The Balloon Heads

Posted on February 18, 2020 by thezman

One of the unremarked aspects of the current age is that we seem to be experiencing exaggerated versions of various types in the managerial society. For example, Pete Buttigieg is an exaggerated version of the managerial class striver. He is entirely without accomplishments, but festooned with participation medals. Trump is the exaggerated, almost cartoonish, version of the populist resistance. He’s the picaresque populist fighting the system, but all of the dials are turned to eleven.

Michael Bloomberg is turning out to be another wildly drawn version of types that have come to associate with the managerial state. The most obvious being the scheming middle-man, who produces nothing, but is highly skilled at inserting himself into transactions where he can extract a fee. Bloomberg became one of the richest men on the planet by gaining a lock on the flow of data to the financial world. This allowed him to, in effect, tax every transaction, despite having no direct role.

He is he exemplar of the new, post-industrial economy. Instead of inventing something or building something, he schemed to gain control of the flow of information, which allowed him to operate as a tax farmer, of sorts. Silicon Valley operates much the same way now. They don’t produce anything of value to us, but instead skim from the economy in various ways. Big finance is also just a massive skimming operation. Bloomberg is the extreme version of the new economic man.

His personal story is an outlandishly exaggerated version of the Jewish success story in 20th century America. He is the product of eastern European Jews who emigrated in the late 19th and early 20 century. He grew up lower middle class, but was able to go first to Johns Hopkins and then Harvard Business School. America has been great for Jews and really great for Bloomberg. So much so he now intends to buy it, or at least its political class, and add it to his portfolio of assets.

Of course, Bloomberg is the wildly drawn version of the cosmopolitan conservative, or what has become known simply as establishment conservatism. If you look around at what passes for the Right in late managerial America, the so-called conservatives are people more comfortable in the urban setting. Their cultural outlook is that of the man, who rides the subway and hails taxis, just like their liberal friends. For them, the country outside the city is a place you fly over, not a place to live.

This means their conservatism is purely economic and superficial. To call it low-tax liberalism is to give more credit to managerial liberalism than it deserves, but it gets to the heart of the matter. The cosmopolitan conservative believes all of the same things as his liberal antagonists, he just dons the green eye-shade and a highly practiced disdain for personal excess. The difference between the cosmopolitan conservative and the left-wing urbanite is ceremonial and superficial.

That’s what you see with Michael Bloomberg. The difference between him and the core of the Republican Party is so narrow that light can barely squeeze through. He is for unlimited economic freedom for the oligarchs at the top of the system and maximum regulation of the lower classes. You can’t question the morality of him owning a bottleneck on financial information, but he can tell you how many shakes of salt you can have on your fries during your assigned day at the burger joint.

This is no different from what you see in conservative circles. Ramesh Ponnuru, for example, has detailed plans for every conceivable social issue. Kevin Williamson is always at the ready to look down his nose at the complaints of the lower classes about the inequity of the system. If in a mania of hunger, Kevin Williamson accidentally swallowed Ramesh Ponnuru, you would have the perfect archetype of the cosmopolitan conservative attitude. The result would be David Brooks.

As an aside, this is why the anti-Trump types will inevitably support Bloomberg as not just the savior of the Democratic Party, but the savior of “our democracy.” Part of it will be ethnic solitary, as most of the anti-Trump people still take Saturday off, even if it is to spend the weekend skiing. The bigger part though will be the fact that Bloomberg is their Übermensch, their idealized man of the future, who rises above the old conservatism, polluted by Christianity and populism.

Finally, there is another angle to the Bloomberg phenomenon. He is the extreme example of the type that lacks self-awareness to the point where his own behavior destroys that which allows him to exist. What Bloomberg is doing is discrediting the very notion of modern liberal democracy. If he is able to buy the nomination, much less the White House, he will have established that America is no different from Russia or Ukraine, areas ruled by oligarchs with little connection to the people.

To be blunt about it, if antisemitism is ever going to take hold in America it will be due to people like Michael Bloomberg. He is right out of central casting. He ticks every box on the anti-Semite checklist and does so with a big bold check mark. He is the wildly drawn caricature of the happy merchant come to life. His breathtaking lack of self-awareness could create more anti-Semites in one year than have existed in North America since the first humans cross the Bering land bridge.

This is current year America. The public stage is populated with cartoon figures, who have little bodies and massive balloon heads. Their bodies are the sum of their contributions to society, while their heads are the wildly exaggerated stereotype of the managerial age. Over-The-Top Jewish Oligarch has been called in to stop Unfrozen Bolshevik Caveman from winning the nomination, because Gay Managerial Man and Screeching Old Harpy are not up to the job.

It turns out that Marx was wrong when he said the history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. It turns out that managerialism heads right to the farce. The logical end point is rule by overly credentialed poseurs and oligarchical middle-men. It turns out that the managerial state is not going to end in a soft tyranny, but instead it will be eaten alive by an absurd parasitic class it created. Perhaps it just comes to hate itself so much, it chooses the only form of suicide available to it.

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The Black Vote

Posted on February 17, 2020 by thezman

Every election and sometimes between elections, the so-called conservatives start mewing about minority outreach. They start the game by saying how this time will be different and minorities are ready to listen. Then they spend time pandering to those voters, while lecturing whites about the need to pander to those people. After the election, when they got no increase in minority support, they say all the things about GOP voters that Democrats say about them.

It is a shameful and ridiculous charade, but republicans never seem to pay a price for it, so they keep doing it. In fact, a large segment of their voting base seems to like this charade. Baby Boomer conservatives are hooked on the idea of winning black votes. They are mesmerized by Trump’s tweet about how the economy is great for everyone except white people. Despite their political orientation, they are just as ashamed of themselves as white liberal boomers.

Those who have crossed over from conventional politics look at Trump’s pandering to blacks as proof he is not really on our side. After all, if he really did understand what is happening, he would spend no time pandering to blacks and instead focus on dispossessed whites. They are a demographic that is both larger and regularly assaulted by the Left. The argument is that these are the voters that put Trump in the White House, having turned up to vote in the 2016 election.

This is the Sailer Strategy, named after Steve Sailer. If Republicans are getting one percent of the black vote, increasing that to two percent is a few thousand votes in states that are not competitive. On the other hand, adding another percent of the white vote could be the margin of victory in states that are competitive, like Michigan and Pennsylvania. One percent of 70% of the electorate is always going to be bigger than one percent of 13% of the electorate.

George Bush the Minor won his two elections without black support. He did do well with Hispanics, but again, this is a tiny slice of the electorate. Go back further and George Bush the Elder won a landslide with just 11% support from blacks. Reagan won in a huge landslide in 1984 with 9% black support. When 66% of whites backed Reagan, fewer than ten percent of blacks voted republican. That speaks to the futility of chasing the black vote if you are a Republican.

The thing is though, 2020 may be the year that the Great Pumpkin comes to the pumpkin patch and gives black votes to all the guilt-ridden baby boomers that have been waiting since the 1980’s. Trump may actually pick up support among blacks and maybe even Hispanic voters. It seems ridiculous, but there is some historic precedent for what could be happening. In what would be great irony, Trump could repeat what Nixon did in the 1972 presidential election.

Most of the comparisons between Trump and Nixon are done by mouth breathers on the Left who check under their beds every night for Russians. Nixon is the universal bogeyman in their political universe. Every politician they hate is Nixon, while all of their backers are fascists or white nationalists. Because of this, people dismiss the comparison to Nixon, but it may actually be a good one. There are a lot of points of comparison between the two and their times in office.

The most important comparison between Nixon and Trump is they are both transitional figures for their party. Nixon figured out that the GOP had to wheel south and southwest in order to win elections. His “southern strategy” transformed the political map and eventually made the GOP the majority party. Despite being right about this, his party hated him for it. It put them on the side of the people they hated, the bad whites in the Progressive narrative, and they resented him for it.

Trump is doing something similar. He is transforming the party away from gentry conservatism and libertarianism toward suburban populism. Instead of appealing to the same urbanite bugmen as the Democrats, Trump is appealing to white voters through the proxy of populist economics. Like Nixon, he is hated by his own party, because it puts the insiders on the side of people their liberal friends hate. Trump is making the GOP the white party, despite their howling and moaning.

Of course, a similar thing is happening to the Democrats. In the 1960’s, the Left went insane and took the Democrat party with it. Nixon won office in large part because white people feared what was coming from the Left. By the 1970s’ the Left was a clown car full of freaks and weirdos. One look at the current Democratic field and you can’t miss the similarities. Like Nixon, Trump will face a party that is riven by internal discord and representing everything that scares white people.

In the 1972 election, Nixon won 18% of the black vote. That is a far cry from being competitive, but it is orders of magnitude greater than what we have come to expect from Republican candidates. Even after Watergate, Gerald Ford won 16% of the black vote in 1976. His decision to pardon Nixon may have doomed him with white voters, but his loyalty worked on black voters. Whatever explanations one wants to assign, in the last great political transition, blacks temporarily moved toward stability.

That may repeat itself in the 2020 election. Like Nixon, Trump is a rare politician in that he is what you see. Trump is not a phony. That plays well with black voters, who truly hate putting on airs, especially by white people. It’s why they are open to Bloomberg, by the way, despite his past statements. They know what they are getting with him, while the other candidates are code-switching phonies. More important, black are less inclined to support a crazy white person than a racist.

There is a lot that could happen between now and November. The Democrats could find a numinous negro to be their nominee in a brokered convention. The economy could collapse this summer. The Wu-tang virus could turn into the Yellow Plague. Making predictions this far out is a mug’s game. The point here is just that the conditions in which a Republican could do well with blacks are forming up. Trump the transition candidate, like Nixon, could deliver blacks to his boomer supporters.

Optical Delusions

Posted on February 15, 2020 by thezman

This post from last month drew a lot of responses, mostly from people who did not want to go along with the conclusions. Someone made a 20-minute response to it on YouTube, making what they call the defense of the big tent. In light of the recent controversy over Nick Fuentes getting banished from YouTube, it is a good time to revisit the whole issue and the topics that surround it. Fuentes is probably the best known purveyor of the good optics argument, so that is highly relevant to this.

For starters and to clarify a few things, the creator of that YouTube response makes some mistakes that are common in these discussions. The first one is to frame the issue as between a big tent and presumably a smaller tent. That was not the point of the column and that is not the issue at hand. One can have a broad-based movement that also excludes people who think they are Roman emperors. Even the biggest of big tent claims have limits on what is and what is not accepted.

The second claim is to conflate the term dissident right with other sub-cultures that may or may not have claims to being right-wing. It is a form of binary thinking to define right-wing as anything not tolerated by the Left. The goat blood drinking pagans calling themselves Roman emperors may not be liked by the Left, but that does not automatically qualify them as dissidents or even right-wing. The left is not all that fond of scientists these days, but most scientists are not right-wing.

Then there is the use of the term dissident. In a generic sense, sure, lots of people would fall under the definition. Anti-Semites, for example, are in dissent from the prevailing orthodoxy on antisemitism. That’s most certainly true. Would that put them in the same club as someone like John Derbyshire, the guy who coined the term dissident right twenty years ago? How about Steve Sailer? Calling all of these people dissidents is as useful as calling them mammals.

The fact is, what distinguishes the dissident right from the conventional right is not just opinions on the human condition and biological reality. What ultimately divides the two camps is the lack of ideology among the dissident right. It is the old Russell Kirk observation about Right and Left. Conservatism is not a set of ideologies, but the rejection of ideology. Conventional conservatism has embraced the Left’s ideological views on human nature, which is the roots of the dissent among the dissident right.

This divide also exists within dissident circles. Anti-Semites, ethno-statists, fascists, third positionists and so on are ideologues. The root of their dissent is they have a different vision of the model society from prevailing orthodoxy. Similarly, they are never in doubt about the possibility of it. Like the Left, to quote Kirk, “they see politics as a revolutionary instrument for transforming society.” That is an important difference between them and the dissident right.

Now, in the YouTube clip, the narrator makes some of the common claims about optics and “punching right” that are popular in certain parts of dissident politics. For example, he claims early on that the alt-right was ruined by the media, who highlighted weirdos and lunatics in their coverage. In reality, the alt-right was doomed when the face of it became a narcissistic dilettante, incapable of organizing a one car funeral. A serious movement never would have tolerated Spencer as the leader.

The whole Spencer fiasco puts the lie to the claims by some that optics are unimportant in their politics. The sole reason Spencer rose to become the face of the alt-right is he looked good on camera. He presented an appealing face to the cause, so he quickly became the face of it. The reason why some of his former followers stick with him is they think he makes their cause look good. It is nothing more than a coping strategy to pretend appearances don’t matter. They always matter.

Another point that needs emphasis is that the whole “no punch right” business was the creation of people trying to sneak into more legitimate politics. You never hear this from people who can function among normal people, despite holding heretical views. It was the dubious claim that a right-wing movement cannot have legitimacy unless it is tolerant of people who have not updated their views since the 60’s. It was, in the end, an effort to co-opt dissident politics by the 1.0 crowd.

Then there is the issue of taboos, which is raised at about the ten minute mark of that YouTube clip linked above. Unsaid, but implied, is the claim that excluding certain people from dissident politics reinforces left-wing taboos on certain opinions. The claim is that excluding people, who are bad for the image of the group, automatically gives legitimacy to the left, by reinforcing left-wing taboos. In other words, trying to present a good image is playing by the Left’s rules on politics.

This is the error of all reactionaries. Instead of developing an internal logic that naturally results in a set of rules and standards, the reactionary simply responds to what he perceives to be his opponent. To be a reactionary in a society run by ideologues is to be a rebel without a cause. Whatever the people in charge of for, the rebel is against and whatever is taboo, the rebel embraces. The modern reactionary is someone who puts a leash around his neck and hands the other end to his opponent.

It also relates to the optics debate this way. Imagine a society that has been ideologically tuned to associate the color purple with heresy. There are regular ceremonies where the bad people are dressed in purple and defeated by the good people. To go around wearing purple would certainly challenge the taboo, but it would also convince most people you are nuts. Unless you have the power to dispel the taboo, breaking them just gives the people with power the chance to reinforce that taboo.

The irony of the reactionary is that ultimately, he embraces the core starting point of all ideologues and that is the binary universe. The ideologue sees the world as white hats versus black hats, good guys versus bad guys. You are either inside the walls with the good people or outside the walls with the bad people. Those taboo breaking reactionaries, with their disdain for optics, embrace the same view. You either break the taboos or you must embrace them. There is no middle ground.

This is why reactionaries fail. Most of life is in the vast middle ground of exceptions, conditions and contradictions. Most people get that. They get that politics is always about trade-offs, half-measures and compromise. You don’t win them over by being as fanatical as the people you oppose. You win them over by juxtaposing your apparent reasonableness against the fanaticism of the prevailing order. You do that by making concessions to their morality. You don’t wear purple.¹

There is the final point worth making here. Those who deny the value of presentation always say, “The Left is going to demonize you anyway.” They mistakenly think optics and presentation are about winning over the Left or abiding by their rules. Again, this is the mind of the reactionary. Good presentations and subtle compromises to convention are about winning over the vast middle. The point of politics is about controlling the field between the various sides.

Yes, the Left will call us Nazis and fascists no matter what we do, but that can only be turned to our favor if it looks absurd. Spencer was easily demonized because he embraced the role of prep school Nazi. Nick Fuentes is not so easily demonized, because he reminds most white people of their kids or grand-kids. He may be a smart-alecky twerp at times, but calling him a Nazi violates bourgeois sensibilities. To put it another way, it is very bad optics for the Left.

Politics is always about keeping the ends in mind and making the necessary compromises to further those ends. Politics is a means to an end. Ideologues always fall into the trap of thinking politics is an end in itself, which is why ideological states are always unstable and usually short lived. Successful outsider politics has to be practical in its application in order to win ground in the vast area that is always up for grabs between the orthodoxy and those challenging it.

¹Anticipating the response from certain circles, the Nazis winning the street battles with the Bolsheviks in Weimar Germany is an exception, not the rule. The middle had collapsed in Weimar Germany, along with the old ruling order. The Right and left, as understood at the time, were not fighting to win over their fellow Germans. They were fighting to fill the power vacuum that resulted from the collapse of the middle.

The Lovecast

Posted on February 14, 2020 by thezman

It has been dark and dreary here in Lagos, so I decided to go a little lighter this week and do a show on Valentine’s Day. The original plan was to just do a segment on it, but it turned out to be a good jumping off point for other related topics. It’s one of those topics that naturally leads to other things related to dissident politics. After all, the whole point of the celebration is to encourage romance, which presumably leads to marriage and baby making, something in short supply in the West.

Like a lot of the topics I do, this is one I could easily do much more on, but I try to stick to the format, which means not getting too deep in the weeds. The history of marriage, for example, could easily be a few hours of time. Plotting marriage patterns in the West from before the Romans to today makes a good case for how the West has been regressing over the last century. It is another one of those areas that suggests our cultural views are growing more primitive.

The marriage topic also underscores just how much of our history has been anathematized by our cultural rulers. The evolution of romance and courting in the medieval period, for example, is something that should be counted as a great innovation of the West and Christianity. It had an enormous impact on the trajectory of the European people. Instead, all we get are harangues about how women are still suffering under the yoke of male supremacy.

The evolution of marriage in Europe is also a great example of how elites can change the culture if they so choose. The prohibitions on consanguinity, for example, altered European society for the better. The Romans then the Church saw the civilizing consequences of banning cousin marriage, even if they did not understand the mechanism behind it. The Occident is not an accident of nature. It is the product of many conscious decisions made over the centuries.

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.

This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening
02:00: Valentine’s Day
12:00: Ancient Views On Love & Marriage
22:00: Christian Role In Romance And Marriage
32:00: Sex And Fertility
42:00: The War On Family
52:00: Porn Talk
57:00: Closing

Direct Download, The iTunes, Google Play, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed, Bitchute

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/R0MD2HMWl6Q

The Conspiracy Metric

Posted on February 13, 2020 by thezman

A useful metric to measure the degree of corruption and degradation of a ruling class would be to plot the distance between official truths and actual truth. The greater the distance between official truth and reality, the greater the degeneracy. North Korea, for example, makes fantastical claims about the ruler, while Switzerland barely notices it has a president. The former is a madhouse run by a cult of personality, while the latter is the model of sober-minded, popular governance.

Another possible metric for measuring the health of a society would be the number of popular conspiracy theories and the degree to which people accept them. The Y-axis would be the number of popular conspiracy theories floating around in general conversation, while the X-axis would be the intensity of belief. The Turks have loads of conspiracy theories and they really believe them. The Swiss, of course, have never been in to such theories and are regarded as skeptical by nature.

There is an obvious argument against using such a metric, as it could simply be a proxy for the general intelligence of the population. Stupid people are more prone to believe fantastical explanations for events than smart people. The QAnon stuff, for example, is a clever mocking of the sorts of people inclined to believe such things. It’s a very clever person with too much time on his hands having fun at the expense of those who are not so clever. Dumb people tend to fall for conspiracy theories.

The thing is, smart people tend to control public discourse in a society, either through owning the means of public discussion or through their influence. A healthy society would have a healthy smart fraction that provides believable and reasonably accurate explanations, so that conspiracy theories are unnecessary. For example, 1950’s America had its tin foil hat crowd, but they were objects of mockery. They did not have millions of paying customers to their internet video operation.

The conspiracy metric would pick up two important factors. One is the size and influence of the smart fraction and its willingness to shape public debate. North Koreans probably have loads of wacky theories about their society, because the smart North Koreans spend all of their time lying to them about what’s happening. That and making sure they don’t get on the wrong side of the tubby cult leader. North Korea has a smart fraction, but it is exceedingly corrupt and paranoid.

That’s an important part of conspiracy theories. The reason they appeal to stupid people is stupid people struggle to understand things. The conspiracy theory allows them to have a simple answer for observable phenomenon. This is an important part of the human animal. We evolved for a very long time, paranoid about what was lurking in the bushes, under the water and in the shadows. Recognizing patterns and creating useful explanations for those patterns is our nature.

In the modern age, that need to fear the dark is still there, so it expresses for many people as belief in harmless conspiracy theories about UFO’s and secret government agencies that run things from the shadows. Even smart people struggle to accept that serendipity and fate are often the powerful forces behind events. People need to know why things happen. If there is no rational explanation for why something happened, then they will gladly accept an irrational one.

Of course, con-men often play on this reality to get people to believe some nonsense that aids the con man in his schemes. Government is also fond of using conspiracy theories to promote their interests. Getting people to believe, for example, that a secret agency using special software can read your e-mail in real-time has enormous benefits to the security state. It causes the people they are tracking to act in ways that are more easily monitored and more easily detected.

If you are a small group of people with an enormous amount of power, people will eventually notice it. Trying to hide this fact is a waste of resources, so the better course is to own and amplify this reality. If you can turn your opponents into aluminum hat wearing nutters, that directs attention away from the truth and onto the conspiracy theorists. All of those theories about secret government programs and 4-D chess, cloak and dagger operations serves the interests of the state.

That’s another reason the conspiracy metric would be useful. The more corrupt the government, the more likely they are to foster conspiracy theories. Of course, people with a corrupt ruling class are more inclined to believe bad things about their betters, so the metric would pick up that side as well. The conspiracy metric would be capturing one aspect of social trust. That is the horizontal bonds that bind the ruling class of a society to the layers beneath them.

Now, the major flaw, at least at this stage, is measuring the number and degree of conspiracy theirs in a society. It’s another one of those things that we can sense, but we struggle to define. We know the difference between pornography and art, in a general sense, but drawing the line is difficult. The same can be said for the line between conspiracy theory and simple suspicion. We can easily identify the extremes but figuring out where to put the line is difficult.

Maybe like the truth gap between official reality and actual reality, the conspiracy index does not have to be precise. We don’t need an exact number to see that the official truth from the current ruling class is much further from reality than in the past. We have enough examples to know the gap is much bigger. The same can be said for the conspiracy metric. QAnon would not have fooled people 50 years ago. We have more stupid and paranoid people today than back then.

A Gay Old Time

Posted on February 12, 2020 by thezman

The Democrat primary season is living up to its promise of being a stinging indictment of modern democracy. Thus far, they have staged two election shows. The first one was a disaster, as the party was unable to properly rig the results, so they effectively cancelled the whole thing. The second time they instructed the media to spend all their time celebrating the king, as it were, of participation trophies for his exemplary participation in the New Hampshire primary, while ignoring the winner.

Putting aside the clownishness of the show thus far, the New Hampshire primary is rather symbolic of the ruling class decay. Biden was propped up for almost a year as the face of the party center. He was supposed to be the guy, who was the moderate’s first choice and everyone else’s second choice. Blacks would support him as a proxy for Obama. The remaining whites would support “Working Class Joe.” Even the Bernie Bros would fall in line behind a traditional left-wing candidate.

In reality, Biden was a doddering old fool, who said embarrassing things in public when he had all of his marbles. No amount of media support and fake polling was going to convince people to support a guy about to keel over at any minute. Instead, the various tribes of the party were left to seek their own standard. That’s what we have witnessed this far. The Democratic coalition is coming apart as the camps dig in behind their candidate to the exclusion of others.

Pete Buttigieg is the millennial candidate in every way. Most likely his support came from his age cohort. Further, it was heavily female, with the male portion being the sorts, who support the case against consuming soy products. On the other hand, Klobuchar is picking up the old Hillary vote. These are the old hens, who think having a female president is the only thing that matters. Her bitchy obnoxiousness reminds them of every fight they won with their ex-husband.

That is the democratic coalition right now. On the one hand it is spoiled, entitled millennial voters. On the other it is their divorced mothers. Sure, blacks, Hispanics, legacy whites and bronze age communists are there, but the people who run the party are of the two groups rallying to Buttigieg and Klobuchar. Those other groups are just accessories. They always have been, but now it is becoming explicit. None of the top-tier candidates have any appeal outside honkyville.

The obvious exception to all of this is the Sanders tribe. For most of the 20th century, this group was carefully sidelined by a party that understood they needed their support, but could never let them on the stage. The Bernie faction was like the alcoholic brother that no one discussed. They were not hated, but everyone in the party hated the embarrassment they caused in polite company. The restraints are off now, so those freaks and weirdos are free to run wild in the public square.

In fairness, there is a parallel between the Bernie Bros and the populists who came out for Trump in the 2016 primaries. Much of Trump’s support was rooted in the decades of broken promises from conservatives. Similarly, the Bernie Bros feel cheated by a party that has promised them the worker’s paradise for decades. There is a strong anti-establishment vibe to the support for Sanders. The difference is that Trump was a genuine novice, while Sander is an old political warhorse.

That’s an important thing for dissidents to remember while watching this circus play out over the next few months. Some people in our ranks will talk about how the Bernie Bros are headed for a great awakening about modern politics. It will be analogous to what some on our side have learned in their disappointment over Trump. That’s self-indulgent nonsense. The invisible army of disaffected whites that came out for Trump was never under any illusions about him. They knew he was a protest vote.

Further, the Bernie Bros are not going to have their red pill moment when their guy gets robbed of the nomination. If he somehow gets the nomination, the Bernie Bros will not wake up to the reality of the Left when they run their “The Case Against Sanders” post in the New York Times. Unlike disaffected whites, the Sanders faction actually enjoys being treated like dirt by the party. They are the dog that barks like mad at the mailman from behind the door. The door is what really matters.

Putting all of that aside, the brewing chaos in the 2020 election is not a sign of a system breaking down, but the natural result of a society being destroyed. The project of pitting one group of whites against another can only end one way. That is a war between whites resulting in a fracturing of the white demographic. This plays to the interest of minority groups, which become just another tribe in the neighborhood. The two-party system cannot work in a balkanized, minority rule society.

More important, perhaps, is the cosmopolitan ruling class cannot function as designed in such a society. The managerial state needs the illusion of popular support and meritocratic success. That’s hardly possible when the only thing the people agree upon is their hatred of the ruling elite. The system cannot hold up when the various tribes are not permitted to have their guys in the system. It turns out that what allows the managerial state to establish itself will be what destroys it.

The New Masons

Posted on February 11, 2020 by thezman

Yoram Hazony took his neo-nationalism show on the road to Rome, where he invited all the best people to talk about his new idea called nationalism. He brought in various political and academic figures from around Europe to discuss this new nationalism thing, but he was careful to exclude anyone associated with nationalism. It was a replay of his show in Washington last summer. The point of it is to rebuild a wall between the establishment and the growing army of dissidents.

As noted in the past, Hazony’s game here is to rebuild the walls between the good thinkers inside and the very bad thinkers outside. Instead of rebuilding the old wall in place, he plans to extend the perimeter so the new wall will include the more docile nationalists and populists, who are happy to have a platform, but will not threaten the castle of cosmopolitan globalism. It’s really just a way to co-opt some of the language and energy of dissidents in order to confuse the issue.

As he did the last time, Hazony was careful to invite the right sort of influencers, the type that appeal to gentry dissidents. For example Douglas Murray was given access so he could offer his opinions on it. Hazony was also given access to the Spectator to complain about how the Left says mean things about him because he is such a threat to their position. It is classic sandwich making that dissidents of a certain type have become adept at identifying.

The effort to rebuild the right side of the sandwich has been underway for a while now, since the 2016 election. The Intellectual Dark Web nonsense was one effort to reestablish the outer boundary of the acceptable Right. Quillette was positioned to be the new frontier of right-wing discourse. Of course, Ben Shapiro was promoted as the voice of young white people. The latest effort to create a new right-wing intellectual zone is what the usual suspects are now calling the New Right.

The sheer number of people employed in rebuilding the walls of the Right is quite impressive and it reflects the urgency of the people inside. If they had a sense of humor, they would nickname these folks “the masons” as an homage to the secret society, as well as to the art of wall building. That would require both a sense of humor and some self-awareness, both of which are absent from our intellectual betters. Instead they gaslight themselves about the success of these projects.

The irony of what Hazony is doing is that he loathes Catholicism, yet he is engaged in a very Catholic enterprise. He is trying to lead a counter-reformation, similar to what the Catholic Church did in response to the Protestant revolts. Like the Catholics, he is not ceding any important ground to the rebels, but instead he is trying to re-brand the faith by talking openly about its abuses. He’s not questioning the logic of cosmopolitanism, just its implementation and excesses.

Of course, unlike the Counter Reformation, Hazony is an outsider coming to town selling a cure for what ails the local rulers. He’s a monorail salesman, playing on the fears and insecurities of his targets. He’s not all that interested in nationalism for Finns or Italians, but he is very interested in Jewish nationalism. His case for a new nationalism is a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. His project is about defending his country, Israel, from defects of cosmopolitan globalism.

The internal contradictions are obvious in his book. His arguments on behalf of Zionism are straight forward and quite rational. Most dissidents would come away thinking they make perfect sense. Then he adds in a million exceptions and qualifications when applying his argument to the West. All of a sudden, things like ethnic distance and common heritage no longer apply. It is a contradictory argument, because it is littered with exceptions.

That’s what makes his tour stop in Rome interesting. Unlike Americans, the European Right is a bit shrewder about this stuff. They understand perfectly well what Hazony is doing, but he is useful cover for now, so they throw in with him. He hopes to free ride on their energy and organization and they intend to use him as cover. The European national populists want legitimacy, so they can look past his motivations. It is a good lesson in the reality of politics.

This effort to co-opt dissident ideas and the energy from national populism can only have two possible outcomes. One possible outcome is the effort is destroyed on the rocks of political reality. Despite the quality of people inside the institutions, they have real power and they are not afraid to use it. In fact, they have shown themselves to be quite vicious. They take pleasure in cancelling people, so it is not unrealistic to think they will squash Hazony like a bug.

The other possibility is it washes away the current political order. This is more likely in Europe, where right-wing parties have been slowly organizing and nibbling away at the established order. The cover provided by Hazony, as well as the fragility of the European model, could open the door for national populist to gain real power. In the US, the bizarre reaction from establishment parties to populism could explode their whole project. Just imagine a Trump -Sanders debate in the fall elections.

That is why these efforts by the wall builders are a positive for dissidents. From the perspective to those downhill looking up at the institutions, the walls continue to look quite formidable. For those inside the walls, they look quite fragile. Those people inside have a much clearer view of their situation. The mad scurrying around we see by the wall builders is a positive. The siege cannot last forever, so the more energy they spend on defense, the better for the people outside the walls.

The Global Paradox

Posted on February 10, 2020 by thezman

When one era ends and another begins is always a hot topic for historians and academics, because history does not make it easy. The old staggers on for a long time, despite it having become pointless or exhausted. The new is not always ready to take center stage, so it is never clear as to when it started. It is Sorites Paradox. Just as we know there is a point where grains of sand eventually become a heap, we know one epoch gives way to another, but exactly when is impossible to say.

Of course, while you are in such a transition period, it is even more difficult to know when the old has finally receded into the past and when the new has begun. History is full of false starts and false transitions. Ideologues are always sure the great transition is right around the corner. For the people living through a transition, it just feels like a “great muddling through” for those aware of what’s happening. For the rest it is just the way things are, as they try to not to think about such things.

Whether we are in such a great transition is hard to know for certain, but people who think of such things are thinking about it. This paper on how NATO can adapt to the populist era is such an example. It is written by Jeff Giesea, someone who has been on the edges of populist politics in America. The focus on the paper in how NATO can adapt to the rise of populism in Europe in order to maintain itself and address some of the issues that give rise to populist movements.

NATO is a great example of why marking the end of one period and the start of the next is so difficult, especially for the people living through it. The senior administrative staff in NATO probably started their careers in the Cold War. Many of the senior political leaders in the West are still people who came of age in that era. NATO has already outlived the Cold War and now may be outliving the age of globalism. It is a legacy institution that still staggers on for no obvious reason.

That’s why they invest time and money thinking about how the institution can adapt to the new age, whatever one calls it. What started as a temporary alliance among Western nations to guard against Soviet aggression in Europe, is now a permanent part of the European landscape. It’s like a union job or a government contract. No one wants to see it end. The Red Army is long gone, but NATO remains ready for them if they ever reappear on the European Plain.

It is a good example of the problems of post-nationalism. NATO was always a national entity, designed to defend nations. In a world without borders, having a military organization built for defending borders makes little sense. Critics of the organization always point to the collapse of the Soviet Union, but the bigger problem for NATO is that it is rooted in the concept of sovereign nations. Each member contributes men, material, bases and money to maintain a joint military force.

In a world where European countries don’t have control of control over their own budgets and cannot mint their own coins, how can they possibly have an active voice in a military alliance? Italy, for example, has to get permission from Brussels to operate a new landfill or power plant. The EU regulates the acceptable size of bananas and how much can be spent on picking up dog droppings. Globalism reduced nations to dependents with no agency of their own.

NATO also underscores a hidden truth about globalism and that is it only exists because the American empire exists. NATO exist because America keeps it going. If America ever started acting like a real country again, it would abandon legacy entities like NATO, as they serve no national interest. The same is true about globalism. The EU has been allowed to flourish, because it enjoys American protection. Take that protection away and Europe returns to a continent of nations.

It’s also an example of how the people muddling through a transition period may be all wrong about what they are noticing. The conventional wisdom says the world is transitioning from nationalism to post-nationalism. Global entities will supplant nation states and global corporations will manage the global economy. These populist uprisings we see in the West are just rearguard actions by those who will not be part of the glorious multicultural global paradise that is tomorrow.

In reality, we may be living through the opposite. The Cold War era may have been the globalist era, dominated by two great democratic empires. On the one side was the democracy of communism. On the other was the democracy of natural rights. First the Soviet Empire collapsed and now the American Empire is receding. The flurry of cosmopolitan globalism is not a rearguard action, but more like the scavengers profiting from the end of that great epoch in Western history.

What is called populism today is simply the West waking up from the long slumber that was the great battle between two empires. Generations of Europeans sublimating national interests for a common defense are now waking up from that period to assert those interests again. In the US, regional and now racial interests that have long been suppressed are bubbling up to the surface. Just as NATO is an entity from a bygone era, cosmopolitan globalism is the echo of a bygone age.

The Managerial Man

Posted on February 8, 2020 by thezman

Every era produces men, who come to symbolize the age or at least some important aspect of the age. Otto von Bismarck, for example, is the embodiment of 19th century European empire building and national conservatism. Ronald Reagan was the full expression of the New Deal ideal that launched the American empire and reordered America in the 20th century. It was not an accident that he was the president to close the Cold War era and start the age of cosmopolitan globalism.

Similarly, a person can come to symbolize some movement or feature of a particular historical epoch. Ernest Hemingway, for example, is the face of the Lost Generation, the cohort of writers and artists who lived through the Great War as young people. Jean-Paul Sartre is what people think of when they hear about existentialism. Whether or not the person is the full embodiment of that movement is not important. They simply possess the important qualities associated with it.

What we may be seeing in the Democratic primary is the pushing aside of the old ideal that still rattles on in the form of Sanders and Biden. Both men are artifacts of the late New Deal period that came to a close in the 1980’s. Sanders still talks about politics as if most men work in factories and coal mines. Joe Biden is running like the friend of the working class, even though his party now hates the working class. These are men of the bygone era, not men of today.

They are being pushed aside by what may be the fullest expression managerial capitalism that accelerated into dominance forty years ago. Pete Buttigieg is both symbolic of his generation and of the class he inhabits. At 38, he is the quintessential millennial, having come of age at the turn of the century. He was 18 years old when everyone was wondering if the Y2K people were right. Of course, he is also a product of the managerial system that now runs society,

Like all managerial types, Buttigieg is a box ticker. He is not a man who actually does things in the world. Rather, he participates in things, gains a credential for having participated in them and uses the credential to advance his career. He was valedictorian of his high school and “won first prize in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum’s Profiles in Courage essay contest.” Then it was off to Harvard and then Oxford for a Rhodes scholarship in Philosophy.

After accumulating all of the credentials he could from his college experience, he went off to work entry level positions in politics and the media, in order to build his resume and network of contacts. Then it was off to McKinsey & Company, one of the major training centers for managerial class strivers. In anticipation of a political career, he joined the Navy reserve for an uneventful turn as an intelligence officer. He finally landed as the mayor of South Bend Indiana.

Buttigieg has the nearly perfect managerial man resume. The only thing that tarnishes it is he may have accidentally done something useful while in the service, like empty a trash barrel or remember to turn off the coffee pot. Otherwise, his is a resume littered with participation medals. From youth to middle age, Pete Buttigieg has avoided doing anything that involves risk or sacrifice. Instead, his life has been like ascending a gentle slope to a position he has always known is waiting for him.

He exists because a system that has evolved over the last half century now selects for men like him. That system’s only purpose is to perpetuate itself, so it selects for people who will never challenge it or even question it. Instead, it populates itself with people, who have internalized the logic of the system to the point where it is habit. The hive mind of the managerial class is the sum of these automatons incapable of existing outside the managerial system.

He is also symbolic of his generation. The generation of Americans, who grew up in the Clinton years and reached adulthood at the turn of the century, are probably the most entitled and effete cohort ever produced. They grew up in the easy years after the Cold War and never faced anything resembling hard times. They came into the world expecting things to turn out well for them. They were also raised by women in a highly feminized educational system and took on those qualities.

The fact that Pete Buttigieg is a genetic dead end is probably the most symbolic aspect of his character. The oriental empires of the ancient age liked to employ eunuchs in sensitive roles. These were men without ambition, as it were, so they were never going to be a threat to the people at the top. The promotion of and popularity of homosexuals in the managerial empire adds a touch of Orientalism and irony to a system that is otherwise sterile and pointless.

It is easy for normal people to dismiss Buttigieg, but he is both a symbol of his age and the system that produced him. He is the full expression of the managerial class that has come to dominate the American empire. His rise is the polls at the expense of the yesterday men like Biden and Sanders is an important moment. The fact that he is every bit as sterile and pointless as the system that produced him could perhaps make him the fullest expression of the Managerial Man.

Dear Z Man

Posted on February 7, 2020 by thezman

Catching up with the correspondence this week, I have to say that the questions made for a good show. I’m not the best judge of these things, but it feels like a good mix of topics to me. I don’t use every question that comes in, as many only require a quick reply, while others are outside my area of interest. One of the first steps to wisdom is confidently saying “I don’t know” when you don’t know something. As I’ve grown older, I say “I don’t know” a lot more than in the past.

It occurred to me while going through the mail that something seems to be changing in the audience for dissident content. The topics are expanding, but also the perspectives on these topics are expanding. It is easy to get blue about the state of things, but there is an undertow pulling more and more people in this direction. Many seem to be showing up without really knowing it. I see this on Gab as well. People are slowly becoming aware of the changes in society and slowly responding.

That’s what shows up in the correspondence. I wish I had a nickel for every time I hear some version of “I just started listening/reading you and …” It could just be a coincidence and maybe I’m suffering from confirmation bias, but I sense that the tides are flowing in our direction. At the minimum, the instinct to signal against dissidents is now waning, as the radicalism of our rulers is on full display. Suddenly, dissidents are the reasonable voice in the room.

I’ve also noticed an increase in the number of e-mails from college domains. Some are students, probably most, but some are staffers too. I think the groyper rebellion on the college campus probably has a lot to do with it. As young people are re-normalized they are thirsty for content aimed at normal white people. They turn up on Gab or find their way here via search results. Both Counter-Currents and AmRen are seeing a steady increase in their traffic, in spite of the censorship.

Now, the black pillers can take solace in the fact that the people in charge are increasingly deranged and still in charge. This apparent good news should not lighten your mood and diminish your melancholy. We remain a subject people, ruled by deranged fanatics, who want us dead. For dissidents, it is vital to always think like an underdog, even when things are going your way. The time to come out of the shadows is when that which casts the shadows is destroyed.

Another thing I’ve noticed is the number of e-mails related to current events has dropped considerably over the last year. I went through the whole backlog this week and not a single mention of Trump, impeachment or any of it. That is encouraging, as it means our side is disengaging from that stuff. That suggests our side is truly on the other side of the divide now. Fewer people are standing on the shore, looking over to the other side, hoping for acknowledgement.