Notice that LeLis never really celebrate their power. You will never see them say “Wikipedia/reddit is so woke I love it” (indeed, they will act as though it is still far-right/fascist/whatever) while RWs will celebrate even the most random thing being RW (“Gen-Zs doing bhajan clubbing”).
Perhaps this is why RWs are happier than LeLis. But only in the same sense of the “poors/tribals happier than busy CEO” meme. Ambition doesn’t feel like happiness. But when shit really hits the fan, it is he who has power and resources (the CEO/LeLi) to save himself, while the guy who was wasting his time being “happy” (the tribal/coping RW) dies of smallpox.
For the Left, nothing is ever enough: they are *always* more extreme than the Overton window (thus their “true” position is almost always infinitely Leftist); while RWs just want a safe space they can breathe in.
The great innovation that makes this possible is the invention of the liberal, who is the good cop to the Left’s bad cop. The liberal serves many functions in the Left-liberal Rāj.
3.3.1Lay leftists
The lay followers (or upāsakas as the Buddhists call it) of a religion are those who are not ordained monks/activists and are not totally knowledgeable about the religion, but nonetheless “belong” to it—i.e. theyMoral deference. Defer to the moral authority of the monks/activists, considering their beliefs and way of life the moral ideal that they are just not good enough to live up to themselves
Directional correctness. Directionally believe in and live by many aspects of the ideology in practice (though not pure-pure-purely), helping to move the Overton window
Supporting the religion. support the religion by whatever means their station in life allows them to, e.g. donating to their causes or providing institutional access and legitimacy if they have the power to.
A religion needs Lay followers, because wealth and power are instrumental goods that any religion must possess to wield power. If all followers devote their lives entirely to religion, becoming monks/activists and becoming totally pure in their thought, then who will earn the wealth and power to donate to them? Who will legislate on their behalf, put up a moderate campaign on their behalf, enforce hard power to serve their ideology?
3.3.2“Good cop”/creating a fake spectrum
The difference between master political operators and ordinary ones is that the latter seeks to shape their little corner of political compass while the former aims to do that for the whole spectrum.
The truly legendary ones supply and provide the controlled opposition too.
This “good cop bad cop” līlā is sometimes even done formally—e.g. during the election of FDR, he was presented as an “insurance against more radical leftists” (figure B.1), i.e. a good cop. In reality, what matters most is that the guy providing insurance against radicalism is your guy—otherwise it is just the Enemy playing good cop, and he will simply use the power you give him to empower the bad cop, as is what happened with FDR.
3.3.3Securing and governing conquered territory
I am often grimly amused by American right-wingers saying things like “Disney/Gillette/Bud-light/ESPN has gone woke!” because it tells you so much about them. Everything is “woke” (or rather: in the possession of the Left-liberal Rāj). You were just content living in your corner of the world and didn’t notice until the empire was literally at your doorstep. You didn’t notice the Rāj as it swept through the institutions, rewrote your culture’s priorities, indeed subtly transformed your own beliefs—you only noticed it when they came for your TV, beer, shaving blade and your kids’ cartoons.
—a great man.
This is less pronounced in India where at least the patriotic middle-classes do not buy into leftist narratives sanitizing Lalu Prasad Yadav or the License Raj or the various atrocities committed by Congress/Pakistan against Hindus (although many do still believe blood-libel hoaxes perpetrated by Congress such as “saffron terror” or Leftist hoaxes about the Indian army in Kashmir). But if you dig into the history of leftist social movements in the West, you will learn the horrendous reality of terrorism and rape-rings and Islamism in the Civil Rights movements, or the pedophilia promoted during the Sexual Revolution1
Time and again you see this pattern: leftists make up an obviously stupid idea2, right-wingers spend 10 years “debunking” it to finally achieve a narrative victory, and leftists move on to the next thing, generated by the same dumb ideology and mental processes that brought you the first one.
Meanwhile, tons of stupid regulation passed, money spent on grifters and irreparable cultural damage. All the “sensible liberals” like Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias agree those were dumb hysterias, without ever bothering to reflect on the dumb meatbags on their thoraxes that produced it.
—On the offensive battles “lost” by the Rāj.
The main reason it is “memoryholed” is because it has been cemented as the absolute standard and most commonly held view in society.
You see such things stated often nowadays, but spoken from a position of established fact rather than a polemical or combative framing.
Thus Leftists lead the offensive battles while liberals secure and defend established territory in their stead, putting down any insurgents (right-wingers).
3.3.4Śāstrārtham criticism
The same good-cop bad-cop līlā is also applied by placing ineffectual extremists to the left of the left-wing ideologues, to make them appear as the good cop, or as relatively even-handed—e.g.Tweets like this also serve an important function in the spectacle being enacted by the enemy—namely, allowing the system to engage in a fake critique of itself.
Muslims, especially activists from academia, media, and the NGO complex, are well aware that such boneheaded Salafi sectarianism, while par for course in the MENA region where they have demographic dominance and political control, is very counterproductive to their position on the left and acquisition of power as a community in Western countries.
It also allows them and their allies to pretend to be principled and show everyone that they are opposed to “right wing” tendencies in every group.
This is not leftists “eating their own” as dumber conservatives think but infact asserting power by elevating fake opposition and then tying it to us (“extremists of all religions are the same,” “Salafists and Hindutva supporters hate liberal Muslims” etc.) as if we and that group [have remotely similar views] or are treated remotely similarly.
I call this “śāstrārtham condemnation”: saying the bare minimum needful to maintain plausible deniability or an appearance of principled even-handedness, even though their actual bias is apparent from the total incongruence between the actual degrees of “extremism” from each side and where the bulk of liberal opposition is focused on.
The slightest rudeness or aggression from the right is treated as Enemy #1, the focus of entire academic industries and media frenzies and crushed with overbearing censorship apparatus and ostracism. Whereas actual terrorism from Muslims is given śāstrārtham condemnation while they massively incentivize it by using the opportunity to run apologia for the terrorists’ “cause”, referring to the leaders of terror groups as “austere scholars” etc.
They do this by:
Making the most milquetoast possible condemnation of Muslim/Leftist extremists, without any follow-up.
Picking some irrelevant crazy-sounding person/claim on your side with zero traction, and criticizing it—bonus points for doing it in a way that actually gives it legitimacy as if it were a reasonable suggestion. E.g. “The Quran must me made mandatory in schools!”—“Do you have any scientific evidence that this helps education?”
Focusing on totally irrelevant issues, like “superstitions among Muslims” or “sexism in Leftist circles” completely ignoring the actual problem (in case of Islam: the Nazi-like supremacist ideology and ensuing violence, terrorism and atrocities toward non-Muslims).
Pretending as though the Nazi-like supremacist ideology toward non-Muslims is restricted to some random orthodox groups that tell women what to wear etc. while in reality the rabid supremacist beliefs and atrocities committed against non-Muslims are completely universal in their society and have nothing to do with those traditionalist groups in particular.
Every time leftists are like “Muslims are LITERALLY getting lynched in India!!” it’s some lifelong child-rapist getting shot by the police.
Every time a RW org reports on “Hinduphobia in India” it’s an innocent tailor getting beheaded in front of his family by bloodthirsty jihadi neighbours he thought were friends, for liking a facebook post.
3.3.5Pragmatic moderation
There is a widespread delusion, especially among online technocrat-LARPing “centrist libs”3, that the “moderate liberals” or “establishment” in the Democratic Party are committed to some centrist technocratic, neoliberal or globalist agenda. These are of course un-serious children who have built their own self-image out of the leftists’ caricatures of them, but it provides an opportunity to make an important point:Such a “faction” simply does not exist. In all of the internal debates between “Leftists” and “liberals” whether online or in Democratic Party Debates, you will note one thing: the liberal or moderate critique of the Left is overwhelmingly focused on questions of electability and practicality. Leftists will say “we should murder all the rich people, burn down every city and rape kids” and liberals will come back with a poll saying “actually that’s unpopular among voters” or “actually that’s really hard to do”.
There is never any moral or ideological opposition to the Left from liberals. The moderation is entirely a matter of pragmatism, and the moment that the Left proves itself capable of winning elections, liberals immediately fold (e.g. Biden inducting Warren/Sanders people into his coalition; AOC, Ilhan Omar and Zohran Mamdani being normalized in that order). And the online technocrat-LARPing “centrist libs” (who do have a moral/ideological opposition to the Left but are irrelevant LARPers) do so as well, coping that somehow it is the leftist candidates who moderated and the election never mattered in the first place because everyone moderates after getting elected or whatever.
Mainstream coverage of post-independence politics portrays Congress as a “centrist;; party flanked by the right and the left.
Yet, the attitude towards those "flanks" was markedly different. One was viewed as the moral ideal, even if not practical; the other was the Enemy.
The “liberals see the far-left as their moral pole” concept was actually most explicitly articulated by Nehru himself4:
Now between the parties of the Right and the Left, as you differentiate them, I would always prefer a party with some ideology built round serious social and economic thinking.
You mentioned the communists. The communists, with all their faults, function in terms of serious economic solutions. What we repudiate is all the dogma and violence of their approach. If they can divest themselves of this obsession and accept the discipline of our parliamentary democracy in good faith, there is not much difference between their goal of socialism and ours.
The other parties you mention, like the Jan Sangh and Swatantra, seem to be organized around plainly fascist and feudal concepts without any social or economic basis. As such, they are dangerous to the country and our values of democracy and socialism.
Or, like I put it:
Libs will be like “you shouldn’t do terrorism, it’s ineffective” then massively reward terrorism by inserting their cause to the top of the discourse and promoting moderate voices nobody had cared about earlier.
[...] Libs will be like: you believe in Firebombing a Walmart? That pales in comparison to my strategy, massively rewarding people who Firebomb Walmarts by responding with endless media attention to why Walmart is bad even though maybe you shouldn’t have firebombed it
3.3.6Internal family squabbles
- In 1973, the Congress Rāj issued a postage stamp commemorating Syed Ahmed Khan—the “Father of the Two Nation Theory” (figure 3.5).
After our military’s decisive victory over Pakistan in the 1971 war for Bangladeshi liberation, the Indira Gandhi government released 93,000 Pakistani POWs in exchange for literally nothing.
Mani Ratnam’s house was bombed by Muslims for Bombay (a very much anti-Hindutva film) that depicted the romance of a Hindu man with a Muslim woman; Kamal Hassan’s Vishwaroopam was banned in several states simply for showing the existence of terrorism. To this date the former especially is spat on by Muslims as having “Hindutva sympathies”. But their allegiances still lie with the Left.
A lot of Indians think that stuff like this is “Prithviraj Chauhan syndrome” or suicidal kindness from the Congress regime. But you will note that Left/Congress never showed similar kindness towards their right-wing/Hindu rivals at home. Mani Ratnam says today: “If Bombay were released today, theatres would be burned down [by right-wingers]”—completely sidestepping the bombing of his own house by Muslim extremists that actually happened in real life.
The actual explanation is that Congress sees themselves and Pakistan as fundamentally on the “same side”—and any conflict with them is seen as a mere familial dispute (while the real enemy are the “Saṅghīs”/Hindutva back home). Rolling over for Pakistan was seen as a moral ideal; the war a mere practical compulsion. Same with Mani Ratnam with the Islamists, Liberals with Leftists etc.
This is not an exaggeration or some polemical claim: Aman ki Asha, “We’re the same people after all, it’s just the British who divided us”, South-Asianism have long been core beliefs of Congress and its style of secularism. This remains how Indian and Pakistani liberals interact across borders: blaming the “Saṅghīs” in India for the divide (of course, they also put śāstrārtham blame on some random Muslim orthodox groups that tell women what to wear etc. even though the rabid anti-Indian/Hindu beliefs or atrocities committed against Hindu and Christian minorities are completely universal throughout the country and have nothing to do with those traditionalist groups in particular).
This is why, e.g. during the 1971 war, the Congress government was internally preoccupied with suppressing coverage of Pakistan’s genocide of Bengali Hindus—to prevent the Indian right-wing from strengthening:
Singh instructed his staff to distort for their country: “We should avoid making this into an Indo-Pakistan or Hindu-Muslim conflict. We should point out that there are Muslims, Buddhists and Christians among the refugees, who had felt the brunt of repression.” In a major speech, Indira Gandhi misleadingly described refugees of every “religious persuasion—Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist and Christian”.
... as Singh told his diplomats, the government’s worst fear was vengeful sectarian confrontations [in India] ... Indian officials did not want to provide further ammunition to the irate Hindu nationalists in the Jana Sangh Party. From Moscow, D.P. Dhar, India’s ambassador there, acknowledged the Pakistan army’s “preplanned policy of selecting Hindus for butchery”, but fearing inflammatory politicking from the “right-wing reactionary Hindu chavunist parties like the Jana Sangh,” he wrote, “We were doing our best not to allow this aspect of the matter to be publicly discussed in India”.
Source: “The Blood Telegram”
Quite simply: Congress is the good cop to Pakistan’s bad cop; the liberal to their Leftist. Thus e.g. Congress blaming innocent Hindus for Pakistani terror attacks such as Samjhauta Express and Malegaon blasts in 2006-085 (and famously attempting to repeat the script with 26/11), Rahul Gandhi suggesting (in July 2009, not long after 26/11) the U.S. should focus on “Hindu terrorists” like Narendra Modi instead of Pakistan-based terrorist groups like LeT6 or Rahul Gandhi and the Indian Left repeating Pakistani talking points word-for-word during Operation Sindoor, is completely congruent. The treasonousness of the Indian Left/Congress is not a post-2014 phenomenon: their loyalties have always laid elsewhere; it’s just made apparent by them losing power in India (similar to how the Mughals or British Raj did after all defend the country when they were in power, in order to protect their own power—but once out of power their transnational loyalties become very obviously treasonous).
Notably, the bad cops do not see the good cops as on their own “side”. They see from their vantage point, from which their own good cops appear to be on the enemy’s side. This is why you see Noam Chomsky complaining about “corporate media”, or why in the leftist and Islamist narratives even Congress is incredibly described as “nationalist” or “soft Hindu nationalist”. But none of that matters to the good cop. The Leftists/Pakistanis can do whatever the hell they want to their Liberal/Congressi towelboys, but the latter still lick their boots, viewing them as their moral compass.
3.3.7Types of Liberals
If you want to understand the theory behind the midwit meme, here it is. Midwits are people who (are smart enough to) use science/rationality/etc for support but not illumination. They are Rādhāguptas: priests who bestow legitimacy on kings, rather than bestow kingship on the legitimate.
In terms of the actual beliefs of the liberals toward Leftism, we may distinguish six types (which are not entirely mutually exclusive).
Leftists doing Taqiyya: (relatively rare) People who hide the degree of their devotion to Leftist ideology in order to make it more palatable.
NPCs/Total Devotees: (very common) These people hold moderate beliefs, but they quickly receive “software updates” as the Overton window moves Left.
Deluded Devotees: (common, especially among middle class families and Autistic Human Capital) These guys genuinely take Leftist self-presentation and in-universe rationalizations at face value, and often try to give actual solutions to the problems Leftists complain about (which infuriates the Left, because they don’t want a solution—they want their narratives validated and the perpetuation of the backwardness of their sacred groups).
E.g. they think the Left cares about the poor, not realizing the Left wants to sacralize and perpetuate poverty rather than uplifting the poor—or they think the Left stands for “peace”, not realizing that the Left only speaks of peace to the good guys, to restrain them from defending themselves (from criminals, terrorists and terrorist states). Or they see Leftists saying things like “terrorists have human rights too” and think of it as some genuine commitment to civil liberties, free speech, Western civilization etc. not noticing that the Left doesn’t extend the same courtesy it shows terrorists to right-wingers. Terrorists can be called austere religious scholars, internal political rivals cannot.
This may be regarded as “suicidal empathy” toward the Left, ultimately deriving from a lack of philosophical empathy, i.e. not understanding how morally rotten it truly is:
What Gad Saad coined as “Suic!dal empathy” (that western society suffers from, but I would say Hindus even more so) stems from a lack of philosophical empathy: where one assumes that one’s own pluralism (in Hindu case) or liberalism (West) is shared by other civilisations.
What that leads to is either no interest to understand other philosophies or civilisations on their own terms—or to hand wave away any differences as insincere (“they can’t possibly take that seriously LOL”)—hence lack of philosophical empathy.
And hence one doesn’t build any response to the other, because the other is not even understood as a genuine other. One book I recommend to Hindus is “Europe, India and the limits of secularism” by Jakob De Roover—related to how this leads to mutual incomprehension.
Principled moderates. (uncommon) These guys actually pick some mid-way (or “independent”) belief and stick to it, regardless of how the Left or the Overton window moves. From here you see quotes like “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me” etc.
Status-insecure. (very common) These eunuchs simply side with the dominant ideology, either because they see the right-wing as “cringe”, i.e. low-status, and they lack any strength of their own, or simply because of social and economic consequences of not doing so.
Rādhāguptas. (uncommon, but common among Autistic Human Capital) These are talented individuals who basically understand the Left is wrong, but have found employment and social circles among the Left, so come up with rationalizations and apologia to justify their position. Often because they think the insurgents (right-wingers) are worse.