Category Archives: Politics

Coaching Markets

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In America, a fall Saturday often means watching some college football or possibly heading off to tailgate at the alma mater. Sunday is for the NFL, which remains the top television draw, despite its problems. For much of the country, Friday night is for the local high school games. Some parts of the country play their high school games on Saturday morning, but for most it is Friday night. In Texas, high school football is a two billion dollar business. Americans love their sports, especially football.

Currently, the two best coaches in the game are Nick Saban, who coaches the Alabama Crimson Tide and Bill Belichick of the NFL’s New England Patriots. The fact that the ancestors of both men are from Illyria is an interesting fact. Not only are both the best of their era, it is possible they are the best ever. Both men have a similar style of managing their programs and both are known for being something less than charming with the media. The shadow of Diocletian is very long.

Anyway, the thing that stands out about Saban and Belichick is they are smart men, who are excellent organizers. They are gifted at working within the constraints of the game and the constraints of their situations. They are not married to a style of play, instead adapting to the talent on-hand and the state of the game. They are known for getting the most from each player, often creating a niche for the player that did not exist. They also adapt to their staffs, shuffling people in and out of their organizations.

The thing is, what makes both men remarkable is that they are exceptions. Coaching football is a very lucrative profession in current year America. Bill Belichick is thought to make close to $15 million per year. Nick Saban makes $9 million per year. Both men are probably worth over $100 million at this point. In the case of Belichick, he could be worth a quarter billion or more, as he surely has been given investment opportunities unavailable to most people. Sports teams are owned by oligarchs.

Now, for two of the greatest of all time, that is probably justifiable, but further down the talent scale, the money is still very good. All over the NFL, there are head coaches making millions per year for being very bad at their jobs. There are lots of assistants making big money for being bad at their jobs. Many assistants, are often known to lack the talent to ever be a head coach, while others are simply happy to be a mediocre NFL coach making a very good living in the game.

At the college level, the cost of mediocrity is most obvious. Many of the college head coaches are dumb people, even by the standards of sport. Will Muschamp coaches the University of South Carolina football team. He makes over $5 million per year. He is not very good at coaching football. He got fired from his last high paying gig and he will be fired from this one. He’s not alone. The game is littered with guys who are not all that bright, but somehow rise to the top of the profession.

If libertarians were right about anything, this would not be the case. There is very little government interference in the coaching business. These are contract employees, so they can be fired at will. Moreover, the colleges seem to be immune from charges of discrimination like private business. Blacks are wildly under-represented in the coaching business. There are few Jews in the management side. Women are just about non-existent in the game. Sport is free to be a free market for coaches.

In theory, the lucrative salaries and the lifestyle should be a magnet for smart young people in America. Every year, thousands of young people head to Hollywood and New York hoping to be a star. They want to be famous. You would think something similar would happen with coaching, where the money is great and you don’t have to have sex with guys like Harvey Weinstein as a condition of employment. Smart young people should be flocking to sports coaching trying to make it big.

Of course, something similar should be true of politics. Congressman and Senators are not pulling down football coach money, but they live a great lifestyle. They also get perks like the right to trade on their insider knowledge. Paul Ryan, for example, went to Washington penniless and retired with a net worth of $6 million. He landed in a seven figure job bribing his fellow colleagues. That should draw hundreds of candidates into every race, but politics is largely a closed shop, despite being democratic.

There’s not point here, other than that to point out that “natural markets” don’t exist, even in the absence of government. There’s almost no government role in the football coaching business, but it is a closed world controlled by relationships and insider information among the coaches. The same is true of politics. In theory, anyone can run for Congress. In reality, they allow in only those they want in. The Senate is the world’s most exclusive club, followed by the House and the football coaching fraternity.

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Constitutional Failure

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A decade’s long refrain from principled conservatives and civic nationalists has been that the problems of America could be cured by returning to the constitutional principles as defined by the Founders. The principled conservatives have, of late, be much more enthusiastic for the alleged principles of the Declaration, while the civic nationalists stick with the Constitution as written. The trouble is, the cause of the present troubles, the source of what ails current year America is the Constitution itself.

Constitutions can be written and unwritten, positive and negative. American has a mostly written constitution, while the UK has an unwritten one. By unwritten, it is understood to mean there is no single controlling document. Instead, there are customs and precedents that have been in place for so long that most citizens think these are, in fact, laws yet they are not. There are laws originating from these customs and precedents, but ultimately, tradition is what frames the political order.

Then there are negative and positive constitutions. A positive constitution is one that details the duties of government. These duties could be to the citizens or they could be the duties of the defined entities within the state. The negative constitution, in contrast, lists the powers of the state, the division of power within the state and the limits of the power of the state over the citizens. The American constitution, as originally conceived, is a negative constitution. It sets limits on the government.

That’s the theory, but in reality, constitutions are a blend of the written and unwritten, as well as a mix of positive and negative law. In the American system, traditions and customs have arisen that seem like laws. Legislatures have passed laws obligating the government to perform certain duties for the citizens. Of course, there is the that divide between those who see the constitutional order resting on the Gettysburg Address and those who see it still in the Bill of Rights. Ours is a blended system.

There’s something else about constitutions that goes unnoticed. That is they define of the roles of the power centers of society within politics. For example, the Founders understood that real power in America was local. In each of the former colonies, there were local elites who welded real power. Because they were sane men, they knew real power always rested in the upper reaches of the natural hierarchy of man. In the new constitutional order, those power interests needed a defined role.

The Senate, which was the body representing the local elites, was given an important role in the new political order. Since there was no such thing as a national elite, and no one wanted such thing, there was no role for a national elite. Instead, the Senate was the body that would represent the states, which were controlled by the local elites. Through the state legislatures, senators would be chosen to represent state interests in the new federal government. The Senate is the rich people’s house.

There is the first problem with the Constitution. In the 18th century, a national elite came in one form and that was a king and the aristocracy. The king had national interests, as he technically owned the society over which he ruled. He also had the power to exercise his rights, either directly or through the network of aristocrats, who were often his kin. This was not something Founders had or wanted. They had just fought a long war with the king to establish their local rule over their domains.

Therefore the idea of a national or global elite was anathema to the Founders, so there was never a role defined for this type power center. Further, subsequent changes to the Constitution have stripped the states of their power in government. The Senate is another democratic body. As a result, local elites have no voice in national government. Compounding it, there is no definition and therefore no limit on the national elites. National and now global interests operate outside the constitutional framework.

That’s the other defect in the constitution. An unwritten political order requires those with power to exert their power. In order to maintain power, elites of all types must actively assert their privilege, often with calls to tradition and custom. In a written system, the bias is toward defending prerogatives and privileges. The law becomes the ultimate source of authority, because it is the lines separating the various power interests within the political order. Everyone has to be a lawyer.

Because the American written constitution never defined a role for national and global elites, they are free to exert their power as much as nature will allow. Because they only confront resistance from those constitutionally limited institutions, playing defense within the law, they have been free to expand to the point where they now transcend the political order. It is why appeals to the law to restrain the aggressive behavior of woke capital is pointless. The law is constrained from acting.

It is why, as absurd as it may sound at first blush, a third house of Congress could be created to resolve this asymmetry. The moneyed interest bribing Congressman and Senators would be prohibited from that practice, but be provided a chamber of their own with power to counter the House, Senate and Executive. The new house, perhaps, would be given the power of the purse, since they pay the taxes, while the House would be given power that reflects the interests of the modern citizen.

This would be resisted by the elite, so it would never happen, at least not without a revolution. This is why efforts to curb the flow of money into politics have failed. The people giving the money have no reason to support such a change. It’s why abolishing corporate taxes would be most resisted by the corporations themselves. It is through the tax code that corporate interests can most influence Congress. Without a reason to lobby Washington, they can’t be there to exert their power over politics.

The expansion of democratic elements into the American constitutional system has added another set of problems, the illusion of choice and the illusion of power. Voters think the parties offer real options, when the options are controlled entirely by the undefined elite. They also think the power of their vote has real value. This blinds the citizen to the reality of his political order. Democracy magnifies the defects of the written constitutional order, resulting in the current instability.

This is why calls to return to the old order or even the order of the second founding is a primitive response to the problem of design. Even if it were possible to roll back to such a system, the power relationships would not change. In fact, a smaller government, as originally intended, would be weaker and less able to fend off the predations of the power elite elite. Put another way, if the roots of the problem are the defects within the Constitutional order, fidelity to that order is the problem, not the solution.

Of course, if the plan is to revolt in order to put the old political order back on the throne, then that leaves open the option of revolting and creating a new political order that reflects the realities of the current age. The original Constitution was about codifying the victory of the Founders, who revolted against the old order. A revolution against the old order of today, a successful revolution, will inevitably result in codifying the victory of the victorious revolutionaries. The new principles will reflect their sensibilities.

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Brought To You By The Letter R

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Something you cannot help but notice, if you spend time scanning the political sites, is the growth of sponsored content. Breitbart will often have stories labeled “Sponsored Content” at the top, but otherwise they look like the rest of their stuff. This is content they are paid to post on their site. In the case of political sites, this content is generated by an industry group or lobbyists, who then pay the site for the opportunity to post the content, much like an advertiser. Hence the name “sponsored content.”

There is also something called “white box” content in the trade, which means it comes without attribution. Someone or some group with an agenda will produce a story and either give it to a site or pay them to take it. Part of the deal is the site gets to claim it as its own work. They will format it to their style and put the name of a writer they claim as their own the byline. The anti-BDS people use this to place stories unfavorable to the BDS movement into so-called conservative publications.

This is dishonest, at the very minimum, but it is a common enough practice that no one seems to care about it. Just how much content on these political sites is produced by concerned interests in Washington is hard to know. The stuff labeled as sponsored content is easy to spot, but the white box stuff is a mystery. Some of this white box content is quietly provided directly to friendly freelance writers, so even the site publishers do not know the real author of these pieces.

For example, how much of Cathy Young’s work is truly her own? Her content is clearly from a very specific perspective. It coincidentally matches perfectly with people like Max Boot, Jennifer Rubin, Bret Stephens and other neocons. Oddly, these people push an agenda the Left violently opposed not so long ago, yet all of these people now work for far left scandal sheets like the Washington Post. In the case of Young, she turns up in so-called conservative sites and far Left sites. What versatility!

There’s another aspect to the political writing game. This is the part tangled up in the Washington hackarama. This is where political consultants, connected individuals and members of the permanent political class use the political sites as a form of advertising for their services. They produce content for the sites and either give it away or in some cases pay for access on the sly. Instead of representing some anonymous interests, the point is to get their name in circulation.

An example of this is a recent article in National Review. It is a post suggesting Huey Long deserved to be murdered because he was a populist and everyone knows populists are the worst people. The writer is listed as Ellen Carmichael, “the president of The Lafayette Company, a political-communications firm.” A few minutes searching around and you will learn that she started in local Louisiana politics right out of diapers and has now moved to Washington as a consultant.

One way to get her name out to potential clients is to post stories suggesting things about her partisanship, her ideas and so forth in the sorts of sites read by people in the political business. At this point, National Review has no audience outside of Republican politics. It is pretty much a trade magazine now. They are happy to take this sort of content, as it is cheap and it fits in with their model, which is to wield as little influence over American politics as possible, while remaining in business.

Now, this is just one example, but multiply this, the sponsored content and the white box content over hundreds of times a month. It is not unreasonable to think that a large portion of what shows up on political sites is created by the hackarama. A lot of the cable news content is produced this ways, as well. For example, all of the Middle East content on mainstream sites is probably the work of The Lobby. Whether through friendly writers or directly through their own staff, it’s all agit-prop now.

From the dissident perspective, this is a useful starting point when discussing politics with normal people. Most readers of normie conservative sites are unaware of the fact lots of the content is really just product placement. The fans of Ben Shapiro don’t know he is pretty much just an actor, hired to promote certain positions. Instead of harping on the latter, the way to awaken normie is to talk about the former. Your Boomer uncle may love Israel, but he really hates being lied to, so go with that.

This may seem like another good reason to burn Washington to the ground, put the inhabitants to the sword and salt the earth afterwards, but that is a foregone conclusion at this late stage. It is another example of how the political system is corrupt beyond any reasonable hope of reform. Washington is a closed system ruled by a uniparty of permanent residents. It’s the Borg. When parts die off or are expelled as waste, new people are absorbed and assimilated into the system.

This reality of Washington is important to understand when examining the Trump administration. He came to town promising to reform Washington, but the Imperial Capital is beyond reform. It operates like a unitary organism now. Any attempt at reform will unleash antibodies to isolate and kill the foreign object. Those antibodies show up in the media. Washington now exists solely to perpetuate itself. To reform it is to kill it, which is no longer reform, but another word that begins with the letter R.

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 Louder He Talked Of His Honor

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Last week, Catholic University hosted a showdown, of sorts, between David French and Sohrab Ahmari. Their dispute started when Ahmari posted this piece on First Things, declaring jihad against Frenchism, which he described as a passive-aggressive approach to the culture war with the Left. It got a lot of attention in conservative circles, mostly because they were happy that anyone was talking about them at all. Here is the video of the show down and here is a summary from American Conservative.

The event itself was typical of the pseudo-academic culture you see around conservative politics at this level. There is the superficial collegiality and the carrying on like this is a meeting of two intellectual giants. An essential element of this culture is the displaying of credentials, as well as the recognition of those credentials. That’s why the opening was like dogs sniffing each other’s butts at the park. Ahmari brought a gift to signal his submissiveness to French, who he considers a superior.

This is, of course, why French agreed to the thing in the first place. He was certainly told that Ahmari is a light weight, who could land a few punches, but was incapable of delivering any hard blows. Ahmari appears to be a guy, who has sampled dissident writing, but is not well versed in the arguments against Buckley conservatism. As a result he was left to flail around while French was able to safely keep the conversation to theoretical topics, rather than the failings of Buckley conservatism.

That is, of course, a game the Buckleyites learned from libertarians. When the conversation is about practical issues, like fighting the Left over cultural turf, they shift the focus to theory. When confronted on theory, they take a deep dive into the weeds of some narrow policy topic. That’s what French was doing with Ahmari. He kept shifting the topics to legalism and constitutional theory, in order to avoid talking about the fact that conservatism has been a colossal, multi-generational failure.

That’s what was a bit disappointing about Ahmari’s performance. A better equipped debater, a dissident for example, would have turned French’s arguments back on him with relative ease. His claim that the Founders wanted a neutral public space, for example, is laughable nonsense. The Founders were white Christians, who assumed they were founding a white Christian country. More important, they were practical men who understood what was required to maintain their people.

Think about it. These were men who revolted against the prevailing order, against centuries of tradition, in order to impose their way of life on their lands. Not only were they willing to overthrow centuries of tradition, they were willing to kill their countrymen in order to found their nation. They were also quite explicit in their motives. They founded a nation for their people and their posterity. By the definitions of today, definitions David French supports, the Founders were white nationalists.

Of course, the neutral public space argument is a justification for not fighting the Left over cultural turf. By claiming a principled claim in support of an open and neutral public space, it rules out doing anything that could actually win the fight. After all, defending the public square from complete domination by the Left, means pushing them out of some portion of it. That would violate the sacred principles of principled conservatives, so they not only refuse to do it, they prevent others from doing it.

Something that never gets mentioned by dissidents is that this line of reasoning contradicts basic Christian teaching. To cede the public space on principle is to agree, in advance, to not proselytize. To preach and proselytize means staking out space in the public square, regardless of the consequences. The very founding of the Christian faith was on the bones of those, who martyred themselves to spread the word of Jesus Christ in the face of violent opposition.

That of course, raises the question as to just how sincere David French is in his religious conviction. He waves his Christian faith around almost as much as he waves around his military service, yet he is not willing to risk much for it. The Gospels are pretty clear on this point. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. Jesus instructed the rich to give away their riches and follow him. Surely, salvation is worth some principles.

This is where dissident Christians can find a niche in dissident politics. There is a long tradition of Christians preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ in the face of fierce opposition from authority. To be a dissident is to reject the authority of the prevailing orthodoxy. To be a dissident Christian is to know the source of all authority. The way forward to a society built around natural association is also the path to a society where Christians can proselytize and lead their fellow man to salvation.

This is what the backers of Frenchism fear. A militant, optimistic and aggressive Christianity would be wildly attractive to disaffected white youth. Imagine young guys in camo flash mobbing public events, while reading Scripture. Imagine them employing the protest tactics of the Left, but in favor of faith. That’s why millions are poured into Christian groups to advocate the surrender model. Their leaders get very rich while leading their flocks away from the public space.

None of this is new material, which is why David French has become the clown nose of Buckley conservatism. It’s not about ideology or theology with this guy. David Frenchism is about celebrating the choices of David French. From his adoption of an African to his JAG service, it’s always about his public acts of piety. That’s what jumps out from the video of that event. Watching him in action, the line from Emerson comes to mind. “The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.”

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 Last Hurrah

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The 2020 presidential election, which will probably be Trump versus Warren, is shaping up to be the final act of Baby Boomer America. Both are of the generation that has come to symbolize the culture of those born after the Second World War. Trump was born in 1946, while Warren was born in 1949. That means both came of age with the Beatles and the Stones. Both were in college when the hippies and anti-war protesters were taking over the college campus. They are children of the 1960’s.

It has been argued many times that the Baby Boom generation is more than just the people who were teenagers and young adults in the late 60’s. According to demographers, the Boomers include people who were in college when Ronald Reagan was president. That’s fine, as far as demographics, but when people think Boomers, they think in cultural terms. The generation that grew up on the Beatles is what they have in mind, not the generation that grew up on Lynyrd Skynyrd.

That really is the important thing to keep in mind whenever discussing generational politics in America. For the Boomers, the 60’s were a vastly different time from the 70’s, in terms of the culture and outlook. The 80’s, 90’s and 00’s, in contrast, are not wildly different culturally. It’s like how the 50’s and early 60’s are really the same culture. The cultural revolution that stated in the 1960’s really did change the country, so by the 70’s it was a totally different experience for young people.

Of course, the Democratic side of the battle has yet to be decided, but the signs are all pointing to Warren winning the nomination. The polls say Creepy Uncle Joe is the favorite, but observation says otherwise. At some point in the fall, he will be found wandering in his bathrobe, demanding to talk to President Nixon. At that point it will be time to take his campaign keys away and pack him off to the home. His support will then flow to Warren, the next demographically pleasing option for them.

There’s also the fact that Warren is quietly drawing huge crowd to her speeches, which is always a sign the voters are at least considering a candidate. The feminist white women in the party think it is there turn to have a candidate. More important, they think they were robbed in 2016. Warren is not just a less corrupt and less repulsive version of Hillary Clinton. She captures the seething rage of that demographic. Hell hath no fury like a scorned, menopausal feminist clutching her dream catcher.

The 2020 presidential campaign will be two sides of the 60’s Boomer culture, facing off against one another in one final battle. The male side, represented by Donald Trump, is nostalgic for an America that no longer exists. Trump sees himself as this generation’s Ronald Reagan. Instead of morning in American, though, it is dusk in America. His tenure is a cargo cult of sorts. He and his supporters seem to think if they carry on like it is 1985, it will suddenly become 1985. Trump is pure nostalgia.

Warren is the feminine side of this battle. Unlike Trump, she is not pining for a return to Reagan’s America. She is all of the liberal Boomers in the 80’s and 90’s, who talked about the terribleness of Reaganism, while enjoying the benefits. Just as Boomer feminists talked like Betty Friedan, but lived like June Cleaver, this side of the Boomer political culture publicly hated Reagan and the 80’s economic boom, but privately benefited from it. The conscience of the 60’s was always forgiving.

Then there is the more personal aspect of it. In terms of popular culture, Trump really is the quintessential Baby Boomer male. He made a lot of money, but will never have much to show for his time. Everything about Trump is wrapped up Trump the person, the selfish, boorish oaf living for the moment. When the wife got too old, he traded her in for a new one. When he hit middle-age, he bought a sports car and started dating young women. His story will be one of endless self-indulgence.

Warren, for her part, is the other side of that coin. She is the scorned ex-wife, who got the house and filled it up with trinkets from the various self-actualizing fads she got into after the divorce. In between glasses of chardonnay, she will spend hours telling you about how awful her ex-husband was during the divorce. She is the woman, who rejected the lifestyle of her mother, but at some point, when it was too late, realized her mother was right all along. That is the real source of her bitterness.

The 2020 campaign promises to be Trump running around the country telling his fans about all the winning, while Warren runs around wagging her boney finger at them, telling them about how she has been wronged. It will be the cad versus the nag, largely a fight among white people about how best to go into that dark night. On the one side will be Trump nostalgic for a lost America. On the other will be Warren, haunted by an America that never was. Two characters from a soon to be forgotten past.

Neither side will have much to say about what comes after them, because they are from a generation that thought they would live forever and never grow old. The people who swore they would never trust anyone over thirty, now can’t spare a second to consider the future of those under 30. It’s going to be two perpetual adolescents throwing one final tantrum, demanding the rest of us indulge them one more time. It is the last hurrah for a generation that will buried, not praised, by those who follow.

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 Uncertainty Of Money

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Imagine a world in which governments do business with one another only in gold, as in physical gold. They can issue promissory notes to one another, but it has to be backed by verified stores of gold. Governments, however, do not use gold for paying employees or contracting work with private business. In the case of employees, government pays in script, the value of which is set by the government. The vendors, on the other hand, are paid with silver, as in real silver coin or silver notes.

The first part of this thought experiment is not a big leap, as governments still hoard gold and will on occasion pay one another in gold. In our imaginary world, gold would be the exclusive currency of government, so regular people would hold very little of it, other than for novelty. This is not much different from today, as gold is not legal tender in most of the world. It is treated, in the law, as a commodity, like diamonds, barrels of oil, bales of hay, and so on. Gold is a product, not money.

The rest of the thought experiment gets a little weird, as companies do business in the tender of their home country. If they did business with one another in silver, then one of two things would happen. Either the price of silver would be pegged at the value of the legal tender or it would be pegged at the price of gold. Since government would always be willing to buy gold in silver or tender, from anyone holding gold as a store of value, the most likely result is all three would be related in value.

The result of this arrangement would be a world where the credit worthiness of governments would be pegged to their gold reserves, but also the gold reserves of their native companies and populations. A government that could quickly buy up gold from its people would have more flexibility than a government so distrusted that its own people would resist selling its gold to the state. Something similar would apply to the credit ratings of businesses, with regards to the supply of silver.

A well run country with a high trust population and a responsible government would find that the flow of gold and silver would be high, as there would be no reason to hoard them. Similarly, the value of the paper script used for retail transactions would have a steady value, relative to the currency of business and government. This would not just be an internal trust. Outsiders would see it too. In contrast, corrupt states with corrupt people would have low trust and lots of hoarding of gold and silver.

Now, this thought experiment is useful in understanding what is happening with the screaming headlines about negative bond yields. The media hypes these events as if they are the sign of the end times. Most likely, they are triggered by the word “negative” and just assume it is bad news. In reality, what the market is saying is that the German bonds are so safe, the holder is willing to pay for the privilege of holding them. Lenders are literally paying the German state for the privilege of lending to it.

Now, it is tempting for a certain sort of person (libertarians) to say it is ridiculous to compare government debt to gold, as in this analogy. They are right. Government debt is actually more secure. The reason is this. Tomorrow, the government can ban the private ownership of gold. Executive Order 6102 is a United States presidential executive order signed on April 5, 1933, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt that effectively banned the private ownership of gold in the United States.

On the other hand, no government anywhere could ban the private ownership of government debt. In fact, no government could risk the hint of not paying its outstanding debts, as that would make all debt worthless. Since, in the case of Western countries, those government bonds are the basis of the financial system, public trust in the credit worthiness of government is vital. That’s why people are literally willing to trade gold at a loss for the privilege of holding German bonds right now.

Now, that does not mean negative rates are all puppies and sunshine. Going back to our analogy, a world where everyone trusts government, but is not willing to trust companies, would result in a disequilibrium in the relationship between gold, silver and the paper script used in retail. The “price” in terms of script for silver would collapse, while the price of gold would soar. After all, why hold silver when business is bad, when you can hold gold or even cash, which has a higher value?

In our age, government debt is the gold in the analogy, but corporate debt is the equivalent of the silver. Modern business works off debt, as it is the currency of the modern age. In prior ages, government debt and corporate debt was captive to the supply of gold and silver. Today, the relationship between sovereign debt, municipal debt, corporate debt and legal tender is enabled and managed by central banks, primarily the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank.

This is why borrowing rates across the West remain at historic lows. The whole point of this arrangement was to prevent the ups and downs, the booms and busts that plagued industrial economies since the steam engine. The trouble is, the system also allows for the easy manipulation of the economy through the money supply. Inevitably, that worked one way and we are now in a place where no one is willing to pay the price of getting things back to something close to historic norms.

This system has also been based on certain assumptions about America that are starting to unravel. One is that America would continue to operate like a giant shopping mall, willing to buy on unfavorable terms. Both Europe and China based their economic models on this assumption. Trump has abandoned that and that’s why we see problems in China and now economic uncertainty in the heart of Europe. The uncertainty of world political arrangements is now showing up in the money.

It also suggests the markets are slowly coming to terms with the fact that the Trump economic model is the new normal. The election is fourteen months away, so if his loss in 2020 was the safe bet, the markets would be responding now. Instead, the global economy seems to be slowly coming around to the fact that either Trump wins in 2020 or his polices will be carried on no matter what happens. America as problem solver for the world’s money problems may be coming to an end.

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Civic Anti-Racism

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In modern America, there are two things that are on display simultaneously in the realm of public debate. One is the celebration of the fact that white people and the interests of white people are in sharp decline. The other is a growing fear of white people. It is a strange combination at first glance, as this should be a time for the coalition of the ascendant to celebrate their looming hegemony. Instead, they endlessly talk about themselves, but in the context of a prophesized white backlash.

The root of this is the strange obsession with racism that has become a religion of its own over the last two decades. The anointing of Obama as the completion of the Second Founding, the event that was supposed to wash the stains of slavery, segregation and racism from America, instead ushered in an era of race panic. The Left is in a near frenzy over racism, which they now see everywhere. It is an obsession to the point where even the so-called Right is infected by it.

The recent outbreak of hysteria over white supremacists allegedly plotting a violent revolution is a good starting point. This post at Reason Magazine, after the El Paso shooting, is a good example. The libertarians used to take a pass on the race issue, preferring instead to obsess over weed and sexual deviance. They avoided it because preaching about free association regarding race would get them in trouble. Today, they are right there with Left hooting about white supremacy.

Now, libertarianism was always just a Progressive heresy, but it attracted a lot of conservatives. Operations like Reason had to pretend to be on the Right. That’s no longer the case, as actual conservatives have abandoned libertarianism for dissident politics. Perhaps they now feel free to let their guard down. The Koch Brothers have abandoned the GOP and are now backing left-wing candidates, so maybe this is part of their scheme. Still, the turn to berserk anti-racism is notable.

The so-called conservatives are not being left out of the panic. Right-wing goblin Ben Shapiro has been all over the white supremacy scare. He is working his tiny little fingers raw explaining why his grift has nothing in common with those really bad people to his Right. As is always the case with this guy, he takes the latest Progressive bogeyman and assigns it to his competition on the Right, so his motives always suspect. Even so, it feeds into the general hysteria over race.

Confidence men like Shapiro may not be the best examples, but it is clear that unhinged anti-racism is becoming a conservative principle. A rising star among conservatives is a guy calling himself Joshua Tait, a doctoral candidate at North Carolina, who is fashioning himself as a historian of conservatism. He turns up all over posting articles about various aspects of conservative intellectual history. Of course, he is an enthusiastic anti-racist and obsessed with those bad people to his Right.

That’s the remarkable thing about his writing. It is infected with a weird obsession about race that used to be cringe inducing when done on the Left. This piece reads like a panic attack over Amy Wax noticing the realities of immigration at the National Conservatism conference. This piece reads like a sobbing apology for the fact that people on the Right used to hold sensible opinions about race. The fact they have been proved correct over the last few generations goes unnoticed.

Now, to most readers, Joshua Tait is an unknown, but he is being groomed to be the next generation of so-called conservative intellectuals. Like we see with the more pedestrian stuff from Ben Shapiro, the so-called smart conservatives will be every bit as hysterical about race. The religion of anti-racism will be a core conservative value. Put another way, a rhetorical trick to rally the tribes of the Democrat coalition is quickly being turned into the organizing ethos of the new political class.

An interesting aspect of this new civic religion of anti-racism is it is mostly built on the assumption that whites, at any minute, will go bonkers and start attacking black bodies, while erecting old statues. The anti-racism of Joshua Tait is not rooted in something practical like greed, as in the case of Ben Shapiro. It’s not the product of cowardice, as you see with the Reason Magazine crowd. It’s a genuine sense that whites are a ticking time bomb that have to be monitored.

In this sense, the new anti-racism is like the old communist obsession with opponents of the revolution. With commies, the opponents of the revolution did not have to exist, but they must be made to exist. That is, if they could not find real counter-revolutionaries, they invented them. Something similar is going on with the anti-racists. They can’t find actual white supremacists, at least not in quantity, so they hunt for signs of it, like an evil spirit lurking on the fringes. The price of anti-racism is eternal vigilance.

It is tempting to think that this all about rallying the tribes of the Left, but it is probably the symptom of a different problem. What’s happening is white people are disengaging from the ruling Left. The old game of Team Blue fighting Team Red, where whites cheered for Team Red, is falling part. The cheering section of Team Red is shrinking. The over-the-top anti-racism is an effort to draw those disaffected fans of Team Red back into the game in order to maintain the old dynamic.

The problem, of course, is that Team Red has been designed to keep as little space between themselves and Team Blue as possible. They are children that can never be out of sight of their mother. As Team Blue races shrieking into the darkness of multicultural fanaticism, Team Red is racing after them. The old political arrangements, animated by hyper-anti-racism is a civic religion of the ruling class that is based on a hatred of sixty percent of the people over whom they rule.

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Monsters and Heroes

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A common plot for a heroic tale is one where a people are under threat from a supernatural monster or maybe a person possessed by great evil. The king is either unable or unwilling to defend the people from the threat, so a great hero emerges to do that which the king is supposed to do. The hero then goes off to face the threat, defeats it thus saving the people and writing his name in the book of heroes. Probably the oldest existing version of this is the Old English epic poem Beowulf.

Now, more sophisticated versions of this plot will bring the king into the story line by exploring the reasons he cannot or will not defend his people. Maybe the king is playing a double game, where he hopes to summon the hero, who he sees as the greater threat, in order to get him killed by the monster. Alternatively, the king is weak or incompetent, thus he represents failed leadership. His character in the story is a reminder of the risk of to a people tolerating bad leaders.

Now, with that in mind, fast forward to the current age and consider what is happening in American public life. For starters, we have an economic system that cannot be described as anything but predatory. The issue has become so acute, even The Wall Street Journal has had to take note. The reason for the collapse of the America middle class is well known. The active efforts to suppress wages, while maintaining a usurious financial system, is draining the life out of the middle-class.

Again, the reasons for this are fairly well understood and, more important, we know who is behind the policies causing it. People have been writing about the financialization of the economy since the 1970’s. Way back when Wall Street convinced Congress they should auction off the manufacturing base, analysts on the Right and Left identified the prime mover behind this phenomenon. The monster that is savaging the people is well known, yet the king does nothing to defend his people.

Concomitant with the financial collapse of the middle-class has been the spiritual and cultural collapse. Probably the most symbolic aspect of this is the opioid crisis, which has put its icy hand on every shoulder of society. It’s not just an urban thing like prior drug epidemics or a class thing like crime. Look at the number of high profile people who ended up in a rehab facility after getting hooked on pain killers. Every week, the nation’s obituaries are full of stories about opioid related deaths.

Again, this is not some great mystery. On the one hand, you have people like the Sackler family who basically got a license to kill. They used it to flood the nation with legal drugs and induced doctors to hand them out like candy. Similarly, the flood of fentanyl from Mexico is well understood. We know who is doing this to the American people, yet the people in charge barely acknowledge it. The monster that is savaging the people is well known, yet the king does nothing to defend his people.

We have spent three years being lectured by our betters about those clever Russians and their Facebook ads, threatening our democracy. It was a giant hoax, of course, and we know why the hoaxers perpetuated it. They were covering up a seditious plot to subvert the 2016 election. The fact that it was a hoax does not mean there are no threats to the political order. We know, for example, that the tech giants are deliberately trying to subvert the democratic processes.

Again, this is not some mysterious thing that is just coming to light. It has been happening for a long time now. Here we have Silicon Valley trying to bully British media outlets to not interview Farage. Here we have a former Google exec explaining how his former employer interferes in elections. What’s happening with these tech oligopolies is not some great puzzle that has just coming to light. The monster that is savaging the people is well known, yet the king does nothing to defend his people.

The pattern is unmistakable. Time after time the people come under threat from a well understood enemy of bourgeois order and time after time the people in charge do nothing about it. Only the most naive think the Epstein affair or the massive corruption in the FBI will be addressed. At this point, everyone knows the plot. The flow of stories will slow to a trickle and then the whole thing will be forgotten. In time, Epstein’s plotters will be partying with the FBI plotters at Lois Lerner’s Vineyard mansion.

The people are under threat by a variety of monsters. It’s not just Grendel, but Grendel’s mother and the whole extended family. The people in charge, whether out of fear, avarice or degeneracy do nothing about these threats. People thought the Orange Knight was the hero, who could slay the monsters and bring peace to the people, but thus far he has remained under his desk, posting insults on Twitter. In fact, the king sees the hero as a greater threat than the monsters that savage his people.

If our version of this tale is to be recounted in future generations, the plot will have to take a different turn. Ours will have to be the version where the people, seeing the king undermine and plot against the hero, finally realize that the real monster vexing them is the one who rules over them. Every society is under threat from monsters, often ones they created or allowed to develop in their ranks. The people who survive are those who figure it out and either find a hero to slay the monster or do the job themselves.

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Process Conservatism

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If you were to bring forward to our age the cultural and political sensibilities of the founding generation and create a political movement around them, you would find yourself in very serious trouble. The reason is you would be so radical in your aims that even the most enthusiastic of constitutional conservatives would denounce you. The reason for this, is that everything about current year America is at odds with what the men, who drafted the Constitution, intended for the country they created.

Despite this rather obvious truth, modern day conservatives have been calling themselves champions of originalism for generations. In fact, they regularly claim they favor a return to the constitutional principles. It is, of course, just a form of signaling or dog whistling as the Left is fond of saying. The so-called conservatives have no interest in returning to the original political order. In fact, any effort to return to the old order is probably the only thing they would actually fight to prevent.

This is because the Buckley-style conservatism that has come to define the American Right was never about ends. When they talk of originalism, they don’t mean the original intent of the Founders or even the original intent of the law. Instead, they mean and original process. Buckley-style conservatism is a means justifies the ends political ideology, a reaction to the Left’s ends justifies the means approach. For Buckley conservatives, getting the process right is all that matters.

This is how something ridiculous like homosexual marriage can quickly moves from an absurd Progressive troll to a timeless conservative principle in a decade. All it requires was a journey through the courts, where an emotionally unstable judge and four lunatics could make it the law of the land. As long as it went through the proper legal process, Buckley conservatives could hail it as a founding principle. For the Buckleyites, originalism is about obedience to process, not original intent.

This article from a legal journal is a good primer on how this obedience to process plays out in conservative jurisprudence. By any measure, the Federalist Society types have been the most successful tribe of modern conservatism. They get judges appointed to the bench and they get law students interested in their ideas. Given the atmosphere on the college campus, that last bit is no small thing. Yet, despite their operational success, conservative jurisprudence has nothing to show for itself.

This is the story of conservatism in general. Politically, the movement started by Bill Buckley has been a smashing success. It reshaped the Republican Party, put three presidents in the White House and turned the GOP into the majority party from the 1990’s forward. Despite this, the country is further to the Left than anyone imagined possible forty years ago. The epitaph for Buckley conservatism, as it heads to the dustbin of history, is that it conserved nothing.

There is no shortage of reasons for why conservatism failed to provide any resistance to the Left, despite having the better grip on reality and popular support. Radicalism always attracts fanatics and a small group of fanatics can do a lot of damage. The Right is always playing defense, which means their margin for error is smaller. The Left is willing to lie, cheat and steal in order to gain victory. These and many others are all true statements, but there is one main reason the Buckleyites were a total failure.

As you see with originalism, the Buckleyites were never willing to state what it is they sought to achieve as an end goal. The hyper-focus on process allowed them to avoid making clear what they wanted. The homosexual marriage issue is always a great example and it is so here. Instead of saying homosexual marriage is irrational and at odds with civil society, which is certainly true, the so-called conservatives wrapped themselves in legal arguments about contract theory and downstream legal issues.

The Right could never bring themselves to state the obvious. The intent of marriage laws and customs is to encourage baby making. The language of marriage makes that abundantly clear. The only purpose of marriage is reproduction. The additional benefits created by society through laws and rituals is to encourage reproduction. Homosexual marriage is therefore an absurd contradiction. The Right never bothered with these arguments and instead fell into Jesuitical legalism.

All of this traces back to the Civil Right era. Buckley and his fellow founders of modern conservatism started out on the other side of the race issue. They opposed desegregation and they opposed the civil rights legislation of the 1960’s. Once it became clear the Left was going to gain the moral high ground on the race issue, the Buckleyites were faced with a choice. They could attack Progressive morality and risk ostracism or they could adapt and fit within that new morality.

They adapted by switching from an ideology with a clear set of ends in mind to an ideology that makes a fetish over process. It has become so ingrained in conservative thinking they can chant slogans like “we have to return to the founding principles” without noticing modern conservatism opposes those principles. They can champion unlimited immigration, as long as it is legal, but they are incapable of opposing immigration in general. After all, that’s not who we are.

What conservatism under Buckley became is a shaming mechanism to prevent whites, and let’s not kid ourselves about the conservative audience, from stating publicly what they want for their community and their country. Thanks to Buckley, it is no longer possible to say, “I don’t want a bunch of foreigners moving into my town, because we live here and that’s how we want it.” Stating preferences is no longer permitted. Instead, what you want has to have some outside justification.

If there is to be a new Right, it will have to be an ends justifies the means ideology with its own internal morality. Conservatism will have to start with “This is who we are and this is how we seek to live.” The goal of the ideology is to achieve a clear set of ends, not a set of processes that may or may not achieve those ends. The process and principles are means to an end. Put another way, a new Right will oppose Progressive ends for non-Progressive reasons. There can be no compromise.

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!

Post Soviet America

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Way back in the late stages of the Cold War, the Soviet political class started to fracture and splinter. The reform movement of Gorbachev was one faction, while the old guard that resisted him was another. There were other factions playing both sides against one another, as well as genuine reformers on the fringe. The reason the ruling elite was splintering was the system over which they ruled was no longer functioning. This reality was becoming clear to many, but not everyone in the party agreed.

Intrigue began to dominate party politics in the final stages of the Soviet Union. There was always politics within the party, but it revolved around the ruling center, much as court intrigue would revolve around the king. As the system began to falter, that center collapsed and party politics was conspiracies within conspiracies, as factions jockeyed for power. Eventually, the system collapsed and the party with it. What followed was a period of looting by oligarchs that rushed into to fill the void.

It is an important thing to think about when analyzing what’s happening in current year America. In the West, the response to the end of the Cold War was the replacement of the old sober minded political class with their self-absorbed, amoral children. The most notable example being Bill and Hillary Clinton, who have come to symbolize Baby Boomer political culture. Theirs is a politics of limitless mendacity. Everything is for sale, including the very institution over which they preside.

In other words, the Soviet Empire fell into a period of chaos and disorder in response to the end of the Cold War, while America fell into a period of self-indulgence. This way of framing it is like two sports teams after a championship match. The losers fall into finger pointing and blaming one another. The winners go on a bender to celebrate their victory and the benefits that come with it. Eventually, the loser regroups. In the case of Russia, it is becoming a normal country again.

There may be another way of reading the post-Soviet period in America. It may be that the period ushered in by the Clintons was an interregnum.  Both sides of the Cold War were purpose built to face off against one another. The Russians bankrupted themselves with an ineffective organizational model, so the end of the Cold War brought a genuine collapse, as that was the only way forward. In America, the country was still rich, so the old model could trundle on as if nothing really changed.

This interregnum was a period where the old political order carried on searching for an enemy to replace the Soviets. First it was the Muslims, which gave us two ghastly wars of choice and the surveillance state. That weakened America greatly, but instead of facing the long overdue reorganization, the political class tried reinventing the Russian bogeyman. Now, as in late stage Soviet Russia, the political center has collapsed and we are entering a similar period of chaos and intrigue.

Like the Soviets, we have oligarchs jockeying to loot what’s left the country, seemingly uninterested in staving off collapse. Big Tech and Wall Street have all the signs of super-predators from another planet, waiting for the chance to rush in and steal whatever they think has value. Like Gorbachev’s government at the end, official Washington is weak, while a populist reform movement builds. Trump is not Boris Yeltsin, but no historic analogy is intended to be perfect.

Of course, there came a point in the late stages of the Soviet Union where the emerging power centers outside the party, what would become the oligarchs, resorted to violence in their struggles with one another and the party. This is something that is starting to turn up more and more in America. Starting with the execution of Seth Rich on a Washington street, through the explosion of Antifa violence, the country is now buzzing with conspiracy over the bizarre death of billionaire Jeffrey Epstein.

That is another thing we are seeing in America that was common toward the end of the Soviet Union. The public is so cynical about the motives and character of the ruling class, that no one believes anything. The fake news meme was effective because trust in the media had dropped to zero. The lies had simply accumulated to the point where no rational person could accept anything from the media at face value. The continued existence of mainstream media just increases the cynicism.

Now, something not reported in the old Soviet Union that we are seeing in current year America is the panic. We are currently in the midst of a White Fright, where the media is tasked with casting daily events as signs of a white supremacist uprising. The coalition of the ascendant is being told to lock their doors and remain vigilante, as the twelfth invisible Hitler is slated to return at any minute. Like the Russia hoax, this one is a ruling class hoax that suggests a breakdown at the very top.

Again, it is not a perfect analogy. That’s not how analogies work. That said, there are important differences between the end of Cold War America and the end of Cold War Russia. The interregnum between the end of the Cold War and current year America is one example. Another is the nature of the oligarchs ready to seize power from Washington. They are foreign in outlook, if not legality. The tech barons and Wall Street financiers have loyalties that transcend any attachment to nation.

These new oligarchs are globalists, while the Russian oligarchs were local. The oligarchs of current year America are anti-nationalists, seeking a post-national world order. Their desire is to turn the heart of the American Empire into just another province. There’s also a class consciousness to their enablers. The managerial elite see themselves as a new class, tasked with administering the new global order. These are not men for hire, as we saw in Russia. These are true believers.

There’s also the fact that the American military is a different thing than what evolved in the Soviet Union. The Russian military was quite comfortable involving itself in politics, while the America military lacks the talent and culture to do it. Civilian leaders in America have always been smart enough to choose obsequious and incompetent generals to run the military branches. The talent is down a few ranks. The culture of the military would not lend itself to political involvement either.

Even so, what all of this suggests is America is headed for a period of chaos similar to what gripped the Russians after the Cold War. Just as the Russian oligarchs were too greedy and short sighted to replace the party, our oligarchs are too foreign and feckless to provide an alternative to Washington. A period of chaos in probably what comes next for post-Soviet America. The sudden collapse of empire and then a reversion to its natural state after a period of chaos and violence.

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