Whither Rufo-ism

Posted on October 10, 2023 by thezman

Since the wrecking ball known as Donald Trump swung through the walls of conservatism almost a decade ago, there has been a desperate attempt to either rebuild the wall or fill the void left by the old conservatism. The Never Trump project was mostly an effort to chase the barbarians out of the city so the good people can rebuild the wall and restart the old politics. For the most part, this project has failed as the massive hole in the wall remains.

A good recent example of this is this post by neoconservative writer Mathew Continetti in Commentary Magazine. He claims that the populists supporting nationalist policies and candidates are actually Marxists. This has become a popular theme with the East Coast Straussians, of which the neocons are a part. It is a hilariously insane line of thought, owing to the steep decline in the human capital we see everywhere in politics, but especially in the neoconservative subculture.

On the other hand, the project to recreate the old dynamic of Left and Right, has quietly plodded along with a new generation looking to create a New Right. Many are just the hucksters we have come to expect in this age. These are the people who live on social media and front-run whatever is happening at the moment. Others are rejects from the old conservative rackets hoping for a fresh start. These are the buzzards that arrive at the end of every movement.

Then you have the more professional and perhaps sincere players who operated on the fringes of conservatism but now see a chance to spread their wings. The Claremont crowd, for example, is working hard to create a New Right based on the primitive notion of natural right, supplemented by appeals to the classical liberalism of the Framers along with large dollops of Lincolnism. Claremont subscribes to the apocryphal version of the founding and Lincoln promoted by Harry Jaffa.

It is from this world that we get Chris Rufu, the guy best known for waging jihad against critical race theory in the schools. He also has waged campaigns against the sexual exploitation of children in the schools. He worked in support of the Florida bill to ban child pornography in grammar schools. He now has a book out titled, America’s Cultural Revolution, which describes the New Left and how it gained power. Paul Gottfried reviewed it here and Charles Haywood here.

Most of what Rufo describes in his book has been kicking around dissident circles for the last decade, mostly due to it kicking around paleo circles for decades. Contrary to the claims of conservatism, the New Left was never an economic or purely political movement, but a cultural and spiritual movement. With the collapse of 20th century conservatism and the cultural revolution of the last decade, this reality has become clear to everyone except libertarians.

Rufo is not without his critics. In fact, Rufo-ism is a very modern political phenomenon in that it is as much about its critics as its content. Thanks to the cultural revolution and the internet, we now live in a purely Schmitt-ian world, as in the German philosopher Carl Schmitt. Politics is only about friends and enemies, so Rufo-ism is becoming one of those points of the friend-enemy distinction. In a follow up post, Paul Gottfried talks about some of Rufo’s critics.

One of the interesting things about the critics of Rufo, as well as his supporters, is the dog that never barks. That dog is race. This is odd, given the material at the heart of his current project. Critical Race Theory is about race. Then there is the fact that Rufo spent much of his early time on this protect lecturing white people that the real victims of CRT were black kids. He put most of his effort into shooting down the idea that CRT is antiwhite, on the grounds that the term is “racist.”

This is an important part of Rufo-ism and the milieu that spawned it. These are people who are opposed to any discussion of race. It is not that they oppose the New Left’s view on race but that they embrace the New Left’s view on race more completely and sincerely than the Left embraces it. Rufo does think race is a social construct and it must be eliminated from all discourse. This New Right imagined by Rufo, Claremont and others is not just colorblind, but colorless.

It is tempting to assume this is just the old conservative two-step. They embrace the moral claims of the people they oppose but they have a different and more lucrative proposal for how to achieve them. Of course, there is the constant fear of being called “racist” which has haunted conservatism since the Old Left declared discrimination the greatest sin and diversity the greatest good. In other words, it is tempting to think Rufo’s act is an effort to avoid the R-word.

This is a reasonable suspicion, but it does not appear to be the case with Rufo nor the other popular figures from Claremont. Rufo married outside of his race and has mixed-race children, so unlike his New Left critics, who live like White Nationalists, Rufo’s “lived experience” comports with his stated views on race. This is not an uncommon phenomenon in this subculture. Further, the Claremont view of politics leaves no room for race or even natural inequality.

There is another reason for the aversion to race. Rufo is a science-denier. He rejects biology as we know it. He worked for the Discovery Institute, which peddles crackpot theories like intelligent design. Of course, the Claremont people largely reject the last two thousand years of scientific progress. They instead embrace the Straussian belief that nature comes with a secret code book on how humans should act. If you say Aristotle’s name enough times, the secret is revealed.

The starting place for the New Right is the assumption that humans are infinitely malleable in terms of character. What you are as a person is determined by the society into which you are born. If you get the moral code of society right and enforce that morality through the institutions, you end up with virtuous citizens. Since virtue in their view is a life lived to the benefit of the polis, there can be no place for things like race, because that undermines their idea of virtue.

If this sounds a bit like Marxism, it should, because this is the basic assumption of Marx and most radical thinkers. Once you assume that morality is an objective truth that lies outside of collective agreement, it means there can be only one truly moral way to organize human society. The goal of politics, therefore, is to discover it and then ruthlessly enforce it. Instead of historical materialism as the moral authority, the New Right embraces their interpretation of classical philosophy.

Putting aside the underlying philosophical reason for their embrace of colorless politics, it sounds a lot like the colorblind politics of the old conservatism. In the 1980’s conservatives were sure America was ready to move beyond race. Everyone had the same opportunity and society would finally escape the long shadow of slavery, segregation, and discrimination. Race would still exist. It simply would not matter in our behavior as citizens and as a society.

The New Right is more reactionary, but the idea is the same. Instead of the optimism of the 1980’s, they are informed by the pessimism of the present. While they agree that discrimination is the worst sin, they see the antiracists as bad as the racists they claim to oppose. The New Right wants to use any means necessary to remove any discussion of race and biological reality from the public square, mostly because they see it as a tool of the people they claim to oppose.

From a dissident perspective, this New Right seems doomed to failure because reality is undefeated, but that view suffers from a flawed view of success. The New Left, like the Old Left and it antecedents since the Mayflower needs a dancing partner, one that shares its ultimate goal. That means something will rise up to take that spot now that the old Buckley-style conservatism is caput. Rufo-ism is a good bet to be what fills that void on the New Left’s dance card.

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Trouble In The Levant

Posted on October 9, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about the classic historical drama, Doctor Zhivago, a post about demographic reality and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

A good rule when trying to understand anything in the Middle East is to first assume that nothing is as it appears on the surface. This is the land of endless intrigue and a land nearly devoid of candor. Another good rule is to assume all interested parties are lying, even those outside the region. This is especially true of anything concerning Israel, which is usually at the center of intrigue. Naturally, that is the place to start when analyzing the recent fighting in the Levant.

For those living off-grid until this morning, the Arab militia group Hamas launched a series of daring raids into Israel from the Gaza strip. They overran Israeli border posts, blinded radar systems, and attacked IDF garrisons. Once inside Israeli, they attacked some sort of outdoor rave that was going on at the time, killing hundreds of people and taking many of them as prisoners. Israel is now promising to genocide the Arab population in the Gaza strip in retaliation.

The first question to ask is how was it possible for such a large, complex operation to happen in a walled ethno-state like Israel? The IDF is a fully modern, high-tech military that is supposed to be the best in the word at defending against insurgents, yet they were caught unawares by Hamas. Further, Mossad exists to monitor these populations for exactly these sorts of threats. Somehow, poorly armed militants were able to organize this without being detected.

Adding to the intrigue is this story in the Wall Street Journal claiming inside information on how this was planned. Since we know regime media does no independent reporting, it means the story was recited to them by the regime. Is it plausible that Washington knew about this while Israel knew nothing? How likely is it that Washington knew about this and did not relay warnings to Israel? Maybe the story is a fake planted by the neocons to paint Iran as the villain.

Regardless, this attack could not come at a better time for the Israeli government, which has been in crisis for a year. Not so long ago there were large protests over constitutional reforms pushed by the Netanyahu government. Some thought civil war was possible, due to the scale of unrest. Those protests reflect a larger demographic problem within Israel. The old liberal ruling class stopped having children, while the ultra-orthodox continue to breed like rabbits.

A full-scale mobilization and war on the Palestinians is just the thing to suppress dissent and whip up support for the state. After all, this is the reason that Washington has been on a war footing since 1945. All of the parties in Israel will now have no choice but to fall in behind the Netanyahu government, at least until the emergency is over and the hostages are returned or killed by the IDF. The early results suggest the plan is to annihilate Gaza and drive off the remaining population.

There is another benefit. For decades Israel has been trying to get the United States to attack Iran and topple the Iranian regime. This was the neocon plan in the Bush years, but the debacle in Iraq forced them to table the idea. Hamas and Hezbollah are backed by Iran, so a slaughter in Gaza could provoke Iran, which in turn would give Washington an excuse to attack them. The bodies were not cold and Lindsey Graham was out reading this exact script to the media.

Israel and the neocons are not the only people dancing on rooftops over what they are calling Israel’s 9/11. The Saudis are probably taking a sigh of relief. Washington has been pressuring the Saudis to normalize relations with Israel, something they would like to avoid as it would complicate their relationship with Iran. Both countries are now in BRICS and slowly working through their longstanding issues. Of course, China and Russia are promising both sides support in this effort.

The Saudis have not made it this long by luck. They understand that the world is changing, and they know their role in this new world will change with it, but they are not going to get ahead of things either. They probably want to see how things develop with Russia and China before alienating Washington. If they can remain on good terms with all sides for now, they have more cards to play. This new flare up in Arab-Israeli tensions give them an excuse to slow-play Washington.

Then we have Iran, which is going to get the blame from Israel and the neocons for instigating this attack. Whether Iran did or did not greenlight the attack is debatable, but they have real power in this game. They have also cultivated strong relations with Russia and China, who would love to play a bigger role in the region. This new war gives Iran a reason to invite both counties into the process of finding a solution to the conflict, thus strengthening Iran.

That is another angle to this that does not get mentioned. Washington has been slowly pushed out of regional politics, outside of Israel and the garrisons in Syria. With the massive drain on the American war machine in Ukraine, is Washington capable of launching a war against Iran? Can Israel sustain their war without new supplies from Washington, which may be low on weapons too? In 2006 Israel actually ran out of certain munitions fighting Hezbollah.

In other words, Iran may be calculating that this is now the time to reset the game board in order to setup new negotiations. Imagine a scenario in which both China and Russia are pushing for a regional peace conference, but Washington and Israel are pushing for war with Iran, but neither has the means to do it. Just as every other Western empire has exhausted itself in the Middle East, Iran may be thinking the Global American Empire has exhausted itself and is ready to leave.

This brings up another angle. The Russians are the big winner in this for the simple reason that the West now has to choose between Israel and Ukraine. Washington had to requisition 80% of Israel’s reserve munitions for Ukraine. They scoured the empire for weapons and ammunition. Facing a second front, they will have to choose and everyone on planet earth knows who will win that one. A hot war in the Levant is going to make for a very cold winter in Ukraine.

This may not be the worst thing for Washington. Ukraine is a loser that will only end poorly, so putting that war on the ignore list and focusing attention on this new front in the Middle East could be a blessing in disguise. Right now, the volunteer army of Ukraine experts are rebranding as Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran experts, so the Ukraine war can be quickly forgotten. The power of regime media is the power to ignore, so if they ignore Ukraine, everyone ignores Ukraine.

One interesting sidenote to all of this is the conservative zombies chanting about how weakness in Ukraine has led to aggression against Israel. They have no idea why they are saying this, but they are not entirely wrong. The failure in the proxy war with Russia has exposed the rot in the American system. Decades of looting and grifting have left the empire unable to follow through on its threats. As a result, the world is becoming less afraid of Washington’s bluster and bullying.

That is the subtext to all of this. The fossils from the Reagan-Bush Museum are not wrong when they say Israel is the only Western outpost in the Middle East. It is just that the West is in decline and that means these outposts will be abandoned or overrun as part of the process of decline. If Israel is to survive it means becoming something other than an outpost of the West. If the West is to survive, it means abandoning these outposts and setting about the task of renewal.

Numbers

Posted on October 5, 2023 by thezman

If you were a young person in the 1980’s and caught up in the swelling conservative movement, you needed to know the numbers. Conservatism, to a great degree, was about making rational arguments which meant starting with the numbers. Things like the budget deficit, economic growth, crime rates and inflation were a common part of the conservative counter to progressive claims. At its most basic, conservatism was rational while liberalism was emotional.

For a while it seemed like the conservatives had carried the day on this issue as the public discourse slowly mirrored conservative discourse. When public figures talked about politics and social issues, it was about the numbers. The media would make a day of covering the latest speech by the Fed chair. Alan Greenspan became a rock star who gave speeches to huge crowds. Every politician made sure to have the Congressional Budget Office bless his latest idea.

Through the Bush years, economists took the place of the court astrologer, providing empirical authority to every normative claim. This reached its peak in the first Obama term when they said that every dollar spent by the government created more than a dollar of economic activity. A line of people with impressive sounding credentials provided the math of this claim. This was the argument in favor of the massive spending program unleashed by the Obama administration.

It was not just politics that got the numbers treatment. After every Super Bowl, the media would spend a day or two crunching the numbers to prove that you were the only weirdo who did not set aside the day to watch the big game. Television ratings were a mainstay of media coverage. The stock market became the central measure of social happiness, with cable channels dedicated to telling us the numbers and what the numbers meant for your happiness.

Today, no one discusses the numbers. Someone arguing for a policy on the grounds that it is good the economy sounds like someone arguing for free silver. In fact, it is the primary criticism of Conservative Inc. They do not care about crossdressers chasing your son around the playground or the tidal wave of brown people pouring over the border into your neighborhood. They care about the carried interest deduction and locking in tax cuts that few experienced or remember.

What is the current projected federal deficit? Without googling it, few people would know, and most people would not bother to do it. The same is true of the total federal debt, which used to be a headline topic. How much does the Federal government owe and to whom do they owe it? Washington is embroiled in a huge drama right now set off by the Federal budget debate and no one bothers mentioning that about forty percent of what they spent is borrowed.

One reason no one talks about the economic numbers is they have become inconceivable large, so they have no impact. People can grasp a million and they can sort of grasp a billion. Being a millionaire would be nice and being a billionaire would be awesome, but trillionaire? It is probably better than billionaire, but what is bigger than anything you can imagine? The thirty-plus trillion federal debt is a meaningless number because it is outside of what most people can imagine.

There is a bigger issue that applies to all the numbers. Decades of lying about the numbers have made all of them suspect. The totally fake economic data pumped out in the Obama years sunk the credibility of the court wizards. When those people with impressive credentials put on their serious faces and said that taking money from you and giving some of it to your neighbor would grow the economy, even the most innumerate started to question the math.

It is not just the big stuff where lying has undermined the trust in the numbers that used to be the guideposts of society. Television ratings are obviously bogus or not as meaningful as claimed. If the people making the content cared about ratings, they would not have smeared their feces all over popular content. Ad makers would not have replaced most of the white people with nonwhites. They certainly would not have every white woman paired with a black guy.

Probably the most egregious offender of the numbers are the tech companies, who clearly fake all of their numbers. How many users are really on Twitter? No one knows but we know the official number is a lie. We can clearly see that the follower counts and impressions are fake. Before buying Twitter, Elon Musk made the rather obvious claim that the site was riddled with bots and fake accounts. Once the deal closed, he stopped talking about the bots and fake accounts.

There is more to the general fakery than the unreliability of the numbers. It is that it reflects a collapse in trust. When the government claims inflation is under control, but you keep seeing your expenses climb, you are reminded by the numbers that the people in charge cannot be trusted. When some new personality bursts on the scene claiming to have a huge audience, but no one you know heard of the guy until last week, you cannot help but wonder if it is a lie.

The numbers of life are not supposed to tell us what we ought to do, but to be a measure of what we are doing. If we cannot trust the numbers or the people issuing the numbers, then we cannot know what they are doing. We have no way of judging what is being told to us or if it is on the level. The only logical response is to assume the numbers are fake and the people issuing them are lying. A society with unreliable numbers is a society run by unreliable people.

Of course, this is most clear in politics. The most important numbers are the votes counted on election night. The logic of democracy is that everyone gets their say, then everyone votes and the side with the most votes wins. Along the way polling tells us how the various arguments and people are doing. If all of these numbers are fake, then what is the point? If the numbers at the soap box and the ballot box cannot be trusted, you are left with the numbers in the cartridge box.

Since the end of the Cold War, American society has travelled along an arc that started with a trust in the numbers and the people behind them to a place where no sane person trusts the numbers or the people behind them. That is probably why it feels like this pirate ship of a society called America is sailing into dangerous waters. Odds are just numbers, and the odds say that in a world without reliable numbers, the most likely outcome is the ship eventually sinks.

No Enemies On The Right

Posted on October 4, 2023 by thezman

Charles Haywood of Worthy House has a post up explaining and defending his concept of “No Enemies On The Right”, which he originally formulated as “No Enemies To The Right” last December. He used that original phrase when discussing the jihad led by Rod Dreher against a schoolteacher who was accused of heresy. Dreher was doing his Christian piety act to both attack someone who could not defend himself and to curry favor with the people he pretends to oppose.

Dreher panicked when Haywood used the phrase “No Enemies To The Right” because it would be very bad for business if people embraced it. Like everyone in for-hire conservative politics, Dreher exists to attack people to his right. That is his reason to exist and why rich people fund his operations. What we insist on calling the Right in America is primarily a policing operation. They impose the morality of the Left on the rabble that the Right is charged with keeping at bay.

Over the last year, Haywood has defended his original argument, refining it as necessary, in response to criticism. Haywood has no interest in becoming the Emily Post of right-wing politics, but his continuing work on this concept is producing something like a rulebook of right-wing etiquette. His ten-point outline for what he means by “No Enemies On The Right” should be viewed as a useful guide for discourse between the various groups in dissident politics.

The slogan “No Enemies On The Right” is not new to Haywood. Those around way back in the alt-right days, which feels like a lifetime ago now, will recall this was a slogan with some of the more popular figures in that space. In fact, it was the motivation for organizing the Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville. The idea was to both bring everyone together but also break the pattern of the Left pitting one group against the other to enforce their moral code.

Amusingly, before the alt-right used the term, it was a popular way for the neocons to stamp out dissent during the Bush presidency. They argued in the runup to the 2004 election that their war plans were too important to let the many lies of the Bush administration divide the Right. Their basic argument was “Sure, Bush is Lyndon Johnson, but the Democrats are worse, so you have to hold your nose and vote for the guy who is the opposite of what we promised.”

Of course, like everything political on the Right, this concept has been lifted from the Left, which coined the term “No Enemies to the Left” during the French Revolution for the same reason Haywood is promoting his version today. Opposing the King and the aristocracy was too important to let petty squabbles drive the many opponents of the regime into the ghetto of endless quarreling. Overthrow the system first then everyone can argue about what comes next.

There is an obvious appeal in this age. The one thing everyone outside the political class can agree upon is the system now only works to serve the interest of the people at the upper reaches of the system. There is a zero-sum game mindset in the ruling class where they assume what is good for them is bad for the people, so what is bad for the people must be good for them. The result is a system run by people who hate the people over whom they rule.

The logical answer is to hate them back. Since the people have numbers, the only way to use this advantage is to unite enough people under an opposition banner that has as its singular goal the removal of the ruling class. This is why this idea terrifies the house slaves of Conservative Inc. They know exactly what this means, which is the toppling of the people who keep them in the lifestyle they think they deserve. From the point of view of people like Rod Dreher, it is Only Enemies On The Right.

There is another advantage to this mode of thought. It forces clarity on the politics of dissent that helps flush out the poseurs and profiteers. Those committed to the larger project will refuse to condemn anyone on their side for crimes against the regime or regime orthodoxy. At most they remain silent. The poseurs and profiteers are always quick to point their bony finger at someone and condemn him for violating the morality of the opposition, like you see with Rod Dreher.

There is one major flaw with the “No Enemies On The Right” concept. It makes it difficult to police the ranks for lunatics and crackpots. Populist politics has always struggled with the weirdo problem precisely because it is unwilling to criticize anyone willing to join the fight against the Left. You can chant “No Enemies On The Right!” until you are blue in the face, but you must have some way to filter out the lunatics or you end up being defined by them.

There is also the problem of what constitutes the Right. The drug addled Antifa marchers oppose the system, but they are not of the Right. Jimmy Dore, the old school progressive comic, opposes the regime, but he is a socialist. The Grey Zone people oppose the America military machine, but they are communists. There has to be something more than opposition to the Left or you end up putting a leash around your neck and handing the other end to people you hate.

This leads to the third problem, which Haywood addresses in his seventh item in his list of “Tenets of NEOTR.” Disagreement is vital for any opposition to the regime as this is the only way to improve the opposition. Ideas need to be debated and that often results in hurt feelings, which leads to public disputes. Chanting “No Enemies On The Right” in these times will just alienate the people in the dispute. There needs to be a way to argue but in a way that keeps the focus on the enemy.

Finally, there is no escaping the fact that this is not a new idea and prior efforts at practicing it have failed. There is a reason it has failed. The main reason is the people chanting it were never really serious about it. Instead, they tended to use it as a shield to ward off criticism. This is how we got to Charlottesville. The way forward with this concept must be to go back and address the past failure. That means more discussion about “No Enemies On The Right” with the aim of getting it right.

The Bleep Show Goes On

Posted on September 28, 2023 by thezman

The regime held another audition last night for the role of token opposition candidate in the presidential election tentatively scheduled for next year. This time they held the audition at the Reagan library, which was appropriate given that all of the actors sounded like exhibits from the 1980’s museum. They even used some clips of Reagan as prompts so the performers could spit out their favorite lines. It gave the whole thing the desired retro feel.

Fox News produced the event, as they did the prior event, but this time they used the B-team to put on the show. In the first event they treated it like one of the phony talent shows that are a staple of broadcast television. They had a drone flying around the auditorium and they introduced the performers like a wrestling show. It was vulgar and crude, but appropriate given the reality of things. The whole thing is just another chapter in an ongoing big lie.

Perhaps having been too obvious the first time, they were more subdued this time, running a standard debate style show. They also used their B-team actors to play at moderating the thing. They had a chirpy little blond woman who was disorganized and flustered the entire night. They had some old guy who must have missed his flight to Heathrow at LAX, so they made him a moderator. The third wheel was a Spanish woman with a spray on tan that was starting to peel.

Most of the night was the performers saying the prepared and rehearsed zingers while everyone else talked over them. It was clear that everyone was instructed to talk over Ramaswamy so that is what they did, often just mouthing what appeared to be gibberish, or vamping as they say in the business. The result was a cacophony of voices while the chirpy little blond hopped up and down in her seat trying to get the performers to stop talking over one another.

Why anyone thinks people will sit through this is a mystery. They could easily solve this problem with the use of shock collars. If a performer talks over another performer, he gets enough voltage to disable him for a few minutes. Maybe employ trap doors under their feet as a sort of timeout. If the performer keeps breaking the rules, the door opens, and he falls into a garbage pit. He then has to climb the stairs back to the stage, covered in garbage, and retake his spot.

Of course, the fact that this would be an improvement over what they are doing is an indictment of the system. If the ruling class treated elections seriously and they cared about public’s opinion, these vulgar displays would never happen. The performers, who would be actual candidates with real agency, would refuse to participate. That is not our reality, so we get these vulgar displays. If you were trying to humiliate the voters, you would not do anything different as far as these shows.

There is some value in watching these things. You get a sense of the narrative from which the regime is operating. It is clear they still think Trump gets put in jail, exiled, or bankrupted so he cannot run. They just had a judge steal his company the other day, so that part of the script is still operative. That means the midget wrestling shows they are putting on are for picking the lucky loser of next year’s election show. One of these losers will get the golden ticket at the convention.

Last night it was clear they have soured on Noble Black Guy. Tim Scott got little action and was pushed off to one side. They could be sidelining him to keep him fresh or they could be moving onto another actor. Neocon Nikki got the star treatment most of the night and the regime produced a bunch of fake polls for her. They have been planting stories in regime media claiming that she is the “insurgent” candidate. Imagine calling the consummate insider an insurgent.

You have to respect the neocons. They may be evil, but they never abandon their project, and they always plan ahead. Despite the results in Ukraine, they still dream the dream of thermonuclear war, so they keep reaching their tentacles into the process to promote those who share their dream of extinguishing humanity. Even though they have publicly abandoned the Republican Party, they see an opening to get one of their sock puppets the nomination and they are seizing it.

The trouble for them and the regime is that the people are coming to understand that there are people with the impudence to distort the truth so infamously as to put forth a shriveled hag like Nikki Haley. She and her scaly backers are not the solution to the political and cultural crisis. They are symbols of it. Only in a morally bankrupt system can degenerates like this flourish. If a meteor struck the Reagan Library last night during the show, the world would be a better place.

Sadly, it will not come to that just yet. Instead, it was merely another reminder to Republican voters that their party hates them. All of the actors were handed lines to say mean things about Trump, who is now the face of the party’s voters. The only thing they did not do is take turns spitting on a picture of Trump. The star of this portion was a fat slob they trucked in to repeat Borsht Belt zingers about Trump. The usual suspects still think this stuff is hilarious, which is a topic all its own.

In the end politics is always about the desires of the ruling class. No matter what the people think, the people in charge want what they want. They will never be talked out of being the ruling class. On the other hand, if what they want makes it impossible for society to operate, then we get a new ruling class. At this point, all of the trust is gone so they have to keep Netflix running, sportball playing and the grillers grilling, so no one notices the cracks spreading all around us.

A Haunting In Canada

Posted on September 27, 2023 by thezman

“There is a specter haunting the West, the specter of fascism” could be the opening line to a manifesto from just about any group in the modern West. Three generations after fascism ceased to exist as a real political and intellectual movement, it hangs over the Western mind like a terrifying fog. Every issue in the political debate is there because it relates to fascism in some way. It either defines who is and who is not a fascist, or it is assumed to be a precursor to fascism.

In every political debate, the people we continue to call conservatives are defined by their fear of being called fascists or an equivalent label. Racism, for example, is nothing more than a crude synonym for fascism. The people we call the Left have a deep sack full of terms that essentially mean fascist. If they call you an extreme right-wing extremist, they really mean you are a fascist. Of course, fascist now simply means “outside the moral consensus” as defined by the Left.

It is not just a rhetorical game. Western liberalism is now just a reactionary, but still revolutionary, cause that has evolved around fear of fascism. All of the weird cultural fads are driven mostly by a desire to strike out at the people the culture warriors assume to be fascists. These are the white people who are trying to live normal lives in middle-class suburbs. Woke is not for anything. It is against fascism and all of its manifestations, which can be anything.

Eric Hoffer famously wrote that “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.” This is clear when you look at what has happened to Western liberalism. Long stripped of its Christian moral foundation, it staggers on in opposition to one devil after another. The devil can take many forms but strip away the covering and what lies beneath is always an Austrian painter in the imagination of the Western mind.

This is a purely negative identity. Western liberalism no longer has an internal, independent definition for itself. Those concepts still linger in the past, occasionally referenced by the people we continue to call conservatives, but only as a way of trying to slither out from under the boulder labeled “fascism” that has been hurled at them by the people we call the Left. Both sides agree that everything they do not like is Hitler and Hitler is their forever enemy.

You see it in the recent scandal in Canada where all the best people were seen cheering a guy who turned out to be a former Nazi. Yaroslav Hunka, who is 98, got a standing ovation after House of Commons Speaker Anthony Rota called him a hero during a Friday visit by Zelensky. Rota called him a hero because he was told that Hunka fought the Soviets in the war. Since Western liberals now think Putin is Hitler, Russians are Nazis, so Hunka must be a hero.

The haunting of the Western mind by the specter of fascism is right there in that ridiculous performance. Because Putin is Hitler, it means Russia is the new Third Reich, which makes Ukraine the symbol of the West. Zelensky has been transformed into Churchill, but not the drunken degenerate version. He is the lion of the West version who rallied the forces of good against fascism. To the dullards who put the event together, Hunka connected the present to the past.

In reality, Hunka was and remains a Banderan, a follower of Stepan Bandera, who was a Ukrainian ultra-nationalist in the middle of the last century. Bandera collaborated with the Nazis because he hated Russians. Ukrainian nationalism is and remains, like Western liberalism, a negative identity. It is haunted by fascism because they see fascism as the great enemy of Russia, which they hate as much as the Western liberal thinks he hates fascism.

Of course, the question is how did this Ukrainian fascist end up in Canada after the war and remain undetected? He is wanted by Poland for war crimes. It turns out that the West welcomed a lot of these guys after the war. John Demjanjuk was a famous example from the 1980’s. He was the center of a moral panic, mostly over the prospect of running out of real Nazis due to the actuarial tables. All the best people turned up to point their bony fingers at Demjanjuk.

That gets to the reality of fascism and why it haunts the West. Fascism is impossible to define, in part, because it is the universal bogeyman. Both communists and liberals have spent generations heaping every sin imaginable on fascism. Those sins, of course, are the things these ideological camps fear most about themselves. With communism in the ash heap of history, fascism is now just the warted, gnarled face of Western liberalism’s worst fears about itself.

Another reason fascism is impossible to define is it was never really a standalone ideology, but a reaction to ideology. Fascism would never have existed if not for the apparent failure of liberalism and the very real threat of communism, especially the Bolshevik variety. Fascism was an ad hoc defense against cultural and spiritual genocide by people who saw both Western liberalism and communism in their raw form as they evolved in the 19th century.

This is why modern liberalism looks strikingly like fascism. We live in an age where the lines between the state and capitalism are impossible to see. Corporate America and the apparatus of the state are two heads of the same hydra. The media, the academy and entertainment are the other heads. The body that controls them is managerialism, which looks a lot like fascism. If James Burnham were alive today, he would easily make the connection between the two.

For a long time, people have wondered what would happen when the last real Nazi or alleged victim of the Nazis is no more. In the next decade that whole generation will be gone, leaving no more devils for liberalism to chase. Similarly, people have wondered what comes after liberalism reaches its end point. Both questions seem to have the same answer in that one cannot live without the other. When both are gone, the long nightmare of the West will finally come to an end.

Election Narrative Update

Posted on September 21, 2023 by thezman

Note: If you are looking for a way to do some good within the parameters of the system, then take a look at the Free Expression Foundation. This is what civil liberties groups are supposed to be doing, which is defending the rights of citizens. The organization is run by a stand-up guy who believes in the mission. They have volunteers, but fighting cases in court requires money, so consider a donation.

The next Republican debate is scheduled for this coming Thursday at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley California. According to state media, the same cast of characters is expected to perform at this event, with the exception of Asa Hutchinson and Doug Burgum, who they forgot to invite. Why this is being held in California is a mystery, as there is no chance a Republican will every win the state. For all anyone knows or cares, there is no Republican Party in California.

Putting that aside, the pre-coverage of this debate shows us that the narrative for the 2024 election is running into serious trouble on the GOP side. The script said that at this point, Trump would be out of the race due to the indictments. The party would have swung behind one of the zombies to stop Ron DeSantis, who would be desperately swimming to the “middle” in order to maintain donor support. Instead, Trump now looms over the whole thing like Godzilla attacking Tokyo.

The main flaw in the narrative was assuming that Trump’s support would collapse after the string of indictments. Because the people behind this stuff are lizard people from an alien planet, they have no way to read public sentiment. They are left to imagine how humans would react under certain conditions. Apparently one of their texts on humans said that humans naturally flee when the bad guys attack their champion for the crime of fighting back against the bad guys.

Regime media is now floating stories like this one in which various toadies wonder why their great plan failed to work. One of the lessons of the Ukraine war is that these sorts of stories appear when the regime finally comes to realize that their current narrative is no longer operational. It is something like the stages of grief. They are now in the acceptance phase of narrative collapse. Next is the bargaining phase where they search for something positive from the situation.

Another problem with the narrative is that Ron DeSantis was not able to play his role as the acceptable alternative to Trump. You may hate Trump with the intensity of a thousand suns, but it does not change the fact that he is the best street fighter the Republican Party has seen since Lee Atwater. He saw right away that DeSantis was a stalking horse, so he unleashed his supporters on him. As a result DeSantis has been dying a death of a thousand cuts.

One part of the narrative has held together. The script called for the great zombie army that is Conservative Inc. to rally to the banner of an approved option. After some fits and starts, they have managed to get this right. The one thing that you can always count on is for conservatives to do what the Left tells them to do. Nikki Haley is now the regime option in the race. She has broken double digits in Iowa, which is probably her high water mark, but that will be enough to make her the favorite.

That is the reason to watch the Thursday debate. Since Neocon Nikki has been anointed as the regime favorite, it means DeSantis has to go after her in order to revive interest in his campaign. Given how poorly he has done to this point, it is a lock that he does not do this and instead attacks Ramaswamy again. For his part, the King Cobra should be ready for Neocon Nikki to use him as a foil. Expect him to arrive wearing garlic as that is how you keep the neocon at bay.

Ramaswamy has turned out to be an enormous problem for the regime as he is a black swan in this story. According to official dogma, it is impossible for a brown person with an elite education to sound like Trump. Not only does Ramaswamy sound like Trump, he makes better arguments than Trump and he is willing to stake out positions that Trump is afraid to take, which are popular with normal people. They do not know what to do with him, so they will fling their poo at him.

Of course, they are falling for one of the classic blunders. The most famous is to never get involved in a land war in Asia, but only slightly less well known is this; never get involved in a poo flinging contest with an Indian. Ramaswamy has figured out that the race issue is losing its effectiveness with voters. That and it strikes people as ridiculous to call him a white supremacist. This gives him room to be the explicitly pro-white candidate while not being white.

With the narrative collapsing, the question shifts to what is next. The polling shows Trump is locked in as the overwhelming favorite in the early contests. What we know from 2016 is that Trump always does better than the polls, so it is fair to assume he will win handily if nothing changes. The script calls for the removal of Trump from the ballot, for the good of the country, so they can always play that card. Otherwise, they have to craft a new narrative to prevent the apocalypse.

The natural fallback position would be to put a pillow of Biden’s face and find a younger more plausible option for the other side. Gavin Newsom was the obvious choice, but he has removed himself from consideration. Presumably they threatened to charge him with raping people decades ago. That leaves no one. Given Biden’s declining ability to speak in public, we could end up with a general election where Trump campaigns in front of huge rallies and Biden does not campaign at all.

The ultimate fallback position, of course, is a rerun of 2020. This time Biden will top his eighty million votes in Pennsylvania alone. They have gone to a system of automatic voting that lets you avoid the hassle of filling out your ballot. This is a great benefit to the dead, who find this to be a big challenge. All joking aside, the lesson of 2020 is they can rig the election and get away with it, so the ultimate solution to narrative collapse is not who votes but who counts the votes.

War With Russia

Posted on September 19, 2023 by thezman

Until recent, few people outside of the Kagan cult and the Pentagon thought about fighting a war with Russia. The former has thought of nothing but such a war since the Roman legions crossed the Alps, while the latter is tasked with wargaming every imaginable scenario, no matter how unlikely. Otherwise, war with Russia stopped being a concern with the end of the Cold War. The only wars anyone needed to think about were the wars against pipsqueak countries in the Middle East.

Of course, the West now finds itself in a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine which could easily tip into a direct war. Former Vice President and current 2024 candidate Mike Pence is promoting the idea of sending American troops to Ukraine. Other than Trump and Ramaswamy, all of the candidates for 2024 want a hot war. The Kagan cult, which runs Biden’s Ukraine policy, is doing all it can to provoke the Russians into something they can use to trigger Article 5.

Assuming war happens, could the West actually win such a war? Until this year, no one thought about this question, outside of the Pentagon. The United States had the world’s best military by far. It has been assumed that a war with Russia would mean certain defeat for the Russian army. The real question was whether the United States could beat both Russia and China at the same time. After eighteen months of war, the answer to the question of war with Russia is not so simple.

For starters you have to deal with the nuclear issue. Russia has 6,257 nuclear warheads and the United States has 5,550. Both sides have more than enough to obliterate the other side. Given the performance of the Russian missile fleet in Ukraine, we can assume that their ICBM’s are in good working order. This means that any conflict that reached the nuclear level would end in both sides being reduced to a premodern state at best.

Both sides know this and both sides know the other side’s process for readying a nuclear launch. Both sides have short-range nukes, but the real county killers are the ICBM’s, so as long as both sides maintain current protocols, neither side would have a reason to pull the trigger on total nuclear war. That leaves some room for using tactical nukes on the battlefield without triggering the end of the world. In fact, both sides would assume all aircraft are nuclear capable.

This is the issue with putting F-16’s into Ukraine. The Russians would have to assume they are flown by NATO crews because they would have to be flown from NATO bases and use NATO communications networks. Further, the F-16 is capable of carrying nuclear weapons, so their appearance over Ukraine will be assumed by the Russians to be NATO seeking to deliver nuclear weapons to the battlefield. The Russians would then be allowed to do the same thing.

If we assume both sides understand the risks of nuclear weapons, a big assumption given the behavior of the Kagan cult, it is possible for NATO to send troops into Ukraine to directly confront the Russian army. Both sides managed many proxy wars and some direct wars with the other side’s proxies during the Cold War, so it is not unthinkable that they could have a direct war without it going nuclear. Both sides could see an advantage in agreeing to such terms.

If we put the nuclear issue to one side for now, we are back to that original question about beating the Russian army. What the last eighteen months has proven is that the Russian army is not the Iraqi army. Washington spent close to ten years training and equipping the Ukrainian army for this war. They have poured untold billions into Ukraine over the course of the war. The West has levied massive sanctions on Russia and yet it is becoming clear that the Russians are winning the war.

One reason for this is the way in which the American military wants to fight is not how this war is being fought. This is a land war between peer armies. NATO would run into the same problems that Ukraine has experienced. They would be sucked into a war of attrition that is conducted from entrenched positions. This is the lesson the US Army War College has drawn from the war. In this paper released last week, they explain some of the realities of a war with Russia in the Ukraine.

The first thing the authors note is the human cost to the American army would be nothing like it has ever experienced. According to their analysis, the United States would suffer more losses in two weeks than it has suffered in twenty years of war in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. They estimate at least three thousand dead and wounded per day. Note they are using Ukraine as an example, which gives a hint as to the real losses Ukraine has suffered in this war.

They also note that NATO would quickly have to tap into its reserves, but this is a bit of a problem as those reserves do not exist. They estimate that NATO would need a reserve force of about 450-thousand men to start the war. The current number is less than 100-thousand men. Attrition war need lots of men, but modern armies need lots of trained men, so the West would need time to build their reserves. Of course, Russia has been doing this for over a year now.

Then you get into material factors. The West has run out of weapons to send to the Ukrainians after eighteen months of war. Granted, the United States still has lots of tanks and fighting vehicles in its inventory for use in a war with Russia, but the lesson so far is those stocks are not enough. Ukraine has burned through thousands of tanks and fighting vehicles. They have used millions of artillery rounds and lost hundreds of Western supplied artillery pieces.

This article in the New York Times gets to the heart of the issue. The economic sanctions have done nothing to limit Russia’s ability to wage this war. More important is the fact that Russian has a greater military industrial capacity than the West. She also has unused capacity that can be quickly converted to making weapons. Russia can make more of the stuff she needs to fight than the West can make, which means the West will have to ramp up production.

Therein lies the problem. There are no factories that can be quickly converted to military use like the Second World War. That means building new, but that also means massive new costs to the West. In that Times article it notes that it costs the West $5,000 to $6,000 to make a 155-millimeter artillery round, but it costs Russia about $600 to produce a comparable 152-millimeter artillery shell. Now apply this math to tanks, and fighting vehicles and you see the problem.

Obviously, war with Russia would mean the West would have to reorganize to fight a war of this scale, but is it possible? Would the populations tolerate the necessary changes to the economy and society? Reorganizing America for total war when most of the country hates the rest of the country is a tall order. Is such a scheme even possible in Europe? Even if we brush aside the internal problems, could the West manage to pull it off in time to avoid defeat?

Thirty years ago, Pat Buchanan ran for president, campaigning, in part, against the de-industrialization of America. One of his points was that nations win wars on their industrial capacity, not their service industry. The same people demanding war with Russia today were gleefully auctioning off the industrial base thirty years ago, telling the working men that they needed to flip burgers. Now that the warmongers need those working men, they are in China, not Pittsburgh.

This is the reality dawning on the world as the Global American Empire flounders in its war against Russia. The Global American Empire is now in decline and the rest of the world is seeing what the Army War College is trying to tell the ruling class. The empire no longer has the capacity to maintain the empire. This is why the endless bluffs from Washington now fall on deaf ears. The question now is not what happens in a war with Russia, but what happens after this war with Russia.

Politics After Principle

Posted on September 18, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a series of posts about my recent journey into the heart of darkness, which is a sad way of saying the future. If you want to see the future too, fly a discount airline to Baltimore or Atlanta. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

For as long as anyone can remember there have been two competing views of how to engage in politics against the people we call the Left. One camp says that opposition must come from a principled group that does not engage in the same tactics as the opponent, in order to provide an alternative to the Left. Their vision of politics is the means justifies the ends, in contrast with the Left, who takes the view that the ends justify the means, or any means necessary to win.

The other camp points out that the Left always wins, so the “principle above politics” business is pointless. The point of politics is to win, which means gaining power, so any strategy that lacks that as its goal is a waste of time. Further, this camp notes that the first principles crowd spends all of their time policing their ranks rather than fighting the Left, which means endless purges. The people being purged are usually the most effective fighters against the Left.

The critique of the “first principles” crowd is an easy one as they stand in front of an empty trophy case with pockets stuffed with cash. Individually they do very well in terms of salary and social status, but collectively they have managed to do so little with so much that it is easy to conclude that it is a long con. Billions of dollars have flowed into Conservative Inc., but they accomplish nothing. The two conservative wins, abortion, and guns, we accomplished by outsiders.

This should be an easy case. If the means justify the ends approach is an utter failure, then we are left with the ends justify the means approach. People on the right tend to favor “no enemies to the right” as a slogan, but fundamentally it is the same thing the Left has preached for generations. When the goal is winning, you do what you must in order to win, even align with low-character people. The point of politics is to gain power and once you gain power you can have principles.

There are a number of problems with this approach, specific to right-wing movements in the modern age. The first is the Boebert problem. For those unfamiliar, Lauren Boebert is a ditzy female congressman from Colorado, who was recently seen getting felt up by a man not her husband at a movie theater. The usual carbuncles of Conservative Inc. were quick to denounce Boebert, who they see as lacking principles. Her behavior violates their principles, so she has to go.

The dilemma for the “no enemies to the right” camp is that no decent man wants to defend this airhead. Whatever utility she has politically is cancelled out by the fact that she is a dingbat and an attention whore. Even remaining silent on her is tough because the absurdity of it makes for easy jokes. Can you expect people to not make Boebert jokes in the name of politics? Can you expect people to defend this ridiculous woman when lefty friends make fun of her?

That gets to the other problem for “no enemies to the right”. The bad guys control the media, so they control the popular narrative. That means they can hold their opponents to a high standard. In other words, they can make their opponents defend all of their members and alleged members. On the other hand, any attacks on their members can simply be ignored. If you are in the game of winning the crowd against the Left, you have to accept this asymmetry.

Dingbats like Boebert are the easy problems. The really tough problem for the “no enemies to the right” camp are guys like Russell Brand and Andrew Tate. The former is a far-left comic turned populist gadfly and the latter is a pimp and pornographer, who attacks the feminist industrial complex. Both have big audiences and often voice positions popular on the dissident right. Tucker Carlson has been seen paling around with them and promoting them to his fans.

Coincidentally, both have been accused by the authorities of rape. Tate was arrested in Romania on sex trafficking claims. He admits to being a pimp and pornographer but claims to operate within the law. Brand has just been accused of being a serial rapist decades ago. He denies the claims. The usual carbuncles of Conservative Inc. were quick to accept the claims at face value and denounce Brand. Their instinct is to always trust the people they claim to oppose.

The trouble here for the “no enemies to the right” side is that both Brand and Tate are horrible people, even if you exclude the claims against them. Tate brags about things that will get him hanged if the Right is ever in charge. If there is a revolution from the Right, Andrew Tate will not live to see its second day. Russel Brand is a sociopath who will attack anyone to get attention. Not so long ago he was happy to attack the enemies of Left if it made him famous.

How can the “no enemies to the right” side defend Russell Brand when it is clear he would savage them if he saw a profit in it? How can they defend Andrew Tate when he should be swinging from a tree branch? The answer is two-fold. The first part is that while all politics is personal, it is also situational. The Brand case offers an opportunity to focus on the abuse of the law against political opponents. It is not about the odious Russell brand, but the grotesque abuse of the legal system.

In this way the “no enemies to the right” side can wear the clothes of the “principled conservatives” to both undermine their claims by holding them to their own standards and attack the behavior of the Left. This leads to the second part which is that a part of dissident politics is reminding dissidents that the point of politics is to win and gain power, not be the most high-minded loser. Sometimes winning means defending people like Russell Brand in order to damage the enemy.

The lesson here in all of this, especially for the “no enemies to the right” side who are new to dissident politics, is that principles of any kind assume a common end. This is why conservatism was a failure. They assumed the other side wanted what they wanted, but through different means. This was never true outside of the neocons who never relinquished their radical ends. In a world of conflicting moral visions, there is no place for the principled stand.

Carl Schmitt wrote, “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.” In other words, the question central to politics is who is on my side and who is not on my side. There is nothing about the answer that should imply eternity. If Russel Brand is a useful ally, then he is a useful ally. When he stops being a useful ally, then he stops being a useful ally. In politics, allies are a bus you ride to the next stop.

The Natural Solution

Posted on September 14, 2023 by thezman

What is the purpose of your life? How should a man live his life? How should we organize our societies and to what end? These are the questions that have vexed mankind for an awfully long time. In the modern age, we are enveloped in messaging about these questions. It seems that every ad is really a lecture about how you should live or how we should organize our societies to some end. This ad from a well-known toy company is a perfect example.

The liberal project, dating from the late Middle Ages to the current year, is about using reason to answer these questions. It is assumed that every life has a purpose and that there is a correct way to organize society. No one accepts that the purpose of the meth addict’s life is to be a meth addict and die on the street. Similarly, no one wants to accept that the best way to organize society is however you like. In other words, there is a right answer to these questions, not just an answer.

This is why thinking about how humans actually live is such a dangerous topic to those with an interest in such things. If you notice that one group of people behaves in a different way compared to other groups, then the right people may get the wrong idea about your commitment to the grand project. If you suggest that who we are is not something we can do much about because it is written in our genetic code, then it suggests the whole project is a waste of time.

This is why we see people in the human science take time from doing what they like to let the right people know that they do not have the wrong idea about things. This post from Gregory Clark professing to be a communist is one example. No one should care about his opinions on economics. He is not an economist or a politician. He is a historian known for tracing the heritability of social success. His book The Son Also Rises suggests genes play a large role in life outcomes.

Mr. Clark may have some interesting things to say about economics or economic policy, but no one who makes economic policy will ever read his book. That is not how economic policy gets made in the modern world. The point of his post and other public statements is to let everyone know he is not going to be any trouble when it comes to those big questions at the heart of Western society. This a ritual that academics must perform if they dare look at how man actually lives.

The irony, of course, is that if you are the sort of person who studies surnames as a proxy for genes in order to see if there is a correlation between genes and life outcomes, you probably know the answers to those questions. Further, your research just happens to confirm the answer. Even more ironic, the people who worry about the implications of such things are not fooled by the public ritual. There is something rather primitive about how these high-minded people act.

Putting all that aside, what lies at the heart of the great terror that has swept the academy and now society in general is the assumption that observations about human beings and their nature will answer those questions. If we notice that not all people are blessed with the same talents, it will tell us something about the purpose of our lives and how we ought to organize our societies. The people in that Apple ad are terrified of Mother Nature, because our best people are terrified too.

The truth of it is, a truth Gregory Clark surely knows, is that nature is silent on those big questions about how we ought to live and organize our societies. Nature cares about one thing and that is fitness. Specifically, every living thing is driven by its gene’s desire to make it to the next round of the game. If your genes make even a partial copy of themselves in the form of your children, that is a win. How you make that happen is of no interest to your genes or Mother Nature.

That sounds terribly cold, which may be one reason our best people are terrified by that being an answer to those questions. If we live in a world that does not care if we live or die and does not care if we experience any joy in the middle, well, that is a terribly harsh reality we have made for ourselves. Maybe we would have been better off not knowing the reality of the human condition. Perhaps that is why anyone who ventures in that direction gets the Eye of Sauron on him.

Another reason for the fear of Mother Nature is that if she is indifferent to those big questions at the heart of human existence, it means the answers must lie elsewhere, which leads to the most terrifying answer of all. That is, we will not be able to gain the answers to the big moral questions through reason. Reason is, after all, based on nature and our observations of the natural world. At least we assume our reason is our evolved ability to comprehend the natural world.

If we cannot reason our way to the right answers to those moral questions, then it leaves three options that no one likes. One option is the supernatural. For most of human existence, the gods answered these questions. Often, the gods answered these questions through what we think of us culture and tradition. We do things a certain way because of this thing that happened with Zeus in the before times. Of course, reality could be an illusion, but that is a topic for another time.

Where that leaves us if we rule out nature as the answer to the big questions, and we never think about the illusion of reality business, are the two things that the liberal project has been trying to erase since the beginning. The main role of the liberal project has been to remove what the liberals called superstition, but which everyone else calls God, as a possible answer. Secondarily, the project has removed past practice as an answer for why we live as we live.

That is the great dilemma of the liberal project. Like a scientist who has spent his career chasing one idea only to find that his work is a dead end, the liberal project perpetuates itself through control of the institutions. The reason they say science progresses one funeral at a time is because the old guys in every field tend to be the biggest obstacle to the young guys with new ideas. In the case of liberalism, the defenders of the dream for an answer in pure reason terrorize those who think otherwise.

In the end, Mother Nature is indifferent to the demands of her creation for answers to the great questions and she is indifferent to whether we understand this. The answers to the great questions do not lie in nature or in a natural reason. The best we can do with our natural reason is improve the general material well-being of the human condition and maybe reduce the friction in human relations. Otherwise, our reason is not much use to us in this process.

If we wish to know the answers, then it means returning to that which we have abandoned, which is to ask the gods for the answer. If that is unsatisfactory, then we can pretend they answered through our traditions and customs. It is not that any of this will provide the universally corrects answer. It is that it will provide an answer and then maybe we can stop arguing about these questions. Then maybe Western man will be able to live in peace with the rest of the world.

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