the alt-right

* insert "if" bw "Fred" and "you"

This thread turned epic? Why is there - is that poop? How did it get on the wall?

and btw for an expert in european history you don't have much to offer on the subject and apparently aren't familiar w/ anything within the medieval european history discipline which even an ignoramus like me knows is prolific from studying medieval european jewish history. you're derisive about mike duncan's podcast, a pretty bright and curious guy, but you might benefit from reviewing some of these topics yourself. finally, even though your outrage is completely asinine and misplaced, maybe even this can be a learning experience because now you know how americans feel when you pontificate about american politics despite having only a poor grasp of them.

anyway i've enjoyed this little spar if only bc it has made me feel nostalgic for classic nakh takedowns which i'm clearly only able to mimic in their most superficial ways. u deserve far more acerbic mockery than i'm able to dredge-up.

Any continents you're not an expert on, Fred?

Fred you gave the declaration of the rights of man to a 15th century French person do you think he would find the ideas familiar and logical, the kind of thing people tend to think but don't dare express? Or do you think he would say that this is a really different way of conceptualizing the relation between man and the state and I haven't seen much else like it before?

― Treeship, 11. februar 2017 15:19 (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I depends on the person, especially his or her 'class', but most of the peasant population would probably find it extremely complex and convoluted, and not that important to his or her own existence. If you asked him or her whether or not he or she wanted to radically change the system away from it's authoritarian ways, I'd suspect most would say yes. And they quite often did try and change the system, and was struck down with extreme violence.

I've never said I'm an expert, btw. Most of what I've said is things I learned in middle school in Denmark. But I've taken university courses in South American, African and Asian history as well, yeah. As I said, I'm a history major.

I do like Mike Duncan, btw. Listen to him myself. He also does explain that the people he talk about in England and France aren't that representative of the entire populations of those places. Something I think is lost on quite a lot of you. As Shakey said, they're the ones with twitter feeds. But if anybody wants to read what a simple medieval miller thought, go read Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms, btw. A masterpiece of history of mentalities.

ffs u're a pompous little shit. i read cheese and the worms in college as well as the night battles and ecstasies. you still have yet to say anything that isn't either a) needlessly pedantic and wrong or b) self-aggrandizing and tedious.

Fred I know most people were illiterate and unversed in political theory in medieval and early modern Europe.

The french revolution was more than a peasant uprising though. A lot of the force behind it was fueled by economic grievances, but the ideology aimed at transforming the entire society according to universalist principles. That's why it was a revolution.

do you even know what you're arguing? you're all over the place. you're surely not arguing that there wasn't a major shift in the conception of human rights over the course of modern european history. even you are not dim enough to think that's the case. instead you're trying to make some case that peasants in authoritarian europe didn't like being ruled by a king. of course if they thought about how much they disliked it at all (for someone who thinks he understands mentalities you sure don't get how ppl become inured to the conditions they're born into) they certainly didn't conceive of how the system would be radically altered years later. but even then - no one said they liked it or was discussing their opinions on the topic at all. i just don't know what to do w/ you. it's like arguing w/ a college freshman who is way too infatuated w/ his own brilliance despite knowing v little. xp

you still have yet to say anything that isn't either a) needlessly pedantic and wrong or b) self-aggrandizing and tedious.

― Mordy, 11. februar 2017 15:38 (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

And neither has anyone else in this thread. And neither has Mencius Moldbug. So the whole thing is fucking stupid.

"do you even know what you're arguing?"

No I don't. And I've admitted to that, repeatedly. The problem is, I have no fucking idea what you're arguing either, and I suspect you don't either.

I thought I knew what you were arguing, turns out I was wrong. But you've substituted my misconception with nothing of interest, instead you're just extremely agressive and seems obsessed with whether or not I understand English correctly.

... ok whatever.

Eventually those ideas became second nature even to everyday people. Ask a Trump supporter whether the president should be beholden to the rule of law. They know that they are supposed to say yes, even if in practice they want Trump to steamroll over people. Authoritarianism is taboo now -- when it emerges it tries to disguise itself by using democratic language -- but before the age of revolutions there was no need for that, authoritarianism was in itself taken to be an acceptable, even obvious way to organize society. People did not believe that sovereignty resided in "the people" in past centuries; now they do. The toothpaste is out of the tube. That was Mordy's point. (If I understand it correctly.)

Sorry lol xposts to my last post

yes u do. it really was not a v complex or interesting pt as i've said so don't understand why we had to spend so much time on it.

Treesh, what you write still don't answers my main question about this whole discussion. I think it boils down to what you mean by "authoritarianism was in itself taken to be an acceptable, even obvious way to organize society". It can mean two things 1) Authoritarianism was called what it was, and wasn't dressed up in democratic language. Which is banal and pointless, but ok. Or, what I thought Mordy meant 2) That the acceptability of authoritarianism was uncontested and natural, which it wasn't. It rested on violent repression and extreme ideological indoctrination through the church.

And I think from where you sit, you see the reason people don't like authoritarianism anymore to be because of the adaptation of the universalist principles from the French revolutionaries, and not the historical memory of the extreme brutality of the former regimes. And I'm telling you, as a European, I didn't learn about the fancy scrolls from US and France in middle school, but the history books were filled with drawings of executions, burnings, torture, etc. It's much more practical than philosophical.

And I might be wrong about what you think.

I think what you're missing Fred is that when you're born into authoritarianism it is all you know; your political imagination is stunted. So even if you hate the government maybe you wish you have a more enlightened ruler but you don't even have a conception of universal suffrage to yearn for. But once such a thing is implemented - slowly and in stages that phased out the authoritarian - the imagination is expanded. The acceptability of authoritarianism /was/ uncontested and natural. You're confusing resisting say a religious hegemony (like say Jews in Catholic Spain or Catholics in Protestant UK) or resisting onerous taxes or resisting some other malady of authoritarianism, with resisting the very concept of a central monarchy itself. The latter took an ideological sea change to happen. It was not, as your suggesting, fermenting on the minds of all peasants laboring under oppression. They bemoaned the oppression but they didn't conceptualize this new way of organizing society. I don't think this is particularly controversial even.

robin hood just wanted a better king

Now once we've passed through this moment and our imagination has been expanded we see Democracy as the best way to address the crimes that seem endemic to [particularly unenlightened] authoritarian rule. The novelty of the alt-right is that they don't couch their authoritarian inclinations within the language of Democracy but challenge the idea that Democracy itself has actually given us the liberation from the sins of the monarchy that we believe it did. This is where, incidentally, their biggest historical misunderstandings arise - they cherrypick data and fail to account for variables in order to a paint a picture of a monarchical England that had less crime and better education than we do today. Fine, that's why they're wrong. But in challenging the results of Democracy (and imho more successfully challenging the pieties of the liberal/'brahmin'/cathedral hegemony) they open up a space to note that these ideologies are only valuable in-so-far as they mitigate the excesses of these forms of government. Moldbug and Land happen to think libertarianism (or idk whatever libertarian authoritarianism they've tried to flesh out) would do a better job safeguarding human rights and welfare than our current system. I disagree with them. But I think they're often right when they note the places that our liberal democracies fail to do an adequate job. We haven't reached a perfect civilization yet - this is just a stopgap.

xp he definitely did! he was a supporter of richard the lionheart!

I know I've seen all the movies

xp i disagree. he says things that i know are wrong but he also says things that are interesting + frames things in provocative ways. tbh i'm surprised when someone reads open letter and comes away thinking it's just the ramblings of some dumb dude. xxp

I'm still just going by part 1 but: the Brahmins/townies stuff is pretty unconvincing if you don't already buy that view of the world (or at least the US), unsupported with any actual data, and imo just wrong. (I could go point by point but I suspect you might agree with on this part of it.)

His three questions that are supposed to start poking holes in the inflatable flying pigs of progressivism are... not very well-formulated ("what's up with the Third World?")? I'll try to engage with them, though: first, the quote about malaria is taken out of context. The Times author gave other significant reasons why malaria made a comeback, aside from the end of colonialism. It also just seems like a somewhat poorly conceived sentence on the part of a science reporter who does not specialize in politics or history. If Moldbug's point is that violent conflicts, poverty, corruption, and poor medical care were not problems under colonial rule, I think he is being either disingenuous or ignorant. He could start here. The material suffering of the colonized is part of the reason why colonialism was wrong. Moldbug does not exactly say this, though, as much as he is using the quote as evidence that progressives value these nebulous abstract concepts of independence and freedom even when they come along with material suffering (I think...?). I am not sure what he is even trying to prove with the examples of Zimbabwe and Somaliland, other than a pedantic one about the terminology "independent". (Is it his idea that a Rhodesian apartheid state would have been more peaceful and stable if it had been left to continue? Surely, the fact that the governed population was willing to take to violence in opposition to the state problematizes this.) If "progressives" are people like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, I'm not even sure that Third World postcolonialism is key to their ideology.

As for the nationalism question, he does have a point about the logical inconsistencies in the Wikipedia quote but I don't see him making a particularly interesting point otherwise, certainly not one that anyone has not thought about before if they have a remotely serious interest in world issues. Again, I'm not sure that the people he considers progressives actually believe what he says they believe. One progressive response to the examples he raises could be that nationalism is defensible when it is a response to foreign oppression and does not involve the invasion or oppression of other nations. Another could have to do with the distinction between civic nationalism and ethnic nationalism.

He answers his own question "what was so bad about the Nazis?" immediately. For the point that he seems to want to make, this question is not formulated well at all and just seems like trolling. Yes, the Allied powers did terrible things too and there have been other oppressive totalitarian dictatorships and other genocides - one can agree with all of this without either i) thinking that there was nothing bad about the Nazis or ii) undermining "progressive" convictions in any real way at all. And what is the basis for the assertion that the US treats South Africa with greater hostility than North Korea? Does the ruling class of the US, who fought a Cold War against the Communist world for 45 years, really treat Communist atrocities as a peccadillo?

Basically, he wouldn't be stealing from the rich and giving to the poor if Richard was on the throne.

I'll never get that hour back.

The acceptability of authoritarianism /was/ uncontested and natural.

And I'm saying this is wrong. Which also isn't very controversial, even. The antique forerunners, the Hanseatic league, free imperial cities, Florence. The Münster Rebellion, the German Peasants War. They might not have thought of universal suffrage as we say - much of it was a sort of Christian communism, kinda? - but there was a lot of constant struggles against authoritarianism.

You overestimate the extent to which the imagination was stunted. You know, Ginzburg! The medieval mind was fertile, hungry and imaginative. That they didn't conceptualize this new way of organizing society doesn't mean they didn't conceptualize others.

and the winner on all three judges scorecards.....

The material suffering of the colonized is part of the reason why colonialism was wrong. Moldbug does not exactly say this, though, as much as he is using the quote as evidence that progressives value these nebulous abstract concepts of independence and freedom even when they come along with material suffering (I think...?)

I think you're right about this argument. I always read this as a combination of a criticism of dogmatic liberalism that sees abstract concepts as valuable even when they come with material suffering as well as a little bit of the classic /bringing civilization to the savages/ argument. I think there's a way to see both sides - that liberal post-colonialism has valued the end of colonization even when the material conditions that followed their end were far worse than the conditions that preceded them (cf the rise of political Islam in the wake of European withdrawal from the Middle East and Northern Africa - though I'd argue that is just replacing one terrible colonialism with a worse one), even while the crimes committed during colonialism were very real. Or even that it's possible to celebrate the end of colonialism even while understanding the value of the institutions and cultures that colonialism introduced in various places (there's an interesting thing about maintaining the institutions of colonialism in the wake of post-colonialism as being one of the hallmarks of countries that successfully navigated the transition). But like he says in that piece - even if virus X is wrong, that doesn't mean Y is right. I don't know if he thinks neocolonialism is the right approach (um - I really mean post-neocolonialism since I think he's advocating for actual colonialism and is probably not interested in what we consider capitalist neocolonialism - though maybe he thinks it's a good compromise) or just that the narrative that is predominant regarding this is simplistic.

re nationalism I think he's right that there's a lot of confusion on this mark. there's no question that the liberal West has supported ethnic nationalism when it comes to some groups and demonized it when it comes to others - or celebrated native/indigenous control among some groups and demeaned it for others. this could just be a consequence of a simplistic view that glorifies the marginalized and marginalizes the powerful (so that if you're doing okay you should be doing less okay and if you're not doing great you could do better) but i mean i often see regarding issues like immigration, ethnic/racial control + power, nationalism, etc at the very least a willingness to overlook the crimes of nationalism perpetrated by some groups contrasted w/ others. Again, does this mean that we should embrace self-interested nationalism for everyone, or should we be consistent and oppose it for everyone, or some third option? I think neoreactionaries go with the first option when the second two are probably better imo.

iirc and I'd have to reread I think his point about WW2 is that it was more about maintaining/protecting a global hegemony than it was about opposing the humanitarian crimes of the Nazis. i think that's pretty true even if there's nothing wrong with trying to defend against a totalitarian regime bent on world domination (and unlike north korea possibly able to achieve it). if anything i think the US was consistent on this pt - refusing to accept Jewish refugees that would've saved 4-6 million lives and basically ignoring the crimes against the Jews (and other marginalized groups) up until they were forced into the war by an attack on them personally.

Does the ruling class of the US, who fought a Cold War against the Communist world for 45 years, really treat Communist atrocities as a peccadillo?

i think this point is for the truest of the ones you've mentioned - at least for "ruling class" defined as the academy/media class. at least ime in the academy. a peccadillo would probably be a good thing since it was often lionized.

Ok, Fred. You understand what I'm saying and you're dragging this out to save face. So let me help you out. You're 100% right, thank you for showing me the error of my ways, etc.

I'll never get that hour back.

i must have spent at least an hour arguing with fred - i'd suggest your hour reading moldbug was more worthwhile

Also Fred - one more note for now (I have to go out to lunch soon) - I think maybe another possible confusion here is that you're interpreting authoritarianism exclusively according to its most violent/dictatorial characterization. The term implies a strong central power and limited freedoms. You keep mentioning examples of ppl who had a limited amount of freedom or strove for a limited amount of self-determination as proof that the authoritarian model was itself contested. I'm arguing that this is a confusion. Even among ppl - like the German peasants - who wanted better conditions for themselves, their imagination did not include toppling the monarchy. This is the central pt and only bolsters my initial point. Among those who rebelled violently against their regimes, EVEN they still did not dream of ending the monarchy. One of the twelve principles of the German Peasants War was that "The nobility shall not force more services or dues from the peasant without payment. The peasant should help the lord when it is necessary and at proper times." Does this sound like a radical alteration of the basis of society? You are correct, there are antecedents to universal emancipation. There were attempts to acquire levels of liberty that were in almost every case COMPATIBLE with an authoritarian form of government. Read authoritarian for monarchist (tho not all authoritarian govs are monarchies) and you'll understand better I think. These ppl weren't looking to overturn the monarchy. They were trying to improve the material conditions of their lives. I think you know this.

Like the neoreactionaries are not advocating for a violent dictatorial authoritarian obviously! They are advocating for an enlightened ruler, a philosopher king, etc. What they are advocating would not just be an acceptable belief in almost the entirety of history but would in fact be a leftist reformer position! This is one of the arguments - Democracy has become such an ideological hegemony that even this extremely left-wing authoritarian position is utterly discredited + marginalized.

I'll just quote what I wrote upthread, because it's still kinda the crux of it:

The reason I jumped into the discussion was because it seemed to me that Mordy suggested authoritarianism was popular as such today, and had been in the past. When really, feudalism, monarchism, had to use incredible violence to keep the plundered population in check. And probably the main reason that I find the neo-reactionaries to be completely useless is that they either ignore, or lie, about this. At least in what I've read.

It's like with communism: At this point you can't ignore the question of political violence, which is why Slavoj Zizek is worthwhile while JacobinMag is worthless.

When they're arguing for 'an enlightened ruler, a philosopher king', they're arguing for something that never existed. And never can exist, and history has shown this pretty decisively. Which is why their viewpoint is discredited and marginalized.

They ARE advocating for 'a violent dictatorial authoritarian', they're just lying about it.

Some authoritarians were clearly better than others but I'd agree w/ possibly this point whole-heartedly: the possibility of abuse when there is absolute power is too significant, and the ability to cause damage with such power too extreme, to ever allow it even if this current guy is ok the next guy might not be. which doesn't insulate democracy from the possibility of abuse but from my limited perspective it has done a better job than authoritarianism at mitigating such abuses. or to quote really the most banal cliche we possibly could: "Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

Since Plato there have been people who argued that an enlightened despot would be a better guardian of individual freedom/social stability than democracy, which can tend toward mob rule. For Plato, it was democracy which had been proven definitively to lead to tyranny, not authoritarianism. In the first century of the Enlightenment this was the dominant position, as people looked to Catherine the Great and others as examples of "enlightened" monarchs. For most of history it was not seen as obvious or reasonable that democracy would secure individual liberty better than other systems -- the thinking started changing in the late 18th century

I'm all in for democracy for the record but I don't think it's a good idea to collapse the idea of democracy totally into "good people, good times." It means self-governance. People can be against that idea and not want to live in some gulag state, even if (practically) it is more likely for an authoritarian state to turn that way than a democratic one

And yes, in our time, any attempt to institute authoritarianism would require widespread, violent repression, which is why these neoreactionaries are so dangerous, especially if they have the ear of Steve Bannon

Well, it's easy to point out intellectual contradictions within progressivism if you're defining "progressive" to include everyone from Bill Clinton to Noam Chomsky, including anyone who shops at Whole Foods and listens to NPR. I could probably respond better if I had specific examples of what you're talking about wrt nationalism, but pointing out some potential contradictions in how some liberals or progressives approach nationalism in practice doesn't exactly strike me as something that undermines the basic principles of liberal humanism. I agree with everything you said about WW2 below (and think it's fairly obvious) but feel similarly about this point:

I think his point about WW2 is that it was more about maintaining/protecting a global hegemony than it was about opposing the humanitarian crimes of the Nazis. i think that's pretty true even if there's nothing wrong with trying to defend against a totalitarian regime bent on world domination (and unlike north korea possibly able to achieve it). if anything i think the US was consistent on this pt - refusing to accept Jewish refugees that would've saved 4-6 million lives and basically ignoring the crimes against the Jews (and other marginalized groups) up until they were forced into the war by an attack on them personally.

i think this point is for the truest of the ones you've mentioned - at least for "ruling class" defined as the academy/media class. at least ime in the academy. a peccadillo would probably be a good thing since it was often lionized.

I'd really quibble with that definition of "ruling class". But we're talking about an American academic class that included the University of Chicago School of Economics and Henry Kissinger and Samuel Huntington, right? (If "ruling class" means anything, I have to assume we're focusing on those in the academy and media who have had the greatest influence.) The fact that many academics might find Marxist analysis a useful tool does not equate to whitewashing the gulags imo.

the greatest influence

on the people who, you know, rule

Thanks for that video again, it's an almost beautiful torrent of bugfuck bullshit. I bet whoever caught that on camera couldn't believe their luck.

If he kept up that level of incredible nonsense, I would definitely not want to cut him out my life.

Mordy:

i said that at one time in history authoritarianism was so omnipresent that even the revolutionaries could only conceive of a constitutional monarchy as the way forward for emancipation and that in contrast today ppl who advocate for authoritarianism are painted as kooks in mainstream magazines. it wasn't a particularly exciting, original, or adventurous remark but it was just one line and i was making a larger point about sea changes in human ideology.

Fred:

And I'm saying this is wrong. Which also isn't very controversial, even. The antique forerunners, the Hanseatic league, free imperial cities, Florence. The Münster Rebellion, the German Peasants War. They might not have thought of universal suffrage as we say - much of it was a sort of Christian communism, kinda? - but there was a lot of constant struggles against authoritarianism.

You overestimate the extent to which the imagination was stunted. You know, Ginzburg! The medieval mind was fertile, hungry and imaginative. That they didn't conceptualize this new way of organizing society doesn't mean they didn't conceptualize others.

Aren't you both right? Or at least Mordy is right in broad terms, but also Fred is right to mention this long tradition of thought and action, even before the classic 18th century reforms and revolts, some of which even went further.

I dunno. I don't know quite how one would go about getting the numbers, to show exactly how representative things like the Peasant's war were of general thinking at the time ... would probably need numbers and data to decide this one?

The main difference being that Mordy didn't throw a whiny tantrum(p) in the process.

Man, I don't in any way feel bad about that. Mordy is defending Mencius Moldbug. Check out what he wrote about Anders Breivik. I'm a Scandinavian socialist, that day was one of the worst in my life, I honestly think I've been pretty calm, all things considered.

That is a libelous characterization of Mordy's posts and I wish it was actionable.

Nah, it's pretty clear Mordy is defending Moldbug? I mean, of course not the parts about how it's sorta okay to machinegun people like me and my high school friends, it's the other parts that are 'interesting + frames things in provocative ways'. And I am compartmentalizing, I really am. But sooo sorry if I lose my temper around that piece of shit Moldbug, but I fucking hate that guy.

Mordy does not think Moldbug is "not that bad" or "on the right track." He reads him because he thinks it is valuable to understand one's ideological opponents, as he has pointed out many times.

Like it or not the West is experiencing the rise of racist nationalism. We can either seek to understand these new movements in order to defeat them or we can just scream that they are Nazis and hope they go away on their own. If the left ends up losing definitively to these alt right morons it will be because we were too lazy to fight this kind of thinking head on.