[lbo-talk] the right's devolution

Philip Pilkington pilkingtonphil at gmail.com
Thu Mar 12 10:56:43 PDT 2009



>From an external perspective I've always found that contemporary American
ideology generally, if I may put it as such, has always been so contradictory as to promote rapid degeneration.

On the one hand, you have one ideological foot on the neo-liberals, or whatever they liked to call themselves. These ideas were motivated, it would seem, by the same concerns held by the Frankfurt School. They believed that statism and technocracy led to totalitarianism and so pushed for complete social atomism so as to ensure this threat was completely buried - of course, unlike the Frankfurt School they were incapable of recognising that such atomism was already a prerequisite for any totalitarianism. On the other hand though, you have the neo-conservatives who recognise in this social atomism the prerequisites for societal collapse (extreme as this view may be). They seem to want to push a pure, illusory nationalist ideology - if I can even use the term "nationalist", as the "nation" here isn't the nation-state that so many others have fought for, it seems more akin to a concept of "God"; the nation here cannot be attacked, exclusion from the nation entails exclusion from society; the nation here is a deus ex machina regulating the balance of Good and Evil elsewhere in the world. It really looks like some sort of "Holy Nation", a sort of mythic Platonic entity.

America's two dominant ideology are at once mutually contradictory and at the very same time mutually reinforcing; a true dialectic of extremes! And don't get me wrong, this isn't some crude Europhillic attack on the "Hamburger State"; growing up in a society which aspires to maximum Americanisation has made me realise this. European elitism here is vulgar. In America the contradictions of Enlightenment political theory are laid bare for all to see and certain Europeans reactions to this sight are nothing more than projections.



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