You observe, correctly, that what passes for economic critique on the right today is a confused pastiche—part socialist resentment, part cultural grievance, and wholly without the economic program necessary to dethrone the true powers they claim to oppose.
To denounce “hypercapitalism” while avoiding the more fundamental conflict between centralized capital and decentralized ownership is incoherent. They speak of “globalism,” of “corporate capture,” but their proposals—child credits, redistribution, even universal healthcare—are not an attack on oligarchic control. They are accommodation. They are payments to pacify the masses while leaving the machinery intact. This is no revolt. It is management.
You are also right that these critics adopt a pseudo-revolutionary posture while refusing to name names or articulate a national program of economic sovereignty. The Japanese model you mention is illustrative: it embodies state policy deliberately crafted to favor the small, the familial, the rooted. That is a national economy—an idea nearly extinct in American discourse. Instead, these right-populists accept the basic tenets of leftist theory, but adorn them with reactionary aesthetics. They are Marxists who go to church.
Putin, for all his faults, did something they dare not: he broke the back of a rival oligarchy and substituted one loyal to state sovereignty--himself, really-- not global integration. This is not a defense of his regime—it is a statement of fact. That model may be unpalatable to liberal norms, but it is coherent. What the populist right offers is not. They do not wish to build a state—only to whine under it.
In which sense is it legitimate to say that he has an "awakened people"?
The people are “awakened” to their role within the structure—not as autonomous citizens wielding political power, but as subjects bound to a civilizational mission defined from above. This awakening is not liberal. It is not about rights, deliberation, or choice. It is national, cultural, and spiritual, if the spirit is accepted as bigoted, ignorant, fawning upon itself. It is the mobilization of mass sentiment toward state-defined ends.
Putin’s state does not seek to enlighten the public with critical faculties. It seeks to restore unity by fusing identity, history, and authority. The “awakening” here is a rhetorical claim of recovered greatness, of immunity from Western moral chaos, and of participation in a resurgent, ordered world. It is not democratic. It is not even populist in the American sense. It is mythic and disciplinary. The myth is a lie, the discipline is imposed by propaganda and the whip and the threat of defenestration.
In that context, the people are “awakened” in the same way a conscript is awakened to duty. They are reminded of their belonging, told what they must defend, and enlisted in the service of the state’s coherence. It is not a liberation. It is a command.
Whether all this is desirable is clear: It is not. A people that is awake because a grotesque man shouts commands and whispers lies into their ears is not awake so much as equipped as a puppet is equipped with strings. They dance about as commanded and consent to have their sons vanned and sent into a meat grinder in Ukraine while the elites' whores and pampered children party on rooftops in Moscow. Tuberculosis runs rampant, education has collapsed, all the legitimate technological achievements of the old Russia go to ruin, and the price of survival is cooperation with the new nomenklatura. This is BAP's hero? Bizarre.
The appearance of unity, of national resurrection, conceals a deeper reality of dispossession. The people are not awakened to sovereign action, but to subservience adorned with patriotic language. The myth serves the state; it does not liberate the citizen. Sacrifice, when rationally undertaken, is the price of preserving a civilization. But when it is demanded to uphold a predatory caste that exempts itself from the costs, it is no longer noble. It is parasitic.
The call to war, to cultural defense, to loyalty—these are not illegitimate in themselves. But they become instruments of tyranny when used to suppress dissent, deny truth, and shield privilege. The mothers of conscripts do not participate in this awakening. They suffer its consequences. The bureaucrat who writes the mobilization order is not its subject. He is its author.
This is not a civilization renewed. It is a civilization devoured from within by a clique that speaks the language of national destiny while behaving like a private syndicate. That is the truth. The pomp of patriotism in such a case is theater masking extraction. There is no genuine awakening here. There is only choreography.
I'd be interested in thoughts around another movie's society Staarship Troopers, but not the mocking hack the director took it in to demean "fascism"... but rather the actual underlying philosophy proposed by the books writer Robert Heinlein.
Something akin to Autarchism, but in short a highly moral, high trust society that promotes individualism with safeguards for corruption. Only those that "served others by sacrifice" i.e. veterans had right to vote or to run for office, bit not while serving as that be a conflict of interest. Want to be merchant? Fine but no voting rights, harder to get agency, etc... lets those that have shown desire for greater good be only ones that can lead. Others free to live as they choose just accept lack of federal benefits.
The safeguards Heinlein envisions are impossible in the multi-ethnic society of the book. Heinlein has a reputation as The Based golden age sci-fi writer but he was still a believer in the idea of multi-culturalism and didn't seem to judge foreign societies on the outcomes they created. In this he was just another liberal.
"I have said for a long time that I believe in rule by a military caste of men who would be able to guide society toward a morality of eugenics. I am indifferent to economics as long as economic activity is subordinate to the interest of this caste and their project."
I'm going to go out on a limb and say I think you're approaching the answer from the wrong question. I agree with the second sentence, but I find the first stale.
For some time now my thoughts have distilled into "what's the first question we should be asking" and for me this is the (age old) "what's the meaning?" of life.
Eugenics for the sake of eugenics is like conquest for the sake of conquest. It's a mindless endeavor and needlessly cruel. What's love got to do with it?
Later in your essay you cite the purpose of Christianity being the salvation of the soul, hence placing spiritual men in positions of dominion (in ages past), as an illustration of the higher calling of placing society over the individual. And there's undoubtedly truth to this, but the institution of the church was corrupt, imperfect, like everything else and every religion addicted to power and social control. What was before, or after, was not necessarily better, but reimagined Christendom is just as Hollywierd. Nietzsche, as well as all the thinkers preceding and following him, would never have emerged if the rotten system of controls hadn't been pushed aside.
And so today we're kinda stuck. We can't get to ground 0, yet we need to start over. And (at least I think) we know power corrupts, that hierarchies not born in virtue or aligned with (for lack of a better word) God and/or spirituality, descend into tyranny.
So until a self evident answer arises or a noble strongman comes along to place the answer on an altar and build a pantheon around it, and then vacate the position (obviously creating something akin to an honor guard etc), we're fucked.
I dig your writing, but all the stuff about fascism or worse, and monarchism, for me that's best confined to the rubbish bin of history. It didn't work out before so thinking it'll work out in the future is like listening to young communists blabbering about real communism not been tried because it was hijacked.
I think everything flows from what's the meaning of life. Great read, thanks for sharing 👍🏼
This is my take on communitarianism. The way I see it is that if you want space travel or technological development, you cannot keep wasting resources on shipping fruitcups from China. Let me know what ya think.
What you describe and appear to long for is not the resurrection of a people but the exploitation of their symbolic capital—their history, their sacrifice, their individual and group identity—by a governing stratum that lives by different rules and bleeds no blood of its own. These filth, the enduring legacy of the KGB, inherit, or appropriate, the lexicon of patriotism, but only to recast it in the service of a parasitic stability. It is stability for them: ruin for everyone else. And ruin, made palatable by lies, is still ruin.
The Russian state as you describe it is not illegitimate because it is harsh. Harshness has its place in hard times. It is illegitimate because it is built on theft.
I think that was an episode of Deep Space Nine. Or Trek recycled the episode, because that exactly describes the plot of a DS9 episode (Sisko and Bashir, if I recall correctly).
BAP is in fact referencing the Deep Space Nine season 2 episode titled "Paradise". The episode is not really a recycle but the theme of a society devolving and any question of the devolved state being suppressed is pretty common in science fiction. Could compare this to the Original Series episode "For The World is Hollow And I Have Touched The Sky", many similarities.
Word salad, gibberish… a coherent train of thought cannot be found here.
congrats on not getting it
You observe, correctly, that what passes for economic critique on the right today is a confused pastiche—part socialist resentment, part cultural grievance, and wholly without the economic program necessary to dethrone the true powers they claim to oppose.
To denounce “hypercapitalism” while avoiding the more fundamental conflict between centralized capital and decentralized ownership is incoherent. They speak of “globalism,” of “corporate capture,” but their proposals—child credits, redistribution, even universal healthcare—are not an attack on oligarchic control. They are accommodation. They are payments to pacify the masses while leaving the machinery intact. This is no revolt. It is management.
You are also right that these critics adopt a pseudo-revolutionary posture while refusing to name names or articulate a national program of economic sovereignty. The Japanese model you mention is illustrative: it embodies state policy deliberately crafted to favor the small, the familial, the rooted. That is a national economy—an idea nearly extinct in American discourse. Instead, these right-populists accept the basic tenets of leftist theory, but adorn them with reactionary aesthetics. They are Marxists who go to church.
Putin, for all his faults, did something they dare not: he broke the back of a rival oligarchy and substituted one loyal to state sovereignty--himself, really-- not global integration. This is not a defense of his regime—it is a statement of fact. That model may be unpalatable to liberal norms, but it is coherent. What the populist right offers is not. They do not wish to build a state—only to whine under it.
In which sense is it legitimate to say that he has an "awakened people"?
The people are “awakened” to their role within the structure—not as autonomous citizens wielding political power, but as subjects bound to a civilizational mission defined from above. This awakening is not liberal. It is not about rights, deliberation, or choice. It is national, cultural, and spiritual, if the spirit is accepted as bigoted, ignorant, fawning upon itself. It is the mobilization of mass sentiment toward state-defined ends.
Putin’s state does not seek to enlighten the public with critical faculties. It seeks to restore unity by fusing identity, history, and authority. The “awakening” here is a rhetorical claim of recovered greatness, of immunity from Western moral chaos, and of participation in a resurgent, ordered world. It is not democratic. It is not even populist in the American sense. It is mythic and disciplinary. The myth is a lie, the discipline is imposed by propaganda and the whip and the threat of defenestration.
In that context, the people are “awakened” in the same way a conscript is awakened to duty. They are reminded of their belonging, told what they must defend, and enlisted in the service of the state’s coherence. It is not a liberation. It is a command.
Whether all this is desirable is clear: It is not. A people that is awake because a grotesque man shouts commands and whispers lies into their ears is not awake so much as equipped as a puppet is equipped with strings. They dance about as commanded and consent to have their sons vanned and sent into a meat grinder in Ukraine while the elites' whores and pampered children party on rooftops in Moscow. Tuberculosis runs rampant, education has collapsed, all the legitimate technological achievements of the old Russia go to ruin, and the price of survival is cooperation with the new nomenklatura. This is BAP's hero? Bizarre.
The appearance of unity, of national resurrection, conceals a deeper reality of dispossession. The people are not awakened to sovereign action, but to subservience adorned with patriotic language. The myth serves the state; it does not liberate the citizen. Sacrifice, when rationally undertaken, is the price of preserving a civilization. But when it is demanded to uphold a predatory caste that exempts itself from the costs, it is no longer noble. It is parasitic.
The call to war, to cultural defense, to loyalty—these are not illegitimate in themselves. But they become instruments of tyranny when used to suppress dissent, deny truth, and shield privilege. The mothers of conscripts do not participate in this awakening. They suffer its consequences. The bureaucrat who writes the mobilization order is not its subject. He is its author.
This is not a civilization renewed. It is a civilization devoured from within by a clique that speaks the language of national destiny while behaving like a private syndicate. That is the truth. The pomp of patriotism in such a case is theater masking extraction. There is no genuine awakening here. There is only choreography.
I'd be interested in thoughts around another movie's society Staarship Troopers, but not the mocking hack the director took it in to demean "fascism"... but rather the actual underlying philosophy proposed by the books writer Robert Heinlein.
Something akin to Autarchism, but in short a highly moral, high trust society that promotes individualism with safeguards for corruption. Only those that "served others by sacrifice" i.e. veterans had right to vote or to run for office, bit not while serving as that be a conflict of interest. Want to be merchant? Fine but no voting rights, harder to get agency, etc... lets those that have shown desire for greater good be only ones that can lead. Others free to live as they choose just accept lack of federal benefits.
The safeguards Heinlein envisions are impossible in the multi-ethnic society of the book. Heinlein has a reputation as The Based golden age sci-fi writer but he was still a believer in the idea of multi-culturalism and didn't seem to judge foreign societies on the outcomes they created. In this he was just another liberal.
"I have said for a long time that I believe in rule by a military caste of men who would be able to guide society toward a morality of eugenics. I am indifferent to economics as long as economic activity is subordinate to the interest of this caste and their project."
I'm going to go out on a limb and say I think you're approaching the answer from the wrong question. I agree with the second sentence, but I find the first stale.
For some time now my thoughts have distilled into "what's the first question we should be asking" and for me this is the (age old) "what's the meaning?" of life.
Eugenics for the sake of eugenics is like conquest for the sake of conquest. It's a mindless endeavor and needlessly cruel. What's love got to do with it?
Later in your essay you cite the purpose of Christianity being the salvation of the soul, hence placing spiritual men in positions of dominion (in ages past), as an illustration of the higher calling of placing society over the individual. And there's undoubtedly truth to this, but the institution of the church was corrupt, imperfect, like everything else and every religion addicted to power and social control. What was before, or after, was not necessarily better, but reimagined Christendom is just as Hollywierd. Nietzsche, as well as all the thinkers preceding and following him, would never have emerged if the rotten system of controls hadn't been pushed aside.
And so today we're kinda stuck. We can't get to ground 0, yet we need to start over. And (at least I think) we know power corrupts, that hierarchies not born in virtue or aligned with (for lack of a better word) God and/or spirituality, descend into tyranny.
So until a self evident answer arises or a noble strongman comes along to place the answer on an altar and build a pantheon around it, and then vacate the position (obviously creating something akin to an honor guard etc), we're fucked.
I dig your writing, but all the stuff about fascism or worse, and monarchism, for me that's best confined to the rubbish bin of history. It didn't work out before so thinking it'll work out in the future is like listening to young communists blabbering about real communism not been tried because it was hijacked.
I think everything flows from what's the meaning of life. Great read, thanks for sharing 👍🏼
So that Mark Walberg scifi movie was about what Earth would look like if jewish women were actually in charge?
Mind Blown...
https://open.substack.com/pub/tompnoid/p/the-communitarian-manifesto?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=tcsdl
This is my take on communitarianism. The way I see it is that if you want space travel or technological development, you cannot keep wasting resources on shipping fruitcups from China. Let me know what ya think.
What you describe and appear to long for is not the resurrection of a people but the exploitation of their symbolic capital—their history, their sacrifice, their individual and group identity—by a governing stratum that lives by different rules and bleeds no blood of its own. These filth, the enduring legacy of the KGB, inherit, or appropriate, the lexicon of patriotism, but only to recast it in the service of a parasitic stability. It is stability for them: ruin for everyone else. And ruin, made palatable by lies, is still ruin.
The Russian state as you describe it is not illegitimate because it is harsh. Harshness has its place in hard times. It is illegitimate because it is built on theft.
I think that was an episode of Deep Space Nine. Or Trek recycled the episode, because that exactly describes the plot of a DS9 episode (Sisko and Bashir, if I recall correctly).
BAP is in fact referencing the Deep Space Nine season 2 episode titled "Paradise". The episode is not really a recycle but the theme of a society devolving and any question of the devolved state being suppressed is pretty common in science fiction. Could compare this to the Original Series episode "For The World is Hollow And I Have Touched The Sky", many similarities.