The obsession with women's bodies does make him sound like an Islamist. He sounds like one of those religious people who thinks that god judges everyone except themselves
Really bad article, that misses the fact that being historical, many have tapped deeply into their roots and seeing the wohs of Liberalismus and ultimately, the Deformation.
Moreover,an Wer can grow. Connor has clearly grown, now has a family in the making, and as such, snide attacks gegn his wlit and accent, seem childish and weak.
Lastly, he tends to do deep primary research and thus, has many sources available on tap to wreck the meta - ideology of Liberalismus. Frankly speaking, pretty shit article.
The Reformation has nothing to do with our current problems. Anyone who tries to tie problems created by post-War politicians to the Reformation is ultimately engaging in dishonest obfuscation and is just posturing rather than engaging with reality.
I would disagree. The Theology of the Deformation begot the Ideology of the Deformation - Liberalismus. It was an mercantile Revolt gegn the "old order" to have moral and social structures unloosened, suchlike being Usury.
The whole thread begins to bear sight with the Deformation, then the Westphalian principles of State.
Anybody saying otherwise is strictly speaking , being untruthful.
Anybody speaking otherwise is being truthful and remains in touch with reality. The Reformation has no connection to mass immigration and the systemic anti-White discrimination that exists in Britain. To blame the Reformation for this is to engage in obfuscation. It archaises post-War ideologies, thus obscuring the actual political and legal battles that need to take place, whilst also helping to demoralise those on our side by making Woke seem like an inevitable outcome of Western civilisation rather than a post-War phenomenon. It is defeatist nonsense. You may as well join the neo-Pagans in blaming Christianity or the Early European Farmer revivalists who blame the Indo-European invasions of the late Bronze Age for our current predicament.
Also, your caricature of the Reformation is bizarre. The catalyst for the Reformation was the selling of indulgences. A large part of the motivation of the early Reformers was to remove the various innovations that had been introduced into Catholic theology that was not concordant with scripture and the traditions of the early Church fathers, such as Christian Aristotelianism. Your points about morality are also delusional, given the infamous libertines known as Puritans.
On a side-note, can you please use stop using childish terms like "Deformation" and "Liberalismus"? You sound like the borderline retarded Maoist Third Worldists who talk about the "United $nake$ of AmeriKKKa".
Doesn’t this miss the mark a bit? Happy to be challenged on this but conceptualising identity seems to be more effective if it’s done on ideological terms framed on a more “spirited” level beyond the purely pragmatic policy level; agreed a lot of it veers from the Kitsch to pantomime but the Lotus Eaters crowd seem to be a positive development in crystallising the anger of a lot of zoomer males, and filtering Substack-autist policy papers to the YouTubers. What would an equally animated but more desirable rightist podcast-sphere look like that keeps a wide number of right-wing males engaged? I also don’t really care if their hatred towards liberalism smacks a little Wahhabist if they’re helping move the dial.
Great rebuttal. I don’t agree with the popular versions of postliberalism I’ve come across, but there’s definitely an element of truth in the underlying concerns raised by the Lotus Eaters/Tomlinson crowd.
Poor article. Yes, explicit religious rhetoric in politics is foolish. Policies should appeal on the basis of good sense to those of faith and those without, But ignoring the contribution of religion to the success of the West in general and GB in particular is to be uniformed. Eg see Peter Harrison on the scientific revolution and Tom Holland in general. The energetic Anglo-Saxon vibe rather less.
Then with the absence of religion since the 2nd World War we have family breakdown, community atrophy, mental illness and narcissistic liberalism which knows no sensible boundaries - broken Britain, a culture of sex and shopping.
Also with the absence of religion, since religion like nature abhors a vacuum and 'humans are religious' - we seem to insist on meaning and atonement - we get rushing in the nonsense of the cult of woke and the Marxist mafia. Yes quite a few people manage an average decency without religion - it's called common grace but without any idea of what has shaped it.
Apart from that I found the article a bit bitchy.The right need to debate well and co-operate on the civilizational threat . Cheap jibes about religion don't help.
Ex-PM Tony Abbott is perhaps Australia's foremost PostLiberal. He combines a deep Catholic faith with a pro-British sensibility so intense that I suspect he has Tim Brooke-Taylor style Union Jack underpants. He is also untroubled by contradictions.
In general, PostLiberalism (along with its allies of National Conservatism and Christian Nationalism) is a US export. For a decade, it allowed its advocates to whinge about modernity in the abstract without having to do anything so grubby as formulate actual policy positions. "The answer is a Catholic Theocracy, what's the question again?" being the underlying intellectual position.
I think most PostLiberals do not actually want power because that would entail accountability.
Unfortunately, the PostLiberals now have access to real power via the likes of JD Vance. I do not think the outcomes will be good for us or for them.
“ergo Catholic Theocracy is not possible” - If we are being pedantic (and you seem like you are), the Papal States were directly ruled by the Pope. That the integralists probably do not want direct rule by the Pope does not mean what they want will be good.
If PostLiberals are so completely opposed to Christian Nationalists then why do they hang out together so much?
Your position seems to be: “well, actually, in theory the PostLiberals should not be doing what they are, in fact, doing”. Which is in no way reassuring.
I can go back and replace “Catholic Theocracy” with “Catholic Authoritarian Regime” if it would make you feel better.
I have not called anyone “dumb religious idiots”. I profoundly disagree with these people but I do not think they are idiots. I will take your position more seriously when I see Patrick Deneen and Doug Wilson denouncing each other rather than sharing conference platforms and writing approving think pieces about each other (Wilson has certainly done this for Deneen not sure about the other way round).
I have no doubt there are differences between and within these groups. They are human beings. But from a political perspective, they are very much of a bloc. And, from my perspective, it is a bad faith position to pretend that isn’t true.
As for your last sentence, I am less concerned with ideas in the abstract than you are and more concerned with their impact on the world. That means I have little interest in debating the finer points of difference between Calvinists and integralists unless those have a material bearing on their political program. Which so far you haven’t really shown.
So I would invite you to spell out the political implications of the differences between these groups as you see them.
If you would care to read my original comment, you will note that I deliberately did not call these groups “the same”, I called them “allies”. I have provided evidence as to why I thought they were allies. I asked you to provide evidence as to why they are not allies. You have not done so. In fact, in your most recent comment, you agree that they are allies. You keep on ascribing to me positions that I do not hold and claiming I have said things that I have not said. You are not a good faith interlocutor.
“You can’t be moral on a desert island” What? The most famous book of all time dealing with a desert island is all about this question though and it’s rather explicit that morality still exists in spite of the protagonist being “alone”.
Christianity does view morality in terms of relations (that's heavily mentioned in the bible). We say God is agape and we have relations with people by our relationship with God (in agape).
I am just a random anglophile looking at this from the outside, but what I take from this is how hard it is to actual calibrate a patriotic frame of reference -- legacy media useless, and the English-speaking internet unable to conceptualize any limits to Californian universalism. Grifters in Central European exile are a fun new twist on this problem that I hadn't had on my radar before, thank you.
No, the moral fabric of the UK has not been fractured by liberalism, and the long dead ideology has nothing to do with the current proliferation of pornography. Can you actually define liberalism? This is the problem with so many on the Online Right, in that many people don't actually know what liberalism is and just use it as another word for "leftism". Herbert Spencer, now known as a "Social Darwinist", wrote in 1884 about how the various factory acts and other social reforms of the mid-to-late 19th century had killed liberalism. Other liberals of the period were writing about how Liberalism ceased to exist around the period from the late 19th century to the early 20th century. We do not live in a society that can be associated with ideas like non-interference, freedom of contract, and individual negative rights. We have been living in a post-liberal society for over a century, and it has been various shades of non-liberal politicians who have passed legislation that has damaged this country.
Also, why are you insistent that there are high numbers of women involved in pornography? Why are so many supposed British nationalists so keen to repeat the slurs of the swarthy against British women?
That’s based on an extremely narrow definition of liberalism; in any case you know full well the disdain for liberalism isn’t teeth-gnashing at classical liberalism (an early development) but rather its continuation. This at its core is systematic neutralisation via Schmitt fictions by which all individuals and points of view deserve equal consideration, and where conflicts between them must be transformed into peaceful, rule-governed debates with open-ended, undetermined outcomes, essentially with the political being depoliticised.
The same ideology that was behind classical liberalism was simply given the tools to actually practice its principles over the course of the 20th/21st centuries and it’s the ideology that obviously governs western elite thinking. The difference between classical liberal reactionaries and what is developing on the dissident right is that the former is exactly that, purely reactionary without any desire to consider their programming might be what’s led to many wasted decades in the West. It’s a positive development a lot of people are looking beyond some Piers Morgan level of analysis or crap on the level of “let’s just go back to the 60s/80s etc”.
At what point does a shade of yellow cease to be yellow and become green? At what point does a person cease to be an adolescent and become a full adult? Similarly, at what point do movements claiming to be based upon a particular ideology cease to actually be preaching that ideology if they keep eliminating core parts of it? How can what people today term "liberalism" still be called "liberalism" if it has destroyed the right to freedom of association? This is the problem with calling modern Leftism "liberalism", since it has completely rejected core points. Also, given that we clearly live in a society where large numbers of individuals and points of view are explicitly not deemed to deserve equal consideration, how can we talk about the ideology of the leftist establishment as being liberalism or related to it?Over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries, the left-leaning establishments of various Western nations have used increasingly authoritarian methods to crush particular points of views, with people being imprisoned in the UK on terrorism for the crime of selling Right wing records. Liberalism was dead by 1910, and what has reigned since the 60's is a system based upon the repudiation of core liberal concepts. Calling the ruling ideology that exists now "liberalism" because it is supposedly descended from it is, as I referenced earlier, akin to arguing that Prussian blue is the same as canary yellow because of the existence of green.
A positive development would be if people stopped talking about abstract, dead ideologies and started talking about the actual laws that need to be changed. I am not advocating going back to the 60's or 80's or the 1910s, but I am advocating for the correct terms to be used so that we can actually understand what exists and what needs to be overcome. We live in a post-liberal world and we need to overcome a post-liberal world.
The obsession with women's bodies does make him sound like an Islamist. He sounds like one of those religious people who thinks that god judges everyone except themselves
Great article, thank you. Missing a mention of Connor’s amusing book collection though.
All I see here is the regime panicking.
Really bad article, that misses the fact that being historical, many have tapped deeply into their roots and seeing the wohs of Liberalismus and ultimately, the Deformation.
Moreover,an Wer can grow. Connor has clearly grown, now has a family in the making, and as such, snide attacks gegn his wlit and accent, seem childish and weak.
Lastly, he tends to do deep primary research and thus, has many sources available on tap to wreck the meta - ideology of Liberalismus. Frankly speaking, pretty shit article.
The Reformation has nothing to do with our current problems. Anyone who tries to tie problems created by post-War politicians to the Reformation is ultimately engaging in dishonest obfuscation and is just posturing rather than engaging with reality.
I would disagree. The Theology of the Deformation begot the Ideology of the Deformation - Liberalismus. It was an mercantile Revolt gegn the "old order" to have moral and social structures unloosened, suchlike being Usury.
The whole thread begins to bear sight with the Deformation, then the Westphalian principles of State.
Anybody saying otherwise is strictly speaking , being untruthful.
Anybody speaking otherwise is being truthful and remains in touch with reality. The Reformation has no connection to mass immigration and the systemic anti-White discrimination that exists in Britain. To blame the Reformation for this is to engage in obfuscation. It archaises post-War ideologies, thus obscuring the actual political and legal battles that need to take place, whilst also helping to demoralise those on our side by making Woke seem like an inevitable outcome of Western civilisation rather than a post-War phenomenon. It is defeatist nonsense. You may as well join the neo-Pagans in blaming Christianity or the Early European Farmer revivalists who blame the Indo-European invasions of the late Bronze Age for our current predicament.
Also, your caricature of the Reformation is bizarre. The catalyst for the Reformation was the selling of indulgences. A large part of the motivation of the early Reformers was to remove the various innovations that had been introduced into Catholic theology that was not concordant with scripture and the traditions of the early Church fathers, such as Christian Aristotelianism. Your points about morality are also delusional, given the infamous libertines known as Puritans.
On a side-note, can you please use stop using childish terms like "Deformation" and "Liberalismus"? You sound like the borderline retarded Maoist Third Worldists who talk about the "United $nake$ of AmeriKKKa".
Doesn’t this miss the mark a bit? Happy to be challenged on this but conceptualising identity seems to be more effective if it’s done on ideological terms framed on a more “spirited” level beyond the purely pragmatic policy level; agreed a lot of it veers from the Kitsch to pantomime but the Lotus Eaters crowd seem to be a positive development in crystallising the anger of a lot of zoomer males, and filtering Substack-autist policy papers to the YouTubers. What would an equally animated but more desirable rightist podcast-sphere look like that keeps a wide number of right-wing males engaged? I also don’t really care if their hatred towards liberalism smacks a little Wahhabist if they’re helping move the dial.
Great rebuttal. I don’t agree with the popular versions of postliberalism I’ve come across, but there’s definitely an element of truth in the underlying concerns raised by the Lotus Eaters/Tomlinson crowd.
Great article.
Poor article. Yes, explicit religious rhetoric in politics is foolish. Policies should appeal on the basis of good sense to those of faith and those without, But ignoring the contribution of religion to the success of the West in general and GB in particular is to be uniformed. Eg see Peter Harrison on the scientific revolution and Tom Holland in general. The energetic Anglo-Saxon vibe rather less.
Then with the absence of religion since the 2nd World War we have family breakdown, community atrophy, mental illness and narcissistic liberalism which knows no sensible boundaries - broken Britain, a culture of sex and shopping.
Also with the absence of religion, since religion like nature abhors a vacuum and 'humans are religious' - we seem to insist on meaning and atonement - we get rushing in the nonsense of the cult of woke and the Marxist mafia. Yes quite a few people manage an average decency without religion - it's called common grace but without any idea of what has shaped it.
Apart from that I found the article a bit bitchy.The right need to debate well and co-operate on the civilizational threat . Cheap jibes about religion don't help.
Ex-PM Tony Abbott is perhaps Australia's foremost PostLiberal. He combines a deep Catholic faith with a pro-British sensibility so intense that I suspect he has Tim Brooke-Taylor style Union Jack underpants. He is also untroubled by contradictions.
In general, PostLiberalism (along with its allies of National Conservatism and Christian Nationalism) is a US export. For a decade, it allowed its advocates to whinge about modernity in the abstract without having to do anything so grubby as formulate actual policy positions. "The answer is a Catholic Theocracy, what's the question again?" being the underlying intellectual position.
I think most PostLiberals do not actually want power because that would entail accountability.
Unfortunately, the PostLiberals now have access to real power via the likes of JD Vance. I do not think the outcomes will be good for us or for them.
“ergo Catholic Theocracy is not possible” - If we are being pedantic (and you seem like you are), the Papal States were directly ruled by the Pope. That the integralists probably do not want direct rule by the Pope does not mean what they want will be good.
If PostLiberals are so completely opposed to Christian Nationalists then why do they hang out together so much?
Your position seems to be: “well, actually, in theory the PostLiberals should not be doing what they are, in fact, doing”. Which is in no way reassuring.
I can go back and replace “Catholic Theocracy” with “Catholic Authoritarian Regime” if it would make you feel better.
I have not called anyone “dumb religious idiots”. I profoundly disagree with these people but I do not think they are idiots. I will take your position more seriously when I see Patrick Deneen and Doug Wilson denouncing each other rather than sharing conference platforms and writing approving think pieces about each other (Wilson has certainly done this for Deneen not sure about the other way round).
I have no doubt there are differences between and within these groups. They are human beings. But from a political perspective, they are very much of a bloc. And, from my perspective, it is a bad faith position to pretend that isn’t true.
As for your last sentence, I am less concerned with ideas in the abstract than you are and more concerned with their impact on the world. That means I have little interest in debating the finer points of difference between Calvinists and integralists unless those have a material bearing on their political program. Which so far you haven’t really shown.
So I would invite you to spell out the political implications of the differences between these groups as you see them.
If you would care to read my original comment, you will note that I deliberately did not call these groups “the same”, I called them “allies”. I have provided evidence as to why I thought they were allies. I asked you to provide evidence as to why they are not allies. You have not done so. In fact, in your most recent comment, you agree that they are allies. You keep on ascribing to me positions that I do not hold and claiming I have said things that I have not said. You are not a good faith interlocutor.
“You can’t be moral on a desert island” What? The most famous book of all time dealing with a desert island is all about this question though and it’s rather explicit that morality still exists in spite of the protagonist being “alone”.
Absolute banger - hope this marks the start of a new zeitgeist of rightism in this country
Unreconstructed Thatcherites whining about postliberals/the dissident right through half-arsed intellectual
Christianity does view morality in terms of relations (that's heavily mentioned in the bible). We say God is agape and we have relations with people by our relationship with God (in agape).
One of the crappier essays I have read on this otherwise fine publication.
Good article! Ignore the ‘TradCath’ whingers :P
I am just a random anglophile looking at this from the outside, but what I take from this is how hard it is to actual calibrate a patriotic frame of reference -- legacy media useless, and the English-speaking internet unable to conceptualize any limits to Californian universalism. Grifters in Central European exile are a fun new twist on this problem that I hadn't had on my radar before, thank you.
Superb. Consider my hat doffed.
No, the moral fabric of the UK has not been fractured by liberalism, and the long dead ideology has nothing to do with the current proliferation of pornography. Can you actually define liberalism? This is the problem with so many on the Online Right, in that many people don't actually know what liberalism is and just use it as another word for "leftism". Herbert Spencer, now known as a "Social Darwinist", wrote in 1884 about how the various factory acts and other social reforms of the mid-to-late 19th century had killed liberalism. Other liberals of the period were writing about how Liberalism ceased to exist around the period from the late 19th century to the early 20th century. We do not live in a society that can be associated with ideas like non-interference, freedom of contract, and individual negative rights. We have been living in a post-liberal society for over a century, and it has been various shades of non-liberal politicians who have passed legislation that has damaged this country.
Also, why are you insistent that there are high numbers of women involved in pornography? Why are so many supposed British nationalists so keen to repeat the slurs of the swarthy against British women?
That’s based on an extremely narrow definition of liberalism; in any case you know full well the disdain for liberalism isn’t teeth-gnashing at classical liberalism (an early development) but rather its continuation. This at its core is systematic neutralisation via Schmitt fictions by which all individuals and points of view deserve equal consideration, and where conflicts between them must be transformed into peaceful, rule-governed debates with open-ended, undetermined outcomes, essentially with the political being depoliticised.
The same ideology that was behind classical liberalism was simply given the tools to actually practice its principles over the course of the 20th/21st centuries and it’s the ideology that obviously governs western elite thinking. The difference between classical liberal reactionaries and what is developing on the dissident right is that the former is exactly that, purely reactionary without any desire to consider their programming might be what’s led to many wasted decades in the West. It’s a positive development a lot of people are looking beyond some Piers Morgan level of analysis or crap on the level of “let’s just go back to the 60s/80s etc”.
At what point does a shade of yellow cease to be yellow and become green? At what point does a person cease to be an adolescent and become a full adult? Similarly, at what point do movements claiming to be based upon a particular ideology cease to actually be preaching that ideology if they keep eliminating core parts of it? How can what people today term "liberalism" still be called "liberalism" if it has destroyed the right to freedom of association? This is the problem with calling modern Leftism "liberalism", since it has completely rejected core points. Also, given that we clearly live in a society where large numbers of individuals and points of view are explicitly not deemed to deserve equal consideration, how can we talk about the ideology of the leftist establishment as being liberalism or related to it?Over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries, the left-leaning establishments of various Western nations have used increasingly authoritarian methods to crush particular points of views, with people being imprisoned in the UK on terrorism for the crime of selling Right wing records. Liberalism was dead by 1910, and what has reigned since the 60's is a system based upon the repudiation of core liberal concepts. Calling the ruling ideology that exists now "liberalism" because it is supposedly descended from it is, as I referenced earlier, akin to arguing that Prussian blue is the same as canary yellow because of the existence of green.
A positive development would be if people stopped talking about abstract, dead ideologies and started talking about the actual laws that need to be changed. I am not advocating going back to the 60's or 80's or the 1910s, but I am advocating for the correct terms to be used so that we can actually understand what exists and what needs to be overcome. We live in a post-liberal world and we need to overcome a post-liberal world.