The Iron Law of Conservatism

The British journalist, and sometime National Review editor, John O’Sullivan stated that any organization or enterprise that is not expressly right wing will become left wing over time. This observation is conveniently named O’Sullivan’s Law and is based on the observation that non-liberals will hire liberals into their organization, while liberals apply ideological tests. The result is liberals eventually take over non-liberal organizations while ruthlessly defending their own turf.

What O’Sullivan was observing is the natural tendency toward entryism among members of mass movements. It is the corollary to proselytizing. The true believer seeks validation so they are always trying to recruit members to their cause. It’s why Mormons knock on doors offering to show you their magic underwear. This also manifests itself in the inclination toward undermining organizations seen as a challenge, often by infiltrating and co-opting them. When an institution flips to their ideological camp, it is seen as validation.

The irony here is that O’Sullivan and other Buckley Conservatives confused their temporary, ad hoc response to communism, with Anglo-Saxon conservatism. The former existed in the temporary space of the Cold War, while the latter is the baseline of Western Civilization. It’s why Buckley Conservatism is now just Progressivism with a blood lust for Arabs. Once the Cold War ended, their reason to exist ended with it. It turns out that Buckley Conservatism was not expressly right wing after all.

That raises the question of what it means to be expressly right wing and introduces this video from Alt-Lite provocateur, Gavin McInnes. The summary, for those uninterested in watching it, is McInnes putting up a board displaying the various figured on the Alt-Right and Alt-Lite. He has a line dividing the two camps. On one side are those who are Western chauvinist, rallying around a group of ideas. They are “inclusive” of anyone that embraces Western civilization and they are not hung up on race or heritage.

The other side mostly agrees with that, but adds in the fact that those ideas were invented by white people and that matters. The West is the result of white people so to preserve Western Civilization you have to preserve white people. There’s also the “JQ” issue, according to McInnes, where the Alt-Right places Jews outside the white camp and outside Western Civilization. He soft-sells it, but the point is that one side is pro-white and the other side is Pro-West, but both sides largely agree on the philosophical stuff.

That’s fine and maybe it is correct. To his credit, McInnes makes clear that it is more of a continuum, than two distinct sets, but he invests a lot of time talking about a vaguely defined line between the two camps. Richard Spencer is over on the side near the fringe Nazis and Paul Joseph Watson is over on the other side, closer to something McInness never bothers to address. The whole shtick is mostly about distinguishing himself from the bad guys on the Alt-Right so the Left is left unmentioned.

To be fair to McInness, he is still young enough to dream of having a big time job at a big time media operation. He got a taste of it at Fox News and he probably hopes that one day he gets a shot to host a show on some other mainstream cable platform. Frankly, they would be wise to dump one of the Jon Stewart Mini-Me shows they have and give a guy like a McInnes a shot to be the normie version of Stewart, but that’s a topic for another day. The point here is McInness is treading lightly.

The defect with the Alt-Lite is the same problem the Buckley Conservatives had a generation ago. They have no antibodies to resist entryism, because they lack a timeless definition of what it means to be Alt-Lite. Western Civilization, after all, includes Karl Marx and Hitler. Nazism is just as much a part of the West as John Locke. In fact, Hitler currently casts a longer shadow than any of the men of the Enlightenment. On what grounds can the Alt-Lite reject Hitler, but embrace the slave owning Jefferson?

The same is true of anti-racism and egalitarianism. How can these be rejected when they are inventions of the West? Of course, the Alt-Lite makes no attempt to reject these as that would get them in trouble with the Left. That’s what opens the door to, and requires them to accept, the defining feature of the dominant orthodoxy. That feature is the blank slate. As McInness goes to pains to point out, if a hotep brotha is on the Trump Train, he has a place at the table of the Alt-Lite, a cherished place.

That’s the fatal flaw that was the undoing of the Buckley Right. The Alt-Lite has no affirmative argument. Instead, it is a list of things it is not and most of those things are to their Right. That firewall they are building to their Right, just as Buckley did with Kirk and with the paleocons, comes at the expense of any defensible line of demarcation between themselves and the Left. That leaves them open to entryism, corruption and subversion, which is why the leading opponents of Trump are all Buckley Conservatives.

That brings us back to the beginning. O’Sullivan was mostly correct, but he left out the most important part of the rule. That’s the definition of Right Wing. What is it that forever separates the Right from the Left? What is the thing about which there can be no meeting in the middle, between Left and Right? The great divide that can never be crossed, is biology.The Left embraces the blank slate and rejects biological reality. The Right accepts biology, human diversity and all the truths about the human animal that arise from it.

The great chain of causality is Biology→Culture-→Politics-→Economics. It’s why Libertarianism, in its current form, not right wing. The Reason Magazine crowd are sure that all you have to do to fix Haiti, for example, is end the licensing of barbershops and other small businesses. And legalize weed, of course. In other words, they get things backward and end up rejecting the human condition. This is the crack in the foundation of all Left Wing movements. It’s what they share in common.

Therefore, any ideology or political movement that does not accept the great chain of causality will eventually be subverted and become left wing.

72 thoughts on “The Iron Law of Conservatism

  1. Pingback: Peter D. Bredon, "St. Camille of the Alt Right" | Counter-Currents Publishing

  2. At its most fundamental level to be “Right”, within the Western Tradition, meant the belief and duty towards the Truth operating within the metaphysical framework of Christian realism. Everything else is either error or Leftism.

  3. “The great divide that can never be crossed, is biology.The Left embraces the blank slate and rejects biological reality. The Right accepts biology, human diversity and all the truths about the human animal that arise from it.”

    For years I have used a simple question to determine left from right. That question is whether a person believes in the perfectibility of mankind. Leftists think they can change people, while the right knows mankind as a whole will always have good people and bad people. As a Christian this is very clear to me; if mankind could have been perfected, Christ would not have been necessary.

  4. Between liberal and illiberal there is nothing, not even “non-liberals”.

    Now, why would an informed person want to describe totalitarian, left wing collectivists as “liberal”? Are we just pandering to the prejudices of dullards who are accustomed to trusting Fox News and gun nut radio? Or have the leftists colonized your brain?

    It’s been a very long time since it was first pointed out that some leftists adopted “liberal” as a smokescreen and disguise for their character, mentality, and long-term objectives. So maybe we should give up the bad habit of repeating their propaganda for them as if it were true. This gives us the following startling revelation about the stupidity of non-leftists, esp. “conservatives”:

    Non-leftists will hire leftists into their organizations, while leftists apply ideological tests. The result is that leftists eventually take over conservative organizations while ruthlessly defending their own turf—which is just what we should expect all winners to do.

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  6. Pingback: What defines the right – Orphans of Liberty

  7. Except, the laws of economics (of which we have admittedly imperfect knowledge) are just as real as the laws of biology (also imperfectly understood), and without appropriate economics (allocation and use of resources) there may not be any human biology to worry about (witness societies with managed economies that do not reproduce themselves). One very real aspect of human biology is a tendency for in group solidarity and support that can manifest itself as a collectivism at odds with the Anglo-Saxon traditions as modified by the great compromises of the 17h century that produced the things Burkes valued.

    Finally, modern Libertarianism is left wing prescisely because of the entryism you describe, but that should not be taken as a refutation of economics as described by someone like Mises.

    • without appropriate economics (allocation and use of resources) there may not be any human biology to worry about (witness societies with managed economies that do not reproduce themselves)

      OK. Now explain how the USA–without a managed economy–is also NOT reproducing itself. Ever take a serious look at “white race” birthrate?

      • It’s managed. Watch the correlation between the stock market and federal budget. It’s just that no media outlets cover it that way. See what happens when it doesn’t pass as expected.

  8. “The great chain of causality is Biology→Culture-→Politics-→Economics.”

    It’s not simply linear like this. There is feedback to biology at each stage, producing eusocial (i.e. civic domestication) selection pressures (over timescales of many generations). If the environment changes too fast we have an evolutionary shock, which can’t be readily adapted to. For example mass migration of aliens into one’s environment.

  9. Nice Cloud. I like your succinctness.

    ““B” is simply a statement of a true natural fact, like the law of gravitation. It is obviously true both theoretically and empirically”

    If this is so, then why doesn’t the left melt away? Dishonesty? Better to espouse a lie than to live with the consequences of overturning it?

  10. Succinctly, the two propositions are:

    Left (prop A): “Race is a social construct”
    Alt-Right (prop B): “Society is a racial construct”

    For the Left prop “A” is a moral position. Those who oppose it are evil heretics, animated by “hate”. Curiously, people with other contrarian views like flat earthers or green cheese mooners aren’t considered to have this animus.

    For the Alt-Right “B” is simply a statement of a true natural fact, like the law of gravitation. It is obviously true both theoretically and empirically.

    For the the Alt-Right, the Left is evil, and “normies” who espouse prop “A” are simply retarded, e.g. the character /r/The_Donald in the Murdoch Murdoch videos.

  11. Libertarian-ism is right wing. Just not directly, but rather, consequently. As Johnathan Bowden pointed out, while the policies advocated for by mainstream Libertarianism do not concern themselves with Biological inequality, they refuse any opposition to human inequality.

    Libertarianism embraces social inequality. The ideology invariably lends itself–in practice–to an embrace of elitism, inequality, rule by the strong and the intelligent. Hierarchy. What Hoppe called “the natural elite”.

    These all correlate with real biological factors, which must, behind the scene, drive the engine of any Libertarian society. In the long run, biological inequality triumphs.

  12. Another example of there likely being no such thing as “conservatism”, rather it being the group of souls late to the table of liberalism- how long ago did Orwell write 1984? With all its warnings about Socialists and their plans for Big Brother and government monitoring everyone’s closest communications ? Wiki Leaks and Snowden have demonstrated these programs now exist, but I’ve never heard any “conservative” organization opposing it. If anything, I’ve witnessed self proclaimed conservatives deride the only organization fighting this trend, the Electronic Frontier Foindation as ‘liberal’ and complaints of the monitoring programs as ‘liberal’. So modernly, given the acceptance of government monitoring we have another example of “conservatism” just being a slow acceptance of liberalism.

  13. Z-man – I’ve been wondering about this divide you point to for awhile now (and had a bit of dust-up over at Vox Day’s site awhile back over this – I pointed to the slipperiness with respect to his conceptions of two of his sixteen principles of the alt-right, namely principles # 4 and #15 – and came away with the impression that Vox Day was offering intellectual dishonesty and obfuscation in response to my query).

    Your stated rationale for dismissing alt-lite in favor of alt-right (as defined) is: “The great chain of causality is Biology→Culture-→Politics-→Economics”. Not really though (by way of half-truth). Of course the chain of causality works in both directions, as per the Darwinian perspective, and as per common sense as well. Yet, the main point I think you are making …… that I think should be abundantly obvious to everyone, is that different demographics (including racial demographics) are well correlated with differences in culture. So ….. better rationale for your worthy position (as more precisely defined) is requisite – yes? As such, if we don’t know, precisely, what the levers are that allow the cultural differences to arise as correlated with demographic differences (and I think the evidence is more and more-so pointing to an information systems approach to sorting this out), ….. it very well could turn out as one strong possibility, that western culture is a human social artifact that may be more universally appreciated, given the right conditions for such to flourish. And of course, the arc of history bears this out to some degree – the western ideas of the enlightenment (respect for the rights and responsibilities of the individual in the primary) have been ascending with respect to universal adoption, albeit in fits and starts, along with aberrant reversals occurring within the larger trend, …. along with sources of ideological antithesis therefore becoming more apparent (such as Islam ….. that does not respect the rights and responsibilities of the individual in the primary …. instead Islam is more-so about promoting submission by the individual).

    From the longer term perspective, for humanity’s sake, more universal acceptance of the principles that underpin western culture, would be among the best possible outcomes – yes? As such, I am suspicious of socially prescriptive arguments that gloss over this point. However I also agree that – since it is an obvious given that the European demographic is the sweetspot, correlation-wise, with western culture – in the meantime, it is also necessary to be very careful not to allow said sweetspot to wither, – otherwise, perhaps to that end – all will be lost with respect to fostering the possibility of this bright future. As such, in the meantime, a more rational immigration policy is called for. (A point of interest in this vein – within the west, Canada is anomalous with respect to how the immigration policy interfaces with social outcomes – perhaps an in-depth case study is warranted re Canada …. but I contend that the current Trudeau administration is showing signs of heading towards errors in this endeavor). My main point though is …. we should not lose sight of the longer term perspective, consider all the possible longer term outcomes, manage towards the best possible outcome(s), and as such take aim at discovering the levers to said outcome(s), as an indispensable aid to said management. What says you?

    • If Western Civ is the sweet spot but there are few people there to represent it in the way that it should be represented any more, then does it really exist? Or is WC some sort of cultural artifact, like the Catholic/Protestant Christian church in Western Europe?

      • Dutch – what i said was – “the European demographic is the sweetspot, correlation-wise, with western culture”. As such, I agree, in the medium term (which is as far a we can realistically look down the road, biologically speaking, anyway), that ensuring the ongoing maintenance of the European demographic is prudent, wise and virtuous (i.e. – let’s not prematurely accidentally kill gooses that lay golden eggs by way of making any premature false claims about what is what, about the necessary conditions for western culture). We are currently still in the process of sorting out these necessary conditions for western culture .

        But, at the same time, if there is a path towards fostering western cultural ideas more universally, should that not be investigated?

        Beyond the medium term, beyond the point down the road that we can still see, one thing is clear nevertheless …… and that is divisiveness breeds conflict and violence, and though humankind has done a pretty good job of managing that up to now, our growing technological capacity, will, at some point in the future, mean that ongoing divisiveness carries too much risk. Searching for mitigation around that now is wise. Universal promotion of the western ideals is one promising prescription for said mitigation.

        • At least from where I sit, Western Civ is positioned as the enemy of everything that so many in the West are working for. Interesting, to me anyway, is that China seems to still aspire to some form of Western ways, as many Chinese children are sent to the U.S. for their higher education. That is a grassroots commitment to Western ideals, sending their own kids to soak them up.

          I apologize for misunderstanding your point. It is one thing to live in the West and be neutral to the cultural heritage you benefit from. It is quite another to attempt to tear it down, piece by piece. I get frustrated by what I see these days.

          • Dutch – yes – there is alot of anti-west nonsense being promoted right now, within the west. All this Politically Correct crap. All this promotion of victim mentality. All this “white privilege” false blame game (false by way of half truth). Ultimately true west is about identifying with the existential conditions of personhood (i.e. – we all, rightfully so, value our own personal self-agency first and foremost), seeing some commonality on that front, and as such identifying more-so with humanity, the universal human condition we are all subject to, as individuals that have natural rights to self-agency and who therefore must take responsibility for our personal decisions. We are all in the same boat when it comes to that. These concepts therefore tend to put more emphasis on the value of merit over any tribal identifications.

            I believe the current PC nonsense is just another temporary aberrant reversal occurring within the larger trend, which is the trend towards ascending universal appreciation of western ideals. It is very good that alot of discussion is occurring around this now.

    • It seems that a main point of disagreement is whether it is actually possible for human *groups* of other than NW European ancestry to voluntarily adopt Western Civilization. IOW, is there a Magic Western Culture that we could send ‘there’ (wherever ‘there’ is)_?

      I think that recent history shows that you really can’t catch that ol’ Magic Culture from nothing but proximity (i.e. the Magic Dirt Theory doesn’t work on groups). However, recent history, indeed all history, shows that *individuals* from most/all human populations can and do adopt other cultures than the one they grew up in: If they want to. This is true including arrivals to our own *magic* culture (i.e. assimilation of some biologically differentiated *individuals* is possible – if they want to).

      History also shows that coercion can work involuntary assimilation if continued long enough. Witness the romanization of (most of) Rome’s conquered provinces. But it usually took three generations and a massacre or two in the meanwhile. And we’re not up to that now.

      So, if the *group* collectively doesn’t want to assimilate (La Raza) or they’re lying about it (Islam) it’s folly to admit them. But what if they *can’t*_? Also, how could we reliably differentiate can’t from won’t_?

  14. i like to think in terms of systems. the world is a system; the USA is a sub-system within it. the current world system is breaking down and will soon be replaced by a new system. same with the sub-sytem we call USGOV.

    so what forces are pressing on the current system, causing it to buckle? very simple, the osmotic pressure of 7+ billion third worlders on one side, and 1.5B first and second worlders on the other side. if you want to preserve what the first world has, you will need to resolve the 7B (either by relocating them to space, or euthansia, or a natural culling from famine or pandemic).

    now that the world’s masses have a scent for social welfare, there will be no keeping down on the farm/barrio.

  15. I learned them back in the 1970s as Robert Conquest’s Three Laws http://tinyurl.com/jcmtole

    1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
    2. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
    3. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

    John O’Sullivan just re-quoted them. I wish I could find the original source. John & I were both reading the same stuff in the 70s, so it’s in there somewhere — prob. the (London) Spectator.

    • John,
      I first heard it as Rusher’s Law, but them I’m certain that William Rusher also read the same materials, and was intimately connected to National Review.
      Like so many other famous quotes of indeterminate origin, it traces beck either to Shakespeare or the Bible.
      And like so many other quotes attributed to many, it remains in the public square because it is so indubitably true.

  16. ZMan, congrats, this is a terrific piece. I only have one quibble.

    “Western Civilization, after all, includes Karl Marx”

    Nope. You unconsciously fell into the Alt-Light trap. Alt-Right orthodoxy asserts that Jews have been both passive parasites on, and active antagonists against, Western Civilization. The Alt-Right would thus disavow any Jewish contribution to Western Civilization, and since Karl Marx is a Jew, that would put his contributions outside the scope of Western Civilization. While we’re on the subject of Marx, it is an inarguable fact that the Communist vanguard has historically been majority-Jew, and during the 20th century Communism (and Cultural Marxism) was, by far, the single most destructive force arrayed against Western Civilization.

    These facts lend tremendous credibility to the Alt-Right position.

    • Does ‘Western Civilization’ include the Bible? Jesus Christ? St Peter? Music? Science? Art? Literature? Just wondering. Hard to discount the Jooish contribution.

      • The Jews who became Christians are ethnically and spiritually quite distinct from today’s Jews. The vast majority of Hebrews who did not become Christians were wiped out by the Romans a few decades after the Resurrection. Today’s remnant are Ashkenazic, Sephardic, Mizrahic, or Ethiopian.

  17. You’ve got your chain of causation somewhat off. It looks more like this:
    Biology→Power→Culture→Economics

    (Although to be fair, there are feedback loops among all of the items above. But the arrow indicates the stronger direction.)

    Power is upstream of culture. This is why the average woman today supports penises in her bathroom, even though she doesn’t want that. She knows what is politically correct. (Politically correct.) More generally, power is the reason people can be induced to disbelieve their lyin’ eyes — about biology, economics, culture, and indeed power itself.

    • eh, no. Critical theory is a load of BS. Women only can do what they do because of the Culture has created the Political climate for such nonsense.

  18. The defining thing is no compromise on my liberty, compromise as Alt-Right, doesn’t exist. That is the zeitgeist.
    What most outside Alt-Right do not grok is the essential thing, as Alt-Right, Hard-Right, as Men of The West: BFYTW.
    It isn’t an argument. It is not a movement per say, it is non negotiable. It is manifest.
    Everything happening in the West is a validation event.

    You may not recognize it yet. The election, not Trump, but the election of him, is the cusp of the manifest actualization of the dirt people validating the essential things. The dirt people will come to know Alt-Light, as events prove, as they have cuck-subservatism, as the left proves, is bereft the truth, as they are factories of dissimulation of irrefutable essential truths.

    • No. All the Left has to do is wait for the rotten fruit of universal suffrage to fall into their hands. Not that they will wait, which the reason Trump was elected. But the fruit is still rotting.

      • True that. First they let non-property owning white men vote. This opened the door for women and civilization slid right down the slope into the abyss. Next step is Hell.

  19. Agree with the talk show. With Red Eye cancelled, I assume Greg Gutfeld will get a shot at a normie late night show.

    • IIRC, Gutfeld has not done Redeye for years. I think Gutfeld still does the five o’clock show that’s like a daytime talk show for women. That may have been cancelled as well, but that’s my recollection.

      What strikes me about these “late night comedy” shows is they have tiny audiences. Black Jon Stewart gets about 800K. Female Jon Stewart gets 700K. There are YouTube guys getting bigger audiences without any of the advertising and production costs.

      • I still can’t figure out who is watching Trevor or Samantha. Their previews are cringe inducing and supposedly those are the best lulz of the episodes shown in the tv spots.

        Was watching some old Johnny Carson and the roast show of Dean Martin. I haven’t laughed that hard in years, and those shows predate me. Art, music, architecture, and comedy have all fallen off a cliff.

      • RedEye…gone…with Mr. Gutfirld at the last show.
        He’s still VERY ensconced with the 5 person fluctuating panel Fox show that replaced Glen Beck, and has a new “panelish” show, much like the original Red Eye, aired in the wastelands on Sat, or Sun. night or Fox News ch.

  20. The great chain of causality is Biology→Culture-→Politics-→Economics

    Is there a reason that you do not place religion as first, and displace biology? Among other heavyweight thinkers who agree, Benedict XVI insisted that ‘cult precedes culture.’ Or, in effect, culture is downstream from cult.

    One may argue about the liceity of the ‘cult’, of course; but it is impossible to exclude “cult” from the chain of causality.

    • Is the South Asian what he is due to his religion or is his religion a result of his biology?

      • I witnessed a town celebration some time back on an island in the Philippines. A huge parade in which people were dressed in varieties of dress native to their own villages and barrios, many of which included warrior dress with primitive weapons, ended in the city center of the provincial capital where it was met by a Catholic priest, who then held up a baby doll and said, Viva baby something or other (can’t remember) to the cheers of the crowd.
        The scene was only moving to me only because of the joy I saw on the faces of the celebrants. I have no clue as to what that was all about, even after reading about it at the time. None of it made sense to me.
        But that’s not my job, either.

      • An interesting aside to an already stellar post, Z Man. But the history of the great religions shows that they can and do transcend all the elements in the postulated chain of causation (e.g. Han Buddhism follows S. Asian). And religion obviously interacts with all the elements with likely exception of human biological differences (except in Cloud ‘thought’).

        To illustrate, it’s hard to imagine ME culture, politics and economics today without extended consideration of Islam. Yet many of those societies were Christian non-biologic time ago. By non-biologic, I mean not enough time for evolutionary divergence in the human populations involved. As evidence: IIRC, it has been demonstrated that Israelis and Palestinians are genetically indistinguishable, yet their cultures, politics and economies are very different to say the least.

        But the main subject here is distinguishing ‘conservatism’ (whatever it means now) from the Prog Land of the mind that seems dementedly determined to destroy our civilization (culture, politics and economics) and therewith most of the biological people carrying it. I don’t see how you draw that line without reference to Christianity.

        Now, it is possible that Western Civilization might have evolved as it did without traditional Christianity but we can’t re-run W. History without traditional Christianity as a control case. Moreover, it seems to me that the Progs *have* run the experiment about where W Civ goes under the rejection and negation of traditional Christianity. Can’t be human biology driving it since their’s is the same as our’s.

        • Moreover, it seems to me that the Progs *have* run the experiment about where W Civ goes under the rejection and negation of traditional Christianity. Can’t be human biology driving it since their’s is the same as our’s.

          Bingo. The Progs are going materialist. What did Chris Lasch call it…..’culture of narcissism’…? It’s also the Therapeutic Culture. Either way, it’s not Judaeo-Christian.

      • The South Asian has SOME ‘cult,’ not likely to be Christian, but something. That cult will ‘out’ in the society–the culture–of that South Asian. Biology is the same, caucasian, Asian, African….albeit each of those races has different strengths/weaknesses of the biological sort.

        The Greeks had a cult derived from their gods, as did the Romans. So do the Mohammedans.

        Now there IS a caveat in all this: there is “orthodox” practice of the cult, and “not-orthodox” practice. That is still prior to “culture,” but will have an effect.

      • In the comments to Vox Day’s take on this post:
        http://voxday.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-alt-lites-fatal-flaw.html
        ”13. ZhukovG April 10, 2017 6:15 AM
        @Lovekraft: No Christianity does not override differences. A Nigerian Christian remains a Nigerian. I can love him and send aid to him while he remains in Nigeria. But if he tries to force his way into my country I am completely at peace with machine gunning him at the border.”
        IOW, religion is a facet of culture, a subset of biology. I pointed out:
        Two excellent examples: Haiti – https://infogalactic.com/info/Haitian_Vodou
        and Mexico’s Santa Muerte, ”Saint Death” – https://infogalactic.com/info/Santa_Muerte
        Both of which are bizarre distortions of Catholicism created by the local culture of those countries.

    • Religion is part of Culture in the chain of causality. Catholicism is not the same flavor everywhere you go. The liturgy may look the same, but Nigerian Catholicism is very different than American Catholicism in NYC.

      Benedict 16 was kinda right. Religion influences culture and culture influences religion. It’s a symbiotic relationship.

  21. here is the question this brings to my mind: is the left’s rejection of biology/genetics a form of willful blindness, denial – the noble lie – and confusion of how to deal with the resulting inequalities associated with the facts of human biological diversity or is it a honest rejection of biology?

    • It’s not an honest rejection of biology. It is true belief that in actual scientific fact biology does not determine behavior, at least at the group level.

      • You may be right, Ryan, but how can this be? The science is clear. I’m not even a biologist and I understand the basic facts of genetics and human biodiversity. So I think that in some proportion, some dishonestly choose to perpetuate the noble lie while some are just ignorant of the science. Also, the distortion of the science by our leftist centered educational system contributes to the ignorance.

        • Orwell wrote, humorously and accurately, of the significant differences in talent, inclinations, and even teeth between the various European tribes as if it were obvious, which of course it is. Observations drawn from the obvious may be funny, or they may be cruel. Observations which are forbidden become poisonous. The greatest cruelty is to assure a person without an ability that he has that ability. His failure becomes his fault.

  22. “The Right accepts biology, human diversity and all the truths about the human animal that arise from it.”
    Agree 100%. Human nature cannot be restructured.

    • “Human nature cannot be restructured.”

      That is one of the fundamental axioms of conservatism, whether attributed to biology or Original Sin.

    • The biology argument, as stated by Mr. LePore, is the beginning and end of it. Most of the cultural artifacts of Western Civilization, and also the current cultural fetishes we are enduring now, exist because of the space provided by the dominance of the western, white, patriarchical culture which biology and evolution delivered. The combination of intellect, stubbornness, and tribalism of the white western male gave us the economic and geographic breathing room to both build the glories of western culture and to put up with the current cultural rot.

      The remnants of that biological selection process will be called for in future years, from the look of things. The question is whether that evolutionary adaptation has been bred out of too many of us in the meantime.

  23. I think the real challenge is defining what these terms mean. As was pointed out in some of my previous comments, American “progressives” from the past century are in no way similar to what you consider progressives today. Are conservatives and liberals today also different from liberals and conservatives of the past? Was Jefferson a conservative, liberal or progressive? And by what standards do you measure him? Hitler certainly worked to conserve and promote Germany and what it was to be a true German. By this definition, he could be very much considered a conservative of his time.

    One could argue in Jefferson’s America, slavery was the accepted norm of that period, in the same way the destruction of Jews was under Hitler’s Germany. Consider the British had already banned slavery in their colonies while it remained in practice in the US. Slavery, at least to the southern plantation owner, was very much normal and so much so they depended upon “conserving” the practice to the point of secession and war.

    • I think the difference between the conservatism of the past fifty years and what we are seeing emerge today is the simple fact that slavery was and is a fact of life, and not something that can be reduced to a manipulable abstraction. What societies decide to do with it amongst themselves is no business of ours.
      I saw a video recently of a Somali maid falling from a window while being taped by her Arab owner. The Somali was first seen hanging by one hand from the window and then falling to her death some hundred feet down. How she got in that position I don’t know. And it is not my job to know, and not my job to try and see that things like this don’t happen in Arab countries.
      The difference between the conservatism of the past fifty years and what is emerging today is the realization that the world cannot be ruled by a universalist moralism that applies to everyone everywhere and that societies set these things for themselves. The libertarian who says that a person has property in himself makes the same error as Aristotle when he says that some peoples are not fit for anything but servility. The man who has absolute property in himself can sell himself. This is precisely what Athenians had been doing by means of debt before the reforms of Solon, which said, no, you can no longer be enslaved for debt. Athens was saying that having property in one’s self was harmful to the society of Athens, from the standpoint of the Athenian citizen. But they still had slaves.
      And slavery abounds among us under other names. It in itself may be a very poor condition of humanity, but it will continue to exist in some shape or form for as long as there are humans.
      It can be minimized or eliminated in some of its forms in some societies at some times, but it remains an historical and contemporary fact.

      • @ Teapartydoc – Agreed. Slavery has many forms, and not just the obvious one blacks scream about in America. Considering how slavery is well documented in modern cultures, I always find it interesting none of the African-American activists (e.g. Farrakhan, Jackson, Sharpton, etc.) are out helping to stamp out slavery currently practiced in other countries against blacks. But let’s be honest – it’s easier, and safer, to scream at white people who have never owned slaves in America than to risk actually going where the problems really exist.

        More and more Europeans are sick to the teeth with the idea we are somehow responsible for all the problems in the world and must therefore allow these people to come here. Many are beginning to seriously question the mentality of political leadership that is intentionally and knowingly doing the wrong thing, against our own people. Many, like myself, have spent time in these sh*t-hole countries and we don’t want their attitudes, value and morals here. It’s just that simple.

        I fully agree with you that we have no responsibility to support people from failed cultures and asocial civilizations especially to the ruin of our own citizens. Thezman made a comment the other day that he was upset Trump attacked Syria since it’s not your problem. We could all take a lesson from the Swiss on not getting involved in other peoples problems. They learned their lesson 500-years ago and have remained neutral ever since.

        • Good points about American blacks, and all too true, as I can attest from close personal experience with them in Detroit and Chicago.

          As for Europe’s immigration problem: I think that the best immigration policy will be an emmigration policy which encourages pests to leave. Since Caucasian leftists (including nationalists like the BNP) are the worst of all pests, I’d recommend that you focus your emmigration policy on them, first. Of course, you’ll never get the right such policy through a electoral process (and probably shouldn’t even try).

  24. My observation is that a lot of so-called conservatism is just late to the table liberalism. The acceptance of homosexuality by “conservative” media being a case in point.

    • I “accept” sodomy the way I accept the free speech of blithering idiots. I believe that blithering idiots tend to weaken the nation and the human race whenever they open their stupid mouths to blither, but, that doesn’t mean I think they must be killed on the spot for it. Just as the answer to stupid evil crazy speech is intelligent good sensible speech, the answer to perverted sex seems to me to be normal healthy sex to counteract it, as long as it remains a matter of verbal debate. Once it gets physically violent, then, that’s a different matter.

  25. This post from Zman will be worth re-reading a dozen times. The pied piper song of the tabula rasa will eventually lead the West over a cliff. While teh racisms r bad, plz no racisms, nothing sins against Western post-modern culture more than the assertion that all men (womyn? genderfluid spiritkin?) are not created equal. They cannot be made equal. The central dogma of our declined Enlightenment deliberately denies reality.

  26. Brilliant post, full of insights.

    The only thing I have ever read close to it are Heinlein’s observations:

    “all correct moral laws — derive from the instinct to survive. Moral behavior is survival behavior above the individual level.”

    “Correct morality can only be derived from what man is — not from what do-gooders and well-meaning aunt Nellies would like him to be.”

    “moral behavior” [is] “behavior that tends toward survival.” I won’t argue with philosophers or theologians who choose to use the word “moral” to mean something else, but I do not think anyone can define “behavior that tends toward extinction” as being “moral” without stretching the word “moral” all out of shape.”

    “Selfishness is the bedrock on which all moral behavior starts and it can be immoral only when it conflicts with a higher moral imperative. An animal so poor in spirit that he won’t even fight on his own behalf is already an evolutionary dead end; the best he can do for his breed is to crawl off and die, and not pass on his defective genes.”

    “The next higher level is to work, fight, and sometimes die for your own immediate family. This is the level at which six pounds of mother cat can be so fierce that she’ll drive off a police dog. It is the level at which a father takes a moonlighting job to keep his kids in college — and the level at which a mother or father dives into a flood to save a drowning child … and it is still moral behavior even when it fails.”

    “Evolution is a process that never stops. Baboons who fail to exhibit moral behavior do not survive; they wind up as meat for leopards.”

    “The next level in moral behavior higher than that exhibited by the baboon is that in which duty and loyalty are shown toward a group of your own kind too large for an individual to know all of them. We have a name for that. It is called ‘patriotism.'”

    • you sure it was heinlein? sounds more like ayn rand, deriving morals from selfishness. moral behavior is the exact opposite- see sermon on the mount

  27. I think the root issue is more fundamental than the Conservative-Liberal spectrum, and specifically that evolution precedes biology.

    We are what we are because of the outcome of the evolutionary gauntlet that shaped us. We are descended from the survivors of a world of extreme existential hardship in which intelligence, resilience, and productivity traits were fitness selected. And this past journey was our natural destiny until the advent of memetic reprogramming allowed our species to distort natural evolutionary processes and override our natural instincts.

    We now live in a time of unparalleled affluence in which parasitism is rewarded by political elites that select for voting allegiance rather than our historically evolved traits. Liberals are man-made parasites.

  28. When reading someone like Friedrich Heer in his intellectual history of Europe you get hints of what Z is talking about. You have a developing Western Europe at times influenced by Eastern thought patterns, which are more abstract and less based on real things, like home and hearth, blood and soil, which mark western thought.
    According to the paradigm set up by Heer, Catholicism​ is western ,while protestantism and the heretical sects are under Eastern influence. The real dividing line is abstraction, which was the dividing line for Burke, when he set his face against the French Revolution. Burke was the lynchpin for Kirk’s The Conservative Mind, and the backstop for what some call paleoconservatism.
    Neoconservatism, which is basically the Jewish form of traditional conservatism, is marked by an increased reliance on abstractions. The main influences are probably Strauss and Harry Jaffa. These two are contemporaries of Kirk, but seem to have had a more durable impact on academic conservatism than Kirk. Even people who claimed to follow Kirk seemed to go limp as time went by.
    Some of the problem with a few of the Kirkians was an embrace of the welfare state, some really cockamamie economic theories, like distributivism, and going so hard against abstraction that they denied the possibility of conservative reforms in other cultures, even while those reforms were taking place.
    I think what we are seeing with the alt right is a shift in the Overton Window of the right itself after we’ve seen how ridiculous neoconservatism is when given it’s head. Given that, the JQ comes into play in a way that it not might have had the neocons been more diverse.
    So what we are left with is a right that is returning to it’s roots while having to confront some demons in the form of the happy merchant class.

    • It really is hard to underestimate the impact of the Cold War on the American political culture. While the prudent half of the ruling class battled the Soviets, the less prudent half set about creating the City Upon a Hill. Even without the Cold War, the conservatism of Yankeedom was always doomed as it started from the same basis as the Left side. Convergence was inevitable.

      • Hard to argue with that. I can’t say how many times at how many conferences I heard conservatives refer to themselves as classical liberals. This reinforces the notion of those farther right that conservatism as we knew it was simply liberalism on a lag. Half of the reason Ayan Hirsi Ali was taken in as a conservative hero was because she held the writings of John Stuart Mill in high esteem. She’s a feminist neocon prop.
        Reminds me of the Zulu marriage scene in the film of the battle of Rorke’s Drift. The Swedish missionary’s daughter asks him what the little spears are for that all of the brides are waving around. He replies that they symbolize the chastity of the brides, and does so without a wisp of condemnation, accepting that this is a tradition he can do nothing about.
        But to a neocon, we’re supposed to get all upset about this crap.
        No. Let the dindu do what the dindu do. Even if it’s nuffin.

        • One of things I’m fond of pointing out is that kids in American schools are taught that Puritans founded America. They learn all about the Mayflower, Plymouth, the Puritans. etc. Maybe they learn about the Jamestown settlement, but it is just filler. The Province of Carolina? It’s as if it never existed until the Civil War. History is written by the victors.

          Buckley Conservatism exists within the narrow framework of Yankeedom. What seems to be happening is the Yankee hegemony is breaking down and the rest of the country is now getting a chance to say their piece.

          • The puritans where the ultimate kind of statists. They denounced biology in all it’s forms. It is why they failed so miserably.

        • Ayan Hirsi Ali is a hero because she is one of the few humans from the Muslim world who is willing to stand against what it stands for in an unwavering and articulate way. She is undoubtedly marked for death by many, and I applaud her stand. She also has good insights on many threads of the Muslim culture, having lived inside of it. Unless she recants her position, I will hold her in high esteem, no matter the rest of her thinking. One problem we have is that almost no one in the Muslim community, or from that community, is willing to speak out against what the Muslim world represents. It is always “you don’t understand”, as some sort of universal Muslim non-apologia apologia. She speaks out, she helps us understand (awful is it is) and she is a hero of sorts, IMHO.

          • Hero? I don’t know. Her basic message to the Dutch is, Look at how badly the people from my country treat their women when looked at from the Dutch perspective. So she’s saying they should no longer import Muslims, and some Muslims want to kill her, mainly because of her apostasy.
            To my mind she’s an unfortunate more than a hero. A man without a country. Or woman. After all, National Review has made the case that gender is a choice.

          • Just found last Friday’s interview of her on the WSJ online. She is very explicit about the dangers of even non-radical Islam, and how it uses the West’s own freedoms to undermine us. Unless you think she is making it all up. But Occam’s Razor and my own lyin’ eyes tell me she is the real deal, and what she says is true.

            Remember, whatever a Muslim says or does, if you question it, you will be told that “It’s a Muslim thing. You just don’t understand”. She will help you understand. Seriously, read last Friday’s WSJ piece, and you may come away with some new insights on Islam and on her. Of course, given what the average American thinks he knows about Muslims and Islam, she has a lot of work to do.

          • You hold in “high esteem” a Somalian who lied to get Dutch citizenship, dropped that to get a US green card, entered into an affair with married father-of-three Niall Ferguson, whom she then married in 2011 and whose child she bore three months later.

            Quite the sort of person one should hold in high esteem, I’m sure. Because “insights” on Mohammedan culture are so vitally important and difficult to come by.

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