Prosperity Does Not Cause Progressivism
In what RationalWiki , with characteristic progressive smugness, calls "the definitive takedown," Scott Alexander at slatestarcodex.com has written a long-form criticism of the Neoreaction movement. Here I'd like to respond to one of its main arguments. The nature of the continual leftward shifting of the Overton window over the last several hundred years is a major preoccupation of reactionary politics. Normie progressives and intellectuals alike tend to see this leftward shift as the result of the application of reason - the freeing of man from his intellectual "self-incurred immaturity", as Kant would call it. This gives it a character of inevitability - once man opens his eyes, he cannot shut them again, and the march towards an increasingly more rational ordering of society must go on. If, somehow, this process were stopped, it would continue in much the same way once we learned to use our rational faculties again. Reactionaries tend to see leftis