The Auron MacIntyre Show - April 09, 2026


The Two Competing Progressive Teleologies of the United States ｜ 4⧸9⧸26

Hosted by
Auron MacIntyre
Mentioned
Aristotle Alexander Hamilton Thomas Jefferson Barry Goldwater Abraham Lincoln Ronald Reagan Jim Crow
Amnesty Betrayal and the World's Shortest Ceasefire ｜ Guest： Ronald Dodson ｜ 4⧸8⧸26 H-1B Invasion： How India Is Transforming the US ｜ Guest： Sara Gonzales ｜ 4⧸10⧸26

Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

156.5

Word count

1,676

Sentence count

98

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

8

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

A nation built on outward expansion turned inward. The same energy that once drove settlers westward and engineers skyward was redirected in a different kind of project, a moral and social crusade at home. This narrative is so powerful that it now dominates both the conservative and liberal mind. This means that the U.S. no longer has a conservative movement, but rather two competing versions of the same progressive teleology.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
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00:00:14.740 From its earliest days, the United States saw itself as a nation with intense purpose.
00:00:20.140 Not a static country, not a museum for inherited customs, but a project.
00:00:24.700 Alexander Hamilton envisioned a commercial republic that would rival the greatest powers of Europe.
00:00:30.000 The Doctrine of Manifest Destiny pushed that ambition across the continent.
00:00:34.140 After World War II, the same impulse extended outward into global leadership.
00:00:38.660 America, in other words, has always kept its eye on the horizon.
00:00:42.480 But once the frontier had been settled, the U.S. seemed to turn inward,
00:00:46.700 focusing its boundless energy and notion of destiny towards a social crusade.
00:00:51.380 The progressive civil rights movement became the story Americans told about themselves more than any other.
00:00:56.800 A nation built on outward expansion turned inward.
00:01:00.980 The same energy that once drove settlers westward and engineers skyward
00:01:05.320 was redirected in a different kind of project, a moral and social crusade at home.
00:01:10.860 This narrative is so powerful that it now dominates both the conservative and liberal mind.
00:01:16.860 This means that the U.S. no longer really has a conservative movement,
00:01:21.040 but rather two competing versions of the same progressive teleology
00:01:24.620 that only really disagree about the pace at which the social revolution should be pursued.
00:01:31.160 The philosopher Aristotle is famous for his discussion of telos, the end or purpose of a thing.
00:01:37.140 Many modern thinkers have discarded this notion of ultimate purpose in favor of more materialistic
00:01:42.140 understandings of the world, but Aristotle is right, and they're wrong. America was always a
00:01:47.280 nation in tension, recognizing the need to solidify its identity as the first true product of the new
00:01:53.760 world even as it was immediately compelled forward by ambition. Restless people settled the US. We 0.87
00:02:00.400 barely complete the conquest of one challenge before some group splinters off to brave the
00:02:05.500 next frontier. The American advance has always been relentless. Our nation is one of great purpose
00:02:11.620 and great energy that will be directed towards whatever end we put our minds to. For most of
00:02:17.900 America's history, its driving spirit was expansion, conquering the frontier, mastering it,
00:02:23.900 not merely territorially, but civilizationally. A restless people moved outward, solved one
00:02:29.980 problem, then immediately sought the next. This produced enormous dynamism. It also produced
00:02:35.700 tension. The country had to define itself even as it constantly outgrew its previous definitions.
00:02:41.980 North America is the natural domain of the United States, but once the West had been truly settled,
00:02:48.860 there was nowhere left for that pioneering spirit to expand. World War II proved to be the nation's
00:02:54.740 most radical period of transformation, during which it emerged as one of only two real superpowers
00:03:01.020 dominating the globe. There were attempts to redirect that impulse. The space race briefly
00:03:05.960 opened the horizon once again. The competition with the Soviet Union offered a global stage. 0.82
00:03:11.980 but these proved temporary. The deeper shift was happening at home. The civil rights movement had
00:03:18.120 begun as a reasonable request for legal equality, but was quickly merging with hippie culture and
00:03:23.420 anti-Vietnam protests into a full-blown revolutionary deconstruction of America.
00:03:29.200 The story of the civil rights movement was no longer the effort to seek a temporary solution
00:03:34.560 for wrong done to a specific group. Instead, the movement fully embraced the progressive
00:03:39.740 and Marxist themes of its contemporaries.
00:03:42.860 America was no longer a great nation that needed to make some adjustments to integrate 0.99
00:03:47.100 black citizens better, it was an eternal oppressor that had to be entirely reconstructed. 1.00
00:03:53.040 That shift matters because it supplies a new telos. 1.00
00:03:56.160 If the old purpose had been expansion, the new one was a quality, understood not as a
00:04:01.840 condition to be achieved, but as a process without end.
00:04:05.660 Every disparity becomes evidence of unfinished work.
00:04:09.060 Every institution becomes suspect.
00:04:11.960 The project couldn't conclude because its logic required constant renewal.
00:04:16.540 That's the point.
00:04:18.280 Conservatives initially stood against the Civil Rights Revolution, believe it or not.
00:04:22.840 Barry Goldwater famously opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, not because he supported Jim Crow,
00:04:29.120 but because he understood the legislation as a revolutionary attack on states' rights, which it obviously was.
00:04:35.080 Many conservatives initially objected to Ronald Reagan enshrining the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday into law because they still remembered that King was, you know, a communist sympathizer and a serial adulterer who had supported what we would later call DEI.
00:04:51.220 It was very clear that the CRA had already mutated well beyond its initial purpose and that civil rights law was expanding to consume every area of American life.
00:05:01.380 But every movie, television show, novel, and news broadcast was selling the Civil Rights Revolution as the new story of America.
00:05:11.240 Conservatives never stood a chance.
00:05:13.820 The new telos of America was one of equality.
00:05:17.500 The framers had written that all men were created equal, and it was now the purpose of the U.S. to make that a reality.
00:05:23.940 While Thomas Jefferson may have penned those famous words, it was clear that neither he nor most of the founding generation meant them in the way that modern Americans do today.
00:05:35.000 The continuation of slavery is the most obvious example, but early American immigration laws restricted naturalization to rights of good character.
00:05:44.040 Alexis de Tocqueville, author of Democracy in America, famously argued that American blacks and Anglos were incompatible and that a race war would likely come before any national civil war.
00:05:56.100 Even Abraham Lincoln wasn't optimistic about the integration of black and white America, with plans to send former slaves back to Africa once the civil war was concluded.
00:06:05.960 Whatever previous generations meant by the famous phrase,
00:06:08.820 all men are created equal,
00:06:10.240 they obviously didn't believe in a never-ending quest to remake society in the name of equality.
00:06:16.560 Predictably, leftists took the revolution as far and as fast as they could.
00:06:20.800 America's original sin was slavery,
00:06:22.820 and the country's entire purpose was now a never-ending mission to atone for this great evil. 0.97
00:06:27.640 The suppression of black Americans was systemic,
00:06:30.580 so the United States had to deconstruct all previous hierarchies to avoid oppression.
00:06:35.880 First race, then gender roles, then marriage, then religion, then the concept of biological
00:06:41.460 sex itself. No matter how absurd the exercise proved itself to be, the hunt for one new
00:06:47.600 oppressed minority to grant civil rights to became the only reason for America to exist. 0.98
00:06:52.960 It's true, Telos. Conservatives dutifully assumed their classic position as beautiful losers. 0.98
00:06:59.260 They rejected the speed and intensity of the revolution, but accepted the premise.
00:07:05.080 Republicans went from rejecting MLK Day to worshipping the communists
00:07:09.040 as some moderate paragon of the Civil Rights Revolution.
00:07:12.860 The conservative movement rapidly came to believe much of what the left had already asserted,
00:07:18.340 but wanted the revolutionaries to drive the speed limit.
00:07:21.640 Yes, the founders were racist.
00:07:23.740 Sure, they failed in their promise.
00:07:25.380 Yes, the story of America is its eternal revolution to achieve social equality, but also, you know, the military and baseball, those are good, and maybe we can keep some of that Christianity stuff, because that does seem important. 0.87
00:07:38.480 This created a strange phenomenon.
00:07:40.660 Two competing progressive teleologies, one extreme and one more moderate, came to dominate the American mind.
00:07:47.640 The conservatives began to manifest this ideology in areas of life where they held power.
00:07:52.740 American foreign policy became one of eternal liberation, where our country came to conquer the world in the name of liberal democracy.
00:08:01.500 Despite theoretically opposing feminism or gay rights in the U.S., conservatives would also cite violations of these civil rights as reasons to invade and control other countries.
00:08:12.820 American churches, even conservative ones, began to center their messages on race relations, liberation of the oppressed, and care for illegal immigrants.
00:08:21.640 A real right wing no longer existed in America.
00:08:25.340 The new frontier was the eternal civil rights revolution.
00:08:28.940 And the only question was, how far and how fast should it go?
00:08:33.380 This dynamic has created something of an identity crisis for the American right. 0.71
00:08:38.200 On one hand, conservatives want to limit the excesses of the left.
00:08:41.840 On the other, they've bought entirely into the progressive premise.
00:08:46.000 American conservatives don't really want to return to the intention of the racist,
00:08:49.980 sexist and homophobic beliefs of the founders, they like the progress, they approve of the
00:08:55.680 revolution, and while to a lesser extent than the liberals, they are ultimately ashamed of their
00:09:00.840 past. This subversion of the American vision is unfortunate, but it doesn't have to remain
00:09:05.980 permanent. Instead of wasting our blood and treasure trying to turn every authoritarian
00:09:10.660 backwater into a flourishing Jeffersonian republic, we could once again turn our eyes to the stars.
00:09:17.160 Instead of trying to stamp out every form of inequality in our society, we could embrace hierarchy and the pursuit of greatness.
00:09:25.640 Instead of being ashamed of our founders, conservatives could follow manifest destiny to Mars and beyond.
00:09:32.620 But that requires rejecting the idea that the nation's highest purpose is to endlessly remake itself in pursuit of abstract equality.
00:09:40.960 It means accepting that hierarchy, excellence, and differences are not pathologies to be erased, but features of a functioning civilization.
00:09:50.840 Before we can pursue the frontier once more, we must believe that we are a people with a purpose, a nation that deserves not to just survive, but to thrive.
00:10:10.960 time to do so. If you want to get these broadcasts as podcasts, make sure that you subscribe to the
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00:10:32.400 are down below in the description. And of course, you can watch all of my videos and read all of my
00:10:37.600 columns over at the blaze thanks for watching and as always i'll talk to you next time