The confusion is congenital; Moldbug is the source. I tried before; he learns, but regresses. The rest of us grasp that Leftism is synonymous with radical egalitarianism. Deviations from this are called “Right”. For leftism, universalism is a corollary; coercion a necessity. When it can be, populism is a means; when not, a vulgarity to be replaced by a dictatorship of the proletariat. When it can be, the people’s will is a justification; when not, something to be re-engineered or disdained. Leftism is a paleolithic impulse willing itself to power.

Yet: “Why attribute so much importance to what leftists think? It’s just foam on the surging current of demotism.”

Moldbuggian muddle-headedness:

‘Leftism is (by definition) chaos, corruption.
Democracy is corrupt because the elite, via the media, inform the mass what to think; they manipulate.
Thus, democracy is and the elite are Leftist.
The elite are corrupt — deceptive — because they believe that the people’s will matters.
This belief thus must be the root and essence of the corruption called Leftism.
Ergo, if the elite would only embrace explicit authoritarianism — like a dictator of the proletariat — they would, guile unnecessary, become rightist!’
…

When leftists justify their policies deontologically they are no less leftist, where leftism is understood in the common sense way.

It is, I think, this myth of non-representative, self-organisation which is the last threat, the deepest illusion, which is most difficult to renounce. Yes, there are in every revolutionary process, ecstatic moments of group solidarity, when thousands, hundreds of thousands, together occupy a public space, like on Tahrir Square on Cairo two years ago. Yes, there are moments of intense collective participation, where local communities debate, decide; when people live in a kind of permanent emergency state, taking things into their own hands, with no leader guiding them. But, I claim, such states don’t last. And tiredness, getting tired, is not a simple psychological fact. So now comes my first thesis, and I will try to be as brutal and provocative as possible.

The large majority of people, – and I am not here presenting you the variation of this 99 percent of people are idiots, I am including myself into this large majority – large majority, I claim, wants to be passive and just rely on an efficient state apparatus. I’m sorry to tell you, but I wouldn’t like to live in a state where some kind of permanent participation and engagement is going on, and so on and so on. I would much prefer to be a passive citizen; there is a machinery of State, or whatever, social services, which smoothly does its work, and the less I know about it, all the better. And I don’t despise ordinary people for it.

Next point: people really know what they want when they are engaged. I claim that no, they don’t. Up to a point, I claim, even the majority even don’t want to know, really. I claim that we should rehabilitate, – of course, not in the old class sense – the term, “elite”. What does a good politician do? A good politician absolutely doesn’t follow or learn from the people what they want. No, he tells them what they want. And if he’s a really good politician, people have this “ah-ha” effect, “oh my God, how clear, now I know what I want”.

– Slavoj Zizek, “A Reply to My Critics”, talk delivered to Birbeck Institute of Humanities, 28th February, 2013

For a time, a small enough group of gentlemanly enough can provide coherent enough leadership to an unimportant enough intellectual movement.

Moldbug was certainly pushing that idea, but I don’t think most people around here buy it. We just haven’t agreed on an alternative model.