The other day, I was looking around for ideas and stumbled across this article at the ironically named American Conservative. I mock the name because there is not much about it that is conservative. Even their anti-war positions are reflexive and not very well thought out. Rod Dreher has been the main guy for a while and he has lurched from one fad to the next, looking for a cult to give meaning to his life. The new editor appears to be trying to make the site more like other legacy right operations.
That article got my attention, because at the top was this note, “Editor’s Note: This is the first in a collaborative series with the R Street Institute exploring conservative approaches to criminal justice reform.” Never having heard of the R Street Institute, I looked up their financials and saw that it was the usual suspects. Any operation that includes David Frum must be working against the interests of white America. He is a despicable person and a subversive.
If you look at their website, they pitch themselves as libertarians. The word “free market” has become an abracadabra word to the donor class that subsidizes these outfits. It basically means these guys are fine with the cultural strip mining that passes for capitalism these days. Just as over-class jargon about “diversity” always signals a war on white people, the use of “free market” means a war on the middle class by the globalists that see America as nothing more than a pirate’s cove.
Ironically, these R Street guys have landed on prison reform as an issue they will champion as conservative. Anyone over the age of forty-five knows that “prison reform” is code for “throw open the prison doors so the blacks can run wild.” There has never been a prison reform effort with the goal of making the streets safe. Instead, it is either anarchy and free weed or a Progressive assault on order. The effort to make this a conservative principle is just another example of the death of conservatism.
Now, the right was always just the dancing partner for the left. A great way of putting it is from Robert Louis Dabney, “American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition.” You will note that he wrote that over a century ago. What tends to lead people into dissident politics is the realization that the so-called conservatives are just body men for the people they claim to oppose. Their ideas are intended to enhance, rather than reject, the morality of the Left.
The reason the modern Right seems like a barren field with tumbleweed bouncing across it is that their dancing partner is now just a shuffling zombie. The Left has not generated a serious insight into modern society in over a generation. Their last big public policy idea was ObamaCare. Otherwise, it has been a series of bizarre gestures toward increasingly narrow fringe groups. They are the dog that caught the car. The Left has a free hand to do what they please in America and they have no idea what to do.
The result of this lack of ideas is that politics is now just a combination of money grubbing and hysterical public tantrums. The hilariously over-the-top reactions in the media to Trump’s meeting with Putin is a good example. None of these people can tell us why Putin is suddenly the devil. They do not even try. Instead, they carry on like teenagers in a slasher film. They took turns trying to outdo the previous loon’s contrived outrage. It is as if they are trying to scream the devil into existence, so they can have a reason to scream.
Much gets written about the impact of cosmopolitan globalism on the middle class and the cultural identity of western nations. It is assumed that the people doing this to us have a purpose, but in reality, they are working on inertia. They do not move forward toward a goal, rather, they just move forward because that is what they do. The politicians are feckless airheads, and their advisers are craven ninnies. Everything is a bust-out now, not because they are crooks, but because they cannot think of another reason to get up in the morning.
That is the other consequence of cosmopolitan globalism. It hollows out the intellectual elite, just as it kills the middle-class. This was evident a century ago, the last time the world was sure globalism was the cure. The great powers staggered into the abyss because they lacked the ability to question their own policies. A war that should never have started went on for years, because both sides kept doing the same things over and over, hoping for a different result. They murdered themselves for lack of a new idea.
Of course, I could have the cause and effect backwards. Maybe the cultural collapse of the West naturally makes one-world utopianism appealing. The Left ran out of ideas fifty years ago and the Right has been on fumes since the 1980’s. Europe has not had a new idea since Marxism. Without a reason to argue and debate, maybe it is natural to assume there is nothing left to debate. All the big problems have been solved and it is time to step into the glorious future. The lack of competition has made our ruling class dull.
I was looking around for ideas [at the] American Conservative
Search for the water of ideas in the desert of the mind.
Funny thing about the Progressives is they act as though Russia simply did not exist until 1917 and after that mostly as a misapplication of socialism as the true glorious future. And now Putin is some sort of novel Satanic incarnation. He’s simply a throwback to when Russia was a large, but relatively poor country enforcing its own Monroe Doctrine in the Slavic neighborhood. They’ve got a couple of traceable commodities, energy and weapons and an oligarchic system little removed from the royals and serfs.
The left’s big idea is open borders. It’s backfiring though, maybe for the first time.
Open borders, is one. There’s no such thing as race, is another. Gender is relative, yet another. These are huge ideas. I just think the whole “the Left has no ideas” is a non-starter. It gets you nowhere in a conversation. Everyone thinks, correctly, that new ideas come from the Left. It’s what the Left does. Progressive…progress over old ideas, with new ones.
Yes, the Dissident Right has a fresh take…”new ideas”. But that doesn’t mean the Left doesn’t. A crappy idea is still an idea. Especially when it has traction.
“Any operation” with David anything, you mean.
Since all institutions are wobbly and decrepit towers of corruption why wouldn’t our military industrial complex be the same. An institution that originally filled a need just teeters on and on through the decades after WW2, after the Cold War, after the War on Terrorism.
Our intelligence agencies are pretty much the same.
What we can look forward to is these institutions no longer creating overseas bogeymen.
Their new ideas will probably take a much more domestic turn.
The new intelligence agencies seem to be pretty effective in their tasks.
I’m talking about Google, Facebook, and Amazon.
I hold out some hope for Rod Dreher. When he isn’t shilling for his awful book or delving into the latest example of papist covering up of pedophilia, he says some stuff that gets close to being red-pilled. I think that if he could get over his incessant need to be liked, he might be useful. Perhaps he will say something a little too edgy and get fired from TAC, that might do the trick.
I’ve been reading Dreher regularly for about 6 months, and he has the red pill in his mouth but hasn’t swallowed yet.
Unfortunately, he will never get over his self admitted nerd desire for acceptance, thus will never be a true dissident.
He does admit that he knows a type of white identity politics is coming, and based on the ever increasing hysteria of the left, doesn’t blame average whites for jumping on that band wagon. He admits that we really won’t be left with any other choice, and he’s right.
You can also see this among guys like Tucker and some writers at Quillette and Medium as well. They’re trying hard to stay even by being good, color blind civic nationalists, but it’s not working.
In the past year a number of well read and well educated writers have seen the writing on the wall, and even socially liberal types have seen that the insanity of the left, empowered by social media, is going to spiral out of control.
As infuriating as watching the daily, even hourly, outrage machine called the left is, I know it pushes normal white people rightward.
It’s all too abstract for my monkey brain. What’s an “idea” anyway? What new ideas have the Right had? Nothing new under the sun right? There can’t be any new ideas. Just new shades of meaning. More emphasis here, a little less there. I suspect the “No ideas” mantra is just a deep sounding put-down. And if it’s effective for our side, I’m all for it. But just between us bros, it doesn’t really mean anything right?
New ideas relative to the last 50+ years: race realism and awareness of J*wish tribalism.
Good one, ZMan–The dog caught the car. lol.
“The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time”, British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey said as the “great powers staggered into the abyss” on the eve of WW1. I don’t know that we have seen them lit yet, but maybe soon.
I’m actually not a super big fan of this guy, but if you want a theory about why the left hates Putin, in “ordinary” ideological/religious/demographic terms (with a little JQ kicker at the end), you can look at this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJdxNEgWirM
Really, I put the Putin hysteria down as a crude attempt at a putsch. Remember, very powerful people were literally calling for a coup d’etat during the height of the hysteria.
It’s really the same as when they tried to gin up frenzy to oust the president because of a lack of “mental fitness.” I know the ZMan is not big on the JQ, but *all* the guys fabricating “evidence” of the president’s insanity were those guys. And this second putsch’s cast of characters has plenty of overlap.
And I think the hysteria is real, in a sense. They are hysterical that they’ve lost the formal power of the presidency and, because the President is an unabashed loudmouth, some control over the Overton Window.
So basically they just need something to project their hysteria onto. If it’s not the president’s mental fitness, it’s the meeting with so-and-so. Tomorrow it will be something else. They’ll seize on *any* pretext to unleash their hysteria and gin up another putsch. But the hysteria is definitely not about what it’s officially about.
I frequently wonder if many on the Progressive Left aren’t simply like spoiled children acting up as a means of inciting whitey (“the man”) to impose some much needed discipline on the misfits. Human beings thirst for values and structure. Progressivism is the erosion of values and structure to be replaced by either nothing at all or perhaps empty hedonism. Even a lot of Progressives, if only subconsciously, must sense that something considerable has been lost. Lingering dilemma: can anyone restore it?
I’ve long thought that this was the case. White women and black people generally has been shit testing white males for 2 generations, and not getting the desired response, which is a spanking and being sent to bed without dinner.
Women definitely desire this, and black people crave order and discipline, but don’t want it from whitey. It pains decent black people that a large subset of black people are incapable of maintaining even the most rudimentary civilizational structures. That white people have to do it for them creates a smoldering resentment in them that occasionally explodes into hysteria and violence. It also gnaws away at the conscience of goodwhites that black people can’t seem to stop screwing up and need constant reassurance and handholding. They subconsciously know that white people are the only ones capable of maintaining the societal standards that the average westerner is used to, but can’t blame black people for this as that wouldn’t look good, thus continue to lash out at other, less woke, whites as a way to relieve the cognitive dissonance.
This is where guys like Farrakhan, and Islam generally, come in. The various flavors of Islam that have taken hold among black Americans are a tell that blacks crave order and discipline. It’s just that they want a black man to be the one to crack the whip and get everyone in line.
I’ve watched Farrakhan speak at length on Youtube. He has explicitly stated that black people are impulsive and emotive and need a strong hand with clear, simple rules to bring order to their lives, and all the black people in the audience agree.
Bottom line, most on the left are waiting, apparently in vain, for Daddy to come home and restore order.
Yes, they will initially kick and scream, the way a toddler does. But once the tears end and they are safely tucked into bed, they will be glad that Dad made the world right.
Maybe Trump should make a tweet aimed at the crazy libs saying “Here comes daddy and my belt is coming off.”
“The Left has not generated a serious insight about modern society in over a generation.” Which one? I’m seriously asking – I spent a whole series of blog posts trying to determine the last time the Left had a new idea. My answer was Marcuse’s “Fuck your way to Socialist Enlightenment,” circa 1955. I’d be interested to hear your take.
Now that I think about it, it’s hard to think of anything in my lifetime. Intersectionality is the only thing that comes to mind, maybe critical theory. I’m not sure they even qualify as ideas, much less new ideas. Third wave feminism is another option, but that’s just a rant against reality.
The truth is, the last great debate in the West was between social democracy and Bolshevism and that was not much of a fight after 1950. These days, you have to look to fringe weirdo for new modes of thought and speculation.
Their winning idea is to assemble a coalition of minority groups to overthrow traditional white (non (((cosmopolitan)))), heteronormative America, It may not be an intellectually compelling idea to debate, but they are winning with it.
Universal income seems to be a growing movement.
I think the crypoanarchist philosophy behind Wikileaks is new. It developed in the mid-late 90s. Nothing since then, not just in politics but anywhere.
The idea that cheap meaningless sex was the ultimate aspiration for woman was a revolutionary idea from the left in the 70s. When I was a younger man, I thought that whoever came up with that line of bs was a true American hero (for men). Now I realize how ridiculous and destructive it was.
The Left has had one new idea in my lifetime, although it’s not an intellectual one … more of a value system.
That is institutionalized “rebellion.” Beginning with a few writers (Jack Kerouac et al.) in the late ’50s, by the mid-’60s it was in full spate. “Dissent” became an article of faith and a requirement for respectability. The counterculture was the culture from then on.
To be taken seriously today, a work of art or even of pop culture must be “edgy” … “pushing the envelope” …”transgressive,” etc. Look at the kinds of sculptures once-traditional museums put on their lawns. The ear-aching contemporary music in “classical” concert halls.
Who do grants go to? Who gets the publicity? The creative (destructive) personality who is most outrageous. Flipping the bird to the bourgeoisie, what is left of it, is no longer the act of bohemians living on the fringe of society. It’s a ticket to fame, fortune, and cultural influence.
That’s the Left’s one new idea, and its consequence has been spiritual ruin.
Here’s the rub: When a Leftist offers a serious insight about modern society, he’s cast into the void, he’s no longer a Leftist. Orwell is the classic example.
Which is to say that the last real expression of ‘leftist’ insight – be it Orwell’s, or that of the great Whittaker Chambers – is that ‘leftism’ is a virus and a catastrophe for the human soul and the continuance of normal human society.
That said, remember, it took real leftists – genuine post-Christian humanists – to experience these epiphanies under the duress of ‘apostasy’ from the ‘creed’.
Love the Dabney reference. The entire essay, “Women’s Rights Women” is an eye-opening read correctly predicting our political climate (and downfall), written in 1876. The essay is a must read, and unfortunately not provided in whole by Counter Currents. Good luck finding it online. If anyone wants it, reply.
I’d like to read it… here’s a link I found: http://www.covenanter.org/reformed/2016/5/22/womens-rights-women
Or maybe there’s a better link? Thanks to you and Z Man for Dabney references and my continued education!
That is the best link I’ve ever found. Thank you!
If anyone is curious how the American cuckservstive ended up cucked, Ron Unz (its former publisher) gives us insight here: http://www.unz.com/runz/why-the-american-conservative-purged-its-own-publisher/
Apparently other than dreher, nothing else on that stupid site gets clicks. It’s just a intellectual playground for ultra wealthy funders’ vanity. Actually started as a Buchananesque website but craved legitimacy of “mainstream conservativism”
Money quote from the end of that article: “It’s time for conservative holdouts to embrace a new, more vibrant, and sustainable identity.” In other words: resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.
It’s kind of like that test the Germans administered to see if you were a mental defective: make a sentence with the words “hare, hunter, field.” If you couldn’t do it, they’d take you for a ride in one of their carbon monoxide vans.
Try it: new, vibrant, sustainable.
“The hare chased the hunter out of the field.” How’s that?
The recent hysteria over the Trump/Putin meeting was just incredible. This was literal screeching autism. Two days ago there was a terrorist attack in Pakistan that killed 150 people, but no media was covering it at all. CNN front page was all-Trump hate, Trump high treason. This is solid proof the left has one singular goal in mind, and that does not include care or concern over human life or international events. It’s all Fake News – all of it. We live in the age of insanity.
I think you are wrong about one thing, they ARE crooks . The level of pay to play in DC would make Capone blush . the corruption is on an unimaginable scale. The GOP’s greatest success has been hiding the fact that they are completely sold out to the cheap labor lobby and the democrats by pretending to be dumb and out of touch .
Think about how may time you hear someone on talk radio or fox news lamenting ” I don’t know why the _____(gop leader) doesn’t understand that the base wants to fix immigration reform ” or cut spending , or whatever . they know exactly what we want and try to sabotage everything we do to try to get it . the GOP leaders will come rushing in to endorse a democrat in any race where an outsider wins the primary. look at the Alabama senate race, or the way they tried to sabotage trump after he won the nomination .
Their corruption is the reason for this . It pays really well to ” not understand” , just ask Eric Cantor .
here is a quote from an article about his loss “Instead, the loss propelled him into a new life — lots of money, influence, powerful friends — among the 1 percent.” this is the article.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/two-years-ago-eric-cantor-lost-his-house-seat-was-it-just-in-the-nick-of-time/2016/06/14/ca1b8696-2801-11e6-a3c4-0724e8e24f3f_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.e610f16e7bf8
ant the title of this article about his life after being toss is unironicly titled ” eric cantors hugge pay day” . http://time.com/3257774/eric-cantor-moelis-new-job/
the time article also mentions Retired congressman biilly tauzin making $11.6 mil in 2010 after retiring in 2005 .
yes indeed being a loyal soldier in the “stupid party” pays very well.
Pelosi has never earned more than $200k a year, I saw recently that she’s worth about $200mil, a thousand years of saving every penny.
Perhaps conservatives are discussing prison reform in an attempt to win over blacks, who seem less and less enamored with the open-borders Democrats. Trump probably has more black support than any Republican president in recent memory.
So we win a few black votes for immigration restriction so that blacks can feel happy that their sons and nephews get to run violently wild. I don’t understand this desire to win over the blacks. The numbers of them that are responsible and persuadable are so vanishingly small and uninfluential. Please like us black guys, we’ll feel so much better about ourselves!
It’s a form of worthless virtue signaling that only makes conservatives look completely deluded. Whether they ever realize it or not, conservative values are essentially white values. Thinking that more than a handful of blacks will ever embrace Whitey’s norms is over-the-rainbow absurd. Better to develop some brand of identity politics that can effectively preserve those norms. Conservatives need to wake up!
Prison reform. Once upon a time in my state a judge was going to release a prisoner that was at one time on death row for brutally killing a six year old girl. Don’t really know the specifics, but there was a public meeting with LEO, media, and local pols. Granddad pulled a card to speak and went against the grain by encouraging them to release the prisoner. If fact he felt it was appropriate that they release the prisoner in the same small town where he killed the little girl and in a nod to forgiveness they should release him on Sunday so that no one would have to miss the welcome home party.
Glenn Reynolds likes to say that the justice system isn’t there to protect ordinary citizens, it’s there to protect criminals from the much harsher treatment they’d receive at the hands of ordinary citizens.
It’s really disappointing me that Trump isn’t forcefully attacking his party enemies (Sasse, Graham et all). It makes him look feckless and weak.
Dude, give him a break. He fighting on multiple fronts!
Trump during his campaign humiliated Graham and McCain. People like them neither forgive nor forget.
The Allies always treated the Vichy authorities – and later the Italians – as ‘potential friends’, with results more good than bad. To forcefully attack weak and compromised men who may yet (obviously for their own reasons) join your side once you’ve established that you’re the ‘strong horse’ is bad politics.
A jackass like Graham might be shining your shoes in a year; the real enemy wants to kill you. Keep priorities straight in wartime.
Because of this and due to the mental and spiritual illness of our elites, we stand on the threshold of a national horror — perhaps even a civilizational horror. Indeed, we’re probably already inside of that threshold. Even one who dedicated his professional life to protecting and serving the existing structure can see this clearly now, as do many of those with whom I served. But, great post, as usual. It’s hard now to provide any meaningful or useful comments, since the awful truth is just so plain to see — they are either going to co-opt us into their madness, or destroy us as they rush ever faster to implement their angry, hate-filled and destructive delusion. I can only say with profound sadness that those few of us truely “woke” (sarc) need to be ready to protect ourselves. Watching the drama now playing out across the stage of our public life, one cannot see how it can continue much longer without lurching completely into some thing from which there is no sane or peaceful recovery. Sad. I guess at this point we can only sit back and critique, perhaps prepare a little, and try not to let it drive us to madness ourselves.
+100. It sure feels like early June, 1914, around here, doesn’t it?
Agree. I just have that uncomfortable sense that something huge is brewing beneath our feet. The people are in an uproar, on both sides; traditionals are furious, but mostly still quiet, and our leaders — my God — our leaders and elites. The ineptitude, unceasing self-interest and calculation, smug ignorance and willful blindness, lack of vision and real leadership ability, and nearly unbroken record of failure or destructiveness these last decades.
I keep watching for the silent “tells” as to what people are thinking. One I keep pondering …. hunting is down slightly, yet firearms purchases (as reflected only imperfectly in the FBI’s background check data) continue at record levels. Something is driving Americans to this behavior.
I think that for many it’s not a rationally arrived at action — to buy a gun. But something is motivating them to do it. My brother in a Northern California city just today told me that, in a large sporting goods store he was patronizing, there was a male to female transexual (or cross dresser, I don’t understand these things) at the counter buying a handgun. And he himself — a former rock drummer, SF and NYC resident — was there enroute to a shooting session at a local range.
A sense of impending disaster lurking just below the conscious level, perhaps? Or perhaps that’s just motivating them to at last make the purchase, and get some instruction on safety and employment of arms.
1914 … yes, or perhaps 1859?
“Everything is a bust-out now, not because they are crooks, but because they can’t think of another reason to get up in the morning.”
Sorry. They are crooks.
I am on the same page , I posted a long rant on this above, with a couple of links you may like.
One way to look at it is that on some deep psychological level, leftists never really expected to win. They’re only really happy when they’re losing, or, more specifically, when they’re being oppressed, because standing up to oppression is a force that gives them meaning. Where an opponent refuses to be genuinely oppressive toward them, they will, in their minds, form that opponent into the most oppressive thing they can think of (hence why all of their opponents are Hitler, on the verge of a new Holocaust), not because they’re hysterically overreacting, but to give themselves a really worthy oppressor to stand up to. For example, the truth is that a couple of twists and turns on social issues aside, Donald Trump both ran on and is governing on what’s essentially Bill Clinton’s platform from 1992. It hardly qualifies him as a Nazi in reality, but how do you derive any meaning from resisting a ’90s moderate? You can’t, so you have to imagine him into being Hitler. (And of course, the media is all too eager to provide you with the feel-good narrative you need to keep yourself happy.)
This can explain why it never works when conservatives try to make peace by giving in on some issue or another, and why the keeps pushing ever-more crazy radical ideas in hopes of finally getting someone to oppress them. “Oh, you gave in on gay marriage? Well how about if we start chopping the dicks off of four-year-olds? Will you finally stop buckling and agree to be the Darth Vader in our Star Wars fantasy then?” At this point, they’ve taken to literally calling for our genocide in hopes of finally provoking us into oppressing them so they can have meaning. And yet you still have some conservatives trying to make peace, which will push the left even further into crazy radicalism. It’s a classic race to the bottom.
It also explains why Obama did basically nothing in eight years in power, and the left did nothing in those eight years other than dream up ever-more transgressive stuff to advocate for in the hopes that maybe someone would oppress them over it someday. To them, actually having power is no fun, because you’re no longer the plucky rebels standing up to the system. (You can see this in the left’s go-to fictional narrative about itself, Star Wars. In the new Disney films, the former Rebels have been the sitting government for 30 years, and yet through some convoluted turn of events have had to form a small, underfunded band of guerrilla fighters called The Resistance, even though it makes zero sense that the government in power would do this. And remember, the first of these movies hit the screen a year before Trump was elected – this is an Obama-era fantasy.) That’s why Donald Trump is the best thing that ever happened to them, psychologically. After eight boring years in power, they can now finally imagine themselves oppressed rebels, and it makes them happy again.
This is all a half-finished thought, but I think broadly true. Most important here is to remember that you can’t ever analyze the left through the lens of logical political power moves. It doesn’t make any sense that way. Instead, you have to analyze it through the lens of the psychology on unhappy people who have made up a story about themselves in order to give their lives meaning.
That does seem to fit the pattern of the abolitionists after their victory in the Civil War. Having freed the slaves, the abolitionist movement after “reconstruction” failed in 1876 moved on for other progressive pastures, until returning to the oppressed negro in the 1950s for a new crusade, after a century of neglect in which white southerners had rebuilt the racial status quo, becoming a threat again.
Rousseau was wrong about many things, but one thing he was right about is that material progress does not translate into spiritual progress. One mark of liberalism has been a tendency to see material progress and attribute that to liberal “reforms” that have taken place around the same time. They think that there is a loose cause and effect relation between the two. This is precisely what Rousseau denied was taking place. But that kind of thinking continues today. The fear of “turning back the clock” begins with this assumption and the shrillness of the admonitions not to turn back the clock are signs of doubt about the veracity of that assumption. When you think about it, this assumption lies at the very core of liberalism, and the reason we see it being discussed by someone considered to be an early Enlightenment figure is that he recognized this assumption at the outset of the liberal movement.
Here we are 350 years later dealing with the same assumption and a dying liberalism coming to grips with the fact that there are limits to growth not necessarily in material progress, but in the spiritual and moral progress that liberalism assumed was driving the whole thing to start with. (Keep in mind here that “morality” has an entirely different meaning to a liberal than it does to a thinking sentient being.) I think another part of the frantic rush to continue to “make progress” is because if material progress continues without the concomitant social and moral progress, then people will see the disconnect, and there will be less imperative to follow the socially and politically geared progressivism. They won’t be able to say, “See this? You wouldn’t have it without that.”
Same mode of thinking about religion and science. That if the church hadn’t been driven from the public square all progress would have stopped.
Don’t forget that the abolitionists largely moved on to the two great leftist causes of the late 19th century: womens’ suffrage and Prohibition. Both ended up working about as well as the idea of integrating blacks into white society as equal citizens did.
There it is. The worst damage is always done by “Progressives” who missed their generation’s Great Crusade. The nutters of the Gilded Age were too young to have done anything in the Civil War, so they went crazy with feminism, prohibition, socialism, etc. In our time the most damage has been done by the Boomers, who are *sure* they would’ve ended the Vietnam War if they weren’t in junior high at the time. Hell, the newest generation of lunatics doesn’t even have a war to protest, since protesting Gulf War 2 was weaksauce anyway (largely because Boomer fossils made it all about them, like they do with everything). These new ones are going to be champion obergruppenfuhrers in the National Populism movement, though, here in a few years.
Almost every older person marched with MLK at Selma, just ask them. Thanks guys.
I don’t generally like long comments, AntiDem, but yours is particularly valuable. It also suggests that they hate it when we ignore them, in all their acting out. I intend to keep ignoring them when they act like idiots in my presence, so they will continue to turn up the crazy. I want them to be as crazy as possible (which also seems to be the objective of Trump’s trolling, on Twitter and elsewhere).
And that’s precisely what they don’t get about Trump, Dutch. To my joy!
Rebels are gonna rebel. That’s all they know and all they want to know.
Hammers and nails all the way down.
Being “overdogs who think of themselves as underdogs” is definitely an important park of their inpenetrable doublethink mental armor. Of course, WE also think of ourselves as underdogs. We need to develop some objective “dog scale” of power and influence to settle once and for all who the overdogs and underdogs are.
“only really happy when they’re losing, or, more specifically, when they’re being oppressed, because […] oppression is a force that gives them meaning”
This goes a long way toward understanding the motivation behind persons such as Barbara Lerner Spectre.
The “American Conservative” now has a number of writers and editors who are actual, self-admitted Marxists, neither American nor Conservative in any normal sense. That they are getting on board with the latest Leftism fad of “Open the Prisons!” is hardly surprising. AmCon has been worthless since McConnell and Buchanan left. It’s kind of like a magazine version of “Saturday Night Live”, or Fred Reed – it’s there because it’s there, and most people don’t even know or care that it still exists.
One of Conquest’s laws :
Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
I would say even if they are explicitly it will go left.
Of Hoffer’s:
“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
But isn’t the American Conservative “explicitly right wing.” We need a stronger law!
Superb essay. Keep “peeling the onion” on these thoughts … you have about 6 additional essays embedded in this one.
As for the lack of ideas, I’d say it’s time to reevaluate Jefferson’s vision for the U.S. as opposed to Hamilton. Two hundred years down the Hamiltonian tunnel and the political class (and mass society) think it still might lead to perfecting man. Jefferson has a few “new ideas” for us to consider. For starters, the dissident right may want to consider thumbing their nose at conventional wisdom and educate their young men for careers as sole proprietors in the trades; this would be the closest thing to freedom and pursuit-of-happiness in America. Good essay here: https://www.firstthings.com/article/2018/06/manual-manhood
Capt S, to “educate their young men for careers as sole proprietors in the trades” is the single most important thing we can actually do to revitalize our people, our communities, our culture, our nation, and our civilzation.
You’ve hit on the fulcrum point.
All the rest will follow.
Been trying to move young men in that direction for quite some time now…All my son’s are or will be headed for lineman jobs…In my opinion it’s one of the top trades out there(kinda biased) and it’s booming right now…
I’m sure that if we just wait a few minutes, peer review ™ will inform our politicians that a double serving of emasculating “don’t rape” re-education will solve our problems
Capitulation Conservatism is stomach-turning… endless appeasement of the left… the more radical the left goes, the more appeasement necessary. Z’s material is fresh air and helped me discover I’ve been “dissident right”, far as I understand it, all along.
Did you just invent the phrase “Capitulation Conservatism?” That is the single best summation I’ve heard for all of the legacy magazines and talk radio.
The conservative who thinks we can reform the country by better outreach to minorities, constitutional conventions, or tax cuts is more of an enemy than Alexandria Ocrazyio.
LineInTheSand – I’ve never heard that before so yes, it’s reasonable to say I came up with it. I couldn’’t begin to touch Z for the clever twist, however I do have the odd inspired moment… So, yes, spread it around and let’s get that demeaning phrase in circulation, “Capitulation Conservatism”.
The big idea of the left is to eliminate racism, which they believe will be accomplished by changing the demographics, sensitivity training to overcome bias, and attacking and silencing wrong-thinkers.
Which reminds me that Faith Goldy just got shut down by PayPal yesterday.
I’m not sure I’d call that an idea. That’s more like a superstition. “implicit racism” and institutional bias” are just new phrases for Old Scratch. Instead of shouting “witch!” while claiming the old woman cavorts with the devil, they yell “racist!” while claiming the white man is a fascist. It’s the age old oogily-boogily, tarted up with academic jargon.
It’s why “Russian hacking” and now “Russian interference” are abracadabra phrases. They conjure images of dark sinister forces working against the anointed.
“The big idea of the left is to eliminate racism” – I hear this all the time and it brings me to tears what horseshit that is. The hate-filled left doesn’t want to “eliminate racism” they want to eliminate you; the racism claim is a weapon in the cultural war.
@Juss
Bingo…It’s amazing to me how many people haven’t grasped that…The core group of Communist’s want us enslaved or dead and they will use everything in their power to do so…
Oh, so it’s the “Communists” who are to blame? Can you be a bit more specific about who promulgated this agenda, while avoiding appeals to NAXALT?
Kind of like how the Bolshevik Revolution was “Communist.”
You seem to have a thought in mind so go ahead and spit it out…I on the other hand can understand evil can reside in any religion, government, or a people…
The big idea of the left is not to eliminate racism, but to create racism to give them something to fight against, and thereby giving meaning to their empty lives.
DLS – yes… however, in addition to “giving meaning to their empty lives” they also incidentally want to eliminate yours.
Of course the sinister Soros-types and the professional race hustlers and (((others))) live for racial division. But they’d never admit it. They’re trying to combat racism is what they say. But the nice liberal cat ladies and pussy hat-wearing feminists and soyboys truly believe the answer to racism is for Whitey to have babies with brown people and to silence anyone who disagrees. We’re-all-the-same and punch-a-nazi is what they believe and there’s absolutely no tolerance for disagreement.
The dilemma for the left is that they are making whitey “woke” (as “white privilege” is essentially living one’s life “not woke”), but the awakening is igniting a white tribalism somewhat akin to all the other forms of leftist tribalism going on.
So they need to thread the needle by getting us all “woke”, meaning aware of our white tribal identity and all that it means, but still encouraging us to race mix in breeding and attitude. I am not so sure that is going to work out in their favor, when all is said and done.
Dutch, don’t forget about the “enlightenment”… Wokeness for the elite 😉
Another reason the progryssyves hate Putin is his forthright defense of Christianity. I believe it’s worth delving into more closely.
I think it’s much simpler than that. The left has never forgiven Russia for abandoning Communism.
Plus, the Cossacks. They constantly hear the horse’s hoofbeats in their heads.
It has to do with the Putin’s treatment of the oligarchs. Look in to the backgrounds of the top 9. Amy chua’s world on fire has a good exposition .
Russia these days is just too Christian for Progressives, just as it was for the Bolsheviks a century ago.
“Now, the Right was always just the dancing partner for American Progressivism. A great way of putting it is from Robert Louis Dabney, “American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition.” You’ll note that he wrote that over a century ago. What tends to lead people into dissident politics is the realization that the so-called conservatives are just body men for the people they claim to oppose. Their ideas are intended to enhance, rather than reject, the morality of the Left.”
Zman, you’re brilliant. This paragraph is one I’m keeping.
“ None of these people can tell us why Putin is suddenly the devil.”
Putin is mean to gays and seems to have little enthusiasm for butt sex.
What respectable man/woman/nonbinary would hold such views in 2018???
Putin is the Devil because he is the leader of Russia, a country that repudiated communism.
Which makes them apostates to the left, and therefor mortal enemies.