Liberalism, Then and Now

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As I pointed out in my last article on the Odinic-Tyrrhic theological framework, the radical right is nothing new. What is only just now coming into focus, however, is an unlikely alliance between certain reactionaries and so-called “racist liberals”. The reactionaries wish to RETVRN, but only so far—attacking nationalism, against all historical evidence,¹ as an innovation rather than a perennialism; the liberals wish to defend this perennialism under the auspices of a genuine innovation. Approaching incoherence from opposite directions, this alliance between what Nick Land has called “reactionary progressives”² is, when seen through the Odinic-Tyrrhic framework, the inverse of the radical right—the trad left.

“Trad left” seems as paradoxical to some of us as “radical right” does to Trigglypuff. To be sure, its core principle makes no sense, but a principle need not make sense to produce a political category. The trad left is a mixture of the Tyrrhic with subversive elements. It has been with us for a very long time, but it wasn’t until Trump, and especially COVID, that it started to become clear. The core idea behind it is that revolution is our tradition, often phrased in confused language as freedom is the cure for tyranny.³ The reactionary-lite mistakes a revolution for tradition; the racist liberal tells us that what we have is “no true liberalism”. I will focus on the racist liberal in this article.

The racist liberal’s worldview is ably sketched out by Ulick Fitzhugh in his article on Henry Sumner Maine’s Popular Government in Meon Journal.⁴ What makes this article excellent is that Fitzhugh himself does not come down for or against the racist liberal, but like a good Socratic dialogue, it ends in aporia. The racist liberal view is that while there may be certain structural and ideological similarities between wokeness and the aristocratic liberalism of the Enlightenment such as anti-populism, a fetish for technocracy, progressivism, and a residual Puritanism, there is no line of filiation between them—the line has been broken and what we have now is post-liberalism. This is very dangerous because it both ignores history and thinks superficially about the conceptual essence of liberalism, and, appropriately for the trad left, the effect is one of deradicalization.

According to the racist liberal, the essence of liberalism is freedom, and by this is meant freedom from the state, with accountability guaranteed by the collegiality of parliament and despotism checked by limited government. And so, because we have neither accountability nor limited government, we no longer have liberalism. This is fine in a world of Platonic forms, but in practice, liberalism has often meant something quite different and far broader than “freedom from the state”.

French republicanism is not exactly synonymous with liberalism, but as the one goes, so goes the other. So we are surprised to find, one year after the proclamation of the First French Republic, a great deal of centralization in the name of liberal ideology. In April–May 1794, the government suspended the provincial revolutionary courts and centralized legal proceedings against thought criminals within the capital. This was followed by the Law of 22 Prairial, which redefined “political crimes” so vaguely as to ensure no enemy of the Revolution could escape, hearing cases for, among other things, spreading fake news.⁵ In 1852, during the Second Republic, Napoleon III organized a coup d’état and curtailed the legislative assembly’s power, then proceeded to restrict civil liberties and manage the Corps Législatif⁶ by his prefects. He ruled by plebiscite, bypassing the opposition and generally hollowing out intermediary structures by directly approaching the people with readymade policies they were expected to approve. During the Third Republic, the Dreyfus affair provided the occasion for yet more centralization under French republicanism. When Alfred Dreyfus was convicted of treason with forged evidence, republicans generally sided with Dreyfus, Catholics against him. When the case against Dreyfus collapsed, republicans, sore from recent betrayals by the clericalists, seized the opportunity to expand state authority to where even former supporters of the republican cause such as Charles Péguy and Georges Sorel became retroactive anti-Dreyfusards, fearing the apotheosis of state power more than the miscarriage of justice. By 1901, in the name of republicanism, a frankly discriminatory Law on Associations had been drafted punishing the Catholic Church, and the government set about purging the higher ranks of the army on the basis of religious and political loyalty to laïcité, what one historian has called the state’s “universal moral religion”.⁷

Such is the liberal commitment to freedom from the state. This is not to say that liberalism is not committed to freedom—freedom is the essence of liberalism, but in a far more abstract sense, and this abstraction is part of the problem. This is also not to say that liberalism has not changed; it obviously has. Let us try to summarize nearly four centuries as briefly as possible:

The revolutionary liberalism of the English Civil Wars and French Revolution—where it was not open power politics—was justified on the same basis as the Reformation: overthrowing tradition and returning to a mythical originary state of freedom. This logically concluded in the aristocratic liberalism of the Enlightenment.

This aristocratic liberalism found its highest expression in Kant’s transcendental deduction of the categories of experience—abstracting the individual away from all particularity and leaving only the bare subject free of context. This universalist epistemology, with the abstract individual free of inherited authority to use his “reason”, logically concluded in bourgeois liberalism.

This bourgeois liberalism, with its emphasis on mercantile values and individual initiative and its distrust of all hereditary status, took as its core value the proposition nation, and more broadly propositionality, where the locus of one’s identity is a freely chosen belief. The proposition nation of bourgeois liberalism logically concluded in mass democracy.

This mass democracy was predicated on the fungible voter-consumer. The main sense in which he could be distinguished from his neighbour was in his appetites, expressed in his democratic and consumptive choices, the more unbridled the better. All that constrained his “freedom to choose” was the fact of his biology, and so he could only logically conclude in wokeness.⁸

This wokeness sought to affirm the individual’s “human right” to make of oneself anything at all and to deny any constraint resulting from the “accident” of birth. The Rawlsian original position characterizes the desire to abstract away all particularity from justice and to sheer it of context, to where any inequality must a priori be evidence of injustice, owing to a commitment to radical biological inessentialism—this has now logically concluded in transhumanism, which attempts to transcend all brute facts of identity whatsoever and to erase the human altogether.

At no stage do you find a rejection of what came before, only a recognition that it did not go far enough. The history of liberalism is the history of an idea taking itself ever more seriously. It is the history not of the abandonment of freedom, but of the devolution of the oppressor—at each stage we are freed from what is closer and closer to us. Revolutionary liberalism aims to free us from tradition, aristocratic liberalism from ignorance, and on it goes through the state to inauthenticity to biology, and finally to free us from our own selves. In this long march from Kant to Kurzweil, nobody forgot to carry the one and nobody made a mistake, except perhaps certain shall we say, “mid-century ideologies” that then provided a foil for the orthodox to double down on this expanding freedom-from.

It can seem terrifying that ideas might be refined over time rather than the Hesiodic view of decline from a golden age. For many Christians, the idea that Protestantism was a purer expression of Christianity than Catholicism is beyond contemplation. For Jews, the idea that Christianity is the end and fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets is sacrilegious. Conceptual history is nothing if not ahistorical in failing to see the essence of an idea, which is not always evident initially—often, perhaps always, it can be seen only in retrospect. As Hume says that a law is a systematic description of experience, the definition of a term is a systematic description of its use through time. If you look at dictionary definitions of nationalism, liberalism, etc., you will come up with one picture; if you look at what these concepts point to as people actually use them, you will come up with quite another.

But one wonders if error or ignorance isn’t the problem here. One wonders whether the position that what we have is no longer liberalism has been arrived at by the racist liberal because the alternative is simply too terrible to contemplate. Perhaps the worry is that if the truth turns out to be other than “the problem was invented 5 minutes ago”, then the truth may well be that the problem is quite old, perhaps ancient. If it turns out that the problem actually is ancient, is this a blackpill? is it dissatisfying? will it help you get a good night’s sleep?—none of that has anything to do with truth.

Become what you are is the mandate not only for men, but for ideas. Once set in motion, the idea of the individual free to detach himself from all particularity, could end up in one of two places: abandonment, or consummation. I leave it to the reader to decide whether Kurzweil—preparing to cryonically freeze himself to escape this mortal coil—or Kant—who never travelled more than 50 miles from his home—are the truest prophet of freedom.

The liberal of today regards himself as not only heir to the tradition of 1789, but a purification and refinement of it, and he is right. The point of asserting the continuum of liberalism then and now is not to get a good night’s sleep, and it is certainly not to justify lockdowns and mandatory vaccinations—but to oppose these in ways that do not end up recapitulating and reinforcing them by enshrining the categories that gave rise to them. We are not the trad left, the cuckservative, but the radical right. And the radical right began as a revolt against the cuckservative—it would be a shame if we ended by becoming them.

1. Anthony D Smith. The Ethnic Origins of Nations, 1988.
Lev N Gumilev. Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere, 1990.
Steven Elliott Grosby. Nations and Nationalism in World History, 2022.
See also: Edward Shils, Clifford Geertz, Tatu Vanhenen, Azar Gat, Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Frank K. Salter, Pierre L. van den Berghe, at al.

2. Nick Land. “Neo-reactionaries head for the exit”, The Dark Enlightenment, 2012.

3. Confused language because the tyrant is not a despot but as I have noted in my article Tyranny and the Modern State Cult, simply the man religiously forbidden from presiding over the state cult. Freedom is not the cure for our modern state cult because that state cult was originally consecrated in the name of freedom.

4. Ulick Fitzhugh. Maine’s “Popular Government” and the Liberal-Elitist Tradition. In Meon Journal. https://meonjournal.com/read/maines-popular-government.

5. Simon Schama. Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, p. 836.

6. The lower house of French parliament.

7. C.T. McIntire. "Changing Religious Establishments and Religious Liberty in France, 1789-1908," in Freedom and Religion in the Nineteenth Century, p 287.

8. Sometimes called “Cultural Marxism”.