing to far-right do succeed, this does not permanently stall the advance of liberalism. While it is the tip of the spear and while it does form a vanguard unto itself, liberalism has shown itself to be incredibly malleable, able to absorb cultural, political, and economic shocks which would have easily felled its predecessors. While this is presently its most advanced cultural form, there will be others under a “right-wing” (still using the common parlance) liberal order. Succeeding in reversing the gains of the transgender clique would not necessarily signal liberalism’s breakdown. Indeed, it would merely reflect that the conservative wing (here using the antileft definition: Those who seek to retain the benevolent features of older forms of liberalism) is ascendant. Another new vanguard will then be selected.
After Liberalism
To embrace antileftism does involve, to varying degrees, embracing an acceptance that liberalism has won in the present, that it has engulfed the whole earth, that it is in its maintenance stage, and that the swarming radicals are merely part of the maintenance process. I am a liberal, in the end, only because there is presently no alternative and I presently have no means to forge one. There is no dual power structure in any society which threatens to topple the existing world order because the existing world order is paradoxically firmly rooted in its fluidity.
At best, there are dual power structures which threaten only to alter the furthest fringes of this or that sphere of influence within liberalism. These do not in themselves threaten the fundamental economic organization of contemporary society which would signal a new revolutionary era. They may usher in historic changes, they may result in terrible wars, they may lead to a vanishing of peoples, but none will have the same effects on the world that the 19th or 20th centuries did. They will serve merely as retrenchments of that world order, even if its leaders change hands often. This is not, however, a wholly negative thing.
The next revolutionary moment on par with that which spawned liberalism will necessarily emerge from an antileftist position, one which unambiguously halts the march of liberalism to such a degree that left, right, and center no longer exist as political categories whatsoever. To adopt this position means to dispose of all revanchist and utopian political forms, as these are the ideological fuel of liberalism’s dynamic machinery. It is to recognize that “it’s all one thing,” and that the new world, in whatever form it arrives, will only be born once its mother—the ruling class of the young world we live in today—is eaten by its own fully-formed children for sustenance.
To desire this premature cannibalization as an end in itself is the stuff of leftism as defined by antileftists; a nihilistic impulse towards destruction with no real concern for the future wellbeing of the child; a desire for a world born still. It is not the short-sighted faith of conservatives that liberalism will last forever because it simply won’t. Antileftism is the solemn recognition that when this day comes, the cruelty of this process must be done out of sheer survival instinct, not matricidal resentment.
Leftism or rightism are both strategies for power-seeking within the social superorganism and today both are strongly reactive to accelerating technological "progress". We live in the daze of Tofflers' "Future Shock" wherein the rate of change or the speed of the struggle (how rapidly the punches are being thrown on each side) is disorienting.
One of the best pieces I've read on substack in ages. Got me thinking real good.