Tag: progressivism

Source: Wikipedia.

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I used to edit Steve Sailer’s articles at Taki’s Mag from around 2010 to 2014. His points were always impeccably argued and perfectly sourced. I can’t ever recall running across a typo or even a wisp of illogic.

This was back in the “essayist” days of what now calls itself the “dissident Right,” when anti-Leftist and anti-egalitarian ideas were so utterly banished from public discourse that anyone who wanted to step up to the plate and take a swing at Everything the Left Was Getting Wrong took great pains to present their case with the rigor of a defense attorney trying to exonerate a client who’d wrongly been accused of murder. (more…)

Republican Senator Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota.

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Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

North Dakota’s newspaperman

Understanding how Americans were duped into entering the First World War while preventing America entering a second war became the life’s work of a North Dakota isolationist and politician named Gerald Prentice Nye (1892-1971). (more…)

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Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)

See also: “Colonel McCormick,” “America First 1939-1941,” “Wind Down the Empire of Nothing,” & “America’s Endless Wars” (more…)

The Administration Building

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The 1893 World’s Fair, also known as the World’s Columbian Exposition, was held in celebration of the 400th anniversary of the discovery of the New World by Christopher Columbus. Best known for its magisterial fairgrounds, the Fair was a landmark event in American history and showcased a large array of cultural and scientific achievements. It attracted an audience of over 27.5 million over the course of six months and exerted a significant influence on American culture. (more…)

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The following is reprinted from the Imperium Press Substack.

Neema Parvini
The Prophets of Doom
Societias, 2023

In polite circles today, you have two choices: You are either a progressive, or a complete reprobate. This is because “progress” is one of our foundational myths. You’re allowed to question the American Revolution or the Norman Conquest; you’re even allowed to question your own biology. (more…)

The entrance to this year’s CPAC Hungary. Photo courtesy of the Visegrád Post.

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The word “woke” was first used as an adjective, as opposed to “awake,” in a political context by black Americans during the twentieth century to describe someone who is “alert to racial prejudice and discrimination.” (more…)

The Paris Commune of 1871, one of Europe’s first attempts to seek an alternative to liberalism.

3,103 words

Part 3 of 3 (Introduction Part I here, Introduction Part II here, Chapter 1 Part 1 here)

Translated by F. Roger Devlin

Let us sum up. Man is a “social animal” whose existence is consubstantial with that of society. Justice in the first instance is not a matter of rights but of measure; i.e., it is only defined as a relation of equity between persons living in society, so there are no holders of rights outside social life, and within it there are only those to whom rights are attributed. (more…)

5,704 words

Part 2 of 3 (Introduction Part I here, Introduction Part III here)

Translated by F. Roger Devlin

Now, for liberalism, man — far from being constituted as such by his bonds with others — must be thought of as an individual unbound by any constitutive form of belonging; i.e., outside any cultural or socio-historical context. (more…)

Francis Fukuyama heralded a return to a Western-centered universal conception of history — but one which sees universal liberalism as its endpoint.

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Part 7 of 7 (Part 1 here, Part 6 here)

We have no standards to judge what are “good” and “bad” forms of being a human, since there are no subjects existing outside the contingencies of historical time and power relationships. All we can do is engage in “discourse analysis” so as to uncover existing hierarchies by analyzing the fields of knowledge through which they are legitimated. We can engage in questioning how we came to be the “humans” we think we are, such as how we came to think that we have natural rights to life, liberty, and happiness, but such a questioning can only show us how our current way of being human is historically contingent and thus changeable. (more…)

Fernand Braudel, widely regarded as the greatest historian of the twentieth century.

5,627 words

Part 6 of 7 (Part 1 here, Part 5 here, Part 7 here)

The “Grand Liberal Narrative” of the Twentieth Century

Despite a wide variety of historical schools, a centrist liberal historiography committed to the ideals of rationalism, meritocracy, and the global spread of human rights dominated the writing of history until about the 1980s — while subsequently integrating within its fold the more progressive schools of New Left, feminist, multicultural, and postmodernist historians via a “new liberalism” determined to ensure equal rights for everyone against the continuing racism, sexism, and ignorance of old liberals. (more…)

Anton von Werner, The Proclamation of the German Empire (1885). The rise of the German Empire coincided with the rise of German historicism. Both presented a new challenge to British and French world domination.

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Part 5 of 7 (Part 1 here, Part 4 here)

German Historicism: The Defeated Alternative to Liberal Progressivism

Peter Watson’s comprehensive book of over 900 pages, The German Genius: Europe’s Third Renaissance, The Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century (2010), demonstrates that from 1750 to the 1930s Germany was the dominant intellectual force in Western civilization. (more…)

Walter Lippmann, whose anti-democratic skepticism changed the course of American politics in the twentieth century.

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Part 4 of 9 (Chapter 1 here, Chapter 3 here, Chapter 4 Part 2 here)

Politically, democracy means the sovereignty, not of the average man — who is a rather narrow, short-sighted, muddle-headed creature — but of a matured public opinion, a very different thing . . . In the forming of this opinion the sage has a million times the weight of the field hand. With modern facilities for mind influencing mind, democracy, at its best, substitutes the direction of the recognized moral and intellectual élite for the rule of the strong, the rich, or the privileged. — Edward Alsworth Ross, Changing America (1912) (more…)

Humza Yousaf, Scotland’s new First Minister.

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Jim Goad has produced a short video to accompany his latest essay, “Despite All the Progress We’ve Made, There Is Still, for Some Strange Reason, a Ridiculous Amount of Work to Be Done” — on how progressives keep telling us “there’s much work to be done,” despite the fact that it’s never made clear exactly when the work of social justice will be done. See below. (more…)