The Original Sin

The original sin of modern conservatism is that it never came to terms with the reality of the Left’s race delusions. Last century, Progressives concluded that the obvious racial disparities in the world were solely due to racism, specifically the racism of whites toward the world’s non-whites. Everything that defines the American Left now is based on this assumption. This a lie, not a sin. The sin was that the American Right, or at least those who came to define the Right, never honestly challenged this claim.

Instead, Buckley-style conservatives accepted this two-part assumption about the world and tried to fit their ideas within it. This was mostly expedience. By going along with the Left’s egalitarianism, they could have a place at the table. With the Civil Rights Movement, the Left claimed the moral high ground on the matter of race. Confronting them on the reality of race would have required courage the conservatives did not possess, so they chose to make an accommodation with the Left. Cowardice became a feature of the Right.

This mistake has haunted Buckleyites for fifty years, because there is no way to fit conservative ideas about society and culture with what amounts to race delusion. The fact that race is real, ethnicity is real and human diversity is immutable, means differences between the races are eternal. Worse yet, by casting the issue in moral terms, opposition to the Progressive race program was by definition immoral. After all, if racial differences can only be due to white racism, any white resistance to reform must be racism.

There was always another problem with Progressive race delusion. Eventually, the Left would run out of ways to address the immutable racial differences. That means they would run out of possible explanations, leaving them with just one conclusion. That is, racism is what defines white people, so the only way to achieve social equality is to get rid of white people entirely. This is why the media is full of over-the-top anti-white rhetoric. The Left is now entirely defined by a visceral hatred of white people.

This leaves conventional conservatism with nowhere to run. When the Left howls about white privilege, the white guys of Conservative Inc. have no response, since they cannot get away from the fact that most of them are white. Then they have the neocons, the shape-shifters of American politics, who will be white and non-white depending upon how they want to play an issue. The result is that any resistance of the Left is automatically a white guy thing and therefore immoral. The prevailing morality is now explicitly anti-white.

As their ranks dwindle, the Buckleyites seem to have some sense they are now in a blind alley, but they are baffled as to why. Super-cuck David French thinks conservatives should try to out-hustle the race hustlers. Roger Clegg would like to hide under his bed until the issue goes away. That is the default position of conservatives on most things now. The swarthy cohort  of the Buckleyites thinks the way forward is to bore everyone to death on the issue and this guy has decided to hold his breath or something.

The conservative position on the Left’s anti-white turn is a combination of pleading, groveling and wishful thinking. The reason is they cannot do anything else as long as they accept the Left’s egalitarianism and blank slate assumptions. If all the problems of the world are due to white racism, and all other efforts failed, it is only logical and moral to get rid of white people, or at least make them sub-citizens. If the problems persist, then killing off the whites is not just the right thing to do, it is the only thing that can be done.

Buckley conservatives have written often about the original sin of race, but the real original sin was their unwillingness to confront Progressives on their racial delusions. Whatever American Progressivism was in another age, in this age, for more than half a century, it has been a cult based on the belief that whites are the root of all evil. It is a toxic religion that makes Bolshevism look optimistic by comparison. There was never any reason to accommodate it, other than expediency and greed. Now it is the ruling ethos of our age.

The opposite of race delusion is not a different form of race delusion. That is the problem with colorblind society argument. There can be no such thing as a colorblind society as long as humans populate society. Man is tribal and hierarchical. These are defining features of our species. To think otherwise is at odds with biological reality. The dream of the colorblind society we hear from civic nationalists is just as nutty as the Left’s delusions about racial justice. Egalitarianism is not simply wrong, but it is also toxic and perverse.

The foundation stone of western conservatism is the unblinking acceptance of the human condition, without reservation. The point of society was to mitigate those aspects of the human condition that interfere with a peaceful and prosperous existence. The original sin of the Buckleyites is they agreed to abandon that core understanding. The result is a movement composed of hollow men, inexorably shuffling toward their demise, as they plead for a second chance. Sin pays its wages in death, but reality is eternal.

The Encirclement

If something gets lodged under your skin, the body will react by trying to push it out, which involves swelling and inflammation, due to the presence of microorganisms on the foreign material. Along with the normal renewal of skin cells, the object will move closer to the surface and eventually, with your help, be expelled. If that does not work, the body summons cells call macrophages that surround the object to isolate it from the body and eventually dissolve it. Sometimes you just end up with a calcified object there forever.

Human organizations work a similar way when they are infiltrated by something seen as hostile or even just foreign. The foreignness is automatically assumed to be hostile and treated as such, until it can be assimilated or expelled. Instead of macrophages, the organization finds a way to isolate the interloper, so that everyone knows it is unclean and he knows he is not welcome. That is what we are seeing with Donald Trump and the American political class. They have surrounded him and are trying to isolate him.

The effort to isolate Trump started early, when anyone who took a job with his campaign was treated like a leper. That turned out to be a stroke of luck for Trump, as it forced him to hire outsiders, who were not locked into old thinking. The only establishment man to support Trump was Jeff Sessions and he is looking like a mole for the political establishment. Even into the general election campaign, Trump was forced to use outsiders and washed-up insiders like Kellyanne Conway, hoping for a second chance.

Once he won the election, the political establishment adjusted its tactics. Paul Ryan rallied the dweeb army inside the GOP to basically ignore Trump’s agenda. That is why nothing happened on the border wall, immigration, or infrastructure. The point is being made that working with Trump would be death for any Republican. In fact, the leadership went out of its way to make sure nothing Trump wanted was in the last budget. The message was being sent that the people in charge saw Trump as a hostile outsider to be resisted

Even as the evidence of a sedition plot to alter the 2016 campaign mounts, you will notice that the grandees of the House GOP are stone silent on the matter. If this sort of thing had happened to Obama by Bush people, sniveling wimps like Paul Ryan would have been sent out on every talk show to condemn Bush and apologize to Obama. Instead, the only guys pushing the story are back bench types like David Nunez, who has come to terms with the fact he has no future in the party. He has nothing to lose so he can talk about it.

This is part of the planned isolation. It is not about policy or ideology. That is the mistake many make when wondering why Trump’s own party hates him. Certainly, the greedy bloodsuckers who bankroll the GOP hate his immigration stance, but they love his trade and regulatory positions. Trump has done more for the wallets of Silicon Valley and Wall Street than any president in history. No, the reason official Washington hates him is he is not them. He is an outsider, the nullification of why they claim we need them.

Then you have the phony-baloney Mueller operation. The original point of the thing was to cover-up the malfeasance of guys like Rosenstein, Comey, Strzok, and the rest of the conspirators in the effort to subvert the last election. It has quickly become a weapon to attack anyone associated with Trump. The whole point of going after Michael Cohen, for example, is to send a message to everyone in the private sector with ties to Trump. The Manafort case is the modern equivalent of the show trials during Stalin’s purges.

It is a bit ironic that the left is now trying to paint Trump as Nixon. It is almost as if it is a coordinated narrative. This and this are surely coincidental. After all, the left ran Nixon out of town for just mentioning stuff that we now know President Obama was doing in the final years of his presidency, but consistency and accuracy are not the issue. Like Nixon, the left hates Trump because he dares speak for the dispossessed. He may be a billionaire, but he talks like a commoner and speaks for the forgotten white American.

The result thus far is a stalemate. Unlike Nixon, Trump is not careless in his dealings, and he seems to know what he is facing. Team Trump is like defenders of a city, surrounded on all sides, but strong enough to repel an assault. Official Washington is the besieger, camped outside the walls not entirely sure how to proceed. They think they can wait it out, but supplies are not infinite. They also have to spend time and resources policing their berserkers, who keep rushing to the walls. Both sides make noise, but nothing happens.

What should worry the establishment is they have thrown everything they can at the walls, but Trump remains popular. In fact, he is more popular now than when he took office and more popular than Obama and Bush at similar points. It is why the Democrats are trying to tamp down impeachment talk. They know this is exactly the sort of thing that will motivate Trump voters in November. It is why the Prog media is full of blue wave stories. They are hoping they can gaslight the typical GOP voter into staying home in November.

For those still clinging to the idea of old America, with the orderly resolution of disputes through orderly elections, the only good result is one where Trump folds and decides to sign off on the neoliberal agenda. If Trump gave up on the wall and his immigration push, his base would abandon him, and the great replacement could accelerate. There is no scenario where the people in charge peacefully go along with doing what is best for heritage Americans. There is no reasoning with fanatics and hired killers.

The fact is the ruling class of America despises Trump and see him as a traitor to their class. His willingness to speak for heritage Americans, people the rulers now see as hostile and foreign, is unforgivable. He is the foreign object in the political body. That is why they see him a cancer on modern politics. There is no living with cancer, at least not for long. It is either killed, removed or it kills you. That is how our rulers see us and it is how they see Trump. The siege continues until it is broken, or the walls are breached.

The Wrong Stuff

A regular feature of the news, going back decades, is how the military is struggling to meet its enlistment goals. One reason for this is the Left’s antiwar past, which is a big part of their origin myth. The geezers in the cult still continue about how they protested the war in college. There is also the fact that the Left needs to believe the tide is turning their way and the people are rushing to their banner. That means the sort of white men who join the service are in decline. The result is regular stories about the lack of recruits.

The thing is though, volunteer armies do not have a great history. In the French Revolution, there were lots of people ready to fight for the revolution, but nowhere near enough to man the massive armies required to fight the rest of Europe. Wide-scale conscription was necessary to meet demand. The same was true during the Napoleonic Wars. In the 20th century, both world wars were fought with conscripts. For example, 70% of the US soldiers were drafted, despite massive public relations efforts to get men to enlist.

America has been running the world with a volunteer army for about fifty years now, but the cost has been enormous. Official spending numbers put the defense budget at about $600 billion per year, but lots of stuff is off-budget. The microprocessor has also been the great force multiplier. The United States has the most technologically advanced war machine in history and a fighting ethos to go with it. That just raises the cost of operations, relative to the overall fighting strength, in terms of manpower and material.

As a result, there is a general consensus that the current US military configuration is inadequate to continue ruling the world. This is a big part of Trump’s push to delegate some of the tasks to Europe and Asia. There really is no reason why the EU countries need any support from the US to police the Continent. The Russians have nukes, but the bear is poor, and the people are in no condition to fight a war. In Asia, the Japanese and South Koreans could do much more to help deal with Chinese aggression.

There is another problem though, one that the Europeans have, but are not willing to acknowledge. That is the lack of men willing and able to fight. This is problem American warmongers are beginning to notice in America. Right-wing Progressives are noticing that the struggle to meet enlistment goals are not just rhetorical. The military is struggling to find young men willing and able to do the work of a modern soldier. Those with the talent are wising up to the reality of this age and the rest simply have the wrong stuff.

For starters, the sorts of men excited about taking orders from a girl are not the sorts of men you want fighting your wars. That only works in Hollywood propaganda. That propaganda, however, has had an impact on the culture. As a result, a decreasing number of men are physically able to meet the minimum requirements. A boy who spent his formative years playing video games and being asked if he would prefer to wear a dress, is unlikely to have the ability to make it through basic, much less be a good soldier.

Then you have the fact that white guys are starting to figure out that the government is their enemy, so signing up to fight for the government is not in their interests. Part of it is the fact that the public has figured out that the neocon response to 9/11 was a scam. They did not care about keeping the country safe from Islam. They only cared about keeping Israel safe from Islam. Importing millions of Muslims after 9/11 did not go unnoticed. A volunteer army relies on patriotism to fill the ranks. Fighting for strangers does not cut it.

There is also the fact that whites are getting wise to what’s happening and public trust is plummeting. A volunteer army not only relies on patriotism, but it relies on civic duty. It is why we still call military service a duty. Some still call politics “public service” even though no one is so naive these days. The point is, like patriotism, civic nationalism is a social contract. Both parties have to uphold their end of the deal in order for it to work. It is why blacks lack patriotism, and they have never been willing to join the military.

The black issue is one to understand. We are constantly bombarded with propaganda about the heroic blacks in the military, but blacks have always been underrepresented in the services. Blacks, of course, are leading the charge against the national anthem. It is not just a stunt by coddled athletes. Blacks in America have never felt a sense of duty to the country, which makes perfect sense, given the nature of black identity. If you see society as dominated by the people you hate, why would you feel loyalty to society?

Then you have the much-celebrated browning of America. As of the last census, the majority of people under-18 are non-white. By the next census, it will be distinctly non-white. War fighting is a young man’s game. A military built to run on smart white guys with a sense of duty is not going to function when it has to rely on non-whites, who despise their host population. Inevitably, the military is going to start looking like a Chicano version of Stripes. No one says it, but everyone in charge sees the problem.

The response will be a greater reliance on high technology, but the cost of the robot warrior goes up faster than his effectiveness. No one bothers to notice that the space age war machine of the Unites States has been fought to a standstill by cave dwelling archaics in Afghanistan. Trillions have been spent trying to outsmart the locals and the graveyard of empires is going to win anyway. In the end, there is no replacement for human capital and there is no way to replace the premier human capital with cheap knockoffs from overseas.

The Warning Signs

An axiom of this age is that the Left always projects onto others the things that it is either doing or planning to do. A good rule is to listen to what they are saying, assume the opposite, and then try to piece together what they are doing. It is the Opposite Rule of Liberalism and it is an iron law of modern life. An obvious example is their howling about election interference. As soon as they started howling about Trump colluding with the Russians, you knew that it was the Left colluding with someone to rig the election.

This is due to something Eric Hoffer noticed about people who join causes. The fanatic is driven by self-loathing. They are attracted to causes, because it allows them to swap their hated identity with that of the group. It is also why they tend to jump from cause to cause, often contradicting previous opinions. Progressivism is a secular religion that is really just a dog’s breakfast of causes. Today it is all about trannies, non-whites, and the never-ending vagina monologue from white women, held together by a hatred of white men.

The point is that you can often get a sense of what the Left is up to by watching where they are casting the accusatory eye. That’s why this story is interesting. Fake twitter followers are a well know phenomenon. It is fairly obvious that many B and C level media personalities buy twitter followers. It would not be shocking to learn that lefty sites like the Daily Beast and Estrogen Post buy followers for their contributors. Are there really close to one hundred thousand people following this person? Seems unlikely.

Anyway, the fact that the NYTimes is focusing on fake YouTube views when their cult is waging an all-out assault on dissidents on-line, probably means that the view counts for lefty YouTube stars are fake. Just how fake is hard to know but given the “by any means necessary” attitude of the Left, there is no reason to think they would be restrained. Keep in mind that the NYTimes was buying traffic from Chinese click farms around the same time they started reporting on the phenomenon of fake followers in twitter.

Perhaps more ominously, this post from the Carlos Slim Journal, demanding Trump be dragged from office and hanged in Lafayette Park suggests the Left’s war on civilization is just getting started. Most people will focus on the rank hypocrisy and dishonesty, but the real focus should be the warning. The Left organized a wide scale conspiracy to rig the last election. The FBI and DOJ are currently running a wide scale conspiracy to hide their ongoing efforts to remove Trump from office and stonewall Congress.

As much as our side jokes around about Pinochet, it is the Left that may be plotting a coup in order to install an authoritarian government. Just look at the organized effort to ban people from the financial system. David Horowitz has just been un-personed by MasterCard and Visa. In the modern age, if you want to wage a civil war, gaining control of the banking system is the first step. Then you take over the internet. Without money or a means to reach a mass audience, fighting back in a civilized way is impossible.

That last bit is important. Most people are willing to fight the good fight until it means coloring outside the lines. That is the water’s edge for most of the people the Left sees as their enemy. It is why the Left is always trying to provoke or invent a backlash. It provides them with cover to scare the normies and use any means necessary to “defend our democracy!” As is always the case, the Left seeks to turn civilization’s virtues into vices they can exploit to undermine society. Your reasonableness is their best weapon.

The thing to understand with the Left is that they are reactionary. Team Obama produced the scheme to rig the last election and when this became apparent to Team Clinton, they reacted by howling about “Russian hacking.” In other words, they immediately began to project their own hated activities onto others. Remember that it was the Left that started the Fake News idea, only to have people point out that the lefty news organs were nothing but fake news. The same was true of the AstroTurf chants over the Tea Party.

What all of this most likely means is that the Democrats are quietly working on their plans to impeach Trump as soon as they gain control of the House this fall. They have upped Pelosi’s Thorazine dosage so she does not blab about it during interviews, but the Left can’t help but get ahead of themselves, hence the NYTimes post. The plan is to impeach Trump in 2019 and then count on the NeverTrump loons in the GOP to join in and force the Senate to remove him. Given the nature of the GOP, this is a good bet.

This is a bit of a meandering post, but the basic point is that it is a mistake to take the Left’s chanting at face value. It is not just that they lie. Ideologues always lie. It is that they are psychologically incapable of concealing their actions. Again, that old self-hatred gets the better of them and they start dropping hints via projection. For two years now, the Left has been trying to convince us that Trump is a dictator, who plots with foreign agents to “harm our democracy.”  That should be read as a warning about what comes next.

That is what puts the Left’s howling about a civil war in perspective. They have been waging a civil war on the rest of us for a couple of years. They have normalized the idea of using public companies to strip people of their right to participate in public debate. They have normalized the idea of stripping people of employment due to their politics. They are now the proscribing people because they hold the wrong opinions. Banning people from using breathing is next. The only thing missing is a coup and a dictator.

The High Cost Of Size

All of the great political philosophies since the Enlightenment have focused on the problem of scarcity. The communists insisted that the abolition of private property would solve the problem of scarcity, so that the only problem would be figuring out how to divvy up the bounty. Libertarians insist that the sanctity of private property solves the problem of scarcity, by making sure the lazy, unfit, and inconvenient starve to death, so the survivors can eat them during lean times. Every ideology has a solution to material scarcity.

What no ideology addresses is the shortage of smart people. Now, there is never an abundance of smart people. Nowhere will you find a business or an organization complaining that they have too many smart people. In fact, companies spend a lot of time and money trying to attract and cultivate smart people. This is the driving force behind a lot of technological automation. It is not so much that it replaces basic labor or reduces costs, as it frees up the smart fraction to focus on the complex problems of the organization.

Now, there are many issues that arise from the natural shortage of smart people. One is that smart people are most valuable when their ideas can be implemented by people who may not be as smart, but have the aptitude to implement the ideas. A good architect needs engineers and engineers need managers, planners, and skilled tradesman. Otherwise, the architect is just a guy who draws stuff. The point is, an organization will not only want to attract the smart fraction, but they will also want to attract the not-quite-so-smart fraction.

Another issue is that the inevitable shortage of smart people will lead to putting not-so-smart people into positions for which they are not qualified. The Peter principle is a well-known concept in management. People in a hierarchy tend to rise to their level of incompetence. The guy who is good as the third in charge gets bumped up to being second in charge, where he is merely competent. Time and circumstances force his promotion into the top spot, where he is over-matched and is viewed as incompetent.

Then there is the problem of people being judged within an organization based on their social skills, rather than their intelligence and competence. The truly stupid are easy to spot, but the mediocre and below average are often hard to notice, because they are extroverts, or they are glib. It seems to be human nature to overestimate the abilities of those with high verbal skills. It is why lawyers always assume they are the smartest people in the room. They have high verbal skills and mistake that for intelligence.

Put it all together and an organization will start out with the normal shortage of smart people. As the organization grows, that shortage will become acute, forcing the firm to rely on a greater number of not-so-smart and mediocrities in positions that should be filled with smart people. The resulting increase in errors will place a further drain on the stock of smart people, as they have to compensate for the downstream problems. Exacerbating this is the increasing tendency to evaluate people on social skills rather than talent.

The result of as an organization gets bigger, it gets dumber. That seems to be the case with American intelligence organizations. Recently, screw-ups downstream from the upper echelon of the CIA, resulted in a very serious breach of security. This led to the exposure of at least thirty spies, all of whom were executed by the Chinese government. This is a serious failure under any conditions, but the cause here suggests the CIA is no longer capable of doing the basics. It is a big bureaucracy full of people way over their heads.

This is not an isolated incident. Diane Feinstein had a Chinese spy on her staff for over twenty years. Counterintelligence is a basic function of the CIA. Their job is look for anomalies in what foreign governments know, because that means the foreign government is getting access from obscure sources. If the guy at the poker table always folds when you have a good hand, it means he knows things he could not know through the normal play of the game. There is no excuse for missing the Feinstein spy.

Of course, there is the matter of John Brennan. He spent 25 years in the CIA as a dangerously incompetence hack. He is known today for being the mentally unbalanced lunatic howling about Trump on cable chat show, but while he was CIA director, he had his e-mail account hacked and exposed by WikiLeaks. By “hacked” it is understood to mean he was recklessly insecure in the handling of his password and account access. The guy never should have been in a junior position, much less a senior one at the CIA.

There are over 20,000 employees at the CIA. Most will never do anything more than process paperwork. Even so, the sheer size of the organization makes it unwieldy for the task assigned to it. Intelligence work is hard. It takes an inventive mind, but also a disciplined mind. The supply of highly disciplined high IQ people willing to spend their lives playing cat and mouse for modest pay is small. Placing a small number of them in a vast stew of incompetents, mediocrities and bureaucrats does not make the stew better.

Fixing agencies like the CIA is simply a matter of making them smaller. Firing everyone with an even number at the end of the agency ID would be a good start. Sure, a few good people would be lost, but the high cost of the mediocre people would more than make up for it. One reckless bozo can cancel out the work of a hundred competent people. The remaining ten thousand people could be broken into five units of two thousand and you would have a better agency overnight. In time, it may even be trustworthy again.

Of course, this is why large organizations can never reform themselves and why fixing American government is impossible. That army of morons at Langley is a constituency within the vast sea of morons known as the federal government. No one reduces their constituency on purpose. Additionally, by the time this is an issue, incompetent boobs like John Brennan are in senior positions. The obsequious climbers have either pushed out the talent or simply swamped them. Government becomes a giant punching itself in the face.

The New Bull Connor

For a long time, Bull Connor was the symbol of southern racism, because he famously used fire hoses and dogs on civil rights agitators in Birmingham Alabama. Like most white people in the 60’s, he opposed the idea of racial integration, but it was his way of doing it that got him labeled as the ultimate racist. It was one thing to believe that integration was a terrible idea. It was another to take pleasure in a hatred of blacks for no other reason than their race. Hatred, even of that which should be hated, always has an ugliness to it.

Today, the ugly face of racial hatred is directed at whites and worn by social justice warriors, claiming to be fighting white supremacy. In reality they are just anti-white bigots who compete with one another over how much they hate white people. One difference between the anti-white bigots of today and guys like Bull Connor is he was happy to live his life in obscurity. He never set out to be a famous racist. Today’s social justice warriors see racial hatred as a path to fame and glory. It is the easy way into the high culture.

An example of this is Brandeis associate professor Dorothy Kim. She is someone passing herself off as a medievalist. In reality, she is a white-hating bigot and a social justice warrior, who lives to harass white people. Her current crusade is an attack on Rachel Fulton Brown, a tenured professor at the University of Chicago. Kim’s reason for attacking Dr. Brown is that she is a conservative white woman, who does real scholarship, rather than agitate for nutty causes. Kim thinks she can get ahead by hating the white woman.

Rachel Fulton Brown is a serious scholar who has written award winning books on arcane medieval topics. She has written this book and this book. Even if you are a fan of medieval European history, these are esoteric subjects, but that is how the stock of knowledge is developed and expanded. Dorothy Kim is a ridiculous person who writes nonsense like this. The only people talking about white supremacy are liars and lunatics. It does not matter which applies here, either should be disqualifying for an academic in civil society.

Dorothy Kim is not just focusing her attention on Rachel Brown. Kim is an all-purpose white-hater who whores herself out to the daffy girls of Progressive media, hired to popularize academic racism. Not content with attacking white people in real-time, the social justice warriors are now determined to rewrite history to make Henry VIII into soul brother number one. In that Daily Beast post, Mx. Kim goes out of her way to fall for the Cheddar Man hoax, suggesting she is dumber than her sparse work product suggests.

That is just the thing about the people like Mx. Kim. They are not just content to publicly attack white people for being white. There is a suicidal nihilism to the modern racist. Their project is as much about decreasing the stock of human knowledge as it is chasing white people from the white societies that welcomed them. What is offensive about Mx. Kim is not that she does not know things, it is that she knows wrong things and demands that the rest of us, as a matter of social justice, accept falsehoods as fact, fiction as truth.

That is another thing you see with the social justice warriors. They seek to replace accomplishment with moral fanaticism. Rachel Brown has reached her status by a long career of being good at her specialty. Mx. Kim is just not bright enough or willing to do the work, so she is attacking white people, in order to establish her bona fides as a culture warrior. Everything about Mx. Kim’s career to this point is a claim that she is a victim, by virtue of her DNA, and therefore must get free stuff from white people or else racism.

That is why these people are so vicious. Being a virtue signaling loon is a highly competitive racket. There is always someone out there preparing a nuttier claim than the nuttiest claim of the moment. Because the ideology of the social justice warrior is completely empty, a pure negative ideology, the result is a version of the mob screaming “Goldstein” in 1984. It is not enough to hate white people. What matters is that you are seen hating whitey and doing so with an enthusiasm that is without rival.

That is the ugliness that Mx. Kim shares with classic racists like Bull Connor from half a century ago. It was not that he opposed integration that made him ugly. It was that he was willing to abandon decency and order in his opposition to it. The willingness to sacrifice everything for a principle is fanaticism and it is just as much an enemy of civil society as the barbarian. That is what you see with people like Mx. Kim. She is a fanatic, ready to burn it all down in the name of social justice. There is nothing uglier than a fanatic.

Addendum: A commenter asked how people like Mx. Kim gets into the academy. The reason the social justice warrior has success is that Progressives are always fighting themselves. By that, I mean they are always at war with that which they fear about themselves or that which they are currently doing. The Left’s rage against Russian meddling corresponds with their own collaboration with Russian oligarchs in an effort to rig recent elections. Google the phrase “Opposite Rule of Liberalism.”

In the case of the academy, the people hooting about racism and white supremacy are relying on the innate racism of the modern academy. “Oh look! We have an Asian applicant in medieval European studies!” The white liberals in the field are so desperate for multicultural status points, they fall all over themselves to find and embrace non-whites, purely on racial grounds. They embrace anti-racism, because they hate their own racism, and the result is more of the self-loathing that drives the Progressive.

Multiculturalism has created a vast market for dull-witted grifters like Mx. Kim. She gets the attention that women naturally crave, but she gets to make a career out of it, thus making herself both a hero of feminism and multiculturalism. Her choice was working in a cubicle somewhere as a clerk or going into the promising world of social justice. it is not hard to see why she chose to be an SJW. It is also easy to see why she is so bitter and nasty. At some level, she knows she is a fraud, and she hates herself even more.

Public-Private Tyranny

In the 1980’s, the term public-private partnership gained popularity, as reformers tried to remedy the problems of spiraling public debt and dwindling public investment in infrastructure. Governments were too strapped to do things like build roads and schools, so they would alter the tax and regulatory system to encourage private enterprise to provide the necessary financing and expertise. A simple example is a city condemning a slum and then giving it to a private developer to build new housing.

There is a formal definition of the concept. “A public-private partnership involves a private entity financing, constructing, or managing a project in return for a stream of payments directly from government or indirectly from users over the life of the project or some other specified period of time.” The laying down of cable and then fiber to provide broadband access is a great example of such an arrangement. The cable company was granted a monopoly and they built out the infrastructure and charged subscriptions.

In theory, it sounds like a winning formula. Government has no incentive to be efficient, as government has no competition. Inevitably, this means government projects become slush funds for the connected and dumping grounds for the otherwise unemployable. The contractors bidding on government work or providing a service on behalf of government have an incentive to keep costs low. Given that future contracts will depend on performance of current contracts, they have an incentive to hit the performance goals.

It’s not without its obvious problems. Efforts to reform public education through public-private partnerships are the obvious example. The primary reason schools fail is they have poor students. The second most common reason is they have poor teachers. No amount of private provision can address the former and public sector unions will never permit reforming the latter. It is why people move to good neighborhoods and send their kids to private schools. It’s a private solution to a private problem.

Of course, public-private partnerships are an effort to address a symptom of a problem, but not the source of the problem. Democratic government has no incentive to increase the capital of society, because office holders are just hired hands. For office holders, government is like a rental car. The renter does not wash the rental car and get the oil changed before returning it. Similarly, the office holder has no reason to improve the part of government he controls, before handing it over to the next guy.

The key to personal success in public life is quickly turning public goods into money and benefits that can be used to buy votes. It’s why state and municipal politicians are fond of increasing public sector benefits. They get the votes and support for their campaigns, while some unknown person downstream gets the cost. In a democracy, government becomes a liquor warehouse during an urban riot. Everyone, even the honest, has an incentive to rush in and carry off as much as they can as quickly as they can.

This is obvious, but there are other problems. Humans in all endeavors seek to prevent competition either through cooperation or domination. Constitutions and courts are intended to keep the competition for public offices open and reasonably fair. To the office holder, this is naturally viewed as a defect that needs to be remedied. That’s where the public-private partnership comes into the mix. Private firms can do things office holders are prevented from doing.

This is what we see with the efforts by the Democrats to rig the last presidential election and then set Trump up for removal. Team Obama could not simply have the FBI arrest him and Team Clinton could not provide electronic surveillance. They formed a public-private partnership, along with Glenn Simpson to get around both problems. The private entities would manufacture evidence that the public entity would use to get warrants, which would result in information they would give to Clinton and later the FISA court.

One of the worst kept secrets in Washington right now is that elements inside the Obama administration conspired with the Clinton campaign to rig the last election. It’s becoming increasingly clear they also conspired with foreign agents. The Mueller probe is just an elaborate ruse to shield this truth from the public to preserve the reputation of the institutions and keep people out of prison. It is the thing everyone knows, because it is manifestly obvious. What no one knows is what to do about it.

Then we have the ongoing efforts to shut down political dissent. The law prohibits politicians from having critics arrested or from shuttering their publications. The law does not prevent private platforms from controlling content, thus we get the match made in heaven, from the perspective of the internet giants and the ruling class. The private firms get their monopolies protected by the state, while the office holders get their critics silenced by the internet giants.

It’s not just the first amendment. Gun grabbers have failed for years to rally public support for gun grabbing. In fact, their efforts to push through gun bans and confiscation have resulted in booming gun sales and support for gun liberalization. To address this defect in government, public officials are now reaching out to their partners in the private sector to bankrupt the gun industry and the NRA. It will not be long before owning a firearm could result in you losing your insurance or bank account.

The funny thing that is happening to our constitutional order is that the political class seems to understand the defects inherent in the system but is choosing to make it worse by enlisting private interests to magnify the defects. They are accelerationists. America is just one giant bust out, where global companies, with the help of our government, are systematically looting the country, while undermining the legitimacy of our system of governance. The public-private partnership has quickly become a public-private tyranny.

Old Men Who Fear Change

One of the first things I learned about conservatism, way back in the before times, was that William F. Buckley made conservatism respectable. In the 1980’s, Buckley became a rock star, riding the wave of enthusiasm for Ronald Reagan. Like a lot of young men in that age, I was caught up in it. Being a conservative was suddenly cool and everyone credited Buckley for making it so. It was hard to argue with the claim. Bill Buckley was a charming, intelligent and sophisticated guy. Who would not want to be like Bill?

The part that no one seemed to notice back then, at least not the people involved in the conservative movement, was that the whole point of the thing was to make the people in it respectable, as judged by their alleged opponents. Pretty much the only thing they really cared about was being seen as respectable. It’s why guys like George Will were not fans of Ronald Reagan initially. They worried that his earthy sense of humor and popularity with normal people would not go over well with their friends on the Left.

A big part of being respectable, at least in modern politics, is drawing the line between yourself and those who are not respectable. In the 1980’s no one thought much about all the people that had been read out of the conservative movement for guys like Bill Buckley to be respectable. That was the thing though, by the 1980’s, conservatism was nothing but drawing lines between the respectable and the unacceptable, to be in good standing with the Left.

That all came to mind when I read this post by the Asness Chair in Applied Liberty. It is the typical flip-flopping equivocation that is a Jonah Goldberg column. If there are two sides to an issue, he will find a way take four sides. Reading one of his columns is like watching a fish flop around on the deck. The basic point of the column is that he fears conservatives have not been vigilant enough in policing that line between themselves and the people the Left finds offensive. Thus, the Alex Jones fiasco.

His follow up column is a call to war for his fellow conservatives. Well, it’s more like a long love letter to Bill Kristol and the other paranoids of the neoconservative cult. He provides a long bit of mythology about Buckley and his fights with the anti-Semites. The reader is obviously supposed to make the connection between those long dead bogeymen from the 1950’s and the bogeymen currently haunting conservatism. In Goldberg’s telling, his generation of conservatives are facing the same challenge as Buckley did 70 years ago.

The amusing part is how Goldberg keeps trying to connect himself to guys like James Burnham and Whittaker Chambers. Maybe being the Asness Chair in Applied Liberty is going to his head. It is just another example of the intellectual hollowness of Buckley conservatism. Chambers was a man of great courage and integrity. Burnham was a brilliant thinker whose ideas are still relevant today. Jonah Goldberg is a feckless airhead. He would have been laughed out of the room by these men.

That aside, there’s a weird cargo cult vibe to all this. The so-called conservatives don’t even bother to think about the arguments coming from the right. They don’t even pretend to know about them. There was not a single mention of the alt-right in National Review until Hillary Clinton mentioned it. Instead, they carry on as if it is 1955 and they are fighting a heroic battle against the John Birch Society. Goldberg’s post has the feel of a man hoping he can make it all go away just by performing all the old rituals.

It really is weird reading this stuff, given where we are now. These guys could be excused for living in the past when the GOP was right there with them. Five years ago, they had no reason to listen to their critics. Times were good and the living was easy. Now, after their audience has abandoned them and Trump is in the White House, their stubborn adherence to a defunct set of arguments is weird. The National Review crowd should be writing their columns while wearing leisure suits.

The thing is, there are two types of conservatives. There are those who seek only to maintain the status quo, regardless the current laws, morals and behavior norms. Then there are the those who believe there is transcendent moral order that corresponds to the natural order. The Buckleyites were always of the first type. The reason they opposed the Left was they feared losing their place at the table. It’s the same reason they oppose the emerging national populists. They’re old men who fear change.

Peisistratos

In the late 7th and early 6th century BC, ancient Athens fell into crisis. As is often the case with the classical period, historians disagree about the causes. One issue upon which everyone agrees is that economics played a part. The wealthy families had become an oligarchy, owning most of the land. Debt-bondage was common. The collateral for loans in that age was the person. This meant that if the Athenian tenant farmers did not pay his rents, he and his children could be seized as slaves.

The way it worked is the farmer would borrow to finance the operations of the farm. If the farm did not produce enough to pay the debt, he would fall into debt bondage. In theory, he literally worked off his debt, so it was a temporary status. There was a special status in the law for someone in bondage for a debt, versus the normal type of slave. The reality was that debt bondage was becoming a permanent state for a large fraction of the population. The result was increasing social strife between the classes.

Rivalry between the leading families was also a problem. As is always the case when there is social unrest, some factions tried to take advantage of it and gain power for themselves at the expense of their rivals. in 632 BC, an Athenian nobleman named Cylon made an unsuccessful attempt to seize power. Many Greek city-states had seen opportunistic noblemen take power on behalf of sectional interests. Factions sought to gain control of the state, to gain an edge over rivals.

There were also regional rivalries that exacerbated the personal and economic turmoil of the age. The rural population had different interests than the urban population. Traders had different interests than farmers. Since most Athenians lived in rural settlements, and debt bondage was an increasing problem, Attika was increasingly resembling Sparta, where a small elite ruled over a large population of helots. This exacerbated the personal and economic rivalries convulsing Athens at the time.

Regardless of the causes, Athens was at a crisis point and fear of a tyrant rising to impose order, led the Athenians to turn to the wisest man in Athens. That man was Solon, a statesman, lawmaker and poet. He was of noble birth, but he was sometimes described as a self-made man, suggesting his family was of modest means. In 595 BC Solon had led the Athenian forces against the Megarians, resulting in a heroic victory. Allegedly, it was the power of his poetry that inspired the Athenians to carry the day.

By the time the Athenians turned to Solon, he was rich, a famous poet and a famous military leader. Solon was awarded temporary autocratic powers by Athenian citizens on the grounds that he had the wisdom to sort out their differences in a peaceful and equitable manner. His task was to find a way to resolve the factional rivalries. The result was a series of economic, legal and moral reforms that are remembered to this day as the Reforms of Solon. Once instituted, Solon gave up his position and left Athens.

The Athenians agreed to abide by these reforms for a period of ten years, but within a few years the old problems and rivalries were back. In addition to the old problems, the defects in the reforms created new problems. Some officials refused to perform their duties as described, while other posts were left vacant. The reforms worked if Solon was around to lend his name to them. Once Solon was gone, the result was worse than before the reforms. As a result, the people blamed Solon for the breakdown of order.

Eventually one of Solon’s relatives, Peisistratus, ended the factionalism by force, becoming tyrant and confirming what everyone feared would happen prior to Solon’s reforms. Solon was still alive, and he mocked the Athenians for allowing Peisistratus to seize power, by standing outside his home, wearing his uniform. Despite being driven into exile twice, Peisistratus was eventually able to impose order on Athens and he ruled as tyrant until his death. His sons succeeded him and ruled until 510 BC.

Solon gets positive treatment from history for having tried to preserve Athenian democracy and for having some success at curbing the power of the aristocrats. Aristotle credited Peisistratus with laying the foundation for the eventual rise of Athens. He changed the economy to be based on trade and he reformed agriculture, away from grains to olives. He did this by offering loans to farmers so they could make the transition. He also built a water system capable of sustaining a large population.

The lesson here is that reform is rarely successful, unless it is imposed by force. The reason is the status quo will always be preferable to those in power. Any reform through mutual consent must involve trade-offs that do nothing to alter the fundamental power arrangements. That was the defect of Solon’s reforms. While they temporarily alleviated the results of the power arrangements in Athenian society, they never attempted to alter them. The result of Solon’s reforms was nothing more than a pause in the factionalism.

This is something to keep in mind in the current age. The problems we see are not caused by errors in voting or mistakes in public policy. There is an underlying systemic problem that cannot be voted away. At the end of the Industrial Revolution, similar problems existed, but the political class was strong enough to impose reforms on the industrial barons and alter the power relationships in American society. That was possible because politics was a power center with the monopoly on violence.

Today, the political class is composed entirely of hired men, speaking on behalf of the interests that back their political careers. In fact, most are just actors, hired because they fit the right profile and look good on television. They have no power. This is the problem Trump is confronting as he tries to push through reforms. It’s not that Congress opposes these reforms. It’s that their paymasters oppose the reforms. He’s dealing with flunkies and errand boys. We don’t need a Solon right now. We need a Peisistratus.

Modest Proposals

The paleo-conservative thinker, Sam Francis, introduced the term “anarcho-tyranny” into the dissident vocabulary. He defined it as “we refuse to control real criminals (that’s the anarchy), so we control the innocent (that’s the tyranny).” For example, the streets are littered with speed cameras, red-light cameras and other surveillance equipment to tax motorists. On the other hand, if your car is stolen, the cops cannot be bothered to look for it and you must hope the insurance company is generous.

Francis focused on crime, but we see it everywhere. Because it has crept up slowly on us, the chaos of our age just feels normal, but so does the shrinking freedom of the surveillance state. A way to see this is to think about the small, relatively easy to impose rules our government could do now, that would make life better. Yet, these modest proposals are never mentioned, much less debated. In fact, the very idea of the state imposing quality of life measures is outrageous.

For example, the scourge of mobile phones is obvious to everyone. We have people walking into traffic while texting. Every summer, there are stories of people coming to harm as they try to take a selfie. Even if those are rare exceptions, driving has become a stressful adventure, because of drivers talking and texting. Spend time around the imperial capital and you come to hate the cell phone. This is an easily remedied problem that the government could address tomorrow.

For example, the Feds could tell mobile phone makers that their devices must shut off when they detect movement. Cars with media centers have this feature, so drivers are not fiddling with the thing while driving. If mobile phones were so equipped, the number of drivers smashing into one another over texting would drop to zero. Idiots and teenagers would hate this, but so what? There’s never a need for a human to talk or text while driving. If you need to talk, pull over and have your conversation.

The assault on privacy by tech companies could be also addressed. Your picture, your name, your financial information, all the stuff that defines you is yours. It should be treated like any other property. Google is not allowed to build a surveillance point on your front lawn. Why are they allowed to spy on you and sell your information to the highest bidder? A law that requires written permission to possess and distribute private information would put an end to the abuse of privacy.

In case you think this is impossible, keep in mind it used to exist. Credit bureaus used to need permission to release your credit history. One of the things you signed in the loan process was a form giving the lender the right to pull your credit report and call on your references. The same is true of employers. The application process included you giving them permission to call former employers. Simply restoring a basic of civil society – property rights – would solve many problems.

To get a sense of just how far we have gone down the road to serfdom, ask a normie friend about such a proposal. Ask them if the government should require Facebook to get your written permission to use your data. The right leaning normie will recoil in horror at the state doing anything. The left leaning normie will most likely give you a blank look, as they are unable to process the concept of privacy. The very idea of you owning you is now alien to most Americans.

On the other hand, the idea of transparency among the ruling class has become an artifact of a bygone age. Around the imperial capital are thousands of not-for-profit operations that are financed by rich people. You can look up some basic information about them, but you can rarely find out who pays the bills. Take, for example, The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights. This group harasses white people and is run by a white-hating woman named Kristen Clarke. Who pays for this?

Politics is now a clash between these types of groups financed by shadowy characters that none of us see. Instead, we see trained actors as spokesman for these front groups that essentially operate as money laundering operations. Because the billionaire class is unable to hire politicians directly, they funnel their bribes through non-profits. Cliff Asness gets to pay Jonah Goldberg to be his mouthpiece and he gets a tax break. He’s not just a member of the over-class. He’s a philanthropist!

Cliff Asness may be a civic minded patriot, but the only reason we can know his name is he chooses to let us know it. He could just as easily have made the gift anonymously or under some other name. Unless you are into dissident politics, you would never know that every utterance of Jonah Goldberg is paid for by some billionaire with interests that may or may not be your interests. Every nickel that comes into a not-for-profit should be public information, so we can know who is paying the paid actors.

The point is, there are probably a hundred small things that could be done today to significantly improve life in America, for the citizens of America. The increasing shrillness of public debate is closely linked to the lawlessness of modern life. There’s a reason the state is incapable of even small reform. It goes back to what Sam Francis observed with crime. The class-consciousness of the managerial class is the same phenomenon that we see with public bureaucracy.