Monthly Archives: November 2020

What We Learned

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Elections are one of those windows into the nature of a society, like the roads or public transport systems. It is a manifestation of the real nature of society. In the case of elections, it is not about the results, but about how the election is run. Orderly, well run societies have orderly, well run elections. The results are known soon after the votes are cast and no one questions them. In disorderly, low-trust societies, the vote is messy and chaotic and no one takes the results at face value.

You see that with yesterday’s election. Most people voting remember when you stopped off to vote on the way home from work or maybe before work. Office people could vote at their lunch break, because it only took a half hour at most. In most of the country, even big urban areas, it was rare to run into long lines or delays. Today, the opposite is now true. It is rare to experience an orderly, well run polling station. Instead it is long lines, broken equipment and lots of shenanigans.

Of course, those chaotic voting stations are not able to tally the votes in a timely manner, so the count carries on for days in some areas. Back in the days of mechanical voting machines and paper ballots, the vote was counted in hours. If the polls in a state closed at seven, the vote was known by nine. Again, there were exceptions, as nothing is perfect, but they were exceptions. Yesterday’s vote will not be known for weeks and much of it will be decided in the courts.

Now, one big reason for the delay is the people counting the votes need time to rig the results in such a way that makes it hard for the courts to see it. Pennsylvania, for example, is furiously printing up new ballots for people who did not vote. These will be filled out for Biden and other party candidates, then dropped off at post offices around the state so they can be added to the real votes. They now have nine days to make up enough fake ballots to tip the state to Mumbly Joe.

In states like California, general incompetence rules the day. Since most of the voters now are foreign born, the results are known in advance. It’s why no one bothers to campaign in the state. Still, in order to maintain the fiction of democracy they run elections, but it takes them weeks to produce a result. Like everything else about the state, their elections are very third world, which is no surprise as the majority of the population is from primitive societies. Demographics are destiny.

It used to be that America would send international observers to a country to make sure their elections were free and fair. The claim was the government was either too crooked or too inept to manage an election, even if they wanted to do it. A gaggle of experts from the West would be sent in to help organize the voting and make sure everything was done properly. These international observers would supervise the counting so that everyone could trust the result.

Now, the shoe is on the other foot. The UN should probably step in and start supervising American elections, because the government is so corrupt and incompetent, no one can trust them to run an election. Iraq now has more orderly and honest elections than most states in America. Iraq actually requires voters to present an ID and they make voters do the purple finger thing to prevent ballot stuffing. Maybe the Iraqi government can send supervisors to Pennsylvania.

In the coming weeks, as this circus drags on in the courts, lots of people will compare it to the so-called banana republics. That is not fair, as those banana republics did not ask for democracy. It was imposed on them. Left to their own devices, they would have been happy with some form of big-man government. It was Western business that demanded democracy, so they could more easily exploit these countries. It is easier to bribe parliamentary mediocrities than an oligarch or despot.

The United States does not have that excuse. If the people were free of their depots, tyrants and lunatics, they would revert back to moderate self-government. The problems faced today are the result of a crooked and disgusting ruling class. In many cases, the people in charge are genuinely insane. Gretchen Whitmer is becoming a modern day Christian VII of Denmark. Our increasingly bizarre and corrupt elections reflect the nature of the American ruling class, not the people.

It is an axiom of the dissident right that democracies always end in despotism, but that is not really true. After Athens lost the Peloponnesian War and democracy was suspended in favor of the “Thirty Tyrants“, the people still wanted to return to their natural way of governing themselves. Eventually those tyrants were overturned and democracy was restored. The institutions of a people are the product of their biology and their culture. That is the chain of causality.

In 1787, Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to the son-in-law of John Adams in which he stated, “The people can not be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty.” Later he asked, “What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion?” This is a question for us now.

If those words sound familiar, they should. In that same letter Jefferson wrote the famous words, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.” That is the real lesson of yesterday’s election charade. The time is soon coming when our petty tyrants will be trembling in their homes or slithering across the border. These disgusting piggish buffoons must meet the fate of all tyrants. That’s what we learned yesterday.

Promotions: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

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

Into The Void

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The Great War not only devastated the physical structure of Europe, it destroyed the legitimacy of the political infrastructure as well. Once the legitimacy of the ruling class was gone, their authority was gone with it. After all, the war was not a natural disaster beyond the control of the ruling class. It was a disaster created by a ruling class that could not explain why the war was necessary. When they tried, no one could believe them, because they had lied the world into war.

The people, looking around at the devastation, wanted to understand why this terrible thing happened to them. The trouble was the people they would naturally look to for answers no longer had the trust of the people. They had squandered their legitimacy waging a pointless war. Into the void of authority came the liberal democrats, the communists and the fascists, offering their own narrative to explain the past and define a future better than the present. The rest is history.

This is a useful thing to keep in mind as the current ruling class of America counts the votes in the presidential election. Every election is pitched as momentous, but that is mostly nonsense. The choices put in front of the voters are always vetted by the ruling elite, so the results are known in advance. The exception, of course, was Trump in 2016, which is why we have been subjected to close to five years of shrieking by the ruling class about how Trump is a threat to their system.

This election could very well turn out to be devastatingly important. For starters, this is a rare case where both sides are sure they will win. Usually, both sides know what’s coming long before the vote. The eventual losing side may have some false hope, but when they lose they are not surprised. This time, both sides are not only sure they will win; they think they will win big. This is despite an unprecedented media barrage offering no possible way for Trump to win on Tuesday.

Both sides come at this from wildly different perspectives. The ruling class radicals backing the Biden campaign are sure they are the product of a meritocracy that has earned the right to rule. It is so obvious that no sane voter would choose any other system, but the one that puts them at the top. It’s why they remain convinced that Trump won in 2016 by appealing to the dark forces. There’s simply no way that a legitimate democratic system could have picked Trump.

This time they have used every weapon of the system to make sure those dark forces don’t prevail. They have bullied the pollsters that serve the political industrial complex into giving them useful polling data. They have used their media to flood the zone with fear, uncertainty and doubt. The same tools they use in their color revolutions abroad have been deployed here. If Trump wins, then it means the system, at least the rule-based system, is no longer of any use to them.

Ironically, if Trump wins, the people supporting Trump will conclude that the people in charge are no longer legitimate authorities. The polls, the media, the analysis, will all be viewed as an orchestrated lie campaign. After all, the best and the brightest of the system said Biden was a metaphysical lock. The result of a Trump win will be that both sides agree that the system is rotten to the core. The Left will seek to destroy it while the Right will stand aside and let them do it.

As Stalin said, it is not the votes that count, but who counts the votes and it is the people counting the votes who are the issue on the ballot. If Biden wins, most sensible people will assume shenanigans. Joe Biden has spent the final weeks of the campaign mumbling to empty parking lots, while Trump is speaking to stadium sized rallies in the key states. The same observations that lead people to think the polls are a lie will lead them to think a Biden victory is a lie.

It is heritage America that is the engine of the Trump campaign. These are people who get misty when they hear God Bless America. They believe that they are fighting to maintain the greatest system in the world for the greatest country in the World. All they have to do is vote harder and the bad guys will be driven from the field and the America they love will come back to herself. If their monumental efforts fail, then it means the system has failed. Their America is lost.

The irony of the Left making war on these people is that without these people there can be no Left, as there is no establishment to support the Left. Those huge crowds coming out to cheer for Trump are what makes liberal democracy possible. If they are finally cut off from having a say in how things are run, then the system begins to falter. Many of those people coming out for Trump will simply drop out, but many will look around for an alternative to the corrupt system they now distrust.

One of John F. Kennedy’s script writers said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” This is the subtext to this election, as both sides go all in on this election. For the Left, a Trump win means they are free to make total war on the system and the people who support it. A Biden win and the veil of ignorance drops for millions of heritage Americans. One side will decide that peaceful revolution, even peaceful reform, is no longer possible.

The truth of democracy is it makes everything political. Even the smallest act becomes a moral signifier, indicating which side you are on. This is because politics forces everyone to be a partisan. In order for democracy to work, everyone must participate, which means everyone picks a side. Partisanship turns everyone into the enemy of someone, often people they do not know. A country full of enemies is not a country, but a forest full of dry underbrush waiting for a match.

This is an election where one side will ultimately conclude that the system itself is no longer worth respecting or defending. The Biden camp is much closer to that point, maybe even resolved to it, but still pretending. The Trump side is not there yet, but inching closer. There is no result that can leave both sides satisfied that the system worked as intended. Like the period after the Great War, we are entering a crisis of legitimacy, which begins with the election results.

Promotions: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

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

The Death of NRx

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Note: I have a new post up on Taki. This is a bigger brain essay on the nature of modern democracy. For something smooth-brained, I have a post behind the green door on the movie Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.

A decade ago the left-libertarian, Arnold Kling, coined the term “neo-reactionary” to describe the on-line community calling itself the Dark Enlightenment. These were mostly fans of the blogger Curtis Yarvin, writing under the name Moldbug, but there were others writing about the same ideas. English philosopher Nick Land added some academic legitimacy to the project. He was the first person to use the term Dark Enlightenment in an essay of the same name.

In many respects, neo-reaction was a forerunner of the alt-right movement, in that it made on-line politics fun and interesting to a growing number of young white males dissatisfied with conventional politics. Reading the blogs and participating in the communities turned esoteric topics into a sense of community. Later, the alt-right would follow the same model, drawing in young white males around a more simplistic critique of modern liberal democracy and multiculturalism.

Of course, the alt-right also followed neo-reaction into obscurity. Almost all of the sites and characters from neo-reaction have either moved onto to other things or disappeared entirely. Curtis Yarvin has moved into the nationalist camp, writing for more mainstream sites. Nick Land has moved onto other things, having been exiled from the academy for holding unpopular opinions on taboo subjects. No one flies the neo-reaction or Dark Enlightenment flag these days.

While it is easy to see how the alt-right collapsed, the failure of the neo-reaction movement is a bit of a puzzler. Most of the bigger names writing on those topics were sensible about what they were doing. They avoided the media and did not have delusions of grandeur like so many in the alt-right. They were happy to stick to their blogs and forums. They even tried to practice good optics by avoiding the spicy language that is common in right-wing forums.

The first problem with neo-reaction, the one that probably led it down a dead end, is that they never got to the heart of the problem of democracy. They were good at criticizing egalitarianism and multiculturalism, but those are the leaves, not the roots of the problem of modern liberal democracy. Like all right-wing movements, they made the mistake of thinking that facts and careful analysis would be enough to counter the moral arguments that are the power source of liberal democracy.

Montesquieu observed that the engine of aristocracy in honor, while the engine of despotism is fear. In a republic, it is virtue. The citizen of the republic respects the logic of the political order and the institutions that maintain it. In liberal democracy, the engine is civic morality. Everything must point toward that vaguely understood sense that the arc of history bends toward the perfectly egalitarian society. Anything that opposes this, even reality itself, is assumed to be the enemy of democracy.

Another big problem for the neo-reactionaries is they often sounded like young men who spent too much time playing video games. Their image of aristocracy often sounded like escapism, rather than serious politics. Then you had the writing style of Curtis Yarvin, which gave the movement a cult like vibe. The meandering and cryptic writing style along with the insider language was more about building a cult of personality than trying to fill out an alternative set of political beliefs.

Probably the thing that did the movement in was the embrace of the term neo-reaction, which allowed the Left to define the movement. This is how the Left steals the moral high ground. They assume they are on the right side of history, following the arc to the final destination of society. Anyone that disagrees is a reactionary. The opposition is not based in logic, but in fear and ignorance. This recasts the dispute as good versus evil, smart versus dumb and moral versus amoral.

This is the reason that what we call the Left in America has gone from triumph to triumph since Gettysburg. Holding the moral high ground allows them to frame every argument without having to establish their claims. The choice of the opposition is to accept it and try to find a way to achieve other ends using liberal morality or simply leave the field entirely. The latter is what neo-reaction argued, if not directly, then indirectly through its escapism.

Neo-reaction largely petered out when the big names could not figure out where to go with it. Yarvin dropped out to make money in Silicon Valley and has now re-spawned as a nationalist. Land moved onto accelerationism, while others have moved back to the conventional Right. Much like the right-libertarianism of Hans Hermann-Hoppe and the citizenism of Steve Sailer, these ideas can only work if the Left goes along with them, which can never happen as long as the Left exists.

That said, these failed efforts are useful to anyone working toward an alternative to the prevailing orthodoxy. We learn more from failure than success. What all efforts to counter the Left have in common is the failure to appreciate that they faced a moral framework, not a set of ideas. You don’t talk people out of their beliefs. Instead, you offer a better set of beliefs, a better moral framework, one that allows them to believe they are on the side of angels.

Promotions: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

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