“Putin’s trip has been a very public display of the strong relations between Russia and North Korea, whose alignment has deepened in the face of shared animosity toward the West.” Sophie Tanno, CNN, June 20, 2024. In mid-February, 2022, my neighbor and I shared a whiskey. Politically, we both lean middle, but from different directions. We both have isolationist tendencies rooted in our common, rural upbringing where we took care of our own and expected others to do the same. That evening, in addition to commenting on the bite and burn of what we were sipping, we discussed the recent saber-rattling of Russia towards Ukraine. We concluded that Covid had apparently run its course, so the media needed something else to hype. Putin was just posing to extract some compromise from the West. There was no upside to invasion. He wouldn’t do it.
"Because most Americans don't want to remake the world into anything. We want a sane, decent society where the streets are clean, the criminals are locked up, the poor have a safety net, a loosely Judeo-Christian social order prevails, the economy creates jobs that can support a family, our borders are enforced, and we are pretty much free to make our lives without interference from governmental busybodies." - Best words to describe us that I've ever read...
Don't you think we are starting to reject the "illiberal authoritarianism," though? It had its moment, like "me, too," but reality has a way of pushing the pendulum back.
Starting to push back, yes. That's what the political realignment sweeping the West is about.
But...
Drowning people are very dangerous. They flail around and will drag anyone nearby under in a desperate effort to save themselves. Social systems are the same way, particularly those rooted in systems of unreality (false views of man or the world.) When challenged, such systems will flail around, breaking and destroying anything they come near in a desperate effort to cling to their false assumptions.
The upside is that the system is cracking and reality is intruding. The downside is that there's no telling how long the flailing can continue before the system actually dies and is replaced. In the case of communism (a similar, elite-sponsored, system of unreality built on a false view of man) its falsity was obvious by Khrushchev's era, but it still survived another 30 years and wrecked millions of lives.
Illiberal authoritarianism has been building for 40 years, and it's just starting to flail now. Let us hope its demise is faster and its replacement (which no one has yet figured out) an improvement.
Provided our unreality is only rooted in 1960's postmodernism, we might be successful at righting our ship of state (a Plato metaphor that I wish more people had actually read.) But what if the false view of man is actually the Lockean/Smithian, Enlightenment idea of a secular, value-neutral state created to defend individual rights? What if man isn't a utility-maximizing being? What if the value-neutral state is actually an illusion? What if we're creatures meant to live within a hierarchy? What if radical individualism is false? Deneen and Amari believe it is. I tend that way too. Whether we're correct remains to be seen.
Many Americans think the Western-led world order has mutated into an illiberal authoritarianism: militantly pushing bizarre racial and sexual policies (sometimes actually militarily); tearing down the structures of every society it touches; liberating people from all unchosen constraints... whether they want it or not.
In the last 30 years, we've gone from a Right that wanted to remake the world in the image of James Madison to a Left that wants to remake the world in the image of the Marquis de Sade, and they both claim to be doing it "for democracy". And people wonder where Trump came from? That's where! Because most Americans don't want to remake the world into anything. We want a sane, decent society where the streets are clean, the criminals are locked up, the poor have a safety net, a loosely Judeo-Christian social order prevails, the economy creates jobs that can support a family, our borders are enforced, and we are pretty much free to make our lives without interference from governmental busybodies.
This is far from the vision of Putin or Xi. But it's equally far from the vision of Ursula von der Leyden or Emmanuel Macron. The claim that populists are "shills for Putin" is somewhat truthful in that both believe the Western global order has become destructive. But the establishments in the US and EU are simply shills for a different kind of authoritarianism, arguably even more insidious since it claims to be oppressing you for your own good.
At least Putin and Xi is honest about what they are.
"Because most Americans don't want to remake the world into anything. We want a sane, decent society where the streets are clean, the criminals are locked up, the poor have a safety net, a loosely Judeo-Christian social order prevails, the economy creates jobs that can support a family, our borders are enforced, and we are pretty much free to make our lives without interference from governmental busybodies." - Best words to describe us that I've ever read...
Don't you think we are starting to reject the "illiberal authoritarianism," though? It had its moment, like "me, too," but reality has a way of pushing the pendulum back.
Starting to push back, yes. That's what the political realignment sweeping the West is about.
But...
Drowning people are very dangerous. They flail around and will drag anyone nearby under in a desperate effort to save themselves. Social systems are the same way, particularly those rooted in systems of unreality (false views of man or the world.) When challenged, such systems will flail around, breaking and destroying anything they come near in a desperate effort to cling to their false assumptions.
The upside is that the system is cracking and reality is intruding. The downside is that there's no telling how long the flailing can continue before the system actually dies and is replaced. In the case of communism (a similar, elite-sponsored, system of unreality built on a false view of man) its falsity was obvious by Khrushchev's era, but it still survived another 30 years and wrecked millions of lives.
Illiberal authoritarianism has been building for 40 years, and it's just starting to flail now. Let us hope its demise is faster and its replacement (which no one has yet figured out) an improvement.
Provided our unreality is only rooted in 1960's postmodernism, we might be successful at righting our ship of state (a Plato metaphor that I wish more people had actually read.) But what if the false view of man is actually the Lockean/Smithian, Enlightenment idea of a secular, value-neutral state created to defend individual rights? What if man isn't a utility-maximizing being? What if the value-neutral state is actually an illusion? What if we're creatures meant to live within a hierarchy? What if radical individualism is false? Deneen and Amari believe it is. I tend that way too. Whether we're correct remains to be seen.
Many Americans think the Western-led world order has mutated into an illiberal authoritarianism: militantly pushing bizarre racial and sexual policies (sometimes actually militarily); tearing down the structures of every society it touches; liberating people from all unchosen constraints... whether they want it or not.
In the last 30 years, we've gone from a Right that wanted to remake the world in the image of James Madison to a Left that wants to remake the world in the image of the Marquis de Sade, and they both claim to be doing it "for democracy". And people wonder where Trump came from? That's where! Because most Americans don't want to remake the world into anything. We want a sane, decent society where the streets are clean, the criminals are locked up, the poor have a safety net, a loosely Judeo-Christian social order prevails, the economy creates jobs that can support a family, our borders are enforced, and we are pretty much free to make our lives without interference from governmental busybodies.
This is far from the vision of Putin or Xi. But it's equally far from the vision of Ursula von der Leyden or Emmanuel Macron. The claim that populists are "shills for Putin" is somewhat truthful in that both believe the Western global order has become destructive. But the establishments in the US and EU are simply shills for a different kind of authoritarianism, arguably even more insidious since it claims to be oppressing you for your own good.
At least Putin and Xi is honest about what they are.