THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GUN CONTROL (AND OTHER POLITICAL AFFECTATIONS)

by Michael Parish

In America, the discussion of political issues is an endless and perpetually inconclusive cycle: Party mouthpieces formulate stock arguments, and the media disseminates them to the rank and file, who then absorb and regurgitate them. They are then repeated ad nauseam whenever a well-publicized event returns the question to the limelight. Solutions are never discovered. This has been standard procedure for at least the last three generations, which, incapable of seeing outside the narrow parameters of bipartisan debate, accept it as the norm. But why?

Politics is not an academic discipline and does not involve the abstractions of that milieu; its matters and its terms are direct and concrete. Its subjects are familiar on a functional level to the majority of the population. If objective truth does exist then the questions being asked in the political milieu should end in objective answers. If Americans can calculate solutions to algebraic equations, they should certainly be able to do the same for poverty, crime, energy, and healthcare.

This has not happened, from which I infer two things: (1) that Americans are truly ignorant of what they speak about politically; and (2) their reason for engaging in political debate is self and partisan promotion, not the actual search for solutions.

LIBERAL HEGEMONY (PART TWO)

by Michael Parish

My previous post was my debut on Alternative Right, so I am surprised by the response it generated. However, I feel that I did not present my opinions in a way that was clearly understood, so have prepared the following not only in response, but to further articulate my basic premise and expand upon it.

My intention was to illustrate the process by which one ideology becomes dominant in a society. Its nominal opponents attempt to retain relevance by phrasing their arguments as answers to, rather than criticisms of, its concerns. Soon they function not as its opponents but its adjuncts. Through the conscious forfeit of its critics, the ideology passively absorbs and redesigns its competition in its own image. I realize I did not sufficiently describe the set of social conditions in which this occurs. They are as follows:

LIBERAL HEGEMONY

by Michael Parish

When an ideology gains control of the institutions that shape opinion, it is said to have gained hegemony. At this point, something happens to public discourse. As the tenets of the ideology are considered objective and not subjective, all contenders must embrace them to keep their corner of the ring. Its ends cannot be contested, only their means. One cannot propose an altogether different value system, but only critique ways of realizing it.

Rather than clashing ideologies, we have clashing methods. The result is the assimilation of all competition into the dominant ideology and their reduction to a shadow of it. There are thus no options beyond minor variations in the same type of thought. In Western democracies, this is the current condition in regards to Liberalism.