In discussing his Jacobite history of the world, Mencius Moldbug finally gets around to explaining the allure of progressisim:
Rather, when you look at what progressives, Whigs, republicans, and other anti-reactionaries actually believe in — whether they are supporters of Obama, Lafayette, Herzen, or any other paladin of the people’s cause — it is rarely (although not never) the simple, nihilistic liquidation of the present order. It is always the construction of some new order, which is at least intended as an improvement on the present one.However, in order to construct this new order, two things need to happen. One: the builders of the new order need to gain power. Two: they need to destroy the old order, which by its insistence on continuing to exist obstructs the birth of the new.
In the progressive mind, these indispensable tasks are not objectives. They are methods. They may even be conceived as unpleasant, if necessary, duties.
One fascinating fact about the presidential campaign of 2008 is that both Democratic candidates are, or at least at one point were, disciples of Saul Alinsky. Clinton actually studied and corresponded with Alinsky. Obama was an Alinskyist “community organizer.” Next year, we may well have our first Alinskyist president.
Last year, the New Republic — not a reactionary publication — published an excellent article on Obama’s Alinskyist roots. I’m afraid this piece is required reading for all progressives.
Alinsky is the author of Rules for Radicals and a proponent of “agitation” — making someone angry enough about the rotten state of his life that he agrees to take action to change it; or, as Alinsky himself described the job, to “rub raw the sores of discontent.” As the New Republic article notes, he was a champion of political theater, like threatening a “fart-in” at the Rochester opera house to bring embarrass Kodak into hiring blacks.
Alinsky also dismissed his students’ selfless bromides about wanting to help others with this response: “You want to organize for power!”
What made Alinsky so effective was that he dispensed with the romantic euphemisms. He just described the thing as what it is. You have to admire him for that, I feel. A Lafayette, a Herzen, or almost any 19th-century republican outside the Marxist department, would have been absolutely appalled by Alinsky. But the fact is that they were basically in the same business.So the progressive is, indeed, the polar opposite of the reactionary. Just as order and stability are essential to reaction, disorder and destruction are essential to progressivism.
The progressive never sees it this way. His goal is never to produce disorder and destruction. Unless he is Alinsky himself, he is very unlikely to think directly in terms of seizing power and smashing his enemies. Usually there is some end which is unequivocally desirable — often even from the reactionary perspective.
But if you could somehow design a progressive movement that could achieve its goal without seizing power or smashing its enemies, it would have little energy and find few supporters. What makes these movements so popular is the opportunity for action and the prospect of victory. To defeat them, ensure that they have no chance of success. No one loves a loser.
This theory also explains why progressive movements can produce results which are good. One: their goals have to be good, at least from their followers’ perspective. Since these are not evil people we’re talking about, their definition of good is often the same as yours or mine. And two: if progressivism is an essentially destructive force, some things still do need destroying.
Progressivism is obviously entropic:
Obviously, its enemy is order. Progressives instinctively despise formality, authority, and hierarchy. Reactionary political theorists such as Hobbes liked to conceive the state in terms of an ordered system, a sort of clockwork. Progressivism is sand in the gears of the clock.More subtly, however, the real entropic effect is in the progressive method of capturing power not by seizing the entire state, but by biting off little chunks of it wherever it sticks out. The effect is a steady increase in the complexity of the state’s decision-making process. And complexity, of course, is the same thing as entropy.