The Age of Regress?

We have reached not the age of progress which the liberals once promised to us but the age of regress. I commented to a friend of mine recently that in order to have a liberal democracy dissent must be allowed and permitted. Otherwise, the democracy turns into a dictatorship. But let's clarify further that the term liberal in liberal democracy only qualifies the word democracy. It does not indicate that democracy is inherently a liberal idea. The idea of liberalism has been corrupted ever since the 19th century from the idea of freedom once perpetuated to the idea of democracy. A dictatorship can certainly be just as democratic, if not more. A dictatorship is simply just the logical consequence of collectivism as a result from democracy.

Erik Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, in his article "Monarchy and War" in The Myth of National Defense places this accusation rather bluntly on democracy. Citing British Prime Minister Disraeli, "[t]he tendency of an advanced civilization is in truth Monarchy. Monarchy is indeed a government which requires a high degree of civilization for its full development. ... An educated nation recoils from the imperfect vicariate of what is called a representative government." (84) Kuehnelt-Leddihn recalls the political nature of the prosecution of Socrates under the Democratic State of Athens. Socrates was placed to death for the corruption of youth. According to Kuehnelt-Leddihn, part of that corruption was the teaching of monarchy (84). But that is not the least part where we see the brutality of democracy unfolding.

It is at the height of the French Revolution, inspired by the American Revolution, to overthrow the monarchy and establish a democratic and equal form of government where we see the full extent of this brutality. Kuehnelt-Leddihn accurately describes the Revolution as "a sadistic sex orgy in which the 'Divine Marquis' played personally and intellectually a leading role." (86-87) We tend to think of the crimes and horrors of the Revolution being an attack on the aristocracy but even the most vicious "sadistic sex orgy, pregnant women...squeezed out in fruit- and winepresses, mothers and their children...slowly roasted to death in bakers' ovens, and women's genitals...filled with gun powder and brought to explosion." (90)

For Robespierre, the goal was not just simply equality, but sameness. Even Goethe considered those who promised both equality and liberty as charlatans  (87). Robespierre not only dreamed of placing the men of France in one uniform and the women of France in another uniform, he also considered church steeples "'undemocratic' since they were taller than other buildings" (87-88). This outright barbarism of the French Revolution led to such a majoritarian rule in that "truth" was relegated to the possession of the majority (88). It is fair to say that Tucker Carlson is a stand-alone journalist who only follows where truth leads him to these days. My own mother hates the idea that only one man could possibly be telling the truth. But truth does not belong to majorities and as more and more people give themselves to demons, the lies usually remain with the majority and the truth belongs to the minority. As Our Lord even states, "broad is the path that leads to destruction, but narrow is the path that leads to eternal life" (Matt. 7:13).

It is no surprise then that Karl Marx's own ideology was drafted from the French Revolution. "Men have often made man himself into the primitive material of money, in the shape of a slave, but they have never done this with land and soil. Such an idea could only arise in a bourgeois society, and one which was already well developed. It dates from the last third of the seventeenth century, and the first attempt to implement the idea on a national scale was made a century later, during the French bourgeois revolution." (Capital, Vol. 1, Pt. 1, Ch. 2) The theories emerging from this Revolution about absolute equality and sameness do seem rather ominous of a certain set of theories emerging today. These theories exist in the form of critical race theory. Class was the focus of the French Revolution. These were why the buildings were "undemocratic". For critical race theorists, democracy is breaking apart because of this absence of equality too. Indeed, critical race theory derives heavily from Marxist thought. Critical theory always attempts to tear down the old structures, according to Paul Kengor (The Devil and Karl Marx, 392). There is a never-ending search for a new victim. The working class no longer satisfies so Black Lives Matter finds this in perpetuating a myth about extant racism in cops and then other ideas follow suit whether it is in queer theory to attack sexual normativities or in the invented concepts of "white privilege". This is cultural Marxism.

As we move further and further away from hierarchical structures, we move further and further away from a monarchial view of the family in nature, and as such in governance. We move further and further away from nature as a result. We grow the power of the government as a consequence. We become blood-thirsty for power. As Søren Kierkegaard noted, "Is it tyranny when one wants to rule leaving the rest of us others out? No, but it is tyranny when all want to rule." (in Garff, Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography, 487). The turning point for modern culture was indeed with World War I. It started as an old-fashioned territorial dispute which blossomed into a battle to defend democracy as the United States entered in 1917. "When in March 1917 the U.S.-allied Czar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate and a new democratic-republican government was established in Russia under Kerensky, [Woodrow] Wilson was elated. With the Czar gone, the war had finally become a purely ideological conflict: of good against evil." (Hoppe, Democracy: The God That Failed, x). Everything Austria represented was inherently wicked to the American Left according to Kuehnelt-Leddihn. It "inhereited many traditions of the Holy Roman Empire (double-headed eagle, black-gold colors, etc.); it had led the Counter-Reformation, headed by the Holy Alliance, fought against the Risorgimento, suppressed the Magyar rebellion under Kossuth..., and had morally supported the monarchial experiment in Mexico." (x)

Church steeples weren't just simply undemocratic to Robespierre, no. Church steeples were a sign of a monarchial culture. Thus, the age of regress naturally makes enemies with the Church and with Monarchisms throughout. For democracies, there is no greater enemy than the Church. The Church is the prize to corrupt. The Church is the prize to destroy. The Church has the greatest bounty on its head for all democracies. Is it any wonder that the Great War only became ideological upon the abdication of the Czar? Is it any wonder that Marx held religion as the opium of the masses and an obstacle to his Communist philosophy? Is it any wonder that Robespierre held the steeples as being built too high and as a subsequent obstacle to his regime of "equality"? We are in an era of regress. An era given over to a cult of demons. We should conclude here with the Bl. Alcuin, "Neither should we listen to those who say, 'The voice of the people is the voice of God,' for the tumultuousness of the masses is always closer to insanity!"