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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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The transition between spheres matters as much as the spheres themselves. You cannot walk from a sacred ritual straight into work without losing something. The silence between is load-bearing. Rushing from work to church profanes the sacred. We need thresholds — time and space to process before proceeding.
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The active life and the contemplative, the profane and the sacred, work and festival — our ancestors kept these deliberately apart. Not as hierarchy, but as wisdom. Each sphere needs its own uncontaminated space to be fully itself. One must not intrude upon the other.
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Progress is typically framed as a corrective lens—analyzing a system/behavior to identify and modify where we have gone awry.
Yet, we often over-index (focus) on a singular flaw. In our zeal to dismantle a perceived problem, we often inadvertently deconstruct the “lynchpin” that was quietly maintaining the entire structure’s functionality. (unintended consequences)
When a “key component” is removed, in the name of improvement, the resulting collapse forces a new stage of analysis to re-progress. We must “progress” again, just to realize what we have lost, and to admit failure is to “regress.”
In this cycle, the most advanced step forward looks indistinguishable from a move backward, proving that true evolution sometimes requires the humility to see what was working all along.
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Enlightenment rationality attempted to bridge a dangerous gap: to preserve traditional virtue by grounding it in cold logic. But this was a structural error. Once logic is the sole arbiter of purpose, that purpose can be logically inverted; any “moral” rule can be rationalized into its opposite.
As Aristotle and later Nietzsche understood, virtue is not a derivation of a code, but an act of the will. Rules and social ethics are merely secondary structures. True morality remains a commitment that sits beyond the reach of pure reason. It requires an effort of will—a “will to power” the rules—that logic alone can never sustain.
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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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In exposing hypocrisy, we appeal to moral laws and values that others created: their rules and standards are the measure of their duplicity.
We urge reform by demanding they follow their own code. Yet they built these rules with power. Treating them as moral arbiters only empowers them further, blocking real change.
The paradox lies in believing morality granted their power—when power first enabled them to dictate morality.
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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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Institutional and corporate systems reward ascension over mastery.
Employees are nudged into unfamiliar management roles, not from aptitude, but ambition. Promotion is tied to hierarchy, not skill. Unfamiliar (out of their depth), their lived experience (expertise) must be supplemented by reported metrics (abstraction), eroding judgment.
An alternative: reward depth. Let mastery, not mobility, guide compensation. Value should scale with contribution, not elevation. Such a model preserves excellence, minimizes role misalignment, and honors the deep knowledge that sustains real innovation.
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The Engineering of Values: Freedom and equality are lauded ideals, yet their realization depends on systems—economic, legal, technological—that rarely distribute costs evenly.
Declaring values is easy; implementing them demands compromise, sacrifice, and design. Often, these particulars contradict our abstract values.
Who benefits and who bears the burden becomes the central moral question: what are the costs? The tension between aspiration and infrastructure forces us to ask not just what we value, but how those values are built—and whom they serve.
Without scrutiny of their engineering, ideals risk becoming empty rhetoric, masking inequality beneath the illusion of virtue: trumpeting abstract moral virtues as bedrock prevents them from being realized, making the declarations of virtue unactionable and therefore meaningless.
