Note: Behind the green door is a post about gay germs, a post about the purse fight between Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder and the Sunday podcast. This week the plan is to do some more Ukraine stuff, given the uptick in war news. You can sign up at SubscribeStar or Substack.
In the comments of my last response to Michael Anton, someone quoted a passage from one of Anton’s posts in our back and forth. For the sake of brevity, no doubt, the commenter clipped out some of the original text. There were a lot of good comments in that post, but that one stuck with me because of the bit about not wanting to be ruled without consent, which is a topic I have addressed in many posts, podcasts and even a speech I gave last autumn.
I rummaged through his post and found the exact passage. Here is what Anton wrote in the first part of that paragraph, “I don’t want to be ruled without my consent and I don’t want to submit to a fake aristocracy. Those are, in fact, among my chief objections to the present regime: it rules me without my consent, and it rules not for the common good but for the private good of a fake aristocracy.” That is a pretty clear statement of the ends he seeks with his natural rights arguments.
As an aside, what is a fake aristocracy? He never bothers to explain what makes one aristocracy fake and another authentic. The closest he gets is, “This points to a fundamental problem with hierarchy. The trad Right rejects nature as the standard for politics because, they say, nature is abstract, universalist, corrosive, etc. But for a hierarchy to have any meaning, it must be based on some evaluation of higher and lower, better and worse.”
Higher than what? Have meaning? Who in the hell is the trad Right? Note that he employs cognitively meaningless statements to illicit an emotional reaction from the reader in order to trick him into a false conclusion. You see, the bad men like fake hierarchy which is bad because fake is a bad word, so putting it next to the word hierarchy makes it bad too. This sort of linguistic guilt by association is clever, but it is what makes his writing so muddled.
Putting that aside, what about this consent business? Specifically, his demand to live in a society in which he is ruled only with his permission. That is, after all, what it means to consent to something. When you consent to something you are voluntarily giving your permission for someone to do something. Sure, you may have needed some convincing, but consent assumes you have a choice. To consent to something, you must voluntarily grant your permission.
When we say “consent of the governed” we mean the permission of those over whom some group of people will rule. That sounds good, because Americans have been conditioned to associate that phrase with positive ideas. It is right there in our holiest of holy documents, the Declaration of Independence. “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” The goodness of government only flows from the consent of the people.
Now, before we go much further, we have to address the elephant in the room and that is the fact that the signers of that document were lying. Most of them owned other human beings and none of them bothered to ask the freemen in their employ about their decision to revolt against the king. When it came to forming a new government, they had two tries at it and never once sought the consent of the governed. It was a nice sentiment, but the framers were practical men.
That naturally leads to a question. Is such a society possible? Is it possible to have a society in which men are free of coercion? After all, that is what Anton is rebelling against in that post. Consent is permission for something to happen or a voluntary agreement to do something. The alternative to consent is coercion, which is the use of force or the threat of force to obtain compliance. How would one structure a society in order to eliminate coercion?
Here is where we must notice something important. A consensus is not the same thing as majority rule. If ten people get together to decide on where to get lunch, the consensus is the place everyone can accept. The final choice may not be the first choice of anyone, but it is on the list of acceptable choices. If six people pick the lunch spot, pull guns on the other four people and force them to go along, then that is coercion, even though the majority voted for the lunch choice.
In other words, if you put things before the people and ask them to decide, you will most likely have some people who oppose the majority decision. In fact, some of those dissenters may categorically reject the choice of the majority. No amount of persuasion or enticement will change their minds. If the choice is where to go to lunch, no great shakes, but if it is how much to pay in taxes or whether to go to war, the dissent becomes a serious issue.
Right away we can see two problems. One is that a society of any size is going to have irreconcilable disagreements. Anyone who organized a lunch order knows how hard it is to reach a consensus. In the end, dissent must be overruled. The other problem is that putting matters to a vote will always result in coercion. The majority will force their preferences on the minority. Since in every vote there is a minority and the composition of that minority changes, everyone is subjected to coercion.
No matter how much consideration the rulers give to the opinion of the people, no matter how hard they try to get the consent of the governed, some people will simply refuse to give their permission. The choices at that point for the majority, as well as the rulers, are stasis, anarchy or coercion. No society larger than the Dunbar number can operate without some coercion. At any given time, some people will be compelled by the rulers to do that which they would prefer not to do.
Now, the few remaining libertarians will no doubt chime in and say that a libertarian or an anarchist society would be free of coercion. After all, all human interaction would be voluntary and individual. While such an arrangement would be free of coercion, it would also be free of all of the things we associate with human society. It is just random humans living in walking distance of one another. It is why there are no libertarian or anarchist societies outside of East Africa.
To be fair to Anton, let us assume he knows this and what he really means is he wants a society with the least amount of coercion. Humans are not perfect so what we create will always fall short of perfect. The societies we create will therefore be as flawed as the people who make them. The question then turns from how to create a coercion free society to how to reduce coercion. How should one organize society in order to reduce coercion to the minimum?
Proof that the universe has a sense of humor, is that nature provides us with the answer to this question. Evolutionary biology tells us that people are most cooperative with those who are closest to them genetically. If you populated an island with Michael Anton clones, they would operate like a multi-celled organism. Each member would intuitively know the preferences of the other, because they would have the same preferences, due to their genetic sameness.
Obviously, that is not possible, but luckily nature provides us with lots of close examples to use as a proof. We know that the first human organizations were kin groups and that larger human societies were built on related kin groups. Ten thousand years ago related kin groups began to settle around stable food sources in order to defend and exploit those food sources. We also know that within these groups men would die for two brothers or eight cousins.
At first blush it might not seem that inclusive fitness has much of a role in reducing coercion in human society. What does your willingness to die for your people have to do with coercion? Well, consensus and cooperation require sacrifice. It does not always require you to sacrifice your life, but when you volunteer to cooperate or you agree to a compromise, you are sacrificing something in order to do it. It is the glue that binds the two sides in the transaction.
In other words, it is not just like-mindedness that fosters cooperation through sacrifice, but it is like bloodedness. This is what nature tells us. If you are looking to increase cooperation and therefore reduce coercion, you want to decrease biological distance between the members. Put another way, the key to being ruled with your consent is to live in a society populated by and governed by your people or people who are no more than distant cousins. Diversity is the death of consent.
Interestingly, Anton seems to know this. In the essay that made him famous, he wrote the following, “Third and most important, the ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty means that the electorate grows more left, more Democratic, less Republican, less republican, and less traditionally American with every cycle.” Note he used to argue from tradition and now he argues against tradition.
When you go back and read the Flight 93 essay, you cannot help but note a difference in tone and substance. Assuming Anton knew his own mind when he wrote that essay, he certainly knew how the phrase “third world” would be read. His deliberate use of the phrase “no taste for” makes clear that Anton thought at the time that non-European people were unfit for a society based in European values and traditions. There is no other way that can be interpreted.
So, what changed? That passage quoted at the start offers a clue. Here is the second part of that original passage. Anton wrote, “I still think whatever you’re planning won’t work; or, to be more precise, I don’t think you’ve done much planning at all. I don’t think you’ve even begun to think through how you’ll organize your new post-natural-rights society, which is why I expect it either to be a mess or else to revert to natural rights without admitting it.”
Let us unpack those two sentences. Anton says he is sure that what I am planning will not work. Then he says I am not planning anything at all. In fact, he says I have not even started planning, but he is sure that when I get around to planning, it will be a mess or I will end up planning whatever he is planning. This is the content of just two sentences written by one man, but it reads like the work of a committee of people not on speaking terms with one another.
Putting that aside, I think we have a clue as to why he has issued a fatwah against me and those on this side of the great divide. It is not that he disagrees with the point I made at the start of this exchange. It is that he thinks it should not be said. He prefers to prattle on about elves carrying natural rights because that is less likely to get mean words from the people who control the moral framework. In other words, he feels he must submit to their moral coercion.
In this post responding to Paul Gottfried’s argument in favor of the Anglo-American tradition, he notes that he and Paul are not Anglos. Anton is Mediterranean and Gottfried is Jewish. Here is what he wrote, “Neither of us, therefore, is Anglo, and neither is related by blood to any of the men who founded the United States, or even were Americans at the time of the founding. It seems to me, then, that neither of us can be, strictly speaking, heirs to the Anglo-American tradition.”
That is an interesting passage for a number of reasons. As far as this topic, it may explain why he has reverted back to the banal civic nationalism that he seemed to reject in the Flight 93 essay. Even though the logic of his own arguments leads to something like Yoram Hazony’s ethnic nationalism, this creates a problem for the people in charge and that creates a problem for Michael Anton. Instead he is looking for a way to argue within the prevailing moral orthodoxy.
That explains that muddled passage about what he thinks of my plans. He is not arguing against my reasoning. How could he? His arguments from Straussianism arrive at the same place as my arguments from evolutionary biology. It is that he assumes that I will soon realize that saying these things out loud is bad for business. In other words, he is projecting his own fears about his position within the conservative industrial complex onto me and the empirical right.
That horse left the barn a long time ago. It turns out that I am far less tolerant of coercion from “fake aristocrats” than Michael Anton. In fact, the starting place for understanding dissident thinking is the assertion that conservatism failed because it was supposed to fail. The men in it traded their souls for expensive homes, fancy suits and the company of people they must treat as their betters. The dissident right is the rejection of that form of politics.
In closing, I will return the favor and offer Mr. Anton a bit of advice. The project to achieve conservative ends within the neoliberal moral framework has been tried by smarter men than either of us. That project began when Buckley capitulated on race back in the last century. It is why conservatism has been a failure. When you accept the moral claims of your opponents, you inevitably accept their conclusions, which is why conservatism managed to conserve nothing.
The reason Michael Anton and his cohorts in the conservative ecosystem feel the need to address dissidents directly is they are losing control of the narrative. Every day more and more people wake up from the 20th century. Much of that awakening is driven by demographic and cultural reality, but another part is the realization that the causes of these problems are not political or economic. They are systemic. The system is failing because it rests on false assertions.
Even though Anton has hurled a lot of invective my way, I bear no ill will toward him, now that I have reconsidered his position. The fatwah he has issued against me will be up on the wall next to other fatwahs. In fact, I wish the entire crew the best of luck, even though Chris Buskirk and Ben Boychuk refuse to reply to my e-mails. When you live in the valley of the damned, you get used to such behavior. After the revolution, I will see that you get sent to a good camp.
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Speaking of purse fights……………..
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I find that quote from Anton to be quite revealing and you apparently missed why it is.
That is a classical marker of the Scotts-Irish culture that the settlers of Appalachia brought with them, that was adopted by new immigrants into the areas they dominated.
It is a “leveler” culture. The “fake aristocracy” reference is that in that culture no aristocracy is legitimate. The “consent of the governed” is a further reference to that culture. It was embraced by them as an inherent aspect of the quasii- anarchy that existed on the frontier that they settled and pushed ever outward. It wasn’t an anarchy in the libertarian or mad max sense – but was resistant to resentful of outside impositions.
My take on this whole kerfuffle is that the things that Anton calls natural rights are more accurately called cultural norms. The organically developed way that cultures define the proper relationship between individuals, the community and outsiders. It’s a weird tic of American cultures to desire the universality of their own cultural norms.
All of which puts me in agreement with Z on this issue.
But imo Anton’s pov is driven by his cultural groundings, not some insidious ideology. And I’d love to get the country back to the place where those cultural norms were predominant again, to the point that they were just accepted as the way things were by an overwhelming majority of people. Which was the case up to a few generations ago.
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You could be right, but given that Anton makes a big deal over the fact that he is not an Anglo and therefore could be excluded from Anglo-American tradition, I do not think he would deliberately mean what you think he means. You could be right and this just further proof that he does not understand the arguments he is making. There are many hints to that effect. The long windedness is always a clue that the writer is unsure of his arguments.
As to your final point, I think most everyone would agree on that, but current demographics makes that close to impossible, if we are being overly generous. What would be required to get back to those cultural norms, however, is ruled out by the universalism baked into the civic nationalist claims we see with Anton. It boils down to “We would like to return to those cultural norms, but we think it is immoral to do what it would take to make it happen.”
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That last sentence distills all the bloviation down to the essence quite nicely!
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What our detractors call “white supremacy” or “systemic racism” or even “capitalism” is really just Anglo-Saxon culture. Maybe you can throw a little Dutch in there as well. If the USA were founded by the Portuguese or the Greeks we wouldn’t be having this cordial exchange between Anton and Z-Man.
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Great post, Z.
The comment section of a Breitbart post covering the black police officers in Memphis is littered with the usual “Democrat mayor!…” and “Democrats are the party of the KKK!…” No one appears to realize that Vermont and Maine are also run by democrats.
The Afghans who have been dumped into the resettlement cities no one voted for speak entirely different languages. Farsi and Pashto are so distinct from one another, a farsi speaker cannot even say hello to a Pashto speaker.
Western balkanization is the only way forward. Those of us who understand that nature and race are real and that biology and sex are real live in a different world from those who still don’t or won’t comprehend or accept reality. We may as well speak different languages and live on different planets.
The USA just may need to become the Separate, Divided Regions of what once was America.
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Though I’m no longer a doctrinaire libertarian, more of a populist these days, I have to point out that there’s nothing inherently un-libertarian about ethnocentrism and group identity. It’s just that the farce that calls itself the Libertarian Party is too cowardly to go against woke egalitarian ideology. Even Rand Paul ended up backpedaling after he bravely condemned the Civil Rights Act.
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The experiment failed. It failed when Lincoln waged war against a consensual, voluntary union of states. It failed when he and later scholars dressed it up as a war for freedom even while it was out in the open that he and the abolitionists knew that incompatible peoples could not share the same land. It failed when the Bull Moose, Progressive, Democrat and Republican parties killed off Marcus Hanna and the last republicans and Woodrow Wilson formalized the Administrative State. It was killed with the Hart Cellar Act, the Civil Rights and Great Society legal and economic regime. Its funeral party was held in 2020.
I would like to see Anton close ranks and argue against the Biden/Mayorkas, or is it Mayorkas/??? unrelenting, unending stream of immigration. The Lieutenants who man a remote and crumbling fort are in their office arguing over who will stand on the ramparts while the hallway outside their office burns – at the orders of those who rule the capital.
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“It is not that he disagrees with the point I made at the start of this exchange. It is that he thinks it should not be said.”
Anton is just afraid of coming to terms with race and intelligence. About the real diversity of Man. About the blank slate fallacy.
He’s like a kid who grew up in religious family and plays football. One day he’s in the locker room and has a gay thought. NO ABSOLUTELY NOT! and recoils in panic, and for the rest of his days he is a raving homophobe.
I don’t mean to compare dissident theories to homosexuality, but nowadays people are scared of being “racist” as people in 1980 were scared of being gay.
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Anton’s main point seems to be that if someone is inoculated to the culture to the point where it becomes the air they breathe, genetic differences will not bear a huge amount of difference in how people function. Also, the aristocracy of a healthy culture will naturally follow the will of the people, since they both flow from the same culture. The idea of a fake aristocracy seems to be dull witted people of a foreign culture enforcing their edicts.
He is right in a way, that a unified culture is necessary for peace, regardless of genetics. The problem of people with different genetic makeups preferring different cultures, and having different cultural limits, is why they are forcing a culture of the most deranged things imaginable and daring dissent. The only way to get all the different races under the same cultural umbrella is to make the culture as simple and bottom of the barrel as possible, something all races can achieve.
Forced school integration was an attempt at cultural cohesion, with expected results. A very cohesive culture can keep a small percentage of genetic outsiders in line, but quickly breaks apart when a critical mass is reached and everything breaks apart. One only needs to see the destruction of cities in the 1960’s to see this.
One of the great sociological experiments of our time is going to be when North and South Korea unite again. It’s at that point we’re going to see whether genetically homogenous people brought up in different cultures will be able to get along. Unfortunately for Anton, I would bet on he North Koreans enforcing a more authoritarian and traditional culture, wiping out American influence and ideas of natural rights. Western liberalism simply does not have the antibodies to resist an aggressive outside culture.
it is certainly true that genetically close people can have incompatible cultures. The British isles are a good example. That is never an issue in dispute. The issues is can genetically distant people share a common culture. All the evidence from history says no and what we know of the human sciences says no.
The immigration experiment in America is as much proof as we need. The northern Euros who came over in the late 19th and early 20th blended in quickly. The southern Euros needed much longer. In fact, immigration was halted due to the problems of trying to assimilate people from outside of northern Europe. Of course, we have just about bankrupted ourselves trying to assimilate Africans with nothing positive to show for it.
In short, if you hope to get the culture right, you better get the biology right.
One thing about the right to self determination, is where does it stop at?
Part of an empire has the right, then a separate ethnic group has the right, then more and more divisions down to the individual.
Side note: The reason I don’t describe Our Insect Overlords as an “aristocracy,” even though they clearly are, is because you just can’t get around the images of knights in shining armor in lots of people’s minds. Even when we’re ruled by Chelsea Clinton and Malia Obama and Jenna Bush, Anton types will still be pretending that gosh, it somehow just worked out that way. They didn’t actually do liege homage to Joe Biden — he didn’t clasp their hands between his, and he didn’t knock them on each shoulder with the flat of his sword — and therefore they’re not aristocrats, even though we’re up to, what, the fifth generation of Bushes in politics?
Main note: Screw “consent.” No, really — Anton clearly doesn’t believe in it either. If you’ve been at all fair in your presentation of his arguments, then he uses “natural rights” in the exact same way Robespierre et al used “the General Will,” which is the exact same way Lenin et al used “dialectical materialism” and “the right side of history.” You can’t be coerced into the inevitable, comrade. Nobody forced you to fall when you tripped over that rock, because Gravity is a force of nature. It’s quite simple, Comrade — the General Will / the social contract / natural rights / the right side of history / the world-spirit / dialectical materialism requires that you die now. Zelensky says thanks, of course, and so do the Board of Directors at General Dynamics and Raytheon, but it was a natural process that did it, same as it ever was.
What is “evolutionary biology” but the melding over time of people with various origins who, via their migrations, inhabit the same land and breed. The “white” race is a relatively new invention. Read what Darwin said about the Irish or Der Fuehrer about the Poles.
As for clans and kinship, consider Scottish history before incorporation into the U.K. Talk about spilling the blood of your kin. If those related “by blood” form the dominant group, others, if not excluded, are assimilated and the genotype begins to change. Some of the best Anglos today may be Mediterranean or Jewish while any number of dumpster divers may trace their lineage all the way back to the Norman conquest.
I think your difference with Anton comes down to your preference to live among whomever you define as “your own kind.” Nothing wrong with that. Jared Taylor, who seems to be a very fine and tolerant man, who lived for years among the Japanese, makes that point explicitly. The fear of such things may reflect the fear that the dominant group will violently oppress or exterminate the minority. You’d have to ask Anton if that’s the source of his fear. Why not if two of you are on friendly terms in spite of any intellectual or philosophical fatwas.
The reality of the battleground around biology and race is now a daily event.
The mayor of New York City announces CRT training is mandatory for all employees.
Van Jones announces the death of the black in Memphis was actually caused by White supremacy.
Reparations are being proposed in the state of California.
The coercion is coming at us daily now.
And much of the coercion is based on a false view of biology that race is just a construct.
The dissident right has the truth behind us in this battle.
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