I have been looking at new cars for a year or so. I started thinking about getting a new car a few years ago, when I realized I was getting to the age where owning a sports car might be a now or never proposition. To enjoy a sports car means driving fast in places where you’re not supposed to drive fast. That means having the reflexes and risk tolerance to take chances. There really is nothing sadder than seeing an old woman driving a Porsche or some old guy putt-putting down the road in a Corvette.

I have yet to pull the trigger on the car buy. The main reason is I hate the hassle of buying a car. The way cars are sold in America has never worked for me. I don’t want to develop a rapport with the car salesman. I don’t want him (her) to help me develop a relationship with the car that will tell the world about me. I’m not interested in having a self-actualizing experience with a car. I guess I’m a weirdo, but I don’t think the way I live my life needs to make a statement. I just want to enjoy the time I have.

There’s also the fact that I can’t seem to make up my mind. I’m not a car guy, in that I don’t get into the car culture. A part of owning a sports car is being a part of the social life around owning it. I think a car is, for the most part, a necessary item of life. I want my car to start in the morning, warm up quickly and have a cold air conditioner.  I never listen to the radio, but Bluetooth is a nice feature so I can listen to my favorite hate-thinkers on road trips.  Otherwise, a car is like the toilet. I only notice it when it does not work.

Still, I feel like I should buy a sports car before I’m too geezerly to enjoy it. I’ve looked at a number of them over the last year. The last sports car I owned was 30 years ago and it was used when I got it. It was fast and fun to drive, but compared to what is on offer today, well, there is no comparison. Modern technology has made affordable sports cars that are vastly better than the most enthusiastic drivers. A modern sports car is not a machine you control. It is a technology platform and the driver is just one part of it.

Something that I did not expect when getting into this is the class issue. I grew up country poor, but I’m not country poor now. I’ve been all over the world and I have been around very worldly people. I retain my working class sensibilities, but I’m not going to lie and say I prefer the proletariat to the bourgeoisie. Whether I like it or not, the car I buy will say something about me. Am I a man who prefers an Audi or a guy who thinks a Camaro ZL1 is the right choice? I never had a reason to think about it until now.

Having driven a number of different cars over the last year, I’ve come to believe that the professional auto journalists are just public relations flacks for the car industry. For instance, I drove a Mustang and a Camaro on the same day. I was in the muscle car mood and they are the two premier options in the category. I read the reviews of them on the popular car sites. I was expecting one model to be refined and the other more brutish, as that is what all of the reviews indicated. Both cars felt pretty much the same.

That’s probably the biggest obstacle to me pulling the trigger. There’s a weird sameness to all of the new cars. A few weeks after the muscle car testing, I did a day of driving European sports sedans. The sameness of the cars, at least in terms of driving them, is the one memory. I found I had to keep a list of the small differences between, say, an Audi and a BMW, as they were otherwise indistinguishable. There’s no quirkiness or originality to set one off from the other. It’s like the car makers are all aiming for the same goal.

This sameness is due to the fact the car makers are global companies now. Instead of the British car makers building cars mostly for Brits and the German makers building cars for Germans, car companies are rootless cosmopolitans, making cars for the world. That means they think they need to avoid the quirky, local flavor, as much as possible. It used to be that America cars were utilitarian and made for the open road. European cars were sophisticated and built for tight corners. Now, they all do the same things and look alike.

This sameness extends to how they sell cars. The last time someone tried to re-think the retail sale of cars was when Saturn was rolled out. Their pitch was the “no-haggle” price and a limited set of options. It never really worked as people have been conditioned to haggle over the price of a car. That and they rolled out the no-frills option idea just when technology was allowing everyone to have a bespoke experience buying everything. The “customized experience” is a great sales tool as everyone wants to feel special.

Look at the car dealers today and they all do exactly the same things. Even their website are cookie cutter. Other than some aesthetics, it appear that maybe one or two website companies have built every dealer’s website. That’s not unrealistic. There is one main software maker for car dealership software. I no longer recall the name of it, but one software package was used by something like 90% of all new car dealers. It’s not unrealistic to think that they or someone else is doing the same thing with the websites.

Despite the uniformity, the other thing that strikes me about the dealership websites is their uselessness as sales tools. I’ve noticed that the cars on the site, often don’t exist on the lot. At the same time, the cars on the lot are often not listed on the site. Dealers are famous for the bait and switch tactic, but this just looks like sloth. Spending time in the dealerships, the vibe I get is that the business remains hostile to technology. They just want to sell cars to the people who walk into the showroom. That’s it.

As far as the car purchase, I’m still weighing my options. I’m down to one of the muscle cars or one of the German sports sedans. I’ve always liked the look of an Audi, but I fear the repair costs. BMW’s are known for sturdiness, but I’m told that is not longer true, so maybe a Mercedes. Having driven enough of them, I’m sure I would enjoy owning any one of them. But, I still cannot get over the thrill of driving that Camaro ZL1. It was like being strapped to a rocket sled. I could get used to that in a hurry.

Math and science are built upon axioms. Very simply, an axiom is something that is always true and assumed to be true. An example is the reflexive property in algebra. A number is always equal to itself. Axioms are the building blocks, from which new truths are discovered. A proof is an inferential argument for a mathematical statement, using other previously established statements. That means a proof can be traced back to the original, assumed truths, those axioms that are the foundation of mathematics.

This is how we accumulate knowledge about the physical world over generations. The proofs based on those building blocks are eventually incorporated into the building blocks of math. The theorems and proofs multiply, slowly building up the stock of things that are known to be true. Calculus was built upon algebra and physics was built upon calculus and so on. It why a student can quickly go from zero to trying to discover new truths about the world. They inherit a supply of things assumed to be true.

This accretive process of increasing our stock of knowledge is not limited to math and science. It is the way human societies evolve over time. We start with basic truths about the human condition and the realities we face as a society. Over time we acquire new knowledge, by building on what we know or that which we think we know. For example, Libertarians rely on the concept of homo economicus. This asserts that humans are consistently rational and self-interested agents pursuing their ends optimally.

In theory, at least, this is the basis of democracy. One side builds a set of policies and proposals, allegedly based on the assumed truths. The other side does the same thing arriving at different policies. After a vigorous examination of the competing claims, a consensus is formed around one solution. If it works out, then that becomes part of society’s truths, from which new problems will be addressed in the future. That’s not really how it works, but people believe it. It is axiomatic that democracy works this way.

What we know to be western liberal democracy, assumes certain things about humanity to be true all the time. The blank slate is the most obvious example. Everything about our politics and culture assumes that humans are infinitely malleable. From school policy to prison reform, public policy is based on the assumption that people can be whatever they choose, because they have free will and a blank slate that can be erased and re-illustrated at any point in their life. You are what you make of yourself.

It’s how our rulers arrived at the idea of importing millions of foreigners. Those foreigners can be re-purposed into tax paying westerners, through education and enculturation, to pay the pensions of the native stock. Those Somali goatherds can be plopped down into Minnesota and over time, develop all of the habits of the average Minnesotan, just by emulation and proximity. Race laws are all based on the assumption that you can train people to stop noticing racial difference and therefore, end racism.

Of course, science is putting the lie to the blank slate. Genetics is everyday filling out the truth of the human condition, which is that we are the result of our coding. The thousands of mating decisions, made by those who came before us, are what make us what we are as people. Everything from our height to our sense of humor is baked into our DNA. Our health outcomes and our life outcomes are the results of that coding. Not surprisingly, the closer our coding is to others, the greater the similarities.

While no one is prepared to say free will is a lie, at least not publicly, no serious person accepts that we are infinitely malleable. The argument that you can change your personality is as nutty as saying you can make yourself taller or younger. This reality used to be a building block of Western thought, but was “discredited” by the blank slate theorists, but it is now being reestablished by genetics. In other words, one of the main building blocks of modern social democracy is about to crumble.

That’s a big one, but it is not the only one. Both Freudian and Jungian psychology still cast a very long shadow over western culture. Freud is no longer taken seriously, outside of his historical importance. The idea that your emotional state is the product of childhood sexual trauma is a click less realistic than phrenology. Jungian psychotherapy is also being overrun by neuroscience. Few people still think they can talked out of their madness anymore. Instead, pharmaceuticals are used to treat diseases of the brain.

It’s not just the quackery. The moral philosophy that underlies our political philosophy is similarly built on a foundation of nonsense. The Enlightenment thinkers all started by considering man’s natural state. It was either a harmonious communal existence or a brutal war like existence. From both starting points, they worked forward to build a model how man went from the state of nature to what was then civilization. The resulting moral philosophy is the basis of our political and legal philosophy today.

Property rights, the rule of law, the relationship of man and state, these are all based on those assumptions about man’s natural state. Libertarians and so-called Conservatives take the Lockean position that society is built upon the social contract. Those on the Left assume Hobbes was right and order must be imposed on society. Marxists further accept the materialist claims about the nature of man. All of the iterations and flavors of political ideology are rooted in one of those two broad assumptions about humanity.

Those assumptions are all wrong. We know that much now. Better archaeology and anthropology is helping illuminate the pre-history mankind. Evolutionary biology is also helping explain the fossil and archaeological record. Genetics, of course, are re-writing the map of mankind, explaining how we spread across the globe. What we are finding out is that man, in his “natural state” was not what Hobbes imagined nor what Locke imagined. Man’s “natural” state is much more complicated and much more local.

The implication should be obvious. Like psychology, as the underlying assumptions give way to new knowledge, the conclusions built on those axioms must give way as well. If tomorrow we learn that two plus two is not always four, everything we know about the world stops making sense. If everything we thought we knew about humankind and human civilization turns out to be wrong, we suddenly don’t know a whole lot about how we should organize ourselves, other than the old rules are probably not going to work.

It seems today that Western societies are painfully re-learning things that were common knowledge a few generations ago. The old axiom, fences make good neighbors, was replaced with “diversity is our strength.” Every time a swarthy fellow blows up in the public square, we inch a bit closer to the realization that diversity is a nightmare. That’s the part we see. The part we don’t see, at least not yet, is the crumbling of the foundation stones of the modern West. That foundation of nonsense is giving way to biological reality

Pretty much the only reason I ever owned a television or had a cable subscription was so I could watch sports. Growing up, we only have a few channels and they were often so fuzzy you could not watch them. Television was just not a central part of my life as a kid, so I never developed the habit. I grew up on sports, so as I got older I did what everyone else did and got cable and a television. In truth, I bought my first TV after a girl I was dating said she would not come over to my place if I did not have a television.

Over the years, the only thing I bothered watching with any regularity was sports. Even as the cable companies kept jacking up the rates, I liked sports enough to keep paying the rate. In fairness, the number of games kept rising and the quality of the television got better, as the prices went up. When I was a kid we got one NFL game on Sunday. If I want to watch every NFL game on a Sunday, I can do it now. The same is true of college and other sports. It really is an amazing change just in my lifetime.

I no longer have a cable subscription. I’ll watch movies off Amazon or off the Kodi, but that’s the stuff I can get free. I stopped watching the NFL a few years ago, even when I still had cable. I’m not sure what happened. The games just got boring to me. I’ll still watch a college football game, but I’m not arranging my schedule around it. Basketball stopped interesting me in the 90’s, mostly because I’m white. The only sport I will watch is baseball and I primarily follow it over the internet and through the box score.

It’s popular to say that the NFL is struggling due to the player protests. There’s certainly something to that, but it feels more like the final straw than the prime reason. I have friends who were regular fans, going to games and watching on TV, but now they don’t follow the NFL at all. At the same time, they cut the cord and started disengaging from sports media too. That’s not just the protests. There’s something else going on in the culture that is causing people to rethink their interest in professional sports.

A few years ago, it was received wisdom that the NFL, and to a lesser extend college football, was the tent pole holding up the cable business. Americans were football crazy and they would pay the price to have their weekend games. Now, ESPN dropping the NFL is no longer a crazy idea. They are getting killed by cord cutting, but they are also paying huge money for professional sports. They are preparing for another round of layoffs. There is a limit to cost cutting. Anyone involved in downsizing knows it is just a way to buy time.

The question no one seems to ask is why has the NFL lost its appeal? Again, the decline has been going on for a few years. Ratings were dropping before the players decided to demonstrate their hatred for white people. If we could get an honest accounting of ticket sales, my bet is those have been in decline as well. People in the secondary market say prices have been dropping for years, which is a good indication that retail sales were sliding too. For some reason, normies in America are losing interest in football.

One possible explanation is that supply created a bubble of demand. We tend to think of economic bubbles as demand driven, but take a look at the bookstore business. There was a time when the bookstore was the small shop selling bestsellers at the mall or a shop in the bohemian section of town. Then all of a sudden, every town had a massive warehouse selling books. Of course, Amazon came along too. Book sales went up until people remembered they did not like reading that much. Poof. Bookstores went away.

Maybe something similar is happening with sports. In the 70’s, it was rare for a sporting event to sell out. Big games were a hard ticket, but even some title games failed to sell out. In the late 70’s and early 80’s, the NBA playoffs were on tape delay. The famous US hockey win over the Soviets was not broadcast live. In the 80’s, new arenas and the roll out of cable made everyone a sports fan. Then the girls got into it and being a sports nut became the way people related to one another in the public.

It could be that after a generation of sports mania, people are remembering that watching live sports is not all that much fun. Just as the culture changed with the new flood of sports television and high end sports arenas, the culture is changing again as the novelty of those things wear off and people rediscover other entertainments. We tend to think of fads lasting a week or maybe a summer, but maybe some things run their course over a generation. Maybe as the Boomers fade, their cultural items are fading too.

If you think about it, Boomers have driven other sports fads that have come and gone. In my youth, tennis was a big deal. Boomers were young enough to play tennis, so they watched tennis too. Then the boomers got old and moved onto golf. Tennis collapsed and golf took off. Now, Boomers are getting too old for golf, so it has fallen into decline. Maybe that’s what is happening with professional sports like the NFL. The demographic cohort that blew the sports bubble is expiring and the bubble is collapsing.

It’s not an elegant answer, but there is no obvious reason why football has a stink on it all of a sudden. The games have been over-hyped circuses for a long time. They actually made some changes to quicken the pace and shorten the games. The cost of attendance is ridiculous, but you never hear that as an explanation for the sudden decline. Even so, that would not explain the free fall in TV ratings. Whatever the cause, it is part of a much longer trend and not the result of one thing, like the player protests.

Can you be a Christian and Alt-Right?

That’s a question the TRS guys were debating the other day. It comes up a lot, mostly because the leading lights in dissident politics are not religious. Some appear to be outright atheists, even if they don’t make a big deal out of it. Of the old guys, I can’t think of any who are Evangelical. Most were Protestants, but have long ago drifted from their churches. I don’t think any of the next generation are religious. Some grew up going to church, but abandoned it as soon as they left home.

The thing with the Gen X and Millennial leaders of the alt-right is most of them are disinterested in religion and its role in human society. It’s not something that occupies space in their mental framework. Just because the leadership and intellectual elements of the alt-right are non-religious, it does not necessarily follow that the alt-right is hostile to the religious. They spent their youth marinating in Progressive dogma and as a result, they see culture through a secular lens, rather than a spiritual one.

There’s a lot more to this so there will be many more posts on the topic, but a good point of entry is the simple question at the start of the post. The alt-right makes race the primary identity. Christians, and I’m thinking primarily of non-denominational Christians, place their relationship with Jesus Christ as their primary identity. That’s an obvious conflict, as nothing in Scripture backs the primary arguments of the alt-right. Even the most expansive reading of Scripture cannot arrive at a pro-white position.

There’s also the fact that many Christians are fanatical supporters of Israel. They have incorporated unconditional support for the state of Israel with their Christian identity. That often extends to Jews in the United states. For many Christians, antisemitism is the worst sin imaginable. That’s an obvious problem with the alt-right. Then there is the egalitarianism that many Christians have internalized as part of their relationship with Jesus Christ. They believe they are called to treat all men as children of God.

None of this is necessarily a deal breaker for Christians and the alt-right, but it creates some rather obvious complications. What it means is the alt-right is going to have to get better at understanding how to talk to and appeal to this type of Christian. Simply making the pro-white argument is not going to have much appeal to people who root their identity in something that transcends race. The alt-right, if it is going to make inroads into the Christian community, is going to have figure out how to engage these folks on their terms.

What about Patriotism?

Strangely, the alt-right may have an easier time engaging with Christians, than the hard core Civic Nationalists. Christians have been oppressed in American for generations and they have learned the hard way that they cannot vote themselves to freedom. That’s not the case with Civic Nationalists. The narcotic of patriotism keeps them forever optimistic that one more election and the nation will return to the 1950’s, except with a lot more brown people, who magically embrace white middle-class sensibilities.

As with Christians, the folks listening to Glenn Beck or Ben Shapiro, as they drive around suburbia, root their identity in something that transcends race and ethnicity. Civic nationalism is a religion and a primary identity. They are Americans, no hyphen. More important, these people look at things like taxes and regulation as primary markers of fidelity to their civic religion. To them, guys like Richard Spencer sound like communists, because he doesn’t seem to care all that much about tax cuts or regulatory reform.

The thing is, the patriotic normie is sure he is working from facts and reason when investing all of his energy into the current political arrangements. In reality, gentry conservatism and libertarianism are a different implementation of the Progressive moral frame work. The ends are different, but the assumptions are the same. You don’t talk people out of their moral sensibilities with facts and reason. In order to sway patriotic normies, the alt-right is going to have to appeal to them in moral terms.

Most of the alt-right seems to think this is a self-resolving problem. Mass immigration and the war on white people will beat the patriotism out of these people. They will inevitably come to accept identity politics. Maybe, but it would be preferable to win over these people before America becomes Brazil. At that point it may not matter. The alt-right is going to have to think about how to offer something to these folks that rivals the narcotic power of flag waving patriotism. That means constructive engagement, rather than mockery.

These are just two facets to a very big topic. Racial politics in America has always been about the two sides of white America debating how to best deal with the blacks. That’s made identity politics two dimensional. In order to move past that, it means creating an alternative moral framework. That cannot be conjured from thin air. It must happen in relation to and in reaction to the current claims on the identity of whites. The alt-right will have to be reconciled with religion and patriotism, or it will fail.

I have a friend who was a reverend in the Episcopal Church. He is technically still in the church, but he has decided to find another vocation. The main reason is that most of the people running the church are women, along with a high number of homosexuals. The result is the people running the church care more about social justice and their genitals than anything else. Like most of the mainline Protestants churches, the Episcopal Church has become a circus of degeneracy and general lunacy. As a result their pews are empty.

That said, you can learn a lot about the direction of the Cult of Modern Liberalism by watching the mainline Protestant churches. They are so desperate for attention, they tend to give the game away by going overboard in the latest Progressive fads. Their internal war on heterosexual white men has been going on a long time now, long before the rest of the Progs decided to make war on the honkyman. This story out of Virginia shows the true nature of the statue toppling stuff and its ultimate goal.

Leaders at the church that George Washington attended decided that a plaque honoring the first president of the United States must be removed.

Christ Church in Alexandria, Virginia will take down a memorial marking the pew where Washington sat with his family, saying it is not acceptable to all worshipers.

“The plaques in our sanctuary make some in our presence feel unsafe or unwelcome,” leaders said, a reference to the fact that Washington was a slaveholder.

“Some visitors and guests who worship with us choose not to return because they receive an unintended message from the prominent presence of the plaques.”

“Many in our congregation feel a strong need for the church to stand clearly on the side of ‘all are welcome- no exceptions,’” they concluded.

A memorial to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee will also come down.

This week, I am indulging a bit in a secret vice. I have a thing for the Dark Continent. It’s not quite jungle fever, but I have a strong interest in Africa for no good reason. It is just such a strange and baffling place for a honky. Everything about it contradicts the magical thinking that passes for common knowledge in the West. Africa is a giant neon sign flashing “You Are Wrong.”

This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. I’m getting better at hitting the exact mark on each section. That brings me unlimited joy, bordering on bliss. There is also a bonus track on Gab, where I say some mean things about Richard Spencer. If you are not on Gab, you should be. Despite their flaws, they are the good guys fighting to keep the lamps from going out in the West.

For this week, Spreaker has the full show. YouTube has the four longer segments from the show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android phone commies can take me along when out disrespecting the country. I am on iTunes, which means the Apple Nazis can listen to me on their Hitler phones.

This Week’s Show

Contents

• 00:00: Opening
• 02:00: Spooky Africa (Link) (Link) (Link) (Link) (Link)
• 12:00: R-Bug Man For Governor! (Link) (Link) (Link)
• 22:00: Queer Science  (Link) (Link) (Link)
• 32:00: Niger Trouble (Link) (Link) (Link)
• 42:00: Old Nazis (Link)
• 47:00: The Media Casting Couch (Link)
• 52:00: From Russia With Cash (Link) (Link)
• 57:00: Closing (Link)

Direct Download

The iTunes Page

Google Play Link

Gab Link

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

I was listening to sportsball radio off the interwebs the other days and I kept hearing ads for the fall television lineup from CBS. The sportball station is affiliated with CBS Sports, so they do cross marketing of their content. Like most people, commercials of all kinds are just background noise to me most of the time. Maybe radio ads have some sort of subliminal effect, but my suspicion is they are just a waste of money. I barely listen to the content. Like most people, radio is just background noise for me.

Anyway, I was about to turn off the radio and do something else when they were going through the “great new shows” on CBS. Having dropped television, I stopped to listen to the promos out of curiosity. I can’t remember the last time I followed a network TV show like a sitcom or serial drama. Probably Seinfeld 20 years ago. Anyway, the ad was long and ran through a list of shows, describing each one in exited tones. What was striking is that each sounded more horrible than the next. Here’s the list.

I can’t help but notice the number of shows dedicated to defending the realm. Some of the shows could be anything, but 12 are clearly about agents of the state defending the state against the bad people. Most of these are shows about the sorts of people our social media overlords are trying to create on-line. That is, they use their super goodness powers to magically identify the crime-thinker. Rather than having a tough guy doing the hard work of policing the streets, its a dork using brain waves to zap the bad thinkers.

Looking at the other networks, it’s a slightly different trend. ABC shows are mostly about unconventional families, non-whites and women. Fox is full of blacks and race mixers, but with a low-brow comedy theme. NBC is heavy on the fire department shows for some reason. Maybe they struck a deal with CBS. Again, these are shows about defending the realm against threats. If you were observing America from another planet, just using television, you would think America is riddle with crime and fire bugs,

As a cord cutter, I have no occasion to see any of these shows, so I could be all wrong about the quality and content. I just know that the only network show I hear mentioned in my daily life is Big Bang Theory. I do hear plenty of people talk about shows they follow on cable or service providers like Amazon and NetFlix. Maybe the people I interact with on a daily basis are not the typical network TV viewers, but my guess is the audiences for network shows have shrunk quite a bit over the last decade.

My other hunch, and I may be way off base on this, but I suspect these shows are written by women or at least have lots of female writers. Shows like The Good Fight and Madame Secretary are obviously aimed at cat ladies. The latter was clearly an infomercial for Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign. It is a safe bet they had shows written about how the main character wins the White House, so they could retool the show to be about the wonderfulness of having the first female President. Thank you Donald Trump.

On the other hand, the apparent crappiness of television shows could simply be a part of the general crappiness of the mass media culture. The movie business is suffering from a season of very expensive flops. So much so the whole business model is being called into question. Bad movies are getting yanked from theaters and the theaters are offering incentives to people to watch the bad movies. Maybe it is just a blip, but the big studios are treating this like a sea change in the business. Something big is happening.

Or, maybe it already happened. The last time “everyone watched” a network show was probably the 90’s with Seinfeld or maybe the Simpsons. When was the last time you heard someone use a pop culture referenced to a sitcom or network drama? What’s happening to the movie business, may have happened to network TV and no one noticed because of the cable shows and cord cutting phenomenon. Put another way, the root cause of all of these phenomenon may be a change in who runs the media business.

It could also be the radical feminization and politicization of the business, rather than the product. The sexual harassment hysteria gripping both Hollywood and the news entertainment rackets suggest the cat ladies are staging a final takeover. Someone named Mark Halperin is the latest male to be hurled into the void by the ladies. The general awfulness of our mass media could simply be the result of diving off the talent and replacing it with social justice warriors and their crazed enablers.

I watched the HBO series Rome recently. It was on about ten years ago and covered the period from the rise of Julius Caesar to the triumph of Octavian over Antony. It was a big budget affair with lots of well done costumes. The story, on the other hand, was mostly about the catty women and their intrigues. That and overly long sex scenes that were unrealistic and stupid. Feminist love this stuff, which is why every tackle-faced cat lady in America camped out to see the film adaptation of 50 Shades of Gray.

I’ve argued on and off for a while now that we are at the end of a great cultural cycle. The old culture that was born and flourished in the 20 century is dead. We still have the structures and institutions from that era, but they are husks of themselves. There is no cultural energy to animate them and give them vibrancy. The collapse of Hollywood may be a sign of it. Movies and TV are artifacts of the last century. Like zombies, these institutions shuffle along, searching for brains, but they are finally collapsing into dust.

One of the stranger things about our public discourse the last couple of decades is the constant call for unity. The black hats on the political stage are always described as divisive or polarizing. The white hats are the “uniters”, bringing people together. Whenever something happens, like a disaster or shooting, the news is full of stories about how the community is united in response. Usually this means some sort of ceremony with candles and the local leaders officiating a ritual intended to show unity.

Of course, the fetish for unity is a Progressive thing. Often it takes comical turns, like when public opinion is running hard against some Progressive cause. Then the public is described as “divided over the issue.” A suitable bad guy is found and scorn is heaped on him by the media for his divisiveness. On the other hand, when opinion is slightly in favor of the Progressives, then we hear that the public is nearly unanimous in their support. This is followed by calls of unity, which means the opposition should surrender.

The classic example of this was homosexual marriage. State after state held referendums on the issue. for 30 some odds times the public voted against it. After every defeat, the media reported that a divided electorate narrowly opposed gay marriage. Then the one time it passes, a deluge of press claiming a tidal wave of support in favor of homosexual marriage. It was so convincing, the Supreme Court decided that voting was too much a bother and unilaterally declared gay marriage a sacrament.

Unity was not always a fetish for our rulers. In my youth, I had to sit and listen to civics lectures from Boomer instructors about the glories of raucous democracy. The whole point of democracy was for the people to have a civilized argument in order to gain a majority around a position. The change seems to have happened in the Clinton years. Anyone who opposed the Clintons was accused of dividing the public. As is true of so many of the problems in the current crisis, the roots of this unity fetish are in the Ozarks.

On the other hand, maybe this berserk desire for unanimity of public opinion on every matter is a sign of something else. The outbreak does coincide with the end of the Cold War. The very real risk of nuclear annihilation kept the American political class under control and it justified doing what was necessary to keep a lid on public dissent. Of course, the public was more than willing to enforce a high degree of conformity, in order to avoid giving the Russians an edge. The Cold War was a unifying and stabilizing force.

Before the Cold War, there was the Second World War. The Great Depression was probably the last time when conditions were ripe for disunity. When the ruling class is unable to keep the people fed, the people are willing to entertain new rulers. On the other hand, it offered the Yankee ruling elite an opportunity to purge the ruling class of heretics and dissenters. The days of guys like Calvin Coolidge getting far in politics were brought to an end with the New Deal and the political realignment ushered in by Roosevelt.

In reality, the last time our ruling class did not have some exogenous thing to justify imposing a high degree of unanimity on the public, and on the ruling class, was the late 19th century. That was after the Civil War, so there was no need for unity. The North had conquered the rest of the country. The South was obliterated economically and culturally, so they were no threat. Appalachia was always too disorganized to be a threat to the Yankee establishment. Unity was the default situation.

The point of all this is that it has been a long time since America has not had something that was useful for rallying public support. The holy war against the Muslims should have been an easy replacement for the Cold War, but our rulers are so infected by the PC virus they could not declare the crusade. Instead they lost two pointless wars of choice and invited millions of Muslims to settle in our lands. The promised clash of civilization has instead become a clash between the Dirt People and the Cloud People over Islam.

That may be the reason our betters are forever going on about the need for unity. These weird rituals after ever terrorist attack are intended to summon the magic spirits that will restore the unifying order of old. The candlelight vigil after every shooting or riot suggests that the deep state actors behind these things are the candle makers. Every Progressive in America spends the following day passing around pics on social media, of people “uniting” to fight the latest outrage, almost always at a candlelight vigil.

There’s also the fact that all mass movements need a devil. The Cult of Modern Liberalism is no exception. It’s why John McCain built his career around the pitch of a “cause greater than ourselves.” His great cause over the last several decades was the nutty idea of spreading western liberal democracy to the Muslim world. Other Progressives have gone all in on stamping out biological reality. The ghost of Hitler and Bull Connor, of course, are always handy bogeymen for our Progressive rulers.

America was never intended to be united culturally or spiritually. The Founders understood that the original colonies had different characteristics, due to the different founding populations. It’s why they maintained the sovereignty of the states in the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution. America was supposed to be a collection of states and cultures, that cooperated economically and for common defense, but otherwise existed independent of one another. It’s why they wanted a weak national government.

What we may be seeing is the end of the long historical cycle that began in the 19th century, with the Hartford convention,  and ended with the Cold War. The 19th century saw the northern states rise economically and culturally, to eventually dominate the rest of the nation. Events in Europe provided handy enemies against which to rally the public and beat back any challenges to Yankee hegemony. We have run out of plausible bogeymen with which to scare the public. As a result, America is returning to its nature.

This could be the the root  cause of the endless calls for unity. The pleas for unity are, in effect, demands to maintain the status quo. Along side the endless laments from the media about the decline of old media and the rise of alternatives, you have a ruling establishment in a long twilight struggle to maintain its status and power. Perhaps in the fullness of time, the Yankee domination of America will be seen as a long cultural cycle, with its own civic religion, national epic and origin myth.

At American Renaissance, I was introduced to an old guy from VDare, who seemed to experience the world strictly through the search functions of his phone. Someone told him about my site and the first thing he did was search for the site name and “white nationalism” to see if I had opinions on the subject. His first hit was a post where I called white nationalism the dumbest thing going. He tried giving me the business about it and I gave it right back to him. I will forever be off the VDare Solstice card list as a result.

In fairness to him, he was a good sport about it. In fairness to me, my criticism of white nationalism is mostly about aesthetics. The term is not a new one. That means it comes with baggage and that baggage is not easily overcome. When most Americans hear “white nationalism” they think of snaggle-toothed rustics, wearing wife beaters and jorts, complaining about the coloreds. Getting modern whites to overcome the cult of anti-racism is hard under ideal conditions. Having Cletus as your sales rep makes it impossible.

That’s something the white identity people need to accept. For generations, Progressives have tightly associated racism with the South. The good white/bad white thing that John Derbyshire discusses is based entirely on this image. Bad whites shop at Walmart, like domestic beer and hate black people. Despite the fact that blacks have been moving back to the Old Confederacy for decades, black culture holds that the South is still aggressively racist. It’s at the core of the statue toppling and confederate flag burning manias.

Even if you can somehow get past the image problem, white nationalism is not some new concept developed by the alt-right. It has a history and it has a lot of veterans of its prior iterations. Those people are still kicking around. The web site Storm Front, in addition to being an FBI honey trap, is the home of the old White Nationalist guys, who used to follow guys like David Duke. If you borrow the language and symbols of these guys, you are inviting them and their ideas into your new version of white nationalism.

There are two problems with this. One is many of these guys were not the best people or the most stable people. Stepping way outside the moral framework is never easy, but it is a lot easier if you’re crazy. It’s also easier if you have nutty ideas that no one takes too seriously. Even the most generous evaluation of White Nationalism 1.0 says it was mostly a reaction to the cultural revolution of the 1960’s. It never came up with a plausible way forward politically or culturally. It was mostly old racists who just liked to complain.

Again, even if you manage to rehabilitate the language and symbols, you can’t get past the fact that prior efforts were a failure. A pretty good rule of life is that failure is assured if you follow in the footsteps of previous failures. It’s why adopting Nazi symbols is stupid. The Third Reich was most notable for being a disastrous failure. Associating your thing with failure is just bad marketing. It also tends to attract people who find some sort of satisfaction in losing. New Movements need need language and new symbols.

Putting all of that aside, prior iterations of white nationalism always suffered from the fact they were reactionary. At their very best, they could only offer a critique of the prevailing order. They had nothing to offer as an alternative, beyond demands to wind the clock backwards. Reactionary movements always fail in the long run for the simple reason that yesterday can never follow tomorrow. Even if everyone agrees the current arrangements are not working, what comes next is never a return to the old order.

There’s something else that prior white nationalists movements never got right. They assumed that a majority white nation was a given. If they could just get a majority of whites on their side, they would win the political battles over race. America is 70% white at the last census and will be majority-minority in a few decades. The issue today is not about keeping America white. That horse has left the barn. The question before us today is how whites will survive as a minority population in a majority-minority country.

That means the math is not about 50% plus one. Whatever comes to define white identity in the age of identity politics will have to appeal to and serve the interests of the vast majority of whites. That can’t just be a visceral hatred of non-whites. Whites in America are mostly from west of the Hajnal line, which means low clannishness. Old fashioned tribal signalling against the next tribe is not going to work. What comes next has to be an ideology that promotes a positive identity offering a promising future.

That’s probably the most encouraging thing to come out of the Charlottesville protest over the summer. The people involved began to appreciate the need to build new symbols and use new language. Even guys like Andrew Anglin are pushing his people to drop the Hitler images, beyond obviously satirical stuff. Mockery of taboos and irreverence for social norms has a place, but it can’t be the focus of a political movement, if it is going to draw in the skeptical. The white identity people seem to get that now.

The irony here is the New Left went through a similar problem. Before they were able to start the cultural revolution, they existed as an ad hoc counter-culture. The old commies from the CP-USA days tried to glom onto it, but the new radicals correctly saw that as a bad idea. They eventually purged their ranks of the old guys and their old ideas. Now, the cultural movement that seeks to destroy the New Left and the Baby Boomer culture is going through a similar process as it organizes itself.

Proponents of the propositional state often make the claim that America is held together by a civic religion. Usually, but not always, the argument in favor starts with the first line of Lincoln’s Gettysburg address. “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” The emphasis is on the bit about all men being created equal, from which flows the ideals of political liberty, equality before the law, democracy, etc.

It’s wise to start with Lincoln, as there is no evidence that the Founders were fond of the idea or even aware of it. Rousseau coined the term in 1762 and many of the Founders would have read his work, but there is no evidence they embraced the idea. In fact, they largely rejected the idea of a unifying state, as a cultural force. Their words and actions contradict the modern interpretation of “all men are created equal” so it is impossible to argue they intended it as currently interpreted. Lincoln is a much better starting point.

That said, it is doubtful Lincoln or anyone alive at the time would have embraced the idea of civic religion. The first guy to talk about America having a uniquely religious quality was Alexis de Tocqueville, but he did not think Americanism was a civic religion or anything close to it. He thought America’s uniquely Christian nature is what allowed for a diverse people to form a single nation. For a 19th century American, especially in the aftermath of the Civil War, the idea of a unifying creed would have been laughable.

The earliest mention of America having a unique civic life, held together by something resembling a religion, is by Chesterton. He wrote that America was “the only nation founded on a creed” and was “a nation with a soul of a church.” This observation was probably not unique to Chesterton. Europeans have always viewed Americans as being moralistic and impractical, with regards to the affairs of state. This is something our rulers encourage. Just look at the war on terror. It’s entirely framed in moral terms.

The fact is, the idea of a civic religion and an American creed is a fairly new one. The guy credited with promoting it is sociologist Robert Bellah. He formalized the concept in a 1967 article titled “Civil Religion in America.” According to Bellah, “Americans embrace a common civil religion with certain fundamental beliefs, values, holidays, and rituals, that transcend their chosen religion.” It’s what allows a diverse people to fight under the same flag, cooperate economically and maintain a multi-ethnic society.

As is often the case, theories of history require the wholesale rewriting of history. That’s what has happened with the civic religion claims. The most generous interpretation is that this new civic religion was born after the Civil War, as a result of the North defeating the South. The “new nation” that came out of that was formed around this new creed. That’s not unreasonable, but it also disconnects us from the Founding and the Founding documents. What it means is that the Constitution is largely meaningless.

A less generous reading is that this was part of a marketing campaign by certain elements in 1960’s America to de-legitimize the dominant American culture. After all, this was the peak of the cultural revolution when the New Left had embarked on its long march through the institutions. It was also around this time that Congress began to fling open the borders and invite the world into the country. If America is not a nation of Americans, but a concept, why not invite in the world, so they can learn the concept too!

The ahistorical nature of the civic religion is not troubling to the believers because they simply want to believe, as long as the civic religion serves their purpose. For Buckley conservatives, libertarians and others, the language of the civic religion is useful as an argument against the Progressive ruling class. It lets them stand in opposition on moral grounds, but also accept defeat, without violating their principles, which they claim are rooted in their Americanism. It is the political get out of jail free card.

The bigger problem with this civic religion stuff is the problem with civic religions in general. If they mean anything, they end up in a blood bath. The reason is a religion has rules that are non-negotiable. For example, you cannot be a Catholic and support abortion on demand. In order to be a member in good standing, you have to be in line with the teachings of the religion. Otherwise, you are a sinner, and maybe even a heretic. No religion can tolerate heresy among its members and remain an active religion.

In theory, you can quit a religion and join another one. Or, you can simply not participate or maybe just do the barest minimum to keep everyone off your back. You can’t realistically quit your country and join a new one. You can’t become agnostic as a citizen. Similarly, the leaders of the civic religion cannot easily exile you for heresy. The result is usually concentration camps or worse. That’s why all other efforts at building a civic religion have ended up in wholesale murder. It is the only practical way to handle dissent.

There is another problem with the civic religion idea, that is particular to America. This has never been a country with a single culture or even a single people. The founding of the colonies was by distinct groups of English. New York City was not even founded by English. If you read the book American Nations, it does a pretty good job of describing the different cultural groupings of the country. Imposing the cult of Lincoln on the nation sounds good to the ruling class, but it has never sat well with the rest of the nations.

This cult of Lincoln promoted by our betters has another defect and that is they are compelled to impose it on the world. This seems to be another problem with all civic religions. The French exported radicalism around Europe. The Soviets exported Bolshevism around the world. The American empire is the story of imposing the American creed on every nation of the world, always against their will. Civic religions, like all religions, don’t seem to play nice with other religions, seeing them as competitors.

That’s why America has gone from a republic full of active Christians to a “meritocracy” at war with anything resembling Christianity. A century ago, Progressives were Christians, who were Progressive reformers. Then they were Progressives, who could also be Christians. Then they were just Progressives. There was a time when “liberal Catholic” was a real thing, but no one can chase two rabbits at once. Eventually, the American civic religion won out and is now being imposed on all of us, by force.

The best you can say about the supposed civic religion of America is that it is what the ruling class uses to keep the plates spinning. There is something to say for economic progress and domestic peace. It is not, however, natural or normal, and therefore it must eventually yield to reality. That’s what we are seeing today. Americanism is a luxury item for an America that was 80% white and free of economic and political inequality among the white population. That’s not today so the civic religion is losing its salience.