A mistake often made when analyzing the actions of the left is to assume everything they do is driven by some master plan. For example, there is a touch of conspiracy mongering in all the George Soros stuff. While he is an evil person, much of what he finances is unknown to him.  Left-wing activism is full of scammers attracted to the free flow of cash. More important, it is a bug lamp for the mentally unstable, whose activism is based on pure instinct. They do not think about what they are doing.

The attack on Tucker Carlson’s house is a great example. That is the sort of escalation that a subversive mastermind would not approve. The reason is the left is far more vulnerable to this sort of thing than the gentry conservatives. Progressive enclaves are made up to look like 1950’s America with a limited police presence and no surveillance cameras. Then there is the fact that the ever-so-slightly to the right talking heads all live in progressive enclaves. All their neighbors are barking at the moon lefties.

Now, the people responsible for the “action” against Carlson were certainly just acting on a whim. The people financing them are similarly acting from emotion, rather than strategic thinking. They feel like they are doing something, and they somewhat envy the people who get involved in street activism. A major part of the Antifa performance is exactly that, a performance. It is aimed at the bourgeois bohemians who write checks to operations like the Antifa operation, One People’s Project.

This has always been a part of radical activism in the United States, at least since the 1960’s with the rise of the New Left. Read the biographies of people like David Horowitz or histories of groups like the Weathermen, and two things always shine through. One is the activists were often seeking attention from their parents. These were kids raised in bourgeois opulence, but desperate for attention. That is the thing that turns up over and over in 60’s radicalism. Most of it was just an effort to scandalize their parents.

Then there is the fact that almost all of it was financed by middle and upper middle-class people. Radicalism in America is a bourgeois enterprise. People often get this confused, thinking that the left is just a bunch of hypocrites. After all, the most liberal places on earth are the wealthiest. Today, all the politically active billionaires are throwing their money into causes that claim to oppose neoliberal capitalism. George Soros is a billionaire, yet he pours money into groups that swear they are going to murder the rich.

Even if you put aside the puerile emotionalism of what is going on with the left, the general plunge into lawlessness is far worse for them than it is for the dissidents. The rules, as currently written, are designed to protect the left. Antifa gets police protection at riots, because the cops know the dissidents would tear the spaghetti armed Antifa boys to shreds, if given the chance. Everywhere you look the system is rigged to protect the left and make it difficult for dissidents to mount a challenge.

A big part of that is keeping middle-class whites thinking they must follow the rules, because that is who they are. By convincing white people that they must scrupulously follow the rules, the left maintains an institutional advantage. If whites come to think the rules are for suckers, because the game is rigged by their enemies, the left loses its most important advantage. Put another way, if the cops decide they do not have to follow orders to protect the left-wing rioters, we will see our final left-wing riot.

If the left were really controlled by a super villain, as the talk radio type of conservative insists, they would not be promoting lawlessness. The people in charge always benefit the most from order. This is an iron law of life. That was obvious in communist countries, where the revolutionary leaders quickly turned into stone-faced defenders of order once they assumed control. The radicalism of today is entirely self-defeating, as it a top-down assault on that which keeps the radicals in power. It is suicidal.

One possible reason is Continental radicalism was always material in nature. The communists believed their system, if implemented, would result in plenty. Once in power, they needed order so they could figure out how to make their system work. Before long, order became an end in itself, as it provided plenty for the ruling party and insulated them from the masses. The Bolsheviks became an ugly, delusional version of that which they replaced. Their materialism ultimately made them into conservatives.

In America, radicalism has always been spiritual. The Puritan notions of salvation, coupled with an outsider’s hatred of the majority population, has made for a radicalism that can never be satisfied with control. The point of the march through the institutions was not simply to replace the WASP ruling class. It was to gain the high ground in a never-ending war on the white majority. The war on whiteness is an all-consuming reason to exist. If it takes destroying everything to get whitey, then our radical rulers will blow up the world.

One of the things people come to realize, when they make the journey to this side of the great divide, is that America lacks an authentic Right. In fact, it may have always lacked an authentic Right, as the country was formed by people who explicitly rejected the ideal of inherited rule and a hierarchical society. That is certainly debatable, but what is not debatable is the fact that modern America lacks an authentic opposition to the prevailing orthodoxy, which is founded in radical egalitarianism and the blank slate.

Since Gettysburg, Progressivism has been ascendant, first controlling the federal state, then slowly and methodically taking total control of the culture and politics. It’s opponent, what Robert Louis Dabney called Northern Conservatism, what we just call conservatism, was never an authentic Right, but “merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition.” Instead of offering an alternative vision of society, the American right offers a series of tweaks and modifications to the Progressive vision.

The result is that the Left comes up with some new radical idea, conservatives throw their dresses over their heads and a make big deal out of opposing it. They rarely offer an alternative, in the case of a real public policy debate. If they do offer an alternative, it is one that accepts the morality that is driving the Left’s interest in the subject. The result is the “opposition” to every radical idea is just a different radical idea, that is rooted in the radical morality of the Left. The obvious example is homosexual marriage.

In this age of media saturation, the phenomenon described by Dabney a century ago can be seen playing out in compressed time on the internet. For example, the Left is in the process of stealing the Florida election, by using wholesale fraud and rule breaking. The response from the so-called conservatives is ridiculous nonsense like this post at the American Spectator. To quote Dabney again, “The resisted novelty of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism.”

The tone and content of the piece is so stunningly obtuse that it seems contrived, until you step back and think about how this has been the pattern for as long as anyone reading this has been alive. It is why the alt-right coined the term “cuck” and why it stung so-called conservatives. It perfectly describes the so-called opposition. Their first instinct is to come up with some way to explain away the latest Progressive outrage. Their obsequiousness to so repugnant, it suggests a total lack of the very essence of what defines a man.

Of course, there is the philosophical issue. An actual opposition would note that democracy must result in the sort of circus we keep seeing in our elections. They would also note that a system designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator must always result in the worst possible answer. At the minimum, an authentic opposition would point out that the Left sees democracy as a bus they can ride to power. Once in power, their goal is corrupt and destroy it so there can be no legitimate challenge to their rule.

Another example of this instinct to grovel is from Joel Pollak at Breitbart. We now live in an age where the federal courts say the President cannot decide who gets a press pass into the White House, but the court is perfectly OK with big banks shutting people off from the financial system because they hold the wrong opinions. An authentic opposition would immediately point out the absurd contradictions of the dadaist legal system constructed by the Left. Instead, the response is to argue this latest outrage is a conservative principle.

The debate about where to place fascism on the modern political scale is mostly pointless, but it does underscore the problem of today. The people feverishly arguing that “the liberals are the real Nazis” do so by first accepting the Progressive moral framework. As a result, like someone trying to build a ship in a bottle, they are reduced to working within arbitrary confines to achieve something with only ornamental value. They do not even notice that they are doing it, because that habit of mind has been institutionalized.

That said, the debate does open the mind to the idea of there being no authentic alternative, because it was killed off in the Enlightenment. As a result, the great debate, the great ideological competition, has all been within radicalism. Bolshevism, liberal democracy, and fascism were all competing with one another. After a bloody century, liberal democracy came out as the unchallenged political philosophy. Because it evolved as a response and now lacks an authentic challenger, it is slowly spinning out of control.

In the meantime, we live in this between age, where liberal democracy is universal and unchallenged, but decaying into madness. It is why the aesthetic resembles the inside of a mental ward, and the players carry on doing the same thing over and over, but in an increasingly bizarre fashion. Perhaps Fukuyama was not completely wrong. Instead of it being the end of history, maybe it is just the end of liberal democracy. It was something that could only exist in contrast to the more depraved variations of Rousseauism.

My dentist is located on a side street in a professional building. It is one of those generic commercial buildings you see in business parks all over America. It is not a big building, just two floors and half a dozen suites or so. It is an odd stretch of road as there is a public library and a school on the street, along with my dentist, but the rest is a residential neighborhood of nice single-family homes, most of which were built in the middle of the last century. It is a nice little neighborhood where everyone knows one another.

On one side of the dentist was an old house that had fallen into disrepair, but after a series of mysterious happenings, the building was condemned and knocked down. The last time I was at the dentist, the old house was just a pile of debris, and a front-end loader was putting it into a dumpster. My assumption was that whoever took possession of the property had decided to start over and build a new house. After all, even though the lot was near the professional building, it was a nice little neighborhood on a quiet street.

This trip to the dentist saw a beehive of activity on the lot. The lot is on a steep hill, so the houses along the street are on terraced plots, with one side of the yard being a steep incline to the terrace up the hill from them. Every driveway has a four-wheel drive vehicle, as it would be impossible to get up the street in the snow otherwise. By the looks of the foundation and some of the excavating, it looked like the plan was to build another office building on the lot. It had that cheap, slapped together look you see in office parks.

I asked the hygienist about the construction, and she told me that the plan was to build three townhouses on the lot. Keep in mind that there are no townhouses in this area and the lot is the size of a postage stamp. Once the thing is done, each townhouse will have a strip of grass about twelve feet wide and ten feet long to call a lawn. It is going to be a monstrosity that is completely out of place in the neighborhood. According to my dentist, no one had a clue as to what was happening until construction had started.

This is an example of the modern economy. The builders are not adding value to the land or to the neighborhood. You can say the value of the land they bought has been increased by their activity and that would be a true statement, but their activity is the process of stealing the social capital of the neighbors, to increase their property value. All the houses within eyesight of this mess will now lose value, as people looking to move into a nice neighborhood like this one, do not want to be near townhouses or renters.

That is apparently the other thing. According to my dentist, the word is the houses may not be on sale, but instead they may be rentals. The scheme is to tap into a low-cost housing program to put blacks from the city into these townhouses via the miracle of Section 8 housing vouchers. Not only will the neighbors have their home values decline because of the aesthetics, they will now have to contend with three houses full of rampaging blacks from the city. I noticed several “for sale” signs on the street already.

Of course, it will not just be the immediate neighbors who pay for this. The school will get much worse if it is Section 8 renters going into the houses. The local stores will go into decline, as crime will become an issue. This killed off a mall on the west side of town. It started as a very nice, upscale place that mostly served the Jews, who live west of Baltimore city. Then it was overrun by blacks and all the businesses closed. The last time I was there with a friend, the place looked like the end times. Total bedlam.

Again, this is the nature of the American economy. Sure, there are still people coming up with ideas to solve old problems, but most of what is called economic activity is just organized theft. Some clever guy figures out how to monetize the social capital of a part of society and then proceeds to sell it off. Amazon is an obvious example of this. There will be no little league teams sponsored by Amazon. There were always little league teams sponsored by the local store owners. That has all gone because Amazon cannibalized it.

The internet economy is pretty much just the monetization of existing ideas, along with the artificial creation of bottlenecks. Apple and Google control the mobile space, so they now operate as toll takers. Neither company does anything interesting, in terms of technology or innovation. They just rob helpless travelers on the internet. PayPal is another example of a firm that adds zero value but gets to operate as a gate keeper. None of this would be possible without the massive taxpayer subsidies to build and maintain the internet.

Cost-shifting is obviously true in real estate. I have joked for years that the builder’s name developments after whatever it is they bulldozed to build the houses. It is a strange, unintentional mockery of culture. They knock down the authentic, to build a synthetic town, so a bunch of strangers can move through it. The argument is that there is a demand for new houses, so the old must give way to the new. No one ever bothers to ask why there is a demand for new houses or wonder from where these people are fleeing.

That is just the thing. America is just a continental sized pump and dump right now. Millions of illiterate peasants are moving in, turning modest neighborhoods into squalor, so those people flee to somewhere else. Of course, the affordable housing for them is plopped next to nice organic neighborhoods, so those people flee to an upscale planned community a little further out from the city. On and on it goes, all financed by credit and perpetrated by people who hate us. The result is a land of strangers with no social capital.

If you are over the age of forty, one of the remarkable things to happen in your lifetime is the collapse of Buckley Conservatism. Odds are, if you are reading a site like this, you used to read National Review and similar publications on a regular basis. Maybe you moved to paleocon outlets like Chronicles, when you got too strong of a whiff of the neocons in the 1990’s. Alternatively, maybe you wandered into the Von Mises or Lew Rockwell style libertarianism, after growing disenchanted with conservatism.

All that stuff is now in steep decline, fading from the stage so quickly that the next generation will probably not understand why it was popular. The Von Mises style of libertarianism will always be with us, as there is a theoretical foundation there that transcends contemporary politics. The synthetic, Reason magazine version will soon follow the Buckleyites into the void, just as soon as the Koch brothers get tired of funding what amounts to a carnival act. That is largely true of the rest of Conservative Inc.

The funny thing is though, Official Conservatism™ and its traveling buddies in libertarianism was always more useful to the Left than to the Right. This is a well-traveled ground for people on this side of the divide, but it bears repeating. The conservative movement that grew up in the 70’s and 80’s never managed to conserve anything, other than their sinecures at think tanks and media outlets. After the end of the Cold War, this reality became even more clear as conservatism morphed into international liberalism.

This was not obvious in the Cold War, as prosecuting it was a real area of contention with the Left, but the main role of the Buckley movement was to provide a buffer zone for the culture warriors of the Left. Conservative Inc. would channel public rage at Progressive social policy, into harmless efforts at resistance. Articles would be written, books would be sold, oaths would be taken, but the trophy case would remain empty. The history of conservatism is a laundry list of defeats in the post-war culture war.

After the Cold War, this became increasingly obvious, as conservative voters rallied to elect conservative majorities, yet nothing changed. Instead, the Right launched the war on Islam, which became the new distraction. Meanwhile, the borders remained open, the culture declined and the white middle-class continued to shrink. This is why Buckley-style conservatism has fallen apart. It never managed to conserve anything, and white people finally woke up to this reality. It is now blinking out of existence.

The collapse of Official Conservatism™ has been a good thing for the Dissident Right, which grew out of the paleocon resistance of the last century. Talk to people in this thing and they almost always broke this way in the Bush years or after it was clear that Ron Paul would never crack ten percent of the vote. Unsurprisingly, people on this side of the great divide know this well, but few people think about what it has meant for the Progressive movement. The collapse of conservatism has affected them too.

This lack of a credible opponent, even one paid to lose, is one reason the Left has spiraled into a raging lunacy. Since the left is in complete control of the media and popular culture, they get to create comparisons. When the comparison was between the dumpy and demure conservative, they had to tone down their act to avoid looking like a lunatic. Now that their basis of comparison is imaginary Nazis, figments of the most fevered imaginations on the Left, they are free to indulge the full depth of their rage and lunacy.

This lack of a sober sounding punching bag seems to be the motivation for pumping air into the tires of the synthetic “intellectual dark web” stuff. Calling the people involved “intellectuals” is pretentious, but pretending they operate in the shadows is silly. The point of casting them that way is to give them credibility with people who have walked away from conventional conservatism and especially libertarianism. This is just an elaborate honey trap designed to lure people over from this side of the divide.

Of course, their contempt for the rest of us gets the better of them. They are calling this thing “the intellectual dark web” as a poke in the eye at the people they truly fear. It is the same reason Jonah Goldberg called his latest book “Suicide of the West.” It is a sneering contempt born from self-loathing. These are people who embrace all the shibboleths of the prevailing orthodoxy, not because they necessarily believe them or even understand them, but because they lack the intellectual firepower to build a coherent response.

Just as the demand for Nazis vastly exceeds the supply, and therefore the Left manufactures them, the need for a buffer zone between themselves and the dissidents requires them to build this wall called Quillette. They envision the “intellectual dark web” to function like a force field. The “dark web” will supply complaint opponents who will say their lines and take their beatings, in exchange for a one percent lifestyle. They will also actively police the boundary between what is acceptable and what is “not who we are.”

Interestingly, the orthodoxy’s choice of buffer says a lot about the people who are ruling over us. In the previous age, the face of the opposition was a WASP-ish looking guy with an over-the-top Brahman accent. The only thing missing from Buckley’s act was a sash and a monocle. It is fun to poke fun at Buckley from this distance, but in his prime he was a good example the middle class American male ideal. He cultivated the American James Bond persona, a smart, educated and sophisticated risk taker, who got the girls.

The people taking over the ruling class wanted to beat that kind of guy. This time the leader is a Jewish girl from Australia. The rest of the ensemble looks like the guest list for a Commentary Magazine fundraiser. No love for toddies and cucumber sandwiches in that crowd. It appears the great intellectual struggle of this new age will not include any white guys. Then again, when the plans do not include white guys, it probably makes sense. The phrase “intellectual ark web” begins to take on a whole new meaning.