AntiDem

Not really. The problem is that Utena is *so* traditional that it might be difficult for a modern reactionary to really understand it. The phrase "modern reactionary" is key here - we can all wish that we were of a different time and place, but in the end all of us are native-born sons of Modernity. We see things through its lens because we have no other. Even our traditionalism and reactionary thought is informed by it. This, as much as than anything else, represents what I was getting at a few questions back when I talked about how we can't really completely return to what once was, nor would we even want to.

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So the problem is that Utena displays the pre-Modern upper class attitude towards homosexuality, which does not line up with either the modern leftist nor modern rightist attitude towards it. In the manners of the old British upper class, homosexuality was seen as a youthful indiscretion - something one did at boys' school and gave up when it was over. It was not expected to be a lifestyle that one engaged in forever, much less a political cause - a little bit of schoolboy buggery was one thing, but the idea of being 45 years old and still "gay" would have been seen as being utterly ridiculous. Similar things could be said of androgyny. That was fine for, even expected of, children - there are portraits of French Kings, as children, wearing dresses, which went without comment because prepubescents were expected to be androgynous - but if Louis XIV had worn a dress to court as an adult, even *he* would have been taken to a madhouse. It was all stuff you were expected to grow out of.

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Anime often represents the tolerant view of homosexuality and androgyny that *can* be taken by a society that isn't under threat from them. In a society in which politicized homosexuality is not trying to upend the established heterosexualist order, homosexuality can be dismissed as a curiosity. If it is not a threat, and stays below a certain threshold safely in the background, why expend any great energy to battle it? It is at most, a minor annoyance, not worth bothering with. Homosexuality was often technically illegal, but this was largely a hedge against exactly what has happened now that it has been legalized - it becoming a destabilizing cultural/political force. It was precisely the fact that homosexuality stayed quietly in the background that made those laws virtually unenforceable, and they remained virtually unenforced

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This was our past - a more civilized world, in which the stable established order was not attacked, and deviations from it were discreetly ignored. Deviants received security through obscurity, and the system that worked for the vast majority was upheld. It was humane and orderly, and now it is gone and cannot be returned to anytime soon. Deviancy has become the sword and shield of the fanatical utopian cult of leftism - it has become an extreme threat to order and decency - and now it cannot be left alone. I wish it were otherwise

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One thing I learned from studying the English Civil War and the Restoration is that no restoration movement every quite succeeds completely. If nothing else, then at least that which is restored must take steps to not repeat the mistakes that led to it getting defeated in the first place (This is something that the "Return to the Constitution!" crowd seems not to quite understand - if we simply go back to the same Constitution that ended up in Roe vs. Wade and the NSA, how do we keep the exact same things from just happening all over again?). This is why the restoration of the Bourbon kings in France didn't take - as Talleyrand noted, they ruled as if they had "learned nothing and forgotten nothing".

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So it depends what you mean by that. We certainly can return to principles that work. Can we ever make it *exactly* the way it was before? No, of course we can't - nor would we even really want to.

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Leftism is by nature universalist and intolerant of/destructive to regionalism (even of regional variations on leftism - look at the Sino/Soviet and Sino/Viet/Khmer splits), but rightism can and should be much more tolerant of it. Duginism doesn't quite make sense to me, but I get the distinct feeling that that's not because it doesn't make sense objectively, but rather because it is a variation of rightism that probably does make a whole lot of sense for Russia, but not necessarily for anywhere else. This is also why the European New Right doesn't quite exactly line up with either Duginism/Putinism or with American rightist movements like neoreaction. Every place has its own realities; one can agree on broad principles while still admitting that a "one size fits all" ideology is simply unworkable in the real world.

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tl;dr: I don't "get" Dugin, but that's probably neither his fault or mine.

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