Quotulatiousness

June 21, 2024

Fractal dissidence

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

Fortissax notes some historic parallels between the many, many factions in Spain leading up to the catastrophe of the Spanish Civil War and the many, many factions of the dissident right in the Anglosphere and the rest of the diminishing western world today:

The Spanish Civil War, approximate Nationalist (pink) and Republican (blue) areas of control in September, 1936.
Map by NordNordWest with modifications by “Sting” via Wikimedia Commons.

We have serious issues on our hands. We must each contribute through our respective projects and instigate real-world change by pen, sword, or ploughshare. We don’t have time to split, fracture, insult, belittle, destroy each other’s reputations, or engage in character assassination. I liken the factionalism of the (terminally) online right to that of the factions in the Spanish Civil War. The online right is important because the internet is the new “public square”. As influential or more, as mass-action in living, breathing cities. The influence of discourse, media, and content on the internet is insurmountable. While small locally, the impact of each content maker, producer, writer, poet, and videographer is huge. We are part of a civilizational, some would even say global, culture, yet not of it. I will provide examples of some similarities I notice while reading through Peter Kemp’s “Mine Were of Trouble”.

In the buildup to the Spanish Civil War, you had conservative patriots (populists, anti-woke patriot-normies), traditionalist Christian monarchists (who parallel Christ-Is-King people), and the Falangist (who parallel the Vitalists, secular-right). This roughly, parallels the groupings of the Dissident Right today. I believe this is a good case study. History may not repeat itself, but it rhymes. All of them had a lot more in common than they opposed. For example, consider the following points:

  • Anti-Communism: Both the Falangists and the Requetés were strongly anti-communist and opposed the Spanish Republic, which they associated with communism, liberalism, and anarchism. They viewed the leftist factions as threats to Spanish traditions, religion, and social order. Today, the Managerial Elite of every single western country has weaponized the New-Left of decades past to use as shock troops against the good people of each nation. We all agree the mass psychosis of capital backed DEI civic cult, their nihilistic, suicidal anti-life acolytes are the most destructive group the human species has ever seen.
  • Support for Strong Leaders: Both groups eventually supported General Francisco Franco’s leadership, despite some initial differences in ideology and goals. Franco’s ability to unify the Nationalist forces was crucial to their eventual victory. In many Western countries today, people are rallying behind Trump, Bardella, Farage, Bernier to name a few. They are not perfect, but they are increasingly influenced by Dissident Right ideas, and culture.
  • Nationalism: The Falangists and the Requetés were deeply nationalist, believing in the unity and greatness of Spain. They were committed to preserving Spain as a single, undivided nation-state. Today, Dissidents of all stripes support nationalism an civilizational cooperation against outside threats like China, the emerging Republic of India, and the Islamic world, who seek to make excursions in Europe.
  • Militarism: Both factions believed in the application of force when necessary to achieve their goals and restore order in Spain. They were heavily involved in the Nationalist military efforts during the civil war. Both the religious right, and the secular Vitalists ostensibly believe a strong body, mind and soul are necessary to enact change. Both hold excellence as a core value, although perhaps one more than the other.
  • Benevolent Authoritarianism: Both the Falangists and the Requetés supported authoritarian forms of government. While the Falangists leaned towards a Nietzsche inspired model, the Requetés, rooted in traditional Christian monarchism, were also supportive of strong, centralized authority to maintain order and uphold traditional values.
  • Natural Social Order: Both groups believed in a natural social order or organic hierarchy. This concept held that society should be structured according to natural, hierarchical lines, which they saw as inherent and beneficial for maintaining stability and harmony. Do the religious right, and the Vitalists not believe this? That the strong, the beautiful, healthy, are fit to lead? That the most capable should be given the opportunity to advance socially?
  • Community Over Individual: While recognizing and respecting the Western man’s innate streak of liberty and individualism, both groups prioritized the needs and values of the community over the individual. They believed that individuals found their true purpose and identity within the larger community and that communal values should guide social and political life. When everyone is doing their part, all prosper.

June 18, 2024

Freddie deBoer contra J.J. McCullough on Conspiracy Theories

Filed under: Cancon, History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I saw JJ’s latest video pop up on my YouTube subscriptions page, read the headline and winced slightly. I generally like JJ’s videos even when I disagree with his presentation or interpretation and from the title, I thought “No, ‘many conspiracy theories’ did NOT ‘turn out to be true'” would require a fair bit of, uh, curation of the theories that get discussed. Freddie deBoer — who I disagree with much more than I do with McCullough — had a similar reaction:

The latest video from conservative Canadian YouTuber JJ McCullough displays many of the attributes that make his perspective unique — he’s genuinely a right-wing figure but an arch institutionalist, a gay Millennial with the kind of vague social libertinism common to a lot of libertarian-leaning conservatives but something of a scold, a Canadian patriot who relentlessly defends the United States from the kinds of criticism of Americanah that you might associate with Europe or, well, Canada — critiques of our provincialism, our consumerism, our boorish tendency to shove the rest of the world around. McCullough likes all of that stuff, more or less, while living a cosmopolitan and vaguely-arty lifestyle in groovy Vancouver. He’s perhaps best known for his war with Montreal, Francophone Canadians, and the entire province of Quebec, which fits his general esteem for a certain kind of capital-R Reasonable Anglophilia.

He reminds me, strangely, of a certain kind of secular anti-atheist, the type who still gets mad about the New Atheists despite the complete collapse of that subculture and whose own lack of belief doesn’t prevent them from waxing poetic about the glories of religion. I have a friend from grad school who grew up in an extremely repressive Christian community when she was young, and who describes leaving as an “escape”. (The kind of community where she and her sisters wore wrist-to-ankle dresses every day of their lives no matter the Oklahoma heat, weren’t allowed TV or radio, absorbed lots of corporal punishment, that sort of thing.) She has very, very little patience for people who are so annoyed by internet atheists that they become in effect advocates for religion; as she says, this kind of vague fondness for religion among the irreligious could only occur to someone who never had to live the way she did. I sort of see the same thing in McCullough — he idealizes certain aspects of America’s ethos because he has never had to live with the consequences of being surrounded by people who believe in it, who consciously or unconsciously demand that everyone else believe in it.

Anyhow, this new video is about conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories are a good topic for understanding McCullough’s very particular ideological makeup. Conspiracy theories are famously a cross-ideological phenomenon, with both left conspiracy theories and right conspiracy theories but also conspiracy theories that don’t fit neatly into either, like 9/11 trutherism. As I said, McCullough is an institutionalist, a small-but-good government sort of guy (or so I take it) who places a great deal of value in official claims, institutions, and experts, and so he’s naturally distrustful of conspiracy theories. And he demonstrates that antipathy in this video through poking holes in a few clickbaity articles listing conspiracy theories that turned out to be true. This all amounts to feasting on a banquet of low-hanging fruit, but it’s not an illegitimate way to approach the question. I just don’t like his conclusions.

The key to McCullough’s bit here is that he doesn’t dispute that the named conspiracy theories (or “conspiracy theories”) that are asserted to be true are true. Rather, he operates by insisting that every identified conspiracy theory is in fact not a conspiracy theory according to his preferred definition. It’s not sufficient for a conspiracy theory to be broadly thought of as a conspiracy theory; it has to comport to specific rules he has devised for what a conspiracy theory entails. Effectively, that means that a conspiracy theory is only a conspiracy theory if it satisfies criteria endorsed by no one but JJ McCullough. I can’t decide if this is an isolated demand for rigor or a No True Scotsman, but either way, McCullough is here insisting on an unusually stringent definition of a conspiracy theory for the purpose of dismissing the idea that any conspiracy theories are true. And there’s a version of this that isn’t entirely wrong; there’s a tautological sense in which all conspiracy theories are false because being false is part of that definition of a conspiracy theory. But McCullough isn’t using that definition, just a particularly odd one that makes his task easier.

So the fact that cigarette manufacturers knew that cigarettes were very bad for your health but conspired to hide this fact from the public is not a conspiracy theory, according to McCullough, because other people of that era suspected that cigarettes caused lung cancer. (Actually proving that took a very long time, at least according to modern standards of causality.) I find this argument powerfully strange! You had a group of powerful people, they indisputably knew that cigarettes were very bad for your health, they indisputably conspired to suppress that information, they were fairly effective at that task. The fact that some early whistleblowers tried to raise the alarm is simply irrelevant. Check out my own proprietary formula.

Group of Powerful or Influential People + Nefarious Intent + Secrecy + Active Conspiring + Negative Consequences, Real or Potential = Conspiracy Theory

That’s a conspiracy, brother, and the tobacco company bad behavior fits. Long before information about their coverups became public knowledge, people were talking about the possibility that the tobacco companies were up to that exact bad behavior. Theorizing, you might say.

June 11, 2024

Mark Steyn on Nigel Farage

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

This is from his Friday round-up post at SteynOnline:

“Nigel Farage” by Michael Vadon is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

Demography is relentless. Douglas Murray notes that the BBC is always warning that the “far right” is “on the march“, but in the west it is demographic transformation that is truly on the march, quietly and unreported, picking up pace every month. By comparison, the wretched Sunak/Starmer dinner-theatre of the UK election campaign is completely irrelevant to Britain’s future. So I am glad to see that Nigel Farage has had a change of heart and opted to join the battle. Back in 2016, in the days after the Brexit vote, I said he was the most consequential figure in UK politics since Mrs Thatcher. Which was true. Alas, people most Britons have never heard of then set about subverting Brexit, and very effectively.

So here we are eight years later, with half-a-million Anglo-Celts abandoning the UK each year and a million Pushtun warlords and Sudanese clitoridectomists and Albanian sex-traffickers taking their place. Demography is relentless, and the hour is late.

Over a decade ago — in fact, closer to two, as I estimate it — Nigel Farage said to me that the first thing you have to do when you found a new political party on the right is to accept the burden of being its only member — at least for a while. Because the first 10,000 people who want to join are neo-Nazis and skinheads and the like. It was a clever insight, and he spread it around. So I had it told back to me many times over the years by populist politicians from all over the Continent, Danes and Dutch, Swedes and Spaniards alike.

Nigel took his gatekeeping seriously — and not just on the domestic front, “distancing” himself from Tommy Robinson and Tommy-associated issues such as Islam and the industrial-scale sex-slavery of thousands of English girls. As Gavin Mortimer reminds us, a decade ago Farage also rejected any Euro-collaboration with Marine Le Pen because her party had “anti-Semitism and general prejudice in its DNA“. Geert Wilders (for whose fine book I am proud to have written the introduction) was furious with Farage and attempted to broker a rapprochement. Nigel was having none of it.

So here we are a decade later:

    * in the Netherlands, Wilders is currently the most powerful politician, leading the most popular party, and has helped move the electorate significantly;

    * in France, Mme Le Pen’s party will, in just two days’ time, win the European elections. She is the de facto leader of the opposition, and her caucus in the National Assembly is the largest and most effective opponent to Macron. She has also helped move the electorate significantly;

    * in the United Kingdom, by contrast, voters are about to elect a left-wing government led by a fellow, Sir Vics Starmer, who thinks men can have a cervix.

I think Nigel over-gatekept.

He has been very good at founding personal vehicles (Ukip, the Brexit Party) that deflate like punctured soufflés when he steps down as leader. Yes, he was very watchable in the jungle on “I’m a Celebrity — Get Me Out of Here”, and, in my GB News days, he certainly handed me a bigger audience at 8pm than any of his guest-hosts. But, as that station’s currently Farageless ratings reveal, you can’t build a sustained movement on one man. Nigel’s advice was clever twenty years ago. Wilders, LePen, Meloni et al were wise to recognise its limitations.

So I’m pleased Farage changed his mind on this election. He should change his mind on the over-gatekeeping, too.

Time and demography march on.

June 7, 2024

Nigel Farage’s challenge to the Conservatives

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ed West perhaps goes a bit far in comparing Nigel Farage and his Reform UK to Lenin’s Bolsheviks in the October Revolution, but he’s not wrong about what the rise of Farage’s party might mean to the already dim re-election hopes of Rishi Sunak’s bedraggled clown posse:

“Nigel Farage” by Michael Vadon is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

I imagine that the last remaining serotonin emptied from the bodies of the Tory election team when they heard that Nigel Farage was to return as leader of the Reform Party and stand at Clacton.

The likelihood is that Farage will win that seat, and the reception he received was certainly electric. And Clacton is not even among Reform’s top 20 targets, according to Matt Goodwin.

It’s possible that the party could overtake the Tories in some polls, although I doubt that they will beat them on election day. That is certainly Farage’s aim, and as he said on Monday: “I genuinely believe we can get more votes in this election than the Conservative Party. They are on the verge of total collapse … I’ve done it before. I’ll do it again. I will surprise everybody.”

Contrary to the jokes about Farage failing to get elected, or the criticism that he is a “serial loser“, he is arguably the most successful politician of the past decade. He built up a minuscule party of ‘fruitcakes and gadflies’ to win two successive European elections. He made Brexit happen, and then stood his candidates down in a number of seats to ensure the Leave alliance remained united in 2019, securing Boris Johnson a victory.

For which he didn’t get the thanks he felt was due, something he alluded to at Monday’s press conference. From what I understand the Tory establishment treated him with a snooty disdain which many an outsider has experienced with the British upper class. And for those making the old point that Farage’s private school background bars him from being a true outsider, that’s not how high society works. Populist movements claiming to represent the downtrodden or disenfranchised have invariably been led by people from highly educated or privileged backgrounds, whether of the Left or Right.

Farage’s targeted constituency certainly fits that bill. Clacton is the town that Matthew Parris called “Britain on crutches” in a piece warning the Tories not to desert their traditional middle-class voters. But the problem for the party is that, through a combination of authoritarian vibes and very liberal policies, they have managed to lose both. Rather than making moderate, soothing sounds while using the British executive’s immense power to shape the country around their will, they have done the exact opposite.

The Government’s disastrous polling figures are not some great mystery. Conservatives don’t tend to have the same emotional attachment to their party as the Labour family does. They vote Tory because they want them to do three things: cut immigration, put more criminals away, and lower taxes. It’s nothing more complicated than that, and they’ve failed on all three.

It is obviously the former that has provoked the most bitterness towards the party. I’m a great believer in Stephen Davies’s analysis of alignment in politics, and the central issue in British politics is immigration, multiculturalism and diversity. Labour are unquestionably on one side of this issue; the Tories are broadly pro-multiculturalism and, while issuing soundbites critical of high immigration, have raised it to record levels. If both main parties are seen to be on one side, something else will fill that gap in the market. Political parties are amoral bodies seeking voting coalitions, and the side which is most united in aligning its core groups around primary and secondary issues will win.

June 3, 2024

Decoding Nigel Farage’s “hidden agenda” … that isn’t actually hidden at all

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I’ve been theorizing that the reason Nigel Farage didn’t plunge immediately into the British election campaign was that he was expecting Rishi Sunak to do his very best Kim Campbell impersonation and utterly destroy the Conservatives as a viable political party. It turns out that that’s pretty much exactly what he’s doing:

Nigel Farage at the ULEZ protests in London, 30 August 2023.
Image from JoNova.

The biggest question of all, however, is what Farage wants to do after polling day. For months now, a growing band of Conservative MPs have been agitating openly for him to be admitted to the party; even Rishi Sunak now says he “respects” him.

Close friends of Farage believe his real plan is to wait for the Tories to implode, and in the aftermath arrive as a saviour in waiting. “He doesn’t want to be the person who puts the bullet in the back of their heads, why be seen to alienate Conservative voters?” said one, while a second, a senior Tory, said: “Our party needs to be able to come back with people like Nigel, where we basically go back to be that authentic Thatcherite party — his natural home.”

[Reform UK leader Richard] Tice says he wants to destroy and replace the Conservative Party, but when asked if he feels the same, Farage says: “I certainly don’t have any trust for them or any love for them”. So does he want to change it? “I want to reshape the centre-right, whatever that means.”

Asked directly if his friends are right and he wants to join the Tories, he adds: “Why do you think I called it Reform? Because of what happened in Canada — the 1992-93 precedent in Canada, where Reform comes from the outside, because the Canadian Conservatives had become social democrats like our mob here. It took them time, it took them two elections, they became the biggest party on the centre-right. They then absorbed what was left of the Conservative Party into them and rebranded.”

I suggest this sounds a lot like he’s floating a merger. “More like a takeover, dear boy,” he replies, grinning like a Cheshire Cat.

May 26, 2024

Will Rishi Sunak be the British Kim Campbell?

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The British election is now underway and if the polls are accurate, Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives are in for one heck of a thrashing. If he’s particularly unlucky, he could come close to former Canadian Prime Minister Kim Campbell’s electoral shipwreck in 1993 (losing a Parliamentary majority and being reduced to two seats in the Commons), but perhaps Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer isn’t quite the <sarc>charismatic juggernaut</sarc> that Canada’s Jean Chrétien was:

Rishi Sunak shortly after becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer in 2020.

I’m old enough to remember the sense of optimism, hope and promise felt when Tony Blair was elected back in 1997; not by me, obviously, but I could at least appreciate that other people felt that ‘things can only get better’.

Whether you think they did or not, Blair transformed the country in his own image, just as his predecessor Margaret Thatcher had done during her similarly long reign. No one could say the same of the recent fourteen years of Tory-led governments, a period that has been marked by a continual drift away from conservatism both within civil society and in many ways driven by the administration itself.

As I have said one or two times before, you could have woken up from a long coma and had no idea who had been in charge the whole time. It’s an indication of how far the Overton Window has shifted that proposals to limit student-led immigration are considered way out there despite being mainstream only a decade ago – proposals which the Prime Minister backed out of. One of the benefits of being in government should be the ability to shift the terms of debate, but whereas the rest of Europe is mostly turning Right, Britain under the Tories has gone the other way.

In retrospect, and I have definitely said this more than once or twice, the post-Brexit immigration policy was their biggest mistake. It meant the worst of both worlds for the country and for Tory coalition building, alienating both a large section of cautious voters over leaving the EU, and the many cultural conservatives they picked up in 2019 who saw the referendum as a vote on immigration.

In a parallel universe where the government reduced net migration to five figures, there may well have been immediate pain: struggles to fill vacancies, inflationary pressure caused by rising wages, and universities which now cannot survive without using the immigration system as a funding mechanism. But the Tories would have been on 30% rather than 20%; that they aren’t aware enough to understand this is strange, but then they aren’t an ideological party.

Rishi Sunak’s decision to hold the election early is very curious. Perhaps he was worried that enough letters would be handed in triggering a leadership contest; perhaps he feared that Nigel Farage would reappear and make the Reform Party even more of a problem. Perhaps he’s just impetuous and has had enough, but the announcement itself, in pouring rain and drowned out by a New Labour anthem played by a public nuisance, was fitting.

The prime minister is very unpopular, and the Tories are currently polling at catastrophic levels, but there is little enthusiasm for Labour and more people think the country will get worse than better after they are elected.

May 24, 2024

“[I]t is offensive to say that women should help men reach their potential; but … men must help women reach theirs“

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

There has been a lot of online outrage after Kansas City Chiefs placekicker Harrison Butker spoke at the graduation ceremonies at his alma mater:

“Stop giving men microphones,” wrote one of the signers of the petition to have NFL kicker Harrison Butker fired.

“As a woman living in post-Roe America,” declared another, “I’m exhausted from men telling women what to do with their lives.”

“How offensive to imply women are put here on this planet to help a man reach his full potential,” fumed a third. “We should be empowering women to achieve greatness however that looks for them. Having children or being a mother isn’t the currency we must pay to be treated as equal members of this society.”

And on and on they go in predictable, and predictably incoherent, statements. Apparently, it is offensive to say that women should help men reach their potential; but, in the next breath, men must help women reach theirs.

At a time when women encourage one another in “rage rituals” and feminists like Mona Eltahawy call for perpetual anger as the route to liberation, few can be surprised by the hysteria that followed National Football League kicker Harrison Butker’s speech to the graduating students of Benedictine College in Kansas. It is a rage that has led well over 200,000 of the furious, mostly women, to sign a petition demanding he be fired by the Kansas City Chiefs.

Manufacturing outrage is what feminist journalism does best, and its audience is eager for cosplay rebellion and narcissistic posturing even when, as in the case of the speech, the hyperventilating is far in excess of the fact. That even Benedictine nuns have joined the chorus shows how many women in all walks of life find such posturing near-irresistible.

Of course, if Butker had addressed the Benedictine College graduates to say that Catholicism was riddled with misogyny and homophobia, no popular petitions would have been launched. If he had said that abortion was a gift to humanity and that female priests would lead the church to glory, his words would have sparked dissent only in the most marginal of venues.

Let a man praise his wife for her devotion to family, and we witness a stampede of foul-mouthed nasties to their bullhorns.

May 11, 2024

Rex Murphy, RIP

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

Canadian political commentator Rex Murphy has died at 77:

Tributes and remembrances from across the political spectrum have poured in for Rex Murphy, who died aged 77.

Mark Critch, a fellow Newfoundlander who parodied Murphy on the CBC program This Hour Has 22 Minutes, recalled that Murphy had worked with his father at VOCM radio in St. John’s, N.L. “You might not always agree with what he had to say but oh, could he say it”, Critch wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “I hope he makes it home to Gooseberry Cove.”

That theme — of not always agreeing with Murphy, but admiring his style — has been frequent in remembrances of his life.

Bob Rae, a long-time Liberal member of Parliament, former premier of Ontario and now Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations, wrote of meeting Murphy on television in 1978: “He stole the show”.

“We disagreed about many things, but I never lost my affection and admiration for him,” Rae wrote on X.

In a video posted Thursday evening, which had been recorded for an award Murphy received prior to his death, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre praised Murphy’s “verbal ninja moves”.

“You are a national treasure. You are a voice of reason. You are a champion of all things that are great in our country,” Poilievre said.

    Canada has lost an icon, a pioneer of independent, eloquent, and fearless thought, and always a captivating orator who never lost his touch.I was honoured to toast to Rex a few months ago on receiving the Game Changers Award for one of this country’s true game changers.

    Rex,… pic.twitter.com/Nz8fWBPv7F

    — Pierre Poilievre (@PierrePoilievre) May 10, 2024

On Friday, the House of Commons held a moment of silence in honour of Murphy.

“Few gifts from the rock rival that of the now-departed Rex Murphy,” Conservative MP John Williamson said in the House. “Rex stood on guard for all of us with great wit and wisdom throughout his many newspaper columns and on-air commentaries. Rex was brave but without pretence. He despised the smug.”

Murphy’s writing, which appeared for more than a decade in National Post, was always fierce, often controversial, and liberally peppered with the sort of language that has the feel of an age gone by.

April 24, 2024

“What is to be done?” – N.S. Lyons at the National Conservatism Conference in Brussels

Filed under: Europe, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I suspect the recent National Conservatism Conference in Brussels would have been a mere blip in the media if it hadn’t been for the dedicated and persistent efforts of local Belgian politicians and activists to prevent it from happening at all, using almost every tool at their disposal. By chasing the event from venue to venue, intimidating the businesses who had contracted to provide services to the event and then finally sending in a massive police presence to physically prevent the conference from going forward, it became a nine-day wonder. One of the people invited to speak at the event was N.S. Lyons:

“What is to be done?” That seems to be the question on everyone’s lips these days. Answering it is I think in fact the real purpose of this conference on National Conservatism here in Brussels.

By now most of us are well aware of the scope of the problems we face. Our societies are controlled by a transnational class of managerial elites increasingly isolated from the people they rule, and from reality. These elites, and the many institutions they control, have been captured by a revolutionary ideology that seeks to remake the world, and everyone in it, from the top down.

The vast machinery of modern managerial technocracy has been turned against us, its bulging bureaucracies seeking to impose on us a totalizing project of internal colonization. Our systems of self-governance, the cultural fabric of our national ways of life, even our very human nature are being intentionally suppressed and replaced with the stifling conformity of a rigid system of ideological and technological control. All remaining semblances of democratic accountability are today being cast aside in favor of governance via mass manipulation and open coercion. Increasingly, any dissent is treated as a threat to the security of the state – and is punished as such.

As has been so amply demonstrated by the police outside our very doors, dispatched to shut down this conference, for conservatives and other dissidents this state of affairs means escalating exclusion and persecution. The reality is that any “liberal neutrality” or “rule of law” once maintained by the state no longer exists – such restraint was an artifact of the old order.

Meanwhile, managerialism’s progressive project has produced a deliberate inversion of moral values, a degradation of competence, and an implosion of social trust. This has begun to induce collapse in the basic systems upholding civilization. The result is a proliferation of crime, addiction, social atomization, and general despair, dysfunction, disorder, and decay. So now we suffer under a state of simultaneous anarcho-tyranny.

What is to be done? First of all, it should be clear by now that old guard conservatism will be of no use to us whatsoever. For decades, such a conservatism has failed to conserve much of anything at all. Even when successfully elected to political office with a strong mandate, conservatives of this mode are soon either coopted by the oligarchic establishment or find themselves isolated and helpless before the vast unelected managerial “deep state”.

They have proven themselves unable to combat either the relentless march of progressive cultural hegemony, or the growing technocratic tyranny that openly advertises its intent to ultimately destroy them. Over and over again, they are fast reduced to blustering uselessly at Congressional hearings, whining on talk shows, or settling in to merely grift whatever they can, while they can. So, unfortunately, just “voting harder” will not be enough to get us out of our present mess.

Alternative für Deutschland is gifted a blueprint for governing by their entrenched opponents

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

Was it Napoleon who said to never interrupt your enemy when they’re making a mistake? If so, the German populist Alternative für Deutschland leaders must be congratulated for not interrupting the latest mistake by the statists they want to replace:

Every day I encounter yet another hamfisted pseudoacademic propaganda operation eagerly churning out oceans of text to shore up the German political establishment. The idea seems to be that with just enough whitepapers, bursting with just enough words, the situation might still be saved.

There are just so many of these outfits, they grow like weeds in the fertile soil of government funding. This Sunday, it has been my dubious pleasure to stumble across the “academic and journalistic open access forum of debate on topical events and developments in constitutional law and politics” billing itself as the Verfassungsblog (the “Constitution Blog”). This factory of tedious prose and political special pleading that nobody will ever read is not just the eccentric side project of a very socially concerned lawyer named Maximilian Steinbeis, oh no. It is funded by the WZB Berlin Social Science Center (and therefore, indirectly, by the German taxpayer) and also by the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law. We would do well to take these people seriously, in other words, and you should keep that in mind, because things are about to get very ridiculous.

Last year, our state-funded Verfassungbloggers realised that elections were approaching in Saxony, Thüringen and Brandenburg. This worried them terribly, because Alternative für Deutschland dominates polling in all three states. They feared that this “authoritarian populist party” might seize control of one or more state governments, just as other authoritarian populist parties have seized control “in Poland and Hungary, in Florida and Texas”. These parties are very bad, because they “use … power … so that they no longer have to relinquish it”. They “manipulate electoral law” and “stifle opposition” and “pack the administration and judiciary with their own people”. As if that were not bad enough, they also “make the media, scientific and cultural institutions dependent on their will”. Of course, the Federal Republic is presently ruled by a party cartel system that is already doing all of that, but the difference is that none of the parties involved are “authoritarian” or “populist”. The priests of democracy get to do whatever they want, and whatever they do is by definition democratic.

In this spirit, our Verfassungsbloggers launched the “Thüringen Project”. Their aim is to identify how the forces for humanitarian pluralism might manipulate the law, stifle the opposition and pack the administration and judiciary in even more extreme ways than have yet been imagined, all to subvert the will of east German voters and more effectively blunt the power of the AfD when they become the strongest party in the Thuringian Landtag.

[…]

All of this iterative looping has culminated in an overproduced, 36-page .pdf file bearing the characteristically cumbersome title “Strengthening the resilience of the rule of law in Thüringen: Action recommendations from the scenario analysis of the Thüringen Project“. No syllable can be spared in our campaign to defend democracy. In the pages of this plan, they finally define what “authoritarian populist parties” are. These are parties that “use the narrative of a natural, ‘true’ people in opposition to ‘corrupt elites’, for the purpose of delegitimising pluralistic democracy and establishing an authoritarian regime”. The AfD are of course “a clear example of such a party”. The more panicked all of these people get, the closer they come to saying plainly what they’re really afraid of, namely the growing hostility of native Germans to an increasingly isolated political elite, which plainly does not care much about “authoritarianism” (they are responsible for plenty of that themselves) as much as they are terrified of losing their hold on power.

April 13, 2024

“One of the banes of the traditionalist and neoreactionary is ideology”

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

Theophilus Chilton urges conservatives to rebuild the crucial social structures that modern life has so signally undermined: churches, the männerbund, and militias (and no, I’d never heard of männerbund either).

One of the banes of the traditionalist and neoreactionary is ideology. Now, any thinking person has a worldview, a comprehensive picture of how they view the world and interpret what they see around them that is based on their experiences, education, and background. However, this is not what is meant with the term “ideology.” Instead, an ideology is a set of beliefs – often unsubstantiated – which are held in a doctrinaire fashion, even in the face of any and all evidences that the beliefs are wrong. Moreover, ideologues will demand adherence to these beliefs, and will actively seek to ridicule and punish those who do not sufficiently fill out the list of checkboxes demanded by the ideology. In short, an ideology is a way for people to avoid having to think for themselves, to resist bringing their worldview into line with reality as it is manifested around them. The key to the concept here is not that of having a cohesive worldview, but the fact that this worldview is held in spite of any countervailing evidence. The ideologue refuses to consider any evidences or objections to his belief system, and will try to find ways (accusing his opponent of being racist, sexist, etc.) to get around having to deal with them.

One such ideology is modern American conservatism, along with its close relative by cousin marriage libertarianism. Just as much as modern neoliberalism demands a blind adherence to a rigidly held set of ideological positions which are increasingly out of step with human nature and reality, so also does modern conservatism. One of the most obvious examples of this is the conservative/libertarian idolisation of “rugged individualism” and “the sovereign individual”. Indeed, these folks have created an elaborate mythology which places the “rugged individual” at the centre of the American experience throughout our history. Like most beliefs built on a purely ideological foundation, this mythology is deeply held while being deeply out of touch with actual history and reality.

If I were to make this criticism on a typical conservative site such as Free Republic, it would be roundly met with automatic and unreasoning condemnation. How dare I suggest that Americans should be anything less than atomised individuals with no connexions or associations of community to each other! I must be the reincarnation of Josef By-George Stalin!

And yet, the whole history of America has been one of traditional communities acting in concert. The Revolution was driven by citizen associations formed in churches and taverns, who then fought as community militias. The settling of the West was not done by individuals, by and large, but by groups who traveled by wagon train for mutual support and self-defence. Even today, most local community matters are handled by citizens acting together. While the individuals in American history may have been rugged, they were not alone. America, like most other traditional Western societies from the classical period forward, was communitarian and group oriented.

In other words, there is ample evidence which suggests that our choices don’t have to be either Ayn Rand or Bernie Sanders. There is a third option, which is to recognise the organic bonds of community, society, and nation which bind men together.

This is important for us to keep in mind today because there are any number of influences due to the modernism of our world today which act to draw people away from community and the positive associative bonds we used to have with each other. One of these which I’ve discussed previously is the set of social phenomena surrounding the creation of suburbia after World War II. Our forms of popular entertainment work toward this end as well – instead of towns and villages coming together to celebrate births, marriages, and deaths with song, dance, and competitions, modern American man sits alone in front of his television or in a darkened movie theatre where he’s not allowed to talk to those sitting next to him. Modern American religion plays into this as well, with its selfish emphasis on “what church can do for me”, rather than the other way around, and where Americans “church hop” from assembly to assembly, never integrating into a body of believers, but always flitting about looking for the next new program for their kids.

I say that we ought to reject this modernism as inferior to what we once had. In place of the atomised individual of conservative and libertarian phantasies, those of us in tradition and neoreaction ought to seek to restore and then strengthen traditional social bonding institutions.

The three institutions which I’d like to discuss in particular here are churches, the männerbund, and militias. Each of these institutions play different, yet complementary, roles in communitarian society. Each also, I believe, appeals particularly to one of the three complementary and interdependent tripartite divisions (spirit, soul, and body) of the holistic makeup of man.

April 9, 2024

QotD: A social conservative criticism of libertarianism

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Libertarians are also naive about the range and perversity of human desires they propose to unleash. They can imagine nothing more threatening than a bit of Sunday-afternoon sadomasochism, followed by some recreational drug use and work on Monday. They assume that if people are given freedom, they will gravitate towards essentially bourgeois lives, but this takes for granted things like the deferral of gratification that were pounded into them as children without their being free to refuse. They forget that for much of the population, preaching maximum freedom merely results in drunkenness, drugs, failure to hold a job, and pregnancy out of wedlock. Society is dependent upon inculcated self-restraint if it is not to slide into barbarism, and libertarians attack this self-restraint. Ironically, this often results in internal restraints being replaced by the external restraints of police and prison, resulting in less freedom, not more.

Robert Locke, “Marxism of the Right”, American Conservative, 2005-03-14.

April 3, 2024

Canada’s The Idler was intended for “a sprightly, octogenarian spinster with a drinking problem, and an ability to conceal it”

Filed under: Business, Cancon, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

David Warren had already shuttered The Idler by the time I met him, but I was an avid reader of the magazine in the late 80s and early 90s. I doubt he remembers meeting me, as I was just one of a cluster of brand-new bloggers at the occasional “VRWC pub nights” in Toronto in the early aughts, but I always felt he was one of our elder statesmen in the Canadian blogosphere. He recalls his time as the prime mover behind The Idler at The Hub:

Some late Idler covers from 1991-92. I’ve got most of the magazine’s run … somewhere. These were the ones I could lay my hands on for a quick photo.

This attitude was clinched by our motto, “For those who read.” Note that it was not for those who can read, for we were in general opposition to literacy crusades, as, instinctively, to every other “good cause”. We once described the ideal Idler reader as “a sprightly, octogenarian spinster with a drinking problem, and an ability to conceal it”.

It was to be a magazine of elevated general interest, as opposed to the despicable tabloids. We — myself and the few co-conspirators — wished to address that tiny minority of Canadians with functioning minds. These co-conspirators included people like Eric McLuhan, Paul Wilson, George Jonas, Ian Hunter, Danielle Crittenden, and artists Paul Barker and Charles Jaffe. David Frum, Andrew Coyne, Douglas Cooper, Patricia Pearson, and Barbara Amiel also graced our pages.

I was the founder and would be the first editor. I felt I had the arrogance needed for the job.

I had spent much of my life outside the country and recently returned to it from Britain and the Far East. I had left Canada when I dropped out of high school because there seemed no chance that a person of untrammelled spirit could earn a living in Canadian publishing or journalism. Canada was, as Frum wrote in an early issue of The Idler, “a country where there is one side to every question”.

But there were several young people, and possibly many, with some literary talent, kicking around in the shadows, who lacked a literary outlet. These could perhaps be co-opted. (Dr. Johnson: “Much can be made of a Scotchman, if he be caught young.”)

The notion of publishing non-Canadians also occurred to me. The idea of not publishing the A.B.C. of official CanLit (it would be invidious to name them) further appealed.

We provided elegant 18th-century design, fine but not precious typography, tastefully dangerous uncaptioned drawings, shrewd editorial judgement, and crisp wit. I hoped this would win friends and influence people over the next century or so.

We would later be described as an “elegant, brilliant and often irritating thing, proudly pretentious and nostalgic, written by philosophers, curmudgeons, pedants, intellectual dandies. … There were articles on philosophical conundrums, on opera, on unjustifiably unknown Eastern European and Chinese poets.”

We struck the pose of 18th-century gentlemen and gentlewomen and used sentences that had subordinate clauses. We reviewed heavy books, devoted long articles to subjects such as birdwatching in Kenya or the anthropic cosmological principle, and we printed mottoes in Latin or German without translating them. This left our natural ideological adversaries scratching their heads.

March 5, 2024

Our “transnational” “elites” naturally hate anything smacking of populism

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Niccolo Soldo’s weekend post discussed some of the reasons western “elites” treat anything that can remotely be considered “populist” as if it were outright armed revolution in the streets:

For around 15 years now, the British have elected Conservatives to govern them, with anti-immigration sentiment the key driver in their choice of parties to rule. #Brexit was powered to victory by this same sentiment.

Instead of getting what they wanted, immigration in the UK has continually increased under each and every Tory Prime Minister. Last week, the ruling Conservatives managed to put out two messages on this same issue:

  1. Putin has “weaponized migration” to harm Europe, including the UK
  2. The massive spike in immigration that the UK has experienced since #Brexit was “unintentional” on the part of the Tories

Throughout the West, citizens are becoming increasingly suspicious of liberal democracy because they realize that no matter who they vote for, they always end up getting the same policies to them (yes, this is a gross generalization … please forgive me). It’s not just that people feel that their interests are not being represented by their elected representatives, but that their ruling elites are becoming increasingly distanced from the people that they purport to represent. The sentiment is growing that we are ruled by managers, and that we, the people, really do not have a say in anything.

For those of us who grew up in the West, democracy is part of our DNA. We live and work under the assumption that government rules on behalf of us, the people, and not lord over us, the peons. All of us now realize that the latter is much more true than the former, which is why you choose to read people like me. Very few of us feel that we have the ability to affect the decisions that impact us on a daily basis and that will direct our futures, and the futures of our families. We all have a stake in our respective societies, but feel powerless to do anything about our present situation.

He then linked to this article by Frank Furedi:

Since the turn of the 21st century populism has emerged as a medium through which the Western Elites recycle their worst fears. In the mainstream media populism serves as a signifier of a dark, potentially dangerous force that undermine the stable political institutions that were carefully nurtured in the post-Second World War Era. That is why terms like extreme, far-right, authoritarian, xenophobic and even fascist are often coupled with the word populist. The semantic strategy for framing populism as the antithesis of democratic and liberal norms is to create a moral distance between it and the rest of society.

The representation of populism as a moral disease is frequently communicated through a hysterical narrative about the scale of the threat it represents. Populism is sometimes medicalised as a virus. The growth of a political movement designated as populist is sometimes likened to an infection. Its growth is described as an epidemic by some of its opponents. “The next epidemic: resurgent populism” warns one analyst. “Populism, racism and xenophobia have infected Europe” asserts a writer in Euractiv. One American academic writes of “Populism as a Cultural Virus”. An essay on the Spanish political party Vox is titled, “A Political Virus? VOX’s Populist Discourse in Timed of Crisis”. A Facebook Post of the Young European Federalist stated that “The virus of populism, racism, xenophobia has affected Europe”.

Otto English, a commentator in Politico wrote hopefully that “Coronavirus’ next victim” would be “Populism”. Others were more circumspect and reported that “Covid-19 has not killed Global Populism”.

The use of a medicalised narrative that diagnosed populism as a form of moral pathology is reminiscent of the use of crowd psychology in the 19th century to de-legitimate the democratic aspiration of the people. The demonisation of the masses in the 19th century anticipates the contemporary pathologisation of populism. Crowd psychologists such as Gustave Le Bon wrote off the people as a mass of irrationality and delusion. Then and now the medicalisation of public life expressed an elite’s hatred of those members of their “social inferiors” who dared to challenge their power.

In recent years optimistic predictions about the demise of populism runs in parallel about doom laden accounts of the threat posed by this supposedly dangerous political force. “Has Europe reached peak populism?” asked Paul Taylor in Politico before hopefully noting that the “tide may have turned against nationalist right”. In recent months such hopes have turned into despair as it becomes evident to all that movements labelled as populist are in ascendant. The June elections to the European Parliament are likely to see a substantial increase in the number of parliamentarians affiliated to populist parties. It is unlikely that the dehumanising language of virology is going to do much to discredit the forward movement of populism.

Anti-populist sentiments are particularly prevalent among the oligarchy that runs the European Union. They refuse to regard populist parties as legitimate political opponents. Instead, they treat them as enemies rather than political opponents, The EU financially supports projects designed to curb the epidemic of populism. One such project titled, “Countering the populist threat: policy recommendations and educational tools” is justified on the ground that “populist sentiments and politics are spreading across Europe, dividing society into ‘Us’ and ‘Them’. It describes itself as an ‘An EU-funded project’, which ‘addresses this challenge, thereby ensuring stability of liberal democracies'”.

March 4, 2024

“Whatever his flaws, Brian Mulroney was a serious person”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, History, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the free-to-cheapskates teaser from this week’s dispatch from The Line, nice words are said in memory of the late Brian Mulroney, former Prime Minister of Canada:

Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, Mila Mulroney, Nancy Reagan, and President Ronald Reagan at the “Shamrock Summit”, 18 March, 1985.
Photo from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library via Wikimedia Commons.

Brian Mulroney died last week. He was 84.

The first thing you could be forgiven for taking away from the news coverage is how far we have fallen.

Brian Mulroney did big things. Negotiating Free Trade. Fighting Apartheid. Getting the Americans to crack down on acid rain. Comprehensive tax reform that saw the old Manufacturers’ Sales Tax (which taxed productivity) replaced with the GST. Sending Canadians to war in Desert Storm. Striking the Royal Commission on Aboriginal People which led to many of the legal advancements Indigenous communities were able to make through the 90s and into this century.

Even when he failed, as he did at Meech Lake, Brian Mulroney was trying to do something fundamentally transformative in Canadian politics.

And nobody who came after him had anywhere near that kind of guts. Not one of them.

There are things people will gripe about when it comes to Mulroney. Karlheinz Schreiber will be pretty close to the top of that list. Mulroney also tends to poll pretty poorly out west for any number of reasons ranging from a perceived over-emphasis on Quebec via Meech Lake and Charlottetown, to awarding the CF-18 maintenance contract to Montreal’s Canadair after (allegedly) promising it to Winnipeg-based Bristol Aerospace.

Mulroney was not beloved when he left office, to put it mildly. His party was basically annihilated in 1993, and the Canadian conservative movement shattered — it has still, in some ways, yet to fully recover. These are facts about which no one made more, or better, jokes than Mulroney himself. But that fall from esteem was almost never seen internationally. As he watched his contemporaries pre-decease him, Canadians got to see how respected the man was on the world stage. Mulroney was asked to eulogize American presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush as well as British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. In this, Mulroney embodied one of the greatest cultural cynicisms of this country: sometimes, the only way for us to claim a Canadian as one of our own is to first watch them make it abroad.

Mulroney’s great triumph is free trade. Yes, because it meant jobs for millions of Canadians. Yes, because it locked us into an economic pact with the world’s powerhouse economy. But also because, in doing it, he went head-on at one of this country’s great cliches: the idea that reflexive, Laurentian, anti-Americanism was somehow a basis for governing instead of just the hallmark of a deeply insecure cultural elite.

Nobody is picking those fights now. Nobody is taking on the big battles to remake the country. We have been treated to almost 30 years of some of the pettiest, small-ball sniping imaginable. Various wedge issues are dusted off by either side, and hurled like stale buns at their opponents. Culture wars are imported for the purposes of giving our political class something about which they can feign moral outrage. Our leaders are afraid of big things either because they’re hard, or because they are unlikely to pay off in a single four-year election cycle. Mulroney is, arguably, the last Canadian prime minister whose vision of what Canada is, or could be, was not limited by a four-year horizon.

We are a serious country that is not led by serious people. And that is brought into focus when you lose a serious person.

Whatever his flaws, Brian Mulroney was a serious person.

The Line‘s editors say that Mulroney wasn’t well liked on leaving office, but the utter obliteration of the Progressive Conservatives in the 1993 federal election can’t be completely blamed on him. His successor as PC leader, Kim Campbell, went out of her way to alienate western conservatives and libertarians during her brief time in office and during the election campaign that followed. She became Prime Minister with a surprising level of tentative support that she jettisoned in record time, taking her party from a majority in the House of Commons to two (2) seats — only one other Canadian PM has ever been defeated in their own riding (Arthur Meighen … but he had it happen twice, first in 1921 and again in 1926).

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress