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Mr. Walker and His Progressives

With natural right now created by tradition, it was only one small step for the West to move into Historicism ― and, hence, progressivism. As much as traditionalists like to distance themselves from big-government progressives, their underlying assumptions are identical. ~K.M. Walker Well, in fact, no, they are not identical. The “underlying assumptions” of traditionalists […]

With natural right now created by tradition, it was only one small step for the West to move into Historicism ― and, hence, progressivism. As much as traditionalists like to distance themselves from big-government progressives, their underlying assumptions are identical. ~K.M. Walker

Well, in fact, no, they are not identical. The “underlying assumptions” of traditionalists and progressives are just about as far removed from one another as can be imagined. Those minimally versed in political philosophy will have learned this in high school.

But I don’t know why Mr. Walker has such an animus against “big-government progressives,” since Claremont’s hero, Lincoln, was the first of these to be President and did more to expand the scale and scope of the federal government than any other president in his century, and he allegedly did so for such high-minded progressive notions as equality. K-L’s image of the Procrustean Bed as the choice instrument of leftist revolution fits rather nicely with what Mr. Lincoln did to the Republic. Progressives cannot stand the thought that someone out there somewhere is doing something that might be contradicting one of his cherished principles–they must be stopped! Decentralism, variety of habits, local differences of custom and tradition all offend the progressive mind–they must be eliminated! Using violent means allegedly to cleanse and purify a society of its traditional holdovers and unwanted heritage–such was Lincoln’s method, and such was the method of the radical French Revolutionaries. Those who wish to construct unwieldy philosophical justifications for this attitude bring the label of neo-Jacobin upon themselves with a fair amount of justice, since they seem to possess the same sort of mind with respect to established institutions and traditional authorities.

Mr. Walker’s posts remind me of the people Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn described in the introduction to Leftism Revisited. So sure were these sorts of people that fascism and Nazism were products of an undefined “Right” (here they had already made a significant error) and represented the extreme opposite of communism that when they recognised practical similarities between the two (which were many) they declared that “extremes meet.” As Kuehnelt-Leddihn said then, and as I will say again, this is very sloppy thinking: extremes, by definition, cannot meet. Mr. Walker has taken two groups, acknowledge by most everyone else as extreme opposites, and pushed them together by claiming they share common theoretical assumptions. Except that he cannot demonstrate that they share any. Next Mr. Walker will treat us, no doubt, to the assumptions shared by Filmer and Lenin. Of course, they have none in common.

Mr. Walker’s sort of thinking cannot distinguish between progressives who invoke (a la Mr. Bush) History or the “forces of History,” among other abstractions such as equality, to justify their myriad crimes and abuses committed while wreaking revolutionary remaking of society and those who look to the actual complexities of historical experience and the guidance of the collective wisdom of tradition to aid them in constructing a humane society. This is the sort of confusion that would identify Burke’s respect for tradition with Hegel’s Absolute Spirit or Marx’s historical materialism, which forces them together because they all happen to be talking in various ways about history. This is, to put it mildly, incorrect.

Karl Popper was not great fan of traditionalism, but he was intelligent enough to see that the “historicism” of Hegel and Marx (which he condemned for its insanity and inhumanity in The Poverty of Historicism) had nothing in common with the traditional societies or traditionalism that these forms of “historicism” opposed and sought to eradicate. The historicists that Popper was referring to believed that they had gleaned the fundamental principles of history and therefore understood how to implement these principles to create an imagined just society. Their assumptions are the assumptions the neo-Jacobins today possess; their assumptions are the assumptions that seem to inform Mr. Walker’s judgements and, if last week’s “debate” was any indication, the judgements of many of his colleagues at Claremont.

It is as if we could not rely on history to teach us anything without buying into simplistic and deterministic models that have been used to legitimise bloody revolutions. The only Americans in the business of practically (mis)using history in that way today to justify their attempt to ignite a global revolution (for freedom, of course!) are the people in this administration and their cheerleaders in the press and academia. Mr. Walker’s confusion is astonishing and ought to be an embarrassment to Claremont, where he is apparently a graduate student. My amazement can best be expressed by a quote from the Professor in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, “What are they teaching in schools these days?”

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