Fading Pop

Posted on March 20, 2025 by thezman

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If you look at the pop music charts for the last decade or so, one of the things you will not notice is the modern nature of the big bands. The reason you will not notice how bands have changed is that there are few bands on the charts. In fact, bands have just about disappeared from popular music. The few bands you see on the music services are those from a bygone era. The biggest selling bands are often those that no longer exist or still kick around playing for old people.

Instead, what you see are solo acts or the occasional dance group assembled like a Broadway play to perform to manufactured content. Even the “boy band” has faded from the scene for the same reason bands have disappeared. That reason is it is much easier for the music industry to create and produce a solo act than to find a band and then develop it into a top attraction. The same is true of “boy bands” which require some degree of organization and management.

Of course, as the doors to bands have closed in corporate music, the selection pressure for musical acts has changed. If a young person has any musical talent, she is better served investing her time in imitating the corporate acts, using software tools readily available to everyone now. She then posts her material to YouTube, hoping to get a following and then maybe catch the eye of corporate. Learning to play instruments and perform in front of a crowd is pointless.

One reason for this change in popular music is money. The music industry, like every industry in America, is fully financialized. This means everything about it is driven by factors like interest rates, return over time and investment opportunities. A “new act” is not judged on musical ability, novelty, or the personal tastes of the industry people, but by the accepted financial models of the industry. Just as wind tunnels made all our cars look the same, finance homogenized popular music.

For example, now that Taylor Swift is packing on pounds and years, the search is on for a singer who will do the same act for the same audience. The “same audience” in this context is age, sex, race, and economic model. The next wave of that demo is not going to get excited by a portly spinster, so they will find a younger model with a slightly different look to do the role. Even if she is not as popular with the target demo, the math of the model is predictable and safe.

The same sort of math affects the live show business. The people hosting the show want predictable sales and returns. The people producing the tour also want predictable sales and returns. The reason for that is the investors want predictable sales and returns, so the live shows follow a proven model. Since the money comes from the same source in terms of expectations, the effect has been a narrowing of the music industry around highly predictable products.

Another reason for the narrowing of the business around controllable solo performers is the market has changed. People spending hundreds of dollars on live shows want a predictably good time. They are not going to invest in an unknown, because that might mean not having the expected good time. In a culture that prizes safety and security above all else, bands are a high-risk proposition. The culture they represent in popular music is an affront to the culture of the modern audience.

Another fact is the death of radio. Once all the pop music stations were consolidated into a few massive corporations, the result was corporate slop. The first to go were the music directors, then the disc jockeys were chopped. The soundtrack to the modern age is the monotony of corporate radio. The legendary “shock jock” Anthony Cumia talked about this in a speech he gave at American Renaissance. Corporate radio is now as dead as the garage band.

Young people still want to play instruments and make music and the tools for producing good music are now freely available. The days of needing a studio are pretty much over as far as producing professional audio content. That means interested people can create bands and put their content out to the world. In theory, the same democratizing process that we have seen in other forms of content applies to music, but for some reason it has not democratized pop music.

This suggests there is something different about popular music compared to writing, podcasting, or livestreaming. Anyone can make music if they desire, just as anyone can publish a book or create a political talk show, but the latter forms have been vastly more successful compared to the music variety. Music needs social proof to gain an audience and that is manufactured at the same place the music is now manufactured. Without corporate, it is impossible to be a pop star.

There also may be a larger cultural issue at work. The concept of the pop star is a 20th century phenomena. Prior to that, entertainers existed on the fringe of society, generally regarded as low status. The 20th century is when this flipped around, and we got big stars from the entertainment world. We may be reverting to the norm as entertainment declines in both quality and status. The disappearing band phenomena is not just an American thing. It is thing everywhere.

What we may be seeing with pop music, and maybe movies and television as well, is the end of a peculiar cultural phenomena. These forms of entertainment were spawned in the 20th century. As that time recedes into the past, the culture of that time follows with it. The important parts of that culture, like the rock band, are fading away as well, to be replaced by whatever the next culture desires. As the West finally leaves the 20th century it is leaving behind its culture.

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Robed Radicals

Posted on March 19, 2025 by thezman

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One way to look at the last ten years is as the struggle of the United States to finally close the books on the Cold War and the 20th century. The reason Trump exists, and the managerial system has reacted in such a violent way toward him, is that he represents the end of the conditions that made it all possible. The return of a strong executive and the normal functioning of government is the end of the managerial system and everything around it.

The comparisons to the late Soviet times are compelling because the Russians went through a similarly violent process to escape their own managerial system and the ideology that controlled it. Like the Soviets, America is now run by old people trapped in the past, lacking the talent to adjust to new realities. Like the Soviet system, the American system barely performs basic functions. Like the Soviets, American political actors can only break things.

That last part is important. Reform by its very nature calls into question the legitimacy of current processes. The reason for reform is that the system is not working to the satisfaction of the users, so it must be changed. Good reformers, however, do not attack the core logic of the system, but focus instead on the parts of it that implement that core logic to maintain the legitimacy of the whole. Maybe it means new people or possibly changes to parts of the system.

Reforms in the late Soviet period undermined the core logic of the Soviet system, resulting in poorer outcomes. We see the same thing in America. The response to Trump in 2016 by conservatives and their party only served to sap the legitimacy of the conservative movement and the Republican Party. Trump started as a vanity candidate, but by January of 2016 he had become the champion of the party voters against the ossified party leadership.

Similarly, the behavior of the media cratered trust in the media. Their efforts to cajole, convince and intimidate people into going along with the managerial class eroded all trust in the media. By the end of Trump’s first term, trust in the media had collapsed to the point where only regime toadies trusted it. The same could be said for the people it was defending. Trump won in 2024 because the main tools of his enemies had been delegitimatized by his enemies.

We are now seeing another phase of this as district judges claim authority over vast parts of the executive branch. The last month has seen these inferior court judges claim to have power over the hiring and firing of personnel, the budgets of executive agencies and the conduct of foreign policy. A judge just ordered the military to enlist mentally unstable people. To stop the future, the managerial class is now destroying the credibility of the courts.

Public trust in the courts was already at a nadir because of the abuses we saw in the Obama years and then the Biden years. When the court ruled that mandating medical insurance was right there in the constitution, the rule of law took a sharp turn into absurdity, but when the Supreme Court ruled that two men sharing rent and bed is the same as your parents, then trust in the law was in free fall. It only got worse in the Biden years with the lawfare against Trump supporters.

What we are seeing from the courts now is the breaking point. No one would dare poll on it, because they fear the result, but there is certainly a majority in favor of the Trump administration telling the courts to pound sand. The whiffs of Sulphur the usual suspects are always sure they detect are not real, but rather they are the floral aroma of Caesarism in response to the reckless behavior of the courts. When the rule of law fails, the people always choose the rule of men.

While this may feel like a positive omen, there is another lesson from the end of Soviet Russia to keep in mind. Russia at the end of communism was a poor country, but a lawful country. It had rules that the people tried to respect. It then entered a period where it was a poorer country and a lawless one. When trust in the system collapsed, trust in the rules collapsed with it. It was only when a new elite emerged to impose a new system and new rules that lawfulness returned.

In other words, this dip into lawlessness we are seeing could very well portend a general descent into lawlessness. Like post-Soviet Russia, we could very well be entering a period where we get poorer as the rule of law collapses. Unlike Russia, America is not a homogenous society with a thousand years of history. America is a diverse country which is a polite way of saying it is a collection of people who would just as soon not share a country with one another.

If the elites backing Trump’s reforms wish to avoid a terrible end to their reform effort, they are going to need to deal with these hothouse radicals on the bench who cannot grasp the danger of their actions. The challenge, as with all reforms, is in dealing with the problem while not undermining the legitimacy of the system. These judges think they are heroes defending the system against the monster, when in reality they are a cancer threatening the last functioning part of the system.

It is not an easy task, which is why most reform efforts fail. In the end, it turns out to be easier to scrap the old and replace it with something new, but the problem is no one can predict who will win and who will lose in that process. It is why the reform is always the safe choice, despite the dismal record. It promises predictable winners. If today’s reformers want to be winners, then these judges need to be made into losers, without making the rule of law a loser as well.

The Ideology Of Ressentiment

Posted on March 17, 2025 by thezman

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Note #1: Last Wednesday was the fourth edition of a show I am doing with Paul Ramsey every Wednesday at 8:00 PM which you can watch live on Rumble and YouTube and, of course, watch at your leisure after the fact.

Note #2: Behind the green door, there is a post about why deporting anti-Israel protestors is a good start, a post about the dangers of the Ukraine tarpit, and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Note #3: Since we are getting signs of spring, it means it will not be long before it is hot, which means t-shirt weather. Just in time for t-shirt season, we have a new shirt for The Occidental Club, which you can buy here.

Over the weekend there was a poll released that said only seven percent of Americans have a high opinion of the Democratic Party. It also said that the party is enjoying its lowest approval rating ever recorded. The events of last week suggest that the party is a disorganized mess at the moment. This is due in large part to the fact that what we call the left has collapsed into chaos. They no longer can explain what they oppose, much less what they claim to offer.

This is due to the transformation of the left over the last thirty years into a grab bag of conspiracy theories and grievances. The American left has always been a conspiracy theory, of sorts, owing to its roots in American Protestantism, but it had a positive agenda through most of the twentieth century. The long list of things it opposed stood in the way of the things it desired. Over the last thirty years, those desires have largely faded, leaving just a list of enemies.

The most obvious example is the antifascist conspiracy theory that was dominant with self-identified leftists for the last decade. The fact that there are no fascists in this age has been used as an opportunity to create them. The same thing happened with conspiracy theories around race. Instead of Hitler hiding behind every bush, it is men in white hoods ready to pounce. The dominant subcultures of the left over the last few decades are all conspiracy theories of some sort.

Another defining feature is that the progressive coalition is all driven by something called ressentiment. This is a sense of hostility towards something or someone that is viewed as a cause of one’s diminished condition. It is frustration at the sense of inferiority and hatred at a perceived external cause. This blend of envy and hatred results in a moral code which delegitimizes the cause of the person’s failure and elevates the status of the alleged victim.

This is what lies behind tabloid news of the rich and famous. The primary appeal is to people who feel they should be rich and famous. The failings of the actual rich and famous allow these people to feel as if they are living better lives or are better people, despite the fact they do not have what they desire. On the one hand they envy the people they follow, but on the other hand they relish their suffering as it allows them to feel morally superior to them.

What we call the left operates the same way. They often target people who are living good lives but hold opinions that the left does not like, and this is what triggers their envy and resentment toward that person. On the one hand, the person “exposing” the bad person is a loser in the conventional sense, while the person they are harassing is successful by conventional measures. Doxing is a formalization of a process by which the loser flings her poo at the winner.

The recent spate of vandalism directed at Tesla automobiles is a good example of how this blend of righteousness and anger works. These people are attacking cars because on the one hand, they envy Elon Musk and what he is doing. He is the man of action they wish they could be, but they are losers, so they hate him for his success as a way to justify their low status. The attacks on the cars themselves are like a child throwing a tantrum when frustrated by a toy.

This is not a surprising development as what we call the left in America is a manifestation of certain aspects of American Protestantism. The progressive ideology is popular Christianity stripped of its Scriptural foundation. What was supposed to console the weak and downtrodden with a promise of everlasting life now seeks to comfort losers with the claim that their betters are not really better. They are bad people because the believers have declared them to be bad people.

The trouble for the people we call the left is that Christianity is a life-denying religion in that what matters is what comes after this life. The faithful navigate this world of sin to reach everlasting life after death. For those who care only about this life, this cannot work, so those Christian ethics at the core of what we call the left quickly curdled into a bundle of resentments and hatreds. The American left is a workshop of resentment staffed by the ugly who live to oppose beauty.

The genius of Christianity is that it offers an image of beauty, the perfectly beautiful, that allows the faithful to catch glimpses of it in the fallen world. Resent and envy toward these glimpses of beauty are sins. Instead of cultivating these qualities among the lower classes, it celebrated those glimpses of beauty to motivate the faithful toward a Christian life with the promise of eternal life after death. Failure in this world was turned into a motivation to strive for success in the next.

The modern left lacks all of this. Instead, it offers the faithful nothing but a sty in which they can wallow in their own crapulence. As a social and political force, it is nothing more than a bundle of incoherent hatreds. While those hatreds provided a rally point for a period, no movement can exist only on hatred. This is why what we call the left is falling to pieces and taking its party with it. The last ideology, American Progressivism, is sinking into the mire of its own hatreds.

Was Reagan Great?

Posted on March 13, 2025 by thezman

Note: Last night Paul Ramsey and I did a livestream on Reagan, so it is a good companion to this post. YouTube or Rumble.

If you were alive and following politics in the middle of the 1980’s, one of your base assumptions would have been that you were living through one of the great presidencies in American history. Ronald Reagan was a massively popular figure because he was credited with pulling the nation out of the tailspin that began in the cultural and political radicalism of the 1960’s. It was morning in America again and every normal person credited Reagan for it.

Forty years on and the only people who mention Reagan are the yesterday men of what is left of Conservative Inc. In fact, their mentioning of him is usually a trigger for people to heap abuse on them. The same can be said for Bill Buckley, who was similarly famous in the 1980’s. William F. Buckley was the intellectual engine of the conservative movement and Ronald Reagan was the man who made it possible. Like conservatism itself, Buckley and Reagan are fading from our minds.

One cause of this is generational. You must be over fifty to have a clear memory of the Reagan years. That is a lot of people, but younger people tend to drive the debate on the internet. They are going to be much more focused on the present. At the same time, the populist movement is to some degree a revolt against what is viewed as baby boomer culture. This is the singular focus on the economy and the stock market at the expense of cultural and demographic issues.

Another cause is that the big issues of this age have their roots in the 1980’s and may have been caused by Reagan. Immigration is the easy one. Not only did Reagan sign off on open borders policies like amnesty, but he was also instrumental in the romanticization of immigration as a core American value. The same can be said for the toxic individualism that has come to define the white middle-class. Of course, it was the Reagan military buildup that made possible the forever wars.

Of course, recency bias plays a role. In the Clinton years, there were people claiming that Bill Clinton was a great president. These were mostly sociopaths, but there were probably some people who believed it at the time. The biggest example of this is Barak Obama who was treated as black Jesus. Now he is forgotten. The importance of Reagan on the present has faded, so his grip on our minds, even for those alive back then, has loosened a great deal.

While all of this is true, it is generally true for every president. No one alive today remembers FDR. Obviously, no one is reminiscing about Lincoln or Grant, but we still talk about some presidents long after they are gone. Other than the yesterday men of conservatism, you never hear much talk about Reagan. There are far more references here to the Clinton years than the Reagan years. The 1992 election remains an important turning point in our politics.

One possible reason for why Reagan has faded is that the things he ushered in have become so normalized that people just assume they are the natural state of things, rather than an innovation of the 1980’s. Everyone just assumes the stock market is an important part of the American economy. Personal debt is just a normal part of life that one must manage. The dominance of the American military and its respect with the America people is just the way it has always been.

That is why you would have Reagan on the list of great presidents. The things he ushered in have stuck with us and are the new normal. Even though Nixon was president at a critical juncture in the development of what would become the Blob, his policies have had no lasting impact. The same can be said for Clinton, who was the first post-Col War president. While his presidency was an inflection point, no one can remember anything he did while in office¹.

On the other hand, this line of reasoning would put Lyndon Johnson on the list of great presidents because we still suffer from his blunders. The Vietnam war still haunts our foreign policy establishment. The civil rights act continues to torment us. It was Johnson who helped turn the Israel Lobby into the mind-altering force we see today. The fact is, the Lyndon Johnson administration is a nightmare from which we can never awake, so maybe the greatest American of the 20th century was Oswald.

As an aside, Lee Harvey Oswald is another example of how history can often pivot on the actions one anonymous man. Like Gavrilo Princip, Oswald changed what people assumed to be the flow of events in a terrible way. Most think that if he had missed and Kennedy had survived, the 1960’s would not have led to the cultural catastrophe that still haunts us today. Many argue the same with regards to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

Speculative history aside, what seemed certain in the 1980’s and into the second Bush presidency, that Reagan was one of the great presidents, is now more open to debate, assuming anyone thinks to debate it. That is one of the most intriguing aspects of Reagan right now. Hardly anyone talks about him. There is more time spent on Clinton, Nixon, or Obama, and no one thinks they were great presidents. Reagan and the 1980’s have become a forgotten bit of our history.

That said, this may be the prelude to a revival of interest in Reagan. Once the geezers leave the scene and the remnants of conservatism are swept from the stage, a new set of eyes can examine that time without the bias of having experienced it. The first passes at history are always self-serving and flattering to the winners. Later passes turn the near past into justification of present agendas. It is further down the line that you get a more candid view of events.

Even if in the fullness of time Reagan is on the list of great presidents and the 1980’s are studied as an important time, what will be lost is the impact the man at the center of that age had on the people. Reagan was a towering figure who changed the culture simply by setting an example with his public presentation. It is a thing to keep in mind as we watch the final act of Donald Trump. Great men are great men because they inspire the great men of their age.

¹Get your mind out of the gutter.

A Time For Choosing

Posted on March 12, 2025 by thezman

There is an old joke about the topic of free will that goes something like, “If free will did not exist, we would have no choice but to invent it.” In addition to the obvious contradiction lies the fact that everything about human society relies, to some degree, on the existence of free will. What is meant exactly by free will is never clear, but there is always the assumption that when people have choices, they choose based on their sense of what is the morally right or wrong option.

At first this might seem wrong because after all, you choosing to have vanilla ice cream rather than chocolate is not a moral issue, but you still go through a process by which you decide one over the other. If, however, you think about it in terms of costs and benefits, then picking a desert is no different from not robbing a bank. You pick vanilla because you like vanilla more than the other choices. Similarly, you choose not to rob the local bank because you like your freedom.

This concept of free will assumes that humans seek that which brings pleasure and reject that which brings displeasure. Of course, this is also the argument against free will as it suggests humans merely respond to the conditions they encounter. If your genetic makeup means you detest the taste of chocolate, then once you are presented with vanilla and chocolate, you do not have a choice at all. The counter here is that you can always choose to skip dessert.

As Steve Stewart-Williams explains in this short post on the topic of free will, there are three states for us humans. There are those in which we can choose while completely free of coercion, those where we choose with some understanding of the potential consequences of each choice and then conditions in which we have no choice, even though multiple options are available. The first is an illusion, the second is useful and the third is probably closest to reality.

This may seem like a pointless topic, but it lies at the center of human society, because in every collection of humans there will be those who choose not to submit to the decisions of the majority. The majority will usually bargain with these people until they reach a point where the will of the majority must prevail. The easiest way to force compliance is to assume the person knows the morally right choice, but refuses to take it, so they must be compelled to conform.

It is why the people called conservatives invest all their time creating elaborate arguments in favor of their opinions. They lack the will and ability to force people to agree with them, but they resort to a form of pleading. It is the slave mentality, which assumes the master can choose to be good to the slave, so the slave must find some way to coax that good behavior from the master. The assumed free will of the master also flatters the slave’s sense of right and wrong.

Of course, democratic politics rests on the assumption that people are both rational and able to choose freely. Collectively, the choices made by the people will reflect the general will and form public policy and the institutions of society. It is why factionalism is a feature of all democratic systems. Like-minded people come together to scheme up ways to trick the rest into going along with them. This game of liar’s poker we call democracy assumes we possess free will.

This is why the people constantly breying about democracy are also the biggest enemies of the human sciences. Even statistical models like the famous “bell curve” offend them because it suggests we may not have absolute free will. If people are not infinitely malleable, then many of the assumptions within what they call democracy cease to make any sense at all. This is why as the talk of democracy has increased, respect for human diversity has decreased.

It is also why AI makes so many people uncomfortable. It is not the image of hyper-violent machines enslaving humanity. We have been subjected to thirty years of neoconservatism and the Israel lobby, so the rise of the machines is not all that violent or terrifying by comparison. What spooks people the most is that AI suggests that we are not all that variable. In fact, we are highly predictable, and that predictability can now easily be modeled and presented back to us.

There is the main appeal of free will. If we are free to choose and we can overcome our biases, prejudices, and the coercion of others, then it means we can individually and collectively choose a different future than the one before us. The existence of free will means all futures are possible. If, on the other hand, our lives are just the result of probability and circumstance, then the future is also going to be the result of the great roll of the dice, over which we have no control.

The good news is that AI is not very smart and is unlikely to become a genuine artificial intelligence, so we are safe to indulge in the fantasy of free will. To test this, ask your favorite AI tool to create an image of a full glass of wine. It cannot do it, because humans have not bothered to create an image of a wine glass filled to the brim, while calling it a “full glass of wine.” There are other tricks like this that reveal AI to be nothing more than a very good search engine.

All of this sounds pointless, but it lies at the heart of the current crisis. The ruling class of the West assumes they can engineer the cultural conditions in such a way that people will choose the “right” options. This is what lies at the heart of every radical political movement. It is not a rejection of the human condition, but the assertion that the human condition is a social construct. Change the social construct and mankind can choose to overcome even his physical limitations.

One response to this is to find new cultural engineers who have more appealing goals and expectations. Fascism was the response to both communism and liberalism in the last century. It is why today’s radicals assume all opponents are fascists. The other option is to accept free will as a useful workaround but that the human condition is immutable and the variety of normative conditions we see are rooted in things well beyond our ability to control. The choice is ours.

Whither Europe

Posted on March 11, 2025 by thezman

In the 2016 election cycle, the majority of the American people signaled that they were done with the ideological politics that had reigned since the Cold War. While Trump did not win a majority in the general election, the election as a whole, including the primaries, made clear that the public was ready to move on. The way to view the last three election cycles is as a long struggle by the public to drag the economic elites out of their isolation and back into politics.

That is what we saw in 2024 and what we are seeing now. What is happening in Washington is both revolutionary and just the start. The cutting of government payrolls is one part of a bigger change in how America operates. The United States is about to end its empire phase and return to being a big powerful country. It is a long overdue transformation that has been made possible by the economic elites realizing things had to change if they were going to remain elites.

Left out of this is what it means for Europe. The issue of Ukraine, for example, has the Europeans on the sidelines, muttering mad ideas to one another about how they will get along as American vassal states without America. They are drawing up grand schemes for re-arming Germany and developing their own nuclear arsenal, so they can pretend Brussels is an imperial hegemon and the political classes of the European states can continue as dysfunctional flunkies.

It is strange to see the Europeans, both their media and their politicians, carry on as if nothing has changed. In the United States, the talk is about the DOGE audits and making deals with the Russians and Chinese. In Europe they are locking people up for speech crimes and looking under their bed for you-know-who, when the closest they will come to seeing him is in the mirror. Suddenly, Europe is a land of poor people wearing yesterday’s fashions.

The problem is most obvious in British politics. The Economist had a cover featuring British Prime Minister Keir Starmer as Winston Churchill. The motivation behind it is the British elites are still suffering from the 1938 disease that used to rage in the United States until the antidote of the 2024 election. If they had made Starmer look like a guest at Studio 54 it would have been less cringe. British politics is a mess of yesterday men looking for a reason to exist.

This post in the Spectator about Nigel Farage inadvertently gets at the problem faced by the Brits and all of Europe. Farage is a generational talent in terms of democratic appeal, but he is worthless as a politician because he accepts the fact that he lacks elite support, especially support from economic elites. As a result, he is always getting close to the important issues facing his people, but he always pulls up just as he is about to engage directly and candidly with them.

What you always sense with Farage is that he desperately wants an invite to the cool kid’s table, so everything he does is aimed at keeping that option open. He could give the ridiculous fops on the continent a tough time, but he never levels the same charges at the local fops, because that would mean giving up forever the chance to sit with them at the cool kid’s table. He may not like their policies, but the dream of being accepted by them still controls his actions.

It is why he is always negotiating with himself when it comes to issues like immigration or Ukraine. Nowhere on earth is there a majority in favor of immigration and in most places, even the thoroughly demoralized portion of the population wants an end to the open border’s madness. This should be a trillion-dollar bill on the ground for Farage to pick up, but he just cannot do it. He gets close, but always has a reason to leave it there, staring up at him.

What Farage lacks is the backbone that comes from elite support, especially from the economic elite. The reason for that is the indigenous economic elite of the UK was transformed into a local office of American Inc. It could act only with the permission of the bosses in the main office, who for decades were happy to leave things to the managers, both at home and abroad. The result is that the economic elites in Europe have the same managerial mindset as the managers.

The problem can be seen in the list of “British” billionaires. We must put “British” in quotes because the man topping the list is Gopi Hinduja. Number three on the list is Sir Leonard Blavatnik from Ukraine. Fifth on the list is Lakshmi Mittal. This feature of the British economic elite is shared on the continent. What passes for the European economic elite are people who gained their opposition by doing business with the Americans by the rules of the Americans.

The reason the UK is becoming a garbage island is because the “owners” have no connection to it. The servants of those “owners”, huddles in the swanky neighborhoods of London, define themselves by their opposition to the British people. The people of the British Isles got better treatment from the Vikings. The reason Farage can never get elite support is because the elites have no interest in a populist, nationalist message, so Farage reduced to being a charming rumpswab.

There are other forces at play, but all of them have their roots in the fact that Europe has been under American rule for eight decades. The reason Farage cannot be the UK Donald Trump is that Farage is not a member of the economic elite. Trump is a billionaire and sees himself as an equal to the billionaires. His perseverance over the last eight years won over the economic elite. Such a thing is not possible in the UK or on the continent, so they cannot produce their version of Donald Trump.

This does not mean things are hopeless in Europe. In fact, the United States suddenly joining the rest of the world in the 21st century is setting the stage for Europe to finally escape the 20th century as well. It will require a longer and more painful process, like what Russia experience after the Cold War. The reason is Europe will need to rebuild its institutions and develop its own elites. That can only happen when America finally kicks Europe out of the imperial nest.

The Blanche DuBois Problem

Posted on March 5, 2025 by thezman

Show Announcement: Tonight at 8:00 PM eastern, Paul Ramsey and I will be discussing communists and the best way to execute them. You can tune in live on YouTube and on Rumble.

Over the last thirty years, many people have noticed that all moral claims within the public policy sphere can be reduced to a few time periods. In the realm of foreign policy, it is always about 1938 and the events around that time. If it is a domestic issue in the United States, then it is always 1968. Perhaps the slow Progressives will try to make it about the 1980’s when their hero was president. For Americans, public policy is trapped in one of three historical frameworks.

On the foreign policy side, it is easy to see how this works. There have been so many new Hitlers on the stage, no one can keep count. Every foolish and destructive misadventure by Washington involves a Hitler figure. They are not just a generic bad guy in the propaganda sense of it, but they represent the re-emergence of the timeless enemy and the timeless struggle. Everything about American foreign policy since the Cold War is about preventing an imaginary past.

This cognitive defect has made its way across the ocean to Europe. Whenever there is a meeting of the local satraps of the American empire, they take turns looking worried in front of the cameras, talking about the possible reemergence of you know who and the danger of resembling Neville Chamberlain. This moral framework is so powerful that they were unable to notice the irony of the Ukrainians using German tanks to attack the Russians in the Kursk region.

In the United States, the other great moral framework is the Civil Rights movement, into which every local issue is jammed. Every black politician imagines herself as the you-go-girl version of Martin Luther King, which means even mundane issues like maintaining the roads is a civil rights issue. Every man in a dress not being called “ma’am” by the clerk is Rosa Parks. This framing has gone so far that nonwhites are routinely called white supremacists.

One of the features of those who have crossed the great divide is that they see the past as the past, not as an emotional support framework. Whatever lessons can be learned from the past in order to navigate the future are studied, but otherwise, the modern dissident accepts that tomorrow does not lie in yesterday. For those trapped in the 20th century, it is an endless singing of “Tomorrow Belongs To Me” and morality tales where they are the hero.

This irrational attachment to the past is ironic, in that the whole point of the Progressive ideology was to advance human society forward, with forward defined as an advanced state of moral existence. While Progressives of the past often focused on material improvement, the spring has always been eschatological. Better stuff was proof of better living and better living was always a normative issue. It is why they continue to see themselves as the Elect.

The thing about ideology is that it tries to replace something that the Christian West eventually took for granted. Within Christianity there is an assumed point to living within the bounds of Christian ethics. Live a Christian life and your reward is eternal life at the feet of God. Ideology cannot offer this because ideology rejects God as the moral authority, so there must be some other reason to follow the moral demands of the ideology, which becomes the project of the ideology.

Marx probably understood this when he described life in a socialist society as a world of men able “to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner.” He was criticizing specialization and its dehumanizing qualities, but he was also describing a world where men were liberated from the human condition, free to be what they chose. Communism always imagined an end point that recreated heaven on earth.

At some point, every ideology must at least imply a vision of the future as a reason to continue to live within and fight for the moral claims of the ideology. If the point of the ideology is more of the same, then why bother? Therefore, central to every ideology is a point to the struggle, a destination that promises to liberate people from whatever vexes the ideology. Therein lies the reason why the modern Progressive remain trapped in and obsessed with past struggles.

Progressivism was always a weird hybrid of Protestantism and liberalism, so it could leave unsaid the promise of Christianity, while refashioning the ethics of Christianity around claims to universalism, egalitarianism and eventually the blank slate. At its peak, it was a restatement of Winthrop’s sermon “A Model of Christian Charity,” but stripped of all Scriptural references. It resonated with an audience that continued to be informed by the vestigial Christianity they inherited.

The implied destination of Progressivism no longer works on an audience lacking even a basic Christian frame of reference. This void has been filled with a circular version of history in which events of today are recast as versions of the old glorious struggles of the past, where the good guys won, and the bad guys were sent fleeing. The Elect in this arrangement are those who can imagine themselves wearing the white rose of resistance or riding a bus in the Jim Crow South.

In this regard, Progressivism has become a hive without a queen. The queen is the promised land, and the hive is the habits of mind that form the ideology. They are the Christian zealots with no conception of God and only a vague understanding of what lies after this moment in time. This void is filled with anger, which is why they have become so vicious in defense of the absurd. The source of their rage is their spiritual death, which they cannot comprehend.

This obsession over 1938 and 1968 is not just a way to solve the pointlessness of Progressivism, but also a way to escape present reality. Every Progressive, whether of the fast or slow variety, is a version of Blanche DuBois, saddling the next generations with themselves and their stories of the past. The rest of us are now struggling to figure out what to do with them. They are an unwanted and useless presence to the people of the present, trying to move into the future.

The Ghost Of The People’s Party

Posted on March 4, 2025 by thezman

Note #3: Since we are getting signs of spring, it means it will not be long before it is hot, which means t-shirt weather. Just in time for t-shirt season, we have a new shirt for The Occidental Club, which you can buy here.

Most of the ideas that shaped 20th century America boiled up during the 19th century in the aftermath of the Civil War. Some arrived from the Old World before and during the war, things like nationalism and socialism, but most were homegrown ideas that arose out of American Protestantism and the struggle with secularization. Interestingly, the Progressive ideology that emerged was sparked by the populist forces at the time and is now threatened by the same populist forces.

The 19th century was a wild time in America. Prior to the Civil War, it became increasingly clear to the industrializing North that the Constitutional framework was not working for them. The Hartford Conventions, largely erased from the history books now, were a series of conferences in the North to debate leaving the Union. This process was short-circuited by the War of 1812, but the sentiment merely found a new home in abolitionism and finally flowered in the Civil War.

The post-Civil War period was no less tumultuous. Reconstruction was a failure, but a foreshadowing of what would be a feature of the progressive ideology. That is the belief that societies can be reordered in such a way that the people in those societies change how they think about themselves, their neighbors, and the state. The abolitionist fanatics did not abandon these beliefs after the failure of reconstruction. They continued to refine this belief as progressivism flowered in the 20th century.

Of course, progressivism itself is a 19th century phenomenon. It emerged out of American Protestantism as a belief that human society can only advance through relentless social reform. The same people who were sure they could reinvent society to accommodate the freed slaves as equals were now sure they could use the lessons from industrialization to reorder America and the world. Religious social reform became a secular political movement.

The engine that made progressivism possible was populism, which was not unique to America or even unique to the 19th century, but if you look at the populist movements of the 19th century, you see many of the features of what would later be the progressive movement and then progressivism. The populists were not angry mobs assembled outside of the homes of the rich, demanding redress of their grievances. They had an agenda that was mostly crafted by elites in waiting.

For example, the Ocala Demands were a platform of economic and political reforms that became the basis of the People’s Party. It was “produced” by the various farmer’s alliances that had sprung up as mutual aid societies following the Civil War. These groups were brought together in the Marion Opera House in Ocala, Florida, where they approved this list of demands. This was formally called the Ocala Demands and was adopted by the People’s Party.

When you read the demands, the first thing that is clear is that they were not written by a collection of dirt farmers in the South. It was not the work of the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance and Cooperative Union either. That was a real group that participated in the Ocala convention, along with the Southern Farmers’ Alliance. These were not people debating the abolishment of the futures markets, the regulation of the money supply or the imposition of a graduated income tax.

The platform was the work of intellectuals and reformers who saw an opportunity to ride the wave of populism to power and influence. They saw a grassroots movement of disaffected farmers as a vehicle for building a coalition in support of their reform ideas, so they attached themselves to it. It is not an accident that the populist agenda looked a lot like the progressive agenda that would emerge in the 20th century. Progressivism would not have been possible without populism.

It is why it is fair to wonder if what we are seeing and have been seeing for the last few decades is the death of the last remaining ideology, progressivism. Populism seems to be an end of cycle phenomenon. It is, after all, a disorganized revolt against the current order, which has reached its maturity and is entering decline. What follows a populist uprising is either a replacement of the old order, a reform that replaces the old elite or a reform effort by the elites themselves.

The assault on the Blob by the Trump administration, led by Elon Musk, is clearly an assault on the old managerial order. Elon Musk is the face of the new technological elite, so it is fitting that he is the point man for this task. Managerialism is the traveling partner of ideology. It was a feature of both fascism and communism. Its looming demise at the hands of the Trump administration, which was powered by a populist uprising against it, fits the historical pattern.

Progressivism has had a long run, but for most of the 20th century it served as a bulwark against fascism and then communism. Its social reforms stopped making any sense by the latter half of the 20th century and either disappeared from the agenda entirely or morphed into bizarre sexual fetishes. Its main reason to exist was to fight communism, but once communism was gone, it was left without a devil, so it has gone insane over the last decades in search of Old Scratch.

The populism that brought Trump to the White House in 2016, sustained him in his wilderness years and then returned him the White House was driven by the excesses and insanity of progressives. Populism is usually framed as the people versus elites, but in this case, it was normal people versus crazy people. The best way to describe the first weeks of the Trump administration is the return of normalcy, unless you are a member of the hive we call the left.

In the fullness of time, what this period may be known for is the death of the last ideology, knocked off by the same forces that spawned it. American populism has always been a check on the excesses of the elite, not as a physical or even political force, but as a cultural force. Ideology is always about changing culture, so it is ironic that the last ideology will be vanquished by a cultural phenomenon. The ghost of the People’s Party has finally called progressivism home.

The Zelensky Problem

Posted on March 3, 2025 by thezman

Note #1: Last Wednesday was the second edition of a show I am doing with Paul Ramsey every Wednesday at 8:00 which you can watch live on Rumble and YouTube and, of course, watch at your leisure after the fact.

Note #2: Behind the green door, there is a post about the events of last Friday, a post about the importance of knowing who is in charge, and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here. I was also on with the boys from the Old Glory Club where we discussed the events of the day. The replay is here.

Ronald Reagan was famous for saying that “the closest thing to immortality is a government program.” He was not the first person to say it. There are examples of American politicians saying a version of this going back to the 1930’s. There are probably versions of this concept going back to the Kingdom of Ur, because it is the nature of government to create constituencies in favor of its actions and those constituencies always lobby for more of what created them.

You see this with Project Ukraine, which was largely created by a small number of zealots called the neocons in the Obama administration. They overthrew the government of Ukraine, installed an anti-Russian government and just like that there was money and opportunity in Ukraine. By the time Trump came along in 2016, the Ukraine project had a sizable constituency in the Western ruling class, which is why Trump was impeached. He threatened the project.

Since the war broke out in 2022, the power of the Project Ukraine constituency has grown much stronger for monetary and political reasons. Important interests in Western countries are making money from the war, so they support politicians who seek to keep the war going. The politicians are happy to oblige, as the war is a nice distraction from the boring tasks the voters expect from government, tasks that the political class has thoroughly and completely ignored.

There is also the fact that the European political class operates like a preschool, where they are the children, and the United States is the teacher. Ending Project Ukraine is like forcing them into regular school or maybe sending them home to parents who do not fawn over them like their teachers. The reality of Europe is bleak, largely due to the perfidy of the Europeans political class. They prefer not to face that and instead fixate on this glorious adventure in which they are the heroes.

Of course, like all government programs, there is the program itself, which always adheres to the iron law of bureaucracy. In any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people. There will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization and those dedicated to the organization itself. The second group will gain and keep control of the organization. We see this with how the Blob is fighting DOGE like Grendel facing off against Beowulf.

This is what we see with Zelensky. He is the anthropomorphized government program, consumed with defending its prerogatives. It is why he was so nasty in his trip to the Trump White House. He could not believe that these people would have the audacity to make demands upon him. He is the indispensable man, on whose shoulders rests the fate of the free world and through him is expressed the hopes and dreams of the managerial class that created him.

This is the problem the Trump administration faces as they seek to wind down what they consider to be a pointless and costly enterprise. They wisely drove a stake through the heart of that part of the Blob that has controlled American foreign policy, which is why official Washington is struggling to defend Project Ukraine. Legacy media is simultaneously calling Trump Chamberlain and Hitler – he is somehow appeasing himself – but otherwise they have no answers.

The Europeans are another matter. They see themselves like the tax eaters in Washington getting memos from Elon Musk. For them, Project Ukraine is their reason to exist now, so Trump’s plans to end it are an existential threat. It is why they cooked up the scheme to trick Trump into going along with their peacekeeper idea last week and why they are now busy cooking up a new scheme. Ukraine is their teddy bear, and they cannot think of being without it.

Zelensky is the key here, as his very life probably depends on this war never ending, at least not until he has an exit strategy. He cannot make a deal with the Russians because the ultra-nationalist will not tolerate it. The only deal he could make is one that requires Russia to surrender, which is not a possibility. His other choice is fleeing the country, but he would no doubt be tracked down by enemies. That leaves him with no other choice but to keep the war going.

One of the truths of a government program is that when it is finally killed off, the world never ends and the people dependent upon it find something else. After the initial sobbing and moaning, the dogs bark and the caravan moves on. That will be the case with Project Ukraine. What must happen first is Zelensky must exit the stage, and either be replaced by chaos or by someone willing to do a deal to end the war. At that point, the Europeans will adjust to the new reality.

This is where things stand now. At some level the Europeans seem to know it, which is why they put on a show over the weekend featuring their favorite comedian. It was a funeral where they could all hug and reminisce, except the corpse was still walking and talking, demanding more money and weapons. The reason Zelensky keeps talking about resigning is he knows that for this program to finally end, he must exit the stage, so he is hoping to create conditions which drag that out a bit longer.

While it may feel like government programs are immortal, immune to all efforts to slay them, nothing lasts forever. That is what we are now seeing. Along with the death of the 20th century mindset in American foreign policy is the death of its last great program, Project Ukraine and its anthropomorphized representation of it. Once Zelensky is gone, the war ends, and the process of developing new, normalized relations in Europe begins as we exit the post-Cold War world.

The Long Way Home

Posted on February 27, 2025 by thezman

One of the many failings of conservatism was the insistence that with just the right argument using just the right data points, the people they called the left would throw down their weapons and embrace them as brothers. At the core of what later became known as civic nationalism was the assertion that all political actors are looking for objective truth and therefore would respond to it. The reason for political disputes was the failure to flesh out the facts.

Politic is about morality, not facts. It is also about power, specifically the power to impose your moral vision on the rest. Facts have little to do with politics and are often seen by ideologues as a threat. The diversity cult looks at the FBI crime stats as a direct threat to their project, so they worked to suppress them. The flat earth people insist that intelligence testing is a conspiracy of some sort. They label it “race-science” because adding the words “race” to anything anathematizes it.

Another thing that the conservative view of politics got wrong is that it left people with only two choices when evaluating left-wing rhetoric. Either the people chanting about white power structures were lying or they were deeply confused. In both cases, it was assumed that they had to know the truth and that the truth would either set them straight or force them to stop lying. Untold man hours were wasted trying to explain the truth to crazy relatives because of this.

Even now, with all that is happening, it is hard for people to accept that the crazies are in fact crazy enough to believe the nutty things they are saying. This post in the New York Times feels like parody, but it is written to soothe the nerves of the believers while they huddle together plotting how to respond. The writer genuinely believes Washington is being taken over by a Stalin-like figure and he and his coreligionists are the beginnings of a great resistance to it.

This is the precursor to the forming of a narrative. The cult we call the left operates like all cults in that it has a story to explain itself and its destination. Within the story are stories to address the bumps along the way as well as the victories. Soon, others will take this framework in which the good guys are being oppressed by the bad guys and create a narrative that fills in the details, especially the part where they finally vanquish the monster and everyone cheers.

It is hard for normal people to accept that the writer is as crazy as it seems. After all, he had to have sat in meetings at the New York Times where people boasted of ruining critics of the Biden regime. He must be aware of the doxing campaigns and the hooded terrorist gangs sent to harass dissidents. It is inconceivable to a normal person that this guy does not see the irony in what he is writing. The truth is he is that crazy and the audience is right there with him.

Part of how cults respond to disconfirmation and setbacks is they create new pleasing narratives for why things have not gone as predicted. A month into the Trump presidency and the crazies have settled on an economic collapse as the most probable end to the Trump tyranny. According to the Times, the economy is already reeling from policies that have yet to be implemented. The Telegraph reports that the really smart people foresee disaster for the Trump economy.

This gets to another thing that people struggle to accept. These people lie. They will make up whatever whoppers they think they need for their narrative. Extreme partisanship rewards sociopathy, so over time the movement will be overrun by people who see no moral distinction between the truth and a lie. All that matters is whether it serves the cause, by which they mean does it strengthen their side or does it cause harm to their opponents?

Despite all that has been revealed so far, as well as the massive media gaslighting campaign last year, people still think there is truth in the media. There is little doubt that the Harris campaign turned many people from civic nationalist into something else, but for many, the whole thing was forgotten after the election. It is called the Gell-Mann amnesia effect, which is when you see something in the media that is an obvious lie but then forget that story and trust the next story in the same media site.

What all this tells us is that even though normal defeated crazy in November and the Trump admin has a plan to defeat the Blob in order to restore sobriety back to politics, the road back to normal will be long and full of trouble. Scan the fever swamps and it is clear that events have had no impact on the crazies. If anything, they have become crazier now that they have shuffled off mainstream platforms into places like Bluesky and Reddit where they are free to fly their freak flags.

Similarly, the media has learned nothing from the last decade. They put everything they had into dragging Harris over the finish line but failed because not enough people trust them anymore. Despite the massive rejection that was the November election, they are now leaning into the same tactics that brought them to this point. The employees of Jeff Bezos at the Washington Post still think they get to tell the owner of the company to buzz off and leave the running of it to them.

While it does appear that we have reached the end of a cycle of madness, perhaps several historical cycles that culminated in the last decade, it is going to be a long road back to normal. The crazies will not simply go away. They must be defeated, caged, and only released when the conditions that created them are eradicated. The normals will have to be trained in the new way of engaging in politics. Much like Russia after communism, America is on the road to recovery, but it is a long road.

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