The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies Hardcover – April 19, 2016

''I have found from many observations that our liberals are incapable of allowing anyone to have his own convictions and immediately answer their opponent with abuse or something worse.'' - Dostoyevsky (epigraph)Why is Dostoyevsky right? Why liberals so rigid?''The language of modernization, by referring, if only associatively, to technology compels us to see the world as an object of engineering and innovative activity, almost like a machine to be improved by new devices and perfected by new inventions.''Give (force) human and human society an update. Now!''The word “technology” comes, of course, from the Greek technê, which, as the ancients said, had such a powerful potential that it could make men equal to gods. It was Prometheus who made a gift of technê to the human race, the gift that enabled people to survive and then to improve their living conditions and make life better.''Humans 'equal to the gods'!''This wonderful gift had, however, another side to it: the ancients warned that technê could, precisely because of its miraculous, almost divine creative potential, draw man into the sin of hubris. Modernity made Prometheus a hero, and his gift was thought to be the best thing that ever happened to mankind because it was believed to be a vehicle of infinite progress carrying the human genius to unimaginable achievements. The meaning of modernization in today’s world goes far beyond technology in standard terms, but the faith in it draws its strength largely from the unprecedented technological successes that man has achieved so far and with which it can yet surprise the world in the future.'' (5)This 'faith' is now worldwide.''The need for building a liberal-democratic society thus implies the withdrawal of the guarantee of freedom for those whose actions and interests are said to be hostile to what the liberal democrats conceive as the cause of freedom.'' (19)What? Withdraw freedom in the cause of freedom? How is this explained? -''Why waste time, they think, arguing with someone whom the march of history condemned to nothingness and oblivion? Why should anyone seriously enter into a debate with the opponent who represents what is historically indefensible and what will sooner or later perish? People who are not liberal democrats are to be condemned, laughed at, and repelled, not debated.''Evidence, reasoning, logic are from the old world. Therefore - bunk!''Debating with them is like debating with alchemists or geocentrists. Again, an analogy with communism immediately comes to one’s mind. The opponents of communism—e.g., those who believed free-market to be superior to planned economy—were at best enemies to be crushed, or laughingstocks to be humiliated: how else could any reasonable soul react to such anachronistic dangerous ravings of a deluded mind?''Family authority? Remove it!''After all, in a liberal democracy everyone knows—and only a fool or a fanatic can deny—that sooner or later a family will have to liberalize or democratize, which means that the parental authority has to crumble, the children will quickly liberate themselves from the parental tutelage, and family relationships will increasingly become more negotiatory and less authoritarian.''These observations seem so accurate, so current, his vision just jumps off the page!''These are the inevitable consequences of the civilizational and political development, giving people more and more opportunities for independence; moreover, these processes are essentially beneficial because they enhance equality and freedom in the world. Thus there is no legitimate reason to defend the traditional family—the very name evokes the smell of mothballs—and whoever does it is self-condemned to a losing position and in addition perpetrates harm by delaying the process of change.'' (21)Who is this guy? -''Professor Legutko is both a prominent Polish and European statesman and a distinguished philosopher who, in addition to more conventional credentials, was once the editor of Solidarity’s underground philosophy journal. . . . So he is ideally equipped to analyze the mystery of this ideological edge.''ForwardIntroductionI HistoryII UtopiaIII PoliticsIV IdeologyV ReligionConclusionThis an erudite, scholarly work. Refers to Marx 57 times, Tocqueville 12, Rousseau 10, Talmon 2, Hegel 4, Kant 8. For example. . .''The triumph of liberalism and democracy was supposed to be emancipatory also in the sense that man was to become free from excessive demands imposed on him by unrealistic metaphysics invented by an aristocratic culture in antiquity and the Middle Ages. In other words, an important part of the message of modernity was to legitimize a lowering of human aspirations.'' (29)'Low human aspirations'? Not improving- but degrading? ''There were, as I have said, exceptions to this view—few, but worth noting. Among the eighteenth-century authors, Kant, who defended liberalism, set up high standards for humanity; in the nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill and T. H. Green had similar intentions. The last two aptly perceived the danger of mediocrity that the democratic rule was inconspicuously imposing on modern societies. They both believed—differences notwithstanding—that some form of liberalism, or rather, a philosophy of liberty, was a possible remedy to the creeping disease of mediocrity. Mill remained under the partial, albeit indirect influence of German Romanticism, and thus attributed a particular role to great, creative individuals whose exceptionality or even eccentricity could—in a free environment—pull men out of a democratic slumber.'' (29)This, clearly, did not happen.''But these ideas did not find followers, and liberal-democratic thought and practice increasingly fell into the logic of minimalism. Lowering the requirements is a process that has no end. Once people become used to disqualifying certain standards as too high, impractical, or unnecessary, it is only a matter of time before natural inertia takes its course and even the new lowered standards are deemed unacceptable.'' (29)Race to the bottom!''One can look at the history of liberal democracy as a gradual sliding down from the high to the low, from the refined to the coarse. Quite often a step down has been welcomed as refreshing, natural, and healthy, and indeed it sometimes was. But whatever the merits of this process of simplification, it too often brought vulgarity to language, behavior, education, and moral rules. The growing vulgarity of form was particularly striking, especially in the last decades, moving away from sophistication and decorum.'' (29)Who can deny it?(Added 11/28/21 after listening twice to audible version. Great!)“Modernity, a completely new era that was born when its makers decided to reject everything that preceded it and to start anew. The creators of modernity—Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Bacon—saw themselves as pioneers of the new who boldly turned their backs on the past.’’This explanation of the source of modernity seems valid; not Darwin, not Einstein, not Marx.“When we look at communism and liberal democracy from this point of view, we can see that they are both fueled by the idea of modernization. In both systems a cult of technology translates itself into acceptance of social engineering as a proper approach to reforming society, changing human behavior, and solving existing social problems.’’Technology isn’t science. Cell phones are tools. Science is belief.“Having cast away the obligations and commitments that come from the past, the communist and the liberal democrat quickly lose their memory of it or, alternatively, their respect for it. Both want the past eradicated altogether or at least made powerless as an object of relativizing or derision. Communism, as a system that started history anew, had to be, in essence and in practice, against memory. Those who were fighting the regime were also fighting for memory against forgetting, knowing very well that the loss of memory strengthened the communist system by making people defenseless and malleable.’’Interesting that the Bible written as historical record that teaches lessons and illustrates wisdom.“There are no better illustrations of how politically imposed amnesia helps in the molding of the new man than the twentieth-century anti-utopias 1984 and Brave New World. The lessons of Orwell and Huxley were, unfortunately, quickly forgotten. In my country at the very moment when communism fell and the liberal-democratic order was emerging, memory again became one of the main enemies. The apostles of the new order lost no time in denouncing it as a harmful burden hampering striving for modernity. In this anti-memory crusade, as in several other crusades, they have managed to be quite successful, more so than their communist predecessors.’’Author repeatedly asserts that democracy more successful than communism in destroying previous culture.“In a famous essay, Immanuel Kant wrote about the advent of the era of “perpetual peace” among the republics. What is interesting, however, is that, according to Kant, this blessed era could and actually should be preceded by a phase of enlightened absolutism.’’Still coming . . .“The need for building a liberal-democratic society thus implies the withdrawal of the guarantee of freedom for those whose actions and interests are said to be hostile to what the liberal democrats conceive as the cause of freedom.’’Freedom withdrawn. No kidding.“As once when all major designations had to be preceded by the adjective “socialist” or “communist,” so now everything should be liberal, democratic, or liberal-democratic, and this labeling almost automatically gives a recipient a status of credibility and respectability. Conversely, a refusal to use such a designation or, even worse, a ostentatious rejection of it, condemns one to moral degradation, merciless criticism, and, ultimately, historical annihilation.’’Cancel culture is here.“Not only should the state and the economy be liberal, democratic, or liberal-democratic, but the entire society as well, including ethics and mores, family, churches, schools, universities, community organizations, culture, and even human sentiments and aspirations. The people, structures, thoughts that exist outside the liberal-democratic pattern are deemed outdated, backward-looking, useless, but at the same time extremely dangerous as preserving the remnants of old authoritarianisms. Some may still be tolerated for some time, but as anyone with a minimum of intelligence is believed to know, sooner or later they will end up in the dustbin of history. Their continued existence will most likely threaten the liberal-democratic progress and therefore they should be treated with the harshness they deserve.’’Harshness they deserve. Indeed.“After all, in a liberal democracy everyone knows—and only a fool or a fanatic can deny—that sooner or later a family will have to liberalize or democratize, which means that the parental authority has to crumble, the children will quickly liberate themselves from the parental tutelage, and family relationships will increasingly become more negotiatory and less authoritarian.’’Right! Who can argue with something so obvious?“Dignity was something to be earned, deserved, and confirmed by acting in accordance with the higher standards imposed by a community or religion—for instance, by empowering a certain person with higher responsibilities or by claiming that man was created in God’s image. Dignity was an attribute that ennobled those who acquired it. As noblesse oblige, dignity was an obligation to seek some form of self-improvement, however vaguely understood, but certainly closer to the Socratic way and further away from its opposite. The attribute was not bestowed forever: one could always lose it when acting in an undignified way. At some point, the concept of dignity was given a different meaning, contrary to the original. This happened mainly through the intercession of the language of human rights, especially after the 1948 Universal Declaration. The idea of human beings having inalienable rights is counterintuitive and extremely difficult to justify. It may make some philosophical sense if derived from a strong theory of human nature such as one finds in classical metaphysics. However, when we accept a weak theory, attributing to human beings only elementary qualities, and deliberately disregarding strong metaphysical assumptions, then the idea of rights loses its plausibility.’’If humans are just random chemicals, smarter animals why have rights?“Solidarity stood up in defense of human dignity (in its original and not the corrupted sense), access to culture, respect for truth in science and for nobility in art, and a proper role given to Christian heritage and Christian religion. It seemed that suddenly those great ideas at the root of Western civilization—which this civilization had slowly begun to forget—were again brought to life and ignited like a fire in the minds of the members of a trade union. This was probably one of the reasons why Solidarity met with such widespread, though short-lived admiration. Suddenly, in this godforsaken place there emerged a movement that not only challenged the Evil Empire, but reminded everyone of the spiritual dimension of human existence, of truth, God, heroism, nobility of culture, the importance of historical and religious heritage, and other high moral principles.’’This did inspire millions. Unfortunately author explains that this movement didn’t last. The democratic replacement of communism successfully removed these beliefs.(See ''Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning'', by Jonah Goldberg)

Ryszard Legutko was born in 1949 in Poland, a couple of years after its status as a Soviet satellite had become recognized by all. He enthusiastically supported the first Solidarity movement in 1980, when he would have been in his early 30s. It was fueled by strong sense of patriotism, history, and Catholicism. The second Solidarity, coming in 1989 just as communism was falling, was not passionate about any of these three. It was more like Western liberal democracy.Legutko noted with disappointment that communist officials transitioned easily into government positions in the new Poland. Very little effort was made to call even the ones who had committed major human rights abuses under the Communists. Good Communists made good liberal Democrats, by and large.That is the thesis of the book. Although communism was vastly more ruthless, liberal democracy has an uncomfortable amount in common with it. The parallels merit investigation. Legutko outlines the correspondence in the realms addressed by his chapter structureHistoryUtopiaPoliticsIdeologyReligionI note here a few thoughts that struck me as particularly noteworthy.The idea that you were born with dignity is new. The traditional concept was that you require dignity by the way you behave in life. An innate "human dignity" possessed by all men is a new idea.The idea of "human rights" that one acquires by simply being born is likewise new. The old notion with more one of quid pro quo. You get proportion to what you give. Nothing is free.The way in which the concept of happiness" has morphed into pleasure is another of Legutko's topics. At the time the founding fathers wrote into the preamble to the Constitution "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness" philosophers in Europe were still carrying on the question of the meaning of life that started with the Greeks. The worthwhile life was one which included virtue, service to the community, family, learning, and achieving to one's limits.The historical notion of happiness has morphed into mere pleasure. Legutko points out that pleasure is fleeting. Even the most sublime, sex, is episodic it cannot be sustained at a constant level. Happiness is something more profound, the satisfaction of a life well lived. Modern man has lost sight of that. Legutko writes of anthropological minimalism," which means reducing man to mere appetites.He writes that not even communism was able to politicize sex. Liberal democracy has done so with a vengeance. It has granted special status to women and gays – Legutko didn't mention transsexuals, though he should have – that give them power and privilege over history whites.Communism and liberal democracy are creatures that must continue to grow. They must push their tentacles ever deeper into society. Schools, universities, the workplace, volunteer organizations and even families have been relentlessly politicized. The state has granted itself power to ruthlessly suppress what it doesn't like. Not mentioned but typical are Germany and Sweden forbidding homeschooling; forcing grade schoolers to shared toilets with transsexuals; forcing Christians to support abortion and birth control.The ostracism that the politically incorrect face has become more and more severe. In Europe you can be jailed for questioning how many died in the Holocaust or whether or not ongoing Muslim immigration is a good idea. These examples are mine – Legutko tends to speak in generalities.Legutko has rather obviously, one supposes consciously, omitted several lines of arguments from this discussion. One such thread would be cultural Marxism. He makes one mention of the Frankfurt school and two to Herbert Marcuse in about the 1950s but that is about it. He makes no mention of the ethnicities of those who worked most doggedly to undermine the traditional Christianity of the United States and Europe.Legutko does not address declining fertility. The dogmas of liberal democracy that people doing almost everything except bearing children and raising them to be like their ancestors. In an evolutionary sense liberal democracy is bound to fail. It simply does not reproduce itself.Legutko likewise does not discuss economics. In its failure to reproduce itself, liberal democracy is not producing taxpayers to fund the generous benefits that the voters have awarded themselves. The entire developed world is creaking under unsustainable debt as I write. The impending collapse of the current financial order will certainly present the liberal democracies with some vast challenges. It is quite likely to even undo them.It has been a quarter of a century since communism fell. Though few saw the total collapse coming, the sclerotic nature of the decrepit communist society was a topic of common discussion. The sclerotic nature of the economy of Japan has been a topic of discussion for 30 years now. The similarities between Japan and Europe have been well noted. We should not be surprised if a financial catastrophe on the order of the Great Depression washes over the liberal democracies and forces a return to more sustainable, traditional values.Here are some interesting passages from the book:"… liberal democracy, as it has developed in recent decades, shares a number of alarming features with communism. Both are utopian and look forward to “an end of history” where their systems will prevail as a permanent status quo. Both are historicist and insist that history is inevitably moving in their directions. Both therefore require that all social institutions—family, churches, private associations—must conform to liberal-democratic rules in their internal functioning. Because that is not so at present, both are devoted to social engineering to bring about this transformation. And because such engineering is naturally resisted, albeit slowly and in a confused way, both are engaged in a never-ending struggle against enemies of society (superstition, tradition, the past, intolerance, racism, xenophobia, bigotry, etc., etc.) In short, like Marxism before it, liberal democracy is becoming an all-encompassing ideology that, behind a veil of tolerance, brooks little or no disagreement.""Both communism and liberal democracy are regimes whose intent is to change reality for the better. They are—to use the current jargon—modernization projects. Both are nourished by the belief that the world cannot be tolerated as it is and that it should be changed: that the old should be replaced with the new. Both systems strongly and—so to speak—impatiently intrude into the social fabric and both justify their intrusion with the argument that it leads to the improvement of the state of affairs by “modernizing” it."Having armed himself with rights, modern man found himself in a most comfortable situation with no precedent: he no longer had to justify his claims and actions as long as he qualified them as rights. Regardless of what demands he would make on the basis of those rights and for what purpose he would use them, he did not and, in fact, could not lose his dignity, which he had acquired for life simply by being born human. And since having this dignity carried no obligation to do anything particularly good or worthy, he could, while constantly invoking it, make claims that were increasingly more absurd and demand justification for ever more questionable activities. Sinking more and more into arrogant vulgarity, he could argue that this vulgarity not only did not contradict his inborn dignity, but it could even, by a stretch of the imagination, be treated as some sort of an achievement. After all, can a dignity that is inborn and constitutes the essence of humanness, generate anything that would be essentially undignified and nonhuman? The dignity-based notion of human rights was thus both a powerful factor to legitimize a minimalist concept of human nature, and its legitimate child. Moreover, it equipped modern anthropological minimalism with the instruments of self-perpetuation, the most efficient instruments of this kind ever devised in the history of the Western societies.""The conservatives, who, in principle, should oppose the socialists and liberal democrats, quite sincerely argue that they, too, are open, pluralistic, tolerant, and inclusive, dedicated to the entitlements of individuals and groups, non-discriminatory and even supportive of the claims of feminists and homosexual activists. All in all, the liberal democrats, the socialists, and the conservatives are unanimous in their condemnations: they condemn racism, sexism, homophobia, discrimination, intolerance, and all the other sins listed in the liberal-democratic catechism while also participating in an unimaginable stretching of the meaning of these concepts and depriving them of any explanatory power. All thoughts and all modes of linguistic expression are moving within the circle of the same clichés, slogans, spells, ideas, and arguments. All are involved in the grand design of which those who think and speak are not Legutkos but with whose authorship they deeply identify, or—in case of doubt—from which they do not find strength or reasons enough to distance themselves."And some worthwhile quotes from other writings: "The EU’s elites are unbending in their belief that “one has to be liberal in order to be respectable, that whoever is not a liberal is either stupid or dangerous, or both. the elites of the West, including those of the United States. Being liberal is the litmus test of political decency. This is today’s orthodoxy. If you criticize it, or you’re against it, you’re disqualified.” The world has shrunk and the liberal paradigm seems to be omnipresent.” “A liberal is somebody who will come up to you and tell you, ‘I will organize your life for you. I will tell you what kind of liberty you will have. And then you can do whatever you like.’ ”“We often say, half-jokingly and half-seriously, that now Poland may become a country to which people will defect”—people “from France, the Netherlands or Britain.”This is a five-star effort. There are many more gems in the book than one can possibly cite in a review.

The striking claim in Ryszard Legutko’s ‘The Demon in Democracy’ is that both communism and liberal democracy share essentially the same central ideology, namely an unquestioned commitment to social improvement and unravelling of historic injustices, with a concomitant attitude of de-legitimation and derision towards historical culture. As Legutko acidly comments, liberalism no less than communism identifies opposition to its prevailing ideology as either maverick or heretical, to be either dismissed or eliminated via a pervasive politicisation of culture and society.A powerful idea at the heart of Legutko’s book is that liberalism is actively destroying the pluralism on which much of its philosophical legitimation rests. He echoes what Patrick Deneen has recently written in ‘Why Liberalism Failed’, a central contention of which is that liberalism actively undermines its own cultural foundations. Both writers look back to Tocqueville who early on saw the dangers of conformity, simplification and sentiment which liberal democracy would give rise to.It is a commonplace today that communist societies were totalitarian and monochrome, and that obedience, conformity and thought-policing were intrinsic to them. Legutko’s argument is that liberal democracies are increasingly not so different. Whereas communism openly avowed the need to destroy all pre-existing culture and recreate ‘citizens’ in a new model, devoid of arcane inheritances from family, church or any other pre-existing ‘structure’, liberalism feigns a conversational plurality in which it promises to pay respect to different identities, values and inheritances, with an offer to minimally arbitrate or facilitate between them. But liberalism has increasingly come to see culture and values as a key battleground and is no longer content to mediate a pluralistic demos, but rather seeks to refashion it.The demos has always been problematic for liberalism, and indeed the electoral franchise was restricted for so long precisely because of uncertainty over where genuine ‘democracy’ might lead. To their great relief, the great ‘democratising’ conservative leaders of the late 19th. century, like Bismarck and Salisbury, saw that extending the franchise did not inevitably lead to leftism and a wholesale attack on privilege, but that there was a significant conservative ballast even amongst those apparently least privileged. In the social and political turmoils in the aftermath of the First World War and the Russian Revolution this conservative ballast not only resisted socialism, it also leant support to Fascism, to the stupefied chagrin of the Frankfurt School and other Marxists. The problem of ‘deconstructing’ this conservatism inherent in the demos became the central project of the intellectual left throughout the 20th century.The latent conservatism in any demos could be said to lie in two principal areas: defence of privilege and resistance to change. As the current intellectual fashion of ‘intersectionality’ highlights, privilege and underprivilege exist across different dimensions, and in the right circumstances the coalition of ‘privileged’ can be very large indeed, especially when the whole social structure is in play. Indeed, it was precisely the realisation of this that made communists so vociferous in their counter-revolutionary brutality: the more evident their radicalism became, the bigger became the conservative coalition that tried to resist them.While resistance to change is partly also motivated by defence of privilege, it is more importantly generated by scepticism that is properly suspicious of the political process, and particularly all political ‘ideology’. A fundamental insight that has recently been rehearsed by, for instance, Nassim Taleb’s ‘Anti-Fragile’ and Jordan Peterson’s ‘12 Rules for Life’, is that it is a difficult and primarily experiential task for a human being to gain understanding in the world. There is a lot of opacity, which trial-and-error, with real exposure to consequences, is much better at helping us to understand than ‘reading’ or thinking. The place one takes in the world depends on a matrix of one’s abilities, access, luck, and above all on the moves and trade-offs one has made in one’s life. Resistance to change is partly resistance to having all of those moves thrown into question by a radical re-writing of the game. But more than anything, purposive engagement with life teaches humility about all simplifications, all rationalistic ‘impatience’ that wants to get quickly from an A to a B. Any move in the game has repercussions, often impossible to foresee. It also gives rise to a grounded, nuanced perspective, which when socially aggregated sums to genuine distributed knowledge that, in Hayekian terms, is much greater than the sum of its individual parts. A demos that is properly experienced and invested in life, and appreciative of the subtleties and difficulties in each and every achievement, is the ideal demos in which liberal plurality is theoretically founded.Contrary to this experientially embedded plurality, Legutko argues that the ideology that rules liberal democracy no less than communism is simplistic, leftist and utopian: a belief that society really can be made much more just, that intellectuals and politicians will lead the way, and that the public needs to be refashioned and led. Whether an intellectual-led utopian political programme could be brought to fruition, or indeed, if it has any meaning at all, is a profound question that has haunted the world since the middle of the 19th century. The list of depressing communist experiments has slapped down the naive but insistent optimism that characterised leftists in the first half of the 20th century, but has not ended the question by any means. Legutko’s is a sharp counter to a Fukuyama viewpoint that saw liberalism and communism as alternative systems, one of which proved superior to the other, hence ‘ending’ history: rather, he argues, liberalism contains the same central problem as communism, and we are far from being at the point where liberalism is fully played out.Legutko’s characterisation of the ideology of both liberalism and communism as essentially simplistic and simplifying echoes a central idea of René Girard, who saw communism as nothing more than a deviation of Christianity: all that is going on in leftist politics is the progressive ‘uncovering of the victimological principle.’ Girard saw Western culture, because of the centrality of Christianity in its evolution, as doomed to endless self-criticism in which each generation would look back aghast at the ‘injustices’ of the generations that preceded them. Only the utopian eschatology baked into the Enlightenment saves the West from dizzyingly falling sick with its persistent relativism, as it is able to convince itself that all this criticism is an advance of ‘progress’. The centrality of this eschatology in the cultural self-perception does much to explain the need to ridicule and delegitimize history.Suspicion about what this dominant leftist ideology really amounts to is harboured by many people and is a powerful source of conservatism. But whether a leftist ideology of ‘restituting injustice for all victims’ might be chaotic or meaningless - that injustice might spring from difference before it springs from power - does not constrain it from having substantial mimetic force.Legutko’s pessimism is precisely that this mimetic idea, of ‘eliminate all injustice’ not only has taken hold of intellectual and political elites in liberal democracies, just as it did under communism, but that it is burrowing into the demos to undermine and destroy real culture where there exists actual wisdom and practical knowledge. The Christian West has always been perplexed by the deeply existential empathy of the core message of the gospel and the impossibility of fashioning a practical politics out of it, and theologians wrestled for centuries with the problem. The practical religion of the Church, and similarly the what one might call neo-Christianity of Jordan Peterson, attempts a fusion of virtues like individuality, responsibility, restraint, love, duty, and above all an embracing of difficulty and an acknowledgement of incommensurability of values, which tries to give due weight to the challenges of individual life, prosperity and social order, as well as charitable empathy. Extending beyond theology, Western culture also discovered the ‘politico-philosophical goods’ of, among others, tolerance for difference, respect for individual autonomy and decentralisation of property, power and agency. And as Legutko points out, these goods often have their roots in conservative and classical rather than in modernist or leftist thought.The peculiar danger that liberal democracies are experiencing is that education in these virtues, and appreciation of these philosophical goods, is being flattened, eroded on the one hand by a docility-inducing culture of consumerism and gratification, and on the other by the political assault on history itself, and the characterising of all historical culture as oppressive and blindly unperceptive. Liberalism has entered this remarkable period wherein the educated public belongs almost exclusively to a professional precariat class, whose identities of community, religion, social class, and increasingly, nationality and gender, are being persistently flattened, to leave, as Patrick Deneen has recently written, political affiliation as the new and only signifier. Social media and political accelerationism have turned this once private thing into the litmus test of social acceptability. Evidencing the correct platitudes of political affiliation for social and career favour has displaced the ‘responsible activity’ of how one comported oneself in the world - one’s personal ethics of courage, fidelity, honesty, self-sufficiency and practical altruism - which used to be the currency of social virtue and which has become ‘privatised’ and, as Deneen says, off-limits to opinion as long as merely law-abiding.Accelerated liberalism which is inebriated with the mimetic ecstasy of ‘persecuting the persecutors’ and uncovering ever more victims is not, any more than communism was, leading to any kind of utopia, however gratifying the victory over each latest injustice. The political order, and the mythical ‘social contract’ that underlies it, is not a rational, transparent or inherently virtuous thing. One could subscribe to Girard, who saw that sacrificial injustice is intrinsic to the social order, or to, say, Jean Baudrillard, who saw that the social bond is not simply one of shared interests, identity and co-operation, but rather is multi-faceted and tactical, with as much competition and distance as alliance and closeness, “a pact which is the contrary of the social contract, a symbolic pact of allurement, complicity, derision.” Every move which ‘rescues’ a victim is a shift in the tactical alignment of the ‘pact of allurement’ which constitutes the social bond.Accelerated liberalism operates by a sleight of hand that focuses only on the rescue of the victim and ignores the impact of the move elsewhere. Often a ‘victim’ is a collateral casualty in a cultural discourse, or tactical disposition, which has evolved to provide a solution or at least an equilibrium to a certain social phenomenon. For instance, ‘traditional sexual morality’ regulated a complex interaction of sexual feelings, family-formation and paternal authority, in which ‘freedom of sexual expression’ was a collateral casualty. In old cultures, there existed interstices wherein there could be derogations from the ideals of cultural morality, albeit always carrying the risk of scandal, but uniform obeisance was always seen to be ideal rather than credibly practical. While liberalism shows an ever more hysterical intolerance to the injustice of any one ‘collateral casualty’, by its simplifying monomania it externalises the collateral costs which emanate from the moves made to assuage its victimological obsessions. In an obvious contemporary example, liberal public policy debate seems incapable of acknowledging the fundamental exclusion and privilege on which all nation states are based, and instead plays a fantasy politics in which an indefinable number of refugees, asylum seekers and economic migrants can be ‘accommodated’, because drawing attention to the collateral effects is branded as scaremongering or ‘alt-right nationalism’.But the social contract is a finely woven cultural object and dismissing as ‘illegitimate’ any objection to what liberals determine should be its reconfiguration, above all when the liberal ideology seems to contemplate no visible limit on the horizon, is to threaten to destabilize the deeply invested tactical alignments which it is based on. Populism is arising now through a growing, ever more widely held conviction, that liberal ideology, and the moves it is making within the culture to police speech and opinion, can only be countered by a brusque, even brutish, refusal to respect its pieties. As Deneen has written, elite liberals have converted meritocracy into a citadel of privilege for themselves, and yet actively embrace an ideological rhetoric that attacks every privilege but their own, an incoherence that invites sceptical derision rather than engagement on its own terms.Islamic communities in the West paradoxically offer islands of resistance to the liberal mimetic onslaught, just as Legutko says rural Catholicism did in communist Poland. René Girard said fascinatingly of religious fundamentalists who, despite defending ideas which he deplores, that “their revolt looks more respectable to me than our somnolence. In an era when everyone boasts of being a marginal dissident even as they display a stupefying mimetic docility, the fundamentalists are authentic dissidents.” The immunity of followers of non-Christian religions from the victimological zealotry of the liberals is fascinating to observe, and shows the importance of properly maintained traditional practice as something that can resist mimetic cultural despoilation. But the tactical dispositions matter, and a liberal politics that refuses to consider the importance of what size, for instance, an Islamic minority should become, or what the consequences might be of how much or little integration with wider society it undertakes, willfully ignores something that the demos know matters very much.Populism is arising because liberal elites are in thrall to a simplistic ideology of a utopian elimination of all injustice yet see themselves as technocratic philosopher kings, who take it upon themselves to silence troublesome parts of the discourse. Indeed, Legutko excoriates the European Union as being the technocratic project par excellence, with practical insulation from the demos its fundamental feature . John Gray has recently commented despairingly, and fearfully, how communist ideas have returned to respectability, something which should be inconceivable given the history of the 20th century. What is evident is that accelerated liberalism offers little protection against this. By its delegitimation of history, its attempted evisceration of the constellation of undertstandings that make up conservatism, and also from what Legutko calls its logic of minimalism - its opting for ease, convenience and gratification - it’s demos is easily swept up in mimetic contagion, which is fertile ground for a left populism of its own.

This is one of the most intelligent and enjoyable reads in a long time. The author talks about a glimmering awareness that the hard-won Polish liberation from communism had led them into a different sort of difficulty. They discovered that the Brussels machinery was sympathetic to ex-communists and hostile to anti-communists. The book is a very careful uncovering of why this state of affairs exists.I enjoyed the book because my own political journey has included time in communist countries, from the time the Soviet Union broke up. I too have had the glimmering awareness that the melding of a 'European' people in a Union is not so different from the melding of a Soviet people. It's achieved with trickery more than invasion, and therefore is harder to intuit. This book is very worthy of close examination - the author explains why he has concluded very similar political algorithms lie behind both projects.

I have been asked to suggest a book that could function as “Traditionalism 101” but always failed to come up with an answer. Definitely the quasi-mystical teachings of Guénon were not it, and Roger Scruton’s works always came across as way too dry. So... this is it, a mandatory reading for Conservatives, anti-PC/SJW and Traditionalists. The fact that this author has experienced Communism first hand gives it an added credibility witch is perhaps lacking from American authors.

An excellent study of the steady increase in the totalitarian tendencies of the liberal elite governing the West. The comparison with communism is particularly instructive and genuinely worrying. A distillation of critiques of the dominant ideology which should be read by as many people as possible. It summarises several years of reading! And it is very well written. Highly recommended

For those who are prepared to think seriously about essential issues of what is taking place in our world. This book is welcome and written by someone well qualified having been born and raised in Central Europe in communist days. Not merely an idealistic theoretician. The minds held captive by materialism seldom seem to think or welcome any challenge to the direction things are taking in the ‘free’ Western democracies.