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The left gains power, giving voice to the marginalized — then fringe voices demand more radical stances.
Attention becomes power: the marginalized are reduced to an “empathetic” means to power.
Constructing this power means expanding marginalization, or amplifying radicalism, which undercuts the centrist maneuvering that could sustain the once valid vision.
The coalition fragments under its own ideological logic of expansion.
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We once politicized culture to drive ideological struggle.
Today, the inverse is true: politics has become culture. No longer an instrument for realpolitik, it serves as a mere broadcast of affiliation—a performance of identity rather than a pursuit of progress.
This shift creates a sterile contradiction: alienation increases amid strict conformity, while active responsibility is replaced by a perpetual cycle of blame, and our hard-won liberations have enslaved us to more work, taxes, and precarity.
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The utopian’s gaze is fixed so firmly on a distant heaven that the present becomes a mere atrocity to be liquidated. When the current world is framed as an intolerable horror, then any calumny, any broken bone, or any shattered "egg" becomes a moral imperative.
This is the dreamer’s most pervasive cruelty: the belief that a future abstraction justifies a present graveyard.
Because the window of power is narrow, the visionary cannot wait for the slow "idiocy" of generational consent. Cohesion must be manufactured; dissension must be crushed. To bridge the gap between reality and the Ideal, coercive discipline becomes the only viable architecture.
In the race toward paradise, only bold lies and force possess the necessary velocity to outstrip human wisdom.
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For Carl Schmitt, the “political” is not a subset of ethics, aesthetics, or economics; it is an autonomous realm ruled entirely by the distinction between Friend and Enemy.
While morality judges “Good and Evil” and economics weighs “Profit and Loss,” for Schmitt, politics identifies the collective “Other” that represents an existential threat to one’s way of life.
In this view, an enemy is not a personal rival to be hated, but a public adversary to be countered. Schmitt argues that the “emotivist” dream of universal humanity is a dangerous myth that masks actual power struggles. By defining an enemy, a group (tribe) attains its highest intensity and purpose.
This dark realism transforms governance from an erudite, polite conversation into a hard, defensive necessity: the “we” is defined by the boundary of who we are willing to fight against.
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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
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Stephen Fry critiques the left’s brand of liberality: a rigidly enforced alignment where beliefs, language, and actions must conform to an approved vision of “diversity.”
Far from genuine pluralism, it becomes a morally curated checklist—political correctness in the 1990s, DEI/Woke today.
Both eras police expression (and language), shifting the enforcer from right to left while preserving the same demand for ideological uniformity masquerading as openness.
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Born to ensure fairness, bureaucracy promised impartiality through rule-based administration. Its etymology—bureau, the compartmentalized desk—reflects its orderly, categorized, compartmentalized ambitions.
Yet Max Weber saw its flaws: efficiency lost to red tape, authority diluted by clerks drunk on procedure. Rather than meritocracy, it cultivates mini-fiefdoms and obstruction.
Consequently, true action often requires going beneath the desk (under the table)—quiet subversions enabling real progress. The structure meant to streamline justice becomes an edifice of delay, where results depend not on diligent process, but on circumventing and undermining it.
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Freud saw sublimation as the transformation of primal drives into cultural achievements: anger into intellect, libido into politics.
Marcuse, by contrast, warned of repressive desublimation—a capitalist tactic that permits desire’s release, not to liberate, but to pacify.
Apparent freedoms—such as sexual expression, consumer choice, and political dissent—can feel rebellious but are commodified and stripped of transformative potential. Rebellion becomes fashion; liberation, a brand.
What feels like escape (or destructive effort) is merely a sanctioned indulgence, looping back into the very system one seeks to resist. Thus, freedom itself becomes a tool of control, dressed in the language of autonomy but bound by market logic.
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Elite institutions (think Ivy League schools) mint cultural gatekeepers whose status hinges not on wealth alone but on signaling “enlightened” beliefs.
These luxury beliefs—costless to elites, costly to others—reinforce class divides under moral pretense. The affluent promote ideals like family fluidity or police abolition, yet privately adhere to stability and security.
(Rob Henderson coined the term luxury beliefs: these are social elites who support hip values, such as socialism or polyamory, while profiteering from free market capitalism and maintaining stable, traditional families, raising kids in a gated suburb, and sending them to private schools. These are often people who say "I’m socially liberal and fiscally conservative," decrying privilege and yet carefully maintaining it, turning a blind eye to the social harm and fragmentation that results from these liberal, progressive beliefs.)
In crafting beliefs as symbols of distinction, elites maintain power while cloaking harm in virtue. The result is an aristocracy of thought: insulated, performative, and quietly punitive.
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Ideology reveals itself through narrative. Who we cheer and who we condemn in stories reflects deeper societal values.
Protagonists often embody virtues of resilience or rebellion, but success is framed within an ideological lens—economic power rarely equates to moral virtue. Modern heroes like Luke Skywalker emerge from margins as reluctant rebels, while classical myths like Odysseus embody cunning authority and brutality.
Entertainment, then, is not neutral; it shapes and reflects our beliefs about power, justice, and legitimacy. By asking "who is made admirable—and why?," we reveal the machinations of cultural conditioning: the story of making the mogul despised and the breaker cheered is a morality play that pays moguls, with little relation to reality.
