Quotulatiousness

February 4, 2025

QotD: The American political spectrum

I tend to think of the American political spectrum as broadly dividing into six major groups (political “tribes” we might say), arranged very roughly from left to right, though I must note that there are serious differences within tribes as much as between them. Going left-to-right, there is first (1) The Left, who are the sort of left-leaning folks who get upset if you call them liberals and are committed to more aggressive forms of socialism that envision and end to or massive curtailment of things like markets. Your actual Marxists go here. Then moving right there are (2) Progressives, who are generally committed to liberalism as a philosophy, but favor large-scale government intervention inside that framework to reshape society (“progressivism”), which they believe can be reshaped for the better. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and AOC go here; some of these folks will call themselves social democrats, evoking the form of this ideology in Europe. Then you have (3) Left-Liberals (“Social Liberals”), who have the same ideological components as the progressives (progressivism+liberalism), but with an inversion of the emphasis, where the individual liberty claim of liberalism is the dominant strain over the society-reshaping goals of progressivism. This is where the mainstream and especially moderate wings of the Democratic party sits.

Then on the right you have (4) Right-liberals (“Classical liberals”), who share liberalism with groups (2) and (3) but reject (or at least substantially challenge) the idea that society can be “engineered” with positive results. This group largely left the Republican party between 2016 and the present (though some were already libertarians). Notably, (3) and (4) in the United States tend to share hawkish anti-authoritarian, anti-communist foreign policy views; this is where the foreign policy “blob” lives. To their right are (5) Traditionalist Conservatives. Because the United States was founded as a liberal country, they tend to still hold some liberal views (and respond well to liberal, “freedom-centered” framing) but their main ideological commitment is generally conservative in its literal meaning of being traditionalist, desiring things to not change or to recover that which has changed and there is a willingness to compromise on liberalism in the pursuit of that. This, I’d argue, is where the core of the Republican Party currently exists. Finally, you have (6) Right-Authoritarians, who come in various forms based on the authority they believe ought to structure society, e.g. populist authoritarians are fascists, whereas Catholic religious authoritarians are integralists and so on. But the core idea here is that there exists an authority, be it the “national will” (invariably channeled by an individual charismatic leader and often herrenvolk in nature) or tradition or the church or whatever else, which has a right to structure society which supersedes individual liberties. For our purposes, they key is they generally despise liberalism because it places limits on that authority. They tend to insist that liberalism makes societies weak even as liberal societies pound their favorite dictators into dust over and over again.

To put the spectrum another way, we might think in terms of publications: Jacobin (1) <-> Vox (2) <-> The Atlantic (3) <-> The Bulwark/Dispatch (4) <-> National Review (5); few major publications openly identify as being in (6) in the United States, but you can see editors at The Federalist or First Things platform political visions that [derive] from it. To the degree to which “horse-shoe theory” works it is because the thing that The Left and the Right-Authoritarians have in common is that they believe in an effectively unlimited claim on the individual by the community, whereas the core of liberal ideology is that the social claim on the individual is and must be limited.

Bret Devereaux, In a footnote to “Collections: The Philosophy of Liberty – On Liberalism”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2024-07-05.

January 30, 2025

Hitler Testifies, Brüning Battles On – Rise of Hitler 10, October 1930

World War Two
Published 28 Jan 2025

October 1930 brings more unrest to Weimar Germany. Chancellor Brüning survives no-confidence votes, while Nazi and Communist clashes escalate into chaos. Berlin sees mass protests, Jewish businesses attacked, and rumors of a Nazi-Soviet conspiracy swirl.
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January 22, 2025

“Do not give institutional power to activists” or “moral projects to bureaucrats”, but “Progressivism systematically does both”

Lorenzo Warby on the dangers of enabling totalitarians and suffering the useful idiots in any political system:

The overthrow of Robespierre in the National Convention on 27 July 1794, Max Adamo (1870),
Wikimedia Commons.

Do not give institutional power to activists, as activism — being power without responsibility that readily lauds bad behaviour — attracts manipulative “Cluster B” personalities. Moreover, activism degrades realms of human action by imposing pre-conceived outcomes and constraints on them. We can see this is in all the entertainment franchises whose internal logics of story and canon have been debauched in the service of political messaging.1

Do not give moral projects to bureaucrats, as such projects elevate the authority of the bureaucrats who become moral masters, devaluing the authority of the citizens turned into moral subjects, and so undermines any ethic of service to said citizenry. Such projects also frustrate accountability, as the grand intentions can, and will, be used to shield the bureaucrats from scrutiny. Indeed, moral projects rapidly become moralised projects, whose grand intentions protects, even aggrandise, the self-interest of the bureaucrats.2

Progressivism systematically does both — give institutional power to activists and moral projects to bureaucrats. Hence progressivism has so often proved disastrous for human flourishing. Indeed, it has a powerful tendency to use the grandeur of its moral intentions to free itself from moral constraints: to be moralised, rather than moral.

As various folk “walk away” from what left-progressivism has become, a common sentiment is some version of “this is not the Left I remember” or “this is not what the Left used to stand for”. Yet, one of the striking things about Post-Enlightenment Progressivism (aka “wokery”) within contemporary societies is how thoroughly it is replicating mechanisms of social control familiar to any student of Communism, of Marxist Party-states.

This “not the Left I joined” is typically a notion of “the Left” that does not include Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Mengistu, Ceausescu … So it is an historically illiterate, “wouldn’t-it-be-nice”, Leftism. Yet it is precisely the Left that does include Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Mengistu, Ceausescu and so on whose echoes are being played out in our societies.

When we look around our contemporary societies, we have commissars/political officers (aka DEI officers, intimacy consultants, sensitivity readers, bias response teams, etc); Zhdanovism, in the remarkable ideological conformism in the arts, entertainment and gaming (usefully discussed here); Lysenkoism in science journals, especially the genderwoo sex-is-non-binary nonsense, though genetics research and male-female differences also have aspects of it; and censorship that was originally paraded as stopping “hate speech”, now being purveyed as anti-dis/mis/mal-information. Critical Pedagogy — which has become influential in Education Faculties and teacher training — is explicitly about replicating Mao’s Cultural Revolution model of permanent revolution. We have the same, disastrous, patterns of institutional power to activists and moral projects to bureaucrats.


    1. There is a large difference from the “we want to be included, we want a say” activism that abolished first the slave trade and then slavery, that abolished laws against Jews and Catholics, that gave us universal male and then female suffrage — what I have called the Emancipation Sequence. Such political movements included previously excluded folk in freedoms and political processes that already existed. They did not give institutional power to activists nor moral projects to bureaucrats.

    2. The institutional shrinkage of the Church has not abolished the meaning-and-morality role it used to play, it has just shifted it into academe and the welfare state apparat, making both simultaneously more arrogant and less functional.

January 21, 2025

Cooking on the Soviet Home Front during WWII

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 10 Sept 2024

Vibrantly colored pumpkin and millet porridge

City/Region: Soviet Union
Time Period: 1939

By the time WWII started, the Soviet Union had already been dealing with famine due to several years of poor harvests. When the German invasion and a scorched earth policy left them with only half of their farm acreage, rationing began, and even so, millions starved.

This Soviet wartime cookbook, The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food, contains mostly recipes that would’ve only been made during the best of times or by those who had access to better food. Even this simple recipe uses milk and sugar, which would have been hard to come by.

The porridge, or kasha, is filling and delicious. It’s lightly sweet from the pumpkin and sugar (though personally I would add more sugar), and the millet has a nice earthy quality. Though not very ration-friendly, you could add some butter for a bit of extra richness.

    Place peeled and finely chopped pumpkin in hot milk and cook for 10 to 15 minutes, then add washed millet. Add salt, and stirring, continue cooking for another 15 to 20 minutes until thickened. Place the cooked porridge in a water bath or in the oven for 25 to 30 minutes.
    Книга о вкусной и здоровой пище (The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food), by the Institute of Nutrition, 1939

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January 10, 2025

Germany Votes – Rise of Hitler 09, September 1930

Filed under: Germany, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 9 Jan 2025

The September 1930 elections reshape Germany’s political landscape. With surging support for extremists like the Nazis and Communists, and declining votes for democratic parties, Weimar faces a deeply polarized future. This episode breaks down the results, voter shifts, and what this means for the Republic.
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January 3, 2025

The Boomers and “reset to Year Zero”

Filed under: History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On Twit-, er, I mean “X”, ESR responds to a post from Devon Eriksen decrying the Baby Boomers for effectively destroying the culture of the postwar “American Dream”:

… I’m a late Boomer, born in ’57. I can dimly remember the day JFK was shot. I watched the moon landing. My teens and early twenties coincided with the 1970s. I was there for it all.

And even then, even in the 1970s, feeling a sense of subtle disintegration all around me, I already dimly grasped that we weren’t just falling. We were being pushed.

But I was very young then; I wouldn’t come to fully understand why, and by whom, for almost another 30 years

We Boomers didn’t burn down our heritage in a fit of thoughtless hedonism. I mean, we did some thoughtless hedonism, yeah, but that’s not where the real damage came from.

If you want to know where the damage came from, look up Yuri Bezmenov. Listen to him explain “demoralization” and the long game of Soviet culture-jamming against the West in general and the U.S. in particular.

Reset to year zero was a Marxist idea. It was part of a suite of memetic weapons, infectious propaganda bombs deployed against the social and cultural cohesion of the “main enemy”.

Often, they were successful in damaging us by leveraging not our vices but our virtues. Valorizing tolerance and liberality until they became helplessness in the face of more and more extreme forms of deviance was one of their attacks.

We didn’t fall on our own. We were pushed. The Boomer fault wasn’t that we were hedonists or nihilists, it’s that we didn’t have sufficient cultural immune defenses against what was being done to us.

Why that is exactly is a long sad story that I’m still not sure I completely understand. But I can hit some highlights.

One is that religion failed us. This is nobody’s fault and I don’t think it could have gone differently; it’s a failure that had been on the cards ever since the mechanistic worldview reached effective completion by Darwin. One of the things the Marxists did was work to accelerate the inevitable decay of religious authority.

Secular conservatives failed us, too. They had one job — just one job — which was to explain why all those Chesterton’s fences shouldn’t be torn down. They utterly flubbed that on all three levels of awareness, analysis, and persuasion. That could have gone differently.

It didn’t help that after the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954 conservatives developed a severe case of cowardice about calling out Communist subversion.

That may have been their single greatest dereliction of duty. The result was that over the next 50 years Communist institutional capture of academia and other institutions went almost unopposed. Which is why today we struggle with “woke”.

Most of us Boomers weren’t wreckers, even by accident. Most of us were duped. It’s easy to say in hindsight we should have done better, but the enemy was very clever and determined.

Try not to judge us too harshly, kids. It’s nice to think that a later generation might have done better, but … I haven’t seen it happen yet.

December 20, 2024

Election Fever – Rise of Hitler 08, August 1930

World War Two
Published 19 December 2024

August 1930 brings Germany to a critical juncture as parties prepare for the September elections. Amid street violence, bans on political uniforms, and soaring unemployment, the stakes couldn’t be higher. This episode unpacks the campaign strategies, shifting alliances, and rising tensions shaping the Republic’s future.
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December 19, 2024

QotD: Replacing the outdated “left” and “right” with more accurate terms

Filed under: Books, History, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Keeping the simple spectrum approach of “Left” and “Right”, I’d divide the world into the fundamentally incompatible camps of “Theory” people and “Reality” people. We all know all about the Theory People, so just one quick example: J.B.S. Haldane. Indisputably a great scientist, and not just a great scientist, a great evolutionary biologist. If there’s anyone on this earth who should’ve been convinced, right down to the very marrow of his bones, that human beings are NOT blank slates, it was J.B.S. Haldane. And yet, he was a Marxist — and not just a Marxist, a really loopy one, even by the standards of the early 20th century.

It was guys like Haldane who caused Stove to write a great essay about “The Ishmael Effect”. He said something like (from memory) it’s a striking fact about powerful minds, that even though they know better than everyone else some fact about the physical world — the conservation of energy, say — their powerful minds cause them to get caught up in all the fascinating implications of their pet theory, such that they fail to see their pet theory requires energy not to be conserved. Thus (said Stove), a guy like Kant: After telling us that no human mind can access the Thing-in-Itself, he gives us four hundred pages of extremely detailed information about the Thing-in-Itself. Or Karl Marx, who was able to soar so far above his own economic class situation as to tell us, with oracular certainty, that no one is able to transcend the cognitive limits of his economic class situation. I don’t think it’s much of an exaggeration to say that “the Ishmael Effect” pretty much IS 19th century philosophy … and thanks to entropy, 20th century politics, and now 21st century culture.

Such are the Theory People who, however many raw IQ points they have, will really see five lights if The Party tells them to, because The Party controls the Theory and the Theory is never wrong, facts be damned. Call them Rubashovs if you like (and are feeling literary), but let’s move on to the Reality People. If Rubashov is the ultimate Theory Person — marching willingly off to his destiny in the dreaded Lubyanka, because The Party requires it and The Party is never wrong — so the ultimate Reality Person is Niccolo Machiavelli.

Much hooey has been written about The Prince, that it’s ACK-shully a biting satire (you could call the Rubashovs’ junior varsity the ACK-shully kids), but Ol’ Nick meant every fucking word. Politics was a contact sport in his day — he picked the wrong side of a political dispute, and got the strappado for it. He knew exactly what he was talking about, and had the disjointed shoulders to prove it.

Machiavelli is often called a cynic, but just as everything in Clown World always turns out faker and gayer than the most jaded can imagine, so even the hardest-bitten cynic can’t touch Ol’ Nick. The Prince is beautifully written, but it’s one of the toughest reads you’ll ever have, because surely he can’t mean what he just wrote … he just can’t. But he does, and it’s true — that for example a man will more quickly get over the murder of his father than the loss of his patrimony. And you know it’s true, if only in the darkest watches of the night when you toss and turn in the coldest of cold sweats. There aren’t more than a handful of sentences in The Prince that won’t give you insomnia, if you really start thinking them through …

But just as (one hopes) even Rubashov would balk at shooting his children on The Party’s orders, so even Machiavelli marvels at the truth that no one is thoroughly, consciously evil, even when it’s in his obvious best interest to be. A man will always convince himself he’s doing good, even when he’s obviously, objectively doing the most heinous evil, and that — Nick implies — is the way to manage a tyrant. Even when doing X is the obviously advantageous thing to do, and doing Y is obviously disadvantageous, you can convince someone to do Y by changing the moral frame.

There’s obviously a spectrum here, which like all human behavior bends in on itself at the extremes. One imagines Rubashov, for instance, going through an “if only Comrade Stalin knew!” type thought process if The Party ordered him to shoot his infant children. Yes, The Party is never wrong … but even though Comrade Stalin IS The Party, The Party is, finally, the historical manifestation of a metaphysical necessity, and therefore, in the light of the Highest Truth, Comrade Stalin — though never wrong!! — is perhaps misinformed in this case … Just as Francesco Sforza or whomever balks at murdering those infants in their cribs, though it’s clearly the very best course of action, politically.

Rubashov vs. Machiavelli. That’s the best I can do.

Severian, “Mail / Grab Bag”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-09-10.

December 18, 2024

QotD: Western shaming – the grass is always greener overseas

Filed under: China, Economics, History, Japan, Media, Quotations, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In the late 1950s, many elites in the United States bought the Soviet Union line that the march of global communism would “bury” the West. Then, as Soviet power eroded in the 1980s, Japan Inc. and its ascendant model of state-sponsored industry became the preferred alternative to Western-style democratic capitalism.

Once Japan’s economy ossified, the new utopia of the 1990s was supposedly the emerging European Union. Americans were supposed to be awed that the euro gained ground on the dollar. Europe’s borderless democratic socialism and its “soft power” were declared preferable to the reactionary U.S.

By 2015, the EU was a mess, so China was preordained as the inevitable global superpower. American intellectuals pointed to its high-speed rail transportation, solar industries and gleaming airports, in contrast to the hollowed-out and grubby American heartland.

Now the curtain has been pulled back on the interior rot of the Chinese Communist Party, its gulag-like re-education camps, its systematic mercantile cheating, its Orwellian surveillance apparatus, its serial public health crises and its primitive hinterland infrastructure.

After the calcification of the Soviet Union, Japan Inc., the EU and the Chinese superpower, no one quite knows which alternative will next supposedly bury America.

Victor Davis Hanson, “The Cult of Western Shaming”, Townhall.com, 2020-01-29.

December 11, 2024

QotD: Simon Leys on George Orwell

Filed under: Books, Britain, China, History, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… the very title of one of his essays, “The Art of Interpreting Non-Existent Inscriptions Written in Invisible Ink on a Blank Page”, tells you the essentials of what you needed to know about the decipherment of publications coming out of China and the kind of regime that made such an arcane art necessary, and why anyone who took official declarations at face value was at best naive and at worst a knave or a fool.

What Leys wrote in 1984 in a short book about George Orwell might just as well have been written about him: “In contrast to certified specialists and senior academics, he saw the evidence in front of his eyes; in contrast to wily politicians and fashionable intellectuals, he was not afraid to give it a name; and in contrast to the sociologists and political scientists, he knew how to spell it out in understandable language.”

Leys drew a distinction between simplicity and simplification: Orwell had the first without indulgence in the second. Again, the same might be said of Leys — who, of course, like Orwell, had taken a pseudonym, and with whose work there were many parallels in his own.

But immense as was Leys’s achievement in destroying the ridiculous illusions of Western intellectuals, as Orwell had tried to do before him, it was a task thrust upon him by circumstance rather than one that he would have chosen for himself. He was by nature an aesthete and a man of letters, and I confess that great was my surprise (and pleasurable awe) when I discovered that he was, in addition to being a great sinologist, a great literary essayist.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Rare and Common Sense”, First Things, 2017-11.

December 10, 2024

QotD: Nuclear deterrence and the start of the Cold War

Understanding the development of US nuclear doctrine and NATO requires understanding the western allies’ position after the end of WWII. In Britain, France and the United States, there was no political constituency, after the war was over, to remain at anything like full mobilization and so consequently the allies substantially demobilized following the war. By contrast, the USSR did not demobilize to anything like the same degree, leaving the USSR with substantial conventional military superiority in Eastern Europe (in part because, of course, Stalin and later Soviet leaders did not have to cater to public sentiment about defense spending). The USSR also ended the war having annexed several countries in whole or in part (including eastern Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, parts of Finland and bits of Romania) and creating non-democratic puppet governments over much of the rest of Eastern Europe. American fears that the USSR planned to attempt to further extend its control were effectively confirmed in 1948 by the Russian-backed coup in Czechoslovakia creating communist one-party rule there and by the June 1948 decision by Stalin to begin the Berlin Blockade in an effort to force the allies from Berlin as a prelude to bringing all of Germany, including the allied sectors which would become West Germany (that is, the Federal Republic of Germany).

It’s important, I think, for us to be clear-eyed here about what the USSR was during the Cold War – while the USSR made opportunistic use of anti-imperialist rhetoric against western powers (which were, it must be noted, also imperial powers), the Soviet Union was also very clearly an empire. Indeed, it was an empire of a very traditional kind, in which a core demographic (ethnic Russians were substantially over-represented in central leadership) led by an imperial elite (Communist party members) extracted resources, labor and manpower from a politically subordinated periphery (both the other Soviet Socialist Republics that composed the USSR and the Warsaw Pact countries) for the benefit of the imperial elite and the core. While the USSR presented itself as notionally federal in nature, it was in fact extremely centralized and dominated by a relatively small elite.

So when Western planners planned based on fears that the highly militarized expansionist territorial empire openly committed to an expansionist ideology and actively trying to lever out opposing governments from central (not eastern) Europe might try to expand further, they weren’t simply imagining things. This is not to say everything they did in response was wise, moral or legal; much of it wasn’t. There is a certain sort of childish error which assumes that because the “West” did some unsavory things during the Cold War, that means that the threat of the Soviet Union wasn’t real; we must put away such childish things. The fear had a very real basis.

Direct military action against the USSR with conventional forces was both politically unacceptable even before the USSR tested its first nuclear weapons – voters in Britain, France or the United States did not want another world war; two was quite enough – and also militarily impossible as Soviet forces in Europe substantially outnumbered their Western opponents. Soviet leaders, by contrast, were not nearly so constrained by public opinion (as shown by their strategic decision to limit demobilization, something the democracies simply couldn’t do).

This context – a west (soon to be NATO) that is working from the assumption that the USSR is expansionist (which it was) and that western forces would be weaker than Soviet forces in conventional warfare (which they were) – provides the foundation for how deterrence theory would develop.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Nuclear Deterrence 101”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-03-11.

December 8, 2024

President Hindenburg dissolves the Reichstag – Rise of Hitler 07, July 1930

World War Two
Published 7 Dec 2024

July 1930 sees the Weimar Republic facing unprecedented turmoil. From Brüning’s budget crisis and the Reichstag‘s dissolution to Nazi and Communist clashes with state governments, Germany braces for a pivotal election in September. This episode unpacks the month’s chaos, political maneuvers, and the rising tensions tearing the Republic apart.
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December 3, 2024

QotD: Old fashioned communists

Filed under: Economics, History, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In my youth, I shared a house with some communists of the very old-fashioned variety. They believed in industrial production because it inevitably resulted in that finest flower of humanity, the factory worker, who would, ex officio, be a foot soldier of the Revolution. No Leonardo da Vinci or Mozart for them! They believed, rather, in the Soviet Union’s ever-rising production, or at any rate graphs of ever-rising production, of something called pig iron, which at some point would overtake that of the United States and Western Europe combined, to the enormous benefit, of course, of the indigenous people of the Siberian tundra. They couldn’t see a landscape without wanting to garnish it with a factory chimney belching smoke, the blacker the better, as a symbol of what they called Man’s triumph over Nature (early communist propaganda and iconography were full of chimneys belching black smoke). They thought of Nature as an enemy, as a malign obstacle to be wrestled with and overcome, or as an evil conscious force obstructing Mankind’s progress to a glorious and infinitely abundant future. The extinction of animal species was welcome to them, not only if they, the extinct species, were in some way noxious to Man or deleterious to his advance, such as flies and snakes, but as symbolizing his increasing mastery over the surface of the Earth. Knowledge is power, and power is what they cared about.

Theodore Dalrymple, “A Matter of Respect”, Taki’s Magazine, 2019-12-31.

November 29, 2024

Why the Communists subjugated half of Europe

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 28 Nov 2024

From the Bolshevik Revolution to post-war dominance, Stalin’s plans forever changed Europe’s political landscape. Discover how the Soviet Union used ideology, diplomacy, military power, and ruthless suppression to control Eastern Europe and establish a new world order.
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November 23, 2024

How the US Paranoia of Leftism was Born

Filed under: Britain, History, Quotations, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 21 Nov 2024

Elizabeth Bentley’s defection in 1945 didn’t just expose a Soviet spy network — it fueled America’s second Red Scare and a wave of anti-communist paranoia. Her revelations about Soviet infiltration within the U.S. government became a catalyst for McCarthyism, reshaping American politics and society in an era defined by fear and suspicion.
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