On Cultural Hegemony and Liberal Framing
The Regime owns the framing, the decisions regarding “normal,” the the meaning of “free speech,” and the application of censorship and “fascism.”
Joe Walsh reflects the general liberal framing on political attempts to confront the present stage of the sexual revolution:
As I mentioned on Twitter: this is the opinion that can be taken when your ideology has achieved hegemonic status within the social order.
Classical liberalism was built on the notion that things like sexual mores can be neutral; everyone can believe what they want and it is up to the rational individual to decide for himself what best suits his priorities, principles, and convictions. But classical liberalism arose against the backdrop of Christendom; wherein there was a continuity between the (Christian-derived) values of the political institutions and the public order writ large. That is to say, after a long struggle against the Pagan world, Christianity, most completely in the West but also extending in different forms into Eastern Europe, achieved what should be called cultural hegemony.
As I discussed at length in my essay on Antonio Gramsci, every society has something at its base that should be considered culturally hegemonic. It is the standard by which changes, revolutionary rhetoric, and trends are judged; it constitutes the instinct of the people and is not derived from “facts and logic” (or from a Biblicist exegetical process) but is rather imparted to the people by way of sentiment and absorption. People mostly formulate their opinions by absorbing the world around them. When the world around them is constituted by Christian themes, they become a “Christian” people.
Now, under this way of things, if dissidents and activists sought to challenge the mores that come out these Christian hegemonic social instincts, what would the response be by protectors of the hegemonic narrative, the ideological reinforcers of “the [Christian] system?” How would the key proponents of the Christian view of things respond when there was a rising tide of dissent that sought to undermine the norms and conventions that were inherently built into the community at a hegemonic level?
Try this:
This is the type of response to dissent that can come when the cathedral is constituted by the the inheritors of the Long Revolution. Curtis Yarvin was correct.
When you have hegemony, you can let the teachers promote what they want; because what they want is generally consistent when your hegemonic cultural values. Hegemony determines what is normal and regular and “common sensical.” When political actors seek to fight against these things, those political actors are seen to be dictators or authoritarians, dangerous to freedom and liberty. This is how Christendom once viewed the Left, and now that the Left has attained hegemonic status, this is how they view their own subversives who are not part of the Left.
The teachers have been radicalized. The teachers have digested the ideas committed to by the Cathedral, and function as catalysts through which these ideas are propagated to children. To seek a response to this realization by political means is to incite the liberal rhetoric by people like Joe Walsh in their defense. They own the framing, they own decisions regarding “normal,” they own the meaning of “free speech,” and they own the application of censorship and “fascism.” This is why the Regime doesn't worry about conservatives outraged by censorship: the American supra-political regime decides what is censorship and what is violent and hurtful speech.
Media and Movement Conservatives (think Chris Rufo) will often react to this reality by arguing that teachers should stay within the bounds of their own administrative function: talk of sex and marriage doesn’t belong in the classroom! There are ways in which this is true, but it actually misses the point. There was a video going around a few months ago where a female teacher shared her engagement news with her class of fifth graders. The Leftists, naturally, were loudly proclaiming that conservatives would have a problem with this if it was gay engagement. So, they point out, conservatives are being hypocrites on the matter.
This isn’t entirely wrong. Conservatives have retreated back toward the framework of neutralist, Classical Liberalism in the face of a Regime that has a positive vision of things inversely analogous to the pre-liberal Christendom. Whereas enlightenment classical liberalism used the rhetoric of neutrality and individualism to break apart the dam of Christendom over hundreds of years, the new Cathedral is too committed to its own total power to fall for agreements in liberal compromise. They fight to win. Conservatives fight for a truce.
The reality of the situation must be this: a teacher that shares her heterosexual engagement with her class is positive reinforcement at the level of absorption and sentiment with regard to the institution of marriage within the Natural Order, and therefore it is good. A teacher that shares of homosexual relations is subversive of the Natural Order and therefore bad.
Of course, public school teachers in the age of the Administrative State are merely functionaries for the advancement of the interests and objectives of the system. So while it would be better to attack the public school system itself, the idea that the solution lies merely in restricting the topics teachers can promote misunderstands hegemonic elements to society. The very presence of the teacher, the way she dresses, the ring on her finger, the picture of her fiancee she keeps on her key ring, all these things craft, build, mold the sentiments and instincts of the children she teaches. Everything is culture war; everything shapes; everything teaches; everything normalizes and contributes to the making of these children.
When you are not part of the Regime and live outside the boundaries of the socially-hegemonic value system, it is your duty to seek the demise of that system. Not to seek truce. The Left used liberalism’s truce-rhetoric to gain positions of power, to replace and old hegemony with a new one. They understood the importance of hegemonic power. Conservatives have yet to understand this.