The Use And Abuse of History

Posted on June 4, 2024 by thezman

In the 1976 election, there was a scene at the Republican National Convention that turned out to be a vision of things to come. President Gerald Ford had successfully fended off the primary challenge of Ronald Reagan, but at the convention it was clear that Reagan was the more popular man with the people. The institutional party took the safe route and backed Ford, but at the convention it became clear that the voters were ready to move on from the old guard.

This was largely true of the managerial class in America. Corporate America was pushing for reform against an intransigent old liberal guard. Wall Street wanted changes to the financial system in preparation for the emerging global economy and the looming microprocessor revolution. This book, written in 1976 coincidentally, talked about the looming revolution in economics that was coming with computers. Of course, a sizable chunk of the political class was ready for change.

What the convention revealed was that the public was also ready to move on from the cultural revolution of the 1960’s and the general political and economic stagnation that defined the 1970’s. On other words, the public was in a mood for reform, and they would be willing to take some tough medicine if the right man was put forth to sell them on it. That man was Ronald Reagan, who won the 1980’s election and ushered in the reforms that came to be known as the Reagan Revolution.

There were elements of the institutional left that opposed Reagan. The media called him Hitler, of course, and spent his entire time lying about everything. They invented the concept of homelessness as a counter to the booming economy. The academy was also opposed to Reagan and responded by diving head long into the antecedents of what we now call the woke religion. The Democratic Party remained trapped in the past throughout the decade.

The point of this walk down memory lane is that reform is always a top-down process that begins with elements of the elite either looking around and sensing danger or growing restless with the prior generation of elites. In the 1970’s, there was a little of both as some elites feared the country was headed to a crackup, while others sensed a new day was dawning and the old bulls needed to step aside. Once they found a champion, the reform effort took off.

Fast forward half a century to our time and we can see some of the elements that existed in the middle of the 1970’s. The world is at some sort of inflexion point economically due to the underlying currency arrangements. In the 1970’s the dollar’s status was under assault due to Western incompetence. Today the dollar is under pressure mostly due to Washington perfidy. There are serious efforts to reduce the dollar’s role in the global economy.

You also have a looming demographic change. In the 1970’s the baby boomers were hitting the labor market and the adult economy like a tidal wave. Much of what drove the economic revival was the loosening of the rules so this massive wave of young adults could earn and spend. Today we are at the other end of that long cycle as the baby boomers exit the work force. They are not being replaced. Instead, we have diversity which must be overcome to maintain the economy.

There are a lot of parallels like this. It is the reason that old paleos like Steve Sailer often compare the present to their salad days. Not only does it help explain the present, but it is comforting to think that like the 1970’s, this period of tumult will give way to another great interregnum, a time of relative peace and prosperity where politics gives way to practical pursuits. That certainly sounds comforting but there are some obvious problems with taking the comparison that far.

The first problem, and the main problem, is the country of today is nothing like it was half a century ago in terms of demographics. Instead of having a massive wave of young, smart people ready to build their future about to enter the system, we have a vibrant tide ready to wash away the white middle-class. Demographically, America is like the film World War Z where the new vibrancy is scaling the walls. No one knows what to do about it, other than build the walls higher.

Then you have the fact that there are no signs that any element of the ruling elite is interested in reform. Instead, they look like toadies of a rock band after a long weekend of partying in a fancy hotel. Theirs is a life of self-indulgence and their highest goal is to maintain the system that lets them self-indulge. What passes for an opposition in elite circles is just geezers and their dim-witted acolytes chanting catch phrases that ceased to resonate half a century ago.

Now, not all things are discussed openly. It is possible that behind closed doors in the elite institutions there are top men working the problem. Perhaps they think AI is the analog to the microprocessor. Maybe it is genetics that will be the revolutionizing force of this coming epoch of reform. It is also possible that those are just more overhyped items in an economy that has been running on hype for decades. Elon Musk is the world’s richest man because he is the biggest hype man.

Even if there is something happening behind the scenes with the revolutionary potential of the microprocessor, where is the Ronald Reagan in the political system to sell the changes that must come with it? Where is the socio-political movement that could produce a salesman like Reagan? The political class now looks like that expensive hotel room the elites partied in all weekend. It is a scene full of sadness and memories of better days that now seem long gone.

You can probably take this a bit further and suggest that Trump was the elites vehicle to make the needed changes to stave off crisis. Despite his faults, he is an oddly charismatic figure, who has wanted nothing more than to be embraced by the ruling elite of his country. He would have been a great pitchman for a renewal, but the system has treated him like an alien virus. Imagine if Reagan had been arrested at the 1976 convention instead of cheered.

Historical parallels are often used to inspire a pursuit of future greatness and sometimes they are used to command a return to past habits. We see both in this age as old men like Joe Biden feebly mumble about the glorious future. We see slightly less feeble old men chanting about a return to past principles. There is a third way to use history and that is to show that the present does not have a comforting analog in the past and therefore we are on our own to sort our future.

That is where the West finds itself now. Those who will make the future will first have to close the door on the past. The challenges of the demographic age have no corollary in the past, so the solution, if one exists, does not live in the past. Put another way, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and John Paul II are not walking through that door, so there is no point in leaving it open. The only reason for understanding the past is to know that it is not the future.

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The Revelatory State

Posted on June 3, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is the final review of and commented upon the Planet of the Apes franchise, a post about roots and leaves and the Sunday podcast, which was all about the Trump trial. Subscribe here or here.

Political science claims to have sorted the various types of political systems that have existed and could exist in the world. As a practical matter this means reducing Aristotle’s list of regimes down to “our democracy” and “fascism.” What is called “our democracy” looks nothing like democracy and it has long ago lost its liberalism. As Paul Gottfried noted many years ago, we now live in post-liberal societies. The trouble is, we lack a label that seems to fit what we are seeing.

The reason we lack a label is our socio-political system is amazingly good at disguising itself by shifting focus away from how it acts onto something else. Every month brings the official celebration of some designated victim group. There are many remembrance days for bad things that may or may not have happened. Of course, there is the perpetual foreign bogeyman who threatens our democracy. Russia is currently the bogeyman, but China is warming in the bullpen.

One way of thinking about our socio-political system is to imagine a Protestant minister who had a vision of some sort. Maybe he got a glimpse of a dreadful future or perhaps a new path to enlightenment. He then sets about telling everyone he can find about his vision and what he thinks it means. Of course, he just assumes his vision requires him to tell the world about that vision and what it means. No one ever has a vision that requires them to keep quiet about it.

Now, imagine hundreds of such people working in the institutions having hundreds of these visions. Instead of one eccentric minister claiming to have received a message from God, it is hundreds of mediocrities working in offices around the country claiming to have found some new bogeyman or maybe some new path to the assumed end point of human existence. Every day is spent hashing out these visions in the marketplace of visions and visionaries.

This sounds a bit wacky but consider the fact that it is rare to see a product sold on its features and benefits. Even the most mundane products are sold based on their alleged benefit to some cause or your moral benefit. No event is just presented as it is, but instead it is cast as part of a morality tale. A person cannot simply be famous for something like kicking a ball around or singing a song. Instead, he must claim that his fame is in service to a cause.

In all of this is the turmoil of competing revelations. June is now called “pride month” for things that up until recently did not exist. There have always been male and female homosexuals, of course, but their private acts were kept private. The concept of “coming out” is a novelty that brings with it normative claims. Somewhere, someone had a vision that said the path to the promised land is through elevating this tiny minority to the top of the social order.

The market for visions and visionaries is like all other markets, so it did not take long before imitators were on the scene. Lesbian and gay, the L and G of the now famous initialism has been joined by Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex, Queer/Questioning, Asexual and other, which gets the plus sign for some reason. It turns out that the commodification of sexual deviance has its limits. The next guy or gal with a sexual vision will be stuck with the plus sign.

While much of this stuff seems novel, and much of it is recently invented, the practice of inventing new normative claims is not new. We see it with the various alien bogeymen conjured over the last three decades. The Muslims could not be left to be Muslims in their own lands. They had to submit to this thing called liberal democracy, a thing that does not exist, but when it did exist, it prohibited the imposition of alien socio-political forms on people who rejected them.

Think back to the Bush years and the crusades against the Muslims sounded like Protestant ministers talking about converting the savages. As if my magic, everyone in Washington got it into their heads that the world was at risk unless the Muslims accepted liberal democracy. Put another way, someone, or a group of someone’s, had this revelation and convinced the rest that it was true. Those who did not accept it as a revelation were packed off to the outer darkness.

We now hear the same sorts of sermons about the Russians, except this time the doubters are accused of cavorting with Old Scratch. Suddenly, all the best people are filled with righteous anger at Russia and determined to defeat this enemy in a holy crusade called Project Ukraine. Next up is China, a country all of these people admired until they started having visions about China doing bad things. The gods have spoken and now it is time to act.

The origin of this crusader mindset can be dated to the abolitionist movement when all of a sudden, northern Protestants decided that slavery was a sin, even though Scripture seems to be fine with slavery. Not only was slavery a sin, but the slaver was an irredeemable sinner, and he must be destroyed. Why all of a sudden did masses of people have this shared vision? No one knows because no one asks, just as no one asks why all the best people now say “Keev.”

That is the other feature of the revelation state. Once the vision finds a market, no one bothers to question it. In the revelation state, novel moral claims go from inconceivably strange to irrefutably true in the blink of an eye. Homosexual marriage is the best example of how a joke became holy writ overnight. No one ever asked how this happened as to do so could suggest it does not belong in the catechism, which is a good way to get hurled into the void.

That is another feature of our socio-political system. It demands total, unconditional submission to its moral claims. It is never enough to agree on most things or be indifferent to some things. You are either one hundred percent in tune with the prevailing morality or you face annihilation. The sinners are forced to confess their sins, but always face punishment, no matter how much they grovel. Absolution is arbitrary, but confession is mandatory.

This revelatory aspect of the American ruling class does not explain everything, but it is one aspect of the system. The socio-political system that emerged after Gettysburg was built on the pre-ideological fanaticism that animated abolitionism. In time it seems to have become an ideology all its own. For most of the 20th century it was held in check by practical necessity, but now it has been unleashed and the result is decades of increasingly deranged revelations.

What we may be seeing is the end of a long sociological arc that began in the 19th century with the Great Awakening. Lots of pundits have compared the present to past Protestant fervors, but they snicker in their sleeve and move on. Instead, what we may be witnessing is not echoes of the past but the final end point of a trend that started in that period, mutated along the way into the final virus we see today. The revelatory state may be the logical end point of the Great Awakening.

The New Religion

Posted on May 31, 2024 by thezman

The show was put together before the Trump verdict, so it is not about the Trump verdict or how we are supposed to think and feel about it. It is a shame, in a way, as the topic of the show gets at the reason the regime is persecuting Trump. From their point of view, he is not just a heretic, but a genuine threat to the new religion because he operates outside the framework of the new religion.

The reason they often refer to Trump as a racist, but not an antisemite, is they associate him with the region they continue to see as a holdout, in defiance of the dictates of the new religion, which is the South. Trump represents exclusion and hierarchy, which are the things they associate with the South and what they oppose. He also represents unreconstructed whiteness.

The funny thing about this new religion is that it is not entirely clear that the adherents understand that they are following the dictates of a new religion. The low-level zombies who charged and convicted Trump are not very smart and they seem to lack self-awareness, so they are most likely acting on instinct. The new religion is just what everyone they know says, so they believe it.

This may even be true higher up. People at the highest reaches of the managerial hierarchy often talk about themselves as if they are the oppressed, fighting the gathering storm of exclusion and discrimination. The fat women in the clip I played during the show has been handed a charmed life but speaks of herself in terms we would expect from a political prisoner or a crime victim.

The joke from the old movie the Usual Suspects is that “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was to convince the world he didn’t exist.” Perhaps the greatest trick from the usual suspects is to create a religion the adherents do not know exists. The power of the open society is that it habituates the people in it in such a way that this alien religion becomes a habit of mind.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

Introduction
The Setup (Link)
The Clip (Link)
What Do We Mean By Rights
What Diversity Means By Rights
The Moral Standard Of Access

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Escalatory Delusions

Posted on May 30, 2024 by thezman

Most men can remember back to a time on the schoolyard when two kids got into a confrontation and one of them kept promising to do something bad to the other if the other did not stop whatever it was he was doing. The threat of consequences was supposed to deter the other, but the other kid was undeterred, and the result was a fight, with the kid making the threats getting the worst of it. Bullies often come to a bad end like this as their bullying is based on threats.

If you are a member of the managerial elite, it is unlikely that you have such a memory as you were raised by women, so no school yard fights. As a result, the logic of the bully, issuing escalatory threats, makes perfect sense. After all, if you can conjure something worse than the other guy is conjuring, then you win! Therefore, success is determined by who has the greatest mastery of escalatory dominance, the alleged ability to escalate a conflict beyond that of an opponent.

This is the engine that has been driving the war in Ukraine. For close to a decade the Russians have objected to what Washington has been doing on its border in Ukraine, but Washington has responded with the promise of more of what the Russians found objectionable, rather than search for a compromise. Once the Russians crossed into Ukraine, Washington unleashed the sanctions war and promised even more punishments, including the promise of regime change.

Throughout the war, the approach from Washington has been to create some artificial red line for themselves or Russia, and then cross it in such a way as to suggest all future red lines will be crossed. Currently NATO is having a debate about launching long range missile attacks on Russia, from NATO countries or with NATO personnel, while pretending it is being done by Ukraine. This is the bully threatening the kid who refuses to back down with something worse than backing down.

Unreported in the West, Ukraine has been using Western supplied drones to attack early warning radar stations in southern Russia. These are part of Russia’s nuclear defense system. They play no role in the Ukraine war, but Ukraine’s handlers are having them do this as a form of escalatory dominance. The point is to signal to the Russians that the West is not afraid of nuclear war. The madness of this is obvious, but to a great degree that is the point, to seem mad.

We see a similar thing shaping up with China. Washington is going out of its way to provoke China over the issue of Taiwan. Various officials have been sent to the island for no other reason than to antagonize the Chinese. A big package of weapons has been shipped to Taiwan and Washington has increased the number of military personnel on the island. Washington regularly talks about how it is actively preparing for a war with the Chinese over the issue of Taiwan.

A great example of how the concept of escalatory dominance controls how American ruling elites deal with the world is the last trip by Anthony Blinken to China in which he went out of his way to insult the Chinese. The State Department insisted on Blinken visiting China, where he held meetings with Chinese leaders. He then went out of those meetings and threatened them with sanctions. This was done to let the Chinese know that there is no red line Washington will not cross.

This is not just a foreign policy strategy. The reason Trump is waiting to hear a guilty verdict is the regime has always assumed that if they cross enough red lines with regards to the rule of law, Trump or his supporters will fold. For going on four years, it has been ever increasing violence against both the rule of law and the customs that have controlled our politics. The point of each new escalation is to warn that there is no limit to what they will do unless you obey.

It is the unquestioned assumption in Washington that there is always some threat they can issue that is so terrifying that the other side will back down that has led them into a crisis for the regime. Half the country now thinks the courts are corrupt beyond reform thanks to the lawfare unleashed by the regime. We are remarkably close to the point where a majority of Americans think we are ruled by lawless gangsters, which even in easy times is an impossible state of affairs.

The crisis gripping the West is due, in large part, to the fact that the system now selects boys and girls with no practical knowledge. Never having had their bluff called and walking away with a bloody nose or a black eye, they just assume such a thing is impossible, so they are free to escalate their threats. It is not so much that their threats work, but that they ought to work. In the artificial reality in which these people live, the ought is the same as the is.

The Trump trial is a good bit of foreshadowing for how this widely held delusion about escalatory dominance will end. At some point, the bluff is called, and the bluffer has to either follow through or their raison d’etre evaporates. This is the story of the bully who finally has to fight and gets beaten. It is not the beating that ends his reign as a bully, but the fact that someone stood up to him. This is what is happening with the lawfare against Trump, who has called their bluff.

Unlike the schoolyard, the end of a regime that relies on escalatory dominance is not so simple and tidy. The regime now has to hope the Trump trial ends in a hung jury so they can maintain their stance. An acquittal has them looking like fools and a guilty verdict has them in a crisis far worse than Trump winning the election. Soon, the bluff will be called over Ukraine and Taiwan. Once this happens, the regime has no answer other than the unthinkable.

Peaceful Separation

Posted on May 29, 2024 by thezman

How best to govern a diverse population is a part of the subtext of public political debates in America, mostly because no one is permitted to debate the orthodoxy on immigration, so America gets more diverse every day. This is treated as a novelty that only the best minds in the managerial elite can tackle. In reality, humans have been dealing with diversity since the first human settlements. It turns out that there are only five solutions to the problem posed by diversity.

The most common way of dealing with the problem of diversity is also the oldest way of dealing with diversity. That is for the dominant tribe to subjugate or even eradicate the alien tribes from their land. The people of one place finally get the upper hand over the people adjacent to them and wipe them out. Alternatively, the main identity group in the newly formed society compels the minorities to adopt their identity. Wiping out diversity is the oldest cure for diversity.

The trouble is it rarely works, especially when you are dealing with large numbers of people in tight communities. The Israelis are trying to drive off the Arabs in Gaza, even going so far as to deliberately massacre civilians, but they are no closer to pushing out the Arabs than when they started their genocidal campaign against them. Even with modern tools, it is extremely hard to remove a large population. It is possible, but in this age, even the Israelis cannot get away with it.

That leaves the four more civilized options. One is to simply keep the various identity groups apart to reduce friction. This was common in the northern cities of the United States into the 20th century. The old neighborhood system that is romanticized today used to be rigorously policed by the authorities to make sure blacks were not going into Italian areas and vice-versa. Keeping the peace meant keeping the groups as separate as possible from one another.

In the South there was a soft version of segregation. Diversity primarily meant blacks, who were systematically segregated from whites in largely symbolic ways. Blacks and whites could share public spaces, but had to maintain separation, even if it were mostly symbolic like riding in the back of the bus. This performative segregation was to reinforce the notion that the two races could never mix. Segregation became a habit of mind, rather than physical separation.

Both of those effective and popular systems were overthrown by the managerial elite in favor of the chaos of the present. This system does not have a catchy name, like segregation or Jim Crow, but proportionalism will do. The system of rights that had been the basis of America society was abandoned in favor of egalitarian ideals to which the elites make exceptions in order to achieve what they arbitrarily see as a proportional outcome among the various tribes of America.

The growing tyranny that must come from such a system is what is driving the academic debates about the civil rights revolution and the rear guard action to hold the line against DIE programs in the institutions. Of course, the people responsible for this disaster are not interested in altering course. They are especially uninterested in the fourth option which is to not manage the diversity at all. This was the way America managed diversity through most of the 19th century.

A good example of this is in this interesting post about an old house by one of the professors in that linked video. He bought an old farmhouse and got curious about its history, so he did the research. It turns out that his house has a diverse history that reflects the way diversity was managed in early America. Basically, people were left to sort themselves out as best they could, which generally meant peaceful separation when peaceful cohabitation was not possible.

As pointed out in that post, who people are, in terms of their primary identity, is how they live, and no amount of downward force can change it. This is why the path of proportionalism as practiced by our tyrants must lead to that first and oldest option for dealing with diversity. They are trying to wipe out whiteness, by which they mean white people, through a campaign of cultural genocide, along with the importation of nonwhites in numbers no society can sustain.

The trouble is that wiping out even a small minority is difficult. Purging America of “whiteness” when most of the population is white and determined to live as they prefer, in the teeth of the cultural pogroms, is impossible. This brings us to the irreconcilable contradiction that lies at the heart of the current crisis. For the ruling elite to remain the currently constructed ruling elite they must continue with proportionalism, even though it must fail and lead to their eventual overthrow.

What all of this points to is both a solution to the current tyrannical regime and the challenge of diversity. Because whites will remain the largest population and will increase their self-segregation in response to their shrinking majority and the cultural assault on them from the elites, the racial tyranny must collapse. Put another way, the old solution of self-sorting, the habit of frontier America, will be the rocks upon which the racial tyrants will be destroyed.

This may seem overly optimistic, but the reality is the current regime is fighting human nature, which is undefeated in fights of this sort. Ideology, and the racialized politics of this age are ideological, is hostile to human nature. Communism did not fail due to technical errors. It failed because it was inhuman. The same is true of the racial ideology of the managerial class. Peaceful separation is the natural state of Americans, and it will be it natural order again.

Trump The Elephant

Posted on May 28, 2024 by thezman

Mary was a five-ton Asian elephant that performed at a circus, until she went berserk and killed one of her handlers. For some reason, the otherwise gentle beast attacked the handler on his second day of work. She picked him up with her trunk, hurled him against a wall and then stepped on his head. The circus owner decided that the right thing to do was to hold a public execution of the elephant for the crime of having murdered the elephant handler. The elephant was then hanged.

This strange story happened in 1916 in rural Tennessee, and it is a good way to think about what is about to happen in a New York City courtroom. This week the jury will get the Trump case with instructions by the judge to convict. This trial and the behavior of the people running it is like the execution of a circus elephant. It is about vengeance, rather than justice. The circus owner hanged Mary the elephant to satisfy the lust for vengeance and the conviction of Trump is for the same purpose.

The trial of Trump has nothing to do with the law. He paid a lawyer to make a problem go away, which happens all the time in America. The claim here is that it was booked incorrectly by his accounting department. The trial was never about the alleged accounting error. It was an excuse to humiliate a man that the judge, the prosecutors, the media and most likely the jury think deserves to be punished just as the locals thought Mary the elephant needed to be punished.

There have always been two sides to punishment. The one we like to think is our motivation is side that seeks to discourage future bad behavior. We want the criminal punished so he and others will not commit future crimes. That is a pleasant thought, but in reality, most of the time punishment is about vengeance. The person who harmed us and is causing harm is what the masses detest the most. Low morality revolves around those things that harm people, society, and our beliefs.

Ironically, this is why the “best” people have relished the seedy details of this trial and now prepare to celebrate the guilty verdict. Joe Biden is set to give an Oval Office speech once the verdict is read. The reason for this is the managerial class has the morality of a servant, despite their control of the institutions of power. They look at Trump as someone who harmed them, their system of rule and their beliefs, so as far as they are concerned, he is evil and must be punished.

The Trump phenomenon has provided an interesting insight into the psychology of the managerial elite. Despite their pretensions and their control of the institutions, they are still motivated by a low form of morality. That starts with what the weak always fear, which is harm done to them by those with power. Theirs is the slave morality which is rooted in paranoia, distrust, and fear. Being a good person, therefore, means not causing those reactions among the servant class.

It makes sense as the managerial elite are not powerful in the convention way in which we think of power in a society. They are the product of a system that empowers the servant of the owner, rather than their own accomplishments. You rise in this system by pleasing those above you and managing your horizontal relations. No can ever reach a place of independence within the system as the system is built upon interlocking relationships within the institutions.

This is the difference between an owner and a manager. The CEO of a company is not truly powerful because he must answer to the owners. The power he wields is on behalf of the people who granted him that power. Those people have power due to their own deeds, so their source of power is internal rather than external. Further, that CEO must always fear being replaced by someone below him. The manager must always be paranoid and fearful of everyone around him.

Trump, of course, is not a product of the managerial system. He is in many respects the abnegation of that system. Rather than getting rich and famous through a system of interlocking dependencies, he got rich building big, complicated buildings and famous by being good on television. Trump, for all his faults, is his own man and this is the not just the opposite of managerial man, it is the nullification of him. It is the existence of Trump that terrifies the managerial class, not his ideas.

This is the other cause for managerial rage over Trump. He has choices because his power is internal. He did not have to run in 2016 and he does not have to run in 2024, but he chose to for his own reasons. Everyone involved in the case against Trump depends to a great degree on the decisions of others. They have bosses or they have a career that comes with normative demands. The judge has to act in a certain way in order to remain in good standing.

That is a key difference between the owner and the manager. The owner can separate himself from the manager, but the manager can never separate from the owner without losing all of his status. The owner makes choices based on what he thinks is best, while the manager makes choices based on that fear of losing his position. The reason the slave resents the master is the same reason the manager resents the owner. It is why the managerial class despises Trump.

There is a related motivation here. The managerial class does not just see themselves as functionaries managing the system. They see themselves as something like a priestly class that dictates the happiness of the people. This is especially true in the media which has the greatest loathing for Trump and his fans. These are people whose power rests solely on dictating what is morally right and wrong. They sit in the judgment of everyone, even the truly powerful.

The reason for this is the power of priestly class rests on their framing of good and evil, which always places them on the side of the good. They prove this by pretending to live the purest of lives according to the morality they impose. Note how our managerial elite is always preaching about things like the climate, race, our democracy, and other parts of the progressive catechism. Our managerial class is the clergy, and the elites see themselves as the high priests.

There is no one who enjoys vengeance more than the priest. The suffering of the wicked is the greatest joy to the truly righteous. For the managerial class, punishing those who transgress and seeing them suffer is their reward. It is why the media love ruining people. It makes them feel like Aquinas relishing the image of the damned writhing in the pits of hell. This is why this case matters so much. The managerial priests will get to see a wicked man suffer.

This returns us to Mary the elephant. The people who wanted to see the elephant hanged were not demanding it for practical reasons. They were weak people who lived in fear and the elephant came to represent that fear. Killing the animal by public hanging was an act of piety. It represented the triumph of their sense of justice, which is always expressed as vengeance by those who see themselves as weak. They killed the elephant as an act of revenge.

That is the point of this trial. The managerial class wants revenge on Trump for violating their taboos and holding a mirror up to their system. Vengeance is the product of revenge and revenge is the result of resentment. The managerial class resents men like Trump as a part of their organizing ethos. By running for president, he became the slave owner who came down to party with the slaves in the slave quarters. His actions remind them of their status as slaves.

In the end, that is the point of the Trump phenomenon. Despite his populist rhetoric, Trump is an aristocrat of the old sort. He is a self-made man. The question he poses is will we and can we be ruled by the servants of aristocrats or will they fail and be replaced by the natural aristocracy. Can you have a society ruled by people controlled by resentment for the natural elite? That is the question Trump poses. Whether they hang him or not, the question must be answered.

The Total State

Posted on May 27, 2024 by thezman

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.

The Summer Of Hate

Posted on May 24, 2024 by thezman

Note: Because it is the Friday of the first long weekend of the summer, I am putting aside the Crayola and recycling some material from behind the green door so I can get outside and take care of a project before the rains come. There will be fresh content throughout the weekend behind the green door. Otherwise, have a wonderful weekend and I will be back on Monday.

The attempted assassination this week of the Slovakian Prime Minister, Robert Fico, did not get much attention in American media. Slovakia is a tiny country tucked away in the eastern most part of what people consider Europe. Most Americans have no reason to care, but a century ago few Americans had a reason to care about Sarajevo either. A lot of history can happen in a small country sometimes.

The reason this could be the case is Slovakia is one of the countries that exists in the gray zone between East and West. It is part of the Visegrád Group, a political and cultural alliance of former Soviet client states. Like Orbán of Hungary, Fico is a nationalist who won office in the teeth of American efforts. There has been whispers that he could get regime changed due to his stance on Project Ukraine.

Like Orbán, Fico is an old school anti-communist, which means he is an anti-ideologue and that means he sees American liberalism with suspicion. In the Visegrád countries, it has been noted that most of the leading pro-American liberals used to be communists, with many having been part of the communist regime. They quickly changed out of their worker costumes and put on expensive suits.

The guy who tried to kill Fico is described as a leftist, but in the context of this part of the world that means he is pro-Western. Since winning election, Fico has been subjected to relentless media campaigns from American NGO’s criticizing him for his stance on Project Ukraine. There has been a lot of talk about getting rid of Fico by any means necessary, a dog whistle for the liberal fanatics.

The reason this may be a foreshadowing of what lies ahead is the reaction in Western media to the news of the assassination attempt. Instead of condemning the use of political violence, which would make sense from the perspective of people wielding power, the popinjays of the chattering skull circuit smugly suggested that Fico deserved to get shot and that maybe it was not a terrible thing.

Keep in mind that the people who turn up on regime platforms are repeating the opinions they hear on the cocktail circuit. This is even more so with Europe as these are all client states, so much of what makes up their politics is the solon culture where pretentious people compete to see who can stake out the cleverest pro-American position while making it sound European.

The reason this matters is the rhetoric aimed at guys like Orbán and Fico is the same we hear directed at Trump or any other skeptic of the liberal project. The first bullet out of the gun, so to speak, is to label them pro-Putin. Both Orbán and Fico have been given the “Russian collusion” treatment by the chattering classes. Both are called threats to “our democracy” for having won elections.

Now think about the situation with Trump. The regime has thrown everything at the guy over the last two years, but he keeps chugging along. Not only that, but his popularity is also probably higher now, and more intense, than when he ran in 2016 or 2020. At the same time, the liberal hatred for the man is now soul defining. If any means necessary was justified in 2020, it is even more true in 2024.

This is the dynamic of political violence. We tend to think of political violence as organized bands of politically motivated actors. Maybe they are sponsored by the ruling class or opposed to the ruling class, but they are organized. In reality, most political violence is the result of disorganized partisans who are set off by inflammatory rhetoric, as we saw with Black Lives Matter.

The other ingredient to political violence is that the people in charge become comfortable with it, justifying it when it serves their interests and overreacting to it when they need an excuse to use power outside the moral limits. The reaction to the Fico shooting is an example of the former and the ongoing suppression of J6 protestors is an example of the latter.

Probably the most important piece of the puzzle is disconfirmation. Political violence comes from the side that thinks the forces of good are at risk of losing, so something must be done to turn the tide. Trump was never supposed to win, so they created the conspiracy theory about Russian collusion to explain it and when that did not solve the problem, they resorted to violence.

In the fullness of time, we will look back at the shooting of Republican politicians at a pickup baseball game in 2017 as the start of the political violence cycle. James Hodgkinson was an anti-Trump kook, but the anti-Trump kooks were not shamed by his actions into toning down their rhetoric. Instead, they shrugged it off and ratcheted up their attacks on Trump and Trump supporters.

This is why the Fico shooting could be important. We are about to enter the summer of hate when the regime pulls out all the stops to defeat Trump. There are hundreds of potential James Hodgkinson types thinking they could be a hero to their cause by taking their shot. The FBI is always working up plans to create a green flag event in case the regime needs to use violence. This could be the kick-off to a wild summer.

Media And The Cult

Posted on May 23, 2024 by thezman

A mostly unexamined aspect of the ongoing crisis is the role the media plays in keeping the managerial class misinformed. It is always assumed that the firehose of lies that come from regime media is designed to trick the public, but the truth is no one in charge cares about public opinion outside the extremes. Politicians come and go, and the parties take turns pretending to be in charge but the administrative state and the managerial class that runs it are permanent.

One only has to look at the presidential elections over the last thirty years to see that elections have no impact on policy. Bill Clinton was supposed to be a break with the polices of Reagan and Bush, but things changed very little. Bush was supposed to bring decency back to the White House. Instead, he empowered the neocons, who set about making war on the world. Obama was supposed to put an end to all that war making, but instead doubled down in Afghanistan.

If you could map changes in public policy from election to election since the Cold War you would end up with a line that slowly moves upward. The only change we see is slightly more of the same with each change in administration. The same can be said of the changes in the House and Senate. As we have recently seen with the Republicans in the House, they are just a shadow of the Democrats, who shadow the Republicans as they take turns in the majority.

The reason for this is ninety percent of our elected representatives never have to fear the voters. They only have to fear the wrath of their party leaders, who are the representatives of the economic elites that underwrite the system. For the typical congressman or senator, there is no profit in appealing to the voters, if it means going against party leadership. That can only result in a primary challenge, so the rational course is to do what the party tells them.

If the political system is now immune to public opinion, then why are we awash in mass media filling the public square with propaganda? One reason is inertia. There was a time when winning the voters mattered and the media was an essential part of how the parties presented their claims to the public. Listen to media figures talk about their profession and they often sound like museum pieces. The Washington Post hilariously has the line, “Democracy Dies In Darkness” on its masthead.

Another reason for the explosion of agit-prop might be that as the number of safe seats has grown, the consensus between the two parties has narrowed. That means the range of acceptable dissent has narrowed as well. Look around Washington and there is only one acceptable position on most issues. For example, you can wail about the southern border, but you cannot oppose immigration. You can “care about working families” but you cannot oppose finance capitalism.

When a broad range of positions are tolerated, the focus is on winning the public to your side, but when the range of tolerable positions is narrow, the focus must be on keeping everyone inside that tolerable range. That is where the media comes in with its firehose of official nonsense. The point is not to sway or trick a skeptical public, but to enforce conformity of opinion inside Washington. Ironically, this was the primary purpose of the media in the Soviet Union.

Take for example this post at the National Interest. This is one of the many neocon publications used to control official debate on foreign policy. It was founded by Irving Kristol, one of the founding members of the neocon cult. The post reads like it was written by a crazy person, but that is because it is a collection of assertions circulating in the mass media for years. The point of the post is to keep these assertions circulating and therefore the default position on Russia.

Imagine you are a congressman sitting on a committee that serves the interests of the Military Industrial Complex. Image further that you made the mistake of reading unapproved analysis of the war and the war claims. You might be tempted to question the people making the claims, until you run into this wall of official opinion that sprouts from every regime outlet and every regime member. Even if you are skeptical, you will find nothing but hostility to your questions.

In many respects, Washington now operates like a cult. People at all levels are recruited into politics because they conform to the attitudes of the cult. Those who show a lack of enthusiasm are either bullied into submission or expelled. Meanwhile, those inside are subjected to a constant wave of mass media that reinforces the currently acceptable opinions of the cult leaders. The media is an endless chorus praising the cult and the positions held by the cult.

Another aspect of cults is that the people inside them lack the perspective and self-awareness to see themselves as being in a cult. No one ever says “I decided to join a cult” because no one in a cult thinks they are in a cult. Instead, they think the logic of the cult explains everything that needs explaining. To those outside, the logic of the cult seems weird and possibly dangerous. The people inside appear to be painfully divorced from reality, maybe even insane.

This is exactly how normal people see Washington. They see lunatics ranting and raving about imaginary demons, while obvious problems are ignored. One congressman after another swears allegiance to a foreign power, while hooting about China and Russia influencing our elections. This is all amplified by a mass media system that is designed to reward such behavior and punish any hint of skepticism about the narrow set of acceptable opinions.

The Real Idiocracy

Posted on May 22, 2024 by thezman

There has been a lot written and said about the decline of intelligence in the Western world, mostly focused on the Idiocracy side of it. Everyday life is getting dumber, compounded by the demographic collapse. Basic processes can easily turn into an ordeal due to stupid people tasked with operating systems that were designed for operators a standard deviation smarter than the current crop. What no one thinks too much about is how this collapse in IQ is impacting the elites.

The dream of the managerial class is to establish themselves as an unassailable aristocracy that rules over a docile population of workers. It is why they favor open borders and mass migration as it provides an unlimited supply of what they imagine to be their ideal helot class. Even if there are pockets of smart challengers out there among the teaming masses, they will be too busy dealing with diversity to organize an opposition to the managerial elite.

This is a good place to start with the decline of elite intelligence. It is not as if we lack data on this sort of arrangement. The end of colonialism in Africa, for example, is a great example of how quantity has a quality of its own. Millions of 80-IQ Africans were able to overthrow thousands of high-IQ Europeans. Today we see something similar as the Mizrahi slowly push aside the Ashkenazim in Israel. They are not as smart as their European tribesman, but they have numbers.

Israel is another good example of what happens to a society when the intelligence of the ruling elite begins to fade. For a couple of generations Israel has skillfully manipulated regional politics and controlled Washington so as to dictate results throughout the Middle East. With the Gaza operation they have shown themselves to be suddenly thumbless. The Israeli government has turned a tragic event into a crisis that threatens its existence.

Of course, we see the other side of this in America. The people running foreign policy used to know how to keep Israel on a leash. The Israeli lobby was constrained by the Jewish economic elite that largely controls the imperial economy and the neocons who control imperial foreign policy. The former cared primarily about controlling the global economy from their perch in New York and the latter cared primarily about their ancient blood feud with Russia from their perch in Washington.

The Biden administration has managed to make Israeli incompetence and obstreperousness worse by failing to deal firmly with Netanyahu. The result is the pathetic scene of the American military building a dock to supply Gaza with food and water while the IDF blows up schools and hospitals. Add in the bungling of diplomacy in the region, primarily with the Saudis, and the American empire is on the cusp of losing all of its influence in the region.

The clueless bungling with regards to Israel is not confined to the realm of geopolitics, but also turns up domestically. The Jewish lobby used to operate in the shadows, nudging key figures behind the scenes to influence policy. Now it sends out simpletons like Ben Shapiro to demand the genocide of Palestinians. The actors hired to play the role of office holders are marched out to read ham-fisted scripts about Israel and propose laws that manage to offend decent Americans.

It is not just with regards to Israel where things are going sideways. There used to be a time when the Anglo side of the imperial ruling class understood the reality of the neocons and kept them under control. The last gasp of this, ironically, was during the Obama years. Maybe it was that Anglo blood running through the veins of the mulatto mafia that ran the Obama White House, but they did manage to broker a deal with Iran and avoid getting sucked into any new wars.

That barrier to neocon excess has collapsed, along with whatever intelligence that remained within the neocon cult. The result is foreign policy is now run by a pair of slovenly imbeciles who sit atop the Kagan cult. One reason for the Israel debacle is the commitment to Project Ukraine, which itself is becoming a catastrophe that promises to overwhelm the European part of the American empire. It is impossible to overstate the stupidity required to think Project Ukraine was a good idea.

The people who think open borders and mass migration are going to lock in their position also think Project Ukraine is a winner and marching the political actors out on stage to swear allegiance to Israel is a good idea. They also thought it was a good idea to fling open the prisons so black criminals can run wild in the streets. They thought the proper response to general unrest among the white population was to unleash demographic hell on the white middle-class.

It is debatable as to just how much of the general decline in intelligence is attributable to the decline in the European population and how much of it is a consequence of the demographic collapse. This is a big, complicated subject, but what matters most is the general intelligence of the ruling class. If the ruling class is dominated by and controlled by the smart fraction and that smart fraction is rooted in the overall population then society can survive a drop in IQ.

If on the other hand, as we are seeing, the ruling class prides itself on being alien and hostile to the population and begins to exclude the smart fraction, even its own smart fraction, then the consequences for society will be catastrophic. It turns out that the real idiocracy is not with the general population but among the people who control the institutions of society. When the people in charge hire people like this to play the role of elected representative, the end is near.

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