Listening to Rana Dasgupta on @novaramedia. Talking about Nation States being an attempt at the sacralisation of the state and furnishing of quasi-religious authority onto the State was enlightening, I never understood whether Monarchists that call upon religious symbolism are for real or masking attempted power grabs through dogma.
It's interesting because both this religious mysticism and communism have a very similar critique of liberalism:
1. Legitimacy must be vertical. It must come from somewhere beyond human will and human consensus. In Leninism, it's the Party that supersedes the People until the proletariat is educated enough to take the reins of the Revolution, for Monarchists, kings are needed to treat the realm as property to be passed to their children rather than a resource to be strip-mined before the next election cycle. Democratic politicians are essentially short-term tenants in both of these cases.
2. The nation-state is an impostor. For Communism, the nation-state is fraudulent because it replaced genuine class solidarity with an artificial cross-class identity, the cure is to dissolve the nation into international proletarian solidarity, which is the real universal community obscured by nationalist mystification. For religious fundamentalists, the Nation State occupies the throne vacated by God and King but cannot actually fill it. Both critique the Nation State's demand for sacrifices (wars, taxes, conformity) to derive legitimacy (the State is omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient).
3. The individual is not the basic unit of society. Liberal Democracy and Nation States demand society be composed of individuals with pre-political rights, preferences, and interests. The state exists to serve those individuals. Both communism and the reactionary traditions identify liberalism's individual as a fraud. The real unit of social life is something larger and prior to the individual, for Marx, it's the proletariat, for figureheads such as Corneliu Zelea Codreanu and his brand of religious mysticism, it's the _neam_: the ethno-spiritual people extending through time, including the dead and the unborn .
#PoliticalScience #Religion #Monarchy #Monarchism #Communism #Marx
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