Past And Present

Posted on May 25, 2023 by thezman

This week we have seen two more contenders join the Republican primary field, promising to be happy warriors to save America. Tim Scott from South Carolina and Ron DeSantis of Florida bring the field to eight, as far as the candidates with any chance of getting on the debate stage. With the exception of Trump and Ramaswamy, the field is all doing some version of conservative nostalgia. That is a mix of the crucible, the covenant, and the creed.

That last bit comes from a short little book titled After Nationalism which describes the three main ways the American ruling class has unified the country. The crucible is the melting pot story of America. The covenant is the claim that America has a special purpose in the world. The creed is the old familiar civic nationalist argument that America is just a collection of ideas. Conservatism has relied on all three to market candidates and programs over the years.

The theme of the book is that those three unifying narratives are no longer working as the country devolves into warring tribes. You can see that in the presentation from the Republican candidates as they announce their campaigns. The Tim Scott show was like a 1990’s Conservative Inc. fantasy about the black vote. The DeSantis campaign teased his announcement with this ad on Twitter, which is Bush era patriotism without the promise of a crusade against Islam.

What the Republican primary is going to give us is another unhealthy dose of the old conservative formula. On the one hand, you are supposed to ignore the fact that you live around people who look nothing like you. On the other hand, you are supposed to focus on those nebulous ideals that allegedly define America. As long as everyone forgets about the long list of harms that have been inflicted on them over the last several decades, we can unite to save the country!

The one exception to all of this is Trump, who is a weird product of the two main forces colliding in the present moment. The one force is the old civic nationalism that held the white middle-class together and tightly bound it to both the Republican party and the political system itself. The other force is the radical changes unleashed by the ruling elites who no longer believe in the old civic nationalism. Trump and his fans exist in that incoherent vortex created by these colliding forces.

In fairness to Ron DeSantis, he seems to share the moral outrage of the average white person over the things we are seeing. His opposition to the sexualization of children is genuine, as well as his opposition to the tribal politics of the Left. Unlike the rest of the field opposing Trump, DeSantis is a normal person who is properly offended by the lunacy that has been unleashed on normal people. Like most normal people, he does not understand why this is happening.

The terms Left and Right have lost their meaning, but we still use them because we have nothing else at the moment. We can, however, see the vague outlines of a new scale developing when we look at the Republican field. Instead of the old 20th century poles of Hitler at one end and Stalin at the other, the new poles are the post-Marx culture warriors at one end and the biological realists at the other. The former is more fully developed, while the latter is still evolving.

Most of the Republican field is left of center. They largely agree with the moral claims of the culture warriors. They disagree, mildly, with their tactics. Tim Scott has no real objection to the antiwhite pogroms run by the military, for example, he just worries that they make it more difficult to wage pointless wars of choice. Nikki Haley is fine with the woke capital media campaigns, but her consultants tell her that she has to pretend to be upset about these things when she is interviewed.

DeSantis is one guy right of center on this stuff. He does not agree with the culture warriors, but he thinks the old system remains intact and that these weirdos are just random lunatics that have slipped their leash. He thinks the system can deal with these people without making any changes to the system. All we have to do is go back to our American principles. In other words, he is a guy who sees the iceberg, but he does not appreciate the part under the water.

On this scale, Trump lies just to the right of DeSantis. In fact, the main difference is style, owing to the difference in temperament. DeSantis responds to the current madness by pulling out the rule book. Trump responds to the current madness by throwing a chair out the window. It is not that either man is more or less offended by what is happening. They have different personalities and different worldviews, based on vastly different lives, so they react differently.

Even so, Trump is still in the camp that thinks the system can solve this crisis, if the right people are running the system. Viscerally he senses that this may not be true which helps explain his vacillation. Since Trump came on the scene, he has been hearing the distant calls of right-wing nationalism, but he lacks the understanding to make out what is being said. He is a man being pulled in multiple directions because he senses that something is terribly wrong with the system.

This conflict between the past and the present is why the Republicans are about to replay their 2016 primary. They have a more diverse field than in 2016 and Trump is not viewed as a novelty act. DeSantis is a better version of Ted Cruz, but he is occupying the same place as Cruz occupied in the 2016 race. Trump, of course, is an improved version of himself, having suffered the full force of the regime. He is not just a rambunctious rebuke, but a legitimate victim of the regime.

Even so, this replay of the 2016 election is due to the fact that the party and the country are stuck in the past. Everything about our present politics is backward looking, as if no one really wants to face up to the present. The 2016 election should have broken both parties free of the past, but instead it made them cling tighter. This election will be a reboot of the old franchise, not because the original was so good, but because no one can think of anything new that better fits the times.

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The Death Of Conservatism

Posted on May 24, 2023 by thezman

It is fair to say that American conservatism is dead, at least the version that has been sold to us by the conservative industrial complex. They still rake in millions from corporate donors, but the public audience for this stuff is largely confined to rest homes in the sun belt. Flag waving and tax breaks for corporations is just not the crowd pleaser it was a decade ago, much less forty years ago. Conservatism as a political force is headed to the dustbin of history.

The question is, why did it fail? Lost in the endless stream of outrage, real and manufactured, is the fact that the winners are ridiculous. Conservatism lost to men in sundresses demanding to wave their genitals in the face of school children. They lost to people who think Hitler is hiding under their bed. They lost to childless middle-aged women drunk on cheap wine, complaining about men on Twitter. It took effort to lose to this collection of bourgeois misfits.

One reason conservatism failed in America is that conservatives could never accept that people lie in politics. In fact, lying is an essential part of politics. The reason is you must paint your opponents as the bad guys and your side as the good guys, which means gross exaggeration. Conservatives never accepted this. Instead, they demanded as much factual accuracy from their side as possible. When people on their side would exaggerate, conservatives were there to set the record straight.

This was not the result of stupidity. American conservatism evolved into the 1980’s as the antidote to politics. They used to make this point in the Reagan years. Conservatism was the lack of politics. Instead, it was just problem solving. That was very appealing to people who did not like rolling around on the mud with left-wing kooks, but it was a terrible way to engage in politics. It is part of what made conservatism the beautiful losers described by Sam Francis.

Related to this was the fact that American conservatism embraced the libertarian idea that people are motivated by rational self-interest. For conservatives in the 20th century, people were not spiritual beings, so much as moist robots who naturally responded to incentives, particularly economic incentives. This is why conservatism was the accounting department for the welfare state. The only way they could relate to their audience was through the jargon of popular economics.

Another result of this was the habit of conservatives to rely on charts and graphs in response to moral claims. The Left would demand we do something about some victim group and conservatives would respond with a table of figures showing that the victims were not really victims. It was not that it made conservatism heartless, but that it made them seem brainless. They kept falling for the same traps, eventually succumbing to the moral claims of the Left.

That is the probably the main failing of American conservatism. To this day they insist that politics is about solving problems. This is false. Politics is always about friends and enemies and those are defined on moral terms. No one wants to fight someone for making a math error. Politics is so nasty and feral because the opponents see one another in moral terms. The other guy is the bad guy because he does not love what you love and hate what you hate.

The Left has always understood this. The reason that the demand for Nazis exceeds the historic global supply is the Left always needs villains. Even when their opponents agree with them, they still call them the worst names in their book. Donald Trump would have been happy to make generous deals with the Democrats, but they needed to hate him more than they wanted a deal. This is why the Left steamrolled conservatives on every issue. They work only in morality, not facts and reason.

This inability to understand what drives politics may explain the inability to accept that their opponents genuinely believe what they are saying. Much of what makes up conservative commentary is a claim that the Left does not actually believe what they are saying, but instead they are using it as cover for money and power. For conservatives, everything is reduced to money and power, because this is what motivates the moist robots they imagine as their audience.

This is why conservatives have always underestimated the Left. Because they cannot accept that these people believe what they are saying, they just assume they will stop saying it once they have money and power. Instead, the Left uses their newly acquired money and power to act on what they said and produce more outlandish things they can push onto society. When you think people are moist robots, you stop believing that people can be evil, which is how evil triumphs.

Finally, the great failure of American conservatism will be seen in the Republican primary that kicks off this summer. The field challenging Trump will insist that everyone must rally around cleaning up the mess created by the Left. They will make the oldest of conservative arguments. That is, you must forget about the crimes committed against you by the other side and instead rally with your fellow citizens, even the ones who hate you, to fight for America!

Of course, this requires you to not get anything you want and instead normalize the latest insanity from the Left. You see, it is your duty as an American to sacrifice your interests for the nebulous concept of America. This was powerful magic forty years ago when the country was 85% white and had a handful of foreigners. In a country being overrun by migrants and hyper-racialized lunatics attacking white people, this rallying cry sounds like a suicide cult.

Robert Lewis Dabney famously described conservatism as “merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition.” This was always true, for sure, but it worked for a long time because the radicals were still aspirational, rather than suicidal. The dialectic between the Left and the Right in American was a useful engine for maintaining the ruling class consensus. One side proposed, the other side opposed, and the consensus was some compromise.

This changed just as conservatism reached its peak. The triumph of conservatism in the 1980’s was followed by the descent of progressivism into the dark, suicidal politics of nihilism and Gnosticism. Conservatives have never come to terms with this and as a result have been a steep decline ever since. As America descends into tribal politics that must follow the transition to majority-minority demographics, conservatism will become a museum piece and then forgotten.

The Tyranny Of The Stupid

Posted on May 22, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about the paradox of tolerance, a post about the growing Ukraine quagmire and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

In The Past is a Future Country, Ed Dutton and J.O.A. Rayner-Hilles, argue that the West is about to be swamped by an unsustainable wave of stupid people. This is not the result of immigration, but rather the culmination of an evolutionary process that began in the Industrial Revolution. Darwinian selection weakened along with the increase in living standards. The result is a steady increase in narcissistic stupid people who undermine the fundamentals of Western society.

In this post, Ed Dutton makes the point that liberal female politicians are getting dumber, as a result of this process he outlined in his book. He relies on two examples, Sanna Marin of Finland and Angela Rayner of Britain, to make his point. Both women are on what we insist on calling the Left and both women are morons. Not only are they stupid, but they appear to have come from stupid parents. They are Nth generation morons who have risen to the top of politics.

It is an amusing and satisfying read for people who think of themselves on the Right, even if he is making sweeping claims from just two examples. For as long as anyone can recall, the people we call the Left have claimed that their opponents are unsophisticated morons who should be dismissed. Having this turned on its head with the use of the human sciences is good fun, but it may be missing the real cause for the great dumbing down of Western politics.

The ideal politician in a liberal democracy has an extremely high verbal dexterity along with an extremely low degree of self-awareness. In fact, the best politicians of this age are glib narcissists who have never done anything useful. Much of the panic over Donald Trump is due to the fact he worked in the dreaded private sector. Having had anything other than a ceremonial position in the real economy is so strange in politics that the political class naturally views it as a defect.

The reason for this is despite the fact we insist on calling it politics, there is little in the way of politics happening in a modern liberal democracy. Everyone in the political system agrees on the moral claims. As Marx noted, when you get the morality settled, there is no need for politics. Put another way, once everyone agrees on the goal, then you are left with a debate about how best to achieve it. The barrier to entry in modern politics is the moral questions.

As a result, the selection pressure in politics is for people who will never color outside the lines and always promote the latest thing. The more natural someone is at conforming to the prevailing orthodoxy, the less likely they are to question what is demanded of them. Of course, if they are especially good at appearing enthusiastic about the latest thing, then all the better. The people in charge are always on the hunt for the glib toady who can really sell the latest thing.

As we see with actors, a lack of self-awareness is key. Someone who is painfully aware of how they look to others, or worries about how they look to others, is not going to be a particularly good performer. Humiliating yourself for laughs or applause works best when you cannot imagine the concept of humiliation. It is why the narcissistic moron is a well-known type in the entertainment world. An idiot who thinks highly of himself, but never questions the script is an ideal actor.

Just as an actor who easily “believes in the project” is always in demand, the politician who is always ready to run with the latest thing is always rewarded. His donors will make sure he is kept in the lifestyle he thinks he deserves. His party will always rely on him to take point on the latest thing. Joe Biden made a long career in politics being a narcissistic simpleton, despite stealing everything in sight. Joe Biden is the perfection of modern democratic politics.

It is not just electoral politics where we see this process, but the politics of the managerial elite as well. David French is a goofy looking buffoon but he has risen to the top of the political media because he has no shame. He will say whatever he needs to say in order to shine amongst the other simpletons. French is the combination of oleaginous rumpswab and narcissistic simpleton that has come to define the chattering classes in the United States.

All of this is the result of democracy. Not the mechanics of voting, but the belief that the general will is the moral authority. Once a society accepts this claim, turns the mob into a god, then moral conformity must follow. After all, if there is no agreement, the general will is unknown, then the people are left with no moral authority. Therefore, the solution is to impose a moral consensus and religiously oppress dissent. The only way democracy can work is if everyone agrees.

This is why Western societies are now policed by a volunteer army of simpletons, prodded along by the autocrats. Democracy collapses if there is not a perceived agreement on the moral questions. Even though the people who rise to the top are stupid, they understand the need for consensus. This is why they so enthusiastically impose the latest thing on the public. Who they are depends upon the belief that everyone supports the latest thing.

None of this is to say that Dutton is wrong about Darwinian selection pressure declining with material prosperity. That is certainly true. Smart people made society safer for stupid people, which allowed the stupid to multiply like tribbles. The reason the stupid are dominating politics, however, is that democracy selects for stupidity because stupid people are much more likely to support the moral consensus. Poverty would not arrest our descent into democratic imbecility.

Radicalizing Ron

Posted on May 18, 2023 by thezman

Memorial Day is a little more than a week away and it is both the unofficial start of summer and the start of the presidential campaign season. Look for Mike Pence and Ron DeSantis to make it official with a kick-off event over the long weekend. Tim Scott may also jump into the race, as he set up an exploratory committee in April, which usually precedes an official announcement. That will bring the field to nine on the Republican side and two on the Democratic side.

In theory, when you run for office, you are running on a platform that you think makes you the best man for the job. In reality, the first step is to run for the nomination, which revolves around being the best chance to win the general election. You may have a great plan for the office, but if you have no chance to win the general election, the voters are not going to support you in the primary. This is why Vivek Ramaswamy will be this cycle’s Andrew Yang.

Normally, the out of office party has a scramble in their primary, where the candidates make their case for being the nominee. It is one part personality contest and one part argument for beating the incumbent. In the case of the Republicans, this would normally mean who offers the best shot to beat Biden. If it is an open seat where both parties are seeking a fresh face, then the primaries tend to devolve into who has the most institutional support in their respective party.

This is what made the 2016 presidential election so rare. Both parties should have had a scramble, but the Democrats rigged their primary in favor of Clinton. The Republicans were ready to rig their primary for Jeb Bush. That way the party insiders could relive the 1990’s with a Bush – Clinton rubber match. Trump wrecked that for the Republicans by changing the calculus of the primary. He made the race into a no confidence vote for the party and the political establishment.

Fast forward to the upcoming Republican primary and the party has the same problem plus additional problems. The base of the party is still very salty with regards to the party leadership and the political establishment. That turned up in the midterm where turnout was tepid in many races. Last week the Republicans lost a sure thing election in Colorado to a random African. They just lost the Jacksonville Florida mayor’s race, despite having huge advantage in money.

Of course, Trump is even more of a middle-finger to the system now than he was in 2016, which strengthens his appeal to disaffected primary voters. The people the voters hate have been waging jihad against Trump since he left office. No one talks about what he did or did not do in office, because the media is full of threats and warnings about Trump and the people who support him. When Biden warned about white supremacy the other day, every Trump voter got the message.

That is the new element to this cycle. Donald Trump is a rich man who could retire from politics and enjoy himself. He could spend his time doing what he truly loves, which is real estate schemes. Whatever you think about the man, he is really good at real estate schemes, and he has a passion for it. Instead, he chooses to be a martyr in a political fight against the full force of the regime. The sorts of people who keep the country going are naturally sympathetic to what Trump is doing.

This is why none of the other options in the Republican primary have a chance to win the nomination, barring extraordinary events. Dreary dullards like Asa Hutchinson, Nikki Haley and Mike Pence can operate only as avatars for what Trump the political symbol represents, which is a rejection of the establishment. The party would be better served by putting cardboard cutouts of various party hacks on stage. Trump making fun of a silhouette of Mitch McConnell would make good television.

Interestingly, the one candidate who seems to understand what is going to happen is Vivek Ramaswamy, who avoids talking about Trump. He has a lot of money which is how he buys his way onto Fox News interviews. In those appearances, he is careful to avoid the Trump issue. Instead, he repeats Trump issues and makes an entertaining complaint against the system. Again, he has no chance, but he seems to get the problem the GOP field is facing.

This is the problem DeSantis faces. He is the only plausible alternative to Trump, but if he attacks Trump, he will sound like the establishment sissies and media rage heads who have been attacking Trump for close to a decade. On the other hand, his path to victory is to argue that he has a better chance of winning the general election than Trump and that is going to require a direct comparison between himself as a candidate and Trump as the well-known public figure.

One clue as to how Team DeSantis is going to try and square that circle is by staking out positions to the right of Trump on things like immigration. He just signed a bill enforcing the states labor laws with regards to migrant workers. The new law requires employers to use E-Verify when hiring. This is something that sets DeSantis apart from the party establishment, but it also puts him to the right of Trump, who keeps doing the legal versus illegal immigration thing.

This is just one issue. DeSantis has already made himself a champion of children with his tough stance on the groomer issue. He has come under fire from the degenerate community over this stuff, with the libertarians leading the charge against his policies toward the Disney corporation. As a political matter, if you have the rainbow warriors and the libertarians attacking you, then you will get a fair hearing from the sorts of people who vote in Republican primaries.

This may be why the regime is worried about DeSantis. His only path to victory is to move the Overton window away from where the regime wants it. Inevitably, Trump will seek to outflank DeSantis on these issues. Imagine Trump taking on the trannies and you can see why Washington is worried. Throw in the opportunistic and entertaining Ramaswamy and the gap between the Cloud People and the Dirt People could become an impossible to ignore chasm by 2024.

That may be the ironic twist to the effort to stop Trump. Ron DeSantis is supposed to be Trumpism without Trump, but in the end, he may be a radicalizing agent that shifts the party base further toward a revolt against the regime. In order to avoid being called Neocon Ron, DeSantis will have to be Radical Ron and in so doing he will help legitimize a radical rejection of regime morality. Opposing the regime moves from instinctive reaction to a radical imperative.

The Modern Mirsky

Posted on May 16, 2023 by thezman

In 1904, Prince Pyotr Mirsky was appointed Minister of the Interior by Tsar Nicholas II, after the previous Minister of the Interior, Vyacheslav von Plehve, had been assassinated by Jewish revolutionaries. This was a volatile time in Tsarist Russia, as trust in the system was at a low. Liberal reformers wanted what they thought the West had in terms of political freedom. Revolutionaries were conducting terror campaigns in order to undermine the tsarist system.

For his part, Mirsky was both a reformer and loyal to the Tsarist system. In his role as Governor-General of Vilna, which is modern day Lithuania and Belarus, Mirsky implemented liberal reforms like granting political rights, ending the pogroms against the Jews, and allowing a degree of autonomy to ethnic minorities. In his role as Minister of the Interior, he granted freedom of the press, freedom of religion and increased the power and authority of local self-government.

Mirsky was not a reformer because he had dreams of creating a liberal paradise to replace tsarist Russia. He was a reformer because he worried that the lack of reform would result in more radicalism, like the sort that had claimed the life of his predecessor and the life of the Tsar’s grandfather. For Mirsky and his supporters within the system, liberal reform was a way to address some of the issues of the people, while also maintaining the legitimacy of the tsarist system.

Uncertain times always product men like Mirsky. He was not the only reformer around Tsar Nicholas before the revolution. There were others but all of them failed to arrest the process that eventually led to revolution. Reformers were around the King Louis XVI and among the aristocracy prior to the French Revolution. They failed for the same reason Mirsky failed. There were men who feared reform would go too far and there were those who feared reform would not go far enough.

This is what should come to mind while watching Elon Musk try to navigate his way through the current crisis. Musk is a reformer at heart. He bought Twitter because he thought it was drifting away from its essential purpose which is to allow for free and open debate about the issues of the day. His inhospitable takeover of the company was driven by a genuine concern for what is happening in the West. Like all reformers, Musk fears what could happen if current trends continue.

It may seem a bit odd to compare Musk to Mirsky or any of the other reformers who existed in revolutionary times. After all, Musk is the world’s richest man. In the managerial age, however, that only buys a seat at the table. The nine other men in the top-10 richest list are worth five times Musk combined. Apple has a hedge fund that is ten times the wealth of Musk. Blackrock controls trillions in assets and has unlimited access to the highest reaches of government.

While Musk may be the world’s richest man and the most famous of the plutocracy, he is just one voice among many. The managerial elite is thousands, and the managerial class is millions of people. This new class is analogous to the aristocratic classes that existed in 18th century France and 19th century Russia. The best Musk or any liberal reformer can do is influence the people in the system. This is what Musk is attempting with his mild reforms of Twitter.

In this illiberal age, Elon Musk has appointed himself to be the minister of speech on-line and is attempting to roll back the reactionary controls that were put in place by the ruling class over the last decade. While Twitter is not the internet of old, Musk has rolled back much of the censorship. He still bans certain accounts, mostly as a way to tell the reactionaries that his reforms will not go too far. Otherwise, he has had a light hand on the censorship of his platform.

This is where that old revolutionary vice shows its jaws. The side that fears the reforms will go too far has successfully organized an advertising boycott. State sanctioned pressure groups like Media Matters have organized other pressure groups to harass companies that were advertising on Twitter. Those companies dropped their ads, resulting in a fifty percent decline in ad revenue. Musk has been forced to hire a girl boss approved by the reactionaries to be his new CEO.

Meanwhile, the other jaw of the vice sees what is happening and assumes Musk will eventually be brought to heel. Open sites like Gab continue to flourish, building on the alternative platform model. Amusingly and a bit ironically, the hard-core censors are abandoning Twitter for the opposite reason. Mass media companies, no longer assured of artificial reach on Twitter, are also jumping ship. Musk is facing the same dilemma all reformers face when taking the middle position.

On January 22, 1905, soldiers of the Imperial Guard fired on demonstrators in Saint Petersburg as they marched towards the Winter Palace. Hundreds were killed and thousands were arrested in what came to be known as Bloody Sunday. Mirsky denied having any role in it, but he was blamed by his conservative opponents, as well as the radical opponents of his half-measures. Mirsky did the honorable thing and resigned from his office and retired from politics.

In the end, Mirsky was like all prior reformers in that he was both right and wrong about what was happening. He was correct that radicalism was spreading due to the inability of the system to address the issues of the times. He was wrong in thinking that the solutions to the problems of the system could be found in the system. Just as there was no saving King Louis XVI and the old order, there was no saving Tsar Nicholas II and the system that made him possible.

This is where liberal reformers like Musk find themselves. On the one hand, they are correct in fearing a rising tide of radicalism. He rightly sees that it is driven in part by the abuses of the ruling class, of which he is a part. The trouble is the system cannot withstand open debate. It cannot risk questioning the shibboleths that sustain the moral framework at the heart of the managerial system. In the end, reformers will be crushed by that old vice that has destroyed prior reformers.

Evil & Stupid

Posted on May 10, 2023 by thezman

Congressman Thomas Massie (R-Agribusiness) is waging jihad against his fellow Republicans in the House over H.R. 2, an immigration bill that has been working through the House since January. He has specifically targeted the E-Verify provision, that would require employers to use the system, which has been in place for decades, to verify that their employees are legally allowed to work in the country. He has been on Twitter railing against the E-Verify system.

There are two schools of thought as to why Massie has picked out this provision of the bill as his reason for opposing it. One is the old “Republicans donors like cheap labor” argument, which is mostly true. Massie gets a lot of money from agribusiness, which relies on illegal aliens to work in meat packing plants, commercial farming enterprises and food processing facilities. What you never find in a food processing plant these days is anyone speaking English.

The other explanation for Massie’s berserk opposition to this provision is that he is a libertarian who spasmodically opposes government programs. He has been dressing up his arguments in libertarian jibber-jabber. He claims that Joe Biden will use the system to prevent normal Americans from working. According to Massie, this program will require you to get permission from Joe Biden in order to work, which is a weird claim, but consistent with libertarianism.

In fairness, both explanations could be true. In order to get into the House of Senate, you have to be willing to take bribes from the donor class. The reason both parties support the current chaos is because both parties have the same paymasters. Those paymasters think borders are bad for business, so they oppose anything that would result in an orderly border policy. Hiring libertarian goofballs to be the messenger on this makes it look principled, rather than cynical.

The donor class will get serious about immigration when they start feeling the pain of immigration in their own lives. This is what happened a century ago. When newly imported anarchist and communist started killing rich people, rich people suddenly got religion on immigration. In short order Congress passed bills effectively ending immigration for over half a century. We will see the same thing once a rich person is murdered by Mexican cartel members.

There is another reason for Massie’s behavior. He may be a sociopath. His claims about E-Verify are obvious lies, yet he tells them with enthusiasm. The system has been in place for decades, but it has been voluntary. In theory, employers are prohibited from hiring illegal aliens, but they ignore the law. The point of making E-Verify mandatory is to force employers to comply with existing law. Massie’s claims about it being a new government program are an absurd lie.

Putting that aside, what we are seeing here is an example of how the Republican Party is an ongoing fraud on its voters. It exists only as a relief valve. You get mad at the Democratic administration and vote Republican. They promise to do something about the latest thing, but then they always find a “principled reason” for not doing something about the latest thing. You see all of their favorite tricks in this latest immigration bill that Biden has already promised to veto.

The first trick is what Massie is doing. He claims to oppose open borders in theory, but he can never find a proposal he likes. Either the proposed solution violates his libertarian principles or, as he argues in this case, the proposed solution is not perfect, so not good enough for him. If you read his Twitter, you will see that he is playing both of these tricks on his voters right now. He says E-Verify will not work and it is a violation of his principled stand against the government.

Of course, the only reason the House is pushing this bill along is the Republicans know it has no chance of becoming law. When they had the House, the Senate, and Trump in the White House, they could not be bothered. Trump was sitting there with his pen ready to sign an immigration bill, but there were always more important things to do like moving commas around the tax code. Republicans only get serious on immigration when they have no chance of passing legislation.

The worst part of this fraud is that people like Thomas Massie deliberately use the virtues of their voters against them. In this case, he is waving the bloody flag of Covid around to scare his voters. “See what they did with Covid now imagine what they will do with this program!” Meanwhile, over three million illegals have entered the country since the start of the year. Millions more are queued up. America is facing an invasion and the Republicans are aiding and abetting it.

Stanton Evans famously quipped “We have two parties here, and only two. One is the evil party, and the other is the stupid party.” Ever since it has been assumed that the Democrats are the evil party and the Republicans the stupid party. The truth is the parties are neither of those things. It is the voters. People who vote for Democrats are evil, while the people who continue to vote Republican are stupid. Only when enough people smarten up will be able to address the evil.

Gradually Then Suddenly

Posted on May 4, 2023 by thezman

There is a famous exchange in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises where over drinks one character asks another how he went bankrupt. The reply is “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” Often this is misquoted as “a little at a time then all of a sudden” which sounds better than the original. Hemingway was famous for his economy of language, which did not always serve him well. Even so, it is probably Hemingway’s most famous line, even if most people do not know the source.

The main reason it is a famous line is it is true in the narrow sense of business, but also in the broader sense of life itself. Things do not suddenly fall apart all of a sudden for no reason at all. In fact, the expression “no reason at all” precedes all of the big lies because nothing happens for no reason at all. The big events in human history are the slow buildup of little things then all of a sudden, a lot of history seems to happen in a short period of time, to borrow another famous expression.

This is something to keep in mind while following this story about an FBI whistleblower’s claims regarding the Biden family. According to Sen. Chuck Grassley and Rep. James Comer, this whistleblower has presented to them documentation showing the FBI has evidence of a pay-for-play scheme run by the family of Joe Biden while he was Vice President. The allegation is that Biden sold his influence to a foreign entity in exchange for cash to the Biden family.

For starters, this is not a new claim, but coming from two politicians not known for rocking the boat changes the nature of the charges. Joe Biden has been dogged by corruption allegations for a long time. He is worth tens of millions despite never having had a job outside government. That and he bragged on the campaign trail about extorting personal favors from the Ukrainian government. He got a prosecutor fired by threatening to withhold an aid package.

Next week there will reportedly be a hearing at which the current head of the FBI will be asked pointed questions about the specific documents Grassley and Comer cite in their letter to the FBI. Most likely Christopher Wray will lie and stonewall at the hearing, refusing to acknowledge even his own existence as a way of telling Congress that he is above the law. This is one of those gradual things. Gradually, the bureaucracy refuses to acknowledge the authority of Congress.

Those paying attention know the FBI is America’s most corrupt organization. They tried to overturn the 2016 election by running an illegal surveillance operation on Trump, then engineered a year’s long coverup of it. Holding black mail material on Biden may actually be worse. That is the real story here. They also have Hunter’s laptop, which they tried to hide and still refuse to acknowledge. Why would they need all of this dirt on a sitting President?

This is one of those gradual events. In isolation, the FBI shenanigans during the Trump era could be written off as partisan zealots abusing their power, but when you add in this stuff you suddenly get a different picture. What emerges is something like a praetorian guard controlling the most important offices in the system through blackmail, extortion, and espionage. The question that should follow is who else are they blackmailing with secret material?

Another gradual moment is the great leaving alone the media is giving to this and the other whistleblowers who have revealed corruption in the FBI. If such revelations happened in the Trump years, the coverage would be wall-to-wall. We would know the name of the whistleblower, as the press would have made her a star. The reputation of the media is very poor, but most people still trust it. This sort of bias is what will eventually lead to the total collapse in trust.

A glimpse of what is coming can be seen in the Tucker Carlson drama. Fox News Channel has lost half their audience since they fired their most popular host, but the collapse is not just about Carlson. It is the final straw, the one break in trust that on top of many others is what finally does it for these former viewers. Gradually, then all of a sudden people realized that Fox News was a scam, run by grifters who privately mocked the people in their audience.

Of course, the Joe Biden story is itself an example of the gradually then suddenly phenomenon in our politics. For half a century he was nothing more than an affable dimwit who represented the interests of the credit card companies. Everyone in Washington knew Joe Biden was a stupid man, but he was likable and generally regarded as an honest man. Sure, he told outlandish lies about his life, but no one thought he was taking bribes.

As with everything else in the 1990’s, Joe Biden appears to have gone from affable dimwit who was mostly honest to a man who walked around Washington with a list of prices for the services he could offer. Those two grifters from the Ozarks set the ball in motion for everyone. If their corruption was allowed, then why not a little influence peddling in the Senate? If that is okay, then why not sell insider information in exchange for stock tips?

This is how we find ourselves with a corrupt buffoon in the Whitehouse, held hostage by a secret police relying on blackmail and extortion. All of those small steps here and there down the path of corruption eventually led to that all of a sudden moment on election night in 2020. Half a century ago when Joe Biden was in his prime, no serious person imagined him in the White House, unless he was on a visitors pass, but all of a sudden, he is president.

In the fullness of time, we will experience the great all of a sudden moment and the usual suspects will swear it was for no reason at all. In reality it will be the result of those many gradual changes that began with the decision by official Washington to invite the Devil into their world. After that, it was one small compromise here, another there, until there were no rules at all, just naked power. Then all of a sudden, no one had any reason to trust anything, and Hell followed after it.

The Narrative Industrial Complex

Posted on May 2, 2023 by thezman

One analysis of the Roman Empire says that it reached a point where the cost of maintaining the empire exceeded the benefits of empire. The investments required to maintain the complex social and political structures to maintain the empire continued to rise while the benefits slowly fell to zero. This is the general thesis presented by Joseph Tainter in his book The Collapse of Complex Societies. Complex solutions eventually reach a point of diminishing marginal returns.

We may be seeing a similar issue with the Global America Empire. On the one hand, we have the massive amount of debt accumulation to maintain the global military presence required to maintain the empire. The official United States military budget exceeds the combined total of the other great powers. No one really knows what the actual cost of the military is, as so much of it is off budget. Of course, this allows many of the rulers to get rich in the process.

On the other hand. Enormous amounts of time and energy are invested in maintaining the rationale for the empire. Unlike the Roman empire, which was ruled by a small number of men, democratic empire must continue to provide energy to the spring of democracy, which is moral certainty. Rome conquered because it could, while America conquers because it has a moral duty. “Our democracy” requires an endless war against those who resist being crushed by “our democracy.”

What this means is that in addition to the trillions spent on weapons and armies, trillions are also spent on maintaining the moral framework. This cost is not strictly a government expense, but the system requires it, so corporations are as engaged in narrative maintenance as government entities. Companies embrace degenerate social fads, like crossdressing, because they support the system. They support the system because it is the system that makes them possible.

The most obvious example is the media. Thirty years ago, much of what a newspaper did, even the big broadsheets like the Washington Post and New York Times, was report on the mundane affairs of the world. They promoted left-wing causes on the editorial side, but the news side was the boring stuff of the news. Today, the entirety of the mass media is engaged in the support of narratives. These entities are staffed with content creators and storytellers.

Here is an example in the Washington Post. Three people were assigned the job of creating a story to explain the mass shooter phenomenon. The plot here is that crazy white people are irrationally paranoid about crime, so they are going shooty all of sudden, for no reason at all! You see, crime is just fine. In fact, under the patient rule of Dear Leader, crime is better now. The real problem is these heavily armed white people and their racism.

Of course, the mass shooter phenomenon is a narrative created by the same people now trying to explain it. The fact is, America is a big country. That means there are lots of potential crackpots, compared to a small country like Norway. When you look at the numbers on mass shootings, America is doing better than most. Norway, on the other hand, seems to have a problem. While “per capita” is a racist trope, it is the best way to understand crime data.

Enormous amounts of time and money are directed by the regime into gun grabbing and concealing the color of crime. The Mexican national who went on a killing spree in Texas had his picture whitened by the news media. This is a thing that started with the “white Hispanic” George Zimmerman who did the world a favor and killed Trayvon Martin ten years ago. Every media company now has people whose sole job is to whitewash criminals this way.

The color of crime is just one tiny area of the narrative support system. The New York Times had a whole floor full of content creators pushing various aspects of the Russian collusion hoax during the Trump years. Thousands of people in the media are now used to push the Ukraine story. Think about the cost in time and money that is required to fake a Joe Biden press conference. The entire media complex is now employed in the creation and support of narratives.

Again, the media has always been run by regime toadies, but thirty years ago most of what they did was reporting. The bigshot columnists and editors were allowed to put their thumb on the scale in terms of what got promoted. The rest of the people produced mundane news accounts. What we see today is an industrial bullshit machine that exists only to crank out new narratives in support of the regime or new tales to promote existing regime narratives.

This is just one small part of the narrative industrial complex. Tens of thousands of people in government have been repurposed to the task. Corporations have whole floors of people dedicated to the job of pushing the latest thing. Hollywood is just another marketing arm of the regime. Of course, the big tech platforms have dedicated themselves to protecting and promoting regime narratives. More people engage in censoring the internet now than in maintaining it.

The Twitter experience offers some insight into the cost of this. When Musk took over, he fired waves of people. His rule was that if you wrote code, you stayed, but if not then you were gone unless you could explain yourself. He eventually fired eighty percent of the staff. The website was unaffected. The reason is those fired people were employed to police and promote the current narratives. They did nothing to keep the site running or make the business profitable.

What all of this suggests is that the cost of maintaining the rationale for the Global American Empire has reached the point of diminishing returns. Just as the Roman empire’s investment in complex systems to maintain itself reached the point of diminishing returns, the cost of the imperial bullshit system has reached that point and maybe blown way past it. The more they try to sell the latest narrative, the less likely people are to accept the next narrative.

The Odious Carbuncle Problem

Posted on May 1, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about American feudalism, a post about the NFL draft show and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

Imagine someone trying to convince you to do something by arguing that this thing is in your financial interests. They give you a stock tip, for example. You check it out and decide to buy some of the stock. In the following weeks, the stock price collapses, and you lose money. Obviously, you will not be happy, but you are not going to assume the guy who gave you the stock tip wanted to harm you. Unless you bought the stock from him, you will assume he made the same error as you.

Now think about a different scenario in which someone convinces you to do something because it is the right thing to do. In other words, he is not appealing to your desire to make money, but your desire to be viewed as a good person. The deed in this case is donating to some cause. You check it out and donate, but soon learn that it is a fraud and the people involved are swindlers. The person who tricked you into giving money was also in on the scheme.

If we assume the money lost is equal in both cases, you are going to have much stronger feelings toward the second person than the first person. One reason is the assumed intent of the two people. The first guy was trying to help you but was wrong about his stock tip. The second person wanted to rob you. Even if the first guy was reckless in his behavior, he was not trying to harm you, but there is no doubt about the intent of the second guy.

More important, the first person appealed to your greed, while the second person appealed to your morality in order to trick you. We can accept some blame when we let our vices get the better of us, as in the stock tip scenario. You let the idea of free money cloud your judgement. When someone turns your virtue into a vice, by playing on your good intentions in order to harm you, it challenges the idea of right and wrong, which is far worse than simple theft.

This is what comes to mind reading this post in First Things. George Weigel is a well-known neocon and warmonger. The timing of the post is a bit odd, given that we are in the end phase of the war. The time for making the “moral case” for yet another war on the world was a year ago. It suggests the Kagan cult is planning to keep the war on Russia going long after the Ukraine portion is settled. Weigel has been dispatched to turn virtue into vice for the suckers of Conservative Inc.

Twenty years ago, almost to the day, Weigel made the same “moral case” for launching a preemptive war on Iraq. It you read both posts together, it is as if he is working from a template. That is because he does work from a template. When you strip away the moral pretentions, Weigel is not much of a thinker. His act is to play on your Christian duty or maybe your patriotic morality. He is not trying to appeal to your reason with a well thought out argument.

Last year, Eric Sammons at Crisis Magazine dissected the Weigel style. “The Weigel Script includes: (1) a comparison to Nazi Germany; (2) turning foreign leaders into cartoon villains; (3) accepting at face value any and all U.S. intelligence that puts the proposed adversary in the worst light; (4) making non-falsifiable assertions about a dire future if the U.S. doesn’t intervene; and (5) ignoring any potential negative consequences of U.S. intervention.”

You see it in the First Things post. He even adds in the now famous meme associated with the neocons. “For no reason at all” Russia invaded Ukraine. In this case, he surely knows that what he is saying is a lie. Twenty years ago, when he was selling the death of Iraqi children as a cost worth paying to stoke his moral vanity, he could claim ignorance about the lies underneath the claims about Iraq. Lots of people assumed George Bush was sincere about the WMD business.

In the case of the Ukraine war, Weigel knows he is lying, and he probably knows that the readers know he is lying, but he lies anyway. You are not supposed to think about the facts, because it is your moral duty to oppose evil! As long as you accept his claims about Putin being yet another Hitler, the lies do not matter. Like the guy from the second example at the start of this post, Weigel is trying to turn your virtue into a vice, and he is doing it with knowledge of forethought.

The thing is, Weigel is not an exception. Conservative Inc. has always produced odious carbuncles who prey on the decency of normal people. Weigel is getting long in the tooth, so his act has been moved from the main stage. Guys like David French have taken up the mantle of moralizer for the cause. He now claims to be the keeper of the true conservative flame, while he writes about himself at the New York Times, the supposed enemy of conservatism.

All of this brings us to a question. Who is the real enemy? Is it the self-described leftist who maintains an alien moral code? Is it the alleged friend and ally who uses your moral code against you? The former thinks he is right and thinks you would be wise to agree with him. The latter knows you are right but uses that to trick you into going along with what is wrong. The former may support evil things like gender identity, but the latter seeks to make you evil.

What all of this gets to is that before conservatism and its neoconservative core are pushed into the dustbin of history, we need to think about how a new moral order resists this form of trickery. The trouble with conservatism is it never thought much about inoculating itself against these sorts of people and instead just accepted them as a feature, rather than a bug. Whatever replaces conservatism must prevent people like George Weigel from gaining a purchase.

The Gods Have Gone Crazy

Posted on April 26, 2023 by thezman

The primary difference between a god and a man is that the gods have powers that no man can possess. It is not that the gods are bigger, faster, and stronger than men, even though that is often the case. It is that the gods can violate the rules of nature or even harness nature itself. Gods can defy gravity, change the course of rivers, or make it go dark in the middle of the day. The gods are gods because they get to make exceptions to the rules that bound the life of man.

Of course, this is not the only role of the gods. If the gods violated the rules of the universe all the time or helped man violate those rules, then the rules would be meaningless and all that would matter is favoring the gods. A big part of what makes the gods is their enforcement of the rules. What man can expect is the rules to apply at all times and all places. It is the exceptions that remind him that his world is the creation of the gods, and he has to respect them.

Christianity changed this relationship a tiny bit. The old gods were relegated to folklore and the new God was the only god. God was not playing an active role in the affairs of mankind, but more of an observer. Even so, God was the great enforcer of the rules of nature, by not violating those rules, outside of miraculous circumstances that lie beyond the ability of man to comprehend. God made the world. It operates by fixed rules and only God can make exceptions.

This is an important concept to understanding the world. Human society is based on the idea that the rules apply to everyone, except the sovereign, who is allowed to exempt himself from the rules and make exceptions to the rules. The king, for example, can pardon a condemned man, even though the man broke the rules. The king is the only member of society to judge himself because he is the only member of society responsible for maintaining the rules of society.

Like the gods, this special position falls apart quickly if the king is making exceptions to the rules to the point where the rules are meaningless. The king goes from being the sovereign to being a tyrant. What defines him is not the rules and his role in the enforcement of the rules, but rather his lack of rules. This is the fundamental definition of tyranny. There are no rules, just the caprice of the ruler. Everyone lives in terror of being on the wrong side of the tyrant.

If one wanted to produce a universal definition for hell, it would start with the complete lack of rules. After all, if the Devil has rules, then you can theoretically appeal to those rules for relief. There is some hope that you can end the torment by complying with the rules or finding a loophole. On the other hand, if there are no rules then there is no hope for appeal as there is no rule to which you can appeal. There is nothing but the desire of the Devil to inflict torment upon you.

The point of all this is that order depends upon rules, but it also requires an enforcer of those rules and that is always someone with the power to make exceptions. If that person or entity abuses that power, we slowly move out of the world of order and into the hellish domain of rule by tyrant. The tyrant flips the concept of the rule of law on its head so that the rules become dangerous. Today’s lawful action can be deemed unlawful tomorrow by the tyrant.

We see this in miniature on the social media platforms. YouTube creators must spend time self-policing their old content because even though they complied with the rules at the time, the rules change constantly. That old video about Rumble was within the rules two years ago, but all of a sudden, it is now a violation of the rules, so you can lose your channel as a result of it. This applies across all social media platforms. The “terms of service” is a license to unleash hell on the platform users.

The same people turning the rules of the internet into a jumble of exceptions administered by petty tyrants are doing the same to the law. It used to be that you could have an opinion about the powerful people. You could get a bunch of your friends to hold a rally in order to express that opinion. In theory you can still do these things, but it is impossible to know if it is legal. Years after the fact the state of Virginia is prosecuting Charlottesville protestors for carrying tiki torches.

Of course, the people turning the law into a dangerous labyrinth are also redefining the phrase “new world order” to mean unpredictable chaos. America is supposed to be the keeper of the rules-based world and the defender of order. Instead, the Washington regime spreads chaos around the world, mostly by violating the rules they demand others follow and punishing those who do follow the rules. Washington has become the global tyrant, the great violator of order.

What one finds behind this spread of lawlessness and chaos are people appropriating for themselves the right to make exceptions. Whether it is trivial things like the rules of social media, the mundane things in our courtrooms and boardrooms, or the big things on the global stage, it is always the same people turning the rules into an unnavigable jungle of exceptions. They have declared themselves gods and have driven the rest of us mad with their endless exceptions.

They may be crazy, but they are not gods, despite their claims. They are just the ruling class of the American empire. Ironically, a founding document of the American experiment provides the remedy. “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

This is what we see happening in the world. The emerging global powers, along with smaller powers like OPEC, are abandoning the old gods of the unipolar world for the new gods of the multipolar world. The new gods promise to respect the rules and avoid exceptions without consent. The same must happen inside the West and eventually in the heart of the American empire. There will be peace only when there are new rules that are enforced by new men who know they are not gods.

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