Category Archives: Politics

The Russian Stain

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During the Cold War, popular culture portrayed the Soviets in two ways, often at the same time. There was the ruthless ideologue, efficiently going about his business as an implacable enemy of freedom. The other type of Soviet character was the morally conflicted guy, whose honor compelled him to serve his country, but he also understood that communism was immoral. As far as villains go, both types of Soviet were given a lot of respect, because Hollywood is sympathetic to Bolshevism.

Today, Hollywood rarely uses Russians as bad guys, but our political class sees them as the epicenter of evil in the modern world. Steve Sailer noted the other day that the pundit class has rewritten recent history to fit this narrative. The neocons are celebrating the tenth anniversary of something that never really happened, at least not in the way they currently tell it. Here is neocon puppet Mikheil Saakashvili, and Robert Kagan and Condoleezza Rice repeating the same whopper.

The funny thing about this myth-making is that it is unnecessary. The number of people in the political class who could locate South Ossetia is tiny. Most normal Americans would be puzzled to learn that there is a country named after the peach state. As a public relations item, this ten year old non-event is useless. There’s also the fact that the actual events are easily accessible on-line. It looms large for the neocons, though, so they can’t stop thinking about it.

The neocons love mucking about in that part of the world. Some would say their interests go back to the pale of settlement days. That is the sort of thing that can get your in trouble. Still, there’s pretty good evidence that the American foreign policy establishment has been meddling in the region since the Soviet Empire. The Boston Marathon bomber was probably recruited by US intelligence at some point. His uncle seems to know a lot of people in the CIA.

The thing that no one has yet to explain is why has the American ruling elite become fixated on Russia. Even if the reason for the neocon obsession is ancient hatreds, why is the America left nuts about the Russians? It could simply be convenience, but there are better villains in the world for them to hate, at least in practical terms. China, for example, makes for a much better villain. Iran or Saudi Arabia work much better with the left’s current deep dive into matriarchy.

Even if you want to believe that the left has been infected by the ancient hatred that animates the neocons, the tenor of the left’s hatred is different. The neocons see Russia as a problem to be controlled so it does not revert back to its imperial habits. The left now sees Russia as Old Scratch. Russia is not a problem to be managed and more than the devil can be managed. The very existence of Russia is seen as an affront to the neo-liberal world order.

This visceral hatred has some similarities to the orogressive loathing of the imperial governments of Europe prior to the Great War. Wilson despised the old order, which is why he was so aggressively vengeful toward the Austrians and Germans. American progressives seem to have developed the same view of Russia, and to a lesser degree the Visegrad counties. Their resistance to the neo-liberal order is viewed as an ideological challenge and that can never be tolerated.

The difference is that a century ago, Wilsonian democracy was ascendant, while the monarchical order was in decline. America and American leaders were the new kids on the world stage, pushing aside the old guard. Today, the neo-liberal order is in a defensive crouch. Meanwhile, Russia and Eastern Europe are pretty much just normal countries do pretty well. Perhaps part of the hatred for Russia is the need to find something to blame for the current troubles in the West.

Of course, it is a reminder of the absolute intolerance of secular religions. When people assign the natural order to divine forces, they can be indifferent to alternative forms of worship, as a part of the great mystery of life. When the natural order is a man made creation and the moral code is created and maintained by man, any deviation must be viewed as a challenge to the creator’s legitimacy. The stubborn existence of European countries practicing the old ways is an insult to the neo-liberal creators.

There also may be the issue of reach. Russia is poor and relatively weak compared to the West, but it remains out of reach. It’s ability to thrive outside the new world order suggests the new world order cannot include the whole world. Central to the liberal impulse, going back to Wilson, is totalitarianism. Russia is like a stain that they cannot get out of the fabric of global society. Putin is a new Tsar, the return of that same stubborn problem they cannot resolve.

Democracy Without Borders

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Steve Sailer is fond of characterizing the Democrats as the “party of fringes” as they make their primary appeal to minority groups. When they run short of minorities, they create them by finding a way to slice off some portion of the majority, declaring it an oppressed minority. The result is we have one party that is the default for the white majority and another party that is for none-whites. It is the circus acts attacking the audience members.

This misses a larger consequence of democracy. That is, democracies must always seek to expand the electorate. This is an easily observed pattern. In the 19th century, as the West began to experiment with limited democracy, the franchise was sharply limited to males of wealth. The vote was limited to men, usually over the age of 25, and limited to property holders. In the early years of political liberalism, less than 10% of the adult population could vote.

The franchise slowly expanded, even in monarchies. The German Empire had universal male suffrage by 1871. Italy expanded the franchise to all men over 30 by 1912 and then lowered the age to 21 in 1918. The British followed a similar pattern. Universal male suffrage became the norm, then it was female suffrage. Unsurprisingly, women voting got going first in Germany, the birthplace of every bad idea in human history, and then spread around the West.

In the United States, the presence of a large black population, as well as a sizable indigenous population, added another wrinkle to the process. The urban immigrant population of the early 20th was another group exuded from voting. Eventually, these groups were handed a ballot. Immigrants became a powerful political force, pushing aside the heritage population in major cities. Blacks have become a key part of the Democratic constituency, once granted full voting rights in the 60’s.

The history of liberal democracy since the late 18th century has been a steady expansion of the voting base. At each turn, various arguments have been put forth in support of expanding the franchise, but the one thing that has always been true is there is never a move to narrow it. After every reform effort, every crisis and every war, the arguments are always in favor of expanding the franchise. Today, the debate is over handing a ballot to children, the retarded and foreigners.

As much as some people wish to believe that open borders are motivated by greed, the real reason is something more systemic. An official open borders policy for labor is actually bad for employers looking to game the rules. That is the whole point of hiring non-citizens over citizens. The illegal, is less likely to fight back at exploitative employers. Open the borders and they become a part of the normalized labor force available to everyone.

The real motivation behind open borders is systemic. In a democracy, all fights within the ruling class take place within the bounds of democracy. One side, let us call them the reformers, wants to change things. The other side, presumably benefiting from the rules, resists these changes. Selling the status quo to existing beneficiaries is easy, because over time, democracy creates a prevailing consensus. This leaves the reformers at a numerical disadvantage.

The solution is to expand the voter base. Political reformers of the 19th century, looking to reform the legal and economic arrangements, could appeal to disenfranchised men, offering them access in exchange for a vote, if they could get the vote. Social reformers of the 19th and 20th century could appeal to the female vote, if they could get women the franchise. The last fifty years in America has been about creating a new voters, by expanding the franchise with race consciousness .

The fight over open borders today are actually a battle to expand the franchise by those seeking to push through a post-national agenda. Since the Cold War, the White House has been held by two progressives and a neocon, which is just a hyper-violent variant of progressivism. Despite a near total dominance of politics, the political center has not moved that much since the end of the Cold War. The consensus has the advantage of numbers, so the solution is to import millions of new voters.

The expansion of the electorate is a consequence of democracy. In the age of kings, the ruling class was narrow, closed and well defined. The interests of the king are the interests of the property classes. Disputes are narrow, as the ruling class is hierarchical, with the king having the final word. The ruling class of a monarchy has a motivation to keep the ruling class numbers small. Expansion of their class must necessarily dilute their power within the ruling class. No one wants that.

In a democracy, no one owns the state, so factionalism is the inevitable result of disputes over the proceeds of government. By the logic of democracy, the fights between the factions are adjudicated by the public through elections. Eventually, a consensus forms and the major factions find an equilibrium. The minor factions and the losers of previous fights have no recourse other than to undermine the consensus and alter the make up the voting public.

It is axiomatic that democracy must be short-term oriented. This is not due to greedy voters, as much as the nature of democracy. The people holding office are temporary office holders with no investment in their position. Therefore, their goal is to squeeze every drop from their position as quickly as possible, Hillary Clinton is the ideal politicians in a democracy, because she wants to auction off every asset of the office she holds, as quickly as possible.

When seen in the light of democracy’s inevitable expansion of the franchise, open borders make perfect sense as the next logical step in Western democracy. It is why the open borders advocates are endlessly chanting about “our democracy” requiring the free flow of people. Democracy starts as a system for the people, controlled by the people in order to chart their own path. It soon becomes a system that eliminates the very concept of a people.

A Garden of Idiots

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It is axiomatic that the political class of a society is a reflection of the culture. That culture is what grows out of the biology of the people, but there is an interplay between culture and biology. The ethnic differences between Swedes and Danes, or even Swedes and Prussians, are trivial, at least in the purely biological sense, but, the culture of Swedes, Danes and Prussians are different in important ways. For that matter, the culture that produced The Lion of the North was very different from that of modern Sweden.

Another way of looking at this is that the type of men in leadership of a society are a reflection of the political culture. At the Founding, the political class of the American colonies was fertile ground. Even adjusting for two plus centuries of propaganda, the men that birthed America were extraordinary in quality and quantity. One or two great minds makes for a special generation of men. The 18th century colonial political class produced many great minds, indicating an amazingly fertile political soil at the time.

On the other side of this, during the same period, is the French aristocracy. One of the remarkable things about that period is that the political class had no able men. The history of the French Revolution is the story of one missed opportunity after another to reform and respond to the changes sweeping the country. All the famous names from that period are from well outside the political elite. The only reason anyone remembers Marie Antoinette is she lost her head over remarks attributed to her that she most likely never said.

Anyway, this comes to mind when seeing a story like this one.

Conservatives should “fight back” against the alt-right and white nationalists, and do a better job reclaiming classic terms to stamp out identity politics, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said on Thursday.

“We have to go back and fight for our ground and re-win these ideas and marginalize these guys the best we can to the corners,” Ryan said. “Do everything you can to defeat it.”

Ryan made the comments in conversation with National Review senior editor Jonah Goldberg. The two conservatives spoke at an event hosted by the American Enterprise Institute. Ryan had harsh words for the alt-right, an umbrella term for extreme right-wing individuals who reject mainstream conservatism and often embrace racism and white supremacy.

“That is not conservatism. That is racism. That is nationalism. That is not what we believe in. That is not the founding vision, that is not the founders’ creed,” Ryan said.

That goes beyond stupid. It is offensively stupid. Even today, grammar school civics lessons make clear that the Founders were crafting a new nation. The entirely of the founding myth is based on “creating a new nation in the wildness.” The Founders were so nationalistic, they even wrote it into the preamble of the Constitution.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

That is the very essence of nationalism. Now, Paul Ryan is entering that phase that reminds everyone why it is best to make a change as soon as it is clear a change must be made. When the employee puts in their notice, pay them their two weeks and send them home. Ryan is now unburdened from the need to lie about his true opinions, so he is speaking his mind, what little there is of it. That just underscores the fact that this feckless airhead is the best the current political class has been able to produce.

Ryan is not an isolated example. His predecessor was a raging alcoholic who would burst into tears at public events. Before him we had Nancy Pelosi, a women on so many psychiatric drugs she rattles when she walks. Look around at the elected officials and it is hard to find someone you would trust to run the second shift at a convenience store. Our political culture is not just a garden overrun with weeds. The weeds took over a long time ago and now there is nothing but weeds. It produces no men of merit.

It is not just a consequence of democracy. Take a look at the conspirators involved in the sedition scandal. Former CIA Director John Brennan, who helped form the conspiracy, is a former communist. He supported the Communist Party candidate in the 1976 election and it was not an act of protest. He was an actual communist. Today he is an unhinged fanatic who goes on social media demanding a military coup against the President. Again, this man was the head of the CIA under Obama. The CIA. How is this even possible?

It does not just stop there. Look at the “intellectual” side of the ruling culture. Paul Ryan gave that interview to Jonah Goldberg, who is waddling around with the title “Senior Fellow” at what is supposed to be a prestigious think tank. Probably the most famous public intellectual in the academy right now is Steven Pinker, who is prone to the most basic logical fallacies. The American college campus is a doctrinaire breeding ground for narrow minded fanatics hellbent on pulling the roof down on Western Civilization.

The political culture of a society can break off from the general culture or even start as an alien over class, as in the case of invasion. The French political class in the 18th century was so divorced from the rest of the kingdom, they as well have been foreigners. The Russian political class, what little there was of of it at the end of the 19th century, was wholly disconnected from the culture of the Russian Empire. There’s certainly a strong whiff of that in present day America. Our rulers are nothing like us now.

Even so, whatever the source material for the current ruling elite, what it is producing is of such poor quality, it suggest a very bad end. Donald Trump is our guy, but let’s face it, he should not be President. If he is what is necessary to prevent the country’s political class from strangling the rest of us through staggering idiocy, it is past time to think weeding the garden is enough. This garden of idiots is beyond the point where a good dose of weed killer will work. It’s time to plow it under and salt the earth, starting fresh elsewhere.

Vae Victis

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The FTN guys posted a special podcast on the American Revolution and the process that resulted in the Constitution. Instead of reciting the standard mythology about the Founders and their alleged love of liberty, they get into the economic motivations of the men who met in Philadelphia to restructure post-colonial America. They also talk about the men who were excluded, as well as the interests they represented. It is a well-done episode that gets into the forgotten parts of the founding story, as well as the economic motivations.

The basis of their analysis is the historian Charles Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. Beard argued that the structure of the Constitution and the process that produced it was the result of the personal financial interests of the Founders. For example, George Washington had provided significant financing for the revolution, so the Constitutional guarantee that the newly formed nation would pay its debts worked out pretty well for people like Washington and the other bond holders.

Beard built on earlier Progressive interpretations of American history and can probably be described as a proto-Marxist historian. His analysis of the Founding is that it was first a revolt against the monarchy and then a counter revolution against democracy by the mercantile class located in the cities. It was not just the issue of repaying war debts. The financial class also saw the Articles of Confederation as a hindrance to trade, because there was no central authority to strike trade agreements with foreign governments.

Beard is an interesting guy, who was immensely popular with the Left into the Cold War, but then fell out of favor in the 1960’s. This seems like an odd thing, given that his reading of American history is based in class conflict. The New Left historians, however, rejected that interpretation in favor of racial and sexual conflict, which meant abandoning facts and standards in favor of emotion and vengeance. Neo-conservative historians rejected all of that in favor of selling the narrative of Americanism as a vehicle for present policy.

One of Beard’s insights was that the people located in cities not only have a different set of economic interests, but they also have a different relationship with government. In the 19th century, which meant the city dwellers were much more receptive to socialism than the citizens in the country. The main reason was that the city dweller gets used to bumping up against the government on a daily basis. It feels natural to them. Citizens in the country, particularly in the 19th century, had little contact with the state, so it seemed alien to them.

This suggests something about the nature of socialism, as throughout history urban populations have supported authoritarians, while rural populations have not. In the ancient world, a savvy tyrant like Peisistratus could appeal to the masses of urban poor, to challenge the power of the aristocrats. On the other hand, authoritarian appeals work much better in high density environments. Still, daily familiarity with the power of the state makes people more trusting and comfortable with it. Socialism relies on that trust.

Of course, the defect of class-conflict historiography is that it tries to jam all facts into a model of society. Instead of the theory explaining history, history is used to explain the theory. There is no question that the men who met in Philadelphia had direct financial interest in the outcome. They were also motivated by all the usual stuff like patriotism, regional loyalty, and petty stupidity. That stuff is every bit as interesting as economics and just as important. In other words, history is both particles and waves.

More important and related to the podcast, is the fact that the people who drive history have personal interests. The men who revolted against the king, did so because they saw an advantage in it. Once they gained control of the country, they were not about to give it away or arrange things to their disadvantage. After all, the whole point of the revolution was to get a better deal. The Articles of Confederation were simply an interregnum, while the new elite figured out how they were going to lock in their position after evicting the old elite.

That was the point of the Constitution and the point of all subsequent changes to it, including the Civil War. Similarly, the mythology of the founding, as well as the “second founding” as neoconservative historians call the Civil War, is part of locking in that position via the miracle of propaganda. All of the soupy romanticism of American history is intended to convince the rest of us that the current arrangements are the result of Providence. Political arrangements are not about ideals. They are about power.

This is an important lesson for anyone in dissident politics. The first goal, that which everything bends toward, is to gain power. This is why the New Left has rolled through the culture. They first seized power and then cooked up timeless principles to justify their position. It is also why the legacy Right’s appeal to principle must be rejected. Limiting your options by self-imposed rules and inviolable principles is a recipe for failure. The truth of life is that politics is about power. First you seize power and then vae victis.

The Globalist Cries Out…

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One of the favorite tactics of the usual suspects is to attack the good guys in order to provoke a response. Then they use that response as an excuse to wage war against the good guys, claiming it is in self-defense. The game is to find a Fort Sumter and if one is not available, they manufacture one. That’s why the Left is attacking Trump people in public places. They hope someone will lose their temper. Then they can claim they are the victim and their crazy demands are justified.

A corollary to this strategy, one popular with so-called conservatives, is to undermine the efforts of their supporters, then claim they were justified in their reticence, because it was doomed all along. It’s a weird game of “I told you so.” The Tea Party movement is a great example. The Republicans were dead in the water after 2008, until white voters revolted and resuscitated the party on populist issues. The GOP repaid them by systematically undermining their efforts, then said “I told you so!”

It’s tempting to think this is unique to America, where our two party system forces everyone to choose between the turd sandwich and the giant douche. It means the two parties can collude with one another, without fear of a third party. As we see with the Brits, a multi-party system does not prevent the so-called conservatives from selling out their voters. After two years of foot-dragging, the Tories have figured out how to comply with the Brexit referendum, without actually doing it.

The UK position crucially “evolves” in two ways that would allow for a Norway-style Brexit deal covering at least part of the EU single market. The first is Britain’s proposal for a “free trade area for goods” involving the UK and the EU that in effect continues existing regulatory and customs arrangements for manufacturing and agricultural products after Brexit. This is achieved by the UK becoming a rule-taker, with a treaty-based commitment to “ongoing harmonisation with EU rules on goods”. Just as important is Britain’s concession on enforcement. UK courts would pay “due regard” to European rulings in cases relating to EU-set rules. In other words, while Britain is a separate legal jurisdiction after Brexit, the European Court of Justice would be supreme in interpreting the UK-EU goods rule book. There are caveats — for example the British parliament could veto changes to the rule book if it accepts the “consequences for market access”. But taken together, the safeguards offer no more freedom than Norway enjoys as a member of the European Economic Area. In his resignation letter Mr Davis dismissed the sense of parliamentary control as “illusory rather than real”.

The short version of this ploy by the Tories is that Britain will technically leave the EU, but continue to abide by all of the rules of the EU. It is an elaborate game of make believe, where everyone is supposed to pretend the government is complying with the will of the people, but nothing really changes. Of course, the Brexiters in government have no choice but to resign. Brexit Secretary David Davis resigned, followed by Boris Johnson a day later.

Of course, the usual suspects are out in force saying, “We told you so! Britain can’t leave Europe.” In the Atlantic, we have all the examples of the typical tactics from these guys. There’s blaming the victim, claiming the Brexiters are responsible for the failure. Then there is the claim the Brexiters are getting what they deserve. Then, of course, the claim that Brexit could never work. Since the usual suspects have had no luck with Trump, they are keeping in shape by plying their trade on British topics.

This is just another reminder that the first enemy of the populists must be the legacy conservatives, who work as bodyguards for the ruling class. The whole point of the Brexit referendum was to undermine the populists. When that failed, the Tories shifted to a policy of killing the initiative with an endless process. If the result of this is new elections, they will try to frighten the voters, by claiming Jeremy Corbyn will scuttle the whole deal, which he probably would do, if given the chance.

What needs to happen in Britain, as well as the United States, is for the conventional conservatives to collapse. What must replace it is an authentic Right that offers a reasoned and practical alternative to the neoliberal order. In Britain, it means the Tories become UKIP without the eccentrics and trouble makers. In the US, it means the GOP becomes the party of Trump. That can only happen with a populist intellectual movement to provide energy and ideas to the New Right.

The Gangster State

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The defining feature of gang life is personal loyalty trumps all else. This is true for low level street gangs, as well as complex organized gangs. The rules are not written down or agreed to by consensus. They are imposed top-down by a group of men loyal to one man and to each other. The head of a drug cartel has lieutenants to enforce discipline on those down the line. The rules within those groups are similarly enforced by lieutenants loyal to the guy in charge of the group.

The effect of this is a chaotic lawlessness. The punishment for the exact same transgression may be wildly different in two different cases. It all depends upon the relationship between the boss and the offender. While all criminal organizations have rules against betraying confidences, there is no fixed rule on the punishment, despite what you see on television. Baltimore gangsters rat on one another all the time to get better prison terms, with varying consequences.

Consider what we are watching with our government. News brings word that the US Attorney is dropping charges against the terrorists who went on a rampage during the inauguration last year. They announced this on a holiday week, so it would get the least amount of news coverage. Now, they certainly could have looked into who financed the riot, who helped organize it and then went after the shot callers, but they never bothered to do any of that. Instead, they dropped the case.

Now, we have mountains of laws for dealing with criminal groups. The Feds could go after a Lacy MacAuley, who details her activities on-line, in order to figure out who pays her rent. Then they could go after that person or group. This is basic police work. At the very minimum, the people financing these terrorists would know they have some exposure, but that never happens. You see, everyone knows who finances Antifa and other terrorists operations.

Here is another example. Peter Strzok is the focus of a serious criminal conspiracy to subvert the last election. A mountain of evidence pointing to his guilt has been in the public domain for a year, yet he was just recently fired from the FBI. He has not been charged with anything and it appears he will never be charged. In fact, he is now telling Congress he has no intention of testifying. In fact, he is not going to show up. Their silly laws no longer apply to people in his gang.

Again, this gets to the way in which gang life operates. There may be rules, but what matters is who enforces the rules and to whom the rules are to be applied. In this case, the wide-ranging criminal organization known as the Democratic Party will never let their people get punished by the Republicans. Those rules about complying with a subpoena from Congress only apply when the gangsters with power can enforce them and they will only enforce them when it suits their interests.

This becomes more obvious when looking at the whole criminal enterprise that is currently called the FBI. There is no question that the people at the top engaged in a wide-ranging criminal conspiracy to spy on the Trump campaign and engineer a criminal investigation of his administration, for the purpose of removing him from office. This is so obvious that no one bothers to deny it. Instead, the game is to avoid discussing it in public and pretend it never happened.

Lurking in the secret FBI files can be only three possibilities. One, there is proof they cooked the whole thing to help get Hillary Clinton elected. The other is some out of left field explanation for the mountain of data, that points to an innocent motive. The final option is a massive hole in the system where the damning proof used to exist but has now been destroyed as part of the cover-up. To date, the FBI and DOJ refuse to comply with Congressional subpoenas to answer this question.

Again, we are back to the gangster model. The people inside these agencies have a primary loyalty to the gang, not to the laws of the country or the alleged institutions charged with promulgating and enforcing the laws. In gang life, you are first loyal to the gang and that’s what we see with this case. Rod Rosenstein was sent to Congress in order to deliver a threat. In a prior age, Devin Nunes would have found a black palm print on his door.

Of course, that seems to be what has happened to Representative Jim Jordan, who is now having to answer questions about a sex scandal from 30 years ago. He was an assistant coach at Ohio State, when another coach supposedly had homosexual relations with some of his players. The liberal media is running with it, because they are told to go after Jordan. The reason? Jordan went after Rosenstein at a hearing and his gang did not like it.

You see, Ohio State hired a law firm to investigate the matter. That law firm is named Perkins Coie, a mammoth firm with global operations. Coincidentally, they were the law firm at the heart of the phony dossier the FBI used to get secret warrants on the Trump campaign. Perkins Coie was the Hillary Clinton campaign’s firm, and they hired FusionGPS to put together the fake dossier, then gave it to the FBI, the media, and scoundrels like John McCain. It is not hard to connect the dots here.

What appears to the rest of us to be corruption and lawlessness, is actually the natural functioning of gang life, in that everything revolves around who is enforcing the rules and against whom they are being applied. The first and only question anyone cares to answer is “how is this good for us?” Everything follows from that answer. The people in the DOJ and FBI are only concerned about what is good for the gang. This is gang life and this is life in the gangster state.

There Will Be Blood

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In a healthy and orderly society, the ruling class maintains a set of rules for arbitrating disputes, allocating power and disciplining transgressors. The rules governing the ruling class are intended to defend the ruling class from internal threats, as well as external ones. The rules make sure that people entering the ruling elite are the sort who will improve and defend the system. It also protects those new members, by giving them an orderly path up through the hierarchy.

Imagine if it was acceptable in the Senate for a back bencher to murder his rivals in order to gain a senior position in the Senate. That could be tempting to an upstart, but then again, killing off newcomers would also make sense. Having rules against murdering rivals protects everyone. An orderly system of distributing power and promoting new people up the hierarchy encourages everyone in the ruling class to defend the ruling class system.

It’s why so-called conservatives rush to the nearest microphone to disavow challenges from their right. They always frame it is a choice between reasonable compromise versus unreasonable extremism. Their calls for civility are essentially a defense of the current order. The rules work for them, as it allows them to enjoy a one percent lifestyle as the opposition to the Left. While not as gratuitous, progressives will also call for civility when they sense a threat from their Left.

That’s what makes the debate on the Left about tactics interesting to those on this side of the great divide, even though we have no role in the debate. There is no one speaking for our issues in the halls of power and our people are excluded from the political debate. On the other hand, the most radical progressive crazies get at least an audience with the people in charge. This Atlantic piece gives a little hint that maybe the moderate middle is about to collapse.

American politics is today a brutal boxing match of harassing confrontations. The disagreements renew two enduring questions: one philosophical, one historical. Is political harassment civil? And do the ugly political confrontations signal a sharp departure, or have they always existed in the United States of America?

Moderates in both major political parties have long argued no on both fronts. Their political brand is unity. They pursue the absence of tension. That has meant avoiding confrontations through building political bridges high above the audible river of children crying in detention facilities, in police cars and cells, in abandoned schools, in abuse-infested homes, in rat-infested apartments, in searches for incarcerated and deported parents, in funeral homes over closed caskets, in plantation shacks after their first whipping, and in slave auctions fearing their new harassers.

These political moderates classify as uncivil those, like Donald Trump, who would toss children into those crying spaces. They classify as uncivil those, like Maxine Waters, who run down into those crying spaces and call for the all-out harassment of the harassers. They look down on both the Trumps and the Waters’ from the heights of their self-styled civility. They look down on those crying children—and their comatose or raging defenders—and counsel patience, preaching a religious belief in the American political process.

Now, you have to put aside the fact that the author of that piece is a ridiculous person with a fake name. His lack of authenticity is part of the act that gets him a place in the prevailing orthodoxy. The angry black man routine allows him to play the part of house anti-white among the ruling class Progressives. If he had stuck with his birth name, he would be forced to play a different role, as no one is going to take seriously a guy playing the Malcolm X part with the name “Mister Rogers” and sporting a cardigan.

What matters is his argument that justice requires the just to be uncivil, by which he means overthrowing the rules. After all, incivility is by definition the rejection of the rules of discourse. Radicals have always been attracted to this formulation, as they always imagine themselves as the righteous underdog fighting the powerful system. In the last century, this was at least plausible, if not entirely accurate. Communist revolutionaries wanted a new system. The New Left was in revolt against the previous generation.

Today, the Progressives are in total control of American life. If you doubt this, name a left-wing web site that has been banned from the internet. The terrorist group Antifa is allowed to operate on Twitter and Facebook. Post FBI crime stats on social media and you risk being doxed by a Huffington Post writer and losing your job. In other words, the people in total control of the system are now losing faith in the system, because they do not think it is effective enough at crushing their enemies. Ibram X. Kendi wants more blood.

This is not surprising. From Robespierre through Marxism, into the multiculturalism of today, the Left has always been a spiritual cause, because all of their schemes require a certain type of person, a certain moral understanding. Ultimately what is required for their society to work is a certain moral order that can only be imposed. As Progressivism has curdled into an anti-white ascendancy, it means erasing all traces of whiteness, which is going to mean erasing white people. You cannot do that and remain civil.

What we are seeing is that the anti-white ascendancy that was birthed by cultural Marxism, brings with it the same defects as Marxism. That is, it lacks a limiting principle, so it inevitably proceeds to the most extreme expression of its core beliefs. There was no end to radical intolerance in 20th century Marxism. There will be no end to the racial bloodlust by anti-white radicals. It is why anti-whites are offended by calls to civility. The inevitable end point of their ideology is unrestrained vengeance against whites.

A dozen years ago, Mark Steyn made the point that the history of ruling elites reforming themselves is not very encouraging. That was in the context of immigration. All these years on, we see that our ruling classes have done nothing to stem the flood of migrants into the West. Therefore, it is hard to imagine them standing up to the anti-white radicals they have cultivated the last few decades. Guys like Ibram X. Kendi exist to hate whitey and they will not be restrained by calls for civility or compromise.

Noah Future

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Lefty rage gets all of the attention because they control the media  Their endless tantrums about losing the 2016 election, as well as their increasingly shrill anti-white rhetoric, is flooding the zone. Lost in all of this is the collapse of neoconservatives into a squalor of vulgarity, dishonesty, and paranoia. Whatever it was, the political movement of Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol is now just bigoted rage-heads. This Noah Rothman column is a good example.

The word “ethics” appears prominently in the biographies of the authors who co-wrote a recent Washington Post op-ed lamenting the “taboo” associated with “talking about overpopulation.” Frances Kissling is the president of the Center for Health, Ethics, and Social Policy. Peter Singer is a professor of bioethics at Princeton University. Only Jotham Musinguzi, the “director general of Uganda’s National Population Council,” doesn’t mention “ethics” in the bio. That’s good because the Malthusian views promulgated in the piece are anything but ethical.

[snip]

Because population control is not a problem in the developed world, where birthrates are declining below even replacement rates, population controllers tend to fixate on sexual habits in the developing world. The authors of this op-ed are no exception. They draw an almost always fallacious straight-line projection to conclude that—in the unlikely event that nothing changes between today and 2100—a population crisis should afflict a variety of Sub-Saharan African nations. To avert this crisis, they advocate promoting and supporting proper sexual hygiene, to which almost no one would object. But their authors’ core agenda isn’t the distribution of prophylactics. They seek to de-stigmatize abortion in the equatorial world, which is controversial for reasons that have nothing to do with faith. After all, it was The Population Bomb and its progenitors that lent renewed legitimacy to old arguments that inevitably result in targeting black and brown populations with sterilization and eugenics.

This is the default approach for Rothman and most of the neocon tribe. Instead of simply disagreeing with someone, they first paint the person as immoral, beyond the pale and therefore fair game for whatever accusation they can conjure. Before offering any evidence, Rothman strongly implies the authors of the Washington Post article are unethical people. He never backs this up with evidence. The fact that he does not like or understand their argument is enough for him to slime the authors.

If you read the WaPo article, you’ll see that it is a good faith effort to talk about the population explosion in Africa. They blame Paul Ehrlich for discrediting the topic of population growth, because they are forbidden to discuss the real issue. To talk about the world’s most important graph, is to risk being called a racist by slime merchants like Noah Rothman, so they dance around it. The piece is actually fair and reasonable, given that it appears the Washington Post.

Now, Rothman is a stupid person, so it is no surprise that he is wildly ignorant of Malthus and population issues. Stupid may be the wrong word. Ignorant is a better word, as he makes to no effort to know about these things. He’s too busy claiming everyone who disagrees with him is immoral. His game is to attack and then cry out in pain when the other side mounts a defense. His likes to paint himself as the moral actor, forced to do horrible things to his enemies.

He is also a serial liar. He smears people all the time and then lies to their face about what he wrote. This classic Tucker Carlson segment is a great example. Rothman lies in his column about something Carlson said. When confronted with it, he then lies about what he wrote. When his own words are read back to him, he changes the subject, only to start lying about what the Secretary of Defense said. When confronted on that, he starts lying about other stuff. Noah Rothman is incapable to telling the truth.

Again, whatever it was, neoconservatism is now just a death cult. It is a strange blend of Zionism and anti-majoritarianism, that lacks an intellectual core. The list of neocon thinkers is not exactly a glittering array of heavy weight intellectuals. Rothman is a smarmy twerp. John Podhoretz is a vulgarian. Max Boot appears to be struggling with mental illness. Bill Kristol is a bitter old fool. Jonah Goldberg is a frumpy dufus. It’s like a Jewish version of the Kennedy family, minus the homicides.

That gets to the heart of it. The Jewish century was powered by a generation of Jewish men who were smart, educated and embraced by a majority ruling class that had built the foundation of the American empire. Not only could neoconservatism only happen in America, it could only happen in Cold War America. Today’s America is a different place and today’s neocons are a collection of feckless heirs, playing make believe as they squander their inheritance. The term of art is reversion to the mean.

Just like the reckless kid with a trust fund, the neocons have caused a lot of damage and continue to be a menace. Their efforts to undermine Trump’s Korea initiative and their efforts to entangle us in the Syrian civil war are two obvious examples. The fact that the New York Times and Washington Post are festooned with these loons, means they will pollute public discourse for a while longer. The good news is that guys like Noah Rothman are the future of the movement, which means it has no future.

The Sacred Immigrant

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For a long time, I have made the point that the Republican Party is not really a political party, in the sense that it is a coalition held together by common interests. Instead, it is more like a dumping ground for politicians. About a third of Republican office holders would prefer to be huddling with the Democrats, but the voters of their home district or state have decided the Democrats are too crazy, so ambitious politicians run as Republicans. The result is a party held together by convenience.

You see that with the immigration disaster brewing in the House. As it stands the GOP could simply do nothing on immigration and ride the wave of popular support into the election. That would be the smart thing. Instead, they are trying to pass an immigration bill that has no chance of making it through the Senate. Now, this could be good politics if it is popular with their voters. Instead, they are about to pass a bill highly unpopular with their voters and sure to remind Trump supporters why they hate the GOP.

A leaked draft of House Speaker Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) amnesty deal could lead to the “biggest” amnesty for illegal aliens in United States history, experts tell Breitbart News.
Ryan’s immigration deal would go beyond giving amnesty to only the nearly 800,000 illegal aliens who are enrolled in the President Obama-created Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

According to a leaked draft of the amnesty deal, obtained by Breitbart News, Ryan’s plan would allow the entire “DACA population” to be eligible for amnesty so long as they meet low educational, work and criminal requirements, prompting the amnesty to explode in size.

That DACA population could include the nearly 3.5 million DACA-enrolled and DACA-eligible illegal aliens, and even more illegal aliens who arrive in the U.S. to fraudulently obtain the amnesty.

NumbersUSA Governmental Affairs Director Rosemary Jenks told Breitbart News that Ryan’s amnesty will — at the least — allow 1.8 million illegal aliens to stay in the U.S.

“This has the potential to turn into the biggest amnesty we’ve ever had,” Jenks said.

The leaked amnesty deal reveals that Ryan and the Republican establishment may even be considering going beyond giving amnesty to DACA illegal aliens.

A second amnesty is included in the leaked draft, one that would allow the children of temporary foreign guest workers and “anyone who has a ‘contingent nonimmigrant status’” to apply for the amnesty.

This amnesty for the children of temporary foreign workers does not have a numerical cap, allowing for an endless amount of foreign nationals to obtain amnesty through this avenue known as “Pathway Concept B.”

“The winners are the DREAMers cause they get their amnesty, Democrats because they don’t have to concede much to get the amnesty and donor-class Republicans who are interested in perpetuating the current system,” Center for Immigration Studies Director of Policy Jessica Vaughan told Breitbart News of Ryan’s leaked amnesty deal.

It is tempting to blame this on the secret “donor party” that allegedly manipulates the inner party, like some sort of Turkish conspiracy. There is no doubt that business pushes hard for unlimited “guest worker” visas. No matter how many indentured servants they are granted, it is never enough. Who is pushing for amnesty? In whose interests is it to hand a ballot to millions of foreigners? That actually hurts the cheap labor lobby, as it removes exploitable people from the labor pool.

This is an example of why so-called conservatives lost every fight over the last thirty years. They start with the assumption that the other team is working from facts and reason, motivated by a desire for some tangible goal. In this case, immigration patriots will demand everyone believe Paul Ryan is getting sacks of cash to push this ridiculous amnesty bill through the House. Sure, some of the provisions are bought by lobbyists, but the amnesty stuff has no obvious constituency in the Republican Party.

The fact is, people are more often motivated by a desire to be seen as on the side of angels, even if it brings personal risk. Just look at the number of pols who have driven a hole into their career opposing Trump. As they go under for the last time, they are smugly certain they are doing the Lord’s work. For many in our political class, open borders is a moral issue now. They want to grant the blessing of your town to the world, because they feel righteous as they watch it play out.

This suicidal altruism is not just confined to the political class. Any time the immigration question comes up, there are people who will blurt out “I’m not opposed to legal immigration. It is illegal immigration I oppose.” That is why the political class is working to legalize every conceivable form of immigration. If there are literally no laws against coming here, then there can be no illegal immigration, and everyone is happy. It is the natural result of sacralizing the immigrant.

It is why arguments from facts and reason about immigration have had no impact on the political class. Even as the public begins to get serious about the issue, the politicians are unresponsive, because they correctly see that the immigrant remains a magical figure in the mind of the public. Until a large majority of the voters become hostile to immigration in the spiritual sense, nothing changes. Yeah, the cheap labor lobbies play into this and exploit it, but the root problem here is immigrant worship.

President BoomerCon

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In his most recent podcast, John Derbyshire made the point that there is little hope of getting any sensible immigration reform out of the current Congress. Paul Ryan is an open borders sock puppet, determined to undermine any effort at reform. Even if the House managed to pass something, the Senate is unlikely to take it up. They have no interest in the topic, beyond amnesty. Just as important, President Trump has largely lost interest, other than the occasional tough talk his promised wall.

This reality is vexing to immigration patriots, who correctly see this as a betrayal, as well as a supreme act of stupidity. Cracking down on illegal immigration is extremely popular and most voters now support curbs on legal immigration. A big reason Trump is in the White House is his tough talk on immigration. This is what set him apart for the dullards in the GOP primary. In theory, at least, the failure to follow through on immigration should be bad for Trump and the GOP.

That is not the case. Trump has a higher approval than Obama and Reagan at the same point in their terms. That is not entirely a fair comparison, as both inherited economies in severe recession, as well as massive reform projects. On the other hand, both came in with a massive mandate to push through their reform agendas. Trump, in contrast, entered office with a hostile uniparty and a divided public. Throw in a berserk mass media and it is remarkable that his polling is so strong.

It turns out that despite what the cool kids of the alt-right have to say about the Boomers, pleasing that generation turns out to be good politics. Trump is of that generation, born in 1946, so it is not surprising that he would be good at appealing to those voters. He is also a guy who understands the math of politics. Boomers are a third of the adult population, but close to half the voting population. Older people vote in higher numbers than young people.

Boomer politics, of course, are close to civic nationalism. Even those on the liberal end of the spectrum tend toward the orderly and law abiding, even though they embrace big government solutions. Baby boomers came of age in a prosperous and orderly age when America was still close to 90% white. That means they continue to have a high trust in political and social institutions. Despite what his critics say, Trump has operated like a good government conservative who believes in the system.

Take a look at his two big achievements thus far. One has been the systematic dismantling of the regulatory regime that had built up under George Bush and Barak Obama. This is one of those civic nationalist things that appeals to people who believe in the fundamentals of the country. Similarly, his tax bill fits in with the general sense that Americans need to keep some of their own money. Put the two together and Trump’s big achievements are right out of the CivNat playbook.

Of course, Trump’s growing obsession with the black vote is right in the wheelhouse of the baby boomer voter. Despite 70 years of failure on race relations, the boomers still believe blacks can be fully integrated into white America. More important, they still seek the approval of blacks, which is why getting a selfie with one of the three blacks at CPAC is a phenomenon on Twitter every year. Trump getting the seal of approval from Kanye West resonated with his base.

So far, the best way to describe Trump’s presidency is as a rollback of the past three administrations to something closer to Reaganism. In fact, Trump seems to be using Reagan as a model. Look at his approach to North Korea. Rather than the bellicose approach of the neocons or the appeasement of the neolibs, Trump has brought back Reagan’s peace through strength doctrine. Different facts and players, but the same approach as under Reagan.

Getting back to the immigration issue, what Trump seems to understand, and what immigration hawks have missed, is that baby boomers have not abandoned their immigration romanticism. They still think it is groovy that people come to America “yearning to be free” just as long as they do it legally. There has been no change in attitudes with regards to immigration as a cultural. Boomers still think immigration works, as long as you have the right laws.

Trump appears to have figured this out, so he has modulated his immigration approach to be heavy on the illegal side, but supportive of the legal side. That explains his strange obsession with giving the DACA people amnesty. It is not just an effort to drive a wedge into the Democrat coalition. Trump wants to be seen as supporting the immigrants “who have followed the rules” because he knows his voters get weak in the knees over that stuff.

The lesson here is that American politics is still controlled by baby boomers, whose politics are rooted in an America that is fading away with them. While this cohort dominates elections, their attitudes will be the center of gravity for our politics. As a politician, Trump has figured that out, so he has adjusted to it. What that means is the Overton Window has not moved all that much. The actuarial tables need more time to make that happen.