The New Serfdom

 I'll have to do a more in depth post on this sometime, but for now, let me just say I think people are wise to appreciate the extent to which Western countries, in particular ones like Canada, are purposefully tending toward Serfdom traps.

Historically, one branch into serfdom was the gradual emancipation of slaves, say in the late Roman empire, into land/trade locked peasantry. In essence, they could have increased freedoms as long as the state was guaranteed products of labour.

Another branch into serfdom was the erosion of rough forms of middle classdom into serfdom via ever increasing tax excises, or increasing governmental authoritarianism.  I don't think slippery slope tax slavery was very common, but I'm still digging through alternative ways this dynamic may have been expressed in historical contexts. The Dawn of Everything makes strong suggestions that changes toward authoritarianism produced a controlled class of people, and that outward looking expansion often created a dynamic where this class of people was viewed as soldier and labour good producers. Basically authoritarian regimes evolved to seeing this class less as autonomous individuals and more as state owned production goods - much like cattle.

Late medieval serfdom tended to view the peasantry much like the cattle analogy - as state owned objects of production.

MODERN EQUIVALENCY

Modern equity based socialism has almost fully evolved the landscape trap for serfdom. In Canada for instance, the governmental behaviour of the two ruling socialist leaders demonstrate a HUGE extraction of resources from the middle class toward the 1) upper classes, 2) bureaucracy, 3) and somewhat toward poorer classes.

Tendencies toward subsidization will likely solidify the serf trap.

Who pays for these expenditures? The middle class.  Right now this is seen as bearable, but as taxes increase by a few percent each year, and real wages drop, over the course of multiple decades you will reach a point of guaranteed immiseration. "You will own nothing and be happy" is, I believe the right wing mantra.  Turchin sees this in terms of his elite overproduction collapse model. Fair enough.

The dynamical parallel between modern and ancient serfdom is in the governing view of the role of the middle class as tools of production rather than as autonomous individuals (classical liberalism).

Trudeau' hubris makes this rather evident. The middle class' role is to support the poor.  This is what "makes one Canadian".  Trudeau's 1700's kingly attitudes enables some more parallels. It is very plausible that Trudeau is purposefully increasing Canada's population not just to grab the 0.1%GDP boost per 100k immigrants, but also to up our relative international position.  Bigger societies have bigger influence. Historically we see authoritarian leanings in Kings expressed via wars of conquest. You grew your crop of serfs up so that each generation you could roll the dice on your big war campaign. I would be VERY surprised if those tendencies had evolved out of our population. Rather, I think they are just expressed more pro-socially via immigrant based country population expansion. There are certainly other superficial reasons for this, but I suspect they are just proximate covers for some ultimate biology.

In post-Rome, I believe the transition of slaves into serfs also created political power. Slaves had no voice. But land/trade based peasants had at least some influence. The Christian church used this to their advantage. That is how bishops emerged as political powerhouses. Alms tied the poor to religious officials. That then increased the secular power of these officials. This then led to the conjoining of religion and governance in the form of "Bishops".

Today socialism buys of the poor for political support via money grown by the middle class. Ballot harvesting only magnifies this issue.  

WHEN WILL THIS BE NOTICED

I don't think the serfdom trap will be noticed until a sufficient number of middle class producers drop out of the labour marker so that state funds become insufficient.  Post lock-down we already see a collapse in labour market participation.

It is not unreasonable to speculate that equity logic may lead the state to suggest that individuals of certain identities who have employable skills should be expected to work. No dole for that white college boy - the 'state' invested in them. In theory, this could be enforced with expectations of base tax contributions based on identity factors. Why have just an income tax percentage when you can set a base rate "contribution". For instance, if you are a white male with no intersectional privilege then you should be able to contribute $2000 a year plus income percentages.  This step has already occurred with child support.  The logical transition from child support to marginalized people support is minor and would be politically advantageous to push via equity.

That is all you need for serfdom.  How do you escape? The middle class functionally doesn't. Each new job advancement comes with increasing production burdens. Escape from these likely would need to come with proper religious/political conversion and with sufficient obeisances to guarantee entry into exploitive class dynamics.

 

Putin's Solution to Bureaucratic Capture

It seems like Putin is trying to figure a way to avoid technocratic (bureaucratic) capture. West has embraced it. Putin's gaming around it.

Only a "noble" caste who has Russia's best interest can be "trusted" to lead the country and avoid Soviet-like capture

This is a Locke-like civil decision. People have lots of freedom (at least in certain spheres) but no freedom to change/critique government or Oligarchy caste.

So in theory, Putin Russia has more freedom in many/some spheres than us in the West (e.g. no DEI priesthood)

My support for this comes from commentary on Putin's extreme dislike for Soviet bureaucracy.

He thought bureaucratic capture is what destroyed his country during early and late Soviet times. (brother died of starvation)

This approach is in opposition to the West's authoritarian democracy model/well.

West maximizes bureaucratic/technocratic capture. This guarantees the "arrow of history/progress". It will be more and more Toxic Caring until the system collapses.

How do you avoid technocratic capture? Keep down the size of your bureaucracy and its power.

How to do this? Keep all power in the hands of a few. (Oligarchy).

How do you select this Oligarchy? The same way religions (or radical moralized groups like NPR or the Woke do) - by selecting for virtue and purging those who get flagged as usurpers/corruptors.

See

@realchrisrufo

and

@jordanbpeterson

latest podcast for virtue as a selector

Virtue based selection for Russia Oligarchy is probably why you see so many assassinations amongst Putin competitors. He seems to be trying (in vain?) to get a purified Oligarchy (that has Russia's best interests at heart-ie avoid bureaucratic capture) that it can be sustained

But sustaining this bureaucratic repressing Oligarchy is EXACTLY against the West's ethos.

So is this the WW3 manifestation of the culture wars, as per

@jordanbpeterson

? Or is this deeper - a war on the role of Bureaucracy?

I'd wager the West-Putin war is a war on the role of bureaucracy, not 'woke culture'

Fits in with

@Peter_Turchin

's elite over-production theory, and even Graeber's anthropology (Dawn of Everything book). Matches what we know about ancient Chinese Mandarin-class pwr struggles

So Putin's likely model is to have a cadre of Oligarchs who's selection ethos is prevent bureaucratic capture so individual freedom can be maximized (in areas other than political system decisions & critiques)

So his fight for 'sphere of influence' border buffer is as much about buffering against 'an end of history' bureaucratic creep, as it is about pure military tactical positioning.

Like Europe wanted to hedge in Napoleonic 'liberty' to prevent its contamination into other countries, Putin is trying to hedge in Woke bureaucratic capture

Putin won't let those ideas of another "end of history' make another turn of the dialetic (ie another Marx revolution)

And that is another dimension as to why NATO membership is so dangerous for him - It guarantees the bureaucratization of a country. And that guarantees and 'arrow of progress' toward socialism. But more than this, toward bureaucratic capture.

If you don't think any of this theory is plausible, try to game theory out some structural solutions to avoid bureaucratic capture You'll come up with its embrace (West's new authoritarian democracy), dictatorial control of it (China's communist capitalism), or this theory

You may also come up with some of the indigenous American political solutions Graeber mentions in "The Dawn of Everything".

I'm wondering if these, non-hierarchical gov' solutions, aren't what the Right's meta-narrative ethos will turn into. "Freedom" just ain't cutting it.

So when @jordanbpeterson tries to get a strong enough narrative to counter the cult-level appeal of Woke (toxic) Caring, you may have to move all the way toward radical individualism with a radically flat governance structure (see Graeber's Dawn of Everything)

Happy Serfdom

Have you ever had one of those periods where thoughts you thought were immobile began to shift?  Two recent info sources have done this for me - David Wengrow's (unfortunately titled) The Dawn of Everything and Jordan Peterson's climate change interviews with some of the top fluid (climate) physicists Koonin and Lindzen.

Wengrow's insight is that "tribal" societies, or at least those which aren't classically Western or axial age changers, have very complicated structures which minimize the reach of structural authoritarianism.  This is especially true with respect to political structures and their tension to foundational societal morals.  From this tensions moral meta-narratives emerge, presumably, out of biological tendencies for inter-group differentiation.  "We are the people who don't keep slaves,"  "we are the people that potlach", etc.

Peterson has taken on climate hysteria, seeing it technically as a type of death cult religion which is energized by toxic caring ideas to "help out", and social justice needs to "make a difference", suppress 1% richness (at least of non social allies), and create socialist equity.  I've long considered voices that minimize human caused climate change as rather fringe and conspiratorial.  I figured the political choices and implications of tackling human climate change were where the real questions lay.  But now that WEF climate change lock-in's have become fully manifest following Covid lockdown norm-breaking, I'm having second thoughts...

What seems to be happening is that leaders' tendency for power enhancement as manifest by kingdom expansion has combined with the emergence of a new religion whose scale is at the magnitude of the axial age transition.  Societies haven't yet figured out how to stabilize "toxic caring" and so the energy created by growing income inequality has stumbled into mass hysteria solutions.  I mean, just look how irrational Orange Man Bad thinking is...  That intelligent people actually believe populist democracy has to be curtailed to protect democracy itself is lunacy.  What's happened is that meta-narratives about things like Orange Man, climate change, social justice, have polarized.  We're seeing major destabilization in the hitherto dynamic tension between individual freedom and state power.  That's where Wengrow's book comes in.  Peterson's points enable us to see authoritarian collectivism as the breaking of old social contracts through cult like reasoning.  No nuance or counter facts are allowed.  Hysteria is required "for the greater good".

It's all classic societal splitting.  The magnitude of things is at least as big as the Protestant Catholic split during the 1600's and the emergence of printing as a way of gelling new magnitudes of people to common ends.

HAPPY SERFDOM

In this dynamic, political leaders have stumbled into "happy serf" solutions.  This seems like a conspiracy theory, and the reasoning most people use to get there definitely fits that mold. But I suspect the technocrats who've gotten together for years to address climate change have figured out that a simple carbon trading scheme enables a perfect storm of change.

• Total carbon levels drop
• The 1st world gives up progress rates and riches by transferring 20th century styled energy-based wealth creation to the 3rd and 2nd world.  World social equity is furthered.
• The rich in the 1st world get fabulously wealthy as they are solely positioned to leverage financial gain in this change (see Sundance from TheConservativeTreeHouse for insight)
• World leaders get to feel like they're doing good, and get to manifest their biological desires for kingdom expansion (bring in the immigrants, and "expand Canadian values to everyone"
• Leaders get to better manage their populations for "sustainable growth" and "right- values".  This is done ini the name of climate salvation, world peace, and social/woke progress.

The meta-ethos is that only a managed population enables sustainability.

The reactionary ethos is that freedom enables novel solutions which then transcend current realities.

No wonder climate change has become the de facto religious issue at the global level. One side says it is real, but insignificant compared to larger trends and issues (like billions of starved poor, future tech change, etc.).  The other side sees commitment to it as a clearly factual test to common pool problems.

CONCLUSION

In this space, technocrats have had to endogenize (incorporate) revolution into change dynamics.  That's why there's so much resonance around "happy serfdom". It's the only solution.  This is what Wengrow describes in relation to traditional societies. Some level of slavery or mass control is inevitable in societies.  How overt this is is largely random.  I suspect how far it goes just depends upon how quickly and successful competing "freedom" narratives and moral solutions solidify.

It's an arms race.  Right now, the freedom movement isn't looking like it's up to par with new global organizations, mass media monocultural controls, and the new woke religious movement.  Serfdom seems inevitable.  Will happy serfdom devolve into 1984's end model (which is fabulously sustainable in theory)? I suspect it will take a few generations for counter movements to get enough traction to overthrow the new authoritarianism.  It was a good 200 years from the 1600's War of Religions until the Democratic revolutions of the 1800's.

Moral Narratives Form Chosen People Logic & Drive Major Cultural Distinctions

 Thinking of this in terms of the idea, from The Dawn of Everything, that major socio-cultural evolution solidifies around moral meta-narratives that allow people to say "we are the group that does/values X, while they are the group that does not".

Its less standard evolution applied to cultural traits (as per most cultural evolution books suppose), and more random minor differences that then get moralized in terms of a narrative (as per moral Group Agent theories).  Group Agents then enable adherents to theorize why they are "the chosen people".  This is the moral narrative re-interpretation / invention.

Accurate Take on Emergency Enabling Authoritarianism

 This is probably the most lucid take on how the new normal state of emergency happens to increase the reach of the state, not through any singular conspiratorial menace, like a Justin Trudeau, but rather via a simple, generally understood morality that operationalizes itself via disparate actors into a (moral) Group Agent.  

I'd also add that the role of meta-narrative, then moralized meta-narrative is ultra important.  As per Wengrow & Graeber I'd also suggest that minor biological tendencies to differentiate your group from neighbouring groups finishes the process.  Basically this creates a post facto moralized meta-narrative that explains why your group is different, via a fairly singularly explainable moral Group Agent meme.  "We're the group that values freedom".  "We're the tribe that honours ancestors properly".  etc.

Political Wokeism as a Long Cycle Reaction to Indigenous Political Liberalism (the classical liberal type)

 This week I ran into two idea threads that combine to produce a very novel theoretical lens to look at radically progressive political wokeism.

WOKEISM IS PURITANICAL YANKEEDOM

One thread comes out of American Nations by Woodard.  His book looks at the legacies of cultural groupings in modern north American culture.  It's no secret that the cultural groups of the north east coast and left coast are strongly influenced by Puritanical affinities and a desire for an environmental regulation of culture - i.e. an SNL "church lady" nanny state.  Scots-irish Appalachian culture and Deep South aristocratic culture were obviously against collectivist nanny states.  But while the Deep South was obviously inspired by self-rationalized notions of Greek aristocratic democracy, Appalachia was probably more inspired by Metis individualism.  The net result has been dynamic tension between American individualism and European collectivism (paternalism?).

CLASSICAL LIBERALISM IS AMERICAN INDIAN

The other idea comes from the archaeologist David Wengrow (see this podcast).  He supposes that societies have often purposefully given up supposedly necessary steps in stage-theoried civilization advancement.  He highlights the role Native American, especially Haudenosaune (Iroquois),y political thought may have played in establishing European political enlightenment theory.  Up here in Canada, k-12 spends a lot of time giving credit to this group for inspiring a lot of North American democratic thought.  Wengrow speculates that things like coffee house political bantering may have been biased by romanticized ideas of Native American fireplace cultural practices, and idealization about radical individualism, especially governance practices that would work with it.

THE CONJUNCTION

None of this is very revolutionary.  But, it made me wonder if the Woke turn away from classical liberalism toward quasi-religious collectivism and its attendant big state parochialism can't be seen as European governance ethos clawing back indigenous North American political leanings.  In other words, we have multi-century cycles of pacing and leading between European parochial governance culture-gens and North American indigenous libertarian culture-gens.  Political Wokeism is the latest version of European governance norms dominating things.  This is hugely ironic.  It emerges via the dominant state role old Yankee/post-Protestant culture has on institutions.  Protestants didn't rebel against Kingly states, they just wanted a Christ King.

To make the leap that political wokeism is Eurocentric governance, you have to disabuse yourself of the notion that today's remnant of Yankee / post-Puritan culture is Puritan god-fearingness.  Rather, what survived was minding-your-neighbours type behaviour: a belief that people and their government have a duty to tell people what to do so a respectable (safe/righteous) cultural and political environment can be produced.  

IMPLICATIONS

This implies that the limited democratic or authoritarian democratic leanings of today's left are a remnant of old European political culture (or culture-gens).  Therefore what we're seeing in today's politics is yet another round of European colonialism, this time trying to put under ground any pernicious remnants of indigenous North America's unique libertarian governance solutions.

In culture war terms, 1600's North America novel governance solutions engendered some out of the box thinking that either sparked the Protestant revolution or at least the 1700's/1800's enlightenment revolutions.  But since North America lost its expansionist potential (maybe around 1900), European culture has, in fits and spurts, been able to claw back individualistic-based governance in favour or Eurocentric collectivism.

SUPPORT

Without going into any great dives in academic literature, my sense is that this idea is supported by the recent emergence of the big 3 modern political worldviews

-European authoritarian democracy
        only the right sort of idea are permissable.  Anything else is deplorable. A very medieval Catholic approach.

-Chinese capitalistic communism
        capitalism can be used to drive innovation and provide funds, but every so often the State needs to claw things back to save equality and maintain proper power

-Russia libertarian authoritarianism
      You have lots of freedom, but you can only vote for a filtered set of oligarchs who have the right historic visions. This keeps the system away from technocratic capture

The individualism associated with golden-era America narratives is nowhere to be seen.  Russia libertarianism seems more like a forced solution to the Soviet's technocratic trap than a just-so adoption of American libertarian though.   Putin seems keen to avoid bureaucratic capture.  The West seems to embrace bureaucratic capture.  It also seems to miss the role of 1st estate - that pan national Catholic glue that put some limits of kingly action, largely via populist backed for the church and its moral guidance and role.  Marxism puts the arrow of history into much the same role.  It is what can cap dictatorial capture. It is what provides sufficient information flow with the laity.

Phase Change Dynamics of the Horsehoe Theory of Politics

 What are the dynamics when political parties switch poles?  The horsehoe theory of politics suggests at the extremes the far left and far right are functionally indistinguishable.  In cultural terms, this highlights the need for delineating garb and customs.  For example, can you functionally distinguish a Wokeist who wants segrated drinking fountains from a Jim Crow racist who wants the same? Only via invisible intent, and then only because of who that intention is designed to help.  They both serve their in-group.  It is really only the in-groups that differ.

BACKGROUND

Here is a quote from Rony Guldmann's excellent unpublished book "Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression: On the Nature and Origins of Conservaphobia "

In a book that delighted liberals, Frank argued that his fellow Kansans had been duped into voting against their own economic interests—that is, into voting Republican—by cynical politicians of the Right. These operatives have succeeded in transmuting economic frustrations into cultural resentment against a fictional “liberal elite,” inciting an irrational cultural class war against these elites to displace the rational economic class war against the powerful business interests that these Kansans should fight and once did fight. Whereas the working Kansans of yesteryear were fiery progressives resisting their exploitation by plutocrats,1 Kansas had recently become a place where workers are more conservative than their bosses,2 driven on by a crusade that suspends material interests in favor of vague, unappeasable cultural grievances.3 The “in many ways... preeminent question of our time,” Frank observed, was how so many voters could get their basic interests so wrong, how so many could forget that “it is the Democrats that are the party of the workers, of the poor, of the weak and the victimized.” This was once “part of the ABCs of adulthood.”4 Yet conservatives have now distracted voters from those ABCs by replacing a hard-nosed economic conception of class with an airy cultural one. Class oppression is now understood to be the result, not of the unprecedented concentration of economic power in the hands of business elites, but of the unprecedented concentration of cultural power in a haughty intelligentsia. It is a perennial struggle between the unpretentious, authentic majority and an egg- headed yet all-powerful elite contemptuous of this majority’s tastes and values.5 Kansans’ real economic powerless vis-à-vis real plutocratic overlords has been recast and distorted as a vague sense of cultural disenfranchisement by liberalism, which conservatives condemn as an alien, menacing sensibility that any authentic American rejects instinctively.

By thus reconfiguring the meaning of class and class conflict, conservatives have arrogated to themselves the mantle of the outsider and underdog. Frank observed:

From the mild-mannered David Brooks to the ever-wrathful Ann Coulter, attacks on the personal tastes and pretensions of this [the liberal] stratum of society are the stock-in-trade of conservative writers. They, the conservatives, are the real outsiders, they tell us, gazing with disgust upon the ludicrous manners of the high and mighty. Or, they tell us, they are rough-and-ready proles, laughing along with us at the efforts of our social “betters” to reform and improve us. That they are often, in fact, people of privilege doing their utmost to boost the fortunes of a political party that is the traditional tool of the privileged is a contradiction that does not trouble them.6 

His main thesis is that by moving into the hegemony the Left has taken upon it the dynamics of the historic Right - oppression, marginalization, in-group favouritism, etc.  This is what the Right critiques.  The Right has moved to become the Left - the marginalized outroup fighting for worker's rights and populist interests.  

They aren’t just venting personal grievances, as they see it, but highlighting the existence of a new cultural dispensation that has supplanted the old rules of public life, where the modus operandi is now the slander and intimidation of conservatives. If liberals inveigh against the oppressiveness and hypocrisy of conservatives, then they must be prepared to have their own oppressiveness and hypocrisy unmasked as well. If liberals insist on diversity, tolerance, and equal respect, then conservatives insist that they be afforded the genuine articles rather than the Orwellian inversions that liberalism in fact offers. 

As a really good thinker Guldmann's ideas are obviously more nuanced that a convenient and simplistic Left-Right swap.  He supposes it is elements in the Left which are led into becoming Right-like, and it is elements of the Right that are led into becoming Left-like.  He alludes to the fact that it is a Darwinian landscape trap that moves groups in the direction of the vanguard.  For example, by accepting the mantle of marginalized oppressee's, the Right can then critique the Left as hypocritical.  This hits the very foundation of Left meta-narratives.  The Left simply excommunicates the Right from civil society via sin based logic.  The Right's meta-narrative of individual freedom is therefore challenged - how can you be free is you choose total societal excommunication? How can you govern when you chose societal splintering and support anarachical directions.

WHY?

The evolutionary question raised is why is there a Left-Right phase change.  I'll assume here that Guldmann is right-enough.  Anecdotal data and hard data in the US suggests this has happened during the Trump era.  The rise of woke authoritarian political religions across the West also suggest this.  The Roman political shift under Constantine suggests this, as does some of the data around the 17th century war of religions.  I'd suggest the American Revolution also suggests the same.

Marx

The easiest answer is Marxist.  In an energized system a change in power can rapidly percolate through supporting institutions.  It is a power revolution.  You see this in places like modern Florida or Colorado where a very minor tilt toward one party can very quickly lead to total domination by that party over a long period of time. Overly mature systems have had their regular checks and balances figured out, so once dynamic tension is gone, and there are no strong social cohesion mores, then the system can flip very quickly.  Physically this would be similar to phase change propogations in supercooled liquids. This requires each particle to be functionally proximate to an adjacent particle, and for the degree of likely interaction to be well above the activation energy needed for any individual change.  Common culture enables "proximity".  Environmental conditions and history determine activation energy.

But this reasoning operates at the "symptom" level.  It gives you a bit of insight into phase change dynamics, but no insight into why humans evolved exaggerated social phase change dynamics, nor no insight into how social-moral-politics fits into our Darwin-Machined landscape.

Pacing & Leading

Another theoretical explanation comes from Aran Norezayan's old work on religion and governance. His theory was that religion and (secular) governance paced and led each other in relation to human polity size evolution.  Basically religion would enable certain gene-cultural traits which increased the stabilization time of larger polity sizes.  Then governance would catch up to polity size operation, eventually leading polity size growth potentials.  Then religion would incorporate some of these governance solutions and vice versa.

The current rise of religious level politics (woke and right) supports this theory.  Politics, especially at the moment Left politics, has stumbled into religious level solutions.  Hence the fall back into sin and blasphemy accusations to disempower political rivals.  Anthropological evidence around chiefdom sized polities also supports tension between governance/war leaders and religious/cultural leaders.  It is supposed that the God-King solution which enabled Empire sized polities was an evolutionary solution to the limitations of dual leadership tensions.

For this dual role theory to explain horseshoe theory politics phase changes, I suspect we need to loosen up traditional religion definitions.  Guldmann, like many leading edge thought leaders, suggest political Wokeism is pure secular religion (see James Lindsay for more evidence)

Chapter 9 narrows the focus to the problem of religious neutrality and investigates conservatives’ conviction that what liberalism advertises as its religious neutrality disguises the machinations of a secular counter-religion. Conservatives believe that what passes for religious neutrality is no high ideal, but the ideological tool of secularist hegemony, and hence liberal domination. Here as elsewhere, conservative claims of cultural oppression invite liberal incredulity. Here as elsewhere, that incredulity is dissolved by the Counter-Enlightenment narrative I defend. Liberals will dismiss worries about the encroachments of a religion of secularism or “secular humanism” as cynical and disingenuous. But they can do so only because their Enlightenment self-understanding overlooks the ways in which vestiges of a religious past have been incorporated into our putatively secular norms and ideals, whose religious function is to exalt their defenders as persons purified of the superstition, paganism, and idolatry of religious conservatives.

In so exalting themselves, liberals surreptitiously promote a new variant of the very religiosity they purport to repudiate. I argue that the relationship between religious conservatives and secular liberals is most profoundly conceived as a contemporary recapitulation of the relationship between conquered pagans and conquering Christians endeavoring to uproot these pagans’ idolatry. What liberals call religious neutrality is an intellectualized, sublimated, and secularized iteration of this ancient ambition, which now operates within unacknowledged layers of social meaning rather than through formal creeds. This plausible deniability is why conservative anxieties about the encroachments of an aggressive, evangelizing secular humanism sound paranoid and conspiratorial. But like all conservative claims of cultural oppression, these apprehensions become intelligible once placed in their broader historical and philosophical context, which always reveals the larger truth of what strikes liberals as conservative obtuseness. And this is that our disagreements about the meaning of religious neutrality are the secularization of what first arose as religious disagreements concerning the relative transcendence or immanence of the divine. The religious neutrality problem is the sedimentation of the theological past in the jurisprudential present, the surreptitious replaying of a conflict between different kinds of religious believers as a conflict about what qualifies as neutrality between believer and non-believer. It is this historical legacy, and not conservative obstinacy, that explains why this conflict has proven so divisive and intractable. 

So, what seems to have happened is that the revolutionary Leftism of the 60's and earlier may have figured out how to leverage religious dynamics to effect the total revolution of the state, education, and social morality.  Hence the reason why Leftism's main argument against conservatism is based on moral excommunication and social marginalization. In evolutionary terms, one has to wonder if the Left has flipped the religious lead.  Conservatives had, for many years, led society based upon Judeo-Christianity.  But that organizing principle could only go so far in a diverse pluralistic world. The Left stumbled into a higher polity solution - a new world religion based on secular ideology, but with the adaptive trappings and fervor or zealous religion. Its universalizing solution was not limited to chapels and formal congregations. It was an ideology, like the French Revolution, but with lessons learned from 20th century communistic failures.

The Left's usurpation of religion now leaves the Right with its older, now poorly adapted, classic religious structure and all its factitious divides.  It is no wonder thought leaders like Jordan Peterson are trying to unite Abrahamic faiths together in order to mount a successful defence against religio-political Wokeism.

If the pacing and leading theory is correct, one should anticipate the Right figuring out governing structures to enable the unification of Christianity and Islam and Secular moral quasi-religion.  But, if one uses history as a guideline, such a solution should take a long time to percolate through the culture until conditions are energized enough for it to swap leads with Woke political-religious governance.  Conservative's oppression narrative isn't a good sell across the population as a whole.  Their governance solutions are also old hegemonic hat.  Democratic election systems are hacked, so people might as well pick the side that is going to support their morals and crush dissent.  The tendency or adaptive benefit of assimilation at a (potential) higher polity level seems to be the driver here.  

Authoritarian assimilation is warranted if you have a new moralized governing solution that creates larger group size by pushing out overly ripe dissenters.  Transformational logic keys in on the adaptive potential of the new religous-governing solution and enables societal purges to not broadly trigger adaptive-system/group collapse.  In other words, you can purge your population and not everyone will think this implies the loss of nation state social cohesion.  I think this is the existential fear conservatives feel.   What conservatives seem to be trying to do is to signal, to the group large, that this purge dynamic is likely to turn on itself.  This is what Soviet era communism and Maoism did to its population. And, what German and Italian fascism did to its population.

SUMMING UP THE BIOLOGY

This train of thought leads one to the conclusion political pole shift, as per the horseshoe theory of politics, is evolutionary selected for its ability to produce a larger unit of selection (polity).  The larger unit emerges from insights gained by the government/organizational or religious/moral side that is out of power.  This side picks up insights from the other side, and in doing so becomes somewhat similar to the other side.  This enables the old hegemon to deeply critique the new revolutionaries as hypocritical. This brings to the fore signals of adaptive group moderation.  Is this new group going to Gulag people like Russia or gas them like Germany?  How slippery is this slope?  The usurping revolutionaries get to define the size of the in-group out-group divide based upon what they think they can get away with, or more technically, what properly balances fitness accrued via purification and fitness lost via purges and elicited levels of disgust/minority protection sentiment.  Human history shows, we don't tend to worry that much about minorities, as long as there is a good meta-narrative about why they are less human than human.  The left is doing a good job on this front.  But, it can't last.  That is why the new universalizing meta-narrative will have to stumble into a convincing solution for when to stop.  In north america, the Right largely did that with first nations relations.  But that solution emerged from the other camp. It wasn't until it was adopted by both camps that the phase change was energized enough to happen.

This seems to be the dynamics of the horseshoe theory of poltical change.  Once both sides accept oppression brakes, the old hegemon is too archaic to stay in power, and the new revolutionaries have to much ascendent momentum not to get in power.  But popular acquisence to the adaptiveness of revolutionary purges is needed.  Hence the superficial reason both sides show their cards about how they are the "other".  Guldmann describes this as the aspects within the Left becoming Right, and vice versa. People get clues about how each side will act when infused with the spirit of those they are toppling.  That spirit is constrained by an evolutionary landscape which is selected for by environmental conditions which rarely change.  This if the revolutionaries don't offer much differrent than the old hegemons, the pain and risk of revolution is signalled to be not worth it.  But, if the meta-narrative offers a novel solution out of old environmental constraints, then the brakes come off.  The system loosed adaptive tension (throttling) and a full and rapid phase change ensures.