Taxes & Conservatism

Posted on April 15, 2024 by thezman

Note #1: Behind the green door is a post about the classic comedy, Dr, Strangelove, in which I reveal that I am a humorless dullard, a post about how O. J. Simpson was framed by the Clintons and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Today is Tax Day in America, a day when millions of Americans drop tear-soaked checks into the mail, along with their many tax forms. Of course, for most Americans it is now just another day. Their taxes are simple, and their tax is paid by their employer throughout the year. The resulting decline of Tax Day and the tax issue is a good entry point for examining how our politics have changed over the last decade and a good place to start when thinking about the death of conservatism.

Half a century ago, the run-up to Tax Day was a big party for the people we call conservatives, as it gave them an excuse to go out into the streets, banging their pots and pans about the unfairness of the tax code. Taxes were not only too high, but they were also far too complicated. Rarely said, but often implied, was the claim that a complex tax code allowed special interests to game the system and avoid taxes or bribe their favorite politicians to get special tax breaks.

You never hear this sort of talk now. Taxes were the bread-and-butter issue of so-called conservatives since Barry Goldwater, but no more. One reason for that is tax simplification was passed under Trump. For most Americans taxes are a few clicks on the computer and that is it. Business owners, rich people and the self-employed still have to go through the game of guessing what the IRS says they owe, but the typical suburban peasant is now free of this burden.

Interestingly, a central theme of so-called conservatives in the 1970’s and 1980’s regarding taxes was that if people knew how much they really paid in taxes they would revolt against the welfare state. There were schemes back then to make taxes a quarterly affair, so everyone was always be aware of their tax burden. Instead, they went the other way and made taxes simpler, so that their voters no longer cared about the main issue for the so-called conservatives.

Of course, the main reason so-called conservatives have forgotten about the tax issue is they have done with it what they have done with so many other issues and that is embraced the position of the people they oppose. The fiscal conservative is like a guy wearing a denim leisure suit in Washington. It is so rare to hear anyone talk about the nation’s finances that when it happens it brings back memories of those halcyon days when the Gipper was shaking his fist at the Soviets.

This raises another truth about so-called conservatism. They were sure that if you starved the system of taxes, it would have to cut spending. Despite history saying otherwise, they were certain of it. Instead, they habituated their minds to ever growing deficits and an incomprehensible national debt. Per capita debt is about five times higher than under Reagan and about four times higher as a percentage of the GDP, so it is safe to say they were all wrong about this one.

There is a demographic aspect to this as well. When the baby boomers were in their prime working years, it was good politics to promise them lower taxes and greater returns from their investments. Now that they are retiring in droves, the tax ploy no longer works, so no one discusses it. Instead, it is good politics to create more money from thin air to pay for the entitlement programs. Like everything else about conservatism, taxes were nothing but a good marketing ploy.

This raises another tax-related issue. Tax collections are at record highs, but the deficit is also at all-time highs. The federal deficit in 2023 was $1.7 trillion. The rosiest of rosy scenarios says that federal budget deficits be $20 trillion over the next decade and federal debt held by the public will reach 116 percent of GDP. Given that these projections always turn out wrong, it is not hard to see why no one in Washington is talking about taxes or the state of the budget.

This is why so-called conservatism is headed to the dustbin of history. It was never really a conservative political movement, but more of a money laundering scheme masquerading as a political movement. The response to progressives promising to rob your neighbor and let you have a piece was so-called conservatives promising to rob the progressive and let you have a piece. Taken together we got a half century of systemic looting of their American economy.

For the last half century, the white middle-class has been the kid getting bullied at school for his lunch money. Progressives, representing the financial elites, threatened to shove the suburban peasant into a locker. So-called conservatives kept upping the lunch money they had to pay to avoid the wedgie. Now those suburban peasants are too old for school, so those financial elites are looking to prey on their children and grandchildren to keep the plates spinning.

Another legacy of the so-called conservatives with regards to tax policy is the sacralization of rich people. Part of their sales pitch for tax changes was the claim that our noble rich people were paying more than their fair share in taxes. This was always nonsense, but it convinced most white people that it is immoral to question the motives and behavior of the rich. One result is a perfidious and destructive ruling class that seems hellbent on pulling the roof down on all of us.

In the end, the disappearance of the tax issue from public debate is a good reminder that we are at the end of a long cycle. That means we are about to start on a new political cycle, so the past framing of things is of no use to us. The old ideas and arguments from the last century, things like tax fairness, need to be sent to the dustbin of history along with the people who championed them. In some future Tax Day, no one will have a reason to think of so-called conservatism.

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A Very American Scam

Posted on April 10, 2024 by thezman

For fifty years abortion was a part of the national political debate due to the fight to overturn Roe v. Wade. Those who opposed abortion sought to overturn this court decision, thus returning the issue to the people. The pro-life side assumed they could win the argument and get laws passed to end most abortions. The pro-abortion people obviously fought to prevent this, even though they always claimed the vast majority of the people saw abortion as a holy sacrament.

Abortion was always a good money maker for Conservative Inc. because on the one hand, they only had to pay lip service to the moral issue. It was not as if they could pass legislation or change a regulation to meet the demands of their voters. The courts would just strike down those changes. On the other hand, the only path to victory was getting a majority of pro-life people in office, especially the White house, so the courts could be stocked with pro-life judges. That meant voting Republican.

The way the two party grift has worked since the middle of the last century was that the Democrats conjure novel ideas and find creative ways to normalize them with the progressive segment of the population. Once these ideas gain circulation, the Republicans pretend to oppose these new ideas. Both sides squabble over it, thus narrowing the options to their preferred positions. Then they aggressively fundraise off it as the novel ideas are slowly implemented.

The genius of this arrangement is the elites get what they want, while both parties protect themselves from outside threats by sucking all the oxygen out of the room in their endless media debates. With the oxygen comes the money, which keeps both camps in the lifestyle they think they deserve. Just as important, none of that money goes to anyone who has a third opinion. The political rackets rest on every issue being reduce to a binary choice.

Here is where you can see why the ruling class hates Trump. When he ran for office, he went to the pro-life crowd with a rational offer, rather than the old offer they have always got from conservatives. He told them he needed their vote and even though he was not one of them, he would deliver for them because he needed their vote. Social conservatives, outside of the professional ones, saw this as a rational offer and maybe better than what they have gotten for the last fifty years.

In office, Trump did what he saw as the rational thing and set about appointing pro-life judges up and down the system. From his point of view, this made perfect sense as he would need the support of these people in the next election. If he could show he delivered, then they would come out in droves. His good fortune was that things broke in such a way that the court finally overturned Roe. Both parties hate him because of things like this that disrupt the political rackets.

Putting that aside, the overturn of Roe was a disaster for Pro-Life Inc and the elite of the social conservativism rackets. They no longer had this issue to use in their fundraisers, other than to wage battles at the state level. Since the leaders of these rackets live in swanky homes around the imperial capital, heading out to the wilderness to help the Dirt People wage political fights is horrifying. This idea is equivalent to Pol Pot sending the intellectuals out to the rice fields.

Since the court sent the issue back to the states, the people running for national office no longer have a reason to primp and preen about abortion. If the national candidates stop talking about abortion, the associated money rackets no longer have a reason to raise money to help “their candidates.” That means the money givers no longer have a reason to give money to these guys. Suddenly, thanks to Trump, a billion-dollar industry is threatened with extinction. What to do?

This is why we now have the mass media claiming abortion is the most important issue on the minds of voters. If a Democrat wins a race for dog catcher in East Podunk Missouri, the Washington Post has a pic of young females standing in line to vote, with the claim they are there because of abortion. The political experts, who are always wrong about everything, rush in to explain how this is a threat to Trump as women too busy in their cubicles to have sex are furious about abortion.

It is all nonsense, but despite the fact the media is nothing but a firehose of lies, people still fall for these tricks, especially people who call themselves conservative. Integral to being a conservative is accepting without question the opinions of your enemies while endlessly tone policing your supporters. If the New York Times announces that the cool kids are now wearing flowerpots on their heads, conservatives will swear it is true and produce the conservative case for flowerpots.

This is where Conservative Inc. has swung into action on abortion. Their new scheme to re-nationalize the issue is to champion a national ban on abortion. You see, their big idea now that the courts sent the issue back to the states, something conservatives argued for since Roe, is to take it back from the states and pass a bill that bans all abortion at the federal level. Of course, they cannot do this without your support so make your check out to Conservative Inc.

The only way such a scheme could ever happen is if the Republicans had a huge majority in the House, a super-majority in the Senate and had a pro-life president in the White House. Thanks to Republican support for open borders and election rigging, this is now impossible. Even if it did happen, the Bush years tell us that they would fink on their voters anyway. Remember fake evangelical George Bush nominating pro-abortion Harriet Miers to the court?

Abortion is a good example of why moral issues cannot be decided through any sort of democratic process. Even if the process is legitimate and the participants come to the issue in good faith, you will not get universal agreement. If such an agreement were possible, it would have happened organically and then the only politics around the issue would be about the best policy to support the moral consensus. Otherwise, there is no debating someone out of their sense of right and wrong.

This is why the scam that is the American political system loves moral issues like abortion, because they can never be solved politically. This means they can frame it as two sides with neither side ever having a chance to fully win. Roe was manna from heaven for Conservative Inc., but now the overturning of Roe is manna from Gaia for the aging spinsters running the feminism rackets. They can finally stop talking about men in dresses waving their genitals at children.

If one is looking for a white pill in these dark times it is that the abortion issue has finally returned to its natural place. Like all moral issues, it is one that must be decided by the collective agreement of likeminded people. This means it is a local issue. States and localities can then treat abortion the same way they manage other thorny moral issues like the location of gentlemen’s clubs. In the end, sanity prevailed, and abortion has become something for communities to resolve on their own.

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The Real World War

Posted on April 2, 2024 by thezman

Note: As everyone probably knows, VDare has been under assault by the regime for years and may finally be forced to close down. They have been de-banked so the only way to send them money at the moment is GiveSendGo. If you can spare a few bucks, they could sure use it.

Over the last two years most people who bother paying attention to the world have figured out that the American Empire is waging a proxy war on Russia. The primary proxy is Ukraine, but lesser proxies are also involved. Armenia used to have good relations with Russia but has now been turned into a Western catspaw for the purpose of stirring up trouble in the region. America overthrew the government of Pakistan two years ago so they would not cooperate with Russia.

We could be seeing another front in the war. Israel made the outlandish decision to bomb the Iranian embassy in Damascus. Reportedly the target was a high-ranking Iranian general who was at the facility holding meetings. It could be the other people were the real targets or it could just have been a target of opportunity as Israel tries to draw Iran into a war. Regardless, targeting an embassy in a third country violates centuries of precedent and custom.

Embassies are technically the territory of the country operating them, so this attack on the Iranian embassy is the same as an attack on Iran. That is how the world will view it and certainly how Iran sees it. The Middle East is a dirty place and all of the players, especially Israel, are dirty players, but this is well beyond the norm. There is also the fact that Israel is bombing the capital of Syria, even though there is no state of war between the two countries.

The way to think of this is to imagine if the Russians hit the American embassy in Poland with a missile. Russia is not legally at war with Poland or America, even if both countries are aiding and abetting Ukraine. If the Russians attacked Poland, then it is war, and everyone understands this. Somehow, Israel and her supporters in America seem to think this rule does not apply to Israel. Both China and Russia have come out with strong statements condemning the attack.

One of the worst kept secrets on earth right now is that Israel wants a war with Iran, and they assume this will draw in the United States. The Israelis wanted this war back in the Bush years during the Iraq war. They assume Iran would lose such a war and the regime would be toppled as a result. Israel foreign policy is based on the idea that if the Arab world is in chaos, there will be no organized resistance to Israel. Of course, Iran is also working on getting nuclear weapons.

The question now is what happens next. The Biden administration does not want a war with Iran as the military is stretched thin. Presumably, they will try to make some sort of backroom deal with Iran to defuse things. Russia is the chief sponsor of Syria and has air defense systems in the country. To this point they have not shot down Israeli jets, but that could change now. Russia is also a partner with Iran so the Russians will need to do something to show support for both countries.

China has been making inroads into the region, primarily by helping to facilitate a reproachment between the Saudis and Iran. The peace that now exists between the Houthis and the Saudis is largely a result of this effort. Iran sponsors the Houthis, and they agreed to make peace with the Saudis as part of this warming relationship between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Note the Saudis have not allowed America to use its airspace to attack the Houthis.

In other words, this is not twenty years ago when Iran was alone and largely isolated from the world due to American sanctions. Iran now has two enormously powerful allies, and it is slowly rejoining the Arab alliance led by Saudi Arabia. Iran now has options that it did not have two decades ago. Instead of retaliation we will probably see an effort to win a diplomatic war against Israel, with the help of China and Russia, as Israel is, for all practical purposes, a tentacle of the American Empire.

This is where the real war is being waged at the moment. The American Empire is based on the assertion that the post-Cold War world is a rules-based one led by the United States, who enforces the rules. The repeated violations of the rules by Washington are what drives both Russia and China. Their argument in favor of a multipolar world is that Washington cannot be trusted to follow the rules, so Washington letting Israel violate important rules is a proof of sorts.

There is also the obvious fact that Washington can no longer control Israel. You get to be the lone superpower when everyone has to obey. Israel thumbing its nose at Washington over Gaza is a problem. Israel bombing embassies in third countries is a humiliation of Washington. The Washington led order rests on everyone, including Israel, accepting that order. If Israel does not respect that order, then it will not be long before the rest of the world follows suit.

Of course, what we are seeing in this new world war is chaos all along the borders of the American Empire. Washington’s plan for Russia for the last three decades has been to create chaos around the borders of Russia, believing this would slowly sap her economic and political strength. This is what is now happening to the American Empire, which is forced to race around the world dealing with crises, many of which are the result of its own actions, like we see in Ukraine.

This is what may prevent a regional war in the Middle East. Russia and China know that time is on their side. As a result, Iran also can play the waiting game. At some point, the American Empire will have no choice but to give up on the region. It has largely been driven out at this point. There are American troops in Syria and Iraq, but the cost of supporting them will soon be prohibitive. Instead of Iran retaliating against Israel, she can wait and deal with Israel at a later date.

What we are seeing is the world organizing not for a great final war with the American Empire but the world organizing to manage the decline of the empire. Washington stirs up trouble hoping to preserve itself by unsettling rivals and Israel hopes to start a regional war before her patron is too weak. Meanwhile, the rising powers of the world are trying to avoid a real war with the declining American Empire. The real world war is a war to survive the end of the last empire.

After Left And Right

Posted on April 1, 2024 by thezman

Note #1: Behind the green door is a post about Gen-Z being raised on the internet and a post about failing up in managerialism. The Sunday podcast was cancelled due to Easter and nothing happening. Subscribe here or here.

Note #2: For those he need to hear my voice as much as possible, there is my appearance on the Killstream last week. I also recorded a show with a young YouTuber who asked some interesting questions.

Note #3: Some may have noticed that I did some experimenting with the comment system over the weekend. It was not without its bugs, so we are back to the basic setup for now. From time to time you may see things like this as I experiment with ideas for the new site that is in the works.

Over the last decade, “conservatism” in America has declined reputationally largely due to the failures and embarrassments of professional conservatism. Depending upon your disposition, the Bush years either sent the conservative movement over a cliff or exposed it for being nothing more than a financial hustle. There are other views of the failure of professional conservatism and all of them are right in their own way, but there is no denying that the Buckley project has failed.

As a result, the last decade has seen various efforts to create a “new right” to replace the Buckley project. Remnants of the alt-right went so far as to call themselves the “new right” for a while, but they had nothing to offer but new slogans. The Claremont collective has fumbled about trying to create a new conservatism, piggybacking on the populism of Donald Trump. Yoram Hazony has tried to preach a new form of nationalism to take the place of conservatism.

So far none of these efforts has made much progress, outside of creating some interesting debates at times. Most recently Claremont published a long essay on its main site attacking the contradictions within Hazony’s nationalism. On their American Mind site they posted a response from David Goldman, formerly known as Spengler in the Asia Times, coming to the partial defense of nationalism. Less rigorous minds have also waded into the topic with echolalic babbling.

One problem that all attempts to fashion a new right face is something Kesler touched on in his essay about Hazony’s nationalism. America is and always has been a multicultural country. Even putting aside the race issue, the thirteen colonies that came together to form the United States were composed of people with unique cultures and histories, which were often at odds with the other states. These differences pre-dated the colonies themselves, coming over from the Old World.

This presents an obvious problem for nationalism as by definition it assumes a common people with common ancestors. Nationalism is exclusive to a particular people, which cannot work when the people are a mixed bag of various people from different parts of the world with different histories. The story of the Tidewater is different from the story of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Framers understood this which is why they settled on a federal system of government.

As Samuel Goldman explained in his excellent little book, After Nationalism, what has held America together since the beginning is a combination of the covenant, the crucible and the creed. The covenant being a mission to build the city on the hill, the crucible being the shared struggle that binds our various people together and the creed is the statement of shared principles. To one degree or another, these concepts still turn up in our political rhetoric.

Early in his book, Goldman quotes the historian Wilfred McClay, who wrote, “Ties of blood, religion, and soil are not sufficient to hold us together as Americans, and they never have been. We are forever in the business of making a workable unity out of our unruly plurality.” This is the problem with nationalism as a defining force in America, but it also presents a problem for anything calling itself conservatism. Which is why the covenant, the crucible and the creed have shaped conservatism.

Like nationalism, conservatism is strongly tied to the past. You cannot have nationalism without a shared history or at least an overlapping history. Different parts of Germany may have unique pasts, but they share enough of a common past to feel a part of the greater concept of German. Similarly, conservatism seeks to preserve social order by maintaining historical continuity. Conservatives do not oppose change, but instead seek to contain new ideas within the framework of the past.

Central to conservatism is the notion that some things are too important to be put up to the scrutiny of reason. Questioning a tradition, for example, should be resisted even if the logic of tradition is no longer obvious. Conservatives assume that the shared habits of a people exist for a reason. Altering or abandoning the old ways risks unknown and unwelcome consequences, so change must be gradual and cautious. Traditions are the result of trial and error over many generations.

The specter that haunts conservatism, however, is who decides that certain things are not to be questioned? Traditions and customs do not fall out of the sky onto people, but are the product of people, a specific people. The reason they are traditions is they have been handed down to you by your ancestors. They are part of your cultural inheritance that comes from those with whom you share blood. Again, this is something the Framers understood as they debated the new Constitution.

What this means is American conservatism must limit itself to defending the political order as defined by the Constitution. Since that order allows for unlimited changes to the document itself, not to mention unlimited interpretation of the plain text, conservatism is committed to defending a moving target. It is why American conservatism has always been, as Robert Lewis Dabney observed a century ago, “the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition.”

There is another problem for conservatism in America. The thing they wish to defend, even if they dismiss the centuries of innovation since its creation, is itself the product of the radical idea of the intentional society. The Framers started from the assumption that they could create the society they wanted because society is, as John Locke understood, the result of human labor and intention. Maker’s knowledge lets man create a society as he would make anything else.

If it is perfectly moral and possible to create a nation out of the wilderness, then it is perfectly moral and possible to recreate that nation, even create a new nation from the old, to meet the demands of the present. In other words, American conservatism must defend that which it claims to oppose, because what it defends is the radical idea that we can make our society into anything we choose. America is, after all, a radical experiment in self-government.

There is a way out of this that some conservatives proposed. Pat Buchanan, for example, argued that the Constitution was the result of British people living in the New World for two centuries. The final organizing document by the Framers was simply the only option possible for the American people. Defending the Constitution is a defense of the people and history behind it, not whatever abstract political theories some people claim as the inspiration for the Constitution.

That may be true, but it runs into that same old problem. The people who created that world and the political order that sprang from it are long gone, along with their sense of history and identity. That America was not just European. It was almost exclusively British and Protestant. America will soon be majority-minority and the founding stock is down to ten percent of the population. Defending something that no longer exists is no more possible than defending a moving target.

All of this brings us to why there will not be a “new right” that emerges from the wreckage of professional conservatism. There never was a right in America, at least not since the North conquered the South. Once the last bits of hierarchy were washed from the continent in the blood of the Confederacy, conservatism ceased to be a thing that could take root in the New World. America is and continues to be a radical experiment, a perpetual revolution seeking to reach the end of history.

This is not all bad news. Conservatism in America has always been a reaction to the peculiar ideology of progressivism which emerged in the 19th century. Conservatism sought to create an alternative ideology as an antidote to progressivism. The failure of conservatism may lead to a greater understanding that the antidote to ideology is not ideology but the anathematization of ideology. In its place there may grow a chemotherapy to the cancer of ideology.

This could be helped by the fact that we seem to be reaching the end of the ideological age, as what we call liberal democracy, but is the mature version of American progressivism, reaches its end. The last ideological states are all in a crisis, which has put the ideology in crisis. Just as failure anathematized the other great ideologies, the failure of Western liberalism may do the same for progressivism, perhaps opening the way to an organic organizing ethos.

Bridge Thoughts

Posted on March 26, 2024 by thezman

In the 18th century, planners did not have to worry too much about ships smashing into bridges because ships were small and made of wood, while bridges and seaports were massive and made of stone. If a captain made an error and hit a bridge support, his ship would be damaged, but the bridge would be fine. The worst case is it would take a few days to clear the debris of the ship from the waterway. In other words, the seaways were somewhat error resistant.

The news of the Francis Scott Key bridge collapse is an obvious example of how this is no longer the case in the modern world. That ship is massive, relative to anything that existed a century ago, much less the 18th century. The bridge, in contrast, was a slim wisp of thing compared to bridges in the past. When it was completed half a century ago it was the third longest truss bridge in the world. Now, of course, it is a pile of scrap iron after having been knocked off its moorings.

People will naturally rush forward with their favorite pet theory about how this could have happened. None of these claims are about the accident or why it happened, but rather a way to use the event to promote their favorite theory. Steve Sailer has decided to avoid the usual answers and instead go with an insane theory about bombs being squirrelled away on the ship. No doubt the usual suspects are working on a plot where Putin is responsible for the accident.

For those who know how ports operate, especially an inland port like the Port of Baltimore, the most likely answer is more mundane. These ships are piloted by a harbor pilot in and out of the upper bay. These are men who know every inch of the waterway and rely on a large support staff to pilot the vessel. That means the cause is a failure of that system, most likely the ships navigation systems. It lost power and the crew was unable to restore power before hitting the bridge.

Putting that aside, the port is the ninth largest seaport in the country and has certain specialties like the import of cars, which cannot be easily replaced. Until the bridge debris is cleared from the waterway and the waterway is inspected, the port will remain closed, which will create supply chain problems throughout the year. Of course, the bridge is a vital part of the local ground transportation system. Baltimore is surrounded by a beltway system and this bridge was a key part of it.

Replacing the bridge has been debated over the last ten years, but the will to do it has never been enough to overcome the sclerosis that plagues state politics. A project that will not be done until most of the people voting on it are dead or retired is never going to get a lot of support in the modern age. The things that get pols trending on social media is what gets the support, even if the reason to be trending on social media is the ghetto has just lost track of one of its simpletons.

Now they will have no choice but to replace the bridge, but that will take years to debate and then years to get approval and then more years to build. The people who make the economy work will figure out ways around this new obstacle in the meantime, so there will be no sense of urgency to address the bridge problem. In fact, it is entirely possible that the bridge is never replaced. A generation from now people will look at the remaining pillars the way people look at old Roman aqueducts.

If you want to contextualize this accident into something bigger, the best approach is from the angle of complexity. Like everything else in the American economy, our ports have become extremely complex systems with many points of failure. There are millions of people with the word “logistics” in their job title who make sure that some point of failure does not fail in the complex system of moving goods in and out of the country and around the country to your store.

One reason for that is the berserk quest for efficiency. Every manager in the system dreams the dream of that box of Cheerios arriving on the shelf just at the moment you decide to reach for it. Everything in the economy is now geared to reduce the shelf time, warehouse time and transport time of every item. Every bit of extra is cut from the system to maximize profit, but the result is often fragile systems that work well when there are no problems but fail miserably in a crisis.

The complexity problem is turning up in the Ukraine war. Russia, with its massive industrial base and redundant systems, now outproduces the West in terms of military supplies at a fraction of the cost. Western countries with massive GDP’s are faced with impossibly complex economies that cannot be quickly modified to address the need to make even simple things like artillery shells. Like the now collapsed bridge, solving this problem will probably never happen.

That is the other angle to this accident. That bridge was built in 1976 and was out of capacity twenty-five years ago. A second span should have been started at the turn of the century with a third span or another bridge up stream in the works, but these sorts of projects are not popular with modern politicians. Half a century ago, the political class was not obsessed with media attention, so they could think longer term about projects that would benefit those who followed them.

It is popular to blame “democracy” for our present ills, but our political system has not changed in fifty years. If anything, we are less democratic today. What has changed is the explosion of media. We now live suspended in a media solution. As a result, even the lowest person measures himself by likes, follows and media exposure. This has warped the political class the most, turning them into ridiculous carny acts that do nothing but find ways to get attention in the mass media.

In the end, none of this matters. The bridge story will dominate the news for a few days this week, but then the media will be onto the next thing. By the end of the summer the port will be reopened, and the bridge will be forgotten. The bridge is a symptom of a much larger problem for which no one has any answers, at least not answers that get you trending on Twitter. Maybe the remains of the bridge will one day be a warning that a people that does invest in its future has no future.

Work Until You Die

Posted on March 21, 2024 by thezman

There seems to be a secret plot to inject the idea of cutting Social Security into the national debate for the looming presidential election. This plot is among the slithering lizard people known as the conservatives. It started with the oleaginous Ben Shapiro demanding that white people work until they die. He then went to Twitter to gin up more talk among the mouth breathers in favor of cutting Social Security. Now the Republican Party is promoting the idea in Congress.

It is an odd coincidence that once Trump secured the nomination, his alleged allies started talking up an idea that has no constituency. No one wants to throw their granny into the street, and no one wants to throw their parents into the streets. More important, the tens of millions of retired white people do not want to be thrown into the streets, especially in the name of sending their last pennies to Israel. It is the third rail of politics for a reason, so why are these reptiles bringing it up now?

The most popular reason is they hope to slime Trump with this issue, thus undermining his general election campaign. They assume, and probably correctly, that the mass media will claim he wants to murder your granny in the promised bloodbath this autumn, no matter what Trump says about the subject. So far, Trump has mostly ignored it, only mentioning the problems of fraud in Medicare. Fraud is a massive problem with Medicare, but fraud is a defining feature of America now.

Another reason for this sudden interest in poisoning their election chances is that idiots run the Republican Party. The reason the party has been called “the stupid party” for generations is it is run by stupid people. They are clever and scheming, necessary skills for democratic politics, but they are not as cynical as the the other side. As a result, Republican leaders are the forever Charlie Brown, sure that this time the Democrats will let them kick the football.

Then there is the fact that the Republican Party and American conservatism evolved in the 20th century as losers. The GOP’s natural role is as the cleanup crew for the Democrats, who run around smashing things. For their part, the so-called conservatives busy themselves racing in front of speeding trains yelling “stop” while the rest boast about how their principles forbid them from winning. Conservatism evolved to be the consolation prize for the politically inept.

You can probably take a little bit from each column and produce a mix that explains the sudden interest in snuffing out granny. There is nothing about any of these possible answers that contradicts the others. Ben Shapiro is a skeevy little hobbit man who hates Trump with the intensity of a thousand suns, but he is also a mediocrity who has a habit of stepping on rakes. There is a reason that his handlers make sure to never expose him to adults during his public appearances.

There is another element to this and that is the desire of many people, no doubt many people from the loser party, to get back to debating issues. The United States does have real problems that could quickly become catastrophic problems if they remain unaddressed by the political class. For example, there is a pre-French Revolution vibe to the government’s finances. This post in Chronicles is a good explainer and a good example of the desire to return to real issues.

Now, “experts” have been predicting doom over the national debt for generations and doom is always twenty years off. It is like the collapse of “fiat money” or affordable solar energy in that it is always twenty years away. Unlike the other two, math says there is a limit to how much debt the government can issue. At some point, the appetite for new debt will decline as everyone will be holding as much debt as they need. At that point, new debt comes with new, much higher costs to the government.

As far as how to avoid this debt cliff, the only answer is the one answer everyone agrees must never be debated. That answer is ending the Global American Empire and returning to normalcy. That means reducing the military budget by ninety percent, deporting the tens of millions of freeloaders, and cracking enough rich people’s heads, maybe even lopping off a few of them, to get the economic elites inline. None of that can be debated, so they talk about killing your granny.

For the most part, Social Security runs reasonably well. The big problem, as far as old people programs, is Medicare, which is riddled with fraud, but Social Security is largely free of fraud and waste. Suring up its finances during the great baby boomer retirement should not be a great challenge. If life expectancy continues to decline, then it will be a self-correcting problem. In other words, if you are worried about the looming debt crisis, there are better places to look for answers.

That is what really gives this topic the French Revolution vibe. A big reason for the revolution was the gordian knot of royal finances. France desperately needed financial reform, but the rich people opposed it because they saw no profit in it. The Global American Empire faces the same problem. All the best people agree that we face a looming financial crisis, and they all agree that they will not sacrifice a hair on their heads to avoid it. Instead, they think you should work until you die.

Bourgeois Minoritarianism

Posted on March 20, 2024 by thezman

Edit: A friend of ours, Judd Blevins, is under attack by the usual suspects and could use some help in his fight. He is a good man trying to serve his community, but the freaks and weirdos are trying to ruin it. Here is his story and a way to send him a few bucks.

The weirdness of this age is a constant topic of discussion, mostly due to the fact that every day brings new weirdness. Ten years ago, if you said men would go to jail for defiling the sodomy flag, people would have thought you were nuts, but this is a thing that now happens in America. You can burn the American flag, but if you get caught insulting the sodomy flag you go to jail. A common side conversation these days is debating what new bizarre and deranged thing comes next.

The question that never comes up in any serious way is why the ruling class spends so much time manufacturing these perversions of reality. Why do these bourgeois people who rule over us embrace bizarre social fads when it is clear they would not incorporate them in their daily lives. Notice, for example, that advertising agencies have almost no diversity, but all of their ads are antiwhite. They promote race-mixing even though they go to great lengths to prevent this in their own lives.

The place to start is how these people see themselves. The people at the top of the various institutions that control society do not see themselves as an elite. Instead, they seem themselves as servants of the elite. Claudine Gay, the former head of Harvard College, never saw herself as part of the elite, despite the position, because she has always had a boss, someone with control over her. Even as Harvard president she had to kowtow to the billionaire donors that fund the college.

This is a reality of our managerial elite. Even though they occupy positions at the top level of critical institutions, they always feel like hired help. The angst of the college president is no different from that of the middle-class manager living in a suburb, but the stakes are much higher. Normal people were outraged that Claudine Gay kept her salary, but her loss of status was the real punishment. In a world controlled by bourgeois status seekers, losing face is worse than death.

For normal people, fear of losing a job or looking bad to your peers is a motivation to conform to expectations. For the managerial elite, this curdles into a resentment of the system over which they rule. These people are the resentful house slave who finds small victories in undermining the master of the house. The embrace of these deranged social fads is a way for the managerial elite to tell their bosses that they have some agency and command their respect.

Managerial angst works another way. The system that allows for the managerial elite has as one of its principles that it is open to everyone. If you do certain things you can rise up the system into the elite. When you strip natural talent from the equation, then all that is left is a recipe for success that anyone can follow. This means that the people at the top can always be replaced by the steady stream of strivers below them who are busy ticking boxes on their resume.

This is the other jaw of the vice that squeezes the worldview of the managerial elite and leads to the proliferation of social rules. In a true meritocracy, the only disqualification from reaching the top is a failure to abide by the rules. The proliferation of arbitrary and capricious rules of conduct replaces what used to allow elites to hold onto their position in the face of more talented challengers below them. The elites can still utter, “He’s not our sort”, but the reason is morality rather than bloodline.

This also breeds resentment of those below the elite level. It is clear that a key motivation behind these degenerate social fads is spite. The managerial elite looks around and they see danger from top and bottom. At the top are rich white-presenting people who seem to live outside the meritocracy. Below are white people who wish to work the meritocracy to climb the ladder. Scandalizing white people in general provides a salve to the fragile psyches of the managerial elite.

This sense of being surrounded on all sides may explain how our elites think of themselves as minorities. It is bizarre to see rich people like Nancy Pelosi carry on like she is an oppressed minority. Many have noted that the proliferation of females in the managerial class has brought with it the victim mentality, but it may simply be that females are more sensitive to it and much more willing to find ways to publicly express this sense of being an oppressed minority.

From the perspective of the managerial elite, they are a minority. When they leave their swank residences, they see miles and miles of Potemkin suburbs, cheap copies of their neighborhoods, clustered around synthetic “town centers” that have the big box retail shops popular with the masses. The managerial elites think these are made possible by their efforts, but they also resent that they are not loved for those efforts, and they rage at the fact their bosses in the economic elite profit from these efforts.

What this suggests is that the conditions that must exist in order to maintain the managerial elite in their positions, by maintaining the system itself, must also lead to the petty degeneracy we see today. A system that values equality, democracy and eschews class distinctions, but exists in contradiction to those things produces a special sort of angst among the managerial elite. Their embrace of degeneracy is, in effect, a slave revolt against a system that is spiritually eviscerating.

Put another way, the the system of values the managerial class must embrace as they rise up the ranks increasingly comes into conflict with the reality of the system as they rise higher in the system. The middle-manager gets the praise of his boss by a selfless devotion to his work, but the people at the top got their position by a ruthless exploitation of those below him. It is this conflict that leads to the boiling hatred of the system that makes the managerial elite possible.

A strong society has a strong elite that works within the set of values embraced by the elite and is manifestly obvious to outsiders. A warrior elite will value the attributes that make a great warrior. An aristocracy will value those qualities that define the aristocratic class like bloodlines. Managerialism, in contrast, has a value system that is in conflict with the requirements of the managerial elite. It is this internal and unresolvable contradiction that leads the elite to attack their own system.

Our Democracy

Posted on March 18, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about living in a world where you can be jailed for holding the wrong opinions and a post about my used car lot. The Sunday podcast was posted early for a change. Subscribe here or here.

Joseph de Maistre famously observed, “False opinions are like false money, struck first of all by guilty men and thereafter circulated by honest people who perpetuate the crime without knowing what they are doing.” We get a sense of that in the weekend media drama over Trump using the word “bloodbath” in a speech. He used the word in reference to what would happen to the auto industry under a second Biden term, but the media left out the part about the auto industry.

The result was a media frenzy based on the false claim that Trump was promising some sort of homicidal revenge if he did not win the election. One media pinhead after another went to their favorite platform to repeat the claim. In some cases, they did so on video platforms as the video of Trump giving the speech in which he used the word was playing in the corner of the screen with the sound muted. So much for the second half of that de Maistre quote about honest people perpetuating the crime.

It probably would have gone like so many other fake media narratives in that normal people without access to the megaphone would have spent days clarifying what was said but by that point the media would be onto the next lie. This time the world’s richest man noticed and posted about it on Twitter. Joe Scarborough deleted his post about it, but others kept up the lie. Nancy Pelosi made the rounds stammering through the claim that Trump is promising a homicidal rampage.

There is nothing new about this, of course. The entirety of the Trump administration was spent this way, where the media would make up obvious lies and people would spend days correcting the lies. The difference now is the world’s richest man has suddenly started to notice things like this. Elon Musk is an eccentric guy, but when he notices something the world notices it with him. Musk seems to be taking aim at the legacy media this cycle, so it will make for some good drama.

This misses the larger issue we see with this story. The person who initiated this drama over Trump using the word “bloodbath” lied and she knew she was lying when she claimed he said, “there would be a bloodbath if he lost.” Her bosses surely knew she was lying but went along with it because it would get attention. The rest of the media who piled on also knew it was a lie. In other words, everyone involved knew it was a lie, but they kept on lying, even when everyone knew it was a lie.

In theory, the media is supposed to be the arena of public debate, where the political combatants argue for their proposals. In imagination land, the media is just a referee, but in more sober telling the media is a collection of competing entities fighting to gain the trust and attention of the market. The marketplace for information should correct for this constant lying, much as it prevents the one airplane maker from filling up on diversity hires and building planes that fall apart in midair.

Therein lies the problem. Just as Boeing is pretty much a monopoly, the media is also a monopoly and for the same reasons. Over the years, Boeing was able to make the best of friends in government, so that it was able to buy up the competition. Similarly, the media has coalesced around a critical mass of flatterers who have exclusive access to permanent Washington. If you want to buy a commercial plan you go to Boeing and if you want to reach the public, you go to the media.

Just as the free market always seems to end up with a few players controlling the marketplace, democracy seems to end up with a few players controlling the marketplace for ideas. The reason a nonsense story like the Trump “bloodbath” comment runs wild is that the media is a monolith. The people in it speak only to each other and the people in it are selected for their ideological compliance. The media is a massive hive controlled by the uniparty.

Of course, the fact that we have the expression “uniparty” and everyone understands exactly what it means speaks to the reality of “democracy.” Instead of it being the marketplace of ideas, it collapses like all markets into monopoly. Reformers like Trump are treated like upstarts in any industry dominated by a few players. If a collection of rich guys tried to challenge the duopoly of Airbus and Boeing, they would quickly cease to be rich guys, as they would be crushed.

That is the plight of anyone who seeks to reform democracy. The desire for reform comes only when it has evolved to its natural state of oligopoly, which often appears to the people as a monopoly. Like the upstart challenging the major players in an industry, the reformers get crushed, unless they have friends in government. To get friends in government means making the same deal as the major players. The path forward is always a deal with the devil or death by his minions.

Joseph de Maistre said, “To hear these defenders of democracy talk, one would think that the people deliberate like a committee of wise men, whereas in truth judicial murders, foolhardy undertakings, wild choices, and above all foolish and disastrous wars are eminently the prerogatives of this form of government.” That was two hundred years ago before any nation foolishly set about proving him correct. Every day the media reminds us that there is no reforming democracy.

Understanding Our History

Posted on March 15, 2024 by thezman

One of the weird things about the Cloud people is how they talk about history as if it is a spirit force or a god. In his State of the Union speech, Biden kept saying things like “history is watching us” and “history requires us” as if “history” was the name of the guy controlling the simulation. He is not the only one who does this. In fact, he never talked like this until the rest of the Cloud people started doing it.

One reason for talking about history this way is it gives them a false sense of moral authority for their various schemes. They claim that history moves toward some paradise, so if their schemes advance us toward that paradise, then they must be on the side of history. It is all nonsense, of course, but nonsense has been the fuel of fanatics and lunatics since the dawn of time.

Even with a sober-minded ruling class, however, there would still be this need to shape history so that the present feels inevitable. Much of what has brought us to the present crisis is the shaping of history to fit the causes of the moment. Our progressive ruling class has been rewriting history since Gettysburg, maybe even since the Battle of Naseby, because the future is certain, but the past is unpredictable.

That is the show this week. I am taking a brief stab at reframing American history in a way that not only helps us understand how we got here but justifies why we must do that which must be done to restore sanity. I am stealing for another “Z” man, Howard Zinn, and creating a dissident version of American history. Maybe more like taking a first stab at the idea of creating a Dirt People history of America.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

Intro
All History Is Bullshit
Real Founding
The Civil War
The American Empire
Democratic Empire

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Burn The Boats

Posted on March 11, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about the Super Tuesday results and a post about my thoughts about moving from Lagos. The Sunday podcast was posted late, as I was tied up on some projects. Subscribe here or here.

One of the things the paleos missed when they began to flesh out managerialism in the last century is how it assumes the qualities of democracy. This is something Robert Dahl picked up in his analysis of American government against the standard of democracy he developed. While the institutions of America were not democratic and could never be democratic, the people in these institutions were motivated by a democratic sense in that they wanted to act according to public will.

This explains, in part, how our institutions have grown increasingly authoritarian over the last three decades, while the people running them have become obsessed with defending what they call “our democracy.” They do not view democracy as a process, but rather as a goal. The truly democratic society is open, and the people freely exchange the right ideas. Defending democracy in this sense means dragging the people to this place, by force if necessary.

This democratic sensibility within democracy is important in understanding the reckless behavior of the people running the institutions. If one were to pick a single word to describe the cause of the current crisis it would be “reckless”. Whether it is reckless foreign policy adventures or poorly conceived domestic fads, the ruling class seems to take pleasure in reckless projects. They operate like gamblers with unlimited credit that they assume will be repaid by others.

The Ukraine war is the latest example. When the Russians threatened war, it was over the Minsk agreements not having been followed. They had a specific set of claims against Ukraine, and they wanted help from the West to enforce those claims, but instead they got bellicose threats from Washington. In retrospect, we now know that the West wanted war with Russia. Deliberately picking a fight with the world’s biggest nuclear power is about as reckless as it gets.

For two years the West has steadfastly refused to have any dealings with the Russians, instead demanding total surrender. Every few months the West seeks some new “red line” to cross, hoping to provoke the Russians. Now the French are recruiting the micronations of NATO to send troops into Ukraine. The whole point of this is to bait the Russians into responding in a way that will then let NATO pretend they are being attacked by Russia so they can invoke Article 5.

Project Ukraine is a pointless and risky adventure, but even as the Russians gain the upper hand, the Western managerial elite remains addicted to it. Like drug addicts, they crave only the next hit of foolish risk in this thing. So much so that they look for new ways to make it so they cannot change course. There is a burn the boats mentality to this project, where they seek out policies that further commit the West to the project in such a way that no one can apply the brakes.

This burn the boats mentality is everywhere. The immigration crisis is not simply about border management, something that could be fixed. It is aimed at making it a permanent crisis, a permanent project for the managerial class. Tens of millions of illegals now roam the countryside, raping and killing Americans. Even if a new president wants to fix the problem, he will still be left with the tens of millions of criminal aliens unleashed on the cities and towns of America.

One of the defenses of aristocratic rule is that it is naturally cautious. The king has an investment in his country and people in that he directly benefits from them. Who he is as a king depends upon the health and welfare of the people and the land on which they live, so he is not going to be quick to risk either of those for novelty. In fact, he is going to be cautious of change, especially in domestic affairs, because he has everything to lose and little to gain.

This is not true in democratic systems where the rulers have no investment at all, as they can be replaced at the next election. Hans Hermann-Hoppe noted that in democratic systems, the people holding office often despise the office they hold, as they gained it only as a steppingstone toward some other goal. The people have nothing but their vote, so they are willing to take great risks. The result is a system that is willing to take enormous risk for theoretical and ephemeral gains.

America is not a democracy, but a sense of democracy is there in the institutions controlled by the managerial class. What we have is a managerial polyarchy, where the elites use the institutions to chase the mirage of the democratic society. Because the goal is not real, it is maximally alluring. This is why the elites are willing to trample the democratic process to defend “our democracy.” What they are defending is not a real thing but the imagined end point of history.

It is that democratic spirit that makes them so risk happy. This burn the boats approach to public policy comes from the sense that this condition of society is temporary and therefore the positions held by the elite are temporary. In a real sense, those positions are temporary, as all managers keep their resume up to date for a reason. Throw in the fact that failure never comes with consequences and the result is a ruling elite that operates like a desperate gambler looking for a score.

The great lesson in democratic risk taking is Athens in the Peloponnesian War where the Athenians were determined to spark war with Sparta. It was the Athenian decision to roll the dice on an invasion of Syracuse that led not only to the end of the war but the destruction of Athens. Given the similarity between America and Athens, it is fair to assume the same fate awaits the American empire. Democratic empire will turn out to be a suicide pact crafted by people addicted to risk taking.

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