“All we can say from the current study is that there are likely to be causal pathways not mediated by education or income. We cannot say that the beliefs of high IQ people tell us what is right to believe, but rather only what smart people choose to believe.” Tobias Edwards at al. 2024
One of the recent minor buzzes on X (Twitter) concerns an article claiming that IQ predicts political ideology, described as either “left-wing” or “right-wing.” In the article, “Predicting political beliefs with polygenic scores for cognitive performance and educational attainment,” published in Intelligence (May-June 2024), Tobias Edwards et al., using measured IQ and polygenic scores for cognitive performance and educational attainment, found that intelligence is correlated with a range of left-wing and liberal political beliefs. (Here is the full text of the article.)
Predictably, there’s gloating by progressives on social media. There is a desire to see this line of research form a weapon in the war against the Party’s obsession, the “MAGA extremists,” those mouth-breathers who worship “Shitler.” As somebody with a high IQ (not quite genius) and professing a non-authoritarian left politics, the article interested me not only because of the alleged association between the two, but also because, given the confusion over terminology in today’s political-ideological parlance, including in academic disciplines captured by progressives (especially my own, i.e., sociology), I wanted to know exactly what attitudes count as “left-wing” and “right-wing” respectively. Spoiler alert: It isn’t at all clear in the paper.
At the core of the problem with this study and many other stories attempting to bring political science into the family of positive psychologies is the proper location of liberalism on the ideological continuum. While I define liberalism as left-wing based on historical meaning (which I come to in a moment), it is defined by others as right-wing. This is because liberalism is a bourgeois philosophy that puts central to its system of logic the principles of individual liberty, including the private ownership of capital. Because the left is ostensibly opposed to capitalism (I say ostensibly because the left these days embraces corporatism), capitalism must be rightwing in character. Associated liberal values, such as freedom of conscience, speech, and writing, are problematic for the same reason. Indeed, the whole Enlightenment project is problematic! As it happens, corporations rule the planet, and, together with the left, suppress liberal freedom in all its forms. (Are you listening, France?)
In Europe, because liberalism often aligns with classical liberal principles emphasizing free markets, individual liberties, and limited government intervention, it is positioned closer to the political right. Europeans see the liberal as that individual advocating economic freedom and personal responsibility, contrasting his advocacy with the more collectivist and interventionist praxis of the left. This right-wing view is often referred to as classical liberalism (reality check: it’s actually leftwing).
Conversely, in America, liberalism is associated with the progressive tradition, which emphasizes government intervention and social justice approaches to address economic and social inequalities. Here, liberalism aligns with left-wing politics, advocating for policies like universal healthcare and welfare programs. The American left focuses on using state power to rectify social injustices and promote a more equitable society, which contrasts with the conservative emphasis on limited government and free-market solutions.
This has been taken as the paradigm of what it means to be on the left. However, one should never forget that Otto von Bismarck, the Chancellor of the German Empire, used social welfare policies as a strategy to counter the rise of socialism in the late nineteenth century. Bismarck’s approach to dealing with the socialist movement combined repression with progressive social policies. Bismarck’s regime established health Insurance in 1883, which provided health care benefits to workers, accident insurance in 1884, which covered workers who were injured on the job, and old age and disability insurance in 1889, which provided pensions to workers who retired or were disabled.
By addressing some of the social and economic grievances of workers, Bismarck reduced their inclination to support radical socialist ideas. By providing state-sponsored welfare, Bismarck sought to demonstrate that government, not socialism, best met the needs of the proletariat. Although these moves were designed to undermine the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the left generally, the SPD continued to grow and eventually became a major political force in Germany—not by seeking to negate the capitalist state, but by leaning into Bismarck’s corporatism through reformism. Indeed, via these developments, Bismarck’s social policies integrated the working class into the existing political system, mitigating the revolutionary fervor and contributing to the stability of the German Empire during his tenure. When the working class threatened the capitalist establishment in the world economic crisis of the late-1920s-early-1930s, capitalist countries either instituted a version of Bismarck’s corporatism, e.g., Roosevelt and the New Deal, or a harder version, e.g., Hitler and National Socialism.
Roosevelt played a key role in changing the meaning of liberalism in America. He did so to market progressive policy, which, as I have explained (and will again here) is a projection of corporate statism. Roosevelt referred to his approach as “New Liberalism.” This term was used to distinguish his policies from classical liberalism, which, as I have described, emphasizes limited government and free-market principles. Roosevelt’s New Liberalism, as embodied in the New Deal, embraced a more active role for the government in regulating the economy and providing social welfare. The agenda included elaborating the regulatory system and laying the foundation for the proliferation of agencies. He pursued massive infrastructure programs that served the material interests of the corporate elite in state-subsidized production and commerce. The New Deal introduced a range of Bismarckian social welfare programs, such as Social Security, unemployment insurance, and aid for dependent children, the later used by progressives to destroy the inner-city black family. To control labor, Democrats passed the National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act) of 1935, which incorporated the proletariat into the political structure.
As noted, classical liberalism focuses on free markets, individual liberty, and minimal government intervention. In contrast, Roosevelt’s New Liberalism put the state machinery to work to secure economic stability and control over the proletariat. Even before Roosevelt, under the leadership of Woodrow Wilson, progressivism had already begun to shift the rhetoric of liberalism to cover ever greater government involvement in the lives of ordinary people. It was under Wilson, in 1913, that the Federal Reserve was established. The Fed is the central banking system of the United States. However, it is not a national bank. The Act Wilson signed aimed to create a decentralized central bank that balanced the interests of private banks and the federal government. It established twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks across the country to operate independently but under the supervision of a central Board of Governors. Also under Wilson, against in 1913, the federal income tax and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) became integral parts of the United States’ financial and tax system.
By the mid-twentieth century, the term “liberalism” in the United States had come to be associated with the principles of the New Deal, i.e., institutionalized progressivism and a permanent corporatist arrangement, emphasizing state responsibility for economic management and social welfare. This massive and instructive state structure became understood as “on the left.” Of course its real function was to make the proletariat depended on a government ultimately under the control of the corporate state. These developments moved Friedrich Hayek to The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944 as WWII was drawing to a conclusion. Hayek warned against the dangers of government intervention and central planning in economic affairs, arguing that the increasing trend towards collectivism and state control, as seen in the rise of totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century, inevitably leads to the erosion of individual freedoms and the emergence of a tyrannical government. Hayek’s core thesis was that government intervention set society on a path toward oppression and loss of liberty. Since central planning requires coercion and concentrates power in the hands of a few, these developments ultimately undermine democratic institutions and personal freedoms. In 1949, George Orwell, a socialist, published Nineteen Eighty-Four, which envisioned a world that reflected Hayek’s fears.
In the European sense, liberalism, with its emphasis on individual liberties and limited government, is the less authoritarian standpoint on the spectrum, whereas the left-wing standpoint, with its collectivist attitudes and government interventionism, the more authoritarian. This should be obvious. It isn’t not because people are blind to it, but because they believe it is a good thing. They want the government to control their lives—and especially the lives of those they despise—while dissimulating their authoritarian desire by projecting it onto those who seek a return to democratic-republican principle and classical liberal values. The American left champions collectivism and government intervention while declaring that it is the political right that is authoritarian. Any time spend on X (Twitter) will confirm that those defining themselves as “liberal” (they are in fact progressives) are horrified by the Supreme Court’s decision regarding the Chevron deference and the details of Heritage’s Project 2025, both of which promise to dismantled the massive government bureaucracy and limit the ability of regulatory agency to administer the lives of people. Putting this another way, the left sees as authoritarian those who seek to return the nation to a constitutional republic based on the ethic of individualism. In a strange Orwellian alchemy, the liberal has become the authoritarian. If by “liberal” one means progressive, then literally. If by “conservative” one means liberal, then falsely.
We might consider that attitudes of authoritarianism and totalitarianism are not inherently tied to the left-right political spectrum (see The Individual, the Nation-State, and Left-Libertarianism; Populism and Nationalism; Marxian Nationalism and the Globalist Threat). Nor are the attitudes of patriotism and nationalism, on the one hand, and globalism on the other tied to the left-right continuum. While it’s true that some left-wing ideologies have historically led to authoritarian regimes, the same can be said for certain right-wing ideologies; the degree of authoritarianism or totalitarianism in a political system may be more about how power is concentrated and exercised rather than specific policy preferences or economic systems. However, classical liberalism’s focus on individual liberties and limited government suggests a preference for a less intrusive state. This aligns with a right-wing stance that prioritizes personal freedom and private enterprise. So what right-stance would produce authoritarianism? Or, perhaps liberalism is actually a left-wing standpoint after all.
After all, liberalism is historically rooted in left-wing ideology in the European context, particularly during the French Revolution, representing a commitment to democratic governance, individual rights, and the rule of law. This was the ideology of the bourgeoisie, ie., the capitalists—in contrast to the reactionary supporters of the ancien régime, i.e., the feudalist mode of production with its ideology of natural hierarchy (appeal to an intrinsic or god-given hierarchy is really what animates right-wing logic and praxis). In the late eighteenth century, the French National Assembly saw those who advocated for the principles of the Enlightenment—“liberté, égalité, fraternité”—seated on the left. These liberals opposed the entrenched aristocratic and monarchal system represented by those seated on the right. This early association of liberalism with left-wing politics highlighted a transformative vision aimed at dismantling feudal privileges, establishing constitutional government, and promoting civil liberties.
Over time, you may be told, European liberalism evolved, just like US liberalism did, focusing on balancing individual freedoms with social justice, and often positioning itself against both authoritarianism and unchecked capitalism. Thus, in the European historical framework, liberalism’s left-wing legacy is tied to its foundational role in championing progressive reforms against conservative monarchical structures. But it was another left-wing standpoint, that of socialism, and the emergent standpoint of corporatism that limited liberal freedoms. (See my analysis of Bismarck above. See also my recent essay Republicans and Fascists.) As corporatism became identified with socialist politics, and thus the left, liberalism was redescribed as a right-wing standpoint.
On the other side of the pond, in a propaganda move, as I have explained, American liberalism’s left-wing orientation paradoxically came to emphasize the role of corporate and government power in regulating the working class, moving under the cover of economic equality and social justice. This is progressivism, the ideological projection of corporatism, and because corporatism involves increased government intervention in the economy and society, which put another way is greater control over society by corporate interest, it emerges as the main authoritarian threat over the last seventy or so years. Not incidentally, European fascism, also a species of corporatism, was the main authoritarian threat in the first half of the twentieth century. What may be confusing to people is that, whereas yesterday’s authoritarianism is defined as right-wing by historians and political scientists, today’s authoritarianism is left-wing be denied as being such. In fact, there is very little functional difference between different forms of conservatism (see my most recent essay Celebrating the End of Chevron: How to See the New Fascism).
Today, if you were to ask around, you would be told that the left opposes capitalism. That, historically, liberalism has been understood as a left-wing standpoint, in contrast with absolutism and feudalism, i.e., social hierarchy justified by right-wing ideology, I have gone to lengths in my essays (I have tired again today) to help readers understand that the term “liberalism” has, in the American context, been deceptively and illegitimately repurposed to denote progressivism, a collectivist ideology. At the same time, liberal views have been recoded as the inventory of conservatism. If liberalism is a right-wing view, and if right-wing attitudes are authoritarian, then how was it that the most technologically advanced and freest civilizations in world history were founded upon its ideas, while the crackpot theories of the world, such as critical race theory and queer theory, standpoints that enshrine anti-white and anti-woman bigotry (not to mention transgress the sexual boundaries between adults and children) herald the end of constitutional republicanism and classically liberal values?
Let’s now return to the article that has some folks geeking out over on X. Significantly, the researchers found both IQ and polygenic scores significantly predicted social liberalism and lower authoritarianism, even after controlling for socioeconomic variables. Crucially, one must be careful with claims of significance. Drawing inferences, such as by conducting significance tests, from clinical samples can present challenges that differ from those in other types of research settings. Clinical samples often involve individuals who seek treatment or are recruited, rather than obtained by inferential sample techniques, which can introduce biases or limitations when generalizing findings to broader populations. Moreover, even accepting significance tests, the beta coefficients explain much less than half of the variability in the dependent variable—and the independent variable is a problematic theoretical construct.
Putting the methodological problems aside for a moment, the authors write, “We might believe intelligence directly changes political beliefs. Political beliefs likely reflect our ethical values and our empirical beliefs, both of which might be altered by intelligence.” They then cite Onraet et al., who, in 2015, suggested that, quoting Edwards et al.’s summation of their conclusion, “the use of stereotypes and socially conservative beliefs function as heuristics, utilizing fewer cognitive resources than thinking about social issues on a case-by-case base. This could cause lower cognitive ability to be associated with right-wing views.” Odd way of putting it, but I think the meaning is plain: those who use fewer cognitive resources are rightwing and authoritarian.
Interestingly, another source the authors cite, DL Weakliem, in a 2002 article in the International Journal of Public Opinion Research, found that education is “associated with liberal values and support for capitalism,” significant because education, “may be in a reciprocal causal relationship with IQ scores,” a supposition I’m confident few would question (I am not here to bash smart and educated people). At the same time, in a paper published in 2023, Ahlskog “found a polygenic score for educational attainment had a positive effect on social liberalism and a negative effect on economic conservatism, using family fixed effects.” The question here, given confusion over language, is whether the concept “economic conservatism” is an ideological stand-in for liberalism and support for capitalism. This would, of course, make the claim a wash. I am sure some of you already have in mind the oft-heard personal statement “I am socially liberal and fiscally conservative” as indicating tolerance for individual choice and preference for capitalist relations. The question would be, then, how did these get decoupled? Moreover, what would it mean to be fiscally liberal and socially conservative?
I hold that, if the French Revolution means anything at all, both liberal attitudes and support for capitalism are both left-wing attitudes. I know I am flogging a dead horse, but bear with me a bit longer as I have a mythological point to make. Consider the title of Ahlskog 2023 article published in the Journal of Experimental Political Science: “It matters what and where we measure: Education and ideology in a Swedish twin design.” When one reads the study, he finds that Ahlskog believed it was important enough to put in the abstract that “education shows positive causal effects on economic, but not social, conservatism.” In other words, if education is a proxy for IQ, high IQ predicts pro-capitalist attitudes (i.e., liberalism) but not conservatism in its traditional sense. Ahlskog’s findings make sense. So why do Edwards et al. gloss over it?
Getting into the weeds with Edward et al., they “employ five scales about political attitudes that were given to parents and offspring during their third follow-up assessment. These were measures of political orientation, authoritarianism, egalitarianism, social liberalism and fiscal conservatism. We also include one social-attitude scale—religiousness” (which understandably fared poorly in predicting anything). How was political orientation assessed? Not based on an objective criterion. Rather it was based on self-declaration, “assessed with the single item ‘What is your political orientation?’ on a 1–5 scale ranging from ‘extremely conservative’ to ‘extremely liberal.’” I get this question all the time from telephonic survey-takers and I ask them to clarify “liberal.” Whether they’re robots or committed to the purpose of the severe, they can’t tell me. Sometimes I invalidate their survey.
Many of those who have been following my blog have in their mind already one of the problems I have with all this. Based on the historic tenets of liberalism, I am very liberal. I identify myself as such. But to many progressives, I am conservative and right wing. Why? Because I am critical of anti-racism, immigration, Islam, and gender ideology (see Am I Rightwing? Not Even Close). Moreover, I am a populist and a nationalist, which, in their view, attitudes relegating me to the right end of the spectrum. At the same time, while I am liberal on matters of assembly, association, conscience, speech, and press (my critics are not), I am less liberal on the question of capitalism, whereas my critics, while organized against free conscience, speech, press, etc., do not share with the Old Left the central concern of class struggle. Instead of class struggle, the New Left is identitarian, fetishizing gender, ethnicity, race, religion, etc. (See my essays Marxist but not Socialist and Why I am not a Socialist.)
Getting even further in the weeds, the authors measure authoritarianism “using 12 items capturing three facets of authoritarianism (subordination, aggression, and conventionalism) from Duckitt et al. (2010)’s tripartite authoritarianism-conservatism-traditionalism model.” They measure egalitarianism using eight items from Feldman and Steenbergen (2001) and Feldman (1988). Religiosity was assessed with the 9-item scale created by Koenig et al. (2005). They used eleven items to measure socialism and liberalism and six to measure fiscal conservatism. These items were adapted from similar questions in the General Social Survey items (Smith et al., 2018). Their test inventory is substantially similar to another study in Intelligence by Willoughby et al. (2021), so they tell the readers to go there (however, Willoughby at el. provides no more information that Edwards et al.).
Edwards et al. explain: “Due to the high correlations among the variables, we create a composite measure to summarize the relationship between intelligence and political opinion. Authoritarianism, egalitarianism, social liberalism and fiscal conservatism scales are combined to create a sum score called the political composite. Before summing, we change the signs of our scales so higher scores indicate left-wing views, ensuring that high composite scores indicate left-wing views too. A scale was coded as being left-wing or right-wing by its correlation with authoritarianism, which is assumed to be right-wing.” I quoted all that because they are telling us that the scales used were determined to be “right-wing” because of their association with authoritarianism. Based on what I just told you, or maybe you realized it before then, you know that this is a ridiculous assumption.
Here are their conclusions: “Across all political beliefs, phenotypic IQ significantly predicts views in a left-wing direction. The effect of IQ on our political composite is 0.35.” Keep in mind that the proper procedure involves squaring Pearson’s R to obtain R2, the proportion of variance explained. While R indicates the strength and direction of the linear relationship, R2 quantifies the proportion of the variance in the dependent variable that can be explained by the independent variable. For example, an R of 0.8 implies a strong positive relationship, but squaring it indicates that 64 percent of the variance in the dependent variable is explained by the independent variable. This is quite a bit of variance explained. This is because the R is quite large. The R cited in Edwards et al. study is not, yielding a R2 of 0.12, meaning that the variance explained by IQ is only 12 percent.
In multivariate analysis the authors found that, upon controlling for family fixed effects, IQ had a significant effect on the political composite (β= 0.26, p= 0.040), as well as on authoritarianism (β=−0.35, p= 0.011) and social liberalism (β= 0.28, p= 0.011). In IQ research, family fixed effects refer to a statistical method used to control for unobserved variables that are constant within families but vary between families. This approach purports to isolate the impact of variables of interest, such as genetic factors or environmental influences, by accounting for shared family characteristics that could confound the results. Again, the alphas are probably not relevant since this was not really a representative sample from the population, but if it were, the finding that, after controlling for income and education, the effect on the composite is no longer statistically significant is, as we see in a moment.
The authors then shift to genotypic IQ which “significantly predicts left-wing political views across the political scales.” Genotypic IQ pertains to the genetic potential or predisposition for intelligence. It is determined by the individual’s genetic makeup and the specific combination of genes that may influence cognitive abilities. Crucially, unlike phenotypic IQ, genotypic IQ is not directly measurable but inferred through genetic studies, such as twin studies or genome-wide association studies, which estimate the heritability of intelligence. “After controlling for the midparent PGS [midparent polygenic score refers to a method used in genetics to estimate an individual’s genetic predisposition for certain traits, based on the genetic information of their parents], genotypic IQ significantly predicted three of the seven political variables; the political composite(β= 0.54,p= 0.009), authoritarianism (β=−0.67,p= 0.002), and social liberalism (β= 0.58,p= 0.009).” Just as they found with phenotypic IQ, they could no longer significantly predict any of the political beliefs when controlling for education and income using genotypic IQ.
If these studies are valid, that is, if it is true that smart people are drawn to left-wing progressivism, and if it is also true, as I have shown many times on Freedom and Reason, and again here today, that progressivism is the ideological standpoint of corporate state, then what is it exactly that smart people are drawn to? You can begin answering that question by asking this question: Who are they? They’re the ones with the advanced degrees useful to those who run society. They comprise the credentialed class, the professional-managerial stratum. They run the administrative apparatuses of both government and organizational bureaucracies, the latter you know as the corporation. Corporations, especially transnational corporations, exhibit characteristics that resemble totalitarian or fascistic structures. Corporations operate hierarchically, with power concentrated at the top among executives and shareholders, paralleling the centralized authority typical of totalitarian regimes. Decision-making processes within corporations are top-down and authoritarian, with little input from workers or the communities affected by corporate actions. This is an effect of the system.
The hierarchical and top-down decision-making structure commonly found in corporations is characteristic of bureaucracies in general. Bureaucracies operate with a centralized authority where power and by design decision-making authority are concentrated at the top levels. In bureaucracies, whether governmental or organizational, decisions move downward from senior officials or managers to subalterns to lower-level employees. This hierarchical structure constitutes a rigid system where rules and procedures are strictly followed, limiting flexibility and innovation. Public and private bureaucracies operate within a hierarchical framework where executives and shareholders hold significant decision-making power. The executive leadership sets strategic directions, allocates resources, and makes key operational decisions, often with limited input from lower-level employees or external stakeholders. They need smart and educated people to run these systems.
To be sure, government and organizational bureaucracies may different in their explicit goals and purposes. Corporations are primarily driven by profit and shareholder value, aiming to maximize returns for investors, whereas bureaucracies, especially in government contexts, are tasked with implementing policies, delivering services, and ensuring regulatory compliance. However, the critique of the concentration of power and decision-making authority in ways that are undemocratic or authoritarian, limiting transparency, accountability, and broader stakeholder participation in decision-making processes, means seeing both as operating according to the same intrinsic logic—and, in the corporate state form, as functioning towards the same external ends: money-power.
Since the principle social logic of the late capitalist mode of production is corporate power, the influence corporations have over society and politics is entrenched and ubiquitous, we might even say intrinsic. Large corporations exert tremendous economic and political power over society, shaping policies and regulations to favor their interests over individual freedom and broader societal concerns. This concentration of power, unchecked by democratic mechanisms, undermines democratic governance and accountability—and the democratic mechanism is undermined by the administrative state and technocratic apparatus. It’s a vicious circle.
Even if the regulatory system were not designed to control people for the sake of corporate interests, corporate interests prioritize profit maximization and shareholder value above other social or environmental considerations and impose these on the public regulations notwithstanding. This profit-driven motive lead to environmental degradation, exploitative practices, and labor abuses, reminiscent of the disregard for human rights often associated with totalitarian regimes. Moreover, the global reach of transnational corporations transcends national boundaries, operating across countries with varying legal and regulatory frameworks. This global presence allows corporations to circumvent local laws and regulations, further consolidating their power and influence beyond democratic oversight. This is why I tell people that the matter has been misput. Big government doesn’t regulate corporations for the sake of the people. Big government regulates the people for the sake of corporations.
The speech and behavior of progressives during the COVID19 pandemic illustrated in dramatic fashion the problem of smart people captured by corporate power and the party representing it. Smart people believe science. They have signs in their yard to that effect. Smart people comprise the progressive left. Check their IQs if you don’t believe it. Progressives know science resides in the institutions of the corporate state, in the medical and pharmaceutical industries, and in the government agencies administering those and a myriad of other powerful interests. Those who doubt the corporate state consensus, and the experts and advocates who manufacture that consensus, are less intelligent. Their grasp of the world is inferior. More than this, they are more likely to be authoritarian, because authoritarianism is not defined in terms of the fascist bureaucracies that run our lives and employ the elite, but rather in terms of the populism, nationalism, and traditionalism expressed by the proletarian masses smeared as the deplorables.
The progressive left, the cognitive elite, expressing a technocratic desire that resides deep in their psyches, are the offspring of the corporate state. We now have generations growing up in the social logic of the system. They fetishize expertise—but, like dutiful subject, only those experts approved by the corporate state. This house believes science. But science is captured by corporate power. Corporate power is inherently authoritarian. The cognitive elite seek technocracy. In technocratic systems, leadership is entrusted to technocrats who possess specialized knowledge, with the emphasis on rational decision-making. This approach prioritizes the application of technical skills and empirical data to address societal problems, striving for efficiency—calculability, predictability, uniformity (with cosmetic difference), and control. In a technocracy, decisions are driven by the scientistic establishment rather than the people through democratic consensus formation. The primary goal is to optimize resource allocation and streamline processes to achieve practical outcomes—but for the sake of who? Expert leadership and rational decision-making can be applied across various sectors, creating a more efficient and effective form of governance—but to what end?
Naturally, the smart people are drawn into the authoritarian structure of corporate technocratic control. From this elite purchase, they see liberalism as a problem. The authoritarian character of bureaucratic collectivism squeezed the individualist ethic out of the system. We live in the irrationality of Max Weber’s stahlhartes Gehäuse. “Today the spirit of religious asceticism—whether finally, who knows?—has escaped from the cage. But victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations, needs its support no longer. The rosy blush of its laughing heir, the Enlightenment, seems also to be irretrievably fading, and the idea of duty in one’s calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs.” The great sociologist continues: “No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. We can respond to some of this. The left has become the New Aristocracy in a future of mechanized petrification embellished with a convulsive self-importance. Fitting, as we stand at the threshold of the New Feudalism of a mechanized age.
* * *
The 2024 United Kingdom general election was held on Thursday, July 4, to elect 650 members of Parliament to the House of Commons. The Labour Party won in a landslide, taking 33.8 percent of the vote. Labour now holds 411 of the 650 seats, more than doubling the number of seats held by the party. This was an outright majority, a resounding victory for the UK left. A legislative election was held in France on June 30, with a second round held on July 7, to elect all 577 members of the seventeenth National Assembly of the Fifth French Republic. The threshold for a majority in the assembly is 289 seats. No party won an outright majority. However, the left wing (Nouveau Front populaire), which includes the communists and socialist parties, won more seats than the nationalists (Union de l’extrême droite). Macron’s centrist political coalition Ensemble pour la République also won more seats than the nationalists. The American left is ecstatic about the advance of the left in these two countries and what they hope it signals for the future of the populist-nationalist movement. They are particularly overjoyed by the French election results. But there is something very funny about those results.
In a recent essay, Three Big Lies About Trump—and Promising Developments in the Transatlantic Space, published a few days after the first round, I wrote about how “it’s a wonderful thing to see the French working class rising against the transnational corporate destruction of Western civilization and the international liberal order.” In the first round, Le Pen’s support was in evidence in nearly every city, town, and village in France, I noted. The nationalists had a chance to become the ruling party of one of Europe’s most imperiled nation-state. So I had hope. In the second round, the nationalists took 37.6 percent of the vote, an increase over their 33.2 percent take in the first round, winning 142 seats. Nice. The left wing won only 25.8 percent of the vote. However, the left wing emerged with 184 seats. Macron’s centrist coalition won 24.5 percent of the vote, coming in third. Yet, his Ensemble wound up with 159 seats. If the second and third place finishers form a coalition, which will weave together globalists, socialists, and Islamists, then France will move decidedly in the direction desired by the transnational corporate establishment, a direction that will see the cultural and national traditions of France deconstructed. Yet Marine Le Pen’s party was the most popular.
On the questions of how the promise of a nationalist majority could be dashed and the party that won the largest share of the votes is third in ranking by seats earned, the discrepancy between the percentage of votes and the number of seats won by different parties in the French election is attributable to the structure of the French electoral system for the National Assembly and machinations that structure allows. If in the first round no candidate gets more than 50 percent of the votes, a second round is held. Candidates who receive a certain threshold of votes in the first round advance to the second round, thus drawing potentially more voters. Moreover, in the second round, parties often form alliances or withdraw candidates to consolidate support around a single candidate to defeat their main opponent. This can lead to situations where a party with a lower national vote share wins more seats due to successful local alliances and strategic withdrawals. There are other complexities, but this is what happened: the nationalists increased their vote share in the second round but faced strategic alliances against them, leading to fewer seats.
I am trying to be optimistic, albeit I’m inclined to believe that this was the last chance France had at saving itself from a very bad end, one portending a bad end for all of Europe despite nationalist gains in European elections, especially in light of the results in the UK. I worry, too, that Biden or his replacement will be elected in November 2024 and the future of the American Republic. On the positive side, the French nationalists showed that they were the most popular party in France and gained seats, this despite coming in third in the seat count. And, who knows whether the other two parties will be successful in forging a coalition government. It could end in a mess that triggers another election.
For those readers who are trying to understand why a high IQ left-winger was hoping for a victory for the political right in France, the answer should be obvious to those who have been following me on Freedom and Reason. It should be obvious as well in what I argued in the essay. In case it’s not, I will explain/summarize. The West is in what J Habermas calls a legitimation crisis. The reason for this is the rise of the corporate state and globalist ambition. The elite of late capitalism has this overarching goal in its collective mind: dismantle the international system of relatively autonomous nations and replace it and its systems of democratic governance and human rights with a one world order administering the masses for the sake of preserving the power and privilege of the transnational elite, finally transitioning to a global neofeudalism where humanity will be managed on high-tech estates placated by diminishing expectations and provisioning of comfort (over freedom). The transition and its result require a technocratic apparatus that controls the population through authoritarian means. This apparatus—the administrative state—has been under construction for more than a century.
A key part of bringing this future to fruition is delegitimizing the secular order established upon Enlightenment values, an order that grasps the necessity of cultural, linguistic, and national integrity, democratic-republican principles of self-governance, and classical liberal values of civil liberties and rights. This is the role played by the left in France and elsewhere across the West, achieved by climate hysteria (dissimulating the regime of austerity), the transnationalization of production (offshoring), mass immigration and amnesty, multiculturalism (cultural pluralism), a shift from individualistic to collectivistic conceptions of accountability (social justice), and disruptive post-humanist ideologies (e.g., gender ideology).
What observers hailing from the left fail to recognize is that, far from the new left representing a challenge to capitalist power, the new left, i.e., the progressive tendency, serves two functions: at the street level, it provides the chaos, intimidation, and nihilism that undermines the cultural foundation of the rational nation-state, sapping the will of the citizen to defend it (loss of self-confidence often causes paralysis); at the governmental and institutional levels, it delivers the law and policies that prepare the citizen-cum-subject for incorporation into the new world order.
freedom and reason 