/lit/ - Literature

>>23073379
He's completely right but it makes me despair of our own time. He's right that the heroes of the 18th and 19th Centuries, the Napoleonic Era, are every bit the equal of the heroes and exploits of Greece and Rome.

But sitting in America in 2024, I realize there seems to be no one of that like among the broader West today. Will we ever flame that brightly again? The Napoleonic Era is like a mythic era, where men who were like gods walked the Earth. It was a rebirth, almost, of an age of heroes.

So I'm filled with despair, but also hope. Because if the flame of heroism and greatness can rekindle in the "Modern" period of history once, maybe it can rekindle yet again.

No aesthetics. Moldbug argues for monarchy and aristocracy purely from a utilitarian perspective, which is highly useful, but you've got to marry that with, well, vibes. The man is a dweeby Jew and absolutely looks the part. Even if you agree with him that a monarchy is the best form of government going forward, if the monarchy just looks like boring old corporate neoliberalism no one's going to sign up.

I hate to bring up fascism because it's like beating a dead horse, but at least the fascists LOOKED cool, or at least interesting. The Italian futurists, the Nazis with their uniforms, etc.. You can't win over people to a right-wing argument without a certain level of aesthetics, even if your ideas in theory stand on their own.

I guess my critique of Fukuyama's central idea is that his idea of "liberal democracy" has turned out to not be very liberal at all. We have essentially returned to a de facto aristocracy, with a small amount of people controlling most of the wealth and most of the power. That, to me, seems to be the antithesis of liberal democracy. Sure, they don't CALL themselves dukes, barons, and princes. But that is, effectively, what the people who run the world are.

Fuck, China is an aristocratic republic. The CCP is the landed gentry. The rest of the world isn't much better. Liberalism has come and gone and we have reverted to a social order that does not look terribly different than what existed in the 18th Century. The differences are merely cosmetic.

>>18595510
Godspeed Anon. I'm not British but I wish you well. I feel a strange love for England in my bones, despite not having a drop of English blood. Maybe it's because of how much I love English poetry.