Sure We Fight, But Then What?

Right now the mad-caps on the conservative right are all singing the same tune. First the liberals want to take our guns and then they want to take our free-speech rights. #1A and #2A.

OK, so we fight. We fight for our gun rights, and the right of self-defense. And we fight for free speech rights; the right to publish our ideas, right and wrong, and petition the government for a redress of grievances, right or wrong.

But then what?

See, my Big Thing is that we conservatives really don't have an answer to the left's program.

The left, as I see it, is filling the hole left by the death of God in the 19th century. But its program is totalitarian: we will bend the arc of history towards justice with a condominium of secular religion and government power and economic power.

The verdict on that is the mass graves of the 20th century. When ideology, government, and economic power are condensed into one entity the result is disaster.

But people still want the consolation of religious hope; they still want government to protect them from pirates and predators, and they still want economic security. And that is the package deal that the left keeps offering. And that is the attraction of "activism" for the well-born crusader. He can be the agent to bring hope and safety and security to the eternally marginalized.

In his Maps of Meaning Jordan B. Peterson tells us exactly what this is about. We live in the Unbearable Present; our constant need is to formulate a solution to this misery, to heal the gaping wound in our society and advance to an Ideal Future.

You will notice that the left has exactly formulated its program on this axis whether with the unbearable exploitation of labor or minorities or women. And they formulate a vision of an ideal future, liberated and emancipated from oppression and exploitation.

Only the left always leads to the silence of the mass grave. So something is wrong.

Peterson symbolizes the problem of redemption from the unbearable present to an ideal future as the opposition between two Hostile Brothers: the Hero and the Adversary.

[The hero] stands on the border between order and chaos, and serves the group as creator and agent of renewal... The hero rejects identification with the group as the ideal of life, preferring to follow the dictates of his conscience and his heart. His identification with meaning--and his refusal to sacrifice meaning for security--renders existence acceptable, despite its tragedy.

But then there is the Adversary. He comes in two forms, the fascist and the decadent.

The fascist wants to crush everything different, and then everything. The decadent immolates himself, and then builds the fascist from his ashes. The bloody excesses of the twentieth century, manifest most evidently in the concentration camp, stand as testimony to the desires of the adversary and as monument to his power.

The problem is, of course, that every self-styled savior represents himself as the true hero, and the other guy as the fascist, decadent adversary. So how is a mother to tell the difference? How do we identify the false hero, who is really a fascist in disguise? How do we see the heroism in the man that "everyone" calls a fascist?

In our current world we have the globalists, who see themselves as arching above the fascist tendencies of the nation state. Then we have the nationalists that see themselves as representing the only practical form of large-scale human representation, because, to paraphrase Enoch Powell, globalism cannot work because there is no global demos, no global people: thus all current attempts at supra-nationalism must fail. Then we have the left that experiences itself as the voice from below, giving voice to the silenced, the oppressed and the exploited.

Which of these is the hero, and which the adversary?

That is the great question of our time.