Arpad Virag – Eastern Europe and the Swine Right

Although I am the furthest thing from a Croatia/Balkan expert, all his observations strike me as true in… well, pretty much every country I have looked at (from the US, to France, to Germany, to Russia, intelligence favors liberalism and discriminates against nationalism), so I assume they are true in general.

Core theses:

Eastern Europe is already far more ruled by progressives (Blue Empire, Cathedral, Polygon, George Soros…) than most on the Right are willing to admit; The Left holds a monopoly on respectable intellectual positions partially because of the miserable state of the Right;

In support for #1:

How do Croats feel about gay marriage and LGBT rights? Nominally, they resist, but the gay pride parade in Zagreb is not only huge, but even the most fearless football hooligans were easily convinced not to give any resistance to the new wave of human rights. Everyone hip in Zagreb has a gay friend. … And how are the rest of the countries around doing? Guess . These are all individual, anecdotal evidence, dealing with only one small country – you may take them seriously or not, but don’t forget the good ol’ Moldbuggian wisdom – trends among the tiny elite is what shapes the future, not the bleating of millions of sheep. Tea Party movement is nonexistent today, while the editors of NYT aren’t exactly dealing with plummeting readership.

All of this is backed up by opinion polls.

One of my frequent arguments has been is that Eastern Europe was essentially kept in an ideological “freezer” for half a century under Communism. This opened the floodgates for the seepage of American soft power and values.

The coming decades there will basically involve a dynamic struggle between continued cultural Americanization, and resurgent nationalism based on observing the increasingly evident failure of the multiculturalism experiment in Western Europe.

In support for #2:

Definition of the Swine Right:

The rightist Swine is a nominally conservative type who is openly promoting traditional values such as God, homeland and family but in reality he’s a treacherous calculated Machiavellian type of low moral virtue, high time preference and low loyalty. The same way a leftist activist is constantly talking about the oppressed proletariat and while raising his own political power and enriching himself with other people’s money, the Swine of the Right is constantly talking about the virtue of raising a family, the depth of his faith and the love of his homeland, and at the same time using every possible opportunity to raise his political power and wealth in the most corrupt and criminal way possible, regardless of the consequence to the things he nominally holds dear. The Swine usually has very little manners, and behaves like a brute despite of his education. In short, The Swine is a swindler and a charlatan who successfully uses right wing rhetoric to expand his wealth and political power. In a way, he is either a communist apparatchik who successfully replaced the hammer and a sickle with the cross or the village brute who finds it very convenient to sit in the first row on a Sunday mass.

The author illustrates this behavior using a number of Croatian political figures, necessarily obscure to non-Croatians, but I think we all know their equivalents in our own countries

And even at the highest levels – Trump, Orban, Putin… one can’t deny that this describes all of them to at least some extent.

Imagine some smart college kid watching all this. On one hand, he sees The World League of Whores and Sodomites, but on the other fanged IQ90 swine who would gladly conscript him and have him die in trenches for a cause such as the glory of our national being, while their cousins are making millions selling weapons to the state. Some of them are lucky enough to be raised in an intellectually healthy environment and to see a possible alternative to progressive madness. However, a lot of them are simply not. If you’re a bookish guy from the countryside and came to the capital as a talented STEM student, there’s quite a large possibility that your new college friends are much nicer and much more intelligent than your village chief, parish priest or your high school history professor. The Left often paints a picture of the Swine as a rural brutish chief, a member of HDZ or HSP with a fake high school diploma who wants to push his son through some joke of a private college and in the local government, and arrange sweet deals for his best mate just happens to own a construction company. While that is not so far from the truth, his leftist counterpart differs only in speaking fluent English, having a liberal arts college diploma and arranging sweet deals for his friends in NGOs. One will be ripping buttons off his shirt while drinking brandy and listening to turbo-folk, while the other one will be sipping craft beers while swinging hips to Depeche Mode. As you may or may not notice from my description, the latter is much much more high status. And although the level of criminality is roughly equal, the latter type is a far smoother criminal. Some say we should simply apply the very well known leftist policy of no enemies to the left, no friends to the right – and they couldn’t be more wrong. Switching to no enemies to the right, is a classical fallacy of trying to imitate leftists policy (entropy) in order to create right wing results (order). After a couple of beers the other night, a thought about this occurred: the classical no enemies quote is referring to the political spectrum, however it’s much more applicable to the IQ distribution: no loyalty to the left, no enemies to the right sounds like a viable Machiavellian solution. You cannot make friends with IQ80 people, regardless of them being Stormfront or BLM, because their time preference is way too high. And you should not make enemies out of IQ140 people because they will see to it that IQ80 crowd can crush you, see you driven before them and hear the lamentation of your women. Loyalty requires both sides to cooperate.

But the Right’s human capital problem makes it very hard to attract the high IQ, which results in Swine leaders, which lowers the prestige associated with being on the Right, exacerbating the human capital problem even further, etc.

So here’s a terrible thought for ya – from the perspective of a young man in Eastern Europe who wants peace, prosperity and order, the rule of the Cathedral might be a healthy alternative to the powers surrounding him. As long as a significant part of the Right acts like the above mentioned Swine, the Left will be even more than secure in it’s picture of intellectual and moral superiority.

Which is why I’m pretty skeptical about nationalism’s prospects in the long-term.

Note that neoliberalism.txt is good at weathering shocks. There are still many, many decades before the West turns into some combination of Beirut and Port-au-Prince, even under the most pessimistic scenarios.