After Conservatism

National Review was founded in 1955 by Bill Buckley and, until the last few years, it has been the prestige publication of American conservatism. The late 50’s is a good starting point for the movement that has been the alternative to Progressivism. Buckley was greatly influenced by Russel Kirk, so the magazine took on Progressivism, but also the libertarianism of Ayn Rand and the failures of previous efforts to create a legitimate conservatism in the United States. The goal was to create a new Right.

Reading the take down of Ayn Rand by Whittaker Chambers all these years later, it is easy to see how things have changed. In the early days of Buckley conservatism, it was understood by people claiming to be on the Right that libertarianism suffered from the same materialism as Marxism. Rand loved ideology so much there was no room in her cold heart for humanity. Today, the so-called Right is indistinguishable from the libertarianism of today. The editor of National Review actually celebrates it.

It has become a cliche of sorts that what passes for conservatism today is just yesterday’s liberal fads. The social media gag “the conservative case for [fill in name of liberal degeneracy]” stopped being funny because it became common on the page of National Review itself. Here they make the conservative case for homosexual marriage and here they make the case for transgenderism. Of course, one of the leaders of what passes for conservatism these days is a man who walks around dressed as a woman.

When confronted by the ridiculous spectacle that is Conservative Inc., it is tempting to fall into the same trap as Muslims, Marxists and libertarians, when they confront the lunacy of their cults. Whenever a Muslim explodes in public, the response is, “well, that’s not the real Islam.” In the Cold War, Marxists professors would always say that Bolshevism was a mongrel and defective form of Marxism. Of course, libertarianism spend all their time wheeling around those goal posts on roller skates that define libertarianism.

The fact is, the conservatism of Bill Buckley was always defective. It was a continuation of what Robert Louis Dabney observed a century ago about Northern Conservatism. Russell Kirk saw conservatism as a disposition, the lack of ideology. What Buckley conservatism was, in fact, was a pose. The range of allowable opinion on the Left, however, allowed for the existence of a reformist element that drew on the old Right, as well as western traditionalism. The managerial state had not yet snuffed out liberalism.

A couple decades ago, the great paleocon academic Paul Gottfried noted that the managerial state had killed liberalism. By liberalism, he meant the philosophical view that distributed powers and bourgeois moral standards worked to restrain the state and protect civil society. The system of governance refined in the 19th century was being wiped away and something new would replace it. Today, what passes for the Left and the Right both agree to call it neoliberalism and both sides strongly embrace it.

In that Fred Bauer post, you see that Buckley conservatives are on the last leg of the journey into the sun. They no longer see a reason to oppose the Left, because the Left disappeared into the sun of neoliberalism a long time ago. As has been its habit since birth, the conservatism of Bill Buckley follows Progressivism around like a puppy. Its last act on the stage will be fusing itself permanently to what was once called the Left to form the bipartisan fusion ideology of the American managerial state.

Paul Gottfried coined the phrase “alternative Right” in his speech at the Mencken conference, when discussing what happened to the paleocons. Richard Spencer appropriated the idea and started the alt-right, but it was never a coherent movement nor did it have anything resembling an intellectual foundation. It was, at best, a grab bag of ideas plucked from various subcultures in the larger umma of the Dissident Right. As a result it became a cult of personality and then fizzled out entirely.

It is easy to lay the blame for the alt-right at the feet of Richard Spencer, but the real problem is something you can pick up in Gottfried’s speech at Mencken. Paleos never fully grasped the reality of Buckley-style conservatism. Paul remains puzzled by how easy it was for the neoconservatives to overrun the conservative institutions. The reason, of course, was that those institutions were built on the same manor as the Progressive institutions. Conservative institutions were just outbuildings for the main house.

If there is to be a genuine alternative to the prevailing orthodoxy, the first task is to accept a central truth of the managerial state. That is, it must approach an intellectual and moral singularity in order to exist. While it will never reach the point where all opinion is assimilated, the allowable differences are now so small they cannot be seen by the naked eye. A system that evolved out the principle of universal truth, must evolve a morality that is intolerant of anything that challenges it. There can be no room for an alternative.

That means that whatever comes after conservatism must first sink roots outside the neoliberal order and maybe even outside the Enlightenment. It cannot be a reaction to neoliberalism, as that implies a dependency. The obvious implication is that what comes after conservatism, in the framework of the American Right, is nothing. That line of discovery and inquiry has reached a dead end. It is an intellectual tradition with no future and no shadow. What comes next must be a clean break from northern conservatism.

160 thoughts on “After Conservatism

  1. Z man, I’m sure you have heard the long standing rumor that the CIA funded the start-up of *National Review* in 1956. The CIA wanted to create a “respectable” conservative alternative to the John Birch Society. The J. B. Society was roughly and sort of the Alt Right of the1950’s and ’60’s.

    Furthermore, the go-between between the CIA and young Bill Buckley is said to have been James Burnham. Burnham’s book, *The Managerial Revolution* is almost a Bible of the Imperial American Big Government-Big Business complex.

    James Burnham was an American philosopher and political theorist. Burnham was a prominent Trotskyist activist in the 1930s, as well as a well-known isolationist. In later years Burnham left Marxism and became a public intellectual of the American conservative movement. His book The Managerial Revolution, published in 1941, speculated on the fate of capitalism. Burnham was also an editor and a regular contributor to the American conservative publication National Review on a variety of topics.

    See more on en.wikipedia.org ·

    • And this, from tonight’s Steve Sailer blog:

      “Franz says:
      December 3, 2018 at 11:43 am GMT • 100 Words
      @Hail
      GV was a total bastard from the Podhoretz’a point of view.

      As editor of Commentary, Norman P crafted a Vidal hit-piece called “The Hate that Dare Not Speak it’s Name”; smearing GV as an antisemite but Vidal only mentioned the Israel Fifth Column, not Jews as such.

      Funnier was Vidal’s comments, strewn through his works, about Jewish Power in Hollywood when he was out there. Paddy Chayefsky, of Network fame, treated Gore so rotten that Vidal asked William Wyler what the point of it was.

      Wyler told Gore, “Paddy thinks movies are an all-Jewish game, and you ain’t no Jew!” That was in the 1950s. The fix has been in longer than the sheep think.

      Vidal is only remembered by the Right as a pervert now, too bad. Jackie Onassis noted that Vidal’s nemesis Bill Buckley was a fag too. How soon we forget! “

  2. No conservative philosophy will ever see a pragmatic chance in hell at being implemented in the Democratic globalists institutionalize their oppression by taking over the presidency, senate, and house in the next couple election cycles. Once that happens, the game is over, and conservatives will be prohibited from even discussing it online without being hit with the coming social credit scores aka China.

  3. White Man’s Burden II

    I forgot to mention John Wayne in The Alamo.
    Hey! At least the Mexican women are Christians, can cook, have big tits.

  4. The failure of the Alt-Right has to be kept in perspective

    The Alt-Right was mostly a meta-political movement, that aimed to change the culture.

    Nobody believed that Richard Spencer was going to become an elected official.

    The culture… of certain segments of the population has changed quite a bit, to where we are seeing White Nationalist topics being discussed on many conservative sites that did not previously discuss them.

    That’s not entirely due to the “Alt-Right” and it’s certainly not something that E-celebs directly accomplished themselves. But the Alt-Right as a broad unorganized current probably helped.

    The reason things are looking less optimistic nowadays is related to the complete collapse of Trump-ism and MAGA Conservatism.

    Few predicted Trump would be this ineffective when elected. Few predicted the complete failure of a civic nationalism to materialize as a thing.

    The Alt-Right and White Nationalism are post-democratic and not at all suited to become politicians in a multi-racial democracy. But Trump conservatism didn’t actually become a thing either.

    So we find ourselves in an interesting situation where we are seeing significant cultural change, but without any real prospect of political representation and increasingly direct repression under a Republican administration that has no interest in doing anything about it.

  5. What exactly is meant by the term “neoliberalism”? The people I’ve asked about this to say its not a rigorously defined term.

    • It’s basically neocons without the wars, the cronyism and the messianic tone. Anti-commie globalists.

  6. “…and maybe even outside the Enlightenment.”

    no “maybe”.

    Jews, both Red Tikkun Olas and Zio-neoconz, better hope Israhell is still on the map when push comes to shove. Otherwise,

    I fear for their future.

  7. White man’s burden?
    Maybe we are destined to be John Wayne (Searchers, Yellow Ribbon, Green Berets).
    The embattled hero.

    • Because those ideas have proven to be entirely inadequate for the challenges we face. Liberty, freedom, and constitutional government are desirable, but they are the outgrowth of white civilization, not the cause of civilizational success. They are impotent in the multiracial present.

      https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DEE80HCXgAAtEfj.jpg

  8. Commenter: “Make a Venn diagram, one circle for Mittens Rmoney and one for Hillary Rotherham Klinton.”

    Why do people here like to skew names? It’s so pervasive that it’s starting to freak me out a little. It really requires an explanation. Is it something to do with older, left-brained men? You guys find it endlessly humorous.

  9. Almost all let’s-imagine-a-perfect-society projects start with a list of axioms or postulates. “We hold these truths to be self-evident…”

    The usual thinking is that any person of good will would accept the axioms, because they are self evident. That’s probably more a definition of what one means by good will than it is of anything else.

    The usual assumption is that all the good outcomes one could hope for would necessarily tumble out of these axioms when they are mixed together, just as everything we do in geometry comes from a handful of statements we don’t bother to try to prove, because we cannot,

    In casting about for what comes after conservatism, we need to be aware of the effort we put into axioms that are supposed to produce — surprise, surprise — just the results we want. We might do better just to focus simply and directly on the desired results.

  10. YANKEE conservatism – – check out a great read
    Amazon.com: The Yankee Problem: An American Dilemma (The …

  11. Nothing to disagree with here but I think it a waste of time to talk about what “conservatives” believe. Since Hoover there haven’t enough of them who weren’t complete liars to matter. Maybe the slobbering over HW has me in this mood.

    The full quote from HW Bush’s famous campaign speech:

    “The truth is, this election is about the beliefs we share, the values we honor, the principles we hold dear…. I’m the one who won’t raise taxes. My opponent now says he’ll raise them as a last resort, or a third resort. When a politician talks like that, you know that’s one resort he’ll be checking into. My opponent won’t rule out raising taxes. But I will. The Congress will push me to raise taxes, and I’ll say no, and they’ll push, and I’ll say no, and they’ll push again, and I’ll say to them, “Read my lips: no new taxes.”

    Catch that line? “…the principles we hold dear…”?”
    https://spectator.org/34257_speaker-george-hw-bush/

    It sounded great, won Bush the election in a landslide – and was a total lie. He immediately threw out the Reagonites and raised taxes. Since then, conservatism has been the same bait and switch. They run on small government then govern like FDR. They don’t believe in anything except a lucrative career in government.

  12. In all likelihood the only major challenge to neoliberalism, in a decade’s time, will be some new mutation of Leninism. Corbyn is the obvious example from the UK. Whites that survive will have to mimic the diaspora, and the first behavior of the mimic will have to be turning a savage new population against the existing managerial class.

  13. “While it will never reach the point where all opinion is assimilated, the allowable differences are now so small they cannot be seen by the naked eye.”

    Scratching my head on this one. Normally, if allowable differences become very small, then non-allowable differences become numerous, large, and, well, diverse. Exactly the kind of place where a new paradigm can appear. But maybe that is what you are saying (in the following paragraph).

    I don’t know about equating libertarianism with Rand’s objectivism. Didn’t she herself deny that? I suppose objectivism might be considered the cartoon version of libertarianism…

    Anyway, what is liberalism, conservatism and libertarianism? The historical answer is amazingly convoluted:
    https://mises.org/library/myth-old-right

    Interesting quote from that article:

    “The U.S. had the sixteenth largest army in the world” in 1932, William Manchester reports, “putting it behind, among others, Czechoslovakia, Turkey, Spain, Romania, and Poland.” And most of those in uniform “were committed to desk work, patrolling the Mexican border…

    What a novel idea – that a tiny army would nevertheless be sufficient to patrol the Mexican border.

  14. Pre-enlightenment is the new post-enlightenment.

    Chambers was quite the visionary – he saw all of this coming long before his contemporaries. But the farther back you go, the more people you’ll find who knew the score. Filmer and Carlyle are good places to start for literate people who want to break from the intellectual prison of Locke and Mill.

  15. I like the term “neoliberalism” to describe our current bipartisan ruling regime, but I’ve struggled to describe it. I think I have a good conceptualization after reading this post. Make a Venn diagram, one circle for Mittens Rmoney and one for Hillary Rotherham Klinton. Wherever they overlap, there is your neoliberalism: open borders; free trade; bankster capitalism; blind support for Israel; subversion, prison, or wars for any who resist Globo-gayplex.

    From a distance, it appears as one solid circle. On closer inspection you find trifling issues which really aren’t that important. That’s where you find our Tweedle-Dee/Tweedle Dum political debates. Hillary wants your guns. Mittens will let you keep a .38 and a duck gun. Mittens is less enthusiastic about a woman’s right to kill, but his SCROTUS justices will be trucons who believe in the sacred “Stare Decisis” and will never touch abortion (or affirmative action, or any issue of free association because “muh precedents”). The NPC’s on both sides think the handful of issues they’re allowed to argue actually matter to the TPTB. As they squabble we slide further into the belly of the Beast.

  16. The first step toward a break is identity politics. It’s already dogma for the neoliberals, depending on whose identity. We can see the effectiveness by the hysteria when identity is claimed by the “wrong” group.

    Start with identity and everything follows: culture, politics, and economics.

    The beginning of the argument is simple. I refuse to apologize for being white.

    • The problem is convincing the Trump-supporting people that we (whites) have to embrace identity politics. I really don’t think the vast majority of them have been presented with our solid argument that “all other ethnic groups play it, and will crush the whites due to demographic force if whites don’t play it.”

      Instead they’re listening to guys like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Charlie Kirk, Dinesh D’Souza, Tomi Lahren, etc. all denounce identity politics, and push feel-good color-blind MLK crap. Because our argument is so good, I don’t think it’s that difficult to convert these good-intentioned patriotic MAGA folks. The difficulty is that there’s so many of them, and not enough of us.

    • Identity Europa looks pretty interesting, and soundly based i.e. not crazy. I’m thinking of sending them some money.

  17. We’re living in a period of extreme crisis, where ideology is irrelevant, because the only important question is a biological one. The White race is on the brink of extinction, at the point of being snuffed out and exterminated by the mudslide and its (((gleeful enablers))). If this extinction is not prevented and reversed, nothing else matters. The only thing conservatives need to conserve, and I do mean the ONLY thing, is the White nations. How this comes about doesn’t really matter, so long as the effort is successful.

    • Most conservative voters are rather insular by nature, rarely taking interest in the problems of the outside world. While condemned as boorish by our cosmopolitan overclass, I don’t see what is wrong with “staying in your lane”. So the Middle American voter has to be suckered into NATO and the endless wars, told they are unpatriotic if they think otherwise. This is what Buckley post-war conservatism sees as its role. Stopping the Right from returning to its natural isolationism.

      • I absolutely hate it when people use the word “isolationism”.

        It’s been used over and over again by the lefties and the people on the right who just can’t seem to get it thru their thick constant sticking their noses into everybody else’s business heads – that minding your own goddamn business is not “isolationism”.

        To a person that feels it’s their purpose in life to rule over and tell everybody else what to do – apparently NOT being that kind of person is “isolationism”.

        If the right is going to make any progress – it’s time to start calling out the a-holes who keep trying to pull that stunt.

        I paid quite a bit of attention to the things Ron Paul said when he ran for President. As soon as he started talking about minding our own damn business and fixing our own problems HERE – instead of galavanting around the world shoving our globohomo values down everybody else’s throats – the screaming about “isolationism!!” started.

        When I see a person use the word “isolationist” as far as I am concerned it marks them as the enemy – in the same way as using any of the phobe words does (homophobe, islamophobe, etc).

    • In a nutshel yes. The fact is “Conservatism” never conserved anything. It was at best a front for rapacious corporations to ass rape the country and people while convincing people it was for the common good and progress,

  18. There is an enormous gulf between what my neighbors here in a deep, deep red corner of already deep red Indiana think conservatism is versus what our “leaders” think conservatism is. If you ask them what it means to be conservative, you will get a long list of talking points (pro-life, traditional marriage, smaller government, etc.).

    How many of the pundits and politicians that we call “conservative” hold any of the same positions that they do? For many years we assumed peopled like Bill Kristol, Glenn Beck and Jonah Goldberg were supposed to be on our side but in reality they are just in this to sell crappy books and support a lavish lifestyle without actually working. We haven’t had a recognizably conservative President since Reagan left office, and even that is debatable, and we have had 14 years of Republican Presidents since. Conservatism is just a racket these days for people like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck to get retirees and truck drivers wound up while never, ever crossing the line. I used to get angry when people on this side said it but the first order of business really is going to be dismantling Conservatism, Inc. before anything else can get done.

  19. I read through the comments on the 2017 Pinochet post referenced at the end of yesterday’s thread. I had such optimism! The midterms solved that. The Trump/Maga thing is not a sea change, for us it is the Tiananmen Square, stretched out. Trump is going for some tariffs, tax cuts, and a border wall, all of which will be quickly reversed in a few years. Net result, zero. Vote harvesting will see to that. Like Obama’s followers, who read much more into him than was actually there, some of us, including me, have done the same with Trump. Mea culpa. Like the students in China, we have outed ourselves and will have nothing to show for it.

    What we, and the Chinese students, do have, is an acute understanding of the opposition we face, and how we can only succeed over time by going underground, and letting things above ground take their course. Because we are now a nation of dindus and gimmees, the time frame for failure is rather short.

    One other thing, the “other side” is one charismatic leader short of reviving the German experience. A heightened sense of ostracizing the designated “other” (which is us) is in place, the disarming of the civilians will proceed, and broken windows, burning books, and bashing over the head are now sanctioned, as long as the right people are doing it to the wrong people. Look at photos of Mark Warner and that Stalwell guy, and imagine them in SS hats. Easy to see how it goes from here. If somebody gets the presidency and decides to go game on, we are the Jews in the whole thing. Go deep underground, and take as many of them out as possible, should they decide to take you out.

  20. There was the other side of the problem, there was no “The Conservative case for a large, nuclear family”. Or “for not disrupting stable small towns”.

    I see complaints that small town newspapers are either disappearing or are just being run by very remote hedge funds so aren’t responsive to anything but profit. But somehow unlike factory workers or coal miners, no one is telling them they need U-Haul. (I’m waiting for NR to either become the captive toady of someone like the Koch brothers, like Cato is, or disappears).

    NR and Conservatism Inc benefited for a while from the duopoly – sort of like Coke v.s. Pepsi. When you didn’t have the internet, there were some small specialty publications (RC and Faygo), but mostly you had one or the other side, and until the end of the cold war, they limited their purges.

    When the internet first democratized information and opinion and reporting, they were doomed. Right now, Big Data is trying to stuff the Genie back into the bottle, but it won’t fit

    I read a complaint (by a clueless elite lefty) that Facebook was causing the Paris trouble. No, it just lets them organize. If Facebook cut them off, they would move to another platfomr en masse.

    But what comes next? A return to Christendom or a Dark Age. You can see it with the progression – Socialism wants wealth without freedom, but it doesn’t work, so you trace back to libertarianism. But that doesn’t work without a culture (all the AnCap security/insurance stuff is as much nonsense as the Socialist 5 year plans to build factories and railroads). Culture gets you to (the greater) alt-Right (Vox Day’s description). But that too isn’t quite the root you need to recover. It involves Graeco-Roman law and philosophy, but also Christendom, and even that only Europeans seem to work, and mostly Northern Europeans (Why did the Euro Bonds having trouble come from Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal, with Ireland as the outlier – known as PIIGS).

  21. I’m surprised that you didn’t pick up the obvious parallel- Conservatives bear the same relationship to Liberals as Blacks do to Whites: They just follow them around.

  22. It should also never be forgotten that Buckley Conservatism was, overwhelmingly, fixated on the idea of opposing the USSR and its frightening expansionism. Domestic issues were never more than a distraction – for example, both Barry Goldwater and WFB opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but pretty much abandonded this opposition when the Commies started to score propaganda points with it. Buckley Conservatism had a good reason for being, but it lost it after 1991, and NR should have just declared victory and gone home, leaving the field free for a new kind of conservatism to arise, more in tune with the needs of the times. But of course, there was a lot of money at stake, so this didn’t happen. Kind of like what happened with the charity set up to fight polio called “The March of Dimes”. Polio is long gone, at least in the US, but, of course, the charity is still with us. Old Cold War institutions like NR, NATO, and USAID all need to go – they are about as relative to current problems as the Freedmans’ Bureau, or the Continental Congress.

    • “It should also never be forgotten that Buckley Conservatism was, overwhelmingly, fixated on the idea of opposing the USSR and its frightening expansionism.”

      Thanks for the laugh. Buckley was a CIA tool, a believer in big government and the expansion of the American Empire.

      Which came first, the Warsaw Pact or NATO?

      If you were frightened by “frightening expansionism” your fears were directed at the wrong target. By means of CIA operations like Mockingbird.

      • You’re wrong. Buckley was a tool, CIA or otherwise, but Communism was and is a muderous expansionist philosophy. Some things are true, even though Buckley said them. The attempt to whitewash communism by some on the Alt-Right, just because the US was expansionsit as well, never ceases to amaze me.

        • The US foreign policy establishment spent the first half of the Cold War more concerned with dismantling European colonialism than containing the USSR. A futile propaganda effort for the “hearts and minds” of Third World intellectuals. We’d have been better off telling Nehru and Gandhi to take their chances with Communism, since they hated European Christians so much.

  23. Every living thing evolves over time, including the macro manifestations of social behavior (culture, politics, economic systems, etc.). Eventually, what persists is what works best in a particular environment, and changing environments motivate changing evolutionary patterns. Today, our dominant environment of affluence and excessive abundance is motivating an evolution toward parasitism and its handmaiden, the extinction of fitness selection. Instead of purging the outliers of the species, we are festering in the cancer of their unbridled growth. That is the underlying phenomenon that is killing us, not a failure of political doctrine.

    • Well, I’ve argued somewhere around here that whites are heading down a dead end like the Panda. The drop in fertility, especially among the ruling classes, coincides with material plenty and the collapse in traditional community-wide belief systems. This appears to be true of East Asians too. Just look at Japan and Korea. Even China is showing signs of the rich man’s disease. The assumption is plenty is the root of the collapse, but I’m not convinced. Plenty is a relative thing. In other ages, people were living relatively well, but still reproduced.

      • It’s a spiritual problem, at the very core. I know that there is sometimes some friction between the Christian and non-Christian in “our thing.” This is one of those issues that materialism comes up short on, but we have an answer. Failure to reproduce is both rebellion and judgement.

        • Right, it has to do with purpose of existence, as in the Huxley dystopia yesterday. Religion provides a purpose to life, once you have found the leisure time to contemplate it. When you stare into the meaningless maelstrom, you jump in! Figuratively.

        • I have been a lifelong practicing Christian and would like nothing better than to pray our way out of this mess, but that’s about as likely as voting our way back to sanity.

        • I agree with Red

          Materialism andit’s off-shoot Consumerism are not replacements for a inner life, meaning and sense of community. In fact the former two are societal poisons. And eventually any society that adopts them loses the will to live.

      • Red Foreman is right, it is a spiritual, not material problem. No belief in something transcendent and you get maximum hedonism in the here and now and no offspring. Because offspring cost big time money, time, and effort to raise.

        If you look at the white sub-populations with high birth rates, almost all are religiously orthodox/fundy/fanatical. They have hope for tomorrow, in the afterlife, and for their children’s children.

        • I agree. It’s rather simple: The more “freedom” you give women (or with divorce laws, power) the less they choose to get married or then have kids.
          Lower fertility doesn’t correlate so much with wealth as with female independence, which may go with wealth (Japan) or not (Peru).

      • Well, I spawned three sons, raised them, and put them all through college (at great expense I might add). It’s not too late for you to get started. Trump was making babies well into his 50s.

        • Trump is rich. VERY rich. Tony Randall married a 25 year old woman when he was 75 and had two kids with her when he was 77 and 78 years old. Tony Randall is also quite a bit wealthier than the average person.

          I am 54 – I just had my first son a week ago. It required medical intervention (on the woman’s side of things – my stuff was tested and worked just fine). Doing it the way I did it was EXPENSIVE.

          Using people like Trump, Randall – or even me as examples – is ludicrous because they are such outliers that they don’t apply to the circumstances of probably 95% of the total population.

          You are correct – it is THEORETICALLY never too late to get started, but it still takes a willing woman for most men to produce a baby, and it seems “society” ( or the village as Hillary Clinton would call it) – has been distinctly uncooperative for a great many men in accomplishing this over the last few decades.

          There’s a big difference between theory – and reality.

          Using Trump – or Randall as some sort of example , strikes me as the kind of theoretical example favored by global warming alarmists.

      • There also weren’t billions of people on planet Earth and most of the population wasn’t urban , its 80% in the US and growing

        The US in say 1920 the last time population was really growing other than the baby boom bubble was 100 million, less than 1/3 the population and it was almost entirely in small towns or rural areas

        Humans like every other animal has a physical and a social carrying capacity and the higher IQ specimens have for the most part exceeded theirs

        Its healthy and natural for the population to decline and when the numbers are reduced, the social stressors from modernity are lower and the complexity lower , it will self correct, probably at 1/2 to 1/3 of current numbers

        You are not going to get free social capital or to use religious memes to hack the human ecology, the population will decline . Its a good thing.

        The only issues is percentage of ethnicity, because of the Middle East/African issue , a population bloom like algae the European population ratio is off.

        It should be around 25% and its now around 10% or so. That needs to be corrected though in no way do numbers overall.

        Humanity could do well with 1/10 the current numbers and swimmingly with 1/5 and could sustain them

      • Demographics don’t lie, this is the issue, all else is just sound and fury signifying nothing. My hypothesis is that it’s a failure of white males on so many levels in that they failed to maintain control of women. Women have to be excluded from the workforce and put back into the home having babies and raising children. Until you figure out how to make that happen you’re putting the cart before the horse. Some countries that are majority white have started to make attempts to address that issue and, if they succeed, the rest will follow for them. These countries still aren’t going far enough, clearly the franchise needs to be limited for instance and some kind of fixing of the failure of spiritual values.
        I see nothing in USA going the right way nor anyone with practical solutions to address the issue. The globalists have an unlimited reserve of fully compliant replacement consumer units to inject into any nation. state. Let me be clear: there are no technical or operational fixes, this is a spiritual battle yet everyone here appears to imaginine drawing some lines on a map will fix things.

        • I must politely disagree that its a spiritual malaise in that with a population of a a quarter billion Whites in the US alone we in no way shape or form need more.

          We need less of them and a change of leadership but allowing population to decline at a natural pace is a good thing

          The human population will come down one way or another, there is not going to be an escape velocity not a colonial effort. We have overshot our physical carrying capacity

          In the end if we allow population to decline while keep a homogeneous population this means less of our kind need starve to death or die of plagues or violence over resources

          Even if somehow we manage to get past the material limits, human happiness will be higher with less people

          Half of Europe’s malaise is caused by being choc a bloc with cities
          Oregon is growing miserable and crowded with 1/15th the population density of Germany!

  24. Our system of government is broken. It is a mathematical certainty that it will fail. The debt accrued due to universal suffrage will come due and either the world will face hyperinflation or default. Either one of the options requires a hard reset.
    Can we have our revolution before the collapse? It’s possible I suppose, but I’d call it extremely unlikely. The “right”, “alt right” or whatever you want to call them needs to position themselves for what comes next and not get too caught up in the vain hope of fixing what is. What do the Brits call it? A shadow government.

    • We are a nation of “dindus” and “gimmes” now. Obama blew that cover. Our best option is to let the rest of it take itself down, and then pick up the pieces in the right way.

  25. I think the Alternative Right has a satisfactory intellectual foundation—more satisfactory than any of the others that you mention—Marxism, conservatism, libertarianism, this ism that ism, ism ism ip! The foundation is simply that race is real and that the USA is a country founded by and for persons of white euaropean descent, and moreover that we are the only ones capable of sustaining and advancing western civilization. What is the difference between alternative right and white nationalism, that is a good question for analysis, but I would say that alternative right is less extreme in that it allows for the presence of minority groups of nonwhites who are committed to the maintainance and upholding of white civilization, not its humiliation and marginalization.

    • I mean, the foundations are simple, common sense, so they don’t require large volumes and arcane language to expound. Political ideologies such as you discuss are complex smoke screens and misdirections, possible compromises of opportunity, which veil simple, primal interests. For example, with neoconservatism: if you agree to attack the Middle East, maintain virtual open borders, we will support your bid for low taxes on the wealthy, less affirmative action, and rhetoric against gay marriage and abortion. This could be seen as a compromise of opportunity between the old Anglo elite, your bushes and Cheneys, with the new Jewish elite. But take a hard look—the gains of one group, based in race and land are real, while the other, based in theology and funny money that could be made into confetti overnight, are transitory. Somebody got neoconed!

    • The problem with the alt-right is it is not really a philosophy or even a coherent set of ideas. It’s mostly the personal brand of Richard Spencer. He’s out advocating for things like the universal basic income and a debt jubilee for millennials now. How you get that from his arguments for a supranational white ethnostate is unclear. It’s why they were so easily co-opted by the WN 1.0 guys. They had no natural defense, because they had not worked out why they believe what they believe and the implications of it.

      I’m not trashing Spencer or the alt-right. I just think it ran its course. There’s a lessons to be plucked from that failed experiment.

      • The alt-right was the movement it needed to be, when it needed to be it. It may have been clumsy and excessive, but it finally put white identity politics in the Overton window and on the map.

        While the alt-right as a movement appears moribund, the zeitgeist that spawned it seems to be growing in leaps and bounds. I hear things spoken routinely that no one would have had the balls to say five years ago, including from the President of the United States himself.

        The alt-right may be over, but I’m not sure I’d call it a failure. It at least got the ball out on the field. Successor movements will have to get it to the goal post. The alt-right didn’t need to become an institution, it just needed to go bang once and get plenty of attention. While it may have ended less elegantly than it should have, it accomplished what it needed to.

        • The alt-right as an internet phenomenon was quite effective at reinvigorating race realism. It’s a good lesson that even the most bitter pills can go down with a little honey. All those funny guys making racist and irreverent jokes did more good than a library of books from the paleocons and paleo-libertarians. They still exist, but mostly confined to Gab now, as the social media platforms have purged anyone with a sense of humor.

          I think the alt-right as a legitimate political force was a bust. Some of it was bad choices. Some of it bad people, of course. A lot of the criticism of Spencer is unfair, but he did step on his dick a lot. The term alt-right has become entwined with his personal brand and who knows where that is going now. He seems to think he can become a WASP Bernie Bro. Maybe. I’m skeptical though.

          • I’m not so sure the term ‘alt right’ is totally entwined with Spencer, at least from where I stand.
            When I explain the concept of alt / dissident right to friends overseas or other non-red-pilled who are willing to shut up long enough to listen, I refer to myself alternately as either alt or dissident right (depending on how I am feeling that day).

            For me, it’s a definition that refers to “Right” but outside of the mainstream box of the R – D framework.

            Maybe I’m using it “wrong,” but it seems the best definition still, today, for what we all seem to be adhering to, in varying degrees and flavors.

      • I recently heard Richard Spencer supporting a universal basic income on JF Gariepy’s “the Public Space” show. He also regularly brings up the economic issues that Ocasio-Cortez talks about, thinking that the “alt-right” needs to make these issues part of the platform in order to appeal to young people. These are interesting topics to debate, but I’m at the point where I don’t know if Spencer is serious or if he’s just being provocative.

        • A stated goal to appeal to the youth in a democratic system is one of the surest signs of a political amateur. It’s all the proof we need that Spencer isn’t serious. He might believe that he’s serious, but he’s just putting a racial spin on Conservatism Inc.’s failed strategy of appeasement.

      • Might the lesson simply be that Spencer is a bad politician? Coherent sets of ideas are the first to go when politicians have their first taste of success. Lenin and Mao got movements named after them, but for all the formidable technobabble they both boil down to “do what you have to to sell your movement to the rubes; retcon it with The Scriptures afterwards.” This is why I think Trump is doomed to fail — there’s Trump, but there’s no “Trumpism.” He doesn’t need to go write a manifesto (though it couldn’t hurt), but he absolutely has to get himself a movement, with symbols, chants, dress code, the works. (The Left has all this in spades; getting people not to notice the utter uniformity — i.e. actual uniforms — of the herd of independent minds is one of their greatest triumphs)

        • A few years ago I was in a room with a lot of alt-right people. Spencer was there. The thing that struck me was how everyone talked about their social media strategy and media strategy. The alt-right was an effective social media movement because ultimately, it was about getting attention on social media. I think that was the undoing of the alt-right. Think about the social media personalities that have come and gone over the last few years. It became a bug light for attention whores like Milo, McInnes, Cernovich, et al.

          That said, you’re right about Trump. There’s no organized movement underneath him.

          • To me, that’s the crux. There’s no home base for Whites who wish to stand up for their people, even if that simply means demanding that Whites not be persecuted.

            If you speak out, you can lose your job, career, friends and, possibly, family. What Whites need is a network of other Whites to back you up if you get fired for opposing immigration or supporting freedom of association.

            We need businessmen who will hire the fired executive. We need think tanks that will hire academics banished from universities for speaking the truth. We need media outlets to hire writers. We needed legal defense funds to sue anyone and anything that goes after Whites. We need political organizations to push our cause and to provide money to candidates.

            We need an alternative infrastructure.

            That won’t happen chatting about things on the Web. That can only happen by people meeting in person and trusting that they can rely on each other.

            The dissident right need to move from the Internet to the real world.

          • Citizen … ,

            Yes. We need to be talking up and performing the kinds of specific, practical actions that you describe. Never mind the sterile ideological manifestos and theorizing.

            If the dissident right can “move from the Internet to the real world” it won’t matter what the movement is called and the quest for genuine leaders (as opposed to media “personalities”) will get a jolt of energy.

          • Whites continue to believe that the overall society is “their” society. We’re all Americans, right?

            Wrong.

            We are now just one group among many. We need to create a White community within the larger society. No need to wait for a revolution or financial collapse. This is something that we can do now.

            (Btw, if civil unrest or a financial collapse ever happened, having an already formed White community would be hugely helpful. If they don’t happen, we’d still be on our way to carving out our own spot in whatever the United States is heading toward.)

            But it’s going to be incredibly difficult. This is what Spencer should have doing these past couple of years. Quietly working to help form White or European-American student groups, business associations, think tanks, community groups. (Instead, he pranced around looking for attention.)

            These organizations should bend over backward to not appear White nationalist. Never use that rhetoric. They should have the exact same rationale and purpose of any Asian American, Jewish, Black or Hispanic group. Use the left’s words against them.

            When they call the group racist, demand that they disband every ethnic/religious organization.

            It’ll be hard at first, but once you get just a few of these groups with just a few members, the stigma will start to dissipate and the groups will grow, which, of course, makes them stronger and thus more difficult to attack.

            The vast majority of Whites will stick their nose up at these groups. Fuck em. We only 5% or 10% of Whites to join in to make this work. After the ball starts rolling, other Whites will join. I’d suspect that ~5% to 10% of Whites really hate what’s going on. Another 30% to 50% would love to join in after it’s safe.

            The rest can – and will – go to hell.

          • There’s no “home base for Whites who wish to stand up for their people” because “Whites” aren’t a monolith and conflating race with ideology always fails. WN 1.0 is retarded. Racial imperialism is retarded.

            Whites aren’t unified. A solid 45% of white people and more than half of single white women reliably vote for the left. It’s an interesting piece of statistical trivia that white Americans are the only group with a right-leaning majority, but that information is utterly useless in America right now.

          • I agree with what you say. Indeed, “Whites” may be too broad a category. But you have to start somewhere. Start pushing for groups that will look out for Whites and see where that leads.

            Regardless, if Whites somehow survive that period of history, the herd will have been severely culled. I wouldn’t be surprised if half of Whites disappear through not having kids or breeding with other groups.

            Fine.

            As HBD Chick points out, odds are pretty good that NW Europeans had a lot of their clannishness bred out of them. That worked for a while, but it’s a huge negative now. That needs to be reversed. It won’t be easy or pretty.

            That’s why I said it would start slowly and painfully (and it might not work at all), but there are Whites out there who want to be with their own.

            Maybe the way groups form isn’t some general “White” label. Maybe Southern Whites coalesce as a group. Maybe Christian Whites come
            together. Whatever. Who cares.

            Let’s just get the ball rolling.

            I simply believe that we need to move past a Web movement or relying on people like Spencer. We can do something now instead of waiting around for some Red Dawn scenario.

          • Neither “whites” nor hyphenated-whites is a useful foundation on which to build a movement or nation. Most of the people who advocate for this do so knowing full well that they aren’t part of the posterity that the early English and Dutch settlers were talking about. They want to invent a tribe that still includes them but not the coloreds and Jews they hate. That’s why white nationalism can’t succeed; it’s not identitarian, merely exclusionary. It defines itself not by what it is, but by what it isn’t. That’s the same reason Progressivism is fracturing. An identity based *only* on exclusion will always purity-spiral and then break down.

            WNs are binary thinkers, just like SJWs. They see “60% of white men” and think “all white men”. They see “85% of black men” or “70% of mestizos” and think “all blacks and browns”. It’s a horrendous way to build a coalition. Try flipping the numbers around and you’ll realize that 15% of black men and 30% of hispanics support you – that’s literally tens of millions – while 40% of whites will fight you to the death – that’s about 120 million. “White” anything means that in America, you lose by numbers and by attrition, especially if you can’t manage your optics and 80-90% of your white target audience won’t back you anyway.

            That’s not an argument for civic nationalism, by the way – just understanding the difference between implicitly vs. exclusively white, and the difference between explicitly racial identity vs. class identity that uses race as a wedge.

          • Your observations are spot on. Nevertheless, I am a white nationalist and here’s why:

            First, a racial identity can be imposed by an enemy. For example, blacks in the USA, no matter which parts of Africa they descended from or how mixed they are, identify as a group because of slavery. Similarly, the disparate white groups will be forged into a group by the accusation of “white privilege.”

            Second, a white ethnostate is not bound to accept the whites who reject white identity.

          • That’s another option. Like most people, I’ve narrowed it down to Eastern Europe or the Derb-inspired Uruguay.

          • Social media does that, doesn’t it? People mistake upvotes and retweets for goods in themselves (the same way the Left mistook “kids reading our webpage” for “kids voting for us” back in the early Aughts). An effective leader has to be more or less an attention whore — he just needs to *do something* with that attention, other than “buy my products.”

          • That’s where intent comes into play. The leader commands attention, because it is necessary to his leadership. The media star chases attention, because it is necessary to his stardom. The narcotic of minor celebrity fuels the latter.

          • If Trump had a party of Trumpism with loyalists in the military then a coup could be feasible. His Levers of Power speech on the campaign run in Palm Beach, Florida nearly made me a true believer myself. It really seemed like he knew that he was a strong man prepared to take down the corrupt powers that be. If he would have pivoted from those anti-globalist speeches and had a party to take power I’d be the first one to run for my rifle and drive to DC to hang traitors. I’d even have a few extra rifles for you, my friends.

        • Trumpism is the traditional Republican platform, but with border enforcement and fighting back hard against the media. Trump has moved the Overton window by showing Republicans they don’t have to fear a brown backlash or the NY Times. If Romney had used this approach, and meant it, he probably would have won. My depression is that the Republican party will not learn this lesson, and will revert to the same open borders, chamber of commerce, fear of the media pussies they have been since Reagan. Thinking back to the history of Bush, Dole, Bush 2.0, McCain, Romney and imagining more of the same, makes me want to just move to Mexico now and get it over with.

          • There it is. Hillary Clinton ran an absolutely terrible campaign in all ways but one: “I’m With Her.” You need an actual personality to build a Cult of Personality, but had it been anyone other than Hillary, that slogan was a killer. Why doesn’t the GOP do any of this? Why doesn’t Trump? “Make America Great Again” was good for the campaign, but to establish “Trumpism” (or just old school Republicanism), you need something personal. What would “I’m With Him” even mean? That’s a serious messaging problem.. “Because he drives the Left nuts” is a great reason for me to follow his Twitter feed, but not enough to get me to go get out the vote for him, much less do… anything else.

      • Anybody who advocates for universal basic income is #1) a moron, and #2) a leftist.

        I haven’t really followed Richard Spencer much – but if he is for UBI, that tells me all I need to know about him.

        As far as I am concerned the Western world got where it is (was?) – because people WORKED. All those fancy buildings, cathedrals, infrastructure – etc – didn’t build itself. And despite the blatherings of BLM and it’s ilk – it wasn’t built by slaves either. It was built by white MEN , who worked their asses off. So much so that many white men will just work themselves into the ground even though the evidence piles up all around them that their work is enabling their enemies.

        That’s why I am FIRMLY of the opinion that : you simply cannot have socialism of ANY form combined with diversity and working white men. It’s simply a formula for failure. Many white men (Japanese men are known to be like this as well) – will work themselves to death. This is something Jordan Peterson has pointed out. You start adding diversity to that – and the natural sluggish behavior of much of the diversity now becomes subsidized.

        It’s a perfect recipe for failure.

        It’s why I trace much of the demise of the West to the notion that you can get something for nothing (socialism).

        Work or die keeps people honest.

      • The problem with the alt-right is it is not really a philosophy or even a coherent set of ideas.

        That is not a bug, that’s a feature. It is why Charlottesville didn’t destroy our movement, we could drop the AR label like a pair of worn-out shoes.

      • I thought Spencer was fairly easy to read. He is promoting fabianism which is fashionably white elite politics of fifty years ago. His problem is that he is promoting it to the lower classes and he is grossly over-estimating the power of white elites to buck the diaspora status quo.

        With respect to the alt right, or dissident right even, more generally: idealism is what victors write about to justify their conquest and holdings. If the right in general is still poweless, which they are, it would behoove them not to have a positon on UBI or anything else until and unless they have decided for certain that it is or is not good for the whites and whether or not it or the promise thereof can be used to out flank enemies on the left.

  26. The Curse of Lincoln continues to dog the footsteps of Northern Conservatism. They just can’t shake his baleful influence.

  27. I think you may be misinterpreting the phenomenon we are seeing at the NRO Mr. Z. It’s the same thing going on at all the mainstream media outlets. In order to boost diving readership and ratings, ALL the mass media platforms, left and right – have been reduced to trolling their own readership to manufacture controversy. It works too: You read some inflammatory idiocy on the NRO, post a link on one of the most popular blog sites on the net, and all your loyal fans (including Yours Truly) – dutifully hie thee hence over to the NRO to see what all the stupidity is about. That is why Goldberg, Sloppy and Fwench are running the show. You were never trolling them, Z… the were trolling you. Your sin was only that you were better at it than they were. 🙂

    The liberal ragsheets do it too. There true-pink degenerate editors will deliberately post material or run a token conservative that will incense Lefty sensibilities – and every homosexual, feminist, atheist, Marxist and loon will show up for the food fight. Instant ratings, click counts, and gratified advertisers.

    I think that we are not losing to Lefty because they are smarter, faster and meaner than we are. I think we’re losing because of our inner cucks and white knights. We don’t want to take the gloves off, we don’t want to throw that punch, or fire that shot or end that relationship… and now we find ourselves in a corner with dwindling options.
    Conservatism to me is nothing more than common sense. I have no problem with what queers do in their bedrooms. I have a huge problem with what they are doing in the classroom, the washroom, and the boardroom. I have no problem with competent intelligent women in the workplace; I have huge problems with the affirmative action phonies and poseurs. Ditto for blacks and minoritiies.

    I can get along with libertarians and even liberals. I will even respect them if they reciprocate. But of course, that isn’t happening; they insist on seeing me as a threat and are psyching themselves up for a war. The sooner we see that and deal with it the better off we’ll all be.

    • At it’s root, “common sense” is really just ancient wisdom that is passed from generation to generation. That tradition added to the robustness of the species and therefore was a net benefit to all. But now, our macro social forces are proactively killing off common sense as if it was a disease, and we are all worse off because of it.

    • The naive white guy assumption is that different people will work together for their common benefit, given a chance. We have all been naive white guys at some point. I got over it.

    • Agreed on the whole clickbait thing. Sometimes I have to step back and remind myself of this, as it is easy to get caught up in the adrenaline rush of the daily doses of outrage. This takedown of Rod Dreher comes to mind.
      https://www.takimag.com/article/the_roof_korean_option_a_response_to_rod_dreher_jesse_russell/

      A choice quote from this:

      “Dreher spends his columns (often filled with more copy-and-pasted writings of other people than his own thoughts) taking his readers on an interminable emotional roller coaster back and forth between white guilt and pride in “the Western tradition” (depending on the week). Like a therapist who profits from his patients never getting better, Dreher has no real solution to any of the critiques he presents, because if he did, the drama would be over and millennial crunchy cons would not be able to share a cry with Rod over coffee and Ativan in the morning. ”

      Reading this, I realized that Dreher (as the main draw at TAC) must feel an obligation to keep the eyeballs coming back several times per day, so indeed he must always stoke outrage, much like a right-wing talk radio host, but always put any resolution way out on the distant horizon.

    • You decry what you call “cucks” and then literally in the next sentence promote cuckservatism:

      “I have no problem with what queers do in their bedrooms” (I’m OK with degeneracy and moral relativism).
      “I have no problem with competent intelligent women in the workplace” (I’m OK with feminism, just don’t let it go too far.)
      “Ditto for blacks and minoritiies.” (I’m OK with losing the country my ancestors fought for.)

      This is an excellent piece by Z because it makes clear that the new thing that is needed to replace conservatism must have at its core, an uncompromising stance towards moral absolutes. This is something that milquetoasts and losers cannot stand, an absolute line in the sand dictating what is Right and True and Good versus the forces of evil, subversion and degeneracy.

  28. It needs repeating that The Enlightenment was an Eighteenth Century phenomenon, and that it was replaced, especially on the Continent, by the Romantic Movement of the Nineteenth Century. The Romantic Movement explicitly rejected the Enlightenment ideals of individualism, reason and science and embraced feeling, intuition and oceanic submergence in a greater whole.

    All leftist movements are Romantic, and the prevailing political ideology of the West is today Romantic. Realization of that fact, and of the fact that the Enlightenment is a dead letter, is necessary to effectively oppose the leftist horror that is coming.

    The Antifas thugs in Portland and Seattle are openly threatening to kill their opponent, and the police and political establishment support them.

    • Modern art and architecture are the decadent remnants of the spent force we called “leftistm”. They are the last gasp of Romanticism.

      • Modern art and architecture were rejected by the communists. They pushed Social Realism. Operas about tractors and peasants like Khachaturian’s Gayne.

    • Portlandia is of course just Berkeley with trees..Antifa is a white/Jewish movement, basically just Bolsheviks, that has not gained any traction in minority areas, and would be very foolish to confront blacks or hispanics…

      • In their own words, An-coms say they tell Blacks/Hispanics not to join because they fear their pets would get criminal records. The claim is that white/Jewish rioters are privileged to afford lawyers (National Lawyers Guild) that help them beat the charges.

        As a propaganda point, “I’m a good white person and thereby oppose white identity politics” is a better sell than “I’m black and want to tear down white supremeists”

    • Bob S;
      I’d say Romanticism hooked up with the Enlightenment at a wine bar in Germany and spawned Marxism. Don’t forget that Marx was the proud producer of *Scientific Socialism* as a corrective for earlier failed (because unscientific) experiments in Communism aka communal living by various sects. Or so he thought.

      Also, it’s not hard to make the case that Rousseau, who considered himself part of the enlightenment, is one of the fathers of both Romanticism and Marxism.

      Point being, *both* should be rejected for their respective roles in leading to the current lunacy.

      • Indeed, Rousseau, considered himself part of the Enlightenment, but Allan Bloom (in his famous book “The Closing….”) stressed that Rousseau was a *”heretic”* (from the Enlightenment), and was thus a decisive mover in the West’s history, largely for his spurring of Marxism etc.

        Insofar as the Enlightenment birthed *capitalism*, the act of also pinning the birth of (its mega-foe) Marxism on it is, to me, rather unfair.

        • Yes. Rousseau was a transitional figure from the Enlightenment to Romanticism. But his heresies did intrigue the French Enlightenment figures (Voltaire, Diderot) and some few British (as I recall, Hume) and of course reached full flower in Germany. Luckily the US founders stuck mostly with Locke, Montesquieu, Smith etc. The tug of Rousseau’s heresies was felt mostly by Jefferson who was thank goodness mostly ignored when it came time to design the post revolution government. Thus the US didn’t go Full Continental until He Who Must Not Be Named drove the most energetic of the 20th Century post Enlightenment thinkers to our shores, where, lacking native predators, they have flourished, replacing our Enlightenment liberalism with the Managerial State.

          Or something like that.

      • “I’d say Romanticism hooked up with the Enlightenment at a wine bar in Germany”

        Pretty close. Lenin hung out in Zurich near the first Dada venue called Cabaret Voltaire.

        Were dadaists socialists? Lenin, who hung out at a place next to Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, never gave them any commissions after the revolution. I get the feeling he didn’t like Naum Gabo very much.

        Certain German expressionists such as Emil Nolde were originally accepted by Goebbels and Alois Schardt, director of the Nationalgalerie in Berlin. But Hitler, in 1934, made it clear that “medievalist expressionism” was out. This, even after Nolde, Mies Van der Rohe, Erich Heckel, Ernst Balach and others signed a call for loyalty to the Fuhrer earlier that year.

      • “Also, it’s not hard to make the case that Rousseau, who considered himself part of the enlightenment, is one of the fathers of both Romanticism and Marxism.”

        Expressionism is considered to be a reaction to Dada, and therefore Romantic, i.e., both individualist and anti-tradition but one super intellectual snob and the other angst-ridden and prole.

    • bob, a really good start!
      When you say that “the Enlightenment is a dead letter”, do you mean this in a philosophical sense, or only in a Realpolitik sense?
      I’d consider a dropping of the philosophical achievements of the Enlightenment (of, say, Machiavelli, Newton, or Montesquieu) to be quite a mistake, until their insights can be incorporated into the utterly necessary challenge to Romanticism.

    • “All leftist movements are Romantic”

      So are anti-romantic like Dada. Dadaism is basically emptiness and irony. It is the dominant modernist movement today with Marcel Duchamp as the patron saint.

      Were the Nazarenes leftist?

    • “The Romantic Movement explicitly rejected the Enlightenment ideals of individualism, reason and science and embraced feeling, intuition and oceanic submergence in a greater whole.”

      The Enlightenment created Frankenstein! Mary Shelley’s mother is considered to be the first feminist.

  29. Oh yeah one other thing. Atlas Shrugged is softcore p***. That was definitely one of the reasons I read it three times before I was 20

    • As a teenager, I heard lots of good things about Rand. When I started reading the Fountainhead, I expected to be swept away by its undeniable truth. Then I hit the rape scene. “Wait, this guy is the hero?” How can a rapist be the hero?

      (Much later I would see that Ayn revealed a side of female nature to which I was blind.)

  30. In a pluralistic society I don’t see your proposal coming about. Unless you can figure out how a small elite of new rightists can govern over the various new nations formed from the old America.

    My new country “Heartland” is a good start, formed from the former American midwest states. (Apologies to the 1980s Amerika tv series).

    • Demography is destiny..That’s why the Globalists have been dumping non-whites in the US for the last 53 years, and at an accelerating pace..No conservative Western nation can survive with 30-40% minorities…They have to go back, but Americans won’t face that truth until catastrophe far worse than the Great Depression is upon us,

        • This.

          But I’m also skeptical of any solution that doesn’t involve metaphysics. They took our religion before they took our lands.

          • The US is among the most Christian nations in the developed world with up to half the people claiming the attend church

            We also have I don’t know how many other religions out there

            Lack of metaphysics is not the problem nor will anything be solved by a return to that Old Tyme Religion unless it ends up Wicca which seems to be the fastest growing one right now

      • “I have a dream ….. of millions of F150 pickups with lawn equipment heading South.”

        When the Free Shit stops most will leave. Won’t get rid of all of them, but most. Best example is the current caravaners down Mexico way. When the situation got dicey and the tear gas flowed a good many of them called it quits. All but a 100 or so die hards will remain in a couple of months.

        • California will stay a mixed culture I suspect but most of the people here speak English and work and have been here for a long while.

          You can force them out if you like but its not going to be easy.

      • I don’t know the whole answer, but this must be part of it: The actual, verifiable truth is cognitive abilities are genetic, whites about 100 IQ average and blacks at 85 average (American Blacks). Mexico averages 90 and Central America 70-80. Whites Will always dominate a free society. Any new country simply cannot allow the one-man-one-vote principal or you get tyranny of the low IQ.

    • Forming a land-locked country surrounded by blue-hive enemies doesn’t really sound like a formula for a bright and long lasting future.

      I see an awful lot of people on the right going with the “new nation in the heartland” premise – and at the same time spouting the “demographics are destiny” tagline……… but I think they’re forgetting one MAJOR thing:

      Geography is destiny too. Probably more-so than demographics in many cases.

      People who have their hearts set on a white nation in the heartland – had better start thinking that shit out a little more thoroughly IMHO.

        • Sure about that? Texas is on the razor edge of becoming blue. We are tomorrow’s California, I think, a once red state flipping all the way over.

          I’m kind of with Carlsdad on this one. The parasite of leftism needs to feed on a host, that host is what Nixon called the Silent Majority. Even if it isn’t the majority in actuality.

          What will happen, if that happened is we will be surrounded on all sides by rotting failing nation states. Because they need someone to loot, the other side will not let us peacefully leave and we’re also forgetting that we are too mixed in.

          If my information is correct, Trump lost Austin, Texas but actually won Staten Island (“New York values”).

          We have to be actually realistic about our chances. Heartland America is not some utopia. We’re basically weak.

          • Assuming that in any future reorganization the state boundries will remain intact. In Texas, the county red-blue schism is stark. It’s likely to remain that way, with red areas remaining red except any near the border and around urban areas. Continuing that example, Texas hasn’t always looked like the current “Lone Star” configuration, geographically.

          • The whole premise of a white nation in the heartland just seems like another iteration of the run run run away behavior displayed by so many on right for so long. Instead of putting their heads down and digging into the real problems and trying to figure out ways to defeat their enemies – it’s just one long train of constant “run and avoid the issues” type behavior.

            Show me a landlocked nation that hasn’t had major issues with their enemies dictating the terms of their very existence.

            Go look at the history of WW1 and WW2 for crying out loud. Look at the success of the German Navy vs the British Navy. Even though Germany is nation with ocean ports – they still have MAJOR issues bringing their naval power to bear on the British because of WHERE their ports were located.

            The longstanding Russian fight to retain a warm water naval base – is another good instructional in how weather and geography dictate your power as a nation.

            If you think you’re going to let the blue hives own the coasts while you inhabit the heartland peacefully – I think you’re freaking delusional.

            Stop thinking you’re going to click your red shoes together and find a solution in running away to Kansas – wipe that shit from your mind. That way you will have mental power leftover to start considering some REAL solutions.

          • Kansas? That may not be much of a sanctuary for the whitey who wants muh Medicare and muh Medicaid and muh social security and muh collective bargaining.

            That Kris Kobach garnered only 43% of the vote speaks volumes.

            A pro-Trump immigration hard-ass got his ass handed to him.

          • Kansas is bible belt territory. They always get their fundamentalist panties in a wad if they think you are not “nice”.

          • Kansas is full of Mexicans, many illegal. That’s how the Democrats took the Governorship. About 25% demographically. They spread like a plague upon the land. Running is all one can do if you have assets. You can’t kill them and your fucking government lets it all happen. For 53 years. Thanks Emanuel Celler.

          • To clarify, Kansas is 25% mestizo. The largely Castiian Mexican ruling elite are quietly snickering as we become them, serving as the containment pond for their excess underclass. Cartel violence cannot kill enough, so to maintain control, avoid uprising without building a social welfare state nightmare (like us) they vent their undesirables into our society. They have been doing it increasingly for seven or eight decades. We are both their social safety net and a large liquidity pool (remittances) for their economy. Why add on to your house when your (dunce) neighbor keeps letting your distant relatives sleep over and eat at his house because his bitch wife (leftists) tells at him to do so? That is until they get drunk and shoot him for fun?

          • I wrote a small chapbook of an essay in 2012 entitled, The Next American Revolution . . . will be stillborn.
            https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008XEZGEU/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i5

            One description of the future is of a USA break up into regional confederations. But the bad news is that the same sort of politicians and businessmen who are in charge now, will be in charge again because the kind of sea change Z Man is talking about needing to occur is unlikely to do so.

            Whatever govt that has Detroit or Baltimore or Atlanta in its jurisdiction or Phoenix and El Paso is still going to have to operate the same way of a welfare state in the near term.

            The only thing to change everything will be a general economic and societal collapse where people get very serious and ruthless about survival.

          • The only solution is to stop all immigration, legal and illegal with a few exceptions for highly skilled candidates. It is too late for that solution. The country will collapse as more and more subhumans pour into the country because the government is in the hands of the global banking cartel and they have targeted this country for destruction. The future is brown and dumb.
            As far as running to a whiter area; that’s just intelligent behavior. The government is infiltrating skinnies and pepperbellies into all white areas as well, however, there is not enough time left before collapse to not be able to kill them all easily.

          • “we will be surrounded on all sides by rotting failing nation states.”

            Good. Let them rot and demonstrate the difference between them and us.

            “Because they need someone to loot, the other side will not let us peacefully leave…”

            Good again. Refuse to be looted and what ever that entails. They can’t beat us and, even the worst of them must realize that yo can’t loot a corpse.

            No matter, it will come to guns sooner or later. It would be much better to control an area (Haven) than for there to be “distributed” violence and it’s 4gw everywhere.

          • Excuse me, I missed this:

            “Heartland America is not some utopia.”

            Ho one is proposing ‘utopia,’ that is the fatuous nonsense we’re trying to defeat/prevent.

            “We’re basically weak.”

            We know ye not. Speak for your self…

            WE are everywhere.

        • What Hoyos said. Texas is going the way of California. What you want, are the states south of the Canadian border, a belt with both Pacific and Atlantic access.

          Yes, they’re Commies now, but that’s less important. Communism can be rolled back, demography, not so easily.

      • Won’t last anywhere without a change of reference.

        Lets assume that the old South split off like before, but no civil war this time. How long will that last? Maybe a decade. What will happen is that the Socialist North with its economy now teetering on the brink of ruin will look for an external threat to distract the masses. The socialist mindset always goes this route. Rather than outright war the North will institute guerrilla insurgency along the border. You will never have peace from that point forward as this is the ‘politics by other means’.

        The liberty side cannot play defense. They would need to engage in economic warfare of their own.

      • Folks aren’t going to get the whole enchilada baring some nightmare scenarios and frankly while we deplorable types are much alike, we aren’t the only ones here.

        I suspect many of the Blue hives will be in ruins but we’ll still need to rule a mostly urban society for many years

        Outside of the Constitutional issues, people in Kansas have no more business giving order to Yankees than Yankees do to people in Kansas anyway

        Also land locked nations are common and can work especially if the new state invests in self defense. There are plenty of weapons available to government that can make short work of millions as we all know

        Also it will be a semi closed society with tight media controls, censorship and control of all incoming information sources . This is not a good outcome but the Left is fantastically good at subversion

        gag them or they run you down.

      • Where do you think all those mega blue hives get their food from?

        Those Hives would become mass graveyards inside of a week if food from the heartland ever ceased. Hell within 48 hours the brownskins and white yuppies would be killing each other over what was available.

        • What about all of the sons and daughters and trannies of the heartland who are active duty and serve Uncle Sam?

          What about all of the sons and daughters and trannies of the heartland who are Uncle Sam’s reservists?

          What about all of the sons and daughters and trannies of the heartland who are part of the constabulary?

          What if they are mobilized for the purpose of ensuring the blue hives get the food?

          What if they are ordered to shoot anybody who obstructs?

        • Agreed. Urbanites have no appreciation for the complexity of the supply chain. Most grocery stores maintain an inventory of three days or less. A trucker’s strike or a blockade would bring the cities to their knees toot sweet. At that point, things would start getting really vibrant.

    • Sorry to rain on your parade, but the Midwest won’t be that white in a generation or two. Whites only account for ~70% of births in many Midwest states, including Minnesota, Kansas, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio. Some, like Illinois are even lower.

      Besides, what makes you think that the most cuck whites in the country will be in favor of blowing apart the United States?

      • If Trump pulls off another surprise victory in 2020, and he still might, it would not surprise me to see the secession of several blue states. The left only opposes separatism when we do it, they have never called separatists in Catalonia and Scotland “racist”. Decoupled from bicoastal donors, the Redstan GOP would have Fidesz-level powers and a newly aggressive base. Most victory scenarios for our side depend on leftists jumping the gun.

        • The trouble is that vote harvesting in a few states like Florida, Georgia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, (California, Colorado, NY, and Illinois are already gone), and it doesn’t matter how the rest of the vote goes. The Senate will be all that will be left to us, and then they will whittle that one down to eliminate the “unfairness”.

          Not to be “defeatist”, but trying to face the reality of the situation. Trump snuck up on ‘em last time.

          • We’re not yet in a situation where electoral politics can be abandoned. And that time may be a long while, as South African whites are still showing up every 5 years to cast a hitherto meaningless vote for the DA Party that turns around and blasts them for their privilege. Are we ready to be Cortez burning the ships?

  31. My father loved Ayn Rand. I woke up one morning when I was 12 and Anthem was on my nightstand. Huge reader so I just picked it up and read it cover to cover. I read Atlas Shrugged 3 times by the time I was 20. But that still meant I had plenty of years to look into her and her ideology. It was completely removed from reality. She was a hero worshipper that applied her ideology to her personal life and just created Mayhem all around her.
    Life is messy and like many people I like order but it’s always going to fall apart eventually. There are many verses to the story of man but the chorus is always the same, slaughter, blood and cleansing fire

    • You say “[Rand] was completely removed from reality.”

      I think she explained reality as well as anyone ever has. She provided the tools for understanding how the world works, both politically and economically.

  32. So many people are black pilled these days but the greatest white pill is that this current tumult in America is the death rattle in the throat of conservatism. We have never been more ripe for revolution. The pieces on the board are perfect for a massive paradigm change and for a new order to take the reigns. All we need is some leadership. Any takers?

    • So far it doesn’t look like it and the factionalization even among the dissident right makes things harder.

      Finding that sweet spot, the compromise that works is THE challenge our Founding Fathers faced and the same one we face

      The “Leave me alone/Constituionalists” can’t lead and millions of people myself included will not follow nor permit the Deus Volt crowd who are at least willing to lead to turn the US into Iran with more Jesus.

      And note I know how much that sounds like what the Left says. The reason I think its true is if there is a revolution as vs. an election, all the gloves come off and once blood is spilled, no reason to stop until you have everything

      Thus my opinion unless handled with great care, its 30 years war 2.0

      That said I won’t step up to the bat not because I’m afraid of ruling but because I’m not fit. I’ve the brains and though I may be wrong the knowledge I lack the Alpha traits required . No one would follow me for a lot of reasons and while I get loyalty and honor, the “world” the Alphas live in and need to project is foreign to me and I don’t care about virtually anything they do.

      People like me aren’t fit for leadership anyway unless you want the Austrian or the like.

        • Without leaders you have no society. Human’s require a hierarchy to function in groups larger than a tribe and allowing nought more than an atomized nuclear family hands victory to the Left

      • factionalization even among the dissident right makes things harder.

        To culturally appropriate Cathedral language, diversity is our strength. The more fractions we have, the more moles they need to whack. By not having leaders or ideologies, we give them no big targets. That’s what makes the Yellow Jackets so dangerous to the French government: there’s nobody to bribe, nobody to threaten or kill.

        • Fair point, The presence of police and security people who support the yellow jackets disallow the usual strategy of just shooting or imprisoning enough people to force compliance

          Also generally the cathedral avoid the whip hand as it causes reprisals. What happened to Charlie Hebedo , who while satirical was an approved satire sent a strong message. You are vulnerable

          However let me ask, if there are hundreds of factions and they manage to take the Cathedral down nibbling it to death by the proverbial ducks how is anyone supposed to actually govern

          Distributive 18th century systems won’t work in modernity

  33. Any system political, mechanical, electronic that is based on positive feedback eventually spirals out of control

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