The Sociology of Barack Obama - part 2

Looking closer at Curtis Yarvin's system in the context of Obama

Sorry for the delay but I’ve been on my annual back surgery sabbatical. I’m now returning to normal posting cadence.

We left off in part one with a summary of Obama’s somewhat incoherent but thoroughly globalist sociology, and a suggestion as to what distinguishes his rhetoric (like the rhetoric of Talcott Parsons and Strobe Talbott) from the political rhetoric of the New Right: an optimistic tone with positive proposals for solving apparently pressing social issues that negatively affect most people.

I further said I’d analyze this phenomenon in the context of Mencius Moldbug/Curtis Yarvin’s post-mortem on Obama’s 2008 election. I’ll do that in part 3 but I’m also going to expand my analysis into a broader look at Yarvin’s holistic system (yep, you’re going to have to endure this).

Yarvin is unusual on the contemporary right in that he made an effort to develop a holistic perspective. Most conservatives lack even a vague holistic sociology. At best, some have a vague religious metaphysics, and a few espouse sophisticated microeconomic and macroeconomic perspectives but lack a practical normative framework to justify implementing policy.

Having never read Yarvin until this past month (I just learned he coined the Matrix red pill metaphor), I’ve only recently discovered how frustrating it can be for the reader when a writer uses a meandering, revelatory style that affirms and then later refutes identical propositions in the same article. I often do this myself out of laziness and a refusal to edit what I write but will try to do better by my readers moving forward.

In this spirit, I will provide a summary of what follows that, I promise you, I am not merely pretending to adopt for some other rhetorical purpose.

This part 2 goes through Yarvin’s ’08 post-mortem and stops to expand upon the themes he raises in the context of his book, A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations. In expanding upon these themes, I’ll add my own criticism. This analysis will bring us to part 3 of this series where I’ll discuss whether Obama is a communist and then look at Yarvin’s proposed solutions and criticisms of legacy conservative movements, which I’ll also criticize. I’ll conclude by making a weak argument that unorthodox conservative reform is possible, useful, and in any case inevitable.