Then, Now and Tomorrow

Posted on February 7, 2022 by thezman

Note: The Taki post is up and related to the today’s post. The ongoing debate about the future of conservatism is interesting to me. It is good that such a thing is happening, but so far it reveals that we are a long way from having a sensible debate. The participants are still locked into an antiquated mode of thought. Sunday Thoughts is up behind the green door for subscribers as well.

Recently there has been a slow rolling debate among right-wing intellectuals about the state of conservatism and what comes after conservatism. The New Criterion held a symposium on “common good conservatism.” The James Wilson Institute has been debating originalism and legal conservatism (here, here, here and here). Josh Hammer from Yoram Hazony’s group has also been writing about that topic. This debate has also spilled into the foreign policy realm.

There are plenty of others chiming on the topic, but the starting point, even if it is not acknowledged, is that conservatism is done. Whatever comes next may carry the name, but it cannot be the same thing. Interestingly, the old Buckley crowd is not a part of this debate, nor are the neocons. They are too busy hanging onto their sinecures to think much about what comes next. The paleocons have also been left out of the debate, which is ironic given that they were right all along.

As is to be expected with people who view themselves as political theorists, the back and forth is not always accessible. This is especially true with regards to the debate around conservative jurisprudence. It is in that debate, however, where we see the first little green shoots of realism. In this essay the writer points out that there will never be a great rollback of the school prayer decisions. The main reason is no judge or lawyer would ever think such a thing is proper.

The great transition from the original constitutional order to what we have today did not happen in a vacuum. The people have changed, the institutions have changed and the people running the institutions have changed. The writer points out toward the end that the truth is the original social order that is so popular with “constitutional conservatives” no longer exists. America, from top to bottom, is a different world from the one that produced the Constitution.

This is the problem with the current debate about the state of the nation and especially the state of conservatism. The starting point is always the belief that things can be rolled back or reset to a prior order. It is a political revanchism where the plotters seek to reestablish the old order, but this time the people in charge of that order will not be so willing to change it. The proposed alternatives to conservatism promise a return to the past, without regard for how we got to the present.

If there is going to be a New Right in America then the starting point must be a discussion about how we went from the 18th century liberal political system to the present custodial state. In other words, it means retracing our steps in order to find the point at which America went off the course charted by the Founders and instead embarked on a new path for the country. It is in the essay about school prayer that the original sin begins to come into focus.

The writer points out that those school prayer decisions were the result of the consolidation of judicial power under the incorporation doctrine, which is the doctrine by which portions of the Bill of Rights have been applied to the states. In the case of school prayer, the courts extended the prohibition on the federal government regarding official religion to the states. Later courts extended the definition of “official religion” to include any reference to religion.

Clearly, the Founders never intended the establishment clause to apply to the states, as it was never applied to the states until the 20th century. The question is why did the court suddenly decide to apply parts of the Bill of Right to the states and by what authority did they do this? The answer is the 14th Amendment, passed as part of the constitutional reforms following the Civil War. Of course, the reforms were imposed by the victors as part of the spoils of war.

The Civil War did not happen in a vacuum. The roots of that conflict go back to the English Civil War and the founding of the first colonies. Note that the victors of the American Civil War were not the primary hand drafting the Constitution. It was men of the South, with their roots in the cavalier side of the English Civil war, who carried the day on important debates forming the new Constitution. It was the losers of those debates who carried the day seventy years later.

Another way of framing this is that the constitutional order so beloved by originalists did not hold up very well to challenge. It collapsed in the 19th century and since then the victors of the long running debate dating back to the English Civil war have been trying to refashion a new order and a new society. If conservatives are going to find a new path forward, they must come to grips with the present. That means reexamining the past in order to understand why their preferred model failed.

This is why the current debate over conservatism is sterile. No one in that debate is willing to reconsider the 19th century and the events that transformed the country from that which the Founders designed to what emerged in the 20th century. The events of the 19th century are now holy writ. The second founding doctrine is just as entrenched with conservatives as it is on the Left. In fact, both sides compete for who best can achieve the perfect equality promised by the doctrine.

The starting place for a new conservatism is the acknowledgement that the founding creation failed the test of reality. That naturally leads to a debate as to why it failed, which is a debate about the 19th century. That, in turns, means a rethinking of the 20th century in order to gain a clear understanding of the present. Once a new historical framework is in place, then a New Right can begin to chart a new course for itself and the society in which it operates.

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Some Greek

Posted on February 4, 2022 by thezman

One of the fun parts of studying the ancient world, even for an amateur, is that you see that the problems of the human condition are immutable. The issues we face today have new characteristics, but they are not new to man. The Ancients had the same sorts of problems because they had the same sorts of people. Then as now, there were people who lived to create trouble. There have always been people nibbling at the support cables of society, hoping for disaster.

Of course, the Ancients could not afford to indulge their fantasies about themselves or the world, so their solutions were to the point. An office holder who betrayed his duty to the office was forced to commit suicide. People who committed crimes, even small crimes, faced rough judgment. Much of what ails the modern age is the unwillingness to deal with the problems of society. As a result, they have metastasized to the point where they seem intractable.

Even so, it is settling to read about how the Ancients worked through the problems of society as it is a reminder that this is a constant. It is also comforting to see that even the most brilliant people of the age got things wrong. Just as troublemakers and subversives are a fixture of human society, wrongness is a universal constant, even among the most brilliant of the age. It is a good reminder that appeals to authority are often an excuse for not questioning authority.

For the show this week I plucked out a handful of not so famous Greek thinkers and did a short segment on who they were and what we can learn from them. As I said in the opening, the show is a bit of self-indulgence on my part. I like reading about this period in Western history, so I like talking about it too. I usually like to keep the show somewhat related to the issues of the day, but every once in a while, it is good to do one for the sole purpose of making the host happy.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening
03:00: Lycurgus
13:00: Solon
23:00: Draco
33:00: Zaleucus
43:00: Parmenides
53:00: Democritus

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The Great Embarrassment

Posted on February 3, 2022 by thezman

Form the perspective of human society, there are two types of crises. The most familiar type of crisis is the unforeseen event that threatens order. A natural disaster, like an earthquake, is the obvious example. The ground suddenly begins to shake, buildings fall over and there is general panic. The people tasked with keeping the wheels of the society turning have to rush around to put things back in place. This unexpected event threatens the very order of society.

On the other hand, something like a hurricane or a major snowstorm is an external threat for which we expect the government to be prepared. Florida gets enough hurricanes that the people expect the government to know how to handle them, so if they do not manage the situation properly, it is a big problem. The elected officials come under pressure to explain why they screwed up. In other words, their failure to do their jobs causes a crisis for the political system.

The external crisis is mostly about getting through it as the external event does not last forever, so once it is done you go back to normal. The other type of crisis, on the other hand, is the internal one. This is where some irreconcilable contradiction in the rules of your system begin to threaten your system. It is not something you can wait out, as the contradiction is not going away. In fact, its existence becomes a greater threat each day that it is not resolved or ameliorated.

The Marxists used to talk about the inherent conflicts in capitalism. They argued that even though capitalism produces great material abundance, it destroys the social fabric that make it possible. Over time, the rate of return on capitalism will turn negative and the abundance will decline. This inevitably leads to social conflict and the collapse of the system. It was central to Marxism that the inherent contradictions within capitalism would inevitably lead to crisis.

The thing about a crisis driven by an internal contradiction is that it forces the people in charge to make a choice that they want to avoid. The communist ran into this when it became clear that Marxism had no replacement for price. If they acknowledged this truth, the justification for their rule evaporated. Alternatively, they could acknowledge that communism would never produce abundance, but then they would have to produce another justification for communism.

This story out of the NFL is a great example of the sort of irreconcilable contradictions that exist in the new social religion of our rulers. The assumption is that there are not enough black NFL head coaches. No one says what the number should be, but they all agree the current number is below the threshold. This is a habit you see everywhere with the new religion. What is the right amount of diversity? The answer is always more, but no one can say more than what.

What all of the beautiful people know is that the number of black coaches is less than the desired number and that is because of racism. All men are created equal, so what else could explain the disparity in the profession? Further, most coaches were players and most players are black. The logic of social Marxism says that the only possible explanation is some hidden barrier or conspiracy. The reason racial perfection does not exist is something structural.

That hidden barrier is always structural. The new religion insists that society is a constructed reality. In this case, as in all cases, white men constructed the reality, so it must be for the benefit of white men. That means the system naturally works against black men, which in this case means hidden or unconscious bias in the hiring of NFL head coaches. The solution is to compel teams to interview at least two black coaches as a wrecking ball against the white power structure.

This bit of logic is slamming into the reality of the business. Teams not only need to win games as a business reality, but they attract owners and executives who want to win games out of competitive instinct. This leads to two relevant results. One is they are always looking to exploit loopholes in the rules to gain an edge. The other is they are going to hire the coach they think can win. A team will hire a Volkswagen Beetle full of midget clowns if that means winning games.

Put another way, the inherent contradiction of the new social religion turns on the fact that the human condition is immutable. They may dream of a world of perfect equality, but men are not equal in the general sense or the particular sense. Therefore, human society is going to be defined by variation and inequality, reflecting the diversity of the people in that society. In the case of football, most players will be black, while most coaches will be white.

The crisis is that the true believers think their good intentions put them on the side of angels, which in this case means the side of nonwhites. In reality, they are alienating the people they claim to represent. Imagine being a young black coach hoping for a chance to be a head coach and quickly learning that your value is in ticking the box on a form required by the league. Regardless of your views on race relations, you have to empathize with this coach suing the league.

What the policy does is reveal that you can have a league where everyone tries to win or you can have a league where everyone tries to comport with the new racial morality of the new religion. You cannot have both. That means the owners can choose between wanting to be a hero to the black man or satisfying the needs of the business. In order to do both, they need to find a way to crush the dreams of this and other black coaches in the name of racial equity.

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at it. The NFL is run by some of the most disreputable grifters finance capitalism can produce. The owners are mostly men who gamed the system to skim billions from the people. They have produced nothing and will leave no footprints when they are gone. The NFL is the full expression what is wrong with placing carnies at the top of the social order. No people deserve this misery more than the NFL owners and operators.

Of course, the NFL is the part of the iceberg we see. They represent the managerial elite of the American empire. This NFL policy is about soothing the sensitive psyches of the managerial elite. It is not really about the black coaches. It is about the elites and their need to reconcile their position in society. Instead of building monuments to their people or culture, they are building monuments to themselves by supporting these reckless social engineering schemes.

It is ironic that the people who come from an intellectual tradition rooted in the belief that the inherent contradictions of capitalism will bring down the system and usher in the communist utopia now sit atop a system riddled with internal contradictions. In the fullness of time, scholar will debate how it was possible that radial politics could be wrong about so much and stagger on for so long. The Enlightenment will inevitably be renamed The Great Embarrassment.

Ukraine On The Brain

Posted on February 2, 2022 by thezman

The surest way to lose an argument is to concede the premise put forth by the person taking the other side of the debate. His starting premise is, at the very minimum, not harmful to his argument. Most likely, he starts with a premise that makes his conclusions inevitable. It would be insane to start from a premise that must lead to a contradictory conclusion. If you concede his premise without considering this strong possibility, you are sure to lose the debate.

This is why it is always good to be wary of people who claim to support your argument, but who insists upon conceding the premise of your opponent. Either that person is stupid or they are trying to undermine your argument. This has been the history of conservatism in America. They concede the premise to the Progressives, while claiming they can win the argument against the Progressives. This was famously observed by Robert Lewis Dabney a century ago.

Victor David Hanson has a post about Ukraine that is a good example of how the so-called conservatives concede the moral high ground. He opens with what is best described as a gratuitous assertion. “Americans want an autonomous Ukraine to survive. They hope the West can stop Russian President Vladimir Putin’s strangulation of both Ukraine and NATO.” No evidence is offered in support of this assertion, because no American outside Washington cares about Ukraine.

His third sentence is even more divorced from reality than the first. “Most Americans oppose the notion that Russia can simply dictate the future of Ukraine.” The truth is, most Americans do not care about this part of the world in the least. Russia could turn Ukraine into a nuclear testing zone and most Americans would only care if it made for some interesting video. Otherwise, Ukraine is down there on the list of concerns with land management in Uzbekistan.

What Hanson is up to here is making the old neoconservative case for endless intervention in the world. That case has been built on the claim that Americans care about the world and Americans will support the costs of meddling in the affairs of far away places like Ukraine. Neoconservatism has always rested on a manufactured consent of the majority. This appeal to the will of the people provides the moral authority for endless intervention in the world.

When the premise of the debate is that the American people care deeply about the territorial integrity of our ancient ally Ukraine and they are committed to stopping our ancient enemy Russia, there is only one plausible conclusion. The to-ing and fro-ing he goes through in that post is just window dressing. If the people demand the safety of Ukraine and define that as the rejection of Russian interests along their border, America has no choice but to be enmeshed in this conflict.

The rhetorical sleight of hand does not end there. Hanson makes clear that this conflict would be over if Putin respected Biden and his team. You see, despite the bellicose language from Team Biden, they are appeasers. Their tough talk about Ukraine is really just a coded surrender of Ukraine. Everyone knows that only one man in human history was ever appeased, so when you think about it, Ukraine is the Sudetenland and Joe Biden is this generation’s Neville Chamberlain.

The argument here is totally bonkers, but it is the natural result of conceding the premise of empire. Once you accept that America has a right and duty to arrange the world to reflect the current values of American elites, there is no conflict too small or too far away that does not demand intervention. In fact, Americans must naturally demand intervention, as to do other wise would be to let evil triumph. This is neoconservatism tarted up with some populist sounding handwringing.

This is why non-interventionism is seen as a bigger threat to the current order than a nuclear exchange with Russia or war with China in the Pacific. To accept the fact that there are some places around the world that are not the business of the American empire opens the debate about the limits of empire. Once we accept that there is a line beyond which it is immoral for us to go, the debate is about where to draw the line and neoconservatism has no argument for this.

Further, if we concede that Russia has legitimate interests in Ukraine, rooted in their history and culture, then we must concede that history and culture exists as something other than social constructs. In other words, to take the claims of Russia seriously is to question a fundamental premise of the current order. This is where it becomes plain that American interests in Ukraine have little to do with reality on the ground and everything to do with the prevailing morality of Washington.

This is why the neoconservatives insist that the American people have a strong interest in protecting Ukraine. If they can make that the premise of the debate, there is never a reason to question the endless meddling in the region. The debate is about how to meddle in their affairs, not whether we should meddle in the region. The former serves the interest of the neocons, while the latter excludes them from the debate, something that needs to happen sooner rather than later.

Wide Right

Posted on February 1, 2022 by thezman

In January, The New Criterion organized a symposium around the topic of the changes in the conservative movement. They invited several writers to respond to the main essay written by Kim R. Holmes, the former Executive Vice President of The Heritage Foundation and former Assistant Secretary of State in the G. W. Bush Administration. The respondents are Ryan T. Anderson, Josh Hammer, Charles R. Kesler, Daniel J. Mahoney, James Piereson, Robert R. Reilly, and R. R. Reno.

Now, if this were a boxing match, it would have been called in the second response to Holmes, written by Josh Hammer, a member of Yoram Hazony’s National Conservatism movement. Hammer offers a lengthy critique of conservatism but the subtext is a bit of inescapable reality. The conservative movement, whatever its intensions, was a complete failure. It conserved nothing. In fact, it may be the biggest failure in the history of political movements.

Conservatives often respond to this with the claim that it was conservative foreign policy that defeated communism in the last century. That is true, but the point of defeating communism was to preserve American’s way of life and protect the ancient liberties of Western people. Winning the Cold War was supposed to be a means to an end, not an end in itself. Instead, the peace dividend has been spent up-armoring the administrative class and the increasingly tyrannical security regime.

One reason conservatism is in a crisis is the defenders of the movement refuse to acknowledge this reality, which calls into question their sincerity. The Holmes essay does not mention this fact and instead offers a long critique of the critics. In so doing he inadvertently reveals the source of the crisis within conservatism and the cause of its failure. His defense of John Locke displays an ignorance of why Locke mattered to the Founders and why he matters today.

Locke is considered the father of liberalism because he solved an important problem. Upon what authority should political philosophy rest its claims about politics and human society? If it is not the king and the social order that was passed down to the 17^th century, then what should it be? If it is God, then it logically must be Scripture, but the Gospels are not much help when it comes to creating a political structure to govern society. Jesus had no opinion on parliamentary order.

Locke was a Christian who accepted that God created the world. Since God must be rational, it follows that his creation is rational. Further, it follows that he knew what he was making when he created the world. He would have no need to change those rules, as God does not make mistakes, so it follows that the rules of nature are fixed. Mankind lives in a world of fixed and discoverable rules, which means we can discover the rules that should govern human society.

Simply put, Locke removed religion and Scripture from the equation so that a moral philosophy could rest upon the authority of nature. It is not an accident that the Founders used the phrase, “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” in the Declaration of Independence. They were not basing their claims against the King on the words of their favorite philosopher. They were basing their claims on the same authority as their favorite philosopher.

Unlike the Founders, modern conservatives are not interested in the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” and instead rest their authority on their favorite historical figures. They are fond of quoting Locke, Jefferson, or Lincoln, especially Lincoln, but these are just men. They can only offer a path to an authority upon which to build a political philosophy. Otherwise, they are as flawed as every man. Locke, for example, believed in the blank slate, which is complete nonsense.

This is why conservatism has been a failure. Without some authority to base their political claims, their opponents are free to dismiss them as mere tactics. From the perspective of the Left, the Founders were just men. On the other hand, the historical process is science and the foundation on which they make their moral claims. Legal and economic arguments are no use against moral arguments, which is why the Left has swept conservatism from the field.

To his credit, Holmes is correct to point out that the National Conservatives are terrified of being associated with identity politics. The trouble is, there is no way to have nationalism without national identity, even if you try to hide that identity behind talk of customs and traditions. Those customs and traditions did not fall from the sky. They are the product of a people defined by the mating decisions of their ancestors and the location of those decisions.

Holmes is also correct to point out that the National Conservatives are wrong about Burke’s influence on the thinking of the Founders. This is an attempt on their part to replace one favorite philosopher with another in order to claim the high ground against establishment conservatives. Further, to pretend that Burke was not well aware of what it meant to be British, to have a British identity, when he was defending the traditions and customs of the empire is to exempt oneself from reality.

The most curious response to Holmes on behalf of the “common good conservatism” side is from Ryan T. Anderson, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. The group describes itself as “dedicated to applying the Judeo-Christian moral tradition to critical issues of public policy”. He correctly points out the fatal flaw in social contract theory, which is the bedrock of the conservative movement. There is nothing in nature or in Locke’s writing that requires a social contract that only guarantees rights.

The proto-society that is coming together could plausibly agree to sacrifice their rights entirely in order to preserve the commonly held property of the members. The human sciences tell us that this is probably the basis of the first human settlements. Kin groups collaborated with related kin groups to maintain hunting grounds and water supplies. Similarly, they could have come together to protect some natural curiosity with which they held a shared spiritual meaning.

The archeological record suggests that what first brought disparate kin groups together was not an agreement to respect each other’s rights. Instead, it was common spiritual belief. Göbekli Tepe, in what is now Turkey, is known as humanity’s first temple. It was constructed by pastoral people as some a shared religious site. It is assumed that agriculture caused people to settle down, but this site offers another plausible reason to settle and cooperate, shared belief in a common set of gods.

That has always been the trouble with social contract theory. It is a thing that exists as a logical construct to solve the problem of natural rights theory. That is, lacking an authority on which to base natural rights, this imaginary contract between people is conjured from thin air to be that foundation stone for the theory. Natural rights theory assumes an axiom for which there is no evidence in history. Further, if such a contract existed, it probably had nothing to do with rights.

An interesting observation by Robert R. Reilly in his critique of the integralists is that “They wish to find themselves in a pre-Reformation Christendom.” Integralism is revanchism, which has run through the conservative movement since the 1960’s. The integralists may dream of returning to Camelot, but the current conservatives dream of returning to 1980. The neoconservatives dream of returning to 1950’s Brooklyn. Conservatism is the promise of a “do-over” where this time the good guys win.

Reilly also offers up this strange argument against the common good. “A love of one’s own can only take one so far. One naturally loves one’s own, but is one’s own always deserving of love? If this love lacks grounding beyond a bare attachment to one’s own, how is it different from others’ preference for their own? Strict nationalism fails to the extent that it does not take into account natural law and natural rights, which together condemn the universal state and expose its inherently tyrannical nature.”

Conservatives used to condemn this sort of universalism to the woolly-headed intellectuals who spent too much time reading Marx. Conservatism simply assumed that custom and convention are what allowed people to live peaceably. Civil society was the product of generations of trial and error, the result being a collection of compromises we call culture. There could never be a universal state, as there can never be a universal culture, because there is no such thing as universal man.

Like all modern conservatives, Reilly is terrified of what naturally flows from putting the interests of your own ahead of strangers. Conservatives have accepted the left-wing claim that anything exclusionary is exploitive and immoral. Loving your child more than the child of the stranger inevitably leads to fascism, according to the theology of the modern Left. Whether it is out of fear, cowardice or stupidity, contemporary conservatives have accepted the morality of the open society.

As a result, they have no choice but to reject that the common good can even exist and they busy themselves making the conservative case for the open society. In fairness, the common good conservatives suffer from this same affliction. Yoram Hazony’s book, The Virtue of Nationalism, tries to make the case for nationalism, but is repeatedly poleaxed by the fact that nationalism can only be rooted in biology, history and location. It also must be exclusive.

This is the problem faced by all of the common good conservatives. Unless they are prepared to make the case that their program includes all of humanity, they must define the who and whom of this new utilitarian conservatism. Who is inside the domain covered by the common good and who lies outside of that domain? More important, who decides? Further, upon what authority will this person be selected and what is the authority upon which they will rely to draw the boundaries?

The common good conservatives are silent on this, even though they privately will confess that their concept of a nation is the same one anathematized by the Left. The Finns should decide what is best for the Finns, even if that means excluding non-Finns from their lands. By nature of the mating decisions of their ancestors in their ancestral lands, they have the sole authority over what it means to be Finnish and what is in the best interests of the Finnish people.

Again, the common good conservatives understand this reality, but they also know that they will be hurled into the void if they acknowledge the obvious. To their credit, the neoconservatives have always understood this and limited their scope to foreign affairs. Their social criticism was always just window dressing that never dared question the morality of the open society. Kim Homes, someone who has traveled in neoconservative circles his whole life, certainly gets this.

Taken as a whole this debate bumps into the question of whether or not it is possible to have conservatism in a democratic society. As Russell Kirk pointed out, the first principle of conservatism is the belief that there exists an enduring moral order. In a political system where the truth, including moral truth, is decided by 50% plus one, there is no room for an enduring moral order. The evidence of this is all around us as men put on sundresses and declare themselves women.

The Founders understood the danger of democracy. This is why they explicitly said the new constitution provided checks against it. The democratic elements included in the new political order were bounded by limits on the state. Modern conservatives reject this and instead think they can achieve conservative ends by convincing 50% plus one to support their claims. They excitedly talk about democracy, because they are operating under the belief they can win over the fickle mobs.

This is because modern conservatism has abandoned that first principle of conservatism. The libertarians, the neoconservatives and the civic nationalists find the idea of an enduring moral order as horrifying as their supposed enemies on the Left. Like the modern Progressive, the modern conservative has made the shifting will of the people the sole authority. In such a world there can be no permanence, no tradition and no appeal to custom. Therefore, there can be no conservatism.

Whether it is the revanchism of the integralists or the sterile nationalism of Hazony’s brand of conservatism, they fail for the same reason mainstream conservatism has failed. Without a moral foundation upon which to make political claims, conservatism is nothing more than a negotiating position within the democratic system. It is why today’s Progressive fad turns into tomorrow’s conservative principle. The modern conservative always starts from the last Progressive victory.

That is the crisis in modern conservatism. For there to be a legitimate conservative movement, it must first come to terms with what it is it seeks to defend. Then it must answer why this must be preserved. These are moral questions that Locke answered by looking at the natural world as an orderly place that operates by fixed rules. As such, human happiness lies in the orderly society that operates under a rational and persistent set of rules.

This naturally means a rejection of the Hegelian theory of history that is the moral basis of both the Left and the prevailing moral order. The hand of history is not carrying mankind to some promised land where all moral questions are answered. A genuine alternative to the prevailing orthodoxy is not a debate about its factual inaccuracies, but a rejection of it on moral grounds. That requires a courage that modern conservatism and common good conservatism are unable to muster.

Many Realties

Posted on January 31, 2022 by thezman

Note: The Monday Taki post is up. After sending it off I thought about the idea of world building, so I addressed than a bit today. The Sunday podcast is up behind the green door and it is mostly about the usual stuff.

The old paleo-conservative gag about the demand for Nazis exceeding the available supply has become something of an iron law of the universe. Each generation discovers that the American Left is obsessed with fascists, white supremacists, the Klan and so on, despite these things no longer being real. Other than some cartoonish play-acting by those desperate for attention, these things are no longer real. They certainly play no role in politics or the general culture.

The lack of supply, however, has been no deterrence, especially now that the internet allows people to create these reality from thin air. The intensively on-line far-left invests all of its time finding someone they can label as the bogeyman or one the many members of the bogeyman army. The Antifa subculture, for example, is organized around the hunt for fascists and white supremacists. They spend all day looking for new baddies and obsessing over the prior baddies.

This being America, this means there is a subgenre of fringe-left media that caters to this subculture with ghost stories about Nazis. Hoffer said that all mass movements in America become a corporation, a racket or a business. The world of on-line hate-hunters is a racket that supplies world building materials to the intensively on-line Left so they can maintain their fantasy space. The witch hunters need witches, so there are people supplying them with witches.

This obsession with imaginary fascists is written off as the work of the mentally unstable, which is true, but it is more than that. What these people are doing is world-building within the alternative reality of their own creation. They live in a reality that says they are the guardians of the future utopia, keeping the world safe from its enemies, which come in many styles and guises. In order to keep this fantasy going, they have to find characters that fit the role of the villain.

In a way, this subculture has become something like the massive on-line role playing games that sprang up a dozen years ago. People can join, but they have to assume a character and then join a band on-line. This band is a set of social media accounts that support one another in their imaginary struggle. Doxing is both a weapon and a world building tool. The revelation of someone in league with the Dark One helps perpetuate the fantasy by supplying social proof to the members.

This is why these people look so outlandishly weird when they turn up in public to riot with other fantasy groups or hold what amounts to a street convention. They take their on-line character out into the real world, but the real world does not have these sorts of people or the bogeymen they are chasing. Antifa, BLM, furries, cosplayers, the alt-right and so on are normal in the alternative reality of their subculture, because the rules of that subculture have been created to normalize this stuff.

That is how to view the now defunct alt-right. Like the intensely on-line far-left, the alt-right formed up on-line as a form of escapism. They quickly became a foil for the intensely on-line far-left, because the interaction with that subculture shaped them into the much needed opponent. The intensely on-line libertarians became intensely on-line fascists because that gave them an enemy, the intensely on-line antifascists, who were happy to have the new villain in their version of reality.

It is not just the intensely on-line far-left that lives in an alternative reality. The anti-Trump movement quickly evolved into an alternative reality. Of course, its was the existing alternative realties of neoconservatives, the intensely on-line far-left and others that coalesced around this new boss introduced to the game. Trump allowed these alternative realties to align against a commonly imagined enemy. It is why they cannot stop talking about him, even after he has been defeated.

Eric Hoffer famously said that mass movements can survive without a god but they must always have a devil. This seems to be true of these alternative realities that are shaping the reality of the modern age. The inherent conflict with reality is masked by the obsession with imaginary adversaries. This has now become a form of world building where the players invest their time inventing new bosses to fight, always based on the general archetype required of their alternative reality.

While this phenomenon is mostly a product of the internet, it is jumping from the virtual into the physical world. The ridiculous Spotify story is a good example. The people running this company are responding to a fictional controversy, when they could easily ignore it. This is because many of the people who work at the firm are also deep into one of these alternative realities where Joe Rogan is the devil. In other words, the alterative realty is spilling into the reality of the CEO.

Of course, the people occupying the C-suites at these companies are not exactly living in reality either. Theirs is a world that is as alien to the daily reality of normal people as the reality of the intensely on-line far-left. In their world, the gesture counts for more than an action. If the Spotify CEO were to tell these loons to bleep-off, that would be viewed as a bad gesture in his reality. It would suggest he is not sensitive to their perspectives and in that reality, insensitivity is a mortal sin.

Much like the intensely on-line far-left, our ruling class is now increasingly occupied with world building in order to make their reality more realistic. The Covid panic is a great example, where a whole industry grew up to feed materials to the world builders of this fantasy game of pandemic. A bizarre aspect of the mass media age is that the ruling class now has an unquenchable thirst for crises. In the absence of real problems, they busy themselves creating them.

Of course, there are real problems, but those problems are boring. Like the kid who has played the game so many times he no longer finds it interesting, the ruling elite no longer has an interest in fixing roads or addressing the issues of society. As Pete Buttigieg made clear the other day, fixing potholes is boring. Instead, he will focus on make traffic fatalities more equitable. This new quest will allow him to have much more fun and feel much more important.

Diverging realities is not exactly new. The French Revolution featured at least two alternative realities. There was the reality of the Old Regime that had lost contact with reality in the late middle-ages. Then there was the new reality of the radicals, forming up in salons and public houses. When the reality of the Old Regime was no longer sustainable in the face of reality, it collapsed. Into the void rushed the new false reality of the Jacobins, which soon foundered on reality.

What is unique about this age is both the novelty of these alternative realities and the proliferation of them on-line. America is becoming a balkanized collection of alternative realties increasingly disconnected from actual reality. The tech giants are now promising to strap VR goggles on every face, which will only accelerate this phenomenon. Instead of people taking soma and living in a dream state, the drug of this brave new world will be the virtual reality and the world building it requires.

The New McCarthyites

Posted on January 28, 2022 by thezman

While doing homework on the Army – McCarthy hearings, I was reminded of two things that seem to come up regularly. One is that the people causing the mayhem in our society are lacking in self-awareness. The term McCarthyism has dropped out of use of late, I cover this in the show, but most people are old enough to remember when it was popular and what it meant. The new McCarthyites are totally unaware of that rather easy comparison between themselves and McCarthy.

The other thing that comes up repeatedly is that the people causing trouble have a weird blind spot about the internet. Often, they will make a big bold moral statement and then sometime later make another big bold moral statement that is the exact opposite of the previous statement. Even crazier is they will do this on Twitter. Not long after, people will post screen caps of their prior statement alongside the new statement, easily revealing the contradiction.

You are left with the impression that these people are unaware of the internet, despite using it for their political drama. You really see this with the January 6 show trials they are cooking up. The claims they are making against these people are for things these people have done in the recent past. Adam Schiff spent four years claiming the 2016 election was illegitimate. Now he is tormenting people for the crime of questioning the legitimacy of the 2020 election.

What lies at the heart of this is the problem presented by McCarthy. The sorts of people attracted to these moral crusades are without the normal sense of self that mentally healthy people possess. They need a foil, someone they can point to as bad in some way, so they can claim to be good by virtue of opposing that person. It is why their politics are highly personal. Liz Cheney cannot stop obsessing over Trump because she is a moral nullity who needs a villain to feel like a hero.

That is what makes the January 6 commission worth following. These people are so morally obtuse they could very well set themselves up like McCarthy. None of the people on that commission are sympathetic to the public. None of them seem to be smart enough to see this. They are so sure they are on the sign of angels, because they are certain their opponents are evil. That is how these people eventually find themselves on the other end of the inquisition.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening
02:00: Background On The Hearings
22:00: The Morality Of McCarthyism
42:00: The New McCarthyites

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Legal Insurrection

Posted on January 27, 2022 by thezman

One of the features of every societal crisis is that the elites of the society stop enforcing the rules of society, especially on themselves. Prior to the collapse of the Roman Republic, the elites started making exceptions to the rules. In the short term they seemed practical, but in the long term these exceptions undermined the moral logic of the rules entirely. Before long, a man in Gaul could decide that the rules no longer applied and he was free to do as he pleased.

This is at the core of the current crisis in the American empire. The rules have become arbitrary with regards to the elite. In turn the elites no longer enforce basic principles that are the foundation of the country. One of the principles is property. It used to be understood that you own the produce of your labor. That was the default and infringement on your ownership had to clear a high bar. Today, the powerful can steal your property without consequence.

This collapse of property rights is at the core of this story out of Florida about a law banning theft of private images. A local politician says nude photos of her were stolen and distributed on-line without her consent. She is leading the charge to change the law regarding ownership of your image. She is also doing the rounds to draw attention to herself, but also raise awareness of the issue. She thinks there should be federal law to protect ownership of your image.

In truth, it used to be understood that you own you and therefore you own whatever you produce, including your image. Forty years ago, a television show maker would have to get a signed release to use footage of you walking down a city street. They did not have to pay you, but you did not have to grant them permission. Today, your image can be freely distributed on-line and you have no recourse. Similarly, your activity on-line can be used by others and you can do nothing about it.

Reasserting property rights to include things like your image, your internet activity, your resume and other non-tangible products of your labor would go a long way to restoring order to society. One reason for that is it would torpedo the business model of the tech monopolies, who rely on your free labor to make a profit. What Facebook calls ad revenue is actually the sale of user activity and content. They sell this data in bulk to marketers, government and corporate interests.

If Facebook had to get a signed release from you every time they sell your data their business model would collapse in a month. Their margins would collapse even if their user were okay with being exploited this way, because the cost of this model would be shifted back onto their balance sheet. The same is true of the other big socials. All of them would have to rethink their business model. This would most likely take place in bankruptcy court as there is no easy answer for them.

Of course, for this to work it would require the return of the old model for enforcing contracts, especially contracts of adhesion or one-way contracts. That is what the terms of service is called in the law. It is a take it leave it offer. These sorts of contracts used to come under careful scrutiny by the courts. The reason is they saw a powerful interest issuing terms to weak interests, so the way to level the playing field was the court would act on behalf of the weak interest.

The reason that the back of car rental contracts all look the same is they went through the legal process over many years. That standard language has been approved by the courts and will therefore be enforced by the courts. That means the car rental firm does not willy-nilly change the language during your rental. The same process has been applied to residential leases and utility contracts. The same legal standards should be applied to terms of service agreements.

A world where the big social media players have to get permission to alter their terms of service and those terms have to be legally clear and concise, is a world where they cannot abuse their authority. They go back to being passive service providers, rather than arbiters of truth. In a world where they have to respect your property rights, they revert back to a traditional business that offers a service in exchange for a fee, rather than a monopoly with socialized costs.

Of course, to return to a rule-based world requires Congress and the courts to rediscover the rule of law and the advantages of an orderly society. That would require them to suddenly get the courage and morality to turn down the massive bribes that flow into Washington from the tech firms. The great lesson Silicon Valley learned during the Microsoft antitrust case is that everyone in Washington comes with a price tag and there is always a sale going on in Washington.

An old adage about money is that if you need hard money to control your corrupt elites, your corrupt elites will find a way around hard money. This axiom of history applies to the law as well. if you need to codify the basics of a civilized society in order to control your elites, those elites will get around the laws of civilized society. That is the fundamental problem in America. Unless and until the elites are replaced with and by a moral people, the chaos will continue until collapse.

Terms Of Service Society

Posted on January 26, 2022 by thezman

If you were to come up with a simple explanation for the difference between the modern era and the feudal era it would be about rules. The West went through a great transition from the 18th century into the 20th century in which the rules that govern society changed to be both clearer and universal. There were other things that happened during this transition that are important, like industrialization and urbanization, but the big one was the change in the rules.

The feudal age was not without rules. In fact, the feudal age had more rules than even the current age, but the rules were opaque and complex. The line between the law, custom and privilege was never all that clear. Privilege was often the thing that prevailed, even over written laws. Most important, the rules of life were not the same for everyone in feudal society. Feudalism was an interlocking set of rules and customs that governed relations horizontally and vertically.

The changes ushered in with the Enlightenment did two things. One is the separation between law, custom and privilege became formal and clear. The law was a separate body of rules that superseded custom and privilege. The latter was possible only when the law was universal. It applied to everyone. It did not happen overnight, but by the time the West moved into the 20th century, the prevailing morality said that the law must be clear and apply to everyone equally.

This change did not spring from nothing. The feudal order evolved out of necessity and circumstance, without too much thought. No one planned it. The Enlightenment brought along the concept of a planned society. We could consciously organize our societies around a new set of rules. The reason we could do this is the natural world was not some great mystery. Men began to see that the natural world operated by a fixed set of rules that could be understood.

What the philosopher John Locke bequeathed to the world was the notion that we could not only figure out the rules of nature, we could discover the rules of society that best comported with man’s nature. If we can figure out those rules and implement them, we will have a society that allows for the full blossoming of man. The debate since the 18th century has been about the nature of man. Communism, fascism, capitalism, libertarianism and so on are all based on this assumption.

Fast forward to this age and we appear to be in another one of those great transitions in how we look at the rules of society. You can see it in the language. Hardly anyone in power speaks of rights anymore. The term civil rights has morphed into a dog whistle by the race hustlers, stripped of any connection to natural rights. Of course, the systemic assaults on basic rights like assembly and speech are so common now, the repression of these rights and the people exercising them is now normal.

The reason for this is we are transitioning from a society based on rights codified in the law to a society based on privileges based on a terms of service. You get to do things promised in the terms of services, as long as you are compliant with the terms of service, which can change at any time. What we used to think of as rights are now privileges, no different from access to Twitter. You get to do things based on your level of compliance to the current set of rules.

The obvious example is Covid. The remarkable aspect of the Covid panic was just how easily the political and administrative state created new rules and imposed them on people without ever mentioning rights. In fact, it has become fashionable for politicians to mock those who mention rights. They point to community standards, trust and safety, much in the same way we see with internet platforms. Your rights do not count as long as they can claim to be protecting the community.

The other aspect of the terms of service society is that the terms of service are opaque and impossible to understand. To this day no one can explain the term “hate speech” yet it turns up in every terms of service agreement. It is turning up in an informal sense all over society. Men are sent to jail for hate crimes, even though there are few laws defining hate crimes. The concept of “hate” is now a spectral force that no one can explain, but it animates the terms of service of life.

One of things that clarity of the law requires is the clarity of the process. In the before times when the law was supposed to be clear, the process of adjudicating disputes was supposed to be clear as well. In other words, the rules defining the process were supposed to be as clear as the law. In the terms of service society, the process for adjudicating disputes is as mysterious as the rules. No one can explain how Twitter enforces its terms of service, not even Twitter.

The citizen in a rules based society is expected to live within the law, but in return he gets protected by the law. In the feudal order, protection was from the man to whom you pledged loyalty, because privilege transcended the law. In effect, the law was a one-way street that imposed rules on people but offered little protection in return. The liberal order was about making the law clear and reciprocal. Men would follow the law because it was in their interest, as the law was what protected them.

The terms of service society is much closer to the feudal order in that we have a proliferation of rules, but we are not in a rule-based society. Because the rules are always changing and their implementation is dependent on a privileged elite, people cannot depend on the rules at all. Creators on YouTube, for example, spend a lot of time policing their past in order to remain compliant. What matters is not the rules but the whims of the censors.

Another aspect of the terms of service society is that citizenship is no longer a thing that has any value. From the point of view of the people enforcing the terms of service, you are compliant or non-compliant. It is why the French president feels free to terrorize French people over the vaccine. They are non-compliant, so their services from the state have been terminated. This is the new relationship between people and those who rule over them. You are compliant or non-compliant.

It is tempting to think this cannot work, but feudalism carried on for roughly a thousand years before things changed. At least a third of a human population is happy to be treated like a prisoner. For most people, freedom is terrifying. They want to be told what to do and some are happy to have no choices at all. To date, no politician has been hanged for imposing Covid mandates. What the last two years has told our trust and safety councils is they can go much further than they dreamed.

On the other hand, feudalism worked in an age where death from disease, violence and starvation was common. Feudalism was a survival response to the breakdown of order, rather than a replacement for it. The terms of service society can only last if it can actually follow through on the promise to turn society into a giant daycare center. If not, then the terms of service collapses and we have no order at all. Trust and safety, as it were, goes away entirely.

Woke Dawn

Posted on January 25, 2022 by thezman

A popular bit of wish-casting among conventional conservatives has been the line “Go Woke, go broke”. This is the unfounded belief that the companies embracing the latest cultural Marxist fads are being punished by the marketplace. It has become a Pavlovian chant among the sorts of people who comment at sites like Breitbart, whenever they do a story on a major brand jumping on the identity train. The fact that no one has gone broke does not seem to register with them.

This is why Hollywood, which should be the most sensitive to the marketplace, proudly embraces the latest cultural Marxist fads. Contrary to the claims in this post at the Daily Mail, Hollywood knows they have no fears of going broke. They have been siding with the cultural commissars since the dawn of the mass media age. Watch an old Chaplin film and his communism jumps out, even without sound. Watch a film like the Manchurian Candidate and the politics are plain.

One reason Hollywood has no fear of going broke is they know most people will find a way to look past the propaganda. They can pack a superhero movie with a lot of propaganda, as long as they also pack in the special effects. The people rushing off to see this stuff are too culturally illiterate to catch the messaging anyway. Even if they do see it, they happily filter it out so they can enjoy the explosions and cartoon fight scenes that are the main draw off these shows.

There is also the fact that people have to watch something. The reason Soviet cinema was hugely influential on American cinema is because it existed. Even in the most repressive regimes, entertainment flourishes. Stalin understood the power of movies, he was a huge film buff, and not just because of the propaganda. He knew, as all authoritarians know, the people need their entertainment. This is why he supported Soviet film and so much of it was produced.

The Soviet citizens were happy to consume it. The typical urbanite in communist Moscow consumed party product then waited for the next party product. Sure, the stories were wrapped around popular communist themes, but they also had all of the human drama and plot twists of any other story. Obviously, there was no box office, but the party kept track of what was popular and rewarded those filmmakers who were popular with Soviet audiences.

This has always been the paradox of marketism. The people who preach the power of the marketplace never look up to notice that the market does not work like their libertarian textbooks claim. The cereal aisle at your local market is not a bizarre full of vendors demanding your attention. It is a couple of cereal makers, one main link in the supply chain and strategically planned shelf space. Your decision was made for you long before you discovered the joy of Cap’n Crunch®.

The reason is, not all consumers are the same. The guy with power commands more attention than the guy with no power. Every Soviet filmmaker thought first of what Stalin would like and then what the party would like in the same way that Hollywood frets about what the cultural commissars are thinking. The reason is the people who insure and underwrite films care about those things too. The “me too” movement revealed that Hollywood is an effect, not a cause of culture.

This is why the ad makers have erased white men from their ads. The people making the ads do not care about the consumers. Why should they? They are not the customer for the ad maker. The customer is the bitter, middle-aged single woman decorating the C-suites at the corporate client. They need to hear they are empowered; despite the fact they have pointless jobs as ornaments. The ad makers know their business, so they sell them ads that tell them they are important.

That is one aspect of this explosion of cultural madness. The last thirty years has seen an explosion in credentialed luxury people. These are people who went through the credentialing system, told at every step that their life not only has meaning to them but is vital to the world, only to find themselves doing busy work. Ask the diversity officer what she does for a living and the shame on her face is obvious. At some level, she knows her life really has no meaning whatsoever.

Of course, to many it is just a grift. Watch a video on the life of a pornographer and you see the same ethical reality you see with many of the people pushing diversity. Robin DiAngelo is a grifter and she has always known it. She is not morally troubled by her grift, because she has the moral compass of a pimp. The big diversity conferences look like a white bread version of the Players Ball. The reason is the people involved at the top of the game have the mentality of a hustler.

This falseness is why the “diversity” is usually ridiculous. When they cast a black actor to play Henry VIII, it is not for diversity. Sure, in their pitch meeting the people plotting this will make the proper noises, but that is just part of the process. This is just the easiest, laziest way to tick the box and get attention for it. Otherwise, nothing has to be changed, as the “diverse” version is just the previous version with different costumes and the costume is the actor’s skin.

A good recent example of this is the Amazon series The Wheel of Time. It is a fantasy show based on a novel series of the same name. When it debuted it got some press for its diversity, but that lasted a week. The reason is the industry sponsored fan sites care as much about diversity as the writers, which is not much at all. What mattered is the sensitive psyche of the harridans at their one client, Amazon. They wanted lots of skin tone, so they were shown lots of skin tone.

That is why the diversity is shallower than the writing and dialogue. All of the characters are stock figures from the fantasy series casting company. In fact, other than skin tone, the series is less diverse than an NBA team. This is a fantasy show so the writers could have produced a variety of different and complex races, but that would be more trouble than it is worth. Once Amazon saw the cast, they quickly signed the show for a second season, because the right boxes were ticked.

A truth of life is that all societies are hierarchical. Democracy and capitalism are very clever ways for the elites to drug the masses into thinking they have a say in how society is managed. There is always someone in charge of every human group and America is no different. Those people have embraced this weird religion we call wokeness and they intend to impose it on society. The marketplace is not going to magically protect you from this madness.

On the other hand, it does tempt people from the fog of democracy and the marketplace into the sober reality of human organization. Before these cultural pogroms launched thirty years ago, the typical right-winger was sure all he needed to do is vote harder and buy the right brand of cereal. Despite their rhetoric, the typical left-winger also bought into the myth of democracy and the marketplace. They thought the will of the people mattered to the decision makers.

Now, the right is increasingly skeptical of democracy and the marketplace. Reality is beginning the breakthrough and that is largely due to the wokeness. The old Left is also having to reevaluate their view of these things. The political divide is forming up around the old “who? whom?” partisanship. There are those with power and access to power and those who have no power. The people with power wear wokeness like it is a symbol of party rank. Everyone else now gets to see it.

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