Category Archives: Culture

The Faith Of The Left

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The reason the Left has gone from triumph to triumph is that they are not motivated by reason, but rather by a quest for salvation. The social issues that they champion, regardless of any practical considerations, are always cast in moral terms. The issue itself is immaterial. It is being on the right side of the issue that matters. Politics is an endless series of tests they must pass in order to remain on the path of the righteous, leading to the promised land.

This story about Obama’s reaction to the election is a good example.

Riding in a motorcade in Lima, Peru, shortly after the 2016 election, President Barack Obama was struggling to understand Donald J. Trump’s victory.

“What if we were wrong?” he asked aides riding with him in the armored presidential limousine.

He had read a column asserting that liberals had forgotten how important identity was to people and had promoted an empty cosmopolitan globalism that made many feel left behind. “Maybe we pushed too far,” Mr. Obama said. “Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.”

His aides reassured him that he still would have won had he been able to run for another term and that the next generation had more in common with him than with Mr. Trump. Mr. Obama, the first black man elected president, did not seem convinced. “Sometimes I wonder whether I was 10 or 20 years too early,” he said.

This is a recurring theme with the American Left. It is the reason they embraced the term “Progressive” as their preferred label. They start with the unspoken belief that the story of man is written. It is the duty of the righteous to live it. It is why “being on the right side of history” comes up so often. The struggle as between those on the side of the great historical force and those who are standing in the way of it. The righteous are always looking forward and moving forward.

It is also why they think of the past as a dark age dominated by sinners. There is no romanticism on the American Left, because the past is by definition further away from the glorious future. Instead, the past is filled with monsters that were either slain by the righteous, or locked away, but ready to return at any moment. For example, they remain forever vigilant about the return of Nazis, as if they still exist. In the mind of the American progressive “Nazi” is just another name for Old Scratch.

Notice in that Times piece that the Trump voters are described as “left behind” rather than unhappy or in disagreement. In other words, the people voting for Trump did so because they were sad for having been left behind by the righteous. Voting for Trump was a cry for help. It is tempting to see this as part of Obama’s narcissism, but in reality, his narcissism is also the result of this deep belief in the flow of history. He was chosen to lead the faithful, so of course he is a narcissist.

You will notice that Progressives are forever warning about some attempt to “turn back the clock” and return us to a former state of sin. It resonates with Progressives, because for them, the eternal quest for salvation means going forward, breaking away from the degraded past. Trump’s “turning the clock back” is viewed as the wages of sin. Obama thinks he tried too hard to deliver his people to the promised land. The result was the great leap backward into Trumpism.

American Progressives are the purest form of true believers because they have disconnected their beliefs from practical considerations. Therefore, they are immune to facts and reason. When you examine the language they use to describe politics and culture, you see the extreme mysticism. Obama does not even really know what “left behind” means, but he is sure it is a bad thing. For him, it is a purely a spiritual issue to be thought of in those terms.

The error the Right has made for generations is to think it is possible to prove the Left wrong, and therefore force them to abandon their agenda. That is like thinking you can disprove sections of the Koran and cause the Muslims to abandon their faith. In fact, efforts to do so will always be met with a fierce defense of the faith. Practical arguments always embolden the righteous, as it confirms their belief in themselves as moral agents in a holy cause. Your irrational resistance is proof they are on the righteous path.

It is why the Left have been so effective since the end of the Cold War, but also why it has become so extreme and bizarre. Defending socialism meant ceding authority to objective data like the unemployment rate or GDP growth. That served as a check on the more unhinged elements. Once free of these objective measures, it became a race to produce the most extreme and bizarre identity group to champion. Lacking a limiting principle, and untethered from practical reality, the Left got increasingly extreme.

While it looks like the Left is headed for some sort of crack up, it is important to remember that people have to believe in something. The reason conservatism was such a flop is it never tried to appeal to this aspect of man’s nature. It was the ideology of the bookkeeper. No matter how fat, dumb and happy, people will always yearn for the eternal. If there is to be an alternative to the prevailing orthodoxy, it is going to have to offer an alternative to those who desire to be on the side of angels.

Bum Fight

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Years ago, I was driving through a rural area in the early evening and as I came up on what looked like an old store, I saw a small crowd out front. The place was a broken down old gin mill and the people out front were watching two scraggly looking drunks duke it out. It was a sad sight. This was the sum total of two lives, drunk and punching one another in the face for the amusement of the crowd. That came to mind reading David French’s critique of this column by David Brooks.

French highlights this passage of the Brooks column:

Once upon a time, white male Protestants ruled the roost. You got into a fancy school if your father had gone to the fancy school. You got a job at a white-shoe law firm or climbed the corporate ladder if you golfed at the right club.

Then we smashed all that. We replaced a system based on birth with a fairer system based on talent. We opened up the universities and the workplace to Jews, women and minorities. University attendance surged, creating the most educated generation in history. We created a new boomer ethos, which was egalitarian (bluejeans everywhere!), socially conscious (recycling!) and deeply committed to ending bigotry.

You’d think all this would have made the U.S. the best governed nation in history. Instead, inequality rose. Faith in institutions plummeted. Social trust declined. The federal government became dysfunctional and society bitterly divided.

Now, putting aside the ret-conning, you would think French highlighted this section in order to make the obvious point. That maybe smashing the old system and turning the institutions over to “Jews, women and minorities” was the reason for the collapse in social trust, plummeting faith in institutions and a bitterly divided society. For that matter, you would think the guy who wrote that passage would have noticed the obvious link between overthrowing the old order and today’s chaos.

Instead, Brooks goes on to list nonsense reasons like “Inability to think institutionally” as the cause of the trouble. This is pretty much the opposite of reality. The managerial class is incapable of anything other than institutional thinking. The section labeled “Misplaced idolization of diversity” is nonsensical, but he is not allowed to say anything but nonsense when it comes to race, so Brooks wants the managerial elite to go on a team building excursion so they can feel better about themselves.

For his part, French is even more clueless.

Combine academic ignorance with a worldview that too often unthinkingly and reflexively rejects religious traditions and traditional religious notions of morality, and you’ve got the recipe for exactly the proud, “elite” individualist Brooks describes. Or, to borrow a biblical concept, “claiming to be wise, they became fools.”

He is right that the “meritocracy is here to stay,” but he’s wrong that we “need a new ethos to reconfigure it.” An old ethos will do, one grounded in humility, true curiosity, and an openness to challenging ideas.

It’s not that America’s “educated elite” has truly failed; it’s that America’s “educated elite” no longer really exists.

 

This is a guy who races to the front of the room whenever Conservative Inc. calls for a two minutes of hate against sexism, antisemitism, or racism. Conservatism is in free-fall because it has been defiantly close-minded to ideas that challenge the prevailing orthodoxy. The fact that the swelling ranks of the Dissident Right see guys like David French as part of the problem should be a clue, but that would require true curiosity about what’s going on and an openness to challenging ideas.

That said, he is not entirely wrong. The managerial state inevitably has to boil off the people who question the system. This is the iron rule of institutions. Some small portion care about the mission, but the bulk are simply their to defend the system and the perks which come from being a part of it. That’s what has happened in America. The ruling class is populated with the sorts of people gifted at repeating that they have been told, but incapable to questioning the status quo. Our elites are uniformly dull and unimaginative.

That’s why the West in general, but American in particularly is going through these populist convulsions. The people who run the institutions are incapable of questioning the logic of the institutions they serve. Both Brooks and French accept as an axiom that turning things over to “Jews, women and minorities” is a good in itself. Therefore they can’t question their role in the current troubles. They are emotionally wedded to the premise of the so-called meritocracy, so they inevitably must defend it from all challenges.

Fundamentally, no society can be run on merit. Any system that attempts to select for ability will inevitably select for that which reinforces itself. That’s what has happened in post-war America. The institution grew in size and reach, but their institution knowledge narrowed. The per capita Federal budget, for example, is three times larger today than 50 years ago, measured in constant dollars. Yet, the differences between the political parties has never been narrower. That’s why elections have had no impact on policy.

It’s also why people like French and Brooks worry about the “dysfunctional federal government and bitterly divided society.” The populist revolt is a direct challenge to the very idea of a managerial elite. Trump, for good or ill, is the rejection of that concept. He is not a man of merit. He is a man of accomplishments, which is a different thing than a list of credentials. David Brooks can sneer all he likes, but no one is putting his name on the side of a big building. No one is asking David French to build their luxury golf resort.

Free Association & Equality Before The Law

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If you are going to pick one thing that is a must-have for a liberal western society, the most likely choice is equality before the law. Things like free speech, elections and private property are important, but they are dependent upon equality before the law. After all, if the ruling class has privilege over everyone else in the law, which will turn to an advantage in disputes over property, politics and even speech. If you look at the list of “rights” we consider to be essential to a civil society, all of them count on equality before the law.

Now, simply having equality before the law does not make for a liberal society. In theory, you could have a society with no property rights at all and still have equality before the law. A communist society, in which all property is held by the public and administered by the state, could have legal equality. Similarly, you could have a society with highly restricted speech and still have legal equality, as long as the speech limits were universally applied and enforced. In other words, equality before the law is not enough.

Obviously, equal justice may be a fundamental requirement of a liberal society, but you need other stuff to make it work. Property rights, enforcement of contracts, freedom of expression and the other items we tend to associate with civil liberty. Even though they cannot exist without equality before the law, a liberal society cannot exist without all those add-on items. This is basic civics, so what about the things that must exist in order for a society to maintain equality before the law? What are its necessary accessories?

The correct answer here is freedom of association. After all, you can have equality before the law along with limits on other rights like speech, as long as they are universally applied. Logically, there is no way to evenly administer limits on association, beyond broad categories like segregation. Even there, the law is forced to treat one group differently from others. This is the crux of Brown v. Board of Education. The material equality of education facilities did not alter the fact that segregation treated blacks unequally.

You cannot have equal justice without free association, for the simple reason the law must always put one citizen ahead of another, in order to limit association. Telling the tavern owner he cannot serve Koreans penalizes the Korean, the tavern owner or possibly the other tavern patrons. It really does not matter who is or is not punished, as the only possible intent of the law is a bias against one group in favor of another group. There can be no equitable reason for placing such limitations on citizens.

This is why America is rapidly sliding away from liberal democracy into something closer to a corporate oligarchy. Once free association was abandoned in the 1960’s, it opened the door to endless meddling by the managerial state in the rights of the citizens. If the people can no longer decide with whom they wish to associate, or not associate, they can no longer have the right to free expression. After all, if you are forcing people together who do not wish to be together, you better monitor their speech. Otherwise, you get a bloodbath.

Put another way, the reason that Christian bakers are being forced at gun point to bake cakes for people they see as degenerates is the state has no other choice. Once you dispense with freedom of association, you abandon equality before the law. It also means ever-splintering minorities are incentivized to demand special privileges from the state, by forcing the court to choose between groups. The homosexual terrorists are attacking Christians, so they can get their group status set above that of Christians.

This explains the fracturing of American public life and the increasing anti-white hostility we see in our popular culture. Once you abandon equality before the law, people rationally seek group identity in order to press for privileges. The arbitrariness of the law creates the appearance of a zero-sum game, in which the gains of one group must come at the expense of another. In the increasingly lawless free-for-all that is modern America, the rational thing for non-whites to do is agitate to get their piece of the crumbling white pie.

Of course, the reason America abandoned free association in the middle of the last century was in an effort to accommodate the minority black population. It is also why Continental societies have never bothered with free association. Wherever there are minority populations, the majority will inevitably impose its will on that minority, simply in the course of pursuing its own rational interests. Blacks in America can only be integrated by force, against the will of the white majority. That is what happened last century.

This is probably why the managerial class has made a fetish of the downstream items we associate with liberal society, like voting, and sacralized the positions within the political class. Any call to reform the political system and every criticism of the powerful is met with howls about “defending our democracy.” Since we now have an illiberal system, the people in charge have reached their status by illiberal means. Therefore, their legitimacy is not self-authenticating. The hooting about democracy is a defense mechanism.

One of the puzzles the libertarians have never un-puzzled is how a society can go from a non-libertarian state to a libertarian one, without a violent, miraculous blood bath. Even in theory, a libertarian state must be a starting point of a society. Once it transitions from that condition, it can never go back. Something similar is most likely true with regards to free association and equality before the law. Once these are abandoned, the interests opposed to their return grow, making a peaceful transition back to the lawful state impossible.

As a matter of simple logic, a return to liberal society now means revolution.

The Dull Man’s Burden

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One of the remarkable things in my time has been the precipitous decline of the so-called conservative movement. Even if you were on the paleocon side of the great fight, you could not help but admire some of the writers and thinkers on the other side. Unlike the Left, which has always tended for preachers, rather than thinkers, the people writing for the Buckleyite, and neocon outlets were often quite bright and original. They even permitted a sprinkling of heretics, which made their publications worth reading.

Over the last decade, anyone with the least bit of originality has been purged from their sites. Scan The Weekly Standard or National Review and what is interesting is how dull it all feels now. It is like reading the internal newsletter of the postal service. That is being kind, as these sites often resemble a cargo cult. They hire guys like Ben Shapiro to spin the oldies, hoping they will be magically transported back to 1994. If you are engaged in this world from the Right, there is no reason to read these publications. They offer nothing.

This post before the holiday by Jonah Goldberg is good example. Goldberg now plays the role of “senior fellow” for Conservative Inc., so he gets the job of doing the theoretical stuff for National Review. He is their man of ideas now. Goldberg made his career as a snarky Gen-X jokester, making conservatism sound fresh. Of course, the implication was that the Left was correct about conservatives being humorless stuffed shirts. Shecky Goldberg’s quest was to make conservatism fit for the Catskills. Now, he is their big ideas man.

I understand very well that conservatives often bristle at the idea they need to change with the times. As the famous line from (the far from famous) Lucius Cary, 2nd Viscount Falkland, goes, “where it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.”

But we forget that the conservative movement’s strength came from the fact that it was armed with new arguments from diverse intellectual sources. More important, its vigor stemmed from the fact that these various strains of conservatives were eager to argue among themselves. There are arguments aplenty on the right these days, but the vast majority of them are arguments over a specific personality — Donald Trump — not a body of ideas. And to the extent that there are arguments about ideas, they tend to be subsumed into the larger imperative to attack or defend Trump. This is from a guy who repeatedly said that large chunks of observable reality are “morally repugnant” and therefore off-limits. It is a bit tough to have “new arguments from diverse intellectual sources.” when the prevailing assumption is that those ideas and sources are outside what is morally acceptable. Of course, whatever it once was, mainstream conservatism is a no longer a vigorous debate about moral and political philosophy. It is merely a shopping list of talking points acceptable in the managerial elite.

 

Even in the mundane areas of public policy, the so-called conservatives are startlingly obtuse in their observations. Trump’s diplomacy in Asia, for example, is a genuine sea-change in American policy. He has craftily linked North Korea’s behavior to US trade relations with China. He is making the master responsible for the servant. This is actually resulting in real progress on a half century problem. Yet, the experts of Conservative Inc. remain baffled by what is happening. They still think North Korea is a Soviet client.

The great Eric Hoffer observed that the difference between a movement and a practical organization lies in the goals of the members. In a political movement, the people joining do so to attain a political goal, something that is bigger than themselves. In a practical organization, people join out of self-interest. They act in order to advance up the ranks of the organization. A rat like Dinesh D’Souza was willing to be a neocon assassin, because he thought it was a good career move. The organization man is not a man who dreams.

That has been the case with the conservatives for a long time now. Ideological zeal may have motivated the pioneers, but they built practical organizations. Buckley-style conservatism, by the 1980’s, had become a lucrative career path for the man good with his letters and careful to never color outside the lines. More important, the organization was positioned within the managerial class, rather than opposed to it. An obsequious writer could work for both National Review and a liberal TV network.

Another product of this is the boiling off of anyone with any creativity. If the in-house intellectual is a vapid airhead with a fetish for 1980’s pop culture references, you are no longer an intellectual movement. The result is a collection of dull and uninteresting people left to figure out how to keep the racket going. That is the point of Goldberg’s cri de guerre. The old act is no longer pulling in the crowds, so they need a new act with new actors. The trouble is the dullards left in charge are not up to carrying the burden.

Voting Your Skin

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Way back in the olden thymes, when Pat Buchanan was challenging Bush the Elder in the GOP primary, I found myself in a working class Irish bar talking politics. The TV in the bar was on the local news and they were doing a segment on the race. A male and female were beside me at the bar, chatting about the race. The woman said something like, “I can’t vote for Buchanan. He’s a racist and I can’t vote for a racist.” The male sort of nodded along, hoping to score some points.

I think that was the point when I began to realize politics, at least for me, was only going to be for entertainment purposes. I did not fully comprehend the implications of what was happening, but in retrospect, Buchanan’s run was the beginning of the great unraveling of the Reagan coalition. The ruling class had managed to convince working class whites that their interests must come second to the new religion. Antiracism is who we are now.

Of course, the managerial class was built on a lie. The managerial elite, particularly the corporate side of the house, hate working class Americans. They developed a particularly healthy disdain for normal white people, as seen in their jihad against companies like Walmart. This was the heart of the Sailer Strategy for Republicans to regain the edge in elections. Now it appears the Progressives are beginning to come to terms with it too.

With the 2018 midterms months away and the 2020 presidential election cycle approaching rapidly, Democrats are considering how to improve their poor showings in 2014 and 2016. The party has been debating — sometimes heatedly — how to do this. Which voters should they target? How should Democrats target them?

But here’s what’s clear: White voters have been fleeing the Democratic Party, and that’s a big reason Democrats are looking to rebound from back-to-back losses.

Whites have slowly but consistently moved away from the Democratic Party. These recent losses are on top of Democrats’ losses among Southern whites during the 1960s and 1970s after Democrats’ support of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Bill Clinton won 49 percent of the white two-party vote in 1996. Al Gore won 43 percent in 2000. John F. Kerry won 41 percent in 2004. Barack Obama won a slightly larger share in 2008, but then dropped to only 39 percent in his 2012 reelection bid. Hillary Clinton got the same percentage as Obama.

Obama was able to mask the Democratic Party’s weakness among whites by prompting record-high turnout among African Americans, as well as strong turnout from other Democratic-leaning minority groups. Hillary Clinton was unable to generate the same level of enthusiasm from racial and ethnic minorities.

What some on the Left are beginning to notice is called math. If you increase your share of a large voting block, like say white people, you get more votes that if you increase your share of a small voting block, like Hispanics. This was the point Sailer made a long time ago, one that Donald Trump took to heart in his 2016 campaign. There’s also the fact that the black vote is maxed out and the Hispanic vote has proven to be quite fickle. It takes a massive effort for the Democrats to get that vote out in strong numbers.

I used the American National Election Study data to show that many whites view the Democratic Party as moving further away from their own positions. This is true both when whites are asked to assess the positions of the parties generally and on a variety of specific issues such as government-sponsored health care and the government’s role in providing employment.

My research suggests this combination of political “sorting” and changing white perceptions of the Democratic Party has resulted in an almost eight-point swing in white vote choice. That lines up well with actual vote returns. White votes were split between the two parties about 50-50 in the 1970s — but in elections since 2000, that has become closer to 60-40 in favor of the Republican Party. Democrats might be gaining more votes from Latinos, Asians and other emerging demographic groups, but they are losing whites as a result.

Furthermore, the demographics of the white voters who are likely to support Democrats are different from the white voters who supported the Democratic Party in previous decades.

Most notably, while the Democratic Party is winning a lower percentage of whites overall, a greater proportion of college-educated whites are voting for Democrats. Attitudes on social issues in particular have become stronger predictors of voting behavior in recent elections; economic attitudes have become more important, too, but were already quite a strong predictor to start with.

The reason for this phenomenon is another temporary factor. College educated whites can afford to avoid many of the realities of multiculturalism. At least they think they can, by moving to ex-urban enclaves. That is something this study missed. The suburban white boy vote started to move toward Trump in the last election. Despite the hand-waving from the Left, these voters are waking up to the reality of the demographic age as well. It’s playing out in their neighborhoods now and they are responding accordingly.

There is also something else that left-wing analysts do not get and that is the intensity of the white response. In the South, whites are much more keenly aware of race and therefore more attuned to voting on racial lines. When it matters, whites will come out hard for their team. The white vote is much harder to split using the normal subversive tricks. This is starting to play out on the national level as even areas close to the Canadian border are seeing violent African and Hispanic migrants dumped into their communities.

As an aside, take a look at the comments of that Post story. You see many of the usual auto-responses from people who think it is still 1968. You also see many more normal responses from people who get it. It takes time for this type of culture changes to seep into all the nooks and crannies of a society, but people are slowly waking up to the demographic reality of our age. While we still bother having elections, white people will increasingly choose to vote their skin over all other considerations.

The Snowglobe

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Before the 2016 election got started, I saw National Review’s David French learn on Twitter what the word “cuckservative” meant. It was an amusing thing to watch as he went back and forth with some alt-right types. I could tell he was feeling like a cool kid picking up slang from the in-crowd on the playground. Then he realized that the “cuck” they were referring to was him. He then set off blocking half the internet. It was an amusing example of his isolation from the rest of us.

The chattering classes are supposed to be the interface between the Cloud People and the Dirt People. Before the explosion of mass media, the chattering skulls would go on the Sunday chat shows to tell us what to think, while pretending to tell us what our rulers were thinking. Usually, these people had a column in one of the big city broadsheets or they were “reporters” in Washington. This worked as the Dirt People had no way to check their accuracy.

Mass media has had some unexpected consequences. For example, we get to learn much more about the commentariat. A cuck like David French has put his whole life out on the internet, so he is not fooling anyone. We just know more about these people than in the analog days. That and their lies are much more easily exposed. When some popinjay goes on a rant about something, we can easily find where he said the opposite and post up on his timeline.

Another result is the strange isolation of the media. Read biographies of old newspaper guys and one of the things that stands out is their working-class lives. It was not just that they were the sons of toil, they remained in that world. In 1934, it was not weird for a big city newspaper reporter to live in the same building as a bus driver. Carl Bernstein never went to college. He worked his way up from the copy boy. Today, no newspaper in America would hire a guy like him.

This isolation has another facet to it. The volume of media means the number of people thinking of themselves in that world is massive as well. Then there is the overlap between the academy, government, and the media. When Obama took office, over one hundred media members quit and went to work for the new administration. As the managerial state has grown and matured, it has absorbed the mass media. The media is now a tentacle of the managerial state.

These blurred lines mean the sense of community has grown. The people covering the Imperial Capital no longer see themselves as natural adversaries of the people they cover unless those people are seen as a threat. The fawning over Obama by the press corps even embarrassed Obama. Contrast that with Trump. The conspiracy to rig the last election by the CIA/FBI/DOJ has largely been ignored by the media, because they see the players as their neighbors, allies, and friends.

A more amusing reminder of this great divide between them and us was the heavy breathing last week about the so-called “intellectual dark web.” Someone from alt-right central casting, name Bari Weiss, wrote a piece declaring a group of squares the new radicals of the internet. Like all women writers of her age, Mx. Weis employs the autoethnographic style\. It is mostly a feeble attempt to cast herself as edgy because she knows people who think they are edgy.

That was the point though. This was not written for the broader audience. It was written for people in the media. It was the sort of self-adulation you see on award shows. From the perspective of someone like Mx. Weis, Ben Shapiro is super-edgy. Anyone inside the managerial class, offering the slightest resistance to the prevailing orthodoxy, is a rebel. It is not a lot different from the guys at prep school who cut class to smoke weed. To their peers, they are bad boys.

The old paleos were able to see the managerial state forming up. They were surprisingly prescient about what would happen to the politics of both liberalism and conservatism, as practiced thirty years ago. What they did not anticipate was the merging of corporate culture, multiculturalism, and the mass media. They cannot be faulted for it, as no one could really anticipate how new technology would accelerate the growth and evolution of the American ruling class. In the 90’s, the smart people predicted the opposite.

The managerial class has achieved class consciousness. If you are working at the New York Times, the American Enterprise Institute, or a government agency, you see the people in these roles as your colleagues. They are the people with whom you socialize and gossip. Their kids go to school with your kids. You live in the same exclusive neighborhoods. Not only are the people outside that world strangers, but they also vaguely feel like a threat.

Unlike ruling classes of prior ages, this one is not entirely endogamous or closed off to outsiders. Like the Chinese imperial exam system, Dirt People with something on the ball can test into this world. But also like the exam system, the American managerial class is becoming immune from new ideas and innovation. What passes for creativity is simply neologism filled recitations of the one true faith. If Jordan Peterson is your idea of a radical thinker, you are living in an intellectual waste land.

The Rock Fight

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The on-going investigation into FBI shenanigans trundles on and it is easy to be a bit cynical about the whole thing. It’s clear that the DOJ and FBI are stalling, hoping the Democrats take the House thus relieving them of their duties to Congress. The modern habit of the Washington elite giving themselves a pass for their bad behavior should lead sensible people to assume nothing comes of this. After all, it involves some of the biggest players in the semi-permanent Washington ruling class and they are above the law.

On the other hand, the list of people who tangled with Trump and then came to a bad end is long enough now to think it is not a coincidence. The mass media and NeverTrump loons like to paint the guy as a buffoon, but he is a very savvy political athlete. What makes it work for Trump is that when guys like Eric Schneiderman go up in flames, it looks like Trump was not involved, but curiously prescient. The fact is, Trump plays rough and the people in the FBI scandal have every reason to fear retribution from him.

That is the thing with Trump. He is a genuine politician, who does not have his head in the clouds or frets about getting a little dirty in a street fight. This is something we have not seen on the Right in national politics since forever. Reagan, on occasion, would throw some sharp elbows, but all of his worshipers since then have either confined themselves to the world of forms or found a reason their principles prevented them from getting into the fight. The result has been a once sided drubbing of the Right by the Left.

The great Sam Francis observed this about the America Right a long time ago. The Old Right, as he called what think of as CivNats, lived in the world of ideas. They operated under the assumption that their ideas would take human form and do the practical work of politics without the creators leaving their salons. You hear echoes of this with libertarians and TruCons today. Every discussion ends up with them quoting some theorist and waving around their Cato supplied pocket Constitution like it is a magic talisman.

On the other hand, the New Right, as he labeled the neoconservatives and Buckleyites, were willing to engage in practical politics, but assiduously within the rules, as currently written. This meant they were always captive to those rules. This gave the Left the whip hand, as they could change the rules whenever the Right was getting the upper hand in politics. The Buckleyites and neocons, instead of challenging the managerial state, have been absorbed by it and have become its champions. Sam Francis predicted this.

The fact that neocons and Buckleyites have been assimilated into the Borg that is the managerial class is evidenced by the people participating in the FBI scheme. You have neocons, their former critics and hard thumping Progressives working together in this conspiracy. Further, the extreme Left, which operates the mass media, is endlessly promoting the narrative cooked up by the conspirators. Whatever minor quibbles these people have with one another, defending the managerial state comes first.

It is why, to some degree, the alt-right and its fellow travelers punch so far above their weight and scare the people in charge. Outside of a few basic ideas, the alt-right is non-ideological. Put three of these guys in a room and they have ten different arguments, depending upon how the alcohol is flowing. At the same time, this loose collection of the like-minded is willing to engage in ad hoc guerrilla war against the managerial class, mostly for the laughs. It is, in part, why the managerial class has overreacted to them.

That brings us back to how Trump is managing the seditious plot, currently being exposed by Congress and the Inspector General. The Right side of the managerial class is puzzled and frustrated by Trump’s unwillingness to put on his good government cap and yap about the process. The ridiculous bleating from National Review types about his boorishness or his recklessness reveals a central fact about Trump and the emerging political movement he has set off. Trump is not of the Old Right or New Right, and neither are his supporters.

For its part, the Left is unnerved by his success at undermining the Mueller plot, while exposing the FBI treachery. They are grasping the reality of Trump. He is not a guy committed to winning them over with theory or looking for a way to join the club. Popular lore says he set off on this journey because he was insulted by the snubs from the political elite. The people peddling it hope it means he wants to join their club and will do so on their terms. It turns out that Trump is looking to bust up the club and make his own.

There is a lesson here. A culture war is a zero-sum game. The ground you gain can only come at the expense of the people in charge and there can never be peace. Complex political theories and carefully elucidated principles have no place in a culture war, or even a political war. It is a rock fight and that means you have to use whatever is handy to take out the other guy. After you win and secure his turf, then you take a break and maybe use the off time to think about theory. Principles are for the victory party.

Behind The Hive Door

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Way back in the olden thymes, American newspapers made the decision to give away their content on-line. It never made a lot of sense, as circulation had been falling for a long time and there was no model for monetizing on-line content, other than porn. It was a classic example of people getting caught up in a fad, without thinking through the consequences. The result has been decades of steep revenue declines, bankruptcies and layoffs at major broadsheets. Warren Buffet thinks all but three newspapers are doomed.

The funny thing about what has happened to newspapers and  the news media in general, is they still don’t seem to understand what has happened to them. Maybe in the business offices they see the reality of their situation, but the people in the media, like reporters and editors, seem clueless. It’s as if they believe some sort of bad juju is the cause of the trouble in their business. You see that in this post by Megan McArdle on the growing number of news sites that are adopting a subscription model for their sites.

For more than a century, magazines and newspapers were what’s known as a “two-sided market”: We sold subscriptions to you, our readers, and once you’d subscribed, we sold your eyeballs to our advertisers. That was necessary because, unbeknownst to you, your subscription dollars often didn’t even cover the cost of printing and delivering the physical pieces of paper. They rarely covered much, if any, of the cost of actually reporting and writing the stories printed on those pages. And you’d probably be astonished at how expensive it is to report a single, relatively simple story.

But that was okay, because we controlled a valuable pipeline to reader eyeballs — a pipeline advertisers wanted to fill with information about their products. You guys got your journalism on the cheap, and advertisers got the opportunity to tell you about the fantastic incentive package available to qualified buyers on the brand-new 1985 Chevy Impala.

Then the Internet came along, and suddenly, we didn’t own the only pipeline anymore. Anyone can throw up a Web page. And over the past 20 years, anyone did — far more than could support actual advertiser demand.

This is exactly backward. Sure, there was a period when the local paper often had a monopoly on news in their distribution area. Once radio and TV got better at delivering news, circulations declined. The reality is the newspaper was a delivery vehicle for employment ads, classifieds and circulars. The news was “free” because people were willing to pay a small fee for the ads, oddly enough. Sure, some portion of the readership would pay for the news, but nowhere near the majority of the subscriber base.

At the moment, in concession to your feelings on the subject, most paywalls are relatively porous. (Yes, we know about the tricks you use to subvert them.) But as more and more publications move behind paywalls, you should probably expect that to change. The less we have to worry about competition from free sites, the more those paywalls will tighten. (To be clear, this reflects my opinion based on analysis of industry-wide economics, not any knowledge of employer business strategy, current or former.)

And that will be a sad thing, because the old open Internet was a marvelous gift to readers, a vast cornucopia of great writing upon which we’ve been gorging for the past two decades. But there’s a limit to how long one can keep handing out gifts without some reciprocity. At the end of the day, however much information wants to be free, writers still want to get paid.

The amusing thing about this post is the writer carries on like media people were doing us a huge favor by providing “free news” on-line. Now the proles have to suck it up and pay the toll so the chattering skulls can continue in the lifestyle they have become so accustomed. The reality is going to much different. As it stand, the only news site to make a pay model work has been the Wall Street Journal. No one really knows if a subscriber model will even work, much less keep the army of chattering skulls in six figure salaries.

The sinister part of the post is “the less we have to worry about competition from free sites, the more those paywalls will tighten.” That’s their dream. If they can starve everyone else of revenue, then they will whither away. At that point the desperate public will rush to pay the establishment propaganda organs for the right to be lectured. These people are so ridiculously entitled, there is no doubt they believe this is possible. The fact is, if Megan McArdle gets hit by a bus tomorrow, more people will be worried about the bus.

The way to look at the news “business” is as something other than a business. For a long time, elite propaganda was financed by a monopoly of the delivery of small ads. Then a group of rich guys figured out how to take that business away. Cable news is facing the same problem. They got to tax every cable home a buck a month to finance government class propaganda. Now cord cutting is killing off that model. What’s about to happen is the rich people will have to pay for their own propaganda, by subsidizing these news sites.

What that means is far fewer chattering skulls living six figure lives. If Megan McArdle had to earn her keep like the various YouTube stars or alt-right figures, she would be taking in borders and doing laundry for the neighbors, in addition to her weekly column. But, none of these people can see what’s coming, because they believe their own BS. They really do think they are a priestly class that gives a greedy public the truth they demand. Tucker Carlson was right about these people. They are stupid rich kids. Deluded ones too.

Thoughts On Elites

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A famous line from the movie The Usual Suspects is “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” Even after all these years, it turns up in comment sections and social media. It is a good line to bear in mind when thinking about who is actually ruling over us. In America, our elites have spent a long time convincing us that there are no elites. The fact is though, every society has an elite and it is usually a stable, semi-permanent one. The people in charge tend to stay in charge.

Here is an interesting bit of data that underscores the stability of a nation’s elites. In the 16th century, the Spanish conquered the area that is now Guatemala. The Spanish were not settlers like the English, so a local Spanish elite came into rule over the conquered people, who were often used as slaves in mining and agriculture. Since 1531, 22 families have controlled Guatemala’s economy, politics and culture. Another twenty-six families have served as a secondary elite, often marrying into the core elite.

The result is one percent of the population, descendants of the Conquistadors, has controlled the country for over four hundred years. This dominance has been locked in by a set of marriage rules, which created a self-perpetuating marriage strategy. For example, both the bride and groom had to bring a certain amount of wealth into the marriage. The result was both families would negotiate marriages much in the same way it was done in medieval Europe. These rules have their roots in the Siete Partidas, that dates to the 13th century.

Of course, elite families marrying one another is not a new idea, but it is more than just wealthy families using marriage to solidify alliances. There is a biological factor to it. The people in the elite got there originally by having elite cognitive skills. Modern elites like to throw around the term meritocracy, but they know biology counts for a lot. It is why you do not often see a member of the elite marrying one of the servants. Arnold learned that lesson. The one on the left is from the house cleaner, while those on the right are with a Kennedy.

 

Another thing about elites is they tend to get what they want. One of the benefits of being in charge is you get to shape the institutions you control. A great example is the Fabian Society. This was not some program hatched by mill workers in their free time. It was a hobby for British elites in the late 19th and early 20th century. The Fabians managed to get most of what they wanted pushed through over time. The reason for that is they convinced their fellow elites it was a good program.

An interesting bit from the Fabian program, which they called the “True Radical Programme” was intended to be far more radical than the other reform efforts. They wanted it to be seen as way-out on the fringe. Yet, things like women’s suffrage, paying MPs a salary and public education eventually became normal. It is something to keep in mind when thinking about the war on men or the waves of anti-white agitation we see in the media. Today’s crazy elite culture is tomorrow’s new normal.

Of course, the real reason elites tend to get what they want is they are better than the rest of us. They are smarter, better socialized and they have greater access to the stock of knowledge relevant to being in charge. Americans despise the idea of a ruling elite, so the people in charge spend a lot of time pretending they do not exist. It is why our form of democracy works so well. The people keep voting for different candidates, but the people in charge never change. That is what we are seeing with Donald Trump right now.

That is probably why the global elite is so worried about the rising tide of nationalism through the West. The constant moaning about “threats to our democracy” really do not mean the people in charge care about actual democracy. The game of bad cop/worse cop we see in our politics is not a bug. It is a feature. The process of voting has been rigged by the ruling class such that the results are fixed. No matter which candidate you choose, you get the same results, because the same people own all of the candidates.

What nationalism does is tie the candidate to a group of people. The politicians of Germany care only for the interests of Germans, not migrants and refugees. Once “them” is no longer as important as “us”, the definitions get more granular. Each pol them looks at his district or province as “us” and the rest of the country as “them.” This makes it exceedingly hard for a national elite, much less a global elite, to corrupt the political system with cash, favors and access to elite society. That is bad for global elites.

This is another reminder that civic nationalism is a sucker’s play. The rules we have in place today are designed to lock in the status quo. No challenge to the status quo, therefore, can be based on assiduously adhering to the rules. In fact, the goal is to turn adherence to the rules into a destabilizing force. When the people in charge no longer trust the rules to protect their position, they change the rules. It’s why Progressives are campaigning to end freedom of speech. The truth is their enemy.

The Moral War

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One of the stranger bits of the current year is how people all over the ideological map are claiming to be “woke”, “aware” and “red-pilled” despite believing things that directly contradict things other “woke”, “aware” and “red-pilled” people believe. The millennial Jewish girl is woke about the patriarchy, while her last boyfriend is red-pilled on the JQ, mostly from having dated her. Knowing “what’s really going on” used to be exclusive to conspiracy theorists, but now it is common in outsider politics.

The truth is, the truly woke understand that the current crisis is not a dispute between tribes or a dispute about facts. It is a moral war where one side controls the moral paradigm and imposes their will on the rest of us The current fight is about control of public morality, not public institutions. Facts and reason only play a supporting role in this fight. Being right on the facts helps win respect, thus giving one moral capital, but the point of the game to define public morality.

A useful way of seeing is this post on National Review about health insurance policy, which is about a “conservative” way of providing universal health insurance. It has all the usual stuff we have come to expect from the pseudo-experts. What is not so obvious is the implied embrace of moral orthodoxy on health care. That is, our collective moral duty is to make sure everyone, even non-Americans, has health insurance and presumably, free access to health services.

A few decades ago, no one thought it was our collective moral duty to make sure everyone had health insurance and equal access to health care. We understood that poor people had to rely on charity. In the 1970’s, the free clinic, where young doctors volunteered as part of the training, was a staple of poor neighborhoods, especially urban ghettos. No one thought they were a failure as a citizen because the blacks in the ghetto did not have access to world class health services.

Today, the political class starts with the assumption that only a thoroughly immoral person does not dream of a world where everyone gets health insurance and access to the finest medical care. Since this is impossible, the default assumption is that the state must take control of the health care system. That means the “far right” is debating “their friends on the Left” about what color drapes to use in the health care commissar’s offices, because the Left won the moral argument.

It is why the emerging resistance to the prevailing moral order has to focus on the moral side of the fight, rather than appealing to facts and reason. There are things that can be factually true, and morally abhorrent. Ethic cleaning, for example, is an effective way for one population to solve a problem of another population. Europeans are the result of just such a process. While the efficacy of genocide, from the perspective of nature, is undeniable, we consider it to be morally repugnant.

With rare exceptions, like cannibalism in times of starvation, the moral always triumphs over the factual. What we see as moral, and immoral, is determined not just by what our rulers tell us, but also by what our peers say. We naturally trust the people close to us first and then to the people who seem to share our interests and then the people who look and sound like us. We will embrace the morality of our kin over the morality of strangers, even when those strangers rule over us.

Over the last several generations, the people who now rule over us have used every weapon in their arsenal to break our natural trust The war on families, communities, schools, the sexes, are all part of an instinctive strategy to break the natural bonds of loyalty that form public morality. It is why having the facts on our side has never meant a damn in political debates. A deracinated public, untethered from its traditions and alienated from its neighbors, inevitably accepts the morality of the ruling elites.

This is the ultimate red pill. The sermons blasting from the megaphones of the mass media may be offensive and insane, but they provide a moral framework. The lack of a credible alternative means most people just fall in line. This has the added benefit of providing social proof. It is hard to be against what is being preached to you when no one else is speaking out against it. People naturally want to be led, but they also naturally want to be seen by their peers as moral people.

This is why the challenge to the prevailing orthodoxy has to be a challenge on moral terms, not facts and reason. Appealing to people’s sense of propriety will also be more effective than appealing to their reason. This only works if the people making the appeal have standing and can provide the sort of social proof people crave. It’s why Jared Taylor has worked so hard to build an organization that offers an alternative moral framework, but also an alternative community.

It is a fact of history that no revolution succeeded when the ruling elite was unified and had moral authority. Social change, whether it is a great wave of reform or an outright revolution, blossoms in times when the elites are in conflict. The cracks arise when the people begin to doubt the moral authority of their rulers. The challenge is to create that alternative moral framework and communities that embrace it. Only then will elements of the ruling class seek to be tribunes of the people.