Right, this was an explicitly progressive program. What they do goes way beyond simple disavowal of their failure
Progressivism always redirects blame for its past failures to its political enemies, which it then uses to justify and coerce its next set of "solutions."
Progressivism is able to do this, of course, because it controls the narrative machine (the academy/media), but also because this control lets it shed its skin over and over again
This allows progs to look back at what they've done and say "No, we would *never* do that now!"
Well maybe you wouldn't, not in that exact same way. But you still hold the same core *values* that let you did that, that caused this thing that's now a great tragedy
So, in 2021, you might not be rounding up the Natives to liberate them through your transcendent education
But you're perfectly happy to turn countless millions of people into the serfs of their student debt, because you still believe education is a transcendental substance that will permanently improve every college graduate's material conditions (and society at large)
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This stems from the struggle to assert where "neoliberalism," post-WW2 ruling order, comes from, and who is to blame for it
So it is popular to say that it's "people with money, who don't want us to have it": and this is sort of true. But the underlying ideology predates them
Everyone *wants* to know who's to blame, all of a sudden, because neoliberalism is clearly failing, so we have to identify which of our enemies (and thus whose values) must be rejected
I am not immune from this. Take with grain of salt. But the cause and effect is everything
The below is true, strictly speaking. This is about the Rockefeller Foundation. I am just going to trust Wikipedia on this one: so, it wanted to pursue the interests of health, birth control... the Science! of the day. We already see ideology creeping in
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
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