Leftism Does Not Mean Weakness
Admiral Rachel Levine, from his USA Today 'Woman Of The Year' clip. Reader asks: if leftism is so weak, how come it keeps winning?
Article by Rod Dreher in The American Conservative
Leftism Does Not Mean Weakness
A characteristically interesting and provocative comment from Matt in VA, left on the West, Still Declining comments thread:
One of the mistakes that American conservatives make most often and most consistently is confusing liberalism and leftism with weakness. That conservatives continue to make this mistake over and over again even when liberals are grinding them into the dust and tossing them in the ashcan of history just shows how important it is to conservatives, how it undergirds their entire worldview, to believe this, I would say, very un-Christian idea that right makes might.
Even today in the year of our Lord 2022, when small minorities like gays have stomped sexually traditional American Christians in to the ground politically, we get these assertions that a nonbinary and trans army is a weak and feeble army, that pajama boy leftists are pushovers, etc. We also see claims that “traditional” rural and exurban communities are safe and Orderly, while liberal/Democratic areas are unsafe, with the implication being that the people of those areas are too weak or compromised to create conditions of order.
But something that I have seen borne out for my whole life is that liberalism and leftism are stronger than conservatism and traditionalism, and generally win any contest, at least sooner or later. One *must* abandon this idea that the correct or the truer Way is the stronger way, at least in this life. The conservative or traditional position on the purpose of marriage may be the best one, the most honest, the most tested, the most rational and the most beautiful, but like many beautiful things, it is quite delicate in itself as a *force* in our world. The degree to which it must be shored up, promoted, protected, ingrained in children nearly from birth, normalized, etc is quite astonishing. Yet conservatives seem to have this impression that such ideas or values can “win in the marketplace of ideas” simply by being baldly stated over and over, without any sort of real power or force being brought to bear, when all of the venal worldly benefits and sticks and carrots are on the other side.
The US military could devote fully 40% of its training to inculcating the deconstruction of the gender binary and the promotion of Kendian anti-racism, and it would not necessarily make the military “weak,” not so long as America continued to have the incredible amounts of $$$ it has. Now, I know, movement conservatives will reply that we have all this money because we have the best values (free enterprise, free trade, freedom to do business), and so our hugely dominant financial position demonstrates our moral superiority. This really is how movement conservatives think! The line in the Bible about camels passing through needles’ eyes is one that American conservative Christians just absolutely have no interest in whatsoever even as they accuse liberal Christians of being selective in their readings of the Gospels. But the reality is that atomizing, commodifying, annihilating consumer capitalism, or whatever you want to call it, leads to worldly power that few can resist, and that power is *real*, and it is certainly not Christian, nor is it “rational” in a secular sense, to continue to insist on this idea that that sort of worldly power is really “weakness.”
Conservatives are very attached, emotionally attached, to the idea that their values are the values of strength, manliness, forthrightness, the John Wayne values. They are attached to the values of the frontier, the sphere in which every man may need to be the law unto themselves; they are attached to the values of a space in which women are not a serious or viable force. Thus we see the *incredible* weakness of conservatives: they have NO skills or abilities to resist forms of power or aggression or coercion that, absent from frontier conditions, are nevertheless very present in the city/in civilization. What might work in frontier conditions will not work in conditions of domestication or in conditions where the space in which one moves is *owned.*
The world in which one operates, if one is a wolf, is very different from the world in which one operates, if one is a domesticated dog. The wolf’s life may be nasty, brutish, and short, and the domesticated dog’s life may be significantly longer and significantly easier, but there is an entire transmutation and reversal of all values (so to speak) here — is what the domesticated dog has obtained worth what has been lost? The conservative looks at the wolf, and compares it to the French bulldog, and says, here is no contest at all. But if enough French bulldogs are harmed, and their owners pass a law legalizing the shooting of wolves from aircraft, traps, homing devices so that the wolf dens can be found and the wolf pups massacred, etc., perhaps in fact it is no contest at all, in the other direction. Perhaps another way of putting this is that the conservative still believes in the “silent majority” and thinks he has the masses on his side. There so often seems to be little or no understanding of what it means when you cannot count on that or assume that, when you have to operate in a hostile information environment or under a *regime* that is hostile. Again, this fantasy that the values and tactics of the frontier are the only applicable or important ones; but this just does not pertain most of the time for most people.
I am very convinced by arguments that the West is in moral and — especially — aesthetic decline, but over and over again I see conservatives taking this intellectual shortcut or falling into this intellectual trap and asserting that that means the West is *weak* or about to collapse or at least to falter, and I do not see that at all. Moral and aesthetic decline, increasing dishonesty and vapidity, etc., do not mean worldly power is about to drop or disappear. Where on earth is it promised that right will make might? Don’t people understand the self-flattery and indulgent thinking that is amply demonstrated by the idea that the United States is rich and powerful due to having the right beliefs and values and ideals? Perhaps our dominant position in the world is in fact evidence that the opposite might be true? OK –one hears it — this sounds like Leftism, and conservatives and the Right wing are by definition not Leftists, so of course they don’t see things this way. It is Leftists who say the USA is powerful and therefore bad — exploitative, unjust, greedy, etc. To which I would say, it is just as great an error to automatically ascribe power to desert, as it is to ascribe power to greed or megalomaniacal dominance. To be sure, there is something annoyingly ungrateful about the leftist who sneers at his own homeland and preens over his attachment to the alien and distant; but there is something off putting about the smug bourgeois too. The fact that it’s gross to see the leftist indulge in conspicuous telescopic philanthropy does not mean that it’s not also gross to have to listen to the self-congratulation of the soft-handed middle class — épater les bourgeoises may be tiresome but there’s a reason it’s also effective.
The truth of the world, I think, is that there are always dangers on both sides; there is always a Scylla AND a Charybdis. There is the danger of Communism on one side, but there are the dangers of out-of-control financialization and commodification as well. There is the danger of narrow and bigoted provincialism, and the danger of cosmopolitan atomization and disintegration. The danger of rigidity so inflexible the whole system breaks, and the danger of flexibility that preserves and sustains nothing at all.
Again, it is possible to imagine a US military that gives over ten or twenty times the amount of time and resources to promoting the Democratic Party platform to its members, without it necessarily being the case that this “weakens” the military or the standing of the US in the world. The question is whether the $$$$ is there or not, and how others stand or compare in regards to that money. Evolution and survival of the fittest are *amoral.* That which is good and noble and beautiful may go extinct, while that which is horrible may survive or even thrive. Beautiful, noble, exotic species of birds and beasts may disappear in huge numbers, yet the virus persists. The horrible, poisonous “marketplace of ideas” god that American conservatives worship (or, at least, assume) is a false god–the “best idea” does not necessarily win, the most cursory look at the history of the world tells us that. “All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” The nearly total capture of all American institutions by the progressive worldview and mindset does not automatically or necessarily mean that these institutions will weaken, only that they will transform. This transformation can indeed come with even greater strength, as the progressive worldview is optimized for making money and is indeed fanatically devoted to the worldly and venal values of money and vulgar status. It would be strange indeed for an ideology that is structured around promoting the interests of multinational corporations and international capital over all else (including real differences of religion, tradition, sex, etc.) to lead directly to *weakness* — one might expect the internal contradictions of such an ideology or its disintegrating and atomizing qualities might eventually lead to problems, but not that it would immediately bring about weakness!
Thoughts? As ever, remember that my citing someone’s comments does not mean I agree with them all, only that I find them interesting and worth considering.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/leftism-does-not-mean-weakness/
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