109. Obstruction
The political left grew from the Abrahamic faiths—particularly Christianity—and it required five conditions to emerge in its mature form: 1. Mastery of rhetoric, so as to manipulate the credulous masses—the art of lying through emotional half-truths; 2. the destruction of central authority, as represented by the Roman Catholic Church, and the rise of a decentralised structure of entrepreneurial rhetorical innovators; 3. the decline of the pagan custom whereby a person merely had to respect the rites of a city or empire, an outlook replaced by the Christian demand that people should all believe and express the same ideas; 4. the belief that there is a hereafter where “the wicked” are punished and “the good” are rewarded; and, 5. a notion that time is progressing—unlike the pagan’s circular time—towards a state of perfect justice and equality (“the arc of history”).
Once these conditions are fulfilled the scene is set for preachers to compete for the favour of the masses; and the intolerant minority—so sure heaven is at hand and demanding purity of belief—prevails over the moderates.
After years of dispute, the Roman Catholic Church emerged: the chaotic competition of the early Church was controlled by central authority. The Catholic Church is the Roman Empire under another name; every Italian town has its saint, and those saints are the old pagan gods in new clothes—the icon, the image, so hated by Abrahamic faiths is preserved. For the Catholics, the hierarchy comes first and the scripture comes second; the emperor has spoken, now obey.
During the Reformation, thanks to the printing press, Christianity decentralised again—and so came the wars of religion. Eventually, a strain of secular Protestantism, progressivism, won out in the West. When Jonathan Harker, the lead protagonist of Dracula, visits Romania, he, a good Church of England man, is horrified when the peasants press a crucifix on him. “Anti-Christian superstition!” he thinks. The cross is a Popish superstition, an attack on Christ; eventually God himself would be abolished as a superstition—actually, by the time Dracula was written, in 1897, that had already happened. This is why the West’s ruling ideology is so fanatical about extirpating the Christian legacy. What is a church, in the end, if not a superstition?
Catholicism is always the backbone for reactionary thought; it is the closest we can get to Europe’s pagan roots within a European context. Hence Catholicism—the imperial purple—is reviled in the contemporary West because we are ruled by an ideology descended from subversion against it.
Progressivism’s rival strain through the 20th century, Marxism, is a Jewish heresy. Marx was an entrepreneurial, if godless, rabbi riffing on the Protestant heretic Hegel. Progressivism is interested in women and blacks and other marginals, just as the English dissenters always were, because the English dissenters saw themselves as the descendants of enslaved Anglo-Saxons under the Norman yoke; they detest “the white man” because, for them, the white man is a Norman—a knight or cavalier, a Confederate in American terms. Marxism, by contrast, venerates the proletariat (the people of no country, just like the Jews), History (Jehovah, the Hebrew God), and the mysteries of the dialectic (Talmudic exegesis).
Conservatives today—Peter Hitchens, Rod Dreher, and Jordan Peterson—are pagan-Christians; they have done as the Catholics did: they jump back from leftism to earlier forms of authority. When a progressive demands universal love for immigrants and transsexuals in the name of Jesus this is not strictly Christianity as commonly understood; and yet: the last shall be first. Once central authority has been destroyed, any number of interpretations are possible; and the most emotionally persuasive interpretation wins. You’re not a hater are you? We’re about love, brother.
The conservatives, being pagan realists at heart, demure and protest in the name of Christ; but, of course, they will eventually, just like all the older iterations of the faith, be swept away by the strains that follow the demagogic logic of iconoclasm to its conclusion.