Category Archives: Culture

Collapse of the Middle

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Every society is focused on four things: Security, Prosperity, Culture and Trust. Security is both external and internal. A primary duty of every society is to make sure it is defended from outsiders, but also from deviant insiders. Those who work against the internal order are just as much of a threat as the invader. It’s why traitors have always been held up for the worst punishments. They threaten the very existence of the society.

Prosperity is another focus of human society since settlement. Technology, after all, is all about increasing prosperity, which is why so much of our efforts are involved in advancing technology. Every society has its own take on what it considers prosperity, but the main reason for human society is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It is a part of our group evolutionary strategy. It is expressed differently across groups, but it is as much a part of humanity as left handedness.

Despite what the lunatics in charge claim, preservation and advancement of the culture is a priority of every society. Culture, after all, is just the rolled up preferences of the individuals in society, handed down from generation to generation. It is a collective identity. It is also how essential knowledge is passed from one generation to the next. A few hours reading the Bible teaches more about humanity than four years in a college.

These three distinct priorities are strung together with trust. Clannish societies will place a premium on culture and security, forgoing prosperity in order to maintain the clan. Altruistic societies will focus resources on prosperity as their cultures are dynamic and adaptive. Swedes spend much more time worrying about prosperity than defending Swedish culture, while Arabs invest all their time in culture and live in squalor.

That very broad outline is a useful way to view politics in western societies. The three main priorities shift up and down in the public’s hierarchy of importance. In times of plenty, the pubic will reward leaders promising to keep the party going. Alternatively, at the end of an up cycle, doubts about the impact on public morality may reward candidates that speak authoritatively to cultural traditions.

This is clear in the recent American elections. Barak Obama won in 2008 largely due to the other side getting blamed for the financial collapse and the bungling of the Muslim problem. Prosperity and security. In 2012, however, the public was uneasy about the deranged assault on the culture by Obama and went looking for an alternative. While Romney said all the right things on the culture, no one believed him. Trust is the shadow that hangs over everything.

Shifting over to Greece, we saw promises of prosperity trump all else in the rush to join Europe and the single currency. The public put aside cultural concerns, expecting the trade-offs to be economically beneficial and they were initially. When things went sour, the public switched from one main party to the next and then finally a coalition of main parties, all in an attempt to restore prosperity. When that failed, the middle collapsed and the fringe parties moved to the center.

Syriza, for all its blather about socialism and Marxism, is a populist party making a cultural appeal to patriotic Greeks. They have no plan for solving the debt crisis. There is no solution. What they have is a cultural appeal, which folds in neatly to an appeal to security. Greeks think Syriza is best to guard the culture and keep Greece safe from the financial vultures. Most of all, Syrza is trusted. They are what they say they are and that means a lot.

In the rest of Europe, security and prosperity trumped all else for forty years after World War II. Our betters like to say this was due to people recalling the horrors of fascism, but that’s not true. Fear of Soviet aggression (and nukes) was the top security concern. It trumped all else. Economic integration was, in part, a component of the security issues. It was only after the wall came down that economics become the top priority.

Ignoring the culture has worked in Europe for a long time, but that time is quickly passing as people begin to realize that Greeks are not Fins and Spaniards are not Brits. Just because everyone uses the same money and flies the same flag does not mean they are the same. Those differences will be expressed through culture, which inevitably shapes economics and politics.

In America culture is always in the discussion due to the Cult making war on traditional America, but it is a one-way discussion. The Progressives form up and start to pull down some important cultural institution and the Right tries to stop them. The only thing keeping the Right in business is as a fire department, called into to try and save what’s left of America. There’s not a lot left these days.

Of course, good times economically and no fear of invasion make sacking the culture possible. Cultural Marxism is a luxury good affordable in rich societies with loads of free time. China and Indian have made great strides economically, but they are still too poor to indulge in ethnomasochism. Like throwing away food, only rich societies in the West can afford to throw away their patrimony.

At least for now. Europe is seeing a collapse of its political middle as the cultural vacuum underneath the political parties grows. Across the Continent, mainstream parties treat their citizens as enemies, standing aside as invaders from the south flood into Europe. They heap private debts onto public balance sheet all in the name of a prosperity that is just over the next hill.

In the US, one party is racing toward a weird techno-fascism while the other party pads along behind them like a slow-witted little brother. Issues of paramount concern to the public are ignored in favor of the ridiculous and absurd.The full force of the state is brought to bear on behalf of homosexuals playing house, while no one can be bothered to halt the invasion from the south. For close to half the country, the political parties have nothing to offer, other than the satisfaction of voting against one of them.

It’s why Donald Trump is getting so much attention. Outsiders have always popped up in party primaries only to fade from the scene. Usually they have a novel idea or represent a narrow constituency. Trump would have been laughed off if he had not had the good sense to say what the public is thinking about taboos subjects like immigration. He’s an American Beppe Grillo.

The other side is not immune. American progressives may have been motivated by a hatred of core Americans, but they always thought of themselves as the righteous defenders of fairness and morality. Bernie Sanders is having success pointing out that the modern Progressive movement has more in common with Italian fascism than old school liberalism.  He does not say it that way, but he is tapping into the growing doubts on the Left over the direction of their movement.

At the start of this long-winded post I said that trust is what strings the three key social categories together. The people will naturally trust leaders with whom that naturally identify. It’s why colonialism ultimately failed. The foreign rulers may have done a better job bring peaces and prosperity, but they could never be trusted because they were foreign. People will take one their own, even if he is a screw up, over a foreigner, even if he is brilliant.

In the West, the ruling elite no longer identifies with their host countries. They see themselves as having evolved beyond national identity. Their actions over the last few decades has made them foreigners to the people over whom they seek to rule. When times are good and the world is at peace, people can overlook the culture gap. When peace and prosperity fade, that gap becomes a maw, collapsing the center.

Then They Came For The Trolls

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Way back in the olden thymes when everyone thought buffalo was food, not a crappy sports town, men hunted the mammoth and said horrible things to one another on dial-up bulletin boards. This was not only before the iPhone (Gasp!), but before Windows, when computing required more than a third grade education. In those days, arguments were settled by using outlandish insults.

I wish I had a nickel for every time I told some douche-bag to chug down a frothy glass of Drano. The acronym DIAF was created because it was so commonly used. If someone really pissed you off, you would tell them to go home, shoot their family and then shoot themselves, in order to clean up the gene pool. Now, you can go to jail in New Zealand for that sort of thing.

Internet trolls face up to two years’ jail in New Zealand under a controversial new law which bans “harmful digital communications”.

And under a parallel amendment to New Zealand’s Crimes Act, a person who tells another to kill themselves faces up to three years in prison.

The law will help mitigate the harm caused by cyber-bulling and give victims a quick and effective means of redress, supporters said.

But critics said the law harms free speech and its fine print could threaten public interest journalism in the country.

Under the Harmful Digital Communications Act in effect from this week, anyone convicted of “causing harm by posting digital communication” faces two years in prison and a $50,000 (NZ) (£6,500) fine, while businesses face fines of up to $200,000 (NZ).

Harmful communications can include truthful as well as false information, and “intimate visual recordings” such as nude or seminude pictures or video shared without permission.

One of the consequences of being ruled by stupid people is they get pretty much everything wrong. The term “troll” does not mean a supernatural beings that dwell in isolated rocks, mountains and caves. It means people who posted things to get attention, as in “trolling for attention.”

Putting that aside, this is insane and the people who came up with it should die in a fire. Imagine the court hearing for some one accused of being a troll. It’s the sort of thing you would expect to see in the day room of the asylum. You get sent to prison and instantly become the baddest guy on the yard because you told some douche to drink poison.

We’re so doomed.

Banning Cigarettes

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I remember the first time I noticed the anti-smoking Nazis. It was in Cambridge and I saw a sign not only stating it was a no smoking area, but it was a city ordinance. Lots of businesses at that point were putting up no smoking signs. Restaurants had no smoking sections. It was the first time I had heard of a law against smoking.

My thought at the time was that it was doomed to failure. Only a nut would care so much about smoking to demand the proliferation of these laws. It seemed like the wacko fad you’d find in Cambridge or Boulder, but nowhere else.

A good rule of life is to always remember that the Left is crazier and more committed than you can imagine. There’s always an “11” on their crazy meter. In this case, anti-smoking laws spread like wildfire to the point where some jurisdictions ban smoking in your own home. Now Seattle is banning smoking outside in public areas.

Smoking cigarettes and other tobacco products in Seattle’s parks became illegal on Monday, as the U.S. Pacific Northwest’s largest city joined other American metropolises in restricting puffing in public.

Seattle’s Parks and Recreation officials voted in May to ban smoking in all of its 465 parks. It had previously required smokers to maintain 25-feet minimum distances from other visitors in any publicly accessible park land, the city said.

On Monday, the city, on its website, encouraged park goers to “smell flowers, not smoke.”

The ban follows similar restrictions in more than 1,000 other U.S. cities and communities across the nation, including New York, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Portland, the city said.

Cities have pursued the ban as the dangers of cigarette smoking became more widely accepted, and because of cigarette butt litter.

“Tobacco use is the leading preventable cause of death and disease both locally and in the United States, so it makes sense to take actions that promote health and healthy environments in our public spaces,” Jeff Duchin, Interim Health Officer for Public Health in Seattle and King County, said in a statement after the May vote.

In Seattle, park rangers and police officers enforce the ban. A verbal warning follows a first offense, followed by a written trespass warning. Repeat offenders are subject to arrest.

Imagine lockup in Seattle.

Thug: What you here for?

Hipster: Smoking, sir!

Of course, this move is due to the fact that smoking is just about gone from American society. Smoking rates are at all-time lows and it is now rare to smell cigarettes in public. Smokers, yielding to constant harassment, go away to smoke. Office buildings now make smokers stand away from the door so you don’t even smell smoke there anymore.

The bigger issue is the rise of vaping. The electronic cigarette has turned out to be the greatest smoking cessation aid ever. I know plenty of people who quit by using one of those things. I see people puffing on those things more than I see smoking. The health effects are trivial and the cost is far less than smoking so I don’t see why anyone would not go this route.

You have to wonder if it is not getting close to the point where it would be a good idea to ban cigarettes entirely. Smoking cigarettes is mostly a habit of the poor so the lunatics can pretend they are doing justice. They can get one last shot at the evil tobacco firms. Enforcement would not be difficult as many retailers are getting out of the cigarette business anyway. The black market would be trivial.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not in favor of it. I was never in favor of banning smoking in public. I spent many a night in a smoky bar either screwing up my courage to talk to the pretty girl or commiserating with the boys about the lack of women. If the bar wants to allow smoking that’s their business. These small decisions must be left to the people. It’s the natural order.

That said, if public health is your goal, banning cigarettes now makes a lot of sense. Unlike narcotics, smoking is not a thing you do on your free time by yourself or with a few addicts in a flophouse. Unlike alcohol, smoking is not a social elixir. Ban cigarettes and most will quit and the rest take up cigars or e-cigarettes.

The Greek Revolution

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The Greeks vote on something this weekend, but no one really knows whether it matters. The news indicates that the deal offered Greece is no longer on the table so the plebiscite on it would be moot. There’s also the fact that Greece appears to be in full blown financial collapse. The scenes on television remind me of the Argentine financial collapse of ’98. In fact, the comparisons are so close that the Argentinians of that era are advising the Greeks now.

Here’s an interesting documentary on the Argentine crisis.

The fascinating thing about this last phase of the now seven year crisis is that the enormity of Greek debt is finally being revealed. The IMF has released their analysis of Greek debt and there’s simply no way anyone can think the Greeks will ever pay their debts. It is a mathematical impossibility. Further, they will never be able to make their interest payments.

Greece has a €50 billion cash deficit through 2018, which means even under the bailout plan that was offered, Greece would be accumulating debt faster than it would be retiring debt. In theory, something magical could happen so that the economy would boom, but the debt burden makes that unlikely.

That means the people in charge of Europe have been lying to their public all this time. Default was an inevitability. That will then be followed by a restructuring of debt and debt forgiveness. Lying is no surprise as it was always assumed that the EU was buying time to transfer these debts from the private holders to the taxpayers.

The deliberate and seemingly pointless immiserating of Greece is what one would expect from a loan shark. It’s not the money, it’s the principle. The EU was supposed to make one big happy family of former countries. The trouble is one of the family members is a bit of a screw-up so the paterfamilias is teaching a lesson. It’s not so much for the one taking the beating, but for the rest. “Don’t be like Greece or we’ll break you like we broke them.”

That sounds good, but it remains to be seen if they will actually break Greece. The first hit is the worst hit and Greece is taking the first hit right now. By the time they vote, a fair number of Greeks will be ready to see it through. The next hit lands to the body of the EU financial system. No one knows what happens when the fallout from Greece starts washing up in the rest of Europe.

It’s easy to dismiss Greece as a dead beat country full of oily grifters. In theory, the Greek people have only themselves to blame for electing crooks and liars. That’s an argument against democracy, but the people never voted for bankruptcy. They were misled by their leaders, who got hooked on the heroin of global finance. They supported joining the Euro because they were told it would avoid these problems.

The problem at the core of global finance is that there’s no market mechanism to restrain public debt. The whole point of a floating currency regime is to disguise public debt in order to avoid making tough choices about the welfare state. It’s not an accident that since the Louvre Accords the size and scope of government has skyrocketed throughout the West.

In other words, a currency system based on credit has worked at hiding the cost of government. In fact, it has been so good at it no one noticed that Greece was running up debt at an alarming rate. In the old system, Greece would have been facing double digit borrowing rates long before they reached this point.

Sovereign debt is mostly a way to rob the property holders of countries. When the state borrows, there has to be someone on the other side of the transaction. If they borrow from their people then they are taking property with a promise to pay at a latter date. If they borrow from abroad, then they are promising their tax payers will pay at a later date.

The only people with the ability to pay sovereign debt are the tax payers.

In the old currency arrangements, this was understood. Lenders knew this. If you lent gold to the neighboring king, you did so knowing you may have to invade his lands to get it back. That made lenders more prudent, which made the crown more prudent. Credit currency makes it appear that default is impossible so no one considers the cost of collection.

Successive Greek governments have promised the property of Greek tax payers as collateral. The Greeks on the dole are demanding their checks and making a fuss about it on TV. The real revolt is the from the people with money. The Greek taxpayers are refusing to pay up. Unless the EU is ready to roll in the tanks, the debts will have to be forgiven.

David Brooks and the Long War

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One of the ways you tell who is winning and who is losing is to look at which way the advice is flowing. Losers never give advice because no one takes advice from a loser so even if they have something to offer, no one pays much attention. Winners, on the other hand, love talking about how they won and will offer anyone and everyone tips as to how to be a winner.

There’s also something else. Winners are confident. They are willing to offer help to the loser because they are sure they are better than the other guy and have no fear he will use the advice to turn the tables. In other words, it is safe for the winner to be magnanimous as he perceives he has little to lose and will gain much by looking magnanimous. The loser, in contrast, must play close to the vest in the hope of scoring an upset.

That’s why we see in American public debate, a flow of advice and suggestions from Progressives to their alleged opponents. Democrats are always brimming with tips for Republicans. Progressives are always out lecturing extreme right-wing extremists about the folly of their extreme right-wing extremism. Here’s an example from David Brooks the other day.

These conservatives are enmeshed in a decades-long culture war that has been fought over issues arising from the sexual revolution. Most of the conservative commentators I’ve read over the past few days are resolved to keep fighting that war.

I am to the left of the people I have been describing on almost all of these social issues. But I hope they regard me as a friend and admirer. And from that vantage point, I would just ask them to consider a change in course.

Consider putting aside, in the current climate, the culture war oriented around the sexual revolution.

Put aside a culture war that has alienated large parts of three generations from any consideration of religion or belief. Put aside an effort that has been a communications disaster, reducing a rich, complex and beautiful faith into a public obsession with sex. Put aside a culture war that, at least over the near term, you are destined to lose.

You get that? David Brooks is generously offering you his sage advice , which is you need to give up and join the winning team. He wastes a lot of time tarting it up, while casting himself as something other than a conventional Progressive. That’s just part of the act. William Safire perfected this a half century ago and now it has become a feature of Progressive agit-prop.

Of course, this is not advice offered in the spirit of fellowship. David Brooks thinks social conservatives are sub-human and he would gladly sign up to slam the oven door on them. This is mostly gloating. Brooks is taking a victory lap. He also hopes that social conservatives will keep fighting. His cult is reactionary and they need bogeymen. When the day comes that the Left clears the field of enemies, it is the day it collapses.

It’s why the Left is so good at inventing monsters. Its identity is based on struggle, something they inherited from Continental communists. Despite the fact Brooks has never known a time when he and his coreligionists have not been in control of the culture, they still believe they are struggling to set things right and break the spine of the WASP oppressors.

After every battle, the Left celebrates, but then says there is much left to be done. This Brooks column always turns up in the transition phase, They partied and now they are sobering up, being reminded that “those evil social conservatives are still out there, plotting and scheming to take back our victory. If only they would just give up!”

In one of life’s great ironies, America is being cleared of Christians by a religious cult that habitually nails itself to the cross and then blames the Christians.

Life in a Kleptocracy

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It’s tempting to think the lawlessness we are seeing with our government is a new development, but it has been a slow incremental process. Heck, you can go back to the the 70’s and fine court ruling that were plucked out of thin air. Roe is the most obvious example. The court held that if the Founders had thought of it, they would have included abortion in the Bill of Rights so we’ll just pretend they did.

Most of the lawlessness in America is a much more mundane thing like the abuse of civil forfeiture laws.

In February 2014, Drug Enforcement Administration task force officers at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky Airport seized $11,000 in cash from 24-year-old college student Charles Clarke. They didn’t find any guns, drugs or contraband on him. But, according to an affidavit filled out by one of the agents, the task force officers reasoned that the cash was the proceeds of drug trafficking, because Clarke was traveling on a recently-purchased one-way ticket, he was unable to provide documentation for where the money came from, and his checked baggage had an odor of marijuana. (He was a marijuana smoker.)

Clarke’s cash, which says he he spent five years saving up, was seized under civil asset forfeiture, where cops are able to take cash and property from people who are never convicted of — and in some cases, never even charged with — a crime. The DEA maintains that asset forfeiture is an important crime-fighting tool: “By attacking the financial infrastructure of drug trafficking organizations world-wide, DEA has disrupted and dismantled major drug trafficking organizations and their supply chains, thereby improving national security and increasing the quality of life for the American public.”

But the practice has become contentious, in part because agencies are generally allowed to keep a share of the cash and property they seize. In cases like Clarke’s, where local and federal agents cooperate on a seizure, federal agencies typically keep at least 20 percent of the assets, while local cops split the remainder among themselves. Critics argue that this creates a profit motive and leads to “policing for profit.”

There’s a term for this. It’s called piracy. In the age of sail, the crown would unleash privateers on the shipping of another country. One king’s pirates were another king’s entrepreneurs. Today, the privateers get a W2 from the local government and rob the subjects of the crown.

This being 2015 America there’s a non-trivial chance this story is entirely made up or they left out important facts. Sadly, we simply cannot trust our news sites these days. Still, I know of too many similar cases. The pattern is they target people they think are unlikely to lawyer up and take them to federal court. If you’re a lawyer at a white shoe firm you can travel through these jurisdictions carrying bags of cash. The state always targets the weak.

Loserville

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Anyone who has played sports knows that strange feeling where you look up and see you’re not just losing but getting clobbered, despite feeling like you were doing well. Maybe the last time you looked up it was close and now it is a blowout. Perhaps you feel like you’re competing, but the other side just keeps pulling away. When you’re in the heat of the battle, it is easy to not only lose sight of the bigger picture, but get a wildly incorrect view of that bigger picture.

Reading conservative sites the last week, I’m getting that vibe from both the chattering skulls and their readers who show up in the comments. There’s a state of shock at what has transpired over the two weeks.Their preferred party sold them out to please global finance. The court untethered itself from the English language and made itself the enforcer for the Cult of Modern Liberalism. Not only was the Right not winning, they were blown off the field.

As I pointed out the other day, the gay marriage ruling is the biggest assault on religious liberty in the history of the nation. One cannot read the majority opinion without wondering how long before the courts declare Christianity illegal.

The ObamaCare decision is the most radical in the history of the court. Judge Roberts literally declared that the English language is no longer a constraint on the court, which means they no longer have to read the relevant laws in future cases.

Most of the Right is in shock, unable to muster more than the old complaints that sound rather silly given what has just transpired. Surprisingly, Rod Dreher gets it, as far where things stand for people of his faith. That’s a well written essay displaying the right amount of sadness for what he and his coreligionists face in the coming years.

No, the sky is not falling — not yet, anyway — but with the Supreme Court ruling constitutionalizing same-sex marriage, the ground under our feet has shifted tectonically.

It is hard to overstate the significance of the Obergefell decision — and the seriousness of the challenges it presents to orthodox Christians and other social conservatives. Voting Republican and other failed culture war strategies are not going to save us now.

Discerning the meaning of the present moment requires sobriety, precisely because its radicalism requires of conservatives a realistic sense of how weak our position is in post-Christian America.

What Rod and others got wrong is they thought they were in the fight. They truly thought they were giving the other side a battle over who will control society. The fact is, they never had a chance. They were getting their butt kicked for decades. The last week is just the part where the other team does the outrageous celebration on the loser’s team logo.

Last week was part of the mopping up phase of the culture war. The major institutions of the West have all been converted to the Cult of Modern Liberalism. There are no cultural institutions that stand in opposition to any of this stuff.

Their breathless support is seen in the speed with which retailers banished the rebel flag. A white guy shoots up a black church and the Cult demands a sacrifice in return. Hours after the gay marriage ruling major companies were celebrating it in TV commercials. You would not be cynical to think that maybe this has all been coordinated.

It’s tempting to think that normal people will resist, but history says otherwise. The Catholic Church is maneuvering to join the Cult on global warming. The Pope has already made noises about embracing the homosexual agenda. Everyone with something to lose is figuring out that it is time to join the winning side. You can be sure that the rest of the Christian sects will follow the Catholics into the abyss.

I received an e-mail from Paul Gottfried a while back, in response to one I sent him. I don’t know Professor Gottfried and he does not know me. I doubt he knows of this blog. Today, no one thinks twice about firing off an e-mail to a stranger and I’m no different. I sent off my query after reading this column.

It occurred to me that we are losing a lot of important knowledge as the geezers of the Old Right die off. They are the last ones to remember the old fights and why we find ourselves where we are. Professor Gottfried would do us all a great service by putting together a list of writers and books that the next generation could use in the resistance.

He was not interested and sounded a bitter tone in his response. Professor Gottfried, like many on the Old Right, has been shunned and forced to live on the fringes. The fringes of the public intellectual space, that is. Almost all of these guys used to write for mainstream publications and conservative publications with wide circulations. One by one they were proscribed starting in the 1980’s.

I really don’t blame these guys for being bitter, assuming they are bitter. They were right from the start. In the 80’s, when being Right was suddenly cool, all sorts of faddish sorts jumped on board, but few possessed the social core required to carry the fight to the Progressives. Instead they went in for whatever was fashionable to sell books, radio shows and ugly ties. Instead of building a movement that could displace the Left, they sucked it dry. The so-called paleo-cons predicted this result.

That’s all water under the bridge now. There’s value in learning from past defeats, but the time for that has passed as well. The only job left is to pack up the old books and articles in the hope that some future generation, looking for a way out, discovers them and find some inspiration.

The Left At War

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A day will come when sacred Troy shall perish,
And Priam and his people shall be slain.

I’ve always found the Third Punic War to be a deeply instructive period of Roman history, one that helps us understand much of the modern world. What allowed the Romans to survive and then dominate their neighbors was their implacability. They never quit fighting even when they were beaten. The only ways to gain peace with Rome were surrender or defeat. No matter how many times you beat Rome in the field, they would keep coming back until they figured out how to win.

I think the reason for this is explained in the Punic Wars, particularly the final chapter that ended with the sack of Carthage. Rome was more than a place and a people. Rome was an idea, an animating force that defined the people of the city. Being Roman was more than just about lineage or location. It was a way of life, the way of life for righteous people. To accept defeat or compromise would be to reject the essence of being Roman.

It’s this nascent nationalism that drove the Romans to keep fighting. It is what drove them to sack Carthage and later Corinth. It was impossible to be Rome if these cities existed as anything other than subjugated provinces of Rome. This implacability is what carried Rome through the third century crisis period. Even when maintaining the empire made no military or economic sense, they did it anyway. It was who they were. Keep in mind that in the third century, Rome was led by men from the Balkans known then as Illyricum.

If you were an enemy of Rome, you knew there could only be two outcomes. You could surrender and hope for good terms or you could fight and eventually lose. Sure, you could win some battles and have a good run of success, but the Romans would never stop coming. Eventually, they would gain the advantage and win. Just as important, Rome did not just extract rents from conquered people. They Romanized them. Rome was the first iteration of The Borg.

This comes to mind now that we are in yet another Confederate flag debate. The first one of these was in the 90’s, but I seem to recall the Left in a snit over the flag in the 70’s when Southern Rock started using it in their stage shows. Regardless, the Left tried to stamp it out in the 90’s, the 2000’s and now again in this decade. Ever since that lunatic shot up the church in South Carolina, the Left has been buzzing about that stupid flag as if it is the cause of something.

As we saw with Obama’s birth certificate, the only people who care about this flag are liberals and lunatics, the distinction between the two is impossible without professional training. The rest of us, a group professional demographers call normal people, simply don’t care. But, we live in a country run by a quasi-religious cult and they do care, so the rest of us have to care – or else. That’s how it works in a theocracy.

What’s instructive here is we see the same implacability on display as I described with the Romans. In the 70’s and 80’s, I used to see Rebel flags on sale at convenience stores – even in Boston. Now, only outcasts display them and the occasional red neck. Most red necks have decided it is not worth the hassle. But, the Left is still determined to sack any city that flies the flag in any way shape or form. The Left never quits and never settles. They declare peace only when they have won completely and permanently.

Of course, the flag is not really the issue. That’s why normal people are caught off-guard whenever the Left starts waving it around and ululating like lunatics. The real issue is the long War Between the Whites that started in the 19th century and continues to this day. We call this the Civil War and that’s a good label, but I prefer my label, as it is more precise. Civil War implies both sides were equal or the same or viewed one another in that way. They never did and they still don’t.

In the 19th century, northern whites of mostly English ancestry used slavery as an excuse to attack and kill as a many Southern whites as possible. Those southern whites were of mostly Scots-Irish ancestry. The northern whites were ready to join their European coevals in the industrial, global age and they did not want those backward agrarian crackers holding them back. Slavery had to go and the people responsible for it had to be punished.

Abolitionists cared more about punishing southern whites after the war than the welfare of the freed slaves. The squabbling between northern lunatics and more reasonable minds over how to go about the post-war reconstruction is largely responsible for the failure of reconstruction to resolve the issue of freed slaves. That was left to the South to figure out on its own.

Like those Romans 2,000 years ago, the Left never quits or accepts defeat. For 150 years northern whites have been trying to finally eliminate their eternal enemy. Over the decades the Left evolved from an English Protestant thing into a full blown post-industrial theodicy. They still have a special hatred for southern whites, but they have expanded their field of vision to include what Obama called “typical white people.”

That’s what was missed when he made that comment. Everyone thought race, when Obama was thinking class. This is a guy raised by elites in elite culture. His grandparents were low-class compared to his coevals in prep school. They were typical Americans, which the Left identifies as middle-class, white and embarrassing. While normal people in the South have no emotions about the rebel flag, it means everything to the Left as it has always been, in their imagination, the flag of their enemy – core Americans.

If you follow the logic, so to speak, it makes perfect sense for the Left to go on jihad against the rebel flag after the white guy shot up the black church. The Left’s idealized image of the enemy is white, male, southern and poor. His flag is the Confederate flag. Therefore, the logical response to this shooting, from the perspective of the Left, is the same as the Romans when Carthaginian traders ripped off Roman merchants. That’s a policy of the extirpation.

The Crisis Period

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John Derbyshire regularly makes the point that in Europe, what defines Right and Left is not economics, but immigration. The only reason they continue to use the old terms of “right” and “left” to describe the mainstream parties is habit. While there are some differences of opinion on economics, foreign policy and regulation between the German CDU and the SDP, for instance, those differences are trivial.

The real difference between modern mainstream parties in Europe is the aesthetics. This is expressed in the leaders they choose. It varies from country to country, but usually one side prefers a Cavalier and the other a Roundhead in terms of presentation. Otherwise, the parties agree on all the big stuff, particularly immigration.

What’s happened in Europe and starting to happen in America is the rise of a new Right. These new voices are all over the map in terms of economics, social liberty and foreign policy. What unifies them is patriotism and immigration. The Danish People’s Party is a bunch of old style socialist and pro-EU, but they want a halt to immigration. The Swiss People’s party is libertarian, Eurosceptic, but anti-immigration. These parties simply want to maintain and preserve their countries.

The whole left-right political spectrum is itself a relic of a bygone era. It arose in the French Revolution when members of the National Assembly divided into supporters of the king to the president’s right and supporters of the revolution to his left. This divide was more than aesthetic. On one side was the future and on the other the past, as far as how the French would be organized as a people.

What’s important to keep in mind is this binary view of politics arose when one form of social organization was collapsing. The divine right of kings made a lot of sense when people accepted the divine. By the end of the 17th century, the ruling elite of Europe was not all that sure God existed, much less cared all that much about who was in charge of each country.

Now, nothing springs from nothing. Just as the right-left politcal spectrum grew out of the French Revolution, the EU and other extra-national organizations did not magically appear for no reason. Individual countries competing for advantage nearly snuffed out western civilization in two great industrial wars. The whole point of the EU is to keep the peace in Europe.

The trouble is it is rests on the new organizing ethos that I call the New Religion of egalitarianism, multiculturalism and anti-racism. In the EU, there’s no difference between a Frenchman, a German and a Greek. In fact. all people are the same, regardless of national origin. Further, all cultures are the same and arguing otherwise is racist.

The problem with that is two-fold. One, people outside the West are not the same as Europeans. The millions of them trying to head north into Europe pose the greatest threat to Western Civilization since Abd-al-Raḥmân was defeated at Tours. Current estimates say there are at least 500,000 migrants in Libya planning to cross the Mediterranean this summer. Given our inability to count, that number is probably double or triple and it is just the start. Tens of millions more are behind them.

As if having millions of Africans pour into your lands is not enough, it turns out that all Europeans are not equal after all. The Greeks are about to usher in another financial crisis, which could very well invite the Russians into the south of Europe. The Italians, Spanish and Portuguese are not far behind. It turns out that the people of the Mediterranean do not share Germany’s sense of frugality.

When explaining the revolts that led to the French Revolution, historians will point to the intellectual rumblings of the Enlightenment or the changing class structure of Europe. While important,the precipitating events were more mundane. Europe experienced extremely cold weather where springs came late and summers ended early. Crop failures followed and then starvation.

In the book The Collapse of Complex Societies, Joseph Tainter explains how human societies develop complex systems for solving the problems they face. That includes complex economic systems, social systems, war fighting systems, etc. These systems buckle and collapse in the face of new threats when the cost of reforming and modifying them exceeds the benefit of preserving them. When their value exceeds their cost, people invest in reforms.

In the case of the French Revolution, the highly complex economic and social systems that evolved out of the feudal period were all wrong for the emerging post-Enlightenment world. The financial crisis, bad harvests and mistakes by the ruling elite were just the final grains of sand to bring the old system down. There was no value in preserving Ancien Régime so it collapsed.

The point of this walk down memory lane is to point out how societies can evolve down a cul-de-sac. The Greeks, the current ones, invested a good chunk of their national wealth in an attempt to join Europe. They even borrowed to pay for it. That has turned out to be a disastrous decision. All of those arrangements they made are now useless to them in the current crisis and arguably part of what plagues them now. The cost of reform exceeds the benefit of reform so there will be no reform.

Circling back to where we started, the reordering of the politics of the West is in response to the stresses faced by the people of the West. The people working to form the new Right in response to the present crisis could very well be in the same tradition as the men who met at Rue Saint-Jacques. When the current arrangements are no longer able to secure the rights and prosperity of the citizens, people begin to think about what comes next.

The Left, of course, is convinced they are the vanguard of the revolution, pushing social evolution toward the promised land. They view the rise of these parties as a reactionary rearguard action by yesterday men afraid of the bold new future. In the abstract, they may be correct, but people don’t live in the abstract.

The Greeks stashing money under their beds only know that the people in charge have failed. The Dane seeing his taxes propping up a growing community of Africans in his ancestral home wonders why the people in charge permit it. Western elites are facing a crisis of legitimacy because they cannot contend with the basics people expect from their rulers.

Periods of crisis are defined by their precipitating events and their resolution. The current crisis has been brought on by mass immigration and economic stagnation. Its resolution will be one of two possibilities. One way is the existing arrangements reform and adapt in order to mitigate the migrant invasion and economic stagnation. The other way is they are wiped away and replaced by something new. There is no third option.

The New Religion

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The Rachel Dolezal story is hilarious for a boatload of reasons. There’s the obvious comparison to people who insist we pretend they are of another sex. If you can pretend to be the opposite sex, why not another race? More precisely, if sex is a social construct, then why is race not a social construct? Of course, for decades the war on white people has been based on the assertion that race is a social construct.

It used to be that we need not worry about such things. Biology was real and people accepted it. Those who did not were deemed mentally ill and treated accordingly. Rachel Dolezal was not fooling anyone, I suspect. People are not that stupid. They are that polite, however, and no one wants to get in a spat over race, even if it involves someone fraudulently using race to game the system. Elizabeth Warren pulled the same stunt and got away with it for the same reasons.

It’s fun to make sport of the internal contradictions, but it is even more fun to watch the Cult attack itself over something like this. Rachel Dolezal believes all the right things and has literally committed her life to them, but in doing so she has made a mockery of the one true faith. But, condemning someone for not being black enough sounds a lot like the paper bag test or the one drop rule.

Aside from the humor, it does reveal the basics of the New Religion, at least at this stage of its development. The New Religion is based on three principles: egalitarianism, multiculturalism and anti-racism.The order is important as the first two principles are the oldest and most important. Egalitarianism goes back to Rousseau and is at the root of all radical movements since the French Revolution.

If all men are the same, logically all cultures are the same. Multiculturalism is not logically possible without accepting egalitarianism. On the other hand, like Marxism, multiculturalism is a solution to the obvious problem that people will notice that not all cultures are the same and not all people seem to be equal. By ennobling the embrace of all cultures and condemning ethnocentrism, noticing becomes a defect in the noticer, rather than in the noticed.

If everyone is the same and no cultures are better than any other, inequity must be due to something other than biology and culture. Since white societies are the richest and most dominant, they must doing something to upset the natural order. That’s where anti-racism comes into the mix. The sin of racism is what allows whites in particular and white society in general, to rule over the rest of the world.

Therefore, white people of the New Religion jostle with one another for who can be the most ethno-masochist. The ultimate expression of that is to change ones race from white to black. We can all agree that Rachel Dolezal is nuts, but her choice here is not entirely irrational from the perspective of the true believer. Some white women marry black men, but she went even further and converted to blackness!

You see the same thing happening with trannies and homosexuals. In the mythology of the New Religion, women have been oppressed by white men almost as bad as blacks. This cult is, after all, a female cult. That makes white men the ultimate evil. How better to address that than proving maleness is a choice. If Bruce Jenner can choose to be female, then all of those terrible white men are choosing to be terrible white men.

All religions work backwards. By that I mean they begin with an endpoint and layout what must be done to reach that endpoint. For Christians, getting into heaven is about following certain rules and “living a Christian life.” For members of the New Religion, the goal is the earthly utopia where everyone lives in a paradise of equality. Therefore, the anointed are those who work to achieve it, through any means necessary.

Religions also always have a certain amount of hypocrisy and irrationality, too. They are human institutions, after all. The New Religion will ignore Elizabeth Warren’s trans-racialism because she is in the elite. Rachel Dolezal is just a provincial in flyover country. That means the good folks at NPR and the NYTimes can make sport of Rachel Dolezal, while celebrating Elizabet Warren.

It’s why cases like this will not have a lasting impact on the evolution of the New Religion. Hypocrisy, it turns out, is a great adaptation. It solves a lot of problems for human religion. Whether it is Catholic Bishops living like royalty while railing against earthly pleasures or Progressive pundits championing Bruce Jenner while condemning Rachel Dolezal, hypocrisy lets the faithful get past the internal contradictions and outright lunacy of their faith.