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eli_sennesh comments on Neo-reactionaries, why are you neo-reactionary? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Ethnonationalist democratic state with a weak implicit hierarchy, actually. Did I ever claim present-day Israel is morally optimal?
No, but I find the juxtaposition of Marxist universalist ideas being fervently communicated by those who enjoy the economic and social benefits of an ethnostate to be amusing.
Fair enough! And I would say we've got several social transformations to go through (ie: a general increase in the level of education and an improvement in methods of government) before we can actually abolish ethnostates.
(It should be stated: I'm a consequentialist, and an objective consequentialist. This means that when things accomplish net good (up to my understanding of "good"), I endorse them, even if they "smell bad".)
So yeah. For here and now with actually-existing people in actually-existing societies, ethnostates seem to be our best heuristic for making democratic, egalitarian societies actually work, instead of degrading into a civil war between tribal clusters (which, I think, is precisely what you're so afraid of). That doesn't make them terminally valuable, but it does leave them instrumentally useful.
No one said ethnostates were terminally valuable, necessarily, but yeah. I wonder what the Tumblr contingent's reaction to your last paragraph would be. You're basically saying ethnos is so important that multicultural states fall apart, and that ethnostates are the best pragmatic form of government.
That's not a historically or spatially universal "best"; it's not optimal. It's "the best we can do given the historical and geopolitical contingencies as they actually are right now." I don't think you even need transhumans or something to have non-ethnic states actually work, you just need to break out of the "Jihad vs McWorld" paradigm of geopolitics.
(Speaking of silly leftists, the man who wrote Jihad vs McWorld concentrated most of his ire on McWorld, since he was writing in the '90s and did not think jihad would become a severe problem. I think we can both say, on this one: what an idiot!
But the bigger question is: if he implicitly supported racial and religious chauvinist movements against capitalist globalization, does that make him, and by implication the entire left-wing "antiglobalization" movement of the '90s and 2000s, reactionary, or some other form of right-wing?
I would say, yes, at least in effect, in the same sense that "pacifism is objectively pro-fascist". You?)
What historical and geopolitical contingencies would allow for the development of a better pragmatic form of government than ethnostates?
Singapore is not an ethnostate.
Singapore is a step up from most countries, but I still wouldn't want to live there -- sure, it's safe and not communist, but as far as I've heard, those are its only redeeming values. Since there are safe ethnostates that aren't communist, that still looks like a superior model.
Me neither, but I think in general NRx likes Singapore -- does it not?
In general, ethnostates look like a Europe-specific phenomenon to me.
Because they're libertarian and from American cities.
Libertarianism leads them to fail to look beyond "safe and not communist"; being from American cities leads them to think that's a high bar. Which it is for America, but America's political situation is insane.
In addition to Japan and China, both Koreas and Mongolia.
(North Korea and Mongolia aren't counterexamples; they were Communist puppet states.)
Japan. Also China for a looser notion of "ethnostate".
Not only that, they also are a relatively recent phenomenon. The Austro-Hungarian Empire wasn't an ethnostate either. AFAICT ethnic nationalism mostly dates back to Romanticism.
It can be argued that the U.S. is not an ethnostate either.
No "it can be argued" about it -- it isn't. And its resulting failures should be obvious.
"The U.S. has numerous failures" is beyond dispute. "The failures of the U.S. are caused by its unique multicultural, multiracial, and multinational characteristics" is a lot harder to defend.
No, I think that's a disingenuous usage. I also don't understand how pacifism is "objectively pro-fascist".
In the book, he uses Jihad as a stand-in for traditional values everywhere, not just Islamic Jihad.
Google the phrase. Orwell wrote an essay on the matter.
No, as a matter of fact, he uses it as a word for a new style of increasingly irrational chauvinist movements, not for "traditional values" in any sense that an ordinary conservative would recognize.
Of course, if you're willing to include Islamism in your term for neoreactionary traditional values... I'm willing to take this as further evidence that neoreaction is a terrible idea.
Islam is certainly not neoreactionary, because neoreactionary refers to the descendants of a certain circumscribed intellectual group that developed from Moldbug in the Bay Area.
So is merely not in theory...never mind about the practice.