The Paradox Of Liberal Democracy

Posted on February 6, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about the great awakening, a post about the 1980’s classic comedy Trading Places and the Sunday podcast. This week the plan is to do some more Ukraine stuff, given the uptick in war news. You can sign up at SubscribeStar or Substack.

The communists were fond of picking at what they claimed were the inherent contradictions within capitalist societies. They argued that these contradictions were irreconcilable and would eventually bring down the system. The accuracy of their claims is debatable, but the examination of contradictions within a system is a perfectly valid analytical technique. Conflicts in logic are often the cause of defects in a system and not just political or economic systems.

In fact, software developers spend much of their lives hunting down these sorts of errors in the code. Perhaps the cause was poor coding or maybe it was the business logic which defined the code that was flawed. Those bugs in the software are the result of one set of rules contradicting or overriding another set of rules. One user enters data and gets one result, while another user enters data and gets a different result, despite both users expecting a similar result.

This software analogy is further useful in that the users will lose confidence in the system if these internal contradictions are not resolved. Systems are sets of rules and if the user of a system cannot trust the rules, they cannot trust the system. Many software systems have been scrapped due to a collapse in confidence. The same holds for political and economic systems. Some communists thought if they could exploit the contradictions in capitalism, confidence in it would collapse.

When we look around at the general lunacy that has come to define the West, it is often assumed that the lunatics are operating outside the rules of liberal democracy and that is the cause of the lunacy. “If we just go back to our constitutional principles” is the call of every civic nationalist in the comment sections of Conservative Inc. No doubt the people in support of the lunacy have similar claims about their opponents not following the new rules of blessed progress.

What if the reason our age is so deranged is the rule-set that defines the ideology we call liberal democracy? What if the crisis facing the West is simply the result of a system that contains irreconcilable contradictions? People are naturally reticent to think like this because liberal democracy has been sacralized. Democracy means good, so anything it touches must be good. Liberal democracy is even better because it contains two words that have come to mean morally good.

If we take a step back and look at what liberal democracy means in theory, it may help explain why it is increasingly deranged in practice. The off the shelf definition of liberal democracy is the combination of a liberal political ideology that operates under a representative democratic form of government. The word liberal here means the political philosophy based on individual rights and liberty. Individuals are equal before the law and equal in their political relationship.

A liberal society, regardless of the political system, will be defined by things like equality before the law and the rule of law. Further, those laws are written down so everyone can understand them. Those laws also codify things like the right to own property, the right to speak and organize in order to address the government, and a market economy that is open and transparent. There are other things that can be part of a liberal society, but in general it is a society based in individual rights.

Democracy, of course, is where everyone gets a say. In theory, everyone participates equally, but this is obviously not possible in a large society. As the political theorist Robert Dahl showed, you cannot have a true democracy in a large society. Instead you have the features of democracy to one degree or another. You can have free and fair elections in which everyone can participate, even though many people will simply choose to ignore the process entirely.

There you have liberal democracy in a nutshell. It is a set of rules based on liberal moral philosophy where the people, through direct voting and through indirect representation participate in the rule making of society. Right away you can see a problem. If the people can make the rules, then they can vote to get rid of those rules that are based in liberal moral philosophy. The public could be persuaded that free speech is a bad idea and vote to suppress political speech.

Now, the usual suspects will jump up and down and say this is not so because those liberal rules are placed outside the democratic process. They are based in nature, maybe, or rooted in the ancient traditions of the people. In fact, they are written on a piece of paper which is kept in a museum. That way everyone knows that those rules are off limits to further tinkering. This is obviously not true, which is why America is shaking itself to pieces over those timeless rules.

Liberal democracy has the same problem that any democratic system has in that the people are the source of all authority. Those timeless rules based in human nature are deemed timeless by people who pretend they are based in human nature. They are not, in fact, rooted in a moral authority outside man. Since an axiom of all democratic systems is that no parliament can bind subsequent parliaments, all rules, even the timeless ones, are open to question.

In theory, liberal democracy has the same problem as communism and libertarianism, in that it has no answer for what happens when people change their minds. It has no answer for what happens when a decent number of people decide that those liberal rules are no longer working. If authority lies in the people, which is true of all democratic systems, then whatever rules you make, however you describe them, will be subject to the whims of the people.

Communists solved this problem by creating a new class of people who will be the vanguard of the revolution. The party makes sure that the rules remain fixed, so that the people never get any wild ideas about communism. Libertarians, of course, solved this problem by never coming close to creating a libertarian society. Even in their solons where everything exists in theory, they never solved this problem, because there is no way it can be solved.

Interestingly, the post-Marx culturalists landed on what they think is a solution to the internal contradiction in liberal democracy. They relied on anachronistic language to appeal to their audience at the time, but in the modern age, repressive tolerance has become the solution to popular dissent. In modern hands, this means those who are deemed a threat to our democracy are surrounded by the defenders of democracy and threatened with destruction if they continue.

Putting that aside, liberal democracy has no solution within the ideology of liberal democracy to the paradox of liberal democracy. If the people are sovereign, it means their are the authority for all the rules of society. That includes those foundational rules that the creators would like to think are immutable truths. When the people are the source of authority for the rules of society, they can change even those immutable rules of the universe if they so please.

This is why America has become increasingly chaotic as it has become increasingly democratic since roughly a century ago. In a time when a limited number of men of high status controlled the rule making, respecting those limits on the popular will was not just possible, it was necessary for their survival as a class. Once authority began to expand through expansion of the franchise, the cancer of democracy began to eat at the rules and the reasoning behind those rules.

As is true of other ideologies, the only way to make them work is to find some authority outside mankind to legitimize those fixed rules. Theocratical liberalism, for example, could work if the holy text codified the liberal moral code. A liberal dictatorship could work, assuming the people at the top saw an advantage in maintaining the liberal order for their people. Tradition could also work as a useful authority. Even belief in the simulation could work if explained properly.

In the end, liberal democracy suffers from the same central defect of all radical ideologies, which is that it seeks to free man of coercion. The liberals dreamed of a world free of political coercion. The Marxists dreamed of a world free of economic coercion, while the post-Marxists dream of a world free of cultural coercion. As the last radical ideology standing, liberal democracy promises a world free of all coercion, which is a direct threat to society itself.

It turns out that humans evolved to live in societies and societies are nothing more than a system of rules. In order to maintain the rules, people must often be coerced into abiding by the rules. Therefore any ideology that promises to eliminate coercion is promising to destroy that which makes society possible. Liberal democracy is a direct challenge to the very idea of human society. it is a suicide pact, which explains the the lunacy of the current age.

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Brother And Son

Posted on January 19, 2023 by thezman

One of the tricks the Clintons popularized for getting around rules and protocols was the sudden collapse in enforcement of the rules and protocols. Instead of violating one specific rule that was hindering them, they would violate all the rules. This way they could blame the system or just unintended errors. This made it hard to see the specific rule they were violating, which made it hard to see the caper. They hid their crimes in an avalanche of sloppiness.

This seems to be what the Bidens were up to when Joe was Vice President. His brother and son wanted to trade access for cash, a common political crime. Influence peddling is probably the second oldest crime. If you can get some important guy to do something or entertain doing something, that has tremendous value, so you sell that ability to people who want to influence the important guy. This is pretty much how all legislation is devised and passed into law in Washington.

This is also how politicians monetize their position. Maybe the wife gets a job at a high powered lobbying firm. Maybe the family members get jobs at companies that just happen to support the politician. Sometimes, as with Nancy Pelosi, the spouse gets to partner with someone with lots of insider access to make incredibly shrewd business deals using that insider information. Of course, the spouse, as we saw with Pelosi, is the conduit for some of the insider information.

For congressmen and senators, this is all perfectly legal. For the Vice President, it is completely illegal. Joe Biden could slip his brother some information about pending legislation or regulation, but he could not trade on the really good stuff. That is the international stuff involving high level access to the President. The Vice President is not allowed to auction off classified information either. He has access to information that is priceless to foreign players, but it is not for sale.

This is where Hunter comes into the picture. This is also where the Clintons came into the picture as well. You see, when Hillary was running the State department, her pervert husband was traveling the world giving speeches. Those audiences were pouring billions into the Clinton foundation in the form of speaking fees. Team Biden, no doubt, looked at this and thought they could do the same. Get Hunter and Jim Biden out there working the international market for cash payments.

The problem for the Bidens was two-fold. One they did not have a foundation to launder money through, so they had to produce some new conduit. The other is Hunter was a crackhead and Jim has no useful skills other than being Joe’s brother. If they start getting hired to do speeches, people will notice. It is beginning to look like the plan was to have these two idiots get big contracts and consulting gigs with foreign players, in exchange for something more than access.

This is why Joe Biden was sprinkling secret documents all over the place. You see, his son and brother had access to the family homes and offices. If Joe were to carelessly leave secret documents at these places, totally by accident because he is getting old and forgetful, Hunter and Jim could accidentally stumble upon them. Maybe they would see something in those files that they could use in their dealings with the foreign players like China and Ukraine.

Breitbart has a story documenting when Hunter lived in the family home and when those documents were in the family home. Of course, Hunter claimed at the time to be paying rent of fifty thousand a month. Now, he was on drugs at the time and spending his days doing those drugs with prostitutes, so maybe his claim about spending that much for rent was just what you get from a druggie. After all, he left his laptops containing intimate details of his life with a repair shop.

The Washington Free Beacon digs further using Hunter’s laptop to establish the timeline of Hunter living at the house and working for the Chinese. The angle that the conservative media is pursuing is that Biden’s reckless handling of secret material was far worse than what they are accusing Trump of doing. Trump kept his secrets in a big vault guarded by the secret service, not a crack addict. That is the stick they are supposed to fetch, so they do not look at the other angle.

The real angle here is the brother. No one is looking into Jim Biden, who has been a business partner with his brother for fifty years. This ProPublica article on Jim and Joe’s long and complicated business relationship details how the two of them have worked in tandem through Biden’s career. Unlike Hunter, Jim does not have a crack problem or a taste for hookers and naked selfies. He operates a complex web of financial companies and financial transitions.

If you wanted to launder money, there is no better way to do it than through a series of interlocking financial companies that move money around daily. Maybe Jim hears or sees something when visiting his brother and maybe he mentions that to an overseas client who maybe plops a few million into one of Jim’s deals. A little here and little there and before long a man who spent his life working for the government is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Funny world.

That is the old Clinton trick. If Biden were handing his brother’s intel, that would turn up on the radar of the spooks eventually. If Joe is just sloppy and lots of people have access to that intel, then that means the leak could be anyone. If the sloppiness ever came out, then the conservative media would have Hunter to chase around, rather than Jim who is not as fun to profile. It sounds overly clever, but politics selects for people who are good at cooking up schemes like this.

Just as we will never know the extend of the Clinton crimes, we will never get the real story on the Biden corruption. Whoever is getting this story into the media has real power and motivations they will never reveal publicly. Maybe the whole thing is a setup and it has nothing to do with corruption. Maybe the corruption was so egregious that even the spooks were offended by it and they are exacting some revenge. Either way, the place to look here is the bother, not the son.

The New Anti-Science Right

Posted on January 17, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about Ukraine, a post about Biden and the Sunday podcast. Since there is interest in it, I will be doing a weekly post on the happenings in Ukraine. You can sign up at SubscribeStar or Substack.

Way back in the heyday of conservatism, a common charge leveled at them from the Left was that they were anti-intellectual. Generally, this meant that conservatives did not appreciate free verse or post-modern art. You see, the Left read books and appreciated the arts while the Right read the Bible and fired off their boom-sticks. It was not so much an argument against the intelligence of the Right, but rather a class argument against the uncouth people entering politics.

After the Cold War, it was no longer possible for the Left to use a class argument against the Right, when their champion was the Snopes clan. There was simply no way to present the Clintons as sophisticated and erudite. Compounding it was the obvious fact that their politics looked like daytime television. These were crude, uncouth people who brought with them a collection of vulgar carny freaks. By comparison, the talk radio guys looked sophisticated and measured.

That was not the end of the anti-intellectual claim. It transformed into a claim that the Right was full of anti-science believers. You see, the Left was now armed with the latest ideas from the social sciences, while the Right was armed with superstitious nonsense from their sky god. Never mind that the social sciences are closer to astrology than actual science. They had studies and the word of men with impressive sounding titles to show how much they bleeping loved science.

Since the end of the Cold War, this has been incredibly effective magic. Just look at how the conservatives curled up in a ball when the Left started waving around their studies about the Covid pandemic. Most of them did not hold up to scrutiny, but the conservatives were unwilling to scrutinize them. Instead, they were happy to embrace policies that they allegedly opposed as a matter of principle. They accepted the grotesque violations of civil liberties because science!

Science, of course, is about debate, when you stop and think about it. Theories are proposed to explain some observed phenomenon. Those theories are tested and challenged in a formalized process. Simply put, science is about broadening the debate about the natural world within an agreed upon process. The exact opposite of science is telling people to shut up because science. This is exactly what happened with Covid and the conservatives were happy to agree.

What appears to be happening is that the Left’s claims against what they call their opposition are being embraced by their opposition. Just as many conservatives in the 1980’s relished their populist, working clash aesthetic, the new conservatives forming up seem to be embracing a rejection of science. They are going to stand on antiquarian ideas from the long lost past and reject the human sciences. This is what you see in this book review by Sohrab Ahmari.

The book and the review are a long form version of the old internet meme about Democrats being the real racists. You see, race never existed until it was invented by bad people to do bad things. Before those bad people, no one had ever noticed the vast differences in people. Then those bad people came along and coined the word “race” and then created “race science” to divide people along entirely arbitrary lines, that while easily measurable, are a figment of our imagination.

Now, Sohrab Ahmari is not working math puzzles in his free time. He is a discount Dinesh D’Souza. An exotic guy who orbits around conservative politics, looking for a place to land. D’Souza got his big break when he stabbed the great Sam Francis in the back on behalf of the Washington Post. Ahmari got his break when he noticed people making fun of David French on Twitter then penned a column based on what he read called Against David French-ism.

Sohrab Ahmari is at the center of the new Right so even though he is no one’s idea of a deep thinker, he represents the new opposition being created within the managerial elite to be the Left’s new foil. He is not an exception. Look at the Yoram Hazony project and you see an even stronger opposition to science. In the tenth item, he writes, “No person’s worth or loyalties can be judged by the shape of his features, the color of his skin, or the results of a lab test.”

The fact that no one says such a thing makes his opposition to it rather weird, but that is not the point. Anyone who has taken in Hazony’s live shows will have seen how he acts when the human sciences are mentioned. In his first show he said something along the lines that the “race scientists” are incredibly good at marshalling the facts to support their arguments, so it is best to avoid debating them. In other words, this is not a pose for him, but a cornerstone of his worldview.

In fairness, some of this hostility to the human sciences is due to fear of mean words from the Left. If you are going to be the useful idiot to the people atop the prevailing orthodoxy, you have to make clear you are no threat to their worldview. Controlling the morality of race has been a highly effective weapon for the ruling class and they are not going to let that weapon drop, even in the face of reality. They are certainly not going to trade it away just to create a new useful idiot.

That said, there is a genuine contempt for the human science on the Right, both the new Right and the old Right. Part of it is due to the fact that once you accept biological reality, whole areas of debate are closed down. Worse yet, important areas of social life are reduced to the tough choices. A big part of democratic politics is reality avoidance, so reducing policy options to coldblooded trade-offs is no fun. Universal human equality is much more fun than biological reality.

A bigger issue here may simply be intelligence. For a long time, the smart fraction was selected into areas like philosophy and theology. Once theology was dropped from ruling class interest, the smart fraction was recruited into things like the amusingly named political science and then political economy. The rise of actual science began to change the selection pressure. For a few generations now, the smart fraction has been selected into STEM and even finance.

The result has been a dumbing down of political philosophy. A dunce like David French can pass himself off as a deep thinker, as long as he keeps up with the latest fads and picks the right enemies. No one else around him is going to notice that he moves his lips when he reads. In such a world, the increasingly complex world of the human science can easily look like black magic. Declaiming against “race science” is not just an in-group signal but a defense mechanism.

Chaos And Control

Posted on January 12, 2023 by thezman

The closest thing we have to a universal principle of human society is that all elites are primarily concerned with maintaining their status as elites. No matter how the society is organized and for what purpose, the number one priority of a social elite is maintaining themselves as the elite. In fact, it is reasonable to say that the point of society, from the perspective of elites, is to maintain the elite. Any benefit to the people is either to maintain the standing of the elite or a happy accident.

It is tempting to think that the best way for an elite to maintain itself is to make sure the people over whom it rules is happy. A good king keeps his people in peace and prosperity, so the people are happy to have him as king. The trouble is, there is always someone who thinks they can do a better job than the king. Good times or bad times, these people will look for their opportunity. Of course, in good times, a new elite can form up outside the system and potentially rival the existing elite.

It turns out that good times bring dangers to an elite. In fact, good times are more of a problem than bad times, because in bad times the elite can use the emergency as a way to rally the people. Roosevelt used the Great Depression to rally the people around a set of alien ideas called the New Deal. His massive expansion of the state was totally at odds with American tradition, but times were tough and the people trusted him, so they went along with his radical ideas.

Emergencies are a great way to bind the people to their current elites. Unless the elite proves to be unable to unwilling to face the emergency, the people will give their existing rulers the benefit of the doubt. Throughout the Cold War, Americans were willing to tolerate all sorts of trouble, because the threat of nuclear war made the idea of challenging the elites seem risky. There was plenty of cultural turmoil, much of it from the top, but the great American middle never wavered.

That gets to the other way elites maintain power. By pitting one group against another, the people are too busy with that to question authority. In fact, self-interest leads them to appeal to the exiting authority to resolve the conflict. If crime suddenly becomes a problem in your town, those complaints about the cops suddenly go away as long as the cops do something about the crime. By keeping the masses busy with various small issues, elites can defend against the formation of rival elites.

This explains the turmoil of the 1960’s and 1970’s. The race revolts, youth rebellion and cultural revolution were not grassroots phenomenon. All of these things were the product of the exiting elites. Look into the background of the radical leaders of that period and most of them came from elite backgrounds. Once their radical days were done, they went into positions within elite institutions. Even those who committed serious crimes were welcomed back home.

The second half of the 20th century was a game of good cop – bad cop on the American people by the ruling elite that emerged after the war. The bad cops created cultural mayhem that “freaked out the squares” while the good cops appealed to the people’s patriotism and decency to fight the Cold War. One hand created division while the other hand created unity. Often these two forces were pitted against one another to the benefit of the ruling class.

During the Cold War, this system served the elites very well. The threat of nuclear war forced the agents of control to contain the agents of chaos. At the same time, the agents of chaos understood they had limits. The two sides of the ruling class were not always in balance, but they always returned to balance. The chaos of civil rights gave way to the control of racial peace. The cultural chaos of the 1960’s and 1970’s gave way to the control of the 1980’s.

Ever since the end of the Cold war, this system has been in crisis. Without the threat of nuclear annihilation, the agents of chaos have no limits. At the same time, the agents of control no longer have to worry as much about the façade of democracy. The crusades against the Muslims brought some stability to the problem, but the Muslims were never a serious threat like the Soviets. For the last two decades the agents of chaos and control have been running wild.

This explains the ridiculous things we see today. On the one hand, the security state is wantonly violating civil rights in order to maintain control. The extent of the crimes committed by the FBI is unknown, but what is known is shocking. On the other hand, the super-rich finance crackpot schemes to unleash crime waves and pervert the law to torment the people. Throwing open the jails and appointing pro-crime prosecutors is the definition of societal madness.

The standard explanation from conservatives for what we are seeing is that the people behind this stuff want money or power. The trouble is the people behind this stuff already have money and power. In fact, they have more money and power than any ruling elite in human history. Western elites, especially the American elites, make the aristocracy of 18th century France look poor and impotent. Clearly, the motivation behind this behavior is not money or power.

What we may be seeing is the organic death of a ruling elite. The 20th century selected for a certain type of person in the American ruling class. One type was the agent of chaos and the other type was the agent of control. There was no selection pressure in favor of prudence or moral scruples. The great crises of the 20th century provided something like an electric fence around the elite. Over time, these conditions produced an elite incapable of self-limit.

Like the panda bear, our elite has evolved down a dead end. They thrash around looking for some great crisis to serve the same role as the Cold War, but that was a unique period in human history. It cannot be replicated. Meanwhile, the agents of chaos and control explore the outer limits of their sociopathy. Unencumbered by the fear of destruction, they keep pushing the limits, while simultaneously creating the conditions for their own demise.

What Is National Conservatism?

Posted on January 5, 2023 by thezman

National conservatism, a movement created by Israeli Zionist Yoram Hazony, has gained some degree of respectability over the last decade. People associated with the movement have been given space on mainstream platforms. His conferences get a large crowd of academic types, most of whom get a speaking role. The event is one part academic conference, one part networking event. Of course, it is all made possible by billionaire Peter Theil who underwrites it.

Therein lies the first puzzle. Look at the collection of people associated with the movement and it is hard to find common ground. Peter Theil calls himself a libertarian, but he supported Trump. Granted, the space between Trump’s 1980’s civic nationalism and libertarianism is not that great, but most libertarians threw their dresses over their heads and went squealing into the night when Trump arrived. They joined their friends on the Left in calling him a fascist.

It gets fuzzier when you see paleos like Paul Gottfried and Daniel McCarthy, along with varieties of the “new right” like Michael Anton and Josh Hammer. The only thing these people have in common is support for Trump. Otherwise, they do not have much in common with one another, at least on the surface. Then you have people like Rod Dreher and David Goldman speaking at these events. Hazony’s events are the bar in Star Wars for dispossessed right-wing intellectuals.

Things get more muddled when you look at where some of these people come down on the key issues of the day. Here is John O’Sullivan giving a speech about Ukraine at the most recent conference. He clearly knows nothing about the Ukraine or the war, but he is happy to defend the Global American Empire’s meddling. Here is someone writing the “national conservative case” for arming Ukraine. He thinks war with Russia will help in the war with China to come.

Those two are not outliers. Here is Yoram Hazony making the rather farfetched claim that Ukraine was just minding its own business when for no reason at all Russia decided to invade them. If one were to take Hazony’s book, The Virtue of Nationalism, at face value, you would expect him to take the opposite position. After all, Hazony’s book is an argument against empire and it is the Global American Empire that is the cause of the war in Ukraine.

Of course, no one can read Hazony’s book and not see that it is mostly a way to give Europeans the language to defend Zionism. The prevailing ideology of Western elites is explicitly anti-nationalist. An ethnostate like Israel falls far outside of what Western elites consider acceptable, so you can see the problem. Israel ethnically cleansing the West Bank does not fit the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion pogrom. The Hazony project is mostly a way to square that circle to Western conservatives.

As an aside, Hazony makes the claim in his book that a people have a right to a homeland if they have the ability to keep and maintain it. He makes this qualification for two obvious reasons. First, it sets a size limit for a nation. Otherwise, three people could get together and demand independence. The other reason is it allows for the easy dismissal of Arab claims in Israel. The Palestinians have no claims because they cannot keep their own lands.

The fact that this argument is best applied to Israel is never addressed. After all, Israel would not exist without the British then the Americans. The entirety of Israeli foreign policy for over half a century has been to use any means necessary to gain favor with great powers in order to fend off the Arabs. Israel is the product of empire. Now that the Global American Empire is looking weak, Israel is now cutting the Ukrainians loose in favor of the Russians.

Putting that aside, the question remains, what is national conservatism? At this point, the best answer is that it is a holding area for people not welcome at reputable events who never want to be associated with disreputable events. For example, Jason Richwine is welcome at a Hazony event, but at that same event Hazony will rage against “race science” like a grievance studies major. Mark Krikorian is welcome, but anyone associated with VDare is banned.

The result is that national conservatism is sort of island of misfit toys. The only thing holding them together is a desire to get a seat at the table. Thiel’s money lets them put on extravagant conferences at world class facilities, which draw in famous people looking for some street cred as an outsider. For example, Marco Rubio, a product of Conservative Inc., gave a speech at Hazony’s event and now talks about himself as an implacable foe of the Washington political establishment.

Otherwise, national conservatism is a term without meaning. The nationalism expressed by people like Hazony is situational. Israel can build settlements in Arab areas because it is in their national interest. Russia, meanwhile, is guilty of imperialism when she moves to defend ethnic Russians from Ukrainian fanatics underwritten by the Global American Empire. This sounds like the same old neoconservatism that has plagued us since the middle of the last century.

As for the conservatism, there is not much agreement. Hazony claims that American conservatism is rooted in Burke. The umbrella group that sponsors his activity is called the Edmund Burke Foundation. On the other hand, the Claremont people that freely circulate in these events reject that claim. They are Lockeans, at least with regards to the American founding. Others are social conservatives rooting their moral claims in the authority of their religion.

There is nothing wrong with heterodoxy. In fact, more events where disparate people can socialize and debate is a good thing. As a movement, however, there has to be something more than Peter Theil’s money and estrangement from the cool kid’s table of the prevailing orthodoxy. Without a common goal or even a common narrative, it is just a collection of outsiders desperate to get back in, terrified of the ominous sounds coming from the darkness to their right.

Friends & Enemies

Posted on January 4, 2023 by thezman

One of the truths of democratic politics is that enemies tend to be forever, while friends tend to be temporary. The reason is politics is personal. When someone does something to harm you in politics, you take it personally. You remember it long after the harm has been forgotten. When someone does you a favor, in contrast, it tends to be transactional, as the person doing the favor is acting from self-interest. Favors are impersonal, while harms are always personal.

This is something Kevin McCarthy is learning right now. His climb to the speaker’s chair has been sidetracked by a small group of malcontents. They oppose him becoming the next Speaker of the House because they do not like him. More important, they think he is a shameless liar, so they do not trust him. The reason they think this is that Kevin McCarthy is a shameless liar. To get where he is he had to knife people in the back, because he has no other qualifications for the job.

It will never be said publicly, but his role in knifing Congressman Steve King in the back, at the behest of the donor class, burned up his capital. If he is willing to work with the New York Times to ruin a Steve King, how can anyone in the caucus be sure he will not do the same trick to them? Politics is a sleazy business, but the reason to be in a party is to have the protection of the party. McCarthy broke an important rule so he is a man with few friends, only money to spread around.

Another truth of politics is that when you take a shot at the king you better not miss, which is where the anti-McCarthy forces are right now. They have to hang together or they will hang alone. Just in case that is not clear, the self-aggrandizing sociopath from Texas, Dan Crenshaw, gave one of his typical tantrums to the press, calling the holdouts forever enemies of the uniparty. In Hell right now, Stalin is slapping John McCain on the back why saying, “That’s your boy!”

The unspoken truth of this fiasco is that this would not be possible if the FBI had allowed the Republicans to sweep the midterms. If it had been a red wave, McCarthy would have had no trouble getting the votes from all of those newly minted House members excited to be in Washington. Instead, the FBI only allowed the GOP to gain a small majority to keep up appearances. That gives this small band of holdouts the chance to throw a wrench in the works of the uniparty.

This brings up the question that no one in the media dares ask. That is, why is it just fifteen members of the party opposing this oleaginous snake? For a long time, we have been told that most of the party is conservative, but the leadership is the problem, always cutting deals with the Democrats. If the conservatives could get control of the leadership, then things would change. It turns out that conservatives are as rare as hen’s teeth in the Republican Party.

The truth is, George Washington was right. No man is so virtuous as to resist the highest bidder and that is axiomatically true in politics. Marjorie Taylor Greene switched teams for the promise of some legitimacy. The party promised to let he pretend to be a serious person in exchange for her support of the uniparty. It turns out that those stories about old Marge being a cheap date were true. It is a good reminder that character is your best guide, even in the sleazy world of politics.

Of course, this whole affair is shining light on a truth about our politics. Democracy is just a show to conceal the real power in society. The holdouts know that they will get nothing from this, even if McCarthy steps aside. The guy who takes his place will be dancing the tune the donors call. Again, for the holdouts, this is not really about principle. They just hate Kevin McCarthy so they are taking their shot. In the end they know the Speaker will be a puppet of the donors.

This affair also suggests that the donors and their puppets in the two parties are tiring of the game of make believe. Once it was clear that the people are too docile to push back against things like lockdowns and mask wearing, no one in charge had any reason to worry about fooling the people with the democracy show. They can have this embarrassing food fight in public, because who cares about the public? Certainly, no one in either party or the pirates that control them.

It is why the right way to view it is as just another carny act on the stage that is liberal democratic politics. It is all sound and fury signifying nothing, but there is no harm in enjoying the suffering of the people made to perform on the stage. Given the age in which we live, expect the holdouts to be bought off or threatened by the FBI and this whole thing comes to end today. McCarthy is human filth, but he does what he is told, so the donors will probably save him.

Even so, there is a lesson for dissidents. Politics is always about friends and enemies, not abstract ideas. The goal is to increase your pool of friends, while limiting the pool of enemies you create in the process. Politics is always personal. Those who go out of their way to create drama and stir up conflict are always bad for your politics, so the best course is to avoid those people. You may not always be able to count on your friends, but you can always count on your enemies.

Willing Accomplices

Posted on January 3, 2023 by thezman

If one were looking for a reason for why the conservative movement failed so completely you would be spoiled for choice. Most people would point to the fact that despite having billions of dollars and majority support on key issues, conservatives managed to conserve nothing. Others would point out that many of the people claiming to be conservative were more concerned with maintaining good relations with their friends on the Left than advancing conservative policy.

Often this is where you hear some form of the Hoffer quote about great causes becoming religions, corporations or rackets. It is a great observations and certainly true, especially with regards to the conservative movement. Any system that produces a sanctimonious simpleton like David French has long since stopped being a serious political movement. Most of conservatism is a racket, while the rest is just a jobs program for philosophy majors.

While true, these are symptoms rather than causes. The real cause of conservative failure was the race issue. Once they conceded the moral high ground to the Left over the issue of race, the Right was forced to embrace the blank slate and egalitarianism in order to make any sense of it. You cannot agree that unequal results are immoral if you also claim that Mother Nature does not distribute her gifts equally. You have deny nature in order to embrace the moral claim.

Once conservatives accepted the starting premise of the Left, they condemned themselves to forever embracing the Left’s conclusions. You can see this in the fight of the antiwhite pogroms called CRT and DEI. This recent National Review post claims that conservatives can win the race debate. That sounds good until you read the actual text of the post and see that the secret formula for winning is another version of the internet meme, “the conservative case for…”

Here are the key lines. “We must see racial disparities where they exist and acknowledge racial trauma as real, because for many Americans, it is real. Responding to the trauma of racial discrimination by simply expressing a commitment to a race-neutral ideal is a bad move.” In other words, the so-called conservatives have to accept the premise of the Left. They see winning as proving to their masters on the Left that they are properly trained on the issue of race.

Now, the author of the piece is an interesting character. We can be sure that his ancestors did not arrive on the Mayflower. He is an example of what conservatives tell us is the new model American. His people arrived recently and as if by magic they are not only as American as everyone else, but they now have a duty to criticize the errors of your ancestors and explain how you can make things right. South Asians have embraced the skins game with a passion.

There is another name for this. Isaac Willour is a fine example of the Ingrate-American, a new arrival who does nothing but lecture white people for not having done enough to make his stay comfortable. White Americans could be forgiven for wondering why in the hell they need to listen to this interloper about anything. Maybe instead of lecturing us about our ancestors, he should be thanking us for a life that the civilization of his ancestors could never provide to him.

Putting that aside, once you concede that racial disparities require your attention and that they are the fault of white people, you sign onto whatever pogroms the Left launches on white people. There can be no salvation for white people until those disparities are gone, but since that is an impossibility, the only choice left is a forever war on whiteness, which is a war on white people. This is the logical end of the conservative embrace of the blank slate.

One you concede that people are amorphous blobs that can be made into anything, the cause of observable disparity shifts from the individual to society. Once you buy into the idea that all men are created equal, you concede that any observed inequality must be the result of some malevolent force in society. Once conservatives signed onto these two concepts, they committed themselves to a war on the majority population in the name of equality, equity and justice.

This is how conservatives went from Bill Buckley arguing with James Baldwin over the issue of civil rights to a world where recent arrivals lecture the white population about the crimes of their ancestors. After all, if all you have is the claim that all men are created equal, endowed with natural rights, what argument can you have against some guy getting off his flying carpet and claiming to be your equal? As your equal, does he not have the right to judge you and your ancestors?

Of course, this degenerate thinking pollutes everything. After all, how can one oppose open borders when you owe such a huge debt to the world? How can one question the economic arrangements when the world is counting on your sacrifice? How can you oppose community wrecking policies when you wanting to live a peaceful life among people like yourself is clearly white supremacy? Once the blood libel gets going, it becomes the universal weapon.

This is why conservatism has been a failure in America. Once they signed off on the blank slate and egalitarianism, they had no way to dispute any of the claims made by the Left, so they were reduced to being their unwilling accomplices. Eventually, their masters lost patience and now conservatives compete with one another to see who can be the most enthusiastic for the latest progressive fad. Conservatism is a shadow that cheers as the Left flits from one cause to the next.

Is American Conservatism Possible?

Posted on December 28, 2022 by thezman

In America, Right and Left are relative terms in that the Right is defined by its relationship with the Left. While the Left flits from novelty to novelty, the Right shouts, “please slow down” while following it around. As Robert Lewis Dabney put it a century ago, “American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition.” His observation has remained true to this day. It is why yesterday’s radical idea is today’s conservative principle.

This is not true in other parts of the world. Radicalism exists, but it throws itself against the defenses of tradition and history. It may break down those walls, as we see in Europe, but the contours of the Right remain in place. European conservatism is the appeal to hierarchy, tradition and permanence. Joseph de Maistre would be shocked by modern Europe, but he would still be able to make out the borders that define the modern conservative forces of Europe.

The opposite is true in America. Take someone from the founding generation and transport him into the middle of the 19th century and he would recognize the forces of radicalism quite easily. After all, the radical abolitionist would look strikingly familiar, having come from the same stock. Transport that man further into time and he would recognize the New England roots of the progressive. Conservatism, on the other hand, would make no sense to him in any age.

That is the problem for conservatives. The rest of the world has traditions, habits of mind and institutions with roots into the mists of time. America is a young society, so the ancient customs are not all that ancient. Most of those were borrowed from Europe during the colonial period. Others were trampled under the hoofs of one prior radical pogrom or another. Modern conservatives are left to conjure an authority due to a lack of tradition and history.

You can see the dilemma here in this speech Michael Anton delivered to Hillsdale College on the end of conservatism and the beginning of a new politics. Anton is part of a project to build a “new” conservatism. Like the “old” conservatism, his starting point is Lincoln and the “second founding” as imagined by Harry Jaffa. Note also that the person introducing Anton is careful to insert the Athens and Jerusalem line into his remarks, signaling his membership in the cult of Jaffa.

The cult of Jaffa and Lincolnism has been discussed at length here and other places, so there is no need to go over it again. Of interest here is the selection of Lincoln as the Abraham of modern conservatism. This is a bit like picking Karl Marx as your starting point for German conservatism. In his time, Lincoln was a radical and not just the bourgeois coffee house variety. He was willing to kill as many of his fellow citizens as needed to impose his radical vision on the country.

The “new right” would no doubt dispute that characterization of Lincoln, but you cannot place Lincoln on the Right during his age. Abolitionism was a radical idea, one that the radicals of the founding generation rejected. John Adams opposed the idea on the grounds that it was worse that slavery. Like many of his generation, he personally opposed slavery, but he understood the danger posed by the abolitionists. Adams would have viewed Lincoln as a dangerous fanatic.

Of course, in his own time Adams was a dangerous fanatic. The people trying to form up a new conservatism love waving around the Declaration of Independence, but that was the most radical document produced to that point. In fact, the entire founding of the United States was a great experiment in radical politics. It is not an accident that America is often called an experiment. The very basis of America is the praxis of radical thought and it continues to this day.

The truth is America has never had much to work with for anyone trying to create a genuine conservatism, because America lacks the history and traditions that would naturally anchor conservatism. Compounding it is that the limited history and traditions that are available are nothing but a long journal of one radical experiment after another in the vain hope of creating that city on a hill John Winthrop imagined when he and his fellow fanatics landed in the New World.

This lack of necessary ingredients with which to fashion a genuine conservatism in America is probably why conservatism has been a failure. When you are reduced to conjuring a novel history in support of novel ideas, as we see with the current “new right” experiment, all you are really doing is engaging in your own form of radicalism, just without the force of authority enjoyed by the Left. Conservatism becomes nothing more than a parlor game for outsiders.

This is why any effort to produce a genuine alternative to the prevailing orthodoxy needs to start with an honest inventory of reality. What can be produced from the materials at hand to create something that can resist the acid of liberalism? The answer cannot lie within the liberal tradition. To go back to 1950, 1850 or 1750 looking for answers to the problems created in those times inevitably means explaining away the defects of liberalism in order to preserve it.

The place to start with fashioning an alternative to the prevailing orthodoxy is not in 1950, 1850 or 1750, but in 2050. Given the current demographic trends, imagine a continent filled with versions of Orania and then contemplate the ideology of a people who can maintain it. This is one lesson we can take from the founders. They tried to fashion a practical solution for their people at the time. The next founding will have to do the same thing, but for a different people.

The Marx Of America

Posted on December 27, 2022 by thezman

Note: Henrik and Lana of Red Ice need some help with medical bills. Their new born needed almost two week in the ICU. Donate here.

There are men who are remembered for what they did. There are men who are remembered for what they said. Then there are men who are remembered for who they have influenced or the chain events touched off by them. This last group is unique for the simple reason it is hard to say exactly why they are remembered. They are history’s version of the popular figure who is famous for being famous. One such example is the late philosopher, Leo Strauss.

That last sentence provides a clue as to why this mediocre philosopher and historian is a figure who looms large of contemporary politics. Serious students of philosophy take exception to calling Strauss a philosopher. Historians dismiss him outright. Students of Greek philosophy roll their eyes when they the man’s name. Even his followers will spend hours debating how to properly label the man. Despite this lack of distinction, Leo Strauss is an important figure in our politics.

For those looking for an accessible explainer on Leo Strauss and his work, Paul Gottfried’s book, Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America is a straight forward summary and analysis of the man and his work. For those looking for an even shorter introduction to the topic, here is a good review of the book. At the end of that review, the reviewer touches on the central question of Strauss. Why does this mediocre academic cast such a long shadow?

The main reason anyone talks about Strauss is that his followers have been central to American politics for half a century. His most famous acolyte was Harry Jaffa, who created the cult of Lincoln that still animates conventional conservatism. His reimagining of American history allowed contemporary conservatives to get to the left of their opponents on the issue of race. It is why the modern conservative cannot shut up about Abraham Lincoln. He is their get out jail free card.

That does not explain why we have lots of middlebrow intellectuals announcing themselves as Straussians rather than Jaffians. Modern conservatism owes far more to Jaffa than Strauss, but the conservative intellectual space is littered with people flying the flag of Leo Strauss. Additionally, there are flavors of Straussianism, as in the East Coast Straussians and the West Coast Straussians. What is so magical about this man that half a century after his death he still casts a shadow?

This is where Marx comes into the picture. Like Strauss, Marx was a mediocre intellectual, but he cast a huge shadow. There were many smart men working the communist and socialist circuits in the 19th century, many smarter and more reasonable than Marx, but it was Marx who towered over the rest. Despite having been wrong about pretty much everything, Karl Marx remains a respected thinker and philosopher on the Left.

One reason Marx rose above the rest was that he provided intellectual authority to the socialist movement. His theory of history turned a collection of moral preferences into scientific fact, which gave the believers an unquestionable authority upon which to base their economic and political claims. To this day we hear people on the so-called Left claim that they are on the right side of history. This means their opponents are on the wrong side of history, so they can be dismissed.

Similarly, the Straussian method provides the believer with a set of tools to instantly create the needed authority for their normative claims. Strauss taught that you must learn the true intent of a writer. The Straussian, of course, has the special skill to see through the esoteric writing of genuine philosophers, who out of necessity always cloak their real meaning from the casual reader. Strauss allows his followers to divine the real meaning of historical texts.

At first this does not sound like much, but it allowed Harry Jaffa to tease out the real thoughts of the Founders, which to that point had been called the Framers, because they wrote the text of the Constitution. Jaffa claimed that their real thoughts were contained in the Declaration. From that he could turn the Founders into Moses and Lincoln into Joshua. The former led his people out of bondage, but not into the Promised Land, while the latter completed the journey.

That is a clever trick, but as Gottfried noted, this was not simply for the amusement of bored intellectuals, but part of a political strategy. By casting Lincoln as the real founder of the American republic, conservatives, who were clustered in the Republican party, could claim him as their own. Not only does the “great emancipator” become a shield against the charge of racism, but he also becomes a license to turn egalitarianism and the blank slate into conservative principles.

That is a major appeal of Strauss. His method provides a set of tools for rhetorical combat within practical politics. The Straussian method allows the user to flit from one tine of Hume’s fork to the other. They can conflate those things that are axiomatically true with those things that are contingently true. Decorated with their own interpretations of Plato and Aristotle, gratuitous assertions become immutable fact. These tools let the users win the debate, rather than reveal important truths.

Probably the main appeal of Strauss is the same as for Marx. For the initiate, the system of thought provides a framework to answer every question. This in turn elevates the believer’s sense of self. When you are on the right side of history, you inevitably are filled with confidence. When you can divine the intent of the great minds and use this secret knowledge against your opponents, you become a god. The appeal in both cases is spiritual, not intellectual.

The comparison between Marx and Strauss works because of the people who were most attracted to the two men. The people who rallied to Marxism were not the urban proletariat, but the urban bourgeois intellectuals. Similarly, those rallying to Strauss are not highbrow political thinkers. His appeal is to the middlebrow bourgeois intellectuals that grow like a fungus on the modern age. Both provided a purpose to idle men without an obvious role in life.

Ideas have consequences and bad ideas have bad consequences. That should be the lesson of Marxism. Leo Strauss was a clever man, for sure, but his bad ideas have given us a half century of political agitation and subterfuge. One would think the embarrassing catastrophe that was the Bush presidency would have relegated Strauss and his followers to the dustbin of history, but when you are untethered from facts and reason, the facts never get in the way of your next argument.

One Big FTX

Posted on December 23, 2022 by thezman

Regimeology is not just the art of interpreting the official pronouncements from the managerial elite, but it is also for interpreting their actions. Nothing they say can ever be accepted at face value, so nothing they do is on the level either. It is all signaling back and forth to communicate between nodes of the collective. If the regime happens to do something useful for the people, it is a happy accident. Most of what they do is about the internal dynamics of the regime.

The Sam Bankman-Fried story is a good example. At this point everyone understands that this is not a corporate financial scandal. There is little chance that the sophisticated people involved with this guy and his partners were unaware of the nature of his business. The entertainment people hired to shill for the company had no idea, as hey are stupid people, but the sharps putting important people in touch with this weird looking goblin of a man were not fooled.

The one thing we know is it was a money laundering operation to move cash into the pockets of politicians and connected people in the regime. To no one’s surprise, there is a Ukraine angle here. Apparently, Ukraine was taking money handed over by Washington and putting some of it into crypto accounts on the FTX exchange, allegedly to pay their own people. The absurdity of that claim is obvious. Most likely it was quietly shifted to other accounts and ended up in other pockets.

They say you cannot teach an old dog new tricks, but there is nothing that says you cannot teach a new dog old tricks. The heart of the issue is one of the oldest tricks in democratic politics. The politician makes a deal with a favored vendor, who then hires friends and relatives of the politician. Some portion of their salary ends up as expensive gifts to the politician. Alternatively, the vendor rewards the politicians with gobs of campaign cash.

In this case, that old political grift was updated to the digital age. Ukraine put funds into the FTX exchange, which Sam Bankman-Fried then used to buy friends in Washington, making sure those friends were friends of Ukraine. Those friends then made sure Ukraine was getting as much cash as possible. Given that so much was happening in crypto, no one was going to try and follow the money. As long as FTX stayed solvent, his scam could go on forever. Whoopsie!

Of course, we will never know where the money went as the regime sent in one of their best fixers to handle the liquidation of FTX. John J. Ray III is no doubt a competent and honest man, but he is being paid one thousand dollars an hour to clean up the mess, so he is not going to be biting the hand that feeds him. You read that right. He is billing one thousand dollars per hour for his services. The one guy who is assured of getting rich off FTX will be the man liquidating its remaining assets.

They can scrub the books and make sure the content creators in the media tell the right story, but that still leaves the main players. The “polycule” that was running this scam is too colorful to ignore. If these people looked like a Chuck Schumer family photo, they could possibly get a pass, but this group is simply too absurd. The two principles, Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison, the woman who looks like a turtle, are household names now, so the regime has to deal with them.

That is where regimeology comes into play. The Clinton crime family sent Jamie Gorelick into work with Turtle Girl. Gorelick, for those too young or depressed to remember the 1990’s, was the Vice Chairman of Fannie Mae, which she ran into bankruptcy, while creating the mortgage crisis. She walked away from the disaster with close to $30 million. Now she is the lawyer for Turtle Girl, who did to FTX what Gorelick did to the mortgage industry.

The reason they sent in Gorelick is to make sure their interests are protected, which probably means they helped her get a deal with the Feds. She keeps her mouth shut about the family business and she avoids a long prison sentence. That helps the Feds shape the charges against Bankman-Fried in such a way that leaves the Clinton family business out of the courtroom. Maybe it helps Mr. Bankman-Fried recall specific shenanigans with enemies of the family.

The fact that they let him out on bond, rather than send him to Epstein’s old holding cell, suggests he is playing ball. Most likely he had to agree to not do anymore media events until his case is resolved. The one thing everyone in the regime can agree upon is they do not want this guy running his mouth in public. On the other hand, if he suddenly commits suicide or decides to get his fifth Covid booster, then we can assume the regime did not want to roll the dice with him.

Of course, like all of the Ukraine grifting, we will never get an honest accounting of what happened with this caper. The only thing we can know is the regime is getting reckless, because they simply do not care enough to be careful. Now that we are fortified for democracy, they can do as they please. As long as the economy keeps chugging along and there is no major crisis, they can steal as much as they can carry. America is one big FTX now. What could go wrong?

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