Note #1: Behind the green door is a post about the JFK assassination, a review of the movie Rebel Without A Cause and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up at SubscribeStar or Substack. Note also that Michael Anton penned a foam-flecked rant about my post on the myth of natural rights. I will respond in time.
Note #2: If you are looking for a book to read, you may want to buy the book A Walk in the Park: My Charlottesville Story. It is a first person account of the events by a couple of good guys who deserve your support. It is a great Christmas gift.
It used to be said that democracies do not go war with one another, even though democracies are often in the center of wars. This has always been the argument for promoting democracy. In theory, if all the world is organized into democracies of one type or another, there can be no war. Another take on this is the claim that countries that have a McDonalds will not go to war with one another. People who embrace liberal democracy have no reason to fight one another.
Of course, democracy is a loaded term that can mean just about anything. Ireland is a democracy where they put Christians in prison for violating the speech laws. Syria treats its Christian population better than most democracies, but it is not a democracy, so the biggest democracy in the world, the United States, feels entitled to bomb its cities and demand regime change. Norway is threatening to jail a woman for reading a dictionary, which is becoming the norm in democracies.
Strictly speaking, there are no democracies in the world. The so-called democracies have some form of representative government. Issues are not put before the voters or even discussed with the voters. As the late Robert Dahl explained, the so-called democracies are actually polyarchies. Power is invested in multiple people, who are charged with implementing what they perceive as the general will. This is done through a set procedures and institutions.
Dahl further argues that this form of government is the creation of the United States and to a lesser degree France. During the twentieth century, this form of government was imposed on Western Europe and parts of Asia, after having been conquered by the United States in the Second World War. After the Cold War, the collective West then imposed this on the former eastern bloc countries. Therefore, Western democracies are a collection of polyarchies.
This helps explain why the Western democracies are so aggressive. It has been roughly thirty years since the end of the Cold War and in that time the Western democracies have been waging war on the world. The term “regime change” is a term everyone in the world understands, because it is always attached to a war of aggression by Western democracies, usually led by the United States. The current war against Russia by the West is all about regime change in Moscow.
The reason the world’s great champion of democracy has been waging war on the world for the last three decades is that the United States has always been an aggressive warrior country. Since the founding, America has been either at war with some other people, at war with itself or creating the conditions for the next war in the name of spreading democracy. It is fair to say that the reason America exists, as a practical matter, is to make war on the world.
The United States is a country created in war. Integral to the founding was the war for independence, which is central to the American identity. Of course, as soon as America was independent, it refused to repay the French for their help in the war, the result being the Quasi-War with France. Right after that it was the Barbary Wars against Muslim pirates and then the War of 1812. American barely existed for a generation before it was declaring war on the world.
The 19th century was one war after another. In addition to the three wars above, there was the First Seminole War, the Texas Revolution, the Second Seminole War, the Aroostook War, the Mexican–American War, the Third Seminole War, the Second Opium War, the Pig War, the First and Second Cortina Wars, the American Civil War, the Second Samoan Civil War, the Spanish–American War, the Philippine–American War, the Moro Rebellion and the Boxer Rebellion.
All of those wars took place against the backdrop of the endless war on the Indians, as America conquered the continent. If you accept the argument from most conservatives that the real founding of the country was the Civil War, the so-called second founding theory, then it is reasonable to say that the point of American democracy is to make war on the world in order to impose American democracy. This explains the 20th century, which was nothing but endless war.
This brings us to the present. The United States is leading the Western democracies in a war against Russia and its allies. Washington openly talks about regime change in Moscow and Beijing. It has not mentioned regime change in New Delhi, but you can be sure that is on tap, as the Indians move closer to Russia. None of these countries want war with America, but they do not want to be fortified with democracy at the point of gun, so they are fighting a war for survival.
America is a country of roughly three hundred million people in a world that is around nine billion people, give or take. That is three percent of the global population, but responsible for at least half the war mongering in the world. If we add in the population of Europe, then we get to roughly 13% of the global population. It is reasonable to wonder if the rest of the world is going to continue to tolerate this 13% of the population being responsible for over half of the wars in the world.
Putting that aside, the violent nature of American democracy raises an important question about cause and effect. Is it the moral spring of democracy that causes America to wage war on the world? This need to impose her values on the world naturally leads to war. On the other hand, is it the natural fanaticism of the people that leads to the embrace of both the secular religion of democracy and the impulse to impose its values on the world?
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Hoo-ey! Next, Let’s get Anton to rave about the universal franchise and the need for immigrant whatevers!
I think you hurt his fee-fees.
Another great article. Thank you for your tireless efforts. My comment is in regard to the prelude to the article, most specifically Michael Anton. Anton is a strange character, kind of a wild-eyed ideologue. If you listen to him speak at any length, he begins every other sentence with “As my teacher Harry Jaffa said…” It is loony. Anton got into a big spat with the traditionalist paleocon Southern historian Brion McClanahan, either last year or the year before in a cross argument printed in Chronicles and American Greatness. It was really nothing more than a continuation of the debate… Read more »
…and like clockwork, Chicom Cv19 hysteric Eric Ding is back with and epic Twitter thread of fake vids and stats:
https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1604750758221676546
It’s all so tiresome.
If one is a member of 2 tribes, does that mean that he’s twice as obnoxious—or 4 times?
Much like George Floyd, the world would actually be better off if Eric Fiegel-Ding shuffled off this mortal coil.
OT: Been thinking about the absolute death of the arts in recent decades. I went through my music collection and was moved to tears by all the beautiful songs I’ve heard over the decades. Now music is crap. Cinema is crap. Books/novels are crap. Comic books are crap; you name it. The only thing with something left is some precious little good TV amongst the utter glut.
It’s shocking to read/see/hear something great from within my lifetime and realize that kind of stuff isn’t made any more; like it might as well have come from another century or another planet.
See the movie “Excalibur” as an example. What they did with lighting alone in that movie was amazing! Now everything is friggen CGI.
I watched “Meet Joe Black” the other night and got the same feeling. That was considered a middling movie in 1998. I’m not much of a Brad Pitt fan, either. Thing was, it had a plot intended for adults above the emotional age of a 13-year-old schoolgirl, everyone in it was dressed to the nines and actually attempted to *act*. And I swear written language is getting dumber too. Not just books, but written language for nearly anything. I’m having a hard time understanding it’s getting so unfocused. I’m getting old, nearly 80, but FFS I speak/write in three Asiatic… Read more »
I’ve had the sense that all the wordiness is a consequence of overeducated people. Short on ways to prove their erudition, they vomit verbiage.
it’s a remake of the 1934 film “Death Takes A Holiday”
It’s every little thing, like female voice-over on radio ads. A lot of them have this squeaky little girl voice that I find very strange and irritating. They all sound sort of like AOC, except I think this trend pre-dates her.
Someone, somewhere decided that the sound of a “vocal fry” female was trustworthy, calming, and would provoke consumers to part with their money.
I’ve thought this in the main myself, but I also realize that I’m getting old. One has seen it all at my age, so the plot lines wear thin and my standards are high. On the other hand, there are a number of newer generations where all of what I’ve seen is now new (for them), rather than “old hat”. I suspect there is a significant aspect of that which permeates my impressions. It also works somewhat in reverse. A while back I began to re-read some of the old science fiction of my youth. I was taken back by… Read more »
It’s easy to see the appeal of super heroes. For 8 year olds. It’s a lot harder to understand with 30 year olds.
Never really understood Superman. One thing, only one damn rare thing in the universe can harm you, and you seem to run into it around every friggin’ corner.
It’s gotta be a metaphor for something.
it’s not just a matter of getting older. things are *really* stupider and classless.
As our population is replaced and darkened everything else is replaced and darkened simultaneously, until the lights go out altogether and a new dark age begins. From Beethoven to Jay-Z.
The cable series Yellowstone is great, (Montana elects rancher Kevin Costner Governor, whose motto is “Progress ends with me”), but nothing else is very good…
Get ready, I heard they just introduced the first gay kiss. Guess where it is all going now.
Brokeback, no doubt.
Hollywood just can’t quit the gay.
Clothes, shoes are getting cheap and ugly. I used to buy button-down shirts in heavy, long-staple cotton broadcloth off the rack. They would starch stiff as a board. Current cotton shirts won’t even hold starch.
In short, yes indeedy, Zman.
We are akin to the Emperor Qin, who, by conquering all his lands, sought to end the wars between them.
White victors are the strongest horse to be ridden. As we were, long ago, and today.
That such a horse would attract a bad rider, who leads it unto foolish paths– well, of course.
You and mchungus are correct; this particular steed would fulfill the promise if it could but only throw off the reins.
And our English, Germanic, and Irish-Scot forebears?
They are Aryans, and Celts.
They’ve been in the Isles for 38,000 years.
Conquest is in their Neanderthal blood.
The forge of war is in their bones.
The element they add, is justice.
I might have gone too far down the rabbit hole, but I’m thinking there’s a good reason Scandinavia or Central Europe weren’t the cradle of civilization. I don’t think it’s ‘our’ thing. Not that we aren’t capable of a kind of civ, but these huge, centralized empires have never been a good fit.
War Democracy is indeed war on war itself; war, traditionally, is the male province of defending or expanding territory. The idea is that an ummah of happy gatherers can replace the kingdoms of raiding hunters. Utopia! No war, no want, no worry- now the nurturers can get to work caring for every sniffle, and feeding every puppy. The breeder-brained scheme to defeat the Aryan male mind; the pimps whisper to the girls, “it is the victors who themselves invented war,” – get rid of the bosses, and one can get rid of their rules. One can become Empowered. This ties… Read more »
One of my favorite tricks is to first bait someone into talking how great democracy is and America is acting in good faith by spreading it around the world is to bring up how we never try to bring democracy to Saudi Arabia. Why is that?
It’s a compliment that Anton took the time to read and consider Z’s post. My take on Z’s political philosophy is that “might makes right,” practically speaking and that further reference to natural right or rights is an intellectual indulgence. That is, Z would prefer an America composed of individuals and communities of European, preferably Anglo-Saxzon-Celtic, descent, those who created the laws, norms and traditions by which America, then the U.S., lived until endangered and ultimately taken over by non-Europeans with particular animus to Europeanized Jews imagined to be cultural and political saboteurs. Z has no obligation to justify these… Read more »
imbroglio: While I do not speak for anyone but myself, I would argue that Zman and many of us here believe that genetics are highly predictive, but not absolutely determinative. That may seem like a minor distinction to some, but it acknowledges that there are/will always be some exceptions, but those exceptions do not negate the overall pattern. And I strongly disagree with your characterization of Zman’s view of “natural rights” as simply the will of the powerful. The powerful always have the means to back their will, by definition. Any individual rights for the less powerful must be either… Read more »
It was not meant as a compliment, though. Anton used a relatively obscure blogger (no slight, to be clear; this is the most interesting blog I read) to virtue signal to Conservative, Inc., that he’s not that sort of guy. Con, Inc., does this all the time with the Left so they will receive the signal.
Addendum: never trust a conservative. No matter how edgy they present.
I was a big fan when Anton was writing under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus. His Flight 93 Election essay was one of a few defining factors in my move to the DR and eventually crossing the great divide. However, in the intervening years, I came to realize he was obviously a relatively establishment civnat and thus pretty much gave up on him. I look forward to the Z rebuttal.
Genetic/biologic determination. Which way do I go, which way do I go? Our overloads are striving to level the population through decapitation and replacement, DIE and miscegenation to the point where they can rule over a vast population of subservient diverse multicultural passive mediocrity who will happily provide lawn care and collect the trash.
It all makes sense with Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt’s notion that the political is the distinction between friend and enemy.
Or that there is no politics without an enemy.
Just skimmed the Anton article. Labeling it a ‘rant’ is only partially descriptive. It struck me as a desperate appeal to authority as well as a spiteful rebuttal to the dissident right. Anton desperately clings to the fallacy of America as that ‘shining city on a hill’ supporting “the noble, the good, the just etc.” Despite both history and the present clearly and repeatedly demonstrating that tribalism, hatred, power, and violence are far more innate in human nature than Anton’s ‘natural law,’ he soundly rejects the DR’s rejection of the Enlightenment. Having the pretense of representative government is good, because… Read more »
Having skimmed Anton’s piece, I’m left with one big takeaway: almost no one will make it through more than a few paragraphs
I only made it through because I printed it out and read it in my comfy chair.
i sure didn’t. it was so careless and sloppy i didn’t see the point of wasting any more time on it.
Great comment. I wasted a significant amount of my life wading through the entirety of Anton’s essay, which was virtue signaling wrapped in intellectual flexing and word salad, for the most part. The takeaway, hidden subtly among the numerous philosophical references, was Anton really, really wants to keep working in Republican politics and getting the grift that drips off the side of the Con, Inc., plate. The funniest bit was concern about a hereditary aristocracy. We have the White/Jew/Pet Minority equivalent of that now, Michael, and they aren’t sending their best!
A couple years after Dahl died there was a short piece in the Anchorage Daily News by the old opinion page editor, “In Skagway lived a boy who grew up to be a scholar of US democracy.” It refers to Dahl’s late-life memoir printed with much less fanfare and far more authorial age than was the case for, to pick a different Holy Civics example completely at random, Barack Obama’s. Various bits from the piece would likely be appreciated by readers of this blog but the most laugh-out-loud refreshing had to be the explanatory note: “…through an examination of one… Read more »
Difficult to agree that the USA is a “warrior state.” The American people didn’t want to enter WW1, nor WW2. How they got hoodwinked into the Vietnam fiasco still puzzles me — maybe because war was never declared and the soldiers there were “advisers” and everything was done incrementally. The US elite has always had to use some subterfuge, some manufactured casus belli, to get the proles on board for its wars of choice. Maybe war is the means that the US elite employs to keep itself in power — the centripetal force that counteracts the centrifugal forces threatening to… Read more »
That the same people and groups have held onto power even after having their subterfuge demonstrated openly and plainly, is the real sickness
‘Difficult to agree that the USA is a “warrior state.”,
If you distinguish between “state” and “people”, the phrase “warrior state” makes sense for the USA.
Conceded. I was comparing the USA to Sparta, which was warlike to its foundations.
“The American people didn’t want to”
When has that ever mattered?
It has. Roosevelt had to provoke the Japanese to attack, so that he could present a casus belli to the American people. In 2001 the attack on the Twin Towers came as a godsend to the neocons in the GWB admin, who in the late ’90s had planned the invasion of Iraq. The line is always: “See? We’re lily-white innocent but these evil people are attacking us [sic], so we gotta go to war.”
I recommend a reading of this work by Randolph Bourne, written as the US was in the process of being propagandized into the Great War. It was a chapter in an unfinished book being penned by Mr. Bourne. This section, here from the website of antiwardotcom, entitled War Is the Health of the State, lays out an understanding of the how and the why as The State exploits the motivations of the masses to achieve societal conformiry to its perceived interests. Even though written more than a century ago, it still contains many insights of value to the understanding of… Read more »
“War is the health of the State.”
— Randolph Bourne ca. 1918
(I thought it was Machiavelli).
Difficult to agree that the USA is a “warrior state.”
Not at all. He doesn’t say “warrior nation”; he says–absolutely correctly, “warrior state.”
Not the same thing at all.
With age and time I have learned to look at the ubiquitous Hollywood war movie in a whole new light. The stirring music of the haunting string section as the good wholesome American boys stormed the beach/ramparts/citadel/whatever. It wasn’t just agitprop, it was highly effective agitprop, as good as or better than any ever produced. It stirred multiple generations of young white men to join up and fight to prove their “manhood” and their “patriotism.” And I was as guilty as anyone ever so beguiled. Only now, when I’m older and the damage already done, am I better able to… Read more »
Youth is wasted on the young.
Yeah, but I suspect that perpetual youth might entail perpetual stupidity. Hormones and all that…
Hollywood has played a major role in prepping/brainwashing America for wars since they have been an industry. They just tried again with the release of “Top Gun Maverick.”
Notice Tom Cruise shoots down 3 Russian made Fighters. SU 57s no less.
Perhaps most depressing was how the word of mouth on that pile of shit was so glowing.
Why expect more of the public—especially Boomers—when most of the top box office today involves super hero fantasy adventures. We no longer live in the real world.
I saw that stinking mess. Nothing but a glorified video game complete with mawkish patriotism. Yuck.
The answer to zman’s question of why Our Democracies are assholes is because of the idea of universality. Once you believe an idea you hold to be a universal, then you become self-righteous about it and aggressive about spreading the idea. Monarchies and dictatorships don’t have this property because even though the king claims God put him there, he can look across the river and see another king or republic or whatever. Our Democracies look across that same river and see something they can consume and assimilate like the Borg. And the clever thing that Star Trek writers did with… Read more »
The other aspect of the Borg—initially—was that they were devoid of all compassion. This was a big slap in the face of all those bleeding heart liberal futurists who thought an “advanced” race would someday stop by and lead us to Nirvana. It fit in with their thinking of their role in society, which as mentioned was never to be a worker bee in a collective.
Totally unrelated to Z’s post, but I was pleased to see Argentina’s collection of Spaniards and Italians beat France’s pack of Hutus and Sand Hutus in the World Cup. How any self-respecting Frenchman could cheer for those aliens who have no connection with France purporting to represent them is beyond me. No, I understand. Their identity as Frenchmen, i.e. as necessarily white descendants of the Franks, has been machined out of them by the Western Power Structure.
Ostei Kozelskii: “Their identity as Frenchmen, i.e. as necessarily white descendants of the Franks, has been machined out of them by the Western Power Structure.”
Trump missed a once-in-a-century opportunity to upset the apple cart when he failed to order the CIA to send covert arms shipments to Les Gilets Jaunes.
Of course, we know now that the CIA doesn’t answer to the President of the USA; rather, the CIA answers to the Director of the Mossad.
The French Republic is just an idea.
A bad one, apparently.
Viva la Argentina. Take note the paucity of Sub Saharans allowed Buenos Aries not to burn in tribute to the win.
May not have rioted after winning the World Cup, but to the Portenos ever lasting credit, they DID burn down all of their banks when their rulers dropped the US dollar/ Argentine Peso peg.
How long until we hear the usual suspects shrieking about flooding Argentina with vibrant immivaders for their pale team having the audacity to beat Africa for the World Cup?
The unbearable whiteness of Argentina will not fly under the GAE’s radar. I can only imagine that an airlift from Mogadishu to Buenos Aires is screaming down the runway as we speak.
Justified as reparations for Argentines having harbored Not-sees after WWII.
best comment I saw: congratulations to Africa for winning silver
Argentina even fielded a Mac Allister, just to rub the whiteness in even more.
“ It is reasonable to wonder if the rest of the world is going to continue to tolerate this 13% of the population being responsible for over half of the wars in the world.”
Why not? We seem to be content with Blacks committing over half the crime in the USA—and they are 13% of the population. 😉
@Compsci-
You totally stole my thunder. I was about to write the EXACT same comment, lol.
And I stole the thunder of a good comment below made before mine. It happens. Fortunately this group is not made up of a bunch of prissy folk. Tomorrow’s another day.
Is there a word for rule by the self-loathing and insane?
There is.
“America.”
GAE leadership is so far gone that they are openly discussing corraling their own citizens in cities as human shields.
The White masses have been used as human shields against the encouraged vibrancy for years. Frankly, if I had been corralled into a city as a human shield, I would use my flashlight to help guide bombers to my location. I’m sure the Pig Elite would have escaped by then but possibly some of the guilty would remain.
The driving principle behind the GAE is something called “militant democracy,” the creation of a refugee to the US from Nazi Germany named Karl Loewenstein. Wikipedia (which now calls it “defensive democracy,” presumably in homage to Orwell) defines it as “laws, delegated legislation, and court rulings which limit certain rights and freedoms in a democratic society in order to protect the existence of the state, its democratic character and institutions, minority rights, et cetera.” In other words, protecting “democratic institutions” is the goal, and the rights of the people be damned. Loewenstein went back to Germany after the war and… Read more »
War builds civ, civ conquers existential threats and becomes undisciplined, civ falls apart. The US is no different. I guess Asian cultures have come the closest to achieving stability, but plenty of blood still flows over there. Wouldn’t know why, but if I had to hazard a guess, they aren’t chasing utopia.
Maybe my bias, but I notice the people chasing peace have the least of it. US is, of course, full of people chasing peace. The world and human nature are fallen. Might as well accept it and make the best of it.
To answer Z’s final question, it’s the people. Our leaders have been a moralizing, missionary people from the start. Despite our founders desire to stay out of European affairs, they were more than happy to spread our values across the American continent. Once the continent was secured, we threw out the idea of not meddling in European or global affairs and dove in head first. While most Americans opposed joining the slaughter of WWI and WWII, our leaders were all for it. But I won’t let the general public off the hook. Once our leaders went to war, the people… Read more »
“Once our leaders went to war, the people fell in line.” Increasingly, I’m coming to see emotional slavishness as the key mental feature of perhaps 90 percent of the human race. This 90 percent will believe literally anything so long as it is asseverated long and consistently enough by credentialled people and institutions. And this is why the Left’s conquest and monopolization of the nodes of information, knowledge and culture has produced Insane Clown World. The Power Structure can make claims, no matter how manifestly false and farcical, about negro superiority, white villainy, the immaculate nature of Biden’s election, J6… Read more »
The reason the work hard play by the rules crowd always accepts the lies of TPTB is because they don’t want to face the reality of their helplessness. A child assumes their parents are operating in the child’s interest, instead of the parents’ own selfish materialism, because the alternative is to be at the mercy of someone else’s benevolence, a position of fundamental weakness in the Game of Life. Similarly for the normie griller/chiller set, they have to assume that those who control kinetic force or wealth generating assets via constituted authority are pursuing the general interest of the people… Read more »
As a counter to your post and mine, one could ask whether slavishness–or intellectual cowardace–is necessary for the survival of the species. Hence, if the vast majority of us were not sheep willing to be herded in a particular direction, our fractiousness might prevent the cooporation required for us to work together for our common betterment. In other words, perhaps it is better for the species if 90 percent of us credulously believe unifying lies than that we all be courageous critical thinkers fearlessly pursuing truth wherever it may lead. I’m not sure I believe that, BTW. Just tossing it… Read more »
OK, your observation that deference for the common benefit is a social good is of course correct. In reality, both collective action and individual initiative are necessary for human groups to both survive and thrive. The problem that always arises is that the hierarchy put in place to allow the leaders to lead and the followers to follow will devolve into those with authority using that authorization to take more than they are statutorily granted, because they can. The banality of evil, because We are all Mortal, and so in the end, selfish materialism will win out among those we… Read more »
A lot of people also simply don’t want the responsibility. Some of that is laziness, some is an honest lack of ambition, which I have no problem with. A lot of slobs, though.
The fear/delusion/laziness matrix is something to contend with lol.
Great comment JR. I hope that we see more.
I regret that I have but one like to give this comment.
“Middle class ego will not acknowledge its enslavement.” Gold
And don’t forget that men wearing dresses are women now too.
Citizen of a Silly Country: “…the WASP puritans have been replaced by the tribe, which wants to use the US as a tool for world domination, which they consider to be their right… This war has given the rest of the world their best opportunity to break free from the global financial dominance of the US. That’s our real power…” All last week, I was trying to hammer home this dichotomy of “not enough fake money” and “too many useless people”. In particular, I’m very worried about the physical corpus of Jerome Powell, in terms of being Huey-Long’ed or George-Patton’ed… Read more »
Commendable insights, sir. Keep ’em comin’, please.
what do you think those 12 -15 people do to that house they are renting? and what happens if they decide they won’t pay the rent? and what happens to the market value of a neighborhood full of houses like that? no, Blackrock is going to be losing a lot of money on it’s real estate holdings.
Mark it. The detainer actions that are so onerous on owners who want to evict renters will be changed wholesale so evictions become easier. I agree this is going to damage the hell out of Blackrock, which is good, but heaven and earth will be moved to try to keep something Too Big To Fail afloat. We’ve seen this movie before.
Regime change is just a fancy way of saying “covert takeover.” Install stooges in high political office which then do the bidding of the USA and enable looting of the host nation’s natural resources. The ensuing profits fund the graft of US politicians and forestall the day of reckoning when short-term national debt must be refinanced at normal interest rates, thus leading to financial collapse. And the collapse is the cure because it results in a fog of chaos via civil unrest. This fog is essential to remedy because LEOs will be up to their eyeballs in riot control tasking… Read more »
Z Man must have tripped a switch with Anton. Calling Z the “trad right”? What the hell is the point of that essay? Going out of his way to say he doesn’t want to live together post-collapse? Good grief. This is why we can’t ever build anything. Those on the right are always worried about pointless and minor differences meanwhile the left cobbles together every freak, non-white and weirdo into an effective coalition that’s willing to do whatever it takes to win. This 20 pound brain, bow tie conservative is more concerned with being “right” and feeling smarter than actually… Read more »
Anton’s essay abounds with strawmen. A few examples:
“The reason why natural right is less corrosive than nihilism should be obvious.” (You don’t say?)
” A true hierarchy is not determined by popular vote.” (You don’t say? II)
If you don’t want to waste your time and eyesight on what amounts to virtue signaling wrapped in philosophy, I’ll summarize:
Vote harder.
Also: biology ain’t real. Ask Plato.
According to Plato, only the Ideas are real.
Yes – but I think he would argue that genders, as an ideal, exist, and thus manifest, dimly, in the physical world; hence, the statues of idealized beauty.
No more real than Our Democracy, I suppose…
Conservatives of his ilk can’t bear to admit that their world is gone. They talk to both the left and dissident right as if they were errant children, but in the meantime the left controls all institutions and the dissidents are sick of re-hashing failed ideological perspectives.
Michael Anton wrote arguably the most important essay since the Revolution. That aside, he is just a more literate Jonah Goldberg when all is said and done. And like Goldberg, Anton thinks there is more grift to be had if he remains a mainstream conservative. That’s probably right, too. Cuckery pays.
I had never before heard of “Michael Anton” until just now, but a quick glace at his Wikipedia entry offers up this gem:
“He is a former speechwriter for Rupert Murdoch, Rudy Giuliani, and Condoleezza Rice, and worked as director of communications at the investment bank Citigroup and as MANAGING DIRECTOR OF INVESTING FIRM BLACKROCK.”
That’s even Deep-State-ier than anything we know about Ron “Deep State” DeSantis.
PS: I just thought of a bumper sticker for about a year from now…
Deep Six
Deep State
De Santis
Anton disappoints me with this essay. I haven’t time to read it now but I intend to do so tonight. If it’s as bad as I think it is, I won’t finish it. I have read a good bit of his stuff over the last couple of years and always have been left unsatisfied He’s a literate normie who maybe knows his way is doomed but just can’t move over to us. He probably regards himself as an intellectual but he can’t think unapproved thoughts because it would cost him his seat at whatever table he is at. Shame to,… Read more »
I skimmed it, sounds like the usual normiecon problem of thinking that believing in things will somehow stop a sociopath who doesn’t believe in the thing from pooping in their ice cream sundae.
“Another take on this is the claim that…”
How about this laughable trope: ‘If women ran the world there would be no war.’
Getting a more accurate view of how women actually behave, versus what I was told, has been at least as disorienting as discovering the primacy of tribalism over shared values.
If women ran the world, we would go to war over perceived slights over the lady ruler’s shoes at an important party.
“World War Strappy Sandals”
“Getting a more accurate view of how women actually behave, versus what I was told, has been at least as disorienting as discovering the primacy of tribalism over shared values.”
Which makes you wonder why they lied about Womanly behavior to begin with? Perhaps left over programming from the church when they wanted everyone to get married and reproduce so the church could take over lands from heathens?
Sugar and spice and everything nice my ass!
Yep. Tell the “be no war trope” to any man that has worked under a female “boss”. Nothing against women, just that I’ve been there and done that. Put them in power and in most/many cases you have a person in the room trying to show you who has the “biggest swinging dick”! Power with these people is a dangerous mixture.
Take a look at St. Olga of Kiev, a medieval Grand Princess and great adept at burying and burning alive her foes.
I judge that women are more likely to send people to fight wars to correct perceived moral wrongs than they are to send people to fight wars to protect or enhance economic/national interests. For the latter would be selfish. Either way the people end up just as dead. And either way it’s other people.
Z Man writes “It is reasonable to wonder if the rest of the world is going to continue to tolerate this 13% of the population being responsible for over half of the wars in the world.”
“13 do 50” gets a second meaning!
Hahahahahaha….
Ja, my first thought when I put thise two numbers together. Well played Z-man.
I thought the same thing immediately. Which makes me wonder…will the rest of the world be as tolerant of this 13% as America is with our problem 13%?
Except that We destroy cities and replace them with Starbucks and Walmart and Chase Bank and They destroy cities and….just destroy them.
I take issue with this “13%” along with those drools that chock things up to “the pandemic.”
Look, out of that 13%, back out the minors too young to commit crimes. Say, 10 and under for that cohort. Then back out a percentage of the women, and elderly.
You end up with more like 6-7%.
Same goes, say, with pornographers. Or financial fraudsters. take the accepted “2%” figure and back out the minors, say under 13. The women, and the elderly.
Then what you left with? Half a percent, for 97% of pornographers?
No great civilization that has left a great body of art and literature has existed that did not also produce great soldiers. It seems we cannot have one without the other.
I will grant the great soldiers (at least in the past), but where is the great art and literature? Perhaps an argument can be made for a few smatterings of literature here and there, but even those were cultivated from the classics of previous civilizations. The art (that is, what is unique to our civilization) is worse than cave paintings.
I should probably qualify that. Modern (post-1940s) civilization has little to commend it in art and literature. I do have a soft spot for art deco and some surrealism, although whether that qualifies as “great” remains to be seen. I have some doubts it will still be admired 300 years from now, but not impossible.
Here’s a list of our great artists…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_artists_before_1900
And here’s a list of our great writers…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_artists_before_1900
And our great architects…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_architects
Yeah, from the Beats onward, it was all over. The postmodern group often sucks. Pynchon – ugh… pretentious crap. Roth – oyy vey. Barth – makes me want to barf. Throw in anything by the Beats (Richey, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Selby, etc) to make a complete crap stew. However, a few writers buck this trend. I think Raymond Carver is a master of the short story – many of his greatest rank among the greatest. I have a soft spot for Updike (though he is tainted with liberalism) – he may be America’s last great man of letters. Winter of Our… Read more »
i like Updike too. read all his Rabbit novels, Witches of Eastwick, couple of others. don’t remember much politicization in there, but might have missed it.
America produced plenty of great literature–Poe, Melville, London, Twain, Hemingway, Faulkner, Frost, Whitman, Stevens, Steinbeck, McCarthy, Irving, Bierce, etc.–but its artistic, architectural and musical contributions were nugatory. The big question is where to place film in all this. Motion pictures were America’s great cultural innovation. But do films, even the best of them, qualify as high culture? To me it is uncertain.
Good list. In my adult life, I’ve watched Lovecraft claw his way up into some of these lists, like Cthulhu rising from his sunken city of R’lyeh. I wonder if he’ll succeed.
I resonate too much with Lovecraft to evaluate his “objective” worth.
“The nightmare corpse-city of R’lyeh…was built in measureless eons behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars. There lay great Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults.”
Yeah, it’s a bit overwrought.
I thought about including Lovecraft but was afraid it would smack of dissident chauvinism.
Eliot too!
“This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”
Yes. Eliot was an oversight. James Fenimore Cooper, too. And Longfellow.
I particularly favor his Four Quartets. I commend them to your consideration..
JerseyJeffersonian, “Four Quartets” is my favorite Eliot by far. It is obscure, yet it still moves me so much. (I usually have no patience for obscure writing.)
So much of that work is about sincere, yet frustrated, Christianity.
“From wrong to wrong
the exasperated spirit proceeds”
I would push back a tiny bit on the musical contributions albeit it was of the folk variety, and add the country produced some excellent theatre although that ultimately is writing, too. American literature had a limited run, though, basically from Fenimore Cooper until John Updike. The first author you cited, Poe, gave us the literary form, now dead, that America single-handedly created.
The country has produced nothing of value in at least two decades.
I like Samuel Barber and David Diamond a great deal, but they hardly belong in the first or even the third rank of composers, and I’m not sure they will ever ascend to those heights.
Jazz is nugatory?? I don’t think so…
Curious that you wonder if the world will tolerate such aggression from just 13% of the population. We’ve been doing that in America for generations. We give the 13% everything they want, and what happens? They always want more, and will burn shit down just to get it.
This joke flew over your head apparently, scroll up…
A well organized, hateful minority violently lording it over everyone else? “Many such cases” as someone once said…
This is why progressives hate the white man. This article is basically a catalog of the white man’s stain on the world. Every race is aggressive in some form, but high IQ plus evangelical moralizing equals far-flung crusades. Europeans are naturally progressive people, as opposed to East Asians, who are naturally conservative. Which side of Eurasia couldn’t keep to itself? Of course, our WASP elite has been taken over by a Judeo-elite, who aren’t quite evangelical and moralizing, but rapacious and anti-moralizing, which has the same effect. So the wars will go on, for a while longer. Time will tell… Read more »
The successor, in addition to its greed-fueled bloodlust, has a missionary zeal to spread Tikkun Olam to the world to benefit its Tribe. If anything, that group is more deranged and dangerous due to its unhinged moralizing.
Well, from what I’m seeing, the Latino-elite are here. One generation from now, they’ll basically run the country. I don’t expect the descendent of Aztecs will necessarily be a kinder and gentler elite. (Yes, I know not all Hispanics are from Central Mexico).
The Latino-elite are not Aztec descendants, but Conquistador.
Which side of Asia couldn’t keep to itself? I suppose we should ask the Mongols, Huns, Avars, Turks, Arabs and Hyksos about that.
The United States’ materialistic wars actually were more justified than its unhinged Napoleonic ventures in that the former usually provided some benefit to the masses beyond enriching the oligarchs. It is time to move beyond the concept of the United States as a democracy and acknowledge it is or at least has become a very violent totalitarian entity that threatens the world and its own citizens. Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia paled in comparison to the current iteration of the United States. As the nation enters its death throes, it has become patently obvious that unlike its totalitarian predecessors the… Read more »
Thank you for your reference to the quote from the great Robert E. Lee, the totality of which is as follows: “The consolidation of the states into one vast empire, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of ruin which has overwhelmed all that preceded it.” Lee was keenly aware of the primary dynamic balance posited for the viability of the Republic – the one so pointedly ignored by those who locate that balance exclusively in the division of the three branches of the federal government – namely, that between the States and… Read more »
You are welcome. From what I have learned and read recently Lee became even more convinced of the philosophical premises of the Southern cause after the war (the quote was from an interview with the brilliant British historian, philosopher and author Lord Acton given a year after Appomattox, for those who do not know). I haven’t determined what brought this about–Reconstruction, maybe, but that’s just a guess–but Lee obviously went from reluctant rebel to true believer after the surrender. The handwriting was on the wall after the Whiskey Rebellion, really. The same convinced lunatics, and they largely are the same… Read more »
As to the link, this is more how East Germany rolled than the Third Reich, while was a piker by contrast. About a fifth of the communist version snitched. We saw similar in the States during Covid. It was chilling and sad. As to your larger point, you are welcome. For those who don’t know, Lee made that comment in an interview with the distinguished historian, philosopher and politician Lord Acton one year AFTER THE WAR. Lee went from reluctant rebel to true believer in the philosophical underpinnings of the Confederacy after Appomattox, apparently. I can just spitball that the… Read more »
I take no sides in this:
If the embedded above doesn’t work then use this, not long
https://youtu.be/iVqQosyOpg4
I don’t think the constant aggression of the United States has much to do with normal Americans or our institutions. Rather it is a product of the who makes up those “multiple people” running the polyarchy. It’s really hard not to notice that the people running foriegn policy for a long time are a mix of immoral grifters like the Clintons and secular Trotskyite Jews. Many of those earlier wars listed were fought to either expand the country or control trade. Now we’ve moved way beyond those goals to some kind of crusade for an agenda most Americans find repulsive.… Read more »
Exactly. See my comment above.
It seems that WW2 and the controls emplaced / economic boon unleashed by the govt taught a certain segment of our aspiring rulers quite a powerful lesson.
Those who stayed home and contracted their business against some govt need oft increased the material well-being significantly — to say nothing of guys like Henry Kaiser.
But many millions, like my uncles, came home exhausted and just glad to be alive.
We’re now reaping the full outcome of that lesson.
There’s some of that to be sure, but some of it too I think is that the subsequent wars are used to justify the previous ones; that if ‘X’ war in the future is seen as being unjustified then that means that ‘Y’ war in the past was unjustified as well.
Note also that Michael Anton penned a foam-flecked rant about my post on the myth of natural rights.
I’ll start believing in “natural rights” when someone can produce the stone tablet from on high. So far, nobody has.
I like Anton, but anyone who believes in natural rights post-Covid (ever, really) is in deep denial about the human condition. Subjugation and oppression are the only truly natural states of man, and both are tolerated as long as there is food and warm shelter available to a critical mass.
There may be natural rights (or natural right, as Anton says), but if so, and they can’t be exercised or expressed, it’s kind of a moot point. If the people in charge say no way, then that’s the way it is – and your natural right be damned. I guess it’s one thing regarding US belligerence during its expansion phase – conflict was going to come about one way or another – the Indians for example, were never going to fit into a modern White society and thus had to be dealt with. On the other hand, from the mid… Read more »
The much-ballyhooed, seldom-evinced natural rights exist on paper. The Soviet Union had numerous rights in its Constitution, as does the United States. They make for a good quick read on a snowy winter day after your electricity has been cut off to save the planet.
Good point. Whether natural rights exist or not is a separate question from being able to exercise them. However, if they do exist, then it removes moral authority from any regime that does not recognize or respect them. Whether that has any practical significance, who knows. But one way to begin the process of overcoming an illegitimate regime is to undermine its moral authority. Thus, the illegitimate Biden regime’s rather harshly overboard treatment of the J6 patriots. The illegitimate Biden regime cannot let anything create a crack in the dam of its illegitimate authority. This is the only way I… Read more »
The answer to your question at the end is “not much longer”. The level of American international bullying is a frequent topic of discussion at places like the Duran, The war in the Ukraine is Russia’s stand against the globalist bullying crap. The rapid growth of BRICS is how much of the world is going to get out from under the petro-dollar and cut us loose. We killed Khaddafi when he tried to float an alternative currency, won’t be so easy when it’s Russia, China, India, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Brazil… The only question is does the empire go out with… Read more »
This is a good point. There is a huge qualitative difference between America’s wars pre-1946 and those that came after. And this goes a fortiori for its wars after 1991, which seem interminable and are hallmarked by an ideological fanaticism that would make Lenin and Trotsky blush.
He’s a “Straussian.” He doesn’t believe anything he says. He believes saying certain things will make you obey.
Correct. The Claremont Institution is not your friend unless you want totalitarianism from the other direction or, in this case, it pays your bills.
Your “rights” are limited to what you can enforce/defend through violence (when necessary). We all understand that. However, the concept of Natural Rights gives one a moral basis to resort to such force, as well as shape its goals. Even if made up whole cloth, it still serves a valid purpose—justification for resistance to those who would control us in aspects of our behavior we’d ordinarily not prefer controlled.