Historical analogies seem like useful tools for understanding current events. Everyone has heard, “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it” a bazillion times. Of course, our analogies are always to past disasters. Most people reading this can probably name a dozen people that have been compared to Hitler and another dozen examples of Western leaders being compared to Neville Chamberlain. For the most part, our analogies to the past are always warnings of pending doom. No one ever compares the present to some tranquil time in the past.
Humans have limited information processing capacity so nature devised ways for us to quickly process information. Pattern matching is one fast way to locate danger in a very crowded scene. If a current event resembles a past event in some way, then maybe they have other things in common. The logical shorthand is AX:BX::AY:BY, with X being the commonality we know and Y being the commonality we inferred. This sort of reasoning is really only useful in avoiding danger, thus the salience of the Santayana quote. Otherwise, he would have said “blessed” rather than “doomed.”
The thing about Hitler, Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun and so on is that they had no obvious analog in the past. The events in Germany after the Great War were incredibly unique. In fact, there is no good example from the past to which they compare. Similarly, the world had never seen the likes of Genghis Khan, which is why the Mongols had so much success. One big reason Attila was so scary to the Romans was that he was clearly a different breed of Hun. Because he was not like his predecessors, he was unpredictable and therefore a very frightening figure to the Romans.
Of course, this is why comparing every petty dictator to Hitler is silly. Saddam was not Hitler. Qaddafi was not Hitler either. Obama cutting a deal with the Iranians may be stupid, but that does not make him Chamberlain. In other words, our attempts to understand the present by finding scary analogs in the past has led to one blunder after another in the Middle East. Our pathological need to remember the lessons of Vietnam made success in Afghanistan an impossibility. Because we remembered the past, we made entirely new and avoidable mistakes.
The point of this is that the upcoming election is being compared to 1980, 1968, 1932 (you know who) and Trump has been compared to everyone from Hitler to Andrew Jackson. Everyone is groping around for a useful historical analogy in order to make sense of this highly improbably election. The most important political office on the planet will either be filled by the wife of a former President or filled by a billionaire real estate developer. It is not exactly Henry Tudor versus Richard III, but the consequences are probably going to be much more important.
This election is looking like an extreme outlier. Hillary Clinton is the only presidential candidate to have been accused of violating espionage laws. She may have beat the rap but name another candidate that had even a whiff of traitorous intent. Trump is the first novice to run as a major party candidate since Wendell Willkie in 1940 and that is not a great comparison as Willkie was involved in politics his whole life. Other than stroking checks to candidates for favors, Trump has not been very political.
Then there is the fact that both parties are a mess at the moment. The Democrats have a collection of geezers at the top and no bench. Their “young guns” are still in college. No one really wanted Clinton, but there was no one else so she is the nominee. On the GOP side, Trump is hated by the party and some segments of the GOP voters. He is the nominee primarily because the rest of the party is a dog’s breakfast of globalist fantasies and 1980’s romanticism. The sense of betrayal among conservative voters is at revolutionary levels.
What is most incredible about all of it is the extreme disconnect between the party elites and their voters. Most Democrat voters would prefer less immigration and better polices for the middle-class and working class. Similarly, most Republican voters would respond to similar appeals, with an emphasis on the more business friendly stuff. Yet, neither party is offering much of anything on these issues. Instead, they are obsessed with weird fads like transvestites or globalist esoterica that no one outside the global elites finds interesting.
We do seem to be in uncharted territory, which may not be a terrible thing. Historical analogies are often wildly mistaken, resulting is disasters like the endless wars in the Muslim lands. The battles of the Great War were mostly due to the generals clinging to lessons of the past, despite the carnage they were witnessing. Much of what plagues American politics today is a layer of Baby Boomer politicians who cannot stop reliving the 1960’s. A break from the past could be the palate cleanser society needs. Or we may be rocketing over a cliff.
Category Archives: Culture
Thug-ocracy
Yesterday the FBI Director detailed the many crimes perpetrated by the Hillary Clinton Gang at the State Department. My expectation has always been that this investigation would peter out over the summer, as that would be best for Team Clinton and Team Obama. The press could then bury it and be counted on to marginalize anyone who dared mention it. This is a familiar pattern in American politics. Plus there is the whole “Arkancide” issue where opponents of the Clintons die under mysterious circumstances.
Instead of watching it on television, I went to twitter and followed along as media people tweeted their impressions. The interesting thing was that the first wave of tweets were all about the hundreds of rather clear violations of the law that had been in the press for months. Then there was a wave of tweets along the lines of “my goodness, I think the FBI is going to announce an indictment.” Even liberals were struck by the weight of the evidence and the tone of the presentation.
Then there was a wave of gasps when he said he would not be calling for Clinton to be charged with the crimes he just listed. Even over twitter, you could feel the disconnect as people tried to wrap their heads around the bizarre contradictions. The man just detailed a mountain of crimes and then pivots around and says that no one would ever be indicted for these crimes. Yesterday was one of those times when even the most grizzled cynic was astonished at the craven cynicism on display.
History is full of events we look back upon as turning points. In some cases, the people involved in the events were unaware of their significance. The Marian Reforms changed the course of Roman history, but the people at the time had no idea what was coming as a result. They seemed like much needed reforms in response to previous military disasters. Having politicians raise volunteer armies and then lead them against enemies was simply not working. No one imagined that these reforms would result in Sulla’s march on Rome.
The events of the last week or so, around Independence Day no less, feel like a big moment, like something has changed in the country. It started with Bill Clinton showing up for a private meeting with the Attorney General. That was followed by a long weekend interrogation of Hillary Clinton by the FBI. Then we have the Attorney General hinting that Clinton would not be charged and the President suddenly deciding to campaign with her. Yesterday the FBI detailed a long list of crimes and then says they will not seek charges.
At one level, it seems like the people in charge are rubbing our noses in the fact they are beyond the reach of the public. They are no longer going to pretend to be citizens of a republic, beholden to the voters. They are above the law and the proof of that is one of their own has committed hundreds of crimes and will not be required to step aside, much less be prosecuted. The law is for the Dirt People and it will be enforced by the Cloud People, but the Cloud People will do as they please.
There is another way to look at it. That is, the ruling class has lost control of the reigns and they can no longer police themselves. Hillary Clinton has no business being president. It is absurd even without the massive corruption and criminality. Hillary’s crowning achievement was marrying Bill Clinton 50 years ago. Even a deeply corrupt and incompetent ruling class should be able to filter out the likes of Hillary Clinton. The fact that they cannot bring themselves to flush her from the system when they have an iron clad criminal case against her is ominous.
There is another angle here. The whole “Arkanside” thing is a fun gag, but it does appear that the ruling class is playing much tougher with one another. Judge Roberts was either blackmailed or threatened into reversing his opinion on ObamaCare. That is incandescently obvious. FBI Director Comey’s erratic performance yesterday suggests there is more here than just a man suddenly changing his mind about law enforcement. He has prosecuted many others for these exact same crimes.
A lesson of history is that when ruling elites become unstable, they become thuggish. Rivals are no longer content to play by the agreed upon rules with the winners and losers showing grace to the other. Instead, politics becomes a blood-sport, where there are no limits on what one can do to win. The men who assassinated Julius Caesar probably did not think murder was a great idea. It is just that it was better than all the others. They convinced themselves they had no choice because that was the only way to win.
There is a byproduct to this. The ruling class loses the moral authority to rule. Once the ruling elite stops abiding by the laws, their only reason to rule is force. That is not just an internal reality within the ruling elite; it is a reality within society as a whole. If Hillary Clinton were to become President, only fools would continue to abide by the laws. It would be a war of all against all within the ruling class and eventually, within society. The last few centuries of the Roman Empire featured endless warfare and revolts for this reason.
America is not the Roman Empire and this is not the Iron Age. It is entirely possible that yesterday will be the point at which the American ruling class recoils at the madness they face. There has not been the series of victory laps in the liberal media we tend to see when Democrats pull a fast one on the public. The old school liberals have been down on Clinton for a long time and this only confirms their opinions. The ship does not always slam into the iceberg. A Thug-ocracy is not inevitable.
That is not the way to bet, however.
The Case of the Citizen Truly Stated
In the English Civil War, a group of renegade soldiers, along with political supporters in London, began demanding radical reforms like universal suffrage, religious tolerance, equality before the law and popular sovereignty. The Levellers did not last long, but they remain an important turning point in Western history. Their radical idea was that a man must consent to be governed and therefore have a say in how he is governed. This is a seminal moment in Western history. A nation would be defined by its people, while empires would be defined by their territory.
Another way to look at it is that a nation is a group of people, who decide their borders, their customs and how they will govern themselves. The consent is not just from citizen to the state, but from citizen to citizen. An empire, in contrast, is whatever land the ruler can hold and the people within it. His relationship to the people is transactional. He guards the people, enforces the rules and the people pay taxes. The people have no obligations to one another, at least in a legal sense. Their only duties are to the king as a subject, while they remain in the kingdom. L’Etat, c’est moi.
The critical thing here is that a citizen has obligations to his fellow citizens, while a subject only has obligations to his ruler. The former is the model we have had in the West for a long time now. In America, it has been the only model. All the blather about the propositional nation stuff obscures this fact in an attempt to justify mass immigration, but even within that mythological concept of America, the citizen is defined by his relationship to his fellow citizens. It’s not the government who defines the citizen. It is the citizen that defines the state. As such, the citizens get to decide who is and who is not a citizen.
That’s the problem the open borders types refuse to address. The government of a nation is just an extension of that agreement between the citizens. It’s even written into the American Constitution, right at the very beginning.
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
In a nation, the government is defined by the people – literally. The people decide who is and who is not “the people” by whatever means they find agreeable. As with any contract, social or otherwise, the parties enter into it voluntarily. We don’t think of it that way, because we are born into our citizenship in most cases, but the fact that we can renounce our citizenship means it is always voluntary. Further, the fact that the state cannot revoke it means it is not a contract with the state. It is a contract with our fellow citizens.
In a land of no borders, there can be no social contract. What would be the point? If anyone can wander in and get the benefits of the contract, without first consenting to the terms of the contract and gaining the agreement of the counter party, what value can there be in citizenship? Citizenship becomes a suckers deal, just as it was in the Roman Empire when citizenship simply meant you paid taxes and had to provide men to the military. In the world of open borders, citizenship is all obligation and no benefit.
In such a world, it will not take long before the calls of patriotism fall flat. After all, what is patriotism but the moral obligation of a citizen to his fellow citizens? Patriotism is the spirit of the social contract. To their credit, the open borders crowd agrees that their vision of paradise is one where all human relations are transactional. Everyone acts in their self interest. So, why would people serve jury duty? Volunteer at their kid’s school? Serve in the military? All of these things assume a moral duty to your fellow citizens. In the borderless paradise, no one owes anyone anything.
Even in the paradise of open borders, order must be maintained and the interests of the wealthy protected. When calls to patriotism and culture are no longer tools available to the state, force is what’s left. This custodial state we see being rolled out by our rulers is not due to a breakdown of the citizens willingness to uphold their part of the social contract. It is the breakdown of the social contract that is causing the growth of the custodial state. Put another way, the state is not just failing in its obligations, it is nullifying the compact between citizens. In fact, they are obliterating the very concept of citizenship.
In response to the Leveller’s call or democratic rights, Henry Ireton responded,
No person hath a right to an interest or share in the disposing of the affairs of the kingdom, and in determining or choosing those that shall determine what laws we shall be ruled by here — no person hath a right to this, that hath not a permanent fixed interest in this kingdom.
How is this different from the arguments of the open borders proponents? They argue, that no one has a right to say who can walk into your country. They say, no one has a right to determine who is and who is not entitled to to the blessings of liberty. Ireton rejected the concept of citizenship. Those who demand open borders are doing the same thing. Instead of a king, they promise a custodial state to rule over us, to keep us safe, accountable only to those with a permanent interest in it.
Return Of Heptarchy
We do not know a lot of the British Isles, prior to the Romans arriving. Archaeological and genetic evidence gives some broad outlines, but the details of daily life and the history of rulers and tribes is largely unknown to us. The best we can do is piece together some general ideas based on what has been dug from the earth and what the Romans recorded about what they found when they landed in Britain. There’s also genetics which can be used to trace the movement of peoples over time. This helps build a general picture, but it is filled with assumptions.
What we do know is that for most of her history, various tribes controlled areas of land and those tribes eventually formed kingdoms. The Picts, the Celts, the Welsh, the Angles and later, the Saxons, are familiar names to people fond of history. Similarly, Wessex, Mercia, Northumbria and East Anglia probably ring some bells for most people. These were some of the kingdoms of the Heptarchy, a period in British history that lasted from the end of Roman rule until most of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms came under the overlordship of Egbert of Wessex in 829.
It is useful to keep this in mind when looking at the changes that are coming to the UK if they follow through on the Brexit vote. The Scots are talking about independence again. The Welsh have been talking about independence for a while and may get serious about it again. Then you have the always difficult problem of the Irish. Membership in the EU was a disaster for the Irish in many ways, but they instinctively wish to go the opposite of whatever way the English are going so it is hard to know what happens with them. Then you have the Unionist issue, which is complicated in the best of times.
Whether any of this will come to pass is unknown at this point, but there is no doubt that the UK is about to go through a period where it redefines itself to meet the world of the future. Those two great forces discussed in yesterday’s post are at work in the UK now. On the one hand, we have movements toward greater local control, even independence, and on the other hand we have a movement to fold the whole country into Europe as an administrative zone of Germany. For now, the smaller is better side is winning the argument, but how far it goes is up in the air.
The issue that lies beneath all of this is whether or not the United Kingdom as a concept is of much use in the modern world. A unified island made a lot of sense in an age when invasion was a reasonable concern. A divided squabbling people would not stand a chance against Norse raiders. The Continent has produced many threats that required a strong and unified Britain. Today, invasion is not a concern and the greatest threat from the Continent is a fresh batch of regulations that make flush toilets less efficient. It is entirely plausible that the costs of being united outweigh the benefits.
Scotland voting themselves out of the UK is an obvious first step, but that may not be a great move on their part. The Scots remind me of the French-Canadians. They like waving flags around more than they like self-sufficiency. Similarly, the Welsh voted Brexit and seem to like being in partnership with the English. Preservation of local customs and language do not require independence. The Scots and the Welsh would probably be happy with the symbolic parts of nationhood, but let the English run foreign policy, trade and the central bank, as long as they have a voice in Parliament.
The other side of this is the fact that the English may be tiring of the Scots. In the last two national elections a clear line exists between the Scots and the English. SNP is basically Labour with more Brave Heart references. The Scots vote for a populist left-wing party while the English are voting for what passes for a nationalist right-wing party now. UKIP in Scotland is a collection of fringe nuts, while in England it is a real party gently tugging the Tories back to where they belong on the Right. I bet more than a few English would like to vote the Scots out of the UK and be done with them.
Then we have the Irish. Currently, there is free movement between England, the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Britain leaving the EU means a return of border controls to the UK and that means borders come back between Ireland and England. There is also the fact that Norther Ireland voted heavily against leaving the EU and is making noises about gaining special EU status. That is only possible if they are an independent country. How likely is it that Northern Ireland will follow the same path as the Scots and begin badgering for independence? How long before the English tire of them?
All of this is idle speculation, but the ground is shifting in the UK.
Tax Farming
Tax farming is a system where the state, usually a ruler or oligarchy, grants the right to collect taxes to a private person or group of individuals. In theory, this agent collects the taxes and hands them to the state, keeping a percentage for his fee. The tax farmer is eager to make sure the taxes are collected so he does a really good job collecting those taxes. Since the tax farmers are usually closer to the people being taxed, they are going to be better at unearthing the various tax dodges cooked up by the people, thus avoiding the problem of tax avoidance.
This was common in the Bronze Age and flourished from time to time in various places into the late Middle Ages. The Italians still maintain a form of it in their banking system, where the small local banks operate as a taxing authority for certain transactions. The remains of this practice are still with us in the form of business and sales taxes. The retailer is basically a tax collector. The difference is the business collecting sales and employment tax is not getting a commission. They are forced to do it by the state as a condition of doing business.
Like all solutions, it came with trade-offs. The king may have lacked the communications systems and granular knowledge of the local economy to efficiently collect his own taxes, but he gave away some degree of his authority when he resorted to tax farming. He also gave away some portion of his tax revenue to the tax farmer. Since the power to tax is the power to rule, the king was also ceding some of his own power to others, who could one day use those powers against him. In other words, the king was trading power for money, which is always a risky trade-off.
Tax farming is something to keep in mind when reading stories like this one from Hollywood. Of the eight people in the story, three run cable empires. Two run empires that piggyback on the cable monopolies. That means five of the eight most powerful media men in America base their power on state-granted cable monopolies, which are really just updated forms of the old tax farm concept. Instead of the state taxing you through your cable and internet, they grant that right to these companies, who kick a portion of it back to the government in the form of bribes and taxes.
It is tempting to resist this comparison because the cable company is not banging on your door, demanding that you give them half your crops. It does not feel like a tax, but income taxes do not feel like a tax either. You never see them. They just happen behind the scenes. Most people are completely unaware of the taxes on their wages. They see what is on their stub, maybe, but they do not see the laundry list of taxes paid by their employer. Those of you who sign the front of paychecks know the stuff on the pay stub is just the tip of the iceberg.
Similarly, as a consumer of pop culture you want to watch TV and go on-line so you get cable. In most areas of the US, there is one cable company. They do not just sell you the content you want, they sell you a package that you have to buy whether you watch it or not. You pay for ESPN, for example, even if you never watch sports. You pay for the parade of freaks on the news channels, even if you are a sensible person who gets his news on-line. That is a tax, no matter what they call it. You are required to pay for these channels even though you do not want them.
Here is a little math. The average cable TV bill in America is now over $100 per month. There are roughly one hundred million cable homes in America, which means $10 billion per month flows into the cable companies via subscriber fees. Then you have the internet access portion which is about half that number. When you have the right to tax $150 billion from the public, you have a powerful tool at your disposal. It is no wonder that five of the eight most powerful media moguls are in the cable rackets. They have been granted the power to tax.
This would be just another swindle the Billionaire Boys Club is running on the American people, except that most people still get their news and culture through the television. All of those moguls are raging left wingers, who use their billions to finance their favorite politicians and pump into your home their ideas about how you should live. It is not an accident that most of what turns up on television looks like it was dreamed up by the sophomores in the women’s studies department. The modern tax farmer does not just have the right to tax the people in his domain. He gets the right to tell them how to think.
The Nature Of The Cult
It is natural to think of cults as being filled with gullible people bamboozled by a charismatic confidence man. It is popular to portray the cult leader as a deeply cynical, maybe even evil, person, who is using his flock to inflict harm or make himself rich. The Nazis are often described as the quintessential cult and Hitler as the ultimate cult leader. The implication of this way of looking at things is that the people who get caught up in a cult are dupes, fools or gullible innocents. Because they were well-intentioned, they can be forgiven, to a point, for falling in with a bad crowd.
The truth is a bit different. The true believer seeks out movements to join. They do not need convincing. They are filled with self-loathing so they seek out groups to join in order to swap out their identity with that of the group. By immersing themselves in the movement, they obliterate their sense of self and assume the identity of the group. It is why within five minutes of meeting a vegan, they tell you they are a vegan, because it is, literally, their identity. It is also why cult members ferociously defend the group. It is self-defense.
Being in a mass movement or a cult only works if the logic and beliefs of the cult explain the world to a satisfactory level. If the cult says the world is going to end tomorrow, it better end tomorrow. Otherwise, the cult collapses as it fails to comport with observable reality. Since reality never fully comports with the worldview of a mass movement, there has to be a method to deal with dis-confirmation. This either means filtering out contrary data or finding a method to fold it into the beliefs of the group.
A good recent example is the Afghan Muslim, who shot up the gay club in Orlando. For the modern liberal, Muslims and gays are always victims of bad whites. Therefore, this event creates a paradox for the Cult of Modern Liberalism as it means two of their beliefs are mutually exclusive. To resolve this, they created a backstory claiming the shooter was actually gay and this was gay rage. The extreme homophobia of the bad whites finally sent this poor gay Muslim over the edge. Therefore, he is just another victim of the bad whites.
It did not take too long before it was clear that this guy was not gay or struggling with being gay-curious. Because the liberal media kept promoting the idea, the FBI eventually had to announce that they found no evidence to support the claims. It was also clear that Mateen was a Muslim lunatic with ties to other Muslim lunatics. None of that mattered as the Cult had their narrative and every Lefty now believes this had nothing to do with Muslims. It was all the fault of white America, homophobia and Islamophobia. The dis-confirmation was turned into confirmation.
Normal people wonder how it is that liberals so quickly cook up these weird theories and then agree on the story, as if it is coordinated. Look at how quickly they produced the gay rage stuff and how every liberal was saying the exact same lines within hours of the incident. Well, look at a school of fish. There is no head fish calling the shots, but they move in concert, responding to perceived dangers, as if they are under a uniform command. The school swarms in one direction and then, in an instant, veers in another direction, as a big fish approaches.
Liberals work similarly. They are always looking to one another for signals as to how they should respond. As soon as one lefty pulled the gay rage card, the rest started repeating it as it felt like the path away from danger. It is why they watch the same shows and read the same news sites. They are constantly watching one another for cues as to which way to swarm. Being in a mass movement is first and foremost about blending seamlessly into the whole. Again, the adherent is there to swap their identity for that of the group so they are hyper-sensitive to the direction of the group.
When faced with dis-conformation, the members of a mass movement will first look to one another in order to reinforce their beliefs. This “circle the wagons” instinct is clear with the reaction we are seeing to the Brexit vote. Instead of wondering what they did wrong, the Remain crowd is blaming it on the moral degeneracy of the Leave voters, calling them racists and xenophobes. The Remain people are locking shields to clearly set themselves apart form the evil Leave voters. Their instinct is to first defend the faith, and then look to each other for the correct response.
You will also note something else in the response to the vote. They are blaming it on old people. We see this in the States after every Democratic loss. When they win, it is young people who carried them to victory. When they lose it is those grubby old racists, who were driven by fear and hatred that defeated them. Mass movements make a fetish of the youth. At least a dozen times since the vote in Britain I have heard a liberal say “the delusions and fears of an aging population have thrown away the future of the young in Britain.”
What is going on here is the process of turning contrary evidence into proof that their cause is righteous. Further, they are turning the loss into a reason for hope. After all, those horrible, racist old people will be dead soon. Then the young and righteous will inherent the earth and usher in the promised utopia. Since there can be no doubt about the validity of their beliefs, focusing on the alleged weaknesses of their adversaries inspires the faithful to keep up the fight. And they always keep up the fight. They never quit. They never change their minds. They just keep at it until they get their way.
What To Do About Islam
Terrorism from the Middle East got going in a serious way in the 1960’s and was allegedly spawned by the creation of Israel. Having failed to destroy Israel militarily, the Arabs set off on a policy of targeting civilians outside the Levant. The main actors at the time were Palestinians, but the rest of the Arabs, including Arab governments, eventually got into the act. Now, of course, we have these amorphous criminal organizations that exploit the global telecommunications system to recruit and direct lunatics all over the globe.
At the same time, Western involvement, and particularly US involvement, in the Muslim world has steadily increased. In the 70’s a handful of Americans worked in these countries, mostly in the oil business, but also as defense contractors. Today tens of thousands of Americans, plus equal numbers of Europeans are in these countries. That is on top of the saturation of Western culture via the internet and television. Then there is the military aspect. America has been dropping bombs on Muslims since the 80’s.
No sane person can conclude that relations between the West and Islam are on the upswing. Thirty years ago, the typical Westerner had no reason to care about the Muslims. Today, it is all we think about, because every other week a Muslim goes bonkers and kills a bunch a people. To make matters worse, the flood of Muslims into Western countries is threatening the social fabric of the West. Think about it. We now have political candidates running on explicitly anti-Islamic platforms.
What is to be done?
The first thing to do is to ban all immigration from predominantly Muslim countries. Banning Muslim immigration is impossible as you cannot implement it, but you can halt immigration from countries like Afghanistan and Iran. The United States actually runs recruiting drives in these countries via something called a diversity lottery. There is no patriotic reason to be importing these people. The West is not short of low-skilled, low-IQ people so importing more of them makes no economic sense. Importing people violently hostile to the West is suicidal and it must end.
That still leaves the problem of illegal migrants. The West used to have no qualms about rounding up illegals and sending them back, but fear of being rude to strangers has paralyzed Western governments. There is no reason to think this will change, but governments can make migration less attractive. Cutting off welfare benefits is the most obvious point of attack. Every Western country is creaking under the weight of social welfare programs. End all welfare programs to non-citizens.
Obviously, there are millions of Muslims living in the West and many have been here for a couple of generations. The Orlando shooter was born in America and his father was a naturalized citizen. America has about five million legal Muslims, while Europe has over forty-four million. Germany is 25% the size of the US and has far more Muslims. Given current fertility rates, these are dangerously high populations of people with an extremely poor history of assimilation. The West needs to think hard about encouraging reverse migration.
One way to do that is to offer cash bribes to leave. Some European countries are already doing this. It is a form of Danegeld, but sometimes that is what must be done. Many of the recent arrivals will jump at the cash bonus, figuring out that the party is over and they are better off going home. That is a big part of all of this. The West needs to make it clear that Islam is not welcome in the West. Cutting off the welfare and paying them to leave sends that message and it discourages others from making the trip to the West.
Another tool that can be used to discourage Muslim migration is a hard ban on cousin marriage. Most Muslim countries continue to marry off daughters to family members. First and second cousin marriage should be banned and heavily fined. No marriage of this type should be recognized. We have DNA tests to check this so it is cheap and easy to enforce. This is one of those things that sends a clear message, “You’re not welcome” to the Muslims.
All of this is incandescently obvious to anyone who has been paying attention. What is remarkable about the age in which we live is that the things people have known and understood for thousands of years are now suddenly heretical. This is due to the fever that has gripped our rulers, but normal people fully understand the sensibleness of limiting Muslim migration into the West. We owe Muslims nothing and are under no obligation to destroy ourselves to accommodate them.
What is not obvious is that our good intentions have done a lot of harm to the Muslim world and as a consequence invited these manufactured problems to our door. The culture and habits of the West evolved in the West. The people of Europe evolved in Europe and in the culture they created. Exporting our culture around the world to people, wholly unprepared for it, has had the same impact as exporting smallpox to the Americas. What has made the Mohammedan go crazy is the endless assault on his culture by Western culture.
The West not only needs to stop bombing the Muslims, but we also have to stop flooding their world with our culture. Western governments, especially the US, have to halt the export of Western culture to the Muslim world. Guys like Sergey Brin will fight it as he wants to control the world via Google, but maybe it is time for Sergey to take two in the hat anyway, but that is a post for another day. For now, the point is to halt the export of Western culture into Islamic countries via TV and Internet.
This also includes technology. What we fail to appreciate is how toxic Western technology is to these countries. They are not built for it. Our technology is like an infectious disease that seems harmless at first, maybe even beneficial, but then curdles into something that destroys the social fabric of these cultures. It is why we have observed initial periods of great progress, followed by a shift to tyranny and then total chaos. It is the pattern all over the Muslim world and the main driver is technology.
What happens is technology results in a material improvement in the lives of the people. They get better food, better medicine, better entertainments and better stuff. But then, this material improvement starts to disrupt the social arrangements and the ruling class uses the better technology to clamp down on dissent in very modern ways. As we see with the Turks, the result is authoritarianism. All over the Muslim world, the only stability comes either from despotism or backwardness.
Secular authoritarianism, however, sets off a counter-reaction where cultural elements begin to take on the secular authorities, the Islamic movements in the Middle East are not just religious in nature. They are counter arguments to Westernization. They are the response to tidal waves of foreign culture that are sweeping over Muslim lands. The West thinks it is helping by demanding democracy and shoving our values onto these people. Instead, we are creating fanatics who are dedicating themselves to fighting against what they see as an invasion.
Since this is going too long, let us summarize it this way. The solution to the West’s Islam problem is a version of containment. The goal is to keep the Muslims bottled up in their lands. Limit their access to the West physically, but l also limit their access culturally. Cut them off from our TV and the Internet. Let them drift back to their traditional ways, even if that means living in tents and riding camels. The Muslim Middle East needs to be a reservation for the Muslim. The only role of the West is to make sure they do not wander off the reservation.
The Ruling Elite
Sine the usual suspects began to control popular culture, the image of the ruling class has been the WASP. The caricature was of a horse faced, toothy guy named “Prescott” that liked to wear a tennis sweater draped over his shoulders. Alternatively, it was the old guy sitting in a leather chair at his club, reading the Financial Times while smoking a pipe and drinking brandy. The point of these caricatures was to highlight the ethnic and cultural divide between the people in charge and the rest of us.
Like all stereotypes, the origins of this are rooted in fact. For a long time, the ruling elite of America was WASP and somewhat inbred. A relatively small number of ruling clans out of New England ran government, finance and foreign affairs. The Brahmins were folks who traced their roots to the founding. They went to the best schools, knew the best people and accepted their duty as the caretakers of the nation. They were of course, almost always Episcopalian.
This is no longer reality in America. It remained a popular stereotype because it is comforting to people. The rulers are not there because they are better. They were born into it or they had connections that allowed them to gain access to power. The ethnics still carry on like the world is run by guys named Pemberton. Jews, of course, love this social construct and are endlessly reminding us that they were kept out of golf courses by the WASP elite.
Despite the mythologizing, the fact is we no longer have a WASP ruling class. The real ethnic nature of the ruling class in America is Jewish. As I pointed out in my Mokita post, Jews are smart and we live in an age when being smart counts for a lot. The stereotype of the Jewish banker or Jewish lawyer is obviously true. The titans of global finance are all Jewish guys. The US Supreme Court is 30% Jewish and Obama has a Jewish guy warming in the bullpen to replace Scalia.
The argument has always been that Jews dominated banking because of historic discrimination and that’s not entirely false. Catholic prohibitions against usury allowed Jews to dominate the lending business, but that does not explain why Hollywood has always been dominated by Jews. It does not explain why 30% of the Fortune 1000 are people of Jewish descent. Jews are one percent of the population, but represent 47% of major American sports team owners.
| Sport | #Owners | Jews | Blacks | Asian | Whites | Other |
| NBA | 51 | 34 | 3 | 1 | 12 | 1 |
| MLB | 30 | 10 | 0 | 0 | 17 | 3 |
| NHL | 32 | 15 | 0 | 1 | 14 | 2 |
| NFL | 32 | 10 | 0 | 1 | 20 | 1 |
| Total | 145 | 69 | 3 | 3 | 63 | 7 |
| 47.59% | 2.07% | 2.07% | 43.45% | 4.83% |
Ownership of sports teams is a great metric because it requires more than just money to own a team. You have to have connections in the elite. These sports leagues are clubs and they don’t just let anyone join. These are clubs for members of the American elite to show they are at the top. It’s the ultimate trophy for the most connected. The fact that close to half the people in sports ownership are Jewish is a reflection of the new American ruling class. It’s guys named Herb, not Prescott.
Despite this amazing dominance, Jews still act as if they are a put upon minority, scrambling to make a go of it in the teeth of ethnic hostility. The show Mad Men, from what I understand, is based on the myth that the Jews were kept out of advertising until last week. The guy that invented the ad business in America was a Jewish guy from Chicago back in the 1920’s. Then there is the whole golf club business that Steve Sailer writes about a lot.
It’s a powerful bit of mythology that probably works as motivation for young Jewish kids setting out in the world. Every ethnic group in America, except Germans and the English, has a similar sort of mythology. The Irish swear that their uncle Seamus was denied jobs because he was Irish. Italians claim they have been forever slandered by the whole Mafia thing. Poles work the Catholic angle. East Asians are quick to remind everyone about Fu Manchu and coolies.
Someone has to be the ruling elite in every society and having Jews in charge is probably not the worst choice. A ruling elite that nurses a grudge against the society over which it rules, because of past discrimination, sounds a lot like Syria where the Alawites angrily rule over Sunni majority. America is a not Syria, so there will not be a violent uprising against the ruler sect, but it does mean Jews will have to stop whining and accept their role as the ruling elite.
It also means that Americans will have rework their idea of the aristocrat. The Talmud is a best seller in South Korea because Koreans want to be successful so they are setting out to emulate the most successful ethnic group. Eventually, Americans will do the same thing. Instead of a striver changing his name to “Blake Ashcroft” and claiming Mayflower ancestry, the ambitious will change their name to Murray Goldblatt and claim Holocaust ancestry.
This is already happening at the fringes. Guys like John Podhoretz are constantly demanding to see Bar Mitzvah photos because they believe people are faking their Jewishness in order to gain access to the club. Whether or not people are “trying to pass” is tough to tell. Podhoretz is an evil little slug. He could just be trying to damage his betters in the community. Still, it is not far-fetched. There used to be a time when you had to prove you went to Choate before gaining access to the elite.
On the other hand, Jewish fertility rates in American are around 1.9, with the highest being among ultra-orthodox sects at 4.1. The Jews in charge are not breeding and it only takes a generation or two of these sorts of TFR’s before Jews in America begin to look like the Amish. Then there is the inevitable out-breeding and falling away from the faith that challenges all religious minorities. It is entirely possible that Jews in America are at their peak and are about to experience a slide into oblivion.
Father’s Day in the Ghetto
When you live in or near the ghetto, you cannot help but notice the fact that family life is nothing like it is out in Honkyville. Dave Chappelle used to do a bit on how his limo driver took him through the ghetto once and he saw a baby on the street corner selling weed at one in the morning. What made it funny is the truth of it. In the ghetto, you will see little kids running around at all hours. Seeing an unattended toddler standing on the corner is not common but seeing small children without their parents is not rare.
I was riding through a section 8 area on my bike once, it was mid-morning probably, and I saw a small kid standing next to a running car. The car had both doors open. The townhouse it was in front of also had the door wide open. Presumably, there was a mother inside, maybe watching the kid and the running car. I did not stick around long enough to get the answer, but I was not shocked by it. This is just a feature of the underclass, especially the black underclass.
Father’s Day around here is always a bit amusing because I imagine the black guys all looking for a place to hide, not entirely sure which kid is technically theirs and which baby momma is looking for them. It is terrible, but I blame Maury Povich for making me cynical about these things. That and the black illegitimacy rate in America is 75%. In the ghetto it is 100%. It is why today the local grocery store is staffed entirely by black people. Whites take off and blacks gladly pick up the extra shifts.
It was not always this way. Black illegitimacy was at 12% before the Civil Rights Movement. Social justice and the welfare state destroyed the black family. By the mid-60’s illegitimacy among blacks was in the 40’s and then exploded with the introduction of recreational drug use. On the one hand, you had young blacks destroying themselves with drugs. On the other hand, you had a warlord culture evolve around the sale and distribution of street drugs. Thug life is not family life.
In the ghetto, black people do not have any concept of fatherhood because no one grew up with a father. Often, the mothers do not even know who it was that knocked them up so the biological father does not even have a name. It is as if the women were impregnated by ghosts. As a result, the black underclass is entirely matriarchal to the point where men live separate lives. The better mothers hope their boys get out of the ghetto, but most just accept they will end up on the corner.
Hispanics have gone a different way with illegitimacy. All the blather about Hispanics being culturally conservative ignores the fact that 53% of Hispanic babies are born to unwed mothers. The difference here is that Hispanic males are not invisible. They stick around and try to take a role in child raising. They may not marry their baby-momma, but they at least make a token effort to take care of the babies. There is still a shame component that compels even the male to pretend to be a responsible father.
The underclass whites are a lot like the Hispanics in that regard. Dwayne may not have bothered to marry Brandy when he knocked her up, but little Randy will grow up knowing Dwayne is his daddy. This is just a carryover effect from when American culture served the needs of the lower classes by enforcing basic rules of conduct. There are still some poor whites around who remember when you did the right thing, but in a generation or two that will fade into the mists of time.
Jerry Springer Nation is the end point for all of it.
It does not have to be this way, of course. In fact, the current conditions are an anomaly in America. This is a new problem created by our betters over the last couple of generations. Bored with the post-war prosperity of the 50’s, they decided to experiment on the poor by blowing apart the traditional institutions that gave some structure to the lower classes. Nature does not dispense her gifts equally. Some in every generation, born with the right stuff, managed to climb out of the under-class.
That is nearly impossible now. Kids coming out of the tough neighborhoods in American cities never learn the basics of behaving in a civilized society. The schools do not bother teaching them much of anything. With no useful role models, even kids with something on the ball are condemned to life in the urban reservation. For boys that means crime and then the cemetery. The unlucky head off to prison. The girls are just baby mills and a conduit to send tax dollars into the ghetto, so white liberals can feel special.
There has never been a time when poverty was fun. It was always hard, but the promise of America was always that even the poorest had hope. “Behave, do the right thing, work hard and anyone can grow up to be president.” That promise has been rescinded by the black-hearted sadists who rule over us. In the future, the robot historians will puzzle over why Americans did not rise up and hang the bastards long before they could do so much damage. Every time I ride through the ghetto, I wonder the same thing.
The Reactionary Left
The word “reactionary” has become synonymous with the Right entirely due to the Left applying it to anyone they hate. The Left does not use it much anymore, as new abracadabra phrases have taken its place. Read radical writings of the 60’s and the word turns up all over the place. The claim is that the opponents of the Left are not working from a basis of facts and reason. Instead, they are merely reacting from emotion and therefore they can be dismissed.
It is why I tend to think the people embracing the label, calling themselves neo-reactionaries, are making a critical mistake. They are dismissing their own thoughts as nothing more than a hysterical reaction to the prevailing liberal orthodoxy. That is not their intention. They are reaching back to an older definition, but that is not how anyone outside their movement is going to take it. Like it or not, the Left controls the language, or at least they have for a long time, so they get to define the terms.
It is just another example of the dominance of the Cult of Modern Liberalism in American life. Everything, even the thoughts of its adversaries, has been warped by it. Vast bits of history have either been lost or retconned to the point where they tell a story in direct contradiction to the facts. The reactionaries used to be the people in charge, facing down the rebels of the radical Left. Today, reactionary conjures an image of a thoughtless old man unwilling to change with the times.
Thinking of the Left as the establishment is hard because the narrative of the Left always features them as the plucky underdog, facing off against the reactionary philistine. The concept of the struggle is integral to the creation myths of liberalism, as well as to the ongoing narrative of the faith. Like all cults, Liberalism can function without a leader, but it must always have a devil. As a result, even the harshest of critics can be forgiven for failing to appreciate the Left’s hold on society.
This altered reality obscures the fact that as an intellectual construct, the Progressive project in America has collapsed. That is evident in the Democratic primary for President. Bernie Sanders ran on the old time theme of economic equality and sounded like a stock character from the 1950’s filmstrip on the Red Menace. It was not what he said, but how ridiculously out of place it sounded compared to modern Progressive rhetoric.
Clinton, in contrast, chants the slogans of identity politics, which are all just in-group signaling. Her campaign to run as a slightly-out-of-the-closet lesbian is what liberalism is today. Talk to a modern liberal and ask them why they are supporting Clinton. Most likely they will change the subject, saying something about Trump. Otherwise, you get a shrug because they do not know. It is just what they do. It is what they are supposed to do.
Something else that has been obscured by the howling from the Left is that it is an entirely reactionary movement now. With nothing to offer a modern technocratic society, other than a post-modern form of nostalgia for the glory days of the Cult, the Left is mostly focused on stamping out bogeymen, real and imaginary, past and present. Listen to a liberal today and what you hear is a litany of things they oppose and those things are more often than not fictional.
It is why the college campus is so weird now. They are dominated by liberal women and minorities, yet they are engaged in endless witch hunts for dangerous white males. The Rolling Stone rape hoax featured a guy named Haven Monahan, a name intended to conjure an image of a toothy, horse faced WASP brimming with entitlement. College has become live action role playing for paranoid Progressives, with the quests set as morality tales based on Progressive piety.
It is what critics of Obama miss when railing about his refusal to say, “radical Islam.” They assume it belies a hidden agenda or a naive ignorance. It is neither. Obama is a reactionary. Whatever his adversaries are for, he is against. His reactionary instincts are mostly just a moldy form of anti-colonialism that was popular with his parent’s generation, but still exists in Afrocentric circles. Obama is defined by what he hates, not what he loves.
It is why his first act as President was to have the bust of Churchill removed. African anti-colonials hated Churchill, seeing him as the symbol of British imperialism. Right out of the gate, Obama was showing us he was a man defined by his hatreds. He was for nothing and against just about everything. In this regard, he is the quintessential reactionary. His only interest is in maintaining the Progressive order. Whether or not it is good for the country is irrelevant.
The entirely of Obama’s presidency can be explained in the reactionary framework. Like most successful blacks in America, he is consumed with a hatred for whites so a lot of what he does is just spite against the honkies. The more substantive acts read like a laundry list of Progressive revenge fantasies. His rapprochement with Russia was styled to be a rebuke of Reaganism, not a diplomatic strategy. It is why it failed. After the point was made, he and his flunkies laughed and move onto other topics.
The big health care push was never about health care. Instead, it was about revisiting the liberal defeat in the early 90’s. That is why it quickly devolved into score settling over issues like abortion and religious liberty. The Left has not the foggiest idea how to reform health care and they are not interested in it. They just wanted to exact some revenge against Christians and the middle-class. The point of that is to remind everyone they are in charge and it is the natural order.
Obama’s refusal to take obvious steps to address the Muslim problem is just a form of trolling. He knows it pisses off the squares and that is why he does it. It is not that he is a secret Muslim or that he has a secret agenda of some sort. The truth is the opposite. He as no plans and not interest in forming a plan. What consumes him is poking a stick in the eye of the people he detests, which so happens to be normal Americans. In this regard, he is our first foreign President, but he mostly just a reactionary President.
Ultimately, reaction cannot exist as an intellectual force on its own, as a simple matter of logic. Just as Buckley Conservatism curdled into a weird Corporate Libertarianism without the menace of Soviet communism, the Left has evolved in reaction to the void where it is old enemy once existed. The radical project was always based on the assumption of scarcity, a zero sum game where some had extra and some went without. It is why communist states never try to arrest scarcity. They need to survive.
Today, no one goes without, as a practical matter. It may be an illusion build on credit money, but a whole generation has grown up with too much of everything. When the poor are suffering from obesity, scarcity is no longer a problem. Instead of promising a future where poverty and inequality are banished, the Left is now a paranoid power cult lashing out indiscriminately in a vain quest to hold power. They are like meth addicts fighting the imaginary spiders, except they wield real power and do real damage.
America, like the rest of the West is entering a crisis of legitimacy due largely to the fact the Left decimated the intellectual battlefield. In the zeal to pull down all competing social constructs, they forgot to build one of their own that can hold up in a modern technological society. What passes for mainstream moral philosophy today is a vast moonscape littered with the remnants of old ideas. The Left is reduced to settling old scores and lashing out at imaginary bogeymen. This is the age of Liberal Reaction.