The End Of Nothing

Something that was quite clear at the end of the Cold War was that the Republican Party, without the Soviets as an enemy, was just a collection of unrelated groups. What held the GOP together, was a general opposition to communism. It was, at the simplest form, the party of patriotism, the weak form of nationalism that used to be the core of the American creed. That patriotism was, in large part, kept alive by the Cold War. The Soviet menace was a daily reminder that we had to stick together to defend our liberty.

What kept the GOP together, to a much greater degree, is what gave coherence to the Buckley Right. The thing that fused the various tribes on the Right together was external to all of them. They feared Soviet communism. To traditionalists and social conservatives, the godless materialism of communism was monstrous. To the libertarian capitalists, it was communist central planning. To the internationalists and expansionists, Soviet domination was the great menace they feared.

Once the Cold War ended, it was no longer obvious as to why the Republicans or conservatives should hang together, other than habit. The GOP first tried to recast itself as technocratic reformers, promising to make government more efficient. That was the general thrust of Gingrich-style politics. It was just a green eye-shade version of what came from the Democratic Leadership Council. Instead of pitching themselves as “new democrats” they would pitch themselves as “new republicans.”

This had an appeal to certain parts of the Buckley coalition as well. The libertarian wing was loaded with technocrats eager to try their hand at social planning. The Jack Kemp wing was sure that some tinkering in the tax and regulatory code would bring an era of boundless prosperity. Second generation neocons were eager to apply this same logic to international affairs. The Freedom Agenda was, when you think about, urban planning applied to the Middle East in order to save Israel.

All of this technocratic obscurantism concealed a fundamental truth about American conservatism, at least as far as the Buckley version. It was never a movement based in a core philosophy. It was just a buffet of rhetoric and policy positions borrowed from movements rejected by the Left. For example, if the Left had retained its Christian roots and enforced that morality, Evangelicals would be on the Left. Most are indifferent to economics. Their interest in foreign policy begins and ends with Israel.

No doubt, Christian readers would take exception to this, because they have been conditioned to believe Christianity is a right-wing phenomenon. That’s a carryover from the Cold War where the Left was identified with godless materialism. In America, the Left has its roots in Christianity. The 19th century reformers were all explicitly Christian and working from Christian morality. Go back and read the writings of abolitionists and it is clear they saw their movement as a Christian movement.

Similarly, the neocons have no obvious fit on the Right. Their worldview is the philosophy of Athens, while paleo-conservationism is the philosophy of Sparta. Conquering the world in order to make it safe for democracy was always on the American Left. It is what motivated the Wilsonian reformers and the New Deal radicals. It is what led Kennedy and Johnson to commit to a land war in Asia. The neocons were always a liberal tribe looking for a political home, not a philosophical one.

This reality of the American Right, that it is just a collection of misfit toys, was made plain in the reaction to Tucker Carlson great speech. If what he said was truly at odds with the core philosophy of the Right, the response would have reflected that. Instead, it was a grab bag of policy complaints (examples: here, here, here and here) The carrying on about Carlson questioning the sanctity of global capitalism strongly suggests these people don’t know why they believe what they believe. They’re just repeating lines from a hymnal.

Of course, this is not a revelation. It was obvious for a long time, but, again, it was papered over by the technocratic obscurantism of the libertarian wing and the Jewish liberation theology of the neocons. The Mitt Romney campaign of 2012 was like watching a robot read the lines of a rule book. No one could think of a reason why Mitt Romney should be president or why his party even existed. His campaign was a collection of slogans recycled from old copies of National Review.

That’s the reality of Buckley conservatism. It was always just a catechism of convenience that gave disparate groups a set of rules so they could work in concert. Over time, it became a racket and repeating those lines correctly became the secret handshake of those working in Conservative Inc.. As an organizing philosophy, it offers nothing, because it promises to do nothing. It’s just a list of reasons why a group of strangers with nothing in common should vote for more of the same.

97 thoughts on “The End Of Nothing

  1. Thank you for this accurate assessment, ZMan. The question now, is whether the non-Left can coalesce around a new unifying ideology. I have no idea what this ideology might look like, other than having a rejection of Socialism at its’ core. The Left is all about power and I see its most glaring weakness being its need for ‘leaders’. That’s why the Left looks for and attacks any non-leftist leaders who emerge. This suggests that a resurgent Right must be leaderless, in the style of what John Robb calls an “Open-Source Insurgency”.

  2. “This reality of the American Right, that it is just a collection of misfit toys was made plain in the reaction to Tucker Carlson great speech”

    One didn’t need to wait for Tucker’s speech to realize the disjointed and dysfunctional nature of the right. The right showed the depth of their failings right after the election of Trump. Once the ballots were counted the right immediately set about:

    1. Proclaiming that they were the new media with no understanding that they were using the left’s platforms so were at the mercy of the left. This was all part of the right’s self defeating need to blindly fight for status. Now many of the people who were most stridently proclaiming their new importance have been driven from the main stage of the web.

    2. Infighting with the belief that status is a zero sum game. This made it easy for the left to get the various factions to play the cuckservative role of stating they aren’t the evil one.

    3. Launching the war against the boomer. If Z Man and others were serious about social change, they would have been contemplating how to edge the group that was most responsible for Trump’s win and controls a lot of wealth to a more fully red pilled outlook. Instead, they began a competition to see who could hate the bomber the most. This was all just another battle for status.

    There is enough status to go around if we ever achieve victory. There is a lot less in defeat

  3. The way I see it. There are globalist and nationalist collectivists. The globalists are the left wing and the nationalists are the right wing. Then there are individualists who get lumped in with right wing collectivists for the convenience of the collectivists whose fundamental core axiom is collectivism. Left wing individualists are paradoxical and, in fact, that is simply leftist collectivists attempting to co-opt whatever social movement they can find. The fact that nationalists are sometimes minarchist confuses the issue (minarchists are collectivists albeit they are addled enough to pretend government can somehow be kept limited – although the idea of having a government dedicated to stopping government is an amusing conceit).
    Collectivists require a legitimizing ideology for government. Globalists have settled on democracy, by which to mean giving as many people as possible the entitlement to vote and then going ahead and doing what the political class wants anyway (the EU being the most shining example of such a nonsense).
    To cut to the chase, the reason nationalists need religion is that the tried and trusted legitimization for the government of a country is the divine right of kings. Dictators essentially rely on the divine right of kings in that the country becomes identified with dictators dynasty.
    I consider myself an individualist but I’m not a libertarian because the NAP baffles me: how can anyone imagine that’s a valid axiom in the real world of people? I’m an agnostic because I think science is process and set of tools not a philosophy and science can’t answer any of the important questions about the human condition (though it can maybe rule out some answers). I don’t see any good reason to suppose that the human mind is necessarily capable of fully apprehending reality and actually that would, on the fact of it, seem unlikely given the sheer scale of the known Universe (and there must be aspects of the Universe and phenomenal reality unknown to us). It seems to me that in all probability there must be superior intelligences that are for practical purposes gods or even god even absent the God of the Bible…. whether they’ll go for the divine right of kings I leave as an exercise for the reader.

  4. The real battle is not conservatism vs socialism. First, conservatism is dead because there is nothing left in the West to conserve. Second, the real battle is nationalism vs global imperialism. The most recent offensive of the neo-liberal world order has failed, but its armies have not left the field and its leaders are actively developing new strategies, new tactics, and new false oppositions in order to attempt to pick up where the last attempt left off.

    • The new false opposition is the ineffectual dork web, personified by Jordan B. Peterwasher. For anybody who wanders off Rush Limburger’s reservation there’s that edgy guy who really believes in individualism. He said something about trannies a few year ago and works for the UN. Yeah, that’s not another dead end!

  5. Jew only influence on Christian society especially white ones

    Most Israel and Jewish community financial profits come from European Christian world
    And Jew used their brain power to harm and destroy European-Christian world

    Without European-Christian world, Israel is nothing but backward isolate state surrounded hostile enemy

    I always surprise when people talking about How Jew smart than everyone and basically they did everything, renaissance and industrial revolution, World Wide Web

    People eventually realized Wizard of Oz are nothing but coward and live off white people

    Diaspora success story will end with decline of western power

    short-sighted and greedy, devoted to hate host society

    They are not smart, just stupid enough to reveal the world that how backward people they are

  6. This is your personal best. Like Babe Ruth pointing to the stands before hitting the ball right on target. Conservatism, Inc. can fume all they like as you round the bases.

  7. There is so much dumbassery on the dead-right. Just read something on Redstste (why do I do this) that lauded some Dem named Tim Scott and his critique of Steve King. Scott complained that our nation was built on “hope, strength, and diversity”, as opposed to the achievement of whites. Sure thing, bud.

    • Tim Scott is one of the cuck-right’s magic Negroes, like Mia Love in UT. They all end up having the same animus towards Whites as their left counterparts.

  8. Chinese here, don’t worry about it
    We got this

    Han Chinese and Hindu nationalist are anti-Christian
    We do not believe in Jesus or Jehovah or Bible itself
    We are Neo-babylonian and future

    This is what will happen in the future, Chinese communist and Hindu nationalist will extract resources around world including West

    We will not teach our own language or custom to out-group and will not accept the Jew
    because after all, we are Anti-christian

    Only white cuckold using i-Phones, Facebook or other World wide web data site made by Jew

    We use our phones, our web site, our product only

    Chinese and Hindu have more power = Jew lose power and influence on the world

    Simple thing, we are going to shut it down Jewish media or World Wide Web bullshit just like they shut down missionaries

    No more I’m a Jesus blood and chosen people so respect me crap because we do not believe Jesus or Jehovah itself

  9. And just for S%$#s and Giggles, this from an email I get every week:

    The foundational documents of our nation were influenced by Catholic political philosophers such as Aquinas, Suárez, Báñez, Gregory of Valencia and Saint Robert Bellarmine, who wrote before theorists like Hobbes and Rousseau. This contradicts a popular impression that democracy was the invention of the Protestant Reformation. Luther and Calvin considered popular assemblies highly suspect. The concept of the Divine Right of Kings, which was a prelude to what we call “statism” and “big government,” was systematized by the Protestant counselor to King James I of England, Robert Filmer.

    For all his vague Deism, Thomas Jefferson might have acknowledged those Catholic sources, if obliquely, in his eloquent phrases. The Constitution’s First Amendment guarantee of the free exercise of religion and Article VI’s prohibition of religious tests for public office were developments rooted in the Thomistic outlines of human rights and dignity declared in the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Arbraoth. Fr. G. Rutler

    • Did T Jefferson acknowledge these Catholic sources in the Declaration of Independence? Because the quoted passage seems to imply he wrote the U.S. Constitution.

    • Just look at the Book of Constitutions and Ordinances (LCO) of the Order of Preachers, commonly called the Dominicans and founded in the early 13th century. It provided for elected leadership at the local, regional and global levels, with limited terms (unlike “for life” of Jesuits or popes for example) in a very republican, as opposed to democratic, form. Many historians suggest that the LCO may have inspired the framework of the U.S. Constitution. I rather doubt that the Protestant Founders would have been keen on using such a Catholic document, but it was certainly the product of a natural law oriented organization.

  10. The Progressive Left had already moved beyond Christianity in the early 1800s, as the Abolitionists blatantly violated the Tenth Commandment: “Do not covet your neighbor’s house. Do not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.” Thus the Bible makes clear that it is perfectly normal to own a man or a woman as one would own an ox or donkey, and anyone who says otherwise is “holier than Jesus”.

    The Progressive Left, then represented by the Whig and Republican parties, killed 600,000 young white men and an estimated one million Africans to end a “barbaric”, but Biblically sound, practice that was fast becoming obsolete anyway. (The cotton gin greatly increased the demand for slaves by automating the most tedious step in cotton production, but by 1850 it was pretty obvious that all the other steps would soon be automated as well.)

    • At best, the Abolitionists were ‘culturally Christian’ as was everybody, at worst, and I think more accurately, they were anti-Christian liken the Jacobins. Only paying lip service to gain a perceived moral high ground.

      Abolitionists were the antifa of their day.

  11. I read through the links to responses to Carlson, they’re all basically ‘straw men’ and not worth the time. What surprised me was the National Reviews comment sections were the least stupid. It seems a large part, if not a majority, of NR commenters got Carlson’s point.

    • NR commenters got Tucker’s point because they’re not getting paid off by Globalists and Big Tech. Unlike some.

  12. Funny thing about Buckley…he started out in his first book -God, Man and Yale – fighting what we would define as cultural Marxism as it was practiced not in the USSR, but in the USA.

    The roots of the problems we now face he identified in 1951…then abandoned it to play Cold War warrior.

    Imagined where we’d be today if he’d stayed on that initial path…

  13. Imagine a guy ran for President and his big slogan was, “Make America Great Again!” What’s not to like about America being great? Now imagine this rather benign, unobjectionable idea was vehemently, violently opposed by a coalition of forces determined to crush the guy who said it. They were literally, violently opposed to the notion of America being great again.

    This really happened, as you all know.

    Now imagine a religion which is founded on the basic proclamation: “Glory to God in the highest! And on Earth peace, good will towards men.”

    What on earth is there to object to about such a wholesome message? And yet factions conspired to have the proclaimer tortured and gruesomely murdered. They were quite literally against peace on earth and good will towards men.

    If you look at American political history and somehow manage to factor out the issues raised by the presence of negroes and Jews, it’s actually pretty boring. Absent the questions of territorial expansion, how to deal with the Plains Indians and the Mexicans, how to handle basic labor-capital disputes, and how to keep a safe distance from Europe (viz., pretty standard political issues for any large country, accounting for particulars), the big troublesome questions in America since around 1870 have endlessly been: a) what do we do about feral negroes and b) what do we do about the endless termite-like destruction caused by traitorous subversive Jews? Life in a white, Christian America would be really quite blissfully dull, absent these two perpetual nuisances.

    The Fabian-style progressive reformist quasi-Leftist movements of the 19th century were basically Christian inspired — thus effort-intensive, simplistic, and involving a lot of scut-work. The destructive subversive spite-filled Left of the 20th century was essentially just a racket and a power-play for traitorous Jews, using feral negroes (and now Mexicans, Muslims, gays and immigrant mystery meat) as their proxies to fight their battles in an eternal struggle to tear down the notions of making (white) America great, peace on earth, and good will towards men. Somewhere in between these two poles was Dorothy Day, Al Smith and the Catholic Worker, but those folks never envisioned 10-year-old trans-boy drag queens dancing in gay night clubs as a goal of the glorious struggle. Guess who does, though.

  14. “…if the Left had retained its Christian roots and enforced that morality, Evangelicals would be on the Left. Most are indifferent to economics. ” ~ Z-Man

    The Z-Man is kind of smart. But he hurts himself with his ongoing hatred hard-on he pops against Christians. That is why Z-Man reveals himself to be wrong, consistently, about US politics. In fact, the Z-Man errs consistently about U.S. political history.

    The Democrats always have been the Catholic Party. They began recruiting Catholics into their ranks as soon as a swell of Catholics hit the shores of the USA by the early-mid 1800s. The Dems convinced those immies that evil Protestant English oppressors of their ancestors were the Republicans.

    The abolitionist Republicans always have been the Protestant party. Protestants founded it. Their goal was slavery eradication.

    What sways the weak into the Z-Man’s orbit is his radio-quality pitchman voice he speaks in his YouTube videos / podcasts, which gives his erroneous talks an air of confidence.

    • Gritt, I appreciate your Catholic vs Protestant contrast, but your hurt feelings are showing.

      Let me explain. For example, I’m libertarian, born that way I think, yet I read this: “The libertarian wing was loaded with technocrats eager to try their hand at social planning.”

      It’s like a 2×4 to the forehead. By gum, Zman is right, I want a libertarian theocracy to rule in DC, to promote and enforce libertarian values.

      How, then, am I different from anyone else? What if I’m outnumbered by other sensibilities?

      Read the rest of that paragraph. Z objectively tallies the interest groups.
      His cold calculation doesn’t deserve your offense. We have to be a bit hard-hearted here, even to ourselves.

    • The Dems have always spoken loudly about fundamental beliefs but have acted completely situationally and in mercenary fashion about scooping up available constituencies, be they Catholics, Muslims, or secular Jews. The Right has operated with a limited and practical playbook most of the time, often situational but generally somewhat realistic for the moment in time. But the Right has mostly been agnostic about who gets on board with them. They establish a standard, and then leave the door open for people to come aboard. They don’t pander to scoop up available constituencies. Slavery eradication was a fundamental part of the Republican platform, back in the day. But Protestantism was mostly uphill from the advocacy of the eradication of slavery in the Republican Party back then, not the other way around.

    • Well you’re right about one thing anyway. Our esteemed host does have an absolutely professional quality radio announcers voice.

  15. I think that all politics is combining against an enemy. Remove the enemy and your politics collapses. Buckleyite conservatism worked well when the enemy was world Communism.

    Today, the question is what existential peril do “we” combine against? Globalists hiring Indian Brahmins to take our jobs? SJWs that are putting our kids in reeducation camps? Muslims that want to take over the world? Democrats that don’t believe in borders? China that dreams of one-world state capitalism? Illegal aliens taking jobs from blacks? Or all of the above?

    I’d say there are plenty of enemies out there. All it takes is some politician to put it all together.

    • Robert Kaplan in “The Coming Anarchy”, written long ago, describes Middle Eastern and North African Islam as a tribal protection against a broader culture and society that does not provide a framework for economic and cultural survival and prosperity. To some extent, Progressivism is similar, in that it appears as a quasi-religious response to the atomization and hollowing out of our culture (such hollowing out and atomization they aided and abetted, to their own benefit). Hence Progressivism’s support of socialism/communism/seizure of other people’s dignity and assets. What old style conservatism and the current alt-right have in common, is a basic understanding that if you get the culture right, the rest follows, and the tribalism and communism fall away. That part was always there.

      The difference is that in decades past, the rule abiding white culture chose from conservative choices “A”, “B”, and “C” from the menu provided. There was no choice “D”, which was “none of the above”. We all dutifully followed the rules, and GWB, McCain, and Romney, as the final three choices that we got, cemented the idea that we needed a “D-none of the above” on the menu. Trump stepped into that breach. We all now fully understand that we need to go to “D”, in all shapes and forms, be it by voting in an accelerationist fashion when the choices are bad, going off the grid, or donning a yellow vest. The TEA party was the gateway to all of this for me, and perhaps many others. It pulled back the curtain. These “off the book” kinds of choices were not in our playbook, years ago, but they are now, and that is the fundamental difference, and why so many of these quasi-conservative movements had legs long ago, but don’t any more. They were all we had, minus the presence of a Goldwater, Reagan, or Trump.

      Goldwater, Reagan, and Trump have also shared a common thread, in that they were all robust and disruptive choices forced on the Right, when the general vapidity of conservatism repeatedly became clear to many. Goldwater never got traction, which trashed choice “D” for years thereafter, Reagan kept pushing and finally got through the door, only to fade away after his terms were up and GHW Bush repudiated RR’s legacy, and now Trump crashes through the door once again. To what end? We will see.

  16. I once attended a live Buckley vs. Galbraith debate in the early 90’s. It was obvious tom me, even as a teenager, that Buckley was a fraud and that the whole scene looked like the Harlem Globetrotters vs. the Washington Generals. Tired old lies from 1960 along with buttoned down choreography don’t appeal to me. Buckley was clearly a sort of rodeo clown of his era funded by GE, IBM, etc., to keep this country from experimenting with a harder core socialism that they were seeing in Europe.

  17. Yo “Z”, would like to see you use those exceptional intellectual and literary talents to compose more content beyond LABELS, especially the political/party types.

  18. It seems like the globalist donor class has added National Review to their harem just to revel in the humiliation of it.

    I know we jeer at them now, but they used to have real writers and thinkers, like James Burnham. It’s another example of how globohomo likes to infiltrate and kill institutions and then wear their skin around. It would have been much better for NR’s dignity and memory if they had just quietly closed shop.

    • “… they used to have real writers and thinkers, like James Burnham. It’s another example of how globohomo likes to infiltrate and kill institutions … ”

      You don’t seem to know anything about James Burnham, one of the godfathers of technocratic American big government:

      James Burnham – Wikipedia
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Burnham

      Overview
      James Burnham (November 22, 1905 – July 28, 1987) 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.

      Hearsay has long said that Burnham was a C.I.A. operative and that the C.I.A. bankrolled *National Review* in its early days. The C.I.A. wanted to create a “respectable,” controlled American Right.

      • George Orwell wrote a couple of opinion peices about James Burnham:

        Second Thoughts on James Burnham – Wikipedia
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Thoughts_on_James_Burnham
        OverviewBackgroundSummaryReactionsExtracts

        “Second Thoughts on James Burnham” is an essay, first published in May 1946 in Polemic, by the English author George Orwell. The essay discusses works written by James Burnham, an American political theorist. In the essay Orwell accepts that the general drift has ‘almost certainly been towards oligarchy’ and ‘an increasing concentration of industrial and financial power’ but criticises the tendency of Burnham’s ‘power-worship’ and comments upon the failures in analysis that arise from it…

  19. The two party system relies on semi permanent coalitions. Unlike Europe, where single issue parties can gain some (tiny fraction of) power. In our system, the party bosses just lie and ignore their constituents. The GOP is heavily weighted in favor of the free trade wing who refuse to enact a single policy from their “coalition partner.” Meanwhile, everytime the Israel first/ perpetual Cold war flashback crowd loses a primary, they simply bodysnatch the winner’s presidential staff. Which is why despite losing EVERY Republican primary for three decades, they still have power.

    The only thing keeping the GOP alive is its enemies.

  20. >”No doubt, Christian readers would take exception to this, because they have been conditioned to believe Christianity is a right-wing phenomenon. That’s a carryover from the Cold War where the Left was identified with godless materialism. In America, the Left has its roots in Christianity. The 19th century reformers were all explicitly Christian and working from Christian morality. Go back and read the writings of abolitionists and it is clear they saw their movement as a Christian movement.”

    The problem with this isn’t that it’s not true, per se, but that it’s not granular enough to accurately reflect reality. An accurate reading is that the left has its roots in Massachusetts Puritanism, which was considered a heresy in its time and still is. Moldbug once related the story of a foreign traveller in America in 1864 who, when he asked a random person on the street what the war was about, was told “It’s the conquest of America by Massachusetts.” Well, first America, then the world. But let’s not paint with such a broad brush that we forget that the Confederates were Christians too, just of a different sort, as also was Franco and Pinochet and Admiral Kolchak and Lech Walesa and nearly everyone else in the West who ever stood up to leftism. (Yes, I know Hitler was an occultist, not a Christian. He was also a damn fool who got his country destroyed and allowed Stalin to take over half of Europe, so he’s hardly anyone to emulate.)

  21. Conservatives are fighting a war of politics, when the real enemy is demographics. There are not enough conservatives left in the U.S. to stem the tide of demographics.

    • That is why we should not focus on changing the county, but replacing the country with sovereign counties.

      • Question: Did you intend “county” in your initial clause, or did you mean “country?”

        Also: Was your final word referencing the smaller organizing and political unit?

        No criticism or snarkiness here … just was a bit confused. I do believe that one possible ourcome is segregation and re-aggregation by counties.

    • This isn’t a voting war and if the Conservatives had the guts, they have the numbers and the guns to take a nation of their own.

      However as our host as noted and I’ve been saying forever they are mostly gutless, money grubbers without a true ideology at least one that isn’t watered down Leftism. They won’t use power for any good end and are measurably less worthy of respect than the Left who while nuts at least tries to make things better.

      The only exceptions are Paleo Conservatives and their successors in the various .Alt Right movements . The Palecons are the guys who need to be in charge unless someone better comes along

      That is not an easy proposition though

  22. “This reality of the American Right, that it is just a collection of misfit toys was made plain in the reaction to Tucker Carlson great speech”

    Actually the responses you linked to were utterly predictable. They were the same excuses the GOP made for globalization a**raping white Blue collars and the murdering the middle-class since NAFTA. The GOP was always the party of big business and country club whites going back to Reagan era.

    For Carlson’s critics, the lower class whites don’t even exist to them or worse openly hate them an want them to die; they never talk to them; and is why they never understood why Trump was elected. Most live in seven figure homes with maids to pick up after them and have what amounts to fake jobs, they have no idea what it’s like outside the bubble world of NYC or the Beltway. They are for all intents a separate species.

    This disconnect always leads to bloodshed, but as Tucker has found out the ruling class doesn’t want to listen and instead are doubling down. To them it’s a case of “the beatings will continue until morale improves”

    • Yep. The US today is like Spain in the early 1930s and, sooner or later, we’ll be like Spain in the mid- to late-30s. It won’t be pretty. But “the centre cannot hold.”

      • Spain ultimately lost and had the worst outcome of post-war nations. They have the most poz, the lowest TFR women, and the most muslims per their size of ant med state. Franco didn’t have the ability to put a long term solution into place and the monarchy reactionaries love to talk about was ready to capitulate at the first opportunity.

        Don’t be like Spain.

  23. “while paleo-conservationism is the philosophy of Sparta”

    Must…. resist…. can’t……. hnnnngggggggg!
    THIS
    IS
    SPARTA!!!!

  24. There is no real right. There is left, and there is not-left. Anything not-left gets lumped into an incoherent thing called ‘right’. That’s why the right cannot be unified. What do thomistic trad catholics have in common with jewish objectivists? Nothing.

    That is not to say there arent right wing movements, but the idea of the ‘right’ as something in and of itself is an illusion.

    In the end, there wont be a unified rightwing coalition that overthrows the left. The left will rule like tyrants and rot and decay like the ottoman empire. Only then will something be able to topple it..and whatever that thing is it will do so after absorbing bits of the right and the left to create something cohesive.

    • “There is no real right. There is left, and there is not-left. ” I’ve been preaching that since Reagan but no one seems to listen. The left decides and defines the right. And they have decided that traditional Americans are the right and all educated/intelligent/cosmopolitan people are “progressive” not leftist. At least till now. With the rise of the Mohammedan-communist unification in the former democrat party anything not “woke” is right.

    • That’s because those who are not of the left believe in negative rights (i.e. what the state cannot do to you) which our country is founded on. The left believes in positive rights, which leads to tyranny, but is much easier to build a movement around.

      • A healthy society has both kinds of rights.

        One with say only negative rights ends up with unstable economies and corporate tyranny, think mandatory 90 hour work weeks, mass immigration for wage suppression and the company store. One with only positive rights can’t exist.

        Every human society mixes both of them and had duties and obligations.

        The run away from responsibility Right wingers and Libertards are just as destructive as the Left

        Some, maybe many of the old American minimal state ideas make no sense in the 21st century, As someone here put it, if Ted Kaczynski had CRISPR back in the day, he’d have killed all of us . Sooner or later some Georgia Guidestones or Eco Freak is going to use the tech to do just that

        This requires government to make sure it doesn’t happen. And yes the USG is incredibly dysfunctional , we can’t even pass a budget or control our borders to keep narcotics out

        This doesn’t imply that government is bad since other governments can do these things. The solution for corruption and disorder like we have is not a free for all but adults taking charge and doing what it takes to get honest stability in the system

    • Largely agree. The “right,” could be said to respect hierarchy and order, but when it comes to what order and who takes charge, no agreement is forthcoming. The force that binds the not-left will have to be new and will likely destroy the old ways that bound many of the rightists to their separate ghettos.

    • Intetesting- just as there are no Protestants without the Catholic Church. They define themselves by it.

  25. With all due respect to the Big Brain Nietzscheans: If we cannot learn how to talk to – and more importantly work with – the Christians, this thing is doomed.

    • If all races meet in the same Christian heaven, how can you exclude anyone from anywhere in this mortal world? Isn’t the Christian God a multiracialist? Does the Tower of Babel story allow us a basis upon which to exclude?

      • Isn’t the Christian God a multiracialist?

        No. Do you know of any evidence whatsoever that suggests such a thing?

        Does the Tower of Babel story allow us a basis upon which to exclude?

        No. That was healed (undone) at Pentecost.

        • A core Christian belief is in bodily resurrection – and not some generic NPC body, but the actual one God gave you beginning at conception.

          Therefore, if Christianity is true, and anyone can become Christian by conversion, repentance, baptism, etc. (i.e., there is no exclusion based upon race or ethnicity), then, it must follow races will meet in heaven.

      • We can because they’re different places that operate under different rules. More importantly, why do you seem to be actively trying to find ways to talk Christians into opposing you? I notice that this is something that the fedora right does a lot: responding to the idea that Christians could be their allies by scouring Christian theology looking for justifications for why Christians should be radical egalitarians, and then bending the ear of every passing Christian to loudly tell them about it. Seems kinda dumb to me.

        • Asking respectfully, “What rules allow for the exclusion of people or races from a Christian country?”

          • It’s a good idea, and nothing says we can’t. Again, the Kingdom of Heaven is not of this world, and different rules apply there. Also, why are you trying to talk me out of being on your side? This is one important reason why white nationalists have spent 70 crucial years accomplishing nothing: because so many of them devote so much time and energy into talking people who might otherwise be inclined to help them out of being on their side. Again, it seems pretty dumb to me.

          • I don’t want to oppose you buddy. I just want to know if we can work together or not. I don’t want to separate myself from you. I want to be on your side as long as it doesn’t kill my side.

            I love the informal Christian community that I live in.

          • It’s an old meme but it still checks out:

            Sunday in America tends to be the most segregated day of the week.

          • Vegetius, perhaps you shouldn’t take comfort in that statistic. Just like our government insists on racial equality in employment, the military, school punishments, or judicial outcomes, it may punish church congregations that are not sufficiently diverse. Perhaps you’ll lose your tax exempt status?

            You discretely racist Christians shouldn’t assume that your segregation will be allowed to persist. At some point you have to be explicit, which is the motivation for my questions above.

          • What rules wouldn’t? I’m supposed to be generous toward the poor, for example, but that doesn’t mean I’m supposed to share an apartment with beggars on the street. Plenty of Christians think that way, but their view is a recent and suspect fashion, I think.

      • It’s not about exclusion, as Zman illustrated in his podcast by describing his father’s views. His father believed everyone should have equal rights and should be respected. But we should also not ignore reality, and should be free to associate with whoever we want, and not be afraid to discuss obvious differences between races.

      • St. Paul in Athens makes it clear that god created the Nations, so if anything God is a Nationalist. Acts 17, verses 24 to 26: “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples made by human hands. Nor is He served by human hands, as if He needed anything, because He Himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. From one man He made every nation of men, to inhabit the whole earth; and He determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their lands.”

    • That’s right, and I’ll tell you why:

      How many white children does the average non – Christian reactionary have?

      Better question: why can’t the based pagan autist (and his pagan wife, if she exists) reproduce?

      Even better question: who is raising the daughters that will bear the next generation of western men?

      The church is mostly pozzed, but it’s remnant is the remnant of the west. Those who don’t see that are those who won’t. “there is no god, and I hate him”

  26. Most [Christians] are indifferent to economics.

    By that I’m sure you mean ‘fundamentalist Christians’; Catholics (serious ones) are concerned about economics; see Leo XIII, for example.

    At least some of Carlson’s epic speech was based on the VERY Catholic understanding that ‘family is the root of all society.’ Buried in there, too, were references to the Law of Subsidiarity, another VERY Catholic principle which argues that social-policy decisions should be made at the lowest possible level: family, neighborhood, municipality, (etc.), as opposed to “top-down” solutions.

    Chesterton was also very interested in economics, and proposed “Distributism” as a scheme for linking the working-man’s productive efforts to his income. The Church has always been a proponent of the ‘family wage,’ understood as a means by which a husband could support his family–but you will note that the word “frugal” is used often in Church discussions on that system. (Thus, the Church was never a strong supporter of “equal pay” theory, although a number of dumb-bunny Bishops and bishop-hired bureaucrats were–and are.)

    It appears that Carlson is acquainted with some of the Church’s teachings, which may be due to his ‘high-church’ Episcopalian upbringing.

    • Wouldn’t it be great if bergoglio was acquainted with some of the teachings of the Catholic Church!

      In all seriousness, he didn’t appear overnight. Vatican II was a result, not a cause

      • Honestly, I think Bergoglio is completely unhinged. He contradicts himself incessantly and cannot communicate clearly. It’s as though he were babylon personified. So I ignore him.

        Now, then. “Vatican II was a result….”

        Result of what? And yes, I’m serious.

  27. No doubt, Christian readers would take exception to this, because they have been conditioned to believe Christianity is a right-wing phenomenon.

    Not those of us who were paying attention. Almost all the mainstream churches, including the Catholic church, were corrupted with the social gospel and progressivism by the early 20th century.

    Today you can find every bad bit of the leftist social justice agenda preached from pulpits all over America every Sunday.

    These days mainstream churches, especially those raking in money with the refugee resettlement scam hand over fist, are the worst enemies of the nation, as well as the worst enemies of Christianity.

    • You should read Bella Dodd’s School of Darkness about the planned destruction of the Catholic Church

      Also, at this point I’m just thinking of only voting far left. It’s time to rip the Band-Aids off

    • Right. Catholic Social Teaching, for instance, combines a robust defense of private property (and antipathy to socialism) with the insistence that individuals are infinitely more than mere economic units, and that civil governments must safeguard human dignity, above all in the context of the traditional family. This is neither left not right, but the satanic nature of the left in the modern age has driven most orthodox Christians into the flabby arms of the Buckleyite right.

      Meanwhile, the institutional churches themselves, as you point out, have gone full globohomo and have aligned themselves with those who seek to destroy them. It’s suicidal.

      • While you are correct about actual Catholic social teaching, for 99.999% of Catholics, catholic social teaching is what comes out of the mouths of the Pope du jour and the local pastor/priest. Much of that is indistinguishable from the Democratic Party platform.

    • Ermmmm…..I can address (somewhat competently) your accusation against the Catholic church’s ‘corruption…..by the early 20th C.’ That is false. There is NO reading of Leo XIII’s 1891 social-doctrine encyclical which shows that he endorses ‘social Gospel’ or ‘progressivism’ unless you completely distort either the Encyclical (Rerum Novarum) or the meaning of the terms ‘progressive’ and ‘social Gospel.’

      As I mentioned above, the ‘social Gospel/progressive’ distortions exist currently in the Church even though JPII and B-16 attempted to quash them especially in Central and South America. But that does not mean that they are official Church teachings–not by a long shot.

      The Church has always been ‘the Church of common sense’ in her teachings. But in the end, it is up to individuals to live a Christian life on both sides of the labor/capital equasion. “Living a Christian life” is the part which is ignored and abused, and that’s the way of the world, my friend.

    • That’s not really a surprise. If you’re my age, you probably remember that evangelicals were all supporting Jimmy Carter in 1976. They didn’t become the “religious right” until after Carter threatened federal interference in religious schools.

      I’ve always regarded the Christian Right as fair weather friends, although to hear them tell it you’d think they invented conservatism. It’s an attitude I’ve always found rather galling.

      • Bruno, so many voters and constituencies simply seek the best political home for themselves that they can find, at any given time. As almost all politicians are, at root, social and economic grifters, and out to feed their egos and personal pocketbooks in the most base manner, voters always seek better. Jimmeh Carter posed as better, and many people bought it. For a while. I don’t hold it against them. But it is a warning, that voters are easy pickings for manipulation. It is no surprise that Reid Hoffman and Facebook may have stripped as much as 10% of Judge Roy Moore’s support away, by simply putting a disinformation campaign up on the Internet. People are suckers, all too often.

    • The last time I went to church, there was a weird tag-team sermon, literally by two gay men (the faggy-voice kind, at that) taking turns inarticulately speaking imbecilically dumbed-down content.

      Like I said, the last time.

      • But that is what everyone misses, BR. When the church hands the pulpit over to the women and queers, EVERYONE eventually does what you did… and another church closes. Once they drink the koolaid… they are pretty much done.
        As a Christian of sorts, I’ve watched the left abandon any semblance of morality and adopt degenerate philosophy and values that undermine men, white People and America.
        The dissident right offers promise unlike the progressive left. But without a code of ethics and morals – it’ll go the same way Buckley conservatism did.

        • It’s a mystery to me how an organization that claims to teach an eternal truth can shift positions according to temporary social whims.

    • The Dems always have been the Catholic Party. The Dems grew out of Anglicanism and not Protestantism.

      Z-Man simply does not know his US history.

      • The Dems grew out of both. More exactly, they absorbed the thinking of both. The self-shame and guilt of Catholicism and the public purging and cultural bossiness instincts of Puritanism. A toxic mix indeed.

    • The universal religion is a great strength in times of confidence and terrible otherwise. Nothing is more revolting than religious “traditionalists,” who make it a point to import and reproduce with the lowest of humanity.

    • The Catholic and Lutheran churches milking the immigration scam for a few million bucks at the cost of destroying their communities tells you everything you need to know about these filth and the morons who support them..

      • Word. Born&raised Catholic. Became Lutheran. Saw exactly what you have described when I lived and worked in SoCal. Not one dime to any church since. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

    • Christianity is neither a right-wing nor a left-wing phenomenon. Today’s mainstream churches are simply preaching the Gospel and conducting God’s work. Of course, the political left and right are desperate to mischaracterize this work as being an “enemy of Christianity”. It’s quite perverse.

    • Even the evangelical (mega-)churches of the post-1980s Moral Majority are supremely cucked. They offer a saccharine, modernist, consumerist, emotive cup of spiritual gruel that does not satiate like old time religion.

  28. I am so happy I found this blog, or to be accurate, I am happy Paul Ramsey mentioned it in a YouTube video. Every day reading the blog is like watching another wizard being revealed behind the curtain. Thanks zman.

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