Progressivism as Fashion

The progressive complaint against reaction is its impertinence. In presenting yesterday's "outmoded" thinking as consisting in permanent values, it fails the fashion test, having the temerity not to know it is vanquished, like spats, or collar bars.

Ultimately, progressivism is a disordered aesthetic that assigns merit based on three criteria: 1) currency 2) purity of its hatred for unapproved forms, and 3) transgression of traditional canons.

In practical terms, it amounts to a celebration -no, an imposition- of ugliness across the spectrum of human activity. If beauty is what succors the human within us, then ugliness is whatever creates a hospitable environment for that which is post-human, or infra-human.

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Multiculturalism Survives in an Atmosphere of Mammon Worship

When your reigning ethos is secular economism, "culture" seems like kitsch, a silly frivolity, and cultural fungibility is made plausible.

Home Sweet Home

It will be bitter comedy, but a joke I'll secretly relish, when weepy sentimentalists and immigrants succeed in making Europe and America exactly like the dung heaps they fled. But then perhaps vast empty tracts of Africa will be ready for the plow of reason and order.

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The coalition of anti-Israel rank-and-file progressives and the Israel-supporting Jewish donor class, while one of necessity in the past, may break apart as the left is forced to reinvent itself in light of its late electoral collapse. The new synthesis on which these forces converge is likely to be a co-opting of the socialist Left-Populism that Senator Bernie Sanders had hoped to harness in his ill-fated Presidential election bid (if a genuine bid it was, rather than a demographic feint). In this makeover, the face of the Democratic Party will become younger, as the party seeks relevance to millennials, many of whom no longer feel any sympathy with the post-war international liberal consensus. A doubling-down on the historic wager that the coalition of the fringes will hold, and that the Trump phenomenon is an anomaly would be a serious miscalculation. While the Trump victory certainly represents a paroxysm of antipathy to liberal elitism, it also expresses an eruption of white...

Letters from Ithavoll

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