Abridged Regressive Right

Chalk it up to narcissism of small differences, but a fair criticism of me would be that I spend almost no time here shitting on Andrew Tate, if I've ever mentioned him here at all. Or Sargon of Aakad or whatever, who else? Alex Jones, I certainly feel I mention Donald Humphrey Trump, the Loser's President, and Jordan Buttersworth Peterson, effeminate postmodern guru often enough to be self conscious of it. I would readily concede that I don't go hard on the right wing of things as much as I pick at the left wing.

I guess in my personal history, I'm not certain there's even a post there. How deep do I have to dig to say that Tucker Carlson or Matt Walsh are insufficient to the task of explaining anything about the world? There is also a great deal of redundancy between criticising the right, and being an atheist. The right as it exists, not so much in Australia because of mandatory preferential voting, but certainly US and UK politics, has very few perches for me to get on board with because of all the god bothering, monarchism and probably biggest for me: economic mismanagement.

There will also be a great deal of redundancy in describing the regressive right and the regressive left. 

Both regressive right and left are tribal, by which I mean they operate double standards for insiders vs outsiders.

Both regressive right and left, have withdrawn the consent of the loser, viewing the people's right to choose the other to govern them as illegitimate. (though there is a legitimate point about who started this death-spiral, and I am fairly certain it is the US political right aka Republicans).

Both regressive right and left assert rather than argue. The both have a fatal conceit that they are in possession of universal ideals, and everything is simply a failure of commitment to realizing those ideals. 

Both regressive right and left can be characterized as "believing in lies" and will therefore "lie for those beliefs" though we might substitute "lies" for intellectually bankrupt ideas.

Right, so a lot of overlap. Two sides, analogous bad behaviour. 

Conservatism, ideally is not that interesting, it's almost just the party-pooper role. Everyone's excited, conservatives need to burst that bubble. 

Allow me to regress to Chesterton's Fence, because Chesterton specified conditions under which a fence could or could not be destroyed and described not a conservative custodian but "the more intelligent type of reformer".

A helpful dichotomy I find, much more so than left-right, is careerist-vocationalist. I think career conservatives likely do not understand the useful function of conservatism, and are subsequently prone to getting mired in the past, and probably confuse conservatism for nationalism. The adopt not just a literal "genesis" myth of lost eden, but a figurative one on top - narratives that take the form "everything was good until x came along." A yearning for a past as an ideal. 

I assert my experience that most lay people are fairly capable of describing what an ideology like communism is about. If I ask a lay person "what is communism?" they generally don't reply with an example, but some summary of the idea like "it's where everyone owns everything" or "workers own the businesses, farms etc." I assert that it is also my experience, that almost no lay person can do the same for fascism, just as when you ask people what communism is nobody says "well it's like Stalin" or "Mao" when you ask a lay person what fascism is they will say "the Nazis". 

I would expect the same inability to describe what something is if I asked lay people what they think "mercantilism" is, or "Georgism" because these theories/ideologies are obscure. Fascism is not obscure, almost every highschool graduate has probably somewhere in their education been exposed to WW2. Yet there is much confusion as to what fascism consists of. I share this confusion, there is a vague and important intuition in which fascism is not defined by hatred of Jews, to recognize that though the Jewish diaspora will likely always be vulnerable to attack, future manifestations of fascism may target other groups. Once you subtract that, it is harder to differentiate fascism from totalitarianism and imperialism. 

Now, this outcome shouldn't be surprising because there really isn't an answer. You can click through the link and get a general picture, but one definition I like is the idea that "the nation" exists within the blood of the people. So in my case I'm an Australian that spent a significant period of my life living in Mexico. I would then in the eyes of a fascist, somehow not simply be Australian because I happened to be born in the nation state of Australia, but that I somehow am Australia (putting me in mind of Steven Colbert's "I Am America and You Can Too") and when I lived in Mexico, I could not in anyway become somehow Mexican, but rather was corrupting Mexico by introducing Australia.

What one might be surprised to note in the definitions of fascism is how frequently "anti-conservatism" is sighted as a feature of fascism. 

I should also invoke nationalism at this point, the regressive-left would probably view, somewhat correctly, nation states as "social constructions" and few people make the distinction between "construction" and "convention", I'm more inclined to call nations a convention by which people around the world self-organize. Nation states are now so ubiquitous, that I would guess, most people don't even think the world could be another way, nor realize that nations are relatively recent ideas. 

I suspect this is because nations often map onto historical kingdoms, like Britain, France, The Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden etc. I would forgive most people for not realizing that nations like Italy (1861) and Germany (1870 and 1990) are younger than the United States of America (1776 or 1619 in regressive-left years). Timothy Snyder talks about these conceits of oldness and youngness a lot. Nationalism is so ubiquotous that if you are like me, you don't think of it as a 19th or 20th century idea that won out, more so than ideas like "Democracy" "Communism" "Fascism" "Colonialism" "Imperialism" etc. 

My guess, is that it is through the broad ignorance of concepts like nationalism and fascism, that the right can slip. It can cease to be conservative, and simply become an entity that retains power for powers sake - esteem, salary, the offices etc. while being largely indifferent to the function they perform.

I like Never-Trumper and likely, "true" conservative David Frum who said that basically The Republican Party recognized that the US was changing, and faced the choice of either changing themselves or to try and game democracy and retain power while declining in relevance. They chose the latter. I'm also dimly aware that Ronald Reagan broke a kind of gentleman's agreement that nobody pander to religious America, and he famously said something like "I know that you cannot endorse me, but know that I endorse you." as a wink and a smile. 

I also accept Johnathan Haidt's identification of Newt Gingrich beginning the massive polarization of Washington by forbidding intermingling and bipartisanship of his republicans. This was the right's withdrawal of consent. Eventually you get Mitch McConnell who basically takes it as the republican's divine right to stop anyone but the Republican Party from actually governing. We see the clear cut regressive double standards where McConnell blocks confirmation of a SCOTUS judge because it is an election year, then rushes the confirmation of a SCOTUS judge mere weeks from an election. 

I think pearl clutching prudes on the far-left who decry everything as fascist, while not convincing me they have any concrete understanding or even approximation of fascism, are reacting to some real intuition. The far-right, much like the far-left, cannot accept or infer anything from, their own lack of popularity. They are totalitarian and anti-liberal. 

The major difference being that the right appears to me, to yearn for an imagined past with some basis in reality - in many ways things were better in the 1950s, unless you like living outside an iron-lung, fucking a member of the same sex (consensually), or being physically capable of turning the wheels of your car while at a standstill. Wealth inequality was smaller, real wage growth was higher, housing was affordable, it was really worthwhile to complete a bachelor's degree and you could expect your standard of living to grow, while children roamed free and blissfully ignorant of how dangerous it was to do so.

Herbert Marcuse argued for "liberating tolerance" which argued for intolerance and repression of right-wing ideas, while practicing tolerance for left-wing ideas/movements. This argument I suspect lives and dies on the premise that the left is in possession of an ideal. Something I feel is the fatal conceit. But change this premise to the ideal being "1950s Americana" or "Ukraine-as-Russia" or "The Holy Land belongs to Christendom/Islam" and I'm confident Marcuse's argument, so long as one believes they possess the ideal, is the same argument for an illiberal right, where we must not tolerate left-wing causes and only tolerate right-wing causes.

The regressive right is depressing for it's lack of imagination. Born of the substitution hypothesis - the idea that "wokeness" is a natural consequence of the decline of religiosity in society, so society had to invent new religion - has some merits but I find it incredibly frustrating as framed. For example, why has religiousity declined? Many right or right-leaning commentators seem to think Christianity needs to make a comeback, as if we just dropped the ball or some shit. I posit that religiosity has declined because religion is very bad at describing reality. Where the substitution hypothesis has legs is pointing out one doesn't go from miserable Christian to happy Atheist. Losing faith in god is but the removal of an obstacle in the way of learning how to be happy on occasion in an imperfect world. 

Being unable to divorce, likely for many has some benefits, salvaging perfectly okay relationships. It would also have had some very negative impacts like trapping people in abusive and loveless relationships, and sentencing generations to untreated misery perpetuated through dysfunctional families and learned attachment styles. 

It's these kind of vanilla issues that an ideal historic right-and-left could symbiotically navigate together, and form the basis of intellectually bankrupt memes like "Judeo-Christian values" among the regressive right today.

I tire of this subject, what is worth emphasizing above all the detail, is the process. First the right adopts the fatal conceit that they know the ideal, they know the correct thing to do. Then believing yourself in possession of an ideal, you withdraw your consent to the very concept of losing, you view lost elections, defeated bills etc. not as your failing but societies. Any contrary perspective on your ideal is not friction through which you could attempt to move onward and upward, but illegitimate toll booth, delaying your arrival at the promised land.

Before you know it, you don't even need evidence to conclude that an election was stolen. You begin arguing against the concept of elections themselves. You resent anyone else exercising the power you would have for yourself. The extent of your criticism is simply determining who is in or out, you do not criticize yourself, only others.

Before you know it, believing yourself in possession of the ends, you embrace Machiavelli's "The ends justify the means" and before you know it, you believe that you are not what you do, and not even who you say you are, but who you think you are.

And suddenly you are Tucker Carlson, going to a Russian supermarket and marvelling at the price of bread, and all you have to do, to get cheap bread, is live under Putin.