{"id":33504,"date":"2017-10-04T01:00:47","date_gmt":"2017-10-04T05:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=33504"},"modified":"2018-09-18T11:07:16","modified_gmt":"2018-09-18T15:07:16","slug":"qotd-transnational-progressivism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/10\/04\/qotd-transnational-progressivism\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Transnational progressivism"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Soviets didn\u2019t invent [transnational progressivism], but they promoted it heavily in a deliberate \u2014 and appallingly successful \u2014 attempt to weaken the Lockean, individualist tradition that underlies classical liberalism and the U.S. Constitution. The reduction of Western politics to a bitter war for government favor between ascriptive identity groups is exactly the outcome the Soviets wanted and worked hard to arrange.<\/p>\n

Call it what you will \u2014 various other commentators have favored \u2018volk-Marxism\u2019 or \u2018postmodern leftism\u2019. I\u2019ve called it suicidalism. It was designed to paralyze the West against one enemy, but it\u2019s now being used against us by another. It is no accident that Osama bin Laden so often sounds like he\u2019s reading from back issues of Z<\/em> magazine, and no accident that both constantly echo the hoariest old cliches of Soviet propaganda in the 1930s and \u201940s.<\/p>\n

Another consequence of Stalin\u2019s meme war is that today\u2019s left-wing antiwar demonstrators wear kaffiyehs without any sense of how grotesque it is for ostensible Marxists to cuddle up to religious absolutists who want to restore the power relations of the 7th century CE. In Stalin\u2019s hands, even Marxism itself was hollowed out to serve as a memetic weapon \u2014 it became increasingly nihilist, hatred-focused and destructive. The postmodern left is now defined not by what it\u2019s for but by what it\u2019s against: classical-liberal individualism, free markets, dead white males, America, and the idea of objective reality itself.<\/p>\n

The first step to recovery is understanding the problem. Knowing that suicidalist memes were launched at us as war weapons by the espionage apparatus of the most evil despotism in human history is in itself liberating. Liberating, too, it is to realize that the Noam Chomskys and Michael Moores and Robert Fisks of the world (and their thousands of lesser imitators in faculty lounges everywhere) are not brave transgressive forward-thinkers but pathetic memebots running the program of a dead tyrant.<\/p>\n

Brittingham and other have worried that postmodern leftism may yet win. If so, the victory would be short-lived. One of the clearest lessons of recent times (exemplified not just by kaffiyeh-wearing western leftists but by Hamas\u2019s recent clobbering of al-Fatah in the first Palestinian elections) is that po-mo leftism is weaker than liberal individualism in one important respect; it has only the weakest defenses against absolutist fervor. Brittingham tellingly notes po-mo philosopher Richard Rorty\u2019s realization that when the babble of conflicting tribal narratives collapses in exhaustion, the only thing left is the will to power.<\/p>\n

Again, this is by design. Lenin and Stalin wanted classical-liberal individualism replaced with something less able to resist totalitarianism, not more. Volk-Marxist fantasy and postmodern nihilism served their purposes; the emergence of an adhesive counter-ideology would not have. Thus, the Chomskys and Moores and Fisks are running a program carefully designed to dead-end at nothing.<\/p>\n

Eric S. Raymond, “Gramscian damage”, Armed and Dangerous<\/em><\/a>, 2006-02-11.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Soviets didn\u2019t invent [transnational progressivism], but they promoted it heavily in a deliberate \u2014 and appallingly successful \u2014 attempt to weaken the Lockean, individualist tradition that underlies classical liberalism and the U.S. Constitution. The reduction of Western politics to a bitter war for government favor between ascriptive identity groups is exactly the outcome the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,28,53,41,13],"tags":[780,1235,1020,269,433],"class_list":["post-33504","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-media","category-politics","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-communism","tag-esr","tag-progressives","tag-propaganda","tag-sovietunion"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8Io","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33504"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33504\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33505,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33504\/revisions\/33505"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}