It’s all the same

Only the names have changed….

Culturally, America has always been split between Cavaliers and Roundheads.  The latter are Puritans, whose creed H.L. Mencken quipped was “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”  The former are proud, liberty-loving wannabe aristocrats, who tend to place their pride and love of liberty above such petty stuff as common sense.

Politically, the split is between Federalists and Anti-Federalists.  Federalists want the government to serve the people; Anti-Federalists want the government to leave the people alone.

It has been this way from the minute the first boot from the Mayflower touched land, and if you want a quick and dirty version of the major events in American history, try figuring out which group was which in each time period.  As politics is downstream from culture, you’ll see some spectacularly odd combinations… usually right before some very bad shit was about to go down.  And if you can’t find one or more of the groups represented in electoral politics at a given time, it’s dead certain something awful is about to happen.

It’s important to notice, however, that there’s no necessary, or even natural, connection between the cultural and political groups.  All combinations are possible.  The original Puritans of Massachusetts Bay set up a theocracy, yes, but unlike their English brethren, they dealt with dissent by simple banishment.  And their descendants had no problem signing off on the Establishment Clause while setting up official churches within the several states.  And students of the Civil War will note that The Slave Power Conspiracy were, despite their states’ rights rhetoric, as Federalist as they come — the SPC, in the form of the Democratic Party, handed down the Dred Scott decision, pushed the Lecompton Constitution, and waged an obvious war of conquest to extend slavery.  They put through the gag rule, and controlled the discourse to such an extent that neither party dared mention slavery during presidential campaigns.  They were perfectly happy with federal power, so long as it benefited them — aristocrats tend to like the government they’re in charge of.

The bad stuff happens when one of the groups gets lost in the shuffle.  Politics just before the Civil War, for instance, completely marginalized entire groups that together made up the vast majority of Americans.  Where were the Roundheads in the Democrat / Whig contests, or the Anti-Federalists in the Democrat / Republican ones?  If you didn’t want to die for slavery one way or the other, you had no representation at all.

We’re seeing the same type of splintering today.  Both parties are chock full of Federalists, and both of them subscribe to the new Roundhead religion of globalism and anti-“racism.”  Cavaliers have effectively been outlawed — this is the “war on masculinity” the “alt-right” keeps talking about — as has Anti-Federalism.  Where could you possibly go to escape the reach of the American government?  Globalize or die.

Or vote Trump.  His candidacy shows just how far the old coalitions have fractured, and how unnatural were their marriages of convenience in the first place.  He’s seen a million faces of Americans who have been effectively disenfranchised, and he’s rocked them all.

I was one of the fools who believed in W’s grand “nation building” project in the Middle East.  I know more history than the average guy, and yet I was fooled, too — such is the power of wishcasting.

In reality, representative government is an Anglo-Saxon thing.  And given the problems we have with it — our current election is between a criminal narcissist and a narcissist criminal — it’s no surprise that cultures with no tradition other than the despotic can’t get the hang of it in just a few years, despite the best efforts of National Review and the Peace and/or Marine Corps.

India is the best case scenario.  Lots of Britons said, and some acted as if they sincerely believed, that the Raj was a “school of democracy” — at some indeterminate future time, Indians would be ready for self-government, at which point Great Britain would leave in peace.  Take that with as much salt as you require, because whether or not any of them would’ve actually accepted a hard date of departure, they still ran the place as if it were a sort of Junior England.  They had to — a subcontinental population in the hundreds of millions was held down by at most 100,000 white folks, commanding a native bureaucracy and army of maybe three times that.  Without significant native buy-in, the Raj was toast, as they found out in spectacular fashion in 1857.

The Indian Civil Service was open to natives almost from 1858, the Ilbert Bill put Englishmen (theoretically) under the jurisdiction of native judges, and the Morley-Minto Reforms provided for direct election of natives to the councils of state.  However it played out in practice — and “Subaltern Studies” people will of course tell you that it was all just a sham — the fact remains that India was about the only place not to go tits up (again, relatively speaking) at independence… and even the Postcolonialists must, however grudgingly, admit that the ICS, Morley-Minto, the Indian Army, etc. were major reasons for that.

Now, none of this should be taken for an argument that only white people can do democracy — as if the ability to mark a ballot is somehow genetic.  Again, see Presidential Election 2016, or any of the literally Caucasian countries surrounding the former USSR.  The point is that representative democracy is the result of a long, long, long history, a unique combination of circumstances stretching back to the Greek polis (and, again, if you want to maintain that white folks have a “government” gene, imagine what would happen if you time warped Demosthenes into modern America and told him that this is representative government.  The poor dude would stroke out).  Other cultures simply don’t have that history, and even the best-intentioned  attempts to impose a facsimile from above give you — at best — India.  Which bills itself as “the world’s largest democracy,” and it is…. sort of, if you add a list of qualifiers about the size of the Chicago phone book.

There’s no substitute for history.  Or, if you want a much prettier phrase, Edmund Burke said that “experience is the school of mankind, and he will learn at no other.”  The best we can do is show ’em how it’s done.  A rational foreign policy starts by acknowledging that…. and best of all, showing ’em how it’s done entails a complete reform of our own system.

It’s either that, or admit that democracy itself is deeply unnatural, and just elect ourselves a despot.

Ace of Spades, on our Glorious Leader’s refusal to bomb jihadis:

Terrorists, he’s told us so many times, are merely misled and misinformed creatures who just need some good economic opportunities and maybe some #HashtagUplift from the State Department and then they’ll stop being terrorists…. It’s only the Exalted People who actually count in this world, and who are actually capable of making moral decisions. The Exalted People — the ones on TV, largely — are a sort of breed apart. They are the only people capable of making free choices. This is of course hysterically condescending and elitist, but worse than that, this attitude that ISIS terrorist soldiers are just like the “bitter clingers” of Pennsylvania, clinging to their xenophobia, guns, and religion, and thus are to be pitied and led into enlightenment, is what permits ISIS’ reign of terror.*

* I’ve seen this belief described as “Vulgar Marxism” — the dumbest, crudest distillation of Marxism, the assertion that practically all human choices are actually dictated by economic circumstances.

This isn’t “Vulgar Marxism.”  If anything, it’s more sophisticated than plain ol’ Marxism, because in Karl Marx’s world, there are no free choices whatsoever.  Everyone’s “social being” is determined by his relation to the means of production, and — all together now — “a man’s social being determines his consciousness.”

That would seem to be a problem for Marx’s beloved Revolution, though.  If nobody can overcome the limitations of their class situation, then how is revolution even possible?  But this is only a problem if you haven’t read Marx, or you aren’t a Hegelian philosopher, or if you just subscribe to what we around here like to call “Earth-logic.”  Because, you see, Marx claims that Revolution is inevitable, because History.

Yes, he really says that.  History is a huge, anthropomorphous Force — indeed, it is the only Force — making the world go.  History talks to itself — this process is called “dialectic” — and the result is what happens in the real world.  Hence, “dialectical materialism.”

What Ace is describing is Leninism.  That’s where the whole “Vanguard of the Proletariat” thing comes from.  Marx’s theory was so obviously bonkers that it needed serious modification if it were ever to be put into practice.  For one thing, you’ll notice that being a revolutionary is pointless under Marx’s original theory, since the Revolution will happen regardless.  For another, it’s also impossible, since no one — including all potential revolutionaries, and  Uncle Karl himself — can transcend the cognitive limits of his class situation.  (Hey, it almost sounds like Marxism is the kind of self-contradictory airy-fairy bullshit that only intellectuals could possibly believe!).  So Lenin retconned himself and his merry band of murderous psychopaths into Marx’s original theory by giving them, and only them, the ability to transcend their class situation sufficiently to send the rest of us to the gulag.

It’s important to call it what it is, because that way, you can evaluate the historical record and predict what our latter-day Leninists will do if given the chance.  The New Economic Policy, for example, bears studying… as does its end.

Nate Winchester sent along an amusing comment thread, wherein some leftard actually types, with a straight face, the assertion that

I’m just going to say that the human nature argument is absolute bullshit and has been debunked several times by way too many people. Basically capitalism has created a nature you think exists, but not really

and cites Erich “Escape from Freedom” Fromm, of all people, in support of this lunatic notion.

Speaking of “has been debunked several times by way too many people,” welcome to the Frankfurt School.  Join me, won’t you, back in the 19th century?

We all know that lefties are word fetishists: They believe that naming something gives you control over it.  My guess is that this peculiar psychological tic is congenital, but whatever.  Karl Marx certainly had it, and because he was the one who attached the name “capitalism” to the exchange of goods and services for other goods and services, he thought “capitalism” was a thing, not an innate hominid behavior we brought down with us from the trees.

As a thing, “capitalism” had a history, a beginning and an end.  Indeed, Marx thought it would end in his lifetime — The Communist Manifesto, written in the wake of the 1848 revolutions, was supposed to be a sort of victory lap for international socialism.  He was wrong about that, but that didn’t stop his disciples from investigating the history of capitalism (to predict its inevitable demise more precisely).

One of them, Max Weber (1864-1920), noticed a correlation between the rise of Calvinism and finance capital.  Calvinism, he saw, was most vigorous among the most entrepreneurial people: the English, the Dutch, the Huguenots, the Swiss.  Which is pretty weird when you think about it, because Calvinism’s core doctrine is predestination.  Given that everyone has been saved or — far more likely — damned since the Creation, you’d think Puritans would be slackers.  Instead, they worked their asses off on every day except Sunday…when they crammed into churches for three-hour harangues about how all human effort is futile.

Freudianism supplied an explanation for this odd state of affairs.  The famous “Protestant work ethic” is what psychologists, borrowing a term from zoology, call “displacement activity.”  Animals confronted with overwhelming, contradictory stimuli often do strange, pointless things — ostriches don’t really bury their heads in the sand, but that’s a classic illustration of the concept.  Calvinists knew they couldn’t do anything to stave off their all-but-inevitable damnation, but there was slim possibility they might be among the Elect.  Frantically working as if their souls depended upon it, Weber theorized, relieved the emotional tension… and whaddaya know, pretty soon a frantic desire to work became one of the surest signs you were among the Elect.

That does account for the Puritans’ exceptional and seemingly self-contradictory industriousness.  But it also means, logically, that “capitalism” is a mental illness.  We understand why ostriches stick their heads in the sand, but nobody’s gonna argue it’s healthy.

Now, it takes some serious chutzpah to say the whole world’s crazy…. which is why both Marxism and Freudianism were almost entirely confined to twitchy Jewish eggheads around the turn of the century.  But then World War I happened, and total society-wide insanity looks pretty fucking plausible from the bottom of a trench.  Pre-war Marxists thought war was impossible, because workers are logical — knowing that it would only benefit their industrialist overlords, the proletariat would simply refuse to fight.  But they did fight, and they died in their millions, and they kept fighting and dying long after it became obvious that nothing they could hope to gain would be worth the cost.

QED.

Or so the Frankfurt Schoolers thought, anyway.  There is, of course, another explanation for the seeming insanity of the First World War.  It’s the same as the one for industrious Calvinists:  People don’t live by reason alone.

Which is not to say that people are all insane. Insanity is a break from reality, and the things which make up human reality — the things which make us human — transcend petty rationality.  G.K. Chesterton said that the purely rational man wouldn’t marry…but nobody would say that a lifelong bachelor who died alone thanks to his devotion to reason had lived a more meaningful life than a devoted husband.  Chesterton also said that the purely rational soldier won’t fight… but we don’t honor those “men” as paragons of reason for refusing to fight.  We scorn them as cowards.  So, too, with beauty, art, friendship, brotherhood, music, religion — none of them are “rational,” but they’re all sane.  They’re the only things that are.  Marxism denies them all — Homo sovieticus is homo economicus, a dull creature that can only interact with the world via spreadsheet.

In other words, the Frankfurt School perspective only makes sense if you equate “sane” with “rational,” and “rational” with “Marxism.”

But if you do that — if “sanity” is your starting point, and “sanity” equals “Marxism” — then Freud’s crude toolkit is more than sufficient to retcon all that stuff about “meaning” into dreary Marxist formulae.  There’s no “meaning” in Freud’s world; we’re all just grab-bags of primitive drives smashed into semi-civilized packages by “society”… which, of course, is merely an artifact of the capitalist mode of production.  We progress by developing our superego, the only rational part of our mentality… and the superego, being rational, wants communism.  If you can’t see that, your superego isn’t sufficiently developed enough to realize that communism is good for you.  So the Frankfurt Schoolers will have to make you into good communists, in the same way that parents make their children into healthy adults — you’re not yet developed enough to realize that you can’t eat all chocolate, all the time, so they’ll carefully ration your chocolate until you’re mature enough to handle it.

And thanks to the overfulfillment of the Five Year Plan, the chocolate ration has been increased from 100 grams to 75 grams.

Ace of Spades, on the media:

Their [the MSM’s] mission is not mere delegitimization of those who do not worship their strange gods. Certainly they do that, endlessly. But it’s more than that — their mission is the full denigration, humiliation, and ultimately dehumanization of the outsiders to the Tribe.

I’ll say this three times because it’s important:

Cultural Power is Political Power.

Cultural Power is Political Power.

Cultural Power is Political Power.

Having been promoted to a position from which they can exert their Cultural Power to thereby exert Political Power, they do so, and they are less and less concerned with pretending they don’t do so.

Ace has just discovered Antonio Gramsci.

Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Marxist and, like all good little Marxists, was flummoxed by The People’s disinclination to revolt.  Marx — by which he meant capital-H History — had decreed proletarian revolution inevitable.  But not only were the proles not rebelling, they were actually getting happier with capitalism!  How could this be?

Again, as a good little Marxist, Gramsci knew that — despite everyone’s lying eyes — the world wasn’t getting better, cheaper, cleaner, safer, because by definition capitalism does the opposite of all those things.  And again — despite everyone’s lying eyes — life in the Soviet Union wasn’t getting meaner, poorer, nastier, shorter, because by definition communism is the opposite.  Therefore, Gramsci concluded, there must be a massive disinformation campaign going on, whereby the capitalists used all the cultural power at their disposal to flip the definitions — up is down; black is white; capitalism makes people happy and communism ends in a slave labor camp.

Gramsci called this massive disinformation campaign “cultural hegemony,” and to counteract it, he urged his fellow revolutionaries to capture the cultural high ground.  Get into the schools, the universities, the media, the arts, and subvert them from the inside.  Tear away the capitalist veil by preaching revolution from every available pulpit, and if the capitalists protest, why, you can use their absurd and antiquated reverence for so-called “free speech” against them!

It worked, too, as we can clearly see.  In our quest to find liberalism’s last new idea, then, we’re up to about 1920.