Trivial Thoughts

Posted on August 4, 2021 by thezman

Sayre’s law states that “In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake.” Another form is, “Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.” This is often attributed to Richard Nixon or sometimes Henry Kissinger. Intellectual history is full of famous battles between rival camps over small differences. For example, two warring camps of Straussians do battle over their understanding of the political philosopher Leo Strauss.

This is not just true of the academy. People within in any organization tend to give more weight to small issues than to the larger issues. The famous example of this is the people designing a nuclear power plant will have vicious disputes over where to place the employee bike shed. Anyone familiar with corporate life knows that the major source of tension between people is the trivial items. This is often referred to as the law of triviality, but despite the name, it is a big part of organizations.

This is something to keep in mind when examining the behavior of actors within the modern political drama. Since the end of the Cold War, the rancor has steadily increased, while the policy debate has steadily narrowed. If you had no idea which political party was ascendant, you just examined the policies coming from Washington the last thirty years, you would be hard pressed to identify the two prevailing ideologies that allegedly control both parties and the disputes between them.

This is where we see Sayre’s law at work. What emerged after the Cold War is a general consensus on the big issues. The ruling elite is in favor of open borders for both cultural and economic reasons. They favor a global trade and economic regime that places the management of these issues outside local legislatures. They embrace democracy as a sort of civic theater, a drama that is never intended to impact policy, but instead reinforces the prevailing morality of the elites.

Within this political structure, there is very little room for any dispute, much less disputes over consequential matters. Our political class, which includes the mass media, the commentariat and the donor class, is left to fight pitched battles over trivial issues, often invented for the purpose. In the case of the media, the selection pressure over the last thirty years has resulted in a collection of performers highly tuned to personalize trivial issues and express those emotions on the stage.

It is why the Trump years were a cacophony of hysterics. This is how everyone responds to everything. In the case of Trump, the entire dramatis personae just happened to be on one side. Note how none of the claims about his administration were rooted in policy. They never engaged in policy disputes with him. It was all highly personal and ridiculously petty. Seventy years ago, when Sayre made his observation about the academy, this was the sort of thing he had in mind.

One reason for this is that whenever serious issues cannot be discussed, the void is filled with heated debate of unserious issues. The result is everyone is looking for a boutique thought to distinguish herself from the mob. Everyone in politics at all levels believes they went into the game to change the world. Instead of accepting their role as another anonymous face in a chorus of actors, they embrace strange, but pointless ideas to distinguish themselves from the crowd.

This is a very feminine instinct, which underscores just how feminized our politics has become over the last half century. The reason the military is always adjusting its uniform policy for female soldiers is they are biologically tuned to signal their fitness to males in competition with other females. The male soldiers are happy to wear the uniform that is assigned to them. Females instantly seek to make small trivial changes. This is the nature of our politics, where everyone wants to be a special snowflake.

One result of this is that all political positions are positional goods. Positional goods are goods that people value because they convey standing within society. For example, South Asians like to wear gold as a way to advertise their wealth. In African cultures around the world, display items like expensive cars are common. In northern European cultures, counter-signaling wealth is a form of positional good. The trust fund guy who drives a twenty year old Volvo, for example.

In politics, especially left-wing politics, positions on issues and the hierarchy of one’s issue list is a positional good. For example, the forgiveness of student debt is an issue for those who stake out the far-left position today. There is no plan as to how to execute such a scheme. They do not appear to understand who holds the debt and what it is used for by the system. The impossibility of forgiving college debt is probably its chief appeal, as it lets them espouse something cost free.

If you go down the laundry list of left-wing political positions, what you find are aspirational and notional items. For four years the Democrats could have struck a deal with Trump on roads and bridges. They were too busy complaining about Hitler to engage in fruitful discussion. In other words, to transform the notional into the practical would have stripped the issue of its value. Something similar happened with immigration, where Trump was willing to give the store away.

Mainstream politics is entirely about positional goods. This is true to some degree of all politics, especially outsider politics, but we now live in an age in which official political discourse is nothing more than a personal spat in the faculty lounge. The difference between what goes on in the academy and in Washington is that the latter revolves around a central set of tenets that contain the ruling consensus. The disputes, however, are every bit as trivial and pointless.

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The Death Of Burke

Posted on August 3, 2021 by thezman

A key contribution of neoconservatives to the conservative movement launched by Bill Buckley in the middle of the last century was the assertion that conservatism is a means justifies the ends ideology. Unlike the Left, the Right will accept less than optimal outcomes as long as they are the result of a just process. Further, conservatives are not reactionaries, instinctively defending order. Instead, conservatism is the defense of liberal processes against the assaults of the illiberal Left.

One reason that these former members of the Left and the emerging new Right found agreement is they both agreed with Edmund Burke on key points. One was Burke’s description of revolution. The liberals who would go on to become neoconservatives did not see themselves as revolutionaries. Like their new conservative friends, they viewed themselves as defenders of liberal order and the liberal process that is contained in and constrained by tradition and institutions.

In his observations about revolutionary France, Burke noted that revolutions seek to cut themselves off from the past. The desire for an entirely new beginning must lead to a repudiation of the past. This divorce from the historical timeline means they have no sense of themselves and their place in history. This is the source of their inherent instability, and why they become murderous. For those who see themselves as defenders of liberal order, this is what makes revolution dangerous.

The other broad area of agreement between these former leftists and their new friends on the Right was on institutions. Burke’s great contribution to the Anglo-Right is his defense of institutions and traditions as constraints on power. Traditions give meaning to daily life, but they also play a key role in shaping the people. The voluntary associations like churches, clubs and so on maintain and nourish the social capital of the people and provide a balance to sovereign power.

Even today, you hear the legacy conservatives talk about Edmund Burke as their ideal conservative stateman. Yoram Hazony, the ultra-Zionist political theorist, named his think tank “The Edmund Burke Foundation”. Modern neoconservatives like Ben Shapiro love quoting Edmund Burke. It is one of the few things upon which traditionalist conservatives agreed with the former leftists. They saw Burke’s philosophy as the center of their understanding of conservatism in a liberal society.

The idea that conservatism is the defense of the existing processes has had a powerful impact on the arc of American society. By elevating process over ends, conservatism built into their defense of tradition and order vulnerabilities that the radicals have been able to exploit for generations. In other words, the very nature off conservatism as the bulwark against radicalism has as part of its design a set of contradictions that must always lead to its retreat in the face of the radical onslaught.

The first of those is the unequivocal defense of process over results. What this has meant, in practice, is the conservative defense of every radical gain. Once the Left can find a way to warp the process to support their ends, they turn their opponents into the most strident defenders of this new order. Abortion is the obvious example. Once the radicals changed the law through the courts, the conservatives agreed that it can only change again through the courts.

This has been the motivation for conservatives to get as many of their judges on the court as possible. The trouble is, in order to be a conservative judge, one must pledge to defend precedent and the traditional functioning of the courts. It is why every conservative judge nominated to the high court must sit in front of Congress and swear to never question the precedents used in support of Roe v Wade. It is why this current court will defend radicalism against all challenges.

The other vulnerability that the radicals have exploited for several generations is that the conservative fetish for means over ends prevents them from questioning the morality of radical goals. Since Marx, the central claim of radicalism is that they are trying to achieve a more virtuous and moral society. Because a just society is such a worthy goal, it justifies radical measures, including violence. Those who stand between now and the better world deserve what they get.

By focusing solely on the means in which political goals are achieved, the conservative must accept the morality of those ends if they are the result of the liberal process, which is the root of their political morality. This is why the “conservative case for…” is an internet meme. Since compromise is always the goal of Burkean conservatism, the first step is in figuring out jhow radical goals can fit into the conservative process. If trannies can be the result of the liberal order, trannies are conservative.

More important, this myopia means the Right can never question the morality of the Left’s stated goals. In fact, they are allergic to it. You see this with the reaction to the Critical Race Theory issue. Conservatives recoiled in horror when it was pointed out that CRT is explicitly antiwhite. The idea of addressing the morality of radical ends is anathema to the conservative mind. Instead, they had to frame it is bad process in pursuits of a worthy goal.

Edmund Burke wrote from the perspective of a man standing on the walls of an old social order looking out over Europe struggling to maintain order. His defense of the British social order was perfectly rational, especially in contrast to the horrors that were unleashed by the French Revolution. Like the social order he once defended, the Burkean conservatism is no longer relevant. The current order is inherently immoral and at odds with anything that a man of the Right should defend.

Further, Burkean conservatism prevents the actions required to overthrow this current order and institute a new moral order. If one is prevented from declaring the current state of things immoral and the goals of its champions as grossly immoral, then there is no way to fight the gathering darkness. If the preservation of the West and the people that make it possible must be sublimated to an abstract process, then conservatism can never conserve anything. It is part of the problem.

This is why the first order of attack for the dissident is conservatism. As long as people are willing to accept “well we have to respect the election results” as an excuse for not opposing evil, there is no escaping the gathering darkness. It is only when the opponents of radicalism commit to its utter destruction through any means necessary that the tides of war will change. That necessarily requires consigning Edmund Burke and his followers to the ash heap of history.

The Show Trials

Posted on August 2, 2021 by thezman

Note: The regular Taki post is up. This week it is another dive back into the Covid pool, with an eye to what is happening to the official narrative. Behind the green door is another world class episode of Sunday Thoughts, in addition to a review of Clarkson’s Farm and the detective series Bosch.

In authoritarian societies, the people have no real way of knowing what is happening inside the ruling class. The media is controlled by the regime, so they are not reporting on what is happening internally. Instead, they are broadcasting the official truth from the regime or elements within the regime. Often, regime elements have their own media platforms through which they speak to other regime elements. This is a form of signaling to avoid open confrontation between regime elements.

Otherwise, the public is left to guess about what is happening inside the regime, even when the policy is clear. During the Cold War, Kremlinologists would study what was happening in Russia to try and guess what was happening in the party. If someone stopped showing up to public events, a mountain of narratives would appear building on this one event. We see this with North Korea today. When one of his uncles is missing from the team photo, it is assumed he fell out of favor.

In America, this opacity is complicated by the grand delusion of liberal democracy, which blinds people from the reality of the political arrangements. The trappings of popular government add another layer to party rule. It often means that the signals coming from inside are warped by the pretensions of openness and transparency in party media. The need to pretend the system is working as advertised means that decrees must be dressed up as the result of consent.

With that in mind, the ongoing show trial for the January 6th protests gives an opportunity to do a little regime analysis. Nancy Pelosi has forced through a series of hearings about the protests, despite nothing new to reveal. The right-side of the party engineered their way out of the process. They knew it was a loser for them, so they are now on the sidelines commenting about it. The left side is forging ahead, with the first round wrapping up last week.

The term “show trial” has been with us since the 1920’s, but gained wide currency during Stalin’s purges in the 1930’s. By definition, a show trial is a public trial in which the judicial authorities have already determined the guilt of the defendant. The point of the trial is to serve as a warning to political opponents of the regime, but also to serve as an expression of power by the dominant elements within the regime. It is all about violence capital within the ruling class.

From the outside, the show trial looks like a display of absolute power. After all, the condemned is usually required to confess to crimes that everyone, including his accusers, know he did not commit. The condemned is forced to humiliate himself as a way of showing his submission to power. Similarly, the people administrating the show trial must pretend to be enthusiastic believers in the proceeding. One element of the show trial is the manufactured appearance of unity.

In reality, show trials are an indication of conflict within the ruling regime, where the dominant camp feels the need to display their power. The point of it is to advertise the violence capital of the side holding the show trial. The reason Stalin had to kill so many old Bolsheviks was he needed to establish himself as the most violent member of the party, the one member willing to kill in order to maintain power. Stalin was making himself into the most dangerous man in a dangerous world.

The thing with Stalin’s purges and show trials is they were not just about his rise to one-man rule of the Soviet state. There were real policy disputes within the party in the 1920’s that are relevant today. The left side of the party, represented by Trotsky, was the accelerationist wing. They wanted rapid adoption of socialism. The right side was the incrementalistic wing, represented by Bukharin. They wanted socialism to evolve over time with party guidance and motivation.

Initially, Stalin sided with the right. In retrospect he chose this course because it gave him time to solidify his hold of the party organization. Stalin was not a theorist or a strategist, but he was an adept organizer. The slow and steady approach, while not living up to the ideals of Bolshevism, meant he could stock the growing bureaucracy with his people. By the late 1920’s when it was clear that the slow approach was far too slow, Stalin switched sides and embraced the accelerationist approach.

The party purges and show trials of the 1930’s coincided with what amounted to a genocide of the Russian peasants. Forced collectivization, execution squads and mass deportations wiped out close to half the agricultural output. Confiscation of crops resulted in widescale famine. It was all part of the revolution from the top in order to turn Russia into an industrial nation. in that regard, it worked. Manufacturing soared and whole cities were created to produce industrial goods.

The point here is the show trial is the bit of the iceberg we can see from outside the ruling regime. The part we don’t see is the party struggle over how to move forward with their stated agenda. In the age of Covid, which started with the chants of “build back better”, it is not unreasonable to see the current show trials in this light. The new rounds of Covid panic, which are a prelude to an autumn lockdown, suggest there is a power struggle inside the party as to how best to force the great reset,

The 18-month campaign against Covid has seen trillions shifted from the white middle-class to elements of the ruling class. The tech oligopoly has profited wildly from the massive changes in society in the name of Covid. Small business has been devastated, much in the same way the kulaks were crushed by Stalin. On the other hand, similar to Stalin’s revolution from above, the great reset is not going to plan. The purge of Trumpism did not end resistance to the party.

Another clue here is the slow maneuvering to pass what is being called an infrastructure plan but is in reality the end of the two-party charade. The $4T plan working its way through the Senate will lock in the gains made by the Left over the last year and foreclose any electoral resistance. The show trial appears to be an effort to whip up support on the left in order to force some elements of the right to sign onto what amounts to their own death certificate.

In our sissified age, the show trial is more about the show than the trial. In this case, men with guns were sent out to arrest the protestors and lock them away in dungeons around the capital. The party leaders lack the courage to bring these people in for a show trial, so they remain incommunicado. Instead of having them shot and air brushed from the history books, they are a silent voice in the proceeding, a reminder to the right side that behind the performance is a will to power.

This is why people should not be fooled by the collection of sissies they rolled out in the first phase. Sure, the those mall cops reading speeches provided to them by the party were ridiculous. One of them was barely literate. The typical mall Santa sees tougher action than these wimps saw on January 6th, but that was never the point of this highly orchestrated drama. Stalin’s show trials were not about public support. The public supported the victims. It was about party politics.

That is the other parallel worth considering. The victims of Stalin were on the side of policies that enjoyed broad public support. Stalin was easily able to overcome this by having control of the instruments of state power. This is why voting harder is not a path out of the current crisis. Your vote does not matter. Instead, what comes next is always what comes next when a ruling elite believes they are the embodiment of the revolutionary dream. The revolution from above will continue.

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Monthly Archives: August 2021

Trivial Thoughts

The Death Of Burke

The Show Trials