Liberals are bad and they know it
Several weeks ago I wrote a piece on how the left disenchants and deconstructs heroes. This post called The Tyranny of Just, explored how progressives will leverage minor truths to demolish broader cultural narratives.
You see exactly what I’m talking about in the new Napoleon movie. Instead of focusing on the life and actions of a great man, we get a sordid tale about how Napoleon was an impotent simp. This type of deconstruction eats away at the foundation of civilization and makes transcendent action impossible.
However, I neglected to explore why progressives use this tactic. I hold that there are three main reasons. First, it serves as a tool to embarrass their political enemies, to assuage personal insecurities, and last to legitimate their rule.
Our elites and their clients are motivated by spite. They will make bad or shortsighted moves to punish their enemies. This trend, which has always been part of the leftist mentality since the French Revolution, has accelerated since the Obama administration. While the core function of politics is always to reward friends and punish foes, prudence dictates that there is a limit.
Currently, it would benefit the regime to bring MAGA back into the fold. They could accomplish this goal either by letting Trump win in 2024 or simply by ending the persecution of Red America. A political elite must appear legitimate to its subject, and even though MAGA is not aligned with the regime they are part of the same polity. If a ruling class loses the appearance of legitimacy, or the Mandate of Heaven as it has been called, they will not be able to keep hold of power. Sources I will not cite, say that roughly 30% of the US population believes that the 2020 election was stolen. This means that almost a 1/3 of Americans think they are governed by an illegitimate elite. For this reason, it would be the right move to bring red America back into the fold.
Now that said, they can’t help themselves. The Left gets off on degrading whites, straights, males, and Christians. One of the primary ways they do this is by demolishing the figures heritage Americans hold dear. We saw this in 2020 in a literal sense. Dozens of statues, monuments, and graves were desecrated or removed. There was a pretense that statues were being demolished because the men they represented were racist. However, this was simple animus. Liberals hate the people who care about these men. So they will undermine them as a way to strike out against their enemies.
Liberals denigrate great men because they are insecure. Yukio Mishima writes about this in Sun and Steel. “ The cynicism that regards all hero worship as comical is always shadowed by a sense of physical inferiority. Invariably, it is the man who believes himself physically lacking in heroic attributes who speaks mockingly of the hero… I have yet to hear hero worship mocked by a man endowed with what might justly be called heroic physical attributes.” In this quote, the author outlines how this cynicism is rooted in personal inferiority. For the cynic is nothing more than a small-minded coward. He is weak and cannot imagine strength.
You see this clearly in Breadtubers. For those who aren’t familiar, Breadtube is the Leftwing commentary scene that rose to prominence in 2019-2020. Figures like Lindsey Ellis, Contrapoints, and Vaush are prominent figures from this group. Out of all of these pundits, I find ThoughtSlime the most fascinating.
I won’t show you a picture of ThoughtSlime, but when I describe him, your mental picture will be completely accurate. He is a non-binary leftist who is obsessed with 90’s consumer culture. In addition to the negative traits he shares with other leftists, he is very clearly obsessed with masculinity. Throughout his work, you’ll see two things. ThoughtSlime hates the fact that he is male, and deeply wants to separate himself from traditional masculinity to prove he’s ‘one of the good ones’. A house man to paraphrase Malcolm X.
He feels inferior to traditionally masculine men. However instead of modifying his behavior to meet these standards ( as Thomas Carlyle would suggest) he desires to subvert the standard.
I believe that this is a common pathology of the liberal mind. Great men, like Lee Washington, and Jackson, highlight their failures. It is easier to demystify or bring those men down to the lowest common denominator than to copy their example.
Lastly, the heroes of the past are a problem for the great lie of progress. Whig History, is the idea that progress is a continual force; as time passes, human affairs will get better over time. Following that line of reasoning, the past is necessarily more ignorant, violent, and corrupt than our current age.
Progress is one of the central religious tenets of liberalism. It is also the main psychic prod used to motivate client groups to action. When Biden said that Romney wants “ To put y’all back in chains” to an all-black audience, his implication is clear. We saved you from the previous social order so time to do your part. The same argument ( albeit with different specifics) is used to motivate women and gays to turn out and vote.
However, progress is faltering. The force that once seemed inevitable is petering out. This has left our elites in a bind. By any objective standard society was safer, more prosperous, and purposeful pre-1970. Our rulers were not perfect, but they were capable and devoted men. Admitting that fact not only means admitting that progress is a false god but also that our ruling class has failed.
This is a non-starter. So instead the elites have decided to make the comparison impossible. Sometimes they outright erase the information ( look at how rare pre-Nuremberg history books have become). Other times they are content to remove it from view. How can it be said our president is not living up to the office when positive examples have been hidden? Removing these men from the public consciousness allows the lie of progress to limp along a few years longer.
The good news is that this will not work. Our rulers are cowards, catamites, and thieves. Every attempt to tear down the heroes of the past only serves to illustrate this point. This essay lays out why liberals cannot abide a hero. They hate the culture that our heroes came from. They are weak and embarrassing men. They know they would be revealed as frauds if heroes were in the public eye.
My advice is this; don’t let them hide. Force them to see the example they fail to meet. The regime must be revealed for what it is. Evil