The Woke Right

     One thing your humble author has tried to do is look at the more fundamental underpinnings of Leftist thinking, and not just the more noticeable superficial effects that others tend to focus on. One of these is the belief that all cultures are different, but somehow equal with their own “way of knowing” of equal validity and worth… except for those inferior cultures that distinguish the good non-Western “ways of knowing” from the bad Western “ways of knowing”. It is this fundamental point of view that underlies the Left’s world view. Increasingly it is becoming a view accepted by many on the Right, except with the good and bad reversed like two of the same coin but with one side showing heads and the other side showing tails.

America does have its distinct values and culture. I don't think it's superior to other Western nations. I think they are different and complementary.

— Marshal Thane (@Marshal_Thane) October 6, 2024

     Notice that they try to diminish the superiority of America over the rest of Western Civilization be denying it has its own distinct values and even culture that is worth preserving. This is why you see such belittlement of America as an idea—they want to replace it with foreign and alien ones. After all, if two different things are of equal value, then they can be but equally valueless. And woe to those who are the on the receiving end of that void getting filled.

     James Lindsay terms these individuals the “Woke Right”. It is a rejection of what makes America separate and distinct from Europe, specifically continental Europe. Such rejection allows those Alien European ideas to be offered as a substitute of equal value despite those demanding the change clearly valuing those alien values more than America’s!

     And yes, these are alien and foreign ideas from a different people, a different land, with no shared history for centuries now (even longer if you distinguish the Anglsosphere with the rest of Europe). America, and much of the Anglosphere originally at least, was the product of the Scottish Enlightenment. This wasn’t some proscriptive ideology or utopian vision, but a descriptive one of reality that had actually developed and made those English speaking peoples’ values superior to the continental Europeans. This is especially true of the alien and foreign development of much of current European thought and societal fundamentals, which are the product of intellectual developments of a more continental variety. Though Linsday speaks of the French of German Idealism in contrast to the Scottish Common Sense Realism, the continental “enlightenment” is more of a rejection of what we in America and the rest of the Anglosphere would understand of the Enlightment and more of a post-enlightenment romanticism and utopian fantasy that has resulted in the faulty premise-laden beliefs of Kant and Hegel to Marx and all the disastrous ideologies that have turned Europe moribund.   And for this difference we can look back on Edmund Burke who rejected this insanity which was a product of Rousseau’s fantasies. It is this collectivist ideology of the God of the Greater/Common Good, “Volonté Générale”, that seems to attract people into the “Woke Right” while causing a rejection of the constraint on power that these of the New Right consider shackles and restrains them and them alone.

15. Rousseau’s legacy is not one of liberty through restraint but of liberation through the dissolution of the self into a collective ideal. That’s a direct path to the philosophies that would later challenge and reject Enlightenment liberalism altogether.

— Logan Lancing, dragon slayer (@LoganLancing) October 2, 2024

     To put it simply, the modern “woke” Right (as Lindsay calls them) have agreed to play the roll the Left defined for them as the Left’s opposition. IOW, they are volunteering to be the what the Left has defined as “the enemy”. To put it in dialectical terms, in order to achieve their utopia (synthesis), the Left (antithesis) needed to invent the right opposition (thesis). The “woke” Right, as Lindsay terms them, have so had their minds shaped by the Left, thatthey have volunteered to be the necessary “thesis” that the Left craved and needed.

     The Left set the stage, wrote the play, and perfected the acting technique. The post-conservative Right is hell bent on being the star in the Left’s limelight. They are but the poor players that strut and fret their hour upon the stage and then will be heard no more.

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