Before loads of people comment, a reminder that Lorenzo is in Australia and has probably gone to bed by now, so he'll be around to answer your questions in about eight hours.
Your dichotomy of the nationalist and internationalist aspects of tyranny probably need even greater emphasis than they typically receive.
But you may also recall that Helen suggested a little while back that the Enlightenment had both a Radical (mostly French) and a Moderate (mostly Scottish/English) component, which were sort of antithetical to each other as well.
The problem with the barbarians crashing the walls and gates of the Roman Empire wasn’t the barbarians, it was the rot inside the walls that led to weakness and an inability to hold off the barbarians.
The USA empire is rotting behind the gates because it has failed to evolve anti-fragile thinking, practices and institutions.
I have come to the conclusion, recognizing in the various very smart people I know who are also devoutly religious, that intelligence and religiosity (or desire for transcendence) are two separate but complementary parts of our evolved psychologies. Both may have contributed to our survival and eventual global dominance. But many people can also be very smart and not religious, or very religious and not so smart after all (perhaps Mr. Pence?).
Self deception is clearly part of how people can accept ideologies and cults that do not withstand even a cursory examination on a rational basis.
I take the view that when Prof. Snyder writes or speaks about anything east of Berlin, pay attention. He is a terrifying linguist who seems to have read everything and produces informed and thoughtful analysis.
When he writes about anything west of Berlin, it is mostly bollocks, as he becomes a liberal-progressive professor in a liberal-progressive bubble who believes what he reads in the NYT and WaPo far too much.
This is really excellent! Thank you for such wide-ranging and in-depth thinking on what I believe is THE issue of our time. And it seems to me that the true fascist spirit can only arise today "from the left", because only the "progressive" narrative has the elements required to capture both the public imagination and the institutions. Worst, the factors that conspire toward this result today constitute a perfect storm. I'm going to have to check your "About" and find out who I'm reading...
I didn't write this one (although I'm an experienced editor of other people's copy). It's one of Lorenzo's.
There's an entire series, & I'm working on making this Substack so popular that no publisher can ignore what Lorenzo has written. That means he gets a published book out of it.
I am liking this comment as liking the book approach. It would save me the trouble of copying and pasting his 40 odd essays into Word for my personal highlighting and commenting.
And this particular essay is about to tip me over into becoming a paid subscriber at Lorenzo's substack.
I find it hard to understand why Lorenzo and a suitable publisher haven't connected already??!! I don't recall my first exposure to his work at Thinking Out Loud, perhaps 15 to 20 years ago?, but since then I have been aware of his particular brand of solid thinking and writing, especially on economics and history. He has certainly accumulated a wealth of material suitable for publication, and deserves greater exposure to that form of wealth known as "filthy lucre".
I have a much larger, ready-made audience, which is why I started publishing his essays on my Substack. There are historical reasons for this.
Many years ago, both Lorenzo and I were on the receiving end of cancellations. The one directed at Lorenzo succeeded, and he was driven out of public life. The one directed at me failed, making me more popular than ever.
Much of the difference in outcomes turned on my social class and access to connections, and I tried over a number of years to figure out how to reintroduce Lorenzo to public life and commentary. This included him writing for a blog I ran, and promoting his blog using my big Twitter account. Neither of those succeeded.
Substack, however, has worked. I have been able to use my reach to get his work out to a bigger audience, and my connections to get it noticed more widely.
And yet, for whatever reason, your contribution and capabilities only recently came within my awareness. :-) I do now look forward to seeing email alerts for your (nominally weekly?) postings, including Lorenzo's work or your own.
For whatever reason, after a while Lorenzo did drop off of my internet viewing/ reading, but whether that was due to his reducing writing or my distraction to other sources given limited time, I don't recall. I have also never joined Twitter so I would not have seen your promotions of his work over there.
"My connections", a phrase pregnant with many meanings! :-)
If you're not from Australia or the UK (and perhaps even if you are), this provides background on me: https://archive.ph/Wr9zv (sprung from behind the paywall).
At Substack's request, Lorenzo and I are co-writing a piece on what happened to him, but the release date hasn't yet been finalised.
Solidly USA; followed George Wills' success factors to ... success.
Don't read fiction any more, beyond my exposure to "good literature" 50 years ago in high school. Then a strong engineering education and work focus. But anecdotally, I seem to have picked up enough "humanities good stuff" insight, and have been exposed to more history of England/ Britain than some British citizens I have met [but I am light on history of Australia, although friends have touristed there and reported favorably].
We did visit England in 1990: Kent, London, Windermere; had neighbors (retired farmers) from Kent winter in our Florida locale each year until they passed. Part of the WWII Great Generation (or older).
And so... a future substack crime thriller in the offing?? :-)
Aug 27, 2023·edited Aug 27, 2023Liked by Helen Dale, Lorenzo Warby
Every part of this analysis of a fourfold attack on Democracy is true. But maybe we need to take a look at Democracy too and whether our 20th c.-version's time is up. I realise this is easy for a 72 year old 'boomer' to say - having been so lucky as to live my life without having to fight a war or live in fear of a Stasi. But I have lived through a 50 year long period in which we have been seduced by an illusion of Left/Right electoral pluralism; meanwhile - via the agency of our Leftist academia sheep dip - every public and private part our culture has been captured by a bogus but virtually unchallengeable 'social justice' religion with its 90% bogus (and highly selective) victimhood narratives. We in the West have been schooled into an expectation that there is a political solution to every social problem. But maybe the hard truth is that our post-war democratic pluralism has now accumulated problems to which it has no credible solution and so we must wait for some new political arrangements to emerge - whatever these may be. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers
Well, I thought I had written a reply about an hour ago. I guess I failed to actually post it, so here is my attempt at repeating it:
From your WND link: "Graham Cunningham is an occasional contributor to several magazines including The American Conservative, The American Mind and City Journal among others."
A very good comment and a good essay. There is a limit to just how many substacks to which I can bother to subscribe, but I will now try to keep an eye out for your work at TAM and the City J, which I do tend to read religiously.
And adding now: "... we must wait for some new political arrangements to emerge - whatever these may be..." I am still inclined to go with the core of the Founders' ideas concerning separation of powers (including federalism and subsidiarity, and maybe with the media or the Fed or the admin state as a separate but controlled power center?), consent of the governed (but with greater awareness of those limits vis a vis mobocracy), and the need for both public and private virtue to accompany our self governance. I would like to aim for something approaching the level of liberty we had in the 1820's [but absent the slavery, of course!]. Our globalist complexity and technological society make that more difficult, perhaps legitimately requiring greater government involvement in our lives. Our cultural evolution seems to be overwhelming our biological evolution. We now need to trust people and institutions that may not deserve such strong levels of acceptance without other controls? I.e., well beyond the trust needs of hunter gatherers.
However, our past recent experience also suggests a firmer rewriting of the 2nd Amendment to address citizen preparations against tyranny, greater discussion of the roles of the media and education as a pubic good, more considerations of term limits and greater transparency in lobbying (and the revolving doors), automatic sunsetting of laws not renewed after a reasonable period of years, and finally a balance budget amendment to curtail the tendency for our politicians to buy votes with other people's money [including borrowing from future generations.]
Yes, and the last line of your Slouching essay was a link to WND, which provided what I copied and quoted on your background. :-) Based on my quick scan, I gathered the WND content was a repeat of the Slouching content, so if it was subtly different, I missed that. [Or did someone else add the WND link?]
Ah, I see. No the essay was one I originally published at WND some time ago. I then posted it on my Substack (more recently). It's the same essay though. I currently have no plans to publish on TAM or City J. at the moment because I am concentrating on my Substack. You will however find some of my previous contributions on it (eg Life in the Shadows of #MeToo for example) and I hope you will have look at those too on STB (and perhaps make it your Read No. 11?) I only post once a month.
I have subscribed to STB, but to be honest I do not expect to end up being a paying subscriber.
After 50 years of saving and investing, I can now afford it, but my prior more frugal life still demands a value per $ assessment. And now a value per unit of time, too. We shall see.
Substack, as a business of providing a substrate for a variety of writers, really needs to come up with an "or best offer" type of subscription mode, although I can see they need some minimum just to cover the costs of the subscription transaction itself. TANSTAAFL.
Since you mentioned the need for some new ideas, and I provided a response to that, do you have any feedback on that response? Devil is in the details, and all of that, of course!
Thanks for the subscription....it's a free one for the foreseeable. What is TANSTAAFL? I don't understand the last sentence about feedback. Are you talking about my comment on this site? If so any feedback would be on this comment thread.
As a Brit, my familiarity with the details of the American constitution is sketchy. I think the separation-of-powers concept was a wise (and inspired) one in the 18th century....probably the Amendments too. As you know, I am a pessimist about the long-term viability of our Western democratic pluralism. Although we in the UK famously have an 'unwritten constitution', a separation of powers is implicit in it. The problem now - at least in my UK - is that we no longer really HAVE a separation of powers. The legislature swings Left to Right but the executive and the judiciary are permanently Left (thanks to the Gramscian 'Long March' mentioned previously). America is perhaps more hopeful I guess....the lucky Trump re-jig of SCOTUS has been a tonic for beleaguered conservatism in your country.
Well, the American colonists considered themselves people with the rights of Englishmen, which the Parliment (and perhaps King George III?) were restricting. The snobs in England were treating their "fellows" in America as lower class rubes. George Washington and others of the American gentry were seeking through commercial accomplishment to show they were the equal of any English aristocrat in ability and wisdom. I recently read that Washington was particularly incensed that Parliment was reducing his ability to be a successful innovative gentleman farmer and small time manufacturer.
On separation of powers: my understanding is that idea actually came from England's government, as described by Montesquieu in 1748. Similarly, the right to bear arms had a long history in England (see Joyce Lee Malcom: To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right [1994]), although this right was largely given up by the end of WWII (need to recheck the details). The right to free speech was explained by John Milton in 1644, in his essay Areopagitica
[ https://www.britannica.com/topic/Areopagitica ]. From what I read, besides whatever back sliding on free speech that we are seeing in America, it is much worse in the rest of the Anglosphere (and the EU, et al.). [Maybe I am mistaken about that? But Helen did say both she and Lorenzo were "cancelled" a while back.]
I believe the rights of habeas corpus and to a trial with a jury of your peers was well established common law (perhaps via Roman law?).
I gather that our "Federalism" and state vs. national divide was mainly a result of multiple state charters from the crown*, as luck would have it. But such breakdown of jurisdictional control, and subsidiarity, is a vey good idea, at least when implemented properly [see Catholic Church for both good and bad examples across history].
Thus, in many ways your constitution is really very much a "written" one, just not collected into a single legal document as your foundational law. I am sure Helen or Lorenzo can amplify or correct what I have said here, should it be necessary.
*Is this use of the word "crown", referring to the institution or to the respective monarch, supposed to be capitalized?
Even a defeat a victory as fighting always raises the costs to the opponent teaching them restraint the only way they’ll learn, and raising the value of yourself and your kin and kind by showing fight.
Absent fighting the Irish would have gone the way of the Picts and other vanished peoples.
I mean fight not talk, or vote, or get a lawyer, etc.
While the commenter "the long warred" may end up being correct, right now I prefer to consider that our Republic is perhaps at worst in a coma, and potentially will still reawake.
Our founders understood history and human nature, so dividing power may still give us a chance to recover when they have not yet fully captured all branches and sources of control [we are still conversing here, are we not?].
The work of Angelo Codevilla set the stage for our awareness of decline, and perhaps the new book from the Claremont Institute, Up From Conservatism, (which I have only begun to read), will help provide more guidance. As Adams, Jefferson, and others noted, before we can Make America Great Again, we need to Make America Virtuous Again [both as a people and as to our distinct individual virtues]. A major element of returning to greater virtue is focusing on honesty in the media and elsewhere. "Thou shalt not bear false witness" is still a powerful commandment. The work by Helen and Lorenzo on this substack and elsewhere are helping in that direction, too.
Actually, it is an elected monarchy. I, like other citizens of Australia, Canada, New Zealand the UK, live in a crowned republic. I prefer the latter. I am really not a fan of Presidential republics/democracies. https://youtu.be/K3wFWpCvrQ8?si=vdz7Qt6J933LnIOw
Democracy is both undesirable and an impossibility given the nature of ordinary people and the inevitability of an elite in any political system. What we require is a new and improved elite that can rid us of the one we have now. We should not embrace populism or double down on the failures of conservatism. Neither should we lionise democracy as a panacea or harp on about the virtues of classical liberalism. Something new is required.
"given the nature of ordinary people ... a new and improved elite ... Something new is required."
It will take at least 30,000 years to evolve the new and improved human that you desire, although I am not sure just what environmental conditions will cause that to occur. Until then we are kind of stuck with the "ordinary people". We live, and we learn, and sometimes we progress by standing on the shoulders of those who came before us. But nature does not care whether humanity exists as a species, or not, nor what form of social and governmental arrangements we decide to emplace. We will survive and continue, or not, based on just how well at least a few of us are adapted to whatever new conditions are presented to us [say alien terrestrials? A biological blight? Etc.??]
Apologies. I see in hindsight that my comment was rather snarky and perhaps even juvenile.
But the Framers understood human nature very well. They were an elite group, and still had to accept compromises (beyond those related to slavery) during their deliberations. Possibly the most impactful one was addressing the small vs. large state representation via the Senate. This article https://lawliberty.org/real-purpose-of-the-senate-to-check-the-actions-of-the-house/ suggests it was less about recognizing the state level sovereignty and federalism than stopping any House level legal rampaging. See my reply to Graham Cunningham for some additional ideas on how things might be improved (or not).
But today the problem with our elites is that they are not truly elite: i.e., substantively and substantially better thinkers or doers than many other well educated folks [such as the many who write for substack and/or comment there and elsewhere. ]
Mencken had maybe the greatest bullshit detector ever installed. He could see through just about every dishonest scheme for power, most especially those crafted by people proclaiming their virtue. "Obey if you want to be wise and pure like I am" is the oldest scam known to man.
Aug 27, 2023·edited Aug 27, 2023Liked by Helen Dale, Lorenzo Warby
I would like to add one more item to the list of how the politics of the transformational future are undermining democracy (I speak here as an American and Californian).
There are 2 contradictory aspects of our zeitgeist that work together:
1) The fact that so much of our social discord and misery is caused by massive income inequality, with the top 1% owning about half our wealth and the top 10% owning at least 80% of it. We all know this is a new Gilded Age, that there is a billionaire class that pulls the political puppet strings, but their wealth and power exist currently behind a high castle wall; and
2) Egalitarianism is the song that just about every outlet sings, Egalitarianism is preached by every rich and powerful person to the left of Mitt Romney, our ruling class claims total devotion to Egalitarianism, but this only manifests in trivialities like: racial balance in movies and Oscars, racial and gender balance in the C-suites, the reign of demography, where every sphere of society has to "look like America", and then of course ridiculous manifestations of Egalitarianism like every kid getting good grades etc.
Thus "Egalitarianism" in modern American discourse works like a shiny new chew toy to keep people dazed and confused at best, or at each other's throats at worse. We will fight to the death over "gender balance" in Star Wars, while then quietly surrendering to eat crumbs from the billionaire's table.
The narratives that uphold the Politics of the Transformational Future (which could be sloganized as "Let them eat Representation!") may be the biggest most effective weapon used and wielded to divide and conquer.
I generally agree with the core of your comment, but there are several addenda left unsaid.
Whenever we see equalitarians complain about wealth disparities, they never say just what level of "disparity" is ok or justifiable. If it is ok for the top 20% of income earners to pay 80% of the income taxes, why aren't they also "entitled" to their higher incomes? Adding payroll taxes rebalances this a little and those taxes should also really be considered but often are not. I suspect that perhaps in the Paleolithic there was a 1% group who had only 1.1% of the wealth, and the other 99% had 98.9% of it. "You want more wealth? Go pound a rock!"
The real situation concerning how much the middle class is disappearing into the lower classes and how much it is elevating to upper middle levels is hard to determine, given conflicting reports. But we know capital has been growing "at the expense of" labor because the application of capital is essential to multiply labor's productivity to increase total wealth. And productivity growth is the real economic growth driver (especially as labor participation rates decline). But productivity comes from innovation and entrepreneurship (a specialized form of labor, of course).
The real concern is not how much wealth the wealthy have, comparatively, but if they are using it solely for personal consumption and/or investment in the economy, or using it to gain political power and influence beyond one-man-one-vote. I am ambivalent about the Citizen's United SCOTUS case allowing excessive (unlimited?) money in PACs and politics, especially money from outside of the jurisdiction of the election/candidate. If free speech were to be limited to personal persuasion in spoken and written form, then maybe some controls could be implemented?? But clearly something is off when Soros can buy up elections for Leftist DA's/ AG's and ruin real rule of law and enforcement practices; or Zuckerbucks can be slanted to aid Dem's over Repub's.
A lot more might be said on this topic but perhaps Helen or Lorenzo have already expounded on this at length and can provide a suitable link or two?
Really excellent essay! This point cannot be overemphasized: fascist (reactionary) movements are always a reaction against the threat of Marxism. If leftists want to prevent fascism is the USA, the most effective strategy would be to police their own bad actors rather than celebrate them.
My main response to this is that human nature has not significantly changed in the last 200 years; there have always been impairments to societies ability to talk to itself, policies have been pushed through universities via organizational capture for decades, and citizenry have been denigrated for as long as citizenry existed. The only new attitudes for Westerners are a focusing on patterns of structural oppression through notions of constraint-as-oppression.
This last feature of society *is* new, and it's very frustrating - but it's also a natural or even inevitable outgrowth of high levels of material security, which removed pragmatic checks on idealism. At one time, people valued things like social justice, but they also had clothes to wash, potatoes to pick, and fences to mend. Now everybody is flabby and socialized into a universe without limitations; of course "constraint is oppression."
> The “if you believe X you are a bigoted conspiracy theorist” stigmatisation of wrongful noticing is a hardy perennial in Pravda-model media.
Maybe you mean stigmatisation of wrongful noticing is hardly *novel*?
Elements of these things may have existed, but the sheer scale and networked coordination that is currently being engaged in is new. Sometimes, quantity does have a quality all of its own. Notice the shift in the attitudes, for instance, of the ACLU.
>Mass Fascism does not happen without mass Leninism. Mass Nazism does not happen without mass Stalinism.
Is that so? I think that the history of Japan provides quite a good example of how "Mass Nazism" can happen without anything even resembling strong socialist or communist movement. Not to say that there were no marxists at all, but they had no power to speak of.
“[U]sers of the social-leverage-and-status strategy often protect their sense of status by simply refusing to read or watch those who speak or write outside their prestige-opinion and luxury-beliefs ecosystem.”
Or, when their media echo chambers do present other opinions, it’s often done via “nut-picking” - presenting fringe figures as representative of the opposition. If suitably inane examples aren’t readily available, straw men will do nicely. Recall Barack Obama’s frequent declarations that “some people believe X, but I believe…,” or “some people say Y, but I say…,” when no sane person ever believed X or said Y.
Too few try to test their beliefs against the best opposing views in an honest search for truth. Instead, many look for ways to label anyone in opposition so that they can dismiss them and their beliefs without having to make an argument.
Before loads of people comment, a reminder that Lorenzo is in Australia and has probably gone to bed by now, so he'll be around to answer your questions in about eight hours.
All forms of fascism were nationalist, by definition, because communism was internationalist.
Both communism and fascism starated out as illiberalism, romanticism, derived from historical anti-Enlightenment and counter-reformation ideas.
Your dichotomy of the nationalist and internationalist aspects of tyranny probably need even greater emphasis than they typically receive.
But you may also recall that Helen suggested a little while back that the Enlightenment had both a Radical (mostly French) and a Moderate (mostly Scottish/English) component, which were sort of antithetical to each other as well.
Trump has Druid juju. His mother, originally a poor immigrant from the Outer Hebrides, spoke fluent Gaelic.
The problem with the barbarians crashing the walls and gates of the Roman Empire wasn’t the barbarians, it was the rot inside the walls that led to weakness and an inability to hold off the barbarians.
The USA empire is rotting behind the gates because it has failed to evolve anti-fragile thinking, practices and institutions.
I have come to the conclusion, recognizing in the various very smart people I know who are also devoutly religious, that intelligence and religiosity (or desire for transcendence) are two separate but complementary parts of our evolved psychologies. Both may have contributed to our survival and eventual global dominance. But many people can also be very smart and not religious, or very religious and not so smart after all (perhaps Mr. Pence?).
Self deception is clearly part of how people can accept ideologies and cults that do not withstand even a cursory examination on a rational basis.
I take the view that when Prof. Snyder writes or speaks about anything east of Berlin, pay attention. He is a terrifying linguist who seems to have read everything and produces informed and thoughtful analysis.
When he writes about anything west of Berlin, it is mostly bollocks, as he becomes a liberal-progressive professor in a liberal-progressive bubble who believes what he reads in the NYT and WaPo far too much.
great work
This is really excellent! Thank you for such wide-ranging and in-depth thinking on what I believe is THE issue of our time. And it seems to me that the true fascist spirit can only arise today "from the left", because only the "progressive" narrative has the elements required to capture both the public imagination and the institutions. Worst, the factors that conspire toward this result today constitute a perfect storm. I'm going to have to check your "About" and find out who I'm reading...
I didn't write this one (although I'm an experienced editor of other people's copy). It's one of Lorenzo's.
There's an entire series, & I'm working on making this Substack so popular that no publisher can ignore what Lorenzo has written. That means he gets a published book out of it.
A book would be super good news!!!!!
I am liking this comment as liking the book approach. It would save me the trouble of copying and pasting his 40 odd essays into Word for my personal highlighting and commenting.
And this particular essay is about to tip me over into becoming a paid subscriber at Lorenzo's substack.
I find it hard to understand why Lorenzo and a suitable publisher haven't connected already??!! I don't recall my first exposure to his work at Thinking Out Loud, perhaps 15 to 20 years ago?, but since then I have been aware of his particular brand of solid thinking and writing, especially on economics and history. He has certainly accumulated a wealth of material suitable for publication, and deserves greater exposure to that form of wealth known as "filthy lucre".
I have a much larger, ready-made audience, which is why I started publishing his essays on my Substack. There are historical reasons for this.
Many years ago, both Lorenzo and I were on the receiving end of cancellations. The one directed at Lorenzo succeeded, and he was driven out of public life. The one directed at me failed, making me more popular than ever.
Much of the difference in outcomes turned on my social class and access to connections, and I tried over a number of years to figure out how to reintroduce Lorenzo to public life and commentary. This included him writing for a blog I ran, and promoting his blog using my big Twitter account. Neither of those succeeded.
Substack, however, has worked. I have been able to use my reach to get his work out to a bigger audience, and my connections to get it noticed more widely.
And yet, for whatever reason, your contribution and capabilities only recently came within my awareness. :-) I do now look forward to seeing email alerts for your (nominally weekly?) postings, including Lorenzo's work or your own.
For whatever reason, after a while Lorenzo did drop off of my internet viewing/ reading, but whether that was due to his reducing writing or my distraction to other sources given limited time, I don't recall. I have also never joined Twitter so I would not have seen your promotions of his work over there.
"My connections", a phrase pregnant with many meanings! :-)
If you're not from Australia or the UK (and perhaps even if you are), this provides background on me: https://archive.ph/Wr9zv (sprung from behind the paywall).
At Substack's request, Lorenzo and I are co-writing a piece on what happened to him, but the release date hasn't yet been finalised.
Solidly USA; followed George Wills' success factors to ... success.
Don't read fiction any more, beyond my exposure to "good literature" 50 years ago in high school. Then a strong engineering education and work focus. But anecdotally, I seem to have picked up enough "humanities good stuff" insight, and have been exposed to more history of England/ Britain than some British citizens I have met [but I am light on history of Australia, although friends have touristed there and reported favorably].
We did visit England in 1990: Kent, London, Windermere; had neighbors (retired farmers) from Kent winter in our Florida locale each year until they passed. Part of the WWII Great Generation (or older).
And so... a future substack crime thriller in the offing?? :-)
Every part of this analysis of a fourfold attack on Democracy is true. But maybe we need to take a look at Democracy too and whether our 20th c.-version's time is up. I realise this is easy for a 72 year old 'boomer' to say - having been so lucky as to live my life without having to fight a war or live in fear of a Stasi. But I have lived through a 50 year long period in which we have been seduced by an illusion of Left/Right electoral pluralism; meanwhile - via the agency of our Leftist academia sheep dip - every public and private part our culture has been captured by a bogus but virtually unchallengeable 'social justice' religion with its 90% bogus (and highly selective) victimhood narratives. We in the West have been schooled into an expectation that there is a political solution to every social problem. But maybe the hard truth is that our post-war democratic pluralism has now accumulated problems to which it has no credible solution and so we must wait for some new political arrangements to emerge - whatever these may be. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers
Well, I thought I had written a reply about an hour ago. I guess I failed to actually post it, so here is my attempt at repeating it:
From your WND link: "Graham Cunningham is an occasional contributor to several magazines including The American Conservative, The American Mind and City Journal among others."
A very good comment and a good essay. There is a limit to just how many substacks to which I can bother to subscribe, but I will now try to keep an eye out for your work at TAM and the City J, which I do tend to read religiously.
And adding now: "... we must wait for some new political arrangements to emerge - whatever these may be..." I am still inclined to go with the core of the Founders' ideas concerning separation of powers (including federalism and subsidiarity, and maybe with the media or the Fed or the admin state as a separate but controlled power center?), consent of the governed (but with greater awareness of those limits vis a vis mobocracy), and the need for both public and private virtue to accompany our self governance. I would like to aim for something approaching the level of liberty we had in the 1820's [but absent the slavery, of course!]. Our globalist complexity and technological society make that more difficult, perhaps legitimately requiring greater government involvement in our lives. Our cultural evolution seems to be overwhelming our biological evolution. We now need to trust people and institutions that may not deserve such strong levels of acceptance without other controls? I.e., well beyond the trust needs of hunter gatherers.
However, our past recent experience also suggests a firmer rewriting of the 2nd Amendment to address citizen preparations against tyranny, greater discussion of the roles of the media and education as a pubic good, more considerations of term limits and greater transparency in lobbying (and the revolving doors), automatic sunsetting of laws not renewed after a reasonable period of years, and finally a balance budget amendment to curtail the tendency for our politicians to buy votes with other people's money [including borrowing from future generations.]
Thanks ssri. I am a bit confused about the bit you say about an WND link?? You don't need a WND link to access this essay. It is on my Substack (Slouching Towards Bethlehem) and to access it you just click on this : https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers
Yes, and the last line of your Slouching essay was a link to WND, which provided what I copied and quoted on your background. :-) Based on my quick scan, I gathered the WND content was a repeat of the Slouching content, so if it was subtly different, I missed that. [Or did someone else add the WND link?]
Ah, I see. No the essay was one I originally published at WND some time ago. I then posted it on my Substack (more recently). It's the same essay though. I currently have no plans to publish on TAM or City J. at the moment because I am concentrating on my Substack. You will however find some of my previous contributions on it (eg Life in the Shadows of #MeToo for example) and I hope you will have look at those too on STB (and perhaps make it your Read No. 11?) I only post once a month.
OK, Graham, sounds good at once per month :-).
I have subscribed to STB, but to be honest I do not expect to end up being a paying subscriber.
After 50 years of saving and investing, I can now afford it, but my prior more frugal life still demands a value per $ assessment. And now a value per unit of time, too. We shall see.
Substack, as a business of providing a substrate for a variety of writers, really needs to come up with an "or best offer" type of subscription mode, although I can see they need some minimum just to cover the costs of the subscription transaction itself. TANSTAAFL.
Since you mentioned the need for some new ideas, and I provided a response to that, do you have any feedback on that response? Devil is in the details, and all of that, of course!
O should I copy and paste my response from the Helen Dale substack to the STB one?
Thanks for the subscription....it's a free one for the foreseeable. What is TANSTAAFL? I don't understand the last sentence about feedback. Are you talking about my comment on this site? If so any feedback would be on this comment thread.
As a Brit, my familiarity with the details of the American constitution is sketchy. I think the separation-of-powers concept was a wise (and inspired) one in the 18th century....probably the Amendments too. As you know, I am a pessimist about the long-term viability of our Western democratic pluralism. Although we in the UK famously have an 'unwritten constitution', a separation of powers is implicit in it. The problem now - at least in my UK - is that we no longer really HAVE a separation of powers. The legislature swings Left to Right but the executive and the judiciary are permanently Left (thanks to the Gramscian 'Long March' mentioned previously). America is perhaps more hopeful I guess....the lucky Trump re-jig of SCOTUS has been a tonic for beleaguered conservatism in your country.
Well, the American colonists considered themselves people with the rights of Englishmen, which the Parliment (and perhaps King George III?) were restricting. The snobs in England were treating their "fellows" in America as lower class rubes. George Washington and others of the American gentry were seeking through commercial accomplishment to show they were the equal of any English aristocrat in ability and wisdom. I recently read that Washington was particularly incensed that Parliment was reducing his ability to be a successful innovative gentleman farmer and small time manufacturer.
On separation of powers: my understanding is that idea actually came from England's government, as described by Montesquieu in 1748. Similarly, the right to bear arms had a long history in England (see Joyce Lee Malcom: To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right [1994]), although this right was largely given up by the end of WWII (need to recheck the details). The right to free speech was explained by John Milton in 1644, in his essay Areopagitica
[ https://www.britannica.com/topic/Areopagitica ]. From what I read, besides whatever back sliding on free speech that we are seeing in America, it is much worse in the rest of the Anglosphere (and the EU, et al.). [Maybe I am mistaken about that? But Helen did say both she and Lorenzo were "cancelled" a while back.]
I believe the rights of habeas corpus and to a trial with a jury of your peers was well established common law (perhaps via Roman law?).
I gather that our "Federalism" and state vs. national divide was mainly a result of multiple state charters from the crown*, as luck would have it. But such breakdown of jurisdictional control, and subsidiarity, is a vey good idea, at least when implemented properly [see Catholic Church for both good and bad examples across history].
Thus, in many ways your constitution is really very much a "written" one, just not collected into a single legal document as your foundational law. I am sure Helen or Lorenzo can amplify or correct what I have said here, should it be necessary.
*Is this use of the word "crown", referring to the institution or to the respective monarch, supposed to be capitalized?
PS: I liked this phrasing: "... the lucky Trump re-jig of SCOTUS has been a tonic for beleaguered conservatism in your country."
In America it’s fight or die.
Even a defeat a victory as fighting always raises the costs to the opponent teaching them restraint the only way they’ll learn, and raising the value of yourself and your kin and kind by showing fight.
Absent fighting the Irish would have gone the way of the Picts and other vanished peoples.
I mean fight not talk, or vote, or get a lawyer, etc.
11 Nations. Colin Woodard.
The US is not a democracy. It’s a republic.
It was.
The Republic is Dead.
As the Republic 🗽died 💀 America 🇺🇸 asked her Who Shall Rule us?
And she whispered; The Strongest.
The Republic got a State Funeral when Biden was sworn in by reluctant and stricken faced soldiers over a field of flags.
This is 🇺🇸 interregnum.
Move on or die mourning on the mound, but she is dead.
While the commenter "the long warred" may end up being correct, right now I prefer to consider that our Republic is perhaps at worst in a coma, and potentially will still reawake.
Our founders understood history and human nature, so dividing power may still give us a chance to recover when they have not yet fully captured all branches and sources of control [we are still conversing here, are we not?].
The work of Angelo Codevilla set the stage for our awareness of decline, and perhaps the new book from the Claremont Institute, Up From Conservatism, (which I have only begun to read), will help provide more guidance. As Adams, Jefferson, and others noted, before we can Make America Great Again, we need to Make America Virtuous Again [both as a people and as to our distinct individual virtues]. A major element of returning to greater virtue is focusing on honesty in the media and elsewhere. "Thou shalt not bear false witness" is still a powerful commandment. The work by Helen and Lorenzo on this substack and elsewhere are helping in that direction, too.
Actually, it is an elected monarchy. I, like other citizens of Australia, Canada, New Zealand the UK, live in a crowned republic. I prefer the latter. I am really not a fan of Presidential republics/democracies. https://youtu.be/K3wFWpCvrQ8?si=vdz7Qt6J933LnIOw
Better version of the West Wing excerpt. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gLoio0Z6jLw
Democracy is both undesirable and an impossibility given the nature of ordinary people and the inevitability of an elite in any political system. What we require is a new and improved elite that can rid us of the one we have now. We should not embrace populism or double down on the failures of conservatism. Neither should we lionise democracy as a panacea or harp on about the virtues of classical liberalism. Something new is required.
"given the nature of ordinary people ... a new and improved elite ... Something new is required."
It will take at least 30,000 years to evolve the new and improved human that you desire, although I am not sure just what environmental conditions will cause that to occur. Until then we are kind of stuck with the "ordinary people". We live, and we learn, and sometimes we progress by standing on the shoulders of those who came before us. But nature does not care whether humanity exists as a species, or not, nor what form of social and governmental arrangements we decide to emplace. We will survive and continue, or not, based on just how well at least a few of us are adapted to whatever new conditions are presented to us [say alien terrestrials? A biological blight? Etc.??]
When I said "something new" I meant a system that accepts the reality of human beings while addressing the problems our societies have.
Apologies. I see in hindsight that my comment was rather snarky and perhaps even juvenile.
But the Framers understood human nature very well. They were an elite group, and still had to accept compromises (beyond those related to slavery) during their deliberations. Possibly the most impactful one was addressing the small vs. large state representation via the Senate. This article https://lawliberty.org/real-purpose-of-the-senate-to-check-the-actions-of-the-house/ suggests it was less about recognizing the state level sovereignty and federalism than stopping any House level legal rampaging. See my reply to Graham Cunningham for some additional ideas on how things might be improved (or not).
But today the problem with our elites is that they are not truly elite: i.e., substantively and substantially better thinkers or doers than many other well educated folks [such as the many who write for substack and/or comment there and elsewhere. ]
Whenever the topic of progressivism is raised I think of the following quote:
The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve.
H.L. Mencken
Any rationale that argues for more government power to “fix” societies problems can only end in tears.
Mencken had maybe the greatest bullshit detector ever installed. He could see through just about every dishonest scheme for power, most especially those crafted by people proclaiming their virtue. "Obey if you want to be wise and pure like I am" is the oldest scam known to man.
100 per cent.
And who might be his doppelganger today? I guess we have a few near equals and a lot of pretenders.
Helen, your reputation for "deep verisimilitude" is in the making right now! :-)
the man was sui generis.
don't think any of us alive are as erudite, fearless and wickedly surgical with a pen.
I would like to add one more item to the list of how the politics of the transformational future are undermining democracy (I speak here as an American and Californian).
There are 2 contradictory aspects of our zeitgeist that work together:
1) The fact that so much of our social discord and misery is caused by massive income inequality, with the top 1% owning about half our wealth and the top 10% owning at least 80% of it. We all know this is a new Gilded Age, that there is a billionaire class that pulls the political puppet strings, but their wealth and power exist currently behind a high castle wall; and
2) Egalitarianism is the song that just about every outlet sings, Egalitarianism is preached by every rich and powerful person to the left of Mitt Romney, our ruling class claims total devotion to Egalitarianism, but this only manifests in trivialities like: racial balance in movies and Oscars, racial and gender balance in the C-suites, the reign of demography, where every sphere of society has to "look like America", and then of course ridiculous manifestations of Egalitarianism like every kid getting good grades etc.
Thus "Egalitarianism" in modern American discourse works like a shiny new chew toy to keep people dazed and confused at best, or at each other's throats at worse. We will fight to the death over "gender balance" in Star Wars, while then quietly surrendering to eat crumbs from the billionaire's table.
The narratives that uphold the Politics of the Transformational Future (which could be sloganized as "Let them eat Representation!") may be the biggest most effective weapon used and wielded to divide and conquer.
Cheers and thanks for another great piece!
I generally agree with the core of your comment, but there are several addenda left unsaid.
Whenever we see equalitarians complain about wealth disparities, they never say just what level of "disparity" is ok or justifiable. If it is ok for the top 20% of income earners to pay 80% of the income taxes, why aren't they also "entitled" to their higher incomes? Adding payroll taxes rebalances this a little and those taxes should also really be considered but often are not. I suspect that perhaps in the Paleolithic there was a 1% group who had only 1.1% of the wealth, and the other 99% had 98.9% of it. "You want more wealth? Go pound a rock!"
The real situation concerning how much the middle class is disappearing into the lower classes and how much it is elevating to upper middle levels is hard to determine, given conflicting reports. But we know capital has been growing "at the expense of" labor because the application of capital is essential to multiply labor's productivity to increase total wealth. And productivity growth is the real economic growth driver (especially as labor participation rates decline). But productivity comes from innovation and entrepreneurship (a specialized form of labor, of course).
The real concern is not how much wealth the wealthy have, comparatively, but if they are using it solely for personal consumption and/or investment in the economy, or using it to gain political power and influence beyond one-man-one-vote. I am ambivalent about the Citizen's United SCOTUS case allowing excessive (unlimited?) money in PACs and politics, especially money from outside of the jurisdiction of the election/candidate. If free speech were to be limited to personal persuasion in spoken and written form, then maybe some controls could be implemented?? But clearly something is off when Soros can buy up elections for Leftist DA's/ AG's and ruin real rule of law and enforcement practices; or Zuckerbucks can be slanted to aid Dem's over Repub's.
A lot more might be said on this topic but perhaps Helen or Lorenzo have already expounded on this at length and can provide a suitable link or two?
Really excellent essay! This point cannot be overemphasized: fascist (reactionary) movements are always a reaction against the threat of Marxism. If leftists want to prevent fascism is the USA, the most effective strategy would be to police their own bad actors rather than celebrate them.
My main response to this is that human nature has not significantly changed in the last 200 years; there have always been impairments to societies ability to talk to itself, policies have been pushed through universities via organizational capture for decades, and citizenry have been denigrated for as long as citizenry existed. The only new attitudes for Westerners are a focusing on patterns of structural oppression through notions of constraint-as-oppression.
This last feature of society *is* new, and it's very frustrating - but it's also a natural or even inevitable outgrowth of high levels of material security, which removed pragmatic checks on idealism. At one time, people valued things like social justice, but they also had clothes to wash, potatoes to pick, and fences to mend. Now everybody is flabby and socialized into a universe without limitations; of course "constraint is oppression."
> The “if you believe X you are a bigoted conspiracy theorist” stigmatisation of wrongful noticing is a hardy perennial in Pravda-model media.
Maybe you mean stigmatisation of wrongful noticing is hardly *novel*?
Elements of these things may have existed, but the sheer scale and networked coordination that is currently being engaged in is new. Sometimes, quantity does have a quality all of its own. Notice the shift in the attitudes, for instance, of the ACLU.
>Mass Fascism does not happen without mass Leninism. Mass Nazism does not happen without mass Stalinism.
Is that so? I think that the history of Japan provides quite a good example of how "Mass Nazism" can happen without anything even resembling strong socialist or communist movement. Not to say that there were no marxists at all, but they had no power to speak of.
Japanese militarism was not Nazism and had a completely different trajectory.
“[U]sers of the social-leverage-and-status strategy often protect their sense of status by simply refusing to read or watch those who speak or write outside their prestige-opinion and luxury-beliefs ecosystem.”
Or, when their media echo chambers do present other opinions, it’s often done via “nut-picking” - presenting fringe figures as representative of the opposition. If suitably inane examples aren’t readily available, straw men will do nicely. Recall Barack Obama’s frequent declarations that “some people believe X, but I believe…,” or “some people say Y, but I say…,” when no sane person ever believed X or said Y.
Too few try to test their beliefs against the best opposing views in an honest search for truth. Instead, many look for ways to label anyone in opposition so that they can dismiss them and their beliefs without having to make an argument.