The typical politician in Washington knows what his staff tells him, plus whatever he remembers from his prior life. Given the nature of the life, what happened in the before times is a fading memory. Of course, few of these people ever did productive work before they got to Washington. In fact, having ever had a real job is close to a disqualification in politics. As a result, most have always been in politics and this is the peak of their political career.

Those staffers who make up the reality for a politician are not earthy men of the people, spending their days talking with the hoi polloi. They are from a specific class and spend their days socializing and networking with one another. What they know about the world is what they tell one another and what they get from the media. Their main focus is to make sure their guy is on the right side of the current trends and primed to say the right things at the events they organize for him.

Of course, the news of the world that flows from the media to the staffers and then to the politician is not news of the world. The content creators in the media do very little in the way of actual reporting. Their job is to take what is given to them by the agency they are assigned to cover and make it into a story. Most of the time this means taking canned quotes they get via e-mail and using them to salt a narrative, always with the phrase “sources say” to make it sound right.

The government agencies feeding the media have their agenda, which is always about what is good for the agency. Pournelle’s law of bureaucracy is on full display at this point, which means the people dishing to the media are people who care only about the bureaucracy they serve. In modern Washington, it is no longer about power and money, but rather the weird internal competition in the system. Leaks to the media are often about signaling between factions.

Washington itself has become something like an organism. All of its parts have a prime directive and that is to benefit the whole. Their secondary directive is to benefit their part of the whole. This means that everyone inside the organism is surrounded by nothing but other bits of the organism. To be inside the system is to live entirely around those who in one fashion or another serve the whole. Washington is both a system and a collective with its own sense of identity.

This helps explain why the war in Ukraine staggers on with no effort by Washington to make a deal with Moscow to end the war. Objectively, a deal should be easy to make and in the best interests of the West. Russia is not an expansive, ideological state with designs on the rest of Europe. There would be no war in Ukraine if not for the senseless meddling of the neocons that run American foreign policy. Making a deal to end the war basically means Washington stops poking the bear.

We hear nothing like this in Washington. There are zero politicians questioning the sanity of American policy. A few make noises about how the money is being spent, but they do not know why those lines are in their script. The people who put them there, those staffers, saw something about this in the media. The media is told by the Pentagon that there are worries about the accounting. Otherwise, no one questions anything because no one has a reason to question anything.

This dynamic plays out in the bureaucracy too. To be in good standing is to be on the right side of the current initiatives. In this case, everyone who knows what is good for them in the Pentagon makes sure to put on that Ukraine lapel pin. Information about what is happening on the ground leaks into the system, but there is no demand for it, so it sits in unread reports. The current narrative demands different facts, so people are busy getting those facts together.

This is also why we get insane press conferences from the people running the war machine part of the organism. Larry Johnson gives some useful commentary on the absurdity of what Milley and Austin had to say. Both men are reading from a script, prepared by people who care first and foremost about the bureaucracy they serve, which is the Pentagon and the military. They probably know the reality on the ground, but there is no incentive to mention it.

Probably the best example of how the organism works is the catastrophic train derailment in Ohio. The DC pols have nothing to say about it because their staffers have not put it in their scripts. The lone exception is J.D. Vance, the newly minted senator from Ohio, but he has yet to be assimilated. The staffers have no idea where Ohio is or if it is even in America. The reason is the media is full of stories about balloons, weird sex stuff and Trump news.

Here we have the most serious environmental disaster in decades and the organism has yet to respond. The reason is none of the entry points into the organism have pathways linked to the middle of the country. All of those pathways open in coastal cities and only the ones that matter to the organism. Unless what is happening in Ohio poses some risk to the organism, it does not exist for the organism. Ohio could become a dead zone and Washington does not care.

This is why our politics are insane. America is run by what amounts to a closed religious cult that cares only for its internal operations. Like any other organism, it draws sustenance from its surroundings, but unlike any other organism, it has little interaction with its surroundings, other than for defensive purposes. It is why elections have no impact on policy. Whatever the result, what gets sent to the organism is digested and put to use by the organism to defend the organism.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

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At the core of the American cultural outlook is the assumption that the more open something is, the better it will become over time. Openness means a low barrier of entry and a low of barrier entry means lots of people with a wide variety of ideas can enter the system, thus improving the system through competition. Therefore, the more open a system is to new people and ideas, the faster it will mutate and improve into something better than the original.

As much as conservatives like to label the cultural lunacy we see happening as the product of Marxism, it really is the product of Americanism. Sure, the people who brought us novelties like gender and racial grievance were trained up in radical philosophy, but they have always operated under the assumption that reducing the barriers to entry is a primary goal. In fact, their presence in the academy is the result of this bedrock belief in total openness.

Whether it is the marketplace of ideas or the marketplace of goods and services, the starting American assumption is the more the better. If you want better health care, so the argument goes, you need more competition among providers. Get more providers competing for patient dollars and inevitably the quality of  service will improve and the cost to the patient will decline. Similarly, open the marketplace of ideas and the number and quality of competing ideas will improve.

George Soros is now a stock villain in normie politics, but look at what he calls his umbrella organization. It is the Open Society. George Soros literally seeks the end of all borders in the world. That is not just national borders, but all of the cultural and social borders that define human society. In many respects, Soros is the extreme representation of the core American principle of openness. He imagines the world as one giant wide open frontier.

Of course, the frontier is why Americans love openness. The founding of the American way of life was based on the idea that you could always head west and find a new place to call home if you were not happy. This later transformed into the natural mobility Americans take for granted. The typical European lives his life in one place, only leaving for holiday trips. Americans move all over the place, often from one type of community to another, without thinking much about it.

You cannot move from Boston Massachusetts to Nashville Tennessee if the people in these areas are naturally hostile to strangers. The typical person from Tennessee may think the typical person from Massachusetts is a mean word, but both people assume it is immoral to exclude someone based on their place of origin. We will never see a campaign by one region to block the migration of people from another region, even when it is terrible for the receiving end.

We have a good example in Idaho. People are fleeing California due to the economy, crime, taxes and general lunacy. They first moved to Colorado where they promptly started voting for politicians that promise to ruin Colorado. Now people are leaving the state because it is getting as bad as California. The people of Idaho know this and should erect barriers to entry in order to protect themselves from California, but they would rather die than be rude to the newcomers.

American openness is the heart of the immigration problem. You can get a majority behind enforcing the laws against migrants flowing freely over the border, but you cannot get majority support for an end to all immigration. The idea of closing a border brings shame and guilt to the mind of the typical American. He cannot explain why he thinks closing the border is wrong, he just knows it. Like the Idahoans, Americans would rather die than be mean to newcomers.

In fairness, American openness was a great advantage. The openness to new ideas and new people turned an empty continent into a superpower. It made it possible to flood the continent and make the most of the natural resources. If Americans were not willing to pick up and move, the West would never have been conquered. Much of the technological progress the world enjoys is the result of openminded sorts coming to America and challenging old assumptions.

When the continent was protected by two massive oceans that were not easy to cross, this ethic of openness was a great asset. Now that the world is much more crowded and oceans are no longer a barrier, openness is a liability. Not only are millions of people flowing into the country ever month, every stupid and toxic idea is free to jump on stage and do its worst. American openness is turning the country into the dayroom of a lunatic asylum with no way to close the doors.

Many blame the problems of the West on individualism, but the more serious problem may be American openness. Since the middle of the last century, American values have been imposed on Europe. They now sound like grievance studies professors because of the American cultural dominance. For three generations, the ticket up the status ladder has had the stars and stripes on it. As a result, openness is now as much a European principle as an American one.

In the West, it is now immoral to close the door on anyone or anything, with the exception of those who want to close the door. The surest way to be removed from polite company is to question the open door policy. Only fascists and white supremacist want barriers to entry and objective standards. Paradoxically, the most tolerant and open culture in human history is violently intolerant of anyone suggesting that there must be a limit to tolerance and openness.

Fitness applies to all things, even morals and ideas. It is looking like the open society, like many species, was able to flourish in an exceptional environment, but once the environment returned to the norm, the open society is no longer fit. Like the giant panda, the open society is only suited for specific conditions. Unlike the giant panda, there will be no zookeepers to maintain it. Either openness is abandoned or it dies out taking the people with it.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

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Last month Paul Gottfried wrote a brief note in Chronicles about an event hosted by The Philadelphia Society. The event was a virtual debate between Christopher Owen and Glenn Ellmers on the topic of which is the more important founding document, the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. Presumably, this is some sort of old person role playing game where the two men reenact the debates between Harry Jaffa and Willmoore Kendall from half a century ago.

In fairness, revisiting this topic is useful for those wondering why conservatives have a fetish for Lincoln. Maybe not this debate specifically, but the debate between Kendal and Jaffa in the last century. So-called conservatives embraced Jaffa’s rewriting of American history because it solved their race problem. If one wants to understand the “conservative case for” and the “democrats are the real racists” memes, you start with Harry Jaffa’s Lincoln project.

Putting that aside, the purpose of Gottfried’s post was to point out that these sorts of conservative groups operate like eccentric museums. They claim to exist in order to promote debate, but in realty they exist to prevent debate. Gottfried could be describing all of Conservative Inc. with this line. “Although founded by Frank Meyer in 1964 as a center for vigorous debate on the intellectual right, the Philadelphia Society now exudes the freshness of an ancient Egyptian tomb.”

That is a slander against Egyptian tombs. At least when someone finds a tomb, there is some curiosity about what is inside it. There is a chance that archeologists will find something new or maybe answer an ancient question. Inside conservative institutions there is nothing new. No one needs to be curious about what is inside because everyone knows what is inside. The point of these operations is to make sure nothing new ever happens on the so-called Right.

Gottfried goes on to call for some new voices to be invited into these institutions in order to freshen up the debate. Even if the geezers inside are not interested in new ideas, at least they can freshen up their old arguments a bit. Even museums spruce up the exhibits from time to time. Of course, this will never happen and Gottfried concedes that it can never happen as long as the tomb managers remain. Politics on the Right advances one funeral at a time.

The thing is though, it is not all that clear that the actuarial tables will solve the problem that haunts Conservative Inc. Look around at the various institutions and you see plenty of young people, but they were selected for their obsequiousness rather than their willingness to challenge old thinking. They get picked and promoted in the same way the Chinese exam system promoted people in the Song dynasty. Conformity is the highest virtue in the conservative ecosystem.

The model for this is National Review. When Bill Buckley started searching around for a successor, he went through a few talented men until he found Rich Lowry. Those talented men threatened to change things at National Review. Lowry was simply too stupid to change anything. More important he was an obsequious rumpswab who would tend to Buckley’s lifelong project like the men assigned to keep Lenin’s body on display in the Kremlin. He was the ideal museum keeper.

This is not just a problem with conservatism. The ruling class of the Global American Empire is the product of the 20th century. It evolved for the 20th century and therefore seeks to maintain the conditions that made it possible. It is why the origin point of every subculture within it is the 20th century. Every issue is jammed into a narrative structure that dates to 1938 or 1968. Every foreign enemy is a new version of Hitler and every domestic villain is Bull Connor.

This is why there can be no airing out of the institutions. Even if the crypt keepers of conservatism fling open the windows and let in some fresh air, they will be forced to close those windows. The survival of conservatism depends on it fitting into that 20th century narrative structure that controls the ruling class. The only way those windows remain open is if it is a bankruptcy sale. That particular institution is being sold off because it is no longer needed.

It is also why the new “conservative” operations quickly begin to conform to the old narratives as soon as they get attention. As long as they are not an explicit rejection of the old thinking, they are assimilated into the collective. First some famous people show up to look around, then the money begins to flow. Before long, the “rebels” are beginning to enjoy the perks that come with submission. They are assimilated into the blob and become another node of the system.

Modern conservatism suffers from the same malady that plagues most of the institutions of the empire. That is, it has no purpose. Once the Soviet Union collapsed, the organizing purpose of the West collapsed with it. The difference was the West thought it won the Cold War and therefore was validated. The communists were under no such illusions, so they got busy escaping the 20th century. The West thought it had arrived at the end of history.

While it would be nice to see a wrecking ball smash through these decrepit institutions of conservatism or maybe see a peasant revolt against them, the reality is they will stagger on as long as the empire exists. A feature of every dying empire is a fear of change and we are clearly in that stage. Those old men keeping the museum exhibits going on the Right, as well as their youthful apprentices, care only for keeping the lights on for another day which means keeping the doors locked.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that makes coffee. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

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