In the years following their disastrous defeat in 2015, the Social-Democratic party of Denmark underwent a hostile takeover. Mette Frederiksen’s faction seized power over the party, and with it created a fundamental shift in the ideological doctrine of the party.
Gone was the obsession with feminism under Helle Thorning-Schmidt, gone was the belief in mass immigration and Inclusivity Uber Alles, replaced instead with idyllic pictures of the Danish Cloth – a white cross in a crimson field, starkly contrasted to the blue skies of midsummer promising a return to “the Denmark you know”.
Sure the red still symbolized socialism, but the white crosses did signal resistance to the ever present, looming shadow of Islam. At the time a great many Leftists wondered how this had come to pass, that the party of Thorvald Stauning would turn its back on the progress that they’d carried the banner of for so long.
Outside of Denmark, as the decay of progressivism becomes ever more apparent, a great many more Leftists will be at least as surprised, if not outright shocked, when this event replicates itself across the Left-wing parties of the Western world. The reasons for this are multifaceted, but have their origin in how the progressive narrative is falling apart at the seems as we speak.
Part One – Narrative Folding
All narratives – no matter their quality or lack thereof, undergo some sort of decay. With every new generation the status quo created by the narrative conclusions of the previous one becomes the foundation for the next. In a way, they fold in on themselves.
This can be seen in the Nordic countries with the socialistic welfare state giving way to a state enabled solipsism, most prevalent in their elder care systems.
It became so easy to simply throw your grandparents to the institutions that it has become an absolute norm to send them to a state run elder home at first given opportunity. It’s not the family’s responsibility but the state’s. And you’re weird for doing otherwise.
We also see this in much of modernity in the Christian thinking world. We began from the premise that man is violent, that force is the solution to all problems, to Christ’s teachings that we must show restraint. As restraint became the new baseline, this gave way to the notion that not only is it important to show restraint, one must be incapable of violence whatsoever; i.e. Pacifism.
Much of the West’s issues, in particular with immigration are a result of ideological pacifism on a societal level against the less obvious violence of the state and the very obvious violence of Islamist’s and Left-wing extremists
A similar effect was seen in the islamisation of the once Christian Levant. It’s mostly known as a textbook example of the power of intransigent minorities, as per Nassim Taleb:
…the spread of Islam in the Near East where Christianity was heavily entrenched (it was born there) can be attributed to two simple asymmetries. The original Islamic rulers weren’t particularly interested in converting Christians as these provided them with tax revenues –the proselytism of Islam did not address those called “people of the book”, i.e. individuals of Abrahamic faith. In fact, my ancestors who survived thirteen centuries under Muslim rule saw advantages in not being Muslim: mostly in the avoidance of military conscription.
The two asymmetric rules were are as follows. First, if a non Muslim man under the rule of Islam marries a Muslim woman, he needs to convert to Islam –and if either parents of a child happens to be Muslim, the child will be Muslim. Second, becoming Muslim is irreversible, as apostasy is the heaviest crime under the religion, sanctioned by the death penalty. The famous Egyptian actor Omar Sharif, born Mikhael Demetri Shalhoub, was of Lebanese Christian origins. He converted to Islam to marry a famous Egyptian actress and had to change his name to an Arabic one. He later divorced, but did not revert to the faith of his ancestors.
Under these two asymmetric rules, one can do simple simulations and see how a small Islamic group occupying Christian (Coptic) Egypt can lead, over the centuries, to the Copts becoming a tiny minority. All one needs is a small rate of interfaith marriages.
Taleb’s analysis is mostly focused on the stubbornness aspect of the process, but does also hint at a rather important part: not why the parents pretended to convert but why their grandchildren became genuine Muslims (and radical ones at that).
As the original event that birthed the new status quo, that being the conversion to Islam, occurred, the fake converts may still have been Christian but they had to behave Muslim in public.
Their children then found this behavior natural and therefore effortlessly acted Muslim in public, but were still close enough to the experiences of their parents that the original narrative of simply pretending to convert would hold. This may even have been true of the grandchildren in some circumstances, but eventually – and inevitably, the internal and initial narrative faded, as it had no external reality left to be attached to anymore. As a result, the descendants eventually grew up behaving Muslim, being treated Muslim and thought themselves Muslim.
The original reasons for the status quo had faded and what remained where the consequences that where seen, felt and acted upon. And any narrative anchored in perceived reality will supplant one exempt from external affirmation. Eventually.
Current year Leftism will begin to undergo this at an accelerated pace, simply because it cannot sustain itself anymore, as too many facets of their ideology have become self destructive.
The most obvious example of this self destructive tendency is the transgenderist narrative.
It is already loosing ground, we are already seeing puberty blockers being banned for minors in the UK of all places, with the rest of the narrative to follow suit over the next five to ten years With it, the rest of the trans narrative is bound to follow suit, due to the internal inconsistencies and radicalism of the ideology.
As biology cycles out the older generations, the younger ones who grew up witnessing the consequences of seeing friends and family members suffer under the consequences of being trans’d, some of which might even have experienced it themselves, they will develop a narrative of great resentment to the consequences of the previous one.
The riots and damage in the wake of BLM and following attempts at normalizing crime in American blue-states will eventually force a resolution. With or without the Left. The younger generations are already being confronted with this havoc, and propaganda can only do so much to make them ignore reality, when it hits them in the face.
The rest of the sexual deviancy of the Left – from shoehorning in homosexuality everywhere, to the attempts at normalizing pedophilia, are not only deeply unpopular with any sane person (for good reason), they’re also unpopular with the migrants the Left themselves have imported. Most immigrants from the third world – whether Mexican or Muslim, are devoutly religious and deeply opposed to such… excesses, and keeping them as a base would require the Left to begin discarding their progressive ideals.
This is not helped by their view of Israel and World War 2. WW2 is sufficiently far in the past that can no longer cause much emotional reaction when invoked.
Combine this coming emotional irrelevance with the younger Left’s hatred of Israel – and that many of the Muslim voters they pay lip service to, loathe the Jewish State as well, and it doesn’t take a genius to see what direction they’re going in.
In addition, most of the narrative power regarding the horrors of the Nazi regime is depleted. The aspect that they they were a product of nationalism, patriotism and militarism (the positive view of a strong military) are slowly decaying, partially due to this lack of emotional interest, partially accelerated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The racism aspect meanwhile is similarly unraveling as the the narrative about the Holocaust has begun to fold in on itself. Since the younger generations are growing up – not with the premise that the Holocaust was a horrid thing they saw with their own eyes (like the Greatest Generation) or with the post-Nazi sentiment that the horrors of WW2 must never be repeated and society must be organized around preventing a repeat at all costs (like the Boomers and Millennials), but with a post-post-Nazi paradigm, that any invocation of the Holocaust or Nazis or racism is used exclusively as a tool. As a tactic used in order to unfairly shut down any conversation critical of the awful policies of the current status quo. And this has reached its zenith in the last ten or so years and is well known by anyone intellectually honest.
Whether or not this results in an anti-Semitic resurgence depends on the amount and effectiveness of the censorship in the next 20 years, as the only reason the alt-right ever had anything resembling relevance was the fact that no other group than the Neo-Nazis where willing to interact with those critical of the current narrative surrounding WW2.
In some ways, we can already see that the Left is abandoning this tactic in favor of other forms of thought-terminating cliches.
A recent Atlantic article covered the rise of “chaos agents” – people willing to spread propaganda regardless of its angle solely because it would cause more conflict within the society. What this really is, is a smoking gun, that the old Nazi accusation tactic does not work anymore and that they’re now trying to replace it with new ones, in order to maintain at least some of the power that the Nazi accusations had. This specific tool will likely not work on the level of the commoner, but it will spread through the universities and intelligentsia as a tool for keeping intellectual discussion in line.
When you take all of this into account – the collapse of the trans narrative, the conservative leanings of the Left’s migrant base, the need for law and order in the wake of immigration and BLM and the increasingly radical anti-Semitism within the younger Left, it becomes obvious that the Left is going to fracture along the lines of progressive versus non-progressive
But while this faction may in ways resemble conservatives on social issues (and here I make the exception of anti-Semitism as it simply does not exist on a large scale on the right) in theory, in practice they will differ quite severely. Why?
Because at the end of the day, the modus operandi of the Left has for decades, if not centuries, been securization.
Part Two – Securization
Securization is the political science term for the study of how narratives are (re)framed to justify the centralization of power under the pretense of security (what they call a “securitized narrative”), and it has been a blatantly obvious tool of the maximal state for decades if not centuries by now.
The most obvious example of this in practice in recent memory was the pandemic project. That society must be locked down and controlled for the security and protection of our (elder’s) lives.
Worth mentioning is that the main architect of modern securization theory – Ole Wæver, was canceled during the pandemic project due to flimsy attempts at framing his work as “racist”.
People who grew up in the 2000s got to see this in the shape of cases like the Patriot act – attempts at expanding the surveillance state under the pretense of security from terrorism.
As the Left grew more dominant we’ve started to see their attempts at securization more often:
- Censorship is justified under the pretense of security, from “nazis”.
- Mass immigration is justified under the pretense of security, of the immigrants’ human rights.
- The deterioration of law and order in democrat cities is justified under the pretense of security, from police brutality
- Transing of children is justified under the pretense of security from their biology, as the therapy wont work as well if they wait, so they have to get them while young, you see.
While securization has been a tool of the establishment Right as well, it has typically been less obviously intrusive and directly harmful, as the right still has libertarian factions within it to counterbalance it. Even now that the Right began to talk about a potential Tiktok ban the suggested policy – being totalitarian as ever – has not been embraced fully by the Right, with Trump himself weighing in against it. It’s debatable whether a ban of Tiktok would be to the benefit of Facebook but, at the end of the day, his concerns do result in a limiting of governmental overreach.
On the Left meanwhile, there are no libertarian reflexes and little pragmatism inhibiting their totalitarian urges.
The thing is that most of the attempts at solving the problems caused by the insanity of the current Left can easily become securitized narratives themselves.
Now that the censorship has created extremists, their existence can be used to either justify even more censorship – or the extremists themselves can begin to argue in favor of their own forms of totalitarianism.
The violence caused by immigration and BLM can be used as justification for a massive police and surveillance state. This already happened under Mette Frederiksen where not only they argued for a massive surveillance state like totalitarian hellholes like China or Britain, but the justification for doing so was as a means of safety from the “consequences of a mistaken immigration and integration policy”. On a side note, during parliamentary debates the minister of Justice argued that since it is impossible to have any sort of freedom without safety, and a massive surveillance state would increase safety, therefore increased surveillance is an increase of freedom. This is one more reason a social-conservative Left-wing both can and will come into existence.
At this point in time, where progressivism is close to being exhausted, social-conservatism simply seems to be the easiest path to grabbing and centralizing power under the maximal state. It would also allow the Left access to the “churchcommie” elements among the politically activated.
Churchcommie is a slang term for a certain type of authoritarian social-conservative that wishes to implement a maximal state in order to stomp out whatever they view as degeneracy in society. If you told one of these people about Ceaușescu’s views on abortion (complete ban alongside contraceptives), without telling them what politician suggested it, they’d probably want to vote for him.
We have already seen such reflexes be used to securitize pornography: bans on various porn sites which we have so far first seen attempted in Britain. While the system inevitably failed due to being unenforceable, the underlying puritanical values that gave birth to this bill are real and a threat to civil liberties. And thus, easily subverted by the future Left.
Part Three – The next Left
The Left will not abandon progressivism overnight. What will happen is the fracture within the Left between progressive and non-progressive will widen ever more as the Left begins to loose power in elections. Eventually, after one too many defeats at the hand of the right, such a non-progressive faction will attempt a hostile takeover – as it happened in Denmark.
The replacement of progressive ideas with social conservative ones has happened many times before in the history of Leftism.
After Lenin’s extremely degenerate views (even by Russian standards), Stalin went in the exact opposite direction and imposed extremely harsh conservative policies (also even by Russian standards) on the Russian people(s).
Similarly Ceaușescu emerged after a much more feminist (yes, really) Soviet puppet regime in Communist occupied Romania.
After Mao’s Great Leap Forward, China slowly began to implement what can be viewed as a form of capitalism – though a very crony and highly state controlled one, as they found out that collective farms simply didn’t work.
While I doubt the Western Left’s social conservative switch will be as brutal, as they still have to win votes at the end of the day, it’ll no doubt still be terrible for the society as it will be used as a means of centralizing power – and lining the Left’s pockets in the process.
But it simply seems to be the only good means of achieving securization in the post-progressive paradigm. And also allows them to tap into the disgruntled totalitarian forces among the politically activated right.
As simple pragmatism forces the lines to blur between Left and Right it’ll become a lot harder for the right to make their case, since their current Trumpist narrative is build around them being against an obviously evil foe. You can’t do that if the foe uses your exact arguments with a different coat of paint and slightly different motives.
(On a side note, it shocked me how easy it would have been to frame this analysis as an elaborate plan by the Left: that they intend to sell a cure for a disease that they created. Though this might literally happen in some parts of California where the bubonic plague is reemerging. That said, this runs on the assumption that the Left actually knows what they’re doing. And they don’t.)
The form that this new Left would take would therefore be much more akin to the Danish Social-Democrats, not just because it is the closest they have to a template that actually makes sense and could work, but also because it is coming from a Scandinavian country.
Most of the bad ideas that are currently haunting the West may have their origin in the USA, but the R&D for them is done in Scandinavia before being shipped back for final testing and publication.
Some of the examples of this include transgenderism, the first “modern” gender reassignment surgery was performed in Denmark after all (look up Christine Jorgensen, if you must). Modern Feminism which was first implemented in true form in Sweden and the recent Atlantic article regarding “chaos agents” is based on the research of a Danish sociologist who worked with the government during the pandemic.
Even the concept of securization theory was heavily influenced by the work of Ole Wæver – also a Dane. Not to mention the notion of the welfare state itself.
“Getting to Denmark” is a common trope in political science, that a welfare “utopia” like Denmark is the desirable end goal of any society.
The Left’s fetishization of Scandinavia and it’s bad ideas is not going to end any time soon and, no doubt, looking to the now much more socially conservative, but still economically Left-wing politics of the region, is a good indicator of where the Left will go next once progressivism has been drained of all it could offer.
Part Four – Conclusions
For the Right this paradigm shift will be a poison chalice; it will only mean a renormalization of conservative values in the short term, as long as such values can be exploited to seize more power for the state. Long term, if not properly managed, this will result in the generation that will follow becoming one extremely hostile to conservative values. And, when a brain drain eventually begins to take hold on the Right, they will be stuck and incapable of inventing new ideas to work around this stigma.
It has been said that Conservatism is not so much about conserving what matters, but ensuring that the innate vices of human nature are managed in such a way their damage is minimized and hopefully turned to benefits.
Perhaps it is time that the conservatives begin managing the vices of Social-Conservatism.
