Category Archives: Culture

To the Gas Chambers!

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Most men grow out of libertarianism, if they were ever so foolish, by their mid-20’s. It is at that age when you have enough experience in the world to see the foolishness of it. It takes longer for the young Progressive male to wake up because of the cultural reinforcements all around us. We live in lands controlled by the Cult of Modern Liberalism. To be something other than a Progressive tests the mind on a daily basis.

I’m fond of pointing out that liberalism and libertarianism are two sides of the same coin. People find that assertion bizarre, but both are utopian and both start with a hatred of humanity. That is the heart of materialism, after all. Materialism places efficency at the top of the moral hierarchy and people somewhere further down. The main difference between the faiths is the the liberal hates all men equally, while the libertarian simply detests the unfit.

This is on full display in this column by Kevin Williamson. The style is familiar where the curdled hatred of humanity is couched in an ad hoc critique of the bogeymen that haunt the dreams of reactionaries and libertarians alike. There’s also the standard layer of free market frosting about the glories of free trade and the free movement of people. It’s the part we’re supposed to notice, rather than the sadistic misanthropy at the core of the article.

Phillips, Inc., in the end decided it had no need for Phillips, Texas, and the town was scrubbed right off the map. The local homeowners owned their houses but not the land they sat on, which belonged to the company. (These sorts of arrangements were, and are, more common than you’d think, as in the case of the many Californians in the Coachella Valley who own their houses but lease their land from the Agua Caliente band of Cahuilla Indians.) Many of the residents of Phillips were uneager to be evicted from their homes, and they sued the company with the help of the famously theatrical Texas trial lawyer Racehorse Haynes, who informed the good people of Phillips: “They might whup us fair and square, but they better bring lunch.” Lunch was served, and Phillips is just gone.
It was the right thing to do. Some towns are better off dead.

That’s always been the truth at the heart of libertarianism, as well as the various implementations of Rousseau’s monstrous ideas. Libertarians have always imagined themselves as trapped with a bunch of fat lazy takers. Lacking the courage to confront the slackers themselves, they seek a system that will do the dirty work for them. Liberals have this same view. They see themselves as the saints of a fallen world and their system will take care of all those sinners.

Way back in the olden thymes, Whittaker Chambers unriddled this connection in his review of Ayn Rand.

Systems of philosophic materialism, so long as they merely circle outside this world’s atmosphere, matter little to most of us. The trouble is that they keep coming down to earth. It is when a system of materialist ideas presumes to give positive answers to real problems of our real life that mischief starts. In a age like ours, in which a highly complex technological society is everywhere in a high state of instability, such answers however philosophic, translate quickly into political realities. And in the degree to which problems of complexity and instability are most bewildering to masses of men, a temptation sets in to let some species of Big Brother solve and supervise them.

The liberal and the libertarian look at the messy arrangements of mankind and wish to clean the slate and start anew, because to work through the current arrangements is dirty and time consuming. One does not seek to alter the current arrangements out of a love or respect for the current arrangements. All utopians first aim to destroy and that is done best with a passion, which can only arise from contempt.

That’s what bleeds from Kevin Williamson’s writing. He looks at the “losers” in America with contempt. Some towns are better off dead. My guess is he thought that was a cheeky line, as he tends to the adolescent, but maybe he did think much about it. As Chambers noticed, libertarians are not full of introspection.

Nor has the author, apparently, brooded on the degree to which, in a wicked world, a materialism of the Right and a materialism of the Left, first surprisingly resemble, then in action tend to blend each with each, because, while differing at the top in avowed purposed, and possibly in conflict there, at bottom they are much the same thing. The embarrassing similarities between Hitler’s National Socialism and Stalin’s brand of Communism are familiar. For the world, as seen in materialist view from the Left. The question becomes chiefly: who is to run that world in whose interests, or perhaps, at best, who can run it more efficiently?

That last line sounds remarkably like Lenin’s adage, “who, whom?”

A Post Defending Matt Damon

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If you have lived in one of the Left’s strongholds for any amount of time, you learn how to navigate around your local moonbats so as to avoid the harangue about whatever it is they are into at the moment. A decade ago when they started vibrating in ecstasy over homo marriage, the safe course was to say, “Let ’em be as miserable as the rest of us!” Then you could walk away without having to listen to the sermon.

Libertarians have built an entire philosophy around avoiding contact with the enemy. Gay marriage? They are against marriage licenses! Immigration? They are against borders! Whatever the issue, they always have some third implausible option they champion so everyone can ignore them. In the culture wars that have roiled the nation over the last fifty years, libertarians have been hiding under their beds.

Anyway, that may be a fine way to avoid conflict, but it makes public discourse impossible. A good example of it is in this screed about Matt Damon in America’s newspaper of record.

Matt Damon is an insufferable jerk. You know it. I know it. Rupert Everett most certainly does.

The Hollywood liberal (read: smug hypocrite) has interrupted the outer-space high surrounding Friday’s release of his Oscar-bait star turn, “The Martian,” to conduct a parallel “I’m Not a Homophobe” tour. But it’s only driving him deeper into the quicksand with LGBTQ types and those, like me, who couldn’t care less whom a performer loves. It’s 2015, Matt. Get over yourself!

He should grovel. GLAAD should dedicate a lecture series to him.

He should shut the hell up.

I’m betting that Andrea Peyser would care a lot if a celeb was found to be “loving” a sheep or a little boy. This affected indifference when it comes to homosexuals is exactly that, artificial. To have an opinion about homosexuals, other than the enthusiastic embrace, means you are evil, maybe even Hitler. If you can’t stomach being Hitler or you cannot embrace sodomy, then you choose the third option, which is to stand on the sidelines and pretend you do so on principle.

Now, Matt Damon is a lunk head and he says batty things. That just makes him a typical Hollywood performer. He’s in a business dominated by gay men so he is courting trouble by speaking publicly about the queers. He could stand up and say all Christians are Nazi pedophiles and his peers would applaud. Appear less than enthusiastic about buggery and you get to bunk with Mel Gibson. Shutting up is probably the best path for him to take.

If you want to live in some version of Iran, ceding the floor to the fanatics is a good way to do it. That is where we are headed. As the space for honest disagreement grows smaller, the number of people willing to risk getting the Hitler treatment grows smaller. Before long the only people left on stage are the guys with the clubs. Andrea Peyser’s admonition, “He should just shut up” becomes a way a life.

The Red Pill Revolution

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I’ve been fond of the red pill-blue pill formulation to describe what is happening with non-liberals in America. It’s popular with the hobbits of the Dark Enlightenment so I never use the terminology, but it is a good way to describe what is happening. It’s not disillusionment. That’s just a precursor to a healthy cynicism. What we’re seeing today is more of an awakening, where people suddenly confront a truth they used to think was nonsense.

It’s popular to compare the Trump surge with the Perot surge, blaming it on populist anger, which is another way of saying the losers are making a racket. That’s the George Will and Charles Krapphammer view of things. Both have been ranting and raving about this on Fox for a few months now. That’s an easy temptation and even easier when you get paid to mail in bite sized commentary for an hour each night. As Buchanan used to say, they have gone native.

Anyway, the thing people forget about Perot is he started as a third party guy, even though he had a special hatred of Bush. His campaign was never a fight within the GOP. That fight happened with the Buchanan challenge of Bush in the primary. Trump is starting as a Republican and while not making his campaign about challenging the GOP power structure, that’s how people are responding to it. If Trump were running as a third party candidate right now, no one would care.

Another big difference in this cycle is the Democrats are not desperate to win like they were in 1992. They were also going through a reform effort of their own in the Bush years. The DLC emerged as the “New Democrats” promising to drag the party to the center. That’s how Bill Clinton grifted his way to the nomination. The desperate could overlook his vulgarity and the reformers could overlook his near total lack of a moral compass. Everyone in the Democrat side just wanted to win.

It’s tempting to credit the Sanders surge as merely a late reaction to Clinton, who is about as appealing as rectal cancer. Even her friends describe her as a moral nullity so there’s room for a not-Clinton in the primary. That’s not what’s going on though, as Sanders has tapped into some of the things we’re seeing on the GOP side. One is immigration and the other is economic nationalism.

Sanders is pretty good on the national question, to the horror of liberal elites. He’s also an economic nationalist, a reminder to many Democratic voters that the party used to be about the working man. Within living memory, Democrats championed the middle and working classes, while today’s liberal is the champion of deadbeats, weirdos and corporatist plutocrats. A lot of Democrat voters are pissed at what has happened with their party and they are flocking to Sanders.

I think the biggest difference here is the role of the media. The primaries were over by the time Perot started talking about a run. It was the summer of 1992 when he became a story and started building a campaign. The press filled the summer promoting Perot because they wanted an interesting story. He was treated like a rock star, just about living on CNN. Eventually, Perot’s nuttiness was the better story and the press started making sport of him.

In contrast, the media has been hostile to Trump from the start. The Conservative media has been a mix of mocking, insulting and incredulous. This column by George Will is revelatory:

He is an affront to anyone devoted to the project William F. Buckley began six decades ago with the founding in 1955 of the National Review — making conservatism intellectually respectable and politically palatable. Buckley’s legacy is being betrayed by invertebrate conservatives now saying that although Trump “goes too far,” he has “tapped into something,” and therefore. . . .

Will starts out by asserting that conservatism was not always “intellectually respectable and politically palatable” and then he calls anyone not scandalized by Trump a subhuman. At least he did not demand they be shoved into ovens. He later goes on to say that a political party has a duty to defend its borders. This from a man who is an open borders fanatic. If you are a normal person who considers themselves a patriotic conservative, how can you not root for Trump over a man calling you a scumbag?

This where the red pill – blue pill concept comes in. Fox and the conservative media have been walking around thinking they are the authentic tribunes of the people. They truly thought they would be heroes to the cause by taking out Trump in the debate. Instead of their viewers throwing rotten cabbages at Trump, they were chucking them at Fox. Watching these folks, it’s clear they are off-balance and they don’t know what’s happening to them.

Unlike the Perot phenomenon, the Trump wave is as much about the general disgust with Conservative Inc. and the mainstream media as it is about populist outrage. A lot of people have started to figure out that Fox is there to move product and sell GOP Inc. to the gullible people on the Right. These are people who signed onto the Tea Party, but have been radicalized by the GOP’s efforts to marginalize them.

The reformer wants to save things. The revolutionary wants to destroy. Perot was leading a reform movement. Trump is leading a revolution, whether he knows it or not. Maybe that’s why guys like George Will are suddenly incontinent over Trump. Maybe they sense the danger. It’s hard to know, but the antics of guys like Erick Erickson are just throwing logs on the fire. Once you take the red pill, you cannot untake it so things will never be the same now that revolution is in the air.

Ramblings on Race, Racism and Race Realism

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If you live around a lot of diversity, you learn how to recognize others who live around a lot of diversity. It’s like the difference between the world traveler and the provincial who never left home. The change in perspective results in a change in demeanor. I’m comfortable in alien places because I’ve been around a lot of people not like me on a daily basis for a long time. I just don’t think it is strange to be the guy who sticks out like a sore thumb.

One of the things you learn when you spend a lot of time around non-whites is that not all white people are the same. That sounds odd, but it works like this. You get to know a lot of “Hispanics” for example and you quickly see that they are not a singular race and they often don’t speak the same language. Guatemalans are a different breed of cat from Cubans or Dominicans or Mexicans from El Norte. Lumping all these people into the bucket called “Hispanic” is mostly worthless.

That revelation leads to rethinking what it means to be white, black or Asian. Italians and Spaniards are called white, but they are not Germans or Swedes. Travel around America and you see that a place like Indiana is part Yankee New England and part Appalachian hick. The term “Hoosier”, by the way, was an insult for Virginia hillbillies. Head a few clicks north and you are into a different population of honkies altogether.

From an anthropological perspective, the old categories of race are falling apart. If you read Nick Wade’s book A Troublesome Inheritance, it becomes rather clear that race classifications based on skin tone don’t hold up. It’s better to think of people as belonging to large extended families. There’s lots of cross pollination between these large extended families, but at the edges where they interface. Swedes share a lot with Germans, but very little with Bantus.

The fact is, skin, eye and hair color are just one part of it. There are character differences that are just as rooted in biology as skin color. Those character and personality traits impact culture, which in turn has impacted biology. This article by Peter Frost is a great explanation of how biology, culture and environment work on one another simultaneously. Swedes are built for a culture built for the environment of Sweden, which is different from the Bantus, who were built for a culture built for flourishing in Africa.

The trouble with discussing any of this is that there’s a another part of the puzzle. Humans are built to distrust those who are not their kind. While it is as natural as left handedness, our culture eschews anything that even hints at racism. This is not illogical as we in the West live in multi-ethnic societies. Keeping the peace means suppressing the instinct to not like the “other” or the foreign. The argument from race realists is that you can take this too far and when you do the results are worse than naked racism.

I have no way of knowing if that is true, but I think it is probably time for people calling themselves “race realists” to simply drop the term in favor of something more biologically correct and less provocative. I’ll refer to myself as a biological realist, for example, because I think you cannot overcome biology with wishful thinking. This has the added benefit of handling the feminist lunacies.

“Fixing the schools” is a waste of time because 80% of education is the IQ and character of the student. Another 10% is family life and the rest is the community in which the school exists. Maybe the school has 2% of an impact and I may be generous here. Put the ghetto boys into a nice prep school, but somehow maintain the ghetto home and community life, and you get the same result as you get from the local public school. Maybe one or two end up better than otherwise.

Similarly, the people who left the Borderlands of England for the New World ended up in Appalachia. They recreated their culture from home, without the interference of the Crown. When those people migrated into the Midwest, they recreated their mountain culture in the new lands. Southern Illinois is not like West Virginia by accident. There’s a strong Scandinavian flavor to the upper Midwest for a reason.

It’s why America can never be a land dominated by a central government imposing a universal culture on the whole nation. The differences are simply too big between the people of Vermont and the people of Texas. No amount of hooting and bellowing from Progressive loons will change biology and culture. It’s another area where biological realism could gain some traction. You can shame the Yankee busy-body out of trying to impose his values on the world. Mention race and he loses the ability to feel shame.

That’s why HBD and race realist people need to free themselves from the plain old racists. The people attracted to your movement for the racism are mostly idiots who will cause you nothing but trouble. That and white nationalism is about the dumbest thing going, given the ethnic and cultural diversity among people who call Europe their ancestral home. The crackers from the hills have as much in common with the German low-landers as they do with Arabs.

That said, it’s probably easier said than done. Saying you don’t like black culture is fine, but most people will call you a racist, even if you are married to a black person or are actually black. Racism used to be an action. Then it became words, then thoughts and is quickly becoming a lack of enthusiasm. If you are not enthusiastic enough in your praise for non-whites, you’re called a bigot.

Thinking about it, the image that comes to mind is of a train slamming into a mountain. Whatever distance and uniqueness there is between the cars, the collision eliminates it, leaving a pile of twisted metal. That’s what has happened with public discussion of anything that relates to ethnicity. It’s slammed into the wall of Cultural Marxism and you can no longer tell the racist crackpots from the Progressive loons.

ISIS and the West

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The rise of fundamentalist Islam has perplexed and outraged the West for a few decades now. The prophesies all said the brown people would rejoice when the good thinkers welcomed Islam into the West. Instead, the muzzies have gone bonkers, rejecting the West and retreating into a medieval philosophy that rejects everything the West believes about the world.

I thought about that while reading this book review in the New York Review of Books. Why it is written by “anonymous” is a mystery to me. Maybe the Economist style is coming to America. It always seem to me that the propaganda arm of the custodial state should use that style. That way it is hard for the masses to dismiss the lectures. Anyway, the article is worth reading, but this bit is what got my attention:

The thinkers, tacticians, soldiers, and leaders of the movement we know as ISIS are not great strategists; their policies are often haphazard, reckless, even preposterous; regardless of whether their government is, as some argue, skillful, or as others imply, hapless, it is not delivering genuine economic growth or sustainable social justice. The theology, principles, and ethics of the ISIS leaders are neither robust nor defensible. Our analytical spade hits bedrock very fast.

I’m highlighting that bit as there was a time when using the phrase “social justice” would get you laughed out of most rooms. Even lefty outposts like the New York Review of Books would flinch at that phrase. That’s because everyone knew it was a ridiculous idea, held only by the naive and stupid. Today, “everyone knows” the point of government is social justice. Go figure.

Interestingly, the “genuine economic growth” line has crossed the street in my life as well. There was a time when only black-hearted right wingers talked about economic growth. Decent people understood that there was much more to life than money. Now, even the most fanatical Progressives thinks that every tree must grow to the sky, no matter what.

I have often been tempted to argue that we simply need more and better information. But that is to underestimate the alien and bewildering nature of this phenomenon. To take only one example, five years ago not even the most austere Salafi theorists advocated the reintroduction of slavery; but ISIS has in fact imposed it. Nothing since the triumph of the Vandals in Roman North Africa has seemed so sudden, incomprehensible, and difficult to reverse as the rise of ISIS. None of our analysts, soldiers, diplomats, intelligence officers, politicians, or journalists has yet produced an explanation rich enough—even in hindsight—to have predicted the movement’s rise.

I’ve argued often that American Progressive faith has a lot in common with Islam. Some of my comparisons are meant to be snarky, but there’s a lot of points of comparison. One area is the inward looking nature of the two faiths. Progressives fixate on communal salvation in the same way Muslims do, the two just have different ends.

The main difference is that Islam knows a lot about the West. Most people don’t know that Islam was the the center of intellectual life before the Mongols came calling. The Sack of Baghdad in 1258 is viewed as the point at which Islam fell behind the West and the East culturally. Muslim Arabs are well aware of this, having grown up in the shadow of the West, often living in the West.

We hide this from ourselves with theories and concepts that do not bear deep examination. And we will not remedy this simply through the accumulation of more facts. It is not clear whether our culture can ever develop sufficient knowledge, rigor, imagination, and humility to grasp the phenomenon of ISIS. But for now, we should admit that we are not only horrified but baffled.

I’ve come to think of Progressives as the decedents¹ of the Puritans for a number of reasons. The one reason important here is the inward looking nature of both Puritan and Progressive culture. The Puritans saw salvation as a community activity. Internal discipline and cohesion were paramount so they focused on it exclusively. A certain studied ignorance of the outside world was critical to maintain discipline. That’s a Progressive quality as well.

The result is the people in charge not only misunderstand the world beyond their understanding, they have no way of understanding it. To understand the draw of Islam to young Arabs, you need to consider the possibility that life in the West is not on the road to paradise. You also have to contemplate the possibility that there are many ways to be happy as a people.

The innate intolerance of Progressives prohibits this sort of speculation. There’s also the deep rooted belief that bad things happen to God’s people when those people fail in their duty as God’s servants. That means 9/11 was America’s fault for not abiding by the Progressive virtues. The rise of ISIS was due to bad US policy in the region (Bush). The muzzies lack agency of their own so they are not blamed.

That’s why Progressives are so vexed with ISIS. President Obama, peace be upon him, has been running policy in the region for a long time. Everything has been done properly and yet these people hate us as much, if not more, than they did in the Bush years. Their “analytical spade” hits bedrock very fast because it does not exist. They have not thought for a second that the Muslims could have a point of two to make.
¹Yes, that is on purpose.

Post-Christian West

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On this day 1374 years ago, give or take, A Northumbrian army assembled on a field in the West Midlands, which is on the west (left) side of England. North Umbria was in the northern most territory of England, bordering Scotland. Their leader was a man named Oswald and he was the king of Bernicia. He was the most powerful king on the island, the Bretwalda, and the man often credited with the Christianizing the north of England.

On the other side was King Penda of Mercia, one of the other kings of the heptarchy. Mercia covered the area that is now called the Midlands, which is conveniently located in the middle of England. Penda was a pagan, the last pagan king of England. Mercia was not very powerful, but they stood in the way of Oswald dominating the south, so they were a natural target for the Northumbrians.

On the day of the battle, Oswald, no doubt, stood before his men and prayed to the new God for victory over their pagan enemies. The custom of the age was to promise gifts to the Church and maybe a daughter or son to the Church in exchange for victory. This was one of the many pagan habits the Church tolerated in order to bring the people slowly into the Church.

On the other side, Penda most certainly made offerings to the old gods, along with promises of additional sacrifices if they were victorious. The origins of King Penda are a bit murky, but we do know he was a pagan, and the pagan faith of Britain was Wodenism. It most likely came over with the Saxons and there’s some evidence that Penda was a Saxon.

The Battle of Maserfield probably lasted just a short while. The “armies” of the day were warbands under the command of an Althing or head chief. No one really knows, but the consensus is that armies were at most a few thousand men and probably numbered in the hundreds. In the end, Penda was victorious. Bede describes the outcome as a field made white with the bones of the saints. Oswald, when the battle was lost, is claimed to have knelt and prayed for the souls of his soldiers. Penda had him chopped into pieces and displayed on stakes.

If you were alive at the time, particularly if you were a Mercian, you probably thought Christianity was on the run and the old gods were reasserting their dominion. Certainly, Christians had their doubts. But, a dozen years later Oswald’s brother killed Penda at the Battle of Winwaed and a dozen years after that Oswiu presided over the Synod of Whitby where the secular and Christian authorities codified Christianity for the whole of England, including Mercia.

The point of this blast from the past is to illustrate how the culture can seem to shift very quickly. Even in the slow moving medieval period, a nation could switch religions within a generation. One day you’re helping your father burn the Christian missionary, the next day your son is packing wood under your pagan feet at the behest of the local priest. In a world where the religion of the king is the religion of the people, things can change quickly.

A little closer to our time is the matter of homosexual marriage. In the US, as is usually the case, the rulers impose their fads on the people through the mockery of the court system. That makes it easier for the people to pretend they are a conservative people with a liberal government. The reality is Christianity is dead in America so the people in charge know they will face no resistance.

In Ireland, a place to played up by Hollywood as an austere Catholic country, the people rushed to the polls to vote for homosexual marriage. It’s not that they really cared about the gays or that they were smiting the Church. They simply stopped being Catholic. In 1990, 80% of the people went to church each week. Today it is half that number so voting for homosexual marriage was just what the cool kids were doing.

The point here is that what you see happening today is a lot like what happened with the spread of Christianity through Europe. It was slow and proceeded in fits and starts. Early Christianity in Britain, for example, was hilarious due to the heavy drinking and fornicating of the priests. The commoners could hardly be held to account by such men, at least on moral issues. Over time, a critical mass of true believers gained the upper hand and Christianity became a defining force in English life.

That’s what we’re seeing with the New Religion. It’s not ready to wipe Christianity out completely. It’s simply too ridiculous to be taken seriously by enough people. But it is making steady progress. If you look at this post from a blogger with a name that is too hard to spell, what you see is the steady erosion of Christianity in America. A third of people under 30 have “no religious affiliation” which means they are not Christian.

About half the country does not attend church at all. In New England, the home of liberal fanaticism, church attendance has collapsed, now resembling Europe. The number of church closings in America suggests that self-reporting of church attendance is wildly inflated. Even in the South, which has always been the most religious part of the country, there’s been a decline in church attendance.

The Battle of Maserfield seemed to stall or even possible signal a rollback of Christianity, but it was just a blip. Similarly, the eradication of Christianity by people of the New Religion has stalled from time to time, but it is winning and will win in time. Today Christians are stripped of their property for disobeying homosexuals. In a generation they will be banned from public. Like Wodenism, Christianity will be a weird part of the past for future generations.

Roundheads Versus the Cavaliers

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A central thesis of mine and a reason for this blog to exist is that most of America is entirely clueless as to why the 20% are making war on them. The daily assaults on the Four Olds by the Cult of Modern Liberalism is like a swarm of bees attacking from all directions. Logically, you know the numbers are small, but it feels like there are so many of them.

Jonah Goldberg wrote a book called Liberal Fascism a few years back. In it he documents how both American Liberalism and European Fascism share intellectual roots and how early Progressives borrowed from the Italian Fascists. There’s nothing new in the book, but it is a nice summary of the topic. Goldberg had to pull his punches, of course, given his career choice. Calling your employers fascists is never a good idea.

The trouble with so much of the analysis of the Left by the so-called Right is that it starts when their people arrived in America. It is a default assumption of “immigrant America” that the wave of Europeans that arrived at the end of the 19th and early 20 century forever reconfigured American culture. The story of America for them begins in the Jewish, Italian and Irish ghettos of New York, cutting off the 200-plus years of history that still defines the country.

If you read the Dissident Right, a common theme is the Cold Civil War between one group of whites (Progressives) and the other group of whites (Traditionalists). The assumption, and probably an accurate one, is that this term refers to the American Civil War. My guess is most people who think of the culture war this way are referring to the American Civil War. That event looms so large in the imaginations of the political elites, it is a reasonable way to start.

I would contend that the better place to start is the English Civil War, the fight between the Roundheads and the Cavaliers, the Parliamentarians versus the Royalists. The people that settled New England were English, who were on the side of the Roundheads. Some actually fought in Cromwell’s army. They also came from specific areas of England, thus having customs particular to that area, which they brought with them to the New World.

The other big colony founded at the time was the Tidewater area around the Chesapeake. The men who founded and developed Virginia and North Carolina were men of high birth and they created the sort of society you would expect from such men. The colonies of the Deep South were founded by plantation owners from Barbados. They not only shared the same sensibilities as the Tidewater gentry, they were also Royalists.

Just as the two sides of the English Civil War had a different political and religious vision, they had a different social vision. This was true of the American colonies. The Yankee world was one that was highly egalitarian and defined political liberty in terms of community freedom. The South was hierarchical, defining liberty as that of the gentry and their freedom as a ruling class.

The bigger divide was in their social views. Males in a Cavalier society were going to be what you imagine. Status was conferred on those who showed courage, daring and risk taking. In a Puritan society, males attained status through the sorts of things a highly egalitarian and fanatically religious people value. Instead of flamboyance, it was competence and community spirit that were the key to status.

This standoff between the New Model Army and the high risk cavalry charge is with us today. The assault on white males is not about race as much as it is about the concept of masculinity. This insane article from Salon gets at what I mean.

Toxic white masculinity defaults to violence as a means of maintaining social and political control. It clings to guns as a symbol of “real” male identity. It fears women as equals; it lashes out at non-whites who are somehow “stealing” white men’s jobs and power. Toxic white masculinity sees “liberals,” “progressives,” “social justice,” and “feminism” as enemies — out of a fear that “white masculinity” will somehow be made obsolete or extinct. The dream worlds and paranoid fantasies of angry white men are distractions that look to some type of Other as the preeminent threat to America’s safety and security. The reality is of course, very different.

There’s the old Roundhead versus Cavalier fight. The Progressive crazies making war on white males today are the spiritual descendents of those Roundheads, who executed King Charles. It’s not a political or cultural issue as much as it is a spiritual issue. The modern Progressive sees the flamboyant brash male as a threat to the spiritual well being of the community. In the Puritan tradition, men are humble, competent and risk adverse, as God expects from the elect.

Another Puritan attribute comes into play here and that’s a fanatic’s sense of obligation to enforce their ways on everyone else. The Puritans believed they were chosen by God to protect the common good through maintaining internal conformity and unity. When John Adams won the Presidency after Washington retired, he immediately set about enforcing Puritan culture on the rest of the country.

The Alien and Sedition Acts are exactly the sorts of laws you expect from religious fanatics. Modern Iranians or Saudis would perfectly understand the point. On the one hand Puritans wanted to keep foreigners from bringing foreign ideas, by forcing them to assimilate – or else. On the other hand, they wanted to stamp out dissent, particularly from those Cavalier males to their south.

Our Fascist Age

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One the stranger things about the Nazis was their opposition to chain and department stores. Anti-capitalist elements of the party pushed through special taxes on department stores and organized boycotts against the larger retail stores. It was not just Jewish business which came in for these assaults. Large industrial concerns were also attacked by elements in the party who wanted a return to the guild system of their imaginary past.

The Nazis had a lot of nutty ideas about all sorts of things, but they figured out that letting the populists run wild would result in economic chaos so they eventually adopted the ideas of other fascists, namely corporatism. The Nazis were never an intellectually rigorous bunch so it is no surprise that they were not very coherent when it came to economics, but they eventually fell into corporatism, which had been kicking around Europe since the 19th century.

The interesting thing is the Nazis had a romantic view of small business that was integral to their worldview. Yet, once they embraced corporatism, they turned on small business quickly. In 1936 they closed 36,000 small businesses and in 1937 they closed another 63,000. The reason was simply that they thought there were too many small businesses and that complicated their larger economic plans. In other words, the corporate state transcended everything, even ideology.

It’s something to keep in mind as America embraces the corporate state, combining it with the technological state. This interesting piece in 538 a while back provides some useful numbers to understand how this is unfolding.

Talk to anyone in Silicon Valley these days, and it’s hard to go more than two minutes without hearing about “disruption.” Uber is disrupting the taxi business. Airbnb is disrupting the hotel business. Apple’s iTunes disrupted the music industry, but now risks being disrupted by Spotify. Listen long enough, and it’s hard not to conclude that existing companies, no matter how big and powerful, are all but doomed, marking time until their inevitable overthrow by hoodie-wearing innovators.

In fact, the opposite is true. By a wide range of measures, the advantages of incumbency in corporate America have never been greater. “The business sector of the United States,” economists Ian Hathaway and Robert Litan wrote in a recent Brookings Institution paper, “appears to be getting ‘old and fat.’”1

Hathaway and Litan say the trend is worrisome, and other economists who have studied the issue agree. Entrepreneurship is a critical source of jobs in the economy. Perhaps even more importantly, it is a major driver of productivity growth. New companies, after all, often arise from an idea about how to do something better, whether it’s making cars or brewing coffee. Many of those ideas fail to pan out, but the ones that work can change entire industries — can be, in other words, “disruptive.”2

But recent research suggests that established businesses have less and less to fear from would-be disruptors. This is partly because, as I noted this spring, fewer Americans are launching businesses. In the late 1970s, according to data from the Census Bureau, 15 percent of all U.S. businesses were startups, meaning they had been founded in the past year. In 2011, the latest data available, the so-called startup rate had fallen to 8 percent. Measured in terms of employment, the drop has been even steeper.

But the issue isn’t just that there are fewer startups. It’s also that fewer of them are succeeding. In 2011, more than 27 percent of new companies went out of business in their first year, up from about 20 percent two decades earlier.3 Even companies that do make it to their first birthday are failing at higher rates than in the past, though that trend is more recent and hasn’t been as steady. The only groups of companies that haven’t seen their failure rate rise meaningfully, Hathaway and Litan found, were ones that had been in business more than 15 years.

Part of what’s happening is driven by ultra-low interest rates. Big companies can raise enormous amounts of cheap capital. That lowers risk so big business can be hyper aggressive with pricing to wipe out small competitors. It also means they can buy up small competitors. When money costs 10 points you have to buy companies at below market. When money costs two points you can buy above market.

There’s also the matter of access. Not far from where I live WalMart opened a giant store near a busy retail area. The state widened the road, put in some lights and added an extra lane for traffic entering the store parking area. A few clicks down the road a local business has been fighting zoning battles for a year trying to expand into the vacant lot next door. So far it has taken him more time to fight the zoning board than it took Walmart to built their store.

WalMart has an army of lawyers and lobbyists. They can grease all the palms that need to be greased and do so with a sophistication the local guy cannot match. The local guy pays more in taxes than WalMart, but he can’t offer no show jobs and other perks pols can hand out to their people. In the corporate state, the small business man is a nuisance, not an asset.

Something new to our time is the technological revolution. In Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, surveillance meant following people around and wiretapping their apartments. Today, the government has their corporate partners archive your e-mail, cell phone calls and internet habits. One can’t help but wonder if the erratic behavior of GOP legislators and judges of late has something to do with what the White House knows about their personal lives.

The sad irony of modern America is the technological revolution was kicked off at the same time the culture began to reminisce about the “greatest generation” and how they whipped the Nazis. Just as that generation is fading away, we are adopting the economics of the people they defeated in the war. Even more ironic is the fact that if you believe the things that generation believed, you are called a Nazi.

The Alien Future

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One of the fun things about reading history is you occasionally bump into names or places that still resonate today. For instance, I was recently reading about the English Civil War, the Roundheads versus the Cavaliers. Names like Richard Lee, John Washington and George Mason were Royalists on the side of the king. They were also ancestors of Robert E. Lee, George Washington and George Mason.

Americans are raised to think of the Founders as fierce republican patriots who detested monarchy on principle. In reality that was never the case. America was a hodgepodge of people and cultures from Europe with all sorts of weird ideas about how to best organize their societies. Events, however, helped change their thinking and their subsequent deeds shaped the new country to this day.

It’s a reminder that human societies are run by men with a long past and they shape their world for subsequent generations. Modern scholars dismiss the great man theory of history, but modern scholars are deeply marinated in all sorts of lunacy. The claim that men are merely the product of their environment misses the forest for the trees. Men are a product of and a shaper of their environment.

Learning about the great men of history is a great starting point. Study Washington, Jefferson, Mason and Randolph and you learn about the Tidewater region of America that produced them. From there you learn the history of the colony and its cultural ties to the Royalists of England. That helps explain why the Tidewater region joined the Yankee colonies in revolt, despite having very different views on liberty.

That’s the thing. Every society has its ruling elite and they are people who respond to events. They can change their minds and go off in a direction that history says is at odds with the tide of history. In modern America, for example, we now have gay marriage in spite of the fact most Americans think it is ridiculous. The people in charge want it, so they make it so, despite being opposed to it not so long ago.

History is, in many respects, the study of the shifting culture through the lens of the great men who shaped it. The ruling elite in the first half of the 20th century were men of the industrial age. Many were not that far removed from the shop floor or the plant offices. Those who inherited their wealth often served in the military with the same men who worked in their father’s plants. The men running the war against Hitler were men of their age even as they were fighting to reshape their age.

This brings me to the central question of our time. What sort of men run the world today?

The West has just gone through one the great revolutions in human history. The technological revolution has and is altering the basic relationships of human civilization. Europe and the Euro are not possible in an analog age. The growing surveillance state is a direct result of the technological revolution. The people who made this revolution and have risen to the elite in this age are also products of this new and different age.

This interesting post on the nature of this new ruling elite is both interesting and unsettling.

This post is a graphic summary of an upcoming data-driven book on Silicon Valley’s political end game: the path toward overhauling the Democratic Party and orienting our lives toward innovation.

At its core, the book argues that changes in the economy also changes the political ideology in power; some personalities and value systems thrive in different occupations and industries. The growth of the knowledge economy has empowered a novelty-seeking personality that places an extreme faith in the power of information to solve the world’s problems.

A growing demographic of highly-skilled college-educated liberals will transform government’s role to be about directly investing in citizens, funding them to become as entrepreneurial, civic, and healthy as possible.

The ultimate goal is to make life as close to the college experience as possible: a life dedicated to research, exploration, and creativity, while automation ensures that everyone has enough food and leisure time to pursue their unique contribution to the world.

The first thing to understand about this emerging ruling elite is they are nothing like normal people. Most grew up in upper middle-class homes, went to private schools and finished up in elite universities. These are folks who lived in a parallel America. They drove the same streets and ingested the same popular culture, but did so from an entirely alien perspective.

It’s tempting to think of this new elite as just an Apple version of the old elites, but that’s a mistake. Consider the media. In the industrial age, news reporters and columnists were jobs filled by men of the working classes who had high literacy. They lived in the same neighborhoods as their readers. Their kids played with the plumber’s kids. Many served in the same roles in the military as their readers. Today, the typical media person is a graduate of an elite school and only knows the sons of toil as servants.

The men and women running the technological age are people used to winning because they have known nothing else. They were sent to good private schools where they got good grades, which led them to excellent private colleges. Ellen Pao captured the imagination of our rulers because she was such an outlier. Her biography was supposed to end with her running a fortune 1000 firm, not as a disgraced grifter.

Pao is a good transition to others who grew up outside of America. Barak Obama is so wildly popular in Silicon Valley because he is a lot like many of these people. He was born somewhere, raised in various places by parents who were citizens of the world, if “citizen” was a real thing, which it is not. That’s the view of the technological elite. They may or may not be Americans (or British or Europeans or whatever), but that’s the accident of birth. They are citizens of their class, first and foremost.

This alienation of the ruling class is not new to history. It’s probably been the norm, at least in Eurasia. It is a departure from what most of us grew up understanding about our world. People used to getting their way and unprepared for failure are going to be different types of rulers than those who rose up through the ranks. It’s the difference between the man who built the business and the man or inherited it.

Not surprisingly, the companies of Silicon Valley look more like a college student union than the old fogey businesses of the past. You can’t really blame them for wanting to maintain this perpetual adolescence. The best of times, particularly for males is late teens through late 20’s. The college campus is now an idyllic playground of perpetual youth, where everyone’s primary duty is to wait on the special little snowflakes.

The trouble is “a life dedicated to research, exploration, and creativity” only works as long as someone is doing the hard work of civilization. Yale is a wonderful campus full of high-IQ, self-actualizing people, but it is guarded on the perimeter by hard men with guns. You don’t want to wander too far from campus as the neighborhoods get ugly very quick. Automation may be the solution, but it brings new problems.

That’s where the alienation is most obvious. Walk around a place like Yale or even a Georgetown and it feels synthetic. A normal person feels like an intruder because they are an outsider. They have responsibilities, struggles and all the petty hassles of life. They face failure, which is something wiped clean from the life of elite colleges. If you want to know why John the Savage hung himself, spend a few days on an Ivy League campus.

The world our new rulers imagine for us will be an alien place compared to what we are used to. We will all be strangers in our own lands, assuming it gets that far. I’m fond of pointing out that Huxley got most things right while Orwell got most things wrong. At the dawn of the technological age, most people would have said the opposite. Maybe as the technological age creeps forward, some third option will reveal itself.

Ghetto Pride Day

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One of the stranger things you see in the ghetto is the summer festival, which is always run by the civil authorities and called something that feels more like wishful thinking than reality. The “neighborhood block party” is really just a free event for the locals, who were thrown together mostly because of public housing or Section 8.

The social workers who organize these things think a day of face painting and free hot dogs will build community spirit. It says something about the organizer who call these neighborhoods “communities.” Typically the word “pride” is shoehorned in somewhere as if you can sprinkle it on the heads of the natives like fairy dust and they will suddenly be proud.

The “community pride” events in the ghetto are about what you would expect. There are loads of single mothers with kids, along with the people from the government to make sure it does not turn into a riot. That means the fire department, ostensibly to entertain the kids, and the cops, often on horseback or maybe motorcycles. Of course, the people are there for free stuff. Community groups that are trying in vain to build community are on always hand, working on their next grant application by taking pictures of kids at their booth.

The pride thing always makes me laugh as the locals haven’t the slightest clue what pride means. How could they? Pride is something you give yourself, through your accomplishments. People in the ghetto are mostly killing time. What they do understand is respect. They are willing to kill over it. The middle-class social workers would get better results if they called these things “community respect” parties, but that sounds scary to the nice white ladies in charge of organizing.

My little slice of heaven had their summer block party yesterday. The authorities setup some games for the kids and they had pony rides and face painting. A church that I did not recognize was giving away hot dogs and sodas. There was some sort of ticket scheme involved to keep the “community” from taking unlimited drinks and hot dogs. The one thing people in the ghetto do well is take free stuff.

Walking around, I was reminded of something that no one discusses today for fear of being called a racist. That’s the slow blending of the races in the underclass. I saw a lot of fat white women with caramel colored kids. You never see black women with caramel kids, of course, but I do see a lot of white women with them. They always have nose rings for some reason too. This is so common, I just assume a white women with a nose ring is down with the swirl.

The other thing I always notice about these things is they schedule them to start mid-morning and be done with by mid-afternoon. You don’t see a lot of males so I guess the timing is deliberate. They know the males roll out of bed closer to sundown, like vampires. If they let the block party roll into dusk it would be a ghetto version of True Blood, where the vampires walk around with their pants falling down, playing with themselves and looking for trouble.

There’s a substantial immigrant community adjacent to the ghetto, mostly people from the subcontinental but there are some Arabs in the mix. The Arabs kit out their women in burkas, which creeps the locals out when they see them. There’s nothing better than seeing the culture clash between the American underclass and immigrants from Asia or Arabia. I always imagine the immigrants wondering how in the hell they keep losing to us.

Looking out at the multicultural paradise today, I’m thinking we’re headed for a bad end. The women in burkas were clustered together and their men were clearly making sure they stayed that way. The subcontinentals seemed to be enjoying themselves, but they made no effort to fit in with the natives. The blacks and the whites in the underclass may be ready to create a new breed of ghetto rat, but the newcomers have other ideas. At some point, that’s going to be a problem.

That’s going to be the Hispanics. I did not see any of them at this thing today. Instead they were down at the soccer field doing their own cookout. I noticed only because I was riding my bike and a guy I know waved me over. For reasons I’ll never know, immigrants like me. Custodio is not afraid to offer his opinion of the natives and he is not wrong in his opinions. Hispanic immigrants may not be rocket scientists, but they’re not idiots either.

That’s another thing no one discusses. Hispanics don’t like blacks and they are not shy about it. Whites have been whipped into submission, but the people flowing over the southern border are not going to sign onto the same program. The Left imagines millions of brown guys lining up to vote for a nice white lady from the university, but I suspect it does not end up that way. Hispanics prefer leaders who sport a thick mustache.

But, maybe it will all workout well.