[observation]

There is something in what you say.

I have to say I think this conflation of altright and neonazi is lazy in the extreme. By the media and most posters here.

Democratic socialism has overlapping territory with communism but we wouldn't say Sweden == Soviet Union.

> those ideologies have at their core the idea of resisting cultural and civilizational decline. I personally think their scapegoats, theories, and solutions are all BS but they're getting somewhere because they are talking about the problem.

I find the most incisive statements are to be found among the neoreactionaries and technocommericalists, with Thiel's loosely associated Stagnation Hypothesis being compelling to me.

> The angst comes from the secondary implication that the future is not set and magic will not happen and that we are actually going to have to deal with our problems.

He says "we can't sit and wait for the movie of the future to unfold", it's the same idea.

The ray of light there is that it is put forward that our funk is to do with social changes in how we think or past civilizational technical debt. A good example of that thought from Hollywood is Interstellar.

I feel like it used to be the case that "change how we think can change who we are/what happens" used to come from the left but now it's coming from the right. The right looks at past glories and says we must change to get to something better, the left says it is all terrible and we must prevent anything from going wrong which means everything must stay the same.

There's been a weird role reversal of some sort.

> This will continue and will get worse until people get their heads out of the 20th century and start articulating new visions of the future.

I've yet to hear of an example of that from the left, the utopians have lost faith. I've listed some examples in my other post but like I said to people like Stross they likely smell of sulfur.

[api]

There are some very good criticisms from the alt-right. There are also great criticisms from the left and from the conventional right. It's easy to criticize. I always skip to "what's your solution?"

The solution offered by the alt-right is neo-monarchism and race nationalism. No thanks. Not only are these irrelevant and backward-looking but the latter is morally evil. Ironically it represents a rejection of the core of Western moral thought from Christianity through the enlightenment.

I agree to some extent with Thiel's stagnation hypothesis. I used to be really excited about him, thinking he got it and might work behind the scenes to try to re-invigorate a culture of genuine innovation in the West. But then he jumped on the alt-right horse and I lost interest.

One of the core hallmarks of a declining or at least demoralized/disillusioned civilization is looking backward. The right is now looking back to the Middle Ages, the 1930s, and the 1950s, while the left is still looking back to the 1960s. Reaction is what decline looks like.

[0x445442]

> America has a lot of problems but I would not prefer to live in Russia or Saudi Arabia.

Would you prefer to live in Japan? Like most, I consider the "alt right" to be on the margins but I also think it's healthy to challenge conventional wisdom.

Japan is not nor does it strive to be diverse and they do not have a lot of the problems the US has.

[hackermailman]

What you want then is to follow the work of Slavoj Zizek who also wants to toss all failed political ideology like 20th century communism as it consistently led to authoritarianism. He is often pushing for a new political theory age. One interesting theory was Murray Bookchin's 'Libertarian Municipalism' as it is designed to operate within a state as a horizontal not vertical power and gradually reduce the centralized control over populations https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/07/murray-bookchin-ecology-k...