True Believers of the Trumps and Le Pens

The philosophical basis is rooted in my anti-liberalism, from John Locke to John Rawls, as well as modern Social Justice Warrior activism.

I've had to ask myself what has always drawn me toward far-right movements. And make no mistake, I've always been very far-right (a point that Vernon Kelley never understood about me). The idea comes to a sense of historic destiny and purpose.

A profound idea occurred to me one day concerning the United States, that the country was founded in Whiggish philosophy, namely John Locke, and that its Whiggism explains both the current direction of the U.S. (so perhaps 1973-on) as well as Western Europe, where despite a vastly different intellectual tradition, has managed to converge on certain fundamental questions that will be tackled.

Classical liberalism, which is what libertarians defend, and modern liberalism, have a striking commonality that contrasts sharply with my views of "humanity," for lack of a better term. Those two components are that politics is a spectacle not to be taken too seriously and that religious belief is taken axiomatically as not being the product of Rational Man.

When we consider the roots of liberalism, it is (in my view) an understandable yet intellectually stunted reaction to the wars of religion, and in particular, the Thirty Years' War that determined the history of Catholic might - a war that Catholics would lose, thanks to France (more on that later in driving forces of history).

What we start seeing is an intellectual direction toward deracinating man from its natural impulses that relate to man's violent nature: God, country, family. The more conservative direction of post-30 Years' War was the Whiggish form, namely that politics and religion are outside the scope of the Executive Sovereign, whose obligation exists only insofar as protecting property rights. (We are starting to see now a move toward Man as Economic Unit.)

The roots of modern liberalism, which manifested in the French Revolution, went in the direction of Equality, in contrast to conservative Property - that the driving force of history have been superficial divisions (God, country, family) driven by the malevolent Executive Sovereign.

In both cases, we see Man moving in the direction of Market (conservative) and Equality (radical). Both cases reject Man as Political Animal.

Modern liberalism, from Immanuel Kant, has its roots in internationalism - that is to say, through economic transactions and international institutions, Man will see past its superficial differences that have long plagued Man (God, country, family), so to move towards a common destiny. The pre-liberal movement, by focusing on God, Country, Family implies, perhaps unwittingly, that common destiny is tribalized.

In contrast to the conservative Whigs, liberalism adopted nationalism, namely that the Country is the People, rather than the Country being the Sovereign. That nationalism would be the "Light Upon Nations" to vanquish the pre-Enlightenment oppressors (Russia, Austro-Hungary, Prussia namely). Liberal nationalism was thus ironically only in form, not of essence, which was in fact international. (Think of Napoléon's generals: Jews, Blacks, non-French - all to rise by merit - and a reaction to hierarchy.)

The wealthier and sanguineous "conservative Whigs" were able to maintain its position of power, as the old liberal nationalism veered toward internationalism, namely in the form of Marxism and similar derivatives - the 1848 revolutionaries who felt that the French Revolution was a bourgeois revolution, ignoring the Jacobins (conveniently) and pretending that the failure of 1789 was an anomalous aberration. (Notice how Marxists always feign this, despite genocide after genocide, unprecedented mass killings in peacetime.) Further, the internationalist liberals begin rejecting nation-state constructs, confusing nationalism with warfare, nationalism with exploitation, nationalism with historic regression. (Progressives maintain axiomatically that the future will always be greater than the present, present greater than the past, and thus there are nothing but mistakes to learn from the past.)

Going into the 20th-Century, the problem with pre-Enlightenment governments was its horizontal social structure, incapable of parliamentary action to accompany the changes of world industrialization. The liberal internationalists, confusing the structural issues of these governments with "History as Class Conflict," eventually pulled a coup for which the conservative Whigs and liberal nationalists united.

But in the cases of both, the conservative Whigs and liberal nationalists, married to parliamentary measures, became incapable of responding appropriately to the liberal internationalists, with communist agents attempting, and often succeeding, in one coup after another in the post-Versailles milieu.

In response, a radical type of modernist movement, the Fascists, emerge. Its philosophic raison d'être is to unite God, Country, Family under a strongman Sovereign whose governmental structure could be sufficiently vertical, rather than horizontal (in contrast to the Russian Empire), while reintroducing a sense of tribal historic destiny meant to confront the liberal internationalist communists in a cataclysmic battle meant to resolve the political question.

Returning to the common root of liberals and conservatives, both of which spawned as a reaction to the Wars of Religion, we find a conflicting legal construction meant to deal with "state of emergency" scenarios. That is the question of resolving state of emergency crises while keeping out the Political. To the conservative Whigs, political questions were never to be resolved but instead to be negotiated perpetually. To the liberal nationalists, that dynamic existed as well. To the liberal internationalists, there was no possible resolution to political questions but by eradicating politics itself: that economics, rather than politics, is the root basis of the identity of Man, that the pre-Enlightenment sense of the political was corrupt, implanted, and served as a distraction to the real issue of class conflict.

The Fascist was thus a product of the French Revolution - its bastard stepchild who exists to quell the internationalists. And in its challenge to the internationalists, the conservative Whigs and liberal nationalists chose the internationalists over the Fascists. (And we get to the bottom of the issue here.)

That issue is Nuremberg. Nuremberg as a legal foundation united the Whigs and the liberals on questions of war and peace. The logic is thus: Germany waged a war of aggression, that war of aggression killed Jews, to kill Jews is a crime against humanity, and that crime against humanity means tribal destiny must go by the wayside in favor of a dialect between the conservative Whigs and liberal nationalists on one side and the liberal internationalists on the other.

The security competition of the Cold War resulted in the national identities of the conservative Whigs and liberal nationalists to be slowly eradicated so to win allies in the Third World in its competition with the Communists.

The conservative Whigs always favored free navigation of the waters and free trade, whereas the liberal nationalists sought an international nationalism by renouncing its own nationalism (the European Union).

A generation later, around 1973, we see a perverted dialectic between the national internationalists and the conservative Whigs - both of whom rejected nationhood in favor of human rights, as implied by the Nuremberg provisions. That means Man is Economic (conservative) while being parameterized by human rights. We get neoliberalism.

What does neoliberalism mean? It means the eradication of the Political in favor of the Economic, that the perpetuity of floating capital shall bind humanity toward a common destiny, that the exploitation of labor in the Third World should eventually lead to its industrialization and thereby further trade, that perpetual peace will be met, as foreseen by Kant.

But what has neoliberalism brought us? A diminished sense of destiny where the worst immoral excesses are marketed and exploited and thus leading to the Nihilist Man with no sense of purpose, the eradication of nationhood in favor of imposed immigration (since Man as Political Animal is denied, different peoples coming in will not result in hate - the Propositional Nation Hypothesis), the uniformity of the parliamentary centers (right and left) such that their divisions in social programs, and war and peace are superficial at best; that the denial of the Political leads to foreign policy void of the value of human life and a naive depiction of geopolitical rivals (say Russia) and revolutionary factions will not meet a response of declaration of war for the former and that the sense of historical progress exonerates and ignores the violent nature of revolutionary factions meant to replace the "bad guy" dictators; the eradication of small communities; the contempt of the working class who are, by nature, married to the sense of duty found in God, Country, Family.

The problem with the ideals rooted in neoliberalism are to be found in game theory. For there to be a common destiny amongt Man, it requires all tribes to renounce the Political (something which only highly industrialized countries have done). A dynamic of that is to be found in War and Peace, namely that to have peace means either for all actors to agree on peace as an acceptable goal, except that is impossible by the nature of the "security dilemma" and the lack of force behind international organs (League of Nations, UN), so every actor wants arms as an insurance policy in case "World Peace" fails.

What we are seeing now is a political battle between the neoliberals and modernists against globalization facing demographic collapse, the denial of the Political by the neoliberal class, and the neoliberal contempt for the working class, refusing to pay attention to their concerns (immigration, jobs, identity), for to do so would be to renounce their own ideological foundation.

Types like Donald J. Trump, Marine Le Pen, Marion Maréchal-Le Pen are calling to action the desire of their own people against the neoliberal political class whose failings are noted above and whose own premises deny the reality of daily pressing problems that the working class face daily.

All three are challenging three premises: war and peace, nationhood, and tribalism. On war and peace, neoliberals, who are so stunted as to deny the Political nature of Man on an international stage, are daily bringing the world closer to a nuclear war, through binding defense treaties, exercising force without understanding the consequences (right on Russia's border, no less). On nationhood, the opposition today wish to return pride in their nations, as a people won't feel pride in being part of a nationalist internationalism (say the European Union); that involves a nuanced confrontation of immigration for which the neoliberals, by their own premise, are incapable of confronting by their own views of Man. And on tribalism, the neoliberals showed their true face after the Cold War, where, without an ideological rival such as the Soviet Union, protecting their own's jobs is unnecessary, since it is free trade and continual economic expansion that brings about peace. The opposition believes, in contrast, to look out for their own, which goes against the neoliberal ideological basis, for there is no such thing as a people, only the people of a peoples, so to speak.

We are heading toward a new ideological paradigm that could result in mass ethnic cleansing, revolutionary violence, and an internationalist nationalism rather than a nationalist internationalism. To deny this future is to create a self-fulfilling prophecy of the aforementioned types of violence, as the necessary parliamentary negotiation is to give the working class a voice.

And most ironically, the divisions we find between those who are True Believers of the Trumps and Le Pens - of the people who are getting F*D by the system and those who benefit from its cronyistic corruption - is really Karl Marx' wet dream. It is the Rural v. the Urban, or the Apollonian v. the Mercurian, and rather than disregard or collectivize against the opposition, there needs to be a negotiation. But the neoliberals, who have so much contempt for the working man, simply can't see past their nose. In short, neoliberalism is incapable of responding to the pressing problems of today: collapsed demographics in birthrates and alien replacement, looming multipolarity of great power actors, working class grievances, and, most importantly, Western Man's alienation and nihilism.

I hope that clears up things.