In the American political system, the president is the symbol of the democratic process, the embodiment of the general will. With few exceptions, he gains office by winning a majority of votes in what is close to a national plebiscite. If the radicals get their way, it will soon be a national plebiscite, as they hope to eliminate the electoral college so that large urban states can dictate to the rest of the nation.

The reward for winning the favor of the people is to be locked away in a museum called the White House, surrounded by the most complex security system on earth. The president is the most isolated man in the nation. He experiences everything through intermediaries in the White House and the Washington media. Everything he thinks he knows about the people over whom he rules comes to him thirdhand.

Thirdhand may be generous. His staff lives in the same sort of isolation as the president, without some of the high-tech security. They have spent their lives in the system and have no firsthand knowledge of the country. Many have lived so long in the biggest small town on earth—Washington, D.C.—that they may as well be aliens. Even their language is beginning to drift away from that of the rest of the country.

Read more here—->Taki

The Russian evolutionary anthropologist Peter Turchin coined the term “elite overproduction” to describe the condition of a society that is producing too many potential elite members. These potential elites jostle for positions that are declining in number relative to the increase in elite members. This game of musical chairs creates conflict as these elites engage in a struggle for power within society.

His choice of terms is a bit misleading, as his description of elite overproduction in America is better understood as an overproduction of people who see themselves as potential elites, despite being mediocrities. He points to the glut of lawyers as an example of the excess of people who wildly overestimate their ability. The number of people toting around an MBA is another example of this phenomenon.

The primary appeal of Turchin’s theory is flattery. It is human nature to resent the people who rule over you. A theory of history that says the problem with the world is there are too many people like that know-it-all rumpswab at the office is going to strike most people as plausible. All of us imagine ourselves as the most rational person in the room, so elite overproduction turns a conceit into scientific theory.,,,

Link

Theoxeny is a theme in Greek mythology in which mortals demonstrate their virtue by extending hospitality to a complete stranger, usually one who is humble like a beggar or a poor traveler. The stranger turns out to be a deity in disguise. The man who is a generous host, thus displaying his piety, is rewarded, while the man who refuses to extend hospitality is punished for his lack of piety.

For the ancient Greeks, hospitality toward foreigners and guests was a very important moral obligation. Zeus is sometimes called Zeus Xenios because of his role as a protector of strangers. The name Xenios is derived from xenos, the Greek word for “stranger.” To have Zeus, the ruler of the gods, embody the moral obligations around the treatment of strangers speaks to the importance of the practice to the Greeks.

In the new religion of the American ruling elite, there is a similar sort of ritualized hospitality toward strangers. It is primarily expressed in the form of open borders, the admittance of anyone who has a reason to settle in America. The reason does not need to make any sense. It just has to provide the ruling class with the opportunity to tell one another how much they care about these strangers….

Read more here.

Imagine it is the 1980s and a collection of mad scientists searching for the secret of eternal life put a typical progressive into a cryogenic state. The lefty does not want to wait for the glorious revolution, and she wants to be young enough to enjoy the paradise the prophets of her faith have promised. One thing leads to another, and she remains an unsavory popsicle until she is thawed out in the current year.

The first thing our defrosted lefty would note is that the modern aesthetic is something like 1950s East Berlin. Modern America is an ugly place. The most popular car colors are black, gray, and white. They all look the same, too. An American parking lot in the 1980s was a circus of colors and shapes. Today, it is row after row of the best ideas from the worst people, all in the name of efficiency and utility.

Our proletarian popsicle would probably assume the communists won the Cold War and imposed their aesthetic on America. After all, the main selling point against communism was the freedom and creativity of the capitalist West. In America, you could let your freak flag fly, and no one could tell you otherwise. The dreary sameness of modern America could only be the result of losing the Cold War to the communists….

Read the rest here.

One of the enduring mysteries, one that is rarely explored, is why all right-wing movements in America have failed to make a dent in Progressivism. The first iteration of conservatism in America was washed away by Progressive reformers in the first part of the 20th century. When political crisis struck, conservatives had no political solutions, just theoretical analysis. Progressives, meanwhile, had a program.

In response to the success of New Deal politics, the American Right reorganized in the middle of the last century around more practical items. Buckley-style conservatism was about winning elections and implementing policy. Like its predecessor, it failed to do much to stem the tide of Progressive innovation. In the end it was corrupted by the system it sought to reform, becoming just another node on the managerial state.

The reason for this long track record of futility is that American conservatism has always been dominated by bourgeois objectivism. Unlike Randian objectivism, bourgeois objectivism is the assumption that the world runs by a set of immutable laws and that the point of politics is to adapt to those laws. Discovering the right answer is the point of all political activity as once the answer is clear, everything falls into place.

In the realm of politics, it means that all political actors, individually and in groups, are acting from rational and discoverable motives. This naturally leads to a reductionist interpretation of Progressive politics. Whatever the Left proposes is feverishly analyzed by conservatives to discern “real motives”. Further, it is always assumed that the Left is driven by the same desires as the Right would be driven, if the roles were reversed.

Read the rest here…

Societal decline is best imagined as a drunk man falling down a long flight of stairs, maybe a long spiral staircase. He begins at the top, the peak of the society, then carelessly makes the wrong steps and begins to tumble down the stairs. It is not a rapid or steady fall to the bottom. Instead, he hits a landing, rights himself for a bit, but regaining his confidence he makes another wrong step and takes another tumble.

Some of the landings are long and he is able to function at that level for a while, thinking he is still at the place he started. Maybe he takes a few tentative steps back to the old position higher up the stairs, but eventually it is another misstep, and he falls back down past that landing to another landing farther down. This is societal decline. It is periods of decline punctuated by periods in which it feels like the decline has been arrested.

This is useful to keep in mind as we watch the new regime come to grips with the new reality they face….link

If you were to round up a random collection of people and lock them up in a school gymnasium, you would have a bunch of people locked in a gymnasium. It would not be a society or a movement or a religion. The reason is those people would have nothing in common, other than the fact that they had been lured to the gymnasium and were now being held against their will.

Now, round up a random collection of people and put them on an island far enough away from land that they could not chance making a swim for it. Maybe they do not even know where the island is in relation to a large, populated landmass. Further, they have no indication that they will be rescued. They are there possibly forever. Unlike the people locked in the gymnasium, this group will begin to change in character….

The rest is here.

A dozen years ago, the neoconservative gadfly Jonah Goldberg wrote a book titled Liberal Fascism, in which he argued that it was the American left that had the love affair with fascism, rather than the right. Like everything that comes from neoconservatism, his tract was actually a left-wing polemic dressed up as a right-wing critique of the left, but it made a useful point.

That is, the American left has always been rhetorically opposed to fascism, hysterically so at times, but there has always been a great deal of overlap between Progressivism and fascism. The fascists a century ago borrowed from the American left. Over the past century, the American left has returned the favor. As a result, Progressivism has evolved into a strange hybrid form of fascism.

Of course, this does not mean that Progressives will be sporting arm bands and khaki outfits anytime soon. That cartoonish version of fascism that has been a staple of American pop culture for generations is not making a comeback. Even putting aside the absurd characterizations, early-20th-century fascism was a product of the industrial age and has no place in post-industrial, technological societies.

Instead, what we are seeing in America is a highly feminized, mutant form of fascism that is unconcerned with the practical aspects of governance and instead obsesses over the aesthetic and moral aspects or rule….Continue Reading