Practical Applications

September 6, 2020 Hunter Wallace Aesthetics, Culture, Liberalism, Modernism, Progressives 43

Is there any practical benefit to studying all of this and tracing its history aside from satisfying my own morbid curiosity about the origins and causes of our decline?

Let all of this soak in:

I’ve been developing a new perspective on this.

We live in the Modern age. Modernist values are culturally ascendant in our world. In the United States, we can trace the roots of this back to the 1910s. It was around this time that the Victorian mainstream of the 19th century came under assault by Modernist insurgents. The old mainstream perished in the Crisis of the World Wars and was replaced by the current Modernist mainstream.

The following excerpt comes from Henry F. May’s The End of American Innocence, 1912-1917:

“The most sustained effort to develop May’s specific version of the Victorian-to-Modern transition has been Singal’s The War Within, interpreting a distinctive group of American intellectuals:” white Southerners deeply socialized into the genteel culture. Studies of other intellectuals sometimes take for granted that a transition of this sort has taken place, but are more immediately directed at other transitions, including from a producer’s culture to a consumer’s culture, from individualism to communitarianism, from sexism to feminism, from provincialism to cosmopolitanism, from racism to anti-racism, and from Eurocentrism to multiculturalism. “Divide studies,” moreover, do not exhaust the prodigious literature on modern American intellectual history, much of which tells stories not of grand transitions but of conginuting projects, conflicts, and dilemmas.”

There is a tendency in our circles to focus obsessively on “who” and not “what” and to get even that wrong. Instead, we should be focusing on the “what,” freezing it and ridiculing the values and beliefs of the mainstream. We’re in a similar moment of cultural transition.

The Moderns defined themselves against the Victorians. We are defining ourselves against the Moderns. You can already see that in the disgust in some of the cartoons above. In order to triumph and become the new mainstream, the avant-garde savagely attacked their genteel enemy.

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43 Comments

  1. Ironic post as I spent two hours on Twitter and have seen these, which left me thinking which of the several “GENRES” makes me more ill……..

    The weak self loathing white man happy to grovel about his level of disdain for his ancestors and Western Culture in general while celebrating his wife’s decision to be a paid whore

    The average at best looking woman who now thinks of herself as model as she exploits the previously discussed self loathing white man along with shut ins, incels, and every other type of man under 50 who feels deracinated and alone in the hollow husk of a society

    The “counter culturist” who puffs their chest as a rebel fighting “the man” as their non binary trans black power ideology is financed by said man

    The “Conservative Republican” owning the Demonrats by being gayer, more anti-racist, and demanding we take in more legal immigrants

    • I assume it goes without saying that “Loving Israel” is included in all these brave groups

  2. I believe that the so called Anglo-Saxons aka Isaac’s sons should have stayed with their trinkets and never enter politics, religion, culture. Because the disaster spread and it’s irreversible.
    It’s trying to play a you role which they are not suited for? Nothing good can come out of it, and nothing did – as is evident by historical accounts all too well as well.

    • The garbage originated in Europe where it had been stirring since Baudelaire’s time in the 1850s and 1860s. It had spread wide and deep on the continent before coming the Atlantic to America

      • Correct. One of the more shocking subjects I researched was the Haitian “revolt” as I always assumed it was a spur of the moment violent rebellion, but to the contrary it was brewing for well over a decade as the newly “enlightened” French, drug on mythical notions such as Universal brotherhood and Egalitarianism, began “empowering” the African slaves and giving them a role in leadership and policing, but even more damaging teaching them the same notions they believed.

        This resulted in various flare ups, various puppet black and mulattos decked out in fancy uniforms taught they were the equal of if not the better to their French counterparts. As is usual, the mulattos confused to their identity and which side they fell on, like Kapernick took ringleader roles. To which they were also brutally tortured raped and slaughtered along with the white French they so hated.

        This predates Americana by a few centuries

      • the so called Anglos on the Right should look around and try to be dispassionate and self-critical when analysing things.
        I’m Venetian and I despise our vulgarity, crudeness and insatiable greed. Even the language I don’t like. Shakespeare chose very badly the place to set his Romeo and Juliet nonsense
        I like though the general anti-illiberal views, anti-political correctness and xenophobia. The self-
        analyses reveals bad and good points.

        • I’m being dispassionate and self critical.

          Modernism did not originate in the United States. It got a late start here in Chicago and New York City after 1907. It was a European movement in the arts that developed in France in the late 19th century.

      • American radical abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison and Charles Sumner were openly anti-white in the current sense long before modernists had any influence anywhere or even existed. Most significantly, they a huge following among average, non-elite middle class whites in the North going back to the 1820’s. There was a mass movement of anti-white politics in the American North, based around liberal Puritan, Quaker and Methodist preachers that began to shift our culture in an anti-white direction even when many of the Founders were still alive.

        From Wikipedia on Charles Sumner:

        “Sumner repeatedly tried to remove the word “white” from naturalization laws. He introduced bills to that effect in 1868 and 1869, but neither came to a vote. On July 2, 1870, Sumner moved to amend a pending bill in a way that would strike the word “white” wherever in all Congressional acts pertaining to naturalization of immigrants. On July 4, 1870, he said: “Senators undertake to disturb us … by reminding us of the possibility of large numbers swarming from China; but the answer to all this is very obvious and very simple. If the Chinese come here, they will come for citizenship or merely for labor. If they come for citizenship, then in this desire do they give a pledge of loyalty to our institutions; and where is the peril in such vows? They are peaceful and industrious; how can their citizenship be the occasion of solicitude?” He accused legislators promoting anti-Chinese legislation of betraying the principles of the Declaration of Independence: “Worse than any heathen or pagan abroad are those in our midst who are false to our institutions.” Sumner’s bill failed, and from 1870 to 1943, and in some cases as late as 1952, Chinese and other Asians were ineligible for naturalized U.S. citizenship.[64] Sumner remained a champion of civil rights for blacks. He co-authored the Civil Rights Act of 1875 with John Mercer Langston[65] and introduced the bill in the Senate on May 13, 1870. The bill was passed a year after his death by Congress in February 1875 and signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant on March 1, 1875. It was the last civil rights legislation for 82 years until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. The Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional in 1883 when it decided a group of cases known as the Civil Rights Cases.[66]”

        Many modernist cultural figures, some of whom you discussed, were white supremacists, anti-Semites and right wing politically. You should carefully analyze the racial and political beliefs of historical figures before condemning them. Walter Gropius, for example, was not anti-white, but he was anti-Semitic. He even joined the NSDAP, although the NSDAP leaders didn’t like his modern architecture in theory, in practice they built most buildings according to his techniques, like everyone else in the world did since 1930. You can blame him for changing architecture, but understand that before modern construction techniques, most people in the West lived in homes that would not be legal to live in today. Those beautiful old buildings that right wing people like so much only served a wealthy urban elite. Average white people lived in tiny shacks or windowless tenement rooms with no bathrooms in the 19th Century. How’s that for populism? Only modern techniques of building lowered the cost of housing so that everyone could afford a clean, safe, pleasant home to live in. If we built structures today with the same construction methods as 19th Century neoclassical or beaux arts buildings, they would cost as much as aircraft carriers.

        This narrative about modernism is reductionist. Anti-white politics in America rose with the Second Great Awakening, crested in the years after the Civil War and then were displaced by a pro-white backlash among elites, inspired largely by Darwinism and Nietzschean philosophy overtaking the influence of liberal Protestantism. That backlash brought the Chinese Exclusion Act, the end of Reconstruction and the racialist era.

        Arch anti-modernist Evangelical Fundamentalist leader DL Moody was a massive supporter of racial integration and deeply hostile to racialism. His movement’s influence on our culture was massive and played a critical role in breaking white solidarity among culturally conservative Americans. Evangelical Fundamentalism’s Christian Zionism made American culture uniquely penetrable by Jews, by fomenting pro-Jewish attitudes not only among elites, but among the rural masses, who served a check on Jewish power in other societies.

        Prohibition was the key issue that moved young WASP Americans towards modernist cultural values. You would have done the same thing had you been subjected to a ban on drinking beer in college by elderly feminist crazies. Post collapse white nationalists like William Pierce and Revilo P. Oliver abhorred Prohibitionists and held that movement largely responsible for the collapse of WASP pride that happened in the first half of the 20th Century.

        Many Remnant egalitarian classical liberal intellectuals, liberal Protestant preachers and anti-racialist, anti-Darwinist, Fundamentalist Protestants inside of the establishment and some socialist radicals, using ideas that predate modernism, were undermining white solidarity in America during the entire period from 1880 to 1910. It’s not a simple matter of European modernism bursting into America and making everything go bad.

        • Blaming the Prohibition movement? As a lifelong, principled teetotaler, I find that “reasoning” absurd. Pubs closed and alcoholism disappeared during the Welsh Revival and the common people were renewed not demoralized. Have you considered that social, and finally legal ACCEPTANCE of the drug alcohol fueled the moral and cultural decline?

          • The common people rebelled against Prohibition by electing liberals who opposed it in a series of epic landslide elections. Prohibitionism was a feminist movement based on virtue signaling and a false consensus that resembled the structure of modern political correctness, where most people opposed it, but felt social pressure from elites to stay passive. Prohibition empowered minorities politically, economically, socially and culturally and cause a concomitant decline in WASP power, wealth, social prestige and cultural influence. This is the view that white nationalists and the anti-imperialist racialists that white nationalism is descended from always had. Prohibitionism grew out of the semitic spirt of puritan style religion and is totally alien to European culture, which is why it was rejected so resoundingly by the American people.

        • Re: “Prohibitionism was a feminist movement”:

          It was claimed that granting women’s suffrage would make prohibition possible; however it was always obvious that the feminine tendency is toward disorder not discipline and that their vote would be harmful to public morality. Two distinct, opposite objectives of order and disorder are conflated.

          Abstinence from alcohol and other recreational drugs is not “semitic” and a “puritan style.religion” is not semitic either. The real “semitic spirit” is to break down the moral resistance of a society or nation to drug use, even while punishing it (as in the endless “war on drugs”) and make huge profits on both the supply and the incarceration.

  3. “modernist” is HW’s code for

    Jewish. Slezkine (a kike), in his book THE JEWISH CENTURY, admits all of this.

    • Unfortunately, no.

      America’s most important Modernists were Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. The former was charged with treason after World War II where he was captured in Italy after supporting the fascists. The latter became a High Anglican conservative and British subject. Pound and Eliot were Right Modernists. It is the Left Modernists whose roots trace back to Greenwich Village who gave us the modern Left.

      • Ezra Pound, was not on any kind of a list, Pound did a “notice me, notice me” thing, and he got noticed. LOL. Ended up in a mental hospital.

        He only ever wrote a couple of poems that might be construed as anti-Semitic.

        Pound’s big contribution to the world of original ideas, was his social credit scheme.

        His greatest poetic refrain was, “our South stinks”…

  4. We have to ‘hold the country together’ as best we can with calculated votes and campaigning WHILE creating an enlarged all white – no freaks allowed – Confederacy 2. New Constitution new laws new programs and penalties with teeth AND with enforcement squads – a few of which would be to locate and quickly deport freaks like all those shown in this article.

    So … meanwhile, we do have to vote –

    https://www.naturalnews.com/2020-09-06-fourteenth-amendment-trumps-secret-weapon-electoral-college-mass-arrests.html

    • Gray- I hope you are correct. If it is so, and/or God grants us a homeland of our own once more apart from these disunited states, I will gladly pull a trigger as part of a corporate citizen militia, should I be asked to do so, the better to speedily remove these antichrists, these animal hominids from this plane of existence within that nation’s new boundaries, in order to ‘rid the land of the evil thereof.’

      “I will make a covenant of peace with my people and drive away the dangerous animals from the land. Then they will be able to camp safely in the wildest places and sleep in the woods without fear.” Ezek. 34:24 NLT.

      “He makes peace at your borders; He fills you with the finest wheat.” Ps. 147:14

      “…the language of “rights”, whether human or national, is a Western language deriving from the French revolution: it has no place in discussions of God’s judgements about the nations. “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof”, and He gives it to whom He wills- temporarily and on trust. If we are believers, then we know that God changes the boundaries of the nations in accordance with His justice and for the sake of the salvation of the peoples –all the peoples – living in them, not because of any specious “rights”. Do the Jews have the right to rule present-day Israel? No they do not! Not even the King of Israel, the Lord Jesus Christ admitted them that right before His death, having given “to Caesar what is Caesar’s”; still less did He accord them that right after they had killed Him, but scattered them in exile across the face of the earth.” – Vladimir Moss

      The people should be led, not followed, as God has ordained… Those who say, ‘The voice of the people is the voice of God,’ are not to be listened to, for the unruliness of the mob is always close to madness. – Deacon Alcuin of York to Charlemagne

      • And ya know the really awesome thing about it Fr. John + ? (((They))) want a restructured America – for their own scummy reasons – we want a restructured America AND THE NEGROS EVEN WANT THEIR OWN STATE!!! It’s time to get the restructuring conversation going. Win win win.

        We can do it peacefully. Transition nice n easy without Civil War II.

      • I’ll give Alcuin some credit for this much better advice to Charlemagne, regarding his policy of forcing pagans to be baptized, and influencing him to repeal the death penalty for paganism: “Faith is a free act of the will, not a forced act. We must appeal to the conscience, not compel it by violence. You can force people to be baptized, but you cannot force them to believe.”

  5. Communitarianism fails because its’ proponents arrived there through being radical individualists dissatisfied with the nonstop self-indulgence of it all. To make a collective movement stick, there needs to be basic principles all can easily understand and adhere to, like the Golden Rule. That emerged into acceptance out of Christianity having influence over the West. Without a coherent religious and philosophical basis for a civilization, it can be pulled in any or all directions. If the moral center collapses, so does the society.

  6. Decades ago, we tried to warn our people. We were ridiculed, ostracized, many jailed, had our lives ruined, some even murdered, and some of those were murdered by the state, to the satisfaction of our own people.

    Now, an obscene mind poison, backed up by communists with endless money, is mainstream, while the people we tried to warn are quietly horrified, terrified into near stasis. Yet, the vast majority of those people still refuse to face some brutal truths.

    Now, Western Civilization grows weaker by the day, and for White people, there is nowhere left to run to.
    Trump is the last RINO president, probably the last White one, too. If Biden is installed, he will not count, since the entire world knows he is cognitively incapable, but even in his most lucid moments, he is nothing but a traitor to the White race, and will preside over our destruction.

    It does not matter what type of “movement” White people try to come up with, going forward, there is only one way our people will survive. There are no “good” choices left, only choices.

  7. Yes and our people have fought back for many years. It seems the enemy is more focused than ever on the destruction of White Christian Civilization. We Must Retake Everything! Deo Vindice !

  8. Nemo: Romeo and Juliet was set in Verona. I think you’re confusing it with The Merchant of Venice. Why wouldn’t you like it? Always one of my favorite plays. Beautiful language and character struggle, although in the last couple of centuries, the Shylock character is seen as the predominant, which I disagree with. I remember my Shakespeare professor debate a student who claimed the play was anti-semitic. My professor said it was not.

    As for 1910 being a year of change, Hitler agreed. ‘Up to 1910 we displayed an extraordinary high level in our artistic achievement. After that unfortunately everything went ever more precipitously downhill.’ Interestingly enough, Virginia Woolf agreed. ‘In or about December, 1910, human character changed.’
    It was also the year Kandinsky began painting abstract, Chagall got going.

  9. Is this your new hobby now,Modernism? Before it was Yang! We get it, no need to over-analyze the hell out of it!

  10. I like modernism. I don’t hate skyscrapers or The Sydney Opera House.

    I loathe Judaized consumerism and the niggerized hedonistic materialism of this age.

    Alot of the freaks in those videos won’t survive what’s coming.

  11. These degenerate freaks are basically nihilists set adrift in a Jew-run society with no structure. In previous times they might have ended up as social outcasts and isolated malcontents. Now they are celebrated as “brave” and “non-conforming”, when in reality they are the vanguard of this new Yiddish age. They are infact, more conformist than anyone else.

    • The money is going bad because of all the debts that are unpayable. The two major cultural capitol cities of the Left, NYC and SF are being abandoned by White, tax paying, law abiding citizens and left to the darkies and freaks who cannot keep the lights on. Things are turning full circle now but the Left will not go gently into the night the way the “conservative” cucks and Republicans would.

  12. It is all in preparation for the Moshiach and those who did this to America are going to get Moshiached like you would not believe. God has his ways.

  13. This tour of modernism has already changed the way I look at history; it makes WWI look drastically — in terms of cultural shift — more pivotal than its sequel.

    Boomers typically venerate the so-called Greatest Generation. The political theology of neoliberalism centers the atrocities of WWII as a foundational event. Politics today too often degenerates into necropolitics: calling others communists and fascists, and the inevitable LARPing as communists and fascists. What if all of this stuff is bunk? The all-American Hollywood world of “Saving Private Ryan” no longer exists. Why then do we even care about WWII? Decentering WWII knocks out the mythological edifice legitimizing the current order.

    What if we have gained enough distance from the 1900s to regain a pre-WWI, pre-modernist perspective? What conclusions would we draw? What would we cherish, and what would we avoid?

    • WWII is almost out of living memory. The Japanese surrendered on Sept. 2nd, 1945 on the deck of the USS Missouri, 75 years ago. A 20 year old sailor on the USS Missouri would be 95 years old today if he is still alive. The last WWII veteran will be dead in another 10 years or so.

      The vast majority of the men who went off to war in 1941 – 1945 were what would be regarded today as 1488 neanderthal “conservatives”. They believed that a woman’s place is in the home, men go off to work to support their families, segregation is natural and good and “gay” meant happy. They believed their cause was just and they were on the side of the angels.

      If televisions were set up on the ships in the fleet in Tokyo Bay on that September morning in 1945 and the crews saw what life is like in 2020 they would have asked two excellent questions: “Who did this and how did this happen?”

        • And, like most people who are incapable of self-reflection, they would just get PO’d at you for pointing out their role in the death of Western Civilization. Most of the WW2 vets I knew, did not like their “good war”, or their sanctified roles in it, questioned. Heroes all, they have delivered us to hell, but at least they got to be proud of it…

  14. Hunter to some degree you are looking at the symptoms and not the cause. You need to go further back as you look to Europe. You need to trace the movements of philosophic thought which established the assumptions that led us here. We are only living in the extreme outcome built upon the trajectory of assumptions started in the early to mid 1500’s. This entire mess is the result of bad Metaphysical thinking. We have discarded the questions of meaning, the questions of Being and the questions of what it means to be human.

  15. America went to poo after 1848, when the Communist revolution failed in Europe, and a few million of the reds came here, and settled in the Midwest, and ruined it.

    Within a few years all the northern cities were honeycombed with Hegelian societies. These are the ones who brought us the Civil War.

    The Commie Antifa and the new Democratic Party are the children of the 48ers.

    Marcuse became a larger influence than Marx or Hegel later on. Marcuse wrote plainly that most Europeans were unfit and should be killed off. An unsurprising opinion from a member of the tribe.

    From Marcuse to Soros is not far at all. I don’t put much weight on the goy rebels, mostly homosexuals and drug addicts, then and now.

    The ones that matter control the money. The only others that matter are the remnant, what is left of the faithful Church.

    The battle hasn’t changed in 2000 years. Don’t flippantly deny their power. They are openly talking now of killing us off . We may well get what Russia got after 1917.

    The only political option left is secession. Failing secession it is inevitable that they will come to exterminate us.

    Don’t forget your heavy coat when they take you away to the FEMA Covid and Vaxx refuser camps. Maybe a Prayer Book as well, it will do you well, since you will not come out of that camp alive.

  16. There was a racialist motivation for modern art and architecture. Aesthetic modernism in architecture and the visual arts was deeply tied to feelings among Northern Europeans in the racialist era that classical Greece and Rome could not be the sole influence for their culture, as these were not the cultures of their ancestors. Since pre-Christian(ie pre-Romanized) Germanic people had no high civilization, they felt that new forms must be created that expressed the “racial soul” of Germanic peoples. German Expressionism sought to reflect this racial soul symbolically and emotionally in art rather than abide by the Greco-Roman ideal of mimesis of the natural world as guiding principal. The artists and architects who pioneered this movement were largely White nationalists, White supremacists, Nordicists and anti-Semitic racialists whose beliefs and intentions could not have been further from the liberal anti-white zeitgeist of egalitarianism that had long been part British and French intellectual culture dating back into the 1700’s.

    Aesthetic primitivism was attractive to these men precisely because their ancestors had been primitive tribal people who fought against and ultimately destroyed the Roman Empire.

    Modernism cannot be conflated with generalized anti-white attitudes, self hatred or egalitarianism. It could be argued that liberalism corrupted modernism more than modernism corrupted liberalism. Randolph Bourne was the son of a liberal Protestant minister and characterized himself as a liberal. His writings are reminiscent of the sentiments expressed by pre-modernist liberal American WASPs of the radical abolitions movement, albeit stripped of Anglo-Saxon superiority thought. Note that Anglo-Saxon superiority was often explicitly linked to Anglo-Saxon liberalism among it’s advocates going back hundreds of years. Anglos were claimed to be superior because they were liberal. In this thinking, they had little value as a people or culture apart from having liberal tendencies. That kind of argument was used against conservatives in the Anglo-Saxon world, who were accused of being secret agents of the Catholic Church or of being in conspiracy with Continental powers.

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