An Empire Of Lies

Posted on May 25, 2022 by thezman

An informal metric for measuring the stability of a society is the distance between reality and the official truth of the ruling regime. The more lies the regime tells, the less stable it and the society over which it rules. Official lies are a good proxy for the degree of authoritarianism within the regime. The degree of authoritarianism is a good proxy for the level of official insecurity. The more thuggish the regime the less support it enjoys, thus the more it needs to lie to the people.

At the extreme end of this metric is a place like North Korea. The regime is deeply paranoid about everything. The Kim family does not trust anyone in the ruling class and no one in the ruling class trusts anyone, especially Kim. The one thing everyone agrees upon is they cannot trust the people. This is why they get images of the tubby Kim in heroic poses or stories of him making ten holes in one playing golf. The regime feels it needs to present him as a god to intimidate the people.

On the other end of the spectrum, you get a place like Switzerland that barely has a government relative to the rest of Europe. Many Swiss residents do not know who is currently holding the position of president. It is a rotating position currently held by someone calling herself Simonetta Sommaruga. The Swiss government has no need to turn her into a rock star or make while claims about her. The official truth of Switzerland is easy for everyone to see, so they have no need to lie.

Obviously, it is an informal metric that is subjective. An extreme case like North Korea is easy to use, but where would France or Germany fall on the scale? They are closer to Switzerland than Ukraine or the United States, but not so close that anyone in France would say they believe their government. In fact, that is the story of the West since the end of the Cold War. Every Western nation has moved down the scale of honesty toward the North Korean pole over the last three decades.

Lying has consequences. One lie begets another lie which then requires more elaborate lying to cover up the previous lies. This lowers trust in the state, but it also lowers trust in institutions and eventually lowers social trust. Step one is the lies erode faith in the ruling class of the country. Step two is people lose faith in the institutions for not having punished the liars. The final step is the people who wake up to the official lies lose trust in those who keep falling for the lies.

You see this with the school shootings. Generations of lying about the nature of crime and the role of guns in these school shooting, have made it impossible to have a civil conversation about the issue. The bodies were not even cold after the latest school shooting and the usual suspects were out in public telling the all to familiar lies about the causes of these crimes. The only thing that comes from this is normal people grow to hate these liars a little more than they did yesterday.

How many people watched President Biden speak about the Texas shooting? The answer, if it was possible to get an honest one, was close to zero. Joe Biden has been a promiscuous liar for generations. Now he is an incontinent zombie barely able to read his script. That script is written by the same collection of sociopaths than have infected politics since the Clintons blew into town. Even the sociopaths have lost interest in the production of these ridiculous theaters of mendacity.

Tragic outliers like a deranged lunatic going on a rampage are just part of the human condition, but can something be done to limit it? It feels like this stuff happens more often now, but who can know? The even bigger question is why are these obviously deranged people ignored by the people around them? The Buffalo shooter was ignored by everyone, despite the obvious signs. The liars fill the space with lies about the subject so that getting a straight answer is impossible.

Of course, the reason the liars exist is they keep people off balance. Official lying has been outsourced in what may be the most cyclical public-private partnership in human history, so that the rulers can just nod along with the symphony of lies. Biden’s script writers just go to one of the websites of the many organizations who exist to produce official nonsense and jot down a few of their lines. The mass media, of course, then blasts this and their own lies to the public.

One of the underrated aspects of Orwell’s Animal Farm is how the pigs used deception to create doubt among the animals. It reached the point where the animals could not trust their own memory. The other day, the Washington Post claimed George Floyd was shot by police. How long before school children are taught that he was hanged by the Proud Boys? More important, how many people will tire of correcting the record and this lie becomes official truth?

The official lies are not just about keeping the public confused. It also serves to keep the managerial class huddled together. On the topic of official lies, the classic Vaclav Havel essay, “The Power of the Powerless” comes to mind. Amazingly, the people who shower the public with disinformation, the official lies, claim to be fighting against disinformation, often citing Havel’s essay. The lying is an important part of their identity as a besieged group defending “our democracy.”

In the final years of the Soviet Union, the general public no longer believed anything said by their government. The people in government were every bit as cynical about the official truths, but they were paid to lie so they lied. What held it together is both sides were sure the other side believed the lies, at least enough of them that the rest dared not question the lies. The collapsed came when everyone realized that no one believed what they were forced to say or forced to hear.

Havel opened his famous essay with this line. “A specter is haunting Eastern Europe: the specter of what in the West is called dissent.” He then explained, “It was born at a time when this system, for a thousand reasons, can no longer base itself on the unadulterated, brutal, and arbitrary application of power, eliminating all expressions of nonconformity.” That was almost fifty years ago in a world that is largely forgotten by modern people, yet terribly familiar to us now.

The final sentence of that opening paragraph is, “What is more, the system has become so ossified politically that there is practically no way for such nonconformity to be implemented within its official structures.” One paragraph from a dissident operating in an alien system from the past captures the current moment in America. A decade later that system collapsed. That is what the sea of lies from our rulers tells us about what lies ahead. A regime built on lies always ends in collapse.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb. Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

The Faustian Bargain

Posted on May 23, 2022 by thezman

Note: The Taki post is up. This week it is a discourse on the proposed replacement for originalism in conservative jurisprudence. The Sunday Thoughts podcast is up behind the green door for subscribers.

Over the last few years, it has become increasingly popular to examine what went wrong with the conservative movement. This was mostly the result of Trump winning the Republican nomination, despite universal opposition from conservatives. At that point it was no longer possible to ignore the collapse of conservatism. Prior to 2016, the movement was the gatekeeper for the party. Trump and the Dirt People kicked open the gates and found nothing worth keeping inside.

One result of this is the sprouting of proposed alternatives like Yoram Hazony’s national conservatism, common good conservativism and integralism. Libertarians, of course, maintain the fantasy that this is their time. There are certainly others working to produce something to fill the void on the Right. All of these proposed alternative start with a basic claim that conservatism failed. None of these new conservatisms bother to think too hard about why Buckley conservatism failed.

This is what makes this post from Paul Gottfried important. He was around when many of the critical turns of the conservative movement were made, so he has a perspective on it that few have today. Most of the main players from the growth phase of Buckley conservatism are gone now. With them went the personal disputes that ended up shaping what became mainstream conservatism in the 1980’s. The one thing the Left has right is that politics is always personal.

Gottfried tries to do three things in the post. One is to bring attention to the recent scholarship on Harry Jaffa, who was a central figure in the debates about the shape and direction of conservatism. Then there is the fact that there was a time when debate was possible within conservatism. Others have noted that there was an interregnum in which sensitive topics like race and immigration could be debated. That window closed in the 1990’s, eventually taking the public square with it.

The main point of Gottfried’s post is to place the blame for this and the collapse of conservatism at the feet of the neoconservatives. Before the neoconservatives gained power, it was possible for Harry Jaffa and Mel Bradford to live together. Jaffa was largely responsible for the Lincoln fetish among conservatives. He claimed the Civil War and the Reconstruction amendments were a perfecting of the original Constitution by reincorporating the sentiments of the Declaration.

Bradford was a Southerner and a Southern conservative. This not only placed him at odds with Jaffa’s reimagining of the Founding and Civil War, but it put him on the losing side of the internal struggles within conservatism. He was on the Russel Kirk wing of the Right, which was purged by Buckley in the 1980’s. In fact, Bradford was one of the first to be hurled into the void by conservatives. Paul Gottfried blames this urge to purge squarely on the neoconservatives.

There is truth to it, but the desire to excommunicate rivals exists in all movements, so it is hardly unique to the neocons. The question is how were they able to change the rules in order to disqualify the arguments of their opponents? After all, no one was purged for being factually incorrect. The dispute between the paleos and neos was over moral questions and that is where Jaffa comes back into the room. It is Jaffa’s work that gave the neocons the chance to rig morality to their advantage.

The central claim of Harry Jaffa is that the Constitution was an imperfect effort to encode the sentiments of the Declaration into the political framework of the new nation created out of the break from England. The contradictions within the constitutional order eventually led to the Civil War. This allowed for some necessary corrections to advance the nation down the road toward the sentiments in the Declaration. Lincoln becomes the Moses of this new nation forged in liberty.

Of course, this requires a reading of early American history that steps outside of the actual facts and written accounts of the Founders. It also requires a new version of the events leading up to the Civil War. That was all made easy because it proved a path forward for conservatives to embrace egalitarianism. They could finally claim that their opponents on the Left were the real racist because Lincoln was a Republican, freed the slaves and said stuff about all men being equal.

That is not being fair to Jaffa, who deserves a much more through debunking than time permits, but this was his contribution to conservatism. The cult of Lincoln he created for the Right cut them loose from the old conservativism, rooted in the natural order, and provided them with a new moral foundation. The New Right would be about equality and liberty. The New Left, in contrast, would be about equality and justice, thus tying the two together through egalitarianism.

Here is a post on the same site as the Gottfried post, in which the editors reject the new normal of American politics. Everything is good until this. “In reality, race is not the ultimate fact of human identity or the central problem of American life. Different ethnic populations have different general tendencies, but not different natural rights. Everyone is capable of learning to live well in this country, but only if we confidently endorse both our geographical and cultural boundaries.”

The linked post in that quote is worth reading, as it rips the mask from the “new conservatism” and exposes it as the old conservatism. The great fork in the road, the shadow that hangs over human history, is biology. The story of man is not one tale with many chapters, but many stories of many people, all of whom have their own unique understanding of themselves and how they should live. The genuine man of the Right understands this and accepts it. Equality, in short, is inhuman.

When you pick up one end of a stick, you pick up the other. This is the problem that destroyed 20th century conservatism. They were offered a Faustian bargain from the likes of Harry Jaffa. They accepted the egalitarianism of the radicals as their foundation stone and in exchange they were rewarded with riches. Conservatism was once again Northern Conservatism and followed the same path that another Southerner observed about them in the 19th century.

Trotsky’s Revenge

Posted on May 19, 2022 by thezman

One of the interesting revelations in Tucker Carlson’s book, Ship of Fools, is that Bill Kristol said privately what he denied publicly about the Iraq war. That is, the war was about Israel and not American security. Saddam was never a threat to American interests in the region but taking him out was good for Israel. The neocons have always denied this, usually claiming it is anti-Semitic to suggest it, but every time they get caught in a lie they squeal “anti-Semitism” so this is not new.

The thing is though, a schemer like Kristol could have been lying to Carlson, hoping he stepped on the same landmines as Pat Buchanan. Carlson was always a war skeptic and a natural conservative, so Bill Kristol would have seen him as a threat. The main play of the second generation neocons has always been the Hitler card. They look for some way to accuse their opponents of being anti-Semites, so that the focus shifts from the neocon schemers and onto the accusers.

Putting that aside, subsequent events suggest that the crusade against Islam launched in the Bush years was never about Israel. The real target for the neocons was the ancient enemy in the east, Russia. Neoconservatism, after all, was born out of a hatred for Russia during the Cold War. The cover story was that these radicals had turned on communism, but in reality, they were reacting to what was happening on the Left with regards to relations with the Soviet Union.

Soon after the fall of the Cold War, the neocons running foreign policy under the first George Bush engineered the first Gulf War. They did this by baiting Saddam Hussein into invading Kuwait. The American ambassador to Iraq at the time was April Glaspie, who met with Saddam before he launched his invasion. It is clear from the notes that he was not committed to war. It is also clear that Glaspie gave him the impression that America was not committed to defending Kuwait.

Why would the neocons want a war with Iraq? It seems like a lifetime ago, but Iraq was a longtime client of the Soviet Union. Once the Soviet Union fell, the Russians were in no condition to help her allies as in the past. This made it a perfect time to take this piece of the board. Given the behavior of the neocons in Ukraine over the last decade, it is not a stretch to think they baited Saddam into war. After all, they have been trying to bait Russian into invading Ukraine.

If we look at the crusade against Islam as a proxy war against Russia, the last thirty years of foreign policy adventures makes more sense. The second war with Iraq was about finishing the job and preparing for the planned attack on Iran, which so happens to be a Russia ally. The creation of ISIS as a weapon against Syria, another ally of Russia, now also makes sense. The occupation of Afghanistan never made sense as a response to 9/11, but it did make a nice forward operating base.

Long forgotten in all of this is how the neocons pushed the Clinton administration into bombing Serbia during the Balkan war. The Balkans have always been a mess, so there was never a reason for America to take sides. This should have been a European matter, worked out in endless meetings, like everything else in Europe. Instead, the neocons pushed for an aggressive stance toward Serbia, which so happens to be a longtime Russian ally. There is a pattern here.

Fast forward to the present and the pattern is clear. The neocons started the Russo-Georgian war by trying to bring Georgia into NATO. Give or take, Georgia is about 3,000 miles from the North Atlantic, thus making her an odd fit for a military alliance based in the North Atlantic. That was never the point, of course. The point was to pick away at the borders with the ancient enemy. NATO expansion has never been about defense, but always about offense.

In more recent times, the neocons have tried to color revolution Belarus, they have stirred up trouble in Kazakhstan and they are probably involved in the tensions between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Then there is the Ukraine situation. Half of Washington has been taking bribes from Ukrainian oligarchs, which has concealed the fact that the neocons have been plotting trouble there for over a decade. The same people behind the color revolution in the Obama years are in charge now.

The point of all of this has been to weaken Russia by nibbling away at her border, forcing her to commit resources to all of these different conflicts. At some point, the current government becomes too weak to defend itself. Maybe with some outside help, the government falls. This opens the door for regime change and the long dreamed of break up of Russia. This is not idle speculation. A few years ago, the Rand Corporation provide the playbook for those interested.

The old line about the neocons being Trotskyites was mostly a way to point out that they were not conservatives in the traditional sense. Many were communist in the middle of the last century. Their “conversion” was never about the things that had long defined conservatism, but rather the temporary needs of the moment. They cared more about beating Russia in the Cold War than anything else. They simply embraced the rest of the conservative program as a means to an end.

One of the underappreciated aspects of the last five years is the exit of the neocons from Buckley conservatism. They have their own publications and regularly attack their old friends on the Right. Of course, they were outlandishly opposed to trump and the pro-American sentiments he embodied. Their primary complain was that he was soft on Russia and Russian allies. This transformation suggest the paleocons were right about the neocon conversion being less than genuine.

There may have been more to the Trotsky line. In radical politics, it was long held that the Bolshevik revolution was hijacked by Stalin. The Trotsky wing never forgave the Russians for allowing the revolution to turn into Tsarism. This fueled the deep hatred for Russia among Trotskyites of a certain persuasion. The neoconservative persuasion was driven by this animus in the Cold War. After the Cold War, it has driven by the berserk obsession for Russia by the second wave of neocons.

What America, and by extension the West, has been experiencing over the last thirty years is Trotsky’s revenge. Resentment at the failure of his faction in the revolution was probably the second to last thing that went through his head. His followers, however, have had it in the forefront of their minds. The current generation of neocons, lacking the intelligence to understand any of this, are simply left with a seething hatred of Russia that has driven America foreign policy for a generation.

European Zionism

Posted on May 18, 2022 by thezman

Note: In a break from the grifter code, I am not going to assume the new merch is the greatest merch in history. Criticisms and suggestions are welcome. This is new ground for me, so I expect to be terrible at first and get better over time. Please shop here and leave a comment when you can. Also send feedback to me.

One of the queer things about American politics is that you can be enthusiastically in support of Israel, even though Israel advocates an ideology that is expressly banned in American politics. The Israelis are ethno-nationalists. The official policy of the state of Israel is blood and soil nationalism. Ben Shapiro once advocated for the “removal” of non-Jews from Israel and he faced no backlash. In fact, this position boosted his standing on the American Right.

In contrast, if you say that America should not let everyone in who shows up at the border, you are called a white nationalist. The mainstream media celebrates the “great replacement” but if you question the decency of the great replacement, you are condemned as some sort of monster. If you notice anything about demographics, you could have a mob at your door. What is celebrated with regards to Israel is the most heinous crime you can commit in America.

There are lots of people who recognize the contradiction, but the fact remains, most white people in America are fine with it. As long as they can celebrate Israel there is no price they refuse to pay. For most white people in America, loving Israel brings a sense of peace in a troubled world. The reason, of course, is it is an acceptable outlet for ethnocentric impulses. Israel does not exist as a real place for Americans. She is an abstraction, an allowable team to support for cultural reasons.

A stark example is the contrast between Greg Johnson, the author of The White Nationalist Manifesto and Yoram Hazony, the author of the Virtue of Nationalism, two books on the exact same subject. Both books make the exact same claims about people and human organization. Both argue for nations to organized around the interests of a dominant ethnic group. Both authors demand a homeland for their people that is only for their people.

Greg Johnson has been made into a pariah, suffering in a form of internal exile, while Yoram Hazony gets to run big expensive conferences funded by Western oligarchs and attended by famous people. The difference, of course, is Hazony is a famous outspoken Zionist from Israel and his efforts are on behalf of the Jewish state. Johnson is a white nationalist who advocates for white people. The typical white person in America does not find this contradiction troubling in the least.

This contradiction has been obvious for a long time and it has been pointed out by various groups when it suits them. The Left used to criticize Israel for being a fascist or apartheid state. That is not as popular today, but it does come up from time to time, an issue Hazony addresses in his writings. On the Right, patriots have often pointed out that they simply want policies acceptable in Israel, like immigration control, to be applied to the United States. The contradiction persists, however.

It has been popular with certain types to blame this contradiction on some sort of conspiracy, but events in Europe suggest it is something else. The war in Ukraine has suddenly brought nationalists, who have been marginalized for generations, in league with internationalists, in opposition to Russia. Nationalists across Europe are now blindly in support of Ukraine and in opposition to Russia. Most of them repeat the agit-prop that comes from Washington.

The insanity on display cannot be overstated. Nationalists will claim with a straight face that they oppose Russia because it is an aggressive empire. Yet, they are throwing in with the Global American Empire, which is promising to erase the last vestiges of European culture and replace it with consumerism. Nationalists may as well put corporate logos on themselves. Perhaps add their own color to the rainbow flag that is the symbol of Americanism around the world now.

It is a bizarre spectacle. For decades, European nationalists had nothing much to say about Russia, other than some observations of the fact that she had not been homogenized into generic American culture. The Visegrád nations have also come in for admiration from nationalists for resisting the cultural decline. Otherwise, nationalists have not had much to say about the East. Now, they are obsessed with Russia and swear they have always been at war with Eurasia.

The most bizarre example of this is Finland. The tiny country tucked away in the northeast of Europe has long been a neutral player in European politics. This was how she maintained herself as an independent country. Finnish nationalism was built on a nuanced understanding of her neighbors, especially Russia. Today, Finnish nationalism is nothing more than unthinking hatred of Russia. They repeat Washington talking points and sound like unhinged neocons in support of empire.

What is happening in Europe is opposition to Russia is now an acceptable outlet for the natural ethnic pride of Europeans. The West is underwriting literal Nazis in Ukraine, but that is acceptable because they oppose Russia. Nationalists now feel they can come out of the shadows, as long as they too hate Russia. In fact, many nationalists have signed on to fight in Ukraine. Every day there are reports of foreign mercenaries being killed or captured in the Donbas.

Just as being a Zionist is an acceptable outlet for nationalist impulses in America, being anti-Russian is an acceptable outlet for nationalism in Europe. The nationalists have even picked up on the idiotic claim that Russia is a multi-racial empire, which is a staggeringly ignorant argument. It is one thing for provincial clodhoppers in America to say such a thing, but Europeans should know better. Their emotional need to be a part of something, however, has overrode their intellects.

That is another interesting piece to this. In America, most white people are as ignorant of Israel as they are everything else about the world. Americans are famously provincial, so the Zionist-White Nationalist parallels are not obvious. Ukraine is in the backyard of European nationalists. Many are anti-Semites. Despite this, they fully support a puppet regime of Washington run by a Jewish comedian, doing the bidding of the neoconservative cabal that runs American foreign policy.

What is happening in Europe is what we have seen in America. The nativism and national pride of the heritage population is being channeled into activism on behalf of the Global America Empire. In America, this energy goes to support Israel, while in Europe it will be channeled into hatred of Russians. It is no surprise that Yoram Hazony is trying to attach himself to this new anti-Russian sentiment in Europe. Look for his next conference in your country this summer.

The usual suspects, of course, will claim that this is the work of the usual suspects, but there is another example of this that says otherwise. In the Covid panic, many in the HBD community, who had been living in the shadows of the biological sciences, jumped on the Covid madness with the zeal of a lunatic. People who spent careers criticizing media claims about biology suddenly accepted everything the media had to say about the Covid pandemic, no matter how ridiculous.

The driver in the HBD-to-Covidian lane was the fact that smart people who had been excluded from polite society suddenly sensed an opening. Instinctively they sensed they could join the conversation, as this was their wheelhouse. They tackled the issue with all the enthusiasm they could muster. Inevitably they signed onto the most draconian measures by people who say sex is a social construct and demand you announce your pronouns when entering a room.

Of course, this never provided a lane back to respectability for them, which should be a lesson for both Christian Zionists and European Nationalists. The morality of the Global American Empire is the morality of the Western managerial elite. That morality is entirely situational, based on partisan concerns. Today, certain nationalists are acceptable because they serve present needs, but tomorrow their supporters will be thrown in dungeons, because it serves the elites.

In the end we are left with two parallel phenomena. The contradiction of American Zionism serves the interest of empire. It was Christian Zionist who supported the wars in the Middle East. Now European nationalism is being retarded to oppose Russia on behalf of the empire, which explicitly rejects European nationalism. In the former case, a distant enemy is used to conceal the enemy at home. In Europe, a local enemy is used to conceal the enemy across the sea.

Finally, and most importantly, a kernel of truth lies at the heart of the deception. In the case of American Zionism, the truth is that people naturally want to be organized around their racial and ethnic identity. In the case of this new European Zionism, the kernel of truth is that people naturally resist empire. In the former, the truth is channeled away from questioning the logic of empire. In the latter, the truth is channeled away from opposing the empire. In both cases, it is seeds cast among stones.

Turn The Page

Posted on May 17, 2022 by thezman

In America, what is called the political Left operates within a few modes of thought tied to seminal events on the Left. One if the civil right era, another is the Watergate era and the other is interwar Europe. All events are framed by this period. If they do not fit these models then they are usually ignored. Of course, their framing of these periods is cartoonish and absurd. It is all easy to understand heroes and villains, who are stripped of moral ambiguity and nuance.

What passes for the Right has always been an echo of the Left, so they have evolved similar framings. It took a while but the 1980’s is one of their primary frameworks for talking about current events. They are always looking for the next Reagan, Thatcher or Bill Buckley among the current mediocrities. Their answer to almost every issue is a slogan from the high water point of conservatism. Modern conservatism is a cargo cult where current members ape the members of the past.

Like their friends on the Left, the Right also has an obsession for the interwar period in Europe, but with a different emphasis. While the Left checks under their bed every night to make sure Hitler is not waiting for them, the Right is always sure Neville Chamberlain is lurking somewhere, ready to give away the Sudetenland. Like the Left, their understanding of that time is cartoonish and absurd. All the players are exaggerated heroes or villains with crude moral choices.

This can be traced to the Reagan years. His innovation in the Cold War was to call the Russians the “evil empire.” This may be the first example of a politician convincing adults by using a reference to a children’s show. Everyone dealing with an affluent white female liberal (AWFL), who quotes Harry Potter all the time, can thank Ronald Reagan for that bit of cultural innovation. Ever since, the right has sorted the world into extreme villains and themselves as the heroes.

Of course, the most extreme villain is Hitler. Reagan stopped short of calling Gorbachev the new Hitler, but that generation knew their history. Those that followed have thrown around the Hitler language as recklessly as the Left. Saddam Hussein was Hitler and his party was “islamo-fascist.” In fact, every Muslim with a complaint about bombs dropping on his head was called an “islamo-fascist” by conservatives. Even the Taliban got this label from conservatives.

In this framing, every Hitler needs a Chamberlain and Churchill. In conservative framing, Chamberlain is not a man who wished to avoid another horrible European war, but a foolish sissy unwilling to face reality. Churchill is not a reckless warmonger known for his alcoholism and lack of judgment, but a heroic visionary who could spot Old Scratch coming before anyone. Of course, every conservative sees a bit of Churchill in himself, so he is always ready for another war.

We see this with the undeclared war on Russia. Putin is Hitler, despite the Russian role in defeating the real Hitler. The Russians are the Nazis invading Poland, even though the guys on the other side are extreme Hitler enthusiasts. Biden has to be Chamberlain, even though he barely knows where he is most of the time and it is his administration that launched the war against Russia. His failure to take it to the nuclear level is proof that he is too soft on the new Hitler.

You see this deranged mental state in this American Conservative post about a warmonger convention held in DC. Those who point out the massive failure of thirty years of pointless wars of choice is now called a neo-isolationist. Note how not supporting aggressive imperial wars of domination is isolationism. Note also that the people who say this love quoting the Founders, except the part where Washington warned about entangling alliances.

Part of this framing is the lack of scruples by modern conservatives. The warmonger events are sponsored by the war machine and they pay well. Sites like National Review are now wholly dependent on money from Big Tech and the Military Industrial Complex, so they are happy to sell endless war, foreign and domestic. Conservatism is now just the public relations arm of the security state. It is why they never expose themselves to pushback on these issues.

That aside, it still leaves the obsession with Hitler. In the middle of the last century, the men who actually fought real Nazis rarely mentioned Hitler. The occasional joke about the old enemies was as much as they did. Their children and now their grandchildren, who grew up insulated from all of life’s troubles, are obsessed with events that happened almost a century ago in another country. The war on Russia reveals that this derangement is getting worse.

The answer may simply be that the so-called conservatives are just boys and girls playing a role, wearing costumes too large for them. Like children in their parent’s clothes, modern political actors are midgets compared to the men who created the roles they are now asked to play. To make up for the fact that they are fleas on the society they inherited, they exaggerate their role in it. A similar phenomenon drives the Left, which also operates like a cargo cult.

Another factor is cultural inertia. The Global American Empire was born in the Second World War and its evolution was in the context of its shadow. The Cold War was driven by the energy of the war against fascism. The energy from the initial creation of the empire was channeled into the Cold War. The residual energy that now gets channeled into endless wars of choice is just cultural inertia. It is the old rationale for existence looking for a place to go in post-Cold War age.

Regardless, the only way forward for America and the West is to finally close the books on the 20th century. That will require a lot of funerals and retirement parties, but Father Time is undefeated in this regard. Once the people defined by the endless fights over old ideas like nationalism, fascism and communism are gone, then the new fights over civilizationalism can begin. The question is whether the actuarial tables can do their magic before it is too late.

Another New Right

Posted on May 16, 2022 by thezman

Note: The Taki post is up. This week it is a discourse on the modern partisan and the impact it has on our politics. The Sunday Thoughts podcast is up behind the green door for subscribers.

The term “New Right” is one of those phrases that has a long life but has never had much meaning in American politics. Bill Buckley was a member of the New Right when he got going in the middle of the last century. Later, various efforts were made to create a New Right as an alternative to the Buckley Right. As conservatism collapsed over the last decade the term has become a popular one with failed alternatives. Members of the alt-right even tried rebranding as the New Right.

The long life of the term in America, without much meaning, says more about the overall state of politics than the various efforts to create an alternative. In Europe, the term New Right has meaning, because it is a real school that has been trying to create a new politics that reflects the current age. In America, the popularity of New Right reflects the fact that there has never been a genuine Right. What passes for the Right is just a foil for the prevailing orthodoxy of the ruling class.

That reality is clearer now that at any time in the history of the empire, but there are those giving the term another shot. There are several groups competition to be the new Right to replace the rubble that is mainstream conservatism. There is a lot of interest in the mainstream in these projects as the prevailing orthodoxy works best when it has a foil to operate as a gatekeeper. Channeling popular frustration into a sterile alternative is the secret to maintaining order.

The least promising of the alternatives is whatever Curtis Yarvin, known as Moldbug, is calling himself these days. Yarvin got famous blogging as a neo-reactionary who criticized democracy in various ways. He would write awfully long essays criticizing liberal democratic system from the perspective of a royalist. His style was something like a stream of consciousness while playing an on-line role playing game. It was elite condescension for those who imagined themselves elite.

After a break from his Moldbug character, Yarvin is back, but playing himself, a retired software developer, who has a lot to say about the present order. Instead of demanding the creation of a monarchy, he advocates a rejection of politics entirely. According to his analysis, any participation in politics ends up supporting the system, so the only way to oppose the system is to drop out entirely. His approach is not much different from Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option, just without the religion.

The basic argument Yarvin makes is that participating within the rules of the system supports the system. If you organize a new party, for example, you are legitimizing the party system and the rules that govern it. On the other hand, if you protest against the system, your protest is either crushed or permitted by the system. Either way, this legitimizes the power of the system, because the system only acts in ways that add to its power and legitimizes its power.

While there are bits of his critique of liberal democracy that are accurate, his alternatives are best described as incoherent label shopping. He has tried out “clear pill”, “grey mirror” and now “deep right” as marketing phrases. None of which mean anything on their own. Instead, they work like insider language for his fans, a way for them to feel like they have special knowledge. Yarvin writes in riddles, so these secret phrases can mean whatever the fan needs them to mean.

A more robust option in the New Right talent contest is the pan-Zionism offered up by the Israeli political scientist Yoram Hazony. He is probably the most complete of the alternatives and has the best financial support. The oligarch Peter Theil has been backing him for a few years, primarily by financing his conferences on nationalism in America and Europe. These have become networking events for the people hoping to win the New Right lottery.

Hazony’s argument, put forth in his book The Virtue of Nationalism, is that the West needs to re-embrace nationalism and reject empire. His argument for nationalism is pretty much the argument for Zionism. In fact, his case seems to be more of a defense of Zionism than a genuine case for European nationalism. In his book, he goes to great lengths to argue that things like fascism and apartheid are not nationalism, which of course are claims made against Zionism.

The problem for all nationalist movements is the elephant in the room. Once you make the claim of exclusivity, that is a people has an exclusive right to determine their composition, it means certain people can be excluded. For European nationalists, this brings obvious comparisons to unfortunate incidents. For Zionists, this offends the donor base which lives primarily in the Global American Empire. The solution is a watered down and exception-riddled nationalism.

In both of these efforts, what plagues them is an unwillingness to address the core defects of liberal democracy directly. The crisis in the West stems directly from the anti-human notions of egalitarianism and the blank slate. This is what underpins multiculturalism, universalism and globalism. Without addressing the twin tap roots of liberal democracy, the critic is left to whack away at the leaves. It means these flavors of the New Right are doomed from the start.

Another entrant in the New Right derby is what is sometimes called common good conservatism and sometimes called integralism. This reflects the two camps that operate within the movement. One camp takes a secular view of politics, primarily focused on the law, while the other camp is explicitly religious. The former seeks to reform the law in order to achieve their ends. The latter is a revival of antidisestablishmentarianism from old Europe.

The secular camp is best represented by Josh Hammer, who is busy creating what he calls common good jurisprudence to replace originalism and textualism. His critique, like many on this subculture, starts with the dissident observation that conservatism has never conserved anything. He repeats the century old observation by Robert Lewis Dabney about conservatism being yesterday’s progressivism. He then proposes an alternative he calls common good jurisprudence.

On the integralism side, the face of that wing is a Harvard academic named Cornelius Adrian Comstock Vermeule. He advocates for a robust state that will act in the best interests of the common good. The common good is largely defined by the teachings of the Catholic Church. He wants a return of throne and later rule, in which the state, however composed, is unconstrained by individual rights. In other words, he wants the current system to be guided by medieval Catholicism.

Like Yarvin and Hazony, the various figures flying the common good conservatism banner have no interest in taking on egalitarianism and the blank slate, even though their hierarchical worldview should demand it. A state that acts in the common good requires someone with the power to decide what is the common good. There is no room for a monarch or an enlightened despot in a world where all men are equal and their equality must be respected by the state.

The problem with all of these attempts to create a New Right is they are limited to a critique of the present order. They refuse to ponder the central questions of all political morality and that is “who decides?” and “by what authority?” The one who comes closest is Hazony and he stops at the water’s edge for obvious reasons. Otherwise, the New Right is pretty much a social club of people who are unhappy with the present order but cannot face the reality of it.

That may be what is preventing a New Right from forming up and taking the place of Buckley-style conservatism on the big stage. The specter haunting the West is demographics, which is animated by those two central questions. There is little need for a New Right unless it is willing speak to demographics and everything that flows from it. When the only question that matters is off the table, everything else is idle chatter that makes for a fun conference, but not much else.

Civilizationalism

Posted on May 9, 2022 by thezman

Note: The Taki post is up. I offer some unsolicited advice to the richest man in the world as he embarks on his Twitter venture. The Sunday Thoughts podcast is up behind the green door for subscribers.

In the eastern part of the European continent, today is Victory Day, which marks the surrender of the Nazis to the Soviet Union. The official surrender was signed on May 8th, 1945, but it was already past midnight in Moscow. It was the biggest public holiday in the old Soviet Union. Now it is celebrated in most of the former republics, with parades and public commemorations. Under Putin, the Moscow military parade was brought back after a hiatus under Boris Yeltsin.

It is hard for Western people, especially Americans, to grasp why Victory Day is so important to the people of the Russian Federation. The events of the war, when remembered at all, are recalled for the purpose of promoting current narratives rather than a sense of national pride. Of course, the memory of the war in Europe is highly stylized and fictionalized. For the people in the East, the war and the triumph over the Nazis is an important part of their national identity.

America lost about 400,000 soldiers in the war. The Brits lost about the same and the French lost close to 600,000. For narrative purposes, the Axis powers are not allowed to talk about their dead. The Soviet Union lost twenty million people. Countries like Poland, Hungary and the Baltic states lost close to ten percent of their population as a result of the Nazi invasion and then the Soviet invasion. This is why the war still looms so large in the consciousness of those people.

The war is why the word “Nazi” resonates much more with the people of eastern Europe than even the nuttiest social justice warrior in America. In America, the cartoon version of the past turns villains like the Nazis into hollow figures who represent whatever the current year harpies fear about themselves. For eastern people, the word conjures memories of an existential threat to their existence. The Great Patriotic War, as the Russians call it, was a war for the survival of their people.

This civilizational angst is what lies at the heart of the war in Ukraine. The Russians see themselves fighting a war for the survival of their civilization. Volunteers from all over the Russian Federation are now fighting in the Ukraine because they see themselves at war with a West that threatens their existence. Washington is not threatening genocide, but something almost as bad, the erasure of their national identity. The Chechens like being Chechen and they will die for it.

This civilizational sensibility is hard for Western people to grasp. America, of course, has no real identity. It is a collection of economic and political slogans that holds together a continent full of strangers. Europe still has some vestiges of national identity, but that has been anathematized by the ruling elite of the continent. Nationalism is now a synonym for fascism. In its place is the concept of European which is even less meaningful than American sloganeering.

Civilizationalism got the people of the East through the war, but it also carried them through communism. Despite the homogenizing ethos of Marxism-Leninism, the national character of the people of the Soviet Union survived. It was this sense of self that has been the basis of revival after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The same sensibility that allowed the people of Eurasia to survive the Mongol invasions has allowed them to survive the invasion of Wall Street bankers in the 1990’s.

Again, this is hard for Western people to fathom. Unlike communism, liberal democracy has been highly effective at reoriented its victims to see themselves in purely economic terms, shedding their cultural identity. Western people are baffled as to why Russians would give up drag queen story hour to seize the Donbas. Western planners even assumed the people of the Russian Federation would rather have McDonalds than a connection with their ancestors.

Washington’s war on Russia brings up two bits of irony. One is the people of the East overcame communism only to find the alternative was worse. The communists promised to steal your labor and the dignity that arises from it. Liberal democracy promises to steal your soul and replace it with consumerism. The communists built monuments to the workers while the liberal democrats destroy the monuments to your ancestors and replace them with planned developments.

The other bit of irony in all of this is that if the West is going to survive it is going to need to embrace civilizationalism as well. The promise of the EU was that it would unite the countries of the Europe for the common good. The trouble is the elites embrace the cancer of multiculturalism. That cancer will have to be removed and replaced with a civilizational sensibility that respects the variations within the culture, traditions and demographics of people with a common history.

This concept is not entirely alien to the West. Europe rallied to defend Christendom against the Muslims. It was not nationalism that led Sobieski to lead his men against the Turks at Battle of Khotyn. It was a civilizational identity that saw the Turks as alien invaders who must be repelled in order to preserve Western civilization. Into the last century, there was an understanding among Western people that despite their differences, there was a West and he had to be defended.

Perhaps the psychosis of liberal democracy will finally be beaten out of the West in what is looking like another futile and pointless war of choice. Despite the disparity in wealth, the Russians merely have to continue to exist in order to win. For the West, liberal democracy requires the unconditional surrender of Eurasian identity to the homogenizing forces of Liberal democracy. History shows that this is every bit as futile as the crusades against Islam.

The big difference between this civilizational war launched by the West and the one launched against Islam is that the East matters. The West has deep economic connections to the East. That means this war will have real costs to the people of the West, in terms of living standards. It is unlikely that the people will be willing to sacrifice the only benefit of liberal democracy for an abstract war against a people who they naturally see as civilizational allies.

The Violence of Democracy

Posted on May 4, 2022 by thezman

For generations in the West, it has been asserted that democracies do not go to war with one another. The claim is based on the extremely limited experience with democratic processes in the 20th century. The nations with democratic elements, as defined by the victors, did not go to war with one another. Britain (democratic) did not go to war with France(democratic) despite being a long time rival. Instead, Britain joined France against the anti-democratic states of the Axis powers.

This claim was a gratuitous assertion for the purpose of selling democracy as the cure for national conflict. In the same way that globalism is pitched as solution to war, democracy is pitched as the antidote to human conflict. It is at the heart of the claim the spread of liberal democracy in the post-Cold War world must inevitably remove war from the policy choices of nations. If liberal democracies do not go to war with one another, then a world of liberal democracies is free of war.

When you think about these claims from the post-Cold War period of American triumphalism, they are just repackaged claims from the past. Thomas Freidman’s argument in The Lexus and the Olive Tree is a post-modern retelling of the arguments in The Great Illusion. Fukuyama’s argument in The End of History is another iteration of the claims that have been made since Adam Smith. Human conflict can be tamed with rules and commerce.

It is an curious belief at the heart of liberal democracy when you stop and consider the mechanics of it. Trade between countries is just shorthand for the trade between individuals in one country with those in another country. Disputes between individuals in commerce are the norm. It is a game of each side trying to take advantage of the other and no one likes being beat this way. Scaled up and it means disputes between countries trading with one another are inevitable.

This is where the myopia and insularity of the managerial class, a creation of the haute bourgeoise, comes into play. This layer of middle managers and middle men are convinced they solve any dispute with the right credentials and a large enough committee budget. The managerial system is a self-licking ice cream cone, a self-referential process that prevents the participants from looking too closely at the mechanics of liberal democracy.

Democracy, of course, is a magical form of mob rule in which all of us are smarter than any of us. It just assumes that if the dumbest people are allowed to have input on the decisions, then somehow those decisions improve. In every other aspect of life, the goal is to keep the stupid people out of the decision tree, but with democracy the goal is to not only recruit them, but to elevate them. If prudence says to avoid war, then allowing the imprudent to rule means war is more likely.

The war-like nature of democracy is easy to see. Athens was the first great democracy and it was incapable of being a good neighbor. The greatness of Athens was the product of the wars with Persia. The golden age of Athens was between 480 – 404 BC and the Greco-Persian wars were from 499 BC to 449 BC. The Peloponnesian War lasted from 431 BC to 404 BC. In other words, the primary feature of democratic Athens was not cultural production by endless war.

America is arguably the first liberal democratic state. Like Athens, it was founded in war and like Athens has been at war throughout its life. A few years after the founding there was the War of 1812, then the Civil War. That ushered in an unusual few decades of peace, but then it was back to war with Spain, then most of Europe. The bodies were not even cold from the Second World War and the great liberal democracies were declaring war on Soviet Russia.

It is the post-Cold War period where you see the violence of democracy. The end of the long struggle with communism should have resulted in a great transitioning from the war economy to a peace economy. Instead, what followed was a generation of war against the Muslims. Now we have a new cold war, possibly even a hot war, with Russia over things no one bothers to explain. The reason for that is no one cares. Liberal democracy needs war. That is the reason for the war.

Once again, we see that the economic claims contained in the arguments about liberal democracy and peace do not hold up. Russia is an important part of the global supply chain for things like energy, food and raw materials. The liberal democracies are willing to starve their people to make war on the Russians. The same dynamic is shaping up with China, which is the manufacturer of many Western goods. Liberal democracy is unconstrained by economic concerns when it comes to war.

It is tempting to pin the violence of liberal democracy on the people at the top of the Global American Empire. There is some truth to it, but we have other examples of how the democratic ethos leads to violence. The French Revolution was the first flowering of the democratic ideal. It quickly descended into a bloodbath then Napoleon, a man determined in to conquer the world, in the name of the people of France. The birth of democracy in Europe was a very bloody one.

Communism is usually placed outside of democracy, but this is a gratuitous assertion by proponents of liberal democracy. Communism is probably the most democratic philosophy, as it is the most egalitarian. Once you assume universal equality, you inevitably assume universal participation in society. Of course, universal equality solves the moral questions, so there is not only no need for politics, but there is no need for the limits of politics. One hundred million people died to prove it.

The point of all this is that real world testing of the theories of democracy and liberal democracy make clear that it is a horribly violent pathology. Just as the real communism has never been tried, the real democracy has never existed, because the claims of democracy and now liberal democracy are incompatible with humanity. Rather than unleashing human potential, liberal democracy makes war on human nature and what follows is endless conflict to distract from this reality.

Perhaps the world war that is brewing between the West and the world is the final act in a play that started with the Enlightenment. In one final convulsion the monstrous ideas that were born in the “age of reason” will finally be defeated. Liberal democracy will be shown to be no better of an implementation of these ideas than communism or fascism was in the last century. One last effort to immanentize the eschaton will violently remove this lunacy from the mind of Western man.

Expansionist Ideology

Posted on May 3, 2022 by thezman

It is generally agreed that fascism was expansionist, primarily because of the events leading to the Second World War. The one real world experiment with fascism led the main fascists states to conquer their neighbors. It is a small sample size so there are people who argue that fascism is not necessarily expansionist. Franco’s Spain had no territorial ambitions. The same was true of Salazar’s Portugal. The counter there is that these two examples are products of their unique history.

Communism, in contrast, was expansionist and explicitly so. Marxist theory assumed that communism would transcend national borders and national identity. The Bolsheviks expanded on this assumption to argue that the advanced industrial states would move to communism first, then help the backward states to industrial and socialize, by exporting revolution to those states. While communism did not advocate conventional wars of conquest, it advocated ideological wars of conquest.

In these debates, there are three main defining issues. One is the ideological nature of the political system. Both fascism and communism were ideological, in that both revolve around a set of beliefs or philosophies. Communism was the better defined of the two, owing to the deeper intellectual tradition. It also had a theory of history that provided something like a divine purpose. The national character of fascism also limited its ideological scope compared to communism.

That brings up the second defining issue. The reason fascism was less expansionist than communism is universalism. Fascism was rooted in national identity, which by definition limits its exportability. Some countries would simply lack the national character for fascism. Communism, in contrast, was universal. It assumed that all people were naturally egalitarian and possessed the same potential. Further, communists argued that inequality between peoples was due to capitalism.

The third defining issue is the revolutionary character of the systems. Fascism was revolutionary only in so far it was a revolt against modernity. In this regard, it was more revanchist than revolutionary. Fascists wanted to restore a lost past in order to gain a lost future. Communism sought a direct break from the past in order to move into the next phase of history. The revolutionary impulse of fascism was limited while revolution was a defining feature of communism.

Using these three scales, it is easy to see why communism was unabashedly expansionist and fascism was debatably so. In fact, communism cannot exist without some new ground to conquer, while fascism is at least capable of operating within national boundaries as a good neighbor. Every communist country has been a nuisance to its neighbors, while we have examples of fascist countries like Spain and Portugal that managed to behave themselves.

When it comes to liberal democracy, there is not much debate about the expansionist impulses of the system. It is assumed that since this system eschews state violence, it eschews conquest in the conventional sense. There is also the claim that democracies do not go to war with one another or launch wars in lieu of negotiated settlement, so it is not expansionist by nature. Liberal democracies are dragged into conflict by illiberal systems that only understand force.

Yet, when we look at liberal democracy in practice, using the three scales to measure the expansionism of other ideologies, liberal democracy looks every bit as expansionist as 20th century communism. The United States, the epicenter of liberal democracy, has been at war for over a century. In fact, the reason for the past tense when speaking of fascism and communism is the United States conquered these two systems in the name of liberal democracy.

Liberal democracy is the most ideological political system ever conceived. It shares the same intellectual traditions as communism, but has become much more narrow over the course of time. Unlike communism, which assumed economic justice would solve the moral questions, thus ending the need for politics, liberal democracy assumes it has solved the moral questions. Liberal democracy is a set of cultural truths about which it tolerates no debate or dissent.

Of course, this assumes a degree of universalism that the communists would have found challenging. Fascists, of course, found the egalitarian claims of liberalism to be absurd and dangerous. Fascism was as much a revolt against liberalism as communism, because of the egalitarian nature of both systems. Liberal democracy combines egalitarianism and the blank slate to make claims about the human condition that no political system has ever entertained.

This is what makes liberal democracy the most revolutionary system of the three ideologies to compete in the last century. Absolute egalitarianism and the blank slate makes mankind limitless. It turns the vanguard into gods who can shape humanity to fit the needs of the ideology. Fascism was a revolt against modernity. Communism was a revolt against the past. Liberal democracy is a revolt against nature, specifically the natural limits of the human animal.

In the three measures of fascism and communism that defined their expansionism, liberal democracy exceeds them. This explains why liberal democracy, after having defeated fascism, quickly declared war on communism. Once communism was defeated, it declared war on the world. Fukuyama’s claim that liberal democracy was the final answer to the great ideological debates of the Enlightenment was not an observation, but a warning.

We see this in Ukraine. National interest should have led all parties to the negotiating table to sort out the problems in Ukraine. In fact, the conditions that led to war should not exist, but the expansionist impulse of liberal democracy created many of the conditions that led to war. It is the stated desire of the liberal democracies to conquer Russia that is keeping the war going. Russia, having shed revolutionary communism, is now at war with revolutionary liberal democracy.

The brewing war with China over Taiwan is another example of the expansionist impulse of liberal democracy. The Taiwan issue could be negotiated, but Washington likes to use Taiwan as a provocation. The radar system that it has installed in Taiwan is part of the explicit nuclear threat against China. The war with Russia is now being used as justification for further provocations. Washington has said that Beijing is next when it comes to regime change.

The very fact that the phrase “regime change” exists at all is a good example of the expansionist nature of liberal democracy. The fascists never expressed any interest in how other countries did politics. The communists were all about exporting revolution to other countries in order to alter their political orientation. We see the same thing with liberal democracy. It first exports the cultural goods of liberal democracy and then begins the color revolution process to effect regime change.

It is a big topic that deserves a deeper analysis, but on the surface it is quite clear that liberal democracy is the most revolutionary, expansionist and intolerant ideology to emerge from the 20th century. The limited expansionism of fascism triggered a war in Europe then world war. The explicit expansionism of communism plunged the world into a forty year cold war. The hyper-violent, revolutionary expansionism of liberal democracy now promises something far worse.

Whither The Interregnum

Posted on April 28, 2022 by thezman

A topic that John Derbyshire and Peter Brimelow have discussed over the years is the cultural interregnum that existed in the late 1980’s and 1990’s. This was a topic raised in their talks at the inaugural VDare conference in Berkeley Springs. For a little more than a decade, starting toward the end of the Cold War and running through the Clinton years, certain taboo topics could be discussed in public. You could also take the rational position on these topics without being killed.

For example, Peter Brimelow published his book in immigration titled, Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster. The book was an expansion of an exceptionally long essay he published in National Review. His essay criticizing immigration policy and warning about the cultural damage being done by it took up the majority of the space for that issue. National Review published an anti-immigration special edition and felt no need to grovel about it.

Around the same time, Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray published the The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. Not only did they publish the book, but lots of people bought, read and discussed it. Those alive during this period probably recall that it was a popular topic of conversation. Murray was actually allowed on television to frankly discuss the findings. Again, mainstream conservatives did not ritually denounce the book.

These are two examples of where now taboo subjects were acceptable. During this interregnum, a wide range of topics and people were allowed to operate. Jared Taylor, the founder and leader of American Renaissance, was allowed on television to talk about his views. His conference was shown on C-SPAN. Here is an old clip of Sam Francis speaking at the conference. Notice the lack of fainting and hysterical demands for violence against the people in the clip.

Today it is hard to imagine what it must have been like to live in a country where people could openly debate the topics of the day. One of the only benefits of the communications revolution is that we now have easy access to archival video from the time before the crazies took over the public square. We know there was once a place where adults could speak freely about difficult topics. The past is a counter to the claims of the present and operates as a hope for the future.

That is the context in which Brimelow and Derbyshire usually discuss this. The 1990’s was a peak time for them and the older dissidents. It was not just the peak years of their personals careers, but a peak for honest inquiry. The end of the Cold War and the apparent transition back to normalcy was a hopeful time. Instead of everything organized around a twilight struggle against communism, the focus of public life could return to the practical and productive.

There are two questions at the heart of this. Why did this period of relative tolerance occur and is it possible to return to such a state? For two decades now the lights have been going out in America and the West. The former Soviet Union offers more political freedom, because they have clear rules. The public square in the West is now controlled by a feckless, emotionally unstable mob that flits from panic to panic, destroying whatever happens to be in its way.

The answer to the first question is rooted in the past. What appears to have been an interregnum was actually a continuation of the Cold War consensus. Maintaining a broad public debate was an essential part of opposing communism. The West was where people could question the state. The Soviet Union did not permit public debate or questioning the state. This consensus carried forward after the end of the Cold War but shifted to more relevant topics.

Note that the closing of the American mind started with the 2000 election. During the Clinton years both sides of the consensus had to search around for a reason to exist now that the communists were gone. One side settled on post-Marx culturalism and the other embraced neoconservatism. For the former side, white people and heritage America would be the enemy around which the ruling class would organize, while the other side wanted Islam to be the new enemy.

You will note that the neoconservatives have produced a new enemy now that post-Marx culturalism seems to be burning out. The Russia-China axis will be the new forever enemy around which America must be organized. The other side seems to be open to this new arrangement, perhaps sensing that their war on white people is becoming dangerous for themselves. On the other hand, nostalgia plays an enormous role in ruling class thinking.

The second question is more difficult to know. The Judeo-Puritan ruling class that still prevails is a product of the 20th century. Unlike in Russia, where the old Cold War ruling class was eventually replaced by a modern one, America and the West remains saddled with a ruling elite built for a prior age. The American ruling class is sure that it can only exist if America is organized around some great struggle. It is why for thirty years they have lurched from one crusade to the next.

On the other hand, reality eventually does prevail. America is now suffering a shortage of qualified people for high skilled jobs. It turns out that airplane pilots and engineers are not floating across the Rio Grande. It also turns out that the cost of racial vengeance is not only borne by the bad whites. Managerial class whites are now experiencing the consequences of their reckless misbehavior. This is no way to organize a society for a new cold war with old foes.

In the end though, the answer to the larger question that looms over all of this is that for America to become a normal society, it must acquire a normal elite. Again, Russia provides a useful example. The old communist elites were able to transition into a new system of rule by oligarch. The 1990’s was also an interregnum of sorts for America’s old Cold War foe. The end of that period brought about a return to normalcy with the rise of a new elite reflective of the new Russia.

This did not happen in America. The cost of winning the Cold War was the belief among the ruling class that they had no need to change. They were on the right side of history so the only rational answer was to push down on the accelerator. For thirty years America has been rocketing toward the glorious future with a generation at the wheel, high on Cold War success and cultural narcissism. Unlike Russia, America’s elite has never had to confront their limitations.

In the long run, the last twenty years may be seen as the slow painful death of the Cold War ruling elite’s legitimacy. This dark age in America and the West will be understood as the slow death of an old power structure. These spasms of illiberal authoritarianism are the death throes of an old system. From the rubble of elite legitimacy will rise a new elite and new cultural framework to support them. There will be a new elite for a new America and a new West.

The Z Blog

Sports, Culture and Other Stuff

Category Archives: Culture