I'm going through the Sunday Night Journal entries, making my final selection of those to be included in a book (not a real book, just a self-published one), and ran across this quotation from E. Michael Jones, which struck me as worth repeating. The context is a discussion of Wagner:
The revolutionary agenda espoused by both Wagner and Bakunin was so politically diffuse that no political reform could have accomplished it. As a result, it is only natural that its political death would only release its revolutionary soul into freer flights of fantasy, where its disembodied soul was free to posit conditions that it was safe to say could never find incorporation in any political system anywhere…..a revolution which was essentially metaphysical in its scope.
Jones's work is a mixed bag at best, tending toward the fanatical as I recall, but that's about as good a capsule summary as I've seen of something that's been happening in leftist politics since the mid-1960s. Independently of its specific positions, with which I don't always disagree, it's a quasi-religion. And contrary to what Jones suggests at least in this fragment, the impossibility of implementing hasn't made it less appealing as a vision, though it probably increases the rage produced by the continual disappointment of its hopes.
My following comment from the post is not bad, either:
I used to be puzzled by affluent and privileged people who complained that they were not free, because there never seemed to be anything in particular that they wanted to do or to have that was not already available to them. But their complaints were quite sincere; they would feel themselves oppressed as long as it was possible for anything to be other than they wished it to be. The dream of an earthly life free from the limits of the human condition is still very much with us (Imagine there’s no heaven…).
(The whole post, "Is Wagner Bad For You?", is here, by the way.)
Light On Dark Water 
Leave a comment