Category Archives: Culture

A Million Petty Tyrants

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When news broke that someone was shooting up YouTube, the usual suspects geared up to profit from it. You can be sure that the ridiculous little twerp David Hogg was looking for cheap airfare to California, so he could mug for the cameras. Then it turned out to be a Persian woman, who was pissed about being censured. She was a nut, but what sent her over the edge was the way she was treated by the petty tyrants of YouTube. She was the multicultural version of Falling Down.

The funny thing is, none of the respectable people have bothered to notice what has been happening with social media until now. This story on PJ Media takes the girl angle and this post on National Review takes the CivNat approach. If the shooter had been Baked Alaska or Sam Hyde, they would be saying the usual things about extreme right wing extremist hate speakers. Instead it was a neurotic foreign vegan, tormented into a homicidal rage by the semi-official thought police now running the public square.

Of course, when bullets start flying, people tend to get serious. Up until now, the people running the social media companies have paid no price for their behavior. In fact, they have been publicly praised by the left side of the ruling class, and quietly praised by the right side. All of a sudden, the folks in charge have to consider the possibility of a lunatic with a gun showing up in their offices, when one of their moderators willy-nilly decides to nuke a user account. That changes the math of being the morality police.

Even through this has been ignored by the media, there are now two types of meetings going on in companies like YouTube. The people in charge are huddling in their executive suites, talking about security and how best to make sure the next lunatic does not get beyond the first floor. The soulless shrew running YouTube will no doubt make sure security around her is beefed up in response to this incident. She will probably issue a memo demanding greater vigilance by the YouTube morality police.

There is a second form of meeting going on today. That’s the one in the lunchrooms and chat rooms for employees of these social media companies. These are the people who take the bullet when the next pistol packing Persian shows up with a beef about the arbitrarily enforced terms of service. At least for a little while, some of them will think twice before pushing the button to delete a video or take down an account. After all, that vegan yoga instructor with quirky politics, could be a really good marksman.

A smart man once said that the post-modern age is a period where the best people painfully relearn all the things everyone used to know. For example, the whole point of liberal democracy was not to give the people a say in how things are run, but to give them a non-violent veto. Instead of the angry rabble stringing up their local rulers and burning down their mansion, the angry rabble gets to vote out some candidates or perhaps pass a referendum that will be ignored. Political liberty is the pressure release.

The guy on street corner, waving around a manifesto, proselytizing to his fellow citizens, is only a threat to the public order, if the people in charge don’t have better answers or a way to steal his ideas. Otherwise, he is just a crank who can be ignored. Today, the street corner is a user account on social media and the manifesto is a series of videos detailing some political or social cause. All of which is entirely harmless, just as long as the people in charge have better answers. Within this lifetime, people used to know this.

Something else people used to know is that the guy with a tiny bit of power, is often the most dictatorial. Meter maids, building inspectors, zoning office clerks, these are people with very narrow authority, but hey wield it with the zeal of a bloodthirsty tyrant. That is because the sort of people attracted to the work, are the sort of people looking for any chance to have authority over another person. The way American cities solved their sadist problem is they installed parking meters and made the sadists into meter maids.

Today, it is the social media companies hiring the petty tyrants, sadists and mentally disturbed spinsters, giving them a job of reading your tweets. These are the people who scan the internet, looking for “hate speech” they can put on a list, so that other petty tyrants can use it to torment the hate speaker or anyone interested in him. These are people who relish the task, because it is the only time anyone notices them. Our public space is turning into a daycare center run by sadistic schoolmarms.

The people in charge of social media firms spend so much time smelling their own farts, they truly think they can regulate what the world has to say about things. Again, people used to know better. Reality is that thing that does not go away when you stop believing in it and reality is, there is no controlling public opinion. There is no way to stifle dissent. The only thing that comes from efforts to do so is a violent response. But, the petty tyrants will only learn that lesson when the next Persian vegan shows up at their door.

Prince Rupert’s Revenge

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There was a time when it was possible to have cordial and even friendly relations with people on the Left. I spent many hours debating my lefty friends over drinks, about the defects of various central planning schemes. Anyone my age or older remembers the way these debates would go. One side talked about economic justice for the working class, while the other side talked about the glory of free markets. Usually, the “right-winger” would bring up the Soviets.

Often, one side or the other would get mad, but it was rarely personal. People get hot in political debates, mostly because we are social animals. Conflict with people inside our group vexes us. It makes us uncomfortable. That was the thing. Liberals and non-liberals could operate in the same peer group. The reason is the Left and Right back then, agreed on the goals. Both sides wanted prosperity. The Left believed socialism produced plenty, while the Right believed a rising tide lifted all boats.

Thinking back, a strange thing happened in the 1990’s, with regards to my own debates with lefty friends and acquaintances. The debates in the 90’s were almost all about the peculiar personal lives of Bill and Hillary Clinton. The Right was always scandal mongering and the Left was conjuring novel defenses for the degeneracy of Bill Clinton and the personal corruption of Hillary. These revolved around Red Team/Blue Team scat fights, that had little to do with policy or ideology. It was just ritualized tribal warfare.

That changed instantly with the 2000 election. All of my lefty friends and acquaintances went insane overnight.  They hated Bush with the intensity of a fanatic. The wars made it impossible to have a discussion with the Left. Granted, many of us were naïve about the lunacy of the neocons, but the Left’s opposition was never more than shrieking madness. How does one debate someone who thinks Halliburton controls the weather and attacked New Orleans?

I remember thinking my lefty friends would return to sanity after Bush left office, but that never happened. A few stopped foaming at the mouth, but for the most part, they crossed into a realm from which there is no return. In the Obama years, they went from one peculiar fad to the next. One week it was homosexual marriage, while the next week it was claims about sex being a social construct. There’s simply no discussion, much less debating, these issues with them.

Looking back, it’s useful to think about the fight between the Left and the Right as a set-piece battle on an agreed upon battlefield. At the center of both sides was economics. The Right had religious archers and the constitutional conservatives on the flanks, but the center of the army was formed around economic issues. Similarly, the Left had race hustlers, second and third wave feminists on the flanks, but their main line troops, the center of the line, were economic Utopians.

The collapse of the Soviet Union had an enormous impact on the ruling classes of the West. In America, it meant the center of the Progressive army broke and fled in all directions. The flanks, however, the racial justice warriors, the gender dragoons and exotic identity battalions rushed into the center, forming a new main line of the Left. The Right, despite carrying the day, was too busy setting up battlefield trophies to notice that the Left had reformed around sexual and racial fanatics, so they promptly surrendered.

A curious thing is happening to this new center of the Progressive battle line. Their moral certainty about the innate equality of man and his infinite malleability, is crumbling in the face of scientific reality. The release of David Reich’s book is the latest direct hit on Boasian anthropology. The response from the soft sciences, which has been a key intellectual authority for the blank slate Progressives, looks like a panicked flight from the battle field. They simply have no answer to science.

The tent pole holding up modern Progressivism is the assertion that all humans are essentially the same and that the observable differences are trivial. All of the Left’s arguments spring from that belief. It’s why they insist the magic of white privilege is the reason black crime is so high or rape culture is why girls don’t go into STEM fields at the same rate as boys. In other words, magic is a plausible answer, as long as reality is ruled out as an option. Biological realism explodes the center of Progressive theology.

That’s what we see happening all over the human sciences. Twenty years ago, some guy in a cardigan could claim that racism was learned behavior and their was no biological basis for race. He could be held up as an intellectual authority and therefore, a moral authority. Genetics is undermining the intellectual authority of those preaching cultural anthropology, multiculturalism and the blank slate. The main line of the Progressive army is suddenly looking like a bunch of primitives chanting oogily-boogily.

It’s tempting to say I’m getting ahead of myself, but we have millions of people relying on DNA services to map their ancestry. Genetics is promising new cures for disease and soon, people will be able to get their intellectual destiny for $50. It will not be long before some clever fertility lab begins offering bespoke artificial insemination, using donors with desirable traits, based on their genetics. People are becoming habituated to the idea that humans are different, because of biology, not culture.

The question, of course, is where does the Left go now. In the late 19th and early 20th century, what we call Progressivism was mostly a Protestant crusade. In the 20th century, they shifted to embracing  the economic utopianism of socialism, with racial and sexual politics as side acts. For the last three decades, the dream of sexual and racial utopias has been the dominant theme of the Left. Once the blank slate is broken on the wheel of biological reality, what comes next?

The answer could be nothing. There are many currents to American history, but the dominant one is what John Derbyshire calls the Cold Civil War. It is our inheritance from the mother country. The story of America has been the good whites and bad whites, the Roundheads and Cavaliers, fighting for control of the country. It’s also a conflict of visions, where the Roundheads always embraced extreme egalitarianism, while the Right has embraced the natural hierarchy of man.

Techno-Feudalism

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Feudalism, in the most general sense, is a set of obligations between a superior and a subordinate, based on land. The lord owns the land and grants access to the land to vassals. The lord provides services like protection and the imposition of order, while the vassal provides food rents, military service and labor to the lord. In practice, a lord could also be a vassal to a greater lord or a king. The result of this combination of relationships is the system we know as feudalism, which dominated Europe in the Middle Ages.

From the perspective of economics, the key components are land and labor, with land being the critical one. For most of human history, labor was interchangeable. German speaking peasants working estates in France were the same as Frankish speaking peasants. Wars were fought over land, so chasing off the other guy’s peasants, in order to take his land, made perfect sense. The land was the thing of value, while the labor that worked it was a commodity. The supply of peasants was never a problem.

The politics of a feudal system are simple. The arrangements were designed to serve the needs of the warrior nobility at the top the system. The lords may serve a king, but they also serve one another in defending and perpetuating the system. It is why innovation was often seen as a threat. If one lord could get much more from his fief, than the other lords, or even the king, then the power relationships all change. Feudalism, by nature, must be highly conservative, as it is based on legal and economic relationships never changing.

The other thing worth noting is that feudalism arises when an empire begins to decline or collapse. The central authority is no longer able to maintain order, so local power centers emerge that can protect land and impose order. Since no single local lord can impose order over his rivals, a system of rules and obligations evolve to handle relations between the local power centers. In other words, feudalism is what comes after the collapse of central authority. It is a return to a default position of local control and local autonomy.

The relevance of this to our age is that we are at the end of the liberal consensus or maybe even at the end of liberal democracy. The West is not an empire, in the way Rome was an empire, but there is no doubt that the last five hundred years of human history has been about the rise of Europeans and the evolution of European social order. The liberal order is base upon the nation state, which roughly corresponds to a single ethnicity. The people of that state own and control the assets of the state, picking rulers from their own people.

The role of the state has been the single focus of Western intellectuals since the Enlightenment. The evolution of economic arrangements, political arrangements and international arrangements, have all been in the context of the state. What is called the liberal consensus is the combination of all these things, based on each state having some form of liberal democracy. A nation gets to be in the liberal order if it holds elections and has a form of representative government, which is notionally responsive to its people.

What has become increasingly obvious, is that private entities now perform many of the duties formerly delegated to the state. Regulating political speech, has always been the job of the government, but now it is tech companies serving that role. Similarly, it used to be the job of government to control the financial system, even at the retail level. Today, firms like  PayPal or Citi Bank are in charge of regulating and controlling access to the financial system. Even central banks now operate outside of national governments.

The result of this delegation of power is that the national authority is losing power over the societies it allegedly rules. This may be the natural result of globalism. As the states delegate important duties to international authorities, they lose the power to impose order domestically. The result is they must rely on private interests that are not constrained by constitutions and customs. In order for government to maintain the illusion of power, they have ceded domestic power to multinationals and tech giants, that they claim to regulate.

In feudalism, the political relationships between the warrior elite were about controlling land and defending it from those outside the alliance. The subjects working the land were not all that important. The post national world we are entering will be one where the global tech and finance giants control the flow of information, working with one another to maintain control of the system. Because a feudal system must be conservative, defending this new system will mean stamping out dissent and alternatives to the dominant platforms.

The thing about the feudal order was how effective it was at preserving itself. At the dawn of the French Revolution, as France began to emerge from feudalism, most people living in what was then France, did not speak French. They spoke regional dialects that dated back, in some cases, to the Roman Empire. Given the ability of tech giants to regulate the flow of information, it is reasonable to think they will be better at controlling and isolating people, as a form of defense in depth. Everyone will live on a data manor.

Puritans And Progressives

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A list of major mass movements in American history would include women’s suffrage, the Social Gospel movement, abolitionism, the temperance movement, the efficiency movement, the New Deal, the Civil Rights Movement, the New Left and maybe Neoliberalism. There are others, but that is a good list of the big ones. What is remarkable, even looking at only the major ones, is the number. America is the land of reformers and proselytizers.

The movements in the 20th century, starting with the efficiency movement, are usually called progressivism. They get their own stall in the American mass movement bizarre, but progressive is a good umbrella term for them. In fact, you can lump earlier movements in with the latter movements. All of them trace some of their roots to the Puritan founding of New England. Unlike European mass movements, American movements are about communal salvation.

American mass movements always start from some version of “a society is judged on the basis of how it treats its weakest members.” This is part of its inheritance from the Puritans. While the Puritans that settled in America believed in predestination, clues about one’s fate could be found in good works, church attendance and prayer. Part of that was making sure others did the same things, as they sought to discover their destiny. It is why church attendance was mandatory for Puritans.

Individual grace meant an individualized reading of and interpretation of Scripture, which led to tensions, even open hostility, within the church. The solution was a strict hierarchy and consensus. If one could only find clues to their own salvation in a thriving community of believers, maintaining the community becomes paramount. That resulted in a forced consensus within each community. Dissidents were persecuted and even banished. A Puritan community functioned like a single organism.

It is a good example of how the practical application of belief can result in practices that appear at odds with the belief. The Puritans rejected the concept of free will, but they still judged one another’s action, because leading a righteous life might be an indication of God’s grace. The righteous would never tolerate an obvious sinner in the community of believers, so policing the ranks for sinners was a potential sign of God’s grace. Everyone, even Puritans, wants to hedge their bets when it comes to grace.

Of course, anyone paying attention to the modern Left understands that forced consensus is at the heart of their beliefs. The constant cries for “unity” and the railing against those who “divide” or “polarize” is an effort to enforce consensus. It is also why conservatives are so fond of purging people from their ranks. It is a purity test, but also a way of removing trouble makers from the community of the righteous. Instead of Quakers, it is racists getting run out of the community.

Another thing that you see in all Progressive movements, rooted in Puritan New England, is the hunt for Old Scratch. The Puritans believed that Satan was a real thing and played a role in human affairs. They saw Satan as a creation of God, that punished the wicked, but also gave purpose to the pious. After all, if your deeds had no impact on the disposition of your soul and there was no price to be paid for sin, what would be the point of virtue? Satan solved half that problem for Puritans.

The post hoc fallacy is not new to this age. If you believe that bad things happen because of a lack of piety, then the only reason for the bad things happening to the community is someone cavorting with Old Scratch. The Puritans were uniquely susceptible to the witch panics, because they saw a direct causal link between sinners in the community and bad things befalling the community. The Puritans were necessarily, but unusually paranoid.

Even though modern Progressives no longer explicitly talk about God or Satan, they still carry with them a fear of supernatural influences. The endless search for racists, for example, is just the same old hunt for Satan. If the community is not unified, it must be due to those polarizing types, who are responsible for white privilege, the glass ceiling or the rape culture. Now, suburban white mothers are fretting that their sons may be cavorting with bad people on-line.

Communal salvation, forced consensus and the fear of Old Scratch inevitably means a sense of alienation to the outside world. Read any description of Puritan life and you see a hostility to outsiders. This is another thing you see with all progressives mass movements and you certainly see it today. The modern Left is consumed with defining who is inside and who is outside their thing. The people inside are the righteous, while the people outside are all evil.

Like the Puritan communities, progressives are inward looking. Those outside the movement are assumed to be hostile. It is why they have so many words that simply mean “people outside the walls.” The phrase “right-winger” is used interchangeably with the word “Republican” even though they are almost opposites. To the progressives, they both mean outsider. Puritans did not waste a lot of time understanding the difference between Quakers and Episcopalians.

This binary world view has another effect. For progressives, there are only two possible answers to any question and they are mutually exclusive. There is the righteous answer and the false or evil answer. It is why they spend all of their time “debunking” human science. If they can defeat the evil answer, it means the righteous answer triumphs and, by extension, they are the righteous. It’s also why the concept of casual indifference is alien to Progressives. There can be no compromise.

This is a good place to note that a generation ago, progressives smugly put Darwin fish on their Subaru. Today, they shake their fist at the “scientific racists” using new findings in genetics to reveal the origins of modern people. Because unity is the promised land, anything that divides people is the work of Satan. It is why racism is the great bogeyman of the Left. The growing mountain of scientific data revealing the diversity of modern humans, is seen as a gathering storm, threatening the righteous.

There are other Puritan aspects to modern progressives, things like conformity and an affinity for black clothing, but the important influence is the spiritual one. The Puritans were utopians, when you strip away all of the mythology and lore. They came to the New World to build their ideal community. When Reagan spoke of the “city on the hill” he was speaking to a spiritual sensibility that started at Plymouth. It is a spiritual sensibility that is with us to this day.

March For Our Masters

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When I was a kid, I wondered why the people in the Soviet Union just put up with being ruled by the commies. Even discounting for the propaganda, the evidence was clear that Russia was remarkably poorer than the West. There were too many stories from defectors about how Western goods were smuggled into the Iron Curtain countries to claim they did not know it. Even if that did not matter, the thuggery should have pushed people into revolt, but it never happened.

Later in life, I got to know an Iranian guy. Iranians with some money would get their kids student visas in Europe and then they would come to the US. He had served in the Iranian army as a conscript during the Iran-Iraq War. He told me a story about how they cleared a minefield near Basra. They asked for volunteers from the Revolutionary Guard, who then ran through the field exploding the mines so the unit could follow them through the field.

Over the years, I have met other people who had lived in totalitarian countries or in the more fanatical Muslim ones. They always have these sorts of stories. Most of the time they are not as colorful as the one my Persian friend told me, but they usually have the same sort of matter of fact way of telling them. I always get the sense that the people telling the story don’t think these events are all that interesting, but its better than talking about the weather or what they had for lunch last week.

The question that always comes to mind, is whether ideological societies produce an excess of fanatics or evolve to use them like an energy source. The Bolsheviks figured out quickly that communist economics were nonsense. There was no amount of tinkering to make it work, but the supply of true believers made it possible to keep the system running, long after the people in charge knew it was hopeless. Without the zealots, the Soviet system would have collapsed after Stalin died.

The same thing is true of the Iranian theocracy. The energy of the revolution kept it going through the difficult early years, but that energy is long gone. The students who sacked the American embassy are in their late fifties and early sixties now. Many died in the Iraq War. The regime itself long ago descended into petty corruption. Still, there are plenty of fanatics willing to spy on a neighbor, in the name of the revolution. The supply of zealots is never exhausted.

When I look at what is happening with the latest round of gun grabbing in America, I wonder if we are simply overflowing with rogue fanatics, looking for a cause, or is the cultural revolution creating them, like batteries to fuel their latest push to slam the cage door on us? When you see bizarre posts like this from old men of the revolution, slobbering over the children now running around promising more revolution, the causal relationship is not all that obvious. It is a snake eating its tail.

Of course, these public events are not organic or spontaneous. Daniel Greenfield has tracked down the money and it is clear this latest spasm of gun grabbing is financed by the same radical ideologues behind the Womyn’s March last year. Still, are these people financing the new fanatics because they need them or are the fanatics just always there, ready to run into the nearest minefield? Maybe natural selection plays some role, where the rewards for zealotry slowly increases the supply each generation.

I wonder what people in Iran or maybe Russia think about this stuff. There are plenty of people in Eastern Europe, who lived through the Soviets, so they probably recognize these organized propaganda riots. Instead of the state marching the children off to reeducation camps to train for the next parade, the camps are sponsored by Global Mega Corp and the parade is financed by a sports team. Is the fact the system is run by corporate ideologues rather, than religious or political ideologues a big difference?

Theodore Dalrymple famously said that communist propaganda was intended to humiliate and degrade the people repeating it in public. That may be true and it may simply have been a byproduct. Similarly, ideological authoritarianism like we see in America and Iran, may not set out to create fanatics, but it is a natural result. The zealotry that animated the regime in the early stages, becomes its sole purpose. It lives to create a new generation of fanatics, who push aside the old ones and start the process all over again.

In this regard, radicalism is like a pathogen. If it kills the host too quickly, it can not spread to new hosts, but it must always spread to new hosts. This is why radicals, since the French Revolution, have obsessed over children. The sight of ridiculous twinks like David Hogg promising a revolutionary bloodbath fills the Boomer radicals with joy, as they know the disease has been transmitted to the next generation. The radical pathos lives on, even as it kills the host. Radicalism feeds on the cancer of zealotry, until it kills the host society.

That gets back to where we started. Most Americans know the people behind the weekend’s orchestrated proselytizing are crazy. Parading children out to lecture the adults is creepy and weird. The last ten years has been an endless freak show of degeneracy and depravity. Yet, the public goes along with it. Those who speak out against it are hurled into the void, and the so-called conservatives mutter about hypocrisy, but otherwise, the radical orgy of depravity staggers on undeterred. The nut-job army serves its purpose.

Winners And Losers

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Mass movements always reach a stage where they can break through and become legitimate social forces or they can fizzle out and die. They either take the next step and begin to attract a larger audience or they are a boutique fad. The neo-reaction movement of a decade ago is a good example of the latter. It was important on-line for a while, but then it lost steam and faded away. Its two main idea men have moved onto other things. The alt-right is at that point now.

If a movement is going to outgrow the pot in which it was a seedling, the people in leadership need to regularly reassess. The New Left in the 1960’s went through several such resets, finally becoming an intellectual and cultural movement that swept the major institutions of the country. One of the early re-thinks for successful movements is purging previous failed efforts and failed leaders. The New Left figured out why the old CPUSA guys failed and made sure to avoid the same mistakes.

Last summer the alt-right fell into the trap of Charlottesville and allowed themselves to be aligned with the bogeymen the Left has been using for generations to scare white people away from identity politics. Guilt by association is powerful stuff, because it works in a mass media culture. The result of locking shields with various white nationalist groups on TV was that the alt-right has become tied, in the public mind, to people who have been unstable and unreliable.

The alt-right, if it is going to be anything, is going to have to build its own thing, clearly separate and independent of the old white nationalist guys of the past. It has to stand alone and that means cutting all ties with the guys who like marching around in public pretending to be the freikorps. Whatever arguments can be mustered in their defense, there is no getting around the fact these groups have had half a century to make their case and they have failed miserably at ever turn.

Exclusively racist groups are not the only failures of the past. The paleocons were smart, creative and energetic, but they were outmaneuvered and eventually purged by the political elite. It is hard not to admire guys like Paul Gottfried and Pat Buchanan, who have spent their lives fighting the good fight, but it is also hard not to notice that they failed. Sam Francis was a great thinker and everyone should read him, but there is a reason these guys lost.

The reason they lost is they made the mistake of thinking the other side was reasonable and amenable to their arguments. The paleocons wanted to be in the club, not burn the club down. It was this desire to belong that was used to derail them. Even today, after all that has happened, these old guys still talk like this is just an argument between friends rather than bloodsport. If the alt-right is going to thrive, it has to accept that what comes next is revolution, not reformation.

Another useful lesson from past losers is the chain of causality. For as long as anyone has been alive, right-wing movements have started with politics first, hoping to rally people to sway elections. The result in every case was the effort being hijacked by political opportunists, who quickly set about trading the goals of the cause for entrée to the political class. The Tea Party is the most obvious recent example. It was an authentic grassroots movement that was quickly hijacked.

The one thing about rejecting the losers of the past is it clears the mind so you can objectively examine the winners. The winners of the post-war cultural revolution won for a reason. One reason is they built their politics on top of a cultural movement. The 60’s counterculture started long before the radicals of the 70’s started taking over Democratic politics. In other words, there were lots of people ready to support someone that spoke their language and understood their perspective.

I watched a documentary about the Weather Underground and one of the things that jumped out to me was a statistic. By the middle of the 60’s, Students for a Democratic Society had 100,000 members. The thing is, the group started small or grew quietly, focused more on building membership than activism. Groups like Identity Evropa may seem overly cautious, but the only way they can grow on campus is if the people in charge ignore them. Revolution grows in darkness.

Another valuable lesson from the New Left is they built independent organizations well outside the mainstream. Many of the fads of the era strike us today as being loopy and weird, but they served a valuable purpose. The radicals of the 70’s, who began invading the academy and politics, were born from these counterculture groups. Living outside the Eye of Sauron is even more important today, now that we have a full blown surveillance state.

Related to that last point is something else worth noting. The radicals of the 60’s and 70’s took every shot to establish who was inside and who was outside, especially when dealing with the media. They would charge establishment media a fee to attend their events but grant free access to their guys. They would use insider language in public events, to make sure you knew if you belonged. It was highly effective at attracting and keeping people in the movement.

The alt-right, mostly through serendipity and dumb luck, has a chance to be a legitimate right-wing mass movement. That is not going to happen if they keep blundering into unforced errors. The fiasco of the Traditional Worker’s Party should be a wake up call for the people leading the alt-right. They have to get smarter and they have to stop screwing up. The alt-right needs to get smart, or it will die. That means learning from the winners and the losers.

The Logic Of Empire

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The first time I did any serious reading of the Roman Empire, the thought that was always with me was why they never thought to downsize. The cost of conquering Gaul was relatively low, so it made sense to do it, but the cost of hanging onto it never seemed to make sense. The same was even more true with Britannia. By the third century, it should have been obvious that the Empire needed to downsize. Yet, that was never a part of the logic of the empire.

The same is true of the Thirty Years War. The Habsburgs were exhausting themselves trying to preserve something that was probably not worth the effort. Of course, we look at these things in hindsight and from a modern perspective. It seems silly to care about the local religious practices, but important people did care about these things. Still, when I read about the rise and fall of empires, I end up thinking through the alternatives, wondering why they were never considered.

The answer is probably the simplest one. People, even the shrewdest rulers, live and plan within their allotted time on earth. Even the Chinese, who take the long view of things, act in the moment. People can think about how their actions will impact their descendants a century from now, but it will never have the same emotional tug as how their contemporaries think of them in the moment. Most men will trade the applause of today for being remembered long after he is dead.

That is probably what we are seeing with the current struggles of Western elites to keep this house of cards together. The “liberal international order” is the perfection of a solution to problems of the long gone past. From the French Revolution through the Cold War, the great challenge in the West was over conflict resolution. After a long bloody series of experiments, the West finally figured out something that worked to keep the peace, maximize material wealth and settle disputes.

The current arrangements are not answering the questions of this age. In fact, they appear to be exacerbating the problems that face the West. Angela Merkel’s decision to invite in a million Muslim warriors made her the hero of her contemporaries, but it guaranteed that generations of Germans will be engaged in a long twilight struggle to save themselves and their people from the terror of contemporary Islam. A generation from now Merkel will be remembered as a monster.

Of course, when we talk of the West, we are really talking about the American Empire that arose following World War II. Washington has its tentacles in every nook and cranny of the world. The United States has active duty military troops stationed in nearly 150 countries. The cost of this is close to a trillion per year, not counting the unknown sums that are not in the budget. If the American ruling class decides it is time to downsize the empire, then the liberal international order is finished.

Assuming it is true that the top 5% of Americans pay 60% of taxes, the cost of empire is mostly paid by rich people. Rich people like peace and stability, so fear of the alternative keeps them invested in a system that no longer makes sense. The internal contradictions of this empire may even be known to the people in charge, but the way out of it is not clear, so they stick with what has worked for generations, no matter the cost to them and their descendents.

Inertia plays a part in these things too. To abandon what their ancestors built would seem like failure, so our rulers keep throwing good money after bad in places like Afghanistan and Mesopotamia. If there is a reason to be involved in the Syrian civil war, not one has said it, but there we are anyway. If Putin wants to set himself up as a modern day Tsar, what is it matter to us? We have an army of specially trained Russia experts, so our rulers keep pretending Putin is a super villain.

The truly weird thing about the American Empire is it started as a homogeneous nation, composed of English speaking white people. The Romans bankrupted themselves trying to keep the barbarians out, while going to great lengths to integrate those that came in through conquest and migration. America is bankrupting itself trying to import barbarians from every corner of the globe. The point is to keep the current arrangements in place, no matter how illogical.

It is an error to assume the people in charge are thinking this stuff through. Lots of smart people were bamboozled into thinking China would get rich and become a modern Western style democracy. Sure, the people who talked those smart people into this foolishness were in it just for a quick buck, but that just proves the point. The people in charge of the West are not thinking too far past next week. They do what seems to work today, no matter the long term cost.

That is probably the best way to think of the logic of empire. No one lives in the long term, because as Keynes said, in the long run we are all dead. Ultimately, relative to the march of history, everyone in charge at all times and all places has a high time preference. The people in charge are just getting what they can from the current arrangements. It is why they instinctively defend the system. It is what provides them with the lifestyle they believe they deserve. That and it is all they know.

Public Acts Of Piety

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Scipio Africanus was a great Roman general. He was the man who bested Hannibal, the great Carthaginian general, at the Battle of Zama. In addition to being a great general, Scipio was a great politician. Then as a now, you did not get a chance to be a great general unless you were good at politics. Politics being what it is, even the great Scipio had his enemies. For example, the warmongering lunatic Cato the Elder, the neocon of his day, accused Scipio of corruption, after he had retired from public life.

One of the ways Scipio navigated his way through the political system was by showing the Roman public he was a man of great piety. He showed his filial piety by risking his life to save his father’s life, when he was wounded and surrounded by enemies at the battle of Ticinus. Later, he volunteered to take command of the army of Spain, even though it was not a glamorous position, in order to follow in his father’s path. Scipio also made sure the public saw him making sacrifices to the gods and conducting himself with great probity.

The point of this, is that it is a natural part of civic life, for the rulers to make a big show of their honor and morality. As in the case of Scipio, public acts of piety are an important part of the political process. They signal to the public and the political class, that the person supports and defends the codes of society. There is the civic code, which defines the political life of society. Then there is the moral code, usually religion, that defines the daily life of the people. The shrewd politician is careful to make sure he is good at both.

This works out well when there is a commonly held religion, even in a very general sense like Christianity. A century ago, an American politician was expected to be seen going to church, for example. He would salt his language with references to the Bible and religious teaching, in order to signal that he was a good Christian. Of course, it was also important to have a unifying set of civil customs. A century ago, most Americans agreed on a set of beliefs, which constituted being a good citizen, Politicians signaled them as well.

Today, we live in a post-Christian age, where most of ruling class is unfamiliar with traditional religion and often hostile to it. Instead, our rulers believe in a grab bag of fads that define multiculturalism. Political correctness is the enforcement arm of this amorphous new faith, so signaling agreement with the current PC causes is how our rulers try to tell us they are moral people. People hoping to rise into the upper ranks, invest all of their time in public acts of piety, often on-line, to prove they are worthy of admission.

Similarly, there is no agreed upon civics. Instead, it is a collection of mystical chants based loosely around the concept of democracy. In the cosmopolitan globalism of our age, there is no longer the concept of citizenship, so it is impossible to appeal to our patriotism and civic duty. Instead, our rulers invest their time worshiping undefined things like “our democracy” often using the same language of the prior era. The difference is, “our way of life” meant something, while “our democracy” means pretty much nothing.

The thing is those old sets of codes had limits built into their definitions. One was pious, in the Christian sense, as long as you lacked the sins common to most men. There was no level beyond pious and even the most faithful man was always tempted. Perfection was not an option. Similarly, civic pride had a natural limit. You were a good citizen, as long as you lacked the things associated with being a bad citizen. In other words, piety was not about what you had, it was about what you lacked, with zero being the natural limit.

In the new religion, there is no limiting principle. It is utopian nature encourages the adherent to seek the next step, the next higher plane of piety. Twenty years ago, being nice to homosexuals was a sign of goodness. Then embracing the homosexual lifestyle was the next level of piety. Then civil marriage then marriage and now we have people demanding schoolboys wear sundresses. Since multiculturalism is, by definition, the nullification of culture, there is no limit to how much one can hate their own society.

That is the other thing that makes the new religion so bizarre and erratic. There is no well defined promised land to this utopian cult. They talk about equality, but in the vaguest terms. There is no standard of equality against which we can measure progress. There is just the demand for more equal. The same is true of justice. There is no definition of the concept, which is why it most often sounds like vengeance. No matter how much the despised group does, it is never enough. “We can always do more” is the only rule.

Reality is the natural barrier between the fanatics and their desired utopia. Their inability to reach the promised land, however, does not cause them to reconsider the project. Instead, they re-double their efforts, staking out even more bizarre positions. Thirty years ago, homosexual marriage was a punch line for popular comics. Today, laughing at those jokes gets you thrown in jail. Just take a moment and consider what comes after the compulsory acceptance of transvestites. The new religion moves quickly.

The Soundtrack Of This Age

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When I was a boy, my grandfather would tool around in his car listening to big band music or classical. The former was the music of his youth, while the latter was what he thought sophisticated people liked. He was not wrong about that. In his youth, the kind of music you could dance to was for proles, while the sophisticated people appreciated classical and opera. It was not as clear cut as that, but the early 20th century was a time when people still looked up for guidance and inspiration. That included entertainment.

The thing I always hated hearing from my grandfather was how modern music was terrible and not fit for civilized people. He was a man of his age and class, so he used colorful euphemisms to describe popular music. Even as a kid, I understood that every generation has their soundtrack. Maybe never having known anything but a world where pop culture dominated, this came naturally to me, while my grandfather still recalled an age before everyone had a radio and television. Maybe he knew things I could not know.

Either way, I have always just assumed that once I passed my mid-20’s, pop music was no longer for me. Some stuff would be appealing, but most would be aimed at kids and strike me as simplistic and repetitive. There were some good bands in the 90’s that I liked, but most of it was not my thing. By the 2000’s, I was unable to name popular groups or the songs at the top of the charts. Today, I have not heard a single note from any song on the current top-40. On the other hand, I am sure I have heard some version of all of it.

That may be why music sales have collapsed. A 15-year old can go on YouTube or Spotify and find fifty versions of the current pop hits, gong back before their parents were born. They can also find stuff from previous eras that was remarkably well done and performed by people with real talent. Justin Timberlake may be talented as a singer, but no one is confusing him with Frank Sinatra. It is simply a lot easier for young people to see that pop music is just manufactured pap from Acme Global Corp.

That is another thing that may be plaguing pop culture in general and pop music in particular. When I was a teen, your music said something about you because you felt a connection to the band. In the sterile transactional world of today, no one feels an attachment to anything, much less the latest pop group. There is no sense of obligation to buy or listen to their latest release. Supporting a type of music or a specific act is no longer a part of kid’s identity. The relationship is now as sterile as society.

That is the funny thing about pop culture in our Progressive paradise. It is a lot like the pop music of totalitarian paradises of the past. The Soviets manufactured their version of Western pop, but it was never popular. Just as we see at the Super Bowl, comrades can be forced marched to an arena and made to cheer, but no one really liked it. There is a lot of that today, as every pop star has the exact same Progressive politics and uses their act to proselytize on behalf of the faith. That is not a coincidence. It is by design.

The West does not have a competitor that embraces freedom and liberty, so the past has become the competition. Look at YouTube and you will see that old songs and bands have enormous amounts of traffic. Given that the people who listened to Sinatra in their prime are mostly dead, it must be younger people discovering and enjoying the old stuff from when the West was still in love with itself. I have often been surprised to see young people, particularly young men, into music that pre-dates me, but it is common.

As an aside, I include music clips in my podcast, mostly to break things up, but also to entertain myself with inside jokes. The number one question I get from people is about the music. Every week I get e-mails asking about some clip and the e-mail is always from a younger person. If I use a clip from an old crooner, I get compliments from people of all ages. Nostalgia certainly plays some role, but most of it is people looking for enjoyable music, because the current popular music just does not work for them.

What is happening to pop culture reflects our age. We have been turned into Pandas by a smothering, soft totalitarianism. The feminization of the culture means we are ruled by mothers, who refuse to ever let us wander from the nest, physically, spiritually, creatively or intellectually. That has had all sorts of effects, like the drop in sperm counts and the collapse of popular culture. A deracinated people, kept in adult daycare centers and tended to by belligerent spinsters is not going to have a lot to celebrate or live for.

The great philosopher Homer Simpson said, “Why do you need new bands? Everyone knows rock attained perfection in 1974. It’s a scientific fact.”  There is a lot of truth to that as per capita music sales peaked in the 70’s and began a decline until CD’s forced everyone to repurchase their music. But that peaked in the late 90’s and there has been a precipitous decline ever since. Two factors driving it would be demographics and the fact that our most musical people, blacks and Jews, no longer play instruments.

Pop music is not art, but like art it does hold a mirror up to society. In the heyday of pop music, the society it reflected was one that was optimistic and happy. Today, the society it reflects is the gray, featureless slurry of multiculturalism and the vinegar drinking scolds who impose it on us. It is not that it is low quality or offensive. It is that the music is a lot like the modern parking lot. It is row after row of dreary sameness. Like everything in this age, popular music has the soul of the machine that made it.

Yesterday’s Election

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There was a special election to fill the seat for Pennsylvanian’s 18th congressional district  yesterday and it appears the Democrat has won. The district had gone for Trump by 20-points in 2016, but the lackluster baby boomer the  Republican Party put up could not be bothered to campaign, much less notice the issues important to the voters. The Democrat, on the other hand, sounded more like Trump on most issues, than his own party. He was lying, of course, but people will vote for a liar over someone who appears to hate them.

The yesterday men of the Left are pointing to this and claiming it is the sign of what’s to comes next fall.

The Democrat candidate claimed a congressional election in a Republican heartland in Pennsylvania, as a vote seen as a referendum on Donald Trump’s performance as president remained officially too close to call early on Wednesday.

n an ominous sign for Republicans eight months before national midterm elections, official results with all ballots from voting booths counted showed moderate Democrat Conor Lamb leading conservative Republican Rick Saccone by a fraction of a percentage point.

Trump won the Pennsylvania 18th Congressional District that they are contesting by almost 20 points in the 2016 presidential election.

With TV networks, which often call U.S. elections, yet to predict a winner, officials were continuing to count several hundred absentee ballots to try to determine the result.

Democratic sources said that, once those ballots were included, they expected Lamb to have won the election by more than 400 votes.

“It took a little longer than we thought but we did it. You did it,” Lamb, a U.S. Marines veteran, told cheering supporters late on Tuesday.

Speaking before Lamb claimed victory, Saccone – who has described himself as “Trump before Trump was Trump” – said the contest was not yet over.

The Democrats are looking to replay what they did in 2006 where they rounded up a bunch of reasonable sounding people to run in Republican districts. Voters, revolted by the GOP, were willing to give the reasonable sounding Democrats a shot. It was a cynical ploy, but what made it important was the shamelessness. Usually, political parties scheme to fool the voters behind closed doors. In 2006, the party was right out in the open about what they were up to and they laughed about it afterward to their friends in the press.

It is why this coming midterm is probably going to follow a different course. For starters, the Democrats that are winning are doing so in opposition to their own party. Conor Lamb ran around saying nice things about Trump, while the Republican sounded like every generic Republican the voters have come to hate. The Left will want to pitch this as a referendum on Trump, but really what is shaping up is a referendum on the GOP establishment. They do nothing but foot drag and obstruct the Trump agenda.

It is also a warning to the Democrat leadership. Their coalition of fruitcakes is an unreliable voting block. You will note thus far that they have won these special elections by appealing to white voters, not left-handed bisexual trannies of color. Conor Lamb sounded like Democrats used to sound in the 1950’s, talking about bread and butter issues in a language normal people can understand. White people will vote for a person who is pro-white, regardless of party. That is a lesson the Washington elite has yet to learn.

The thing is though, the establishment of both parties is locked into a model of politics that belongs in a museum, rather than a modern campaign. The old Left-Right framework is no longer relevant. Within the white vote, the issue is nationalism versus cosmopolitan globalism. The establishment of both parties continues to operate as if the politics of gesture is still salient. They still play the Fukuyama end of history stuff, where all the big issues have been decided, so what’s left is pointless gestures and meaningless symbols.

Phase change in politics is a slow moving thing as the people being phased out never come to terms with their own fate until it is just about sealed. The generation of politicians running both parties are creatures of the previous era. They evolved to fit that era and, in many respects, they are the perfection of that era. The best politicians of any age usually reach perfection just as they are no longer needed. That is America today. We have a political class perfectly designed for 1992, but utterly useless for our current era.

What this means is a period of contentious and contradictory elections, as the voters and politicians try to figure out what works. In the demographic age, democracy can only evolve in one direction and that’s people voting their skin. This is the lesson of history and the inevitable result of biology. Baby boomers are, for the most part, locked into the civic nationalist model. Younger generations are adapting to the new reality.