One aspect of the art of rationality is locating the true sources of disagreement between two parties who want to communicate with each other, but who can’t help but talk past each other in different languages due to having radically different pre-existing assumptions.
I believe that this is the problem that any discourse between neoreaction and progressivism currently faces
Actually no. The organised political left is not wanting to communicate with neoreactionists. Neoreactionists are not even on the radar of most left wing political thinkers.
The whole idea that there something called progressivism comes from neoreacons. If you want to locate sources of disagreement you might start with arguing why you find the term “progressivism” a useful notion.
“Our subjective values are worth pursuing in and of themselves just because it makes us feel good” really, how many of the people on the left do you think would agree with that sentence? It seems to me like a strawman.
In reality, people are not content with being able only to exercise the “right of exit” from institutions or governments that they don’t like.
I think the idea that dictatorships generally give their citizens the right to exists is without basis. North Koreans don’t have a right to exit.
Progressivism is a well-established concept—it’s the umbrella category that includes the Social Justice movement, European social democracy, members of the Democratic Party in the US, statist environmentalists, etc. In terms of the flawed left-right spectrum, progressivism is the ideology of those between the socialists and the center. More broadly, “progressivism” is sometimes used to refer to left-wing thought in general.
However, “progressivism” as the term is used by reactionaries is even broader—it means “not a conservative or a reactionary”. I’ve come across reactionaries labeling the libertarian Cato Institute as progressive, though neither libertarians nor self-identified progressives would agree with that terminology. Sometimes reactionaries ascribe views to progressives that self-identified progressives would find abhorrent. IMO, the ideological distance between actual progressivism and reaction is smaller than the distance between actual progressivism and “progressivism” as reactionaries imagine it.
Yes, I’ve realized that neoreactionaries use the term “progressive” to basically mean “post-Enlightenment thought” in general. And that is the way I am using the term in this thread.
Edit: Except there is that tricky problem that neoreactionaries trace the origins of “progressivism” and “the Cathedral” back even farther to “ultra-Calvinism” and the Protestant Reformation. So I guess “progressivism” is post-Reformation thought, which would include Enlightenment thought and New Deal liberalism as further signposts along that road?
Dunno, I’m very firmly not neoreactionary, and reading about neoreaction makes me feel like there really is a meaningful category that, at the very least, libertarians and US mainstream liberals both belong to, since I’ve largely transitioned between aforesaid two groups and it felt like a much smaller jump than from either to neoreaction.
It’s a spectrum, I think. There is a meaningful category (something like “consequentalist pro-market individualists”) that includes some libertarians and some American liberals, but this category wouldn’t include all libertarians or all progressives, e.g. Hans-Herman Hoppe and most SJWs would be outside this category. In fact, once you get to Hoppe, you’re basically next door to neo-reaction, and the more tribalist post-modernist anti-cultural-mixing SJWs seem close to reaction as well.
the more tribalist post-modernist anti-cultural-mixing SJWs seem close to reaction as well.
How so? I would disagree with that: there’s nothing in reaction against cultural mixing (for that matter, nationalism / ethnic self-determination is a minority position—remember Moldbug’s position on the British Empire), and the ethical intuitions are completely different.
I’m not sure what the closest area to neoreaction outside the right is. I’ve met some very interesting Communists, but I’m not sure that particular type exists outside that corner of the internet.
Horseshoe theory: as you go towards the extreme ends of the political spectrum, positions become more similar to each other rather than to mainstream positions. It may not be literaly true in all cases, but it does seem to be a valuable heuristic, North Korea is the most obvious example.
As for SJWs vs NRs, SJWs are often accused of being misandrists and anti-white racists, while NRs are, more or less overtly, male supremacists and white supremacists. It could be argued that these are both instances of tribalism, although in the SJWs case there is usually also some degree of counter-signalling, since most of them are white and perhaps half of them are male. Futhermore, both movements are essentially totalitarian, as they seek to police aspects of people’s lives which are considered to be outside government jurisdiction under classical liberalism (e.g., public expression, sexual and romantic life, and, to some extent, private contracts and hiring practices).
EDIT:
Oh, almost forgot: “Patriarchy/Rape culture” vs. “the Cathedral”, or, how to explain away the fact that the world hasn’t already adopted our obviously saner and morally superior ideology by assuming that they must all be infected by some sort of vague, unfalsifiable, memetic virus we just made up.
“The Cathedral”, according to Moldbug, is those high-status industries and positions which shape public opinion and public policy—roughly, the respectable press (i.e. not the National Enquirer), Hollywood, the Ivy League, Southern Poverty Law Center, etc. It’s not a way of explaining away anything; it’s an attribution of blame for how present public opinion has turned out, combined with an assertion that these information organs form a natural group (left). Somewhere between Moldbug’s rants about how the big universities should be torn down and their grounds sown with salt and their professors forbidden to teach ever again, there are some statements with a bit more gravitas.
Falsifiable assertion: The New York Times and publications like it will report on (for example) the SPLC’s assertions with a tone of “and we should do as the SPLC says”, but will report on (for example) the Pope’s assertions and the Vatican with a tone of “and isn’t it strange how Catholics believe such funny things?”
(Unstated premise creating relevancy: The NYT has higher status than Fox News. General form: Left-wing media outlets have higher status, and closer ties to high-status institutions, than right-wing media outlets.)
Particular example: Consider the effect noted at The Federalist where the violent treatment of one side’s holy victim/martyr figure is called disgusting pointless brutality, but the violent treatment of the other side’s holy victim/martyr figure is called an important moral message.
As LW has discussed, nonsense can serve as a rallying point and a signal for demonstrating group loyalty. Anyone willing to buy into a group’s insane nonsense is probably going to be a devoted member of the group. NR learned and copied quite a lot from LW (in particular, More Right was spawned from Less Wrong) including this, so there’s no need to explain it away. But even before LW was created, Moldbug wrote:
from the perspective of the security forces, it may be quite useful to have one or two questions for which the bad answer is true, and the good one is nonsense. Some people are just natural-born troublemakers. Others are naturally loyal. Separating the sheep from the goats gives the authorities a great way to focus on the latter.
Nonsense also gives a basis for arbitrary acts of power. Following the Principle of Explosion, once you’ve incorporated something nonsensical or contradictory into your ideology, you can use it to rationalize any action or outcome you want. Isn’t that great for the group in power?
“The Cathedral”, according to Moldbug, is those high-status industries and positions which shape public opinion and public policy—roughly, the respectable press (i.e. not the National Enquirer), Hollywood, the Ivy League, Southern Poverty Law Center, etc. It’s not a way of explaining away anything; it’s an attribution of blame for how present public opinion has turned out, combined with an assertion that these information organs form a natural group (left).
And “Patriarchy/Rape culture”, according to SJWs, is those high-status industries and positions which shape public opinion and public policy—roughly, the respectable press, Hollywood, the Silicon Valley, the video games industry, the Ivy League, and so on.
(Unstated premise creating relevancy: The NYT has higher status than Fox News. General form: Left-wing media outlets have higher status, and closer ties to high-status institutions, than right-wing media outlets.)
Do they?
Anyway, there is no question that conservative (can we say that Fox News is neoreactionary?) and leftist media outlets exist, and at some point some one side may be more popular than the other. The point is that both SJWs and NRs perceive their “enemy” not limited to some specific people or organizations, but as a diffused cultural element, which is thought to somehow “brainwash” the uninitiated into not seeing the obvious Truth of the One True Ideology. This is similar to the religious fundamentalists preoccupation with the Devil’s influence, or the militant communists preoccupation with bourgeois propaganda. In fact, it could be argued that the defining trait of radical movements is a black-and-white morality that paints themselves as the morally righteous brave knights who fight a world of corruption.
And “Patriarchy/Rape culture”, according to SJWs, is those high-status industries and positions which shape public opinion and public policy—roughly, the respectable press, Hollywood, the Silicon Valley, the video games industry, the Ivy League, and so on.
This is not something I have ever seen asserted, and it sounds to me as though you are drawing a false parallellism here, so I’d be curious to see which SJWs that is according to. Moldbug points to a set of organizations when he says “Cathedral”, and you could taboo the word into a list starting with the NYT. The descriptions of “Patriarchy” I’ve heard generally point to an institutional culture + its internalization in people’s heads + the structure of power relations + male default on ungendered mentions of persons, etc.
“Where does this idea that, if NPR is wrong, Fox News must be right, come from? They can’t both be right, because they contradict each other. But couldn’t they both be wrong? I don’t mean slightly wrong, I don’t mean each is half right and each is half wrong, I don’t mean the truth is somewhere between them, I meanneither of them has any consistent relationship to reality. [...] you and I and [conservatism] agree on the subject of the international Jewish conspiracy: there is no such thing. We disagree with [nazism], which fortunately is scarce these days. This can be explained in many ways, but one of the simplest is that if Fox News stuck a swastika in its logo and told Bill O’Reilly to start raving about the Elders of Zion, its ratings would probably go down. This is what I mean by “no consistent relationship to reality.” If, for whatever reason, an error is better at replicating within the conservative mind than the truth, conservatives will come to believe the error. If the truth is more adaptive, they will come to believe the truth. It’s fairly easy to see how an error could make a better story than the truth on Fox News, which is why one would be ill-advised to get one’s truth from that source.”
NR would like to distance itself from conservatism.
The point is that both SJWs and NRs perceive their “enemy” not limited to some specific people or organizations, but as a diffused cultural element,
Imagine you’re kidnapped by inconvenient plot-driving aliens and dropped off a thousand years ago in, say, the Archbishopric of Trier, an ecclesiastical principality in the 1017 Holy Roman Empire. Conditional on you being a typical LessWrongian, I’m going to guess that you would object strenuously to living in a medieval theocracy, and not just because of the low level of technological development.
In one sense your “enemy” at this point might be the Archbishop, and secondarily the Pope who can appoint a replacement if you get rid of the Archbishop. In another sense your “enemy” might be the diffused cultural element that people around you generally accept that having one theocrat appoint another theocrat to make the rules for you is an acceptable form of government.
That’s sort of how the neoreactionaries feel. In one sense there are wrongful people and institutions which are running the show, but making those magically disappear wouldn’t help; because of the second sense in which there’s a wide consensus that those people and institutions, or at least similar sorts of people and institutions, are acceptable ways of running the show. (Now, if the NRs could somehow get control over the NYT&co for a year and set the tone, that would be a different matter.)
which is thought to somehow “brainwash” the uninitiated into not seeing the obvious Truth of the One True Ideology.
Taboo “brainwash” and let’s consider 1017 Trier again. The people of 1017 Trier believe very strange things. The people of 1017 Trier do not believe random things, but consistently similar sorts of strange things—for example, they might believe that it is evil to take a census—partly because someone has been teaching them those things. This is a pattern which happens. NRs believe it has happened to our countries, and is still happening today.
This is similar to the religious fundamentalists preoccupation with the Devil’s influence, or the militant communists preoccupation with bourgeois propaganda. In fact, it could be argued that the defining trait of radical movements is a black-and-white morality that paints themselves as the morally righteous brave knights who fight a world of corruption.
This sounds like lazy thinking, specifically, rounding to the nearest cliche. I thought Yudkowsky had a post on this, but I can’t seem to find it—the thing where journalists frequently describe AI research in terms of the Matrix/Terminator movies.
Furthermore, your use of “preoccupation” etc. sounds like loaded language to me, begging the question by implying that the preoccupation (or its target) is trivial or irrelevant, but that’s part of what is under debate! For example, I don’t think one would say that 1944 America had a “preoccupation” with nazi propaganda.
Horseshoe theory can’t tell the difference between actual similarities, contingent effects of the existing political spectrum (contrarian personality types, say, or people who see the problems with the existing ideology but don’t have answers and end up jumping back and forth between alternatives), and absence of traits unique to the ideology of the observer.
...the postwar American development of a conceptual vocabulary—“totalitarianism”, “authoritarianism”, “statism”, “central planning”, horseshoe theory, “human rights”—by which communism and fascism were positioned as varieties of a broader unitary category and America assured itself that it had always been at war with Eurasia.
If the public/private divide as thought by classical liberalism is unique to classical liberalism, of course things will look like a horseshoe: as you go further from classical liberalism, you see that the importance of/adherence to the classical liberal public/private divide falls away—which must mean everything that isn’t classical liberalism is the same, right? No.
I’m not sure where you’re getting the stuff about NRs favoring government regulation in private contracts and hiring practices. Or the “accused of”/”are, more or less overtly...” distinction: many SJWs show overt hatred (resentment weakly disguised as contempt, as resentment usually is), and if anything, resentment-based hatreds ought to be treated as more worrisome than contempt-based hatreds, since most genocides are committed out of resentment, and most of the exceptions (like those of the British Empire*) are motivated by a drive for lebensraum, which doesn’t really apply here.
Obligatory footnote to avoid connotationally reinforcing a common misconception: the vast majority of the killing in the Americas was done by Old World diseases and was inevitable given contact before the development of modern epidemic control, and the smallpox blankets are generally considered to be a myth. I’m not sure what the statistics look like for Australia.
the smallpox blankets are generally considered to be a myth
I’m aware of one case (the siege of Fort Pitt, during Pontiac’s Rebellion) that seems to be reasonably well documented. There doesn’t seem to be consensus that it was effective, though, and smallpox existed among the Lenape before the incident.
Horseshoe theory seems to me like declaring North on a compass rose to be “middle”, and saying as you go further “east” or “west” around the compass, the extreme east and extreme west gradually become more similar to each other. This is a mismapping resulting from the confusion of “east” with “counterclockwise starting from north” and west likewise—to restore the analogy to its origin, I think the political axis has here gotten mixed up with some other attribute or set of attributes.
To look at it another way: I could place the horseshoe so it’s quasi-centered (middled?) on anything. Suppose I center it on, for example environmentalism, and declare the sides to be ordered by religion. Then I could argue that moderation is most compatible with environmentalism, while going towards the extreme end of the “religious spectrum” leads to the two sides becoming more similar to each other than to environmentalism—but this is really a feature of antitheists and fundamentalists both being non-environmentalists, which all look alike from the environmentalist position!
Horseshoe theory seems to me like declaring North on a compass rose to be “middle”, and saying as you go further “east” or “west” around the compass, the extreme east and extreme west gradually become more similar to each other.
Which is in fact true. Perhaps a more apt analogy is that, as you go north, east and west become less distinguished, up to the North Pole, where going east and going west reduce to spinning around yourself counterclockwise or clockwise while standing at the same spot.
In this analogy, the North Pole would be ideal totalitarianism, where the government micromanages its subjects’ lives in great detail, it is always right and doesn’t even have to explain itself since it is its own source of legitimacy, and nobody can question its ways. Real-life North Korea sits close to the North Pole.
Classical liberalism/”Progressivism” would be perhaps the South Pole or maybe the Equator.
I think the most appropriate category is “classical liberalism”, which encompasses positions ranging from most forms of social-democracy (roughly corresponding to mainstream US liberals, if I understand US politics correctly) to most forms of neoliberalism (Thatcherism-Reaganism) and libertarianism. From Wikipedia: ”Liberalism is a political philosophy or worldview founded on ideas of liberty and equality.[1] Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but generally they support ideas such as free and fair elections, civil rights, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, free trade, and private property.”
This excludes fascism, theocracy, oligarchy, absolute monarchy, neoreaction (a mixture of the previous items), most forms of communism, and some extreme forms of social justice (the dreaded SJWs).
“classical liberalism”, which encompasses positions ranging from most forms of social-democracy (roughly corresponding to mainstream US liberals, if I understand US politics correctly) to most forms of neoliberalism (Thatcherism-Reaganism) and libertarianism.
I think you’re treating it much too widely. I don’t consider the European social democrats or the US progressives to fall under “classical liberalism”.
Classical liberalism is more pro-market than social democrats or mainstream US progressives are. As I’ve seen it used, it has three common meanings:
Pre-20th century libertarians and proto-libertarians.
Modern libertarians who aren’t minarchists, anarchists, or social conservatives. Sometimes they’re called “moderate libertarians”, though they aren’t necessarily moderate. At other times they’re called “pragmatic libertarians”, which may be somewhat more accurate.
A general ideology that encompasses classical liberals of the first two definitions as well as minarchists and anarcho-capitalists.
c.f. the Cathedral, which is an attempt to frame the culture that the rest of us call “Western civilisation as it is now” as a conspiracy, or something enough like a conspiracy to speak of in the terms appropriate to one.
When Googling on Social Europe I only find them using the term progressivism to refer to the US. They may speak about about progressive policies but not use the term progressivism when speaking about European policies.
In terms of the flawed left-right spectrum, progressivism is the ideology of those between the socialists and the center.
In the European context I haven’t heard the word progressivism as referring to third way policies. Third way policies usually get justified by saying that we have no other choice instead of being justified by themselves shaping society as we want society to be.
I think the Social Justice movement came out of postmodernism and Woodrow Wilsons progressivism was modern in nature.
I think the Social Justice movement came out of postmodernism
The term approximately as we know it was used by Catholics in the 19th Century, coined in the 1840s by Jesuit priest Luigi Taparelli. (How we got from there to Tumblr is an interesting journey but an approximately continuous one.)
I’ve been desperately in search of a good history as I seek to decrappify the RW article on the topic, which is rather too cobbled-together (and the SJWiki one doesn’t even try for a history). So if anyone has something handy …
(The stereotypical Tumblr SJW phenomenon seems to have escaped academic notice. This actually surprised me when I went looking, given I know how rabid sociology students are in seeking out new subcultural study fodder.)
The whole idea that there something called progressivism comes from neoreacons. If you want to locate sources of disagreement you might start with arguing why you find the term “progressivism” a useful notion.
Not sure I agree. Progressivism seems to be used in more or less the same sense that it would be in mainstream (at least US) political discourse, albeit perhaps somewhat broader. “Demotism”, however, does seem to be a fabricated category.
I think the idea that dictatorships generally give their citizens the right to exists is without basis. North Koreans don’t have a right to exit.
This is true, but you can make an argument against Exit as a strong check on abuse, or as a strong selective force, without invoking anywhere nearly as bad as North Korea. The social forces keeping people in place are very powerful in comparison to political convictions: for example you got a lot of liberal Americans talking about moving to Canada or the like during the Bush era, but not one in a hundred actually did, despite the fact that doing so would have been quite easy as emigration goes.
Progressivism seems to be used in more or less the same sense that it would be in mainstream (at least US) political discourse, albeit perhaps somewhat broader.
There are plenty of people who call themselves progressive but they usually don’t speak of progressivism.
Progressivism is a term about a political battle at the beginning of the 20th century. Woodrow Wilson was practicing progressivism. Neoreacon tend to argue as if the positions of the left in the 21th century are the same as those of Wilson.
Investor state dispute settlement is a very new policy tool. The whole idea of corporations as people is very new. We engaged in deregulation. You find few people on the left who see that change as progress that’s to be celebrated because history moves forward.
In Germany Agenda 2010 came out of the third way. Cutting pensions isn’t what progressivism envisions. It not the kind of history moving forward that’s to be celebrated.
While neoliberal think tanks build a worldview that allowed the financial sectors to get deregulated, the left lacks a real counterproposal and a vision at the moment. Quite frequently people on the left want to defend the status quo these days.
There are plenty of people who call themselves progressive but they usually don’t speak of progressivism. Progressivism is a term about a political battle at the beginning of the 20th century. Woodrow Wilson was practicing progressivism. Neoreacon tend to argue as if the positions of the left in the 21th century are the same as those of Wilson.
I know about the Progressive Era. However, the term’s stayed alive (or been revived) in the US as a loose synonym for “leftist” or “liberal” (in the American sense), which have pejorative connotations in some quarters over here; consider for example the Congressional Progressive Caucus, founded in 1991 to represent the Democratic Party’s leftist wing. Since most prominent neoreactionaries are American, that’s probably the sense in which they mean it. It is not a sense unique to neoreaction.
American leftists are aware of the novelty of the policy tools you mentioned, but they’re likely to see them as novel means to regressive ends. Since neoreaction essentially assumes the American Left’s future-historical schema (as a default, and with different emotional valance), it’s likely to agree.
As to neoreaction lumping Woodrow Wilson’s policy goals with those of, say, Ralph Nader, that is a potential weakness. It’s not one I was trying to explore in the grandparent, though, and I don’t think the terminology is very revealing given what I’ve already discussed.
Plenty of people call themselves progressive. That doesn’t mean that they see themselves as adhering to something called progressivism. Otherwise link to a few American politicians who use the term progressivism to describe their own policies.
Since most prominent neoreactionaries are American, that’s probably the sense in which they mean it.
From what I read of neocon thought, I don’t think that’s the case.
American leftists are aware of the novel policy tools you mentioned, but they’re likely to see them as means to regressive ends.
There were no multinational corporations a hundred years ago. You can’t regress to a state of multinational corporations as they are in their nature a new phenomenon.
To quote Moldbug Cthulhu always swims left. That was part of the Marxist idea of history. Sooner or later the left wins, because it’s the right side and we know it’s the right side because sooner or later it wins. We know this because when we look at the past the left always won.
Somehow it’s not the freedom of the individual worker that rises as time goes on but corporation have became people that also claim their freedom. Those corporations seem even better at claiming freedom than workers.
Neoliberalism also destroys traditional values of nation states but not in the way socialism does. To Molburg it might be both Cthulhu but the difference matters a big deal in the modern political discourse.
Plenty of people call themselves progressive. That doesn’t mean that they see themselves as adhering to something called progressivism. Otherwise link to a few American politicians who use the term progressivism to describe their own policies.
Don’t make too much of the “-ism” suffix. Neoreactionaries generally don’t believe the overwhelming majority of modern politics to be dictated by members of a capital-P Progressivist sect, vivid cathedral analogy notwithstanding; instead, they see said politics as conforming if unchecked to a vaguely Marxian notion of progress ever leftward (because Cthulhu), which is roughly unitary since the late Enlightenment (also because Cthulhu), and which they sometimes call progressive (because that’s the neutral word for a leftward tendency in American politics). “Progressivism” then is merely how you form the word for the corresponding ideology.
Lately Cthulhu brought deregulation of the financial sector, corporate personhood, reduced maximum tax rate and Investor State Dispute Settlement.
Of course neoliberalism that produces those policies and with lately drives much of Cthulhu’s direction can be thought of as an extension of left liberalism of the 19th century but today’s left doesn’t like it. Of course the cathedral produces corporate personhood and the cathedral deregulated the financial sector but if that’s what you call “progressivism” people that call themselves progressive aren’t in favor of that.
they see said politics as conforming if unchecked to a vaguely Marxian notion of progress ever leftward
Today’s left doesn’t. It doesn’t like that corporations gain more and more powerful as things progress. It’s afraid of technology. Just look at GMO. Do you see today’s left celebrating GMO’s as valuable progress that moves society forward, the way the left did celebrate nuclear power in the 1950′s and 1960′s?
Of course the cathedral produces GMO’s but if you label that position that supports GMO’s as progressivism than people who self label as progressives don’t really hold that position strongly.
The East India Company (EIC), originally chartered as the Governor and Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies, and more properly called the Honourable East India Company, was an English, and later (from 1707)[1] British joint-stock company,
Let’s take any contemporary multinational, say Sony. Wikipedia (emphasis mine):
Sony Corporation (ソニー株式会社 Sonī Kabushiki Gaisha?), commonly referred to as Sony, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Kōnan Minato, Tokyo, Japan.
Actually the sentence you cite does contain the word “multinational’ while the above sentence I cited doesn’t.
There a trend that modern multinational corporations don’t feel like they belong to any single country. Of cause they tend to comply as much with local laws as necessary to avoid getting into trouble but they don’t they themselves as belonging to any single nation.
The East India Company had its own currency, military vessels, and colonial governors. It effectively functioned like an independent state, much like our modern corporations seem to want to one day.
Actually no. The organised political left is not wanting to communicate with neoreactionists. Neoreactionists are not even on the radar of most left wing political thinkers.
The whole idea that there something called progressivism comes from neoreacons. If you want to locate sources of disagreement you might start with arguing why you find the term “progressivism” a useful notion.
“Our subjective values are worth pursuing in and of themselves just because it makes us feel good” really, how many of the people on the left do you think would agree with that sentence? It seems to me like a strawman.
I think the idea that dictatorships generally give their citizens the right to exists is without basis. North Koreans don’t have a right to exit.
Progressivism is a well-established concept—it’s the umbrella category that includes the Social Justice movement, European social democracy, members of the Democratic Party in the US, statist environmentalists, etc. In terms of the flawed left-right spectrum, progressivism is the ideology of those between the socialists and the center. More broadly, “progressivism” is sometimes used to refer to left-wing thought in general.
However, “progressivism” as the term is used by reactionaries is even broader—it means “not a conservative or a reactionary”. I’ve come across reactionaries labeling the libertarian Cato Institute as progressive, though neither libertarians nor self-identified progressives would agree with that terminology. Sometimes reactionaries ascribe views to progressives that self-identified progressives would find abhorrent. IMO, the ideological distance between actual progressivism and reaction is smaller than the distance between actual progressivism and “progressivism” as reactionaries imagine it.
Yes, I’ve realized that neoreactionaries use the term “progressive” to basically mean “post-Enlightenment thought” in general. And that is the way I am using the term in this thread.
Edit: Except there is that tricky problem that neoreactionaries trace the origins of “progressivism” and “the Cathedral” back even farther to “ultra-Calvinism” and the Protestant Reformation. So I guess “progressivism” is post-Reformation thought, which would include Enlightenment thought and New Deal liberalism as further signposts along that road?
I suspect that the neo-reactionary conception of “progressivism” is outgroup homogeneity bias at work.
Dunno, I’m very firmly not neoreactionary, and reading about neoreaction makes me feel like there really is a meaningful category that, at the very least, libertarians and US mainstream liberals both belong to, since I’ve largely transitioned between aforesaid two groups and it felt like a much smaller jump than from either to neoreaction.
It’s a spectrum, I think. There is a meaningful category (something like “consequentalist pro-market individualists”) that includes some libertarians and some American liberals, but this category wouldn’t include all libertarians or all progressives, e.g. Hans-Herman Hoppe and most SJWs would be outside this category. In fact, once you get to Hoppe, you’re basically next door to neo-reaction, and the more tribalist post-modernist anti-cultural-mixing SJWs seem close to reaction as well.
How so? I would disagree with that: there’s nothing in reaction against cultural mixing (for that matter, nationalism / ethnic self-determination is a minority position—remember Moldbug’s position on the British Empire), and the ethical intuitions are completely different.
I’m not sure what the closest area to neoreaction outside the right is. I’ve met some very interesting Communists, but I’m not sure that particular type exists outside that corner of the internet.
Horseshoe theory: as you go towards the extreme ends of the political spectrum, positions become more similar to each other rather than to mainstream positions. It may not be literaly true in all cases, but it does seem to be a valuable heuristic, North Korea is the most obvious example.
As for SJWs vs NRs, SJWs are often accused of being misandrists and anti-white racists, while NRs are, more or less overtly, male supremacists and white supremacists.
It could be argued that these are both instances of tribalism, although in the SJWs case there is usually also some degree of counter-signalling, since most of them are white and perhaps half of them are male.
Futhermore, both movements are essentially totalitarian, as they seek to police aspects of people’s lives which are considered to be outside government jurisdiction under classical liberalism (e.g., public expression, sexual and romantic life, and, to some extent, private contracts and hiring practices).
EDIT:
Oh, almost forgot: “Patriarchy/Rape culture” vs. “the Cathedral”, or, how to explain away the fact that the world hasn’t already adopted our obviously saner and morally superior ideology by assuming that they must all be infected by some sort of vague, unfalsifiable, memetic virus we just made up.
“The Cathedral”, according to Moldbug, is those high-status industries and positions which shape public opinion and public policy—roughly, the respectable press (i.e. not the National Enquirer), Hollywood, the Ivy League, Southern Poverty Law Center, etc. It’s not a way of explaining away anything; it’s an attribution of blame for how present public opinion has turned out, combined with an assertion that these information organs form a natural group (left). Somewhere between Moldbug’s rants about how the big universities should be torn down and their grounds sown with salt and their professors forbidden to teach ever again, there are some statements with a bit more gravitas.
Falsifiable assertion: The New York Times and publications like it will report on (for example) the SPLC’s assertions with a tone of “and we should do as the SPLC says”, but will report on (for example) the Pope’s assertions and the Vatican with a tone of “and isn’t it strange how Catholics believe such funny things?” (Unstated premise creating relevancy: The NYT has higher status than Fox News. General form: Left-wing media outlets have higher status, and closer ties to high-status institutions, than right-wing media outlets.)
Particular example: Consider the effect noted at The Federalist where the violent treatment of one side’s holy victim/martyr figure is called disgusting pointless brutality, but the violent treatment of the other side’s holy victim/martyr figure is called an important moral message.
As LW has discussed, nonsense can serve as a rallying point and a signal for demonstrating group loyalty. Anyone willing to buy into a group’s insane nonsense is probably going to be a devoted member of the group. NR learned and copied quite a lot from LW (in particular, More Right was spawned from Less Wrong) including this, so there’s no need to explain it away. But even before LW was created, Moldbug wrote:
Nonsense also gives a basis for arbitrary acts of power. Following the Principle of Explosion, once you’ve incorporated something nonsensical or contradictory into your ideology, you can use it to rationalize any action or outcome you want. Isn’t that great for the group in power?
And “Patriarchy/Rape culture”, according to SJWs, is those high-status industries and positions which shape public opinion and public policy—roughly, the respectable press, Hollywood, the Silicon Valley, the video games industry, the Ivy League, and so on.
Do they?
Anyway, there is no question that conservative (can we say that Fox News is neoreactionary?) and leftist media outlets exist, and at some point some one side may be more popular than the other.
The point is that both SJWs and NRs perceive their “enemy” not limited to some specific people or organizations, but as a diffused cultural element, which is thought to somehow “brainwash” the uninitiated into not seeing the obvious Truth of the One True Ideology.
This is similar to the religious fundamentalists preoccupation with the Devil’s influence, or the militant communists preoccupation with bourgeois propaganda. In fact, it could be argued that the defining trait of radical movements is a black-and-white morality that paints themselves as the morally righteous brave knights who fight a world of corruption.
This is not something I have ever seen asserted, and it sounds to me as though you are drawing a false parallellism here, so I’d be curious to see which SJWs that is according to. Moldbug points to a set of organizations when he says “Cathedral”, and you could taboo the word into a list starting with the NYT. The descriptions of “Patriarchy” I’ve heard generally point to an institutional culture + its internalization in people’s heads + the structure of power relations + male default on ungendered mentions of persons, etc.
No. Or at least, please don’t.
From the Open Letter to Open Minded Progressives:
“Where does this idea that, if NPR is wrong, Fox News must be right, come from? They can’t both be right, because they contradict each other. But couldn’t they both be wrong? I don’t mean slightly wrong, I don’t mean each is half right and each is half wrong, I don’t mean the truth is somewhere between them, I mean neither of them has any consistent relationship to reality. [...] you and I and [conservatism] agree on the subject of the international Jewish conspiracy: there is no such thing. We disagree with [nazism], which fortunately is scarce these days. This can be explained in many ways, but one of the simplest is that if Fox News stuck a swastika in its logo and told Bill O’Reilly to start raving about the Elders of Zion, its ratings would probably go down. This is what I mean by “no consistent relationship to reality.” If, for whatever reason, an error is better at replicating within the conservative mind than the truth, conservatives will come to believe the error. If the truth is more adaptive, they will come to believe the truth. It’s fairly easy to see how an error could make a better story than the truth on Fox News, which is why one would be ill-advised to get one’s truth from that source.”
NR would like to distance itself from conservatism.
Imagine you’re kidnapped by inconvenient plot-driving aliens and dropped off a thousand years ago in, say, the Archbishopric of Trier, an ecclesiastical principality in the 1017 Holy Roman Empire. Conditional on you being a typical LessWrongian, I’m going to guess that you would object strenuously to living in a medieval theocracy, and not just because of the low level of technological development.
In one sense your “enemy” at this point might be the Archbishop, and secondarily the Pope who can appoint a replacement if you get rid of the Archbishop. In another sense your “enemy” might be the diffused cultural element that people around you generally accept that having one theocrat appoint another theocrat to make the rules for you is an acceptable form of government.
That’s sort of how the neoreactionaries feel. In one sense there are wrongful people and institutions which are running the show, but making those magically disappear wouldn’t help; because of the second sense in which there’s a wide consensus that those people and institutions, or at least similar sorts of people and institutions, are acceptable ways of running the show. (Now, if the NRs could somehow get control over the NYT&co for a year and set the tone, that would be a different matter.)
Taboo “brainwash” and let’s consider 1017 Trier again. The people of 1017 Trier believe very strange things. The people of 1017 Trier do not believe random things, but consistently similar sorts of strange things—for example, they might believe that it is evil to take a census—partly because someone has been teaching them those things. This is a pattern which happens. NRs believe it has happened to our countries, and is still happening today.
This sounds like lazy thinking, specifically, rounding to the nearest cliche. I thought Yudkowsky had a post on this, but I can’t seem to find it—the thing where journalists frequently describe AI research in terms of the Matrix/Terminator movies.
Furthermore, your use of “preoccupation” etc. sounds like loaded language to me, begging the question by implying that the preoccupation (or its target) is trivial or irrelevant, but that’s part of what is under debate! For example, I don’t think one would say that 1944 America had a “preoccupation” with nazi propaganda.
Horseshoe theory can’t tell the difference between actual similarities, contingent effects of the existing political spectrum (contrarian personality types, say, or people who see the problems with the existing ideology but don’t have answers and end up jumping back and forth between alternatives), and absence of traits unique to the ideology of the observer.
It’s also a useful propaganda tool:
If the public/private divide as thought by classical liberalism is unique to classical liberalism, of course things will look like a horseshoe: as you go further from classical liberalism, you see that the importance of/adherence to the classical liberal public/private divide falls away—which must mean everything that isn’t classical liberalism is the same, right? No.
I’m not sure where you’re getting the stuff about NRs favoring government regulation in private contracts and hiring practices. Or the “accused of”/”are, more or less overtly...” distinction: many SJWs show overt hatred (resentment weakly disguised as contempt, as resentment usually is), and if anything, resentment-based hatreds ought to be treated as more worrisome than contempt-based hatreds, since most genocides are committed out of resentment, and most of the exceptions (like those of the British Empire*) are motivated by a drive for lebensraum, which doesn’t really apply here.
Obligatory footnote to avoid connotationally reinforcing a common misconception: the vast majority of the killing in the Americas was done by Old World diseases and was inevitable given contact before the development of modern epidemic control, and the smallpox blankets are generally considered to be a myth. I’m not sure what the statistics look like for Australia.
I’m aware of one case (the siege of Fort Pitt, during Pontiac’s Rebellion) that seems to be reasonably well documented. There doesn’t seem to be consensus that it was effective, though, and smallpox existed among the Lenape before the incident.
Horseshoe theory seems to me like declaring North on a compass rose to be “middle”, and saying as you go further “east” or “west” around the compass, the extreme east and extreme west gradually become more similar to each other. This is a mismapping resulting from the confusion of “east” with “counterclockwise starting from north” and west likewise—to restore the analogy to its origin, I think the political axis has here gotten mixed up with some other attribute or set of attributes.
To look at it another way: I could place the horseshoe so it’s quasi-centered (middled?) on anything. Suppose I center it on, for example environmentalism, and declare the sides to be ordered by religion. Then I could argue that moderation is most compatible with environmentalism, while going towards the extreme end of the “religious spectrum” leads to the two sides becoming more similar to each other than to environmentalism—but this is really a feature of antitheists and fundamentalists both being non-environmentalists, which all look alike from the environmentalist position!
Which is in fact true. Perhaps a more apt analogy is that, as you go north, east and west become less distinguished, up to the North Pole, where going east and going west reduce to spinning around yourself counterclockwise or clockwise while standing at the same spot.
In this analogy, the North Pole would be ideal totalitarianism, where the government micromanages its subjects’ lives in great detail, it is always right and doesn’t even have to explain itself since it is its own source of legitimacy, and nobody can question its ways.
Real-life North Korea sits close to the North Pole.
Classical liberalism/”Progressivism” would be perhaps the South Pole or maybe the Equator.
I think the most appropriate category is “classical liberalism”, which encompasses positions ranging from most forms of social-democracy (roughly corresponding to mainstream US liberals, if I understand US politics correctly) to most forms of neoliberalism (Thatcherism-Reaganism) and libertarianism.
From Wikipedia:
”Liberalism is a political philosophy or worldview founded on ideas of liberty and equality.[1] Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but generally they support ideas such as free and fair elections, civil rights, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, free trade, and private property.”
This excludes fascism, theocracy, oligarchy, absolute monarchy, neoreaction (a mixture of the previous items), most forms of communism, and some extreme forms of social justice (the dreaded SJWs).
I think you’re treating it much too widely. I don’t consider the European social democrats or the US progressives to fall under “classical liberalism”.
Classical liberalism is more pro-market than social democrats or mainstream US progressives are. As I’ve seen it used, it has three common meanings:
Pre-20th century libertarians and proto-libertarians.
Modern libertarians who aren’t minarchists, anarchists, or social conservatives. Sometimes they’re called “moderate libertarians”, though they aren’t necessarily moderate. At other times they’re called “pragmatic libertarians”, which may be somewhat more accurate.
A general ideology that encompasses classical liberals of the first two definitions as well as minarchists and anarcho-capitalists.
c.f. the Cathedral, which is an attempt to frame the culture that the rest of us call “Western civilisation as it is now” as a conspiracy, or something enough like a conspiracy to speak of in the terms appropriate to one.
Well, Jim Donald’s definition of leftism roughly boils down to meme’s optimized to spread through government power.
When Googling on Social Europe I only find them using the term progressivism to refer to the US. They may speak about about progressive policies but not use the term progressivism when speaking about European policies.
In the European context I haven’t heard the word progressivism as referring to third way policies. Third way policies usually get justified by saying that we have no other choice instead of being justified by themselves shaping society as we want society to be.
I think the Social Justice movement came out of postmodernism and Woodrow Wilsons progressivism was modern in nature.
The term approximately as we know it was used by Catholics in the 19th Century, coined in the 1840s by Jesuit priest Luigi Taparelli. (How we got from there to Tumblr is an interesting journey but an approximately continuous one.)
Is there a history of the term anywhere? I’d be interested in seeing how it got here from there.
I’ve been desperately in search of a good history as I seek to decrappify the RW article on the topic, which is rather too cobbled-together (and the SJWiki one doesn’t even try for a history). So if anyone has something handy …
(The stereotypical Tumblr SJW phenomenon seems to have escaped academic notice. This actually surprised me when I went looking, given I know how rabid sociology students are in seeking out new subcultural study fodder.)
Not sure I agree. Progressivism seems to be used in more or less the same sense that it would be in mainstream (at least US) political discourse, albeit perhaps somewhat broader. “Demotism”, however, does seem to be a fabricated category.
This is true, but you can make an argument against Exit as a strong check on abuse, or as a strong selective force, without invoking anywhere nearly as bad as North Korea. The social forces keeping people in place are very powerful in comparison to political convictions: for example you got a lot of liberal Americans talking about moving to Canada or the like during the Bush era, but not one in a hundred actually did, despite the fact that doing so would have been quite easy as emigration goes.
There are plenty of people who call themselves progressive but they usually don’t speak of progressivism. Progressivism is a term about a political battle at the beginning of the 20th century. Woodrow Wilson was practicing progressivism. Neoreacon tend to argue as if the positions of the left in the 21th century are the same as those of Wilson.
Investor state dispute settlement is a very new policy tool. The whole idea of corporations as people is very new. We engaged in deregulation. You find few people on the left who see that change as progress that’s to be celebrated because history moves forward.
In Germany Agenda 2010 came out of the third way. Cutting pensions isn’t what progressivism envisions. It not the kind of history moving forward that’s to be celebrated.
While neoliberal think tanks build a worldview that allowed the financial sectors to get deregulated, the left lacks a real counterproposal and a vision at the moment. Quite frequently people on the left want to defend the status quo these days.
I know about the Progressive Era. However, the term’s stayed alive (or been revived) in the US as a loose synonym for “leftist” or “liberal” (in the American sense), which have pejorative connotations in some quarters over here; consider for example the Congressional Progressive Caucus, founded in 1991 to represent the Democratic Party’s leftist wing. Since most prominent neoreactionaries are American, that’s probably the sense in which they mean it. It is not a sense unique to neoreaction.
American leftists are aware of the novelty of the policy tools you mentioned, but they’re likely to see them as novel means to regressive ends. Since neoreaction essentially assumes the American Left’s future-historical schema (as a default, and with different emotional valance), it’s likely to agree.
As to neoreaction lumping Woodrow Wilson’s policy goals with those of, say, Ralph Nader, that is a potential weakness. It’s not one I was trying to explore in the grandparent, though, and I don’t think the terminology is very revealing given what I’ve already discussed.
Plenty of people call themselves progressive. That doesn’t mean that they see themselves as adhering to something called progressivism. Otherwise link to a few American politicians who use the term progressivism to describe their own policies.
From what I read of neocon thought, I don’t think that’s the case.
There were no multinational corporations a hundred years ago. You can’t regress to a state of multinational corporations as they are in their nature a new phenomenon.
To quote Moldbug Cthulhu always swims left. That was part of the Marxist idea of history. Sooner or later the left wins, because it’s the right side and we know it’s the right side because sooner or later it wins. We know this because when we look at the past the left always won. Somehow it’s not the freedom of the individual worker that rises as time goes on but corporation have became people that also claim their freedom. Those corporations seem even better at claiming freedom than workers.
Neoliberalism also destroys traditional values of nation states but not in the way socialism does. To Molburg it might be both Cthulhu but the difference matters a big deal in the modern political discourse.
Don’t make too much of the “-ism” suffix. Neoreactionaries generally don’t believe the overwhelming majority of modern politics to be dictated by members of a capital-P Progressivist sect, vivid cathedral analogy notwithstanding; instead, they see said politics as conforming if unchecked to a vaguely Marxian notion of progress ever leftward (because Cthulhu), which is roughly unitary since the late Enlightenment (also because Cthulhu), and which they sometimes call progressive (because that’s the neutral word for a leftward tendency in American politics). “Progressivism” then is merely how you form the word for the corresponding ideology.
But since you asked...
Lately Cthulhu brought deregulation of the financial sector, corporate personhood, reduced maximum tax rate and Investor State Dispute Settlement.
Of course neoliberalism that produces those policies and with lately drives much of Cthulhu’s direction can be thought of as an extension of left liberalism of the 19th century but today’s left doesn’t like it. Of course the cathedral produces corporate personhood and the cathedral deregulated the financial sector but if that’s what you call “progressivism” people that call themselves progressive aren’t in favor of that.
Today’s left doesn’t. It doesn’t like that corporations gain more and more powerful as things progress. It’s afraid of technology. Just look at GMO. Do you see today’s left celebrating GMO’s as valuable progress that moves society forward, the way the left did celebrate nuclear power in the 1950′s and 1960′s?
Of course the cathedral produces GMO’s but if you label that position that supports GMO’s as progressivism than people who self label as progressives don’t really hold that position strongly.
Ahem
The first sentence of the article:
...and?
Let’s take any contemporary multinational, say Sony. Wikipedia (emphasis mine):
Actually the sentence you cite does contain the word “multinational’ while the above sentence I cited doesn’t.
There a trend that modern multinational corporations don’t feel like they belong to any single country. Of cause they tend to comply as much with local laws as necessary to avoid getting into trouble but they don’t they themselves as belonging to any single nation.
The East India Company had its own currency, military vessels, and colonial governors. It effectively functioned like an independent state, much like our modern corporations seem to want to one day.