Reactionary philosophy in a nutshell

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A long, but interesting take on the alt-right/reactionary movement, from the point of view of a progressive.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/re ... -nutshell/

It's always pleasing when people take up the challenge of explaining your opponents position in your own words.

Imagine a country called Conservia, a sprawling empire of a billion people that has a fifth-dimensional hyperborder with America. The Conservians are all evangelical Christians who hate abortion, hate gays, hate evolution, and believe all government programs should be cut.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of Conservians hop the hyperborder fence and enter America, and sympathetic presidents then pass amnesty laws granting them citizenship. As a result, the area you live – or let’s use Berkeley, the area I live – gradually becomes more conservative. First the abortion clinics disappear, as Conservian protesters start harassing them out of business and a government that must increasingly pander to Conservians doesn’t stop them. Then gay people stop coming out of the closet, as Conservian restaurants and businesses refuse to serve them and angry Conservian writers and journalists create an anti-gay climate. Conservians vote 90% Republican in elections, so between them and the area’s native-born conservatives the Republicans easily get a majority and begin defunding public parks, libraries, and schools. Also, Conservians have one pet issue which they promote even more intently than the destruction of secular science – that all Conservians illegally in the United States must be granted voting rights, and that no one should ever block more Conservians from coming to the US.

Is this fair to the native Berkeleyans? It doesn’t seem that way to me. And what if 10 million Conservians move into America? That’s not an outrageous number – there are more Mexican immigrants than that. But it would be enough to have thrown every single Presidential election of the past fifty years to the Republicans – there has never been a Democratic candidate since LBJ who has won the native population by enough of a margin to outweight the votes of ten million Conservians.

But isn’t this incredibly racist and unrealistic? An entire nation of people whose votes skew 90% Republican? No. African-Americans’ votes have historically been around 90% Democratic (93% in the last election). Latinos went over 70% Democratic in the last election. For comparison, white people were about 60% Republicans. If there had been no Mexican immigration to the United States over the past few decades, Romney would probaby have won the last election.

Is it wrong for a liberal citizen of Berkeley in 2013 to want to close the hyperborder with Conservia so that California doesn’t become part of the Bible Belt and Republicans don’t get guaranteed presidencies forever? Would that citizen be racist for even considering this? If not, then pity the poor conservative, who is actually in this exact situation right now.

I'd almost agree with you, except for in this country you don't hear people talking about closing illegal immigration from Europe (it happens and it happens a lot), nope we're only concerned with Mexicans, hell not even illegal Asian immigration which is actually at a higher percentage than Mexican immigration since the financial meltdown of '07. To say that this is purely about politics and governance is to deny the underlying racism that fuels it-- the essence of the thing itself.

How about the Conservians who "see the light," and become influenced by the Progressives?

How about those "silent majority" folks in Conservia who are actually Progressive?

Racism is discussed in the article. Many alt-right philosophers believe that not all human groups are interchangeable, so discrimination between them might be sensible. The dear progressive author won't go that far, but he is happy to admit the current progressive theories are seriously flawed, if not totally wrong.

Maybe it's not about skin colour at all, but justified based on the behaviour and socio-economic impact of the two groups on American society.

This whole article is a gem actually, some more highlights:

Surveys of women show that they were on average happier fifty years ago than they are today. In fact, in the 1950s, women generally self-reported higher happiness than men; today, men report significantly higher happiness than women. So the history of the past fifty years – a history of more and more progressive attitudes toward gender – have been a history of women gradually becoming worse and worse off relative to their husbands and male friends.

This doesn’t necessarily condemn progressivism, but as the ancient proverb goes, it sure waggles its eyebrows suggestively and gestures furtively while mouthing ‘look over there’.

To confirm, we would want to look within a single moment in time: that is, are feminist women with progressive gender roles today less happy than their traditionalist peers? The answer appears to be yes.

Amusingly, because we do still live in a society where these things couldn’t be published unless someone took a progressivist tack, the New York Times article quoted above ends by saying the real problem is that men are jerks who don’t do their share of the housework.

But when we actually study this, we find that progressive marriages in which men and women split housework equally are 50% more likely to end in divorce than traditional marriages where the women mostly take care of it. The same is true of working outside the home: progressive marriages where both partners work are more likely to end in divorce than traditional marriages where the man works and the woman stays home.

More:

Let’s take safety. This is one of Mencius Moldbug’s pet issues, and he likes to quote the following from an 1876 century text on criminology:

Moldbug then usually contrasts this with whatever recent news article has struck his fancy about entire inner-city neighborhoods where the police are terrified to go, teenagers being mowed down in crossfire among gangs, random daylight murders, and the all the other joys of life in a 21st century British ghetto.

Of course, the plural of anecdote is not data, but the British crime statistics seem to bear him out:



If this is true, it is true despite technology. If crime rates have in fact multiplied by a factor of…well, it looks like at least 100x…this is true even though the country as a whole has gotten vastly richer, even though there are now CCTVs, DNA testing, police databases, heck, even fingerprinting hadn’t been figured out yet in 1876.

This suggests that there was something inherent about Victorian society, politics, or government that made their Britain a safer place to live than modern progressive Britain.

All these statistics become moot if Conservia, underneath it all, isn't what it seems to be.

Education is another example of something we’re pretty sure we do better in. Now take a look at the 1899 entrance exam for Harvard. Remember, no calculators – they haven’t been invented yet.

I got an SAT score well above that of the average Harvard student today (I still didn’t get into Harvard, because I was a slacker in high school). But I couldn’t even begin to take much of that test.

Okay, fine. Argue “Well, of course we don’t value Latin and Greek and arithmetic and geometry and geography today, we value different things.” So fine. Tell me what the heck you think our high school students are learning that’s just as difficult and impressive as the stuff on that test that you don’t expect the 19th century Harvard students who aced that exam knew two hundred times better (and don’t say “the history of post-World War II Europe”).

Do you honestly think the student body for whom that exam was a fair ability test would be befuddled by the reading comprehension questions that pass for entrance exams today? Or would it be more like “Excuse me, teacher, I’m afraid there’s been a mistake. My exam paper is in English.”

That isn't the point, the point is Conservia is, and by extension, its people are different to that of the land to which they are moving.

This is the final bit I will copy to the forums, it's a pleasant train of thought:

It seems like there’s an uncanny valley of dictatorship. Having no dictator at all, the way it is here in America, is very good. Having a really really dictatorial dictator who controls everything, like the czar or this hypothetical Israeli psychopath, kinda sucks but it’s peaceful and you know exactly where you stand. Being somewhere in the middle, where it’s dictatorial enough to hurt, but not dictatorial enough for the dictator to feel secure enough to mostly leave you alone except when he wants something, is worse than either extreme.

Mencius Moldbug uses the fable of Fnargl, an omnipotent and invulnerable alien who becomes dictator of Earth. Fnargl is an old-fashioned greedy colonizer: he just wants to exploit Earth for as much gold as possible. He considers turning humans into slaves to work in gold mines, except some would have to be a special class of geologist slaves to plan the gold mines, and there would have to be other slaves to grow food to support the first two classes of slaves, and other slaves to be managers to coordinate all these other slaves, and so on. Eventually he realizes this is kind of dumb and there’s already a perfectly good economy. So he levies a 20% tax on every transaction (higher might hurt the economy) and uses the money to buy gold. Aside from this he just hangs out.

Fnargl has no reason to ban free speech: let people plot against him. He’s omnipotent and invulnerable; it’s not going to work. Banning free speech would just force him to spend money on jackbooted thugs which he could otherwise be spending on precious, precious gold. He has no reason to torture dissidents. What are they going to do if left unmolested? Overthrow him?

Moldbug claims that Fnargl’s government would not only be better than that of a less powerful human dictator like Mao, but that it would be literally better than the government we have today. Many real countries do restrict free speech or torture dissidents. And if you’re a libertarian, Fnargl’s “if it doesn’t disrupt gold production, I’m okay with it” line is a dream come true.

Very interesting. He says he's going to try and counter it later with his own rebuttal. I tried to find it, and while I don't know if this is what he was referring to for sure, it seems likely:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/th ... onary-faq/

Another monster piece from the look of it. I've had my fill reading the first big piece, so I thought I'd link it.

Just to be clear, Scott Alexander (the man who blogs at Slate Star Codex) is not himself NRx, he's just written what is usually considered the definitive guide to it, and is cordial with some of the major figures of the philosophy, namely Moldbug (AKA Curtis Yarvin). He's actually rather opposed to NRx, but has this funny habit of trying to understand things before he decides how he feels about them, hence the long explanatory posts. His whole site is worth your time, especially the pieces under the 'things I will regret later' tag.

NRx... even sounds like some medicinal prescription. Also supposedly known as the 'dark enlightenment', and to think people seriously support the reversal of centuries of rationality and as a final act of ironic democracy destroy democracy itself... well, let's hope it's confined to one country, at least... and, at any rate, I doubt anyone could argue that the world is at the centre of the universe anymore, and even if you could reverse all scientific progress you would be the one to take away the same devices that, after all, communicated this abomination in the first place, that Galileo could only despair of...

Also, one thing about that graph... one really can't compare Victorian crime with modern crime... have you any idea how different statutes are these days? Not to mention the average punishment. Also, "Victorians were worried about the rising crime rate: offences went up from about 5000 per year in 1800 to about 20000 per year in 1840." - nationalarchives.gov.uk

Last edited by Mootoo on 26 Jul 2016, 7:09 pm, edited 3 times in total.

Then were's the movement to deport poor whites in the trailer parks? Exactly.

We only have a porous unsecured border to the south to call that racist is just stupid, Europe and Canada are 1st world countries whereas Mexico and Central America are third world. Huge difference! People overstaying their visas is an issue separate from our border but in the end everyone that isn't supposed to be here should go back eventually. They need to end jus soli citizenship, it should be based on the citizenship of your parents as it is most of the world. You should not be able to sneak in and have a kid that is automatically a citizen, that is not fair nor is it good policy. There isn't anything wrong with preferring people from one country over another either, how someone might integrate should 100% be considered so someone from Canada or the UK or Australia for example should have a lot easier time moving here than say someone from Syria or El Salvador. We don't need our markets flooded with cheap labor, we do not need to make the rich richer and the poor poorer while making our neighbors less safe, our social services more overburdened, and make our bad schools even worse!

Maybe there is one, but I like to point you to the treatment of the Irish in America and Britain in the recent past. They are about as white as they come, yet they suffered arguably worse treatment than Mexicans do today. Obviously it cannot be a matter of skin colour, so what was it?