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 17th 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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short story of american politics moderate liberals and liberal-liberals fought against royality. They win. Moderate called themselves “conservatives” aka “to conserve TRUE liberalism”, and “liberals” (which were note at all in favor of “liberty”) wanted a step by step “progress”. Of course, “conservatives” loose (which can win a game by playing only in his backyard?). Then, conservatives died (in the fall of 2008). And them, not well aware, not well intelligent, not well sefl-counscient, appeared nationalism, the forgotten little bro. Nat was very young and very naïve, and the ghost of Daddy Con was stille there. IS still there. But,… Read more »
Great essay. The Calhounian solution is to assert the primacy of ‘the community’ and the necessity of a political order whose purpose is reproduction of the community by asserting and protecting community values.
You can prioritize parochialism or you can prioritize universalism but you cannot prioritize both.
Late to the party as usual. “The modern conservative always starts from the last Progressive victory.” By necessity. You’ve re-stated Locke’s conundrum and have suggested, sub rosa, that it can hardly be otherwise. From whence is a definitive moral order to come? If it’s an a priori moral order, by whose authority indeed? While such things are debated, time and ancestry move on. The “New Republic” of a bona fide conservatism falters on the problem of the mullato and the absorption, via assimilation, of the mulatto into the flesh and blood of the people. The NASDAP’s tried to make a… Read more »
The “Hegelian theory of history” that the Left adheres to is rooted solely in the fact that most lefties lead pointless, empty lives so their ideology becomes extremely self-centered. They are the main character in their own RPG movie. But the thesis of this post is all too true. Conservatism is dead. It’s been limping along and I think we can finally call it 100% done now that Rush is gone (RIP, I grew up listening to him every day). But the movement was an undeniable failure. Z’s description of yesterday’s liberal fad being tomorrow’s conservative principle is something that… Read more »
American Conservatism – and western civilisation – was thrown into turmoil because a buffoon became President. It was inadmissible to too many that the political system could degenerate so far as to allow someone so crass and unqualified to be the most powerful man on earth (yes, the current guy is also a buffoon, but at least he has some decorum). It undermined everyone’s confidence in the system and unleashed the anarchy we are seeing. It will take decades to recover from that lunacy. Conservatives: get a proper candidate. All else – all the philosophy and theorising – is just… Read more »
Faith in the institutions was collapsing before Donald Trump ran for office. The press, federal government, law enforcement, and congress have been in steep decline for decades. Ditto for nearly every other institution. The only widely appreciated segment of society was the military. So, whatever was going on in this country predated Donald Trump. My guess: conservatives were slowly waking up as they realized they were the only ones playing by the rules. Mr. Trump was elected because Mitt Romney played by all the rules the far-Left sets out for normie conservative discourse and lost to a black racist anyway… Read more »
I thought he was talking about W!
So a child sniffer has “decorum”?
… and then, for some reason, this drunk showed up at the dinner party. Don’t know how he got it, but there he was. And he was, like, shouting, “You will never fix this until you have a proper candidate, you fools!”
Weirdest damn thing, man.
“Their social criticism was always just window dressing that never dared question the morality of the open society. ” — I don’t know what you meant there, whether it’s that neocon “social issues” were insincere or that they didn’t go far enough. I remember it as a consciously uptight-square alternative scene, like the lo-fi indie rock to 1960s liberals’ glam-metal hair bands. Irving Kristol’s more popular anthologized stuff comes to mind (“Two Cheers for Capitalism”). If you consider it window-dressing, in the sense of a thin pretext to boost imperialist “going on offense” foreign policy, well, it’d have to be… Read more »
Paleocon’s have a little brother inferiority complex with Conservatives that they can’t shake off.
Always believing that big brother Conservative has their back and he just don’t know how badly I’m being treated and once he sees then they all get it.
No.
“The Gospels are not much help when it comes to creating a political structure to govern society” This is wrong. The holy orders (knights templar, knights hospitaller, dominicans, jesuits, etc) are all supported by scripture and early church father commentaries and it was a shoddy protestant translation of the “priesthood of all believers” concept that allowed them to suppress these orders. The schools, hospitals, financial aid societies, intelligence agencies, and armed forces were controlled by those who had taken vows of chastity and poverty, as a way of reducing corruption as people were less likely to sign up for these… Read more »
Speaking of kings, I was struck by how seldom a king’s grandson was also a king in Europe. They eventually started consolidating power, but it seems like the more typical model is that kings were more or less elected.
Evidently the server had issues.
Totally off topic post, but if I’m ever made King of the Universe, I’m banning ridiculous fake eyelashes, particularly from black women. If I never see another caterpillar sitting on a Quintiffa’s eyelids, I’ll be a happy man.
Can I get an amen?
How do they function with those super long nails?
Oh, and make sure to ban women from completely shaving their eyebrows off and trying to recreate them with pencil. It’s just obscene.
“The common good” is the foundation of my faith in the ethnostate. Yet it is instructive to observe how imperfect that foundation is. Words and Constitutions are fragile vessels to entrust our deepest aspirations, yet that is all we have in this world. Couldn’t the vax mandaters or the gun grabbers base their claims upon invocations of the common good? Why yes they can. We must express our hopes in words and yet words can always be twisted. Therefore, the only solution to the inescapable problem with the slipperiness of words is that the people who interpret your words must… Read more »
Two laws of nature are POWER and CARE FOR OFFSPRING. There are other laws, but the inner workings of nature are beyond human understanding. Those 2 laws have worked successfully generation after generation, forever. Problem is we want something more. How does “Nature” feel about us arrogantly overwriting its immutable laws?
Go deeper. In evolution, what persists is what works in a particular environment. Traits and behaviors that do not support fecundity and robustness quickly die out with the extinction of those individuals over prolonged time periods. Only the reinforcing and supportive traits and behaviors propagate into the future because those individuals live long enough to reproduce consistently. This is the natural law of all living things and it has always been thus. Here’s the hard part. Differing environments can (and often do) result in a different set of reinforcing and supportive traits and behaviors. That is why the peoples of… Read more »
Conservatives long ago abandoned the authority of nature. They are blank slaters just as much as the Left. To accept nature is to accept that different peoples will govern themselves differently and that those different people will create wildly different cultures, institutions and economies, which will not be suited to other groups. That’s nature. CivNats pretend to believe in nature by saying, “Yes, groups are different on average, but within each group are individuals who shares our values and beliefs.” Whether they know it or not, they’re implying that these individuals share a genetic similarity to similarly-minded people. It’s a… Read more »
One day the movie Gattaca will be a reality, and nothing on the philosophical menu of today will be left on there. Our current philosophical state, like the rationalism of the 1770’s, will be obliterated. Take affirmative action for instance. Today it’s based on historical grievances. Tomorrow it will be “you see, we never could have been a Tom Brady, our genetics won’t allow it, therefore the playing field will have to be equalized because nature is mean and discriminates.” What a tough pill to swallow that will be. The volumes of grievance based material that will have to be… Read more »
Both Conservatives and Liberals buy into the blank slate completely, they differ on why it doesn’t reflect reality.
Conservatives offer explanations like personal choice (work hard) and not embracing free markets/ constitutionalism enough.
Liberals start foaming at the mouth when they hear Conservatives say things like personal choice ( being smart enough to understand implications of that) and instead opt for a more powerful religious explanation, modeled on christianity. The Dark God of White supremacy and the original sin of White privilege is keeping blacks down.
An essay that I am going to have to read over a few times. A lot here.
From my first read a lot of good points.
I took away a couple things
The social contract is based upon natural law
A fixed law from God or nature.
The idea that we are on a linear time line to some kind of utopian end is wrong.
We live within natural laws as set forth by God or nature
“… the result being a collection of compromises we call culture.” Culture is human behavior systematized by the trial and error of lived experience. “There could never be a universal state, as there can never be a universal culture, because there is no such thing as universal man.” If politics is downstream of culture, then culture (systematic human behavior) is downstream of biology. Culture is the software operating on the hardware of biology (genomic inheritance). Each ethnic group within each race has different preferences for how to organize themselves socially, politically, and economically. There is no one size fits all… Read more »
“There could never be a universal state, as there can never be a universal culture, because there is no such thing as universal man.” Whether they will ever admit it or not, the left and Con Inc. desire to destroy all races. They want to breed everyone to the point that everyone is a dark hue. Then there will be no differences, they believe. This is the reason you see so many advertisements with blacks with White mates. Make it popular for the women. Even women, who are genetically wired to desire children, will naturally seek out their own race… Read more »
My best normie friend just said this to a few days ago, “At least we can put all this racism behind us when we all interbreed.”
Speak for yourself.
I agree that interbreeding is a possible solution to the problem of racial incongruity. Yet the Haitians in their revolution killed the lighter colored ones first.
Even you materialists will feel the pull of your love for your own. You don’t want to see your race die. David’ Lane’s fourteen words.
Saga, channeling George Burdi:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tzm9mM9BE6A
They will turn you into the new gulag without a moments hesitation.
Common good can only be sustainable within a shared ethnic identity. The track record of universalist moral policies has always shown that every universalist society ends up with factions of particularists that organize to take all of that common good for themselves. Just modeling this sort of thing with Dawkins selfish gene game theory shows how favoring your own kin is perfectly within Natural Law, which is ironic given Dawkins’ retarded leftism.
A society has the right to determine its own moral code and how its’ members must conduct themselves. It is also completely justified in using force to insure it. The nature and justification of a certain moral code is not the question but rather keeping it stable while maintaining a certain flexibility over time. This is the problem we face, and it’s big, really big. To establish any moral code in a society you first have to develop it and get people willing to follow it. Then you have to be able to defend it by force if necessary. I’m… Read more »
I love a good thought experiment, and Social Contract theories are fun to play around with. However, I have one of my own, and I suppose it gets to the heart of what should a true conservative conserve. What would America be like if, post WWII, we kept the basis of white male morality instead of the globalist melting pot theorem? Would similar fractures have evolved but, instead of demographics, regionalistic tensions akin to the Troubles in N. Ireland? Would things have worked out well? Thoughts?
“What would America be like if, post WWII, we kept the basis of white male morality instead of the globalist melting pot theorem? Would similar fractures have evolved but, instead of demographics, regionalistic tensions akin to the Troubles in N. Ireland? Would things have worked out well? Thoughts?” What happened while the Declaration was being debated in 1776? What happened in the run-up to the War of 1812? What happened during the Nullification Crisis in 1832? What happened after the elections of 1860? What about the presidential election of 1948? Of 1964? Things didn’t work out before now, and they… Read more »
“These are moral questions that Locke answered by looking at the natural world as an orderly place that operates by fixed rules.” – Locke never opened his web browser after brewing his morning coffee to see a bunch of n words fighting over the last steak in a suburban Philly Golden Corral. Had he seen that, like Socrates on his deathbed, he would have said “I know now, that I know nothing.”
“Loving your child more than the child of the stranger inevitably leads to fascism, according to the theology of the modern Left.”- Politics is downstream from religion, and this statement is the beating heart of modern day Christianity. Sadly, only the developing neo-paganism of the far right can throw off these shackles, as misguided as it is. We need a generation or two where Christianity can go into the corner for a time out to contemplate what it’s done, as the last boomer is suffocated in a nursing home by some pickaninny or neglected to death by some Filipina.
They don’t believe that at all.
They say whatever learnt phrase gets them to their goal depending on the target they are attacking.
I wish people stop listening to the words they use as if thy have meaning. They are just incantations to get you to give up your own culture.
Arguing the meaning means you have already lost, as they just move on to the next incantation and you are stuck in the frame they have given you.
They would be speaking in tongues or grunting if that worked,
I know these people quite well, and they would rather care for earthy, magic people 10 time zones away than their own pot addict kids who end up falling away and even detesting them (as they should). And this is multi-denomination. Across the board. You see, shi tting in a trench behind a hut brings you closer to Jesus, and we all learn from them.
You are talking about the NPCs. Who cares what they say, they don’t even have thoughts.
The phrases they learn and repeat as if they were a dog come from above and as I said they are just incantations.
The echoing non-people are not the ones we should focus on.
attack the originators and identify their motivations, the NPCs will follow. But don’t mistake the two for each other.
Christianity is 99.8% NPC at this point. It’s that .2% that will end up redeveloping it. As they should.
The universality of Christianity is killing us
But wasn’t always such a milquetoast religion, obviously
I’m not so sure neo-paganism holds the long term answers but it may provide some short term answers because what stands in front of us cannot be reconciled with Christian universality. We are in us vs them territory. I suppose much like our distant forebears for whom paganism proved effective enough to keep them alive and distinct for many centuries. Could be history repeating after a long period of dormancy.
Neo-paganism is dumb, but it serves a great short term purpose and knocks around the fallacies now at the very heart of Christianity…along with acoustic guitars. Nietzsche can be proven wrong by a robust Christianity that’s not full of lies. But to this day he dances all over modern day Christians, even from his grave. Other than the sacraments themselves, I really see very little about it that will survive even one more generation. It’ll take on a new form once anyone who remembers the 70’s is no longer here.
Modern day pseudo-Christianity is heretical. Christianity, before people stopped reading the Bible with any seriousness, managed to defend itself and its cultures against ferocious threats without declaring it a Christian virtue to commit cultural or national suicide. We are asked to spread the word of Christ, not to volunteer for mass extinction.
That said, if the Western world cannot retrieve this earlier sense of its Christian mission, a new moral order will have to arise. I doubt that capitulation to the ‘DIE’ cult will suffice. We will have to find a reason to live and a moral center to prevail.
To paraphrase Lincoln, the Gospels are not a suicide pact.
“We need a generation or two where Christianity can go into the corner for a time out to contemplate what it’s done, … .”
That is just downright stupid.
Judge them by what they do, not what they say. ConInc. is a sham for the simple reason that most of their elected political operatives routinely offer the glad hand, mouth the approved narrative, bluster that they mean business “this time”, stab their voters in the back at crunch time, and then think nothing of this betrayal. In a sane and healthy society, those deviants would be hung before sundown and the problem would be quickly solved by this highly effective feedback mechanism. No political organization can long survive an epidemic of treachery that is casually ignored or tolerated. There… Read more »
The problem is one of scale. The country is just too large to be governed by one government, especially one that knowingly, deliberately reduces the sovereign states to the status of mere provinces of a unitary state. And that is what has happened.
How can “regulations” on agriculture be uniform for potato farmers in Idaho and tobacco farmers in North Carolina?
What does Portland, Oregon, have in common with Cullman, Alabama?
Nobody wants to speak the truth and act upon it. It’s a fatal flaw.
You won’t get much instruction for political organization from the Bible. Needing any formal government was an indication of the failings of the people to accept God as king and just obey Him. Samuel had one of the greatest anti-government rants ever and it’s just as relevant now.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Samuel%208%3A10-18&version=ESV
“You won’t get much instruction for political organization from the Bible.”
You are mistaken.
https://www.amazon.com/Politics-Guilt-Pity-Rousas-Rushdoony/dp/1879998076
Excellent insights into the demise of the American right. Many of my “conservative” friends view the current Republican party as nothing but grifters performing kabuki theater as the left’s fake opposition.
I will never forget how none of the Rs uttered a peep about the J6 guys, especially the supposed anti-tyranny bros Cruz and Rubio.
We had to hear them blather on about how their dads escaped tyranny, know it personally and up close.
Yeah yeah yeah
Trump too. Unforgivable.
Only silver lining is that I know now the R party is entirely useless and not looking out for me. A few years ago I had some faith in the party. I will never make that same mistake again, even regarding Trump. He is forever on my shit list.
I’m afraid the former majority White population has become so polluted and compromised/atomized – both physically and culturally that no conservatism based on morality can come to the fore – it’d just get shouted down by the multiple factions that now constitute our current “citizen” base. The left has been in charge for so long now that their egalitarian moral structure has become ingrained and entrenched throughout the system. Barring some sort of comprehensive collapse, I don’t see how an overall new traditionalist type morality can replace what we now endure. Of course such a thing be massively ugly, not… Read more »
We were dead the minute we let women vote. Now they propose to do our thinking, moralizing and even our fighting for us.
This is our fault. We let them do it.
Women are supposed to push for unreasonable things to test limits. And men are supposed to say ‘NO’ to unreasonable things. When men grow too comfortable and well-fed they abandon their responsibility to say no to bad ideas. And after a while the barbarians are at the gate.
If Adam had said, “No, Eve, put the fruit down,” we’d live in a completely different reality. But God knew that given a choice between loving God and playing God, man would inevitably choose to play God. That’s why he gave us a path to salvation through Christ’s sacrifice and the freedom from that choice that it represents.
There is much wisdom in religions. Man left to his own devices first built the technology to implement Armageddon on his own (nukes). And is now trying his best to develop technology that may supplant us, whether that is possible or not (artificial intelligence).
It seems man without religion is very smart indeed. But very unwise as well.
Indeed. One cannot have a mass democratic system in age of mass centralized media.
Its simply too easy to set and control the narrative.
The last 2 years of outright NPC control should convince all on this side of that fact.
Comprehensive collapse is on the agenda. The exact timing is what’s unknown. My guess is that it’s still a couple of decades off, but that’s just a guess. The big question is, What comes after? It could be much worse than what we have now. It could be the complete extermination of whites by the non-white hordes. The will depend to some extent on how well whites can regroup and retreat to defensible spaces. I’ll almost certainly be gone by then. I hope that those carrying some of my genes will be up to the challenge.
On the other hand it doesn’t require all of the 0.6 * 330 million people in the nation to align in order to make this unworkable. A very small fraction indeed is still a great many people. Insurgency is partly the art of a skillful tiny minority picking their targets to antagonize the powerful and elicit overreactions that steadily alienate the majority overtime. They know this but it doesn’t help. For all the papers that have been written at the naval academy on the subject they couldn’t help themselves in Afghanistan because their ideology demands the impossible and is founded… Read more »
“It will be same here when food gets scarce.”
Speaking of which:
http://republicbrief.com/farming-insider-warns-the-coming-food-shortages-are-going-to-be-far-worse-than-were-being-told/
“Barring some sort of comprehensive collapse, I don’t see how an overall new traditionalist type morality can replace what we now endure.”
You’re right that the population is not what it ought to be, but nothing even approaching half of the population accepts the idiotic superstitions of gender-mania, for example. And what you are talking about happened in France. After the excesses of the 1789 revolution and the Bonaparte interval, the French monarchy was restored in 1814.
We can expect something like that. Events are cyclical.
The major cleansing is already underway, kosher shots and boosters to wipe Whitey off the face of the earth. Pureblood Whitey will be a minority, fair enough. Life is tribal, always was always will be. Remnant Whitey won’t be taking no shit. Bringing the pain flows thru our vein.
“The hand of history is not carrying mankind to some promised land where all moral questions are answered.” And yet, this is the foundation on which all leftist principles are based. Not to be all Ram Dass, but living for a future that doesn’t exist is a fool’s errand. Always be here now. The only concern people should have about their sociopolitical contracts is, “Does it work?” Just implementing that into the conversation forces us to evaluate decisions that have been made. If it doesn’t work, get rid of it. Don’t continue to tweak it just because someone declares it… Read more »
Answering what conservatism seeks to defend seems to be a good starting point. I believe it seeks to defend the continued biological (i.e. genetic or Darwinian) existince of a genetically related people. How narrow or wide you wish to define that people is really up to the individual nation state. This is the most natural thing to defend for two reasons. One is that most of us wish to see our posterity survive indefinitely into the future. There is something melancholy about visting the Aztec pyramids in Mexico or Pompei in Italy and thinking ‘the people who built these probably… Read more »
Disagree on the Aztecs.
I just watched a video on cartel violence in Mexico.
The graphic images of mutilated people convinced me that the Aztecs have plenty of descendants running around.
Posit: What works is a unique language combined with a traumatic national experience. The Finnish are unique among Europeans in that their language is radically different than nearly every other European language. It’s not derived from Indo-European roots, but instead is from a branch known as Uralic (Hungarians and Estonians also share this). The Finnish suffered through a bloody, brother-on-brother Civil War after WWI; it was like the Civil war in Russia, except the nationalist forces won instead of the communists. They were well united by language and shared experience to effectively resist the Soviet push in the “Winter War”… Read more »
ProZNoV: Yet the Finns are now led by a woman, and have chosen a nogger as their beauty representative for the past few years. The rot is there, too – perhaps not quite as deep or widespread, but they have their share of rapefugees and local politicians and women who excuse them. So however unique the Finnish language or despite their historical trauma, it has not been enough to save them from globohomo.
There is not a single white country outside the former Soviet sphere that is not disintegrating. Even Franco, with the explicit objective to avoid this, failed in Spain which is woke as hell today. Empirically speaking – and I HATE to say this – the most successful ‘conservatives’ of the 20th century were Stalin-Chruschev-Breshznev. They flunked on fertility rates. But otherwise they were the only ones conserving what we want to conserve. This deserves serious investigation.
I’m on the same wavelength as you – I just posted a thought experiment in a similar vein.
I think the key to this deeply unwelcome result is lack of prosperity and affluence. Mixed with foreign domination, that seems to have bought Eastern Europe and Russia 40 years on us, or more. They seem to be going more conservative.
“Nature’s God” ha.
Its striking to realize that the Founding Fathers were just chasing a fad all their own. Like a college student bleating out communists terminology, they spurned the Christian God for some half assed deism and buzzwords.
As much as they, as established men of the colonies held a certain conservativism, they certainly had their own cringe temporal provincialism. Chasing Locke, who had been dead for less than a century at that point, for intellectual justification is just…. depressing.
This is completely wrong.
I appreciate your comment, and you are correct. Having said that, something just struck me about it, true as it is. One of my criticisms of the left is their desire to deconstruct society, to deconstruct our history, to critique all of the men and events that led us to our current paradigm as somehow wrongheaded, immoral, corrupted etc. Oh their case they are constantly criticizing every person and even as white supremacist, patriarchal, anti-science, blah blah blah. In our circles, many of us are critiquing the same people and events for somehow not being strong enough to hold firm… Read more »
But with hindsight we can see the steps that led us here. That constant
“were genuinely attempting to create a society that benefited the common man and limited the power of people who already had too much power.”
led us to drag queen story hour. If so much of conservativism is just a desire to reload the political save file, then it benefits us to look as far back as possible as critically as possible to see just how predetermined 2020, the 1960s, the 1930s, or
1790 was.
You are correct, but I can’t think of any line of reasoning circa 1776 or 1676 or likely even 1936 where normal men of intelligence would have predicted “drag Queen story hour” or “minor attracted persons” (read pedophiles) being a thing or that even the looniest of the loons of their day could have thought of in their wildest imaginations. Yes we can learn from their mistakes but I think normal people with conservative type leanings, or even traditional liberals like Glen Greenwald who we find common ground with, would find over the top criticisms of these people sort of… Read more »
You missed the weimar republic and the descent into widespread degeneracy?
No I didn’t miss the Weimar Republic. I’m pretty sure though that even in the Weimar Republic, there was a fairly strong resistance to bringing this stuff into elementary school classrooms and libraries, and normal people weren’t seeing it broadcast on their TVs into their living rooms every day. (TV was fledgling). The degeneracy was there and it is important to not minimize it, but I don’t think it was permeating into life for most ordinary people. It was somewhat contained within urban centers and nightlife, not walking down the street in broad daylight in front of your kids playground.… Read more »
I did not say that they experienced it at the same level.
You said you could not see a line from one point to the current situation.
I simply pointed out that the start of this degeneracy in the Weimar was interrupted by the Germans. But the line is clear and it just spread out to the west with the spread out of those expelled from Germany.
These ‘provincials’ at least had the wisdom to protect your rights to say what you want and to acquire the means to protect yourself. Two things sorely missed here in Europe.
“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.” One of the central paradoxes left unresolved by the Founders is the “authority” question Zman raises here. It’s really the central question. If the system doesn’t rule by Divine Right, on whose authority does it ultimately rest? And to be fair, the Founders themselves didn’t see God nor religion in the same way. Ben Franklin didn’t support one denomination; he famously donated to all kinds of churches in Philadelphia – even a mosque… Read more »
Seems the “authority” is simply government power, at least where we sit today.
And all adds up as to why the government did its best to weaken both the churches and the family unit as competing entities of authority. Very clever rabbits.
Mao wins again.
The problem is people are corrupt, brainwashed and lead by traitors, foreigners and people who hate them. There is no system or moral authority which can defend against such corruption. Furthermore, we have entirely abandoned the young to the progressives. If you want to deal with children in virtually any capacity, you have to get permission from progressives. They control the professional licensing required to deal with children. They also control the culture those children live in and gate-keep the cultural manufacturing fairly well. While conservatives are busy writing papers nobody will ever read on such abstractions as discussed in… Read more »
“Furthermore, we have entirely abandoned the young to the progressives.”
Exactly. This is the killshot that dooms our people. Debating what structure of government we should have is far, far less important than stopping depraved Marxists from having total ownership of our children.
If our own kids don’t belong to us then it doesn’t matter what politics we prefer.
I’m not sure this can change. Even here among the most aware or “based” whatever you wish to call it there seems to be endless theorizing and circular logic. You are completely correct but there is something quite odd about the right where they want to pontificate, expound, theorize, formulate, and speculate. Meanwhile as you said, the left is talking in simple direct language directly into the brains of everyone including children. We are mentally masturbating about Lockean philosophy and splitting hairs about laws and governmental systems. Things your average person has no earthly conception of nor would they care… Read more »
I completely agree with everyone’s points in this post. That is one of the larger reasons I think organizing a movement of sorts is fruitless. Rather, you have to tend towards those in your immediate vicinity – if you want to have hope. I’m too much of a pessimist about the outcome, but for those like Z who seems to fight the good fight out of hope, the need to cultivate local connections and unplug your kids from the indoctrination as much as possible is a necessity.
Claiming moral authority is the first step in moving to beating the left. There is no retreat from this point. It’s our last stand. As Z states, it’s not asserted through logic or reasoning. “We believe in a moral structure which ensures the propagation of our people, the continuation of our way of life and the continuity of our culture.” That’s all that needs to be said because now we’ve defined our end goal. It’s about ourselves and our posterity – what the founders got 100% correct. How we get there is to be debated but we mostly understand the… Read more »
Seems too defensive.
Defense is just slow losing. The authority must be more forceful.
Unfortunately the for God and Country things seems mostly over.
But one needs something positively galvanizing along similar lines that is simple and rhetorical.
Part of the problem is trying to identify what rhetoric would work given the current normie media controlled overton window.
Yeah, we are at the point now, for better or worse, where the law of the jungle prevails. Whoever wins, might is right, gets to establish what and who and how we establish our guiding authority. For me the issue is increasingly “Is it worth it?” Meaning, do I want to go to war with the left and even if we win we have a demographic nightmare? It is a multi-prong war unfortunately, the left being only one front. So some type of secession HAS to be talked about, because beating the left AND then still having to live with… Read more »
And today starts “Black History Month” which will be intermittent bouts of telling everybody how great blacks are and how much they achieved for America and mankind and how oppressed they all are and how whites who never owned a slave owe reparations to blacks who never were.
It’s gonna be a dark month (pun intended).
Imagine if we had zero. Zero black people. Country would be better in every single way.
Well, although as has been observed already, this formulation doesn’t fit the leftist controlled Overton Window very well, here goes:
“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”
We find ourselves crawling from the wreckage, so where now?
Falcone, you are over the target.
I prefer something as a constant repeated refrain to bring home the otherness for normals.
“Why are you here?”
Just keep repeating this to all their assertions.
The key it seems (and we should learn this from the left) is that no one cares about justification.
Rhetorical conditioning works and works en masse.
Anything longer than a sentence is waste of time to move people’s views. You build the justification after the fact.
Separation is the only way to have a chance to avoid catastrophic conflict. It’s perhaps unavoidable, but if it can be avoided, separation is the only way.
The Founding *was* separation. It’s right there: “to ourselves and our posterity” I understand why it makes those of immigrant descent defensive, but come on!
We don’t need moral authority, we need to change the morality. We need to undermine every moral assumption baked into the cake (people’s minds). To me, one of the single biggest failings of conservatism has been the total abandonment of culture and particularity of children and young adults. We are the equivalent of the cult de-programmer for people escaping a cult or someone who handles DPRK defectors. If they make it over to us at all, they have all of the baggage with them. We are trying to undo a life of programming and moral priming against people like us.… Read more »
“Natural rights theory assumes an axiom for which there is no evidence in history. ”
Indeed. And the Lincoln of the Jaffaites and “conservative” “movement” only “works” if one completely abstracts the Illinois Ape from the shabby corruption of party politics and the historical context of the War of Northern Aggression. (Edgar Lee Masters’ “Lincoln the Man” is a helpful palate-cleanser in this regard.) I assume this is why that Jaffaites so vehemently screech against “historicism.”
Great piece, Z.
Yeah, I think this is a good critique of Integrationalism. I confess that I would very much like to return to pre-Reformation Christendom. But it also seems obvious that most of those who are pushing the idea are doing so because it provides yet another dodge against the central questions of legitimacy. That it, it allows them to pretend the central facts regarding the mating decisions of their ancestors are not really the most important thing. And so you get an image of a guy like Rusty Reno, who is married to a Jew and whose children are, therefore Jews,… Read more »
“In defense of what way of life can you imagine he might stand at the bridge, back to the village, waiting to be cut down by some horde?”
The answer is blood and soil:
Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
“To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds
For the ashes of his fathers
And the temples of his gods?”
Wherever possible it would probably benefit our ethical system to simplify simplify simplify. The further you get from the simple rule, the easier it is to subvert. The Leftist Politic has been thus: cause chaos through endless over-complication, extreme nitpicking and obsessive holepoking. While reading the article I was reminded of Kant’s island parable. You don’t need really some complex justification or ethical system to know right from wrong. “Imagine an island society that was about to disband, with all the inhabitants departing for other places. Someone who commits a murder on the eve of departure still ought to be… Read more »
Can’t do anything now but I really wish this was saved for a Taki piece. The clarity and breath would have been better served giving that audience a taste of what is offered here regarding the most fundamental foundations of dissident agreement: the right has been wrong and no matter how many times they argue means over ends (beautiful losers?), and attacking ones own is the highest form of principal; they still lose (empty trophy case).
Very nice. Thanks for the well written summary. Is this perhaps penance for that strange post you threw up on Gab last night, Zman?
The limit on Taki is 2500 words, so I was cutting it close. I looked around at some other sites, but no takers, at least not in the current form.
Post on Gab? I don’t recall posting anything weird on Gab last night.
I gathered as much after reading through your responses to others, made prior to my post (maybe I’ll just read before asking next time?). I was referencing the provocative Gab summary to the Unz AP series on Bobby K Jr. There was a long stream of responses and the last few take the cake. Specifically regarding the context of his reference to Anne Frank in his speech on COVID government response. Also. Have you seen the news up here regarding the Police and Municipal Unions response to the Boston Mayor? The Police Patrolman’s Association is in a bit of a… Read more »
Honestly I just skimmed the Unz post. I was repeating the summary of others.
TB once did the funniest poll ever: (The worst sh*thole in MA) But now it seems that he’s always fighting some lawsuit or another.
Conservatism failed because it disarmed itself of the social, historic & ethnic identities which serve as the primary motivators of civic life in any prosperous, multicultural society where people don’t have to worry about when the next meal comes. American conservatives were faced with an opposition that ruthlessly dog whistled against heritage Americans along racial, religious, economic, and even social lines and conservatives responded by turning the other cheek — took a high ground that didn’t exist. The result: they were thoroughly routed. Hundreds of historical monuments lost, our military bases renamed, mass disrespect of our national symbols. When facing… Read more »
Awesome stuff, great points
I would always get a kick when in college reading high minded stuff like in the New Criterion then walk around and encounter an 80 IQ country negro who could barely put a complete sentence together and realize, does anyone ever consider that this is our reality? These are our people? And we are talking about Locke? I’m not saying I have the answers, but the academics and intellectuals don’t have it in them to be brutally honest about life and people, and thus their output and product must always come with an asterisk. * This is only a game,… Read more »
The Founders (see my post above) were themselves nebulous on the important points you raise. It’s the fundamental problem of our system. So what comes next? The questions of our Age must be: What is the System? who is Sovereign? for whom does it operate? and who is In and who is Out?
The Israeli right (Hazony) benefits by supporting right-of-center political movements in Europe and the US that remain pro-Israel. Zionism is threatened by left-wing movements that view Israel as a racist, imperialist apartheid state. The reason why Hazony doesn’t support AmRen, VDare, or more radical groups like that is because these groups are too controversial, so organizing a major conference around these groups and there views would be a waste of time. Why would any donor give serious money to groups that will never be given a platform in the first place? It has nothing to do with the interests of… Read more »
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.
What are those limits? The Constitution can be amended by Congress.
No, the Constitution can be amended by the states. Congress can propose a change, but the states must agree to it. The amendment process was one of those checks on democracy. The initial setup was for an executive to lead in times of crisis and take the point on dealings with the outside world. The Senate was the chamber representing local elites, while the House was the chamber representing the people. The court was to be the referee in legal and constitutional disputes.
Alternatively, one could pack the Supreme Court with additional judges by majority vote and a presidential signature. That’s what the democrats floated last year. Just add 10 more seats, all democrats, and then reinterpret the document along ideological lines.
“First Amendment? It clearly doesn’t cover hate speech (speech the government hates). Guns? Only for well regulated militias, not you. Voting … I’m sure there’s something in here disqualifying the opposition parties.”
Democrats might one day have enough state legislatures to prevent any opposition to this measure. Some of them clearly felt bold enough to give it a try just recently.
I see.
But the states are also democratic so it’s still democracy all the way down. There are no immutable stone tablets.
What I’m really asking is what Americans mean when they say that they’re not a democracy but a republic. I can explain the differences between presidential and parliamentary democracy, negative and positive parliamentarism, semi-presidentialism and federalism, but I have no idea what makes a republic not democratic.
t’s still democracy all the way down.
Ballot boxes all the way down, dammit!
Edit function please!
The full term is constitutional limited republic. If one accepts the limits stated in the constitution and amendments then popular will or declarations by smaller bodies can’t change that without amending the constitution. Now we know as the founders feared that the powers that be can just ignore or interpret (lie) for whatever purpose they want. Lincoln did as legions of others to this present day have. Mentioning the word Constitution now just means invoking a holy word followed by whatever despotic act they intend to implement. As Joe Sobran said, the constitution poses no threat to our current form… Read more »
popular will or declarations by smaller bodies can’t change that without amending the constitution.
Yes. All democracies work like that.
Democratic republic is what it’s called
Oligarchy is what it is with some checks and balances possible when people decide that the voice of the public matters and they can use the vote to thwart an opponent.
Don’t be fooled by the rhetoric. This country has always operated under the Golden Rule, where the man with the gold makes the rules.
To Felix: ours doesn’t. Then again who believes America is a democracy on our side. Also, all democracies are not all the same.
The fundamental distinction between our constitutional republic and a democracy, at least theoretically, hinged upon the principle of subsidiarity underpinning federalism. The Founders intended the national government to be one of limited powers set forth explicitly. It was understood that any power not specifically granted to the federal government was implicitly reserved to the states. The Bill of Rights was a further attempt to delineate those powers that could not be arrogated by government without usurping what belonged to the individual citizen. The 10th Amendment, which has almost completely passed from contemporary jurisprudence, was an explicit statement of this reservation… Read more »
Amended or just ignored
The latter is so much easier.
I doubt the latter is in the Constitution.
Not in he constitution but very much a part of America.
Lincoln shit all over the constitution and is worshipped by even “constitutional conservatives”
Tells you all you need to know. The constitution was the product of a certain group of men of a certain time and place, they were its authors, it was THEIR baby, and everyone else following them had their own ideas, their own babies.
Don’t ask me how we held together for this long. Or maybe it’s just the nature of man that things and societies take a while to unravel
“Don’t ask me how we held together for this long.”
Since 1865, the “union” has been held together at gunpoint.
But a forced “union” is no union at all; it is an abusive relationship that the abused party will abandon at the first *real* opportunity, and that is exactly where we are headed–and not for the first time.
I knew a partner at a big law firm. They all hated each other but they made lots of $$. That’s how it held together.
The explanation you are asking for cannot be given in the comment thread of a blog.
The process of the decay in American institutions has been a very, very long one–and very complex–and it continues today, although it is observably clear that we are now nearing the end point in the process of deterioration.
For the answer you seek, you would need to do a lot of reading. A lot.
Or just reading it to mean whatever you ‘feel’ it should mean.
Well, that is the approach periodically adopted by the Supreme Court, following their invidious, and sadly unchallenged role in Madison v. Marbury. (Wherein ravening Federalist party extremist, John Marshall, chief justice at the time, led his ideological brethren on the Court to deny Madison, a Democratic Republican, the right to select his choices to serve in the Executive Branch so as to retain their “stay behind” Federalist officeholders to thwart Madison’s policies. Vaulted the Court into a policy-setting role because of Marshall’s hard-nosed politics. Granted permission to subsequent Courts to do likewise. Just one of many steps to degrade the… Read more »
Law, including constitutional law, is downstream from culture. If American culture changes too much it does not matter what is in the constitution because you can’t compensate downstream for an upstream failure. This is why you suddenly have five gowned clowns reading the constitution like tea leaves and finding all sorts of weird stuff ‘between the lines’ such as two New Yorker dudes having the ‘inalienable right’ to marry each other in Alabama’s most conservative town. Law will not protect against a rotting culture.
This is stare decisis at work. The only corrective measure available is legislative action to swat down the court rulings, and then, good luck smuggling that past the rule-making antics of the bureaucracy when they can twist the intent to comport with their preferences.
And the legislature is perhaps the most vulnerable branch to cultural rot. We were just saved from insane laws by ‘Legal Madonna’ from AZ. There’s no salvation there when the culture goes.
I’m blackpilled as heck right now because above I just realized, in a discussion about Finland of all places, that the only Western countries that became more culturally conservative in the 20. century were the ones once run by the G*ddamn communists. What do you do when you hate the answers empirical reality returns??
Moran: You accept that, no matter your religion, most people just aren’t that smart, or capable, or independent. You accept that most of them need some control and care and leadership. You give up childish beliefs like democracy and stop shying away from certain authoritarian beliefs. Not always and everywhere, but I’m tired of the reflexive zomg fascism bashing I see among so many on the right. I don’t particularly what one calls it, but a functional White country with a functional White government still cannot work and prevail without some bedrock foundations and the power to back them up.… Read more »
You’re right, this is about survival. There is no price too high. If it takes going into hell and waltzing the devil’s ugly mother to death, so be it.
But you gotta admit, saying Stalin was the 20th century’s only successful ‘conservative’, that is pretty ironic.
Isn’t this essentially the Catholic argument against Protestantism?
You need a powerful organized alternative and one based on eternal moral truths to counterbalance raw political,power?
I think Z is saying much the same thing, if you take it to the logical conclusion.
Falcone:
“You need a powerful organized alternative”
Priests, Bishops, Cardinals, the Pope. We need at least one more ladder step.
Tis a real conundrum. The Pope has feet of clay, yet the Protestant answer, every man is a Pope, is no solution either.
Similar to the US Constitution problem. Judges. The Bible. “Judges”.
Yep, definitely a conundrum UNLESS we say that God exists and is the ultimate authority. But at the same time, we need a strong Church. We just do, because democracy, politics, this and that leave many people, cold and empty. They need a sanctuary away from all this, something more real and lasting. I know when I was a young man and just feeling lost, or alone, I would go and sit in the pews and just sit there and think and in time feel put back together As I got older I needed this less and less, but it… Read more »
Excellent Falcone.
“conundrum UNLESS we say God exists.”
Conundrum, part 2. How does one go from saying God exists to believing God exists?
Maybe it’s not necessary? A line is a collection of points. What is a point? I don’t know but we gotta start somewhere.
Then it’s a conundrum only when the people all agree and all believe that God exists
Why this multicultural crap with everyone having different ideas and beliefs will be the death of us. I know for a fact, at minimum, it creates a society that looks and acts like a slum. See Los Angeles or NYC.
Related – these truckers are resting on a moral foundation and very clearly stating their belief in the Christian God. Very strong foundation and suggests this will not end any time soon.
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2022/02/01/trucker-revolt-on-the-western-front/
“You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”
The sage of Hippo
Oddly, the Catholic system is not unlike the US checks and balances among the three branches of goverment. Instead of Congress, Executive and Judiciary, you have Scripture, Papacy and Tradition. So if a Pope acts contrary to Scripture and Tradition, he can be found a heretic and deposed. It may take while (even happened post-humously to one Pope if I recall).
What pope rules Japan? Strong ethnic and cultural identity, uncorrupted by mass immigration, can easily serve as an organizing principle. “For us and not for them.” IMHO, that’s much better than any central authority which can be easily subverted in a single generation. For example, it’s rumored the current pope is an atheist; Bill Maher thinks so and has joked about it. Corrupting just one man can do tremendous damage if that’s your sole source of authority, but it’s much harder to corrupt an entire nation determined to keep its identity. America maintained its majority White Caucasian (and chiefly British)… Read more »
The pope is just as emblematic of white failure as current day America Both institutions and cultures have been corrupted So tells me that it’s about more than any one man. It’s about an organization of true believers, moral men holding the fort while the leader may wander off an do something stupid, a la the current Pope or Joe Biden. In summary, it’s a failing top to bottom, corruption top to bottom. How it happened we can all debate, but it’s here and it’s with us. So what do we do moving forward? Try to fix it? Let it… Read more »
I think the idea is that there will always be some spark, the world is nothing but sparks looking for something to burn. There will be some crisis the elites cannot manage, and then the ish gets real.
China takes Taiwan and puts an American carrier on the bottom while Russia takes more of Ukraine and sweeps aside the American tranny force sent to stop them. Meanwhile, China cuts off the supply of fertilizer – they control 1/3 of all production, so I’m told.
Now, you got yourself a genuine crisis.
Indeed, Falcone. You final paragraph is where I’m at now. Time used to be that I’d muse about the current systems failings, perhaps try to do some research to prove my point to people already converted or those who just didn’t care. We all know the countries of the Anglosphere probably had their zenith over fifty years ago now, and are rapidly declining. We all still need The System to some extent, so we have to be content to realize this, but work toward protecting ourselves when it the steep steps in the decline show. This means we accept the… Read more »
Funny enough I was looking up home schooling in the UK.
The 1996 Education act determines this. One can home school individually, but >5 children for >24 hours a week requires a registration (its a criminal offense not to) as an independent school which falls under the OFSTED inspector authority.
The only carve out is explicitly Jewish and Muslim private schools. Not any other religion.
You could not legally set up a school teaching alternatives to the current globohomo in the UK if you wanted to.
Response to Trumpton:
Legally?
Like I say, at some point, if certain things we know are right for us to do are denied to us, we ought to draw our line.
The “>24 hours” is of interest to me, as my wife and I had reasoned a sound education for a child’s formative years could be done with around 15 hours per week, to play with.
Naturally, one excludes the “life lessons” delivered by responsible parents at any time of the day or night to said child.
@orange frog
The 24 hours is defined as “full time education”.
By law every child must receive a “full time education” commensurate with age.
However, what that entails if home schooled is up to you mostly.
Its when one tries to establish any group (other than those exempted) where the state steps in and wants control.
The Church was always a second source of legitimacy and power. The great benefit from a social perspective was, well, two sources of power and legitimacy.
The Medieval concept, and the reason I genuinely would like to see it return, was simple: the people are not a power pyramid, the way the idiot books say. Instead, the model was that of a body, straight out of St. Paul, where the pain of a foot matters to the body as a whole. Hell, Calhoun adopted this idea with his concepts of republican government.
“Hell, Calhoun adopted this idea with his concepts of republican government.”
And everybody should read Calhoun. Especially his “Disquisition on Government.”
“The Church was always a second source of legitimacy and power.”
Uh, which “church” because they all uniformly claim their legitimacy comes from God.
A guy with a name like Forever Templar asks, “which church,” when I said, “the Church.”
There’s a scene in the movie “The Pope of Greenwich Village,” in which Daryl Hannah asks Mickey Rourke when he’s going to outgrow his knuckleheaded cousin, Paulie. Rourke explains to her that Paulie is family. “Wasps outgrow people. Italians don’t outgrow people.” I’m not Italian, but I’m more comfortable with the idea of loyalty to people than to ideas. Also, if a rule hurts people I love or things I hold dear, I’ll ignore or bend the rule if I can. Is that conservative? I don’t know, but most Hollywood movies that features a hero shows someone unwilling to bend… Read more »
Good food for thought Joey.
Loyality to people or loyalty to ideas?
It’s complicated. Isn’t loyalty to people at base, just tribalism? People are idea holders. What if your idea holder has ideas you don’t like? When to switch loyalties?
“Loyalty to people or loyalty to ideas?” Which brings us once again to feudalism, where loyalties were personal and where law was something to be “discovered” through daily life, custom, and tradition, rather than something to be “legislated” by “officials” after said “officials” had conferred with “experts.” And the system of legislation, officials, and experts is necessarily oppressive, since those types oppress other people “for their own good.” That’s possible–indeed, inevitable–when your polity ignores the things that we *know* to be true about human nature. And now we have arrived at the point where the “officials” and their “experts” tell… Read more »
Wasn’t that the essence of the old “High Toryism? Loyalty uber alles?
As an aside, I always thought that was one of the great movie titles ever.
Joey: Thanks for pinpointing an existential conundrum. I think most of us here would agree with you that people come before principles most of the time. I may be an outlier in that there are certain things my sons could do (marry a black or come out as homo) that would cause me to utterly reject them, so there are areas where I put principle above people. My younger son was due for jury duty (cancelled at the last minute, thank God) and he was telling me he was grateful for the reprieve for various reasons, chief among them being… Read more »
I don’t recall if the Pope of Greenwich Village movie kept the novel’s response to Hanna’s character that an Italian is closer to his fifth-cousin than an Irishman is to his own twin.
There is a lot of truth in that Briefly, when I go back to Italy it is like the Prince is coming into town, and they basically throw a festival with family from many generations coming over. It is truly is something. Then I come back to LA and get shit on and honked at and given the stink eye by all sorts of rejects from the world over. Aargh…… Beam me up Scotty. Any time works for me! But I can’t help but feel a fondness for even Los Angeles which has been very good to me, inasmuch as… Read more »
[…] ZMan is not optimistic. […]
This may be the most perceptive and insightful piece I have encountered on the topic at hand. Modern conservatism, it seems, has attempted to evade and avoid the single most significant issue facing it; viz., what and whom, exactly are they conserving? Certainly not the original founding principles, since they have long been cashiered from contemporary thought in favor of “democracy” and inclusiveness. So, in order to properly conserve what the Founders wrought, we must all assume the identity of 18th Century Englishmen. That is actually not a bad thing, in my opinion. Personally, I am the third generation of… Read more »
But isn’t it always a two way street?
You take on the soul and mannerisms of an Englishman, but what of the true Englishman? The “real article”? He is then obligated to treat you as one of his own? Does he get a say in the matter? Is he compelled to indulge your desires?
Aren’t we getting into a similar situation where we are all supposed to call a man a “she” because he self identifies as a woman?
The odds are high the Mr. Steve and Mr. Falcone naturally ACT like the original British citizens of a constitutional republic and LOOK like such citizens. Mr. Steve’s ancestors may have come from the Hapsburg Empire, but the odds of Mr. Steve having a Hapsburg chin or hemophilia is pretty low. Keep Mr. Falcone out of the sun for a few days and whatever Moorish tan he may have will probably fade. Like the Aseknazim, these two men can pass the “fellow white” test because they both LOOK and ACT white. They can pass the American test because they ARE… Read more »
Ha ha
Yes, I do get quite tan, but naturally I am pale.
But I am not English but rather what I am is an Anglophile. I have become much the same as my adoptive parents, as it were. And I bless them for the opportunity. I just wish they, the WASPs, still ruled the place.
The tan line test for Whiteness.
Falcone: I believe recovering lawyer Steve specifically identified his family as having been ‘invited.’ And, in the sense that America had almost totally open and unlimited immigration for Whites prior to 1924, anyone who arrived prior to that time could be said to have been legally invited. Of course, that begs the question of precisely who did the inviting (the 19th century industrialists who needed mass labor, particularly after so many White Americans were slaughtered in Lincoln’s War, or the actual American citizens who lived here who were increasingly opposed to the cacophony of voices in their neighborhoods). Steve’s comment… Read more »
I get that
What I was hoping to tease out of Steve and anyone else reading is the term “Anglophile”
Because THAT is what we are both saying. THAT is what we both are. The term has fallen from popular usage. Or more fairly put regarding myself, I am maybe 75% Anglophile and 25% New Orleans/Tampa/Italian orphan with a rambling cajunesque redneck accent when drunk.
What can a man do? I do my best.
An Englishman encountering some one else behaving in that way has always just assumed that is how all right and proper gentlemen behave, irrespective of where they live.
Whether you are Indian or Russian does not matter. They are just being civilized, and that is how it should be.
It does not make them English an no one would have considered that to be even a thing.
If you square the hypotenuse of a right triangle you get a total equal to the sum of the squares of it’s two legs. That is a natural law. The political problem we face lies in the fact that in the moral domain there are no natural laws. We have no natural rights. They are man made decisions that can and will change over time. Different factions will try to push those changes in different directions which inevitably leads to conflict. We need a divinely inspired formulation of Natural Law that an entire population will agree to live by. An… Read more »
I will do a follow up on this, but the central problem of this age is the answer to the question, “upon whose authority?” The American Left has their theory of history as their ultimate authority. The American Right use to have Nature and Nature’s God followed by tradition and custom. The European Right used to have biology and history. Now, the Right in the West has not authority to which they can point as the starting point of their argument.
“Upon whose authority?” Without a doubt, the greatest question of our time. Right now, most are content to never ask it. Even in the military, where “whose authority” supersedes and answers all, that question is no longer asked. We just assume that whatever authority all these edicts come from must be legitimate. At work, we get inspectors who come in and insist that we do things a certain way, even though it isn’t necessary or another way works just fine. But these inspectors are just peers from a different organization similar to our own. When I ask for the actual… Read more »
“I will do a follow up on this, … .”
And I, for one, await it eagerly. Today’s essay is outstanding!
Upon whose authority seems to come down to “You and whose army?”
Z burning the midnight oil. Nice!
Yep, you point your finger on it imo: we live in a moral universe. Minor and perhaps immaterial quibbles aside, I agree.
The horror writer Ramsey Campbell used to say he did his best writing when he should be sleeping, as his brain and circadian rhythms kind of had him in a dream state. This piece might not be Z’s absolute best, but its length and depth make it stand out.
Definitely true for a lot of creative people. I’ve always done my best painting between 2 and 3 AM.
The truth is, I fell asleep on the couch, woke up at 1:00 AM and could not fall back asleep. I had written this post last week and something for another publication, but they did not like it, so I was going to rewrite it. I re-read and decided that I liked it and decided to post it here.
I’m not surprised you had no takers, it cuts way too deep. I need to read it over again and follow up some references with with I’m unfamiliar but this one goes right up the thermal exhaust port. Given that there is one natural law we can sure of conservatism at best can thought of as holding water in your hands and at worst like a garroter whispering “ssssshhhh it will all be over soon.”
We do in fact live in a moral universe But I have to wonder if there isn’t a biological aspect to it? We all know that a child can see a person get hit over the head and robbed and know, instinctively, that it was wrong. But maybe the black kid thinks it’s cool? And thinks, I want to be that guy with the hammer when I grow up, he showed guts. I know enough young blacks to know they have an entirely different set of moral codes built in. So we are back to square one. If we are… Read more »
Why, do you suppose, the American project designed to get the Indians to become farmers was an abysmal failure, down to this day?
We are different people Someone somewhere in here one day said we are a “pastoral” people, which I find to be a great summation Example, look at our religious imagery, what appeals to our innermost self, a manger and a lamb and a baby. That is who we are, without anyone needing to tell us. This is just what springs from us and comports with us at the deepest immutable level. And these people, when children, see a guy getting hit on the head with a hammer and robbed know, in their heart, that it is wrong. No one needs… Read more »
Watched a doc about Ghana cocoa farmers. They propped a corpse up in a chair and had a meeting with him. The whole village especially old women came to whisper in his ear, yell at him, cajole him, and so on. Then they buried him in a wood coffin carved like a cocoa pod.
Cause injuns drink too much?
Hey no way. Squanto taught the Pilgrims how to farm or something.
“If we are to have any semblance of a morals based society, we have to separate from competing races.” That is certainly preferable, but not strictly necessary. From 1619 to 1965, we kept quite good control of what are now destructive “others.” It is not difficult, but the *will* must be present *and* at least unmolested by the law. “Nothing we want in life is possible with our current demographics.” This, however, is an entirely different thing, and your assessment here is absolutely correct. Readers might find it instructive to look at who voted for and who voted against Hart-Cellar… Read more »
All of the Jews in Congress supported Hart-Cellar, along with all of the Catholic Senators and 89 of 92 Catholic representatives. Protestants in the South and West tended to oppose the bill. So the white ethnics/Ellis Islanders were pro-immigration. Today, however, plenty of white ethnics are anti-immigration or at least voted for Trump, even a good number of Jews (Auster, Gottfried, Miller, Beatie, Michael Hart, Michael Levin, etc.). Plus, all white ethnics (yes, even Jews), are considered “white” by the racial preference hierarchy created by the civil rights movement, and therefore suffer difficulties in hiring and education, (unless they are… Read more »
Falcone, I’ve been thinking all day about how to respond to your comment, and I can’t come up with anything I’m satisfied with! Here’s the best I have: life is natural, and if the universe (and nature) is moral, it stands to reason there’d be a moral to life as well. We all sense this instinctively when we ponder the meaning of life. As for biology, it does the best it can. Take evolution. Ever notice how discussion of evolution is invariably couched in hypothetical language? Why, because it’s not proven of course. Sure, the mechanisms and processes supposed to… Read more »