The End Of Empire

Posted on February 14, 2022 by thezman

Note: The Monday Taki post is up. The subject of it and today’s post is the rather bizarre crisis in Europe. Of course, Sunday Thoughts is up behind the green door for those needing audio stimulation. Much of it is about the situation in Europe.

The question that has not been given much consideration over the last few decades is how exactly will the Global American Empire end? All empires come to an end, but not all of them end the same. Usually, they dissolve into their constituent parts like we saw with the Soviet Union. This may or may not bring with it a spasm of violence, but the unnatural combination eventually returns to its nature. What makes each empire unique is its birth and its death.

Like every empire before it, the Global American Empire will end. This may be what we are seeing with the current crisis in Europe over Ukraine. Russia is well past the dissolution of the Soviet Empire. Europe has also evolved past the old arrangements made necessary by the Cold War. The only player stuck in the past is the Global American Empire, which is carrying on like it is 1960. We are now seeing the hints of the end for the American empire in Europe.

The starting place is the fact that the stuff coming from Washington is so bizarre that not even the Ukrainians understand it. The rhetoric has gone well beyond the normal sort of moralizing that has distinguished the American empire. Washington and now London have conjured a reality in which the Russians are ready to launch into Ukraine while the Russians and Ukrainians are happy to find a peaceful solution. The whole thing is making Washington look a bit nuts.

All of this happening against the reality that if the Russians want to invade Ukraine there is nothing NATO can do about it. If the Russians wanted to move onto Berlin there is not much NATO could do to stop them. Over time, the West would be able to rally and cripple the Russians economically, then roll them back militarily, but in the short term everyone gets that NATO is a paper tiger. It is also a pointless vestige from a bygone era that should have been scrapped a generation ago.

This is one entry point into the crisis. The Germans want to finish Nord Stream 2 and build closer economic ties with Russia. The Russians want to restore their ancient relationship with Western Europe. They will not accept the American conditions that they must embrace the religion of the West. There will be no rainbows and transsexuals in the Russian culture. There will be no scenes of Russian soldiers walking around in pumps claiming to be sorry for their ancestors.

The Germans and the French seem to be ready to make the deal with the Russians and begin a new era for both sides. The Russians can maintain their traditional model for organizing themselves and Europe will begin to normalize economic relations with the rest of Eurasia. This leaves little room for the Global American Empire, which is based on an assertion that there is only one moral way to organize a society. This potential new arrangement is a rebuke of the very idea of empire.

Another entry point into viewing the current crisis as a stage in the dissolution of the Global American Empire is in the reaction itself. Even the American media has lost track of how many times the Biden people have claimed an invasion is imminent. It feels like it is a weekly thing now. The State Department swears the tanks are revving their engines and then nothing happens. European leaders have to be wondering if the empire is losing its grip on reality.

The hysteria could very well be the only thing left. Again, if Russian draws the line on NATO expansion and takes over Ukraine, there is very little Washington can do about it other than make a lot of noise. The promise of crippling economic sanctions is as ridiculous as the rest of the bellowing. Europe needs to buy important stuff from Russia in order to exist. Germany and France will go along with superficial stuff to please Washington, but they are not committing suicide over Ukraine.

What we may be entering is a final phase of the Global American Empire in which conflicting realities create a lot of friction. One reality is that America’s dominion over Europe was always unnatural for both sides. In the Cold War it was seen as a necessity, so it was a tolerable contradiction. Those conditions have not existed for over a generation now and reality is reasserting itself. Western Europe will be dominated by France and Germany and Eastern Europe by Russia.

Another set of conflicting realities is that the heritage stock of America never wanted to be a major player in world affairs. The sales pitch by the imperial leaders was always based on this assumed reluctance. The Global American Empire was a necessity born out of war and tragedy. That necessity is long over and yet the managerial elite of the empire insists on maintaining the empire. Meanwhile the public is dealing with cultural and economic collapse.

There has never been a time when the average American has felt more divorced from his government than now. The guy the empire counts on to wave the flag and respond to war drums is not sure which side to support. This is one of those unspoken truths about this Ukraine affair. The reservoir of patriotism is now dry among the cohort of Americans who have always been the most patriotic. The response from these people over Ukraine is a shrug or maybe a wry smile.

This may be what the end empire is like from the inside. We will have spasms of bellowing and shouting from Washington, but the world will slowly crawl out from under the shadow of Washington. Meanwhile, domestic politics will grow increasingly untenable, with populist revolt replacing electoral organizing. The system simply stops working as the reason for it to keep working no longer makes sense. The end of empire is a million small breakdowns in the system.

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Rambling Man Vol 4

Posted on February 11, 2022 by thezman

This week I have been pressed for time, so the shows I have in the planning stages had to be shelved for something that fit the schedule. Since the schedule has little free time right now, that meant I turned on the mic and spoke for an hour off the top of my head about whatever was on my mind. I did no editing and I stopped only once or twice for a drink as I was recording, so it is pretty much a first draft. All things considered it is not the worst noise you will hear this week.

Upon reflection, I probably have more to say about the trucker protest in Canada than I said in the show. One thing that comes to mind as I type this is that it reveals just how controlled the mass media is now. They have been told to ignore it other than some approved narratives and that is what they have done. Look at the Canadian media and there is zero sympathetic coverage of the protestors. They are making no effort to meet with these people and give them a hearing.

The American media has brought down the cone of silence. Drudge has a government issued warning to Canada at the top. The New York Times and Washington Post are busy peddling their latest Russia fantasies. Soviet media was more informative that the American media is now. If you want to know anything about anything you have to dig around in Substack and independent sites. The American media is now a blanket of darkness thrown over the public square.

The other thing that comes to mind is how blatant the authoritarianism is now. I see the Canadian dictator just ordered the funds for the truckers frozen. He just made up some new rule apparently or his handlers did. Trudeau is most likely illiterate, so he has to rely on others to do these things. The US government is flying surveillance aircraft over the protest to intercept communications. They will then “share” this intel with their “partners” in the Canadian secret police.

This is the new game now. We saw this with Trump. The CIA asked Australia and Britain to spy on the Trump campaign. That got around the rule against the CIA spying on Americans and gave the FBI an excuse to do their own spying. Five years ago, they made up a phony story as cover, but now it is out in the open. We live in a country that has secret police that spy on people with impunity. America is becoming East Germany with better consumer goods.

That last bit is always the undoing of authoritarians. You can run a police state or you can have a happy productive society that has nice things. With posted inflation approaching double digits and real inflation much higher, the economic reckoning is quickly approaching. There is no easy way to tame inflation. It always means a recession and usually an ugly one. People are unhappy now. Imagine where things are when the economy is in the dumper.

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This Week’s Show

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Truckers
GOP Crackup
Rogan
Black Stuff
Conservatism
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After Left And Right

Posted on February 10, 2022 by thezman

Categories are useful, which is why humans have been using labels for people and things since the dawn of time. Using generalizations for people, events and things is a handy way of communicating important things efficiently. The political terms Left and Right have been with us since the 18th century for that reason. They are broadly useful in describing people and ideas. In the particular they are often confusing, but when it comes to the big categories, they work.

In 18th and 19th century Europe, the Right was those on the side of the old aristocratic order, while the Left represented some form of liberal alternative. The Right defended the rights of the crown against the demands of the crowd. The Left advocated the rights of the people against the traditions of the crown. The Left was coming at politics from an empirical perspective. They talked about rational government. The Right were traditionalist, often rooting their position in religion.

In the 19th and 20th century, especially in America, the terms Right and Left were redefined around economic concepts. The Left were socialists, embracing Marxist arguments, to one degree or another, about economics and history. The Right was the defender of markets and free enterprise. Those old class concepts, king and peasant, inevitably were incorporated. The Left was on the side of the working people, the new peasants, while the Right was on the side of business.

The limits of this new economically based politics are obvious when looking at the early 20th century, particularly the interwar years. Fascism is considered to be right-wing, even though all of them embraced socialism. They also championed the workers in their organizing and rhetoric. Communism was much more popular with the upper classes than the working classes. Look at 20th century communism and what you see is academics and the scions of the upper classes.

Lost in all of this is the term liberalism. In the 19th century, liberal meant rational government rooted in natural law. The Founders were liberals. They sought to create a political order that reflected the people and history of the new country. They were not basing their arguments in religion or tradition. They were debating the most rational form of government for a land populated as it was at the time. Into the 20th century, liberal was a fairly good stand in for reason.

Fast forward to the middle of the last century and the term liberal had been conflated with the term progressive. They had become synonyms. Progressivism was anything but liberal in the traditional sense of the word. The progressives rooted their ideology in New England public Protestantism and oogily-boogily borrowed from European intellectuals of the Hegelian tradition. Regardless of it claims, Progressivism has always been in opposition to empiricism.

This redefinition of the word liberal is just one example of the larger assault on the common language. It has reached the point today where no reasonable person accepts anything said by the upper classes at face value. The reason is they no longer use the language as defined by the dictionary. The most recent example is the phrase “the science has changed” which has nothing to do with science. In fact, the only thing we can know for sure from that statement is the science has not changed.

The assault on cognitive meaning in the language and the rise of emotional language in public discourse is part of a larger dynamic in American political discourse that has come to redefine Left and Right. To be on the Left is to embrace an ideology rooted in your emotions about the topic and the people involved in the topic. To be on the Right is to engage rationally with a topic. Liberalism has become an assault on reason, while illiberalism is the defense of reality.

In his book After Liberalism, Paul Gottfried points out that what masquerades as liberalism in America is post-liberal. Things like pluralism and democracy are not part of the liberal tradition. 19th century liberals understood that not all men were invested in society, so not all men warranted the franchise. Similarly, they understood that all ideas were not equal or deserving of equal consideration. By extension, the people behind those ideas were not deserving of equal consideration.

Gottfried does not address it in his book, but one could argue that managerialism in America is a response to the collapse of reason in the political order. The formation of the administrative state and the concept of managerialism were the response to the collapse of the old constitutional order in the 19th century. These are not based in reason, but a practical necessity. The labyrinth of bureaucracy, private and public, that control public life exist to provide stability.

What this means is that the terms Left and Right have to reconsidered to fit the reality of the present age. The Left is illiberal, emotional and irrational. It is the rejection of the human condition, not in a spiritual sense, but in an empirical sense. It is not an accident that the people most into life-extension technology and various forms of virtual and hyper reality are on the Left. They seek to transcend human biology by living on forever in a new world created for them on-line.

This is why the term right-wing is cognitively meaningless. Those holding to the old economic definition are culturally and politically irrelevant. They oppose a political force that no longer exists. The traditionalists have a similar problem, because much of what can be defined as American tradition has been defined by the Left. Since Gettysburg, the Left has controlled the culture. So much so that things like abortion have a greater claim to tradition than opposition to it.

The greatest trick of radicalism has been to slowly lay claim to irrationality, things like tradition, emotion and spirituality, incorporating them into their theories of history and human organization. Their opposition has been left with sterile facts and figures or claims to tradition that no longer have emotional energy. The American Left is irrationality in the guise of science, emotion draped in the garb of reason, illiberalism wearing the costume of liberal governance.

Getting back to the terms Right and Left, the great crisis on the Right is rooted in the fact that the Right does not exist. It does not exist because it does not understand what it opposes or even if it opposes the Left. Until people desiring an alternative to the prevailing orthodoxy come to terms with the moral and linguistic reality of the prevailing orthodoxy, there can be no cognitive opposition. You have to know what you oppose, before you can explain why you oppose it.

As a practical matter, the West is now in a pre-Enlightenment period. This is why our age looks so much like late feudalism with better stuff. In 17th century France, there was no Right because there was no Left. There were just the way things were. Today, there is no Left or Right for the same reason. There is the prevailing orthodoxy with its established hierarchy and a bunch of disaffected peasants. The Right-Left dichotomy no longer exists practically or theoretically.

To What End?

Posted on February 9, 2022 by thezman

Note: For those in need of some audio stimulation, my appearance on Cotto & Gottfried is now up on iTunes. It is mostly about the state of conservatism.

It has been noted many times now that people in the West have to read American media the same way they used to read the Soviet media. Most of what we get from mainstream sources is the natural propaganda one expects from the toadies and bootlickers that follow every authoritarian regime. Other pieces are planted by regime elements for reasons that are not always obvious. As with Kremlinology a generation ago, regime-ology is something of sport now.

For example, the regime keeps planting these stories about an imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine in their favorites outlets. A few days ago this entirely made up report was sprinkled all over regime media. It painted a grim picture of the attack that we are told was happening any minute. Of course, the White House comes out every day and tells the stenographers in the press pool that the Russians will invade Ukraine as soon as tomorrow, but tomorrow never comes.

Today we have the latest regime scare story written by one of the zombies at their favorite outlet. The point of this story is to embarrass French President Emmanuel Macron who is trying to work out a deal with the Russians. He has been meeting with the parties the last two weeks to put an end to the situation. Unlike the Washington regime, Europe has no interest in war over Ukraine. The Europeans can read a map and they are not insane.

For a long time, it was assumed that the reason for the war drums from Washington was due to so many pols being on the Ukrainian payroll. We know the Biden family has been taking bribes from Ukraine for over a decade. That was one of those interesting stories that arose from the second impeachment of Trump. This tiny little corrupt country in Eurasia had a lot of friends in both political parties. The best sort of friends, the kind that can be bought and will stay bought.

That may be part of it, but it is clear that the Ukrainians have no desire to be the battleground in a new Cold War. For their part, the Russians have made clear they will never tolerate Ukraine in NATO. This should be an easy demand to meet, as no one in NATO, other than the Washington regime, wants Ukraine in NATO. Everyone in Europe understands the reality of Ukraine. It is a hyper corrupt kleptocracy that would be better off turned into a federalized neutral zone.

The other aspect of this is that the stories about the Russian military buildup appear to be mostly fake. The Russians are free to conduct exercises in their own land, which is what they have been doing thus far. They have not been sending weapons or “advisers” to the friendly militias operating in Ukraine. The CIA has been conducting covert operations with friendly militias for a decade now. In other words, this whole thing is one long running color revolution.

That raises the obvious question. If no one in Europe wants a war over Ukraine and the Ukrainians are not interested in a war, what is really going on here? One option is the permanent foreign policy establishment is infested with paranoids who wake in the middle of the night to the sound of hoofbeats. That has been an amusing line for years, but it would be a terrifying reality. Is the Ukraine mess really the result of deranged fanatics operating in the Washington foreign policy establishment?

Another less terrifying option is energy. The one thread that ties the foreign policy misadventures of the last thirty years together is energy. Russia has partnered with Iran and Syria because of energy. If they can control of natural gas out of the Middle East into Europe, that gives them leverage. Nord Stream 2 is a regular topic for the regime media, so it is fair to assume that the regime is worried about it. In this context, Ukraine is just a convenient cat’s paw in a larger geopolitical game.

What the regime is hoping for is an invasion of Ukraine that would then force the Europeans, especially the Germans, to kill Nord Stream 2. The Russians would remain the primary supplier of natural gas to Europe, but they would not become the exclusive supplier of energy. If Nord Stream 2 comes online Washington loses most of its leverage over Europe with regards to Russia. This is why they are so committed to this narrative about a Russian invasion. It has to happen.

The problem with this scenario is that it is too late to kill Nord Stream 2. The pipeline is complete and filled with gas. The last step in the project is for Germany to start using the gas and pay the Russians for it. No sane person can imagine a scenario in which this project is shut down. Even an invasion of Ukraine by Russia would only delay the opening of the pipeline. The Germans want the gas, the Russians want to sell it to them, so that deal will be consummated no matter what.

One interesting side bar to this is that the regime is certain they can jawbone the Russians into invading Ukraine. They also seem to think they can convince the world that a war is imminent. It is one of those examples where the regime reveals how disconnected they are from reality. Exactly no one seems to be falling for this disinformation campaign, especially the Russians. Yet the regime keeps running these stories in their media as if they are working.

As was the case with Kremlinology, we are left with our best guesses as to why the Washington regime is hyper-aggressive toward Russia. It could simply be cultural momentum within the foreign policy establishment. No one inside the regime knows why they have to talk about Russia as the great villain. It has just been the way it has always been. No one questions it, so the cultural inertia inside the system just keeps pushing the political class into confrontation with Russia.

That is the problem with closed regimes like we have in Washington. No one can see inside to figure out what is happening. Everyone inside sees everyone outside as a possible enemy, so no one talks candidly about what is happening. Everything operates inside of a black box. No one sees in and no one sees out. To the outside the world, the regime looks increasingly paranoid and dangerous. Eventually, it burns through its legitimacy and we arrive at a Ceausescu moment.

The Pirate’s Cove

Posted on February 8, 2022 by thezman

An observation made by paleocons in the last century was that the political system had been purchased by the financial system. By that they did not mean bankers were handing bags of cash to specific politicians. That has been going on since both money and politics have existed. What they meant was that the financial system had started to overwhelm the political system. More specifically, the ethics of the emerging new financial system had overwhelmed the political system.

In the money game, every rule is seen as an obstacle to be circumvented, rather than a limit on activity. The only thing that matters is profit. No one in the world of finance has ever considered if their trade is ethical, outside of some areas where there are agreed upon rules or the state imposes rules. In these exceptional cases, it is not ethics that restrains the activity, but force. Banking has always been a Darwinian game where the strong eat the weak. Morality has no role.

Government, on the other hand, has to be a game of morality, in which the boundary between right and wrong is policed. That is the point of government. The starting place of every human organization is answering the question, “Who are we?” What flows from that is a set of rules to define the answer. Government is either granted the power to enforce the rules or the elites seize power in order to enforce the rules, depending upon your philosophical outlook. That is the point of the state.

What some of the paleos observed in the 1980’s is that the ethics of the financial class had overtaken the ethics of the government. Politicians were now thinking the same way a banker thinks when he sees a rule. The first and only thought is how can I get around this in order to profit? Of course, those who are good at solving the puzzle are rewarded, while those who are bad at it or refused to abide by the new ethics of government, are eliminated.

If you look at a graph of the Dow Jones from the start of the last century to the present, what you notice is a sharp tick up in the 1980’s. From WW2 into the early 80’s the graph is a smooth upward trend, reflecting the post-war expansion. Then all of a sudden, when the post-war expansion was clearly over, the graph turns sharply upward and has climbed to heights thought impossible. It also corresponds with the collapse in political ethics that started in the 1980’s.

Cynics will say this all sounds naïve as politicians have always been crooked, but that confuses the personal with the systemic. Men are not angels and every system, no matter how ethical, will have some unethical people in it. The reason we know politicians are crooks is we used to regularly arrest crooked politicians for taking bribes or running schemes. In other words, they fell afoul of the rules. Note that we no longer arrest politicians for financial corruption.

Those old enough to remember the before times know that the corruption surrounding the Biden family would have been disqualifying a generation ago. Taking any money from a foreign source was going to be a problem. Today, it is rare to find a pol in either party who is not paid by foreigners. One member of the House intelligence committee was sleeping with a Chinese spy. The normalization of bribery over the last generation is well outside the norms of traditional politics.

This is what those paleos were talking about in the 1980’s. Here is a good example of this from Pedro Gonzales in Chronicles. He got access to a Telegram channel where a payola scheme was openly discussed. There was a time within living memory when this would have been devastating. Careers would have been ruined. Today everyone inside the political system shrugs, because everyone is on the take. Pens for hire are so common that no one thinks it is odd.

This is why National Review, for example, created the National Review Institute, a not-for-profit that operates National Review. The not-for-profit does not have to disclose its donors, so no one knows who is calling the tune. That money is used to pay for content, often supplied by allies of the donor as guest content. There are shops all over now that hire writers to produce white box content for interest groups, who then sell it to these sites for the benefit of their donors.

This is not an accident. Just about every mainstream media outlet aligned with the two parties sits around thinking about how to do this. They know it would not sit well with the public, which is why they setup the not-for-profit entity. Like the bankers who hide their grifts in mountains of regulation, the political press hides their corruption in the tax code, fund raisers and phony book deals. Like the bankers, they look at the rubes on Main Street as suckers to be played.

Of course, if you want a career as a pundit, you better figure out quickly that the game is to make the donors happy. Since those donors are in one way or another aligned with finance or technology, the issues are simple. The reason National Review will never have a discouraging word to say about tech censorship is they rely on tech money to keep themselves in the lifestyle they believe they deserve. Whether they believe it or not, everyone involved is a pen for hire now.

Again, this is not about some people being corrupt. This is a about a revolution in the ethics of the vast political system itself. Forty years ago, people across the political spectrum operated from the assumption that the goal of public policy was good government, which they defined in utilitarian terms. Good government was the greatest benefit to the greatest number of people. No one talks like this now, because no one thinks like this anymore. Everyone thinks like a banker.

The irony here is that the last forty years have been a great test of the libertarian claims about the nature of man and society. America has been transformed into a pirate’s cove where the only limit on your profit is your conscience. The one thing everyone agrees upon is that this system is horrible. Soon the other thing everyone will agree upon is that we need a strong hand to reimpose order. Right now, the left-authoritarians have the advantage, but the right-authoritarians have the numbers.

Then, Now and Tomorrow

Posted on February 7, 2022 by thezman

Note: The Taki post is up and related to the today’s post. The ongoing debate about the future of conservatism is interesting to me. It is good that such a thing is happening, but so far it reveals that we are a long way from having a sensible debate. The participants are still locked into an antiquated mode of thought. Sunday Thoughts is up behind the green door for subscribers as well.

Recently there has been a slow rolling debate among right-wing intellectuals about the state of conservatism and what comes after conservatism. The New Criterion held a symposium on “common good conservatism.” The James Wilson Institute has been debating originalism and legal conservatism (here, here, here and here). Josh Hammer from Yoram Hazony’s group has also been writing about that topic. This debate has also spilled into the foreign policy realm.

There are plenty of others chiming on the topic, but the starting point, even if it is not acknowledged, is that conservatism is done. Whatever comes next may carry the name, but it cannot be the same thing. Interestingly, the old Buckley crowd is not a part of this debate, nor are the neocons. They are too busy hanging onto their sinecures to think much about what comes next. The paleocons have also been left out of the debate, which is ironic given that they were right all along.

As is to be expected with people who view themselves as political theorists, the back and forth is not always accessible. This is especially true with regards to the debate around conservative jurisprudence. It is in that debate, however, where we see the first little green shoots of realism. In this essay the writer points out that there will never be a great rollback of the school prayer decisions. The main reason is no judge or lawyer would ever think such a thing is proper.

The great transition from the original constitutional order to what we have today did not happen in a vacuum. The people have changed, the institutions have changed and the people running the institutions have changed. The writer points out toward the end that the truth is the original social order that is so popular with “constitutional conservatives” no longer exists. America, from top to bottom, is a different world from the one that produced the Constitution.

This is the problem with the current debate about the state of the nation and especially the state of conservatism. The starting point is always the belief that things can be rolled back or reset to a prior order. It is a political revanchism where the plotters seek to reestablish the old order, but this time the people in charge of that order will not be so willing to change it. The proposed alternatives to conservatism promise a return to the past, without regard for how we got to the present.

If there is going to be a New Right in America then the starting point must be a discussion about how we went from the 18th century liberal political system to the present custodial state. In other words, it means retracing our steps in order to find the point at which America went off the course charted by the Founders and instead embarked on a new path for the country. It is in the essay about school prayer that the original sin begins to come into focus.

The writer points out that those school prayer decisions were the result of the consolidation of judicial power under the incorporation doctrine, which is the doctrine by which portions of the Bill of Rights have been applied to the states. In the case of school prayer, the courts extended the prohibition on the federal government regarding official religion to the states. Later courts extended the definition of “official religion” to include any reference to religion.

Clearly, the Founders never intended the establishment clause to apply to the states, as it was never applied to the states until the 20th century. The question is why did the court suddenly decide to apply parts of the Bill of Right to the states and by what authority did they do this? The answer is the 14th Amendment, passed as part of the constitutional reforms following the Civil War. Of course, the reforms were imposed by the victors as part of the spoils of war.

The Civil War did not happen in a vacuum. The roots of that conflict go back to the English Civil War and the founding of the first colonies. Note that the victors of the American Civil War were not the primary hand drafting the Constitution. It was men of the South, with their roots in the cavalier side of the English Civil war, who carried the day on important debates forming the new Constitution. It was the losers of those debates who carried the day seventy years later.

Another way of framing this is that the constitutional order so beloved by originalists did not hold up very well to challenge. It collapsed in the 19th century and since then the victors of the long running debate dating back to the English Civil war have been trying to refashion a new order and a new society. If conservatives are going to find a new path forward, they must come to grips with the present. That means reexamining the past in order to understand why their preferred model failed.

This is why the current debate over conservatism is sterile. No one in that debate is willing to reconsider the 19th century and the events that transformed the country from that which the Founders designed to what emerged in the 20th century. The events of the 19th century are now holy writ. The second founding doctrine is just as entrenched with conservatives as it is on the Left. In fact, both sides compete for who best can achieve the perfect equality promised by the doctrine.

The starting place for a new conservatism is the acknowledgement that the founding creation failed the test of reality. That naturally leads to a debate as to why it failed, which is a debate about the 19th century. That, in turns, means a rethinking of the 20th century in order to gain a clear understanding of the present. Once a new historical framework is in place, then a New Right can begin to chart a new course for itself and the society in which it operates.

Some Greek

Posted on February 4, 2022 by thezman

One of the fun parts of studying the ancient world, even for an amateur, is that you see that the problems of the human condition are immutable. The issues we face today have new characteristics, but they are not new to man. The Ancients had the same sorts of problems because they had the same sorts of people. Then as now, there were people who lived to create trouble. There have always been people nibbling at the support cables of society, hoping for disaster.

Of course, the Ancients could not afford to indulge their fantasies about themselves or the world, so their solutions were to the point. An office holder who betrayed his duty to the office was forced to commit suicide. People who committed crimes, even small crimes, faced rough judgment. Much of what ails the modern age is the unwillingness to deal with the problems of society. As a result, they have metastasized to the point where they seem intractable.

Even so, it is settling to read about how the Ancients worked through the problems of society as it is a reminder that this is a constant. It is also comforting to see that even the most brilliant people of the age got things wrong. Just as troublemakers and subversives are a fixture of human society, wrongness is a universal constant, even among the most brilliant of the age. It is a good reminder that appeals to authority are often an excuse for not questioning authority.

For the show this week I plucked out a handful of not so famous Greek thinkers and did a short segment on who they were and what we can learn from them. As I said in the opening, the show is a bit of self-indulgence on my part. I like reading about this period in Western history, so I like talking about it too. I usually like to keep the show somewhat related to the issues of the day, but every once in a while, it is good to do one for the sole purpose of making the host happy.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening
03:00: Lycurgus
13:00: Solon
23:00: Draco
33:00: Zaleucus
43:00: Parmenides
53:00: Democritus

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The Great Embarrassment

Posted on February 3, 2022 by thezman

Form the perspective of human society, there are two types of crises. The most familiar type of crisis is the unforeseen event that threatens order. A natural disaster, like an earthquake, is the obvious example. The ground suddenly begins to shake, buildings fall over and there is general panic. The people tasked with keeping the wheels of the society turning have to rush around to put things back in place. This unexpected event threatens the very order of society.

On the other hand, something like a hurricane or a major snowstorm is an external threat for which we expect the government to be prepared. Florida gets enough hurricanes that the people expect the government to know how to handle them, so if they do not manage the situation properly, it is a big problem. The elected officials come under pressure to explain why they screwed up. In other words, their failure to do their jobs causes a crisis for the political system.

The external crisis is mostly about getting through it as the external event does not last forever, so once it is done you go back to normal. The other type of crisis, on the other hand, is the internal one. This is where some irreconcilable contradiction in the rules of your system begin to threaten your system. It is not something you can wait out, as the contradiction is not going away. In fact, its existence becomes a greater threat each day that it is not resolved or ameliorated.

The Marxists used to talk about the inherent conflicts in capitalism. They argued that even though capitalism produces great material abundance, it destroys the social fabric that make it possible. Over time, the rate of return on capitalism will turn negative and the abundance will decline. This inevitably leads to social conflict and the collapse of the system. It was central to Marxism that the inherent contradictions within capitalism would inevitably lead to crisis.

The thing about a crisis driven by an internal contradiction is that it forces the people in charge to make a choice that they want to avoid. The communist ran into this when it became clear that Marxism had no replacement for price. If they acknowledged this truth, the justification for their rule evaporated. Alternatively, they could acknowledge that communism would never produce abundance, but then they would have to produce another justification for communism.

This story out of the NFL is a great example of the sort of irreconcilable contradictions that exist in the new social religion of our rulers. The assumption is that there are not enough black NFL head coaches. No one says what the number should be, but they all agree the current number is below the threshold. This is a habit you see everywhere with the new religion. What is the right amount of diversity? The answer is always more, but no one can say more than what.

What all of the beautiful people know is that the number of black coaches is less than the desired number and that is because of racism. All men are created equal, so what else could explain the disparity in the profession? Further, most coaches were players and most players are black. The logic of social Marxism says that the only possible explanation is some hidden barrier or conspiracy. The reason racial perfection does not exist is something structural.

That hidden barrier is always structural. The new religion insists that society is a constructed reality. In this case, as in all cases, white men constructed the reality, so it must be for the benefit of white men. That means the system naturally works against black men, which in this case means hidden or unconscious bias in the hiring of NFL head coaches. The solution is to compel teams to interview at least two black coaches as a wrecking ball against the white power structure.

This bit of logic is slamming into the reality of the business. Teams not only need to win games as a business reality, but they attract owners and executives who want to win games out of competitive instinct. This leads to two relevant results. One is they are always looking to exploit loopholes in the rules to gain an edge. The other is they are going to hire the coach they think can win. A team will hire a Volkswagen Beetle full of midget clowns if that means winning games.

Put another way, the inherent contradiction of the new social religion turns on the fact that the human condition is immutable. They may dream of a world of perfect equality, but men are not equal in the general sense or the particular sense. Therefore, human society is going to be defined by variation and inequality, reflecting the diversity of the people in that society. In the case of football, most players will be black, while most coaches will be white.

The crisis is that the true believers think their good intentions put them on the side of angels, which in this case means the side of nonwhites. In reality, they are alienating the people they claim to represent. Imagine being a young black coach hoping for a chance to be a head coach and quickly learning that your value is in ticking the box on a form required by the league. Regardless of your views on race relations, you have to empathize with this coach suing the league.

What the policy does is reveal that you can have a league where everyone tries to win or you can have a league where everyone tries to comport with the new racial morality of the new religion. You cannot have both. That means the owners can choose between wanting to be a hero to the black man or satisfying the needs of the business. In order to do both, they need to find a way to crush the dreams of this and other black coaches in the name of racial equity.

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at it. The NFL is run by some of the most disreputable grifters finance capitalism can produce. The owners are mostly men who gamed the system to skim billions from the people. They have produced nothing and will leave no footprints when they are gone. The NFL is the full expression what is wrong with placing carnies at the top of the social order. No people deserve this misery more than the NFL owners and operators.

Of course, the NFL is the part of the iceberg we see. They represent the managerial elite of the American empire. This NFL policy is about soothing the sensitive psyches of the managerial elite. It is not really about the black coaches. It is about the elites and their need to reconcile their position in society. Instead of building monuments to their people or culture, they are building monuments to themselves by supporting these reckless social engineering schemes.

It is ironic that the people who come from an intellectual tradition rooted in the belief that the inherent contradictions of capitalism will bring down the system and usher in the communist utopia now sit atop a system riddled with internal contradictions. In the fullness of time, scholar will debate how it was possible that radial politics could be wrong about so much and stagger on for so long. The Enlightenment will inevitably be renamed The Great Embarrassment.

Ukraine On The Brain

Posted on February 2, 2022 by thezman

The surest way to lose an argument is to concede the premise put forth by the person taking the other side of the debate. His starting premise is, at the very minimum, not harmful to his argument. Most likely, he starts with a premise that makes his conclusions inevitable. It would be insane to start from a premise that must lead to a contradictory conclusion. If you concede his premise without considering this strong possibility, you are sure to lose the debate.

This is why it is always good to be wary of people who claim to support your argument, but who insists upon conceding the premise of your opponent. Either that person is stupid or they are trying to undermine your argument. This has been the history of conservatism in America. They concede the premise to the Progressives, while claiming they can win the argument against the Progressives. This was famously observed by Robert Lewis Dabney a century ago.

Victor David Hanson has a post about Ukraine that is a good example of how the so-called conservatives concede the moral high ground. He opens with what is best described as a gratuitous assertion. “Americans want an autonomous Ukraine to survive. They hope the West can stop Russian President Vladimir Putin’s strangulation of both Ukraine and NATO.” No evidence is offered in support of this assertion, because no American outside Washington cares about Ukraine.

His third sentence is even more divorced from reality than the first. “Most Americans oppose the notion that Russia can simply dictate the future of Ukraine.” The truth is, most Americans do not care about this part of the world in the least. Russia could turn Ukraine into a nuclear testing zone and most Americans would only care if it made for some interesting video. Otherwise, Ukraine is down there on the list of concerns with land management in Uzbekistan.

What Hanson is up to here is making the old neoconservative case for endless intervention in the world. That case has been built on the claim that Americans care about the world and Americans will support the costs of meddling in the affairs of far away places like Ukraine. Neoconservatism has always rested on a manufactured consent of the majority. This appeal to the will of the people provides the moral authority for endless intervention in the world.

When the premise of the debate is that the American people care deeply about the territorial integrity of our ancient ally Ukraine and they are committed to stopping our ancient enemy Russia, there is only one plausible conclusion. The to-ing and fro-ing he goes through in that post is just window dressing. If the people demand the safety of Ukraine and define that as the rejection of Russian interests along their border, America has no choice but to be enmeshed in this conflict.

The rhetorical sleight of hand does not end there. Hanson makes clear that this conflict would be over if Putin respected Biden and his team. You see, despite the bellicose language from Team Biden, they are appeasers. Their tough talk about Ukraine is really just a coded surrender of Ukraine. Everyone knows that only one man in human history was ever appeased, so when you think about it, Ukraine is the Sudetenland and Joe Biden is this generation’s Neville Chamberlain.

The argument here is totally bonkers, but it is the natural result of conceding the premise of empire. Once you accept that America has a right and duty to arrange the world to reflect the current values of American elites, there is no conflict too small or too far away that does not demand intervention. In fact, Americans must naturally demand intervention, as to do other wise would be to let evil triumph. This is neoconservatism tarted up with some populist sounding handwringing.

This is why non-interventionism is seen as a bigger threat to the current order than a nuclear exchange with Russia or war with China in the Pacific. To accept the fact that there are some places around the world that are not the business of the American empire opens the debate about the limits of empire. Once we accept that there is a line beyond which it is immoral for us to go, the debate is about where to draw the line and neoconservatism has no argument for this.

Further, if we concede that Russia has legitimate interests in Ukraine, rooted in their history and culture, then we must concede that history and culture exists as something other than social constructs. In other words, to take the claims of Russia seriously is to question a fundamental premise of the current order. This is where it becomes plain that American interests in Ukraine have little to do with reality on the ground and everything to do with the prevailing morality of Washington.

This is why the neoconservatives insist that the American people have a strong interest in protecting Ukraine. If they can make that the premise of the debate, there is never a reason to question the endless meddling in the region. The debate is about how to meddle in their affairs, not whether we should meddle in the region. The former serves the interest of the neocons, while the latter excludes them from the debate, something that needs to happen sooner rather than later.

Wide Right

Posted on February 1, 2022 by thezman

In January, The New Criterion organized a symposium around the topic of the changes in the conservative movement. They invited several writers to respond to the main essay written by Kim R. Holmes, the former Executive Vice President of The Heritage Foundation and former Assistant Secretary of State in the G. W. Bush Administration. The respondents are Ryan T. Anderson, Josh Hammer, Charles R. Kesler, Daniel J. Mahoney, James Piereson, Robert R. Reilly, and R. R. Reno.

Now, if this were a boxing match, it would have been called in the second response to Holmes, written by Josh Hammer, a member of Yoram Hazony’s National Conservatism movement. Hammer offers a lengthy critique of conservatism but the subtext is a bit of inescapable reality. The conservative movement, whatever its intensions, was a complete failure. It conserved nothing. In fact, it may be the biggest failure in the history of political movements.

Conservatives often respond to this with the claim that it was conservative foreign policy that defeated communism in the last century. That is true, but the point of defeating communism was to preserve American’s way of life and protect the ancient liberties of Western people. Winning the Cold War was supposed to be a means to an end, not an end in itself. Instead, the peace dividend has been spent up-armoring the administrative class and the increasingly tyrannical security regime.

One reason conservatism is in a crisis is the defenders of the movement refuse to acknowledge this reality, which calls into question their sincerity. The Holmes essay does not mention this fact and instead offers a long critique of the critics. In so doing he inadvertently reveals the source of the crisis within conservatism and the cause of its failure. His defense of John Locke displays an ignorance of why Locke mattered to the Founders and why he matters today.

Locke is considered the father of liberalism because he solved an important problem. Upon what authority should political philosophy rest its claims about politics and human society? If it is not the king and the social order that was passed down to the 17^th century, then what should it be? If it is God, then it logically must be Scripture, but the Gospels are not much help when it comes to creating a political structure to govern society. Jesus had no opinion on parliamentary order.

Locke was a Christian who accepted that God created the world. Since God must be rational, it follows that his creation is rational. Further, it follows that he knew what he was making when he created the world. He would have no need to change those rules, as God does not make mistakes, so it follows that the rules of nature are fixed. Mankind lives in a world of fixed and discoverable rules, which means we can discover the rules that should govern human society.

Simply put, Locke removed religion and Scripture from the equation so that a moral philosophy could rest upon the authority of nature. It is not an accident that the Founders used the phrase, “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” in the Declaration of Independence. They were not basing their claims against the King on the words of their favorite philosopher. They were basing their claims on the same authority as their favorite philosopher.

Unlike the Founders, modern conservatives are not interested in the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” and instead rest their authority on their favorite historical figures. They are fond of quoting Locke, Jefferson, or Lincoln, especially Lincoln, but these are just men. They can only offer a path to an authority upon which to build a political philosophy. Otherwise, they are as flawed as every man. Locke, for example, believed in the blank slate, which is complete nonsense.

This is why conservatism has been a failure. Without some authority to base their political claims, their opponents are free to dismiss them as mere tactics. From the perspective of the Left, the Founders were just men. On the other hand, the historical process is science and the foundation on which they make their moral claims. Legal and economic arguments are no use against moral arguments, which is why the Left has swept conservatism from the field.

To his credit, Holmes is correct to point out that the National Conservatives are terrified of being associated with identity politics. The trouble is, there is no way to have nationalism without national identity, even if you try to hide that identity behind talk of customs and traditions. Those customs and traditions did not fall from the sky. They are the product of a people defined by the mating decisions of their ancestors and the location of those decisions.

Holmes is also correct to point out that the National Conservatives are wrong about Burke’s influence on the thinking of the Founders. This is an attempt on their part to replace one favorite philosopher with another in order to claim the high ground against establishment conservatives. Further, to pretend that Burke was not well aware of what it meant to be British, to have a British identity, when he was defending the traditions and customs of the empire is to exempt oneself from reality.

The most curious response to Holmes on behalf of the “common good conservatism” side is from Ryan T. Anderson, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. The group describes itself as “dedicated to applying the Judeo-Christian moral tradition to critical issues of public policy”. He correctly points out the fatal flaw in social contract theory, which is the bedrock of the conservative movement. There is nothing in nature or in Locke’s writing that requires a social contract that only guarantees rights.

The proto-society that is coming together could plausibly agree to sacrifice their rights entirely in order to preserve the commonly held property of the members. The human sciences tell us that this is probably the basis of the first human settlements. Kin groups collaborated with related kin groups to maintain hunting grounds and water supplies. Similarly, they could have come together to protect some natural curiosity with which they held a shared spiritual meaning.

The archeological record suggests that what first brought disparate kin groups together was not an agreement to respect each other’s rights. Instead, it was common spiritual belief. Göbekli Tepe, in what is now Turkey, is known as humanity’s first temple. It was constructed by pastoral people as some a shared religious site. It is assumed that agriculture caused people to settle down, but this site offers another plausible reason to settle and cooperate, shared belief in a common set of gods.

That has always been the trouble with social contract theory. It is a thing that exists as a logical construct to solve the problem of natural rights theory. That is, lacking an authority on which to base natural rights, this imaginary contract between people is conjured from thin air to be that foundation stone for the theory. Natural rights theory assumes an axiom for which there is no evidence in history. Further, if such a contract existed, it probably had nothing to do with rights.

An interesting observation by Robert R. Reilly in his critique of the integralists is that “They wish to find themselves in a pre-Reformation Christendom.” Integralism is revanchism, which has run through the conservative movement since the 1960’s. The integralists may dream of returning to Camelot, but the current conservatives dream of returning to 1980. The neoconservatives dream of returning to 1950’s Brooklyn. Conservatism is the promise of a “do-over” where this time the good guys win.

Reilly also offers up this strange argument against the common good. “A love of one’s own can only take one so far. One naturally loves one’s own, but is one’s own always deserving of love? If this love lacks grounding beyond a bare attachment to one’s own, how is it different from others’ preference for their own? Strict nationalism fails to the extent that it does not take into account natural law and natural rights, which together condemn the universal state and expose its inherently tyrannical nature.”

Conservatives used to condemn this sort of universalism to the woolly-headed intellectuals who spent too much time reading Marx. Conservatism simply assumed that custom and convention are what allowed people to live peaceably. Civil society was the product of generations of trial and error, the result being a collection of compromises we call culture. There could never be a universal state, as there can never be a universal culture, because there is no such thing as universal man.

Like all modern conservatives, Reilly is terrified of what naturally flows from putting the interests of your own ahead of strangers. Conservatives have accepted the left-wing claim that anything exclusionary is exploitive and immoral. Loving your child more than the child of the stranger inevitably leads to fascism, according to the theology of the modern Left. Whether it is out of fear, cowardice or stupidity, contemporary conservatives have accepted the morality of the open society.

As a result, they have no choice but to reject that the common good can even exist and they busy themselves making the conservative case for the open society. In fairness, the common good conservatives suffer from this same affliction. Yoram Hazony’s book, The Virtue of Nationalism, tries to make the case for nationalism, but is repeatedly poleaxed by the fact that nationalism can only be rooted in biology, history and location. It also must be exclusive.

This is the problem faced by all of the common good conservatives. Unless they are prepared to make the case that their program includes all of humanity, they must define the who and whom of this new utilitarian conservatism. Who is inside the domain covered by the common good and who lies outside of that domain? More important, who decides? Further, upon what authority will this person be selected and what is the authority upon which they will rely to draw the boundaries?

The common good conservatives are silent on this, even though they privately will confess that their concept of a nation is the same one anathematized by the Left. The Finns should decide what is best for the Finns, even if that means excluding non-Finns from their lands. By nature of the mating decisions of their ancestors in their ancestral lands, they have the sole authority over what it means to be Finnish and what is in the best interests of the Finnish people.

Again, the common good conservatives understand this reality, but they also know that they will be hurled into the void if they acknowledge the obvious. To their credit, the neoconservatives have always understood this and limited their scope to foreign affairs. Their social criticism was always just window dressing that never dared question the morality of the open society. Kim Homes, someone who has traveled in neoconservative circles his whole life, certainly gets this.

Taken as a whole this debate bumps into the question of whether or not it is possible to have conservatism in a democratic society. As Russell Kirk pointed out, the first principle of conservatism is the belief that there exists an enduring moral order. In a political system where the truth, including moral truth, is decided by 50% plus one, there is no room for an enduring moral order. The evidence of this is all around us as men put on sundresses and declare themselves women.

The Founders understood the danger of democracy. This is why they explicitly said the new constitution provided checks against it. The democratic elements included in the new political order were bounded by limits on the state. Modern conservatives reject this and instead think they can achieve conservative ends by convincing 50% plus one to support their claims. They excitedly talk about democracy, because they are operating under the belief they can win over the fickle mobs.

This is because modern conservatism has abandoned that first principle of conservatism. The libertarians, the neoconservatives and the civic nationalists find the idea of an enduring moral order as horrifying as their supposed enemies on the Left. Like the modern Progressive, the modern conservative has made the shifting will of the people the sole authority. In such a world there can be no permanence, no tradition and no appeal to custom. Therefore, there can be no conservatism.

Whether it is the revanchism of the integralists or the sterile nationalism of Hazony’s brand of conservatism, they fail for the same reason mainstream conservatism has failed. Without a moral foundation upon which to make political claims, conservatism is nothing more than a negotiating position within the democratic system. It is why today’s Progressive fad turns into tomorrow’s conservative principle. The modern conservative always starts from the last Progressive victory.

That is the crisis in modern conservatism. For there to be a legitimate conservative movement, it must first come to terms with what it is it seeks to defend. Then it must answer why this must be preserved. These are moral questions that Locke answered by looking at the natural world as an orderly place that operates by fixed rules. As such, human happiness lies in the orderly society that operates under a rational and persistent set of rules.

This naturally means a rejection of the Hegelian theory of history that is the moral basis of both the Left and the prevailing moral order. The hand of history is not carrying mankind to some promised land where all moral questions are answered. A genuine alternative to the prevailing orthodoxy is not a debate about its factual inaccuracies, but a rejection of it on moral grounds. That requires a courage that modern conservatism and common good conservatism are unable to muster.

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