“The other side knows no compromise, and they aim to marginalize those who still represent the conservative cause. In the current political climate, the conservatives stand contra mundum. Two practical conclusions follow from this: first, the conservatives should not let the other side divide them and should try to form a solid international alliance; second, they must build conservative institutions sufficiently robust to survive the destructive offensives of the Left (something Poland's Law and Justice failed to do).”
I have concluded this decades ago and why I am an anti-Regime Trump supporter. Case in point.
‘’If we reduce intellectual and artistic differences to politics and partisanship – as it has been happening for some time now – then ultimately it is also political power, not truth or beauty, which settles every controversy.”
I have attempted to use this argument with my left friends that are artists and true intellectuals to no avail. Their totalitarian drift seems to be a personality/brain wiring construct that supersedes consideration of truth and fact for what better supports their very own condition. Frankly, I see them as flawed thinkers… people afflicted with a lack of intellectual honesty and little emotional self-control. I have come to the conclusion that democracy is flawed in that they are the very people unqualified to rule, but that so crave power to control others they end up exploiting democratic systems to secure power. The rest of us need to awaken to the NEED to defeat them at the ballot box and to ensure they don’t infiltrate and take over key institutions like education and the media.
We need to stop accepting the non-serious and absurd. We need to stop treating it as respectful and worthy of debate. We need to brand those that hold theses views as being in need of cognitive behavior therapy.
Lastly, I see this as a problem having so advanced society to female dominance. It has never happened in history. Vulnerable narcissism has exploded and it seems the primary explanation for the political and social chaos we all feel. The wrapping of their ideological absurdism and destruction in a feminine shroud causes too many of the rest of us owning traditional chivalrous tendencies to back down… especially with their effective media mob power to brand us as misogynists. I ignore that and repeat that I support complete gender equality so I will debate females as I would any male. We cannot allow this praying of a victim card while they passive-agressivly kill.
While I agree that today's liberalism is indistinguishable from progressivism I still object to conflating the two terms.
I'm more comfortable identifying this destructive ideology as progressivism rather than liberalism because there is much to be valued in the traditional old fashioned American liberalism of the 19th century. Unfortunately, subsequent American history has demonstrated that the only vestige left of that liberalism is today's libertarianism.
Whenever liberalism is rhetorically attacked from the non-libertarian right I always get a little uneasy. When the word 'liberal' is weaponized by self-identified conservatives as a slur it is frequently directed also against libertarians in an unscrupulous attempt to characterize libertarians as some kind of liberal fellow travelers.
This behavior should always be called out for what it is: right-wing authoritarian pandering. Of course, when correcting this kind of misleading rhetoric we should not turn it into an occasion for an ad homonym attack. We don't want to divide the anti-progressive right, but we need to stand up for ourselves and the correct use of language.
I have a problem equating progressivism with the modern left. The first progressive in terms of politics in the US was Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican. Progressivism that is pragmatic but visionary vs what our modern postmodernist globalist left and Democrats pursue is a different animal. I don't see their policy aims as progressive. I see them as fanciful and regressive.
Thomas Sowell's book A Conflict of Visions is a great read connecting the dots here. The Democrat side along with a shrinking minority of GOP establishment types, are wired to pursue top-down control, but are never qualified to make optimized decisions. They think they are The Elect, but they are actually some of the least competent to lead... but they crave that position. The key to democracy and this Great Experiment is the system that distributes decisions to the stakeholders... the citizens... and their representative government. It is supposed to be government by the people of the people and for the people, but it has turned into government by the ruling class, of the ruling class and for the ruling class.
The reason I see it as a Marxist drift is that that type of progressivism is never satisfied. It always seeks more power and control and thus it does not end until private property is acquired by the government and authoritarianism dominates until it is total in power.
Modern liberal progressives as we label them are really illiberal authoritarians that will keep pushing until the system is top-down controlled in total. And today they want to conceded that control and power to a global authority.
Right-wing authoritarianism if you want to call it that, at least the American style, except for a very small number of idiots, is only that of defense.... to make sure the rules of the system are such that these illiberal collectivist totalitarians don't get to subjugate us and erode our hard-won liberties. For example, Republicans do not support many restrictions on fee speech (i.e., the book bans) except that the system has been corrupted with toxic gender ideology in kid's books. You can make the point that the remedy is to compete with books that refute the information in the other books, but for the fact that the education system, including all the publishers, has been infiltrated to be controlled by the illiberal collectivist cultural Marxists who clearly admit in their Theory doctrine that everything is about power.
Yes, TR was a visionary who envisioned aggressive nationalism and Federal collectivism: labor laws, business regulation, antitrust laws, income tax, foreign neo-colonial wars, and feminism. Almost everything bad about America today can be traced back to the early Progressive Movement.
If I may say so, the error in your comment is that while you correctly despair of what America has turned into, why not connect the dots? Everything about rotten current America grew out logically from the early progressives. You wrote that "progressivism is never satisfied. It always seeks more power and control". Of course, I agree, which is why a little leftism like TR's cannot be a pragmatic concession. The leftism the early progressives brought us grew and grew into the present day oppressive professional managerial class.
As long as libertarians or right wing others keep saying that they approve of the so-called "reforms" of the progressive era they will not be able to make a persuasive argument.
I am being scrupulous here and not committing a slur, but libertarians are liberal fellow travelers, wittingly or not. Conservatives have consistently pointed out to libertarians that the "live and let live" mantra is a denial of natural law and that the slippery slope is real. For example, libertarians assured us that gay "marriage" was a harmless concession to gay activists. As predicted, it has lead to calls to normalize polygamy and to lower the age of consent. The LGBTQ+ activists have even surprised conservatives as they seem to have taken a ramp off the slippery slope and catapulted over the normalization of ephebophilia and hebephilia and gone straight to normalizing pedophilia with the graphic sexual content in books at school targeting pre-pubescents. Same story has been repeated with contraception leading to more abortions, slutty magazines leading to the objectification of women, etc.
We can disagree over labels--progressive, liberal, libertarian--but the best way to identify false teachers is by their fruits you will know them. Bitter fruits, indeed.
Might it not be more accurate to say that only some libertarians advocated same sex marriage? There is a spectrum of libertarianism. I agree with you that gay marriage was a mistake and a slippery slope that is leading to undesirable consequences.
I think you are on thin ice criticizing contraception. Do you really think that contraception leads to abortion? As for "slutty magazines", I agree that pornography is unhealthy, but there are behaviors that we may condemn and discourage while at the same time say that the government should not treat adults like children.
Mark, thank you for the measured response. Point taken on not all libertarians supported gay marriage. True of any “ism”.
As for contraception, please read Pope Paul VI’s encyclical, “Humanae Vitae”, from 1968. He called artificial birth control “intrinsically wrong” and then spelled out the slippery slope that would result. It’s an easy read, very direct, and incredibly prophetic.
Unfortunately, the culture war, of which libertarians are vocal supporters, has morphed the government from treating adults like children to treating children like adults.
Thanks for the reference Alan. I did read some of it, but I (as a non-Catholic) don't accept the basic premises of his argument. Here is a related question: should contraception be illegal? If not, why not?
Mark, seriously, if Paul VI’s premises are false, how was he able—56 years ago—to predict exactly what has unfolded in terms of the loss of dignity and respect for human life and the slaughter of millions of babies through abortion? Was he a shaman, a mystic, a fortune teller?
I think not. He was simply drawing on the nearly two millennia of Christian thought and insight into the nature of man.
Let’s just take contraception as one example. Natural family planning (NFP) has a higher rate of success than the pill of the 1960s and today. Progressives, liberals, libertarians or however we label them have made an idol, a false god, out of technology. There is and never will be a consequence free technology that plays god with human life. “Take this pill and you can enjoy uninhibited sex without fear of an unwanted pregnancy” has led to millions of unwanted pregnancies, out of wedlock births and abortions. It didn’t take a genius to anticipate that result.
Purely from a heath standpoint alone, the pill should have never been approved. Three generations of women have ingested toxic poisons into their reproductive systems starting as young as nine years old until they reach menopause in their 40s and 50s. There has been an explosion of uterine and cervical cancers per capita since the mass use of contraception began. Coincidence?
Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of Catholics had the same reaction to the encyclical as you did. The path of “risk-free” sex is so much more appealing than curbing our appetites. Even some of the most “liberal” elements in the social sciences agree that Paul VI was right and they were wrong.
As the Bible says, “Wisdom seems very harsh to the uninstructed.”
"I'm more comfortable identifying this destructive ideology as progressivism rather than liberalism because there is much to be valued in the traditional old fashioned American liberalism of the 19th century. "
Is it? Or was it just a stepping stone, precursor to this?
Was it also really better in itself from what preceded it?
I think you are correct that there were flaws in the American system from the beginning that set us up for later failure. Without the legal right of secession the states were destined to eventually loose all their powers to the Federal government. When I defended 19th century liberalism I was thinking of it as something of an antecedent of libertarianism, but you are correct that 19th century liberalism was not equivalent to modern libertarianism.
"We need to brand those that hold theses views as being in need of cognitive behavior therapy."
I agree with your conclusions but disagree with your solutiions. You are advocating exactly the same technique as your adversaries. You're another Age of Reason guy fumbling around in the Age of Kneeling Nancy.
We are most likely in a religious/spiritual war, not a material/intellectual war. They won that one years ago, probably with the French and American revolutions when the mercantile and intellectual classes overthrew the church and aristos; and introduced a new class, the bohemians, who subverted privilege, obligation, honor, custom and divine order. They are now bohemians with-a-career.
Having spent my youth in theatre companies and rock bands, I'm well qualified to discuss bohemians, and they are nothing like the managerial classes. If anything, they are libertarian -- a word which was conspicuous by its absence in this fascinating interview.
Yes, the absence of questions about a libertarian angle was notable, but perhaps the topic might have seemed exotic to a Polish intellectual. Ryszard Legutko is obviously supper smart and N.S. Lyons asked really excellent questions.
They unwittingly support the managerial class today. I think for the reasons that I mention... there is a connection to the educated elite that push these destructive luxury beliefs as both are highly emotive human processors. They are both fanciful in their thinking... not really pragmatic... art cannot be constrained with pragmatism if it is to be transformative. That is a problem for them in that the managerial class... the elites that run the world... if successful in their totalitarian march... make for a miserable existence for the artistic types.
I think back to Florence in the middle ages where it was the private managerial class that funded all the arts. But in that case the managerial class was the conservative side not the collectivist totalitarians.
"art cannot be constrained with pragmatism if it is to be transformative."
Good grief, man. The whole point of art is to aid in the manifestation of a god. That's pragmatic, isn't it?
"Florence in the middle ages where it was the private managerial class that funded all the arts"
Frank, you'd better go back to the drawing board. The church funded the arts, as did the aristocrats. Not only did the aristos and church fund, they told the artists what to make.
Frank, you are a textbook case of the conservative type who just doens't get it. You think "'art", whatever that is, is either decoration or entertainment. Or, you appear to think it "transforms" naive goofballs by pranging them with a magic want like in a bugs bunny cartoon, while pragamatic realists, such as yourself, grapple objectively with reality. LOL.
Like I said. You are living in a differenct age. That world is dying, if not dead.
No. The Medici family funded the arts in Florence. The bankers. The church was also funded by the bankers.
You are too weird for my thinking in your response about art and God. Creative types are creative types that may or may not focus their creativity on the supernatural divine or not. They have a right-brain dominance and capabilities in that capacity that the left-brain types cannot rise to. They are never well served by collectivist systems where the allowed art is only propaganda and compliance is demanded, not creativity. However, they seem to drift toward collectivism as their favored political system. Artists create their own tragic circumstances in this way... and maybe that is their needed cycle.
Well, let's just say 19th century bohemian culture migrated into the petit bourgeoisie. It adapted to their social imperatives, i.e., having a career. For example, the original bohemians had a fascination with blacks going back to Baudelaire. It continued with the Beats and The White Negro by the 1950s, courtesy of Norman Mailer. And then it went mainstream in the 60s with the counter culture. Those counter culture boomers became the establishment, as we know. It's weird. But it happened. Remember "don't trust anyone over 30?" LOL. The electon of Barak Husein was the crowning ascheivment. The grand climax, as it were.
Rock and roll idols are like Dionysian gods. Similar to Hollywood movie stars. The petit bourgeoisie bohemians identify with them, to use a modern term. In earlier times the stars would have been some sort of priest or shaman and the women Maenads.
Reasonable minds can disagree with the solutions. My problem is that we would have to accept the absurd to attempt to win the argument. I think that just mainstreams the absurd and incrementally marches us toward the collectivist hell they aim toward.
I think drawing a bright line is needed... even if it risks allowing extremists from the other side to gain some traction. Moderation does not seem to work as they have ideologically captured most of our institutions of influence and power.
Yes I agree, we unfortunately need to stop allowing them to use kindness as a weapon against us. James Lindsay said that they're evil in part because they take advantage of good people. They make this continually long list of things that are supposedly offensive and bad and use it as a sort of shield around themselves. Hysteria is one of their most potent weapons imo.
Thanks so much for publishing the interview with Professor Legutko; his analysis is sadly so true. The West has many bumpy years ahead. Niech żyje Polska!
If we had listened to the Poles and other Eastern Europeans for many centuries, and I’m thinking for example of the Council of Constance in 1414, much bloodshed and tragedy in Western Europe and the world would have been averted. I’ve always been puzzled by the curiously condescending attitude of Western Europeans to Eastern Europeans (I’m thinking especially of the Polish, Czechs, Hungarians and Ukrainians). It’s an unjustified position that cannot survive direct contact with the intellectually brilliant and spiritually profound thought and culture of Eastern Europe. We ignore their wisdom at our peril.
Very broadly speaking, the Council of Constance was called to unify the Catholic Church and end the schism of two (and then three) Popes. This unity was achieved in ways that were partly sinister and tragic. For example, the great reformer Jan Hus (who was Czech / Bohemian) was invited to address the Council under a safe passage guaranteed by the Holy Roman Emperor. In fact, the Emperor betrayed Huss, violated his oath, and Hus was imprisoned, tortured and burned at the stake on 6 July 1415, still in the early part of the 4 year Council. This postponed for a century the necessary reforms of the Catholic Church and instead the pressures and injustices built up so powerfully that they led to the great schism of the Reformation and the division of the Church into Catholic and Protestant.
The second great tragic decision was the rejection of the Polish position in relation to the war between the German Teutonic Knights (actually known as the Deutschen Orden The German Order) against the pagan Lithuianians (part of Poland). The Western Europeans argued that pagans could be killed just for being pagans. The Poles argued strongly against this and argued for the Christian values of kindness and tolerance. The Polish position was essentially ignored.
Ironically and tragically, the killing of European Christians (exemplified by the burning of the holy man and genius Jan Huss) was a logical consequence of the Western European position endorsed at the Council of Constance, once the concept "pagan" was updated with "heretic." If the Polish position of tolerance had been adopted the devastating and murderous religious wars that raged in Western Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries would not have happened.
I hope this helps. It's inevitably a very brief, condensed summary of very complex historical events.
Yes, more bad ideas in Western Europe (it happened in France). My point was that Western Europeans refused to listen to the Eastern Europeans and learn better ways from them.
Oh, yeah, the Cathars (Albigensians) had much better ideas than Western Europe--no sex, no meat, no water, kill the diplomats sent to negotiate. Billions of us wouldn't be here today if the Cathars had won. Klaus Schwab's dream come true!
I’m no fan of the Cathars but they were Western Europeans too, even if their ideas came from the Ottoman Empire. My point was that Eastern Europeans often had good solutions that were ignored by Western Europeans. It’s interesting to imagine how the Polish or the Hungarians would have dealt with the Cathars—perhaps very differently from each other!
You have only to look at the survival of the Russian Orthodox Church, and Polish Catholicism, after decades of communist suppression, to see that traditions can outlive short-lived revolutions.
This is an incredibly long essay. For normal mortars who are not retired yet could there be an introductory abstract/summary on what are findings/conclusions?
What is this price? I honestly want to know the aim. What is the end goal for the masses?
Also, I wonder how many of these managerial elite know they will be used until power is so concentrated they will be burned at the stake, so to say. I'd bet many who think they are elite now will wish to be as far away from the tyrants as possible if they get their way. And in short order.
Thank you for discussing Legutko, and for interviewing him. He has far greater depth to him than most who are engaged in these issues. The intellectual integrity that it took Legutko, as someone who confronted actually existing Communism in his own life, to nonetheless conceive of the flaws in Liberalism -- which most intellectuals in such societies saw as the truth which would set them free -- is exemplary. One thinks of Solzhenitsyn as an intellectual parallel.
Political leaders like Orban and Fico, and further afield with Putin and Xi, resist portions of what Legutko concedes, in his best-known work, to be the common core of Modernity that is shared by both Liberalism and Communism. This resistance would seem to be the "conservatism" that Legutko references throughout the interview. But what is the goal of such selective resistance? What is its internal consistency? As he acknowledges in his book, the demon in democracy will not be exorcised until Modernity passes away, and is replaced by a better set of beliefs. What purpose, then, in focusing on political action within the context of EU institutions, or their analogues elsewhere?
If you're fighting a delaying action in the face of a superior force, what is the objective? If you aren't covering someone else's maneuver -- or their withdrawal -- your efforts are futile. If the delaying force is covering a maneuver, well, then, let's wargame that concept of operations. If a withdrawal, then we must determine the terrain to which we are falling back. And if our backs are to the sea, then we'd better start building some boats.
If, on the other hand, our assessment is that in the long term, the enemy force cannot sustain itself, then perhaps we would be well advised to refrain from prolonged engagements -- which fix us in place to be targeted and defeated in detail. We should even be willing to consider partisan tactics and la guerrilla. Sometimes these are the subtlety by which the weak overcome the strong.
It would seem that Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Greece, today Poland, perhaps eventually Hungary and Russia, show us the end of the opposite course.
Legutko's words "Today’s liberalism has already identified far more enemies and thought crimes than the communists did" are striking or perhaps staggering is a better descriptor. If last week's State of the Union is any indicator, we are there America, we are there...
I'm going to re-read The Demon In Democracy. I had forgotten this phrase: "... our awareness that we were always surrounded by non-reality, i.e., artifacts fabricated by the propaganda machine, whose aim was to prevent us from seeing reality as it was." This precisely describes the cultural atmosphere in the US. It started long ago of course. Think of billboards. We have no TV, we limit the internet, we homeschool; my children found out about "LGBT" and "racism", among other non-reality phenomena, from billboards put up by the city (!) celebrating / denouncing them. There is no escaping it. We must just defend what we have. I was heartened to read a recent article from Chris Rufo in City Journal about his determination to create a "miniature world" for his children. That's what we are doing, too, way down south. To hell with people who decry "living in a bubble." Better to live in a bubble of reality than in a big, borderless world of non-reality!
Very interesting, i'm definitely going to have to read this guys books.
I liked how torn he was between optimism and pessimism. I feel the same. Often more pessimistic though; to me it's like how do you not see what's happening and be totally opposed to it, and conclude that you have to support Trump and those like him to counter it? I suppose the answer might be that they're watching 'state media' in essence, who do not allow them to see other arguments from their own.
Thanks for this.
“The other side knows no compromise, and they aim to marginalize those who still represent the conservative cause. In the current political climate, the conservatives stand contra mundum. Two practical conclusions follow from this: first, the conservatives should not let the other side divide them and should try to form a solid international alliance; second, they must build conservative institutions sufficiently robust to survive the destructive offensives of the Left (something Poland's Law and Justice failed to do).”
I have concluded this decades ago and why I am an anti-Regime Trump supporter. Case in point.
‘’If we reduce intellectual and artistic differences to politics and partisanship – as it has been happening for some time now – then ultimately it is also political power, not truth or beauty, which settles every controversy.”
I have attempted to use this argument with my left friends that are artists and true intellectuals to no avail. Their totalitarian drift seems to be a personality/brain wiring construct that supersedes consideration of truth and fact for what better supports their very own condition. Frankly, I see them as flawed thinkers… people afflicted with a lack of intellectual honesty and little emotional self-control. I have come to the conclusion that democracy is flawed in that they are the very people unqualified to rule, but that so crave power to control others they end up exploiting democratic systems to secure power. The rest of us need to awaken to the NEED to defeat them at the ballot box and to ensure they don’t infiltrate and take over key institutions like education and the media.
We need to stop accepting the non-serious and absurd. We need to stop treating it as respectful and worthy of debate. We need to brand those that hold theses views as being in need of cognitive behavior therapy.
Lastly, I see this as a problem having so advanced society to female dominance. It has never happened in history. Vulnerable narcissism has exploded and it seems the primary explanation for the political and social chaos we all feel. The wrapping of their ideological absurdism and destruction in a feminine shroud causes too many of the rest of us owning traditional chivalrous tendencies to back down… especially with their effective media mob power to brand us as misogynists. I ignore that and repeat that I support complete gender equality so I will debate females as I would any male. We cannot allow this praying of a victim card while they passive-agressivly kill.
While I agree that today's liberalism is indistinguishable from progressivism I still object to conflating the two terms.
I'm more comfortable identifying this destructive ideology as progressivism rather than liberalism because there is much to be valued in the traditional old fashioned American liberalism of the 19th century. Unfortunately, subsequent American history has demonstrated that the only vestige left of that liberalism is today's libertarianism.
Whenever liberalism is rhetorically attacked from the non-libertarian right I always get a little uneasy. When the word 'liberal' is weaponized by self-identified conservatives as a slur it is frequently directed also against libertarians in an unscrupulous attempt to characterize libertarians as some kind of liberal fellow travelers.
This behavior should always be called out for what it is: right-wing authoritarian pandering. Of course, when correcting this kind of misleading rhetoric we should not turn it into an occasion for an ad homonym attack. We don't want to divide the anti-progressive right, but we need to stand up for ourselves and the correct use of language.
I have a problem equating progressivism with the modern left. The first progressive in terms of politics in the US was Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican. Progressivism that is pragmatic but visionary vs what our modern postmodernist globalist left and Democrats pursue is a different animal. I don't see their policy aims as progressive. I see them as fanciful and regressive.
Thomas Sowell's book A Conflict of Visions is a great read connecting the dots here. The Democrat side along with a shrinking minority of GOP establishment types, are wired to pursue top-down control, but are never qualified to make optimized decisions. They think they are The Elect, but they are actually some of the least competent to lead... but they crave that position. The key to democracy and this Great Experiment is the system that distributes decisions to the stakeholders... the citizens... and their representative government. It is supposed to be government by the people of the people and for the people, but it has turned into government by the ruling class, of the ruling class and for the ruling class.
The reason I see it as a Marxist drift is that that type of progressivism is never satisfied. It always seeks more power and control and thus it does not end until private property is acquired by the government and authoritarianism dominates until it is total in power.
Modern liberal progressives as we label them are really illiberal authoritarians that will keep pushing until the system is top-down controlled in total. And today they want to conceded that control and power to a global authority.
Right-wing authoritarianism if you want to call it that, at least the American style, except for a very small number of idiots, is only that of defense.... to make sure the rules of the system are such that these illiberal collectivist totalitarians don't get to subjugate us and erode our hard-won liberties. For example, Republicans do not support many restrictions on fee speech (i.e., the book bans) except that the system has been corrupted with toxic gender ideology in kid's books. You can make the point that the remedy is to compete with books that refute the information in the other books, but for the fact that the education system, including all the publishers, has been infiltrated to be controlled by the illiberal collectivist cultural Marxists who clearly admit in their Theory doctrine that everything is about power.
Yes, TR was a visionary who envisioned aggressive nationalism and Federal collectivism: labor laws, business regulation, antitrust laws, income tax, foreign neo-colonial wars, and feminism. Almost everything bad about America today can be traced back to the early Progressive Movement.
If I may say so, the error in your comment is that while you correctly despair of what America has turned into, why not connect the dots? Everything about rotten current America grew out logically from the early progressives. You wrote that "progressivism is never satisfied. It always seeks more power and control". Of course, I agree, which is why a little leftism like TR's cannot be a pragmatic concession. The leftism the early progressives brought us grew and grew into the present day oppressive professional managerial class.
As long as libertarians or right wing others keep saying that they approve of the so-called "reforms" of the progressive era they will not be able to make a persuasive argument.
I am being scrupulous here and not committing a slur, but libertarians are liberal fellow travelers, wittingly or not. Conservatives have consistently pointed out to libertarians that the "live and let live" mantra is a denial of natural law and that the slippery slope is real. For example, libertarians assured us that gay "marriage" was a harmless concession to gay activists. As predicted, it has lead to calls to normalize polygamy and to lower the age of consent. The LGBTQ+ activists have even surprised conservatives as they seem to have taken a ramp off the slippery slope and catapulted over the normalization of ephebophilia and hebephilia and gone straight to normalizing pedophilia with the graphic sexual content in books at school targeting pre-pubescents. Same story has been repeated with contraception leading to more abortions, slutty magazines leading to the objectification of women, etc.
We can disagree over labels--progressive, liberal, libertarian--but the best way to identify false teachers is by their fruits you will know them. Bitter fruits, indeed.
Might it not be more accurate to say that only some libertarians advocated same sex marriage? There is a spectrum of libertarianism. I agree with you that gay marriage was a mistake and a slippery slope that is leading to undesirable consequences.
I think you are on thin ice criticizing contraception. Do you really think that contraception leads to abortion? As for "slutty magazines", I agree that pornography is unhealthy, but there are behaviors that we may condemn and discourage while at the same time say that the government should not treat adults like children.
Mark, thank you for the measured response. Point taken on not all libertarians supported gay marriage. True of any “ism”.
As for contraception, please read Pope Paul VI’s encyclical, “Humanae Vitae”, from 1968. He called artificial birth control “intrinsically wrong” and then spelled out the slippery slope that would result. It’s an easy read, very direct, and incredibly prophetic.
Unfortunately, the culture war, of which libertarians are vocal supporters, has morphed the government from treating adults like children to treating children like adults.
Thanks for the reference Alan. I did read some of it, but I (as a non-Catholic) don't accept the basic premises of his argument. Here is a related question: should contraception be illegal? If not, why not?
Mark, seriously, if Paul VI’s premises are false, how was he able—56 years ago—to predict exactly what has unfolded in terms of the loss of dignity and respect for human life and the slaughter of millions of babies through abortion? Was he a shaman, a mystic, a fortune teller?
I think not. He was simply drawing on the nearly two millennia of Christian thought and insight into the nature of man.
Let’s just take contraception as one example. Natural family planning (NFP) has a higher rate of success than the pill of the 1960s and today. Progressives, liberals, libertarians or however we label them have made an idol, a false god, out of technology. There is and never will be a consequence free technology that plays god with human life. “Take this pill and you can enjoy uninhibited sex without fear of an unwanted pregnancy” has led to millions of unwanted pregnancies, out of wedlock births and abortions. It didn’t take a genius to anticipate that result.
Purely from a heath standpoint alone, the pill should have never been approved. Three generations of women have ingested toxic poisons into their reproductive systems starting as young as nine years old until they reach menopause in their 40s and 50s. There has been an explosion of uterine and cervical cancers per capita since the mass use of contraception began. Coincidence?
Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of Catholics had the same reaction to the encyclical as you did. The path of “risk-free” sex is so much more appealing than curbing our appetites. Even some of the most “liberal” elements in the social sciences agree that Paul VI was right and they were wrong.
As the Bible says, “Wisdom seems very harsh to the uninstructed.”
"I'm more comfortable identifying this destructive ideology as progressivism rather than liberalism because there is much to be valued in the traditional old fashioned American liberalism of the 19th century. "
Is it? Or was it just a stepping stone, precursor to this?
Was it also really better in itself from what preceded it?
I think you are correct that there were flaws in the American system from the beginning that set us up for later failure. Without the legal right of secession the states were destined to eventually loose all their powers to the Federal government. When I defended 19th century liberalism I was thinking of it as something of an antecedent of libertarianism, but you are correct that 19th century liberalism was not equivalent to modern libertarianism.
"We need to brand those that hold theses views as being in need of cognitive behavior therapy."
I agree with your conclusions but disagree with your solutiions. You are advocating exactly the same technique as your adversaries. You're another Age of Reason guy fumbling around in the Age of Kneeling Nancy.
We are most likely in a religious/spiritual war, not a material/intellectual war. They won that one years ago, probably with the French and American revolutions when the mercantile and intellectual classes overthrew the church and aristos; and introduced a new class, the bohemians, who subverted privilege, obligation, honor, custom and divine order. They are now bohemians with-a-career.
Having spent my youth in theatre companies and rock bands, I'm well qualified to discuss bohemians, and they are nothing like the managerial classes. If anything, they are libertarian -- a word which was conspicuous by its absence in this fascinating interview.
Yes, the absence of questions about a libertarian angle was notable, but perhaps the topic might have seemed exotic to a Polish intellectual. Ryszard Legutko is obviously supper smart and N.S. Lyons asked really excellent questions.
They unwittingly support the managerial class today. I think for the reasons that I mention... there is a connection to the educated elite that push these destructive luxury beliefs as both are highly emotive human processors. They are both fanciful in their thinking... not really pragmatic... art cannot be constrained with pragmatism if it is to be transformative. That is a problem for them in that the managerial class... the elites that run the world... if successful in their totalitarian march... make for a miserable existence for the artistic types.
I think back to Florence in the middle ages where it was the private managerial class that funded all the arts. But in that case the managerial class was the conservative side not the collectivist totalitarians.
"art cannot be constrained with pragmatism if it is to be transformative."
Good grief, man. The whole point of art is to aid in the manifestation of a god. That's pragmatic, isn't it?
"Florence in the middle ages where it was the private managerial class that funded all the arts"
Frank, you'd better go back to the drawing board. The church funded the arts, as did the aristocrats. Not only did the aristos and church fund, they told the artists what to make.
Frank, you are a textbook case of the conservative type who just doens't get it. You think "'art", whatever that is, is either decoration or entertainment. Or, you appear to think it "transforms" naive goofballs by pranging them with a magic want like in a bugs bunny cartoon, while pragamatic realists, such as yourself, grapple objectively with reality. LOL.
Like I said. You are living in a differenct age. That world is dying, if not dead.
No. The Medici family funded the arts in Florence. The bankers. The church was also funded by the bankers.
You are too weird for my thinking in your response about art and God. Creative types are creative types that may or may not focus their creativity on the supernatural divine or not. They have a right-brain dominance and capabilities in that capacity that the left-brain types cannot rise to. They are never well served by collectivist systems where the allowed art is only propaganda and compliance is demanded, not creativity. However, they seem to drift toward collectivism as their favored political system. Artists create their own tragic circumstances in this way... and maybe that is their needed cycle.
The Medici's beieved in divine order. Modern mercantile types believe in nothing at all, other than their careers.
Frank, you ought to stick to what narrow technical fields you know.
" However, they seem to drift toward collectivism as their favored political system"
Frank, artists go where thd money is, whether it be the state, corporations or individual patrons.
Well, let's just say 19th century bohemian culture migrated into the petit bourgeoisie. It adapted to their social imperatives, i.e., having a career. For example, the original bohemians had a fascination with blacks going back to Baudelaire. It continued with the Beats and The White Negro by the 1950s, courtesy of Norman Mailer. And then it went mainstream in the 60s with the counter culture. Those counter culture boomers became the establishment, as we know. It's weird. But it happened. Remember "don't trust anyone over 30?" LOL. The electon of Barak Husein was the crowning ascheivment. The grand climax, as it were.
Rock and roll idols are like Dionysian gods. Similar to Hollywood movie stars. The petit bourgeoisie bohemians identify with them, to use a modern term. In earlier times the stars would have been some sort of priest or shaman and the women Maenads.
Reasonable minds can disagree with the solutions. My problem is that we would have to accept the absurd to attempt to win the argument. I think that just mainstreams the absurd and incrementally marches us toward the collectivist hell they aim toward.
I think drawing a bright line is needed... even if it risks allowing extremists from the other side to gain some traction. Moderation does not seem to work as they have ideologically captured most of our institutions of influence and power.
Yes I agree, we unfortunately need to stop allowing them to use kindness as a weapon against us. James Lindsay said that they're evil in part because they take advantage of good people. They make this continually long list of things that are supposedly offensive and bad and use it as a sort of shield around themselves. Hysteria is one of their most potent weapons imo.
Thanks so much for publishing the interview with Professor Legutko; his analysis is sadly so true. The West has many bumpy years ahead. Niech żyje Polska!
If we had listened to the Poles and other Eastern Europeans for many centuries, and I’m thinking for example of the Council of Constance in 1414, much bloodshed and tragedy in Western Europe and the world would have been averted. I’ve always been puzzled by the curiously condescending attitude of Western Europeans to Eastern Europeans (I’m thinking especially of the Polish, Czechs, Hungarians and Ukrainians). It’s an unjustified position that cannot survive direct contact with the intellectually brilliant and spiritually profound thought and culture of Eastern Europe. We ignore their wisdom at our peril.
Chris, tell us more about the Council of Constance and implications of listening to the Council.
Very broadly speaking, the Council of Constance was called to unify the Catholic Church and end the schism of two (and then three) Popes. This unity was achieved in ways that were partly sinister and tragic. For example, the great reformer Jan Hus (who was Czech / Bohemian) was invited to address the Council under a safe passage guaranteed by the Holy Roman Emperor. In fact, the Emperor betrayed Huss, violated his oath, and Hus was imprisoned, tortured and burned at the stake on 6 July 1415, still in the early part of the 4 year Council. This postponed for a century the necessary reforms of the Catholic Church and instead the pressures and injustices built up so powerfully that they led to the great schism of the Reformation and the division of the Church into Catholic and Protestant.
The second great tragic decision was the rejection of the Polish position in relation to the war between the German Teutonic Knights (actually known as the Deutschen Orden The German Order) against the pagan Lithuianians (part of Poland). The Western Europeans argued that pagans could be killed just for being pagans. The Poles argued strongly against this and argued for the Christian values of kindness and tolerance. The Polish position was essentially ignored.
Ironically and tragically, the killing of European Christians (exemplified by the burning of the holy man and genius Jan Huss) was a logical consequence of the Western European position endorsed at the Council of Constance, once the concept "pagan" was updated with "heretic." If the Polish position of tolerance had been adopted the devastating and murderous religious wars that raged in Western Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries would not have happened.
I hope this helps. It's inevitably a very brief, condensed summary of very complex historical events.
Thanks! Indeed, though, killing heretics predated that Council, e.g. the Albigensian Crusade.
Yes, more bad ideas in Western Europe (it happened in France). My point was that Western Europeans refused to listen to the Eastern Europeans and learn better ways from them.
Oh, yeah, the Cathars (Albigensians) had much better ideas than Western Europe--no sex, no meat, no water, kill the diplomats sent to negotiate. Billions of us wouldn't be here today if the Cathars had won. Klaus Schwab's dream come true!
I’m no fan of the Cathars but they were Western Europeans too, even if their ideas came from the Ottoman Empire. My point was that Eastern Europeans often had good solutions that were ignored by Western Europeans. It’s interesting to imagine how the Polish or the Hungarians would have dealt with the Cathars—perhaps very differently from each other!
The persistence of the traditional is our best hope.
You have only to look at the survival of the Russian Orthodox Church, and Polish Catholicism, after decades of communist suppression, to see that traditions can outlive short-lived revolutions.
This post should be read together with Matt Taibbi's latest, at https://www.racket.news/p/the-dumbest-cover-story-ever .
This is an incredibly long essay. For normal mortars who are not retired yet could there be an introductory abstract/summary on what are findings/conclusions?
For whom is this booklet really written?
;-))
"Nor the price they must pay for it"
What is this price? I honestly want to know the aim. What is the end goal for the masses?
Also, I wonder how many of these managerial elite know they will be used until power is so concentrated they will be burned at the stake, so to say. I'd bet many who think they are elite now will wish to be as far away from the tyrants as possible if they get their way. And in short order.
Thank you for discussing Legutko, and for interviewing him. He has far greater depth to him than most who are engaged in these issues. The intellectual integrity that it took Legutko, as someone who confronted actually existing Communism in his own life, to nonetheless conceive of the flaws in Liberalism -- which most intellectuals in such societies saw as the truth which would set them free -- is exemplary. One thinks of Solzhenitsyn as an intellectual parallel.
Political leaders like Orban and Fico, and further afield with Putin and Xi, resist portions of what Legutko concedes, in his best-known work, to be the common core of Modernity that is shared by both Liberalism and Communism. This resistance would seem to be the "conservatism" that Legutko references throughout the interview. But what is the goal of such selective resistance? What is its internal consistency? As he acknowledges in his book, the demon in democracy will not be exorcised until Modernity passes away, and is replaced by a better set of beliefs. What purpose, then, in focusing on political action within the context of EU institutions, or their analogues elsewhere?
If you're fighting a delaying action in the face of a superior force, what is the objective? If you aren't covering someone else's maneuver -- or their withdrawal -- your efforts are futile. If the delaying force is covering a maneuver, well, then, let's wargame that concept of operations. If a withdrawal, then we must determine the terrain to which we are falling back. And if our backs are to the sea, then we'd better start building some boats.
If, on the other hand, our assessment is that in the long term, the enemy force cannot sustain itself, then perhaps we would be well advised to refrain from prolonged engagements -- which fix us in place to be targeted and defeated in detail. We should even be willing to consider partisan tactics and la guerrilla. Sometimes these are the subtlety by which the weak overcome the strong.
It would seem that Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Greece, today Poland, perhaps eventually Hungary and Russia, show us the end of the opposite course.
Legutko's words "Today’s liberalism has already identified far more enemies and thought crimes than the communists did" are striking or perhaps staggering is a better descriptor. If last week's State of the Union is any indicator, we are there America, we are there...
I'm going to re-read The Demon In Democracy. I had forgotten this phrase: "... our awareness that we were always surrounded by non-reality, i.e., artifacts fabricated by the propaganda machine, whose aim was to prevent us from seeing reality as it was." This precisely describes the cultural atmosphere in the US. It started long ago of course. Think of billboards. We have no TV, we limit the internet, we homeschool; my children found out about "LGBT" and "racism", among other non-reality phenomena, from billboards put up by the city (!) celebrating / denouncing them. There is no escaping it. We must just defend what we have. I was heartened to read a recent article from Chris Rufo in City Journal about his determination to create a "miniature world" for his children. That's what we are doing, too, way down south. To hell with people who decry "living in a bubble." Better to live in a bubble of reality than in a big, borderless world of non-reality!
Very interesting, i'm definitely going to have to read this guys books.
I liked how torn he was between optimism and pessimism. I feel the same. Often more pessimistic though; to me it's like how do you not see what's happening and be totally opposed to it, and conclude that you have to support Trump and those like him to counter it? I suppose the answer might be that they're watching 'state media' in essence, who do not allow them to see other arguments from their own.