An objective justice as the measuring stick of civilisational progress succeeds an historical foregrounding of rights and morality, presupposing a set of criteria grounded by textual weight. Fairness, equality, natural right, transactional integrity. These undergird the meaning of justice as both a product of law and the progenitor of that same law. Whether conceived in libertarian doctrines of property ownership and exchange relations[1], Rawlsian concepts of opportunity or a Dworkinian auction of leximin potential[2], all fall back on the objective criteria of judging claims and counterclaims.

Christopher Rufo’s invocation of hyperreality in his criticism of Nick Fuentes and the wider anti-Israel right wing is an interesting segue into postmodernism, particularly for a conservative activist. His primary criticism of Fuentes, that he is a media influencer draped in layers of irony that make his pronouncements largely redundant, is correct in its analysis. There is no reality behind his ideology, just further levels of obfuscation and comedy. Praising Stalin or engaging in Holocaust revisionism are just ways of reaching toward a barely-coherent ideology of authoritarianism. There’s nothing serious behind it. Fuentes is a gay Mexican Catholic calling for the establishment of a theocratic WASP ethnostate.

In the paranoiac fantasies of modern progressivism, the most widespread and deeply-seated is that of the egalitarian conceit, the blank slate notion of equivalence between sexes, races and cultures. There being no basis to differentiate, there can be no basis to discriminate or compartmentalise. However, as natural differences diverge from each other, specialities and deviations emerge that don’t fit this paradigm. The conceit becomes an enforceable norm, and from it come discursive and coercive instruments of multiculturalism, anti-racism and feminism.

Individualism as the sine qua non of liberalism is one the great shibboleths of the modern era. The unmoored individual, a mythical creation in its own right, is both protagonist and antagonist in the various ills of society. From “society does not exist” and greed is good to deaths of despair and anomie, individualism serves a dual purpose in relation to liberalism as a governing ideology.

The successor ideology, or the new orthodoxy, represents an evolution of liberalism rather than its replacement[1]. What then contests it must understand this evolutionary nature, recognising that the fruits of the new orthodoxy grew from the liberal tree. Sullivan identifies moral clarity as the clarion call of this movement[2]. This means the removal of objectivity or neutrality as values of a governing consensus, instead characterising nations or the Western ethico-legal order as intrinsically racist and subjective. Sullivan thereby reveals the flaw of his argument, that the liberal order was genuinely objective, whether in its governing apparatuses or in its media complexes.

The character of what is called progress contains a deep irony. In the flavour of dramatic irony, we as an audience can seemingly see ahead of our expert narrators, yet the play goes on as we are told that, no, everything is going according to plan. In fields as diverse as ecology, agronomy, economics or medicine there is a disconnect between what is witnessed and what is accepted. These fields are increasingly side-lined in developed economies which are dominated by their service and administrative sectors[1]/tasks[2], creating a loss of knowledge.

Enclosure, beyond its historical specificities as a means of enclosing common land, has a wider implication of enclosing autonomy itself in various forms. “The enclosure of common land ran alongside the decline of communal systems of agriculture and the marginalisation of other forms of communal entitlement”[1]. The specific aspect of the community is the maintained functioning of established lifeways and relations between groups/classes. Enclosure in a wider sense is the closing off of means of independence, in the form of freehold land, unclaimed commons or specific relations that entail duties between groups. Through a combination of structural imperatives and negotiated choices both rapid and extended declines of established modes of existence are curtailed and destroyed in favour of new methods and relations which close off autonomy.

A “peculiar species of authoritarian utopianism sweeping through the ruling institutions of American life, which I have termed ‘the Successor Ideology’”[1] is emergent in liberal democracies throughout the West. In various forms of identity politics, culture wars, NGO complexes[2] and institutional capture, a sociocultural logic is nascent, struggling to fully form into a coherent multiplicity of organisational and political structures. Through Rudi Dutschke’s formulation of a long march through the institutions, the successor ideology represents a bridge between systems of liberal government and neoliberal business practice and a metastatic superstructure of cultural revolution.

The video posted of Adam Posen[1] (a well-known monetary economist deeply tied to the variety of neoliberal think tanks, central bank committees and academic fellowships) stating that support for manufacturing industries and onshoring of productive capacity are a “fetish for keeping white males with low education in the powerful positions they are in” is perfectly indicative of the ideological networks of which Posen is a member. It shows the embedded nature of the successor ideology (woke ideology, post-neoliberalism, identity politics, etc.) and its tentacular reach, as it easily seeps into establishment institutions and policy-making networks.

The spate of industrial fires across food production and packaging facilities in the United States sparked a conspiratorial reading of events. A pattern of fire during an existing food crisis and a growing awareness of the tenuousness of food supply chains has led to suggestions that these are not random events but planned sabotage[1] that extends central control of food processing systems and forces consumers into a food serfdom. Equally, there are suggestions that this is simply a Baader-Meinhof phenomenon and that the extent of fires in production and processing facilities have always been relatively high[2].