Thread by @17cShyteposter

In just fifteen pages of "Suicide of the West," Burnham's already proven a major thesis: that the West has lost the will to survive

Published 1964, so written before the Civil Rights Act. Always crazy to read people forecasting these processes so (relatively) early in the game

Really looking forward to the extrapolation of the passage that follows: that liberalism is the rationalization of this process of suicide

Probably best captured by "the conservative case for X," e.g. "the conservative case for chopping your son's nuts off"

lol. Basically, for liberalism, "the science is settled" on everything, and if you resist "the science" of the consensus, you are, as it turns out, the only group liberalism is justified in wielding force against

Feel familiar?

Modern progressivism managed to integrate these two views, but by asserting that Original Sin only applies to "racism," "whiteness," white *people*

Since progressivism requires the elimination of Original Sin to continue unimpeded, its core logic makes its intentions very clear

"Professor Sidney Hook has squeezed the entire definition of liberalism into a single unintentionally ironic phrase: 'faith in intelligence.'"

Rationalists BTFO'd

Since society is perfectible through reason, and we're still so far away from being perfect, then everything from the past, that got us to this point, needs to be burned down and replaced with the new.

Progressive obsession with education stems from the fact that the only thing holding us back from our Promised Land is ignorance, which can—and must—be cured in every single individual

...oddly, though, while progressivism believes that everyone is just the product of their circumstances, and thus blameless for their misdeeds, it is only forgiving to *certain classes* of these victims of circumstance, while being actively hostile to others

(Also lol)

The next part is pretty interesting, because it's an analysis of the reasons why liberalism is possessed by the notion of free speech, open dialogue, discourse, etc.

But that's... obviously no longer the case today. Why?

It's not hard to argue that progressivism got all it wanted out of liberalism, many components of liberalism would only be holding it back at this point, and so it is actively discarding them, leaving it free to continue the consolidation of its power process.

Check this out. The same urge that leads modern liberalism to remove power from local sources and centralize it under the federal government...

...leads it to also desire to remove power from *national* sources, and centralize it under *global* rule and authority.

(Comically, the professor's argument—that liberalism can only exist under worldwide liberalism—is the exact same argument the Soviets made for communism!)

Oh my god. If you're noticing a certain Borg-like "assimilate or die" mindset to Reason-driven liberalism, here's a contemporary of Burnham's summing it up the best I've ever seen:

This is one of my favorite parts so far. Liberals look at a thing like Skid Row, and since society has clearly wronged the poor souls that live there, they designate it a "problem," for which there must be a "solution"

But since liberal solutions are ideological, and almost always contrary to nature, the attempt doesn't solve the "problem," but only displaces it—and makes life worse for both the former residents of Skid Row, and all the other residents of the city

The illiberal argument Burnham is making here is that some portion of people will always be, to be blunt, noncontributing low-lives

If this is a "problem," it's an intractable one, that can't be educated or engineered away. It can only be mediated

The best mediation was already invented: Skid Row. A localized place where these types could be sequestered from polite society

And *also* provided an environment with standards suited to them, allowing them a better quality of life than the homeless camps that replaced Skid Row

And if you've read working-class literature from before the abolition of Skid Row (like Fante, Bukowski, Steinbeck), you can see this isn't just some abstract argument

Skid Row was grim: but I'd much rather live in Skid Row, than the tents

Burnham, summarizing all of the assumptions baked into liberal ideology, and its resulting social solutions:

"When the fact is tragic, his ideology offers him refuge from fact."

Burnham moves on to journalists. Five people die in a Peruvian strike. No other information is known, but syndicated reporter Ralph McGill "fulfilled his liberal duty to enlighten us" as to the truth: "feudal conditions obtain in Chiclayo"

Burnham, skeptical, digs up the facts:

There's a couple pages in between that makes the case even more strongly—Burnham speaks to people who've lived in Peru, insist Chiclayo has relatively strong working conditions for S. America

Report same rumors of communist agitation that are later presented by Martin

Identifying that a story sounds like BS, discovering that the reporter actually knows nothing and is shoehorning the flimsiest facts into his progressive morality play that he reports as national news, then tracking down the real truth:

Burnham is an OG frogposter

Here he sums the thinking up really well, but again, note the big shift between the 1960s and the 2020s: "academic freedom" and "free speech" are now hateful right-wing values

Indicating that progressivism has advanced to a new phase of its conquest

Two main things here: again, that education is the means through which we at last liberate ourselves from all human ills, and reach the Promised Land

The kicker: the correct education can only be provided by the institute of government—church and family are its natural enemies

The (old) church is obviously the enemy of progressivism, but it's important to absorb how the exact same logic applies to the family

Given the number of children turning their parents in to the feds these days, I'd say its subversion of family is well under way

So hey, liberalism got the thing that's at the very core of its ideology, everything must be perfect now

Huh, turns out mass education doesn't lead to truth, but most often to propaganda + indoctrination, as wielded by illiberal forces? Whoops lol. Hope that doesn't happen here!

Any attempt to end all "discrimination" will only result in creating new forms of it

This results in new forms of discrimination the elites who hold this ideology approve of: against men, white people, etc. Since elites control government, government will enforce this as well

This part is just like pure hate speech against the Blue Check Class that is the platonic embodiment of this psychological profile

Basically, the NPC commissars

The irony here, right, is that liberalism is supposed to be the individual process of consciously reasoning through reality to reach Truth. But in practice it's just another faith, handed down like any other; people just grow up with it.

They don't *like* understanding it.

Guys like this always say a lot of prophetic things, but at the halfway point of the book, this one is the most eerily prophetic of them all

He defines the four major values of liberalism, then argues that the *order* in which they are valued is crucial. The Founding Fathers ordered their values thus:

Freedom
Liberty
Justice
Peace

Post-WW2 liberalism orders its values much differently:

Peace
Justice
Freedom
Liberty

With the modern Global American Empire's purpose shifting to enforcing LGBT rights at dronepoint, the liberal regime in Current Year now orders these values thus:

Justice
Peace
Freedom
Liberty

So a free citizen of the nation no longer shares any values with the ruling order.

You can't naively maximize all these values at once. When you elevate one in the hierarchy of values, you demote another. It's a system of tradeoffs, without escape.

The elevation of social Justice can only come at the sacrifice of individual Freedom.

...oh. Which he states, explicitly, a few pages later

"I am only offering evidence for the conclusion that in the case of most liberals today, individual Freedom has a lower priority than social Justice."

Pretty amazing to predict your enemy's exact language 50 years in advance

The extension of this logic is that the more competing identities you try to include in your rubric of Justice (racial, religious, sexual orientation, etc), the more Freedom you must sacrifice—especially of the majority, whatever that is, but also of all minority groups...

...except, of course, for the very most favored minority identities. Those are the ones your identity, and its freedoms, will be offered up on the altar to: the exact people *most foreign* to your own natural interests and desires

Apropos of nothing, Happy George Floyd Day

In the interest of fairness, next comes a fairly lengthy criticism of elevating the value of Peace above national Liberty—with a few hints that a nation/civilization is fully justified in engaging in armed conflict to pursue its interests

This, I have to guess, is why Burnham is sometimes described as the "first neoconservative," and I'll say it's the first time I've really raised my guard against his reasoning

But he doesn't make his case directly enough for me to really dig into it. Still worth noting

Anyway, back to owning the libs! Next, he identifies guilt as a core piece of human nature, and describes Christianity as a complete system to allow humans to reckon with it

Having discarded Christianity, liberalism then finds new ways for people to relieve their guilt

So we have both "wokeness as religion" and another process that's a close cousin to virtue signaling: minor symbolic acts which cost the believer nothing to participate in, while still allowing them to fully gain the spiritual benefits of participating in the religion

I was going to highlight the key sections here, but I would have to highlight the whole damn thing

Because it is a perfect and complete description of the BLM riots during the Summer of Floyd. Again, right down to the very language used by 2020's activists and believers

The well-off feel guilt, don't know why, engage in progressive politics to relieve it. Identifying both the AWFL and the communist trust funder/child of military contractors

These types aren't new. They've been with us all along.

Oh, and note that in Burnham's day, college enrollment was roughly just 25% of what it is today. Now think about the explosion of journalists, pundits, blue checks, AWFLs, leftist podcasters, etc etc. Really makes you think 🤔

So liberalism's urge to intervene isn't actually rational, it's driven by an inborn component of human nature that religion is no longer around to neutralize

So it *has* to act. To "solve" and "uplift." Maybe the main contrast to the conservative urge to "let well enough alone"

How on earth does George Floyd, violent criminal, become a national saint?

Because his very lowness proves that he is actually *more moral* than us—because his conditions were *inflicted* on him by us

He was a martyr even before he died. His death by the police is just the QED

Through this, we also have the answer to why the media, the embodiment of progressivism second only to academia, literally doesn't care about murders in Chicago or Baltimore, but goes into a frenzy over every fake noose hoax

It feels it has no moral standing to judge—since it, or more accurately society, is to blame for these murders

It then defines "society" as its political enemies who refuse to advance the reforms the prog knows would stop all Chicago murders

You know, like disbanding the police

Now that he's spent 200+ pages describing and dissecting the progressive ideology, he can really let loose

The question now is whether there's anyone left in the 21st century right capable of drawing the line

"Within the universe of liberalism there is no point at which the spirit can come to rest; nowhere and no moment for the soul to be able to say: in His Will is our peace."

Embodied, of course, by the progressive's latest mantra: "I'm so tired."

By the way, I've skipped over countless examples of liberal hypocrisy when it comes to far leftists, be it the ultra-woke or literal communists, since "Dems say X here, but then say Y *here*!" is so played out at this point, but this is probably his best summary so far

This hypocrisy stems from the fact liberalism understands it's of the left: so while it loves "punching right," it hesitates to ever meaningfully resist its own extremists and subverters

Liberalism, then, inevitably surrenders all of its values to left-wing illiberalism

This framework in place, we see what most "liberation movements" mean in practice: the redistribution of wealth from those who built it, to those who didn't

Cloaked in and justified by the logic of liberalism

Liberalism itself might not agree with hard and "equitable" redistribution—it merely believes in giving everyone the same *opportunity* to pursue freedom, wealth, etc, and will happily subsidize that process, after all it promises equality—

We might not really mean the rhetoric—but it's still what we're *saying*, what we're promising. Why wouldn't they take us at our own word?

From liberalism, we have now derived wokeness: anything less than full Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity is the sickest of hypocrisy

The result of morally disarming yourself against the basic logic of equality when core liberal principle promises that very equality is inevitable: the full dismantling of liberalism.

(This quote isn't taken from here—Burnham drops it himself.)

At the 75% marker, Burnham has pretty much proven the thesis of the work, the thing I was curious how he'd accomplish way, way back in the second tweet of this thread. We're now entering victory lap/QED/"Stop, stop, he's already dead!" territory

So, hopefully the most fun part

He then goes on to identify liberals by status and class: teachers, columnists, preachers, entertainers, bureaucratic tools, every one of them haranguers and scolds, or the bloodless tissue of the managerial body. This is who they are

Victory Lap status: achieved

"Point of personal privilege, we're leftists, not liberals!"

No, workers actually hate you, except what you can provide for them economically, and you have become increasingly captured by liberalism, liberal *values*, not what workers actually want

DSA status: eternally owned

Burnham, at last, gives liberalism credit for something: reforming the foolish and often brutal criminal punishments left over from the Renaissance

However, even when liberalism correctly identifies a problem, its delusions render it incapable of *solving* the problem

Liberals, on some hidden level, get that their "solutions" don't work, that they don't belong in power

This is why, when they attain it, they have to pretend they're still fighting against the "system," which is somehow still holding them back even when they're in charge of it!

This is why progressives are, right this moment, play-acting like they're boldly standing against the Establishment when they control—when they *are*—every part of it:

Because that means their utopia should be here. Yet it's still not showing up. Someone *else* must be to blame

Liberalism's inability to confront reality, and thus to provide solutions, is becoming an increasingly big deal

This is describing Latin American revolutions, but it can easily be applied to any structure: liberalism guts the old order, but has nothing to put in its place

Communism is more than happy to step in and provide the will + order that liberalism can't

To whatever extent that liberalism once served a purpose, it's since become so decrepit and demented, and so frightened and hateful of the truths it can't admit, that it can no longer do anything but destroy: motivated not just by its delusion, but by its resentment

Ramping up to the ending, in case you're concerned about spoilers for a political treatise (don't ask me, maybe you'd rather read it for yourself or something), so if so, let this serve as the warning to Go No Further

Through its belief in egalitarianism—not just within its own nations, but globally—liberalism will inevitably force Western nations into a declining standard of living, even into hunger and poverty

Sound unrealistic? Now eat your bugs and live in your pod

The logic of liberalism demands this. For the leftist urge is to create human gray goo, or as he puts it, "distinctionless human mass."

He has predicted, here, wokeness, with its demands that you hand over your power and privilege, a process liberalism is powerless to stop

There is a way out: to discard the dogma that all people are interchangeable, and to accept that there is something unique, even superior(!), to Western civilization

But that suggestion would now get you triple-canceled by day's end, because it unravels the core goal of the left

Leftism is threatening the very survival of the West. And since, again, the very nature of liberalism only allows it to oppose the right, this means it will eventually by subsumed by the left.

It has no way out. Not from within itself

He's specifically concerned about being destroyed by communism (this was 1964, remember), but if you pull a fun trick and replace "communists" with "progressives," all of the underlying logic remains the same

If anything it just makes his argument more based!

So you just need the will to fight back—but ah hell, turns out the acid bath of liberalism has undermined and dissolved everything that *makes* men willing to fight

Liberalism feels sterile because it is the process of spiritually castrating yourself

This also explains why the war in Afghanistan was destined to fail. Imagine trying to enforce women's rights at gunpoint lmao

Progressive capture of the war machine has made them more willing to deploy it, but that ensures the outcome can only be tragic and absurd

When you believe that all people are the same, and can be reshaped at will, you will find yourself at war with nature

When you lose that war, you will not abandon your dream—you will accuse your countrymen of subverting the great dream.

And become tempted to get rid of them.

It's not the dream that's impossible. The dream is beautiful! How can you be so hateful, to stand against the dream? This can't be allowed. What's to be done with you?

Now we can the logic of the gulags, the death camps, and of mass migration.

And now he goes full Dark Side. What liberalism is, then, its reason and its function, is to convince the West that extinguishing itself is actually a beautiful and wonderful thing.

It is the soft murmuring of a mother to her dying child...

...a psychological break, driven mad by a glimpse of nature as it is, uncompromising and hard, retreating into a full world of warm delusion...

The ceaseless whispering that allows the weak to invert all their fears and failures into moral triumph

That gives a dying man the ideology, and the great relief that comes with it, to see every advance of his sickness as another step toward victory—and to welcome his own death.

...and that's the end of the book.

Having finished it, I've got various thoughts to add, but if you made it this far, no need to worry about missing out on the ending of the work itself, I know this has been comically long lol

It was one of the first attempts, if the author can be believed, to capture the logic and psychology of modern liberalism. I.e. progressivism, as opposed to classical liberalism

It did this so well that nearly all of it is still 100% accurate, 57 years later.

I tried to provide the gist—maybe a lot more than the gist—so if you read this whole damn thread, you got most of it

But it's still worth reading in itself, if you're interested, both for its thoroughness and for its historic place in American conservative thought

Specifically, you can see how Burnham's reasoning allowed him to be both "the first neoconservative"(!) while at the same time providing huge thought-fuel to paleoconservatism, which is hard to make sense of without reading it firsthand

Like I don't know the full lineage of neoconservatism, but if this was the "founding document," the main error that came afterwards seems to be that you cannot hope to exert Western power *externally* until you have corrected its flaws *internally.* Doing so can only lead to ruin

In other words, as long as the ideology you rule yourself by is bad, any attempt to exert force on others will be bad, because your head will be filled with idiot ideas about how much you can actually accomplish

Burnham definitely rattles his saber here...

...but I don't believe he'd think for a second that you could "establish liberal democracy" in Iraq, or especially Afghanistan. He wouldn't even want that, because it would mean inflicting cultural suicide on *them*

In short, neoconservatism rejected all the "based" parts of the arguments here while employing the parts it found useful to justify using military force to expand progressive ideology (and the elephant in the room)

That's why Obama and the modern left has no real problem with it

Anyway, enough ass-covering for neocons

I'm pretty steeped in this stuff by now, so I'm sympathetic to the large majority of the arguments Burnham's making. But most people, obviously, aren't: that's why he wrote this book, even in his time their ideology had become dominant

There aren't many works that can cut through that, that can shake someone's faith in the liberalism they've been steeped in since birth, that's in every classroom, every broadcast, even, madly, an increasing number, even the majority, of sermons

A great virtue of Suicide of the West is I think it's capable of doing that, if only for some

If liberalism is a dream, this presents its logic so broadly and starkly that even the dreamer starts to be bothered by its noticing of the dream-logic he lives in.