Category Archives: Culture

Intolerant Cruelty

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Over at Marginal Revolution, there is a long thread on the callous indifference of liberals to the damage they have caused with ObamaCare. I called out an someone calling himself Michael Foody for his arrogance. What’s remarkable about the exchange is that he and his supporters are incapable of mustering empathy for the people that have been harmed by this ridiculous program. It’s as if they are enjoying the suffering of others.

A striking feature of modern liberalism is the bizarre pleasure they take in the suffering of people they consider inferior. In my youth, they put a lot of effort into claiming they were motivated by compassion for the little guy. The poor, afflicted and oppressed were turned into posters they could wave around to close off debate. It was never sincere, of course, as appealing to the masses is a common tactic of authoritarians, be they of the fascist variety of the communist type. Hitler and Stalin were men of the people.

Modern liberals have abandoned much of this. They still have their imaginary victims and imaginary bogeymen, but all of their empathy, if we can call it that, is directed to people in their own class. Progressivism is the religion of the managerial class, the new class, that sees itself as apart from the rest of us. In fact, it appears the identity of these people is defined by their hostility to the rest of us.

If you read the MR thread, you see quite a few commentators who appear to delight in the suffering of their fellow citizens. The Brookings Institute guy comes off like a Soviet Commissar when asked about the number of Ukranians they have starved. You can just imagine the guy muttering, “A single death a tragedy.A million deaths a statistic” as he dismisses the complaints of those screwed over by this law.

It is increasingly clear that the appeal of this program, and maybe the entire Obama administration, is that they think white middle class people hate it. In other words, the Obama presidency is just a long act of spite. If middle class white people started warming up to Islam, the Left would swing over to the neocon position and demand endless wars in the Middle East. That’s the central truth of the cult of modern liberalism. They are defined by a deep hatred of those they see as their natural enemies.

Southern whites, the religious and the middle class are the enemy. A harmless old woman like Paula Deen is savaged because she is popular with Southern Whites. The governor of Texas is mocked and ridiculed because he is publicly religious. Sarah Palin is the devil because she is 100% middle American. Normal people have seen her type at the PTA meeting, the soccer field and the grocery store. That’s why the Left loathed her so deeply and instinctively. She was the typical American mom.

As ObamaCare rolls out, it is becoming obvious that the bill was written to cause maximum damage to middle class institutions. They have rules that force the religious to pay for abortion and birth control. There are rules that make it difficult for small business to offer health coverage. There are rules that punish families. Now we are seeing that the new policies that are offered up as a replacement are two and three times as expensive as the old policies, while covering less.

The thing about compassion is there is a limit. You can only give so much. Cruelty, on the other hand, never has a limit. You can always find some new way to be monstrous to people you hate. When it is a contest to see who can be the most intolerant of the dispossessed whites, the process spirals out of control. That’s what the future holds for us as the Left competes with itself to find even more creative ways to attack the enemies of the state. This will be an age of intolerant cruelty.

Why Legal Weed Is Not So Easy

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When most people think about libertarians, the thing that comes to mind is their obsession with legalizing drugs. Since the 80’s, every conversation with a libertarian always turns into a debate about legalizing drugs. The right-libertarians are less berserk about it, but there are far fewer of them than the left-libertarians. The former are more like traditional conservatives, while the latter are just low-tax liberals. Drug normalization used to be a standard item on the Progressive agenda until the 1990’s.

While libertarians are right about many of the consequences of the drug war, they are unrealistic about the consequences of legalization. The easiest way to see this is to think about a mother driving down the road with her pre-teen kids. On the radio is a splashy ad about the weed sale at WalMart. In a society that has banned cigarette ads, it seems unlikely that we would tolerate the open sale of drugs, even mild ones like weed. In other words, libertarianism sounds great in the lab, but it would never hold up in the wild.

Even if you can work out a convenient lie like “medical marijuana” so you can have legal weed that exists on the fringe of society, there are other problems. This is a good example. If these two coaches were at a bar getting hammered, they would maybe face some sort of reprimand or a trip to a phony counselor. That’s never going to happen with smoking weed, like these idiots were apparently doing. The public may be willing to legalize weed to a limited extent, they will never embrace it like beer.

Punishing employees for doing that which is perfectly legal will also be problematic. The public, faced with a choice between banning weed or allowing their kid’s teachers to do bong hits in the teacher’s lounge will prefer prohibition. When you get to things like drug testing air traffic controllers, heavy equipment operators and law enforcement people, even legalizing weed creates all sorts of new problems. Again, people can tolerate a pilot who likes a beer after his shift. They won’t tolerate a pilot doing bong hits.

Whenever this is pointed out, libertarians always come back with “Well, what’s the difference between drinking beer and smoking weed.” It’s a form of tactical ignorance, whereby they demand you prove something that is obvious. A person can have a beer and beer completely functional. Most beer drinkers don’t get hammered. The whole point of smoking weed is to get wasted. The same is true of most street drugs. The proper use must lead to a mental state that makes the user incapable of rational behavior.

Anyway, it is the central problem with libertarianism and liberalism. Both make assumptions about humans that are not based in reality. Humans are not moist robots. We have prejudices and preferences that are not always rational from a distance. More important, American is a multi-ethnic and multi-racial society. Blacks have different social behavior than whites. What would work fine for middle-class whites living in the suburbs, is never going to work for blacks anywhere. This is a fundamental reality of life.

Even if the biodiversity scares you, consider the cultural things. People in New England are obviously different in their attitudes and behavior from people in Appalachia. Travel around this country and note how many different tribes of whites. The Founders got this, which is why the designed a federations. America is a land of nations. Universalist secular religions like libertarianism and Progressivism start by pretending these differences are superficial and meaningless, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

The point is, even under ideal conditions, like a white middle-class suburb, libertarianism is a non-starter, because people are not rational. They have tastes and preferences that are not rational. They don’t want weed being sold in the open. They don’t want cigarettes sold to kids or porn on daytime television. More important, they expect their government to make sure these things don’t happen. Therefore, legalizing drugs will almost certainly result in all sorts of new laws to make sure weed remains a marginalized item.

That said, it’s never been clear that libertarians are serious about any of their arguments, so this could just be a pose. After all, libertarians don’t seem to care about the war on smoking. Banning them from advertising seems like a serious breech of free speech rights, yet libertarians can’t be bothered to address it. The reason is that would get them in trouble with the Left. A big part of libertarianism is avoiding any issue that is important to the Left, unless of course they agree with the Left, then they are enthusiastic.

President Mugabe

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Martin Luther King is treated like a saint these days. According to popular mythology, he was the Progressive version of Jesus, sent to cleanse the sins of the white man. The truth is, he was far from a saint. By most accounts, King was a lot like Al Sharpton. He was personally corrupt and a degenerate. His great gift was a talent for manipulating upper middle-class whites, while at the same time appearing to oppose them on behalf of the blacks. Whites believed they could deal with him and blacks trusted him.

King had was a sixth sense about the ruling class whites. He knew that they lacked the appetite for confrontation and were generally in favor of dismantling segregation. Northern whites wanted it gone because they hated southern whites, but upper class southerners wanted it gone too. These whites wanted to be accepted in the national elite and saw segregation as an obstacle. King understood this and played on that divide as you can see in his Letter From Birmingham Jail.

The subtle point, made in the context of the events that got him locked up, was that whites had a choice. They could negotiate with him or fight with the brothers on the street. At the same time, the message to northern whites was that blacks would not submit, so it was safe to back them against southern whites. This two cushion bank shot had the desired effect of weakening the resolve of southern elites, who were put in the same impossible position as South African whites a generation later.

In the end, King’s great gift was not his ability to rally and uplift blacks, but his ability to pit one groups of whites against another. The faction willing to fight would be abandoned and used as a scapegoat. Later, guys like Jackson and Sharpton turned this trick into a racket. They would threaten to riot outside a corporate headquarters until they got paid. Jackson became a millionaire shaking down large companies. Sharpton is less rich, but he certainly lives well scaring white liberals into paying his way.

In post-Colonial Africa, there was a similar phenomena, but in a different context. The white colonials were looking to put a black face on their possessions and went looking for the best and brightest Africans. The Brits went so far as to send them back to England for training and education. Eventually, some rose up and took control as the colonials withdrew. The story over and over with the new African leaders was they all possessed an ability to sooth the fears of the whites, while appearing as authentic Africans.

Time after time, the colonials were lead to believe that these guys were more like them than the typical African. They held no ill will toward them and would continue on the policies established by the whites. Ian Smith of Rhodesia, a skeptic of British policy, was even won over eventually. Once they gained power, however, the new black rulers set about slaughtering anyone they thought was a threat. Eventually, that meant turning on the white farmers and administrators and eventually genocide.

We are seeing something similar with Barak Obama. It turns out that his only real skill is the ability to make upper-middle class white liberals do stuff for him. Otherwise, the guy is incompetent. You see it in this story from the LA Times, of all places.  This is the basic stuff of governance. Governments spy on one another. They get caught. They are always prepared for both so as not to look foolish. Yet, this administration is incapable of this basic duty. This is statecraft 101 and the administration can’t master it.

As an aside, a trouble pattern seems to be emerging with regards to the use of the intelligence services in this administration. They seem to have a flagrant disregard for the normal protocols. The reason those protocols exist is to avoid these sorts of diplomatic blunders. The story makes quite clear that the White House deliberately broke the rules in order to spy on European leaders. That suggests a cavalier attitude toward the limits of the state. Who else are they spying on and what other rules are they breaking?

Anyway, pick an item and the only thing Obama has been able to do well is rally upper-middle class white liberals to defend him from his critics. Everything else has been a mess. He had an opportunity to radically alter government in his first two years and blundered so badly little was accomplished. Even his most slavish fans grumble about the blown opportunities. It turns out that replacing whites with non-whites has a real impact on the basic functioning of western-style governments.

Americans are now getting see up close why Africa has failed. We elected the Robert Mugabe of America politics as President. He’s not threatening genocide, at least not yet, but there are trouble signs that his administration is about to unleash a torrent of anti-white rhetoric. His talk about going “Bullworth” is all about taking the gloves off with regards to race. The last thing America needs is race talk from the mulatto president. That could very well be the price of incompetence. A simmering race war.

Back From The Memory Hole

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Drudge had this linked this morning. It says a lot about this age that so many things get deliberately erased from the official record, only to pop back up later. It speaks to the new power of the media, thanks to the communication revolution, but also to their vulnerability, due to the communication revolution. They have these huge megaphones they can use to obscure stories they don’t like, by trumpeting the stories they do like. On the other hand, the internet never forgets, so even the obscure can be found.

In this case, it was well known at the time that the crime was not what the New York Times claimed. They massaged the facts to fit the prevailing worldview among their readership. They may have even believed their own nonsense, as these people are true believers. They had all the bogeymen right there in the story – rednecks, flyover country, western outfits. Shepherd, of course, had the right look. Liberals prefer their homosexuals to be of the twink variety, not the bear variety and white, of course.

It all made sense to the hive mind of the New York Times readership. When skeptics questioned the veracity of their claims, it was easy for them to dismiss the critics as right-wing homerphobes. The stock of words that means “heretic” is useful in allowing the Left to dismiss anyone who questions their claims. One of the benefits of moral certainty is when you get push back from non-believers, it feels like confirmation. The Left believed the fiction version of this story and got the spiritual hit they crave.

Now there is a book from a professional homosexual challenging all of the claims made by the Progressive media. The evidence is pretty clear that the three men knew one another and they were drug addicts. They certainly did drugs together and maybe sold drugs together. One of them was certainly gay or at least bisexual. The murder was the result of the same stupid stuff we see every day from the lower classes. Drugs, money and sex are almost always the reason someone ends up dead in the ghetto.

In this case it looks like a combination of drugs and sex. Three druggies that may have been homosexuals, with one another or separately, got into a dispute involving drugs and one of them ended up dead. In other words, remove the homosexuality from the mix and no one cares about this story. The fact that the victim was probably a gay gives the Left license to filling the official narrative with facts about this case. It’s an great example of how the news is just agit-prop, with very little connection to reality.

True Believers

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Belief is one of those things that people instinctively recognize when they see it, but struggle to describe. The person operating from a deeply held belief may come to the same conclusion as someone working from facts and reason, but that not the purpose. In other words, the believer gets the right answer because it happens to confirm their beliefs, while the rational person gets the right answer, because it’s the right answer.

The true believer is never dissuaded, while the rational can change their mind when presented with new information. No one is a pure logic machine, but the concept is a good way to understand the mind of the believer. Belief operates in the world where confirmation is always the goal. Empiricism operates in the realm where accuracy is the goal. if they are ends of a spectrum, then most people lie somewhere in between.

Dedicated and loyal Catholics, for example, are convinced that each new Pope will revive their church. The pages of National Review, for example, are filled with glowing stories about the new Pope, despite the fact he is probably a communist and wants to take the Catholic Church down the same road as the Protestant faiths. The true believer is always sure that just around the corner, their dreams will come true.

In modern America, the most active religion is Progressivism. We tend not to think of it as a religion or a belief system, but that’s what it is. It is a secular religion that seeks to fill the role of Christianity in the West. It serves to explain natural phenomenon, often by way of supernatural forces. it has a set of moral codes and, most important, it provides a justification for the powerful to impose those moral codes on the rest of us.

The different between secular religions and those reliant on the supernatural is the source of legitimacy and authority. Instead of an omniscient god the Progressive puts his faith in what he determines to be the general will. There’s no written text to spell this out, of course, so the general will is whatever the hive mind of the American Left determines it to be at any given movement. Progressivism is occasionalism.

They are also far out on the fanatical end of the scale. Failure is always greeted by a doubling down, a determination that the only response to disconfirmation is to go even further to the extreme. This is a feature of all radicalism. The radical mind thinks that if a little is good, a lot must be better. On the other hand, if a little is not enough, then the answer is even more. There’s no limiting principle in Progressivism.

A great example is the hilariously incompetent ObamaCare exchanges. Simple math said all along they could never work as promised. Perhaps some people will benefit, but the majority will be screwed. As the evidence pours in showing just how bad this disaster will be, the Left keeps insisting it is a dream come true. Never mind that Sally Kohn is probably a liar. She and her coreligionists will not be swayed by evidence.

It’s is why it is pointless to engage with the Left. It’s not that they are liars or that they don’t argue in good faith. Those things are true, for sure, but the reason it is pointless is they are true believers. That’s what motivates them to lie, dissemble and exaggerate. They really do believe their own nonsense. Trying to convince them to renounce their faith is about as sensible as trying to talk Muslims out of their faith.

Now, there are elements of the Left who are motivated by other things. They wear the skin of true believers like Sally Kohn, because it is good cover. There are opportunists in every religion. There are always subversives who use the cover of social movements to undermine the majority. That’s all true, but the bulk of Progressives, the white ones at least, really do believe this stuff. They are the truest of true believers.

Post Reality

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In his last podcast, John Derbyshire mentions Sam Francis with regards to the Tea Party movement and similar spasms of Middle Americans Radicalism. Francis was a brilliant observer of America and first rate political thinker. The reason he is largely forgotten now is he ran afoul of the ruling elite. More specifically, he was a blasphemer on the issue of race, which can never be tolerated. Anti-racism is how the elite define themselves, so they see anything that can be described as racist to be a personal insult.

There should always be a wide space between what the culture rules out of bounds and that which the elites would like to silence. Elites will always want to silence critics, but in an open society this must be tolerated. The elites can point and sputter, but they should not be willing or able to condemn their critics, outside of extreme cases. If the ruling class becomes the arbiter of what is tolerable on moral grounds, the result will be something closer to a theocracy, rather than liberal democracy.

That said, it’s not wrong to say that guys like Sam Francis harmed themselves by deliberately violating public morality. Public discourse should be raucous and rude, but you have to know when to pull your punches too. You’re not getting very far by offending people, especially when you seem to enjoy being offensive. It makes the target sympathetic. When that target is the elite, that means they have license to swing the hammer at you. In other words, you’re asking for it.

Despite being a fan of John Derbyshire, I would say he had it coming when he was un-personed over this column. He was intentionally provocative. He could have pulled his punches a bit and made all the same point, but he wanted to provoke a response and he got his wish. To his great credit, he has never complained about it, so he did what he did fully prepared to take his medicine. There’s a place for that, for sure, but there is a place for those willing to use esoteric language and euphemisms too.

Anyway, the reason for this post is that Derb’s mention of Francis got me to re-read some old old Sam Francis essays. The man was not only brilliant, but he was right about a lot of things. In fact, the paleocons were right about an amazing number of things. Pat Buchanan was right about immigration, trade and the economy. Joe Sobran was mostly right about the culture and capitalism. John Derbyshire has been right about things like immigration, the culture war and the human sciences.

I could go on, but the point is, they were all mainstream voices in their day. They were contrarians, for sure, but no one thought of them has crazy or dangerous. Eventually, they were all driven from the stage. Those that have died have been erased from the collective memory. Those still alive have been forced to live in their shed, brought out once in a while for a struggle session. In other words, they were punished just as much for being right as for being at odds with public morality on the issues of race and culture.

Mark Steyn coined the term I’m using as a title. The elites of America are feverishly insulating themselves from reality. It is perfectly sensible for elites to insulate themselves from the physical reality of life. The King knew the peasants lived in filth. he did not have to see it every day. That’s not what is happening in modern America. Our royalty is walling themselves off from reality and demanding the rest of us accept their imaginary world as our reality. We have to play make believe with them.

The obvious question that arises from this is how long can such a condition go on before reality simply refuses to stay out of sight? At some point the differences is human potential have to be accepted. Are we really going to try and run and army with girls in combat units and transvestites in the command staff? Are we going to fill Congress with the quality of people we see on the Baltimore city council? Even if this is possible, how long could it endure? What happens when even the elites learn it is impossible?

Appeasing The Gods

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At various times in the 19th and early 20 century, drought would threaten to wipe out whole towns, even states. The Dust Bowl is the most famous to modern Americans, as it drove tens of thousands from the land and to the west coast, looking for a new life. Of course, people often look for reasons beyond the natural, so many of the people who stayed, hoping for a miracle, looked for all sorts of ways to make it rain. That, in turn, made them easy prey for con men and charlatans promising to bring relief from the drought.

It seems rather primitive, looking back from this vantage point. Droughts still happen, but a big complicated technological country like America can work around it. The idea of some guy showing up promising to make it rains sounds nutty. It was not that long ago. In fact, there are plenty of people living today who knew Okies. Many old folks in California were the children of Okies, maybe even having made the trip as small children. The point is that it was not so long ago that appealing to nature or the gods was no considered crazy.

Anyway, that came to mind when reading this strange story from the UK. The Europeans have a primitive fear of nature these days. The Brits are leading the charge on ”climate change” which is just a modern form of nature worship. Watch BBC America and the shows always have some mention of green this or earth friendly that. The car shows are most humorous because they always stop at some point and provide a lecture to the viewers about recycling your oil or coolant at the “council dump.”

The fact that they are spending money to ward off a cataclysm that will never come is a reminder that we have not advanced as far as we think. The rituals and magic of 100 years ago just have new names today. There is a veneer of science to this stuff now, but at its core, it is the old fear of the super natural. Modern people worry that they are somehow at odds with nature and at some point, nature will get mad about it. The fact that the science is beyond anyone’s comprehension makes it more scary.

The religious angle to climate change is easy to see for those who have read the Hebrew Bible or had some religious training. We stopped teaching religion in public schools and church attendance has been dropping for years, so most modern people are ignorant to the religious aspects to climate change. Al Gore, for example, had some sort of nervous breakdown in the 2000 campaign. After a trip into the wilderness, he recovered and returned as the Prophet Al to warn the public about God’s pending wrath.

If you had read the Old Testament, you saw it right away. No one in our ruling elites attends mass or has religious training so it was lost on them. Gore went to divinity school, so  he may have done this on purpose, but it is entirely possible he does not know he is playing the role of Old Testament prophet. The fact that he made a few hundred million from this crusade suggests it is an act, but Gore never showed himself to be a grifter in the past. He’s always been a fanatic and he happened to hit it big this time.

What the Europeans are doing is a bit different. They abandoned Christianity a long time ago. Instead they threw their lot in with secular religions that promised earthly salvation, without the sacrifice demanded by the supernatural. Communism, fascism and socialism are nothing more than attempts to immanentize the eschaton. That is, arrange things in such a way to bring about plenty and relieve suffering. They still believed. It’s just a question of what they believe. Now it is a modern form of nature worship.

Of course, people who think the planet is plotting against them are not optimistic about the future. That’s why fertility rates have plummeted all over Europe. Many countries are actively recruiting Muslims to settle in their lands and wipe out their culture. of course, there is the endless quest to make materialism fill the void where Christianity once existed in the hearts of Europeans. The result is a vicious cycle, where the more they embrace neo-pagan religions, the more they dread the future and hate their past.

These new gods will not be appeased.

The End of Black Colleges

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The seemingly endless reshuffling of the college football conferences is usually explained as a function of money. Football is the big revenue sport, with men’s basketball a distant second in college athletics. Everything else is way down the list and therefore not all that important to the decision makers. Therefore, whatever promises to increase football revenue is done, even if it harms the other sports. As a result, the major football schools have been consolidating their hold on TV money by creating super-conferences.

Steve Sailer suggests there may be a different issue at play, one no one is allowed to discuss, even though everyone knows it exists. Colleges are reorganizing to corner the market on smart black athletes, which helps them boost their diversity. Put another way, the demand for smart black guys, who can play a revenue sport is expanding due to the quest for diversity. This is the driving up the price for black athletes, so the schools are consolidating their hold on the market by realigning.

That increase in price is reflected in the cost of maintaining high level sports programs, so while the pie gets bigger, the number of slices get smaller, as the big schools take bigger slices of the pie. It is certainly true that the pool of qualified applicants keeps growing, but the pool of the preferred applicants is not growing, at least not organically. It’s why elite colleges love African students. Barak Obama was highly sought after by elite schools, despite being mediocre, because he ticked a lot of important boxes.

It is an interesting observation and not entirely false, but if the best athletes were Chinese, the conferences would still be consolidating. The main reason is the cable monopolies are state sanctioned tax farmers. They get to tax people though their cable bill. Those revenues get directed to approved things and the big state colleges have figured out to get a taste of the skim. Federal grant money also plays a role as these colleges get billions in federal grants. By pooling together they increase their grasping power.

That said, the demand for competent black athletes is an example of how diversity has changed the college business. The historically black colleges used to field competitive sports teams and attract the talented ten percent of black youth. Once sports integrated, the best black players went to the big state programs. High IQ black athletes would end up at programs like Notre Dame, Boston College and Northwestern. As a result, the great black programs like Grambling and Southern have fallen on hard times.

That still left room for a Spellman and Morehouse to be the Black Ivies, but now the Ivies and “new Ivies” are desperate for black students. A smart black kid whose parents and grandparents went to Howard, for example, is getting offers from all of the elite colleges, so he has no reason to attend an historically black college. Just as American is skimming the best and brightest from the undeveloped world via immigration, the top colleges are skimming the best out of the historically black colleges and prep schools.

Inevitably, this will be reflected in the administration. As the quality of student declines, the quality of administrator will decline. Condoleezza Rice is not teaching at one of these colleges when she can work at Stanford. Talented black administrators follow the talented students, often working in the same schools from which they graduated. Ironically, the celebration of non-whites, as a vehicle to expand diversity, is killing off one of the better parts of black culture in America. The historically black college is dying.

Fake Libertarians

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Way back in the olden thymes, my liberal friends would occasionally claim to be libertarian or “mostly libertarian.” They would usually bust that out whenever I was making sport of their hive mentality. When Bill Clinton was raping interns, it was great fun to mock the feminists who somehow managed to get past the rape business to support Clinton against those prudish inquisitors. That’s when they would suddenly discover their inner libertarian and say that what adults did on the floor of the oval office was no one’s business.

It was the Clinton years when I began to look at liberalism as a cult. Cult leaders always end up indulging in deviant behavior that their followers manage to overlook. It’s as if the charismatic leader crosses some threshold, where his strength of personality becomes more of a factor than his ideas. The proof of that is how his followers rationalize their leader doing things he allegedly opposes. Those who can do this become more committed, while those who can’t are boiled off and join some other cult.

Of course, one reason liberals think they may be “slightly libertarian” is they are in favor of legalizing weed. Liberals are the modern Roundheads so to them, this feels like a huge concession toward personal liberty. Their movement has been stamping out smoking, eating, sex, sloth and everything else that seems like fun for so long, they think it is radical to oppose the drug war. Those Puritan instincts tell them that even the most private of behavior must come under public scrutiny, so being OK with weed feels radical.

That and they obsess over their crotch. For whatever reason, the Left has an obsession with lady parts to the point of distraction. It’s an odd obsession that is in part a need to be vulgar. They associate probity with middle-class white culture, which they oppose, so being vulgar feels like rebellion to them. Therefore, indulging in sexual degeneracy, which would seem at odds with other aspects of their secular religion, is acceptable because it offends an enemy of their movement. It’s an exception that supports the cause.

I was thinking about this the other day when looking at the Lion of the Blogosphere’s latest pro-abortion rant. He has an obsession with cultural conservatives and therefore he dwells on abortion, thinking it is the opposite of decency. He is a guy who will occasionally try to pass himself off as libertarian which is a bit ridiculous. The HBD guys like him and they tend not to be liberal, but there’s no reason to think one excludes the other. In fact, an oblique form of race realism has always been at the heart of American radicalism.

Still, I wonder why it is some on the Left feel the need to play the libertarian card. It could simply be a part of their natural tendency to deflect. People are attracted to secular religions out of self-loathing. They seek to swap their hated self, for the identity of the group. Therefore they are always trying to avoid discussion of themselves, because that requires facing up to their nature. Playing the libertarian card is a lure to draw attention away from them onto something else, anything else.

Alternatively, we see conservatives in Progressive enclaves using the libertarian ruse to avoid conflict. Anyone who has lived in Massachusetts knows that child molesters get better treatment than conservatives. If you are at a social event and say something that violates one of their many taboos, you can be sure the screech owls from the local feminist coven will be trying to rip your flesh from your bones. For reasons I’ll get into another day, the Left does not view libertarians as a threat.

Of course, this suggests that libertarianism is not a real ideology or a real social movement, but rather a way station of sorts. Left-libertarians can code-switch between liberalism and libertarianism, depending upon their situation. Right-libertarians can do something similar, in order to avoid the wrath of lefty. That means as the divide grows, libertarianism will collapse, as it will be impossible to exist in both camps. That’s a topic for another day, but it means libertarianism is not a real thing.

The Coming Civil War

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The boys and girls over at the flagship of Conservative Inc. have their panties in a bunch over the increasingly hostile relationship between them and the rank and file of the conservative movement. Well, what’s left of the conservative movement. Decades of broken promises and outright lying from public figures claiming to be conservative leaders has the hoi polloi looking for other options. Normal conservatives, which means middle-class white people, for the most part, are feeling betrayed.

Part of it is due to the awakening of the base to certain realities of party politics. One of those realities is that most of the people in charge are just in it for the money. These are career men who have wives and kids and mortgages. They are risk adverse. It is why they are quick to plead for a deal to end the bickering over policy. It is why they are willing to trade everything for stability. Great change means great tumult and tumultuous times are bad times for the mediocrities that are party functionaries.

Normal people look at this and think they are being taken for a ride. After all, what’s the point of voting for conservative candidates and supporting conservative causes, if the people running these things are willing to sellout for personal gain? These people are always ready to tell you about the need to compromise, but they never lecture the other side this way. That’s what is driving the general discontent with conservatives. David French has a post on it here and Goldberg has his say here.

Jonah Goldberg is the king of straw man arguments. His preferred method of dismissing criticism is to call the critics “populists” and then claim that populism is crypto-leftism or the precursor to fascism. Once he has anathematized the messengers he then moves on to explain why it is dangerous to listen to these bomb throwers. What he is doing is something the Left likes and that is creating an immoral straw man and then associating it with the arguments or facts they want to dismiss. It’s a form of scapegoating.

Of course, it is a ploy to avoid the elephant in the room. The Right lose every fight. They lose the PR wars. They lose the negotiations. They lose elections against weak candidates. They conceded ground to the Left before the debate gets going. Just on practical terms, the Right has been a near total failure for almost two decades. Whatever the defects of the critics, the people in charge of conservatism have failed at every turn, but have suffered no consequences.  In fact, they have grown quite rich.

The David French piece deserves special recognition for its mendacity. Every loser who wants to avoid the consequences of being a loser tries to play the victim card. They always claim to have received death threats. French claims to have received threatening calls at home. If he does not have a police report, then he is a liar. It is a serious crime to call someone and threaten them. Calls are easily traceable and the police take these things seriously. If true, he should file the report and post it.

In many ways, David French is emblematic of what is wrong with the so-called conservative movement. They think politics is a buffet line where all they need to do is put a few things on the tray and proclaim their fidelity to those with similar tastes. Put another way, they have reduced conservatism down to a handful of policy positions that just happen to be popular with their corporate and wealthy donors. Instead of maintaining an intellectual tradition, they are a public relations firm for the highest bidder.

Today it is hard to lie in public. Liberal politicians from normal states have been learning this the hard way. They used to get away with lying at home as no one called them on it in the press as long as they voted liberal. Now they get exposed quickly. The so-called conservatives are struggling with the problem now. Years of watching the so-called Right promise and fail, only to lecture their base about making unreasonable demands has most conservatives wonder if it as not always a scam.

What comes next, as conservatives wake up to the reality of demographic change and the emerging identity politics, is a big civil war on the Right. On one side will be the kept men of Conservative Inc., defending their perks and positions. On the other side will be a new Right, one more in tune with today’s realities and much less concerned with upsetting the feelings of the Left. It will be more populist and probably more racially aware. Most likely, the old Buckley crowd ends up on the Left, if the Left will have them.