Last Stand of Romanticism
I have noticed a growing ideological divide over the past decade or so, in a manner most people whom I have encountered are oblivious to. It’s not merely straightforward political polarization that is at play; there is giant wedge between romanticism vs materialism, and it underpins everything else.
I do not mean romanticism as in taking a love interest out riverside in the moonlight, having a picnic in a summer night and drinking 10 year old wine from a generational vineyard together beneath the stars, but rather the Enlightenment era-concept. Romanticism is inherently reactionary to some extent, even the early “egalitarian” liberal forms of it have shades of this sentiment. That once used to be associated with liberalism, but also is versatile enough to be associated with monarchy and later fascism, among other things. As of now, I do not believe it could be anything further from what is now called liberalism, and likely will never be close to it again beyond solely for reminiscences’ sake. It could loosely be called neo-romanticism, if you will, although that is less explicitly political and a rather broad category including various artistic movements, which nonetheless are still tied to what I am talking about. Having fantasies about the future is not intrinsically romantic either.
This shift has been more general post-WWII, but only began to have it done away completely during Barack Obama-era neoliberalism. His campaign slogan, famously, was “HOPE”. That was the messaging behind his entire campaign: offering something new, supposedly a better world. While economically speaking, Obama wasn’t “leftist” – I would say he falls left on a pure left-right axis - his campaign was based on vague promises of economic and social change. It is one of the last times I remember that there was a major candidate in the Western world who was promising good things on a socially leftist basis, as a strong focal point. The final time I remember this was with Justin Trudeau’s campaign in 2015. After both of their respective campaigns, their liberal idealism quickly soured into very transparent cynical cronyism with the same trappings of what they campaigned on.
Doom and gloom is strongly associated with contemporary left-wing rhetoric, whether it be part of the establishment or not. There isn’t even a false sense of optimism offered anymore like the previous era like during the previous era I mentioned. Lockdowns, vaccines, “saving the planet” compulsion of tolerance and diversity, all of this done with a sense of doom rather than real optimism. There is no utopian “think of a better world”. Gay sex “fully-automated luxury communism” and incessant fecal matter and references to garbage and waste jokes as an ironic of form of coping do not offer anything either.
It’s a broad mindset of “we’re fucked and you’re going to like wallowing in it” or a “yeah we could do better as a society if more people had sex changes and didn’t believe race exists”. This is despite how many things go in their favour socially, the world is getting worse and somehow moving further away from their vision overall. It’s a severe form of cognitive dissonance. There’s no shining future that it offers, and the amount of people who identify with either leftism typically show this in their character and mental state. Even Obama-tier liberalism, which is still relevant under former VP now POTUS Joe Biden, just does not offer the sparkle that it once did; it’s a much more dour, defeatist view.
Let us now compare this to the right-wing. Mainstream right-wing politics are the same as ever, often pulling to the left, although there is some recent backlash with overplaying hands, e.g. capitol protests in the US, trucker protests in Canada, Roe vs. Wade overturning in the US, even if those are entirely different with different institutional effects and outcomes. Mainstream right-wing politics tend to offer a few more morsels of optimism when it comes to populism, but still offer little way in the way of significant meaningful change. Most of it is in effect another form of liberalism but with window dressing.
There is a sense of pervasive blackpilling in the more fringe right wing, as with the doom and gloom I mentioned earlier when discussing leftism. However, both “the good old days” and “better future than has never been tried but could be” are sentiments held by the right wing. Even with lack of power and events and situations frequently going against them, right-wingers have a much more specific romantic vision of how the future ought to play out, whether it being reactionary or a more evolutionary view of certain systems.
There is a strong sense of love and passion about what they want, removed from the debauched sterility oppositional alternatives, and even if this future differs somewhat depending one’s ideological orientation. Perhaps I am somewhat blinded, but I do not see anything bright and future about anything the contemporary left-wing has to offer socially; it is fundamentally about making everyone the lowest common denominator of miserable, regardless of social or economic status. I used to have some sympathies towards it myself when I was younger, so it’s not as though it’s completely foreign to me to be unable to understand this. What is presented now is like some bizarre and maddening funhouse mirror of not-too-distant times.
There is no fulfilment of the soul that is to be offered beyond pretending that subjectivist morality is now objective, and even as various experiments fail over all the place, they say they will do something right this time about something that would never work. The guiding force this about wanting to force someone to love something that they hate and punishing people for having what they see as inappropriate emotions towards their ideal.
It’s not a question of individualism vs collectivism either: no matter the extent of individualism or collectivism one believes in politically on the right wing, the point behind romanticism is a collective spirit, something different than material circumstances such as being a “working class” or a “comrade”, or fantasizing about decapitating rich people. Revolution should not be an end goal for a society in itself: it is short-sighted and proves lack of vision for what one wants beyond it, and does not necessitate stability or maintenance of the new status quo. Especially if the would-be revolutionaries do not take into consideration about what consequences there will be afterwards, along with who is spared and who is punished.
The ultimate point I am making is that there is a fight or die sentiment inherent to right-wing romanticism. Nobody knows where exactly the future will go or how the tides will turn, or if certain factually correct narratives will be buried from history and subsumed under a deluge of lies, like many others before then. Various somewhat similar worlds envisioned are not something that will ever be treated as nicely as it is in the future if it comes to being erased. Even if it is looking at certain things through rose-tinted glasses, romanticism is about acceptance of flaws and that one should die on a hill that that is meaningful and prideful to them, rather than endlessly scurrying around and shifting one’s principles constantly to suit the current sociocultural environment.