The conventional left/right model of the political spectrum holds Fascism and Marxism to be polar opposites of one another. Marxism is regarded as an ideology of the extreme Left while Fascism supposedly represents an outlook that is about as far to the Right as one can go. A title recently translated into English by Portugal’s Finis Mundi Press, Eric Norling’s Revolutionary Fascism, does much to call the perception of Fascism, conceived of as it was by Mussolini and his cohorts, as an ideology of the extreme Right into question.

This work was originally published in 2001 and author Norling, a historian and lawyer, is a native Swede who now resides in Spain. Norling observes that throughout the entirety of his early life, from childhood until World War One, Mussolini was every bit as much as man of the Left as contemporaries such as Eugene V. Debs. He was what would later come to be known as a “red diaper baby” (meaning the child of revolutionary socialist parents). As a young man, Mussolini himself was a Marxist, fervently anticlerical, went to Switzerland to evade compulsory military service, and was arrested and imprisoned for inciting militant strikes. Eventually, he became a leader in Italy’s Socialist Party and he was imprisoned once again in 1911 for his antiwar activities related to Italy’s invasion of Libya. Mussolini was so prominent a socialist at this point in his career that he won the praise of Lenin who considered him to be the rightful head of a future Italian socialist state.

When World War One began in 1914, Mussolini initially held to the Italian Socialist Party’s antiwar position, but in the ensuing months switched to a pro-war position which earned him an expulsion from the party. He then enlisted in the Italian army and was wounded in combat. The reasons for Mussolini’s shift to a pro-war position are essential to understanding the true origins and nature of fascism and its place within the context of twentieth century political and intellectual history. Mussolini came to see the war as an anti-imperialist struggle against the Hapsburg dynasty of Austria-Hungary. Further, he regarded the war as an anti-monarchist struggle against conservative forces such as the Hapsburgs, the Ottoman Turks, and the Hohenzollern’s of Germany and attacked these regimes as reactionary enemies who had repressed socialism. Mussolini also prophetically believed that Russia’s participation in the war would weaken that nation to the point where it was susceptible to socialist revolution (which is precisely what happened). In other words, Mussolini regarded the war as an opportunity to advance leftist revolutionary struggles in Italy and elsewhere.

When the Italian Fascist movement was founded in 1919, most of its leaders and theoreticians were, like Mussolini himself, former Marxists and other radical leftists such as proponents of the revolutionary syndicalist doctrines of Georges Sorel. The official programs issued by the Fascists, translations of which are included in Norling’s book, reflected a standard mixture of republican and socialist ideas that would have been common to any European leftist group of the era. If indeed the evidence is overwhelming that Fascism has its roots on the far Left, then from where does Fascism’s reputation as a rightist ideology originate?

The answer appears to be a combination of three primary factors: Marxist propaganda that has regrettably found its way into the mainstream historiography, the revision of leftist revolutionary doctrine itself by Fascist leaders, and the inevitable compromises and accommodations made by Fascism upon the achievement of actual state power. Regarding the first these, David Ramsay Steele described the standard Marxist interpretation of Fascism in an important article on Fascism’s history:

In the 1930s, the perception of "fascism" in the English-speaking world morphed from an exotic, even chic, Italian novelty into an all-purpose symbol of evil. Under the influence of leftist writers, a view of fascism was disseminated which has remained dominant among intellectuals until today. It goes as follows:

Fascism is capitalism with the mask off. It's a tool of Big Business, which rules through democracy until it feels mortally threatened, then unleashes fascism. Mussolini and Hitler were put into power by Big Business, because Big Business was challenged by the revolutionary working class. We naturally have to explain, then, how fascism can be a mass movement, and one that is neither led nor organized by Big Business. The explanation is that Fascism does it by fiendishly clever use of ritual and symbol. Fascism as an intellectual doctrine is empty of serious content, or alternatively, its content is an incoherent hodge-podge. Fascism's appeal is a matter of emotions rather than ideas. It relies on hymn-singing, flag-waving, and other mummery, which are nothing more than irrational devices employed by the Fascist leaders who have been paid by Big Business to manipulate the masses.

This perception continues to be the standard leftist “analysis” of Fascism even in present times, and goes a long way towards explaining why, for instance, American political movements or figures that have absolutely nothing to do with historic Fascism, such as the Tea Party or the neocon mouthpieces of FOX News or “conservative” talk radio, continue to be recipients of the “fascist” label by atavistic liberals and leftists.

The reality of Fascism’s origins was quite different. Its creators were an assortment of leftist intellectuals and political figures whose common reference point was their realization that Marxism was a failed ideology. As Steele observed:

Fascism began as a revision of Marxism by Marxists, a revision which developed in successive stages, so that these Marxists gradually stopped thinking of themselves as Marxists, and eventually stopped thinking of themselves as socialists. They never stopped thinking of themselves as anti-liberal revolutionaries.

The Crisis of Marxism occurred in the 1890s. Marxist intellectuals could claim to speak for mass socialist movements across continental Europe, yet it became clear in those years that Marxism had survived into a world which Marx had believed could not possibly exist. The workers were becoming richer, the working class was fragmented into sections with different interests, technological advance was accelerating rather than meeting a roadblock, the "rate of profit" was not falling, the number of wealthy investors ("magnates of capital") was not falling but increasing, industrial concentration was not increasing, and in all countries the workers were putting their country above their class.

The early Fascists were former Marxists who had come to doubt the revolutionary potential of class struggle, but had simultaneously come to regard revolutionary nationalism as showing considerable promise. As Mussolini remarked in a speech on December 5, 1914:

The nation has not disappeared. We used to believe that the concept was totally without substance. Instead we see the nation arise as a palpitating reality before us!...Class cannot destroy the nation. Class reveals itself as a collection of interests—but the nation is a history of sentiments, traditions, language, culture, and race. Class can become an integral part of the nation, but the one cannot eclipse the other. The class struggle is a vain formula, with effect and consequence wherever one finds a people that has not integrated itself into its proper linguistic and racial confines—where the national problem has not been definitely resolved. In such circumstances the class movement finds itself impaired by an inauspicious historic climate.

Fascism subsequently abandoned class struggle for a revolutionary nationalist outlook that stood for class collaboration under the leadership of a strong state that was capable of unifying the nation and accelerating industrial development. Indeed, Steele made an interesting observation concerning the similarities between Italian and Third World Marxist “national liberation” movements of the second half of the twentieth century:

The logic underlying their shifting position was that there was unfortunately going to be no working-class revolution, either in the advanced countries, or in less developed countries like Italy. Italy was on its own, and Italy's problem was low industrial output. Italy was an exploited proletarian nation, while the richer countries were bloated bourgeois nations. The nation was the myth which could unite the productive classes behind a drive to expand output. These ideas foreshadowed the Third World propaganda of the 1950s and 1960s, in which aspiring elites in economically backward countries represented their own less than scrupulously humane rule as "progressive" because it would accelerate Third World development. From Nkrumah to Castro, Third World dictators would walk in Mussolini's footsteps. Fascism was a full dress rehearsal for post-war Third Worldism.

During its twenty-three years in power, Mussolini’s regime certainly made considerable concessions to traditionally conservative interests such as the monarchy, big business, and the Catholic Church. These pragmatic accommodations borne of political necessity are among the evidences typically offered by leftists as indications of Fascism’s rightist nature. Yet there is abundant evidence that Mussolini essentially remained a socialist throughout the entirety of his political life. By 1935, thirteen years after Mussolini seized power in the March on Rome, seventy-five percent of Italian industry had either been nationalized outright or brought under intensive state control. Indeed, it was towards the end of both his life and the life of his regime that Mussolini’s economic policies were at their most leftist.

After briefly losing power for a couple of months during the summer of 1943, Mussolini returned as Italy’s head of state with German assistance and set up what came to be called the Italian Social Republic. The regime subsequently nationalized all companies employing more than a hundred workers, redistributed housing that was formerly privately owned to its worker occupants, engaged in land redistribution, and witnessed a number of prominent Marxists joining the Mussolini government, including Nicola Bombacci, the founder of the Italian Communist Party and a personal friend of Lenin. These events are described in considerable detail in Norling’s work.

It would appear that the historic bitter rivalry between Marxists and Fascists is less a conflict between the Left and the Right, and more of a conflict between erstwhile siblings on the Left. This should come as no particular surprise given the penchant of radical leftist groupings for sectarian blood feuds. Indeed, it might be plausibly argued that leftist ”anti-fascism” is rooted in jealously of a more successful relative as much as anything else. As Steele noted:

Mussolini believed that Fascism was an international movement. He expected that both decadent bourgeois democracy and dogmatic Marxism-Leninism would everywhere give way to Fascism, that the twentieth century would be a century of Fascism. Like his leftist contemporaries, he underestimated the resilience of both democracy and free-market liberalism. But in substance Mussolini's prediction was fulfilled: most of the world's people in the second half of the twentieth century were ruled by governments which were closer in practice to Fascism than they were either to liberalism or to Marxism-Leninism. The twentieth century was indeed the Fascist century.

Matthew Lyons is a leftist writer of  the "watchdog" variety and has in the past worked as a co-author with Chip Berlet. He currently operates a blog called "Three Way Fight" which previously featured a critique of AlternativeRight.Com from a hard left perspective. More recently, Lyons published an extensive critique of the ideas and work of yours truly on the socialist New Politics website. I have since produced a three part response. See Part One, Part Two, and Part Three. Lyons has posted a very brief reply to my reply. Readers of AltRight may find the exchange interesting or at least amusing.

Professor Roderick Long is a Harvard grad who currently teaches philosophy at Auburn University. He is also a devout “Austro-libertarian,” an ideology that synthesizes Austrian economics with individualist anarchism in the manner championed by Murray Rothbard. He is associated with the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a libertarian think tank, the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, and the left-libertarian Molinari Society. Professor Long is someone whose work I generally respect and which contains some interesting and valuable insights into matters involving political theory, class theory, political economy, legal theory, and a number of other matters. Unfortunately, Long is also a PC lunatic on social questions who once compared pro-lifers to Guantanamo torturers during an online discussion he and I were both party to. His argument? Childbirth is physically painful, therefore denying a woman an abortion at any time she wants for any reason she wants amounts to the imposition of physical torture. Pretty thin, huh? Apparently, women who undergo abortion procedures never experience any kind of discomfort, physical or otherwise. (By the way, I generally favor legal abortion, in case anyone is wondering.)

I was therefore surprised to see Professor Long offer the following insight during a discussion of how “Austro-libertarians” might engage in outreach to the Left:

There are some left-wingers whom I call the “aristocratic left,” and whom I despair of reaching. These are left-wingers who have a particular vision of an idyllic society and are prepared to hammer into place anyone whose preferences or behavior don’t align with the vision; in effect they see other people as their property. Back when I lived in North Carolina, on the city line between Chapel Hill and Carrboro, I used to watch with mixed amusement and horror as the affluent white “liberals” who ran the city councils of those two communities competed to see which city could impose the most callous and intrusively micromanaging legislation. In Carrboro, which incredibly billed itself as the “Paris of the Piedmont,” the council thought that old cars looked unsightly, and so declared that residents would be forbidden to park in their driveways any car older than a certain number of years (I forget how many). Unsurprisingly, this law had a more burdensome impact on lower-income households than on higher; so much for the idea that liberals are supposed to care about the poor. The Chapel Hill council, with similar solicitude, forbade a local copy shop to post its (low) prices or to use words such as “discount” in its advertising, because the emphasis on low cost seemed tawdry, and clashed with their vision of an upscale community. (I am not making this up.) I have to laugh when conservatives accuse liberals of practicing class warfare, because these regulations were certainly class warfare-but from the opposite direction from the one suggested by the accusation. The Carrboro council also thought that cul-de-sacs looked unfriendly and standoffish, too much like private communities, and so proposed not only to ban new ones but to ram streets through existing ones; apparently the beloved mantra of children’s safety only applies sometimes. Mercifully, I don’t think that one finally passed. The same council also wanted to require drive-in banks and restaurants to install downward-sloping exits, thus allowing cars to turn their engines off and glide soundlessly and emissionlessly back down the street. (I am still not making this up.) What gun laws were favoured by these two hyperactive city councils I leave to your imagination. I have no suggestions on how to sell Austro-libertarianism to left-wingers of this variety; they seem like enemies of the human race.

Of course, Professor Long goes on to contrast this evil “aristocratic Left” with the good Left:

There are many, many left-wingers whose primary motivation for their left-wing political stance is the very libertarian impulse to protect people who are being pushed around. These left-wingers look at contemporary society and see an economy dominated by massive, impersonal corporations with enormous and seemingly unaccountable power; they see lower- and middle-income people disempowered in the workplace and struggling to make ends meat; they see institutions and social practices rigged against blacks, women, gays, immigrants, and other oppressed groups-and they turn to government to address these inequities, viewing the democratic state as an institution in principle accountable to the public, and thus able to serve as a bulwark against private power and privilege. Call this variety of left-wingers the anti-privilege Left. And this is the Left we can reach.

Not so fast. Taken together, the two statements quoted above represent a dizzying combination of genuine perspicacity and utter obliviousness. On one hand, Professor Long is one of the very few from what might be called the “cultural hard left” to recognize that there is, indeed, such a thing as an “aristocratic Left.” (Obviously, “aristocratic” is being used here as an adjective or metaphor for the more general category of educated, affluent or wealthy elites.)

One of the more important insights advanced by the “radical right” is the recognition that liberalism is in fact an ideology of the elite. Most hard leftists regard nearly everyone to the right of Leon Trotsky to be an “extreme right-winger” and it is not uncommon to see such people denounce moderate conservatives as “fascists” or “crypto-Nazis.” The publications of the hard left persistently lament the supposed ongoing drift of domestic American politics to the “far right” even though American society continues to become ever more liberal, and the ideas of yesterday’s loony leftists become ever more mainstream and respectable. For example, expressing support for gay marriage, which would have been regarded as insanity during the supposed Golden Age of Decadence of the 1960s and 1970s, is now just another somewhat controversial but still respectable middle-of-the-road, perhaps slightly left-of-center opinion.

Likewise, the election of the first Black president is somehow dismissed by the Left as just a cosmetic feature that hides what a horrid, racist, White supremacist society America really is, even though nothing destroys the reputation and career of a public figure any quicker than accusations racism, no matter how mild or dubious.

Further, Professor Long recognizes that the upper classes and affluent upper-middle classes are hardly consistent or even frequent proponents of ostensibly conservative economic values such as “free markets” or “limited government.” Rather the wealthy and affluent are like every other socioeconomic interest group in that they want state intervention into the economy on their own behalf, not “free enterprise” or “market discipline.” This is a sharp departure from the usual leftist habit of dismissing conservative and libertarian critics of state-managed economies as mere apologists for the plutocratic status quo. But what Professor Long is missing is the insight that perhaps many of those who present themselves as champions of the workers, the poor, minorities, women, gays, immigrants, and on down the list of the officially oppressed might also have less than honest or honorable motivations, and might in fact frequently be charlatans, crooks, scam artists, or aspiring tyrants. Nor does it occur to him that perhaps those “aristocratic leftists” whom he labels as “enemies of the human race,” and who are persistently agitating for repressive gun laws and intrusive economic regulations, might in fact be the same class of folks who are similarly pushing the vast array of attitudes, institutional policies, and bits of legislation that have collectively been given the popular label of “political correctness.”

For it is among this class of upper-middle income and wealthy liberals that Long describes that we typically find the most zealous proponents of affirmative action, amnesty for illegal immigrants, legislated “rights” for the organized gay lobby that in fact abridge the associational, religious, and economic liberties of others, radical feminists who are not downtrodden seamstresses in garment factories but tenured academics or activist attorneys or other professionals, university professors and administrators, public sector bureaucrats who oversee the managerial state, corporate executives who pride themselves on their extensive commitment to “diversity” and “sensitivity,” and so on. Might it not just be that this socioeconomic demographic, those “aristocratic leftists” who are “enemies of the human race,” are in fact the exact same people who are the most zealous proponents of PC fundamentalism? And might they indeed have sinister ulterior motives for assuming such a stance?

This is not to say that many liberals and leftists do not hold the political beliefs that they do out of sincere regard for those whom they consider to be oppressed or downtrodden. But when we see the affluent and influential classes championing things like mass immigration or the suppression of public debate concerning taboo subjects along with all sorts of other pernicious legislation, economic policies, or social practices, perhaps we should ask ourselves why this is the case?

Whenever I have presented my “totalitarian humanism” theory to seemingly sincere liberals, the main difficulty they seem to encounter in comprehending my analysis is their inability to absorb the idea that those who claim to be waging a righteous crusade against racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, et. al. ad nauseam could possibly be motivated by anything any other than a desire to do good and make the world a better place. At worst, I am often told in response, the PC zealots are guilty of mere overreaction to past injustices or excessive exuberance in pursuit of a noble ideal. Indeed, I believe that it is this same mindset that accounts for the otherwise inexplicable phenomena of why Nazism has come to symbolize the ultimate in evil, while Communism has rarely received such a treatment in the history books, and is certainly not regarded in the same manner by intellectual and cultural elites, even though its murderous and genocidal propensities certainly rival that of any of its ideological competitors. Therefore, exposing the destructive proclivities of PC for the tyrannical anti-human ideology that it is becomes one of our most important tasks.

One of the few edifying things about the tapoica-brained fruitcake in Arizona making the news: I smell fear. I don't think ordinary people in this country are afraid, but I'm pretty sure the ruling class are soiling their hormone-free recyclable underthingees.   Ramussen agrees with me as to the mental state of the political class:

The gap between the Political Class and Mainstream voters on this question is enormous. While 76% of Political Class voters are concerned that opponents of Obama’s policies will turn to violence, 60% of those in the Mainstream are not very or not at all concerned.

More than 75% of voters now believe the U.S. government lacks the “consent of the governed,” a foundational principle of the American political experiment.

 

How else can you explain IRA terrorist-lovin' "conservative" Peter King's preposterous Marie Antionette proposal? How else can you explain both the ADL and ... the SPLC of all groups coming to the defense of Jared Taylor and American Renaissance? Could it be these groups have realized that open debate with a man like Jared Taylor is a losing game? Their defence of Mr. Taylor is actually quite clever: had they done the predictable thing and gone after him and his organization, they would have generated considerable sympathy and almost entirely favorable publicity for Mr. Taylor's organization. One might even speculate that this story was planted by a sympathizer in Fox News to drum up sympathy and publicity for AR. Certainly that has been the ultimate effect; even though the neocons keep up their slurs ... they're forced to acknowledge and defend the "far right." Doubtless many curious people will have a look over there; I hope AR has their best foot forward.

Fear makes people do stupid things, like accuse innocent people. While the natural thing to do is to defend AmRen and Mr. Taylor from these slurs, really, now is the time to go on the offensive. If I were Jared Taylor, I'd take advantage of this bad publicity to get his message out. I'm no political strategist, but I've done some martial arts, and the right thing to do to a frightened and confused opponent is to overwhelm them. It's not a gentlemanly thing to do, but it is what you need to do to win. What does this mean, practically speaking? The left is presently busy hyperventilating over Sarah Palin; I wouldn't want to interrupt them when they're having one of those, um, personal moments. Go after the neocons: get the attention of their followers. The neocons are the ones who just dropped the microphone. The left is helping: let 'em help -their days are numbered anyway. Professor Gottfried has recently been doing a splendid job of pointing out the unbelievable vapidity of authorized "conservatives" like Jonah Goldberg and Rich Lowry -we need to do more of this, if we're going to peel away their supporters who don't realize there are actual alternatives to the media authorized nincompoops who claim to speak for them.

Scott Locklin’s recent series on social class for AltRight was very intriguing to me, as Scott’s ideas overlap quite well with a theory of class and its relationship to PC that I have been working on for some time. He identifies the recently formed upper middle class of newly rich quasi-bohemians and affluent PC professionals as “the human embodiment of the Managerial State” and identifies this class as the primary enemy the Alternative Right needs to confront. I believe Scott is absolutely correct.

Last year, I did an analysis of voting patterns in U.S. elections according to socio-economic class. You can read the results here. Much of the data I discovered was unsurprising. The rich overwhelmingly vote Republican (outside of New York, L.A. and the Bay Area). The poor overwhelmingly vote Democratic. Blue collar workers (the “working class”) vote Democratic outside the South, where the results are more mixed depending on the locality. The more traditional sectors of the middle and upper-middle classes tend to vote Republican. By “traditional,” I mean Main Street commercial interests, small to medium sized business owners, middle managers, and white collar workers in traditional professions (like accountants). The major anomaly and by far the most interesting discovery in my research was the pattern of persons with solidly upper-middle class incomes and professional or social positions voting Democratic. This occurs primarily in the so-called “blue states,” or to break it down more accurately, in the counties, municipalities, and precincts in or around major urban centers where affluent professional people tend to reside. What we are seeing is the emergence of an upper-middle class that is economically prosperous, or even wealthy, but gives its political and cultural allegiance to the Left, often the fairly radical Left.  What I have called “totalitarian humanism” (we can call it “cultural Marxism” or simply PC if others prefer) is the ideological manifestation of this particular class.

The red-state/blue-state divide between Democrats and Republicans is normally interpreted as a “culture war” pitting the pre-1960s culture against the post-1960s culture. This would seem to be at least partially correct when it comes to partisan voting patterns within the middle and upper middle classes, though as Paul Gottfried recently pointed out, it’s doubtful that even ordinary GOP voters can rightfully be called “conservative” nowadays. But to a large degree I think partisan voting patterns can be understood as symptomatic of a wider “class struggle” between the traditional upper class that Scott describes, meaning the dying class of old bourgeoisie WASP elite, and an insurgency by this newly-emerging leftist upper-middle class.

This phenomenon is further illustrated by an analysis of the various factions and interest groups within the two major parties. It’s interesting that the Wikipedia entry on “factions in the Republican Party” includes only two issues of note, so-called “national security” (meaning the neocons and the overlords of the military-industrial complex) and “business” (a faction dominated by Wall Street, the banking cartel around the Fed, and politically connected welfare corporations). It’s clear enough that the professed social conservatism of the GOP is little more than an occasional bone to be thrown to the useful idiots who make up the “base,” as I’ve written about before. Contrast this with the Wikipedia entry on the Democratic Party’s “voter base” which reads like a role call of the PC Left: affluent liberal professionals, career bureaucrats, public sector workers, union bosses and their underlings, the academic left, college students who hope to join the upper middle class, elites among the racial/ethnic minorities, official gaydom, feminists, environmentalists, animal rights activists, little green men from Neptune, and on down the line. As Scott pointed out, it is precisely these elements that staff the “managerial state” or provide its clients or constituents, and PC provides their legitimating ideology.

 I believe Scott is correct that the “job of the alternative right…is to destroy the present upper middle class, and eventually replace it with something better.” If so, what will “something better” consist of, and from where will its allies and constituents come?

Kenneth Minogue has written what appears to be an interesting new book on the downfall of democracy as a viable political system. There are some excerpts at the New Criterion which are worth your attention. Minogue makes the point that the Managerial State and prosperity has more or less corrupted the national character and turned us into a nation of politically correct victims and limp wristed careerists. He doesn't explicitly recognize the checks on this put in place by the founding fathers to prevent this (aka only letting male freeholders vote), but it's worth keeping in mind as we degenerate into a nation of slaves.

My concern with democracy is highly specific. It begins in observing the remarkable fact that, while democracy means a government accountable to the electorate, our rulers now make us accountable to them. Most Western governments hate me smoking, or eating the wrong kind of food, or hunting foxes, or drinking too much, and these are merely the surface disapprovals, the ones that provoke legislation or public campaigns. We also borrow too much money for our personal pleasures, and many of us are very bad parents. Ministers of state have been known to instruct us in elementary matters, such as the importance of reading stories to our children. Again, many of us have unsound views about people of other races, cultures, or religions, and the distribution of our friends does not always correspond, as governments think that it ought, to the cultural diversity of our society. We must face up to the grim fact that the rulers we elect are losing patience with us...

It is this element of dehumanization that has produced what I am calling “the servile mind.” The charge of servility or slavishness is a serious one. It emerges from the Classical view that slaves lacked the capacity for self-movement and had to be animated by the superior class of masters. They were creatures of impulse and passion rather than of reason. Aristotle thought that some people were “natural slaves.” In our democratic world, by contrast, we recognize at least some element of the “master” (which means, of course, self-managing autonomy) in everyone. Indeed, in our entirely justified hatred of slavery, we sometimes think that the passion for freedom is a constitutive drive of all human beings. Such a judgment can hardly survive the most elementary inspection of history. The experience of both traditional societies and totalitarian states in the twentieth century suggests that many people are, in most circumstances, happy to sink themselves in some collective enterprise that guides their lives and guarantees them security. It is the emergence of freedom rather than the extent of servility that needs explanation...

The problem about identifying servility in our modern Western societies results from the assumption that freedom and independence are admirable, and their opposites not. Hence the strong human tendency to trade off freedom for some other condition of things—money, security, approval—must take on the appearance of a virtue. A further problem with servility is that its opposite might seem to be a swaggering parade of one’s own independence, but this is just as likely to be a cover for a servile spirit. Since the essence of servility is dependence of mind, independence is compatible with situational caution, as in the case of the assistant to Lord Copper in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, who responds to whatever idiotic remark his press baron employer might make with the words “Up to a point, Lord Copper.” Wariness, tact, and hypocrisy are inevitable elements in the comic conditions of modern bourgeois life, and their significance is never obvious, even to those indulging them...

And if it should seem that invoking servility as characterizing some of the conduct of modern Westerners is excessively dramatic, let me observe that we do actually have a vocabulary that recognizes slavishness in the everyday life of our societies. It happens, for example, when we call someone a toady, creep, wimp, careerist, or some other such denigration. Indeed, our vocabulary reveals a variety of ways in which we recognize tendencies which are quite precisely servile. Any failure to perform a public duty unless some private benefit is given, for example, is an exercise in corruption, and such corruption is a derogation of the moral life characteristic of the slave.

Christine O’Donnell is surely the biggest train wreck the conservative movement has yet produced.

Put aside, for the moment, her Young Earth Creationism and dictates against masturbation (an odd position, by the way, for an unmarried woman of 41.) Put aside the strange financial irregularities that have cropped up throughout her life (she received a BA from Fairliegh Dickinson this past fall after failing to pay tuition for 17 years.) Forget the alleged back taxes (everyone makes mistakes) and her strange accusations of burglary against her Senate opponent Mike Castle. Christine O’Donnell can best be summed up by the 6.9 million dollar “gender discrimination” lawsuit she filed against The Intercollegiate Studies Institute, the venerable conservative think-tank and publishing house where she once worked. It seems that this putative “radical conservative” was planning on getting rich via Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

I linked to Professor Codevilla's essay in my previous works on social class, but it's important enough to merit a little discussion by itself. Professor Codevilla's essay came out as I was writing my own ideas down, and appears to have made quite a splash in the blogosphere. In hopes of encouraging more people to consider the emerging right wing perspective on social class, I'll append a few excerpts. Codevilla is definitely our type of fellow: he's more of a Hawk than most would be comfortable with, but he finds the idea of exporting Democracy to be ridiculous, and he knows where the problems lie. He served in the Navy, as a Foreign Service Officer, and helped the Reagan Administration transition teams on intelligence. He's also very much against the present day Republican party, which he sees as part of the problem.

While he's an occasional contributor to National Review, they have so far treated his essay like a piece of road kill; prodding at it with a stick to make sure it's dead. Radio silence from Weekly Standard. Reason magazine is excited, but resentful that he doesn't include gay marriage enthusiasts and dope fiends in with the "good guys." I suppose the ding dongs in Reason Magazine are rightly confused: nobody wants to think of themselves as part of the problem, which they assuredly are.  Meanwhile, just about everyone else who isn't a mainstream conservative is pretty excited. Rush Limbaugh (whose audience is largely working and middle class) has been promoting him, and I hope he continues to do so.

Part six of a series on social class in America. Parts five, four, three, two and one.

Many people on the Alternative Right seem to think that race and genetics are the ultimate forbidden topic in America today. I disagree with this. There are mainstream publications which manage to publish reasonably true things about race and genetic differences regularly, with nary a peep from the right thinking. Certainly, among the left wing, these ideas are highly politically incorrect, and mentioning them can get you into all kinds of social trouble, but people do talk about them, a lot. People still react to some such truths with rage and "right thinking" people must ritually denounce the implications of belief in the theory of evolution, but American society talks about race and "human biodiversity"/HBD plenty for my tastes.

HBD is a topic which never interested me much, beyond the occasional ribald ethnic joke to liven up a dull party. Part of the reason is I always understood it to be true; I come from a big family and grew up in a neighborhood of big Catholic families, and it was always pretty obvious that the apple never fell far from the tree. Part of the reason is, really, there's nothing much you can do about knowing this sort of thing; practically speaking it's generally actionably irrelevant. I have also read some popular books and articles on the subject where the statistics were so atrocious, the best thing you could say about them was that they came up with a good "just so story." I suspect a lot of the people who have written the HBD stuff of the last couple decades are going to end up looking as silly as people who wrote on this subject 150 years ago did. We're really at the very beginning of understanding the subject. Two of my big hunches about the subject are that ideas on outbreeding depression and epigenetics will throw the subject into utter chaos, and we will at some point realize we have done irreparable harm to ourselves as a species by doing things we now think of as completely harmless. You read it here first.

A series on social class in America. Lower, working, middle and upper middle here.

The upper class in America is widely misunderstood. Everyone thinks the upper class is made up of the people with all the money. This is incorrect. The upper class in America are the people who successfully inherited their money via a particular folkway. Most people who made their own money are upper middle class people, with upper middle class values, upper middle class lifestyles and upper middle class neuroses. If they're lucky and raised their children properly, their grandkids will be genuine members of the upper class, but very often, they won't be.  Some upper class people in America are fairly rich, but I strongly suspect most of the big money is in the upper middle class. Some upper class people have decidedly small checkbooks.

The upper class in America are the people who used to be in the society page of the newspaper. One of the great tragedies of American history was how this class mildly stepped aside as the ruling class, and handed it over to the "modern" cretins in the upper middle classes. They're still the upper class and distinct from the lower orders, but they mostly seem content to fiddle while Rome burns. They do well in the markets; why should they worry? They no longer make taste for the lower classes as they did in the past, and they  don't lead in any obvious way. They do understand things, as they are the embodiment of historical continuity, and so there may be some hope for them yet. One of the defining characteristics of the upper class in America is what I like to call the "agon." It's what Nelson Aldritch (a genuine member of the upper class) describes in his own way as "the three ordeals." If you're a young member of the upper class in America, you will not necessarily inherit the family fortune as a matter of course. Well, you might, but you might not inherit the status that goes with it. Things are expected of you. You're expected to attend a good school. You're expected to do dangerous things, particularly if you're a man. Acceptable ordeals of danger: sports, aviation, spying, sailing, dressage, Teddy Rooseveltian outdoors and military antics. You're also expected to contribute something to society; charity work, funding the arts, teaching kids, publishing ventures. These ordeals of the upper class are what tames them, and makes them a positive social good in America. In a sense, they earn their money by developing real virtues. Development of human character is what makes the upper class admirable, rather than Caligulesque monsters. Oh, sometimes they do manage to be bad people, but their ordeals are a moderating force on their excesses. Really, the upper class is America's aristocracy. In fact, we often find they're related to actual nobility. I posit that the dispossession, demoralization and decadence of this nobility is the core cultural fracture which ruined the United States in the middle 20th century.