OMG this is beyond spot on! This is what I'm trying to say in my multiple tweets in the last few months....this guy nailed it big time!
Trump and Brexit: What has happened to the world?
- Thread starter sullydnl
- Start date
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In the latest episode of the United Hour Podcast, Nik @Rood and Imran @Annihilate Now! start with the good news by celebrating Manchester United Women's emphatic FA Cup win over Spurs at Wembley and the future of manager Marc Skinner.
Then it's the bad news and the ever worsening form of our Men with losses to Arsenal and Palace.
Finally the main debate - ETH Out now or keep him until the end of the season - if not longer. Are you Team Nik or Team Imran?
Paul the Wolf
Full Member
If you do this.... this will happen
If you do that.... that will happen
If you do the other... the other will happen
No, I'm not listening to what you've said, it's scaremongering.
If you do that.... that will happen
If you do the other... the other will happen
No, I'm not listening to what you've said, it's scaremongering.
Pogue Mahone
Swiftie Fan Club President
Irish politician in talking sense shocker.Leo Varadkar T.D.
The Sunday Times published my article yesterday on the election of Donald Trump. Here's what I wrote:
The election of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States was unexpected. The tight result and low turnout of barely 50% was no landslide. Rather it reflects a deeply divided country and a population significantly disengaged from politics. Even though Hillary Clinton narrowly won the popular vote, Trump had a clear victory in the Electoral College by winning a majority of States. As a consequence, he will be the next President. If we respect democracy we have to respect its results.
True this is the fifth time in American history - and the second time in this century alone - when the person winning the popular vote has not won the election. But that is the way the US system works. Perhaps President Trump will change it. After all, he tweeted in 2012 that ‘the electoral college is a disaster for democracy’. Or perhaps not.
This weekend is a good opportunity to pause, and recall that the cultural, economic and familial ties that bind America and Ireland go back centuries. These ties are far more important than the identity of any office holder on either side of the Atlantic. We will maintain those ties and we will strengthen them.
The election, of course, raises questions and perhaps also teaches us some lessons. In many ways the campaign and its outcome has echoes of Brexit. It mirrors the shift to nationalism and populism in Poland and Hungary. It may yet presage serious developments closer to home, such as a challenge by Marine Le Pen to become President of France and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands.
Traditionally, politics divides left and right. That is still true, but less so than in the past. A new divide is emerging internationally between modern, global liberalism on the one side and nostalgic, often populist, nationalism on the other.
The first group believes that globalisation and migration are good things on balance. They warm to multi-culturalism, want more free trade, fewer borders and barriers, approve of international institutions like the EU and UN as the only means to tackle transnational problems like climate change and threats to international security, and they seek to empower women, LGBT citizens and minorities. They generally like the world and want more of it.
The other group has different priorities. They are not to be dismissed, but to be understood. These people haven't benefited so much from the enormous economic changes underway. They may fear or disagree with cultural changes. In America, the UK and elsewhere, they include voters without a college education who find it harder to access the good jobs on offer in the globalised economy. Once they might have secured paid, pensionable and secure jobs in mining or manufacturing. Now it's low-paid, precarious jobs in the service industry.
They also include more conservative voters who are uncomfortable with the social forces that are reshaping our world. Many grew up in a world run by political, military and business leaders who were white, male and Christian. It had been that way for centuries. It is no longer.
The rapid shift in economic power to Asia, record migration, aggressive secularisation and even the rise of women into leadership positions does not sit well with them. They are neither racist nor sexist but are attracted by the nostalgia of an era when things were better for them, and much simpler. So slogans such as 'Make America Great Again' or 'Take Back Control' have a visceral and emotional appeal.
I think three lessons can be gleaned from the forces now guiding international politics. The first is that the public do not like or trust politicians. As we saw in the campaign, Trump could say or do almost anything and get away with it because he was a celebrity. Clinton, a career politician, was badly damaged by the controversy over an e-mail server, because it seemed to confirm, fairly or unfairly, underlying doubts about her trustworthiness.
For decades, politics has been governed by opinion polls, focus groups, big data and carefully calibrated and tested messages. Today, the public sees through all this and views it as phoney. They crave authenticity almost to a fault. Any sort of candour has become an attribute, even when it's uncomfortable and shocking. Perhaps the quick-witted ambitious First Lady of Arkansas, who shocked middle America in 1992 by saying that she excelled in law because she didn't want to stay home making cookies, might have had more appeal in 21st century America than the scripted, cautious, artificial Secretary Clinton who struggled to connect with voters and articulate their genuine hopes and fears.
Second, those of us who strive for a modern, free, globalised and liberal world need to stand up for what we believe. We must defend and promote our vision of the future, not apologise for it. Global free trade leads to jobs, growth and prosperity. We should never appease those who harbour hostile views about women, ethnic or other minorities. Rather than trying to imitate the apparent authenticity of Donald Trump, we should look to Obama, who eight years ago offered a message of hope that was thoroughly modern and forward-looking.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we need to respond to the fact that the changes in the global economy have not benefited many people. Achieving full-employment - unemployment is under 5% in America - is not enough. People need good jobs that provide a decent standard of living. They need security, a safety net when things go wrong, and access to a pension when they retire. Above all, they need to believe that next year will be better than the last.
This will require a shift in the international economic orthodoxy of recent years towards one that goes for growth and is more focused on raising living standards than other metrics. Some economists will no doubt point out the risks. However, not rebalancing policy in this manner will bring much greater risks.
Not all of this applies to Ireland. But some of it does. Brexit passed because Remain politicians failed to connect with voters, failed to respond to their hopes and fears or to persuade them of a better future. The same can be said of the recent American presidential election. We face both risks and opportunities in the years ahead. But if we recognise that the answer is to trust people with the truth, and have faith in them to respond through a genuine engagement with the issues, presented in an authentic way, then we need not fear the future.
Crackers
greasy ginfers
I'm not a huge fan of Fine Gael, but have always thought Leo had a huge amount of sense to him.Irish politician in talking sense shocker.
Pogue Mahone
Swiftie Fan Club President
Ditto. On both counts.I'm not a huge fan of Fine Gael, but have always thought Leo had a huge amount of sense to him.
Pogue Mahone
Swiftie Fan Club President
Mind you. Is it just me or did he get this bit wrong?
Should that not read "away from"?This will require a shift in the international economic orthodoxy of recent years towards one that goes for growth and is more focused on raising living standards than other metrics.
Stanley Road
Renaissance Man
No, austerity policies have stifled growth across Europe, the shift should be toward spending in infrastructure and other projects to promote growthMind you. Is it just me or did he get this bit wrong?
Should that not read "away from"?
Pogue Mahone
Swiftie Fan Club President
Ok. It's just that I thought economic orthodoxy is that growth is essential as a measure of success. And he's arguing that other metrics should be considered instead. You're probably right though.No, austerity policies have stifled growth across Europe, the shift should be toward spending in infrastructure and other projects to promote growth
sullydnl
Ross Kemp's caf ID
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I certainly find it reassuring that the favourite to take over what is probably our most right-wing party is quite firmly of that broad liberal, multicultural, pro-globalisation mindset.
It makes sense that Varadkar would identify the public's craving for candour and authenticity given his popularity seems to be largely based on appearing to be more candid and authentic than most of his peers.
It makes sense that Varadkar would identify the public's craving for candour and authenticity given his popularity seems to be largely based on appearing to be more candid and authentic than most of his peers.
Pogue Mahone
Swiftie Fan Club President
It shows how moderate our politics really are compared to the absolute freak show across the pond(s).I certainly find it reassuring that the favourite to take over what is probably our most right-wing party is quite firmly of that broad liberal, multicultural, pro-globalisation mindset.
It makes sense that Varadkar would identify the public's craving for candour and authenticity given his popularity seems to be largely based on appearing to be more candid and authentic than most of his peers.
utdalltheway
Sexy Beast
Not only that, he tied it to Irish issues.Irish politician in talking sense shocker.
question: why does it have this at the beginning? is it taken from his blog or something like that?
"Leo Varadkar T.D.
The Sunday Times published my article yesterday on the election of Donald Trump. Here's what I wrote:"
Pogue Mahone
Swiftie Fan Club President
He posted it on Facebook.Not only that, he tied it to Irish issues.
question: why does it have this at the beginning? is it taken from his blog or something like that?
"Leo Varadkar T.D.
The Sunday Times published my article yesterday on the election of Donald Trump. Here's what I wrote:"
Mockney
Not the only poster to be named Poster of the Year
I like that. Particularly refreshing when everyone's panicking about the fall of liberalism and implying it needs to ape the appeal of the right more.Irish politician in talking sense shocker.
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Stanley Road
Renaissance Man
I kinda see it as recent orthodoxy which is cut from within, basically devalue your workforce and goods as you have no option to devalue your currency, otherwise known as neoliberalism. I think.Ok. It's just that I thought economic orthodoxy is that growth is essential as a measure of success. And he's arguing that other metrics should be considered instead. You're probably right though.
Pogue Mahone
Swiftie Fan Club President
He's a smart cookie. A fellow medic dontcha know. I like the sneaky jab at Trump over electoral reform. Takes guts considering his boss (our taoiseach) issued a particularly anodyne and sycophantic press release in response to the election results.I like that. Particularly refreshing when everyone's panicking about the fall of liberalism and implying it needs to ape the appeal of the right more.
DFreshKing
Full Member
Was going to post this the other day. Pretty much what i was trying to say only he did it with wit, sense and an ability for anyone reading/watching to understand. :-(OMG this is beyond spot on! This is what I'm trying to say in my multiple tweets in the last few months....this guy nailed it big time!
in my defence, I had been working at my pc for about twelve hours.
Ramshock
CAF Pilib De Brún Translator
fecking brilliant and unfortunately spot on
Think some of you lot need to watch this.
Sweet Square
Full Member
Post Truth Politics(And why it's a load of old shite) - http://www.slate.com/articles/news_...016/08/the_biggest_political_lie_of_2016.html
Pogue Mahone
Swiftie Fan Club President
That's well written but I disagree with almost all of it. Here's an excellent piece presenting the other side of the argument. Particularly like it because it puts the boot into one of my own bug-bears, lies spread on social media.
George Owen
LEAVE THE SFW THREAD ALONE!!1!
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- 16,346
Andrew Sullivan:
The Reactionary Temptation
An open-minded inquiry into the close-minded ideology that is the most dominant political force of our time — and can no longer be ignored.
The Reactionary Temptation
An open-minded inquiry into the close-minded ideology that is the most dominant political force of our time — and can no longer be ignored.
Look around you. Donald Trump is now president of the United States, having won on a campaign that trashed liberal democracy itself, and is now presiding over an administration staffed, in part, with adherents of a political philosophy largely alien to mainstream American politics. In Russia, Vladimir Putin has driven his country from postcommunist capitalism to a new and popular czardom, empowered by nationalism and blessed by a resurgent Orthodox Church. Britain, where the idea of free trade was born, is withdrawing from the largest free market on the planet because of fears that national identity and sovereignty are under threat. In France, a reconstructed neofascist, Marine Le Pen, has just won a place in the final round of the presidential election. In the Netherlands, the anti-immigrant right became the second-most-popular vote-getter — a new high-water mark for illiberalism in that once famously liberal country. Austria narrowly avoided installing a neo-reactionary president in last year’s two elections. Japan is led by a government attempting to rehabilitate its imperial, nationalist past. Poland is now run by an illiberal Catholic government that is dismembering key liberal institutions. Turkey has morphed from a resolutely secular state to one run by an Islamic strongman, whose powers were just ominously increased by a referendum. Israel has shifted from secular socialism to a raw ethno-nationalism.
We are living in an era of populism and demagoguery. And yes, there’s racism and xenophobia mixed into it. But what we are also seeing, it seems to me, is the manifest return of a distinctive political and intellectual tendency with deep roots: reactionism.
Reactionism is not the same thing as conservatism. It’s far more potent a brew. Reactionary thought begins, usually, with acute despair at the present moment and a memory of a previous golden age. It then posits a moment in the past when everything went to hell and proposes to turn things back to what they once were. It is not simply a conservative preference for things as they are, with a few nudges back, but a passionate loathing of the status quo and a desire to return to the past in one emotionally cathartic revolt. If conservatives are pessimistic, reactionaries are apocalyptic. If conservatives value elites, reactionaries seethe with contempt for them. If conservatives believe in institutions, reactionaries want to blow them up. If conservatives tend to resist too radical a change, reactionaries want a revolution. Though it took some time to reveal itself, today’s Republican Party — from Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revolution to today’s Age of Trump — is not a conservative party. It is a reactionary party that is now at the peak of its political power.
The reactionary impulse is, of course, not new in human history. Whenever human life has changed sharply and suddenly over the eons, reactionism has surfaced. It appeared in early modernity with the ferocity of the Catholic Counter-Reformation in response to the emergence of Protestantism. Its archetypal moment came in the wake of the French Revolution, as monarchists and Catholics surveyed the damage and tried to resurrect the past. Its darkest American incarnation took place after Reconstruction, as a backlash to the Civil War victory of the North; a full century later, following the success of the civil-rights movement, it bubbled up among the white voters of Richard Nixon’s “silent majority.” The pendulum is always swinging. Sometimes it swings back with unusual speed and power.
You can almost feel the g-force today. What are this generation’s reactionaries reacting to? They’re reacting, as they have always done, to modernity. But their current reaction is proportional to the bewildering pace of change in the world today. They are responding, at some deep, visceral level, to the sense that they are no longer in control of their own lives. They see the relentless tides of globalization, free trade, multiculturalism, and mass immigration eroding their sense of national identity. They believe that the profound shifts in the global economy reward highly educated, multicultural enclaves and punish more racially and culturally homogeneous working-class populations. And they rebel against the entrenched power of elites who, in their view, reflexively sustain all of the above.
I know why many want to dismiss all of this as mere hate, as some of it certainly is. I also recognize that engaging with the ideas of this movement is a tricky exercise in our current political climate. Among many liberals, there is an understandable impulse to raise the drawbridge, to deny certain ideas access to respectable conversation, to prevent certain concepts from being “normalized.” But the normalization has already occurred — thanks, largely, to voters across the West — and willfully blinding ourselves to the most potent political movement of the moment will not make it go away. Indeed, the more I read today’s more serious reactionary writers, the more I’m convinced they are much more in tune with the current global mood than today’s conservatives, liberals, and progressives. I find myself repelled by many of their themes — and yet, at the same time, drawn in by their unmistakable relevance. I’m even tempted, at times, to share George Orwell’s view of the neo-reactionaries of his age: that, although they can sometimes spew dangerous nonsense, they’re smarter and more influential than we tend to think, and that “up to a point, they are right.”
I met Charles Kesler in March on an idyllic sunny day in Pasadena, California, where he lives. He’s a soft-spoken, thoughtful figure, with a shock of white hair and a bemused smile on his face. He grew up in West Virginia, with a schoolteacher mom and a dad who owned a grocery store. They were, he told me, culturally conservative and politically mixed. He is now a professor at Claremont McKenna, where he focuses on the roots of a specifically American conservatism, exemplified by his reading of the Founding Fathers. (He’s the editor of a very popular edition of The Federalist Papers.) He also edits the Claremont Review of Books, a small conservative version of the New York Review of Books that attracted attention first in its critique of George W. Bush’s Iraq War, and again last year, when it came out in support of Donald Trump just when the entire Republican Establishment was trying to destroy him. Along with The American Conservative and the new quarterly American Affairs, it’s now a central forum for many of the sentiments that helped Trump win the presidency.
What on earth was a professor like Kesler doing backing a man who has barely read a book in his life, seems to think Frederick Douglass is still alive, and who’d last less than a few seconds in a Kesler seminar? He smiled a little defensively. He’s perfectly aware of Trump’s manifest flaws — his “crudity, anger and egotism,” as he has written. He has conceded that Trump was seeking a job “for which everyone — everyone — agrees he is conspicuously unready.” Even when we met, he averred: “I don’t know how serious he is.” And yet he still gambled on a despotic, undisciplined, impulsive former Democrat.
It was an act of desperation, he explained. In classic reactionary fashion, he believes that we are living through a crisis of American democracy. The Claremont consensus (to put a name on this strain of thought) holds that beneath the veneer of constitutional democracy, we are actually governed by a soft despotism of permanent experts, bureaucrats, pundits, and academics who ignore the majority of the American people. This elite has encouraged a divisive social transformation of the country, has led us into disastrous wars, and has created a deepening economic crisis for the middle class. Anyone — anyone — who could challenge this elite’s power was therefore a godsend.
Kesler’s worldview is rooted in the ideas of the 20th-century political philosopher Leo Strauss. Strauss’s idiosyncratic genius defies easy characterization, but you could argue, as Mark Lilla did in his recent book The Shipwrecked Mind, that he was a reactionary in one specific sense: A Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, Strauss viewed modernity as collapsing into nihilism and relativism and barbarism all around him. His response was to go back to the distant past — to the works of Plato, Aristotle, and Maimonides, among others — to see where the West went wrong, and how we could avoid the horrific crimes of the 20th century in the future.
One answer was America, where Strauss eventually found his home at the University of Chicago. Some of his disciples — in particular, the late professor Harry Jaffa — saw the American Declaration of Independence, with its assertion of the self-evident truth of the equality of human beings, as a civilizational high point in human self-understanding and political achievement. They believed it revived the ancient Greek and Roman conception of natural law. Yes, they saw the paradox of a testament to human freedom having been built on its opposite — slavery — but once the post–Civil War constitutional amendments were ratified, they believed that the American constitutional order was effectively set forever, and that the limited government that existed in the late-19th and early-20th centuries required no fundamental change. (Jaffa made an exception for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which he believed was the only way to enforce the post–Civil War amendments against southern resistance.)
The expanded government of the last century, begun in earnest by Woodrow Wilson, was, therefore, an unconstitutional and anti-democratic power grab by educated elites. Kesler and many of his fellow Claremonters believe democracy is exercised best at the local level, in accord with the “unenlightened” views of the citizenry, or directly through members of Congress, unencumbered by the layers of bureaucracy, executive fiat, and the control of centralizing modern governments. They call this ever-growing apparatus “the administrative state,” and they loathe it not so much for how it constricts economic growth (as many conservatives do) but for how it creates a kind of political tyranny — a ruling class that can enforce its morality and policy preferences through Executive-branch regulation. The Obama administration’s reworking of Obamacare after its passage, for example, and its climate and immigration policies were all big policy changes that never went through Congress.
The Claremonters were particularly upset last year by the Obama administration’s use of Title IX to direct all public schools to institute transgender-friendly policies for bathroom facilities. “Political correctness,” Kesler believes, “is a serious and totalist politics, aspiring to open the equivalent of a vast reeducation camp for the millions of defective Americans who are products of racism, sexism, classism, and so forth.” He supported Trump because the candidate relished taking on both the administrative state and the PC movement: “If relimiting the government by constitutional means was not an option … then what is left but to use the system as it is, and try placing a strong leader, one of our own, someone who can get something done in our interest, at the head of it?”
Kesler also saw in Trump’s instincts on immigration and trade a return to 19th-century Republicanism, which he believes is newly relevant in a post–Cold War world. The party of McKinley and Coolidge had, after all, been one that favored tariffs. The party platform of 1896 declared, “We renew and emphasize our allegiance to the policy of protection, as the bulwark of American industrial independence, and the foundation of American development and prosperity.” In 1924, the GOP platform reiterated this: “We believe in protection as a national policy.” Kesler saw Trump as tapping into this old Republicanism, noting that he was the first president in living memory to use the word protection favorably in his inaugural address.
On foreign policy, too, Kesler projects onto Trump’s impulses a return to the classic American position before the Second World War: suspicious of multinational entanglements, prickly in the defense of the western hemisphere, and dedicated primarily to the national interest. On immigration, Kesler sees in Trump a return to the 1920 Republican platform, which proposed to limit the number of foreigners to “that which can be assimilated with reasonable rapidity, and to favor immigrants whose standards are similar to ours.” Trump, Kesler wants to believe, vaults the conservative movement back more than 70 years. And he’s fine with that.
“We would happily trade our current government for one that worked exactly as designed in 1787, as amended in 1865 and shortly thereafter.” You would be hard put to find such a blunt declaration in Kesler’s Claremont Review, but it’s just one of many provocations that appeared last year in the now-defunct group blog the Journal of American Greatness. The blog had a madcap feel to it, bristling with almost tongue-in-cheek assaults on the modern world, on stuffy career conservatives, and risible “social justice warriors.” Its authors included a young Straussian, Julius Krein, who is now editing a new journal, American Affairs, and an older student of Jaffa’s, Michael Anton, who now works in the press office at the National Security Council.
Anton is the most interesting intellectual behind Trumpism, today’s American version of reactionism. He’s the suave, credentialed foil to Steve Bannon’s rumpled autodidact, a Trump official who just published a paper on Machiavelli in an academic journal. I recently met him for dinner near the White House. An immensely tall man, of piercing intelligence and meticulous attire, Anton is a product of post-hippie California, one of many contemporary reactionaries who rejected their reflexive youthful liberalism because of their revulsion at the political left they encountered on campus — in Anton’s case, at Berkeley.
Once a conventional Republican, an aide to George W. Bush, and an advocate of the Iraq War, Anton decisively broke ranks in 2016 and came out as a proud reactionary. Anton’s critique of the current moment — and his justification for backing Trump — can best be summarized by the slogan the group blog adopted: “What difference, at this point, does it make?” (It doubled as a snarky reference to one of Hillary Clinton’s comments during the Benghazi hearings.) He became famous for his essay “The Flight 93 Election,” in which he compared America in 2016 to the 9/11 plane hijacked by jihadists and on a course to crash in Washington. In those circumstances, he recommended: “Charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You — or the leader of your party — may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees. Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain.” It’s not just that Trump is better than the alternatives: “The truth is that Trump articulated, if incompletely and inconsistently, the right stances on the right issues — immigration, trade and war — right from the beginning.”
The Claremont critique of the administrative state and the liberal elite does not appear to be enough for Anton. His aim is at what he calls, rather wickedly, “the Party of Davos,” or the “Davoisie.” This is the administrative state gone global. With The Economist as its Bible and its social liberalism and economic conservatism turned into unquestionable dogmas, the Davoisie, perched in the Alps, luxuriates in self-love. It routinely shoots down any critiques of globalization, sees few problems with mass immigration, and is still busy celebrating an ever-more-powerful European Union and ever-more-expansive free-trade agreements among ever-more countries.
None of this, Anton concluded, has anything to do with the American people and their interests. The Davoisie were too busy lifting foreigners out of poverty and celebrating the latest disruptive tech invention to cast a glance toward, say, the beleaguered inhabitants of Kansas or Michigan. Anton admired Trump, he wrote last year, largely because “he’s single-handedly revived talking about government serving its own citizens first.” Trump understood that the American idea is a compact “for the American people, and not for foreigners, immigrants (unless we choose to welcome them) or anyone else.” Three months into a Trump presidency, Anton hasn’t changed his mind.
Politics comes before economics, Anton insists. Free trade may boost our economy, encourage efficiencies, and advance innovation and wealth, but it affects different people differently. And this matters in a democracy. A society’s stability and fairness and unity count for more than its aggregate wealth — especially when, as in recent decades, almost all the direct benefits have gone to the superrich, and all the costs have been paid by the working poor. In the Journal of American Greatness, Krein scorned the abstractions so beloved of the Davoisie: “There is no ‘free trade’ outside of undergraduate economics textbooks,” he wrote, “and trade agreements exist precisely to determine the winners and losers of those zero-sum transactions inherent in any global competition.” Economically unifying the entire planet is not necessarily in a nation’s interest at all.
Nor, according to today’s reactionaries, is mass immigration. And it’s on this topic — more than any other — where the abstract ideas of neo-reactionaries connect with the fears, passions, and cultural panic of many among the population at large.
The Journal of American Greatness’s position goes something like this: The economic benefits (for capitalist elites) and multicultural delights (for progressive elites) of mass immigration are taken for granted by the Davoisie — and by liberals and free-market conservatives more generally. If you live in a major metropolis, with unprecedented prosperity and a tradition of assimilating newcomers, what’s not to like? And if you’re an immigrant, these places are full of jobs you are happy to take. But if your family is in a rural area or a heartland city, where ethnic diversity has not been the norm in the past, and where globalization has dramatically eroded traditional blue-collar jobs, it’s a little more complicated.
Mass immigration, neo-reactionaries argue, creates more job competition for those without college degrees, and, by the laws of supply and demand, lowers wages for some, even as it massively increases profits for a few. At some point, a citizen on the losing end will surely ask: Why is my country benefiting foreigners and new immigrants, many of them arriving illegally, while making life tougher for its own people? And why doesn’t it matter what I think? It’s this question that Anton has a policy answer for. Scaling back free trade and ending mass immigration would “improve the economic prospects of the lower half of our workforce to a greater extent than either would in isolation,” he has written. “The people have repeatedly said ‘no’ to more immigration, ‘no’ to more free trade … but the administrative state will not allow itself to be driven in a direction it does not want to go. It therefore must be broken.”
And then there is the cultural impact of mass immigration, which the Party of Davos, living in a post-national world, celebrates as a vision of the global future. Neo-reactionaries beg to differ. They get a little vague here — tiptoeing awkwardly around the question of race. A nation, they believe, is not just a random group of people within an arbitrary set of borders. It’s a product of a certain history and the repository of a distinctive culture. A citizen should be educated to understand that country’s history and take pride in its culture and traditions. Honed and modulated over time, this national culture gives crucial legitimacy to the American political system by producing citizens acclimated to the tolerance, self-government, and other civic values that democracy needs if it is to function. And so Anton, who gives America’s long history of successful integration of immigrants short shrift, worries about the influx of what he delicately calls “non-republican peoples.” “What happens when the West ceases to be western?” he asked me. On the blog, he was much more direct: He wrote that “Islam and the West are incompatible” and that Muslim immigration should be almost entirely banned. A country like the United States requires “a certain type or character of people.”
Isn’t all this just code for white nationalism? That’s certainly what self-described white nationalists cite in their support for Trump. When I asked Anton bluntly about whether he believes race matters to a national identity, he turned uncharacteristically silent: “I’m not going to say something that could be used to destroy my livelihood and career.” Kesler, when I confronted him with this as well, responded: “The definition of ‘white’ is a political definition. It may be that a lot of people we now regard as inherently and unchangeably Hispanic will turn out to be whites eventually as their incomes go up, as their place in society changes over time in the same way that Italians and Poles and Central Europeans were once ‘second-class’ whites.” Kesler seemed to be describing a white-nationalist country that slowly absorbs others into the fold — turning their cultural “otherness” into an integrated, but still somehow “white,” American identity. “The rate of intermarriage among African-Americans is going up, too,” he tells me as my eyes widen. “How different would American politics be if Obama had defined himself as multiracial rather than black as such … as a new kind of American transcending race?”
Neo-reactionary unease with mass immigration is exacerbated by what they see as the administrative state’s shift from belief in a “melting pot” model in which all immigrants assimilate to a common American culture to the multicultural model, where the government, business, and society recognize different languages and celebrate ethnic diversity over national unity. Anton notes that America is now “a country in which Al Gore mistranslates e pluribus unum as ‘Out of one, many’ and in his error is actually more accurate to the spirit of our times.” The problems of ethnic division are further compounded by the view growing among the elites that America itself is at root a racist white construction, and that “assimilation” is therefore an inherently bigoted idea.
This notion of a national culture, rooted in, if not defined by, a common ethnicity, is even more powerful in European nations, which is why Brexit is so closely allied to Trumpism. In the case of Britain, the question of race is framed within a euphemism used by the British government itself: a “visible minority” versus an “invisible one.” “Since 2001, Britain’s ‘visible minority’ population has nearly doubled, from 8 percent to 14 percent today,” Benjamin Schwarz, the national editor of The American Conservative, noted last year. “It is projected to rise to about 38 percent by mid-century.” Is Britain changing so fast that it could lose any meaningful continuity with its history and culture? That is the question now occupying the British neo-reactionaries. Prime Minister Theresa May has not said many memorable things in office, except this: “If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.”
A year ago, Anton took issue with an article I wrote for this magazine in which I described Trump as reminiscent of Plato’s description of a tyrant emerging out of a decadent democracy and argued that we should do what we could to stop him. Anton’s critique was that I was half-right and half-wrong. I was right to see democracy degenerating into tyranny but wrong to see any way to avoid it. What he calls “Caesarism” is already here, as Obama’s abuse of executive power proved. Therefore: “If we must have Caesar, who do you want him to be? One of theirs? Or one of yours (ours)?” Krein put it even more plainly: “Restoring true constitutional — or even merely competent — government requires a fundamental transformation of the underlying culture and elite opinion. It requires, in a certain sense, regime change in America.”
That indeed is the explicit aim of Curtis Yarvin, who takes Kesler’s and Anton’s dismay at modern America to new and dizzying heights — and reactionism to its logical conclusion. A geeky computer programmer in his 40s, he writes a reactionary blog, Unqualified Reservations, under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug and has earned a **** following among the alt-right. His magnum opus — “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives” — is an alternately chilling and entertaining assault on almost everything educated Westerners hold to be self-evidently true. His critique of our present is not that we need a correction to return us to traditional notions of national culture and to unseat the administrative state and its elites; it is that we need to take the whole idea of human “progress” itself and throw it in the trash can. Things didn’t start going wrong in the 1960s or under the Progressives. Yarvin believes that the Western mind became corrupted during the Enlightenment itself. The very idea of democracy, allied with reason and constitutionalism, is bunk: “Washington has failed. The Constitution has failed. Democracy has failed.” His golden era: the age of monarchs. (“It is hard not to imagine that world as happier, wealthier, freer, more civilized, and more pleasant.”) His solution: “It is time for restoration, for national salvation, for a full reboot. We need a new government, a clean slate, a fresh hand which is smart, strong and fair.”
At first, Yarvin reads like some kind of elaborate intellectual prank (as well as a legendary exercise in trolling). And he writes with a jocular, designed-to-shock style that is far more influenced by snarky web discourse than anything in, say, the Claremont Review. But the more you read, the more his ideological transgressions seem to come from a deadly serious place. He challenges the idea that the present is always preferable to the past: “There is no strong reason to think that governments recent and domestic are any better than the governments ancient and foreign,” he writes. “The American Republic is over two hundred years old. Great. The Serene Republic of Venice lasted eleven hundred.” The assumption that all of history has led inexorably to today’s glorious and democratic present is, he argues, a smug and self-serving delusion. It’s what used to be called Whig History, the idea that all of human history led up to the democratic institutions and civilizational achievements of liberal Britain, the model for the entire world. This reflexive sense that the world is always going forward has become an American orthodoxy almost no one questions. Insofar as progressives see flaws in the system, Yarvin suggests, it is only because the work of progress is never done.
Why do so many of us assume that progress is inevitable, if never complete? Yarvin, like the Claremonters and American Greatness brigade, blames an elite that he calls by the inspired name “the Cathedral,” an amalgam of established universities and the mainstream press. It works like this: “The universities make decisions, for which the press manufactures consent. It’s as simple as a punch in the mouth.” If that concept of “manufacturing consent” reminds you of the Chomskyite far left, you wouldn’t be wrong. But for Yarvin, the consent is manufactured not by capitalism, advertising, and corporations but by liberal academics, pundits, and journalists. They simply assume that left liberalism is the only rational response to the world. Democracy, he contends, “no longer means that the public’s elected representatives control the government. It means that the government implements scientific public policy in the public interest.”
And the Cathedral has plainly failed. “If we imagine the 20th century without technical progress, we see an almost pure century of disaster,” Yarvin writes, despairing from his comfy 21st-century perch. His solution is not just a tyrannical president who hates all that the Cathedral stands for but something even more radical: “the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law, and the transfer of absolute power to a mysterious figure known only as the Receiver, who in the process of converting Washington into a heavily armed, ultra-profitable corporation will abolish the press, smash the universities, sell the public schools, and transfer ‘decivilized populations’ to ‘secure relocation facilities’ where they will be assigned to ‘mandatory apprenticeships.’ ”
This is 21st-century fascism, except that Yarvin’s Receiver would allow complete freedom of speech and association and would exercise no control over economic life. Foreign policy? Yarvin calls for “a total shutdown of international relations, including security guarantees, foreign aid, and mass immigration.” All social policy also disappears: “I believe that government should take no notice whatsoever of race — no racial policy. I believe it should separate itself completely from the question of what its citizens should or should not think — separation of education and state.”
And with that final provocation, Mencius Moldbug disappears into cyberspace...
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligence...eactionary-right-must-be-taken-seriously.html
We are living in an era of populism and demagoguery. And yes, there’s racism and xenophobia mixed into it. But what we are also seeing, it seems to me, is the manifest return of a distinctive political and intellectual tendency with deep roots: reactionism.
Reactionism is not the same thing as conservatism. It’s far more potent a brew. Reactionary thought begins, usually, with acute despair at the present moment and a memory of a previous golden age. It then posits a moment in the past when everything went to hell and proposes to turn things back to what they once were. It is not simply a conservative preference for things as they are, with a few nudges back, but a passionate loathing of the status quo and a desire to return to the past in one emotionally cathartic revolt. If conservatives are pessimistic, reactionaries are apocalyptic. If conservatives value elites, reactionaries seethe with contempt for them. If conservatives believe in institutions, reactionaries want to blow them up. If conservatives tend to resist too radical a change, reactionaries want a revolution. Though it took some time to reveal itself, today’s Republican Party — from Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revolution to today’s Age of Trump — is not a conservative party. It is a reactionary party that is now at the peak of its political power.
The reactionary impulse is, of course, not new in human history. Whenever human life has changed sharply and suddenly over the eons, reactionism has surfaced. It appeared in early modernity with the ferocity of the Catholic Counter-Reformation in response to the emergence of Protestantism. Its archetypal moment came in the wake of the French Revolution, as monarchists and Catholics surveyed the damage and tried to resurrect the past. Its darkest American incarnation took place after Reconstruction, as a backlash to the Civil War victory of the North; a full century later, following the success of the civil-rights movement, it bubbled up among the white voters of Richard Nixon’s “silent majority.” The pendulum is always swinging. Sometimes it swings back with unusual speed and power.
You can almost feel the g-force today. What are this generation’s reactionaries reacting to? They’re reacting, as they have always done, to modernity. But their current reaction is proportional to the bewildering pace of change in the world today. They are responding, at some deep, visceral level, to the sense that they are no longer in control of their own lives. They see the relentless tides of globalization, free trade, multiculturalism, and mass immigration eroding their sense of national identity. They believe that the profound shifts in the global economy reward highly educated, multicultural enclaves and punish more racially and culturally homogeneous working-class populations. And they rebel against the entrenched power of elites who, in their view, reflexively sustain all of the above.
I know why many want to dismiss all of this as mere hate, as some of it certainly is. I also recognize that engaging with the ideas of this movement is a tricky exercise in our current political climate. Among many liberals, there is an understandable impulse to raise the drawbridge, to deny certain ideas access to respectable conversation, to prevent certain concepts from being “normalized.” But the normalization has already occurred — thanks, largely, to voters across the West — and willfully blinding ourselves to the most potent political movement of the moment will not make it go away. Indeed, the more I read today’s more serious reactionary writers, the more I’m convinced they are much more in tune with the current global mood than today’s conservatives, liberals, and progressives. I find myself repelled by many of their themes — and yet, at the same time, drawn in by their unmistakable relevance. I’m even tempted, at times, to share George Orwell’s view of the neo-reactionaries of his age: that, although they can sometimes spew dangerous nonsense, they’re smarter and more influential than we tend to think, and that “up to a point, they are right.”
I met Charles Kesler in March on an idyllic sunny day in Pasadena, California, where he lives. He’s a soft-spoken, thoughtful figure, with a shock of white hair and a bemused smile on his face. He grew up in West Virginia, with a schoolteacher mom and a dad who owned a grocery store. They were, he told me, culturally conservative and politically mixed. He is now a professor at Claremont McKenna, where he focuses on the roots of a specifically American conservatism, exemplified by his reading of the Founding Fathers. (He’s the editor of a very popular edition of The Federalist Papers.) He also edits the Claremont Review of Books, a small conservative version of the New York Review of Books that attracted attention first in its critique of George W. Bush’s Iraq War, and again last year, when it came out in support of Donald Trump just when the entire Republican Establishment was trying to destroy him. Along with The American Conservative and the new quarterly American Affairs, it’s now a central forum for many of the sentiments that helped Trump win the presidency.
What on earth was a professor like Kesler doing backing a man who has barely read a book in his life, seems to think Frederick Douglass is still alive, and who’d last less than a few seconds in a Kesler seminar? He smiled a little defensively. He’s perfectly aware of Trump’s manifest flaws — his “crudity, anger and egotism,” as he has written. He has conceded that Trump was seeking a job “for which everyone — everyone — agrees he is conspicuously unready.” Even when we met, he averred: “I don’t know how serious he is.” And yet he still gambled on a despotic, undisciplined, impulsive former Democrat.
It was an act of desperation, he explained. In classic reactionary fashion, he believes that we are living through a crisis of American democracy. The Claremont consensus (to put a name on this strain of thought) holds that beneath the veneer of constitutional democracy, we are actually governed by a soft despotism of permanent experts, bureaucrats, pundits, and academics who ignore the majority of the American people. This elite has encouraged a divisive social transformation of the country, has led us into disastrous wars, and has created a deepening economic crisis for the middle class. Anyone — anyone — who could challenge this elite’s power was therefore a godsend.
Kesler’s worldview is rooted in the ideas of the 20th-century political philosopher Leo Strauss. Strauss’s idiosyncratic genius defies easy characterization, but you could argue, as Mark Lilla did in his recent book The Shipwrecked Mind, that he was a reactionary in one specific sense: A Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, Strauss viewed modernity as collapsing into nihilism and relativism and barbarism all around him. His response was to go back to the distant past — to the works of Plato, Aristotle, and Maimonides, among others — to see where the West went wrong, and how we could avoid the horrific crimes of the 20th century in the future.
One answer was America, where Strauss eventually found his home at the University of Chicago. Some of his disciples — in particular, the late professor Harry Jaffa — saw the American Declaration of Independence, with its assertion of the self-evident truth of the equality of human beings, as a civilizational high point in human self-understanding and political achievement. They believed it revived the ancient Greek and Roman conception of natural law. Yes, they saw the paradox of a testament to human freedom having been built on its opposite — slavery — but once the post–Civil War constitutional amendments were ratified, they believed that the American constitutional order was effectively set forever, and that the limited government that existed in the late-19th and early-20th centuries required no fundamental change. (Jaffa made an exception for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which he believed was the only way to enforce the post–Civil War amendments against southern resistance.)
The expanded government of the last century, begun in earnest by Woodrow Wilson, was, therefore, an unconstitutional and anti-democratic power grab by educated elites. Kesler and many of his fellow Claremonters believe democracy is exercised best at the local level, in accord with the “unenlightened” views of the citizenry, or directly through members of Congress, unencumbered by the layers of bureaucracy, executive fiat, and the control of centralizing modern governments. They call this ever-growing apparatus “the administrative state,” and they loathe it not so much for how it constricts economic growth (as many conservatives do) but for how it creates a kind of political tyranny — a ruling class that can enforce its morality and policy preferences through Executive-branch regulation. The Obama administration’s reworking of Obamacare after its passage, for example, and its climate and immigration policies were all big policy changes that never went through Congress.
The Claremonters were particularly upset last year by the Obama administration’s use of Title IX to direct all public schools to institute transgender-friendly policies for bathroom facilities. “Political correctness,” Kesler believes, “is a serious and totalist politics, aspiring to open the equivalent of a vast reeducation camp for the millions of defective Americans who are products of racism, sexism, classism, and so forth.” He supported Trump because the candidate relished taking on both the administrative state and the PC movement: “If relimiting the government by constitutional means was not an option … then what is left but to use the system as it is, and try placing a strong leader, one of our own, someone who can get something done in our interest, at the head of it?”
Kesler also saw in Trump’s instincts on immigration and trade a return to 19th-century Republicanism, which he believes is newly relevant in a post–Cold War world. The party of McKinley and Coolidge had, after all, been one that favored tariffs. The party platform of 1896 declared, “We renew and emphasize our allegiance to the policy of protection, as the bulwark of American industrial independence, and the foundation of American development and prosperity.” In 1924, the GOP platform reiterated this: “We believe in protection as a national policy.” Kesler saw Trump as tapping into this old Republicanism, noting that he was the first president in living memory to use the word protection favorably in his inaugural address.
On foreign policy, too, Kesler projects onto Trump’s impulses a return to the classic American position before the Second World War: suspicious of multinational entanglements, prickly in the defense of the western hemisphere, and dedicated primarily to the national interest. On immigration, Kesler sees in Trump a return to the 1920 Republican platform, which proposed to limit the number of foreigners to “that which can be assimilated with reasonable rapidity, and to favor immigrants whose standards are similar to ours.” Trump, Kesler wants to believe, vaults the conservative movement back more than 70 years. And he’s fine with that.
“We would happily trade our current government for one that worked exactly as designed in 1787, as amended in 1865 and shortly thereafter.” You would be hard put to find such a blunt declaration in Kesler’s Claremont Review, but it’s just one of many provocations that appeared last year in the now-defunct group blog the Journal of American Greatness. The blog had a madcap feel to it, bristling with almost tongue-in-cheek assaults on the modern world, on stuffy career conservatives, and risible “social justice warriors.” Its authors included a young Straussian, Julius Krein, who is now editing a new journal, American Affairs, and an older student of Jaffa’s, Michael Anton, who now works in the press office at the National Security Council.
Anton is the most interesting intellectual behind Trumpism, today’s American version of reactionism. He’s the suave, credentialed foil to Steve Bannon’s rumpled autodidact, a Trump official who just published a paper on Machiavelli in an academic journal. I recently met him for dinner near the White House. An immensely tall man, of piercing intelligence and meticulous attire, Anton is a product of post-hippie California, one of many contemporary reactionaries who rejected their reflexive youthful liberalism because of their revulsion at the political left they encountered on campus — in Anton’s case, at Berkeley.
Once a conventional Republican, an aide to George W. Bush, and an advocate of the Iraq War, Anton decisively broke ranks in 2016 and came out as a proud reactionary. Anton’s critique of the current moment — and his justification for backing Trump — can best be summarized by the slogan the group blog adopted: “What difference, at this point, does it make?” (It doubled as a snarky reference to one of Hillary Clinton’s comments during the Benghazi hearings.) He became famous for his essay “The Flight 93 Election,” in which he compared America in 2016 to the 9/11 plane hijacked by jihadists and on a course to crash in Washington. In those circumstances, he recommended: “Charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You — or the leader of your party — may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees. Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain.” It’s not just that Trump is better than the alternatives: “The truth is that Trump articulated, if incompletely and inconsistently, the right stances on the right issues — immigration, trade and war — right from the beginning.”
The Claremont critique of the administrative state and the liberal elite does not appear to be enough for Anton. His aim is at what he calls, rather wickedly, “the Party of Davos,” or the “Davoisie.” This is the administrative state gone global. With The Economist as its Bible and its social liberalism and economic conservatism turned into unquestionable dogmas, the Davoisie, perched in the Alps, luxuriates in self-love. It routinely shoots down any critiques of globalization, sees few problems with mass immigration, and is still busy celebrating an ever-more-powerful European Union and ever-more-expansive free-trade agreements among ever-more countries.
None of this, Anton concluded, has anything to do with the American people and their interests. The Davoisie were too busy lifting foreigners out of poverty and celebrating the latest disruptive tech invention to cast a glance toward, say, the beleaguered inhabitants of Kansas or Michigan. Anton admired Trump, he wrote last year, largely because “he’s single-handedly revived talking about government serving its own citizens first.” Trump understood that the American idea is a compact “for the American people, and not for foreigners, immigrants (unless we choose to welcome them) or anyone else.” Three months into a Trump presidency, Anton hasn’t changed his mind.
Politics comes before economics, Anton insists. Free trade may boost our economy, encourage efficiencies, and advance innovation and wealth, but it affects different people differently. And this matters in a democracy. A society’s stability and fairness and unity count for more than its aggregate wealth — especially when, as in recent decades, almost all the direct benefits have gone to the superrich, and all the costs have been paid by the working poor. In the Journal of American Greatness, Krein scorned the abstractions so beloved of the Davoisie: “There is no ‘free trade’ outside of undergraduate economics textbooks,” he wrote, “and trade agreements exist precisely to determine the winners and losers of those zero-sum transactions inherent in any global competition.” Economically unifying the entire planet is not necessarily in a nation’s interest at all.
Nor, according to today’s reactionaries, is mass immigration. And it’s on this topic — more than any other — where the abstract ideas of neo-reactionaries connect with the fears, passions, and cultural panic of many among the population at large.
The Journal of American Greatness’s position goes something like this: The economic benefits (for capitalist elites) and multicultural delights (for progressive elites) of mass immigration are taken for granted by the Davoisie — and by liberals and free-market conservatives more generally. If you live in a major metropolis, with unprecedented prosperity and a tradition of assimilating newcomers, what’s not to like? And if you’re an immigrant, these places are full of jobs you are happy to take. But if your family is in a rural area or a heartland city, where ethnic diversity has not been the norm in the past, and where globalization has dramatically eroded traditional blue-collar jobs, it’s a little more complicated.
Mass immigration, neo-reactionaries argue, creates more job competition for those without college degrees, and, by the laws of supply and demand, lowers wages for some, even as it massively increases profits for a few. At some point, a citizen on the losing end will surely ask: Why is my country benefiting foreigners and new immigrants, many of them arriving illegally, while making life tougher for its own people? And why doesn’t it matter what I think? It’s this question that Anton has a policy answer for. Scaling back free trade and ending mass immigration would “improve the economic prospects of the lower half of our workforce to a greater extent than either would in isolation,” he has written. “The people have repeatedly said ‘no’ to more immigration, ‘no’ to more free trade … but the administrative state will not allow itself to be driven in a direction it does not want to go. It therefore must be broken.”
And then there is the cultural impact of mass immigration, which the Party of Davos, living in a post-national world, celebrates as a vision of the global future. Neo-reactionaries beg to differ. They get a little vague here — tiptoeing awkwardly around the question of race. A nation, they believe, is not just a random group of people within an arbitrary set of borders. It’s a product of a certain history and the repository of a distinctive culture. A citizen should be educated to understand that country’s history and take pride in its culture and traditions. Honed and modulated over time, this national culture gives crucial legitimacy to the American political system by producing citizens acclimated to the tolerance, self-government, and other civic values that democracy needs if it is to function. And so Anton, who gives America’s long history of successful integration of immigrants short shrift, worries about the influx of what he delicately calls “non-republican peoples.” “What happens when the West ceases to be western?” he asked me. On the blog, he was much more direct: He wrote that “Islam and the West are incompatible” and that Muslim immigration should be almost entirely banned. A country like the United States requires “a certain type or character of people.”
Isn’t all this just code for white nationalism? That’s certainly what self-described white nationalists cite in their support for Trump. When I asked Anton bluntly about whether he believes race matters to a national identity, he turned uncharacteristically silent: “I’m not going to say something that could be used to destroy my livelihood and career.” Kesler, when I confronted him with this as well, responded: “The definition of ‘white’ is a political definition. It may be that a lot of people we now regard as inherently and unchangeably Hispanic will turn out to be whites eventually as their incomes go up, as their place in society changes over time in the same way that Italians and Poles and Central Europeans were once ‘second-class’ whites.” Kesler seemed to be describing a white-nationalist country that slowly absorbs others into the fold — turning their cultural “otherness” into an integrated, but still somehow “white,” American identity. “The rate of intermarriage among African-Americans is going up, too,” he tells me as my eyes widen. “How different would American politics be if Obama had defined himself as multiracial rather than black as such … as a new kind of American transcending race?”
Neo-reactionary unease with mass immigration is exacerbated by what they see as the administrative state’s shift from belief in a “melting pot” model in which all immigrants assimilate to a common American culture to the multicultural model, where the government, business, and society recognize different languages and celebrate ethnic diversity over national unity. Anton notes that America is now “a country in which Al Gore mistranslates e pluribus unum as ‘Out of one, many’ and in his error is actually more accurate to the spirit of our times.” The problems of ethnic division are further compounded by the view growing among the elites that America itself is at root a racist white construction, and that “assimilation” is therefore an inherently bigoted idea.
This notion of a national culture, rooted in, if not defined by, a common ethnicity, is even more powerful in European nations, which is why Brexit is so closely allied to Trumpism. In the case of Britain, the question of race is framed within a euphemism used by the British government itself: a “visible minority” versus an “invisible one.” “Since 2001, Britain’s ‘visible minority’ population has nearly doubled, from 8 percent to 14 percent today,” Benjamin Schwarz, the national editor of The American Conservative, noted last year. “It is projected to rise to about 38 percent by mid-century.” Is Britain changing so fast that it could lose any meaningful continuity with its history and culture? That is the question now occupying the British neo-reactionaries. Prime Minister Theresa May has not said many memorable things in office, except this: “If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.”
A year ago, Anton took issue with an article I wrote for this magazine in which I described Trump as reminiscent of Plato’s description of a tyrant emerging out of a decadent democracy and argued that we should do what we could to stop him. Anton’s critique was that I was half-right and half-wrong. I was right to see democracy degenerating into tyranny but wrong to see any way to avoid it. What he calls “Caesarism” is already here, as Obama’s abuse of executive power proved. Therefore: “If we must have Caesar, who do you want him to be? One of theirs? Or one of yours (ours)?” Krein put it even more plainly: “Restoring true constitutional — or even merely competent — government requires a fundamental transformation of the underlying culture and elite opinion. It requires, in a certain sense, regime change in America.”
That indeed is the explicit aim of Curtis Yarvin, who takes Kesler’s and Anton’s dismay at modern America to new and dizzying heights — and reactionism to its logical conclusion. A geeky computer programmer in his 40s, he writes a reactionary blog, Unqualified Reservations, under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug and has earned a **** following among the alt-right. His magnum opus — “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives” — is an alternately chilling and entertaining assault on almost everything educated Westerners hold to be self-evidently true. His critique of our present is not that we need a correction to return us to traditional notions of national culture and to unseat the administrative state and its elites; it is that we need to take the whole idea of human “progress” itself and throw it in the trash can. Things didn’t start going wrong in the 1960s or under the Progressives. Yarvin believes that the Western mind became corrupted during the Enlightenment itself. The very idea of democracy, allied with reason and constitutionalism, is bunk: “Washington has failed. The Constitution has failed. Democracy has failed.” His golden era: the age of monarchs. (“It is hard not to imagine that world as happier, wealthier, freer, more civilized, and more pleasant.”) His solution: “It is time for restoration, for national salvation, for a full reboot. We need a new government, a clean slate, a fresh hand which is smart, strong and fair.”
At first, Yarvin reads like some kind of elaborate intellectual prank (as well as a legendary exercise in trolling). And he writes with a jocular, designed-to-shock style that is far more influenced by snarky web discourse than anything in, say, the Claremont Review. But the more you read, the more his ideological transgressions seem to come from a deadly serious place. He challenges the idea that the present is always preferable to the past: “There is no strong reason to think that governments recent and domestic are any better than the governments ancient and foreign,” he writes. “The American Republic is over two hundred years old. Great. The Serene Republic of Venice lasted eleven hundred.” The assumption that all of history has led inexorably to today’s glorious and democratic present is, he argues, a smug and self-serving delusion. It’s what used to be called Whig History, the idea that all of human history led up to the democratic institutions and civilizational achievements of liberal Britain, the model for the entire world. This reflexive sense that the world is always going forward has become an American orthodoxy almost no one questions. Insofar as progressives see flaws in the system, Yarvin suggests, it is only because the work of progress is never done.
Why do so many of us assume that progress is inevitable, if never complete? Yarvin, like the Claremonters and American Greatness brigade, blames an elite that he calls by the inspired name “the Cathedral,” an amalgam of established universities and the mainstream press. It works like this: “The universities make decisions, for which the press manufactures consent. It’s as simple as a punch in the mouth.” If that concept of “manufacturing consent” reminds you of the Chomskyite far left, you wouldn’t be wrong. But for Yarvin, the consent is manufactured not by capitalism, advertising, and corporations but by liberal academics, pundits, and journalists. They simply assume that left liberalism is the only rational response to the world. Democracy, he contends, “no longer means that the public’s elected representatives control the government. It means that the government implements scientific public policy in the public interest.”
And the Cathedral has plainly failed. “If we imagine the 20th century without technical progress, we see an almost pure century of disaster,” Yarvin writes, despairing from his comfy 21st-century perch. His solution is not just a tyrannical president who hates all that the Cathedral stands for but something even more radical: “the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law, and the transfer of absolute power to a mysterious figure known only as the Receiver, who in the process of converting Washington into a heavily armed, ultra-profitable corporation will abolish the press, smash the universities, sell the public schools, and transfer ‘decivilized populations’ to ‘secure relocation facilities’ where they will be assigned to ‘mandatory apprenticeships.’ ”
This is 21st-century fascism, except that Yarvin’s Receiver would allow complete freedom of speech and association and would exercise no control over economic life. Foreign policy? Yarvin calls for “a total shutdown of international relations, including security guarantees, foreign aid, and mass immigration.” All social policy also disappears: “I believe that government should take no notice whatsoever of race — no racial policy. I believe it should separate itself completely from the question of what its citizens should or should not think — separation of education and state.”
And with that final provocation, Mencius Moldbug disappears into cyberspace...
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligence...eactionary-right-must-be-taken-seriously.html
Yes there is. They are evil cnuts who deserve to be called on their views 24/7.The right (namely Farage and Trump) were in the right place at the right time and played a very smart game IMO. No point demonising them per se.