A Strong Delusion

Because it is ideologically ill-disposed to understand the motives that inform human nature, socialism's grasp of the human sciences is mortally flawed. Thus, politics, culture, history, and economics are viewed through a warped prism that distorts the full depth of reality. But even though it is an audaciously evangelical worldview that seeks to mold and explain the totality of the entire human condition using solely materialist terms, the socialist model is surprisingly resilient to critique. To be sure, to the Left it has attained the quality of a secular faith, and the altruistic moral philosophy undergirding the science of the collective is deemed untouchable. Yea, even while its stunning failures invariably bring down governments and consign its critics to either public humiliation or re-education camps for the commission of its own peculiar vintage of blasphemy, its penchant to evoke fanaticism remains unabated. For this catechism of flesh, which has shut the skies to supplication, the only entreaty left to political man is the golden calf of the Universal Homogenous State. Had socialism’s prime article of faith, “The Heavenly City wrestled down to Earth,” not appealed to the transcendent longing in man for a temporal version of celestial happiness, it would have no doubt gone the way of all failed political schemes. But the rebel heart’s rejection of God carries with it deep rooted consequences, since the ever-desiring soul cannot abide the yawning vacuum of the moral-political sphere being scrubbed free of perfection’s lofty arc. Therefore, the yearning heart will rationalize each and every socialist failure as the cruel conspiracy of a wicked adversary or by reasoning that socialism had not travelled far enough in its earnest endeavor at jump-starting mankind’s moral evolution. If mistakes were made, they were due to half-measures; and if the full draught of humanist science had been applied with the firm and merciless hand of surgical precision, the malleable human animal could redeem its nature and reign as gods. As all true believers will attest to, each expulsion from the Garden requires a redoubled effort for the serpent to impose its will upon those dwelling in the bliss of ignorance.

It is against this backdrop that one might seek to understand the shock of the populist November Revolution and how it has wounded the Marxian-Hegelian historical eschatology. The standard narrative informing the Progressive worldview predicts that the foreordained End of History will usher in a storehouse of freedoms by virtue of the State’s evolving benevolence. When its enemies of reaction are broken, the outcome of the final dialectical struggle will breathe life into a redeemed human nature. Having been healed of all vestiges of its false consciousness and alienation, the people of the earth will finally pass beyond the birth bangs of good and evil. During this great millenarian chrysalis, the withering away of contentious philosophy that spawned every bloody political crusade will culminate in the reconciliation of man to his brethren. In this humanist gospel, the world returns to one accord, as mankind merits the Garden by virtue of his own heavy lifting. How unfortunate for the faithful, however, that the unfolding of recent events in both Europe and America have stricken the prophesy, as the intelligentsia of the West have been stupefied by a perverse retrograde force boiling in the minds of men. Indeed, this supposed irresistible Will to Globalism has found itself upended by the rough and unshaven masses whose “narrow” interests are distanced from the enlightened quest for a new world ecumenical order. Like hordes of mice, they have nibbled through the bowstrings of mighty Assyria as the nationalist contagion spreads – threatening to pull down every ivory tower of those who would be the Masters of Men. Cocooned within the reverb chamber of Progressive orthodoxy, the Left stands aghast at the grubby dissenters of utopia occupying Middle America: those counter-revolutionaries spiking the vision by hacking away at the augured City of Man. Having long ago initiated cultural civil war, the Clintonistas marvel not so much that they are engaged in battle, but that they, having full access to the wealth and agitprop of the status quo, were taken down on their own terms by squalid faceless creatures whose trailer park convictions should have been drowned in the waters of superior reason. But like Moses in the bulrushes, Providence intervenes and liberty often escapes, bringing with it unseen consequences. It is a living truth that many people who conduct their lives in the maw of The Great Blue do not come into significant contact with men or women who possess a different viewpoint on politics and culture. They know of no real in-the-flesh opposition and their understanding of the Constitution is corrupted by ten thousand half-truths before they reach the voting age. The Right, conversely, must continually resist being baptized in the smug secular acid baths of popular culture. We, by default, swim in it if we are in any way at all engaged in: its entertainments, its”news”, and its educational/indoctrination systems. We would be liars if we claimed that these temples of elite culture were not dismissive and antagonistic to our traditional constitutionalism and morality. The forces countering the Left (I do not say that they are conservative) prevailed because their adversaries set up a caricature of the Right as a strawman to tilt swords against -- all from the safe space of their own cardboard strongholds. Their champion wielded a sword dripping with more of her own blood than that of her enemy. As one of the most detestable candidates in American history, the Democratic party outfitted her in its own porous armor, the same armor worn by their previous Golden Child. It proved insufficient for the task at hand and was rejected (at the time that I am writing) if not by a plurality of Americans, then by an aggregate of them. Conversely, if those of the Right have attained a clear understanding of radical motives and agendas, it is because we are bombarded with them on a daily basis and have tangibly witnessed the eroding of our political position over real time by executive fiat. If the Left has been gut-punched and are now reeling in incredulity at what has occurred, it is because the foundations of their politics and the strength of their relative positions were deeply embellished and motivated more from wishful thinking than from a sound understanding of what a moral-political tidal wave coming from Main Street could do. To their enduring horror, it all turned out to be the populist blowback par excellence - historically more stunning than even 1980. In the end, the whorish media brought forth strong delusion, and its acolytes believed its lie. And finally, an answer to the “Progressive,” whose white-hot venom lays charge that America’s future has somehow been snatched away by those illegitimate Huns of Reaction: If we are reactionary, then it is because we are responding to an assault on our republic's first principles, and you are now mournfully surprised that we would not roll over and hand you our national birthright without a fight. Your protests do not arise from our attack upon your liberties, but from your own bad faith over a heated contest where your thumb was on the scale and you pressed home every advantage, including the considerable propaganda organs of the expansive state. You will find that our resolve is ever firm, and that we possess the means to secure our rights -- both from the rule of law and from the right of self-preservation that flows from the God of Nature or Nature's God. Should you proceed with your violent tantrum to take by force what was won in fair engagement, you have no idea the resources that we can bring to bear, if necessity bids us, to rise up and smite you down. Glenn Fairman writes from Highland, Ca. He can be contacted at arete5000@dslextreme.com and followed at www.stubbornthings.org.