Category Archives: Greatest Hits

Countries And Nations

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In our current age, we just assume that the world is organized into countries. Look at any map and there is no place on earth that is not part of a country. The exceptions are the Arctic and Antarctica. They are governed by a coalition of countries, but they lack more than a sprinkling of people. Otherwise, every bit of the world that has people is part of a country. More important, a bedrock assumption is that countries are a permanent part of the human condition. Countries are forever.

Nothing is forever, of course, but we can get a sense of how durable the current country model is by looking at some recent examples. The war in Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein revealed that Iraq was not a unified country. The big sectarian divisions of Sunni, Shia and Kurdish quickly became obvious. Within those larger divisions, there were smaller groups with other loyalties. There are 150 tribes in Iraq and below that are hundreds of clans and thousands of houses. Iraq is a complicated place.

It turned out that keeping Iraq together required a very strong central government with the ability to balance the various tribes against one another to keep the peace. Even after the US military figured it out and pacified most of the place, the government did not fully control all of the country. The only reason it remains an intact country today is the surrounding countries prevent it from breaking up and the West provides money and material so the government can survive.

The fact is, Iraq is a country only as long as the rest of the countries accept it as a country and help it keep together. If Iran decides it wants to annex part of the country, a part with coreligionists loyal to Iran, there’s not much Iraq can do about it. Joseph Tainter explained this in his book The Collapse of Complex Societies. In the modern age, a society is unlikely to collapse, because of the surrounding countries. Like Iraq, a country can go through a very difficult period, but ultimately survive.

At the other end of the country scale, in terms of internal stability, we have some good recent examples in Eastern Europe. The Visegrád Group, Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, have managed to stay together, despite enormous external pressures. Just surviving the Soviet Empire is something close to a miracle, given what happened to Russia proper. Now, under enormous pressure to allow millions of foreign invaders into their countries, they persevere.

This is not hard to understand. Poland is 98% Polish. They speak Polish in their homes and see themselves as Polish by ethnicity. The tiny minority communities, like the Silesians, have been there for as long as anyone knows. Slovakia is 80% Slovak, with another 9% Hungarian. That minority population has been there forever. The Czech Republic is 95% Czech. These countries are not just arbitrary concepts. They are nation-states that share a common language and a common heritage.

The peculiar history of these countries may explain why they have survived as nation-states, but also why they resist the call for open borders. All of these nation-states have been absorbed by empires, but they have never been on the other end. Poland never tried to conquer Europe. Still, the core reason they have managed to survive through conquest and division is they are nation-states. What this says is that countries can come and go, but the nation-state has permanence.

That brings us to another type of country, the United States. At the founding, calling America a nation-state was a bit of a stretch, but not unreasonable. The overwhelming majority of the people were English and spoke English. There were some Dutch and Indians, with some French sprinkled in, but the only other ethnic group of any consequence were Germans. They were about 10% of the population at the founding and clustered in the midland states.

That’s not the America of today. You can probably just lump in the whites as a single ethnic group, the White American, but we have large numbers of non-whites. Then you have those old regional cultures that are still lurking in the background, creating new divisions among the newcomers, as the newcomers magnify those divisions. Somalis dumped in Maine are going to change the state in a different way than those dumped into West Virginia. America is looking like Iraq now.

A reasonable person should wonder how long before America starts to have the same troubles as we saw in Iraq. The central government is better organized and more capable than the Iraqi government, but there are limits to everything. The Federal government largely depends on the states voluntarily going along with what the Federal legislature decides is the law. But as we see with California, states are starting to buck this trend, mostly due to their new citizens.

This brings us back to Tainter. His conclusion, after reviewing and analyzing why complex societies collapse, is that the modern age has too much inter-dependency for a society to collapse. Countries have deep connections with other countries. Everyone agrees upon the borders and that the country system must be maintained. The thing is though, the primary force behind this is the United States. Without American economic and military might, the country system probably falls apart.

That’s not to say America is headed for a collapse or even a crackup. Maybe as the country turns into Brazil demographically, it will avoid becoming Brazil economically and culturally. The bigger question though is when does the internal cost of keeping this country together cut into the resources needed to keep the country system together? At what point does the vibrancy of America make it impossible to keep an Iraq together or a Mexico from dissolving into chaos?

The Book Of Spite

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I think the main reason for the popularity of Jonah Goldberg’s book Liberal Fascism was the claim that the liberals were the real fascists. The book itself was a bit of a slog and as David Gordon noted, it was riddled with factual errors. I’m not an expert on historical fascism, so I did not take the fast and loose treatment of the facts personally, but the people who know the subject treated the book as an insult. Paul Gottfried has never forgiven Jonah Goldberg.

When I saw that Jonah Goldberg’s next book was titled Suicide of the West I was reminded of that reaction by the old paleocons. The title is, of course, a deliberate reference to James Burnham’s classic text. Then there is Patrick Buchanan’s classic book, Suicide of a Superpower. Of course, it is also hints at Oswald Spengler’s classic The Decline of the West. For a neocon lightweight to pick such a title and topic, well, it suggests it is another deliberate swipe at an old enemy.

To make matters worse, the entire tribe of neocon grifters have tumbled out of their clown car to promote the book. David Brooks calls it “Epic and debate-shifting.” Yuval Levin says, “More than any book published so far in this century, it deserves to be called a conservative classic.” The Weekly Standard treats it like a newly discovered part of the Torah. I get how the commentary rackets work, but this degree of rumpswabbery is unseemly.

That said, I decided to give the book a read and write a review, fully expecting to use it as a segue into some points about Burnham, Buchanan, and others. The rest of the book’s title sums up the neocon argument against Trump. The rather mild pushback against cosmopolitan globalism we have seen in the last two years has been treated like the end of the world. My assumption going in was that it was going to be the long play version of every Weekly Standard editorial since 2016.

I was wrong. This book is terrible in ways that I did not expect. The terribleness starts in the introduction, which is written in the jocular style you would expect from a short blog post about a television show or a movie. In fact, he relies on quotes from movies to make his points. When you pick up a book with the pretentious title Suicide of the West, it better read like a serious book. Instead, Goldberg becomes Shecky Goldberg doing a vaudeville routine based on Western philosophy.

The first clue that he is in over his head is the superficiality. The introduction is a rambling and shallow discussion of religion and human nature, which somehow veers into a discussion of the movie The Godfather. When he gets into his discussion of human nature, it’s obvious that he is way out of his depth, and he knows it. Frankly, it reads like something submitted by a freshman coed. If he had dotted his i’s with little hearts, it would have been more authentic.

The book is really three books. The first part is just rambling nonsense about human nature that would embarrass anyone on our side of the great divide. The second part is a grammar school social studies book. The third part feels like it was written by a committee of people not on speaking terms with one another. Big chunks of it undermine his main thesis. Even accounting for my own deep skepticism about his motives, it is a surprisingly weak argument.

Goldberg is a good example of the defects of the American commentariat. There is an army of mediocrities, hired to sing the praises of the managerial state, perched on media platforms in New York and Washington. They are close to being an inherited class, a chattering aristocracy. Many of them are handed titles like “senior fellow” or “scholar” by think tanks, so they start thinking they are academics. Instead of relying on people who know the material and reporting their arguments, modern pundit pick up a few things and start thinking they are the experts.

The other odd thing about the book is he tries to frame current events as a war between populism and capitalism, nationalism, and democracy. He makes no effort to explain how un-elected supranational organizations are democratic or how global oligopolies are capitalistic. What it reveals is the neocon ideology, whatever it was, is now just a defense of soulless transactionalism and materialistic score keeping. American society is just a deracinated collection of economic units.

In all candor, I found myself skimming about midway through it. I kept wondering why he picked the title, given that his product falls far short of his ambitions. Then I remembered the old paleocons and how they responded to his first book. My hunch is he picked the title out of spite and then started writing the book. At some point, he either got lazy or realized he was in way over his head, so he reverted to goofy pop culture references and superficial banter.

The result is a dull book by an equally dull writer.

Particles And Waves

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There is a concept in physics called the wave–particle duality. The current scientific theory holds that all particles also have a wave nature. A simple way to think of it is light can be the flashing you see from a signal lantern, but also a range of colors depending upon the wavelength. Similarly, history can be described as the great forces sweeping men along like corks bobbing around the sea, the wave nature, but it also can be described as events, set in motion by great men, the particle nature.

The fact that both are most likely true, is probably at the root of our inability to learn from the past. People in the present will naturally look for figures in history to emulate, thinking if they act like them, they will get the same results. The trouble is the forces that acted on men in the past were different from those of the present. Similarly, people often assume they are riding historical forces that have an inevitable end. They foolishly ignore serendipity and the actions of important figures.

Consider what has been going on with the FBI scandal that appears to be heading to some sort of denouement this summer. On the one hand, the managerial inertia of an agency that has come to see itself as the policemen of the ruling class, drove all of these people into something close to treason. There are simply too many people involved for it to be viewed as just a conspiracy. James Comey is too dull to have followed along with a conspiracy. He was dragged along by events.

On the other hand, this crisis has come to a head due to the actions of men. If Trump were a slightly different guy or had better advisers, this crisis would be at a different stage at this point. Similarly, if the oleaginous Rod Rosenstein had fallen down a flight of stairs on election night, the events he set in motion after the election, most likely would not have occurred. While all of these men are being pushed along by social forces much larger than them, they are not without agency.

Interestingly, this crisis has a lot of similarities to what happened with Soviet espionage in the last century. In the early 20th century, being a communist or some sort of boutique socialist was a fashionable thing for ruling class types. That is what it was though, fashion. At least that is what people in the ruling classes assumed. The problematic communists were the trade union organizers. During the war, the main concern was with those sympathetic to the fascists.

The people who decided to become spies for Russia in the last century, were largely drawn from the elites of America and Britain. These were not people drawn from the lower classes, bitter at their condition. Alger Hiss had a great life. What for him and many others like him started as an immature fascination with communism developed into a group identity. These people were pushed along by a sense of communal identity that took on a life of its own. Spying was affirmation.

The same thing is on display with this burgeoning FBI scandal. The intelligence community still selects from the best and brightest of the American elite. This sense of elite status seems to have metastasized into a belief, in many of these people, that they are a class of priestly warriors. Like the people who spied for the Soviets almost a century ago, the people in this present conspiracy truly believed they were acting honorably. Comey called his book “Higher Loyalty” for this reason.

Where the comparison with Soviet espionage breaks down is that the spies did not represent a threat to the intellectual underpinnings of the system. Granted, the people in charge could no longer trust people from their own ranks to be loyal to the state, but that was manageable within the system. This FBI scandal is a direct threat to the very structure of the managerial state. Replacing the people is not going to fix the flaw in the system. The managerial state is devouring popular government.

History is not simply the playing out of a great narrative, even though it fun to frame it that way. The people involved have agency. They will do things that shape the forces acting on them. Sometimes serendipity changes the course of events. Ögedei Khan got drunk and died unexpectedly, thus forcing the withdraw of the Mongol army from Hungarian plain, rather than sweeping into the heart of Europe. The course of Europe was forever changed because the Mongol ruler had a drinking problem.

That may be what we are witnessing with this FBI scandal. The great paleoconservative thinkers saw the managerial state forming up half a century ago. They could imagine it slowly swallowing up the institutions of American society, including the state itself. They could not see the unexpected. Trump’s election and the popular revolt going on may be revealing things to the political class that truly frightens them. This FBI scandal could be that bit of serendipity that changes the natural course of events.

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.

Bad Seeds

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In a few years, the majority of children in the United States will be non-white. That means in a generation, the majority of adults will be non-white. Most white Americans do not understand this, but slowly they are starting to wake up to this reality. Whether or not our rulers fully grasp this or the implication of it is a mystery. It is entirely possible that their hatred for bad whites is so all-consuming that they have not thought it through. Or perhaps, as some people argue, the great replacement is the point of the project.

Regardless, the darkening of America will have consequences. This story on the 2017 NAEP test scores is a good example. The results, unsurprisingly, are not positive, but they are predictable. The race gap that has allegedly haunted the ruling class for generations has not changed a bit. Of course, that’s not in the press coverage, but you can easily find it by going to the source. The only change in the race gap happened when they added a category for mixed race, thus moving some blacks out of that group.

 

The comparison between whites and mixed race students is interesting.

 

Whenever these sorts of results are published, we get two predictable reactions. One is the Progressive lament about the schools. Left-wing Progressives will demand more money for the schools in order to fix all these terrible gaps. Right-wing Progressives will claim it is the fault of public schools and maybe unions. You can see some of that in the comments to the news story. The other response will be from the remaining stalwarts on our side of the divide, pointing out that biology refuses to yield to wishful thinking.

The thing is though, no one thinks much about what is going to happen as the the mix of students gets more swarthy. We are probably seeing that in these numbers. The gaps did not change, but the mix of students is changing. That means the results will continue to decline going forward. Maybe our rulers will keep yelping about the schools, but at some point, they will probably change the standards or start faking the data so the obvious is less obvious. That’s the thing about diversity. It can only work in a no-trust society.

Of course, it’s going to mean schools start competing with one another for white and Asian students. Since the foolish decision to desegregate schools, it has been a game of Old Maid, as school districts and municipalities employ clever ways to dump their unwanted blacks onto some other sucker. The future will have that plus rules to keep the children of ice people trapped in their schools. In time, a Democrat administration will create rules that prevent whites from moving away from blacks in order to “balance the schools.”

The state and city break down tells a familiar story. The test results track closely with demographics. A city like Detroit finishes at the bottom, because it is a black city, while Austin finishes at the top, because the black population is eight percent. The state breakdown is also familiar. It reveals that not all whites are the same, but the non-white population is very consistent. I took a look at the top-10 and bottom-10, along with the white population for each state. West Virginia is letting white people down.

The two outliers in the top-10 are states with high numbers of South Asians, as well as more blacks from the talented ten percent. The financial capital and the political capital of the world warp everything around them. Even Maryland feels some of it. Otherwise, the results track closely with the white population. That means if you want your state’s test score to improve, you need to attract Asian migrants and figure out how to encourage blacks to move to another state. You may want to pass on Hispanics too.

This is just one example of what happens when you get more diversity, but it is a good one. High quality public schools are largely an Anglo thing. It spread to the Continent, along with other liberal ideas, but is not a big deal in the rest of the world. East Asian societies are an exception. As America moves to majority-minority status and becomes a low-trust society, the very idea of public schools will probably disappear. How long before the people in charge figure out that testing is largely pointless and put an end to it?

Look around South America, that’s a pattern you see. The white population simply does not care all that much about the non-white population, beyond making sure they are not around them. A very similar pattern has existed in the Levant for centuries. Every hill and village is its own country. That’s the other thing about diversity. It breeds a callousness between different tribes of citizens. In one of life’s ironies, one of the first things that will die in the diversity paradise is civic nationalism. Ben Shapiro should plan accordingly.

Speculative Speculation

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Pat Buchanan wrote a book contemplating alternatives to war with the Nazis and one implication of his alternative history is the Nazis never would have existed. A more sensible policy toward Germany after the Great War would have short circuited the process that created the Nazis. His other assertion is that even if Hitler came to power, his ambitions would not have been magnified by the humiliation resulting from the Treaty of Versailles. The Nazis would have been different.

In one of Dan Carlin’s podcasts, he speculated a bit about what would have happened if the Nazis had survived World War II and continued to rule Germany. Instead of war, the British had struck a deal with the Germans so they could have a country for all German people, but not dominating the continent militarily. The result being something similar to modern Germany, in terms of territory, but run by the Nazis. The point of his thought experiment was to imagine how Nazism would evolve as a peacetime ruling ideology.

Usually, these sorts of thought experiments just assume the Nazis would have remained the evil Hollywood version we have all been trained to imagine. The rest of the fantasy has them doing awful things to all of the usual suspects. In reality, the Nazis evolved into what they were partially in response to war. Germany was turned into a munitions factory in order to wage war and that altered the party. A party ruling a normal nation, at peace with its neighbors, would have been a different party.

One outcome of the Buchanan scenario of a Germany at peace, but ruled by the Nazis is there would not have been a Holocaust. That sounds counter-intuitive, but the choice of mass murder was not the first option for the Nazis, when dealing with unwanted minority populations. War made it the default option. In a peaceful world, the most likely scenario would have been the traditional one, where Jews, gypsies, slavs and anyone else deemed undesirable would have been exiled.

Another probable outcome is Hitler would have been deposed at some point after peace with the rest of Europe. His personal style was appealing in the economic and political crisis of pre-war Germany and tolerable in the crisis of war. Megalomaniacs tend not to do well in stable periods. Eventually, the various classes and interests of German society would have decided they could do better than Hitler. That and the leadership of the party was full of ambitious and aggressive men.

That means the most likely outcome of peace would have been turmoil in the party and a series of purges like under Stalin. Germans are not Russians, so a period of turmoil would most likely have resulted in a some sort of stable ruling committee at the top of the party. The unbalanced lunatics and sadists would have been purged in favor of the more practical. There were a lot of Albert Speer types in the junior ranks, who knew how to run a proper society.

There are a lot of assumptions there, but that’s the nature of alternative history. If things were different, they would not be the same. Assuming the Nazis could have negotiated peace to a willing Europe and managed to get through the decade or so of intra-party squabbles to emerge as a stable ruling elite, what would the “new” Germany have evolved into as a society? It’s not something anyone thinks much about as it does not further the narrative. The Nazis are evil. The end.

Probably, the Great War veterans that founded the party would have been pushed aside, in favor of the inter-war generation from upper-class families who joined the party in the 1930’s. A guy like Albert Speer was able to rise quickly because he was smart, well-educated and cultured. That means the party would have become less militaristic and more corporate. That also means German society would have evolved away from a martial order to something like a modern America.

Economically, the Nazis were ad hoc socialists, in that they embraced command economics as a practical solution to present problems. Ideologically, they had no economic plan. Again, Albert Speer provides insight into what the post-peace Nazi party would have done. Companies like Mercedes, Siemens, Krupp, BASF, Deutsche Bank and others that profited doing business with the Nazis during the war, would have emerged as the dominant companies under peacetime Germany.

It would have been the sort of corporatism we see emerging in America, where private firms get narrow monopolies and in exchange for enforcing the cultural norms desired by the ruling elite. Corporations are not supporters of civil liberties and they certainly don’t like market competition. Wherever big business prevails, freedom declines and markets collapse. Instead of being turned into a massive munitions facility, the peaceful Nazi Germans would have been turned into a national corporate conglomerate.

The point of this sort of speculation is not to better understand the past, but to better understand the present. The first half of the 20th century in Europe was the result of a great economic paradigm shift. Europe had moved from an agrarian, trading society to an industrial and urban one. The result was the great concentration of wealth and the rise of corporatism. It was not just in Germany. The Italians, Spanish, Portuguese and even Americans saw a lot of merit in fascism.

When looked at from the current age, where global corporations are enthusiastically enforcing moral codes and partnering with the state to impose an order that benefits the managerial class, it suggests corporatism is inevitable or a default arrangement. The democratic state prefers dealing with a few dominant actors, so popular government encourages the concentration of capital. Eventually, those concentrations of wealth become rival power centers and then they join the state as partners in power.

Interestingly, what the Nazis imagined for Europe, where Germany sat atop a unified continent, is pretty much what the EU is today. What we have come to call globalism is taking the same concept and scaling it up to include all of the modern economies. A guy like Albert Speer, if he were alive today, would recognize what was evolving. It also means that the balance to this would be some sort of organized labor component, that includes everyone outside the managerial class. The third leg of the stool, so to speak.

An Ethnocentric Death Cult

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Is neoconservatism just ethnocentric millenarianism? The neocons tend toward the apocalyptic in their language and they always wear the mask of the righteous when discussing the issues they view as central to their narrative. You never hear a neocon say that “well, good people can disagree.” Instead, they describe those with whom they disagree as the epitome of evil, usually the new Hitler. Their lust for war suggests a strong desire to immanentize the eschaton.

We tend to think of suicide cults as groups of lonely losers, preyed on by a charismatic sociopath, who convinces them of the coming end times. They either come to the movement convinced that only a cataclysm can set things right or they become convinced by the teachings of the cult that the great reckoning is at hand. It’s fairly typical, according to the experts, for the people in these movements to see themselves as a minority, operating as a sanctuary for the righteous.

Millenarianism tends to operate on the fringes of society, but not always. The prophets of the Jewish Bible are basically outsiders interpreting events in the context of an apocalyptic timetable. Judaism itself is defined by such a timetable. Judaism is the belief in a Messiah, who will deliver Jews from their enemies and rule over a Jewish kingdom.¹ Christianity is founded on the idea of a second coming, when Christ will return to reign as king with the just, both living and dead.²

The point here is that a belief in the end times or a foreboding sense of a coming cataclysm is not necessarily fringe or crazy. In fact, it is common in human societies, suggesting it is a common tendency in people. Therefore it is not outside the realm of possibility that neoconservatism is a form of millenarianism. It certainly has a strong Levantine edge to it and the adherents clearly view themselves as an oppressed minority in the Biblical sense, despite their status.

In fact, it is a curious feature of neoconservatism. When anyone notices that it was explicitly Jewish at its founding and is almost exclusively Jewish today, the neocon cries out, demanding the person noticing be punished. It’s as if noticing what is a defining feature, something the founders of the cult advertised, causes the adherents physical pain. What is often interpreted as subversive obfuscation, could very well be typical cult behavior. People in cults seek to disappear, which is why they joined the cult.

Just watch the body language in this interview of Noah Rothman done by Tucker Carlson the other night. What looks like a sociopath’s gambit, the lying by omission and half truths, can also be interpreted as a fear response. Rothman is promoting World War III, calling anyone not down with nuclear winter an agent of Putin. When Carlson focuses on what Rothman has written, putting the focus on him as an individual, Rothman physically recoils, like he is being assaulted.

Whether or not neoconservatism is a cult is debatable, but what is not debatable is the lust for the final great confrontation. For obvious reasons, neocons oscillate with rapturous enthusiasm whenever war in the Levant is mentioned, but they are obsessed with the great final conflict between good an evil. Their ancestral hatred for Russia is one element, but neocons were weened on the belief that a nuclear war with Russian was inevitable. It is entirely possible that the belief has come to define them.

They also seem to think Trump is a sign of the coming end times, when the great battle between the righteous and the wicked will reach its denouement. So much so that guys like Noah Rothman argue it is time usher in that final battle. This from a guy who would soil himself in a physical confrontation. As Tucker Carlson has recently started to mention, hatred of Donald Trump is now bringing the neocons back to the Left, by turning the Left into vocal advocates for violence against Trump.

It is tempting to write-off the neocons as lounge chair imperialists with divided loyalties, but the central theme to their warmongering is always Russia. Their general lack of interest in confronting China, which a real threat to the US, or Mexico, which is a collapsing narco-state on our border, suggests violence is not the core issue. We launch drone attacks all over the Middle East, we could certainly drone Mexican drug cartels. If the neocon just wanted blood, that would be a much more promising target.

Their singular focus is Russia. Even their opposition to Trump is based on his unwillingness to talk about Putin as Hitler. If you list all of the neocon wars and desired wars, Russia is the common theme. The defining characteristic of the neocon is a hatred for Russia, viewing it as the Mordor in the great battle between the righteous and the wicked. Their reason to exist is to bring about the final confrontation. Whatever it was, neoconservatism now functions as a death cult.

¹I know.

²I know.

The Gathering Darkness

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In Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, Christopher Caldwell wrote, “One moves swiftly and imperceptibly from a world in which affirmative action can’t be ended because its beneficiaries are too weak to a world in which it can’t be ended because its beneficiaries are too strong.” It is a wonderful observation that applies to much more than just affirmative action. It seems to apply to all aspect of the Left. Today’s minority view is tomorrows absolute, inviolable dogma.

That has been the way with the Left and science. It used to be common to see a Subaru or Volvo decorated with a Darwin fish. The point was to let the world know that the driver was a good liberal, who embraced reason, rather than superstition. Of course, the other point was to stick it to Christians, who the Left had declared their enemy in the middle of the last century. Even so, science was a big part of how Progressives defined themselves, but then suddenly, imperceptibly, the opposite was true.

That’s what we are seeing with the response to David Reich’s book, Who We Are and How We Got Here and the subsequent articles he has written about his research. The great Greg Cochran has been reviewing the book, pointing out the bizarre contortions Reich goes through in order to avoid having his lab burned down. It is a bit of an exaggeration to say that Reich fears an angry torch wielding mob, but it is only a small exaggeration. Many careers have been ruined by getting on the wrong side of the mob.

Understandably, Cochran takes exception to much of this, because he is a true man of science. He values truth above all else. He has no patience for the political, and now theological, nonsense that saturates the modern academy. There’s also a personal aspect to it, as Reich takes some cheap shots at the late Henry Harpending, who was Cochran’s colleague for many years. They collaborated on The 10,000 Year Explosion and on this groundbreaking paper. Cochran can be forgiven for taking this a bit personal.

On the other hand, though, David Reich is young. He is in his prime years as a scientist and as such he has to be careful to not upset the mullahs in the orthodoxy. That’s why he is going through these ham-handed efforts to inoculate himself against the charge of heresy. The morality police may not burn down his lab, but they are more than happy to burn down his career. If they will hurl a giant like James Watson into the void, they will not flinch at David Reich.

If you are old enough to remember the 1980’s, you remember a time when it was Progressives chanting about free speech, the need for independent media and the glories of scientific inquiry. Today, it feels like a million years ago, only because none of it is true now and not just in small ways. Progressives have swung so far in the opposite direction, becoming what they always claimed they were fighting, it is impossible to imagine them being otherwise.

The funny thing is that our Progressive mullahs are probably worse than the people who suppressed Galileo. Relatively speaking, they are worse than Torquemada. The old inquisitor was quite lenient, relevant to the age, when stealing a cow could get you hanged. Galileo’s trouble with the Church had as much to do with politics and his personal squabbles as science. Today, the people in charge take a perverse pleasure in destroying the life of a heretic. Billionaires now hunt Dirt People on-line for sport.

If you are in the human sciences, none of this is lost on you. If you read academic papers, they have become so thick with jargon and statistics, they are impenetrable to all but the people in the field. Some of it is the normal pattern of group behavior, but some of it is a defense against the charge of heresy. Instead of writing coded notes in the margins of approved texts, people in the human sciences rely on impenetrable gibberish and eye-glazing statistics.

One thing that is clear, in hindsight, is that Church efforts to contain the growth of scientific inquiry were a rearguard action. The institutional place of the Church was not toppled by science and reason. The role of religious institutions was already diminishing with the rise of the secular institutions and the spread of commerce. The clergy was no longer the richest faction in European society. Their efforts to re-impose order on society was reactionary and doomed. The world was changing.

Perhaps something similar is happening with Progressives and human sciences. Their embrace of reason was always like their embrace of liberal democracy, socialism and social reform. It is as a means to an end. Free speech was a bus they rode from their position outside the academy, to a position atop the academy. Once they got to their destination, they got off the free speech bus. That is certainly true of their embrace of science and reason. Once they gained power, they peeled the Darwin fish off the car.

On the other hand, there is no reason to think that humanity is a linear progression from tribal darkness to some glorious post-human future. We have the phrase “dark ages” because there have been dark ages, when society collapsed and sat dormant for centuries. Back when the turn began, Allan Bloom wrote that relativism and multiculturalism were ushering in a closing of the American mind. Perhaps now we are seeing the fruit, the coming of a new dark age ruled by fanatics and dullards.

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.