Irreconcilable Differences

Posted on August 31, 2020 by thezman

The great concern of the American Founders was that factionalism would result in irreconcilable differences. In Federalist 10, Madison argued against direct democracy, because it inevitably leads to factionalism. People have different interests due to differences in opinion, wealth and status. Naturally, the like-minded join together in factions to advance their interests, even at the expense of the community. The remedy was the representative structure in the proposed constitution.

In a big diverse country like America, there are very few things a large majority of the people will agree upon. There are the big things like individual rights and equality before the law, but most issues will only be supported by a plurality. If most people don’t care, then the plurality gets their way. If not, then the plurality is out of luck. The important thing is that there is general agreement on the big stuff and a willingness to ignore the small items or leave people to sort them on their own.

That was the point of the representative structure they devised. On the one hand, it prevented the fifty percent plus one from imposing its will on the rest. Tyranny of the majority is still tyranny. The system was designed to compel compromise among the factions that would inevitably form up. On the other hand, it delegated much of what mattered to people in their politics down to the states. This was to prevent one region from imposing its will on the rest.

The system did not last very long. Lincoln obliterated that old structure and created a new country dominated by the North, which explicitly wished to impose its morality on the rest of the country. Starting in the early 20th century, the ruling faction has been growing the power of the national government, at the expense of state government, in order to impose its will on the rest of the country. The full flowering of liberal democracy is minority rule, where a tiny group control everything.

This is exactly the sort of problem the Founders wished to avoid. By sharply limiting the power of the national government, it could never be a weapon used by one faction against the rest of the country. It would also prevent the formation of partisan schisms, where the two sides are defined by their opposition to the other. The new system would make it “more difficult for unworthy candidates to practice the vicious arts by which elections are too often carried.”

By “vicious arts” Madison meant the playing of one faction against another, in order to generate enthusiasm from one versus the other. The Founders understood that democracy always led to tyranny or anarchy. The antidote was republicanism, where individual or group interests were sublimated to the good of the whole, even when the individuals involved lacked the natural republican virtue. If Madison were alive today, he would recognize the pit into which we have fallen.

There are libraries full of books on how and why we quickly abandoned the system the Founders created. First it was the Civil War when the North conquered the rest of the country by force of arms. Then it was the slow dismantling of the federal system to create the system we today call liberal democracy. There will be libraries of books written on whatever comes next, assuming that what comes next is not a dark age. We are a long way from the original vision and we shall never return.

What is not discussed very often is how this evolution has arrived at a point where a significant portion of the people no longer accept reality. The partisanship and factionalism have reached a point where one faction is no longer able to agree with the other on basic points of reality. You see this in this post by a far-left activist working for the New York Times. The point of the post is to demonstrate that he will reject anything his enemy says, even when it is obvious fact.

Here we have the CDC posting updated information on the coronavirus that people with knowledge of how these things work suspected all along. The death counts were overblown, because the system was designed to do it. At some point the numbers get adjusted back to something closer to reality. In this case, the adjustment is newsworthy because it is so extreme. Still, it is a real thing, but the partisans cannot accept it, because they think it is supporting their enemies.

The same is true about the rioting this summer. You can go on-line and see people looting, fighting, burning and destroying things. Despite the thousands of hours of video on-line, the partisans demand we pretend they are peaceful outbursts over something they insist is true, despite the lack of evidence. When people they assume support Trump, their most supreme enemy, point out that these rioters are being underwritten and supported, they call it a conspiracy theory.

What makes this even more insane is the person who wrote that post, like the others in his ideological faction, spent years telling us invisible men with Slavic accents used mind control to alter the last election. They insisted that while the Biden family regularly takes bribes from foreign governments, noticing this is part of a conspiracy to undermine the democracy. These people not only oppose everything their enemies say, they create wild fantasies to justify their opposition.

Even though they did not use the word partisan in the modern sense, the Founders understood that groups of like-minded people could disagree with one another to the point where they could find no comprise. Their system was designed to force compromise, by preventing any one group from having complete power over the rest and thus imposing their will. That is the whole point of federalism and the separation of powers in the national government.

The Founders could not imagine partisanship in the modern Marxist sense, where the factions are defined in opposition to one another. Peter Baker, the writer of the New York Times post, is not able to think on his own. His partisan fervor now leads him to take the opposite of whatever he imagines his enemies are saying. If Trump says it is raining, then Mr. Baker will claim that his enemies have created a conspiracy theory where water falls from the sky.

If Mr. Baker were a lone lunatic, he could be dismissed, but he is representative of the ruling class. He is one of their paid spokesmen. How is it possible for normal people to reach a compromise with people who are defined by their unwillingness to reach any compromise with us? Who they are is defined by not agreeing with us on even the basic bits of observable reality. When a reporter is stationed in front of burning building and told to call it a peaceful protest, where’s the middle ground there?

We have reached a point where the ruling class is at war with reality. Part of that reality is they are a ruling class with certain duties and responsibilities. They reject that solely on the grounds that the people they rule over define a ruling class as having certain duties and responsibilities. This is why they celebrate the anarchists burning cities and murdering citizens. They oppose Trump, because he rhetorically represents the rest of us and they are the forever enemy of us.

There appears to be only two options at this stage. Either the ruling class abandons its war on the rest of us or the rest of us accept that we are at war. The former requires the ruling class to break free of the partisan madness that now grips them. This is something without precedent, but we live in an unprecedented time. The other option simply reacquires time. At some point, necessity will require people to accept reality and act accordingly. The rest is predictable.

Either way, we have reached a point that the Founders anticipated. They could not imagine men in sundresses shrieking like lunatics about white privilege, but they knew that unrestrained factionalism led to conflict. They knew that irreconcilable differences could only lead to one thing. That is where we find ourselves. Normal society is now at odds with the people that rule over it. Either the people in charge come to their senses or the people will have no choice but to remove them.

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Optics Matter

Posted on August 28, 2020 by thezman

One of the timeless lessons of this year has been that the future is always going to be full of surprises. To start the year, no one could have predicted the Covid panic and the rise of local tyrants using the panic to push people around. A month ago, no one would have predicted the recent events in Kenosha. It just seemed like these ruling class riots would continue in the same manner until the election. Then suddenly we have video of a young white kid fighting for his life in the streets.

It is way too soon to know how the story of Kyle Rittenhouse ends, but there is no doubt that this event stands out from all others this year. It does not fit the standard narrative the Left likes to jam all events. Public reaction to it has thus far been much different than we have seen with recent events. There is a good chance that this event may be the inflection point in the coming election. Even though we are still early in the story, there are several good lessons to be drawn from this event.

The obvious lesson right away is that appearances matter. Kyle Rittenhouse is a sweet looking kid who looks like a typical white teenager. Even without the closeups, just looking at the video, it is clear he is not a villain on the prowl. If he was an inked-up gym rat, he would not have gained instant sympathy. People would have assumed he was looking for trouble and found it. If he had Nazi neck art, then the initial response would have been entirely negative.

The fact is, looks matter. More precisely, presentation matters. It is the starting people for everyone trying to assess new information. Humans are pattern matching creatures, so we quickly try to match new events to known events. As soon as one is found, then that becomes the starting point. As Oscar Wilde joked, “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.” In this case, the starting point is one that elicits sympathy and compassion from most people.

This is the lesson the alt-right never learned. They not only convinced themselves that appearances don’t matter, they went out of their way to strike a bad pose. The fact is, the facts almost always take a back seat to people’s impressions. The handsome, well dressed salesman will move more product than the slovenly salesman, even when the latter has a superior product to the former. Politics is about persuasion and in the persuasion game, looks count for a lot.

Another lesson of this event is that you have to engage people where they are, not where you wish them to be. Everyone on this side of the great divide understands that these riots are part of the larger demographic issue. People on the other side of the divide, the normal whites, do not understand the demographic angle. In fact, they have been conditioned to avoid the topic altogether. Like dogs trained with a shock collar, they flinch whenever the race issue arises.

This story resonates with normal white people because it is a gun story, a self-defense story and a civic nationalism story. The race angle is still there, but instead of being the face of it, it is background noise. The heart of this story is stuff normal white people can understand and they are comfortable discussing. If this is Nazi-guy shooting black people, no lawyer is taking the case and no prominent people are speaking out in favor of the shooter. Instead, it is trophy for the Left.

Engaging people where they are opens doors. The oldest truth of sales is people buy from people. In politics, people buy from people with whom they can relate and who care about their issues. The people passionate about race, ethnicity and demographics are already on this side of the great divide. The people on the other side are passionate about other things. The path for them over to this side is through those issues, so mocking those issues, as so many do, is counter-productive.

Another useful lesson here is that the enemy is not a collection of super-intelligent super-villains. They often get high off their own supply. The crazies in the Antifa media are running this story as if the shooter is an evil white Hitler guy. They can’t see past their own ideological blinders. Their hatred for white people is so all consuming, they are trying to sell this as a racist attack. A headline like this over a picture of Rittenhouse is so incongruous that is suggests mental illness is at play.

We see another side of this with the Wisconsin prosecutor. A left-wing fanatic, immersed in that subculture, he immediately assumed Rittenhouse is an evil Nazi guy from one of their campfire stories. Charging this kid with capital murder is so outrageous and evil, it makes the kid into a symbol of everything that is wrong. Someone in control of his faculties would have gone for the lowest charge and worked from there. These people win because they have power, not because they are smart.

There will be a lot more to come as this story unfolds, but one final lesson is that winning the optics war counts for a lot. The so-called conservatives have avoided this story entirely thus far. The reason is they were destroyed by the Nick Sandman debacle and they are still hurting from it. They lost that optics battle. Public relations are a big business because optics matter. The winner is often the side that simply makes the best first impression on the public.

That is why those involved in dissident politics have always got to remember to be the friendly face to the skeptical public. If you meet the expectations people have for the good guys, you get treated as the good guys. If you insist on playing the role of the bad guy, then you will lose every fight, even when you are right. The person who seizes the moral high ground is almost always the person people initially trust. It is always better to be fighting from the top than from the bottom.

Thoughts On Kenosha

Posted on August 27, 2020 by thezman

Kenosha Wisconsin has now become the pivot point for the revolution from above being waged on middle America. Riots have convulsed the city for three nights since a violent black rapist was shot by police after resisting arrest. Large swaths of the city have been burned as the mayor cheered on the rioters. This led to the shooting of three rioters by a 17-year old kid, who volunteered to help defend the property owners. The video of the incident has become a world-wide sensation.

Of course, this being Jim Snow America, the white kid is now charged with capital murder and faces life in prison. White people who kill in self-defense get charged with capital murder, while blacks who kill for sport are allowed to go free. You see, the former is exercising white privilege and is guilty of being white. The latter, on the other hand, is the victim of white privilege and is justifiably angry. In post-reality America, privilege means being stripped of your rights and dignity.

If Kyle Rittenhouse was a black or an immigrant from the third world or even a transexual, he would not be in jail right now. He would be held up as a hero by the mainstream media. President Trump would send Air Force One to bring him to Washington for a special ceremony. Speakers at the RNC convention would be told to mention his name in their speeches. He is white, so no one at the convention will mention his name. They have not mentioned Cannon Hinnant either.

Unlike other cases where the media can suppress the truth while spreading lies, this time the truth was all over the internet before the media could act. As soon as it happened, social media had video of the attack on Rittenhouse. He fell to the ground as violent criminals attacked him and he opened fire on them. There can be no narrative in which he is the villain. He may have been naive, but he was simply following the civic nationalist code and doing what he thought was his duty.

This is Jim Snow America. A white kid following the rules is guilty, no matter what the facts say, so he sits in prison. His family started a defense fund on Go Fund Me, but it was immediately taken down. Again, in Jim Snow America, whites are not allowed to avail themselves of the resources for self-defense. The system will now wage war on this kid’s family in order to prevent them from defending their son. In Jim Snow America, white people just have to take it.

It is an infuriating reality, for sure. In a better world, the mayor of Kenosha would already be swinging from a tree. The good people of that city would have remembered the words of Jefferson and fertilized their tree of liberty. Of course, in a sane society, it would never have come to this. There would be no riots sponsored by the ruling class, so Kyle Rittenhouse would not have felt the need to go out in the streets. The reason all of this happened is the rulers made it happen.

As infuriating as it may be, it is this reality that must shine through. Those old rules you were taught about the law and your rights as an America no longer exist. They certainly don’t exist if you are white. If you are white, the system sees you as an enemy and will spare no expense in attacking you. The reason Kyle Rittenhouse sits in jail is no one told him this. Instead, internet warriors playing tough guy on-line encouraged him to be a man of action.

This is why people who like saying “well, at least he is doing something” need to be shouted down at every opportunity. These are people who think every cause needs martyrs, just as long as they are not the martyr, so they encourage everyone else to be foolishly brave. Like James Fields, we have another naive and impressionable young white man facing life in a cage, because he was convinced that doing something is always better than doing nothing.

This is just one aspect of a larger point that white people need to grasp. None of this would be happening if not for the political class. The Kenosha police department has tanks and armored vehicles. They have highly trained tactical units that are trained by Israel special forces officers. The Kenosha police force could invade a small country, but they are nowhere to be found during these riots. The reason they are absent is the politicians have ordered them to let the riots rage.

This is what makes Kenosha a pivot point in the ruling class revolt. This kid is not a scary monster who can be anathematized by the system. Even vulgarians like David Frum think he looks innocent. Note that Frum is okay giving weapons to these kids when they are killing Muslims on behalf of Israel, but otherwise he never wants to see white people holding firearms. For the typical white person, if he had a son, he would look like Kyle Rittenhouse.

Ultimately, that is now the significance of the Kenosha riots. White people are faced with the reality of their sons being sent to prison for the crime of being white. They face having their businesses destroyed because non-whites are ungrateful. They are being harassed at restaurants and in their home by mobs sponsored by the ruling class who have embraced anti-whiteness as a revolutionary cause. It’s no longer an abstract political argument. It’s daily reality.

Witnessing The Revolution

Posted on August 26, 2020 by thezman

Like the Democrat convention, the Republican convention is mostly about the past, in that it is packaged and marketed to people who no longer exist. The Democrats put on a show that would have been great for their coalition of a generation ago. The Republicans are doing much of the same, tailoring their pitch to white civic nationalists, feeling generous in their prosperity. It’s a lot of happy warrior stuff, even though the warriors are too old now to be happy about anything.

American politics has been increasingly backward looking since the end of the Cold War and the rise of the Baby Boomer generation of politicians. No group has been as nostalgic, especially for their own past, as the Boomers, so it makes some sense that their politics would be backward looking. Clinton was supposed to be their generation’s Kennedy, while Obama was their Martin Luther King. Of course, every Republican has been one of their favorite bogeymen from their past.

The odd thing about Baby Boomer political nostalgia is it is both a longing for a past that never really existed, but also a nostalgia for a present that never occurred. On the Left, this manifests as fond memories for the 60’s revolution, of which they played no part, but also a sadness for it never living up to the promise. Most of the Boomer politicians lived normal middle-class lives. They were never street radicals. Then there is the fact that the cultural revolution was the work of their parents.

Conservatives have a similar thing going on. For them, the past starts in the 1980’s as the peak expression of post-war America. They don’t dream of going back to the fifties, because that would be racist. Instead it is the 80’s, when there was no racism, but it was still great to be white. On the other hand, there is the sadness that the Reagan revolution never amounted to much more than the conversion of America into a continent sized economic zone with an army.

There is more to the backward focus than generational nostalgia. The dynamic that emerged after the last industrial war has reached its end. The Left-Right political dialectic that rose up in the 1950’s was a product of the Cold War. It was a power sharing arrangement within the new ruling class of the new empire. The Left would hold sway over domestic issues, while the Right would run foreign policy. Economics was where they would hold mock battles during elections.

Once the Cold War ended, that dynamic stopped making sense. It is why the neocons are so desperate to revive tensions with Russia and continue the crusade against the Muslim world. They oppose a confrontation with China, because they have no cultural connection with the East and they see financial opportunities there. The people who finance their lifestyles are getting rich in China. The old dynamic was very good for the usual suspects, so they desperately want to revive it.

Something similar is happening on the Left. The stuff we are seeing with left-wing agitation and rioting is like a weird cargo cult. They are reenactors playing roles they heard their grandparents talk about at family gatherings. Those behind it are trying to conjure a familiar bogeyman from the past. They desperately want Bull Connor to show up with fire-hoses and attack dogs. They’ll settle for idiots in homemade armor, just so they can pretend it is yesterday.

It is common to call the 1960’s a cultural revolution. Some say it was the sexual revolution or maybe the youth revolution. Still others point out that the revolution started in the 1950’s with black civil rights. The great cultural upheavals that transformed the country started soon after the war and petered out in the 1980’s. The scene then shifted to the financial and technological revolutions that took America from the industrial age into the current age. The revolution never ended.

This is something the Bolsheviks figured out before anyone else. A society that moves from one static state to another is not revolutionary. It is merely adjusting in order to preserve the old order. A revolutionary society is one in which change is constant, because the revolution never ends. Of course, everything ends, but a real revolution never ends on its own. It must be extinguished. Otherwise, every change fuels the next change, which fuels a subsequent change.

This was the case with the Bolsheviks. The revolution carried on through the war and into the Cold War. Eventually, after Stalin and then Khrushchev, the people in charge had enough revolution and they entered a period of stasis. Despite all the rhetoric, Russia became a very conservative empire in the 1970’s and remained so until it collapsed in the 80’s and 90’s. Interestingly, the radicals were also right about what would happen once the revolutionary fires were extinguished.

Unlike Russia, America has remained in a revolutionary state. In fact, once could argue that the revolution started before the great industrial wars. You could probably date it to Gettysburg or maybe the Social Gospel movement. Some argue that the Civil War was a second founding of the nation, a rework of the first, but repairing the flaws in the original founding. This would then be the birth of the revolutionary America, the genuinely revolutionary America, that exists today.

In that context, the nostalgia and tumult we are seeing today is another chapter in the story of revolutionary America. As Fidel Castro said, revolutions are a fight between the past and the future. In present day America, the future is a land of different tribes with no shared history, language or culture. The past is the America both sides of the fading ruling class celebrate in their conventions. The thing that is certain in this fight is the future always wins, which is what we are witnessing.

Conventional Reality

Posted on August 25, 2020 by thezman

The Republicans kicked off their 2020 convention promising to do a better job than the Democrats in this age of panic driven virtual reality. Instead of disembodied heads floating on screens it would look more like a convention. They even had some people gathering in a physical place in North Carolina. The Democrats tried to make themselves look cool by relying on Zoom sessions for all of their activity. The result was it looked like something a YouTube grifter would put together.

To make that point early, they had Charlie Kirk open the show for them. While he is pretty much just an enormous empty head attached to a stick figure, he was standing behind a podium giving a normal speech like a normal person. The fact that he was selected to open the show should remind the Fuentes – Casey crowd that modern politics is entirely disconnected from popular opinion now. They effectively exposed Kirk as a fraud, but his backers still like him and that is what matters.

In fact, the whole TP-USA operation is a good entry point for people coming to this side of the great divide in understanding the reality of democracy. The rich people sponsoring Kirk and his operation are like the people who back boy bands. The record companies assume the kids have to listen to something, so if they flood the zone with their material, they get the sales. In the case of Kirk, they know the political kids will join something, so they control the options they can join.

After Kirk, it was the usual parade of diversity we have come to expect from our ruling class propaganda events. There was a woman then a black football player and then a black Democrat politician. Both from the South. In diverse America, blacks and women can identify as “southern” but it can never be a white guy. Then it was some Hispanics of various types and then the girlfriend of one of Trump’s kids gave an impressively weird speech about something. It was just weird.

After appealing to all of the constituencies that will never vote for Republicans, they had Jared Taylor come out and give the case for white people. He made the case that even though the GOP is full of actual cuckolds, white people have to vote for someone, so it may as well be the party that occasionally supports their interests. While Trump is not a white nationalist or an even a racist, he is the embodiment of implicit whiteness, while Biden is the manifestation of the current anti-White pogrom.

Obviously, that never happened and will never happen. The diversity crap irritates everyone on this side of the great divide and many on the other side as well, but the sad truth is most GOP voters lap that stuff up. It is why Trump does it. Generations of Americans have been indoctrinated into this cult of diversity. White people get misty-eyed when they see a black or brown endorse “their side.” It is both validation and flattery, a one-two punch that still works on normal whites.

There have been many ways of describing the established politics. The inner party – outer party construct makes the Republicans the colorful paint job on the Progressive vehicle at the heart of our politics. The kosher sandwich is a phrase popular with the anti-Semites to describe the false dichotomy of democracy. People get to vote who they like as long as that person supports the system. The NRx guys used the term cathedral, while neo-liberal critics used the term motte-and-bailey.

Another way to think of it is the Republicans and conservatives operate like an invisible fence that rings what is acceptable political discourse. The people are wearing shock collars, so when if cross the line they get the jolt. If they stay over the line, the juice is shut off, but if they try to cross back, they get the full blast. The result of this is the zone of acceptable politics is ringed by those who wandered beyond the barrier and now look in wishing they could return.

It is why the alt-right scared the Left so much five years ago. When they were just suburban white guys making jokes about diversity, feminism and multiculturalism, they threatened this construct. People could look outside the barrier and see normal people having fun, not wearing their shock collars. Then the alt-right put on funny costumes, strapped on their collars and marched right into the barrier. Their conditioning was too much and they played the role the Left needed them to play.

It is one of the paradoxes of dissident politics. The Left bans dissidents from the parts of the public square they control. Dissident then demand to be allowed back onto these platforms, often destroying themselves doing it. This serves the interest of the Left, by reestablishing that barrier in the minds of the people. If the damned just go off and enjoy their life outside the barrier, indifferent to being excluded, it undermines the logic of the system and the legitimacy of the gatekeepers.

That is easier said than done, which is why the old regime staggers on. Trump won because he is the most unconventional politicians in forever and he will be re-nominated at a thoroughly conventional convention. It’s not that the people organizing it are deliberately trying to undermine him. It’s just that like everyone inside the system, they only know the system. They have been immersed in it their whole life. It is their reality. They are just parts of a whole they do not fully comprehend.

That is the dissident project, when you think about it. It is not about injecting heretical nanites into the existing system in order to transform it from within. It is not about launching an assault against it, like it is a city to be sacked. Those both serve to validate the system. It is about contradicting the underlying reality of the system, by constructing an independent reality. Dissident politics must exist outside the current construct as a genuine alternative.

The Impersonal Partisan

Posted on August 24, 2020 by thezman

One the distinguishing features of modern liberal democracy is the personal nature of political fights. Disputes are no longer disagreements over policy or clashes between interest groups over the spoils of government. Instead they are highly personal matters, in which both sides are defined by their unwillingness to compromise. In fact, the unwillingness to find any compromise with the other side is what comes to define the partisans. Everyone is defined by their enemies.

The term “partisan” in the way it is used in modern politics was coined by Lenin as a counter to bourgeois objectivity. The Marxists argued that since class interests determine ideology, there is no point in thinking about non-partisans politics. The partisan should fight for the interests of his class, or in the modern sense, his identity group, even if that contradicts the interests of society as a whole. The modern partisan is supposed to care only about winning for the good of his group.

Obviously, the partisan has a personal stake in his politics, in that he is fighting for his class, tribe, identity group and so on. The partisan stands to benefit personally if his class carries the day, but that’s not the point of politics. The union activist, fighting to unionize a shop, benefits from the spread of unions, but his reason for unionizing is it is good for his class. Similarly, the member of a minority group would advocate for his people, because it is good for his tribe.

That is another strange aspect of modern politics. There is a disconnect between the partisan and the cause he champions. Affluent white female liberals, for example, have no practical connection to the issues they champion, other than the nonsensical concept of intersectionality. In the partisan sense, they should be on the side of those defending the cultural hegemony of bourgeois white people. Instead, they champion causes that threaten their lifestyle.

This combination of deeply personal politics and disconnected partisanship results in a highly emotional, disembodied politics. The upper middle-class female who is overly officious with the lazy sales clerk is mocked as a “Karen” by the sorts of people who should be the defenders of order. The epithet is liberally tossed around by people claiming to be conservatives. The result is two sides defining themselves by their hatred of the other, despite their shared interests.

One reason for this is partisan politics only makes sense when the stakes are high for the partisans in the fight. A century ago, when union activists were fighting for worker rights, the workers had a lot to gain. The employers had a lot to lose in the practical sense, but also in terms of their political position. In a post-scarcity world, the stakes are low, often non-existent. Black Lives Matter has nothing to gain or lose. The most they can hope for is a temporary trophy on social media.

Another reason for the highly personal partisanship is the long shadow of second wave feminism on our politics. Feminism in the second half of the last century not only came to exert greater influence on the culture, but it became highly personal. Just as ideological partisanship triumphed over objectivity, personal politics triumphed over dispassionate issue advocacy. Feminism not only feminized our politics, it turned into an emotional hair-pulling contest. It’s always personal.

Personal partisanship is highly negative. The modern partisan no longer is defined internally by his class, tribe or identity. He is defined by his enemies. Modern political identity is a dynamic between adversaries. The woke are defined by their opposition to imaginary racists. Because they are imaginary, they end up attacking normal people, who respond by attacking imaginary communists. Everyone must be defined by who they oppose, making them a slave to their enemies.

The reason the political class has been silent on the urban unrest this summer is from their perspective, they have no dog in the fight. The woke warriors pulling down statues are not threatening the ruling class. They are threatening the invisible Nazis. The BLM people pulling people out of their cars and killing them are not threatening to attack the ruling class this way. In a world where political action can only occur in the face of an enemy, the ruling class has no reason to stop the madness.

The irony of liberal democracy is that it is supposed to result in the public will being expressed in the laws passed and enforced by the state. Instead, it results in the general will being sublimated to petty squabbles and negative identity. The people in power are free to act without fear of public disapproval. Even if the voters are unhappy with the politicians, they are going to spend all of their time attacking imaginary adversaries, because that is the source of their identity.

In theory, the way out of this is an impersonal partisanship. A return to the old style politics where activists work on behave of the interests of their group, indifferent to the interests of others, unless there is conflict. The point of conflict always being the advancement of group interests. In reality, the attraction of personal politics is probably too great to overcome. It is simply natural to respond in a personal way to personal assaults from those who stand in the way of your cause.

Impersonal partisanship, therefore, must start with the disengagement from the political, both formal and informal. The successful groups in the future will be those who have organized outside the system, defined their interests and seek to advance them without regards to the interests of other partisans. That will mean successful outsider politics habituates an indifference to other identity groups. They simply become objects to overcome or navigate around, but otherwise uninteresting.

The impersonal partisan will be one who invests his time in building the strength of his own group, without regards to the actions of others. Instead of reacting to the actions of other tribes, he acts only in the interest of his group. The healthy identity group does not have friends or enemies, only interests, so the partisan is one who has no investment in personal politics, only the interests of his group. By resisting the main weapon of liberal democracy, the impersonal partisan can effectively fight for his cause.

Taboo Breaking

Posted on August 22, 2020 by thezman

The Scandinavian nationalist, Fróði Midjord, is fond of saying that the way to break a taboo is to break the taboo. The logic is that taboos only work as a crowd control device when the crowd agrees with the taboo. If people stop abiding by a taboo, then it loses its power to enforce behavior. We see this with the social norms that have fallen away since the 1960’s. Things like adultery and divorce were normalized, in part, by people ignoring the taboos against them.

Of course, a good way to have your life destroyed is to go around breaking taboos, especially the ones that matter to the people in charge. Start talking race realism at your office and you not only get fired, you become unemployable. Break the taboo against fighting back against left-wing street thugs and you could end up in prison. Breaking taboos works only when a critical mass of people decides to break the taboo and a larger set of people are ready to join them.

That’s the other problem with taboo breaking. Without popular or institutional support, the taboo breaker ends up enforcing the taboo. He gets hauled out in front of the crowd and is properly punished. The crowd sees it and the point is made. If you don’t want to end up like the guy being made into an example, don’t break the taboo. Rosa Parks would not be known to us without the support of the ruling class. Her taboo breaking was welcomed by the people in charge.

Obviously, taboos are an essential part of every human society. They are the unwritten rules that habituate people to the historic norms of society. Usually, they have some basis in reality. A prohibition against going to the dark part of the forest is probably because it poses a real danger. A taboo against infidelity is rooted in the understanding that stable families make for a stable society. Shaming the adulterer is a way to discourage the behavior that disrupts stable family life.

Taboos also require a moral authority. We’re pretty sure belief, as in spiritual belief, co-evolved with language. There’s a pretty good chance that religion co-evolved with human settlement. As human groups began to settle down and invest in their territory, rather than just guard it, religion evolved to provide both the rules to govern human relations and to provide an authority for those rules. If the gods think you should not steal from your neighbor, you should listen to them.

When a taboo is rooted in religion or even tradition, it becomes self-enforcing. Humans are social animals, which means we want to be thought well of by others, so we look to show our conformity to group norms. One way to do that is public piety. The person known for fidelity to the faith or the traditions of the group is always going to be thought well of by his peers. Enforcing taboos is a good way to demonstrate your piety, thus you are someone that can be trusted by others.

This is the fundamental flaw in the current taboos. There’s no religious basis for anti-racism, for example. Even if there was, the people screaming about racism are flamboyantly opposed to religion. There’s nothing in our history or traditions that can be the moral authority for something like anti-racism. Republican virtue demands equality before the law and support for the basics of citizenship, but it does not require you to live next door to a black guy. In fact, it opposes such a requirement.

Most of the current taboos are deliberately conceived to contradict religion and tradition, which are dismissed as white privilege. The normal impulse to be around those with whom you have something in common has been anathematized in order to damage the normal functioning of society. Sending men dressed as women into the schools, while demanding everyone celebrate it, is nothing more than an outlandish rebuke of religion and tradition. Its only purpose is spite.

The same can be said for the whole catalog of modern taboos. There is no moral authority for them. There’s no logical basis for them either. A society that thinks sexualizing children is acceptable cannot rationally claim it is immoral to oppose the normalizing of men in dresses. The only authority for the current taboos is the force wielded by the taboo makers. They have control of the institutions and use that power to enforce these taboos on society.

Force is always the costliest form of rule. When the law is the habit of mind and obedience is the natural instinct, the ruling class does not have to spend very much to maintain order and their place at the top of that order. On the other hand, when their rule is at odds with habit and the people must be forced to obey, the cost of maintaining order eventually exceeds their capacity to impose it. Our ruling class is exhausting itself maintaining this collection of absurd moral codes.

It is why deliberate taboo breaking is probably the wrong course. Giving the people in charge easy targets and useful examples lowers the cost of enforcement. Mockery and avoidance do the opposite. It’s hard to drop the hammer on someone who is mocking your silly taboos. It’s expensive to root out the bad thinker minding his own business in the cubicle farm. The guerrilla in a modern moral war must live in the shadows, turning up to mock the enemy, but always avoiding direct confrontation.

Summer Letters

Posted on August 21, 2020 by thezman

It used to be that the political conventions were must see TV for anyone that took their politics and citizenship seriously. Even partisans would watch the other party convention, just to be informed. That pretty much went away entirely in the 1990’s when the Clintons came to power. They introduced all the wretched public relations tactics that are with us today. The conventions are orgies of partisan bomb throwing and petty name calling, making them unwatchable.

In the world of lies, you can’t consume these events via news reports, because the news reports are just paid ads for the uniparty. Joe Biden could have wandered onto the stage in his bathrobe, talked about which pills he takes after breakfast and the reports would have called it an historic speech. Every news outlet is calling his speech “the one he has prepared all his life to deliver.” They started saying that before it was delivered, meaning they were fed the line by the party.

The thing is, democracy does fully represent the culture of the time. The inner party having a dementia patient as their leader makes perfect sense in this age. The fact that he really was their best option make it more poignant. Rather than face the next generation of party hacks, they would rather have a man that captures public sentiment, which is to forget about the whole thing. If he wins in November, it is the perfect ending to the liberal democratic experiment.

How many people bothered to watch is a mystery. Again, in the world of lies we will be told the entire nation tuned in to watch this doddering old fool. The convention did not draw flies for the week, so the guess is Biden was mumbling to the choir. That’s what has made these things unwatchable. They used to be a sales pitch to the general public, but these days they are the sales pitch to the craziest of crazy partisans. The normal person is supposed to be offended by the show.

That’s why it is good to be taking a break from the show the next two weeks. I won’t have to look through the mass media for content to discuss. Reading agit-prop is not a lot of fun in normal times, or what passes for normal now, but it is impossible during the election season. It makes a man think things that should not be thought. What makes it so infuriating is the fact that people producing it either believe it or are so horribly cynical they produce it knowing it is nonsense.

That’s the plan for the next two weeks. I have work projects to finish up that require more time than normal. I have some political projects to work on and the book is starting to come into focus. I’m about halfway done the first draft and the outline for the rest is done, so it is just a matter of writing it. Disconnecting from the media and buying a little time in the schedule is about as close as I get to a vacation these days. I’ll still be posting every day, but the show will be on hiatus until after Labor Day.

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. I am now on Deezer, for our European haters and Stitcher for the weirdos. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below.

This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00 Opening
02:00 Silly People
07:30 Anarchy
13:30 Anti-Semites
16:45 Patreon
28:45 Lock Downs
33:15 Flee The Country
40:00 Milo The Fed
41:15 National Justice
55:00 Thank You

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

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/VVYVuK8bhHc

The Failed Experiment Problem

Posted on August 20, 2020 by thezman

At the end of the Cold War, Progressives pointed out that conservatism no longer had a purpose, so it was probably going to follow communism into the past. Of course, the Left had its own problems in this regard, but conservatism in America had largely been about opposing the Soviets. They had conceded all the important points in the cultural war and the Left was ready to embrace corporate control of the economy, so there was no longer any purpose to conservatism.

This was a fair analysis, but one conservatives could not accept, as it would mean getting real jobs and doing honest work. Instead they tried to define conservatism as green eye-shade bean counting in the 1990’s. That was no fun as they like spending borrowed money as much as the Left. Then they tried to define conservatism to mean dropping high explosives onto Muslims. That worked for a while, but then the public soured on the pointless flag waving and hollow patriotism.

In the Obama years, conservatism entered the darkness and it has not been able to find a way out of it ever since. They tried to rally people around hating Trump, but that just underscored the bankruptcy of modern conservatism. Since then, various writers have been trying to figure out what conservatism is supposed to mean in the age of post-national globalism. The one enduring feature of the Right has been its roots in nationalism, so without that, it has no anchor.

This summer, the American Conservative has been running pieces on the topic from various writers. Here’s one from July doing the old constitution bit. Here’s one relying on historicism to define conservatism. A couple of Israelis contributed a piece claiming conservatism is a big shopping mall. This one makes the Straussian argument that conservatism is rooted in natural rights. Along the same lines, Yoram Hazony posted a long piece at Quillette about the dangers of Marxism.

The main take-sway from all of this is that no one in conservatism has the slightest idea how to breathe life into the corpse of their project. If they are unwilling to reject universalism and egalitarianism, they cannot embrace nationalism, other than as a shallow rhetorical device. Yoram Hazony has turned himself into a pretzel trying to promote a nationalism detached from biological reality. Everyone else is too afraid to go near anything that contradicts Progressive dogma on biology.

The truth is, the closest America ever came to having a genuine conservative alternative to Northern Progressivism ended in the Civil War. Since then the dynamic in America has been the Left innovating and the Right implementing. The Left, needing to exercise its reform impulse, finds something to break with novel ideas. The Right then comes in to clean up after them, finding some way to normalize it. The Robert Lewis Dabney observation is has never ceased to be true.

This is why whatever replaces conservatism as the alternative to the Progressive orthodoxy has to free of conservatism. It must be a clean break with that failed tradition of accommodation and obedience. A genuine alternative, a real competitor to the Left, has to be a stand-alone moral framework, rather than just a collection of criticisms and critiques of the liberal moral order. A critique is just a conditional agreement. That’s always been conservatism, agreement with conditions.

This may prove to be easiest in Europe, as Europeans have a genuine conservatism in their past they can pull out of storage. It may have failed under the pincer assault of Marxism and liberal democracy, but it offers a foundation to build on. Like an old house with good bones, it can be rebuilt with modern ideas and understandings. The failings of liberal democracy now make it a weaker foe than in the past. Liberal democracy is no longer about promise, but about practice.

For Americans, the task is difficult, as it means jettisoning most of the American story, maybe even the very concept of American. The frontier culture that has always been at the root of American mythology no longer makes a lot of sense in the demographic age with high-density urban areas. Rugged independence is suicidal when facing a demographic assault. There’s also the fact that the past has been rewritten to support the egalitarianism and universalism of the Left.

Then there is that American creed that starts with the assertion that all men are created equal, endowed with inalienable rights. The rejection of universal equality is a rejection of the core component of Americanism. This is the trap that devoured Buckley style conservatism in the last century. It is simply impossible to forge an alternative to Progressivism without first rejecting universal equality. To American ears, that sounds like a rejection of their very identity.

It is not impossible though. Events are what forge ideologies and the demographic changes sweeping North America will forge new political constructs. Organizing civil life in a world where the government is no longer willing or able to control the frontier or police the violent elements will require new ideologies. Most likely that means a return to the oldest form of social organization, which is relatedness. The large society problem will be solved with racial and ethnic identity.

Ultimately, that is the project facing the West. Liberalism, communism and to a lesser degree fascism, were all solutions to the large society problem. Liberal democracy is the current experiment in solving the problem. The real alternative to the prevailing order starts with accepting that these experiences have all failed. They failed because there is no solution to the problem, other than a passive ethno-nationalism organized around group identity and rights.

Conventionally Speaking

Posted on August 19, 2020 by thezman

Political conventions are probably the dumbest aspect of American politics, especially in the modern technological era. Half a century ago, they still made some sense from a logistical perspective. Getting all the national and local players together in the same physical place was the only way to maintain the network. It was also a television event that gave the party a chance to make their pitch. They also brought in the donors for the grip and grin sessions that seem to work on rich people.

Today, the old-style convention looks increasingly like a pointless relic. The only people who need to meet in person these days to talk politics are dissidents and that’s because of the pogroms against white activists. The people in charge can avail themselves to all the modern technology of the day. As far as a television event, the convention looks ridiculous to most modern people. It’s like watching a movie from the 1970’s, where people are using pay phones and wearing suits on airplanes.

The parties stick with them mostly because politics is a risk-adverse game. These days, every campaign has pollsters and consultants telling the campaign what to do. Inevitably, they say the same things over and over, as that is the low risk strategy for the consultants and pollsters. If the campaign does the normal stuff and fails, the candidate gets the blame. If it succeeds, then it proves the tried and true methods work. That’s why the parties stick with convention format.

As silly as it all is, the convention does offer some insights into what is happening behind the scenes of the party. That was clear on day one of the Democratic virtual convention now in day three. The people hired to produce it were not creative wiz-kids given the challenge of creating the first virtual convention. Instead, they hired people who make corporate videos and infomercials. Anyone who has had to consume corporate video saw the fingerprints on day one.

That tells us the people running the DNC and the Biden campaign are just as old in their thinking as the people running the party. Joe Biden (77), Nancy Pelosi (80) and Chuck Schumer (69) hit middle age before the typical voter was born. They were set in their ways before the first ISP came into operation. These are analog people living in a digital age, by avoiding anything new and different. This virtual convention was made for people who put their face right up to the screen in a Zoom session.

Thus far, the convention tells us that there is a serious rift between the young woke crowd and the old guard. The choice of speakers to highlight is the tell. They featured the genocidal Andrew Cuomo and Obama’s Wookie on the first night. They gave Bernie Sanders a few minutes and a canned speech. The Bernie wing is not happy, which is why they are rioting in their strongholds, so using the first night to remind them who is still in charge of the party was a message.

Maybe the most amusing part of the show thus far was the angry guy routine done by Andrew Cuomo. He did his thing sitting at a desk, like a corporate CEO addressing the company by video conference after a big round of layoffs. The point was to be inspirational in a tough time, but instead it was angry and bitter. The only thing missing was a threat that if morale did not pick up, the beatings would continue. Cuomo is the argument in favor of sending the sons of politicians into exile.

It’s also clear the party bosses don’t understand what they have unleashed with the anti-white rhetoric. They did the old corporate diversity crap on the first night, but it was actually worse than the corporate diversity training videos. It did not address anything that has been happening for the last few months. The use of the Buffalo Springfield song would have gone over well with the 70-plus crowd, but by that point it was well past lights out in the nation’s rest homes.

Another indication of the general detachment from reality is the use of Republican turncoats in this convention. The idea is to use these faithless finks to show undecideds that even the Republicans are abandoning their man. Most people unsure about voting for Trump already hate the GOP. That’s why they tend to sit out elections. Trotting out Colin Powell and John Kasich just reminds them that they hate the same people who hate Donald Trump. It has the opposite of the intended effect.

Another insight that can be gleaned from this thing is the party is deeply worried by the overall lack of enthusiasm for their guy. The first night drew roughly half the audience they drew in 2016. The party then ordered their media organs to bump the numbers up in subsequent stories. In this age of lies, we can expect the media to claim the Biden speech was watched by every human on earth, but the reality is this thing and his campaign are not all that interesting to people.

Now, it should be pointed out that the lock downs have broken all the normal patterns of behavior with regards to media consumption. The sports leagues are experiencing their bad television numbers. People working at home are no longer talking about sports and TV shows with co-workers. There are no live audiences, so the social proof has been removed from sports. This convention may be suffering from the same thing. People are disconnecting from mass media due to the lock downs.

Putting that aside, what comes through in this convention is that conventional politics has reached the end of the road. The Democrats will soon be the brown party and their cries of racism will sound even more absurd than they do today. Whatever replaces the Republicans will be the white party and calls for constitutional principles will sound as absurd as the whining about white privilege. This convention and its reliance on 50-year old pop culture references is the end of the end.

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