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Cole's avatar

It is important to admit to the simple asymmetries in the political spectrum when consideration about Sorelian myths arise. The right can use these myths and the left cannot because they have different sorts of political goals and standards, are not symmetrically constituted, and have different relations to the present state of things. The right mostly wants their enemies punished and to slightly tinker with the present order to disadvantage the least off further, make things better for both the middle classes and the wealthy, and to shore up what they see as the great chain of being. The left doesn't agree with what it wants, honestly, but it will generally strive to make the effect of its actions a cumulative change to the production process with the goal of making people happier and will try to emancipate people by giving them more 'control' over social changes. The right is also much smaller and denser, both in terms of dedicated membership and ideological distance. The amount of ground between a Thiel-head, McConnell, and a Blue Lives Matter guy from Mobile is utterly miniscule to that between a DSA alderman, Pelosi, and some quasi-anarchist from Portland. Finally, the right remains very reliable tax-cutters, which means they get sluiced with funds whereas the left is perpetually strapped for cash and made to ask their base for regular injections of cash. All of this means that the right's bar is much lower, which makes it easier to form internal alliances, paste over ideological differences, and cooperate to get boring, inglorious and useful things done. The left's internal disagreements are so great that it can't plaster over them with some shared beautiful, expressive, and non-instrumental fantasy because one of the essential experiences of being on the left is disagreeing with other leftist; questions of efficacy and ends can't simply be answered by pointing out how flustered some conservatives got at seeing a gay man on an advertisement. Another issue is that these sorts of myths are for people for are others' pawns and the left has broadly been paranoid about that since Lenin. The right does not promise the masses emancipation, so it doesn't have any anxiety about putting the knout on people and making them more and more dependent and self-satisfied.

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Kyle Sutton's avatar

FYI, Part 1 of this series is what moved me to a paid subscription and this addition did not disappoint.

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