The Immanentist Coup

Immanentism and the Fall of Constitutional Judgment

This is not a fight between Left and Right. It is a replacement of foundations. The Founding presupposed truth, natural law and limited jurisdiction. Immanentist politics redefines power as collective will on all ‘sides’. The pre-political foundations must be recovered and restored institutionally because the consumer ‘Marketplace’ cannot steward formation in self governance. Market incentives and consumer mindset prevent that. You cannot serve two masters. Caesar and self governance are anathema to one another.

The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are not merely legal or political documents. They are metaphysical assertions expressed in juridical form. They presuppose that reality is intelligible, that human nature is real and normative, that moral truth exists independently of will, and that legitimate authority is constrained by that truth. In short, they are ontologically and metaphysically realist documents. They only function if truth precedes power and if judgment precedes choice, with law binding because it corresponds to what is true, not because it expresses what is desired. Immanentism, in all its forms, directly contradicts these premises. Operationally, immanentism asserts that meaning, value and legitimacy arise within human consciousness, history, or social process, rather than from an order external to man. Truth is no longer something recognized to which the mind corresponds and conforms; it is perspectivial; projected and emerging through development, experience, or collective will. Once this shift occurs, authority can no longer be anchored in reality. It must follow interpretation. That single inversion renders the Declaration and Constitution inoperative. It doesn’t do this by rejecting them outright but instead, by hollowing them of their substantive binding force while preserving their rhetorical symbolic appeal.

On the political left, immanentism manifests through theories of progress, ‘evolving’ rights and ethical imperatives framed as ‘shared values’ . The Founding is treated as aspirational rather than authoritative, its claims to self-evident truth reframed as early moral intuitions awaiting completion. Rights are no longer understood as pre-political facts grounded in human nature, but as recognitions that expand ideologically, with social consciousness. Under this formation, law becomes a tool for aligning institutions with contemporary moral sentiment. In this framework, constitutional limits appear as barriers to justice instead of what they truly are in function, which is safeguards of liberty. The Constitution may be praised rhetorically, but it no longer restrains power; it authorizes transformation in a population conditioned to immanentism. On the political right, immanentism appears in a different costume but performs the same operation. Authority is grounded not in natural law but in will; whether national will, cultural identity, or sheer power. Sovereignty is treated as an expression of collective force rather than a trust constrained by the moral reality of given, created nature. Law instead becomes whatever the dominant group (Democracy) can impose. This is not a defence of the Founding but a replacement of its realist foundations with voluntarism. Where the left dissolves limits in the name of progress, the right dissolves them in the name of order. In both cases, truth no longer binds will.

At the political center, immanentism takes its most effective and least visible form. Here it appears as technocracy, pragmatism and managerial governance. Moral ontology is quietly abandoned in favour of systems optimization, expertise and ‘evidence-based’ policy. Law becomes administration with rights becoming interests to be balanced. Under this public formation, citizens become data points in feedback mechanisms/processes for system optimization. This form of immanentism does not announce itself as ideology; it presents itself as neutrality. Yet it is precisely here that the Constitutional Republic is most thoroughly displaced because restraint gives way to ‘management’, and judgment is replaced by processes determined through Choice Architecture. Authority no longer answers to truth but to efficiency. Across left, right and center, the same operational pattern emerges. The Declaration’s claim that certain truths are self-evident is either denied, historicized, or ignored. The Constitution’s role as a limit on power grounded in reality is reinterpreted as a flexible framework responsive to (post and trans) human development. Sovereignty migrates from persons governed by conscience to institutions governed by process (which has been the case throughout the past century). This is not political disagreement within the constitutional order; it is the quiet abandonment of the order’s metaphysical conditions which for very many - were abandoned well over a century ago).

The more difficult question is why Americans failed to recognize this happening in real time. The answer is not simply ignorance or bad faith. It is cognitive disablement produced by systematic changes in education, culture and epistemology that severed Americans from the faculties required for self-government. First, judgment was replaced with opinion. Classical education trained the intellect to distinguish truth from falsehood by conforming the mind to reality. Modern education trains students to express perspectives, preferences and feelings. The second act of the intellect (judgment) was displaced by interpretation, critique and self referential personal (consumer) choice. Once judgment is lost, citizens cannot recognize when authority has detached from truth. They can only choose between narratives.

Second, metaphysics was removed from public understanding. Americans were taught civics as procedure rather than ontology. The Founding was reduced to historical context, power struggles, and compromises, stripped of its philosophical grounding in natural law and moral realism. Without metaphysical literacy, citizens cannot perceive when documents are being reinterpreted in ways that negate their foundations. They are left arguing over outcomes while the premises disappear.Third, education was inverted from formation to conditioning. Schools ceased forming moral agents capable of restraint and instead began shaping attitudes, values and behaviours aligned with prevailing norms. This shift did not feel coercive because it was framed as empowerment and inclusion. But operationally, it trained citizens to adapt to change rather than judge it. Once adaptation becomes a virtue, resistance to immanentist authority appears irrational or immoral.

Fourth, religion itself was neutralized as a source of resistance. Through modernism and the heresy of immanence, objective doctrine was replaced with experience and transcendence was replaced with ‘consciousness’. Americans absorbed the habit of treating truth as interior and evolving, even when they thought they were defending faith. This made them cognitively receptive to the same move in civic infrastructure. If truth unfolds in religion, why not in law? Finally, liberty was redefined as choice rather than self-government. Americans were taught to equate freedom with the absence of restraint, rather than with the capacity to govern oneself according to truth. This made them hostile to limits and suspicious of moral formation. As a result, they defended freedoms while abandoning the conditions that make freedom possible. When immanentist power arrived promising security, prosperity, or recognition, they had no conceptual tools remaining, no formation, with which to recognize and resist the subversion.

This is why Americans were such easy targets for subversion. They were not martially conquered; they were managerially retrained. Their cognitive faculties were redirected away from immutable reality and toward evolving process. Their moral vocabulary was hollowed out. Their constitutional inheritance was reduced to rhetorical slogans. By the time immanentism fully emerged in politics, law and governance, Americans could no longer name it; because the very faculties required to recognize it had been systematically disabled. The Declaration and Constitution cannot survive in such an environment. They presuppose a people capable of judgment, conscience and restraint; people who recognize that truth binds will and that authority must answer to reality. Immanentism, whether progressive, nationalist, technocratic, religious/theological or libertarian, denies that premise. It relocates authority from being to becoming and in Hegelian fashion, from truth to history, with law relegated to interpretation. That is why it is utterly incompatible with the American Founding and the tragedy is not merely political. It is ontological. A people formed to live within becoming cannot recognize being when it confronts them.

This is the deepest root of Yuri Bezmenov’s term ‘Demoralization’ and Joseph Pieper’s ‘Platonic Nightmare’. Until that capacity for recognition, discernment and judgement is restored, every movement claiming to defend freedom, while denying reality, will continue unwittingly or knowingly (and the result is the same, hence the utility of true believers, assets and handlers) to aid the very subversion it claims to oppose. You are watching the operational preparation of the public right now, as the America 250 Project increases its sales pitch for ‘Democracy’ in the very name of the Constitutional Republic and The People are already clapping like seals for it and cheering it on. The Demoralization is deep and ‘Communism’ has only been a preparatory phase for what is now being sold as the ‘solution’ to Communism and political corruption in the name of Liberty and Freedom. The propagandizing of the public never stops and never will as long as the public has no formation, yet deluged with information. Cardinal Woolsey’s ‘Learning Against Learning’ and flooding the zone (information realm) never gets old it seems.

So let’s consolidate what we’ve set out here (and touched on in previous articles too). Immanentism is experienced as a cognitive posture. Operationally, it is the belief (often unspoken and unexamined) that meaning, truth and value arise from within human consciousness, experience, or historical process, rather than from a reality that exists independently of us. Once this posture is adopted, the mind no longer treats truth as something to be discovered and conformed to. It treats truth as something that is generated, negotiated, or evolved. This shift does not feel dramatic. In fact, it feels empowering. It flatters the subject by placing the source of meaning inside the self or inside the collective ‘We’. But that very move quietly disables the most important human cognitive faculty - judgment.

Judgment is the act by which the intellect recognizes whether something is or is not the case. It is not a preference, a vote, or a choice. It is an act of recognition. When you judge that two plus two equals four, you are not choosing an answer; you are acknowledging a reality that binds you whether you like it or not. Judgment, properly understood, is submission of the mind to what is real.

Immanentism destroys this posture from the inside. Once meaning is believed to arise from consciousness or process, the mind is subtly trained to treat every claim as an expression of perspective rather than an apprehension of reality. Truth becomes something that belongs to someone or emerges over time, not something that stands over everyone equally. As a result, the intellect stops asking, ‘Is this true?’ and begins asking, ‘Does this resonate?’, ‘Does this work?’, ‘Does this align with my values?’ or ‘Is this where history is going?’. That change sounds small - it is not.

When judgment is replaced with resonance or alignment, the mind loses its ability to recognize constraint. Reality no longer binds; it competes. Every claim becomes one option among others. The intellect is no longer oriented outward toward being; it folds inward toward preference, identity, or narrative. This is the moment at which judging collapses into choosing. Immanentism depends on this collapse.

If people clearly understood that judging is not choosing, immanentism could not survive. Why? Because judging implies that something is the case whether or not it is chosen, endorsed, or preferred. It implies an external court of appeal. Immanentism cannot tolerate such a court. It requires that meaning remain open, fluid, and revisable; because authority must remain with the interpreter, the system of management, or the process. Operationally, this is why immanentist cultures relentlessly emphasize consumer choice while quietly hollowing out self governing judgment. People are trained to believe they are exercising freedom when they select among options, express opinions, or align with values. But none of these acts require recognition of reality. They require only preference. A population trained this way becomes highly expressive and deeply disoriented at the same time. Now add in social media to the mix. The damage to self-awareness is profound. A person formed under immanentism loses the ability to distinguish between recognition and assertion. They experience their beliefs narcissistically as extensions of themselves rather than as responses to reality. When challenged, they feel threatened; not because an argument is wrong, but because their identity has been touched. This is why disagreement feels like violence in immanentist environments and devastatingly, plays out in acting out - which you’re seeing currently in Minnesota and many other places. Without judgment, the self has no distance from its claims. When coming up against reality, immanentist self delusional radicalized choices can be fatal.

This also explains why immanentism produces such intense confusion around responsibility and restraint. If truth emerges from within or from history, then there is nothing to which the self must submit. Restraint appears arbitrary and limits ‘feel’ imposed. Obedience ‘looks like’ oppression. Yet at the same time, because reality has been evacuated, the self has no stable ground on which to stand. It becomes dependent on systems, experts, norms and narratives to tell it what is acceptable. What presents itself as autonomy quietly turns into managed conformity. For believers, this means faith becomes experience rather than assent to truth, with doctrine becoming symbolic. Moral claims become contextual as obedience becomes choice alignment with an ideologically perceived movement, rather than objective awareness with correspondence to reality. For non-believers, the effect is identical; reason becomes instrumental, ethics become negotiated and with that - truth becomes provisional. The disagreement is not about God. It is about whether anything exists that binds the mind and will apart from choice.

This is the crucial point - immanentism does not primarily make people immoral or irrational. It makes them incapable of recognizing when they are no longer judging at all. Once judgment is confused with choosing, every disagreement becomes a power struggle, because there is no shared reality left to appeal to. Whoever controls interpretation controls meaning. Whoever controls meaning controls legitimacy. This is why immanentism is so effective as a subversive force. It does not need to censor truth. It only needs to prevent people from recognizing what truth is. By training them to experience all claims as perspectives and all judgments as preferences, it disables the very faculty required to detect deception. It utterly and thoroughly disarms people, leaving them defenceless in the face of subversion and tyranny, all the while flattering them and filling them with presumptions to the contrary. This does all look like late stage cancerous destruction but it need not be terminal if metaphysically realist Education can be restored - for which the resource and the will (and the personnel) are all necessary. Recovery begins with a simple but radical clarification; judging is not choosing. Judgment is the intellect’s recognition of reality; choice is the will’s response to what has been judged. When that order is restored; when people relearn how to let reality speak before they decide how to act, immanentism loses its grip. Power can no longer hide behind process and freedom can once again entail self-government rather than a pretence of managed choice. Until that distinction is restored, no political reform, cultural movement, or moral exhortation will hold. The issue is not simply ideology - it is foundational cognition.