The New Creed

Posted on July 1, 2022 by thezman

237

This is the Fourth of July weekend, the high point of the summer and theoretically the most America holiday of the year. Thanksgiving is probably the most American holiday, but the usual suspects have been gnawing away at it. July 4th is expressly a holiday for celebrating what it means to be American. It is the one day of the year when normal people are allowed to be nationalistic and patriotic. You are even allowed to say nice things about the white people who founded the country.

It is hard to know, but it seems that patriotism is on the wane. The days of retail shops decorating themselves with red, white and blue colors are gone. They no longer run sales around the holiday. The media seems to be ignoring the holiday this year, despite the fact their cult controls the formal government. Back in the Obama years they took this time to tell us that the strange man with the Muslim name was actually Abraham Lincoln reincarnated. This year it is silence.

Back in the Bush years, white people were super-patriotic. The crusade against Islam was the main reason. After the end of the Cold War, white people were desperate for an enemy and the usual suspects were happy to oblige. That may have been when patriotism started to decline. By the end of the Bush years many people thought their civic nationalism had been exploited for illicit purposes. The last twenty years have largely confirmed those suspicions.

Of course, patriotism has always been a white thing. Black people are the least patriotic for obvious reasons. The origin story of black people is probably enough to prevent great loyalty to the country. There is no getting around the fact that blacks were brought here against their will. Even though Africans in America live like kings relative to Africans in Africa, the resentment is part of black identity. Therefore, the decline in patriotism is all about white people.

The steady decline in white patriotism can also be rooted in the antiwhite pogroms that have become a feature of America. Every ad maker complies with the edict to erase all white faces from their ads. The exception is the race mixing ads and when they use a white man as an object of ridicule. Movies and television shows have not gone quite so far, but the antiwhite messaging is still there. Of course, politics is drenched in antiwhite rhetoric from the Left with conservatives nodding along.

It is a weird thing to see the regime demanding everyone accept high food and fuel prices as the price to pay for democracy. The implication is that paying the price for bad policy decisions is our patriotic duty. White people can be forgiven for thinking this is just a joke at our expense. The regime is laughing at us. Why would white people make any sacrifices to a regime that calls us evil? Why would anyone be loyal to a system that has produced this corrupt regime?

According to a recent poll, most people think the government is corrupt and a quarter are open to an armed revolt. Interestingly, the reason for this is in the text of that Guardian story. “This deadly attack on the US Capitol stemmed from the false, partisan, pro-Donald Trump belief that Joe Biden did not win the 2020 election. Rioters attempted to thwart certification of the election, in an effort to keep Trump in office.” This degree of lying naturally makes people want to revolt.

This raises the question as to whether patriotism is possible in this age. Back in the Bush years the media was biased against “conservatives” so naturally “conservatives” were patriotic as a way to oppose the liberal media. There seemed to be a line between the media and the political class, even if the media favored one side. Now only a simpleton thinks the media is anything but the voice of the ruling class. As a result, we are constantly reminded of their corruption.

If it is no longer possible for a rational person to feel any loyalty to the nation, then what will hold the country together? In the book After Nationalism: Being American in an Age of Division, Samuel Goldman looks for a new way to unify the nation. Here is a good summary from Chronicles. Goldman describes the three prior unifying identities as the covenant, the crucible and the creed. These were the large frameworks in which patriotic loyalty was cultivated.

There is plenty to dispute in that description, but what the Chronicles review makes clear is that there is no obvious fourth option. The only way to arrive at something close to a civil society again is by first removing the people in charge of the political and cultural institutions. The crazies currently in charge are not going to be talked out of their positions and they are not going to sacrifice themselves for the common good, so that means physically removing them from power.

This is why the regime is so desperate to break up anything that looks like self-organizing by normal people. They understand better than most Americans that the only thing preventing a revolt is confusion in the masses. It is why they remain haunted by the January 6th events. Their determination to put Trump in jail is viewed by them as a matter of self-preservation. It is why the bigots have been enlisted to start attacking Christians who question the regime.

The fact is, the system holds together only if the majority population has no sense of identity at all. Patriotism focuses too much attention on the institutions and the people running them, so that cannot be allowed. Regional, religious or racial identity, at least among the majority population, is dangerous, so it is forbidden. The nature of minority rule is that it must make sure the majority never agrees on anything. Division is now the new creed of the American empire.

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The Story Tellers

Posted on June 30, 2022 by thezman

266

The war in Ukraine has brought into focus a strange belief among the ruling elites of the West that the world is controlled by narratives. If they can conjure a good story that seems to cover the facts in evidence, then the story is not only true, but it will control reality for the people in it. It is a form of abductive reasoning where they start with observations of varying degrees of plausibility, make sweeping conclusion and then declare war on anyone who raises doubts about them.

Formally, abduction is a form of logical inference. You begin with a set of observations and then look for the most likely conclusion from the observations. It is simply the best available explanation for what is observed. There is the possibility that some less likely or entirely unknown explanation is the correct one. This is where the ruling class logic departs from the formal definition. The explanation deemed most likely becomes an article of faith, often in support of some other belief.

Another difference from the formal definition is that the initial set of observations are never debated or reevaluated. The faith of the ruling class in their own ability to observe and define the world rules out uncertainty about their observations. Since many of the observations are part of this process, reconsidering these observations means questioning the reasoning behind them. More important, it means doubting the reasoner behind them and that is forbidden.

With regards to the war in Ukraine, Western leaders told the politicians that Russia was nothing but a big gas station with large land holdings. They could not sustain a large army in the field for very long. They lacked the capacity to make the ammunition and equipment needed for the war. Her economy was no better than Venezuela, so a boycott would bring it crashing down and before long it would lead to one of those mysterious color revolutions so popular these days.

This set of observations dates back to the post-Cold War days when the Russian economy was recovering from the collapse of communism. To whatever extent they were true at the time, no one has bothered to update them. They have become articles of faith, pillars upon which all relations with Russia are based. Over time, the new set of observations about Putin have been synthesized by the same crowd to fill in the gaps between the prior observations.

This mental framework with regards to Russia and the war in the Ukraine is so brittle and inflexible, it is forced to ignore facts on the ground. This story in a main Western media organ has become a standing head. In the old days of the newspaper business, a standing head was a headline used so often that it was made into a permanent block for the printer. For five months, Western media has been quoting regime experts claiming the Russians are about to run out of supplies.

The first quoted official is illustrative. “There will come a time when the tiny advances Russia is making become unsustainable in light of the costs and they will need a significant pause to regenerate capability.” This is true only within the logical framework of the belief set. The fact that Russia is obliterating the Ukrainian army and seizing large chunks of territory is ignored. The fact that the prior predictions have been false and the Russians show no signs of running out material is also ignored.

The undeniable truth of the war is that the Russians are using an expeditionary force of about 200,000 men from its professional army to systematically annihilate the Ukrainian army, which is larger and dug into fortified positions. This is possible because Russia is not a gas station with land holdings. In fact, it now has a military industrial capacity greater than the West. It can sustain its operations in Ukraine for as long as it takes to destroy the Ukraine and its ability to field an army.

None of this seems to register with the decision makers. This quote from retired Gen. Ben Hodges, a former commander of U.S. forces in Europe who is now with the Center for European Policy Analysis, is illustrative. “I remain very optimistic that Ukraine is going to win.” He then added, “Right now it sucks to be on the receiving end of all this Russian artillery. But my assessment is that things are going to be trending in favor of the Ukrainians in the next few weeks.”

The natural assumption by people in control of their faculties and aware of what is happening in the Ukraine is that these people are lying. Many of them, especially the ISW types, have a well known cultural affinity for lying. This general, and many like him in the decision tree, display no signs of sociopathy. They genuinely believe the narratives that they have played a role in creating. The fantasy world they have made for themselves is now more real than physical reality.

This disconnect between the world the elites imagine they control and the world that exists for everyone else is the crisis in the West. Four months ago, that general should have seen that their plan to bunkerize the Donbas and wait out the Russians was quickly becoming a suicide pact. The Russians are simply standing off and hammering these fortifications with artillery. This reduces their losses to the barest minimum, while it slowly and systematically destroys Ukraine.

That is reality, but for Western elites, this does not exist. Instead, they imagine a world where heroic fighters, who look a lot like them, are defending against an increasingly desperate horde of barbarians from over the horizon. It is the great battle for Middle Earth and the beautiful people are the elves and the Ukrainians are the humans, hobbits and other lower creatures of the world. Meanwhile, Putin is Sauron and his army are those vicious, bloodthirsty orcs.

The war in the Ukraine is but one glaring example. The gap between reality and the narratives created by the ruling class are everywhere. The energy crisis they created is not angry people paying five dollars a gallon for gas. It is the struggle to break free from hydrocarbons and transition to a world powered by fairy dust. Food shortages are just the price to be paid for transitioning to sustainable food created in labs using twigs and bugs so that the woodland creatures may be free.

No matter the problem, they have a story for it. They call these stories “messaging” but they are just stories to comport the bits of reality that interrupt the dream, with the larger narratives that define ruling class reality. This summer we will be awash in messaging in the run up to the election, which now works like an award show for the freaks that populate the political class. The best message wins. The winner then gets to spin some new narratives to please the Cloud People.

A Sports Example

Posted on June 29, 2022 by thezman

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When the big tech companies decided to crack down on speech on-line, conservatives started chanting about how these are private companies and therefore they had a right to regulate what is done on their platforms. The reason conservatives said this is they were taking bribes from the big tech companies. If Silicon Valley started human sacrifice, National Review would have posted the “conservative case” for ripping the beating heart out of virgins to please Moloch.

Even without the bribes, conservatives would have sided with the oligarchs because for conservatives, the term “private company” has no real meaning. It is just a way to dodge the issue of state power. The Left advocates the promiscuous use of state power to achieve their moral ends, while the Right opposes any use of state power to achieve any ends, which leaves a big void. We end up with giant corporations pushing people around with the consent of the state.

A mundane example of this is sports. In the West, sport has been a central part of the culture since the Greeks. Sport has always been a theatrical version of war, which allows men and society to blow off steam. Sport also allows diverse people, as in people not bound by kin relations, to build bonds. The town comes together to play the next town in a game. After the game, the people of both towns throw a big party with one town having bragging rights until the next time.

In other words, large scale athletic spectacles have a social function, one that is integral to the smooth operation of society. This is why in modern times, cities will spend hundreds of millions to create venues for pro sports teams. A section of the city will often be designed around the arenas, with shopping, nightlife and swank living arrangements placed around the sports facilities. The sports are viewed as a social good so the city spends money on them.

Professional sports leagues also enjoy special rules granted to them by the government that protect them from competition. In the United States, it means an antitrust exemption from Congress. States will grant special tax exemptions, especially for the payroll taxes of the athletes. Localities will give them free land, utilities and exemptions from the normal property taxes. In America, sports leagues are special monopolies that exist as a creation of government.

Here is where the above mentioned dynamic between Left and Right works against the interest of the people. The Left uses state power to make sure these sports leagues aggressively support the cultural causes. The four big sports leagues are out front on the things like sodomy, cross-dressing, social vengeance and so on. They also make sure to support other state-sponsored ventures like war mongering and the medical fads that are an increasing part of daily life.

While the Left is weaponizing sports against the majority population, the Right carries on like these leagues are bastions of libertarianism, instead of rentier enterprises for the benefit of the oligarchs. Any suggestion that maybe the state do something about the outlandish prices or the grotesque subsidies these operations enjoy is met with howls of “socialism’ from conservatives. You see, those subsidies are just tax avoidance and taxes are bad so reasons.

The result is sports leagues function like tax farmers. Every cable household is sending money to pro sports leagues through their cable bill. Since the sports stuff is bundled into the basic bill, you pay for sports by default. The only way to avoid paying for sports is to not have a television subscription. Even taking that approach, you are subsidizing sports through property taxes, sales taxes and entertainment taxes. Everyone is a tenant on the sportsball farm in America.

A functioning opposition to the Left would take one of two moral positions on the issue of professional sports. One is the equality position. The only way to treat all economic actors equally is to avoid special treatment. The sports leagues should lose their antitrust exemption and lose their tax subsidies. They should also lose the right to muscle cable operators into forcing their product on customers. For example, only 25% of people watch ESPN, but everyone pays for it.

The other moral position on this issue is to engage the Left in how best to regulate these public goods. For example, make the leagues choose between pay-per-view and commercials in the broadcasts. Currently, they are allowed to both price-fix the purchased content and jam it full of ads. A football game is about an hour of game time and two hours of other stuff, mostly ads. This is how thirty-two oligarchs get nine billion per year just from broadcasting their games.

If sports are a public good, then they need to be regulated in the best interest of the people, like a road or a waterway. Economic considerations fall behind the moral and social considerations. On the other hand, if they are just another business with no special meaning to society, then they get treated as such. In America, the first option is only open to the Left and the second option is never considered. Both Left and Right support using sports to advance left-wing ends.

This little example illustrates a core premise of the dissident project. It is the destruction of the old dynamic between Left and Right, where one side argues from morality and the other side hides behind abstract economic concepts. The new dynamic needs to begin with the basic question. Does the issue lie in the public culture or does it belong in the private culture? The former requires public power to regulate on behalf of the public, while the latter needs to be protected from public power.

Note that the issue is culture, not economics. This is the other aspect of that change in the political dynamic. The debate must always start first with the culture. Not only does this focus the mind on what actually matters, but it keeps the specter of who decides hanging over all public debate. What is in the best interest of the culture and who ultimately decides is the core of all politics. A genuine opposition to the Left embraces this reality and makes it the focus of their politics.

The Crisis Of Competence

Posted on June 28, 2022 by thezman

231

One of the subtexts to the current war in the Ukraine is the fact that the West has been wrong about every aspect of the conflict. None of the predictions about the actual fighting have been correct. Even the propaganda has been hilariously wrong, often making the West look foolish. The economic response, which was supposed to be a fatal blow to Russia, has gone horribly wrong. Europe now faces an unprecedented energy shortage this fall and winter.

The bulk of the blame lies at the feet of the neoconservatives running foreign policy for the Global American Empire. The same cast of characters who were horrifically wrong about Iraq and Afghanistan in the Bush years have managed to turn a regional issue into a global disaster. London and Brussels, along with the provincials occupying legacy positions in national government share blame as well. They enthusiastically went along with a war plan that had no chance to succeed.

The degree of wrongness is a thing of beauty, when you can look at it from a purely objective point of view. Rolling dice, flipping coins or pulling policy ideas out of a hat would have had a better result. One could be forgiven for thinking that maybe this series of errors is somehow deliberate. Maybe that ridiculous bald guy from the World Economic Forum really is a super villain. The masters of the universe are setting the West ablaze so they can build back better.

The question that should be pondered is why has everything gone so terribly long for the collective West? One reason is competence. The Global American Empire is led by a man who barely knows where he is most of the time. In his prime, Joe Biden was known as an affable moron. In his dotage, he is a confused and incompetent old man unable to perform his duties. His handlers give him stage instructions for basic things like where and when to sit.

Biden is the bit of the iceberg we see. There is a whole apparatus around him that was instrumental in getting him into office. The Washington political community thought a dementia patient was better than Trump. That says nothing about Trump and everything about the people who engineered Biden’s ascension. People forget that the Democratic Party had to rig its own primary to get Biden the nomination. They never stopped to think what this would mean after the election.

Of course, this degree of incompetence is made possible by a political culture that is defensive, isolated and insulated. They picked Biden because he was the safest option to get rid of Trump. Biden’s primary appeal to the political class was that he was a vegetable they could move around however they pleased. Biden and his family were simply happy to fill the role and play their part. He also provided the best chance of liberating the city from the scourge of Trump people.

That decision gets to the insularity of the political class, not just in Washington, but across the collective West. These are people without any understanding of the societies over which they rule. When you look at the resumes of these people, the common feature is no experience in the dreaded private sector. Politics has been their life since they were adults. In fact, we have reached a point where private sector experience raises suspicion in the political class.

These are people who simply have no idea how things work. They just take for granted that things work. Like the heirs of a family business, the political class has spent their life in a system without ever having to think about how it came into being. The system of power they command is a permanent feature of life. The only variable is who will have control of the institutions of power. That is politics, the game of verbal chess which picks the winners and losers in the system.

Therein lies the other cause of this unfolding disaster. The West is a collection of people who deal in words exclusively. They have never done anything, other than talk about making other people do things. Nancy Pelosi has been in Washington for eighty years and there is no single physical thing she can point to, other than her ten-thousand-dollar freezer, as a product of her political career. When she is dead, the next wave will wash away her footprints in the sand and she will be forgotten.

On the other side of this fight is a different system, one that is the result of people doing things and rising in the ranks as a consequence. Putin is a man who had to navigate a world where failure meant prison or death. When that world collapsed, he had to navigate a world of chaos. When he gained power, he then had to impose order, often taking on powerful oligarchs backed by Western interests. Putin and his ruling circle are a collection of men who do things, not just talk about things.

Six months ago, the West was prepared to give the Russians a good tongue lashing, cancel her from the internet and de-platform her from the financial system. On the other side, the Russians prepared to fight a war against a well-armed and prepared enemy in Ukraine and a well-armed and prepared West on the world stage. One side was ready for a battle of words while the other side was ready for a battle of actions. It turns out that words count for a lot less than actions.

All civilizations have periods of incompetence. The Russians suffered through the Gorbachev and Yeltsin periods. The difference for the West is that the system has been selecting for bourgeois obsequiousness for a long time. The reason Washington is run by fossils is the next in line is much worse than the geezers. Mitch McConnell knows something about running the party. Kevin McCarthy was selected because no one in power worried that he would be a challenge.

The crisis of the West is that it is now run by a managerial class that was selected for being the teacher’s pet, ticking the right box on a form and making sure to never utter a discouraging word around the boss. It is why presidents have been increasingly ridiculous since the Cold War. Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump and now Biden are all mileposts in the decline of competence. Next up is Kamala Harris, an absurd manifestation of a system that selects against competence.

The Righteous Cause

Posted on June 27, 2022 by thezman

253

Note: My Taki post is on the same topic. Sunday Thoughts is up behind the green door for those who are in need of audio stimulation. I also have a post up about my recent trip to the doctor for the annual inspection.

Clausewitz famously wrote that “War is nothing but a continuation of politics with the admixture of other means.” Like all overused expressions, this one is always used to end analysis rather than open it. The true meaning of the expression is much deeper than the simple comparison between two related activities. War and politics have much in common so the comparison should be used to take what is known about one and use it to understand something about the other.

You see this in the case of abortion. For fifty years religious and social activists in America have organized to overturn the Supreme Court decision that invented a right to abortion in the Constitution. From the perspective of most religious people, life begins at conception, so the court has institutionalized murder as a right. Others saw the issue as an assault on the logic of society. The Orwellian invention of new rights was simply laying the groundwork for arbitrary rule.

Within the pro-life movement, therefore, there was always this double helix around which the movement organized itself. One strand was the moral arguments about human life and the other strand was the rational arguments about the constitution and the structure of America politics. In the end, the court yielded to those rational arguments, but that could not have happened without the energy of the moral arguments that kept the movement going for over fifty years.

In war, men will die for their cause. They will not die for a paycheck or the promise of war booty after the battle. They will die for a cause because they are motivated by a sense of righteousness in the cause. When an army believes it is fighting for what is right, it is willing to do whatever is necessary to win. An army fighting with a bayonet at its back or because it is paid to fight is risk adverse. It will do only that which is advantageous to it because that is what reason dictates.

This is something people have known since forever. The ancients observed that men would fight like lions in defense of their own lands but became quite conservative when they crossed into the enemy’s lands. The reason militaries try to build bonds of brotherhood within units is they know men will fight for their brothers, even sacrificing themselves if necessary. In other words, a man will die for two brothers of eight cousins, but that is the limit of his sacrifice.

Therein lies the reason the pro-life cause was able to sustain itself for two generations fighting to overturn Roe. For the people in that movement, the logic of abortion is not what motivated them. In fact, most never bothered to think much about the legal and political logic of the issue. They simply focused on the morality of it. Abortion is murder and a society that institutionalizes murder is immoral. They felt a moral duty to commit their lives to end this immoral practice.

It is important to note that the only two issues the Right has had any success in America are guns and abortion. The gun people had the advantage of the second amendment but they never relied upon it. Only a few gun cases have made it to the courts and they have only nibbled around the issue. Instead, the gun people launched a crusade against the gun grabbers in every state and locality. Their task has always been to anathematize gun grabbing and the gun grabbers.

The lesson here for those engaging in politics is that like war, politics is about morality, not facts and reason. The soldier fights for his love of country, often expressed as love of his brothers in arms. He fights for a cause bigger than himself. In politics, the winners are those who frame the issue in moral terms, seizing the moral high ground and demanding opponents justify their actions in the face of morality. The losers are those who settle for facts and reason.

This is why the American Left has won every battle against the so-called conservatives over the last century. The Left makes moral claims while the co-called conservatives force opposition into rational claims. The exception has been the two issues where professional conservatism has had little role, abortion and guns. It is important to note that professional conservatism has opposed the NRA over the years and they opposed Trump, who promised to fill the court with pro-life judges.

It is why conservatives oppose the term “antiwhite.” They know that this is a morally charged term that offers no opportunity for them to negotiate away the interests of the people they claim to represent. It makes a clear moral distinction between us and them, which is the enemy of the sorts of people working in conservatism. The same is true of the word “groomer” which is not only factually accurate, but it also lays bear the moral implications of the sexual revolution.

In the end, the lesson of the abortion movement for dissidents is that the way to defeat the moral framework of the Left is with an alternative moral framework. You cannot defeat moral arguments with facts and reason. People will sacrifice for a just cause, but not for a logical explanation. It turns out that Ben Shapiro’s line about facts not caring about your feelings is just another trick to prevent a moral people from standing on their morals to oppose the moral framework of the Left.

A Discourse On Reform

Posted on June 24, 2022 by thezman

The show will go on hiatus for a week, so this is a two hour program to make up for the loss of an hour next week. Since we are officially in summer, something I wanted to do, but have not found a way to do it, is plug some books from our side that people may find useful on the summer holiday at the beach. I do not do many book reviews, but I get a lot of requests for them, along with book suggestions.

For the fictionally inclined, three books by two authors from our side have been recommended to me. Karl Dahl’s Faction is a crime novel released last year and another episode is coming out soon. Spencer J. Quinn, who turns up in the comments here and writes for Counter-Currents has sent me two of his books. One is White Like You and the other is Charity’s Blade.

Old friend Joseph Cotto has a book out about the history of Florida. This focuses on the French settlements and what happened to them. It is a bit of forgotten history that there was a French settlement in Florida. It is fair to say that the history of the state and of the country would be much different if the French had done a better job managing their colonies in the New World. Counter-Currents has reviewed it here.

While on the topic of friends of the show, I did a review of Paul Gottfried’s latest book for American Greatness a few months back. Given that the Left is now promising another summer of rage, some may be inclined to study up on the history. Antifascism: The Course of a Crusade is a short read about the surprisingly long history of anti-fascism in the West. It is a good companion to his book on fascism.

Finally, I recently read Kevin MacDonald’s book Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition and I have to say it is an odd book. I was planning to do a review, so I did a close reading, taking lots of notes, but even after thinking about it for a while I am still not sure what to make of it. I did not hate it, but I did find it a bit frustrating because of how it is organized. It could just be a matter of taste.

In case anyone is interested, I am currently re-reading Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution for my own book project. My copy comes with the essay by George Orwell titled, Second Thoughts on James Burnham. The essay is a critique of Burnham’s often ridiculous claims during the war and the failure of his theory from a socialist perspective, which itself is an interesting reminder of Orwell’s own limitations.

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The Market Devil

Posted on June 23, 2022 by thezman

In the movie The Usual Suspects, one of the characters says, “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” It is a clever line that gets to the heart of the human condition. When people have a clear understanding of right and wrong, most of life’s dangers are avoidable. In the context of the film, it turns out to be a perfect summary of what happens to the main characters. They are undone by their unwillingness to accept clear moral boundaries.

A similar thing can be said of this age. The greatest trick democracy ever pulled was convincing the world that the marketplace exists. Much of what ails the modern West is this naïve belief that the world is controlled by market forces. The invisible hand, guided by the desires of the majority, picks the winners and losers. Those who vex or offend the majority will eventually be laid low by the market. Those on the side of the majority will be raised up as the winner.

What is truly remarkable about this belief is not that people buy into the surface logic but that they keep believing it despite the results. To use another movie idea, this belief is the forever blue pill. Just when people begin to see reality, someone comes along with a handful of blue pills labeled “marketplace” and the people gobble them down to the cries of “go woke, go broke” or some other ridiculous claim about the beauty and majesty of the great god called the marketplace.

The power of this belief is best seen in the entrainment world, where people channel their passions into entertainment franchises. The popular YouTube movie critic, The Critical Drinker, has this bit about the Star Wars franchise. Despite being well aware of the politics motivating the people in Hollywood, a big part of his act is in identifying “the message” in films and television shows, he is baffled as to why the people behind this popular franchise are forcing their politics on their fans.

The underlying assumption of his critique is that the marketplace is a real thing and it will one day punish the people ruining his favorite franchise. Yet, by any objective standard, the franchise was ruined a long time ago. The second set of films was a clear cash grab and the politically charged nonsense that followed looks like a critical studies department at a fifth rate state college exploded on film. The franchise has been a two decade long, carny trash political sermon.

In those two decades, the franchise has grossed eight billion dollars for a rough profit of seven billion dollars. The most grotesquely political bits of the franchise, the last five films, has netted over four billion in profits. In other words, the more they jam their carny trash morality in the faces of the fans, the more money they make. The clear lesson here is it does not matter what they do. The next Star Wars could literally be Disney executives raping kids and it would make billions.

Another aspect of the false consciousness is the assumption that the people making entrainment product are motivated by money. Because money comes from the magic of the marketplace, the desire for money must lead to a desire to please as many customers as possible. If this is true, logic then says that the degenerate politics being pushed in these films pleases the marketplace. After all, replacing the normal stuff with abnormal stuff has been a boon to the franchise.

The believer in the marketplace cannot accept this so he remains baffled. The truth is the people making our entertainment product are motivated by money, but they know it does not come from magical market forces. It comes from the people who control society and impose their morality on the rest of us. Please the feminist orcs from HR and you get a fat paycheck. In other words, in a democratic society it is not the marketplace but the moral space that decides.

Entertainment has always been about public morality. Look back at the earliest days of filmmaking and this is clear. The very first films were efforts to undermine the prevailing morality in an effort to insert a new moral code. The communists and fascists were trailblazers in filmmaking, inventing things that are still with us today, because they saw the power of entertainment to shape public morality. Go back even further and the Greeks used theater to control public morality in Athens.

All of this points to the fact that the marketplace is a creation of man and like all of man’s creations, it is controlled by those with power. After all, the marketplace is simply a set of rules and those rules must be enforced. If the parties to a transaction have no fear of the rules, they have no reason to abide them. Enforcement of the rules must come from a party with power over both sides of the transaction. It is fear of that power which makes the marketplace possible.

The people making movies and television shows understand this because the people underwriting their projects remind them of it all the time. The near monopoly held by the big content makers is possible only because people with power have shaped the rules so that a small number of players control the industry. The movie makers fear and respect that power, so they always seek to please it. The reward is a lifestyle beyond anything normal people can imagine.

This clearly applies to democracy itself. The overwhelming majority of white people have been voting Republican for decades. In that time the Republican Party has moved steadily away from the interests of its voters. In fact, they have increasingly embraced policies explicitly at odds with the interests of their voters. They have now reached the point where they are mocking their idiot voters for trusting them. After all, what are you going to do? Vote libertarian?

Despite the obvious, people continue to vote in the belief that the marketplace will eventually punish these people. If a majority of voters elect people who hold the opinions and values of the voters, the government has to yield. People often say that Christianity has no future because people no longer accept the supernatural, but this November’s election will prove otherwise. People trust the supernatural more than ever, but they now call their god the marketplace.

Thinking About The Possible

Posted on June 22, 2022 by thezman

A popular setup for the cooking shows is a gameshow format in which the contestants are forced to cook a meal using the wrong ingredients. Maybe they have to compete for ingredients and all of them end up with a partial list of required items. Maybe they are given wacky items and tasked with making a traditional dish. The secret ingredient is aardvark noses and the dish is chicken cacciatore. The entertainment is in watching them solve the puzzle in amusing ways.

The underlying truth of these shows is that a dish is not just the sum of its ingredients or just the skill of the chef. The dishes that are famous in our culture are the combination of ingredients in the right proportions, assembled by people with the skill and cultural understanding to create the dish. A Spanish guy who grew up on paella knows how it is supposed to look and taste. He may be able to get the same effect using ingredients not traditionally used in the dish.

This is the truth of politics. The old line about politics, that it is the art of the possible, depends on the same set of assumptions. To get something passed through a legislature, you have to get a majority. Outside of symbolic items like momentary resolutions, this means finding a compromise that a majority can accept. Put another way, in order to get a bill passed the ingredients for it must exist. Then you need someone to assemble those ingredients into the final bill.

Strangely, when the subject moves up into meta politics and political philosophy, this understanding gets tossed away in favor of the blank sheet approach. It is just assumed that the remnants of today, after the collapse of course, will be easily swept away and a new system can be built from scratch. After the revolution, the winners will get to conjure from nothing a new political system. The facts and events that led to the great starting over are left out of the discussion.

This blank slate mentality infects the Left and Right. For the Left, the glorious future that is free of suffering and exploitation is otherwise undefined. In fact, its lack of specifics is the appeal. They just know they will be able to fish in the morning, hunt in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening and do critical theory at night. In other words, the glorious future can be what the believer wants it to be because the future will be free of all of the things that made the glorious future possible.

For the Right, this blank slate thinking imagines a do-over based on a fictional understanding of the past. The Founders, for example, assembled in Philadelphia to draft the Constitution, carrying loads of virgin parchment. They were going to start from scratch and create what they hoped would be their ideal republic. The American conservative imagines himself going back to that time, with the knowledge of today, to help tidy up the bits that have gone wrong.

Of course, the reality of the founding is something different. The Founders came together like the contestants on those cooking shows. They had a vague idea of what they wanted to make. They knew they had a limited set of ingredients. They also had the experience of the prior effort to create a national government. These were practical men focused on what was possible given the constraints of the age. They were not dreamers and idealist. They were wizened realists.

Left-wing people are incapable of thinking in these terms because what attracts them to the various subcultures on the Left is the desire to escape this fallen world. It is why facts and reason have no effect on their politics. Right-wing people, in contrast, are much more realistic about the human condition. They should be inclined to focus on what is possible, given the ingredients, than they are, which raises the question as to whether there even is a genuine Right.

Putting that aside, if one wants to imagine what comes next for America, the place to start is the ingredient list. Just as the Founders had to think first about what was possible with the ingredients at their disposal, the man of the Right in this age must first think hard about the ingredient list. What sort of civic life will be possible in America given the probable list of ingredients. There is some uncertainty on some of them, like technology, but others are better understood.

For example, there is no avoiding demographics. By the middle of this century, just a generation away, American will be a nonwhite society. That means that the people taking up positions of authority in two decades will have spent their entire lives as a minority in a society made by white people. Whatever civic life is possible will be one where Nick Fuentes and Ocasio-Cortez are typical. That is not a demographic for which the Founders designed the Constitution.

Is it possible to have a society with things like equality before the law when the society is composed of adversarial tribes? Of course, the idea of the individual being the building block is not going to hold up in a world where competing groups fight for the spoils of society. On the other hand, maybe there is a common ground in a fragmented, multiracial society around which to build a politics. What unifying set of understandings or beliefs could emerge in the society of the future?

There is also the possibility that civil society is impossible under the conditions that are shaping up at the moment. Immigration is a good example. America has no border as a practical matter, yet the public seems to be fine with it. Maybe that changes as the reality of this becomes clear to people. There has been some movement in the polling on immigration. On the other hand, the rulers are for open borders so that will be the policy until events force a change at the top.

That brings up the other important ingredient. The starting point for a new politics based in the reality of society is that it can only come after events lead to a replacement of the current elites with a new elite. How that happens will cast a long shadow over those tasked with shaping a new society. The Founders were certainly affected by their experience in the war against England. What will that conflagration look like and how will it impact the people who come after it?

An honest examination of the present trends says that two things are true about current politics and what comes next. One is that there is nothing to be done to arrest the current trends. It does not mean they will continue indefinitely, but that they will run their course to their logical end. The other assumption is that the ingredients available to build a civic society in the future will look nothing like the past. In fact, it is possible that a civil society as we understand it is not going to be possible.

The point of this exercise is that the past is not going to be terribly useful for the people tasked with creating a civil society in the future. Western man will soon find himself in the same situation as those cooking show contestants. Their training and skill at making traditional dishes is often a liability when they are handed bizarre ingredients like aardvark lips and bat testicles. The clean sheet of paper is in their mind, not the canvas on which they will create their masterpiece.

This is the next phase of dissident thinking. The critiques of this age and its causes is nearly complete. What must come next is acceptance that there will be no great restoration after the revolution. Instead, what comes next will start with the available ingredients and the experience of the failure of this age. That is a hard project but whoever shapes the future will first have started out with a plan for a future that lies within the possible, rather than fantasies of the past.

Barbarians At The Ballot Box

Posted on June 21, 2022 by thezman

For the longest time, the debate over immigration has been about how both sides can agree on open borders while appearing to disagree. The Left made the spurious claim that America was the result of immigration. If immigration declines, then the country will decline. The Right made the claim that immigrants were natural conservatives and the only way for the Right to compete in the future was to load up on those super-duper conservative immigrants via open borders.

Outside of this immigration two-step, race realist would point out that immigrants tend to support the government party for practical reasons. In the West, the government party is always a few clicks to the left of the people and several giant leaps to the left of its heritage population. In America it means seventy percent of immigrants will vote for the Democrats, regardless of their policies. The cultural inclinations of the immigrants will have no impact on their political activity.

There has always been a cynically pragmatic thread to the immigration debate centered on the crude reality of politics. The Democrats supported open borders because it brought them extra voters to exploit. Their call for more immigration parallels their ballot stuffing measures. Republicans want more immigration because their donors want cheap labor. The “cheap labor lobby” theory relies on the antiquated claim that the business lobby still wears monocles and top hats.

It is starting to look like these claims make sense, but only within the context of a good economy, stable demographics and a pacified white population. In the post-Cold War America, the Democrat-Republican two-step on immigration made a lot of sense for both sides of the dance. Similarly, the observations of the race realists and cynics played out in every election. All of sudden, none of this is making any sense because the logic in which it worked is falling to pieces.

The first bit of logic that is breaking is the economy. When the white middle-class is doing well, they want their government to be generous. The government becomes an extension of their moral sensibility. When the middle-class feels stress, this swings around the other way. Now that the white middle-class is hitting retirement, that swing is looking quite dramatic. There is not going to be a lot of sympathy from a group living on savings when the stock market has lost twenty percent.

There is also another aspect to the changing economy. Airline pilots and engineers are not floating over the Rio Grande. The sort of people coming over the border are not bringing anything of value. There is no shortage of unskilled labor. The real labor crisis in America is in competency. The real struggle for business is in finding people who can do skilled work and will want to do it well. Rather quickly, immigration is no longer an exploitable asset for the open borders lobby.

Another problem for the open borders people is the collapse in institutional trust that accelerated in the last half dozen years. Trump was a warning that the people were losing faith in their institutions. The response by the institutions was to prove the people were correct in their suspicions. Anything the two parties try to sell is assumed to be part of some conspiracy to harm the country. The reaction to the latest gun grabbing by both parties is a perfect example of this new normal.

One other bit of the old structure that has started to crumble. The ruling elite of America, sensing the “browning of America’ have embraced leucophobia. This is a bigotry toward all things white, driven by a fear of being white or acting white. The defining feature of the popular culture the last decade has been a snarling, aggressive war against white people, especially white men. This pogrom was institutionalized in the late Trump years as part of the color revolution against him.

This is turning out to be a poison pill for the antiwhites with regards to the Spanish speaking immigrant population. It is turning out that the conservatives were sort of right about migrants being naturally conservative. They were simply wrong about what they naturally want to conserve. The Hispanic vote does not want to be lumped in with the freak show the Left has assembled and they are not down with the leucophobia that has become a standard feature of American life.

The polling over the last year that has suggested a shift in Hispanic voting is now turning up at the ballot box. Surprisingly, the only Republican to get that this has nothing to do with boiler plate conservatism and everything to do with ruling class degeneracy is Marco Rubio. It turns out that Hispanics are more revolted than white people by the sight of a man in a dress. They are willing to vote Republican because anything is better than a crossdresser.

There is a similar dynamic going on with the color wheel. Hispanics have a much more intimate relationship with blacks in America. They tend to live near them, often taking over their neighborhoods. Hispanics are extremely race realist. The effort to lump them in with blacks, as part of the rainbow coalition is offensive to them. Democrat efforts to make them a stripe on their flag is turning this block into a collection of extremely race realist Archie Bunkers.

Politically this is creating an amusing dynamic. One side is demanding the Hispanics get in the back of the bus with the other BIPOC’s while the other side is screaming at them about the evils of racism. Hispanics are about to learn what white people have been learning the last ten years. That is, they have no voice in politics. Forty percent of the population is white-wing and no one in either party speaks for them. Hispanics are about to join the politically disposed.

None of this should be viewed as good news. The Republicans winning a landslide in the fall elections will only make things worse. Whenever the people vote the wrong way, the ruling elite forces the Republican party to punish them. Then there is the prospect of the government being run by Biden, McConnel and McCarthy. The long simmering Irish question will finally burst into the open. That and having three morons, one with dementia, running things can only lead to disaster.

All that aside, there is a late Roman empire feel to this. The ruling elite, in an effort to conceal their weakness, chooses to settle barbarian tribes rather than fight to keep them at bay. Rather than create a constituency for the ruling elite it just adds to the number not represented in the ruling elite. At some point, the newly settled barbarians and their new neighbors decide that the new group of barbarians are a better play and they throw open the gates.

The End Of Time

Posted on June 20, 2022 by thezman

Note: My Taki post is back from the celebration of Juneteenth. Sunday Thoughts is up behind the green door for those who are in need of audio stimulation. If you need even more audio stimulation, then there is this from the weekend. I was very active over the weekend, so there is this bonus post behind the green door.

The terms Left and Right have been ubiquitous in Western public discourse for so long people just assume they are universal constants. The fact is though, they are neither universal nor constant. There is no African Right or Burmese Left. These cultures have not been shaped by the French Revolution. Similarly, what it means to be on the Right or Left has changed over time. Today’s left-wing American genuinely detests yesterday’s left wing American, who is probably on the Right today.

There is not much in the way of ideology on either side. There has not been an important thinker on either side in a long time. The last important radical thinker was probably Herbert Marcuse or perhaps John Rawls. On the Right, Paul Gottfried and Sam Francis are recent, but their influence is only on the fringe. The main driver of politics is the Left and they are wildly ignorant of the intellectual history that shapes left-wing politics today.

In the main, people divide up over history. What controls the American Left is the sense that the past is littered with monsters. These monsters are things like slavery, discrimination, morality, decency and so forth. The fact that these things have existed means they could exist again. The practical effect of something like slavery, for example, is zero, but the possibility it could return shapes the present. These monsters haunt the dense fog that is the left-wing mental space.

This is why the Left maintains all of its focus on the future, a place that is free of those monsters like inequality and human suffering. It is a secular Gnosticism in which a mystical and esoteric understanding of what lies at the end of history justifies the assault on the present. The monsters of the past haunt this fallen world and the only way out is to destroy this world thus freeing mankind from its grip and allowing man to move into the next phase of human history.

On the other side of this is the Right. They share the Left’s disdain for the present, but for entirely different reasons. They see the present as a degraded version of some past they hold up as the ideal. To be on the Right is to consume yourself with discovering forgotten kingdoms and then imagining yourself in them. Just as the future is an escape for the man of the Left, the past is a refuge for the man of the Right. The difference is his escape is much more detailed and appointed.

It is on the Right where you see the immutable differences between American and European politics. In Europe, the man of the Right can embrace ancient social structures like pre-Christian paganism and tribalism. He can embrace the aristocratic age of the high Middle Ages. These are not pasts that an American can conjure as they do not exist in the American past. The one shared alternative is the period of the interwar years but that brings unique problems.

For Americans, the most popular past is the Founding. Throughout the 20th century, right-wing Americans have said some version of, “If we just return to our founding principles everything will be fine.” Even at this late date there is an effort to conjure the 18th century colonial experience into the present. Implementations of this have been a desire to return to the America of the 1950’s or the 1980’s. In both cases, it is a desire to go back before the start of the present troubles.

This difference between Left and Right explains the difference in tangible results over the last century. Left-wing activity can move forward. Time marches on regardless of human desire, so the illusion of progress is easy to maintain. It just requires the destruction of present customs and traditions. The image of a toppled statue provides the left-wing mind with s symbolic step toward the promised land, which in turn provides a motivation to keep moving forward.

The Right has the insurmountable problem of time. There is no way to go back in time to start over. Time only moves forward. This physical reality that provides the Left with hope provides the Right with dread. Every day they move further from their desired spot in the past, suggesting it will never be attained. This despair results in a stubborn defense of the present, not because of its superiority to the proposed future, but for its vantage point into the desired past.

The reason modern conservatism is stuck in 1985 is because that was the last good viewing point for 1955. Of course, that was the last good viewing point for 1925 and so on into the founding period. Similarly, for many on the European Right, the interwar years were the last high ground to see the fading aristocratic order. For the Right, history is a series of signal fires leading back to a romanticized ideal order where Western man could fully express his nature.

While the Left has the advantage of time, they are increasingly haunted by the fact they are running out of it. The old Marxist framing said that once economic relations were solved, political relations would be solved. That proved to be both impossible and incorrect, so they moved up to the institutions. Once they controlled those, they would guide society into the future. That led to the seizing of the culture. By controlling the means of cultural production, they can build the desired future.

Of course, the reality of the human condition is once again unravelling these plans for the great temporal leap. The only thing that remains is something like a rapture in which the political elect is taken off this fallen world into the promised land, leaving the rest of humanity behind. One reason the Left sounds increasingly like a UFO cult is they are sure the end times are approaching. They cannot articulate it, by they sense the hour is short and the great finale will happen any minute.

The Right is not prepared to make the leap into the abys but they are also haunted by the prospect of time. In their case, it is the reality that is too late to defend the present from the ravages of the Left. There is nothing left to defend. The last bridges to the past have been severed. Like survivors on a lifeboat, the Right is terrified by the prospect of floating along for eternity in a sea of nothingness. For the Right, hell is the eternal present, cut off from the past.

Perhaps this signals the final denouement of the cycle that began with the French Revolution and ushered in ideological politics. The dream of the glorious future will die with the dreams of a return to the glorious past. Politics will lose its sacredness and return to being the struggle over practical things. The sacred and the profane will return to the sphere outside of earthly demands. The sacred will produce moral men to debate the practical, rather than practical men to debate morality.

On the other hand, maybe the West is simply out of time. The long cycle that began in the high Middle Ages has run its course. The people will remain but what defines them, that old Western tradition, including its messianic claims, will fade away, slowly replaced by something not yet born. The West is now a death row inmate waiting execution, terrified of both the future and the past. The former for obvious reasons and the past because it is what brought him to this point.

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