Note #3: Since we are getting signs of spring, it means it will not be long before it is hot, which means t-shirt weather. Just in time for t-shirt season, we have a new shirt for The Occidental Club, which you can buy here.
Most of the ideas that shaped 20th century America boiled up during the 19th century in the aftermath of the Civil War. Some arrived from the Old World before and during the war, things like nationalism and socialism, but most were homegrown ideas that arose out of American Protestantism and the struggle with secularization. Interestingly, the Progressive ideology that emerged was sparked by the populist forces at the time and is now threatened by the same populist forces.
The 19th century was a wild time in America. Prior to the Civil War, it became increasingly clear to the industrializing North that the Constitutional framework was not working for them. The Hartford Conventions, largely erased from the history books now, were a series of conferences in the North to debate leaving the Union. This process was short-circuited by the War of 1812, but the sentiment merely found a new home in abolitionism and finally flowered in the Civil War.
The post-Civil War period was no less tumultuous. Reconstruction was a failure, but a foreshadowing of what would be a feature of the progressive ideology. That is the belief that societies can be reordered in such a way that the people in those societies change how they think about themselves, their neighbors, and the state. The abolitionist fanatics did not abandon these beliefs after the failure of reconstruction. They continued to refine this belief as progressivism flowered in the 20th century.
Of course, progressivism itself is a 19th century phenomenon. It emerged out of American Protestantism as a belief that human society can only advance through relentless social reform. The same people who were sure they could reinvent society to accommodate the freed slaves as equals were now sure they could use the lessons from industrialization to reorder America and the world. Religious social reform became a secular political movement.
The engine that made progressivism possible was populism, which was not unique to America or even unique to the 19th century, but if you look at the populist movements of the 19th century, you see many of the features of what would later be the progressive movement and then progressivism. The populists were not angry mobs assembled outside of the homes of the rich, demanding redress of their grievances. They had an agenda that was mostly crafted by elites in waiting.
For example, the Ocala Demands were a platform of economic and political reforms that became the basis of the People’s Party. It was “produced” by the various farmer’s alliances that had sprung up as mutual aid societies following the Civil War. These groups were brought together in the Marion Opera House in Ocala, Florida, where they approved this list of demands. This was formally called the Ocala Demands and was adopted by the People’s Party.
When you read the demands, the first thing that is clear is that they were not written by a collection of dirt farmers in the South. It was not the work of the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance and Cooperative Union either. That was a real group that participated in the Ocala convention, along with the Southern Farmers’ Alliance. These were not people debating the abolishment of the futures markets, the regulation of the money supply or the imposition of a graduated income tax.
The platform was the work of intellectuals and reformers who saw an opportunity to ride the wave of populism to power and influence. They saw a grassroots movement of disaffected farmers as a vehicle for building a coalition in support of their reform ideas, so they attached themselves to it. It is not an accident that the populist agenda looked a lot like the progressive agenda that would emerge in the 20th century. Progressivism would not have been possible without populism.
It is why it is fair to wonder if what we are seeing and have been seeing for the last few decades is the death of the last remaining ideology, progressivism. Populism seems to be an end of cycle phenomenon. It is, after all, a disorganized revolt against the current order, which has reached its maturity and is entering decline. What follows a populist uprising is either a replacement of the old order, a reform that replaces the old elite or a reform effort by the elites themselves.
The assault on the Blob by the Trump administration, led by Elon Musk, is clearly an assault on the old managerial order. Elon Musk is the face of the new technological elite, so it is fitting that he is the point man for this task. Managerialism is the traveling partner of ideology. It was a feature of both fascism and communism. Its looming demise at the hands of the Trump administration, which was powered by a populist uprising against it, fits the historical pattern.
Progressivism has had a long run, but for most of the 20th century it served as a bulwark against fascism and then communism. Its social reforms stopped making any sense by the latter half of the 20th century and either disappeared from the agenda entirely or morphed into bizarre sexual fetishes. Its main reason to exist was to fight communism, but once communism was gone, it was left without a devil, so it has gone insane over the last decades in search of Old Scratch.
The populism that brought Trump to the White House in 2016, sustained him in his wilderness years and then returned him the White House was driven by the excesses and insanity of progressives. Populism is usually framed as the people versus elites, but in this case, it was normal people versus crazy people. The best way to describe the first weeks of the Trump administration is the return of normalcy, unless you are a member of the hive we call the left.
In the fullness of time, what this period may be known for is the death of the last ideology, knocked off by the same forces that spawned it. American populism has always been a check on the excesses of the elite, not as a physical or even political force, but as a cultural force. Ideology is always about changing culture, so it is ironic that the last ideology will be vanquished by a cultural phenomenon. The ghost of the People’s Party has finally called progressivism home.
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I wish I shared your confidence that we’ve finally seen the end of progressivism, but I doubt it. There will be progressives as long as there are perverts, parasites and spiteful mutants, and we’ve got a lot of them. And sadly, they aren’t moving to Canada as promised.
Watch Trump’s speech to congress this evening. There will be interruptions. Progressivism is definitely not dead.
Perhaps at some point we should draw a distinction between progressivism and the childish narcissism it has either spawned or enabled. All ideologies, sooner or later, to some degree or another, get skinsuited by powerful interests with their own agendas. However, progressivism was also skinsuited by degenerates with no agenda other than their own depravity. Which lately has become a stand in for “freedom.” Throwing tantrums is part of that schtick, but it’s not really “progressive.”
I’m not sure Progressivism (or, as I prefer to call it, Progressive Liberalism) was ever not shouty and narcissistic. There have been sober center-left Liberal types like Mike Gravel and Tulsi Gabbard, and old class warriors like Tony Benn, but when I think of “progressive” I think of those ugly women in the early 20th century who tried to take our alcohol away.
Modern hair dyes, piercing guns, junk food, and electric trimmers have given those women new ways to express their inner ugliness outwardly. In a way it’s better now because you won’t mistake them for human beings.
Very interesting observation: progressivism + “mental un-wellness”* = ?
(*and make no mistake: hypermedia “fans the flames”)
As long as the JQ is alive and well, we’ll continue to have Progressivism in some form or other. It’s a sad, but necessary comment on the way these maniacs think. Most of us can’t/won’t go where this sort of thinking goes. “Perverts, parasites and spiteful mutants” will always be among us, but we cannot allow the Usual Suspects to enlist them. That means shoving these PPSMs back into the closet and locking the door so they can never again be used as political weapons.
Even if it were dead, we have 10s of millions of foreigners in the country. It is simply not the same place, because it’s not the same people. Unless and until they are physically removed, at least most of them, we will never be the same country again.
We’re NEVER going to be “the same country again.” Such notions have to be put aside; and the loonies are on to something (as they very rarely are) when they allege that we “maybe never were.”
The question, then, is “what will we become”?
Whatever we become needs to be something shorn of hostile aliens.
The answer is we will become one of two things: 1) A mishmash of conflicting cultures, and/or 2) A (one) culture that “wins out” and remains predominant—but it won’t be of a Northern European, White Christian ethos. But even that does not paint the correct/total picture as it fails to take fully into account the new average IQ of the population and the myriad problems associated with a mean of 90-92 national IQ. I believe it was Lynn that claimed there were no functional democratic societies with a national IQ below 90-92. The unknowns at this point? Critical “Smart Fraction”,… Read more »
“…we have 10s of millions of foreigners in the country.” This! It’s worse. As of today, officially we have 48.8M foreign born nationals in the US. That’s 14% of the current “official” population. In 1970, it was at 4.7%—its lowest point ever recorded. So in less than 60 years, or a little more than two generations, we’ve tripled the number of foreign born us citizens. These new “citizens” were overwhelmingly non-White, and non-Christian. The rise of Boomers 1946-1964 masked the growing cancer and kept a lid on things to a point—but no longer. By 2040, the majority of Boomers will… Read more »
Exactly. Current year “progressives” are just deformed freaks looking to rationalize their dysgenic, envious behavior. Progressivism as an actual ideology died out with the failure of the New Deal.
Well said. I’ll believe it when we’ve “removed” the problem children. The permanent kind…
Filthie has been spotted sobbing over his poutine and Moosehead because the promised exodus of spiteful mutants to Canada has failed to materialize…
It would be nice if we could quit being slaves to ideology. We need to put our people first not some set of ideas. Institutions, ideas and programs exist to serve our people not the other way around.
Get your thinking straight, comrade; We are not slaves to ideology. We are people enslaved by ideology.
Focus on furthering our people could be construed as a type of ideology. It’s certainly racialism. Not that there’s a thing wrong with that.
I read through the comments, reloaded, then read the new comments, then went back and replied to gaps. Looks like I need to do another reload at the end, as your comment was not here last reading.
Very much this. I’m not sure why our host is so consumed with distancing himself from ideology. All I can think of is that he’s using it as a pejorative through some connotation rather than a strict denotation.
“We need to put our people first not some set of ideas.”
Putting our people first IS an idea. Just one that is, at present, out of favor.
Zman, the progressives HAVE changed how the people “think about themselves, their neighbors, and the state.” They were definitely a religious and intellectual movement hitching its wagon to populism, but they welcomed and were subsumed by those they considered their “elder brothers” in faith – the Jews. America no longer considers itself a settler nation, but a melting-pot immigrant nation. Instead of a united manifest destiny, we have a multi-racial ‘mosaic’ united in condemning and exterminating White people in order to destroy the bugbear of ‘racism.’ Our neighbors are not those other Whites who support ‘hate,’ they are the Somalis… Read more »
Premature? Ya think? The courts have not been touched. The unis and colleges? Fully intact and churning out progs and fem-supremacists like it was 1990 forever. The grade schools? Ruled by leftist hags, busily constructing new generations of homos, castrati, proglings and pantsuited superwomen. The military is still pozzed. The corporations openly BRAG that the Ebil Ebil white males need not apply. The Prot churches have been emasculated and conquered for decades. Institutional Feminism is organized and funded to the teeth and has not been budged an inch. Nor even recognized as an enemy. I could go on. Yes, thumping… Read more »
Essentially, the entire Leftist archipelago outside of FedGov remains largely untouched by Trusk’s entirely praiseworthy initiatives. Until the institutions, the corporations, the media and Hollywood are gutted and reformed, Leftism will continue running rampant. Right now, we’re barely scratching the surface.
Amidst all of this “winning”, not a single soul has been held accountable. Not one arrest, no executions for treason, nothing. All that’s going to happen without accountability is the left will rig something in four years and put it all back. Then they will punish Whites even more. Perhaps outright killing us. This is why the right is filled with losers. The right fails to adopt the tactics of its enemies, which is to vanquish its opposition. To become a vicious attacker with extreme prejudice is the only path to ridding us from this evil.
Not trying to be a plan truster, but they have to know this. Not just based on logic, but prior events, going back to the very formation of the Deep State. There is no halfway here. The real question is what do they do with their own people who don’t do the job. Kash Patel is already starting to look like a squish, not surprisingly.
Yep, but it’s too soon to proclaim “Trump failure”. We must hang in there. We must play the long game. Evidence? How many of the observations made here over the years concern the Leftist attempts—and failures—due to over playing their hand. Indeed, it has been perhaps Conservatism’s saving Grace. Let’s not make the same mistake.
i think you are conflating two distinct issues. the death of ideology *and* a return to normalcy. the latter doesn’t necessarily follow from the first. while trump might harken back to 1950s normalcy, very few of the citizenry do. what comes next IMO is decentralization, and the concomitant ‘splitting’ of large nations into region sized entities. large size is expensive, and a disadvantage when resources are scarce or exspensive.
We’ve been with ideology so long it’s tough to know what normalcy even is. Maybe free association is the starting point.
The HBD crowd is going nuts too. They always claimed to be about genetics and practical when it came to politics. But since the election of Trump the first time they have been increasingly rabid in their support of the managerial state. It started with covid lockdowns and then turned into zealous support for Ukraine. And now Greg Cochran is blasting Elon day and night because of DOGE. You’d think Cochran and Sailer would be excited about diversity being challenged. But no, they both hate Trump too much, I guess because he challenges a system they love. I don’t think… Read more »
I don’t know enough about Cochran, but I’d argue Sailer’s only ever been on his own side – the coalition of the self-identified global intelligentsia. His HBD was a mile wide and a micrometer thick. He would wax endlessly about black women’s preoccupation with their unappealing physiognomy, but very carefully avoided ‘noticing’ much of anything about east Asians in America, and Jews in America.
I put Cochrane in there with Francis Collins as a disappointment and a reminder that even the most cognitive who get some enduring important things correct, also get important thing wrong. No one bats a thousand, but attaching any element of one’s personal identity into any movement shaped by internationalists will lower it greatly.
Normally I insult them at length, but fundamentally there’s only this:
HBD/”elite human capital” nerds are nerds, i.e., spiteful mutants.
Look at them.
Ugly people are bad people—bad for other people. Your whole body knows this. Grug knew it, and Aristotle knew it.
That’s it. Never trust a goofy-looking man.
The Cochran question has been discussed. He lost most all credibility during COVID, whereas Z-man rose. Not entirely different from Sailer. Nothing detracts from their previous HBD teaching’s and writings however. To take these two individuals and use them to taint HBD science is painting with too broad a brush. What is it we always say about renowned scientists who leave their area of expertise to dwell/comment in socio-economic areas? We hate them, but politely ignore them. So should you.
It will be interesting to see how the breakup of Social Media, which you’ve written about, into mutually exclusive silos plays into it. The only real bulwark against Ideology in the broad sense is localism — Progressivism took root in the cities, because that’s the only place it can. If Peak Social Media was, say, 2016, when Trump used it to get elected, now the breakdown of Social Media might ironically encourage localism. Karen can’t hector the entire world on BlueSky, because only fanatics are on BlueSky, so she’ll have to get into NextDoor and do her hectoring “in person.”
Silicon Valley seems to be trying to create a new ideology: techno-capitalism. Like previous movements, they have attached themselves to the populists to gain power. That explains their flip to Trump in 2024 and them pushing their protege Vance as VP, hoping that he’ll take over in 2028. There could be some good outcomes if they succeed–return to normalcy on social issues and a focus on economic nationalism for example. But they have ‘bigger’ plans too. The worst include moving to a CBDC and full time surveillance of the population, for their ‘safety and convenience’ of course. If we can… Read more »
A technocracy would delight Elon Musk and his bug men friends at Apple. For the first time in history geeks have an economic purpose — now they’ll have a political one as well.
— Greg (my blog: http://www.dark.sport.blog)
Stop the shilling of your shitty blog already.
I’m suspecting the use of an AI being programmed to respond to a daily Z-man commentary. He should be banned for using this group in an experiment.
From South Louisiana:
Happy Mardi Gras
Having king cake and coffee for breakfast now. Let the good times roll!
Le bon temps rouler!
I’ve been to the French Quarter twice: once during Mardi Gras, and once on a random day. Both were horrible experiences. Not my thing.
When people talk of America becoming Brazil North, I think of the utter degeneracy of Carnival. Our culture is already disgusting without incorporating that display of pagan lust.
Mardi Gras in Louisiana developed separately from Brazi. (The origins of Mardi Gras in Louisiana are French). Of course, you can still hate it, but it’s not incorporating anything from Brazil. It was a part of our culture before Louisiana was American.
I find it interesting that the entire Democratic side of our national Senate voted for the rights of men in sundresses to take their clothes off in front of teenage girls.
The majority of normal people even in blue states do not support this position and it just reinforces that our representative government is just hired help for a degenerate progressive elite.
“just hired help for a degenerate progressive elite”
Astute observation and great example of your point.
Yes, this is a great bit of verbiage. I will show the respect of imitation by stealing it shamelessly and using it.
I’ve been tracking the progressive response to Trump and, well, there just isn’t much of it. Even Trump chucking Zelensky out of the WH like Uncle Phil did to Jazz didn’t muster much of a response. Considering the Ukrainian dwarf has been treated like the world’s greatest hero, that is quite surprising. It sure seems like whatever funding and organization was used to form #TheResistance in 2017 doesn’t really exist anymore, although of course I can’t totally prove it. The fact that Trump’s first move was to shut down USAID of all things also is quite interesting in light of… Read more »
“..the entire worldview we have been fed our entire lives is totally fake and government funded.”
That’s right: Our weltanschauung, F & G.
(If you had tried to convince me of such 5yrs ago, I would have…resisted.)
As de Tocqueville observed, Americans love creating and joining organizations..the Grange movement, which promoted farming and farmers, nearly elected the orator William Jennings Bryan, on a platform of looser money…Americans have decided that they no longer want to sterilize their children, import foreigners, or spend money they don’t have on foreigners and foreign wars..So what’s next?
Martin Armstrong’s AI predicts the US will break up in the 2030s into likeminded groups of States, which might well work better than the current jumble..Maybe the Hartford Conventions were just a couple of centuries before their time….
To finance the Progressive movement, the Elites here built a financial system to sustain America’s global hegemony. Ordered around the dollar as reserve currency, thereby requiring us to run trade/budget deficits, it grew as the Globohomeaux Elite realized they could finance heaven-on-Earth schemes with Eurodollars, debt and swap lines from the Fed. It might have kept working had they not had covid, imported millions of third-world savages and started the Ukraine War. So we face financial and ideological bankruptcy. My guess is that replacing the Dollar will be harder than replacing the ideology.
A little big brained this early in the morning for me, I ordered a tee shirt, read later.
T-shirt idea needs work. Given our present Euro relationship i’m not feeling it. Also a little graphic content would help.
Yeah, this one is a bit lackluster. I was hoping he would go with the “If you meet a libertarian, beat him” theme. He could have sold brass knuckles and a baseball bat with the words “Your Rights” stenciled on it as knock-on items.
I like the simple design.
If someone made a “Whites Only Laundry” shirt that looked it was worn by a sponsored softball team, I’d totally buy it.
Trump said something—just a sort of throwaway line—which in retrospect seems much more than an off-the-cuff bit. Words to the effect of “We have lots of smart young people working for us.” Even though he’s a part of the gerontocracy—and, gasp! a boomer—he recognizes the problem. I think he also recognizes (unlike a lot of us) that, though whites are already in a minority in the youth cohort—they are going to be able to punch far above their weight. Whites always could (on the frontier, in South Africa, wherever you put us) but lot of our people were cooperating with… Read more »
Everyone is open to temptation no matter how righteous they may seem now, just have to find the right button. If 10 million in Bitcoin doesn’t work, threaten mommy and daddy.
What we are witnessing is the decline of the free money gravy train. The Fed printed fake fiat money endlessly and corrupt politicians used it to buy votes and stay in office endlessly. This grift has been growing exponentially thereby making a financial collapse inevitable. Trump and his team are now putting on the brakes and the parasites are shrieking in existential terror at the prospect of having to actually work for a living. Ideology-du-jour has always been a mask to hide this grift.
Wait until all those laid off Federal workers start applying for local State government jobs, or lobbying for and working for the Democrats in the next election. Hell hath no fury..
the white ex-feds are screwed, no one is going to hire them.
Yesterday, Governor Hochul was begging them to come to Albany and take one of the 7,000 bureaucratic jobs that need filling. She said NYS needs engineers and programmers and accountants. Unfortunately, she’s appealing to hordes of unskilled pencil pushers who are/were nothing but drains on the public coffers.
‘but most were homegrown ideas that arose out of American Protestantism and the struggle with secularization’ Protestantism is a big word, covering most every Christian that isn’t a Catholic. And that’s a wide field of differences. For example, the elite women that originated Institutional Feminism in America during the mid-nineteenth century largely were rogue Quakers, only nominally Christian. They had very little in common with mainstream, Biblical Protestantism. Yet their anti-Christian movement swept, and finally conquered, most of the Western world. . . with the backing of moneyed elites. The Progressive agenda of the 20th century borrowed far more from… Read more »
One of the delusions of American conservatives was that the USA was founded as a Christian nation. It is true that most 18th century Americans were Christians but the founders leaned toward Deism (Jefferson being the most prominent example), our founding documents do not recognize any religion and the God they mention is the generic god of Deism, not the Christian Trinity.
At the end of the Roman Empire you get a huge bureaucracy, government graft, bagaudae (bands of peasant insurgents), civil wars, outsiders in the military and finally leading it, colonization by barbarians, and a provincial nobility that decided it was better to cooperate with the locally settled barbarians and not rely the Roman government which could no longer protect them. These aren’t precisely analogies because the times were much different then, but the broad decay resulted in change. A comical take on this is found in the historical novel Fortuna at the Rudder. I hope that we don’t find the shake up as… Read more »
When ideology is dead, are we simply left with naked competition for access-to/power-over resources? And what will be the dividing lines?
Z Man: “Progressivism has had a long run, but for most of the 20th century it served as a bulwark against fascism and then communism.”
It is far more common to hear people say that progressivism was communism at a slower pace. FDR’s progressive administration was full of self-identified communists.
What did Z Man mean?
“It is why it is fair to wonder if what we are seeing and have been seeing for the last few decades is the death of the last remaining ideology, progressivism.” It’s a complex topic. First of all, the post-WW2 elite agenda was to make sure that the Democratic Party expunged most of its really progressive elements. It became a pig with some progressive lipstick on it. From where comes the saying, “The Democratic Party is where progressive movements go to die.” Along with this, the Rockefeller Republicans drifted towards the Democrats in the late ’70s. I think it’s fair… Read more »
The perpetual danger of populist movements is that they will be captured by elites who then use the movements for decidedly unpopulist goals. This happened to 19th century populism and could happen to the 21st century variety too, if the assault on government bureaucracies turns into a license for unchecked corporate plunder. Corporations are no more friends of the little guy than are the federal bureaucracies.
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