Author Archives: thezman

The Shadows Grow

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On election night last year, Fox News rolled out Britt Hume to editorialize on the results and what it meant for conservatism. Hume went through the list of things that he said defined conservatism over the last number of decades. He then pointed out how Trump rejected these items, in full or in part, to win the GOP nomination and then the general election. Hume’s definition of conservatism sounded like a lunch order. It was just a list of policy goals, like cutting taxes, reducing regulation and free trade.

That’s because over the last several decades, Official Conservatism™ has been reduced to a soulless list of agenda items, based on the same assumptions about the human condition as Progressivism. In many cases, the official Left and the official Right agree on the same goals, but disagree on tactics. Tax policy is a great example. Both sides agree that tax policy is about social engineering, by rewarding certain behaviors and punishing others. The debate, such as there is, is about which behaviors to prioritize.

The critique of Official Conservatism™ from the Right is rooted in the observation that Conservatives now agree with Progressives on base assumptions about the human condition and human organization. Humans are infinitely malleable and human society has no organic, natural form. As a result, both Left and Right now share a moral code, which is a Progressive moral code. This has reduced conservatism to an assistant’s role, where its primary job is to police the Right and purge those who threaten the moral order.

For the last 25 years, the institutions of Official Conservatism™ have done a good job of imposing their will on the other elements that allegedly make up the coalition of the American Right. Social conservatives have been coerced into supporting globalist economics. Foreign policy realists have either been purged or forced into accepting the neocon position. Everyone has been marinated in immigration romanticism to the point where even the most sensible will genuflect when passing the Statue of Liberty.

The trouble is, the old paleocons were right all along. The hip and modern version of conservatism, what the alt-right boys call Boomer Conservatism, has been a complete failure, even by its own standards. Globalism has not made the typical American more prosperous. In fact, we have experienced a decline in living standards. Wars of choice to bring the joys of social democracy to the savages have resulted in America looking like a police state. The effort to spread liberty has made all of us less free.

It is the area of social policy where Official Conservatism™ has been an unmitigated disaster. It’s not just the trannies stalking the girl’s restroom or the degenerates running wild in the public square. Those are the sorts of things that can be rectified in an hour, if the state feels the need. The real disaster is in the institutions that define the culture at the street level. Social groups, churches, even religion itself, has seen its legitimacy undermined by the new consensus forged between the Left and the Right.

This post on National Review the other day by Ramesh Ponnuru is about the rethinking of this arrangement by social conservatives. He is working off this essay by the editor of First Things, a religious-right operation founded by Richard John Neuhaus. Ponnuru’s post is mostly hyperventilating and hand-waving, in an effort to not address the main observations made by the author. Guys like Ponnuru never imagined they would need to defend themselves from their Right, so they have no way to do it, other than dismissal.

One thing that stands out about the First Things post is the acknowledgement that the bargain struck between traditional Christianity in America and the political Right was deal salient in another age. It no longer makes sense in a post-Cold War America where the challenges are purely cultural. This is a critique of Official Conservatism™ that is popular with blogs like this one. The marriage of convenience between social conservatives, anti-communists and libertarian economists stopped being convenient when the war ended.

Now, First Things is not about to embrace the alt-right, or even biological realism anytime soon. You see that in the post, where the author goes through the usual rituals to signal his fidelity to anti-racism. His discussion of Charlottesville brings to mind a man trying to bury something that keeps rising to the surface no matter how much dirt he piles on it. The thing that is rising from the earth, despite his frantic efforts to cover it up with scare words, is the realization that the old moral paradigm is no longer useful in this age.

For the longest time, Official Conservatism™ was defined by the three key elements of its coalition. Social conservatives, free market libertarians and hawkish anti-communists made up the Grand Army of the Right. They even sang The Battle Hymn of the Republic at the GOP convention. Once the Cold War ended, the anti-communist leg no longer had a reason to exist, which is why the coalition spiraled out of control. Social conservatism had always been a junior partner, but after the Cold War it was reduced to window dressing.

Fundamentally, the Dissident Right, of which the alt-right is a part, is a reaction to the failures of American conservatism. If Official Conservatism™ is unable to keep men in sundresses out of the girl’s restroom, what good is it? The answer from the Dissident Right is that it is no good at all. Seeing elements of Official Conservatism™ begin to openly question their arrangements along the same lines suggests the shadow of the Dissident Right is starting to reach the walls of the Orthodoxy. They are noticing us.

It goes beyond noticing though. Read conventional right-wing journals and what you find is a vapid recitation of 1980’s dogma, salted with references to Buckley and Reagan. It’s like listening to disco. Read sites on the Dissident Right like American Greatness and you find thoughtful criticism and reasoned attempts at making sense of the current age. The shadow of the Dissident Right is growing, because relative to the legacy right, the people in this thing are intellectual giants. Ideas do matter and we’re the ones with the ideas now.

The House Negro

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The first time I had any reason to know about Ben Shapiro was when he appeared on the Piers Morgan show to talk guns. For those who may not remember, CNN had imported a British popinjay to host an evening chat show. Americans tend to associate the British accent with sophistication and erudition, so CNN thought having a British guy read from the Progressive catechism would lend credibility to their lineup. Morgan quickly revealed himself to be an insufferable windbag with a British accent and his ratings tanked.

The only time I had a reason to watch the show was after Shapiro’s appearance and clips were floating around social media. The Boomer Cons were out in the streets, waving their pocket Constitutions and throwing their tricorn hats in the air. To my untrained eyes, the whole thing looked like a setup. Everything on TV is staged, after all. This exchange just looked like two very bad actors reading lines prepared for them by others. Whether or not it was on the level, it started Shapiro off on his path to become his generation’s Bill Safire.

In the age of mass media, it is hard to imagine a time when political commentary was limited to three TV networks and the newspapers. That meant there were very few spots for the professional pundit. Getting one of those gigs was like hitting the lottery, except it required years of apple polishing in the news business and politics. William Safire figured out how to create a position in the commentariat that only he could fill. That’s the spot for the housebroken conservative, who would jovially defend Republicans among liberals.

When I was a kid, Safire was the only non-liberal voice on television chat shows. I no longer recall the network or show, but after 40 minutes of Progressive dogma, they would have Safire on, along with three liberals, to give the other side. This was what passed for balance in those days. It made Safire rich and famous, because he was the only guy on television who would dare speak for the other 80% of the country. Even by the standards of the day, he was a total cuck, but he was the only non-Prog on television.

Safire paved the way for George Will, who performed the same act on the David Brinkley show for years. Every newspaper in the country eventually had a housebroken conservative as a columnist. The explosion of conservative talk radio in the 90’s made the role less valuable, but it remains a feature of the chattering classes. The Fox News Channel is essentially a whole network based on the same premise. They criticize the Left in an approved manner, never going too far or committing any mortal sins.

The trouble these days is the legacy media has an audience that is very old. The audience for Fox News is close to 70. The young and hip Rachel Maddow is popular with menopausal cat ladies. The Sunday chat shows have a similar demographic. Gen X was probably the last generation to engage with newspapers and TV chat shows. Even there, most people under 50 are getting their news from on-line sources. Increasingly, those on-line sources operate in opposition to the legacy media, politically and culturally.

That’s where a guy like Ben Shapiro is seen as the millennial Bill Safire. None other than the New York Times has declared him “the voice of the conservative millennial movement” and “the cool kid’s philosopher.” Shapiro is described as a rock star on the college campus, meaning his audience is not on blood thinners. The piece quotes National Review’s David French, who gives Shapiro his blessing. This suggests the kept men of the legacy Right are on board with making Shapiro the new media version of Bill Safire.

The trouble is we no longer live in the age of three tightly controlled TV networks and newspapers delivered by trucks. In a world where the choices are standard issue liberals and obsequious cuckservatives, the cucks looked pretty good. That’s not the world in which we live now. It’s not so much that there are alternatives to the mass media. It’s that there is so much mass media. Even if they can cultivate a guy like Ben Shapiro into a millennial house Negro, he’s just another voice on a giant stage full of megaphones.

The bigger issue though is the rise of alternative media. I can hear what Ben Shapiro has to say on talk radio, cable news or read it on any number of official websites. I’m not going to get quirky ethno-libertarianism from anywhere but Stephen Molyneux. The TRS guys are a unique media presence that speaks to the issues of our day. For truly intelligent commentary, I can go to Steve Sailer or J’Onquarious. The point is, there are lots of people smarter, more inquisitive and more daring than Ben Shapiro in the media now.

What’s probably going to kill the Progressive house Negro role is what’s happening on social media. Facebook and Twitter have a problem. They need to keep the heretics off their platform, but they need to keep their audience. Their solution is verification. They think by eliminating pen names and anonymous commentary, they will get rid of the serious threats to the orthodoxy. They are probably correct, but they are creating a whole new problem for themselves and their model of controlled opposition.

It is really hard to pitch a Ben Shapiro as the edgy critic of the orthodoxy when he has that seal of approval next to his name on social media. That’s what the blue check mark now means. It says you have been declared safe by the people in charge. That means all the house Negroes of Conservative Inc are branded with the mark of their owner. The only thing left to do is pass a Fugitive Pundit Act. If a faux right-wing pundit gets red-pilled and runs off to the alt-right, we’ll be required to return him to his media masters.

The End Of The Yankee Imperium

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At the very beginning of the 19th century, the New England states were increasingly at odds with the Southern states. One cause of the discontent was the sense that the slave states had too much power over the Federal government. Another was the decline in trade with Europe during the Napoleonic Wars. The Embargo Act of 1807 and the Non-Intercourse Act of 1809 sharply reduced trade with Britain and France. There was also the rivalry between the North and South, which dated to the founding the colonies.

Discontent with the War of 1812 brought things to a head. The Federalist Party in New England had been agitating for changes in the Constitution, like eliminating the three-fifths compromise. New England newspapers openly discussed secession. The Hartford Convention was a series of meetings among representatives from the New England states to discuss their grievances. The whole project collapsed with the wave of patriotism that resulted from Jackson’s victory over the British at the Battle of New Orleans.

This episode in American history has largely been forgotten, mostly because the North won the Civil War fifty years later. The winners write the history books and this bit of history has never fit the narrative. It’s also why the  Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina has been erased from the history books. Northern conservatives have made John Locke and the Scottish Enlightenment their base. The fact that Locke and Shaftesbury hoped to impose feudalism on the American South is inconvenient.

The point here is that Americans have been raised up on a history of the nation written by Yankeedom. The North won the Civil War so they became the dominant region both legally and economically. Through the 20th century, the North also came to dominate the nation culturally, writing the history books and defining the national narrative. That’s how we get nonsense about the Puritans seeking religious freedom and carving a nation out of the wilderness. Jamestown has been all but erased from the nation’s memory.

The dominance of the North over the rest of the country probably would have petered out in the 20th century, but world events changed the direction of America. Teddy Roosevelt badgered Woodrow Wilson into breaking with American tradition, with regards to getting involved in European affairs. The Yankee desire to dominate North America became a quest to dominate the world. Once the US chose to get into the Great War, the old traditional American conservatism was killed off forever. The Yankee Empire was born.

The aftermath of the Great War, the Depression, World War II and then the Cold War prevented any change in America’s domestic arrangements. These were great unifying events; in that they justified the suppression of anything challenging the established cultural order. The upheavals of the 60’s and 70’s were based in New England, the Upper Midwest and Northern California for a reason. American Conservatism was born at Yale and run out of Connecticut for the same reason. That where the ruling class lived.

All empires end eventually. Often it is from exhaustion, the cost of maintaining the empire having long ago exceeded the benefits. Other times the culture that built the empire runs its course. The empire remains as a brittle outer husk that eventually shatters. Other times, it is a slow, ad hoc retreat back to something resembling normalcy. The Soviet Empire is a good example of this. It’s not been an organized retreat, but it has been a fairly bloodless one. Russia is now back to something close to its historic norm.

America was never built to a be great crusading empire. Even after generations of cultural cleansing, Alabama is still a vastly different place than Vermont. Regionalism is still the defining feature of America. Having one region dominate the others was the fear of the Founders, which is why they struggled to craft a government after independence from the British. The solution was a small federal government that handled a narrow set of things, like war and trade, that could only be done by a central government.

America’s ruling class, especially over the last few decades, have gone to great lengths to explain why providence has ordained America as the world’s peace keeper. The usual suspects have twisted this into a foreign policy of keeping the world safe for the Jewish diaspora. The truth is, the American Empire was always built on serendipity. The total destruction of Europe and the technological backwardness of East Asia left a huge vacuum. The atom bomb locked in the gains of the victors, by locking out all challengers.

The world that birthed the American Empire is long gone. China is now taking up her historic role as the hegemonic power of Asia. Europe is fully recovered, in the material sense, from the 20th century. It is time for Europe to recover culturally and that can only happen when the Yankee Empire recedes. Whether or not the European people have the will to defend themselves from the barbarian hordes to their south, that’s not something that can be decided for them. Europe must live or die on its own.

Domestically, it is long past time for a return to normalcy. The Cold War has been over for 25 years. The rest of the country is economically and demographically in better shape than Yankeedom. The oldest and most sclerotic states in the nation are located in the Northeast and Upper Midwest. The election of Trump and the resulting chaos in Washington strongly suggest the rest of the nation is ready to step outside the shadow of Yankeedom. CalExit and similar rumblings from Progressives are another sign of change.

The fact is, America was never a singular nation. It was a hodgepodge of nations, thrown together with degrees of overlap. The regions of the country share a language and share some history, but they are significant different too. America, maybe even all of North America, is better run as a federation, like a continent sized version of Switzerland. The areas where there can be no agreement are delegated to the regions. The areas where the interests are shared are delegated to a federal state.

That can only come with the end of the Yankee Imperium.

The New Romantics

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One of the forces pushing the alt-right along is a rejection of the modern, sterile aesthetic that is the technological age. This seems to be especially true of the younger millennials and Gen Z. They grew up in a world of glass and stainless steel, smooth edges and shades of gray. This is also an age that rejects spontaneity. It is why popular culture is so dull and feminine. There is a drugged dullness to our age. It is not a rational age, for sure, more like an unromantic age.

That is part of the appeal of the new dissident politics. There is a danger to showing up at alt-right rallies or associating with hate thinkers on social media. Men, especially young men, like adventure. For the generations raised by helicopter parents, thought police and sensitivity training, the danger of the alt-right is attractive. Breaking taboos and standing outside the herd is exhilarating, but the associated brotherhood fills a void the custodial state created in young men. It is not just fun to be bad, it is liberating.

We seem to be at the confluence of two forces acting on our societies. One is the hyper-feminization we see everywhere. There are few public places where men can be themselves or hold a dominant place. In fact, any sphere of life that is male oriented is under pressure to bring in girls. Even things like sports are forcibly integrated. We live in an age where elites want to put girls on football teams and in the boxing ring. Modern life is covered in a wool blanket, drenched with the fetid waters of feminism.

The other force is mass media. If you examine modern movies, one of the odd things is that many are in celebration of old weird America. Boston, for example, became a popular setting for movies, but almost always the old Boston of ethnic neighborhoods. Mass media allows young people a glimpse of the old lost age. They can see a time where the South was still rural and mysterious, the Northeast had tribal ethnics and Los Angeles still had Americans. For the young, old America feels like a foreign country.

The point here is that we are now at a time, at least from the perspective of a young male, where America is a feminine and deracinated society. For those of us who have lived through this transformation, it may be depressing, but it is not jarring. We saw the changes over time. We heard the warnings of those commentators on the Old Right and we saw those warnings ignored. It is like driving a new car for ten years. You know it is old and you remember when it was new, but you also remember everything in between.

Young people lack that middle part. They came into a world disconnected from the old world they can still see on TV or in movies. For young white males, increasingly alienated from the modern culture, it is not a big surprise that they would look backward for examples of how to move forward. Spend time following alt-right social media, and you see lots of references to the fact that the current culture is degraded and ugly. The past had true diversity, while present is a homogenized, degenerate slurry of nothingness.

This interesting story from the Guardian UK, about something similar happening in Germany, suggests this could be a pan-Western phenomenon. The difference is that it is still possible to be a famous intellectual in Europe. You can also be famous as a writer of fiction, read by men. In the US, public intellectuals are chattering skulls on cable TV, who spit out vapid platitudes approved by the people in charge. Literature, of course, is now dominated by women, so it has no point and no audience, outside the academy.

That said, Europe and America have something in common. Young males, disconnected from the culture, are searching for something to give purpose to their lives. A common refrain on the alt-right is about the uselessness of being a wage slave in a cubicle farm, just so you can buy useless crap from global corporations. That seems to be a theme of the new romanticism bubbling up in Europe. It is young people, particularly young males, reaching back to an age before they were born, for inspiration and purpose.

The Guardian piece is quick to point out the connections between German Romanticism and you know who. That brings up a big difference between the US and Europe. Germans are not about to become minorities in their own country. The same is true of the rest of Europe. In the US, whites will be a minority in a generation. The cultural phenomenon may have many parallels today, but in the fullness of time they will head off in different directions. It is why the alt-right is less artsy than the new European romantics.

All in all, what we are seeing is validation of an age old truth. One of the top-level duties of a ruling class is to keep its young men busy. Too many alienated and idle young men always spell trouble. What has happened in the West is the ruling elite has deliberately pushed men out of the social order. The follow on act was to invite in millions of foreigners to gloat over the deracinated male population. There are only so many mixed race couples you can see on TV before you get the message.

This will not end well

Warring With The Cult

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Last weekend, Richard Spencer tried to hold his annual conference. The vehicle Spencer uses to run his alt-right thing is the National Policy Institute, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit based in Montana. This is a standard thing to do these days, for any sort of activism. It allows rich people to quietly fund activities and take a tax deduction for it. It also gives solo acts a way to fund their activities, without having to keep a day job. Once a year, Spencer has a conference and dinner for the people interested in his efforts.

Last year was the infamous Heil-gate episode, where Spencer’s imprudence got himself in trouble. Since then, Progressives have been working hard to un-person him and anything he touches. That linked video has 2.8 million views for a reason. As a result, he was unable to book the Reagan Building for his event, which is a violation of Federal law, but the people in charge think the law is for suckers. They do what they want. As a result, Spencer was forced to find another venue for the event.

A weekend conference organized by white nationalist Richard Spencer was shut down after the owners of the Maryland farm he rented discovered he was behind the event.

The think tank that Spencer leads, the National Policy Institute, hosted the conference for about 100 people at Rocklands Farm, a winery and events venue in Montgomery County. Spencer said in an interview that a third-party logistics company contacted Rocklands Farm on behalf of the National Policy Institute this month and didn’t reveal that white nationalists were affiliated with the event when they booked it. The company told the farm’s management only that it was a “corporate” gathering, according to Spencer.

The conference started about 11 a.m. Sunday and was scheduled to continue until 8 p.m. Caterers at Rocklands Farm served brunch, and participants recapped 2017. At about 4 p.m., Spencer said, someone working the event learned that Spencer was there, and management told everyone to leave.

“We didn’t lie, we didn’t deceive, and we certainly did not break any rules while we were there,” Spencer said. “We had sharp words and were obviously disappointed, but there was no confrontation of any kind.”

The farm refunded the group’s money after asking it to leave.

The owners of Rocklands Farm didn’t comment on the incident beyond a statement on their website Monday, which says it proudly does “business according to family values, including welcoming people of all backgrounds, race, ethnicities, cultures, and religions.”

If you go to the source article, the picture of Spencer they use is from his thing at the University of Florida. OK. Stock photos are standard stuff in the news business. Then they use a picture of a black protester from that Florida event. That has no place in a story about something entirely different and 3,000 miles to the north. It is an important lesson that no one on our side can seem to get through their thick skulls. The people in charge are perfectly willing to lie, cheat and steal to win. They are not bound by any rules.

Putting that aside, the highlighted portion of the story is illustrative. This is the sort of the stuff Gentry Conservatives wave around claiming they have their principles, while the winning side is riddled with hypocrisy. The winning side, however, just shrugs, because as far as they are concerned, that quote is the model of logic. That is the nature of cults and the people inside them. The rules and tactics of the cult are the model of moral perfection and timeless logic. You not getting this is proof that the adherents are anointed.

Cults have an internal language that only the members fully understand. The zombie who issued that statement knows that “family values” means the cult’s definition of family values. By “people of all backgrounds” they just assume it excludes people outside the cult. The people outside the walls are not really people. They do not exist as a flesh and blood humans. It is the same reason the Puritans had no trouble burning Indians and chasing Anglicans off into the wilderness. They did not see them as human.

I will also note that the Washington Post story is not an actual news story. The Five W’s could have been done in a paragraph, which by the conventions of news reporting make it not worth doing. It was a non-event. That is why the bulk of the story is folklore and legend now popular with the cult. There is the Charlottesville reference, the preening and pleading of the fearful restaurant owners and so on. This is written as a cautionary tale for other cult members. “Beware! If you are not vigilant, the Nazis will show up at your door!”

It is why it is useless to bother engaging with these people at any level. It is better to imagine them as a colonizing tribe of aliens. There is no middle ground, no room for agreement, because their reason to exists, their core identity, is based on wiping out all non-believers. Anything that even hints at compromise, is seen by the cult as a direct threat to its very existence. That is why they take so much pleasure in stalking guys like Spencer around and preventing him from living a normal life. It is what defines them.

Happy Thanksgiving

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The first time I heard this song in full was on the way back to Massachusetts. It was the day before Thanksgiving and it was snowing. Driving through Stockbridge, I came upon a cop who had pulled over a car full of hippy looking degenerates. I stopped and offered to help him beat the hippies. He was more than happy to let me join in on the fun. Before long there was a whole gang of us, beating hippies and enjoying good fellowship. There’s really nothing like the holiday season to bring out the best in people.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

The Neocon Mind

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One of the things that struck me when I read Whittaker Chamber’s book Witness, was the point he made about his thinking, before and after his conversion from communism. He said he still thought like a Marxist. That is, the mental processes were still the same, despite his efforts being aim at combating Marxism. David Horowitz made a similar point about his own conversion. The way in which he thought, his rhetorical inclinations, they remained radical, but in service to the goal of stopping radicalism.

The man of the Left is one who puts everything into service of the cause. The morality of the Left is that the ends justify the means. The mere existence of the Clinton Crime Family is a testament to the utility of this ethos. There was no rule Progressives could champion that the Clintons would not violate. In fact, it has often seemed like the Clintons exist merely to make hypocrites of everyone who supported them. Yet, through it all, after every indignity, the Left finds some way to twist the truth to support them.

That is the Progressive mind. The cause comes ahead of everything. When Barak Obama won in 2008, he could have demanded a human sacrifice at his inauguration, and the Left not only would have supported it, they would have claimed only racists opposed human sacrifice. We are seeing the same thing play out with the neocons, who have made their loony “NeverTrump” cause into something close to a cult. Every event is spun into some weird conspiracy or bizarre outrage. Hating Trump is their reason to exist.

Jonah Goldberg has been a particularly oleaginous Trump hater. Back in the primary, his game was to play the guilt by association gag on the NRO blog. For instance, when NeverTrump loons claimed David Duke was a Trumper, Goldberg made the claim that Trump’s dismissal of it was proof he was in the KKK. It is the oldest ploy. One lies and the other swears to it. That is because the Progressive mind sees no clear line between the truth and a lie. One is as good as the other, as long as it furthers the cause.

You see that with this post from Jonah Goldberg at National Review. Ostensibly it is a post about sexual misconduct. In reality, it is a game of moral equivalence so he can denounce Roy Moore, a proxy for Trump.

Whenever popular passion swamps politics, true-believing zealots and opportunistic demagogues will exploit that passion. The zealots will overreach. The demagogues will demagogue — using a good cause to destroy political enemies and defend unworthy allies. Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore is credibly accused by nine women of preying on teenagers, one as young as 14. Harvey Weinstein is credibly accused by at least 50 women of a long list of offenses, including rape. Democratic senator Al Franken has been accused by two women of inappropriate advances or groping.

Notice the slight of hand. Calling the Moore accusers credible is what people in the business call a lie. The best you can say about some of them is they are not obviously insane. The worst you can say about Moore, is he wanted a young wife forty years ago when he was still a relatively young man. Franken and Weinstein, in contrast, are admitted degenerates. There is a mountain of corroborating evidence to support the claims against them. Goldberg knows this, but he lies anyway, because that serves the cause.

That is the thing to keep in mind with the neocons. Neoconservatism was never a right-wing phenomenon. It was a Progressive heresy, and only a very narrow one. Their dispute with the Progressives was never over ideology. It was over tactics. The neocons wanted to aggressively wage jihad against the Soviets. After the Cold War, they wanted to use the American Empire to make the world safe for global Jewry. Otherwise, they were perfectly fine with the Progressive social project, as long is it did not harm the war effort.

This circles back to the way Chambers and Horowitz described their thinking after they came out of the darkness. The neocons may have, out of necessity, aligned with conservatives to achieve certain goals, but they were always men of the Left. As such, they think like men of the Left. That old habit of the ends justifying the means is still central to who they are. It’s why a Bill Kristol can manipulate his son-in-law into conspiring with foreign agents in the Never Trump conspiracy. Anything for the cause.

The funny thing about this is many neocons over the years have made this argument about Progressives. Jonah Goldberg was fond of pointing out that the Left was an ends justifies the means ideology, while the Right was a means justifies the end ideology. That was just another lie to further the cause. When the game is to trade away the culture for a free hand in foreign affairs, they needed a way to explain away their failure to conserve anything on the domestic front. Principled failure was the answer.

The truth is, conservatism is the rejection of ideology, and therefore a rejection of both sides of the neocon coin. Roy Moore, like Donald Trump, is no one on the Right’s idea of the perfect candidate. There is no such thing. Moore serves a purpose, faults and all, that no other candidate serves. He will vote the right way on the important issues. The same is true of Trump. He can be vexing, but he has a knack for finding the best answer when it matters the most. That is conservatism. Muddling through from one thing to the next.

Jonah Goldberg can never understand that.

Devlin Reviews Hawley

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One of the items on my vacation list is to read Making Sense of the Alt-Right, by Alabama political science professor George Hawley. His book, Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism, was well received. It is refreshing when someone from the academy looks over the walls of the hive and not only sees what is on the other side but makes an honest effort to understand it. I do not know anything about the man’s politics, but he does not appear to be a guy spending his nights howling at the moon.

That came to mind reading F. Roger Devlin’s review of Hawley’s latest, posted on VDare.com the other day. Devlin is a serious guy, who is largely responsible for the whole man-o-sphere subculture. He literally wrote the book on critiquing feminism. That is not a small accomplishment. He has also been involved with the alt-right from the start, so he has observed and interacted with all of the big shots of the movement. That positions him to be a good critic of a book written by an outsider, attempting to understand the alt-right.

The review is worth reading, even if you are not interested in a book length treatment of the alt-right. Devlin’s four key points that define the alt-right are excellent and precise. I think the fourth point cannot be emphasized enough, mostly because it is a point I often make about dissident politics. When I write about peaceful separation, it is not intended to be a road map or political treatise. The point of the exercise is to break free of the old moral paradigm and get readers to start thinking outside of those restrictions.

Before I get off onto another point, I would take some issue with Devlin’s criticism of Hawley’s use of scare words like “racism” to describe the alt-right. Paul Gottfried, in reviewing Hawley’s previous book, made the point that it is a requirement of every academic. “If I were young enough to be considered for tenure in the average political science department at an American university, I too would spray my books with PC bromides in order to keep the Leftist lunatics off my back.”

This is a point that cannot be overstated. Every university is infested with feminist rage-heads, writing autoethnographic “research” papers about how toxic masculinity makes them angry. In departments like political science, feminist “scholars” demand that the white males take a version of the Voight-Kampff test, to make sure they are replicants. “If you see a white person and black person in a photo, how much do you hate the white person?” My guess is Hawley salts his lunch orders with PC jargon, just to be safe.

Putting that aside, Devlin makes a point that is always missed when people discuss the alt-right or the larger ummah of the dissident right. There are layers to it. The guys posting frog cartoons into the timelines of Progressive media people are not the alt-right or any part of the dissident right. They are part of this cultural phenomenon, in the same way that hippies were part of the 1960’s counterculture. Hippies played no role in the intellectual side of the New Left, just as Milo has no role in the intellectual side of the alt-right.

It is one of the things I learned over this past year, attending the hate festivals of the dissident right. There are a lot of smart people having second thoughts about the modern world and the intellectual traditions that created it. Roger Devlin is a good example. He is not spending his evenings trying to promote his brand on Periscope. He’s reading books and writing essays on sites like AmRen and Counter-Currents. There is a lot of intellectual capital in this thing that is concealed by the pranksters and self-promoters.

That said, I would take issue with this bit in Devlin’s review:

The Alt-Right is a political movement which seeks to ensure the continued existence and well-being of European descended people. As such, it neither implies nor precludes any particular religious beliefs. We are not opposed to Evangelical Christianity as such, but some figures the Evangelical leadership (notably Russell Moore of the Southern Baptist Convention) are our declared enemies and we treat them as such.

The alt-right, like the larger dissident right, is a cultural phenomenon, not a political movement. Smart young males, mostly out of necessity, are picking up paleo-conservative ideas and questioning the prevailing orthodoxy. These ideas are being extended to question the core assumptions of modern American political order. It is more akin to the Scientific Revolution than a political movement. The former was about rethinking our place in nature. The latter is about rethinking who gets to be in charge.

It is why it feels like the alt-right is hostile to Christianity. It has to be. What is generally understood to be mainstream Christianity in America, has been hollowed out by Progressivism, and is now worn like an animal skin by crackpots and degenerates from the fringes of the Left. Even the more culturally conservative parts of the country practice a form of Private Protestantism than embraces extreme egalitarianism, anti-racism and universalism. It is not an accident that these churches are deep into the refugee rackets.

I think most big names in the alt-right avoid the subject, mostly because it results in howls about how this is not real Episcopalianism or this is not real Christianity. It is reminiscent of the days when academic Marxists would say the Soviet Union was not real Marxism. It may be theologically true that the current iterations of Christianity are outside the traditions and teachings of the faith, the fact remains that the people running mainstream Christianity these days look a lot like the faculty of your local gender studies department.

That is not a small thing. The reason the New Left was able to sweep the field in the culture war, which included deposing the Old Left, is that their thing took on a quasi-religious tone. Humans are built to be believing machines. That is a part of biological reality our side has yet to face, but it must be faced eventually. Something is going to have to fill the spiritual vacuum if this cultural phenomenon is going to be a cultural and then political movement. An Alt-Right form of Christianity would be a welcome development.

Those quibbles aside, the review is worth reading if you are interested in a sober rendering of alt-right thinking. A part of the development of an intellectual movement is learning how to engage with critics. If your thing cannot hold up to scrutiny, your thing is not going to be a thing for long. Having intellectuals from outside this thing engage with elements of the alt-right is healthy. When serious people start to take dissident politics seriously, it means these ideas are starting to penetrate the mainstream.

The Past Is Always Uncertain

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Progressives are often, and correctly, accused of re-writing the past in order to endorse their current claims about the present. It is a necessary habit that has been incorporated as a feature of the movement. Since most of what they currently believe about humanity and human organization is contrary to observable reality, they have to no choice but to reinvent the past. Something similar seems to be happening with the Buckleyites as they fall into obscurity. They are creating alternative realities to explain the present.

This piece by Henry Olsen is a good example. He makes the point that what so-called conservatives consider to be “conservative” has not been a winning formula for them in Republican elections. He then picks some representative examples of liberty-conservatives, presumably the sort championed by the Buckleyites, who went nowhere in the GOP presidential primaries. The main point Olsen is trying to make is that what he calls the liberty-conservatives have not had a lot of success in elections.

The subtle normalization of Rand Paul is interesting, given that NR types savaged Ron Paul when he was a real candidate. I will also note that National Review was prone to calling the utterances of George W. Bush “Reaganesque” and they praised “compassionate conservatism” as some sort of advanced form of Buckley conservatism. It is what makes their current fetish for timeless principles so comically bizarre. The definition of timeless conservatism is a set of goal posts on wheels that they push around to fit the moment.

That is the thing about re-imagining the past. You have to cherry pick and time shift in order to make it work. Barry Goldwater, for example, has not been salient in American politics for going on 40 years now. The youngest person to have voted for him is now seventy-four. On the other hand, the “liberty conservatives” were ebullient when George W. Bush won in 2000 and the GOP controlled both houses of Congress. Of course, there is no mention of Reagan, who was a Goldwater conservative, and the GOP’s most successful President.

The general point that Olsen is making is that today, the constituency for libertarian-conservatism is small, even within the Republican base. This is probably true, but the question is why? All of the megaphones of Conservative Inc. have been tuned to blast out the message of libertarian-conservatism. Talk radio, websites, Fox News, the commentariat, all of the organs of the so-called Right have been preaching about shrinking size and scope government for as long as anyone reading this has been alive.

So, why is that position a loser within Republican circles?

One obvious reason is no one believes it. When the GOP had opportunities to shrink government, they grew government. When they had chances to normalize our foreign policy, they went empire building. When they had the chance to defend the domestic economy, they threw in with open borders and globalist trade policies. The most egregious sin off all, however, has been their liberal use of Progressive rhetoric to denounce dissenters as racists, excluded from acceptable public discourse.

There is one exception and that is immigration. The one big win for liberty-conservatives was the 1986 immigration reform act. This made it possible for tens of millions of foreigners to flood into the country. Ann Coulter the other day noted that one in eight Virginia residents is foreign born. That means there are more foreigners in Virginia right now than the liberty-conservatives said they needed to amnesty in 1986. The one thing these guys were good at doing has been a disaster for their alleged love of liberty.

You see that in a post from J’Onquarious. The sort of civic minded libertarianism, which is popular with Conservative Inc., is really unpopular with the sorts of people they are hellbent on importing by the millions. The reason their favorite bugman was trounced in the Virginia election is that the sort of people liberty conservatives are fond of championing, are not interested in supporting liberty conservatives. It turns out that a policy of wishing death on your voters and their culture, is not a good way to win elections.

That is not a reality these so-called liberty-conservatives can face. Olsen does not bother to address this, as there is no way to explain away the mathematical and demographic realities. His only mention of immigration is to be gobsmacked at a Cato-backed study that shows Trump voters are not in favor of their wholesale demographic replacement. The fact that their one success has been a disaster for them, never registers. Instead, it is ignored. Olsen’s suggestion is more of the same, just even more of it.

This is where you see that all forms of mainstream conservatism share the same assumptions as Progressives about the nature of man and human organization. It is also why they have developed the habit of rewriting history, especially their own history, in order to explain the present. When you start from the premise that biology is unimportant, that all people everywhere are essentially the same, you are condemned to a life of disappointment, unless you can endlessly redraft the narrative to avoid facing reality.

The one major difference between the retconning of so-called conservatives and what we see from Progressives, is that the latter controls the institutions. Rewriting and replaying old fights is a proven way to distract people from current failures. When you control the levers of power, an unpredictable past becomes a useful tool in maintaining control. When you are allegedly challenging the status quo, an inability to clearly remember yesterday undermines your credibility. No one believes these guys and they keep reminding us why.

Uncivil Religion

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One of the weirder aspects of the modern age is the endless calls for unity from our superiors, particularly those in the Progressive camp. It is weird for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact the Left is endlessly trying to marginalize anyone that disagrees with them. It is how diversity came to mean rigid homogeneity. Putting aside the hypocrisy, it is weird because it is fairly new and very un-American. It also contradicts the very premise of democracy, which is about competing opinions, jostling for support.

It seems that the calls for “unity” have coincided with the spread of the American civic nationalism stuff. Thirty years ago, no public figure talked about “who we are” or made grand claims about a unified America culture. In fact, the lack of conformity was the gold standard of intellectual rigor. Democrats used to claim they had so much internal debate, it was like herding cats. Republicans used to crow about being the party of ideas, meaning that they had the bulk of free thinkers and dissident chattering skulls.

It is not a coincidence that the flowering of the civic religion stuff has coincided with increasing calls for unity and now the un-personing panics. Religions, particularly in their growth phase, are highly intolerant of competing religions. It is why the Left, even today, attacks Christianity. They see it as competition. In order to have a civic religion, it means stamping out ideas and movements that contradict it, even if those ideas are rooted in observable reality. In the name of unity, dissent must be crushed, along with the dissenter.

Related examples of this are Iran and Saudi Arabia. The ruling elites of both lands are members of sects within Islam. In both countries, the demands of unity require hordes of religious enforcers making sure no one has incorrect thoughts. To tolerate any dissent puts the power and authority of the ruling elite into question. Since the ruling elite are the embodiment of the religion, any dissent is a direct threat to the very existence of the theocracy. Unity is a necessary element of theocracy, even it comes at the point of a gun.

In terms of pure civic religions, ones that expressly reject the supernatural, the most obvious examples ended in bloodbaths. The French Revolution is the first real stab at establishing a civic religion. Nazism, Bolshevism and Maoism, on the other hand, quickly devolved into murder machines, killing off over one hundred million, but they did so in the name of national unity. With Nazism and Bolshevism, even well intended questioning of the prevailing orthodoxy got you killed. Again, unity abhors anything resembling dissent.

There is a chicken and egg issue here. Is the rise of a priestly class the inevitable result of a civic religion, or does the elite attempt to legitimize themselves by peddling civic religion and making demands for unity? In prior ages, ruling dynasties would claim divinity in order to eliminate challenges to their reign. Even today, the motto of the monarch of the United Kingdom is dieu et mon droit. I will also note that the kingdom is united in the body of the monarch. This is a common element of all European monarchies.

Getting back to modern America, the fetish for unity and the promotion of the American civic religion looks a lot like a search for a reason to maintain the status quo. It is reactionary. The very real threat of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War held the American nations together, under the Yankee Imperium. Once that was gone, something had to replace it, or the Cold War arrangements would be replaced. It is not an accident that “both sides” of the political elite rely on the same language to quash dissent.

The increasing demands for unity, however, will probably backfire. You see this with social media. Facebook has instituted polices to silence unapproved facts. They have been moving much slower than Twitter, which is aggressively going after anyone who disagrees with the Council of Cat Ladies running the place. They have now declared jihad against anyone who is suspected of thinking bad thoughts. That means they will use your search results and surfing habits to police your access to Twitter. Think about that.

The unintended result of this is to de-legitimize the Right half of the ruling class. A so-called conservative with a twitter account, especially one with a blue check, will now be seen as nothing more than an organ grinder’s monkey. The civic religion only works when political debate is confined to the tiny ideological space occupied by Progressives and their hand-picked opposition. Strip away the legitimacy of the so-called conservatives and the civic religion is revealed to be a public relations campaign by the ruling oligarchs.

That is the core reason that American public debate seems so uncivil. In an effort to defend the status quo, the ruling elites have become increasingly aggressive at stamping out dissent. The whole “Russian hacking” nonsense was a thinly veiled way of saying that those who voted for Trump were either stupid or un-American. The fact that it appears the purveyors of this story were themselves in cahoots with the Russians suggests there are no limits to what they will do to crush their opposition. Torquemada would be proud.

This heavy handedness also legitimizes the dissidents. Gab has struggled along, but the purges and promised purges resulted in a boost in membership. The steadfast determination by the owners, in the face of serious threats and even laughably stupid threats, has given them legitimacy with people who think a marketplace of ideas is essential to civil society. Put another way, that which was previously dismissed as heresy, now has the air of legitimacy. That is the real threat feared by the ruling class.

Eric Hoffer said, “Fanatical orthodoxy is in all movements a late development. It comes when the movement is in full possession of power and can impose its faith by force as well as by persuasion.” It is also a late phase effort, a rearguard action, intended to defend the status quo, despite there no longer being an obvious use for it. The current arrangements in America no longer serve anyone other than the relatively small number of people who live like royalty in the Imperial Capital and its satellite cities.

At some point, the cost of maintaining unity among increasingly hostile tribes outweighs the benefit. The increasingly shrill demands for unity and obedience, along with the corresponding fissures opening up in public life, suggest we are following a familiar path that leads to a break down. Some social scientists seem to get, to some degree, what is happening, but no one knows what comes next. Maybe it is just too frightening to consider or maybe it is impossible to know. What is not coming, though, is national unity.