La Gran Mentira

Posted on June 8, 2021 by thezman

One of the selling points of liberal democracy is it is supposed to create a marketplace of ideas, where the proponents debate their proposals. Politicians get grilled by an adversarial media on their positions. Like the market for goods and services, the marketplace of politics is supposed to weed out the crackpots and zealots, so the people can choose between sane options. In practice, there is no marketplace of anything in liberal democracy, just approved positions.

This Breitbart story is a good example. It is an interview with Senator Marco Rubio, who has been assigned the job of selling an anti-populist message as Trumpian. It is the old Karl Rove big tent nonsense about needing to sell the party to nonwhites. Because of what happened in 2016 and 2020, they have retooled the message. Instead of focusing on Trump’s loss, they are focusing on their anomalous gains down ticket and crediting that with the Hispanic vote. It is the new Big Lie.

Now, Rubio is as dumb as a goldfish, so he is never going to question the script he has been provided by his handlers. He also plays the Hispanic role well enough for the white people being targeted with this trick. Of course, he has been reliably open borders and supports endless wars of choice. You would think the interviewer would mention his fierce opposition to Trump and his coziness with the neocons, but that never happens in the highly scripted media environment.

Another bit of nonsense the interviewer did not bother to mention is that Trump did not do all the well with Hispanics. In 2004, Bush the Minor got 44% of the Hispanic vote according to studies after the election. McCain got 31% in 2008 and Romney got 27% in the 2012 election. Trump also got 27% in 2016. In 2020 it bumped up to 31%, despite four years of pandering to Hispanics. His black support jumped more than his Hispanic support over the same time.

This is easily obtainable data. Rubio has been making this claim since Karl Rove stapled a new cover page on his 2012 GOP Autopsy last October, so there has been plenty of time to check the numbers. You would think a reporter would ask Rubio about the facts, but that is not how it works. Rubio is there to sell the Big Lie and so is any reporter granted an interview with him. The whole point of the Big Lie is to keep repeating it unchallenged until it seems like the truth.

Of course, the point of the Big Lie is to keep whites from noticing what is happening to their country. That was the real danger of Trump. His voters could see with their own eyes that everyone at his rallies was white. His voters were allowed to discuss immigration, trade, and the endless wars. Trump was a lousy President, but he was a dangerous catalyst. He got white people talking about and noticing things that threaten the ruling regime, which is why they hated him.

Another angle to the Big Lie in this case is that it is intended to separate Trump from the party voters. Taken at face value, the claim here is that Hispanics liked the Republicans running down ticket, but not Trump. You see, that is why Trump lost but the party clung to enough seats to avoid a blowout. The Georgia Senate run-off has been hurled down the memory hole. The point is to repeat the claim that Trump the person was the problem, so he has to go.

The fact is, Trump was always the white candidate. His support was over 90% white and he won in 2016 by tapping into disaffected white voters in states the Republican Party had abandoned decades ago. He was unable to build on that support in 2020, because he spent four years pandering to nonwhites. Putting aside the gross irregularities in the election, Trump failed to deliver to the people who gave him the improbable 2016 election and it hurt him in those key states.

That is the point of the Big Lie. The people behind it are only focused on one thing and that is preventing white people from noticing what is happening. The absurdity of having a neocon stooge like Rubio sell the lie is part of the magic. Whites are supposed to come away thinking Rubio was won over in the Trump years. After all, how else can you explain this rabid anti-Trump guy now praising Trump? Why would the pro-Trump site Breitbart be going along with it?

This is why the Republican Party must be destroyed. It serves no other purpose than to prevent whites from accepting demographic reality. That reality is this. About one percent of the GOP vote is black. Another 5% is Hispanic and another 2-3% is coming from other nonwhite groups. Generously, ten percent of the GOP vote is from nonwhites and this has been true for generations. No amount of outreach or wishful thinking is changing that mathematical reality.

The Democrat Party is the antiwhite party. About 27% of their vote is from whites, while the rest is from nonwhites. That number continues to drop. In 2008 whites were 32% of the Democratic Party base. In 2000 it was 34%. The combination of whites heading for minority status and the Democratic Party becoming viciously antiwhite is collapsing their white support. There is a chicken and egg debate here as to whether they are driving whites out of the party or responding to demographics.

This is ultimately what the Big Lie is intended to conceal. Despite the painting of Trump as a racist, his support with nonwhites improved. If he had been clear about whose interests he served, he not only would have won more white votes, but he would have won more nonwhite votes. Osama bin Laden was right. “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse.” That is what the Big Lie seeks to conceal from the people who need to hear it the most.

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The Panic Culture

Posted on June 7, 2021 by thezman

Note: There is the weekly Taki post. It is another take on the Covid panic and ties in well with today’s post. For the audiophiles, there is a Sunday podcast up behind the green door. Of course, if you buy me a beer, you get my secret writings.

Now that the Covid panic is finally winding down, it is a good time to look at how it quickly became a religion for many people. It is fair to assume that most people looked at Covid as a blend of public health and public policy. They do not know much about either topic, so they trusted what they were told. Others, however, embraced Covid and the rules around it like a new religion. The rituals and statistics quickly became the central point around which they organized their lives.

One of the first signs of this happening were the personal testimonials. By the late spring of last year, the Covidian had stories to tell. “I know of four people who have died from Covid this month” was a popular one. Despite the statistical improbability, millions were telling us about their personal war with Covid. The victims became younger as the age realty became apparent. Finally at the end, we are getting stories about the unvaccinated dying despite being healthy.

The joiner always personalizes her latest fetish. On the one hand, it lets her be the star of the story. We saw this after 9/11, where millions of people swore they knew someone in the towers. It is also a personal testimony to show how the believer has now given herself over to the faith. It is a show of piety. Of course, it also insulates the believer from having to explain herself. It is an appeal to authority in which her alleged suffering makes her the unquestionable authority.

Then there is the suffering that comes with every civic religion. Sacrifice is an important part of all religions. Membership is not supposed to be easy as the value of anything easily attained is always low. In the case of Covid, the goofy mask wearing, standing six feet apart and other nonsense was quickly and mindlessly embraced. It was a public sacrament, like taking communion. Of course, this gave the Covidian a chance to lecture the rest of us about the need to respect their piety.

The ascetic is an important part of every religion. The vegetarian makes a big show of not eating meat, because their role requires it. Similarly, the keto adherent will let you know she does not eat carbohydrates. Food-based cults are always popular with ascetics, because all of them require abstention. In the case of Covid, the constant slathering of hand sanitizer was the sign of their discipline. The Covidian never missed a chance to perform the ritual before every activity.

It is not an accident that the same people who tote grimy canvas sacks to the grocery store were the first to embrace the rituals of Covid. All civic religions in the modern age come with these piety symbols, usually with a corporate logo. Public television stations made millions giving members tote bags with the logo on them. Note that American sports teams quickly rushed out branded face masks. In a world of strangers, displaying your corporate overlord is important.

Hoffer famously pointed out that “What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.” He was wrong about this, in that our rackets and cults tend to come with a corporate sponsor. In our highly atomized and corporatized existence, the corporate logo provides legitimacy. The Apple logo replaced the Darwin fish, for example. The Church of Covid became a money making racket, a cult and it was sponsored by our corporate overlords.

Every religion has its apostles, and this was no different. The army of pseudo-intellectual poseurs that spring up in the media are always there to add authority to the latest narratives. All of a sudden, anyone with a connection to medicine or immunology was preaching from a digital street corner. The fact that none of them knew a thing about this disease or public policy did not matter. All that mattered is they were there telling us to repent or fear the wrath of Covid.

Probably the most obnoxious aspect of the civic religion is the martyrs. Because democracy turns deadbeats into civil servants and civil servants into priests, every politician quickly became a martyr to the cause. Every state with draconian Covid laws has a governor who publicly nailed herself to the cross. You see, they really hate passing these crazy laws, but they are suffering for all of us in this twilight struggle against the great threat to humanity known as Covid.

It is worth noting that Covid seems to have blended several strains of social pathology into a single event. We have the civic religion, but there is also the primitive fear of nature and nature’s wrath. Then there is the panic. This is what really gave the whole thing its juice. Like the satanic panics or the day care panics or the witch trials, the Covid panic caused most people to suspend their sense of disbelief. The lack of evidence became a weird proof of the danger.

Finally, what the Covid panic may indicate is that these ritualized panics will become more common and intense. If people will believe the flu is an extinction event, then they will believe just about anything. It is the old expression, people who believe in nothing will fall for anything. America and the West is now populated with gullible, deracinated primitives looking for a reason to exist. The future may be one crisis after another, each more bizarre and ridiculous than the last.

Electric Elite

Posted on June 3, 2021 by thezman

Most everyone has looked down at the fuel gauge and suddenly realized the tank is very close to empty. Maybe it is the idiot light going on as you pass the sign that reads “last stop for food or fuel for X miles.” The worst one is when this happens in a rural area or at night. The prospect of being stranded on the side of the road for a very long time quickly crowds out other thoughts. It is a terrible feeling. Almost all of us are conditioned to make sure this never happens.

Running out of gas used to be a common thing in America. In the early days of the automobile, care did not have a gas gauge and gas stations did not always have gas, so it was a common scene. The first “gas gauge” was a marked stick the driver would stick into the tank. Until very recent, gas stations used this method to test how much water was in their tanks. Eventually, more sophisticated solutions were invented and then manufacturers install them at the factory.

Running out of gas is not very common these days. For starters, we have gas stations everywhere people live. They are about 120-thousand gas stations in America. If you live in an urban or suburban area, finding a gas station is not a challenge. The cars are also vastly more efficient today than the old days. Even sports cars get over 20 miles per gallon, so when the light comes on, you have about 40 miles to find gas. It is why it is very rare to see someone walking down the road with a gas can.

This old concern will become a feature of life shortly. Every car maker is determined to abandon the internal combustion engine for electric in the next decade. All of them have a five year plan to ditch the IC engine. Even the sports car makers are planning to drop the old engine and use electric motors. The roar of the engine will soon be replaced by the high pitched hum of the motor. Whether we wanted or not, the electric car will be forced onto American roads over the next decade.

The problem is that electric cars need to be charged. Right now, there are about five thousand fast chargers in America. The term “fast charger” is a little bit of inside humor the EV people enjoy. It takes about forty minutes to charge a car on a fast charger, so the word fast here is sarcasm. There are more slow chargers available, but slow should be interpreted as glacial. Those slow chargers take hours to charge. They are only useful as at-home options or at office parks.

Replacing the gas stations with fast chargers is no easy task. There is the cost, obviously, even if one assumes they could be profitable. That is not an assumption you can make at this point. The economics of EV charging stations are wildly different than those of a normal gas station. You do not need a lot of space for cars pulling into the pumps, fueling up in five minutes and then pulling away. You need vast spaces for cars pulling in and parking for an hour as they charge up the batteries.

Then there is the power grid. The current estimates say the cost to upgrade the power grid for electric cars is between four and ten trillion dollars. That is not money to be spent all at once, but it is real money. In modern America, most streets look like the surface of the moon and our bridges are literally collapsing. Like all aging empires, America is struggling to keep the plates spinning. How realistic is it to think we can upgrade the power grid over the next decade for electric cars?

Like the automobile makers, the nation’s utility companies have five and ten year plans for upgrading their part of the power grid. One cannot help but appreciate the Gosplan nature of this project. Like the car maker’s five year plans, the utility company plans always has a line in there for free money from the Federal Reserve. Unlike the car makers, the electric companies have not secured their free money. Slipping tax breaks into the code is a lot easier than printing trillions of dollars.

As with the Soviets, the central planners in America just assume whatever they dream can become a reality. The Soviets were sure they could find the right math to replace the role of prices in the market. Once they conquered that problem, the system would literally run itself. American central planners are sure they can find the right moral language to make their dreams pop into existence. If electric cars become who we are then all of the problems will solve themselves.

The electric car fetish is a good example of how markets are an illusion, at least in the broad sense the Austrian school economists argued. There never was a market for electric cars and there is not one now, at least in the organic sense. Instead, the market has been manufactured by government policy. Massive subsidies to the production side and subsidies to the demand side have created the market. Take those away and Elon Musk is back selling monorails to midsized cities.

It is also a good example of how elites have the dominant role in society. As with other things like immigration and the Covid panic, your opinion is never solicited, and it is never wanted. These are decisions made by a small cluster of policy makers at secret retreats and over cocktails at parties you will never attend. The American elite has decided the electric car is the future, so that is that. The fact that it could turn out to be another disaster like Covid is not a worry.

The argument against central planning has always been a simple one. It is impossible for the planners to account for all of the variables. Even the most basic of human systems is maddeningly complex. The truth of this is never a deterrent to the elites, especially those who are sure they are on the right side of history. The comically insane outcomes from the Soviet system never deterred the planners. The metric system did not teach American elites a lesson either.

Finally, the electric car fetish is a good example of what happens when an elite class enters into decline. They become rapacious and impractical. On the one hand, they seek to enrich themselves as quickly as possible, because no one in the elite feels a loyalty to the elite class or the society over which they rule. Everything becomes a smash and grab. On the other hand, they have become so insulated from the society over which they rule, they can no longer see their own folly.

America probably needs to spend five trillion over the next ten years to get the infrastructure back to first world standards. We need a Marshall plan for the roads, bridges, and utility systems. An aspiring elite would focus on that, rather than frivolous nonsense like electric cars. It would also be more scrupulous about who gets the money for the projects. That is not the future. Instead, it will be abandoned EV’s next to massive potholes and collapsing bridges.

Autumn Awaits

Posted on June 2, 2021 by thezman

One of the most fascinating things about any revolution is the mistakes made by all sides leading up to the revolution. The errors of the people in charge tend to be the most obvious, as the winners focus on them as justification. “The king did this, so we had no choice but to do that” is the formula. Objective analysis usually reveals that the motives of the ruler and the revolutionaries were far less coherent. In retrospect, revolutions tend to look like a series of massive blunders.

The reason, of course, is that both sides of the fight tend to see the other side as a black box. They only see the actions of the other side, without understanding the motives or reasoning. With limited evidence, they fashion explanations that tend to be self-serving and petty. The aristocracy in France could have done a lot of things to head off disaster, but instead they made one error after another. From the outside, what was driven by ignorance appeared to be driven by malice.

There is a cascading effect in revolutions. The initial conditions that lead to general unhappiness soon give way to anger over specific events. One group gets angry over something, and they no longer see the ruler as reasonable. Then another event triggers different people and before long every event adds to the avalanche of unrest. In between, there seems to be some calming, but in reality, it is just the energy building up for another burst of anger and frustration at the next event.

We may be in one of those periods of calm. The dropping of the Covid nonsense and the start of summer has people thinking of things other than politics, despite the signs that this summer will be ugly in many ways. Soaring prices for food and fuel are always bad omens, bit so far people seem to be ignoring them. Similarly, the building crime wave is not getting much attention. Antiwhite violence is already a problem, but white people seem to be looking past it for now.

Even if the revolution takes a holiday this summer, there are a couple of big storm clouds on the horizon. Both are Supreme Court cases. The first one is an abortion case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. This will take up the question of the constitutionality of a 2018 Mississippi state law that bans abortions after the first 15 weeks of pregnancy. People who claim to know about these things believe the court could overturn or sharply limit Roe v. Wade.

The other case is a gun case. The court, in NY State Rifle & Pistol Assoc. v. Corlett, will review a New York law that requires individuals to get a license to carry a concealed gun outside the home. In District of Columbia v. Heller the court ruled that the Second Amendment provides an individual right to keep a handgun at home for self-defense but did not address the carry issue. Many think the courts will rule that carrying a firearm is equally protected by the Second Amendment.

If one were to identify two key beliefs of American civic nationalism, one would be faith in the courts to enforce the Constitution, if we get the right judges in place. The other is faith in the Second Amendment as the ultimate backstop. The whole purpose to voting for so-called conservatives is to eventually get a court that will strike down many of the left-wing programs, like abortion. Along the same lines, that same court will affirm the Second Amendment, thus ensuring people will never fear their government.

There is a good bet that the court rules against the civic nationalist position on both of these issues in the fall. The abortion case is the most likely shock to the system, as this was the reason to support Trump. He stacked the court with his people and now they are supposed to deliver. The Christian conservatives ignored Trump’s rather obvious personal failings because he promised to deliver judges. He did his part and now the judges have to live up to their end of the bargain.

History says they will find a way to fink on the people. In theory, it is a 6-3 court, but John Roberts has miraculously transformed into Ruth Bader Ginsberg, so it is really a 5-4 court again. Gorsuch is the most likely to find a reason to vote with the far-left. He has already found a way to fink on his side. In Bostock v. Clayton County, Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion granting men in dresses special rights. It is not hard to image him flipping to the far-left on this abortion case as well.

The gun case is a bit different, as the court could find some technical problem with prior rulings and send it back for rehearing. It is also not the radical change that the abortion case presents. Extending Heller to include carrying a firearm outside the home will have no impact on most of the country. Still, given the nature of Washington, it is not hard to imagine a similar dynamic as the abortion case. This time it would be Barrett siding with the far-left, sighting some nonsense about black victimization.

The regime has already begun to let the court know that they better rule the correct way, or their will be consequences. Senator Blumenthal from Connecticut is the first out of the gate threatening the judges. It will not be long before he is joined by other prominent Democrats, as well as the media. Then you have the extortion rackets run by the FBI and other players. The odds of the court ruling in favor of the civic nationalist position are very low, but their expectations are very high.

This is shaping up to be one of those unforced regime mistakes that seem to characterize every revolution. The abortion case in particular is the one that could radicalize a lot of civic nationalists. Christian conservatives are already on the edge, given the overtly anti-Christian pogroms run by the ruling class. If the court finks on them in the fall, it could be the last straw. They will conclude that there is no path forward in conventional politics and begin to organize outside of the system.

Predicting the future is always a mugs game, but history says that the regime does not miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. The combination of paranoia and partisan hatred keeps leading them to the wrong decision. The wise move would be to give the people a win in the courts on these issues, but wisdom requires wise men, and the ruling class is desperately short of them. Instead, the regime will be dispensing truckloads of red pills to civic nationalists when the court returns in the fall.

Partisan Minds

Posted on June 1, 2021 by thezman

A fetish of the modern Right in America has been complaining about and denouncing partisanship in Washington. In fairness, the Left will indulge in this on the rare occasions when the Republicans do something for their voters. Mostly it is a conservative fetish, as it is the Left that drives the debate. The Right needs to maintain the fantasy that republican virtue still matters, so they regularly complain about the Left acting in their narrow interests, rather than in the interests of the country.

In theory, the conservatives are correct. Partisanship is the great bane of a republic, as it subverts the very basis of a republic. What is necessary to maintain a republic is what Montesquieu called republican virtue, the willingness to put the interests of the system ahead of personal or factional interests. For example, you must respect the office, even if you have no respect for the man holding the office. This shows up in our military culture where you do not salute the person, you salute the rank.

The trouble with the conservative approach is we have not lived in a republic for a very long time, so they are playing make believe. We live in a liberal democracy that is decreasing liberal with each turn of the wheel. In democratic systems, the ends justify the means, so partisanship dominates. It replaces republican virtue in favor of subjective moral certainty. This is one of the reasons that conservatism is worthless in a democracy of any sort. It prohibits victory as defined by the rules.

A good example of how partisanship works is in this conversation on the Daily Wire program, which is part of a series they run call Backstage. It is one of those round table deals where the stars chat about issues of the day. The highlighted clip is the discussion of Israel and their attacks on the Arabs last week. The people behind the Daily Wire are hyper-Zionists, so the conversation follows predictable contours. Israel is heroically fighting attacks from those evil Arabs.

Matt Walsh tries to point out a true fact, which is that Americans do not have a patriotic duty to support Israel or any other country. Immediately, the rules of the show are suspended as Boreing, Shapiro and Klavan leap to attack Walsh. It is an amusing bit of mask dropping, given the title of the show. The rules of decorum stop mattering to the partisan, as soon as his interests are in play. They cut off Walsh a few times and make sure he cannot get his point across to the audience.

An example of how rules are meaningless to partisans is when Shapiro claims that patriotism means love of ideas, while nationalism means love of country. This is laughable nonsense, and he surely knows it, so it is also a lie. The word patriotism comes from the Greek for “of one’s fathers” or fatherland. Of course, nationalism means a devotion to one’s own people. Both concepts have been attacked for obvious reasons, but their etymology is never in dispute.

In other words, Shapiro does not feel bound by truth when it comes to these topics, because what matters is his partisan interests. He wants conservatives to think they are duty-bound to back Israel, so he feels justified in making crazy claims like Americans have a patriotic duty to blindly defend Israel. This is an instinct that exists in the lizard brain, so he does not think of what he is doing as dishonest or immoral. It is just what he does, like pulling his hand away from a hot item.

Another aspect of partisanship is on display with Andrew Klavan. In that clip he makes the case for exterminating the Arabs. He does not put it like that, but that is the implication of his argument. In his view, the Arabs will never behave, and the Israelis are justified in using lethal force. The logical leap from those two statements is that the final solution to the problem is the liquidation of the Arabs. His excitement at the thought of exterminating the Arabs is an insight into the partisan mind.

Partisanship, like ethnocentrism, places group loyalty at the top. The first thing the partisan does when encountering people or issues is place them on one side of the partisan lines. “Is this person on our side?” is always the first question. In the case of issues or events, the question is, “how can this be turned to our advantage?” Since the partisans swaps his own individual identity for that of the group, these questions always feel deeply personal. They are life and death.

In a sense they are life and death. Since who Ben Shapiro is, from the perspective of Ben Shapiro, is his membership in the Zionist subculture, any questioning of it is a questioning of his very existence. It is why Klavan starts to salivate at the thought of killing Arabs. He cannot see them as human, as they are opposed to his group, so they are his mortal enemies. One is always justified in using any means necessary when defending your life from a threat.

You hear this in the left-wing justifications for violence over the last year. When they say “silence is violence” they are not being cheeky. To the partisan mind, you are either on their side or against their side. Words and violence are the same to the partisan mind, as anything that opposes the group is seen as a lethal threat. That is why silence is viewed as violence, as not declaring your support means opposition and the partisan is free to use any means necessary to end a threat.

There is not only no reasoning with a partisan, but there is no appealing to their better nature or their sense of virtue. Their chief virtue, the thing that matters the most to them, is their loyalty to the cause. Everything is warped to fit that moral framework, even the very definition of words, as you see with Ben Shapiro. Everything is viewed as a tool that can either be used against opponents or can be used by opponents. Facts and reason have no more resonance than clubs and guns.

This is why moral appeals against partisanship fail. It is like making the claim that pork is healthy to a devout Muslim. He does not share your morality, so your morals appeal sounds weird and offensive. Your good intensions are proof of your bad intensions, which defeats the point of making the moral appeal. The only counter to partisanship is more extreme partisanship. Once that genie has been let out of the bottle, the only way to put it back in the bottle is through any means necessary.

An Approved Alternative

Posted on May 24, 2021 by thezman

Note: The regular Taki post is up and the topic is our friends at the FBI. Behind the green door is the Sunday news podcast. There is also a review of the book Red Plenty, which is a very interesting book on Soviet central planning. There is also a post about the looming war between the barefaced and the Masketarians.

The great Sam Francis observed that the Buckleyites were doomed to failure, because they not only engaged the Left in practical politics, but they also embraced the rules the Left had imposed on practical politics. As Francis put it, conservatives had accepted the premise of the managerial class, which meant they would eventually be forced to defend it. If the premise of your ideological movement is the permanence of the managerial state, your existence literally depends on its existence.

That is why Buckley’s project was punctuated by rounds of purges, which often seemed designed to remain in good standing with the Left. In reality, the two sides of the political class, embraced the same set of premises, and the same moral framework. It is like a rivalry between two departments in a large corporation. Their differences are completely bounded by the overarching concerns of the corporation. Both sides know that the point of their rivalry is that the corporation always wins at the end.

The problem with the purging of bad-thinkers is two-fold. One is it boils off anything resembling diversity of thought. Instead of an ongoing debate among equals, it becomes an echo chamber. The other consequence, something that appears to be a feature of the managerial class, is smart people get purged. The result is a slow decline in cognitive capital. If you are curious and ask too many questions, inevitably you run into conflict with the system.

That is what you see with National Review. The last interesting guy on staff was Mark Steyn and he was run off years ago. John Derbyshire was hurled into the void half a dozen years ago. The only thing interesting about National Review these days is looking up the long list of people they fired. Otherwise, the site is now just a collection of dullards who repeat what they are told. Like conservatism itself, National Review has been consumed and fully masticated by the system.

This is why Trump was able to win in 2016, but lost in 2020, despite being more popular and facing a vegetable. In 2016 he was facing off against a brittle and pointless right-wing system that shattered when he struck it. The left-wing side was not prepared to take on the role of disciplining the right-wing side, so Trump was able to squeak through and win the election. The left-wing side was fully prepared to deal with Trump in 2020 and made sure there was no way he could win again.

The problem for the system is it still lacks an approved alternative. Despite its many flaws, Buckley-style conservatism was a valuable vessel into which was poured the political aspirations of white America. About 40% of white people called themselves conservative at the peak. Another 25% leaned that way on most issues, but maybe had some objections on other issues. This made the right side of the political system seem like a legitimate alternative to the left side of the system.

Something similar happened in the late-1960’s and early-70’s. The old-line Republican leadership, the Rockefeller Republicans, lost their legitimacy due to their impotence in the face of the culture war waged by the Left. The Goldwater campaign in 1964 was the first shot across the bow of the old guard. The ascent of Nixon masked the problem, but finally the conservatives rose up to supplant the old guard. The Reagan revolution was more about creating a new approved alternative to the Left.

Today there is no out-of-the-box movement ready to push the wreckage of conservatism over the side. The long run of Buckley-style conservatism anathematized anything that looked like a threat from the Right. It is easy to miss, but conservatism became extremely narrow and intolerant after the Cold War. Populism, nationalism, and traditionalism are all forbidden topics in modern politics. The result is alternative thinking is a scattered mess, often polluted with eccentrics.

One strange result of this loss of an approved alternative is the left-side of the political class is in a panic. Progressivism in America is now a fully negative identity that needs an enemy to survive. More important, that enemy needs to be compliant. Over the long Cold War, the left-side of the political class evolved to depend on that compliant right-side as its constraint and raison d’etre. This is why it is desperately flailing about trying to create a new version of the old familiar.

It is also why the Republican party is trying to get a make-over. They dumped the ridiculous Liz Cheney not because they disagreed with her opinions. In fact, most Republicans share her disgust for their voters. It is just that she is screwing up the plan to put Trumpian lipstick on the old pig of right-wing politics. The hope is if they decorate their language with Trump’s rhetoric, white voters will forget how much the party hates them and go back to reflexively voting for the GOP.

The trouble they are having is that white people increasingly distrust the system as a whole, not just the Republican leaders. The Trump wing now defines themselves in opposition to system. They still talk about voting in new people, but their plan is self-contradictory, even though they do not see it. Throwing more people into the “the swamp” just means the creatures in the swamp are well-fed. Another tainted election and that reality becomes clear even to the dimmest of them.

Then there is the dissident wing, much smaller, but growing. These are the people who have come to terms with demographic realty. While lacking a coherent moral philosophy, they have broken free of the prevailing moral framework. They can no longer accept a politics that features two sides of the same. No amount of political marketing is getting this group back in the fold. Not even a return of Trump will bring this group back to liberal democratic politics.

What the political class faces is a choice. They can try to adapt to this reality and become a ruling party like in South America. They win every election, but the opposition parties are allowed to exist as a pressure relief. The other option is to prop up the Republicans and conservatives as a Potemkin alternative, knowing that very few people think they are anything more than yes-men to the oligarchy. Those are the options for the next approved opposition.

Systemic Crisis

Posted on May 19, 2021 by thezman

All human systems, whether created by design or created by happenstance, start to evolve as soon as they are born. This is true of systems like a company or tools like process regulation systems. Like Frankenstein’s monster, they take on a life of their own and break loose from the creator. This usually happens quickly. As soon as something like an organization gets going, it starts changing. The people in it find defects to remedy, new things to add and so on. Evolution starts instantly.

That evolution has an impact on the people in the system or in the case tools, the users of those systems. The ability to look down the road, to see several moves ahead, seems to decline in human organizations as they evolve. Initially, the people running them are always looking ahead. That was the point of the organization. Over time, they either lose their ability to look ahead or they are replaced by people who are only interested in the short term, because that is where the rewards lie.

An example of this college athletics. Initially, student sports were just a natural result of young people and free time. Before long college teams were challenging one another to sports matches. Males like to compete, and groups of males like to compete for their tribe, so college teams playing one another was natural. The natural rivalries that existed between states added to the fun. College athletics in America is an example of a system springing up by happenstance over time.

Like all systems, college athletics began to evolve. The University of Oklahoma, for example, invested in their football program for state pride as a way to raise spirits during the Great Depression. Other colleges learned that being good at a popular sport got them attention. Notre Dame would be just another cow-college if not for the use of ringers to make their football program famous. What started as amateur fun turned into a marketing vehicle for colleges and universities.

Of course, the colleges and universities never imagined that college sports would be a multi-billion dollar entertainment industry one day. Television did not exist, at least to anything like today, so there was no way to see this outcome. By the middle of the last century, college athletics evolved into a popular American tradition that was mostly about school and state pride. The players got free tuition for playing the sport and the school got to promote their brand on the field.

Once it was a mature system though, the ability of the people running it to see down the road started to decline. The NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma is a good example. This was a case that began in 1979 over television rights. The schools wanted to strike deals for putting games in TV, while the NCAA wanted to retain the right to control those deals. The schools won the case and the flood gates of television money opened soon after, reaching the billions today.

Half a century ago, the people running college football had no idea what was going to happen once they started taking TV money. On the one hand, they could not see the proliferation of mass media culture that was coming. On the other hand, they were focused on the here and now. They did not think about how a new revenue stream would change how the system functioned. They did not think about how it would change their thinking. They just needed the cash.

This type of example is common in America. Last year the people in charge began to run around smashing things because of Covid and their own sore feelings. None of them gave a second thought to the consequences. When faced with millions out of work, they did not think about the long term impact of their remedy. They just started throwing invented money at people. We are now on a wild ride of unpredictable scarcity and inflation with no ability to look more than one move ahead.

Getting back to the college athletics example, short-term thinking within an organization takes on a life of its own. In the case of college athletics, these highly educated college presidents have a couple of generations of examples to draw from, but they are as trapped in the moment as their predecessors. They tinker with the rules to address one issue, only to create a chain reaction they never considered. This story about the advent of the transfer portal is a good example.

One reason that people in a system lose the ability and willingness to think a few moves ahead is the incentives evolve along with the system. The people in the system who show some skill at patching up immediate problems benefit. Those pointing out the potential costs down the road gets ignored. When it comes to tools like regulatory systems or software, change means immediate cost. Since human organizations tend to be intertwined with tool systems, both forces work in concert.

Take the college athletics problem. If a group of college presidents wanted to address the excesses of college athletics, they would face enormous institutional pushback over the immediate costs. Changing the regulations and subsystems that are in place to maintain things as they are would cost a lot of money. The reformers would also be in competition with demands to address immediate problems. The reformers get drowned out by the natural functioning of the system.

Reforming a system is like trying to reform evolution itself. The thousands of cumulative decisions that went into the present state cannot be turned on or off without addressing the other decisions. In time, all human systems evolve past the point where reform is possible without an existential threat. If the choice is death or reform, then the minimum reform can happen to avoid death. Even facing death, reform faces long odds, if death can be rationalized into a distant possibility.

The French Revolution is a good example here. The threat of death was both personal and abstract, but the aristocracy could not bear the thought of reform. It was not as if they did not know their system was teetering on collapse. Their best ministers had explained this reality in detail. It was simply the case where the inertia was too strong for the reformers. No one could look ahead and immanentize the eschaton, so the immediate always took precedent over the future.

This is something to keep in mind in the current crisis. Reform, if it is possible at all, will come only in the shadow of the gallows. If the political class begins to fear for their life, then maybe they begin to act to push that inevitability off into the future. Of course, 80-year old men tend not to be long-term planners. Still, if genuine fear grips the ruling classes, then maybe we see reform. That is not the way to bet. Like all systems, this one most likely is carried on by internal forces until it collapses.

Big Con

Posted on May 18, 2021 by thezman

Every once in a while, a post or series of posts comes along that captures why conservatism never amounted to much. This post in the ironically named American Conservative is a good example of the genre. The topic is how to deal with the privatization of authoritarian power, primarily in Silicon Valley. The argument put forward is that using the state to tame these rogue companies is morally wrong, so we have to find some new way to contend with these out-of-control tech firms.

The first thing you should notice is the style is exactly what we get whenever the topic of immigration in on the table. The obvious answer is dismissed. In the case of immigration, that means shutting down the border and cracking down on employers who use helot labor. The open borders crowd always says that is impossible or harmful in some way. Instead, they offer a collection of overly complex solutions that have no chance of succeeding but will keep the punditry busy.

In the case of Big Tech, we have laws on the books to put an end to this reign of terror, but enforcing those is socialism, according to the usual suspects. We cannot have that, even if it would work. Instead, let us have a twenty-year series of international commissions to study technical standards and pass a bunch of laws that no one reads, but have cool names like “Data Portability Act”. In other words, the people who cannot build a wall along the border are going to fix the internet.

Interestingly, the rodents from Conservative Inc. always use the same trick the Left is so fond of using, which is the false dichotomy. “We can shut ourselves off from the world or embrace globalism” is how they frame trade. “We can become a hermit nation or remain a nation of immigrants” is how they frame immigration. Now it is “We can choose central planning or preserve an open internet” with Big Tech. It is the same partisan game the Left plays, just tailored for a middle-class white audience.

The fact is, enforcing Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act as intended puts a halt to the most egregious violations of our rights. Twitter can choose to be a publisher or an open platform. If it is the former, they can censure their platform however they like, but they are accountable for the content. If they choose to be an open platform like Gab, then they get the protection of Section 230. There is no need to reinvent the internet to solve the biggest problem with Big Tech.

Similarly, the obvious collusion that goes on with these big firms could be crushed with the use of existing law. There are plenty of examples of the tech companies colluding with one another to ban people from their platforms. If we can give a cop 20-years on civil rights violations for shooting a fleeing suspect, we can give the harpies of Silicon Valley a few years for violating the civil rights of Alex Jones. One lawsuit is all that would be required to end that practice and restore some sanity.

Of course, the author of the AC piece is clearly trying to strike the libertarian position, which is a blend of hiding under the bed and shilling for global capital. This is what is wrong with the libertarian-conservative commentariat. They are not interested in advocating conservative interests. Instead, they are focused on making sure their corporate donors are free of government interference. If that means the rights of conservatives are trampled, well “whoopsie!”

The writer of the AC piece is someone calling himself Zach Graves. He is head of policy at the Lincoln Network. You always have to be suspicious of any group using the name Lincoln and this is no exception. As we saw with the Lincoln Project, these groups tend to attract the very worst people. In this case, this is a not-for-profit located in San Francisco, conveniently near Silicon Valley. A Loren Graves, presumably the same guy as the writer, is a paid staffer for the group.

Before signing on with the Lincoln Network, Mr. Graves was with something called R Street Institute, which is neoconservative front group. The founder of the Lincoln Network is a man calling himself Garrett Johnson. He popped out of college into a job on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, then into a position as the founder of something called SendHub and now the founder of Lincoln Network. Nothing strange about this at all. There is no reason to suspect anything hanky.

This is the problem with conservatism in a nutshell. It has always been infested with pens for hire. This bit of corporate marketing posted at American Conservative is just a paid advertisement masquerading as commentary. To their credit, the site does acknowledged that they were paid to run it by Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, which is a pro-business non-profit in Missouri. There is a good bet that they bankroll the R Street Institute to some degree, given their location.

This is the problem with subjecting everything to the marketplace. When the highest bidder gets to determine public morality, no one can ever question the morality of the highest bidder. Public opinion becomes another commodity to be traded, rather than a genuine exchange of ideas. The founder of The Lincoln Network would be happy to promote communism if that pays better than shilling for Big Tech. He is just face purchased on the market to make the brochure look good.

Similarly, the writers and “policy wonks” at these shops are just pens for hire, with a set of specialties. “Need generic libertarian babble about technology? No problem, we have Zach Graves. That is his specialty.” R Street puts him on the UPS truck and ships him off to a Silicon Valley non-profit. Like the economy as a whole, the marketplace of ideas has become a pirate’s cove. Everything is for sale and everything can be purchased, if the price is right. The consequences are for the suckers to bear.

This is what conservatism should oppose. One basic tenet of conservatism is that there is a transcendent moral truth. That means it is indifferent to the marketplace. it also means that truth itself is not up for bid. Once you concede this point, you are no longer on the Right, but just another kiosk in the bazaar if increasingly bizarre ideas. The way to end the pirate’s cove is to shut it down and hang the pirates. That’s the starting point for conservatism, if it is to be anything more than another grift.

Meat Man Versus Weed Man

Posted on May 13, 2021 by thezman

Often, the natural confluence of events results in something so elegant or complex that people see the hand of design behind the result. Even though the odds of there being a secret conspiracy or master chess player behind the result are very low, that just seems better than the odds of chance getting the result. Most conspiracy theories rely on this sort of logic. The official explanations seem so unlikely that they must be part of some conspiracy to shield the truth from the public.

A good example of this is the last election. No sitting president has seen a double digit increase in his vote, but still lose. In fact, no one has been able to find an example like this in other elected offices. That’s how rare it is. This once in forever thing could be accepted in isolation, but it is just one of such things. There are so many unexplained anomalies that people are naturally skeptical. The invisible hand of design, even without hard proof, seems like the more likely explanation.

We may be seeing something similar happen with food. All of a sudden, we are being bombarded with agit-prop in favor of eating bugs and plant-based proteins, rather than eating beef and chicken. Beef seems to be the primary target, but that could simply be the result of the Left’s long war against cows. The Left believes cows are part of a secret conspiracy against Gaia to poison the atmosphere. The “cow fart” conspiracy is as real to them as the ongoing Russian conspiracy.

A few years ago, the fast food chain Burger King introduced something called an “impossible burger” which is made from grass clippings. The claim was that it tasted just like their regular burgers but was made from plants. Why they did this was never asked or explained. Up to that point, the number of people saying, “Man, I could really go for a burger made from grass clippings right now” was zero. In fact, the number remains stubbornly pegged at zero. No one wants this.

Now, billion dollar companies make dumb decisions. History is full of ideas cooked up in corporate offices that turn out to be laughably stupid. Maybe this grass burger idea is just another example, like new Coke. The thing is though, they did not invent the grass burger or the idea of it. There are two companies pushing this idea. Impossible Products and Beyond Meat are producing fake meat products. It was the former who approached Burger King with the plant burger idea.

Now, it is important to note here that these new fake meat products do not taste like meat as is claimed. They taste like what people who have never tasted meat think meat tastes like to humans. The fake beef has the mouth-feel of oatmeal. It is a weird sort of grainy slime when you eat it. It is not horrible and if you were starving you would probably eat it, but cannibalism would start to look appealing. Like the previous attempts to create fake meat, this new stuff is not very good.

The point is the companies pushing this do not have a better mousetrap. They are not even making that claim. In fact, they make it clear that their products are not better than what they seek to replace. In their public demonstrations they concede that it is, at best, a close facsimile. Instead, they claim their products are morally superior. You see, the burger made from grass clippings and dried leaves pleases Gaia. She will therefore reward the grass eaters and punish the meat eaters.

That is insane, but these products have the backing of the oligarchs. Both of these companies are supported financially by rich people. The troubled Bill Gates is behind the Impossible Burger scheme. He is the guy trying to blot out the sun because he thinks it is part of the cow conspiracy. Other oligarchs are rushing to get in on the fake meat racket as well. All of a sudden, the rich are sure real meat will go the way of the buggy whip and be replaced by bugs and grass clippings.

The question is, why? The fact is there is no market for fake meat. Dozens of efforts to create one, including the current fake burger idea, have flopped. The fact is the public is not going to voluntarily start eating bugs and grass clippings just because the climate loons say Gaia commands it. If the choice is between a real burger and the artificial alternative, people choose the real burger. In other words, there is no business opportunity here that the oligarchs are trying to exploit.

That is, unless the government plans to ban meat. Despite the organized media campaign by the regime to claim otherwise, the regime is plotting to ban meat. They will not do it outright, but instead regulate it out of existence. In the name of climate change, they will make the sale and production of meat products increasingly expensive. This is why the billionaires all see fake meat as an opportunity. It is also why recipe sites are now removing meat recipes from their websites.

In one respect, the highly coordinated media campaign to deny the Biden war on burgers is correct. There is no design behind this. What is driving it is the weird new religion taking hold of the American ruling elite. They really believe that Gaia is angry with us and will unleash her wrath unless we repent. Of course, they mean repent in that you will commit the act of contrition and they will get salvation. They also get to keep eating meat while you dine on spiders and dandelions.

The war on meat is not a conspiracy. It is an example of the Hoffer line about mass movements in America. They become a business, a racket, or a corporation. In this case, the Gaia worship sweeping the ruling class is becoming a business. These grass and twig burger companies are the first wave of companies hoping to capitalize on the artificially created market for fake food. They see the madness in the eyes of their peers and immediately think about how to profit from it.

Of course, all big business in America depends on government. These fake meat companies and the billionaire sponsor will lobby the state to create legislation favorable to them and harmful to their opponents. The political rackets will get a chance to skim some off this new business, as long as the play ball with fake meat. All of a sudden, real meat has to increase the bribes to counter fake meat. The war on meat is just another manifestation of the natural corruption in liberal democracy.

Trump, A Retrospective

Posted on May 11, 2021 by thezman

Evaluating most things in real time is a difficult process, because you do not have the benefit of seeing how things end. It is why hot-takes in the middle of a news event always sound stupid in retrospect. Those evaluations are more about the mood of the moment and the desire for attention than sensible analysis. It is only after the thing ends and the dust has settled that you can get a grip on what happened. This is the case with the Trump phenomenon, which ended months ago.

Now, we do not know if Trump will run again. He says he will start doing rallies this fall, but so far, no news on that front. For now, he has been commenting about old enemies and endorsing candidates who have said nice things about him. Elise Stefanik, for example, has gotten the Trump endorsement to replace Liz Cheney. The fact that Stefanik is one of the most liberal Republicans in the House and is nothing but a sock puppet for the establishment makes no difference.

That is a good jumping off point to think about why the Trump years never amounted to more than lots of noise. The Stefanik example is part of a pattern with Trump with regards to how he does politics. He tended to endorse candidates on whether they would win, rather than if they were on his side politically. He endorsed Mitt Romney, for example, who has been a life-long fink. He also endorsed the two Georgia senators, who were everything he allegedly opposed.

Trump’s politics were always an extension of Trump’s business approach, which was just an advanced form of personal brand management. He wanted the Trump brand to carry weight in politics in the same way it worked in real estate. For most of his life, the game was to promote the brand, while others found deals where the brand could be the difference between success and failure. The Trump brand would push the deal over the top and thus earn Trump a lion’s share of the profits.

This started way back in the 1980’s when Trump figured out that the way for him into the world of big-time real estate was to create a media image for himself as the big time deal maker. He was the real life Gordon Gecko, the character from the 1980’s hit movie Wall Street. This got him on television chat shows where he perfected the style that has become synonymous with Trump. The pop culture icon became the brand that would make Trump the real estate mogul.

From the late-80’s forward, the Trump business model was simple. He would swap some of his brand prestige for shares in a deal, like a casino. The people on the other end needed the brand to promote the project to investors and politicians, so they were willing to cut Trump in on the deal. Genuinely smart real estate people from the Trump organization would then swoop in a maximize the profit for Trump Inc. They got their money first and often at the expense of the resulting project.

The genius of this approach is every new casino or resort property with his name on it enhanced the brand, thus opening up new deals. Trump Inc. became a frog in a pond full of lily pads. They just hopped from one to the next. Unlike other real estate developers, they did not have to find new deals and cultivate the political relationships required to make the deal a possibility. Others did that and brought these opportunities to the Trump people, hoping to get the Trump endorsement.

This worked amazingly well in real estate, but not in politics. The Trump brand never counted for much in Washington, where the voters are looked upon as ants at the picnic, rather than a source of strength. Trump’s miracle win in 2016 meant nothing in a world where 95% of incumbents win reelection. Compounding it, the only deals that happen in Washington are the deals that benefit the insiders. The only thing Trump could swap his brand value for were deals his voters hated.

That was the story of his four years. One side of the uniparty was focused only on destroying the Trump brand. Trump never experienced that sort of conflict in the business world, so he was ill-equipped to counter it. The other side of the uniparty was willing to bring him deals so he could attach his name to them, but those deals did nothing for his brand or his voters. Throwing open the jails and giving the store away to rich people was the equivalent of a Trump casino in Tehran.

Where the Trump style failed the most was in the organization. In the 1980’s, Trump attracted a group of very savvy people into his organization. They were the ones who did the deal making and profit extraction from those deals. This allowed Trump to be the head of brand management. Trump’s people knew their job was to make sure the final deal boosted the Trump brand, because that meant more deals. Trump’s role was to use his brand to endorse the deal and take the credit.

It was a good system that was never replicated in Washington. His team was ignorant of how things were done in Washington. His son-in-law was actually working for interests outside the Trump administration. Official Washington was happy to send a stream of their people to fill posts and undermine Team Trump. His organization never had a chance to turn the Trump brand into anything, because they did not know how to do it, even if the brand had real value to official Washington.

That is why the Trump years were lots of promises, but no delivery. Team Trump would bring out the brand hoping someone would come forward with a deal. Either the deal on offer was garbage or there was no deal to be had. Trump’s DACA moves are a great example of the no deal. He was sure he could trade that for his wall. Instead, they ignored him entirely. Trump was begging them to do a deal on DACA and they just ignored him harder. The art of the deal had no market in DC.

The Trump phenomenon is a good example of why democratic reform is impossible in a liberal democratic system. The only way to reform the system is to understand its internal workings and have people willing to make the changes inside the system to create the desired reforms. The reformer has no choice but to engage the system through the rules of the system. There is no way to reform the system from the outside, as the outsider has no access to the system.

For generations now, the political system has been selecting for people who defend the interests of he system and the people in it. You cannot get a job at any level of politics unless you are useful to the people in the system. The entry points of the system, primaries, elections, staffing jobs, are all designed to filter out people who could be unhealthy for the system and select for those who will defend the system. Even if a reformer sneaks in, they are surrounded by antibodies of the system.

This is something the paleoconservative thinker Sam Francis recognized with the conservative movement a million years ago. As soon as they decided to engage in democratic politics, they would be forced to trade their conservative principles for access to the system. Otherwise, they would be shut off from the system. Over the years conservatism has traded everything away. They are now a shuffling husk that staggers long behind the Left living on scraps.

This is the inevitable crisis of liberal democracy. Those “liberal principles” that are supposed to constrain the excesses of democracy end up becoming obstacles to democratic reform. On the other hand, a genuine effort to reform the system from outside is framed as a threat to liberal principles. Trump immediately became Hitler, the great bogeyman of liberalism, solely on the grounds that he was a creature that existed outside the liberal democratic system.

That is the real lesson of the Trump years. There is no way to reform liberal democracy from the inside, as it has evolved to prevent reform. It is impossible to reform from the outside as liberal democracy is defined by opposition to outside pressure. That means the only reform possible is replacement, which requires a rejection of both liberalism and democracy as anything more than expedients. Real reform begins with the rejection of the system and its moral framework.

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