Category Archives: Politics

Mencken 2018 Diary

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Last year was my first time at the Mencken Club. I knew about it, as John Derbyshire has been a regular since the beginning and he has written about it every year. Not being an intellectual or an academic, I just assumed it was not for me. A few years ago, a famous person in dissident politics suggested I give these events a try, as I might enjoy it. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, so I attended Mencken and AmRen last year, as well as some other lesser-known events.

The Mencken Club conference is organized like an academic conference, and it is populated with smart people, many of whom are intellectuals and academics. There are plenty of normal people there as well. Academics and intellectuals like to socialize as much as normal people, so even if you do not play in that space, you can still enjoy fraternizing with these folks over drinks. The social element is what makes these things worthwhile. That is why our enemies try so hard to shut them down…

This year the event went off without incident and it was a good crowd. Mencken is a smaller event than American Renaissance, mostly because it unabashedly appeals to an academically oriented crowd. Paul Gottfried, the man responsible for it, has written a dozen or so books on politics and political theory. The speakers are all big-brained people, who read and write about big-brained topics. It is also an older crowd. I scanned the room and maybe a dozen people were younger than me.

Last year, I noted that there was a strange nostalgia in the room. It was what I imagined it was like when Confederate soldiers got together after the war, to reminisce about their experiences and the what might have been. There was a lot of talk about old lost battles and old lost friends. There was some of that this year, as it is just part of the deal with an older crowd. There was also a new embrace of the new fight and the new battlefield on which it will be fought…

It occurred to me that one reason the sober side of the Dissident Right is becoming more radicalized is the fact the left is now otherizing them. When CNN demanded the White House hurl Darren Beattie into the void, it was a Fort Sumter moment for a lot of the paleocons and their fellow travelers. They could live with being purged by Buckley, because they could still live and work in the above ground intellectual economy. The Left is now demanding that end and I think that was a wakeup call…

I met a famous legal scholar on Saturday. I will not name her, just to be safe, but she is a dedicated reader! In fact, she told me she recommended one of my podcasts to her students, which was quite flattering. It is another benefit, at least for me, of attending these events. To be around members of our intellectual elite is quite humbling and a good reminder that I can always get better. There were people in that room, like the legal scholar, who had forgotten more about these topics than most of us will ever know…

I got to sit next to the great John Derbyshire at lunch. I do not have to worry about naming him as he has not only been hurled into the void, but he is also now the pit master. He gave a talk on how the future was most likely going to resemble Brave New World and most people would be happy with it. This rankled more than a few people in the room. A woman from Tennessee stood up during the Q&A and said something to the effect that her people would fight to the last man to prevent such a future. I love mountain culture.

I think John’s talk rankled, because he was mostly right. Look around and you see the signs of the looming World State. People are never vexed by a dystopia they know is a fantasy, but they do get upset about a dystopia that is possible. I pointed out to John, however, that his vision has one flaw. Utopia always implies genocide, as no perfect world can include the full range of humanity. Marxist relished this truth, but our rulers, like libertarians, lack the guts to face this reality. Therefore, they will lack the will to impose it…

On Friday, I met someone who is in government. He heard I was at the event and came to meet me. I cannot say any more about him but let us just say he works for a famous politician. We had arranged to meet in advance, so his name would not be associated with the event. This is not the first time this has happened. I get e-mails from “our people” who work in the system, trying to undermine the enemy from within. I jokingly call it the secret handshake society, but that is the way it is, and it is what I find most encouraging.

You see, people in power don’t waste time and resources hunting down the harmless or harassing the easily frightened. They target the people, groups, and ideas they see as a threat to them. That has the strange effect of making heresy more appealing to the sorts of people who oppose the prevailing order. The Left’s paranoia is not unjustified, but it is probably our greatest asset. Their lashing out at heretics is making heresy cool. It is the new counterculture and that alone draws support to our banner…

Finally, I sat at Paul Gottfried’s table for dinner on Friday. I have had very little interaction with him to that point, so it was a great treat to finally get to spend quality time with him. He is a wonderful person and exactly what one would expect a college professor to be like, in that he is willing to indulge those striving to learn, but willing to correct to facilitate the process. He has also got a great sense of humor too. Like everyone at the conference, I am grateful that he has created a place for subversives to meet and socialize….

 

The Cancer of Fanaticism

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In my school days, teachers would often say that historians remained puzzled as to why so many good Germans stood silent as the Nazis took over or how Russians just allowed the Bolsheviks to go on a murder spree. The point was to have us think about these events as something other than just a good guy versus bad guy thing. The lesson of history was that the forces of good had to be active, not passive. Otherwise, the people seeking to exploit and subvert society would not meet any resistance.

Perhaps for school kids, it was a fine exercise, but it was the sort of thinking that motivated the Nazis and Bolsheviks to murder. These were not people who thought of themselves as evil or on the wrong side of history. On the contrary, they saw themselves as the champions of light, fighting the forces of darkness. As such, they were duty bound to use any means necessary to win. Maybe the people at the top were more cynical, as is usually the case, but the rank and file were the truest of true believers.

The only person I have read, other than myself, who bothered to contemplate the mindset of the typical Nazi, Bolshevik or Progressive was Eric Hoffer. His classic book, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, is the field guide to understanding the mind of the political zealot. Over the years I have referenced it many times, when posting about the American Left. Hoffer’s book is not the definitive work, more of a skeleton key to unlock a mode of analysis. It is a starting point in thinking about the Left.

For example, the conventional way of framing politics is the old Left-Right scale, where Hitler is on the Right and Stalin is on the Left. This scale was useful during the Cold War as a rhetorical device, but it never made any sense to describe the modern political universe. It is why stupid people and the historically ignorant argue that the Nazis were leftists or that fascism exists today. The demands of that political scale require everyone to seek the undefined to middle, to avoid being Hitler or Stalin.

A better scale, especially in the current age, is probably one that has the true believer at one end and the non-ideological skeptic at the other. Unlike the old Left-Right scale, there is no one at either end to point to as the most extreme example. Instead, it is impossible to be entirely free of belief, as humans are not robots. Therefore, there are no pure skeptics. At the other end, there is always some way to be just a bit more pious than the most pious, or at least appear to be, so it is a line that extends out indefinitely.

Another way to think of it is the skeptical end is zero, the complete lack of belief or faith, if you will, and the total acceptance of observable reality. No human is built with a desire to reach zero. It is like looking into a blast furnace. No matter how beautiful it is, the closer you get the more intolerable. Just as no one can walk into and experience the purifying flames of the furnace, no one can ever fully embrace reality. As a result, the most cynical among us are clustered at some safe distance from the point of absolute reality.

At the other end, the next point on the scale is like the next step on the road to paradise and each step is more inviting than the next, at least to those built to seek it.  Unlike the other end of the scale, there is no intense resistance, so the only thing that can keep the believer from seeking greater purity is a leash of sorts, either internal or external, that limits their ability to seek the ultimate goal. In the post-Christian West, we are learning that some men lack that internal governor and will go as far as they can to reach paradise.

That is, of course, what lies beneath the great ideological struggles of the Western world since the French Revolution. They may not be explicit, but that is what lies beneath all of them. Communists of various stripes thought they could create the worker’s paradise in the industrial age. The radicalism of Robespierre became a secular religion, in which men were gods. The fascists were a utopian reaction to the utopian radicals of their age. They simply had a different vision of paradise, which is why they embraced the same methods.

We see this today with the America Left, which has, in fits and starts, become increasingly radical and increasingly untethered from reality. Into the 20th century, it still carried with it the Christian restraint of accepting that paradise, if it exists at all, is in the next life. That is all gone now, and the believers are filled with the passion of the zealot. All that matters to them is the next step on the path. Whoever is the most pious, the furthest along on the journey, is the standard until someone else can prove to be pious, further along the path.

That explains the dogpiling we see from these fanatics, whenever they discover a heretic or obstacle. They lack anything resembling human compassion, so the heretic serves only one role for them. That is as a point of comparison. The more outraged and exited one is about the heretic, the more pious they are. The heretic becomes point zero on the graph, so the further one is away from the heretic, emotionally and spiritually, the further along they are on their journey to paradise. Thus, the endless piety contests.

It’s why someone like Howard Dean feels righteous in calling for the imprisonment of Andrew Torba, for the crime of existing. Dean is not a bright man, but he is filled with the passion of the true believer. For him and the rest of his cult, the point of shrieking at Torba is not a practical one. It is spiritual one. They are showing how far along the path they are away from the sinner and toward the land of milk and honey. Dean probably would have called for Torba’s murder, but he did not have to show he was the most pious.

That is the great challenge of the post-Christian era. The limiting principle of Christianity, that grace was for the next life, is gone. That means all the lunatics are off the leash and society has no intellectual framework for putting them back on the leash. As a result, the West is afflicted with a metastasizing cancer in the form of increasingly deranged true believers, determined to extend their quest for self-abnegation to the whole of society to bring about the end times. Either the cancer is removed, or the host will die.

Kept Men

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In a series of tweets yesterday, someone calling herself Emerald Robinson announced she had evidence that at least one “conservative” magazine was taking payola from a tech giant. The implication was that the magazine was taking money in exchange for countering the stories about the tech oligarchs censoring dissidents.The woman works for an outfit called One America News, which is a small operation that has made a name for itself during the Trump phenomenon. Here are the tweets in case they vanish.

The most likely candidate, before examining the hints in the tweet, is National Review, which lost its moral compass when Rich Lowry took over the operation. It is also the one conservative publication with any influence, at least before it hurled itself onto the Never Trump bonfire three years ago. If you are going to bribe a conservative publication, you may as well bribe the biggest one. It is not like any of these operations are making so much money that they would say not to a bribe. It’s their reason to exist.

Of course, the clue about the subscriber base evaporating adds to the speculation that the culprit is National Review. When you look at the tax filings for the 501(c)(3) they use to launder contributions, it appears their donations shriveled up during the campaign. Their ugly smear campaign against Trump and his voters turns out to have been a costly blunder. That is if the tax filings tell the whole story. It is possible that the tech giant or some other wealthy patron is paying writers directly or using another vehicle.

I speculated during the campaign that Dan and Farris Wilks were buying support for Ted Cruz and funding the Never Trump lunacy among so-called conservatives. The two are members in good standing of the donor class and the guys bankrolling people like Ben Shapiro, Dennis Prager, and Glenn Beck. My suspicion was they were spreading cash around on the side to the various pens for hire at operations like National Review and the Federalist. It would explain some rather obvious patterns we saw in the campaign.

Now, in fairness to National Review, we do not know if the person tweeting this stuff is legitimate or correct. Her name suggests she should be swinging from a pole, rather than covering the White House, but these days, the differences between the two professions are microscopic. In fact, it would be a relief to learn that the mass media is simply singing for their supper, delivering what a handful of billionaires demand. Otherwise, it suggests a systemic failure that can only be addressed by madame guillotine.

Still, even if the rumor is just that, it raises an important point. The media in America has never been objective or bound by a code of conduct. Into the twentieth century, everyone understood that the newspapers were owned by rich guys with an agenda. There were newspapers for the parties and for the factions within each party. What happened in the Cold War is that the bias was concealed to fool the public into supporting the struggle against the Soviets. Suddenly, reporters became journalists and priests.

When you dig through the tax forms of the various not-for profit operations used by Conservative Inc., you find that their stars are living lifestyles that would make the people who read them faint. Jonah Goldberg is a great example. He gets 200 large from the National Review Institute. He gets a similar figure from American Enterprise. Then he has a cable deal from Fox. He writes books that no one reads, but the not-for-profit system buys these books in bulk. Add it all up and he lives like royalty for doing very little.

Of course, this explains why the so-called conservative opposition is unwilling to oppose or conserve anything. They are afraid to bite the hand that feeds them. To wander off the reservation and possibly anger their pay masters, means leaving a life of extreme luxury for, at best, a middle-class life. It is not as if a Jonah Goldberg could replicate his earnings in the dreaded private sector. The life of a kept man is one of trepidation. They live in fear that the fads will change, they will be deemed heretical and ejected from the hive.

At the human level it is somewhat understandable, but when you look at the whole, it means the whole system is a massive scam design to fool the public. Just as campaign finance laws are designed to obscure who is bribing your politicians, the labyrinth of 501(3)(c) operations that finance the commentariat are designed to conceal who is controlling public opinion. Even if we never get the full story about which publication was taking the bribes, the truth of it is slowly bleeding into public consciousness.

In the meantime, the kept men glance furtively at social media, wondering if it will be their publication that gets outed or if maybe their name will turn up in the story. Maybe some are reaching out to their friends at other media operations, just in case they need to find a new landing spot. It is the whore’s life they chose, so no one should feel pity for them. In fact, these people deserve nothing but scorn. They choose to play an active role in the decay of our society, by undermining social trust. They deserve what is coming to them.

Zero-D Chess

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The paleocons were right about many things, particularly about the growth of the managerial state, but they were not right about everything. There were things they simply could not imagine, much in the same way sci-fi writers cannot imagine the cultural implications of technology. No matter how smart you are, you can only think so many moves ahead. One thing the paleocons got wrong about the managerial state is just how damaging it was to the people inside it.

This post about the scheming of Rod Rosenstein and Robert Mueller is a good example of how weakness is viewed as strength by people inside the system.

In court filings last week the Department of Justice deployed what could be the nuclear option in its latest effort to prevent President Trump from declassifying information regarding FISA warrants used to spy on his campaign aide Carter Page: It is claiming that such a move would interfere with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

This is the first time the DOJ has explicitly made this argument implying personal peril for the president, since interference could open Trump to charges of obstruction of justice. Until now, the department has argued that declassifying the documents threatened national security.

In the 178-page court document, DOJ officials said they had “determined that disclosure of redacted information in the Carter Page FISA documents could reasonably be expected to interfere with the pending investigation into Russian election interference.”

That rationale has heightened suspicions among congressional investigators that the special counsel is being used to prevent the disclosure of possible FBI abuses and crimes committed during the Russia probe. Opened by the FBI in July 2016, the Russia investigation was taken over by Mueller when Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed him special counsel in 2017.

By the DOJ’s logic, according to one source, the fact that the investigation is ongoing protects it from scrutiny, including the president’s.

The post goes on to explain that the reptilian Rod Rosenstein constructed an elaborate trap for Trump. He can allow Mueller to investigate the administration to death, while covering up the subversion and possible treason committed by the FBI. He can also go public with these facts and be charged with obstruction. The writers of the post no doubt think this is brilliantly clever and they are probably correct about what the subversive Rod Rosenstein is plotting.

It suffers from one glaring defect. It is not based in factual reality. There is no doubt that the subversive Rod Rosenstein is covering up his own crimes here. He signed off on a lot of this stuff and he fears being turned into the fall guy in this caper. His natural inclination is to assume he is the outsider and that the rest, who do not share his loyalties, will somehow pin the blame on him. Like John Dean, he is playing a double game hoping to escape punishment.

This is a great example of the core flaw of managerialism. It turns everything into a cheeky parlor game, in which the winner is the one to come up with the most verbally clever solution. The people inside the system come to believe that is actually how the world works. Because their world is a one governed by words and gestures, they start to assume the outer world functions the same way. It creates a false sense of superiority in a class of soft men.

There’s no doubt that the bureaucrats inside the system think they really outfoxed Trump, but they are mistaken, because this is not how the real world works. Trump is the President. He has real power. For example, he can declassify those documents and release them to the public. No one else can do that with the stroke of a pen. Rosenstein can conjure all the cheeky word puzzles he likes, but Trump retains that power. In fact, they may be playing into his hands with this effort.

That’s the real fight here. Rod Rosenstein can threaten obstruction of justice all he likes, but he has not power. Trump has real power. He can address the nation one night, reveal the secrets Rosenstein is trying to hide and then fire all of the people involved in this subversive plot and its cover up. Congress, even one run by Democrats, is not going to impeach Trump for exposing corruption. At least, they would be wise to not go down that dangerous path.

That’s probably why Trump has been sitting on this stuff until after the election. He has no fear of Rosenstein. He just needs to get through the election and then figure out the new game board. If the GOP keeps the House, then maybe he lets Congress work this case via hearings. If it is the Democrats, then maybe he calls their bluff and releases these documents to the public during the lame duck session. He just has to not worry about people like Rosenstein.

The End Game

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A popular topic on the Right for a long time has been the looming economic trouble that everyone agrees is inevitable, due to the spiraling debt. The political parties lost interest in the debt during the Obama years, but the problem remains. The Federal government adds another trillion or so every year and we are just at the start of the great Baby Boomer retirement, which promises to bankrupt Social Security and Medicare. All the things Reagan warned about, and did nothing about, are still there and getting worse every day.

Now, as I mentioned in the podcast last week, one reason no one cares about this stuff anymore is that nothing ever happens. The politicians never do anything to address the problem and the warnings about the disaster never come true. The 2008 mortgage meltdown can probably be blamed for the public’s indifference to these issues now, and maybe the politicians too, because the disaster was averted. That problem was worse than the predictions, but the consequences were nothing like predicted.

For the Right and increasingly for the Left, the handwringing over the looming financial troubles has always been a proxy for the general angst about democracy. After all, the primary driver for the debt trouble is the public’s insatiable desire for free stuff and the politicians need to give it to them. The creative ways in which the U.S. government finances its spending is driven by the need to feed the beast that is democracy. They say necessity is the mother of invention and we see that in our fiscal situation.

The thing is though, a financial crash, even a debilitating one, is never enough to bring down a nation. For example, the Long Depression lasted in the United States from 1873 to 1896, with the most severe portion being the first decade. The Great Depression lasted for over a decade and was followed by a world war. There was never a fear of revolution in these economic disasters because the public trusted itself and the institutions of the nation to work through the problems. People just kept working on the problem until it got better.

Revolts come when people no longer trust their rulers. The king bungles a series of issues, and the people decide they need a new king. The ruling class gets reckless and lazy, and they find themselves on the run. Revolutions come when the system itself is no longer trusted. The economic crisis that triggers it is just an excuse for doing what people have been thinking about doing for a long time. The radicals were able to overthrow the French monarchy because no one could think of a reason to not overthrow the system.

That is the dangerous waters we seem to be in today. Now, elites love to confuse the institutions with the people occupying them. Despite being replaceable and often replaced, they see themselves as indispensable. That is just their arrogance, not a sign the public has lost faith in the system. After all, no one trusts Congress, but the voters can replace all the congressmen with more trustworthy people in a series of elections. Is that a loss of faith in the institution or just the normal process of democracy?

Still, there is a growing distrust of the system, and it is something you see in the Progressive coalition, Trump voters and the Dissident Right. The reasons are different, but all around, people are losing faith in the system itself. Team Brown wants to begin the great replacement today and they see the system as a hindrance to their efforts. The MAGA-pedes see the system as an impediment to Trump’s reform efforts. The Dissident Right sees the system as part of the cancer that is destroying white society.

Cultural discontent is not a new thing, so it is tempting to think that we are reliving the period from the 1970’s into the 1980’s. Smart people in the Nixon years thought the country was headed for civil war. By the middle of the 1980’s everyone was happy again due to the robust economy. Trump’s approval rating is his highest as the economy is finally showing that old dynamism again, but people are even more angry now than before the election. Maybe this time is different and a good economy is not enough.

Of course, the troubles half a century ago were different than today, despite the similarities. The culture war of the 60’s and 70’s was between white people in a country that was 90% white. The fight today is between whites and non-whites in a country rapidly moving to majority-minority. Then we have the brown waves of migrants washing up on the southern border, that serve as a daily reminder of what the future holds for white people. This is a very different crisis than we saw in the 60’s.

History buffs like to look at the French Revolution for clues as to how the American experiment ends. The alt-right thinks the interwar period in Germany is a good model for what comes next. Of course, the Roman Empire is always a handy example. All of that is probably wrong. In fact, the alt-right is laughably wrong about what comes next. The better example may be the Holy Roman Empire. The slow disintegration of that political construction is a less glamorous story, but it may be a more relevant one for us

After all, America has always been a multi-cultural empire. It was just confined to this continent and composed of white people. Even today, the cultural difference between the people of New England and those of the Midwest are obvious. The whites of the west coast are wildly different in temperament than the whites of New York. When someone from the Northeast visits Texas for the first time, they almost always say that they feel like they are in a different country. That is because Texas is a different country.

Since Gettysburg, American has been a collection of cultural regions held together by the Yankee hegemony. The rest of America has functioned like Puerto Rico to the winners of the Civil War. That is, they retained some local autonomy but were never allowed to have a say in the big issues. A fun way to see this is to examine the list of President before the Civil War and after the Civil War. Heck, the GOP is a party based in the South and Southwest, yet the President is the quintessential New Yorker.

Maybe instead of a dramatic collapse or a great revolution, maybe the future for this empire is to just stagger along from one crisis to the next, losing a little bit of influence here, a little bit of land over there. A long, episodic process where the American Empire slowly disintegrates, returning to its natural parts. A generation from now, America will be out of Asia. Another generation and Europe is free. All the while the role of the central government recedes domestically as the local cultural regions re-assert their authority.

Killing Lincoln

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One of the unmistakable features of modern conservatives is their not-so-veiled hostility toward heritage America. Some attribute this to ethnic hostility, given the infiltration of the right by neoconservatives. Initially, these people made the journey from communism to anti-communism and were never conservative in temperament. Of course, the money has made them into unpleasant snobs. All of that is true to one degree or another, but it obscures an important point about modern conservatives.

The Official Right has a different interpretation of American history than most normal white people. Blacks, of course, fixate on slavery and segregation, so their view of American history is through hostile eyes. If you ask a normal white American to tell the story of America, he will start with something about how the Puritans came to America to escape religious tyranny. Once the colonists got things going, the King tried to tax the colonists, so there was a revolution.

The Official Right has a different view of American history. They look at the founding as an imperfect result. First and foremost, they view the tolerance of slavery, and the enshrining of it in the Constitution, as a great sin. Rather than embrace the principle of liberty for all, because all men are created equal, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution created a compromise. While all citizens were free and equal under the law, slavery created a class of people who were not citizens.

In the view of the Straussians, the intellectual movement based on the writing and teaching of Leo Strauss, the Constitution was not just a flawed document, but an immoral one, because it violated that core principle of equality. From this perspective, the Civil War was a purification of the country, removing the original sin of slavery and forming a new Union, based on equality and universal liberty. For the Official Right, America was reborn in the Civil War and Lincoln was the Moses.

This is why the Official Right has a Lincoln fetish. For example, Rich Lowry wrote a Lincoln book. The neocons treat Lincoln as a prophet. Jonah Goldberg regularly writes about Lincoln as if he is a god on Mt. Olympus. For the Official Right, Lincoln is the Founding Father. Those guys who wrote the Constitution are not entirely dismissed, but they are secondary figures in the story. For the Official Right, the American story starts with the Gettysburg Address.

A big part of this is due to a guy named Harry Jaffa, who became something of a cult leader for the neoconservatives. His framing of the Civil War as the second founding allowed the neocons to see themselves as proof of the concept. The original founding excluded them from the narrative, while the second founding not only included them in the story of America, but it also made them proof of its righteousness. Lincoln’s America was not just for the founding stock. It was for whoever could get control of it.

Of course, the old WASP side of the Official Right was also willing to embrace this notion of the second founding. Since northern conservatism was mostly just a cleanup crew that followed Progressivism around, the story of the second founding made their unwillingness to oppose the Left seem noble. Since Reconstruction, the role of what passes for conservatism has been to fill the void after every great spasm of Progressive activism overturned the old order. The Official Right’s job was to make it all work again.

The problem with this telling of history is it assumes a core immorality of the founding stock and the institutions they created. It also locks in the notion that it is the role of Northern reformers to be the guardians of civic morality. The Left need only appeal to the notion of universal equality and liberty and their opponents were disarmed. After all, the party of Lincoln, if it stands for anything, stands for universal equality and liberty. The conservatism of Harry Jaffa is nothing but a complex apologia for Progressivism.

A fun gag is to talk to the grandees of the Official Right about Lincoln’s actual views on race relations. The quickest way to get hurled into the void by angry Buckleyites is to quote Lincoln on the issue. The fact is, Lincoln was a man of his age, when it came to race, despite his zealous opposition to slavery. Like all abolitionists, he did not care about the slaves, he cared about the slave holder. That was the soul he sought to save. The slaves themselves were just props on the stage of the morality play that was abolitionism.

The Official Right can never accept this. One of the criticisms of Harry Jaffa on this score was that he was not a scholar of Lincoln, so much as the chief polemicist for the cult that formed around him. His telling of history left out anything that contradicted his concept of the second founding. This is true not only from an academic perspective, but also from a human one. This telling of history leaves out most of the country. For anyone outside the northern alliance, their ancestors are either villains or non-entities in the narrative.

That is the source of the low-level hostility toward heritage America that has been a feature of the Official Right and that is now its face to the rest of us. Since Gettysburg, the story of America has been the story of northern hegemony. On one side are the reformers and fanatics, always looking for a reason to put the lash to the legacy population. On the other side are the so-called conservatives, who hold most of the same views, but see their role as making the latest fads work, so the overall American project can move forward.

The Lincoln fetish that blossomed among so-called conservatives in the middle of the last century was a form of Stockholm Syndrome. Unable to conjure and sustain a moral opposition to the Left, they embraced Lincoln as their Moses. Their acquiescence to the Left was the result of deeply held principles with roots in the founding, the second founding. They were champions of “a new birth of freedom — that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

This is the great challenge in attempting to overturn the Judeo-Puritan orthodoxy that defines the America ruling class. It requires more than just defeating present day arguments over public policy. It means restoring large chunks of history that have been systematically erased by our zealous overlords. Killing off the cult of Lincoln and the political movement it animates, means telling a better story to the people charged with tearing it down. That inevitably means killing Lincoln as the founder of the nation.

The Leverage President

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One thing about the Kavanaugh drama that did not get enough attention, is how Trump leveraged the event to transform the Republican Party into his party, one that is looking to him for leadership. Just listen to some of the things GOP senators are saying now and it is as if they have gone through some sort of religious experience. Not only are they operating like a real political party, but they are also standing up to the left’s morality play. It is a remarkable transformation.

Two moves by Trump seem to have set all of this in motion, as well as making it possible for Kavanaugh to get confirmed. One is Trump did not take the bait and get into a media fight with the left. In fact, he remained remarkably quiet, even as the media tried everything to goad him. Maybe it is just his natural inclination to not go through the door his opponents open for him, but he seemed to know that it was part of the trap Feinstein, Katz and Bromwich had cooked up over the summer.

The other thing he did was put the whole thing on the Senate GOP, particularly Mitch McConnell. This was the key move. By explicitly saying he was leaving the issue to the Senate to resolve, the focus shifted from him to the Senate. More important, it put the Republicans in a bind. They could either face the wrath of the left or they could face the wrath of their voters. Trump correctly figured out that survival still counts for something in the GOP, so McConnell had no choice.

What this says is Trump is getting better at being president and better at using his brand as a weapon in Washington. I have said since the beginning that Trump is a very rare guy, who instinctively knows how others view him. He uses your perception of him as part of the sales pitch. It is why people find his boasting to be amusing. When he does it, his supporters feel like they are in on the joke. They get that he knows it is boast and that it irritates the left.

That is the thing with understanding Trump, something a brilliant observer pointed out three years ago. Trump operates like a famous real estate developer. He is always looking to leverage his assets to take advantage of whatever opportunities that may present themselves in the future. In the case of the Kavanaugh hearing, his best play was to stand aside and let Mitch McConnell handle it. Regardless of the result, he was getting something from the transaction.

This is not the 4-D chess nonsense. Trump is not a master strategist, in the sense that he is four moves ahead of everyone. It is that his inclination is to always play the game, any game, to maximize his options when it is his next turn. That is how the world of commercial real estate development works. You never know what will present itself next, so you make sure you are able to seize on whatever pops up. Trump’s applying this to Washington now.

You see this with the Rosenstein situation. The thorn in Trump’s side right now is Mueller, simply because he has the power to be a nuisance. Mueller is supervised by Rosenstein, who is clearly compromised in the FBI scandal. When Congress demanded the FBI documents be declassified, Trump was ready to leverage it. That gave him the excuse to review all the requested material, without anyone claiming he was meddling in the investigation. It also forced Rosenstein’s hand.

At that point, Trump had leverage on Rosenstein. It is why days after Trump decided to hold off on declassifying the documents, the left-wing media was running stories about how Rosenstein was going to be fired. Those stories most likely came from the camp of the conspirators. They just assumed that once Trump knew the facts, he would fly into a rage and fire the crooked Rosenstein. Instead, Trump put a saddle on him and is now riding him around Washington.

That is unlikely the end game. I have always thought that Trump is waiting until after the election to make his next move in this thing. Instead, what he has been doing for the last year is maneuvering so that he has options. There is a very good chance that what Congress has uncovered, what is in those secret files, implicates former Obama officials and maybe a few high-ranking Democrats. That is pretty good leverage for Trump if he is suddenly faced with a hostile House and Senate.

The other play if the election goes poorly is to simply dump all of it out during the lame duck session after the election. At which point he can fire Mueller and Rosenstein, while demanding Sessions appoint a second special prosecutor to handle the FBI scandal, including the role of Mueller and Rosenstein. That assumes there are some real bombshells hiding in those secret files. Given the panic about the effort to declassify them, it is a safe bet that there is some bad stuff in those files.

Of course, it is now looking like the brown wave the liberal media has been predicting is not going to happen. Left-wing outlets are now talking about maybe a very narrow House win and losses in the Senate. Given the Kavanaugh loss, it is not out of the question that the GOP holds the House. Winning has a funny way of motivating the winners and demotivating the losers. If this momentum carries the GOP to victory next month, then the options for Trump multiply.

The Wizards

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In the 1980’s, one of the great puzzles for conservatives was how left-wing economists could not bring themselves to acknowledge the obvious. The Soviet economic model was a failure in absolute terms, as well as relative terms. Even long after the Soviets collapsed, guys like Paul Krugman remained puzzled by the inability of the communist system to keep pace with the West. His answer was that the Soviets either lost their will or lacked the moral fiber to make revolutionary socialism work.

As Greg Cochran has pointed out, the failings of socialism were obvious to anyone willing to look at what was happening. Once the Soviet Empire fell, it was undeniable, but economics never paid a price for being so wrong. In fact, the status of the field went up after the Cold War. Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz became a shaman to the ruling class, despite a miserable track record. He is another guy who thinks the morality of socialism should make it work.

Now, part of this is something that John Derbyshire pointed out in his infamous review of Kevin McDonald’s book, The Culture of Critique. “Jews are awfully good at creating pseudoscience—elaborate, plausible, and intellectually very challenging systems that do not, in fact, have any truth content.” In fairness to John, he was summarizing what McDonald had written, but he largely agreed with the assertion. There is a fair bit of this in economics, where smart Jews conjure alternative reality.

That is a fun point to make, but that is not the reason for economists to be wildly wrong about so much, yet immune from criticism. By now, someone in the field should have pointed out that Joseph Stiglitz is a crank. Someone like Christine Romer, who was Obama’s top economist, was completely wrong about the effects of his stimulus plan, yet she was rewarded with a plum job in the academy. In most every field, even astrology, being that wrong is disqualifying.

Now, it is fun to mock economics, but it really should be a useful field and play a positive role in public policy debates. There are useful observations that come from the field, with regards to how people respond to various economic policies. In theory, the economics shop should provide objective analysis of government performance, policy proposals and basic data about the state of the economy. Government is about trade-offs and economics should provide the details of those trade-offs.

Of course, there are reasons for the field being a mess. One reason is that economics is not science. It is a basic set of immutable truths swimming in a sea of pointless analysis, clever models that mean nothing, and wishful thinking. Then there is the fact that there is money to be made in putting your stamp on the polices. When Christine Romer was selected by Obama, it was the golden ticket to elite of the New Keynesian Economics cult. She and her husband are now senior clerics.

There is something else that can be teased out of this phenomenon and that is the corrosive effect of democracy on objectivity. Democratic forms of government lack legitimacy, because they start with the assumption that anyone can hold any office within the system. No one is going to respect the office of legislator if the job can be won and held by anyone. Even in a republican form of government the assumption is that anyone can enter the process.

Unlike other forms of government that can rely on the blessing of the religious authority, democracy inevitably obliterates any threat to itself. Christians like to believe that the decline in faith corresponds with the rise in public corruption, but it is the reverse. The spread of democracy is what drives the decline in faith. Everywhere democracy becomes ascendant, religion moves into decline. This is an observation Muslims have made, which is why they oppose democracy.

That need for moral authority is still there, so inevitably democratic system evolves a civic religion and before long a civic clerisy. This intellectual elite, supported by the political elite that control the democratic institutions give their blessing to the whims of the office holders. The role of economist is that of the court astrologer in Persia or Merlin in the court of King Arthur. They appear to be consulting hidden knowledge, but they always end up endorsing whatever their patron desires.

The other side of this coin is there is no reason for the political class to attack their court magicians, even when they are completely wrong, because they will need them to bless the next set of policies. Romer is the worst case. Her and her husband have lifetime positions at an elite university. Stiglitz gets treated like the senior shaman by all sides of the political elite, because someone must fill that role. It is a lot like how the Catholic Church handles pedophile priests, when you think about it.

The Civil War

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The paleocons recognized in the 1980’s, that the conservatism of Bill Buckley was doomed to fail, because it started from the premise that the current political arrangements were legitimate. Since the left had defined those arrangements, it meant the right was going to become corrupted by its willingness to operate within the progressives rules. For example, if you agree that segregation is evil, there are only a narrow set of policy positions you can support with regards to race.

That is, of course, exactly what happened. Instead of being a moral philosophy that stood in opposition to Progressivism, it became a foil. Conservatives were the controlled opposition, who gave legitimacy to left-wing ideas by opposing them and then ultimately embracing them. If you embrace the premise, you inevitably embrace the ends. The debate is about the middle part. It is why conservatives have spent decades trying to accomplish the goals of the Left, without embracing the means of the Left.

During the Cold War, the debate between the left and right was mostly about economics and foreign policy. As much as the conservatives tried to paint the left as a bunch of Bolsheviks, the right never seriously challenged the left on socialist policies like public pensions, socialized medicine, and anti-poverty programs. Similarly, the approach to the Soviets was a debate about how to best manage it. The exception was Reagan’s talk of roll back, but that was mostly rhetoric.

That is something to keep in mind with the battle over what will come to oppose the latest iteration of progressivism. The Ben Shapiro types who are endlessly punching right by demanding America be defined as an idea, rather than a place and people, are embracing the main argument of the left. They have different notions of what those ideas mean and how they should be implemented, but Shapiro agrees with the left that America is just a set of ideas, not a place and people.

This new right must end the same way as Buckley conservatism ended. That is, as an amen chorus for the progressive state. If you agree that the new definition of a nation is post-national, as in not being defined by borders, language, and people, then the debate is what defines the new state. If you further agree that the new state is defined by ideas and a set of values, then the only thing left is to figure out who defines those ideas and how will they be enforced.

This notion of the state as a post-national, post-Christian theocracy is not without real consequences. It may seem ridiculous, but when the people in charge believe in something, no matter how absurd, the people pay the price. You see that in the Kavanaugh fight. Big shot intellectuals are starting to notice what people on this side of the great divide have been saying for years. If society is defined by “who we are” then someone who dissents must be excluded from that society, by force, if necessary.

In that context, splitting the difference could no longer be passed off as moderation. It was cowardice. Any Republican who voted against Kavanaugh (and, of course, any Democrat who voted for him) would thereby exit his party. Just as the congressional vote in 1846 on the so-called Wilmot Proviso revealed that the fault-line in American politics was about slavery, not party, the Kavanaugh nomination shows what American politics is, at heart, about. It is about “rights” and the entire system that arose in our lifetimes to confer them not through legislation but through court decisions: Roe v. Wade in 1973 (abortion), Regents v. Bakke in 1979 (affirmative action), Plyler v. Doe in 1982 (immigrant rights), and Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015 (gay marriage). The Democrats are the party of rights. As such, they are the party of the Supreme Court. You can see why Ted Kennedy claimed in a 1987 diatribe that the Yale law professor Robert Bork would turn the United States into a police state. For Democrats, an unfriendly Supreme Court is a threat to everything.

That means the country itself. The general Democratic view that has hardened since the 1960s is the one expressed on many occasions by Barack Obama. The United States is not a country bound by a common history or a common ethnicity—it is a set of values. That is an open, welcoming thing to build a country around. But it has a dark side, and we have seen the dark side during the hearings. If a country is only a set of values, then the person who does not share what elites “know” to be the country’s values is not really a member of the national community and is not deserving of its basic protections, nice guy though he might otherwise be. Such people “belong” to the country in the way some think illegal immigrants do—provisionally.

At the founding, opponents of the new Constitution argued that the new political model would inevitably result in the supremacy of the court. Anti-federalists argued that the Supreme Court would become a source of massive abuse. Beyond the power of the executive, the court would eventually come to dominate the legislative branch. This is exactly where we find ourselves today, where both sides of the ruling elite view the court as the only source of legitimate moral authority.

That’s why the Kavanaugh fight was so vicious. Progressives fear the court could define “who we are” in such a way that excludes them. It’s also why guys like Ben Shapiro are not just wrong, but dangerously wrong. By going along with the general premise of a country being just a set of values, he is committing suicide on your behalf. He has a place to go if things don’t work out here. If the definition of “who we are” turns out to not include you, where are you going to go?

That’s why this new notion of the state can only end in horror. Since the Greeks, political philosophy has assumed that a society is a group of related people, with a shared history and shared space. The debate was over how best to organize society, to match the temperament and character of the people. This new model allows no room for debate and no tolerance of dissent. Like every totalitarian ideology, it has to end in a bloodbath to define “who we are.”

The Survivor

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Something that has gone unremarked in the latest outburst of female hysteria is why these purple-faced rage-heads we see on television and on social media, call themselves survivors. The word turns up in all their self-descriptions. It is clear the word has taken on a spiritual meaning. The survivor, they insist, is incapable of error or dishonesty. We must not only believe survivors, but obey them. To do otherwise violates some unexplained, sacred code.

What it is they have survived? The claim is they are survivors of sexual assault, which is a strange thing to say since no one dies from sexual assault. The law defines assault as “an intentional act by one person that creates an apprehension in another of an imminent harmful or offensive contact.” Therefore, sexual assault is the credible threat of unwanted sexual contact by someone with the present ability to do it, but not the act itself. That is a different crime.

No one dies from a threat, so the idea of being a survivor of a threat, at least in the narrow sense of the law, is ridiculous. Most likely, these women are using “assault” colloquially, as in a physical attack. Even so, this has two problems. One is no one dies from sexual assault as currently defined. Even rape is non-lethal. The victim could die from the physical encounter that preceded or followed the rape, but we have moved into a realm of crime no one includes in the definition of sexual assault.

If we are to take them seriously, we must stick with present reality when defining sexual assault. In the current age, sexual assault means anything from a dirty joke to a woman being pressured into sex. Somewhere in that range is the woman who got knee-walking drunk and woke up with her panties on her head. Even allowing for the alleged trauma that ensues, these are not things one survives. It is like saying you survived a parking ticket or a rainy week of vacation.

The other problem is the concept of survival is not passive. It is active, which is why people get applause for things like fighting off a shark attack at the beach. It was not dumb luck, at least not exclusively, that saved the person. They fought for their life to overcome the threat. Exactly no one has died from being hit on by the boss, so you do not get special credit for having endured it until you found a new job, or the guy got canned for being a creepy perv in the workplace.

That may sound monstrously indifferent, but that is the point. An objective view of what we are seeing, therefore, must include the very real and very intense emotion we see from these women. The purple-faced shrieking does not validate their claims, but it does suggest they really believe this stuff. They truly believe they have gone through some transcendent ordeal, a purifying trial that has altered them in ways that only those who have experienced it can understand and appreciate.

That is the clue as to what may be going on here. Purification rituals are common to religions in all times and places. For example, baptism, according to the Catholic Church, is the ritual through which we are freed from sin and reborn as sons of God and members of the Church. Conversion to Judaism requires full immersion in a Mikveh, a ritual purification bath connected to a natural spring. In the Greco-Roman world, the mystery religions were those that required initiation of some kind.

We have in modern times the phrase “trial by fire” which we understand to mean a potentially lethal ordeal that also purifies the survivor. They come out the other end of the experience, changed by the ordeal. Soldiers, for example, who experience heavy combat are assumed to have been changed by the experience. The assumption is the act of survival requires skills and deeds that are otherwise never required. The survivor therefore gains special knowledge as a result.

Within the progressive coalition, various tribes have creation myths that hinge on the concept of the survivor. American Jews have turned the holocaust into something that dwarfs the flight from Egypt. Survival is integral to Jewishness. God’s chosen people survive because they are God’s chosen people. Surviving the Nazis not only bestows special status on the victims, but it feeds into the sense of Jewish identity as a people under assault.

Blacks have a similar origin myth. Like the Jews, they were in bondage, but unlike the Jews they never fled oppression. Instead, they were transferred to a different form of oppression in the form of segregation. Their survival as a race and their ongoing fight for freedom is what defines blackness in America. The “black body” stuff that turns up in Afrocentric literature is a mystical implementation of the assertion that blacks are under constant physical threat and it defines them.

White women find themselves at a loss to match blacks and Jews in terms of victim status, so they invented intersectionality. Since the only thing white women must complain about is white men lusting after them, they must find something else. For a long time, feminists have been trying to compare their “struggle” with that of blacks and Jews, but it is a tough sell. Comparing Becky’s struggle to get that promotion, with slavery or the holocaust, does not go over well.

That seems to be where the “I’m a survivor” stuff comes into the mix. Claiming special victim status because your great grandfather had to ride in the back of the bus does not hold up to someone claiming they were assaulted last week. For Jewish women this is like hitting the lottery. They get to remind everyone that they lost family they never knew, and they can say Haven Monahan grabbed their boob at a college party. So far, black women have not jumped on this, but maybe that is a bridge too far.

In other words, the anger being directed at normal people by these enraged women probably has nothing to do with the rest of us. It is a battle within the progressive cult over status within the cult. Brett Kavanaugh was just a convenient prop to be used in what amounts to a morality play. This drama allows people in the audience to display their piety, by how they react to the show. It is why white and Jewish male progressives have been falling all over themselves in support of this.