anon_felu said in #4903 2w ago:
We open with this incredible line from Deng Xiaoping: "development is the hard truth".
What is development? The power to create, the power to grow, the power to fight. Development is anabolic and accelerating. You build the machine, then the machine that builds the machine. Development is the growth of the metropolis, the substrate of higher life and invention. GDP is not synonymous with development but neither can it be ignored; the market-based, non-grift, non-"public-spend" portion of GDP is a useful reality check. Above all, development is mandatory. The numbers must go up. A nation is either growing or dying.
Now here's another hard truth: development is largely uncorrelated with ideology. An incompetent elite turns anything it touches to stagnation and decay. Conversely, a live, intelligent elite can create development using a wide range of ideologies as their source of structure and legitimacy.
Observe some winners:
- Nominally Left: the Chinese Communist Party. Contra low-information takes, the CCP remains meaningfully Communist. They use Leninist organizational principles (vanguardism, discipline, control of coercive organs) and Marxist moral language. They permit entrepreneurial capitalism tactically, but retain a strict Communist hierarchy that places the party-state in charge of the merchant class.
- Nominally Center-Left: Denmark. Denmark has a live elite that ignored disastrous Euro consensus on migration, accepting very little third-world flows. They have robust GDP growth rivaling that of the US. Their pantsuit girlboss Prime Minister speaks fluent WEF but ultimately hires competent people.
- Nominally Right: Singapore. Lee Kuan Yew was an "anglofascist who happened to be Chinese", but just like his Communist counterparts, he simply cherry-picked the functional parts of that ideology while discarding the non-functional parts.
For each ideological category you can imagine, it's likewise easy to find losers. For example, look at Pinochet in Chile, a rightist who presided over two decades of kleptoidiocracy and near-zero economic growth.
So what do we see? Nominal ideology is neither necessary nor sufficient. The traditional left-right axis is of limited use. Instead, all actually-successful ruling elites achieve both:
1. They are meritocratic. This is a fundamentally right-wing tendency, since it operationalizes hierarchy and the recognition that people are unequal in ability.
2. They hold themselves accountable for public welfare. Call this "noblesse oblige", call it "economic justice", call it whatever you want--this is a fundamentally left-wing tendency, since it implies that the stronger and more capable owe something to the less capable, and not just an abstract libertarian equality of opportunity, but a measurable outcome of consistently elevating all major populations' lived conditions.
And above all, successful elites achieve the Hard Truth of positive development. The country gets richer and more technologically advanced, faster than its peers.
Thus I offer the provocation that Liberalism is as good a legitimating ideology as any other. And for the United States, easily the best.
Liberalism does not need to be defeated, only commandeered.
This is a core question for ascendent patriotic youth movements. You have some, like Milei in Argentina and the AfD in Germany, that speak the language of classic Liberalism and seek to renew the concept by wresting the crown back from various forms of suicidal gynosocialism.
You have others, like Bukele and Missao, that consider Liberalism obsolete. MAGA sits between, with factions in each camp.
Which way, anon?
What is development? The power to create, the power to grow, the power to fight. Development is anabolic and accelerating. You build the machine, then the machine that builds the machine. Development is the growth of the metropolis, the substrate of higher life and invention. GDP is not synonymous with development but neither can it be ignored; the market-based, non-grift, non-"public-spend" portion of GDP is a useful reality check. Above all, development is mandatory. The numbers must go up. A nation is either growing or dying.
Now here's another hard truth: development is largely uncorrelated with ideology. An incompetent elite turns anything it touches to stagnation and decay. Conversely, a live, intelligent elite can create development using a wide range of ideologies as their source of structure and legitimacy.
Observe some winners:
- Nominally Left: the Chinese Communist Party. Contra low-information takes, the CCP remains meaningfully Communist. They use Leninist organizational principles (vanguardism, discipline, control of coercive organs) and Marxist moral language. They permit entrepreneurial capitalism tactically, but retain a strict Communist hierarchy that places the party-state in charge of the merchant class.
- Nominally Center-Left: Denmark. Denmark has a live elite that ignored disastrous Euro consensus on migration, accepting very little third-world flows. They have robust GDP growth rivaling that of the US. Their pantsuit girlboss Prime Minister speaks fluent WEF but ultimately hires competent people.
- Nominally Right: Singapore. Lee Kuan Yew was an "anglofascist who happened to be Chinese", but just like his Communist counterparts, he simply cherry-picked the functional parts of that ideology while discarding the non-functional parts.
For each ideological category you can imagine, it's likewise easy to find losers. For example, look at Pinochet in Chile, a rightist who presided over two decades of kleptoidiocracy and near-zero economic growth.
So what do we see? Nominal ideology is neither necessary nor sufficient. The traditional left-right axis is of limited use. Instead, all actually-successful ruling elites achieve both:
1. They are meritocratic. This is a fundamentally right-wing tendency, since it operationalizes hierarchy and the recognition that people are unequal in ability.
2. They hold themselves accountable for public welfare. Call this "noblesse oblige", call it "economic justice", call it whatever you want--this is a fundamentally left-wing tendency, since it implies that the stronger and more capable owe something to the less capable, and not just an abstract libertarian equality of opportunity, but a measurable outcome of consistently elevating all major populations' lived conditions.
And above all, successful elites achieve the Hard Truth of positive development. The country gets richer and more technologically advanced, faster than its peers.
Thus I offer the provocation that Liberalism is as good a legitimating ideology as any other. And for the United States, easily the best.
Liberalism does not need to be defeated, only commandeered.
This is a core question for ascendent patriotic youth movements. You have some, like Milei in Argentina and the AfD in Germany, that speak the language of classic Liberalism and seek to renew the concept by wresting the crown back from various forms of suicidal gynosocialism.
You have others, like Bukele and Missao, that consider Liberalism obsolete. MAGA sits between, with factions in each camp.
Which way, anon?
referenced by: >>4904 >>4905 >>4906 >>4913
We open with this in
