It seems that at its core, the problem people have is when living seems unfair. I think that we can all sympathize with that experience. When we don't get what we deserve, or we get a punishment that we don't deserve.
Was this really handled better by the gentry leaders? We now have popular depictions of both a romantic nobility with peaceful peasantry, or a cruel nobility with suffering slave-peasants. Either seems plausible depending on the noble and their economy.
The medieval nobility was quite different from the gentry in its ~1800-1850 heyday. I think enabling men like George Washington, Coke of Norfolk (though a Whig), etc. is a significantly better bet, though of course imperfect, than massive bureaucracy meant near-purely to stamp out differences in outcome
That’s not to say unfairness isn’t attendant to that, or that it isn’t inefficient in some ways, but I do think its fruits are better than the fascism/communism/liberalism alternatives
While it is worth considering alternative political systems, in the abstract, I would point out that America arguably did fairly well for a long time with its constitutional framework and a culture more heavily founded on values, particularly religion.
That, I think is the missing element in most secular right critiques of the current order. Invoking European aristocracy but in a modern secular utilitarian framework would likely degenerate back into techno progressivism.
Recall also that England is theoretically a constitutional monarchy with a remnant wealthy aristocracy. Yet, they are becoming an Orwellian surveillance state with thought crime particularly aimed at racial and anti-Christian targets.
This is true in history, but misses that the liberalism of America for a long while was held more in theory than reality. The Virginia gentry's domination of the American government for the first decades was quite effective and led to reasonably good outcomes, as did the following decades of - with the exception of Van Buren - rule by country gentlemen. That's why I prefer the term gentry to aristocracy, as it's more relevant to the American experience
And that point about England hasn't been true since the 1911 Parliament Bill. Were it true, the (generally more to the right) hereditary Lords would have vetoed much of this, as shown by their political stances in the post-WW1 years.
The comment re: gentry is probably an apt distinction given the "gentleman farmer" ideal of the nostalgic American view. I would go so far as to say the idea of liberalism was in that context, ie of social mores and religious constraint. Ie. freedom to choose the right, not libertinism. You can see a significant amount of moralism (in a neutral-to-good sense) running through the American founders and ruling classes until fairly recently.
I am unfamiliar with the 1911 bill you note, thank you for the point-out.
Oh you should read about the Parliament Bill, I think it explains why England/Britain is the way it is.
Yes, the gentry/gentleman farmer thing is an interesting aspect of American history. There's a book called The Age of Federalism that describes well how the status of the Virginia gentry played into their love of republicanism with unique characteristics. I think that attitude (though applied widely as political power left the Old Dominion) is a much larger part of the "American Spirit" than is credited, but doesn't work particularly well in the absence of the social structures and duties that were attendant to it. Your point on libertinism gets to this.
Very well said, the first step I think towards moving back to tradition though is via philosophy and fiction being restored to what it once was. It's part of the goal behind my writings; philosophy to analyse and push forward from a rational perspective tradition and fiction to entertain and present secondary worlds modelled after LOTR & Conan that lionize goodness, honour and valour.
Liberalism in practice has nothing to do with equality or consent. Liberalism in practice is one thing: Free movement of goods, persons, money and contracts.
It's why the basis of race communism I'd 'free movement' of non-Whites into White spaces.
It certainly involves those things in practice, but 1) it is the moralism of the theory that I think rots brains and leads to race communism, and 2) it involves more than just that free movement in practice, particularly when it comes to undoing the ties that bing
Without 'free movement' liberalism cannot exist. It's foundational to the whole system. 'Free movement' is *how* 'the ties that bind' are challenged and then dissolved. Without 'free movement' you do not need 'one law for all everywhere' that supercedes all other considerations (such as 'human rights' or 'civil rights'). 'Free movement' is an *activity*, the ideology comes later. You could fix all the 'moralisms' and still every community with any real internal coherence would be under attack because it must always answer to outsiders 'who have the law on their side'.
This is conflating the social, philosophical, political and economic aspects. Open borders does facilitate arbitrage of 3rd world scrappers into societies with order based on internalized civic values ("that's not nailed down, I'll take it.... " "It wouldn't be nice for us all to beat the crap out of that thief, he's black and by definition under privileged").
The author is also conflating some of these things,too, I admit. They do have a common root and your average progressive activist or suburban voter isn't parsing it out too far.
I think the reason you get that is that liberalism is, in part, a moral philosophy, and the abstract ideas attract a great many people. So you can't, for example, hang criminals en masse because of the privilege issue, but then you also can't retreat from that position because doing so would be immoral.
What does 'conflatiing' mean in this context? Is 'the world' all jumbled together analog-style? Isn't that why consequences of our actions sometimes surprise us. The 'social, philosophical ... aspects' are categories in our minds. In the world, they're all combined into one thing called 'the world'. Since at least Plato, people's thinking has been detached from how things actually happen to us, how the world expresses itself to us.
Besides, the categories of 'social, philosophical' etc are meant to facilitate thinking about problems, not constrain them. They serve us, not the other way around.
You can separate these spheres practically. E.g. Switzerland does not have free flow of people, immigration is controlled. And AFAIK there are trade controls to protect industry, as in much of Europe. However, they are able to benefit from liberalization financially at the same time with a relative lack of restrictions on financial freedom.
This essay is confidently written and historically dressed—but for me, it conceals more than it reveals. Behind the footnotes and fury is something much simpler: fear masquerading as political theory. Fear of change, of difference, of not being in control. That, and a deep yearning for a world where power was inherited, not shared.
I’ve written a full response - less a takedown, more a reckoning. Not to defend liberalism blindly (it’s flawed, no doubt), but to challenge the fantasy that returning to rule by the gentry would solve anything. History remembers that world differently: as a brutal, exclusive order where most were subjects, not citizens. You can read it here:
I would say the problem is we have a lack of equality. The meaning of equality is good and true as all peoples are made in the image of God, the problem is when people stop recognizing that, and you get racism. Which is why they use equality as a mask to hide what they’re truly doing which is racism. There’s a reason why a few years back they started saying that being racist against whites couldn’t be called racism. It’s all a discursive manipulation of language to make it hard to understand what’s going on and we all must be careful to not fall into that, and that doesn’t mean turning a blind eye to what’s wrong, it means being color blind and working on a case by case basis.
It seems that at its core, the problem people have is when living seems unfair. I think that we can all sympathize with that experience. When we don't get what we deserve, or we get a punishment that we don't deserve.
Was this really handled better by the gentry leaders? We now have popular depictions of both a romantic nobility with peaceful peasantry, or a cruel nobility with suffering slave-peasants. Either seems plausible depending on the noble and their economy.
The medieval nobility was quite different from the gentry in its ~1800-1850 heyday. I think enabling men like George Washington, Coke of Norfolk (though a Whig), etc. is a significantly better bet, though of course imperfect, than massive bureaucracy meant near-purely to stamp out differences in outcome
That’s not to say unfairness isn’t attendant to that, or that it isn’t inefficient in some ways, but I do think its fruits are better than the fascism/communism/liberalism alternatives
While it is worth considering alternative political systems, in the abstract, I would point out that America arguably did fairly well for a long time with its constitutional framework and a culture more heavily founded on values, particularly religion.
That, I think is the missing element in most secular right critiques of the current order. Invoking European aristocracy but in a modern secular utilitarian framework would likely degenerate back into techno progressivism.
Recall also that England is theoretically a constitutional monarchy with a remnant wealthy aristocracy. Yet, they are becoming an Orwellian surveillance state with thought crime particularly aimed at racial and anti-Christian targets.
This is true in history, but misses that the liberalism of America for a long while was held more in theory than reality. The Virginia gentry's domination of the American government for the first decades was quite effective and led to reasonably good outcomes, as did the following decades of - with the exception of Van Buren - rule by country gentlemen. That's why I prefer the term gentry to aristocracy, as it's more relevant to the American experience
And that point about England hasn't been true since the 1911 Parliament Bill. Were it true, the (generally more to the right) hereditary Lords would have vetoed much of this, as shown by their political stances in the post-WW1 years.
The comment re: gentry is probably an apt distinction given the "gentleman farmer" ideal of the nostalgic American view. I would go so far as to say the idea of liberalism was in that context, ie of social mores and religious constraint. Ie. freedom to choose the right, not libertinism. You can see a significant amount of moralism (in a neutral-to-good sense) running through the American founders and ruling classes until fairly recently.
I am unfamiliar with the 1911 bill you note, thank you for the point-out.
Oh you should read about the Parliament Bill, I think it explains why England/Britain is the way it is.
Yes, the gentry/gentleman farmer thing is an interesting aspect of American history. There's a book called The Age of Federalism that describes well how the status of the Virginia gentry played into their love of republicanism with unique characteristics. I think that attitude (though applied widely as political power left the Old Dominion) is a much larger part of the "American Spirit" than is credited, but doesn't work particularly well in the absence of the social structures and duties that were attendant to it. Your point on libertinism gets to this.
I wrote about some of this (though not all) in more depth here, if you're interested: https://www.theamericantribune.news/p/the-death-of-the-gentleman-and-the
Very well said, the first step I think towards moving back to tradition though is via philosophy and fiction being restored to what it once was. It's part of the goal behind my writings; philosophy to analyse and push forward from a rational perspective tradition and fiction to entertain and present secondary worlds modelled after LOTR & Conan that lionize goodness, honour and valour.
Thank you! Yes, fiction plays a massive role
It does indeed, it’s downstream from philosophy and theology and shapes’ peoples’ perceptions of reality.
Citing Elon Musk as a Source….. this is for sure intellectualism at its peak
Liberalism in practice has nothing to do with equality or consent. Liberalism in practice is one thing: Free movement of goods, persons, money and contracts.
It's why the basis of race communism I'd 'free movement' of non-Whites into White spaces.
It certainly involves those things in practice, but 1) it is the moralism of the theory that I think rots brains and leads to race communism, and 2) it involves more than just that free movement in practice, particularly when it comes to undoing the ties that bing
Without 'free movement' liberalism cannot exist. It's foundational to the whole system. 'Free movement' is *how* 'the ties that bind' are challenged and then dissolved. Without 'free movement' you do not need 'one law for all everywhere' that supercedes all other considerations (such as 'human rights' or 'civil rights'). 'Free movement' is an *activity*, the ideology comes later. You could fix all the 'moralisms' and still every community with any real internal coherence would be under attack because it must always answer to outsiders 'who have the law on their side'.
This is conflating the social, philosophical, political and economic aspects. Open borders does facilitate arbitrage of 3rd world scrappers into societies with order based on internalized civic values ("that's not nailed down, I'll take it.... " "It wouldn't be nice for us all to beat the crap out of that thief, he's black and by definition under privileged").
The author is also conflating some of these things,too, I admit. They do have a common root and your average progressive activist or suburban voter isn't parsing it out too far.
I think the reason you get that is that liberalism is, in part, a moral philosophy, and the abstract ideas attract a great many people. So you can't, for example, hang criminals en masse because of the privilege issue, but then you also can't retreat from that position because doing so would be immoral.
What does 'conflatiing' mean in this context? Is 'the world' all jumbled together analog-style? Isn't that why consequences of our actions sometimes surprise us. The 'social, philosophical ... aspects' are categories in our minds. In the world, they're all combined into one thing called 'the world'. Since at least Plato, people's thinking has been detached from how things actually happen to us, how the world expresses itself to us.
Besides, the categories of 'social, philosophical' etc are meant to facilitate thinking about problems, not constrain them. They serve us, not the other way around.
You can separate these spheres practically. E.g. Switzerland does not have free flow of people, immigration is controlled. And AFAIK there are trade controls to protect industry, as in much of Europe. However, they are able to benefit from liberalization financially at the same time with a relative lack of restrictions on financial freedom.
This essay is confidently written and historically dressed—but for me, it conceals more than it reveals. Behind the footnotes and fury is something much simpler: fear masquerading as political theory. Fear of change, of difference, of not being in control. That, and a deep yearning for a world where power was inherited, not shared.
I’ve written a full response - less a takedown, more a reckoning. Not to defend liberalism blindly (it’s flawed, no doubt), but to challenge the fantasy that returning to rule by the gentry would solve anything. History remembers that world differently: as a brutal, exclusive order where most were subjects, not citizens. You can read it here:
👉🏽 https://open.substack.com/pub/noisyghost/p/a-note-to-the-man-who-misses-the?r=5fir91&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I would say the problem is we have a lack of equality. The meaning of equality is good and true as all peoples are made in the image of God, the problem is when people stop recognizing that, and you get racism. Which is why they use equality as a mask to hide what they’re truly doing which is racism. There’s a reason why a few years back they started saying that being racist against whites couldn’t be called racism. It’s all a discursive manipulation of language to make it hard to understand what’s going on and we all must be careful to not fall into that, and that doesn’t mean turning a blind eye to what’s wrong, it means being color blind and working on a case by case basis.