The Wrong Side of History

August 2, 2020 Hunter Wallace History, Progressives 16

I woke up this morning with this idea.

Progressives are on the “wrong side of history.”

I can’t tell you how many times that I have been told this over the past two decades. I’m on the “wrong side of history.” It is the modern progressive form of the old Whig theory of history. The Nazis were on the wrong side of history. We’re Nazis. Therefore, we’re on the wrong side of history.

In this absurd worldview, history in the inevitable march toward freedom, equality, justice and progress. It moves in a linear fashion. The modern day progressive liberal is the summit of human history. They are morally superior to everyone who ever lived before and most people living today. In fact, we are almost criminal in their eyes for standing in the way and doubting the forward march of human progress.

Alternatively, history doesn’t move in this linear fashion. It moves in a circle or more accurately a coiled spiral. There are cycles in history and broad divisions into ages – Renaissance (worldly), Reformation (heavenly), Enlightenment (secular intellect and materialism), Romantic (secular emotion and idealism), Antiromantic (repression of spirit) – in which some idea or another is dominant, which is always a reaction to the previous age and takes the form of an elite consensus. This elite consensus always becomes decadent after about 80 to 100 years have passed when the generation that forged it during the last crisis finally dies off. It is shot through with dry rot and combusts in a new crisis that ends each age.

  • The Crisis of the Late Middle Ages which culminated in the Avignon Papacy and the Black Death unleashed the relaxed wordliness of the Renaissance Cycle.
  • Dissatisfaction with the relaxed wordliness of the Late Renaissance and humanism with its dawning awareness of the corruption of religious texts over time unleashed the renewal of piety and the heavenly focus of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation era.
  • The bloodbath that was the Thirty Years War and the English Civil War and the slow development of Western science in the Late Reformation era unleashed the secularism and materialism of the Enlightenment Cycle with its skepticism of faith and confidence in reason and the intellect.
  • The bloodbath that was the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars in the name of abstract universal liberty unleashed the Romantic era with its emphasis on secular emotion, folk cultures and idealism. It led to nationalism which culminated in the World Wars.
  • The bloodbath that was the World Wars of the 20th century which was caused by the extremes of nationalism led to the Antiromantic era and its repression of spirit, self loathing, disenchantment and loss of confidence in Western civilization. It lead to antiracism which led to decolonization and demographic change which culminated in … ?

At the end of every age, the elite consensus begins to feel tiresome and stifling to some while others take it to new extremes and dissolve and combust the existing social order in the process. The relaxed wordliness of the Renaissance Cycle turned the Papacy into a commodity. The splintering of Christendom and the Wars of Religion led to a sense of exhaustion with religious doctrine and the turn toward materialism and secularism. Napoleon setting Europe ablaze in the name of universal ideals turned the mind toward what was particular about each nation. The World Wars destroyed the self confidence of Western civilization and led to the loss of spirit, deracination and demographic replacement.

The idea that progressive liberalism is the summit of all human history and the future will be the eternal perpetuation and further development of the present is not suggested by history. Instead, the elite consensus of our times, which is the Antiromantic era, will be taken to an unsustainable extreme like in the Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment and Romantic era before it. It will become rotten. The whole structure of society will become the kindling. Fanaticism from within the existing elite consensus will set it ablaze. It is never the “fringe” that plunges a society into a crisis. Fringe ideas or reactive undercurrents tend to advance during and after a crisis in the context of a new social mood.

101 years passed between Luther’s 95 theses and the opening of the Thirty Years War. 138 years passed between Thomas Hobbes publishing Leviathan and the start of the French Revolution. 99 years passed between the final surrender of Napoleon and the beginning of World War I. In America, 100 years passed between the defeat of the Spanish Armada and the Glorious Revolution. 87 years passed between the Glorious Revolution and the American Revolution. 78 years passed between the end of the American Revolution and the War Between the States. 76 years passed between the end of the War Between the States and the American entry into World War II after Pearl Harbor.

It has been 75 years since the American victory in World War II. The dry rot of the postwar consensus – liberalism, antiracism, cosmopolitanism and modernism – is really beginning to show. It is curdling into the familiar toxic form – the sort of extremism that produced the Jacobins and the Nazis – the former being an exaggeration of the Enlightenment ideal and the latter an exaggeration of the Romantic ideal. The Jacobins brought out the guillotine. The Nazis brought out the concentration camps. In contrast, the Woke want to subject our entire society to Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic couch and put us all through mass therapy in which we will plead guilty and confess our “sins.” These “sins” are the -isms and -phobias which were all made up in the 20th century to repress our spirit. In their eyes, our very being results in the “systemic oppression” of minorities. We can’t stop ourselves from holding them down.

These people who are the exaggeration of the Antiromantic ideal say that their goal is to destroy America. They will. Their fanaticism will be cheered on by established elites. The self loathing, disenchantment, cynicism and hatred of their own country can end in no other way. Beyond them in the mid-21st century after the crisis into which they will plunge us all lies the next age, which as always will be a negation of theirs: the Age of Spirit, the reenchantment, reraciantion and revitalization of the West.

About Hunter Wallace 12392 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

15 Comments

  1. I came across this quote from Spurgeon’s Morning and Evening Devotional regarding Genesis 1:5. I need to recite these words over and over whenever i despair.

    “Learn first to be content with this divine order, and be willing, with Job, to receive evil from the hand of the Lord as well as good. Study next, to make the outgoings of the morning and the evening to rejoice. Praise the Lord for the sun of joy when it rises, and for the gloom of evening as it falls. There is beauty both in sunrise and sunset, sing of it, and glorify the Lord. Like the nightingale, pour forth thy notes at all hours. Believe that the night is as useful as the day. The dews of grace fall heavily in the night of sorrow. The stars of promise shine forth gloriously amid the darkness of grief. Continue thy service under all changes. If in the day thy watchword be labour, at night exchange it for watch. Every hour has its duty, do thou continue in thy calling as the Lord’s servant until He shall suddenly appear in His glory. My soul, thine evening of old age and death is drawing near, dread it not, for it is part of the day; and the Lord has said, “I will cover him all the day long.”

    • “There are cycles in history and broad divisions into ages – Renaissance (worldly), Reformation (heavenly), Enlightenment (secular intellect and materialism), Romantic (secular emotion and idealism), Antiromantic (repression of spirit) – in which some idea or another is dominant, which is always a reaction to the previous age and takes the form of an elite consensus.”

      HW, this only works if you believe the West itself to be valid. Orthodoxy (and therefore, Russia- for one) does NOT consider you valid. We consider the West insane.

      “The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.”- Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius

      “Christian theology has left an indelible imprint, a presupposition, which permeates the “popular histor-iographical consciouness” of the Second (Western) Europe, with its persistent division of History into the tripartite scheme delineated by various sigla: “Ancient History, Mediaeval history, Modern History” or “Classical Ages, Dark or Middle Ages, Modern Age” being the two most popular. The origin of this discernible form is, not surprisingly, the Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Ghost—or rather, the dialectically formulated and deconstructed “Trinity” of the post-Augustinian Christian West. This Augus-tinian-Trinitarian civilization, which in these pages is designated “The Second Europe,” was erected on the foundation of the Orthodox and Eastern Europe, which is similarly designated “the First Europe.” The basic thesis of these essays is thus that there are Two Europes, Eastern and Western, First and Second respectively, and that both are the effects and consequences of very different and ultimately con-tradictory theological presuppositions and methods. These essays argue that these different and mutually exclusive presuppositions and methods have permeated every facet of legal, social, and cultural conventions. But to say this is to say nothing new, nor terribly original, and certainly nothing terribly upsetting to the “multiculturalist” or “Judeo-Christian Conservative.” The thesis of the Two Europes is explored in these essays from the presupposition that the Western, Second Europe is derivative and aberrant. ”
      – http://www.anthonyflood.com/farrellghdprolegomena.htm

      With that insight, BOTH the apostate West, AND the Antifa/Jewish anarchic Weltanschuung, are ‘on the wrong side of history.’

  2. A Hunter classic quote in this article

    Preach it, brother!

    “Beyond them, in the mid-21st century, after the crisis into which they will plunge us all, lies the next age, which as always will be a negation of theirs: The Age of Spirit – the re-enchantment, re-racination and re-vitalisation of the West.”

    (Just to note for Hunter that ‘reracination’ is mis-spelled in initial version of the above … Have repunctuated etc the quote in a more across-the-pond style of English.)

  3. This wave and cycle business is mostly Marxist in origin, and operates on the Marxist teaching of historical materialism, also called by some historical determinism.

    Nikolai Kondratieff was the major Russian proponent of long waves both in historical development, and, economics. Kondratieff was shot in 1938 during the great purge.

    Personally, I think historical determinism/materialism is kookie, but, it is true that the past is prologue, and not in the Shakespearian sense either. LOL.

  4. “Progressives are on the “wrong side of history.”

    This is excellent trolling trick also. I remember when they pushed their stuff in the Eastern Europe and the people calmly explained that faggot marriage and diversity and multicult are communist coexistence forms like Gulag or Kolkhoz or Red Army base and must be left to the mad dark twentieth century.

    Western white liberals were mad as hell because nobody trained those NPCs to deal with such arguments. Arguing that genetic white liberal issues and they themselves are ghost from the past drive them crazy.

    I fought decade ago with group of EU school specialists. The promoted “child friendly education” I told them that we had this already in the Medieval dark ages and ended in 1897 when functional reading and writing went above 92% and illiteracy was declared extinct. Those EU specialists faces went blue.

    Blaming communists that they are reactionaries from the past who fighting against progress and change pisses them off so it i good to remind them this every possible moment.

    Diversity is nothing more than noble savage myth from 17th century when uneducated people believed witchcraft and all other stupidities . It is very sad that some people education is still 400 years behind the rest of humanity,

    When somebody start screaming about college degree, the it is good to remind this person that Stalin called western educated people not useful geniuses but useful idiots and ask, did Stalin ever called working class idiots ? Even working class Hitler supporters for propaganda purposes ?

    And so on.

  5. In 12 years National Socialism accomplished more than the anglo yankees or their brothers in Dixie did in 150 years, and they were able to get it done while being at war with the anglozionist and (((ussr))) for almost half that time.

    National Socialism isn’t an extremist “fringe” ideology. It’s a pan-european port in the storm.

  6. We’re going through a promotion of nationalism phase in the empires rising to replace ours. The Chinese and the Russians are generally staying out of the internal politics of the countries they’re expanding into, which allows for nationalist aspirations among the natives. The growing empires get influence and capital, the locals get infrastructure and development they can’t develop on their own. It’s a repeat of colonialism, without the political attachment that leads to turd worlders eventually invading the imperial home countries en masse.

  7. There is enormous dissonance between two major things going on. 1. Earth is getting hotter on its surface. This is wrecking all sorts of human endeavors. 2. People from tropical areas, bred in hot areas, are moving en masse from their homelands to areas that, at least part of the year, are cold. This means demands for things like minimum winter heating laws in rental units that are insanely high, like 74 degrees, so the tropical people don’t have to “freeze.” Any white person would just put on a sweater when it gets cold, instead of turning up the heat.

    If you’re antiwhite, meaning pro-hot weather, wouldn’t you cheer both developments? But they don’t cheer number 1. Why?

  8. In my view, history (and all the other “could have been” timelines that weren’t followed) is more like an infinitely branching fractal tree. The side of history we are on is just a consequence of many convergent choices, the sequence of which could very much be, and in my opinion currently is, a very bad timeline, and thus the “wrong” side of history. There are an infinite number of branches in that fractal pattern that would have created a different timeline.

    For instance. The choice of Lincoln to not send slaves back to Africa or to set aside land for them to start their own colony…this was a bad convergence of choices and set us on a bad timeline.

    Now. If you think of a timeline like you would a path, we all have the ability to recognize that the path we are on is not getting us anywhere, that it was a mistake to take this path. Think of getting off the wrong exit on the interstate and winding up on your way to Montgomery when you meant to be going to Atlanta. You wouldn’t continue driving to Montgomery. You would correct your mistake, find the nearest exit or detour, and get back on the right path.

    The liberal progressive is incapable of seeing that they missed the best exit or picked the least favorable path based on their GPS data. They will follow their “progressive” trajectory right over a cliff if that’s where it is taking them. They’ll never question the choices of the past and never consider correcting mistakes.

    In fact, I think they really believe that the path we are on is some kind of destiny, set in stone, and that path is unquestionably the best most moral path, as ordained by some higher power. They don’t believe in the same God that I believe in, the one who gave us free will.

    • @memebro great phrasing. Perhaps in saner times many of us would just be slightly right of center. I have become “far right” due to the runaway leftist, communist, anarchistic lurch into their perceived utopia. Their utopia is petty, juvenile and destructive, the epitome of evil.

      If I had a small brush fire in my yard I’d be content to reach for the small fire extinguisher mounted in my garage. However, if the fire quickly spread and was in the process of engulfing my garage I’d need a larger fire extinguisher, or most likely, the fire department. I’m of the opinion that a fascist/ns counterweight is required, a force equal to or greater than theirs. The left is a raging inferno without any opposition besides us. We’re small in number and lack the power to have much of an impact. It appears the best and perhaps only route available to us is to enlighten and protect those innocents close to us, and strap in for a long ride on the tiger.

  9. These protests in London are not helping the Labour Party efforts to appeal to a winning majority.

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