If one were to summarize why Buckley-style conservatism failed, the clearest answer is that it stopped being conservative. The central tenets of conservatism are tradition, organic society, hierarchy, authority, property rights and prudence. In the Anglo-Saxon model, ordered liberty can also be included. The limits on authority are the logic of a fixed and orderly legal system. Probably the most concise explanation of American conservatism came from Russel Kirk seventy years ago.

Buckley conservatism, in contrast, was never deeply rooted in social philosophy and this was a deliberate act. The Buckleyites wanted a create a political movement that could compete with Progressives. In order to do that it meant winning elections and that meant providing a practical platform for governance. As a result, Buckley conservatism was always a compromise. In order to fashion a practical political platform, it meant deviating from conservative dogma as necessity required.

This lack of ideological moorings, however, led it to drift away from conservatism toward something that is better described as marketism. Libertarians see property as the key to individual liberty. All human rights derive from ownership of self and property is the fruit of labor, so absolute property rights safeguard individual liberty. Marketism, in contrast, views liberty as the unfettered right to trade property and labor. Therefore, liberty is maximized only through the free and unregulated marketplace.

In both cases, the definition of individual liberty is at odds with conservative conceptions of individual liberty, as well as the tenets of conservatism. The Right has always understood that a man could only be free within the context of society. To exist within a society, he must gain control of his passions and master himself. Customs and traditions, which habituated him to his duties as a member of society, also channeled his energies to that which served the good of his society.

This conception of ordered liberty, in which man can only be free within the context of his role in society, is the wellspring of conservative thought. Respect for hierarchy, for example, is not just an observation of man’s natural state, but an acceptance of the fundamental nature of human society. Similarly, the right of property can only be a coherent concept within a human society, not outside it. There can be no property rights without society, so property rights must ultimately serve the good of society.

For libertarians and market absolutists, any restraint on how you can dispose of your property or how you trade property with others is seen as a violation of your individual sovereignty. Inevitably, it means taking the side of the market when it bumps up against custom or tradition. It means siding with novelty that promises more market freedom, even when it undermines the organic institutions of society. Inevitably, conservatives became the defenders of the wrecking ball that destroyed American culture.

It’s why a Kevin Williamson could gleefully cheer for the destruction of small-town America and their customs, in the name of the free market. From his perspective, the limitations of localism are a gross violation of freedom, so destroying those local communities sets the residents free to maximize their economic utility. Buckley conservatism has drifted so far from its alleged starting position, it now stands in opposition to that which defined its alleged starting position.

This recent piece by David French is another example. In it, he turns conservatism on its head in order to promote marketism. The problems of college athletics, however you wish to frame them, are not the result of too little commercialism. Only a blithering idiot could come to such a conclusion. The trouble with college sports, and the college system as a whole, is it is now almost entirely free of the system of customs and traditions that created it. Higher education is a market that strives to be a racket.

David French, of course, has become the comical front man for Buckley conservatism over the last few years. His blend of sanctimonious finger wagging and principled mediocrity is the exaggerated version of the dissident critique of conventional conservatism. He is the clown nose of Conservative Inc. This is not solely due to his many personal defects. His embrace of unconditional marketism has led him to adopt an entirely transactional view of human existence.

There used to be a time when both sides of the Progressive orthodoxy understood the limits and liabilities of the marketplace. The Left would howl about consumerism at the expense of authenticity. The Right would point out the dangers inherent in an unfettered marketplace. Buckley famously said, “The trouble with socialism is socialism. The trouble with capitalism is capitalists.” The modern conservative would not understand that juxtaposition. For him, the marketplace is supreme.

The underlying truth of radicalism is that it not only seeks to free men from the human condition, but it seeks to have them rise to the heavens and become gods. For the modern conservative, something similar has evolved. Whether it is a fetish for property or a fetish for markets, the Buckley conservatives imagine men breaking free of their constraints in order to become fully engaged market participants. For them, the paradise at the end is a shopping mall full of atomized strangers.

That’s why Buckley conservatism has failed. It is a primal call for a war of all against all, where atomized bugmen jostle to maximize their utility in the market. To consume product is the end point of existence. It is a crude and vulgar existence that celebrates man’s worst instincts at the expense of his nobler aspirations. What is on offer from so-called conservatives is a different type of hell than what is on offer from their partners on the Left, but it is still the same Progressive sandwich.

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It is generally assumed that liberal forms of government like parliamentary democracies and representative republics are middle-class in nature. That is, they require a strong and stable middle-class to come into existence, but they also foster the growth of a strong and stable middle-class. Because the bourgeois are conservative by nature, unwilling to risk their peace and prosperity, liberal democracies will tend to resist radical social experiments or take on great risks, like wars of conquest.

Of course, the history of popular government in the West strongly argues against those theoretical assertions. Not only has the West been racked by war, the peace that has existed for the last three generations is due to the imposition of empire. The Pax Americana is the result of the decades long stand-off with Bolshevik radicals and the final triumph of the American financial empire. In other words, the results of liberal democracy seem to be the opposite of what is predicted.

In fairness, one could argue that the last century of war and radicalism were part of the birthing pains of liberal democracy. Prior to the Great War, the West was still largely dominated by hereditary empires. Radicalism was the result of the prior age, born in the Industrial Revolution under the age of kings. The great competition for what would follow hereditary rule was the industrial wars and the subsequent ideological war, which was ultimately won by bourgeois liberal democracy.

This is the underlying assumption of Francis Fukuyama’s book, The End of History and the Last Man. The final triumph of the American empire of the Russian empire was not just the end of the Cold War. It was “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government” He has since revised his opinion on the matter, in light of current ructions, but it is an argument you still hear from time to time.

It does not matter how you frame it, as the West is now dominated by liberal democracy and the bourgeois sensibilities that supposedly support it. Look around the political classes of the West and you will not find exceptional men. In fact, much of Europe is now run by frumpy middle-class women. What is remarkable about the ruling classes of the West is not their mediocrity, but their uniformity. Every politician says the same things and behaves the same way in office. It’s rule by automata.

The horror that has gripped Washington for the last three years is not about policy disputes with Donald Trump. It is mostly about style. Trump is garish and flamboyant in his words and deeds. He is not a man with bourgeois sensibilities. Instead, his tastes range toward the crude and the base. The bourgeois hatred of Trump is all about the aesthetic. He’s not one of them and he is not respectful of their thing, so they see him as a threat, a foreign object that must be expelled from the body politic.

Of course, this smug, bourgeois elitism is not limited to Trump. It has become an article of faith in Washington and throughout the ruling capitals of the West, that the hoi polloi is the enemy of democracy. The great caper to rig the 2016 presidential election was as much about thwarting the will of his voters as the man himself. Today, the political class in Washington is proudly undermining the basics of democratic order in the name of democracy. Something similar is happening to Boris Johnson in Britain.

Washington politics is now an endless squabble between mediocrities over trivial matters that distinguish one from the other. Because these people all fall within a very narrow band of general talent, what makes one stand apart from the other is little things that would normally be overlooked. In order to avoid that, they amplify these trivial issues and endlessly pick at one another’s small distinguishing features. The result is endless hairsplitting and backstabbing over persona slights and insults.

It turns out that bourgeois government looks a lot like everything else in bourgeois society, in that it is debate about how many mediocrities can dance on a pin. The reason for this is the great middle is not all that great. If we use the standard of IQ studies and say the average IQ in America is 100, that is the pole around which bourgeois society is twisted. The closer one gets to that number, the more representative of the whole. By definition, the middle-class is mediocre.

Further, the people who fall about one standard deviation above the middle are going to be the people who dominate the cognitive fields like law, polices, the media and the academy. That’s an even narrower band of people. Relative to one another, they are even more mediocre. Walk around a college campus and you are surrounded by people who never met a risk they did not take. The same is true in the political class. What’s remarkable is the near total lack of accomplishment outside of politics.

Critics of democracy generally point to the stupid getting access to the ballot as the main flaw of democratic systems. If for example, America only allowed males to vote, the political center would be somewhere to the right of Ted Cruz. If whites were the only vote, something similar would result. The argument from those very bad people who make such arguments is that we have 30% of the population not built to operate a Western style democracy. As a result, the system must fail.

Whatever truth there is to that, the reason for those conditions, for stupid people getting the vote and foreign people imported to vote, is the bourgeois political class, supposedly operating from middle-class sensibilities, made that choice. The decision to expand ballot access was not done by the king or the oligarchy. That was the work of middle-class people supporting members of their class in political office. The same can be said of open borders, where bourgeois demands for cheap labor rule the day.

The fact is, a precondition for a middle-class is an elite that will impose order and discipline that allows for the growth of a middle-class. The bourgeois was never intended to rule, rather they were built to serve. Put them in charge and you get what one would expect by putting the inmates in charge of the asylum. The resulting bedlam always requires a strong hand to restore order. This is why authoritarianism always seems to follow every foolish experiment with democratic rule.

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Critics of the modern age usually start from the assumption that the way in which the West is organized is fine. The problem is either the people, as in we have a rotten ruling class, or some set of defects that have been introduced into the system. The lament is often some form of “if we had only not done X.” This is usually accompanied by fingering some point in the recent past, like the 60’s. Recency bias has always been a major part of right-wing criticism of left-wing politics.

The underlying assumption is that liberal democracy will work just fine, if we can just get rid of those terrible liberals or go back and correct some mistake from the past. No one ever stops to wonder if maybe those nasty liberals and errors in judgement are a feature of liberal democracy, rather than a defect. Like Marxists or libertarians, the right has worked from the assumption that the right sort of citizen can be conjured or created, in order to make liberal democracy function as intended.

The truth is, the results we see around us, whether it is spasms of radical self-destruction or the suicidal flood of migrants, are all the natural result of liberal democracy. The troubles facing the West are not the result of some defect or shabby operators at the top. This is what you get from liberal democracy. As a wise once man said, “Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There was never a democracy that did not commit suicide.”

The reason, of course, is the underlying assumption of democracy. That is, all men possess the same set of talents. After all, if every man’s say in the running of society is equal to the rest, if it carries the same weight at decision time, then all men must truly be equal. Otherwise, it is a system that deliberately vests the incompetent with the safety and security of others. In other words, the democrat must either be suicidal or sincerely believe men are of equal talent in this important task.

This is the fundamental faith of modern liberal democracy. It assumes and demands that all people are equally capable of making decisions about public policy. This is why noticing any differences in people has become a crime. To note that the retarded, for example, lack the necessary agency to care for themselves, raises the question of who else may lack the necessary qualities to care for themselves. If you cannot care for yourself, how can you be trusted to judge what is in the best interest of others?

This is why we see campaigns by radicals to expand the ballot to children, criminals and the mentally feeble. They couch their cause in fairness, but ultimately what is driving them is absolute egalitarianism. To acknowledge that people are not equally capable of being citizens, means debating where the line is drawn between those capable and those incapable of citizenship. This is a slippery slope that can only lead to the upending of the assumptions of modern liberal democracy.

That is where any alternative right, or alternative anything, must start, as it is the only way to arrive at an alternative outcome. Democracy starts and ends with egalitarianism, which is a binary issue. Either all men are equally capable of active participation is society or they are not. There is no middle ground. Democracy chooses the former and must relentlessly work to make it manifest. This is the root of the current madness that has gripped the West. It is a denial of biological reality.

This is the place to start when contemplating an alternative to the prevailing orthodoxy, whether it is in the narrow domain of politics or the larger one of culture. If all people are not the same in the particular sense, then it follows that all people are not the same in the general sense either. Since a “people” is the sum of the traits and abilities of the individual components, then what we observe as national character is the result of those individual differences peculiar to the people of that nation.

This brings us to the other face of democracy, which is universalism. Every democracy, from the Greeks to the present, assumes that the only legitimate and moral form of government is democracy. After all, if all men in the democracy are equal, it must mean all men in every society are equal. The social contract instantly becomes portable, applicable everywhere. Therefore, anything but liberal democracy is an immoral and inauthentic form of human organization.

The Peloponnesian War was a defensive struggle to resist the rapacious aggression of the Athenians, versus the natural hierarchy of the Spartans. The Great War that devastated Europe was ultimately to impose liberal democracy. The Second World War was a follow on to defend liberal democracy from fascism, which was followed by a 70 year war to defend it against Bolshevism. The history of democracy is a blood bath to prove it works everywhere for all people.

If what we observe is true, that people are not all the same in the wholesale or the retail level, then the question is why? The egalitarians point to various forms of magic like racism, the environment and the tides of history, but all of these collapse under the least bit of scrutiny. If any of these claims were true, we would see evidence of it in the West, where tens of millions of non-Europeans have been imported. Instead, the evidence revels the opposite. The differences in people are natural.

It is these natural differences in people that must be the starting place for any alternative to the prevailing orthodoxy. That sounds easy, but it is the great struggle of this age. It not only means standing outside the moral order, it requires questioning everything we inherited from the Enlightenment. That is what will divide Right and Left in the coming age. On the one side will be the defenders of the Enlightenment, and its egalitarian pretensions, while on the other will be biological realists.

Just as the Enlightenment struggled to escape the cocoon of the Middle Ages, biological realism is struggling for life today. Even sober minded critics of liberal democracy struggle to embrace it. Paul Gottfried, in his first post back at the venerable paleocon outlet Chronicles, makes this point about himself. He can acknowledge some of the points from biological realists, but ultimately he prefers to hug the shore of nurture, rather than sail into the sea of nature.

Yoram Hazony, the Israeli philosopher, wrote a book in which he wrestled with biological reality in his defense of nationalism. Chapter after chapter relied on accurate observations about human diversity. In fact, the foundation of his argument is that nations are different, because they are composed of people, different from the people of other nations. Yet every time he reached the obvious end point of his logic, he pulled back and started flapping his arms and howling about equality.

Hazony and Gottfried are realists, when it comes to ethnicity. Hazony is an ethno-nationalist, while Gottfried is a paleo-conservative. Neither man is naive about the realities of the human condition. Both struggle, however, to transcend their conditioning, which shows how powerful the egalitarian ethic is in the West. It can overcome not only facts and reason, it can make you question your own observations. The project to build a metaphysics around biological reality, therefore, is daunting.

The human diversity we see all around us, the diversity of outcomes, within regions and nations, as well as between them, is not an accident of fate. It is not the result of some dark magic or a conspiracy of one people at the expense of another. These differences are rooted in our nature. Human biological diversity is a real thing that describes who we are as a species. Man is not man without this great diversity, because we are the result of a long natural process of regional trial and error.

Because biology is real, that means sex is real, race is real and ethnicity is real. These are all real things, coming into sharper focus every day through the study of the human genome. The long journey from the dawn of modern man to the first civilization was not the same for all people. The resulting nations of people reflect the long biological journey made by each people. It also represents the natural division of labor, for creating life and for living it, between the sexes and between the talents.

The Enlightenment was the software needed to take Western man out of the Middle Ages, through the age of sail and the industrial age, into the technological age. Like all legacy code, it has reached the end of its time. The demographic age, in which Western man finds himself a minority in a sea of diversity, all creeping up on his natural habitat, will require new code. We need a new moral framework and to do that means deposing the current one and everything that it entails.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!