Note: Behind the green door is a series of posts on the original Planet of the Apes films, which I watched and reviewed. There was no Sunday podcast due to the holiday, but it will return next week. Subscribe here or here.
If you are of a certain age and inclination, reading The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies, a new book by Auron MacIntyre, feels like a trip down memory lane to a time when you were discovering the major figures of what would eventually be called paleoconservatism. The text is filled with references to Carl Schmidt, Machiavelli, Vilfredo Pareto, James Burnham, Paul Gottfried, Sam Francis, and other figures who feature prominently in the paleo subculture.
That is the first way to approach this book as the writer was by his own account a garden variety conservative until a few years ago. That means he accepted the neoconservative foreign policy claims, the libertarian economics, and the civic nationalism of the Buckley crowd. The Trump years, the 2020 election and Covid forced him to reevaluate that way of framing politics. Working in the media, he also witnessed firsthand the corruption and mendacity of the fifth estate.
Judging from the number of references to Covid and how often it is used as an example in making points about what he calls the Total State, it is fair to assume that the mass panic and group think within the managerial class during Covid is what sent the writer on his journey out of civic nationalism. The state’s willingness and ability to trample the idea of a rights-based society in the name of public health, along with the media cheerleading, broke the spell of civic nationalism.
What followed was a crash course in the ideas of the “alternative right” as Paul Gottfried used to call it before that term was anathematized. The result is this book which can be read as an intellectual journey. Ideas common in dissident circles were new and amazing in their ability to explain what was happening during Covid. The enthusiasm MacIntyre has for the material will surely bring back memories for older readers who recall experiencing this material in their youth.
Another way of reading this book is as a summary, a Cliff Notes version, of managerialism and the managerial state. MacIntyre borrows the title of the book from Carl Schmidt, who called this form of government der Totalstaat, which translates into English as the Total State. He could also have used the term Sam Francis used, Leviathan, or simply the managerial state. All roughly mean the same thing, which is the all-encompassing corporate state.
Read this way, this book is an excellent primer for the person who is embarking on a journey out of civic nationalism. MacIntyre covers all the important bits using accessible language and recent examples, like the Covid panic. He makes good use of references to the pantheon of stars that make up the paleo constellation but does so in a way that does not require the reader to know about these people. It is an introduction to other modes of conservative thought and the topic of managerialism.
Still another way to approach this book is as the down payment on the long overdue project of building an alternative intellectual framework. What passes for the right in America was not much more complicated than saying, “not so fast” to the schemes dreamed up by the people we call the left. The closest anyone came to building an alternative moral framework was Sam Francis who died before he could finish is magnum opus, Leviathan and Its Enemies.
In his review of The Total State, Greg Hood suggests this might be the start or a restart of that project as MacIntyre is not just a nobody on the internet. He is a member of the so-called conservative media with access to influencers allowed to operate unmolested on the public stage. He regularly turns up on television during elections and has mainstream guests on his show. MacIntyre dusting off these ideas from a perch within mainstream media could be the start of the project.
There could be something to this as there is a gold rush right now to find something to replace Buckley-style conservatism. There are formal efforts like Yoram Hazony’s National Conservatism project and the Claremont Institute. There are informal efforts among online content creators, the sort of people I called Cosmos and those Dave Green calls the LinkedIn Right. There are lots of people searching for a New Right and perhaps they discover a new ideological framework.
The book is not without its flaws, of course. MacIntyre mentions Curtis Yarvin too many times and one is counted as one too many. Yarvin simply has no place in a serious discussion about politics or political theory. Maybe his name was dropped because he is reportedly Peter Theil’s court jester or maybe MacIntyre thinks this is a useful reference point for his intended audience. Regardless, seeing Yarvin’s name turn up in anything is like discovering a hair in your soup.
That aside, another quibble is one it inherits from paleoconservatism and that is it cannot explain why managerialism exists. Burnham noticed that it first appeared in fascist systems. Later writers observed that communism was also good soil for the growth of managerialism. Now we see American-style liberal democracy has also been overtaken by bourgeois managers. This is hardly an accident, but paleos have never produced an explanation for it.
That leads to another quibble that also comes from the paleo space. MacIntyre cannot provide an answer for what to do about it. He finished his book with three possible ends for The Total State. One is it staggers on due to a monopoly of power. Another is it is replaced by a strong man of some sort. The final option, the one MacIntyre prefers, is that it slowly dies from its own internal contradictions. Note that none of these lead to any action against the managerial system.
That was always the flaw of paleoconservatism. It was a call to inaction in the face of perpetual revolution from the top. You cannot build a political movement on a foundation that calls for hiding out in the basement until the storm passes. Even if the storm passes, what comes next will not be the work of those who choose inaction in the face of danger, but by those who have a platform that calls for action in pursuit of something different and better than hoping for nicer weather.
In the end, the judgment of any book is whether it did what it set out to do, not what could have or should have done according to the critics. When approached by any of the angles above, The Total State accomplishes the goal of the author. It is a book for those who would like a fuller understanding of the terms commonly used in dissident circles and for the people looking for a path out of the banality of what passes for conventional conservatism.
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My objection to the nomenclature of “Total State” “Deep State” “Leviathan” “Managerial State” etc is that it creates the impression that the problem is so large and intractable that it is unsolvable by any reasonable means. Every proposed solution devolves into an arcane or esoteric complexity of analysis and speculation. Ultimately you get a division of camps supporting the usual remedies; civic persuasion via magic words, voting harder, militias, secession, civil war, et.at. Why not just call a spade a spade? Our society is infected with a pathogenic virus in the form of human parasites. Although inordinately powerful, they are… Read more »
This is an optimistic take and I hope correct, but it increasingly seems the problem is with the infected and not the virus.
I kind of agree. I think a lot of people overestimate how many of der normie is actually on our side. I don’t necessarily know if that matters or not, but I do think the normalcattle isn’t nearly as angry by (most) of the state of affairs as we’d like to think they are.
The problem is “normalcattle” don’t matter. The “normalcattle” is busy eating and producing milk, babies and beef.
What matters is the elite. They are all on the same page. To the extent dissident elites exist, they and their views are unknown to others. If they came out as dissidents, they would be ejected from the elite. Elon Musk is now finding this out and his dissident views are pretty minor. I will be very surprised if Musk is not broke and in jail by the time they are finished with him.
Full stomachs account for much of the complacency, and those are going away as a matter of policy. The elites, as often happens, also have contracted the virus they helped to spread.
Machiavellis says citizens should be kept poor.
The Morpheus character in The Matrix (1999) basically got it right about normies: “The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you’re inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight… Read more »
That’s applicable to much more than just “normies”,
@The Wild Geese Howard. The rabbit hole is far deeper than even most DR realize.
The last time I bought a gallon of paint thinner it was $5.99 at Menards in September, 2020. (I looked up the receipt online. And if we could post graphics here, I would post it.) I buy it again Saturday night for $22.96. Same store, same brand (Sunnyside), but they shrinkflated it by 16 oz. People are noticing stuff like that.
I paid 9$ for those little stickies you put in books to mark a place
“Our society is infected with a pathogenic virus in the form of human parasites.” The infected *are* the virus. There is one potential solution—theoretical I admit—the removal of those infected from political society. In short, the concept of “earned suffrage”. Folks who don’t contribute, or contribute very little, or have inability to contribute to society, do not captain the ship of state. They may be allowed to partake to the limits of their contribution in society’s overall benefits, but they do not “run the show”. This is the only way to cull the herd—not some Pol Pot solution—just a quarantine,… Read more »
UK is seriously considering allowing 16-17 year olds to vote. Several US localities reportedly are trying to allow non-citizens to vote. Seems suffrage is moving in the wrong direction. Alas I think ultimately any remedies will require TomA style actions. These should remain nebulous at the present time for what I’d hope should be obvious reasons. Perhaps that is all for the best, anyway. We cannot know the future. Fog of war and all that; we don’t even have the war yet, so how could we possibly have the fog? Perhaps: make contingency plans yourself, be a bit discreet about… Read more »
“Seems suffrage is moving in the wrong direction.”
What isn’t moving in the wrong direction?
No argument with TomA style actions being most likely to occur. However, afterwards strict suffrage limitations will need to be applied in order to retain the gains made. Such limitation will hopefully assure the parasites don’t revert us to the past, while assuring no individual or smallish group obtain absolute power.
In short, we don’t want democracy and we don’t want monarchy.
The UK also is thinking about a national service program, which is little more than a disguised draft. These things are connected.
The UK national service program would also be a convenient major vector for rolling out digital biometric ID, social credit scores, universal basic income, and CBDCs.
If democracy, as opposed to Our Democracy, is to have any hope of long-term success, the franchise must be very tightly restricted. Perhaps only 15 percent of adults should be allowed to vote. Having said this, if America had exerted demographic discipline, perhaps tight limitations on the franchise wouldn’t have been necessary.
“…if America had exerted demographic discipline, perhaps tight limitations on the franchise wouldn’t have been necessary.”
Bingo! Yahtzee! Yep, we once had such innate demographic limitation, but failed to understand the benefit it brought us. Hence we failed to protect it, and here we are today.
And that’s fifteen percent of White, male adults…
Heh heh. You’re a major hard-ass.
That’s a compliment, by the by…
Even a low bar, like proof of paying at least $1,000 income tax in a year in order to be able to vote, would weed out many undesirables and give us better government. Just that measure alone would prevent rulers like Lula or the ANC from ever taking power.
I’ve often wondered if one couldn’t do something like you get 3 less votes than number of digits in your tax bill. Or maybe 5 less than the natural log of your tax bill, as someone paying $100k likely has more than triple the useful advice as someone paying only $1k.
But you need some kind of a log or root function to keep it from being just an oligarchy.
I probably favor a weighted voting system. The votes of those people we want to have the most electoral swat–married white men who earn good money, have high IQs and no or little criminal past–would be weighted much more than dumb, poor, single chicks, for instance. It might be a good idea to allow some questionable people to vote just to make them feel like they’ve got skin in the game, but to water down their electoral power to such a degree that they actually have the most minimal influence.
This is perhaps the ideal system. All of the advantages (and there actually are a few) of democracy but with most of the truly stupid and irresponsible excluded from politics. The problem is that you can’t get there from here. No one is going to propose this in the current system because it would be impossible to get enough people to vote for their own disenfranchisement.
I could see such a system being seriously considered but only after the kind of apocalyptic crisis in the current system that we would like to prevent.
We cannot know how many will fight when the time comes because the pathogens own the MSM/social media and have a vested interested in keeping that information from us. Sowing doubt and despair is far more advantageous because it keeps a critical mass from recognizing that we are far more numerous than commonly assumed. My own sense is that a lot of people are seething below the surface and just waiting for a spark to ignite the inferno. And the danger is that that explosion of anger will be directed at convenient neighbors rather than the root problem. Congress cannot… Read more »
Didn’t know that about the private jets and it is jaw-dropping. The political establishment is such a joke now it is to be expected, though.
You may well be right. However, if MacIntyre had proposed this, his book wouldn’t have seen the light of day, and if he self-published, his livelihood would have been retracted. But perhaps he should have done that anyway. For our movement to succeed, martyrs will be necessary and some people will have to make terrible sacrifices. But how many of us are willing to be martyrs? How many of us are willing to risk having to live in a cardboard box along an interstate?
In answer your questions, many may say they are willing – as long as you, or someone else goes first.
I look forward to the book and will buy and read it. As for this: That aside, another quibble is one it inherits from paleoconservatism and that is it cannot explain why managerialism exists. Burnham noticed that it first appeared in fascist systems. Later writers observed that communism was also good soil for the growth of managerialism. Now we see American-style liberal democracy has also been overtaken by bourgeois managers. The answer to the question is an unpleasant one. The Total State (a great phrase, btw) exists because people want it to exist, at least initially. The lesson I and… Read more »
The reasons for the existence of the managerial state are really quite simple. 1) Managerial types are very well organized. I mean this in the personal sense. They are the kind of people who can keep track of many things at once and enjoy doing it. Thus they tend to be elevated to administrative positions. Successful ones are also very good at networking and cultivating people who can help their careers. 2) In addition, they have a herd mentality. They follow the prevailing ethos, whatever it may be, and regard independent thought with suspicion and hostility. They are “team players,”… Read more »
Excellent analysis.
Agreed – that is an excellent analysis.
As Bizarro Man summarizes…”the state always attracts people who seek power over others and unfair advantage…a fundamental problem”…
Like any criminal activity, it requires means, motive, opportunity, and moral deficiency. The state has it in spades.
Good summary. Hayek would emphasize the trading of individual freedoms as it’s gradually replaced by [corporate] state planning or rules (and, of course the personnel and power inevitably required for those.) Hayek, being an economist, often gives economic examples. In classic liberal times there is relatively little government oversight. Capitalists, whether the local tradesman or a factory owner, make most of the decisions of what goods and services to be offered, whom to hire, how to secure supplies, etc. As an administrative state grows, more and more of these powers are handed off to the planners who rule by government… Read more »
The very citizens of a nation not only demand a prison be built, but they help design it, build it and operate it.
This explains why denial of mushrooming totalitarianism is so common. Most would-be critics quite often have been part of its implementation, mostly inadvertently, and it is hard to admit such a thing.
I have noticed that when one points out the facts that our society is rapidly devolving into a banana republic, that our elites are massively corrupt, people immediately become hostile. But except for elites and their running dogs (i.e. leftists) the reaction is not anger, but fear. One is forcing them to acknowledge something they know, but don’t want to think about, because it threatens the illusion that they are safe, which they are desperate to hang on to.
And to be fair, this fear and denial are understandable. I do my best to shield my wife from what I think may happen within the next 15 years, although she has an inkling. She doesn’t need the additional anxiety.
It’s very hard to say if this problem would repeat itself in a system without Jewish access to power. In a fascist system, I’m not entirely sure what his basis for criticism is except maybe that in a meritocracy, upward strivers have a nervous and intemperate relation with power.
I’m personally unopposed to a mixed system where the state relies on some managers and some aristocrats for its leadership cadre, but things would have to be set up to not make that a source of tension in of itself.
Fascism in many key ways resembles the current situation.
There can be no question that AINO is a fascist state. The inextricable linkage of government, industry and the cultural institutions, as we see in AINO, are classically fascist. AINO also has a preferred people (negroes) and an enemy people (whites). Hell, AINO even has a hawkish foreign policy, although it prefers soft to hard imperialism. It’s all there. The former USA is the FSA, the Fascist States of America.
Precisely. It is why I chuckle whenever people in the DR advocate for fascism. Ummm….
Nothing wrong with fascism, it just has never been implemented correctly…. 🙂
Hahaha…I thought that very line!
Thoughtful people on the DR advocate not for the Hitlerian National Socialist version of fascism but the Franco-Pinochet version.
The essential problem is that the fascist state already exists, and it is not going to devolve itself into an agrarian Jeffersonian republic.
Therefore the only relevant question is, will they control it, or will we?
What matters is not what kind of system it is but who controls it
Precisely. However, there’s really no question about it. They control it. We merely exist at their sufferance. But that’s not to say we couldn’t control our own fascist structure in some future ethnostate…
Well, if it was our fascism…
It uses the same techniques of mass population control as fascism. Unlike fascism, it is not dedicated to benefit the people of a particular national state, but rather to spreading universal “democracy,” feminism, homosexuality, and consumerism.
Say what you will about Jonah Goldberg, but he was not wrong when he pointed out the similarities between the Wilson-FDR bureaucratic warfare state and fascist nations in his book “Liberal Fascism.”
Yes, what we have here is postmodern fascism–something de novo on the global scene. But you left out the one thing it is most intent on spreading, at least throughout the West–diversity.
An historian by the name of Leon Poliakov–a Finkel’s Finkel if their ever was one–inadvertently pointed up many similarities between the Nazis and the New Left in a book called The Aryan Myth. I suspect Goldberg mined that book pretty thoroughly for Liberal Fascism, although I don’t know if he gave Poliakov any credit.
Concur. Another takeaway from Hayek is that from his view in 1944, both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, although originating from vastly different premises were virtuallly indistinguishable in terms of the subjugation of the individual and the supremacy of State planning and power. I suppose, a case of form follows function.
The miseries of war and military service aside, it’s news to me if national socialism in Germany was a bad deal for ethnic Germans comparable to how Stalinism was for ethnic Russians.
Those are colossal things to leave aside, though.
“it cannot explain why managerialism exists”
Managerialism is a sub-species of Passive Aggressive Personality Disorder.
Passive Aggression was seeded into our DNA by Massa Lucifer hisself.
Massa Lucifer fully intends to deploy the Hive Mind of Passive Aggressive Personality Disorder as the means by which to destroy the entirety of his Father’s Creation.
And the (((Bronze Age Death Cult))) is Ne Plus Ultra Passive Aggression.
That’s why (((they))) are leading the charge.
I don’t get the “passive” part from the photo, one of tens of thousands.
Jack Dobson: “I don’t get the “passive” part from the photo, one of tens of thousands.” You’re absolutely correct. However, the damage wreaked by that particular act of Active Aggression [levelling Gaza] was supposed to have functioned as a metaphor for the Passive Aggressive Bronze Age Death Cult having leveled the entirety of Western Civilization [in the abstract]. A picture of a flesh & blood human being having been trainwrecked by Passive Aggression might look something like… Or maybe like this… It’s not easy to illustrate [in drawings or paintings or pictures] precisely how Passive Aggression is destroying everything. It’s… Read more »
Topflight stuff, Bourbon. As you laid out, leveled Gaza is the least of it.
That’s leveled,Gaza? Well, I must say that, if this is representative of the Israeli effort, then it surpasses photos of bombed out German cities I’ve seen. Really, in WWII photos you can actually see structural shells still standing. This looks like a controlled demolition of structures for an urban renewal project. In short, as has been rumored, the effort seems less to remove Hamas that to remove the Palestinians.
Ah, but you see the Palestinians made them do it! 😛
I just finished Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom written 80 years ago (!!!) and citing sources from much earlier. Your post could almost be a book report.
Good points. As for the people… I have been saying too many people want to ride in the wagon and not enough want to pull it. The Plato death of democracy, voting oneself a raise and all.
I suspect things will disolve into some flavor of regional factionalism with strong local leadership post collapse.
I have been wondering if we will have electricity in the future. Seems doubtful.
Electricity has been a widespread thing less than 125 years. The complex systems that require it not so much. Bill Gates blocking the sun with debris might kill millions if not billions. Loss of electricity to support our complex systems definitely will do so.
The book “One Second After” is about an EMP taking out the American power grid. It’s pretty good. The ending is a bit optimistic but it is a novel.
Perhaps your book, if you ever finish it, will suggest a viable course of action against the managerial state. If you stop with the monkey posts. 😀
I might add, that with societal degradation speeding up, delay of completion of “the book” may mean *impossibility* of completion. The thoughts you put down may well be passé before publication. Publish first, then continue to revise as necessary.
RETVRN TO MONKE
For daily commentary, yours is the best succesor to Sobran, Buchanan and Francis. Different, and made for our day.
Yeah. Pretty common theme these last several years. Someone from more or less mainstream conservatism does that thing where they notice the thing, write up a pretty good description of the depth of the problem (avoiding that one thing that must be avoided because of all those shoes) and pointing to absolutely no solution whatever. Vote harder, someone will save us, maybe this whole thing will just break itself. Someone observed that the main dividing line on our side is between the racist liberals (e.g. Steve Sailer: it’s the bleqs, and we need to get a coalition to vote to… Read more »
If you follow Jeremy Carl’s “The Unprotected Class” to its logical conclusion even though the author shies away from his reporting, the destination of America is inevitably Rwanda circa April/May/June 1994. There can be only that ending to the central ideology of what animates Western Society: hate for YT. And it is completely entwined in the Managerial Class. It is probably better to ask, where does the Managerial State not exist? It seems not to exist much in Japan, in Latin America, and Russia and China. In the former, various political and cultural patronage networks prevent the Managers from achieving… Read more »
I only can speak to Japan from the time I lived and worked there and it was some time back. You are close. Japan continues, albeit to a far lesser extent than in the past, to be a hierarchal and patriarchal society. The remnants of its rigid class system remain and Burakumin still are looked down on, for example. Of course, the Usual Suspects tried and for a while did push Japan into affirmative action and other destructive actions. Shinzo Abe tried to reverse some of that, and you know what happened to him. Japanese widely suspect the elements we… Read more »
How about trying Milei’s method? Just start eliminating whole departments, agencies, and cabinet members by executive order! Trump, of course, is unlikely to do any such thing, but he could start with the FBI, which was established by an EO…nobody deserves to be cancelled more…
If memory serves the Dept of Education was created by EO also, among others. But in AINO, the court would come up with some reason for saying that what was created by EO cannot be rescinded by EO. It has already happened, re: counting illegal aliens in the census.
Eviscerate HUD and the Dept. of Indoctrination first. Creatures like booker use it to destroy our neighborhoods and flood them with the biological garbage of the planet. As to the latter, everyone here knows that it is because of this dept. that our education system has gone in the toilet.
eliminate both of those depts – to start with – and use the money somewhere else.
The problem with the Millie’s method is that the system will survive such an action—outlive Millie (he’s a relative term limited treatment)—and then grow back. Something akin to a cancer tumor not fully removed.
Big agree on yarvin. He’s 100 percent an undesirable and should not be counted as a serious person in this thing of ours, like someone like BAP or any of the chosen that would really like it if they could speak for us.
Ok I’ll bite, what’s the problem with Curtis Yarvin? I think his understanding of political history is top-notch, and while his political theory (i.e. going back to some form of monarchism) may sound far-fetched at first glance, it does have some decent points; and he’s just as cutting as Z-man himself when it comes to pointing out the flaws of mainstream conservatism.
Sounds like you need to lurk more.
You are grasping at straws if you think MacIntyre is any form of wedge for dissidents to have any influence or did I read this incorrectly. Johnny come latelies with some mystery meat baggage don’t give me much hope.
I wish I could say more but events and system-political collapses will have to happen. You are right though, we can’t wait for it to happen without some action and creating alliances for when opportunity presents itself.
The “State” is a very physically ugly group of people to look at, with a hand always in your pocket. Evildoers, that self-define as the ‘good people’ while marking you and yours as the opposite. Grandstanding, ever-present, braggarts, filled to the brim with threats. Personified by divorce lawyers that nudge their weak-minded female clientele, ‘you know’ maybe there was a little abuse… you know…’ Ready to tell you what was ‘wrong’ with their first and second wives while seeking their third. Believe ‘business’ is providing the least, for the most as long as not sued or sued for more than… Read more »
?!?!? (((Yoram Hazony))) ?!?!?
WTF == what da ph0rnication, Bro?
“MacIntyre cannot provide an answer for what to do about it…You cannot build a political movement on a foundation that calls for hiding out in the basement until the storm passes.” Yes, it all starts with us. At grassroots level. Small, determined, unglamorous decisions – from homeschooling to boycotting to refusing to join the military, to contributing small donations to activists like Rufo or Zman, the list is practically endless – which eventually add up to massive societal change. We don’t need some supposed strongman to swoop in and rescue us – how did Trump work out, after all? –… Read more »
“…another quibble is one it inherits from paleoconservatism and that is it cannot explain why managerialism exists. Burnham noticed that it first appeared in fascist systems. Later writers observed that communism was also good soil for the growth of managerialism. Now we see American-style liberal democracy has also been overtaken by bourgeois managers. This is hardly an accident, but paleos have never produced an explanation for it.” The answer is that democracy, fascism and communism are all materialist, post-industrial political philosophies. As such there is more similarity between them than difference. The difference is essentially one of managerial technique in… Read more »
I don’t want to be too negative about MacIntyre, because anything that introduces Normie to Carl Schmidt is objectively a good thing. However, this ground was better plowed by Neema Parvini’s “The Populist Delusion”, without any Panglossian implications that we can vote our way out of this. Only a revolutionary circulation of elites will suffice. This is why all of these popular press books ultimately fail. The authors cannot advocate systemic revolution and maintain their legacy media access, so they all invariably punt. Yarvin was important at one time as a “gateway”, but his relevance has diminished as he has… Read more »
MacIntyre is employed by Glenn Beck.
I understand he’s working within the system but it is not possible to make a substantve critique of the present catastrophe if you support AIPAC and its policies.
Parvini Rug Emporium and Trivium While U Wait has the right of it. This (officially at least, and probably anyway) is a long-haul, multi-generational thing and there can be no easy quick fixes. Local resistance, parallel institutions, etc. are all good and necessary, but the necessary circulation of elites is another thing entirely and without it, you’re left with Trump and MAGA sorts flailing around not knowing how to grasp the levers of power whilst slurping their peas off their knives with caps on backwards. As for prescriptive dicta, Parvini & Co appear to subscribe to the First Rule of… Read more »
“All within the state. Nothing outside the state. Nothing against the state.” – Benito Mussolini
That pretty much sums things up, today. And that guy died 79 years ago.
Liberals fixated on mustache man and fascism are just doing what they always do: telling us who they are and what their objective is.
People have trouble defining the total state, but the fascists through Il Duce had a pity definition that I’ve always used.
Good old conservatives. Yammering away while the ship goes down. I detest Karl Marx and the misery that his ideology has caused, but by golly, he was right about one thing: the point is not to understand society but to change it.
“That aside, another quibble is one it inherits from paleoconservatism and that is it cannot explain why managerialism exists.” I think Quigley does a good job of this. I quoted him at length a while back on here. Tragedy and Hope, chapter XVI, The New Age. “That leads to another quibble that also comes from the paleo space. MacIntyre cannot provide an answer for what to do about it.” “The final option, the one MacIntyre prefers, is that it slowly dies from its own internal contradictions.” Imo, the vaxx. Drinking the kool aid. Call me a nut job lol. If… Read more »
“Falls apart from its own contradictions” is a disingenuously sanitized way of saying that the civilization will collapse under its own weight with catastrophic repercussions for most people.
Either inflation or deflation* is the end. The GAE (albeit diminished) can likely stagger on through anything else**. It’s all about the money. The narrative about the collapse of the USSR, for some inexplicable reason, usually tends to ignore the 300% inflation at the end.
*Deflation had a go at it in the 1930s but things held together. There’s books about it
**barring asteroid strikes, yellowstone caldera, nukes etc.
I expect ambitions of tyranny from tptb, but the people’s servile willingness to be managed I’ve witnessed the past few years has shocked me more than anything that’s come from above.
The whole high trust thing has been the result of mutual accountability, and it’s broken.
Things have gone horribly wrong! How do I get in on it? That’s not my nature, so I’ve always rejected that aspect of The Right™. Success, status, recognition, etc., are not righteousness. What is emerges from an incredible mess of mostly nonsense, but if an evil and stupid system rewards you, you are at the very least mistakable for something evil and stupid enough not to trigger its immune system. That should inspire severe self-examination, not implorations for Thielbux. If actual existing hierarchy were the true judgment of Eternity (or whatever), rather than a great error/injustice, things wouldn’t have gone… Read more »
[…] ZMan pushes the red pill. […]
Liberalism (including the American variety) is a revolutionary ideology and the inherent utopianism of revolutionary ideologies always leads them to create the tyrannical total state. It has just taken a bit longer here.
A good book on the subject of liberal democracy and tyranny Is “The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies” by Ryszard Legutko.
Legutko grew up in communist Poland and later watched democracy adopt the same sort of controls on its populace as the Communists did.
It exists because of Jewish influences
liberal democracy and communism for population control or for looting host society via subversion
Sassoon family was a powerful jewish family rule over Shanghai, they are a main player of opium trade
after Chinese communist took over the powers they confiscate the sasson family’s assets
Han-Chinese knows what nature of Jewish are, and how to deal with them
problem will solve when white men confiscate Jewish wealth and expel them
You wrote that Han-Chinese knows what nature of Jewish are, and how to deal with them. The history of Maoism suggests otherwise. In fact, 85 to 90% of the foreigners helping the Chinese at the time of the Communist takeover were Jewish. We’re all familiar with the general features of what followed the Maoist takeover. So it looks like many Han were played for fools by some people who wanted to subvert and destroy the cultural basis of an independent Han people. This is how the suspects have rolled for thousands of years, doing so directly or through proxies. The… Read more »
The State: As Seen on TV
[…] a review of Auron MacIntyre’s Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies, Z-Man […]
[…] a review of Auron MacIntyre’s Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies, Z-Man […]
“Not so fast!” Hehe! Oh Mr man, I can’t mad at you!
A brief comment here that really doesn’t have much to do with the subject of the article. Yoram Hazony’s National Conservatism is, I think, a horrible “remaking” of American “conservatism” or the American right. If one reads through his book, he basically repudiates every historical American on the right. I find no value in his work at all. It simply seems like another effort by Republican party politicos to corner the American right in a Republican party myth.
Not for your nation, anyway.
At least three questions ought to be asked about the principals and their objective. Examples:
• Whose nation?
• What is to be conserved?
• What are the good reasons for conserving that?
• What are the other reasons?
• Who are the ringleaders?
• Whose money pays for it?
• How did the payers obtain their money?