Francis Fukuyama on Neoliberalism and Liberalism

There is always confusion about ideology, particularly liberalism in a liberal age. Everything becomes conflated with liberalism, often in distorted ways. Even many conservatives call themselves classical liberals, conveniently ignoring early liberals like Thomas Paine who, as egalitarian proto-leftists, often were radicals, rabblerousers, and revolutionaries. But it might be fair for conservatives to also claim a liberalism of sorts, since they obviously don’t want to be openly identified with classical conservatism: colonial imperialism, neo-feudalism, neo-monarchism, neo-aristocracy, land theft, genocide, slavery, indentured servitude, white supremacy, etc; whatever they may, in many cases, genuinely support (e.g., theocracy) but won’t acknowledge. Indeed, one might argue that every modern Westerner to some degree is a liberal at this point, because so much is framed and defined by it, be it progressive or reactionary. As often noted, the average conservative today is more liberal than the average liberal was a century ago (e.g., majority support and mainstream acceptance, even among Republicans, for same sex marriage).

Besides, there never has been a single liberalism. That insight is something many are beginning to struggle with. In a review of a recent book by Francis Fukuyama, Aaron Irion discusses liberalism and gives an overview of Fukuyama’s take on it without once mentioning conservatism (Maladapted Liberalism: A Review of Francis Fukuyama’s Liberalism and its Discontents). The thing is that Fukuyama’s so-called End of History wasn’t a general triumph of liberalism but specifically of neoliberalism, which in the U.S. is identified with the political right as economic conservatism, most infamously as Reaganomics (Starve the Beast, Two Santa Claus Theory, military largesse, creation of the permanent national debt, defunding public good, deregulation, plutocratic tax breaks, corporate subsidies, etc). It’s true that such neoliberalism has also taken over the Democratic Party, but we should honestly admit that the liberalism of the American majority is much further left, specifically about economics, in being less forgiving toward the neoliberal dominance of corporate capitalism and globalized plutocracy, not to mention still supportive of interventionist progressivism (American Leftist Supermajority).

The original neoliberals were FDR Progressives who lost faith in democratic processes, politics, and policies, especially the prioritizing of public good, and so most of them became Republicans and joined right-wing think tanks. Possibly a few well-intentioned idealists aside, most of them saw capitalist realism and corporate rule of the world as their new salvation, with democracy as a mere rhetorical flourish and side effect. It is one of the more illiberal forms of liberalism, that is to say only liberal at surface level and maybe not even that. One could, nonetheless, accept neoliberalism as a genuine kind of liberalism. It echoes the anti-leftist hyper-individualism that, in gaining power during the Cold War, sought to disempower and disenfranchise the political so as to usurp all power within the economic sphere and hence to have corporate-controlled markets replace democracy proper. This has involved two ideas: (1) spending money is voting with one’s dollars; and the corollary (2) money is speech. But what it ignores, as Corey Robin noted, is that “the implication for democracy is clear. There can be no democracy in the political sphere unless there is equality in the economic sphere” (The real problem of Clarence Thomas).

That is the ultimate test. The political right typically won’t denounce democracy entirely, although the early classical conservatives did so quite vociferously. To attack democracy directly these days is politically incorrect and shameful, and hence political suicide. No politician would ever get elected, not even in reactionary America, if they explicitly stated they were anti-democratic. So, instead, the reactionary right will claim to be for democracy, sometimes claiming to be the ‘Real Liberals’; but their purpose is to co-opt democratic rhetoric in order to defang democracy itself, to eliminate it as an effective possibility. Tellingly, neoliberals who want supposed ‘free markets’ to replace democratic politics don’t actually want freedom in markets either. They go bonkers if it’s suggested that markets and workplaces should be democratized, the only way that freedom could operate. As Robin suggests, economic democracy may be more directly important than political democracy, as leftists have long understood that power comes from those controlling material conditions and the means of production; hence the close link between social democracy and democratic socialism.

There is no such thing as limited democracy; no way to have partial self-governance, partial slave abolition, partial suffrage, partial civil rights, partial secularism, partial public good, etc. Either there is democracy in all areas and in all ways or there is no democracy at all. A free market is only actually free if everyone operating within it and affected by it is equally and effectively free (i.e., positive freedom). And such freedom, or lack thereof, is experienced personally and daily. Most people aren’t actively and explicitly involved in politics on a regular basis but almost everyone is constantly and obviously affected by economics every time they go to work and go to the store. But in the end, there is no separation between the economy and politics. Democracy is an entire culture of trust, a way of being and relating. Left-liberalism has always sought a balance between individual liberty and collective action, between private rights and public good. “Perhaps, if we all embrace something like the Last Man inside ourselves, devote ourselves to the struggle, to the hard work of moderation that it’ll require,” as Aaron Irion concludes, “we can struggle not against liberalism, but for a better liberalism and a better world.” That is the only honest issue to be debated.

For Fukuyama, once an advocate of neoliberalism, he has become one of its greatest critics and now largely, if not entirely, points in the opposite direction. In an interview with Sergio C. Fanjul, Fukuyama said that, “I was never opposed to social democracy. I think that it really depends on the historical period and the degree of state intervention. By the 1960s, many social democratic societies had become mired in low growth [and] high inflation. At that point, I think it was important to roll some of that back. That is, in fact, what happened in Scandinavia. Most of those countries reduced tax rates, reduced levels of regulation and therefore became more productive. But I think that in the current period, we need more social democracy, especially in the United States. We still don’t have universal health care, which I think is ridiculous for a rich country, a rich democratic country. My attitude towards social democracy really depends on what period you’re talking about and what country you’re talking about” (Francis Fukuyama: ‘The neoliberals went too far. Now, we need more social democratic policies’).

Social democracy is central to a liberal society. Such a society can only be created through active support, promotion, and defense. “All liberal societies,” Fukuyama continues, “have to [be able to] preserve their own institutions. When you get a political party, for example, that is anti-democratic or anti-liberal, that, if it gains power, it’s going to shut down freedom of expression, not going to permit future democratic elections and so forth, a liberal society has the right to defend itself. […] A liberal society must [have the ability] to protect itself from illiberal forces. […] The most severe one is from a resurgent populist nationalism that’s represented by Orbán in Hungary, by Erdoğan in Turkey, by Modi in India, by Donald Trump in the United States. All of these people were legitimately elected… but they use their legitimacy to threaten illiberal institutions. They want to eliminate the independent court system, they want to shut down opposition media, they [weaponize] the justice system to go after their political opponents.” The one and only thing liberalism can’t tolerate is intolerance. Yet the American right has always been fundamentally opposed to tolerance, as it has fought against social democracy.

So, where does Fukuyama’s ideal of ‘moderation’ fit in. Is he suggesting moderation between a fascist elite and a neoliberal elite, or rather moderation between the left-liberal majority and all the elites combined? This may be where Fukuyama stumbles, as maybe he remains anti-populist, paternalistic, and elitist in his wariness toward actual democratic self-governance. His state of confusion, unfortunately common among the elite, leads him to carry forward some of the illiberal views of democracy he held as a neoliberal. Sergio C. Fanjul asked him, “Are liberalism and democracy always fellow travellers?” His answer was that, “They are allies and they support each other, but they don’t necessarily have to exist at the same time. Orbán wants an illiberal democracy, with elections, but without freedom of the press or belief or free opposition. There are also liberal societies without democracy, like Singapore: there is individual freedom, but there are no elections.” *Sigh* There is no such thing as illiberal democracy or non-democratic liberalism. The former is a banana republic, with appearances of democracy only. And the latter is simply Confucian patriarchy and paternalism.

Liberalism and democracy are something else entirely, as expressions of freedom, egalitarianism, and justice; the complete opposite of social conservatism, right-wing authoritarianism, and social dominance orientation. The difficulty might be that liberal democracy, as rhetoric and reality, can seem unsexy and unexciting. In fact, to the reactionary mind and anyone under stress pulled into the reactionary, it comes across as downright boring (Boredom in the Mind: Liberals and Reactionaries). “Fukuyama makes clear,” Irion writes in reference to Fukuyama’s 1990s vision of the ‘Last Man’, “that liberalism may not remain unchallenged. In his telling at the time, liberalism brings peace, stability, and prosperity, but humans may struggle against it anyway. If for no other reason than “a certain boredom,” a desire to “struggle for the sake of struggle” and prove to themselves that they remain free, that they “remain human beings.”” It’s more than possible that Fukuyama too finds it a bit boring, in now giving a weak defense. Only the radical imagination, in narratizing new and inspiring visions, can inoculate against such moral ennui.

* * *

Francis Fukuyama Plays Defense
by Krithika Varagur

For Fukuyama, the big surprise of liberalism’s trajectory after the Cold War has been the scope and impact of neoliberalism—the free-market reforms of deregulation, privatization, and austerity that began in earnest in the nineteen-seventies. He believes that neoliberalism, as opposed to classical liberalism, has tanked liberalism’s reputation among young people today. Although many neoliberal policies started half a century ago, their effects, like excessive inequality and financial instability, are more plainly visible to him now.

Neoliberalism is not a complete theory of justice, morals, or the good life but a narrower set of ideas about political and economic institutions, and how they should work in the service of free markets. It emerged, in Fukuyama’s account, as a valid reaction to bloated mid-century welfare states in the U.S. and Europe, but was then “pushed to a counterproductive extreme.” Internationally, institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank sought to undo capital controls in many other countries, triggering financial crises with “alarming regularity.” Some neoliberal reformers in the U.S. and abroad also rolled back the social-welfare policies that had improved their fellow-citizens’ quality of life. Fukuyama writes all this off as an anomalous hijacking of liberal principles: “Liberalism properly understood is compatible with a wide range of social protections provided by the state.”

But is neoliberalism really separable from what Fukuyama dubs classical liberalism? The distinction has long been fuzzy; the twentieth-century Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, for one, was both a vocal defender of classical liberalism and a co-founder of the Mont Pelerin Society, the international neoliberal forum, in 1947. And Fukuyama stumbles in characterizing neoliberalism as liberal individualism pushed to right-wing extremes. As the historian Quinn Slobodian has argued, the pioneers of neoliberalism were not focussed on individuals’ rights; they were concerned, primarily, with the institutions of markets. Neoliberalism has not only been about tearing down regulations so that people can buy things more freely but about actively building and reinforcing institutions, like the World Trade Organization, that insulate markets around the world from the vagaries of nation-states and democracies.

After five decades of privatization and austerity around the world, it is nearly impossible to picture any liberal democracy today without its neoliberal institutions. And Fukuyama doesn’t really try, offering only a tepid suggestion to redistribute some wealth in order to offset inequality “at a sustainable level, where [social protections] do not undercut incentives and can be supported by public finance on a long-term basis.” (A colleague of Kristol’s riffed that a neoliberal is “a liberal who got mugged by reality, but has refused to press charges.”) After reading Fukuyama’s chapter on neoliberalism, it becomes clear that the task ahead for liberals isn’t more abstract argumentation but, rather, devising practical ways to curb the regulations and bodies that push democracies to serve markets instead of their citizens.

But Fukuyama has been anticipating certain other problems with liberalism for decades. In “The End of History and the Last Man,” he wondered whether, even after the collapse of rival ideologies like communism, liberalism might contain the seeds of its own decline. “Could we assume that successful democratic societies could remain that way indefinitely? Or is liberal democracy prey to serious internal contradictions, contradictions so serious that they will eventually undermine it as a political system?” Fukuyama wrote, presciently, in 1992. At the time, he concluded that it did not—but he did accurately identify several sore spots: liberal societies tended to “atomize and separate people,” were deleterious to community life, and would continue to harbor inequality. What he had underestimated was the extent to which liberal societies could breed hyper-individualistic consumers, obsessed with “self-actualization” and identity at the expense of politics and public-spiritedness.

Fukuyama is clearly flummoxed by the scale at which these threats have escalated. And he tries to make sense of it by briefly turning the floor over to communitarian critics of liberalism, who grasped such issues much earlier. In doing so, he retraces a major debate of the nineteen-eighties, which followed John Rawls’s seminal liberal treatise, “A Theory of Justice,” from 1971. While Rawlsian liberalism posits that humans are fundamentally autonomous, communitarians like Michael Sandel, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Michael Walzer argue that they are fundamentally shaped by their communities. And whereas liberalism protects individuals’ rights to choose their own versions of the good life, the communitarians countered that states or other communities should take an active role in shaping a common good. Such arguments have recently returned to the public sphere, from both the left and right. They touch a nerve for many in the U.S., who, despite living in the world’s richest country, may still feel they lack community, shared values, or hopeful future.

Fukuyama scrupulously entertains several communitarian critiques, and even repudiates Rawls for his “elevation of choice over all other human goods.” But he never convincingly accounts for the social and moral voids that plague today’s liberal societies. He turns instead to a taxonomy of “thick” and “thin” political visions. (These terms were also trotted out in earlier liberal-communitarian debates; Walzer wrote a book titled “Thick and Thin,” in 1994.) “Successful liberal societies have their own culture and understanding of the good life, even if that vision may be thinner than those offered by societies bound by a single religious doctrine,” Fukuyama writes. He finds the conservative critique that liberal societies “provide no strong common moral horizon around which community can be built” to be “true enough,” but struggles to come up with ways to “reimpose a thicker moral order.” Wearily, he concludes that this “thinness” is a “feature and not a bug” of life under liberalism.

Were Fukuyama really hoping to convince the skeptics, he could have easily reached within liberalism’s own history for examples of how it can enrich, rather than erode, the social fabric. In late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century England, the liberalisms expounded by reformist economists like William Beveridge and J. A. Hobson helped establish the modern welfare state, as the Oxford scholar Michael Freeden has shown. For them, liberalism was not just about protecting free choice but also about actively generating the conditions for individuals to flourish. In the U.S., Progressive-era liberals like Herbert Croly, who co-founded The New Republic, in 1914. saw liberalism as about more than abstract equal rights; it was also about concrete things like higher wages and a social safety net.

Rather than showing how such visions of welfare have been part and parcel of liberal democracies, Fukuyama avers only that liberal democracies “remain superior to the illiberal alternatives.” Alternatives from the left are largely reduced to caricature; Fukuyama’s bogeymen of a “progressive post-liberal society” include the evaporation of national borders, “essentially meaningless” citizenship, and “anarchist” rule along the lines of the short-lived autonomous zones that arose in Seattle and Portland in the summer of 2020. Having summoned such stand-ins for the left on one end, and the more obviously undesirable spectre of right-wing illiberalism on the other, Fukuyama absolves himself from having to truly confront the social and material deprivation of liberalism’s subjects.

Constitutionalism: Elitism Versus Populism

The following is part of a CUNY talk about American democracy, as moderated by Katrina vanden Heuvel. In the section shared below, Corey Robin answers a question about the Supreme Court. He talks about the relatively recent change in how the Court is expected to be the official interpreter of the Constitution, something the Anti-Federalists feared would happen, in their defense of true federalism. It’s the accrual of centralized power.

What Robin calls populist or interdepartmental constitutionalism is what’s more commonly known as living constitutionalism, the great enemy of conservatives. As part of the Anglo-American tradition, it comes out of Quaker constitutionalism; in which a constitution is believed to be a living covenant between a living God and a living generation of a specific community of people. That is how Anti-Federalists treated any public document as the basis of governance.

The Quaker-raised John Dickinson wrote the draft of the Articles of Confederation, what was the first constitution of the United States of America; literally describing a confederation of independent and autonomous nation-states. As a living constitution, it was not considered to be written in stone, to be submissively worshipped as a holy text. Under the Articles, any generation of any of the nation-states could at any moment rescind their consent to be governed by it. What was freely given could be freely taken back.

Following Robin’s comments, Jamelle Bouie added some thoughts. He did reference the Anti-Federalist criticism of bowing down to the dead hand of corpses; i.e., the written word of documents and laws treated as absolute, infallible, and unchanging, as if they were divine authority. He also made the Anti-Federalist argument that the constitution, like the government, is made to serve the people; not the other way around. But interestingly, neither Robin nor Jamelle even once mentioned the Anti-Federalists.

Democratic self-governance is the “mother principle” of republicanism, and hence the reason the constitutional order failed from the beginning, as having replaced the Anti-Federalist principles of the Articles. Such was the retrospective judgment according to Thomas Jefferson, writing in 1816 (“You’re the only people alive on the earth today.”). The Spirit of ’76 didn’t survive in the Constitution, as a piece of paper, but in the “in the spirit of our people” and in the “will of the people.”

Today, this way of thinking is mostly limited to the political left. Whereas the right, in their historical ignorance and amnesia, claim that living constitutionalism is unAmerican. In fact, this is the original intent of the original founding documents; the Declaration of Independence written by the Anti-Federalist Thomas Jefferson (influenced by his Anti-Federalist friend Thomas Paine); and the Quaker-inspired Articles of Confederation that was revised by Anti-Federalists. Robin and Jamelle suggest that we should return to our American roots.

Of course, that is a challenging prospect. The Anti-Federalist vision has always been central to American culture, as informing and inspiring the public mind and imagination. Those like Paine and Jefferson thought governance should be direct and local, as close to the people as possible. But neither of the main parties any longer consistently represent this.

Still, there are recent examples that demonstrate Anti-Federalism in action. It is Anti-Federalist when state governments legalize or decriminalize marijuana usage, while the national government enforces a war on drugs. It is Anti-Federalist when local governments declare themselves a Sanctuary City and refuse to cooperate with ICE agents. This is the people and their most immediate representatives challenging the constitutional order, those who interpret it, and those who enforce those interpretations.

This is an old conflict. Many early revolts were about constitutional issues. The Anti-Federalists were all about the problems of taxation without representation; and in fact fewer Americans had a political franchise after the ratification of the Constitution than under the British Empire. This is what motivated such things as Shays Rebellion, in refusing to submit to what was unconstitutional under the prior Articles of Confederation. And when slaves revolted, again and again, they were refusing and refuting the entire basis of slavery explicitly written into the Constitution. Their interpretation was to claim freedom.

There are more mundane examples or at least ones that don’t involve violence, just plain civil disobedience at a community level. When states first passed abortion bans in the late 1800s to early 1900s, many city and county authorities refused to enforce these laws and doctors continued the practice according to local consent and custom. At the time, there was no constitutional decision on the matter, certainly not by the Supreme Court. But it was about the constitutional order, about at what level should such decisions be made.

Each state has its own constitution, after all. And maybe even cities should have constitutions. Jefferson thought that not only the national government but also the state governments were too distant from the people, who should be able to easily and quickly travel to participate in direct self-governance; think of New England town hall democracy. Even many counties were too large for Jefferson’s taste. Basically, democracy is first and foremost about a community of people. Jefferson may have been taking this inclination to an extreme, but one has to admit that the most well functioning democracies typically are tiny countries, smaller than most U.S. states.

In the broad sense of constitutionalism as a living agreement of a living generation, it’s simply what we’ve collectively agreed upon and continue to consent to, whether or not it’s ever been written down and formalized as a law-like document. Even the U.S. Constitution has no direct legal authority, as its more of a patriotic mission statement, a public declaration of shared ideals and principles, commitments and aspirations. It only gains legalistic force with interpretation, upon which laws are written or rationalized.

Also in line with communal civil disobedience, a specific historical case involved Prohibition, definitely a case of the national government and one of the earliest enactments of the war on drugs. In Templeton, Iowa, the local population was close-knit, largely an ethnic immigrant population from the same area of Europe. They were known for making the whiskey called Templeton Rye, and they had no interest in stopping; in fact, they continued to do so right out in the open.

So, they avoided moving their product across the county line and certainly not getting anywhere near the state line, instead having the Mafia do the transportation for them. This kept it a problem of local law enforcement and courts, and hence out of the hands of the Feds. What this meant is that any Templeton resident who was caught and brought up on charges would simply face a jury of his or her peers in that county; that is to say their family, friends, and neighbors would determine their fate. This loyal community repeatedly refused to prosecute, and maintained this stance until Prohibition ended.

This was one of the original reasons for a jury of peers, as a last option of veto power. The Anti-Federalists got their love of a jury of peers from the Country Party ideology of the Radical Whigs. It was an old stopgap on abusive power and overreach. It may be a ruling elite who passes and enacts the laws, but it is the people who hold the final judgment in enforcement. In that context, it becomes apparent the unconstitutional danger of secret prisons and courts (e.g., Gitmo).

What is constitutional, in how the ruling elite interpret it, depends on how far the powerful think they can go, what they try to get away with, and what they are allowed to get away with. The constitution is always under negotiation and that is determined also by how much push back is given not only from local governments but, more importantly, from the people. If the people refuse to cooperate and assent, then there is no constitutional order.

That is how constitutional interpretation happens in the real world, but it’s rarely acknowledged and so remains invisible. Those in power don’t want we the people to know we have final veto power on all constitutional decisions. If we refuse to accept our responsibility as the self-governed, then our consent to be governed means nothing, other than fear of punishment if we don’t obey. This is why the ruling elite find it necessary to use propagandistic media to suppress and silence the leftist moral supermajority, since there is so much Americans wouldn’t tolerate if they realized most other Americans also opposed it.

Such a docile population wasn’t the aspiration of the Anti-Federalists. Jefferson assumed, or rather hoped, that every generation would have its own constitution, and that before long there would already have been multiple constitutions as has been the case in many other Western democracies. There is no such thing as a constitution for all time, one ring to rule them all. Even our present Constitution is jerry-rigged and, in endless ways, contradicts or overturns any number of the various original intents as espoused by various American revolutionaries, founders, and signers.

Effectively, it’s no longer the same constitution, with an overlay of numerous numerous changes through amendments, precedents, and interpretations. And the only power it holds over us is our own interpretation of it. The question is are we freely choosing our constitutional order, through conscious intent, or have we simply been indoctrinated into mindless and cowardly submission. Whatever is the case, the moral responsibility remains in our own hands, we the people, we the living generation.

* * *

Corey Robin:

“There’s been a sea change among progressives in their attitude towards the [Supreme] Court. And I think it’s also generational, actually. I just think among people who are younger than my generation [GenX], it’s much more intuitive that the Supreme is not the friend of freedom, which was not at all the case when I was growing up. There were still those tailwinds from the Warren Court that I think continued up until rulings on gay marriage and all the rest.

“But there are two issues. One is the idea that the Supreme Court is the supreme interpreter of the Constitution. That was up until, again, the Cold War actually, a very contested idea in American politics. Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR, they didn’t — although they were careful not to act against the court, they never accepted in public discourse, in political discourse what both Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy said, which is: It is the job of the Supreme Court to interpret the Constitution and for us to accept the Supreme Court’s ruling. That’s a pretty recent thing.

“So, I think the first thing we have to really try to unpack and get our heads around is what used to be called a kind of either popular constitutionalism or interdepartmental constitutionalism, that we have a system where many different political actors and citizens are in a position to interpret the Constitution. And many of the great reforms of the Progressive era, the wave of constitutional amendments or Reconstruction, that was on the wave of decades of popular agitation, of people reclaiming the definition of the Constitution from the Court; and I think that’s really important.

“And the second thing, I would say, because the first thing is not that controversial anymore. Willie Forbath and Joseph Fishkin had a book last year called The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution. And one of the very persuasive arguments they made is that the real moments of constitutional reform — the big one is Reconstruction, and in the Progressive era there was women’s right to vote, income tax, reform of the Senate, and one other which I’ve forgotten — there was not only a popular constitutionalism, there was an understanding of the relationship between the Constitution and political economy.

“We have gotten into a very strange mode in this country, and I think this is unfortunately the result of the Warren Court and the New Deal where we think of the Constitution and the Court as this, insofar as it is concerned with rights and freedoms, it’s about the rights of the dissenting minorities, the rights of racial minorities, the rights of individuals, and so forth. But if you look at Reconstruction in particular, there was a real sense that what those amendments were about was toppling a racial oligarchy that was supported by all these oligarchic institutions in the economy; and that you need to unite a vision of political economy and the Constitution if you want to have a hope of engendering a popular constitutionalism.

“And one of my concerns during the Trump era was that respect the norms and these kinds of… which we don’t hear much anymore… but I don’t think you can get very far engendering a belief in constitutionalism. I don’t want to say the Constitution ’cause it’s a bit of a disaster. But in constitutionalism, if people aren’t connecting it to the kinds of things that Jamelle was talking about at the beginning about democracy, being a form of collective self-governance and that speaks to the concerns of everyday life.”

Henry Fairlie’s Toryism, the Good King, and the People

“The king and the people against the barons and the capitalists.” That is the motto of the Tories, according to Henry Fairlie; or at least what he claimed Toryism used to represent for centuries until the Thatcher era. In this formula, the king was seen as representing the entire country and population, not merely one sector such as the ruling and economic elite. The monarchy was perceived, if a romantic conceit, as above petty and corrupt realpolitik. This goes hand in hand with the ideals of noblesse oblige, that with power comes responsibility; having informed early modern ideals of an enlightened ruling elite. Such an image of the monarchy was taken seriously by the recently deceased Queen Elizabeth II who strove to maintain a clear divide between the Crown and all else, signifying that which is morally superior and lasting. Though an obvious myth in practice, it stands in for an ancient impulse toward a good society maintained by a righteous leadership (e.g., King Arthur, as the good ruler who brings healing to the land).

Fairlie was a respected, if not respectable, British journalist and essayist who ended up in the United States; most famous for having coined ‘the Establishment’ (sadly, later reappropriated by Margaret Thatcher, someone he despised). He might be considered ‘conservative’-like by bent, but decried modern conservatives, particularly in his adoptive home; which is precisely why he was an advocate, albeit cautious, of liberal reform. This is partly clarified by High Toryism, as traditional communitarianism, that resists the modernizing force of conservatism, while upholding certain Country Party positions (e.g., opposition to a standing army); a similar distinction Corey Robin makes in describing conservatives as anti-traditional reactionaries. Fairlie pointed out that the Tory tradition was lacking in America, and that so-called conservatives were a sorry replacement.

He hated Ronald Regan, of course, without any quibbling: “the Reaganites on the floor were exactly those who in Germany gave the Nazis their main strength and who in France collaborated with them and sustained Vichy” (‘Mencken’s Booboisie in Control of the GOP’, Bite the Hand That Feeds You). But it was far from limited to Reagan Republicans. Describing American conservatism as “narrow-minded and selfish and mean-spirited,” he explained that, “This is one reason, although it is by no means the only one, why the English Tory feels at home with the Democratic Party, while the Republican party fills him with a puzzlement that gives way to desperation and at last to contempt” (‘In Defense of Big Government’, Bite the Hand That Fees You). That was written in 1976, years before Reagan remade the Grand Old Party into a capitalist whorehouse, although likely Fairlie’s mood was shadowed by the fall of Richard Nixon and Saigon; a low point for Republican pride. Imagine what Fairlie would’ve thought of Donald Trump’s presidency, likely saddened but not surprised.

He wasn’t merely attacking American pseudo-conservatism, for he had his own ideals rooted in British conservatism or rather traditionalism, as he may have felt the word ‘conservative’ had lost its value or else never had any value. “The characteristics of the Tory, which separate him from the conservative,” he wrote in that same essay, “may briefly be summarized: 1) his almost passionate belief in strong central government, which has of course always been the symbolic importance to him of the monarchy; 2) his detestation of ‘capitalism,’ of what Cardinal Newman and T.S. Eliot called ‘ursury,’ of what he himself calls ‘trade’; and 3) his trust in the ultimate good sense of the People, whom he capitalizes in this way, because the People are a real entity to him, beyond social and economic divisions, and whom he believes can be appealed to and relied on, as the final repository of decency in a free nation.” It is because of these defining traits that it’s “not unnatural that he [the Tory] often feels inclined, and in the past 150 years has often shown his inclination, to seek his allies among the Socialists.” Timothy Noah, who knew him, said that, this “description puts Tories well to the left of today’s Democratic Party, particularly when it comes to health reform” (Henry Fairlie, Health Maven).

Indeed, there have been numerous examples of Tory socialists without contradiction (related to the Red Tories that have influenced the Canadian Conservative Party to accept social reform and the welfare state, which makes one think of Abraham Lincoln’s Red Republicans that included Marxists). One might argue that socialism, specifically democratic socialism, is the inevitable or likely culmination of Toryism; if by Toryism we mean holding the public good, the commonweal above all else. According to Fairlie, the problem with American politics is not the threat of left-wing radicalism like socialism but, rather, the wrong kind of socialism. Noting the pervasive power of big government, including in protecting and subsidizing big business, he shared the argument that everyone is now a socialist. It’s just a matter of whether socialism serves the people or the plutocracy.

Modern government stands in for the role once played by the monarchy. So, is it the king and the people against the landed gentry or, instead, the king and the landed gentry against the people? In either case, it is ‘strong government’, as Fairlie put it. He concluded that, “it is time that it was acknowledged that there are now only two choices […] There is no longer a third way.” This is among the oldest of conflicts. Is the government legitimate and, if so, who does it serve? The determining factor, to his mind, was democracy. “It is time that we pointed out to the neo-conservatives that democracy has never been subverted from the left but always from the right. No democracy has fallen to communism, without an army; many democracies have fallen to fascism, from within” (‘Mencken’s Booboisie in Control of the GOP’, Bite the Hand That Feeds You).

To give an American example along the lines of ‘king and the people’, think about how Theodore Roosevelt styled his own presidency. With a genuine sense of noblesse oblige as part of old wealth, he saw his election as giving him the authority to paternalistically act on behalf of the American people and the public good. He not only broke up monopolistic trusts but ensured new ones wouldn’t form, in spite of knowing that it would destroy his political career, as doing right was more important; he aspired to be an enlightened aristocrat, achieving the natural aristocracy and disinterested aristocracy idealized by some in the revolutionary generation, the belief that the independently wealthy could resist the corruption of wealth and so rule fairly and wisely (a distorted version of this ideal was used by Donald Trump). When one robber baron sought Roosevelt’s help in building a transcontinental railroad where every aspect would be owned by him, he denied federal intervention to make it possible because that would give too much power to a single private corporation, potentially greater power than the government itself in being able to control transportation, trade, and hence entire markets across the entire country. In a democratic republic, nothing should be more powerful than the government that serves the people.

That first Roosevelt presidency comes close to Fairlie’s Toryism. The only other Republican president who may have approximated his ideological standards, as a ‘good king’, would’ve been Abraham Lincoln (The Social Importance of Morality Tales); although admittedly Lincoln was rather Whiggish in being in favor of laissez faire capitalism and in being rather corporate friendly. Fairlie wanted a Toryism for the country he came to admire in so many other ways. But is the Tory spirit really foreign to America? Does it need to be introduced by a well-meaning British immigrant? One might argue that we simply need to resurrect America’s own origins. After all, we were British colonies almost as long as we’ve been a separate country. Echoes of Elizabethan English (Queen Elizabeth I) is no longer heard in England and yet persists here in America (e.g., y’all from ye all). Maybe much else persists, if we simply dug a little deeper.

What Fairlie so highly praised might be found precisely where the elite rarely look, in public opinion (American Leftist Supermajority). Going by his definition, one could argue the majority of Americans are Fairlien Tories, with no small inclination toward democratic socialism or else social democracy — Americans haven’t lost faith in the need for good governance, as public polling shows, even as they’ve lost trust in a government that has been corrupted. Maybe this has always been present in the American people, but it was submerged below the bickering of the elite one-party state with two right wings. As Thomas Jefferson came to believe in his elderhood, though the constitutional experiment had failed right from the beginning, the spirit of democratic republicanism lived on in the people (“You’re the only people alive on the earth today.”). That is to suggest that likely more Americans agreed (and still agree) with Fairlie than he realized.

What is this spirit of the people? It is none other than the Spirit of ’76, the revolutionary impulse. To bring things back around, it’s telling that the first instinct many American colonists had, in being oppressed, was to appeal to the king in the hope he would intervene and defend the people against the arrogance of a power-mongering Parliament. Sadly, this was a misunderstanding of the times. Even if King George III wanted to help, which he didn’t, the position of the monarchy had been defanged during the Glorious Revolution. There was no powerful king to stand up to a self-dealing aristocracy and plutocracy, the two beginning to overlap since the establishment of the English East India Company in 1600; later to become the infamous British East India Company that was the greatest foe of the colonists. That is why early American laws placed such stringent restrictions on corporate charters; only to be given to organizations to serve the public interest (infrastructure building, hospital management, etc); and generally to not last beyond the project’s completion or within a single generation, as defined by twenty years. But let’s step back, many centuries.

This failure of the monarchy to live up to the Tory ideal of a united front, the king and the people, was nothing new. During the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, the peasants and their allies among the lower classes had, in seizing London, effectively taken hostage King Richard II. But they didn’t want to control the king, only to be heard by him. They thought the corrupt courtly advisers, not unlike J. R. R. Tolkien’s Gríma Wormtongue, were whispering lies into his ears; that if only he heard the truth, he would be won over to their cause. The king, under duress, agreed to their demands of justice and fairness but never honored them, after his troops regained control. The rebels were punished and killed for their efforts. Maybe in having learned this lesson, the next major populist revolt, the more successful English Civil War (AKA Wars of the Three Kingdoms), ended by beheading the king. From one revolt to the next, there was an emerging class consciousness amidst a worsening class war; with egalitarian rhetoric already heard in the 14th century and becoming proto-leftist leveling ideology by the 17th.

The political form this anti-corruption movement eventually took was the aforementioned Country Party, in opposition to the Court Party. The Country Party originated as “a coalition of Tories and disaffected Whigs,” more of a movement than an organized party, having “claimed to be a nonpartisan force fighting for the nation’s interest—the whole “country”—against the self-interested actions of the Court Party, that is the politicians in power in London” (Wikipedia, Country Party (Britain)). Interestingly, the opposition to a ruling elite didn’t form earlier because the aristocracy was still associated with feudal communalism, as distinct from royal officials. But such a distinction became moot over time, as later on the lords spent more of their time not at their estates near their feudal villages, but in the palace and the surroundings of London — a disruptive change detailed by Barbara Ehrenreich’s Dancing in the Streets. Yet the memory of the feudal intimacy between aristocracy and peasantry was still strong enough in the colonies that the two did unite in a common revolution, as they did in France as well. One might note, though, that there is a reason the main leaders of the American Revolution were country gentlemen from Virginia, still acting as paternalistic feudal lords, and not courtly gentlemen from South Carolina, the latter of which spent most of their time in Charleston when not in London.

The funny thing is how the monarchy became symbolic. When the American revolutionaries sought the king as an intercessor, following the example of the 14th century peasants, they were invoking the monarchy as representing English ethno-nationalism. What they were really demanding, at first, was the rights of Englishmen as citizens of England and subjects of the British Empire. The king as ruler of it all symbolized this sense of being part of the English populace, even as many American colonists had never set foot in England, along with many others not being of English ancestry at all. It was an imaginary identity and powerful at that. Likewise, the actual king himself was ultimately irrelevant for, if the king did not represent the people and the country, then he was no king of worth by definition of this Tory principle. This was seen in the English Civil War, “such was the popularity of the monarchy that this was the ground on which it was fought, even when they got to the point of trying and cutting off the head of the king, they really told everyone that they were fighting for monarchy” (The Jim Rutt Show, Transcript of EP 160 – Curtis Yarvin on Monarchy in the U.S.A.). The monarchy was a way of speaking about legitimate government as ultimate authority — actual monarchs be damned!

This is the background to Fairlie’s Toryism. He doesn’t mention a Country Party because, “The ideology of the party faded away in England but became a powerful force in the American colonies, where its tracts strongly motivated the Patriots to oppose what the Country Party had cast as British monarchical tyranny and to develop a powerful political philosophy of republicanism in the United States” (Wikipedia). So, of course, he didn’t find Toryism, per se, in America. British Toryism and the Anglo-American Country Party parted ways, but retained their shared origin in historical influence. It quickly gets confusing, though, since initially the Country Party in England was identified with Whigs, not Tories or rather only some of the latter: “Country party, which came ultimately to embrace radical Whigs and reconstructed ‘Tories'” (David McNally, “Scientific Whiggism”: Smith’s Political Philosophy, Political Economy and the Rise of Capitalism). The Toryism of that era (1670-80s) was for the divine right of kings, rather than a constitutional monarchy; and hence there was not necessarily Fairlie’s Tory alliance of king and the people; but it could be found in the Whig Party. The more respectable Whigs, however, dissociated themselves from these Country tendencies; and by the early 18th century the Whigs were now the Court Party; though the Whigs came back around to Country ideology later on.

It’s important to note, though, that in the Exclusion Crisis of the late 17th century the Tories and Whigs may not have indicated any coherent set of ideologies, still less consistent membership. The two sides were often using similar rhetoric, such as Tories likewise turning to populist appeals and fears. Jonathan Scott wrote: “there were no whig and tory ‘parties’ in 1678-83 partly because the ‘whig’ (anti-court) majority of 1678-80, and the ‘tory’ (loyalist) majority of 1681-1683 were mostly the same people. … From 1678 to 1683 people remained convinced of an imminent threat to the church and government; in 1681 they changed their minds about where the greatest threat was coming from” (quoted by Tim Harris in: Party Turns? Or, Whigs and Tories Get Off Scott Free; & Politics under the Later Stuarts: Party Conflict in a Divided Society 1660-1715). And: “What must be noted behind this consistency of rhetoric is the consistency of its constituency. In both cases we are dealing with a majority of the political nation. The rhetoric was the same partly because, in many cases, so were the people expressing it. To a large extent, and with the important exception of some hardliners on both sides, 1678’s ‘whigs’ were 1681’s ‘tories'” (quoted by the same).

Some of this might’ve been the case of the successful rhetoric of the early Whigs being emulated and co-opted by the early Tories, a common tactic of reactionaries as a way of neutralizing an opponent’s position. One distinction remained stable throughout this period, Whigs defended religious non-conformists and dissenters while Tories attacked them. There had been a growing religious divide, in the Western world, from the peasants revolts to the Protestant Reformation to the English Civil War to the American Revolution, where in each case heretical critics and leaders stood against church authority, hierarchy, and power; typically motivated by righteous denunciations of political corruption, concentrated wealth, and abusive power within organized religion — the American revolutionary Thomas Paine became an infamous pariah later on for having written Age of Reason, a deist diatribe and jeremiad against organized religion (Nature’s God and American Radicalism); very much a product of Country Party, with its anti-clericalism. It’s the same old conflict that has happened with every new religion or sect that challenged an entrenched theocracy or priestly class, such as with the original egalitarian Christians (Stephen J Patterson, The Forgotten Creed).

“In the same essay [‘Of the Political Parties of Great Britain] Hume points out that this basic difference [of two political temperaments] parallels a similar one over religion: partisans of the Establishment side naturally with the party of monarchy; those of the schismatic or heretical sects, with the ‘republican’ or ‘commonwealth’ party. This idea has also become a commonplace, and most modern writers on party have discerned the origins of the two historic parties in religious differences. [… Keith Feiling] traces the Whig and Tory parties back to the era of Reformation, pointing out that there were originally three parties: a Catholic ‘Right,’ an Anglican ‘Center,’ and a Puritan ‘Left.’ With the virtual disappearance of the sixteenth century there remained only two parties: that of the Church opposing that of the Sects. Ever since, the division between Whig and Tory (and between Liberal and Conservative) has reflected this division between Chapel and Church — Dissent and the Establishment” (Robert Walcott, The Idea of Party in the Writing of Later Stuart History).

It’s amusing that the author of that quote, writing in 1962, referred to Fairlie’s term ‘the Establishment’, coined in 1955; a 20th century idea being anachronistically projected as a frame onto the past. Anyway, by whatever language used to describe it, before the modern era, almost every uprising and revolt involved oppressed and silenced religions, religious factions, and religious cultures; and since the Axial Age, this has often been structured along the lines of authoritarianism (or social dominance) versus egalitarianism. So, about Country Party versus Court Party, all the British views on Crown and Parliament could be interpreted as secondary, as offshoots of religious structures and movements in competition and conflict in how groups sought the legitimacy of authority and authorization. Even today, a country like the United States remains highly religious, all across the political spectrum. How liberals and conservatives perceive politics has much to do with the historical development of religion, with the Roundhead dissenters of the English Civil War having settled in the northern colonies and the Cavalier Anglicans having established themselves to the south. Something to keep in mind.

Having gone into decline in England, the United States was more fully imprinted by the earlier form of the Country tradition, becoming what once was called Anti-Federalism but what today is no longer named at all, though remaining as an ideological undertow. “The writings of the country party were eagerly devoured by some American colonists who came to fear the corruption of the English court as the greatest threat to the colonies’ desired liberties. They formed a Patriot cause in the Thirteen Colonies and used the country party ideas to help form Republicanism in the United States. [James H.] Hutson identified country ideology as a major influence on the Antifederalists during the debate over the ratification of the United States Constitution. Similarly, Jeffersonianism inherited the country party attack on elitism, centralization, and distant government during the ascent of Alexander Hamilton and other Federalists” (Wikipedia). As a side note, it’s amusing that Thomas Jefferson, as a Cavalier aristocrat, narratized the revolutionary conflict as akin to the Anglo-Saxon tribes defense against the Norman invasion that would establish the Cavalier aristocracy; but such Country-like rhetoric appealed to him as a rural landowner, distant from Court power. We still require greater context to understand how Anti-Federalism formed, specifically what allied the likes of Jefferson and Thomas Paine; both, for example, having had advocated progressive land taxes to redistribute what they perceived as wealth and resources stolen from the former feudal commons.

Let’s go to the very beginning of Toryism. It is a word that comes out of old Irish, maybe related to the sense of being sought, pursued, chased, or hunted (from tóir). The dispossessed and displaced Irish Catholics were oppressed, early on under Oliver Cromwell’s Roundheads; sadly, since both Irish Catholics and Cromwellian dissenters had been oppressed by the same Church of England. So, these Irish tories allied with the English and Scottish Cavalier’s on the side of the monarchy (similar to why many Native Americans allied with the British Empire during the American Revolution). The term ‘torie’ originally was associated with thieves and bandits, and so it came to refer to the political opposition. But it eventually was associated with the triune of ‘God, King, and Country.’ Right from the start, it had a mix of meanings; and one might sense hints of the odd usage by Fairlie. The Country Party has an even more mixed history, not always clearly associated with any single actual party but more often a term to indicate a coalition of interests. But it too had a meaning of opposition: “dissenters of all kinds will be of the Country party” (David Hume, Of the Parties of Great Britain).

Patriotism, as loyalty to country (ethno-nationalism, the land and the people), was early on synonymous with a Country ideology. One thing that sometimes brought Toryism and Country Party together was a republican idiom, even when not actually opposed to monarchy itself; which is odd since republicanism, by definition, means rule without monarchy. Once again, it’s what monarchy represented, not necessarily monarchy itself. It was, instead, “opposition to the government, the centre of which was the court,” such that the monarchy was seen as something separate and above, the ‘Court’ being what today we’d think of as the bureaucracy, the deep state, and the military-industrial complex (Max Skjönsberg, Patriots and the Country party tradition in the eighteenth century: the critics of Britain’s fiscal-military state from Robert Harley to Catharine Macaulay). In the 18th century, the radical Whig Catharine Macaulay wrote approvingly of the regicide during the English Civil War; and yet also hoped for “a patriot king and a patriot ministry co-operating with the body of the people to throw off the shackles of septennial parliaments” (History of England, Vol. 8) — that is the kind of attitude that likely so incensed Edmund Burke, not fear of regicide in distant France but the regicidal tradition right at home. To confuse things further, “the ‘libertarian’ Country party platform had an imperial dimension, which can be connected with the Tory blue-water foreign policy of the early eighteenth century” (Skjönsberg). That last part touches upon Fairlie’s Toryism, in which his having been far from an anti-imperialist or opposed to big government in general, including when it came to war.

In a more distorted form, one can think of those self-styled American ‘patriots’ who attack the ‘government’ all the while praising the police state and the military empire (what, in the past, would’ve been thought of as support for the king and the king’s army, in distinction from Parliament); or decrying authoritarianism while supporting theocracy, white supremacy, and an aspiring strongman. Such strange ideological tendencies can go off in many directions, some quite contradictory. Out of this emerges modern populism, sometimes right-wing but at other times left-wing, but often inconsistent. It’s dual form took shape early on. In the way the Cromwellian army operated, and in line with the earlier rhetoric of the peasants revolts, the Country Party had a genuine component of egalitarianism: “The Country Party began having regular meetings in London, calling itself the Green Ribbon Club. The Club was an open political and social organization that encouraged membership from all classes, and the members freely mixed to exchange ideas” (Elizabeth Breeden Townes , Contemporary reactions to the Popish Plot and the exclusion crisis). At the same time, many of its leaders found it convenient to incite xenophobia and paranoia. So, there would be simultaneous denouncement of both slavery and Catholicism, expressing fear of oppression and the demand to oppress others — sounds like the present reactionary right here in the United States.

In the century following the English Civil War, this raucous confusion took a particular form on this side of the pond, and with the same force of populist zeal. But when imported to the American colonies, the meanings of words morphed: “Like their British predecessors, the ‘Jeffersonian Republicans’ feared the growing power of the executive and its influence over the legislative power that risked upsetting the constitutional equilibrium. As avid readers of Bolingbroke and Catharine Macaulay, they were steeped in the Patriot and Country traditions. These traditions were called ‘Whig’ in America, but they had in fact been predominantly associated with Tories during the years of Whig oligarchy after the Hanoverian Succession, and they could occasionally unite Tories with opposition Whigs. Jeffersonian accusations against Hamilton of being ‘Tory’ illustrate how this could lead to confusion, as his financial system was modelled on Whig politics against which British Tories protested for decades” (Skjönsberg). Most members of Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party joined the Democratic Party, while a smaller portion turned to the Whig Party and National Republican Party (no association to present GOP); many of the Whigs later joining the present Republican Party. For this reason, outsiders assumed that the Democrats, in opposing the Whigs, must be Tories.

Indeed, the Democrats, in having grown beyond their Anti-Federalist roots (e.g., a strain of abolitionism), became more neo-traditionalist in some ways (e.g., actively defending neo-feudal slavery); where revolutionary liberty was whittled down to that of privilege, even as the political franchise began to expand to all white males. To further complicate, consider that supposed godfather of modern Anglo-American conservatism, Edmund Burke, was a member of the liberal and progressive Whigs. Yet like the Tory Fairlie, his demands for reform were simultaneously strong and moderate, depending on what he was responding to. Burke criticized the British East India Company and initially supported the American Revolution, but once war broke out his loyalty was ultimately to the British Empire. Despite claiming him to support their own legitimacy, the main thrust of American conservatism has been decidedly anti-Burkean, just as much as it has been anti-Tory — Reagan went so far as to quote from the optimistic vision of Thomas Paine, the ideological enemy of Burke. Meanwhile, British conservatism has for the past couple centuries been freely mixing the old elements of both Whigs and Tories. One might throw one’s hands up in despair of making sense of it all, but what is important are the steady and continuing undercurrents.

Of course, we must emphasize again the point that Tory and Whig haven’t had singular unchanging definitions across history. In the 1670s, the radical Whigs challenged the standing army, in favor of local militias, as the military represented the king’s power beholden to no one else; whereas a constitutional monarchy would limit the king’s authority. But over the following 18th century, fear of standing armies drifted over into Tory rhetoric (Lois G. Schwoerer, “No Standing Armies!”). In both cases, this opposition to excessive and oppressive military was a defining feature of the Country Party, a party of no specific party but always shifting. This view on a standing army came to be a major point of complaint among the American Anti-Federalists and other true Federalists. This suspicion of martial power could be seen with the moderate Federalist and reluctant revolutionary John Dickinson, draft author of the Articles of Confederation (revised by Anti-Federalists and so the single greatest Anti-Federalist document); such as with his related argument of Purse and Sword, positing that freedom was not possible if the same ruler, political body, or level of government controlled both taxation and military.

Of course, Fairlie was never against a standing army. But then again, almost no one today would be, not on consistent principle as could be the case many centuries ago. That goes to his argument that we now live in a world of strong governments and hence national militaries, it only being a matter of who is served by them. It’s largely become a moot issue and so a consensus has formed across the political spectrum, although the rhetoric of militias still rings potently, if only among a small reactionary fringe of militant extremists actually takes it seriously. A modern nation-state simply can’t operate without a standing army; and so to oppose it is to oppose modernity as we know it and all that goes with it; and even among the most reactionary, few actually want to return to feudalism, the last time standing armies were rare. On that point, the Court Party has won out, both in practical politics and public imagination.

Someone like Fairlie was very much a modern figure, generously borrowing from both the Country and Court traditions. He definitely drew upon that long established egalitarian populism of the Country Party, having formed before any peasants revolts — listen to the libertarian rhetoric of the ancient world, such as inspired the anti-authoritarian messages of prophets and teachers (e.g., Jesus) and numerous anti-authoritarian uprisings (e.g., the gladiator revolt led by Spartacus, his wife having been a Dionysian prophetess, a religion associated with liberty). On the other hand, as opposed to the Country worldview, Fairlie was firmly in the camp of an activist government; drawing upon a liberal progressive strain of the Court ideology, a strain that preceded the American Revolution by more than a century. As representing a Court platform at its best in terms of interventionist government, by the early 19th century when Country-minded egalitarianism had been mainstreamed, “the Whig political programme came to encompass not only the supremacy of parliament over the monarch and support for free trade, but Catholic emancipation, the abolition of slavery and expansion of the franchise (suffrage)” (The Politics of Britain Wiki, Whig (British political party)). As such, Fairlie’s Toryism inherits much from the old radical Whigs. Still, he is clearly a Tory through and through in his detesting laissez-faire capitalism, neoliberalism, corporatism, inverted totalitarianism, financialization, and regressive taxation; old issues that tightly bound earlier Toryism to certain Country inclinations.

Ultimately, he often seems to side with Court ideology, ignoring party labels, in lamenting American conservatives undermining of government and unwillingness to accept political responsibility; specifically in relation to consent of the governed, noblesse oblige, public good, culture of trust, and similar ideals representing a shared society as a moral community. But then again, Country criticisms of government tended to be selective, not sweeping; not necessarily, on principle, opposed to strong or large government, as long as it was good governance. Whereas Republicans dismiss out of hand the hard work necessary to run a modern government, preferring to merely attack and tear down, dismantling it and selling off the parts for short-term profit and self-interest, eating the seed corn so that there can be no next year’s crop; all part of strategy of Starve the Beast. That is the dark side of Country ideology, pushed to a reactionary extreme without any counterbalance of Country virtues. Though there was always a genuine populist impulse in speaking for certain segments of the lower classes, the Country Party too often in practice ended up being a cover for the interests of the capitalist class (merchants and large landowners) who wanted to cut government down to size, small enough that it could be drowned in a bath tub — not so that a more direct self-governance could fill the void but so that there would be no outside restrictions on their own oligarchic dominance, local and/or private.

Think of the original states rights argument of Southern aristocrats which, in opposing federal treaties, sought to steal Native American land; and then justified it with populist appeals of opening the land for white settlers. That is kind of the right-wing populism that so worried the likes of Richard Hofstadter when he wrote The Paranoid Style in American Politics. But that unfairly dismisses millennia of genuine populism, built on an emerging class consciousness that made all of modern leftism possible, no matter how the reactionary right has co-opted it. The merchants and large landowners wouldn’t have taken up such rhetoric, if they hadn’t been preceded by a centuries-long grassroots movement of working class revolt; not merely limited to agrarianism, if sometimes taking that form; much less identical to the extremes of reactionary politics such as anti-Catholicism, antisemitism, and McCarthyism. Hofstadter too came around to admitting he was wrong, that genuine populism was much more diverse and very often radically left-wing in its egalitarianism (Anton Jäger, The Myth of “Populism”).

One wonders if, in following in this ancient pedigree, Henry Fairlie recognized his debt not only to the Court Party but also to the Country Party. Did he understand its importance to the American founding and the potential it has continued to hold? Did he understand how the Country Party and Court Party had intertwined across Anglo-American history, each in its way influencing his vision of Toryism?

Our Life Among the Reactionary Right

The Left and the Right in Relationship

We find that, in our location and life circumstances, we are in contact with a variety of people across the ideological spectrum(s), along with across cultural differences. This diverse town is a major medical and research center centered around a liberal state college. The writers workshop here is the oldest of its kind. Though relatively small, the community draws people from all over the country and all over the world; and it’s situated amidst farmland, pulling in many residents and workers who grew up in rural communities and small towns as well; thus balancing out the middle class WEIRDness (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic). But our own bias is mostly that of a local yokel, if someone who at times has lived in other states and regions of the country. Most of our life has been in this town and, though without a college degree ourselves, we fit in just fine with our intellectuality, love of learning, and book obsession. All of that, of course, goes along with our liberal-mindedness.

Yet, as radically left-liberal as we might be, we were raised by conservative parents who are rightward socially, religiously, and economically, if they are somewhat moderate; and we spent our teen years in the conservative, nay right-wing authoritarian, Deep South. Even now in being surrounded by liberalism, for various reasons, we somehow end up spending much of our time talking with those on the right, some more reactionary than others: Republican partisans, fundamentalists, Tea Partiers, MAGA supporters, and alt-righters. Some are family, while others are friends and coworkers. They are a diverse bunch and so they wouldn’t agree on a number of issues, but among them there is a common disconnect that comes up again and again. It’s certainly frustrating, to a leftist, and often just plain strange and disconcerting.

We probably spend more time thinking about such people than they spend thinking about us, and so here we are. Let’s give an example. There is one guy we’ve personally known for a long time. He is an all around conservative Republican trapped in a right-wing media bubble and echo chamber. His views tend toward the conventional, though increasingly reactionary as he ages. He more or less fits the stereotypical profile of demographics and life experience that one might expect, though not relevant for our present purposes. Among our right-wing relationships and acquaintances, he is the one we talk to the most regularly and the most engagingly, for the simple reason we’re around each other a lot. So we are particularly familiar with his worldview and what motivates it. We are informed of his background and what has shaped his life.

He is smart and educated, as is the norm around here, and yet his understanding is so narrowly confined as to give him no larger perspective. Admittedly, he has physically seen more of the world than we have. Intellectually, though, he is less well traveled. Anything that disagrees with his beliefs and biases is often dismissed out of hand. Though retired from the educational field, he simply doesn’t have much curiosity outside of what he already knows or thinks he knows, and having been an expert in his field he is prone to the smart idiot effect, in believing he doesn’t have to research a topic for himself to have a relevant opinion that is to be taken seriously. When point blank given evidence that contradicts his views, he’ll typically refuse to look at it and just digs in further; the standard backfire effect that research shows is more common on the Right, and well-educated conservatives most of all (an interesting phenomenon we won’t discuss further here).

All evidence that doesn’t confirm his bias is asserted as having a liberal bias or is somehow wrong, faulty, or whatever; without any need to prove it (e.g., climatology science is false, manipulated, and corrupt because he read one right-wing book on the topic and so no further information is needed). He won’t offer counter-evidence, just assumes he is right until he is proven wrong, which is impossible to do in his own mind since he already knows he is right. How does one respond to that? Of course, when this anti-intellectualism is pointed out, he gets defensive and asserts that, as someone on the left, we’re just calling names. No, we’re not. We’d love to have a meaningful intellectual discussion with him about many topics, but his intellectual willingness in many cases is not up to match, though not for lacking general intelligence, far from it.

A Liberal Mind Amidst Right-Wing Media

If this otherwise nice fellow were merely stupid, we wouldn’t bother talking to him in the first place or at least we wouldn’t engage with him beyond casual chatter. Yet in having been bottle-fed on early Cold War propaganda, he lacks intellectual defenses against manipulative media. He tends to mindlessly repeat the rhetorical framings, narratives, and talking points he hears from right-wing media and political elites. Unlike us, his media consumption doesn’t extend very far, pretty much limited to sources that conform to the same basic set of scripts. He doesn’t have exposure to any left-wing media or even moderately liberal media, in the way we are constantly exposed to right-wing and conservative media. Part of the reason for this difference is that we have an uncontrollably driven sense of curiosity that ends up leading us all over the place, along with what we inadvertently pick up from the surrounding cultural and media milieu.

As a liberal-minded liberal, it’s hard for us to imagine not wanting to know other perspectives. Besides, even when trying to mind our own business, it’s impossible to ignore right-wing media when it’s constantly in our space, such as televisions playing in the background and newspapers laying about. Keep in mind that all corporate media has a right-wing bias, if only in terms of the capitalist realism and class war of the ownership class (i.e., the super-rich elite who own most of the corporate media that is concentrated in a few transnational corporations). Also, consider that, if you go anywhere in the United States, the most common channel to be playing in any place of business (restaurant, bar, hotel lobby, etc) is Fox News. This isn’t a right-wing country, at least not in terms of supermajority public opinion, but we are ruled by a right-wing elite, media and otherwise.

That is the thing. In our having liberal-minded thin psychic boundaries, it’s not part of our capacity to block out what is in the world around us, whether or not it would be our preference. We are hyper-attuned and sensitive like a staticky shirt picking up lint everywhere we go, the kind of cognitive tendency that comes up in studies on what distinguishes liberals and the liberal-minded. It’s an expression of high openness to experience, and it has other affects as well, in terms of the dual trait openness/intellectuality. Though we may be an extreme example in our roving curiosity, surveys show that liberals in general consume more conservative media and alternative media than do conservatives of liberal media and alternative media; partly because liberals are on average younger and spend more time on the media-diverse internet. Then again, it’s hard for a liberal to do otherwise, of any age group, as right-wing media is pervasive, while leftist media is mostly excluded from the ‘mainstream’.

Anyway, it’s just in the nature of liberals to be liberal-minded, that is to say motivated by intellectual curiosity and cognitive complexity, and so seeking out a greater variety of views and sources. One of the strengths and weaknesses of the liberal-minded personality trait openness is that the boundaries of the mind are thin and porous, that is to say the opposite of highly focused and narrowly confined. To the degree one is liberal-minded one would not be content and satisfied listening to the same set of opinions over and over, hearing talking points parroted. With wandering and sprawling minds, curiosity tends to get the better of liberals. We on the left are vulnerable to being drawn into the corporate-controlled media environment, just because we’re curious and that is mostly what is available. It takes a lot more conscious effort and intention to look for underfunded leftist media.

Let’s consider some specifics. For instance, according to audience data, a liberal is more likely to watch Fox News than a conservative is to listen to NPR, even though the former is much further right than the latter is to the left; as even NPR is mostly privately-funded (i.e., corporate-funded) and, according to one analysis, gives more airtime to right-wing think tanks (an analysis that was already biased in labeling centrist think tanks, to the right of the American public, as ‘liberal’). To find a leftist equivalent of the extremist rhetoric heard on Fox News, one would have to look even further left to alternative media, but such media territory is a complete blindspot for most conservatives, as well as for many liberals. It’s hard to imagine anyone in the United States who is not intimately aware of Fox News, what it spouts, and the effect it has. It’s strange considering most Americans, on most issues, are to the left of the political elites, including the DNC elite. Yet majoritarian left-liberal views are so silenced in ‘mainstream’ media, even supposed ‘liberal’ media, as to be treated as near non-existent.

This is part of a larger pattern of ideological divide. Similarly, someone on the left is more likely to be familiar with genetic determinism than someone on the right is to be equally familiar with epigenetics, and the same for numerous unequal disparities of knowledge: leftist knowledge of corporate capitalism versus rightist ignorance of Marxism and communism (or even ignorance of the anti-corporatist capitalism of the American founding generation), leftist knowledge of neoliberalism versus rightist ignorance of anarchosyndicalism (or any other similar variations of socioeconomic leftism), leftist knowledge of right-libertarianism versus rightist ignorance of left-libertarianism (despite left-libertarianism being the original meaning of ‘libertarianism’), leftist knowledge of fundamentalist apologetics versus rightist ignorance of pagan parallels in Abrahamic religions (the latter of which was written about by Thomas Paine, the main inspiration for the American Revolution), and endless other examples.

So, one side is always coming to the table with greater familiarity with the other side, but it is not mutual to an extreme degree. Instead of knowledge, right-wing rhetoric turns leftists into inane cartoon characters. In listening to Fox News, one lady we know is always saying how absurd and crazy is the political left, by which is typically meant the DNC elite. Indeed, if one were to mostly watch Fox News and little else, it would be hard to not be shocked by leftist politics that, as portrayed, makes absolutely no sense. But what doesn’t occur to the indoctrinated reactionary mind is that maybe it’s the media caricature, not the target of derision, that is absurd.

Getting to Know the Reactionary Right

Because of a lifetime of such a media environment, and because of being liberal-minded in our curiosity, we have become quite conversant not only with conservative ‘mainstream’ media like Fox News and The Wall Street Journal but also have gained long familiarity with more alternative stuff: Reason Magazine, Epoch Times, Imprimis, etc; along with the websites, blogs, and Youtube channels of religious apologists (e.g., Stephen J. Bedard), racists (e.g., Richard Lynn), white supremacists (e.g., Steve Sailer), genetic determinists (e.g., HBDchick), anarcho-capitalists (e.g., Stefan Molyneux ), and on and on; ad nauseum. Also outside the bounds of respectable society, we’ve listened to the likes of Alex Jones, Stephen Bannon, and Jordan Peterson long before most on the Right had even heard those names.

After seeing him in Richard Linklater’s movies in the early Aughts, it was from Alex Jones that we first learned of the concept of a false flag operation; that was when he had yet to go full Looney Tunes, if he was already teetering on the edge of sanity. As that decade ended, during the Obama administration, Stephen Bannon came out with a documentary on generations theory that we saw; and we quickly recognized it as propaganda. Our parents were watching a lot of Fox News at the time and Glenn Beck became a common presence in our life. On our own, around then or maybe earlier, we checked out the largely unknown Greg Gutfeld on his late show on Fox News, but found it boring; and now he is the new primetime comedian commentator to fill Beck’s absence. It was during that period when we first came across talk of Jordan Peterson, his not having been politicized back then and, instead, mostly known for his 1999 book Maps of Meaning. It was actually a Canadian liberal who introduced us to him; prior to his having embraced the alt-right, having become an IDW (intellectual dark web) figure, and having turned his life into political spectacle.

In the past, we used to actively seek out such interesting and intriguing, sometimes bizarre, stuff and would look into almost anything, as we felt morally obligated and intellectually compelled to understand what was going on in the world, including what was bubbling up in the reactionary mind. At times, depending on our mood, we could and still can be openly curious to almost any alternative view, if sometimes just for shits and giggles. The most extreme paranoid fantasies and rantings, in the more innocent times of decades past, could be taken as mere entertainment; because there was no mass movement and corporate media pushing them to the extent seen now, and certainly there had yet to be a Donald Trump presidency and a MAGA insurrection. Our alternative-loving mentality has had a way of leading us down strange, sometimes dark, paths; a habit we blame on our tender young psyche having been imprinted upon by Robert Anton Wilson and Art Bell; what once were gateway drugs for the curious liberal.

We don’t regret our past explorations. It made possible for us to follow all the lines of influence that eventually formed into the present deranged reactionary right, though it would’ve been hard to have predicted what it was to become in its full glory. We were right there at the beginning and it’s fascinating to think back on it. We came of age in the ’90s and viscerally felt the changes in the air. When still in high school, while down in South Carolina, we’d sometimes catch the early right-wing radio talk shows, such as Laura Schlessinger and Rush Limbaugh, along with occasionally listening to fire-and-brimstone preachers as they can be mesmerizing. Following that, we spent several summers in the Bible Belt region of North Carolina, where we worked at a Christian camp and, also while dating a local girl, got to know far right fundamentalists up close and personal.

All in all, the world of the reactionary right is not alien to us, even as it will always be something outside our own mentality. We’ve lived with it, grasped what it is, watched it develop, felt its impact in our gut, and seen what it does to others. It influenced us as well, if only in determining what we didn’t want to be. Now we’re in a different place in our life. We’ve tried to learn to be more discerning in what we put into our mental space, as we’ve found too much of the crap out there to be torturous and usually pointless, not worth wasting one’s time upon. Concern for mental health required us to stop such bad habits of wide-open curiosity, if we still prize an open mind. Nonetheless, it’s not like we can isolate ourselves. Even now, we know the exact talking points that are popular right at this moment on Fox News. We absorb it all like a sponge, all the more reason to set clear boundaries.

No Shared Knowledge, No Mutual Communication

To get back to the conservative guy we mentioned, for all the above reasons and more, we know where many on the right are getting their thoughts and ideas from, whereas few on the right have any clue about where those of us on the left are coming from. It’s a immense chasm to cross, and so it makes actual and mutual communication a rarity, but it can happen at times and that is what motivates us to reach out to the right-wingers within our personal world. Frustration aside, we do enjoy dialogue with those of other views, and that is why this particular conservative has occupied so much of our attention. When not taken in by right-wing fears, he actually is capable of nuanced thoughtfulness and so talking with him is far from a waste of time. Plus, we simply value our relationship with him on a human level; not everything is about overt ideology.

Because of our larger perspective with a broader knowledge base, we are able to sense our way into his worldview; and so we sometimes can couch our own views in the language, ideas, and frames that make sense to him. Yet he can’t return the favor, as it simply is not in his capacity. Our holding all the responsibility for translation can be tiresome. Even then, only on occasion do we successfully manage to lure him out of his reality tunnel of ideological realism and groupthink. At those times, he is able to be somewhat clear-minded and critical, if only briefly for he soon falls back into a more comfortable stance. The only reason we’ve been able to reach him at all is because the political right is fractured and the cracks offer opportunities for light to shine in, creates weak points to gain leverage and wedge open just enough before the openings snap shut again.

In contrast to his GOP partisanship, we are an equal opportunity critic of the entire two-party duopoly. This is useful in that we can get him to lower his defenses by our attacking the DNC elites, particularly the Clintonistas, of which we despise all the more as they stand in for the entire Left on corporate media spin, while in reality third way politics mostly triangulates itself between the moderate right and the corporate right, with some liberal sugar to help the poison go down. In talking to him, we can segue from such criticisms of Democrats into even harder hitting critiques of the totalizing corruption of both parties within a common power structure that dominates society. This usually works in drawing out his semi-libertarian streak, but his defenses return at the slightest hint of ideological threat. We have to be cautious in not being too provoking, and our success is spotty at best.

Still, we can often get him to agree, surprisingly, with rather leftist views (on the problems of neoliberalism, excessive CEO pay, near monopolies, externalized costs, harmful inequities, culture of trust breakdown, monied corruption, etc). That is as long as we don’t point out that we are expressing leftism. The main challenge is that, no matter what, he will always mentally still be living in the early Cold War. A McCarthyist battle against authoritarian Stalinism and in favor of authoritarian fascism will never end in his Burkean moral imagination, and no non-authoritarian third option is quite possible as a viscerally real choice, despite his being able to intellectually conceive that non-authoritarianism sounds nice as an ideal and in theory. Basically, like most on the reactionary right, he has no actual understanding of democracy or genuine concern about it. How could he when all he hears is anti-democratic rhetoric on right-wing media?

Democracy is just a word to be bandied about and, in reactionary style, defenders of democracy get caricatured as attacking ‘democracy’ (i.e., the status quo of the Establishment). Yet, since he is part of the respectable classes, he can’t admit that he is anti-democratic (i.e., right-wing authoritarian) and anti-egalitarian (i.e., social dominance orientation), if not entirely (like many Americans, he is ideologically schizoid). Such an admission would be politically incorrect, even on the political right. This is the double bind we are caught in as a society. Many individuals can’t openly declare and commit to what they actually value, believe, and uphold. Another obvious example is how racists these days deny being racists, whereas in the past they’d have been proud of their racism, to the point of open supremacism and eugenics. This goes hand in hand with the political right co-opting the label of classical liberalism, while eschewing the ugliness of classical conservatism, but eschewing it in name only.

Reaching Out to the Closed Mind

To this conservative guy, old school neocon President Joe Biden is a communist or else he is a communist puppet under the control of Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders. And the corporatist Affordable Care Act (AKA Obamacare) is likewise communist, despite it increasing the wealth and power of the private oligopoly of insurance companies, and despite it having originated in a right-wing think tank and having been first implemented by the Republican Mitt Romney (it would make more sense to call it Romneycare). Everything that isn’t far right is communist, or anything that is right-wing but then adopted by the Democratic Party. And whatever you do avoid the topic of postmodern Marxism, a complete oxymoron since postmodernists and Marxists are historically bitter enemies, to such an extent that declassified records show that the CIA intentionally promoted postmodernism to combat Marxist influence. Such facts are irrelevant, though, in speaking to those on the Right.

In not knowing themselves, in refusing to know themselves, right-wing reactionaries know the other side even less and know the larger world not at all. So, lost in such darkness, they are prone to frightening nightmares, where what they project outward is cast back upon them as shadows; with all the shadow boxing that entails, wild punches being blindly thrown and haphazardly landing upon the innocent. Their only sense of the entire Left is a fantastical phantasm that would instantly dissipate in the light of self-awareness, but that would require them to lift it up into open-eyed scrutiny. How does one talk to someone on the Right when their words drop off into empty air filled with the insubstantial imaginings and frightening specters that only they can see? Yet in being part of the same society, how can we not talk to these others, how can we not attempt to reach out? After all, they are our family and friends, our neighbors and coworkers. They aren’t really other, even if that is how they perceive us or rather how the media they consume portrays us.

“You’re the only people alive on the earth today.”

“You’re the only people alive on the earth today. All those people who created traditions, created countries and created rules…they are dead. Why don’t you start your own world while you’ve got the chance?”
~ Bill Hicks.

What is rarely, if ever, taught in public education, much less heard in elite institutions of politics and media, is that this anti-authoritarian demand to be free of the past was one of the main views of the American revolutionaries, including many major leaders like Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, having openly defended direct democracy and majoritarianism. They often spoke of this problem as the ‘dead hand’; a criticism applied to any established institution, tradition, custom, norm, law, constitution, or holy book. Freedom is always in the present because it is the only moment in which to act freely. To live shackled to the past, in being beholden to the dead, is to not be truly alive; instead, it’s to be infected with the soul sickness of the zombified living dead. One of the greatest of oppressions is to be haunted by a past that controls one’s mind, identity, and ability to act; held with the vice-grip of commanding voices that possess the victim, like J. R. R. Tolkien’s Gríma Wormtongue whispering into the ear of King Théoden of Rohan.

During the American Revolution, the radical advocates for the living generation and living constitutionalism came to be called the Anti-Federalists, only because they lost the war of rhetoric when the so-called ‘Federalists’ took control in dismantling the Articles of Confederation and enforcing centralized government controlled by elites (this kind of radical critique, such as when Bill Hicks speaks it, is now identified as ‘liberal’ or ‘leftist’). But in reality the ‘Anti-Federalists’ were the strongest defenders of actual federalism as decentralized power and self-governance. Levi Preston, a revolutionary veteran, as an old man simply stated what the American Revolution was about, “Young man, what we meant in going for those redcoats was this: we always had governed ourselves, and we always meant to. They didn’t mean we should.”  He clarified exactly what he meant. Right before that, he said, “Oppressions? I didn’t feel them. I never saw one of those stamps, and always understood that Governor Bernard put them all in Castle William. I am certain I never paid a penny for one of them. Tea tax! I never drank a drop of the stuff; the boys threw it all overboard.” It was not a tax revolt, as if early working class Americans were willing to fight, sacrifice, and die in defense of capitalism. Their sense of freedom denied was much more visceral and communal, with political implications right from the start. They were social justice warriors. They understood that the political is personal and the personal is political.

Such righteous assertion of self-independence, self-autonomy, and self-governance — the Spirit of ’76 living in the Spirit of the People — is not possible if one places the authority of corpses and ghosts over one’s own self-authorization and self-authority, any more than one can be free by submitting to the power of an aristocrat, king, or pope (or dictator, demagogue, etc; or partisanship and lesser evilism). Every living generation, morally and practically, has no choice but to choose for themselves, again and again. Even choosing submission to the dead is a choice of the living and so responsibility for the consequences of that choice cannot be denied. That sense of freedom-loving, almost anarcho-libertarian, independence is why many of the revolutionaries didn’t see the revolution as having ended with the defeat of the British Empire and so continued to fight against corrupt and oppressive elites, including against the plutocratic and oligarchic Federalists (e.g., Shays’ Rebellion); with the Spirit of ’76 never having gone away. Jefferson’s hope and Paine’s promise spring eternal; as evidenced by the thousands of riots, revolts, uprisings, insurrections, protest movements, and mass strikes that have happened since that time.

The colonial working class radicals and revolutionaries weren’t the only ones who bucked against new oppressions replacing the old, even ignoring rare aristocrats like Jefferson. Many others understood or suspected that leading Federalists like Alexander Hamilton were consciously modeling the new ‘constitutional’ republic on the British Empire and the British East India Company, if those like James Madison figured it out too late. These Federalists aspired not to be free but to be the next ruling elite of an even greater global superpower. Such schemes were a real threat, as we can see with what the United States has become, but it’s obviously not like no one saw it coming. Consider moderate and principled Federalists like John Dickinson, initially resistant to revolution at all and later the draft author of the Articles of Confederation, who feared such imperialistic centralized and concentrated power; as expressed in his purse and sword argument (basically, an Anti-Federalist argument; and the Articles did become a touchstone of Anti-Federalist thought). Even the Anti-Federalist Abraham Clark, supposedly the one who suggested a constitutional convention, was unhappy about the results; to such an extent that he warned, “We may awake in fetters, more grievous, than the yoke we have shaken off.” That worry turned out to be prescient, like so many other Anti-Federalist warnings and predictions.

Decades later, Jefferson would admit in private correspondence that the experiment of constitutional republicanism had been a failure because the founders failed to understand the mother principle, that of democratic self-governance. He said that the Spirit of ’76 only lived on “in the spirit of our people“ (and in the “will of the people”; not in the constitution or government), the only hope that the gains of revolution would not be entirely lost. The people, as advocated by the Anti-Federalists, understood the soul of the American Dream better than the elite, as promoted by the faux Federalists. That fundamental conflict is what our country was founded upon and it remains with us to this day. Not even the American Civil War was able to undo that moral corruption and political foundering because there was no one in leadership who was wise enough and brave enough to throw the Ring of Power into Mount Doom when they had the chance, and indeed there were numerous opportunities to course correct, to revive the anti-authoritarian and egalitarian vision of the Articles of Confederation.

None of this is merely about the past but about the ever present choice of each and every new living generation. That is why Bill Hicks’ words resonate with us today, the same reason the words of the Anti-Federalists inspired revolution back then. The authority of those words are not in who said them, be it a comedian or a ‘Founding Father’. The force of those words is in knowing they speak truth for time immemorial, as we can verify that truth in our own minds, hearts, and souls; can observe it, test it, and prove it in our lived experience; can touch it, feel it, and know it in the world around us. The sense of being a living generation of people is not an abstraction but what cannot be denied. First appearing in the Axial Age, there was the notion that all living people, as individuals or communal selves, can have direct access via experience and relationship to ultimate truth, natural law, higher reality, or divine being.

The message of Hicks and the Anti-Federalists is ancient, fundamentally spiritual and religious in nature — as Levi Preston explained, “We read only the Bible, the Catechism, Watt’s Psalms and Hymns, and the Almanack.” The point is that they read these texts for themselves, as literacy was becoming common, and so the words were brought to life by their own voices. Rising literacy rates and availability of reading material, including radical pamphlets written by Paine, was the main force behind the revolution of mind that preceded the revolution of government and society. With an emerging independent-mindedness, the once mostly indentured and wretchedly oppressed colonials were gaining confidence in themselves. Unlike in earlier eras, they could read for themselves, interpret what they read for themselves, think for themselves, and so act for themselves.

There was a change not only in mentality and identity, for it was part of an ongoing shift in an entire worldview, a transformation of experienced reality; what first was planted in the Axial Age, took root in the Middle Ages, and finally was coming to fruition in early modernity. It’s a sense of being enmeshed within and inseparably part of a living world. This is what Jesus meant by the Kingdom of God being all around us. And it’s what the 14th century peasants meant, in revolting, when they demanded equality on Earth as it is in Heaven. That is what then inspired those like the Quakers, having come into their own during the radicalism of the English Civil War, to formulate their view of living constitutionalism; the source of John Dickinson’s thinking, as he was raised Quaker. Living constitutionalism, according to the Quakers, treats a constitution as a living document, not a dead piece of paper; for it is considered a compact between a living God and a living community, a specific living generation of people. Ironically, the reactionary right tries to cast shade on living constitutionalism as anti-traditional, when they know nothing of the traditions our society are actually built upon.

No one, not in the past nor in a distant place, can speak to anyone else on behalf of God or speak for anyone else in relationship to God (i.e., the highest truth, reality, and authority). We are all responsible for our own connection to and discernment of the ultimate. This is why natural law, now often co-opted as reactionary rhetoric, could in the past be perceived as radically dangerous in challenging the entire basis and justification for human law, as politically-established and government-enforced. That is what Jesus was invoking in challenging Jewish and Roman hierarchical authority and social institutions, casually dismissing them as if irrelevant with a zealous and charismatic confidence that the truth he knew could not be denied or harmed, no matter what the ruling elite and Roman soldiers may do to his body. In the living moment, he acted on, demonstrated, and proved the truth he spoke; emphasizing he was not special in this manner by telling others that they too were gods, of the Holy Spirit. The living God is not far away in Heaven but here on Earth. The living Revelation is not in the ancient past but right now. The living Word is not in a book but in the world. The living Reality is experienced and known by those with eyes to see, ears to hear.

* * *

Let us make a small note here. We briefly mentioned the reactionary but didn’t go into further detail, as it wasn’t our present focus and we’ve talked about it plenty elsewhere. But as always, it can’t be ignored. What we did mention is how the reactionary has largely co-opted the rhetoric of natural law and so repurposed it to regressive ends. The deeper point, though, is that natural law originated in the radical, not the reactionary. A similar thing can be said of living constitutionalism. Sure, the reactionary can co-opt the social force and political results of living constitutionalism, as it can co-opt almost anything and everything. That is unfortunate, if it also shows the weakness and limitations involved. What the reactionary can never do is co-opt the moral force and motivating essence of natural law, living constitutionalism, and such. That is the beating heart that we are speaking of. The reactionary is always deadening. It is death and brings death to everything it touches, most of all rot of the human soul. It’s love versus fear, vitality versus anxiety, life versus death; but the two sides are far from being equal. One is light and the other mere shadow.

The living moral force of the living truth and reality is inherently and fundamentally radical and forever retains the radical; it is progressive and never regressive, liberating and never oppressive. All that radical literally means is a return to the root; and hence a return to underlying nature, fundamental truth, first principles. That is the point of showing the long history of this shared inheritance of profound wisdom, making clear that the roots of the radical go deep into human nature and human society. Not mentioned at all here is that the notion of a living experience of a living world is rooted even further down into the most archaic layers of our shared humanity, back to bicameral and animistic societies. No amount of reactionary co-option can undo this power. That is because it originates and is sourced within us, individually and collectively. As long as humans exist, the radical living challenge will remain potent and threatening. That is the whole point of why the reactionary feels compelled to co-opt the very thing that undermines it, in grotesquely wearing it like a superficial mask. This is the reason that a probing intellectual, spiritual, and moral discernment is of the utmost.

Yet it’s not only that the reactionary can’t undo the radical for neither can it stop it from spreading. That is precisely what has been happening these past millennia, as a new mentality has been taking hold, beginning as a spark and catching fire again and again. The Holy Spirit is a burning fire, the world aflame in light. The mistake many make is thinking that Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thought is merely about a dully simple, reductionist, and materialistic individualism. But that false understanding is because the radicalism of the past has been obscured, as has been the radicalism of Western origins and the radicalism of the American founding. For instance, take the appearance in the ancient world, as if out of nowhere, of the idea that there is a common humanity, a universal human nature, a shared world, a single cosmos. During the Axial and post-Axial ages, that radical understanding came up in the words of numerous prophets, philosophers, wisdom teachers, gurus, and salvific figures. Human identities have grown ever broader over time. The peasantry, in revolting, came to an emergent class consciousness. The colonists, in revolting, upheld the ideal of global citizenship. Such an expanding and inclusive worldview keeps on growing, with each age of tumult bringing us to new understanding and a greater identity.

So, there is what is ancient to human society, even primal in having originated within the human psyche from millions of years of hominid evolution. To experience the living fusion of self and world, human and non-human is the undifferentiated state that forms the baseline of human existence. That isn’t to say differentiation, therefore, is bad; of course not. But starting millennia ago, a divide began to form, a mere crack at first, that has since fractured and splintered into modern psychosis. The radical impulse has never been to resist or deny differentiation that has made possible modern individuality, but neither has it sought to dismiss and devalue the communal identities of the past, the very ground of the bundled mind that we stand upon. Instead, what radical thinkers have advocated is how to transform and reform past communal identities, such that collective health and sanity can be maintained. Abstract identities, however, disconnect us from the living sense of belonging to others and to the larger world. For most of human existence, belonging has meant an identity of tribe built on a deep sense of place. That concrete immediacy and sensory immersion remains essential and necessary. Yet in a globalized interconnected society our ability to perceive a shared living reality is potentially immense; the imaginative capacity to sense, feel, understand, and know that other people are equally real. It’s the task before us, the ancient ideal and aspiration that guides us.

* * *

Roger Williams and American Democracy
Founding Visions of the Past and Progress
Whose Original Intent?
Anti-Partisan Original Intent
US: Republic & Democracy (part two and three)
Democracy: Rhetoric & Reality
Pursuit of Happiness and Consent of the Governed
St. George Tucker On Secession
The Radicalism of The Articles of Confederation
From Articles of Confederation to the Constitution
The Vague and Ambiguous US Constitution
Wickedness of Civilization & the Role of Government
A Truly Free People
Nature’s God and American Radicalism
“We forgot.”
What and who is America?
Attributes of Thomas Paine
Predicting an Age of Paine
Thomas Paine and the Promise of America
About The American Crisis No. III
Feeding Strays: Hazlitt on Malthus
Inconsistency of Burkean Conservatism
American Paternalism, Honor and Manhood
Revolutionary Class War: Paine & Washington
Paine, Dickinson and What Was Lost
Betrayal of Democracy by Counterrevolution
Revolutions: American and French (part two)
Failed Revolutions All Around
The Violence of Bourgeois Revolutions and Authoritarian Capitalism
The Haunted Moral Imagination
“Europe, and not England, is the parent country of America.”
“…from every part of Europe.”
The Fight For Freedom Is the Fight To Exist: Independence and Interdependence
A Vast Experiment
The Root and Rot of the Tree of Liberty
America’s Heartland: Middle Colonies, Mid-Atlantic States and the Midwest
When the Ancient World Was Still a Living Memory
Ancient Outrage of the Commoners
The Moral Axis of the Axial Age
Axial Age Revolution of the Mind Continues
A Neverending Revolution of the Mind
Liberalism, Enlightenment & Axial Age
Leftism Points Beyond the Right and Beyond Itself

Erotic Fantasies of Moral Imagination

“[A]n unalterable fact about the body is linked to a place in the social order, and in both cases, to accept the link is to be caught in a kind of trap.”
 ~ Lewis Hyde

Conservative Sexual Fetishism

Conservatives, as you might’ve noticed, have always had a fetish about other people’s sex lives, an obsessive-compulsion that drives their reactionary minds like a dominatrix wielding a whip; and in the Burkean wardrobe of the moral imagination, conservatives really do like to kink it up. Particularly titillating to fantasize about is that of other people having perceived illicit sex, be it pedophilia or bestiality or simply garden-variety homosexuality (i.e., anything religiously proscribed, consensual or not, that will get you a one-way ticket to Hell). There is the irresistible allure of the taboo, and large swaths of human experience are taboo in conservative ideology. That is a lot of material to work with in scripting and staging morality porn on the inner stage of the conservative soul. So, what could otherwise be a normal, healthy, and pro-social expression of sexual freedom, in being denied, becomes distorted and demented. This perverted mentality is motivated by the same vexatious urge behind the preoccupation over other people not having sex as well, the barely submerged eroticism bursting forth like the plump bosom underneath a tightly-bound bodice on the cover of a romance novel. Even in negation, suppressed sexual energy overwhelms like being told to not think about pink elephants.

The unnatural concern in having one’s focus neurotically drawn toward others not having sex is evidenced by the popular Christian genre of virginity porn (e.g., the Twilight novels written by a conservative Mormon); the sexualized obsession with innocence that, to consider another category of culture war fantasy, also underlies right-wing conspiracy theories of pedophilia, innocence harmed and defiled. Or think about the weird phenomenon of purity rings, where a young woman’s public identity of moral purity and social worth is constructed according to the imagined non-act of avoiding vaginal penetration, whatever sexual acts she actually does or does not do secretly in her private life; it then being a question of how far can she go (kissing? groping? heavy petting? fellatio?) while maintaining this prized ‘virgin’ status that, according to belief, is ultimately determined by an omniscient, intrusive, and voyeuristic father-god who, like a peeping tom, watches his human children’s every sexual act or non-act, as the case may be, and judges it like giving an ice skating score (for humor: Garfunkel and Oates, The Loophole). Praise be! Now there is a fascinating fetish. The intensity of thwarted desire, like floodwater building behind a dam, combined with a sadomasochistic religiosity; that could become immensely intoxicating.

It’s amusing that Edmund Burke made famous the conservative-style moral imagination in his lurid portrayal of a wild mob, seemingly with lecherous and lascivious intentions, having violently ripped away the French queen’s delicate underclothing; presumably revealing her tender flesh and womanly parts to the prying eyes that sullied her purity, innocence, and nobility — basically, it was a rape fantasy and it obviously got Burke all worked up and excited. It was an invented scene of repressed sexual frenzy being messily released like a young boy’s ejaculate, not an accurate historical account of sociopolitical events during the French Revolution; and it is to be suspected that the pent up libido, one of the few real and accurate details, was based on Burke’s personal experience. That writing has set the tone for the reactionary mind ever since, and it helped liberals like Thomas Paine to make clear what was so dangerous and perverse about such untethered frothing. In any case, it was Burke who named this kind of ideologically-motivated and collectively-expressed fantasizing as ‘moral imagination’ and, in demonstrating it’s compelling persuasiveness for the reactionary mind, the practice of it has stuck as the main weapon of culture war and moral panic ever since.

Conservative Projections of Shame

Such inventive eroticism, equal parts lustful and prurient, is symbolic of all things illicit, far beyond being limited to any possible variety of sex act (described or implied, denied or suppressed); as representing the bestial nature of the body, an expression of Adam’s Original Sin, the eternal field of battle between God and Satan, good and evil. It doesn’t matter what other people are actually doing or actually want to do, nor necessarily about the fantasist’s behavior either. This is entirely about the conservative’s carnal nightmares that they are trapped in, as they can’t escape their own mind; and, indeed, they apparently get off on it, which surely further adds to an endless cycle of masochistic shame that draws them ever back into the shadow of their own unresolved issues. It certainly makes for a time-consuming hobby, if one is worried about getting bored; and the reactionary mind, in particular, despises boredom. That is the necessity of melodramatic political theatre and political spectacle — it is entertainment, pure and simple; as much or more to entertain the one telling it, in how the purpose of evangelizing is mostly to further entrench the conviction of the evangelical, not about converting unbelievers and saving souls.

All of that might be fine, if conservatives were able to keep such dark fantasies and fetishes as a private psychosis and delirium, and as long as no illegal acts were committed (each to their own, live and let live; as a liberal would say), but no such luck. The freedom of personal imagination and the responsibility of personal conscience, as idealized and practiced in a secular liberal democracy, has never been the keystone of conservative moral order inseparable from conservative social order. The problem is that, as part of their lust for power, they are always trying to use their own perverse imaginings as rationalizing fodder for culture war in order to supposedly stop other people from doing what conservatives do in their own minds, whether or not acted out in their own private lives. They can’t stand their sense of self-disgust and so feel compelled, if in a state of horror, to set it loose on the public stage. It’s a cry for help, but the rest of us aren’t sure how to help them. Should we have a national intervention for the sake of public health?

Conservatives are forever trying to pass, reinforce, and defend laws against what they deem immoral behavior, sexual and otherwise, not because of what non-conservatives might do but because conservatives fear, maybe for good reason, that they can’t control their own behavior. They think they know what others would do because they know what they would do, if they had the opportunity, for they are fantasizing about it all the time. So, they seek to apply a distorted Golden Rule: Rather than do unto others as you would want others do unto you, it’s stop others from doing what you believe is wrong as you would want others to stop you from doing as bad or worse. That is how the reactionary mind assumes social order must be maintained, by way of authoritarian systems of social control, since people are treated as inherently bad and untrustworthy. Everyone, after all, is a born sinner; an old theological dogma that persists even into the secular thought of many non-religious individuals.

Conservative Social Control Replaces Self-Control

In the dark corners of the reactionary mind, the terror and torment is that these shameful fantasies, repeating over and over as hidden sins and repressed lust, will escape out into the real world and make for interpersonal messiness; but, as Jesus warned, even a sin of thought is still a sin; no doubt a condemnation that plagues the worried soul of many a conservative. It must be frightening to have such a libidinously demented fantasy life that always feels out of control, like a demonic force ever tempting one to horrific wrongdoing and moral depravity. We might not want to be too harsh considering that conservatives, in respect to themselves, might be correct about the need for external power and hierarchical authority of behavioral control. They might really become dangerous, if they ever stopped collectively suppressing their anti-social tendencies and harmful desires. Maybe they need all the assistance they can get.

No doubt, the persistent sexualizing that is played out on the inner stage of the conservative mind isn’t merely that of innocent and impotent passing thoughts, as the reactionary mind is addicted to what it denies, pulled toward what it pushes away. This oppressive repression acts as a fuel to the fire of their anxiety-driven righteous anger of self-loathing, what makes them so worked up in a way that liberals have a hard time understanding. Such sexual repression, as endless examples show, really does increase sexual compulsion and/or malbehavior. Think of how many gay-hating preachers later were found out to have been covertly following an active gay life, sometimes using church funds to do so. Or think of all those priests who, in having taken vows of bachelorhood and abstinence, ended up taking advantage of the children under their care. Conservatives are warning about the darkness they know intimately in their own hearts. It’s an indirect admission of an uncomfortable secret and an unpardonable guilt that they can’t give voice to in a more straightforward manner, for the public humiliation would destroy them.

So, they express these uncontrollable urges as dark temptations and harmful inclinations projected onto those other supposedly bad and dangerous people: leftists, liberals, and atheists, or else minorities and the poor, strangers and foreigners, those perceived as deviant or different, basically any target that can be conveniently othered and scapegoated (literally, living beings to be sacrificed after symbolically placing the community’s sins upon them). One such immorality play, particularly powerful, in the conservative imaginary is bestiality, and there isn’t much else like it. As with the exaggerated emphasis on and disturbing obsession with pedophilia, the conservative holds bestiality aloft as a caricatured sexual extremism that stands in for nearly every sexual act other than missionary style between a religiously married man and woman; although, within a conservative patriarchy, there is greater forgiveness toward a heterosexual male’s non-marital or extramarital sexual activities (men have needs, so goes the argument), and there is some wiggle room about age of consent for many conservative societies.

Conservative Symbolism and Imagination

Intriguingly, within a worldview of debilitating anxiety over impurity and perceived threats, the moral imagination of the reactionary mind has often used animals to make its points about the needs and claims of cognitive certainty, shared identity, group boundaries, social order, class/caste hierarchy, and moral worth: peasants and slaves as beasts of burden, the indigenous and backwoods whites as wild creatures, Africans as monkeys, Irish as white gorillas, Jews as a sub-species, immigrants as diseased rats, homeless as stray cats, and on and on; such bizarre metaphorical stereotypes being endless. As another example, ethnic Catholics, in the WASP imagination, were historically likened to ‘animals’ breeding out of control; in justifying xenophobic demands of anti-immigration, oppression, segregation, and eugenics. Ironically, this anti-ethnic and anti-Catholic prejudice was the reason that most American Protestants (in both main parties), during most of the 20th century, supported family planning clinics, birth control, and abortions. Civilized humans, in their superior self-restraint, supposedly don’t give into the wild lust of wanton bestial copulation and procreation.

This brings us to the proper role of the proper kind of sex, and hence what is improper. Within this ideological worldview, if all other humans unlike oneself (non-WASPs, non-Americans, non-whites, etc) are mere animals or are animal-like, then someone of the right group having sex with someone of the wrong group is akin to committing bestiality, incurring moral impurity for all involved and requiring punishment or exclusion to reinstate the moral order, to make the world right again. The perception of the natural world, be it sincere belief or cynical rhetoric, has long been implemented as a metaphorical model for the human world; most powerfully symbolized by the physical body. So, bestiality is never really about bestiality, in all its glory of ideological resonance; and, more broadly, sexuality is never merely about sexuality; similar to why conservatives preaching on abortion aren’t actually talking about the claim of killing fetuses and aren’t actually expressing concern for the sanctity of human life.

Filtered through symbolic conflation, every culture war issue means something else, all rhetoric of moral panic points elsewhere. It’s just distraction of ideological sleight-of-hand. This might be why bestiality, something that doesn’t actually come up in normal life all that often, plays such an outsized role on the American right in their social commentary, culture war, religious moralizing, and political narratives. It gets awkwardly mentioned way too often that it starts to make the rest of us feel a bit uncomfortable. What is up with this strange obsession? Outwardly stated, the eternal warning of social conservatives is that, if as a society we allow gay sex or whatever, it will inevitably lead to a libertine free-for-all where sexual deviants will roam the land anally-raping cows and molesting children; or something like that. In that moral worldview, there are only two possibilities, total repression or mass orgy; with the wrong choice leading to bad consequences — first anarchy and chaos will burst forth upon the streets and into the schools, preying upon the innocent, and then social breakdown and societal collapse will follow in its wake.

Conservative Storytelling and Fearmongering

Do many conservatives really believe any of this? Probably not. That is besides the point. It’s make-believe and useful-fiction, if still powerful, both powerful as social control and powerful as political theatre. It’s not uncommon for people to act according to what they, deep down, know isn’t true; for suspension of disbelief is required to some degree in any fictional narrative or fictional enterprise. And humans have a talent for knowing and not knowing something at the same time. It’s all about telling a ‘good’ story. We liberals get confused because we have a tendency to take conservatives at face value, since they are always proclaiming their own literalism. Of course, they could never admit that narrative matters more to them than truth because, then, the spell of the narrative would be broken. The story told is more comforting than would be reality disclosed because, no matter how fearful and discomforting that story, the conservative doesn’t want to become aware of what they really fear, what is in their own heart and mind. This is why their moralistic storytelling is often confused and doesn’t quite add up, when rationally analyzed. The purpose is not to make sense but to make nonsense, to disconnect one from direct and visceral sensory experience of reality. Such a way of thinking is shown with an amusing example, going back at least to the 1990s but probably earlier.

An old conservative argument is that the Western Roman Empire fell, not because the Christians turned it into a self-destructive theocracy, but because the Roman population suddenly started having too much butt sex. Strangely, Romans were supposedly less gay when they were pagan worshippers and only turned to a widespread fondness for men-on-men action once Christianized in the last centuries of Roman reign. It’s not clear how that puts Christianity in a positive light, but for whatever reason a significant number on the religious right find it a compelling argument for why they should once again be allowed to return to their nostalgic dreams of theocratic longing, to Make Rome Great Again! But was the Empire ever great in the first place? In any case, there is no decline of the Empire for a simple reason: The Empire never ended. That is how a wise philosopher once put it, in talking about the authoritarian right-wing of his own time. It has never ended because the power-mongers will never let it end, in reality or imagination. Yet, if you listened to them, you’d think the Empire is in a constant state of threat; that at any moment the radical left and/or the dirty masses will rise up to finally defeat and destroy the Forces of Order for all time, bringing on an Age of Darkness and Despair, the End Times foretold in Holy Scripture.

But the reality is the Empire can never end as long as its foundations remain protected within the insurmountable walls of the reactionary mind. God and His Kingdom, like the supernatural beings of fairyland, are always receding as the Age of Miracles and Magic disappears into the hazy past; while the reactionary mind longs for the return of the archaic voices of authorization, in their comforting certainty. In the reactionary mind, the Queen is forever being violated and ravished, and yet the Empire somehow remains forever in place. The Queen comes out every day, like a Disneyland worker putting on her costume and acting out her role, to the delight of her audience. The other ghosts of the haunted moral imagination, in various guises, likewise get trotted out to keep the whole charade going. It is sort of amusing, when one takes it as a strange and deranged form of entertainment. Along with watching actual porn on the internet, the conservative creates ideological porn to be viewed on an inner screen. By the way, according to internet data, porn viewing rates are highest in the Bible Belt, specifically with the highest rates of gay porn. When religious conservatives preach about the evils of sexuality, the sins of the flesh, they have many porn viewing hours under their belts to assist their mentally visualizing in great detail what they claim to hate so much. Let’s just say they Biblically know what they’re talking about. The moral imagination of the reactionary mind is so vivid for a reason.

Conservative Fantasizing About Bestiality

All of this craziness was brought back to our attention because of a particular case of right-wing moral panic, involving the right-wing’s beloved bestiality fetish. The self-identified conservative Ryan Farmer, just some random dude online who salivates over people having sex with animals, earlier this year wrote critically about Maryland’s House Bill 209 that is a repeal of Section 3-322 of Maryland’s criminal code, what has been called the ‘perverted practice’ statute. That statute “is built on a foundation of animus against homosexuals, but goes substantially farther, likening oral sex—which surveys demonstrate is practiced by upwards of 80% of adults—to bestiality” (The Honorable Luke Clippinger, HB0209 2022-01-21 Testimony to House Judiciary Committee). It was already technically unconstitutional and effectively unenforceable because of an earlier federal court decision, but police officers were still charging gay men with violating it (Bradley S. Clark, Why does Maryland law still prohibit sexual contact between same-sex couples?). The morally outdated law was simply being used to harass individuals, as motivated by the immoral bigotry of police officers who were using it as a cudgel of prejudice.

That was the real issue. Socially acceptable and consensual acts of sexual freedom, even something as simple as fellatio, were being conflated with bestiality; and homosexuality was being implicated as well. To reinforce this evil caricature of otherwise normal and healthy sexual behavior, Farmer stated that, “Effectively, this is legalization of bestiality, as these Delegates have no clear interest in re-enacting the criminality of performing sex acts with an animal” (2022 HOUSE BILL 209: MARYLAND DEMOCRATS SEEK TO LEGALIZE ACTS OF BESTIALITY). That is, as always, total bull shit. Being “a proud Marylander,” he had to have known that House Bill 641, signed into law a few years ago, had already made bestiality illegal separate from all the rest (Dawn White, Gov. Hogan Signs Bill Making Bestiality A Felony). So, why is he lying? Well, to the reactionary mind, there never needs to be a reason to deceive and manipulate, as long as it gins up fear and anxiety; that is all the justification that is required, mere moral panic for the sake of moral panic. It’s what the conservative craves, the state of agitation that feels normal to the permanently agitated psyche.

As a side note, one might strongly suspect that, as with gay porn, bestiality rates are probably higher in the Bible Belt and in other conservative areas, considering all of those lonely conservatives out in rural areas (what happens in the barn stays in the barn), and who knows what is going on beneath the thin veneer of normality out in the conservative suburbs (always a favorite setting for horror stories); but unfortunately, it’s doubtful there is good data on such things. In all seriousness, that is an interesting thought. Maybe conservatives are rightfully concerned about bestiality because they know or suspect that it’s common in their own conservative communities. It’s a similar logic that led Edmund Burke, in being familiar with the English precedent of regicide, to focus on the beheading of the French king. His real concern, unstated because it was too threatening, was nearer to home. Rather than French events having influenced English society, it was actually the Anglo-American recent past of English Civil War and American Revolution that had inspired the French revolutionaries. That is precisely what made it so terrifying. Someone like the Englishman Thomas Paine, radical and revolutionary, was a homegrown product of traditional English culture; a strain of moral imagination that was best left unacknowledged.

Conservative Moralistic Authoritarianism

It does make one wonder. Of all things, real and imagined, why is bestiality in particular so horrifying? It’s not as if conservatives are generally and strongly motivated by concern for animal wellbeing, such as in terms of the fundamentalist belief that God created animals solely for the purpose of being used by humans. Many and maybe most conservatives apparently are fine with what those on the left would often consider cruelty and harm toward other species, involving laboratory testing, puppy mills, factory farms, slaughterhouses, hunting, meat-eating, environmental damage, ecosystem destruction, mass extinction, etc; not that all of these issues fall along simplistic and dualistic ideological lines. Here is the point. If you were asked if you’d prefer that someone killed and ate you or had sex with you, which would seem the better option and which the worst? Assuming an animal had consciousness and intelligence, how do you think they’d answer that question? The sense of moral depravity and deviancy, in the conservative mind, has nothing to do with the animal’s rights and protections, the animal’s life and happiness; and has nothing to do with reduction of suffering, according to the least harm principle; nor is it about defense of consent, considering the most conservative (and most religious) countries and U.S. states have the lowest ages of consent for sex. What is perceived as wrong by conservatives is the perceived moral harm to the social order, the impurity that would infect society. So, the concern is not that of what a human does to an animal but what the taint of the animal does to the human.

The average individual on the political left would more likely be consistent in equally opposing both bestiality and carnivory, on principle, as neither could be deemed consensual acts and as both potentially betray the least harm principle; although application of principle can be complicated and nuanced, something a liberal would also be more likely to openly admit and intellectually justify (e.g., there are environmental and ethical leftists and liberals who eat meat, albeit they typically have environmental and ethical arguments for their dietary choice). At the other ideological extreme, more than a few right-wing libertarians would quite possibly perceive neither bestiality nor carnivory as problematic, at least not necessarily in terms of libertarian principle (if for other reasons), in that their concern is merely or primarily about human liberty; and not necessarily the ethics of animal rights and animal protection; but of course, the response of left-wing libertarians would be a different question with a different spin on ‘liberty’, probably more in line with the liberal. So, whether liberal or libertarian, there would be a consistent principle, albeit a different preference and application of principle, but the reactionary mind of the conservative has no similar consistent principle, other than defense of hierarchy for the sake of their own power and authority; and hence the reason social science research finds that hypocrisy is common among right-wing authoritarians, which research in turn links to social conservatism.

Conservative morality, though ideologically dogmatic, is not fundamentally and primarily about anything specific in a real world sense but whatever can get used as a rhetorical red herring while the actual purpose remains obscured, often hidden in plain sight. It’s not about sexuality, as it’s not about abortion, drugs, etc. And it’s not about the treatment or mistreatment of animals, children, or whatever else. Nor is it about rights and liberty. What it is about is denying the agency of the subordinate class, that is to say to keep the oppressed in their place; a rigidifying and stratifying of the social order by way of shutting down of the public mind and moral imagination, hence fear and anxiety as a potent psychosocial force. Social conservatism is and always has been a central component of authoritarianism, a defining feature in fact; and the viscerality of the body and bodily experience (sex, abortion, menstruation, motherhood, sexually-transmitted diseases, etc) is one of the most powerful tools through which to narratize, a point made by Lewis Hyde about metonymy, but also emphasized in Michel Foucault’s biopolitics. It is upon and through the body, along with physicality in general, that ideological worldviews and identities are interpellated, enacted, and enforced; although it’s through a return to direct sensory experience of embodiment that such an ideological trap can be undone, a reconnecting to what was disconnected.

Look to any authoritarian regime, organization, or group and you will always find an enforced submission to constrained and exclusionary sexual mores, identities, and roles; and punishment of oppression, violence, or banishment to anyone who doesn’t comply to group identity and groupthink (e.g., libertines), anyone who challenges the ideological system (e.g., feminists), anyone who otherwise doesn’t fit in (e.g., transgender), and anyone who is required as scapegoat (e.g., homosexuals); where the perceived consequence of punishment is taken as proving the merit and necessity of the moralistic system. The right-wing social order must be maintained at all costs, simply because social order is valued on its own terms; not justified by how it serves the people, for everyone must justify themselves in serving it because, if failing that, their continued societal membership in good standing might not be justified at all. A totalitarian order is considered a necessity because, in a dualistic worldview, without it nothing stands between civilization and the forces of anarchy, chaos, and destruction. But to the liberal-minded, such authoritarian order itself is the madness. That is the gut-instinct in pushing back so hard against sexualized culture war. Freedom, in all ways, is worth fighting for.

* * *

Trickster Makes the World
by Lewis Hyde
pp. 169-170

[A]n unalterable fact about the body is linked to a place in the social order, and in both cases, to accept the link is to be caught in a kind of trap.

Before anyone can be snared in this trap, an equation must be made between the body and the world (my skin color is my place as a Hispanic; menstruation is my place as a woman). This substituting of one thing for another is called metonymy in rhetoric, one of the many figures of thought, a trope or verbal turn. The construction of the trap of shame begins with this metonymic trick, a kind of bait and switch in which one’s changeable social place is figured in terms of an unchangeable part of the body. Then by various means the trick is made to blend invisibly into the landscape. To begin with, there are always larger stories going on— about women or race or a snake in a garden. The enchantment of those regularly repeated fables, along with the rules of silence at their edges, and the assertion that they are intuitively true— all these things secure the borders of the narrative and make it difficult to see the contingency of its figures of thought. Once the verbal tricks are invisible, the artifice of the social order becomes invisible as well, and begins to seem natural. As menstruation and skin color and the genitals are natural facts, so the social and psychological orders become natural facts.

In short, to make the trap of shame we inscribe the body as a sign of wider worlds, then erase the artifice of that signification so that the content of shame becomes simply the way things are, as any fool can see.

If this is how the trap is made, then escaping it must involve reversing at least some of these elements. In what might be called the “heavy-bodied” escape, one senses that there’s something to be changed but ends up trying to change the body itself, mutilating it, or even committing suicide…

The Political Ratchet is a Political Racket

In the United States: Antifa, as a label, refers to no existing organization. And anti-fascism, as an ideology, is linked to no known acts of terrorism. These have become primary targets of bipartisan state oppression, as rationalization to suppress populist protest movements and to eliminate leftist critics of authoritarianism, social dominance, and psychopathy. This is how democratic self-governance is prevented, how a banana republic is maintained. This is how lesser evil voting ratchets up greater evil politics.

“On September 9, the news came out that a whistleblower within the Department of Homeland Security had filed a complaint about the department’s Trump-appointed leadership instructing him to downplay the threat represented by white supremacists and play up the dangers posed by anarchists and anti-fascists. Yet it has largely escaped notice how Joe Biden and other Democrats have embraced Donald Trump’s talking points about anarchists and anti-fascists. It is convenient for centrist Democrats that they can pose as Trump’s moderate critics while appropriating his talking points about protesters, letting him do the dirty work of establishing the narratives that justify state repression.”

The insidious workings of the political ratchet
from CrimethInc.

Reactionaries Seeking Reaction

The reactionary mind, to a large degree, is simply another way of speaking of conservatism; at least in Anglo-American society. That is separate from speaking of this being a reactionary age. Anyone can be pulled into reaction, but not everyone gets stuck in reaction. It’s the latter that is what it means to be a reactionary as an identity, rather than a passing state.

Yet we can narrow it down further. The most reactionary of reactionaries help us to understand what exactly is the modus operandi of the reactionary mind. As the name suggests, a reactionary is one who easily reacts and so is constantly in a reactive pose. This coincides, of course, with regressive politics; but it’s important to remember that reactionaries aren’t ideologically consistent.

It all depends on what they are reacting to. They don’t define themselves but are defined by their reaction. They are the shadow of liberalism, progressivism, and leftism; not to mention the denial and suppression of all that is traditional. There is no ultimate substance to the reactionary mind, much less a principled position. Like chameleons, they change with conditions.

Even that doesn’t fully get at what is going on. It’s not only that they react to anything and everything. That reaction is both their mindset and their entire worldview. They only understand reaction and so they also want to elicit reaction in others. They try to instigate reaction in general, to create a total shit-fest of reaction, because that pulls others into reaction where the reactionaries have the advantage.

Conservatives, on average, are more likely to be misinformed and spread misinformation; as compared to liberals. Yet it is not found evenly across all conservatives. There is a specific sub-type of conservative with a need for chaos. This is the reactionary extreme that is the most likely, in particular, to share fake news; along with a motivation to spread hostile political rumors and support negative behaviors toward politicians. They know it’s fake. That is the whole point. It is intentional disinformation, but not necessarily as propaganda.

The causal distinction appears to be conscientiousness. Those sharing fake news tend to be low in conscientiousness, a direct correlate to the need for chaos. But high conscientious conservatives are no more prone to this behavior than liberals. Interestingly, liberals in general are lower in conscientiousness and yet their liberal-mindedness seems to offer a protection against this reactionary behavior. Liberals, whether low or high conscientiousness, were not more likely to share fake news.

So, the defining feature of the reactionary mind is both their own reaction and the seeking of reaction in others. This goes to the old saying about wrestling with a pig. Both of you will get muddy, but only the pig will be happy. In the end, reactionaries are like the disobedient little boy who has come to believe that any attention is good attention. Maybe they didn’t get enough love as children.

* * *

All that said, these chaos-loving conservatives are a bit perplexing, in making sense what is the reactionary mind. Conservatives, on average, have higher measures of conscientiousness. So, what does it mean for a conservative to be low conscientiousness? Conscientiousness is what makes conservatives love social order, what makes them good, submissive, and obedient workers, religious adherents, Nazis, etc. This relates to the conservative-minded need for closure, which in turn makes one “prone to embrace competitive conflict schemas” (Margarita Krochik & John T. Jost, Ideological Conflict and Polarization: A Social Psychological Perspective).

High conscientiousness not only predicts conservatism but also authoritarianism (Eric W. Dolan, Personality traits predict authoritarian tendencies, study finds). Both are also linked to extraversion and agreeableness, with the one trait they diverge on is neuroticism. In some ways, an authoritarianism is just the extreme expression of a social conservatism under stress; and one might expect that neuroticism rates increase with conservatives when under stress. For an example of stress, pathogen exposure and parasite load are correlated to both authoritarianism and social conservatism, probably mediated by the disgust response.

If it’s true that stress might increase neuroticism, it might also suppress conscientiousness and so unleash a need for chaos; or what from a liberal perspective seems like chaos. Social conservatives are people who are vulnerable to stress and so easily overwhelmed by it. But under less stressful conditions, they are able to manage stress and actually have a great talent for doing so. Their need for order, control, and predictability serves this purpose; up to the point it stops working. Potential authoritarianism as personality can quickly become manifest authoritarianism as behavior, as political action, power, and oppression.

Under chronic stress, everyone can have greater psychological reaction, social dysfunction, aggression, divisiveness, fantasy-proneness, magical thinking, odd beliefs, paranoia, xenophobia, stereotypical-mindedness, and mentally illness. The strongest form of this that can really mess up a society is high inequality that induces collective madness (Keith Payne, The Broken Ladder). But simpler factors can have an affect, even if only temporarily. Get liberals somewhat inebriated and, with their neurocognitive functioning compromised, they’ll fall back on speaking in the kinds of stereotypical thinking that is more common among conservatives.

The need for chaos is linked to social dominance orientation (SDO) and dark personality (psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism, sadism). And all of these certainly increase with severe and chronic stress, particularly high inequality. That is what we’ve been seeing in recent years, although the conditions have been worsening for decades. It’s been gasoline and a match throw on dry grass during a drought.

There also would be a strong resonance between the need for chaos and conspiracy-mindedness. This isn’t only a general mistrust and suspiciousness (Beth Ellwood, People with a higher conspiracy mentality have a general tendency to judge others as untrustworthy; Marius Frenken & Roland Imhoff, Don’t trust anybody: Conspiracy mentality and the detection of facial trustworthiness cues) but also a tendency to act conspiratorially (Karen M. Douglas & Robbie M. Sutton, Does it take one to know one? Endorsement of conspiracy theories is influenced by personal willingness to conspire). Those who are untrustworthy project onto others, in assuming everyone is like themselves.

And all of that has everything to do with dark personality and SDO (Evita March & Jordan Springer, Belief in conspiracy theories: The predictive role of schizotypy, Machiavellianism, and primary psychopathy; Beth Ellwood, Machiavellian and psychopathic personality traits linked to belief in conspiracy theories). It is all mixed up. These are all the various derangements of the mind that crop up in a deranged society.

Like those spreading fake news having lower conscientiousness, those spreading conspiracy theories tend to be lower in agreeableness (Tim Christie, Study: Disagreeable people more prone to conspiracy theories). It’s the socially conservative mind switching to its reactionary dark mode, as defensive posture against perceived extreme uncertainty and potential threat. The willingness to share fake news might be caused by a total breakdown of reality discernment, specifically trust in authorities to discern reality. That makes perceived reality a free-for-all where every claim is equally plausible and it simply becomes a matter of confirmation bias.

What is fascinating is that the need for chaos is a corollary to the need for order. To the conservative mind, the only two options are order or chaos. It’s a black-and-white mentality. What conservatives fear more than anything is the breakdown of social order as, to their mind, it’s a breakdown of moral order. It’s an existential crisis of their very sense of reality, their sense of meaning. When desperate enough, they will do anything to reaffirm meaning, even if it’s invoking chaos. It’s related to the conservative proneness to fantasizing about violence, particularly redemptive violence; from overthrowing the government to hoping for the End Times (Violent Fantasy of Reactionary Intellectuals).

Some have theorized that totalitarianism, what generally means authoritarianism, is caused by social isolation, loneliness, and anomie. These are common features of modern society with mass urbanization and industrialization, as exacerbated by high inequality and as results in social breakdown. Loneliness, by the way, is a predictor of the need for chaos (Camara Burleson, Need for Chaos and Predicting Radical Behavior in a Political Setting). Such conditions increase social conservatism in the population, even on the ‘left’, and this pushes social conservatism to extremes. Liberal-mindedness simply can’t function well when the conditions of health disappear.

* * *

Don’t Cry for QAnon
by Daniel Cubias

Chaos Theory
by Amanada Darrach

The “Need for Chaos” and Motivations to Share Hostile Political Rumors
by Michael Bang Petersen, Mathias Osmundsen, & Kevin Arceneaux

Personality Type, as well as Politics, Predicts Who Shares Fake News
by Asher Lawson & Hemant Kakkar

Study finds conservatives with a need for chaos are more likely to share fake news
by Eric W. Dolan

Of Pandemics, Politics, and Personality: The Role of Conscientiousness and Political Ideology in Sharing of Fake News
by M. Asher Lawson & Hemant Kakkar

Low Conscientiousness Conservatives and the Desire for Chaos We further contend that behavior of low conscientiousness conservatives is motivated not only by vehemently promoting the interests of their group, but also by denigrating other rival groups. Such a staunch inclination to elevate one’s group at the expense of other political outgroups is an act of negative partisanship — a reality that has become increasingly common due to the exponential rise of intense political polarization since the start of the 21st Century (Abramowitz & Webster, 2016; Van den Bos et al., 2007; Westwood et al., 2018). As
conservatives generally score higher on social dominance orientation – a set of beliefs that acknowledges and supports hierarchical differences in society (Kugler et al., 2014) – they may be more likely to criticize other groups to defend their own (Jost et al., 2003). Conservatives in comparison to liberals are also more vigilant in perceiving social threats to their group (van Leeuwen & Park, 2009), which can further increase their tendency to actively denounce other groups and outgroup members. This desire to promote the status of one’s group at the expense of other groups and outgroup members can lead to a generally hostile mindset, labelled a “need for chaos” (Arceneaux et al., 2021). The need for chaos is described as a drive to disrupt and destroy the existing order or established institutions in an attempt to secure the superiority of one’s own group over others. Such a mindset is especially salient when dominance-oriented individuals feel they are being marginalized and rejected by the broader cultural environment (Arceneaux et al., 2021; Krizan & Johar, 2015; Twenge & Campbell, 2003).

Given the lack of orderliness, diligence, and self-control associated with low conscientiousness individuals, coupled with the high social dominance orientation and group loyalty among conservatives, we contend that low conscientiousness conservatives will be more likely to entertain beliefs and engage in behaviors that seek to cause chaos, as a means to defend their group. Indeed, existing research has shown that people are more willing to believe and share outlandish conspiracy theories when it helps them to achieve a positive image of their group, its dominance, and its existence (Douglas et al., 2019; Roberts et al., 2009). Likewise, the desire to cause chaos also leads to less support for outgroups such as immigrants, and a greater desire to increase one’s social status and alter the current power structure, especially when political polarization is rampant (Arceneaux et al., 2021; Van Bavel & Pereira, 2018). Consequently, we predict that the interaction effect of conservative political ideology and conscientiousness on sharing of fake news will be mediated by this desire for chaos.

Furthermore, recent research has highlighted that the dissemination of fake news is largely driven by people’s inattention to accuracy. Once accuracy beliefs are primed either implicitly or explicitly, individuals are relatively more judicious when it comes to the sharing of fake news (Pennycook, McPhetres, Zhang, & Rand, 2020; Pennycook et al., 2021). However, our proposed effect, where low conscientiousness conservatives share fake news due to an elevated desire for chaos, is indicative of a motivated process. Specifically, when low conscientiousness conservatives perceive fake news as a means of furthering their social goals (Douglas et al., 2017) and sowing seeds of destruction (Arceneaux et al., 2021), the accuracy of news stories should play a smaller role in determining their intentions to share such stories. In other words, people who pursue general destruction to defend their ingroup should indicate higher subjective assessments of the accuracy of fake news, as long as it serves the agenda of their group, which in turn will predict the sharing of such news. Thus, when motivated to believe false information as accurate, priming individuals with accuracy beliefs might not be enough to deter the spread of misinformation. Rather, such motivated individuals will perceive false news as subjectively more accurate and hence share falsehoods at a higher rate regardless of accuracy
primes.

The Un-Silent Generation

It’s funny that one of the oldest living, yet still quite relevant, generations is called the Silents (1928-1945). That is such an amazing misnomer when one looks at the individuals who have defined that generation. Consider the single greatest religious right mastermind in recent American politics, Paul Weyrich, who was the leading figure behind the culture wars, Moral Majority foundation, and the right-wing Shadow Network. He may not have been out in the public limelight, but he was never silent and his voice carried in the halls of power. Still other Silents like the plutocrats Rupert Murdoch and Charles Koch continue to have an outsized influence over the American mind and society, as never before seen.

Yes, the Silents have often been overshadowed by the media and political narratives spun around the generations immediately preceding and following them, the Greatest Generation (or G.I. Generation) and the Boomer Generation. It’s true that the main conflict they fought in, the Korean War, never received much attention; in the way did World War II and the Vietnam War, although many Silents were among the military and political leadership during the latter. Yet even as they haven’t had one of their own elected president until Joe Biden, he is our current president and the oldest ever to assume office. Likewise, although they lost majority in Congress some years back, Silents nonetheless maintain key positions of power not only with the presidency but also with several major political elites like John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, Anthony Fauci, and Bernie Sanders; and that is only to list the Democrats (The Dying Donkey). Both parties are held captive by the elderly.

Some Silents like Weyrich operated more in the background, but plenty were out in the open and hard to ignore, for good or ill. Far from being silent or silenced, they possibly have been the loudest generation, not to mention maybe the most powerful and influential (as many are still among the ruling elite). Also, despite being portrayed as moderate and modest, their generational cohort includes plenty who were far left radicals and far right extremists, along with some who were downright demented and dangerous. More importantly, they are the single longest ruling generation in American history, a title that is often wrongly given to Boomers. The Silents’ collective voice is still with us and regularly heard in the corporate media and coming out of Washington, D.C. That’s impressive for a demographic consisting mostly of people in their 80s and 90s.

It goes far beyond political and corporate control. Don’t forget that much of the music that defined the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s was produced not by Boomers but by Silents. They comprise some of the greatest Rock ‘n Roll legends of all time, people who back in the day disturbed their elder’s peace of mind in being a part of the soundtrack of youthful rebellion and revolt, not to mention Elvis Presley’s provocatively gyrating hips that shocked a nation — people were easily shocked in the good ol’ days. It’s similar to how many of the cultural and activist leaders of of that era, from Martin Luther King Jr. to Timothy Leary, were also of that not so silent generation. The Sixties that gets blamed on Boomers would not have happened without the so-called Silents’ widespread influence and inspiration. Many of them were radical voices of protest, critique, and demand during one of the most tumultuous periods in American history. That isn’t even to discuss the great writers and artists that came out of that generation, some of them with wild and crazy imaginations or else intellectual and psychological insight, social critique and commentary; not to mention diverse public intellectuals.

There is a diversity of Silents who were famous or infamous icons, terrorists, activists, leaders, politicians, public intellectuals, influencers, writers, musicians, artists, and stars. Besides those already mentioned, here is a small selection:

• Che Guevara (if not American), Jim Jones, Charles Manson, Ted Kaczynski, and Sirhan Sirhan;
• Bernie Madoff, Jack Welch, Sheldon Adelson, Colin Powell, Ross Perot, Norman Schwarzkopf, Oliver North, Bob Woodward, Jim Bakker, Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich, Mitch McConnell, and John McCain;
• Warren Buffett, George Soros, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Walter Mondale, Madeleine Albright, Ted Kennedy, Harry Reid, Harvey Milk, Ralph Nader, and Noam Chomsky;
• Jack Kevorkian, Larry Flynt, Gloria Steinem, Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Ken Kesey, Tom Wolfe, Flannery O’Connor, J. G. Ballard, Margaret Atwood, Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, Jim Henson, Fred Rogers, Muhammad Ali, Louis Farrakhan, and Wavy Gravy;
• Jane Goodall, Andy Warhol, Barbara Streissand, Jane Fonda, Joan Baez, Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley, Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Jerry Garcia, Bill Cosby, Patrick Stewart, George Takei, Barbara Walters, Joan Rivers, Jerry Springer, and Geraldo Rivera;
• Et cetera.

Many others were born on the cusp at either side of the somewhat arbitrary generational bracket, some right at the edge and even more a few years shy — some definitions of the Silent Generation put the starting point at 1925, which would include the likes of Malcolm X and Gore Vidal. For a more recent example, if President Donald Trump had been born 6 months earlier, he would be labeled a Silent. And Hillary Clinton is just slightly over a year past the generational demarcation. Among the most represented in power are more than a few first wave Boomers who basically had the same life experience as Silents in having had grown up in the stultifying Fifties and reached adulthood before to the Sixties heated up (e.g., Hillary Clinton began her political aspirations as an Eisenhower Republican). So, combined with the Biden presidency (along with the continuing influence of Murdoch, Koch, Soros, Gingrich, Cheney, McConnell, Pelosi, Fauci, Sanders, etc), the most recent years of political rule has been largely dominated by the Silent Generation and their age adjacent peers, with the younger generations having a hard time breaking into power or gaining representation.

Rather than having been silent all these decades, one wonders when they’ll finally become silent. They are maintaining significant control during this transformative period of the Fourth Turning (Neil Howe and William Strauss), from which will follow a new generational cycle (approximately 80 years) and the establishment of the hold on the sociopolitical order, handing over the reigns of power in determining who will be their ideological heirs (e.g., in having helped to pick the present crop of Supreme Court ‘Justices’). That means they’ll have disproportionate influence in shaping society for the rest of this century. No one is against old people from having a voice, but it is a problem when they silence the youth voice. The main problem, of course, is not that they are senior citizens; rather, how reactionary that generation has become over time. For too many Silents, their position for a long time has simply been a defense of their power and the benefits they’ve accrued, at the cost and sacrifice of the rest of society.

A thought experiment of questions

If there actually was a military-intelligence-industrial-media complex and if it had a massive black budget funded by profits from front companies and criminal enterprises and/or dark money funneled through front organizations, international banks, etc — not to mention involvement of and access to the resources and capabilities of client states, allies, trade partners, puppet dictators, foreign oligarchies, organized crime syndicates, etc — how would anyone know about what was happening outside of the ruling elite directly involved within the highest echelons of the crony establishment, deep state, shadow network, plutocratic corporatocracy, soft fascism, and inverted totalitarianism (or whatever one wishes to call it)? How would we the people know what was going on? Would the media elite in the big biz news media report on it? Would the political elite in the one-party state with two wings tell us about it? Who would speak truth to power, what media platform would allow such critical honesty to be widely broadcast, and how would these moral voices be heard by a public that is lost in mediated reality tunnels?

Besides, would it even require the bad intent and organized conspiracy of a secret cabal of social dominators and dark personalities (Machiavellians, psychopaths, and narcissists) or could it emerge almost naturally, or at least unintentionally and by default of the biases and incentives built into the system itself, as the result of normal human relationships and social affiliations, shared life experience and common interests in terms of a ‘natural aristocracy’ of monied elite and high society that lives in the same neighborhoods, goes to the same churches, sends their kids to the same schools, belongs to the same clubs, vacations at the same resorts, attends the same social events, donates to the same non-profits, owns stock in the same companies, are members of the same corporate boards, and generally hobnobs in the same social circles and career networks, in some cases even where family dynasties form through inherited wealth and power and how they are bonded together through generations of intermarriage (i.e., cronyism and nepotism)?

Do most individuals in the elite ever stop to think about the immense system of privileges and protections, power and position in which are embedded every aspect of their lives, identities, careers, and relationships; upon which is built their entire lifestyle of comfort and pleasure, safety and security; a socially-constructed and hermeneutically-sealed poltico-economic reality that in many cases continues from conception to death? Are the upper classes, as sheep herded through carefully structured and highly controlled elite institutions, any less brainwashed and miseducated or more so? In their roles as wealthy influencers, philanthrocapitalists, powerful actors, backroom dealers, political insiders, public intellectuals, and thought leaders, do they believe the lies, disinfo, and propaganda they help spread? What would cause them to become aware of the world into which many of them were born and everything they were freely given as their birthright within the power structure? What tiny fraction of a percentage of the ruling elite actually worked and/or lucked their way up out of desperate dirt poverty, not merely having started out in the upper middle class? How many of them have ever known anything other than membership in the upper classes?

If a semi-covert or obscure Anglo-American-Western Empire as the greatest geopolitical and economic superpower on earth, though hidden in plain sight, was doing top secret technological and military research, development, and build-up for ongoing and upcoming covert operations, espionage programs, propaganda campaigns, proxy wars, international conflict, and cold war containment, possibly in preparation for World War III, with the cooperation and support of various geopolitical power structures (UN, NATO, World Bank, etc), would there be any undeniably obvious outward signs and documented evidence of this activity that could be clearly detected, easily uncovered, and demonstrably proven by outside observers, investigative journalists, and academic scholars, no matter how intelligent and informed? What if other old centers of imperial power, such as Russia and China, were likewise being restructured behind the scenes such as a Russo-Sino-Eastern Empire to oppose, challenge, and potentially defeat it’s historical enemies in the West? If there had already been a second cold war going on for decades now, would most of us have any clue to its existence, what it means, and where it might lead? Are we about to enter a new era of imperial wars of adventurism, aggression, and expansion, as was the case from the 18th century to the world war era?

Or are the real powers that are acting behind the scenes entirely different from any imperialism or imperial-like power the world has known from earlier eras? If the United States CIA, for example, had surreptitiously become an autonomous transnational paramilitary organization as part of a global deep state that operated entirely beyond all normal political oversight and public accountability, democratic or otherwise, that could be enforced by any national and international governing bodies, treaties, agreements, and legal systems, would the ‘CIA’ as such appear or operate any differently than it did in the past or would it otherwise seem to continue to do what it always had done, whatever else it might be doing that couldn’t be publicly seen? What if the CIA itself or even the entire United States government had now become a front organization for an emerging socio-politico-economic power structure of a kind, globally extensive and pervasive, never before seen to such a degree of complexity and centralized control? Would even the average lower level career politician, political party operator, or bureaucratic functionary be aware that anything had changed or would it smoothly and imperceptibly merge into the social, political, and economic cronyism and corruption already established over generations?

What if, like how a banana republic creates the illusion of democracy, transnational neo-imperialism or some other form of globalization maintained the external forms and appearances of separate and independent nation-states (maybe akin to the centralized faux ‘Federal’ government of the United States that originally, according to the Articles of Confederation, was a Federation freely joined by nation-states that were free to leave; after all, that is why they were named ‘states’)? Considering that the once diverse private and public, for-profit and non-profit media in the Western world (presumably similar to other parts of the world) used to be mostly locally-operated before nearly all of it was shut down or bought up and consolidated by a few transnational parent companies that are also invested in big energy, big defense, big tech, big drugs, big ag, etc, what if this big biz media that represents 90% of the news infotainment and soft propaganda (political rhetoric, mediated narratives, public relations, perception management, etc; in alliance with astroturfing, think tank machinations, lobbyist group influence, corporate advertising, etc) that most Americans watch has since become a propaganda arm of a shadowy superpower (deep state, deep neo-empire, or deep whatever), just another extension of the military-intelligence-industrial-media complex with loyalty to nothing else? Would we be able to smell that something was off simply by turning on the television, radio, or other tech device?

As a counter-balance and reality check to contrast against paranoid cynicism (real or perceived, justified or not), what would the world be like and how would our society function if all that was suggested above did not exist at all and, instead, we were an entirely autonomous public beholden to no power above or beyond our own democratic self-governance as free citizens of independent countries and communities (or city-states or anarcho-communes or anything else your crazy radical imagination could dream up) with fully functioning free markets and social democracies (or democratic socialism)? On a practical level of direct and personal experience, how would we tell the difference between authoritarian non-freedom and non-authoritarian freedom? What kind of lives would we live, what kind of communities would we call home, what kind of work would we do, what kind of economic fairness and social justice would exist, what kind of real freedom and effective rights would we have, what kind of resources and opportunities would be available to us, what kind of governance would we freely choose? And if we we were fully aware and informed, not indoctrinated and propagandized or manipulated and deceived in any way, how would we perceive the world we find ourselves in and how we would we act to move toward the world we would prefer? What would it take for we the people to become intellectually discerning, morally courageous, fully engaged, and politically empowered agents of our own shared freedom and collective determination?

What would freedom feel like in our bodies, minds, and souls? What would it feel like to be free in the world, to be free in ourselves and in relation to others, to be free members of free communities of people, to know freedom as a living experience within a living world? From that sense of freedom, how would we live and act freely? As freedom is etymologically cognate with friendship, what would it mean to treat others as equally free beings in mutual relationships of freedom? What does it mean to know, understand, and honor freedom as an ideal, vision, and reality? What does it mean to free here and now, not only as an aspiration but as a simple undeniable experience of what it is to be human, as a choice and acceptance of the ever present potential of freedom? Are we not all free in that we all belong to humanity, in that we are all at home in this world and have a right to be here for there is nowhere else we could be? Isn’t freedom the realization that we are citizens of the world, inhabitants of earth as a biosphere, members within the body of Gaia? What if that sense of freedom took hold in society and culture, within the public imagination, and spread as a contagious revolution of the mind? Isn’t freedom the acknowledgement that we are already in interrelationship? If freedom as our birthright is the starting point, what follows from that?