Asabiyyah

Posted on June 2, 2025 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about the death of college athletics, a post about building a workbench, and the Sunday podcast. On the Substack side of the green door, there are now weekly videos. Subscribe here or here.

If you were to imagine the ideal human community, you would probably assume “ideal” meant peaceful and cooperative. There may be people who think the ideal society is one that it is something like a prison exercise yard, but most people think of the idyllic society as one in perfect harmony. Everyone cooperates with one another in order to overcome the natural challenges that come with human society. Disagreements are worked out through the free exchange of ideas and compromise.

Everyone understands that even on a small scale, such a thing is not possible, but it has always been a useful metric. We often measure society against this standard of what we conceive of as the ideal society. It is why every year there are studies posted listing the happiest countries or the least corrupt countries. These are ways to see how the country stacks up against that ideal. Happy people have less crime and corruption than people in quarrelsome, uncooperative societies.

This is not a Christian concept as many assume. People have noticed since the ancient times that societal health correlates with cooperation. Aristotle talked about the concept of philía, which roughly means friendship or affection. It is the glue that holds a people together, which is a requirement of the polis. It is the natural desire to cooperate with others, not just from personal interest, but for the sake of the polis. The “politics” of a society, therefore, arise from friendship and affection.

The 14th-century Arab historian and sociologist Ibn Khaldun wrote about this thing he called asabiyyah, which is something like social cohesion or group solidarity. It is the natural desire to cooperate that arises from family and the tribe, which allows for the construction of increasingly complex social structures. The more asabiyyah a society possesses, the more it is able to accomplish. This, Khaldun noted, is also why complex societies inevitably collapse.

The thing that makes it possible for one people to dominate other people is that which eventually erodes their social cohesion. It is social cohesion that facilitates cooperation, which increases the prosperity of the society. That prosperity then brings expansion and the incorporation of new people, who begin to drain that social cohesion. The cost of acquiring new people is the loss of social cohesion. This then raises the cost of governing the society, which further erodes asabiyyah.

There are many famous theories as to why human societies rise and fall, but all must contend with this central truth of human society. It can only exist when people are able to trust and cooperate with those outside their kin group. The greater the distance from that kin group, the more it costs to maintain cooperation. The reason empires always fall is they end up including people so distant from one another that they are unable to form any sort of cooperative relationship.

Look around the West and you see two things. One is the cost of the state is spiraling upward as it becomes increasingly incompetent. An unsaid truth of many American cities is they lack a genuine police force. The police are just a state sponsored gang that keeps the less organized gangs in check in order to maintain some safe areas for the elite and the tourist areas. Parts of cities like Baltimore can no longer be included in the concept of “civilized society.”

European cities are struggling with the same issue, but for different reasons. Instead of an unassimilable population from an old economic model, they imported millions of people who are genetically distant from the native population. Many of these people are hostile to other people imported into Europe. This alone has eroded social cohesion, but the efforts to maintain order are also eroding social trust. Every man jailed for speech crimes is a loss of European asabiyyah.

This may explain the sudden lurch in elite opinion in the United States away from unlimited immigration to what may be open hostility to it. Every day the window on the issue seems to move from the long-held position of open borders to what is now called remigration, the return of migrants to their homelands. The State Department has announced it is opening an office of remigration to facilitate this. A year ago, uttering the word “remigration” in many places could get you jailed.

This change is elite driven, which is what matters. Instead of an elite responding to public opinion, it is the elite now trying to drive public opinion. When the CEO of JPMorgan Chase speaks dismissively about immigration, as he recently did on the left-wing cable channel CNBC, something big is happening in the clouds. Conventional wisdom among the elite on immigration has swung to the opposite side. There is a reason for it, and it is not a sense of shame.

This gets back to those old concepts about what makes society possible and how best to measure the prosperity of a society. Decades of mismanagement due to the needs of the American empire have drained the West of its asabiyyah. As a result, the cost of maintaining order in the West is reaching a danger zone. All one has to do is look at the budgets of Western governments and then look at the condition of society. In many places, no government at all would be an improvement.

Therefore, it should not be surprising that it is the money men who are the first to sense something is seriously wrong in the West. They may not understand the cultural issues, but they see the gap between the cost and the results. The world’s richest man was not tasked with finding trillions in waste by accident. With $19 Trillion in debt rolling over in the next year, the money men are right to be worried that they have drained the last drops of asabiyyah from the Western world.

While it is tempting to see this sudden realization as a positive, Ibn Khaldun was not optimistic about a society’s ability to rebuild its asabiyyah. This is a theme with all writers who examined societal decline. Once a society hits that inflection point, it no longer has the capacity to reform itself. Social cohesion is not something that can be rebuilt, not even through shared struggle, as it is something that naturally occurs. Once it is drained it is gone and the society it produced is gone with it.

Perhaps this is a necessity as the West finally escapes the age of ideology. The decline of the West will open the ground for new social cohesion to form organically among the European populations that remain in Western lands. The new, post-ideological societies, growing up in majority-minority lands, will place social cohesion and asabiyyah at the top of their social hierarchy. The new asabiyyah will grow out of the wreckage of the ideological society.

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The Odd Squad

Posted on May 29, 2025 by thezman

Note: This is the five year anniversary of the death of George Floyd, peace be upon him, so I will be part of a Twitter space discussing the life and legacy of one of our nation’s greatest heroes. You can listen here.

The general assessment of Trump 2.0 so far, by those inclined to support him, is that his domestic operation is doing great, but his foreign policy operations is a work in progress, to be generous. It is still early, and the primary focus should be on domestic policy, but foreign policy is not unimportant. Thirty years of horrific domestic policy has often been justified on foreign policy grounds, so they are not entirely divorced from one another.

The reason the Trump foreign policy operation is struggling can be understood by looking at the team assigned to implement his policy. The top foreign policy job was given to Marco Rubio, a guy with zero experience in this area, other than sitting on Senate committees. A pawn of the Israel lobby, he also sided with the neocons for his entire career in the Senate. During the transition, this nomination was counted as the worst of Trump’s cabinet picks.

Rubio seems to have had some sort of epiphany when it comes to politics that went unnoticed as he no longer sounds like a neocon. In fact, he sounds like a critic who has been reading dissident websites. His commentary on South Africa, for example, is the sort of stuff that used to get your bank account closed. Even so, Rubio is without experience, so he is learning on the job, a job that traditionally sets the tone for the administration’s foreign policy approach.

Things get more unconventional with the national security team. Mike Waltz was the National Security Advisor until it was revealed that he was playing footsy with far-left radicals in the media. Then there are Michael Anton and Sebastian Gorka as Deputy National Security Advisors. Both are best described as media personalities with close ties to the neocons. Eli Lake loves Anton and Lake is firmly in the paranoid anti-Russia social network of neocon media activists.

Then you have Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence and Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense, two people with no experience in their areas of responsibility and zero experience running big, complicated organizations. Gabbard’s claim to fame is breaking with Washington on Syria and her party on social issues. Hegseth was a popular Fox News star with unconventional opinions on the military. These are Trump’s most out of left field foreign policy picks.

The two defining features of Trump’s foreign policy team is a general lack of experience on foreign policy issues, and they have earned the trust of Donald Trump. That last part gets attacked by the media, but it is important if you are looking to redefine and revitalize the foreign policy community. Trump needs spear catchers who will do what must be done to implement policy. What sunk Trump’s first term were all the people thinking they could use Trump to boost their career.

The main problem is the experience. This is not always a bad thing as fresh eyes are certainly needed in all of these areas. Old hands would never think to ask why things are done the way they are done, especially in how information is selected and filtered before it is presented to the President. The intelligence people in Trump’s first term gave him the mushroom treatment. Most of the time, he was left with choices he did not want but was forced to pick from them.

The real issue here is these people are not just tasked with implementing Trump’s vision of a new foreign policy, but they have to figure out what that is and then figure out if they agree with it. It is not all that clear if Trump’s vision is merely dovish within the context of the standard Wilsonian model that has dominated America since Wilson or if it is a rejection of that framework entirely, in favor of the 19th century conservative approach embodied by the famous quote from John Quincy Adams.

Added to this is the fact that it is not all that clear if most of the people have thought much about this until this point. Seb Gorka is mostly known for being rude to people on Twitter and being a guest on conservative chat shows. Michael Anton is best known for one essay in 2016 and his love of fashion. Tulsi Gababrd is the only member of the team that has offered original thoughts on foreign policy. For the most part, Trump’s team is a blank slate when it comes to foreign policy.

This may be a good thing, as at least he has a team that is open to questioning the status quo, even if they have not formulated an alternative. The foreign policy community is stuffed to the gills with people who have been carefully vetted by the Israel lobby and the neocons. Trump had little choice but to reach outside of that world for people he could trust and who would try to think for themselves. The result is an odd squad of neophytes and eccentrics.

It remains to be seen if this works but it explains why foreign policy is so uneven at the start of this term. It also explains why Trump has been so reliant on Steven Witkoff, as his personal emissary. He may be the one guy who understands what Trump is thinking with regards to foreign policy. There again, we see a man with zero experience in foreign affairs, outside of business dealings. Like everyone else in the Trump foreign policy team, he is learning on the job.

This may explain why the Russians are willing to talk to the Trump people. They see the effort to break from old patterns. It may also be why the Iranians have agreed to talks with Trump people, despite Trump breaking their deal in the first term. People who spend a lot of time studying American politics sense an opportunity to break from the past with regards to dealing with the Americans. It also explains why the Russians are so patient with the Trump team.

Again, it is too soon to know how this ends. It is an odd collection of people held together by a desire to head in a new direction, even if they have no clue as to which direction they will be heading. Perhaps for now a desire to break from the past is enough to get the ball rolling. If they managed to avoid being outflanked by the Europeans and subverted by the Washington establishment, they might finally create a plausible alternative to Wilsonian democracy.

Keepin’ It Real

Posted on May 28, 2025 by thezman

Note: Tonight Paul and I will be taking a victory lap on the Covid topic, so use the time to think about how you will congratulate us on being right about everything. You can tune in on Twitter, YouTube or Rumble.

The first four months of the Trump restoration have exceeded everyone’s expectations for no other reason than it has shifted the conversation. The bad guys are still battling everything in the courts and Congress, but unlike the first time, Trump seems to have a plan, and he has been aggressive in executing it. As a result, he has been setting the agenda rather than the bad guys. The one place where he is failing is with Ukraine, where it looks like he has painted himself into a corner.

When Trump came to power, the choices with regards to Ukraine were to either abandon the whole thing and get blamed for tanks in Kiev or continue the Biden policy and get blamed for tanks in Kiev. To his credit he tried to shake things up by talking directly to the Russians and bypassing the snakes in the foreign policy community while doing it, in an effort to reset the board. Clearly, the snakes and the bad guys did not see that coming, so they were unprepared for it.

The problem is that the facts on the ground have not changed, so there is no deal Trump can make with the Russians to end the war. Zelensky will never do any peace deal as that means the end of him. The nationalists in Ukraine will never accept a deal, which is why Zelensky cannot do a deal. The Europeans seem convinced that peace in Ukraine means the withdraw of America from Europe, so they are fighting like hell to keep the war going, even as it harms their positions.

Now it seems clear that the Russians have understood from the start that Trump was never willing to break with the Europeans or take on the crazies in Washington who created the Ukraine mess. They were happy to talk with him, but they knew there was nothing he could offer them, as he was simply unwilling or maybe unable to do what is necessary to get a deal done with them. That means peace comes when Ukraine can no longer fight and the Russians dictate terms.

That is probably why Trump is so angry. He probably understood his dilemma, but for some reason thought he could charm his friend Putin into yielding on some things in order to get a deal done. This was a serious error. Russians have been known for centuries as unyielding negotiators. They never trade what they have for something they already have or are about to have. They always deal from their interests, never personal vanity or out of a need to get along.

The best example of this is the Hitler-Stalin pact. Stalin was a Bolshevik, and he detested the fascists, but Russia was not ready to fight the Nazis, so Stalin did a deal to buy time, even if it meant doing a deal with the hated Nazis. Stalin was also willing to make deals with the capitalists, because it served Russian interests. The point here is even at the peak of their ideological fervor, the Russians still did diplomacy like Russians, which means in the interest of Russia.

For some reason Trump and Witkoff seemed to have thought they could talk the Putin government out of being Russian, but now they are finding out that their charm offensives changed nothing. The position of the Russians has not changed with regards to Ukraine and the West. They want Ukraine as a demilitarized, deradicalized neutral state with no connection to NATO. They will get that at the bargaining table, or they will get that on the battlefield.

Trump also suffers from the fact that the rest of the world no longer trusts Washington, no matter who is in the White House. The thing many Americans struggle with when it comes to foreign policy is that the same people who have been lying to us for decades have been lying to the world. The people who ran the Biden admin were not suddenly honest when it came to diplomacy. The American political class lies about everything to everyone, even themselves.

In a way, Trump and his team are the new management of a company that used to be a dominant player in the market but after years of mismanagement is now in trouble, which is why there is new management. They can go to their customers and promise things will change, but the customers are under no illusions that new faces will solve the problems of the company. In fact, the new promises after years of broken promises just raise more suspicions about the company.

That is probably part of Trump’s frustration. He is being treated by world leaders as a guy who lies all the time, when he is not the guy who did the lying. It is the other side of being an American. There are good things that are associated with being an American, things like confidence and risk taking. The other side of the coin is the bad things, like dishonestly and unreliability. It is why the only thing worse than being the enemy of America is being the friend of America.

Even though there are hints of realism creeping into official foreign policy discussions, we remain a long way from a realistic foreign policy. Trump and his team are still making the mistake of thinking the world looks at America as the good guy, the white hat trying to make the world a safer place for democracy. In reality, the rest of the world views America as either a thumbless clod or a perfidious troublemaker. The Russians lean heavily toward the latter type.

Ironically, Trump finds himself in the inverse position as his hero Ronald Reagan at the end of the Cold War. Regan would say, “Trust but verify” when dealing with the Soviets, on the grounds that the West kept its word. It was assumed that the communists would cheat, just like they did at the Olympics. Now the roles are reversed, and it is the Russians who assume they will keep their end of the deal, but it is the West that will eventually break the deal.

This is the reality of late empire America. The emerging world order where major regional powers work to keep the peace is the result of the lone superpower failing to hold up its end of the bargain. The alien weirdos who gained control of foreign policy traded American respect and credibility so they could seek revenge on their ancient enemy to the east. The result is America has a lot of work to do in order to restore her reputation and that will require a mighty dose of realism.

The Return Of Elites

Posted on May 27, 2025 by thezman

This is the time of year when entertainers, politicians and famous rich people are asked to deliver commencement speeches. Inevitably they deliver tirades against normal people and in favor of the latest trends. This season, the popular chant with this sort is the “rule of law” which is ironic given that the people chanting it spent the last decade obliterating the concept. The question that is rarely asked is why is it that rich people are so eager to support this stuff?

It is not just the ditzy actors who are prone to this. A part of getting rich in America is adopting the politics of the rich, which is hostile to normal things. Rich people, until very recently, were solidly behind open borders. They backed the street violence and chaos of the last decade through donations to the thicket of not-for-profits. The billionaires underwrote the entertainment content that preached the bizarre social theories at the root of their deranged politics.

On the surface, it makes little sense. If you are a rich person, you should not want to undermine order, as it is the rules that make you rich. You got your wealth because of the system, so the system is your friend. Think a little further, however, and you can see why the rich might want to make the rules more opaque. It is a form of pulling up the drawbridge behind them so new schemers cannot get in on the action. They got theirs, so it is time to keep you from getting yours.

In this regard these strange opinions about how we ought to act and how we ought to organize society function as a selection mechanism. The rich use the willingness to adopt these opinions as a test of your willingness to obey. This is very clearly how they select politicians. The more suggestable the person, the more likely they are to find success in politics. No master has ever wanted a slave who thinks outside the box or is willing to question authority.

That said, many of our rich people believe in this stuff. For actors, the answer probably lies in the fact that merit plays a small role in their success. Pretending to be someone else, singing a catchy tune and being funny are not uncommon skills. Restaurants in Los Angeles and New York are full of people capable to being good at those things in movies and television. Taylor Swift does not possess skills uncommon in her trade, but she is a megastar and everyone else sings for their supper.

Randomness plays an enormous role in carny life. Hollywood is full of stories about women who were spotted by a talent scout and turned into a star. Then you have the many actors who landed a role in a film that turned out to be a huge success, despite the studios thinking otherwise. Sally Field hit it big in Smokey and the Bandit, for example, despite the studio not wanting her or the film. Carny life is more about random chance than talent and hard work.

In a world where success and failure are random chance or perhaps decided by hidden forces unseen by the players, it is no surprise that these people are in the sort of paranoid politics that define carny life. It is not a huge jump from thinking shadowy figures behind the scenes determine your fate as an actor to thinking that an invisible army of Hitler fans secretly control society. Their lived experience tells them that the rules are a facade for the real power structure.

Randomness explains carnies and politicians, but what about the oligarchs? Why are so many of them fond of these paranoid politics? The last ten years of woke madness would not have been possible without the support of the oligarchs. In fact, the story of Trump’s return to power cannot be understood without noticing how the nation’s richest men lined up behind him. Most opposed him just five years ago, but then they changed teams and now support his reform efforts.

Here is where we see chance again. Look at the oligarchs and what you rarely see is people with unique talents for anything other than exploiting a bottleneck or monopoly that was often the result of chance. The PayPal mafia, the fifty or so people who founded PayPal, got super rich by exploiting special access to the banking system in order to facilitate online payments. Many went on to exploit new bottlenecks and monopolies to get even richer.

This is not a novelty of this round of oligarch formation. The oligarchs that emerged in the industrial age were similarly fortunate. A common story of that period was one where the guy who got super rich from a new idea was not the guy who came up with the idea, but the guy who bought the idea and then exploited it. The industrial oligarchs were good at gaming the system of the time, much in the same way that the modern oligarch was the product of gaming the system.

One of the truths about capitalism and market economics is that it does not select for virtue or even talent in the conventional sense. It selects for the ability and willingness to find gaps in the rules and the ability to ruthlessly exploit them. The tech barons found a gap in property laws, for example, that allows them to steal your information and then sell it to government and business. Without this loophole, the giant social media platforms collapse overnight.

The result of this system that randomly awards people with opportunity and then lavishly regards those who are willing to ruthlessly exploit the opportunity is an oligarchy composed of sociopathic lottery winners. The weird social politics that defines the attitudes of our elite are both a defense against similar lottery winners lurking below and a justification for their position. They are not just lottery winners, but members of an elect, fated to hold positions in the elite.

It has been noted that the creation of new oligarchs of the industrial era ended in the early 20th century. This came with the rise of managerialism, but also with a narrowing of the economic class. The overclass faded from the scene, retreating into philanthropy and public service roles. From the perspective of the typical American, the gap between the rich and poor narrowed and the middle-class came to dominate. Getting rich came to mean doing slightly better than middle-class.

This current revolt against managerialism led by some of the oligarchs is coming when the fruit of the technological revolution has been harvested. There are no new billionaires being minted from new technology. Similarly, the financial sector that experienced a parallel boom has consolidated as well. The one exception may be AI, but this is why the current oligarchs are desperate to wrestle control of it from the managerial class.

What we may be experiencing is another period of consolidation similar to what happened after the industrial revolution. The weird social politics are no longer useful as a defense of the oligarchy, so they are seeking to reorder the managerial system to lock in their positions and marginalize the sorts of politics that come with the boutique beliefs that define the woke phenomenon. They are tapping into populism as a useful way to pressure their fellow oligarchs into compliance.

The bulk of the 20th century was determined by elites who acted like elites and operated from the shadows. That was peak America, from the perspective of the typical American in this age. There was strong family formation and a strong middle-class that defended moderate morality. A nation full of normal middle-class people happy with the rules is not going to cause any trouble for the elites. Perhaps that is what the current elites are trying to recreate in this age.

This could explain the growing war on credentialism. The managerial class is festooned with people with little practical knowledge but festooned with credentials that they think make them a genius. This is why they think they can tell the rich guys what to do and where to do it. Breaking the spine of the managerial class will necessarily mean breaking their belief system. The sudden anathematization of woke culture is an effort to kill their gods and therefore their sense of authority.

In the end, the thirty or so years of bizarre social politics that have proliferated among the elites may be ending due to the consolidation of the oligarchy. Whatever benefit there was to these luxury beliefs has been consumed. What is left is a rallying point for members of the managerial class who refuse to bend the knee. Restoring normal social order is another step in shoring up the position of the oligarchs by removing any of the remaining threats to their position.

Generations

Posted on May 21, 2025 by thezman

Note: On Tuesday nights, I participate in a Twitter space where we discuss spicier topics than you find in the news. The replay of last nights episode here

Generational politics is one of the cruder forms of politics as it generally reduces to members of one age cohort hurling slurs at other cohorts. Ironically, the origin of this form of politics is the baby boomer generation, who were the first group of Americans to form an identity around their birth cohort. Baby boomers have since been synonymous with the post-war cultural trends and the radical politics that came to dominate the second half of the twentieth century.

These days, of course, “boomer” has become an epithet due to their children using it to describe degenerate or materialistic culture. Boomers are selfish old people who only care about their stock portfolios and their lawns. They are the “greedy geezers” of this age, which is ironic in that the term first gained traction decades ago as the baby boomers started to take over politics. This is another example of how the universe has a sense of a humor and cruel streak.

Of course, thirty years ago when terms like “greedy geezer” were getting tossed around, the culture was undergoing a generational shift. The WW2 Generation was giving way to the baby boomers. Bill Clinton came to be seen as the typical boomer, ushering in a new set of morals and sensibilities to politics. For the last thirty years, baby boomer politics have been American politics. Now they are seen the out of date politics of a quickly fading era.

We are about to experience another generational culture shift as the children of the baby boom generation begin to push their parents over the side. This is why the term “boomer” has become an epithet. The derogatory use of the label is a signal that the user is not into conventional culture and politics. To reject “boomer politics” is to reject the old-fashioned dichotomy of left-versus-right, as is defined by cable news programs, talk radio and the mainstream media.

We are getting a glimpse of this in the Trump administration. Donald Trump is technically not a baby boomer. This must be said because otherwise you get six million messages explaining that the baby boomer generation starts with those born after noon on June 30th, 1946, and Trump was born on June 17, 1946. It is this sort of hairsplitting that makes generation politics so mind-numbingly stupid. It makes the blue pencil crowd seem stable minded by comparison.

That aside, Trump is emblematic of the politics and culture that we generally associate with the baby boomer generation. He is materialistic, hedonistic, and jarringly superficial in his politics. For example, his main interest in ending the Ukraine war is so we can do business deals with the Russians. The history and geopolitical import of what he is doing is never mentioned by him. For Trump, it often seems like that the only thing that matters is the acquisition of stuff.

Contrast this with J.D. Vance, the millennial man in waiting. His story is centered on his cultural journey from the underclass into the managerial class and then as a critic of the managerial system that made him possible. He is the most articulate critic of managerialism to ever hold office in Washington. It remains to be seen if he wins the White House on his own, but he is clearly setup as the heir to Trump. He will take the baton on behalf of his generation from the boomers.

Despite the millennial disdain for baby boomer culture, they are the results of it due to the fact they were raised in the product of it. Things like helicopter parenting and structured play time were boomer creations. Millennials are the first generations raised by people who used the word “parenting”, so it is no surprise that the millennials are the first to use the word “adulting.” They were raised to expect a highly structured and safe environment where everything is clearly labeled.

There is far greater cultural intensity with millennials than prior generations. For the boomers, generational politics was mostly about marketing cultural items like clothing, lifestyle choices, and music. For millennials, culture is tangled up in the structure of life, so they are more keenly aware of themselves as a cohort. They are the first generation to sense that their identity is entirely exogenous. Individually and collectively, they are who they are because of taxonomical reasons.

This shift in generational identity can be seen in how millennials react to generalizations versus how baby boomers react. Make a generalization about baby boomers and you get flooded with boomers telling you that they are not like that. Make a generalization about millennials and they will agree and amplify it. Because conformity has always been a part of millennial cultural awareness, conforming to generational stereotypes does not bother them. It is their normal.

This is another thing with millennials that is different from boomers. They expect the systems they inherited to work as described on the box. The two sides of millennial politics are from those raised on the mother’s milk of post-Marx culturalism and those raised on civic nationalism. The former is perpetually angry that things are not fair, and the latter is determined to make things work as described to them. Vance versus AOC is a duel between competence and anxiety.

That brings up something else about millennial culture. It is focused on the present, but in the context of what was promised. This makes it backward looking. The Vance side is determined to remake things, so they are what he expected, rather than something new that is a break from the past. The AOC side is similarly determined to remake the present to fit the promise, but the promise came from the New Left politics that sunk roots in the culture when her parents were kids.

Generational politics can only take you so far in getting a sense of what lies ahead for the culture and politics. Reality is the great restraint, and the millennials are inheriting an enterprise in decline, while their parents inherited one that was at its peak. This is the heart of the millennial critique of the boomers. They see their parents as living off the profits of the past and they see themselves as tasked with cleaning up the mess after a long generational party.

This is why the millennial age could turn out to be quite conservative. Necessity will mean relegating luxury beliefs to the fringe. No one has time for the hysterical and childish politics of the AOC side when there is work to be done, debts to be paid and institutions to be restructured. Millennial politics could be the domination of the organizational men, who take pride in making the machine operate and have no tolerance for throwing sand in the gears.

The Banality Of Biden

Posted on May 20, 2025 by thezman

Hannah Arendt coined the term “banality of evil” while covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. She noted that Eichmann was not the cartoonish villain one expected, given the accusations against him. Instead, he appeared to be a normal man who performed the tasks assigned to him, without having any ideological or emotional attachment to them. This led Arendt to argue that evil could be the result of the work of ordinary people who were not inherently malicious.

Her formulation turned out to be useful to generations of evil people who used this framework to accuse ordinary Americans of being evil, for the crime of living their lives as white people. That was probably why the line became so popular, but that does not strip it of its truth value. Human systems are capable of turning the ordinary acts of the people in the system toward evil ends, even though the people themselves may not be evil in the ordinary way we think of it.

This is the subtext to the broad indictment of managerialism. The fascists, understood through the lens of managerialism, created a ruthless machine, animated by ideology, that dehumanized their society. The Soviets were close behind in creating a communist machine that forced everyone into the moral framework of the ideology. Those who could not fit into the ideology were destroyed. This is what made fascism and communism evil. They mechanized and normalized brutality.

Of course, that view of fascism and communism was from the perspective of people on the cusp of post-liberalism. The paleocons, sensing that America was succumbing to the same managerial forces as Europe, were warning about what lies ahead for managerialism as an organizing political order. They were wrong in their analysis, as America ceased to be a liberal society in the 19th century. Progressivism, the unique American ideology, was filling the void in the 20th century.

This turned out to be the great innovation of progressivism. It appropriated the language and forms of liberalism in order to present itself as the antithesis of ideology. It was the broad conclusion of reason. Progressivism, repackaged as liberalism in the Cold War, was not about how the world ought to be, but about how the world would be if only people allowed it to be so. Man, liberated from superstition and ignorance, would naturally settle into liberal democracy.

The result, however, was what the paleos predicted. The managerial revolution that began in the first quarter of the 20th century got going for the same reason it got going in communist and fascist societies. Ideology is not enough. It needs a practical application that takes the moral claims and turns them into an ethical system administered by a priestly class. The role of the priest in a Christian society is filled by the manager in an ideological society.

It is why America is awash of moralizing. Every politician eventually turns himself in an Old Testament prophet, warning that we must comply with the tides of history or face certain destruction. Every product is sold as a sacrament. Buy this widget in order to tell the world you are a righteous man. Middle managers in corporations are sent off to leadership class, so they can properly evangelize to their cubicle jockeys. The most trivial things are attached to great moral crusades.

This brings us back to Arendt’s observations about Eichmann. The crimes against civilized life we have observed over the last years were done by people, who like Eichmann, did not present themselves as evil. They could not imagine themselves as evil because they were on the right side of history. The proof of that is everyone they know is on the same side and everyone they know is a good person striving to make the world a better place.

It is this system of thought that made Joe Biden president. He was the smiling face of a machine that rewarded affable, useful dullards, as long as they served the needs of the system, which was the endless hunt for enemies of the system. The peak of the woke terror produced President Joe Biden, the guy who was supposed to normalize the terror by making ordinary people accept it as normal. How can “Working Class Joe” be a bad guy when he is always telling jokes and smiling?

It is why it is right to think about Joe Biden as the Eichmann of woke. Just as Eichmann and many men like him were the banal face of the underlying evil of the system, Joe Biden was the avuncular, jovial face of the American managerial system. He is not unique, but typical, the good example of the type that has come to dominate the political class, which is the fig leaf for the managerial class. The smiling, backslapping pol is what stands between the citizen and the machine.

Stripped of the charming rogues and pitchmen, the evil of the machinery is made plain and therefore easy to resist. That is the part of Arendt’s observations about Eichmann that applies to us now. Even if neither man can be accused of evil on the individual basis, their talents were put to use by an evil system. Even if one can show that their intent was not evil, it does not matter. They helped normalize evil and that is arguably worse than the evil itself.

It is tempting to think this is an inappropriate comparison, given the death sentence that has been handed to Biden. In 1961, however, when Eichmann was given his death sentence, the system which he served was long gone and the damage it wrought was gone with it. Joe Biden is still causing damage. His cancer diagnosis is now removing the last bits of trust in the system. The life of Joe Biden and now his looming death, has been in service to the destruction of social trust.

It was hard to hate men like Eichmann, even after their actions had been universally condemned, because they were not obviously evil men. That was always the point of Joe Biden and why the managerial class loved him. He was a simpleton and braggard, but he would ruthlessly execute his instructions and do so in a way that was hard for the people to hate. He normalized evil by making it feel like the way things were done and had to be done. Joe Biden is the banality of evil.

Happy Campers

Posted on May 19, 2025 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about the classic film, The Maltese Falcon, a post about my trip to the Old Glory Club, and no Sunday podcast. I got back too late on Sunday to do a show, but I will post something extra this week about the conference or maybe a second video. On the Substack side of the green door, there are now weekly videos. Subscribe here or here.

One of the realities of the late managerial age is that the sorts of numbers managers love and therefore produce in volume, are increasingly unreliable and often manufactured to fit an agenda. Good data is usually too late to be actionable or is simply the accurate version of the previously reported fake data. Economic data is the most obvious example of this trend. It used to be central to the news cycle but has now become so corrupt the media will ignore it.

In the Biden years, much like the Obama years, it became popular with the reporting agencies to produce fake economic numbers and then come back at a later date to “revise” the previous data so they could pretend they were being accurate. It was always a cycle where new data contained information about how the previous data was revised in a way negative to the administration, but often made the new data look like the administration was doing a great job.

Peak managerial mendacity was Covid. The CDC stopped reporting deaths as a real-time number so they could report fictionalized accounts of bodies in the streets, always somewhere not where you live, which explained why you did not see the bodies in the streets, but they were somewhere! Old metrics that relied on hard data, like dead people showing up in morgues, were massaged to the point where you could no longer get the number of actual dead people.

We are getting a version of this now that Trump is back. His tariff plan has kicked off a new genre of managerial horror stories. These come in the form of economic reports that, like the bodies in the streets phenomenon, always focus on a part of the country where you do not live. Somewhere there are empty Walmart shelves due to the trade war with China. There are people you do not know who are shocked by the rise in prices, even though your prices have declined.

The cycle for management is always the same. First, they produce reliable numbers from trusted sources to measure their performance. Then they create models from those numbers to justify their continued employment. This is when they begin to reimagine how the old data is collected and before long, we have theories about how best to manage information, which always underscores the need for management to keep a tight control on the narratives.

Bankruptcy usually follows that last phase, or at least an economic crisis great enough to warrant restructuring. That is because reality is indifferent to the model makers and will eventually break every model. We are living through a version of this process in the twilight of managerialism. Since the Obama, years the choice has been between your lying eyes and the model of reality presented by management. Enough people picked the former and we are now undergoing a change in management.

For example, during the Biden years we were told that the economy was going great and those grumbling about egg prices were ingrates. Now that Trump is in power, the media say we are in a depression. Go on the roads right now and you will be confronted with miles of RV’s and campers. This week, which leads to Memorial Day weekend, the nation’s highways will be full of the things. So much so that massive traffic jams will be a feature of the weekend.

Why does this matter? RV’s and campers have long been a useful metric for the economy and the public perception of the economy. The more people hitting the roads for campgrounds and parks, the better the economy. In 2023, the industry went into a deep recession to the point where many companies shut down production. Then it started to slowly bounce back in 2024. Now it is undergoing a boom with the highways now flooded with happy campers.

This used to be a metric discussed in public, but like so many of these things, it fell out of favor in the Obama years. Management and its marketing department, what we call the media, decided that the customers really did not know best, so they scrapped those numbers in favor of metrics that flattered management. The reason they are in the jam that they currently find themselves is they started to believe their models of reality instead of facing reality. Now there is a hostile takeover underway.

A cruder and more hilarious version of this process is the recent reporting of Joe Biden’s health and fitness. The data in this case was our eyes. Everyone not blinded by their own models of reality saw a frail, doddering old man. Management’s model, however, showed that he was a model of fitness and virility. Now that model is being revised to show he was actually suffering from dementia and has aggressive cancer. The new model is now converging with reality.

The Biden story is a version of the basis trade, which pits models of a point in the future and the models are continuously updated until the point is reached. It is a way for the model makers to think they can control the future, so it makes sense that the people running America Inc. would think in these terms. They just forgot about the part that says in the end, reality always wins. That is what you see on the road. America is happy with the state of things, so they are going camping.

Under New Management

Posted on May 14, 2025 by thezman

President Trump has wrapped up his trip to Saudi Arabia and the Western media is trying hard to ignore it. The main reason is they hate Trump, of course, but a secondary reason is they do not understand the importance of the trip. To them, it just looks like another foreign trip by a president. In reality it is a glimpse of how the large share owners of America Inc. are restructuring the company. The deals signed in Saudi Arabia are the first step in that restructuring.

For fifty years, the United States and Saudi Arabia had an agreement primarily centered around oil trade and the use of the U.S. dollar. The formal part of the agreement committed the Saudis to investing their profits from energy into U.S. Treasuries in exchange for American military commitments. The result was the Saudis priced everything in dollars, which led all other OPEC members to work in dollars, thus establishing the petrodollar concept.

The reason the dollar is the world’s reserve currency is it is backed with energy, the one thing everyone needs. The gold bugs like to say the dollar is “fiat currency” and is just colorful bits of paper, but that was always false. The dollar, like all real money, represents power. From the 1970’s to the present, the dollar represented the power of the United States and the power of hydrocarbons. Instead of money backed by shiny bits of metal, the dollar was backed by energy.

Another consequence of this arrangement is it provided an unlimited demand for dollar-denominated debt, especially treasuries. Because that debt is created within the American banking system, it made the United States the global bank. In effect, the petrodollar arrangement made the United States the world mint and the world’s banker, with the oil producing countries as the miners. With only one mint, it meant that the United States also controlled the mines.

This system has been under great pressure of late for a few reasons. One is the abuse of the system by the neocons in their foreign policy schemes. No one cared that much about using the financial system against small, nuisance countries like North Korea, but when the system was turned against big countries like Russia, one of the important mints, then people did care. The rise of BRICS as an off-dollar trading system was a response to the abuse of the system.

Another reason for the faltering dollar scheme is the Saudis decided to let the fifty-year-old agreement lapse. One reason for this is the abuse of the system by the neocons during the Biden years. The neocons were deliberately trying to destabilize the region in their war against Russia. This is not what the Saudis want. The other reason is the world is changing, and the Saudis need to adapt. They cannot continue to be a gas station in the desert. They need to diversify.

The biggest reason for the pressure on the petrodollar system is it hollowed out the American economy. It is not just the decline in manufacturing, which gets most of the attention, but also the decline in the nation’s infrastructure. This is becoming acute as the demand for electricity climbs. Artificial Intelligence may be oversold, but it is a real thing that will spike demand for electricity. Without trillions in new investments, the United States will not keep up with the world.

That last bit is the what the Saudi deal addresses. The Saudis are not going to plow their profits into treasuries, but into direct investments in the United States, while the United States provides support for Saudi Defense and infrastructure. This means the Saudis will be investing in American companies that are doing work inside the United States to build factories and infrastructure. The Saudis are not just a mint serving the American bank, but an investor in America Inc.

That is another thing easily missed about this trip. In the past, presidents went to Saudi Arabia to talk about military cooperation and the local politics. Business was delegated to Treasury and Commerce. The Treasury Secretary might make a trip to the region and meet his counterparts to discuss money. When a president visited these countries, money was not on the agenda. It was politics and the military situation in the places where America had stationed soldiers.

Notice on this trip that Scott Bessent was on the trip. Notice also that Bessent turns up in all of these foreign policy events. He led the charge on the so-called mineral deal with the Ukrainians. For the first time in a long time the bankers are now part of the foreign policy discussion. In fact, Bessent is involved in everything. He is part of the effort to root out some of the massive waste in government. What we are seeing is the return of political – economy to America Inc.

For several decades, at least, the managerial class has separated economics from politics, leaving the latter to the elected officials. Economics was too important to let the politicians get involved, so it was handled by experts. The result has been the perversion of economic policy. Instead of economic policy that benefits the people of the nation, we got policy that satisfied the theorists and the tiny minority that was able to arbitrage their access to the experts.

What this trip to Saudi Arabis represents is the return of political-economy where political decisions, including foreign policy, is measured against the standard of the national interests. Trump made that clear in his speech. He declared that foreign policy would no longer be about nation wrecking but about making deals that benefit the American people. Much as economics is being dragged from the abstract to the practical, foreign policy is being brought back to reality.

This trip also symbolizes the return of American Inc. The United States has never been a country in the traditional sense. It was always a business, something like a conglomerate containing many regional companies. The post-Cold War years were a monopoly phase, where managers stopped worrying about profits and focused on pet projects and social schemes. That time is done, and the company needs to be radically reformed to become competitive again.

Like all corporate restructurings, this one will fall far short of the dreams of the reformers, but whatever the result, it must be better than the alternative because the alternative is bankruptcy. In the case of empires, bankruptcy usually ends with the shareholders swinging from trees. The oligarchs of American seem to get this, which is why they are backing Trump and his turnaround team. Time will tell if American Inc. re-emerges as a strong company or a failed experiment.

The Slaves Of The South

Posted on May 12, 2025 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about progressive echo chambers, a post about old televisions and old ways to watch them, and the Sunday podcast. On the Substack side of the paywall side, there are now weekly videos, which are getting better, for those who like video. Subscribe here or here.

A topic that comes up regularly is why the Southern states produced so many terrible Republican politicians. Many of the most perfidious elected officials in Washington come from states that are solidly Republican. The most obvious is South Carolina, which seems to have a political class as corrupt as Massachusetts. Lindsey Graham might be the slimiest politician in America. Now Thom Tillis of North Carolina is making a run at Graham’s crown.

The voters in the South are some of the most conservative in the country, but they elect most of the unreliable pols in the GOP. If elections worked as people insist, a guy like Graham would not exist. Instead, the state’s senators would reflect the majority of the state’s voters, which are very conservative. The South Carolina delegation would be the fire-eaters of the Republican Party. Alabama and Mississippi would be working hard to set the edge in Republican edginess.

Last week, Thom Tillis finked on the President by pulling his support for Ed Martin, Trump’s nominee for U.S. Attorney in DC. Maybe Tillis took a bribe, which happens so often in Washington now that it is the new normal. More likely, he simply agrees with his friends in the Democratic Party. He agreed to be the Republican who finked on the base this time, taking one for the team so to speak. Next time, another Southern Senator will suddenly decide his principles require him to be a fink.

In states dominated by the left-wing crazies, the pols tend to be even more fanatical than the typical voter in the state. Oregon politicians, for example, are reliable spear catchers for the far-left. One of their Representatives is now living in El Salvador to protest Trump’s deportation of MS-13 gang members. Ocasio-Cortez is now calling for violence against federal immigration officials. In progressive states, the elected officials are always to the left of their voters.

In so-called conservative states and districts, the opposite is true. The defining feature of Republican pols from the most conservative states is their willingness to bend their knee to the people they claim to oppose. They live in fear of being called one of the scary words the crazies use to control their conservative pets. Thom Tillis would urinate himself in public if he were ever called a mean word, so he makes sure to be ahead of all of these things, which means surrendering on every issue.

The main reason for this is the local elites in the South live in shame of their heritage and of the white people they represent. Like booshie people everywhere, they want nothing more than to be invited to the cool kid’s table. Since Gettysburg, the cool kid’s table has been where the progressives sit. The winners get to define what is and what is not cool and that remains true to this day. The United States is a Yankee imperium, and the South is a conquered land.

It is a good example of how control of the centers of cultural production can alter the behavior of the people. The managerial elite is not going to gaslight people into thinking a man in a dress is normal or trick people into embracing black sociopathy, but they can set the cultural tone for the elites. If you want to be popular in the centers of power, Washington, New York, Los Angeles, or Silcom Valley, you better conform to the cultural norms of the trend setters who control those power centers.

It is why Patrick Buchanan once quipped that when Southerners send one of their own to Washington, he quickly goes native. He goes from being his district’s representative to Washington to being Washington’s representative to his district. If you look around at the biggest finks of the Republican Party, they fit that role perfectly. Lindsey Graham hates the people he represents. They are not his people. It is his burden that he was born in such a backward state as South Carolina.

The question is why the voters tolerate it. People like to blame the voters, but when your choice is Graham and a guy with a bone in his nose, you cannot be blamed for voting for Graham. That is the other side of this master – slave relationship. For his loyal service to his friends in Washington, they make sure he never has a serious primary challenger or a serious general election opponent. The loyal colonial official, like Graham, gets the protection of his lord.

It is not just the machinations of the parties that account for this. There are enough white people in the South who are ashamed of themselves to make forming a majority of the proud impossible. The same cultural pressures that make a Thom Tillis ashamed his people work on the locals. Fashionable people in the provinces always ape the ways of those in the big city. Many booshie South Carolinians are as revolted by Southern culture as the typical Manhattanite.

William Faulkner described a South undergoing a transition, where the old elite with roots in the antebellum South, the Compsons, was giving way to a new class, the rapacious, vermin-like Snopes clan. The old elite had a natural superiority about them, but they were ill-suited for the new South. The new elite, on the other hand, was without virtue, so perfectly suited for the new age. They were willing to say anything and sell anything to get an advantage.

Faulkner’s description of the Snopes clan is exactly what you would expect from the ruling elite of a conquered people. They exist not as a genuine elite but as way to prevent the formulation of a genuine elite. The conqueror always wants the conquered to remain conquered and the most efficient way to do that is to make sure their leaders are loyal to the conquerors. Just as the house slaves keep the field slaves from revolting, Southern elites keep the South pacified.

In a democracy, this process is subtle and natural. No one in Washington worries about a revolt against the Yankee imperium. They only have to make sure that the politicians in the provinces are their sort of people. The same sorts of selection pressures that exist in the high school cafeteria exist in official Washington. The social pressures are all one way and as a result, the compliant representing Southern states have long careers, while the difficult drop out of politics.

It is why remedying this at the ballot box is impossible. Efforts to depose Lindsey Graham always fail, because he is the product of a system that is designed to not just defend his kind but produce them from the raw material of popular resistance that might get lucky and beat him in a primary. A populist who beats Graham will go to Washington, and before long he will go native. He will sound just like the other house slaves who serve their masters in the Yankee imperium.

Time Will Tell

Posted on May 7, 2025 by thezman

Western countries largely came into being after the Second World War in that their political and economic systems were formed up after the war. There was the aftermath of the war and the Cold War that shaped the political economy of the West. We still talk about “The West” in the 20th century sense of it, despite the fact that the Cold War is long over and many formerly communist countries are in the EU. The West is as much about political psychology as geography.

A part of that political psychology was a Marxist sense that the moral questions had been resolved, at least with regards to politics and economics. Social democracy was rebranded as liberal democracy in Europe and in the United States it was rebranded as democratic capitalism or free market capitalism. The mainstream political parties accepted the consensus on politics and economics but offered small alterations to it to distinguish themselves from the other parties.

In the United States, this meant that the two parties agreed on all the major items like dealing with the Russians but had different approaches to the same goal. In Europe, the main parties decorated themselves with things like environmentalism, socialism, and some cultural items, but they agreed on the most important items which were relations with the United States and anti-nationalism. The former was in response to communism and the latter was in response to fascism.

This is a highly simplified model of post-war reality, but useful in understanding the psychology of voters and the political class. The consensus and faith in it are what shaped politics until the current crisis. Politicians did not have to worry about policies or ideology, as the ideology was settled, so they just had to select from platforms that had been approved within the consensus. The voters showed their displeasure by voting against the incumbent or their satisfaction by voting for him.

Even in the multi-party system of Europe, voting was a binary thing. If the economy was good, then the parties that were associated with the status quo did well, but if the economy was bad, then those parties were punished. In the United States, you had the added aspect of party fatigue. Even in good times, a party that had been in power for too long would lose an election because the voters wanted a new look. Bill Clinton won in 1992 mostly due to this reason.

This worked fine if the public was satisfied with the consensus and no one was permitted to question the consensus. The fear of nuclear war solved the first part during the Cold War and credit money handled it after the Cold War. While there is always discontent, no matter how good things feel, it was never enough to cause any serious doubt about the status quo. The populist rumblings since the Cold War were marginalized by the media and political class.

That is where the second part of the model is important. The political classes in the West became increasing narrow after the Cold War. The seriousness of the situation in the Cold War required serious debate about the issues of the day, so the debate was open to a broader range of ideas. After the Cold War, triumphalism and the economic boom narrowed the range of tolerated opinion. The uniparty concept we see everywhere in the West is a product of this.

This is how the West has reached the current crisis. As the public has grown unsettled about public policy and the fruits of it, they find themselves with no reasonable options at the ballot box. The mainstream parties all hold the same views. This is especially obvious in Europe where parties that are allegedly polar opposites form governments, often as a way to exclude popular outsider parties. Germany and France now have governments without popular support as a result.

The root cause of the crisis in the West is that old Marxist line about once morality is settled, there is no need for politics. The Western consensus was a moral consensus, which means the politics within the consensus were performative. Since the end of the Second World War, the West did not have much in the way of politics, because everyone agreed on the important moral questions. After the Cold War, the moral consensus narrowed, and dissent was exiled.

The current crisis is due to elite moral consensus narrowing to a set of beliefs at odds with the sensibilities of the public. The moral consensus has collapsed with regards to the elites and the public. What the Cloud People believe is not only different from the beliefs of the people over whom they rule, the Dirt People, but it is hostile to the interests of the Dirt People. It is how the shuffling zombie that is the UK Prime Minister can boast about favoring aliens of British subjects.

It is why there is no solution within the democratic process. That process evolved to give the Dirt People choices approved by the Cloud People. There will never be an option to get rid of the Cloud People on the ballot. The point of the democratic process is to confirm to the Cloud People that they are the Cloud People. We see this with Trump, who is like a giant set upon by a massive swarm of bees. The democratic system will defend its master at any cost.

Proof that the universe has a sense of humor is the fact that the West has reached this crisis because the defenders of democracy are daring the people to do what is necessary for the will of the people to be respected by the state. The smug, soyish faces of the male politicians and the schoolmarmish demeaner of the females, reeks of contempt for the voters. They see the people as weak and contemptible for not doing what they should, in response to the elites.

Time will tell if this holds. The election results increasingly show that the public in the West do not like their options. As they search for alternatives, the system seeks to eliminate those options. Maybe the people will run out of excuses and rise up to do what they should have done long ago. Maybe Trump succeeds enough to destabilize the system to the point where it falters and is replaced. Maybe we just keep voting ourselves into civilizational collapse. Time will tell.

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