Societal Collapse

Posted on October 13, 2022 by thezman

Note: The long awaited release of my talk with Greg Hood of American Renaissance has finally arrived. You can listen to it here.

Most people think of societal collapse as something like a zombie apocalypse where everything suddenly stops working. Instead of people turning into brain eating zombies, they stop going to work. The “system” collapses, so everyone just stops doing what they normally do all of a sudden. The next day, people divide up into gangs and begin to guard their turf using what is left of modern weapons. Life quickly returns to a hunter-gatherer existence with modern clothes.

This image of collapse is a powerful one. Google the phrase “United States collapse” or some version of it and you get results going back many years. Most of them start with economics but some start with culture. Right now, the people we call the Left for some reason think America is on the verge of collapse because they cannot force people to nod along with their weird morality. Many normal people think collapse is coming because they see the food bill every week.

Of course, there is a market for taking the contrary view. This is a popular gag for internet characters on what we continue to call the Right. They counter the claims from their fellow anti-leftists with arguments for why the “founding principals” will prevail and avoid societal collapse. Maybe they will point out that the magic of the free market has conquered communism, so it will conquer whatever is happening now. It is a form of strategic gainsaying to get attention.

The thing is societal collapse is a real thing that does happen just as civil wars, revolutions, wars and social upheavals are real things. Thirty years ago, the Soviet Union collapsed and we got to watch lots of it on television. When people suddenly realized that the guards were not going to shoot them if they tried to escape to the West, it did not take long before order broke down. Once the process started, there was no way to stop it and the system collapsed.

The thing is it did not happen overnight. The collapse actually started much earlier but people did not notice it. Little things stopped working. For example, people in Hungary began to notice that the border to Austria was not always guarded. Maybe the guards were there and ignored their duty or they just abandoned their post. Over time the border was not much of a border. Similar breakdowns of small systems became common over the course of the 1980’s.

Of course, the collapse of the Soviet Union did not send these societies back to the stone age either. Politics became increasingly chaotic. Law and order broke down to the point where criminal gangs were imposing their will on whole cities, because the police no longer had the ability or desire to stop them. The people got poorer in many small ways, but mostly in the breakdown of trust. They could not rely on the system, so they slowly abandoned it for alternatives.

We do not think of social trust as a part of the poverty equation, but in realty it is the key component of social happiness. High trust societies may not have unlimited consumer goods, but the people trust the system, because they trust one another. This allows for long term planning. Africa will never be rich, despite having massive natural resources, because social trust is near zero. Finland will never be poor because the Finns can count on their fellow Finns to always be Finnish.

Social collapse, like war and revolution, will reflect the material relations of the age because those reflect the resources of society. Revolution in the 18th century was peasants with pitchforks, because that is how you can revolt in an agrarian society operating under feudal rules. In the 19th century revolution was workers hurling homemade bombs and shooting at the authorities, because that is how you can stage a revolt in an industrial urban society.

This is the information age, so revolution will reflect the weapons we choose to use in this age, which will be money and knowledge. Money in all of its forms is a type of information that says things about the general state of affairs. In completely financialized societies like the West, money is the big weapon. It is also other information, like the government hiring clowns and carnies to nudge people in the “right direction” during the Covid panic.

The great tumult in the West over the last decade has been centered on the things that are important in the information age. The rise of a new group of oligarchs was made possible by the technological revolution. Just as agrarian people measured wealth in land and industrial people measured wealth in capital, technological people measure wealth in control of information flows. The reason Mark Zuckerberg is richer than Bill Gates is he controls something more valuable than PC’s.

Societal collapse in the information age will, at least at the beginning, reflect the socioeconomic relations of the age. Trust in what we are told by the media has collapsed, because it is easier to see the lying than in prior ages. In 1985 you could think the New York Times was biased, but predictably so. Today, you cannot trust anything they say because it is false in unpredictable ways. Trust in the media has collapsed because their information is chaotically false.

The slow collapse of trust in our information is spreading. We used to think that the courts were predictable, if not always fair. Poor people might not get the same justice as rich people, but the reason was understood. If you could afford a competent lawyer, he would get the most from the system for you. Today, no one knows what the hell will happen in a courtroom. Alex Jones just got fined a billion dollars because the regime supporters are still salty about the 2016 election.

Of course, trust in government is collapsing not because they do not fix the streets or make the buses run on time. Trust is falling because they lie. It is not about politicians lying, which is expected and predictable. It is the government itself. For example, they appear to be faking key economic data. Their inflation numbers are laughable as anyone who buys food will tell you. They also like to change the meaning of words, which puts an Orwellian spin on the lying.

Getting back to the topic of collapse, what happens in the information age when no one trusts the information? In a world where your bank may close down your account because they claim you hold the wrong opinions; how can you trust them to be straight about anything else? If the government is faking economic data, how can we trust anything else they are doing? When the people responsible for 100% of disinformation claim to be fighting disinformation, who can we trust?

When the Soviet system began to collapse, it was the symbols of its power that first came under pressure. When people stopped fearing the border guard, they slowly stopped fearing the system behind it. The same will be true in this age. When people stop trusting the information that runs this world, they will slowly begin to stop trusting the system behind it. It is at that point the system begins to slowly unravel as alternative trust networks form up to fill the void.

The bottom line is those waiting for collapse are mistaken. It is not a thing that is looming over the horizon. It is a thing that is happening now. Every day there is a new reminder that the system cannot be trusted. Maybe it is ten dollar gas in Germany or skyrocketing food prices in England or demonstrably false claims from the drug makers with regards to the Covid jab. These things chip away at trust in the system and like the game of Jenga, the result is inevitable.

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Conservative Morality

Posted on October 12, 2022 by thezman

One of the great tricks conservatism plays on normal people is to offer up a set of false choices in response to regime morality. The ruling class comes out with some new thing and conservatives come out with new responses. One choice is something the regime has declared a fatwa against, while the other choice is allowed. The job of the conservatives is to herd their people into the acceptable choice. Often, the acceptable choice is just an extreme version of what the regime offers.

The best example is racism. Way back in the last century, elements of the ruling class invented a new sin called racism. For most of human history, everyone just accepted the fact that people were different and people liked to be around their own. This was so obviously true no one had to think much about it. The exception was when one group of people tried to move into the area of another group of people. Invasions always led to violence, which is why invasions were immoral.

For reasons no one bothered to explain, elements of the ruling class decided that it was immoral for you to want to live around people like you. Further, you were not allowed to notice the differences in people. That was this new thing called racism. For several generations now, conservatives have been trying to prove that the Democrats are the real racists. You see, the greatest conservative principle is opposing racism more than the people conservatives claim to oppose.

This desire to be more of whatever the regime is promoting infects everything nook and cranny of the conservative mind. When the regime decided sodomy was a sacrament, conservatives celebrated sodomy. When the regime decided men in dresses could stalk your children in the playground, conservative suddenly discovered a new sacred principle in favor of crossdressers. To be a conservative is to fully embrace every degenerate moral claim of their alleged opponents.

Here is a good example of how conservatism is just the extreme version of yesterday’s moral claims by their opponents. The Supreme Court is looking at two cases related to freedom of association. Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina challenge the race policies of their respective defendants. In both cases, the schools discriminate based on race.

What the regime has always argued is that white people have dominated the world due to dumb luck and their unique cruelty. Whether it is the exploitation of resources held by nonwhites or simply good fortune, Europeans have unfairly outperformed the rest of the world and this is immoral. Therefore, it is required that current white people be made to suffer in order to balance the scales. This is the moral claim made in all policies under the umbrella of restorative justice.

One way to even the scales is to force whites to accept nonwhites into their lives so that the nonwhites can partake in the good fortune of whites. In education, for example, the underlying assumption is the teachers in white schools do a better job teaching their subjects than the teachers in nonwhite schools. The proof is Asians, who prefer white schools over black schools. Asians do very well, so it must be that special magic that exists in white schools, but not in black schools.

In the middle of the last century, a natural right enjoyed by all humans since the dawn of time was stripped from Americans. You no longer had the right to place your body next to another body without permission from the state. Further, you no longer had the right to deny nonwhites access to your life. Effectively, what was done is the forging of a new right possessed only by certain nonwhites. That right is the right to access white people and the things they create.

The rational opposition to this is that all people, even white people, have a right to make the most of their talents. Therefore, they have the right to work with whomever they think is in their best interest. This is a foundational argument of Western liberalism and the basis for market economics. Since you own you and have the right to use your labor as you see fit, it naturally follows that you have the right to associate, or not associate, with whomever you choose.

Conservatives do not make that argument. As you see in that post, their argument is that you have no rights whatsoever. You are not even allowed to notice that people are different and posses different qualities. Instead, in order to be even more berserk about race than the most berserk member of the new religion, you have to poke out your eyes and rip off your ears. The conservative principle with regards to the human condition is to be to the extreme left of the new religion.

Of course, the moral position here is that Harvard, a private college, can discriminate however it pleases with regards to admissions. If they want a freshman class of left-handed Korean midgets, they can only admit those people. On the other hand, North Carolina is a public university and as such must admit students according to a set of rules applicable to all American citizens. That would also bar them from favoring legacies and potential sports stars in admissions.

You see, while we human beings and citizens enjoy the absolute right of free association, our government does not have that right. Otherwise, it is not our government and is instead an occupying force. Foundational to liberal society is free association and that means we collectively own the state. As equal partners in the state, the state cannot favor one group over another. Again, equality before the law is a bedrock item in a moral society.

The writer of that post is probably a decent sort. He wants to do the right thing, but he has been conditioned by conservatism to think the right thing is always the most extreme version of whatever the liberals are peddling. It is so ingrained in the conservative mind that they do not notice it. If the liberals suddenly favored wearing colorful jock straps on their heads, conservatives would be boasting about how their new headgear is the best ever.

The result of this madness is the courts will now decide if the state has a right to discriminate against white people or no one has a right to discriminate against anyone for any reason at all. Given the makeup of the courts, the most likely result will be to ban the most basic right of free association. In effect, the new rule will render citizens as prisoners in a permission state. Conservatism will have made otherwise free people into servants of the managerial state.

Food Phobia

Posted on October 5, 2022 by thezman

Food plays an important role in every culture. Since culture evolves in a place and that place has certain foods not known in other places, food helps ground the culture in a time and place, which helps ground the people in a time and place. A big part of the answer to the only question that matters – who are we – is the place where the answer was created by our ancestors. It is why our holidays have special foods. They help remind the people of the answer to the big question.

In the West, fear of food is also a big cultural item. For some reason, Western people remain convinced that their food is out to get them. From time to time certain foods have been banned. In pre-modern times the reasons ranged from the superstitious to the ritual, while in modern times “science” is the blame. In this age, we are told every day that something in our diet is trying to kill us. These days, people are often defined by the foods they think are plotting against them.

Fear of food seems to track with belief. The more ideological the person, the more likely they are to be paranoid about food. Vegans and vegetarians are almost always in one of the subcultures on what we call the Left. The exception will be someone who got it into his head that something is bad for his training regimen. Otherwise, when someone tells you they are a vegan, and they almost always tell you that as soon as you meet them, they are telling you their politics.

This may have been true before ideology replaced religion. When he was not busy inventing the triangle, Pythagoras was running a cult. A big part of his cult was the foods that were prohibited. Of course, religions of the book have dietary laws. Jews are not supposed to eat pork or shellfish. For a long time, Catholics were not supposed to eat meat on Friday. Since religion seeks to answer the big question or at least contribute to the answer, it makes sense that it would have food rules.

In this age of disbelief, food fads seem to fill the void for some people. Vegans and vegetarians are the obvious examples. They make a big deal out of their food, as if the consumption of the correct items is a sacrament. Keto people are not far behind in this regard, but they tend to be fascinated with the math of it. A big part of the keto subculture is tracking the macros. Every meal is a math puzzle. Get the numbers right and Andhrímnir will bless the day.

The biggest food fetish by far in this age is the fear of certain foods. Stories like this one in the New York Post are a daily occurrence. Some food gets the stink eye because “science” claims that it is plotting to kill you. In this case, white rice is part of the conspiracy known as heart disease. A billion Chinamen eat rice every day and have relatively low heart disease rates. This obvious fact will be ignored and some people will accept the claim that rice is a killer.

Interestingly, the science of food is riddled with science denialism. Heart disease, for example, is most certainly a genetic issue. This old post from Jayman on the topic is a good explainer on the genetic reality of heart disease. Our health outcomes are probably 98% genetic, but the “food science” people insist that arranging the right items on the dinner plate will magically bring good health. Food science is a good reminder that we are as superstitious as ever.

Of course, admitting that genetics, not diet, is the key driver of human health would be bad for business, so “food science” embraces the blank slate. If the reason people eating a Mediterranean diet have a low incidence of heart disease is due to them being Mediterranean, then you are not selling many cookbooks. On the other hand, if you claim that all people are exactly the same and the differences we see are due to things like food magic, then you can sell a lot of cookbooks.

There is the theological angle as well. The New Religion treats human biodiversity as a heresy, one of the deadly sins, in fact, so we cannot notice that certain people seem to have certain diseases while other people have different diseases. Just as dietary laws are part of all religions, the New Religion has embraced food magic. The rice in your cupboard that is plotting your demise has nothing to do with the rice that seems to like the people of East Asia. Peace be upon you.

The truth is, outside of the extremes and controlling for obvious poisons, food plays little role in your health. What matters is your over all calorie intake and the balance of nutrients you get from the food. If you get enough calories and the right mix of nutrients, you will be as healthy as your code indicates. Eat too much and you get fat. Eat the wrong things and maybe you get scurvy or rickets. Otherwise, your food intake is just not all that important to your health.

In this age, the issue with food is the extremes. The rising incidence of diabetes is driven, in part, by the fatness of people. Demographics play a role as certain people are more prone to both obesity and diabetes¹, so as they grow in number their diseases will grow in proportion. Even so, Americans eat too much and eat far too many calories from carbohydrate laden foods. Stand outside of a Starbucks and you will see fat women waddling out with what look like deserts every morning.

Interestingly, the one thing that is never mentioned by the fear mongers is the vast array of chemicals in prepared foods. It is just assumed they are safe, but we really do not know if long term consumption of sodium nitrate or guar gum has an impact on the human body. Big food is never going to pay anyone to study it and they will never let government look into it. The recent Covid experience should make clear who calls the shots when it comes to public health.

Putting that aside, the rise in claimed food allergies and weird diets is probably linked to the collapse of the culture and local community. It always returns to the answer to the big question – who are we? If you are not allowed to answer in the affirmative, then you are left to answer in the negative. Instead of being what your people eat, so to speak, you are what you fear on the dinner plate. A negative food identity fills the void left by a positive cultural identity.

¹Some people with reading disabilities interpret this to mean obesity is caused solely by genetics, rather than calorie intake. This is an error on your part. Genetics plays a role in everything, including obesity, but it is not the only factor.

The Moral Hazard Society

Posted on October 4, 2022 by thezman

For the last couple of weeks, there have been whispers that some large banks may be in trouble due to the rising dollar. The strength of the dollar is due, in part, to the Federal Reserve’s effort to fight inflation. It is also due to the decline in both the Euro and the British pound. Economic conditions in Europe are deteriorating quickly because of poor management at every level. The relative strength of a currency is the relative strength of the managerial elite that issues it.

Recently, the gossip has turned to Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank, both of which have seen their share prices collapse. The former has lost about 60% since the start of the year and the latter is down around 50% off its recent high. Credit Suisse could be at risk of imminent collapse, due to its deteriorating credit condition. Banks need credit to function and right now, no one is excited about extending credit to a bank whose CEO is telling employees that the bank is not about to fail.

Some are calling the Credit Suisse crisis the Lehman moment. This refers to the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, which triggered the financial crisis. Banks are dependent upon one another, so if one fails, it can set off a chain reaction where the next weak bank fails, then the next weakest bank. Get enough banks unable to make payments to other banks and the whole system crashes. This is why everyone is worried about the banks all of a sudden.

It is also why the market boomed on Monday. The stock market is wholly dependent on central bank policy now. Loose policy means lots of money creation in the banking system, which means lots of money flowing into markets. Tight central bank policy means the money gets fussy about where it flows. It can even sit on the sidelines and wait until things appear more stable. The robots are betting that Jerome Powell blinks and ends his tightening to save the banks.

This is similar to what recently happened with the Bank of England. All of a sudden, there was no market for the long dated British bonds. This is why the British pound declined in value. This in turn created a crisis for British pension funds, as their collateral started to evaporate. The BoE had to step in and buy long dated bonds to guarantee their price and save the pension funds. As a result, the gilt and pound have stabilized over the last few days.

The weirdness of this age is right there in that action by the BoE. On the one hand, they are trying to fight inflation by reducing the money supply. They do this by raising interest rates, which reduces bank activity. This slows the creation of money, thus reducing the supply of money relative to demand. As relative demand increases, the relative value increases, which is what brings down inflation. In reality, it means a recession, which does the hard work of cratering demand.

Where we are now with the BoE, and probably the Federal Reserve, is that the bank is trying to reduce the amount of money in the system relative to demand. At the same time, they are trying to increase the money in the banking system in order to prevent the banks from running out of cash. Put another way, we may be in a situation where central banks are injecting and withdrawing money at the same time, which is one of those things that is supposed to be impossible.

The current crisis is due to the choices facing central banks. They can provide liquidity to the system or they can fight inflation. If they raise rates to fight inflation, major players who got sloppy with interest rate swaps, for example, are suddenly facing an extinction event, which threatens the whole system. On the other hand, if they protect the system by leaving rates alone, they face the political fury of governments contending with double digit inflation and energy shortages.

There is a bigger issue. The energy problems, the supply chain disruptions, inflation and the fragile credit markets are due to political incompetnace. Over the last three years, Western governments, led by Washington, have found every bad decision possible and then made it with furious enthusiasm. People cannot be blamed for thinking it is deliberate, because that is the best answer. The odds of rulers being this dumb this often strikes most people as impossible.

This is a time when Occam’s razor does not apply. They are this dumb. Liz Truss came to power promising to give rich people free money to boost the economy. This was a moronic plan that nearly blew up the economy in her first weeks. Truss is a simpleton who has no business in politics, so she thought it was a grand idea. She is in office because her predecessor was a bloated party boy who saw Churchill whenever he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror.

Go back through British PM’s and it is one buffoon after another. This mirrors what has been happening in America. Joe Biden is in the late stages of dementia and he will be on the ticket for 2024. His predecessor was a carny act. The guy before that was a formless nobody who was willing to act the role created for him. The guy before that was a simpleton controlled by his father’s friends. You can do this in every Western country going back decades. They are as dumb as they act.

The crisis of competence in the managerial elite is not the root cause. The real first mover is the moral hazard economy. Going back to the 1970’s, the Western political system has come to rely on a handful of clever bankers to save the political class from their own idiocy. Starting with Paul Volcker, central banks have been the mother hen of political economy, always right there to kiss the boo-boo of the politicians or the pirates in the financial system when they stepped on a rake.

This safety net under the political economy of the West has warped the selection pressure on the people in the system. In a world of no real risk, feckless airheads like Liz Truss can rise to the top on promises to the powerful. After all, if she breaks something, nothing really bad can happen. The result of this risk-free political environment is that it rewards reckless behavior. The bigger the claim, the bigger the media splash, which means bigger political clout.

The same selection pressure can be seen in banking. In a world where bankers go to jail and lose all of their money if they screw up, there is a low tolerance for people who are reckless and foolish. In a world where the Fed steps in to not only save your bank but save your golden parachute and those of your colleagues, why would you not take the most dangerous risks? For over thirty years central banks have created a moral hazard, which in turn created a culture of reckless disregard.

It is this sense that no harm can ever come from error that is leading the West into a crisis from which it may not survive. It is this mentality that is leading to the game of chicken with nuclear weapons. The West is now led by a collection of mentally unfit bullies who think they own the school yard. At some point, like all bullies, they will get punched in the nose and see their own blood. In this case, it is reality that will do the punching and the bankers will not be their to kiss the boo-boo.

This raises the serious question. Bullies learn their lesson in the schoolyard because that lesson is not lethal. In the present age, how can the ruling class suddenly feel the pain of their own stupidity, without blowing up the world? How can real risk be reintroduced to change the selection pressure without risking collapse? The moral hazard society may have reached a point where there is no solution. The phrase that may be needed here is creative destruction.

A Medieval Desire For Revenge

Posted on October 3, 2022 by thezman

Notes: The Monday Taki post is up. This week is a post about the natural coercion that takes place in any democratic system. Sunday Thoughts is up behind the green door, covering some news items of the day. SubscribeStar and Substack.

Toward the end of the Second World War, the “Allies”, which by this point was a polite fiction, were thinking about what comes after the war. The three big powers of Europe, France, Italy and Germany, were in ruins. The British were bankrupt. Then you had the Russians, who were clearly looking past the war. The big item on the agenda was what to do about the Germans. Within living memory, they had been blamed for two monstrous wars that crippled the West.

United States Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau produced a plan in 1944 that called for the annihilation of Germany as a country. The central argument was that there was something defective about German people that causes them for no reason at all to do the things they were doing. The only solution was to make it so these people could never do those things again. Morgenthau did not blame politics or ideology for the wars, but the German character.

The plan called for the de-industrialization of Germany. This would have been done by partitioning Germany into various bits. Some portion would go to Poland, while another portion would go to France. The Ruhr Area, the main industrial area of Germany at the time, would be stripped and occupied. What remained of Germany would be divided into two areas with no industry. Basically, the country known as German would cease to exist and its people would soon follow.

That last part is key. Even after it was made clear to Morgenthau and his supporters that his plan would result in wide-scale starvation, he pressed forward. Optimistic analysis at the time said that 40% of Germans would starve to death if the Morgenthau plan was implemented. Of course, the number would be much higher due to the inevitable revolts by the Germans, which would be met with force. The goal of the Morgenthau was the genocide of the German people.

From the point of view of this age, it sounds like madness, but war does funny things to people, especially long wars. The Russians had lost tens of millions of people fighting the Germans, so left to their own sensibilities at the time, they probably would have exterminated most of the Germans and reduced the country to rubble. What was left would have become a slave state in the Soviet Union. Of course, Morgenthau had similar motivations for destroying Germany.

The chief supporter of the Morgenthau plan in Britain was Churchill’s assistant Frederick Alexander Lindemann, 1st Viscount Cherwell. Besides having a great name, Lord Cherwell was described as having “a medieval desire for revenge” not just on Germans but on anyone he disliked. Naturally, the Morgenthau plan for Germany tickled his natural desire to see opponents suffer. This bit of trivial reinforces the fact that the plan was purely retributive, rather than remedial.

The Morgenthau plan has a curious history. It was published in the closing days of the war, but it became a rallying point for the Germans. All of sudden, the very real prospect of extinction was on the table. Allied commanders said the plan had made their job much more difficult. After the war, there was an effort to memory hole the idea because of the Cold War. Recently the plan has gained attention because it draws attention to certain subjects that are bad for current narratives.

Interestingly, the plan was quickly deemed impractical by the people who would be charged with implementing it. This happened before anyone stopped to consider the morality of committing genocide on the Germans. Genocide is the right word, as that includes erasing the culture of a people. Despite the obvious impossibility of the plan, the backers never gave up on it. It was only the clever machinations of people around Roosevelt and Churchill that prevented the genocide.

Today it would be nothing more than a side note to the history of the war, but it seems as if that old “medieval desire for revenge” still casts a shadow. The events in modern Europe look like an updated version of the Morgenthau plan. The Germans are slowly being reduced to peonage by Anglo-American policy. The pretext this time is not fear of German militarism, but fear of German independence. Ukraine policy makes sense when the goal is the destruction of Germany.

That is what is on tap unless something changes. German industry cannot survive if energy conditions persist much longer. Their primary advantage in Europe and the world has been easy access to cheap energy. The energy crisis not only deprives them of cheap energy but may deprive them of energy. The Germans are now facing the prospect of blackouts and periodic shutdowns due to gas shortages. This is just the start of what could be a long crisis.

Then there is the knock-on effect. Energy is not just about making things like cars and chemicals, but about growing food. All of Western Europe will be facing a serious fertilizer crisis in 2023. Germany has relied on imports for all of its commercial fertilizer, so cuts in those imports will wipe out German food production. A country that cannot make anything, heat its homes or feed itself looks a lot like what the people behind the Morgenthau plan had in mind eighty years ago.

Of course, there is another element to this. The first Secretary General of NATO was Brit named Hastings Lionel Ismay, also known as First Baron Ismay. He is credited with having said the purpose of NATO was “to keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” In retrospect, the sole purpose may have been to keep Germany down. Germany is the key to Russian involvement in Europe, so controlling Germany is a way to control Russia.

That is what we see in the current crisis. Washington blew up those gas lines because those gas lines primarily served the Germans. It allowed them to do business with Russia and could perhaps allow the Germans to be an honest broker in the war between Washington and Moscow. It speaks to that “medieval desire for revenge” that Washington would rather risk a nuclear war with Russia than let the ancient enemy get even a hint of independence and self-respect.

Perhaps the way to read this crisis in Europe is as the final chapter in a long story with roots into the 19th century. The cutting off of cheap energy to Germany will finally reduce the Germans to poverty. They will be dependent on Washington and the rest of Europe for survival. This may strike modern ears as insane as the original Morgenthau plan, but like that old plan, the new plan, maybe it should be called the Kagan Plan, is about a “medieval desire for revenge.”

An Inflection Point

Posted on September 28, 2022 by thezman

Imagine if in response to Governor DeSantis sending migrant invaders to Martha’s Vineyard, the Biden administration blew up the Overseas Highway that connects the Florida Keys to the mainland. In response to Texas doing similar things, they knocked out part of the power grid in Texas. For good measure, they started a car bombing campaign against leading opponents of immigration. It may sound insane, but it is not too far from where we find ourselves.

Now, take it a step further and imagine that the major media outlets simply ignored these things entirely. You see clips on-line of the collapsed bridges in Florida, but you can find little about it in the news. They simply report that something happened and no one knows who did it. Maybe a few crackpots on these media platforms claim that DeSantis blew up the bridges as a false flag operation. Texas governor Greg Abbot is blowing up his power grid for the same reason.

This scenario is so ridiculous it would not pass muster with Hollywood studios as the basis for a political satire. Somehow, we have reached this moment. Last week, someone planted bombs near the Baltic Sea gas pipelines that bring natural gas from Russia to Europe. This caper required a great deal of coordination and technical skill, so it was not a group of kids. Everyone knows it was ordered by Washington and probably carried about by the American military.

If you head to the big America media platforms, this act of international terrorism that threatens the wellbeing of Europe is barely noticed. The New York Times is obsessing over some old video of Roger Stone and the hurricane. Presumably, they hope the storm wrecks Florida because they hate Florida. The Post has a below the fold story but they are gearing up to claim the terrorism is part of Putin’s dastardly plan to spread disinformation in the West.

Typically, the regime has a narrative ready to go when they pull a caper, but this time they have just been doing the self-satisfied grin. Radek Sikorski is a high ranking Polish politician who is married to Anne Applebaum. She is a member of the Trotsky cult run by Robert Kagan, the husband of Victoria Nuland, who is the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs. She is running Ukraine policy. Sikorski tweeted this out moments after the attack.

The Europeans quickly announced that it was an act of terrorism but seem to be in shock as they have yet to follow the script that says to blame Russia. Maybe this level of humiliation is even too much for the Europeans. The absurdity of blaming Russia is so ridiculous that it is impossible to say aloud without laughing. The American navy has been operating in the area and we have video of Joe Biden making threats to destroy the pipelines back in February.

Where we are now is that Washington is ordering the destruction of key European infrastructure in order to make war on Russia. Given the nature of the people involved, you can be sure many of them stood to make money from the attack, but the primary motive was the war on Russia. The Europeans are already in dire straights over energy this winter. This terrorist act by Washington now means something like a Turnip Winter for a wide swath of Western Europe.

Put aside the practical issues. Washington is now openly sponsoring and probably carrying out terrorist acts in Europe. Some would claim that this is not new as Washington has spent a quarter century bombing the Middle East. That is a fair complaint, but it happened under the guise of war. They were bombing the other side’s stuff, not the infrastructure of Europe. Imagine if Washington blew up the Chunnel in response to 9/11 and we have a good comparison.

The Europeans are a broken and defeated people, but even they have to be wondering what they have gotten themselves into with this Ukraine debacle. They eagerly signed up to be a “partner” with Washington in this great adventure to save Ukraine from the icy clutches of the Russian bear. Now, their economies are in collapse, their people are facing a winter without heat, governments are collapsing and their partner in all of this is now bombing their infrastructure. Some partnership.

The fact that the American media has been told to ignore this suggests Washington realizes they have a problem. It is hard to portray yourself as the good guy when you are bombing critical assets of your partners. This is one of those unforced errors that confirms the suspicions people have been voicing in private. In this case, it is that the real threat to peace in Europe is Washington, not Russia. The self-proclaimed defender of freedom is, in fact, its greatest threat.

This may be why the Biden White House signed off on this caper. It is an act of desperation aimed at keeping the Europeans in line. Germany now must hope Washington supplies enough LNG to make it through winter. That means the rest of Europe has to play ball with Washington, or face an economic collapse, as Germany is the economic engine of Europe. This act of terrorism was a warning to Europe that they better toe the line or else.

Regardless of the motivations, this feels like a game changer. It is too soon to know if it is an inflection point, but it could be the thing that changes minds. For Americans, it is one big piece of evidence that we are ruled by lawless tyrants. They will do anything to hold power, even commit acts of terrorism. For Europe, it could be the moment when they see the folly of their submission to Washington. For the world, it is more proof that Washington is the great threat to peace in the world.

The Demon Of Democracy

Posted on September 26, 2022 by thezman

It has become trite to point out that the lovers of democracy have a one way relationship with it. When the results of an election are favorable to the ruling class, they praise democracy. When the results are something other than what the rulers wanted, then you can no longer trust the process. The United States has spent the last six years torn between these two competing forces. The 2016 election was rigged while the 2020 election was the most bizarrely pure result ever.

We are about to get another dose of this in Europe as elections go the wrong way for the people who actually run Europe. In Sweden, the normally passive Swedes decided to send a very mild message to their ruling class by giving a bunch of votes to the Swedish Democrats. This allowed a moderate coalition to form up and depose the Social Democrats, which has been the ruling party for decades. For the usual suspects, this means snow Hitler is around the corner.

An honest assessment of the Swedish election would start with why it has taken so long for the Swedes to push back against the system. Decades of immigration have turned Sweden into the rape capital of Europe. Large swaths of Swedish cities have become no-go zones thanks to the migrants. The city of Malmo has become famous for its problem with grenade attacks. Rival gangs of migrants use their skills learned at home to turn the once peaceful city into a war zone.

At least some of the Swedes have decided that they can risk being called bad things in order to send a message. For this to happen, however, the Swedish Democrats had to drop all of their tough talk and position themselves as reformed heretics who will only gently rock the boat a tiny bit. It is a good reminder that whoever controls the moral framework, controls the moral consensus. In order to participate in democracy, you must submit to the moral consensus.

This past weekend, the Italians did the unthinkable and elected a female as the next leader of the country. Before the election, the unelected president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, warned the Italians that she has a particular set of skills and is not afraid to use them if they vote the wrong way. The Italians being Italian were happy to give her the now famous solute and vote for a block of right-of-center parties in Sunday’s elections.

Giorgia Meloni, head of the Brothers of Italy party, will be the next prime minister, as her party received about 25% of the vote. Salvini’s League and Berlusconi’s Forza Italia will give the coalition a majority of seats in both chambers. The Brothers of Italy managed just four percent of the vote in the prior election and has been viewed as a fringe party with little impact on Italian politics. Suddenly, their pro-family and anti-immigration message is resonating with Italians.

Of course, the usual suspects have branded Meloni a fascist. You see, anyone who falls outside the moral consensus is a fascist. To her credit, this has not had to desired effect on Meloni’s rhetoric. Her victory speech was refreshingly moral. “Yes to natural families, no to the LGBT lobby, yes to sexual identity, no to gender ideology, yes to the culture of life, no to the abyss of death, no to the violence of Islam, yes to safer borders, no to mass immigration, yes to work for our people”

The same people who tell Europeans they must heat their homes with candles and get used to cold showers in the name of democracy in Ukraine, will now set to work undermining these two democracies. The Swedish Democrats have been accused of apostacy with regards to Russia. Silvio Berlusconi has been accused of being a Putin ally by the usual suspects. It is not hard to see where this is going. If you vote the wrong way, you are on the side of Russia.

Getting back to Ursula von der Leyen, you can be sure she will start pressing the new governments to pray at the feet of the moral consensus. Her primary weapon is financial, which she is now using against Hungary. The voters there support Viktor Orbán, who is no fan of men in dresses chasing girls in public toilets. The EU has thus declared that Hungary is not really democratic, despite their democracy. This means the EU will not begin withholding tens of billions in money.

All of this should be familiar to Americans. Voters sent a message to the ruling class in 2016 when they put Donald Trump in the White House. The message was received and the ruling class has been making war on those voters ever since. In a democracy, a legitimate result is one that pleases the permanent ruling elite. Anything that even questions the elite moral consensus is a threat to our democracy. The Swedes and Italians are about to learn this lesson.

The reality of Western democracy is that it is a weird form of colonialism where the rulers demand regular affirmation from the ruled. The point of elections is for the people to thank their rulers for their service. The rulers are naturally offended when the voters fail to hold up their end of the bargain. The social compact in Western democracy is that the ruling class commands and the voters obey. Anything else is a threat to our democracy and requires any means necessary to thwart it.

This is why elections have had no impact on policy in America. This exhaustive study from 2014 makes plain that voting means nothing. “Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.” As the saying goes, there is no voting your way out of the problems of democracy.

It is not all bad news. The continued support for Trump in America and now the elections in Europe suggest the people are slowly beginning to slip free from the tentacles of the imposed moral consensus. Even the normally passive Swedes are starting to look their masters in the eye and ask, “who says?” If enough people begin to wake up from the nightmare of liberal democracy, they may begin to break free from the underlying morality of it.

What the West will need to save itself is not bureaucrats promising to worship a system, but leaders who understand it is not how, but who. It is not how decisions are made, but who makes them. For Italy to regain itself, it must be Italians who make the decisions, not Brussels bureaucrats. For America to reclaim its nature, it must be Americans making the decisions, not an alien managerial elite. The demon of democracy is it leads people to forget this basic reality of life.

Lesson 230

Posted on September 22, 2022 by thezman

Way back in 1996 when the Communications Decency Act of 1996 was being contemplated, no one imagined the outsize role of the internet. In fact, few of the people debating the bill had ever seen this internet thing. The internet as we understand it was in its infancy and only tech savvy hobbyists were using it. Most homes did not have a personal computer at the time. The only thing everyone was sure about was that the internet had to be free to grow.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act made a lot of sense to all involved, because it gave the new internet companies relief from parasitic lawyers who were already sinking their fangs into the industry. Giving the public platforms protection from liability allowed them to host the public platform without having to edit everything the users posted on the platforms. At the time, the tech companies claimed they lacked the resources to monitor user behavior.

The logic made sense as long as that last bit was true. If the people creating these public platforms could not edit what was posted, then they could not reasonably be held accountable, as we do for newspapers and magazines. The New York Times controls its content, so in theory it is responsible for it. As a practical matter they are never held accountable and libel people daily as we saw with the Sarah Palin case a few months ago, but that is a topic for another day.

In a quarter century, much has changed. Not only can the tech platforms edit what is posted on their sites, they now aggressively monitor content. Not only that, but they also promote content on the platforms and they create their own content. The millions of bots used to boost some content over others is a form of content. It is similar to a newspaper making the editorial decision to post some stories on the front page and relegate the real stories to the back pages.

The Section 230 protections were specifically tailored on the assumption that the platforms could not control what was posted. Therefore, someone could not reasonably sue them for defamation. It would be like holding the building owner liable for something someone write on the walls outside. In theory, the platform, like the building owner, would take reasonable steps to remove the material. If the court asked, they would try to identify the person responsible.

Of course, we live in a different age and therefore the laws crafted for the prior age no longer make any sense in this age. No one in 1996 could contemplate a world where an oligopoly in Silicon Valley controlled political discourse. Further, no one imagined the oligopoly being controlled by crazy people. This is why the matter is working its way through the courts in various conflicting cases. In fact, it will probably end up in the Supreme Court in the next term.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit upheld a Texas law barring companies from removing posts based on political ideology. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit overturned a similar Florida law on the grounds that it violated constitutional protections for tech companies. The question is whether these private firms that get the same protections as all other private firms or are they private firms operating public accommodations and therefore can be regulated.

Morally, this would be a simple question if not for the racial double standard that has become nearly universal. Facebook regularly hosts livestreams of black people hunting a killing white people. This happened most recently with the Memphis spree killer who livestreamed his rampage on Facebook. On the other hand, a white guy uses the wrong pronouns when describing a public degenerate and he is banned. In the age of Jim Snow, everyone knows the score.

Before the Jim Snow laws, when Section 230 was created, no one imagined the sorts of double standards we now accept. In 1996, everyone agreed that a public accommodation had to accept everyone as long as they did the minimum that was required of the enterprise. Restaurants could require a dress code, but they could not ban people for holding the wrong opinions. If they violated their own rules, then they could be held accountable in the courts.

Ultimately, the court will have to fashion a new standard. If Facebook is a public accommodation, then what are the rules that define such a thing? If it is a private company, then how can it have special privileges? The simplest solution is to clarify how one can claim Section 230 protections. A platform that does not edit the content of users would qualify, while a firm that censors the users would not qualify. This would be the logical solution, which is why it cannot happen.

Instead, the court will end up supporting the tech companies, because the so-called conservatives will be so high from chanting “they are private companies” that the crazies on the court will write the decision. We will end up with a new standard that says private companies can viciously and aggressively discriminate, as long as it is not against protected classes. At this time, there is one class left unprotected in the law, which is the class known as while people.

In fact, there is a good chance that the court creates a new framework that requires public platforms to aggressively censor content in order to get the protections offered under Section 230. That would mean a site like Gab is wiped out unless they apply the same standards as Silicon Valley. It would also mean that hosting companies are required to monitor the content of their users. This would be the first example of “common good conservatism” in the law.

This sounds terribly negative, but it is realistic. Stalin allegedly said that it is not the votes that count, but who counts the votes. He probably never said it, but it is something he would have grasped. He was a communist, but he eventually came to see that who decides counts for more than how things are decided. That is what we see in the current age with things like censorship. It is not the rules that matter, but who is enforcing and interpreting the rules that matters.

If the tech firms were run by the same sorts of people who were running what passed for big tech in 1996, none of this would matter. The internet pioneers were civic nationalists and libertarians. They were on-line to get away from people who wanted to police free expression. They needed Section 230 to keep the internet open, but they were replaced with people who want to close it down, so one way or another, speech will be closed down on the internet.

Finally, this is a good reminder that when a society begins to debate the letter of the law, it no longer respects the spirit of the law. Put another away, if the people in charge are so corrupt that they need written rules to behave themselves, they are corrupt enough to find a way around those written words. This is where we find ourselves with the current ruling class. They see the rules like they see the truth. If they are useful, they enforce them. If not, then not.

The Great Dimming

Posted on September 20, 2022 by thezman

For a long time, it was understood that the success of a people was tied to the quality of the people in terms of their abilities. A highly capable people would do better at the necessary things of society than an incompetent people. Often, moral claims would cloud the view. Maybe one people were chosen by God to rule over the others or maybe the people offended the gods and had been punished as a result. Even so, there has always been a link between talent and results.

Today we understand that Mother Nature does not distribute her gifts equally between peoples or among people. Some people are smarter than others. Some people have cultural qualities that seem to be rooted in their shared genetics. These cultural qualities provide a benefit when it comes to the tasks of society. A people who values hard work and honest dealings will do better than a people who favor sloth or lying. Whether these cultural qualities can be inculcated is debatable.

The blank slate crowd are sure that everything about a human society is a construction of the mind and can therefore be deconstructed. Western society, which has towered over the rest of mankind for more than five hundred years, can be disassembled and then reassembled to put non-Western people in charge. There is no evidence to support the claim, but a great global experiment is underway, nonetheless. There is mass migration from the Global South into the West.

A dozen years ago, Jason Richwine did his doctoral thesis in the topic and found that migration into the United States from the south was decreasing the quality of human capital by reducing the over all IQ of the population. He relied upon the mountain of IQ studies that show the average intelligence of Hispanics to be ten points below the average for Europeans. The usual suspects flew into a rage and had Jason Richwine condemned for heresy.

No one bothered to challenge the conclusions of his study, as that would suggest moral claims can be subject to objective measures. A key component of any religion is that the moral claims are unassailable. The new religion of Diversity, Inclusion and Equity operates like every other religion. Its principles are beyond question. In this case, it means that all people are equally capable and the differences seen between people are due to the racism of white people.

You see this in a response by a writer at Reason Magazine. Ronald Bailey makes no effort to dispute the factual claims of Richwine, as he lacks the intellectual capacity to understand them, much less dispute them. Instead, he draws a parallel between Richwine and eugenicists from a century ago. You see, “eugenics” is a bad word so laying it in the same area as a person makes that person bad. You can then safely dismiss the words of the bad people without addressing them.

Even if you accept the claims in that Reason post, the flow of people from the south into America is having a clear impact on IQ. The claim is that the people coming in will get smarter by standing on the better dirt in the United States, but it will take four or five generations for that to happen. That is roughly a century. While that is happening, the population of low IQ people rises. This is happening rather quickly due to the age distribution of the white population.

For example, using government data, whites have an average IQ of 100, blacks are at 85 and the new people are around 90. This is consistent with what Richwine found in his research and what subsequent research has shown. This is one of those times when the official government position mirrors reality. That means that the average IQ in the United States in 1950 was around 98. By 1980, with the uptick in immigration and decline in white fertility, the average was just over 97.

In other words, with very stable demographics and little immigration, the average IQ in the United States had not changed very much in thirty years. This would explain why the country was able to pull out of the cultural lunacy of the prior decades and turn things around so quickly. There were a lot of smart people. Societies with high average intelligence also have a much larger number of smart people. These are the people who solve the problems made by other smart people.

By 2000, the effects of immigration were showing up in the test scores. The average IQ of the country, based on the new demographic mix, was below 97. By 2020 the average had fallen to below 96. In another decade it will fall below 95 and when the white population is a minority, it will be around 93. Note also that the aging off of the white population lowers white IQ. Not only are white people getting dumber, but old people are dumber than their younger selves.

Imagine a wardrobe made for a man who is 6’5″ and athletic being handed down to a man who is 5’10’ and a lazy person. The latter can pretend he does not like the style, but the reality is the clothes simply do not fit. This is what is happening in America as the people are replaced with new people. The old cultural, political and economic institutions were made for a people with an IQ close to 100. The new people will struggle to operate what they have inherited.

The flat earth people argue that culture is meaningless and the new people will be able to run the country as they like with the same economic results. The only thing that will change is the complexion. Instead of white guys staring at their mobile devices as they walk into traffic, it will be trans-lesbians of color. In fact, the final end of whiteness will unleash the creative energy of the nonwhite people. The result will be the paradise the prophets have long promised.

The trouble is the facts suggest otherwise. Twenty years ago, Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen made the connection between intelligence and economics. In IQ and the Wealth of Nations they showed that average national intelligence corresponds with the over all wealth of society. The usual suspects condemned the book and the authors, while accepting their conclusions. There is a reason the best universities do not draw names from a hat for admissions.

Recently, researchers George Francis and Emil O.W. Kirkegaard have revisited the topic and came to the same conclusion, which is to say there is a strong correlation between national wealth and national IQ. Francis notes that national IQ correlates not only with economic prosperity, but every national indicator of success. That means things like crime, social trust, affordable family formation and all of the other things we associated with stable, happy societies.

Of course, there is the smart fraction issue. As civilization becomes more complex, the demand for cognitive ability increases. At the top, where the most complex decisions are made, the demands go up much faster. The more complex a society, the more above average people are required to manage it. A society where everyone is the same IQ of 100, will not perform as well as a society where the average is 100 and intelligence is normally distributed.

The trending down of national IQ means the relative number of people in the smart fraction initially declines, but the overall smart fraction grows. In time, however, this reverses and the smart fraction begins to decline quickly in total and in relation to the size of the population. There are not enough smart people around to keep the system running, so the system must become less complex. Put another way, it must disaggregate, either slowly or all of a sudden.

What this means in terms of public policy is debatable. The most likely answer is that debating it is a waste of time. There is no arresting the demographic changes and there is no changing what that means as far as human capital. Even if there is a way to make it work, there are not enough smart people around willing to do it. At some point North America passes through the marching moron phase into something else. That something else will poor, nasty, brutish, and short lived.

The New Reactionism

Posted on September 19, 2022 by thezman

Notes: The Monday Taki post is up. This week is a post about cultural vandalism, a term that I would like to see more often. Sunday Thoughts is up behind the green door, covering some news items of the day. SubscribeStar and Substack.

Since roughly the French Revolution, the dynamic of Western politics has been the conflict between radical forces and reactionary forces. The radicals, armed with liberal ideas, seek to change social arrangements for the better. The reactionaries, fearing what change could bring, instinctively oppose these changes. This description is entirely self-serving, which is why “radicals” love it. The point is to frame politics as good guys, the radicals, versus bad guys, the reactionaries.

In this age it does not hold up as a logical construct because the people waving the flag of radicalism control the institutions. The so-called reactionaries cannot be working from fear for what change will do to their social power, when they have no political or social power to conserve. This does not stop the radicals from pretending their victims have power, but it is a self-serving game of make believe. The people on the receiving end of radicalism know who has the whip hand.

This is why the old Left-Right framing makes no sense. The people claiming to be on the Right these days are not monarchists. They are not in genuine opposition to the people on the Left. They simply prefer a slower pace of change. The Left is certainly not opposed to institutional power, like all prior left-wing movements. They worship institutional power and act in defense of it. To maintain the old framing, the dissidents are the New Left and the regime is the New Right.

Recent events support this new framing. The election integrity protests during the 2020 cycle looked like every other protest against power. The people in control of the institutions certainly saw it that way. They still carry on like January 6 was a failed Bastille Day or the echoes of 1848. In response, they are acting like institutional power always reacts to threats. They are rounding up opponents, abusing the rights of their citizens and threatening retribution.

A good example of this new reactionism is in the paranoid chanting about threats to “our democracy” that are a feature of the current regime. Those old enough to remember the 1980’s or even the 1990’s see this fetish for democracy as novel. The standard response from so-called conservatives whenever someone said America was a democracy was to correct them and say it was a republic. Even the Left would make this point, lamenting the lack of democracy.

All of a sudden, as if there was a secret meeting of the ruling class, America is a democracy and that democracy is under assault. This started in the Obama years when his backers pushed the nutty idea that white people would oppose him strictly on the grounds that he was a black Muslim from Africa. Even though he gained a bigger majority of the white vote than Bush or Clinton, they persisted in this claim, saying his opponents opposed the democratic process.

Of course, what solidified the new language was 2016. The man who won the election based on the rules of how we conduct elections, was deemed a threat to the process that put him in office. This is not what they meant when they said Trump was a threat to democracy. What they meant was that he was a threat to the established order and the people it benefits. The word “democracy” now implies the established order and the semi-permanent ruling elite.

This is no different from how genuine reactionaries in 18th century Europe responded to the threat of socialism. They used the same sort of language and they used the same sort of tactics we see today. The point of their rhetoric was not to persuade the masses to side with the old order, but to persuade the people running the institutions to use their power to defeat the radicals. In other words, reactionaries do not seek to win arguments, but rather to rally elites to wield power.

Here is an example in the New York Times. David Leonhardt is employed by the “paper of record” to inform the managerial class. His archive is full of stories that would be of use to people in power, but utterly worthless to everyone else. His job at the media shop that serves the regime is to set the tone for other regime outlets and to help set the priorities of the regime. Normally he worries about how to keep the peasants fed, but this post is about “threats to our democracy.”

The reactionary quality is clear in the first so-called threat. He claims, “a growing movement inside one of the country’s two major parties — the Republican Party — to refuse to accept defeat in an election.” The New York Times literally created a bureau in 2016 to cover the Russian collusion hoax. The point of their existence, and that of all regime outlets, was to undermine the legitimacy of the Trump presidency. The word “hypocrisy” does not scratch the surface here.

The second threat somehow manages to be even more contradictory. “The second threat to democracy is chronic but also growing: The power to set government policy is becoming increasingly disconnected from public opinion.” On the surface this sounds fine, but he does not mean public opinion as in elections. He means the perception of public opinion as held by the people in power. His example is the recent Dobbs case, which he claims runs counter to public opinion.

When you interpret “democracy” to mean “established order” when used by regime elements, this makes sense. There is a Burkean flexibility in defense of the status quo in the face of public discontent. That is, they acknowledge the rules and the rights of the people, but only as far as they are reasonable. If the rules or the exercise of rights threaten the established order, then they are unreasonable. You can have whatever political system you like as long the people in charge agree

This new reactionism is what lies behind the weird social fads and assaults on decency that have become common. The claim by the people behind these things is that they are trying to subvert the old order, when in reality they are useful idiots. Their job is to keep the people occupied with these controversies so they do not start thinking about why their schools are a mess or why two incomes are no longer enough to provide a middle-class life. it is defensive distraction.

Historically, reactionism is something that flowers at the end of an age when the old order feels threatened. That is one way to read the current crisis. The people leading the charge to defend “our democracy” are decrepit old people who represent the dire warnings about managerialism. They are mediocrities raised up to the top of the social order, yet fully aware of their mediocrity. It is a system now dominated by highly insecure managers paranoid about everyone around them.

The reason reactionism turns up at the end phase of a regime is that it often works fairly well to blunt the forces of change. Reaction is what drove the response to Napoleon, eventually leading to the restoration in France. Reaction held back the tides of socialism in the 19th century into the 20th century. Reaction is what defeated Trump and put Joe Biden in the White House. Fear is a powerful motivator and powerful people in fear for their position make for a powerful force.

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