Category Archives: Politics

The Feedback Loop

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Confirmation bias is one of those universals that effects everyone. It’s natural for people to gravitate toward that which confirms what they wish to be true. No matter how hard you try to “be objective” you naturally prefer that which fits your biases. In the sciences, there are elaborate processes to correct for this tendency. In theory, having your work reviewed by peers, especially those with different biases, will correct for bias. It does not always work that way, but that just shows how tough it is to overcome our biases.

In the realm of public policy, there is no process for overcoming bias. In theory, public debate should work like peer review, but the people allowed into the debates tend to hold the same biases as everyone else in the debate. Every debate on crime, for example, excludes the important stuff, because of reasons. The result is a debate between people, who all agree that the important stuff can never be mentioned. Therefore, the public is left to hope that the people making public policy get lucky.

In theory, even if the people in charge all share the same biases, they have to face the public, which is supposed to be the acid test of liberal democracy. If the public is unhappy with what the politicians are doing, they vote in new politicians. This fear of unemployment is supposed to keep the politicians from straying too far from the consensus. As we see throughout the West, the reality is something different. Ruling classes all over the West are wildly out of step with the public, which is the cause of these populist revolts.

Part of the reason may be a feature of the managerial state that has emerged since the end of the great industrial wars of the last century. The political class is no longer part of the feedback loop that existed between themselves and the public. Instead, they get their information about public sentiment through policy experts and polling. When an office holder wants to know where to stand on an issue, he does not canvas his district or hold a series of constituent meetings. Instead he consults his staff of experts.

The result is something you in this rather odd post at National Review. The post is a long rebuttal to the main thesis of the book Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities, by Eric Kaufmann. The main thrust of the book is that white nationalists and immigration patriots should be allowed to participate in public debate. Since immigration fanatics and non-white identity groups get to participate, whites should get the same courtesy. That this is a radical idea at National Review is topic all by itself.

A clue that you are in an emperor’s new clothes moment is when the response to a simple suggestion is a graph, followed by thousands of words of commentary. That’s what you see from the writer. His answer to the complaints by whites about immigration, for example, is to claim that whites are not really complaining about immigration. In other words, instead of addressing the main argument, he attacks the premise. In effect, his point is the immigration patriots cannot participate because they don’t exist.

Now, it has to be said that the sorts of people writing for National Review live in terror that one day the Left will put their name on the wrong list. Therefore, their every waking moment is spent confirming the current morality of the Left. At the moment that means anything with the word “white” in it is bad and opposition to the brown hordes pouring over the border is immoral. Basically National Review is going on record saying this Kaufmann fellow and his crazy ideas about debate is a very bad person with bad ideas.

Putting that aside though, consider what Verbruggen is doing. Instead of looking outside to get a sense of what’s happening in the public, he consults a Gallup study, one that confirms his bias. Of course, the only people who read National Review these days are Republican Party consultants, who will use posts like this to convince their masters that there is no need to worry about their angry voters. After all, those torch wielding mobs outside their office really don’t exist. It says so right in that Gallup poll.

Of course, there is the fact that the response by these people to public unrest about immigration, way back when they threw open the borders, was a public relations campaign to anathematize opponents. Back in the 1990’s, when it was still possible for people like Peter Brimelow and John Derbyshire to post opposition to immigration on National Review, the public was comfortable being in opposition. Once opposition to open borders was declared immoral, the public stopped voicing concerns to pollsters.

In other words, the feedback loop in the managerial state now works like this. The power elite want some set of polices, so they hire top men from the managerial class to sell it to the public. Whether or not the public buys it is immaterial, they just need evidence that there is public support for it. Once they generate that, they are convinced and set about convincing policy makers to push the new policy. Of course, there is plenty of money to go around, so politicians are more than happy to believe whatever is fed them.

In the managerial state, the feedback loop is like something you would see in a business school model of a failing business. Senior management brings in a market research firm to tell them the problem is not management. Rather, it is positioning in the market place. The solution is to hire a new marketing firm to convince the market that the company’s products are the best. The same research firm then studies the results and reports back that everything is working. Meanwhile, the company sinks further into the red.

That may sound like a strange comparison, but take a look at this post in the Columbia Journalism Review about the new publisher of National Review. The collapse of National Review over the last twenty years has one direct cause, the embrace of neoconservatism and the abandonment of their core constituency. Instead of facing up to the fact that they have a bad product and a lot of bad managers, they are going to rework their website so they can create a safe space for engagement. Meanwhile, their site is a ghost town.

The apparent insularity of the political class is the result of being cut off from the normal feedback loops. When National Review had to scramble for readers, they had to know something about the public. When the political class had to canvas for votes, they met actual voters who told them about what was on their mind. Today, the entire managerial class is like a monastery, where everyone is trying to be the star of the choir or the best at illuminating manuscripts. They spend all of their time talking to themselves.

As an aside, the reason social media and website comment sections terrorize these people is it is there where the yawning gap between themselves and the public is most obvious. When National Review had a comment section, their writers saw plainly that the readers were not buying what they were selling. The solution was to get rid of the comments. On social media, the solution is to purge the platforms of anyone that upsets human resources. Our thought leaders can only take so much reality.

Sam Francis made the point decades ago that both political parties in America are far to the Left of the people who vote for them. The reason for that is the political center of the ruling class has always been to the extreme Left of the public. Cut off from the feedback loop, that center has now drifted out beyond the event horizon of most people. It’s why our rulers seem like strangers to us. It’s why writers for Conservative Inc. stagger around in a daze, years after having been jolted by their remaining connection to the feedback loop.

Contempt Of The People

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Outside of the various hives on the modern Left, it is generally assumed that the natural progression of democracy is toward some form of dictatorship. What starts as a sensible idea by sensible people leads to an expansion of the franchise to include a majority of people, who are not sensible. This inevitably leads to instability. The system first breaks down into factionalism and then becomes both corrupt and inept. The solution is the man of will, who will cut through the process and impose order on the chaos.

This is why the Founders were steadfastly opposed to democracy. They knew their history and their political philosophy. They also understood human nature. It is also why both sides of the Progressive order have rewritten history to have the Civil War as the second founding. Ben Shapiro cannot sing the praises of democracy if the authority to which he is appealing was opposed to it and to him. It turns out that democracy not only corrupts the present it must corrupt the past in order to legitimize itself.

One the problems with social cycle theory is it seems to blinker people into thinking that history not only repeats itself, but does so exactly. In the case of modern America, people think we are far away from Caesarism, because we have yet to have a Sulla. In other words, they assume the ascent into authoritarianism will follow the exact same path as past shifts from republic to empire. If present events don’t exactly fit the old template, then American has yet to enter that cycle, so there is no fear for an America Caesar.

This is a mistake, of course, as history does not repeat itself like a reboot of an old television franchise. Instead, the general pattern is repeated, but within the context of the age, along a different timeline. In the case of America, Lincoln was the Marius phase while the New Deal was the Sulla phase. Instead of a social war between the two, one phase ran its course, setting the ground work for the other, which in turn set off the process leading to where we are now. There’s no Caesar, but we see the signs of Caesarism.

For example, look at the general uselessness of the Congress. One party, the Republicans, are the sock puppets of global interests. In theory they represent the white middle class, the only people willing to vote Republican, but they are wholly owned by global enterprise. The Democrats, on the other hand, represent the spiritual aspirations of the global class. They feed at the same trough as the Republicans, but serve the female side of the global elite. They are the yin to the GOP yang.

This collapse of legitimacy results in a Congress that does very little. Instead, it relies on the Executive to do what it asks. The vast federal bureaucracy that Trump is struggling to operate is the real government of America. The FBI sedition scandal is a good example of the contempt with which the New Class holds the political class. They have no fear of either party in Congress, as they know they are powerless. Proof of that is the parade of people lying to Congress and never facing the consequences.

It used to be that defying the will of Congress had serious risk. Contempt of Congress was a weapon that could be used to put someone in prison. The last person that angered the Congress enough with their lying was Rita Lavelle. That was back in the 1980’s and she served six months in prison for contempt. Since then, Congress has been noticeably less willing to throw its weight around, to the point where the oligarchs feel free to lie in extravagant ways in front of House committees. They hold Congress in contempt.

What we have today is rule by a surprisingly small number of people. At the top is the global pirate class that owns the media, technology and finance. Under them are the lesser elites that rule over the academy, mass media, politics and foreign policy. This is the New Class, an elite within the bureaucracy that has a free hand in running the state, as long as they don’t anger their paymasters. At most there are a few thousand people controlling a few million person bureaucracy that runs the global empire.

Further evidence of this is what has been happening with Trump. The real power, the New Class, operating the executive bureaucracy, has no respect for him, so they happily do what they must to undermine his agenda. Instead of begging Congress to its job, he needs to figure out how to use the weapon that is the vast executive branch. Perhaps he is figuring it out, but thus far he has been unable to come to terms with this reality. The next Democrat president will not make the same mistake.

The Bolshevik Revolution was supposed to end up in a dictatorship of the proletariat, but instead resulted in a largely urban dictatorship of the nomenklatura, a term, derived from the Latin nomenclatura, meaning a list of names. The suggestion was that it was hereditary, rather than meritorious. Trotsky referred to it as a caste, rather than a class, as it looked more like the old Tsarist order, rather than something new. The managerial state described by James Burnham, has evolved into a similar sort of ruling caste.

This may be why we are now seeing similar displays of power that were seen in the old Soviet Union. The banning of books, the suppression of speech, the use of internal exile to intimidate dissidents, these are all features of the Soviet system now present in modern America. It could also be the result of minoritarianism, as both the Soviets and modern American see a disproportionate number of people in this ruling caste that are not part of the majority population. Therefore, they rule in fear of demographics.

Another point of comparison is how authoritarian rule that comes after some form of popular political system, whether communism or liberal democracy, is that it has firm control of the cities, but far less control of the hinterlands. Despite the mythology, the Soviet system was never able to fully control its territory. The Bolsheviks were reduced to weaponizing neglect, in order to keep the rural areas pacified. The American opioid epidemic is serving a similar function for the American New Class.

Again, historical analogies are never precise. The patterns we are seeing in modern America could also compare to a number of other historical examples. What matters is the macro pattern, where democracy inevitably leads to some form of authoritarian rule, based in the urban areas. That’s where we are now in modern America. The illusion of democracy has disguised the deep contempt the ruling elite has for the people, but that contempt is becoming more obvious. At some point, they will simply stop pretending.

Beyond Archeofuturism

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Social cycle theory argues that stages of civilization and history generally repeat themselves in cycles. The most famous explanation of this is Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, where he compared human civilization to an organism. There is the birth phase where society comes into being. An adult phase where is fully formed and reaches its potential and then the decline of old age and eventually death. Another way of stating it is that human civilization has seasons, spring through winter.

This way of thinking about the West has been popular with various right-wing movements ever since, as it generally fits the more realistic worldview of the Right. The Left, in contrast, has always embraced the idea that human civilization evolves toward some idealized point of existence. Progressives chose their label, because they are not only in favor of progress, but they believe it is inevitable. They are on the right side of history, because unlike their enemies, they are not standing in the way of progress.

The argument for Spengler has a lot of support in our history books, as there are plenty of civilizations that were born, lived and then died. If human history naturally progressed to some ideal form of existence, it would seem that the middle ages were a detour, which means there could be other detours. Alternatively, Africa made no meaningful progress until Europeans arrived and handed them the tools of modernity. Even so, the magic of historical progress does not appear to be working its magic on the Africans.

Closer to home, it is obvious that the West has hit some sort of wall, when it comes to inventiveness in the social sphere. Regarding political organization, not much has happened since widespread democracy was embraced a century ago. It has become more absurd and corrupt, but that hardly qualifies as progress. Culturally, the West has not produced much of anything worth commenting upon, other than popular culture, which also seems to have stalled. Pop culture today is reboots and repeats of the past.

At a more granular level, this is obvious in the political sphere. Take a look at the Democrats running for president. Bernie Sanders is a sort of weird nostalgia tour for Baby Boomer lefties and their spiritual soulmates in the younger generations. Listen to him speak and he barely makes any sense. In fact, all of them rely on emotive gibberish and their mostly concocted back stories. The gay mayor a gay who speaks in riddles. The mixed senator is Obama with a vagina. Warren is an angry old hen.

Take a step back and the Democrat Party is no longer a political party in the traditional sense of the concept. It has no agenda, other than a hatred of white people, but even that hatred has no point, beyond keeping the non-whites angry. The GOP had been a pointless collection of castoffs for decades until Trump came along, but even there, the MAGA stuff is just a weird echo of the Reagan years. If Sanders is a nostalgia candidate for lefty boomers, Trump is a nostalgia tour for aging Reaganites.

The near total lack of political innovation is quite startling when you read something like this, which was posted at American Conservative. The general thrust of the article is the Right needs a new Frank Meyer, who helped turn the American Right into a fusion of social conservatism, libertarian economics and hawkish anti-communism. The post reads like the pitch for rebooting an old movie franchise. Instead of fighting the Soviets, the new Conservative Man will start a Cold War with China and promise to cut the debt.

It is not just the mainstream political ideologies that are staggering around in the darkness of the past, searching for a reason to exist. The alt-right embracing fascist iconography and larping as Nazis was as much about a lack of imagination as breaking taboos. They could not think of a way forward, so they were hoping for a do-over. This surge in what is called white identity politics is mostly just a rediscovery of old ideas that lived and died a century ago. There are a lot of antiquarians in identity politics.

Francis Fukuyama famously declared the end of history, as if the West had finally reached the Promised Land. Liberal democracy triumphed over communism. He has since backed off on that a bit, but this is the end of a long super-cycle that started in the late middle ages and peaked in the Industrial Revolution. There really has not been an innovative political idea since the beginning of the last century. The expansion of liberal democracy has brought with it weird cults and heresies, but those are decoration, not innovation.

The view from the Right, properly understood, is to look at this and see the winter of Western civilization. The barbarian hordes are pouring over the border. It’s not that the West is incapable of defending itself. It’s that it lacks the youthful energy to do it. Like an old man sitting in his rocker, the Occident is simply too burdened by time to get up and defend, much less build, his civilization. In other words, we are in the same place as Rome entering the final century of the Western Roman Empire.

Another way of viewing this, however, is to be a bit less grandiose and see the West in a transition period. The period from the French Revolution through the Second World War was driven by the technological and economic changes that swept the West. The old political order, which was rooted in the feudal economics of the middle ages, slowly and often violently gave way to a new political order rooted in capital and industry. The feudal relationship does not make a lot of sense when capital is king.

Perhaps this period we are in is a transition from the industrial order to something that better fits the technological age. One reason national governments are in such shabby condition is they have lost one main reason to exist. People in Europe are no longer in competition for resources. Everyone in the West has extra of all the things that matter and extra of most of the luxury items. Organized competition for stuff is no longer a salient part of political life. Germany is not going to be invading Poland to get more farm land.

Put another way, the path forward may be exactly that, allowing the past to fade into the darkness of history, while looking for a new organizational model that fits the needs of technological, post-industrial and post-scarcity societies. A political philosophy that has the attributes of the block chain, rather than the corporation, is the future for a technological society. Instead of decorating old ideas with new trimmings, it will be the past decorating new a political philosophy, purpose built for the current age.

The Dissident Right

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Labels are important in social discourse, as they are shorthand for a collection of ideas, arguments and images. It’s why the Left always makes its first assault on something by corrupting its labels. If they can anathematize the label, then they effectively discredit the people and ideas associated with it. It is a form of the aphorism often mistakenly credited to Stalin, “No man, no problem.” Similarly, social movements often first try to establish their name and symbols, before fully explaining what it is they are championing.

One reason the alt-right was easily smashed by the Progressive establishment is that they chose symbols that had already been anathematized by the Left and their team name had no intrinsic meaning. They would have been better off dressing as circus clowns, rather than prep school Nazis. They thought they could break the taboos against fascism by irreverently breaking the taboo, but instead they simply ended up playing a well-known role in the Left’s morality play. From there it became easy to demonize the name “alt-right.”

That said, if the term alt-right had a better definition, one that was both positive and intrinsically respectable, there efforts to break the fascist taboo by irreverently mocking it could have worked. The reason is the public would have identified them with a label having an established meaning that was separate from the cartoon version of fascism the Left has promoted for generations. Instead, alt-right had no obvious meaning, other than an association with Richard Spencer, who was quickly turned into the bogeyman.

It is why “dissident right” has a better chance as a label for an authentic alternative to the Progressive orthodoxy. The word “dissident” has both a literal meaning and an historic meaning. In fact, the idea of the dissident has emotional resonance in the West, as it is associated with resistance to authoritarianism. While “alt” is that key on your keyboard you use when things go wrong, a dissident is a heroic figure, stoically refusing to buckle to the authoritarian. It’s a word the Left cannot demonize without revealing themselves.

The trouble is, the label does not have a literal definition that is known to most people who use it for themselves or the larger movement. You see that in this post over at Counter-Currents by someone using the name Eordred. He runs through the various tribes that continue to operate outside of mainstream public discourse, but he struggles to arrive at a definition. It is only at the end that he makes a passing reference to the actual source of the term, coined by John Derbyshire a couple of decades ago.

The dissident right is, to some degree, a reaction to the shift on the Right, among the Buckleyites mostly, to embrace the blank slate and egalitarianism. This was mostly due to the infestation of neoconservatives and libertarians. The neocons brought with them that old Marxist belief that society can be willed into any shape you like, regardless of the people in it. Libertarians, like Marxist, simply refuse to accept the reality of the human condition. As a result, the mainstream Right implicitly embraced the blank slate.

The dissidents were those who first dissented from the prevailing orthodoxy on human nature and human organization. Drawing on science, rather than tradition or religion, the dissidents made the correct point that human diversity is real. People, as we see them today, are not the result of historical forces, but the result of evolutionary forces. It turns out, and the evidence continues to pour in support of this, that human evolution is local, copious and recent. The observable differences are rooted in biology, not culture.

While the dissident right is, to some degree, a reaction to the drift into blank slate mysticism by the establishment Right, it is not reactionary. To be a reactionary is to be entirely controlled by the Left, which is why reaction has never been able to sustain itself as an authentic organizing philosophy. It is the cleanup crew after a spasm of radicalism has made a mess of things. The dissident right is not a reaction to radicalism. It is a promotion of biological reality. It offers an alternative foundation for political philosophy.

As far as being on the Right, it is because biological realism reaches the most of the same conclusions of the traditional Right, with regards to human nature and the human organization. The difference is that the traditional Right assumes those traditions, customs and institutions are the result of accumulated wisdom. The dissident right, in contrast, thinks of traditions, customs and institutions as evolved solutions to human organization that are peculiar to a people, because of their peculiar evolutionary arc.

In other words, go into any high school cafeteria and you will see the students self-segregating along academic class, social class, sex and race. This is not the result of accumulated wisdom in the form of custom or the result of tradition. It is not the result of mystical forces like white privilege or social constructs. It is the nature of humans to attract to those with whom they share fundamental connections, which are rooted in biology. Their hierarchical relationships are similarly rooted in their biology.

This difference in starting premise is what distinguishes the dissident right from the traditional Right and puts it at odds with some elements on the Right. Instead of defending tradition on philosophical grounds, it challenges the status quo on empirical grounds. It is why the Left is so frightened of what is coming from the human sciences. Their effort to anathematize these ideas by calling them “scientific racism” inevitably makes them look like vinegar drinking scolds, condemning Galileo in defense of superstition.

That said, this radical starting point could very well be why it cannot coexist with the traditional Right. There is a noticeable gap in perspective between those with an empirical world view versus those steeped in tradition and philosophy. When your starting point is an English biologist, rather than a German philosopher, the cultural differences are quite noticeable to both parties. The rationality of the dissident right may make it unsuited for political conflict, which is not about the right answer, but the right weapon.

The Strange Death of Neoconservatism

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Political movements usually end in one of two ways. One is they achieve most of what they sought and then fade away, having lost their purpose. Alternatively, they fail to achieve their goals, perhaps having been discredited or out-competed by a rival movement, then fade into obscurity. In both cases, they will kick around for a while, going through a stage where they exist as a racket, rather than a legitimate movement. They feed on the nostalgia of people, who originally supported the cause in its better days.

An obvious example of the former is the crusade to legalize abortion. Once the Supreme Court invented a right to abortion, the point of the abortion movement should have been satisfied, but they transitioned from that to an effort to normalize it. That was largely successful by the 1990’s, but by then abortion was good business for the people in the abortion rackets. They make money on the political end, as well as on the selling of baby parts side of things. Planned Parenthood is a multi-billion dollar business now.

The other side of the coin is paleoconservatism, which flourished in the 70’s and 80’s, as a response to the infestation of the conservative movement by former Progressives, calling themselves neocons. In many respects, the paleos were not a political movement, but more like antibodies released by the Right in order to ward off a virus. That virus, in the form of guys promising to radicalize the Right, won the battle and the paleocons were slowly purged from Right and from the Republican Party.

That brings us to neoconservatism, which was spectacularly successful as a political movement. What started as dissatisfaction with their fellow leftists in the 1960’s had come to dominate the Right by the late 80’s. Domestically, they normalized unlimited immigration and the financialization of the economy. On foreign policy, they successfully pushed through their freedom agenda, which was aggressive war to impose democracy on the Middle East. It is fair to say the neocons revolutionized American politics.

It is that success that has discredited the movement and its leaders. So much so, in fact, that one of the founders of the movement is now abandoning his creation. Norman Podhoretz, one of the godfathers of the movement, has announced that he is re-branding himself as a paleo-neoconservative. He not only confessed to supporting Trump, but now agrees with his old nemesis, Peter Brimelow, on the immigration issue. He still defends the Iraq war, mostly out of vanity, but he is now a war skeptic in the Trump mold.

Now, this does not mean the rest of the neocons are about to become Trump supporters or demand the rehabilitation of Pat Buchanan. Like a drug resistant virus, people like Bill Kristol, Max Boot and the other Trump-haters will still be with us. It’s just that their movement and its primary issues are on their way to the ash heap of history. Outside of the cheap labor lobbies, immigration has lost its appeal. A re-thinking of global capitalism is happening across the West and the freedom agenda is thoroughly discredited.

There are a lot of explanations for why the neoconservative agenda has crashed into ignominy. Some argue that the failure on the foreign policy front was due to an inability of neoconservatives to appreciate the cultural conditions required for democracy. Others, like Darren Beattie, take this beyond the foreign policy issue, and blame the neocons embrace of the blank slate. Like Marxists, they simply thought people were interchangeable, because they could be molded into whatever society needed.

A better answer lies in the words of Norman Podhoretz in that interview with the Claremont Review of Books. In it he says, “But in the army I got to know people from all over the country and I fell in love with Americans—they were just great! These guys were unlike anybody I had ever met in New York or in England or France.” That’s an odd thing for someone to say about his fellow citizens. It’s the sort of thing a foreigner says about his new neighbors. It also seems a bit forced, as if he feels like is required to say it.

Explaining his change of heart on Trump, Podhoretz says, “I said to my wife: “This guy [Trump] is Buchanan without the anti-Semitism, because he was a protectionist, a nativist, and an isolationist. How did I know he wasn’t an anti-Semite? I don’t know—I just knew.” Later he goes out of his way to make that point again, that his quarrel with Buchanan was mostly about his alleged antisemitism. Therefore, he can change his mind on the entire neocon agenda, just as long as no anti-Semites are involved.

It is a strange confession from someone whose life’s work has been a multi-generational lecture about first principles. It is this flexibility on their core beliefs that is the clue about why neoconservatism has fallen into disrepute. They were never really motivated by anything other than tribal animosity toward the people they sought to replace. Podhoretz back-stabbed people like Brimelow and John O’Sullivan, marginalizing them within conservative circles, for no other reason than tribal animosity.

Another example of this is later in the interview, where Podhoretz relates an anecdote about the writer Henry James, who was no fan of Jewish immigration. Upon visiting the Jewish ghetto in New York, James allegedly said “Well, if these people stay, whatever language they speak, we shall not know it for English.” Podhoretz then says, with noticeable glee, that “the only people who are reading Henry James and indeed writing doctoral dissertations on him are the grandchildren of those people.”

Taken together, it reveals that neoconservatism was never a political movement centered on a native patriotism. It was a purpose built weapon for people who saw themselves as strangers at war with people they saw as hostile to their tribe. This not only allowed them to sideline critics by calling them anti-Semitic, it was an energy source to motivate the adherents to stick together and fight. Even today, as people like Bill Kristol descend into madness, the neocons hang together in their fight against Trump. They stick together.

Ultimately, it was not the tribal hostility that was their undoing. It was their unfamiliarity with the people over whom they sought to rule. It’s easy to think one group of strangers are the same as the other group of strangers. That’s why open borders made sense to the neocons. Guys like Podhoretz could learn to love Americans, but he could probably learn to love Guatemalans too. Similarly, the auctioning off of the industrial base made perfect sense, as the neocons knew nothing about the people losing their jobs.

Finally, the collapse of the neocons seems to comport with the theory of Ed Dutton, regarding the decline in general intelligence. The generation of Norman Podhoretz had a lot of smart Jews, who were motivated to climb to the top of society. Their children and grandchildren, in contrast, are like the ne’er-do-well heirs to a fortune. John Podhoretz and Bill Kristol are quite stupid compared to their parents. This decline in Jewish talent not only pulled down neoconservatism, but may be signaling the end of the Jewish century.

 

Ruling Class Rage

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One of the truths of life is that people tend to not notice what is happening outside of their cultural and social bubble. It’s hard to step outside of your daily life and see the big picture, as far as political and cultural stuff. We mostly surround ourselves with people who hold the same opinions and have the same interests. Those with whom we are at odds, we navigate around and they navigate around us. We avoid political talk with that left-wing friend, who still thinks Trump is hiding Boris and Natasha under his bed.

Everyone, to some degree, lives in their silo, not thinking all that much about what’s going on in the other silos, beyond how it effects their thing. It’s why most Trump supporters are not surprised to see Trump doing so well in the polls. They like their guy and his good poll numbers confirm it. On the other hand, the remnants of the alt-right, struggling with the passing of their moment, are still sure Trump is going to lose in 2020, because he has abandoned them. His strong polling does not register, as it is outside their silo.

This blinkered view of things is usually wrong, to some degree, which is why it is a good idea to take a step back when trying to understand something like the hearing on “white nationalism” in Congress yesterday. The House Judiciary Committee hearing on “Hate Crimes and the Rise of White Nationalism” was weird, even by the standards of current politics. Even the people doing clown world jokes could not have imagined a hearing where a black woman is made to be the face of white nationalism in America.

To make the thing even more bizarre, none of the people involved in this circus was actually white. There were Jews, blacks, mystery races, various sub-groups of the coalition of the ascendant, but no white guys. However you define white nationalism, the one thing everyone agrees upon is it is mostly white guys. What you are not going to see at a white nationalist gathering is a black women, who started her career as a race hustler, hoping to become the female Al Sharpton of her generation.

Of course, the people involved in the circus can be written off as not right in the head, but why would the Democratic leadership allow such a thing to happen? Regardless of what you think about the people running the Democrat party, you can’t say they are bad at the game of politics. They are very good at the game, which is how they ascended that greasy pole to leadership. Why would they allow their racial rage heads to run wild and draw attention to themselves this way? What could they gain from it?

The temptation is to answer these questions with your favorite gratuitous assertion about the official Left or the official Right. Steve Sailer has popularized the notion that these performances are part of a master strategy to keep the coalition of fringes good and angry at the dwindling white majority. White Nationalists see Candace Owens as part of larger plot to keep white Baby Boomer arfing like seals at the magic negro. Those things are plausible, but convenient answers tend to be the least likely in politics.

Another possibility is that our political class is simply consumed with rage to the point where they are defined by it. Who they are is entirely dependent upon how much they hate heritage America and native stock Americans. The circus yesterday was not the result of some clever plot, but the result of people who hate whites so much they can’t stand to be in the same room with them. Instead of actual white nationalists, they brought in a black grifter to operate as the spokesman for white nationalism.

Something Ed Dutton points out in his recent book is that in the later phases of social decline, the ruling elites will often indulge in various religious and cultural movements, hoping to restore the moral center of society. The mystery schools flourished in Late Antiquity, for example. Perhaps this weird anti-white rage we are seeing from our ruling classes is simply the public aspect of a modern mystery cult. They are play-acting at what it will be like when the prophesies come true and we are a post-white society.

It may strike the more practical minded on the Right as a bit ridiculous, but keep in mind that all rational explanations of left-wing behavior have been wrong for as long as anyone reading this has been a live. The conservative analysis of the post-war Left in America is known for its wrongness. The Buckleyites got everything about the Left wrong, which is why they failed so completely. Whatever motivates the Left to perform these morality plays, we know it is not what conservatives claim.

That’s the important take away from yesterday. It was a morality play performed for people inside the political bubble. For the same reason having a black guy play Henry V makes sense to the Left, having Candace Owens play Jared Taylor made sense. It’s not the person that matters to them. It is the role they play. Whatever practical considerations there are for staging the thing, the one big reason for it was to stoke the rage of the ruling class. It is their mystery cult and what now defines who they are as a class.

The Supplicant

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The professional right is often referred to as the controlled opposition, because they have the habit of throwing the match whenever they have a chance to win. This is happening with the Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Somalia) controversy and will no doubt happen with the scandal around Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (D-Puerto Rico). Rather than take the opportunity to twist the knife, the professional conservatives will jump to the defense of their friends on the Left and attack those on the Right trying to exploit the situation.

The term “controlled opposition” is a handy bit of rhetoric on social media to help red-pill people, but it misses some important points. The most obvious being these are not men thinking “Hey, I better find a way to lose, so my real friends on the Left can win.” None of these guys are that smart. On the other hand, the Left is not cultivating these guys like the KGB cultivated traitors during the Cold War. There is no control center in Arlington tracking the conservatives, instructing them in what to write and say.

Such a formal set of arrangements would require a sense of awareness on both sides that is simply not in evidence. There’s skullduggery, for sure, as we have seen with the neocons, all of whom are coded to be subversive. Even there, it is biology at work, not agency. They cannot help themselves. For the rest of the so-called conservatives, it is a lifetime of conditioning by a political culture that has created two main roles. One is the priest and the other is the supplicant. The latter is reserved for conservatives.

You see it in this Washington Post opinion piece about Ilhan Oman, by someone calling himself Henry Olsen. He is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a think tank in Washington. In his post, he unfavorably compares Omar to Steve King, who he assumes everyone knows is the worst person on earth. He thinks he is a cheeky fellow by creating this parallel between someone the Left has put on the proscribed list and this Somali woman. You see? The Dem are still the real racists!

It is not all that clear whether Olsen is trying to condemn Rep. Omar or forgive the Left for tolerating her. On the other hand, he seems to be saying to his exclusively Progressive readers, this is the Washington Post after all, that his side has learned their lesson and will have zero tolerance for blasphemers in the future. In other words, in what is supposed to be a post lampooning the Left for their hypocrisy with regards to blasphemers, he spends a lot of time groveling to the Left and offering them support.

Republicans learned the hard way with King that where’s there’s smoke, there’s fire. His repeatedly bigoted statements about immigrants were condemned but otherwise ignored by House Republican leadership. Clearly, they hoped that they were aberrations, or that the congressman would come to his senses and keep whatever bigotry he harbored in his heart to himself.

But that approach proved too lenient. Earlier this year, King finally made indisputably clear what many had long suspected during an interview with the New York Times, in which he said: “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?” He had finally crossed the line, and Republicans — who could not expel him from their caucus under party rules — removed him from all committee assignments. (King has argued that the quote was mischaracterized.)

The trouble here is that the Progressive media smeared King, claiming he said things he never actually said. It was then a pile on by so-called conservatives that turned a cheap political hit job into the crime of the century. There is also the fact that King was more than happy to play along and go through the required struggle session. Omar actually said the things that have Mr. Olsen upset and she is not backing down from them. The only similarity to King here is they are both correct about the topic at hand.

Mr. Olsen is a man whose morality is entirely defined for him by the Left. They have declared it immoral for whites to cheer for their own team, so he is enthusiastic to enforce that morality in his sphere of influence. Similarly, any questioning of Israel is strictly forbidden, so Mr. Olsen is physically incapable of even contemplating the subject. It is not that he is sitting there, pecking out these sorts of posts, thinking about how he can turn this problem for the Left into an own goal. He sincerely believes this stuff.

Now, to be fair to those who are sure money is changing hands, there is a financial incentive built into the supplicant’s life. Mr. Olsen gets to write for the Washington Post, which is a nice paying gig. He also gets $130,000 per year from think tank work, which amounts to showing up at receptions and luncheons. He gets other writing jobs because of his association with these well-known operations. Then there are the books that no one reads and speeches at taxpayer funded operations. It is a nice life.

To be even fairer, Mr. Olsen is probably a great guy. That is something you cannot help but notice with Conservative Inc. Other than the neocons and libertarians, everyone is super nice and very friendly. That is part of what makes them great supplicants though. They are so willing to please, so easy going in the face of humiliation and torment, there is just about nothing the Left can do to them to make them angry. The Left selects for submissiveness in its loyal opposition and they are good at it.

That is the problem. It has always been the problem with the Professional Right. A genuine alternative to the prevailing orthodoxy is never generous with the other side. The point of being in opposition is to turn everything against the other side, to advance your agenda and to sweep the other side from the field. There can be no mercy, as the other side will never return the favor. The Left gets this. That is why they feel no compunction about attacking school children for the crime of rooting for their own team.

This is why people like Mr. Olsen are much less generous with people on our side than with his alleged opponents on the Left. Because his role is defined by the Left and his morality is defined by the Left, he has no choice but to defend the Left. An attack on the Left is felt as an attack on him. If the Left is ever forced into retreat, Mr. Olsen will be there with the other camp followers, padding along behind them. Without the Left, he and the other toadies of Conservative Inc. are nothing. They no longer exist.

It is why the so-called Right, despite the facts on the ground, cannot stop themselves from stabbing the people to their right. It is not professional jealousy or a fear of their donors getting vexed with them. Sure, there is some of that, but those excuses always come after the knee-jerk reaction against dissidents. Guys like Mr. Olsen are entirely dependent on the Left to define their lives and give meaning to their efforts. They are as much a part of the Left as the house slave is a part of the master’s household.

Recursive Grifting

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Last weekend was CPAC, the annual convention for the Professional Right™ to show off their new wares for the coming year. In theory, it is a gathering of grassroots activists, conservative politicians, and conservative media to socialize, network and strategize about how to defeat the left. This was true in the early days, but somewhere in the 1990’s it became a trade show for Conservative Inc. The conservative carnies use it as a way to network and showcase their talents.

Just as Conservative Inc. has become a grotesque mockery of itself, C-PAC is something closer to a clown show rather than a real political event. The organizers have given up pretending to be conservative. Instead, they are going for something like an awards show. They actually invited a clown this year. It is proof that the Official Right™ is now Trump’s world, which is a blend of reality TV and professional wrestling. There is lots of drama, all of it choreographed, but in the end, nothing actually happens. It is just a show.

It is tempting to get down about this, but the frivolousness of Official Conservatism™ is probably good news. An important part of developing an authentic alternative to the prevailing orthodoxy is discrediting the Potemkin version. There is also the pure entertainment value in seeing our adversaries beclown themselves. C-PAC invited Prog and Antifa media into cover this circus and the results were predictable. The lefty media ran to their hives and bleeped all over their “friends on the respectable right.”

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at seeing a grifter like Oliver Darcy tell his fellow left-wing grifters about his time with the so-called conservative grifters. We have shameless grifters calling out other shameless grifters, as part of their grift. Of course, the grifters being called out will return the favor, as part of their grift. It is a magnificent display of recursive grifting.  Perhaps grifter space-time is folding in on itself. We are about to see the grifter-verse collapse in on itself and form the prophesied grifter singularity.

While it is hilarious to write the word “grifter” that many times in a single paragraph, there is a very serious issue here. If a bunch of left-wing grifters are in the same room as a bunch of right-wing grifters, there is the chance for a grifter paradox. This is when the two sides of the grifter-verse agree with one another. Scientists are not entirely sure what happens at that point. Some speculate it opens the gates of Hell, while others fear it will open a worm hole to the home dimension of the grifter, unleashing even more grifters.

The whole thing was not just a puppy-pile of political pornography. A few dissidents managed to suit-up in their EPA-approved hazmat attire and get inside to report back to the rest of us. There are people on our side who want to throw people like Loomer, Goldy and Fuentes into the same pile as the rest of the media whores, but there is an important difference. People who are good at getting attention and willing to do what it takes to get your attention are useful to the dissident effort to discredit Conservative Inc.

That is what our side needs to get better at understanding. There is a difference between the tool and the man who wields the tool. It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools, and it is a poor political movement that blames its media savvy people. The trouble with Conservative Inc. is not that it is good at media whoring. The trouble is that is all they are now, media whores. They have not had a new insight since the 80’s. Our side is teeming with new ideas of varying quality. We need to get better at selling them.

Young people like Fuentes and Goldy also do a better job of connecting with the young audience. Young people like the ad hoc YouTube videos and live streams. The sorts of young people signing up for Young Americans for Freedom, the main group behind C-PAC, are the sorts of soulless careerists, who only appeal to aging Boomers. They are the sorts of young people old people admire. Having some edgy, grifty people of our own to real in new eyeballs from the younger generation is a worthwhile trade at this point.

That said, one of the unique challenges any dissident movement faces in the mass media age is keeping itself from becoming a feeding trough for media grifters. The Tea Party is a great example of a genuine grassroots effort that was swamped by an army of media whores and political con-men. Like a plague of locusts unleashed from Washington, these people chewed through the movement, leaving nothing but stalks. The great challenge is in defending against that, while not ghettoizing the movement in self-defense.

It is why watching how legacy operations like CPAC operate and how dissidents nibble away at them is useful. It is always tempting to turn away in disgust, but these sorts of events can be put to use in red-pilling the civic nationalist in your life. The over-the-top grifting on display is another opportunity to make contrasts between an authentic alternative and the Potemkin one called conservatism. Maybe we get lucky and see that grifter singularity and it takes the whole lot of them into the void.

Rugged Individual Sociopaths

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Imagine a discussion about the sex abuse that goes on in Hollywood, and someone says, “I guess I’m meant to cry tears of sympathy for all of these people who were molested. Somehow, I just cannot muster a single tear. You made your choices. Nobody puts a gun to your head.” That would no doubt elicit gasps and a good deal of the familiar point and sputter. If nothing else, people are expected to show a little empathy for victims, especially when it is kids or young adults.

Empathy is essential to a high-trust society. It allows people to cooperate, rather than spend their time defending themselves from others in society. Empathy allows people to engage with others, trusting that the other side is acting in good faith and not trying to cheat the other party. It makes it possible to engage in things like charity and social improvement. When you can put yourself in the mind of a person outside your kin-group, share their feelings about things, cooperation is possible.

It is why liars and cheaters can never be tolerated. Their actions put the trust of society into question, which means their lack of empathy costs everyone. In some respects, the lack of empathy is worse than the crime itself. A man who kills another man in a dispute, but feels remorse, can be rehabilitated. A man who steals from another man and is unable to understand why it is wrong or celebrates his act, can never be rehabilitated and can never be a part of society.

This basic insight into the nature of society has been a central element of the Western right since de Maistre. It was always the radical that imagined human society as based entirely on self-interest. Humans would either cooperate because it worked to their advantage or not cooperate because it was to their advantage. Humans were selfish and altruism was just a consequence of society and culture. Therefore, set the conditions of society just right and people will cooperate.

The right has always rejected this. The quote at the start of this post is a variation of this tweet from Matt Walsh. He is, according to this, “a writer, speaker, author, and one of the religious right’s most influential young voices.” In addition to that, “He is known for boldly tackling the tough subjects and speaking out on faith and culture in a way that connects with his generation and beyond.” In reality, he is reproducing official dogma for the official right, what remains of it.

What that tweet reveals is that Official Conservatism™ thinks it is perfectly fine for sophisticated parties to prey on unsophisticated parties. In his case, it suggests the religious right would be fine with the strong preying on the weak, as in the example at the start of the post. After all, pederasty is by definition a crime because the adult is sophisticated, while the young person is not. Therefore, it is assumed they cannot bargain in the sexual marketplace on fair and equal terms.

There is nothing in the writing of Matt Walsh to suggest he is in favor of pederasty, but there is no reason to think he would oppose it. After all, if he is so utterly lacking in empathy that he cannot muster even a bit of sympathy for people saddled with egregious school debt, his fitness for society is in question. His brand of flamboyant sociopathy is what we would expect from a predator. You have to wonder what is wrong with someone who is so proudly callous toward his fellow citizens.

This is exactly why Official Conservatism™ is headed for the dustbin of history. It no does not offer an alternative to radicalism. Instead, it embraces the same callous and materialist view of society as the radicals. It starts from the premise that we are just random strangers flung together by serendipity, ruthlessly trying to advance our self-interest. The only difference between the radical and the conservative is that the former still thinks this can be remedied, while the latter embraces it.

A civil society is one in which the individuals naturally balance their interests against the interests of the whole. Popular government assumes this to be true. The people will debate and persuade one another about the proper balance. A democratic society composed of sociopaths quickly descends into gang warfare, wherever-shifting alliances of individuals makes war upon one another in a zero-sum game, ruthlessly exploiting the available resources. That is a prison yard, not a high-trust society.

That is why people with a soul should look at the student debt problem with sympathy and horror. It is not just that these kids are saddled with debt. It is that they and their parents are being preyed upon by sophisticated parties, with the aid and protection of the state. It is a form of economic piracy, in which the crown is quietly supporting the pirates, at the expense of the people’s commerce. Conservatives have always rejected this. Christians have always rejected this. Today, the “religious right” embraces it.

This inability to comprehend the basic building blocks of Western society is also why they cannot understand how open borders are a disaster. For someone like Matt Walsh, people are interchangeable, not only with one another, but with other economic units. In the materialist world view, social capital matters only in that it can be exploited for economic gain. In the zero-trust, Hobbesian world of the modern conservative, the greater the diversity, the greater the openness, which makes exploitation easier.

Authentic conservatism has always understood that Western society is built on trust, and trust comes naturally to the familiar. Our greatest natural empathy is toward our family and then our kin group. From there it is extends, but weakens, to those who look and sound like our kin. It breaks down entirely when it reaches those who are alien in appearance, speech, and custom. Therefore, high-trust societies can only exist in societies with a shared heritage and a shared biology. Diversity and trust are mutually exclusive.

The Citizen In A Democratic Empire

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When most people think of citizenship, they think of their nation’s constitution, or the rights guaranteed to them in the law. They will think of their obligations to their country, like paying taxes, obeying the law, and defending the nation. In the West, a citizen is pretty much as the dictionary defines it, “a native or naturalized person who owes allegiance to a government and is entitled to protection from it.” It is a reciprocal set of obligations in the law, animated by a sense of duty by both the rulers and the ruled.

Additionally, at least in America, citizenship comes with a belief in equality between the people and the office holders. Every American grows up hearing that anyone can be President. The House of Representatives is known as the people’s house, because it was designed to not only represent the people but be populated by representatives from the people. In other words, the citizens are ruled by their fellow citizens, not strangers or hired men paid by strangers. You can only be a citizen in your nation.

In the post-national world, that old definition of citizen no longer works. In a world where foreign people can just move in, claim the benefits and protections from the government, citizenship loses all value. At the same time, the state is increasingly alien to the people over whom it rules. In the European Union, the people are no longer ruled by their national governments, as all the big decisions are made in Brussels. In America, political offices are increasingly being filled by exotic weirdos with no connection to the natives.

The question then is what does it mean to be a citizen in a democratic empire?

The most obvious thing about the new citizen in the new post-national world is that the relationship between the citizen and the state is transactional. The state looks at the people as assets and liabilities. Theirs is a custodial role. The people that serve the interests of the state are treated differently from the people who depend on the state for their existence. It is a corporate relationship, except that people cannot be fired, so the useless ones will be stashed away while the productive are put to work.

Similarly, the citizen looks at his government in terms of what it can provide to him. He owes the state no more than he owes the coffee shop. The rules promulgated by the state are to be navigated around, rather than respected. If the rules work for the citizen or his group, the law is supported by the citizen or his group. On the other hand, if the law is an obstacle, then the law is subverted or ignored. In a post-national world, respect to the spirit of the law makes no more sense than having loyalty to a country.

This means that patriotism has no role in the democratic empire. Loyalty to your country only works if you have a country. The residue of patriotism will last for a while, as people will still think of their neighbors and friends as their countrymen, but in time, as those people are replaced by strangers, patriotism will disappear. In a transactional world populated by stranglers, your primary loyalty cannot be to the state, as it is just as much a stranger to you as the new neighbors, who just moved in from over the horizon.

The sterile transactionalism is already evident. Consider the change in relationship between employers and their workers. Everywhere in America, employment is at-will, which means an employee can be dismissed by an employer for any reason. Further, local business is atrophying as global enterprises monopolize the marketplace. It used to be local business was a part of every community, sponsoring little leagues and charity drives. You will never see your kid’s little league sponsored by Google or Amazon.

Of course, this will have unforeseen consequences. For example, the military will no longer be able to rely on patriotism for recruitment. Since no one is a citizen in the old sense, the military stops being a citizen military. Instead, it takes on the characteristics of a mercenary army. The decision to join is no different than the decision to take one job over another. This will also apply to the police. The cops will no longer be citizens protecting and serving their community. They become free range prison guards.

Humans are social animals so the loss of national and regional identity means something will replace it. In a transactional world where everyone is a civic stranger, the old-fashioned loyalties will become more important. Family, community, and tribe will be the only identities that have meaning. Again, we see the beginnings of this with the administrative layer of the managerial class. Those FBI agents plotting to overturn the 2016 elections were motivated by the emerging new identity politics.

That is the thing that gets overstated in discussion of identity politics. The old identities will surely play a role, like race, ethnicity, and religion. New tribes resulting from the post-national relationships will emerge. The managerial state will begin to fracture and balkanize, as the rival power centers begin to jockey for power. Again, this can be seen in the obstruction of the Trump agenda by career bureaucrats in the government. They have become their own tribe, and they have become class aware.

This paradise comes with a cost. Nations hold together for the same reason communities hold together. The social capital, those invisible bonds between people, breathe life into the organizing structure. Patriotism and civic duty are what animate the republic. Duty to king and the people is what animates a monarchy. This social capital is what binds the rulers to the ruled. In a highly transactional world, where social capital has been monetized or pushed to the margins, something else must animate the system.

That something else must be force-driven by the self-interest of the people occupying positions in the power centers. We see some of that with the censorship campaigns by the tech giants and banks. This will become more overt until everyone has a natural hostility to everyone outside their social group. The cost of maintaining order will increase, but the means for imposing order will increase the cost of imposing that order. The empire will have no choice but to become more ruthless in its dealings.

If one wants to a preview of the post-national world, look at Lebanon. Every hill and every valley are its own nation, so to speak. Groups of the same religious sect or political persuasion can form temporary alliances, but Lebanon is not a coherent country with a common purpose. It is just a place on the map with meaning only to those completely removed from the realities of Lebanese life. The future citizens will be highly local and covetous of the small benefits he and his group can extract from the whole.