In Chapter 2 we described Left-liberalism by stating what it is not: Left-liberalism is not the Prakṛti that embodies it; it is not the identities of its adherents; it is not its methods and strategies; it is not even the sub-nationalisms of the grievance-groups it claims to represents (but rather, we will see, it is the mechanism that arranges these sub-nationalisms in the worst possible manner). Here, we shall describe what the Left-liberal Rāj is.
The concept of an Ideological Regime—an ideology whose values were so omnipresent in the social mileu that everyone had thoroughly internalized its values; an ideology that possessed soft and hard power to enforce its own dominance—goes back to Gramsci in the early 20th century, who knew it by the name of Hegemony. He himself was of course a Marxist, and the Ideologies that stood accused were Classical liberalism/Capitalism and Fascism.
There are many obvious faults in his formulation. In order to explain why the world supposedly lived under this Hegemony—to answer the question “Why? Why is [was] this ideology hegemonic—how did it attain that status?”, the Marxists would state “the ruling class spreads this ideology in order to further its interests”. This basic thesis of course predates Gramsci, and was the basis of all other Marxist “social theory”.
And that is a stupid Type-II conspiracy theory (appendix A), that is: it suffers from the free-rider problem. All the corporations and elites and whatever cannot uniformly “conspire to maximize their class’s self-interest by oppressing the poors”1, because at an individual level the benefit from doing so is socialized among all their peers but the cost is paid by themselves. For stigmergic co-operation to occur, the individuals involved must be aligned. “Self-interest” does not align unrelated individuals or corporations into a single “class”, because one individual’s self-interest is diametrically opposed to another’s. What does align people is Ideology—i.e. a system of moral beliefs whose goals are independent of the self of the agent who adopts it. Thus ideology may be defined as an “alignment of some agents”, or the moral system of some super-agent. “Make money for yourself” is not an ideology, because me making money is not the same as you making money. But “make the world more wealthy” is2. Classical liberalism was certainly an ideology, but the Marxists were (willfully) wrong in claiming that the true ideology behind it was “self-interest of the ruling class” etc; no, they genuinely believed in individual liberty and free-market economics.In competitive democracies, factions with the understanding of great importance of unsaid views and instinctive sense to co-ordinate with other “party” members without any instruction from top or formal organizations wins.
Second: the ideologies that they accused never held the sort of hegemony that they believed to. Section 4.1 lists the “elements of sovereignty” needed to call an ideology hegemonic—among these, Classical liberalism lacked Śatrubodha: it was exceedingly tolerant, and lacked the antibodies to ostracize its rivals; while Fascism lacked Svayaṃbodha, prioritizing aesthetics over substance. Nobody can really describe what “fascism” means or what exactly fascists believe about every policy detail, except in the terms the Left describes it in (thus we have a weird situation where the Left can simply declare random things as fascist, as we have made them the sole authorities on the topic).
Third: Classical liberalism/Capitalism is the system that raised the world out of poverty, and is simply the most efficient as far as economics was concerned. The very claim that it was a system enforced by the elite through deceit is just wrong.
In any case, the world Gramsci saw is long-gone—and his own frameworks apply far more to this New Regime which the Leftists have built in the image of their own critiques. The Old Gods are dead, and the Left stands accused. Yet, by continuing to act as though the Old Regime is still hegemonic, by playing both the roles of the Regime and the Revolution, they continue to attract fanatical adherents for the infinite Recursive Revolution (section 3.3). The point of this book is to flip the gun at the only regime you and I have ever known—to deconstruct the Left.