Policemen despair of order or reform, and seek rather to erect barriers protecting the outside world from the contagion. The clang of the patrol is answered by a kind of spectral silence, and such prisoners as are taken are never communicative. Visible offences are as varied as the local dialects, and run the gamut from the smuggling of rum and prohibited aliens through diverse stages of lawlessness and obscure vice to murder and mutilation in their most abhorrent guises. That these visible affairs are not more frequent is not to the neighbourhood’s credit, unless the power of concealment be an art demanding credit…

He was conscious, as one who united imagination with scientific knowledge, that modern people under lawless conditions tend uncannily to repeat the darkest instinctive patterns of primitive half-ape savagery in their daily life and ritual observances; and he had often viewed with an anthropologist’s shudder the chanting, cursing processions of blear-eyed and pockmarked young men which wound their way along in the dark small hours of morning. One saw groups of these youths incessantly; sometimes in leering vigils on street corners, sometimes in doorways playing eerily on cheap instruments of music, sometimes in stupefied dozes or indecent dialogues around cafeteria tables near Borough Hall, and sometimes in whispering converse around dingy taxicabs drawn up at the high stoops of crumbling and closely shuttered old houses. They chilled and fascinated him more than he dared confess to his associates on the force, for he seemed to see in them some monstrous thread of secret continuity; some fiendish, cryptical, and ancient pattern utterly beyond and below the sordid mass of facts and habits and haunts listed with such conscientious technical care by the police. They must be, he felt inwardly, the heirs of some shocking and primordial tradition; the sharers of debased and broken scraps from cults and ceremonies older than mankind…

In this work it developed that Suydam’s new associates were among the blackest and most vicious criminals of Red Hook’s devious lanes, and that at least a third of them were known and repeated offenders in the matter of thievery, disorder, and the importation of illegal immigrants. Indeed, it would not have been too much to say that the old scholar’s particular circle coincided almost perfectly with the worst of the organised cliques which smuggled ashore certain nameless and unclassified Asian dregs wisely turned back by Ellis Island. In the teeming rookeries of Parker Place—since renamed—where Suydam had his basement flat, there had grown up a very unusual colony of unclassified slant-eyed folk who used the Arabic alphabet but were eloquently repudiated by the great mass of Syrians in and around Atlantic Avenue. They could all have been deported for lack of credentials, but legalism is slow-moving, and one does not disturb Red Hook unless publicity forces one to.

I think this passage would not have been as striking if I had read when it was written ninety years ago. I might have considered it to be overreachingly hysterical and suggested new public housing to be built.

The problem with everyone right of center over the past few hundred years is that they do not fully repudiate the Enlightenment, and all its works, and all its empy promises.

Tolkien was resolutely traditionalist; his books are celebrated by progressives. It’s hard to find what’s particularly Catholic or Christian about The Lord of the Rings, perhaps because the West remains infused with those values. With Lovecraft, it’s the opposite – people don’t perceive the racism in his geneology because they have forgotten what geneology means.

I’ll not argue with you there. We know as well that most of the left probably have no real clue why the ‘neoreaction’ even exist nor what it is a reaction too. Obviously it is more symptom than program since if has of yet as you’ve shown here at Outside In only a scattered semblance of organized programmatic statements and intellectual goals for itself. You’ve mentioned that this is probably a watershed year for your group since so many seem to be either bellying up and distancing themselves or becoming more focused and beginning the hard, tough process of actually thinking through just what it is that the neoreaction wants to do and say.

As still a member of that old style skeptic naturalism and what might be termed Enlightenment (2.0) I wander through all the extremes with my eyes open to understand what this creature we are is on about in our political spectrums. The extremes always seem to touch base at certain junctures and for those willing to actually listen to the noise they might discover something else: the truth of what is coming at us.

I’ve been avoiding him as he is deranged, but 2014 is all about inclusively getting it.

Krugman says Progressives are winning the War on Poverty.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/10/opinion/krugman-the-war-over-poverty.html?ref=opinion

By winning he means 92 million Americans out of the work force and the expansion of the Dole to the Middle Class. [or “draw” as applachian ghetto whites call it].

We warned them in 2008 they want us all on welfare. Apparently it’s a selling point.