What Comes After Conservatism?

I just whipped through Roger Scruton's latest, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition and I am here to tell you that conservatism is dead.

Scruton's short book leads us through the pre-history of conservatism, to the glory days of Adam Smith and Burke, that reflected and enhanced itself against the liberals like the American founders. Then he talks about the French and German contribution, from Hegel, Chateaubriand and de Maistre; the Hegel bit surprised me. Then we have the cultural conservatives like Arnold, Ruskin, T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis. Then we have the reaction to socialism, in Hayek, Oakeshott, and Burnham.

But what about "Conservatism Now" the final chapter? This is what leads me to say that it is all over with conservatism. Today's (actually yesterday's conservatives) are involved in a fight against political correctness and religious extremism, i.e., Islam. So we are talking about Orwell, Bauer, Buckley, Rand, Kirk, Huntington, and of course Scruton himself.

Yeah. What about it? What has conservatism done for you lately? The truth is that conservatism has become an Outer Party to the left's and the deep state's Inner Party. It is a decorative flourish to the power project of the evolved, educated class.

And so, chaps like you and I have to think about what comes next. And here is what I think. I need we need to mount an ideological movement that can achieve strategic concentration on the religious and cultural and political battlefront with simple pejoratives similar to those the left uses, as in racism! to attack people that don't like racial quotas, sexism! to attack people that don't believe that women should be specially privileged and/or driven out  into careers in their peak child-bearing years, homophobia!  to  attack people who want to privilege the marriage-and-children family, and xenophobia! to attack people that want to maintain and deepen the unique American culture and homeland.

And so, I think, we must start by concentrating our minds on the big questions that human society is designed to engage with, meaning the big questions that our current ruling class has utterly failed to address. The problem with the conservatives over the centuries, as revealed by Roger Scruton, is that the conservative line has always been a half-hearted critique, as in, oh well, we really don't think that the full-on worship of reason is so great. Or, we don't think the full-on bureaucratic-administrative state is the best of all possible worlds.

Meanwhile our liberal friends have been ruthlessly marginalizing us as people that don't care about the workers, that don't care about the blacks, that don't care about women, that don't care about gays. Thus the vile pejoratives  of racist, sexist, homophobes. Oh and don't forget about "hate" and xenophobia. Thus, anyone that disagrees with the Inner Party of the ruling class is cast out into Outer Slobbovia as worse than Hitler.

I say: Enough! So what next?

Obviously, "the best defense is a good offense." That means that it is time to stop whining and apologizing and start attacking.

OK. Great. But what are we attacking for?

Let's go back to first principles. The whole point of human society is to wive, thrive, and survive. There is nothing esoteric about this; we are talking about family and children, jobs and opportunity, and protection from existential peril. But people are not the all the same: that is what my reductive Three Peoples theory is supposed to illuminate.

What do the People of the Subordinate Self need? They need a religion and culture that steers them towards making it in the city. That means growing away from the subordinate feudal and slave culture of the agricultural world to the responsibility culture of the city. In other words the whole bourgeois ethos of Axial Age Religion, the bourgeois family, and the responsibility to develop and maintain marketable skills. You want to wive and thrive and survive in the city? Then get with the bourgeois responsibility ethos. You will notice that our present ruling class does not do that good a job at providing a society that leads the immigrants to the city towards these goals, and that must change. All we need is a pejorative to name and shame them for their cruel and unjust treatment of the People of the Subordinate Self.

What do the People of the Responsible Self need? They need to understand that just following the rules, going to work, and obeying the law is not the whole of life; it is necessary, but it is not sufficient. What if the world changes? And it will. People need to get a little creative;  otherwise when the world changes you are going to be out of luck. One of the great themes of the left is that when the feudal lords no longer needed soldiers, they just "hurled" the peasants off their estates; when the farmers started using threshing machines they no longer hired agricultural laborers that used to do the threshing by hand: too bad for them; and when the market changed the capitalists just laid off the workers that had built their corporations into world beaters. I argue that a responsible person does not rely on the boss to take care of him. He knows that it is up to him to change with the market.  You will notice that the current ruling class does not do too much to teach the average deplorable to renew their skills and change with the market, and that must change. All we need is a pejorative to name and shame them for their cruel and thoughtless treatment of the People of the Responsible Self.

What do the People of the Creative Self need? They need to understand that there are other people in the world besides themselves and their need to amaze us all. Their current war on Axial Age religion, on the bourgeois family, and their monstrous taxation and regulation of ordinary work is the crime of the century, and the ruling class deserves to be thrown out for its monstrous crimes and injustices. And their current culture of "activism" that they are called to be the Saviors of the marginalized and the oppressed is a pompous self-congratulatory conceit that is all about the need of creative people for meaning and validation and has little to do with the needs of the marginalized and the oppressive. It is fine for creative people to experiment at the margin, but they should be experimenting on themselves and not on the People of the Subordinate and Responsible Self. In particular they should not be trying to mainstream their culture of sexual experimentation. The words of the actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell still apply.

Her best-known remark, uttered upon hearing about a male homosexual relationship, was "My dear, I don't care what they do, so long as they don't do it in the street and frighten the horses,"

But of course, today the whole point is not just to frighten, but to stampede the horses. You will notice that the current ruling class recklessly advances the class interest of the People of the Creative Self with no regard at all for the needs and inclinations of other people, and this must change. All we need is a pejorative to name and shame them for their unjust promotion of their own class needs and their open war upon the needs of everyone else.

As you can see, I have thought out the whole campaign, its justification and its goals. All I need are the pejoratives. But I'm thinking about that; I'm thinking!

Can Anyone Stop Identity Politics?

Back in the 1960s liberals knew that the New Left and the New Politics was going to fundamentally transform America.

But ordinary Americans looked at the riots and the protests and voted for Richard Nixon. Twice.

So liberals cooked up a case against Nixon and shamed him out of office in 1974.

But then ordinary Americans came back and elected Ronald Reagan six years later.

Let's look at this straight up. Back then white working class Americans looked at the new liberal politics and they didn't like it. Just like today.

Back then white working class Americans didn't like the idea that white working class Americans were going to be the ones paying for Affirmative Action and quotas with their jobs. And their children were going to have to pay for the wonders of school busing with their education.

In 1992 Bill Clinton squared the circle by making like he was one of the guys. And so he pulled the white working class away from the Republicans. And then the white working class voted for Barack Obama.

Maybe, like many of us, the white working class thought that by voting for Obama they would put to rest the race politics that had been aimed like an arrow at their livelihoods and their culture, and sneered at them as All in the Family sneered at Archie Bunker.

But they were wrong. Race politics is who liberals are. They need race politics to get their 90 percent of the black vote and they need gender politics to get their 80 percent of the gay vote or the 62 percent of the single women vote.

Of course liberals think they are really smart, and that they can control their supporters, so that if identity politics really became a problem and threatened America they could turn it off and still lead hyphenated America on to sunlit uplands.

But Lee Kuan Yew, long-time Prime Minister of Singapore has written that in a multiracial society, people vote by race. That's from Samuel L. Huntington's Clash of Civilizations. So here is how people vote in Mississippi, according to local columnist Bobby Harrison.

What continues to be a little odd about voting in Mississippi is that the state has the nation’s highest percentage of African American voters, who almost always vote Democratic while white Mississippians vote Republican by high margins.

 You don't say. According to Steve Sailer Mississippi whites voted 88 percent for Romney in 2012.

I fear that we educated middle-class people are living in a fool's paradise. We have convinced ourselves that we are tolerant and non-racist and that we can live in harmony with others different from ourselves.

But in fact, of course, we live next to people exactly like ourselves: educated upper-income people that define ourselves by our education and our profession and our cultural sophistication and our tolerance.

Very nice. But suppose that our neighborhood started to decline and that immigrants started to move in and crime started to go up. What then?

The answer is simple. We would move. Because we can afford to. So for us to preach tolerance and inclusion and diversity is just fine, because we could always get out if the going got tough.

For the folks lower down the income scale things are not so copacetic, because their jobs are not so secure, their options are not as broad, and their finances are not robust enough to take the hit of moving out. There is a reason why they adhere to notions of tribal and racial identity. Because that is how humans have defended themselves from the invaders since time immemorial. And right now they feel themselves under attack.

Like I say. The best way to unite a divided people is to take them to war. That's how the US united the divided immigrants of 1900. The ruling class sent their children to war in 1941.

But what sort of a war could the ruling class gin up today to unite the immigrants of 1990? The War on Terror didn't do it. If anything it divided the nation.

So you tell me. What kind of a war would unite all the factions of the ruling class so that nobody checked out half way through?

Frankly, my dear, I have no idea.

A House Divided Cannot Stand

In his Clash of Civilizations Samuel Huntington argues that the world, following the centuries of western hegemony, is now divided along civilizational lines. So if you are a politician in Singapore or China, you extol the obvious superiority of Confucianism, and if you are a political leader in a Muslim country you extol the obvious truth of Islam and the Prophet, peace be upon him.

Huntington believes that the ideological age, in which half the world was run on socialist ideas, is over, and that we are reverting to a religious age, with cultural rather than ideological cues. International and intranational conflict, he writes, now occurs along civilizational -- actually religious -- fault lines, not ideological fault lines, as during the Cold War.

Except that the ideological fault lines were religious, if we accept that socialism/communism/progressivism is a secular religion.

On this view, the leaders of the West should be extolling the virtues of Christianity, as the rest of the world extols their Axial Age religions; only they are not. In fact, the West is divided between a nominally Christian capitalist side and a progressive/secular religious side.

The interesting thing is that the progressives use not their religion, but tribal cues, to rally their voters. Thus they have spent the last 50 years raising racial and sexual consciousness among women and minorities. This is palpable in the current 2016 election cycle as Democrats rally women against the sexual harasser Donald Trump and blacks against the police with Black Lives Matter.

Notice that our Democratic friends are not raising issues; they are raising race and gender identity. Now, nominally, this race and gender politics proposes the white male as an "other." But really, behind the screen, they are attacking our Christian, capitalist, limited government culture.

Against this progressive push, Donald Trump openly wraps himself in the flag and the nation. Although, of course, his core voters that show up at his rallies are overwhelmingly white and ordinary middle-class.

If Trump were the racist, sexist that our Democratic friends want him to be then he should be openly making a racist, sexist pitch for his Trumpster votes just as Democrats are unashamed as making a sexist pitch for "nasty women" and a racist pitch by endorsing the racist Black Lives Matter.

But here is the thing. If Huntington is right, and the coming fault lines across the world are going to be religious, then the divided West better get its act together. Because in any conflict the side that is united has a huge advantage over the side that is divided.

To raise the question is to answer it. Right now, native Westerners across the West are starting to rise up against their globalist rulers, and they are doing it over the question of religion. People in the west are clearly stating that they do not want a Muslim minority in the West that achieves strategic concentration.

As this Muslim issue develops it will put pressure on the western women who are clutching their pearls this season over Donald Trump's locker-room talk. And the Muslim issue will put pressure on African Americans that are more worried about police shootings than about the cultural collapse in the black majority inner cities and the threat that rising Hispanic and Muslim numbers represent to their special status as liberals' favorite victims.

For years I have worried about how conservatives can possibly push back against liberal identity politics -- i.e. sub-national tribalism -- because how can you do the politics of division when your basic line is that Americans are the best people in the world and America is the best country in the world? Where is the encouragement for rage and coming out to vote out the corrupt rascals?

The basic thrust of Huntington's Clash of Civilizations argument is that wars on the fault lines between civilizations force secondary actors to decide which side they are on, and usually they side with their co-religionists. So you can see that as the fault lines develop in the coming years, they are going to force the West to decide which side it is on, and the current divide between Christian capitalists and progressive identity believers will have to be resolved one way or another.

But there is another question, that Huntington doesn't address. He talks about fully westernized politicians like Lee Kuan Yew putting on the armor of Confucianism when running for office in Singapore. But was that just a blind?

Put it this way. How much of the western cultural agenda is optional if you want to be a leading civilization that can carry a big stick in the world and win fault-line wars? Capitalism? Limited government? Democracy? Rule of Law? Christianity? Tolerance? Science? Free speech? You tell me.

The Real Clash Isn't "Civilizations"

The argument of Sam Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations is that the real divide isn't between nations, as in the post 1848 nation-state system. It isn't between ideologies, as in capitalism vs. socialism.

No, the real large-scale conflicts are between civilizations, meaning the extended expression of "blood, language, religion, way of life" that people in a civilizational area have in common.

The crucial distinctions in religion among human groups concern their values, beliefs, institutions, and social structures, not their physical size, head shapes, and skin colors.

On Huntington's view the last century was a failed age of ideology, which aimed to replace the dominant European hegemony with a new world secular religion. But the failure of the Soviet Union put an end to that and resulted in a West-and-the-rest in which the basic civilizations reasserted themselves. Post 1990 and the collapse of communism we have: Western, Latin American, African, Islamic, Sinic, Hindu, Orthodox, Buddhist, Japanese civilizations.

Which is to say that the peoples of the Earth have returned to their Axial Age religions after the failure of the proposed secular religion and culture of the Class of 1848 and socialism. Of course they have. When a new god fails, people go back to the old gods.

Now I agree with Huntington that the world of global politics is certainly a clash of civilizations, but I think that he misses the larger point. Something else is trying to be born, something that nobody understands and nobody wants to look in the face. Call it the opening of a new Pandora's Box.

And so the story of the last century and more is an attempt to stuff these new demons back into the box. Or an attempt to return to the pre-industrial Garden of Eden.

But, of course, there is no going back to the Garden of Eden. It was Eve eating of the Tree of Knowledge that did it, or in Hegelian terms, the beginning of self-consciousness.

In my view the secular religions and politics of the last century or so since 1848 has been the effort, both by elites and the lower orders, to turn away from the new order of markets and innovation, because they hate it and fear it.

That was the point of the socialist revolution; it would put the genie of capitalism and freedom back in the bottle. And that is why ideological revolutionaries all across the world flocked to socialism's banner and erected socialist regimes everywhere from Russia to China to India. They were threatened by capitalism and freedom too just like Europeans. But it all failed because it was an attempt to deny the new reality, that people were now going to interact with each other in their daily business through markets rather than through vertical power relationships with a lord or priest or patron.

What we see in the world today, after the death of the socialist god that failed, is a grudging acceptance of capitalism and markets, up to a point. But everyone is agreed that it must be kept in its bottle, as far as possible, and subordinated to the age-old wisdom of the culture, the Sinic culture in China, the Hindu culture in India, etc. So Huntington quotes political leaders like Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore, about how Sinic culture is much superior to Western culture and its corrosive individualism.

But there is a profound conjuring trick going on here. Many of the new leaders in the post-colonial nations were products of western education, like Pakistan's Jinnah, Singapore's Lee, and Sri Lanka's Bandaranaike. When they rose to power they had to "indigenize" to appeal to their countrymen and get elected.

They reverted to their ancestral cultures, and in the process at times changed identities, names, dress, and beliefs.

So what they are really doing is changing their nations while pretending to adhere to the old ways. Because you just can't expect most people to, e.g., get on a rocket ship to Mars knowing that they will never come home again. Just because Elon Musk is selling tickets.

I wonder if that is what Donald Trump is doing, promising to Make America Great Again in a return to good manufacturing jobs at good wages. Trump is a businessman; he knows you can never go back. But I am sure that Moses never told the Israelites that he would keep them in the wilderness for 40 years.

In Jesus in Beijing a Chinese Christian speaks of the experience of the Chinese confronting the West. First the Chinese thought the West was all about its military power, then its science, then its politics, then its Christianity. All true, but notice what he misses out: the West's markets and its permissionless innovation.

It is the last thing, markets and innovation, that all politics is presently organized to control and to neuter. That is what the six or so civilizations are trying to do all over the world. Or, at least, that is what their leaders are telling their peoples.

But the real clash is between the old ways of vertical allegiance and its Patron/Client (or Hegelian Master/Slave) culture and the new ways of horizontal cooperation through the market. That is what scares everyone half to death even as it has brought forth the Great Enrichment of per-capita income from $3 to $100 per day.

All across the world politicians and wise men are promising to protect people in their vertical silos against the fearful rising of the oceans that will marketize everything it its path. But they are lying, either to themselves or to the people they lead.

All religions ask their adherents for surrender: to God, to the ancestors, or to God's love. The god of the new world asks us to surrender to the market, to search out, each individual, how to contribute to society and its prosperity. And the whole world is united in determination to stop such a shocking and radical break with the past.

What will be the result of this real clash? Nobody knows. That is what we are all trying to figure out: the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.

One Step at a Time

Here in Washington State we had our primary yesterday. The result? Sen. Patty Murray is in trouble, since her vote about pegged equal with the Republican vote. And three Dem districts are in play, the 2nd with Koster against incumbent Larson, the 3rd, an open seat, and the 9th, maybe, with Muri against the incumbent Smith.

If a couple of those seats turn Republican then we'd get a 5-4 GOP advantage instead of a 6-3 Dem majority in the House delegation.

I said it back in 2008. The only way you get to win in politics is by letting the voters get a taste of the other guys. Disgust, the psychologists are finally realizing, is not just about avoiding rancid meat, but avoiding rancid ideas.

With President Obama we have the world set upside down. We have a war on the American economy, with a breathtaking program to seize a huge chunk of the economy and parcel it out to Democratic Party supporters. And we have a president who wants to pass on the great clash of civilizations, the question of whether the West shall prevail or Islam. It is all laid out today by Ayaan Hirsi Ali in The Wall Street Journal.

The president's hope was that moderate Muslims would eagerly accept [his] invitation to be friends.

The president is a One Worlder, a devotee of the fashionable idea that the fall of Communism meant the "End of History" according to Francis Fukuyama. No it isn't, wrote Samuel Huntington in The Clash of Civilizations, and Ali agrees.

The West's universalist pretensions are increasingly bringing it into conflict with the other civilizations. most seriously with Islam and China.

The future of the West depends upon a successful defense against these challenges, according to Ali. Ordinarily, as far as Islam is concerned, it shouldn't be a problem, since the Islamic countries are "ruled by despots of various stripes."

China is a bigger problem, but here there is hope--that China is reinventing itself as a Christian country. Huh? Here is a Chinese Christian describing to David Aikman in Jesus in Beijing how China has looked at the West over the last two centuries.

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.

There are thought to be about 100 million Chinese Christians in house churches in China, but nobody knows, because the house churches are more-or-less underground. So China may in fact be in the process of modeling itself on the West, rather than challenging it.

The great thing about the Obama administration is that all the ideas that the center left has been pushing for the last half century are going to be utterly repudiated by the American people in the next few years. Not because the American people will have done an exhaustive analysis on them, but because they are associated with Obama and the failures of the Obama administration.

And it all starts in the House districts in play this November in Washington State and elsewhere.

Because we are looking right down the barrel of an 80 seat pickup for Republicans in the House. That will be the biggest pickup since the 75 seat swing in 1938, and it will change the rules, starting on November 3, 2010.

The Wages of Multiculturalism, Again

A big problem in the war on terror, Michael Barone opines, is that we are not just fighting Islam. We are also at war with the usual suspects: the western left.

[I]n terms of intentions, they are not enemies in the sense that they consciously wish to destroy our society... But they have also been working, over many years, to undermine faith in our society and confidence in its goodness. These covert enemies are those among our elites who have promoted the ideas labeled as multiculturalism, moral relativism and (the term is Professor Samuel Huntington's) transnationalism.

Then Barone writes, like a deconstructionist pro, about the notion of privileged ideas and narratives. There are people in our society who have made it their business to emphasize the bad parts of our history and ignore the good parts.

You might say that while they rail against the privileged dead white male narrative they have constructed their own privileged narrative, one that you dissent against at your peril.

But then the elite young men who declined to serve in the military during the Vietnam War set out to write a narrative in which they, rather than those who obeyed the call to duty, were the heroes. They have propagated their ideas through the universities, the schools and mainstream media to the point that they are the default assumptions of millions. Our covert enemies don't want the Islamo-fascists to win. But in some corner of their hearts, they would like us to lose.

The trouble is that necessary process of rooting out this covert enemy and refounding the American narrative of hope and optimism is going to be a long and divisive war.

And it hasn’t even got started yet.