Untimely Observations

Ellison Lodge’s attempt to bring order to the debate about Jewish nationalism and influence in America was very laudable and plausible. His categories have the appearance of fairness and balance, which is an achievement in an area that generates so much “heat” and miasma. His four categories also have a pleasing symmetry and simplicity that almost reminded me of Newton’s laws of planetary motion. However, after a few days rolling them around in various portions of my rather convoluted and un-geometrical mind, I couldn’t help thinking that they made the classic Western (or White) intellectual error of equivalence, which is treating things as if they all exist on the same plane.

This sort of thinking, rather like Newtonian physics, has the appearance of rationality, extension, and universal applicability, and, more than this, just like Newtonian physics, it almost always works. For example, there is certainly equivalence between German and French national rights and interests. Although these might have been addressed at various times by different methods—politics, economics, and war—the idea that both countries had roughly equal national rights and weight has always informed their history and their relationship.

When France was dominant at the time of Napoleon’s ascendancy, the idea of a German national interest mobilized things beneath the surface and prepared the way for his downfall. Likewise, when France was crushed by the superior military genius of the Germans in 1870 and 1940, the idea that France was somehow still equal to Germany kept the national flame burning strongly. This idea of a just equivalence of national interests between all the European nations has led at various times to wars and more recently to the unfortunate situation where the nations have agreed—based on the idea of a kind of negative equivalence—to temporarily subsume their legitimate national interests in the bureaucratic swamp of the European Superstate.

I read with interest Dr. Srdja Trifkovic’s account of his most recent experiences with the Canadian border authorities, who once again have denied entry to a law-abiding citizen on spurious or hastily manufactured grounds. This comes only some months after Richard Spencer’s own experiences, which resulted in him too being denied entry to the Great White North. And they are not the only ones. Even politically incorrect liberals like George Galloway, and peaceful U.S. protesters against the war in Iraq, have been banned. Here is a perplexing account by one of them:

The crux of Byron Roth’s disagreement with Kevin MacDonald is essentially that Prof. MacDonald makes criticisms of Israeli nationalism that he would never make about European peoples. This critique is frequently leveled against Patrick Buchanan by writers like Larry Auster.

This is, in many ways, the inverse of one of the easiest criticisms some White Nationalists make about Jewish Leftists: namely, that they hypocritically support Israeli nationalism, while screaming that enforcing our immigration laws is “racist.”

If one were to try to sort out views on nationalism in Israel and the West, it could be neatly split into four categories:

1. Those who support ethno-politics for Israel but not for Europeans and the West.  (neoliberals and neoconservatives like Abe Foxman, Alan Dershowitz, Bill Kristol et al.)
2. Those who oppose ethno-politics for Israel and the West (Noam Chomsky, Max Blumenthal et al.)
3. Those who support ethno-politics in the West and in Israel  (Lawrence Auster, Diana West, Michael Savage)
4. Those who oppose ethno-politics for Israel but support it for the West (Pat Buchanan, Kevin MacDonald)

Presumably, the intellectually consistent views would be 2 and 3. Group 1 could be seen as Jewish hypocrites, and group 4 must be anti-Semitic.

It is not that simple, however.

When popular culture is relentlessly permissive and debauched, the only true rebellion is to exhibit self-denial and fearsome wholesomeness. In spite of these undeniable contemporary circumstances, most kids today still choose to “rebel” by being utterly conformist in mindset and behavior; they show their supposed “individuality” and freedom from society’s constraints, that is, by doing exactly what the culture instructs them to do. Inter alia, they wear tight-fitting clothes, get pierced in various unseemly bodily regions, and consent to have their lower backs plastered with tacky tattoos; they drink, take drugs, and engage in numerous, random sexual encounters called “hook-ups.”

Perhaps such behavior was provocative at one time, in the pricklier clime of a more conservative Zeitgeist. Today, however, it is truly yawn-worthy, more of the same ol’ same ol’. To use the parlance of the times, it is simply “lame,” and not in the least bold, to engage in such ubiquitous activities. There is nothing exciting about these presumed “transgressions” anymore. The only truly transgress-ive act is one that rejects the notion of such pathetic faux-defiance with steely contempt, which opts instead for that which the sheep-like majority now commonly shuns as “reactionary.” Put succinctly, licentiousness is now utterly boring and bourgeois, while chastity is the sexy new taboo.

Given this fact, why have we yet to see a lustily defiant alternative culture of chastity emerge? Much as this trend begs to be born, it still remains largely unseen in today’s sea of tiresomely depraved bawdiness. There is, of course, the “contemporary Christian” scene, but it is an all-too-brittle and toothless cultural phenomenon, marked more by absence than anything else; it is, more often than not, a supremely sanitized aesthetic affair; relentlessly and determinedly bland, cleansed of bad words and racy content, the fare favored by this crowd is usually harmless, shorn of all rough edges. But the choice to reject the idols of the age, and to embrace what is traditionally known as “virtue” ought not be construed as a mere retreat into the safety and security of the goody-good-hood. The decision to pursue virtue and eschew vice is, in fact, the exact opposite of this depiction. One does not truly court danger until one opts to scorn the principalities and powers of the times, along with the debased hedonism these authorities relentlessly champion as the essence of “cool.”

We live, after all, in a time when it is often more debilitating to one’s reputation to be labeled a “virgin” than a “slut,” where to exhibit undue “intolerance” for sexual immorality is a far worse crime than indulging in such behavior, where a “prig” is denounced to an infinitely greater extent than a confirmed rake. Surely, then, deciding to be chaste takes courage and gumption, as well as self-discipline. When a young person refrains from premarital sex, an activity his body aches to take part in, he in effect doubles his calamity; not only does his society throw the alluring prospect in his face constantly, but he also invites the ridicule of his peers, who think him a “freak” and a “loser.” If he responds that he thinks it best to remain chaste until marriage, he is in return held in contempt as “prudish” and “judgmental.”

Being willing to countenance all of these epithets automatically thrown his way—to hang a defy one’s own hormones, as well as one’s peers and rulers simultaneously, takes a special kind of nonconforming spirit. The extent of gleeful defiance necessary for such an endeavor could almost be called “punk” in a way. And indeed, there is one subspecies of the burgeoning punk scene called “straight edge,” which makes clean living—no booze, no drugs, no sex—a kind of mandatory creed. But it’s one thing to subscribe to a fad, and quite another to positively embrace a way of life.

Both the contemporary Christians and the punked-out straight-edgers, then, fail to hit the mark. The former have an overarching transcendental mindset, which is greatly needed, but their approach to engaging the culture is altogether too wimpy, smiley, and hippy-dippyish; they are easily dismissed as lightweights. The straight-edge adherents, for their part, bring a needed sharp and pointed aesthetic to defend their creed of choice, but they generally lack a metaphysical orientation for all of their behavioral prescriptions.

What is needed is a movement which combines the spiritual rootedness of the contemporary Christian milieu with the hard-nosed approach of the straight-edge scene. But just where can we find such practitioners of idealistic Realpolitik? In my second installment of this treatise, I will explore an intriguing possibility, one that has taken shape in the last few years and whose momentum still appears to be gathering.

I’m quite grateful to Alex, not just for interviewing me but publishing his ongoing series of portraits of the radical Right. Interviews like these help us understand the men and women in our movement in ways that simply reading their arguments and essays do not.

There’s much of interest for AltRight readers in my conversation with Alex, including my tale of being expelled from Canada, which reads a little like an episode from his dystopian novel, Mister. I also bring up an important theoretical point regarding what it would mean for our side to “win.” I hope we can begin a conversation about this matter here.

Alex Kurtagic: The Left would like the apolitical man in the street to imagine that our winning the argument would mean a return to the bad old days: women would be summarily fired from their jobs and told to make babies; Blacks would be re-enslaved and lynched; Savitri Devi’s works would be standard university textbooks; people would be forced to carry bagfuls of gold coins to conduct their business transactions; television programming would consist of 24-hours solid of political speeches; court witnesses would swear on a copies of Mein Kampf; science would be abolished (except for eugenics) and society would be plunged into a dark age of brute force, ignorance, fear, and superstition. What does, in fact, a future where we have won the argument look like?

Richard Spencer: Oh sorry . . . while I was reading your last question, I became lost in a rapturous fantasy. No, what you describe is terrible! I would never want to live in this fascistic, masculine, gold-standard nightmare world.

At about this time last year I started reading Matt Yglesias’s blog and responding to his posts in the comments section.  Austin Bramwell in the American Conservative had rendered an interesting opinion of this eminently credentialed elite opinion shaper, saying he “has the most depth” among a good sampling of younger bloggers. I began reading his blog out of curiosity.

Yglesias is less philosophically minded than I had expected. Philosophy was his major at Harvard, but Yglesias seems to mostly find philosophy irrelevant. I suppose Harvard’s analytic bent makes philosophy seem irrelevant to public policy wonks. He doesn’t discuss first principles and only reveals his values obliquely. He makes utilitarian arguments from a perspective colored with liberal platitudes.

His writing is dry and his sense of humor is odd and he is a fan of gangster rap. I don’t know what a hipster is exactly but I feel like the term suits him well—hipsters are like porn in that way, we all know it when we see it. He compensates for a lack of style in his writing with snark. Mencken, who said the Jews were “the most unpleasant race ever heard of,” would have probably called Yglesias an all-too-typical member of his tribe.

Engaging some of the other commentators on his blog was the first time I had sparred with liberals on a written level.  What struck me was how ignorant well over half of them were. They were ignorant about basic rules of logic and matters of knowledge. None seemed to understand simple facts.  All denied the consensus that statistical differences between racial groups are a) mostly intractable at this point because b) there are biological limits represented by various “averages.”

Twenty five years ago, as the totalitarian regime in the Soviet Union was beginning to face internal crisis, G. Edward Griffin interviewed a Soviet defector and ex-KGB agent named Yuri Bezmenov. Bezmenov explained, in simple terms, the process by which the Soviet Union and the KGB attempted to subvert and topple governments. They called this process “ideological subversion.” Even though the Cold War is over, it is important to understand this process because the KGB was by no means the only organization to engage in it. We encounter one technique of ideological subversion in particular, demoralization, every day in schools and in the media, and the only way to effectively defend against this technique is to be aware of it and to identify and expose those who are actively engaged in promoting it.

According to Bezmenov, ideological subversion was so important to the KGB that most of their resources were allocated to it. “Only about 15 percent of time, money, and manpower is spent on espionage as such,” he explained. “The other 85 percent is a slow process which we call either ideological subversion or ‘active measures.’” Ideological subversion is a long-term process that involves four stages: 1) Demoralization, 2) Destabilization, 3) Crisis, and 4) “Normalization.” In this article, I will focus on the first step of the process, demoralization.

The purpose of demoralization, According to Bezmenov, is to “change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite the abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country.” Effectively, demoralization would render a large part of the population vulnerable to Marxist-Leninist ideology and confused as to its real intent. In any conflict, it is just as important to get as many of your opponents to sit on the sidelines as it is to neutralize them on the battlefield. Proper demoralization would ensure that a large percentage of the population would sit on the sidelines of any eventual revolution, or even actively work against their own interests in support of that revolution.

The benefit of demoralization is that the targeted population will not know it is being demoralized, and once demoralization sets in, a certain percentage of that population will actively pursue the goals of the enemy without even being aware of it. This is achieved by using what appear to be perfectly valid means, i.e. promoting the questioning of authority or of long-held assumptions, but which are aimed only in one direction: at the opposing ideology of the agents engaged in the process of ideological subversion. Once demoralized, exposure to true information does not matter anymore because a person who is demoralized is not able to assess true information. According to Bezmenov, “Even if I shower him with authentic information, with authentic truth, with documents and pictures. Even if I take him by force to the Soviet Union and show him concentration camp, he will refuse to believe it.”

With enough sympathizers in schools and in the media, the minimum time it would take to demoralize a population is 15 to 20 years, because that is the minimum number of years which it requires to educate one generation of students. In relation to the Soviet campaign in the United States, Bezmenov explained, “Marxist-Leninist ideology is being pumped into the heads of at least three generations of American students without being challenged or counterbalanced by the basic values of Americanism… Most of it is done by Americans to Americans, thanks to lack of moral standards.”

Recent revelations by the Federal Bureau of Investigation demonstrate that educators in the United States were actively involved throughout the 1960s and ‘70s in organizations with ties to communist front groups. Historian Howard Zinn, author of the influential book A People’s History of the United States, was one whose participation in and advocacy for Marxist groups was well documented by the FBI. His FBI file was recently released after his death, showing that, although he denied participation, several reliable informants in the Communist Party USA identified Zinn as a member who attended party meetings as many as five times a week. There are photographs of Zinn teaching a class on “Basic Marxism” at party headquarters in Brooklyn, New York, in 1951.

In light of this information, and what we know about the process of ideological subversion, it should be obvious that Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States was nothing more than a tool to promote demoralization among American students. A People’s History is often lauded as simply an effort to “turn traditional history books on their head,” and to add another voice to the historical narrative. Neither of those goals are necessarily bad, and it is true that Zinn was actively engaged in questioning the fundamental assumptions about the history of the United States, but to what end? Given the history of Zinn’s involvement with the CPUSA, his “leftist, multicultural, anti-imperialist historiography” can be seen for what it truly was.

Legitimate criticism, questioning, and dissent must never be confused as being part of an active demoralization campaign. It is the source of those efforts, and their ultimate aim, that indicates whether or not those efforts are being used to further the process of ideological subversion. Demoralization has only progressed as far as it has because most Americans have either been unwilling or unable to counteract it. To resist, we must spread awareness of how demoralization works. Then, we must develop the habit of investigating, questioning, and determining the motives behind all sources of information. Finally, we must work on strengthening the arguments in favor of our own beliefs. A truly informed and independently-minded public is our best defense against this insidious tactic.

If you spend any time on Facebook, you may have seen someone you know post the following copy-and-paste status message, which seems to have been making the rounds at least since the Arizona immigration law went into effect:

Your car is Japanese. Your pizza is Italian. Your beer is German. Your wine is Spanish. Your democracy is Greek. Your coffee is Brazilian. Your tea is Chinese. Your watch is Swiss. Your fashion is French. Your shirt is Indian. Your shoes are Thai. Your radio is Korean. Your vodka is Russian--and then you complain that your neighbor is... ......an immigrant? Pull yourself together! Copy if you are against Racism!

Let's just address a few basic problems with this.

First of all, my car is a Toyota, but as you can see from the VIN, it was actually made right here in the USA. In fact, we make Toyotas here in Indiana. And that pizza we had last week? That was made from all US ingredients, too. I’m pretty sure at least the cheese was from Wisconsin. I think the tomatoes were from California, though I realise some don’t consider that part of the US anymore.

With that out of the way, let's talk about what Stanley Fish calls 'boutique multiculturalism'. I read his article on the topic back in my college days and it has remained a favourite of mine ever since. Fish is a Leftist of the highest order, but he's an intelligent Leftist, so I do rather enjoy what he writes, even when I don’t agree with all of it. If you can find it, read it; I highly recommend it.

Boutique multiculturalism, as Fish defines it, is a superficial fascination with the Other: ethnic food, weekend festivals, and high-profile flirtations with the Other. Boutique multiculturalism is exactly what all this global consumerism nonsense in the Facebook status message means. Purveyors of this superficial brand of multiculturalism appreciate, enjoy, sympathise with, and 'recognise the legitimacy' of cultures other than their own. But they always stop short of approving these radically different other cultures at the point where it would matter most to the strongly committed members of the other culture. We may, for example, say that Jews should be allowed to practice their religion in our countries, but we certainly don't approve of kosher animal slaughter or of women being forced to shave their heads and wear wigs. But hey, that dreidl game is really fun! At the point where the boutique multiculturalist finds another's cultural practices inhumane or irrational, he withdraws his respect and appreciation. For this person, multiculturalism is just a matter of lifestyle.

In this interview with Craig Bodeker, AltRight contributing editor Derek Turner provides what may be the most concise yet penetrating explanation of the origins and nature of political correctness I have yet to encounter. The full video is available on the website of the National Policy Institute.

Critics of PC have advanced several theses regarding its origins. Paul Gottfried has suggested that it is largely an outgrowth of left-wing American Christianity. Bill Lind considers it be a form of “cultural Marxism” derived from an inversion of orthodox Marxism advanced by the Frankfurt School. David Heleniak has an interesting thesis suggesting that PC is largely a derivative of the Christian doctrine of original sin that subsequently took on a secular form through the influence of the philosophy of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Still others regard PC as good old fashioned Communism wearing a different set of clothes. My own efforts to investigate the historical development of PC (which I prefer to call “totalitarian humanism”) have led me to a position that is something of a synthesis of these narratives.

Derek points out that political correctness has become the most deeply entrenched in historically Protestant countries, primarily the nations of Scandinavia and the Anglosphere. Presumably, this can be explained as a manifestation of the sense of Calvinist guilt that has been woven into the cultural fabric and historical memories of Protestant societies. That colonial American Puritanism was a rather extreme manifestation of the Calvinist ethos, and that American left-wing Christianity came about largely as an eclipsing successor of orthodox Calvinism in the American northeast, may help to explain why PC first took root in America and exported itself throughout the Western world the way that it did. If indeed Rousseau’s philosophy provided a secular transformation of the notion of original sin, then it is not improbable that such thinking would take root in a cultural milieu where orthodox Calvinism had once been virulent, but was in the process of shedding that history while retaining some of its residual influences, which would have been the case with northeastern American Protestantism during the developmental periods of this country.

It should not be surprising then that the Frankfurt School found a home for itself in northeastern American universities following its exile from Nazi Germany (and after an ironic stay in Geneva, the city most closely associated with the legacy of Calvin!). Some of the iconic figures of the New Left, such as Angela Davis and Abbie Hoffman, were personally students of the Frankfurt School’s most extreme left-wing advocate, Herbert Marcuse, and it is another irony that just as Marcuse eventually settled in California, it was at West Coast universities such as Berkeley that the leftist student rebellions of the 1960s began to emerge before spreading throughout the West and even elsewhere. As for the relationship between orthodox Communism and PC, in my efforts to trace the origins of the term, I have encountered phrases such as “correct politics” or “correct political line,” and references to persons being shunned or dismissed from organizations for “incorrect politics” in old radical literature from the late 1960s and early 1970s, particularly among Weather Underground-influenced groups or the most extreme offshoots of the “black power” movement. The Maoist influence on these groups is well-known, as is the fascination of some of the more extreme New Left radicals of the era with the Chinese Cultural Revolution. PC in many ways resembles a Maoist self-criticism session, so there is likely a connection there.

I actually grew up in part as a Calvinist fundamentalist myself during the 1970s. My family were adherents of old-style orthodox Calvinism of the kind represented by theologians like J. Gresham Machen and Cornelius Van Til, and for a time we were involved with a church associated with the theocratic “Christian reconstructionist” movement of R.J. Rushdoony and Gary North. All of my education up through and including my sophomore year of high school was done at a fundamentalist academy that adhered to dispensational Christian Zionism (think of Bob Jones University and you will get an idea what the atmosphere there was like). During the late 1980s and early 1990s I was a left-wing Chomskyite and it was during this time that I first began to personally encounter PC. Observing the psychology of PC and its behavioral manifestations up close and in an unadulterated form gave me a sense of déjà vu: “Where I have seen this kind of thing before?” Having long since abandoned my previous Christianity by that time, I came to realize that PC essentially amounts to Christian fundamentalism without a Christ (perhaps this explains the Left’s habit of elevating perceived progressive saints such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to the status of Christ-like semi-divine figures).

Whatever the true historical trajectory of PC may be, its obscurantist and totalitarian nature is obvious enough. It is ironic that eccentric religious subcultures such as the ones I came from are demonized by the anointed as dangerous theocratic fascists about to carry out an Taliban-like coup any minute now (a view that wildly exaggerates the influence and degree of extremism of such subcultures), while a form of obscurantist totalitarianism that has actually has the support of elites, intellectuals, academics, journalists, and others of genuine influence continues to entrench itself in Western cultural and political institutions.

James Kalb's taxonomy of Alternate Modernities is something which hasn't been given enough attention. What are the actual alternatives out there? Are there any alternatives? I find myself abundantly in agreement with his and Professor Gottfried's pessimistic assessments, though perhaps I am looking at things in a slightly different way.

Addressing Mr. Kalb's idea that liberalism more or less had to end up the way it did, I must disagree. I strongly suspect many of the Alternative Right would be reasonably happy in the world of 1913 or even 1961. There was nothing historically inevitable about the liberal program turning into the preposterous abomination it is today: a demoralizing world in which perversion is mandatory, Europeans persecute themselves and erase their own history, and the idea of tipping your hat to a lady is absurd. Liberalism could have gone in completely different directions; for example, in 1961, one might have guessed that liberalism would have expended its energies improving the pace of scientific progress and human power over nature, rather than trying to convince everyone of absurdities such as the equality of the genders. Perhaps this would have taken us in some horrible new direction, worse than the present situation where we have dildo commercials at Christmas time, or perhaps it would have been better: but it would have been different. Dildo commercials were not an inevitable outcome of a John Stuart Mill essay, nor are they some kind of consequence of a lack of Catholic faith.

We got where we are today because of a quasi-religious movement. It was a deeply moralistic movement, made up largely of societal outcasts and marginal figures, and made possible by the connivance of mainstream American institutions, such as mainline Protestantism. Much of history is made up of such movements. Most present histories of the 1960s are written by the victors rather than objective observers. As such, the events of that era are looked upon as a historical inevitability, just as the Arab Chroniclers looked on their conquests of the Byzantine and Sassanid empires as inevitable outcomes of Allah's favor on the faithful. For us to look at any of the events of the last 50 years as having been inevitable outcomes of modernity is, well, silly. What happened was Western Civilization was overrun by a host of savage quasi religious zealots, before I was born.

The present prevailing orthodoxy has no holy book, though it has its gurus, taboos, demons and saints. The way it functions in our society resembles the Catholic Church in Italy or Austria; or, more properly, communism in Russia in the 1950s, minus the fun and the gulags. Certainly, the prevailing orthodoxy as it exists today could collapse, just as did the Soviet Union—but I don't see Americans as completely exhausted with multicultural liberalism as the Soviets were with communism. The vast majority of people in America actually believe in the nonsense; many people believe in it with considerable fervor, to the point where they would consider me some kind of horrible person worthy of censure or worse for not believing as they do. Beyond that, should the Empire fall, it's worth noting that the successor states to the Soviet system had no subsequent guiding principle. They fell apart into quasi nationalistic regions with various low-level civil and ethnic wars, which are still far from settled.

The leaders of our culture committed suicide from lack of confidence. We will not see Western Civilization again without some sort of quasi-religious modern day Livonian crusade against the people who run our decadent culture. Do you see such a Livonian crusade on the horizon? I certainly don't; at least not in America. There aren't any large groups of people with the right opinions and cultural cohesion to pull it off. The fact of the matter is, you'd be lucky to live in a part of the country where anyone of the Alternative Right had the cultural cohesion to organize something on the level of a church bake sale. There are precious few who can even publicly state their views for fear of being destroyed professionally. The situation is different in Europe. There are forces building in Europe which could make WW-2 look like a pie throwing contest, but in the United States of America at least, the insanity could last for many decades longer. Certainly there are good people remaining in the heartland, and many people instinctually know what is happening, but, Tea Parties not withstanding, they show no real signs of cohering sufficiently to change anything.

While I agree with Mr. Kalb that understanding human nature and how we got to our present state is an agreeable way to pass the time, I don't know that it's going to get us anywhere. Millions of minds will have to be changed before any serious political changes can be contemplated, decades of societal conditioning undone, vast bureaucracies will have to be unmade and hundreds of thousands of minor power-brokers replaced. Who is going to do this? What large group of people with a coherent understanding of the world and human nature will be able to do it? Who will replace our present ruling class?

While Richard and others have rightly pointed out the many failings of military leadership; I see eventual military coup and Caesarism in our future. In the event of total economic collapse, the Army will still be there, and it will run the country. Whatever you think of the present use of the military, and however silly its genuflections to the false gods of liberal multiculturalism, it is the only large group of effective people left in America. Academia is a joke, the legal professions hopelessly corrupt, and the last vestiges of the manufacturing economy are mostly military. We can only hope such a coup would be led by good and decent men who look after the interests of the nation as a nation; an American version of Park Chung Hee or Lee Kuan Yew perhaps.

Mind you, I don't want this to happen: no sane person does, but I think it will happen, because Caesarism is how late societies fall apart. One doesn't need to be a Spenglerian metahistorian to recognize this is the direction in which we are headed, if we aren't already standing at the breach. One need only look at how the youngest generation is being raised: either future criminals surrounded by chaotic non-families; or coddled, drugged numskulls whose every waking moment is directed by their parents. The young today already live in a totalitarian state; I'm certain they wouldn't have it otherwise as adults. The rest of us are so cowed, we don't even notice that we already live in a police state.  Modern nations consist of many centers of power. Which one do you think is least incompetent?

We stand between the Scylla of multicultural bureaucratic plutocracy and the Charybdis of Caesarism. Which rock do you wish to avoid foundering on? What is to be done? We are doing what we can now: the political program of Paleoconservatism and the Alternative Right is the correct one: starving the beast is the only thing which will prevent disaster. In the meanwhile, we must build our communities and face the future with what equanimity and good cheer we can muster.