Nixon’s Ghost

Posted on June 21, 2023 by thezman

Fifty years ago, Nixon was run out of politics mostly for the crime of having insulted the sensibilities of the new class in Washington. Through the Second World War, Washington had been a provincial backwater in terms of elite culture. The war changed that, turning the city into the imperial capital with a high culture of its own. Richard Nixon was an offence to the sensibilities of the bourgeois radicals who came to dominate what is now known as permanent Washington.

When you read the bill of indictment against Nixon from this point on the time line, it has a quant and innocent feel to it. Other than the Watergate break in, the rest of the alleged misdeeds look like an idealized version of the Clinton years. His accusers claimed he interfered in various executive agencies, which was a spurious claim at the time and laughably ridiculous from the perspective of this age. Nixon was a piker compared the presidents who followed him.

Proof that the universe has a sense of humor is that the the young radicals of half a century ago are now in charge, doing all of the things that supposedly outraged them back in the Nixon years. Joe Biden, who was in national politics fifty years ago, an incredible fact all by itself, was fond of saying of Nixon that he was a singular problem, not a reflection of the system or his party. The argument in favor of defenestrating Nixon was that it was in defense of the system.

It has been clear for a long time now that Biden is personally corrupt. His son is a drug-addicted degenerate who has made tens of millions for the Biden family by selling access to and favors from his father. Fifty years ago, Biden and all of official Washington would have said such behavior is a threat to the system and the offender must be removed from office. Today, they say talking about this is a threat to our democracy and you need to be removed.

Of course, the news of Hunter Biden’s sweetheart plea deal brings up another great parallel to the Nixon years. That is the modified limited hangout. A “limited hangout” is a bit of tradecraft used when the official story for an operation is blown. The operative then fully admits that the cover story is fake and volunteers some bits of the real story, but omitting the parts that he wants to conceal. This diverts public attention to the new narrative away from the real story.

In a meeting to discuss the unfolding Watergate scandal, H. R. Haldeman described to President Nixon the new public relations plan to contain the scandal. In the conversation he described it as a modified limited hangout. Interestingly, this is now common practice in Washington. We call it spin. Every day that goofy looking African woman reads the latest narratives to the Washington press zombies who then dutifully repeat the story on their platforms.

The Hunter Biden plea deal is a modified limited hangout. The first phase is the press release describing the deal. Then the media zombies will be fed some juicy details of the crimes in order to shift focus away from the other crimes. Anyone who raises the issue of Biden taking bribes from Ukraine will then get accused of being a conspiracy theorist or maybe a shill for Putin. In other words, the Biden family admits to a small crime in order to shift attention from the big crimes.

Obviously, the difference between now and then is the media. Nixon faced a much smaller mass media, but it was extremely hostile to him. Biden will never be asked about it or have it mentioned in his presence. This is why they went with such a small hangout, rather than something more substantive. In fact, this plea deal looks like a deliberate middle-finger to the rest of us. Even brain-dead zombies in conservative media have noticed this.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the degeneracy of the mass media since the Nixon years is quite a thing to behold. Not only are they defending this crooked deal, they are treating Hunter Biden as a victim. You see, these charges are never brought, but he is the son of the most popular man in human history, so he is being held to a higher standard of justice than mere mortals. The obsequious media rumpswab is the first line of defense for our managerial tyrants.

All that said, the argument against Nixon was fundamentally a republican one, in that his critics demanded that his defenders place loyalty to the institutions over loyalty to party or the man himself. There is no doubt that many of the Republicans who finked on Nixon thought of themselves as a modern Brutus. Even though they had doubts about the motives of his accusers, sacrificing Nixon in order to elevate republican virtue was a trade they made with conviction.

Now that the roles are reversed, those radicals of fifty years ago now demand loyalty to the man in order to defend “our democracy” which simply means the system that allows them to rule unchallenged. It is a good reminder that the lawful can never deal lawfully with the unlawful. That was the mistake fifty years ago. The lawful should have done what was necessary to physically remove the radicals from society. Instead, they thought their loyalty to the law would be enough.

It is an example of the Frank Herbert quote. “When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles.” For the radicals of fifty years ago, republican virtue was a bus they rode to power. They made those arguments because they thought they would work. Once in power, they got off the bus and climbed aboard the authoritarian bus.

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The Crisis Of Trust

Posted on June 20, 2023 by thezman

The primary concern for any ruling elite is to remain the ruling elite, which means they must always look out for the peasant revolt. By definition, ruling elites are a minority population that rules over the majority. The relationship between the elite and the masses must be asymmetrical, which is why there are no elites that are poorer than the people over whom they rule. Combined with the numerical disparately this makes managing the relationship a primary concern for elites.

Second, but still in the primary group of concerns, is the palace coup, which is a way of saying instability in the elite class. There is a hierarchy within every elite and elites are composed of humans with a fixed lifespan. This means the people at the top of the elite class will not be there forever. This gives hope to younger members at the bottom who have ambitions about rising up the ranks. Every ruling elite needs a way to control this so that the elite can appear unified to the masses.

To see how this works, one only has to consider the most common form of rule in human history, which is monarchy. The king must always balance the needs of the people against the needs of his family, but he must also balance the interests of the prominent families against one another and his own interests. The king does not want angry peasants showing up at his castle, but he also has to make sure the nobility thinks he is their best bet to remain a nobility.

This is the key to the monarch’s success. The nobility, the church and the peasants all have to see the king as their best chance at peace and prosperity. If any of the three begins to see the king as the cause of their troubles or a threat to their position, they no longer have a reason to support the king. Maintaining the balance, therefore, requires the king to be the very symbol of order. It is only in an orderly world that you can be sure that your interest will be protected.

In the modern age, the same rules apply, but they are expressed in more abstract and arbitrary terms. For example, the party in charge is responsible for keeping a good economy, which is not always easy to quantify. Even in the best of times, there are people unhappy with the economy. In the booming 1980’s, the working classes were not happy because their jobs were being sold off to foreigners. The middle-class was thrilled because their jobs were booming.

That three-legged stool on which monarchy rests, the nobility, the church, and the peasantry, does not work in a liberal democracy. No one is loyal to anyone in liberal systems because we are all individuals. What fosters cooperation is individual loyalty to a set of ideas that define the system. The three-legged stool of monarchy is replaced with economics, security, and culture in a liberal democracy, which is held together by trust in the official holders and the institutions.

If you look at American elections going back since the dawn of this liberal democratic empire, they have always been about the same topics. Economics is always a top concern of voters and the pols seeking their vote. Security is a close second, expressed as crime fighting or foreign policy initiatives. The third item always on the list is something from the culture war that never ends. Elections turn on which side is most trusted at the moment on these items.

Go back to the beginning and you see it in presidents. Eisenhower was trusted on foreign policy because that was the top concern. Kennedy won in 1960 because the culture was becoming the top concern and Nixon was not viewed as a trustworthy political actor, despite his competence on other issues. Nixon won in 1968 by appealing to Southerners on cultural and security grounds. He also won votes from other regions due to his foreign policy credentials.

While democracy obscures elites from the people, the superficial aspects of the system operate by the oldest of rules. The people will generally support those who are most trusted on the pressing issues of the day. If it is the economy, then the side viewed as sympathetic to that issue will do well. When people are concerned about the culture, then those viewed as normal will triumph over those indulging in cultural experimentation and novelty.

This brings us back to the needs of the ruling elite. The dynamics of democracy are supposed to address both of their primary concerns. On the one hand, it is a useful feedback loop to keep the peasants from revolting. Instead of angry peasants showing up at the castle with a list of demands, the peasants select the options presented by the ruling class on election day. The rulers then know where to fix their attention and the peasants feel like their concerns are being addressed.

Of course, elections and the industry around them help solve the other problem within the elite, which is the palace coup. Elections are a sort of scoreboard used by elites to settle differences between the sides. It also helps them gauge how the peasants are responding to elite initiatives. This prevents elites from imposing polices that are good for the elite, but hated by the peasants. It reinforces the survival logic that must guide the internal behavior of all ruling elites.

If we look back at the two great revolutions in Western history, we can see how this natural order was at the center of the revolt. In pre-revolutionary France, the peasants were facing increasing pressure economically. The nobility was increasingly at odds with the king. The church was coming under pressure by the changing cultural landscape brought on by new ideas. All three legs of the system were faltering while trust in the king was declining.

Tsarist Russia faced a similar crisis. On the one hand, the peasants were under pressure from the changing economic conditions of the empire. On the other hand, the urban working class was demanding reform. The conservative culture was failing the peasants, but it was in opposition to the workers. The fracturing culture threatened the position of the nobility. Instead of being that which held the system together, the Tsar was increasingly viewed as the problem.

When you look at the current crisis, you first see that the feedback loop that allows the elite to take the temperature of the peasants is broken. The elite stopped trusting the election system after 2016. The elite response to this collapse in trust resulted in the peasants losing trust in the system in 2020. In other words, the trust system is collapsing on both sides of the relationship. This is what makes the debate over economics, security, and culture so bizarre.

The disconnect can be seen in the issues. The people are worried about the collapse of the American system, but the elites are pushing radical cultural fads like pedophilia and ritual child mutilation. The people are increasingly concerned for their safety, but elites are unleashing black criminals and promising global war. Inflation remains the top concern for Americans, but both parties ignore it. The political system and the voters are two ships passing in the night.

When you look at the other half of the elite concerns, the palace coup, it is clear that the elites are highly paranoid about one another. The behavior of the secret police toward the political class reflects that loss of trust in the political system. The increasing narrowness of debate within the media reflects the general fear of being seen as disloyal to the system. The people at the top are not just paranoid about the peasants but they also fear their own people.

Following the loss of the Russo-Japanese war, a delegation of liberal reformers led by an aristocrat named Sergei Trubetskoi went to the Tsar and told him that the people still trusted him, but they could no longer tolerate the chaos. In other words, it was not the policies of the Tsar that were causing civil unrest. It was the failure of those polices to restore order. Therefore, reform was needed to restore trust. The Tsar seemed to agree and then set about doing the opposite.

What followed was increased activity by the secret police and the unleashing of gangs loyal to the regime. Like Antifa, the SPLC, the ADL and the other regime aligned toadies and thugs, the Black Hundred set upon anyone suspected of questioning the Tsar or the tsarist system. Disorder was met by elite policies that created more disorder. Tsarist Russia was plunged into a spiral of declining trust by the one thing that held the system together, the Tsar himself.

The relevance to this age should be obvious. The current unrest is not due to incompetence or perfidy among the political class. That is an issue, but that has always been a feature of the liberal system. The cause of the current unrest is a collapse of trust in the system itself. In order to preserve their status, the elite is acting outside the agreed upon rules. This further erodes the peasant’s trust in the system, which feeds the elite distrust of the peasantry.

America is rapidly approaching that point where the calls for reform contradict the demands for order. The elite can initiate reform, but this puts their position at risk, so they view calls for reform as a physical threat. Therefore they choose to impose order, which is viewed by the peasants as a threat to their safety. Those two irreconcilable forces, reform and order, end up on the same track heading for a crash. This is never settle by the ballot box, but by the cartridge box.

The Reality Of Model Dependent Reality

Posted on June 12, 2023 by thezman

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One line of attack against various forms of socialism has been that these organizational models run contrary to human nature. Humans naturally want to keep the produce of their labor, so any system that requires them to give over their labor to the whole is going to require a great deal of force to implement. Similarly, humans are not equal in ability, so there will always be unequal outcomes. A system that supposes no one is in charge and everyone is equal is unnatural.

Libertarianism has a similar problem. Like communism, it assumes things about humans that are not true. This is why there are no libertarian societies. As Hans Hermann-Hoppe observed, there is no way to go from the present to a libertarian society within the rules of libertarianism. More important, there is no way to maintain a libertarian society within the rules of libertarianism. Like communism, libertarians imagine a world that is odds with the human condition.

In both cases, what we see is a clash between the model-dependent reality of the ideology and reality itself. It is not hard to imagine a society that operates by the sorts of rules the ideologue prefers. The trouble comes when you try to implement the scheme on flesh and blood human beings. As with every model, there are going to be things the model must ignore in order to make sense. In real life, the things that exist outside the model tend to land in a death camp.

It is becoming clear that liberalism, as in Western liberalism or liberal democracy, has the same problem as communism and libertarianism. That is the model makes perfect sense and answers the main problems of human organization. In reality it falls prey to what the other great ideologies have found impossible to address. That is, it requires things from human beings that do not come naturally to man. Like those other models, the only available solution is coercion.

The madness that is gripping the West can be viewed from two angles. One is that the system has been taken over by spiteful mutants who exist to trample the underlying assumptions of the liberal order. These are the people who intrude in on your private space and tell you how to live and think. They also seek control of the common space in order to impose increasingly deranged rules on society. These people are overrunning the liberal democracies of the West.

What this tells us is that the model does not contain within it the tools to defend itself against these people. While the current madness is novel in many respects, it is part of a wave that began long ago. You can draw a line from the abolitionist fanatics to the pride parades of this age. All along the way, liberalism has had no way to defend itself against these people. For that matter, it had no way of dealing with communists and fascists, other than extreme illiberal violence.

The other way of looking at this problem is that something within the liberal order cultivates the spiteful mutant. Perhaps as Ed Dutton has proposed, scarcity requires a firm hand on the spiteful mutant. They must either be controlled or culled from the population, which keeps their numbers and influence at a minimum. Liberalism results in material excess, which in turn eliminates the apparent need to control the spiteful mutants and so they multiply like rabbits.

A simpler answer is that the liberal model is lacking something that is critical to understanding the human condition and human organization. Like communism, not accounting for an essential bit of reality leaves a choice. You either change the model or you change reality. As anyone who has worked with model makers will tell you, the model maker is like God in that he loves his creation and will do anything to preserver it, no matter how terrible it seems.

In this long post in defense of liberalism and conventional conservatism, Harvey Mansfield provides a clue to the problem. He writes that the goal of liberalism is a society where no one is in charge in the sense that anyone is compelling anyone else to sacrifice for the common good. The liberal model of reality “yields a fundamental right to consent that protects all other rights from infringement by rulers.” In other words, human society is purely voluntary.

Therein lies the two critical flaws in the liberal model. The first and most obvious is that it assumes a human society of equals. No one is in charge because no one can compel another to act either against his own interests or in the common good. This not only flies in the face of observable reality, but it contradicts the point of society. Human beings organize into groups for more than material benefit. The group provides structure to the individual identity, which provides a rationality to existence.

Human organizations possess properties not present in the members. The most obvious is culture. Just as individual atoms do not possess temperature, individual humans do not possess culture. Temperature is the product of atoms interacting with one another. Similarly, culture is the product of humans interacting with one another, not just in real time, but over generations. In other words, essential to what makes us who we are and our lives worth living is our people.

As Mansfield explains in his post, liberalism does not account for this bit of reality and instead substitutes what amounts to magic. The private and public choices of the members will magically address the common good. The decisions of members in their private deliberations and ad hoc public choices will somehow result in conditions that preserve the society. As with other models of human reality, liberalism inevitably falls back on magic to solve its problems.

The other critical flaw is the assumption that a society in which no one is compelled to act in the public good is possible or even desirable. The reason communist systems failed is they finally accepted a truth of the human condition. That is, human societies are always hierarchical. Whether it is the party, the ruling class or the aristocracy, a group of people will rule over the rest. What reality tells us is that coercion is just as much a part of the human condition as left-handedness.

This is why Western liberalism looks a lot like communism in practice. On the one hand, the model requires everyone to pretend that no one is in charge, and everyone is voluntarily submitting to the rules. On the other hand, a model-dependent elite is making the rules and ruthlessly imposing them on the whole. As with communism, the “good of society” is easily confused with the good of the ruling elite. Instead of abandoning the model, the ruling class works around the flaws.

The liberal model of society is failing because like all models it leaves out the bits of reality that make the model messy or impossible. On the one hand, it has no defense against the illiberal tyrants that are multiplying like rabbits. On the other hand, it lacks a method to compel members of society to act in the common good or to even conceive of a common good. As a result, the liberal model is leading to the destruction of the people who conceived it.

Finally, the growing similarities between the liberal model and the communist model are rooted in two common assumptions. The first assumption is that the point of human organization is the liberation of the individual. This means freedom from political coercion, as in an aristocracy, freedom from economic coercion, as Marx explained and now freedom from cultural coercion, as we see with our woke rulers. None of this is ever explained or justified. It is simply assumed to be true.

The other assumption is that these models must never be opposed. It is why the great champions of communism and liberalism sound more like religious fanatics than reasonable advocates. Once one accepts the moral claims about human freedom, one is compelled to attack anyone who questions these moral claims, as to do otherwise suggests doubt. If you accept that maybe liberation is not the point of society, these models fall apart and take their champions with them.

In the end, the answer to the flaws of model-dependent reality is reality. Once one accepts the reality of human organization, the political models fade away and what you are left with is an understanding that human society is only possible when the members feel a duty to maintain it and defend it. Anything or anyone which undermines this primary mission must be removed from society. In other words, the point of human society is to preserve itself and thereby preserve the members.

Pandora’s Ballot Box

Posted on June 6, 2023 by thezman

According to Merriam-Webster, hope is a desire accompanied by expectation of or belief in fulfillment. You want something to happen. You have little or no reason to think it will happen, yet you sense that it is going to happen. Hope and faith are traveling partners, in that hope is often the result of trusting a system or person. The system has worked in the past, so despite evidence that it is not going to work this time, you hope that it carries through again.

Hope and faith are the cornerstones of elections. In the best of times, people are left to hope that the guy who wins will do a decent job. Even when it is obvious that the winner will be a dud, maybe even crazy, people have faith in the system to carry us through the ineptitude of the office holders. Popular government requires people to believe that all of us are smarter than most of us. Every couple of years people hope this is true as they cast their ballots for people they barely know.

What we have seen over the last thirty years is that some people, the people we call the Left, have increasingly lost faith in the system. Their reason for voting is not the hope that it will continue on, but that this time it finally fails. Barak Obama was the turning point with his constant talk about hope and change. The whole point of his presidency was to destroy the old system and replace it with a new one. He was the change they had been waiting for.

The looming presidential election is looking like a similar inflection point for the people we call the Right. In 2016, most of them voted for Trump, hoping he would be a message to the system. People voted for Trump as a rebuke, an often crudely humorous rebuke, of official Washington. These people still had faith in the system, so they hoped that Trump could deliver the message. The people were unhappy, and Washington needed to address their concerns.

This time, much of the support for Trump is like the hope and change business that Obama ran on in 2008. People saw what happened in the Trump years and they have been following the aftermath. They no longer have faith in the system. The system produced this corrupt ruling class. The thinking is that another Trump term will cause so much anger in official Washington that they will go berserk. Everyone else will then see that the system is hopelessly broken.

There is still some faith in the system. Lots of the MAGA hat wearing folks think this time will be different, but a good chunk of his support is cynical. This is why his support is so solid, despite the presence of Ron DeSantis. People know that in a normal country with a functioning political system, DeSantis would be the far better choice, but America is no longer a normal country. Prudent administration is not the answer to a demonic ruling class hellbent on pulling the roof down on us.

On the other hand, Ron DeSantis is the hope and faith option. His support is entirely from people who still have faith in the system. Here is the venerable Paul Gottfried coming out in support of DeSantis over Trump. Josh Hammer, a member of the common good conservative club, is also supporting DeSantis. Pedro Gonzalez sounds like Bill Kristol in coming out in favor of DeSantis. Three people from three different perspectives making the same argument.

These folks and the others supporting DeSantis think the system is mostly fine, but it needs the right guy to get the right result. They hope DeSantis is that guy, because after all, he “got things done” in Florida. For his supporters, Florida is a model for how things ought to run. DeSantis is therefore the model for how an executive pulls the right levers in the system in order to get the desired result. The fact that Florida is nothing like Washington plays no role in their thinking.

DeSantis is the last gasp of conservatism. Until the catastrophe of the Bush years, the subtext to conservatism was that it needed to be presented to the Left in just the right way so as not to upset them. Conservatism had to sneak up on lefty with a pleasant-sounding program presented by someone they liked or at least they could not plausibly claim was Hitler. For the DeSantis supporters, their guy is Trumpism without the crude orange man that makes the regime so angry.

Of course, their support rests on the assumption that the right man can get in there and pull the right levers to get the right result. It also assumes that the people in opposition will go along with this. The shadow of ignorance about the nature of the people in charge hangs over the DeSantis supporters. They are sure that the other side wants what they want and that they do not believe what they say. They just need a good talking to and they will stop the nonsense.

The hard reality is that the people who run the empire want what they want, and they will not be talked out of it by an election. The reason they recoiled like a startled snake when Trump came to town is because they feared him. He represented a threat to their preferred order, so they sunk their venomous fangs into his presidency. They will do the same thing to the next guy if he proves to be a threat. There is no way to clear out this nest of vipers at the ballot box.

In the 2016 election, Michael Anton famously penned the Flight 93 election essay that allowed many on the Right to throw in with Trump. The essay was an argument in favor of Trump as one last desperate attempt to save the system. The fact that the Trump presidency ended like the famous flight did not register with many people. Some of them are now throwing in with DeSantis for the same reason. It is one last desperate attempt to save the system, in which they still have faith.

According to Hesiod, when Prometheus stole fire from the gods, Zeus took vengeance by giving the lovely Pandora to Epimetheus, the brother of Prometheus. She was left with a jar and told not to open it. Being a woman, this meant she could do nothing else but open it and out came all the evils that plague the world. She quickly put the lid back on, but the only thing remaining was what is often translated as hope, but which could also mean deceptive expectation.

In 2016 the Dirt People stole fire from the gods in that they defied their masters and supported Trump in the primary then the general election. Instead of sending a jar containing plagues, they sent another ballot box. In 2020 that box was opened and out came the secret police to carry Joe Biden to the White House. Despite it all, some still cling that that ballot box, hope trapped inside, thinking that maybe this time when they open the box, their hopes will be realized.

The Death Of The West

Posted on June 5, 2023 by thezman

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Since the French Revolution, the West has been cursed by a political framing that operates along an axis. At one end we have the Left, the people demanding radical change to liberate humanity in some way. At the other end is the Right, the people not just opposed to change, but the defenders of the natural order. Both ends see the other as the bad guy in the relationship. For over two centuries, all political movements have been forced to pick a spot on the axis.

This often leads to some ridiculous alliances. Libertarians are supposed to be the polar opposite of communists. Hitler is the polar opposite of Stalin, which then puts Hitler in the libertarian camp. This causes those sympathetic to libertarianism to claim that Hitler was actually a leftist. After all, he was a socialist! While this is idiotic, it does underscore the problem with the Right-Left political axis. It fails as a way to describe politics over a long period of time.

It also precludes right-wing radicalism. By making change a left-wing phenomenon, it means the right-wing must always be for stasis. This is popular with the Left, as it lets them pretend to be the good guys, but it also turns the other side into mindless reactionaries with no reason to oppose change. It is also wrong in that the Right, in all of its forms, does not oppose change. What the Right opposes is experimentation that treats institutions as arbitrary objects.

There is a bigger problem with the Left-Right political axis. It eliminates the possibility for right-wing radicalism. If the only people who can contemplate a radical reordering are those who embrace change, then the logic of the political scale says that it is impossible for right-wing people to imagine radical change. Yet we know that people on the Right, however defined at the time, often want radical change. It may simply be a rollback of prior change, but it is still change.

For example, most people defined as right-wing in the current year would like to see the sexual revolution rolled back at least forty years. A growing cohort thinks it is necessary to roll things back to the 1950’s. A small, but growing portion of the right wonder if we should roll it all back to the very beginning. If a right-wing Joe Biden comes to power and rolls back the sexual revolution, even if it is just to the 1980’s, most people would see that as a radical change in the culture.

In fairness, you could call these people reactionaries. Granted, their reactions are incredibly slow, taking at least a generation to form, but strictly speaking they want to return to some point in the past, not break with it. Left-wing radicals imagine themselves making a clean break with the past and creating something new. The fact that it is not new in the least is another matter. One side wants to break from the past while the other side wants to return to what it imagines is the past.

That seems to solve the problem, but what about the people who think we must make a break with liberalism in order to save Western people? These are not people seeking a return to some point in the past. Some joke about the return of monarchy and feudalism, but they are not serious about it. Instead, they see the future as a clean break with liberal political traditions. The people now calling themselves post-liberal think we must produce something new to replace liberalism.

Adrian Vermeule, the Harvard scholar, and champion of common good conservatism is not entirely clear about the details of his post-liberal order, but he is quite clear in his rejection of liberalism. Patrick Deneen, who is a Notre Dame political science professor, has a new book in which he argues for overthrowing the liberal order and replacing it with a dictatorship of working-class, by which he means the people who actually work and sustain the culture.

Read what these post-liberals have to say about what we would consider to be the status quo and they certainly sound like radicals. Unlike the standard model of radicalism, they are not challenging the human condition. There is no post-liberal man in their conception of the future, other than to argue that mankind will be free of the utopian claims that lie within the liberal order. Mankind will be liberated from the relentless coercion of its liberators.

Dissidents, of course, seek something similar. The main difference is that the Dissident Right is willing to address the demographic issue. To be on the Dissident Right is to wrestle with the question of what kind of society is possible with the demographics we will have in the not-too-distant future? More important, are the possible options tolerable and if not, what must come next? Like the post-liberals, the Dissident Right is ready to leave the old liberal order in the past.

For all the usual reasons, the dissidents and post-liberals get called fascist by the people who claim to be on the Left. It is proof that the universe has a sense of humor that the most dogmatic defenders of the status quo and the holders of power are the people who claim to be on the side of revolutionary change. In the modern age, the antifascists are sponsored by major corporations, who are in a close partnership with government and the centers of cultural production.

Putting that aside, if we broaden the definition of the term “liberalism” to include all Western thought since the late Middle Ages, then we are left with a universe that includes Marxism, libertarianism, liberal democracy, anarchism, fascism and all the combinations of these ideologies. To one degree or another, all of them imagine a world where mankind is freed from the human condition. What we now call liberalism is the final form of this long ideological struggle.

This gets to a truth about the modern world and its opponents. That political axis that has been with us since the French Revolution is increasingly incoherent because it assumes something that is not true. It assumes that ideology is a constant of the universe and therefore politics is a war between competing ideologies. In reality, ideology is a novelty. For most of human history, the moral questions were decided by religion, not by men with utopian schemes.

What the incoherence of that old political axis may be telling us is that we are reaching the end of the ideological age. What the post-liberals are doing, even if most do not realize it, is challenging the moral claims of liberalism. It is not an accident that the champions of post-liberalism are overtly religion. Both Deneen and Vermeule are traditional Catholics. Their post-liberal order assumes the moral questions have been answered by a revived traditional church.

The signs of the post-ideological age are most evident on the global stage. The last ideological state is at war with Russia because Russia rejects liberalism. The Russians are happy to borrow from the West but wish to remain Russian. The West is preparing to attack China for similar reasons. China’s capitalism with “Chinese characteristics” is unacceptable to the West. Soon, the rest of the world will join the enemies list for the crime of rejecting the liberal moral order.

For over two centuries, the West has been defined by that political axis that was born out of the French Revolution. What most people think of as the West is that long ideological struggle that has given us what we call liberal democracy. With the end of the Cold War, the struggle was over and liberal democracy won. In reality, the Cold War was the penultimate struggle of a dying age. What was born with that political axis will die with the final rejection of it.

Next Phase Of The Ukraine War

Posted on May 31, 2023 by thezman

It has been a year since the Russians began the process of shifting from a limited military operation to a full-scale war. After the Ukrainians withdrew from settlement talks in Turkey, the Russians realized the West was in it is for the long haul, so they had to adjust to this new reality. The first thing they did was appoint General Sergey Surovikin to take control of military operations in Ukraine. Then came a mobilization of 300,000 additional forces to support the war in the Ukraine.

What followed was a campaign of missile attacks on Ukrainian power plants, rail hubs and strategic infacilities. Then came the mass use of UAVs to overwhelm Ukrainian air defense systems. This was all part of the general shift from a quick conflict aimed at a negotiated settlement to a long grinding war of attrition. The purpose of this new Russian strategy was to slowly destroy Ukraine’s ability to conduct offensive operations with an eye on eventually destroying their military.

A year into this new war, the results are close to what many predicted when the Russians shifted to this model. The West lacks to military industrial capacity for this sort of warfare, so the supply of weapons to Ukraine has declined. Meanwhile, the Russians degraded Ukrainian air defenses to the point where they can now stage constant air raids on Ukrainian supply lines. The long talked about Ukrainian offensive has been indefinitely delayed as a result of these attacks.

It is hard to know what is happening inside Ukraine due to the tsunami of propaganda from the media and the volunteer army of regime toadies online. Trivial events are rolled up into glorious narratives that have no bearing on reality. When the Wagner forces captured the remaining high-rises in the city of Bakhmut, Western sources reported that Ukraine was staging a counter attack to encircle them. In reality the Ukrainians were simply staging a fighting retreat from their positions.

That said, it is becoming clear that the Ukrainians are in trouble militarily and the end may be closer than many realize. For starters, Zelensky now spends most of his time outside the country. Some have speculated that he thinks the end could come at any minute and would prefer to be elsewhere when it happens. For over a year he was doing zoom sessions from his bunker to entertain Western media. Over the last month he has found any reason to be outside the country.

General Zaluzhnyi, the man in charge of the Ukrainian army, has been mysteriously absent for over a month. One short video of him was released, after the Ukrainians put out a series of fake stories about his whereabouts. The man in charge of the defense of Bakhmut has also been keeping an unusually low profile. As with Zaluzhnyi, General Oleksandr Syrskyi was fond of entertaining Western media. Over the last month he has not made any media appearances.

Then there is the new tactic by the Ukrainians of launching drone attacks against civilian targets inside Russia. The first attack was a month ago that targeted the Kremlin before the big Russian holiday. Then there was the very weird attack on a border village with Ukrainians pretending to be anti-Putin Russian militants, using American equipment to stage an uprising. Last weekend, there was a wave of primitive drones sent at Moscow, with a few striking apartment buildings.

Of course, the weirdest thing to happen recently is the long running hype about a Ukrainian counter-offensive that was due a few months ago. It was supposedly set for March, but then was delayed due to weather. Then it was delayed until early May due to logistics and then delayed again for unknown reasons. Meanwhile the Russians have intensified their attacks on Ukrainian supply lines. Maybe one has to do with the other, but no one seems to be interested in the answer.

Maybe this is all 4-D chess, but the parsimonious answer is that things are starting to unravel in Ukraine. A year of increasing Russian attacks on Ukraine’s military industrial system has degraded their ability to fight. Two months ago General Milley said Ukrainian air defenses were near collapse. A couple of weeks ago a New Yorker pieced confirmed speculation that Ukraine was short of ammunition. The spike in Russian air activity over Ukraine suggests they now control the skies.

The weird behavior of Ukrainian leadership and the decline in activity by the Ukrainian military suggests their capacity to fight is critically low. The sudden use of insurgent-style tactics, championed by Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukrainian intelligence, may signal a shift in Ukraine in response to reality on the ground. What Zelensky and his generals may be preparing for is something like what happened in Iraq. The military collapses, but in a way gives rise to an organized insurgency.

This may be the final play by Washington. The neocons have been circulating a Korean-style end to the war. The Russians keep and hold their positions and the Ukrainians, with Western support, hold their positions. There is no logical reason for the Russians to accept something they have for something they do not want. If they keep fighting, they will soon break the spirit of the Ukrainian army and prevent the West from resupplying them with new weapons.

On the other hand, if Washington turns the west of Ukraine into a launching pad for Ukrainian terrorist attacks on Russia, maybe the Kremlin is willing to consider a deal similar to the Korean solution. There is history for this. In the Second World War Ukrainian nationalist worked with the Nazis to attack Russia. Today’s Ukrainian nationalist consider Stepan Bandera, the leader of the nationalists during the war, as a hero and example to follow.

This shift would have several benefits. One it would give Washington an excuse for not dealing with the issue. Useful idiots like Lyndsey Graham could be counted on to call the terrorists “freedom fighters” as he did with ISIS. It would reduce the cost to Washington, as terrorism can be funded at a fraction of a land war. Primarily, it would require Russia to keep fighting after the Ukrainian army was defeated. You can see the appeal of this to the neocons.

It is unlikely that the Russians would accept a Korean-style partitioning of Ukraine, if it means NATO operating in the rest of Ukraine. The neocons probably assume this, so they will move ahead with their insurgency plan. Since this will no doubt spill into EU countries like Poland and Germany, which have millions of Ukrainian refugees now, this has the added benefit of keeping Europe dependent on Washington. Terrorist chaos on the border of Europe is good for the neocon cause.

The Future Of Fed Plenty

Posted on May 30, 2023 by thezman

Americans have been conditioned to believe we live in a market economy where producers chase customers. The subtext to American politics for generations has been protecting the marketplace from the socialists. In reality, America is more of a command economy than a market economy. We do not think of it as a command economy because that phrase brings to mind commissars arguing about why the left shoe factory has a different quota than the right shoe factory.

While we have never had five-year plans or an official industrial policy, the people in charge have always had a tight grip on the economy. The primary lever since the 1980’s has been the money supply. The bank of all banks, the Federal Reserve, controls the flow of money in the system. While it does not decide how many shoes get made, it does decide the shoe maker’s cost of money. The Fed can create a recession to reduce demand and it can create plenty through cheap money.

This is not the only lever of our command economy. The regulatory state exerts an enormous amount of power on the economy. Right now, the EPA is plotting to kill off the gas stove market in order to please Gaia. The claim is gas stoves give people the cooties or something, but the real reason is the people in the EPA are primitives who follow a spirit religion. They can and often do change economic activity based on what their shaman has to say about Gaia.

It is not just the federal administrative state with power over the economy. The states have their own junior varsity administrative state. In Maryland, for example, they have decreed that all new homes must be equipped with sprinkler systems, like the sort you see in office buildings. The National Fire Sprinkler Association just happens to be located in Maryland. Their members, conveniently enough, have the exclusive right to install and maintain sprinkler systems.

That is the other level of the command economy. Large private operators can exert enormous pressure on the administrative and politics systems. They also get favors that small players cannot purchase. Every Walmart in America enjoys free infrastructure and tax abatements from local government. One reason the big box store eliminated the small retailer is they colluded with the state. Like the Bolsheviks in the 1920’s, America’s ruling party prefers consolidation into controllable industries.

The Bolsheviks liked large enterprises because they assumed they would be easier to control, and they would drive off the vestiges of capitalism. They were somewhat right about the last part, as we see today. The first part they never got right. By the 1970’s, the Soviet system grew increasingly complicated as it became less efficient, because the scale of the system outpaced the ability to manage it. There were too many variables and too many interactions between those variables.

The American command economy would have faced the same problems, and it was headed in that direction in the 1970’s, but a couple of big things happened. For starters, the decision was made to ship the manufacturing base overseas. Instead of trying to centrally manage an industrial economy, production was handed over to the third world so they could do it. The Fed could use the money supply to control the flow of manufactured goods into the system.

The other thing that happened was the microprocessor revolution. The Soviets recognized this as their way out of the complexity problem, but they were already past the point of diminishing returns by the time cheap computers and trained computer programmers were in sufficient supply. America escaped this fate, as the economic planners were able to harness these new tools to control the economy. The managerial state would not be possible without computers.

The trouble is our system is now suffering from the same problems the Soviets faced in their command economy. The complexity is overwhelming the system. The Federal Reserve has been fighting inflation for two years now. At the same time, spending has spiraled upward with no hope of arresting the growth. This forces the Fed to create more money through various means. The recent debt ceiling drama suggests there is no political way to solve the fiscal crisis.

It may not feel like a crisis as there are plenty of jobs and there is plenty of money to buy consumer goods. People have lots of complaints, but few of them are about the economy, as far as anyone knows. Given the monolithic nature of the media, we cannot assume that what we see in the press is reality. Even so, there are no bread lines and sales of houses and consumer goods are strong. Whatever problems that exist are not showing up in consumer behavior.

Of course, the years following the death of Stalin were good times in the Soviet Union, as their economy grew faster than any economy in the West. After recovering from the devastation of the war, shops were full of basic goods and the Soviet system seemed to be working better than capitalism. The Russians were ahead of the West in the space race, and they enjoyed a missile gap. Then red plenty slowly ground to a halt and their system fell into a generation long decline.

The fed plenty that American has been enjoying for the last thirty years may be about to turn negative for the same reasons. The system has become too complicated for the masters of the system to operate. In the Soviet times, the result was too many left shoes or mountains of concrete with shortages of winter coats. In this age, it means bans of gas stoves and diversity programs because companies care more about ESG scores than the desires of their customers.

This was always the argument against command economies. It was not so much that some unelected authority made decisions. It was that over time, they would always succumb to complexity. The lack of price signals subjected the economic trade-offs to political jockeying. In the Soviet system, the politically favored got what they wanted, even when it made no economic sense. In our system, we see the same phenomenon but colored with liberal jargon.

Perhaps this is where AI steps into the breech. The next great leap in data processing and decision making will overcome the complexity issue. Instead of armies of analysts with economics degrees pouring over data to draft reports for the managers, AI systems will do the work in real time, making changes to the flow of money and information in the system to overcome bottlenecks and political jockeying. Fed Plenty will become the objective of the robots put in charge of the economy.

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.

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.

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