Yes—the glitch is a misunderstanding of your audience and your purpose. "Leftists are hypocrites" does have a use, but it's not to win over independents or whatever
It's to convince soft rightists to harden their stance by showing them how *they* still believe in leftism
This isn't something that can be achieved through cheap or superficial "gotchas." The left is always running leftward, so its right-now policies will always be in contradiction with some of its earlier "principles"
This isn't a weakness, it's a strength
Taking them at face value is to admit on some level that *you* believe in their earlier principles. Otherwise why are you attacking the contradiction and not the original principle itself?
Shouldn't the principle be the real weak point that you can slam down on?
Since you have no objection there, apparently believing it to be true, you have almost no grounds to reject their new extension of it—that extension is very rarely truly hypocritical. It's just the logical expansion of the belief
So in what way do you actually differ from them?
On this level, then, "leftists are hypocrites" is an admission that they were recently totally right about this, and so they're probably right about this ideological update too.
This only ensures you're going to keep whining about hypocrisy until you're doing so from the gulag
Now we're down to the bone of the matter—and if the bone was broken at some point, then your job is to reset it, and that's where it's going to hurt like hell
Because you're going to have to reject some level of liberalism itself, which all modern leftist is built on
And it's right here that "Leftism is hypocrisy" can actually work
Because you can show the break between the beautiful theory, and the painful reality that results from that theory. The only people this can convince are the people who already feel the ache of the misdiagnosis
Leftists-through-liberalism are high on their own opioids, appealing to them is ridiculous
"These people are hypocrites" only works when people are prepared to look at the truth: that people aren't equal, and the arrangement of society must reflect this, in some form or another.
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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
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
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"