Posted by Arcane on Sun, 02 Jan 2005 19:34 | #

OK, now this is conspiracy theory. I have a headache right now so I won’t comment on it at length, but jeeese.

And last I checked, the original “third way” was developed by G. K. Chesterton and was known as “distributism.” There is actually a party in the UK that is called the <a >Third Way</a> and advocates along those lines. Distributist ideas are extremely popular in paleoconservative movements and movements to the right of it, such as the with WNs, “national anarchists,” “international third position[ists]” groupings on the far-right.

The second “third way” movement was under Tito, who tried to create a socialist economic model that combined certain elements of private property with workers organizations for the workplace. Also it relates to his foreign policy, in which he tried to make himself neutral in the conflict between East and West.

The third “third way” movement would have to be Swedish parties… an extremely free-market coupled with high tax rates and tons of social welfare programs to make up for various “disparities” that intellectuals encountered / developed in the marketplace.

The modern usage of the term “third way” is with the Democratic Leadership Council, who developed the New Democrat movement, which espoused a Third Way mixture of neoliberal economics, balanced budgets, industrial policies for various industries, and progressive tax rates, along with a moderate social policy. It was exported by DLC operatives when they sent over people to help Tony Blair reform the Labour Party so that he could get elected. After being elected, he worked with Anthony Giddens to create a philosophical basis for it and wrote a manifesto jointly with Gerhard Schroder. The movement was called “the renewal of social democracy,” and was adopted by social democratic parties across the European continent.

Your interpretation of the modern Third Way is wrong. The Third Way represents the fact that the Left lost the idea war in the late 20th century. It is the acceptance by the Left that free-markets are the best way to create wealth and that socialism simply doesn’t work (Blair makes jokes about socialists that you would expect out of Thatcher).

The Right has won on economics. The Third Way is just the Left’s way of being pragmatic.

And I won’t even go into all the things you have to say about law enforcement and military powers in the US. Most of it is wrong. *cough* Back to bed now.

Posted by Matt on Sun, 02 Jan 2005 21:41 | #

I think the fact that the Left is now associated with “communitarianism” makes a great straw-man for right-liberalism to attack.  Both left- and right-liberalism are radically individualist and anti-tradition.  They just disagree about what is the best way, as a practical matter, to emancipate the free and equal new man, self-created by reason and will, from his historical oppressors.

Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 02 Jan 2005 22:03 | #

Arcane,

Distibutism is represented in Third Positionism, not the Third Way.  Distributism is a putative, ant-capitalist, anti-marxist system of economics that you can read about here:-
http://www.distributism.org/
and which informs the economic thinking of many anarchist groups and the British National Party.  Clintonian it ain’t.

Also, as you say capitalism defeated the Soviet system and, at home, class war predicated on classical or economic marxism.  But the left switched with remarkable aplomb and fleetness of foot to hegemonic politics (look at the contrast between John Rawls two major books, published about a quarter of a century apart).

Furthermore, today’s global capitalism is embraced by the left.  It is a different animal to the victor in the Cold War, and is a full partner in the development of the Post-Nation and the various supra-national governing elites.

The two elements that come out of Niki’s post and hit me between the the eyes are :-

First, the similarities his “hard conspiracy” reading of events has with the emergence of an internationalised left applying a uniformly hegemonic analysis to live politics.  We’re not talking about Gramscian theatre groups here!

I’ve often made the point that the beginnings of this universal political sea-change are lost somewhere with the spent coffee cups and the trail of footprints in the carpet of expensive conference hotels.  But it began someplace and it wasn’t in party politics.  The common man was not consulted.  So conspiracy?  I don’t know.  But neither do you.

The second element here that chimes with me is that the measures being taken by our rulers to protect us are, we all agree, peculiarly heavy-handed.  In Britain we have had the extraordinary Civil Contingencies Bill, about which I blogged here:-
http://majorityrights.com/index.php/weblog/comments/79/

The libertarian right has deplored but not been able to explain this total-power approach, far surpassing the Patriot Act.  I don’t know whether Communitarianism explains it.  Neither do you.

In general, there is everywhere a sense that “something” is happening that we haven’t voted on and have no influence over, that politics has come to be between meaningless choices, that we are not as free individually as ever we were, that our nation’s political life is an essentially destructive process.

I just don’t know if my instinctive Conservative response to all that is just pissing in the wind.  Niki is brave enough to put his neck on the line and say, “yes it is, and here’s why”.  I think that’s worth getting out of bed to debate properly - headache or no - don’t you?

Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 02 Jan 2005 22:14 | #

Matt,

Under classical marxism governance was suppose to wither away.  But of course there had to be governance while the Age of the Free & Equal New Man was being ushered in.

Under liberalism - which, in effect, means the left’s hegemonic or culture politics -  there is no specified developmental role for governance as the Age of the Free & Equal New Man comes into being.  So what would hapen to it?  Would it not globalise in order to fill the vacuum left by the end of nationhood?

Posted by Matt on Sun, 02 Jan 2005 23:03 | #

So what would happen to it?  Would it not globalise in order to fill the vacuum left by the end of nationhood?

Speaking off the cuff, I think there are really two questions not one.  One question is, what would I predict to happen in actual fact?  The other, what do liberal cultural elites actually think they are doing?

The answer to the first question is that I really have no idea, although I expect some sort of degenerate despotism of the usual sort that comes about when absolute public loyalty is required to a creed that bears no resemblance to how people can actually live.  The answer to the second is that I think the Left has pretty much stopped talking about it since Marx.  The closest approximation is Fukayama’s “end of history”, and even he is keeping pretty quiet on that front at present.  As long as there are inequalities brought about by oppressors and arbitrary nature there will be a need for guns, bombs, and jails to set things right.  After all, democracy is the natural right of every human being on earth.

The second question/answer is by far the more interesting of the two, it seems to me.  America in general and American liberalism in particular have been very successful largely due to a refusal to think things through too much.  As soon as a liberalism starts to concretely articulate its end of history scenario, it has shortened its projected lifespan considerably.  A liberalism that looks too far into its own future with clear-headed rationality will naturally see its own death.  So it takes the tactic that most human beings take when faced with death: refuse to think about it.

Posted by John S Bolton on Mon, 03 Jan 2005 02:10 | #

Political philosophies such as collectivism will not want basic issues to come into controversy, if they have a monopoly in the venues where they might get controverted. Communitarianism, as used today, is socialism that fears to say its name. Small, cohesive, yet cosmopolitan and elite, groups will be masters of international redistribution in order that envy be appeased and third world retardates need not suffer the consequences in terms of death rates.

Posted by Geoff M. Beck on Mon, 03 Jan 2005 05:08 | #

I’m willing to hear this poster’s arguments. Anything is better than the confused rhetoric of free trade, with is nothing but corporatism.

Adam Smith has nothing to do with economics today.

Posted by Mark Richardson on Mon, 03 Jan 2005 05:42 | #

Let me suggest a couple of problems with the sketch of politics outlined by anticommunitarian.

The first concerns timing. Most of the things which conservatives dislike have been around for a long time now. Take the example of feminism. There were feminist theorists in the early 1800s, and a very influential first wave of feminism which lasted from the 1850s up to the 1940s, then a second wave beginning in the early 1970s, followed by a third wave in the mid-1980s.

So if we conservatives want to explain what’s gone wrong we have to look for things which long predate the emergence of a Third Way philosophy in more recent times.

A second problem is the idea that the Third Way advocates are against liberal individualism. Take the example of Tony Blair. He justified Britain’s participation in the Iraq war as follows,

“We are fighting for the inalienable right of humankind ... to be free ... free to be you, so long as being you does not impair the freedom of others.”

This is just a funny New Age way of expressing a classic liberal individualism which many of the American founders also adhered to. Thomas Jefferson, for instance,wrote more elegantly in 1819 that, “Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our own will.”

So Blair is part of an unbroken political tradition, which has been an open orthodoxy rather than a secret movement, for many many generations.

Posted by John S Bolton on Mon, 03 Jan 2005 08:16 | #

The new aspects are the embrace of treason in enthusiasm for diverting tax money to foreigners, while pretending that only insane hatred would disapprove, along with an embarassment over the crimes and failures of socialism, open irrationality and contempt for rational debate, and cynicism with no masks to cover it. The new left, with its radicals shunted to a darkened sideshow, with anti-caucasianism in the place where loyalty to civilization ought to be, and a blind international levelling impulse where morality should be, could be what such neo-communitarians are promoting.

Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 03 Jan 2005 11:39 | #

John has it.

Because its actors are of both left and what passes for right these days, Communitarianism is nine parts method, one part ideology.  It is, I suppose, governmentarianism.

It is not straining after the golden dawn of the free and equal man in the intellectual sense.  It has no enquiry of its own.  It wouldn’t matter whether, say, the feminism it grinds out is that of the sixties’ revolt or of the nineties’ lesbian agenda.  The demeanour is progressive because all modern politics, right and left, is progressive.  More importantly, it is internationalist and its will is to power.

I’ll digress for a moment because I think it’s important to understand, in answer to Mark’s ideology-centred comment, how the impetus to govern can, in modern times long shorn of the “old boy network” (Blair cronyism notwithstanding), become bifurcated from the impetus to achieve certain end-results.

I have much respect for the writings of the UCLA professor, Douglas Kellner.  His work on the history of cultural marxist philosophy is an excellent resource for curious Conservatives.

This essay:-
http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/courses/ed253a/MCkellner/CSFS.html
from 1997 is his most interesting on the remarkable Birmingham School, which still exists and has been the principal engine in the UK of the Gramscian “Long March Through The Institutions”.

The Birmingham School was established by Richard Hoggart in the early 1960’s and sought to impart culture theory to its lucky, lucky students.  Around 1970 Hoggart withdrew and the remaining principals, Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams, steered the School in a more aggressively marxist direction, in particular centering the cultural analysis on the work of Louis Althusser and Antonio Gramsci.

Althusser lost some of his shine - wife-murderers tend to do that.  But Gramsci remained central in what, somewhat euphemistically, we call culture and media studies.  I would add that the latest, exciting developments in this field have almost broken completely with marxism and are identity-centred (watch your balls, men - they’re after them!).

OK, end of thumbnail sketch.  The Birmingham School had, until two years ago, a website on which it bluntly explained to interested parties (and I paraphrase): Students emerging with a degree from this institution will not be expecting to pursue employment in the mainstream fields of publishing, journalism or the broadcast media.  They will have open to them a wide range of employment possibilities in government and government services, quasi governmental organisations and the voluntary sector.

So to return to my point ...

As a revolutionary method the Gramscian “March” has delivered power and influence to its not insubstantial number of participants by bypassing the will of the people as expressed in the ballot box.  It has corrupted the process by which power has traditionally been sought: representative politics.  Political correctness has become the password to advancement - and the measure by which employment at any level in government, even as a local bobby, is attainable.

Inevitably, out of this a certain impetus ... a certain recognition of a new means by which one can be the government has grown.  It is not a means that has a natural end-point, since in itself it is nothing but the will to power manifested in a new way.

At the top there has arisen thereby a generation of progressive and internationalist politicians and related leaders who see no necessity to refer back to the people for approval of anything they do or will do in the future.

And what else would they do except continue the March upwards towards world government?  That they are a train out of all democratic control and, furthermore, a perfectly psychotic train that is not merely careering down the track but slamming the sleepers and rails before them as they go, is certainly true.  But they will not be stopped.

Posted by Mark Richardson on Mon, 03 Jan 2005 13:42 | #

The way I read your post Guessedworker is that you are taking a line similar to John Ray, namely that the left are simply motivated by a desire for power, rather than a principled politics, and that they have become uniquely anti-democratic in centralising power for themselves at the top.

Of course, politics is definitely about the seeking of power, and the more that the elites push a radical liberal agenda, the further they remove themselves from the lives of ordinary people.

Nonetheless, I think it’s wrong to see the current situation as being a product of a “neoleftist” urge to power. For instance, the loss of national loyalties and the preference for global governance is a longstanding product of liberalism.

As far back as 1820 the poet Shelley urged the creation of a New Man who would be “tribeless” and “nationless” so as to be “the king over himself.”

In the same century Disraeli wrote with great political foresight of “the great contention between the patriotic and the cosmopolitan principle which has hardly begun and on the issue of which the fate of this island as a powerful community depends.”

In the nineteenth century also liberals were routinely able to silence opponents with accusations of bigotry and prejudice, rather than with reasoned debate.

In the liberal world, inherited national identities are constraints on individual freedom and equality. So it’s unlikely that it would ever cross the mind of a liberal that they are committing treason when undermining their own national traditions.

We are at the end point of an even longer march than Gramsci ever envisaged.

Posted by Matt on Mon, 03 Jan 2005 15:32 | #

Agree with Mr. Richardson.  Is the big issue for traditionalists that liberals seek ever more comprehensive power, or is it why liberals seek ever more comprehensive power?  The former seems too obvious to state.  The latter, it seems to me, is the far more interesting question.  Knowing that liberalism is relentlessly driven is something I suppose, but knowing what drives liberalism is the critical question.  Part of the reason it is critical is that the best weapon against liberalism is the light of self-awareness: “For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved.”

Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 03 Jan 2005 19:21 | #

Well, there’s hope for us yet.  As well as being the father of world governance, Amitai Etzioni is a blogger!
http://www.amitai-notes.com/blog/

Mark, Matt,

I am satisfied that a prima facie case exists for the existence of an informal but worldwide communitarian process, based around whatever “pieces” are on the table: anti-terrorist legislation, global agencies (maybe not the UN so much), a universal liberal agenda run by essentially non-nativist, small-c conservatives etc.

Niki’s hard-conspiracy reading is something else, however.  I’d need him to address the gap before I can comment further.

Posted by Niki Raapana on Mon, 03 Jan 2005 23:16 | #

Thank you all.  The case for the existence of a worldwide communitarian process rests mainly in my research of the purpose and the goal of the Hegelian dialectic.

We sent our thesis to Etzioni, the ASA and the PSN in Jan 2003. The Communitarian Network added us to their Links page, and Etzioni added us to his blog (then he took it off). In Dec 2003 we posted the Historical Evolution of Communitarian Thinking. We’ve had over a thousand visits from the link at GWU. Teachers, professors and students use our Hegelian dialectic tutorial daily.  We’ve had thousands of visits from universities around the world, and to this date, no one has even attempted to dispute our conclusion as to their roots.  They cannot explain where they come from. 

The best source for the “pieces” as Matt suggested is in our “guru” Dr. Amitai Etzioni’s writings, his various global consultant positions, and his position in the White House.  The communitarian Robert Putnam wrote George Bush’s first acceptance speech. Etzioni is a WH adviser on numerous pre and post 9-11 communitarian programs, going back into the late 1970s under Carter. His rise to power and prominence in the New World Order Projects (and in American politics) is freely advertised by his Communitarian Network.  His terrorist training, his Fabian beliefs, his anti-war/gun activism, his more moral insistance that Americans must give up their individual rights to be safe (and build “community”) and all his various “volunteer” citizen’s programs best explain how communitarians can so easily flip-flop between the right and the left.

As for my being “wrong” about America, Etzioni’s ties to American military and private contractors, and his influence on local and state law enforcement agencies is also fully documented by the communitarians.  Bill Clinton called community policing “a DLC idea” in 1994. Etzioni “hosts” privacy meetings with corporate data companies and selected U.S. Representatives. ABCD programs for citizen data-gathering (and development) were designed at Northwestern University by Communitarian John McNight. Feminist Bella Asbug signed the preamble too. In Seattle, ABCD was introduced by the Dept of Neighborhoods (DON, one of many new communitarian city agencies).

I have DOJ-FOIA documents that connect DON directly to the COMPASS database, which all ties neatly into Etzioni’s directives to State Driver’s Liscensing to CONFORM to a National ID standard. I also have the Joint DOJ-DOD Technology Report-1999. In 2002 I was contacted by a Crime Mapping Consultant for COMPASS, who asked how I gained such a level of expertise in the COMPASS program.

Please don’t assume I do all my research online. I attended their meetings, I interviewed them, and I know all about SPD Chief Gil Kerlikowske’s position as a D.C. COPS’s grant funder and as a designer of the COMPASS program.  It isn’t incidental that he signed off on the Privacy Act requirements that were missing from Seattle’s COMPASS grant application, and then a month later was “selected” as the new Police Chief. Seattle was a “pilot test.”

Etzioni explains the “why” in his most recent book “From Empire to Community.”  (As an aside, last spring when we first contacted his Network, one of Etzioni’s office assistants sarcastically and very unpurposefully confirmed our published hunch that Etzioni does NOT write everything he puts his name on.)

Posted by John S Bolton on Tue, 04 Jan 2005 09:26 | #

If the pretense at community of values is only ‘smash the rich’, because the smallest of scholars find it unbearable that there are some halfway successful societies extant, haven’t they only anti-values for their anti-community?

Posted by ben tillman on Tue, 04 Jan 2005 23:36 | #

I am satisfied that a prima facie case exists for the existence of an informal but worldwide communitarian process….

How have we come to affix such a pleasant-sounding label to something so sinister—worldwide totalitarianism?

Posted by ben tillman on Wed, 05 Jan 2005 00:03 | #

Knowing that liberalism is relentlessly driven is something I suppose, but knowing what drives liberalism is the critical question.

Cui bono?

Posted by Guessedworker on Wed, 05 Jan 2005 00:44 | #

John,

I don’t think it is as staightforward as that.  One of the high priests of civic values is Anthony D.Smith, the Jewish-British author and LSE Sociology Professor whose lifelong specialism has been the study of ethnies, nation and nationalism.  A good thumbnail sketch of his position is here:-
http://members.tripod.com/GellnerPage/Warwick.html

He is quite clear that nations are purely social constructions in the fullest, sociological sense.  He defines an ethnie in the wooliest possible fashion as “ties” and “geneology” and splits it from nation, which he dates from the arising of industrial society and modernity.  Never mind Henry V at Agincourt.  No sense of nation existed in Elizabethan England, apparently (the Bard wasn’t indulging in the sociology-speak of “retrospective nationalism”, though I am if I rely upon him to prove my case - a form of “heads you win ...”).

Still, Smith does acknowledge the need for people to share memory, values, heritage and what-have-you, and find therein a reified myth of nation.  But of blood is there no sign, it having been shifted somewhere west of the reified myth.

Despite all that, Smith still concludes the Warwick Debate address to which I have linked thus:-

“What follows from this analysis?  First, that in a world of political and cultural pluralism where states and ethnies operate with rival conceptions of the nation and its boundaries, ethno-national conflict is endemic. Second, that nations and nationalisms are a political necessity in a world of competing and unequal states requiring popular legitimation and mobilisation. Third, that because so many people feel their nation performs important social and political functions, it is going to take more than a Maastricht Treaty to wean them away from these deeply felt national allegiances. And finally, because so many nations are historically embedded in pre-modern ethnic ties, memories and heritages, we are unlikely to witness in our lifetime the transcendence of the nation and the supersession of nationalism, of which so many utopians have dreamt!”

The meaning of this I take to be: we have ceded the terms of the debate, we may even have ceded the debate.  But words are less than the deeds of blood, which will sustain.  Indeed, there is no likelihood of anything half-permanent being built on anything else.

How it will all come apart, of course, should the communitarians establish their utopia, is a very big question.

Posted by John S Bolton on Wed, 05 Jan 2005 10:13 | #

The communists used to promote their despotism by saying that ethnic groups would be at each other’s throats without the indispensable dictatorship, which makes propaganda for the brotherhood and unity of all mankind. Communitarians may present themselves as enforcers of intercommunal peace, with no qualifications for such a role other than Nietzschean ruthlessness, but don’t anyone forget that they are from the socialist tradition which called itself the scientific socialism which would prevent economic disaster. The peddlers of mass murder as an end in itself, our leftist professoriate on alternative welfare, have no credibility when they cry peace and brotherhood, do they?

Posted by Matt on Thu, 06 Jan 2005 17:54 | #

I wrote:
“Knowing that liberalism is relentlessly driven is something I suppose, but knowing what drives liberalism is the critical question.”

Mr. Tillman replied:
“Cui bono?”

That can never be the entire story.  People do act out of selfish interests, of course, but “liberalism” is not a synonym for “selfishness”.  Liberalism is a system of beliefs with many loyal followers; their loyalties may at times be explicable in part as self-interest, but we would be fools to accept that as the whole story, or even as the most critical part of the story.  Quite the contrary, it is literally an irrelevance because as a practical matter self-interest accompanies all human endeavors, and is therefore useless as a discriminator between different human endeavors.

Posted by Matt on Thu, 06 Jan 2005 18:08 | #

Communitarians may present themselves as enforcers of intercommunal peace, with no qualifications for such a role other than Nietzschean ruthlessness, but don’t anyone forget that they are from the socialist tradition which called itself the scientific socialism which would prevent economic disaster.

I agree with this but I think it is important to note that modern communitarians did not invent the notion of the community as something which morally transcends the autonomous individual. (The individual also transcends the community, of course, and a good social order recognizes both: neither the community nor the individual are atomically reduceable to each other).  Rather, modern communitarians swiped the idea from earlier traditions in the face of what they saw as the failure of liberal capitalism to achieve equality.

But as Mr. Bolton says, this modern economic communitarianism is not about community as a transcendent object of our loyalties.  It is just a technique, in much the same way as nazi racism was not fundamentally about ethnic loyalty but rather was about eugenic technique: an application of scientism in the pursuit of the free and equal new man. 

Fundamentally liberalism is about the free and equal new man, self-created by reason and will; not the various competing techniques intended to bring him about.

Posted by Matt on Thu, 06 Jan 2005 18:26 | #

I wrote:
It [modern communitarianism] is just a technique, in much the same way as nazi racism was not fundamentally about ethnic loyalty but rather was about eugenic technique: an application of scientism in the pursuit of the free and equal new man.

This is something that ethnically loyal rightists need to understand, by the way.  The Nazis did not fail in getting their racial views adopted by virtually everyone: they succeeded.  They transformed ethnic loyalty from something tied to traditional roots, destroyed the Saileresque extended family that is loyal to its own without finding the Other inherently less than human.  All that remains of ethnic loyalty in the minds of most moderns is the Nazi idea of technologically superior genetics: the genetically inferior are less than human and cannot participate in the free and equal world of the ubermensch. 

So in the modern world any race-consciousness is inherently Nazi.  To refuse to admit that a particular race is part of the free and equal uber-race is to say that that race is less than human; that it is holding back the free and equal new man; that it is the untermensch.  These days that can only be said with social impunity - nay sanction - about the white race.

Posted by John S Bolton on Fri, 07 Jan 2005 03:16 | #

On the contrary, any race consciousness other than a larger scale European one, is being given every encouragement and establishment in the government schools. You’re up against propaganda for official discretion, which may be taken at face value just so long as it takes to refute it, but must never be taken as sincere. The only sincere part is that which answers the question: how can scholars and officials obtain power to establish theoretically puristic dystopia. Communitarianism, the brotherhood and equality of man, antiracism, the black racesoul, minority particularisms and chauvinisms, all contradict and cancel each other out, leaving only an elite power struggle. it is the result of institutionalized aggression in the field of idea, following out its principle to the bitter radical end.

Posted by Matt on Fri, 07 Jan 2005 05:32 | #

”...any race consciousness other than a larger scale European one, is being given every encouragement and establishment in the government schools.”

Yes, of course, but it is exactly a Nazi form of race consciousness.  It is the race-consciousness of the oppressed ubermensch, who would be the free and equal new superman if only he were not being repressed by the tyrannical untermensch. 

My point was not that race consciousness does not exist in the modern psyche: it was that the only form of race consciousness that is conceivable to the modern psyche is (objectively, not psychologically) the Nazi kind.  (The Nazi himself is now viewed in reverse: he viewed himself as the racially oppressed proto-ubermensch; now he is viewed as the racial oppressor, the untermensch that must be destroyed through one means or another to make way for the new man, and whites who are not properly obsequious to liberalism are viewed as Nazis).

Traditional racial ties of the Sailer extended-family type aren’t even conceivable to most moderns: most moderns literally cannot conceptually process it, because their racial paradigm is the Nazi paradigm.  That is why most moderns view the sort of people who frequent blogs like this one as Nazis: ironically, because they themselves have adopted the Nazi view of race.

Posted by John S Bolton on Fri, 07 Jan 2005 07:21 | #

It certainly isn’t a car accident in the road of the history of ideas. It is not as if one could just remove some wreckage ( with convincing arguments ) and get traffic moving again. Civilization is in the way of the power-hunger of scholars and bureaucrats; so is truth, freedom from aggression, law and patriotism. Believe it or not, these people are not the enemies of the white race, nor the partisans of the tropical-adapted races that they are taken to be. They are not sincere; the disadvantaged minorities are stepping stones to power, to be discarded as soon as dictatorship is established in the countries which have been the most resistant to it. Once they have the power that they covet, the whites become the power base, to be again flattered with nationalistic rhetoric. One who imagines otherwise, I would say has been hoodwinked by the unprincipled, mendacious products of aggression in the field of ideas. Leading recent example: Milosevic ( before and after the switch from communism )

Posted by Matt on Fri, 07 Jan 2005 20:08 | #

But again, it isn’t just about power.  It is power with purpose: and that purpose is to destroy the oppressor-untermensch and emancipate the free and equal new man.  Individual actors (Hitler, Stalin, Milosevec, Clinton, Bush, Chirac, Blair) and their ambitions are completely irrelevant without the liberalism which animates them.

The Right’s current fixation on personal selfish motives as the pat explanation for all of the activities of liberalism has a dangerous side-effect: it leaves the Right itself vulnerable to infiltration by liberal ideology.  Nay, it doesn’t merely leave it vulnerable, it actively imports liberal ideological commitments into the Right.  Thus you end up with a hawkish left-leaning liberal like George Bush being widely understood as an extreme right-winger.  Why?  Because the Right refuses to comprehend the liberalism it opposes; because it is easier to whine about leftists being power-hungry than it is to face the liberalism that has taken over the Right itself from within.

Yes, by embracing liberalism as its trophy victims, favored ethnic groups are setting themselves up for annihilation.  No, they have no idea that this is what is taking place.  But so what?

It is long past time for the Right to immunize itself from this disease.  And the only way to do that is to stop fixating on the personal motivations of particular actors, and for the Right to repent of the liberalism with which it has become infected.  It is to confront liberalism as liberalism, not as some pseudo-psychological confrontation with the personal Maslow heirarchies and will-to-power of politicians.

Posted by John S Bolton on Wed, 12 Jan 2005 07:48 | #

You have to look at the history of the left with special attention to its reversals of position. In the 30’s they were for scientific socialism and industrial development, in the 60’s they went antiscience and antitechnology. In the 30’s one of their slogans was; ‘unite and fight for a white South africa’, later it was black power. They were for autarchy, then for free trade. They were for man, then they were for rare birds. Every leftist and ancillary (liberal) position is disposable, except one: that society must move towards dictatorship. Socialism is mass murder as an end in itself, it is power with a purpose in that sense. Behind that is the wish of the government professoriate for the chance to nurture a dream of imposing a pure theory of society by force, onto an existing one. This is how the government school degenerates and becomes like a disease.

Posted by Matt on Wed, 12 Jan 2005 18:46 | #

“Every leftist and ancillary (liberal) position is disposable, except one: that society must move towards dictatorship.”

No.  That is absolutely, utterly, completely wrong, and believing it is what leads the Right to complicity and ruin.  The Right believes that sort of thing because it is easier to believe that than it is to face the only viable option: unequivocal, categorical repentance from core liberal principles.  Most on the Right now also believe that they are the free and equal new modern man, and would rather see the West go down in utter ruin than give up that commitment.

Liberals (including socialists and nazis) never, ever give up their commitment to freedom and equality for the new man.  They just disagree about who he is, about how to destroy his putative oppressors, and about how much compromise with nature and history is necessary as a tactical thing.

Posted by John S Bolton on Thu, 13 Jan 2005 08:05 | #

The inequality of man appears to be a premise of many socialist and liberal political orders and theories. There have been socialists of the throne and altar; there have been monarchists of the left. Please account for de Maistre, de Gobineau, Comte and the right Hegelians, and the founders of America. Wells,Shaw and Mencken may also need explanation. If what you mean is that universal principles are always used by theoreticians, that might be true, with a possible exception for the fascist ideologists, or some of them. If your scholarly and political consensus for freedom and equality includes Nietzsche, doesn’t that indicate an equivocation of some kind?

Posted by John S Bolton on Thu, 13 Jan 2005 08:33 | #

Also; if the problem is that we are demonizing people, such as the white race, in order to get to the magic land of equality, won’t we still have to class as subhuman a certain potion of the population, namely the aggressors, in order to be able to punish violent crime in any conceivable social order? Won’t we have to class as subhuman the breeding practices found to be normative in some populations? So the problem can’t be that society sometimes demonizes a group; how would wars be fought then, and how long may a pacifist society be left unmolested?

Posted by Matt on Fri, 14 Jan 2005 03:17 | #

If your scholarly and political consensus for freedom and equality includes Nietzsche, doesn’t that indicate an equivocation of some kind?

It might but for the ubermensch/untermensch distinction within every liberalism.  Freedom and equality are for the ubermensch alone, and is only truly possible after the extermination (by one means or another) of the untermensch.

Also, I have described liberalism rather specifically.  Antiliberalism does not reduce to pacifism.  The warriors at Lepanto were no pacifists, nor were they liberals.

Posted by Matt on Fri, 14 Jan 2005 03:23 | #

Also you needn’t attempt to predicate acceptance of an understanding of liberalism on liberalism’s putative intellectual coherence.  Indeed, one will always fail to recognize liberalism-qua-liberalism when applying that specific criteria, as liberalism-qua-liberalism is rationally incoherent.  The specific example you raise is that liberalism on the one hand demands universal equality and on the other demands discrimination between the oppressed-ubermensch and the oppressor-untermensch, that the former may be emancipated via the latter’s destruction.

Nevertheless, despite its rational incoherence, it is something that can be understood within its various instantiated settings within the actual world and actual history.

Posted by John S Bolton on Fri, 14 Jan 2005 04:50 | #

In that case, look at history and find that there is no movement which, in power, does not, before long, demonize some group with whom war starts, or who are simply too far below standard. What is different upon entering liberal or leftist phases is that mass public education allows for a snowballing cultural effect which generates the attempted idealization of mass murder. Freedom changes its meaning to its contrary, the desire for freedom from aggresion is turned into propaganda demanding freedom for aggression. It is not a question of whether society demonizes some people or not.

Posted by Matt on Fri, 14 Jan 2005 07:19 | #

Liberalism does not merely mean “some people are demonized”, no.  It is much more specific than that (despite its nearly comprehensive pervasiveness in the modern world).

Liberalism postulates a new man; a man who is free, and is the equal of all other men, self-created through reason and will, emancipated from the chains of history and tradition and nature, a modern self-creation.

Some liberalisms (e.g. naziism, communism, feminism) are very dogmatic.  Others (neoconservatism, libertarianism) are more equivocal.  Some (libertarianism, modern liberalism, neoconservatism) think the new man is already here, that he is us; others (naziism, communism) think he has to be technologically constructed.  But they are all liberalisms (or call them “modernisms” if you prefer); their highest political ideals are individual freedom and equal rights, thought they disagree over who is the new man, who is the oppressor, and how to go about the project of eliminating oppression in favor of freedom and equality for the new man.

Some actual liberals/moderns are very dogmatic; others are lukewarm in their loyalties.  Some are wishy-washy about destroying the bonds of history and tradition and nature, others want to turn those bonds toward liberal ends, and still others hate those bonds and would annihilate them utterly in a single destructive act if they could.  Some think it is wiser to enact the revolution slowly; some think the revolution has reached the end of history already; others think the end of history must as a moral matter be brought about as quickly as possible.  Some liberalisms would banish the transcendent from politics utterly; other liberalisms would allow the transcendent to influence politics, but only to the extent that the new man wills it to be so as realized through liberal institutions.  These differences are real and they generate the taxonomy of liberalisms; but they do not alter the category to which they all belong.

The main point, though, even if we quibble over the structure and theory of liberalism-qua-liberalism, is that liberalism/socialism/modernism is not just about power.  Saying that it is just about power and nothing else is a mistake.  It allows the enemy to hide in the grass and infiltrate us from the inside. Worse than that: to believe that liberalism is just about power with no goal other than power is to believe a falsehood.

The only reasonable response to liberalism and its utter dominance of modern political discourse is repentance: not the demonization of some group of liberals or other, but repentance from and categorical repudiation of liberal principles.

Posted by John S Bolton on Fri, 14 Jan 2005 07:58 | #

The pervasiveness of the larger liberalism you speak of, seems to lead to a contradiction. If the solution is to repent of the hubris that breaks bonds of nature, tradition and community of values which once were unquestioned, and which breaks with history, substituting new free and equal men, haven’t these breaks already happened? If they have, then we need (not contradictorily?) revolutionary action, and of a type that deliberately picks which community of values is to be revolutionized towards, like jacobins or Bolsheviks. Why would the alternative not be to shut down the forced anti-culture of the government schools, and trust that a nobler spirit will reconvene all that which may in private means, without aggression, be capable of being summoned? If we are not the new man yet, reservoirs of what is old and good must be superabundant in comparison to the need. That is, where the need is to recreate cultural value, by reference to older models.

Posted by Matt on Fri, 14 Jan 2005 16:44 | #

I think it is true that there is no longer any such thing as conservatism as traditionally understood: that the most pervasively authoritative established tradition has become the rejection (in variations of lukewarm/slow and dogmatic/immediate) of established traditions.  And while I don’t reject government schools which inculcate civilizational values into the young on principle - that isn’t strong enough, I see their rejection on principle as a fundamental error - I do reject their current content and would see their disappearance as a net gain.

Posted by John S Bolton on Sat, 15 Jan 2005 10:49 | #

Well then, brother, it is clear that your faith is strong and clean. I don’t want to belabor may point about how the appearance of aggression in the field of ideas brings on that which has its vocation from hell, because you are one of the good.