Thread by @Tinkzorg

The incredibly anti-burkean idea that "culture" is somehow a vcr that you can program, rather than the result and sum total of a million different social processes, is going to destroy so many wannabe "counter-revolutionaries" in the years ahead.

unherd.com/thepost/conser…

It's a seductive idea, though. Partly because idealism is always seductive, but also because it lets you ignore fundamental questions about the "who" and "what" of your own coalition. People who think like this generally have no experience with retail politics.

The notion that somehow the "only" politics that is possible today is "middle class politics" speaks more to the makeup of various putative political "dissidents" today than anything else.

The idea of a "culture war blitzkrieg" win for "the right" is ridiculous. It literally cannot happen. Those cultural positions embody the class interest of the vast horde of apparatchiks who live off and subsist on the institutions they now control.

The only way to "win" in such a scenario is not to present a superior intellectual product in the marketplace of ideas, it's to systematically purge and dismantle the institutions that generate wokeness as such.

That in itself will take a very long war. But the dissident political scene in general is just filled with these totally overeducated, economically obsolete people. Like hermit crabs without shells, they aren't about to torch any generator of sinecures to the ground.

Moreover, what is this "culture" that would somehow defeat the current one, and who would be the *soldiers* (and not the self-proclaimed generals) of such a blitzkrieg?

Almost all "dissidents" today are openly and constitutionally anti-populist, sometimes to a degree that literally defies parody. The idea that "throne and altar catholicism" could be applicable to the *US* makes Bob Avakian's Revolutionary Communist Party seem sane by comparison.

The issue here isn't even the surplus of would-be anti-democratic authoritarians, but that every dissident who harbors anti populist dreams today is just a less based and intelligent Yukio Mishima (PBUH).

Mishima harbors all these fanciful dreams, goes to some army base to get them to revolt, then discovers that the soldiers just laugh at him.

Pro tip: if you don't intend for the populist masses to accomplish your goals, then you need to offer something the soldiers care about.

How many american soldiers are interested in the doctrines of Donoso Cortés? The bolsheviks relied on the soldiers to make up for their minority position, but at least they promised the soldiers bread, peace and land, not sermons about the historical dialectic.

In short, all these dreams about victory in the culture war belie just how contradictory the right is and how likely it is to split apart and fracture in the days ahead.

Ironically, Charlie Kirk pointed this out on some podcast, though he probably didn't understand the implication of his own arguments.

Kirk talked about how he'd hold talks to conservatives talking about how being a plumber or electrician was just as good as going to some expensive, woke, satanic college. Everyone cheers. Kirk then asks the audience how many would be ok with their own kids skipping college.

Nobody raises their hand. Whoops! And yet this is kind of a huge in-built problem. Not in some gay diversity and representation sense, but just that educated professionals have interests that increadingly diverge from everyone else.

This is especially true now, because there's just too many professionals and their contribution to the prosperity of America is probably a net negative at this point. Their desperate attempts at self-preservation is political poison.

Eventually, this contradiction that Kirk identifies (and is 100% a part of himself lol) will make the collapse of the first international look orderly in comparison. There are too many chiefs and not nearly enough indians.

Eventually, I think you will see the emergence of a sort of "bolshevik right", of people who are ruthless enough to totally sacrifice much of the "email caste" right in order to achieve populist power.

You might think this is a very bad, not good at all outcome. But at least those putative rightwing (counter)revolutionaries will have something more to offer the soldiery than Yukio Mishima had, lol.