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Editors’ Note: The essay below is penned by Conlan Salgado, a recent college graduate and a contributor to The Prickly Pear. Conlan is an astute political observer and highly informed conservative. His essay deserves careful reading. We recommend reading Mr. Salgado’s’s excellent articles published in The Prickly Pear. 

I was recently introduced to a wonderful term by the political analyst Darren Beatty: “retail politics”. Appropriating only slightly, I thought of how “retail punditry” was a succinct phrase for describing how most Americans acquire their arguments, opinions, and slogans. The Republican and Democratic media establishments are full of retail pundits: these are people who offer cheap, relatively reliable, extremely uniform talking points and narratives according to the pundit’s particular bent.

I call these talking points cheap, because they are not purchased through intense intellectual labor, the interrogation of history, or a wealth of true information. One of the most famous retail phrases—“Love is Love”—is an actual philosophical fallacy (defining a thing by itself). I call these slogans reliable because many of them have replaced arguments in their ability to convince or persuade and have lasted decades, becoming clarion calls for majorly successful activist movements. Consider the power of the pro-abortion phrase “My body, My choice”.

The CEOs and owners of retail punditry, i.e., those who own the legacy media, have recently started repackaging the Israel-Palestine conflict. As it turns out, products are flying off the shelves! “From the river to the sea. . . Israel Israel you can’t hide. . . Hey Hey Ho Ho, the Occupation has to Go!” Entire continents of intellectual and historical truth are being purchased for a pittance. The conservative pundits have retailed and detailed the campus protests also, speculating on everything from why the Left is suddenly pro-free-speech to whether we should deport foreign students who engage in campus
violence.

Contemporary Leftist activism is violent because it is Neo-Marxist: simple as that. One of the central insights of early Marxism was that violence, i.e., conflict, instigated meaningful change. Because, according to Marx, the logic of history was in itself a cycle of violence and resolution, violence was the entire metaphysic. At the heart of identity was conflict between identity groups; at the heart of history, class conflict; at the heart of society, conflict over power and the means of production. Contemporary activists have been inculcated to believe that violence precedes revolution. More specifically, Marx borrowed Hegel’s vocabulary of “thesis-antithesis-synthesis”, where the synthesis is the solution to the violent confrontation between thesis and antithesis. For example, the antithesis of war is peace. The antithesis of private ownership wealth is communal poverty: it’s synthesis is communal ownership wealth, which is communism.

It is within such a neo-Marxist context that the Campus Protests become more disturbing—an indication that a Maoist-style cultural revolution is in the works and already flourishing. Of course, Mao made extensive use of the youth and university students in his mass murderous campaign, but this is not the similarity I wish to draw attention to. Rather, notice how an antithesis of sorts is being introduced, systematically, into each and every cultural space, until a total transformation of purpose has been effected. A society of Aristotelian friendship is replaced by a society of state-sponsored enmity (more on that in a second).

Universities, for example, are spaces of education, where education means “a leading out of ”, or, “A leading forth”—a leading forth out of ignorance and out of the small confines of the self. Education ought to make people more intelligent, more refined, more magnanimous, more sophisticated, more capable of handling difference and opposition. What is the antithesis of education? Indoctrination. Indoctrination, rather than being a “leading out of ” is really a “confining within”—in-doctrination, as opposed to education. Indoctrination traps people within their own ignorance, within a myopic of the self. Education (a leading out of) introduces people to the world outside themselves, the world of other people, the world of shared objects and shared events and shared moments.

Education trains people in the art of sharing themselves—whether through exchange of ideas, intelligent conversation, argument, etc. Education teaches people how to value correctly, how to discipline and augment improper and proper emotions, and thus education teaches us how to relate. Education, in the above sense, cultivates love, for as Iris Murdoch so exquisitely wrote: “love is the difficult realization that something other than the self exists.”

Indoctrination, on the other hand, is the cultivation of hatred. If love is the difficult realization that something other than the self exists, hatred is the refusal to acknowledge that something other than the self exists, and clearly we can see the fruits of indoctrination in so many current ideological trends! What is transgenderism except the affirmation that even biological and external reality are possessions of the self, that the self exists as sole arbiter of “what is real” (nothing exists outside the self). Leftist ideology has collapsed into denying that the self exists in “a given world”. Rather, indoctrination traps me inside my self, causing hatred, leading to my refusal to acknowledge anything as real outside the experience of my own subjectivity—even my own body manifesting as self-hatred.

Indoctrinated people, as opposed to educated people, are notoriously unequipped for sharing themselves, whether through the exchange of ideas, intelligent conversation, argument, or any other peaceful means. An inability to share oneself leads to loneliness and self-referentiality, an increasing reliance on one’s own emotions and volatile mind as ultimate figures of authority. This is why you see young liberals quoting their feelings as seemingly legitimate replacements for arguments and the process of reason-giving. Because connection and relationship is a fundamental human need, those who cannot share themselves tend to rely frequently on forcing themselves on others: argumentation is replaced by screaming; conversation is replaced by insult matches. Bullying, physical intimidation, and even violent assault become attractive ways of forcing oneself on a world which is estranged from the indoctrinated self.

More broadly speaking in terms of society, chaos is the antithesis to law/order. The Marxist project is by definition a replacement of one type of society with another, so it must involve chaos as its essential ingredient. But there are many forms of law/order: custom, tradition, ceremony, shared language, shared loyalty to an integral community. So when we look throughout society, we see attacks launched on political norms, such as jailing your primary political opponent in an election year; or judicial customs, such as liberal DAs cancelling entire classes of crime and releasing violent criminals without parole; or shared language and loyalty, such as the importation of 10 million foreign nationals—foreign in both language and values and political loyalty for many of them.

All these antitheses produce a so-called synthesis, which, as I mentioned in passing, is a society of state-sponsored enmity that replaces a society of Aristotelian friendship. Aristotle’s theory of friendship is far too complex for the scope of this article, but, in brief, per Aristotle, the highest form of friendship involves two people falling in love over a shared, and presumably worthwhile, activity. As Gabriel Richardson Lear puts it, “Since human existence, for Aristotle, is essentially in activity, the question becomes which joint activity is most suitable for friendship?” In a healthy and flourishing society, there are many types of human connection, in part because there are many social activities to be pursued along with others.

Note the connection here between friendship and education, which I described, in part, as introducing “people to the world outside themselves, the world of other people, the world of shared objects and shared events and shared moments.” The strength of a society may be measured by the strength and integrity of its institutions precisely because it is within the spaces of those institutions that genuine social friendship is developed, that genuine human goods (knowledge, connection, love, self-sacrifice) are pursued with the intention of brining people together. Church, school, sports clubs, political clubs, hobby clubs—through pursuing a diversity of activities, I not only develop my human features fully (mind, body, soul), I do so in a way that prioritizes connection since I am laboring or playing in the company of others. In this fashion, social activity is sublimated to the transcendent goal of love (see Murdoch above).

Currently, as leftists gradually colonize every cultural space, the human features atrophy: mind and soul become weak as Church and school and clubs become spaces not where a diversity of activities is explored but mere uniformity of thought and opinion is enforced. Religion becomes social justice; even businesses must seek to prioritize the One Ideology at the expense of profit (ESG, Go Woke Go Broke). No space is allowed to foster a genuinely different project than the Ideology. Each person becomes an avatar and multiplication of sameness until we live side by side with only ourself—the blandest, most stripped, most cowardly versions of ourselves.

As the human features atrophy, we cannot recognize the humanity within each other. We turn to pagan and barbaric practices. Culture wars become civil wars. It becomes acceptable for men to hit women; it becomes acceptable for groups of people to assault lone individuals; it becomes acceptable for young people to physically attack the elderly.

The most worrying element of the Campus protests is not the protestors. They are largely lily-livered (or should I say, lavender-livered), incapable of fighting but adept at brawling, largely unarmed, of average intelligence, and of average ambition. Even as these protestors broke windows and beat up lone Jews, they demanded free food, condoms, and all the comforts of 21st century America. Believe me readers: in a real fight, they would NOT PRESENT ANY DANGER WHATSOEVER. It is precisely because their behavior is encouraged, safeguarded, or dismissed that they are so bold, so obnoxious. It is because their administrations and professors bail them out, allow them to occupy public buildings and walks, praise them publicly, and negotiate with them as if they are a legitimate entity.

Imagine, for example, an administration which immediately called upon police to disband any encampments, make arrests of those who resist, expel all protestors who assault others or disturb the peace, deport all foreign national students who advocate or agitate for terrorism, and release strongly worded statements condemning both antisemitism and islamophobia (of much less concern, it is important to note). The Campus Protests are desired. The fact that the very authorities tasked with safeguarding law and order are openly and flamboyantly colluding with groups specifically organized to carry out lawless activities is a symbolic transfer of sovereignty from the forces of civilization (the law and government and education) to the forces of anti-civilization (mob justice and violence).

The Campus Protests are not a rerun of the sixties. They are a preview of the 2030s. Pay attention: you are living in a country without a legitimate government. You are living in a country without a president. You are living in a country without due process; you are living in a country without a free press. You live in a country where thoughts are punishable by law. You live in a country without borders. You are living through the sack of Rome.

We have one more chance to redeem our inheritance through democratic means: November 5th. After that, desperate times will call forth desperate measures. In the very near future, your country and your family will need you to be a force for civilization, whether you stand with others, or alone. But in order to be a force for civilization, we must be filled with it. This summer, spend time with your family and those you love. Go to Church. Read great poetry and great novels; read your Declaration. Know the Bill of Rights by heart. Listen to Beethoven and Mozart and Paul Simon and Irving Berlin and the Great American Songbook. Watch comedies. Go play sports with your friends. Engage in long conversation. Immerse yourself in the activities which make up civilization.

Above all, flaunt your Trumpism. Wave your MAGA flags, wag your tongues. Allow yourself to imagine the moment as we watch Joe Biden stumble out of the Oval Office; we’ll line the streets, and spread the wicked smile of civilization across our faces as we scream: Hey Hey Ho Ho, the Occupier has to Go!