Right Wing Critics of American Conservatism

I've just finished George Hawley's, Right Wing Critics of American Conservatism and would like to say that this is a really good book. Its main emphasis is on non-mainstream American Conservatism post WW2 with some mention of pre-War thinkers. It covers a lot of ground, and it covers it succinctly. Most of all it gives, each of the movements, I feel, a fair hearing and accurate rendition of their main personalities and ideas. I think anyone looking to get a good broad overview of the subject would not go wrong with this book.

But I think the book is also valuable for Hawley's own input into the subject matter since I think his survey quite accurately identifies several problems which still beset "the Right".

What's becomes apparent upon reading the book, is that the non-mainstream Right is composed of various disparate groups whose philosophical positions are sometimes contradictory and incompatible. So Hawley's first problem is how to define the common doctrinal tenet in all these groups. Hawley comes to the conclusion that what separates the Right form the Left is the Right's rejection of the notion of equality, a notion which is the central tenet of the Left. Personally, I've got a couple of problems with this approach. Firstly, I think it a too superficial analysis which leads one to the conclusion that the battle between Left and Right is a battle between the preference for equality or its opposite.

Secondly, it does tend to put together, "under one tent" groups which are otherwise intrinsically opposed to one another. Paleoconservatives and American Nazi's are both considered right wing, yet both have visions which are incompatible with each other. This has been a fundamental problem which I feel has seriously hampered the Right in its ability to combat the Left.

As things stand, membership of the Right Club seems to be premised on the notion of being anti-Left. In other words, it's a reactionary anti thesis to the Left's ideas. This, of course, "frames" the right in Leftist terms and cripples the Right by allowing any idiot who is opposed to the Left, no matter how stupid the reason, into the Club. A great example of this are the National Socialists, who get lumped as Right wing despite the fact that their ideological heritage is more in common with socialism and the French Revolution than with Burke.

Pragmatically, what this means is that the Right is frequently allied with forces which turn against it at a critical moment, stabbing it in the back, the Neocon revolt against Trump being an example of this. (Many of whom voted for Hillary).

The membership problem needs to be resolved.

The other issue that Hawley identifies in his survey is the gradual decline in highbrow conservative publications and thought. It sad fact that the public space has been seriously dumbed down but do I think he is onto something here. However, given the dramatic rise of the internet, most of the good stuff is happening on-on line. But as Hawley notes, most public discussion when it comes to conservative issues is done through the shock jocks and media presenters and he laments that there has been a decline in the quality of public space Conservative thought.

Still, I think he missed what I regard as the greatest new development in Conservative thought--the Manosphere--and totally underestimated its significance. The manosphere, as far as I'm concerned, is the only area where conservative thinking is quite alive and active at the moment. The sexual dystopia that we live in has, in many ways, been abetted by traditional western thought. Poisoning Eros did not just reduce lust but it also neutered sexual polarity and fueled the feminist revolution. When sexual identity is defined by moral virtue instead of erotic ones, the biological nature of the actor sort of becomes irrelevant and split is unintentionally encouraged between biological fact and human actor.  The Manosphere is a corrective to this thought since it teaches that biomechanics puts real limits on sexual polarity.

Overall, I think, his charge is justified. Neoreaction--at least to me--seems to have stalled for the moment and I think and more active presence would be a corrective to this dearth of new ideas.

Finally, Hawley points to the demographic challenges facing Conservatism. Hawley notes that the vehicle for Conservative values seem to be, by and large, Older White Males. Given the demographic reality we live in and the decline in Conservative values among the young, Hawley paints a bleak picture of Conservatism's future.

As said before, it's a good book which gives a good and easily readable survey of post World War Two non mainstream conservatism. Thoroughly recommend it. Five Stars.

The Middle American Revolution

It's a shame that Sam Francis was not alive to see Donald Trump's victory. More than anyone else, he had discerned the hurt and pain which was being felt by America's yeomanry since the 1980's. In his small way, through pen, article and book, he  tried to educate Americans about their predicament and motivate them to resist. During his lifetime, his efforts were in vain. Rather, it took eight years of Communist  Democrat governance to final motivate them.  Trump's victory was  in effect, a vindication of his views, especially the belief that the Republican "Neo-Con" approach to politics was wrong. Trump's strategy, which was essentially textbook Francis, delivered spectacularly.

Trump by any considered deliberation is a flawed candidate, who in normal times would never have achieved what he did, except that these are not normal times. Middle America was looking for a saviour, the threat to its existence being palpable, that it was prepared to overcome his history and his all-to-clear faults and chose him, to the surprise of the World, in preference to the diabolical harridan. By appealing to middle America, Trump was able to defeat--against impossible odds--the combined media/establishment collusion. 

As an Australian, U.S. politics affects me in an indirect, if real way. Yet, I've got to admit, this election has given me more anxiety than any here in Australia. Like many other commentators, I felt that this was America's--and therefore the West's--last chance. I think had the Harridan won, the U.S. would have crossed a precipice from which it would have been impossible to recover. Christian persecution would have ensured and a demographic flood that would have been unleashed that would have drowned what remained of the bourgeois, Middle American culture. America would have remained as a geographical entity but it would have transformed into something altogether unrecognizable. I think many Church leaders realised this as well and there was palpable sense of fear among some. For the first time ever in my memory, when the prayers of the faithful were being offered in my local Catholic church, a "non political" prayer was offered in support of Trump.

This election was THAT important.

Trump's victory was therefore not just a big f**k you to the establishment but a deliverance from what was sure to be a persecution of Christians, the beginning of which was started under the Obama administration. Still there needs to be pause. Whilst we were not pushed over the edge, both the U.S.--and Western Civilisation--still stands at that precipice, and unless the Trump administration actively goes out to destroy the institutional structures which turned against middle America and its cultural foundations, all this election amounts to is a stay of execution.

Sam Francis initially had great hopes for the Reagan Revolution but was dismayed as the enthusiasm and energy of that movement was co-opted and decapitated by the politics and machinations of the managerial state. By the time Reagan left office, the state was bigger, more intrusive and less accountable. Regan, in many ways, built the state structure which was co-opted by the Democratic Left and later used to crush middle America.

Francis recognised that in order for any Middle American Revolution to succeed it had to dismantle the managerial state--insofar as it was feasible--and deliver power back to America's traditional bourgeois class. Failing to do so would simply result in a resumption of persecution with the next turn of the political cycle. Unless the Trump presidency is led and guided, it too risks being a Reagan v2.0. What gives me a lot of hope is Trump's reputation of not forgetting his enemies. He has also been given control of Congress and the House of Representatives.

I say "led and guided" quite seriously because as a result of this election, official "Conservatism" is dead, and a new one needs to take its place. The internet, and not the mainstream media, is now the forum of ideas and it's quite surprising to see just how influential it has been, especially with regard to the "Right". Trump, also, seems to have grasped its influence.

Its not the purpose of this post to give a detailed program but "culture management" and "power limitation" are the keys to enduring victory.  Leviathan needs to be hacked to pieces and it should be the role of the dissident Right to push the Administration in the right direction. For example, some of the ways which the Administration could dismantle leviathan is by;

1)Stopping the Federal subsidy of the Left. Defund and Tax the Humanities departments. Move them physically into minority areas and only provide "conditional funding". Make Humanities degrees conditional on completion of a STEM qualification and so on.

2)Break up the media monopolies. Recognise that the internet is now a utility and needs to be regulated as such. Break up Google, Facebook, Twitter etc.

3) Make it a Federal offense to mislead in journalism.

4) Decentralise, Decentralise, Decentralise. Only allow at Federal Level what can't be done at local.

5) Reverse the "Demographic Engineering" of the Left. Unchecked migration had the synergistic effect of dropping labour costs and turning the country "blue". It doesn't have to be done inhumanely. i.e. If your an undocumented immigrant you can stay but no citizenship rights and so on. Undocumented migrants should be housed in "Blue" areas since these people are more accepting of minorities.

6) Leave religion alone. Don't promote it, don't hinder it and so on.

7) Carbon tax on newsprint.

This has been, in terms of political drama, THE. BEST. ELECTION. EVER.  But I have often felt that given the apparent insurmountable odds faced by Trump, there has been something of the Divine active in the affairs of men. To quote Roissy;

I’m not a religious man, but it seems to me the Hand of God is guiding this election, and that He has notarized The Trumpening. The tragedy that accompanies this view is that even with God handing them every reason to vote Trump, a large group of Americans sees fit to defy His magnanimity. Well, the unwoke are about to be smote.

In Catholic circles we are currently in the Year of Mercy. I think we have been given--what many intelligent non-believers also believe--is one last chance.  We can't afford to stuff this one up. The gloves are off, it's a grab for power.

Understanding the Trump Phenomenon

BTW, this could probably be one of the best political commercials ever.  Narrated by Michael Moore himself.

I love seeing the beast being turned onto itself.

Spread the word.

Janus

An even deeper source or socialist resistance to the syncretic 'Marxist' approach to fascism proposed here may be that it implies a far closer and more uncomfortable affinity between fascism and communism in practice than most Marxists would like to acknowledge. As forms of political modernism, both offered totalising solutions to the problem posed by the decadence of liberal society, which were outstanding specimens of the application to socio-political engineering of the "historical predictions' that Karl Popper identified with his concept of 'historicism' - a curious reversal of the connotations given the term by Benjamin - and with the mainspring of totalitarianism. In both cases, time utopia of a new society was formulated by blending scientific and technocratic discourse with mythic thinking, thereby producing that characteristic ideological product of modernity, `scientism'.' Both, when implemented, spawned an elaborate 'political religion' and, in their Nazi and Stalinist versions, provided tilt rationale for mass murder on an industrial scale,

Roger Griffin, A Fascist Century

One of the reasons I'm hostile to the alt-Reich--as opposed to the Dissident Right--is because it's a false hope for the Dissident Right and which will ultimately undermine it. And the reason why it will ultimately undermine it is because the Alt-Reich's father is Marx himself. Unlike the Left, whose danger to the Right is self evident, the Alt-Reich is a much more subtle foe, masquerading as an ally when in reality it's a disguised version of the enemy. This may seem difficult to comprehend as the Alt-Reich espouses many of the ideals of the Dissident Right, such as ethnic homogeneity, sexual polarity and border control but these views arise from a totally different metaphysical system to that which "powered" the Old European Civilisation and therefore represents a break from it. Put simply, the all the versions of Fascism, from "soft" to "hard" are essentially Modernist political ideologies and therefore are the kindred spirits of Marx.

Part of the problem in understanding Fascism and its variants is due to the historical treatment the subject has received. Jewish scholars have tended to give it a Semetic spin, whilst Marxist scholars have tended to see it as a bourgeois reactionary phenomenon. The problem is that these perspectives are wrong. Spanish and Italian Fascism did really care much about the Jews whilst all the parties claimed to act in the interest of the workers and were initially largely supported by them. The bottom line is that these perspectives are wrong.

Perhaps the world's foremost academic expert on the subject of Fascism is Roger Griffin, whose academic work has changed the contemporary for understanding of Fascism. To put it briefly, Fascism is the syncretist product of "Right wing feels" and the philosophy of modernity. i.e. modernism/positivism. It's a different version of modernity to that offered by the Left but all the same, it is a rejection of the past. From Griffin's, A Fascist Century.

This is not to be taken as unqualified endorsement of the view that Hitler was a conscious moderniser, which has been argued by some scholars. His basic obsession was not with modernising Germany, but with eradicating the nexus of forces to which he attributed its collapse (Zusammenbruch) and dissolution (Zersetzung). While he admired American technology, he loathed the multi-racial liberalism and materialism it embodied, and strove to turn Germany into the heart of a European empire based on crude racist and Social Darwinist principles for the triumph of the fittest. But while Ian Kershaw is right to criticise Zitelmann's thesis it is still appropriate to see Hitler's vision as an alternative, and (no matter how perverse and unrealisable) a revolutionary version of modernity, rather than the expression of anti-modernity or 'reactionary modernism'. It is a palingenetic utopia (indissociable in retrospect from the horrendous dystopian implications of its actualisation) which reverberates in Hitler's words on the occasions where he privately gave vent to his deepest convictions; 'Those who see in National Socialism nothing more than a political movement know scarcely anything of it. It is even more than a religion: it is the will to create mankind anew'.

Hitler's project for the renewal of European civilisation - its transformation into a genuine Kultur - under German hegemony involved a wholesale rejection of many aspects of the modern (indeed when he used the term it was with negative connotations). However, not only was this project entirely reliant for its realisation on all aspects of modernisation able to be co-ordinated with Hitler's larger palingenetic aim, but the aim itself was inconceivable without such quintessentially modern forces as massification, social engineering, bureaucratisation, rationalisation, the technologisation of warfare, Social Darwinism, nationalism, racism, and charismatic power. Furthermore, its focus was the quintessentially modern form of power assumed by the nation-state. ...............At the root of the Holocaust was the state-led drive for a fully designed, fully controlled social world, of a society lovingly tended and ruthlessly pruned by the 'gardening state'. So far the forces of pluralism at work in modern society have conspired to prevent such biopolitical projects from being carried out on a grand scale. But when this countervailing moment is overridden by authoritarianism there is little to stop wholesale social engineering and the terror state this creates: the electoral victory of Nazism in 1933 ensured that its totalitarian scheme of utopian society could be implemented to a terrifying degree.

To study Nazism is, on one level, to study the awesome potential of modernisation to create ephemeral and abortive (but to their victims terrifyingly real and definitive) symbioses between the traditional and the modern, to produce a form of modernity deliberately attempting to crush the Enlightenment humanist tradition. To grasp this fact destroys any comforting equation between modernity and humanism, modernity and civilisation, modernity and progress, modernity and the good. There is a famous line at the end of Brecht The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, namely 'The womb that gave birth to Nazism is fertile still."

Griffin's proposition, is that while Fascism and Socialism are superficially distinct entities at a deeper level they're simply different variants of Modernism, both variants being profoundly anti-traditional. Any "Right wing" which aims to be a restorative force in history cannot ally itself with a movement which plans to undermine it.

Understanding the 20th Century

For the first time since Christianity formed souls and societies, we find ourselves faced by a public and social apostasy which is no longer merely the schism of a nation or a king, nor the heresy of a teacher or a sect, nor a political and moral revolt, but which is a whole civilization cutting itself off completely from Christianity, a civilization that must be reconquered, re-Christianized."

Maurice Blondel

I suppose what I want to do with this post is lay out my understanding of the "grand narrative" of the 20th Century. In essence, my theory is that "practical" Christian Society failed in the the 19th Century and events of the 20th Century were the results of the secular attempts to build a better society.

Catholic Traditionalists are inclined to think that the serious rot in Western Civilisation began with Vatican Two, but more perceptive minds were well aware that the rot had set in well before then.  The above quote is from Maurice Blondel, written at the beginning of the 20th Century.

Perceptive Christian  minds of the time, like Blondel, realised that the society built by institutionalised Christianity was in DEEP trouble. Indeed, reading some of his contemporaries at the end of the 19th Century, one is impressed with their keen awareness of a sense of an impending transformational change about to engulf society. These authors were passionate Christians who were horrified at the progressive secularisation of society and wanted to reverse the trend and yet they realised they were up against a formidable foe in the face of Modernism.

Now by Modernism, I mean a philosophy of life that is for all intensive purposes Positivistic. And what was apparent to these thinkers, writing at the about the turn of the 20th Century is that positivism was crushing the all before it. Essentially, the history of the 20th Century could best be described as the battle of ideas born within the Positivist vision following the practical irrelevance of European Christian Culture. When Nietszche proclaimed that 'God was dead", he shouting the death of the motive force of European Civilisation.

Now it needs to be understood that understood that Fascism, Communism and contemporary Liberal Democracy are all ideologies framed within the Positivistic metaphysical system, and as such, all are a break from the European Civilisation which existed before 1914. They arose out of the vacuum that came about with the "Death of God". Sure the philosophical foundations of Modernism/Positivism go all the way back to intellectual errors in the Medieval philosophy but they only become culturally transformative after the First World War, when significant numbers of people took them on board and were able to effect their consequences.

Why people took them on board is interesting. What's really apparent in reading the authors of the late 19th Century, is the social ferment and instability in all of the European countries of the time.  Europe's population increase by four hundred percent during the 19th Century, and despite all the scientific advances, vast numbers of people were malnourished, uneducated, poorly housed and living in poverty.

Happy, well fed people don't revolt, and the fact of the matter is that many people weren't happy. Not in the Gloria Freedman sense but in the sense that their crushing poverty and limited ability to escape it induced a yearning for something better. Traditional Christianity taught them to "bear their cross" and seemed unable, with certain few exceptions, come up with any real solutions. The practice of Charity was inadequate to the needs generated by the population explosion and traditional Christianities defence of private property and the realities of lasseiz faire Capitalism meant that the social structure of society was pretty much entrenched. This left people with three options:

1) Bear your cross. i.e. Suck it up.
2) Emigrate to the New World.
3) Abandon the traditional conception of Man and Society and look for something new.

 

Emigration is an interesting one, and it would be interesting to see how much it contributed to the stability of the 19th Century by acting as a "pressure valve" against social agitation. But its also interesting as a metric with regard to how bad things really were in Europe at the time. Passage to the New World was not without its perils ship wreck were common and emigration was usually final, in the sense that it severed a man from his family and his past.  The fact that large numbers of people were prepared to undertake it gives some idea of the social pressures that people were under. Europe, despite its technological and cultural glories was a social mess.

Likewise the French revolution is seen as the originator of the modern world, but it needs to be understood that the Revolution did not arise ex nihilo, rather deep social problems were its gestational medium. The Revolution needs to be seen as an attempt to escape them. Had France of Louis XVI been prosperous and well fed, I doubt if there would have been any Revolution at all. Likewise, specter of Socialism only became real only after the population explosion of 19th Century Europe was able to digest it through the laissez faire Capitalism of the time, producing an exploited urban proletariat, disaffected and ripe for agitation. The ideas of the philosophes are only given an audience when times are hard.

Furthermore, the triumphs of science vastly undermined the authority of religion. Childbirth, which had roughly a 5% mortality at the end of the 19th Century was bought down to less than 1%, not by prayer but by modern medicine. Why go to the priest when the doctor is more effective. It didn't take much of a push to lure the masses towards secularism.

The point of this is that Christianity had practically failed, particularly as a social phenomenon and while people still continued to mouth religious platitudes and perform religious observances, they did so out of habit rather than conviction. When more liberty was finally given to them, especially Catholics after Vatican Two, religious practice withered.

The intellectual vacuum left by Christianity paved the way for secular solutions to societal problems, solutions which rejected the Christian metaphysic and which were ultimately positivist, and therefore modernist, in their foundation. Fascism, Liberal Democracy and Socialism are the Right, Middle, Left repesctive "solutions" to these problems but are ultimately all cut from the same modernist cloth. And there is nothing in Modernism which prevents the transformation of one to the other except perhaps historical contingency.

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.