Richard Spencer and Robert Burnham’s Facebook conversation is pretty frightening, but I must say that it pales in comparison to a recent Free Republic thread about Julian Assange.  A commentator recommends the government go after the man’s family and when someone objects he’s shouted down as a liberal commie.

Some other representative suggestions.

His head would look good on a pike.

He truly needs to be carbombed

Surely someone in our DOD can take this pipsqueak out. We have killed better men for less in the past.

I support a CIA covert operation to coat his butt-plug with arsenic. ARSEnic...get it? (too strong? sorry.)

This truly has become deadly serious. He needs to be taken out. No internet bravado here, our government or allies need to act and end this. I don’t know if our various agencies can act on their own, but if they can, I hope they do soon. 

$200 for a bullet between that mother effer's eyes.

All this hatred, and for what?  Ten years ago a couple fanatics killed three thousand Americans.  Every death is a tragedy, but the US has sinned against the Muslim world much more than it’s been sinned against.  Half a million Iraqis died due to US sanctions and then another half million thanks to the war.  Yet if any Muslim in the world talks like these so-called patriotic citizens do it’s proof of the inherent depravity of the religion.

What’s really scary is speculating on what Republicans would advocate if there actually was a terrorist problem-this is, if the murder rate for Muslims ever reached 50% of what it is for Americans blacks or people of the Islamic faith ever managed to kill 1/10th as many people as the US murders overseas.  They already defend the right of the president to murder anyone whom he deems a “terrorist” and hold “enemy combatants” indefinitely.  Thankfully the “war on terror” is a government fabrication, for if it wasn’t and people actually were dying in any large numbers the US would by now make North Korea look like Hong Kong.

What indicates that conservatives are particularly dull is that they seem to understand that everybody in power is against them, but at the same time desire the state to have the prerogative to decide whether they live or die.  It reminds me of when William F. Buckley said he was fine with totalitarianism in America in order to defeat international communism while he rallied against the Godless and degenerate elite, who naturally ended up running the system he advocated. But at least Buckley was facing an enemy that had taken over half the planet and had the potential to destroy it all, not a few isolated anti-social failed engineering students and low IQ Nigerians with firecrackers in their pants.  

I don't know if I quite agree with Richard and Robert who believe that these sentiments represent something healthy that simply should be channeled into another direction.  The way one terrorist attack carried out with box cutters threw the entire nation into the arms of big brother shows how effeminate and cowardly we've become.  The branding of anybody who tried to link US policy to the terrorist attacks as "blaming America first" represents not only a general stupidity, but hostility to intellectual inquiry.  The wars that resulted out of the attacks managed to somehow combine the worst aspects of White Man's Burden imperialism and Wilsonian idealism.  And of course hostilities in the Middle East have facilitated the complete Zionist take over of the Republican Party.   Sure, there's a decent bit of implicit whiteness and anti-ethnomasochism in there, but it's in a very thick neo-con shell which will be very difficult to crack.  

In an age of checklists, decision trees, and zero tolerance, it's a puzzling notion.

People think it means giving up on reason. Or doing what's been done no matter what. Or accepting an external authority that has nothing to do with the situation we're actually dealing with.

What else could it mean, when each of us has his own thoughts and goals, reason is a matter of studies and statistics, and social authority is either following rules we've agreed to for our own purposes, or getting someone else's demands shoved down our throat?

Traditionalists are often painted as partisans of lost causes. The ideologues of modernity and “progress” thus consign actual rightist movements to history’s dark remnants, all the while leading humanity’s march into a radiant future of equality and liberty.

We have witnessed their future, and all its supposed radiance is but an artifice. Modern civilization offers a plethora of material goods to mask the denial of the one true Good; it creates virtual worlds of distractions and amusements to convince man to forget how he abandoned the one true God.

Ivan Ilyin, the philosopher and premier theorist of the White Russian movement, saw this earlier than most. The Whites were first into battle in the confrontation with one particularly savage program of the Revolution, Soviet Bolshevism. As an unabashedly faithful Christian, monarchist and patriot, Ilyin understood the full gravity of the threat and how to combat it; above all else, he knew victory could only be achieved through the will to spiritual resistance, in a war beginning in our own hearts.

As I was turning on TV earlier in the week (my wife keeps the set permanently on FOX), I heard Glenn Beck complaining about the Black Panthers. Viewers were then shown a picture of a presumed Klansman in a truck carrying a noose. Supposedly this is what the Black Panthers were planning to do, by looking tough in the presence of approaching voters near a polling station in Philadelphia. Beck then began screaming about how we were ceasing to judge people by “the content of their character,” a reference to the government’s failure to take action against the Panthers’ interference with voting procedures. For the next five minutes Beck dwelled on the idea that “Dr. King gave his life to prevent this from happening.” Indeed King, who had spent his life bearing witness to the truth, would be truly upset to see “how we’ve blown his legacy.”

Three observations are in order here. One, there is nothing in what the Panthers were doing that looked as they were planning a lynching. It’s not even clear that the white guy shown earlier was about to engage in the same quaint custom. Two, I couldn’t imagine that the real MLK would have been entirely unhappy with what Beck disapproved of. King favored all kinds of favors and set asides for his race and would undoubtedly have been delighted with a lopsided black voting majority in Philadelphia or anywhere else that brought his soulmates to power.

An isolated phrase from King’s “I Have a Dream” speech admittedly reveals very little about the speaker’s leftist politics, but perhaps Beck could bestir himself to notice what else King said and wrote. Perhaps Beck could even be induced to stop quoting that magic line that he uses in his monologues once he discovers more about King. But then perhaps he shouldn’t. If he keeps on long enough with his drippy routine while inventing new black founding fathers, he may achieve a victory of sorts, by lifting the GOP’s share of the black vote from 2 to 2.1 percent. But I certainly won’t listen to him as he engages in this Herculean task.

Tradition makes us what we are. The institutions that are dominant today want to make us more manageable as human resources, so they destroy all traditions but those of consumerist careerism. The latter, of course, include pluralism and inclusiveness.

People usually don't like it when things that are close to them are attacked for someone else's benefit. So why doesn't everyone join the traditionalists and overthrow the technocrats?

Paul Gottfried joins Richard to discuss the paleos, the neos, the Old Right, Buckley, and the conquest of the conservative movement by neoconservatives.

Last week was a bad one for David Weigel, an acquaintance of mine who resigned his position as an online reporter and blogger at the Washington Post (likely at his editors’ urgings) after it was revealed that on a liberal email listserve, “JournoList,” he had written mean things about Matt Drudge, Rush Limbaugh, and the conservative movement he was tasked with covering.

Weigel’s attacks on Rush and Drudge were personal: he wrote, clearly in jest, that he wished they’d both die. His take on Glenn Beck must have been red meat on an email list that was created by WaPo’s Ezra Klein and reportedly included such luminaries as Paul Krugman, Matthew Yglesias, Eric Alterman, and Jeffrey Toobin. Said Weigel,

One extra, obvious point -- Beck’s campaign against [Van] Jones was transparently racial . . . he treated his very white, very angry audience to video after video of Jones giving scorching speeches. At one point Beck just eschewed subtlety and played videos of Jones alongside videos of Jeremiah Wright while he remained on the screen mugging like Harpo Marx.

Perhaps even Klein, Krugman & Co. were embarrassed by Weigel’s Frankfurt-esque comments about Republicans' protecting "white privilege” (if only!).

When a friend told me about this last weekend, I predicted that Weigel would soon get hired by The Nation. I was wrong. Yesterday, he was named a MSNBC contributor.

Paul Gottfried's comments on my post on shrinks and hipsters raise several interesting points: is the social outlook found among the modish half-educated young an organic development or an intentional construction? Can we can do something about it and the broader stream of advanced liberalism of which it is part? And if something can be done, what's the key?

On the first point, there's no doubt a bit of a mixture but organic development seems more basic. Today's education is propagandistic but a system of propaganda can grow up organically. There's nothing radically autonomous about liberal theorists and propagandists. They function as part of a system that's evolved historically.

Paul's books have shown that major political traditions--liberalism, leftism, Christian activism--have all sunk into the same politically-correct mush. I've followed up with a book of my own claiming that the degeneration is a result of current understandings of knowledge and reality. If all that's even partly true, how can our situation at bottom be something that's constructed?

In any event, an emphasis on organic development helps avoid conspiracy theories and false optimism. If our present situation were simply a construction it could be dealt with by finding the bad guys who are doing the constructing and getting rid of them. That would be good if true, but our problems are too basic for that.

"Organic development" is another way of saying that a lot of things have grown up that are working together to promote advanced liberalism. That seems to be the case. It's conceivable that the bad guys continually win overwhelmingly because they're demonically powerful and clever, but more likely it's because the wind is blowing their way.

The point of my initial posting was that one notable version of advanced liberalism expresses a psychological type that is produced by the conditions of life today, in particular by the expectations and presuppositions that surround young people as they grow up.

To mention such influences isn't to claim they're the whole story. The (at least short-term) stability of the present situation shows that the hipster psychological type and its conditions and consequences are part of a package in which one part supports the others.

That package includes the people and institutions present-day trends make socially dominant. Those people and institutions naturally favor the trends and understandings that secure their position.

Hence the system of indoctrination that passes for education today. If liberalism makes you law school dean, you'll use your deanship to promote liberalism. And if hipsterdom destroys human ties and makes tradition inconceivable, the managerial state will be perfectly happy to promote hipsterdom.

Indoctrination is certainly part of how things work now, but it wouldn't turn people into self-satisfied true believers unless they were more than ready to accept the message offered. Nor would it be so consistent and pervasive if it didn't express a self-sustaining system of concepts, attitudes, and understandings that makes the message seem self-evidently correct.

On the question of what to do, it's worth noting that the "organic development" guy in the discussion (me) is more inclined to say something can be done than the "intentional construction" one. Even so, I wouldn't carry the point too far. No law, policy initiative, or corps of administrators is going to get us out of the hole we're in. We need a basic shift in outlook and how people carry on their lives.

Something so basic and comprehensive would amount to a religious conversion. If that's so, then "nothing can be done" does sound like a sensible comment. You can't just will a mass religious conversion, especially on the grounds it'll have political benefits.

On the other hand, it seems right to look for what's possible. Basic transformations do come about, and people can do things that further or retard them. So why not try to understand what's going on, what's needed for something better, and what we can to promote it? If political difficulties lead us to notice that some things are more basic than politics, then that's a good thing too and it can tell us something about what we should attend to.

What sort of transformation is needed is a big topic. Here are a few points that seem worth mentioning:

• Ideas have consequences, and the nature of man, the good, the world, moral obligation, and so on affects the public order. For that reason Christianity is prepolitical rather than apolitical as some of the comments suggest.
• In a totalitarian age even nonpolitical religion is political, because it challenges official doctrine by denying the ultimate significance and authority of the regime. That's why commies past and present have wanted to squash Christianity.
• That's also why the purely political is no longer politically serious. We can't challenge the status quo unless we emphasize what precedes politics.
• When you've got big problems that aren't going away, basic principles are more important than current manifestations. The Catholic Church formed the West, and I think it remains essential to the West, but like much else it hasn't been in great shape lately. A basic question is whether that's a matter of fundamental principle or of stupidities and corruptions that won't necessarily last--in other words, whether the essential points are still there that would enable a return to type.
• Another question, assuming (as some suggest) that today's basic understandings and institutional arrangements make radical secularity inevitable, is whether those things can sustain themselves or whether we're living on borrowed time and a basically different understanding of man and the world will be needed for social order to remain functional. If the latter is true (which is my view), then the serious political question is what that understanding will be.

Having read Jim Kalb on hipster liberalism, I find there is much in his essay I agree with and even more that I disagree with. His description of the self-absorbed individual who yaps constantly about equality but has no moral center applies to most academics of my acquaintance. This description also pertains to the college-age students I encounter; and I agree with Jim that these students and their degree-carrying mentors have been insufficiently socialized in any traditional sense. These individuals never manage to grow up, found families and integrate themselves into what Jim and I would regard as normal, or even quasi-normal, human communities. The types of associations to which these free-floating human tissues attach themselves are collections of singles or lifestyle activists who in our media culture are depicted as members of PC-certified communities.

Where I disagree with Jim is in his characterization of such types as merely narcissistic products of a rudderless society. It seems to me that much of what he is criticizing is planned destruction. It is the achievement of the managerial state, public education, and the cultural industry to have produced uprooted, hedonistic individuals, seeking their own ego-enhancement together with greater equality for supposedly oppressed minorities and lifestyle exhibitionists. (The lack of traditional authority is not the same as the absence of control.)

These are not position that individuals arrive at without guidance from above. Most academics and young professionals of my acquaintance couldn’t have an original idea if they tried. They all think exactly as they’ve been programmed for decades. In a traditional society, they would act like everyone else. In our society, they act in a similar way, but harbor the ridiculous illusion they have independent thoughts and are running their own show.

While doing a Google search I ran into an abstract of a 2007 scholarly article by three French psychiatrists whose English title is "New society, new families: a new basic personality? From the neurotic to the narcissistic-hedonistic personality."

The basic thought is that changes in education, family structure, social attitudes, and so on have led to a new dominant personality type with specific pathologies that require a reorientation of psychiatric care:

This basic personality, which could be termed as "narcissistic-hedonistic", is characterized by few internalizations, a poorly efficient Superego, nearly no guilt feeling, a weakly socialized Ideal Self suggesting more the Ideal Self of the early childhood, and finally a difficulty in experiencing or testing oneself as a free subject. The resulting narcissistic fragility leads the subject to be more dependent on external objects, to be allergic to frustration, to find delay in the achievement of instinctive aims hard to take, to develop an exaggerated pursuit of perception and sensations. The relation to time is also affected through a privileged investment in the present and the shading off of historical time. These changes must lead to a different subjectivity stemming from a new basic personality. Disorders may stem from three axis of this new basic personality: dependency with attachment disorders, narcissistic fragility, and a high risk of depression; guilt-free "narcissistic perversion" with people, who use other people for their own and exclusive interest, without real empathy; "light" psychopathy, with people capable of social integration for shorts periods of time, with a lot of breaking off in love, friendship, and professional ties.

The account is jargony but the substance sounds familiar. The basic idea is that people aren't really getting socialized, so character and connections to other people disappear. Instead there's just impulse, self-indulgence, and flip-flopping between grandiosity and depression, tyranny and subservience, and no doubt other mindless polarities. Life becomes a matter of pure immediacy and groundless assertion of self, combined with insecurity and avoidance of issues.