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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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Currently, the right coalesces around shared grievances of the populace — a reliable glue that, for years, enabled the Democratic Party.
Yet, the stability we seek (not to swing positions) breeds its own extremists, who turn inward, reifying tradition into brutal dogma.
Every coalition that consolidates carries the fractures that will unravel it.
Overreach happens and begs for correction. The oscillation between restriction and expansion is the moderation: the pendulum swings, but can we slow it or reduce its momentum?
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Hegel’s labor of the negative: you find something wrong — inequality, injustice — and break the existing system to fix it.
But what drives you is still a negative, the absence of perfection (a lack). So you must find the next flaw, break again, rebuild again. The engine never stops, as perfection is unattainable.
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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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It is said European progressives often draw on communist ideals, while American progressives are often said to stem from anarchism. But Lionel Shriver argues it’s not anarchism—it’s narcissistic nihilism.
She agrees with Gad Saad’s “suicidal empathy,” but sees it as inaccurate; there’s no real empathy, just performative theater. (They don’t actually help the disenfranchised, but don the garb of caring and outrage until they fool themselves into belief.)
The difficulty is the conversion from Richard Rorty’s “liberal ironist” (who grasped the illogic of the struggle to universalize “anti-cruelty”) into the “non-liberal non-ironist.” This new (extreme) progressive demands instant, whole-hearted allegiance based on emotive beliefs and status rather than reasoned progress.
The other side: American Conservatism’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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Slogans like “Hate won’t make America great” are presented as obvious truths, yet reductively moralistic.
One could argue that hate, born from oppression, fueled the United States break from England… or the abolition of slavery. Similarly, outrage after Pearl Harbor propelled America to greatness amid dire circumstances, yet rage was disastrously weaponized after 9/11.
Terms shift with context. The causal relationship is important: ‘hate’ is a reaction to the violation of the ‘great’ American virtues (justice, loyalty, trust, freedom, etc.).
