They don’t teach it this way in college (for obvious reasons), but the Civil War was a revolt of the Elites. Put polemically, but not unfairly, The American People were offered four choices for President in 1860:
- tacitly pro-slavery;
- pro-slavery;
- fanatically pro-slavery; or
- fuck you.
These were embodied by John Bell, Stephen A. Douglas, John C. Breckinridge, and Abraham Lincoln, respectively, but the names on the tickets really didn’t matter, because it all boiled down to two options: Some flavor of politics as usual, or fuck you. And here’s the important part: The vast, vast majority of the country voted for politics as usual. “Fuck you” got 39.82% of the vote, which by my math means that 60% of a country that would soon be conducting the largest military mobilization yet seen in the history of warfare wanted things to keep going as they were.
In fact, it’s worse than that. As much as I hate to credit him with anything, Barack Obama was right — He truly was a Lincolnesque figure, in that Lincoln was vague to the point of incoherence about his origins, aims, and platform, too. A vote for Lincoln wasn’t a vote for disunion; it was a thumb in Dixie’s eye, no more. In other words, it was a vote to put the ball in the South’s court — an electoral-college version of the double dog dare. We voted for “none of the above,” pro-slavery people, now whatcha gonna do about it?
We know the answer — they haven’t yet forbidden us from teaching the fact that secession happened sorta-kinda-quasi democratically — but for obvious reasons they don’t teach that the secession conventions were all rigged in favor of the fire-eaters, and even then the motions barely passed. Which, again, means that “politics as usual” was nearly the default position of guys specifically summoned to discuss ending politics as usual. If you want to say that the Civil War was started by about twenty guys nobody’s ever heard of, with names like “Louis T. Wigfall” and “Laurence M. Keitt,” you won’t hear much argument from me.
Severian, “Misunderstanding the Civil War”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-05-29.
July 29, 2022
QotD: The US Civil War as a “revolt of the elites”
July 25, 2022
QotD: Napoleon Bonaparte, the Great Man’s Great Man
That’s because Napoleon was a Great Man, possibly the Great Man — a singularly talented genius, preternaturally lucky, whose very particular set of skills so perfectly matched the needs of the moment. There’s no “social” explanation for Napoleon, and that’s why nobody mentions him — the French Revolution ends with the Concert of Europe, and in between was mumble mumble something War and Peace. The hour really did call forth the man, in large part, I argue, because the Directory was full of men who were philosophically opposed to the very idea of elitism, and couldn’t bear to face the fact that they themselves were the elite.
Since our elite can’t produce able leaders of itself, it will be replaced by one that can. When our hour comes — and it is coming, far faster than we realize — what kind of man will it call forth?
Severian, “The Man of the Hour”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-05-22.
July 21, 2022
QotD: The history of the self-portrait
Severian, “As I Can”, Founding Questions, 2022-04-18.
July 17, 2022
QotD: When “the revolution” is in danger, resort to whatever will energize the masses
The problem with that, of course, is that Revolutionary France immediately found herself at war with the rest of Europe. Europe’s crowned heads have rarely been brainiacs, but again, anyone marginally saner than Robespierre saw immediately where the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen was heading. They did the smart thing and invaded, which put the Enlightened in a real bind — war being the third most un-Enlightened thing ever. But they’d rather be hypocrites than dead, the Enlightened, so they had to knock together a new set of national symbols on the fly, ones men would fight and die for (absolutely no one was willing to bleed for “Reason”; whaddaya know).
To their credit, they did a hell of a job. La Marseillaise, Lady Liberty, La patrie en danger! … good stuff. It was part of Napoleon’s singular genius that he could turn these Roman Republic-inspired symbols into first his “consulship”, then his emperorship, but it didn’t have to go that way; Revolutionary France might’ve held out had the Littlest Corporal been killed in action. The important thing here is to note how effective such explicitly nationalist, indeed rabidly jingoist, symbols are, even when pushed by guys who not five minutes ago were proclaiming the Brotherhood of Man.
The Soviets did the same thing, and for the same reasons — look how fast “Workers of the world, unite!” became first the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, then the Great Patriotic War for the Fatherland – but they, too, went through an incredibly fecund period of inventing unifying symbols. Even though History has passed few clearer judgments than she has on Communism, you have to admit that as a symbol, the Soviet hammer-and-sickle is world class.
Severian, “Repost: National Symbols”, Founding Questions, 2021-10-27.
July 11, 2022
QotD: The sad plight of the academic
Boredom is, in fact, the modern West’s signature pathology. Nobody with a rich, full life — a rewarding job, some hobbies, family and friends — bothers about “intersectionality” and whatnot. That’s not to say that Normals don’t get bored. However, for us boredom is a temporary feature of life. We know how to handle it; we have a zillion ways of killing time. What’s more important, we know that boredom’s just a part of life; it happens to the best of us.
For them, each episode of boredom is an existential crisis. They’ve convinced themselves that they have all the answers, that to be #Woke is to be a god among men. So if their lives aren’t 100% wonderful and fulfilling all the time — every second of every minute of every hour of every day — it throws the fundamental premise of their entire existence into question. It it any wonder, then, why they’re constantly hyperventilating about everything? Without a constant infusion of drama, they have to face the fact that they’re just people, buggering through life with the rest of us.
Severian, “The Reluctant Revolutionary”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-04-05.
July 7, 2022
QotD: Predestination
Modern people see that as carte blanche to do whatever we want, because hey, if we do it, God made us do it … which, if you think about it for half a second, means God Himself is responsible for “sin” (quotation marks necessary, because it can’t be evil if I have no possible choice in the matter). Calvin, Knox, et al thought of that too, of course — they were crazy, not stupid — and they even had an answer: Shut up, that’s why. Not the most theologically sophisticated reasoning, but when you’re being burned at the stake for Arminianism it’s remarkably persuasive. Meanwhile, you’d best live like the holiest Puritan that ever lived … even though it’s exquisitely pointless, because you’re almost surely damned.
Severian, “Public Piety”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-01-29.
July 3, 2022
QotD: The US media when Donald Trump “happened”
But then Donald Trump happened, as my students would’ve written. Though it’s only a few years in the past, we’ve already forgotten just how much The Media loved Bernie Sanders when the Republican nomination was still in doubt. Trump, of course, made The Media lose their shit so egregiously that what they did to W. looked like the happy ending to an Oriental massage, but virtually nobody was cheerleading for Hillary qua Hillary. It took the specter of The Donald as president to get them all on the same page.
Which brings us to now. The Democratic Party can read a poli-sci textbook. They know how difficult it is to beat an incumbent president in a good economy. Hell, it’s almost impossible to beat an incumbent president in a bad economy — see 2004 and 2012. It takes a major systemic shock to turf out an incumbent in the modern era — a catastrophe on the magnitude of a serious third party challenge (Ross Perot in ’92), or the incumbent being Jimmy Carter. The poli-sci textbooks say that the Dems’ only hope is to run the closest thing to the Antimatter Donald Trump they can find. That is to say: the blandest, SWPL-iest Goodwhite on their roster.
Alas for them, The Media will be having none of that. Trump somehow triggers them even more than he did in 2016 — don’t ask me how; it violates several important laws of thermodynamics — so they’re going all-in on goofballs like AOC and her “Squad.” The Media loves “the Squad,” and since The Media have convinced themselves that theirs is the whip hand, they’re ordering us to love “the Squad” too. To which Trump replies with a version of “lol get fucked,” and since “you’re free to leave this country if you hate it so much” seems forehead-slappingly obvious to anyone without a journalism degree, Trump’s poll numbers rise. Which prompts another stern lecture from The Media, which receives another “lol get fucked,” and around and around and around we go …
But here’s the thing: The battle for the whip is a battle royale. There are more than just two combatants. The Party still thinks it’s in charge. The Media, with 2008, 2012, and 2016 in its pocket, think they’re in charge. Nobody bothered to ask “the Squad,” though, and that’s the truly terrifying thing: “The Squad” thinks they’re in charge, and they might actually be right.
We’ve already got Congress voting to condemn Trump’s tweets. Set aside how brain-bogglingly infantile that is — and how petty and retarded it appears to the American public. Consider just how badly Nancy Pelosi et al, aka The Party, had to screw up to find themselves in this situation.
Severian, “Which Hand Holds the Whip?”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-07-17.
June 29, 2022
QotD: How Cadet Che shows that West Point isn’t West Point anymore
Bad as that is, there’s much worse. Notice the passivity of it all. What were any of the parties involved trying to accomplish? If Cadet Che had wanted to get kicked out of the service (as it seems finally happened, according to the linked article), there are a million easier ways. In fact, cadets at West Point are volunteers. The Army makes a big production out of this: If you can’t hack it at the Point, you’re simply not officer material. All it takes is a letter to the commandant, and you’re out — Cadet Che could’ve been drinking beer with his fraternal socialist comrades at Big State 24 hours after turning in his resignation.
Even the kid’s form of “protest” was passive. There’d be a certain utility, I suppose, for the Revolution if the kid had written “I’m a Communist sleeper agent” on the inside of his hat — evidently our standards are so lax that we don’t do basic background checks on our potential military officers. But he didn’t write that. Instead, he wrote “Communism will win,” a passive, bloodless statement … and that’s it.
The passivity is the truly terrifying part. A West Point graduate is among the elite if anyone is — he has command of at least a platoon of heavily armed trained killers, and the radio one of them carries has the power to call in armor, air strikes, cruise missiles … and yet, not “I’m a communist,” not “¡Viva la Revolución!,” not even “Lenin lives!” Just … “communism will win.” How, comrade?
Severian, “The Man of the Hour”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-05-22.
June 25, 2022
QotD: The Left’s long march through the institutions
Once they were in, they of course credentialized everything, such that the cultural-transmission professions — journalism, education, even art and music — suddenly required college training … and all the trainers were Reds. Ever wonder why you seemingly have to have a fucking Master’s Degree to get your lit-wank novel published? Seriously: read the author bio of any of the flavor-of-the-minute wunderkinder that get their painfully quirky dreck blurbed in the New York Times Review of Books — every blessed one of them has some kind of advanced degree in “creative writing”. All those graduate-level “creative writing” programs aren’t just make-work for otherwise unemployable Eng-Lit PhDs, in other words. They’re what the Union of Soviet Writers was in the USSR: The guarantors of politically-reliable content.
That’s the setup. Ready for the twist?
They won, but they don’t know it. Not only was the Revolution televised, it’s still being televised, 24 hours a day, on 587+ satellite cable channels and umpteen digital streaming services. Eugene V. Debs’s wettest wet dream couldn’t compare to Current Year America. The SJWs are like the Seekers, out there desperately trying to prepare the world for the UFOs … but the UFO already landed in their backyard, and they were too busy trying to save the world to see it.
That’s why widespread political violence is inevitable, and damn soon. Nancy Pelosi may be the nastiest evil old bitch to ever slime through the halls of Congress, but she’s not stupid. She’s just in an impossible situation. She’s the leader of an organization that didn’t manage its True Believers, and now she’s fucked either way. […]
That’s what the old-school Commies didn’t see coming. Those poor deluded fools really thought that “intellectual” was an adjective. The Russian word for the noun version is intelligentsia, and they gave the Soviet Union no end of trouble — Stalin had to send boxcars of them to Siberia fairly regularly to keep them in line. In the West, though, they really thought that you can have an “intellectual” steelworker, or dockhand, or farmer, and the like. They were counting on it, in fact — see “community colleges were all Red fronts”, above.
Instead, “intellectual” is the True Believer’s self-chosen job description. You can meet some fearsomely learned people in your day-to-day, but the only people you’ll ever meet who use the word “intellectual” without sneering are Media types and their panty-sniffers in the ivory tower. They’re extremely useful idiots, which is why none of Palsy Pelosi’s predecessors sent them to Siberia like they should’ve. And now it’s too late.
Severian, “If the UFO Actually Comes, Part II”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-09-26.
June 12, 2022
QotD: Zima
There was, however, something perversely enticing about a drink that seemed to come from a post-apocalyptic wasteland in which color did not exist. There was an ingrained assumption that Zima must be expressly targeted at somebody, but nobody knew who that was … Zima was ridiculous … but did that actually mean it was brilliant? The only viable conclusion was “sort of”.
It’s true at first blush, but so douchey that you want it to be wrong just to spite whoever wrote it. I’ve never wanted a Zima more in my life than I did after reading that passage. But at second glance, it’s laughably false. Ask anyone who was in college in the 1990s; they’ll tell you exactly who Zima was “expressly targeted at”: Frat bros who were expecting female company. Because it was clear — no, really, it was beer(-ish) that looked like club soda — it somehow seemed like “diet beer”. Which meant your female party guests were almost guaranteed to have three or four more than they should.
In other words: Zima was the midrange panty dropper. Not as classy as white zinfandel, not as trashy as Boone’s Farm, there was no other possible reason to have it in your dorm fridge, but it somehow had plausible deniability when you offered it to her as a light refreshment. If Klosterman ever had sex at any time between January 1, 1990 and December 31, 1999, he knows this. There’s no way he doesn’t.
Severian, “A Meta-Review”, Founding Questions, 2022-02-24.
June 4, 2022
QotD: A smidgen of forgiveness for the Boomers
That has to mess with your head a bit.
In the same way, no previous generation had ever seen their youth commercialized and sold back to them in middle age, and that’s what messed with our heads. The passing fancies of those ordinary suburban kids in 1963 all involved sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. We — Gen X — wanted those things too, but since by definition nothing is lamer than your parents, we had to be all, like, you know, whatever about it.
If you can grok the concept of a 45 year old telling you — with complete, almost heartbreaking sincerity — not to trust anyone over 30, you can grok the 1990s.
If you can’t, I don’t recommend trying. It’s like an anti-koan — if you solve it, you’ll achieve a lower consciousness. But if you’re determined to experience it, get really, really, really drunk and watch Forrest Gump a few times back to back. Really experience it as a work of art … because it is. It’s meticulously constructed. Forrest Gump is a mildly retarded man who stumbles, through dumb fucking luck, into fame and fortune through every significant event of the last half century. (He even has a huge dick, although that’s a detail from the source novel that got left on the cutting room floor).
Is there any more perfect metaphor for My G-G-Generation than that?
That’s what we grew up with. That whole generation was what some wag said about George Bush the First: Born on third base, thinking he hit a triple. And, of course, by merciless application of cold logic: that was also us. The only difference was that while the Boomers were congenitally incapable of seeing it, we were congenitally incapable of getting over it. So, you know, like, whatever.
Severian, “A Meta-Review”, Founding Questions, 2022-02-24.
May 29, 2022
QotD: Was Biden’s Afghan evacuation driven by Twitter “optics”?
But the Apparat didn’t do that, and the reason was: Twitter.
All the Blue Checkmarks on Twatter agreed that “letting” Bad Orange Man pull out of Afghanistan would be “handing him a win”. After all, he said he was going to do it! And if he somehow got out before the 20th anniversary, that’d be an even bigger win. Obviously, then, they had to “let” Biden do it, because that’s a “win”. And of course he had to do it in August, so that he could “spike the football” on 9/11/2021.
So the withdrawal had to be pushed into 2021, and it had to be slapdash. Indeed, it had to be the exact opposite of whatever Bad Orange Man was planning to do, so that there was no possible way Bad Orange Man could claim a “win”. It had to be all Biden …
… and so it was. With results that anyone smarter than a concussed goldfish — which of course excludes everyone with a Blue Checkmark — could’ve predicted.
If the Blue Checkmark Borg on Twatter, then, decides that Brandon needs to look tough by nuking Moscow, then it’s go time. And since the social dynamic on Twitter is ever-spiraling lunacy — the only way to “win” Twitter is by being more screechingly insane about everything than everyone else — then whoever gets there fustest with the mostest is going to drive the “decision”.
Severian, “Ukraine”, Founding Questions, 2022-02-24.
May 20, 2022
QotD: Credentialism
The reason for this — if you want to slap an academic-sounding label on it — is “the reification of the bureaucracy”. Even if 99 out of 100 doctors, say, just want to practice medicine, there’s that last guy who makes “being a doctor” his life’s work. He joins all the associations, and because that kind of guy is basically just Trigglypuff with better hygiene and lower BMI, he quickly rises to a position of influence in every organization. He lives for the bureaucracy. Which means he’s a politician, and there it is.
If you want more examples, look no further than the original guilds, the craft associations of the Middle Ages. Any settlement big enough for actual cash money to change hands in it soon had an exquisitely class-conscious group with lots of actual, but no formal, power. Your smart tyrant co-opted the politicians from the merchant guilds, made them de facto nobility and bade them act like it — that gave you the Renaissance. Your dumb (or merely nonexistent) tyrant let the merchants’ resentments fester — that gave you the Reformation, and the whole catalog of ideological murder that followed.
Severian, “Credentialism Ruins Everything”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-03-22.
May 2, 2022
QotD: Online education
And that’s just college, which now more than ever is exactly what the sententious goobers on the faculty always said it was: A professional football team with a few classrooms attached. They’re memory-holed now, no doubt, but I recall a time over the summer when a few studies on the impact of online “learning” came out. They were worse than even I expected, and I’m cynical enough to give Diogenes wood. Some huge fraction of kids never even bothered logging on. At all. And, of course, they were promoted to the next grade …
Severian, “More Scattered Thoughts”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-10-13.
April 25, 2022
QotD: The 15th century as a “mulligan”
As I’ve written here before, the 15th century makes much more sense if you consider it a “mulligan” century, a do-over — an attempt to stuff the Early Modern cat back into the High Medieval bag in the wake of the Black Death. One cannot, of course, say that thus-and-such should’ve happened in history — history is the study of what actually did happen — but it’s clear that the Black Death was a giant hiccup in the otherwise “natural” progression from Middle Ages to Early Modern. It was all there in embryo in 1340; had the Black Death not hit the pause button for half a century, the great ructions of the early 1500s would’ve hit in the early 1400s. And they no doubt would’ve been a lot less severe, too — without the Black Death, the “Martin Luther” of 1417 might’ve been one of the great reforming Popes.
Read Huizinga or Duffy, and you get the overwhelming impression of bright children playing dress up. Everything’s cranked way past eleven. Like kids, they know that grownups do these things, and because they’re bright kids they have some idea why grownups do it … but not really, and the nuances utterly escape them. Huizinga tells the story of some churchman who ostentatiously drinks every drink he’s given in five swallows, one for each of Jesus’s wounds … obnoxious enough, but then he goes that characteristically Late Medieval extra mile — because both blood and water flowed from Christ’s side, he takes the second swallow in two gulps.
Knights vow to not open one of their eyes until they’ve met the Turk in battle. Another churchman rails against the kitschy little figurines found in burghers’ homes, a carving of the Virgin Mary with a door in her stomach. You open it up, and there’s the Trinity. Bad enough, but again the Late Medieval twist: He’s not upset at the figure as such (even though it’s the next best thing to idolatry); he’s pissed because you see the entire Trinity there, and not just Jesus, as is theologically proper. Speaking of Mary, academics debate, in all apparent seriousness, whether or not she was an “active participant” in Our Lord’s conception. And so on: Creeping to the Cross, endless novenas and rosaries and vigils, the whole spastically ostentatious public piety of the devotio moderna. The Imitation of Christ is great, everyone should read it, but imagine people doing all that in public, and not in the cloister as Kempis intended.
The old, exhausted, Alzheimery (it’s a word) dregs of a once vital and vibrant spirituality. Sound familiar?
Severian, “Alt Discussion Thread: Sacraments and Superstitions”, Founding Questions, 2022-01-18.
