Social Liberalism Has No Long-Term Prospects

The title of this post may come as a bit of a shock to a lot of folks who have been observing events over the past few years.  How can I say that social liberalism – by which I largely mean the homosexualism, the transgenderism, the abortionism, the aggressive feminism, and the rest of the anti-human, anti-civilisation agenda of the culturally marxist Left – has no long-term prospects?  Haven’t they been sweeping all before them?  Haven’t they successfully imposed gay marriage on an unwilling population?  What about the success in forcing transgenderism onto the military, as well as society at large?  Despite the best efforts of the “religious Right,” isn’t abortion more entrenched as “the law of the land” now than it has ever been?

The answer to these questions is, “Yes – but it doesn’t matter.”

First things first, however.  The reason cultural, social liberalism has risen to the fore in recent years is because “conservatism” has been a complete, utter, embarrassing-to-even-be-associated-with-it failure.  It’s pathetic.  There’s no getting around it.  And the reason for this is because “conservatives” are weak-minded, weak-willed, and weak-kneed.  They have no stomach for conflict, and they break the first time someone lobs a PC-conflict epithet at them.  In short, conservatives conserve nothing because they’re wimps.  They spent too many decades playing the inside-the-beltway games, and they’ve become accustomed to enjoying the crumbs the progressives throw to them.  This is why all of these DC “conservatives” can find the “courage” to rally against Trump, but not once in seven years have they ever put up any sort of substantial fight against Obama, Eric Holder, Loretta Lynch, or anyone else on the progressive, SJW Left.  But sure, Ted Cruz and Mike Lee can get kudos from the National Review crowd for refusing to support their own party’s presumptive nominee, because he’s “racist” and wants to stop the Amnesty Express.

So, trusting in conservatives to “make things better” is a fool’s errand.

But back to the issue at hand.  We find ourselves facing a progressive SJW regime which appears to have almost total control of America’s government, as well as its academic, commercial, and social institutions (much the same could be said for other Western nations as well).  How can this not represent long-term prospects for social liberalism?

Here’s how.

What we need to understand is that social liberalism – homosexualism, transgenderism, and all the rest – is an inherently unstable transitional state, to present an analogy drawn from the energetics of chemical reactions.  In reaction dynamics, a transition state is a configuration along the reaction pathway at which the potential energy is the highest.  This state is an ephemeral, intermediate configuration known as an activated complex, and in irreversible reactions, it will always proceed on to the final product(s) of the reaction.

In social dynamics, the sort of radical social libertinism we see today represents just such an unstable, intermediate form.  Let’s face it – the things that represent the socially liberal SJW agenda are unnatural.  They require great amounts of energy to both produce and then to maintain.  The reason the radical Left has had to take such a top-down, forced-evolution approach in imposing its agenda and then in punishing those who deviate from it is because their agenda would never have developed on its own.  It takes tremendous energy to create such deviations from a traditional society.  By applying that energy (i.e. by forcing the reaction), they have generated a social state which reflects their desired worldview, but which is energetically unstable and will quickly proceed to an energetically more favourable product.

Assuming that the current reaction pathway is irreversible (i.e. we’re never just going to “go back” to the way things were before), there are two likely possible results (i.e. reaction products) which will occur once this unstable transition state breaks down.

The first is that we will fall into a totalitarianism of some sort, which will include the almost complete rollback of the social liberalism the Left has been pushing.  As noted above, the “SJW social libertine” transition state is unstable.  It is that way for a specific purpose.  The Left knows that their agenda of homosexualism, feminism, etc. serves to break down and destroy traditional morals and society.  This has been used to great effect previously by the Left.  Three particular examples will suffice.

• The breakdown in morals in the Weimar Republic as a result of the progressive social reforms of the 1920s
• The decriminalisation of homosexuality and other deviancies like abortion and divorce by Lenin in 1917
• The radical progressive social liberalism instituted in the Hungarian educational system by the Communist Gyorgy Lukacs during the brief Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919.

In each of these cases, radical social “reforms” were instituted that were not dissimilar to what we’re seeing today – homosexuality was promoted, traditional masculine and parental authority were grossly undermined, abortion was encouraged.  However, in each of these cases, the libertine attitudes were quickly and inevitably replaced with the exact opposites.  In Germany, the rise of Nazism soon saw rigid clampdowns on this newfound social “freedom,” with homosexuals finding their way into the death camps along with Jews.  Hungary similarly saw social clampdown as their restored constitutional monarchy drifted into the orbit of fascist Germany and Italy.  In the Soviet Union, Stalin recriminalised homosexuality in 1933, and even adultery became illegal in the Soviet Union.

Social liberalism destabilises societies.  Once the destabilisation is no longer needed – the old traditional society has been done away and the New Order of whatever sort is put into its place – the destabilising elements will be removed by the totalitarians.  They’re not going to have a bunch of queers and cross-dressers tearing up THEIR new creation, after all.

So one end of the current reaction path the SJWs have put us on is a stultifying totalitarian system in which the SJWs will be themselves forcibly suppressed.  Little consolation, of course, to the rest of us who would also be living in constant danger of the gulag.

However, there is a second possible reaction product that can arise from this transition state, though it will also be significantly different from the sort of liberal democratic “end of history” scenario envisioned by the neo-conservatives.

This is the restoration of a traditional society, one that will not be like the old which has been done away with, but which will still seek to return to the old ways as much as possible.  Of necessity such a system will be austere and will not be to the liking of libertarians and other ideological fantasists.  This traditional system may end up being itself corruptible (as all things having to do with man are), yet it will involve a significant return to what was good about the past, even if the political forms are different. Two general examples here will illustrate.

First, you have the establishment of the Principate by Augustus after his victory in the civil wars in 27 BC.  Augustus established a monarchy in everything but name, even while his propaganda arm professed that he had “restored the Republic.”  Yet, the old aristocratic republic was never again to be.  The late Republic had become a moral cesspool.  Corruption, greed, bribery were rampant, as were sexual vice and excesses among the nobility.  These contributed to a breakdown in legitimacy not dissimilar to what we see in the West today.  When Augustus took power, he really did not act as a heavy-handed dictator.  He sought to at least give the appearance of adhering to constitutional forms as much as possible, and he was sparing in his use of the penal powers of the principate.  Augustus did, however, institute quite a bit of moral legislation designed to restore the virtues and morals enshrined in Roman reverence for the old Republic – the Republic of Cato and Marcellus and Aemilius Paulus.  Marriage was encouraged, as was having numerous children.  Women were returned to their traditional roles in Roman society.

The Principate under Augustus certainly was not a restoration of the old Republic, but it was a restoration to a more traditional form than the Republic had devolved into previously.

The second example I would point to is the “second religiousness” predicted by Spengler.  Spengler identified the second religiousness phase as representing both the decline of a civilisation, but also its rejection of the “rationalism” phase (which does not necessarily meet the dictionary definition of “rational”) which has rejected the traditional religion, which has been exactly what we’re seeing today with SJWs and their rejection of traditional Christian morality.

So the socially liberal transitional state does not need to decompose into a totalitarianism – it can finish its reaction pathway as, well, reaction.  This reaction will not be a return to “the good ol’ days.”  In fact, successful reactionary movements (which have existed, by the way) never are.  But they can return to something that is at least compatible with the old ways and morals, and which may end up actually becoming a new phase of a civilisation.  The degeneracy and collapse of late Roman civilisation in the Western Empire led directly to medieval civilisation, whose degeneracy and collapse, in turn, led to modern Western civilisation.  The degeneracy and coming collapse we see on the horizon for the West may simply represent the coming transition to a new civilisational form pursuing a linear trajectory from our own, with its own traditional forms being established off of our own.  It will almost certainly involve great dislocations – economically, socially, militarily – but the cycle will repeat.

Either way, the current state of affairs will not last forever, or even for a significantly long time.  SJWism and other elements of the radical progressive social agenda simply cannot exist for very long.  They’re too unstable and unnatural.  It is part of our job as traditionalists to try to steer that inevitable collapse in the direction we want (reaction, tradition) rather than in the direction intended by the globalists and progressives (leftist totalitarianism).