Is Conservatism just NeoTraditionalism these days?

[Consul]

But you're cool with the workers forming unions at least, right? C'mon man u gotta give me sumthin.

Today's Socialists now hate the unions: haven't you heard? They're all "deplorables" and "rednecks," they want us to think. The new proponents of Socialism (for us only, mind you, not for them) are the business bigwigs and the government establishment. They've figured out that what they want to do is "milk" the ordinary person -- and unions are a nuisance, because they advocate for the proles.

Indeed, there is a split in the left, between the traditional "social left" and the new "cultural left" (to which the "woke left" belongs):

"The Vietnam War saw the end of the traditional alliance between the academics and the unions—an alliance which had nudged the Democratic party steadily to the left during the previous twenty years. We are still living with the consequences of the anti–Vietnam War movement, and in particular with those of the rage of the increasingly manic student protesters of the late 1960s. These protesters were absolutely right that Vietnam was an unjust war, a massacre of which our country will always be ashamed. But when the students began to burn flags, and to spit at returning soldiers, they did deeper and more long-lasting damage to the American left than they could ever have imagined. When they began to spell “America” with a “k,” they lost the respect and the sympathy of the union members. Until George McGovern’s defeat in 1972, the New Left did not realize that it had unthinkingly destroyed an alliance which had been central to American leftist politics.

Since those days, leftists in the colleges and universities have concentrated their energies on academic politics rather than on national politics. As Todd Gitlin put it, we academics marched on the English department while the Republicans took over the White House. While we had our backs turned, the labor unions were being steadily ground down by the shift to a service economy, and by the machinations of the Reagan and Bush administrations. The best thing that could happen to the American left would be for the academics to get back into the class struggle, and for the labor union members to forgive and forget the stupid and self-defeating anti-American rhetoric which filled the universities of the late 1960s.

This is not to say that those twenty-five years of inward-looking academic politics were in vain. American campuses are very much better places—morally better places—than they were in 1970. Thanks to all those marches on the English department, and various other departments, the situation of women, gays, lesbians, African-Americans, and Hispanics has been enormously improved. Their new role in the academy is helping improve their situation in the rest of American society.

Nevertheless, leftist academic politics has run its course. It is time to revive the kind of leftist politics which pervaded American campuses from the Great Depression through the early 1960s—a politics which centers on the struggle to prevent the rich from ripping off the rest of the country. If the unions will help us revive this kind of politics, maybe the academy and the labor movement can get together again. Maybe together we can help bring our country closer to the goal which matters most: the classless society. That is the cause for which the AFL-CIO [American Federation of Labor & Congress of Industrial Organizations] organizers are now fighting, and for which some of their predecessors died."

(Rorty, Richard. "Back to Class Politics." 1997. Reprinted in What Can We Hope For? Essays on Politics, edited by W. P. Malecki and Chris Voparil, 138-145. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022. pp. 144-5)

[Immanuel Can]

You are right only if socialism is equated with (Soviet-style) communism.

I'm completely right. There's not a single case of Socialism being the regnant economic plan, and there not being death and economic disaster. But if you think otherwise, just name this Socialist success story.

Not all socialists are absolute anti-capitalists preferring an anti-free-market, anti-private-property, & centrally state-planned economy. There are market socialists, and social democrats accept a private-property-involving mixed economy.

You're not rising to the challenge. Name one place where Socialism has been allowed to rule the economy (so not merely some place in which a limited socialist institution is payed for by capitalist means, but one in which Socialism has been fully accepted) that has not been a place of murder, repression and economic collapse.

Here are some interesting distinctions drawn by John Rawls:

Rawls hasn't said anything interesting in a long time. He's arbitrary. And he's frequently just dead wrong.

The social (welfare) state with its institutions of social security such as health insurance and unemployment insurance (as we have it in Germany) does have a record of success! It's a very good humanitarian thing!

Until it crashes the economy. But that's what it does.

I don't think so. The big threat isn't the welfare state but global financial capitalism!

Just wait. The more control Socialism gets of the economy and the political scene, the more severe the dysfunction that sets in.

You must know this. Germany had it's flirtation with serious Communism during the Weimar Republic, and then rubber-banded into National Socialism, while Russia was busy turning into a Communist hellhole. And the result? 6 million dead Jews, 8 million dead Germans, 24 million dead Russians...

I'm all for free healthcare, if it could be made sustainable. Unfortunately, there's no example of it doing that.

For example, the public healthcare system in Germany is in fact sustainable.

Then you'd better explain to both the UK and Canada how to make that work. Their systems are collapsing their economies. I don't know what Germany is doing, but I'd bet it's not Socialism. It's a few Socialist-style institutions paid for by capitalist profits. Socialism itself is never sustainable.

But you can inform me if you know how Germany does it, and I'd be interested in hearing it.

If public schooling is (mis)used for ideological indoctrination by the (Far-)Left or the (Far-)Right,

Which "far right" has any influence in public education? It's always the Leftists.

Nope! The fascists and the nazis (mis)used public education for indoctrination!

Here's the problem: Fascism and Nazism are Socialisms.

Now, I know what you're going to say. You're going to say that Fascists and Communists hate one another. And you're right: and that fools many people. But this misunderstands the dialectic. Here's the hard truth: both Fascism and Communism are of the same essence, though oppositional in form.

If you know Kantian-Hegelian dialectics, which Marx relied on, you'll know a few things that most people misunderstand about dialectics. People think that thesis and antithesis are opposed like black and white, or like on and off, or whatever. But Hegel is quite clear that the antithesis emerges from the inherent contradictions produced by the thesis itself. In other words, Fascism, rather than being the opposite of Communism, is its "shadow" or evil doppleganger, which emerges from the same place as communism: from Collectivist Totalitarianism. The two conflict, alright: but only, according to dialectics, so that they will merge into a final solution called "synthesis," in which elements of both are preserved.

You can see this in Germany. The Communists produced massive social disruption during the Weimar Republic. In backlash, the country swung to Fascism. Fascism went into violent conflict with Communism. But the "synthesis," if that had ever happened, would not be one or the other, but some other form of Collectivist Totalitarianism.

James Lindsay puts this paradox extremely well. He says, "Fascism is the right hand of the Left, just as Communism is the left hand of the Left." They are both species of Collectivist Totalitarianism. And they share many features, such as the nationalization of industry, militarism, a one-party system, purges and camps, repression of individual autonomy and denial of rights, and most notably, always some guy like a Hitler, Stalin, Kim Jong, Pol Pot, Mugabe, Castro, Maduro, Ceaucescu, Hoxha...some strong man who takes over and runs the show.

They are nowhere near so far from each other as Communist rhetoric would like us to think. They're oppositional partners, or thesis-antithesis of the same problem.

Or what about the ultraconservative school laws in the US against gender theory, critical race theory, and liberal sexual education in general?

It's not "ultraconservative" to oppose Communist propaganda moves. Cultural Marxism loves to demonize its enemies, but it has no right to seize control of public sexuality, or of race, or of biology (far less of children), and to turn them to its propagandistic purposes. And that's what all the things you've listed really are. If you know their history, you know that's true.

To refuse them isn't "conservative." It's just realistic.

Generally, ethics is independent of theism and theology.

It isn't. Secular ethics has prove to be a total failure from a rational point of view. The current field, broadly speaking, is split between Deontologies of various kinds, Consequentialisms of various kinds, and Virtue Theories of other kinds. And there's no meta-basis for adjudicating between them, or even of saying that we owe any of them anything.

Divine-command ethics provides no rational alternative.

I don't know what you mean by "divine-command ethics," because the term is abused to cover far too wide a field. But it's obvious that if God does exist, then God must be involved in the moral field somehow. And then we'd have to debate how.

Anyway, it presupposes the truth of theism, which makes it inacceptable in principle for atheists like me.

Well, you really cannot be an Atheist and be rational, because the evidentiary bar for Atheism cannot be met. So you might want to rethink that. Even Richard Dawkins won't claim outright to be an Atheist, because he knows it's rationally indefensible. He prefers to be called a "firm agnostic" (His term).

"A female, black, youthful, able-bodied homosexual" and "a fat, male, Chinese, elderly, disabled heterosexual" certainly cannot become physical/corporeal equals, but they can become ones in other respects (moral, legal, social, political, economic ones).

What are these "respects" of which you speak? Take any of your specific cases, and show how the Chinese man can be made authentically equal to the black woman.

For example, same basic liberties (e.g. freedom of speech), same human rights, same right to non-discrimination, same rights to political participation (e.g. right to vote and be elected), same right to education, (in the event of need) same right to access to and support by the welfare state (e.g. public healthcare).

Those are all "equalites of opportunity." The critique of the Neo-Marxists on that is that it's "unequitable" and "unjust" to leave the Chinese man still so disadvantaged relative to the black woman. A level playing field, they say, is not level if you started out worse off. So how are you going to make the two genuinely equivalent, equivalent in all outcomes?

For that is what Neo-Marxism demands: not equality of treatment, or equality of opportunity, but equity of outcomes, regardless of particulars.

They could as well be made equals with respect to their wealth, since it's not a law of nature that the one is poorer/richer than the other.

You can only do that by stealing from the industrious to pay off the indolent. And to take somebody's legitimate effort to create value, and to use it to pay off somebody who's created less or no value is surely an injustice of the first order. It's robbery.

Of course, can doesn't imply ought; and there is an ongoing debate over how much moral, legal, social, political, or economic inequality is justifiable.

Right. It doesn't imply "ought." So we can't even know that we owe the Chinese man and the black woman equality...or that we owe it to anybody. ("Ought" as you will know, is a contraction of "owe it".) That's why there's an "ongoing debate," and one without any possibility of adjudication.

You are not a metaethical nihilist, are you? You don't share the Foucauldian Left's antifoundationalist view that ethics & politics are basically nothing but a brute power game, an exercise of the will to power, do you?

No. And I'm glad you don't seem to be, either. But then, I have very good reasons for not being a metaethical nihilist, because I believe in a metaethical Arbitrator capable of adjudicating which ethical posture is right in a given circumstance. But, as an Atheist, you would be denying the existence of any such; so then, the Foucaultian critique (which he stole from Nietzsche, really, including the argument that all morality is nothing but an inauthentic power-game) would be very compelling. How would you resist it? There's no metaethical basis of arbitration anymore.

You've erected a straw man against egalitarianism here!

Not at all. It is precisely how calls for egalitarianism are actualized today. For instance, at Harvard University, Chinese students have much higher entrance demands placed on them than whites, or Hispanics or blacks. And this is done in the name of "fairness" and "inclusion" and "equity." So addressing the "egalitarian" needs of these minorities discriminates against the Chinese.
Any problem with that?

If the idea of helping disadvantaged members of minorities in the education system results in blatant reverse racism and sheer anti-meritocracy, I do have a problem.

Needless to say, though, Socialism is not meritocratic. It's adamantly against merit, because merit produces inequality every single time. When a person with merit takes on a task, and one with less or no merit takes on the same task (like, say, going into a university program), the one with merit comes out on top, and the one without it sinks. Socialists hate that. It automatically produces hierarchy, which Socialism regards as always oppressive, and does not consider to be based on actual merit.

From the socialist perspective, equity and equality are intimately connected.

They're opposites, actually.

Equity means "equality of outcomes." Equality means "equality of opportunity." They're opposites, because if you give equal opportunity, then the stronger/smarter/faster/healthier/or whatever instantly gains an upper hand, and that produces inequality of outcomes.

Well, one of the hallmarks of Socialism is the belief that all evils are products of social systems and social conditioning, not of human nature. The shift from the personal responsiblity of the individual to the blaming of "structures of oppression" requires us to accept that the evils do not come from human beings, but from some other dynamic. And Socialists are notoriously vague on what that dynamic is.

Yes, from the combined perspective of Marxist socioeconomic determinism and postmodernist antihumanism, the individual human agent/person/subject is no relevant causal or moral factor anymore, being just a puppet on strings manipulated by impersonal power structures (as linguistically embodied by Foucauldian "discourses"), in which case there is no room for personal responsibility but only for universal victimhood.

Right.

[Immanuel Can]

But you're cool with the workers forming unions at least, right? C'mon man u gotta give me sumthin.

Today's Socialists now hate the unions: haven't you heard? They're all "deplorables" and "rednecks," they want us to think. The new proponents of Socialism (for us only, mind you, not for them) are the business bigwigs and the government establishment. They've figured out that what they want to do is "milk" the ordinary person -- and unions are a nuisance, because they advocate for the proles.

Indeed, there is a split in the left, between the traditional "social left" and the new "cultural left" (to which the "woke left" belongs)

Yes, there is.

But effectively, the Cultural Marxists have eaten the old-style Proletarian Leftists. And ironically, the Cultural Marxists tend to come from the elites and the spoiled, white, middle class in the West. For them, the old-style trade unionists are a pest. But it's one they're quite determined to get rid of. The ordinary, blue collar folks have too much common sense, or needs to practical and daily for them to tolerate. The Cultural Left is adamantly utopian, and its interest is in advancing collectivist politics, not in meeting the basic needs of Joe Lunchbucket and his missus.

For example, open borders are in no way in the interests of old style unionists and low-level workers. To have one's economy flooded with cheap labour, and then to be burdened with higher taxation, and to have ones social and welfare institutions swamped with needs from non-citizens is not what produces better wages or better working conditions for steelworkers in Pittsburgh.

[Consul]

Indeed, there is a split in the left, between the traditional "social left" and the new "cultural left" (to which the "woke left" belongs)

Yes, there is.

But effectively, the Cultural Marxists have eaten the old-style Proletarian Leftists. And ironically, the Cultural Marxists tend to come from the elites and the spoiled, white, middle class in the West. For them, the old-style trade unionists are a pest. But it's one they're quite determined to get rid of. The ordinary, blue collar folks have too much common sense, or needs to practical and daily for them to tolerate. The Cultural Left is adamantly utopian, and its interest is in advancing collectivist politics, not in meeting the basic needs of Joe Lunchbucket and his missus.

For example, open borders are in no way in the interests of old style unionists and low-level workers. To have one's economy flooded with cheap labour, and then to be burdened with higher taxation, and to have ones social and welfare institutions swamped with needs from non-citizens is not what produces better wages or better working conditions for steelworkers in Pittsburgh.

The Righties love to use "cultural marxism" as a pejorative propaganda term, but it can also be used purely descriptively by politologists. However, from the historical perspective, the scope of its reference is often not clear. Is it a synonym of "neomarxism", such that it begins in the 1920s/30s (Gramsci, Frankfurt School)? Or does cultural marxism begin in the 1950s/60s with the sort of British Marxism (Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, and E.P. Thompson being central figures) as eventually embodied by the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies (aka Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1964-2002, with Stuart Hall being a central figure)?

Whatever, when I use the phrase "Cultural Left" (especially in discussions about the "Woke Left")—which I prefer to "Cultural Marxism" and "Cultural Socialism" (Eric Kaufmann)—, I use it much more narrowly (in Henry Gates's & Richard Rorty's sense) to refer to the post-New-Left, post-1970s "Academic Left" (J. Diggins), which is influenced inter alia by the Frankfurt School & the Birmingham School.

(As opposed to the latter's Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, the Frankfurt School still exists with its academic Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, and its third & fourth generation of scholars. By the way, it celebrates its 100th birthday this year! I presume you won't wish them a happy birthday. )

Diggins distinguishes between four American Lefts in the 20th century:
1. "the Lyrical Left" (10s-20s)
2. "the Old Left" (30s–50s)
3. "the New Left" (60s-70s)
4. "the Academic Left" (80s–?)

"[T]he Academic Left is anomalous in deviating from previous Lefts in several ways. It is the first Left with no social constituency beyond the college campus, no sustained hope in the Enlightenment and the promises of reason and science, and seemingly no faith in the spirit of freedom but instead a gloomy preoccupation with the structures of domination in a universe of power and oppression, a murky universe of causeless events in which the oppressor is not necessarily identified."

(Diggins, John Patrick. The Rise and Fall of the American Left. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1992. p. 21)

"…the cultural left, which I am defining here loosely and generously as that uneasy, shifting set of alliances formed by feminist critics, critics of so-called minority culture and Marxist and post-structuralist critics generally – in short, the rainbow coalition of contemporary critical theory."

(Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. "Whose Canon Is It, Anyway?" The New York Times Book Review, February 26, 1989. p. 1)

"In the course of our conference, Henry Gates defined the "American Cultural Left" as a "Rainbow Coalition of feminists, deconstructionists, Althusserians, Foucauldians, people working in ethnic or gay studies, etc." The emergence of this left in the course of the last ten years or so is an important event in American academic life. The humanities, and particularly, the departments of literature, are where the action is in the American academy."

(Rorty, Richard. "Two Cheers for the Cultural Left." 1990. Reprinted in The Politics of Liberal Education, edited by Darryl J. Gless & Barbara Herrnstein Smith, 233-240. Durham: Duke University Press, 1992. pp 233-4)

"The heirs of the New Left of the Sixties have created, within the academy, a cultural Left. Many members of this Left specialize in what they call the "politics of difference" or "of identity" or "of recognition." This cultural Left thinks more about stigma than about money, more about deep and hidden psychosexual motivations than about shallow and evident greed.

This shift of attention came at the same time that intellectuals began to lose interest in the labor unions, partly as a result of resentment over the union members' failure to back George McGovern over Richard Nixon in 1972. Simultaneously , the leftist ferment which had been centered, before the Sixties, in the social science departments of the colleges and the universities moved into the literature departments. The study of philosophy—mostly apocalyptic French and German philosophy—replaced that of political economy as an essential preparation for participation in leftist initiatives."

(Rorty, Richard. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. pp. 76-7)

"The difference between this residual [reformist] Left and the academic [cultural] Left is the difference between the people who read books like Thomas Geoghegan's Which Side Are You On?—a brilliant explanation of how unions get busted—and people who read Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. The latter is an equally brilliant book, but it operates on a level of abstraction too high to encourage any particular political initiative. After reading Geoghegan, you have views on some of the things which need to be done. After reading Jameson, you have views on practically everything except what needs to be done."

(Rorty, Richard. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. p. 78)

"When the Right proclaims that socialism has failed, and that capitalism is the only alternative, the cultural Left has little to say in reply. For it prefers not to talk about money. Its principal enemy is a mind-set rather than a set of economic arrangements—a way of thinking which is, supposedly, at the root of both selfishness and sadism. This way of thinking is sometimes called "Cold War ideology," sometimes "technocratic
rationality," and sometimes "phallogocentrism" (the cultural Left comes up with fresh sobriquets every year). It is a mind-set nurtured by the patriarchal and capitalist institutions of the industrial West, and its bad effects are most clearly visible in the United States.

To subvert this way of thinking, the academic Left believes, we must teach Americans to recognize otherness. To this end, leftists have helped to put together such academic disciplines as women's history, black history, gay studies, Hispanic-American studies, and migrant studies. This has led Stefan Collini to remark that in the United States, though not in Britain, the term "cultural studies" means "victim studies." Collini's choice of phrase has been resented, but he was making a good point: namely, that such programs were created not out of the sort of curiosity about diverse forms of human life which gave rise to cultural anthropology, but rather from a sense of what America needed in order to make itself a better place. The principal motive behind the new directions taken in scholarship in the United States since the Sixties has been the urge to do something for people who have been humiliated—to help victims of socially acceptable forms of sadism by making such sadism no longer acceptable.

Whereas the top-down initiatives of the Old Left had tried to help people who were humiliated by poverty and unemployment, or by what Richard Sennett has called the "hidden injuries of class," the top-down initiatives of the post-Sixties left have been directed toward people who are humiliated for reasons other than economic status."

(Rorty, Richard. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. pp. 79-80)

"By 1982 the leftists who knew what they believed belonged to an ascending cultural left that privileged race, gender, and sexuality, building on the social movements of the sixties. Meanwhile a long-departed Italian Communist leader, Antonio Gramsci, won a tremendous vogue for contending that the left wrongly cedes the entire cultural realm to the right.

Gramsci died in a Fascist prison cell in 1937. He argued that capitalism exercises hegemony over the lives of people where they live, in schools, civic organizations, religious communities, newspapers, media, and political parties. Hegemony is the cultural process by which a ruling class makes its domination appear natural. Gramsci contended that if the left had any serious intention of winning power, it had to contest the right on the cultural level. This argument swept much of the Socialist left in the 1980s, giving Marxists a sort-of-Marxian basis for appropriating the cultural leftism of identity politics, difference feminism, and other forms of cultural recognition.

The idea that socialism is compatible with liberal democracy and the related idea that socialism is compatible with capitalist markets have long histories in cooperative, ethical, and religious traditions of socialism. Both ideas, however, were anathema to orthodox Marxists."

(Dorrien, Gary. American Democratic Socialism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021. p. 7)

"There is little point in debating further whether anything has changed in the shape of the American Left since the New Left, as a social movement, died. Clearly a momentous change has occurred, yet the question of exactly how to characterize this change remains contested. Was Duberman correct in saying that there is no American Left? Duberman himself seemed to be of two minds even on this point. In the same review, he referred to “the multicultural left,” what Henry Louis Gates in 1990 dubbed “the cultural left.” Duberman made clear that, in his view, this cultural Left ought to be viewed as the New Left’s legatee. John Patrick Diggins, in the recently updated and expanded version of his 1973 book The American Left in the Twentieth Century, also argued that out of the “shards” of the New Left there had taken shape by the 1980s the fourth American Left of the twentieth century, primarily within American universities. Unlike Duberman, Diggins tends to think that this academic Left had abandoned the beliefs and goals historically attributed to the Left. Whichever of these contrary views one holds, it is clear that if there indeed has been a cohesive Left in the United States in the last quarter of the twentieth century, it is the fourth American Left of the century—not simply a continuation of the New Left of the 1960s."

(Rossinow, Doug. "Letting Go: Revisiting the New Left’s Demise." In The New Left Revisited, edited by John McMillian & Paul Buhle, 241-254. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003. pp. 246-7)

"…That ideological vacuum was gradually filled by the cultural (or identitarian) left who later became the progressive mainstream. The New Left, who exorcised the industrial working class from Marxism in the 1960s and the 1970s, prepared a ground for the cultural turn. Historically, the New Left “cultural Marxists” served as an intellectual bridge between the old Marxian socialists and the current woke progressives. The “scorched earth” tactics of post-modernism that demolished and fragmented the omnipotent castle of Marxism and positivism further cleared an intellectual space for the gradual rise of the cultural left in the 1990s. The latter embraced race, gender, and environmentalism at the expense of class. Overall, identity politics became the popular exit for the mainstream left from the earlier ideological conundrum. The old economic categories of Marxism were refilled with the new cultural content."

(Znamenski, Andrei. Socialism as a Secular Creed: A Modern Global History. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2021. p. 385)

"Many ideas of the early and late New Left ended up in the academic Left of the past quarter of a century. This impulse, a post-New Left that we could simply call the Cultural Left, brought to its scholarly work the cultural radicalism of the late 1960s. Consequently, its inquiries have revolved around such cultural issues as subcultural and ethnic identities, matters of gender power, race, the influence of popular culture, the hidden motives behind language and texts, and the desirability of a multicultural ethic (a post-New Left conception arising from the liberationist and separatist commitments of the late-1960s New Left) instead of a liberal pluralist society (an Old Left design)."

(Jumonville, Neil. Henry Steele Commager: Midcentury Liberalism and the History of the Present. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. p. 227)

"Essentially the post-modern radical left has shifted from the traditional radical left’s Marxist focus on economic relations as the source of oppression and class struggle to cultural hierarchy as the source of oppression."

(Hamilton, Neil W. "Zealotry and the Fundamentalist Academic Left." In Mistaken Identities: The Second Wave of Controversy over "Political Correctness", edited by Cyril Levitt, Scott Davies, & Neil McLaughlin, 54-83. New York: Peter Lang, 1999. p. 56)

[Consul]

Whatever, when I use the phrase "Cultural Left" (especially in discussions about the "Woke Left")…, I use it much more narrowly (in Henry Gates's & Richard Rorty's sense) to refer to the post-New-Left, post-1970s "Academic Left"…

The (post-70s) Cultural Left = the Postmodern-Postcolonial Multicultural Left = the Identitarian-Minoritarian Left = the Woke Left

As for the already mentioned split within the Left:

the Cultural Left (as a "Superstructure-Left") vs. the Social Left (as the traditional "Base-Left")
the Symbolic Left (fight for recognition/respect) vs. the Economic Left (fight for redistribution)

(This is a theoretical opposition of "ideal types", which aren't sharply separated in reality. There can certainly be a mixed Cultural-Social Left.)

[Consul]

James Lindsay puts this paradox extremely well. He says, "Fascism is the right hand of the Left, just as Communism is the left hand of the Left." They are both species of Collectivist Totalitarianism.

Lindsay's statement implies that totalitarian extremism always belongs to and emerges from the Left, which is blatantly untrue. Counting the fascists and the nazis among the Lefties is a cheap attempt to whitewash the sins of the Righties.

Divine-command ethics provides no rational alternative.

I don't know what you mean by "divine-command ethics," because the term is abused to cover far too wide a field.

There is an alternative term:

"There is a class of metaethical and normative views that commonly goes by the name ‘divine command theory.’ What all members of this class have in common is that they hold that what God wills is relevant to determining the moral status of some set of entities (acts, states of affairs, character traits, etc., or some combination of these). But the name ‘divine command theory’ is a bit misleading: what these views have in common is their appeal to the divine will; while many of these views hold that the relevant act of divine will is that of commanding, some deny it. So we would do well to have a label for this class of views that does not prejudge the issue of the relevant act of divine will. The label that I will use, following Quinn 1990, is ‘theological voluntarism.’"

Theological Voluntarism: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/volu ... eological/

"Divine command theory. This is the view that moral value, principles and moral obligation are grounded in divine will. Systematic reflection on this view goes back at least as far as Plato's 'Euthyphro', and the central difficulty of the view remains much the same, that is, does God command what he commands because it is good (or right), or is the good (the right) what it is just because God commands it? In Western monotheistic traditions it is widely held that God's commands are the basis of moral requirements, and that God is morally perfect. However, the question of the relation between being commanded and being morally right remains problematic. Also, while divine command theory is an approach that clearly gives moral commands enormous authority, there is the further issue of whether moral requirements need to be sanctioned and supported in that way in order to be authoritative for human beings. Why could we not be able to ascertain what is right, and be motivated to do it, just on the basis of our own reason and understanding? Moreover, what is the relation between our moral understanding and revelation? Are there elements of morality that could not be grasped by unaided reason? Even though divine command involves a supernatural being and its will, it can still be seen as a version of moral objectivism because of the status of moral principles. That is, they are objectively right because they are grounded in God's will. Of course, critics of theism will argue that the theistic basis of the approach is a reason for denying that it is a form of objectivism."

(Jacobs, Jonathan A. Ethics A-Z. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005. pp. 35-6)

[Iwannaplato]

James Lindsay puts this paradox extremely well. He says, "Fascism is the right hand of the Left, just as Communism is the left hand of the Left." They are both species of Collectivist Totalitarianism.

Lindsay's statement implies that totalitarian extremism always belongs to and emerges from the Left, which is blatantly untrue. Counting the fascists and the nazis among the Lefties is a cheap attempt to whitewash the sins of the Righties.

They'll be blaming tyrant kings on the left soon.

[Immanuel Can]

The Righties love to use "cultural marxism" as a pejorative propaganda term, but it can also be used purely descriptively by politologists.

Well, it's apt.

Old-style Marxism, now called by the Neo-Marxists "crude Marxism," was centered on class-struggle. But that's failed. The New Marxists use cultural features, such as race, sex, ethnicity, sexuality, cultural particulars, colonialism, and so forth, in an effort to gin up the revolution that Marx promised but couldn't deliver. And they proceed through the seizing and exploiting of culture, in media, films, education, law and a variety of other cultural artifacts.

Consequently, "Cultural Marxism" is perhaps the most appropriate and polite term we could use for them. Culture is the lynchpin of their current activities.

[Immanuel Can]

James Lindsay puts this paradox extremely well. He says, "Fascism is the right hand of the Left, just as Communism is the left hand of the Left." They are both species of Collectivist Totalitarianism.

Lindsay's statement implies that totalitarian extremism always belongs to and emerges from the Left, which is blatantly untrue.

I can see you're shocked and horrified. That's okay. Lots of people are fooled into not knowing the sympathy between Fascism and Communism, because theyr'e so impressed with the conflicts between them. But they're both forms of Collectivist Totalitarianism. And if you know how dialectics really works, then you know that the antithesis has to emerge out of contradictions in the thesis itself; and that the resultant conflict is supposed to issue in synthesis. So the whole Fascism-Communism struggle is a family fight: two Collectivist Totalitarian systems fighting it out to see which form of Collectivist Totalitarianism will win. And their true opposites are democracy, liberalism, individualism, human rights, free markets, and so on.

As Lindsay says, "Fascism is the right hand of the Left, just as Communism is the left hand of the Left." That's quite true. Think it over.

Divine-command ethics provides no rational alternative.

I don't know what you mean by "divine-command ethics," because the term is abused to cover far too wide a field.

There is an alternative term:

"There is a class of metaethical and normative views that commonly goes by the name ‘divine command theory.’ What all members of this class have in common is that they hold that what God wills is relevant to determining the moral status of some set of entities (acts, states of affairs, character traits, etc., or some combination of these). But the name ‘divine command theory’ is a bit misleading: what these views have in common is their appeal to the divine will; while many of these views hold that the relevant act of divine will is that of commanding, some deny it. So we would do well to have a label for this class of views that does not prejudge the issue of the relevant act of divine will. The label that I will use, following Quinn 1990, is ‘theological voluntarism.’"

That's actually better. Theological Voluntarism might do. So far, so good. What's your comment about Theological Voluntarism?

Plato's 'Euthyphro',

Is a dead horse. It's been asked-and-answered.

[Consul]

Consequently, "Cultural Marxism" is perhaps the most appropriate and polite term we could use for them. Culture is the lynchpin of their current activities.

Yes, there is a left phenomenon that is appropriately called so; but when "cultural marxism" is used to refer to the contemporary Woke Left in particular, the question is how (non-superficially) Marxist it really is. It seems that calling it "cultural marxism" overemphasizes its Marxist aspect. How much of Marx's Marxism is actually part of woke theory? I think calling it "cultural neo-/post-marxism" would be more appropriate.

Anyway, "cultural marxism" wrongly suggests to the nonacademic audience that woke leftism is basically the same as and as evil as orthodox communism (Marxism-Leninism). Well, this (false) impression is intentionally created by (far-)right propaganda! They want people to think of Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao's China when they hear the adjective "woke".

Moreover, that label conceals the fact that the Woke Left is strongly influenced by liberalism as well. Although Eric Kaufmann uses the term "cultural socialism", he writes that…

"The Awokening’s roots are more liberal than socialist."

Eric Kaufmann: Liberal Fundamentalism: A Sociology of Wokeness

So why not call it cultural liberalism?

[Consul]

…So the whole Fascism-Communism struggle is a family fight: two Collectivist Totalitarian systems fighting it out to see which form of Collectivist Totalitarianism will win. And their true opposites are democracy, liberalism, individualism, human rights, free markets, and so on.

Yes, but these similarities don't justify the assertion that political extremism is always a left thing. It obviously isn't!

There is an alternative term:

"There is a class of metaethical and normative views that commonly goes by the name ‘divine command theory.’ What all members of this class have in common is that they hold that what God wills is relevant to determining the moral status of some set of entities (acts, states of affairs, character traits, etc., or some combination of these). But the name ‘divine command theory’ is a bit misleading: what these views have in common is their appeal to the divine will; while many of these views hold that the relevant act of divine will is that of commanding, some deny it. So we would do well to have a label for this class of views that does not prejudge the issue of the relevant act of divine will. The label that I will use, following Quinn 1990, is ‘theological voluntarism.’"
Source: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/volu ... eological/

That's actually better. Theological Voluntarism might do. So far, so good. What's your comment about Theological Voluntarism?

Being an atheist, I think it's a (meta-)ethical nonstarter; and even if theological voluntarism is logically compatible with atheism (as stated in the SEP entry), I fail to see why any atheist would want to adopt it. Do you know any philosopher who endorses and defends atheistic theological voluntarism? – I don't.

Plato's 'Euthyphro',

Is a dead horse. It's been asked-and-answered.

What's the answer?

[Immanuel Can]

Consequently, "Cultural Marxism" is perhaps the most appropriate and polite term we could use for them. Culture is the lynchpin of their current activities.

Yes, there is a left phenomenon that is appropriately called so; but when "cultural marxism" is used to refer to the contemporary Woke Left in particular, the question is how (non-superficially) Marxist it really is. It seems that calling it "cultural marxism" overemphasizes its Marxist aspect. How much of Marx's Marxism is actually part of woke theory? I think calling it "cultural neo-/post-marxism" would be more appropriate.

Well, you're running into the problem of the informed ideologues versus what Lenin apparently called "useful idiots." (If he didn't, it was soon taken up by others to signify people who followed the ideologues, but really had no understanding.) There are far more "useful idiots" among the propagandized than there are informed ideologues. For example, when BLM started, it was started by women who proudly declared themselves to be "trained Marxists." (Cullors, Garza) They claimed to understand Marxist theory, and to know that what they were doing was primarily aimed at fomenting Marxist revolution. But the foolish, middle-class whites who joined her in throwing bricks and Molotov cocktails in the streets were clearly badly informed about what they were joining. Still, they were "useful" to the Marxist project.

The irony is that the "Wokies" never woke up at all. They're blissfully asleep, clueless about the Marxist project that is using them. They're so far from self-aware that they employ the tactics of Hitler's brownshirts, even while claiming to be "Antifa." But can we excuse them for their ignorance, or exempt them from their role in the Marxist project? Hardly: because the Marxists perceive mobilization of the ignorant masses as essential to their project. There are far too few fully-informed people still willing to remain Marxists: so the whole project would die, without the many, many "useful idiots."

Anyway, "cultural marxism" wrongly suggests to the nonacademic audience that woke leftism is basically the same as and as evil as orthodox communism (Marxism-Leninism).

It's more dangerous, actually. Old-style Marxism was so simplistic, with its one-front attack on class, an attack that simply collapsed of its own wrongness when the fullness of history revealed that classes are very maleable. The Neo-Marxist attack on multiple fronts, spanning culture, and without regard for anything but the creation of revolution itself. This makes them insanely problematic. They literally believe that smashing the status quo is all that is necessary for HIstory (their great god, History) to "progress."

But they use people, and they throw them away. Look at how the Woke Left is today abandoning gays and Feminists -- two groups that were very important to the earlier years of their trouble-making, and the causes of which they took up so lavishly and extravagantly. Nowadays, they throw them away for the more radical "Queer" agenda and the "Trans" agenda. And don't expect to see them regain the agenda anytime soon, so long as the Cultural Marxists find it serviceable to champion these latter groups. Nobody may be telling the Feminists and gays yet, but they're now on the fringe of Marxist favour...to be jettisoned the minute they impede the new disruptive plan.

Well, this (false) impression is intentionally created by (far-)right propaganda! They want people to think of Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao's China when they hear the adjective "woke".

That's a very good thing for them to hear. I wish they would. I wish today's students knew the abominable history behind Marxism, so manifest in every single place it has been implemented. And I wish they would pause, and ask themselves, "Why would we want all that over again?" But they don't seem to. They seem to (very naively) think that Marxism will finally work when "we" get to put it in place...that all the Russians, Chinese, Romanians, Albanians, Zimbabweans, Koreans, Cubans and Venezuelans were fools who just couldn't get it right, but "we" can.

The hubris is absolutely breathtaking. It's also likely to prove fatally wrong.

So why not call it cultural liberalism?

Because there isn't one thing "liberal" about it. And the point of naming something is to say what it is.

[FlashDangerpants]

I thought it was worth looking at this supposed commitment that Conservatives have to checks and balances. But if we cannot get past some confusion about the word "institution" then that would be a pipe dream.

Maybe it is. What is your thinking on that?

Well, now that we aren't going to get weird about the word "insistitution" we may as well revive the paragraphs that were otherwise ignored because of that confusion.

rights, constitutions, checks-and-balances ... those were radical ideas when created, opposed by traditionalists who were largely monarchists who saw their Kings as rulers by divine right as was his role prescribed within the traditional notion of the Great chain of being. It would take generations, civil wars and large amounts of bloodshed for the traditionalists to accept a notion such as a constitution with checks and balances. Multiple kings got their heads chopped off for that stuff.

Now technically we could perhaps see precursors to those ideas you list in the Mediaeval period. The excommunication of Henry IV, Magna Carta, and the restriction of the right of king to raise taxes in support of wars can all be seen as sort of Conservative rebellions in that they reinforced existing rights for privileged groups (1st and 2nd Estates by and large), but in general your list there is something of a reach IMO.

More latterly though, I would agree that modern Conservatives would be expected to have the highest regard for institutions that check the power of the excutive and so on. Mike Pence for instance is about as Conservative as any man alive, in all probability he nears the logical maximum, I fear that anybody who finds a way to have less personality than he does would no longer qualify as alive. When he refused to claim radical new powers in order to overthrow the biggest of all checks and balances (an election) he was probably being one of the most Conservative persons ever to not wear a crown. The people who attempted to thrust such power onto him were, by contrast, revolutionaries. Although hardly of "The Left", you should take care not have such an obvious blind spot over your right shoulder.

So I would like to remind you at this point that I raised this thread for the purpose of discussing conservativism vs radicalism not to have yet another left v right opinion-fest. There are conservative traditionalist pigeons and radical reformist hawks perched on every branch of the political tree.

[Immanuel Can]

…So the whole Fascism-Communism struggle is a family fight: two Collectivist Totalitarian systems fighting it out to see which form of Collectivist Totalitarianism will win. And their true opposites are democracy, liberalism, individualism, human rights, free markets, and so on.

Yes, but these similarities don't justify the assertion that political extremism is always a left thing. It obviously isn't!

Quite true. But the extreme Right looks rather different from the version the Left would like us to adopt. They're not Fascists; they're anarchists, nihilists, Randians, open-marketers, Libertarians, individualists and other anti-establishment types. And they're really only ever a liminal force in any Western democracy, just a small percentage of real extremists who have gone too far with liberties and lost touch with social responsibility completely. They're a fractious little bunch that come to nothing.

But note how different all this is from Collectivist Tyrannies. They have BIG plans, for big governments, for socialized everything, for global management, with utopian dreams...none of this do you find on the real "Right," even at the extremes.

Do you know any philosopher who endorses and defends atheistic theological voluntarism? – I don't.

I do. William Lane Craig comes to mind immediately. John Lennox, too. C.S. Lewis is a famous one. And in ethics, there would be Plantinga. There are actually a lot of Christian philosophers around today, and good ones, too.

I don't know what to call Anthony Flew. He became some kind of Deist. But he's interesting, because up to his later years, he was regarded as a flagship voice for Atheism. But his last book, a rebuttal to his detractors who were mad at him for "changing teams," was called "There is a God." It's worth a read...I have it here, on my desk, actually.

Plato's 'Euthyphro',

Is a dead horse. It's been asked-and-answered.

What's the answer?

You haven't heard? Okay. It's very simple.

Socrates is very specific about being a polytheist, and about founding his argument on his polytheism (if you check the text, you'll find this very clearly spelled out). Now, a polytheist has to believe that "god" and "good" are not coextensive terms. As Socrates says to Euthyprho, what one god "hates," another "loves." So what makes a thing "good," in a polytheistic world, has to float free of any conception of the gods. And this creates the famed Euthyprho dilemma: do the gods love things because they are good, or are they good because the gods love them?

But Socrates has already undercut his own argument: for he has pointed out that the gods do not agree. So "good" and "what the gods love" cannot be reconciled on any terms...and we see this in The Odyssey, for example, wherein Poseidon hates Odysseus, Athena loves him, and Zeus doesn't care about him either way. That's the polytheistic worldview. But the answer has to be that whatever "good" is, it cannot really be identified with all the gods at once, at least, not in any superficial way.

But Christians are monotheists. For them, "good" and "God" are coextensive. What God loves is always good, and what is good is always what God loves. And there are no "other gods" to contradict that expectation. So the Euthyprho dilemma becomes simple nonsense, no more cogent than asking, "Is this man a son or a father?" The answer is, "It depends on which way you're looking at the equation."

[Immanuel Can]

I raised this thread for the purpose of discussing conservativism vs radicalism not to have yet another left v right opinion-fest. There are conservative traditionalist pigeons and radical reformist hawks perched on every branch of the political tree.

I don't really see that. When I ask people to identify these "traditionalist pidgeon" types, they can never really find them. I don't think "traditionalism" is very high on anybody's agenda today. But I do think that the term "conservative" has some currency. There are people who want to conserve things.

Moreover, I don't find that the radicals want "reform." They seem to be mostly campaigning for destruction and some kind of unspecified reconstruction. "Reform" seems far too gentle and conservative a process for what they want, as it implies a more gradual conversion of the present into the future, and they seem to want to burn things down and break them, instead.

I can't help also to note which you designated the carnivore, and which you designated the prey animal. Was that deliberate?