The Return of Antidemocratic Theocratic Monarchy

[honorentheos]

https://youtu.be/XAkhpu5flUo?si=rxJHQhlw6aUAZeBs

"Christians will not be safe with Kamala Harris as president."

Trump said this today before going on to claiming yet again Harris will make deals with China and Putin wouldn't have attacked Ukraine if Trump had been president. Some here may get why the topics flowed together as they did.

Anyway, while I'm hesitant to put too much weight on Wisecrack as a source, it can be a guilty pleasure of mine. And this recent video pulled together a few topics that aren't contextualized as effectively elsewhere so I thought others here might find this of interest:

https://youtu.be/DrrsnFT-LNo?si=e6yIj5GAMFwLuNRP

The Philosophy and Theology of JD Vance

There is a new wave of right-wing philosophers and theologians advocating for things like turning American into a non-democratic corporate monarchy ruled by a CEO, or merging the state into the Church and replacing our legal system with the Ten Commandments. And the scariest part is that these thinkers have the ear of people like vice presidential nominee JD Vance, and Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. We’ll explore it in this video on Curtis Yarvin, Christian Nationalism, and the End of Democracy.

[Moksha]

I assume this will be our future, but I am uncertain whether these corporate dreamers have considered the Trumpian underbelly of their ideals. It might not be all peaches and cream for the upper class, and it could well be a horror for the rest of us.

[Manetho]

Also relevant is this article, focusing on the theocratic side of Vance's intellectual influences, as opposed to Yarvin on the techbro side.

The author is a professor at Ave Maria University — hardly someone prone to crying wolf over the danger of Catholic theocracy.

Put simply, postliberalism is three things. First, it is an authoritarian ideology adapted from Catholic reactionary movements responding to the French Revolution and, later, World War I. Second, it is a loose international coalition of illiberal, right-wing parties and political actors. Third, it is a set of policy proposals for creating a welfare state for family formation, the government establishment of the Christian religion, and the movement from republican government to administrative despotism.

The third point might sound unhinged, but postiberals have come to object to liberalism. While most Americans know the term “liberalism” as a reference to a left-of-center ideology common among Democrats, the other common use is in reference to a political theory that prioritizes individual rights as a source of political authority and human flourishing. Postliberals believe this “classical liberalism” to be a disembodied secularizing (even Satanic) force that uses the language of liberty of conscience, representative government, and constitutionalism to conceal the true liberal aim of denying the authority of the highest good. In their view, liberalism has presently fallen apart, and there is now no need to “conserve” classical liberalism as movement conservatives like William F. Buckley Jr. to Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan had argued.

On the contrary, postliberals want to end liberalism and entirely replace it with what comes next—what is literally “postliberal.” Given that liberalism entails liberty of conscience, representative government, and a constitution, none of those will be part of a postliberal order. Citizens will become subjects. Personal liberty gives way to bureaucratic discretion. Market economies are replaced by an alliance of corporate and state power…

What they needed was a politician of their own. That politician has turned out to be Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019. In a speech in 2022 at a postliberal event held at Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio, Vance mentioned that he had “admired … from afar” some of those in attendance while others he had “gotten to know very well over the last few years.” A year later, after winning his Senate seat, Vance admired them up close at the book launch of Deneen’s Regime Change, where he declared himself a postliberal. Vance has made many public statements backing postliberal public policies, such as granting greater voting power to parents of large families, and he has publicly praised Hungarian President Viktor Orbán as a model for effective conservative governance.

[honorentheos]

Thanks for posting more on the topic, Manetho. Especially the quote regarding post liberalism from the article you shared in particular.

Put simply, postliberalism is three things. First, it is an authoritarian ideology adapted from Catholic reactionary movements responding to the French Revolution and, later, World War I. Second, it is a loose international coalition of illiberal, right-wing parties and political actors. Third, it is a set of policy proposals for creating a welfare state for family formation, the government establishment of the Christian religion, and the movement from republican government to administrative despotism.

The third point might sound unhinged, but postiberals have come to object to liberalism. While most Americans know the term “liberalism” as a reference to a left-of-center ideology common among Democrats, the other common use is in reference to a political theory that prioritizes individual rights as a source of political authority and human flourishing. Postliberals believe this “classical liberalism” to be a disembodied secularizing (even Satanic) force that uses the language of liberty of conscience, representative government, and constitutionalism to conceal the true liberal aim of denying the authority of the highest good. In their view, liberalism has presently fallen apart, and there is now no need to “conserve” classical liberalism as movement conservatives like William F. Buckley Jr. to Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan had argued.

On the contrary, postliberals want to end liberalism and entirely replace it with what comes next—what is literally “postliberal.” Given that liberalism entails liberty of conscience, representative government, and a constitution, none of those will be part of a postliberal order. Citizens will become subjects. Personal liberty gives way to bureaucratic discretion. Market economies are replaced by an alliance of corporate and state power…

What they needed was a politician of their own. That politician has turned out to be Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019. In a speech in 2022 at a postliberal event held at Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio, Vance mentioned that he had “admired … from afar” some of those in attendance while others he had “gotten to know very well over the last few years.” A year later, after winning his Senate seat, Vance admired them up close at the book launch of Deneen’s Regime Change, where he declared himself a postliberal. Vance has made many public statements backing postliberal public policies, such as granting greater voting power to parents of large families, and he has publicly praised Hungarian President Viktor Orbán as a model for effective conservative governance.

The creep away from political differences in the US being policy differences and instead becoming systemic differences is gravely concerning.

To expand on this and how it has metastisized beyond Trump to being a political movement that will be with us long after the election even if Harris wins:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... ent-leader

In contrast to Trump, who has no ideology except accumulating power and wealth for himself and taking revenge on those who would deny these to him, Vance does have an ideology. He’s the emerging leader of the anti-democracy movement in the US.

Vance would never have become a senator from Ohio in 2022 were it not for the billionaire tech financier Peter Thiel, who staked $15m on Vance’s election – a major portion of all the funds that went into Vance’s race.

Thiel knew what he was buying. Vance had worked for Thiel’s California venture capital firm before running for the Senate and was part of Thiel’s libertarian community of rich crypto bros, tech executives, back-to-the-landers and disaffected far-right intellectuals.

Because Thiel had been a major funder of Trump’s 2016 presidential run, he had significant influence with Trump when urging him to pick Vance for his vice-president.

Yet we are caught in a Catch-22 when speaking out against this. Why? Because the "both sides are guilty" mentality of many can't recognize that this isn't politics as usual with Democrats engaging in using Nazis and racists where the post liberals use socialists and atheists. We have Ajax elsewhere asserting Trump's call to Zelensky trading dirt on a political opponent for aid is comparable to the Biden White House tying military support to Israel with their commitment to humanitarian aid to civilians on Gaza because in his mind it is just about swaying the election rather than actual human beings.

That's insane. Well, at least he let slip he knew that the call was what it was, so there's that I guess.

Ajax at least is open that he sees the future of America as one either divided geographically via war or treaty down theo-political lines, or a Zion under theocratic law.

But the folks like Ajax who openly admit this are only a fraction. The hyperbole around transphobic alarmism is based on this outlook. Folks who view abortion as murder are getting their doses of media outrage from these sources feeding foundational ideological thought on the right rather than any political think tank debating when personhood should be recognized. Putin is an ally because he is a model for authoritarian manipulators of democracy leveraging theocratic populist sentiments.

So to some it is a war against dark forces manipulating progressives who are just doing the same thing when raising the alarm about the threats to democracy this takeover of political conservatism presents. And they are convinced this is true and beyond discussing.

[Some Schmo]

The religious embrace of Trump in America is the latest stark and obvious evidence that people make up their religion as they go along. Lying is habitual.

Religion is poison. It's like alcohol, slowly killing society as people get drunk on their own irrational ideas. They may not be stupid, but their ideas sure are.

[honorentheos]

The video makes the point that the Theobros are unlikely to manage full systemic change as they lack enough broad appeal. But the alignment of the Theobros with the Techbros represents a postmodern Machiavellian collapse of libertarianism that is much more pervasive and appealing to folks who don't care about God as a reality so much as a means.

From the article I linked above:

Thiel is a self-styled libertarian who once wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

Hello? Freedom is incompatible with democracy only if you view democracy as a potential constraint on your wealth and power.

That’s the point. Thiel and Vance – along with Elon Musk, Steve Bannon, Blake Masters, tech entrepreneur David Sacks, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, Palantir adviser Jacob Helberg, Sequoia Capital’s Doug Leone, blogger Curtis Yarvin, and others in the anti-democracy movement – believe that the only way true libertarians can win in the US is for a Caesar-like figure to wrest power from the US establishment and install a monarchical regime, run like a startup.

in my opinion, libertarianism often collapses under its own weight as an ideology if it lacks an enlightenment foundation. And one of the most common directions that then moves is into distrust in democratic systems where the libertarian turns to realpolitik and cynical manipulation as necessary. Behind this is an intolerance for opposing views and an almost impervious belief in ones own rightness of thought.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

Whenever I read a thread like this, or elsewhere, I simultaneously feel gratitude for the people posting this kind of information and anxiousness because I want to take what’s posted and distill it down to a one or two sentence quip so those with no interest in reading a few paragraphs can’t help but be presented with the information because their eyeballs happened to skim over ~10 words.

I, therefore, present this challenge to Honor and Manetho: take what you wrote, and make it into a visual soundbite, a 6-second TikTok, so that the skimmers inadvertently ingest the message.

- Doc

[Manetho]

There are wackjobs who want to get rid of individual rights so Christianity can dominate the United States, and J. D. Vance is listening to them.

I don't know how to say that in visuals.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

There are wackjobs who want to get rid of individual rights so Christianity can dominate the United States, and J. D. Vance is listening to them.

I don't know how to say that in visuals.

Thank you, I used metaphors to ask for what you said so succinctly.

- Doc

[canpakes]

There are wackjobs who want to get rid of individual rights so Christianity can dominate the United States, and J. D. Vance is listening to them.

I don't know how to say that in visuals.

Ooh, a challenge.