In my spare time this week, I followed up on the latest content from Sublation Magazine and the videos available on their YouTube channel. As I had pointed out in The Work-Standard (3rd Ed.) and in today’s Update post, Sublation Media does espouse ideas that resonate with the concept of a Left-Hamiltonianism. If American Affairs ought to be recognized as one of the vehicles for Right-Hamiltonianism, then Sublation Media must be its Left-Hamiltonian equivalent. A true Left-Hamiltonianism, just as its Right-Hamiltonian counterpart cannot be a type of Classical Liberalism, likewise cannot be a type of Social Liberalism. In essence, the two should form the two halves of what I have been referring to as a “Conservative Socialism.”
Currently, Right-Hamiltonianism is trying to rid itself of the Economic Liberals who have subverted the importance of industrial manufacturing and the infrastructure required to sustain its many production processes. That has resulted in the determination to put forward a conception of Conservatism that is more Nationalist in its outlook. What Left-Hamiltonianism needs to strive for is to challenge all past assumptions about what we think we know about American Socialism and how to better conceptualize it to suit the historical epoch of the 21st century. Social-Democracy already failed to be viable decades ago and any ideas about importing foreign conceptions of Socialism are out of the question.
When I wrote the Third Edition of The Work-Standard, I did not find enough time last year to make a definitive conclusion on whether Sublation Media should serve as the archetypal model of Left-Hamiltonianism. But after months of reading and watching their content, I am finally certain of the conclusions I had made in The Work-Standard. The potential is there, the right ideas are there, and the similarities to Right-Hamiltonianism are also there.
The About section of Sublation Media says it all:
“We live in a time of crisis. In recent years, we’ve been told that the left has been on the ascent. Yet, despite the popularity of “socialism” among a generation who came of age in the post-Cold War era, the political energy that characterized the 2000s and 2010s seems only to have bolstered capitalist politics to meet the crisis of neoliberalism. At the same time, the old guides and standbys no longer serve. Not only has the social democracy revival of the 2010s failed but the old leftist sects are dying off and the academic left is in crisis. Existing leftist publishing is often yoked to compromised organizations and historically exhausted projects. Something else is required.
The question that Sublation Magazine poses is whether the crisis of our time might yet prove an opportunity. How might this waste, this discontinuity, facilitate an active forgetting, an overcoming of the past? How to help make possible a new beginning for socialism or some credible heir to its aspirations? Attempting this demands spurning all thought taboos. Only then might we hope to sublate — to realize and overcome — the current impasse.”
On the YouTube channel, a few recent videos deserve mention here, one of which was originally posted in 2020 but got taken down and is now available again as of late. One video supports my longstanding point that “Nostalgia has become the new opium of the masses.” It is one thing to recognize genuine achievements from the Soviets and Eastern Bloc countries, Maoist China, the German Reich, Fascist Italy, Falangist Spain, or Imperial Japan. It is a whole different matter altogether to ignore their own failures and focus solely on their successes, assuming that their experiences can be recreated down to the smallest historical detail within one’s own time and place. Always never pour new wine into old wine bottles.
For both Left-Hamiltonianism and Right-Hamiltonianism, America cannot be defined as something from a “1950s barbecue commercial.” America has a centuries-old legacy that emanates from the idea of America as a nation, a Federalist American Union. Here, the concept of Americaness was forged on the battlefields of the American Revolution, where people in the Thirteen Colonies started identifying themselves as Americans before their own States.
The second video entertained the question of whether Twitter (now called “X”) has become a more consolidated bastion of Wokeness under Elon Musk. It argues that, contrary to what the Western mainstream media would like everyone to believe, there is a Social Liberal religiosity driving this Wokeness on Twitter. This Social Liberal religiosity is not at all new insofar as it was historically the same ideological forces that gave us, among other things, Prohibition (and, by extension, the Castellammarese War of 1930-1931). It led the intellectual vanguard of what Michael Lind has referred to elsewhere as the “Cold War Liberalism” which informed the Democratic-Republican Party’s stances toward the New Deal’s legacy and the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries. More importantly, it is the same ideological force within the Democratic-Republican Party that contributed to the formation of the Empire of Liberty after 1945.
In the late 20th century, there was a major shift among American Protestants (and it was in fact a shift that originated from American Protestantism), who found themselves divided over the direction in which Social Liberalism should be heading. There was far more at play than just the questions of Civil Rights or the continued US involvement in the Vietnam War. Should American Protestantism secularize itself to the point where it becomes a vehicle for Social Liberalism? Or, on the other hand, should American Protestantism try to promote every notion that America is, for all intents and purposes, a Protestant nation?
Those questions are not constitutional ones over Amendment I’s Freedoms of Speech and Religion, but questions on whether American Protestantism has any relevance left among Social Liberals. The most notorious ones went on to form the foundations of the so-called “Christian Right” and “Neoconservatives,” reaching the apex of their power and influence in the Bush 43 Presidency by the 2000s. The rest, however, became the basis for what people have been referring to as “Wokeness.”
The conclusions reached in that video are also reflected by Spengler a century earlier in Prussianism and Socialism. I say this because I am personally adamant that such movements reflect American Protestantism’s older attitudes within English Protestantism:
“The English are a nation of theologians. Their great revolution took on primarily religious forms, and following the abolition of the state no language except theological language remained with which to express the concerns of communal life. And so it has been: a biblical interpretation of questionable business dealings can ease the conscience and greatly increase ambition and initiative.”
“The English Independent, on the other hand, was externally free, just as his Norman forebears were free. He fashioned for himself a pure lay religion using the Bible as fundament, granting to each individual the privilege of interpreting the text as he wished. Whatever the Independent undertook was therefore, as it were by definition, morally correct. The Englishman never entertains a single doubt on this score. Success is a proof of Divine Providence. While the [Prussian] Pietist regarded himself as solely responsible for the morality of his behavior, the [English] Independent placed this responsibility with God. No one has the power to alter such deep convictions.”
Isn’t it interesting how the rise of Wokeness coincided with the Reagan Revolution’s emasculation of the Federal Government and the enlargement of the Empire of Liberty? That the deemphasis on the role of the Federal Government since the 1980s helped contribute to such ideas becoming commonplace? That we should view it as the outward social expression of Neoliberalism? Such conclusions are those which I had gleaned from that second video.
Lastly, the third and final video concerns reactions to the Great Reset in response to the Coronavirus Pandemic. There is no doubt that the Great Reset is a rhetorical device to describe the Neoliberal economic strategy to recover from the effects of the Coronavirus Pandemic. The effects of that strategy, from the high Interest and Inflation Rates to the rampant shortages, are self-evident to everyone within the past four years. It is even more fitting for its initiation to have been announced by the King of England at the World Economic Forum.
There are some interesting critiques of Christopher Lasch and Paul Sweezy which are beyond my knowledge. To be honest, I have not read much into Lasch or Sweezy. In fact, the latter was virtually unknown to me until I learned about him from that video. As for the former, knowing somebody who had written so much about Lasch’s ideas on another Blog, some important questions came to mind. What if the Great Reset, as a rhetorical device, was just the semblance of an economic strategy that in final analysis lacked genuine substance? What if, rather than being the latest example of Neoliberalism’s technocratic bureaucracy that encompasses the Empire of Liberty, it was just an attempt to boost morale among Liberal Capitalists? Given the fact that the video was made in 2020, I am certain that the Great Reset was purely rhetorical.
Categories: Philosophy
The Fourth Estate 
Leave a comment