Every once in a while, a post or series of posts comes along that captures why conservatism never amounted to much. This post in the ironically named American Conservative is a good example of the genre. The topic is how to deal with the privatization of authoritarian power, primarily in Silicon Valley. The argument put forward is that using the state to tame these rogue companies is morally wrong, so we have to find some new way to contend with these out-of-control tech firms.

The first thing you should notice is the style is exactly what we get whenever the topic of immigration in on the table. The obvious answer is dismissed. In the case of immigration, that means shutting down the border and cracking down on employers who use helot labor. The open borders crowd always says that is impossible or harmful in some way. Instead, they offer a collection of overly complex solutions that have no chance of succeeding but will keep the punditry busy.

In the case of Big Tech, we have laws on the books to put an end to this reign of terror, but enforcing those is socialism, according to the usual suspects. We cannot have that, even if it would work. Instead, let us have a twenty-year series of international commissions to study technical standards and pass a bunch of laws that no one reads, but have cool names like “Data Portability Act”. In other words, the people who cannot build a wall along the border are going to fix the internet.

Interestingly, the rodents from Conservative Inc. always use the same trick the Left is so fond of using, which is the false dichotomy. “We can shut ourselves off from the world or embrace globalism” is how they frame trade. “We can become a hermit nation or remain a nation of immigrants” is how they frame immigration. Now it is “We can choose central planning or preserve an open internet” with Big Tech. It is the same partisan game the Left plays, just tailored for a middle-class white audience.

The fact is, enforcing Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act as intended puts a halt to the most egregious violations of our rights. Twitter can choose to be a publisher or an open platform. If it is the former, they can censure their platform however they like, but they are accountable for the content. If they choose to be an open platform like Gab, then they get the protection of Section 230. There is no need to reinvent the internet to solve the biggest problem with Big Tech.

Similarly, the obvious collusion that goes on with these big firms could be crushed with the use of existing law. There are plenty of examples of the tech companies colluding with one another to ban people from their platforms. If we can give a cop 20-years on civil rights violations for shooting a fleeing suspect, we can give the harpies of Silicon Valley a few years for violating the civil rights of Alex Jones. One lawsuit is all that would be required to end that practice and restore some sanity.

Of course, the author of the AC piece is clearly trying to strike the libertarian position, which is a blend of hiding under the bed and shilling for global capital. This is what is wrong with the libertarian-conservative commentariat. They are not interested in advocating conservative interests. Instead, they are focused on making sure their corporate donors are free of government interference. If that means the rights of conservatives are trampled, well “whoopsie!”

The writer of the AC piece is someone calling himself Zach Graves. He is head of policy at the Lincoln Network. You always have to be suspicious of any group using the name Lincoln and this is no exception. As we saw with the Lincoln Project, these groups tend to attract the very worst people. In this case, this is a not-for-profit located in San Francisco, conveniently near Silicon Valley. A Loren Graves, presumably the same guy as the writer, is a paid staffer for the group.

Before signing on with the Lincoln Network, Mr. Graves was with something called R Street Institute, which is neoconservative front group. The founder of the Lincoln Network is a man calling himself Garrett Johnson. He popped out of college into a job on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, then into a position as the founder of something called SendHub and now the founder of Lincoln Network. Nothing strange about this at all. There is no reason to suspect anything hanky.

This is the problem with conservatism in a nutshell. It has always been infested with pens for hire. This bit of corporate marketing posted at American Conservative is just a paid advertisement masquerading as commentary. To their credit, the site does acknowledged that they were paid to run it by Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, which is a pro-business non-profit in Missouri. There is a good bet that they bankroll the R Street Institute to some degree, given their location.

This is the problem with subjecting everything to the marketplace. When the highest bidder gets to determine public morality, no one can ever question the morality of the highest bidder. Public opinion becomes another commodity to be traded, rather than a genuine exchange of ideas. The founder of The Lincoln Network would be happy to promote communism if that pays better than shilling for Big Tech. He is just face purchased on the market to make the brochure look good.

Similarly, the writers and “policy wonks” at these shops are just pens for hire, with a set of specialties. “Need generic libertarian babble about technology? No problem, we have Zach Graves. That is his specialty.” R Street puts him on the UPS truck and ships him off to a Silicon Valley non-profit. Like the economy as a whole, the marketplace of ideas has become a pirate’s cove. Everything is for sale and everything can be purchased, if the price is right. The consequences are for the suckers to bear.

This is what conservatism should oppose. One basic tenet of conservatism is that there is a transcendent moral truth. That means it is indifferent to the marketplace. it also means that truth itself is not up for bid. Once you concede this point, you are no longer on the Right, but just another kiosk in the bazaar if increasingly bizarre ideas. The way to end the pirate’s cove is to shut it down and hang the pirates. That’s the starting point for conservatism, if it is to be anything more than another grift.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

One of the subplots to the ongoing crisis in America is how various voices within official conservatism are struggling to come to terms with it. In the last years of the Obama administration, they were sure they had a good read on things. Their turn to run the system was coming up and they were busy getting their resumes ready for jobs within the next Republican administration. Then their plans took a direct hit from their own voters in 2016 and their thing has been taking on water ever since.

The neoconservatives, with their vermin-like rapacity, continue to focus on their project, regardless of what is happening. That means infiltrating the Biden administration through the foreign policy establishment and promoting the old-time religion through proxies like Liz Cheney and Lindsey Graham. It also means rooting out populists from the Republican ranks. From their perspective, the chaos is just another opportunity to warp the political process to their advantage.

The other side of official conservatism, the civic nationalist wing, finds itself a stranger in its own movement. The people they were sure they represented turned on them in the 2016 primary and remain hostile. The big stars of “right-wing” media now sound like Pat Buchanan, rather than Bill Buckley. Tucker Carlson is the biggest voice in official conservatism and he sounds like the people Conservative Inc ran out of their thing back in the 1980’s. Conservatism has an identity crisis.

Part of that identity crisis is the collapse of intellectual capital. The best minds on the Right are either in the grave or outside of official conservatism. Look around the organs of official conservatism and it is mostly kids repeating the old clichés. The rest are time servers who made their career by avoiding anything difficult. Part of the crisis is that there is no one around with the courage to question the orthodoxy or the grounding in political history to contextualize the current crisis.

The result is weird analysis like this from guys like David Brooks, arguing that the solution is to attack the people now abandoning conservatism. “Republicans and conservatives who believe in the liberal project need to organize and draw a bright line between themselves and the illiberals on their own side.” Those “illiberals” he claims, will “eventually turn to the strong man to salve the darkness and chaos inside themselves.” That’s paranoid madness, not analysis..

A less deranged analysis comes from fellow Times man, Ross Douthat, who seems to have spent some time listening to the swelling ranks to his Right. He points out that conservatives don’t conserve anything. This is an old observation of dissidents, going back to before Trump ran for president. Douthat repeats many familiar claims by dissidents about how liberal democracy destroys family, tradition and community, before it then consumes the ancient liberties it is supposed to defend.

Then Douthat inadvertently reveals the nature of the crisis within conservatism by framing what he thinks is the list of currents tearing through the Right. “What are we actually conserving anymore? is the question, and the answers range from the antiquarian (the Electoral College!) to the toxic (a white-identitarian conception of America) to the crudely partisan (the right to gerrymander) to the most basic and satisfying: Whatever the libs are against, we’re for.”

You cannot help but note that the one item on the list with any intellectual and popular vigor is identified as immoral. He uses the language of the Left to describe demographic realism as off limits. Maybe it is the need to signal his obedience to the Left or a genuine embrace of progressive morality, but the default position of the modern conservative is to treat demographics as automatically immoral. They rule out the problem when discussing the solution to the crisis.

The specter haunting conservatism is the specter of demographic reality, the same specter that is haunting America and the West. So-called conservatives like Douthat refuse to acknowledge it. In fact, they say it is “toxic” to point out that America will soon be a majority nonwhite country. The reason this bit of observable reality is toxic to professional conservatives is that the Progressives say it is toxic. They have anathematized any discussion of demographics.

The conservative political theorist Russel Kirk wrote, “A people’s historic continuity of experience, says the conservative, offers a guide to policy far better than the abstract designs of coffee-house philosophers.” The only way there can be a “people’s historic continuity of experience” is if the people actually exist. At its core, conservativism has always been about preserving the people, not their stuff. Once you stop conserving the people, conservatism is just an ornament in the liberal democratic garden.

Modern conservatives, rather than defending the historic American nation, defend the liberal democratic process. No matter the ends that result from that process, conservatives believe they must defend the process. The result has been a couple of generations of politics where one side defends the process while the other side works to subvert it for short term gain. Conservatives end up defending those subversions and the perversions they create become conservative principles.

Both Brooks and Douthat wonder if conservatism can exist within liberal democracy, but neither is willing to consider both answers to that question. They just assume the answer is it can, so the project is to figure out how. That blindness shows that conservatism cannot exist within liberal democracy. It must yield to the morality of liberal democracy, which will always be controlled by those who are able to muster fifty percent plus one in favor of the morality they favor.

The crisis of modern conservatism is that conservatism must begin and end with the conservation of the people. What conservatism has become is a conservation of a system that is literally destroying the people who created it. Worse yet, it has become a defense of a moral framework that is the enemy of the fundamental conservative tenet that there is an enduring moral order. Conservatism is either the opponent of liberal democracy as practiced, or it is the tool of it.

The death of modern conservatism, and its morally ambiguous traveling partner libertarianism, is a necessary step toward a genuine alternative. It is only when the fight steps out from the prevailing moral framework of egalitarianism and the blank slate that politics can return to a debate about what is in the best interest of the people. At that point, liberal democracy recedes, and the role of leaders is to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.

A new year brings new changes. The same is true for this site as we adjust to the reality of managerial authoritarianism. That means embracing crypto for when the inevitable happens and the traditional outlets are closed. Now more than ever it is important to support the voices that support you. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you prefer other ways of donating, look at the donate page. Thank you.

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

The Derek Chauvin trial came to a speedy end yesterday with the jury finding him guilty on all counts. What this means is they thought he intentionally caused the death of George Floyd and unintentionally caused the death of George Floyd. To a normal person, this makes no sense, but it is another reminder that America stopped being a rational society a long time ago. In a sensible society, this trial never would have occurred, because George Floyd would never have existed.

Lots of people were jubilant over the result. They do not know why they are happy, as they lack the ability to reflect on their own actions. They just know that their tribe won and that means they should be happy. That is the nature of liberal democracy. It is always about “who” and “whom” because everything is partisan. Those people celebrating are not happy for themselves. They are happy because they believe their enemies, real and imagined, are unhappy at the result.

It is not a lot different than a blood feud. When one side kills a member of the other side, it is not about righting some wrong or solving some problem. It is about adding more blood to the feud. That is how the Left sees white America. It is the people they hate and anything they can do to harm a white person is automatically good. Most of those people celebrating know nothing about the law, policing, crime, or the people involved in the incident. They just know Chauvin is white.

Of course, the other side of this, the sensible white people trying to make sense of what is happening, are not happy. Many were willing to be reasonable and meet the other side halfway on this. Maybe Chauvin was wrong or made a mistake. Maybe he should face some sort of punishment. Maybe he needs to be made an example so other cops are more careful. They thought that was the point of the system. The jury would do the right thing and find a suitable compromise.

Those sensible white people are waking up to the terrible reality of America. The system they have spent their life trusting is now as irrational and deranged as those people celebrating in the streets. America is not the land of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and the other Founders. It is not the land of Abraham Lincoln. It is the land of Maxine Waters, Nancy Pelosi and Ocasio-Cortez. They not only run the country, but the country also runs by the deranged logic of their minds.

For sure, many will rationalize what happened in order to stick to the old civic nationalist slogans they love so much. “This will be overturned on appeal” or “we have to take our country back from these Democrats” will get a lot of play. This is behavior of people in a cult when the tenets of the cult are disproven. Instead of accepting that beliefs were false, they internalize the disconfirmation into a justification for a more intense commitment. These people will decide to vote harder.

The parasites in Conservative Inc. will fund raise off this, telling those people desperate for answers that they will fight those liberals on their behalf. In a bankrupt society like America, every event is a chance for the grifters to grift a little bit more. You can be sure the conservative talk show hosts were popping champagne last night when the verdict was announced. There is nothing better for the conservative grift than losing, which is why they have been making sure to lose for generations.

Many though will let go of that last reed that was tethering them to the old America they grew up believing was real. Many will go through the stages of grief, maybe skipping to step three by this point. The realization that this is not their country and they are now second class citizens will not bring them comfort. It will free their mind of the frustration of believing in a myth. They will quit Red Team and start the process of looking for a new team, which will lead them to this side of the great divide.

This is the reality of a cultural revolution. The people smashing the system in the name of the revolution are beyond reason. It takes time for the rational, the people who make society function, to come to grips with it. Little by little, one martyr at a time, people do come to grips with this reality. You can be sure that every white cop in America is having the conversation with his wife right now. He may not know what to do, but he no longer sees himself and his job the way he did not so long ago.

It is frustrating, of course, for the people who have been on this side of the great divide for a long time. How is it that white people cannot see what is happening and where this must inevitably lead? The fact that no one was born on this side of the great divide, and we all made our own journey, is easily forgotten. For those on this side, this is the new normal and it is hard to imagine thinking any other way. The other side is a foreign country populated with people living a delusion.

That is the real test in these times. Those who have opened their eyes and see what is happening have to avoid being bitter about it. The job at hand is to wake up as many people as possible, ignore those who cannot open their eyes and help those staggering into the sunlight adjust to this new normal. There will be many more martyrs in the days ahead. Every war has them. The challenge is to give their martyrdom meaning so that one day, there are no more martyrs to our cause.

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

Montesquieu observed that different political systems have different internal motivations, an engine that drives the people in it. He used the term principle as the thing that gave the system energy. In aristocratic systems it was the desire for honor that drove people to act. In a republic it was virtue. Instead of serving a man who was the manifestation of the state, the republican man served the institutions. He respected the office, not necessarily the office holder.

The principle of liberal democracy appears to be morality. The language of this age is drenched in moral claims. The mantra of the age is diversity, inclusion and equity, which is shot through with sentiment. How much diversity is a good thing? There is no limit, of course, as diversity is a good in itself. Equity is a purely subjective term as it means distributing resources based on the needs of the recipients. The people who make that decision are those who are at the top of the moral hierarchy.

In addition to echoing and updating sentiments from the beginning of western racialism (liberté, égalité, fraternité), the point of these sorts of slogans is to communicate civic piety between the speaker and listener. Alone they are just echolalic babbling, but when spoken or written for an audience, the speaker feels virtuous, as she assumes the listener, upon hearing these code words, will see that the speaker is pious. These terms are about signaling and confirming piety.

The problem with this is morality needs authority. In a theocracy, like in Iran, this problem is solved with Islam. The mullahs are the defenders and chief promotors of their form of Islam, so they sit atop the moral hierarchy. They provide the limits on democracy and a scale against which to measure piety. Similarly, Puritanism provided the moral authority for the early settlers in what is now New England. They had democratic societies, bound by Scripture.

Liberal democracy does not have or tolerate a belief outside the fingertips of man, so it cannot rely on established religion for moral authority. Instead, it relies upon the marketplace to provide that authority. The will of the people is formalized in elections and the marketplace. This is why the most powerful people work to make sure their opinions seem to reflect popular will. Rigging an election or faking a public opinion poll makes perfect sense when placed in the framework of liberal democracy.

The god of the marketplace has always had one very serious flaw. If Herodotus is to be trusted, the Persians were the first to notice this. They saw the Greek marketplace as nothing more than brothers lying to brothers. The seller misrepresented his products in the hope of fooling the customer. The customer misrepresented his interest in the hope of bargaining down the price. The spirit of the agora was deception, which makes the god of the market a fickle liar.

We are seeing this playout with the Covid vaccine. A mass vaccination campaign requires public trust. After all, letting someone put something in your body that you do not understand is a leap of faith. In a high trust society where the people believe the rulers have their best interest in mind, this is not difficult. In a low trust society, the rulers must search for external sources of authority. In the case of Covid, they have paraded out hundreds of experts from medicine and science.

The problem is those experts are products of the marketplace. They work for pharmaceutical companies, the political system, research outfits supported by the Chinese communist party and so on. These experts are fully democratic men in that they are products of the marketplace. They represent the interests of whoever is paying their salary at the moment, not the interest of the people. We can no more trust them that we can trust the salesman at a used car lot.

Because we are now fully democratized people, we are conditioned to assume that everyone is a product of the marketplace. Their interest in the truth is meaningless as the truth is what the market says at the moment. They are either making the market or following the trends of the market. In the case of Covid, everyone looks at the experts and wonders whose interests they are representing. The moral authority of liberal democracy turns out to be a cynicism without limit.

Something Montesquieu never mentioned, but that is relevant to this age, is the relationship between the principle of the system and its durability. John Adams famously said in a letter to John Taylor, “Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes exhausts and murders itself”. A republic, it seems, does not do much better. The one Adams helped found was quickly dashed to pieces by his descendants. Monarchy seems to be the most durable, having been with us since the start.

The reason for this is democracy has no room for religion, while republicanism tries to contain religion within the civic institutions. Aristocratic systems, even without religion, reflect the reality of the human condition. They begin with the assumption that there is always someone one charge. The question is how that is decided and blood turns out to be the most predictable. There is no debating lineage. It is far from perfect, but it seems to be the most stable of mankind’s political systems.

Of course, just about any political system can work in a high trust, competent society, which means a homogeneous society. Both of those qualities are inversely proportional to diversity. Liberal democracy, as we see, places diversity as its highest goal, which is why it eventually murders itself. It burns the social capital built up by the preceding system until that fuel is exhausted. It turns out that liberal democracy is the sign that a people are finished and are ready to shuffle off into the history books.

A new year brings new changes. The same is true for this site as we adjust to the reality of managerial authoritarianism. That means embracing crypto for when the inevitable happens and the traditional outlets are closed. Now more than ever it is important to support the voices that support you. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you prefer other ways of donating, look at the donate page. Thank you.

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.