The sum of all fears for the average Russian has just been averted. The large packet of totalitarian answers to a problem of questionable magnitude has been booted from the State Duma. There has been an air of dread amongst the populace who were waiting to see if nationwide QR-code legislation would make it into law destroying their lives and businesses to separate those vaccinated from plague ridden riff raff. There was an expectation that some sort of Hegelian Dialectic gamesmanship would get a watered down, but still crushing version of this system passed. Thankfully for the sake of the Russian economy and sanity itself this is now not to be. This decision to completely bail on a QR Code apartheid not only comes at an interesting moment in history but has great relevance for Russia itself and issues related to Covid-19 on a global scale.

Screenshot: From the official Instagram account of the State Duma: “The Council of the State Duma unanimously removed the bill on QR codes from consideration”. Interestingly the text says the next big law under consideration is about “punishing pedophiles” even more harshly.

Why was the public so concerned over this, shouldn’t we fight Covid-19?

There was a sort of test run of this QR code system in Moscow. It didn’t last very long and from the onset it was clear that the Russian masses were not going to let laws get in the way of their daily activities as is tradition. Any filtration processes at subway entrances were a joke that caused a complete transport collapse and lasted around 48 hours in total. The boiled down version of this idea mostly applied to restaurants which were forced to check guests for having a vaccination code. There was much resistance to this, and certain crafty restaurateurs saw the value of convincing the government that they were enforcing QR code restrictions while just letting anyone through the door anyways. After Putin came back from one of his trips abroad, this system, which was ever so critical for our safety, vanished into thin air, but it certainly left a bad taste in the public’s mouth and many bankrupt restaurants.

Later a similar project was put into place in Tatarstan with even more violently resisted results. Perhaps if this were to have happened on a national level in one clean sweep it could have broken the Russian economy. The QR madness in Moscow/Tatarstan from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok would have been vastly more devastating than all of Washington’s sanctions packages combined. Perhaps it was a wise choice for a certain President to keep this a “States’ Rights” issue and repeatedly reaffirm that vaccination is a personal choice.

 So why did this happen now?

 People have been asking me for quite some time about the reality of anti-Covid measures here in Russia and what the government is doing. The problem is that to understand today’s Russia you simply cannot think of the state as a monolithic block. There is no Putin dictatorship under a crushing cult of personality with all roads to power leading to an often shirtless God-Emperor. Russia is not the Borg Cube.

There has been a massive unseen war going on behind the walls of government institutions over the pandemic, which explains why Covid policies here have come and gone seemingly at random in various regions. Even at the macro level, there has been a soft push (with the threat of a hard push) for vaccination and yet Putin himself a few weeks ago said something very important about the Omicron Strain…

“Although they say it (Omicron) is not so harmful, some experts even call it live vaccination. <…> Let’s not get ahead of ourselves”.

In political terms this seemed like a big call to just let the whole Covid situation go while having the ability to retract this statement in a few weeks if necessary. It is also a very Russian answer to a problem for things to just magically work themselves out on their own. For those conspiratorially minded it is interesting that this self-vaccinating Omicron Variant of Covid-19 that Putin brought to public attention is accused of being artificially created by the Mainstream Media. This is some dark food for thought for sure.

Going further into the realm of conspiracy, there could be a connection between the absolute failure of negotiations between Russia and the U.S. and finally dropping this QR code legislation. Russia got nothing that it wanted from the Globalists so maybe the Globalists are going to get nothing from Russia? Moscow’s participation in the big school play may be over for good.

What does this mean for Russia?

Both sides of the Covid fight in Russia have done a good job of building up enemy lists and a deep seeded hatred for the other. When one side wins in this type of scenario we can all guess what is going to happen next. There could be some major restructuring and firings coming up within the next year as revenge time is surely nigh.

For the Russian masses this will show that being obstinate pays off. Very often people of questionable intelligence vastly overestimate the ability of the individual to make change in society, but one thing the individual can do is resist, and when the majority of the population decides to grind the wheels the engine comes to a halt. The more collective mindset of Russians has saved the day and the Russian cultural traits of complete disregard for rules and brutal obstinacy have been revalidated for another generation.

What does this mean in the context of Covid-19 globally?

There is now a major nation that has essentially given up on anti-Covid measures. It is also a global player with some significant media and internet presence that can advertise this fact. While Australians are being beaten and gassed for not wearing a mask at some bar, Russia will probably say to the world how great it is that they defeated Covid using measures that had a minimal impact on the rights of citizens and now everything is back to the Old Normal. They may even broadcast the whole notion that Omicron is a passive solution to the problem and that there is no threat.

This will make Russia become even more attractive to Western Conservatives and we should expect a wave of anti-vaxxer immigration to the land of bears and snow. You may scoff at this notion, but when one gets emails about this issue daily, things look a lot different.

But of course, if Russia completely drops its war on Covid, that will mean that Russians will suddenly present a “danger” to the populations of foreign nations and may be banned from traveling to most if not all of the West regardless of vaccination. And going to Russia as a Westerner could mean the death of your travel future as you’ve been tainted by their lack of anti-Covid measures. That may sound insane but it is bureaucratically logical and a natural next step in the ever devolving Monopolar vs. Multipolar conflict that we are all in against our will.

At his year-end press conference, Russian President Putin said that “a woman is a woman and a man is a man,” and he expressed his confidence that the religious denominations of the Russian Federation would have the moral fiber to resist the intrusion of the corrupted and degenerate values of the Western world.

Alas, the Western World has no such moral fiber. The West has cut itself off from its past and is tottering on the premise that it can survive by acculturating its youth to disbelieve in the West. The purpose of Western education is the deracination of Western youth and their alienation from Western culture. That is what insouciant families pay taxes and tuition for.

Every year in my Christmas column I point out that the voices that connect us to the past have been demonized and cut off, leaving us in a country without a foundation. Moreover, Hollywood, TV, media, Internet, and educational systems at every level in every state are working openly or surreptitiously to rewrite the history of Western culture as a white racist enterprise that must be overthrown. The purpose of public schools has been converted to brainwashing children into a guilt complex due to the color of their skin and to installing a sense of entitlement into the minds of BIPOC children. Parents protest but ideological anti-white school boards pay no attention.

In other words, what education does in the Western world is to deracinate the white ethnicities and elevate the immigrant-invaders.

Western education has already produced a generation or more of people who have no idea who they are. “Western Civ Has To Go” was a student chant in US universities as long ago as the 1960s. For decades few graduating classes have ever read a word of Shakespeare. Indeed, their proficiency in the English language is so poor they are incapable of reading him. The literary and artistic metaphors used to convey meaning are unknown to them. The classic literature of Western civilization in which the real challenges of life are revealed are replaced by Woke and minority whining. Essentially, the educational systems produce illiterate barbarians. The smartest ones are the dumbest of all. They are the unthinking geeks who produce the police state control devices and robotics that are inherent in the digital revolution. The purpose of the digital revolution is to remove independence, purpose, and meaning from human life. We are not even going to be permitted to drive cars. Privacy is not only a disappearing value, it is becoming a non-word, a word whose meaning is incomprehensible to all but the very old.

George Santayana said that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” It did not occur to him that soon there would be people, indeed entire countries, without a past.

European cities that survived the mass bombing of civilian cities by the British and Americans during WW II have ancient buildings, cathedrals, and narrow streets that remind people that there was a past. But not Americans. In the US everything is constantly remade. Neighborhoods are torn down and reappear as something else. I live in what was until a few years ago an old Florida community, a charming, quiet place of beauty. Today almost every house has been knocked down and the lots divided and subdivided. Everywhere massive commercial rentals have gone up that sleep 20 to 30 people despite zoning that prohibits it. A live community with a history fell victim to outside real estate speculators and developers and is now populated with holiday makers numbering 20 or more times the former population. If a person who lived here 10 years ago returned, he would not recognize the place. His house no longer exists. His neighbors’ homes no longer exist. Nothing that he remembers exists.

This happens to entire cities. I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, but today I cannot find my way in the city. All landmarks are gone.

Now cities are removing monuments that represented memory, street names that represented memory, school names that represented memory in order to cleanse themselves of what they have been indoctrinated to believe is a racist past.

When a governor of the state of Virginia ordered the removal and destruction of a statue of Robert E. Lee, we see not only the success of critical race theory in brainwashing a weak-minded governor of Virginia, the Virginia state legislature, and the Virginia media, but also the acquiescence to the erasure of memory. Americans have become a people without a past.

All of the Western nations no longer exist. Nations are reduced to countries without borders as there is scant limit to influx by peoples of alien languages, cultures, and behaviors. All Western nations are Towers of Babel. In Europe religious life is found only among Islamist immigrant-invaders. They are building mosques (churches) everywhere. As I often ask, how long has it been since a Christian church was built in Europe or the UK.

Even the most famous Christian cathedral of Europe–Notre Dame–is being refashioned as a multicultural shrine with street art and modern art murals creating with mood lighting “emotional spaces” in place of confessional boxes and medieval integrity of the Christian cathedral. In effect, Notre Dame, and thereby Christianity, is being vandalized and adulterated, and the Pope apparently signed off on it.

So what is the West when the West is without nations, without Christianity, and without a past?

It is a nothing. And this is what the Russians and Chinese are beginning to see.

Every great family and every great civilization has some roots in sin and crimes. What the Western world has forgotten is that they also have roots in accomplishments, moral, artistic, cultural, economic, political. We should not forget that man is fallen. There are good and evil that contend for his soul. It was Christianity that gave the powerless a voice capable of challenging the voice of raw power. It was this voice, together with material interests, that produced accountable government, itself subject to a rule of law.

Today the rule of law is disappearing. The US Constitution is in tatters. Everyone has become a tyrannical dictator. Not only presidents, chancellors, and prime ministers, but also employers, school boards, university administrators, mayors, governors, airlines, restaurants, sports organizations, issue mandates that are violations of the Nuremberg Laws laid down by the United States at the WW II war crime tribunals. Now the government in Washington refuses to obey its own creation, finding that Big Pharma profits, control over citizens, and perhaps darker agendas are more important than the rule of law.

The “watchdog media” are silent on the transgression but are shrill in propagandizing the criminal agenda. In other words, there is no honest media to hold government accountable, so government does what it desires. This is the definition of tyranny.

paulcraigroberts.org

In the recent past I have written about “The Real Reason the Right Continues to Lose Every Ideological Battle” in connection to its fundamental blindness that the Liberalism it supports is the source of the “woke” madness around us, i.e. putting the individual as a little god-like figure on a pedestal is not going to create a strong group-value focused culture. That piece was oriented towards the English-speaking Right, but the International Right who has no particular addiction to Individualism still fails to intellectually triumph over the “value system” of the rainbow color haired freak show that is pushing their global ideological agenda. This International Right would include Viktor Orban’s Illiberalism that wants to add a counterbalancing element of “us” into the “me”-focused Western-Democratic system and Vladimir Putin’s highly-undefined call to “Russian Conservatism” for his country and Conservatism of various forms for the natural diversity of the upcoming Multipolar World.

On a personal level it is these sorts of new ideological movements and answers to the doomed-scenario of Liberalism that are what give me the strength to get out of bed in the morning. An alternative to the Cultural Masochism and Hedonism of the West exists and there are nations on Earth, in fact some could say the majority, that want to embrace an existence rooted in their traditions and culture rejecting the homogenized and atomized meaningless future of a completely Postmodern Globalized World.

There really are truly brilliant ideas coming from the Eurasian landmass east of where the Berlin Wall once stood, and yet they remain fully in the realm of the academic and abstract, as food for thought and speeches at the Kremlin. For someone who lives within Russia it is amazing what level of support Conservatism and Traditionalism have and yet how little has been implemented systematically or even defined. The slogan “Traditional Values” is a massive hit across the territory of the former USSR. It is two words that have great power and an inherent attractiveness to the people in these parts. It is a powerful short message that rivals “Diversity” or “Human Rights” in its potential implications, which themselves behave like self-justifying arguments. This is a truly massive ideological development within Russia that should be affecting public policy, raising levels of passion within the nation and making big changes and yet Russia systemically remains Liberal and the upcoming generation of Russians are going to be just as broken and raised by TikTok as their Western counterparts. This is so frustrating, so obvious and yet why this is happening, for years I had not the ability to put into words.

But then by random chance I heard a story from over two thousand years ago that explains everything. This tale from Ancient Greece lays out exactly why the Russians and Hungarians are paralyzed in the face of such seemingly weak intellectual competition from the “wokeness” brigades. At the moment I finished listening to this story, I knew that this is why we are losing. This scenario of confusion from countless centuries past is exactly the reason why Russian Conservatism and Traditional Values and Hungarian Illiberalism never leave the realm of fancy public speeches. The star of the show is Socrates and you can listen to it in vastly greater detail here.

The locals in Ancient Greece wanted their young men to grow up courageous for they thought that this quality is the most important for having a great society made up of great men. They approached Socrates, the smartest gent around, for ideas on how to make their boys into courageous men.

Socrates explained to them that they would need to find an expert in courage, because how can you instill something in youths if you do not have expert knowledge in it? So the question became who are the most courageous men in society?

They decided unanimously that it would be best to consult two generals who had real combat experience. These men fought for their lives many times and came out the winners so surely they should know everything about courage. Who is more courageous than a highly successful battle-hardened warrior?

The generals were quite sure that they knew exactly what courage was and that “armored fighting” as they called it (i.e. training for real war, not sports like boxing) was the best way to make wimpy boys into tough men. The generals were absolutely sure of this.

However, prodding questions from Socrates showed them that they really didn’t have any definition of what courage was. Would going into an easy battle with little risk be courageous? Would the opposite, going into certain death be courage or madness? Doesn’t it take courage to stand up for what is right at great risk even in a social context? Is the battlefield really the only place for courage? Since childbearing has significant risks, does that make all mothers courageous?

Long story short, at the end of it all, no one was able to define what courage is in a consistent way and yet everyone remained absolutely sure that courage was in fact a very good and absolutely necessary thing, and that the generals possessed it.

They were stuck with the paradox of being absolutely sure that something was right and critical for future generations, but at the same time being completely unable to define it or understand it, thus making any attempts to instill this value on society essentially shots in the dark with no systemic methodology to guarantee results.

The story ends with all parties shrugging their shoulders and going home, nothing changed.

 Now if we change the word “courage” to “Traditional Values” then we get a perfect carbon copy of what’s happening across the Multipolar World – everyone is sure that Traditional Values are righteous and necessary, yet they remain ultimately undefined, meaning they are impossible to implement into law (perhaps excluding the Islamic Republic of Iran), instill in the youth of tomorrow or at the very least propagate through the media. If you cannot even define and put structure to your value system how the hell are you going to base your society on it? This is the maddening factor that burns anyone of intellectual acumen in Russia. The overwhelming majority is in favor of this brilliant slogan “Traditional Values” and yet what this means is completely undefined. You cannot triumph on the battlefield of ideas when you are not sure of what you are talking about. Any Conservative would say that “feelings” are a weak argument, but that is really the only thing standing behind Traditional Values, a gut feeling that this is right, much in the same way the generals had a hunch that armored fighting is the best way to bring out courage in teenagers.

Although this story about Socrates is very telling, the ancient Greeks had some advantages that allowed them some slack in how they raised their youth. The Athenians probably did not have to deal with big money NGOs, Hollywood, and every form of media pushing an “anti-courage” agenda. A shrug-your-shoulders, hope-the-kids-turn-out-alright, way of thinking is not what is needed, especially for Russia, Hungary or elsewhere in a partially Globalized World. Ideology in a sense is a bit of a zero-sum game. All of us have to have some sort of ideological structure in our minds, and if no one can promote an idea besides wokeness then guess who’s going to win? The time has come to define what Traditional Values are, and what Illiberalism would look like. This is the time to build the apologetics to justify these “feels” based Right Wing dream projects.
So if we are to suppose that Traditional Values are the way to go then what does that mean?

Even something as basic as marriage needs to be analyzed, broken down and structured into a coherent logic for 21st century Traditionalism. We argue that marriage is between one man and one woman because it was “tradition”, but it was also tradition to only be allowed to get married when the man had the infrastructure to provide for the wife. So no house = no marriage? Do brides need their fathers to sign off on them getting wed, that’s how it used to be? It was also tradition to harsh punishments on acts of adultery (if it went public), do we need to bring this back? Public shaming kept children from being born out of wedlock, does this mean we should have a 21st century shame-based punishment system? In the past if a man died often his family would look after the widow, so does that mean that we have to create a system of allocating widows by some sort of lineage to be taken care of in old age? In the olden days men had the responsibility for and authority over their wife and children, how exactly is that going to work in our times after generations of Liberalism, or is this part of tradition to leave on the cutting room floor? Just the single question of what marriage would look like in a 21st century Traditionalist society has gone completely undiscussed and is absolutely massive in scale, thus it has no argumentation or apologetics for the promotion of this way of looking at marriage, thus it isn’t going to happen, while in the West marriage to babies, dogs and ghosts will probably become a reality.

To put it bluntly, if we are going to do this whole Multipolar World filled with a renaissance of various Traditional Values thing, then we are going to need to actually do it and in a systematic way. Somehow a concept as goofy and inherently flawed as “intersectionality” got from the academic/think tank realm, to the activism sphere, then to the media and has now become a dominant ideological pillar of the Western World being spread globally by big corporations and Hollywood incidental PR. If our Traditional Values are actually worth saving then they must be able to do the same. If certain key players in Hungary and Russia really want to save their societies it is going to take funding think tanks, big media projects, and a lot of PR in the entertainment sphere. This is no longer an option but a necessity, you simply cannot expect to win with ideas that you yourselves to not fully understand nor challenge.

The Western hemisphere is suffering from a dearth of political talent at a time when a wave of Cultural Marxist ideology is being forced on the people, already suffering under the physical and mental strain of a pandemic and its draconian response.

This month, New Zealand’s Green Party, which shares power with Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s ruling Labour Party, removed a portrait of Winston Churchill, the famed British statesman, from a public area in the Parliament House. It seems that the left-leaning lawmakers could not handle the daily reminder as to what a devoted leader of the people truly looks like. Thus they proceeded to do what the left does best, which is to play the deranged game of cancel culture with their own history.

The left-wing beef with the ‘British Bulldog’ is that he promoted imperialistic views, as well as hostility towards socialism, so apparently we’re supposed to forget that the British statesman helped to save the world from the scourge of Nazi Germany during World War II. Thus, without any democratic debate on the matter, Churchill’s visage was swiftly moved to a less conspicuous place lest anymore leftist sensitivities come under assault. In Churchill’s place the Greens said they will display “new art by a tangata whenua artist.”

What the asinine stunt by the New Zealand Leftists effectively demonstrates is the pathetic depths to which statesmanship has fallen. After all, are we not in the midst of a pandemic? With the fate of humanity on the line, how is it conceivable that the idea of removing the portrait of a dead white man – and not necessarily the most infamous in the rogue’s gallery – entered anybody’s head? What better way for these politicians to deflect attention away from their own questionable leadership skills than by dragging up the deficiencies of past statesmen?

As to be expected, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern passed on a very good opportunity to take the steam out of the woke movement’s global inquisition as she expressed ambivalence over Churchill’s removal.

“I personally do not care where portraits hang in Parliament – I care about what we do in this place,” she told reporters. “We’ve got a responsibility to look after New Zealanders in a massive crisis we’re facing.”

“Frankly, who hangs on the wall at the time we do it – I don’t care.”

The Green Party’s hatred of Sir Winston Churchill is born out of a hatred of the western values and freedoms that he fought for: Democracy, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Religion, Freedom of Association.

Looking fwd to welcoming Sir Winston Churchill to Nationals offices. https://t.co/CaAAw6vc7T

— Simeon Brown (@SimeonBrownMP) August 10, 2021

How is it possible that Ardern “doesn’t care” about paying a very humble homage to a talented statesman who helped forge cooperation between New Zealand and Great Britain during World War II in their mutual effort to defeat Hitler? Churchill, in the face of a real existential crisis, demonstrated political acuity and aptitude and not a moment too late. Ardern, facing her own crisis that goes by the name of Covid, unfortunately cannot say the same.

Although her island nation of some 5 million inhabitants has recorded just 26 Covid-related deaths since the beginning of the pandemic and under 3,000 confirmed infections, Ardern just announced that New Zealand will keep its borders closed to international travellers (with exceptions made for Google founder, Larry Page, of course) until the end of the year.

In February, after three new local COVID-19 cases were reported in Auckland, Ardern  ordered everyone to stay home except for essential shopping and essential work. In March, the entire country went into full lockdown for an entire month.  The message is clear: New Zealanders, much like other places where the simple pleasures in life – shopping, traveling, eating at a restaurant – are becoming severely hindred with the introduction of vaccine passports, will be forced to forever coordinate their life plans with that of a viral outbreak.

Is that the sort of action a leader cut from the same cloth as Winston Churchill would have advised under similar circumstances? It’s very difficult to imagine. Regrettably, the truly great Western leaders of the type that once dominated the world stage are gone, and it seems that that is no accident. As the trajectory of international politics moves from the national to the global, the very worst type of politician – weak, craven and more subservient to global institutions, like George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, and their warped ideologies – have been thrust into the spotlight.

These new and very underachieving ‘woke’ leaders, typified by the likes of US President Joe Biden, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel are very poor substitutes for the leaders of yesterday who possessed the conviction, spirit and courage necessary for the success of Western democracy.

Although they had their flaws, is it very difficult to imagine, for example, former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and ex-French President Jacques Chirac – two fiercely independent European leaders who, together with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, expressed their opposition to the US and UK invasion of Iraq in 2003 – opening up Europe’s borders to accommodate millions of illegal aliens. Yet that is exactly what Macron, the former Rothschild investment banker, and Merkel have succeeded in doing to Europe, where in the year 2015 alone over 1 million illegal migrants entered various European states for a taxpayer-subsidized lifestyle. That inexplicable decision has an American version now furiously underway on the US-Mexico border – during the peak of a pandemic, no less – thanks to the destructive policies put in place by the Biden administration.

At the same time, Brussels has committed itself to promoting the transgender ideology that first took root in the United States before spreading around the Western hemisphere. In fact, Jacinda Ardern’s New Zealand has the dubious distinction of being home to the world’s first transgender Olympian. In the Tokyo Summer Games, Laurel Hubbard competed for New Zealand in the weightlifting event.

Now, the Eastern European nation of Hungary, which has just passed child protection laws similar to that of Russia’s that forbid sexual propaganda in kindergartens, schools, on television and in advertisements, faces severe sanctions from Brussels for daring to do the right thing. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who singlehandedly halted the flow of illegal migration into the continent with the construction of a border fence along the Serbian border, said he would let the Hungarian people decide on the issue in a referendum.

Hungarians will be asked whether they support the teaching of sexual themes in schools without parental consent, and whether they believe gender reassignment procedures, complete with puberty blockers, hormone drugs and radical surgeries, should be promoted among children.

Now that the global mainstream media largely supports open borders, transgender ideology, and every other leftist narrative (which, by the way, makes the question of premeditated collusion a viable one), the importance of strong and courageous leaders to stand up to the madness is of the utmost importance. Yet for every Viktor Orbán and Vladimir Putin, who seem to rule with the best interest of their people and nation at heart, there are one hundred venal and spineless leaders who would sell their country and people down the river for a song.

The reason for the removal of Winston Churchill’s portrait from the New Zealand Parliament had nothing to do with the shortcomings of the British statesman, and everything to do with the glaring deficiencies of today’s lackluster liberal leaders who could not bear to be reminded of their mediocrity every time they passed the picture of the great man in the hall.

Describing the atmosphere in 10 Downing Street last summer, Sir Jeremy Farrar, the infectious disease expert who heads the Wellcome Trust, speaks of a government “vulnerable to what looked like racketeering”. When he sat down at a meeting chaired by Boris Johnson, he was struck by the presence of snake oil salesmen looking for contracts for Covid-19 rapid testing that everybody knew was useless.

“It sometimes felt,” he writes in his memoir Spike, “as if I had strayed on a set for The Third Man, that fantastic Carol Reed film of a Graham Greene novel, which features a black market for penicillin.”

The analogy is telling because Greene’s post-war Vienna and the Johnson government convey the same sense of pervasive sleaze. Furthermore, Johnson’s personality has much in common with that of Harry Lime, the anti-hero played by Orson Welles, who exudes bonhomie but is entirely egocentric and dangerous to anybody who gets in his way.

Optimists may convince themselves that the racketeers and the snake oil salesmen saw their opportunity to profit from the chaos at the height of the pandemic, but hope the same will not necessarily happen in more normal times. But, as scandal has succeeded scandal over the last two years, I wonder if we are not entering a more corrupt era in British political life. The situation feels more and more like that in 18th century Britain or in the resource-rich states of the Middle East, where those without the right connections know that they stand no chance of doing profitable business.

My impression was confirmed by the revelations over the last week about the secretive “Advisory Board” within the Conservative Party that brings together wealthy donors in an exclusive club that some members have paid £250,000 a year to join. The club, which is acknowledged nowhere in party publications, brings with it the advantage of regular meetings with Johnson and Rishi Sunak.

What these super-rich donors reportedly have in common is that they are Thatcherite free marketeers, hostile to regulation and state intervention. They include the people who have long supported Johnson during his rise to power and presumably expect their money to win them access and influence. Denials by the Tories that the donors benefit in any material way from their largesse is incredible.

As with everything else done by Johnson’s government and the Tory party, such furtive fundraising from the super-rich has its farcical side. It is orchestrated by Ben Elliot, who was given the job by the prime minister because of his high society links. Elliott is famous for running a “concierge” company called Quintessentially, which caters for the most eccentric needs of celebrities, such as sending a dozen albino peacocks to a party for Jennifer Lopez.

But as Johnson cultivates the plutocrats and puts their minds at rest about his populist pledges, he is also promising the exact opposite to former Labour voters in the Midlands and North of England. All politicians make promises they cannot keep, but there is a new shamelessness about the process: Johnson boasts of “tearing up” the town and country planning regulations, just as property interests donate £17.9m to the Conservative party in the two years he has been prime minister.

The rising power of the plutocrats, the contradictory promises to all, and the increasing smell of corruption is scarcely surprising. This pattern prevailed in the US during Donald Trump’s presidency and still does in India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The so-called pluto-populist regimes tend to behave in similar ways because they all rely on an uneasy alliance between plutocrats, nationalists and social conservatives.

The interests of the members of this coalition are very different, so it can only be kept together by promising everything to everybody, while giving special privileges to party loyalists. This requires breaking down the division between political parties and government by reducing the independence of the civil service and the judiciary, and bringing them under political control .

The danger inherent in pluto-populism is that the glue that holds it together is rejection of a status quo that many people find unacceptable for quite opposite reasons. Members of the “Advisory Board” do not want more state intervention, but voters in Hartlepool and Sunderland do. Trump won the White House by promising to help de-industrialised America, but in practice he gave priority to the traditional Republican programme of tax reductions for the wealthy and deregulation for business. Populist pledges, like rebuilding the US infrastructure, were swiftly forgotten.

The essential glue for pluto-populist nationalist governments is anger, usually directed against a minority such as Black people in the US or Muslims in India. In Britain, the need for this glue is the motive for the “culture wars”, most of which are imported from the US or spring from an exaggerated or fabricated domestic threat. A piece of graffiti on a statue of Winston Churchill is inflated into a wholesale assault on the totems of British nationalism.

In Britain racism tends to be half-concealed, as with the government’s confused attack on taking the knee, but in the US it is now startlingly open, as shown by the Republican governor of Missouri this week pardoning the couple who pointed guns at a Black Lives Matter demonstration.

Pluto-populist regimes are by definition unstable because they rely on stirring up division and they cannot make good on their promises to their different constituencies. Though demanding law and order, they tend, once in office, to show a contempt for the law and an intolerance of media criticism, combined with measures to suppress it.

All this creates the sort of generalised instability in which racketeers flourish. The pandemic created optimum conditions for snake oil salesmen who could use the panic last year as a means to make vast profits. Those who handed out huge contracts to companies with no means to fulfil them could blame the pressures of the crisis.

What makes the revelations about the donors’ club ominous is that it is only the latest in a series of scandals that predate Johnson and the pandemic. David Cameron was only mildly criticised by MPs for showing “lack of judgment” in the vigour with which he lobbied for Greensill in its bid to access government finance.

Overall, I have a sense that the Covid-19 emergency has only served to accelerate the impulse towards a sleazier and more corrupt Britain, one in which Harry Lime and his racketeers would have felt very much at home.

counterpunch.org

“The retreat of the West began with the fall of communism in 1989”, the political philosopher, John Gray, writes. “Our triumphal elites lost their sense of reality, and in a succession of attempts to remake the world in their image [… they have brought about] the result that Western states are weaker, and more endangered than they were at any point in the Cold War”.

The West’s decomposition, Gray outlines, is not only geo-political; it is cultural and intellectual. Western countries now contain powerful bodies of opinion that regard their own civilisation as a uniquely pernicious force. In this hyper-liberal view, which is heavily represented in higher education, Western values of freedom and toleration are now understood to be little more than code for White racial domination.

Whether Western élites are now capable of transforming their vacuum-sealed zeitgeist is questionable. Rather, the underlying, deeply moralising approach of this hyper-liberalism limits discourse to moral stances that are simplistic, held to be self-evident, and morally-impeccable. Arguing realpolitik pros-and-cons today is not far from being a prohibited enterprise. Indeed, shifts in the global strategic paradigm, or indeed of the wider challenges that it faces, are not addressed in any serious fashion. For, that would demand a realism and a strategic grasp, which mainstream western opinion-leaders reject as defeatist – if not immoral.

The U.S. Metro-élite has converted cultural attainment into economic privilege and vice versa. It controls what Jonathan Rauch describes in his new book, The Constitution of Knowledge, as the epistemic regime—the massive network of academics and analysts who determine what is true. Most of all, it possesses the power of consecration; it determines what gets recognized and esteemed, and what gets disdained and dismissed.

Just to be clear, this dynamic is on course to become the biggest dividing line in global politics – as it already is in U.S. and EU politics. It is getting worse both in the U.S. and Europe, and it is going to leach out into geo-politics. It already has. “It’s not what you want; but it’s coming anyway”. And if the long drift of history is any guide, it will bring increased tensions and the risk of war.

Here is one sample (taken from Ishaan Tharoor’s daily column in the Washington Post):

It’s one of the least surprising convergences on the planet. Fox News host Tucker Carlson — arguably the most influential voice on the American Right, absent a certain former president — is in Hungary. Every episode of his prime-time show this week will be televised from Budapest.

Carlson, as my colleague Michael Kranish charted in a probing profile last month, has become the “voice of White grievance”… the most well-known proponent of a brand of far-right, nativist politics, popularized by Trump, and now pushed further by a coterie of pundits and politicians who are steadily taking hold of the Republican Party … They are virulently anti-immigrant and sceptical of free trade and corporate power … They embrace an often religious and implicitly racist brand of nationalism, while waging a relentless culture war against the perceived threats of multiculturalism, feminism, LGBT rights – and liberalism writ large.

The Fox News host is hardly the only right-wing American pointing to Orban’s example. In a recent speech, J.D. Vance, a venture capitalist campaigning on a folksy, nationalist platform in the Republican Senate primary in Ohio, derided the “childless left” in the United States as agents of “civilizational collapse”. He then pushed for Orban’s agenda: In Hungary, “they offer loans to newly married couples that are forgiven at some point later if those couples have actually stayed together and had kids,” Vance said. “Why can’t we do that here? Why can’t we actually promote family formation”?

Our point here is not political. It is not about the Washington Post’s or Orbàn’s perceived merits. It is about ‘otherness’. It is about the refusal to concede that the ‘other’ may hold an authentic alternative view (and identity) – even if you disagree with it, and do not accept its premise. In short, it is about absence of empathy.

The ‘creative class’ (a term coined by Richard Florida), didn’t set out to be an élite, dominating class, David Brooks, the author of Bobos in Paradise, (himself a liberal NY Times columnist) claims. It just happened. The new class was supposed to foster progressive values, and economic growth. But, instead birthed resentment, alienation, and endless political dysfunction.

The ‘bobos’ didn’t necessarily come from money, and they were proud of that; they had secured their places in selective universities and in the job market through drive and intelligence exhibited from an early age, they believed. But by 2000, the information economy and the tech boom were showering the highly educated with cash.

Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class lauded the economic and social benefits that the creative class had brought – by which he meant, more or less the ‘bobos’ of Brooks’ earlier christening (the Bourgeois Bohemians – or ‘bobos’. ‘Bohemian’ in the sense of coming from the narcissistic Woodstock generation; and ‘bourgeois’ in the sense that post-Woodstock, this ‘liberal’ class later evolved into the mercantilist top echelons of cultural, corporate and Wall Street power paradigms).

Florida was a champion of this class. And Brooks admits that he looked on them benignly too: “The educated class is in no danger of becoming a self-contained caste”, he wrote in 2000. “Anybody with the right degree, job, and cultural competencies can join.”

That turned out to be one of the most naive sentences he had have ever written, Brooks admits.

Every once in a while, a revolutionary class comes into being which disrupts old structures. In the 19th century, it was the bourgeoisie, the capitalist merchant class. In the latter part of the 20th century, as the information economy revved up and the industrial middle class hollowed out, it was Creative Class people, Brooks argues. “Over the past two decades, the rapidly growing economic, cultural, and social power of [this class] has generated a global backlash that is growing more and more vicious, deranged, and apocalyptic. And yet this backlash is not without basis. The creative class, or whatever you want to call them, have coalesced into an insular, intermarrying Brahmin elite that dominates culture, media, education, and tech”.

This class, who were accreting enormous wealth and were congregating into America’s large metro areas, created gaping inequalities within cities, as high housing prices pushed middle- and lower-class people out. “Over the past decade and a half,” Florida wrote, “nine in ten U.S. metropolitan areas have seen their middle classes shrink. As the middle has been hollowed out, neighbourhoods across America are dividing into large areas of concentrated disadvantage – and much smaller areas of concentrated affluence”.

This class also came to dominate left-wing parties around the world that were formerly vehicles for the working class. “We’ve pulled these parties further left on cultural issues (prizing cosmopolitanism and questions of identity), while watering down or reversing traditional Democratic positions on trade and unions. As creative-class people enter left-leaning parties, working-class people tend to leave”.

These polarising cultural and ideological differences, now precisely overlay economic differences. In 2020, Joe Biden took the votes of just 500 or so counties, yet together these 500 account for 71 percent of American economic activity. Trump, by contrast, won more than 2,500 counties. Yet, those 2,500 together generate only 29 percent of GDP. This is why the Dems taunt Republicans, who decline the Covid vaccine as ‘parasites’ – as those Blue counties are the ones that overwhelmingly pay the bills that result from infection.

An analysis by Brookings and The Wall Street Journal found that just 13 years ago, Democratic and Republican areas were at near parity on prosperity and income measures. Now they are divergent, and getting more so.

If Republicans and Democrats talk as though they are living in different realities – it is because they are.

“I got a lot wrong about the bobos”, Brooks says. “I didn’t anticipate how aggressively we would move to assert our cultural dominance, the way we would seek to impose elite values through speech and thought codes. I underestimated the way the creative class would successfully raise barriers around itself to protect its economic privilege … And I underestimated our intolerance of ideological diversity”.

“When you tell a large chunk of the country that their voices are not worth hearing, they are going to react badly—and they have. The working class today, vehemently rejects not just the creative class but the epistemic regime that it controls … This dominance however has also engendered a rebellion among its own offspring.

“The members of the creative class laboured to get their children into good colleges. But they’ve also jacked up college costs and urban housing prices so high that their children struggle under crushing financial burdens. This revolt has boosted Bernie Sanders in the U.S., Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France, and so on.

“Part of the youth revolt is driven by economics, but part is driven by moral contempt. Younger people look at the generations above them and see people who talk about equality but drive inequality. Members of the younger generation see the Clinton-to-Obama era—the formative years for the creative class’s sensibility—as the peak of neoliberal bankruptcy”.

The resonance with Russia in the 1840s and 1860s, with the radicalisation of the offspring generation from their Liberal parents, is apt.

The wider geo-political point is that if Orbàn, the leader of a EU member-state is dismissed so peremptorily as a ‘Trumpist’, backward nativist bigot – we may easily predict the absence of empathy and understanding for other world leaders: whether they be Xi, Raisi or Putin.

We are dealing here with the ideology of an aspirant ruling class that aims to hoard wealth and position, whilst flaunting its immaculate progressive and globalist credentials. Intractable culture wars, and an epistemic crisis, in which key factual and scientific questions have been politicised, is essentially nothing more than a bid to retain power, by those who stand at the apex of this ‘Creative Class’ – a tight circle of hugely wealthy oligarchs.

Even so, schools are pressured to teach a single version of history, private corporations sack employees for deviant opinions, and cultural institutions act as guardians of orthodoxy. The prototype for these practices is the U.S., which still proclaims its singular history and divisions as the source of emulation for every contemporary society. In much of the world, the woke movement is regarded with indifference, or – as in the case of France, where Macron has denounced it as “racialising” society. But wherever this American agenda prevails, society is no longer liberal in any historically recognisable sense. Knock away the myth, and the liberal way of life can be seen essentially, to have been an historical accident.

What accident?

“In 2007, Alan Greenspan, the former chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, was asked which candidate he was supporting in the forthcoming presidential election. “We are fortunate that, thanks to globalisation, policy decisions in the U.S. have been largely replaced by global market forces,” he replied of the contest between Barack Obama and John McCain. “National security aside, it hardly makes any difference who will be the next president. The world is governed by market forces.”

(It was Greenspan’s policies that propelled the bobos to become the global elect, and which made them fabulously wealthy.)

“The complacency of Greenspan represented the apex of neoliberalism, a term often misunderstood and overused, but which remains the best shorthand for the policies that have shaped the global economy as we know it: privatisation, tax cuts, inflation targeting and anti-trade union laws. Rather than being subject to democratic pressures – such as elections – these measures were portrayed as irreversible. “I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation,” Tony Blair declared in his speech to the 2005 Labour Party conference: “You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer.”

But this proved a false dawn. “I’ve found a flaw [in my ideology],” Greenspan told a Congressional hearing during the 2008 Great Financial Crisis. “I don’t know how significant, or permanent it is.

You have to watch this. You really do. It’s jaw-dropping. It’s a new CIA recruitment ad:

She is an unnamed Latina Millennial who says she has been “diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder,” and is “cisgender.” She goes on to say, “I am intersectional, but my existence is not a box-checking exercise,” and that she had doubts about her place at the agency, but then decided she would refuse “to internalize misguided, patriarchal ideas of what a woman can or should be.”

Here’s one in which a CIA librarian talks about how awesome it is that he can talk about being gay at work, and how affirming the CIA is:

Here’s a clip from a blind woman talking about how she feared rejection when she applied at the CIA, but it’s such a caring and inclusive employer that it all worked out. A still from her video:

By Eric ZUESSE

The difference between “progressive” and “liberal” gets to the core of what politics in the real world is actually about, and of whether the nation is being controlled by the public (a democracy), or instead is controlled by the tiny percentage of the population who are enormously wealthy (an aristocracy — a capitalistic dictatorship, or also called “fascism” — so that the public are actually the nation’s subjects, instead of the nation’s citizens). Whereas progressivism is 100% supportive of democracy, liberalism is supportive of control by an elite, but one that supposedly represents the interests of the public. There is a big difference between progressivism and liberalism. Most simply phrased: Aristocrats always control the public by employing the popular mythology so as to motivate the majority to accept their own subordination to the aristocracy; and, whereas liberals support that, progressives don’t. This deception by the aristocracy minimizes the amount of physical coercion that will be needed in order for them to control the public. Progressives reject any mythology, and oppose any aristocracy. Liberals simply do not. Conservatives are the aristocracy. The noblesse oblige conservatives are the liberal aristocrats who say that they serve the public interest, but the other aristocrats say that they have no such obligation, and that their being an aristocrat proves their worthiness. And that is the way things function, in the real world. The ‘news’-media are important in deceiving the public so as to enable the aristocracy to control, and this is the reason why aristocrats buy ‘news’-media even regardless of whether those ‘news’-media are directly profitable: owning the ‘news’-media is providing a major service to the entire aristocracy, and therefore becomes repaid to such an owner in many other ways — all aristocrats want to please that member. It’s gratitude to a fellow-aristocrat, and that check can be cashed in many different ways.

On 15 August 2020, I headlined “How Billionaires Took Over Liberalism and Destroyed It” and described as follows the difference between “progressivism” and “liberalism”:

Whereas conservative media rely unashamedly upon the existing popular mythology, liberal media need to rely upon that but to pretend not to, and to be instead ‘humanitarian’ and ‘enlightened’ in a more tolerant and open-minded sense: they specialize in hypocrisy — it’s liberal aristocrats’ particular style of art-form; they’re the ‘not conservative’ type of aristocrats. They pretend to be what they aren’t (champions of democracy — which they actually despise and crave to overcome, if it exists at all).

Progressive media (to the extent they exist at all, which is only very slight, anywhere) avoid both hypocrisy and mythology: they are openly anti-aristocratic, and rejecting also any mythology — they are populist, while not affirming the popular (or any) mythology. (By contrast: conservative ‘populists’ are committed to the existing popular mythology, and can therefore be manipulated by openly conservative aristocrats — they can be “Tories,” or even “Nazis,” and they can therefore vote against their own “class interests.” It’s stupid, but conservative ‘populists’ nonetheless do it routinely.)

As a result of this (since the progressives’ appeal — rejecting both the aristocracy and the mythology — is so small), politics almost invariably pits conservatives against liberals, and therefore promotes dictatorship (rule of the nation by its aristocracy), either way.

What’s true for news-media is true also for politicians; and U.S. President Joe Biden is a liberal, very definitely NOT a progressive. Misunderstanding his ideology (as being ‘progressive’) is causing many people to misunderstand his motivations, and to misunderstand his policies. Here’s an example of this type of misunderstanding:

On April 23rd, Robert Bridge headlined at Strategic Culture “Bye-bye ’Burbs: Biden Plan to Create ‘Affordable, Multifamily Housing’ in the Suburbs Will Kill the American Dream”, and he criticized “U.S. President Joe Biden’s longwinded and exorbitant Job Plan,” because:

Buried inside the document under the heading, ‘Eliminate exclusionary zoning and harmful land use policies,’ the project is laid out: “For decades, exclusionary zoning laws – like minimum lot sizes, mandatory parking requirements, and prohibitions on multifamily housing – have… locked families out of areas with more opportunities. President Biden is calling on Congress to enact an innovative, new competitive grant program that awards flexible and attractive funding to jurisdictions that take concrete steps to eliminate such needless barriers to producing affordable housing.”

The progressive radicals are up in arms over single-family dwellings, which they believe is part and parcel of the “new redlining” designed to perpetuate inequality. If only it were so simple.

First, the only “barrier” that may prevent people from living in the cozy suburbs is income, which should not be seen as some sort of ‘racist’ impediment – “economic discrimination,” as the left calls it – but rather the natural outcome of a lifetime of sacrifice, hard work and dedication.

A book by the investigative historian Paige Glotzer was issued in 2020, How the Suburbs Were Segregated, which explained in concrete terms how one very important aspect of America’s notorious anti-Black racism — in the suburbs — was largely planned by a UK corporation even during the 1800s. Government itself had assisted and largely created segregation. (For the most part, the investors in the corporation that Glotzer studied — Baltimore’s Roland Park Company — were not aristocrats, and the largest of those investors, a Londoner, “John Collins Odgers,” listed his profession as “Nonconformist Minister B.A.” Glotzer, by luck, had happened to come upon the Roland Park Company’s complete files. This company is the one that had established the racial-segregation system — including red-lining — which came to dominate suburban land development during the first half of the 20th Century. It became the model that the subsequent, larger, companies followed. At the start, American segregation was created by these well-to-do private British investors and later built upon by American investors. The 2017 U.S. best-selling book by Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law, had already made well known the Government’s complicity in forming America’s racial segregation, but Glotzer’s book focused more on both the local and the international economic factors that produced America’s racial segregation.)

A good summary of Glotzer’s book was provided in Jessica Levy’s interview of Glotzer at the site “Economic Historian,” which was headlined with the book’s title — especially this from it is informative:

JL: One of the major benefits of this approach is the ways in which you were able to link the early history of American suburban development to broader histories of British investment and settler colonialism. Could you expand a bit more on how you accomplish this?

PG: This is one of the things that actually surprised me in my research, and that set off my historian alarm bells that this was actually a really important thing to continue focusing on. I begin by looking at who financed America’s earliest planned segregated suburbs. It turns out that some of them (in fact, I found 400) were British investors who had a history of actually putting their money into various places where they thought the influx of white people would increase the value of land. That brought their money into places such as North American West, into places in Africa, into sites of British Empire, including in the Caribbean and including in India.

So, settler colonialism and the displacement and oppressive labor regimes that were a part of settler colonialism were the sources of the finance capital that ultimately came to Baltimore. And I think it’s really important to see how suburban development actually fits the mission of those investors because as a peripheral space on a city, those investors were also counting on an influx of white people to increase the value of that land.

In another interview of Glotzer, at “ThinkBelt,” and likewise titled like the book, she explained the process of historical discovery that had led her to produce the book.

Furthermore, segregation has, itself, been shown to increase the amount of violence against the ghettoized minority. A September 2017 NBER study by Cook, Logan, and Parman, “Racial Segregation and Southern Lynching”, reported: “We find that conditional on racial composition, racially segregated counties were much more likely to experience lynchings. Consistent with the hypothesis that segregation is related to interracial violence, we find that segregation is highly correlated with African American lynching.” Consequently, it is reasonable to presume that not only did elites and the governmental policies that they instituted increase segregation, but they also increased violence against Blacks (such as lynchings).

The link that Mr. Bridges used for “new redlining” leads to a Democratic Party policy-analysis site, which is not “progressive radical” as he falsely labels it, but simply progressive, and could also be called “liberal” because only libertarians are un-concerned about the problems that it’s aiming to solve). The difference between the two polar ideologies — “progressive” versus “liberal” — is that progressivism is at one end of the ideological spectrum, and libertarianism is at the opposite end, but liberalism is in-between and mixes the two opposite ideologies in such a way that the financial interests of billionaires and other super-rich won’t be hit more than the financial interests of the middle class will. In other words: liberalism places the entire middle-class-and-above population into one category, all of which are to be taxed at approximately the same percentage-rates, instead of there being a progressive system of taxation which applies increasing percentage-taxation-rates from the poorest to the richest households, such that there will be a certain level of wealth and income level below which a given household will have a negative percentage-taxation rate (and-or “welfare policies” to meet the needs of the poor), and in which everyone who is above that wealth-and-income level (but especially the super-rich) will be, via the taxes that they pay, net subsidizing the households that are in the poorer category. A progressive recognizes the fact that money is power (to hire agents to represent one’s interests, in the writing of governmental policies, and otherwise), and that therefore (to the extent that a free market exists) a poor person is naturally far less represented in government than a rich person is. Progressivism is an attempt to compensate somewhat for this natural money-is-power feature of any capitalist economy. That’s why billionaires don’t donate to the political campaigns of progressive politicians, and yet billionaires donate approximately equal amounts to the Democratic Party (which is liberal) and to the Republican Party (which is libertarian). Only a tiny percentage of Democratic politicians are progressives; however, all Republicans champion a free market, capitalism, and the only difference between different Republican politicians is the different extent to which they are committed to that ideology (“the free market”) as being inviolable Scripture, the “free market” Scripture (pure capitalism). Therefore, if progressives are 2% of Democratic Party elected politicians, and if half of elected politicians are in each of the two Parties, then progressive politicians will constitute only around 1% of America’s elected politicians (none of whom are Republicans). Maybe 2% of elected Democrats are progressives, and maybe 2% of elected Republicans are Scriptural libertarians, but to call the Democratic Party “progressive” (such as Mr. Bridges did here — even “progressive radicals”) is like calling the Republican Party Scriptural libertarians (which likewise only around 2% of elected Republican politicians actually are). It’s not even nearly an accurate portrayal.

In fact, at the middle of American politics, such as Joe Manchin and Kristen Sinema on the Democratic side, and Susan Collins and Shelley Moore Capito on the Republican side, the ideological differences are near zero, even though the Party differences now are maybe more fractious than ever before in American history. In American national politics, the center is liberal, and the conservative half (the right and far-right) are Republicans; and the liberal half are Democrats, but around 2% of Republicans are populist conservatives such as Rand Paul, and around 2% of Democrats are populist ‘liberals’ who reject any sort of elitism and are authentically progressives, such as Bernie Sanders. The broad middle, which is around 98% of Congress, are liberals and conservatives. On foreign affairs, the entirety of the broad middle have always voted in Congress to expand the American empire (are neoconservatives), and only the few populists (the progressives on the liberal side and the Scriptural libertarians on the conservative side) have sometimes voted against expanding the American empire. Joe Biden never voted against expanding the American empire — he consistently backed sanctions, coups and invasions. Therefore, to call Biden a progressive is to call him what he never was nor is.

Another big difference between progressives and libertarians concerns governmental regulation. Libertarians are against it, and progressives are for it, but liberals are in between and are committed mainly to making regulation as ineffective as possible at limiting or reducing a person’s accumulation of wealth (since extreme inequality of wealth destroys democracy if there exists anything like a free market; and what is produced, instead, by a free market, is then actually an aristocracy, no democracy at all). For example: whereas libertarians are against regulation, liberals favor placing as much of the expense or “burden” of regulation as possible onto the regulated firms themselves, so that the corporations will largely “self-regulate.” Progressives disfavor that and demand for regulations to be part of the system of laws that are created by the democratic government itself. Progressives — unlike libertarians, and also unlike conservatives and liberals — are 100% devoted to democracy. And that’s democracy both in national affairs, and in international affairs. In national affairs, it’s progressive taxation and democratically imposed laws regarding what corporations may do; and in international affairs, it’s supporting democratically imposed international laws and world government instead of any imperialism by any country against and controlling any other country. It is 100% democracy that a progressive supports, both in relations between individuals at the national level, and in relations between nations at the international level. By contrast, for example, in international affairs, American Presidents since 1945 have all  been imperialists, who have consistently been imposing America upon other countries, not only in Latin America but increasingly throughout the world, as an American empire over all nations. America has been the world’s greatest enemy of the United Nations (which U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had invented and started to plan), ever since FDR’s death. There has been no progressivism, at all, in American foreign policies, ever since FDR died on 12 April 1945. However, there has been liberalism in America’s domestic policies, such as (the imperialist) Lyndon Johnson’s introduction of Medicaid and Medicare in the 1960s. (After all, German imperialists had invented socialized pensions under Bismark in Germany during 1881-1889, and invented socialized medical care under Bismark at the same time. This was in response to the populist failed revolutions throughout Europe that had started in 1848.)

Another big difference between liberals and progressives is that, since liberals respect wealth as reflecting merit (and therefore look down upon the poor as being necessarily less worthy than the rich), they explain social problems as being due far more to conflict between ethnicities than to conflict between the rich versus the poor. This way, liberal political parties can receive the necessary funding from billionaires, because billionaires then aren’t being blamed for the existing injustices (which stem from what the billionaires impose upon the political order). Progressives blame the injustices upon the people who cause them, who are those billionaires and their corruption of the government — their buying of  the Government. Whereas progressives really do try to reduce  their government’s corruption, liberals are just as corrupt as libertarians are. Libertarians are corrupt because they believe in one-dollar-one-vote government — corruption is intrinsic to their “free market” Scripture; it’s part of ‘freedom’, in their view, and the only bad thing about it is if the government is involved in it. Liberals accept that part of their belief (acceptance of corruption), and this is one of the biggest ways in which they are NOT progressive. That’s because every progressive is committed 100% to democracy — one-person-one-vote government. Capitalism (one-dollar-one-vote government) and democracy (one-person-one-vote government) are intrinsically hostile toward one-another. Attempts to combine them fail, just like attempts to dissolve oil by mixing it with water fail. They are opposites that don’t mix but repel.

Joe Biden is very much a liberal, both domestically and internationally. He mixes libertarianism with progressivism. This is noblesse oblige conservatism, or simply liberalism. Throughout his career in the U.S. Senate, he was the leading Democrat who opposed the use of legislatively required busing in order to desegregate the nation. He worked with the openly racist Republican Senator Jesse Helms to block implementation of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision. That’s consistent with his middle-of-the-road position. He argued that segregation could best be dealt with by eliminating the governmental regulations that had produced segregation. He was arguing for the libertarian ‘position on segregation, accepting each individual’s right to be a racist or any other type of bigot; and, in this matter he was actually pushing for a libertarian solution to the problem of segregation, because the federal, state, and local, governments had encouraged banks to “red line” and exclude from lending to, Black-majority neighborhoods, and (on the local level) to impose zoning requirements that likewise would ghettoize Blacks. America’s Government, like most, had legislated discrimination — not all of it was only of the “free market” variety. Now, at the end of his career, as President, Biden is trying to impose this progressive-libertarian or “liberal” solution, and he is obtaining in Congress support not only from his fellow-liberals but also from Congress’s few progressives, and this is because of yet a fourth feature of progressivism:

Whereas libertarians believe that bigoted actions or decisions that an individual makes should be allowed by law so long as no non-bigotry-related law has been violated by that individual, progressives oppose all bigotry, and believe that no bigoted action or decision — even by only an individual — should be legal. Progressives view bigotry as being not merely a personal choice but a big threat to any democracy. They strongly favor governmental regulations such as placing requirements upon any zoning regulations that exist, so as to demand those regulations not to increase discrimination of any type. For example: zoning that prohibits extremely noisy businesses in residential neighborhoods would be allowed, but zoning that prohibits apartment buildings and requires only single-family buildings, would not.

By contrast, libertarians endorse purely the free-market approach, which allows people to be bigoted against women or ethnicities or minorities, instead of punishing bigotry and rewarding the absence of prejudices. Whereas progressives believe that the government has an obligation to oppose bigotry, libertarians believe that it does not, and that each individual has the right to be bigoted and to despise or even hate whatever group he or she wishes — that it’s a matter of that person’s freedom, no right of members of any discriminated-against group. The libertarian, Mr. Bridge, therefore says that “the only ‘barrier’ that may prevent people from living in the cozy suburbs is income, which should not be seen as some sort of ‘racist’ impediment – ‘economic discrimination,’ as the left calls it – but rather the natural outcome of a lifetime of sacrifice, hard work and dedication.” In other words: he assumes that the free market is justice, and that anyone too poor to be “living in the cozy suburbs” is deficient in “a lifetime of sacrifice, hard work and dedication,” and therefore not deserving of “the cozy suburbs,” and especially not deserving of tax-subsidies from the people who do live there. In other words: he assumes that a person’s net worth is that person’s worth; the free market is fair. (Imperialism does not exist; exploitation does not exist; the poor just leach upon the rich, and are the source of their own problems. The rich, out of their kindness, endow charities to help them, but government has no obligation to the poor. Whomever cannot pay has no right.) That is libertarianism.

Consequently, Joe Biden, as a liberal instead of a progressive, is willing to oppose bigotry so long as the bigotries of the super-rich, who want to live isolated from contact with the poor, or who want to exploit the poor (such as abusing their own workers or consumers), won’t be substantially impacted. By contrast, a progressive respects equally the rights of each and every individual (including the right to vote) and is therefore committed against bigots, and for equality of rights..

In foreign policies, the conservative libertarian elected politicians, who are the ones that receive funding from Charles Koch, Peter Thiel, Robert Mercer, and other libertarian billionaires, are moderate neoconservatives (supporters of U.S. imperialism) but are not as beholden to America’s arms-manufacturers as liberal ones are who depend heavily upon Democratic Party billionaires, such as George Soros. Furthermore, the less-conservative libertarians, who aren’t quite as dependent on billionaires’ backing as the neoconservative libertarians are, have a larger number of small-dollar donors, and these libertarian politicians are approximately as anti-imperialistic (non-neoconservative) as the progressive elected politicians are. That’s the one policy-area where politicians such as Rand Paul and Bernie Sanders have rather similar policies. Both the libertarian and the progressive populists tend to be less imperialistic than any other types of American elected politicians are. Other than that, however, libertarians are the opposite of progressives. Whereas all progressive elected politicians are populists, most libertarian elected politicians are elitists and are highly dependent upon billionaires. Therefore, most of the elected libertarian politicians are approximately as neoconservative as the liberal ones are.

In fact, Biden’s foreign policies are almost exactly the same as Trump’s were, and only the rhetoric has changed on that. Biden is even increasing, yet further, his predecessors’ neoconservatism.

Ever since the year 1900, the only progressive American President has been FDR; all the others were either liberals or libertarians. All Democratic ones except for FDR were liberals, and all Republican ones were libertarians (though Theodore Roosevelt was mainly liberal on domestic issues). Whereas FDR was the most progressive Democratic President after 1900, TR was the most liberal Republican President since 1900. Prior to 1900, the last progressive Democratic President was J.Q. Adams (1825-1829), and the most progressive of all U.S. Presidents was the only progressive and first Republican U.S. President, Abraham Lincoln (1861-1865). But after 1945, no progressive has occupied the White House: billionaires have solid control here.

Of course the situation is somewhat different in other countries, with different political systems. For example, in Germany, the leader of the Green Party is more like an American Democrat (liberal neoconservative) and less like an American Green Party leader (progressive) is. In Germany, the Party of the Left — called “Linke,” or “die Linkspartei”, or simply “die Linke” (the Left) — is the progressive Party.

In Europe, the term “neoliberalism” is normally used instead of “libertarianism.” (For example, the Links Party is strongly anti-neoliberal, and is also anti-neoconservative.) However, America’s libertarians tend to believe that neoliberalism isn’t sufficiently purist, because “neoliberalism wants to aim the wealth generated by markets at specific social goals using some government mechanism, whilst libertarianism focuses on letting the wealth created by free markets flow where it pleases.” In other words: America’s libertarians believe that organized crime is okay, as long as government stays away from it and all transactions are freely entered-into. Privatize everything, and it’s okay. Might makes right. Laws don’t make right. (In fact, if “laws” are “regulations,” then they make “wrong.” Only ‘God’s laws’ make right — because ‘God’ is “the Almighty” and might-makes-right.) That’s libertarianism. It’s a belief in ‘natural law’, not in human-created laws (and maybe also not in scientific laws — unless those are created by some “God,” meaning the supposedly existent almighty being).

If the ‘God’ is Islamic, then the imperialism can be, for example, of the Turkish variety and extolling Islamic conquest of the world; or, if it is, for another example, Jewish, then it can be of the Israeli variety and allied with America’s imperialism. But, regardless of what a particular form of might-makes-right is, it’s not progressive. Laws (in the social sense, instead of in the physical and biological sciences) are instead made by humans, and for humans (whichever humans control the government). That’s the progressive view, and it definitely is not the traditional view, anywhere. Biden is an American liberal traditionalist. He’s no sort of progressive, and especially no sort of “progressive radical,” because he is, instead, a liberal American traditionalist. To interpret him in any other way is to misinterpret him.

Anyway: these ideologies have always existed, but aristocracies have always benefited from confusing the public about them, so that the wrong people would be blamed. For example, Karl Marx blamed “the bourgeoisie” instead of “the aristocracy,” and thereby managed to receive funding from some aristocrats. If he had received none, then who would have published him before some of his followers established the Soviet Union? And, if he had received none, then would any Marxist government have ever become established, anywhere? And, of course, many ‘progressive’ publishers, even today, are Marxist. Very few actually progressive publishers even exist, but the ones that do are generally tiny bootstrap or self-funded marginal operations.

This is the real world. Injustice is natural. Justice is rare.

theduran.com

As many of you know, David Brooks and I are friends. I can tell you that it’s hard to find a more generous and decent man anywhere. That’s really true, and that, besides my innate loyalty to friends, is why I ball up my internal fist whenever I hear people criticize him harshly. And it’s why I’m not going to publish any comments on this blog that criticize him personally (as distinct from criticizing his ideas). But I also recognize that David is dispositionally and convictionally more liberal than I am, and far more optimist about the way of the world. This is a preface to say that his column today is halfway about me and people like me.

Here’s why it’s “halfway” about me.

As you know, I was never a Trumper, but also not a Never Trumper — and Brooks’s column today illustrates why. I did not and utterly do not share the sense among the Never Trumpers (Republican or Democrat) that the system is basically okay, and the country is basically okay. Neither did I share the view that Donald Trump was any kind of solution.

(That said, read the whole Kerwick column; the quote Brooks uses is much less offensive in context. Berwick is not talking about going on the offense. He’s talking about being defensive against rioters and Antifa. He’s saying if you want to protect yourself, your property, and your neighborhood from these bullies, you have to be prepared to be violent in response to violence. I actually agree with that. Some Christians are pacifists; most are not. I am not. If Berwick had not written the odious paragraph Brooks cited, I would have agreed with his column.)

Republicans and conservatives who believe in the liberal project need to organize and draw a bright line between themselves and the illiberals on their own side. This is no longer just about Trump the man, it’s about how you are going to look at reality — as the muddle its always been, or as an apocalyptic hellscape. It’s about how you pursue change — through the conversation and compromise of politics, or through intimidations of macho display.

I can tell a story in which the Trumpians self-marginalize or exhaust themselves. Permanent catastrophism is hard. But apocalyptic pessimism has a tendency to deteriorate into nihilism, and people eventually turn to the strong man to salve the darkness and chaos inside themselves.

OK, let’s get to work.

That said, the column is the kind of thing you’d have expected to see in a liberal St. Petersburg newspaper in 1915. I don’t say that to be insulting. I say it descriptively. It is the opinion of an intelligent, cultivated liberal observer who cannot see how bad things have become. The fact that Donald Trump was no kind of realistic solution does not mean that the conditions that led to his rise are false, or that the Republicans who see things apocalyptically are wrong. I too would have been one of the 51 percent of conservatives in that poll who said that politics is primarily about “ensuring the survival of the country,” though I emphatically do not believe the threat to us comes from terrorists, criminals, and illegal immigrants. The threat to us comes primarily from the elite leadership class in government, academia, corporate America, media, and other institutions.

It is true that conservatives are badly led, and that those who think things will be okay if we just cling tighter to Trump are only making things worse, if only because they have chosen a false solution. But I genuinely don’t understand how any non-progressive person can think things are basically fine. Let me put a fine point on it: I don’t understand how any non-progressive person can be anything just short of apocalyptic, given the state of things.

Let me explain.

We are living in a country whose elites are teaching us to see each other primarily on the basis of race, and to hate each other for it. Look at what political scientist Zach Goldberg has found:

1/n No, the NYT (and likely other outlets) didn’t always do this (i.e., ‘[Name of person], who is white…’) to the same extent that they have over the past decade or so. pic.twitter.com/wHB0hXs3r4

— Zach Goldberg (@ZachG932) April 22, 2021

The elite leadership class is jamming this neoracist ideology down everybody’s throat at every turn. Now even the US military does it too. Here, from today’s news, is just one of the impacts on ordinary people:

The Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) is moving to eliminate all accelerated math options prior to 11th grade, effectively keeping higher-achieving students from advancing as they usually would in the school system.

Loudoun County school board member Ian Serotkin posted about the change via Facebook on Tuesday. According to Serotkin, he learned of the change the night prior during a briefing from staff on the Virginia Mathematics Pathway Initiative (VMPI).

“[A]s currently planned, this initiative will eliminate ALL math acceleration prior to 11th grade,” he said. “That is not an exaggeration, nor does there appear to be any discretion in how local districts implement this. All 6th graders will take Foundational Concepts 6. All 7th graders will take Foundational Concepts 7. All 10th graders will take Essential Concepts 10. Only in 11th and 12th grade is there any opportunity for choice in higher math courses.”

His post included a chart with what appeared to be set math courses for 2022-2030.

VDOE spokesperson Charles Pyle indicated to Fox News that the courses would allow for at least some variation depending on students’ skill level. “Differentiated instruction means providing instruction that is catered to the learning needs of each child (appropriate levels of challenge and academic rigor),” Pyle said.

On VDOE’s website, the state features an infographic that indicates VMPI would require “concepts” courses for each grade level. It states various goals like “[i]mprove equity in mathematics learning opportunities,” “[e]mpower students to be active participants in a quantitative world,” and “[i]dentify K-12 mathematics pathways that support future success.”

Because most black students, for whatever reasons, are disproportionately underachieving in math, the state, in its bountiful compassion, is going to level everybody else down. You know what’s going to happen, then, right? The rich will be able to afford to take their kids out of public schools and put them into schools where they won’t be held back to the standards of the weakest students. The middle class and the poor are out of luck.

How is this justice? This kind of thing is advancing everywhere in this new America.

Now we learn that the Biden administration is planning to go big on pushing Critical Race Theory on all public schools in America. 

This neoracist ideology, which has become the dominant ideology among American elites and their institutions, is going to destroy the country. I honestly do not understand why writers like my friend David Brooks are not alarmed by this. I’m not kidding: Critical Race Theory is going to destroy America as we know it, as this Christopher Rufo explainer makes clear.

Bari Weiss, this blog, and others have been reporting on the very important fight going on in elite NYC public schools over the effects of critical race theory on the curricula there. Its important because whatever happens with the elites — the future power-holders in this country — is important. If you wanted to know what was going to be common on campuses nationwise in 2021, you would have done well to look at the Ivies a decade earlier. Allow me to quote from Live Not By Lies:

In our populist era, politicians and talk-radio polemicists can rile up a crowd by denouncing elites. Nevertheless, in most societies, intellectual and cultural elites determine its long-term direction. “[T]he key actor in history is not individual genius but rather the network and the new institutions that are created out of those networks,” writes sociologist James Davison Hunter.  Though a revolutionary idea might emerge from the masses, says Hunter, “it does not gain traction until it is embraced and propagated by elites” working through their “well-developed networks and powerful institutions.”

This is why it is critically important to keep an eye on intellectual discourse. Those who do not will leave the gates unguarded. As the Polish dissident and émigré Czesław Miłosz put it, “It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy.”

Arendt warns that the twentieth-century totalitarian experience shows how a determined and skillful minority can come to rule over an indifferent and disengaged majority. In our time, most people regard the politically correct insanity of campus radicals as not worthy of attention. They mock them as “snowflakes” and “social justice warriors.”

This is a serious mistake. In radicalizing the broader class of elites, social justice warriors (SJWs) are playing a similar historic role to the Bolsheviks in prerevolutionary Russia. SJW ranks are full of middle-class, secular, educated young people wracked by guilt and anxiety over their own privilege, alienated from their own traditions, and desperate to identify with something, or someone, to give them a sense of wholeness and purpose. For them, the ideology of social justice—as defined not by church teaching but by critical theorists in the academy—functions as a pseudo-religion. Far from being confined to campuses and dry intellectual journals, SJW ideals are transforming elite institutions and networks of power and influence.

The social justice cultists of our day are pale imitations of Lenin and his fiery disciples. Aside from the ruthless antifa faction, they restrict their violence to words and bullying within bourgeois institutional contexts. They prefer to push around college administrators, professors, and white-collar professionals. Unlike the Bolsheviks, who were hardened revolutionaries, SJWs get their way not by shedding blood but by shedding tears.

Yet there are clear parallels—parallels that those who once lived under communism identify.

Like the early Bolsheviks, they are radically alienated from society. They too believe that justice depends on group identity, and that achieving justice means taking power away from the exploiters and handing it to the exploited.

Social justice cultists, like the first Bolsheviks, are intellectuals whose gospel is spread by intellectual agitation. It is a gospel that depends on awakening and inspiring hatred in the hearts of those it wishes to induce into revolutionary consciousness. This is why it matters immensely that they have established their base within universities, where they can indoctrinate in spiteful ideology those who will be going out to work in society’s institutions.

This is happening to us right now! And these radicals, in power in institutions and corporate suites, are advancing their illiberal revolution, within the formally liberal rules of our society. Amazon is deciding not to publish certain kinds of books — which is its right, but which is also illiberal. Publishers are withdrawing books based on certain unproven accusations against writers. Here in Budapest, I was discussing yesterday with some Hungarians the complaints from Hungarian liberals that the Orban government and its supporters monopolize the media and suppress dissenting views. While I have only been here a few days, and don’t yet know how much of that is true, I can say for sure that our own leading media, while not under any kind of government pressure, nevertheless absolutely and without apology marginalize views they dislike. Remember, the process that resulted ultimately in Bari Weiss resigning from the Times began when the paper refused to publish an op-ed from a US Senator whose view — that the National Guard should be called in to stop rioting — was shared by over half the American public. [UPDATE: A reader points out correctly that I got that wrong — that they published the op-ed, but it caused intense blowback in the newsroom, and ultimately the firing of James Bennet. — RD] If you are waiting to see op-eds  seriously opposing BLM, or transgender ideology, or anything else beloved of our ruling class, in our top newspapers, or if you are hoping for fair coverage of these issues from our major media, you are on serious drugs.

I hear all the time from college students telling me about how afraid they are to say what’s on their mind in their classes, for fear of being failed by their professors, or attacked by a mob of students. This has been going on for years; I have the receipts in my email in-box. Do you ever read about this in our mainstream media? Rarely, if ever. They only see what they want to see. This is all happening in an America that is formally liberal and democratic, but there’s nothing liberal and democratic about any of it.

This week we saw a white police officer shoot to death a black teenage girl who was in the process of trying to stab another black female. He saved the life of a black woman — and for that, he was denounced by the usual suspects as a racist killer, and one of the richest and most powerful athletes in the country, LeBron James, tweeted out the cop’s face and a threat. Why anybody would want to be a police officer in a country like ours is becoming, I have no idea. In the name of this utopian ideology, we are destroying our schools, and we are destroying the ability of the police to maintain law and order. Hannah Arendt, whom I quote in LNBL, said something similar happened in pre-totalitarian Germany and Russia:

The members of the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past forced their way into it.

And now we get to gender ideology. I won’t recap here the many cases to which I’ve drawn attention of American children being catechized in these malicious lies in schools. Yesterday I met a young Hungarian scholar, and talked to him briefly about the “Uncle Jay Should Move To Budapest” post, and how gender ideologues in schools are teaching American and Canadian kids to reject what their parents say, and to regard their parents as backward fools. His eyes widened, and he said, “I did my PhD thesis on how the first thing totalitarian regimes do to start gaining control is to insert themselves into the family, and began to separate children psychologically from parents.”

And now we learn that the US Postal Service has been monitoring social media posts of ordinary Americans, looking to root out “extremists.” Where are the Republicans on this? Too busy fighting opponents of the Iran deal to scrutinize a purge of domestic political opponents of the Left? Did you see that a Norfolk, Va., police officer was fired for the perfectly legal act of donating $25 to the defense fund of Kyle Rittenhouse? Madness.

Did you know that in one of Philadelphia’s poorest and worst schools, they’re teaching children to celebrate “black communism”? I kid you not. And now, as the invaluable Christopher Rufo has documented using whistleblower leaks, Philadelphia public schools are using George Floyd to further radicalize children:

The day after the Chauvin verdict, Philadelphia Public Schools teaches kindergarteners that “George Floyd was killed by a police officer” and that America is built on a “pyramid of hate” culminating in “genocide.”

The lesson plan, produced by Philadelphia’s Office of School Climate and Culture, instructs kindergarten through second grade teachers to encourage students to discuss “what happened to George Floyd and the goals of the Black Lives Matter movement.”

The teachers are told to share a “social story” presenting the case in racial terms: “George Floyd was killed by a police officer”; “Mr. Floyd was African American, the officer was white.” The lesson teaches that for years, “some police officers have hurt African Americans.”

Finally, the teachers are asked to discuss the “Pyramid of Hate” with the children as young as four years old, teaching that “our society” is built on “biased attitudes,” “systemic discrimination,” and “bias-motivated violence,” which can lead to “genocide.”

From the documents, this “Pyramid of Hate” designed by the ADL:

Read the fine print. We go from a “lack of self-reflection or awareness of privilege” to “cultural appropriation,” and ultimately to genocide. The clear implication is that if you don’t stamp out things at the base, you will eventually have genocide.

This is stone-cold ideological indoctrination designed to smear anybody who objects to left-wing radicalism as a potential génocidaire. This week, in the establishment publication Foreign Policy, an essay appeared calling for truth commissions and reparations in the wake of the George Floyd verdict.

I could go on.

It’s happening. It’s happening right now in America, and it’s accelerating. Contra David Brooks, though there are indeed some dark American hearts, the greater darkness is not in the hearts of Americans, but in the hearts of these proto-totalitarian elites who are transforming the country. When Brooks faults alarmists like me for failing to recognize that the way to achieve change is through the “conversation and compromise of politics” I feel that I’m being gaslit. Yes, I would very much like to discuss conversation and compromise — but this is not on offer from the illiberal left, and its establishment enablers. I don’t understand why Brooks and those like him can’t grasp how the things happening in the country look to so many of us. Talk to the left-liberals Bari Weiss, Bret Weinstein, and Heather Heying about “conversation and compromise of politics.” It scarcely exists. We are being demonized and driven out of our jobs and livelihoods, having our children propagandized by ideologues trying to separate them from their families and even their understanding of themselves as male or female, and being told that we are guilty of racist bigotry simply for believing in rewards for achievement — things that were common in America until the day before yesterday.

The reason I wrote Live Not By Lies is because people who grew up under communist totalitarianism could see all this coming, and have been trying to warn their fellow Americans. The book has become by far my biggest seller, despite the fact that, by contrast to The Benedict Option (also a big seller), it has received almost no mainstream media attention. I’m sure that there was no conspiracy to suppress attention to the book. It’s just that the idea that the United States is moving towards “soft totalitarianism” strikes people in the ruling class as crazy — this, despite the many examples I give in the book, and every week in this blog space. They cannot comprehend what’s actually happening in this country. Once again, I turn to Arendt, from The Origins of Totalitarianism (also quoted in Live Not By Lies):

There is a great temptation to explain away the intrinsically incredible by means of liberal rationalizations. In each one of us, there lurks such a liberal, wheedling us with the voice of common sense. The road to totalitarian domination leads through many intermediate stages for which we can find numerous analogues and precedents. . . . What common sense and “normal people” refuse to believe is that everything is possible.

This is how I read columns like David Brooks’s: as rationalizations to explain away the intrinsically incredible, but actually existing, state of affairs. Brooks duns the radical pessimism of the Right, but he doesn’t actually engage with why so many of us are radically pessimistic, and whether or not we have a right to be, considering the things we believe.

Again, part of my own despair is that at this point on the Right, we have the ever-useless Republican Party, and impotent and often crackpot rage of the fire-in-the-belly Trumpers, who give their minds over to dipshit conspiracies like QAnon, while their enemies, having marched through the institutions, are now marching outward, conquering everything. One problem is that good people like David Brooks want to defend liberal democracy, but liberal democracy is ceasing to exist, because even the liberals are now illiberal. The time to have defended liberal democracy is when the mobs were coming for professors like Nicholas and Erika Christakis at Yale. We are supposed to believe now, though, that what is now mainstream on the left — e.g., Biden’s coming push for mainstreaming Critical Race Theory in US public schools — is in any way classically liberal or democratic?

And when people get sick and tired of two standards of justice for people of different races, and get fed up with their children being told that the should hate themselves for being white, and that maybe, despite having man-parts, they might actually be female, and people start fighting back substantively — with public protests and legislation, not tweets and lib-owning commentaries — these same defenders of liberal democracy are going to wonder how on earth we got here.

In conversation with a politically aware Hungarian yesterday, I explained to him why I thought the totalitarianism coming into being in the US now is “soft” — because it presents itself in therapeutic terms, and because it is being carried out under cover of “liberal democracy.” He looked at me, cocked his brow, and said, “But you know, it won’t stay soft for long.”

No, it won’t. What I suspect will happen is that many of us on the Right will get sick and tired of being pushed like this, and some will react in destructive ways (e.g., January 6). This will give the state, and its allies in corporations, the justification they want to crack down hard.

That’s why we who are its targets had better refuse false hope, and prepare to hold out for the long run, while we still can. I hope that we can figure out some ways to put a stop to this, but at this point, in the first half of 2021, I seen nothing and no one on the horizon. We cannot afford to sit back and wait for a savior figure. One of the most important lessons the Right should have learned from the Trump administration is that performative anti-wokeness is useless.  You have to know how to use power to get things done.

Ultimately, though, our core problem is spiritual — and that’s not something that can be solved through politics. But that’s something for another post. Let me restate a Brooks passage:

The level of Republican pessimism is off the charts. A February Economist-YouGov poll asked Americans which statement is closest to their view: “It’s a big, beautiful world, mostly full of good people, and we must find a way to embrace each other and not allow ourselves to become isolated” or “Our lives are threatened by terrorists, criminals and illegal immigrants, and our priority should be to protect ourselves.” Over 75 percent of Biden voters chose “a big, beautiful world.” Two-thirds of Trump voters chose “our lives are threatened.”

For me, my personal challenge, as a man of the Right and as a Christian, is how to live through this:

It’s a big beautiful world, mostly full of good people, but our lives are threatened by a loss of God, and of a deep sense of the Good, and by technocratic, progressive ideologues who call Evil good, and who are forcing on us a world in which identifying the good and living faithfully to it is becoming more difficult. How can we resist this without surrendering to an Evil that promises falsely to help us?

I’ll leave you with a poem I read today, after looking up the name of the man whose image leads this page. It’s a statue in Budapest. Miklos Radnoti was one of the greatest Hungarian poets of the twentieth century. He was a Jew who converted to Catholicism, but who died in the Holocaust. His poetry was optimistic and full of life, until in the late 1930s, the shadow of totalitarianism over Europe changed him.

This is one of his final poems before his murder. What is so touching about it, at least to me, is how he draws attention to the details of the lives of those he loves and knows, and contrasts that with the abstraction they all become to the bomber pilot flying overhead. Radnoti was writing as a captive held by fascists in a war, but I would say that the ideological abstractions that led to the war are the same abstractions that are allowing the progressive ideologues to make culture war on a diverse country and a diverse people whom they don’t know, but certainly despise:

UPDATE:  A reader writes: