Reality

To understand what the core problem of the 20th Century is, we need to understand the foundation upon which it rests. And this article, in the Daily Mirror, of all places, serves well to illustrate the problem.

Elon Musk isn't stupid but even he admits that there is a chance that we could be living in a "simulated" reality. He is indeterminate on the matter because, quite simple, it's impossible to be definitive.




Let me illustrate what I mean. In the movie the Matrix, the "reality" human beings experience is simply a computer program operating though a spinal modem which completely controls their sensory experiences. The famous scene of Neo "unplugging" from the Matrix serves to illustrate the difference between the reality, as experienced through the spinal modem and the "real" reality.

But here is an interesting thought experiment: Suppose you are connected to a spinal modem and disconnected yourself, how could you prove that you were really disconnected? How could you be sure that the act of disconnection was not just another "simulation" designed to lull you into thinking that you were, when you really weren't? Think about if for a while.

The idea of living in a reality that is only just a simulation isn't as far fetched as it sounds once you start thinking about the problem. The real problem is how do you prove the question is not true once it has been asked? The answer is you can't, and it's why Musk doesn't give a definitive yes or no answer to the question. As I say, he's not an idiot. Kurt Godel and Alfred Tarski would both answer along the same lines.

What's all this got to do with 20th Century history? A lot actually.

Prior to the Enlightenment, European culture believed--as do most other cultures--that there was more to reality than we simply experienced: they realised that there was a world which existed outside the "matrix". While the dumber Europeans made up stuff about this other world, the smarter Europeans recognised that there was no way to access this reality through human effort alone. A person needed to be "unplugged" but he could not do it through his own efforts. In Christianity this concept was called revelation.

The real changed occurred around the time of the Enlightenment. Most Christians see the Enlightenment as the beginning of the decline, I don't. These Christians fail to distinguish between the mother and its bastard offspring, Positivism. Positivism (in all of its variants)  was a corruption of Enlightenment thinking. The fundamental premise of the Positivists was that there was nothing outside the Matrix, and like Agent Smith, they set about ensuring that any ideas of reality outside it were punished.

Positivism was really a fringe element in European history till about the mid 19th Century when it achieved "critical mass" and started influencing European culture in a meaningful way. I think its important to realise that it's not enough just to have the ideas, one also needs the means of effecting them. Hence my graph from a previous post which Nick Steves took some issue with. The rot in European civilisation really starts when people enough people start getting on board with the notion that the Matrix is all there is.

Strange to think that the Christians are more akin to Neo and his friends whilst the Positivists are the modern day Agent Smiths.

Neo illustrates the philosophical problem.

Hillary thinks I'm Alt-Right, Stormfornt and Vox think I'm a cuck

For this author, the response by most of the Alt-Right to Hillary's speech was one of naivete. Back in the "Old Days" of the Soviet Union, when Uncle Joe singled out an enemy, the astute recognised that that that person was about to receive a world of hurt. Looked in that context, Hillary's speech, if it really did represent the position of Communist Democratic Party of the United States, was pretty much both a declaration of war against the Alt-Right and public recognition that the GOP are it's "house pet".  Both parties agree that the Alt-Right is their common enemy and they are now, for all practical purposes ideologically indistinct.

Both parties are have shown that they are committed to the managerial state and its existence, and as the purpose of the managerial state is to fix "problems" for the common good, what Hillary (and the GOP) did is identify the Alt-Right as a "problem" and thereby declared war on it. What this means is, that should Trump not win,  in the next few years the state apparatus will be orientated towards the suppression and destruction of the Alt-Right. I also need to add that I'm not convinced that Trump is all that "Alt-Right" either, I hope I'm wrong, but any victory of his will simply be a stay of execution, till the political cycle restores the Democrats, unless there is a fundamental shift in the political culture of the U.S.

Personally, I would have preferred the public denunciation of the Alt-Right to have occurred in the future,  as this would have given more time for the ideas of the Alt-Right to have gained "cultural penetrance" but the enemy is not stupid and recognises that he is losing the war for the hearts and minds of the body politic and has to act now.

I hope I'm wrong, but by the time this is over I imagine that there will be persecutions against the Alt-Right done withing the Anglo-Saxon tradition. What this means is that whilst there won't be the Gulags in Alaska, people will lose their jobs, have their careers wrecked, be politically disenfranchised, economically crushed, publicly ridiculed and with the state turning a blind eye to their abuse by "socially just" criminal elements with the occasional lynching.

The people whom the Left will go after will be the people they consider Alt-Right and I think this is an important distinction which many of the Alt-Right fail to understand. The Left's definition of the Alt-Right includes everyone who is "right" of the GOP and is not a libertarian. That includes traditionalist Christians, Nazi's, NRx, nationalists etc. Everyone who's not with the program. This definition suits the Left, since by mixing Nazi's with Christians it conflates them in the minds of the sheeple, and it can punish one with the sins of the other, all with public approval.  It's a political tactic designed to conflate and by the Left's definition I fall into the Alt-Right.

Within the non-approved Left however, the alt-Right has a specific meaning which has developed over the last year or so. The stormfront-esqe entryist hordes have shifted its real world meaning to mean something akin to "soft Nazism" with an emphasis on; anti-Christianity, genetic Calvinism, blood and soil politics, Judaic obsession and mass-man political theory. From this perspective I'm explicitly NOT of the Alt-Right. These guys, have as their "tradition", the rejection of pre-Modernist European culture and the embrace of Right-Modernism. Anybody who wants to see how eerily similar the past was to the present should google up the political philosophy of Charles Maurras. His ideology was a dead end.

The "Right" I belong to is incompatible with the Alt-Right, primarily because it's anti-Christian and ultimately Modernist in foundation,therefore by its definition I'm a cuck. But it won't really matter. When Hillary sends in her Soros-troopers we're going down together.

Sam Francis on the Jews

As I've mentioned in my previous posts, I don't really like talking about the Jews since whenever the topic is raised everyone goes mental and it becomes impossible to have a serious discussion on the subject. Still, I thought I'd put this post up in reply to commentator Dystopia Max, who in the made the following comment in reply to this post.

By the way those coincidences are probably the main reason Sam Francis implicitly distrusted the neocons, much more so than 'containing the essence of liberalism', which strikes me as a lame excuse for something he could not say in polite company.

Francis was never one to be politically correct and this ultimately cost his job. One of the things I like about Francis is that he devoted some serious thought to analysing the failure of conservatism drawing from a wide intellectual tradition and from schools of thought not traditionally thought of as conservative. He realised that the conservative failure had deeper roots than one of inappropriate organsiation and that in many ways the problem was one of the conservative relationship with modernity. Francis also recognised that most of the right was intellectually brain dead and that in order to escape the fatal embrace a new leadership was required which would not repeat the same mistakes of the past.

One of the Right's most serious problems has been its relationship with Judaism. There is no doubt, that as a whole, the Jewish community in the U.S. pushes Left, and therefore provides a plausible causative agent for the the cognitive-lite-Right, but Francis, unlike most of the alt-Right was not stupid and saw that the problem was much deeper.

Sam Francis had an exchange with a certain Vic Gerhard over at the Vangaurd News Network in 2003, (I'm not going to link to it since I don't endorse the site, but readers can Google it.) which I think explains his thoughts quite clearly. It think it would be pertinent to quote Vic Gerhard first.

Anti-Semitism is saying or doing anything a Jew does not like; whether the statement was true, or the act perfectly justified. That is the real de finition. How can you even pretend otherwise when Jews call someone who defends Arabs (Semites) against Jewish tyranny an 'anti-Semite'?

It's great that you are pecking around the edges of the problem. I'm just not sure what more proof you need to see that Jews are directing American foreign policy; that Culture of Critique and its mind-boggling account of facts is completely true; that to rail against blacks and hispanics without mentioning Jews is like complaining about symptoms but not the disease.

Maybe this sounds cruel and racist; and yet it is true isn't it? Personally, I've read enough of your writings, heard you speak enough times, and even talked to you on occasion, so that I am convinced you recognize the Jewish problem. It would be an immense help if you could now take off the gloves and let the Jews have it. They have it coming. They are the true enemy of Middle Americans. "Oil" is not the justification for this war but a laughably transparent Jewish hedge, nor are the Christian fundamentalists to blame; if they were not supporting Israel we would barely, as before 9/11, realize they existed.

My friends are going to jail for speaking their minds; every day another one is arrested or visited by the FBI, or raided by the Terrorism Task Force. Now is the time, name the Jew, put THEM on the defensive for once. Otherwise, Middle America is doomed; its sons' dying in Central Asia, its jobs moving out of the US, its population increasingly non-White and hostile. We need you to act now; a few months from now may be too late.
Your columns could make an immense difference at this crucial moment. We are watching history, and if the Jews triumph here there may be no stopping them, ever. Goodbye White race.

Vic Gerhard
Wilmington, N.C.

To which Francis replied;

I just wrote a column on Moran in which I was fairly explicit about this matter. I have another today that is also pretty explicit about the role of neo-cons (not all Jews) in getting us into the war. What more do you want? Peter Brimelow at Vdare told me the first column probably would not be published by any newspaper in this country (we'll see; my column last year supporting what Billy Graham said to Nixon was not published by my three best outlets), and without my authority or knowledge he changed a key line that altered my meaning. You simply cannot go much further than I have already gone and expect to be published at all in anything like mainstream media, and anyway, aside from the current war, I think there are other problems besides the Jewish role in stirring up blacks and pushing immigration. Both blacks and Hispanics have now acquired their own racial consciousness and are not necessarily under Jewish control.

Further on;

Well, I'm sorry I'm such a disappointment to you. The fact is that I have read the Culture of Critique, as well as the other two volumes, know MacDonald personally, and agree with much though not all of what he says. My entire body of writings over the last 20-25 years is an explanation of how I disagree and and have a somewhat different view of the world than what is frankly a monomanical obsession with an omnipotent Jew.[ED] There are reasons why neo-conservatism exists other than Jewish power, and these should be obvious to any one actually involved in politics. I was a witness to many of them. Just one, for example, is the greed and ambition and shallowness of many orthodox non-Jewish conservatives fro the "respectability" they thought Jews could give them. You and critics like you always assume that because others don't say what you demand they say, they must be afraid to say it. The fact is, as I just told you, I have just written two columns that will probably harm me more than they help me, so it is not fear on my part. Can you even imagine that maybe I don't agree with your view of the Jews, that the Jews and the Jews alone are solely responsible for everthing bad that has happened and is going on? I really don't think you can. Moreover, as I was trying to tell you indirectly, I depend on outlets like Vdrae and Rockford; if they don't publish me, I don't get published, and they would not publish me if I write what you want me to write (which I do not agree with anyway). Sobran does not get published outside of his own newsletter and maybe the Wanderer. The American Conservative won't publish him. Chronicles won't publish him. His syndicate dropped him. So don't tell me about things I know about more than you. It's fine to publish on sites like VNN., but no one -- non one --reads them or takes them seriously outside a handful of people. Sure I'd like to be rich, but do you imagine I thought I would ever get rich writing what I write? I really just don't know how to explain to people like you what the real world is like, because the truth is -- take it form someone who went through graduate school, worked in a think tank, in the US Senate, and at a nationally distrubuted newspaper for 9 years -- you and your pals do not have a fucking clue.[ED]

Gerhard continues to goad and Francis replies;

I had thought that you, unlike several of the others who like to rant about my "cowardice," "treachery," "phil-Semitism," etc., had a little more sense, but apparently I was misguided. Let me try to explain once more in some detail what I am trying to tell you.

1. What you said in your last communication was insulting because it at least indirectly and perhaps directly questioned my integrity, accusing me of cowardice or ignorance or dishonesty or greed or ambition as the only plausible reasons I do not write what you want me to write as you want it written. I have to say that I have received many criticisms as a columnist but this -- from the professional (and usual anonymous) anti-Semites -- takes the cake. No one else presumes to tell a writer what to write or how to write, even as they insult his character and intelligence -- not religious nuts, not racial nuts, not libertarian nuts -- except maybe the Jews themselves. But leave all that aside.

2. Vdare, Rockford, etc won't publish openly anti-Semitic pieces because (a) they like most gentiles are irrationally afraid of Jewish power and (b) they also have rational concerns over Jewish power. Both have Jewish "friends" who give them money, publicity, support, etc. and they are afraid -- I believe not entirely without cause but in an exaggerated way -- of losing that. Also, like most people they would like to do something else besides attack Jews and sometimes there are Jews with whim they need to work in order th do those things. (Rockford just held a conference in the Middle East on a prospects for peace there; it wasn't my idea and I don't see the point, except that some donors (non-Jewish ) gave them money to do it.) Therefore, they are very careful about antagonizing Jewish supporters. As you may know, they were virtually destroyed in the late 1980s by neo-con defunding because of positive remarks they made about Gore Vidal and because of their opposition to immigration. Nevertheless, they have consistently published pieces critical of Zionism, including several of my recent columns on the Iraq war and Jewish neo-con- Israeli power, and of foreign entanglements, perpetual wars, etc. Chronicles also published a review of MacDonald by Paul Gottfried which I strongly disagree with but they allowed MacDonald to write a long response, more than the American Conservative allowed. I do not control either RI or Vdare and often disagree with how they are run, but essentially they do not attack the Jews because they are more interested in other problems.

2. Unless you really do believe that Jews are the causes of all problems, which you deny, you have to admit there are other problems. You ask what I disagree with in MacDonald. I can't really comment on the general evolutionary theory since I'm not an expert, but I have no problem with it. Nor do I have a problem with his characterization of Jews in general, though some people tell me it's less true of some Jewish groups (Sephardic) than others (Ashkenazic) or at some periods of history than at others. What I do not agree with Kevin on is that while he's right about the way Jews are, that doesn't mean they are always successful. They may have pushed open borders as a means of undermining what they saw as a hostile host society, but that doesn't mean their efforts were the reason we have open borders or that other groups didn't want open borders for their own reasons. I dealt with immigration partly when I was in the Senate and frankly the role of the Jews was not at all apparent, as it was in foreign policy, and many social issues. The main enemies of immigration control on the right are (1) libertarians and (2) Catholics; the same was true at the Wash. Times, and I knew Jews who were opposed to more immigration at both places.Libertarianism tends to be Jewish-led, but it exists as an independent force in its own right among gentiles. I recall in 1995 or 95 Bill Gates visited Sen. Alan Simpson to lobby him on H1-B visas; Simpson caved. Neither is Jewish and neither did what he did because of Jewish power or influence but because of business and political interests. Business interests have been the main reason we have immigrant workers pushing out American workers in meat packing, textiles, poultry processing, etc. The Jews may serve as lawyers or lobbyists for these groups but Jewish groups per se have had little to do with immigration policy in recent years.

3. I don't deny that Jews have power -- certainly in the media and cultural centers generally and in politics through funding, staffing etc. But Jews are not the ruling class in this country (at least not yet). As in many other societies they form a subelite that provides services for the ruling class (tax collecting in Poland, e.g.), but I think they have little interest in becoming the actual ruling class because they have no interest in that as long as their interests are secured.[ED]

4. Your line about standing on street corners getting attacked by Jews is frankly childish. No I didn't. I just lost my job and my career for what I wrote about race (and I can tell you Jews appear to have had something to do with that and have certainly used it against me ever since). I'll bet Kevin MacDOnald never did either. I have a clue for you: Standing on street corners and yelling anti-Semitic slogans isn't a very effective way to Challenger much of anything. Hyde Park is full of characters like that. What I have tried to do -- explicitly at the Times and later as well -- has been to make explicit and serious discussion of race respectable. That means picking your shots and not saying everything you'd like to say because you know it will simply baffle or alarm many readers, but it does mean that you can tell many, many people a lot of things they didn't know or hadn't thought about. I think I was beginning to succeed when I was fired, and that may have been the real reason I was fired. Last summer when the National Alliance had its march on the Israeli Embassy I asked a friend who was planning to attend why and what good it would do? I told him all you will accomplish is give the Post the chance to portray all of you as a bunch of Nazi goons at a time when some opinion sectors were starting to turn on Israel. That's exactly what happened -- pictures of swastika flags, jack boots, etc. that understandably frighten and alienate most Americans and allow the Jews to say, "See, we told you what all those critics of Israel were like!"[ED] The idea that people like Linder and VNN accomplish much of anything outside of mutual masturbation is ludicrous. Frankly, I had never heard of Linder until he started attacking me and some people told me about it. With all due respect, I had never heard of your column until you told me you write one.

Finally, I have been gratified (one of the few gratifictaions I ever get in my profession) by being told by dozens of young people that I had taught them something they would not have known otherwise. No one but you and your friends have ever denounced me for being a hypocrite, a coward, a liar, a traitor, etc. I would have thought that you would have expressed some appreciation for what I have done, but the fact the you don't and can find only the most hateful things to say about me tells me all I need to know. As I told one of your colleagues recently, from now on I can only regard the whole bunch of you as my enemies and as enemies of the cause for which I am working. [ED]

What I now find most intriguing is that the alt-Reich brigade are now trying to claim Francis as their ally. If you google around on the internet, you'll see some of the sites try to represent this conversation along the lines of what Francis "really" meant. Meaning that Francis couldn't say what he wanted to say because of the Jews.  I'll let you look it up. I think it would be safe to say that if Francis was still alive he'd give these sites the finger.

Francis was also critical of Buckley, but he wasn't critical of him for purging the National review of its more lunatic elements. His main critique was that Buckley was aiming for "respectability" among the people that mattered instead of preaching the truth. Unlike the alt-Reich, Francis could do nuance and distinction.

Alt-Reich: The Black Hole of Modernism

Zippy Catholic put up a good post the other day, This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things. I've reproduced the pertinent illustration.

Now, while I disagree with Zippy on many things, I do agree with him wholeheartedly with this post. And it's a post I believe has relevance with respect to the the emergent Alt-Right.

There has much talk about Hillary Clinton's denunciation of the Alt-Right but I think a few definitions are in order here in order to clarify thinking for the confused. Many of the alt-Right believe that that Hillary's denunciation was specifically targeted at the Richard Spencer Alt-Reich but I think that they are mistaken.

For Team Hillary, the Alt-Right are ALL those opposed to them who don't fit into the Libertarian or mainstream Conservative classifications. Monarchists and Neo-Nazi's are therefore all grouped together as Alt-Right. Given the intellectual tradition of the Left this is to be expected yet anyone with a thimbleful of intelligence will realise that there are large ideological differences between the two. George Hawley has written an extremely good book surveying the wide variety of thought that makes up the dissident Right. Much of the thought, it needs to be pointed out, is fundamentally mutually incompatible and its only commonality is that it is neither mainstream conservative or overtly Left wing.

Hawley takes the defining principle of the Left as being a belief in radical equality. Now I have some quibbles with this definition but it's a good starting point and the Alt-Right clearly falls into this category.  However,  Traditionalist Christians and the Aryan brotherhood  are clearly lumped together under  Hawley's taxonomy but to Christians at least, this state of affairs is deeply disturbing and intuitively wrong, hence, there are problems with a system which puts us in the same political space.

This intuitive unease, in my opinion, is well founded, since I believe that that large part of the failure of the Right in the 20th Century has come about by failing to recognise who are its allies and who are its enemies and a good deal of its problems have come about through making allies with pseudo-Right groups which effectively undermine its cohesion and co-opt the it's transient political and cultural successes to the service of the Left. The problem is not one of equality, it's a problem of metaphysics.

A good example of this failure came about during the Regan Revolution when the Right finally achieved enough political power to dismantle the managerial state. However the result was a failure and the managerial state was larger and more coercive at the end of the Regan era than it its beginning. It was a failure which bothered Sam Francis quite a lot.

His analysis of the failure highlighted two shortcomings or the Right. Firstly, there was failure of effective leadership which misunderstood the nature of the beast it was dealing with, resulting in its effective decapitation. Secondly, the infiltration of Neo-Conservatives into positions of power and influence ultimately undermined Reagan legacy and enabled the expansion of the managerial state which ultimately furthered the Left's aims. . Sam Francis intuitively hated the Neo-Conservatives but I never got the impression that he was really able to identify what was the ideological difference between him and them, apart from the fact that neo-Conservatives were OK with government intervention while he was not. In my opinion, Francis was never fully able to grasp the poison of the Neoconservatives because of his own ambivalence with regard to Christianity.

Like it or not, Christianity, was the dominant force in the culture of the West for the last 1900 years and anyone who attempts to explain away the role of Christianity in Western phistory is quite simply an idiot or intellectually dishonest. Christianity permeated every aspect of life including political and social theory and the underlying metaphysical assumption of European civilisation was Christian Realism.

By Christian realism, I mean, the belief in a material and "spiritual world", the belief in reason and human nature and a a value system which was ultimately upheld by God and a belief in the existence of evil. There may have been differences in the understanding of the particular points by the three main strains of Christianity but they shared this commonality. Traditional Western Conservatism had Christian Realism as its bedrock from which the rest of the social and political theory was built upon.

European civilisation was doing very well with this approach. The great turning point in Western History comes about at the end of the 19th Century and really picks up steam after the First World War. It is about this time when the 'people that matter" start ditching Christian Realism and start embracing Materialism/Positivism as their underlying metaphysic, and thus Modernism was born.

Now it's important to understand that Modernism and Christian Realism are fundamentally opposed to each other. Indeed, once you fall into the Modernist "black hole", Christian realism is beyond the event horizon and therefore cannot be reached.  Modernism, intrinsically, denies the existence of God, or his practical relevance and thus, on a fundamental level,  is cut off from traditional western culture. In the same way that Christianity marked a epochal break from pagan pre-Christian Europe.

The thing to note, though, is just as Christianity was able to incorporate such pagan traditions such as it's art, architecture, Roman law and Greek thinking, it was able to do so and remain Christian because it retained it's Christian Realist metaphysics. The modern "Right" on the other hand rejects this Christian Realism and dresses up its modernism in Christian European drag. Thus it remains modern even though looking "traditional" and lures the cognitive-lite into its fold.

One example of Modernism in "Christian Drag" was Nazism. "Got mitt uns" was stamped on every German soldiers' belt and yet the same regime persecuted Christians when convenient and behaved in a way which completely dishonored the Christian ethic. Hitler was profoundly anti-Christian yet he recongised it's importance in keeping the "sheep" under control. Germany was a profoundly religious and by-the-large stupid country and Germans were easily tricked into thinking Hitler was Divinely Providential as long as he called on Christ whist gassing the Yids. (In many ways they resembled today's Evangelicals) It needs to be understood that while the relationship between Christians and Jews as always been rocky,  "no final solution" was ever practiced or promulgated prior to modern times. Christians may have hated the Yids but they would have to answer to God for their murder. The modernist "Christian" has no such qualms.

The other example is Neoconservatism. Neoconservatism was a conservatism based on a rejection of Christian Realism, hence its appeal to (((Non Christians))) who were smart enough to see that the mainstream left was suicidal. By dressing themselves up in strong foreign policy positions, sound finances, and a belief in the traditions of America (minus their intellectual underpinnings) the sheeple of America were easily convinced that there was a continuity between its beliefs and theirs. And yet as time marches on, the metaphysics assert themselves, and we find that the Neoconservative Right more and more resembles the Left. That's because they have the same genetic/intellectual lineage.

The (((irony))) is that the Spenceresque alt-Reich shares the same intellectual lineage as Neoconservatism, and thus over time, from the point of view of Christians, will resemble the Left. In the end it will poison any "right resurgence" from the inside, much like Neoconservatism did, because it shares its metaphyiscal underpinnings with the Left. It might look different to the Left but it's made of the same stuff. The wrong stuff.

For those who are stupid, I'm not saying that the Alt-Reich doesn't have some good ideas, it's just that its ideas when formulated through the metaphysics of Modernism leads to modernist outcomes. i.e. failure or progression of the Left. Ethno-nationalism, needs to be formulated through a Christian Realist framework in order for it not become self destructive or ultimately further the Left. There's is no way to restore the glories of the past because as long as the black hole of Modernism is embraced you're trapped it event horizon from which you cannot escape.

Neoreaction, Not Alt-Right.

Today, Vox put up a post explaining what the alt-Right is.

To quote Vox;

"This is no longer true, assuming it ever was. The great line of demarcation in modern politics is now a division between men and women who believe that they are ultimately defined by their momentary opinions and those who believe they are ultimately defined by their genetic heritage. The Alt Right understands that the former will always lose to the latter in the end, because the former is subject to change."

No, the line of demarcation was defined long ago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Live not by Lies.

Truth is the only stable foundation of any political, moral, religious or social order.

My last few posts have dealt with some of the writings of Sam Francis. Francis was an implacable foe of the Neoconservatives whom he felt had poisoned the Right. Francis, despite his considerable analytical skill was quite vague as to why he found NeoConservatism so objectionable simply stating that it contained the "essence of Liberalism."

As far as I can tell, Francis felt that NeoConservatism was Liberalism in disguise.  And it's my opinion that the Alt-Reich is pretty much the same.

At it's heart, it still bases itself on Genetic Calvinism which is ultimately a rejection of the Christian basis of Western Civilization.  And while it definitely does not resemble the current beta liberalism, an alpha liberalism is liberalism just the same.

Sam Francis on Masculinity.

It is all very well to blame the politicians, managers, media wizards, and incumbents who profit from this system, but the truth is that it is the citizens themselves who permit it to flourish and endure. It is a universal characteristic of modern mass organizations that they encourage dependency and passivity, that most of the individuals who are members of these organizations cannot possibly understand or acquire the highly technical skills that enable the organizations to exist and function, and that the role of most of their members is entirely passive and subordinate while power and responsibility is centered in an elite that does understand and perform their technical operations. Lacking any real power or responsibility, the members merely do their jobs and behave as they are told to behave. This is why you usually receive such terrible service in government offices and larger stores (it's not the clerks' store, and it makes little difference to them whether the customer is satisfied or not), why so few customers complain about it (they are told not to expect courtesy or help because the store is "self-service"), and also why television sitcoms have to play recorded laughter to let the mass audience know when something funny has been said or done (the members of the audience are also passive and will respond to whatever signal is sent to them). In mass politics, the role of "citizenship" is largely confined merely to passive voting for whichever of the two organizational monoliths the citizen has been enticed to support. Comparatively few citizens even do that today, and the number who hand out petitions or work for candidates or run for office themselves is a minuscule part of the population. 

The result of this inculcation of passivity is that even populist revolts such as that of the Perot movement last spring and summer cannot survive apart from manipulation and managed leadership. Despite all the enthusiastic support Mr. Perot's phantom candidacy attracted, no sooner had he withdrawn from the race than the whole bubble popped, usually in tears and whining at the "cowardice" and "betrayal" of the leader, and the only question asked of his followers, the only question they seem to have asked themselves, was which of the other two candidates would they support. It never occurred to any of them to assert active leadership of the movement themselves and fill the void that the Texas billionaire had pretended to create and fill. [ED]

Indeed, the inculcation of passivity by the managerial system and its elite is an essential foundation of its power, not only on the political level but also on the social, economic, and cultural levels as well. The entire structure of the system depends upon manipulating its members into believing (or not challenging the assumption) that they are not capable of performing the simple social functions that every human society in history has performed as a matter of routine. It is the constant instruction of the propagandists of the system that we are not capable of educating our own children, taking care of them without brutalizing them, providing for our own health or old age, enforcing our own laws, defending our own homes and neighborhoods, or earning our own livings. We are not capable of thinking our own thoughts without ubiquitous and self-appointed pundits to explain to us what we see and hear nor of forming our own tastes and opinions without advice from experts nor even of deciding when to laugh when we watch television.

What is really amazing about American society today is not that there is so much violence and resistance to authority but that there is so little[ED], that there is not or has not long since been a full-scale violent revolution in the country against the domination and exploitation of the mass of the population by its rulers. A people that once shot government officials because they taxed tea and stamps now receives the intrusions of the Internal Revenue Service politely; a society that once declared its independence on the grounds of states' rights now passively tolerates federal judges and civil servants who redraw the lines of electoral districts, decide where small children will go to school, let hardened criminals out of jail without punishment, and overturn local laws that are popularly passed and have long been enforced. 

Is it any wonder that the two political parties and all their repulsive leaders, managers, speechwriters, image-makers, officials, fundraisers, vote-catchers, and candidates are frauds who are less convincing than street-corner card sharks? Why should they not be frauds? Who is there to expose their racket and hold them to account? "If God did not want them sheared," says the bandit leader in the movie "The Magnificent Seven" about the Mexican peasants he is robbing and killing, "he would not have made them sheep." The peasants in the movie prove they aren't sheep not by hiring the seven gunfighters to protect them but by finally taking up arms themselves. Sheep don't fight back; they wait for others to fight for them. If there remain today any Americans who are not sheep, they'll stop trying to hire phony populist gunfighters to save them from the wolfish bandits who run the country, and in the next four years they'll start learning how to shoot for themselves. [ED]*

Sam Francis, Revolution from the Middle.

Recently, whilst on holidays, I had the opportunity to read Sam Francis', Revolution from the Middle, and, Shot's Fired. Both are good books and have deepened my appreciation of Francis. I have some arguments with Francis, some of which I plan to expand on later on, but I'm in broad agreement with him on many matters. Reading though his works, I definitely got the impression that he was dismayed at the impotence of the socially corrective forces in the Anglosphere, an impotence which I believe he felt was due the the social conditioning bought about by "managerialism" but personally, I feel that it's malady lays much deeper.

Recent articles in the Web have noted that despite living in an age of sexual libertinism  the incidence of sexual activity amongst millennials is going down.  Religious types may celebrate but  Bacchus is not being displaced by the active belief in a Christian God. Logically, this would indicate that Eros is asleep on the job. Furthermore, recent strength tests show that millennials are physically weaker than their fathers and sperm counts are falling. What's going on?

I'm not sure, but all the "signs" seem to point towards a failure of "masculinity". A failure which I believe is due to multiple causes and therefore not really reducible to one overarching explanation. But it's a failure which I believe is going to have profound social and  political consequences for Western Civilisation unless it is rapidly repaired. Quite simply, the Left is winning because the Right lacks "Men".

Recently, Roissy made a call to the alt-Right (Riech) to reclaim game. I think NRx should take note. It's not simply about how to organise a society, but it's also about the type of people that form the constituency of that society. Any society, when faced will existential threat will wither, if its defence is based upon the bravery and motivation of eunuchs.

*(Disclaimer for the retarded and NSA) Francis wasn't did not advocate, nor do I, picking up a gun and shooting people. He felt the primary battle to be fought was cultural, not physical. The Right needs smart men, not Anime-Gun twitching-Eunuchs.

Sam Francis on Globalism.

"But in fact globalism is not at all the same thing as imperialism. In imperialism, at least the historic versions of it we know, a particular political and cultural unit expands and imposes itself and its power on other particular political and cultural units, as when Rome, Great Britain, or the United States conquered and controlled other countries and other territories. Up to a point, imperialism is a perfectly normal and natural (though not necessarily harmless) result of any successful state. If a state keeps winning its wars, if its subjects or citizens are economically successful, then sooner or later the state and its people will wind up with an empire, and typically the state then sends out some of those people to govern the empire, exploit it, and bring back lots of swag and ego-gratification for those remaining at home.

Globalism is rather different. Under globalism, the political and cultural unit that is expanding is not the city-state, nation, or people that expands under imperialism; indeed, the dynamic of globalism works to submerge and even destroy such particularities. What expands under globalism is the elite itself, which progressively disengages itself from the political and cultural unit from which it originated and becomes an autonomous force, a unit not subordinated or loyal to any particular state, people, or culture. In the globalist regime that is writhing to-ward birth today, the transnational elite that runs it does not even claim to be advancing the material or spiritual interests of the nations it uses; the elite has only contempt for national identity, regards national sovereignty as at best obsolete and at worst a barrier to its aspirations, and believes (or affects to believe) that nationality and all its characteristics are on the way out. "

Programming Note

I was hoping to put up another post on Francis this week but unfortunately time has not been my ally.
I plan to resume again in another four to five weeks.

Francis on McCarthy

To repudiate McCarthyism, however, would be to accept not only the establishment but also the premises and agenda on which it operates, for the complex of public and private bureaucracies that compose the establishment is inseparable from the environmentalist, utopian, and social engineering functions that the premises and agenda of liberalism express and rationalize. The American Right, then, if it is serious about wanting to preserve the nation and its social fabric and political culture in any recognizable form, must continue to embrace Joe McCarthy and the kind of militant, popular, anti-liberal, and antiestablishment movement that he was the first to express on a national scale. 

One of the best essays, in my opinion was Francis's take on Joe McCarthy.  McCarthy is a much maligned figure in American history and undoubtably was a reckless man. However its important to remember that revolutions are not really started by intellectuals but by mortal, fallible men facing the contingencies of the time.  The prayers that reach God are not only uttered by saints but also by "sons of bitches" and Joe McCarthy seemed more of the latter. Burnham didn't like him, though he was too smart to disown outright, claiming that he was "anti anti-McCarthy". Whittaker Chambers also wanted to disassociate himself from McCarthy, not because he didn't recognise the validity of his claims, rather the recklessness of his methods was likely undermine the long term anti-liberal cause. He thought him as a "rabble rouser" who "simply knew the that a tomato had been thrown and the general direction from which it came."

By all accounts, McCarthy was not a "nice" man. Francis writes;

He violated the rules of the Senate as well as the standards of common decency. He physically attacked Drew Pearson. He lost his temper, bullied witnesses, talked dirty, and drank too much. He insulted such devoted public servants and stalwart patriots as Dean Acheson, Adlai Stevenson, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and George Marshall. He tried to link Stevenson with Alger Hiss, and he made attorney Joseph Welch cry on national television. Perhaps worst of all, when journalists or other senators called McCarthy a liar, a criminal, an extremist, a homosexual, or a fraud, he paid them back in the same coin with his distinctive gift for invective. Joe McCarthy said and did all these things and more, and the evil that inheres in them lives after him and recoils upon us to this day in the hatred that attaches to his cursed name. 

Francis recognises that McCarthy evokes a visceral hatred out of all proportion to the nature of McCarthy's "crimes", since many of the people and institutions that he did criticise were ultimately responsible for the deaths of millions of people. So why the hate? Francis writes;

The real reason for the hatred borne by the name of Joe McCarthy has little to do with the evil that is attributed to him or with his uncompromising anticommunism but rather with what he discovered about the forces—the people, ideas, and institutions—that by 1950 had come to dominate American government and public discourse and with what he communicated and exposed to the American people about those forces. McCarthy not only claimed that a communist presence had entered into the federal government but also that noncommunist or ostensibly anticommunist elements in the government and more broadly in the national elite were in some sense "soft" on or sympathetic to communism and, consequently, that they lacked the resolution to extirpate the internal communist presence and deal effectively with communism abroad. Even more, he suggested that the connection between the elite and the forces of subversion and aggression was in itself an indictment of the elite, regardless of whether its members were formally affiliated with communism, whether they had actually committed espionage or treason in a legal sense, or whether they verbally espoused opposition to communism. McCarthy, in other words, was not principally concerned with the issue of communism in government but with the relationship between communism and the elite, or establishment, and because his concern necessarily involved a militant challenge to and a rejection of the elite, it launched a massive political and verbal counterattack upon him, crushed him and the movement he created, and transformed him into the demonic embodiment of evil that moves among us even today.

Francis recognised that the changes bought about by the New Deal in the United States had effectively resulted in a displacement of America's traditional governing class and its replacement by a managerial class who, while opposed to the methods of communism, were quite sympathetic to its ends. This intellectual sympathy, rendered them "soft" when combating communism  and in many instance instances, wittingly or unwittingly, helped further along the communist cause.  Francis fully understood that liberalism--in the American sense--did not differ from communism by very much being simply a "softer" variant of it, a point that Francis further elaborates in the essay.

It's important to recognise significance of the liberal capture, especially in light of historical developments in the second half of the 20th Century, particularly with regard to the failure to contain Soviet aggression and the cultural collapse of traditional western society in the Sixties.

Liberals had captured all the key institutions by the early 50's, so it's no surprise that by the early Sixties, when the universities had started agitating for cultural change, the institutional pushback was not there. That's because the institutions were already in agreement with demands of the students. Mainstream America's attempt to push back against the tide was doomed to failure, since the institutions of government were against them. This also explains why relatively peaceful movement such as protests and civil disobedience were so effective out of all proportion to the efforts and why in a country like North Korea, where the managerial class is quite happy with the state of affairs, similar such protests are suicidal.

It also explains a lot of the conservative failure in pushing back the "left tide". Emulating the methods "left's success" i.e. protests and civil disobedience are likely to be ineffective, since the Left's methods are premised on having an elite that is sympathetic to their ideals. Conservatives, emulating their methods lack the pre-requisite elite support and likely to see their methods fail. But more importantly, conservatives using such methods are being diverted from more practical modes of opposition by using the civil rights paradigm as a model of resistance. If anyone doubts this the current institutional apathy in pursuing left wing groups who are violent towards the right are a case in point. Had a the roles been reversed, and a right wing group responsible, arrests would have been made. McCarthy was able to impress upon the public the extent of the liberal capture.

The elite's horror of McCarthy stems not from his failure to apply due process but rather the fact that he used their methods on them and was able to stage a populist revolt:

Nevertheless, it was not the minutiae of congressional investigations and the administration of federal laws and regulations that created McCarthy's following, nor did they significantly contribute to the hatred of him that the new elite exhibited. Had McCarthy announced, in Wheeling, West Virginia, on February 9, 1950, the discovery of Communists in labor unions rather than in the State Department, his speech would have attracted little notice. The State Department and the individuals whom McCarthy proceeded to identify by name were at the heart of the establishment and its agenda, and when McCarthy made bald assertions about their connections to communism, he was launching an attack upon the establishment that it could not ignore and which it could reciprocate only with hatred. Other criticisms of the elite from the Right—of its economic and foreign policies or of the constitutionality of its legal measures—did not challenge its fundamental legitimacy or its basic loyalty and integrity, nor did they generally suggest that the establishment was a distinct social and political, as well as an ideological, formation, implicitly and inherently alien and hostile to the mainstream of the nation[ED]. Hatred and destruction of McCarthy were the only possible responses to this kind of attack. Thomas Reeves says in his large biography of McCarthy that he is our King John. It may be more appropriate to say that he is the liberals "Trotsky", their Emmanuel Goldstein, their Jew. His very existence was a threat to their interests and power and was ultimately incompatible with their dominance in the United States. 

While most people recognise McCarthy as a red "witch hunter", Francis makes the crucial distinction in recognising that McCarthy was a populist witch hunter who had, for the first time, managed to organise some sort of pushback against the managerial state. Intellectuals may have been able to put forward good intellectual arguments against the New Deal but McCarthy was the first to organise a populist pushback.

It was McCarthy's accomplishment to infuse into the American Right the militancy of a counterrevolutionary movement, and the large following he attracted tends to confirm that there was indeed what Chambers called a "jagged fissure" between the elite and the "plain men and women of the nation" on the issue of the relationship between the elite and communism. The militant anti-liberal and anticommunist movement that McCarthy was the first to instigate also underlay the Goldwater movement of the early 1960s, the Wallace following of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the "New Right" of the last decade. Every time these mass expressions of anti-liberalism have appeared, mainstream conservatives and the Republican party have hastened to take political advantage of them and use them to gain political office—as Eisenhower did in 1952, Nixon in 1968, and Reagan in 1980. Yet every time also, those who gained office have proceeded to ignore, to compromise, or actually to betray the constituency on which their officeholding was based. They have done so because they are themselves part of or closely connected to the elite against which this constituency is mobilized. 

Francis casts McCarthy's legacy in a different light. While it is true that he was a flawed man, "the son of a bitch" was the first to politically challenge the liberal elite. Subsequent scholarship and particularly the disclosure of the Venona project have vindicated him to a degree, however Chambers assessment of him was ultimately correct; his faults and excess were ultimately his downfall.

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.