Professor Thomas Main is an anachronism.
This is how he is perceived by the “lumpen intelligentsia” of illiberalism. The man is a relic of his time and place which is a bygone age. What do I mean by that?
“Normal” for Thomas Main is late 20th century New York.
It is America and the world since FDR and World War II. It is America under the thrall of the “mainstream media.” It is a world in which the United States is a liberal democracy” and “the leader of the Free World.” It is a world in which Liberalism as a public philosophy is ascendant. It is a world in which policy decisions are largely made by technocrats and politics is the narrow window of debate that happens within the professional class which dominates both political parties. It is a world in which Christianity is no longer dominant and morality has become synonymous with the -isms and -phobias and White racial identity is taboo and repressed and blacks are exalted as sacred beings and racial etiquette revolves around how not to offend them. It is a world in which antiracism, modernism and cosmopolitanism have been absorbed into liberalism and in which these values have been imposed on the nation by the hegemonic New York media.
If we could put Thomas Main in a time machine and send him back to Victorian America like Marty McFly, he would be shocked by its “extremism” and illiberalism which was the norm in those days. “Liberalism” didn’t mean in the 19th century what it means today. “Democracy” didn’t mean the same thing either. Main wouldn’t feel comfortable in the America of the 1880s. He would be shocked by its “vituperative” press and mass politics and racism and sexism. No one had read Freud yet. Cherished norms and guardrails of Our Democracy didn’t exist.
As time moves on and Thomas Main’s world comes crashing down, we are confronted with the “rise of illiberalism.” He sounds like one of the Victorians at the end of their era when they were losing their grip on power which was being dissolved by film and radio. We’ve been over this before here how the previous Victorian mainstream died in the 1920s. The current 20th century liberal “mainstream” emerged in the late 1910s and early 1920s.
The liberals of old are the conservatives of today. Today’s liberals of today are more on par with Marxism/ communism
Good summary. You get the sense that Main’s worldview was formed by the time he was fifteen or something, maybe because he personally witnessed someone call a black a nigger and he decided then and there that ‘racism’ is so wrong it must be eradicated from the earth. And he really hasn’t updated his views since. That’s why the anti-white illiberal left is essentially invisible to him. They just burned down half the country, turned liberal norms upside down virtually overnight and are hellbent on the toxification of whiteness, but Main can’t quite get himself to notice.