Some Thoughts about Virtue Regimes

“Those who oppose Chairman Mao: We will crush their doghead.”–Red Guards poster

2,580 words

In our country we wish to substitute morality for egotism, probity for honour, principles for conventions, duties for etiquette, the empire of reason for the tyranny of customs, contempt for vice for contempt for misfortune, pride for insolence, the love of honour for the love of money… that is to say, all the virtues and miracles of the Republic, for all the vices and snobbishness of the monarchy. — Maximilien Robespierre, “On Virtue and Terror” (1794)

Robespierre, Saint-Just, and Camille Desmoulins burst upon the world-historical stage as prototype “social justice warriors.” The French Jacobins, the original egalitarian evangelicals, were a poisonous mix of self-righteous certainty, moral fanaticism, and utopian delusions. This was a venomous personality type that has spread like a deadly contagion into our own era. That abomination is now called an “activist,” the stamp of approval the Left puts on moral trend-setters who do hit jobs on, as Robespierre put it, “the tyranny of customs.” During Mao’s Cultural Revolution they were the youthful Red Guards who attacked the “four olds”: “old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits.”

The Jacobins were above all moral crusaders, the first to create a modern virtue regime, emperors ruling over an “empire of reason” with deadly force as a fallback option. They failed. The Bolsheviks, employing even greater force, also failed. Their failure was more protracted and cataclysmic. Nevertheless, virtue regimes inspired by Marxist scriptures became a trend during the twentieth century and led to experiments in many parts of the planet: China, Cuba, Cambodia, eastern and central Europe. Most of them, to use current managerial argot, delivered “poor performance outcomes,” as in mass murder, prison camps, poverty for the many, luxury for the few, and famines. The implementers always held themselves up as models of moral perfection and rectitude. The problem was that the peons could never quite meet the high moral standards dictated from above. With the muscular brand of “encouragement” typically resorted to by self-admiring, professional do-gooders who suddenly find themselves in power, daily existence under their benevolent supervision was all stick and no carrot.

What are the notable characteristics of a virtue regime?

First and foremost, a virtue regime promulgates a foundational narrative based on a set of moral ideals with mobilizing power. For the Jacobins and the Communist regimes of the twentieth century, the narrative turned on the ideals of “equality” and “democracy.” Foundational narratives have a tightly-controlled vocabulary and rigid syntax with predictable patterns of utterance, departure from which is a marker of heretical deviation. They are designed to saturate every aspect of the daily experience of the community — schools, work, recreation, entertainment, news — ubiquitous and so insidious that no one consciously realizes that his thinking, perspective, and attitude are being manipulated, that his view of the world is what his betters have decided it should be.

Second, coalescing around the messaging emanating from regime propaganda centers is a priestly class laying claim to a moral authority that justifies the exercise of extraordinary powers to protect the citizenry from harm and advance their well-being.

The Jacobins’ claim to priesthood was the possession of “public virtue”:

What is the fundamental principle of democratic or popular government — that is to say, the essential mainspring upon which it depends and which makes it function? It is virtue: I mean public virtue . . . that virtue is nothing else but love of fatherland and its laws . . .

The priestly Jacobins donned the mantel of virtue and called the shots because they were the “genuine” lovers of the fatherland. These priests did not seem to notice the circularity of their claim to power. Every virtue regime has internal enemies, the pretenders to virtue who constitute an existential threat to the regime. Only the priests know who they are. The true, self-certified fatherland-lovers of democracy possessed the moral yardstick to measure “genuine” love so as to separate out the fakers, the vicious. Eliminating the vicious was the first obligation of the ruling class, not a task for the irresolute or faint of heart. Hence: “Terror is nothing else than swift, severe, indomitable justice — it flows, then, from virtue.”

Third, the moral foundation of a virtue regime is universalist, which gives the regime the moral authority to export itself to the world. German National Socialism was also a virtue regime, but a notable exception. It, along with Italian Fascism, was crushed by two world-power universalist virtue regimes, the United States and the Soviet Union; “freedom and democracy” was their rallying cry. After the war these two original antifa-behemoths fell out with each other. For decades they engaged in campaigns of mutual recriminations of immorality that justified their proxy wars, with each side claiming that they were exporting “real democracy” to the oppressed.

The sudden collapse of the Bolshevik virtue regime in 1991 left the liberal-democratic US alone as the world’s arbiter of right and wrong, and with a ruling class that never hesitated to use its economic-military power across the globe to make it a more virtuous place — usually with, again, poor performance outcomes. Iraq? Libya? Syria? Afghanistan? Which raises a profound question: When did the US become a virtue regime?

Different plausible cases can be made for when it all began, but I’ll go out on a limb and say that the big turning point was the election of Woodrow Wilson and the subsequent American entry into the First World War. How much more virtuous could a world leader be than aspiring to “make the world safe for democracy”? Of course, it didn’t work out the way he’d hoped, but then Franklin Delano Roosevelt came along, and he was cut from the same missionary bolt of cloth as Wilson, and was even more ambitious, or — “Get real!” as they say — delusional. He looked around and felt bad that not everyone, everywhere on the planet could speak freely and attend his favorite church. So, “freedom of speech and worship for humanity” — and he was just getting started. To make the world a really swell place, he thought: “Why not? Let’s pull out all the stops and have freedom from want and the freedom from fear” — for everyone. Voila! His famous “four freedoms,” all of which were going to materialize with the launching of yet another world war, the destruction of Europe, and the death of millions of people. His revered partner in making this “freedom” bonanza happen was Joseph Stalin, whose empire of virtue, you might say, was an edifice built on fear. His latitudes for speech and worship were also not what Americans other than himself and Harry Hopkins had in mind for export. As far as “want” goes, months after FDR took office in 1933, heavily influenced by New York Times Moscow desk chief Walter Duranty whose reporting was usually free of the truth, he extended formal diplomatic relations to his future comrades-in-arms running the gulags. This was at the exact time that millions of Ukrainians were dying from want of food: planned starvation from the famine Stalin had engineered.

Since the Second World War, the American governing class has in one way or another been about “virtue,” which it equates with the honorific abstraction we know as “democracy.” Democratic people are by definition virtuous people. For decades, foreign policy was about keeping the commies at bay, because what they called “democracies” were really tyrannies — remember the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (German Democratic Republic)? That was true, but on the home front, where “true” democracy was flourishing, the commies after the 1950s were not kept at bay and a basic freedom that was not in FDR’s repertoire, “freedom of association,” was being dismantled by American Jacobins known as civil rights lawyers and activists.

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The passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act was a huge turning point in America’s transition into a fully-fledged virtue regime. “Civil rights” turned into the state religion, with a foundational narrative based on “racism” as the “original sin” and the mobilizing ideal of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s colorblind society, where the races would live in a state of perfect harmony and equality.

Like clumps of mushrooms in shaded, soggy soil, a priestly class sprung up comprised of government bureaucrats and enforcement officers, race-equality intellectuals and “diversity experts” who, like ill-tempered Rottweilers, set upon the pretenders to virtue and exposed the “racism” they were perpetuating in every nook and cranny of American society.

Unlike otherworldly religions such as Christianity, where condign punishment and just reward can be attained in the afterlife, the state religion of civil rights must achieve moral perfection — perfect equality — in the here and now. The problem is that it’s not unattainable in this world; there is never enough equality, or “diversity” which inches us toward equality, which also makes the relentless pursuit of it insatiable and the methods employed to achieve it without any conventional restraints. “Terror is nothing else than swift, severe, indomitable justice — it flows, then, from virtue.”

“Racism” is the root of all evil, the driving force that makes equality impossible. It forms the grievance template from which has come an explosion of discriminations — “sexism,” “homophobia,” “Islamophobia,” “transphobia” (they continue to proliferate) — all of which manifest the sinfulness of a society permeated by bigotry and hate, and a particular class of sinners, enemies of “our democracy,” who are responsible for them.

The religion of civil rights is advanced by the theology of “human rights,” codified in a document, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It emanated from virtue-signalers at the United Nations, another one of FDR’s capitulations to delirium and founded by Communist fellow travelers and traitors (such as Alger Hiss), as well as mass-murdering cynics from Stalin’s entourage. This high-minded monstrosity of 30 articles and almost 2,000 words was composed by a UN committee led by Eleanor Roosevelt. It’s called “universal,” supposedly a timeless document of moral guidance for everyone, everywhere and for all times. However, it suspiciously reads like a moral wish list of Left-leaning idealists to be used by Third World hustlers hoping to maneuver themselves into well-compensated positions of power and prestige.

The theology of human rights has been warmly embraced by our anti-racist virtue regime because of the ease with which it expands to bring new victim-categories of bigotry and hate under the umbrella of its benevolent protection, and because the expansion further enhances the moral power of the theology and the stature of the theologians. Another day, another discovery of human rights violations that arouses the familiar moral outrage that’s supposed to stir us to action. From Human Rights Watch:

Recognizing the Rights of Transgender People: It’s time to create a world that recognizes the rights of transgender people. (italics added)

“Create a world” is what God used to be about; but a new, gender non-conforming sheriff is in town with a sense of moral urgency — “It’s time!”

Human rights theologians regard human rights as universal moral imperatives, which means that they should be enforced everywhere and for everyone. Our virtue regime could not but be obligated to export them to any place where they are not recognized.

From Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Commemorating LGBTQI+ Pride Month — Press Statement (2023)

The Department of State proudly works to promote and protect the human rights of LGBTQI+ persons around the world. We strongly oppose the “otherization” of LGBTQI+ persons to justify authoritarian power grabs and attacks on institutions of democracy globally.  Democracies are stronger when they celebrate the full rights and value of all persons, without discrimination.” (italics added)

“Preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States” has mysteriously given way to the worldwide repression of “otherizers.” It should be clear now that the virtue-crats running the show here have no interest in actually governing the nation in which they hold office. We –that is, United States citizens — are merely a subset of the planet’s entire population, “persons around the world” who are supposed to be “celebrating” — whatever that means — “full rights and values,” empty virtue-speak to disguise the mischief they are about. That many folks around the world have yet to drink the “human rights” Kool-Aid and don’t want to be virtuous American-style is merely proof of how desperately they are in need of our intervention. Which is why there are 750 US military instillations in 80 countries around the globe. Remember the words of Robespierre: “Terror . . . flows from virtue.”

In a little over a hundred years, the ambition for the regime has evolved from “making the world safe for democracy” into making the world into a democracy that looks like gay-friendly Ben & Jerry’s Vermont writ large, where intolerance is never tolerated and boys just wanna be girls. Any traditions, customs, manners, and associations that would resist the conformity and homogenization that comes with democratization sans discrimination have to be relegated to the dustbin of history as remnants of the multiplicity of “isms” and “opbias” that have thwarted the “progressive” march of history toward equality.

A virtue regime, as noted above, must have internal enemies, those who have not yet embraced the state religion, those whose very existence is a threat to the established order and its claims to legitimacy. Understanding this should make it obvious why Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and his highly improbable victory drove the entire establishment into an unprecedented state of concentrated fury that persisted through his four years in the Oval Office and continues to the present.

You see, Trump never claimed to be virtuous. He claimed to be “a winner,” someone who knew what to do with power and would use it to serve the interests of the people who voted for him, a disturbing idea for the ruling class. He was the anti-virtue candidate, rudely distaining the usual virtue-signaling required of political office aspirants, pouring ridicule on his politically-correct detractors. Worse, he didn’t seem to care what the establishment thought of him.

Trump’s major campaign promises, to seal up the border and to shut down foreign wars, were a direct challenge to two of the virtue regime’s highest priorities. The first is to flood the US with a deluge from the Third World to replace the white European natives. The other is to export American-style “democracy,” replete with the whole “liberation” package of feminism, gay rights, pornography, etc. — a project requiring vast military expenditures, tax money diverted to the enforcement arm of the virtue regime that spends more on its military than the next ten countries combined. The virtue regime rewards the American taxpayer with a decaying infrastructure, exploding crime, and a deteriorating economy. Adding insult to injury, the kleptocrat parasites in charge treat their hosts as the enemy.

Virtue regimes don’t last, because the anti-reality postulates of the state religion prevent them from responding to their failures with the recognition of their actual causality. Failure is entrenched as a permanent, unalterable feature of governance. The continuous failure of American black achievement, for example, is explained by the anti-reality postulate of race as a social construction — which makes it impossible to mitigate that failure, beginning with the admission that white racism is not the cause. Unless anti-reality postulates such as this are relinquished, our virtue regime will continue to lurch toward dissolution, looking like a junkie on the verge of an overdose.

It has been said that the German Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke the Elder once concluded that “no plan survives contact with the enemy.”  So, to paraphrase: “No virtue regime long survives contact with reality.” The decades-long anti-reality tour may be drawing to a close.

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