Managerial Menticide

Posted on February 21, 2022 by thezman

Note: The Monday Taki post is up. The subject of it and today’s post is the new way to look at the system ruling over us. Of course, Sunday Thoughts is up behind the green door for those needing audio stimulation. Much of it is about the situation in Europe and the evolving Canadian dictatorship.

One of the problems with the Opposite Rule of Liberalism is that it relies on the old Left-Right dichotomy of American politics. This framing persists despite the fact that it is a vestige of a bygone era that no longer works today. The political divide is now between those who adhere to the basket of ideas called Western liberalism and those who defend the post-Marxist managerial state. The latter group is made up almost entirely of members of the ruling class.

In other words, we now live in a world divided by those in the system of control that hovers over the West and those who live under it. The Dirt People versus Cloud People framing is a much more honest, if a bit sarcastic, framework for the world. The ruling system is like a miasma that hangs over society, infecting the minds of the people and their relations with one another. We can see the elites at the top, just barely, but the system they control is all around us.

A big part of what ails society is this sense that things are not as they seem, but it is hard to get a read on why. That noxious miasma that lingers in every aspect of society often leads people to doubt their own senses. Their experience tells them things about the world and people in it, but everywhere they look they are getting messages telling them that what they think they see is not true. Instead, they are to believe something that is often the opposite of what they experience.

This is where the Opposite Rule continues to work. Those who are aware of the contradictions of daily existence can apply the rule to the information stream that comes from the system, filling the area around them. Whatever is in the air at the moment, start from some version of the opposite, and the truth will be near. The Opposite Rule of Liberalism is best restated as the Opposite Rule of Managerialism. This organic, self-aware system that rules over us is the opposite of truth.

A useful example comes from the daily barrage of “information” from the system about the crisis in Ukraine. Here is a story from the New York Times headlined, “Russia has been laying groundwork online for a ‘false flag’ operation, misinformation researchers say.” Note that this story is not behind the usual paywall, as they want wide circulation of it. Note also that the writer is one of the infants they employ to copy and paste material into “news reports.”

This news report starts with a news report from a European based group called European Expert Association, which is described as “a research group that focuses on security in Ukraine.” When you take a look at who these people are, it becomes obvious that they are Ukrainian activists. These are not neutral observers searching for the truth about the crisis. More important, when you look at their resumes you see all the familiar NGO’s that are pushing for war with Russia.

Of course, this is the New York Times, the first draft of history and the leader in the American news media. They do not just take this at face value. They hand it to a group called the Global Disinformation Index, a nonprofit “research” group. These are the go-to guys for the Times reports on misinformation and disinformation. To the shock of no one in the Times offices, the researchers at Global Disinformation Index confirmed everything said the European Expert Association.

The reason the Times was not surprised by what they heard back from the Global Disinformation Index is the person running it is Anne Applebaum. She is a notorious warmonger and neoconservative. Here she is advocating for the liquidation of the Afghanis and the Syrians as a “solution” to those problems. Applebaum is a big believer in what Stalin supposedly said about people causing problems for the regime. No man, no problem. Applebaum just scales it up.

Her partner in this enterprise is a Ukrainian activist named Peter Pomerantsev, who is probably on the payroll of a Western intelligence service. His biography does not pass the laugh test. His role in life has been to seed Western media with anti-Russian information dressed up as Ukrainian nationalism. The rest of the staff of the Global Disinformation Index all have an axe to grind with some enemy of the neocons, past, present or in the future.

The point of this walk through the swamps behind the ministry of disinformation is to illustrate how the new rule works. If a media outlet is claiming to root out disinformation, you can be sure they are not doing that. Instead, start with the assumption that they are waging a disinformation campaign. That is what you see in the New York Times story and any story containing the words “Global Disinformation Index.” Then you can begin to figure out what is really going on with the story.

Of course, the entirely new obsession with misinformation and disinformation by government and mass media is a big lie. Since forever, people have known that governments lie all the time. They have known that the media is partisan, a form of activism more often than not. Yet suddenly we are being told that the media and the government are now declaring war in false information. Since they are the only possible source of disinformation, this means war on themselves.

The big lie, for those unfamiliar, is a lie so colossal that no one would believe that someone could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. This is now the default tactic of the managerial state. They tell us that Eskimo truckers protesting vaccine rules are white supremacists. Then they bring in a “hate expert” to claim that freedom is a form of violence. These outlandish whoppers are then signed off on by new experts who sagely tell us the moon is made of cheese.

Unlike normal propaganda techniques, this new tactic is not to further a cause, although it can be used that way as we see with Ukraine. The neocons are simply taking advantage of a defense mechanism that has evolved since the Cold War. By flooding the zone with outlandish nonsense, the system prevents cogent analysis of what it is doing or contradicting it in any way. It is a form of menticide to paralyze the people by suspending them in a solution of false narratives.

This is the utility of the Opposite Rule. It helps clarify the new relationship between the leviathan and the people. Instead of viewing society as a hierarchical structure that is responsive to the will of the people, you see that it is an adversarial relationship between a ruling organism and the people. This ruling organism is the vast administrative state made up of government, corporations, the academy, non-profits and the mass media. It is a fully integrated organism.

The endless waves of information, mostly false information, is its primary defense mechanism against what it sees as a threat. That threat is the people over whom it hovers like a noxious cloud. The point of the false information is to keep the people in a fog of confusion about who really rules over them. You cannot rebel against that which you are not even sure exists. Menticide is the primary defense mechanism of this system of social control we call managerialism.

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Performative Democracy

Posted on February 17, 2022 by thezman

One of the striking things about the Canadian trucker protest is that we have been able to get a good look at Justin Trudeau. To this point no one outside of Canada has had a reason to care about him. Sure, he is a ridiculous person who likes wearing funny outfits in public, but that is democracy. Until now few people outside of the great white north have grasped the depth of this man’s ridiculousness. The whole world now sees that Canada is ruled by a feckless airhead.

In fairness, Canadians can point out that while Trudeau is a ridiculous person, he is not wearing diapers and unsure of his own name. In the theater of the absurd that is western liberal democracy, Joe Biden has to be the headliner. The Global American Empire has a dementia patient in charge. Not only that, when Joe Biden was at his peak fifty years ago, he was considered one of the dumbest men in Washington, so he is a dunce with dementia now.

Most people tend to write off these examples as exceptions. After all, the system does produce some serious people. At least that is the hope. What keeps people voting is the belief that someone will come along who will actually do the people’s bidding and be reasonably good at it. In the daily life of most people, there are plenty of capable people doing important work. In a nation of three hundred million, we should be able to find enough competent people to fill these offices.

The trouble is the system is stuffed with people who are probably worse than Justin Trudeau or Joe Biden. Is Mitch McConnell or Nancy Pelosi an upgrade over Joe Biden in terms of cognitive ability? Is Justin Trudeau more ridiculous in his role than Maxine Waters or Ocasio-Cortez. Allegedly the most important legislative body on earth has a bag lady and ditzy barmaid. You can probably find one hundred members of Congress who are more ridiculous than Justin Trudeau.

It is not just at the top of the system either. Again, the habit is to think of the people as exceptions rather than the rule. The rest of the system has decent people who can be elevated to the national stage if people just vote harder. Then again, one of those people is Marjorie Taylor Greene. She is supposed to be the antidote to someone like Ocasio-Cortez, but in reality, she is just another flavor of the same thing. Silly people are the one thing that both parties embrace.

When you look down at the entry point of politics, what you see is the system seems to select for these people. Here is a young women with a bright future. She is currently in the Nebraska senate. Her Twitter profile reads, “State Senator in Omaha’s District 8. Vice Chair of Urban Affairs. Bi queen. Abolish ICE. She/her.” It is not hard to see her getting elevated to Congress at some point and then becoming a national figure as the first pronoun American in Congress.

Her web site says she is an “entrepreneur and small business owner” but that is a gross exaggeration. When you dig into her business career you learn she owned a boutique for a short time and then founded “Safe Space Nebraska, a nonprofit organization that protects bar patrons from harassment.” That is not the work of an “entrepreneur and small business owner”. That is the work of a public nuisance. She is why in a better age the scold’s bridle was popular.

Gormless dingbats like Megan Hunt are not an exception. She is the rule in modern politics, up and down the system. In fact, when you look down the ranks what you see is that demented old men like Biden and feckless airheads like Trudeau really are the best the system can produce. When you look at the actuarial tables, it is clear that a guy like Trudeau will be remembered as Canada’s Pericles in a few years. Joe Biden will be the Zoomer generation’s Patrick Henry.

The Founders, of course, were opposed to democracy because they assumed the people would be manipulated by craven opportunists. Ambitious men with little regard for the common good would play on the passions of the people. This would inevitably lead to factionalism. The people would care more about the narrow pursuit of their faction’s interests rather than the public good. Democracy becomes mob rule, where different mobs take turns ruling over the other mobs.

We are certainly seeing that in modern America, but what the Founders never imagined is that the craven opportunists would be stupid and ridiculous. Justin Trudeau is a simpleton, but he also possesses a rare set of social skills that has allowed him to rise to the top of his government. Joe Biden was a stupid crook, but somehow managed to stay in the Senate for generations. Even in his current condition, he was able to manipulate the system to win the White House.

What the results are telling us is that mass democracy in large technological societies selects for moronic sociopaths. The most likely reason for this is that democracy quickly becomes pointless in a large technological society. It is just window dressing for the managerial elite that operates the vast administrative state. The system can tolerate Joe Biden, because the president is a ceremonial position. In fact, all of the elected offices are ceremonial, just part of the performative democracy.

Circling back to where this started, the trucker rebellion in Canada is probably the first real test of this system. Thirty years ago, Justin Trudeau would not be tolerated because the Cold War required serious men in these positions. Three decades of easy times has allowed the system to evolve into the absurdity we now see. Reality, however, is coming back from holiday. This will be the first real test of performative democracy and the actors and actresses that populate it.

Storm Clouds

Posted on February 16, 2022 by thezman

If you are over a certain age, something you will remember is that the economy used to be a central part of the daily news feed. People talked about the economy because it was always in the mass media. Of course, you had lots of news about finance, especially the stock market. This dovetailed with the stories about the federal budget and the resulting deficits. People used to talk about the federal debt because it was a number that was easy to conceptualize.

All of this has been pushed aside in favor of other topics now. Look at the front page of the New York Times on any day and the one thing you are not going to see is news about the debt or even the economy. Instead it is foreign affairs or perhaps a long story on the fight against Trumpism. The Washington Post is pretty much just a copy and paste operation, relying on press releases from government agencies. It is as if the economy and related topics no longer exist.

One reason people are not talking about the economy over lunch is the mass media has been told to drop it. The real power of corporate media is the power to ignore, which is what they have done with economics. When was the last time the New York Times did a big story on the finances of the government? There was a time when this was a stock feature. People used to know the size of the federal debt because it was a number that was made meaningful by the media.

Another reason econ-talk has moved to the fringes of the public debate is the people in charge launched a culture war against the people back in the Bush years. That is when the great shift in media focus started. Bush became Hitler and the Left reorganized itself around the great crusade against fascism. This academic psychosis started to spill into the retail politics of the Left. By fascism they mean anything and anyone that opposes the grab bag of incoherent beliefs now called the Left.

The great leaving alone of the economy was also made possible by the fact that the system seemed to be on autopilot. The mortgage meltdown of 2008 did not result in bread lines or mass unemployment. The accounting scandals from the prior decade had no impact on daily life. We have had several market crashes over the last twenty years and no traders have leaped from their office windows. Like war, the gyrations of the economy have been “made for television” events.

The truth is the economy is something people care about and it is something they can know about without the media. If you are a Dirt Person, you have been watching your food bill tick up over the last year or so. You have chatted about this with people at work and with friends at parties. Food inflation is becoming a feature of life. Now gas prices are starting to creep into the conversation. The solons in the mass media may not notice it, but everyone else sees it when they gas up.

The last time inflation was a thing, Reagan was going around the country while running for president, saying, “Inflation is as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber and as deadly as a hit man.” This sounds way over the top, but it resonated with people because at one level he was right. Crime is about social trust and the crime of inflation robs the people of their trust in the basic functioning of society. Inflation puts everything about economic life up for grabs.

Compounding things now is the fact that the core demographic responsible for there being an economy has lost all trust in the government. The inflation numbers recently posted were met with scornful laughs. Everyone knows they are under-gunning the inflation numbers, because these are people who have lied about everything for the last decade or more. The same people who wear ceremonial face gear and lie about the Covid problem are now reporting seven percent inflation. Right.

This is why inflation should be the number one topic on people’s minds as we proceed through the long dark winter Biden has inflicted on us. Even the fake numbers the government released say that something must be done. The Fed has committed to tightening the money supply starting in March. History makes clear this will result in a recession and an uptick in unemployment. Put another way, the bad news on the economy is just getting started.

How will the public respond to the first real recession in decades? How will they respond to the rambling about it by a geriatric old fool who can barely put two sentences together? How will Americans respond to the stream of managerial sociopaths that will be sent out to insult our intelligence? How will the media respond? They have been the Greek chorus for the system for so long, are they even capable of dealing with a practical issue at this point?

This long vacation from reality that our ruling class has enjoyed since the end of the Cold War is about to end. They can stick to whatever theories they remember from their grad-school seminar on diversity and equity but the reality of the human condition has not changed. The ruling class of any society is responsible for the general welfare of the people in that society. When they fail, they are held accountable. This is an immutable law of human organization that never goes away.

This is why the situation in Canada bears watching. Trudeau is a simpleton who has no business being in charge of anything. Contrary to the old chestnuts about democracy, he is not the ruler the people deserve. He reflects the competence of the ruling class that installed him in office. The people who thought this feckless pansy was right for the job are so far proving to be incapable of managing this trucker crisis. They have made Canada the first English speaking dictatorship.

The American people are far more docile and subservient than Canadians, but until a few weeks ago people assumed the Canadians were a beaten people. It turns out that there is still some life left in Canadians, which suggests there may be a flicker of life left in Americans as well. Put enough pressure on people and they will find the courage to rebel against their masters. Inflation, recession and widescale unrest is the sort of pressure Americans may need to find their spine again.

The holiday from reality is over and we are about to enter into a period in which serious topics with real meaning return to the fore. The reckless sissies and addle minded old fools who have been playing make believe for the last few decades will now have to face a real crisis. Similarly, a lethargic and prostrate people will now have to remember how to stand up for themselves again. It will not be long before the last few years of the culture war seem like a golden age of tranquility.

After Left And Right

Posted on February 10, 2022 by thezman

Categories are useful, which is why humans have been using labels for people and things since the dawn of time. Using generalizations for people, events and things is a handy way of communicating important things efficiently. The political terms Left and Right have been with us since the 18th century for that reason. They are broadly useful in describing people and ideas. In the particular they are often confusing, but when it comes to the big categories, they work.

In 18th and 19th century Europe, the Right was those on the side of the old aristocratic order, while the Left represented some form of liberal alternative. The Right defended the rights of the crown against the demands of the crowd. The Left advocated the rights of the people against the traditions of the crown. The Left was coming at politics from an empirical perspective. They talked about rational government. The Right were traditionalist, often rooting their position in religion.

In the 19th and 20th century, especially in America, the terms Right and Left were redefined around economic concepts. The Left were socialists, embracing Marxist arguments, to one degree or another, about economics and history. The Right was the defender of markets and free enterprise. Those old class concepts, king and peasant, inevitably were incorporated. The Left was on the side of the working people, the new peasants, while the Right was on the side of business.

The limits of this new economically based politics are obvious when looking at the early 20th century, particularly the interwar years. Fascism is considered to be right-wing, even though all of them embraced socialism. They also championed the workers in their organizing and rhetoric. Communism was much more popular with the upper classes than the working classes. Look at 20th century communism and what you see is academics and the scions of the upper classes.

Lost in all of this is the term liberalism. In the 19th century, liberal meant rational government rooted in natural law. The Founders were liberals. They sought to create a political order that reflected the people and history of the new country. They were not basing their arguments in religion or tradition. They were debating the most rational form of government for a land populated as it was at the time. Into the 20th century, liberal was a fairly good stand in for reason.

Fast forward to the middle of the last century and the term liberal had been conflated with the term progressive. They had become synonyms. Progressivism was anything but liberal in the traditional sense of the word. The progressives rooted their ideology in New England public Protestantism and oogily-boogily borrowed from European intellectuals of the Hegelian tradition. Regardless of it claims, Progressivism has always been in opposition to empiricism.

This redefinition of the word liberal is just one example of the larger assault on the common language. It has reached the point today where no reasonable person accepts anything said by the upper classes at face value. The reason is they no longer use the language as defined by the dictionary. The most recent example is the phrase “the science has changed” which has nothing to do with science. In fact, the only thing we can know for sure from that statement is the science has not changed.

The assault on cognitive meaning in the language and the rise of emotional language in public discourse is part of a larger dynamic in American political discourse that has come to redefine Left and Right. To be on the Left is to embrace an ideology rooted in your emotions about the topic and the people involved in the topic. To be on the Right is to engage rationally with a topic. Liberalism has become an assault on reason, while illiberalism is the defense of reality.

In his book After Liberalism, Paul Gottfried points out that what masquerades as liberalism in America is post-liberal. Things like pluralism and democracy are not part of the liberal tradition. 19th century liberals understood that not all men were invested in society, so not all men warranted the franchise. Similarly, they understood that all ideas were not equal or deserving of equal consideration. By extension, the people behind those ideas were not deserving of equal consideration.

Gottfried does not address it in his book, but one could argue that managerialism in America is a response to the collapse of reason in the political order. The formation of the administrative state and the concept of managerialism were the response to the collapse of the old constitutional order in the 19th century. These are not based in reason, but a practical necessity. The labyrinth of bureaucracy, private and public, that control public life exist to provide stability.

What this means is that the terms Left and Right have to reconsidered to fit the reality of the present age. The Left is illiberal, emotional and irrational. It is the rejection of the human condition, not in a spiritual sense, but in an empirical sense. It is not an accident that the people most into life-extension technology and various forms of virtual and hyper reality are on the Left. They seek to transcend human biology by living on forever in a new world created for them on-line.

This is why the term right-wing is cognitively meaningless. Those holding to the old economic definition are culturally and politically irrelevant. They oppose a political force that no longer exists. The traditionalists have a similar problem, because much of what can be defined as American tradition has been defined by the Left. Since Gettysburg, the Left has controlled the culture. So much so that things like abortion have a greater claim to tradition than opposition to it.

The greatest trick of radicalism has been to slowly lay claim to irrationality, things like tradition, emotion and spirituality, incorporating them into their theories of history and human organization. Their opposition has been left with sterile facts and figures or claims to tradition that no longer have emotional energy. The American Left is irrationality in the guise of science, emotion draped in the garb of reason, illiberalism wearing the costume of liberal governance.

Getting back to the terms Right and Left, the great crisis on the Right is rooted in the fact that the Right does not exist. It does not exist because it does not understand what it opposes or even if it opposes the Left. Until people desiring an alternative to the prevailing orthodoxy come to terms with the moral and linguistic reality of the prevailing orthodoxy, there can be no cognitive opposition. You have to know what you oppose, before you can explain why you oppose it.

As a practical matter, the West is now in a pre-Enlightenment period. This is why our age looks so much like late feudalism with better stuff. In 17th century France, there was no Right because there was no Left. There were just the way things were. Today, there is no Left or Right for the same reason. There is the prevailing orthodoxy with its established hierarchy and a bunch of disaffected peasants. The Right-Left dichotomy no longer exists practically or theoretically.

The Pirate’s Cove

Posted on February 8, 2022 by thezman

An observation made by paleocons in the last century was that the political system had been purchased by the financial system. By that they did not mean bankers were handing bags of cash to specific politicians. That has been going on since both money and politics have existed. What they meant was that the financial system had started to overwhelm the political system. More specifically, the ethics of the emerging new financial system had overwhelmed the political system.

In the money game, every rule is seen as an obstacle to be circumvented, rather than a limit on activity. The only thing that matters is profit. No one in the world of finance has ever considered if their trade is ethical, outside of some areas where there are agreed upon rules or the state imposes rules. In these exceptional cases, it is not ethics that restrains the activity, but force. Banking has always been a Darwinian game where the strong eat the weak. Morality has no role.

Government, on the other hand, has to be a game of morality, in which the boundary between right and wrong is policed. That is the point of government. The starting place of every human organization is answering the question, “Who are we?” What flows from that is a set of rules to define the answer. Government is either granted the power to enforce the rules or the elites seize power in order to enforce the rules, depending upon your philosophical outlook. That is the point of the state.

What some of the paleos observed in the 1980’s is that the ethics of the financial class had overtaken the ethics of the government. Politicians were now thinking the same way a banker thinks when he sees a rule. The first and only thought is how can I get around this in order to profit? Of course, those who are good at solving the puzzle are rewarded, while those who are bad at it or refused to abide by the new ethics of government, are eliminated.

If you look at a graph of the Dow Jones from the start of the last century to the present, what you notice is a sharp tick up in the 1980’s. From WW2 into the early 80’s the graph is a smooth upward trend, reflecting the post-war expansion. Then all of a sudden, when the post-war expansion was clearly over, the graph turns sharply upward and has climbed to heights thought impossible. It also corresponds with the collapse in political ethics that started in the 1980’s.

Cynics will say this all sounds naïve as politicians have always been crooked, but that confuses the personal with the systemic. Men are not angels and every system, no matter how ethical, will have some unethical people in it. The reason we know politicians are crooks is we used to regularly arrest crooked politicians for taking bribes or running schemes. In other words, they fell afoul of the rules. Note that we no longer arrest politicians for financial corruption.

Those old enough to remember the before times know that the corruption surrounding the Biden family would have been disqualifying a generation ago. Taking any money from a foreign source was going to be a problem. Today, it is rare to find a pol in either party who is not paid by foreigners. One member of the House intelligence committee was sleeping with a Chinese spy. The normalization of bribery over the last generation is well outside the norms of traditional politics.

This is what those paleos were talking about in the 1980’s. Here is a good example of this from Pedro Gonzales in Chronicles. He got access to a Telegram channel where a payola scheme was openly discussed. There was a time within living memory when this would have been devastating. Careers would have been ruined. Today everyone inside the political system shrugs, because everyone is on the take. Pens for hire are so common that no one thinks it is odd.

This is why National Review, for example, created the National Review Institute, a not-for-profit that operates National Review. The not-for-profit does not have to disclose its donors, so no one knows who is calling the tune. That money is used to pay for content, often supplied by allies of the donor as guest content. There are shops all over now that hire writers to produce white box content for interest groups, who then sell it to these sites for the benefit of their donors.

This is not an accident. Just about every mainstream media outlet aligned with the two parties sits around thinking about how to do this. They know it would not sit well with the public, which is why they setup the not-for-profit entity. Like the bankers who hide their grifts in mountains of regulation, the political press hides their corruption in the tax code, fund raisers and phony book deals. Like the bankers, they look at the rubes on Main Street as suckers to be played.

Of course, if you want a career as a pundit, you better figure out quickly that the game is to make the donors happy. Since those donors are in one way or another aligned with finance or technology, the issues are simple. The reason National Review will never have a discouraging word to say about tech censorship is they rely on tech money to keep themselves in the lifestyle they believe they deserve. Whether they believe it or not, everyone involved is a pen for hire now.

Again, this is not about some people being corrupt. This is a about a revolution in the ethics of the vast political system itself. Forty years ago, people across the political spectrum operated from the assumption that the goal of public policy was good government, which they defined in utilitarian terms. Good government was the greatest benefit to the greatest number of people. No one talks like this now, because no one thinks like this anymore. Everyone thinks like a banker.

The irony here is that the last forty years have been a great test of the libertarian claims about the nature of man and society. America has been transformed into a pirate’s cove where the only limit on your profit is your conscience. The one thing everyone agrees upon is that this system is horrible. Soon the other thing everyone will agree upon is that we need a strong hand to reimpose order. Right now, the left-authoritarians have the advantage, but the right-authoritarians have the numbers.

Then, Now and Tomorrow

Posted on February 7, 2022 by thezman

Note: The Taki post is up and related to the today’s post. The ongoing debate about the future of conservatism is interesting to me. It is good that such a thing is happening, but so far it reveals that we are a long way from having a sensible debate. The participants are still locked into an antiquated mode of thought. Sunday Thoughts is up behind the green door for subscribers as well.

Recently there has been a slow rolling debate among right-wing intellectuals about the state of conservatism and what comes after conservatism. The New Criterion held a symposium on “common good conservatism.” The James Wilson Institute has been debating originalism and legal conservatism (here, here, here and here). Josh Hammer from Yoram Hazony’s group has also been writing about that topic. This debate has also spilled into the foreign policy realm.

There are plenty of others chiming on the topic, but the starting point, even if it is not acknowledged, is that conservatism is done. Whatever comes next may carry the name, but it cannot be the same thing. Interestingly, the old Buckley crowd is not a part of this debate, nor are the neocons. They are too busy hanging onto their sinecures to think much about what comes next. The paleocons have also been left out of the debate, which is ironic given that they were right all along.

As is to be expected with people who view themselves as political theorists, the back and forth is not always accessible. This is especially true with regards to the debate around conservative jurisprudence. It is in that debate, however, where we see the first little green shoots of realism. In this essay the writer points out that there will never be a great rollback of the school prayer decisions. The main reason is no judge or lawyer would ever think such a thing is proper.

The great transition from the original constitutional order to what we have today did not happen in a vacuum. The people have changed, the institutions have changed and the people running the institutions have changed. The writer points out toward the end that the truth is the original social order that is so popular with “constitutional conservatives” no longer exists. America, from top to bottom, is a different world from the one that produced the Constitution.

This is the problem with the current debate about the state of the nation and especially the state of conservatism. The starting point is always the belief that things can be rolled back or reset to a prior order. It is a political revanchism where the plotters seek to reestablish the old order, but this time the people in charge of that order will not be so willing to change it. The proposed alternatives to conservatism promise a return to the past, without regard for how we got to the present.

If there is going to be a New Right in America then the starting point must be a discussion about how we went from the 18th century liberal political system to the present custodial state. In other words, it means retracing our steps in order to find the point at which America went off the course charted by the Founders and instead embarked on a new path for the country. It is in the essay about school prayer that the original sin begins to come into focus.

The writer points out that those school prayer decisions were the result of the consolidation of judicial power under the incorporation doctrine, which is the doctrine by which portions of the Bill of Rights have been applied to the states. In the case of school prayer, the courts extended the prohibition on the federal government regarding official religion to the states. Later courts extended the definition of “official religion” to include any reference to religion.

Clearly, the Founders never intended the establishment clause to apply to the states, as it was never applied to the states until the 20th century. The question is why did the court suddenly decide to apply parts of the Bill of Right to the states and by what authority did they do this? The answer is the 14th Amendment, passed as part of the constitutional reforms following the Civil War. Of course, the reforms were imposed by the victors as part of the spoils of war.

The Civil War did not happen in a vacuum. The roots of that conflict go back to the English Civil War and the founding of the first colonies. Note that the victors of the American Civil War were not the primary hand drafting the Constitution. It was men of the South, with their roots in the cavalier side of the English Civil war, who carried the day on important debates forming the new Constitution. It was the losers of those debates who carried the day seventy years later.

Another way of framing this is that the constitutional order so beloved by originalists did not hold up very well to challenge. It collapsed in the 19th century and since then the victors of the long running debate dating back to the English Civil war have been trying to refashion a new order and a new society. If conservatives are going to find a new path forward, they must come to grips with the present. That means reexamining the past in order to understand why their preferred model failed.

This is why the current debate over conservatism is sterile. No one in that debate is willing to reconsider the 19th century and the events that transformed the country from that which the Founders designed to what emerged in the 20th century. The events of the 19th century are now holy writ. The second founding doctrine is just as entrenched with conservatives as it is on the Left. In fact, both sides compete for who best can achieve the perfect equality promised by the doctrine.

The starting place for a new conservatism is the acknowledgement that the founding creation failed the test of reality. That naturally leads to a debate as to why it failed, which is a debate about the 19th century. That, in turns, means a rethinking of the 20th century in order to gain a clear understanding of the present. Once a new historical framework is in place, then a New Right can begin to chart a new course for itself and the society in which it operates.

Wide Right

Posted on February 1, 2022 by thezman

In January, The New Criterion organized a symposium around the topic of the changes in the conservative movement. They invited several writers to respond to the main essay written by Kim R. Holmes, the former Executive Vice President of The Heritage Foundation and former Assistant Secretary of State in the G. W. Bush Administration. The respondents are Ryan T. Anderson, Josh Hammer, Charles R. Kesler, Daniel J. Mahoney, James Piereson, Robert R. Reilly, and R. R. Reno.

Now, if this were a boxing match, it would have been called in the second response to Holmes, written by Josh Hammer, a member of Yoram Hazony’s National Conservatism movement. Hammer offers a lengthy critique of conservatism but the subtext is a bit of inescapable reality. The conservative movement, whatever its intensions, was a complete failure. It conserved nothing. In fact, it may be the biggest failure in the history of political movements.

Conservatives often respond to this with the claim that it was conservative foreign policy that defeated communism in the last century. That is true, but the point of defeating communism was to preserve American’s way of life and protect the ancient liberties of Western people. Winning the Cold War was supposed to be a means to an end, not an end in itself. Instead, the peace dividend has been spent up-armoring the administrative class and the increasingly tyrannical security regime.

One reason conservatism is in a crisis is the defenders of the movement refuse to acknowledge this reality, which calls into question their sincerity. The Holmes essay does not mention this fact and instead offers a long critique of the critics. In so doing he inadvertently reveals the source of the crisis within conservatism and the cause of its failure. His defense of John Locke displays an ignorance of why Locke mattered to the Founders and why he matters today.

Locke is considered the father of liberalism because he solved an important problem. Upon what authority should political philosophy rest its claims about politics and human society? If it is not the king and the social order that was passed down to the 17^th century, then what should it be? If it is God, then it logically must be Scripture, but the Gospels are not much help when it comes to creating a political structure to govern society. Jesus had no opinion on parliamentary order.

Locke was a Christian who accepted that God created the world. Since God must be rational, it follows that his creation is rational. Further, it follows that he knew what he was making when he created the world. He would have no need to change those rules, as God does not make mistakes, so it follows that the rules of nature are fixed. Mankind lives in a world of fixed and discoverable rules, which means we can discover the rules that should govern human society.

Simply put, Locke removed religion and Scripture from the equation so that a moral philosophy could rest upon the authority of nature. It is not an accident that the Founders used the phrase, “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” in the Declaration of Independence. They were not basing their claims against the King on the words of their favorite philosopher. They were basing their claims on the same authority as their favorite philosopher.

Unlike the Founders, modern conservatives are not interested in the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” and instead rest their authority on their favorite historical figures. They are fond of quoting Locke, Jefferson, or Lincoln, especially Lincoln, but these are just men. They can only offer a path to an authority upon which to build a political philosophy. Otherwise, they are as flawed as every man. Locke, for example, believed in the blank slate, which is complete nonsense.

This is why conservatism has been a failure. Without some authority to base their political claims, their opponents are free to dismiss them as mere tactics. From the perspective of the Left, the Founders were just men. On the other hand, the historical process is science and the foundation on which they make their moral claims. Legal and economic arguments are no use against moral arguments, which is why the Left has swept conservatism from the field.

To his credit, Holmes is correct to point out that the National Conservatives are terrified of being associated with identity politics. The trouble is, there is no way to have nationalism without national identity, even if you try to hide that identity behind talk of customs and traditions. Those customs and traditions did not fall from the sky. They are the product of a people defined by the mating decisions of their ancestors and the location of those decisions.

Holmes is also correct to point out that the National Conservatives are wrong about Burke’s influence on the thinking of the Founders. This is an attempt on their part to replace one favorite philosopher with another in order to claim the high ground against establishment conservatives. Further, to pretend that Burke was not well aware of what it meant to be British, to have a British identity, when he was defending the traditions and customs of the empire is to exempt oneself from reality.

The most curious response to Holmes on behalf of the “common good conservatism” side is from Ryan T. Anderson, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. The group describes itself as “dedicated to applying the Judeo-Christian moral tradition to critical issues of public policy”. He correctly points out the fatal flaw in social contract theory, which is the bedrock of the conservative movement. There is nothing in nature or in Locke’s writing that requires a social contract that only guarantees rights.

The proto-society that is coming together could plausibly agree to sacrifice their rights entirely in order to preserve the commonly held property of the members. The human sciences tell us that this is probably the basis of the first human settlements. Kin groups collaborated with related kin groups to maintain hunting grounds and water supplies. Similarly, they could have come together to protect some natural curiosity with which they held a shared spiritual meaning.

The archeological record suggests that what first brought disparate kin groups together was not an agreement to respect each other’s rights. Instead, it was common spiritual belief. Göbekli Tepe, in what is now Turkey, is known as humanity’s first temple. It was constructed by pastoral people as some a shared religious site. It is assumed that agriculture caused people to settle down, but this site offers another plausible reason to settle and cooperate, shared belief in a common set of gods.

That has always been the trouble with social contract theory. It is a thing that exists as a logical construct to solve the problem of natural rights theory. That is, lacking an authority on which to base natural rights, this imaginary contract between people is conjured from thin air to be that foundation stone for the theory. Natural rights theory assumes an axiom for which there is no evidence in history. Further, if such a contract existed, it probably had nothing to do with rights.

An interesting observation by Robert R. Reilly in his critique of the integralists is that “They wish to find themselves in a pre-Reformation Christendom.” Integralism is revanchism, which has run through the conservative movement since the 1960’s. The integralists may dream of returning to Camelot, but the current conservatives dream of returning to 1980. The neoconservatives dream of returning to 1950’s Brooklyn. Conservatism is the promise of a “do-over” where this time the good guys win.

Reilly also offers up this strange argument against the common good. “A love of one’s own can only take one so far. One naturally loves one’s own, but is one’s own always deserving of love? If this love lacks grounding beyond a bare attachment to one’s own, how is it different from others’ preference for their own? Strict nationalism fails to the extent that it does not take into account natural law and natural rights, which together condemn the universal state and expose its inherently tyrannical nature.”

Conservatives used to condemn this sort of universalism to the woolly-headed intellectuals who spent too much time reading Marx. Conservatism simply assumed that custom and convention are what allowed people to live peaceably. Civil society was the product of generations of trial and error, the result being a collection of compromises we call culture. There could never be a universal state, as there can never be a universal culture, because there is no such thing as universal man.

Like all modern conservatives, Reilly is terrified of what naturally flows from putting the interests of your own ahead of strangers. Conservatives have accepted the left-wing claim that anything exclusionary is exploitive and immoral. Loving your child more than the child of the stranger inevitably leads to fascism, according to the theology of the modern Left. Whether it is out of fear, cowardice or stupidity, contemporary conservatives have accepted the morality of the open society.

As a result, they have no choice but to reject that the common good can even exist and they busy themselves making the conservative case for the open society. In fairness, the common good conservatives suffer from this same affliction. Yoram Hazony’s book, The Virtue of Nationalism, tries to make the case for nationalism, but is repeatedly poleaxed by the fact that nationalism can only be rooted in biology, history and location. It also must be exclusive.

This is the problem faced by all of the common good conservatives. Unless they are prepared to make the case that their program includes all of humanity, they must define the who and whom of this new utilitarian conservatism. Who is inside the domain covered by the common good and who lies outside of that domain? More important, who decides? Further, upon what authority will this person be selected and what is the authority upon which they will rely to draw the boundaries?

The common good conservatives are silent on this, even though they privately will confess that their concept of a nation is the same one anathematized by the Left. The Finns should decide what is best for the Finns, even if that means excluding non-Finns from their lands. By nature of the mating decisions of their ancestors in their ancestral lands, they have the sole authority over what it means to be Finnish and what is in the best interests of the Finnish people.

Again, the common good conservatives understand this reality, but they also know that they will be hurled into the void if they acknowledge the obvious. To their credit, the neoconservatives have always understood this and limited their scope to foreign affairs. Their social criticism was always just window dressing that never dared question the morality of the open society. Kim Homes, someone who has traveled in neoconservative circles his whole life, certainly gets this.

Taken as a whole this debate bumps into the question of whether or not it is possible to have conservatism in a democratic society. As Russell Kirk pointed out, the first principle of conservatism is the belief that there exists an enduring moral order. In a political system where the truth, including moral truth, is decided by 50% plus one, there is no room for an enduring moral order. The evidence of this is all around us as men put on sundresses and declare themselves women.

The Founders understood the danger of democracy. This is why they explicitly said the new constitution provided checks against it. The democratic elements included in the new political order were bounded by limits on the state. Modern conservatives reject this and instead think they can achieve conservative ends by convincing 50% plus one to support their claims. They excitedly talk about democracy, because they are operating under the belief they can win over the fickle mobs.

This is because modern conservatism has abandoned that first principle of conservatism. The libertarians, the neoconservatives and the civic nationalists find the idea of an enduring moral order as horrifying as their supposed enemies on the Left. Like the modern Progressive, the modern conservative has made the shifting will of the people the sole authority. In such a world there can be no permanence, no tradition and no appeal to custom. Therefore, there can be no conservatism.

Whether it is the revanchism of the integralists or the sterile nationalism of Hazony’s brand of conservatism, they fail for the same reason mainstream conservatism has failed. Without a moral foundation upon which to make political claims, conservatism is nothing more than a negotiating position within the democratic system. It is why today’s Progressive fad turns into tomorrow’s conservative principle. The modern conservative always starts from the last Progressive victory.

That is the crisis in modern conservatism. For there to be a legitimate conservative movement, it must first come to terms with what it is it seeks to defend. Then it must answer why this must be preserved. These are moral questions that Locke answered by looking at the natural world as an orderly place that operates by fixed rules. As such, human happiness lies in the orderly society that operates under a rational and persistent set of rules.

This naturally means a rejection of the Hegelian theory of history that is the moral basis of both the Left and the prevailing moral order. The hand of history is not carrying mankind to some promised land where all moral questions are answered. A genuine alternative to the prevailing orthodoxy is not a debate about its factual inaccuracies, but a rejection of it on moral grounds. That requires a courage that modern conservatism and common good conservatism are unable to muster.

Many Realties

Posted on January 31, 2022 by thezman

Note: The Monday Taki post is up. After sending it off I thought about the idea of world building, so I addressed than a bit today. The Sunday podcast is up behind the green door and it is mostly about the usual stuff.

The old paleo-conservative gag about the demand for Nazis exceeding the available supply has become something of an iron law of the universe. Each generation discovers that the American Left is obsessed with fascists, white supremacists, the Klan and so on, despite these things no longer being real. Other than some cartoonish play-acting by those desperate for attention, these things are no longer real. They certainly play no role in politics or the general culture.

The lack of supply, however, has been no deterrence, especially now that the internet allows people to create these reality from thin air. The intensively on-line far-left invests all of its time finding someone they can label as the bogeyman or one the many members of the bogeyman army. The Antifa subculture, for example, is organized around the hunt for fascists and white supremacists. They spend all day looking for new baddies and obsessing over the prior baddies.

This being America, this means there is a subgenre of fringe-left media that caters to this subculture with ghost stories about Nazis. Hoffer said that all mass movements in America become a corporation, a racket or a business. The world of on-line hate-hunters is a racket that supplies world building materials to the intensively on-line Left so they can maintain their fantasy space. The witch hunters need witches, so there are people supplying them with witches.

This obsession with imaginary fascists is written off as the work of the mentally unstable, which is true, but it is more than that. What these people are doing is world-building within the alternative reality of their own creation. They live in a reality that says they are the guardians of the future utopia, keeping the world safe from its enemies, which come in many styles and guises. In order to keep this fantasy going, they have to find characters that fit the role of the villain.

In a way, this subculture has become something like the massive on-line role playing games that sprang up a dozen years ago. People can join, but they have to assume a character and then join a band on-line. This band is a set of social media accounts that support one another in their imaginary struggle. Doxing is both a weapon and a world building tool. The revelation of someone in league with the Dark One helps perpetuate the fantasy by supplying social proof to the members.

This is why these people look so outlandishly weird when they turn up in public to riot with other fantasy groups or hold what amounts to a street convention. They take their on-line character out into the real world, but the real world does not have these sorts of people or the bogeymen they are chasing. Antifa, BLM, furries, cosplayers, the alt-right and so on are normal in the alternative reality of their subculture, because the rules of that subculture have been created to normalize this stuff.

That is how to view the now defunct alt-right. Like the intensely on-line far-left, the alt-right formed up on-line as a form of escapism. They quickly became a foil for the intensely on-line far-left, because the interaction with that subculture shaped them into the much needed opponent. The intensely on-line libertarians became intensely on-line fascists because that gave them an enemy, the intensely on-line antifascists, who were happy to have the new villain in their version of reality.

It is not just the intensely on-line far-left that lives in an alternative reality. The anti-Trump movement quickly evolved into an alternative reality. Of course, its was the existing alternative realties of neoconservatives, the intensely on-line far-left and others that coalesced around this new boss introduced to the game. Trump allowed these alternative realties to align against a commonly imagined enemy. It is why they cannot stop talking about him, even after he has been defeated.

Eric Hoffer famously said that mass movements can survive without a god but they must always have a devil. This seems to be true of these alternative realities that are shaping the reality of the modern age. The inherent conflict with reality is masked by the obsession with imaginary adversaries. This has now become a form of world building where the players invest their time inventing new bosses to fight, always based on the general archetype required of their alternative reality.

While this phenomenon is mostly a product of the internet, it is jumping from the virtual into the physical world. The ridiculous Spotify story is a good example. The people running this company are responding to a fictional controversy, when they could easily ignore it. This is because many of the people who work at the firm are also deep into one of these alternative realities where Joe Rogan is the devil. In other words, the alterative realty is spilling into the reality of the CEO.

Of course, the people occupying the C-suites at these companies are not exactly living in reality either. Theirs is a world that is as alien to the daily reality of normal people as the reality of the intensely on-line far-left. In their world, the gesture counts for more than an action. If the Spotify CEO were to tell these loons to bleep-off, that would be viewed as a bad gesture in his reality. It would suggest he is not sensitive to their perspectives and in that reality, insensitivity is a mortal sin.

Much like the intensely on-line far-left, our ruling class is now increasingly occupied with world building in order to make their reality more realistic. The Covid panic is a great example, where a whole industry grew up to feed materials to the world builders of this fantasy game of pandemic. A bizarre aspect of the mass media age is that the ruling class now has an unquenchable thirst for crises. In the absence of real problems, they busy themselves creating them.

Of course, there are real problems, but those problems are boring. Like the kid who has played the game so many times he no longer finds it interesting, the ruling elite no longer has an interest in fixing roads or addressing the issues of society. As Pete Buttigieg made clear the other day, fixing potholes is boring. Instead, he will focus on make traffic fatalities more equitable. This new quest will allow him to have much more fun and feel much more important.

Diverging realities is not exactly new. The French Revolution featured at least two alternative realities. There was the reality of the Old Regime that had lost contact with reality in the late middle-ages. Then there was the new reality of the radicals, forming up in salons and public houses. When the reality of the Old Regime was no longer sustainable in the face of reality, it collapsed. Into the void rushed the new false reality of the Jacobins, which soon foundered on reality.

What is unique about this age is both the novelty of these alternative realities and the proliferation of them on-line. America is becoming a balkanized collection of alternative realties increasingly disconnected from actual reality. The tech giants are now promising to strap VR goggles on every face, which will only accelerate this phenomenon. Instead of people taking soma and living in a dream state, the drug of this brave new world will be the virtual reality and the world building it requires.

Legal Insurrection

Posted on January 27, 2022 by thezman

One of the features of every societal crisis is that the elites of the society stop enforcing the rules of society, especially on themselves. Prior to the collapse of the Roman Republic, the elites started making exceptions to the rules. In the short term they seemed practical, but in the long term these exceptions undermined the moral logic of the rules entirely. Before long, a man in Gaul could decide that the rules no longer applied and he was free to do as he pleased.

This is at the core of the current crisis in the American empire. The rules have become arbitrary with regards to the elite. In turn the elites no longer enforce basic principles that are the foundation of the country. One of the principles is property. It used to be understood that you own the produce of your labor. That was the default and infringement on your ownership had to clear a high bar. Today, the powerful can steal your property without consequence.

This collapse of property rights is at the core of this story out of Florida about a law banning theft of private images. A local politician says nude photos of her were stolen and distributed on-line without her consent. She is leading the charge to change the law regarding ownership of your image. She is also doing the rounds to draw attention to herself, but also raise awareness of the issue. She thinks there should be federal law to protect ownership of your image.

In truth, it used to be understood that you own you and therefore you own whatever you produce, including your image. Forty years ago, a television show maker would have to get a signed release to use footage of you walking down a city street. They did not have to pay you, but you did not have to grant them permission. Today, your image can be freely distributed on-line and you have no recourse. Similarly, your activity on-line can be used by others and you can do nothing about it.

Reasserting property rights to include things like your image, your internet activity, your resume and other non-tangible products of your labor would go a long way to restoring order to society. One reason for that is it would torpedo the business model of the tech monopolies, who rely on your free labor to make a profit. What Facebook calls ad revenue is actually the sale of user activity and content. They sell this data in bulk to marketers, government and corporate interests.

If Facebook had to get a signed release from you every time they sell your data their business model would collapse in a month. Their margins would collapse even if their user were okay with being exploited this way, because the cost of this model would be shifted back onto their balance sheet. The same is true of the other big socials. All of them would have to rethink their business model. This would most likely take place in bankruptcy court as there is no easy answer for them.

Of course, for this to work it would require the return of the old model for enforcing contracts, especially contracts of adhesion or one-way contracts. That is what the terms of service is called in the law. It is a take it leave it offer. These sorts of contracts used to come under careful scrutiny by the courts. The reason is they saw a powerful interest issuing terms to weak interests, so the way to level the playing field was the court would act on behalf of the weak interest.

The reason that the back of car rental contracts all look the same is they went through the legal process over many years. That standard language has been approved by the courts and will therefore be enforced by the courts. That means the car rental firm does not willy-nilly change the language during your rental. The same process has been applied to residential leases and utility contracts. The same legal standards should be applied to terms of service agreements.

A world where the big social media players have to get permission to alter their terms of service and those terms have to be legally clear and concise, is a world where they cannot abuse their authority. They go back to being passive service providers, rather than arbiters of truth. In a world where they have to respect your property rights, they revert back to a traditional business that offers a service in exchange for a fee, rather than a monopoly with socialized costs.

Of course, to return to a rule-based world requires Congress and the courts to rediscover the rule of law and the advantages of an orderly society. That would require them to suddenly get the courage and morality to turn down the massive bribes that flow into Washington from the tech firms. The great lesson Silicon Valley learned during the Microsoft antitrust case is that everyone in Washington comes with a price tag and there is always a sale going on in Washington.

An old adage about money is that if you need hard money to control your corrupt elites, your corrupt elites will find a way around hard money. This axiom of history applies to the law as well. if you need to codify the basics of a civilized society in order to control your elites, those elites will get around the laws of civilized society. That is the fundamental problem in America. Unless and until the elites are replaced with and by a moral people, the chaos will continue until collapse.

The Last Stop

Posted on January 20, 2022 by thezman

Way back in the 1980’s, it was popular for members of the conservative movement to claim that the Left had run out of ideas. It was true to the extent that the Left had run out of policy ideas, having used them up in the preceding four decades. Conservatives were brimming with ideas on how to fix those policies. The big talk of rolling them back was really just a politically astute way of making reform look radical. The Right was always about fixing what the Left had broken.

The truth is though, those old progressive ideas from the early part of the century had run their course, but a new set of ideas were percolating in the academy. What we think of today as cultural Marxism and “wokeness” was coming together in the flophouses and brothels of left-wing politics. After the Cold War ended, these ideas started to take over the Left until we reached the present crisis. This crisis, however, seems to be the end of the line for radical thinking.

You see it with the obsession with Trump. Stable minded people with an agenda, even a nutty agenda, would have erased their old foe from the history books after dispatching him in the 2020 election. Instead, they cannot stop thinking about him and the army of imaginary bogeymen they think he leads. The Democrats have now hatched a plot to charge him with sedition so he cannot run for office in 2024. In reality, it is just a way to keep him alive as an adversary.

To normal people, this looks like madness. The truth is, Trump is old news and by the time 2024 rolls around he will probably not be a lock to win the nomination. This Ann Coulter column is a good indication that many of the people who supported Trump in 2016 are ready for someone new. Coulter’s judgement on these things is not always the best, she was a fan of Mitt Romney, but she speaks for Populist Inc. They are ready to move on and the Democrats would be wise to let them.

That said, Trump is a master marketer and he could very well retool his act as a revenge tour in 2024. Given the state of things right now and the chaos that looms on the horizon, the public could be ready to burn it all down. The GOP will surely win both house this fall then set about finking on their voters. The next presidential election could be a battle to win over factions in a purple-faced rage at the politicians. In that environment, Trump could look like the sober choice.

Still, the Left won the revolution and should be busy enjoying the fruits of victory but instead they long to return to the battle. The reason is the ideology that fueled the revolution is turning out to be nothing but clever words with no truth content. There is no end of history, no promised land of equality. Rather than being a strength, diversity has turned out to be a clever marketing scheme by corporate communists who live like white nationalist while lecturing everyone about race.

What the Left has quickly become is a glaring example of negative identity. They are not for anything that exists. Instead, they are a laundry list of things they oppose, with the claim that these things stand in the way of paradise. The fact that many of the things they rage against do not, in fact, exist, makes the agony all the more severe. It turns out that bellowing about white supremacy, something that does not exist, is not as fulfilling as screaming in the face of someone wearing a red hat.

In the movie Conspiracy about the 1942 Wannsee Conference, one of the actors tells another a story about a man who hated his father and loved his mother. When his mother died, he did not weep at her grave. When his father died, he was inconsolable, crying like a baby. The lesson of the story was that the man had defined his life by his hatred of his father. When his father was gone, he lost that which gave meaning and purpose to his life. That was why he was crying.

The American Left and their political party are now that man weeping at the grave of Donald Trump’s presidential career. This is, in part, why they cannot let go of the Covid madness, despite their party’s efforts. The mask is a reminder of better times when they had a reason to get up every morning. It is why their party is putting on the insurrection show for them. It is a bit of nostalgia for better times. It is why they hope to reanimate the Trump movement with an indictment.

That is the trouble with negative identity. A political movement organized around it can only end in sorrow. If it wins, it loses the reason to exist. If it fails, it runs the risk of retribution from the people it assaulted and it runs the risk of internal dissention over not having defeated the enemy. Negative identity becomes a self-made Alamo, a desperate last stand by people afraid of the future. It is why these movements attract so many weirdos and degenerates.

Unlike in the 1980’s, the sputtering of the prevailing radicalism is unlikely to give way to a new radicalism, at least not from the Left. Cultural Marxism was a reaction to the failing of economic Marxism. There is no next step in the underlying theory of history that animated both ideologies. This really is the end of the road for the theoretical framework that gave birth to Utopian radicalism. What comes next will probably be outside the old model of Left and Right.

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