Category: Liberalism, Page 10

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  • The Party Is Over

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 14th 2020 4:47pm EDT

    Why is our world so screwed up? In the early 20th century, we went through World War I, the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression and World War II. The Victorian culture of the 19th century died in this tumultuous crisis period and the Modern culture of the 20th century emerged from the wreckage. The key […]

  • The New Era, The Modernist Intelligentsia and the Development of Modern Culture

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 13th 2020 12:08pm EDT

    In the 1920s, a bunch of different threads that we have been tracing came together and crystallized as the Modern liberal intelligentsia which replaced the Victorian mainstream. The following excerpt comes from Paul V. Murphy’s book The New Era: American Thought and Culture in the 1920s: “By the 1920s, then, intellectuals had witnessed a society […]

  • Modernists and American Historiography

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 13th 2020 1:54am EDT

    There are few things that I find more aggravating than listening to conservative liberals prattle on about the deracinated civic nationalism of the Founding Fathers. Victorian America was a White, Anglo-Saxon (in culture), Protestant nation with liberal and republican principles. It was not a “Nation of Immigrants” or a “melting pot.” The conservative liberal vision […]

  • The New Era

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 8th 2020 4:04pm EDT

    As I have argued, Modern America emerged in the 1920s. The Victorian consensus on identity, culture and morality began its long term decline in this period when the Losters rebelled against their parents after World War I. The rifts that began to open up in the 1920s were temporarily overshadowed by the mirage of unity […]

  • The Hays Code

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 7th 2020 10:08am EDT

    In the 1920s, millions of Americans began watching Hollywood movies and movie theaters spread across America. Almost as soon as film developed into the preeminent art form of 20th century mass culture, some Americans began to worry that mass entertainment was corrupting morals. The following excerpt comes from Nathan Miller’s New World Coming: The 1920s […]

  • The Second Klan and Modernism

    Occidental Dissent - Oct 2nd 2020 10:44am EDT

    In the 1920s, the Second Klan was on the other side of the culture war between Victorians and Moderns that I have been describing in recent weeks. In fact, the rise of the Second Klan was more about national identity and this cultural and moral breakdown than it was about race. The Second Klan appealed […]

  • From Babbitt To Bateman: The Bohemian Origins of Consumer Capitalism

    Occidental Dissent - Sep 30th 2020 10:39am EDT

    The Victorians had prized religion and morality and an ethic of self-denial, thrift and industry. They also restrained sexuality. The Moderns rejected all of this as bourgeois, repressive and philistine. They wanted to live their lives in the moment and devoted to the religion of art and experience. If you lived a bourgeois life like […]

  • The Greenwich Village Idea

    Occidental Dissent - Sep 30th 2020 2:37am EDT

    What is Modernism? Why are we spending so much time on this? Who were the Moderns? Who were the Victorians? What was the nature of this culture war that broke out in America in the late 1910s and early 1920s? How did it lead to the creation of our world? The following excerpt comes from […]

  • The Triumph of Antiracism

    Occidental Dissent - Sep 28th 2020 4:48pm EDT

    How did racial science fall out of fashion in America? What led to the triumph of “antiracism” in the 1930s and 1940s? The following excerpt comes from Philip A. Klinker and Rogers M. Smith’s book The Unsteady March: The Rise and Decline of Racial Equality in America: “That shock led to an intellectual battle in […]

  • The Young Intellectuals and Nietzsche

    Occidental Dissent - Sep 28th 2020 10:54am EDT

    I’ve been getting some pushback against my argument that Friedrich Nietzsche had a major formative impact on the people who created modern American liberalism. The hallmark of modern liberalism is social liberalism or cultural liberalism. It is left-libertarian. It is driven by the transgressive impulse to tear down cultural norms. It is an aesthetic form […]

  • The Lost Generation and Modernism

    Occidental Dissent - Sep 27th 2020 5:27pm EDT

    I finally watched the whole documentary. In the 1910s, there were only a few Moderns in the United States who were living what at the time were eccentric lifestyles in a few bohemian enclaves in Chicago and New York City. The catastrophe that was World War I which sent 2 million American soldiers to France […]

  • Randolph Bourne, Modernism and The New Woman

    Occidental Dissent - Sep 26th 2020 3:05pm EDT

    The “New Woman” of Modern America rejected what it meant to be a woman in Victorian America. In the 19th century, women were either respectable and devoted to their families or were whores and prostitutes. The overwhelming majority of women got married and chose to live a respectable life. The Victorians thought that women were […]

  • Hidden Hands: The CIA, Modernism and the Cold War

    Occidental Dissent - Sep 25th 2020 8:06pm EDT

    During the Cold War, the CIA used jazz, rock and abstract expressionism as weapons to subvert and degenerate the culture of the Eastern Bloc and to promote liberalism and free-market capitalism. Michael Jackson’s music was banned as degenerate art in the Soviet Union. If you look deep into the history of the avant-garde, the neocons […]

  • This Side of Paradise

    Occidental Dissent - Sep 25th 2020 12:38pm EDT

    Victorian America ended in the catastrophe that was World War I. 2 million American soldiers had fought in France. 130,000 of them never came home. The Wilson administration imposed a suffocating conformism on the country which exceeded anything in American history before or since. We have already seen how The Masses was shutdown and anarchists […]

  • The Modernism Debate

    Occidental Dissent - Sep 24th 2020 1:24pm EDT

    .@TheCptBlackPill and I debate “Modernism.” https://t.co/7jwZnMXH4p— Richard ? Spencer (@RichardBSpencer) September 24, 2020 Where does modern liberalism come from? In my view, the hallmark of modern liberalism is cultural liberalism, which distinguishes the liberalism of Modern America from the liberalism of Victorian America. The former is primarily an aesthetic form of liberalism. The latter was […]

  • The Revolt Against The Masses

    Occidental Dissent - Sep 23rd 2020 3:48pm EDT

    It was reading Eric P. Kaufmann’s excellent book The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America that drew my attention to Modernism. I’m currently reading through his sources. As I became curious about the link between Modernism, cultural liberalism and American racial and culture decline, I discovered that Fred Siegel had already written a book about this […]

  • The Cosmopolitan Ideal

    Occidental Dissent - Sep 23rd 2020 1:02pm EDT

    In recent weeks, I have been writing about the 1910s and trying to give you a sense of what Victorian America looked like on the eve of the cultural revolution. It was a White, Anglo-Saxon (in culture), Protestant nation that also happened to be liberal and republican in principles. In our own times, we are […]

  • The Rise of Modernism

    Occidental Dissent - Sep 17th 2020 5:27pm EDT

    I’ve been skipping all around the world. In this article, I will try to sum up the case that I have made so far and where I am going with this argument, which is that the rise of Modernism is central to understanding our decline. In his book The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America, Eric […]

  • Contact Theory

    Occidental Dissent - Sep 15th 2020 4:41pm EDT

    In his book White Identity, Jared Taylor explained that the theoretical basis for racial integration was something called “contact theory.” “The theoretical basis for integration was set out in An American Dilemma written in 1944 by the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal. With the possible exception of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, no other book has had a […]

  • Review: The End of American Innocence, 1912-1917

    Occidental Dissent - Sep 15th 2020 1:12pm EDT

    Henry F. May, The End of American Innocence, 1912-1917 When did our own times begin? Culturally speaking, when did Victorian 19th century America become Modern 20th century America? Why did this happen? How did this happen? What changed? In The End of American Innocence, 1912-1917, Henry F. May argues that the transition began in New […]

  • The Young Intellectuals

    Occidental Dissent - Sep 13th 2020 8:53pm EDT

    This is the whole point of why we have been studying Modernism The following excerpt comes from Henry F. May’s book The End of American Innocence: “The Young Intellectuals went further than mere tolerance: they turned the conventional hierarchy upside down. Anglo-Saxons, repressed and bigoted, were at the bottom of the scale; at the top […]

  • The Cuties Uproar

    Occidental Dissent - Sep 11th 2020 12:46pm EDT

    Netflix is comfortable with this. Plenty of people will defend it. This is where our culture is at. pic.twitter.com/UlqEmXALmd— Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) September 10, 2020 Unless you have been living under a rock this week, you have probably heard about the big conservative uproar against Netflix over the French film Cuties which sexualizes children. […]

  • The Roots of Cultural Liberalism

    Occidental Dissent - Sep 10th 2020 10:53pm EDT

    The is a pretty good summary. I’ve never seen post-liberals, reactionaries or White Nationalists bring up the true origins of cultural liberalism. The following excerpt comes from Henry F. May’s book The End of American Innocence, 1912-1917: “It was not the fervent romanticism of an earlier period, though it drew on the romanticism of all […]

  • Pride and Prejudice Fails To Meet Modern Inclusion Standards

    Occidental Dissent - Sep 9th 2020 1:59pm EDT

    Starting in 2024, movies will need to meet specific inclusion standards in order to be eligible for the best picture Oscar. https://t.co/aPT1qejKvU— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) September 9, 2020 The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which is responsible for the annual Academy Awards, has implemented sweeping new restrictions and requirements that will determine […]

  • American Racial Decline and Modernism

    Occidental Dissent - Sep 8th 2020 12:10pm EDT

    I’m bumping up my response to ATBOTL from the comments who raises some good points: “American radical abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison and Charles Sumner were openly anti-white in the current sense long before modernists had any influence anywhere or even existed. Most significantly, they a huge following among average, non-elite middle class whites in […]