Category Archives: Culture

Materially Hollow

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If you wanted to locate a point on the timeline as to when America began its descent into the current crisis, a good candidate would be when the Right decided to focus on economics over culture. While there is no specific day on which they made the shift, it happened somewhere during the cultural revolution of the 1960’s and 1970’s, largely in response to that culture war. When the Right embraced fusionism, the die was cast and events would inevitably lead to the current crisis we see today.

Fusionism was the work of Frank Meyer, a 20th century political thinker, who was one of the founding members of National Review. In the book, In Defense of Freedom: A Conservative Credo, Meyer sought to unite libertarian ideas with traditionalism, into a new conservative ideology to oppose the Left. Instead of defending culture and tradition on their own terms, the New Right would use libertarian arguments to show that traditional culture was economically superior to socialism.

What happened to the American Right is it embraced the materialism of the Left, but sought to use those arguments to arrive at traditional ends. Rather than reject the hollow materialism of socialism and communism, the New Right would embrace it and celebrate it. Man was no longer a spiritual being operating in a material world, but a narrowly self-interested economic unit, who pursued his subjectively-defined ends in the most efficient way possible. Culture now took a back seat to economics.

Of course, what they were doing, even if they did not understand it at the time, was conceding the culture war to the Left. By shifting from a defense of culture and tradition on their own terms, the Right was no longer going to challenge the moral claims made by the Left. Instead of disputing the morality of Progressive reforms, the Right would put on the green eye shade and explain why those reforms were too expensive or upsetting to the economy. The Right became the accounting department of the Left.

Again, at the time, this probably seemed like a clever strategy. Post-war America was concerned about peace and prosperity. If you wanted political power, thus control of the culture, so the argument went, you had to win the argument over how best to achieve peace and prosperity. A political platform that promised economic growth and a foreign policy that promised peace through strength was the winning ticket. The Reagan Revolution of the 1980’s looked like a proof of concept.

The trouble was this could work as long as the general culture remained intact, ready to simply say no to the latest Progressive innovations. It turned out that 20th century conservatism was a free rider, living off the cultural surplus of post-war society. Like the Left, the New Right consumed this cultural surplus, but never contributed anything back to the cultural stock of society. More important, it allowed to atrophy the tools a people need to defend their culture and traditions from the Left.

By elevating economics over culture, the Right could just as easily justify left-wing assaults on civil society. The destruction of small-town America, for example, is largely a right-wing project. They are the ones defending oligarchical operations like Amazon and Walmart, that convert social capital into profits, draining the life from small town America. As long as it can be justified economically, the Right is happy to see these economic pirates raid your town and your neighborhood.

Think of it this way. For generations, social organizations relied upon local businessmen to underwrite them. The local church relied about its wealthy members to pay for the upkeep of the church and bankroll church activities. Local youth sports leagues were sponsored by local small business. Google is not going to pay for the repairs to the church’s pipe organ. Amazon is not going to sponsor your kid’s ball team. The price of cheap goods from Walmart was the spirit of your community.

This is why the cultural decline is accelerating. In the 1990’s, the mainstream of the Left snickered at homosexual marriage. A generation later and you get fired from your job if you are insufficiently enthusiastic for the guy in accounting, who recently started pretending to be a woman. The political Right has no answer for why this madness is intolerable, as they cannot find an economic argument suggesting it is too expensive or bad for global finance. They don’t know why transvestite story time is wrong.

When it all comes down to money, it means every man has a price. More important, it means his price will be at wherever the cheapest seller is at the moment. That’s been the story of the Buckley Right for the past thirty years. They are always ready to sellout to the lowest bidder, thus the culture war turned into a race to the bottom. The wreckage of Buckley conservatism is the result of a political strategy based on knowing the price of everything, but the value of nothing.

If there is to be a revival of the American Right, it must be a cultural revolution, not an economic one. An authentic alternative not only says Bob from accounting cannot wear a dress, but Bob cannot be in our town, as he is not one of us. We don’t tolerate men who wear dresses, because that’s who we are. An authentic alternative rejects economic man and embraces the whole man, who is defined by is community and his role in that community. Spiritual man must reign over economic man.

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The Children’s Crusade

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For the longest time, the Conservative Movement operated as the screeching gates of Tartarus that kept the damned from reentering politics. This worked because they had some great thinkers and writers, who functioned as adamantine columns. For the politically engaged, especially the youth, these writers provided the convincing arguments and critiques from the Right. That’s what made Buckley-style conservatism so effective at gate-keeping. They had high quality gate-keepers.

It was this effectiveness that was probably the undoing of Buckley conservatism in the long run. By the 1980’s, being an acceptable conservative was a good job at a good wage, so few were willing to risk being hurled into the great pit of despair. As a result, those gates and their adamantine columns were not maintained. The great writers faded away one at a time. The system itself grew corrupt, attracting grifters and lunatics, who saw Buckley conservatism as a means to an end.

As a result, even those grifters are moving on from conservatism. Jonah Goldberg and Steve Hayes are now peddling their warmongering fetish to Progressives. As Paul Gottfried pointed out in a recent essay, they are just drifting Left in search of an audience willing to buy their shabby neoconservative act, while dressing in the rags of Conservative Inc. The movement is left to hiring homely child actors like Charlie Kirk to run around peddling whatever it means to be a conservative these days.

An example of the callow mediocrities charged with keeping the gates is this recent post at National Review. It is a review of the Andrew Marantz book about various scary creatures he encountered on his adventure outside the hive. Simply on technical grounds, this is something that never would have made it past the editors thirty years ago. It is a dilettantish effort at comparative analysis and a ham-handed effort at gate-keeping, while accusing Andrew Marantz of trying to be a gate-keeper.

The ridiculousness of the post is made plain in the penultimate paragraph when he writes, “For all that Marantz gets wrong, everyone should agree that far-right extremists should have as little influence as possible.” That right there is exactly what dissidents mean when they accuse these guys of being gate-keepers. The writer just concedes to the Left, the people he allegedly opposes, the basic premise that those most feared by the Left can be systematically excluded from public debate.

Later in the same paragraph he writes, “Their gatekeeping either will be too tepid for progressive activists or it will enrage the Right, which will hit back — by revoking their protection against liability under of the Communications Decency Act, or with antitrust enforcement against Big Tech, or with a culture war that puts the would-be gatekeepers squarely in the crosshairs.” In other words, the point of the post is not an attack on the Left, but a friendly bit of advice to help them maintain their power.

Of course, the absurd assertion that the Right will become enraged and hit back at the Left is so lacking in self-awareness that it reads like a troll. The defining feature of Buckley conservatism is its steadfast unwillingness to fight back. They never get enraged about any of the excesses of the Left. Instead, conservatism is just a collection of sob sisters warning that one of these days, not now, but soon, they will stand up on their hind legs and do something. It’s why the word “cuck” stings them so much.

Notice also the unwillingness to address the excesses of the Left with regards to the public space. Marantz is making the case that the rich and powerful should crush the people he does not like, but dig deeper and it is really a way to justify what the Left is doing already. In other words, the mobs of heroin addicts and mental patients called Antifa are just a response in lieu of more responsible elements stepping in to control dissident opinion. Marantz is trying to justify what is already happening.

Nowhere in the piece will you find any push-back to what the Left is currently doing with their terrorist tactics. In fact, Conservative Inc. has been silent on these issues, because ultimately, they agree with them. In their historic role as the gate-keepers, they are always willing to take help from their friends on their Left. The only bad guy in the post is the people both Left and Right agree is their shared enemy. That enemy is the swelling number of people willing to fly the black flag of dissident politics.

Again, the writer is young and inexperienced, so it would be uncharitable to make more of this than is required. That’s the thing though. There was a time when Conservative Inc. did not have to rely on rent boys for content. Someone this age with an interest in writing should be covering high school sports for a local paper or maybe submitting articles to his college journals. That’s where you learn to form your thoughts and express them in a compelling manner, not the flagship of conservatism.

That’s what conservatism is reduced to these days. They operate like a grooming gang of creepy geezers, cruising the college campus for young people so dull and joyless they think pleasing an audience of seniors is cool. Charlie Kirk, an old person’s idea of a young person, is used not so much to sell whatever it is Conservative Inc. is peddling these days, but to keep young people from looking outside the bounds of conventional politics for answers. Charlie Kirk is a far cry from Russell Kirk.

In a time when many dissidents are feeling a bit low about the state of the fight, this should be a source of encouragement. When the flagship of Buckley conservatism is relying on kids like Nicholas Phillips, they’re finished. If the gate-keepers think a ridiculous dimwit like Charlie Kirk is their big gun to defend the citadel against the barbarians, it may be time to open the gates. Children’s crusades are always the last desperate effort of an exhausted combatant.

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The Perfidious Right

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A feature of Buckley-style conservatism has been its willingness to borrow the language from those it purges, but tarting it up with modifiers in order to make it acceptable to their masters on the Left. They are not really borrowing the ideas, as they have no interest in those. What they are looking for is the energy of the people they purged, in the same way a mythical beast sucks the life force from its victims. The idea is to direct some of the excitement toward themselves, without having to do anything.

It’s not just an American thing. It may be better to cast it as a feature of English-speaking politics. A great recent example is from England, where the Tories decided to steal the thunder of the nationalists by putting Brexit up to a vote. The game was to pretend they wanted Britain to leave the EU, but have the vote go the other way, so the Tories could pretend to be nationalists, without having to clash with their paymasters and moral betters. It did not work out that way, but that was the plan.

The first example of the Buckleyites playing these games was way back in the before times when they purged the Birchers. There’s little doubt that many of the Birchers were nuts and unstable. They accused everyone of being a tool of Russia, which makes them a forerunner of the modern Democratic party. The thing is, Buckley purged them from the movement, but kept extreme anti-communism as his issue. Conservatism was thereafter defined by a less than serious opposition to communism.

Often, what the so-called conservatives will do is bolt on modifiers to ideas popular among their base or in dissident circles. The game is to pretend to be enthusiastic for the thing, while telling the Left there is no reason to worry. The compassionate conservatism stuff peddled by the neocons is a great example. The unspoken meaning was that these compassionate conservatives were big fans of Reagan-style politics, but would make sure the Left was happy with whatever they were doing.

As Buckley conservatism fades into the background, the push now is to revive it by tarting it up as a defense of nationalism. The first effort was the Yoram Hazony book and roadshow this past summer. Now, Rich Lowry has a book out claiming to be a manly defense of American nationalism. Lowry was at the Hazony show over the summer and no doubt noticed that no one bothered noticing him. He wandered around the venue like a lost soul. Suddenly he is a nationalist.

Of course, his brand of nationalism must first be accepted by the globalist oligarchs that keep Conservative Inc in business. According to the official blurb for the book, “He explains how nationalism is an American tradition, a thread that runs through such diverse leaders as Alexander Hamilton, Teddy Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Ronald Reagan.” You see, as everyone knows, nationalism has always been about diversity, because everyone knows diversity is a nation’s strength.

Lowry is not the only body snatcher trying to repackage the arguments of Pat Buchanan into a new movement palatable to the Left. Someone calling himself Colin Dueck has a book making the same claims as Lowry. Here’s his latest bit of self-promotion on the National Review website. His big idea is the clunky term Conservative American Nationalism, which he would no doubt pitch as CAN. Maybe he’ll take to calling himself the CAN-man or sell coffee mugs with CAN on them.

Dueck is a defender of the liberal international order and he is primarily concerned with preserving that order, while addressing public unhappiness with it. His book does not clearly make that point, but he has made that point himself. Here is a short clip of him doing so from last year. In other words, the game here is to use the language of nationalism to defend the liberal international order. It’s the same gag they ran on the Tea Party people. Borrow the language in order to neuter it.

You see the perfidy in the opening paragraphs. Dueck writes, “With regard to foreign commitments, America’s conservative nationalist tradition goes back to George Washington’s Farewell Address, along with Thomas Jefferson’s confirmation of it, urging the country to avoid permanent entangling alliances.” Notice the modifier attached the phrase “entangling alliances.” The implication is that Washington was fine with temporary entangling alliances, just not permanent ones.

In his farewell address, Washington said something different. “The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible. So far as we have already formed engagements, let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith. Here let us stop.” At the time of his address, the United States had few political relations with Europe. Yet, even these temporary connections were seen as a threat by Washington.

Later, Washington is even more explicit. “Excessive partiality for one foreign nation and excessive dislike of another cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on the other. Real patriots who may resist the intrigues of the favorite are liable to become suspected and odious, while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people, to surrender their interests.” Washington was describing Buckley conservatives perfectly.

Of course, the main flaw in these new calls for nationalism in America, even if they are sincere, is that the time for that has passed. The people now throwing around nationalistic language were the people, who purged people like Pat Buchanan back when it was still possible to preserve the historic American nation. Instead, the Buckleyites usurped the confidence of the people, in order to convince them to surrender their interests to cosmopolitan globalists.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Better Beliefs

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The one universal quality of left-wing politics that is true in every time and place is the need for an external enemy. It is onto this enemy the movement focuses its attention, making it a rallying point and a rallying cry. Ideally, the enemy is mysterious, maybe even a bit supernatural. A supernatural enemy supports the idea of the movement being in a decisive battle for the future of humanity. An important element of left-wing politics is a sense of urgency. There’s no time to wait, as the final battle is at hand.

Orwell, of course, understood this well and created two the great left-wing bogeymen in English literature. Emmanuel Goldstein is the “enemy of the people” during the two minutes of hate at the beginning of the novel 1984. In Animal Farm, Snowball is the blame for all the farm’s troubles, after he disappear. In both cases, the bogeyman is a traitor, who willingly turned on the cause. In both cases, the bogeyman is mysteriously absent, thus can be amplified as an almost supernatural villain.

Eric Hoffer said, “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.” This is certainly true, but it has a peculiar application on the Left, as the positive beliefs of left-wing politics are most often the least understood by the adherents. A feature of left-wing politics is a vague understanding of what they are for, but a detailed understanding of what they oppose. In fact, it is what they oppose that gets the attention. The bogeyman becomes an obsession.

For example, the modern Left in pretty much just a collection of incoherent bellows and yelps with no real purpose, other than opposition to white people. Last week the Left was anti-war and now this week they love war. Their position on foreign policy is dependent on whatever Trump has to say about the issue. The American Left is purely reactionary, tethered to Donald Trump like a slave being taken to market. Their politics are devoid of practical meaning It’s just ways to point and sputter.

This Rolling Stone article in the latest ways to spot an evil doer is a great example of how the Left invests everything in its bogeymen. The ADL, a left-wing terrorist organization, maintains a database of symbols they claim are used by the supernatural members of their even more mysterious enemies. Putting aside the absurdity of the bowl cut or the OK sign being secret symbols, think about the sort of person who thinks this way. It is a person obsessed with what they imagine is in the shadows.

That is why the Left invests all of its energy into inventing and describing various aspects of the Eternal Enemy. It’s not that they need the bogeyman as a rallying point for their coalition. That’s a mistake paleocons like Steve Sailer make. He’s a practical guy so he projects practical reasons onto the actions of the Left. If they were sober minded enough to reason through these things, they would not be on the Left. To be on the Left is to abandon all reason in favor of a set of beliefs.

Belief is powerful magic. Because the Left controls the high ground of the American empire, their beliefs are imposed on the rest of the world in a million little ways. For example, Neo-Nazis are the most hated group in the world. People from around the empire hate Nazis more than they hate criminals. The fact that Neo-Nazis really don’t exist, while criminals are a daily part of life is important. People have been convinced to hate an imaginary enemy more than the enemy at their door.

Of course, democracy is the most fertile ground for left-wing magic, because democracy provides no mechanism for uniting people. In fact, democracy is all about creating divisions, over which the public argues and comes to some compromise. Short of an official religion and extreme intolerance of alternative beliefs, a secular religion fills the void as a unifying set of beliefs. Democracy makes a people crazy, emptying their heads of reason in order to fill it with the nonsense of civic religion.

It is the desperate need for bogeymen that must be the focus of any successful dissident movement, because it is the spirit of the ruling class. The reason the Left advertises those lists of “hate symbols” is to encourage stupid people to adopt them as some form of rebellion. Again, the Left needs enemies to exist, so when none exist, it manufactures them. As the saying goes, the demand for Nazis long ago exhausted the supply, so the business of the Left is in creating new Nazis to meet demand.

Therefore, the successful resistance to the Left in a democracy is one that avoids playing the role cast for it by the Left. The battle for the shared reality of the public culture is a war of attrition. The winner is the one that is most efficient in the use of resources, but best at driving up the cost to the other side. Whatever comes after liberal democracy, the people who replace the Left, will fill a void created when the Left collapses after having exhausted itself maintaining its control of society.

This is a lesson of right-wing failure in its fight with the Left. The Right in American always countered left-wing belief with empiricism. Facts and logic would prevail over the emotions of the Left. Ben Shapiro chirping “facts don’t care about your feelings” is a rallying call for the Left. The reason is it turns the resistance to the Left into an easily demonized opponent. The alternative to left-wing belief is not the lack of any belief whatsoever. The alternative is a different, more appealing set of beliefs.

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Autumn Joy

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It is a rainy and gray in Lagos, as the keeper of sacred law begins her descent into despair, anticipating the return of her daughter to the underworld. According to myth, this is the time when the goddess Demeter begins to grow sad, thinking about her daughter, Persephone, leaving her to return to Hades. As a result, the earth begins to lose its life and become increasing barren. When Persephone departs, the land falls into winter until the time when Demeter anticipates the return of her daughter.

Now, there are other interpretations of the myth. The alternative version has the barren period as the dry Mediterranean summer, when life was threatened by drought. For most people, that version does not work and it does not square with the sophistication of the people who created the myth. It’s the sort of thing a certain sort of person says in order to be disruptive. The Greeks understood not only the cycle of life, but the consequences that came from ignoring or denying this natural reality.

That’s probably why autumn has such a magical quality to it for most European people, at least those with a grip on reality. There is the beauty of it, of course, but that beauty is followed by winter. It is the ability to appreciate the majesty of nature, even when you know what follows, that separates people. On one side are those who long for an endless summer, where they never have to think about tomorrow. On the other side are those who accept the cycle of life and the reality of the human condition.

Even in a place like Lagos, the beauty of the season is impossible to miss, unless you are one of those summer people. There are those who prefer summer to winter, but would not want to live in a land without seasons. Then there are those who spend their winter bitching about the cold, swearing oaths about how this is the last winter in wherever it is there is winter. If you are around these sorts, autumn in made even better, as you get to see their torment against the backdrop of the fall foliage.

Being a level-headed occidental man, I love this time of year. Yesterday morning I got out on a bike path in the country. The leaves are just starting to turn around here. For some reason, fall has been late this year. Perhaps Demeter got her hopes up that this time things would be different. Maybe she took a class on feminism and died her hair blue, until Zeus came down and straightened here out. Women, even the supernatural ones, need a man to keep them in line. That too is the nature of things.

Out on the path, I did not encounter many people. Around Lagos, spring is when people get out and do their walking, hiking and riding. As spring turns to summer, the number of people I will see out in the woods will shrink until the fall, when it is down to the hardy souls who are outside all year round. This is true of fishing. If you are a fall fisherman, this is one of the better times, as you have the river to yourself. The people inside don’t know what they are missing, but then again, those outside don’t miss them.

This time of year in this part of the world brings the white tail rut. It is the time of year when a young buck goes in search of a bride. In reality, it is when they go insane chasing tail to the point of exhaustion. It is one of those things that you can explain to a city person and they suddenly become wiser about life. Urbanization has cut most people off from the reality of life, like the breeding cycle of animals, which means they can fill their heads with crazy ideas at odds with the human condition.

I think the thing I like most about this time of year is the shorter days or that the days are growing shorter. I am at my most productive in the fall and winter, as the ever shorter days reminds me that I have only so much time. When the sun is up until a few hours before bed time, it feels like time comes to a crawl. When you wake in the dark and come home in the dark, you have no illusions about time. Every rustle of the leaves is like a giant clock striking the hour. Best get at it.

Now, I do like winter, so the gathering darkness and dropping temperatures is not followed by something I think is awful. In fact, winter is my second favorite month of the year, just behind autumn. The only reason winter falls behind autumn on my list is that it does not snow enough here in Lagos. Instead we get ice storms that are no fun. They can be pretty, but usually it means spending an hour chiseling my car door open, while trying not to fall and break a hip. I’m not a kid anymore.

In Denmark, they call this the cozy season or the start of the cozy season. They have a word for it, “hygge” which roughly means “a quality of coziness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or well-being.” They take all their fun indoors, where they will turn the lights down, sit by the fire and have conversation with friends and family. In Lagos, we include the sound of sirens and gunfire, but the concept is the same. I’m looking forward to the hygge.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Cartel Land

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A popular item of discussion in some quarters of the dissident right is what will be the thing that puts the current regime in crisis. The instability we see in the West is largely due to the instability of America. The economy staggers on, but no one really believes it can continue as currently constructed. The political class is looking like a pirate ship, rather than orderly democracy. The elites operate like America is a smuggler’s cove and they are the pirates. Everywhere you look you see instability.

Usually, the two top answers for what will be the spark that sets the world ablaze are economic collapse and military failure. Maybe the economy will spin out of control, resulting in a great depression. This will be the spark that ignites public anger toward a ruling class they already despise. On the other hand, maybe a great military catastrophe, something like the Varian Disaster. This will destroy the America military reputation and the order that depends upon it will begin to unravel around the globe.

Another possibility is something small that at the time seems insignificant, but in the long run turns out to be an inflection point. There is the trajectory before the event and the trajectory after the event. A great example of an event that was interpreted one way at the time, but was later seen as a great turning point was the Roman defeat of Carthage and Corinth. The consequences of these two victories changed the trajectory of Rome, creating the conditions for the shift from republic to empire.

If we are looking around for some small event, or seemingly small, that could turn out to be an inflection point today, the Mexican failure to deal with the Sinaloa cartel this past week is a good choice. The operation by the Mexican government to arrest Ovidio Guzmán López, the son of former drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán, and then turn him over to the U.S, may be more than a typical Latin bungle. It has revealed that Mexico is a failed state, largely controlled by large criminal cartels.

At some level, even the dullest member of the America foreign policy elite understands that Mexico is not a normal country. The Mexican government does not have control of its territory. Much of the population is ruled over by local warlords, who operate various criminal trades. Some of those warlords wear expensive suits and show up at Davos to party with the global elites. The vast manufacturing and distribution operations in Mexico are there because global business can operate there outside the law.

From the perspective of global business and the flunkies they employ in our government, this lawlessness has been a boon, but it comes with a price. That was made clear last week when the Sinaloa cartel forced the Mexican government to hand back their leader. If you live in Mexico, you now know who is actually in charge of that part of Mexico. More important, the Mexican government and the cartel now know who is in charge and they know the other side knows too. It was clarifying.

Well, it should have been clarifying. Judging from the reactions of official Washington, it appears they barely noticed. In the long run, this staggering ignorance of what is happening just over the border may be the most important item of this age. While serious-faced politicians lecture us about the need to build a wall between Syria and Turkey, we have a new Afghanistan forming up to our south. Like Afghanistan, Mexico is now run by warlords, willing to do business with anyone.

The stupidity of the American ruling class will no doubt result in doing the dumbest thing possible in Mexico. That’s helping the Mexican government assassinate and arrest some leading cartel figures. Rather than address the problems of Mexico, it will be an effort to maintain it as a free zone for well-connected pirates to operate outside the law, but with more compliant warlords in place. The result will be an acceleration into anarchy and eventually the collapse of Mexico as a country.

Killing the local warlords was a strategy American employed during the War on Drugs in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Most urban areas were run by a local heroin kingpin, who controlled the drug trade in the city. He also controlled the people in the drug trade, which meant limiting the street warfare. The urban black population fell back into the normal pattern of governance. This meant big man rule, where the heroin kingpin operated like a local chieftain. He kept things under control.

In order to look good on television, the authorities decided to combat the drug problem by arresting these local drug kingpins. That allowed them to make flashy arrests, where they would display stacks of drugs, cash and guns. This, of course, was about getting bigger budgets by gaining public support for their efforts. The result was a busting up of these local cartels, but they shattered into thousands of small gangs. The result was the urban warfare we still see today. A place like Baltimore is a tribal war zone.

Turning large swaths of Baltimore into a no-go zone is easily overlooked, as people can just move away and avoid it. The same is true of the Middle East. As we have seen, the occasional exploding Mohamed has not caused the public to turn on the ruling class in great numbers. Mexican cartels taking over American towns and turning cities into war zones would not go overlooked. That is what’s coming as the American ruling class tries to maintain Mexico as a free zone for their pirate buddies.

On the other hand, if there are some sober minded people left in the American ruling class and they wake up to what is happening to our south, it could be the turning point in the ruling elite. The collapse of Mexico could force the American ruling class to sober up and start acting like a ruling class. That means protecting the interests of the people over whom they rule, by making sure the ruling class always has the public interest at the forefront of their mind. We become our greatest ally again.

The future is not written, but for those who like to think about what comes next, what bookends this interregnum, the chaos of Mexico is a good study. It is that reality which will not go away if our rulers stop believing in it. At some point, they either address it and solve it or it forces a change in rulers. There’s simply no way the public will tolerate the chaos of Mexico spilling in their cities and towns. That means the rulers, if they wish to remain rulers, will not be able to tolerate it either.

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Proof Of Concept

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The NBA’s public relations disaster with China is one of those unanticipated events that is both amusing and clarifying. The amusing part is easy. The people who run the NBA are the worst sorts of people, so watching them get slapped around by the Chinese government brings lots of pleasure. Seeing the Chinese carry on like hysterical girls is a lot of fun too. The paper-thin skin of the ChiComs is a reminder that despite their tough talk, they live in mortal fear of the society over whom they rule.

The clarifying part is the most important, as it reminds us that despite what our rulers tell us, countries still matter. China likes consuming product, but they like being Chinese more than they like watching the human flea circus that is the NBA. When the choice is between who they are and consuming product, the former is going to win. As John Derbyshire pointed out, the Chinese are focused on becoming a global power, not folding themselves into the bland nothingness of the global community.

Of course, what makes this so clear is that the NBA is a billion-dollar enterprise that throws its weight around America in the culture wars. When George Zimmerman shot the hoodlum Trayvon Martin, the NBA players took the side of the hoodlum. The players would wear hoodie sweatshirts like the hoodlum. When the Ferguson cop shot Michael Brown, the players came out against the cop. The league and its players drip with anti-white animus and no one in authority dares say anything about it.

In contrast, one unfortunate tweet and the NBA owners were crawling on their bellies, begging the ChiComs for mercy. Lebron James, the league’s biggest star, was seen volunteering to harvest organs from executed Chinese political prisoners. As Derbyshire pointed out, it was a display of raw power. The NBA will tell Donald Trump to take a hike, but they won’t dare get on the wrong side of the communists. The ChiComs have no fear of the human flea circus. They know who holds the power.

This incident gets to some eternal truths about human society. One of those is that power springs from identity. The man who is confident in who he is, will project power, regardless of his circumstances. This scales up very well. Societies that have a strong sense of identity, can punch well above their weight. You see this in Eastern Europe where countries like Poland and Hungary are successfully squaring off with the EU over immigration policy. The EU can’t stop the Poles from being Polish.

Of course, that strong identity is not enough. The people have to believe they have a shared destiny. They need a coherent narrative to explain how it is they are a people and why they have a future. It does not matter if that narrative is true. What people believe will always trump facts. That is another one of those eternal truths about humanity. The Chinese believe they are a people with a future, one where China dictates terms to the world. That’s what makes them so bold.

All of this is a roundabout way of getting to the great chain of causality. The starting place for a human society is the people, the biology. Whatever the potential of the people is the potential of the nation. The Chinese are a smart, resourceful and resilient people, who have been around a long time. The reason China went from something close to feudalism in the middle of the last century to a global powerhouse today, is there is a lot of human capital in China. China has good biology.

The next link in the great chain of causality is culture and that’s something China has more than anyone. It probably has to do with the homogeneity. The Han are roughly 92% of the Chinese population. The other people are relegated to the fringe. When there is no need to accommodate differences, the culture can concentrate. Whatever the reason, Chinese culture is as strong as any on earth. So strong, in fact, it could endure the homicidal maniacs of the Cultural Revolution.

China is the great proof of concept. They have the biology right and they have the culture right, so they have been able to survive disastrous institutions, insane economics and homicidal politics. If you get the biology right and the culture right, you have a chance to get the rest of it right. There are no guarantees and China is proof of that as well. That’s the other side of it. If you get the biology right and the culture right, you can survive the mistakes made downstream in politics and economics.

Western globalists have had to lie to themselves about China, in order to square the fact that China is prospering despite rejecting Western liberal democracy. To accept China as she is would mean rejecting the great multicultural project. The looming conflict with China will drive that point home to the West and it may be a good thing in the end. Whether or not there is time for Western nations to pull out of their death spiral and get their biology right is unknown, but they will have the example of China.

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The Growing Darkness

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The term “dark age” came into popular usage among intellectuals during the 18th century, but the term itself was actually coined by Petrarch. He was an early Italian Renaissance scholar in the 14th century. It was originally used to describe a certain period of time, but eventually became synonymous with the period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance. The assumed lack of human progress, due to the lack of records and demographic decline, was a dark time for humanity.

The term began to fall out of usage as scholars gained a better understanding of the middle ages. The period described as dark, in terms of human accomplishment began to recede, eventually covering just the period immediately after Rome. Eventually the term fell out of fashion altogether, first because it was not terribly accurate and then because the usual suspects got involved. The image of dark versus light was seen as problematic, so now using the term is a microaggression.

That’s a good point to wonder if the West has not already entered a new dark age, in which superstition rules over rationality. The concept of the microaggression is something superstitious people living in a dark age would have understood. After all, a microaggression is the idea that certain words and phrases, incantations, will cause a miasma to develop around the people saying and hearing the words. This miasma or evil spirit will cause those exposed to react involuntarily and uncontrollably.

In fact, everything about political correctness and multiculturalism relies on oogily-boogily that people in the dark age of Europe would have found ridiculous. The people of Europe in the middle ages may not have had a sophisticated understanding of the natural world, but they did not think the dirt had magical qualities. Magic Dirt Theory would have struck them as laughably ridiculous. They may not have understood cognitive science, but they knew the apple does not fall far from the tree.

This twitter thread from last month is a useful example. It is primitive howling at the moon, but the source is someone claiming to be a scientist. Granted, anthropology is now just a dumping ground for girls, who could not find a husband, but the fact that such a thing exists in a college campus suggests a shadow is now hanging over at least part of the West. If you look at the twitter profile of that person, you’ll note she has her pronouns listed. These are the talismans of the modern academy.

Mx. Townsend is not some isolated example. She is a milder form of what is becoming quite common in academia. Cordelia Fine wrote a whole book denying that there are two sexes or even that sexes exist. She was carried around from campus to campus, celebrated as a great thinker. Her book is complete nonsense. It is now a race to see who can most completely deny observable reality about humans, in order to please some undefined spirits that will usher us into the age of equality.

It’s tempting to dismiss the madness we see in academia as trivial or temporary, but this has been going on for several generations now. Stephen J. Gould, for example, spent his life trying to shrink the stock of human knowledge. While his motivations can be debated, his purpose was not. This deliberate effort to pull down the shades and plunge the intellectual space into darkness has been going on for generations. We are just now seeing the shadows creep across the college campus.

A dark age is always imagined to be a period when the stock of human knowledge stagnates or even declines. Another way to think of a dark age is one in which the people are unable to manage the complexity bequeathed to them. As a result, society goes through a period of retrenchment. It devolves into something simpler that can be managed by the available human capital. A dark age is one in which the people rebuild the floor of their society, so future generations can build on it

Somewhere in the last century or maybe the prior century, people in the West began to lose the ability to control their institutions. By control, it should be understood to mean the knowledge of how they work and why they were created. It is one thing to know how to use the toilet. It is another thing to understand public sanitation and the reason it is a vital public service. People in the West no longer seem to know why their institutions exist or how they must be maintained in order to properly function.

That’s why the college campus is a good place to examine, when thinking about the crisis in the West. In theory, the people running the society of tomorrow are now being trained on the colleges of today. Yet, they are being taught things that are laughably false by people who are often suffering from mental illness. In other cases, they are taught by people who hate them and hate the West. A people who understood why these institutions were created would never have permitted this to happen.

There is another aspect of the term dark age. We often use it to describe a time when it is unacceptable to be curious about things. Everyone is forced into a conformity of thought and belief. It is associated with primitive superstition. Of course, the usual suspects always apply this to whites and Christians. Within living memory, they would portray Christians as closed-minded bigots, who were obsessed with stifling curiosity and free expression. The victims were always the usual suspects.

That’s just another part of the blood libel against the Occident and it is this blood libel that is steering the West into a dark age. In a frenzy to eradicate all that is white, they are stamping out what it means to be white. Since curiosity about the natural world is an implicitly Western trait, enforced conformity around a body of anti-knowledge is seen as the solution to whiteness. In this context, the dark age is not the result of a natural process or an accident of history, but the goal of the people who rule over us.

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The Progressive Sandwich

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If one were to summarize why Buckley-style conservatism failed, the clearest answer is that it stopped being conservative. The central tenets of conservatism are tradition, organic society, hierarchy, authority, property rights and prudence. In the Anglo-Saxon model, ordered liberty can also be included. The limits on authority are the logic of a fixed and orderly legal system. Probably the most concise explanation of American conservatism came from Russel Kirk seventy years ago.

Buckley conservatism, in contrast, was never deeply rooted in social philosophy and this was a deliberate act. The Buckleyites wanted a create a political movement that could compete with Progressives. In order to do that it meant winning elections and that meant providing a practical platform for governance. As a result, Buckley conservatism was always a compromise. In order to fashion a practical political platform, it meant deviating from conservative dogma as necessity required.

This lack of ideological moorings, however, led it to drift away from conservatism toward something that is better described as marketism. Libertarians see property as the key to individual liberty. All human rights derive from ownership of self and property is the fruit of labor, so absolute property rights safeguard individual liberty. Marketism, in contrast, views liberty as the unfettered right to trade property and labor. Therefore, liberty is maximized only through the free and unregulated marketplace.

In both cases, the definition of individual liberty is at odds with conservative conceptions of individual liberty, as well as the tenets of conservatism. The Right has always understood that a man could only be free within the context of society. To exist within a society, he must gain control of his passions and master himself. Customs and traditions, which habituated him to his duties as a member of society, also channeled his energies to that which served the good of his society.

This conception of ordered liberty, in which man can only be free within the context of his role in society, is the wellspring of conservative thought. Respect for hierarchy, for example, is not just an observation of man’s natural state, but an acceptance of the fundamental nature of human society. Similarly, the right of property can only be a coherent concept within a human society, not outside it. There can be no property rights without society, so property rights must ultimately serve the good of society.

For libertarians and market absolutists, any restraint on how you can dispose of your property or how you trade property with others is seen as a violation of your individual sovereignty. Inevitably, it means taking the side of the market when it bumps up against custom or tradition. It means siding with novelty that promises more market freedom, even when it undermines the organic institutions of society. Inevitably, conservatives became the defenders of the wrecking ball that destroyed American culture.

It’s why a Kevin Williamson could gleefully cheer for the destruction of small-town America and their customs, in the name of the free market. From his perspective, the limitations of localism are a gross violation of freedom, so destroying those local communities sets the residents free to maximize their economic utility. Buckley conservatism has drifted so far from its alleged starting position, it now stands in opposition to that which defined its alleged starting position.

This recent piece by David French is another example. In it, he turns conservatism on its head in order to promote marketism. The problems of college athletics, however you wish to frame them, are not the result of too little commercialism. Only a blithering idiot could come to such a conclusion. The trouble with college sports, and the college system as a whole, is it is now almost entirely free of the system of customs and traditions that created it. Higher education is a market that strives to be a racket.

David French, of course, has become the comical front man for Buckley conservatism over the last few years. His blend of sanctimonious finger wagging and principled mediocrity is the exaggerated version of the dissident critique of conventional conservatism. He is the clown nose of Conservative Inc. This is not solely due to his many personal defects. His embrace of unconditional marketism has led him to adopt an entirely transactional view of human existence.

There used to be a time when both sides of the Progressive orthodoxy understood the limits and liabilities of the marketplace. The Left would howl about consumerism at the expense of authenticity. The Right would point out the dangers inherent in an unfettered marketplace. Buckley famously said, “The trouble with socialism is socialism. The trouble with capitalism is capitalists.” The modern conservative would not understand that juxtaposition. For him, the marketplace is supreme.

The underlying truth of radicalism is that it not only seeks to free men from the human condition, but it seeks to have them rise to the heavens and become gods. For the modern conservative, something similar has evolved. Whether it is a fetish for property or a fetish for markets, the Buckley conservatives imagine men breaking free of their constraints in order to become fully engaged market participants. For them, the paradise at the end is a shopping mall full of atomized strangers.

That’s why Buckley conservatism has failed. It is a primal call for a war of all against all, where atomized bugmen jostle to maximize their utility in the market. To consume product is the end point of existence. It is a crude and vulgar existence that celebrates man’s worst instincts at the expense of his nobler aspirations. What is on offer from so-called conservatives is a different type of hell than what is on offer from their partners on the Left, but it is still the same Progressive sandwich.

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Buddha’s Children

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In his interesting post on Robert Mugabe’s intelligence, the blogger calling himself Pumpkin Person notes “One reason for thinking he’s in the upper end of this range is that he was a Marxist, and left-wing politics are positively correlated with IQ (at least if you control for race and income).” This does not imply that all Marxists are highly intelligent. He is simply noting the observation that left-wing politics of the radical sort highly correlate with intelligence. Smart, educated people tend to be radicals.

This is an assertion most people have heard, if they have gone to college, spent time on a college campus or consumed popular culture. The assertion, that intelligence and radicalism are traveling partners, is a part of the cultural bath in which every western man swims. It certainly holds up when you look at the data. Whoever the Democrats nominate for President, no matter how nutty and deranged, that person will win more than 80% of the vote in every college town of America.

Now, normal people chafe at this assertion as the obvious implication is that stupid people oppose radicalism. That’s certainly what the usual suspects have always claimed, until biology became a taboo of late. Anyone over the age of forty probably recalls being told something like this in college. Of course, it was never just a passing observation. The link between radicalism and intelligence was always supposed to put critics on the defensive, as if they are inferiors.

The power of this can be seen in how Bill Buckley adopted the over-the-top WASP intellectual style. The point of it was to inoculate himself against the claim he was too dumb to understand what the Left was claiming. George Will’s silly bowtie or Kevin Williamson’s quill pen act are other recent examples. These affectations are intended to signal the person is smart and therefore cannot be dismissed by the Left. It’s Athena’s shield for the right-wing Perseus of left-wing politics.

It is certainly true that the data supports the claim. The voting patterns of the educated bear this out. There are exceptions from time to time, but generally speaking, the more credentials you have acquired, the more likely you are to be on the Left. Since credentials are a pretty good proxy for IQ, the original assertion holds. The smarter you are, the more inclined you are toward radical politics. Or, if you prefer, the smarter the person, the more open they are to radical politics.

The problem with this observation is that it a logical fallacy. Specifically, it is the fallacy of association. A famous example of this fallacy is the observation that hardcore drug takers usually start with marijuana, so pot is a gateway drug. All hardcore drug takers start life drinking milk, but no rational person would say milk leads to smoking crystal meth in adulthood. In other words, there is no causal link established between IQ and radicalism in politics, no matter how much the Left would wish it so.

Then there is the issue of how one defines left-wing politics. Every single establishment right-winger would have been called a radical a century ago. Two centuries ago the radicals in the West were people advocating liberalism. All of these terms used to describe politics are relative and their definitions shift over time. To pretend that Left and Right are timeless categories is to reveal a total ignorance of history. Even figuring out the relative poles in each era is not always possible, as we see today.

There is another angle here that is more important to the topic. People are social animals and we are a self-segregating species. People of like mind will tend to congregate with one another out of instinct. This is obvious to anyone who has been in a lunchroom of a large public school. This is not just true of mature humans. Even babies are attracted to their kind. This is why the college campus is so intolerant of free inquiry and dissent. Over time, it has boiled off those with contrary opinions.

What this means is smart people are naturally going to end up in areas around other smart people, like the college campus. The ornery and disagreeable will usually be boiled off for all the natural reasons. Most, however, will be as open to peer pressure as everyone else, maybe more so. Most smart people tend to live sheltered lives, insulated from the harsh reality of the human animal. If they are not left-wing when they hit the college campus, they soon adapt to their new friends and new culture.

This is such an obvious thing we have memes for it. The know-it-all coed, back from her first year at college, is a standard type in American culture. It’s a stock character in television and movies. Then you have the modern meme of sweet little Suzy heading off to college and coming back and blue-haired lesbian with a nose ring. This happens less frequently with males, which probably explains why the college campus is looking more like a hormonal coven these days than anything imagined by Aristotle.

Another thing to consider is that 500 years ago, if one were to use modern techniques to measure IQ and politics, the correlation would look much different. Instead of the intelligent tending toward radicalism, they would tend toward monasticism. The smart men of the age, if they were not the first born, often ended up in the Church. That’s where smart, curious men of the age went to be around other smart men. Maybe they would end up in the court of their king, defending the natural order.

Putting it all together, the reason radicalism and intelligence seem to go hand-in-hand in this age is that radicalism is the secular religion of this age. Just as the best and brightest of a prior age would have been great theologians, the smart set of this age seek to advance the secular religion of today. That means coming up with novel ways to justify it in the face of observable reality. Of course, there’s always profit in being the defender of the faith, so the Left attracts the most ambitious too.

The reason we currently observe a correlation between left-wing politics and intelligence is because left-wing politics is the secular religion of this age. In America this has been true since Gettysburg. In Europe, neo-liberalism has been the dominant faith since the end of the last war. To be in the high IQ world means embracing the religion of the high IQ world. If tomorrow, those people become Buddhists, the smart young people of tomorrow will suddenly trend toward Buddhism.

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