The fable of progressive innocence

Refusing to grapple with the metastasising of their own political tradition.

Who are the most important figures of the Left in terms of global history? Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Mengistu, the Kim dynasty …

What do they have in common? They are mass-murdering tyrants. In world-historical terms, Karl Marx mainly matters because the aforementioned mass-murdering tyrants were motivated by—and sought to implement—his ideas and his vision.

Wikimedia Commons: past and present Marxist-Leninist states.

Do contemporary Western left-progressives seriously grapple with this historical reality? Overwhelmingly no. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, etc., are regularly air-brushed out of any conception of what it is to be “Left”. Paulo Freire, the founder of Critical Pedagogy, explicitly wrote the creators of “sclerotic” bureaucracy such as Lenin and Stalin out of the revolutionary canon. (Like Marcuse, Freire felt that Mao had “redeemed” himself with the Cultural Revolution, embracing the need for permanent revolution.)¹

Some of such airbrushing comes from how left-progressivism acts as a secular religion. Socialism/Communism/Marxism does not fail, people fail Socialism/Communism/Marxism. As soon as folk get the Theory just right, and good folk like them are put in charge, it will all be fine. That is clearly Paulo Freire’s view, and of those who follow in his footsteps.

This is, of course, nonsense. But it is nonsense that flows from refusing to grapple seriously with the metastasising of their own political tradition and from the reasons folk refuse to so grapple. Instead, they promote the fable of progressive innocence: bad things never come from what progressives do—or, at least, not what true progressives do.

This has become particularly destructive nonsense given that contemporary left-progressive politics is generating within Western societies new versions of the control dynamics that the aforementioned mass-murdering tyrants created and used. Such dynamics are operating via networks, rather than centrally-directed political Parties. Nevertheless, they generate the same underlying patterns.

Degrading all they touch

Hence we now have commissars/political officers in many organisations—except they are called diversity officers, sensitivity readers, intimacy consultants, bias response teams and so on. Even so, they are commissars/political officers. Indeed, they are inquisitors, operating on the standard basis of inquisitors—error has no rights and they can determine error. Such control of public legitimacy—of what constitutes “acceptable” (defined as moral) and “unacceptable” discourse—provides a great deal of social leverage. Much of their “training” is not much more than struggle sessions.

We also have Lysenkoism—the subordination of scientific process and use of evidence to ideology—invading science (notably biology and medicine) from genderwoo and Queer Theory denying the biological realities of sex. Such networked Lysenkoism is the application of control of discourse legitimacy to—and against—science.

Of course, many of those who are pushing, or enabling, such Lysenkoism have no idea who Trofim Lysenko was, or what Lysenkoism represents. Nor have they learned the lessons that Soviet bloc STEM had to learn so as to not hobble itself. Hence, in some ways, Anglosphere academe is now more intellectually degraded than its post-Lysenkoism Soviet bloc equivalent.

We have Zdhanovism—the subordination of entertainment, literature and the arts to political messaging—invading Anglosphere TV, films, literature, comedy, entertainment generally. What YouTube film critic The Critical Drinker calls The Message, with the blacklisting of actors and others who refuse to bow the knee to the cultural orthodoxy.

Source: Any Critical Drinker YT.

This is the application of control of public legitimacy to arts, literature, entertainment and, in the end, against, the same. Hence, for instance, the degrading of various previously beloved entertainment franchises.

We see the expanding of censorship—a mixture of blocking designated mis- and dis-information, along with suppressing ever-widening notions of “hate” and “offensive” speech —justified by morally urgent political projects, such as climate change. All such designations being mechanisms of control of public legitimacy, giving the designators of approved, and unapproved, discourse social leverage.

Just as Catholic orthodoxy did under the Iberian Inquisitions, Wahhabism does in Saudi Arabia, and Twelver Shia orthodoxy does in the Islamic Republic of Iran, adherence to the approved beliefs becomes a loyalty-selection device. Approved beliefs as a loyalty-selection device has been used in every Marxist regime.

We have social alchemy Theory—the notion that if social dysfunction in developed democracies is increased, if the existing “oppressions” are burnt away, the utopian future will emerge from the ashes, like gold from lead—invading education and public policy. This then generates increasingly dysfunctional schools and universities as well as disastrous anti-police activism.

We see caricature (distorted) history and cartoon (simplified) history being propagated to support the above—and to trash the heritage of Western societies. Such caricature and cartoon history is used to burnish the wonderful intentions of those propagating such distortions and either actively, or passively, facilitating the above control dynamics.

In each case, we see action against—and so degrading—the function of a realm of human action. For each realm of human action has its own internal dynamics, its own ways of working.

To subordinate a realm of human action to principles of action from outside itself that are antipathetic to its ways of working always ends up degrading the field. Science cannot have predetermined conclusions—nor can art, story or whatever—without being degraded.

The classical liberal demand for refuges from politics is not a naive misunderstanding of social dynamics. On the contrary, it is a defence of, and deference to, the functioning-for-human-flourishing of human societies and the realms of human actions.

Those who attempt to politicise everything degrade all they touch. Their self-righteous demand for control; to determine who is in error, and who therefore has no standing to act, speak, create, discover; who impose predetermined taboos and conclusions; degrades any realm of human action such restrictions are imposed on. The very demand for such power is proof that they lack the understanding to wield it.

All the aforementioned networked versions of familiar patterns of action in Marxist tyrannies flow from exactly the same intellectual tradition that motivated the aforementioned mass murdering tyrants. Yes, the various forms of Critical Theory are updated versions of the Dialectical Faith—the notion that history is driven by conflict whose spiralling upward resolution will eventually create the utopian, oppression-free future. But they are the same base ideas, creating the same patterns of social action and control, albeit in networked, rather than centrally-directed Party, form.

These patterns are quite clear, but invisible to those who adhere to the fable of progressive innocence, who adhere to the notion that folk like them can never be vectors for Bad Things. Nevertheless, plenty of ex-Soviet bloc folk can—and do—recognise the patterns.

Two levels

There are two levels operating in the above social dynamics: there are the Dialectical Faith believers who generate the Theory and its supporting tropes. These are the folk whose writings and ideas James Lindsay discusses at length.

Around them is a larger group of liberal-progressives who have accepted equalitarian doctrine while making people of colour (though not “white adjacent” East Asians) a sacred victim category. This larger group are the folk Eric Kaufmann discusses in terms of left-modernism.

The fable of progressive innocence shields left-progressives from seeing these patterns. (Well, some do, but they are all in favour.)

James Lindsay is quite right to say that “wokery” has a logic to it and the dysfunction it creates is intentional—for the true believers, for those who accept social alchemy Theory. But there is a larger group who are being played, who are useful idiots, and who make themselves stupid through their (self-righteous) arrogance. For them, the fable of progressive innocence is necessary self-protection.

For that is what stops them even acknowledging—let alone grappling with—the metastasising of their own political tradition: sheer self-righteous arrogance. Wonderful moral folk like them cannot possibly have complicity with anything bad. No, they have embraced such ideas precisely because they are such clever, such wise, such moral folk. Nothing bad can come from this, except not pushing their ideas hard enough.

It is exactly the same pattern we see with Socialism/Communism/Marxism: no amount of failure is too much failure. None of the enormous level of human horror inflicted on hundreds of millions of people by Marxist regimes—regimes that, as the Soviet and other archives show, used Marxist language even in their private communications—has resonance. No amount of tyranny and mass murder counts, because such wickedness has nothing to do with their wonderful selves and their noble social vision. A sense of moral grandiosity is both appeal and protection.

Left-progressivism magnified Fascism, Nazism …

The fable of progressive innocence has recurring manifestations. The patterns of authoritarian politics in interwar Europe provide particularly historically resonant examples.

This starts with refusing to notice how much Fascism and Nazism are forms of progressivism: right-progressivism to be sure, but still progressivism. Both Mussolini (an ex-radical socialist) and Hitler adapted the modes of political operation of Leninism to their national and racial projects. Projects that sought to change social realities to create the transformed future.

They both engaged in the Jacobin mode of politics: politics unlimited in means—the ends are so wonderful, so urgent, they justify any means—and unlimited in scope—everything is politicised. Lenin Jacobinised Marxism, as he clearly stated. Mussolini Jacobinised Italian nationalism.

Hitler Jacobinised Aryan racism. As his was a much larger project of social transformation than Mussolini’s, Hitler created the only C20th regime that mass murdered on Marxist scales, killing “race enemies” rather than “class enemies”.² A horror that has since been used to divert attention from Marxist mass murders: including attempting to define genocide so it applies to killing “race enemies” but not “class enemies”.

The demand that every use of language ever—no matter how private—conforms to left-progressive norms and taboos is how contemporary left-progressives pursue politics unlimited in scope. No area of life is not to be shaped by their moralising, as that both maximises their social leverage and evidences how thoroughly they own morality. Moral grandiosity is both the motivation and the project.

However dysfunctional this may be to the wider society, and the various realms of human action—and it is dysfunctional—the shared political obsession motivating this social and institutional imperialism gives such believers an enduring political advantage over those who want to get on with their lives. It particularly gives them an advantage over conservatives who believe that institutions, and realms of human action, should mostly run themselves.

Then there is the recurring refusal to notice how much authoritarian traditionalism (Horthy in Hungary, Franco in Spain), along with Fascism (Italy) and Nazism (Germany), were empowered by rational fears of revolutionary progressivism.

In those countries where Communism was a minor political phenomenon—the Anglosphere, Scandinavia, the Low Countries—authoritarian traditionalism, fascism or similar politics were also minor political phenomena.

In France, there was an electorally significant Communist Party that never became the dominant on the left. Moreover, left-progressive politics as a whole did not treat the peasantry/rural folk with contemptuous neglect. Hence, in France, the politics of fascism, or near equivalents, was more significant than in the above countries, but was still relatively contained.

In those countries where violent revolutionary-progressivism was a serious threat—especially if the dominant forms of left-progressivism treated the peasantry/rural folk with various levels of contemptuous neglect—then you got a Horthy, a Mussolini, a Hitler, a Franco.

So, the Bela Kun-led Communist Revolution in Hungary led to Horthy gaining power. Violent Leninist agitation in Italy enabled Mussolini to cast himself as Italy’s national defender and ride to power. The growth of the Stalinist KPD, and concomitant street violence, was a huge aid to Hitler in Germany.

For it was not free speech that enabled the rise of the Nazis—Weimar Germany had hate speech laws under which Nazis were frequently prosecuted. It was the failure to suppress political violence that was much more fatal to the legitimacy of the Weimar Republic.

Source: “In this 1920s cartoon by Philipp Rupprecht, Hitler is depicted as having his mouth sealed with tape that reads ‘forbidden to speak.’ Beneath: ‘He alone of two billion people on Earth may not speak in Germany.’”

What so many refuse to confront is that fears of Leninism and Stalinism were entirely rational. There was nothing that a middling person in Hungary, in Italy, in Germany, in Spain, in … might value—not life, liberty, property, nor faith—that was not at risk if the Leninists or Stalinists won.

In Spain, the violence of anarchist, Stalinist and other left-revolutionary agitation—including the assassination of the conservative Parliamentary Opposition leader, which looked like an attempt to decapitate the opposition—enabled Franco to unite traditionalist Spain and win the Spanish Civil War.

The ridiculous claim that such politics—reacting to left-progressivist violence—are somehow “natural” outgrowths of “capitalism” when such politics were so minor in the Anglosphere, in Scandinavia, in the Low Countries, is a mechanism for obscuring how much such politics was a response to violent left-progressivism. Such politics gain traction because the scale and intensity of the left-progressive threat discredits conventional liberal-conservative politics.

These responses included—especially in the case of Italian Fascism and German Nazism—adopting Leninist modes of political operation. The institutional structure of the Fascist, and especially the Nazi, Party-State was each far more like that of the Soviet Union than they were like any liberal-democratic “capitalist” polity. Just as the contemporary polity whose institutional structure most resembles that of Nazi Germany is the People’s Republic of China. But the fable of progressive innocence inhibits noticing such things.

About Populism

The equating of contemporary national populism with Fascism or Nazism is ridiculous. Not least because contemporary left-progressivism has not displayed anywhere near the level of violence of its interwar revolutionary counterparts.³ Hence national populism does not have paramilitary wings, fetishise violence or military forms, nor does it support aggressive militarism or foreign adventurism by their polities. Indeed, contemporary populism in the US is a reaction against the “forever wars”.

But the political bad faith in equating national populism with Fascism or Nazism has two layers to it. Not only is it a misrepresentation of such politics, but it also involves not noticing how much national populism—as another manifestation of alienation from conventional liberal-conservative politics—is a reaction to contemporary left-progressivism.

The most obvious reaction is to using migration as a weapon against local working classes. This pattern is particularly obvious in the UK, but can be seen in the US and across Western Europe.

Then there is the denigration of the heritage of Western countries by internationalising Anywhere elites. (Anywheres being those whose identity come from achieved status and whose networks are not rooted in locality.) This is felt—quite rightly—by ordinary citizens, particularly working-class citizens, as an attack on their identity and the communities they are embedded in.

There is also what writer Wesley Yang labels as non-electoral politics of institutional capture: the by-passing of voters by activist networking into institutions, supported by the approved narratives of mainstream media. This is most obvious in matters Trans and, once again, with migration; with elites imposing policies on countries that the majority of citizens do not support and have not voted for.

Elite policies of aggressive internationalism operate to systematically disadvantage and disenfranchise ordinary citizens. Vastly unaccountable UN bureaucracies produce—or often simply launder—policy ideas, which then get spurious “authority” as being decisions of the “international community”. Such notions then feed into the institutions of the administrative state.

These dynamics bypass the voters. This is, of course, much of the appeal of the same. This evasion of democratic accountability is more or less universally used to promote terrible ideas. It turns out that democratic accountability is a surprisingly good filter: much, much better than its absence.

The expanding apparatus of censorship so ardently pushed by so many left-progressives (“speech is violence”) as they promote not only restriction of speech but compulsory affirmation (“silence is violence”) promotes and defends dysfunction while increasing the appeal of populism. For censorship generates distrust. The more it becomes obvious that various concerns and ideas are suppressed, the more reasons folk have to distrust institutions and their processes. Distrust that is entirely understandable, has a large element of rationality, and is feeding into populism.

The more conventional liberal-conservative politics fails to seriously grapple with any of this, the more populism arises as a response. But it is very much a response. As anyone who is not in thrall to the fable of progressive innocence can readily see.

Metastasising for thee but not for me

The other side of the fable of progressive innocence, particularly of the refusal to deal with the metastasising of their own political tradition—and the self-righteousness that underpins such refusal—is the constant characterising of alternative political traditions as “naturally” metastasising, as constantly verging on, or becoming, “fascist”.

The use of the imagined future as a political and moral benchmark; the characterising of past and present as realms of sin; the use of future-focused Theory to frame, select and judge evidence; all lead to a persistent refusal to take the problems of social order seriously.⁴

As the fundamental concern of conservatism is the creation, and maintaining of, social order, this makes left-progressives often remarkably poor at “getting” conservative concerns. Instead, left-progressives often take conservatives as believing some inversion of left-progressive beliefs. They take their left-progressive framing and apply it to everyone else. This leads to a lot of false analysis that, nevertheless, can be a useful coordinating and motivation device.

This is not a uniquely left-progressive sin. Folk who get the Ukraine-Russia War wildly wrong typically do so because they apply their own alienated analysis of domestic Western politics to the conflict, completely failing thereby to understand the dynamics of Russian autocracy. Similarly, folk who get the Israel-Hamas Gazan War wildly wrong also typically do so because they apply their own alienated analysis of domestic Western politics to the conflict, completely failing thereby to understand the dynamics of Islam, of the Arab world, and of Hamas.

Left-progressives seeing conservatism as an inversion of their own politics enables left-progressives to continue with their own framings but at the cost of misreading conservatives and conservatism. Conservatism then becomes an inversion of righteousness, so inherently metastasising. It becomes politics hovering on the edge of “fascism”, always so ready to “tip over” into it.

Meanwhile, the recurring pattern of metastasising left-progressive politics generating political reactions utterly pass them by, protected by the fable of progressive innocence.

Indeed, the failure to grapple with the metastasising of their own political tradition is also something of a motivational advantage for left-progressives. It makes them much less inhibited, with greater capacity for developing idea-intensity.

Conversely, liberal-conservatives are often very well aware of the possibilities of their own political tradition metastasising, which helps inhibit—and divide—their responses to the social and institutional imperialism of left-progressives. This is then aggravated by centre-right politicians, staffers and so forth generally being Anywheres, thus lacking resonance with—or understanding of—the concerns of Somewheres: folk whose identity and networks are very much based on locality.

Denying attacking dissent

The recurring contemporary denials of the reality of cancel culture—of folk having their reputations trashed, losing their jobs, having their careers destroyed, for breaking left-progressive taboos and dissent from left-progressive claims, via mobilised stalking mobs—is another manifestation of the fable of progressive innocence. Left-progressives cannot be doing bad things, so such claims have to be false, or just what happens in all societies, or is just contemporary societies developing a more heightened sense of morality. Really, it is just people being moral, showing social concern.

It is perfectly true that shaming and shunning have been human patterns for (likely) at least the entirety of our existence as Homo sapiens. Such shaming and shunning is very much a mechanism used in foraging societies, for example.

It is also very clear, however, that something new is going on with the contemporary patterns of destroying lives, reputations, careers over words and ideas: particularly via mobilised stalking mobs. As a friend noted:

Between McCarthyism and 1987 (when the Jewish lobby did for Philipp Jenninger in Germany), THERE IS NOT A SINGLE INSTANCE OF THIS KIND OF BEHAVIOUR.

This is new in a broader sense:

We have literally not lived in a world where significant numbers of people who think being a gossip, a sneak, or a coward is a completely normal way to behave have had power before.

There are several, intersecting, patterns going on here. One is the feminisation of public discourse and institutions. These modern patterns of shaming and shunning manifested within the women’s movement well before they spread into the wider community. (See Jo Freeman’s essay ‘Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood,’ Ms magazine, April 1976.)

Another is the activist lobby purporting to be speaking on behalf of Jews pioneering so many of the techniques of contemporary cancel culture in order to attempt to control how folk spoke, or even thought, of Jews. We nowadays see Trans activism indulging even more virulent forms of the same patterns in order to enforce their demand to control how other people speak and think of Trans folk. They might ask: how that demand has worked out for Jews?

Social media has hugely empowered stalking shaming-and-shunning mobs. Between the ability to generate bots, and the capacity to mobilise outrage, online mobs can have wildly outsized salience.⁵ The power of intolerant minorities has been leveraged by social media, helping to create media and institutional dynamics wildly at variance with the opinions of the wider citizenry.

Left-progressive politics—with its sense of self grounded in imagined futures—has found it very easy to evolve to take advantage of, and to magnify, these patterns.

As someone who has hung around with both left-progressives and conservatives for decades, a very obvious pattern is that conservatives are typically far more relaxed about disagreement—including political disagreement—than left-progressives are. The latter are much more likely to get personally contemptuous, morally shaming or otherwise abusive about dissent than the former. They are also much more likely to express intense dislike, even hatred, of political opponents.

The reason is surprisingly straightforward. Conservatives accept that there are a whole lot of constraints—both physical and due to human nature—that we have to accept and work with. Such acceptance of constraints embedded in the nature of things makes human action matter less. This includes making differences in opinion matter less. That conservatives focus on the problems of order, based on acceptance of inherent constraints, also makes them more aware of the limitations of politics and the value, even the need, for non-political social spaces.

Conversely, the more things are socially constructed, the more human action matters. In particular, the more operative political views matter. It becomes much more desperately important than human action conform to what will achieve the golden future.

Hence conservative senses of self are generally much more anchored in things outside themselves—heritage, religion, culture, family, hobbies, etc.  By contrast, left-progressive senses of identity are far more anchored in what is in their heads, by what they are ideologically committed to.

Dissent becomes not only a barrier to the social salvation they are committed to, but an attack on their very sense of self. Hence they tend to be much more emotional—including more contemptuous and otherwise vicious—towards dissenting views.

Anger is very much a key emotion of left-progressivism, one that shows up strongly in Communist propaganda. Marx’s own writings are full of anger.

This aggressive defensiveness also increases the tendency of left-progressives to end up in cognitive “bubbles”, as folk of their acquaintance are more likely to sit on their own views rather than “spoil” the emotional ambiance of an occasion, due to the emotional defensiveness of left-progressives.

Which gets us to the deepest level generating the fable of progressive innocence. Left-progressivism is based around the imagined future, which sets the moral benchmark for judgement as well as their sense of identity. In order to preserve that moral benchmark, and that sense of self, the imagined future benchmark can be, and is, regularly re-construed so as to be never wrong.

As a thing of imagination—for there is no information from the future—the imagined future is not constrained in a way that prevents such re-construal. On the contrary, that lack of constraint, that ability to be re-construed so as to be never wrong, is central to the appeal of the politics of the imagined future. Such politics naturally generates the fable of progressive innocence—as a feature not a bug.

Well, it is a feature for the believers. It is very much a bug for everyone else.

It not only leads to the ways progressivism—whether of left- or right- versions—ends up degrading all it touches, ends up being the enemy of human flourishing. See what it has done to academe, to schooling, to entertainment, to media, to … It also leads to how, in a fundamental sense, left-progressivism never learns—except in ways of updating its mechanisms of motivation, signalling and coordination.

Left-progressivism can update itself to evolve from centrally-directed political Parties to operating via networks. It can update itself to shift from economic issues to cultural ones. But it does not learn to not degrade what it touches. It does not learn to control the metastasising of its own tradition. For, in a sense, it is not a metastasising, it is the recurring tendencies of the thing itself.

The recurring statement about those who disagree “if only they would listen”; the hyperbolic consequences attributed to dissenting statements—both patterns that come up in the excellent series of podcasts The Witch Trials of J. K. Rowling—the constant denigration and abuse of dissent and dissenters—racist! Transphobe! misogynist! Islamophobe!, and so on—are symptoms of the left-progressive claim to own morality: self-righteous arrogance parading as moral concern.

The ability to re-construe the imagined future that is their moral benchmark so as to never be wrong, and the wide claims about how much is socially constructed, makes such claims and inferences seem reasonable. The fable of progressive innocence expresses and buttresses these claims and patterns.

One of the startling things about the literature of the Dialectical Faith—from Marx to Critical Theory and its spin-offs—is how much it is full of un-evidenced bullshit: statements made for rhetorical effect without regard for their truth. But acquiescence in such ostentatious moral grandeur establishes one as both a wonderful person, with noble intentions, and a loyal member of the transformational moral and cognitive elite. It is an ongoing example of how, in the absence of reality testing, bullshit wins.

The pretence of science

One of the vectors by which these ideas have been able to continue to be propagated—to continue to be adapted and evolve—is the delusion that Karl Marx was a social scientist. To treat Marx as a social scientist is to put the bar of what constitutes science far too low. He started with his metaphysical vision and then wrestled with the thought of Adam Smith, David Ricardo and other classical economists to create a system of analysis to justify and support that vision.

Marx was a pre-Darwinian metaphysician pretending to be a social scientist. To compare how Marx operated to how Charles Darwin proceeded is such a sad benchmark for any pretension that Marx was any sort of scientist.

Darwin’s science has provided ever-expanding knowledge of the biological world and ourselves. Marx’s pretence at science has generated toxic untruth.

It is an arguable case that the net effect of social science on Western societies has been negative, starting with the “laws of supply and demand” inhibiting effective response to the Irish Great Famine.⁶ If we count Marx as a social scientist, then it is unambiguously true that the net effective of social science on human history has been overwhelmingly negative.

Treating Marx as a social scientist has interacted with the dynamics that gives us the fable of progressive innocence to preserve the notion that we should take Marx’s thought—and its derivatives—seriously despite the fact that Marx was wrong about almost everything. No amount of failure is sufficient to dethrone Marx and the ideas that flow from him. This indulgence of Marxian pretensions has been a key element in the descent of academe into toxic conformities, in how academe—unlike sport—has become not a realm of excellence, except in a degraded and perverted, purity-spirals, sense.

A bodyguard of falsehoods

The fable of progressive innocence is protected by layered bodyguards of falsehoods: about the past, about the present, about others, about the dynamics of progressivism. The fable of progressive innocence is both a necessary protective device and a disastrous misunderstanding of the dynamics of progressivism and what it means for human flourishing.

The recent book Unhumans gets one big thing right. We should not judge progressives and progressivism by their oh-so-noble intentions, no matter how loudly proclaimed. We should judge them by what they do. If we do that, the fable of progressive innocence collapses into the destructive nonsense it is.

References

Christopher Boehm, “Egalitarian Behavior and Reverse Dominance Hierarchy”, Current Anthropology, Vol. 34, No.3. (Jun., 1993), 227-254 (with Comments by Harold B. Barclay; Robert Knox Dentan; Marie-Claude Dupre; Jonathan D. Hill; Susan Kent; Bruce M. Knauft; Keith F. Otterbein; Steve Rayner and Reply by Christopher Boehm).

Helen Dale, ‘Merit, Inclusion, and Raygun at the Olympics,’ Law & Liberty, September 24, 2024, https://lawliberty.org/merit-inclusion-and-raygun-at-the-olympics/

Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin, National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy, Pelican, 2018.

Jo Freeman, ‘Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood,’ Ms magazine, April 1976, pp. 49-51, 92-98. https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/trashing.htm

Herbert Gintis, Carel van Schaik, and Christopher Boehm, ‘Zoon Politikon: The Evolutionary Origins of Human Political Systems’, Current Anthropology, Volume 56, Number 3, June 2015, 327-353.

David Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere: The New Tribes Shaping British Politics, Penguin, 2017.

Arnold Kling, The Three Languages of Politics: Talking Across the Political Divides, Cato Institute, 2017.

Jack Posobiec & Joshua Lisec, Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them), War Room Books, 2024.

Fleming Rose, ‘Words and deeds,’ Index on Censorship, (2012), 41(1), 55-62.

Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, The Bodley Head, 2010.

1. If what is going on, especially in the US, feels somewhat “Maoist” it is largely because of the influence of Critical Pedagogy and its notions of permanent revolution on Education Faculties, so teachers and education administrators.

2. Identity-progressivism applying the oppressor-oppressed template to race has shifted contemporary progressivism to also be concerned about “race enemies”.

3. Though the BLM riots in the US headed in that direction, they were not as destructive as US riots during the 1960s.

4. Inability to grapple fully with the problems of social order is also a flaw in much libertarian thought.

5. Very useful advice when encountering an online mob is “count them”. Often, the numbers are much smaller than they appear.

6. The recurring tendencies within social science to postulate invisible sociological gremlins—such as disparate impact or systemic racism—to base itself on false models of human behaviour, to sort evidence by Theory, has generated considerable social dysfunction via misconceived public policy. This includes wildly over-stating the benefits, and under-stating the costs, of low-skilled or non-working or culturally distant migrants.