Category Archives: Politics

The Nitwits Of The ‘Narcissus’

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It has long been known that certain types of jobs and professions attract certain personality types. The entertainment business attracts shallow people, who crave attention and adulation. Cops tend to be belligerent bullies. It does not mean all entertainers are shallow airheads or that all cops are jerks, just that these fields tend to attract those types. In fact, shallow airheads and belligerent bullies may have some advantages in these fields over average people.

Modern mass democracy seems to attract a certain personality type as well. The person we tend to see in politics and the associated media, large and small, is someone, who takes great pleasure in admiring himself. His vanity is not rooted in accomplishment or even proven skill, but rather in an idealized version of himself, which is often quite different from his actual self. The world of mass democracy, especially the media, is a world dominated by narcissistic nitwits.

Just look at some of the people that were in the Democratic primary field. Pete Buttigieg is a man of no accomplishments. In fact, given all the advantages he has had compared to most people, he has been a failure. Yet, he spent a year sashaying around the country, carrying on like he was doing the world a favor. Think about the level of self-regard it takes for a small-town mayor to think he can be President. You have to like yourself a whole lot to do what he did this last year.

The political media is where this is most obvious. David French is a great example of the narcissistic nitwit. The only reason to notice him at all is due his many idiotic things he has posted on-line over the last decade. Tucker Carlson called him a buffoon and “one of the least impressive people he has met.” Carlson is in showbiz now, which means he is around feckless airheads all day. That means he ranks French below the bubbly weather girls and the addle minded jocks he meets.

French is a pretty good example of what has come to dominate the world of non-profit conservatism over the last couple of decades. This is guy, who exaggerates his own trivial accomplishments and spends an enormous amount of time telling the world about his wonderfulness. He is a moral nullity that spends his time on line lecturing us about the moral failings of public figures. How is it possible for such a nothing person to have so much self-regard? It should be impossible.

Another good example of the narcissistic nitwit is Tom Nichols. That would be “Five Time Jeopardy Champion” Tom Nichols for you commoners. He is fond of telling everyone he meets that he is really good at remembering pointless trivia. He is also fond of being wrong about everything, but carrying on as if he is an expert on everything. He is, of course, always disappointed in the rest of us. So much so he writes long essays explaining why the world does not deserve Tom Nichols.

The thing is, guys like David French and Tom Nichols are not unusual. The political media is full of people posing in front of empty trophy cases, grinning like they are the champions of everything. Their careers are a mix of pointless credentials, timely obsequiousness and idiotic public pronouncements. Yet, they strut around as if they are doing the rest of us a favor by remaining on the planet. The gap between self-perception and reality is breath taking.

It is not just the mainstream either. Mass media, especially low-barrier to entry stuff like video streaming, has loaded minor politics with narcissists too. Look at the e-celebs that have become a staple of the dissident scene. Many are dumb girls, who flash their boobs on camera, but there are plenty of men that think they are Tom Nichols. Think about some of the fringe people, who have been born on third base, but ended up on first base, yet carry on as if they are world changing figures in history.

Again, it is not the self-regard. Lots of men are cocky, especially when young, thinking they are all that and a bag of chips. It’s a form of peacocking. Women, of course, naturally seek attention. The difference between normal vanity and what we see with these narcissistic nitwits is the massive gap between their self-perception and the reality of their resumes. They are so delusional that they may as well be imagining themselves to be entirely different people. Their life is a larp.

Now, the most likely explanation for this is mass media. Nowhere has mass media had a greater impact than politics. Turning it into a game of attention seeking, like the entertainment rackets, means it will attract the attention seekers. That’s certainly true, as politics at all levels has been turned into entertainment. Politics, especially fringe politics, is as much of a hobby as a real effort to change things. The general lack of seriousness means the un-serious can run wild.

That said, this seems to be a feature of modern democracy. Since the game is winning the crowd, at any cost, people willing to do anything, even humiliate themselves, to win the crowd become major figures. Two types of people are willing to humiliate themselves for the pleasure of others: those with no self-regard and those with infinite self-regard. The former has no pride and the latter has no shame. Shameless is the word that best describes people like David French.

There have been many technical explanations for why democracy is a system that eventually destroys itself. Those explanations are sound, but one reason seldom mentioned is that democracy selects for the worst people. You cannot run anything with feckless airheads and narcissistic nitwits. That’s democracy though. It elevates the vain and stupid into positions of authority. It elevates narcissism and boasting over prudence and caution. It makes the people reckless and stupid.

There is another aspect to this that helps explain the dominance of narcissistic nitwits in modern liberal democracy. Empathy and compassion are rooted in self-interest. When done so publicly, they become a form of status seeking. The narcissist is bets equipped to display what appears to be a heightened sensitivity to suffering of others. They are willing to rend their garments and sob in public on behalf of everyone. They put on a great show, that allows the public to vicariously empathize with the suffering of man.

Self-preservation is the natural limit on compassion. In a healthy society, this limit scales up to be the limit tolerable to maintain social order and continuity. Democracy not only unleashes the narcissistic nitwits; it crumbles the limits on compassion that these narcissists feed on like maggots. Democracy murders itself not just because of the low-quality people it attracts, but because it indulges in limitless compassion to the point where it can no longer defend itself.

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Dimensionality

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Politics is often described as a dispute over a set of issues or maybe a dispute between groups with some stake in an issue. This is the simplest and crudest form of politics, the sort you get at the town meeting or a social club. In reality, political divides are much more complex, often tangential to the issues. Trump, for example, would love to spend a trillion dollars on roads and bridges. The Democrats have talked about it for years, but now they oppose it, because they hate Trump.

That’s one of the dimensions to politics. The opposition to Trump is entirely personal, often stemming from class identity. The more candid anti-Trump people come right out and admit that they oppose him because they don’t like his style. The personal dimension to politics plays a much larger role that it should, but democratic politics always attracts small-minded narcissists. The system itself rewards this sort of behavior, so even the more mature fall into the trap of personal politics.

This gets into another dimension of politics, one where you begin to see the divide between the camps. One side thinks people are the problem that politics must fix and the other side thinks the system is what needs fixing. Scott Alexander did a post on this a couple of years ago. One side sees politics as a war between groups, while the other side sees politics as a result of systemic failure. The left blames Trump or Putin for their woes, while the Right blames “the swamp” for everything.

The interesting thing about this is the two sides will flip when it comes to specific topics like crime or regulation. The Left thinks crime is the result of defects in society like racism, while the Right pins the blame on criminals or maybe judges, who allow criminals to walk free. This conflict versus mistake dimension of politics has a situational dimension to it as well. When it is convenient to blame the system, both types will blame the system. The same is true with personalizing issues.

Of course, on this side of the great divide, people tend to look at politics as war and focus on specific people as the trouble. That’s the nature of outsider politics, as it by definition opposes the system and the people in it. There’s also the fact that dissident politics is immature at this time. There’s not a lot of theory to hold it all together or even a common set of definitions. People call themselves dissidents, in some cases, because they think it sounds cool.

This gets into another set of dimensions that Greg Johnson has covered. Politics involves ideas, events, and people. Small-minded people focus on the people, while average minded people focus on events. The higher minded will talk about ideas, but at the top, all three are part of the political discussion. The cable chat shows are not going to spend time discussion theory, for example. Instead they cover the events of the day and the people involved in those events.

This is another reason why dissident politics remains focused on people. It is not that dissidents are stupid or ignorant. The issue at this stage is that most dissidents are politically immature. For generations, Americans have been conditioned to operate within that very narrow space of official politics. One side wants tyranny by government, while the other side wants a tyranny of corporate power centers. You get to choose who rules over you, but not how they rule over you.

One sign that dissident politics is beginning to grow up is the appearance of books and articles looking at events and ideas from outside the system. Chris Caldwell’s recent book, for example, is a serious treatment of the forces unleashed by the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960’s. Caldwell is not a dissident, although he could probably feel at home on this side, but he is clearly aware of what’s happening on this side. When intellectuals take dissidents seriously, the movement is maturing.

That’s another dimension to politics. There is a lifecycle to all political movements, whether they are driven by events or ideas. We live in an age in which the ideas of the Enlightenment have largely run their course. We are also at a point where the American Empire is coming to an end. Then there is the political order within America that co-evolved with the empire. The current turmoil is due to the confluence of several cycles coming to an end at the same time and place.

That’s why dissident politics remains immature. The start of the new must wait for the old to reach a stage when it can no longer retrain its replacement. For several decades now, the old system could keep dissident politics bottled up, but the cracks in the walls are obvious to everyone now. Like a landslide waiting to happen, there is a lot of energy stored up in the status quo. What will cause that energy to be released cannot be known, but it is just a matter of time.

That may be the most important dimension to politics. Time is not a constant in the political world. Often events move quickly and uncontrollably, while at other periods, time feels like it stops. Right now, we are in an interregnum, where stuff happens, but not much has changed. We are in the period between when the old falls away and the new rushes into replace it. Time stands still, but at some point, it is going to take off like rocket and things will change quickly.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

AFPAC Report

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The first stop on my journey the America First gathering in Washington was the National Harbor, a pod-people colony just outside the capital. I pulled into the designated garage and found a spot on the designated floor. At the stated time the lights of a car not far from where I parked started to flash. I walked over, got in and found the directions to where I was to meet my interlocutor. The keys were in it so, I drove it to the address listed on the envelope.

Driving around the National Harbor, I could not help but think this place is the American equivalent of the house on the embankment. It is a colony of about 4,000 people, all of whom are there because they work in the imperial bureaucracy in some capacity. Some are “private sector” while others are government employees. They are not high up in the system but some could climb the party ranks. Others will spend forever as imperial functionaries until the revolution comes for them…

The AFPAC event was held outside the capital at a secret location in Virginia. I arrived as everyone else arrived and I could not help but notice that the average age of the event was looking to be high 20’s. The median age was not far from it. I was going to be the geezer in the room. This is something that is unavoidable, at least until the state commits me to a rest home. These rooms seem to get younger, but in reality I’m just getting older. The rooms don’t change all that much.

What does change though is the energy in the room. I’ve been in rooms full of young dissidents and it feels like a funeral. This room was jumping. It was also the sort of high quality people dissident politics needs to attract. These were young men who were comfortable in a jacket and tie. Based on my conversations, I would assume the typical attendee was middle to upper middle-class and a college grad. In other words, they had other options, but chose dissident politics.

A sign that something has traction is when famous people show up just to be in the audience for the event. Having a famous person speak is one thing. Getting them to sit with the hoi polloi in the audience is another thing. Gavin McInnes was there, socializing with everyone. Various internet personalities were there like Baked Alaska, Roosh the Little Red Elephants guy and the Ralph Retort guy. Like everyone else, they were there because they wanted to be part of the scene…

One of the positive things about this scene is the young guys really do seem to get that politics is not about being right, but about being persuasive. What killed the alt-right, one thing among many, is they had the political sophistication of teenagers. You still see it with the remnant of the alt-right. They hate on a kid like Fuentes, because he does not go hard on their issue. They can’t see past their own feelings and appreciate that Fuentes and his following are doing useful work.

That’s something I picked up talking with attendees. My guess is most are to the right of Fuentes and Malkin, but they appreciate that the two of them are a useful face to the public they are trying to persuade. There was no one in the room thinking they were living in Weimar Germany. Many, despite their youth, knew they were picking up from the Buchanan movement which came and went before most of them were born, much less politically aware. They know their history.

That is, however, the one thing that kept coming to mind as I chatted with the attendees and listened to the speeches. It felt like a room during the Buchanan campaign or how it felt during the Reagan years. Those rooms were bigger and had all the same energy, but the result was failure. The reason was what Sam Francis noted forty years ago about what he then called the New Right. As soon as you engage with the system, you agree to play by its rules. The house never loses.

Maybe that is a favor the Left is doing for dissidents. More than a few people said to me something along the lines that we cannot vote our way out of this. I don’t think these guys see conventional politics as an end in itself, but just one of the many tools to be used in the larger project of building an alternative orthodoxy. They don’t have a lot of answers on that front, but at least they get it. That puts them a big step ahead of the Buchanan people and the paleocons a generation ago…

Michelle Malkin is a good example of why civic nationalism must inevitably lead to someone like Ben Shapiro lecturing you about the creedal nation. Her speech was pretty much what Ben Shapiro says, except she strongly opposes immigration and what she calls globalism. For obvious reasons, Malkin must argue on ideological grounds, rather than from nature. Her brand of dissident politics must be open to everyone, who accepts the ideological points of her program.

It’s one of those things that sounds good in theory, but in reality it is impossible to police ideological borders. The Left has been trying to solve that puzzle since the French Revolution and it always ends in disaster. The right-wing effort at it led to Buckley conservatism and eventually David French. For now, ideology and argument are the tools required to win people to our side, but ultimately the goal must be boundaries that do not require constant maintenance…

Listening to Fuentes speak, I was thinking about how this spasm of white identity politics has mirrored previous iterations. The alt-right split in two. One group is seeking to operate above ground and gain legitimacy. The other group retreated into a self-imposed ghetto. The TRS crowd is really just a younger version of the old Stormfront community that formed up after the Buchanan movement. Go back further and it is a replay of the Bircher-Buckley split.

Fundamentally, these splits are over presentation. The “optics” side cannot fathom why the hardcore cannot understand the need to make a good presentation. The hardcore cannot understand why the optics guys don’t see the dangers of compromise. Both sides are right, but both sides have always failed. The hardcore ends up in something similar to a cult and the optics guys get gobbled up by the system. There really needs to be a different approach to this in order to avoid a repeat of the past…

After the event, all of us retired to the Trump International for drinks. It was packed, so everyone ended up at another bar. Word must have got out that a 100-plus dissidents were loose in the city, as many of the CPAC people started to turn up. Mike Cernovich arrived to little fanfare. My old friend Mindy Robinson was there. She was disappointed that the bar did not have a pole for her to swing on, so she picked a fight with another women and was escorted out by police…

Spend time in the Capital and you quickly understand why these people are so divorced from our reality. It is a company town. We are not ruled by a class of people so much as by a village of aliens. Everything about their lives is in the Imperial Capital and the surrounding suburbs. They work, socialize, mate and reproduce all in the insulated world of Washington. Not only that, it is a great life. The nightlife is fun. The work pays well and demands very little. It’s like a fantasy world.

That’s the trouble though. I was telling some people about when I was walking around Saint Petersburg and suddenly grasped why people rise up and smash their rulers in a bloody revolution. It’s not because they are cruel or they have so much and the people have so little. That is a part of it, for sure, but the real spark is the indifference. The people in Washington, living off the imperial system, simply don’t care about what goes on outside the imperial capital. We don’t matter…

On final note. Patrick Casey is proving to be a very effective organizer. He’s not flashy and he has no illusions about what he is doing. He put together a first class event that came off without a hitch. The jury is still out on Fuentes, but he is young and he is smart to partner with Casey. They make a very good team. I’ll also note that Scott Greer was a great addition to the show. His speech was a great lead-in to Fuentes and Malkin. He’s an example of the high quality people we need to attract.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Our Legacy Code

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There is a bit of a paradox within all systems in that the point of the system is to regulate human activity, as well as the activity initiated by humans. At the same time, it is just at the point where they reach that goal where they become obsolete. When the humans can no longer change the system or work around it efficiently, the users of the system start to question the system. The end point of all systems is the point at which it reaches its logical conclusion.

The most obvious is business software systems. A company initially buys a software system because it has logic that will implement the business processes the company seeks to implement. Soon, they begin to tinker with it in an effort to wring out more utility from the system. Maybe that is small modifications to parts of the system logic or additional data items to existing data sets. They keep doing this and over time the system does just about everything the business needs.

At some point, they want to make an additional change, but see that the cost of making this change to the nearly finalized software system is higher than the benefit they will receive from the change. At first this is proof that their long work on the system was a success, but in time it is seen as a defect, a shortcoming. They begin to look for a new system that will allow them to begin the process a new, so they can modify it to slowly make it a perfect tool for the business.

This life-cycle of a software system is not unique to technology. It happens in other systems as well. It is not unreasonable to think of revolution as the replacement of a legacy system with a modern one. Politics in this sense is the software of society, purchased by the elite, implemented by the ruling class and administered by the bureaucracy of the state. It is why libertarianism is impossible, by the way. It requires a society to return to pencil and paper on purpose.

Sticking with the software analogy, another thing that is revealed by revolutions and even the successful reform efforts is something you see with software systems, which is the accumulation of cruft. Much of the “improvement” gained by changing systems comes from abandoning old logic and requirements that never made any sense, but took too much time and money to remove. This often means people whose jobs exist because of that cruft in the legacy system.

The same applies in social systems. A genuine reform effort in America, for example, could simply start with firing everyone from the federal system who has an odd number of letters in their last name. Sure, some genuinely essential personnel would be lost, but the thousands of bits of human cruft would make up the difference. Much of what plagues late empire America is the generations of pointless and redundant code along with the associated people that covers the system like plaque.

Revolutions are cast as revolts by commoners over practical issues. The revolt gets out of hand either by circumstance or some failure by the elites. The result is a toppling of the system. To go back to the software analogy, the revolution is a revolt by users that cannot be addressed by the guys in IT. The system cannot be changed to meet the demands of the users, so the system is removed, the IT department is put to the sword and a new software system is purchased and implemented.

That’s true in primitive societies. The Bolshevik revolution could not have happened in an industrial society. Western Europe did not go from feudalism to industrial communism, because it first entered into a period of limited liberal democracy. The Russians were still operating a social system built for the tenth century, but trying to adapt it to technology and thinking from the 19th century. They went from pencil and paper to cybernetics in one big leap forward.

A better way to think of revolution, using the software analogy, is that point in the life-cycle when the cost of change exceeds the perceived benefit. The French Revolution is a good example of this. The aristocracy could not justify to themselves the cost of changing the system they inherited. The bourgeois revolutionary first started as a reformer, like the quality team inside a company. It’s when necessary change appeared to be impossible that they demanded the legacy system be replaced.

We are seeing this with the political class. The first round of efforts to modify the existing system started in 2016 with the election of Trump. We’re seeing a second round now with the apparent nomination of Bernie Sanders as his challenger. Trump was always a reformer who believed in the fundamental integrity of the system. Sanders is a revolutionary who promises to first remove the legacy system. His platform is mostly about removing the old with promises of something better.

In its response to these challenges, the so-called meritocracy is proving the point made by the reformers and the revolutionaries. They could, in theory, easily adjust to co-opt the reformers and delegitimize the revolutionaries. Yet in both cases they assumed the defensive crouch rather than change their behavior. Like the IT guys maintaining the legacy software system, they see change as a threat, so they make change more expensive than the perceived benefits of those changes.

In 2016, the Republican Party could have easily stopped Trump by moving toward him on immigration, trade and endless war. Instead, they advised the other candidates to move the other way, thus paving Trump’s way to the nomination. Something similar has happened with Sanders. Instead of co-opting his bread and butter issues, the party told the candidates to go extra heavy on wokeness, trannies and white privilege. This has made Sanders the default for those who reject that stuff.

If the political class was a business, senior management would be meeting about why the management and administrative layers have been unable to deal with this problem, despite all of the warnings. It would be time for a major shakeup. The trouble is, the so-called meritocracy that controls politics is the senior management. Only a shareholder revolt, to mix metaphors, is going to change things. Perhaps that is what the 2020 election is shaping up to be, a shareholder revolt.

The trouble with these analogies is that when a company buys a new software system or reorganizes its business processes, they don’t execute the people defending the old way or even have them sent to camps. Those people either embrace the new or quietly go away with their severance. In politics, the old people never go away quietly and instead fight to the last man to defend a legacy system that serves them. The last three years of Trump make that abundantly clear.

For those puzzled by the appeal of Sanders, there’s your answer. American politics is controlled by an elite that keeps one large swath of voters in one party and another large swath in another party, then makes them fight one another. In 2016, the voters in one camp revolted against their camp guards. In 2020, the other camp is staging a revolt. In both cases, it is a revolt against legacy code that appears to be beyond reform. We are living in legacy code that must be replaced, if it cannot be patched.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

A Night At The Circus

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The maniacal Mike Bloomberg took the stage for the Democratic debate last night and to his credit, he made the thing interesting to watch. Up until now, these shows have been quite dull. They had the feel of a faculty meeting at a third-tier private college, where everyone pretends the issues at hand are important, but in reality, they are just going through the motions. The introduction of Bloomberg added a genuine sense of urgency to the thing, which made it entertaining.

That sense of urgency mostly served to exaggerate all of the characters on stage, as they let their hair down in an effort to steal the limelight from Bloomberg. Lizzy Warren was the school principle from Uncle Buck, desperately trying to make sure no one had any fun and treated everything with utmost seriousness. She also seemed to vibrate, as if she was receiving a mild jolt of electricity. If she had put a light bulb in her mouth, while the others were talking, it would have made perfect sense.

Similarly, Klobuchar reminded everyone why giving women the vote was a bad idea, as she ticked every box for the matronly politician. At various points she was offended, over eager, cloying and schoolmarmish. She probably had the best night of the bunch, until she got into a purse fight with Buttigieg. He mocked her for not knowing the name of the Mexican president. She responded by demanding if he was calling her dumb, which made the point in an amusing way.

The prize for most ridiculous character on the stage goes to Pete Buttigieg, who looked like a child playing dress-up. Not exactly a child, more like a robot child. That’s because he is the quintessential millennial, who prepares for everything like a test. He probably even practices how he turns to address the other people on stage. When he lectured Klobuchar about not knowing the name of the Mexican president, you just knew that in real life he is a bitchy pedantic nuisance.

Strangely, Joe Biden probably had his best night, but it is a good reminder that you get one chance to make a first impression. Even though he was coherent and lucid for the entire night, you notice that because it is rare. He is at that stage of life where his mind prefers to be in neutral and it takes effort to get the thing in gear. Once he gets it in gear, he is fine, but you never can be certain he will stay that way. You can’t help feeling a bit sad for him, as he staggers through the final days.

What made the show, of course, was Mike Bloomberg. He spent most of the night looking mildly irritated by the whole thing. It was as if he had used a crazy act in court to avoid being sent to prison, but was instead sent to the asylum. He knew he had to keep up the act, but desperately wanted to start shouting that he was not insane like the people around him. The only thing missing was a big Indian to throw a sink through one of the windows to close the show.

Bloomberg is the Democrat version of Ross Perot. He’s not really a candidate, but more of a foil for the other candidates. Last night all of them went ham on him in an effort to show they are the most virtuous of the bunch. Warren went full rage head over Bloomberg having called women “fat broads and horse-faced lesbians.” For the rest, Bloomberg was the cartoon rich guy. They took turns flinging their poo at him. For the most part, he just smirked it off, dismissing them as sideshow clowns.

That’s where we get to the Ross Perot comparison. In 1992, Perot ran as a rich guy with a common touch, trying to save the system. He hated the Bush family and he wanted to see George Bush lose. His folksy and erratic performance in the debates probably put Clinton in the White House. That seems to be the role Bloomberg is hoping to play for the Democrats. His mission is to keep Sanders from winning the nomination outright, so the party can figure out some way to stop him.

Bloomberg also lifts the veil on something we don’t get to see. For our Jewish ruling class, Bernie is the embarrassing uncle, who never amounted to much. He is a reminder of a past they would like to forget. The Jewish Bolshevik is a stereotype that has largely faded from our consciousness, because Jewish billionaires like Bloomberg have worked hard to erase it from the scenery. Jews are no longer subversive irritants like Bernie, but benevolent oligarchs like Bloomberg.

Putting that aside, Bloomberg did not score any hits on the other candidates, but they managed to dirty him up pretty good. Last night was a good example of why normal people tend to do poorly in politics. He was unprepared to play a convincing character in response to the other characters on the stage. Instead, he allowed them to define him as their favorite villain. He was the evil white man, the pervy misogynist, the soulless greed-head and the callous oligarch.

That’s probably going to force Bloomberg to shift his strategy away from attacking Trump with his billion-dollar ad campaign and instead attack Sanders. Most likely, Sanders wins Nevada and heads into South Carolina with a chance to knock out the remaining candidates. Some may linger on, but in two weeks the race will be Bloomberg and Sanders. In order to avoid looking like a fool, Bloomberg will have to go scorched earth on Bernie and his supporters.

All in all, it was a great show, maybe even the best debate ever. No, none of the performers should be allowed loose in society, much less be elected president, but it was a hilarious performance. When the robot historians are sifting through the rubble of this age, they will probably use footage of this debate as an example of just how terribly wrong things went in late empire America. “And just like that, everyone went insane” will be how they describe this age.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

The Balloon Heads

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One of the unremarked aspects of the current age is that we seem to be experiencing exaggerated versions of various types in the managerial society. For example, Pete Buttigieg is an exaggerated version of the managerial class striver. He is entirely without accomplishments, but festooned with participation medals. Trump is the exaggerated, almost cartoonish, version of the populist resistance. He’s the picaresque populist fighting the system, but all of the dials are turned to eleven.

Michael Bloomberg is turning out to be another wildly drawn version of types that have come to associate with the managerial state. The most obvious being the scheming middle-man, who produces nothing, but is highly skilled at inserting himself into transactions where he can extract a fee. Bloomberg became one of the richest men on the planet by gaining a lock on the flow of data to the financial world. This allowed him to, in effect, tax every transaction, despite having no direct role.

He is he exemplar of the new, post-industrial economy. Instead of inventing something or building something, he schemed to gain control of the flow of information, which allowed him to operate as a tax farmer, of sorts. Silicon Valley operates much the same way now. They don’t produce anything of value to us, but instead skim from the economy in various ways. Big finance is also just a massive skimming operation. Bloomberg is the extreme version of the new economic man.

His personal story is an outlandishly exaggerated version of the Jewish success story in 20th century America. He is the product of eastern European Jews who emigrated in the late 19th and early 20 century. He grew up lower middle class, but was able to go first to Johns Hopkins and then Harvard Business School. America has been great for Jews and really great for Bloomberg. So much so he now intends to buy it, or at least its political class, and add it to his portfolio of assets.

Of course, Bloomberg is the wildly drawn version of the cosmopolitan conservative, or what has become known simply as establishment conservatism. If you look around at what passes for the Right in late managerial America, the so-called conservatives are people more comfortable in the urban setting. Their cultural outlook is that of the man, who rides the subway and hails taxis, just like their liberal friends. For them, the country outside the city is a place you fly over, not a place to live.

This means their conservatism is purely economic and superficial. To call it low-tax liberalism is to give more credit to managerial liberalism than it deserves, but it gets to the heart of the matter. The cosmopolitan conservative believes all of the same things as his liberal antagonists, he just dons the green eye-shade and a highly practiced disdain for personal excess. The difference between the cosmopolitan conservative and the left-wing urbanite is ceremonial and superficial.

That’s what you see with Michael Bloomberg. The difference between him and the core of the Republican Party is so narrow that light can barely squeeze through. He is for unlimited economic freedom for the oligarchs at the top of the system and maximum regulation of the lower classes. You can’t question the morality of him owning a bottleneck on financial information, but he can tell you how many shakes of salt you can have on your fries during your assigned day at the burger joint.

This is no different from what you see in conservative circles. Ramesh Ponnuru, for example, has detailed plans for every conceivable social issue. Kevin Williamson is always at the ready to look down his nose at the complaints of the lower classes about the inequity of the system. If in a mania of hunger, Kevin Williamson accidentally swallowed Ramesh Ponnuru, you would have the perfect archetype of the cosmopolitan conservative attitude. The result would be David Brooks.

As an aside, this is why the anti-Trump types will inevitably support Bloomberg as not just the savior of the Democratic Party, but the savior of “our democracy.” Part of it will be ethnic solitary, as most of the anti-Trump people still take Saturday off, even if it is to spend the weekend skiing. The bigger part though will be the fact that Bloomberg is their Übermensch, their idealized man of the future, who rises above the old conservatism, polluted by Christianity and populism.

Finally, there is another angle to the Bloomberg phenomenon. He is the extreme example of the type that lacks self-awareness to the point where his own behavior destroys that which allows him to exist. What Bloomberg is doing is discrediting the very notion of modern liberal democracy. If he is able to buy the nomination, much less the White House, he will have established that America is no different from Russia or Ukraine, areas ruled by oligarchs with little connection to the people.

To be blunt about it, if antisemitism is ever going to take hold in America it will be due to people like Michael Bloomberg. He is right out of central casting. He ticks every box on the anti-Semite checklist and does so with a big bold check mark. He is the wildly drawn caricature of the happy merchant come to life. His breathtaking lack of self-awareness could create more anti-Semites in one year than have existed in North America since the first humans cross the Bering land bridge.

This is current year America. The public stage is populated with cartoon figures, who have little bodies and massive balloon heads. Their bodies are the sum of their contributions to society, while their heads are the wildly exaggerated stereotype of the managerial age. Over-The-Top Jewish Oligarch has been called in to stop Unfrozen Bolshevik Caveman from winning the nomination, because Gay Managerial Man and Screeching Old Harpy are not up to the job.

It turns out that Marx was wrong when he said the history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. It turns out that managerialism heads right to the farce. The logical end point is rule by overly credentialed poseurs and oligarchical middle-men. It turns out that the managerial state is not going to end in a soft tyranny, but instead it will be eaten alive by an absurd parasitic class it created. Perhaps it just comes to hate itself so much, it chooses the only form of suicide available to it.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

The Black Vote

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Every election and sometimes between elections, the so-called conservatives start mewing about minority outreach. They start the game by saying how this time will be different and minorities are ready to listen. Then they spend time pandering to those voters, while lecturing whites about the need to pander to those people. After the election, when they got no increase in minority support, they say all the things about GOP voters that Democrats say about them.

It is a shameful and ridiculous charade, but republicans never seem to pay a price for it, so they keep doing it. In fact, a large segment of their voting base seems to like this charade. Baby Boomer conservatives are hooked on the idea of winning black votes. They are mesmerized by Trump’s tweet about how the economy is great for everyone except white people. Despite their political orientation, they are just as ashamed of themselves as white liberal boomers.

Those who have crossed over from conventional politics look at Trump’s pandering to blacks as proof he is not really on our side. After all, if he really did understand what is happening, he would spend no time pandering to blacks and instead focus on dispossessed whites. They are a demographic that is both larger and regularly assaulted by the Left. The argument is that these are the voters that put Trump in the White House, having turned up to vote in the 2016 election.

This is the Sailer Strategy, named after Steve Sailer. If Republicans are getting one percent of the black vote, increasing that to two percent is a few thousand votes in states that are not competitive. On the other hand, adding another percent of the white vote could be the margin of victory in states that are competitive, like Michigan and Pennsylvania. One percent of 70% of the electorate is always going to be bigger than one percent of 13% of the electorate.

George Bush the Minor won his two elections without black support. He did do well with Hispanics, but again, this is a tiny slice of the electorate. Go back further and George Bush the Elder won a landslide with just 11% support from blacks. Reagan won in a huge landslide in 1984 with 9% black support. When 66% of whites backed Reagan, fewer than ten percent of blacks voted republican. That speaks to the futility of chasing the black vote if you are a Republican.

The thing is though, 2020 may be the year that the Great Pumpkin comes to the pumpkin patch and gives black votes to all the guilt-ridden baby boomers that have been waiting since the 1980’s. Trump may actually pick up support among blacks and maybe even Hispanic voters. It seems ridiculous, but there is some historic precedent for what could be happening. In what would be great irony, Trump could repeat what Nixon did in the 1972 presidential election.

Most of the comparisons between Trump and Nixon are done by mouth breathers on the Left who check under their beds every night for Russians. Nixon is the universal bogeyman in their political universe. Every politician they hate is Nixon, while all of their backers are fascists or white nationalists. Because of this, people dismiss the comparison to Nixon, but it may actually be a good one. There are a lot of points of comparison between the two and their times in office.

The most important comparison between Nixon and Trump is they are both transitional figures for their party. Nixon figured out that the GOP had to wheel south and southwest in order to win elections. His “southern strategy” transformed the political map and eventually made the GOP the majority party. Despite being right about this, his party hated him for it. It put them on the side of the people they hated, the bad whites in the Progressive narrative, and they resented him for it.

Trump is doing something similar. He is transforming the party away from gentry conservatism and libertarianism toward suburban populism. Instead of appealing to the same urbanite bugmen as the Democrats, Trump is appealing to white voters through the proxy of populist economics. Like Nixon, he is hated by his own party, because it puts the insiders on the side of people their liberal friends hate. Trump is making the GOP the white party, despite their howling and moaning.

Of course, a similar thing is happening to the Democrats. In the 1960’s, the Left went insane and took the Democrat party with it. Nixon won office in large part because white people feared what was coming from the Left. By the 1970s’ the Left was a clown car full of freaks and weirdos. One look at the current Democratic field and you can’t miss the similarities. Like Nixon, Trump will face a party that is riven by internal discord and representing everything that scares white people.

In the 1972 election, Nixon won 18% of the black vote. That is a far cry from being competitive, but it is orders of magnitude greater than what we have come to expect from Republican candidates. Even after Watergate, Gerald Ford won 16% of the black vote in 1976. His decision to pardon Nixon may have doomed him with white voters, but his loyalty worked on black voters. Whatever explanations one wants to assign, in the last great political transition, blacks temporarily moved toward stability.

That may repeat itself in the 2020 election. Like Nixon, Trump is a rare politician in that he is what you see. Trump is not a phony. That plays well with black voters, who truly hate putting on airs, especially by white people. It’s why they are open to Bloomberg, by the way, despite his past statements. They know what they are getting with him, while the other candidates are code-switching phonies. More important, black are less inclined to support a crazy white person than a racist.

There is a lot that could happen between now and November. The Democrats could find a numinous negro to be their nominee in a brokered convention. The economy could collapse this summer. The Wu-tang virus could turn into the Yellow Plague. Making predictions this far out is a mug’s game. The point here is just that the conditions in which a Republican could do well with blacks are forming up. Trump the transition candidate, like Nixon, could deliver blacks to his boomer supporters.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Optical Delusions

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This post from last month drew a lot of responses, mostly from people who did not want to go along with the conclusions. Someone made a 20-minute response to it on YouTube, making what they call the defense of the big tent. In light of the recent controversy over Nick Fuentes getting banished from YouTube, it is a good time to revisit the whole issue and the topics that surround it. Fuentes is probably the best known purveyor of the good optics argument, so that is highly relevant to this.

For starters and to clarify a few things, the creator of that YouTube response makes some mistakes that are common in these discussions. The first one is to frame the issue as between a big tent and presumably a smaller tent. That was not the point of the column and that is not the issue at hand. One can have a broad-based movement that also excludes people who think they are Roman emperors. Even the biggest of big tent claims have limits on what is and what is not accepted.

The second claim is to conflate the term dissident right with other sub-cultures that may or may not have claims to being right-wing. It is a form of binary thinking to define right-wing as anything not tolerated by the Left. The goat blood drinking pagans calling themselves Roman emperors may not be liked by the Left, but that does not automatically qualify them as dissidents or even right-wing. The left is not all that fond of scientists these days, but most scientists are not right-wing.

Then there is the use of the term dissident. In a generic sense, sure, lots of people would fall under the definition. Anti-Semites, for example, are in dissent from the prevailing orthodoxy on antisemitism. That’s most certainly true. Would that put them in the same club as someone like John Derbyshire, the guy who coined the term dissident right twenty years ago? How about Steve Sailer? Calling all of these people dissidents is as useful as calling them mammals.

The fact is, what distinguishes the dissident right from the conventional right is not just opinions on the human condition and biological reality. What ultimately divides the two camps is the lack of ideology among the dissident right. It is the old Russell Kirk observation about Right and Left. Conservatism is not a set of ideologies, but the rejection of ideology. Conventional conservatism has embraced the Left’s ideological views on human nature, which is the roots of the dissent among the dissident right.

This divide also exists within dissident circles. Anti-Semites, ethno-statists, fascists, third positionists and so on are ideologues. The root of their dissent is they have a different vision of the model society from prevailing orthodoxy. Similarly, they are never in doubt about the possibility of it. Like the Left, to quote Kirk, “they see politics as a revolutionary instrument for transforming society.” That is an important difference between them and the dissident right.

Now, in the YouTube clip, the narrator makes some of the common claims about optics and “punching right” that are popular in certain parts of dissident politics. For example, he claims early on that the alt-right was ruined by the media, who highlighted weirdos and lunatics in their coverage. In reality, the alt-right was doomed when the face of it became a narcissistic dilettante, incapable of organizing a one car funeral. A serious movement never would have tolerated Spencer as the leader.

The whole Spencer fiasco puts the lie to the claims by some that optics are unimportant in their politics. The sole reason Spencer rose to become the face of the alt-right is he looked good on camera. He presented an appealing face to the cause, so he quickly became the face of it. The reason why some of his former followers stick with him is they think he makes their cause look good. It is nothing more than a coping strategy to pretend appearances don’t matter. They always matter.

Another point that needs emphasis is that the whole “no punch right” business was the creation of people trying to sneak into more legitimate politics. You never hear this from people who can function among normal people, despite holding heretical views. It was the dubious claim that a right-wing movement cannot have legitimacy unless it is tolerant of people who have not updated their views since the 60’s. It was, in the end, an effort to co-opt dissident politics by the 1.0 crowd.

Then there is the issue of taboos, which is raised at about the ten minute mark of that YouTube clip linked above. Unsaid, but implied, is the claim that excluding certain people from dissident politics reinforces left-wing taboos on certain opinions. The claim is that excluding people, who are bad for the image of the group, automatically gives legitimacy to the left, by reinforcing left-wing taboos. In other words, trying to present a good image is playing by the Left’s rules on politics.

This is the error of all reactionaries. Instead of developing an internal logic that naturally results in a set of rules and standards, the reactionary simply responds to what he perceives to be his opponent. To be a reactionary in a society run by ideologues is to be a rebel without a cause. Whatever the people in charge of for, the rebel is against and whatever is taboo, the rebel embraces. The modern reactionary is someone who puts a leash around his neck and hands the other end to his opponent.

It also relates to the optics debate this way. Imagine a society that has been ideologically tuned to associate the color purple with heresy. There are regular ceremonies where the bad people are dressed in purple and defeated by the good people. To go around wearing purple would certainly challenge the taboo, but it would also convince most people you are nuts. Unless you have the power to dispel the taboo, breaking them just gives the people with power the chance to reinforce that taboo.

The irony of the reactionary is that ultimately, he embraces the core starting point of all ideologues and that is the binary universe. The ideologue sees the world as white hats versus black hats, good guys versus bad guys. You are either inside the walls with the good people or outside the walls with the bad people. Those taboo breaking reactionaries, with their disdain for optics, embrace the same view. You either break the taboos or you must embrace them. There is no middle ground.

This is why reactionaries fail. Most of life is in the vast middle ground of exceptions, conditions and contradictions. Most people get that. They get that politics is always about trade-offs, half-measures and compromise. You don’t win them over by being as fanatical as the people you oppose. You win them over by juxtaposing your apparent reasonableness against the fanaticism of the prevailing order. You do that by making concessions to their morality. You don’t wear purple.¹

There is the final point worth making here. Those who deny the value of presentation always say, “The Left is going to demonize you anyway.” They mistakenly think optics and presentation are about winning over the Left or abiding by their rules. Again, this is the mind of the reactionary. Good presentations and subtle compromises to convention are about winning over the vast middle. The point of politics is about controlling the field between the various sides.

Yes, the Left will call us Nazis and fascists no matter what we do, but that can only be turned to our favor if it looks absurd. Spencer was easily demonized because he embraced the role of prep school Nazi. Nick Fuentes is not so easily demonized, because he reminds most white people of their kids or grand-kids. He may be a smart-alecky twerp at times, but calling him a Nazi violates bourgeois sensibilities. To put it another way, it is very bad optics for the Left.

Politics is always about keeping the ends in mind and making the necessary compromises to further those ends. Politics is a means to an end. Ideologues always fall into the trap of thinking politics is an end in itself, which is why ideological states are always unstable and usually short lived. Successful outsider politics has to be practical in its application in order to win ground in the vast area that is always up for grabs between the orthodoxy and those challenging it.

¹Anticipating the response from certain circles, the Nazis winning the street battles with the Bolsheviks in Weimar Germany is an exception, not the rule. The middle had collapsed in Weimar Germany, along with the old ruling order. The Right and left, as understood at the time, were not fighting to win over their fellow Germans. They were fighting to fill the power vacuum that resulted from the collapse of the middle.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

A Gay Old Time

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The Democrat primary season is living up to its promise of being a stinging indictment of modern democracy. Thus far, they have staged two election shows. The first one was a disaster, as the party was unable to properly rig the results, so they effectively cancelled the whole thing. The second time they instructed the media to spend all their time celebrating the king, as it were, of participation trophies for his exemplary participation in the New Hampshire primary, while ignoring the winner.

Putting aside the clownishness of the show thus far, the New Hampshire primary is rather symbolic of the ruling class decay. Biden was propped up for almost a year as the face of the party center. He was supposed to be the guy, who was the moderate’s first choice and everyone else’s second choice. Blacks would support him as a proxy for Obama. The remaining whites would support “Working Class Joe.” Even the Bernie Bros would fall in line behind a traditional left-wing candidate.

In reality, Biden was a doddering old fool, who said embarrassing things in public when he had all of his marbles. No amount of media support and fake polling was going to convince people to support a guy about to keel over at any minute. Instead, the various tribes of the party were left to seek their own standard. That’s what we have witnessed this far. The Democratic coalition is coming apart as the camps dig in behind their candidate to the exclusion of others.

Pete Buttigieg is the millennial candidate in every way. Most likely his support came from his age cohort. Further, it was heavily female, with the male portion being the sorts, who support the case against consuming soy products. On the other hand, Klobuchar is picking up the old Hillary vote. These are the old hens, who think having a female president is the only thing that matters. Her bitchy obnoxiousness reminds them of every fight they won with their ex-husband.

That is the democratic coalition right now. On the one hand it is spoiled, entitled millennial voters. On the other it is their divorced mothers. Sure, blacks, Hispanics, legacy whites and bronze age communists are there, but the people who run the party are of the two groups rallying to Buttigieg and Klobuchar. Those other groups are just accessories. They always have been, but now it is becoming explicit. None of the top-tier candidates have any appeal outside honkyville.

The obvious exception to all of this is the Sanders tribe. For most of the 20th century, this group was carefully sidelined by a party that understood they needed their support, but could never let them on the stage. The Bernie faction was like the alcoholic brother that no one discussed. They were not hated, but everyone in the party hated the embarrassment they caused in polite company. The restraints are off now, so those freaks and weirdos are free to run wild in the public square.

In fairness, there is a parallel between the Bernie Bros and the populists who came out for Trump in the 2016 primaries. Much of Trump’s support was rooted in the decades of broken promises from conservatives. Similarly, the Bernie Bros feel cheated by a party that has promised them the worker’s paradise for decades. There is a strong anti-establishment vibe to the support for Sanders. The difference is that Trump was a genuine novice, while Sander is an old political warhorse.

That’s an important thing for dissidents to remember while watching this circus play out over the next few months. Some people in our ranks will talk about how the Bernie Bros are headed for a great awakening about modern politics. It will be analogous to what some on our side have learned in their disappointment over Trump. That’s self-indulgent nonsense. The invisible army of disaffected whites that came out for Trump was never under any illusions about him. They knew he was a protest vote.

Further, the Bernie Bros are not going to have their red pill moment when their guy gets robbed of the nomination. If he somehow gets the nomination, the Bernie Bros will not wake up to the reality of the Left when they run their “The Case Against Sanders” post in the New York Times. Unlike disaffected whites, the Sanders faction actually enjoys being treated like dirt by the party. They are the dog that barks like mad at the mailman from behind the door. The door is what really matters.

Putting all of that aside, the brewing chaos in the 2020 election is not a sign of a system breaking down, but the natural result of a society being destroyed. The project of pitting one group of whites against another can only end one way. That is a war between whites resulting in a fracturing of the white demographic. This plays to the interest of minority groups, which become just another tribe in the neighborhood. The two-party system cannot work in a balkanized, minority rule society.

More important, perhaps, is the cosmopolitan ruling class cannot function as designed in such a society. The managerial state needs the illusion of popular support and meritocratic success. That’s hardly possible when the only thing the people agree upon is their hatred of the ruling elite. The system cannot hold up when the various tribes are not permitted to have their guys in the system. It turns out that what allows the managerial state to establish itself will be what destroys it.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

The Global Paradox

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When one era ends and another begins is always a hot topic for historians and academics, because history does not make it easy. The old staggers on for a long time, despite it having become pointless or exhausted. The new is not always ready to take center stage, so it is never clear as to when it started. It is Sorites Paradox. Just as we know there is a point where grains of sand eventually become a heap, we know one epoch gives way to another, but exactly when is impossible to say.

Of course, while you are in such a transition period, it is even more difficult to know when the old has finally receded into the past and when the new has begun. History is full of false starts and false transitions. Ideologues are always sure the great transition is right around the corner. For the people living through a transition, it just feels like a “great muddling through” for those aware of what’s happening. For the rest it is just the way things are, as they try to not to think about such things.

Whether we are in such a great transition is hard to know for certain, but people who think of such things are thinking about it. This paper on how NATO can adapt to the populist era is such an example. It is written by Jeff Giesea, someone who has been on the edges of populist politics in America. The focus on the paper in how NATO can adapt to the rise of populism in Europe in order to maintain itself and address some of the issues that give rise to populist movements.

NATO is a great example of why marking the end of one period and the start of the next is so difficult, especially for the people living through it. The senior administrative staff in NATO probably started their careers in the Cold War. Many of the senior political leaders in the West are still people who came of age in that era. NATO has already outlived the Cold War and now may be outliving the age of globalism. It is a legacy institution that still staggers on for no obvious reason.

That’s why they invest time and money thinking about how the institution can adapt to the new age, whatever one calls it. What started as a temporary alliance among Western nations to guard against Soviet aggression in Europe, is now a permanent part of the European landscape. It’s like a union job or a government contract. No one wants to see it end. The Red Army is long gone, but NATO remains ready for them if they ever reappear on the European Plain.

It is a good example of the problems of post-nationalism. NATO was always a national entity, designed to defend nations. In a world without borders, having a military organization built for defending borders makes little sense. Critics of the organization always point to the collapse of the Soviet Union, but the bigger problem for NATO is that it is rooted in the concept of sovereign nations. Each member contributes men, material, bases and money to maintain a joint military force.

In a world where European countries don’t have control of control over their own budgets and cannot mint their own coins, how can they possibly have an active voice in a military alliance? Italy, for example, has to get permission from Brussels to operate a new landfill or power plant. The EU regulates the acceptable size of bananas and how much can be spent on picking up dog droppings. Globalism reduced nations to dependents with no agency of their own.

NATO also underscores a hidden truth about globalism and that is it only exists because the American empire exists. NATO exist because America keeps it going. If America ever started acting like a real country again, it would abandon legacy entities like NATO, as they serve no national interest. The same is true about globalism. The EU has been allowed to flourish, because it enjoys American protection. Take that protection away and Europe returns to a continent of nations.

It’s also an example of how the people muddling through a transition period may be all wrong about what they are noticing. The conventional wisdom says the world is transitioning from nationalism to post-nationalism. Global entities will supplant nation states and global corporations will manage the global economy. These populist uprisings we see in the West are just rearguard actions by those who will not be part of the glorious multicultural global paradise that is tomorrow.

In reality, we may be living through the opposite. The Cold War era may have been the globalist era, dominated by two great democratic empires. On the one side was the democracy of communism. On the other was the democracy of natural rights. First the Soviet Empire collapsed and now the American Empire is receding. The flurry of cosmopolitan globalism is not a rearguard action, but more like the scavengers profiting from the end of that great epoch in Western history.

What is called populism today is simply the West waking up from the long slumber that was the great battle between two empires. Generations of Europeans sublimating national interests for a common defense are now waking up from that period to assert those interests again. In the US, regional and now racial interests that have long been suppressed are bubbling up to the surface. Just as NATO is an entity from a bygone era, cosmopolitan globalism is the echo of a bygone age.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!