The Right to be Unpopular
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Free expression and isonomy are foundational to a functioning liberal democracy. Without free expression there is no liberalism and without isonomy there is no democracy:
Is our age the first in the country’s history wherein younger cohorts are less classically liberal than their elders are? There is no clear racial, gendered, or political confound. To the extent that it is anything, it is generational.
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I reckon a lot of these respondants are thinking of their own right to be heard, not rights in the generality. The left tend to think they are the outsiders with unpopular opinions and that their BLM protests need to be protected from smirking MAGA white supremacists.
If you asked a question like, ‘Should people be allowed to rally in support of preserving Confederate statues?’ then the results would have followed the usual pattern readers of this blog see every week.
Maybe the younger respondants were thinking more of their enemy’s right to be heard than their own, but other surveys seem to back up the idea that they are more open to tyranny than older generations
I think, all other things being equal, younger people would be less likely to support the protection of unpopular ideas in any age, not just ours, especially if the distinction between unpopular and wrong is elided. It does violence to everyone’s inborn sense of right and wrong to entertain the suggestion that ideas which are wrong deserve some sort of official protection. Children are born naturally assuming that the people in charge can be counted on to enforce the right and punish the wrong. Every youngster’s lamentation that “that’s not fair!” is a fit of righteous indignation when that turns out not to be the case.
It is only as people mature (and only in the West, with it’s liberal traditions) that they start to pay lip service to the liberal ideal of free expression, and this is only because they realize that it is a necessary shibboleth for joining adult society and winning the approval of the gatekeepers. So they aren’t really being converted to the ideal, they’re politicking. Liberalism was never anything but a system of catchwords, obeisance to which is enforced by law and social sanction.
The politicking reaches its extreme when the purveyors of extremely unpopular and distasteful ideas (e.g. homosexuality) feel empowered to broadcast and inflict their perversions upon the rest of society with the perfect assurance that the powers of the state will come to their defense in order to protect their “right to be unpopular” from the entirely justified reaction of the majority. Call it frontlash, call it anarchotyranny, call it whatever you will; it was ever thus these last few centuries in the West. Every liberal movement has advanced itself by just such a dynamic, with results the were predictable and predicted.
Maybe it’s time to rethink those rights and provisions of Classical Liberalism.
The abnormal returns into the normal, system-wise.
Classical liberalism, and all liberalism in general, is an aberration in any society that isn’t primitive. The only reason it exist is because post-Roman barbarians had it (useful in small tribal communities) and managed to keep it somehow in feudalism. The Slavs, however, did not – this makes sense – according to new research, we originate from high-intensity agriculturalist that lived in concentrated village societies (which is already enough to cause a “civilized” phenotype to emerge)
There was a little study on brachycephaly and civilization. More brachycephalic peoples were historically more civilized, and more “resistant” to disease and other stressors. Long-headed peoples, like northwest Europeans are, are basically always neurotic and finnicky. The smallest stress makes them lash out. In Africa this results in violence, in the West this results in mass screeching and offense at whenever whatever is the most socially mandated autistic obsession at the time is broken. The Information Age just made it far more apparent.
However, as long as one lives in a civilization, their phenotype also becomes more civilized. The nervous ones simply dies of stress early or falls for some self destructive meme (transgenderism and mutilation, so on and so forth).
So yes, everything sets itself in place, and so will this. Liberalism shall be crushed, and so will progressivism, inshallah.
Democracy is disgusting. I’m a millennial white male and I want democracy destroyed and replaced with a strict caste system, in which 99% of humanity resumes their actual roles: fetching creek water and fleshing pig skins.
Only Ivy League academics and their offspring should be literate and publishing anything. Everybody else is kept illiterate, without electrical power or running water and outside earshot. If you still want to live in a world “that anyone can edit”, you’re definitely a distributor of abhorrently wrong opinions and mis-judgments.
This fucktarded comment is exactly the reason why Slavs and other annoyingly stupid and useless groups should be subjugated and kept irrelevant as they always nornally have been. We should never have to accidentally stumble upon one of your apalling failures to describe reality ever again. Liberalism is getting crushed indeed — and your kids turned in to eunuchs again.
Liberalism is a product of germanic/protestant genes/culture. As the share of NW europeans in american population drops so will support for liberalism. Given that younger generations are more diverse the result is not surprising.
I think that only a small slice of the populace has ever understood “free speech” to mean speech for the other, not oneself. What’s different today is that the elites no longer support free speech. Take the ACLU for example, it has moved from being a protector of “the ideal” to an enthusiastic member of the mob. It still rots from the head.
Is this really how you see the world?
All modern societies have strong threads of liberalism running through them. China is a liberal place, yet its GDP per capita PPP only places it about where the US was, developmentally, in the 70s.
A lot of old Chinese people grew up in extreme poverty in the fields. Their attitudes and the ones they give to their children, will reflect that, but this will change over time.
Liberalism, and unfortunately the progressive variety, fits neatly into the concerns, passions and stresses of living in a city, with modern conveniences.
If you want an alternative, try to create something that fits better.
Or, do you think telling people that they’re heading to apocalypse, or that they’re bad, or weak, or stupid, will be more persuasive?
Source?
The young have been indoctrinated against free speech. For them “hate speech is not free speech”. Older Americans were taught that by definition, free speech is for everybody or it is for nobody.
I suspect that a lot of policies, which I like, require a courageous elite that is happy to look bad in order to protect them.
Immigration restriction requires unfriendly treatment towards potential illegal immigrants. This will never be popular in an age when every baby, child and woman can be filmed in genuine and passionate tears.
True free speech requires standing up to defend the most odious. Again, this takes courage. There will always be ideologies that everyone hates and thinks only scum adhere to. Associating with those, even if just for free speech reasons, is brave.
Not smashing the rich with punitive taxes also requires this; but the elite are always motivated to be extremely robust in this area!
Democracy amps this up further.
Yes, this is the darkest take on it, and not inaccurate.
I do think genuine classical liberalism can be an honest thing, and can be a good thing, but it only functions within very strict communal bounds. This being the cruel irony of it. America, if not doomed when it brought blacks to its shores, was doomed when it integrated European migrants in the 19th-century.
Legal immigration is the real great Satan.
Illegal is the lesser Satan.
Well, in regards to that issue, at least.
I endorse the rest of your comment and probably agree with all of it but I have a question.
If 30 percent of the population control, say, 70 percent of the wealth, you and I would call that an egalitarian society. If 20 percent of the population control 80 percent of the wealth, that’s probably more realistic; and if the country is affluent then there is probably plenty to go around.
However, as a thought experiment, what if 10 percent of the population control 90 percent of the wealth? Or what if 1 percent of the population control 99 percent of the wealth? It has not gone that far, and the last tranche is an unrealistic exaggeration in any case; but does some point not arrive at which even a modest, capitalist-sympathizing, free-market-supporting, private-property-affirming citizen will object, “Hey, what’s in this for me?”
I read a story somewhere about land warrants issued to U.S. war veterans in the 19th century. The veteran could exchange his warrant for a tract of newly opened land in Illinois or Missouri, suitable for farming. The warrants were transferable, though, so a certain New Jersey speculator (perhaps I recall the details incorrectly) bought up a fistful of warrants from New Jersey veterans who did not wish to move west. The New Jerseyan then took the train to Illinois, exchanged the warrants for title to half an Illinois county, and took the train back to New Jersey.
The disgruntled farmers who owned the other half of the county responded by electing a county commission that boosted the property tax rate on persons who owned more than a certain number of acres—the only such person, of course, being the New Jerseyan. The New Jerseyan was forced to sell at a loss.
Were the farmers wrong?
The United States observably did pretty well when her top marginal federal income tax rate was 70 percent, as it was for nearly 50 years during the mid-20th century. When the rate was reduced to 50 percent and then to 28 percent, I was in favor of the change, but now I am no longer so sure. This is why I ask.
Right. Many young people lack much knowledge but feel clever when they can repeat arguments against institutions like free speech that challenge what they’ve been told.
Between 1700 and 1900 Britain was the world greatest center of innovation to everything from parliamentary democracy and politics to religion and philosophy to technology and science. It was also a very unequal society with 1000 families owning practically all land and having special legal status.
Confiscatory tax rates enforced by bureaucrats is not something anybody should want, even for the rich. And by rich I mean the moderately rich, those that became wealthy by opening businesses or in the creation of goods and services. The productive rich. The focus should be on the vampire class: those that make money from money. The vampires — the Soroses, Schwabs, ect. — often turn their filthy lucre into projects detrimental to humanity. We see evidence of this in North America and Europe every day. They should be taxed into oblivion, their heirs forced to find menial work. Obviously this will never happen because the bloodsuckers are protected by the governments they partially own.
I bet you’re salivating at the thought of that, pleasuring yourself even perhaps. It’s your way after all
@dfordoom
This is why I finally gave up on the post-alt-right. There is the neo-Trotskyism to which you have referred.
I assume that the guy is not a Fed, though of course anything is possible. I get where he’s coming from and have some sympathy, but the post-alt-right has lost perspective and wit, unfortunately, as you see.
In my judgment, nothing can be built on this fellow’s foundation. His position has degenerated into angry extremism for extremism’s sake—and I get it: there is plenty to be angry about. I should know! Bigger, happier, humbler, more flexible imaginations are needed to plot the way forward, though. Not this.
Legal immigration is the real great Satan.
I say:
Trump has been screaming like a fat ass baby boomer globalizer treasonite about flooding the USA with mass legal immigration “in the largest numbers ever” and my decision to write-in another candidate’s name for president in 2020 still seems the correct thing to do.
I said this to US Senator John McCain in 2007 about legal immigration and the Republican Party’s push for more and more nation-killing mass legal immigration:
YOU LOST, THE OPEN BORDERS CAMP LOST WITH THE AMNESTY FOR ILLEGAL ALIENS, BUT THAT IS JUST A SMOKESCREEN. THE BIGGER QUESTION IS THE MASS IMMIGRATION INTO AMERICA, THE LEGAL IMMIGRATION, THE REFUGEES, THE ASYLUM-SEEKERS.
https://www.unz.com/article/end-of-the-overton-window-main-stream-media-and-their-pet-democrats-declaring-borders-unthinkable/#comment-2395618
Tweet from 2015:
Pewitt Confronts McCain On Open Borders Mass Immigration(58:00 min):
https://www.c-span.org/video/?201489-1/mccain-campaign-event
The Right to be Unpopular
I say:
All this Critical Race Theory crud is just ANTI-WHITE TOTALITARIANISM and the rancid donor-controlled politician whores in the Republican Party will not explicitly advance and defend the interests of Whites as Whites.
The evil and treasonous ruling class of the Republican Party is protected by the JEW/WASP Ruling Class of the American Empire and the Ruling Class of the American Empire props up the politician whores in the Republican Party by using the ruling class controlled corporate propaganda apparatus to censor and stifle any patriotic attempt to give Whites explicit representation in the mass media.
Rupert Murdoch and his evil plutocrat snot brat kids push mass legal immigration and mass illegal immigration and amnesty for illegal alien invaders and they have used Fox News and the evil and treasonous Wall Street Journal to stop any attempt to make WHITE IDENTITY POLITICS explicit and ubiquitous.
The so-called “System” as it were is just the nasty treasonous scum in the JEW/WASP Ruling Class using propaganda power and monetary policy power to crush the living Hell out of the European Christian ancestral core of the USA.
Remember:
The hostile low IQ Blacks are merciful; the globalizer plutocrats and the JEW/WASP Ruling Class of the American Empire and the nasty and avaricious money-grubbing duplicitous liar scum in the White Upper Middle Class are the dreaded enemy.
WHITE CORE AMERICAN FREE SPEECH ARMY IS ON ITS WAY
Tweet from 2015:
I’d give the source – but unfortunately, I bookmarked it in my twitter. And my twitter was suspended.
The basic premise: the more brachycephalic on average a population, the more “stress resistant” it becomes. Now, these stressors are mostly old issues, like starvation – but they do affect the reactions to less important and more widespread stresses today.
For example, outside Northwest Europe, and their “extended ethnic area” (basically just the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) the term “microaggressions” doesn’t exist. Similarly to other “hyperwoke” lingo. Of course, it exists only as an elite shibboleth, and they themselves don’t take it seriously, but there’s a facade of seriousness, it’s brutally enforced even beyond the internet lynch mob.
Go to Spain, or Portugal, or Italy, or even France – nope. This facade isn’t even a thing. It’s blatant lip service, the enforcement of the doctrine is mostly by paid shills and moderators, and not voluntary, because whoever goes and does it voluntarily is ridiculed. The more east you go from that point, the more extreme it gets, to the point that in Serbia it is the liberal progressive types that fall victim to mass targeted harassment and are basically chased off the internet (for a while, being Western satraps means they are reinstated quickly)
Absolutely, a polity needs to answer that question, for its citizens. Everything is kinder and warmer in places like that.
I wouldn’t like it to happen to me, but they protected their community and area without resorting to barbarism.
I don’t much care if that is right or wrong. It isn’t horrible and they really felt they needed to do it.
I want 0% for me, of course, but I don’t find a top rate of 40% too threatening. You keep a substantial chunk more than half, that’s OK.
I just always hope that it doesn’t get spent on programmes, which are actively harmful.
If you let individuals get more powerful than the State you have an Oligarchy. That’s what anti-trust law is for and estate taxes.
You were correct then, and remain so now.
I usually don’t employ such a language, but – I feel that younger generation, 15 to 28, is full of shit.
They are dim-witted; cowardly; rootless; ballless; without identity; won’t procreate; conformist cowards; …
I am talking about Euro-whites, the rest don’t interest me.
Why accept presumptions of liberal democracy if we are to critique it and provide alternatives? (This is the biggest fallacy of libertarians – classical liberalism without liberal democracy)
Translation: “there was no study, I’m a hallucinating dipshit schizophrenic, I make things up about Northwestern Europeans to make myself feel better about my sense of inferiority to them.”
I noticed that brachycephaly wasn’t helping southern Europeans recover from their cuck-tier fertility rates. Actually, some REAL studies have said that Southern Europeans have been literally castrated by the stress of the financial crises in their countries. I guess you could call castration a resistance to stress, since once your body’s hormonal system has been destroyed by trauma, it can’t really respond to stress anymore, using a strange sort of cucky logic.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0073828
Who decides what is wealth? These proportions will differ for real estate, corporate stock, and financial instruments. And how is 80% of real estate calculated? Square footage? Assessment? Market price? Productivity?
Children are the ultimate wealth. Who is having 80% of them? Who are the Pareto Parents?
Yep. The idea that there was once a Golden Age in which people believed in free speech is an illusion. Most people in the 1950s did not believe in free speech for fascists or communists or for anyone advocating social change or for anyone advocating for sexual freedom or for anyone advocating for anything at all that happened to be unpopular at the time. For most people freedom of speech has always meant “freedom of speech for everyone whose political/social views are more or less the same as mine.”
Yes, that’s a good point. The big difference might be that elites in the past encompassed a much broader range of opinions. There were left-wing elites and right-wing elites, there were socially liberal members of the elites and socially conservative members of the elites.
And elites in the past may not have been all that keen on free speech but they recognised it as being useful. Partly they saw it as a useful safety valve. Partly they saw it as necessary to maintain the social order and to maintain belief in the system.
Good points. You ain’t gonna change people’s minds merely by insulting them and you ain’t gonna change their minds unless you can offer them a vision of the future that they’ll like better than what they have now.
I really don’t think that’s true. I think it is true that older generations were indoctrinated into believing that they had free speech and that that was a good thing, but in practice free speech did not include the expression of unpopular views. Free speech meant “free speech within the narrow limits of what is popular and socially acceptable.”
In other words free speech in the past meant exactly what it means today.
Older people today appear to be more in favour of free speech but that’s only because it’s the opinions popular among older people today that are being suppressed. Younger people want free speech to be suppressed because in practice it’s not the views popular among younger people that are being suppressed.
The market, I think. Or acquisition cost as booked in account, if you prefer.
Rough, but reasonable. Sure.
If I have inadvertently missed your point, then please feel free to correct me!
Difficult to say whether it’s generational or age-based. Those ages are also the most conformist of the ages given where social acceptance is of most importance.
Obviously we could also say that social media could also be producing a generation effect but it’s hard to know since the cohorts most exposed haven’t really ‘grown up’ yet in terms of starting families so it’s hard to know if the effect sticks without the reinforcement of social media.
But it’s clear to say that social media has ‘feminised’ social and political discourse as a result of the power users of social media being adolescent girls. Themes of making everyone get along and not be excluded are basically instincts of women raising children or teachers of young children. Except we’re not talking about one child being victimised by another and given attention to make them feel better, we’re talking about entire ethnicities and nations being deemed victim and victimiser. But what if you expand your category of ‘victim’ to include whole groups of people, many of whom really are ‘victimisers’? You get aggressive, sociopathic ethnic activists engaging in provocations against other ethnicities without having any consequences.
The same thing with ideologies like CRT, 3rd wave radical feminism and SJWism that seem to appeal to women (Black guys are ethnocentric is other ways) and are dominated by them. They seem to believe in notions of there being no absolute truth. That everyone is being subjective and how you feel about something is more important than subjective truth, which apparently doesn’t even exist. (How we can have ‘discussions’ or ‘debates’ on things if there is no objective truth is beyond me) If that sounds more like an idea that would emerge from women socialising with each other and, more importantly, online rather than men, you’d be right. Such notions are alien to men who aren’t battling with each for status by social warfare.
Essentially we have outsourced a lot of society’s discourse to 15 year old girls with BPD and nobody is talking about it.
“Liberalism is a product of germanic/protestant genes/culture.”
Citations required.
There’s a strong resistance in elite American culture to looking at non-elite people as ends in themselves, with their own stories and complexities. Instead, they are abstractions whose lives should and could be molded to fit whatever ideological fixation elites have at the moment.
You could argue that this is normally the case for elites throughout human history. But it hasn’t been this nakedly apparent or extreme in American history before, with the open belittlement of the interests of voters. It’s not just belittlement of those specific interests: it’s also contempt for the notion that the voters have a moral right to pursue their interests at all, dressed up in glib, hyper-moralized language. “Nation of renters”, “ban the police”, “I have no privacy and life has never been better”, “Economic anxiety”, “Coming from a place of privilege”, the bizarre media obsession with eating bugs: they all share the same undertone. You are a Bad Person for pursuing what you want or need in life.
This is better, more insightful, more illuminating, more interesting editorial than almost anything one now finds in The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times.
It is well written, too.
I shall miss the blog.
Cogent points, well-presented.
Looks like you meant to write objective in place of the “subjective” that I highlighted in the above quote.
I appreciate this as well as your other comments in this thread. I don’t think there is much in any of them that I would disagree with.
Free Speech for Me — but Not for Thee: How the American Left and Right Relentlessly Censor Each Other is the title of a 1992 book by the late Nat Hentoff.
Brief excerpt below from Hentoff’s 2017 New York Times obituary.
I would expect that you, and likely at least a few others here, would appreciate Hentoff.