Why The Right is going to Keep on Winning

In my last blog I detailed why post-modernism is inherently reactionary, this blog however, is all about the consequences of a culture saturated with post-modernism in the long run. Simply put, the right wing is going to keep on winning, until they are sick of winning, what follows is an explanation as to why.

During the heyday of the enlightenment project, it was always considered reactionary to question the extent of reason. If you could dethrone reason as the arbiter of how society should work, then the next-best things would be society's traditions, religion and personal and collective experience. This is the logic of Ur-conservatism. Edmund Burke, uses this kind of questioning of reason to criticize the French Revolution, and he elevates Christianity as "the engine of social progress" as an alternative to the brutal violence of the terror. During the 1930's Neo-reactionary and fascist intellectuals also attempted this same critique mixed with their own ideas about socialism. A prominent figure of this era was Julius Evola, who understood the enlightenment as the cause of a degeneration in the vitality of society. To Evola, the warrior-type was under threat from reason, and modern society at large which was inflicting violence upon this idealized noble-savage in an attempt to civilize him. Post-modernism, despite seeming left-wing in orientation, at least when practiced in the universities, takes on-board several of these past critiques of reason, and mixes them with new scientific discoveries in quantum theory and psychology and which have attained widespread acceptance within our culture. The most important thing to note, is that post-modernism was a mass-movement before it was intellectualized by Foucault and Derrida, so it has gained more widespread acceptance than either the left or right is really aware of politically, and has been doing so since the late 1970's.

Even Alan Watts, a Zen convert and religious teacher, evinces tell-tale post-modern ideas which were at the time embryonic in the new age movement. Religious ideas are able to welcome science, but the aloof enlightenment concept of "reason" is the enemy of all religions equally (in fact this is because it is ultimately also just another unverifiable religious idea). Therefore, the imperative for the nascent new age movement was to directly confront the depth-less enlightenment understanding of man as an autonomous knowing subject endowed with reason. In the early post-war days Aldous Huxley furnished the first blow from within the left-wing intelligentsia with his various books on esoteric subjects and LSD trips, including the book, The Doors of Perception (1954). Also the Discordian movement in the same era began to attack the enlightenment idea of man with sarcasm rather than open critique, furnishing us with an early example of the ambiguous, sarcastic and absurd humor post-modernism is known for, and which flies in the face of the enlightenment concept of man. Unlike Burke or Evola, these first broadly post-modern attacks come from within, and at a time where the intellectual climate had become accepting of them.

So why, given this shift, would the left ever be able to hold sway for the next 200 years or more? The orthodox post-modern view that emotions, instincts, experience and intuitions are as valid as reason in terms of truth-content, that there is no hierarchy which elevates reason as the arbiter of truth and that truth can be cultural; is nothing more than a fig leaf for the feeble minded post-modern leftists behind which lies a call to tradition, monarchy, family and fatherland. Unlike the half-baked reactionary attempts under fascism in the early 20th century, which were forced to re-purpose socialist ideas to give them political legitimacy, the late 20th century left had been forced by the cultural climate to re-purpose the reactionary sentiments of the demos, which came to them under the guise of leftists like Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley, and Michel Foucault. The left just can't win in this environment, because they must hypocritically celebrate pluralism and culture, while trying to destroy the culture of the indigenous populations in white countries by fraud or force, and then arguing that we don't have a culture. If all the left can offer is a war over culture, the universities and urbanites are going to be repeatedly trounced. The post-modern right is just more coherent in calling for tradition, family and fatherland as bulwarks against chaos, than the left is in arguing that we should bring the whole world to our streets.