1. “The history of the twentieth century suggests that totalitarian regimes are highly unstable, evolving toward some type of bureaucracy that fits neither the classic fascist nor the socialist model.” (p. 24) This certainly seems true of China, the most successful of those regimes; I am (admittedly to my detriment) neither a historian nor an international relations specialist, but the only counterexample that comes to mind is North Korea, which can be safely written off in any pattern to which it is an exception.
2. “The tradition of English Marxism, as articulated by Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson … repudiated economic determinism and the mechanistic distinction between economic ‘base’ and cultural ‘superstructure’. It showed that class consciousness is the product of historical experience, not a simple reflection of economic interest. The work of Williams and Thomas also showed how Marxism could absorb the insights of cultural conservatives and provide a sympathetic account, not just of the economic hardships imposed by capitalism, but of the way in which capitalism thwarted the need for joy in work, stable connections, family life, a sense of place, and a sense of historical continuity.” (p. 29) I know nothing about either of them, but they’re going on my reading list.
3. The theories of inevitable historical progression through a particular set of stages came not from Christian eschatology, but, as per Hans Blumenberg, from the mistaken assumption of the necessity of competition with Christianity on its own ground. The characteristic feature of progressivism is the “moral rehabilitation of desire”: the belief that the “private vices” of “envy, pride, and ambition” become “‘public virtues’ by stimulating industry and invention”, whereas “thrift and self-denial” lead to stagnation; in other words, the finding of value in, the moral rehabilitation of, man’s “insatiable appetites”, as a driver of never-ending expansion. “The modern conception of history is utopian only in its assumption that modern history has no foreseeable conclusion,” and its denial of the belief in the life cycle of civilizations, or at least the possibility that said life cycle may apply to ours, that it may go the way of Rome and die a natural death.
4. “[I]f humanity thrives on peace and prosperity, it also needs an occasional taste of battle. Men and women need to believe that ‘life is a critical affair,’ in Richard Niebuhr’s words. They cannot be satisfied merely with the opportunity to choose their goals and ‘life-styles,’ in the current jargon; they need to believe that their choices carry serious consequences.” This drive for cosmic significance is present in Christianity and communism, and, as per Lewis Mumford, was at least partially responsible for the success of Hitler. Compare Orwell, who Lasch quotes; or Alain de Benoist’s statement that it is “better to wear the helmet of a Red Army soldier than to live on a diet of hamburgers in Brooklyn”. This is also, according to a professor who I mentioned this to, a key point in Frankfurt School analysis (a school which Lasch once followed), which can be explained along the following lines: When traveling a long distance by car, it used to be the case that one could only take back roads; but now, we have highways, which largely prevent us from getting lost, point out the attractions we might want to see along the way, and are far more convenient. To take the highway, then, is more convenient, but at the same time less human. (I can’t vouch for any of this myself, though, since I haven’t read any proper Frankfurt School yet.)
5. According to Jon Elster, the “most valuable and persuasive element in Marxism … is the way it makes ‘self-realization’ the ‘central value in society.’ But this is another way of saying that Marxism owes much of its appeal, at least in the West, to its identification with the central values of capitalism itself—which can allegedly be achieved, in their fully developed form, only after the socialist revolution.” It may be interesting for someone with more knowledge of the Marxist and liberal traditions to catalogue their similarities, or at least those existing before their cross-pollination (or, alternatively, the coöptation (yes, with the diaeresis… there really is no less wrong way to write that word!) of what remained of leftism) in the American academy.

Also, some administrivia: I have a Tumblr now, so follow if you’re into that sort of thing.

From IBTimes:

The Anonymous collective has hacked into and defaced the website of an American nationalist party, claiming it had connections with Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul.

Hackers attacked and took possession of the website belonging to American Third Position (A3P), a white nationalist party which allegedly has connections with neo-Nazi and extreme right-wing organisations.

…

“We call upon not only other anti-fascists but all those opposed to white supremacy to utilise this information and make hell for these white nationalist scumbags,” the statement added. “It is essential, if we wish to live in a world free from oppression, to expose and confront racists at their jobs, their schools, at their homes and in the streets.”

The Anonymous hacks are part of an ongoing campaign called Operation Blitzkrieg, which is aimed at attacking and exposing the websites of neo-Nazi organisations in Europe and the United States.

When this operation is considered in terms of memetic immunology, its flaws become obvious: a campaign against white nationalism is essentially a campaign against smallpox. One would be hard-pressed to find a school of thought more out of favor than that represented by the A3P, but Anonymous, which markets itself as opposition to the status quo, believes it to be a worthwhile target.

This is but the latest point in a long and obvious trend: read this page and try to find anything that the average Starbucks-class college student would not support. You won’t, and considering their likely membership, this is unsurprising. This is why Anonymous is irrelevant.

When I say ‘irrelevant’ here, I mean that they will not bring about any sort of meaningful change; in fact, they are a tool of the status quo. The status quo must be thought of as a direction, not merely a state, considering how predictable change has become. (Does anyone dispute at this point that, for example, gay marriage will soon be legalized, most likely by the courts?) Political action must address this change, must figure out where it stands relative to that change and act accordingly; if it limits itself to addressing the present, it may end up misdirecting its energy, addressing issues that will soon resolve themselves by pure inertia and ignoring issues for which the direction that inertia will eventually drive them in has not yet been decided.

You don’t change the direction of a car by flooring it, kids. Get off the gas and look up: the bridge is out, and you’re about at the edge of the cliff. If you won’t try the steering wheel, at least get in the back, and hand the damn thing over to someone who can actually drive.

(Note: Posts will be more infrequent than usual for a while due to college; I’m taking more classes than I perhaps should be.)

This itself is a problem, and a serious one.

I am not denying here that the newsletters contain content that is, to say the least, highly problematic; I just see no reason why they are relevant. In similar cases of politicians’ personal beliefs or actions being called into question, there are two arguments that I have seen for their consideration: that those beliefs or actions can be used to predict the political behavior in office of the candidate in question, and that the personal character of politicians reflects on, or otherwise affects, that which they govern. These arguments are certainly not always invalid, but their validity in this particular situation is dubious at best.

For the first argument to be valid, there must not be a body of evidence significantly more useful for making such predictions. Expressed personal beliefs are certainly better than nothing, but as we all know, politicians say things to get money, votes, or media attention that they neither believe nor intend to implement while in office. Ron Paul is no unknown Chicago one-termer; in fact, as he said in tonight’s debate, he has served twelve terms in the House. One cannot spend over two decades as a politician without accumulating some sort of record, but Paul’s record appears to be a non-issue here. As for the second argument, any ‘racist’ message that Ron Paul’s election may send must be contrasted with the message of toleration for the disastrous neoliberal status quo that any other candidate’s election certainly would send.

Another argument, peculiar to this case, is that Ron Paul’s claims that he was not aware of the articles run under his name show a lack of management skill that makes him unfit for the presidency. This commits the same error as the first: it assumes that Ron Paul, a politician, does not lie. It is possible, of course, but it is far too convenient to simply assume incompetence, especially since Paul has not mentioned that the only byline on any article published in the newsletter was not his.

I suspect that the issue of the newsletters came about thus: Ron Paul, after being defeated in the 1984 Republican primary, agreed to the ‘paleolibertarian’ support-building strategy of Lew Rockwell, chief of staff for Paul in the House, vice president of the corporation that published the newsletters, and suspected ghostwriter, in an attempt to get back into office. This strategy consisted of, as reason put it, “exploiting racial and class resentment to build a coalition with populist ‘paleoconservatives’” by including in the newsletters the rhetoric that is now being used against him. This explains the time table: Paul was defeated in the 1984 Republican primary and reelected in 1996, and almost all of the citations in the two TNR attack articles are from that period: (the only citation after 1996 is a 2007 campaign letter “invok[ing] the Branch Davidians [by questioning the necessity of the Waco siege, although TNR declines to mention that] and ‘the mysterious death of Hillary’s pal Vince Foster’”)

In other words, what we have here appears to be a politician playing politics, and then, in refusing to admit it, playing more politics, and if we take this at face value, the concept of playing politics is so new to the entire media establishment that they are scrambling to do something else with it. But if this concept is not new to them, their statements are not to be reflexively taken at face value. This, of course, raises the question of just how they are to be taken, but the answer to that question will have to wait for my next post.

But this is not all there is to a true paradigm shift. Changes in the descriptive do not necessarily change the prescriptive; if, for example, the liberal and leftist claims about the irrelevance of human nature were thrown out, the claims about the prescriptive value of maximizing freedom could still remain untouched, with only a lowering of the highest amount of freedom perceived possible. A true paradigm shift requires a shift in ideography: without it, collapse will be interpreted through the lens of that ideography. Consider the Ron Paul supporter: what we have now is not good; capitalism is good; therefore what we have now is not capitalism, and capitalism must be implemented.

This is so because ideography is not completely void of denotation. Although there is a wide playing field for the strategic maneuvering of ideographs, that playing field is not infinite; there are situations to which terms almost certainly cannot be applied. Xeer is not communism, and slavery is not freedom. In addition, the playing field is tilted; although it is possible to maneuver certain ideographs into certain places, it is highly counterintuitive, and therefore they are not likely to stick. (This, of course, is the failure of American conservatism.) An ideography, like an ideology, has a direction, and if it points straight to hell, the solution is not to apply it more consistently.

This is all rather confusing, and perhaps should be summarized. The tweet that set me on this path, from @corinthino, may serve that purpose well:

Before the change in thought there must be a change in thought that makes the change in thought possible in the first place.

Before a new paradigm can be adopted, the old one must be discarded; otherwise, the direction remains the same. As I said here: “How can you have a successful revolution when you can’t even break away from the values of the ideology you’re trying to destroy?” The ruling ideology will view its own collapse through itself, and take it as a reason to further its own ends. In order to change directions, then, the driver’s seat must first be emptied.

(Hopefully this makes sense; I’m not too sure of it myself. And whatever you do, don’t take it as truth; it’s just a model, and it may or may not be useful.)

I doubt there are any observations or arguments here that haven’t been written down by past generations of conservatives, many times before.  Given French legitimism, Jesuit natural law communitarianism, Dutch Calvinist sphere sovereignty, German Right Hegelianism, Russian mysticism, American Agrarianism, and the metahistorical masterpieces of Spengler and Voegelin, one sees that conservatism is poor neither in arguments nor in genius.  What it does lack is a tradition.  The irony here is exquisite, isn’t it?  Conservative thinkers do brilliant work, but it doesn’t get passed down.  A T. S. Eliot, say, will produce a powerful defense of some aspect of conservatism.  It will perhaps be noted, but then quickly forgotten, while the grand narrative–”conservatives are stupid; they have no ideas, just inherited prejudices”–remains untouched.  The next generation of conservatives begins intellectually from scratch.  We reproduce a small bit of what these earlier generations did, and we think ourselves very clever.

The obvious difference between modern-day conservatives and earlier generations thereof is that we have much greater access to information. Most research no longer requires days of digging through forgotten corners of libraries in search of the slightest clue as to how to proceed; these days, we can just hit Wikipedia for pointers, and Google Books and the Internet Archive serve up all but the last few generations of conservative thought.

The results? Carlyleanism, distributism, monarchism, slow history made easy. Access to narratives beyond those of the establishment. The power of our technology to challenge the prevailing narratives of our time has surely been covered many times before, but I doubt anyone has considered which narratives those are. We’ve always had Marx, but only now do we have Belloc.

(Incidentally, this is why I have no problem with e-readers. Actually buying ebooks from places like Amazon is problematic, to say the least, but I would much rather not have to stare at a computer screen to read Carlyle.)

Such things make it far easier to understand the liberal absurdity of “emancipation”, described most accurately by Carlyle:

Certainly the notion everywhere prevails among us too, and preaches itself abroad in every dialect, uncontradicted anywhere so far as I can hear, that the grand panacea for social woes is what we call “enfranchisement,” “emancipation;” or, translated into practical language, the cutting asunder of human relations, wherever they are found grievous, as is like to be pretty universally the case at the rate we have been going for some generations past. Let us all be “free” of one another; we shall then be happy.

Our institutions are flawed, and rather severely so; not only that, but the flaws—more accurately, the heresies, for heresy is, as Belloc said, nothing more than “the dislocation of some complete and self-supporting scheme by the introduction of a novel denial of some essential part therein”*—are aspects of an ideology, Moldbug’s “Universalism”, which has been on the rise for anywhere between two and twenty centuries, and now clearly holds the scepter of prestige in the entire Western world. (Of course, one who follows Alain de Benoist’s origin story of Universalism would not see it as a heresy at all, but my sense of decency prevents me from criticizing Christianity one day from the center of its calendar—a center for which we may very well have capitalism to thank, since I, at least, would expect the center to be the far more theologically significant and far less easily commercializable Easter. But on the other hand, as early as 1833, it “all other doth efface”.) Given all this, is it any surprise that those institutions are commonly seen as irreparable?

Anyway, it is Christmas Eve, so I suppose I should post something in the spirit of the season. Here’s the least intolerable version of God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen that I could find, besides the instrumental Mannheim Steamroller versions:

And a relevant bit of context from Frost:

Whether you believe in the particulars or not, I think the ideas of God and The Devil as metaphors for the just authority and the temptations of evil are useful. If you believe in Good and Justice, why not call this natural order ‘God’? If you believe in Evil, why not call its personification ‘The Devil’? I make this mental substitution all the time when reading dusty old books, and it works just fine for me.

Leaving aside the problematic notion (it is a rare man who can withstand violations of subsidiarity with his morals intact!) of one “Savior … to save us all from Satan’s power”—a notion that Alain de Benoist would surely call Christian to the core—the message is strikingly relevant. Nobody at this point can deny that we have strayed far into the clutches of Satan, although if you ask ten people, you’ll get eleven Satans; we clearly now stand at the beginning of a paradigm shift, but there is agreement on neither the paradigm nor the shift. (My own prediction is that, just as the last century belonged to the left, this one will belong to the right. After all, the first Whig was the Devil. But I am most likely either too optimistic or too pessimistic here; it’s anyone’s guess as to which.)

* As for Belloc, I doubt the practical existence of such a scheme as he posits; there are many complete, self-supporting schemes out there, but none that can withstand the human factor. One that could, of course, would be utopian. This probably relates to dialectics somehow, but I’ll leave that up to someone more well-versed in that system than I.

In closing:

Now to the Lord sing praises,
All you within this place,
And with true love and brotherhood
Each other now embrace;
This holy tide of Christmas
All other doth deface:
O tidings of comfort and joy,
comfort and joy,
O tidings of comfort and joy.

those laws which hinder [the globalizing elite] go unenforced, those which serve them are enforced.

Of course, this only applies when the globalizing elite are the ones in charge, as they are in the case of the federal government. One can easily imagine duocodicalism being used to further agendas that would be distinctly distasteful to said elite. Duocodicalism is a tool in the toolbox of the ideologue; like many other tools, it can be used for almost any purpose.

Anarcho-tyranny is the endgame of duocodicalism. Those who support certain tyrants will support the instances of duocodicalism that bring those tyrants closer to power. Duocodicalism can also arise out of honest confusion over the proper role of politics, but that’s another post for another time.

To accept the suppression of speech found morally objectionable by a government whose ideology one supports, one must also accept the suppression of speech found morally objectionable by a government whose ideology one does not.

The easiest way to find out which ideology holds power at any given time is to find the one whose adherents support the most suppression of speech. Consider the schoolbook fable of the Puritans: it is said that they protested the lack of religious freedom in England, but established theocracy in their colonies. Better yet, consider National Socialism: they burned books in Nazi Germany, but enlisted the legal aid of the ACLU in America.

It is now said that there is an “international consensus”, backed by the United Nations, that ‘hate speech’ is to be suppressed. What does this say about where power lies?

I’ve referenced the concept of ideography before, but I haven’t given it a proper treatment yet. In short, an ideography in the political sense is a set of ideographs: terms assigned a particular emotional load by an ideology for use in its rhetoric.

The use of ideographs will often seem absurd to readers outside the ideology to which they belong. An average American going through Nazi political material would almost certainly find the references to Volksgemeinschaft, das Führerprinzip, and Jewry to be, at the very least, disorienting, similar to the feeling one gets when traveling to a foreign country and finding that the toilets have foot pedals instead of flush handles. But then, so would the average Nazi upon hearing the constant references of Western political material to the somewhat isomorphic concepts of liberty, democracy, and fascism. For an example closer to home, consider the reaction of the average American ‘liberal’ (I’ll dispense with my usual scare quotes from here on out; just keep in mind that, contrary to my usual practice, all terms are to be taken in their usual American senses) to Newt Gingrich’s “secular socialism” routine.

Can an isomorphic example, of a conservative reaction to a sound bite applying the liberal ideography, be constructed? It is possible to come close, with, for example, the constant charges of racism leveled at just about every conservative figure and movement, but there is one crucial difference: liberals don’t respond emotionally to “secular socialism”, but conservatives most definitely do to “racism”. In fact, as the conservative line on affirmative action demonstrates, “racism” is just as much a part of the conservative ideography as the liberal one. And, for that matter, the white supremacist one: David Duke uses it.

Pretty pervasive ideograph we have here, if a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan uses it to deliver the exact same emotional load as Tim Wise. They both agree that racism is a Bad Thing; the only difference is in the definition. Duke wants to apply it to Wise, and vice versa. Any debate between the two (ignoring that, in reality, at least one of the two would have to be carted off by security five seconds in) would almost certainly consist mostly of redefinitions of the term, and other ideographs common to the American political arena. These semantic games are common: witness the attempt of Roger Scruton, one of the few conservatives with two brain cells to rub together, to split the positions he disagrees with that can be supported by the positive ideograph “liberty” into a new, negative ideograph, “license”, instead of rejecting the ideograph altogether.

It is clear, then, that in addition to the conservative ideography, there exists an ideography shared by just about the entire American political arena, which I will call the American ideography. Its contents include, on the positive side, liberty, equality, freedom, democracy, progress, fairness, and justice, and on the negative side, racism, fascism, and anything related to Hitler.

The astute reader will, by now, have picked up on an omission: nowhere have I mentioned liberal ideography. There is a reason for this omission: there may be a few minor differences, but at least on the major points, the liberal ideography is the American ideography. Most ideographs used by liberals are also used by conservatives, and with the same intended effect. (This is less so on the alt-right; one of the many instances of convergent evolution between Mencius Moldbug and the European New Right is their explicit refudiation of that ideography.)

Now consider the history of the American ideography. Its terms’ associations have changed consistently, and in a consistent direction: leftward. Equality under the law became equality of opportunity, and is now becoming equality of outcome. Freedom from the tyranny of a single, unelected, overactive monarch became freedom from fear and want, and is now becoming freedom from any sort of moral judgment of all but the most repulsive forms of libertinism. And so on. Considering the structure and history of this ideography, and its identification with ‘Americanism’, there can be no American Right. The American ideography does not hold promise for conservatives, and yet they do not challenge it; in fact, they do the opposite, and in doing so, sign their own death sentence.

That is the failure of conservatism.

From Loudoun to Fairfax to Montgomery, communities that are growing are also growing more integrated, with people of every race and ethnicity living side by side. Prince George’s stands virtually alone as a place that is gaining population yet has an increasing number of residents living in neighborhoods that are overwhelmingly one race — in this case, African American.

… Integrated neighborhoods often are created when Asians and Hispanics move into predominantly white neighborhoods, said John Logan, a Brown University sociologist who has studied segregation patterns for 30 years. He says these “global neighborhoods” pave the way for more blacks to move into a community without triggering white flight.

In other words, these “global neighborhoods” offer a ‘solution’ to the lack of diversity common to any established neighborhood, and therefore to the natural tendency for people to prefer living near others like themselves. (That does not, of course, just mean race; I know many whites (SWPLs, of course) who would prefer living around nonwhites, as long as those nonwhites are sufficiently like themselves.) The error should be blatantly obvious to any unbiased observer with basic knowledge of the area, but considering that two of the ‘reporters’ are placeless technocrats shipped in from far out of state, not to mention that the Post itself has a deserved reputation as a low-grade propaganda outlet for sappy feel-good left-liberalism, it’s sadly predictable that it wasn’t obvious to them.

The difference between Montgomery and Prince George’s County is that Prince George’s went black first. (Once you go black, you never go back? Not until the gentrifiers come in, anyway, but I doubt they’d like suburbs.) This is going to seem trivial, but considering that a piece that missed this point so catastrophically was published, I feel obligated to point it out anyway: the large-scale entrance of minorities is a much more recent process in Montgomery, and presumably Virginia also. The concomitant collapse of the affected neighborhoods has not yet overtaken inertia: the people I know who want to leave started talking about doing so around two years ago, and I suspect it’ll take them a few more years before they finally move out.

Here is the process: non-Asian minorities move in, the neighborhood gets worse, whites move out. This is a well-known process. (In the case of this area specifically, I suspect blacks move in first, then Hispanics, causing the blacks to leave after the whites, but I haven’t seen anything, either in data or on the ground, to make that more than a hypothesis. All I know is that Hispanics came into Prince George’s after blacks.) And yes, the neighborhood does get worse. Laurel, for example, is, at least in parts, a distinctly well-off area, but the last time I had to take their local public transportation, half the seats were missing, the other half were slashed, and the bus had blown-out speakers blasting gospel music. I am not making this up. And the last time I had the misfortune of having to go to the mall there, it looked like a scene from a bad post-apocalyptic horror movie: there was just about nobody there, half of the storefronts were empty and trashed, and the place looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in months. (That visit was truly frightening, in a way few things are. Imagine seeing an area that you are familiar with dead, killed by an unstoppable process that has already sunk its tendrils into the entire landscape of your youth, and knowing that you may never be able to go back home because there will be nothing to go back to.)

The difference between Prince George’s and other areas, then, is not that those other areas are shining visions of the utopian future dreamed up by the elite; it is simply that they are in different stages of the same process. As anyone on the ground will tell you, Montgomery County is getting worse, but Prince George’s has already gotten worse. (And the notion that Hillandale, of all places, is a beacon on the path toward Enlightenment is particularly laughable. If Hillandale is anything at all, it’s an example of what not to do in suburban design. The only reason racial tension hasn’t hit the absurd level it has in places like Greenbelt is that the place (or rather, nonplace) is so alienating that the neighbors might as well not exist. But that’s a separate issue, for a future post.) In twenty years or less, Montgomery will look demographically like Prince George’s, for two reasons: areas tend to get worse as they get less white (or Asian, possibly), and people like to live near others like them.

I’ll close with an even more telling quote from the same article. This one needs no comment.

As an adult, [Sterling Crockett] yearned for a place where he could feel proud of who he is, where race isn’t everything, and where he and his family would live around other upwardly mobile blacks.

“I saw it as an opportunity to get into a community that is inhabited and run by African Americans,” Crockett said[.]