Francis on Chambers.

Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.

According to Paul Gottfried, Sam Francis was equivocal on the relationship of Christianity and Western Civilisation so I was surprised to see Francis include Chambers in his narrow group of serious thinkers. Quite frankly I bought the his book, Beautiful Losers,  simply to see what he would say about Chambers whom this blog has championed before.  Francis, though clearly under the influence of Burnham's positivism, is perhaps one of the few understood the importance of Chambers thinking and the importance of his "witness" in the Alger Hiss trial.

The trial, and Chambers victory against nearly insurmountable odds, had the effect of re-orientating American Conservatism towards a more religious understanding of itself; gave birth to the McCarthy movement, which even though flawed, was the first example of populism against the managerial state, launched the career of Richard Nixon and helped expunge the Rockefeller republicans from the party in the Goldwater campaign.

Quite frankly, it's a surprise that he is so neglected given his mark on history and Francis is to be commended for both recognising his importance and for keeping his memory alive. Still, reading Francis,  I was more of the impression that he "intuited" Chambers greatness rather than fully intellectually appreciating his significance.

Chambers, like Burnham, was an ex-communist who eventually repudiated its ideals. Both men shared a common outlook which separated them from the "conservative tradition". Whereas Burhnam belonged to tradition of Machiavelli,  Chambers intellectual lineage belonged more to the tradition of Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn.

Burnham's modernism alienated those traditionalist conservatives who were aware of it. Their minds tend to center on the more ethereal regions of religion, ethics, metaphysics, and aesthetics, rather than on the sociological analysis of political conflict and the geo-politics of global struggle, and they are not attracted to and are often repelled by a worldview that centers on conflict, power, and human irrationality. Whittaker Chambers, whose own mind reflected a tension between modernism and antimodern elements and who ex-pressed deep admiration for Burnham, nevertheless criticized him for his "prudent, practical thinking." "The Fire Bird," wrote Chambers, "is glimpsed living or not at all. In other words, realists have a way of missing truth, which is not invariably realistic." The "Fire Bird" refers to the classical myth of the phoenix, a bird composed of fire that, since it was consumed by flames as it flew through the air, left no body. Its existence therefore could not be proved empirically, by finding its body; it had to be seen alive or not at all. Chambers's meaning is that Burnham's worldview demanded empirical proof for things that by their nature could not be proved but were nevertheless known to be true by those who had seen—or felt or intuited—them. 

Chambers recognised that Burnham's vision was limited by his Positivism and that he had missed what the real fight of the 20th Century was all about, the battle between atheism and religion. Religion, Chambers recognised, motivated men for the sacrifices and struggles that were needed to sustain a culture, something which a better arranged or "managed" atheism did not do. Chambers, staring about him in the glory days of 1950's America,  could see that the the atheistic managerial state was slowly strangling, and excluding, the motive principle that had sustained the West. Seeing beyond the gloss to the underlying substance Chambers wrote:

there is a strong family resemblance between the Communist state and the welfare state. The ends each has in view have much in common. But the methods proposed for reaching them radically differ. Each is, in fact, in direct competition with the other, since each offers itself as an alternative solution for the crisis of the 20th Century; and Fabian Britain has at last supplanted Soviet Russia in the eyes of political liberals when they look abroad. Nevertheless, that family resemblance is nerve-wearing, since all the minds that note it are not equally discriminating, especially in a nation that has only just become conscious of Communism and still rejects socialism. So, at every move against Communism, liberal views come unglued, and liberal voices go shrill, fearing that, by design or error, the move may be against themselves. 

The beast could morph and Chambers was adept at recognising it's manifestations.

Chambers was contemptuous of Liberalism and saw it as another morphed form of managerial atheism. Attempts to reconcile Liberalism to Conservatism misunderstood the nature of it and Chambers despaired the lack this awareness and the stupidity of many conservatives. Francis writes:

Yet if Chambers rejected twentieth-century liberalism, he was not much more sympathetic to the conservatives of the 1950s. He declined to attach himself in any way to Joe McCarthy, less perhaps from dislike of the man than a belief that McCarthy would eventually taint his witness. He was not comfortable at National Review and found preposterous the quaint dogmas of classical liberalism dressed up as conservatism. In a letter to Buckley in 1957, he called the free-market economist Ludwig von Mises "a goose," and Frank Meyer's self-appointment as the ideological gatekeeper of the American Right seems first to have amused, then bored, him. The ideas of Meyer and Russell Kirk struck Chambers as "chiefly an irrelevant buzz." Of Kirk's The Conservative Mind he asked, "if you were a marine in a landing boat, would you wade up the seabeach at Tarawa for that conservative position? And neither would I!" Only with Buckley himself and James Burnham did he seem to share anything like a common outlook, and at last he resigned from National Review, acknowledging to Buckley and himself that he was not a conservative in any serious sense but "a man of the Right."

What exactly Chambers meant by this term is far from clear, but he contrasted it with "conservatism" and seems to have identified it with a defense of capitalism. "I am a man of the Right because I mean to uphold capitalism in its American version. But I claim that capitalism is not, and by its essential nature cannot conceivably be, conservative." Yet despite his identification with capitalism, almost nowhere did Chambers offer an explicit defense of it, and in both his letters to Buckley and in a National Review piece of 1958 on federal farm policy, he was perfectly conscious of the contradiction between capitalism and conservatism and the link between capitalism and the advance of socialism. Like most conservatives and like his neighbors in rural Maryland, Chambers saw the freedom I and independence of farmers threatened by federal regulation of agriculture. But he also believed such controls were "inescapable." 

I think its important here to understand what Chambers means by "Man of the Right",  which I don't think Francis fully grasped. Chambers  was intrinsically opposed to the atheistic vision which was the hallmark of modern Liberalism, but he was also opposed to the rag tag bunch of anti-Liberalists and traditionalists who were put on the "Right" merely by being opposed to the Left. He saw that many of these anti-Leftists were either hopeless aesthetes and nostalgics or  "right-materialists" who saw man simply as an economic unit, or racial entity unit.

His evisceration of Ayn Rand   single-handedly threw her out of the conservative fold: A better managerialism is not what he was about. And the point that Chambers was trying to make by this statement is that it is possible to be anti-Left and to still be evil or stupid, which he thought many conservatives were.

Nor has the author, apparently, brooded on the degree to which, in a wicked world, a materialism of the Right and a materialism of the Left first surprisingly resemble, then, in action, tend to blend each with each, because, while differing at the top in avowed purpose, and possibly in conflict there, at bottom they are much the same thing. The embarrassing similarities between Hitler's National Socialism and Stalin’s brand of Communism are familiar. For the world, as seen in materialist view from the Right, scarcely differs from the same world seen in materialist view from the Left. The question becomes chiefly: who is to run that world in whose interests, or perhaps, at best, who can run it more efficiently?

Like Burnham, Chambers shared much of his historical determinism, which in turn imparted upon him a spenglerian gloom. It also alienated him from Traditionalists who failed to recognise that late 19th Century was transformative in the scheme of human relations. Chambers' experiences in the Hiss Case lead him to the conclusion that he was on the "losing side", and much like a 19th Century physician, he could diagnose the problem but was powerless in effecting a cure. Francis writes:

The significance of Chambers's witness, then, is considerably diminished if it is mistaken as merely an account of Soviet communism and its Western stooges. His point throughout his writings in the 1940s and 1950s was that the roots of communism lie in the West itself and that they flourish because the modern age has chosen to credit the serpent's promise. That promise and its lethal consequences for the West were as palpable to him in the United States of Truman and Eisenhower as they had been under the Edwardians and as they were in the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin. Only when the West had awakened to the falsehood of the promise could it bear what he called "that more terrible witness" by which it would destroy its external enemy and begin to purge itself of its internal toxins. But he had no expectation that the West would do so, and no suggestions on how to do it. 

Whilst I think Francis gives Chambers an accurate appraisal, I feel that this own lukewarm religiousness rendered him partially deaf to Chambers' message. Francis was looking for a method, or program, within the existing materialist world view and it was Chambers contention that such a search was futile as there was no solution within it. The only way out was by re-embracing religion. Burnham, on the other hand,  seemed to Chambers witness more seriously and by the time he had written Suicide of the West, Burnham had conceded that ideas, i.e. culture, were just as significant as material and historical determinism.  Burnham's identification of liberalism as the solvent of the West owes a large part to Chamber's influence, yet he would not fully embrace religion, whilst recognising its utility, till shortly before his death.

The point of Chambers witness is that there is no conservative revival unless we bend the knee to God. The best we can hope for is a Singapore or Japan like scenario but perceptive observers of these countries realise that, they too, are dying. And even they, with their well managed managerial states pale into insignificance, in terms of cultural output when compared to the glories of European Civilisation. 

Chambers's message is that the cause of the death spiral of the West is atheism. Atheists, of course, reject this message, but it's also problematic for Christians. Faith is not something that can be socially engineered so expecting everyone to be on-board with faith and religion is not going to happen.  It can be shored up with logic and argument but the faculty which gives certainty to the propositions of faith is a free gift of God that cannot be socially engineered. Religious reactionaries, I do not feel, have fully recognised this fact or its political implications.

With regard to NRx, Chambers diagnosis pretty much damns Moldbuggian NRx which, trapped in it's atheism is really just better way of arranging things. If NRx was to be truly transformative it needs to go Churchy. This will be a bitter pill for many.

It's true that Burnham made a huge impression on Francis, but as he lay dying from the complications of aortic surgery, Francis was visited by a Catholic Priest--Anton Scalia's son--who offered him the choice of a blessing or the Last Rights.  Like Burnham, Francis chose the Last Rights. Perhaps Chambers made more of an impression on Francis than he let on.

Francis on Burnham:II

It's clear from Francis's writing that he felt that contemporary conservatism, in both its libertarian and "traditionalist" forms was incapable of dealing with the societal changes which occurred in the 20th Century. Francis felt the the libertarians had an "abstract" view of man which did not map onto reality and the traditionalists were still operating under the assumption that the fundamental nature of the world had remained unchanged. If Sam Francis was about anything, it was about the understanding of reality and how to navigate it, it was for this reason that Burnham appealed to him. 

Burnham regarded himself as an empirical student of power. Power as it is actually wielded rather than is theoretically expressed and hence the strong influence of Machiavelli, Marx, Mosca and Pareto in his thought.  His intellectual lineage put him outside the "tradition" of many conservatives who did not know what to make of him. On the other hand, Burnham himself felt that a conservatism which did not deal with the practical circumstances in which it found itself, and instead dealt with abstract principles only was an anachronism and destined to failure. Burnham's expositions of the ugly realities of power confused many who assumed that he was approving of them, which was not case. Burnham faced and stated realities regardless of how repulsive they were to himself.

The primary goals at which I aim in this column, as in most of the books and articles I have written, are fact and analysis. I do not accept any theory of class, national, ethnic, partisan, or sectarian truth. If conclusions I reach are true, they are just as true for Russians as for Americans, for pagans as for Christians, and for blacks as for whites.

For Burnham, historical and material circumstance had rendered traditional society obsolescent, in the same way that the internet is now rendering much of the media irrelevant, not by moral choice but by practical operation in the real world. And much like typesetters have become increasingly irrelevant, so too have the petit bourgeois capitalists in the modern world.

Yet the managerial regime did not evolve nor its elites become dominant in the economy, government, and mass society without a struggle. From the early twentieth century to the present, the social and political forces that resisted the formation of the managerial regime and the implementation of its agenda constituted a conservative, at times reactionary, influence. Small businessmen and entrepreneurs, the more parochial sectors of American society, lower middle-class elements, and groups that found the fiscal burden and social effects of the new regime a threat to their economic status and cultural identity provided the political base of the conservative resistance to managerial forces and ideas. The members of this base saw in the fusion of state and economy a threat to their own independent standing, endangered by the labor unions, regulations, and intervention imposed by the new managerial state in partnership with mass corporations. They saw their own values and institutions denigrated and undermined by the cosmopolitan ethic and egalitarian policies of the new elite. They suffered from the inflation and exorbitant taxation that financed the managerial state and from the crime and social dislocation that resulted from its social policies, by which the managerial regime subsidized an urban proletariat as its own political base. They were offended and often frightened by the globalist and, in their view un-American, international policies of the elite, which involved permanent intervention in world affairs, expensive foreign aid programs, the prospect of global war, and the renunciation of national interests in return fora cosmopolitan "one-world" that they regarded as both illusory and dangerous.

There's a lot to unpack in this paragraph of Francis's but I'm only going to concentrate on the main points.

Firstly, the battle is between the bourgeois and the current managerial elite.
Secondly, the strategy of the managerial elite is to squeeze the bourgeois middle by buying off the lumpenproletariat, who sell their votes to the highest bidder. This group are principally made up of the socially dysfunctional white and black lower classes in the U.S. who have been effectively "de-bourgeoised" by either genetic limitations or through adopting values which ensure their poverty. Kevin Williamson copped a lot of heat  for his article in the National Review--(there is a lot I disagree with)-- but he inadvertently vindicates Burhnam's and Francis's analysis:

Nationalism may speak to a longing for lost national greatness, but in our own time, it speaks at least as strongly to the longing after — the great howling lamentation for — the ideal family that never was lost, because it never was formed. The Mikes of the world may be struggling to make it in the global economy, but what they really are shut out of is the traditional family. The current social regime of illegitimacy, serial monogamy, abortion, and liberal divorce has rendered traditional families optional, at best — the great majority of divorces are initiated by wives, not by husbands — and the welfare state has at least in part supplanted the Mikes in their role as providers[ED], assuming that they have the wherewithal to fill that role in the first place. Traditional avenues for achieving respect, status, and permanence are lost to them.

The strategy of the elites was to buy the votes of the dysfunctional class. The cultural revolution of the Sixties effectively increased the pressure on the middle from the bottom.

Thirdly, the values of the managerial elite are different to the values of the bourgeois and there is an active displacement going on. This is going about through active exclusion from the decision making apparatus, economic pressure and cultural ostracism. According to Francis, the elites are effecting the destruction of the middle class.

Burnham, due to his historical determinism, felt that the managerial revolution was inevitable but what perplexed him was, unlike previous revolutions in the West, specifically when bourgeois society replaced the medieval one and which resulted in even greater civilisational advancement, the current elite was presiding over a civilisation that was dying. Burnham saw that the Elites were not just presiding over a new type of society but they were presiding over a society that had lost the will to live.

Burnham, though born a Catholic had been an atheist for much of his life. He recognised the "utility" of religion for a society but thought it one of Sorel's "Myths" that kept a society together. He did not believe in the truth of it. In trying to explain the West's loss of the will to live he tried to frame a different theory, one that both he and Francis did not seem entirely convinced of but one which I feel has a fair amount of merit. Francis writes in the Political Science Reviewer;

In his last book, Suicide of the West, Burnham was pessimistic about this ability and about the very survival of non-Communist civilization. Yet he was somewhat evasive on the exact causes of the contraction and decline of the West.[ED] It is true that the causes of the decline were not the subject of the book and that Burnham narrowed the possible causes to a failure of the will to survive within the governing elite, a failure rationalized by liberal ideology but more deeply associated, as Burnham suggested, "with the decay of religion and with an excess of material luxury". He did not pursue this suggestion further, however, and indeed it is too large a problem to be treated in Suicide of the West. 

It may be noted that Machiavelli had also attached central importance to the decline of religion and the rise of luxury as subversive forces in political society. Machiavelli had written in the Discourses, "there is no greater indication of the ruin of a country than to see religion contemned" and "in well-regulated republics the state ought to be rich and the citizens poor."' The decline of religion removes the principal unifying force in society able to rationalize sacrifices and suffering; the rise of luxury contributes to factionalism and the usurpation of the public interest by private groups and to the general softening and corruption of the physical and moral strength of the citizens. It is therefore not surprising that Burnham would have suggested these two phenomena as likely causes of Western civilizational decline, but he did not develop them.

Yet it is possible to reconstruct more clearly Burnham's views on the causes of the decline of the West and on the future of the West from the body of his published writings. Both problems in his mind were closely related to the internal structure and mentality of the Western governing elite. From The Managerial Revolution to Suicide of the West Burnham had predicted that the rising managerial elite would contain a heavy proportion of Class II residues [ED:Broadly analogous to alpha males, Class 1 residues are analogous to betas] and would be efficient in the use of force. Although he had regarded the totalitarian tendencies of the new elite as a serious threat to freedom and to the flexibilities that societal survival requires, he had praised the coming elite for its dynamism, its resoluteness, and its ability and willingness to seize leadership. In The Machiavellians he had written that "We may be sure that the soldiers, the men of force, the Lions, will be much more prominent among the new rulers than in the ruling class of the past century". In The Coming Defeat of Communism, published over a decade later, he again dwelt on the dynamism of the new elite and the decadence and vacillation of the old entrepreneurial class.

In Suicide of the West, however, he reversed this prediction and portrayed the managerial groups, under the influence of liberal ideology, as foxes, vacillating, unwilling and unable to use force, and relying on negotiations, propaganda, and opportunism. The correlation of liberal ideology with the managerial social forces was explicit, and it contradicted Burnham's earlier optimistic estimate of the new elite.

Although Burnham never explicitly accounted for his change of opinion, in Suicide of the West he suggested an explanation for the change that is entirely consistent with his earlier Machiavellian formulation of the theory of the managerial revolution. While it remained true that the social transformation has led to a greater presence within the elite of, and a greater reliance on, military leaders, the very nature of the managerial revolution, with its shift from small-scale, personal leadership to mass-scale, bureaucratic leadership, altered the character of the new military elite.

Technological change brings into the military force more and more persons exercising "civilian skills" (administrative, technical, scientific) that lack the in-bred immunity of the older, narrower military vocation to liberal ideas and values.

Two years later, in a highly controversial article in National Review on Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, Burnham made the point more explicitly. Burnham praised McNamara, "a perfect exemplar of the top level of the new managerial class," for trying to "make the defense establishment as closely as possible an integral element of our advanced managerial economy." 'A Much of the criticism directed at McNamara Burnham saw as originating from traditional, entrepreneurial elements in American society and from traditional military types in the armed services. These critics were resisting the technical modernization of the armed forces as pan of their general social resistance to the managerial revolution and the new class that was leading it. Yet Burnham was not entirely laudatory of McNamara and the elite he represented. He cited a letter-perhaps apocryphal-from a naval electronics technician who commented that he had seen no proof that "McNamara & Co. have an intuitive feel for the use of force: they seem to be more foxes than lions."' Burnham, then, was aware that military leadership by foxes or Class I residues may lack the qualities of command, combativeness, and endurance that lions would exhibit. "There are things in war," Burnham commented, "not dreamt of by IBM's computers.

The point that Burnham was making was that managerial society, perhaps by its very nature, requires or finds useful the residues and psychic forces of the fox, not those of the lion. As he had written of the Class I residues in The Machiavellian: 

it is this residue that leads restless individuals to large-scale financial manipulations, merging and combining and re-combining of various economic enterprises, efforts to entangle and disentangle political units, to make and remake empires. (MDF, 187) 

These are precisely the traits needed by those who manage mass-scale organizations-whether economic, political, educational, religious, social, or professional in function. They are traits that lead to success in the mastery of technical and administrative skills; the use of language in argument, negotiations, and propaganda; and the disciplines of modern organizational life. The traits of the lions or Class II residues-fierce loyalties and hatreds, a capacity for violence or brutality, and a willingness to endure suffering and sacrifice-are not required by modern managerial society to any great degree. Thus, managerial society, even in its military organizations, tends to promote and encourage those elements of the population that exhibit Class I residues and to demote, exclude, and discourage those that exhibit Class II residues. It also has an affinity for derivations such as liberalism that reflect Class I values and ideas, and an aversion to derivations such as conservatism that do not reflect Class I values and ideas and to some extent reflect those of Class II. 

Burnham's psychological analysis of the implications of managerial rule raises a dilemma. If managerial society requires for the control of its internal power structure the psychic forces that are efficient at managerial and verbal skills but have an aversion to force, then there is a contradiction between the internal requirements of managerial power and its external requirements, which demand skill in the use of force. Hence it is that the principal threat to the survival of a managerial society, in which Class I forces predominate, must come from outside it or from below, from Class II residues consigned to the lower strata of society. Pareto had made this contradiction explicit, and Burnham had quoted his lengthy statement of it in Suicide of the West. Burnham's final formulation of the theory of the managerial revolution in Suicide of the West recognized the importance of Class I residues in the governing elite, and this recognition implied a different estimate for the future of the West under managerial rule. Whereas Burnham's earlier discussions of appeasement, retreat, and decline had associated these phenomena largely with the decadent entrepreneurial elite, he now linked them with the managers. The implication was that the phenomenon of decline was not a passing phase that would be reversed by the new elite but a permanent feature of the dominant managerial class. "The decay of religion and the excess of material luxury' were not so much the causes of Western decline, in this analysis, as part of the syndrome of phenomena associated with an elite of foxes. Pareto himself had correlated the rise of religious skepticism and the increase of wealth with the accumulation of Class I residues in the elite.

Burnham's argument essentially is that as society becomes wealthier, it's managerial elite becomes less "jock" like and more nerd "like" with a commensurate inability to fight external attacks. Burnham wasn't the first to notice that rich societies goes "soft" and while I think this is only partial explanation for the decline, I do think it is one with considerable merit. On a variety of metrics, I think that there has been failure of masculinity in the West which I think partially explains the lack of its assertiveness and it's inability to combat simple threats, however the explanation is incomplete.

Burnham also recognsied that explanation was incomplete and had to include the embrace of Liberalism, a position he came with the help of Whittaker Chambers. He realised that Liberalism was the poison affecting the elites though he could propose no antidote and thus became pessimistic of the West's Future. The problem with Burnham's approach to power is that while it deals with how to best arrange society based upon the empirical observations of the past, it does nothing to to explain why that society should want to chose to live.  But Burnham, presumably because of his scientific Atheism could never see religion as anything more than a "useful" social glue but which was ultimately "unscientific" and therefore beyond the scope of his analysis.

Whittaker Chambers did not make that mistake.

Francis on the Managerial Revolution.

Francis quoted Whittaker Chambers in explaining how the Managerial Revolution occurred in the U.S.

I saw that the New Deal was only superficially a reform movement. I had to acknowledge the truth of what its more forthright protagonists, sometimes defiantly, averred: the New Deal was a genuine revolution, whose deepest purpose was not simply reform within existing traditions, but a basic change in the social, and, above all, the power relationships within the nation. It was not a revolution by violence. It was a revolution by bookkeeping and law-making. In so far as it was successful, the power of politics had replaced the power of business. This is the basic power shift of all the revolutions of our time. This shift was the revolution.

While the revolution in the U.S. occurred peacefully, Burhnam felt that the type of society it created with similar in "structure" to ones being created in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Contemporary critics were horrified by the assertion and I imagine what beguiled analysts of the time was the fact the revolution as the U.S. was peaceful it was therefore fundamentally different in nature than from the totalitarianisms birthed in violence. But what these analysts failed to see is that with the changes bought about the by New Deal,  the U.S. assumed the "structure" of a totalitarian society even though its "managers" weren't totalitarian.  The checks-and-balances which limited government power still remained on paper but were practically were swept away through a variety of judicial and economic actions which neutered the constitution and vastly expanded government power.

Burnham, and Francis tended to view the "managerial" class along Marxist lines in the sense that class acted to self consciously further its self-interest and power, which in turn implied and ever increasing domain of "management" and hence an expanding government. While I do think that there is an element of truth in this, I feel this is a weak point of Burnham's analysis. At the time he was harshly criticized by both Orwell for this view--correctly in my opinion--and Burnham's thinking changed later in this regard, especially by the influence of Chambers. When Burnham wrote Suicide of the West, it wasn't the parasitic managerial class which was the issue as much as it was the "culture" of that class. Francis wrote;

The ideology of the emerging managerial regime in the United States came to be known as "progressivism" and later as "liberalism," though a more appropriate label might be "managerial humanism." The ideology articulated a view of man as the product of social and economic environment and thus susceptible to amelioration or perfection by a scientifically trained elite with power to redesign the environment. It involved a collectivist view of the state and economy and advocated a highly centralized regime largely unrestrained by traditional legal, constitutional, and political barriers. It rejected or regarded as backward, repressive, or obsolete the institutions and values of traditional and bourgeois society—its loyalties to the local community, traditional religion, and moral beliefs, the family, and social and political differentiations based on class, status, and property—and it expressed an ideal of man "liberated" from such constraints and re-educated or redesigned into a cosmopolitan participant in the mass state-economy of the managerial system.

Francis recognised that the nature of the class would in turn reflect the nature of the society, but Burnham's analysis felt that human dynamics and societal structure would relentless push society in an anti-traditional direction:

Despite the conservative, stabilizing, and establishmentarian appearance of consensus liberalism, however, the managerial system is incapable of stabilization. The dynamic of managerial capitalism involves a continuing erosion of the social and cultural fabric through the mass consumption and hedonism, social mobility, and dislocation that it promotes and through the obsolescence of hard private property, under the control of individual and family ownership, that corporate and collective property and governmental regulation encourage. The managerial state obtains its raison d'être from continuing intervention, activism, and social engineering, as became clear in the War on Poverty, the civil rights revolution, and the Great Society programs. The intellectuals, technocrats, and professional verbalists of the managerial intelligentsia and communications elite—what Kevin Phillips has called the "mediacracy"[ED:Cathedral]—are committed by their material interests and their ideological predispositions[ED] to the design and implementation of continuing social change, the rejection and destruction of the bourgeois constraints on their functions and power, and the defense and extension of the apparatus of the managerial system. The rhetoric of conservatism did not alter the basic reality of the managerial regime and its continuing revolution, and the reality came to the surface again in the utopian imagery of the "New Frontier," "Camelot," and "Great Society" of the 1960s and even in the planning of the Vietnam War. Lyndon Johnson and his advisers projected a "TVA on the Mekong" that would "solve" the environmental problems that, in their view, lay at the root of communism, and the "McNamara Revolution" in the Defense Department carried through the managerialization of war and the technocratic transformation of the military services. Few large corporations supported Senator Barry Goldwater's rather quaint evocation of bourgeois beliefs in the 1964 presidential campaign, and most corporate donations accrued to the Johnson-Humphrey ticket.• The "conservatization" of managerial liberalism in the postwar era was intended to legitimize the managerial regime by lending it the appearance of continuity and respectability and to check the tendencies of the ideological Left to push the regime beyond what the elite wanted and required, but it did not significantly slow or reverse the radicalizing and anti-bourgeois mechanisms of the regime and its system of social dominance by the managerial elite.

It's interesting here to see that Francis thought that "big business" capitalism worked synergistically with the managerial state to erode both traditional society, morality and the protective mechanisms for individual liberty. Francis also saw that the managerial elite could superficially appear conservative but was ultimately radical at its core and unless the managerial "structure" could be disestablished it would pose a continual threat to any nascent attempts of Conservative resurgence.  He regarded the Reagan years as a failure and interesting illustrated how the managerial apparatus managed to deal with upstarts who wanted to change the status quo.

"Reaganism," then, was neither a continuation of the bourgeois conservatism of the Old Right nor one more installment of an eternally recurring William McKinley nor the culmination of a cycle in American politics by which one elite ousted another and then itself succumbed to corruption. It was rather an effort to wed or fuse those destabilizing movements, fed by resentment, fear, and frustration, which gelled in the New Right and the candidacy of George Wallace, with still-dominant managerial elements in the state, economy, and cultural apparatus. Those elements saw their institutional apparatus of power and the "consensus" that rationalized it jeopardized by an insurgency from the right as well as from the left in the 1960s and 1970s and by the whole unraveling of American society that their own efforts at social reconstruction had helped cause. So far from challenging or displacing an old elite, Reaganism simply allowed the leadership of the insurgent forces to crawl into bed with the managerial establishment and sample its favors, thereby effectively decapitating (or, to extend the  sexual metaphor, emasculating the insurgency)[ED]

The formula worked as long as the Teflon President was there, and it has worked for his successor since Good Old Dutch was strapped to his pony and hauled back to his ranch. But it may not work much longer if recession and the economic woes Mr. Phillips discusses pop out of the political woodwork as they seem to be doing. What is surprising in Mr. Phillips's analysis is not his conclusion that Reaganism actually endangered middle-class aspirations but his neglect of the continuing power of the cultural and social frustrations he has so admirably penetrated elsewhere. In his 1982 book, Post-Conservative America, he predicted that what historian Fritz Stern called the politics of cultural despair"—racial, national, and social hostilities and dislocations—would coalesce with economic frustrations to yield a chauvinist, authoritarian, and perhaps overtly racialist political movement on the order of what occurred in Weimar Germany. In his present book, there is virtually no reference to that thesis despite its continuing relevance.

Here we are.

I think the important things to take from Burnham are;

Firstly, the Managerial Revolution transformed the U.S. (and other Western Societies) structurally so that they resembled societies with '"totalitarian" power structures.

Secondly, the "culture" of the managers, reflected the nature of that society and the nature of that totalitarianism. And contemporary events bare this out. As our elite culture drifts relentlessly leftward and atheistic the legal protections afforded to Christians have vapourised and a "soft Left" totalitarianism is taking its place.

Francis on Burnham.

The neglect of Burnham by liberal and even mainstream media is explained by many conservatives as the response to be expected from those whose incantations to the broad mind and the open mouth are belied by their contempt for those who dissent from their canons. Yet Burnham was also neglected by many conservatives, who knew him best through his column and his classic Suicide of the West, repeatedly reprinted since its first publication in 1964. George H. Nash in his monumental The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945 acknowledges Burnham's importance in the emergence of conservative anticommunism in the 1940s and 1950s, but neither Mr. Nash nor most other students of American conservatism have fully appreciated the significance of Burnham's political ideas or their potential for constructing a serious and critical political theory for the contemporary American Right.

By far, the greatest influence on thinking of  Sam Francis were the writings of James Burnham.  A communist in the 1930's and who was in contact with Trotsky, Burnham became disillusioned with Communism in early 40's and eventually turned hard right. Though, Burnham "turned" right, he was never really "at home" with the post war Right from a social and intellectual perspective. What set him apart from most of them was his "modernist" understanding of contemporary events.

Burnham did not generally socialize with the conservative movement. He was not a member of the Philadelphia or Mont Pelerin societies, rarely contributed to conservative periodicals other than National Review, and seldom or never participated in the seminars and summer schools of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute or Young Americans for Freedom. His aloofness was probably in part a personal choice, but it also reflected an incongruity between his mind and that of the mainstream of American conservatism as it has developed since the 1940s. Burnham and his more percipient readers were aware of the incongruity, which served to keep him at a distance  from many of his professional collaborators on the Right, while, ironically, causing the Left to concentrate its fire on his writings to a greater degree than on those of any other conservative intellectual figure of our era.

Burnham came to public prominence through the publication of his book, The Managerial Revolution.  Matt Forney gives a good review of the book here, though I disagree with some of his thoughts.  Even Orwell was impressed enough to write a rebuttal of it and the book and at the time earned considerable praise. And although Burnham's approach was strongly inspired by the Marxist analytic method, the book, in my opinion, needs to be seen within the same tradition of thinking as exemplified by Ortega y Gasset and Pitrim Sorokin. These thinkers recognised that  a fundamental change had occurred in society at the end of the 19th Century as a consequence of religious collapse, technology and more importantly, the rise in population mass. Traditional conservative thinkers tend to ignore the latter two in their analysis of human history, seeing human nature as something apart from the material conditions of man and society. Richard Weaver once remarked that Ideas have Consequences but  what's really important in the Burhnamite analysis is that the historical and material circumstances of man have consequences as well.  And one of the things which impressed me with regard to Burnhams analysis is the notion that more people doesn't just mean a bigger society, it also means a different type of society.  Quoting Francis: 

The twentieth century, for the United States as well as for the rest of the world, has been an age of revolution of far more profound transformational effect than any the modern world has ever experienced. Perhaps not since neolithic times has mankind undergone simultaneous changes in economic, social, political, and intellectual relationships of such far-reaching consequences. Some aspects of this transformation are obvious and have been explored by count-less analysts—the rise of totalitarianism, the intellectual revolution precipitated by Einstein and Freud, the decline of the Euro-American civilization and the rise of non-white power centers, the evolution of a "postindustrial" technology and economy in place of agricultural and manufacturing sectors. Yet for all the theories, explanations, and accounts of the twentieth-century revolution, there is no better perspective from which to view this transformation than James Burnham's theory of the managerial revolution, formulated in 1941. Despite many flaws, inaccurate predictions, and overstatements, Burnham's theory perceives the essential core of the twentieth-century revolution and contains the elements by which the complex political and intellectual ramifications of our age can be explained. Although in a narrow sense Burnham's theory sought to explain the civilizational impact of the "separation of ownership and control" in the corporate economy and the rise of large corporations directed by professional managers rather than by traditional individual owners and partnerships, in a broader sense his theory applies to political and social, as well as to economic, organizations. The characteristic feature of twentieth-century history has been the  vast expansion in the size, scale of transactions, and complexity and technicality of functions that political, social, and economic organizations exhibit. This expansion, which Pitrim Sorokin also noted under the label "colossalism," was itself made possible by the growth of mass populations and by the development of technologies that could sustain the colossal scale of organization. Just as business firms expanded far beyond the point at which they could be operated, directed: and controlled effectively by individual owners and their families, who generally lacked the technical skills to manage them, so the state also underwent a transformation in scale that removed it from the control of traditional elites, citizens, and their legal representatives. Just as in the mass corporations a new elite of professional managers emerged that replaced the traditional entrepreneurial or bourgeois elite of businessmen, so in the state also a new elite of professionally trained managers or bureaucrats developed that challenged and generally became dominant over the older political elites of aristocrats and amateur politicians who occupied the formal offices of government. Both in the economy and the state, organizations began to undertake functions for which a smaller scale of organization was not prepared and which the traditional elites of aristocratic and bourgeois society were unable to perform. A similar process occurred in labor unions, professional associations, churches, educational institutions, military organizations, and the organs of mass communication and cultural expression. In all sectors of twentieth-century industrial society, the growth of mass organizations brought with it an expansion of functions and power, a new elite wedded by its material interests and psychic and intellectual preparation to continuing expansion, and a metamorphosis of the organizations themselves as well as of the social and political orders they dominated.

What needs to be understood here is that Burnham recognised the rise of this class was not the product of some "conspiracy" or malignant design, rather he recognised that the rise came about through the complex interchange between commercial forces, technology and population. Changes which frequently, were enthusiastically embraced and forwarded by Conservatives as well. Take Capitalism, for example. The push for efficiency in capitalistic organisations doesn't just result in lower "overheads" but also selects for organisations which are highly centralized. What this means is that Capitalism in operation is synergistic with the centralising tendencies of the managerial state.* Likewise the current decline in the fortunes of the Press is less an intended outcome than and unintended consequence of technological innovation. It also illustrates why  "turning" the clock back is not a realistic option since turning it back involves not only a change in values but a change in the material and technological circumstances as well

The evolution of the new order and its ideology was not, of course, the result of a conspiracy or a conscious design on the part of its founders, but rather the product of an almost irresistible process by which new technologies, new forms of organization, and new ideas joined together to challenge and replace old forms that were unable to sustain or accommodate the immense scale of human numbers and their interactions. Those who gained from this process—the new managerial elites—encouraged it instinctively from a combined sense of their personal and group interests and their unquestioned faith in their self-serving ideology.

The past is dead, hence Francis's opinion that any new Right will not be a rehash of the past--sorry Trads--but will rather be a new formulation, while different, will maintain a continuity with the old. Still the important term here is "self-serving" ideology, something I will get back to in the next post.

Burnham was a student of power and wanted to understand who, what and how to wield it. Burnham's analysis led him to the conclusion that power in modern society was situated in the "managerial" class, which acted for its own interests by co-opting the lower classes[Ed: and Minorities] to squeeze the middle class which it saw as its greatest threat.  Particularly, it's bourgeois elements. It's interesting here to see that the problem is not just the elites but the proletariat as well. Francis recognised that the continual exploitation of the "bourgeois middle" would eventually radicalise it and motivate it to action.

Using Burnham's analytic method Francis felt that the best approach to attack the managerial state was for Conservatives not to "reach out to minorities", whom he felt would never bite, but to position themselves as representing the interests of the bourgeois middle. The failure to that would would leave a vacuum which would be exploited by a strong man who would.

Goodbye GOP. Welcome Donald Trump.

*(For those who have difficulties understanding, I'm not saying capitalism is wrong, rather that it has both positive and negative dimensions which cannot be seen by a simple balance sheet analysis.)

Beautiful Losers. The Intellectual Triumvirate.

Firstly, I think it is important to fix Sam Francis to a particular point in the Political spectrum in order to fully appreciate his ideas. Whilst Francis wrote for many publications, he did not agree with the editorial tone of some of them, even those who popularised his ideas. Francis's writing  offended a lot of people and he advocated positions which struck the sacred cows of political correctness at their very heart. As a result, he became persona non grata amongst "Respectable" publishing  and he ended up being banished amongst the the extreme. The practical effect of this exile was that his opinion have been associated with their and thus his reputation has been besmirched. I think this is unfair.

Had Francis been born in 1920's America he probably would have been considered a moderate, even a liberal, but the passage of time has seen society culturally so shifted to the Left that by the time of his death he was considered a member of the lunatic right. Yet this was not his natural intellectual home.  While he would of applauded Trump--and not for the reasons that most expect--I think he would have found the Stormfront Right abhorrent. He was a serious thinker and most of them are clowns.

Francis's proper positioning in the political spectrum is not within the Aryan Nation but within the Paleoconservative tradition, what Francis would call the Old Right.  He was fiercely opposed to Neoconservatism and regarded most of the "official right" with some disdain. For him, the United States was a "concrete" thing; a geography, a nation, a people, a history. It most emphatically was not a "proposition".  However unlike most of the traditionalists, Francis understood that many of the changes wrought to U.S. society were very unlikely to be undone:

If the Old Right stood for anything, it stood for the conservation of the "Old Republic" that flourished in the United States between the American War for Independence and the Great Depression and the civilizational antecedents of the American republic in the history and thought of Europe, and it is precisely that political construct that the managerial revolution overthrew and rendered all but impossible to restore. The Old Republic cannot be restored today because few Americans even remember it, let alone want it back, and even a realistic description of it would frighten and alienate most citizens. The essence of a republic, articulated by almost every theorist of republicanism from Cicero to Montesquieu, is the independence of the citizens who compose it and their commitment to a sustained active participation in its public affairs, the res publica. The very nature of the managerial revolution and the regime that developed from it promotes not independence, but dependency and not civic participation, but civic passivity. Today, almost the whole of American society encourages dependency and passivity—in the economy, through the continuing absorption of independent farms and businesses by multinational corporations, through ever more minute regulation by the state and through the dragooning of mass work forces in office and factory and mass consumption through advertising and public relations; in the culture, through the regimented and centralized manufacture and manipulation of thought taste, opinion, and emotion itself by the mass media and educational organizations; and in the state, through its management of more and more dimensions of private and social existence under the color of "therapy" that does not cure, "voluntary service" that is really mandatory, and periodic "wars," against poverty, illiteracy, drugs, or other fashionable monsters, that no one ever wins. The result is an economy that does not work, a democracy that does not vote, families without fathers, classes without property, a government that passes more and more laws, a people that is more and more lawless, and a culture that neither thinks nor feels except when and what it is told or tricked to think and feel.

To be sure, there are many Americans who resent and fear these trends, and sometimes they flex enough political muscle to gain a few more tax breaks, a handful of increased federal entitlements, or a tenuous and temporary relief from strangulation by the managerial octopus. Their discontents and fears, if properly mobilized, may revive an American Right and may eventually succeed in achieving some of its projects. But almost no one wants a republic or even knows what a republic is, and there can be no possibility of a republic in the United States again until Americans are willing to assume the burdens of civic responsibility and independence that republican life demands. The American Right—Old or New, Paleo or Neo—failed to persuade Americans to take up those burdens, as their ancestors took them up in Williamsburg and Boston, at Fort Sumter and Gettysburg, and those who identified with its cause are only a few of the Americans who will eventually pay the price of that failure. No matter how beautiful its ideas and theories, no matter how compelling a chart of the currents of history's river it drew, American conservatism was not enough to channel those currents into other courses. It is as a chronicle and an explanation of these beautiful losers in our history that these essays may serve.

Francis thought that many of the conservative intellectuals were too abstract and concerned with ideas more than the practical application of them. For Francis the most damning indictment of the conservative intellectuals was their ineffectiveness, and his aim in writing this book was too analyse this failure in order not to repeat the mistakes of the past.  For Francis, a large part of the Traditionalist failure stemmed from a failure to understand that the material, social and economic conditions bought about by progress were likely to be irreversible and that nostalgic efforts to turn the clock back were a waste of time.

But even if it has a future, the Right will not be riding in a conservative vehicle, at least not one that would be recognizable to most of those who have regarded themselves as conservatives since World War II [Ed]. That vehicle has pretty much ended up on the junk heap of history, and in retrospect it is hard to see where else it could have landed. The meaning of the world-historical change that Burnham called the managerial revolution is that what the Old Right, in any of its philosophical or political forms, represented and championed is defunct.

This something I want to dwell on a bit more in a later post, but what Francis is saying here is the changes wrought on society by impersonal forces such a capitalism, population growth, affluence and technology are in themselves transformative of society.  Traditional society wasn't just killed by choice, it was also killed by technology, specialisation and population growth. What Francis[and this blog] is saying is that traditionalists have failed to factor these "impersonal factors" into account in their visions of restoration. Reading the book, one gets the impression that while Francis values some of the thought of the old Right, he is dismissive of most of it because of it because it was ineffectual. Francis was extraordinarily well read and what I found interesting was his list of intellectuals who he felt offered a path to success for the conservative movement.

While the mainstream of Old Right thought continued to dwell on philosophical esoterica, the three Old Right conservatives considered in these essays—Burnham, Willmoore Kendall, and Whittaker Chambers—actually departed from the mainstream in formulating ideas by which a popularly based Right could mount effective challenges to managerialism and its liberal formulas. The thrust of Kendall's thought was toward what today would be called a populist strategy, and Burnham, though he seems in the 1950s to have advocated cooperation with what he regarded as the historically irreversible managerial revolution, followed a similar path from the late 1960s and 1970s. Chambers never showed any sympathy for the new managerial regime and recognized in it a domesticated form of communism that was less violent, but no less revolutionary, than its Soviet cousin. Unlike Burnham and Kendall, however, Chambers's response to the revolution was one of intensely personal religious withdrawal. Yet throughout Chambers's work, from his earliest essays and short stories, written in his communist period, through his last letters and articles, he dwelled on the material and psychic suffering of the common man, what he called in Witness "the plain men and women of the nation." Despite their differences, these three Old Rightists are perhaps the only major theorists of the first generation of the Old Right who made any significant contribution to the development of a body of ideas and a practical strategy that could bring the Right out of its philosophical clouds and political archaism and point toward a realistic and popularly based challenge to managerial power.

I had never heard of Kendall, knew a bit a Burnham and know Chambers very well and of the three Kendall seems the odd one out, however, nowhere is there a mention of Der Furher, Evola or Chamberlain. Francis was simply a cut above the rest. Of those three, the one with the most influence was by far James Burnham, whose studies into the nature of modern power provided both an analytical framework with regard to understanding the power of the Left and provided a intellectual tool by which strategies could be developed in order to combat it.

Sam Francis: Beautiful Losers.

I've got to admit that while I had heard of Sam Francis before I really didn't delve much at all into his writings, and it was only a recent article and some commentary over at Radix which further piqued my interest in him, and I must admit, I've been mighty impressed. Over the last few weeks I've been reading some of his works and am of the opinion that the Dissident Right needs to pay much more attention to him.

It's a shame that Sam Francis died relatively recenetly, on the verge of the blogging revolution. Were he still alive, I imagine he would have carved his own niche in the Dissident Right and become a formidable force shaping it. I am of the impression that he didn't always agree with the tone or the official positions of many of the journals he wrote for, but given the state of affairs that existed prior to the widespread use of the internet, he was limited to writing for the increasingly few journals--on the margins--that would publish him.  Journals which, frankly, I don't think were up to his standards.

His banishment to the margins, by the forces of political correctness, I imagine was their way of denying him conventional legitimacy and smearing him as a unbalanced and someone not worthy of serious consideration. 

And yet he is.

Francis is different.

Unlike most conservative commentators who simply push for a reset to the past, Francis realises that this isn't going to happen, and if the Right wants to end it's near century losing streak its got to start doing things differently. Though coming from the Paleoconservative faction of American thought, Francis was heavily influenced by the writings of James Burnham, author of the Managerial Revolution, and this in turn influenced his analytic method when it came to understanding the sociological aspects of the liberal/conservative conflict. Burnham was an empiricist of power, both in an understanding how it was wielded and how it was gained. Francis took these ideas and placed them within the Paleoconservative context. He sought to apply these principles to analysis of the American conservative movement and his thoughts, I feel, are applicable to contemporary times.

However sophisticated and well expressed conservative intellectualism may have been in the years after World War II, its virtues did not assure it victory, mainly because there existed in American society and political culture no significant set of interests to which its ideas could attach themselves. Hence, post-World War II conservatism in its political efforts generally ignored the philosophical contributions of its highbrow exponents and fell back on the more mundane considerations of low taxes and small budgets, anticommunism and law and order; and the preoccupation of the Old Right mind in that era with an abstract and abstruse intellectualism helped ensure its eventual irrelevance. For the most part, any suggestion that the savants of the Right ought to have attended to the concrete social, regional, and ethnic dimensions of the human and American conditions rather than to their purely philosophical aspects was greeted with accusations of "determinism," though why it is less deterministic to say that ideas, rather than nonintellectual forces, are the major causal agents in human affairs has never been clear to me. The truth is that, for all their talk about social "roots," conservative intellectuals in the postwar era were often rootless men themselves, and the philosophical mystifications in which they enveloped themselves were frequently the only garments that fit them. 

Alienated from the prevailing intellectual and political currents as well as from traditional social forms that were ceasing to exist or cohere, the conservative intelligentsia was able to find explanations for and solutions to the civilizational crisis it perceived only in the most esoteric theory, and the "practical" applications of such theory often took the form of some species of romanticism or archaism--a pretentious medievalism, accompanied by antimodernist posturings and colored with a highly politicized religiosity; an attraction to archaic social and political forms such as the antebellum South, the ancien regime of eighteenth-century Europe, or the era of nineteenth-century laissez-faire; and a distaste for and often an ignorance of American history that derived from a mirror-image agreement with the Left-liberal understanding of America as an "experiment" dedicated to an egalitarian and progressivist proposition. If the intellectuals of the Right did not adhere to some form of archaism, they tended, like Whittaker Chambers, simply to withdraw from the world in despair and acknowledgment of defeat.

Sam Francis was not a Traditionalist. For Francis, the old ways did not work, the task was how to win, but before doing so, it was important to understand why the losses kept accumulating, hence his book Beautiful Losers, which is essentially  both an understanding of the failure of the Conservative movement and some ideas to get it out of the cycle of defeat.  The book is a collection of essays that he had penned for various journals with an accompanying introduction explaining his choice. Most of the essays are stand alone pieces but are unified in his "Burnhamite" analysis. Francis was acutely aware of the dissolution occurring about him and was convinced that the conservative approach had to change if there was to be any push-back.

Any objective look at the state of Western Society would show that there is not much further we can go in the slouch towards Gomorrah and given the relentless Left-ward drift of society. There's not really much more time left before the "right culture" of the West becomes a memory or effectively erased. New approaches are required.

It remains possible today to rectify that error by a radical alteration of the Right's strategy. Abandoning the illusion that it represents an establishment to be "conserved," a new American Right must recognize that its values and goals lie outside and against the establishment and that its natural allies are not in Manhattan, Yale, and Washington but in the increasingly alienated and threatened strata of Middle America. The strategy of the Right should be to enhance the polarization of Middle Americans from the incumbent regime, not to build coalitions with the regime's defenders and beneficiaries. Moreover, since "Middle America" consists of workers, farmers, suburbanites and other non- or post-bourgeois groups, as well as small businessmen, it is unlikely that a new Right will make much progress in mobilizing them if it simply repeats the ideological formulas of a now long-defunct bourgeois elite and its order. The more salient concerns of postbourgeois Middle Americans that a new Right can express are those of crime, educational collapse, the erosion of their economic status, and the calculated subversion of their social, cultural, and national identity by forces that serve the interests of the elite above them and the underclass below them, but at the expense of the middle class. A new Right, positioning itself in opposition to the elite and the elite's underclass ally, can assert its leadership of alienated Middle Americans and mobilize them in radical opposition to the regime.

A new, radical Middle American Right need not abandon political efforts, but, consistent with its recognition that it is laying siege to a hostile establishment, it ought to realize that political action in a cultural power vacuum will be largely futile. The main focus of a Middle American Right should be the reclamation of cultural power, the patient elaboration of an alternative culture within but against the regime—within the belly of the beast but indigestible by it. Instead of the uselessness of a Diogenes' search for an honest presidential candidate or a Fabian quest for a career in the bureaucracy, a Middle Amierican Right should begin working in and with schools, churches, clubs, women's groups, youth organizations, civic and professional associations, local government, the military and police forces, and even in the much-dreaded labor unions to create a radicalized Middle American consciousness that can perceive the ways in which exploitation of the middle classes is institutionalized and understand how it can be resisted. Only when this kind of infrastructure of cultural hegemony is developed can a Middle American Right seek meaningful political power without coalitions with the Left and bargaining with the regime.

Eliot may have been right that no cause is really lost because none is really won, but victory and defeat in the struggle for social dominance have little to do with whether the cause is right or wrong. Some ideas have more consequences than others, and those that attach themselves to declining social and political forces have the least consequences of all. By allowing itself to be assimilated by the regime of the Left, American conservatism became part of a social and political force that, if not on the decline, is at least confronted by a rising force that seeks to displace it, even as the regime of the Left displaced its predecessor. If the American Right can disengage from the Left and its regime, it can assume leadership of a cause that could be right as well as victorious. But it can do so only if it has the wit and the will to disabuse itself of the illusions that have distracted it almost since its birth. 

I imagine that Francis would have cheered the Donald Trump movement if not Donald Trump himself, though I image he would be more pessimistic of his success given contemporaneous circumstances in which his success is occurring.

I really both enjoyed and found this book thought provoking.  Over the next few weeks I plan to put up a commentary on some of the essays from the book and offer my opinion on some of his analysis

Once again, I'd recommend it and I feel that every Neoreactionary should have it on his bookshelf.

Potpourri.

Just a couple of interesting things I found on my blog travels this week.

Firstly, a good YouTube video by Black Pigeon on the subject of the negative effects of multiculturalism.

Unlike the usual slouch towards and trying to establish a racial hierarchy, Black Pigeon avoids the subject all together and simply concentrates on the societal problems of highly diverse populations groups. Bit long but worth a view.




Brett Stevens put up a very good post which I felt dealt with the subject of racial diversity quite well.

In the South — otherwise known as the part of North America with culture and honor — we settled this by having separate neighborhoods. Whites live in one place, Africans another, Mexicans another still, and Asians somewhere else. Balance is maintained because each group rules itself.

I always offer up the question: if you are African-American, and you get pulled over by a police officer, what type of face do you want to see? The answer is African-American. Same as whites want to see white police officers, Hispanics a Hispanic police officer, and Asians a (rare, but committed when it does occur) Asian police officer.

The fact is, that if we have control over our own communities, we are not enemies but distant friends. I like the “distant friends” idea because it enables me to enjoy people without insisting they be like me. White standards work for white people… for others, well, who knows — it’s up to them.

I'm not sure that the South "worked". To quote Roissy, Proximity and Diversity= War and even though there was state enforced segregation, the reality of running it resulted in a festering social wound. Still, what I like about Steven's article is that it doesn't aim at racial supremacism but simply the recognition that groups are different and that we can like people from other races whilst still wanting ethnic homogeneity.

Unlike most bloggers on the subject of the negative effects of multiculturalism, my criticism of it is not based upon racial superiority lines, rather its based upon an understanding of human nature and its hard wired cognitive biases for ingroup/outgroup distinctions. 

On the subject of the Alt-Right, West Coast Reactionaries have put up a fantastic post with lots of links expressing concern with the direction it is taking.

The reason why it is important to consider how the Alt. Right is being seen by the outside world is because what the outside world will see depends on who is being the loudest. And going by how increasing numbers of outsiders are viewing the Alt. Right, it is not looking good.

It is not all “just a joke”; there are various spheres which comprise the Alt. Right, and some may lean towards irony and the like more than others, of course, but the network in its totality is coming to only represent such spheres. Do not get me wrong, there will always be hardline intellectuals in any community of this sort, but ordinarily they exercise a deal of influence and prevent their community from moving beyond their confines. However, the Alt. Right is growing in size rather exponentially due to the Trump phenomenon and the migrant crisis in Europe, thus it is impossible to maintain a single orthodoxy over the masses of anti-SJW teenagers.

Andy Nowicki also puts up a good post dealing on the subject (bit long though) but worth listening to. The smarter guys seem to recognise that the dissident Right can't be a "big tent" which takes in everyone who opposes the left.

The Left, White Nationalism and the 1488'ers

Perhaps the most interesting meta-political development over the past few years has been the rise of the dissident Right. It still in its early stages but it appears that several media outlets have begun to notice and no doubt, so enough, a concerted campaign will be mounted to to discredit it.

The traditional pragmatic approach of the Left, in dealing with it opponents, is to label them all as fascists or Nazi's wherever there is some doctrinal disagreement which they wish to emphasise. It needs to be understood that here the aim is not to logically justify that assertion as much it is to reinforce an association in the minds of cognitive misers, who are the majority in a democratic body politic.  As readers of this blog will note, cognitive misers, think in terms of associations so  Left psychops are intended to  primarily work through the limbus and not the mind itself.

As advertisers have long noted, positive associations with a product are far more effective in selling it than a logical explanation of its virtues.  What has hampered the Right in its battles against the Left is the traditionalist anthropological fallacy which saw people as rational actors instead of cognitive misers. The Right, in trying to combat the Left, has perused a strategy a logically refuting through data and argument on the assumption that ideas will prevail.

This assumption was wrong.

Sam Francis explains:

My conclusion that conservatism has transformed itself into virtual extinction will surprise and perhaps even anger those who favor the formalistic and normative approach, which does not easily stoop to considerations of social change and historical fluctuation and is reluctant to admit that some things, even ideas, fail. Regarding political events as the earthly manifestations of timeless abstractions, the intellectual mainstream of the "Old Right" from the end of World War II developed a highly sophisticated body of ideas and a highly articulate body of spokesmen to express them. Perhaps because they were too uxoriously wedded to Weaver's principle that "Ideas Have Consequences," most of the conservative intellectuals who subscribed to this body of thought always seemed to assume that it was only a matter of time before their own beliefs would creep up on the ideas of the Left, slit their throats in the dark, and stage an intellectual and cultural coup d'etat, after which truth would reign. [ED] I have never thought so, in part because I have less faith in the power of intellectual abstractions than most of my conservative colleagues. The historian Lewis Namier remarked that "new ideas are not nearly as potent as broken habits," and Burnham, describing Vilfredo Pareto's view of human rationality, wrote that "rational, deliberate, conscious belief does not, then, in general at any rate, determine what is going to happen to society; social man is not, as he has been defined for so many centuries, a primarily 'rational animal.' In the tradition of Namier (who briefly studied under Pareto) and Burnham, I place more emphasis on the concrete forces of elites, organization, and psychic and social forces such as class and regional and ethnic identity than on formal intellectual abstractions and their "logical" extrapolations as the determining forces of history. Ideas do have consequences, but some ideas have more consequences than others, and which consequences ensue from which ideas is settled not simply because the ideas serve human reason through their logical implications but also because some ideas serve human interests and emotions through their attachment to drives for political, economic, and social power, while other ideas do not.

The latest findings of cognitive science further buttress this view. The way to control the masses is not though the mind but through the primal limbic drives, and the Left, for all its talk of rationality, has recognised this fact, and pragmatically always concentrated its efforts on getting the proletariat to  "feel the strength" of its arguments instead of logically assessing them. Hence the aim of the Left has been to positively align its objectives with positive limbic sensations and hence the importance of its ideas and its causes being cool, hip, compassionate and trendy are more than them being factually correct. And its approach, I believe, has gone a long way towards its triumph over conservatism. Conditioning, not argument, is the way to sway the masses. Orwell's definition of "bellyfeel" in the Newspeak dictionary makes this same point.

Conditioning, however, requires the co-opting of pre-existing tendencies of the human psyche and associating them with the product. Goebbels for instance, ordered that depictions of the Jews in German propaganda to always be in the negative and to associate such depictions with other negative imagery such as rats and filth. The idea being that the negative associations be strengthened by such methods. However, there is a limit the power of such a technique and German propaganda was quite clear never to show the Jews being mistreated in any bestial form or manner because by doing so you generate sympathy for your victim and the intention to demonise him fails.

Conditioning is one of the most powerful mind control mechanisms since it operates at the level of the modus operandi  of the cognitive miser: Associative Cognition.

The Left has always recognised that for the average Westerner, the Nazi "brand" is associated with the worst forms of evil in the 20th Century and therefore it has always tried to smear its opponents as Nazis. The idea here being not to prove the logical connection but simply to reinforce the association so that whatever their opponent stands for, their idea becomes associated with the negative emotional state that comes with contemplation of Nazism. Of course sometimes the association is so out of kilter that the slur fails, but the failure rests on a clear ability to recognise the mismatch between the slur and the target. But what happens if the distinction is not so clear?

Suppose the target is actually quite sympathetic to Hitler, suppose when you Google the target quite a few Nazi images show up, suppose your obsessed with the evil of Jew's, how clear is target distinction then?

It isn't and the Lefts claim gains traction.

The terrible thing about the Nazi's, is apart from their terrible crimes, is that they seriously weakened the West's capability of withstanding Leftist attack by tarring all the elements of their ideology with the stench of evil through association.  Nationalism, did not produce the concentration camps in the First World War,  yet post war it has become associated with it.  Prussian Militiarism, which was honorable prior to the Second World War, through its association with Nazism degraded all further virile aggressive defence and the standing of the Military in the West. The Nazi's greatest legacy may be that they were able to weaken the good ideas of the West by association with the evil they wrought.

If, the dissident Right wants to bring back some of these ideas, things such as nationalism, ethnic homogeneity, virile masculinity etc, it needs to disassociate them from the associative links with Nazism that they have have established in Western Culture. The thing is that the Left wants you to think that all White Nationalists are Nazis and the the 1488'ers want you to think the same. They both have the same objective.

Human Nature and Political Society.

I've been meaning to reply to commentator Tom for a while now with regard to a comment he left over at this post:

Of course, homophily exists, but given the massive harm it causes to humanity as a whole, I see no reason to mold society to it any more than I see a need to cater to other natural emotions such as violent jealousy[ED].

There are a ton of human impulses that society suppresses, and because man is a product of both nature and nurture, such impulses are heavily modified by experience. I'm sure that if I wasn't raised in Toronto, a heavily multicultural city, I'd be slightly discomfited by my workplace where there is no majority race, I hear Arabic, Hindi and Russian spoken around me, and the clothing styles, while majority jeans and polo shirt, also include Hijab/Abaya and the occasional sari.

Nobody here (a programming shop) blinks an eye because this is what you see every day on the street.

Yes, there are fewer cultural touchstones with my coworkers, so I exercise some cultural homophily with my personal friends (we're all hard-core computer geeks from a variety of races), but surely homophilic tendencies are no basis for the structure of society.

Or should I be agitating for a society where everyone must have read the science fiction greats before getting citizenship?

Whilst I respect Tom's comments, the comment above is in many ways akin to the argument pushed by feminists that a woman should be able to wear whatever she wants and not expect to get sexually assaulted.

Let me explain.

Traditional human anthropology tended to divide nature into its rational and irrational components. The irrational components being our appetites, desires, biases and other tendencies which overarching reason was mean to regulate for our own good.

Now the problem with this approach is that the concept of "reason" was rather vague. The implicit assumption was that the "reason" of the philosopher was also the same "reason" of the prole. The problem, as modern psychology and cognitive science has demonstrated, is that while everyone is capable of reason, the "quality" of everyone's reason is not the same.

An aspect of psychology that is relevant in this instance, is that of Kohlberg's theory of moral development. In essence, Kohlberg demonstrated that people's motivation for moral action is varied. At the lowest--and most populous level-- moral action is based on the avoidance of punishment and the promise of reward and its only that and only at the rarefied level of the enlightened few that it is motivated by considerations of higher ethical principle.  In other words, the reasoning of the bottom is different from the reasoning at the top yet the observed behaviour is the same.*

 
The other relevant dimension here are the latest findings from cognitive science which show that most people are "cognitive misers", even those with high I.Q., and that intuitive "logic" is default operating mode for most people.

When you meld these two findings together you find that most people's daily operations are intuitive in their nature and constrained by external factors such as punishment or shame rather than "considered behaviour modulated by rational deliberation". Sure, there are people like that, but they're in the minority.

It follows therefore that if you want the masses to behave properly, especially when asking them to act in ways which are profoundly counter-intuitive, pragmatically you need to have a strong policing force i.e. state retribution or strong cultural shaming mechanisms, i.e. institutionalised religion to keep people in line.

Expecting everyone to "reason" like a moral philosopher is based upon the assumption that everyone can. This of course is a rehash of the radical equality principle of all men and fails to recognise that some men are limited in reaching this level of cognition. (Note, it's one of the ways mainstream Christianity inadvertently laid the groundwork for Liberalism.) So anyone pushing this agenda is, in a way, furthering the intellectual supposition that all men are cognitively equal.

But suppose you do accept the fact that there is an inherent intellectual inequality amongst men, how then do you regulate public morality in such an environment, especially when asking men to act in a strongly counter-intuitive way? The only way to do so is by having a strong external apparatus, i.e. Church or State threatening to punish wayward behaviour. i.e. Big Brother.  Furthermore, with the collapse of "cultural constraints" the void for regulating behviour needs to be assumed by the state, thus,  radical liberalism necessitates a powerful state regulatory apparatus to provide a check against the intuitive tendencies of the masses.

This is a "high energy" state of affairs. The state needs to be constantly maintained and strong in order to keep society together, should the state falter the intuitive impulses of the masses will reassert themselves. In countries like the U.S., where there is greater degree of individualism and multiculturalism, when the lights go out and the police go on strike, anarchy starts brewing quite rapidly. On the other hand, in countries such as Japan, where there are strong cultural "policing" mechanisms, and more realistic understanding of human anthropology, failure of state does not necessitate a failing society.

The former Yugoslavia was a classic example of this. Comprised of six different ethnicities, most of which did not want to live with each other, the only way the state could be kept together was through a strong totalitarian regime. Interestingly, the people most able to "get along" where the educated "cognitive" types whilst the masses maintained their grudges.  The failure of the policing state meant that natural demographic forces could assert themselves,  the rest is history.  Yugoslavia failed because it needed a strong state to force Croats, Serbs and Slovenes to be Yugoslavs and it was an example of trying to fit men to the model instead of fitting the model to men.

Stable "low energy" states are those which intuitively coalesce, where human nature is not taxed by its membership of them. A state based upon the "intuitive" emotions,experience and morality of the people is far easier to maintain than one which is pushing against human nature all the time. Catering for homophily which is near universal is different from catering to violent jealousy which is exceptional. Equating the two is wrong. A society which pushes against violent jealousy is going to require less "policing" than a society that pushes against "homophily" and is thus more stable.

Stable societies are build on an understanding of human nature and not a rejection of it. Still,  there does need to be some regulation of its more primitive aspects but the approach should be one based on the minimal amount of intervention necessary, not wide scale social engineering. Incidentally, this is one of the reasons why Puritanical societies go feral once the thumbscrews are released. Human nature only stand so much deformation.

When the feminists argue that a woman should be able to walk down the street wearing whatever she wants without being molested, they're uttering both a moral truth and an anthropological lie. It's akin to saying men should be able to transcend homophilous instinct. The problem with both both statements is that the fail to acknowledge the reality of human nature and and the human capacities to transcend them. If, however, this state of affairs was able to be achieved would necessitate a strong police state which would need to be maintained in order for there not to be a lapse into anarchy.

Stable societies are based upon the  recognition of human nature as the foundation of them. Not asking too much of people means that when the pressure is put on society, it doesn't go bad. Furthermore, if you're going to police a society, you're better off doing it through culture rather than the police state. I'd rather a minister in a church hall than a policeman in my bedroom.

*Note, the relationship of demographics and Kohlberg's theory of moral development is complex. Since this is a blog and not a academic paper I've tried to keep things simple.

Sam Francis, Bill Buckley, NRx.

One of the books I've finally got around to reading is Sam Francis's Beautiful Losers: Essays on the Failure of American Conservatism. It's a book I'd highly recommend, in fact, its a book I'd insist that neo-Reactionairies include in their cannon because of the insights that it gives. I hope to make a few comments about the book in the next few posts, particularly with its relevance to the NRx but today I just want to make a brief comment on William Buckely, especially because there has been a lot of Buckley hate coming from the Alt-Right.

I, like Francis, have a mixed opinion of Buckley. His purging of the "lunatic fringe" from the Right, in my mind was necessary for its survival in the post war period, but on the other hand, he was unable to successfully reinvigorate it during his stewardship of the National Review and led its drift towards NeoConservatism. Part of the problem, in my opinion, was due to his attempt to create a "broad church" Conservatism, but in doing so, he gutted the core elements of conservative beliefs. The other problem, as I saw it, was that Buckley enjoyed being an "intellectual" and felt that intellectual argument alone would save the day.  This as Francis points out, was a fatal error and contributed much to political neutralisation of conservatism. Still, given the broad front from which attacks were being waged upon it, Buckley should be praised for keeping any sort of conservative operation alive at all.

Francis recognises that whilst under Buckley's leadership all was not well with Conservatism but it also needs to be understood that Buckley was right in purging the conservative movement of it's more idiotic elements. Something NRx's should note.

[Buckley] forcefully rejected what he called "the popular and cliche-ridden appeal to the grass-roots" and strove instead to establish a journal which would reach intellectuals. Not all conservatives agreed with this approach, but the young editor-to-be was firm. It was the intellectuals, after all, "who have midwived and implemented the revolution. We have got to have allies among the intellectuals, and we propose to renovate conservatism and see if we can't win some of them around." 

Yet while Buckley seemed cognizant of the "revolution" that had transpired and was, in fact, successful in attracting a number of intellectuals, he failed to see that the new intellectual class as a whole, which had indeed "midwived and implemented the revolution," could not become conservative. It could not do so because its principal interest, social function, and occupational calling in the new order was to delegitimize the ideas and institutions of conservatism and provide legitimization for the new regime, and its power and rewards as a class depended upon the very bureaucratized cultural organizations that conservatives attacked. Only if conservatism were "renovated" to the point that it no longer rejected the cultural apparatus of the revolution could intellectuals be expected to sign up.

 Moreover, by focusing its efforts in Manhattan, Washington, and the major centers of the intelligentsia and other sectors of the new elite, Buckley and his conservative colleagues isolated themselves from their natural allies in the "grass roots." While there was clearly a need for intellectual sophistication on the Right, the result of Buckley's tactic was to generate a schism between Old Right intellectual cadres and the body of conservative supporters outside its north-eastern urban and academic headquarters. Among these supporters in the 1950s and 1960s there flourished an increasingly bizarre and deracinated wilderness of extremist, conspiratorialist, racialist, and even occultist ideologues who loudly rejected both the Old Right mainstream and the Old Right's new friends in the intellectual and cultural elite, but who failed to attract any but the most marginal and pathological elements in the country and exerted no cultural or political influence at all [ED]. At various times in its history, National Review has found it necessary to "purge" itself of such adherents, and each catharsis, no matter how prudent, has rendered its "renovated" conservatism less and less palatable to ordinary Americans and more and more acceptable to the Manhattanite intelligentsia it has always sought to attract. 

Here Francis teaches NRx an important lesson. Firstly, whilst NRx is not populist, it's going to be irrelevant if it's not popular.  Simply being an intellectual exercise is not enough. Francis has more to say on the subject which I will comment on in later posts. But the other thing Francis realises is that Buckley's purges were necessary since many of the those attracted to the conservative movement were actually hostile to the "Old Right".

Buckley's three huge mistakes were in;

1) Trying to conform to the establishment.
2) Not having an adequate enough yardstick by which to measure a Conservative's credentials.
3) Purging the obvious psychopaths whist missing the more cunning snakes. i.e Neoconservatives.

It's the latter two points which worry me the most with regard to current developments in the dissident Right.  Looks a bit like history repeating.