Sit down, folks, this is going to be a long one.

When we hear the term “Deep State,” we tend to think of people staffing the federal bureaucracy. I want to suggest to you that that is an incomplete way to think about it. The Deep State in Western liberal democracies consist not only of government bureaucrats, but also of the leadership in major corporations, leading universities, top media, medicine and law, science, the military, and even sports. A more accurate way to think about what we are dealing with comes from the Neoreactionary term “the Cathedral,” which NRxers use in more or less the same way that 1950s Beats used the term “the Establishment.” I like the term “Cathedral” because it entails the religious commitment these elites have to their principles. You can no more debate these principles with them than you can debate with a religious fundamentalist. They adhere to them as if they were revealed truths.

Yet they still like to pretend that they are liberals — that they favor open, reasoned discourse. This is, in fact, a lie. It is a lie that they depend on to conceal the hegemonic intolerance that they wish to impose on everybody under their authority.

Note these remarks by Prof. Carlo Lancelotti:

It is true that no society can tolerate everything. What the Cathedral is now doing is radically limiting discourse, and demonizing as heretics all those within its purview who dissent, no matter how reasonable their objections. (And now Facebook is incentivizing some of its users to report their friends as potential “extremists.” Please get off Facebook now!) The Cathedral seeks to make all of society over in the mold of a college campus. The Cathedral is growing ever more radical. In recent months, we have seen the US military embrace wokeness (to use the slang term for the most vibrant and activist form of the Cathedral’s religion). You would think that it makes no sense for the leadership of a racially diverse armed forces to embrace and indoctrinate its officers in a neo-Marxist theory that causes everyone to see everyone else primarily in hostile racial terms, but that is exactly what has happened. In time — and not much time, either — we are going to see young people who were once from families and social classes that once were the most stalwart supporters of the military declining to join the armed forces in which they are taught that they are guilty by virtue of their skin color.

We have watched the Cathedral’s militant votaries sack universities and render once-mighty media institutions into Cathedral parish newsletters. I wrote last week about the disgusting op-ed in Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post, in which a degenerate mother in Philadelphia wrote about how excited she was for her small children to see gay sadomasochists whipping each other at the local Pride parade:

It was good to see lots of people in the comments under that op-ed objecting to it. The point is, though, that the leadership of the Post‘s newsroom judged that a piece of filth like this belonged in the paper, because it is a reasonable part of our discourse. In this part of the Bezos empire, a writer is allowed to advocate for public BDSM displays for children; in another part, Ryan T. Anderson’s book critical of transgender ideology is not allowed to be sold.

That’s the Cathedral and its values. The Cathedral has also taken over corporate America, and the professions. I hardly need to elaborate on this further, not for regular readers of this blog. It was a hard knock this past week to see that the US Supreme Court, which some of us had thought would be the last line of defense for anybody traditional in this soft-totalitarian Cathedral theocracy, refused to take on the Gavin Grimm case, and the Barronelle Stutzman case. The Cathedral line in favor of privileging LGBTs over religious people and secular people who don’t accept the full LGBT gospel is hardening.

The Supreme Court is not going to save us. Nor is Donald Trump. The more people on the Right perseverate over Trump, the weaker we will remain in the face of hardening soft totalitarianism.

I realized over the weekend why I have been so affected by the experience of being here in Hungary these past three months. It has clarified for me the nature of this conflict. First, take a look at this powerful piece by Angela Nagle, writing about the views of Irish intellectual and cultural critic Desmond Fennell. Excerpts:

To this day we are still grasping around for words and concepts to describe the thing we sense we are living under – liberalism? neoliberalism? technocratic capitalism? libertinism? authoritarianism? woke-something? – and we still haven’t quite found it. Years ago Fennell wrote an essay in which he tried to theorise the general sense many now feel intensely, that we live under a nonsensical and absurd regime, a permanent revolution of rules built upon a shaky moral and metaphysical foundation that is self-contradictory and mysterious to us or which may not exist in any stable sense. Some now call it Clownworld. Conspiracy theories abound in an attempt to grasp what it is.

Although its vision was distinct from the other utopias and kept American exceptionalism intact, in his view it was the most profoundly radical of the revolutionary utopian experiments, which benefited from having never formally recognised the end of the old regime and the arrival of a new. He compares this to ancient Rome, in which the Republic’s replacement with the Empire was not spoken of as having amounted to a revolution until Ronald Styme’s 1939 book The Roman Revolution. The second American Revolution began in the 1930s, he argues, and was complete by the early 1970s. All the other radical 20th century experiments perished, he says, “only that resulting from the Second American Revolution – the system in which we now live in the West – remains.”

When Fennell uses the term sense or sense-making he is describing a binding and holistic system of values through which a people make sense of the world and their lives, which is strong enough to outlast all the other changes and crises. He defines civilization as “a grounded hierarchy of values and rules covering all of life and making sense, which a community’s rulers and ruled subscribe to over a long period… because the community is motivated to keep reproducing itself by the sense, and therefore goodness, that it finds in its framework for life.”

Fennell argues that the first part of the 20th century began a revolution that was more utopian and effective than any other (cf. Philip Rieff, who argued in 1966 that the therapeutic revolution in the West was more significant than the Bolshevik Revolution). What we now have, says Fennell (in Nagle’s telling), is a society based on rules pronounced from on high, but without any real grounding. More from Nagle:

The ethos of the sexual revolution is today simultaneously ultra puritanical and ultra libertine depending on the context, so that the abandonment of your wife and children is now less of a social faux pas than asking someone out on a date at work – you can only get publicly disgraced and fired for the latter. Most just trundle along confused but hoping that we can survive unscathed through correctly intuiting what elites decide the new rules will be in any individual case. This now reaches into every aspect of life and the imposition of new rules is becoming ever more strange to us, which is already manifesting in ways that Fennell alludes to, and will one day bring the experiment crashing down, he claims.

“For the most part we experience it as senseless unreflectively, in that depth of our being where countless generations of human beings before us have trained us by heredity to assess – in a combined act of reason, feeling and intuition – any presentation purporting to be a framework for life. And that encounter with senselessness, when our minds and hearts are seeking sense, sends distress, a pain of the soul, pressing into our consciousness.” Nothing more natural, then, he says, than that we would want to stop reproducing this society altogether by becoming childless and sterile and to commit self-injury and the annihilation of consciousness through drugs, self-harm and suicide, even as we simultaneously believe this is the greatest model of life that has ever existed.

Having surpassed “its more conservatively post-western Soviet counterpart” he says “for as long as the buying and doing power of governments and consumers continues to increase, and the teaching that this contemporary western life is morally the best life ever known continues to have some force for some, the West’s senseless post-European system will continue to function.” But “with no sense-making respected set of rules to fall back on as a comforting matrix of order in the reduced material circumstances, the inevitable will happen. The chaos of the prevailing values and rules will be transformed into a violent social chaos without many precedents in history.”

Read the whole thing. I appreciate the reader who sent it to me.

Solzhenitsyn said, in his 1983 Templeton Address:

More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”

Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”

What is more, the events of the Russian Revolution can only be understood now, at the end of the century, against the background of what has since occurred in the rest of the world. What emerges here is a process of universal significance. And if I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire 20th century, here too, I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: “Men have forgotten God.” The failings of human consciousness, deprived of its divine dimension, have been a determining factor in all the major crimes of this century. The first of these was World War I, and much of our present predicament can be traced back to it. It was a war (the memory of which seems to be fading) when Europe, bursting with health and abundance, fell into a rage of self-mutilation which could not but sap its strength for a century or more, and perhaps forever. The only possible explanation for this war is a mental eclipse among the leaders of Europe due to their lost awareness of a Supreme Power above them. Only a godless embitterment could have moved ostensibly Christian states to employ poison gas, a weapon so obviously beyond the limits of humanity.

This is where we are today. For example, only a godless nation can permit the sexual mutilation and sterilization of its children, and call it good.

What does this have to do with Hungary? Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his government have brought down the wrath of European Union leaders over Hungary’s recent law restricting sex education for children, and information about LGBT presented to children. The prime minister of the Netherlands, in extraordinarily bellicose language, threatened to “bring Hungary to its knees” over the law. I am reliably informed by an American source in a position to know that in Washington, even among conservative elites, Viktor Orban is seen as nothing but a fascist. I have been writing all summer about the radical disjunction between Hungary as it is, and Hungary as described by Western elite discourse (media and otherwise). This is by no means to say that Orban’s government is flawless — it certainly is not; corruption, for example, is a big deal here — but to say that there has to be some reason why Western elites of both the Left and the Right despise Hungary so intensely, and slander it so.

There’s a lesson in all this, I believe, for where conservatives and traditionalists in the West are, and where we are likely to go. I have come to believe that the standard left-liberal and right-liberal critiques of Orban — “Magyar Man Bad” — are just as shallow as the “Orange Man Bad” critique of Donald Trump. I say that as someone who was critical of Trump myself, though I credited him for smashing the complacent GOP establishment. I write this blog post in the spirit of Tucker Carlson’s excellent January 2016 Politico piece titled, “Donald Trump Is Shocking, Vulgar, and Right.”

I’ve been reading lately a 2019 book, The Light That Failed, by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes. Both men are liberal scholars who undertake to explain why liberalism failed in Central Europe and Russia after the fall of the Cold War. It’s a remarkably insightful book, one that any conservative with an interest in the problem should read, even though its authors are liberal democrats. They write:

A refusal to genuflect before the liberal West has become the hallmark of the illiberal counter-revolution throughout the post-communist world and beyond. Such a reaction cannot be casually dismissed with the trite observation that “blaming the West” is a cheap way for non-Western leaders to avoid taking responsibility for their own failed policies. The story is much more convoluted and compelling than that. It is a story, among other things, of liberalism abandoning pluralism for hegemony. [Emphasis mine — RD]

You would have thought that in any reasonable pluralistic polity, a sovereign nation choosing to restrict what its children can learn about human sexuality would be of little interest to other nations within that polity. After all, Hungary is not France any more than Estonia is England. There is an immense amount of diversity in Europe. But see, the Cathedral’s liberalism — whether in America or in the EU — is not pluralistic, but hegemonic.

Krastev and Holmes (henceforth, “the authors”) point out that after 1989, the West expected Central European countries to imitate them in every way. The authors — who, remember, are liberals — write:

Without pressing the analogy too far, it’s interesting to observe that the style of regime imitation that took hold after 1989 bears an eerie resemblance to Soviet-era elections where voters, overseen by Party officials, pretended to “choose” the only candidates who were running for office.

More:

A feeling of being treated disrespectfully was also fomented by what can be reasonably identified as the central irony of post-communist democracy-promotion in the context of European integration: the Central and East European countries ostensibly being democratized were compelled, in order to meet the conditions for EU membership, to enact policies formulated by unelected bureaucrats from Brussels and international lending organizations. Poles and Hungarians were told what laws and policies to enact, and simultaneously instructed to pretend that they were governing themselves. Elections started looking like “a trap for fools,” as Rudyard Kipling would have said. Voters regularly threw the incumbents out, it is true, but the policies — formulated in Brussels — didn’t substantially change. Pretending to rule themselves while being ruled by Western policy-makers was bad enough. The last straw was being disparaged by visiting Westerners, who accused them of merely going through the motions of democracy, when that was exactly what political elites in the region thought they were being asked to do.

The authors explain that the reforms demanded by the West weren’t like “grafting a few foreign elements onto indigenous traditions,” but rather “put inherited identity at risk” and stoked “fears of cultural erasure.” From my perspective, this is what you see when you get over here and start looking more closely at what George Soros and people like him, both within and outside of government, did, and seek to do. And so, as the authors put it:

[P]opulism’s political rise cannot be explained without taking account of widespread resentment at the way (imposed) no-alternative Soviet communism, after 1989, was replaced by (invited) no-alternative Western liberalism.

Here’s something I bet you didn’t know about Viktor Orban. After the 2008 crash, Western governments bailed out banks left and right. When Orban came to power in 2010, he chose not to do that, instead taking the side of hard-pressed Hungarian homeowners who had been allowed to take out home loans in Swiss francs. He and his party passed a law to protect homeowners at the expense of the banks. Excerpt from the NYT report:

Speaking in Parliament earlier this month, the prime minister, Mr. Orban, said he “expected that international organizations will attack us in international forums.” He said that “in case of unfavorable judgments, we will react with suitable countermeasures.” He did not say what those might be.

But even if Hungary is slapped down, Mr. Orban has captured an antibank and antifinancier spirit that is much more widespread.

And from a follow-up in the Times: