Unseeing liberalism, pt. 1

On the politics of removing distinction; and in defense of American racist politics

Reader “RAD” did me the favor, in a comment on my earlier post, of introducing me to an astonishing book which aligns with my arguments regarding liberalism’s intrinsic need to render all spheres of human life political — Ryszard Legutko’s The Demon in Democracy.

Published in 2016, the central thesis is that liberal democracy in Europe has achieved everything that communism eventually aspired to or practiced, with an unaccountable elite reshaping society according to a utopian, “scientific” end-point of human development.

Communism devolved to seeking to orient all modes of being and thinking in society around communism, but failed; liberalism has devolved to actually orienting all modes of being and thinking in society around liberalism.

Lenin, of course, made this practice his only method of argumentation: every fact, thought, idea, book or person was looked at from one and only one perspective—whether they were useful for or detrimental to Russian communism.

The liberals adopted a similar Leninist practice, though probably they would not find the adjective pleasing.

This post will explore and reflect upon Legutko’s remarks on feminism and multiculturalism, with four parts.

• i. Feminism and the destruction of a natural politics of women

• ii. Multiculturalism as the destruction of culture

• iii. The role of the 1960s leftist revolution in modern liberalism (I will dispute this in a follow-up post).

• iv. American resistance to liberalism in the form of organic community politics. Yes, Democrats are the real racists, but that is why they are more effectively anti-liberalist than Republicans.

i. The (feminist-liberalist) politics of nothingness

Legutko obliterates any need for me to flesh out in practice how liberalism invades all spheres of life within its geographical bounds. Nothing can be apolitical or exogenously political, all must be political in terms of liberalism. His remarks on this point, in Chapter 3.5, are so sharp and accurate they are almost distracting to insert here. For clarity, everything in this post that is not directly quoted is my own wording and not an attempt to depict Legutko’s thoughts, however much they overlap.

The old communal bonds, incomprehensible to and feared by the liberal-democratic mind, were to be replaced with new modern ones. The feminist ideology, for example, proclaimed that women are united by a special feeling of togetherness and solidarity[...]

Just as the “proletariat,” “women” is an abstract concept that does not denote any actual existing community, but only an imagined collective made an object of political worship among feminist organizations and their allies. But the paradox is that this feminist woman, being an figment of political imagination, is considered by the feminists to be a proper woman, a woman in a strict sense, the truest woman, just as for the communists the Marxist proletariat was the truest representative of the working class. By the same token a real woman living in a real society, like a real worker living in a real society, is politically not to be trusted because she deviates too much from the political model. In fact, a non-feminist woman is not a woman at all, just as a noncommunist worker was not really a proletarian.

When, within a liberalist context, a political program (feminism) is created for the subclass of women — when the fact of “being a woman” becomes invaded politically by liberalism —  it can only have one meta-principal, which is to advance laws and propaganda designed to efface any social consequences that derive from being a woman — it is to make the human experience of being a woman being nothing.

This is a utopian vision and there are certain contradictions that naturally emerge in the course of progressing from illiberal womanhood to liberal nothingness. In order to let women engage in sport “equally,” laws must force the creation of ghettoized sports programs, and the media eventually (when bandwidth has expanded enough that media companies can afford dead air) must show women engaging in sport as a facsimile of masculine spectacle — but almost as soon as this is finally accomplished, women’s sports are invaded by men pretending to be women. After all, there was never any why not implied in the logic that led to the laws and media propaganda that gave us televised women’s sports. Feminists now look for magical distinctions between their own philosophy and Critical Theory, but both are of a nature that from the start conducts a political invasion of utopian equality on natural social distinctions.

What was rendered obsolete in liberalist feminism, though due to these necessary practical contradictions not left out of the political program immediately, are whatever intrinsic and contingent political concerns relate to actually being a woman. In an anti-liberal sense being a woman may indeed have political consequences, but they firstly stem from what is different (socially and naturally) in society about this identity; do not stem from an explicit program of obviating those differences; are not pre-defined or predictable in any given context (they do not make war against contexts themselves); and lastly do not even require that women have the vote or are politically aware (however, one could still imagine a “women’s party” that represents women as a stakeholder in practical government, without a liberalist or feminist program).

These political manifestations would be organic rather than obligate; they would stem from each society’s natural order. The point is not that liberalism creates politics where they did not exist ever, anywhere, but that it removes from life any element of human relations that the social order has managed to solve without politics, e.g. via culture (tradition, community, and religion). The organic politics of being a woman do not cease to function when feminism becomes the liberalist regime’s program for “being a woman,” but they are left outside of the same, an enemy to conquer on the way to obliterating apolitical social order. And all things in society that are still being a woman, and still engage with those organic modes of (culture and) politics, are the enemy of liberalist “being a woman,” and those women who eschew the feminist program are in its eyes not women (because they are not striving toward nothing).

ii. On Phony Multiculturalism

This dovetails and brings us to Legutko’s remarks on multiculturalism. Briefly first, some more of my own words on the same problem: If a liberalist politics of “being a woman” understands itself as making war on natural social consequences of womanhood, and making women “nothing,” then the (at least temporary) end-result of repeating that process on all communities is to fashion (or approach more and more closely) a “multiculturalism” that is devoid of different cultures. Likewise, no given community (which becomes not a community but a set of members which the state works to render socially indistinguishable from any other set) can be allowed a political program devoted to the organic and contingent practical needs of the community (whatever hasn’t been solved by culture), but instead must be represented by the liberalist media/state directly — the media/state at most recruits young members of this dissolving community to fill in the blanks on what it is about the dominant community (the white, male default, for now) culturally that oppresses them individually and atomically.

One would think that such a program is congruent with the logic of democracy, which after all is based on the competition among groups struggling for power. This argument is partly correct and partly fallacious. It is correct so far as it actually points to today’s persistent tendency to turn social groups into something like political parties, which, once they become parties, lose their communal character. Women, homosexuals, Muslims, ethnic groups are being perceived as and transformed into quasi-parties, organized from above by the political or ideological leadership and not possessing other characteristics than those resulting from the struggle for power against other groups and no other identity than that provided by this leadership, allowing no ideological dissent. Whoever is not a member of this quasi-party, even though for some reason—be it sex, birth, or color—he should be included, but stays outside its boundaries or sometimes even opposes it, is the enemy, a sellout, and a traitor. [...]

Many ingredients of the multicultural cake are not ingredients any more but have become the cake itself. Feminism is not the “culture” of feminists or feminist parties or women, but the political platform espoused by governments, the European Union, and many international institutions; the ideology of homosexuality is no longer in the hands of homosexual activists and their organizations but is a major item in national and global agendas.

iii. Again, liberalism or leftism?

In this careful selection of quotes, and heavy-handed use of my own remarks, I give a false impression that Legutko agrees with me that the modern program of liberalism is a natural end-result of the Lockean vision. In fact Legutko ties all of these ails to the leftist revolution of the 1960s — in this, liberalism became what it is today, wedded to democratic pretenses but fundamentally impatient with the capacity of Western republican politics to bring about equality and justice, and therefore prone to dictatorial legal social engineering on behalf of a purported “majority.” This manifests in the leftward, 5-year-plan lurches of the 1960s and 2010s in America, and the everyday order of the European Union.

To a great extent this still rebuts Lindsay and Coughlin (who are disputed in my previous post): left-informed liberalism does not operate according to Actual Critical Theory Conspiracy Programs at first, and to whatever extent it may seem to do so today, the logic does not appear different than the supposedly innocuous aims of the 1960s. Feminism today, as then, seeks to destroy the natural social differences of being a woman; it is a war against whatever in society about being a woman is not political and directed toward equality.

Likewise, Legutko’s formulation of a left-informed liberalism explains semi-intrinsically the depredation of republican anti-majoritarian limits on the state (so, this can be considered a leftist ill), but still ties the raison d’être of these revolutions to what is understood by everyone today as liberalism. There is no obvious barrier between a liberalist notion of equality and de facto state-enforced equity, because in both cases the conceit is that the media/state is at war against natural and socially organic human differences in communities (even in nations where there is only, at the time of liberalism’s introduction, one culture). In this respect we may understand all of the pre-modern philosophy of liberalism as something which is appropriated by this new, different, leftist but not Marxist thing (and Legutko formulates the term “liberal-democracy” to denote the current order, in which democracy has almost no republican scaffolding and the state is essentially communist).

Therefore, in another post, I will expand my own thoughts on why this change represents not mere appropriation but expansion of the Lockean political habit.

iv. On American Romanism and Republican Hyper-Liberalism

What is notable before closing are the tensions that make true multiculturalism more resilient to liberalist “multiculturalism,” which I propose explain why liberalism faces so much backlash and inertia in America while it achieved such sweeping hegemony in Europe.

When there is only one culture within a given nation, the organic means by which politics and the state solve problems that cannot be solved by culture become invisible. Liberalist politics must content itself to make war on male/female differences and heteronormativity, but there is no way for the liberalist state to “see” what in the native culture it must destroy, until large masses of immigrants are brought into the nation — as has only recently been accomplished within most of the continent. These human invasions allow for the liberalist state to expand its invasion on the life of its native constituents; but they also reveal limits to the state's power in that same regard, creating a test of the liberalist project that may yet produce a backlash in Western Europe.

Otherwise, however, the dominance of the European Union’s appointed liberalist managers over Europe is far beyond what really prevails in the politics of the purported American “uniparty.” Why is this so? The answer is, in fact, actual multiculturalism.

In America since the 1850s, the political needs of non-dominant cultures have been constantly obvious and solved in organic, illiberal ways, via party patronage machines. The classic example here of course is the Irish machine of New York’s Tammany Hall. In California we may look to Chicano political art as a reflection of a modern pre-liberalist political engine. It sometimes is a bit paternalistic — there is often the sense of something having been commissioned on behalf of an imagined united Chicano folk, whether that was true at the time of creation — but overall the concept being depicted is not “being Chicano” but being Chicano.

Barrio Logan, San Diego, CA. Roman Eugeniusz (wikipedia.com) (Brightened.) CC BY-SA 3.0

Chicano public art reifies and reflects that the state is responding to whatever natural, organic political needs manifest from the community. It is not demanding that outsiders see the same community as equals; it is not painstakingly drawing individuals out of the community to paint them into generic contexts, to make them “nothing.” Chicano politics, like Black Nationalist politics, was anti-assimilationist.

These are the elements of American political practice that I refer to as Roman, if only to make a distinction between the Hellenistic philosophical practice of considering and arguing about politics in idealized and universalist terms.

The American state — city, state, and Federal governments — has long responded to marginalized communities organically, even when those groups were excluded from the franchise (as, remember, all immigrants for some time are). At times this manifests as powerful elites courting the plebeian vote to disempower the gentry; at times it doesn’t; at times communities are naturally politically animated in response to persistent unmet needs; at times their patrons in the government are mere bureaucrats maintaining established doles, and mostly people within the communities served just live their lives. Only in the wars of Washington and the North on the culture of Southern whites have American politics regularly revealed and reflected the universalist ideals of liberalism.

Against this established functional order of practical identity politics that pervaded in the mid-century, the modern liberalist war on communities in America has faced a protracted uphill battle. Essentially all progress so far has been the result of media brainwashing of a younger generation to “decolonize” them from their own community, to alienate them from the subculture of their birth and make them identify with the vague notion of a “multiculture” of individuals without community.

Given that the young are not reliable voters, this has done little to displace extant political machines that still cater to the older generations in practical ways, and for this reason much of the Democratic party is still not truly liberalist at all — identity politics on the American left remains confused about whether it wants to preserve or destroy the differences between communities, i.e. whether it is practical and essentially racist or whether it is instead liberal.

By contrast, it is the Republican party which has since the 1980s, if not long before, cloaked itself at all times in liberalist notions. Even Republican identity politics — references to tradition and to community — obsequiously casts these elements of culture as somehow a manifestation of the American liberalist creed. Republicans do not defend these values as representing the American white’s way of life.

This has resulted, as anyone involved in the online right would tell the reader, in a complete atrophy of resistance to liberalist precepts on the American “so-called right,” a tendency in fact for American whites who still imagine any place for themselves in mainstream politics to be the first to denounce any acknowledgement of differences between the Anglo-American default culture and that of other races. “Democrats are the real racists,” as the best example of this mental habit.

But so what if they are? Racist politics have persisted in America since the founding; there is no need to understand them as “anti-American” unless one buys the liberalist conceit that the destruction of racist politics declared necessary in the 1960s is obviously a good thing, and obviously a progression toward a founding ideal.

Thus there is no more staunch defender of liberalism than the middle-aged or elderly Republican — the “conservatard,” if the reader is unaware of how this mindset is described from the alt-right — who has absorbed decades of propaganda affirming liberalist values by Republicans explaining to voters why less government, not more, is actually the best way to achieve the same.

Here I will quote myself, in an aborted original version of this post. We can recall, however, the opening quote from Legutko that claims that liberalism copies the Leninist practice of criticizing every proposition in terms of whether it advances liberalism:

In America certainly (in my own words), to denounce or even express ambivalence over egalitarianism, de jure (bot not de facto) free expression, and “democracy” (as a vague idea of elections making tomorrow’s TV news say things are better, i.e. more liberal), might as well be to snatch babies out of mothers’ arms and bite the heads off. And in any given political debate each opponent often seeks to explain to the audience how the other's views have committed some hint of infidelity to these values. “Often” approaches “always” as liberalism’s march on American patronage politics conquers new demographics, though recedes again when cultural backlash or immigration prompts a shift rightward or to local priorities — but the mainstream “right” has since the 80s has been at all times primarily liberalist, asking the public to believe that the liberalist virtues of reducing the state somehow exceed the liberalist virtues of increasing it.

The values of liberalism in the modern, liberalized discourse of America are so all-pervasive as to be invisible as choices — as if the universe of possible human values were a sphere unable to extend beyond the scope of liberalism. When a substack Covid vaccine dissident extorts his readers to “help defend free speech!” after two years of his speech proved to be nothing more than a squirt gun aimed at a castle wall that was ultimately and anticlimactically opened from within anyway, the reader somehow does not ask why.

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