America Inc.

Posted on June 10, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about grammar robots, a post the general weirdness of dissident politics and the Sunday podcast, which thankfully had nothing to do about Trump or the anti-Trump kooks. Subscribe here or here.

One of the criticisms of the paleoconservatives is that they never got around to formulating an explanation for why the managerial state emerged. They did a good job describing it and how it differed from the straightforward administrative bureaucracies that have been a part of society since Diocletian. How the bureaucracy transitioned from instrument of the ruling elite into a ruling elite itself has remained a bit of mystery, with only some stabs here and there at an explanation.

The fault probably lies with Burnham, who was the first guy to create a political theory from observing the emergence of the managerial system. He wrote his most famous book, The Managerial Revolution, during the Second World War when the Nazis were at the peak of their power. Therefore, his understanding of managerialism was shaped by the militant authoritarianism of it. Burnham was still a communist, so this no doubt played a role in his understanding of managerialism.

The emergence of managerialism in interwar Europe is easy to explain simply by pointing to the conditions that prevailed after the Great War. Fascism emerged on the losing side of the war because of the chaos that emerged as a result of the collapse of the old order and the general lunacy of liberalism and communism as they fought to fill the void left by the old order. Fascism rode the popular demand for a return of order to power in places like German and Italy.

Once in power, the fascists had to actually govern. The existing institutions they inherited were either badly damaged by the war and the post-war chaos or antiquated holdovers from the prior era. Managerialism provided both a blueprint for governing but also a source of authority. Gather up the best people and set them to work rebuilding infrastructure, the economy, and the state. Once they began to make progress, public support for the system provided the necessary legitimacy.

This model for managerialism being a modern, industrial response to both the collapse of the old order and the chaos of the present works pretty well for the emergence of it in communist Russia. The collapse of the tsarist system and the Russian civil war left Russia as a chaotic mess. Into that void flowed Stalin first inside the party and then as something of an industrial age tsar. He gathered up and developed an army of people to manage, govern and control the new Soviet society.

That same process does not work for America, where managerialism emerged at the same time as it did in Europe. Many have noted the parallels between FDR’s New Deal revolution and the emergence of fascism in Europe. Until the war, many New Deal progressives were fans of Mussolini. They never liked Hitler, due to his crudeness and antisemitism, but they liked Mussolini. There was in the 1930’s a great deal of cross pollination between the two systems.

America, however, was not emerging from a failed war and its political order was not destroyed as a result of it. On the contrary, America was remarkably stable in the aftermath of the economic collapse in the 1930’s and the political system seemed to be working very well. There is no doubt that FDR revolutionized the relationship between the citizen and the state during this period, but he did not do so in response to the loss of legitimacy of the old arrangements.

It should also be noted that the managerialism that emerged in America was different from the militaristic version that emerged in the fascist countries, which built upon trench socialism. Similarly, Stalin’s managerialism was a way to recapture the collective spirit of the revolutionary years in which the Bolsheviks finally seized power and won the civil war. The managerial revolution of FDR was softer and an outgrowth of volunteerism of early America.

Therein lies a clue as to why managerialism emerged in America. Through the 19th century, Americans were largely governed by local association. Other than the post office and military service, the typical American had little reason to think about the federal government. It was an abstraction. Even state government played a limited role in his life compared to local government and the community associations that defined the life of most Americans.

The industrial revolution changed America by urbanizing large chunks of the population, thus destroying rule by association for large numbers of people. The shift from industrial work also changed the relationship between the man and his work by making it individualistic rather than communal. The failure of a farmer impacts many more people than the farmer and his family. The failure of a factory worker is a burden only on the worker and his family. Work became a solitary pursuit.

Like the rise of managerialism, the rise of individualism is one of those things that many recognize as a problem, but no can explain. Why all of a sudden did Europeans stop thinking collectively and start thinking individually? Racial solidarity among Europeans was so natural it did not require a vocabulary to describe. Today we have a vast array of labels to describe white ethnic and racial solidarity, despite the fact that it barely exists and only in the virtual reality of the internet.

As work isolated men from one another, the natural response was to think individually and see the man next you as competition. This was obviously good for the factory owner, so work in many cases became a competitive arena, a Hobbesian existence where the owner harnessed this war of all against all to increase productivity, reduce costs and maximize profits. The result was a class of citizen who was no longer defined by community but by alienation from community.

This alienation inevitably led to unhappiness as man is a social animal and evolved to be so within small groups. The emergence of masses of Americans living in big cities fighting one another for wages lead to a disenchantment of the world. The rise of urban political machines was one consequence. Another consequence was a looking inward for spiritual happiness. When community can no longer provide a larger purpose to life, the only option is to seek it individually.

The shift from community man to individual man naturally leads to the individual abandoning his duties to the community. Self-government rests on the assumption that the bulk of the citizens have a moral duty to the whole. Who they are is not just what they have or even what they contribute to the whole. A big part of what defines the community man’s sense of self is the success of his community. Individual man lacks this entirely, so he has no reason to participate.

This is the same void of order into which managerialism flowed in interwar Europe and post-tsarist Russia. The tutelary state that emerged in America in the 20th century was not imposed on an unwilling populace, but simply filled the void left by a growing population of people uninterested in anything outside their window. Urban and now suburban peasants needed the protection of the state because as atomized individuals, they were no longer willing to participate in their own protection.

This is why the state has also become a church of sorts. Much of what the managerial state does is moral guidance. Painting rainbows on crosswalks and then daring anyone to defile them is intended to create sinners so the priests of the system can punish those sinners thus providing the needed moral instruction. What used to be done by community pressure and the local minister is now done by credentialled members of a faceless and remorseless managerial class.

Managerialism is the natural form of government for an industrial people as it mimics the life of the industrial worker. Republican government and aristocratic government reflected the reality of the people, who were primarily organized around communal activities like farming and trade. Twentieth century America turned into a continent-sized business park occupied by one business, American Inc. Like every business, America Inc. needed a management class, so it got one.

The question is can this model survive the post-industrial age? America began to deindustrialize fifty years ago. The old industrial model of governance has tried to adapt to the transition to the information economy, but managing information is vastly more difficult than managing capital and labor. In fact, it may not even be possible to manage information without poisoning the minds of the managers. The current crisis may simply be due to this problem.

On the other hand, it may be that you cannot have a society organized around marshaling data and data frameworks. Perhaps America Inc. is simply a legacy business parasiting off the societies that continue to make things, fix things, dig things from the ground and invent things. Perhaps the end point of managerialism is the same for all antiquated business models. The current crisis is the struggle to avoid the inevitable bankruptcy of the managerial system.

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Escalatory Delusions

Posted on May 30, 2024 by thezman

Most men can remember back to a time on the schoolyard when two kids got into a confrontation and one of them kept promising to do something bad to the other if the other did not stop whatever it was he was doing. The threat of consequences was supposed to deter the other, but the other kid was undeterred, and the result was a fight, with the kid making the threats getting the worst of it. Bullies often come to a bad end like this as their bullying is based on threats.

If you are a member of the managerial elite, it is unlikely that you have such a memory as you were raised by women, so no school yard fights. As a result, the logic of the bully, issuing escalatory threats, makes perfect sense. After all, if you can conjure something worse than the other guy is conjuring, then you win! Therefore, success is determined by who has the greatest mastery of escalatory dominance, the alleged ability to escalate a conflict beyond that of an opponent.

This is the engine that has been driving the war in Ukraine. For close to a decade the Russians have objected to what Washington has been doing on its border in Ukraine, but Washington has responded with the promise of more of what the Russians found objectionable, rather than search for a compromise. Once the Russians crossed into Ukraine, Washington unleashed the sanctions war and promised even more punishments, including the promise of regime change.

Throughout the war, the approach from Washington has been to create some artificial red line for themselves or Russia, and then cross it in such a way as to suggest all future red lines will be crossed. Currently NATO is having a debate about launching long range missile attacks on Russia, from NATO countries or with NATO personnel, while pretending it is being done by Ukraine. This is the bully threatening the kid who refuses to back down with something worse than backing down.

Unreported in the West, Ukraine has been using Western supplied drones to attack early warning radar stations in southern Russia. These are part of Russia’s nuclear defense system. They play no role in the Ukraine war, but Ukraine’s handlers are having them do this as a form of escalatory dominance. The point is to signal to the Russians that the West is not afraid of nuclear war. The madness of this is obvious, but to a great degree that is the point, to seem mad.

We see a similar thing shaping up with China. Washington is going out of its way to provoke China over the issue of Taiwan. Various officials have been sent to the island for no other reason than to antagonize the Chinese. A big package of weapons has been shipped to Taiwan and Washington has increased the number of military personnel on the island. Washington regularly talks about how it is actively preparing for a war with the Chinese over the issue of Taiwan.

A great example of how the concept of escalatory dominance controls how American ruling elites deal with the world is the last trip by Anthony Blinken to China in which he went out of his way to insult the Chinese. The State Department insisted on Blinken visiting China, where he held meetings with Chinese leaders. He then went out of those meetings and threatened them with sanctions. This was done to let the Chinese know that there is no red line Washington will not cross.

This is not just a foreign policy strategy. The reason Trump is waiting to hear a guilty verdict is the regime has always assumed that if they cross enough red lines with regards to the rule of law, Trump or his supporters will fold. For going on four years, it has been ever increasing violence against both the rule of law and the customs that have controlled our politics. The point of each new escalation is to warn that there is no limit to what they will do unless you obey.

It is the unquestioned assumption in Washington that there is always some threat they can issue that is so terrifying that the other side will back down that has led them into a crisis for the regime. Half the country now thinks the courts are corrupt beyond reform thanks to the lawfare unleashed by the regime. We are remarkably close to the point where a majority of Americans think we are ruled by lawless gangsters, which even in easy times is an impossible state of affairs.

The crisis gripping the West is due, in large part, to the fact that the system now selects boys and girls with no practical knowledge. Never having had their bluff called and walking away with a bloody nose or a black eye, they just assume such a thing is impossible, so they are free to escalate their threats. It is not so much that their threats work, but that they ought to work. In the artificial reality in which these people live, the ought is the same as the is.

The Trump trial is a good bit of foreshadowing for how this widely held delusion about escalatory dominance will end. At some point, the bluff is called, and the bluffer has to either follow through or their raison d’etre evaporates. This is the story of the bully who finally has to fight and gets beaten. It is not the beating that ends his reign as a bully, but the fact that someone stood up to him. This is what is happening with the lawfare against Trump, who has called their bluff.

Unlike the schoolyard, the end of a regime that relies on escalatory dominance is not so simple and tidy. The regime now has to hope the Trump trial ends in a hung jury so they can maintain their stance. An acquittal has them looking like fools and a guilty verdict has them in a crisis far worse than Trump winning the election. Soon, the bluff will be called over Ukraine and Taiwan. Once this happens, the regime has no answer other than the unthinkable.

Trump The Elephant

Posted on May 28, 2024 by thezman

Mary was a five-ton Asian elephant that performed at a circus, until she went berserk and killed one of her handlers. For some reason, the otherwise gentle beast attacked the handler on his second day of work. She picked him up with her trunk, hurled him against a wall and then stepped on his head. The circus owner decided that the right thing to do was to hold a public execution of the elephant for the crime of having murdered the elephant handler. The elephant was then hanged.

This strange story happened in 1916 in rural Tennessee, and it is a good way to think about what is about to happen in a New York City courtroom. This week the jury will get the Trump case with instructions by the judge to convict. This trial and the behavior of the people running it is like the execution of a circus elephant. It is about vengeance, rather than justice. The circus owner hanged Mary the elephant to satisfy the lust for vengeance and the conviction of Trump is for the same purpose.

The trial of Trump has nothing to do with the law. He paid a lawyer to make a problem go away, which happens all the time in America. The claim here is that it was booked incorrectly by his accounting department. The trial was never about the alleged accounting error. It was an excuse to humiliate a man that the judge, the prosecutors, the media and most likely the jury think deserves to be punished just as the locals thought Mary the elephant needed to be punished.

There have always been two sides to punishment. The one we like to think is our motivation is side that seeks to discourage future bad behavior. We want the criminal punished so he and others will not commit future crimes. That is a pleasant thought, but in reality, most of the time punishment is about vengeance. The person who harmed us and is causing harm is what the masses detest the most. Low morality revolves around those things that harm people, society, and our beliefs.

Ironically, this is why the “best” people have relished the seedy details of this trial and now prepare to celebrate the guilty verdict. Joe Biden is set to give an Oval Office speech once the verdict is read. The reason for this is the managerial class has the morality of a servant, despite their control of the institutions of power. They look at Trump as someone who harmed them, their system of rule and their beliefs, so as far as they are concerned, he is evil and must be punished.

The Trump phenomenon has provided an interesting insight into the psychology of the managerial elite. Despite their pretensions and their control of the institutions, they are still motivated by a low form of morality. That starts with what the weak always fear, which is harm done to them by those with power. Theirs is the slave morality which is rooted in paranoia, distrust, and fear. Being a good person, therefore, means not causing those reactions among the servant class.

It makes sense as the managerial elite are not powerful in the convention way in which we think of power in a society. They are the product of a system that empowers the servant of the owner, rather than their own accomplishments. You rise in this system by pleasing those above you and managing your horizontal relations. No can ever reach a place of independence within the system as the system is built upon interlocking relationships within the institutions.

This is the difference between an owner and a manager. The CEO of a company is not truly powerful because he must answer to the owners. The power he wields is on behalf of the people who granted him that power. Those people have power due to their own deeds, so their source of power is internal rather than external. Further, that CEO must always fear being replaced by someone below him. The manager must always be paranoid and fearful of everyone around him.

Trump, of course, is not a product of the managerial system. He is in many respects the abnegation of that system. Rather than getting rich and famous through a system of interlocking dependencies, he got rich building big, complicated buildings and famous by being good on television. Trump, for all his faults, is his own man and this is the not just the opposite of managerial man, it is the nullification of him. It is the existence of Trump that terrifies the managerial class, not his ideas.

This is the other cause for managerial rage over Trump. He has choices because his power is internal. He did not have to run in 2016 and he does not have to run in 2024, but he chose to for his own reasons. Everyone involved in the case against Trump depends to a great degree on the decisions of others. They have bosses or they have a career that comes with normative demands. The judge has to act in a certain way in order to remain in good standing.

That is a key difference between the owner and the manager. The owner can separate himself from the manager, but the manager can never separate from the owner without losing all of his status. The owner makes choices based on what he thinks is best, while the manager makes choices based on that fear of losing his position. The reason the slave resents the master is the same reason the manager resents the owner. It is why the managerial class despises Trump.

There is a related motivation here. The managerial class does not just see themselves as functionaries managing the system. They see themselves as something like a priestly class that dictates the happiness of the people. This is especially true in the media which has the greatest loathing for Trump and his fans. These are people whose power rests solely on dictating what is morally right and wrong. They sit in the judgment of everyone, even the truly powerful.

The reason for this is the power of priestly class rests on their framing of good and evil, which always places them on the side of the good. They prove this by pretending to live the purest of lives according to the morality they impose. Note how our managerial elite is always preaching about things like the climate, race, our democracy, and other parts of the progressive catechism. Our managerial class is the clergy, and the elites see themselves as the high priests.

There is no one who enjoys vengeance more than the priest. The suffering of the wicked is the greatest joy to the truly righteous. For the managerial class, punishing those who transgress and seeing them suffer is their reward. It is why the media love ruining people. It makes them feel like Aquinas relishing the image of the damned writhing in the pits of hell. This is why this case matters so much. The managerial priests will get to see a wicked man suffer.

This returns us to Mary the elephant. The people who wanted to see the elephant hanged were not demanding it for practical reasons. They were weak people who lived in fear and the elephant came to represent that fear. Killing the animal by public hanging was an act of piety. It represented the triumph of their sense of justice, which is always expressed as vengeance by those who see themselves as weak. They killed the elephant as an act of revenge.

That is the point of this trial. The managerial class wants revenge on Trump for violating their taboos and holding a mirror up to their system. Vengeance is the product of revenge and revenge is the result of resentment. The managerial class resents men like Trump as a part of their organizing ethos. By running for president, he became the slave owner who came down to party with the slaves in the slave quarters. His actions remind them of their status as slaves.

In the end, that is the point of the Trump phenomenon. Despite his populist rhetoric, Trump is an aristocrat of the old sort. He is a self-made man. The question he poses is will we and can we be ruled by the servants of aristocrats or will they fail and be replaced by the natural aristocracy. Can you have a society ruled by people controlled by resentment for the natural elite? That is the question Trump poses. Whether they hang him or not, the question must be answered.

The Total State

Posted on May 27, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a series of posts on the original Planet of the Apes films, which I watched and reviewed. There was no Sunday podcast due to the holiday, but it will return next week. Subscribe here or here.

If you are of a certain age and inclination, reading The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies, a new book by Auron MacIntyre, feels like a trip down memory lane to a time when you were discovering the major figures of what would eventually be called paleoconservatism. The text is filled with references to Carl Schmidt, Machiavelli, Vilfredo Pareto, James Burnham, Paul Gottfried, Sam Francis, and other figures who feature prominently in the paleo subculture.

That is the first way to approach this book as the writer was by his own account a garden variety conservative until a few years ago. That means he accepted the neoconservative foreign policy claims, the libertarian economics, and the civic nationalism of the Buckley crowd. The Trump years, the 2020 election and Covid forced him to reevaluate that way of framing politics. Working in the media, he also witnessed firsthand the corruption and mendacity of the fifth estate.

Judging from the number of references to Covid and how often it is used as an example in making points about what he calls the Total State, it is fair to assume that the mass panic and group think within the managerial class during Covid is what sent the writer on his journey out of civic nationalism. The state’s willingness and ability to trample the idea of a rights-based society in the name of public health, along with the media cheerleading, broke the spell of civic nationalism.

What followed was a crash course in the ideas of the “alternative right” as Paul Gottfried used to call it before that term was anathematized. The result is this book which can be read as an intellectual journey. Ideas common in dissident circles were new and amazing in their ability to explain what was happening during Covid. The enthusiasm MacIntyre has for the material will surely bring back memories for older readers who recall experiencing this material in their youth.

Another way of reading this book is as a summary, a Cliff Notes version, of managerialism and the managerial state. MacIntyre borrows the title of the book from Carl Schmidt, who called this form of government der Totalstaat, which translates into English as the Total State. He could also have used the term Sam Francis used, Leviathan, or simply the managerial state. All roughly mean the same thing, which is the all-encompassing corporate state.

Read this way, this book is an excellent primer for the person who is embarking on a journey out of civic nationalism. MacIntyre covers all the important bits using accessible language and recent examples, like the Covid panic. He makes good use of references to the pantheon of stars that make up the paleo constellation but does so in a way that does not require the reader to know about these people. It is an introduction to other modes of conservative thought and the topic of managerialism.

Still another way to approach this book is as the down payment on the long overdue project of building an alternative intellectual framework. What passes for the right in America was not much more complicated than saying, “not so fast” to the schemes dreamed up by the people we call the left. The closest anyone came to building an alternative moral framework was Sam Francis who died before he could finish is magnum opus, Leviathan and Its Enemies.

In his review of The Total State, Greg Hood suggests this might be the start or a restart of that project as MacIntyre is not just a nobody on the internet. He is a member of the so-called conservative media with access to influencers allowed to operate unmolested on the public stage. He regularly turns up on television during elections and has mainstream guests on his show. MacIntyre dusting off these ideas from a perch within mainstream media could be the start of the project.

There could be something to this as there is a gold rush right now to find something to replace Buckley-style conservatism. There are formal efforts like Yoram Hazony’s National Conservatism project and the Claremont Institute. There are informal efforts among online content creators, the sort of people I called Cosmos and those Dave Green calls the LinkedIn Right. There are lots of people searching for a New Right and perhaps they discover a new ideological framework.

The book is not without its flaws, of course. MacIntyre mentions Curtis Yarvin too many times and one is counted as one too many. Yarvin simply has no place in a serious discussion about politics or political theory. Maybe his name was dropped because he is reportedly Peter Theil’s court jester or maybe MacIntyre thinks this is a useful reference point for his intended audience. Regardless, seeing Yarvin’s name turn up in anything is like discovering a hair in your soup.

That aside, another quibble is one it inherits from paleoconservatism and that is it cannot explain why managerialism exists. Burnham noticed that it first appeared in fascist systems. Later writers observed that communism was also good soil for the growth of managerialism. Now we see American-style liberal democracy has also been overtaken by bourgeois managers. This is hardly an accident, but paleos have never produced an explanation for it.

That leads to another quibble that also comes from the paleo space. MacIntyre cannot provide an answer for what to do about it. He finished his book with three possible ends for The Total State. One is it staggers on due to a monopoly of power. Another is it is replaced by a strong man of some sort. The final option, the one MacIntyre prefers, is that it slowly dies from its own internal contradictions. Note that none of these lead to any action against the managerial system.

That was always the flaw of paleoconservatism. It was a call to inaction in the face of perpetual revolution from the top. You cannot build a political movement on a foundation that calls for hiding out in the basement until the storm passes. Even if the storm passes, what comes next will not be the work of those who choose inaction in the face of danger, but by those who have a platform that calls for action in pursuit of something different and better than hoping for nicer weather.

In the end, the judgment of any book is whether it did what it set out to do, not what could have or should have done according to the critics. When approached by any of the angles above, The Total State accomplishes the goal of the author. It is a book for those who would like a fuller understanding of the terms commonly used in dissident circles and for the people looking for a path out of the banality of what passes for conventional conservatism.

Media And The Cult

Posted on May 23, 2024 by thezman

A mostly unexamined aspect of the ongoing crisis is the role the media plays in keeping the managerial class misinformed. It is always assumed that the firehose of lies that come from regime media is designed to trick the public, but the truth is no one in charge cares about public opinion outside the extremes. Politicians come and go, and the parties take turns pretending to be in charge but the administrative state and the managerial class that runs it are permanent.

One only has to look at the presidential elections over the last thirty years to see that elections have no impact on policy. Bill Clinton was supposed to be a break with the polices of Reagan and Bush, but things changed very little. Bush was supposed to bring decency back to the White House. Instead, he empowered the neocons, who set about making war on the world. Obama was supposed to put an end to all that war making, but instead doubled down in Afghanistan.

If you could map changes in public policy from election to election since the Cold War you would end up with a line that slowly moves upward. The only change we see is slightly more of the same with each change in administration. The same can be said of the changes in the House and Senate. As we have recently seen with the Republicans in the House, they are just a shadow of the Democrats, who shadow the Republicans as they take turns in the majority.

The reason for this is ninety percent of our elected representatives never have to fear the voters. They only have to fear the wrath of their party leaders, who are the representatives of the economic elites that underwrite the system. For the typical congressman or senator, there is no profit in appealing to the voters, if it means going against party leadership. That can only result in a primary challenge, so the rational course is to do what the party tells them.

If the political system is now immune to public opinion, then why are we awash in mass media filling the public square with propaganda? One reason is inertia. There was a time when winning the voters mattered and the media was an essential part of how the parties presented their claims to the public. Listen to media figures talk about their profession and they often sound like museum pieces. The Washington Post hilariously has the line, “Democracy Dies In Darkness” on its masthead.

Another reason for the explosion of agit-prop might be that as the number of safe seats has grown, the consensus between the two parties has narrowed. That means the range of acceptable dissent has narrowed as well. Look around Washington and there is only one acceptable position on most issues. For example, you can wail about the southern border, but you cannot oppose immigration. You can “care about working families” but you cannot oppose finance capitalism.

When a broad range of positions are tolerated, the focus is on winning the public to your side, but when the range of tolerable positions is narrow, the focus must be on keeping everyone inside that tolerable range. That is where the media comes in with its firehose of official nonsense. The point is not to sway or trick a skeptical public, but to enforce conformity of opinion inside Washington. Ironically, this was the primary purpose of the media in the Soviet Union.

Take for example this post at the National Interest. This is one of the many neocon publications used to control official debate on foreign policy. It was founded by Irving Kristol, one of the founding members of the neocon cult. The post reads like it was written by a crazy person, but that is because it is a collection of assertions circulating in the mass media for years. The point of the post is to keep these assertions circulating and therefore the default position on Russia.

Imagine you are a congressman sitting on a committee that serves the interests of the Military Industrial Complex. Image further that you made the mistake of reading unapproved analysis of the war and the war claims. You might be tempted to question the people making the claims, until you run into this wall of official opinion that sprouts from every regime outlet and every regime member. Even if you are skeptical, you will find nothing but hostility to your questions.

In many respects, Washington now operates like a cult. People at all levels are recruited into politics because they conform to the attitudes of the cult. Those who show a lack of enthusiasm are either bullied into submission or expelled. Meanwhile, those inside are subjected to a constant wave of mass media that reinforces the currently acceptable opinions of the cult leaders. The media is an endless chorus praising the cult and the positions held by the cult.

Another aspect of cults is that the people inside them lack the perspective and self-awareness to see themselves as being in a cult. No one ever says “I decided to join a cult” because no one in a cult thinks they are in a cult. Instead, they think the logic of the cult explains everything that needs explaining. To those outside, the logic of the cult seems weird and possibly dangerous. The people inside appear to be painfully divorced from reality, maybe even insane.

This is exactly how normal people see Washington. They see lunatics ranting and raving about imaginary demons, while obvious problems are ignored. One congressman after another swears allegiance to a foreign power, while hooting about China and Russia influencing our elections. This is all amplified by a mass media system that is designed to reward such behavior and punish any hint of skepticism about the narrow set of acceptable opinions.

The Cosmo Right

Posted on May 15, 2024 by thezman

A regular feature of the internet age is the emergence of what is called a “new right” that is supposed to supplant the “old right.” This is largely due to the collapse of Buckley-style conservatism over the last twenty years. The assumption is that the failures of mainstream conservatism and its dwindling demographic must lead to its demise and its replacement by a new, more contemporary right. As a result, there have been a lot of hats thrown into the ring from alternative rights.

What may be emerging as the real threat to win the competition is something that has yet to name itself. The recent hit piece on the publisher of Passage Press, the group responsible for rehabilitating Steve Sailer, led to a gathering of online friends and acquaintances in support of the publisher. This is the online character known as Lomez, who has written for Claremont sites and has a big following on Twitter. He is part of a loose network of influencers that could be called the Cosmo Right.

That is the first place to start with understanding this collection of people emerging into a movement of sorts. They are cosmopolitan in the old bourgeois sense of the word, as they often live in or around the trendy cities. Maybe they went to a college that is near a trendy city or they worked at a company in a hipsterville. Maybe they just like to hang out in places like Austin. It is not so much about location when it comes to their cosmopolitanism, but their attitude.

These are people comfortable in and around the people David Brooks called bourgeois bohemians or Bobo’s. Brooks described them as highly educated people who enjoy the aesthetic of the creative world but pay for it by successfully maintaining a position in the competitive modern economy. Twenty years ago, when he wrote his book about these people, the Bobo’s were a white couple who lived in a gentrified part of the Five Burroughs but had jobs in Manhattan.

This potential new right that is forming up seems to be mostly people who have drifted in and out of that world. They come from generally upper middle-class backgrounds, went to college, and entered a profession. Finding the meritocratic world stifling and sterile, they have been looking around for something more fulfilling and that is not limited to their lifestyle. Their politics are the result of waking up from neoliberalism and then searching about for alternatives.

A representative example is the Blaze writer and commentator Auron MacIntyre, whose book The Total State reads like a personal journey out of the world of conventional politics into the wilderness of dissident politics. Instead of going down the usual rabbit holes which is so common when people get red-pilled on politics, he has maintained a foot in the world of conventional politics, often normalizing ideas that first gained traction in the shadows of dissident discourse.

This gets to the natural trendiness with this new scene. This new right is composed of people comfortable in a world that is often defined by trends, so they do not get swept up in whatever is happening at the moment. In other words, this is a conservatism of disposition, rather than of ideology. Scan the posts of the site IM1776 and you get a Russel Kirk vibe from it. The focus is not on a political agenda, but more on analysis and the proper positioning of politics with the personal.

This is also a millennial demographic. Zoomers get a lot of attention due to their shenanigans online and their skillful use of digital media, but this new scene is almost exclusive to people from the millennial cohort. Like the Zoomers, they come from the suburban middle-class, but unlike the Zoomers they went onto college and got jobs in the above ground economy. Their politics are the result of that experience in the world of practical things, rather than the internet fever swamps.

Another interesting and novel aspect is that this ad hoc collection of people can be described as post-national, post-racial and post-regional. They are all what Leonard Jeffries would call “ice people” but there is no emphasis on it. It is a lot like the old paleo-conservatism in that there are a lot of secular Jews and conservative Christians from mainstream sects. You also see a mix of people from different regions with a regional focus, but not exclusively so.

This is the new cosmopolitanism that may be the result of the demographic changes sweeping the Western world. The old racial categories no longer work because it is no longer a world of black and white. The majoritarian outlook no longer works as there is no longer a natural majority. The response to multiracial neoliberalism may be a cosmopolitan conservatism rooted in classical Western attitudes. The answer to the new Mercurians will be new Apollonians.

There is also the fact that it is young and educated. These are not people with warmed over political agendas from the past, but young, educated men reexamining the past for the foundations of a new political foundation. That means it is less a political agenda than a cultural movement. There is a cool factor growing up around these people on social media, which brings in new voices and new ideas. That gives this new scene a vitality missing from prior new right initiatives.

Of course, this could just be another ripple in the river that is the political in the mass media age. This is not the first effort at creating an alternative to the shuffling husk that is Buckley-style conservatism. The difference here is that this emerging new subculture is not a deliberate creation. Unlike Hazony’s newfangled nationalism, the Cosmo-Right is an organic thing that is emerging gradually. Therefore, it may have more staying power because it is not built to replace anything.

The Great Panic

Posted on May 13, 2024 by thezman

Ever since the Hamas attacks on October 7th, 2023, the American empire has been convulsed by increasingly deranged tremors. The Israelis adopted a policy that on the surface makes little sense. All it has done is poison relations with the Arabs and much of the world. In America, both political parties have gone nuts in response to the attacks, Israel’s response, and the reaction to that response. Peak madness may be Lindsey Graham suggesting Israel uses nukes on Gaza.

Graham, of course, is trying to show he is the most Zionist of Zionists in a party that makes Likud look dovish. Elected Republicans are obsessed with Israel to the point where even pro-Israel supporters are suffering from severe cringe. Here is Ted Cruz claiming that no one came to the aid of Jews in the Second World War and that Israel has had to go it alone. The logic here is that you are either on the side of unconditional support for Israel or you are Hitler.

One reason for this, of course, is the power of AIPAC. Thomas Massie has opposed the blank check to Israel, so AIPAC has launched both a smear campaign against him, but also a television campaign in his state. AIPAC has been threatening politicians around the country with what could best be described as a “stand with Israel or you get two in the hat” marketing campaign. The only thing missing is a pic of Kennedy slumped over in the car as his wife tries to keep his head together.

The madness is not contained to the street level politics. The normally sober minded David Goldman, the man behind the Spengler column in the Asia Times, posted a crazy rant about Christian Nationalism at the Claremont site, American Mind. In that post he seems to suggest that Christians do not deserve their own nations and must worship Israel if they want to survive. It is a bit of mask dropping that you only ever see from fringe players in the diaspora.

All of this raises the question as to what is happening here? The large and well-funded philosemitic ecosystem seems to be shaking itself to pieces. The trigger for this lurch into madness was the Hamas attack, which the people in this ecosystem demand be treated like a world defining event, when in reality it was just another reprisal in a long running blood feud between the Arabs and Jews. For some reason, it is not seen as such by these people. Instead, it is an inflection point.

One reason for this is the changes inside Israel. The old guard is reaching its demographic end point. Since its founding, Israel has been controlled by Ashkenazi Jews, mostly from the diaspora. The other Jewish tribes, particularly the Mizrahi, have been spectators. The Mizrahi are the Jews who have always been in the Middle East, as opposed to those who migrated with the Roman Legions into Europe. Mizrahi is a modern term that means “eastern.”

The dominance of westernized Ashkenazi Jews has meant that Israeli politics has reflected the politics of the American empire. One side has taken the dovish view of Arab relations, and the other side has taken the hawkish view. Further, Israel diplomacy has followed American diplomacy. This has made it easy for the Israelis to deal with the rest of the world diplomatically and provided some limits on Israel behavior. Now that the Mizrahi are ascendent, this dynamic is changing.

The Mizrahi have now entered government and are taking over what has been the political right in Israel. They have an agenda that starts with the removal of the Arab populations from “Greater Israel” which is why the expression “from the river to the sea” is so controversial. The Mizrahi also demand the return to Talmudic law and the building of the third temple, which means destroying the Al-Aqsa Mosque. The Mizrahi back Netanyahu, who needs them to survive politically.

This changing of the guard inside Israel explains the crazy response from the Israelis, in the teeth of global opposition. It does not explain why the Israelis seem willing to offend their supporters in America. Normally, the protests we see in the West would have led to strong pressure from whoever is occupying the White House to tone down the violence and address the optics. Instead, we have both parties demanding total, unconditional obedience to the Israeli cause.

That gets to a different problem. Project Ukraine has brought to light some hidden truths about the Global American Empire. One is that the vaunted American war machine is a paper tiger. Western wonder weapons were supposed to scare the Russians into submission, but instead they have been a colossal failure. Further, all of the predictions about how the war would unfold and how Russia would respond to Western efforts have turned out to be fantastically wrong.

Project Ukraine is looking like the Varian Disaster for the American empire. This is having a profound impact on the internal politics of the empire. After all, the people responsible for this catastrophe look a lot like the people who are mismanaging the unfolding catastrophe in the Levant. It is not hard for even the most dimwitted to make the connection because the people running foreign policy routinely claim primary allegiance to Israel.

There is also a changing attitude in the general public. Thirty years ago, Washington would not have had to do these marketing stunts to whip up support for Israel, because the public supported Israel. The public has clearly changed. The long allergy to thinking about the role of Jews in these foreign projects is gone and now you see things in the public square with regard to the role of Jews in politics that would not have seen the light of day a few decades ago.

This does not mean Americans are becoming antisemitic. It just means as ethnic and racial awareness break through the forcefield of mass media menticide, awareness of both Israel and Jewish influence in politics is growing. People notice that Ben Shapiro cares more about Israel than America. They are noticing that public officials love Israel more than they think about their alleged constituents. Just compare Nick Fuentes to Kevin MacDonald and you can see the change.

Taken together this explains the panic we are seeing. The erratic behavior and weird mask dropping are the result of the sudden awareness that the old arrangements with regards to Israel and the Jewish people are falling apart. Just as the American empire is reaching its denouement, the Jewish century is also reaching an end. As the world transitions to a multipolar order, the internal politics of the West must change with it in order for the West to survive.

For people whose lives were constructed around the old order being permanent, this emerging new order is causing panic. In fact, much of what makes up elite Jewish identity depends on the old imperial order remaining in place. That means the multipolar world and the new American politics are a mortal threat. The panic we are seeing, whether genuine or purchased as in the case of Republican politicians, is the result of the great change that is about to sweep the American empire.

The Naked Classroom

Posted on May 11, 2024 by thezman

Most people, whether they admit it or not, accept the basic premises of what is commonly called Human Bio-Diversity. We tend to live around people who look like us and think like us. It is why after more than half a century of trying, the United States is as segregated as it was before civil rights. Humans naturally self-segregate and that is both natural and based in natural properties.

The term Human Bio-Diversity is credited to Steve Sailer, who years ago hosted an email list using that label to discuss advances in the human sciences. For a time, the HBD subculture functioned as a sort of counterculture, reacting to the dominant blank slate culture, while refuting their claims about the human condition. It has remained a gateway drug for many who end up in the dissident camp.

Thirty years ago when The Bell Curve was released, what would become the HBD world was primarily focused on intelligence. After close to a century of systematically measuring human intelligence and comparing the results to various social outcomes, science seemed to prove what people have always suspected. Intelligence is heritable and genetically determined.

Over the last thirty years, managerial culture has turned against the human sciences in an effort to defend their blank slate presuppositions. If IQ is mostly about genes and most of the rest is about home environment, which is also mostly about genes, then most of what makes up pedagogy is as empirical and tarot card reading. This is the topic of Ed Dutton’s new book The Naked Classroom.

The book sets out to do three things within the context of education. One is it explains why schools and schoolteachers tend to be far left. Dutton relies on the human sciences to explain the qualities that are selected for by schools, but also what types of people will be attracted to education. The chapter on the biological basis for homosexuality is both enlightening and disturbing in this context.

The second goal of this book is to function as a breezy summary of what we know about human cognition for the average reader. Simply knowing that intelligence can be measured is not useful without some real-world examples that show how intelligence plays a role in every aspect of life. For example, boys reach puberty later than girls, which is why they seem dumber than girls pre-teen.

The final goal of the book is to explain how intelligence and dimensions of personality, the Big Five, explain the cultural trends. People with slightly above average intelligence tend to be more compliant with social trends because they quickly see the benefit in participating in the latest thing. This explains why the woke always tend to be midwits with impressive credentials but limited practical knowledge.

For those looking for a gentle introduction to the HBD topic, then this is an excellent book to buy and read. Dutton is aiming at the general reader looking for a place to start and he is a very capable teacher. His YouTube channel is popular because he is also a highly entertaining presenter. It is a short book that covers the main topics of intelligence, personality, and human differences.

This brings up the main problem in the book. If you are a fan of the Jolly Heretic YouTube channel, then you have heard Dutton discuss the material in the book many times on his show. In fact, the book is a written summary of the last couple of years of his video work. In other words, it is not a book for those already familiar with Ed Dutton or the general ideas within the human bio-diversity subculture.

Another nit that can be picked is that Dutton hints around at the question of whether people can be trained to be logical, but he never takes it head on. This is the general flaw with the HBD space. They get to the water’s edge but never come to the inevitable conclusion that must follow their observations. If who we are is written in our code, then the liberal project is nothing more than superstition.

For example, if what science tells us about male homosexuality is largely correct, then logically we should never permit male homosexuals to be around young males without strict supervision. In fact, we should be aggressively screening out homosexuals from schools, youth groups and so forth. Of course, suggesting this means men with guns are sent to throw you into the void.

In other words, if the people with real power refuse to go where science about human nature must lead, then what is the point of knowing any of this? Further, there must be some material explanation for why people with heads full of oogily-boogily seem to rise to the top of liberal societies. Perhaps evolution does not care about empiricism as much as the fans of evolutionary biology insist.

In fairness, this is not the point of the book, so Dutton cannot be faulted for not diving into this topic. He also has to worry about being hurled into the void. In the end, the evolutionary imperative may simply shrug off liberalism like a case of fleas and it will follow other oogily-boogily into the dustbin of history. In the fullness of time, the HBD people will be proven correct about the reality of the human condition.

In the end, a book is judged by how well it achieves what the author sets out to do, not by what some crank in the critic community thinks it should have done. In his short summary of how IQ and personality shapes education in the West, Dutton ticks all of the boxes he set out to tick. The result is a great gift to the dissident curious who needs a gentle introduction to the topic as they sit by the pool this summer.

Little White Pills

Posted on May 9, 2024 by thezman

When was the last time you changed your mind? Most likely the answer takes some time as humans tend not to change their opinion on things that much and when they do, it happens over a slow period. Most people on this side of the great divide did not wake up one day and decided to abandon their old worldview. People slowly came to realize that the old way of looking at things was not working and then all of a sudden, they noticed lots of other people noticing the same thing.

That has always been the reality of the red pill experience. It is not so much that the person getting red pilled is going through a sudden transformation but that they are suddenly noticing lots of other people who are on the same road. Almost everyone in the dissident space came here by first running into a writer, YouTuber or social media character that articulated what they were thinking. Then it was another and another until the person was firmly in the dissident camp.

We see this with support for Israel. For a long time, the default position for most white people was to support Israel, mostly for American reasons. Americans love the underdog and Israel seemed like the underdog. In the 1960’s and 1970’s the Israelis had to fend off the much larger neighbors, often working together. The fact that Israel somehow beat the bigger opponent tickled the American respect for the small dog that has the heart of the big dog.

That changed starting with the Bush years. After being pummeled and denigrated for a couple of decades by the American war machine, Americans look at the Arabs as hapless nitwits and Israel as a protectorate of the American empire. The Jews are no longer the plucky underdog, so when they attacked the Palestinians, many Americans wondered if they should be cheering for the people of Gaza. As a result, support for Israel has plummeted over the last six months.

There are still people who think it is 1985 and that Israel is “fighting for its survival” but those people are strange anachronisms. This has in turn damaged the Republican Party as they roll out anti-speech measures thinking these prohibitions against criticizing Israel are popular with their base. Instead, most GOP voters are reacting in the same way they would if Mike Johnson showed up for work wearing a denim leisure suit and sporting a massive afro.

It is not that people are suddenly reading Mein Kampf and becoming antisemites or that they accidentally clicked on a Nick Fuentes video and were red pilled on the reality of Zionism in America. What happened is the tectonic plates of American perception have been slowly moving with regards to Israel for decades. The events in the Levant confirmed these changing perceptions and when people noticed this in other people, a critical mass of new opinion has formed around Israel.

We may be seeing something similar with regards to white identity. The other day, Ann Coulter was a guest on a podcast hosted by former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to do the normal stuff. Coulter opened by stating right up front that she would not have voted for him, despite agreeing with him on many things, because he is an Indian and she does not want to be ruled by Indians. She went on to say that America is a white country and should remain so.

The normally unflappable Ramaswamy was poleaxed. He probably expected Coulter to attack Trump, as that is her current act. He would then defend Trump, as he is a Trump surrogate on the campaign trail. Instead, he was told by a very white woman that she would never vote for a very brown man. To his credit, Ramaswamy did not begin to shriek about racism, but then again, Indians are the most ethnocentric people on earth so at some level he certainly understood her position.

The remarkable thing about this exchange is not that she said it, but that there has been no reaction from the kooks. Further, the sissies of conservatism have not raced off to their fainting couches. In fact, there has been little reaction at all to what in the near past would have been a John Derbyshire moment. A few members of the kook squad have tried to make this a thing, but so far there are no mobs forming up to demand Coulter be cancelled from her various media gigs.

The important thing here is not so much that Coulter said what she said or that it has not resulted in a lynching. The important thing is that millions of normies heard a familiar voice say it is, in effect, okay to be white. It is one of those crystalizing moments for the suburban peasant when he realizes that lots of other people are thinking the same thing and that it is okay to think such things. The ground just shifted but in reality, the ground shifted long ago, and Coulter simply acknowledged it.

Like the changing views on Israel, the changing views on whiteness are the result of the winners overplaying their hand. The Israel lobby has made itself so obnoxious that it has turned natural sympathy into skepticism and even antipathy. The triumph of diversity has now normalized racial tribalism among white people. This Ann Coulter moment has confirmed to millions of normies that it is not only okay to be white, but it is a necessity of their politics now.

The Looming Chaos

Posted on May 8, 2024 by thezman

There is an old expression in politics that roughly says the most successful politicians are blessed with the right enemies. William Weld, a long time Massachusetts politician, was enormously gifted, until alcoholism got the better of him. He could have reshaped state politics and become a national figure, but he ran into the far wilier Billy Bulger at the local level and the more powerful duo of John Kerry and Ted Kennedy at the national level, so he never lived up to his promise.

We seem to be seeing the opposite with Donald Trump, who has better political instincts than most seasoned professionals, even though his only political experience was at the very top of the game eight years ago. Imagine a fighter stepping into the ring for the first time and the opponent is the reigning world champion. Then imagine that guy winning, and you see the enormity of 2016. Since then, the system has thrown everything at the man, and he is still going.

The main reason Trump continues to move toward the Republican nomination and a general election rematch is he is blessed with the best enemies. The two Federal court cases are now stalled indefinitely. In both cases, the reason for the delay is the chief inquisitor appointed by the Biden administration is proving to be an incompetent fanatic who cannot stop lying to the court. In the most recent example, he was forced to admit the FBI tampered with evidence and lied about it.

A smarter, more sober minded prosecutor would have used the process to tangle Trump up in a myriad of potential scandals that both drained his resources and created a black cloud over his campaign. Instead, the deranged Jack Smith thought he could get into a street fight with a guy who prefers street fights. In the fullness of time, Jack Smith will be remembered as one of Trump’s dumbest adversaries. The guy has managed to turn the power of the Federal government into a liability.

Then we have the locals who seem to have been drawn from central casting if central casting is located at the diversity department of a mental asylum. In Georgia, Fani Willis turned herself into a living argument against affirmative action. In New York, Alvin Bragg has managed to make a sham trial into a daily platform for Trump to do what he does best, which is walking around New York City, sweet talking the locals, who line up every day to see The Man fight the man.

The question is where will all of this lead. It is a mortal lock that Trump is convicted of whatever it is they claim he did wrong. It is also a guarantee that the third world judge sentences Trump to jail time. He has threatened Trump with jail over Trump talking publicly about the court case. This judge is stupid and insane, so we are most likely going to see a situation in which the Secret Service faces off with the State of New York about how to jail a former president.

It remains to be seen how this plays with the public, but no one in power actually cares about public opinion. They just use it as a fig leaf. It is safe to assume that the people running the Republican Party would love to dump Trump, so this might be their chance to remove him from the ballot. The trouble is, that means the end of the party and even the dullards of Conservative Inc should be able to see it. Then again, “conservative” is just the long spelling of “retarded.”

This is where Trump’s luck may come into play. The guy thrives on chaos and what will happen this summer with regards to the nomination is chaos. In other words, his opponents are creating for him the conditions in which he does best. By doing nothing more than existing, he will put party leadership in a vice. One jaw is defending him against rogue state courts and the other jaw is the people who call the shots in Washington, demanding the party remove him from the ballot.

It gets better, or at least more amusing. Joe Biden is clearly a mess physically and mentally, which will not get better with time. The other day he was leaving the White House, and it appears he soiled his diaper. Even former NFL players are laughing about Biden’s physical and mental health problems. Biden’s growing incoherence will not be helped by black sports stars making diaper jokes about him. The precious black vote follows the lead of their black stars.

The solution to the Biden problem is to remove him from the ballot at the convention and swap in someone new. Biden is told to stand aside at the convention, maybe have him deliver one last speech in which he “graciously” steps aside for someone new, who then picks a running mate that is not the butt of jokes. In other words, the solution to the Biden problem might be the chaos option. Upend the whole race at the last-minute hoping that something good arises from the chaos.

None of this should lead anyone to think Trump will win the general election or be allowed to assume office. The people in charge have other more effective ways to block Trump if these efforts fail. The way to bet right now is that the Republican Party removes Trump from the ballot at the convention, as he will be sitting in a jail somewhere in New York or maybe under house arrest. Even so, that will be just one log on the bonfire of chaos that is coming.

In the end, Trump is lucky in that he is getting exactly what he needs to thrive politically, but what he is, and always has been, is a wrecking ball. His role in the late empire political process is to fulfill another old expression, those whom God wishes to destroy, he first deprives of reason. Trump makes the managerial class insane, which results in chaos, the thing on which Trump feeds. That cycle of chaotic madness is now heading to a climax this summer.

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