Author Archives: thezman

The Crisis Of Constituencies

Posted on by
186

One of the defining features of post-Cold War America is that public policy no longer reflects public sentiment. Washington passes plenty of laws every year and spends plenty of money on various programs. State governments have also grown like a weed in their size and scope. Plenty is done in the name of the people, but precious little is favored by the majority of the people. Instead, public policy debates are about breaking down majority opposition in service to minority interests.

In theory, democracies should operate on the principle of majority rule. Fifty percent plus one carries the day on every issue. This is certainly true in the small scale, where a simple show of hands is enough to decide an issue. That does not scale up very well, so countries have representative bodies like parliaments and legislatures. Still, in a representative democracy, with some exceptions, the majority will should be reflected in public policy debates in the parliament or legislature.

Much of what vexes the current age is the sense by all factions that their interests are no longer represented. The Left is convinced that nefarious forces are preventing the majority from putting the Left into power. That may be delusional, but they believe it to be true, which is what matters. The Right, broadly defined to mean everyone not on the Left, believes their majority interests are ignored. There is no issue around which you can find a majority that thinks their interests are being served.

This paradox of democracy, where the majority is captured by shifting minorities, is not simply the product of hierarchy. The rich certainly wield power disproportionate to their numbers, but even the rich find their interests thwarted. For example, global business would love to have unlimited foreign workers, but they can’t seem to buy enough influence in Washington to get it. The same can be said for things like trade policy, regulatory policy and tax policy.

The truth is, much of what the majority would like on domestic policy is of little or no interest to the ruling oligarchs. For example, the roads in America look like what you see in the third world. Big transportation items like bridges, highways and tunnels have not been updated in half a century. The Silicon Valley oligarchs are not going to be harmed by better infrastructure. Wall Street would profit from new road building, but there is never a majority in Washington for it.

On the other hand, projects with no natural majority somehow get pushed through and linger on despite popular discontent. The big health care push in the Obama years had no popular support as passed. It became increasingly unpopular as the reality of it became a real thing for Americans. The Republican party promised to repeal or fix it for close to a decade, but nothing happened. There was always a majority in Congress opposed to whatever changes were proposed.

Health care is a great example of how minorities rule majorities. Every comma in the regulatory code has a dedicated constituency behind it. Their existence depends on the part of the code that created them, so they ferociously defend it. The millions of lines of regulatory code have thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of little bands guarding their bit of code from anything resembling reform. The only thing these tribes are sure to agree upon is that change is never good.

This is why both parties intuitively opposed Trump’s wall project. On the one hand, lots of those little constituencies feared it threatened their turf. If we had a really good barrier system like Israel, maybe we don’t need as many border agents. Maybe we don’t need as many bureaucrats in the illegal alien processing system. It may sound far-fetched, but every state has prison guard unions that lobby their state to pass laws, because more laws means more criminals, which means more prisons.

Then there is the fact that the wall would have created an army of new constituencies invested in the barrier system. All of those people would have become covetous of their new host and prepared to fight for their interests. Government is not a zero-sum game, but it is treated as such by the vested interests. A barrier system would mean new constituencies and that would mean every slice of pie got thinner. It’s why the only thing that gets done is that which serves existing constituencies.

It is why the Covid stuff could be permanent. In just six months new industries have sprung to life serving the demands of Covid regulations. Businesses have had to reorganize in order to operate under these regulations. They have already absorbed the costs of compliance. They have no incentive to go back to the old way. Of course, an army of “health and safety professionals” are rising up like a zombie army. They will fight tooth and claw to maintain this new environment.

There are many paradoxes to democracy, but one glaring one is that instead of breaking down into mob rule, it becomes minority rule. It is a form of the Pareto principle, where a small percentage account for a large percentage of politics, but the small percentage is always shifting and variable. Every issue has its own minority interest driving the bulk of the politics related to that issue. There never seems to be a majority in favor of ending that minority interest.

The sclerosis that we see in modern America seems to be immune from any effort to force through change. Look at the struggles Trump has had in removing troops from Afghanistan and Syria. The military industrial complex is a honeycomb of small interests accounting for the bulk of politics within that system. Whatever Trump does to try and get out of these quagmires, those interest unite into temporary coalitions to undermine the effort in order to protect their fiefdom.

Interestingly, this inability to reform due to a legion of petty interests blocking reform is similar to the situation in pre-revolutionary France. Collectively, the king and aristocracy had good reason to reform the nation’s finances and reform certain aspects of the French economy and society. Yet, there were always petty reasons to block necessary reform, so they kept drifting toward crisis. Eventually, of course, this inability to act in the interest of the majority sapped their legitimacy.

That may be the process America is in now. The Left, always looking to subvert order and continuity, is spoiled for choice when looking for dissatisfied factions. In a world where the only majority is one that sees its interest being ignored, the Left can always put together an angry mob to disrupt order. This ease with which they sow discord in society leads the rest of society to question the legitimacy of their government, which seems powerless against these disruptions.

Adding to that is the fact that the majority cannot put their finger on a single thing their government does for them, but is spoiled for choice when looking for things the government does in spite of them. To the natural majority, it seems as if the ruling class is deliberately avoiding that which should be easy. Their incompetence and sclerosis are increasingly seen as deliberate. Like France, we are drifting from general unhappiness to a crisis of legitimacy that is increasingly personalized.

Note: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Do Goblins Go To Hell?

Posted on by
283

After years of false promises, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg has finally made the world a better place by exited from it. Her near-death experiences had reached a number where it was starting to look as if she was immortal. She was in the hospital more than the typical nurse, but somehow always managed to recover. It turns out that her deal with Old Scratch did have an expiry date and the world rejoices. They announced her death Friday night, but who knows when she really died.

As is custom when a Progressive goblin dies, the liberal media will carry on as if she was the most important person in history. They had already made movies about her that no one watched, so they will all be wearing black armbands this week. Whatever funeral services they have for her will be turned into another circus. Maybe in honor of George Floyd, peace be upon him, they will drop her corpse next to his. Then pilgrims can pay respects to both on the same trip.

Ginsberg was the example of everything that has gone wrong with America. Her tenure as a justice was defined by her doctrinaire screeds against ordered liberty. The only reason she was on the court was due to the unwritten rule that at least four justices must be Progressive fanatics, preferably Jewish ones. Her career on the lower court made clear that she would always follow orders from the Left. She did not write a single opinion that was not known in advance.

Of course, the issue in her final days was the fact that she was nothing more than an animated corpse, but she refused to retire. There was no way she was lucid enough and competent enough to perform her duty, but the system allows a justice to stay on until they take their last breath. In theory, Congress can remove them, but that never happens, so the judges can stick around until death. With Ginsberg, it did not matter as all of her opinions were written in advance for her.

If one were hoping to reform America in order to prevent what appears to be a bloody breakup, the first place to start is the court. A new rule of Zeleucus should be imposed, where any judge proposing to overturn a statute or ancient custom must appear before a citizen’s council with a noose around his neck. If the council votes against the proposal the judge is immediately strangled. This would eliminate subversives like Ginsberg from the legal system in a generation.

After that, no judge should be allowed to serve past 75. There are plenty of people with supple minds well into their 80’s, but people near the end of their days should not be defining the future. Allowing a grand council of geezers to bind future courts and future legislatures is judicial entrenchment. There are no perfect solutions to this, but preventing people like Ginsberg from loitering on the court is first step. It gives each generation a chance to have their own court.

Of course, the dominant role of the court in our political life is something that would have to be addressed. Rule by robed masters with lifetime appointments is not only un-American, it is anti-Western. Rule by wise man or holy man is an oriental import that no occidental people should embrace. Judges and courts are for administering the laws that are written by the people’s rulers. Whether it is a representative body or a monarch, the laws are written by the sovereign, not the courts.

Because the Left subverted the court in the last century, we are condemned to have increasingly deranged nominating processes. The circus around replacing the last left-wing justice lasted months, so you can be sure the people operating death squads in our cities will put on a grand show this time. The planned colored revolution against Trump now has the perfect vehicle. Whoever Trump nominates will be the center of a manufactured revolt in the streets of Washington.

Despite what Mitch McConnell is saying now, there is a good chance that this gets kicked down the road. Both parties are pulling out all the stops to help Biden, so making the election about who picks the replacement for Ginsberg is the smart play. This will get the woke women out to replace the BLM and Antifa rioters, who appear to have run out of steam. The election can now be about female empowerment, rather than the right of non-whites to loot and pillage.

On the other hand, holding off the nomination could drive up enthusiasm for Trump, as even so-called conservative understands what is at stake. Gun rights people are already highly motivated to vote in November. Now that there is a chance to tilt the court their way for a generation, they will be hyper-enthusiastic. The social conservatives will also be activated by this news. Trump has signaled he intends to appoint an anti-abortion advocate if he has the chance.

In the long run, none of this matters. As we have seen with so many justices, once they get on the court their skin suit falls away to reveal their reptilian nature. Whoever Trump nominates will go native and do the bidding of the Inner Party. Like all of the other institutions, the court is only a weapon against the people now, never a weapon on behalf of the people. This is the result of being ruled by an alien elite. Still, Ginsberg is dead and Lucifer has another soul to torment.

Note: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

The Podcast Of Failure

Posted on by
242

Failure analysis is one of those things that most people do every day, but they don’t think about it that way. Much of what passes for a work in a modern corporation is exception handling, which is just solving the problems that occur when the normal business processes fail in some way. No one calls customer service to tell them that they are happy with the product and have no complaints. Those departments and the people in them exist to figure out what went wrong and remedy it.

At a higher level, smart people making big salaries spend their days trying to understand why complex systems produce unacceptable results. There are people who spend every day studying plane crashes, looking for the cause of the failure. Pretty much every quality control program is just failure analysis. The idea is to measure success against some ambitious standard and then look for the causes as to why the standard is not currently being met.

The one area of life where failure analysis is seldom used is politics. When the goals are not met, and they are never met, no one asks “How come this policy did not work as we expected?” Conservatives, for example, never think about why their side loses almost every fight with the Left. The ones they win are the ones the Left does not care about all that much, like moving commas around the tax code. In some cases, like emptying the jails, the conservative victory was really an own goal.

In conventional politics, this is fine, as failing is often a career enhancer. Failing up is such a common phenomenon in Washington that it is the norm. That’s because a politician failing to deliver for his voters is usually doing so with the blessing of the inner party or powerful influencers of the party. Success and failure within an established political order is defined as helping or harming the establishment. Modern Washington cares only about maintaining their cultural and political hegemony.

Outsider politics and reform efforts play by a different standard. Their very existence depends upon them succeeding. The same is true for outsider politics, where the game is to alter or overturn the status quo. Failure in these cases not only means there is no change to the established order, but often the reformers and their supporters suffer serious consequences. It’s why understanding failure is paramount for outsider politics and political reformers. Mistakes can be lethal.

Strangely, there is very little failure analysis in the graveyard of right-wing resistance to Progressive aggression. For close to seventy years now, all efforts to stop the Left’s march though society have failed, and no one bothers to think about it. Instead, it is just more calls to keep doing the same things over and over. Today, for example, so-called conservatives keep bellowing about the constitution, while they sit at home obeying lock down orders.

If there is going to be an alternative to the liberal democratic order, it must start with first accepting that all past efforts failed. That’s a difficult emotional hurdle for most, because it means questioning important assumptions. It is much easier to keep repeating the same chants than to honestly question your own beliefs, but if the trajectory of American politics is going to change, it must begin with accepting that the past is a graveyard of errors.

That’s what the show is about this week. Putting it together, it quickly became clear that it is a very big topic. I could probably do a couple hours on every segment. The failure of Buckley conservatives could be a multi-part Dan Carlin series. Sixty-five years of failure is a lot of failure. Still, a good first effort is to introduce the concept and maybe get people thinking critically about what has been tried and why it failed. The reason we are here now is the prior efforts did not work.

This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. Spreaker has the full show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android 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. The anarchists can catch me on iHeart Radio. I am now on Deezer, for our European haters and Stitcher for the weirdos. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below.

Note: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 00:00: Opening
  • 02:00: The Study Of Failure
  • 12:00: The Recitation Of Failures
  • 22:00: The Buckleyites
  • 32:00: The Paleocons
  • 42:00: The White Nationalists
  • 57:00: Closing

Direct Download, The iTunes, Google Play, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed, Bitchute

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

The Unconservatives

Posted on by
286

The defining feature of Conservatism over the last quarter century or more is that it steadfastly refuses to consider the consequences of its dogma. In fact, part of its dogma is to reject any consideration of consequences. Conservatives proudly state that the means justifies the ends. If policy fits conservative ideology, then the results are by definition acceptable. You see that myopia at work in their latest fetish over zoning regulations in the suburbs and exurbs.

The American Conservative has been running posts like this one that claim the suburbs need to be exposed to predatory developers. The marketplace should decide if a chemical plant is built next to the school or a federally subsidized tenement is constructed in your town. After all, every conservative knows that the will of the marketplace is supreme. The only way for anything to be legitimate is if it is the result of the invisible hand of the marketplace.

Of course, National Review has also jumped onto this fetish. This post from last month in response to the Trump administration trashing some Obama era housing regulations demands the suburbs be deregulated. He also makes the conservative case for exposing local communities to the whim of developers. The irony here is the author lives in one of the most regulated suburbs on the planet. In fact, Northern Virginia would not exist as it does if not for the federal government.

Like the fetish for legalizing drugs or hardcore pornography, conservatives first start their case by rejecting the obvious consequences. Any consideration of the knock-on effects of public policy violate conservative dogma. The only thing that can matter is if these proposed polices square with what passes for conservative theory. In this case it means zero government involvement in the regulation of development. Property owners can do whatever they like with their property.

Of course, at this stage, conservative theory is barely distinguishable from libertarian theory, which is nothing more than a pose. It is a way to stand on the sidelines and pretend to hold the moral high ground. In this case it means avoiding the real issue at play in this story. That is the systematic blockbusting of white suburbs by the Left through the use of federal housing regulations. They are trying to dump non-white populations into white suburbs in the name of retributive justice.

Rather than think about that, because that is scary and icky, the modern conservative focuses on the theoretical aspects of the issue. Like the reformer in Chesterton’s fence, they refuse to wonder why this is an issue. They refuse to ponder why the Obama people were doing what they were doing or why local communities have been fighting these efforts over the years. None of that matters. As is true with all ideologues, all that matters is the ideological conformity.

The irony here is that what passes for conservatism today is pretty much the opposite of what conservatism has meant historically. Conservatism has always prized continuity, as that is the result of generations of trial and error. Change must come slowly and deliberately with proper consideration for local customs and concerns. Modern conservatism is the embrace of constant change, the whirlwind of the marketplace, in total disregard for community and custom.

Another part of that embrace of continuity is the point of Chesterton’s fence. The conservative not only knows there are consequences to every reform, but those consequences will have consequences as well. It’s not that the Right is adept at seeing the downstream consequences of the proposed reform, but that they know we cannot always see far enough downstream to truly know the second order effects of the proposed reform. Prudence is chief among virtues.

Getting back to housing policy, what we do know is the Left is not acting from republican virtue when they propose changes to the law. They are animated by anti-white hatred and the quest for retributive justice. That is the starting assumption when examining any proposed reform from the Left. Therefore, the conservative must look at how best to prevent the consequences the Left imagines. In this case, how best to prevent the Left from devastating the white suburbs.

As to the issue of property rights, this is another example of how modern conservatism is an inversion of what conservatism has meant historically. Conservatives have always understood that rights are the product of human society. Citizens have rights and one cannot be a citizen unless they are part of a society. Therefore, the good of the community comes before the individual. This is why no right is absolute. There are always situations in which rights give way to the public good.

This is the case of local control of development. The people in the community live in the community, which means they live with the consequences of how members dispose of their property. They get a say in that. Ideally, this is a light touch that relies on the moral scruples of the community members, but when that fails, the collective good of the community must prevail. Further, the rights of the outsider, the developer, do not exist, because the developer lives outside the community.

It is popular to call the modern conservative controlled opposition. There is some truth to it for sure, as many are paid by left-wing media organizations. For most of them, they are just part of another tentacle of the managerial octopus. Some tentacles lash at the body of society, while others, like this one, try to cut off oxygen to the brains of otherwise conservative people. The hope is they will sacrifice themselves and their community in the name of abstract principles.

Note: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Lenin’s Ghost

Posted on by
241

Probably the only thing that everyone in modern America can agree upon is that we now live in a hyper-partisan age. The modifier is needed, as we used to lived in a mildly partisan age. Before that, American politics was about coalitions. The parties represented factions willing to compromise to some degree. Either this hyper-partisanship is a natural end point of liberal democracy, perhaps a prelude to civil war, or something happened in the last quarter century to get us here.

The first place to start is with Lenin, as he is the man credited with introducing both the term and concept into the West. The term was coined to counter objectivity in political economic analysis. Lenin rejected the idea that there is some objective good for all of society, because true objectivity is impossible when the interests of one class of society conflict with the interests of other classes. Therefore, the only rational politics is one in which you expressly advocate for the interests of your side.

In America, where the Marxist sense of class identity has never taken hold, party affiliation was the closest we had to partisanship through the Cold War. One would support a party out of family tradition or maybe regional affiliation, even when the platform of the party did not directly appeal to your interests. Loyal Democrats, for example, would argue that the party was best for the country as a whole. It was the blend of tradition, objectivity and republican virtue.

This is no longer the case in America, Partisanship is now much closer to the concept Lenin had in mind. The anti-Trump people, for example, hate Trump for entirely partisan reasons. Not only is republican virtue no longer a consideration, but policy itself is no longer a factor. Under Obama, for example, his partisans championed public works projects. They now reject those same projects, the very notion of them, because Trump now supports them. All politics is person and partisan.

Oddly, in a country that is decidedly middle-class, bourgeois objectivity with regards to public policy is now alien. A candidate talking about the general welfare would sound strange and unnatural. Similarly, the party factionalism has faded away. What are the interests of the Democrats and Republicans? The only thing that is true is global enterprise underwrites both parties. Otherwise their squabbling represents no practical interests of any definable interest group.

Has there been a Lenin in the American story who can be blamed or credited with introducing hyper-partisanship to our politics? The place to start, of course, is the founding. That is, the second founding. Was Lincoln a partisan and did he make explicitly partisan appeals? There’s no evidence for it. Lincoln’s public utterances were appeals to republican virtue and objectivity. The sadism of the abolitionists could be interpreted as partisanship, but they were just fanatics.

Even if Lincoln could be called the first partisan, it did not stick. The erecting of confederate statues, the ones now being demolished, was an effort to end the animosity between the two sides. Partisans have no sympathy for their enemies, even when they are thoroughly defeated. FDR is another good option, but again, he saturated his rhetoric in bourgeois objectivity. In fact, FDR and the ruling elite were quite fearful of the sort of partisanship introduced by the Marxists.

If we are to find an American Lenin, it is much closer to our time. The best candidate would have to be Bill Clinton. It was in his administration that objectivity was dispatched from public discourse. He and his people shamelessly lied, and their media partners greedily repeated the lies. A man willing to debate the definition of the word “is” in a deposition is not a man who accepts the concept of truth. The only thing that mattered to the Clintons was what was good for them.

That is an important fact about American partisanship. The Clinton machine was not representing a class or even a coalition. The only thing that mattered to the Clinton machine was what was good for the Clinton machine. They were willing to say and do anything that furthered their interests. The interests of others, even the interests of the country, were not a consideration. In fact, harming others was also their fallback position, if they could not gain a direct benefit.

This hyper-personal, hyper-partisanship was not a natural element in the Bush machine, but it was imposed on them. The whole Bush as Hitler thing was a direct effort by the Left to make their political differences with the Bush administration about the personality of Bush and his people. The Left still hates Dick Cheney, even though he has been out of politics for a dozen years. Of course, Obama is the David Koresh of the cult of anti-racism and anti-whiteness.

Now, the problem with the Lenin analogy, and any parallels drawn between this age and the Bolsheviks, is that this form of partisanship evolved within popular government, rather than in opposition to authoritarianism. An “us against them” mentality is a necessary component to revolution. American hyper-partisanship did not evolve to topple power or even to promote an alternative to power. It evolved among the power elite as a way to solidify their power.

Personal partisanship is the natural consequence of popular government. The Greeks did not have parties, they had personalities. Factions were labeled the “followers of” some notable politician. In the Roman Republic a similar system existed. Factions within the Senate were built around people. As America has slowly abandoned the republican political culture in favor of democratic culture, it is inevitable that factionalism would give way to personal partisanship.

On the other hand, this is akin to saying that the Bolshevik Revolution would have happened if Lenin never existed. By putting all of the emphasis on historical process, the people making events become spectators. History is the blend of people, events and ideas. In this case, the long Cold War and the natural evolution of liberal democracy was the perfect ground for a megalomaniac like Bill Clinton to introduce hyper-partisanship into American politics.

Note: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

American Pericles

Posted on by
231

A popular topic among those less optimistic about the American Experiment is to compare America to Rome, either the republic or empire. The former camp looks for the Sulla in the past and the Caesar in the future. The latter camp looks for evidence that the American Empire is in its final days, like fifth century Rome. The trouble with comparing America to Rome is it is not a republic. It has not been since Gettysburg and is now something closer to a radical democracy.

The more accurate historical analogy for modern America is ancient Athens. While America is not quite yet a radical democracy, that is the current path. Soon the electoral college will be circumvented, so that presidents are elected directly. The Senate was democratized a century ago. The franchise is universal and will soon extend to anyone currently standing on American soil. The last ragged bits of republic will soon be gone and America will be a radical democracy.

Just as the wealthy and powerful in Athens assumed democracy worked best when they controlled it, the American oligarchs favor democracy because they believe it insulates them from the public. The factions at the top are prevented from open warfare because they have a common enemy, the general welfare. Thus, they are always willing to cooperate in order to maintain their position, even if it means one faction gains at some small expense to another faction.

Probably the most important man in the history of the Athenian democracy was Pericles, the first citizen of Athens, as Thucydides called him. He was a statesman and general of Athens during the time between the Persian and the Peloponnesian Wars, which is usually called the Athenian golden age. He turned the Delian League, which was a federation of city-states, into an Athenian empire and led the fight against Sparta during the first two years of the Peloponnesian War.

What is often overlooked about Pericles is that he is responsible for the structures we now associate with ancient Athens. He began the public works projects to beautify the city, including the building of the Parthenon. Most of the surviving structures on the Acropolis, in fact, were the work of Pericles. It is possible that ancient Greece would have no hold on the western mind if not for those old ruins. What we think of when we think of ancient Athens is mostly from the time of Pericles.

Is there an analog to Pericles in the American narrative? The place to start would be Lincoln, who should be called the founder of America or possibly the re-founder or second founder. Lincoln destroyed the old republic and set the country off on the path of becoming a democracy. In one sentence, thirty words, Lincoln re-positioned the country to rest upon the Declaration of Independence rather than the Constitution and the history and debates that surrounded its creation.

The trouble is, Lincoln was not much of a democrat and he was no voice of the people, as was the case with Pericles. Lincoln really was not all that fond of the black people he was freeing from bondage. It is not clear that Lincoln fully understood the ramifications of his project. He certainly could not foresee his creation becoming first a continental empire then a global empire in less than a century. He may not have fully grasped the radicalism and ramifications that was contained in his Gettysburg speech.

That’s another important aspect of Pericles that is relevant to this age. He knew exactly what he was doing and he understood the nature of Athenian democracy. He was often accused of being a populist and a potential tyrant by the rich and powerful, because he so carefully courted the approval of the masses. Much of what he accomplished was in the face of resistance from what we would call the ruling classes of Athens. Pericles fully understood his projects and its significance.

Pericles was also committed to the general welfare. His first building project was the walls guarding the city of Athens. This had two consequences, in addition to protecting the city from attack. One is it put people to work. Rather than depending upon the generosity of the wealthy for such endeavors, the people could now count on the state to provide work on these projects. The other is it protected the poor in the city, but left the landed estates outside the city exposed.

The most obvious example of such a politician in American history would be Franklin Roosevelt, as he ushered in the federal public works project. It is easy to forget just how radical the Roosevelt administration was in America. The mobilization of the public in the face of the depression was unprecedented. For close to a century now, it is assumed that the federal government is responsible for the welfare of the people, rather than the states or powerful local interests.

Another interesting parallel between FDR and Pericles is that while both men were high born, from powerful families, they were opposed by the ruling classes. One of the great political dramas in golden age of Athens was the struggle between Thucydides, the leader of the conservative faction, not the historian, and Pericles over spending on projects like the Parthenon. Pericles outmaneuvered and outwitted Thucydides and the conservatives to win public approval for his projects.

Similarly, FDR faced a great deal of resistance to his projects. Factions in his own coalition objected to part of his program, while conservatives tried to bottle up his plans in the courts. Like the opposition to Pericles, the opposition to FDR was also keenly aware that there was a foreign policy element to the debate. The support for FDR’s domestic program was tied to support for his policies toward Europe. In fact, his domestic program was essential to his foreign policy.

Another possible candidate as the American Pericles would be the combined administration of Kennedy and Johnson. The space program is probably the closest thing America has to the Acropolis. The reforms of Johnson, which were largely created by the Kennedy people, haunt us to this day. Given the current unrest and the demographics of the country, it is not unreasonable to think that America will never escape the shadow of the Johnson administration.

Donald Trump, of course, could be the modern Pericles. He is not a great orator, but Trump has an uncanny ability to resonate with the public, both good and bad. He’s also a high-born man who sees himself as the defender of the public. No president has shown a greater concern for the general welfare since FDR. Unlike FDR, but like Pericles, Trump is faced with a ruling class committed to stopping him. As with Pericles, their opposition is strongly linked to foreign policy.

One other way to look at this is that in a democracy of any sort, the Pericles role is an essential one, as is the role of the oligarchs. Lacking the legal structures to balance between the natural factions in society, particularly the rich versus the general public, democracy evolves these roles in the form of charismatic politicians. Whenever the relationship between the people and their rulers gets out of balance, men step forward on behalf of both sides to reestablish an equilibrium

Of course, the other significance of the life of Pericles is that after his death, Athens was plagued by inferior men, inciting the worst habits in the public and only concerned with personal popularity. The inability of Athenian democracy to produce statesmen close to the quality of Pericles marked the end of the Golden Age of Athens and led to defeat at the hands of the Spartans. The run of politicians since FDR, with the exception of Reagan, is another useful parallel to consider.

Note: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

The Arc Of White

Posted on by
313

One of the distinguishing features of politics in the American Empire is the phenomenon of white populism. This is something that emerged in the middle of the last century with the establishment of the American Empire after World War II. Every generation has experienced a wave of populist unrest, always in reaction to some reform movement initiated by the white elites. The elites act and the white working and middle classes react.

The first example of this was the white populist revolts in reaction to the Civil Rights Movement and the 1960’s Cultural Revolution. Whites in the South reacted to the destruction of segregation. This was followed by a revolt by northern whites over things like forced busing and the cultural upheaval. This set off the great political realignment where southern whites and northern ethnics migrated from the Democrat Party to the Republican Party in the 60’s and 70’s.

Another white populist revolt started with the de-industrialization of the country starting in the 70’s and accelerating into the 80’s. The rapid conversion of the economy from manufacturing to retail and services continued the political realignment that started in the 60’s. The so-called Reagan Democrats were mostly the people who had voted for Nixon, but this time they moved the GOP for good. This was also the start of the gap between the knowledge economy and the labor economy.

The current crisis is another wave of white populism. This time it is in reaction to the continued looting of the middle-class economy by the global elites, but also the betrayals of the Bush years and the Kulturkampf of the Obama years. Large numbers of whites in American have come to the conclusion that the political and economic elites are at war with them. The election of Trump in 2016 is one obvious result, but the hysterical and now violent reaction of the elites is another.

The thing about these waves of white populism is they follow the same pattern; despite the fact the triggering events are different and the times are different. There are some obvious parallels between what is happening now and what happened in the 1960’s and 1970’s, but modern America is nothing like the America of the 60’s. In fact, the people of that age would not recognize this age as America. Despite the enormous differences in culture and demographics, the pattern is the same.

One aspect of every white populist spasm has been that it gets funneled into a form of legitimate politics. The conservative movement of Bill Buckley, for example, tapped into white populism in order to get professional conservatives into office. Nixon’s so-called Southern Strategy was an explicit attempt to get disaffected white voters in the South to abandon their allegiance to the Democrat Party. Legitimate politics promised these voters a remedy to the assault on their culture.

The rise of Evangelical conservatism in the 70’s and 80’s was another effort to funnel white unrest into legitimate politics. Christians logically figured that if they organized politically, politicians would seek their vote. They would get the vote by addressing their concerns about things like abortion, family law and education. Of course, the Tea Party Movement and now the MAGA stuff are more efforts by whites to defend themselves through the legitimate political process.

Another thing all of these right-wing populist movements have in common is they failed to get anything for their efforts. Nixon did nothing to address the concerns of Southern whites over desegregation. He was happy to let them think he was on their side, but Nixon was more focused on gaining acceptance from official Washington. Reagan delivered for corporate interests and the military industrial complex, but never got around to doing anything for social conservatives.

Today we are seeing the same thing with Trump. His reelection depends entirely on whites coming out to vote for him for symbolic reasons. He will not deliver anything useful to white voters, but he will be a constant irritant to the elites. In fact, the only practical reason to vote for Trump in November is his reelection will send the elites into orbit and they could harm their own efforts. Otherwise, like Nixon and Reagan, Trump will deliver nothing for white populists.

The one new wrinkle to this process is that after the Cold War, many Republicans became hostile to white populists. The purging of the paleocons by the neocons in the 1990’s realigned the party away from populism. Most Republicans, for example, were openly hostile to the Tea Party movement. Trump’s biggest problem in Washington is his own party, which hates him as much as the Left hates him. So-called conservatives are fully onboard with multiculturalism now.

Of course, white populism has always had another outlet. That is the path of what can loosely be called white nationalism. In the 1960’s, people like George Lincoln Rockwell and William Pierce tried to tap into white populism to promote racial awareness among disaffected whites. Theirs was an anti-politics, in that it rejected the political system itself as illegitimate. Rather than try to mobilize people to elect better politicians, they wanted to organize people to create a new system.

In the case of Rockwell, it got nutty and then it got bloody. He tried selling Nazism to a country still proud of defeating the Nazis in WWII. The absurdity of his presentation got him plenty of attention, but that did more harm than good. He attracted a lot of weirdos and lunatics to his banner. He ended up taking two in the hat outside a laundromat, but even all these years later, the Left finds him to be a useful example to wave in front of bourgeois whites as a warning about white nationalism.

This is a pattern that has repeated in every spasm of white populism. The white nationalist lane is divided into one sober minded track and one eccentric and often dangerous track. William Pierce was a genuine intellect who understood the larger problems facing white people in America. He could never figure out how to break free of the eccentrics like Rockwell in order to attract a broader audience. The result was white nationalism became an insulated subculture.

This pattern repeated in the 1980’s. People like David Duke and Don Black came out of the Rockwell experience with the hope of breaking out of the white nationalism trap and addressing a general audience. Instead, Duke ended up being a less bizarre version of Rockwell and his movement was plagued by criminals and weirdos. After some national attention in the 1980’s, as well as some white nationalist violence, this phase of white nationalism faded into an insulated subculture.

In this current wave, the pattern has held. The alt-right started as a genuine populist revolt on-line among younger white males. The anonymity and irreverence of on-line culture gave them a way to express their unhappiness with modernity. The alt-right tapped into that, but like prior white nationalist spasms, this one was overrun by eccentrics and criminals. This time, the preppy airhead, Richard Spencer, was the clown prince used by the Left in their presentations.

As an aside, white nationalism in America has tracked the technological changes in the country over the last fifty years. The first iteration was banned from conventional media platforms, so it relied on things like newsletters and shortwave radio. The second iteration was the first to use the internet to build an on-line culture. Stormfront really was an innovation in political organizing. This last phase is confined to private internet channels, podcasts and live-streams.

Taken as a whole, the pattern is clear. These spasms of white populism in reaction to social experimentation by elites or changes in the economic order always end up going down two dead end paths. One is conventional politics, always through existing political channels, like the GOP. The other is white nationalism, which always ends up in a circus of attention seeking eccentrics, who are easily exploited by the Left. It is two roads that lead to the same dead end.

Interestingly, these two tracks always end up convinced that the other track is a dead end populated by losers. Today, many of the MAGA people invest as much time in rejecting the bad whites as they do supporting their cause. The remnants of the alt-right, in the name of white people, invest much of their time attacking white people, their history and their customs. Many of them sound anti-American to most people. Their rhetoric is decidedly leftist and hostile to American traditions.

The logical way out of this trap is something William Pierce recognized, but was never able to implement. That is, white populism needs to be channeled into a bourgeois politics that attracts high quality people who understand the problem is the system itself, rather than the office holders. In other words, it borrows the central insights of white nationalism, but provides it with a cultural and historical framework that appeals to the mass of middle-class white people.

Whether such a movement can get going is open to debate. The history of white populism is now a nightmare from which we cannot awake. Any effort to speak of white interests brings all of the usual suspects from past failed efforts into the mix. It’s as if all the parties enjoy playing the roles that have been created for them. The arc of white politics in America is looking like an immutable law of nature. It may require whites reaching minority status for the pattern to break.

Note: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

The Echo Chamber

Posted on by
208

For generations now, the mass media has referred to itself as the echo chamber or the media echo chamber, at least with regards to politics. A favorite politician or pundit says something pithy or useful and the media repeats it verbatim until everyone is sick of hearing it. After the 2010 midterms, Barak Obama used the word “shellacked” as in his team was “shellacked”, and the media repeated it every hour for days as if it was wisdom sent down from the heavens.

This was an incite the Clinton crime syndicate figured out how to use to their advantage back in the 1990’s. They would come up with some slogan they wanted to get the media repeating. They would then have their mouth pieces repeat the line over and over in their media appearances. The media would get the hint and then start repeating the slogan over and over. What they essentially did is weaponize the natural conformity of the mass media and use it as a propaganda organ.

The best example of this is the Russian conspiracy stuff from 2016. For weeks DNC e-mails had been leaked on various forums. The media had been instructed to ignore them, but people were reading them anyway. Eventually, Team Clinton came up with the idea of blaming it on Russian hackers. They sent out someone to brief the press on the campaign plane. It was like she had a strange form of Tourette’s. She just kept saying “Russian hacking” like a lunatic.

The fact that it works says a lot of about this age. There are people in the media and in charge of the media operations that understand this ploy. You would think someone would call shenanigans on this once in a while, but it never happens. That’s because the handful of people who control these big media operations think it benefits their long-term project. The people working as reporters are just carny-folk now, willing to say and do anything to keep their acting gig.

Another way the media echo chamber is used to attack the well-being of the public is through the use of manufactured evidence and phony experts. The “gun show loophole” is a perfect example. There is no such thing as a gun show loophole in our gun laws, but the media repeats the lie, anyway. The reason is the Left supplies so-called experts to repeat the lie and wave around fake data in support of it. As a result, we have a label for something that does not actually exist.

The fictional threat of this moment is white supremacy, which no one bothers to define, but the media is sure exists. The echo chamber is regularly fed nonsense stuff like this from so-called think tanks. In the first sentence we see several obvious lies, but they will be echoed by the media. The expectation is that the Biden campaign will program their candidate to repeat some of this stuff, so the media will then repeat it for a few weeks after, to drive home the message.

This is not an accident. This particular scheme is a highly coordinated effort orchestrated by the usual suspects. Not only do we have Daniel Byman at Brookings, but there is his old friend Joshua Geltzer from the Obama administration, now working for a “New America.” Mentioned by Brookings as an expert in support of their claim is Heidi Beirich of the SPLC. She claims to be an expert in extremism, but presumably not extreme fitness, some other kinds of extremism.

Putting aside the obvious fact that none of the people behind the white supremacy propaganda campaign were altar boys, they also all have that weird obsession with Russia that keeps turning up. In this case, they are making the claim that the imaginary white supremacists are in league with the invisible army of Russian agents called the Russian Imperialist Movement. The absurdity of calling them white supremacist is apparently lost on these people.

Stand back and look at this as a whole and we have paranoia over white supremacy, which is entirely fictional. Then you have all the Russian conspiracy stuff, which is mostly fictional. Russia, like every country on earth, has an active interest in the empire, so they try to lobby for their interests. They are not bribing American politicians or planting listening devices outside the White House, but they have their espionage services like every country.

While the media echo chamber is useful in promoting the narrow interests of groups like the Clinton crime syndicate, it is highly susceptible to subversion by people with agendas at odds with the usual suspects. That’s the real reason behind these spasmodic efforts to censure right-wing voices. It is not hard for clever right-wing groups to use social media to meme their ideas into the echo chamber and have them rocket around the internet.

That is the weakness of the media echo chamber. It works when it appears to be organic and natural. If it looks contrived, it actually works against the people trying to influence the public. Leaving it open makes it more effective for the people in charge, but it also makes it useful for their opponents. Closing it off makes the tool useless to the owner, as well as the opponents. There is no middle ground that works for the usual suspects, but not for their enemies.

What this means is the efforts to censure the public square will become less overt in the coming years. Banning people and manipulating search results is too ham-fisted to work in the modern age. Instead, contrived terror campaigns like the “white supremacy” stuff or the Russia paranoia will become the norm. The echo chamber will be flooded with this stuff, in an effort to drown out dissent. The echo chamber is about to be a bell rung by the same people all day every day.

Note: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

The Return Of The King

Posted on by
244

Something I wanted to talk about in the show, but I got long winded on other stuff, so I had to skip it, is something I talked about with a friend this week. That is, why is it that so many people have gone crazy all at once? There’s always been partisanship and fierce debates between liberals and normal people. People have always had heated debates about current events. Today, we have lots of people who seem to live in an alternative reality from the rest of us.

The issue that my friend and I were discussing is the riots. He had just had an interaction with someone on-line where the person told him the riots were fake news created by conservative news outlets. He pointed out that we have videos of arson and looting, much of it from left-wing sites. He sent him video of Minneapolis as proof that the riot actually happened. The person dismissed it all as a conspiracy theory saying that the protests have been peaceful.

Just as there has always been partisanship, there have always been crazy people who line their clothes with aluminum foil. What’s different now is it feels like we are overwhelmed by them. They work in the media. They work in government. They are in the schools. It is not just left-wing conspiracy stuff. The whole QAnon thing is another example of mass lunacy. It’s like the novella I Am Legend, except instead of turning people into vampires, the virus makes them crazy.

One theory on this is that these sorts of crazy people have always existed, but they existed in isolation. The person prone to Russian conspiracy stuff was not around others that indulged in that stuff. Paranoia and social norms kept these people from meeting in real life. The internet has allowed these people to freely and comfortably network with one another on-line. All of a sudden, this type of person knows lots of people who are prone to their type of madness.

What the internet has done is provide social proof. No matter how your madness plays out, you can find a Facebook group to tell you that you are not only not alone, but you are right. Instead of these people living in isolation, fairly sure they are alone in these thoughts, they now have lots of people who share their madness, giving them the confidence to be public with it. We are now plagued by highly confident, maladapted mutants, to use an Ed Dutton term.

There have been plenty of gags on television where the internet is suddenly shut down and people are forced back to the old ways. People suddenly must talk to one another and use maps. One likely outcome, if we shut down the internet, is the world would suddenly get much calmer and quieter. The plague of maladapted mutants would no longer be plugged into their networks. They would be reduced to shouting their lunacy on street corners wearing sandwich boards.

Human society evolved ways to peacefully manage the lunatics that are a part of every human society. A mild form of shunning, with the occasional witch burning, was enough to keep these people under control. Social shaming of gossipy women, for example, was effective at controlling the Karen problem. We have yet to evolve such mechanisms for doing this on-line. Worse yet, these gossipy women now control the discourse on-line as big tech censors.

The solution to the current unrest may be as simple as banning women from the internet or maybe just social media platforms. For that matter, just turn the who thing off entirely. Would the world really be so bad if you had to order from the Amazon catalog over the phone rather than on-line? is your life going to be worse or better without Twitter and Facebook? If all the internet billionaires were killed tomorrow, is anyone really going to notice or care?

This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. Spreaker has the full show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android 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. The anarchists can catch me on iHeart Radio. I am now on Deezer, for our European haters and Stitcher for the weirdos. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below.

Note: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 00:00: Opening
  • 02:00: Uber And Lyft (Link)
  • 17:00: Will To Failure (Link)
  • 32:00: The Electric Fence (Link) (Link) (Link)
  • 47:00: Russia Update (Link) (Link) (Link)
  • 57:00: Closing

Direct Download, The iTunes, Google Play, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed, Bitchute

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

Left & Right

Posted on by
403

Like so many words, phrases and labels, the terms Left and Right have been so abused that they no longer have literal meanings. Instead, they are charged with partisan and moral meanings. The obvious example is how Progressives use the term “right-wing” as an epithet, synonymous with evil. Even those who try to use the terms in rational ways struggle with useful definitions. Are libertarians on the Left or the Right? They tend to side with the Left, but they claim to be on the Right.

The origins of the terms are not much help either. We get these labels from the French Revolution. The Right were those who supported the king in the French National Assembly. They sat to the right. Those in opposition to the king sat to the Left. The West no longer has monarchists and America has not had Royalists since the 18th century. Even the monarchist parties in Europe are not in favor of bringing back monarchy in the 18th century sense of it.

Of course, those opponents of the monarchy in 18th century France were not Marxists or Bolsheviks. They were republicans and democrats in the classic sense. We don’t have those anymore either. The modern Left makes lots of noises about democracy, but it is just an ornament. They decorate their language with appeals to democracy and popular governance, but that’s just so they can pretend to be the cutting edge of the general will, the vanguard of the people.

Then you get into the touchy subject of the interwar years. Dumb people say the Nazis were left-wing because they had the word “socialist” in their name, but even dumber people say they are on the right because they were antisemitic. In the context of their historical moment, they were on the Right, as they were nationalists and they existed as an opposition to Bolshevism. Even so, much of their program overlapped with what the Bolsheviks were offering.

Libertarians also present another problem. They like to think of themselves as the fullest expression of classical liberal thinking. They also claim to be the polar opposite of communists and socialist. In theory that is plausible. As a practical matter, they are never in opposition to the Left and usually support their social agenda. The only practical politics we see from libertarians is the undermining of any organized resistance to the Left.

There’s also another problem with placing libertarians on the Right. It is the same problem you see with fascism. They are ideologues. Instead of starting from the reality of the human condition and human organization, and then creating a politics rooted in those realities, they start from the end and work backwards. Libertarians and fascists imagine their ideal society and then assume if it is somehow imposed on society, it will alter the nature of man and human organization.

That gets to the heart of Left and Right. Russell Kirk famously said that conservatism is the lack of ideology. In the context of his time this was a very good definition, but it is not entirely true. Conservatism is a collection of ideas and ideals, but what it lacks is a dogma. Conservatism lacks a set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true. Instead, the underlying truths of conservatism lie in the nature of man, which is open to debate and analysis.

This is why modern Progressives have suddenly turned on science, particularly the human sciences. Those people with Darwin fish on their Volvos, now have climate change and diversity stickers on their Audis. They used to wave around their imagined love of science as a gorgon’s head against what they claimed was the superstition of Christianity. Now they wave around the superstitions of multiculturalism to ward off empirical truths about humanity.

This framing of Left and Right as dogma versus pragmatism also helps explain why America is suddenly convulsed by multicultural terrorism. For at least a generation, we have not had a political Right. When Bill Buckley first got started, he and his fellow conservatives were in that classical tradition. Read his early work and feels like it is from another planet. No one in the current conservative ecosystem would dare write such things. Russel Kirk remains a forgotten man.

As Sam Francis predicted, the conservative movement Buckley started was eventually assimilated into the Progressive order. Since the end of the 1980’s, maybe the 1990’s, conservatism has simply been an ornament on the Progressive moral framework, a flashing light to distract the people. America finds itself under assault by drug addicts, lunatics and deviants because the doors to the asylum have been left open for at least a generation now.

Fukuyama famously declared that the end of the Cold War and the triumph of liberal democracy in the West was the end of history. In reality it is was the end of a particular historical epoch. The final vanquishing of a conservative opposition, not the end of the Cold War, was the end of that history. The war between dogmatic idealism and the human condition that started with the Age of Reason came to an end with the triumph of liberal democracy.

This is why we see western societies in a crisis. Those radical elements toppling statues and screaming in people’s faces at restaurants need a leash that can only come from a serious opposition. The radicals won, so there is no opposition, either intellectually or physically. The radicals are now like bees at the end of summer when the queen dies. They are flying around trying to do what they are programmed to do, but just end up living out their time in a trash barrel.

It is also why we see the Left desperately trying to conjure a new Right, a new bogeyman they can attack. By any reasonable assessment, Donald Trump is a political moderate. He is the New York City version of Bill Clinton, which is why he was a big supporter of Bill Clinton. Despite this obvious reality, the Left has painted him as a tyrant. The lack of a genuine Right has reduced them to pretending Trump is Hitler and his supporters and brown shirts.

The question now is what comes next. Most people on this side of the Great Divide want to believe this is the Bolshevik Revolution all over again. The conventional conservative is sure the Left are the real Nazis. Maybe without an opponent, the Left punches themselves out and collapses. Maybe the inanity reaches a point where a genuine conservative response begins to take shape. Alternatively, maybe it is simply the end of Left and Right. The Left won.

Note: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!