Status Updates From Moldbug on Carlyle

My own grandfather was a CPUSA member, and this was certainly not his intent.

Alas, socialism can be explained in one sentence. Socialism is the last stage of democracy.

So Carlyle said to his readers: England is going to the dogs.

The Left is the faction of the professors, the scientists and the scholars, the cognitive elite. It is the faction of the true ultra-rich, the old money, the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts and Fords, and their trustafarian hipster junkie grandchildren.

Quite simply, the Carlylean likes a strong hand at the tiller. And a strong tiller, too. This taste he shares with the socialist and the fascist—his fellow enthusiasts of government power.

We are all Horatios*; this world is not in our philosophy. When we judge it without seeing it or knowing anything about it, we only reveal ourselves as fools.

*like in Hamlet

Here we start to see the prophetic powers of Carlyle.

A reactionary is not a Republican, a Democrat, or even a libertarian. It is not even a communist, a fascist, or a monarchist. It is something much older, stranger, and more powerful.

First, it is no daring literary act to exalt Carlyle as superhuman. Like Johnson, he was exalted as superhuman in his own time.

I feel I have done a reasonable job of advertising Carlyle—or, at least, explaining Carlyle.

As a royalist, I take it for granted that a good King will pursue libertarian policies, if of course they are called for.

As a post-Misesian, I am a third class of libertarian: a royalist libertarian. Which is to say, a royalist

Professor Hoppe’s Democracy: The God That Failed is still one of the best anti-democracy tracts I’ve read, and it was most certainly the first.

The Carlylean technique accepts only absolute veracity as the basis for any political strategy.

Right is right; left is left. The axis is real. Jonah Goldberg can call Hitler a leftist; Hitler, indeed, called Hitler a leftist, at least in the sense that he called his party a Socialist Workers’ Party. But Hitler, while a very bad rightist, was a rightist.

And all organizations, big or small, public or private, military or civilian, are managed best when managed by a single executive. Hence: royalism

The problem with Mises as guru is that Misesian classical liberalism (or Rothbardian libertarianism) is like Newtonian physics.

As it so happens, before I became a royalist or a Carlylean or whatever, I was a libertarian. Specifically, a Misesian.

You will meet Carlyle, the royalist Progressive. There is also Carlyle, the royalist fascist.

But properly tuned and restored, he [Carlyle] is Messiah enough for any grown man. Hey, man, we all need a Jesus.

I am a Carlylean. I’m a Carlylean more or less the way a Marxist is a Marxist. My worship of Thomas Carlyle, the Victorian Jesus, is no adolescent passion—but the conscious choice of a mature adult.