Liberal Majoritarianism

Posted on March 31, 2021 by thezman

The truth is like a body. No matter how clever you are in trying to conceal it from view, it eventually turns up. One truth that keeps turning up despite great efforts to bury it is that humans are naturally hierarchical. Another is that in any human organization, someone has to be in charge. This is the body that liberal democracy desperately tries to conceal, but it keeps popping into public view. The result is the people in charge spend an enormous amount of their time trying to rebury the body.

Democracy, of course, is majority rule. Liberal democracy, in theory, is majority rule within a framework of principles, like equality before the law, separation of powers and human rights. A proposition is put forward and it carries the day if fifty percent plus one supports it. Its rightness is therefore determined by the majority, not by some intrinsic quality it possesses. The majority is the legitimizing authority in a democracy of any sort, including a liberal democracy.

This is an important defect. Since it is universally true that humans are naturally hierarchical and every society has someone in charge, it means the ruling class is the result of natural factors. In other words, the most important part of a human society exists outside the legitimizing power of majority rule. Instead of invalidating the idea of truth being the result of popularity, liberal democracy flips things around and demands that the majority, real or imagined, grants legitimacy to the rulers.

It is a good example of the immutability of belief. When a person or a society comes to believe something about itself, reality is willed in support of that belief. That which confirms the belief is held up as proof, while that which contradicts the belief is ignored or disputed. It is why a disbeliever is always the prey for believers. The destruction of the disbeliever not only validates the belief. It validates the believer. This is why democracy breed fanatics operating in the name of the public.

This great conflict in liberal democracy spins up over time into the frenzy we are seeing unfold in front us. The people in charge need the validation of the majority to bestow legitimacy on their position. It is why they go berserk whenever they lose an election or fail to get their way in a public policy fight. On the one hand, it is a threat to their image as the will of the people. On the other hand, it means there are enemies of democracy that must be hunted down and defeated.

The logical end point for one man rule is that the king, the pharaoh, or the emperor eventually comes to think of himself as the embodiment of the people. He is the physical manifestation of the people, but also their moral purpose. The king becomes a god and is therefore self-validating. In liberal democracy, the ruling class comes to think of themselves as the embodiment of the public will. They exist because the majority created them, and their existence is validation of the public will.

This was clear after the last two elections. When Trump won, the ruling elite was compelled, it was their moral duty, to get rid of him at any cost. He was a threat to “our democracy” because he was viewed as a repudiation of the elite. They had a moral duty to defend democracy from him. On the other hand, the manufactured majority for Joe Biden, with all of its absurdity, quickly became a point of public morality. The elite demanded their opponents publicly admit it was a legitimate election.

This is why people are sent by their employers to reeducation camps to learn the latest social fads. It is not enough to comply with these edicts. People silently tolerating in public the edicts of the rulers could be privately rejecting them. Since those edicts are by default the will of the people, it means there could be millions of silent enemies lurking in their homes and offices. The only way to make democracy safe from these silent enemies is to root out dissent.

It also seems that the hunt for dissenters provides a useful distraction for the people in charge, allowing them to pose as part of the mob. Note how the most powerful people in our liberal democracy carry on as victims. By playing the role of David, while being Goliath, they hide from themselves the realty of their position. Instead of being at the top of the social hierarchy, with all it entails, they see themselves as the guys at the front of the mob, chasing off the enemies.

As with communism, the civic religion that evolves to perpetuate the falsehoods of the system quickly becomes a delusion the ruling elite needs to perpetuate among themselves in order to carry out their role. The rulers of a liberal democracy come to see a natural majority for everything they do. Whether that majority exists or is the product of imagination is immaterial. They believe it does exist or that it would exist if the enemies of democracy were not preventing it.

We are at the point in liberal democracy where the majority is the source of all truth and the arbiter of morality. When no majority exists, one is manufactured through propaganda or coercion. If that fails, then one is simply invented. Since no source of legitimacy exists outside the majority, liberal democracy starts to look a lot like every other totalitarian system. Everything in the public will, nothing outside the public will and nothing against the public will.

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Lawless And Chaotic

Posted on March 30, 2021 by thezman

The main difference in form between a liberal democracy and a republic is that the latter is defined by a fixed set of rules. The former, in contrast, is formless as it is defined by the will of fifty percent plus one. The republic has clearly defined roles for itself, including limits on its power. In a liberal democracy, there are no limits, because truth itself is just a simple majority, so the roles and limits of the liberal democracy are whatever the people want at the moment.

When the truth is defined by the majority of the mob, this must inevitably lead to chaos, as we can no longer live in a world of fixed rules. Present experience suggests that rules themselves are seen as the enemy in a liberal democracy. We see this in the language used by the most pious of liberal democrats. They want to disrupt the status quo, break barriers and open everything up to the world. The end of this project is never mentioned, as it does not matter. They just like smashing things.

We see this most clearly in the transformation of the mass media. A generation ago the core of the media was a tool of the ruling class, but it had lots of tentacles that functioned as a check on the ruling class. There was a relationship between the media and the ruling class. The media could be very useful in promoting the interests of the ruling class, but it could also turn on its masters. The media needed to maintain some distance as the fourth estate in the republic.

That old set of arrangements are gone now. Today, the media operates like the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution in Iran. Their job is to hunt for heretics and witches, which they currently call white nationalists. Whether real or imaginary, they exist to root out these evil doers and expose them to the world. They have lots of names for these evil doers, but white nationalist is the official name, the one they chant when they seek to summon forth the arch demon of their faith.

In present day America, being a white nationalist is just about the worst thing you can be, as it includes all of the worst heresies of the age. It means primarily that you hate all of the things a good person is supposed to love. If you are accused of being a white nationalist, whether you are one or not, you are subject to the worst punishments we currently have now. You can be proscribed. This is a form of internal banishment in which you are treated as a pariah by society.

White nationalists don’t like this for two reasons. One is that they don’t think there is anything immoral about being a white nationalist. They point out that black nationalists do not suffer from this moral prohibition. Jewish nationalists are celebrated. The other reason white nationalist object to the current use of the label is they correctly point out that the definition used by our betters is a lie. White nationalism is just nationalism for white people, not a bundle of hatreds against others.

None of this matters, as the accusation is enough to cause real harm to the life of the person accused of being a white nationalist. This is why VDare sued the New York Times last year. If the label sticks, it basically places the accused outside legal protection, which at this time is limited to financial and cyber-attacks, but in the near future it may include physical attacks as well. How long before “he was a white nationalist” is a justification for intentional homicide?

Now, the VDare case was dismissed and in that dismissal we get a glimpse of why the truth has no place in a liberal democracy. The Times, you see, never accused Brimelow and VDare of being heretics. They repeated the claims made by others. This is how the game is played. A pipsqueak outfit like the Daily Beast circulates the accusation and then it is repeated by a major publication. The Times just has to pretend they are reporting the charge and they get away with libel.

This sleight of hand turns up all over the media. Mark Steyn, in his often amusing deposition in the Michael Mann case, pointed out that National Review is now claiming they are not a publisher. You see, because they allow highly filtered and censored comments, they now qualify as a public platform. They are protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. This means they are free to libel anyone they like as long as there are some comments allowed on the post.

Of course, the big social media players have been exploiting this new truth for a long time now. They do all of the things that a publisher would do, like promote content, edit content and block content, but that is now proof that they are not a publisher. For example, they accuse rivals of having malware on their sites by posting warnings to their links. If you click the BitChute link in this tweet, for example, you are given a warning about BitChute’s shady technology practices.

What’s happened to the media in America is the result of living in a world where the truth is fifty percent plus one. In a world where the truth is defined by a majority, all the incentives shift from truth telling to persuasion. Facts become sparingly used props in the argument to persuade the public. Facts are sprinkled in to give the argument authenticity in order to trick the audience. The truth is therefore defined by who wins the argument and winning by any means necessary is now a virtue.

We now live in an age in which we are awash in mass media, but the only truth is that nothing in the media is true. Even provable fact is positioned as to be in service to some lie aimed at deceiving the public. Of course, a world without truth is a world without rules, which is a world without limits. Anyone can do anything to anybody if they can convince a simple majority of it. The law, which is about limits, ceases to exist because in a world where everything is possible, there can be no limits.

Perversely, every new law, every new effort to limit the assault on truth becomes a weapon against the truth. We see that with Section 230. A law to place limits on these platforms and their potential opponents, is now a license for the platforms and their former adversaries to wage war on the truth. The mass media is a defamation machine in service to the most gifted liars in society. Liberal democracy has become a theocracy in which the lie is the god and truth is Satan.

Darkness From Above

Posted on March 29, 2021 by thezman

Note: The regular post on Taki is here. I decided to dive back in the ancient Rome comparisons, which is always a good time. Of course, there is content behind the green door for those supporting the cause with their wallet.

A big part of the ongoing crisis in America is that both sides of the political debate agree on one main point. The people are responsible for the mess. Joseph de Maistre gave us the phrase, “Every country has the government it deserves.” The American ruling elite has turned it into their raison d’etre. Because they have nothing but contempt for the people over whom they rule, they feel they have an obligation, a sacred duty, to be every bit as contemptable as the they imagine their subjects.

The general shabbiness of the current ruling class relative to those of the past can be seen when looking at the oligarchs of the prior age. Great technological advance brings great changes in economics. There are winners and losers and some portion of the winners become something like royalty. The industrial age gave America a class of super-rich who were every bit as powerful as old world aristocracy. They controlled the economy and finance, and thus the country.

These were the robber barons. The term itself actually comes from the feudal age, when a class of knights would shake down travelers for money. They would charge tolls for goods crossing through their lands, even though they had no authority to do so, and the roads were intended for public use. A robber baron was someone with status who maintained it though unscrupulous practices. Surprisingly, it was the New York Times that first used the term to describe modern industrialists.

The robber barons were accused of exploiting unethical monopolies over natural resources like coal and oil. They maintained these monopolies by bribing politicians and threatening those who challenged them. They squashed their competition, which let them suppress wages. If that was not enough, they operated financial scams on unsuspecting investors, often by manipulating the markets through fraud. The robber barons were high status crooks.

If that sounds familiar, it should. The oligarchs of the modern age make the robber barons look like pikers in terms of wealth and immorality. They are not hiring private armies like the Pinkertons to murder their workers. Instead, they are unleashing waves of foreign peasants who create mayhem in your community. They finance terrorist groups like Antifa and BLM to attack white people. Of course, they have their tentacles wrapped around the economy like a kraken.

When you look back at the men who were the oligarchs of the prior age, they are not very different from the current crop of oligarchs. Look at their biographies and they are familiar to a modern eye. Getting a monopoly on oil, like Rockefeller, is no different from having a monopoly on operating systems, like Bill Gates. James Fisk got rich through stock fraud, which is no different from what we see from the gangsters in the financial class today. We just have more of them.

There is one big area of departure in this comparison. The robber barons of old had some sense of shame, which led them to take some of their ill-gotten gains and put them back into society. Maybe it was just a way to buy public approval or maybe it was a genuine sense of duty, but they did underwrite things public works projects, colleges, and museums. In fact, most of the remaining culture we have that is worth the name was paid for by the robber barons of the industrial age.

The current robber barons appear to have no shame. Instead of using their money to build cultural monuments they are trying to blot out the sun. That is right, Bill Gate is using his wealth on a plan to block the sun. Feudal man got great cathedrals from his rulers, while industrial man got great museums. Technological man is getting crackpot schemes to plunge the world into permanent winter. By comparison, our oligarchs are super villains compared to those of past ages.

This is not just a one-off example. Gates is fairly typical of the modern robber baron, in that he seems to have a fetish for schemes that cause more harm than good. He poured money into African relief programs that were doomed from the start. He has bankrolled education schemes that make a mockery of what we know about how to train up the young generation. He has been making an ass of himself on the Covid issue, spouting one kooky idea after another.

Part of this, of course, is the modern moral framework. The robber barons of the prior age were working within the Christian moral framework. They may not have been believers, but the public was still Christian. If they wanted to be seen as pious men, they had to commit public acts of piety. Modern man is far more primitive in his beliefs, so pleasing the earth goddess or fighting evil spirits is the way to salvation. Even the hacks in the political system get in on the act.

Perhaps de Maistre was right. The people in the prior age would have had the good sense to hang someone promising to blot out the sun. If a governor stood in front of a pothole filled road blaming in on the gods, he would have been tared and feathered as a lunatic, if not a blasphemer. Today, out best and brightest indulge in the onanistic religion of climate change with the same fervor as the loons promising us they can control the sun. We have the rich people we deserve.

Lessons In Identity

Posted on March 28, 2021 by thezman

One of the reasons conservatives preach against identity politics is they believe it contradicts republican virtue. In a republic, people are supposed to be supremely loyal to the institutions of the republic. The men that hold office are not what matters, but rather, the office itself. You are supposed to respect the office, even if the man in the office is not respectable. This is why preventing low character people from holding office is important, as it diminishes the respect for the office.

Identity politics, in the conservative formulation, is tribalism and that means the tribe comes before everything else. A person who puts his tribe ahead of all else will sacrifice the office he holds or the political system itself, if it is good for his tribe. This is why conservatives moan about identity politics. They think it is un-American. They are not entirely wrong on this point. This is clear with the Jonathan Pollard case. His primary loyalty is to his people, so he spied for Israel.

For obvious reasons, conservatives will never use a case like this when moaning about the dangers of identity politics. Instead, they direct their anger at the white people who have been supporting them for decades but getting ruined as a result. Alternatively, they will gently chastise the Left for firing-up the blacks with fantastical claims about supernatural racism. They are not directing their wrath at the blacks, of course, but at the white people they say are responsible for it.

The Pollard case, however, is an excellent example of identity politics, both the positive and negative manifestations. Pollard claims that “If you’re outside Israel, then you live in a society in which you are basically considered unreliable.” This is a version of, “if they are going to call you a Nazi, you may as well be a Nazi.” In other words, Pollard believes Jews have no choice but to be unreliable and subversive in their hosts countries, because that is the role carved out for them.

This is a great example of negative identity. Pollard thinks all diaspora Jews are defined in their opposition to their host population. This means a big part of who they are is controlled by exogenous forces. If they are in Asia, then their anti-Asian attitudes will come to define them, but if they are in America, it is un-Americanisms. Pollard is defining diaspora Judaism in the same way Woody Allen defined it in the movie Zelig, in which the main character was nothing more than a chameleon.

On the other hand, Pollard points out that to be a Jew is to first and foremost have a loyalty to the tribe and to Israel. In fact, it is this loyalty to Israel that defines the Jew wherever he may find himself. This is a positive identity. Loyalty to Israel and maintaining the cultural habits of the Jewish people, no matter the environment, is what defines the Jewish person. If all the non-Jews died tomorrow and there were only Jews left on the planet, this would still control Jewish identity.

This duality to identity points out something important. If all non-Jews did die off, then that positive Jewish identity would quickly weaken. After all, loyalty to Israel would not mean much when there is no longer a threat to Israel or the Jewish people. Without some comparison and competition, this identity would grow weak. As those familiar with the Hebrew Bible know, the great threat to Israel was always internal. Those secondary identities are what come to dominate in such a condition.

On the other side of the coin, a strong identity turns negative when the group is surrounded by an alien identity. For example, Pollard’s casual assumption that Jews must be seen as unreliable by host populations. Therefore, being a good Jew means working to undermine the host population. What he is suggesting, at least in the case of Jews, is that being a minority population is unhealthy. A minority group with a strong group identity will inevitably become self-destructive.

This duality of group identity is why Europe, despite massive efforts to the contrary, maintains national identity. Net out the tens of millions of alien immigrants and the majority of native people are strong nationalist. The reason for this is Europeans are close enough to one another to notice the differences. There is plenty of competition between European people to maintain the group identity. It is why immigration is important to the European project. It dilutes nationalism.

In North America, identity in the form of nationalism never gained a strong purpose until the 20th century and that was largely artificial. What it means to be American was never a topic of conversation until the 20th century, because it never needed to be. Your local identity was much more important. Even racial identity was never strong, because blacks were small in number and never a real threat. This is why white identity never developed in North America. Non-whites were never competition.

All of this is quickly changing. The invasion from the south will intensify nationalist identity in Europe to the point where whites preaching against it will be laughed off the stage by white Europeans. The weakening of the European consensus is clear when you look at what is happening in ruling class politics. Here and there the view of immigrants and their role in Europe is changing. Denmark and France are two recent examples of where the consensus is starting to shift toward nationalism.

In America, the white population is so beaten down by decades of anti-white agitation that the recovery is much slower. Whites have been conditioned to never take any side, especially their own, but that is changing. The latent sense of identity is flowing into proxy issues like populism and gun ownership. These issues lack an explicit white identity, but they have a strong implicit one. They are white identity with training wheels and in time these will become more explicitly white issues.

The truth is like a body. No matter how well you try to hide it, it eventually turns up, usually at an unexpected time. Ethnic and racial identity are truths of the human condition, so they can never be forgotten, no matter how well buried. That is the truth of the Pollard case now floating to the surface. Identity is about trust. A people can only trust their own people. As racial and ethnic distance grows, the trust declines, which is why peaceful separation is the natural order of mankind.

The Carny Train

Posted on March 26, 2021 by thezman

I am torn on whether this age should be called the Carny Age, the Crazy Age, or the Age of Hysteria. I like all three and there are probably others that work, but the last one really gets to the heart of the matter. America is like an aging woman, suddenly realizing that her biological clock is running out of ticks. All of that phony confidence she learned from modern feminism is quickly turning into anger and bitterness. Much of the lunacy is driven by early and middle middle-aged women.

Here is a perfect example. This story is written by a middle-aged Indian woman attacking one of the schools in the big basketball tournament. The whole point of the story is so the aging mediocrity can get some attention. Look at her resume and you see that her “I am woman here me roar” life choices did not work out as the lesbians in the woman’s studies department promised. Mx. Jhaveri has never reached higher than an entry level position at small media outfits.

Time after time, what has been termed cancel culture, turns out to be projectile hysteria by early middle aged women. The Huffington Post is nothing but a coven of homely women in terror over hitting the wall. It is why they foment so much of the doxing and cancel culture nonsense. Popular culture is one long night of premium ice cream, Lifetime channel marathons and late night texting. Our women have gone insane and taken the rest of the country with them.

That is why Age of Hysteria seems to work the best. It also implies that the solution is something like this. On the other hand, the underlying cause of this is the carny morality that has taken over the ruling classes. None of our betters has anything resembling dignity now, not even the British royals. That current batch looks like extras from one of those game shows where contestants agree to do humiliating things in order to win some cash prizes. The prize today is an Oprah interview.

Everywhere you look in the ruling classes, the people who should be secure in their position are desperately shouting, “Look at me! look at me!” Despite their wealth and power, they carry on like they need affirmation. That is the carny culture. The engine that drives that sort of society is the willingness to do anything for some applause, some attention, or some laughs. Whatever it takes to get the crowd to perk up and take notice of you is acceptable. There is no bad publicity.

As I said in the show, people living in a period rarely know how it will be viewed from the distance of time. Given the current trajectory, the Zoomers could look back on this time in a generation and call it the Golden Age. How this time is viewed will depend a lot upon how the current crisis concludes. People in the 1970’s thought they were doomed, but then things turned around for a couple of decades. Maybe that is what awaits us in the coming years. A period of relative calm and good fortune.

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.

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

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This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening
02:00: The Carny Age (Link) (Link) (Link) (Link) (Link) (Link) (Link)
22:00: The Meth Of Minor Celebrity (Link) (Link)
37:00: Facing Evil (Link) (Link) (Link)
47:00: The Plight Of The Covidians (Link)

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

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/sQezFHNjbWg

Sanctimonious Morons

Posted on March 25, 2021 by thezman

Given the fanaticism of the managerial class, most political topics are useful only in sorting people into political buckets. Liberals support “taxing the rich” while conservatives oppose “socialism”. The only thing that matters in these “debates” is which side you are on as nothing is ever debated. In fact, the debate around the topic looks more like a distraction. The point of the debate is to provide cover for what is happening behind the scenes between pols and their handlers.

While those ceremonial debates are useless, there are some issues that are useful, because they reveal truths about the system and the people in it. Firearms policy is one of those issues. The 2A community in America is large and extremely well informed on the topic of guns and gun laws. Knowing the rules is an important part of every subculture within the gun community. Knowing the local laws is often a prerequisite for entry into the community, so the members are highly informed.

This is one reason the Left struggles with the issue. The Left wins when they can claim the moral high ground, because that means Conservative Inc. will fold up like a cheap tent and beg for forgiveness. Part of seizing the moral high ground though is claiming a thoroughgoing knowledge of the issue. The reason the Left is festooned with barnacles claiming to be policy experts is so they can claim a mastery of the topic. This lets them say “we know best” and push through their policies.

With guns, this is not possible. All of the facts work against gun grabbing. Whether it is the mythological gun show loophole or the assault weapon ban, any discussion of the issue quickly reveals the Left knows nothing about guns. In fact, it is like they make a point of not knowing anything about guns or gun laws. They say insane things that even the sympathetic find cringe inducing. One result is the people in favor of gun grabbing tend to come off as ignorant fanatics.

The gun issue is useful in another way. All of those normies on the other side of the divide think that facts matter when dealing with the Left. Gun grabbing is a great issue to show them that facts really do not matter much at all. No matter how many times they explain the facts of firearms to these people, they will keep chanting the slogans from their cult about guns. The reason for that is the Left is about morality, their morality, not facts or reason. They are the anointed, so facts do not matter.

Here is an example of how a sense of moral superiority is what really matters, rather than factual accuracy or rational debate. Taken at face value, it would mean Arne Duncan knows nothing about guns or voting. There has never been a time when voting was more difficult than buying a gun. In fact, voting has always been easier than doing pretty much anything. The most difficult part of voting today is not vomiting all over the voting booth when looking at the choices on offer.

Now, Arne Duncan is not just another airhead on Twitter. He is a very special airhead, who is the executive director of something called the Emerson Collective. This is a not-for-profit founded by the widow of Steve Jobs. They are another monastery in the ruling class theological framework, promoting the usual stuff. Amusingly, Arne Duncan wrote a book titled, How Schools Work, which is his firsthand account of how he was a terrible Secretary of Education during the Obama years.

Note his Twitter profile. He has a picture of himself with a gaggle of black people, which is supposed to tell us he is a member of the anointed. He is such a good guy; black people just want to be around him. Sure, he lives in a gated, whites-only neighborhood with a bunch of other rich white people, but the brothers just love him. The picture would be better if he were wearing a pith helmet and a safari outfit. His act is the modern version of the white man’s burden, without doing any heavy lifting.

That was the point of his tweet. In fact, it is the point of his entire life. He and his fellow travelers on the Progressive carny circuit are all about their virtue. He does not have to be troubled with facts about voting and gun laws, for example. Those are for the servant class to quarrel over. Arne has a dream, a dream where everyone gets a ballot, even the imaginary, and those votes are dutifully ignored. The point of democracy is so worthless layabouts like Arne Duncan can express their moral superiority.

For the most part, it is a pointless waste of time for dissidents to engage in the nuts and bolts of political discourse. Most issue are of the first type, where the debates are about signaling your team affiliation. Some issues, like the gun issue, are useful in that they can be used to reveal to the open minded, the reality of liberal democracy. After all, what is the point of engaging with someone like Arne Duncan, who is a noxious blend of breathtaking stupidity and sanctimonious codswallop?

It goes beyond that though. The people behind these ridiculous operations like the Emerson Collective are not interested in making society better. The widow Jobs just wants some grace on the cheap. She has plenty of money, so she can underwrite this stuff, because it makes a nice addition to her moral charm bracelet. Nothing about the Emerson Collective is about helping people. It is about boosting the ego of the people involved, by letting them pretend they are on the side of angels.

Who Are We?

Posted on March 24, 2021 by thezman

The failures of conservatism are a popular topic on this side of the great divide, mostly because most on this side passed through conservatism. While it is true that an understanding of human nature leads to a traditionalist political outlook, it is also true that having a conservative inclination leads one to dissident politics. Russell Kirk was right that conservative politics is the end result that begins with a certain attitude, a perspective on society that naturally leads to right-wing politics.

This attitude begins with the understanding that all human societies have an identity, an instinctive answer to the question, “Who are you?” That is closely tied with the understanding that someone is always in charge. This is where modern conservatism goes off the rails. Modern conservatives are terrified to even think about identity, because they are terrified of being accused of having one. Identities are exclusive and that is the opposite of inclusive, the greatest thing ever.

This peaks through in this American Conservative post about the lack of diversity at the US State Department. The post is in response to this post in the far-left DC scandal sheet called Politico. The claim is that State has a systemic racism problem. The conservative response to that is always some form of the old internet meme, “Democrats are the Real Racists.” In this case, it is those well-bred white people popping out of elite colleges, who then go into the State Department.

The post is interesting in that it gives some insight into how the American foreign service operates, but it amplifies left-wing morality, because the writer comes at the topic from something other than a conservative attitude. A genuine man of the Right would say that the State Department is a vital ruling class institution. It represents to the world the interests of the American ruling class. The reason it is full of Jews and Protestants is that is who runs the country.

This attitudinal deficiency also leads to errors in tactics. When a left-wing site like Politico starts bellowing about the lack of diversity in the ruling class, it is intended to distract, not spawn a dialogue. Since thinking about who is really in charge of the country is anathema to the modern conservative mind, they are more than happy to chase the diversity stick tossed by the people in charge. The result is more mewing about the lack of diversity, as if anyone cares.

This is something that modern conservatives have never grasped about their role in this relationship with their alleged opponents. Their primary duty is to keep anyone from talking about who is in charge. This is a key part of the managerial state. From the outside it always looks like a committee composed of faceless bureaucrats. In a world where it is never clear who is in charge, it is near impossible for the people to pin the blame on the people who are actually responsible.

Further, when the question “who are we?” is only asked in secret, the answer is only uttered in secret. That AmCon post gently touches on this fact, but it should have been the focus of the post. Instead, it is only hinted at, while the writer does the old DR3 and championing diversity. It never seems to occur to him that the people running the State Department have an interest in running the system as they do. That maybe the people in charge know who they are and intend to remain in charge.

Note also the reliance on the fantasy of the meritocracy. There is the belief among conventional conservatives that the alternative to Progressive domination of the institutions is meritocracy. Like the market place, a meritocracy is a man made thing, which serves the interests of those who make it. It is not some magically occurring bit of nature that grows in the wild. A meritocracy is always a tool of the ruling class used to perpetuate their position at the top of the social hierarchy.

The elephant in the room, of course, is the question of diversity. Right after “who we are?” and “who is in charge?” comes the question, “What are the rules?” Those rules are inevitably aimed at maintaining the answer to the first two questions. The reason the ruling class is happy to see unlimited diversity outside their ranks, but no diversity inside their ranks, is they have to intention of stepping aside. The people outside the walls only matter when they cause a ruckus or make threatening noises.

In other words, the opportunity here was to point out that diversity is poison and serious people avoid it at all cost. The people running important institutions like the State Department, Wall Street or the media get this. The reason these institutions look the way they do at the top is the people in charge are serious. They know diversity of any kind, especially diversity of opinion, is bad for them, so they make sure to root out any diversity in their ranks. There is a lesson there for all of us.

20th century conservatism was a failure in large part because it either refused or was temperamentally unable to tackle the basic questions of human organization. That starts with understand who we are and what are our interests. Then it quickly moves to deciding what sort of people need to be in charge and what sort of rules must be in place in order to maintain the resulting society. Conservatism was always happy to leave the questions unasked, so they were always a leaf in the wind.

This is why any alternative to the current regime must first start with a sense of identity, a point around which people can rally. This is why communists focused so much attention of class identity. It is also why bourgeoise intellectuals were so enamored with communism, despite not being working class. The draw of identity is natural. People with no natural sense of identity envy those that have one. That is the power of group identity and why it must be the core of any political movement.

The Renter Society

Posted on March 23, 2021 by thezman

Anyone who has rented a car, or an apartment knows it is a different relationship from owning a car or especially a house. Drive through a working class neighborhood and you can easily spot the owners from the renters. The houses with overgrown lawns will usually be the renters. Of course, everyone knows the jokes about rental cars. Even the most conscientious renter tends to be more reckless with a rental car. You just do not have the same connection with it as you own car.

Another thing goes along with this. People with old beat up used cars tend not to be as careful as people with new cars. This has been tested. Take that old clunker and fix it up or replace it with something nice and the driver gets more conscientious about his driving and how he treats the car. The same thing probably happens with houses or even neighborhoods. What is the point of having a great lawn if every lawn in your neighborhood is a trash strewn, overgrown mess?

The point here is that the relationship one has to the property at his disposal is controlled to some degree by the ownership and condition. For this reason, it has been an article of faith with conventional conservatives that the way to lift people out of poverty is to get them into a house they own. The theory is these people will invest in their community, because they own a house in it. They have skin in the game, while the renter can just pick up and leave if things get bad.

This is not something that gets much attention now. While homeownership rates are about where they have always been, few people really own their house. They have a mortgage that they may never pay off. Each generation of American is poorer and carries greater debt. The policy to inflate home prices means younger people will carry a mortgage much longer and carry a much larger debt load in general. America is a land of debtors falling deeper in debt with each generation.

Then there is the general erosion of property rights. You may own your home and your car, but some company is tracking your use of them. That information, which is your property, is bought and sold without your consent. If you have a smart TV, it is spying on you, maybe even listening to your conversations. Just as the landlord can come into your apartment at any time, corporate America can poke around in your life whenever it feels the need to harvest information about you.

It is not just in our private lives where we see the transactional arrangement supplanting the ownership society. Businesses are increasingly moving to technology platforms that are pure services. Instead of owning the accounting system and running it on your server, you sign up for a web-based option. You pay monthly and agree to their terms of service, like all the other services that now dominate our lives. Increasingly, a business is just a temporary set of rental agreements.

This is something that cannot be overstated. if you look at the firms behind the apps that pop up in our lives, there is nothing to them. They have assembled a collection of licensed products that they have given a clever name. They work out of temporary offices and rent server space from Amazon. The employees are contract labor from somewhere over the horizon. The traveling circuses of old had deeper roots than the typical tech startup. They at least owned the tents.

There is something else that relates to this change in our society. Drive around and the infrastructure is looking shabby. Streets are full of potholes. Utility lines are a cluttered mess, often looking like something from the third world. Schools are old and shabby, even in nice middle-class areas. People think about the tyranny part of anarcho-tyranny, but it is the anarchy part that has the greatest impact. There is a general shabbiness to our lives that erodes our civic pride and commitment to community.

Taken together, the engine for creating social capital has slowly fallen into disrepair, to the point where we have adopted the renter’s mentality. The only time politicians speak of community is when they are discussion artificial or imaginary communities like the “trans community” or the “Asian community.” Even more bizarre is that most people think about their on-line groups when they think of community. The typical millennial has a stronger relationship to other gamers than his neighbors.

The other thing about the renter’s mentality is the owner of the rental property does not invest more than necessary. The landlord does not install granite counter tops in a rental unit and the car rental place is not waxing the cars between rentals. The software as a service vendor is cutting costs on development, because that is his only way to increase his profit margins. Eventually, these savings have to be balanced out with a capital infusion, but often after the property is sold.

This cannot work in a society. There is no way to replace the social capital that is not being created due to the lack of community. We see this with the attempts by Washington to inject money into the economy. What is not stolen by the pirates that prey on the economy has no impact on the people. The $1,400 check is never going to be the same as a job at a local business, run by one of your neighbors. Once the money is spent, there will be a new cry for more checks.

America is a rentier economy populated by people with a renter’s mentality. Every relationship is transactional. Once the transaction is over, the parties go on their way until the next transaction. One result of this is the country now looks like a neighborhood full of rental properties. No one, not even the government, sees a reason to invest in anything other than their immediate needs. The last functioning institution is the military, and it is succumbing to the same mentality.

It is tempting to call this feudalism, but feudalism had a strong ownership component and a well-defined set of reciprocal responsibilities. Modern America is becoming something different. A tiny group of people own everything, either directly or through the financial system, with no relationship to anyone other than through the rental agreement, the terms of service or the short term contract. The vast majority are just passing through society like renters.

Whether or not this is sustainable is an open question. The only societies we have ever created without social capital are penal colonies. Even in those, the inmates build bonds with one another. A prison cellblock has more social capital than a gaming community or social media network. We are into uncharted territory. Can a society sustain itself in a crisis, even a society post scarcity, when none of the members feels any connection to the other members? It seems unlikely.

On the other hand, maybe one part of the post scarcity society is there is no longer a threat of a genuine crisis. The great crises of the last few decades have been imaginary or exaggerated. There is a strong sense that things like the Covid panic are due to the political class not having anything to do with their time. These fake crises give them a reason to demand our attention. Maybe the renter society is a natural response to the elimination of real threats to society.

Free To Choose

Posted on March 22, 2021 by thezman

Note: I am posting regularly behind the green door on more casual topics like movies and personal topics. The latest is a review of the 2012 movie Dredd. This week’s Taki post is up and somewhat related to this post.

In a modern prison, the prisoners are quickly conditioned to have a reason for everything when asked by a guard. They are prisoners and they have no freedom, so they need permission for everything. On the other hand, prisoners have a lot of time to work the system, so they get good at the rules. With the help of lawyers on the outside they hold the prison system to their own rules. As a result, everyone working in the system knows they need a reason for everything they do.

The prison is the ultimate expression of a world without choice. This is a thing to keep in mind when looking at what is happening in America. It is no longer acceptable to say “because I want to” when asked about a preference or choice. You have to have a reason for your choices. The sources of authority are the prevailing dogma on human relations or science, which is just another word for the dogma. Science has become a deity of sorts for the true believers of the modern age.

One example of how this played out was the homosexual marriage debate. The people pushing it flipped the debate by demanding to know why homosexuals could not get marriage licenses. All of a sudden, everyone was scrambling around for a reason to standby the default position of humanity. Since the official dogma asserted that anyone opposing the homosexual agenda was a bigot and therefore dismissed from the debate, there was no acceptable reason to defend natural reality.

The important part of that debate in regards to the permission society is how quickly normal people went along with it. Once the Left framed the issue as a question, normal people scratched their heads searching for an answer. They just assumed they needed a reason to defend biological reality. Critically, public opinion was no longer justification for maintaining normal marriage. A majority preferring to keep the old ways was not a good reason. Group preference was no longer acceptable.

Public policy is not the only area where choice is being stripped from us. In fact, having a preference is immoral. White women can no longer say they prefer to date white men, for example. That violates the official dogma. They need to find some other reason to not date outside their race. Something similar is being pushed with homosexuals and transvestites. Even the most intimate and personal of choices are subject to examination and you better have a good reason for them.

What kicked this off, of course, was the war on free association. In the quest for racial equality, white people were stripped of their freedom to associate with whom they wanted in daily life. If a white person chooses not to hire a nonwhite, they know they need to record an acceptable reason. If asked, they must provide this reason. The same is true of renting an apartment or asking about the schools. In the permission state, you are guilty until you provide your permission slip.

In this conversation between Christopher Caldwell and Andrew Sullivan, they discuss why many people oppose what they call globalism. Caldwell thinks it is because these people are not capable of competing, while Sullivan assumes these people are ignorant of the glories of diversity. There is an assumed lack of agency. The possibility that people simply prefer to live in more traditional communities is alien to them. There must be some reason that fits within the prevailing orthodoxy.

The prohibition on personal preference is a paradox of liberal democracy. In theory, the system is supposed to reflect the accumulated preferences of the people. That is the point of having an election. The people vote their choices, and the preference of the majority carries the day. The people do not need a reason to make their choices, because in a democracy the will of the people is the finale authority. That is the point of democracy, but now we are at the exact opposite position.

This is another great parallel between communism and liberal democracy. In the former, the dictatorship of the proletariat was supposed to result in the full expression of the public will but ended up with a dictatorship of a tiny minority. In liberal democracy, the election process and open debate are supposed to get consensual government, but in reality, it is something closer to a theocracy. In both cases, the ruling minority appears to despise those they rule but cloak themselves in moral authority.

It turns out that preferences and moral authority are conjoined. When moral authority resides with the people, in their traditions and customs, they maintain the freedom to choose within the broad outlines of those customs and traditions. Once moral authority shifts to some arbitrary ideology, then moral authority shifts to a tiny elite. A similar process happened with the Catholic Church in the middle ages. Church dogma replaced tradition and culture as the moral authority of the people.

That suggests the remedy for liberal democracy is a reformation. In this context, the reformation was about restoring moral authority to the people, by rooting their faith in their local customs and traditions. Lutheranism reflected the nature of the Germanic people, while Anglicanism reflected the sensibilities of the English. For liberal democracy, this means restoring national sovereignty, so that the will of the people can be expressed in politics and public policy.

Rambling Man Vol 3

Posted on March 19, 2021 by thezman

Note: I will be on with Patrick Casey tonight at 7:00 PM. The topics will be 1) the importance of the kids staying off my lawn, b) why my generation’s music is better than the current crap and iii) why we used to wear an onion on our belt. You can click this link to listen, but you need an account to ask questions in the chat.

The last segment of the show this week is mostly about this clip featuring Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Caldwell. Someone on Gab sent it to me, suggesting they are starting to stumble into the Cloud people – Dirt People thing. Listening to the two of them, I felt like I was eavesdropping on a conversation among aliens. I was struck by their solipsism and lack of imagination. They both know there are people and societies outside their world, but they do not think too hard about them.

What really got me was how the two of them agreed that they are part of the global economy, while the rubes out in flyover country are not. It is fair to say that neither of them is part of the economy at all. Writing essays for one another is economic activity of a sort, but only at the furthest edge of the leisure end. The guy riding a leaf blower around an office park is involved in the global economy. He is from another country and his tools are sourced from around the world.

This gets to the heart of the current troubles. The ruling class is stuffed to the gills with provincial mediocrities who think they are worldly sophisticates. When our betters go abroad, they go to places that are filled with the exact same people they experience in Washington, New York, or any of the elite enclaves. Look around at where these people live and work and it is always the same. Their world is an extended version of the college campus, a shelter from the reality of the rest of us.

I think this is one aspect of the managerial class that gets missed. One reason these people assume all people are the same is that in their world it is true. For the most part, race, sex, ethnicity, even class, are superficial attributes. That nice African from the sociology department has a funny accent, but otherwise he is not all that different from the Jewish guy in the anthropology department or the white woman from the psychology department with the dream catcher on her door.

There also seems to be a sense of randomness to their outlook. Hollywood stars are far Left mostly because they know they got lucky. For them, life is a lottery, and they got a winning ticket, so they assume this is how the world works in general. The mediocrities in the managerial class seem to have adopted the same view. They look around at the sameness around them, the utter lack of utility, and they think they are the beneficiaries of good fortune, which they call privilege.

This is not wrong, but it does not work as they imagine. For them, life was simply a matter of following the clearly written instructions. Almost all of these people have the same sort of background. Professional parents, private schools, elite colleges, self-actualizing career choices. All around them are people who have the same story, so why is it they get to live relatively easy lives? It must be their privilege, which they now project onto the world outside their walls.