I’ve just read a response by Rod Dreher to a recent NYT op-ed, by Jason Barker, praising Karl Marx.
Mr. Dreher grants to Marx a correct understanding of the revolutionary power of capitalism:
Capitalism ”” for Marx, the merchant class (the “bourgeoisie’) were the carriers of capitalism ”” turns everything into a market. Capitalism is a revolutionary force that disrupts and desacralizes all things. All that talk in The Benedict Option about “liquid modernity’? That’s based in Marx, actually. Zygmunt Bauman, the late sociologist from whom I took the idea, was a Marxist.
Look, most of us conservatives in the West are to some degree supporters of the free market. What we missed for a very long time was that it is hard to support a fully free market while at the same time expecting our social institutions ”” the family, the church, and so forth ”” to remain stable. This is an insight of Marx’s that we conservatives ”” and even conservative Christians ”” ought to absorb. I write about this a lot, though not in specific Marxist terms.
The thing is, Christian Democratic parties throughout Western Europe have largely absorbed this truth. Catholic social teaching is based in these insights as well. They aren’t necessarily against the free market, but rather say that the market must be tempered for the common good.
That wasn’t Marx’s view, obviously. Marx thought the free market was itself wicked, and ought to be totally controlled by the state. We know where that all ended up: with a hundred million dead, and entire economies and societies destroyed.
Dreher adds that Barker’s piece openly acknowledges that an evolved Marxism is one of the roots of the modern Left’s “social-justice” crusades:
But we can agree that Marx was right to diagnose the revolutionary nature of capitalism, if catastrophically wrong about the cure for capitalism’s excesses. If that was as far as Jason Barker went, that would be fine. But he doesn’t ”” and this is the warning. Barker continues:
The key factor in Marx’s intellectual legacy in our present-day society is not “philosophy’ but “critique,’ or what he described in 1843 as “the ruthless criticism of all that exists: ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.’ “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it,’ he wrote in 1845.
Racial and sexual oppression have been added to the dynamic of class exploitation. Social justice movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, owe something of an unspoken debt to Marx through their unapologetic targeting of the “eternal truths’ of our age. Such movements recognize, as did Marx, that the ideas that rule every society are those of its ruling class and that overturning those ideas is fundamental to true revolutionary progress.
We have become used to the go-getting mantra that to effect social change we first have to change ourselves. But enlightened or rational thinking is not enough, since the norms of thinking are already skewed by the structures of male privilege and social hierarchy, even down to the language we use. Changing those norms entails changing the very foundations of society.
There it is, reader. There is the “cultural Marxism’ that you hear so much about, and that so many on the left deny. It is in the Marxist principle that there is no such thing as truth; there is only power.
Dreher draws the right conclusion from this:
This is why it is pointless for us conservatives and old-school liberals to stand around identifying contradictions and hypocrisies in how the progressives behave. They don’t care! They aren’t trying to apply universal standards of justice. They believe that “universal standards of justice’ is a cant phrase to disguise white heterosexist patriarchal supremacy. They believe that justice is achieving power for their group, and therefore disempowering other groups. This is why it’s not racist, in their view, to favor non-whites over whites in the distribution of power. This is why they don’t consider it unfair to discriminate against men, heterosexuals, and other out-groups.
They will use things like “dialogue’ as a tactic to serve the long-term strategy of acquiring total power. Resisting them on liberal grounds is like bringing a knife to a gun fight. The neoreactionaries have seen this clearly, while conservatives like me, who can’t quite let go of old-fashioned liberalism, have resisted it.
Yes, we neoreactionaries have seen this very clearly indeed. Why, just a few weeks ago, commenting on the media’s outrage at Facebook’s having provided user data to a firm associated with the Trump campaign, when they didn’t seem to mind that they did it for Obama just a few years earlier, I wrote this:
This has a lot of people over on the Republican side of the aisle blasting the mainstream media for hypocrisy. But if that’s the way you’re looking at this, you couldn’t be more wrong. What the MSM are showing here is, in fact, disciplined adherence to a timeless and consistent political principle:
Defend your people, always. Attack the enemy with whatever comes to hand, always.
How I wish more people understood this!
It appears that Rod Dreher now understands it. He continues:
I hate to say it ”” seriously, I do ”” but I think that today’s conservatives (including me) are going to end up as neoreactionaries…
That’s what happened to me, too, Mr. Dreher. It wasn’t what I’d had in mind, either — but here I stand. I can do no other. Welcome aboard.
There’s more, and it’s all worth your time. Read it here.
11 Comments
It’s not such a big deal to become a ‘reactionary’ or ‘far rightist’, objectively speaking. It just means you’re not actively participating in a form of mass insanity. Was it George Carlin who had the joke about how he used to be called a ‘nigger lover’ and then later a ‘white supremacist’ without ever changing his opinions? It’s pretty much like that. A neo-reactionary or far rightist is typically just someone who still believes in elementary obvious principles such as the objectivity of truth and the law of non-contradiction, the most obvious facts about human affairs, etc.
Only someone lacking all powers of insight and introspection and observation, or all powers of logical thought, could come up with this:
Okay, sure: we should challenge the ‘eternal truths’ of our society, ‘the ideas that rule’ in our society which are also ‘those of its ruling class’. So what are those ideas? Most definitely and obviously they aren’t ideas of white supremacy or patriarchy or western chauvinism or Christianity or anything else that Mr. Barker and his allies want to question or attack. In fact–very obviously!–none of these things are ever defended by anyone in power, and haven’t been for generations… The ruling false ideas are, of course, precisely the ideas of ‘Black Lives Matter’ and ‘Me Too’ and everything else that Mr. Barker supports–and somehow, absurdly, takes to be radical and subversive new ideas conflicting with the interests of our rulers.
Lack of insight, indifference to observable reality and logical coherence… These are signs of severe mental illness. A neo-reactionary or far rightist nowadays is usually just someone who doesn’t have that kind of mental illness.
How can he be so stupid as to think he’d be published in the New York Times–the New York Times!!!–if he was saying anything even remotely radical or threatening to the power structure?
And yet they really do believe it. Some do. The rest are just evil.
Dreher also recently wrote about that wrath of gnon interview you linked below.
Jason,
So he did. Small world!
At the end of the item there’s an update: a reader had written in to let Mr. Dreher know that Wrath of Gnon had tweeted a meme saying that:
This was too much for Mr. Dreher, who said:
This is a reflex. However many red pills Mr. Dreher may have nibbled — and he did say, in his own piece, that he figured he’s going to end up as a neoreactionary — clearly he hasn’t fully digested them yet.
When a commenter asks why, exactly, he drew his finger back so swiftly from the flame, Mr. Dreher added this (my emphasis):
That is a mind snapping shut; it’s what Orwell called crimestop. There is no reason at all why the idea that cultures are, as I’ve written here, the “extended phenotypes” of distinct human populations should be incompatible with Christianity; it might simply be an empirical fact of the world.
It’s only what you do with such an idea — how you think it is relevant morally — that would make believing such a thing an obstacle to Christian godliness.
It always saddens me when I see this sort of thing in people whose minds I admire. It shows the terrible power of social orthodoxy — the very same power that Mr. Dreher describes so clearly in his essay!
It took him a while.
The time for dialogue is over. This is an all out power struggle now.
?
Uriel Fiori:
“Marx thought the free market was itself wicked, and ought to be totally controlled by the state.”
i haven’t yet found very much evidence that Marx thought Lenin-style state socialism was the only way forward, or even the best way. as you go through Capital 3, it seems that the revolutionary power Marx expects comes directly from capitalism, in its contradictions. it the state ever came to be a major figure, it would be (as in patchwork) as a capitalist state – one run for profit.
i think the prospect of right-wing marxism is definitely not one of conservative Christian democracy, but of unbound automation: http://www.xenosystems.net/right-on-the-money-2/
“becoming neoreactionary”, if it means anything, means getting to that.
I think almost all devout Christians Malcolm (or at least American believers in light of our unique history) simply have a mental block concerning sociobiology, and especially its relation to delicate subjects like race, moral development, and culture. Because of the faith’s powerful emphasis on agency and the supernatural, it can appear counterintuitive that so much of life may actually be natural and shockingly determined. (When I was a Christian in the past, I found it difficult to wrap my head around for instance the seeming fact that spiritual desire is heritable, and distrubted in the population unequally.) Hence Dreher’s mind “snapping shut.”
Actually, this phenomenon doesn’t apply only to Christians. The prominent Orthodox Jew David Goldman (“Spengler”), who is almost always extremely candid discussing issues, doesn’t like sociobiology either.
I had the exact same bemused reaction Malcolm. Holds that both the alt right is the only possible response while refusing to entertain the possibility of accepting that response.
The fact every time he pulls this elaborate doublethink trick it’s accompanied by strange anger, is dreher acknowledging indirectly his intellectual humiliation.
Red Collar Preachers:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/politics-in-the-pews-anti-trump-activism-is-reviving-protestant-churches-at-a-cost/ar-AAwKARI?li=BBnb7Kz
Jason,
Nowadays, perhaps. But this devout Christian, for example, certainly didn’t.
Things have changed.