Category Archives: Politics

Of Two Minds

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Probably the only thing that everyone agrees upon in modern America is that the ideological divide has grown wider over the last few decades. This divide becomes even starker when one redefines the Right to be the center of dissident opinion, rather than conventional conservatism. While the Buckley crowd runs faster after the radicals as they plunge into the darkness, the dissidents are pretty much where the Buckley Right was at the start of the cultural revolution in the 1960’s.

In fairness, the dissident right has moved further into the biological realism camp in the last ten years or so. If we define Left and Right as one pole being the blank slate and the other being biological reality, the Right has now moved further toward the later pole, as the Left has raced toward the other. This is explains why the great compromisers, the Buckley Conservatives, have been pulled apart over the last two decades. It is no longer possible to ignore these poles and no longer possible to bridge them.

One thing that everyone outside the radical Left seems to accept is the Left has become far more emotional and emotionally unstable over the last few decades. The Left, of course, would dispute this, if they bothered to address it, but even the most cowardly of Buckley Conservatives agrees with this assessment. The Left is now defined by its emotional outbursts and demands to shut down anyone that dares question the tenets of their faith. The waves of censorship are a direct result of these demands.

A good example of this institutional hysteria is the recent book by Hindu nationalist Angela Saini, which purports to show that biology is a social construct. This is a woman, who for very personal reasons, has to claim that race and ethnicity are figments of our imagination, but writes books celebrating her people. Saini is a great example of the internally conflicted and perpetually panicked Left. Her latest book is an effort to use cherry picked science to anathematize the human sciences, in defense of ideology.

The fevered tone, however, is self-defeating, as it further isolates the blank slate crowd as a ghetto culture of radicals. When an algorithm can create your face just from your voice, the notion that we are not what of biology dictates is preposterous. When ancestry companies are relying upon cheek swabs to tell people their race, ethnicity and the origin of their people, Angela Saini sounds like a mad woman. This is what the Left appears to be today. A collection of emotionally overwrought primitives.

The question is why the Left appears to be going mad. David Aurini has a go at it looking at the Big Five Personality Traits. The radical Left is high in Agreeableness and Neuroticism, while being very low in Conscientiousness. As a result, they panic when they perceive any threat and demand everyone get along – or else. They are also more intensely on-line (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube), which tends to amplify their sense of being surrounded by threats, thus elevating their level of panic.

Of course, another way to looking at this great divide is along sexual lines. The Left is clearly more feminine today than at any time. The people on the Left assailing biological reality are people like Angela Saini, Amy Harmon and Cordelia Fine. They write books claiming biology is a social construct. While there are some thirsty betas on the Left nodding along with these sorts of women, the point of the spear in the war against the human sciences is mainly populated with the daughters of Mars.

Another aspect to this is the browning of the Left in America. The Left is not only being feminized, it is being tribalized by people like Angela Saini. She can never be occidental and is therefore condemned to live outside the Western tradition. Because she can never be fully part of the West, but is detached from her people’s past, she has to work toward creating a new reality that can include the immigrant reality. While in the past, Left and Right existed within Western identity, the Left is slowly detaching from it.

This is probably the key reason the Left now feels so alien to even the milquetoast members of the Buckley Right. People like David French desperately try to keep pace with the Left as it rockets away from the core of Western identity, but he remains tethered to Western tradition. There’s simply no way to fit the shared reality of strangers, who immigrated to the West, into the shared reality of the natives. Their realities are too different and largely at odds. The Left is now defined by its degree of separation.

Just as important, this new identity evolving on the Left is a negative one. It is defined by its hostility to the core Western man. The attempts by those in the remnant of the Buckley Right to find common ground with the new Left is seen as an assault. Any effort to incorporate the identity of the new comers into the Western tradition is viewed as cultural appropriation, another way of saying an assault on their identity. As a result, it appears the West is at war with itself as the distance between the poles widen.

To some degree, the West has been at war with itself for a long time. One side has always thought the importation of strangers was suicide. The other side came to believe it was vital. There’s no bridging the gap between these two opinions. It turns out that the former was always correct. The new political divide, therefore, will be between those alien infiltrators, and their native collaborators, hostile to the heritage identity, and the natives, who remain in the core Western tradition and identity.

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Negrophilia

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In Paris, during the interwar years, the avant-garde and artists developed a passion for what they saw as black culture. Part of it was due to the trade in exotic items from French colonies in Africa and part of it was due to exposure to black troops from America and Africa during the war. The word negrophilia is derived from the French négrophilie that means love of the negro. The modern and fashionable of the day would collect African art, listen to Jazz and hang out at clubs where the Charleston was popular.

A century later, a similar sort of frenzy has gripped people who fashion themselves as sophisticated and fashionable. Instead of Jazz, they listen to hip-hop and worship black sports figures. Instead of collecting African art, they collect African orphans. More important, instead of admiring the cultural products of blacks, they have developed an unconscious worship of blacks. They have elevated them to minor gods, who must be protected at all cost. The protection of these gods is a sign of righteousness.

This new form of negrophilia is entirely a conservative thing. That’s conservative as in right-wing Progressive, not historic conservatives. These are the people who see Candace Owens as something of a shaman. So much so allegedly sober minded people are willing to embrace nutty academic fads in order to prove their love for her. It’s not her specifically, but black exceptionalism in general. Any black who embraces the habits of white bourgeois society becomes something sacred to be defended at all costs.

You see that with the so-called principled conservative crowd, who are suddenly up in arms about the media harassing someone for their political opinions. Those principled conservatives took to their quill pens to denounce the Daily Beast for posting personal information about a black Facebook user, who mocked Nancy Pelosi. He either created or doctored a video of Pelosi, which showed her slurring her words. The Left was very upset by it, as it mocked their octogenarian leader.

Up until this point, the principled conservatives were silent on the campaign of harassment by the Daily Beast against other people holding taboo opinions. The reason is those victims were white and their opinions are pro-white. Conservatives were not just silent about the social media purges of pro-white users, they celebrated it. They wrote snickering posts about how private companies had the absolute right to censor speech and the victims were free to create their own platforms.

The obsequious David French tries to find some principles that makes it OK for the media to harass white people, but not black people. All he is able to do is insert himself into the story as an alleged victim of mean people on-line. His effort to defend the sacred black man is just autoethnicgraphic groveling. For those unaware, when the term “cuckservative:” was popularized, French was one of the first guys to see it turn up in his twitter feed. He has never recovered from it.

One thing to note is that none of these principled conservatives can be bothered to defend a principle here. Theirs is an emotional response. They see a sacred black in distress and they naturally rush to his aid. It’s what drove them to slobber over Diamond and Silk, the black YouTube performers. It’s what made Sheriff Clark a star. Sure, it is a way for them to shout “DR3” as they hiss at the Left, but the driver is not just the desire to zing the Left. These people worship an idealized black.

This fever has gripped them to the point where they are unable to defend their own ideas, what few of them exist, without finding a back to confirm them. Conservative Inc. has been vexed by the rise of white identity politics, but could never muster much of an argument against it. The reason is it would require attacking left-wing identity politics and they can’t risk that, so they now have a black to do the job for them. Blacks are always used as a cat’s paw by principled conservatives.

Of course, the cause of this is a phenomenon that started on the Left in the 1980’s, when liberals moved past the street theater of radicalism. Instead of going to the ghetto to link arms with people like Jess Jackson, the new radicals wanted to invite blacks into their world. Not just any blacks, of course. They preferred the talented ten percent, who would be happy to confirm the sensibilities of bourgeois radicalism, by aping the opinions and mannerisms of the bourgeois bohemians. Barak Obama says hello.

Forgotten to the mists of time were Obama prototypes like former Baltimore mayor Kurt Schmoke. Back in the 1980’s, he was the first of a new breed of black politician. He was Ivy League educated and more comfortable in the boardroom than the ghetto. As the saying went at the time, he was black, but not, you know, black. His role was not to be the voice of black America in the ruling class, but instead to be the symbol of ruling class virtue. White politicians loved having their picture taken with him.

Because today’s principled conservatism is just yesterday’s Progressive fads, the modern conservative now embraces the negrophilia of the 1980’s. Just as the liberals of yesterday were interested only in an idealized black, today’s conservatives only care about blacks who play a similar role. They ignore the blacks who the Left employs to attack white culture, as they fear being called a racist. Instead they worship people like Candace Owens and Diamond and Silk, who are willing to confirm their virtue.

That’s not to say that Sheriff Clarke or Candace Owens are dishonest in their presentations or running a con on white people. They seem sincere in their beliefs. According to all accounts, they are genuinely nice people. The thing is, what they say is not remarkable. The reason they are stars is they are black people saying the same things Sean Hannity says every night. These principled conservatives love these people because they assure them they are not going to be called a racist.

The one big difference between the Left’s negrophilia and that of these principled conservatives is self-awareness. For the Left, these good blacks were just useful pawns in the culture war. They were a means to an end. For principled conservatives, these sorts of fads are an end in themselves. That’s because principled conservatism is a defensive crouch, not a set of ideas aimed at a goal. Despite all of their howling about their principles, principled conservatism is just a pose.

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The Unraveling Right

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The defining feature of American Conservatism since the rise of Buckley and National Review is that it managed to conserve nothing. In fact, the movement was largely born out of the Civil Rights Movement, in which the New Right, as they were called then, conceded the right of free association to the Left. From that point forward, conservatism in America was mostly just a modification of Progressivism, often following it around like a shadow from one new radical idea to the next.

The truth is, whatever Buckley imagined for his movement in the beginning, it was soon turned into a partner of Progressivism. In exchange for a free hand in dealing with the Soviets, the Right would allow the Left to dominate domestic policy. It may not have been explicit decision, or even a conscious one, but that was the result. The Reagan years are a great example. The revolution cultivated the seedlings of global finance and presided over a massive military buildup. Domestically, it did nothing.

In fairness, the Buckley project did bring about the end of the Cold War, which few people imagined was possible in the 1960’s. Into the Reagan years, most people in the West thought the Bolsheviks were on the right side of history. The trouble was, this habit of acquiescing to the Left on domestic matters had become a part of the Right’s fabric. When it was time to turn back to domestic policy, they could not do it. Instead they allowed themselves to be tricked into a new foreign adventure by the neocons.

That is a useful way to think of the last thirty years. Buckley and his minions did such a great job of defining conservatism as the sidecar of Progressivism, it was incapable of adapting to the post-war reality. Instead, it put all of its energy into finding a new foreign policy cause to fill the void of fighting communism. Meanwhile, the Left was fully prepared to spend the peace dividend on outlandish social experimentation like open borders and homosexual marriage. The Right just stood by and watched.

The fact that Conservative Inc., the material and monetary manifestation of Buckley’s project, still staggers on, despite losing most of its relevance and audience, is a testament to institutional power. People get used to worshiping at the same place, so even when the place no longer deserves their worship, they return out of habit. For the same reason the Episcopal Church still exists, National Review still functions as a flagship for a movement that is long past its expiration date.

A sign that this hollow institution sits atop an equally hollow movement is this recent exchange between someone calling himself Sohrab Ahmari and David French, of National Review. Ahmari makes a case familiar to most on the dissident right, that conservatism has conserved nothing. More important, its very design is to ensure that it can never win a fight with the Left in the culture war. It is the designated opponent that puts on a good show, but in the end concedes the game to the Left.

The response from David French is an amusing confirmation of the most biting criticism of Conservative Inc., in that it combines a total lack of self-awareness and a dog’s breakfast of empty slogans. The fact that the French essay is heavily decorated with advertisements and pleas for money just adds to the humor. His argument is that making a bunch of ritualized noises about the past, while being rolled in the Culture War, is the definition of conservatism. Everyone agrees with this.

What Ahmari builds his case on is the observation that people like French invest heavily in maintaining a set of rules on the Right that prevents victory. That is, a primary activity is endlessly reminding people that to be conservative is to live by a set of principles. These principles control how the Right engages the Left. On the other hand, the Left is happy to help the Right enforce these rules, as the Left never plays by any rules. It plays to win, so these principles become a road map for winning every battle.

This is a certain type of sandwich, where normal white people are faced with an impossible dilemma. They can lose their moral purpose by breaking their own rules, while beating the Left, or, they can hold onto their principles and lose. That’s the role of people like David French. He’s like the Army chaplain, who convinces the troops to embrace pacifism. Alternatively, he is the Tokyo Rose whispering subversion into the ears of white people, undermining their will to fight.

The response by the rest of Conservative Inc. to the Ahmari post is revealing, in that it is not much of a defense of French or Conservative Inc. Reason Magazine babbles about individual liberty while calling Ahmari names. The fact that the core of the Ahmari post is that the individualism fetish is why the Right keeps losing is lost on the writer. Winning the culture war requires collective action with a collective purpose. There can be no individual liberty without first defeating the Left and retaking the public space.

Probably the most illuminating defense of French comes from Michael Brendan Dougherty in National Review. His post reads like it was coerced. There is a long meandering summary of the recent history of conservatism. The actual defense of French boils down to “he is worthless and his approach is laughably stupid, but hey, he’s a nice guy and is popular with my boss.” Conservatism is mostly just logrolling now, so this “defense” is a good example of why National Review is nearing an end.

The lesson to be drawn from the failure of conservatives, for those who will take up the culture war, is that principles are about what you won’t do. They are prohibitions on your behavior. When you engage the enemy with a long list of things you will not do in the fight, you have provided him with a road map to victory. That’s been conservatism for the last thirty years. Whether conscious or unconscious, their cherished principles have amounted to nothing more than a primer for how they will throw the fight.

The fact is, principles are worthless unless you can enforce them. The whole point of having principles is to legitimize the maintenance of order after the victory. Logically, the first step in a principled agenda is to win. That requires collective action and a willingness to play rough, not individualism and a fetish for tone policing. An army of individualists is a hunting ground for the well-organized. In order to get anything like a conservative order means white people acting collectively and doing what is necessary to win.

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Cynicism, Then Revolt

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A popular line from libertarianism is that the state is violence. Another way of stating this is the state has a monopoly on violence. The implication is that the state imposes order, the order of those who control the state, with the threat of violence or through actual violence, in the case of law enforcement. It is a Hobbesian view of society, in which order is imposed, but an inaccurate one. Society, even authoritarian ones, rely on consent and a shared set of rituals and symbols to perpetuate consent.

Even the most authoritarian of societies, the prison, where the members have no control over their bodies, relies on consent and ritual to maintain order. The regularization of prison life, along with predictable symbols of authority, keep the prisoners from revolting against the guards. Without cooperation from the inmates, a prison would be ungovernable. The cost of housing and feeding humans in perpetual revolt against their captors would be prohibitive. A prison requires consent.

In a western liberal democracy, order tilts in the other direction, where the state relies more on ritual and symbol to encourage the consent of the governed. Elections are a big part of the ritual, where the people are made to believe their concerns are considered by the office holders. Every western nation has symbols and rituals to remind the voters that they live in a democracy. In America, patriotism is used to manipulate the people into supporting the system, despite their misgivings and distrust.

Order in America relies on the balance between the state’s monopoly of violence, the consent of the people and the maintenance of symbols and rituals that are the physical manifestation of the American creed. As long as the people trust and respect those symbols and rituals, they will support the current order. More precisely, as long as they believe those rituals, like elections and civic participation, support the American creed, they will respect the institutions of the state that maintain order.

Most likely, the process by which a liberal democracy moves from order to disorder, is like walking through a submarine. The people start in the compartment of high trust, but events lead them to leave that compartment and move to the next compartment called doubt or distrust. Once there, the door closes behind them. This is where the people begin losing faith in the office holders. The next compartment from there is cynicism, where the people have lost all trust in the system and the ruling class.

In this phase of social evolution in a liberal democracy, there is some remnant of consent and some tug of patriotism. The emotional connection between the citizens and the state is vestigial. It is a memory and a sadness at the onset of political cynicism, but then slowly builds to an anger at what has been lost. This is what Darren Beattie fears is right around the corner for America, if Trump’s agenda fails due the deliberate thwarting of the public will, by the people controlling the state.

It is safe to assume that the marginalized supporters who came out to vote for Trump will be forever divorced from the shared consent of the people. They will stop voting and stop thinking their future lies with democratic solutions. Just how many of Trump’s voters will fall into this state is hard to calculate. On the other hand, the coalition of the ascendant will be energized by this, so the general level of cynicism will be offset to some degree by enthusiasm from the coalition of the ascendant.

The truth never mentioned in the Beattie column, because it is forbidden, is populism is just code for white. What Trump represents is the white population, who think it is still possible to hold onto heritage America. If we just get immigration under control and fix some of the trade deals, things will slowly get back to normal. Oddly, this is the one thing the Left gets right about Trump. He does want to make America white again, if not demographically, certainly culturally and institutionally.

There is no question that many whites in America have moved from the compartment of distrust to the compartment of cynicism. Beattie is wrong to assume this process is not already underway. It started a long time ago as a trickle on the Right and now the pace is accelerating. This is evident in the growth and persistence of the dissident right, which has thrived despite the authoritarian tactics of the ruling class. Despite having more political prisoners than ever, we have more dissidents than ever too.

Still, Beattie is not wrong to assert that the failure of popular causes, like immigration controls, will push many more people into the cynicism compartment. The result will be an America where consent begins to fade and is replaced by coercion. White people will continue to follow the rules, not because they respect those rules, but because they fear reprisals from the state. The authority of the ruling class will no longer be based in their legitimacy to rule, but their control of the monopoly of violence.

In the trenches, soldiers will fight and die for their comrades, despite the rotten conditions their leaders create for them. In human society, the people will tolerate great deprivations in support of their neighbors. That social capital, upon which authority relies, will help maintain order, even when the rulers have failed in their duties. In a land where everyone’s neighbor is a stranger, there can be no foundation of social capital upon which to rest authority. The people must trust and respect their rulers.

That’s the next compartment after cynicism. When Trump’s agenda fails, as it sure will, white cynicism toward the system will grow. It will reach a point where the ruling class can only maintain order through coercion. They will live in fear of crisis, as the people will have no reason to sacrifice and no trust in the system to see them through the difficult times. The relationship between ruler and ruled will be like an old married couple hanging on until the kids are grown. The divorce is inevitable.

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The Little Fights

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An old joke about libertarians is that they are fond of saying, “That works very well in practice, but how does it work in theory?” It’s an old joke that goes back before such a thing as libertarianism existed. It is often used to zing the excessively intellectual. The joke itself is a twist on the fact that strategy, based in theory, often fails miserably in the field. The world of theory is neat and tidy, while the real world is messy. Ideologues can’t grasp this distinction and live only in theory, which is the point of the joke.

No doubt, libertarians will take exception to this characterization, but this truth is an issue faced by all outsider politics. What often makes them outsiders is an excessive adherence to ideology or to a set of narrow demands. Their unwillingness to compromise makes them unappealing to most people. The various green movements are a good example of theory clashing with reality. You can talk people into being more environmentally conscious, but people are not giving up their cars to please mother earth.

Some on the alt-right suffer from this malady. The reaction by some of them to the British election smacks of that old joke about practice versus theory. Here’s Mike Enoch criticizing Nigel Farage as a gatekeeper, while offering a defense of Carl Benjamin, of all people. Richard Spencer went down the same road when he was on the same YouTube show this week. In both cases, they jam the results into their preferred moral framework, rather than analyzing the results in the proper context.

Farage is a single issue guy, who is first and foremost a politician. He is not a strategist or a political theorist. He is a pitch man, selling a simple idea. Britain needs to get out of the EU and begin functioning like a normal country again. Beyond that, he has no strong opinions on much of anything. In fact, he is willing to embrace the popular side of anything in order to eliminate it as an obstacle. His forays into meta-politics are always with an eye on influencing practical politics, which is where is he is best suited.

The way to think of this is to consider the doughnut shop. Political theory is a debate about how retail commerce, like donut shops, fits in with a preferred social organization. Are doughnut shop keepers bourgeois flunkies of the capital class, oppressing the proletariat, or are they an organic resistance to central planning? In the world of political theory, the choice of signage is not a topic of debate. The closest things come to the actual doughnut shop is having the debate in the doughnut shop.

Meta-politics is the debate and discussion of actual doughnut shops and the various ways of making doughnuts. This is the same as comparing the merits of anarcho-capitalism with other types of libertarianism. The practical benefits are described and compared, but in a largely abstract way. After all, the relative merit of one policy compared to another is similar to the comparison of one type of doughnut versus another type of doughnut. Often the people doing the comparing matter more than the comparison.

Finally, politics is the act of selling doughnuts. The guy running the shop is not all that concerned about the propriety of selling more cream filled versus plain, as his primary task is to sell doughnuts. In theory, having 85 types of doughnut on offer makes sense, but if it results in lots of waste, then having just the five most popular types is going to make more sense to the doughnut maker. This works in practice, so he is not going to care if it violate theory or rustles the jimmies of the food critics.

In this regard, a guy like Farage is the doughnut maker. He is focused on winning over as many people as he can to his single issue. Politics is a sales game, where the salesman is always trying to figure out the needs and motivations of the voter. His politics, therefore, have to be flexible enough to fit many situations. The good salesman removes all of the reasons to say no. He attacks the objections, rather than just pitch the benefits. In politics, the game is to avoid disqualifiers so the voter focuses only on the pitch.

That’s why Farage’s new party won big, while Carl Benjamin, Sargon of Akkad, and UKIP were humiliated at the pols. Farage is a likable guy, who avoids taking controversial positions on inconsequential issues. He maintains his focus on the one issue that matters to him, Brexit. Benjamin is a smarmy ideologue who never misses a chance to step on a rake. He embarrassed himself and anyone associated with him, by confirming all of the claims made by his critics. It turns out that there is such a thing as bad publicity.

The alt-right guys will contend that winning is pointless if it does not result in a change in policy or a change in the political culture. That is a fair point and something anyone voting Republican the last 30 years can understand. The GOP has won many elections, but delivered very little to their voters. In the case of the British election, this analysis does not apply as the vote was not an actual election. It was a test of the political atmosphere in Britain that will influence the upcoming struggle to find a new Prime Minister.

It’s why calling Farage a gatekeeper or part of the problem is pretty dumb. The election results give support to the Brexit hardliners in the Tory party and give cover to the moderates, who can now side with Brexit. Britain leaving the EU has enormous downstream consequences for nationalist movements all over the continent. The British leaving the EU strips away the taboo. It is no longer unthinkable for other countries to consider leaving the EU as an option to being ruled by Brussels.

The point of all this is that what we saw in Britain is a good example of why outsider politics remains on the fringe. Ideologues can’t understand why candidates don’t run as ideologues, refusing to compromise on anything. The alt-right guys want candidates to run as open and avowed racists. In the case of Farage, they wanted him to talk about the Paki rape gangs and knife wielding Muslims, rather than his main issue. They simply don’t get why valiantly losing is a bad idea, so they criticize guys like Farage.

It’s also why the Left has been so wildly successful, compared to their numbers. It has been popular for generations to accuse liberals of being unrealistic dreamers, but in reality they operate like cold blooded pragmatists. They win every small fight so it makes it easier to win the next small fight. They are like rats gnawing at the support cables of the status quo, knowing that one day the cables will snap. They never confuse political philosophy with retail politics and they never lose sight of larger goals when in small fights.

Farage winning the election is a small victory, but that’s what it takes to change the culture, winning the small battles. It is the cumulative effect of changing a mind here and a mind there, of normalizing a bit our stuff here and anathematizing some of the orthodoxy over there. It’s messy and boring, which is why ideologues don’t like it, but it is the only way dissident politics can change the culture and eventually change politics. What our side needs is more guys like Farage and fewer rigid ideologues scolding him.

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Echo & The Cucky Men

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One of the strange aspects of the Obama years was how much of what they did was an effort to address old wounds that still haunted the Left. Health care reform is the obvious example. The Left never got over how Bill Clinton threw the Left overboard after Hillary’s health care debacle led to the 1994 election wipe-out. The Obama effort was all about addressing that old wound. The ultimate product looked like the result of a revenge fantasy, mostly because it was about addressing those old wounds.

It was not just health care. The entirety of the Obama administration was about the past, despite his endless jabbering about the glorious future. Their dealings with Iraq and Afghanistan were mostly about “proving” Bush was wrong and they were right about how to respond to 9/11. Their Iran policy was a do-over of the Carter years and their Russia policy was a do-over of the 1980’s. They even pitched Obama at one point as the Progressive answer to Reagan, He was their Ronald Reagan.

It’s not just the Left playing the old records and dreaming of better days. The 2016 Trump campaign was a WWE version of the Reagan campaign of 1980. The slogan “Make American Great Again” was borrowed from the Gipper. He ran on the slogan “Let’s make America great again” in his successful 1980 presidential campaign. It’s pretty clear Trump intends to use some version of “It’s Morning In America” in his reelection campaign next year. This campaign ad will feature a panda, rather than a grizzly.

Of course, his presidency has been a call back to past events as well. The seditious conspiracy against him by the FBI and CIA is an echo of what the Left accused Nixon of plotting back in the 1970’s. Both sides are replaying the past as a do-over. Team Trump is going win the Watergate this time, while the Left is sure Trump is going to pull off his face at any moment and reveal himself to be Tricky Dick. In this version, to keep with the current age, Peter Strzok is the soy-man version of G. Gordon Liddy.

The endless echoes of politics past is sure to continue, as we see in the Democratic presidential field. The only two people talking about the present are Gabbard and Yang, both of whom will be ushered off the stage by Labor Day. The rest all sound like museum exhibits from previous eras. Joe Biden is actually running on the slogan “Make America Normal Again.” That sounds a lot like Carter’s campaign in 1976, after Nixon and Watergate, where he promised to restore dignity to politics.

Politics is always a repeat of the past, to some degree, but what makes this age a weird echo is debates themselves. The biggest issues facing the West are never discussed, outside of dissident circles. Trump ran on immigration and trade, but no one talks about those anymore. The Democrats could be running on the student debt issue or the crisis facing the young people of the middle-class. Instead they are talking about socialism, as if it is this brand new idea that has never been tried.

One reason for this entirely backward looking perspective is demographics. Both political parties are built to compete for the votes of Baby Boomers, who remain the largest identifiable cohort. The Boomers are entering the last turn of their race, so inevitably they are sentimental and nostalgic. The fact that the most likely contest in 2020 is between an octogenarian and a septuagenarian, both white and both male, will allow Baby Boomer voters to feel like they are still young and hip.

That’s probably the single biggest cultural problem facing America today. The Baby Boom generation is not going to age gracefully. Instead of picking which one of their kids will take their keys away, they will keep a white-knuckled grip on the wheel until the country goes over the cliff. Nancy Pelosi should be in a rest home right now. Instead she wanders around the capital in her bathrobe and slippers, the third most powerful person in the Imperial government, unable to remember her own name.

The blame is not all on the Boomers. As America becomes majority-minority, the cost of cobbling together a coalition goes up. Bringing blacks and angry Jewish feminists together into a coalition is near impossible. Delivering anything to the white middle-class means standing in front of the open sewer that is Progressive morality. Multicultural America is an ungovernable riot of competing interests, so it is a lot easier to go the nostalgia route and court the white Baby Boomers. It’s easy and fun.

There’s also the fact that no one wants to face up to the truth of the current situation in present day America. Inviting in 50 million strangers was a bad idea. Fixing it means telling most of them to go home. Civil Rights was arguably noble and decent, but the downstream result was a disaster. Bringing back free association is too scary for the soft men and unstable women of the ruling class. Our political class is mostly cucks and kooks, unable and unwilling to muster anything resembling courage.

That’s where we are now. America is a country ruled by cucks who are afraid of the future, so they rummage around in the past. They’re like children putting on shows for their parents, wearing their clothes and singing their songs. It’s all echoes of the past and cucking to current fads. It is an entirely useless ruling elite that will have to be wiped away, before we can face the future. Barring an asteroid strike and societal collapse, it means waiting for the great Baby Boomer die off to clear the path forward.

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The Cloud War

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After the Mueller report was released, the conventional wisdom was that, after a period of mourning by the crazies on the Left, the whole matter would be forgotten. The Russian collusion nonsense had served its purpose and now it was time to move onto figuring out who would replace Trump. The Democrats have a massive field of candidates for their nomination. This reflects the fractured nature of their coalition, so the focus would shift to sorting out how best to unify the party around a nominee.

That’s not what has happened. Instead, the Democrats are slowly inching toward impeachment, while Trump and his new consigliere are moving ahead with investigating the domestic spying scandal. Supposedly, Trump told Pelosi and Schumer he was done dealing with them until they dropped the investigations. This is probably just a lie fed to the willing media, as part of the war. Most likely, the offer to drop all of it was made by Schumer, but Trump rejected it, as he now has the better hand in this fight.

Proof of this is the decision to hand over to Bill Barr the power to release classified documents related to this scandal and other scandals as yet unknown. That last part is the real issue here. It is pretty much accepted that elements within the FBI, and most likely the CIA, conducted an illegal surveillance operation on the Trump campaign and the Trump transition team. The only decision left on that front is whether or not these people face changes or the whole thing is swept under the rug.

That last part is where things get interesting. If everyone was sure the parties in the FBI scandal were stand-up guys willing to do their time and keep quiet. This is probably over and done with by now. The trouble is, they are not stand-up guys. Worse yet, there are too many of them and too well known to be Arkancided. If they get charged, they will probably look to better-deal themselves by cooperating. What dirt they can dish is the great unknown and it may even be unknown to the Democrat leadership.

That brings us back to the order to authorize Bill Barr to release classified documents into the public. As the Conservative Treehouse guy noted, the order has some unusual features to it. Giving Barr this power is unprecedented, but that can be explained by the politics in Washington right now. The real puzzle is the inclusion of the Department of Treasury and the Department of Energy. What could the Energy Department have in its files related to the FBI scandal? What would Treasury have?

One answer lies in the story of Uranium One, which is the turd that official Washington cannot seem to flush. This is the deal that sold off uranium resources and companies to a Russian firm. The Wiki page is interesting, because it reveals just how many people were involved in this deal. Those people all seem to have connections to intelligence services in the Anglosphere. These are the same intelligence services that pressured Trump into holding off on releasing the classified documents months ago.

Of course, what this means is the Russian collusion story was just an effort to conceal the FBI spying scandal, which was an effort to cover a lot of other corruption, especially the Uranium One deal. That’s the item at the center of everything. That would explain why Treasury and Energy are on the list. It would also explain why the FBI under James Comey was so vexed by the Clinton e-mail scandal. Clinton was running a pay-for-play operation out of the State Department and a lot of people knew about it.

The question is why would everyone go along with it, but the history of the Clinton family is the story of exploiting the ambition of minor figures. The salary men in the FBI dream of getting to the top job, so why not play ball with Clinton? The vermin-like rapacity of Hillary Clinton is like something from a Faulkner novel. When it comes to corruption, she is shred, ruthless and clever. The people in Washington, however, are naive, sheltered and simple minded. They stand no chance against Hillary.

Way back in the 1990’s, a truth obvious to many people was that the Democrats, desperate to regain power, sold their souls to the Clintons. They were willing to overlook their obscene corruption, as long as they delivered. It’s turning out that the Clinton family was not just a cancer on the party, but a cancer on American politics. Like the guy who sold his soul to the devil, official Washington is now realizing it was a horrible error to take the Clinton deal. Now they are at a loss as to how to get out of it.

As an aside, the old WASP virtue of keeping low-class people out of public life was not just about snobbery. It was an understanding that people like the Clintons were like an invasive species among the upper classes. High status people did not train their young to hair-split and subvert the rules. They trained them to uphold the rules. As a result, they could never compete with the sort of people who saw rules and customs as an obstacle to their ambitions. Exclusion was a form of self-defense.

Ultimately, political scandals are always about politics. The reason any of this matters is it threatens the political order. On the one hand, the Cloud People cannot tolerate a rogue intelligence community. On the other hand, they can’t just open all of this to public view, as the public will lose respect for the political order. That’s the war going on now, between those trying to change the political order and those seeking to defend it and their privileges within it. Trump now has a new weapon in that war.

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Modern Political Escapism

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One of the weird features of current age America is it is kind of like a community theater production of popular Broadway shows. The people on stage are enthusiastic to play the roles and the production people work hard to get everything just as the audience would remember it. The audience will tolerate some changes and revisions, in order to update the show, but otherwise they want to see the original. The culture of this age is like a long re-do of the past, in order to get it right this time.

The most obvious place for this is in movies. There are small independent films that try new things, but the big productions are all rehashes of old material. In many cases they are remakes that deviate in amusing ways from the original. This has become so obvious that there are a bunch of hackneyed jokes about it. As soon as a remake is announced, everyone lets fly with jokes about how it will feature a one-legged trans lesbian of color, rather than the white male star in the original production.

Where this lack of new ideas is most obvious is in the realm of politics. The vast Democratic field, which is up to 22 now, is interesting for the sole reason that it is the wildly boring cast of characters. The front-runners are two near-dead geezers who sound like museum exhibits on the 1970’s. The rest remind everyone of the people you meet at a corporate retreat. They are studies in blandness. The primary is going to be a beauty contest without a talent competition, because no one has any talent.

One of the interesting things to come out of the Ben Shapiro meltdown on the BBC, besides him behaving like a spoiled teenager, was the exchange over which side of the political class has new ideas. Shapiro was right to point out that the new ideas on the Left are just remakes of very old ideas, but he was unable to name a single thing the so-called conservative movement has to offer. The American Left is a post-modern art installation, but the American Right, the official one, is the storage closet.

If you go to National Review Online and search for the word “socialism” you get more than a hundred pieces ranting about socialism this year. The word “automation” generates no hits for this year, despite the fact automation of labor is the most important economic topic of this age. The word “immigration” gets some hits, but all from the two people who focus on it and nothing but political observations. Is there a “conservative case” for or against immigration? They have one for men pretending to be women.

In fairness, those “conservative case for” pieces that dissidents love to mock have dried up of late, in favor of a trip down memory lane. The conservative movement is now committed to fighting socialism. Every day they put out tired essays like this one from Kevin Williamson. National Review is committed to promoting the moronic strategy of the Republican Party, which is desperate to campaign on anything other than what their voters see as important. America has always been at war with abstract ideas!

Of course, they never actually argue against socialism. There’s no conservative case for ending social security. That’s a giant wealth transfer from the young to the old. The same is true of Medicare. They can’t even muster a case against programs like subsidized school lunches. Instead, like Ben Shapiro, they focus all of their energy on attacking the ideas of unstable females like Ocasio-Cortez. American political debate is a bum fight outside a debilitated old bar in a town that has seen better days.

In fairness, there are some people on the permitted Right that understand Buckley Conservatism is dead. This Rod Dreher post about J.D. Vance speaking at the American Conservative dinner touches on it. The thing is though, you see why these guys are hopelessly trapped in an ideological cage built for them by the Left. What Vance imagines is some weird new conservationism that proves once and for all that the Democrats are the real racists. It’s reactionary nostalgia for yesterday men.

The fact is, Buckley style conservatism was always just a wart on the face of American Progressivism, intended to make it less attractive. It was never a fully formed moral philosophy that could stand independently from Progressivism. It’s why it was so easily infiltrated by libertarianism after the Cold War. Both ideologies are dependent on the Left to exist. Libertarianism was a critique of central planning, while conservatism was a defense of Western order in the face of 19th century radicalism.

Whatever comes next is not going to be rooted in middle-aged white guys emoting about black single mothers. That Vance speech is just another version of the same old plea for mercy conservatives have been sending out since they lost the fight on freedom of association in the 1960’s. Cobbling together tribes of losers, hiding out in the jungle long after the war has ended, is not the future of the Right. What comes next is going to be a moral philosophy rooted in biological reality.

In the meantime, both sides of the political order will belt out show tunes from their salad days, while pretending they are having a serious debate. It is, in part, a way to avoid facing up to present reality. Why talk about the inherent instability of a majority-minority society when you can debate climate change? Why talk about the plight of white people in America when you can rant about Venezuelan economic policy? In addition to being a dearth of new ideas, modern political debate is a form of escapism.

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The End Of The Road

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At the end of the Cold War, when Francis Fukuyama wrote The End of History and the Last Man, the belief among the Western elites was that the great debates were over and liberal democracy was the winner. The days of nations competing for resources and ideologies competing for adherents were gone. Instead, liberal democracy would spread to the rest of the world and capitalism would be the universal economic model. If there was to be a debate at all, it would be over how best to distribute the great surplus.

Thirty years later, it seems a bit ridiculous, but in the context of the age, it was not an unreasonable prediction. The Cold War suppressed economic development in both the East and West, for close to seventy years. The West spending lavishly on armaments meant not spending on other things. The East having embraced communism meant three generations lost to pointless social experimentation. Stripped of the burden of war, the world could rapidly develop, unleashing an enormous supply of human capital.

It did not really turn out that way, of course. The West is noticeably less free today than it was thirty years ago. The ruling class is rushing to close off political debate and free expression. In the name of democracy elites are sending gangs of thugs to harass and assault people exercising their democratic rights. In the name of capitalism, a narrowing group of oligarchs are exercising control over large swaths of the economy. The surveillance state is reaching levels unimaginable thirty years ago.

In the shadow of this growing authoritarianism sits the political and cognitive elite, unable to come to terms with what is happening. What is remarkable about the current age is the public debate, the officially permitted one, at least, is irrelevant to what is actually happening in the world. Three years on and the American media is still talking about invisible gremlins supposedly hypnotizing voters in the 2016 elections. Meanwhile, millions of barbarians pour over the southern border and the public space collapses.

This summer, various types of patriotic groups will come to Washington to demonstrate and proselytize for their constitutional rights. It is a feature of life in the Imperial Capital that used to go unnoticed. People demanding free speech by speaking freely in front of the White House was always a bit amusing. Now, however, those speakers will be attacked by black clad militants, calling the speakers fascists. The media will hiss at the speakers, claiming their demands for free speech are a threat to democracy.

Meanwhile, the supposed conservative opposition will be having name tag parties where they will talk about the threat of socialism. Nowhere is the absurdity of the age more obvious than in the so-called conservative movement. They have coordinated, with the Republican Party, a campaign to fight socialism. The stunning inability to come to terms with present reality is breathtaking. Their campaign against socialism is every bit as ridiculous as seeing people walking around dressed in leisure suits.

It is not just right-wing Progressives trapped in the past. What passes for serious thinking on the Left side is just as vacuous. This is a journal published by a Harvard graduate student that’s popular with the “serious” Progressive. It is every bit as retrograde and irrelevant as the nonsense belched out by so-called conservatives. The midget wrestling of this age is two young intellectuals, like Nathan Robinson and Ben Shapiro, debating socialism, using language that fell out of fashion a generation ago.

In all candor, many on the dissident right suffer from the same problem. Look around the intellectual space – and it is quite vibrant – and you cannot help but notice that a lot of it is backward looking. A big part of it is “rediscovering” thinkers from the last century, who were on the losing side of the great debates of their age. There’s that haunting, familiar to every southerner, that the wrong side won. If only we could go back and re-fight those old fights, maybe things would be different. It’s a longing for an unrealized present.

This antiquarianism is most obvious in the street fights between the radical Left and radical Right. One side imagines themselves as the Rotfrontkämpferbund while the other side is the Sturmabteilung. The silliness of either side thinking they are part of some radical tradition is obvious. More important, it reveals the lack of original thinking. Old dead ideas like fascism, anarchism and radical socialism have little to tell us about politics in the post-industrial, technological age. It’s nothing more than play acting to no end.

Fukuyama was a bit grandiose in pronouncing the end of history, but he was not wrong about the Cold War marking the end of something. It turns out that it was the end of the Enlightenment. All of the debates important to the intellectuals who emerged from the middle ages have been addressed. There’s nothing left to be said on those topics. It turns out that much of it was just a dead end. Perhaps all of it. The resulting conclusions don’t seem to have much value in this post-Enlightenment age.

Meanwhile, noises coming from the cognitive elites fill the air, but they mean nothing to any man standing in the current age looking forward down the timeline. Instead, the noises from these people are like the wailing of animals trapped in the tar pits. They are sad, mournful and a bit terrifying, but the only reason to pay any attention to them is to listen for signs of their waning. Their time is done and once they are gone, the world can move forward with whatever comes next and stop thinking about a now dead past.

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Failure Analysis: Charlottesville

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Failure analysis is probably the most important component of progress in any area of human endeavor. Figuring out what went wrong, why it went wrong and then scheming how to prevent it from happening again, is how we move forward in business, science, technology and even social organization. After every election, the losing party goes through a period of self-examination in order to figure out why they lost. The old line about learning more from failure than success is true, as long as you actually learn something.

With Joe Biden launching his campaign in Charlottesville, now is a good time to examine the catastrophe of the Unite the Right rally in 2017. Now, the first thing to note that from the point of view of the Left, this was a great success. Almost two years on, it remains an emotional rallying point for all of the tribes in the fight against whiteness. It is why very old white man Joe Biden picked it for his campaign announcement. He wanted to let those tribes know that he is their man, despite his noticeable lack of vibrancy.

That is an important lesson of this event. Activism is always about rallying your side and depressing the other side. Everything else is secondary. Most of the dissident right is happy to forget about this event, while the Left has made it one of the key events in their narrative. Put the phrase “Unite the Right” into a search engine and you first get the Wikipedia page describing it as a rally by the worst people. An image search returns pics of Nazis and noble non-whites. For the Left, Charlottesville was a triumph.

That is the first lesson of the event. It was a failure. Many involved have yet to come to terms with that reality. Instead, they keep working to correct the record about what happened and who was responsible. This recent live stream by Richard Spencer is a good example. The fact that they keep thinking the facts matter says they still don’t understand what happened. To the Left, the facts are unimportant. What matters is they have martyrs and they have a bloody shirt to wave around.

Therein lies another lesson. For too many in dissident politics, this obsession with applying the blue pencil to the Left’s myth-making remains a liability. Conservatives have always fallen into this trap. While the Left is performing yet another morality tale, the Right is busy editing the script for accuracy. In politics, factual accuracy is only important if it advances the narrative. What matters, what always matters, is convincing the public that your version of reality is the most pleasing. The facts are just part of the set.

Beyond accepting that it was a disaster for our side, however you wish to define it, the question is why did it happen? Part of it was the people involved got caught up in the moment, so they stopped thinking. They really thought they were in one of those great periods of transition. Eric Striker actually makes that point in this episode of his podcast at around the 55-minute mark. Before the event, Spencer had posted his version of the Port Huron Statement. They thought the revolution was happening.

Another reason the event turned into a great piece of propaganda for the Left and a disaster for the Right is the organizers made the classic error of thinking the Left would abide by its own stated rules. This never happens, as the Left sees rules, laws and principles as conveniences that further their efforts. The laws are like the New York subway system. You get on and off as necessary. It is a means to an end, not an end in itself. For the Left, winning is always the end. They will never let the rules get in the way.

Conservatives have been making this mistake for as long as anyone reading this has been alive. American right-wingers always assume the Left has practical, tangible motivations and that they will abide by their own rules. After all, conservatives have practical goals and always play by the rules. You’ll notice that all of those Virginia democrats caught up in the black face scandal are still in their jobs. Even the serial attacker, Justin Fairfax, is still in his job. In the fight with the Left, there are no rules.

One lesson many on the alt-right have learned from the event is that all the people flying the “pro-white” banner are not the same. Those older groups, what is often called White Nationalism 1.0, are incompatible with the modern movements. Those guys remain stuck in the past, determined to remain in a sub-culture that operates on the fringes. Many of them are simply crazy or violent. There’s no need to disavow these people, but if you’re going to build something new, you have to break free from the past.

Charlottesville is a great example of why outsider movements need to first build small, in real life organizations. Holding a big public rally looks cool and gets a lot of attention, but it also draws a lot of lunatics and weirdos. In person organizing, especially in small groups, allows for careful vetting. If Jason Kessler had to apprentice in a local group for a couple of years, he never could have talked people into his venture. The goofballs with the Hitler flags could never get in front of the cameras at an alt-right event.

That’s the most important lesson of Charlottesville. Every war is a media war. This low-grade civil war in the West is about imagery and narrative. In Charlottesville, the Right allowed the Left to control the production, so they could control the narrative and the imagery. Future activism must always confound the preferred narrative, thus putting the Left on the defensive. The media organs of the Left are big and powerful, but they are not nimble or adaptive. That can be used against them with clever activism.

This AIM action over the weekend is a great example. Those aging commies in the audience were ready to celebrate their edginess until a bunch of young guys turned up to heckle and mock them. Instead of trading made up stories about their days fighting the man, they were being mocked as the man. The subsequent news stories sound like something to come from the Soviet press in the old days. The only thing missing from the reports are the words “hooliganism” and “running dog lackeys.”

In time, the tank will run dry on Charlottesville and it will cease to be a bloody shirt for the Progressive mobs. The lessons though can never be forgotten by dissidents trying to build an alternative to the current order. Mistakes have consequences. One of those consequences must be shrewder leaders and better strategies. Otherwise, the dissident right will follow the conservatives into the same dead end. The difference is there will be no cushy think tank jobs waiting for the losers of this political fight.