If Progressivism is narcissistic nihilism, American Conservatism has migrated from the Protestant pulpit to the altar of Thomas Sowell’s “Constrained Vision.” It replaces the quest for “solutions” with a cold management of “trade-offs.”
This fosters the inverse of Gad Saad’s “suicidal empathy”: fortress empathy. This is a utilitarian tribalism that accepts individual loss to maintain systemic order.
Drawing on Carl Schmitt’s “Friend-Enemy” distinction, the Right increasingly views MacIntyre’s “emotivist” as a political nullity—someone whose reliance on feelings renders them incapable of the harsh decisions required for civilizational survival. This produces a Darwinian hardness, a rigid insistence on hierarchy and discipline that views the fluid, empathetic subject not just as weak, but as a fundamental threat to the mechanics of reality.
The other side: American Progressivism’s Evolution