The Wages of Radicalism

Reflections on radical politics, the end of history, and how to do serious politics.

Radical politics usually have an underwhelming conclusion.

Nearly every radical movement marches under the banner of blood and iron to radically reshape the world in its image, yet scratching beyond the bluster reveals more mundane visions of life. Nearly all radical movements over the past century have converged on the desire for welfare states, high speed (electric) rail, a relatively technocratic government cabinet (usually under an ideologically-infused head of state for identitarian reasons), etc.

Group dignity is important. Much of radical politics usually boils down to ‘why doesn’t our group have these mundane amenities?’ Unfortunately, the perceived zero-sum nature of inter-group competition creates great bloodshed and chaos, yet their visions are nearly the same.

19th century Europe was racked with nationalist causes fermenting revolution and national homogenisation (read: genocide). This spread to the rest of the world in the 20th century. Now we can look on in hindsight from the perspective of the 21st century to ask: was it worth it? After the blood and struggle that saw millions of people killed, exiled, and oppressed, many of the nation-states birthed in that era are barely functional.

After all the suffering and struggle of the Irish people, where are they today? It doesn’t seem like they are well served by Irish nationalism. They became even more undifferentiated from the English. They speak English, have abandoned Catholicism, and joined the EU. Poland is on the same trajectory (maybe apart from speaking English — for now). Where is Bulgaria (and most of the Balkans)? Their youth have all left for Germany.

The greatest argument against ideologies like nationalism is that after all the blood and struggle, most people aspire to a garden variety American-style life of consumption and ‘live and let live’ beliefs.

Islamism is another example. Most Islamists really just want a religiously identitarian state on the surface; in substance, they want a working parliament, a technocratic cabinet under a Caliphal-style figure, and then modern amenities like high speed rail, some form of welfare statism, and so on. In short, a nation-state model differentiated based on religion, not ethnicity. Which is really not so much of a difference.

The Taliban waged an epic, multi-generational series of wars against the Russians, themselves, and a western coalition led by the USA and won out when American troops withdrew from Kabul in August 2021. After battling the mechanised armies of two world empires in the valleys and mountains of Khorasan, Taliban fighters are now deployed to the office and must war with emails and spreadsheets. Would ISIS have ended up any different if they had succeeded? It seems highly unlikely.

We got a taste of radical politics in the western hemisphere with the election of Donald Trump, the rise of the ‘alt-right’, esoteric blogosphere movements, and other right-coded dissident political scenes between 2016-2020. Having observed them and even gotten to know some of the key players in these movements, it seems that by today most radical figureheads have either burned out, become cancelled, or have used their dissident status as a means of becoming junior members of the status quo hierarchy. Most people who have claimed to be status quo dissidents are either mere aesthetes or temporarily embarrassed elite-aspirants. The prose-waxing edgelords and the manifesto-wielding “reformers” are best to be avoided. You can and probably should engage with their materials as there are always interesting ideas out there that you can simply take, launder through a cleaner epistemological program, and make safer for application.

It might be cliché to say that Fukuyama was right, but there is (currently) nothing beyond the End of History that he articulated. All the blood and suffering of religious, ethnic, and national causes aspires to nothing more than what we have achieved through the system we currently have. So, why bother with the radicals at all when this can/is usually achieved by the systems held by radicals in great distaste on account of their supposed lack of vitality?

We rail against the inequities of liberal democracy and its contemporary proceduralist form, but what is the alternative? One, we want the same ends for the most part. Two, has anyone actually created a better system for achieving those ends?

It seems that we really have two choices today: Communist Technocracy with Chinese Characteristics, and Capitalist-Managerial Technocracy with American Characteristics. Even then, China is not metaphysically distinct from western civilisation; they took western civilisation and did it better. It is still too early to tell who will converge to who.

In any case, radicals vastly underestimate the world-historical forces necessary to produce a third option, and vastly overestimate their own capacity to be said world-historical forces.

Zooming out, Fukuyama’s End of History as the closing chapter of industrial civilisation, not of history as a whole, seems fair. It seems increasingly unlikely that there are alternatives to ABC-ideologically flavoured technocratic managerialism in our era of world history. There are only so many ways to manage industrialising/ed nations. A truly radical movement would seek to go beyond industrial civilisation. What that looks like or how it could be achieved is beyond my scope to imagine.

This goes over the radical mind, and as the 21st century moves on, men will rise to promise a people war, struggle, and death, and modern man will look at his life of soft contentment with dissatisfaction and throw himself into the fire. Radicalism will always have its adherents — but its wages are bitter. Radicals either end up as mere cannon fodder or get into serious trouble for doing something stupid and counterproductive to society. Radical ideologies are rarely if ever worth committing one’s life to — just to lose it for a vision that ends up as mundane as anything we already have today.

The one benefit gained from surfing radical politics is one develops a more rigorous understanding of power, civilisation, and human nature. It is useful from time to time to ‘step out of the box’, away from asinine, lower-order ideological hazing, and to o abandon -isms for the is. One must strive to adopt a more Aristotelian approach: first-principles thinking on fundamental questions of war and peace, life and death, prosperity and poverty, freedom and slavery. These questions matter. Everything else is frivolous.

If done well, political action is the highest returning activity anyone can engage in. If one is interested in political affairs, one should have the intention of restoring a sense of sober realism that helps us to understand and provide solutions (however temporary) to the fundamental questions. And one thing to bear in mind: there are no solutions, only trade-offs. The failure of the radical mind lies in an unyielding belief in totalising solutions to the age-old problems of humanity.

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