"Liberalism against the drifts of progressive libertarian ideology" (3/3)

Marc Rameaux is a professional in new technologies and an economist, author in particular of an essay entitled The Tao of Economics . Good use of the market economy (L'Harmattan, 2020).

Sébastien Laye is an entrepreneur and President of the Parti Quatre Piliers.

In this series divided into three articles, to be published every Friday, we will show the complementary and indissoluble role of freedom and sovereignty in building peaceful societies. This alliance is the ideal antidote to the rants of progressive libertarian thought.

To read also: "The independence of a nation requires its economic freedom" (1/3)

To read also: "Economic freedom is ethical" (2/3)

Third criticism commonly made to liberalism, that of destroying the historical memory of nations, of instrumentalizing heritages and traditions to make them only simple exchange variables, destroying them if necessary. The famous communist maxim "of the past, let's make a clean sweep" seems to have been realized in the end much more by the large globalized market than by the Socialist International.

The basis of this criticism is that economic calculation does not need a past, at most a memory of a few months at most. Traditions of thought, whether scientific, artistic, religious, literary, are no longer evaluated by one yardstick: what are they worth on the market? Can they be a good trade-in product? It doesn't matter if they represent a lineage of several hundred, sometimes several thousand years. Only the bottom line matters, and what it represents in terms of business value.

As the short-term tastes of the general public are generally mediocre, cultural productions become vulgar and standardized. The law of the market enshrines junk food and reality TV.

Finally, globalization dreams of a kind of universal peace mediated by trade which would all be win-win. Any specific cultural or national trait must be erased, so as not to interfere with the fluidity of exchanges. The cultural counterpart of the great world market is that of a uniform humanity, no longer claiming any historical heritage. This can go so far as to deny any biological distinction, for example the difference between masculinity and femininity which would be only cultural facts resulting from the choices of each one.

Attachment to one's country or its culture is assimilated with nationalist hatred and condemned as such with the greatest severity. There is no longer even a question of tolerating distinctions such as that of the famous quote by Romain Gary: "Patriotism is love for one's own, nationalism is hatred for others." Even perfectly peaceful attachment to one's country and devoid of aggressiveness is at best assimilated to an obsolete old age and most often to a withdrawal into oneself from narrow, low-ceilinged and perfectly despicable minds.

"Progressivism", a demagoguery for the use of the upper classes.

Progressivism is a diffuse ideology, little codified. Fortunately, it is possible for us to study it much more precisely, because it has recently been the subject of a real manifesto. Raphaël Enthoven's speech to the Convention of the Right on September 28, 2019 can be seen as the literal framing of progressivism. And as Enthoven himself indicates, he claims to be liberalism.

We can thank Raphaël Enthoven. He was courageous enough to deliver a contradictory speech in the midst of an assembly which was entirely hostile to him. But that's not why we can be grateful to him. No, what was extraordinary in his speech, is the candor with which he affirmed that he represented open-mindedness, the future and reasoned argument, while the content of his intervention was intolerant. and an incredible contempt for the human being.

Enthoven's main line of argument is that he and the progressives represent the future, that anyone who does not come together with the progressive creed is obsolete and doomed to disappear. What, according to him, gives an irresistible force to this sense of history is that one never goes back on additional freedom. He gives this law an absolute character, speaking of "irreversibility". Enthoven appropriates the arrow of time, historical determinism. His "tolerance" becomes very hypocritical because it amounts to saying: "I do not forbid you to think the opposite of me, but you are in any case doomed to disappear."

There is, of course, a gaping flaw in this "reasoning", which any first-year epistemology student would spot immediately.

For what Enthoven claims to hold, there would have to be an explicit and infallible demarcation criterion of what constitutes "progress" or "freedom". For past and old events, hindsight allows us to reasonably judge whether or not such and such a change has constituted progress and whether it has given people additional freedom. But for a present or recent change, such a judgment criterion does not exist.

Let's move on to the very simplistic definition of what freedom is as an additional possibility of doing something, regardless of the fact that everyone's freedoms conflict and that additional freedom for some may mean oppression for others. For Enthoven, who often claims to be a Spinozist, ignoring this first level of interaction is more than embarrassing, bordering on ridiculous.

Child labor or the right to seize are undoubtedly freedoms for those who benefit from it. Fortunately, we have come back to these “freedoms”. Cartoon examples? No doubt, but only looking back from history makes it possible to realize the very shocking nature of what was considered normal at the present time. This complexity of judgment appears when the cases are more nuanced: is the possibility of working on Sundays an additional freedom or an oppression? What about the possibility of leaving your young children in a day care center belonging to your company, as some Nordic countries do? And what about the possibility of being informed on their smartphone of the location of an epidemic focus, requiring the health traceability of each citizen?

It is obvious that in all the preceding examples, knowing if they constitute a freedom or an oppression depends strongly on the economic pressure and the social pressure which is exerted in accompaniment of each individual. Liberalism teaches us precisely this nuance: as long as individual free will can take precedence over the economic or social context, these possibilities are freedoms. In the opposite case of oppressions, except for certain extremists among the liberals who consider that as soon as a human being makes a choice, it is necessarily freely consented. These fanatics of "consent" and "contract" refuse to see that in extreme cases, economic pressure amounts to much the same as a gun to the head. In any case, what is presented as additional freedom can turn out to be an instrument of oppression and the overthrow of one towards the other can be very rapid.

Let us give other examples on more critical subjects: GMOs, the fight against global warming, surrogacy, unexplored forms of sexuality, new pedagogies, generous policies for immigration: are these changes progress and gains in freedom or can they precipitate us into terrible forms of oppression?

It is impossible to determine it absolutely: there is no criterion of demarcation of progress or the "sense of history". Fortunately, moreover: if such a mechanism existed, no need for our judgment and our free will. There is no need for democracy and election either: it would suffice to consult the words of Raphaël Enthoven or Laurent Joffrin to show us the way of light, which only shriveled and despicable beings could contest, but to whom in their immense tolerance. , our guides would grant the right to disagree.

Many conservatives do not have an unequivocal judgment on the above points. Sometimes their opinion fights that of the progressives, sometimes they join it. It is not the content of what progressives believe that is most disturbing, but their method of argumentation, their hypocrisy of proclaiming that they never stop doubting but do the exact opposite when the time for argumentation comes. came, believing he had the truth and had to enlighten humanity.

To read also: "The French right must make the choice of economic freedom"

It is fashionable to tax the populists with the qualifiers of "simplistic", "demagogues", "irresponsible". In reality, these character traits were invested long before the emergence of populism, by progressives for several decades.

In a review of Alexandre Devecchio's latest work, we show in the last part how progressive discourses are not only distressingly simplistic but constitute a kind of demagoguery for the use of the upper classes. Progressivism is narcissistic flattery aimed at a certain group of people, intended to affirm how intelligent and enlightened they are, constituting the very negation of critical thinking. This simplicity is found in all areas: economic (the analysis of Ricardo's complete vision shows it), political and social. Progressives complain about the emergence of populism, but the latter are only the boomerang return of their soothing discourse.

The emergence of progressivism coincides with another phenomenon: the appearance of mediocracy, the takeover of decision-making and communication positions by mediocre, superficial personalities, incapable of in-depth analysis, surfing on a few simplistic slogans. and a Manichean view of the world. The progressives are above all impostors, the false elite having gradually replaced the real elite. Psychologically, they correspond to the observed growth of narcissistic perverts in decision-making positions.

The new opium of intellectuals

Progressives sometimes refer to the thought of Karl Popper, in the defense of an "open society". For a true Popperman, there is no claim more ridiculous than this.

Popper would never have put forward the term "progress" in political philosophy. He can use this word concerning its meaning restricted to the field of science. But in politics, "progress" supposes the explicit definition of a guideline of history, that is to say a historicism in the Poppérien sense of the term.

The "progressives" believe that there is one and only one line of thought that is better than all the others. Even more: this line corresponds to an “objective” vision of things, while any opposing opinion would be marred by subjectivity and obscurantism.

Thus Enthoven to declaim: For a simple reason (which goes beyond our respective opinions, above which I beg you to rise for a moment, the time to hear the transpartisan evidence that I am giving you now): we will not go back on additional freedom ...

What allows me to be so sure of myself are not my convictions. (Personally, you can imagine that I am in favor of each of its rights. "Progressivism" is that.) What makes me so certain of my prediction is human nature itself!

Does Enthoven suspect for a second that this is exactly the way the Soviets argued? A "philosopher" summons human nature with the certainty that he has the key to it. After having argued according to the maximum pressure of the wind of history and the grandiose becoming of mankind, if that was not enough, the Soviets ended up saying that it was not themselves who made this speech, but reality herself. The latter is obviously on their side.

Centuries, even millennia, of critical rationalism, to get there. Inestimable work on what is a proof, a demarcation criterion, the refutability of discourse to get there. And these people say they are open to others ...

Any argument, whatever it is, is partial and one-sided. What makes it valuable, especially in scientific knowledge, is not that it is endowed with a higher objectivity a priori. But that it will more or less withstand the face of critical tests. The knowledge that best survived this ordeal has more value than the others, that is the foundation of Poperism. Until other confrontations where they could possibly be supplanted by other even more resistant knowledge.

Progressivism does not admit this schema: between "decoders", the law against "fake news" or Enthoven's argumentation, it considers that there exists a sort of objective line of thought a priori, representing progress. , any other thought being necessarily inferior. By an extraordinary coincidence, of course, this line of thought corresponds to what they themselves think. That progressives do not ask for a single second the question of whether the light of good to which they have privileged access would rather be the deceptive shimmer of their narcissism speaks volumes about their sufficiency.

All important discussions do not result from a binary pattern, but from a tension between two opposites. So with sovereignty and free trade as we have seen. The same is true of identity and openness. Thinking about this divide is not about drawing a line between good and evil and drying up all debate. To say that openness is good and identity is bad is as stupid as to claim otherwise. It is in their permanent tension that reflection begins. A completely permissive opening is either blissful or hypocritical: the one you receive is not necessarily benevolent.

Finally, Enthoven asserts:

Individually and collectively, the idea of ​​identity makes no sense.

As an individual, what we call the “me” is never more than an addition of memories and qualities that memory and DNA have sewn together to give us the illusion that upstream of all these qualities, there would be a subject. But when we look for the subject himself, the naked subject, separately from all his qualities, we find nothing. The ego is like the heart of an onion.

At the collective level, what we call identitarianism (or identity thought, which we find indifferently on the right of the right and among the Indigenous people of the republic) is never more than the arbitrary sanctification of customs or skin colors that were once declared to be an end in themselves. Or a value in itself.

The subject does not exist: Enthoven dispatches in a few lines what is a largely unresolved debate. How does he consider this to be obvious? According to the same law which makes him possess a revealed truth, the same which allows the decoders of the newspaper Le Monde to have a privileged position on the relation to the truth?

Regarding the painful caricature on the "collective scale", did it occur to Enthoven that there was no need to be essentialist or communitarian to believe in identity? It is enough only to give value to memory. We are not speaking of "customs" or "skin colors", but of the fact, for example, that there is a line of historical thought between Aristotle, the grammarians of the Middle Ages and modern logicians, up to the developments of l IT and AI. Whoever performs an apprenticeship without historical memory loses an important part of his meaning if he is not interested in his genealogy. There is just as much a French literature, and the language of Racine is a marvel combining concision and precision of our language. Collective identity is nothing other than the vision of historical lineages, in all fields, inviting us to participate in secular or millennial constructions.

The progressives claiming to be Popper forget (or have they ever known it), that he defined himself as conservative, this attitude of humility in relation to reality, of never appropriating neither the truth nor the meaning of the history, and to advance our societies in small steps, not according to evidence possessed by self-enthroned spirits in the light.

A Roger Scruton is in this much closer to the Poppérien heritage than are all progressives: again a question of historical lineage of thought.

In France, we miss the smiling and biting irony of Raymond Aron: how much he would have smiled in the face of the certainties of the progressives, their claim to hold a criterion for the advancement of humanity.

Progressivism is ultimately the new opium of intellectuals. This rapprochement owes nothing to chance: for a very large number of progressives who are old enough to have known this period, we find a Maoist or Stalinist past, an adhesion in their youth to this intellectual terrorism which raged under the leadership of Louis Althusser and made France decades behind in philosophy and human sciences.

This brilliant heritage has left its mark. We must not overwhelm Enthoven alone, we find similar nonsense in Joffrin, in the corridors of the World, the Express and Liberation or on the airwaves of France Inter, where ideological homogeneity has something of scary. The Mao passes passed to Rotary are legion there.

This particular way of arguing, starting from the principle that History and Truth are on their side before any discussion is the hallmark of this school. Sorry dear progressives, the lights are not those of your soothing visions, they have passed into the patient, discreet and modest work of Anglo-Saxon logicians, of Popper, Quine or Putnam, heirs of the long line of critical rationalism begun with the Socratic doubt. Sorry to be attached to this "identity", which we have the weakness to believe that it constitutes what remains to us of civilization.

Progressives also have great difficulty with freedom of speech. Between Avia law, Fake news and control of social networks by standards defined entirely by them, progressivism is characterized by a kind of intellectual upstart, wishing to be the sole source of speech and thought.

He confirms himself well as heir to the communist terror which raged in the sixties: that of a Cohn-Bendit who presented himself in an open and smiling light but was careful, with strong arms in support, to make his reign by force. only word in the amphitheatres, or of Che Guevara, liberating icon specializing in summary executions.

Communism is the Soviets plus electricity, said Lenin. Progressivism is upstartism plus intellectual terrorism: the same cocktail, simply brought up to date. We must be wary of all sellers of tomorrows who sing, whether they are those of the advent of the proletariat as those of the great pacified market and of the man without memory and without qualities who must happen: that is good. , they are precisely the same men, a few decades apart.

Enthoven concludes that his opponents are an endangered species, and that for this reason he has nothing to fear. Let us return it politeness, with the aphorism of Gustave Thibon: "to be in the wind, it is an ambition of dead leaf".

We can bet that progressivism will meet the same fate as these heavy and monumental constructions of Soviet architecture, as grandiose as they are hollow and in bad taste, formerly symbols of a contemptuous power, today empty shells.

Fifty years of lies to ourselves

The detestation of liberalism in France could still appear a few years ago as due to legitimate concerns, although incorrectly attributed to liberalism.

With a share of public spending that shatters all the standards of other developed countries, a state apparatus that signs its failure in almost all areas despite a steadily increasing financial greed, tax and regulatory oppression that prevents entrepreneurial forces to grow, it becomes harder and harder to ignore the real reason for our woes.

To read also: Jean-Louis Harouel: "Progressivism is not at the center, it is on the left!"

Are the French ready to face reality? In part only. Their relationship to the state is that of a child abused by his parents. The State is more and more a Thenardier: the taxpayers are mistreated, plundered, repressed, for a growing part of the money intended to finance soft posts of convenience. Ironically, it is liberalism that is criticized for defending its selfish interest, while no one today equals that of the French state.

Like the mistreated child, many French people complain about their fate and see what kind of merry-go-round they are victims of. But they still hesitate to come out of childhood. It is better for them to have a family cocoon that has become a prison, iniquitous and arbitrary, than to face the fear of taking responsibility. Freedom is frightening: it puts us face to face with ourselves. Most of the protests end up calling for more and more fools, more expenses that will be taken from them to the bone.

Getting out of childhood is always difficult. The scapegoat of liberalism translates the fifty years of lying to ourselves, to the fact that we refuse to see that the state mom and dad is absolutely no longer worthy of its functions and especially that it is high time to learn to live by ourselves, without crutches. The real reason for the detestation of liberalism appears: it is the ideal scarecrow to perpetuate the extraordinary apparatus of extortion that the French state has become.

True conservative liberals do not admit extremist thoughts aimed at destroying all public power. As long as man is not a reasonable angel, the state will be a necessary evil. But the truth of liberalism is that it is extremely difficult to control that those who exercise public power do not misuse it for their own benefit. Also the size of public services must be constantly monitored, any complacency or corruption tracked down, the usefulness of each position questioned and proven. It is in the interest of the officials themselves: no one lives well in a deleterious atmosphere, at the permanent hand of a mafia that one is obliged to serve.

At the crossroads

The current crisis has starkly highlighted the indispensable nature of sovereignty. We are at a bifurcation in history. Either the rising sovereignist forces listen to their old demons, those who make some admire the experience of Maduro, who adulate the return to a planned economy and to an omnipresent place of the State, however already obese. And the date with history will be missed, with dramatic consequences if France sets out on a Venezuelan path.

Either the sovereignists understand that true liberalism, the one which has driven out the ideological chimeras of globalism, is not an enemy but its indispensable complement. Sovereignism and liberalism have this in common that they value what is free, independent, master of its own destiny, proud to be able to assert its differences in what they have best.

A political force that would manage to synthesize these two powers and make them play in a coordinated way would become unavoidable, even the first of all, extracting us from the lethal trap of the unwanted alternation between Macron and the National Rally.

Without Liberalism, Sovereignism becomes stubborn, simplistic, easy to fool. He confines himself to a purely defensive role and always lags behind agile, fluid, cunning opponents.

Without Sovereignism, Liberalism becomes hollow, superficial, ignoring centuries of knowledge and culture that preceded it. He gets lost in the void, levels down when he promises prosperity, no longer knows how to show courage and authority when necessary.

Liberalism and Sovereignty are indispensable to each other, opposites but complementary, feminine principle for the first, masculine for the second: the Tao of the economy.

To oppose them and to make them irreducible enemies is to carefully prepare for defeat.

Leonidas and Thémistocles, Sparta and Athens, courage, resistance and hardness on the one hand, fluidity, cunning, intelligence on the other hand: only the alliance of the two made it possible to defeat the barbarians.