The basic leftist urge is terror at the natural world and what it takes to exist within it, that's why they want to gray-goo it, so they can simply exist as yeast, indistinguishable and without consciousness
Nietzsche and Uncle Ted best diagnose this from the right
I don't know Hegel. But based on this analysis, he and the Marxism that built on him is the leftist urge attempting to use the liberal ruling framework to employ reason, specifically through material analysis, to convince us to fight for the gray-goo world it yearns to return to.
The Founding Fathers, as Moldbug identified, deployed a right-wing coup to arrest this process, through the Constitution.
It lasted for a while, and is still fighting a little. The post-modernists are the attempt to bring their Lockean reason to its conclusion: final gray goo
What this points to is that leftism can only exist within a creature that is both social, as in dependent on the group, and conscious, with the awareness that it depends on the group—and that it, as a weak member of it, might not even deserve to exist.
This drives it to insanity, which is to say that its driving impulse is either to grind the group down to its own level, relieving its existential terror, or to extinguish consciousness itself, so that it is no longer capable of perceiving itself for what it is.
Religious tradition was likely the great salve of this, which both taught the fearful how to live more upwardly, better, while also promising an escape from their lifely terror, if they participated in this urge toward life, and rejected their inborn hatred of it.
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This is an ideology that spits in your face, and then belly-laughs as you do backflips to explain why, as its warm spittle drips down your lips, we must be "more civil, more liberal" than it: we will just "reason" people out of their frenzy
Liberalism had a nice run there, it was very pleasant for a while. But it's proven so impotent at leading that it can be taken over by a newsroom of 25-year-old "communists" with cow rings who spend more on their SSRIs and therapists than a healthy person spends on their home
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
Hard disagree on the first part (if you can even taste tannins an average person should be able to distinguish red from white 90% of the time on that factor alone)
But the overall thrust is right, b/c the main point of criticism is just to find dudes with similar taste to yours
Criticism of any kind involves two main branches of "expertise": sampling way more of the field than anyone normal has any time for, and then applying your specific aesthetic preferences to whatever you've just tasted/read/watched/etc
The first branch is, for almost all people, way more important than the second: so the goal of most criticism *should* be that of a humble aggregator
"I waded through all this so you don't have to, and here's the stuff I'd watch for fun if it wasn't my job"
This is how progressives have been engineering "democracy" for years now, remember that the idea isn't to engage in discussion/debate, it's to bypass it through carefully designed rhetoric
Big data various iterations of propaganda until you find the form that achieves the goal
This was formerly achieved by passing the winning iteration to journalists who would then distribute it to the public
So once you've got enough data, it becomes possible to program JournoBots to guide unruly citizens through their dialogue tree to reach the approved conclusions
Of course normal people recoil at hearing the NYT say "So we built a little propaganda machine to help you route-around your fellow citizen's concerns in real time lol"
But this is all second nature to journalists, who've been steeped in this process for a long time
To understand leftism, you just have to understand its fundamental animating goal, which it turns out is very straightforward: to dissolve us all into interchangeable human gray goo
Once you've got that in place, everything else follows from it
The mind naturally recoils from this goal, because of how unnatural it is. It throws up all kinds of rationalizations, "No, it's about protecting those who can't protect themselves"
Yeah, you're making my point. The value of harm reduction, continued to its end goal, is gray goo
This basic principle immediately exposes the flaw at the core of Marxism, which the modern liberal "right" treats as Ur-Leftism, because the "liberal right" is itself a ridiculous contradiction, doomed by its inability to reach back *beyond* Communism
You know what, here's the hottest take I can drop, Stephen King *should* have been the next Poe or Lovecraft, he had both the imaginative horsepower, the narrative mastery, and the sense of horror necessary to become this.
Some of King's work, especially his early ones, and *especially* the first four Gunslinger novels, prove this. He had it in him. Immense, insane imagination, the sensitivity was there.
Bad. Ass. Author. But there was something just a little off. He couldn't quite do it.
So wait—my most volcano-scorching-hot take is that early Orson Scott Card, the Mormon, is the greatest horror author of our age. He sold out later but his '70s/80s shorts are the most horrifying works I've ever read from that period. Even more terrifying than King