In the final years before the sack of Constantinople, the Byzantine court (silk-robed, incense-choked, endlessly self-assured) was busy debating whether angels had weight and if Christ’s sandals would pass through fire. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Bosporus, real fire. Latin soldiers sharpening swords. Ships being stocked. The empire's greatest minds were measuring the distance between dogma and doctrine while the walls groaned. That’s what came to mind reading yet another performance by the so-called defenders of Western civilization, who clutch their pearls over campus posters while applauding leaders who are actively dynamiting the global institutions that gave the West whatever moral weight it ever had. They are arguing over pronouns while the city burns.
And I’m not being metaphorical. These guys aren’t just neglecting the walls—they're handing the sledgehammers to the arsonists. People sell themselves as guardians of Enlightenment values, but the second those values get in the way of their cultural vengeance fantasies, they throw them under the bus and call it a trolley problem. NATO? Optional. International law? Too slow. Decency? Complicated. The “least bad option” logic they use to back demagogues isn’t pragmatic—it’s lazy and cowardly. It’s comfort food for people who want to be angry and righteous at the same time. They’ll tell you Trump is rough but necessary, like a bitter medicine. No. He’s arsenic. And they’re mixing the dose because they hate the taste of kale.
The impulse is understandable. The left can be smug and censorious. Institutions feel broken. It’s fun to flip tables. But if your idea of defending Western civilization is cheering for its erosion—as long as it offends the right people—then you were never defending it in the first place. You were decorating the foyer while someone sawed through the foundation. The Byzantines thought their scrolls and ceremonies would protect them from what was real. They didn’t. The sack came anyway. And the historians who wrote it down didn’t bother to distinguish between the court jesters and the court philosophers. They all went down together.
This is a very insightful point but I think you can also point to analogies in the western empire as well. Nero after all promised to restore a "New Golden Age" and wound up letting much of the city burn down after which he claimed it for a new palace. The games were in full swing, much of the populace was enticed by bloodsport and the elites busied themselves with flattery and climbing over the bodies of their peers while outside the gates the vandals crept closer and closer.
"Conservatism is when something triggers the libs, and the more the libs are triggered the more conservatismer it is."
It feels like the moment the economic and cultural left (with whom on many issues I am in agreement) set one toe past the point of comfort for a lot of self-declared centrist moderates, those moderates immediately abandoned their expressed principles and ran into the embrace of the waiting fascists, while a number of supposedly principled conservatives revealed themselves to have been said fascists all along--and in doing so came to embody that quote meant to parody them, and further provide an illustration of what the left had claimed all along about "fish hook theory". (Or, as the Black Panthers put it, "scratch a liberal and you'll find a fascist". To be clear, I am not claiming this about the author.)
(For two examples from Europe, as I recall, witness the aftermath of the 2019 election in Thuringia, where the liberal Free Democratic Party accepted the support of the fascist Alternative für Deutschland to elect an FDP member as Minister-President and it took the tacit support of the conservative Christian Democratic Union for the Die Linke-SDP-Grüne alliance to stay in power instead; see also the aftermath of the 2024 legislative elections in France, where the conservative Les Républicains splintered between a faction that allied with the fascist Rassemblement national and one that did not, and then despite the Nouveau Front populaire winning a plurality in the Assemblée nationale, their chosen candidate, Lucie Castets, was not given the opportunity to form a government and instead the centrist President Emmanuel Macron chose first a conservative from Les Républicains and then a centrist from his own Ensemble alliance as Prime Minister, in both cases hoping that the Rassemblement national would at least decline to defeat the government, in order not to have a government with the explicit support of La France Insoumise, even after the party agreed that it would not seek any Cabinet positions in a hypothetical Castets government.)
There's actually another layer to the situation in France that made it even more irritating to the left.
France uses a two-round electoral system, where if no candidate receives a majority in the first round, the top two candidates advance to the second. For legislative elections, there are a few exceptions; in particular, any candidate receiving sufficient support from all registered electors (not just those who actually voted) can advance to the second round even without finishing in the top two. In past elections, even having three candidates advance was rare; having four advance hadn't happened in (I believe) half a century. The second round is simple plurality voting such as is used in Canada and most places in the United States, regardless of the number of candidates.
Five districts in 2024 saw four candidates advance to the second round, and over 300 had three-way contests.
Shortly after the first-round results were announced, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of La France Insoumise, announced that the Nouveau Front populaire would withdraw all its candidates who finished third or worse in races where the top two candidates were from the Ensemble alliance and the Rassemblement national. (I don't know about how they treated candidates for Les Républicains.)
In 2022, meanwhile, when Mélenchon had finished a very close third to Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen in the Presidential election, he had vociferously supported Macron in the second round because he saw Le Pen as an existential threat to the French Republic.
Some time later, Gabriel Attal, Macron's Prime Minister, announced that the Ensemble alliance would also withdraw candidates who finished third or worse in a contest where the top two were from the NFP and the RN--but only if the NFP candidate was from one of the traditional "republican" parties of the French left, the Socialists, Communists and Greens. This left many districts as three-way races between a RN candidate, a LFI candidate, and a third-place Ensemble candidate. (Again, I do not know what Les Républicains did, or what other parties did regarding races involving their candidates.)
It is very plausible that the RN only won as many seats as it did because of left-centre vote splitting between LFI and Ensemble candidates in the second round in those three-way races, even as the NFP had attempted to engineer an effective left-centre voting alliance that would see the anti-NR vote rally around a single candidate in the second round.
This infuriated the left, who had chosen Macron and Ensemble as the less bad option against Le Pen and the RN, and so then to see Macron outright reject the possibility of a left-centre alliance despite the NFP winning a plurality in the Assemblée nationale and the Ensemble alliance the second-most seats, easily holding a majority between them, and instead nominate a LR Prime Minister and in effect look for a centre-fascist alliance (this is "fish hook theory", that when the centre feels threatened from its left, it runs into the arms of fascists) only further incensed them.
The LR Prime Minister was defeated in the Assemblée when both the NFP and RN voted against his government, but when Macron then nominated a member of his own alliance as Prime Minister, while this still infuriated LFI (the largest of the four parties in the NFP in the Assemblée, though not by much) because he refused to consider Castets despite her being (vaguely) a Socialist and LFI having promised not to accept Cabinet positions in her government, the left-wing bloc splintered somewhat because the Socialists, seeing an opportunity to reassert themselves as the main party of the French left, declined to join LFI's motion to defeat the new government. I haven't looked into it much since then.
Macron's official line on why he declined to nominate Castets was because he didn't think her government would survive an Assemblée vote, but given that the NFP would have backed her fully, and all he had to do was tell his own alliance to back her as well, this smacks of a refusal on his part to consider working with LFI, despite their having sacrificed some of their electoral prospects to stop the RN, with whom Macron promptly tacitly worked in attempting to keep both of his Prime Ministers in office, particularly his first selection from LR.
(Macron had pleaded for "republican" parties to work together to back a government in the immediate aftermath of the election, meaning by that everyone except LFI and the RN, but at the time the NFP was fully united and the three older parties refused to splinter from LFI, knowing that they needed the non-competition agreement between them to elect as many candidates as possible in the event of another snap election.)
In brief, in France in 2024, at least from the left's point of view, the left did everything it could to help the centre stop the fascists, and the centre promptly spat in the left's face and cozied up to the fascists instead. (Though the fascists weren't all that willing to work with the centrists, either, as it proved.)
It's no wonder that that Black Panthers observation has been making a comeback--or, to put it a bit more coarsely, "Scratch a liberal, and a fascist bleeds."
EDIT: There's another incident, again from France, that I recall. I can't recall what year this was, but Macron's Higher Education Minister was debating the question of Islam in universities with Marine Le Pen on TV. When the Minister made the argument that expression of the Muslim faith (if not Muslims themselves) should be restricted or banned on campus, Le Pen made a face that showed she knows full well that that's the sort of position everyone would expect her to take, and instead she found herself arguing for France's long tradition of religious liberty--an inversion of what you'd expect from someone who claims to be a centrist and someone whom everyone says is a fascist.
I think you are on to something there. You can also get some mileage out of Dr. Martin Luther King's comments about "White Moderates". In his case he was talking about people who claimed to be on your side but don't want change. I would argue it applies equally to people who say they are "not racists" right up until a black guy becomes president and then they find common cause with open racists.
Yes, I also like to quote Dr. King in "Letter from a Birmingham Jail":
I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.
He also remarked, "The majority of white Americans consider themselves sincerely committed to justice for the Negro. They believe that American society is essentially hospitable to fair play and to steady growth toward a middle-class Utopia embodying racial harmony. But unfortunately this is a fantasy of self-deception and comfortable vanity."
And, of course, there's Malcolm X's observation about white liberals:
In this deceitful American game of power politics, the Negroes (i.e., the race problem, the integration and civil rights issues) are nothing but tools, used by one group of whites called Liberals against another group of whites called Conservatives, either to get into power or to remain in power. Among whites here in America, the political teams are no longer divided into Democrats and Republicans. The whites who are now struggling for control of the American political throne are divided into "liberal" and "conservative" camps. The white liberals from both parties cross party lines to work together toward the same goal, and white conservatives from both parties do likewise.
The white liberal differs from the white conservative only in one way: the liberal is more deceitful than the conservative. The liberal is more hypocritical than the conservative. Both want power, but the white liberal is the one who has perfected the art of posing as the Negro's friend and benefactor; and by winning the friendship, allegiance, and support of the Negro, the white liberal is able to use the Negro as a pawn or tool in this political "football game" that is constantly raging between the white liberals and white conservatives.
Politically the American Negro is nothing but a football and the white liberals control this mentally dead ball through tricks of tokenism: false promises of integration and civil rights. In this profitable game of deceiving and exploiting the political politician of the American Negro, those white liberals have the willing cooperation of the Negro civil rights leaders. These "leaders" sell out our people for just a few crumbs of token recognition and token gains. These "leaders" are satisfied with token victories and token progress because they themselves are nothing but token leaders.
A pithier way of putting it is that a moderate is someone who looks at the extreme violence done by the far-right and the less violent actions (but still violent) taken by the far-left, and concludes that since both do violence both are equally bad--thus giving cover to the far-right.
As a native American gazing on Europe and its colonies, I have to say that so much of what Western people call "civilization" has something to do with form, not substance -- as if the underlying moral order of their caste system were divinely designed, and the only remaining issues had something to do with manners. Western philosophers have argued over who should be on top, with morphing conclusions dependent on the use of force. For all those who get their cultural directions from reading the papers, good luck. No surprise that the chattering class has your brains by the balls.
Have struggled to find a more accurate term than hypocrisy. Thank you for this: “This represents more than mere hypocrisy. It represents the complete intellectual and moral bankruptcy…”
In the final years before the sack of Constantinople, the Byzantine court (silk-robed, incense-choked, endlessly self-assured) was busy debating whether angels had weight and if Christ’s sandals would pass through fire. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Bosporus, real fire. Latin soldiers sharpening swords. Ships being stocked. The empire's greatest minds were measuring the distance between dogma and doctrine while the walls groaned. That’s what came to mind reading yet another performance by the so-called defenders of Western civilization, who clutch their pearls over campus posters while applauding leaders who are actively dynamiting the global institutions that gave the West whatever moral weight it ever had. They are arguing over pronouns while the city burns.
And I’m not being metaphorical. These guys aren’t just neglecting the walls—they're handing the sledgehammers to the arsonists. People sell themselves as guardians of Enlightenment values, but the second those values get in the way of their cultural vengeance fantasies, they throw them under the bus and call it a trolley problem. NATO? Optional. International law? Too slow. Decency? Complicated. The “least bad option” logic they use to back demagogues isn’t pragmatic—it’s lazy and cowardly. It’s comfort food for people who want to be angry and righteous at the same time. They’ll tell you Trump is rough but necessary, like a bitter medicine. No. He’s arsenic. And they’re mixing the dose because they hate the taste of kale.
The impulse is understandable. The left can be smug and censorious. Institutions feel broken. It’s fun to flip tables. But if your idea of defending Western civilization is cheering for its erosion—as long as it offends the right people—then you were never defending it in the first place. You were decorating the foyer while someone sawed through the foundation. The Byzantines thought their scrolls and ceremonies would protect them from what was real. They didn’t. The sack came anyway. And the historians who wrote it down didn’t bother to distinguish between the court jesters and the court philosophers. They all went down together.
This is a very insightful point but I think you can also point to analogies in the western empire as well. Nero after all promised to restore a "New Golden Age" and wound up letting much of the city burn down after which he claimed it for a new palace. The games were in full swing, much of the populace was enticed by bloodsport and the elites busied themselves with flattery and climbing over the bodies of their peers while outside the gates the vandals crept closer and closer.
"Conservatism is when something triggers the libs, and the more the libs are triggered the more conservatismer it is."
It feels like the moment the economic and cultural left (with whom on many issues I am in agreement) set one toe past the point of comfort for a lot of self-declared centrist moderates, those moderates immediately abandoned their expressed principles and ran into the embrace of the waiting fascists, while a number of supposedly principled conservatives revealed themselves to have been said fascists all along--and in doing so came to embody that quote meant to parody them, and further provide an illustration of what the left had claimed all along about "fish hook theory". (Or, as the Black Panthers put it, "scratch a liberal and you'll find a fascist". To be clear, I am not claiming this about the author.)
(For two examples from Europe, as I recall, witness the aftermath of the 2019 election in Thuringia, where the liberal Free Democratic Party accepted the support of the fascist Alternative für Deutschland to elect an FDP member as Minister-President and it took the tacit support of the conservative Christian Democratic Union for the Die Linke-SDP-Grüne alliance to stay in power instead; see also the aftermath of the 2024 legislative elections in France, where the conservative Les Républicains splintered between a faction that allied with the fascist Rassemblement national and one that did not, and then despite the Nouveau Front populaire winning a plurality in the Assemblée nationale, their chosen candidate, Lucie Castets, was not given the opportunity to form a government and instead the centrist President Emmanuel Macron chose first a conservative from Les Républicains and then a centrist from his own Ensemble alliance as Prime Minister, in both cases hoping that the Rassemblement national would at least decline to defeat the government, in order not to have a government with the explicit support of La France Insoumise, even after the party agreed that it would not seek any Cabinet positions in a hypothetical Castets government.)
There's actually another layer to the situation in France that made it even more irritating to the left.
France uses a two-round electoral system, where if no candidate receives a majority in the first round, the top two candidates advance to the second. For legislative elections, there are a few exceptions; in particular, any candidate receiving sufficient support from all registered electors (not just those who actually voted) can advance to the second round even without finishing in the top two. In past elections, even having three candidates advance was rare; having four advance hadn't happened in (I believe) half a century. The second round is simple plurality voting such as is used in Canada and most places in the United States, regardless of the number of candidates.
Five districts in 2024 saw four candidates advance to the second round, and over 300 had three-way contests.
Shortly after the first-round results were announced, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of La France Insoumise, announced that the Nouveau Front populaire would withdraw all its candidates who finished third or worse in races where the top two candidates were from the Ensemble alliance and the Rassemblement national. (I don't know about how they treated candidates for Les Républicains.)
In 2022, meanwhile, when Mélenchon had finished a very close third to Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen in the Presidential election, he had vociferously supported Macron in the second round because he saw Le Pen as an existential threat to the French Republic.
Some time later, Gabriel Attal, Macron's Prime Minister, announced that the Ensemble alliance would also withdraw candidates who finished third or worse in a contest where the top two were from the NFP and the RN--but only if the NFP candidate was from one of the traditional "republican" parties of the French left, the Socialists, Communists and Greens. This left many districts as three-way races between a RN candidate, a LFI candidate, and a third-place Ensemble candidate. (Again, I do not know what Les Républicains did, or what other parties did regarding races involving their candidates.)
It is very plausible that the RN only won as many seats as it did because of left-centre vote splitting between LFI and Ensemble candidates in the second round in those three-way races, even as the NFP had attempted to engineer an effective left-centre voting alliance that would see the anti-NR vote rally around a single candidate in the second round.
This infuriated the left, who had chosen Macron and Ensemble as the less bad option against Le Pen and the RN, and so then to see Macron outright reject the possibility of a left-centre alliance despite the NFP winning a plurality in the Assemblée nationale and the Ensemble alliance the second-most seats, easily holding a majority between them, and instead nominate a LR Prime Minister and in effect look for a centre-fascist alliance (this is "fish hook theory", that when the centre feels threatened from its left, it runs into the arms of fascists) only further incensed them.
The LR Prime Minister was defeated in the Assemblée when both the NFP and RN voted against his government, but when Macron then nominated a member of his own alliance as Prime Minister, while this still infuriated LFI (the largest of the four parties in the NFP in the Assemblée, though not by much) because he refused to consider Castets despite her being (vaguely) a Socialist and LFI having promised not to accept Cabinet positions in her government, the left-wing bloc splintered somewhat because the Socialists, seeing an opportunity to reassert themselves as the main party of the French left, declined to join LFI's motion to defeat the new government. I haven't looked into it much since then.
Macron's official line on why he declined to nominate Castets was because he didn't think her government would survive an Assemblée vote, but given that the NFP would have backed her fully, and all he had to do was tell his own alliance to back her as well, this smacks of a refusal on his part to consider working with LFI, despite their having sacrificed some of their electoral prospects to stop the RN, with whom Macron promptly tacitly worked in attempting to keep both of his Prime Ministers in office, particularly his first selection from LR.
(Macron had pleaded for "republican" parties to work together to back a government in the immediate aftermath of the election, meaning by that everyone except LFI and the RN, but at the time the NFP was fully united and the three older parties refused to splinter from LFI, knowing that they needed the non-competition agreement between them to elect as many candidates as possible in the event of another snap election.)
In brief, in France in 2024, at least from the left's point of view, the left did everything it could to help the centre stop the fascists, and the centre promptly spat in the left's face and cozied up to the fascists instead. (Though the fascists weren't all that willing to work with the centrists, either, as it proved.)
It's no wonder that that Black Panthers observation has been making a comeback--or, to put it a bit more coarsely, "Scratch a liberal, and a fascist bleeds."
EDIT: There's another incident, again from France, that I recall. I can't recall what year this was, but Macron's Higher Education Minister was debating the question of Islam in universities with Marine Le Pen on TV. When the Minister made the argument that expression of the Muslim faith (if not Muslims themselves) should be restricted or banned on campus, Le Pen made a face that showed she knows full well that that's the sort of position everyone would expect her to take, and instead she found herself arguing for France's long tradition of religious liberty--an inversion of what you'd expect from someone who claims to be a centrist and someone whom everyone says is a fascist.
I think you are on to something there. You can also get some mileage out of Dr. Martin Luther King's comments about "White Moderates". In his case he was talking about people who claimed to be on your side but don't want change. I would argue it applies equally to people who say they are "not racists" right up until a black guy becomes president and then they find common cause with open racists.
Yes, I also like to quote Dr. King in "Letter from a Birmingham Jail":
I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.
He also remarked, "The majority of white Americans consider themselves sincerely committed to justice for the Negro. They believe that American society is essentially hospitable to fair play and to steady growth toward a middle-class Utopia embodying racial harmony. But unfortunately this is a fantasy of self-deception and comfortable vanity."
And, of course, there's Malcolm X's observation about white liberals:
In this deceitful American game of power politics, the Negroes (i.e., the race problem, the integration and civil rights issues) are nothing but tools, used by one group of whites called Liberals against another group of whites called Conservatives, either to get into power or to remain in power. Among whites here in America, the political teams are no longer divided into Democrats and Republicans. The whites who are now struggling for control of the American political throne are divided into "liberal" and "conservative" camps. The white liberals from both parties cross party lines to work together toward the same goal, and white conservatives from both parties do likewise.
The white liberal differs from the white conservative only in one way: the liberal is more deceitful than the conservative. The liberal is more hypocritical than the conservative. Both want power, but the white liberal is the one who has perfected the art of posing as the Negro's friend and benefactor; and by winning the friendship, allegiance, and support of the Negro, the white liberal is able to use the Negro as a pawn or tool in this political "football game" that is constantly raging between the white liberals and white conservatives.
Politically the American Negro is nothing but a football and the white liberals control this mentally dead ball through tricks of tokenism: false promises of integration and civil rights. In this profitable game of deceiving and exploiting the political politician of the American Negro, those white liberals have the willing cooperation of the Negro civil rights leaders. These "leaders" sell out our people for just a few crumbs of token recognition and token gains. These "leaders" are satisfied with token victories and token progress because they themselves are nothing but token leaders.
A pithier way of putting it is that a moderate is someone who looks at the extreme violence done by the far-right and the less violent actions (but still violent) taken by the far-left, and concludes that since both do violence both are equally bad--thus giving cover to the far-right.
Thank you so much for taking the time to write this.
As a native American gazing on Europe and its colonies, I have to say that so much of what Western people call "civilization" has something to do with form, not substance -- as if the underlying moral order of their caste system were divinely designed, and the only remaining issues had something to do with manners. Western philosophers have argued over who should be on top, with morphing conclusions dependent on the use of force. For all those who get their cultural directions from reading the papers, good luck. No surprise that the chattering class has your brains by the balls.
Yes, one of many problems with civilisationism is that it is a collectivist and often authoritarian view on humans. Many "defenders of the West" are right-wing collectivists and not in favor of democracy and freedoms https://dl1.cuni.cz/pluginfile.php/478958/mod_resource/content/1/Brubaker_Between_Nationalism_and_Civilizationism.pdf
Have struggled to find a more accurate term than hypocrisy. Thank you for this: “This represents more than mere hypocrisy. It represents the complete intellectual and moral bankruptcy…”