Whither Rufo-ism

Posted on October 10, 2023 by thezman

Since the wrecking ball known as Donald Trump swung through the walls of conservatism almost a decade ago, there has been a desperate attempt to either rebuild the wall or fill the void left by the old conservatism. The Never Trump project was mostly an effort to chase the barbarians out of the city so the good people can rebuild the wall and restart the old politics. For the most part, this project has failed as the massive hole in the wall remains.

A good recent example of this is this post by neoconservative writer Mathew Continetti in Commentary Magazine. He claims that the populists supporting nationalist policies and candidates are actually Marxists. This has become a popular theme with the East Coast Straussians, of which the neocons are a part. It is a hilariously insane line of thought, owing to the steep decline in the human capital we see everywhere in politics, but especially in the neoconservative subculture.

On the other hand, the project to recreate the old dynamic of Left and Right, has quietly plodded along with a new generation looking to create a New Right. Many are just the hucksters we have come to expect in this age. These are the people who live on social media and front-run whatever is happening at the moment. Others are rejects from the old conservative rackets hoping for a fresh start. These are the buzzards that arrive at the end of every movement.

Then you have the more professional and perhaps sincere players who operated on the fringes of conservatism but now see a chance to spread their wings. The Claremont crowd, for example, is working hard to create a New Right based on the primitive notion of natural right, supplemented by appeals to the classical liberalism of the Framers along with large dollops of Lincolnism. Claremont subscribes to the apocryphal version of the founding and Lincoln promoted by Harry Jaffa.

It is from this world that we get Chris Rufu, the guy best known for waging jihad against critical race theory in the schools. He also has waged campaigns against the sexual exploitation of children in the schools. He worked in support of the Florida bill to ban child pornography in grammar schools. He now has a book out titled, America’s Cultural Revolution, which describes the New Left and how it gained power. Paul Gottfried reviewed it here and Charles Haywood here.

Most of what Rufo describes in his book has been kicking around dissident circles for the last decade, mostly due to it kicking around paleo circles for decades. Contrary to the claims of conservatism, the New Left was never an economic or purely political movement, but a cultural and spiritual movement. With the collapse of 20th century conservatism and the cultural revolution of the last decade, this reality has become clear to everyone except libertarians.

Rufo is not without his critics. In fact, Rufo-ism is a very modern political phenomenon in that it is as much about its critics as its content. Thanks to the cultural revolution and the internet, we now live in a purely Schmitt-ian world, as in the German philosopher Carl Schmitt. Politics is only about friends and enemies, so Rufo-ism is becoming one of those points of the friend-enemy distinction. In a follow up post, Paul Gottfried talks about some of Rufo’s critics.

One of the interesting things about the critics of Rufo, as well as his supporters, is the dog that never barks. That dog is race. This is odd, given the material at the heart of his current project. Critical Race Theory is about race. Then there is the fact that Rufo spent much of his early time on this protect lecturing white people that the real victims of CRT were black kids. He put most of his effort into shooting down the idea that CRT is antiwhite, on the grounds that the term is “racist.”

This is an important part of Rufo-ism and the milieu that spawned it. These are people who are opposed to any discussion of race. It is not that they oppose the New Left’s view on race but that they embrace the New Left’s view on race more completely and sincerely than the Left embraces it. Rufo does think race is a social construct and it must be eliminated from all discourse. This New Right imagined by Rufo, Claremont and others is not just colorblind, but colorless.

It is tempting to assume this is just the old conservative two-step. They embrace the moral claims of the people they oppose but they have a different and more lucrative proposal for how to achieve them. Of course, there is the constant fear of being called “racist” which has haunted conservatism since the Old Left declared discrimination the greatest sin and diversity the greatest good. In other words, it is tempting to think Rufo’s act is an effort to avoid the R-word.

This is a reasonable suspicion, but it does not appear to be the case with Rufo nor the other popular figures from Claremont. Rufo married outside of his race and has mixed-race children, so unlike his New Left critics, who live like White Nationalists, Rufo’s “lived experience” comports with his stated views on race. This is not an uncommon phenomenon in this subculture. Further, the Claremont view of politics leaves no room for race or even natural inequality.

There is another reason for the aversion to race. Rufo is a science-denier. He rejects biology as we know it. He worked for the Discovery Institute, which peddles crackpot theories like intelligent design. Of course, the Claremont people largely reject the last two thousand years of scientific progress. They instead embrace the Straussian belief that nature comes with a secret code book on how humans should act. If you say Aristotle’s name enough times, the secret is revealed.

The starting place for the New Right is the assumption that humans are infinitely malleable in terms of character. What you are as a person is determined by the society into which you are born. If you get the moral code of society right and enforce that morality through the institutions, you end up with virtuous citizens. Since virtue in their view is a life lived to the benefit of the polis, there can be no place for things like race, because that undermines their idea of virtue.

If this sounds a bit like Marxism, it should, because this is the basic assumption of Marx and most radical thinkers. Once you assume that morality is an objective truth that lies outside of collective agreement, it means there can be only one truly moral way to organize human society. The goal of politics, therefore, is to discover it and then ruthlessly enforce it. Instead of historical materialism as the moral authority, the New Right embraces their interpretation of classical philosophy.

Putting aside the underlying philosophical reason for their embrace of colorless politics, it sounds a lot like the colorblind politics of the old conservatism. In the 1980’s conservatives were sure America was ready to move beyond race. Everyone had the same opportunity and society would finally escape the long shadow of slavery, segregation, and discrimination. Race would still exist. It simply would not matter in our behavior as citizens and as a society.

The New Right is more reactionary, but the idea is the same. Instead of the optimism of the 1980’s, they are informed by the pessimism of the present. While they agree that discrimination is the worst sin, they see the antiracists as bad as the racists they claim to oppose. The New Right wants to use any means necessary to remove any discussion of race and biological reality from the public square, mostly because they see it as a tool of the people they claim to oppose.

From a dissident perspective, this New Right seems doomed to failure because reality is undefeated, but that view suffers from a flawed view of success. The New Left, like the Old Left and it antecedents since the Mayflower needs a dancing partner, one that shares its ultimate goal. That means something will rise up to take that spot now that the old Buckley-style conservatism is caput. Rufo-ism is a good bet to be what fills that void on the New Left’s dance card.

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Trouble In The Levant

Posted on October 9, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about the classic historical drama, Doctor Zhivago, a post about demographic reality and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

A good rule when trying to understand anything in the Middle East is to first assume that nothing is as it appears on the surface. This is the land of endless intrigue and a land nearly devoid of candor. Another good rule is to assume all interested parties are lying, even those outside the region. This is especially true of anything concerning Israel, which is usually at the center of intrigue. Naturally, that is the place to start when analyzing the recent fighting in the Levant.

For those living off-grid until this morning, the Arab militia group Hamas launched a series of daring raids into Israel from the Gaza strip. They overran Israeli border posts, blinded radar systems, and attacked IDF garrisons. Once inside Israeli, they attacked some sort of outdoor rave that was going on at the time, killing hundreds of people and taking many of them as prisoners. Israel is now promising to genocide the Arab population in the Gaza strip in retaliation.

The first question to ask is how was it possible for such a large, complex operation to happen in a walled ethno-state like Israel? The IDF is a fully modern, high-tech military that is supposed to be the best in the word at defending against insurgents, yet they were caught unawares by Hamas. Further, Mossad exists to monitor these populations for exactly these sorts of threats. Somehow, poorly armed militants were able to organize this without being detected.

Adding to the intrigue is this story in the Wall Street Journal claiming inside information on how this was planned. Since we know regime media does no independent reporting, it means the story was recited to them by the regime. Is it plausible that Washington knew about this while Israel knew nothing? How likely is it that Washington knew about this and did not relay warnings to Israel? Maybe the story is a fake planted by the neocons to paint Iran as the villain.

Regardless, this attack could not come at a better time for the Israeli government, which has been in crisis for a year. Not so long ago there were large protests over constitutional reforms pushed by the Netanyahu government. Some thought civil war was possible, due to the scale of unrest. Those protests reflect a larger demographic problem within Israel. The old liberal ruling class stopped having children, while the ultra-orthodox continue to breed like rabbits.

A full-scale mobilization and war on the Palestinians is just the thing to suppress dissent and whip up support for the state. After all, this is the reason that Washington has been on a war footing since 1945. All of the parties in Israel will now have no choice but to fall in behind the Netanyahu government, at least until the emergency is over and the hostages are returned or killed by the IDF. The early results suggest the plan is to annihilate Gaza and drive off the remaining population.

There is another benefit. For decades Israel has been trying to get the United States to attack Iran and topple the Iranian regime. This was the neocon plan in the Bush years, but the debacle in Iraq forced them to table the idea. Hamas and Hezbollah are backed by Iran, so a slaughter in Gaza could provoke Iran, which in turn would give Washington an excuse to attack them. The bodies were not cold and Lindsey Graham was out reading this exact script to the media.

Israel and the neocons are not the only people dancing on rooftops over what they are calling Israel’s 9/11. The Saudis are probably taking a sigh of relief. Washington has been pressuring the Saudis to normalize relations with Israel, something they would like to avoid as it would complicate their relationship with Iran. Both countries are now in BRICS and slowly working through their longstanding issues. Of course, China and Russia are promising both sides support in this effort.

The Saudis have not made it this long by luck. They understand that the world is changing, and they know their role in this new world will change with it, but they are not going to get ahead of things either. They probably want to see how things develop with Russia and China before alienating Washington. If they can remain on good terms with all sides for now, they have more cards to play. This new flare up in Arab-Israeli tensions give them an excuse to slow-play Washington.

Then we have Iran, which is going to get the blame from Israel and the neocons for instigating this attack. Whether Iran did or did not greenlight the attack is debatable, but they have real power in this game. They have also cultivated strong relations with Russia and China, who would love to play a bigger role in the region. This new war gives Iran a reason to invite both counties into the process of finding a solution to the conflict, thus strengthening Iran.

That is another angle to this that does not get mentioned. Washington has been slowly pushed out of regional politics, outside of Israel and the garrisons in Syria. With the massive drain on the American war machine in Ukraine, is Washington capable of launching a war against Iran? Can Israel sustain their war without new supplies from Washington, which may be low on weapons too? In 2006 Israel actually ran out of certain munitions fighting Hezbollah.

In other words, Iran may be calculating that this is now the time to reset the game board in order to setup new negotiations. Imagine a scenario in which both China and Russia are pushing for a regional peace conference, but Washington and Israel are pushing for war with Iran, but neither has the means to do it. Just as every other Western empire has exhausted itself in the Middle East, Iran may be thinking the Global American Empire has exhausted itself and is ready to leave.

This brings up another angle. The Russians are the big winner in this for the simple reason that the West now has to choose between Israel and Ukraine. Washington had to requisition 80% of Israel’s reserve munitions for Ukraine. They scoured the empire for weapons and ammunition. Facing a second front, they will have to choose and everyone on planet earth knows who will win that one. A hot war in the Levant is going to make for a very cold winter in Ukraine.

This may not be the worst thing for Washington. Ukraine is a loser that will only end poorly, so putting that war on the ignore list and focusing attention on this new front in the Middle East could be a blessing in disguise. Right now, the volunteer army of Ukraine experts are rebranding as Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran experts, so the Ukraine war can be quickly forgotten. The power of regime media is the power to ignore, so if they ignore Ukraine, everyone ignores Ukraine.

One interesting sidenote to all of this is the conservative zombies chanting about how weakness in Ukraine has led to aggression against Israel. They have no idea why they are saying this, but they are not entirely wrong. The failure in the proxy war with Russia has exposed the rot in the American system. Decades of looting and grifting have left the empire unable to follow through on its threats. As a result, the world is becoming less afraid of Washington’s bluster and bullying.

That is the subtext to all of this. The fossils from the Reagan-Bush Museum are not wrong when they say Israel is the only Western outpost in the Middle East. It is just that the West is in decline and that means these outposts will be abandoned or overrun as part of the process of decline. If Israel is to survive it means becoming something other than an outpost of the West. If the West is to survive, it means abandoning these outposts and setting about the task of renewal.

Let’s Talk About Politics

Posted on October 6, 2023 by thezman

The ouster of Kevin McCarthy is one of those things that quickly gets internalized, despite its novelty, because the media machine operates like a hype man for a professional wrestling operation. It turns everything into trashy daytime drama, so even an important thing becomes just another poo-flinging contest between professional media partisans. As a result, it loses all meaning.

In the fullness of time, we may look back at it as one of those cracks that appeared in a system that was about to collapse. Think back to the downfall of Speaker Jim Wright in the late 1980’s and what followed. Like McCarthy, Wright was not very popular, but he was a system man who would not rock the boat. The trouble was the old system was no longer sustainable as the world outside was changing.

In the case of Wright, there was a new generation coming along and there was the final leg of the political realignment that started in the 1970’s. In the case of McCarthy there is a generational change and the radicalization of politics. The days of playing the old Republican Party tricks are coming to an end. McCarthy’s “say one thing and do another” approach is no longer going to work for the GOP.

The thing not getting enough attention is the fact that the Democrats were willing to let him swing rather than cut a deal. Maybe it was pure partisan spite or just incompetence, but they left money on the table in order to avoid being seen by their donors and voters making a deal with the other side. Even the dumbest Republican had to notice the unanimity of their “friends across the aisle.”

This McCarthy business suggests Washington may be reaching one of those inflection points like 1994 or 1974. The baby boomer generation is about to leave the stage just as the world is changing rapidly. When Speaker Wright was toppled, the boomers were ready to take over as the Cold War was coming to an end. As the millennials are taking over, the Global American Empire is coming to an end.

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McCarthy
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Numbers

Posted on October 5, 2023 by thezman

If you were a young person in the 1980’s and caught up in the swelling conservative movement, you needed to know the numbers. Conservatism, to a great degree, was about making rational arguments which meant starting with the numbers. Things like the budget deficit, economic growth, crime rates and inflation were a common part of the conservative counter to progressive claims. At its most basic, conservatism was rational while liberalism was emotional.

For a while it seemed like the conservatives had carried the day on this issue as the public discourse slowly mirrored conservative discourse. When public figures talked about politics and social issues, it was about the numbers. The media would make a day of covering the latest speech by the Fed chair. Alan Greenspan became a rock star who gave speeches to huge crowds. Every politician made sure to have the Congressional Budget Office bless his latest idea.

Through the Bush years, economists took the place of the court astrologer, providing empirical authority to every normative claim. This reached its peak in the first Obama term when they said that every dollar spent by the government created more than a dollar of economic activity. A line of people with impressive sounding credentials provided the math of this claim. This was the argument in favor of the massive spending program unleashed by the Obama administration.

It was not just politics that got the numbers treatment. After every Super Bowl, the media would spend a day or two crunching the numbers to prove that you were the only weirdo who did not set aside the day to watch the big game. Television ratings were a mainstay of media coverage. The stock market became the central measure of social happiness, with cable channels dedicated to telling us the numbers and what the numbers meant for your happiness.

Today, no one discusses the numbers. Someone arguing for a policy on the grounds that it is good the economy sounds like someone arguing for free silver. In fact, it is the primary criticism of Conservative Inc. They do not care about crossdressers chasing your son around the playground or the tidal wave of brown people pouring over the border into your neighborhood. They care about the carried interest deduction and locking in tax cuts that few experienced or remember.

What is the current projected federal deficit? Without googling it, few people would know, and most people would not bother to do it. The same is true of the total federal debt, which used to be a headline topic. How much does the Federal government owe and to whom do they owe it? Washington is embroiled in a huge drama right now set off by the Federal budget debate and no one bothers mentioning that about forty percent of what they spent is borrowed.

One reason no one talks about the economic numbers is they have become inconceivable large, so they have no impact. People can grasp a million and they can sort of grasp a billion. Being a millionaire would be nice and being a billionaire would be awesome, but trillionaire? It is probably better than billionaire, but what is bigger than anything you can imagine? The thirty-plus trillion federal debt is a meaningless number because it is outside of what most people can imagine.

There is a bigger issue that applies to all the numbers. Decades of lying about the numbers have made all of them suspect. The totally fake economic data pumped out in the Obama years sunk the credibility of the court wizards. When those people with impressive credentials put on their serious faces and said that taking money from you and giving some of it to your neighbor would grow the economy, even the most innumerate started to question the math.

It is not just the big stuff where lying has undermined the trust in the numbers that used to be the guideposts of society. Television ratings are obviously bogus or not as meaningful as claimed. If the people making the content cared about ratings, they would not have smeared their feces all over popular content. Ad makers would not have replaced most of the white people with nonwhites. They certainly would not have every white woman paired with a black guy.

Probably the most egregious offender of the numbers are the tech companies, who clearly fake all of their numbers. How many users are really on Twitter? No one knows but we know the official number is a lie. We can clearly see that the follower counts and impressions are fake. Before buying Twitter, Elon Musk made the rather obvious claim that the site was riddled with bots and fake accounts. Once the deal closed, he stopped talking about the bots and fake accounts.

There is more to the general fakery than the unreliability of the numbers. It is that it reflects a collapse in trust. When the government claims inflation is under control, but you keep seeing your expenses climb, you are reminded by the numbers that the people in charge cannot be trusted. When some new personality bursts on the scene claiming to have a huge audience, but no one you know heard of the guy until last week, you cannot help but wonder if it is a lie.

The numbers of life are not supposed to tell us what we ought to do, but to be a measure of what we are doing. If we cannot trust the numbers or the people issuing the numbers, then we cannot know what they are doing. We have no way of judging what is being told to us or if it is on the level. The only logical response is to assume the numbers are fake and the people issuing them are lying. A society with unreliable numbers is a society run by unreliable people.

Of course, this is most clear in politics. The most important numbers are the votes counted on election night. The logic of democracy is that everyone gets their say, then everyone votes and the side with the most votes wins. Along the way polling tells us how the various arguments and people are doing. If all of these numbers are fake, then what is the point? If the numbers at the soap box and the ballot box cannot be trusted, you are left with the numbers in the cartridge box.

Since the end of the Cold War, American society has travelled along an arc that started with a trust in the numbers and the people behind them to a place where no sane person trusts the numbers or the people behind them. That is probably why it feels like this pirate ship of a society called America is sailing into dangerous waters. Odds are just numbers, and the odds say that in a world without reliable numbers, the most likely outcome is the ship eventually sinks.

No Enemies On The Right

Posted on October 4, 2023 by thezman

Charles Haywood of Worthy House has a post up explaining and defending his concept of “No Enemies On The Right”, which he originally formulated as “No Enemies To The Right” last December. He used that original phrase when discussing the jihad led by Rod Dreher against a schoolteacher who was accused of heresy. Dreher was doing his Christian piety act to both attack someone who could not defend himself and to curry favor with the people he pretends to oppose.

Dreher panicked when Haywood used the phrase “No Enemies To The Right” because it would be very bad for business if people embraced it. Like everyone in for-hire conservative politics, Dreher exists to attack people to his right. That is his reason to exist and why rich people fund his operations. What we insist on calling the Right in America is primarily a policing operation. They impose the morality of the Left on the rabble that the Right is charged with keeping at bay.

Over the last year, Haywood has defended his original argument, refining it as necessary, in response to criticism. Haywood has no interest in becoming the Emily Post of right-wing politics, but his continuing work on this concept is producing something like a rulebook of right-wing etiquette. His ten-point outline for what he means by “No Enemies On The Right” should be viewed as a useful guide for discourse between the various groups in dissident politics.

The slogan “No Enemies On The Right” is not new to Haywood. Those around way back in the alt-right days, which feels like a lifetime ago now, will recall this was a slogan with some of the more popular figures in that space. In fact, it was the motivation for organizing the Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville. The idea was to both bring everyone together but also break the pattern of the Left pitting one group against the other to enforce their moral code.

Amusingly, before the alt-right used the term, it was a popular way for the neocons to stamp out dissent during the Bush presidency. They argued in the runup to the 2004 election that their war plans were too important to let the many lies of the Bush administration divide the Right. Their basic argument was “Sure, Bush is Lyndon Johnson, but the Democrats are worse, so you have to hold your nose and vote for the guy who is the opposite of what we promised.”

Of course, like everything political on the Right, this concept has been lifted from the Left, which coined the term “No Enemies to the Left” during the French Revolution for the same reason Haywood is promoting his version today. Opposing the King and the aristocracy was too important to let petty squabbles drive the many opponents of the regime into the ghetto of endless quarreling. Overthrow the system first then everyone can argue about what comes next.

There is an obvious appeal in this age. The one thing everyone outside the political class can agree upon is the system now only works to serve the interest of the people at the upper reaches of the system. There is a zero-sum game mindset in the ruling class where they assume what is good for them is bad for the people, so what is bad for the people must be good for them. The result is a system run by people who hate the people over whom they rule.

The logical answer is to hate them back. Since the people have numbers, the only way to use this advantage is to unite enough people under an opposition banner that has as its singular goal the removal of the ruling class. This is why this idea terrifies the house slaves of Conservative Inc. They know exactly what this means, which is the toppling of the people who keep them in the lifestyle they think they deserve. From the point of view of people like Rod Dreher, it is Only Enemies On The Right.

There is another advantage to this mode of thought. It forces clarity on the politics of dissent that helps flush out the poseurs and profiteers. Those committed to the larger project will refuse to condemn anyone on their side for crimes against the regime or regime orthodoxy. At most they remain silent. The poseurs and profiteers are always quick to point their bony finger at someone and condemn him for violating the morality of the opposition, like you see with Rod Dreher.

There is one major flaw with the “No Enemies On The Right” concept. It makes it difficult to police the ranks for lunatics and crackpots. Populist politics has always struggled with the weirdo problem precisely because it is unwilling to criticize anyone willing to join the fight against the Left. You can chant “No Enemies On The Right!” until you are blue in the face, but you must have some way to filter out the lunatics or you end up being defined by them.

There is also the problem of what constitutes the Right. The drug addled Antifa marchers oppose the system, but they are not of the Right. Jimmy Dore, the old school progressive comic, opposes the regime, but he is a socialist. The Grey Zone people oppose the America military machine, but they are communists. There has to be something more than opposition to the Left or you end up putting a leash around your neck and handing the other end to people you hate.

This leads to the third problem, which Haywood addresses in his seventh item in his list of “Tenets of NEOTR.” Disagreement is vital for any opposition to the regime as this is the only way to improve the opposition. Ideas need to be debated and that often results in hurt feelings, which leads to public disputes. Chanting “No Enemies On The Right” in these times will just alienate the people in the dispute. There needs to be a way to argue but in a way that keeps the focus on the enemy.

Finally, there is no escaping the fact that this is not a new idea and prior efforts at practicing it have failed. There is a reason it has failed. The main reason is the people chanting it were never really serious about it. Instead, they tended to use it as a shield to ward off criticism. This is how we got to Charlottesville. The way forward with this concept must be to go back and address the past failure. That means more discussion about “No Enemies On The Right” with the aim of getting it right.

Ukraine Budget Drama

Posted on October 3, 2023 by thezman

Last week the House passed a stop-gap spending bill to keep the government running for another forty-five days as they haggle over a budget. As is always the case now, it was all insider baseball and pointless theater. The people on the stage doing “Shutdown Fever” seem to think there is an audience for this stuff, despite the fact the audience for this material is just the Washington media. The peanut gallery has been empty for so long they do not bother to open it anymore.

Aside from the usual finkery and shenanigans that come from these things, there was one thing that could prove to be interesting. Speaker of the House McCarthy agreed to drop Ukraine funding from the bill in order to get the votes to pass it. He promised the Democrats a separate bill, but his promises are even less reliable than some of the famously unreliable promises. The fact that the Democrats were willing to go along with it suggests they were not terribly upset by this finkery.

Despite what some back-benchers have to say, none of this has to do with the money being spent on the Ukraine project. Washington prints the money it spends, so no one in Washington worries about spending. It is not even clear that they care about the Ukraine project, but this is a good issue for them to show that McCarthy is nothing more than a gormless sock puppet for the people who really run Washington. McCarthy made sure to prove they were correct on that score.

The fact that the Democrats went along with this without too much of a fight and the White House has been moderate in tone is the curious thing. So far no one has bleated anything about Russian interference, which is has been the pattern for two years now whenever anyone questions the official Ukraine narrative. It could be that they know the fix is in so they can ignore this tempest in a teapot. Let the outer party have their poo-flinging contest, as long as the money keeps flowing.

It is also possible that the Evil Party knows the Stupid Party will come to their rescue as this Ukraine project slips into a debacle. If the Republicans are willing to take the lead on defunding this project, then they get the blame for what happens in 2024. Given the way things are going on the battlefields, it is reasonable to think that with or without Washington money, things could be very grim by next summer. Perhaps that is why the Democrats are letting the Republicans win this one.

The thing is though, the neocons never give up on a project, so it is hard to imagine them going along with this. Ukraine is not Iraq or Afghanistan. If the money runs out, the ultras will kill Zelensky and Ukraine collapses into civil war. The Russians then take control of the country and Ukraine ceases to exist. Ukraine has lost half of its population since independence and that will accelerate with a civil war. The result will be a lightly populated border state between Russia and the West.

This suggests that maybe there is some uncertainty in the White House about where to go next with the Ukraine project. Money is not the real issue. It is the dwindling supply of weapons and ammunition in the West. The Pentagon keeps warning about this issue, which no one seems to understand. It will take years to resupply the war machine with new weapons to replace those sent to Ukraine. The American military industrial base cannot keep pace with the demands of Ukraine.

If NATO cannot keep sending weapons to Ukraine, then what are the options to reduce the burn rate or stall the war until supplies can be replenished? That is where things get tricky as all of the options rely on the Russians going along with the scheme. If the plan is to slow the burn, it means the end of offensive operations by the Ukraine army, but the Russians will continue to pound them. If the plan is a cease fire, then it means getting the Russians to go along with it.

A third option, related to the first two, is the trial balloon let slip by the British Minister of Defense over the weekend. The idea is to put NATO forces into Western Ukraine as trainers and advisors. They would be housed on bases, which would be turned into supply depots and repair facilities. The belief is the Russians would not blow up these facilities due to the presence of NATO forces. NATO would have safe zones in Ukraine to build up supplies and train a new army.

Given that the Russians have blown up a number of command centers with Western advisors in them, this sounds nutty. On the other hand, those facilities did not have the NATO flag over them. They were Ukrainian military facilities disguised as things like hotels and business parks. In Syria, Washington has had a garrison there protecting the remains of ISIS from the Russians and Syrians. Perhaps Washington thinks the same thing will work in Ukraine.

Taken together, this latest bit of budget drama suggests that Washington is unsure where to go with the Ukraine project. This deal buys them a month or so to come up with a new plan. This coincides with the onset of the autumn rains which will force the Ukrainians back into their bunkers and trenches. That will also slow the burn rate of weapons and ammunition. The old narrative has finally collapsed, and they now need a new narrative or someone on whom to pin the blame.

Walking With Death

Posted on October 2, 2023 by thezman

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The other day on a long walk I came upon a dead deer lying across the sidewalk that must have been recently hit by a car. The animal was lying stretched out, as is always the case for some reason, head and neck arched back with one big brown eye looking up innocently at anyone who came upon it. There is a sadness in the look of a dead deer, even when the death comes at your hands. Despite this reality, millions of deer hunters are preparing for the coming season.

On my way back I saw a couple of older boys, maybe even their late teens, looking at the animal from a distance. They took turns taking pics of each other in front of it, always from a safe distance, as if they thought the animal would roar back to life and attack them for some reason. Even at a distance, it was clear it disturbed them. As I approached, they warned me that there was a dead deer in my path, which suggested this was a novel experience for them.

A few moments of banter between us confirmed that they had never seen a dead animal this close. At first that seemed unbelievable, but they probably spend most of their days inside playing games or in controlled experiments we call school, so the odds of seeing anything in nature are low. At that age, their experience with death is their character dying in a video game. There are no sad lifeless eyes looking up at them in whatever game is popular at the moment.

Of course, there is no youth hunting to speak of in the built-up areas, so it is unlikely those two young men will experience death that way. In the United States only about five percent of young people hunt. The numbers around urban areas on the coasts are probably so small that it cannot be measured. There are more males under the age of sixteen who identify as trans now than those who hunt. Those two young men are less disturbed by crossdressing than they are by death.

Much of what we call progress in the last three centuries has been about insulating ourselves from the reality of the human condition, especially death. Few people know where food comes from or how it is possible. There is a growing sense among the urbanized populations that what they call meat is a crime against Gaia, in the same way that your car is an offense to the mother goddess. Fake meat exists to exploit this growing unawareness of the cycle of life.

We are not far from the point in science fiction where humans who reach their expiration date mysteriously disappear, sent off to the recycling plant. One day Uncle Bob is struggling up the stairs and the next day no one talks about Uncle Bob. He was picked up and loaded into a wagon overnight. Rich people are racing to find the magic elixir that will let them avoid death or at least stay young until the end, because progress means reaching a point when we overcome death.

There is a good chance that the present lunacy is made possible by the apparent insulation so many feel from the reality of the human condition. In a world where the consequences of flouting nature are brutal and personal, one must respect the reality of the human condition and pass that respect onto the next generation. The man with a son makes sure his son learns the reality of death at a young age, usually by having his son take the life of an animal hunting or farming.

In an age where life and death are abstract concepts, there is no need to think about it, much less talk about it with the next generation. This removes the essential element for understanding the arc of life, especially the arc of your life. When you see every day that all living things have an end, often a brutal end, you can understand that life is a beginning, middle and end. Since the middle part is the only bit you can control, you never lose sight of it as it is how you will be judged in the end.

Death has another value that we have lost. It is the thing that binds people together in the common struggle of life. When every man is aware of the death sentence that was issued to him at birth, he is keenly aware of the death sentence that hangs over his family, his neighbors, and his community. Just as he must struggle every day to reach that predetermined end point, he must struggle with his family and neighbors in order to give the next generation the chance for their struggle.

For most of human existence, the answer to the great question – who are we? – was answered every week at a funeral or execution. That last bit is something lost to the mists of time, but it was an essential element of social life. The punishment of the guilty was part of the glue that held society together. The condemned was not just hurried away like Uncle Bob but brought before his neighbors to be expelled from the life of society in the most extreme way possible.

The public execution had another value. As Joseph de Maistre observed, the executioner absolves the condemned man of his sins and sends him out of this life as an innocent man. At the moment of death, the price is paid and at that second, he moves from guilty to innocent. His last gasp takes all of his sins with him. It is not the executioner who has absolved the condemned. The executioner is the agent, the tool through which the community acts to cleanse itself of sin.

In this way, familiarity with death brings familiarity with life and sin. The former comes easy, but the latter must be relearned almost daily. When life, your life, has a clear end and that end can come in a variety of ways, those ways provide a different sense of purpose to each life. The purpose of the man swinging from a rope is different from the man dying to defend his people. Death provides clarity about purpose and therefore clarity about the crimes against that purpose.

All of this is lost in the modern age. Few young men will ever hold in their hands the still warm, but lifeless body of an animal. They will never see the executioner perform his duty to his people. Death is an abstraction. The closest people get to it is through the unreality of the digital world. In that realm, death is a problem to be overcome, while in the physical world it is a thing that no longer exists, because it is just assumed that one day, before your last day, death will be overcome.

In a world of that sort of certainty, there is no reason to think about the purpose of life or the crimes one should avoid committing against that purpose. In a world full of people with no purpose other than momentary pleasure, the society in which they operate must be a sterile playground. Anything with meaning must be stripped away as it could lead to unpleasant thoughts about the lack of meaning and purpose. To defeat death, we must first defeat any notion that there is a meaning to life.

What Is Possible

Posted on September 29, 2023 by thezman

It is fair to say that political philosophy, as we currently think it, is the search for the ideal or best form of government. Even now, at the end of history, when all of the best people are sure we have figure out that “our democracy” is the ideal form of government, there are heretics thinking about what could be better. It is hard to image what could be better than “our democracy” but they are imagining it.

Of course, even the best people must concede that there must be something better as otherwise there could be no progress. The only way we stop progress is by reaching the end of time which is the perfection human society. Once we reach that point, no one will imagine there can be anything better, so there is no longer a need for political science, political philosophy or even politics.

While we are progressing toward something, it very clearly is not the perfection of mankind and human society. Instead we are ruled by lunatics and simpletons hellbent on smashing what is left of Western society. The more likely answer to what comes next is chaos and then some effort to impose order. Therefore the question of political science will be what sort of order is possible.

What form of government is possible with the demographics we have and will have in the not too distant future? Will it be possible to have a general answer to that question for all regions of North America. Lilly white Vermont will have very different answers than highly diverse Georgia. Mexifornia cannot have the same answers as New England or states in the black belt.

One answer is that there is no system that can provide order, at least with the ingredients that we have in terms of people, history, geography and so on, so those will have to change. This is the recipe for civil war. The result of that process will then frame what is possible with what remains. The political questions then become, what is possible and what must happen to have tolerable options.

This Week’s Show

Contents

The Debate Over Rights Versus Tradition
What Is Possible
Monarchy – Tyranny
Aristocracy – Oligarchy
Democracy – Polity
Managerial Polyarchy
The Reality Of America

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The Bleep Show Goes On

Posted on September 28, 2023 by thezman

The regime held another audition last night for the role of token opposition candidate in the presidential election tentatively scheduled for next year. This time they held the audition at the Reagan library, which was appropriate given that all of the actors sounded like exhibits from the 1980’s museum. They even used some clips of Reagan as prompts so the performers could spit out their favorite lines. It gave the whole thing the desired retro feel.

Fox News produced the event, as they did the prior event, but this time they used the B-team to put on the show. In the first event they treated it like one of the phony talent shows that are a staple of broadcast television. They had a drone flying around the auditorium and they introduced the performers like a wrestling show. It was vulgar and crude, but appropriate given the reality of things. The whole thing is just another chapter in an ongoing big lie.

Perhaps having been too obvious the first time, they were more subdued this time, running a standard debate style show. They also used their B-team actors to play at moderating the thing. They had a chirpy little blond woman who was disorganized and flustered the entire night. They had some old guy who must have missed his flight to Heathrow at LAX, so they made him a moderator. The third wheel was a Spanish woman with a spray on tan that was starting to peel.

Most of the night was the performers saying the prepared and rehearsed zingers while everyone else talked over them. It was clear that everyone was instructed to talk over Ramaswamy so that is what they did, often just mouthing what appeared to be gibberish, or vamping as they say in the business. The result was a cacophony of voices while the chirpy little blond hopped up and down in her seat trying to get the performers to stop talking over one another.

Why anyone thinks people will sit through this is a mystery. They could easily solve this problem with the use of shock collars. If a performer talks over another performer, he gets enough voltage to disable him for a few minutes. Maybe employ trap doors under their feet as a sort of timeout. If the performer keeps breaking the rules, the door opens, and he falls into a garbage pit. He then has to climb the stairs back to the stage, covered in garbage, and retake his spot.

Of course, the fact that this would be an improvement over what they are doing is an indictment of the system. If the ruling class treated elections seriously and they cared about public’s opinion, these vulgar displays would never happen. The performers, who would be actual candidates with real agency, would refuse to participate. That is not our reality, so we get these vulgar displays. If you were trying to humiliate the voters, you would not do anything different as far as these shows.

There is some value in watching these things. You get a sense of the narrative from which the regime is operating. It is clear they still think Trump gets put in jail, exiled, or bankrupted so he cannot run. They just had a judge steal his company the other day, so that part of the script is still operative. That means the midget wrestling shows they are putting on are for picking the lucky loser of next year’s election show. One of these losers will get the golden ticket at the convention.

Last night it was clear they have soured on Noble Black Guy. Tim Scott got little action and was pushed off to one side. They could be sidelining him to keep him fresh or they could be moving onto another actor. Neocon Nikki got the star treatment most of the night and the regime produced a bunch of fake polls for her. They have been planting stories in regime media claiming that she is the “insurgent” candidate. Imagine calling the consummate insider an insurgent.

You have to respect the neocons. They may be evil, but they never abandon their project, and they always plan ahead. Despite the results in Ukraine, they still dream the dream of thermonuclear war, so they keep reaching their tentacles into the process to promote those who share their dream of extinguishing humanity. Even though they have publicly abandoned the Republican Party, they see an opening to get one of their sock puppets the nomination and they are seizing it.

The trouble for them and the regime is that the people are coming to understand that there are people with the impudence to distort the truth so infamously as to put forth a shriveled hag like Nikki Haley. She and her scaly backers are not the solution to the political and cultural crisis. They are symbols of it. Only in a morally bankrupt system can degenerates like this flourish. If a meteor struck the Reagan Library last night during the show, the world would be a better place.

Sadly, it will not come to that just yet. Instead, it was merely another reminder to Republican voters that their party hates them. All of the actors were handed lines to say mean things about Trump, who is now the face of the party’s voters. The only thing they did not do is take turns spitting on a picture of Trump. The star of this portion was a fat slob they trucked in to repeat Borsht Belt zingers about Trump. The usual suspects still think this stuff is hilarious, which is a topic all its own.

In the end politics is always about the desires of the ruling class. No matter what the people think, the people in charge want what they want. They will never be talked out of being the ruling class. On the other hand, if what they want makes it impossible for society to operate, then we get a new ruling class. At this point, all of the trust is gone so they have to keep Netflix running, sportball playing and the grillers grilling, so no one notices the cracks spreading all around us.

A Haunting In Canada

Posted on September 27, 2023 by thezman

“There is a specter haunting the West, the specter of fascism” could be the opening line to a manifesto from just about any group in the modern West. Three generations after fascism ceased to exist as a real political and intellectual movement, it hangs over the Western mind like a terrifying fog. Every issue in the political debate is there because it relates to fascism in some way. It either defines who is and who is not a fascist, or it is assumed to be a precursor to fascism.

In every political debate, the people we continue to call conservatives are defined by their fear of being called fascists or an equivalent label. Racism, for example, is nothing more than a crude synonym for fascism. The people we call the Left have a deep sack full of terms that essentially mean fascist. If they call you an extreme right-wing extremist, they really mean you are a fascist. Of course, fascist now simply means “outside the moral consensus” as defined by the Left.

It is not just a rhetorical game. Western liberalism is now just a reactionary, but still revolutionary, cause that has evolved around fear of fascism. All of the weird cultural fads are driven mostly by a desire to strike out at the people the culture warriors assume to be fascists. These are the white people who are trying to live normal lives in middle-class suburbs. Woke is not for anything. It is against fascism and all of its manifestations, which can be anything.

Eric Hoffer famously wrote that “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.” This is clear when you look at what has happened to Western liberalism. Long stripped of its Christian moral foundation, it staggers on in opposition to one devil after another. The devil can take many forms but strip away the covering and what lies beneath is always an Austrian painter in the imagination of the Western mind.

This is a purely negative identity. Western liberalism no longer has an internal, independent definition for itself. Those concepts still linger in the past, occasionally referenced by the people we continue to call conservatives, but only as a way of trying to slither out from under the boulder labeled “fascism” that has been hurled at them by the people we call the Left. Both sides agree that everything they do not like is Hitler and Hitler is their forever enemy.

You see it in the recent scandal in Canada where all the best people were seen cheering a guy who turned out to be a former Nazi. Yaroslav Hunka, who is 98, got a standing ovation after House of Commons Speaker Anthony Rota called him a hero during a Friday visit by Zelensky. Rota called him a hero because he was told that Hunka fought the Soviets in the war. Since Western liberals now think Putin is Hitler, Russians are Nazis, so Hunka must be a hero.

The haunting of the Western mind by the specter of fascism is right there in that ridiculous performance. Because Putin is Hitler, it means Russia is the new Third Reich, which makes Ukraine the symbol of the West. Zelensky has been transformed into Churchill, but not the drunken degenerate version. He is the lion of the West version who rallied the forces of good against fascism. To the dullards who put the event together, Hunka connected the present to the past.

In reality, Hunka was and remains a Banderan, a follower of Stepan Bandera, who was a Ukrainian ultra-nationalist in the middle of the last century. Bandera collaborated with the Nazis because he hated Russians. Ukrainian nationalism is and remains, like Western liberalism, a negative identity. It is haunted by fascism because they see fascism as the great enemy of Russia, which they hate as much as the Western liberal thinks he hates fascism.

Of course, the question is how did this Ukrainian fascist end up in Canada after the war and remain undetected? He is wanted by Poland for war crimes. It turns out that the West welcomed a lot of these guys after the war. John Demjanjuk was a famous example from the 1980’s. He was the center of a moral panic, mostly over the prospect of running out of real Nazis due to the actuarial tables. All the best people turned up to point their bony fingers at Demjanjuk.

That gets to the reality of fascism and why it haunts the West. Fascism is impossible to define, in part, because it is the universal bogeyman. Both communists and liberals have spent generations heaping every sin imaginable on fascism. Those sins, of course, are the things these ideological camps fear most about themselves. With communism in the ash heap of history, fascism is now just the warted, gnarled face of Western liberalism’s worst fears about itself.

Another reason fascism is impossible to define is it was never really a standalone ideology, but a reaction to ideology. Fascism would never have existed if not for the apparent failure of liberalism and the very real threat of communism, especially the Bolshevik variety. Fascism was an ad hoc defense against cultural and spiritual genocide by people who saw both Western liberalism and communism in their raw form as they evolved in the 19th century.

This is why modern liberalism looks strikingly like fascism. We live in an age where the lines between the state and capitalism are impossible to see. Corporate America and the apparatus of the state are two heads of the same hydra. The media, the academy and entertainment are the other heads. The body that controls them is managerialism, which looks a lot like fascism. If James Burnham were alive today, he would easily make the connection between the two.

For a long time, people have wondered what would happen when the last real Nazi or alleged victim of the Nazis is no more. In the next decade that whole generation will be gone, leaving no more devils for liberalism to chase. Similarly, people have wondered what comes after liberalism reaches its end point. Both questions seem to have the same answer in that one cannot live without the other. When both are gone, the long nightmare of the West will finally come to an end.

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