Monthly Archives: July 2018

Democracy Without Borders

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Corporatist Enterprise

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Fascism is word that no longer has meaning, mostly because the left has made it the catchall term for anything they currently oppose. Even adjusting for that, no two academics can agree on a usable definition of fascism. Paul Gottfried, who has studied the subject more than anyone alive today, makes the point that fascism was a lot of different things, even to its advocates. It was an anti-movement, a reaction to and rejection of things like modernity, radicalism, and liberalism.

That is not a fair rendering of Gottfried’s thoughts on the subject, but it is a useful starting point when thinking about historical fascism. The book Fascism: The Career of a Concept is an excellent entry point into a topic for those interested in a sober minded history of fascism. An aspect of fascism that rarely gets discussed in the current age is its corporatism. Fascists, particularly Italian fascists, were corporatist. Mussolini saw the state as something like an organism that transcended all institutions.

The most famous expression of this is the line from Mussolini’s Doctrine of Fascism, “everything in the state, nothing against the State, nothing outside the state.” The state not only provides the services expected of the government, but it also provides the spiritual purpose for those in the state. The individual exists only in so far as his interests as an individual correspond with the interests of the state. The state is an organism that defines the citizen.

This is often used as the description of totalitarianism, but that is not an exactly accurate comparison. Bolshevism, for example, was indifferent to the spiritual life of the citizen, only focusing on the political and material life. That is the striking thing about Italian fascism versus Marxist movements. It attempted to give purpose to the life of the citizen, beyond his material utility. Instead of viewing the citizen as an economic unit, fascism saw the citizen as a heroic part of the great struggle.

This spiritual appeal can be seen in the modern managerial state. Politics is becoming all consuming. You cannot watch a movie or sporting event without being barraged with messages about “who we are.” Trump sounds like an anachronism, because he talks about bread-and-butter issues, while the rest of the managerial elite focuses on esoteric topics like “who we are” and “our democracy.” By democracy, they mean the managerial system and culture.

It also shows up in the modern conception of the business enterprise. It is not enough to have a job. It must give purpose to your life. It must be part of the great struggle that helps you reach your potential in service to the great cause. You see that in this story about a firm that forces its employees to embrace vegetarianism. Read about the company and it sounds like a religious mission. It used to be that businessmen only wanted to make money. Now they are priests.

It’s why rank and file employees of new style companies like Constant Contact feel the need to moralize from their cubicle. The young woman doing this is not merely a bonehead functionary. She sees herself as committed to the cause of the company, which is a holy cause. It is not a place where she performs tasks for money. It is what defines her life as a person. Led by tech, the managerial enterprise is not just an employer to its hired help. It is the defining feature of their lives.

The historian Ernst Nolte described one aspect of fascism as “theoretical transcendence” which he called a metapolitical force. Fascism sought to go beyond what exists in this world, toward a new future that was free of the restraints on the human mind. It imagined a world that was free of class, poverty, ignorance, and material restraint. That is what the modern managerial enterprise preaches. They are not just selling a service. They are changing the world.

The bizarre nature of the modern enterprise, where it describes itself as a mission to change the world, is one result of democracy. It obliterates local institutions, leaving the citizen as a stranger to himself and his fellow citizens. The corporation fills this void by providing a structured environment where the employees share an identity and see one another as on the same team. The managerial enterprise becomes both the local community and the church for its people.

The trouble is that a business is primarily about making a profit. Social activism keeps running up against the profit motive. Short of state sanctioned monopoly power, the corporate enterprise must compromise its values in order to make a profit. This is why democracy must favor monopoly. You see this with media companies, where the government encourages collusion and combination. Amazon enjoys massive subsidies, as it obliterates all other forms of retail.

This dynamic between the growing cultural power of the corporation, and its greater dependence on the state for protection, results in a merging of the two. Walk around a government campus and you see the modern corporations. College presidents now call themselves CEO’s, not because the college has become a business, but because both are now part of the great mission. The line between the state and the private sphere no longer exists because it cannot exist for both sides to thrive.

This is why gun grabbers, for example, have turned to corporations to advance their gun grabbing agenda. The state failed to ban guns, so now banks, media companies and retail monopolists are stepping in to “solve” the problem. In the not-so-distant future, you will have the unfettered political right to carry a gun, but no one will sell guns because it is practically impossible. No “private” enterprise will do business with a gun maker or a gun retailer. Individual rights are worthless without individuals.

The Irrational Mind

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Smart people tend to think smart people are immune from irrational beliefs. The smart scale has belief at one end and rationality at the other. The conceit of smart people is that they populate the rational end, while dumb people are at the other end. This leads to hubris. Smart people often fail to examine their own beliefs, assuming their every utterance is the model of rationality. It also leads to blindly going along with the crackpot ideas popularized by pseudo-intellectual posers.

The fact is, that smart scale is fiction. Smart people are just as prone to nutty ideas as anyone else. Belief as a stand-alone cognitive trait is largely independent of our ability to work the puzzles of life. History is full of examples. Francis Bacon dabbled in the occult and alchemy. Ben Franklin was a Rosicrucian. J.B.S. Haldane was the father of population genetics and a resolute communist, then a socialist and at one point a fan of eastern mysticism.

Another consequence of thinking belief and rationality are mutually exclusive is the mistake of assuming a rational motive to crazy actions. For example, Steve Sailer thinks people like Paige Harden are running a complex ruse when they go out in public and howl from the progressive catechism. After all, Harden is a smart person who spends all day working on tough problems related to human genetic diversity. Sailer jumps to the conclusion that she must be doing this to safeguard her research.

That is comforting to a smart guy like Sailer as it appeals to his preference for a wheels-within-wheels explanation of the world. The truth is though, smart people are just as prone to group think and crazy talk as everyone else. Read Mx. Harden’s social media feed and you come away with the sense that she is every bit as nutty as the hormonal feminists from the womyn’s studies department. She believes these things because these are the things her social class now believes.

That is the age-old error regarding the left. The default assumption is that they are acting as rational players. If they are rational, yet arriving at insane ideas like communism, egalitarianism, and multiculturalism, they must have the wrong facts or a mistake in their reasoning. After all, they are smart people and smart people always seek the factually correct answer. Therefore, the only explanation for their mistake is they lack the facts or have a flaw in their logic.

The bourgeois Marxists of a century ago are now bourgeois anti-whites today. Read old books from a century ago and it is remarkable to see how many smart people bought into fascism, socialism, and communism. The New Deal intellectuals were all fans of European fascism, and many were communists. The British ruling class was saturated with various forms of socialism. Today, you cannot be a Cloud Person without embracing anti-white hatred. It is what good people do.

Of course, most of the bourgeois socialists of a century ago were serious about their radicalism right up until it required sacrifice. It is the old gag about the pig and the chicken discussing breakfast. The pig is committed, while the chicken is merely involved. You see that with the modern anti-whites. You can be sure that Mx. Harden makes sure to avoid the spicier parts of Austin like Montopolis, which is just seven percent white. She appreciates her diversity from a great distance.

Just as pointing out the outlandish contradictions between how bourgeois socialists lived and what they advocated had no effect on them, pointing out Mx. Harden’s hypocrisy is a pointless exercise as well. In fact, she will hate you all the more for having tried to force her to focus on herself. The whole point of being an anti-white is to hide from her own whiteness. Her belonging to the anti-white anointed is all about self-abnegation. She hates white people because she hates herself.

Modernity is based on the false assumption that man is rational. That people wish to be satisfied with their material wants and at peace with their neighbors. The truth is people are motivated by a quest for grace. Humans want to believe the universe cares for them, and it has a purpose for their lives. Therefore, they seek out some avenue to reach that state of grace, to give purpose to their lives. Ask Paige Harden about her research, and you will get some statement about social justice.

That is the key to understanding the current crisis. Our ruling elites believe they are on the side of history, so the results of their actions must be the will of the heavens. They do not measure the results empirically or think through the consequences. When they see white people complaining about anti-white rhetoric, the anti-whites see this as proof of their righteousness. Marxist said the recalcitrant working classes were suffering from false consciousness. Today’s anti-whites accuse recalcitrant whites of white privilege.

The Power Of Comfortable Beliefs

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A frustration on our side are the people, who should be on our side, but continue to believe things that are obviously untrue. For example, we see new evidence against the alleged benefits of immigration, but most Americans still worship immigrants like they are magic talismans. Show some principled conservatives a video from a naturalization ceremony, featuring bearded Muslims and those principles conservatives will burst into celebratory tears of joy.

What makes this more frustrating is that you could sit down with these people, explain the facts of immigration to them, and they will nod along in agreement. Then, an hour later they will say something stupid like “we need these workers to do the jobs Americans won’t do!” Generations of propaganda about open borders play a role, but a bigger part is that it is just easier to stick with the familiar opinions. Once you arrive at an opinion on some subject, changing it is not easy.

This is not just something that happens with the hoi polloi. The intelligentsia suffer from it more than normal people. Steve Sailer often notes how supposedly smart people in the human sciences fall for old fallacies about genetic group differences. Here is an example from a while back. Eric Turkheimer is a smart enough guy to know he is wrong, but it is easy to be wrong. There is also a social benefit to remaining wrong, so he stays in the easy chair of egalitarian ignorance.

Greg Cochran puzzles over this stuff in the field of medical research, about which he knows a great deal. His idea that pathogens may be the root cause of things like Alzheimer’s is a revolutionary idea that is universal rejected by science, despite some promising evidence in the case of Alzheimer’s disease. Cochran remains puzzled by this, but the answer is the same as with group genetic difference. It is simply easier and safer to believe the old ideas.

There seems to be something baked into the human consciousness that rejects empiricism, even for people in empirical fields. Mystery is more interesting than certainty, superstition is more inspiring than materialism. A famous example of this is how medicine initially responded to the Spanish Flu. Despite germ theory being established science, many doctors still thought the cause was miasmas that came from burning human waste.

One obvious cause is that when everyone believes something, or people assume everyone believes something, it is assumed to be correct. This is human nature, which is why propaganda is such a big part of our lives. Our rulers flood the zone with one set of opinions, in an effort to drive out all others, so that people will assume everyone accepts the official dogma. It’s why every TV ad features race mixers. There can be but one opinion, the approved opinion.

There are practical considerations, as well. If you are in politics, there is no upside to pointing out to your liberal colleagues that open borders are suicide. Bernie Sanders is not a bright man, but even he understands the laws of supply and demand apply to labor markets. He will enthusiastically support the Puerto Rican bimbo running on a mix of open borders and universal free stuff. There’s no obvious benefit to pointing out that this woman is as dumb as a gold fish, so they nod along with her.

When even people in difficult STEM fields virtue signal on nonsense like racism, there is more than practical necessity at play. Paige Harden is a smart women working in a field compiling mountains of evidence contradicting the progressive narrative, but she will stick with the narrative, because everyone she knows believes it. If she gets her way, brown people will be squatting in the burned-out husk of her lab, as society will have reverted to their natural state.

It is an important thing for outsider movements to keep in mind when thinking about how to approach the other side. The normie in the tricorn hat hooting about the constitution is not amenable to facts and reason. He is in a comfortable place that lets him feel morally superior to lefty, while embracing progressive morality. You turn him to the dark side by making that place uncomfortable for him. It is why mockery and humor are powerful weapons of outsider movements.

It is also why various forms of socialism persist, despite the monstrous failures at implementing them and the mountain of evidence contrary to the theory. The appeal of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is that going along with her is easy and fun. The media and all of the beautiful people are celebrating her. She is like a viral video that everyone feels they need to see. Socialism has always that desire to feel that something better must lie ahead..

Barak Obama was the definition of an empty suit. He managed to make John Kerry seem complex. Yet, millions of white people showed up to vote, crying as they pulled the lever, believing they were about to experience the rapture. Obama was obviously a feckless ninny, but it was easier to believe he was the messiah, so most people went along with supporting him. It turns out that the most effective movements are the ones that make it easiest for people to accept things that are obviously untrue.

Libertarianism

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From time to time I get serious queries about my views on libertarianism. I take a backseat to no man in my disdain for modern libertarians, so I think a lot of people just assume I have never bothered to fully understand the topic. This is a popular defense from libertarians and soccer enthusiasts. As with soccer, the primary appeal of libertarianism is its simplicity, so this line of defense is a bit silly. Still, I thought a fuller explanation of my views on the topic would make for an interesting show this week, so here we are.

Now, as we see with defenders of Islam, libertarians have a habit of strapping on roller skates whenever you begin to analyze their thing. “That’s not the real Islam” follows every terrorist attack. “That’s not the real libertarianism” will inevitably show up in the comments of this podcast. I chose to rely on Hans-Hermann Hoppe for this show, as he is the pope of the faith right now. I did draw on Rothbard a bit and Rand, of course. I largely ignored the childish scribbling from Reason [clown horn] and Cato.

This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. Spreaker has the full show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android commies can take me along when out disrespecting the country. I am on iTunes, which means the Apple Nazis can listen to me on their Hitler phones. The anarchists can catch me on iHeart Radio. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below. I’m now on Spotify, so the millennials can tune in when not sobbing over white privilege and toxic masculinity.

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 00:00: Opening
  • 02:00: Wrong From The Start
  • 12:00: Getting There and Keeping It
  • 22:00: The Reality Of The Market
  • 32:00: The Story of Iceland
  • 42:00: Drug Legalization
  • 47:00: Libertarian Trade
  • 52:00: Individualism
  • 57:00: Closing

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The High Cost Of Cheap Labor

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From time to time, the claim is made that we need to import indentured servants from Asia, because the STEM fields are short of labor. This is a variation of the old line about crops rotting in the fields for the lack of stoop labor. The fact that no human living in America has ever experienced a food shortage due to crops rotting in the fields underscores the fact that these claims are nonsense. Indentured servants from Asia are cheap and more important, the threat of them depresses wages for American workers in the STEM jobs.

That is the cost of cheap labor that is easy to see. There are other costs that are not so obvious. In the case of the tech fields, indentured servants from Asia have had the perverse effect of discouraging young Americans from going into these fields. When tech firms started filling entry level jobs with foreign labor, they made the field unattractive to young people, who correctly saw that jobs were scarce and the ones available paid low wages. Young Americans were advised to not go into technology, as a result.

Put another way, cheap foreign labor drove out domestic labor from these entry level jobs, thus institutionalizing the use of indentured servants in the low-level tech jobs. Slavery had the same effect where it was practiced. In the case of tech, there is a social element involved. You go to college in order to get a good job. That is a social definition that goes beyond earnings. If your field requires you to work with smelly South Asians for five years until you can be the supervisor of smelly South Asians, that is viewed as a low-status field.

There has been another consequence of the use of indentured servants. People think of tech as coding shops in Silicon Valley, but the vast majority of American business relies on small local firms that bring a combination of technical and business skills to their role as technology consultants. The usual pattern is someone works as a programmer for a developer and then goes out on his own as a consultant, supporting clients that use the software that he worked on as a developer. He becomes their part-time CTO.

The result of flooding the entry level jobs with  Asians on H1-B visas has been a shortage of people in these higher end consulting and development jobs. In many parts of the country, the shortage of people with a mix of business and technology skills that can be used to solve real world problems is acute. You can find plenty of pajeets, who can write code but are useless at solving problems. Locating someone with business and programming skills that can solve real problems is becoming close to impossible.

At the other end of the labor market, the hidden cost of cheap labor has created another problem. The landscaper hiring Mam-speaking tribesman from Guatemala is no longer hiring teenagers on summer break. Retail operators in vacation areas game the system and import Eastern Europeans for service jobs. The availability of cheap foreign labor has made the summer job a thing of the past. It used to be a part of growing up in America, but now it is a rarity. Instead, foreigners do seasonal work.

In general, the part-time job and summer job was when a young person started to learn how to be an adult. They had to show up on time and learn how to get along with strangers. They had to learn how to put up with a crappy boss and perform tasks that seemed stupid and pointless, in order to get paid. They also learned the value of money and its connection to labor. That first check, less taxes, was the great eye opener for every young American. Today, they do not experience that until adulthood.

There is another aspect to this. The summer job for boys was often manual labor, like operating a rake or lawnmower for a landscaper. Maybe it was as a laborer on a job site for a roofer or painter. It was there that a young man got his first taste of being a man, because he was around adult males in their natural habitat. A young man learned that men are not as forgiving as mom and that you had to be earn respect. Young males today do not experience this. Instead, they live like girls.

This is probably why millennials have such a terrible reputation. The girls are spoiled brats, making crazy demands, while the boys are hysterical sissies. One of the things employers will tell you on the side is that they are careful about hiring millennials. They would prefer to overpay for a semi-retired boomer than hire a petulant man-child from the millennial generation. When a millennial takes over a family business from a retiring parent, it is a good bet the company will go through a rough transition.

Public policy is about trade-offs. The cost of cheap labor is not limited to the direct cost to labor markets. There are hidden, long-term social costs. The generations of young people warped by the consequences of not working will show up in the culture long after Sanjay is back in Bombay. What foreign labor does is monetize future social capital and pull it forward. It is a form of debt creation, not a lot different than eating the seed corn. Future social harmony is consumed today, with no way to replace it.

 

The Ideological State

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Civic nationalism is an effort to define a nation ideologically, rather than biologically and geographically. Up until the French Revolution, a nation was primarily a related group of people with a common language, culture, and history. The French were not defined by geography or ideology, but by blood. The lands they occupied were French lands because French people occupied them. The people were loyal to themselves and, by extension, a king, whose duty was to defend the interests of his people.

The French Revolution changed that as a nation came to be defined by geography and ideology. The challenge of replacing private government, where a king defends his lands and the land of his people, is in finding something to replace the basis of loyalty. That is where the civic religion comes into the mix. Instead of people giving their soul to God and their sword to the king, both are pledged to the new civic religion, where the state is the object of worship and veneration. Citizenship becomes a sacred duty.

The Enlightenment ideas about public government were, of course, a reaction to the defects of the aristocratic regime. A good king makes for the best form of government, but a terrible king, who is greedy or stupid, makes for the worst form of government. The former advances the peace and prosperity of his people, while the latter damages it. Placing the fate of the people on luck, hoping the next king turns out to have the right mix of qualities for the age, seems like a rather silly way to run a society, when you think about it.

Public government addresses that by giving the people an organized way to get rid of bad rulers and change public policy. The trouble with public government is the same trouble we see with public property. When no one owns something, no one has an incentive to sacrifice for it or invest in it. The tragedy of the commons applies to all public goods, including government. The solution is the civic religion, where the identity of the citizen is tied to the success of the state. The state becomes the altar of the people.

This is why, in our current age, the ruling class drones on endlessly about democracy and the alleged threats to democracy. They do not use the word democracy to mean people voting on public policy. They mean it as a synonym for the neo-liberal order and the cosmopolitan ideology that animates it. It is why the wrong person winning an election is a threat to democracy, while the right person winning is a celebration of democracy. It is also why the coup plotters in the FBI still feel smugly justified in their actions.

Ideological nations have two problems. One is they must endlessly whip the citizens into a fervor in order to keep them loyal to the state. Religions have the same challenge, which is why the preacher is always warning about some imminent threat to your soul or reminding everyone about God’s wrath. Piety is a full-time commitment and that applies to civic piety, as well. It is why communist countries are drenched in patriotic symbols, songs, and public performances, designed to keep everyone in a heightened state of ideological frenzy.

The other problem, a consequence of the demands of piety, is they become ruthlessly intolerant of dissent. “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state” becomes the mantra of every nation built on ideology. If people are allowed to question the ideology that organizes the state, they are doubting the project itself and this must be viewed as a threat to the state. Therefore, civic religions must always become increasingly intolerant and narrow, in order to defend the state against challenges.

This is why the two great industrial wars of the 20th century were blood baths. When one tribe fights another for access to the river, they just want access to the river. They see each other as competitors for a resource. Compromise and mercy are possible because their conflict is not personal. They may work up a good hatred for the other people in order to screw up their courage, but that is a fanaticism of temporary necessity. Once the material dispute is resolved, the people have no reason to hate one another.

When two people make war over religion, because they see one another as an abomination or a direct threat to what defines them as a people, the conflict must be a fight to the death. There can be no mercy toward that which threatens your existence. This also means no limits. The total wars of the 20th made perfect sense to the combatants because they saw the other side as devoted to evil. Incinerating a city is perfectly reasonable if you think the people in it are evil, because they support an evil ideology.

Again, this is something we see in our own time. Social media is full of post by Progressive fanatics, celebrating violence against people they call Nazis. It is not that these victims are actual Nazis, of course. It is just that the word now means “evil people” who the pious see as a threat to their existence. By definition, the pious must never show mercy to evil, as to do so means accepting that there is some virtue in the evil people that is worth preserving. Piety demands no mercy be given to the impious.

Now, the American ruling elite, for the last 75 years or so, has claimed that rather than being a nation defined by blood and soil, America is a nation defined by allegiance to a set of ideals, the American creed. That way, anyone who wanders in can be a citizen, as long as he pledges allegiance to those ideals. This was a post hoc justification for mass immigration in the early 20th century and a way to include the sons of recent immigrants into the national mythology. It sacralized the immigrant as the ultimate American.

In fact, Americans are now more loyal to foreigners than to one another. It seems that a third defect of the ideological state is that the ideology evolves a hatred of itself. Something similar has happened in Europe. The EU is, after all, an effort to apply the lessons of America to the European continent. Instead of defining the people biologically and geographically, a European will be an idea. In Europe and America, the idea of citizenship has curdled into self-loathing. What defines the people is their hatred of themselves.

This is not correctable. People join a cause or a movement in order to swap their individual identity for that of the group. In other words, people are driven to ideology out of self-loathing. A society based on ideology must therefore reward those most riddled with doubt and celebrate self-loathing as the highest virtue. The ideological state, regardless of design, must always become a suicide cult. It simultaneously boils off the skeptical and rewards the most fanatical. A society run by fanatics always ends up in a blood bath.

Thoughts On The Current Crisis

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Imagine you and a group of your friends produce what you think is a revolutionary way to improve the world. You are so sure it is a great idea, you and your buddies decide to overthrow the government so you can implement your idea. Now, even assuming your revolutionary idea is legitimate, that is a terrible way to go about changing the world. You and your band of nobodies lack the numbers and the moral authority to take over the government. The most likely result is you get arrested and locked away in a padded cell.

Now, a more rational way of putting your brilliant idea into action is for you and your group to go out and start telling people about it. In a prior age, this meant handing out fliers and knocking on doors to spread the good word. In the current age, you can start a social media campaign and create a YouTube channel, where you post informative videos on your brilliant ideas. Maybe someone with a big on-line following notices your efforts and joins the cause. Perhaps someone of importance gets interested in your ideas.

The point of raising awareness and getting people involved in your movement is to increase your numbers. One reason your plot to overthrow the state failed in the first paragraph is you lacked the numbers. If you get a million people to sign onto your cause, then you have a chance. Not only that, when it comes to changing minds, quantity has a quality of its own. People are much more open-minded to an idea that has a big following than one held by a tiny fringe group. Human beings are social animals.

On the other hand, numbers alone are not enough. Your revolution also failed because you still lack moral authority. In a country of 300 million, a million strong movement is still pretty small. The state will feel justified in using extreme force against you and your movement if they see you as a threat. Numbers are not the only reason you failed. The people in charge could operate in the knowledge that most people see them as the legitimate power in the country. Therefore, they can squash all threats.

Revolutions succeed because the prevailing order lost its moral authority. Even though the numbers that oppose them are small, the lack of moral authority means no one is willing to risk much to defend the status quo. The lack of legitimacy is why governments fall, religions collapse and cultures collapse. The Bolsheviks did not succeed because they had a better set of tactics or a plausible alternative. They toppled the Czar because the one thing everyone agreed upon is the old order had to go. Anything had to be better.

That means you and your band of revolutionaries does not really need a manifestly brilliant idea to change the world. If the prevailing orthodoxy has lost its legitimacy, even a mediocre alternative is enough. If you examine successful revolutions, the alternative on offer is usually quite vague and, in the end, totally impractical. It was more of a sunny vision, a promise of a better day, than a fully considered alternative moral order. It was just something that felt better than the discredited status quo.

The point of all this is that in the current crisis, the job of the dissident is to build numbers and delegitimize the prevailing order. When the alt-right got full of themselves and decided to it was time to start the revolution, they were squashed like a bug. The reason was they lacked the numbers, and they had done nothing to undermine the moral authority of the people in charge. To most white people, the riot in Charlottesville looked like a bunch of fringe weirdos making a nuisance of themselves. They deserved what they got.

Ultimately, revolutions that matter start with the small group and slowly grow into a larger group. That was true of the Jacobins, the Bolsheviks, and the Iranian revolutionaries. It was true of the American revolutionaries. The small group grew into a larger group and then it became a sub-culture. Finally, it blossomed into a counter-culture that provided a home for the whole man, not just the revolutionary. Dissidents in America are in the sub-culture phase or possibly in the early phases of becoming a counter-culture.

Another aspect of successful revolutions is they are short on concrete ideas. Detailed plans can be analyzed and critiqued. Vague promises cannot. That is one reason Trump won in 2016. His promises sounded good, mostly because they lacked specificity. They were aspirations, not policies. That means the people spending their days working out the new legal code for the ethno-state are wasting their time. The timeless principles of today are just the rules instituted by the winners, after they won.

There are two recent examples American dissidents should study. The first is the Evangelical movement that started in the 1970’s as a response to the cultural revolution of the 1960’s. They had unassailable principles and specific policy goals that arose from those principles. They had great organic organizations, their churches. They had money and manpower. They also focused on one party, hoping to make the GOP the counter to the Left. By the 80’s, the Evangelicals were a powerful political force.

They also failed to accomplish any of their goals. Their top issue was abortion, specifically rolling back Roe. They lobbied hard to get their guys into office and on the bench so they could get that ruling overturned. They had zero success. In fact, it is hard to find any aspect of the culture war they were able to win. If you had told Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson in the 70’s that their efforts would still mean gay marriage and trannies stalking little boys in public toilets, they probably would have lost their faith entirely.

The reason they lost is they engaged the ruling class on their terms. The Evangelicals agreed to play by the rules set by the ruling class. This ultimately meant supporting the ruling class institutions, like the political rules and the party system. Those things are designed to preserve the current order. In effect, the Evangelicals agreed from the start to defend and support the prevailing order. It was inevitable that their efforts would only lead to more of the same because they agreed to all of the assumptions of the prevailing order.

Another useful example is the NRA. Starting around the same time as the Evangelicals entered politics, the NRA decided to change direction. They became apolitical, supporting only candidates that were pro-gun. They stopped arguing about the efficacy of gun control as a crime fighting tool and started arguing about gun culture as a vital part of American culture. The NRA shifted from political debates to moral debates and captured the high ground by linking gun rights to patriotism and basic America concepts of liberty.

This is why the fight over guns has been the one exception in the culture war. The Left tried hard to capture the high ground, usually by standing on the bodies of dead kids, but they failed because the NRA always fights to hold the moral high ground. They never conceded the premise or the moral framework of the debate. When the Left says they want guns off the streets because of the children, the NRA says they want guns in the hands of parents, so they can protect their children and themselves.

The lesson for our thing is to first understand where we are in the process. Our job right now is to grow our numbers by promoting our ideas. Part of doing that is taking every opportunity to undermine the other side’s moral authority. Just as important, it means developing a genuine alternative to the moral order. A counter-culture has its own ethos, which means its own media, its own language, and its own comedy. That last part is important because what we mock speaks directly to what we believe.

Revolutions feel like they happen overnight, but they are the culmination of a long process that starts before the vanguard is out of diapers. The 60’s radicals would never have existed without the Beatniks and the drug culture. The Jacobins would not have existed without the salon culture that had developed in Paris. Radical politics are born of a counter-culture that provides the basis of an alternative moral order. For there to be right-wing radicals tomorrow, we must build the right-wing counter-culture today.

Old TV Shows

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I have been working on some projects that have required me to sit in front of the laptop most evenings. My habit when I have to work in the evening has been to watch some television while working. Without a cable subscription, this means watching something off the Kodi or whatever movies are free on Amazon. I saw they had The Sopranos and The Wire on prime, so I decided to binge watch those two series. I watched them when they were on, but it has been ten years, so I figured I had forgotten most of it.

I enjoy watching old movies just to see the culture change. Watching a movie from the 1940’s is like watching a foreign film. There are hints at subversion, as the commies were in deep with Hollywood back then, but they had to be careful, so it is extremely subtle. A degenerate like Gore Vidal could slip some subtle homosexual stuff into the script, but even in the 1960’s, the degenerates had to be careful. They had to fear old, weird America, as whites were still in charge and were willing to fight back.

Anyway, I was a little surprised at having the same sort of reaction watching shows that are just ten years old now. I watched The Wire first, as I get asked about it and I forgot most of the story. There were scenes in the show that would be cut out today, for fear the anti-racist lunatics would burn down the studio. A realistic portrayal of black America is no longer permitted, so I wonder if the show would even get made today. Then there would be the demands from the actors to make it even more black or make the whites eviler.

The fact is the writers highly glamorized the hell out of black crime in Baltimore. There are no savvy and clever black drug dealers. All you have to do is look at the crime reports, and it is obvious. Most of the murders in the city are between knuckleheads over petty disputes. The crime is disorganized and random, because the street gangs are just as disorganized and chaotic as everything else in the black community. The truth is the smart drug distributors stay far away from the street level drug dealing in Baltimore.

Similarly, there are no smart, but corrupt black politicians. There is plenty of corruption, in fact the entire city government is riddled with hacks. It’s just that they are ham-handed about it. The Feds could lock up every elected official tomorrow, but that would be both pointless and politically impossible. Imagine the reaction to seeing black politicians frog marched out of their offices. Watching these parts of the series, I had the same reaction as I do when watching a 1970’s portrayal of black America. It is all sadly alien.

The Sopranos is a show that certainly would not be made today. There is a part of the story when the main character’s daughter dates a mixed-race boy at college. For starters, the kid is half-Jewish and half black, with his mother being black. No way the today’s writers touch a topic like that unless the mulatto is somehow made into a Wakandian superhero. Then there are the comments from the mafiosi about blacks that no actor would agree to utter on screen. There is simply no way it could get made today.

That said, I forgot how good the program was for a TV show. I recall that pretentious phonies preferred The Wire at the time, but the truth is, The Sopranos is a vastly better show. The humor is first rate. That is the thing that struck me. Our current age is dominated by vinegar drinking scolds, so nothing is funny anymore. Humor is dead because everything Hollywood makes is saturated in multicultural proselytizing. Much of what makes The Sopranos work is that it still has plenty of old-fashioned jokes about life.

Keep in mind that these shows were made just a decade ago. In the 1980’s, watching shows from the 1970’s meant adjusting to the lower technical standards and clunky soundtracks. Frankly, I find it easier to adjust to black and white movies than the campy soundtracks of the 1970’s, but maybe that is just me. The point here is that the damn broke in the culture war last decade. The lunatics no longer feel any restraint, so it is endless poz in everything. Someone from the recent past would not recognize us today.

Something I have mentioned before, but really came to mind while speed watching these shows is just how much is padding. I now fast forward through all sex scenes, as they add nothing to the show. Thirty years ago, I could understand spicing the show with some smut, but in the world of unlimited porn, there is no need for it in a regular adult drama. Maybe they put it in there out of habit, like the car chase in every action film or maybe the actors demand it. They are all vulgar degenerates, after all.

Another thing I find myself doing is skipping past the pointless character development stuff that usually makes no sense. Maybe women like learning about the emotional issues of the fifth guy on the crew, but it adds nothing to the story, so I do not care. In the Sopranos, I skipped most of the scenes featuring the kids. I get that they are a part of how this mob boss is struggling with life, but that can be assumed. I do not need to spend twenty minutes watching the daughter interact with the mulatto in her college dorm.

The Energy Of Religion

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The other day, I caught a little of Jim Goad on Luke Ford’s podcast. I did not stick around long, as Goad went into a childish rant about religion. It was a bit embarrassing to see a middle-aged man act like a toddler demanding his binky. Then again, the sum total of atheism is a childish rant, demanding someone else explain the mysteries of religion to the satisfaction of an atheist. “Tell me how a loving God would let bad things happen to good people” is the typical rant. It is a question that can never be answered to their satisfaction.

Atheism is a good example of a negative identity. If Christianity did not exist, atheists would have to invent it so they could rail against it. You will never hear an atheist talk about the majesty or beauty of atheism. In fact, they never talk about it at all. Instead, it is endless complaining about religion, especially Christianity. The atheist defines himself entirely by his opposition to religion. It is why they almost always inform you they are an atheist within five minutes of meeting them. They are like vegans in that way.

Atheism is nutty on two fronts. One is the core irrationality of it. The existence of God, gods or some supernatural force that animates the universe is unknowable. The big religions get that, which is why it is at the core of those faiths. For that matter, what we understand to be the universe could just be a kid’s science experiment in another dimension. Our world exists in a terrarium on the desk of some kid in the lizard people dimension. These are things we cannot know. That is the nature of faith.

This is where a “bible believing Christian” tells me I am wrong. They know God exists because of something they read somewhere in their bible. Well, you do not know that and saying you do puts you outside Christianity. The Catholic Church had a word for people who went around saying they knew things about God. They called them heretics and burned them at the stake. You can believe in God, and you can believe he plays a hand in man’s affairs. You can believe anything, but you can only know what is knowable.

Belief is one of modern man’s oldest traits. It is assumed it co-evolved with language, for the simple reason both involve abstract thinking. The future condition tense, for example is about something that might happen in the future. This is not something that is real, that you see and touch. it is something you imagine. To express that, to even think it, you need language that can contain the idea. That is what language is, after all. It is a container to hold ideas and concepts that you can transmit to other humans, across time and place.

Belief works the same way, even simple beliefs that existed with primitive early man. To imagine a spirit force that animates the wind, or the tides requires the ability to imagine that which cannot be seen or touched. Conjuring a spirit force as the explanation for the tides requires the ability to infer things from observation. This belief becomes a container to hold this idea. The stories that came to surround the existence of the spirit force are also containers, to make it easy to transmit this abstract idea to others over time and place.

As humans settled, their observations about nature mixed with their own ability to alter nature. The first breeding of dogs, for example, surely changed how people thought of animals and their fundamental nature. Throw in the complexity of human relations that arises from settled life and it is no surprise that belief has become more complex. Those containers had to hold more complex abstract ideas, so simple beliefs based in nature were replaced with complex religious systems that could encompass complex ideas.

Put another way, just as our complex communications systems are part of what defines us as modern humans, our complex belief structures define us as modern humans. Belief, especially in the form of mature religious systems like Catholicism and its offshoots, is an incredibly efficient way of preserving and transmitting human experience and inferred knowledge. The Christian Bible contains vast stores of knowledge about human relations, just about everything one would ever need to know about human society.

A good way to think of this is to consider the gas tank in your car. It is for holding gasoline, which is the most amazing energy containing system we possess. Vast amounts of energy are contained in small quantities. That energy is so easily released, it requires only a small spark, yet it is so stable and safe, we lug vast amounts of it around at high speed on our highways. To top it off, it is relatively cheap. A thousand generations of human technological advance resides in that gas tank, powering your car down the road.

That is why it has proven impossible to replace. By now, the West has probably invested close to a trillion dollars trying to produce a replacement for gasoline and the equally amazing internal combustion engine. International huckster Elon Musk has driven himself to madness trying to build electric cars. Yet, we are no closer to replacing the internal combustion engine than fifty years ago. Like solar power and renewable energy, the world of electric cars remains an avatar that is always over the next hill.

Religion, and for the West that means some iteration of Christianity, is the gasoline and internal combustion engine of our culture. The long war on religion is not much different than the war on oil. The one difference is that unlike with cars, we did not wait for a replacement before junking the old technology. Instead, the West abandoned what worked for the fantasy of something better. We keep trying to make civic religion the replacement, but like Elon Musk, we are being driven mad trying to make it work.