From Classical Liberal Consensus to Woke Tyranny

The operating assumptions of the Liberal Age built our modern dystopia

One of the things that has always fascinated me about history is defined by the following question: how much are the things that occur today the inevitable result of the things that happened yesterday? How much does cause and effect represent locked in, unavoidable determinism?

This is a question that is particularly important for anyone who thinks that the past was better than the present. For anyone with the conservative instinct, for anyone who feels that one of the most important political and spiritual tasks of life is the recognition of the debt we owe to the past and a care and reverence towards the best achievements and traditions handed down to us, we find ourselves at some point wondering:

How did the world I admire create the world I detest?

If we want to recover, rebuild, reclaim a former greatness (Make America Great Again, for example) we face the problem of recognizing that the things we loved have already lost. The whole reason we need to reclaim them is because at some point they failed, at some point they allowed themselves to be defeated. Or they contained within themselves the seeds of their own destruction.

These are problems that can only occur to the conservative instinct. Our enemies are far, far more concerned simply with seizing power in the instant, and doing everything they can with that power while they have it. Their eyes are fixed on the future, both as a utopian vision of what they will achieve and as an ignorant, barbarian contempt and hatred of what their ancestors (or my ancestors) did. All systems of, for want of a better word ‘thought’, derived from Marxism have the historical determinism of Marxism. Globalists, progressives, Cultural Marxists and Economic Marxists alike, together with technocrats, transhumanists and Islamic expansionists, all have the idea that time is on their side, that history is moving inevitably in their direction.

They see history as a tide they are riding, which will surely break the ground beneath our feet and sweep us away. They see themselves, their victory, as inevitable, as just what history will naturally unfold.

But those of us who begin from the understanding that things were once better than they now are, and that the past is a precious heritage under continued assault, have none of that fanatical sense of inevitability. If anything, we will tend to be prone to a despair that seems to confirm the confidence of the other side. Because we know that society has moved more and more away from the things we love.

Where we are today, in this present dystopia, tends to suggest to us and our enemies that the political tide only flows one way, and that this is against our interests. This is why so many official conservatives give in, why so many of them seem to accept that, once gained, no advance of the other side can ever be reversed. Trying to preserve things that are being destroyed is inherently harder than trying to knock everything down. And its inherently more exhausting too, just as rebuilding or building positive achievements also takes more effort, more time, more care, than destroying things whilst motivated by a blind trust that whatever follows will be better.

Its this experience of repeated defeat, of struggling against the tides of entropy itself, despite periods of electoral dominance, that leads to a defeatist attitude that is as much responsible for the betrayals of their core values enacted by official conservatism (Con Inc) as is the seduction of those representatives within corrupt networks of quid pro quo and influence peddling. For every sincere crook, for every conservative who actually only cares about golf club membership and positions on the board, there are at least two broken soldiers, conservatives who say to themselves that certain things can never be reversed or certain lost glories can never be restored.

What makes our side better is that we are not ideological fanatics completely ignorant of the past, and we are not indoctrinated zealots happy to build our future on a mountain of skulls. But this reasonableness and moderation is of course a hopeless defense against those who possess no reasonableness or moderation of their own.

Official conservatives have been somewhat like the dreadfully naive ‘soft left’ youth of Israel, who attended a Peace concert full of love and concern for their Palestinian neighbors, while those Palestinians were tooling up ready to rape and slaughter them (the western world as a whole is of course in the same position regarding its understanding of what Islam is and how Islam treats non-Islamic societies and peoples it overcomes).

There are of course many, many official conservatives who are simply out for themselves, who adopted Con Inc politics and the mouthing of patriotism and right-wing economic stances while never actually caring about the people, the nation and the principles that politics is supposed to support. We are all familiar with the fake Republicans or fake UK Conservatives who are just in it as a business, who just want to take the pay and the perks and the opportunities for graft that come with being a compliant, defeated, ultimately obedient and controlled opposition movement. But there are also a huge number of broken soldiers and mournful strategists who decide that victories cannot be won and the whole process of being on the Right is about moderating the scale of defeat, or of complying in ways that allow an electoral win without any possibility of doing something actually conservative with it.

Today, these mournful strategists are the ones telling us that Republicans should not respond in kind to Democrat lawfare, or that Trump must pick a very non MAGA candidate for VP. They are the ‘Republicans’ looking for that ideal black lesbian socialist Vice President, or at the very least demanding that the CIA or the military industrial complex get to choose who it is ‘for the sake of unity’.

Similarly, mournful strategists, experts in managed decline, polite submission, and the kind of realism and pragmatism that considers ALL greatness an impossibility, are the ones more terrified of real victory than they are of perpetual defeat. This conservative character type is in fact composed of natural submissives, people who think that accepting progressive triumphs as set in stone marks them as unusually mature and sophisticated. The classic touchstone of that attitude in the US of course is the spectacle of alleged conservatives horrified by the repeal of Roe v Wade and determined to consider it a massive blunder more responsible for losses than electoral fraud is.

These psychological aspects of official conservatism are as important to understand as the networks of corruption that make it pay to be a traitor. Populists are what conservatives become when they cast off the mournful strategists and embrace the quest for greatness. Populists are unique in refusing to accept past progressive or Marxist advances as irreversible. Populists understand that everything that is taken, can be reclaimed, and that if progressives, Globalists and technocrats can fundamentally transform society (as they already have) so can we.

Reclaiming the past is no more fundamentally impossible than reshaping the present. You can do the second in ways that achieve the first. There are no broken soldiers or mournful strategists in populism. There are just people who see no point in winning an election unless you use that victory, and no hope in just trying to limit the scale of your societal and cultural defeat. The populist does two vital things that official conservatism abandoned-he listens to the hopes and dreams of ordinary people, and he sets about trying to build something real.

He does not accept defeat before beginning to get to work, and he does not see the Enemy as inevitable and unconquerable.

BUT….of course this is a huge task, and its one better conducted by understanding the flaws in the past that made this present what it is.

Too many conservatives, even those who become populists, accept a classical liberal paradigm for what they should want, without acknowledging that aspects of the classical liberal inheritance are themselves responsible for the contemporary woke tyranny we are experiencing.

Classical liberalism is an ideal that allowed the birth of nightmares. Yes, it is a good thing, solely in and of itself. Yes, the free press, free speech, an independent judiciary, the separation of Church and State, parliamentary rule, the rule of law, democracy, equality of rights and representation, individual human rights, consideration for minorities, Christian empathy and compassion….all these are things which helped the West do better than the rest.

BUT the tyrants of the past were also right that they are also all weaknesses. They contain the seeds of their own destruction. They are virtues waiting to become vices. The very fact that we, the West, inclined towards treating others better than Eastern despotism did could (taken to self denying extremes) become the vice that it is today, where the Other is fetishized as better than ‘your own’, where the needs of the minority outweigh the needs of the majority. where all empathy and compassion is reserved for the outsider, the foreigner, the illegal alien or the arriving refugee, and NONE is preserved or reserved for the actual citizen or the existing populace.

Universal human rights are a great ideal, an ideal to be proud of, a wonderful achievement of western civilization….but the human rights industry has protected rapists, sheltered torturers, welcomed enemies, excused every manner of vileness and barbarity. We spend more time considering the human rights of people who rape, torture and kill than we do considering the rights of their victims. If somebody wants to make the rape and murder of the truly innocent more likely, then they will find that human rights legislation and human rights lawyers will be their best assistants.

Human rights campaigners and laws have been the very best friends of terrorism. Innocent ordinary people have been maimed and murdered thanks to the human rights of their killers, or justice denied to the families of these victims because of the concentration of human rights as an industry on the protection of the guilty. Asylum seekers have raped and murdered people.

In the UK, a plane deporting an illegal immigrant did not fly out because passengers and protesters altruistically objected to the inhumanity of deportation. The person due to be flown out remained in the country. Whilst awaiting a further decision (fully considering their human rights as an asylum seeker) that person raped a young 15 year old girl. Many other similar examples exist.

A rape that would not have occurred except as the consequence of classical liberal attitudes seeding the ground with the kind of woke altruism and alleged empathy that becomes a vice in itself and an assistance to evil. With no empathy left for the victims of woke virtue signalling and woke love of the Other.

Kindness towards evil is malice towards good. Somebody else pays the price of such tainted virtues.

So the populist task should perhaps not be a desire to reclaim classical liberal principles exactly. Those are the very things that made the civilized West vulnerable to barbarian assaults, both foreign and domestic in nature. What use is a free press that hates its own people and lies constantly and is owned by people trying to turn our society into a hellhole of corruption and degeneracy? Should the abstract principle of the freedom of the press matter more than the living interests of the People or their freedom? What do you do with a press that has a unified malign intent and a track record of facilitating woke tyranny? Just let them keep on as one of the most significant forces of evil in our society?

Once the classical liberal settlement is broken, broken by the kind of forces and people that could only emerge in a too tolerant context and who are themselves the perfection of old virtues as new extreme vices, the liberal settlement is not going to produce the restoration of the rights of the People you need.

So you have to know which parts of the Old World you preferred contained the seeds of its destruction. You have to demand not a universal equality, universal rights, or universal consideration, but the prioritization of your own people, even if that mirrors the excesses and crimes of the progressive and Globalist forces you oppose. You can’t play by the rules they have already broken, and by the limits that they do not obey. In looking at what you want to restore, to reclaim, and to make great again, a wise awareness of the parts that already went wrong to put us where we are, is vital.

You have to understand that the human rights of your own, especially the most innocent, ALWAYS matter more than the human rights of the Other, especially the guilty. Because treating these rights as equal, or worse treating the Other as superior, is inherently both unjust and self-destructive. It’s a kind of vast complacency, when it isn’t deliberate malice. It’s dancing at the Peace concert, while the rapists draw near.

You aren’t going to defeat Woke Tyranny (or Islamic tyranny) with the tools of Classical Liberalism. Those tools already lost the battle against Woke Tyranny, as well as having partly fathered (or mothered) Woke Tyranny in the first place. Those tools are already letting various deeply malign forces (from Globalists to Islamists) ruin your country, your society, your world. Reclaiming the world from them takes more than a mournful strategy of slow defeats or an old, already defeated ideal of a time when we were all much ‘nicer’.

It takes a ruthless vision of our own. That’s what rebuilds, restores and reclaims.