A Conversation with The Upheaval’s N. S. Lyons (Part 2 of 2)

At his great Substack newsletter, The Upheaval, and elsewhere, the pseudonymous N. S. Lyons’ wide-ranging, historically informed, and insightful writing examines that which has given rise to three simultaneous revolutions affecting all of our lives—along with their consequences. They are the rise of China, the ideological revolution roiling the Western world, and the technological advances aggravating each of the first two.

In a City Journal article earlier this year, for example, Lyons writes,

America today faces a multitude of escalating sociopolitical crises that are rapidly tearing apart the body politic: a rapacious strain of tribal identity politics; spreading legal, cultural, and moral chaos; lawlessness in the streets; and the entrenchment of an oligarchic managerial elite, increasingly willing to cast aside any remaining shred of democratic or national sovereignty in its pursuit of top-down global “progress.” Behind every one of these fractures, one finds the ongoing work of the Ford Foundation.

That article caught our Giving Review eye for its implications about Big Philanthropy, as did Lyons’ earlier, April speech to the National Conservatism conference in Brussels about the idea of a “parallel polis.” As an example of a parallel polis, he cited Hungary’s Civic Circles movement—which “focused on establishing community organizations across the nation to bring people together in grassroots civic action, volunteer work, and education in practical self-governance,” as he described it. Around the world, movements like these have stood in opposition—first by their mere existence, but also by their activities—to top-down, centralized bureaucracies that exercise power and authority over people, who properly resent and act against it.

Our fellow co-editor Bill Schambra recognized the concept as one put into practice by the grantmaking of the conservative Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, on the program staff of which we all used to work. Schambra wondered whether there might already be something of a parallel polis in America—one worthy of more support from conservative philanthropy, in the form of grants to local, neighborhood-based, grassroots organizations essentially doing the same thing as the Civic Circles groups.

At the subsequent National Conservatism conference in Washington, D.C., in July, Lyons and Schambra both participated in a panel about the idea and its implications.

Lyons was kind enough to join the two us for a recorded conversation last month. During the first part of our discussion, which is here, we talk about The Upheaval, Gnosticism, progressive managerialism, the Ford Foundation, philanthropy’s role in the ideological revolution, and what could perhaps be done about it.

The just less than 16-and-half-minute video below is the second part, during which we discuss the concept of a parallel polis to stand against progressive managerialism, whether such polei are political, whether there might already be one or the beginning of one in America, and how conservative philanthropy could and should support one.

In the Communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe during the Cold War, according to Lyons,

the idea was basically to manage everything from the top down, right? And one thing managerial regimes do … just because it’s what they do, they destroy the intermediary community organizations and institutions that exist between the individual and the state. So all these Tocquevillian associations and institutions that are created from the bottom up by people to solve their problems—the fabric of democracy—the managerial regime can’t stand those and it can’t stand them because it wants to manage everything. It thinks it can manage better than these organic, messy organizations. So it tends to sort of slowly wipe them out or dissolve them. And in the case of Communism, to an extreme degree—even trying to break apart the family unit, for example ….

After the Cold War, in Russia and other formerly Communist countries, “there was basically none of those organic institutions left. You had the state, and you had the individuals, and you have these state companies, and basically nothing else,” he says.

“In Czechoslovakia under Communism,” however, “the dissidents made an explicit decision to build institutions and communities and associations underground, specifically as a means to resist Communism by creating those very institutions that the Communists most hated—which was … organizing outside of the Communist party,” Lyons continues. “The idea was to combat the atomization, isolation, [and] demoralization that the Communist regime was creating. So they built this whole network of underground institutions.

“This was very effective, but it wasn’t just because they were keeping each other’s spirits up,” he goes on. “They were building underground institutions and networks that were resilient. What they essentially did was create a parallel state. So, in Czechoslovakia, when communism collapsed, unlike in Russia … the transition to democracy went much better because the parallel polis became the parallel state.”

Are parallel polei political? “On the one hand, if you build a parallel polis, you’re abandoning politics, you’re going outside of politics. You are going back to the grassroots level,” Lyons answers. On the other hand,

these organizations are inherently political, I would say, because they’re there. … Parallel organizing really is how mass movements are created in general. They don’t always lead there, they aren’t always intended to do that, but they can do that. And so they I would say, yes, they are often inherently political.

In America, “I think many of these organizations already exist,” he tells us. There are “people already all over America who are who have seen challenges in their communities and have come together to create organizations formally or informally that that try to solve those problems. And you can think of those as the same kind of organizing is what I’m talking about.”

Lyons recommends that conservative philanthropy consider offering more support to an American parallel polis. “I think to really have an effective parallel polis, it needs to be united in some way” and “working towards essentially the same broader vision. He thinks “we probably need other new institutions to be built as well, in addition to what’s happening already.”

This article first appeared in the Giving Review on September 4, 2024.