Readers of Nietzsche, or of Eugene Rose, are already familiar with the attribution of a cultural teleology to modernity, directed to the consummate realization of nihilism. Our contemporary crisis finds this theme re-animated within a geopolitical context by the work of Alexandr Dugin, who interprets it as a driver of concrete events — most specifically the antagonization of Russia by an imploding world liberal order. He writes:

There is one point in liberal ideology that has brought about a crisis within it: liberalism is profoundly nihilistic at its core. The set of values defended by liberalism is essentially linked to its main thesis: the primacy of liberty. But liberty in the liberal vision is an essentially negative category: it claims to be free from (as per John Stuart Mill), not to be free for something. […] … the enemies of the open society, which is synonymous with Western society post-1991, and which has become the norm for the rest of the world, are concrete. Its primary enemies are communism and fascism, both ideologies which emerged from the same Enlightenment philosophy, and which contained central, non-individualic concepts – class in Marxism, race in National Socialism, and the national State in fascism). So the source of liberalism’s conflict with the existing alternatives of modernity, fascism or communism, is quite obvious. Liberals claim to liberate society from fascism and communism, or from the two major permutations of explicitly non-individualistic modern totalitarianism. Liberalism’s struggle, when viewed as a part of the process of the liquidation of non-liberal societies, is quite meaningful: it acquires its meaning from the fact of the very existence of ideologies that explicitly deny the individual as society’s highest value. It is quite clear what the struggle opposes: liberation from its opposite. But the fact that liberty, as it is conceived by liberals, is an essentially negative category is not clearly perceived here. The enemy is present and is concrete. That very fact gives liberalism its solid content. Something other than the open society exists, and the fact of its existence is enough to justify the process of liberation.

Continue Reading

Zombie proposes a key to contemporary American politics: White liberals despise black people and can’t admit it. This is smart conservative jiu jitsu rather than anything remotely neoreactionary, but as a wedge to lever things apart, it has some intriguing potential. The central claim of a carefully-elaborated argument:

White progressives believe that black people are too dumb to make rational decisions on their own and too uncouth to behave civilly. So the progressive urge is to heap rules upon rules to control blacks and render them harmless to themselves and others. At the same time, progressives are terrified of being perceived as racist. So they hit upon a solution: Make rules which restrict everyone‘s freedoms, even though the progressives are actually targeting African-Americans. The collateral damage in this cynical equation — law-abiding citizens of all ethnicities — erroneously assume that the intrusive rules are aimed at them. But they’re missing the point: Progressives don’t enjoy restricting their own freedoms along with everyone else’s, but can conceive of no other legal mechanism to deal with what they see as misbehaving blacks while still appearing to be race-neutral.

ADDED: PJM apparently going all-in with this meme — “But [Obama and Kerry] do — and here’s the irony in Obama’s case — have the traditional white man’s view of that same Arab world — to wit, Arabs are crazy and primitive.” We’re the true anti-racists!

Does ideological space make more sense when depicted as a triangle (rather than a line or quadrant)? It certainly helps to explain the room for controversy on the ‘extreme right’. Having Darwin out there beyond the edge of the ideologically-thinkable makes a lot of sense, too.

Click image to enlarge.

If anyone knows where this diagram originated, please let me know and I’ll credit it properly.
(Accessed via @MikeAnissimov).

Linking this on Twitter catalyzed a far more animated discussion than I had anticipated. Fundamental question: Is Bane NRx?

Outside in has no settled position on this (yet), and hadn’t expected to need one. A tentative proposal though: The League of Shadows is so radically neoreactionary it doesn’t relate to the Left as a political option, but solely as a mindless pathogen — as germ warfare to be guided against a decaying social order. That militant leftist activism will produce nothing but ruin is an assumption held so firmly it doesn’t require explicit acknowledgement — and the movie audience has to tacitly identify with this analysis for Bane’s strategy to make any sense. The Left is a disease, and therefore a potential bioweapon.

To try to work something like that outside a movie, it would really be necessary to be the functional equivalent of the League of Shadows (manipulating mainstream politics dexterously, from above, or beyond). It’s probably agreed that NRx isn’t there yet … unless what we see hides something else.

ADDED: In the Twitter chat, it has pointed out that my understanding of the background story is profoundly confused (especially regarding Bane’s troubled relationship with the League of Shadows). Hopefully, by the time people have finished with me in the ensuing comments thread, I’ll have been properly schooled. This (suggested by @CineRobert) might help.

From Henry Dampier’s ‘Shooting an Elephant':

Destroying the GOP is the best way to undermine support for democracy on the right. The reason for this is that, without hope for electoral success, the rank and file of the right will be forced to abandon their hopes for electoral redemption. When the typical “Joe Plumber” recognizes that it’s fruitless to go to the polls or to send money to their favorite politician, the GOP will fold in more states, which cedes to progressives the right to ruin more towns and cities in the service of their ideological goals.

This would limit the available options of the right wing population to either accept destruction or secede. Cutting off the option of winning elections, and making it obvious that it’s no longer possible to win elections, is key to achieving this goal.

(via @Nick_B_Steves)

The GOP is the Cathedral’s first aid kit. Taking it out of the equation makes perfect sense.

Ace of Spades, sounding more than a little reactospheric:

To the left, ever to the left, never to the right, always to the left …

This is how the “ratchet” works …

(The whole post, responding to this righteous denunciation of ‘compassionate conservatism’, is well worth reading.)

While on the theme of finessing the ‘no enemies to the right’ mantra, some back-to-basics essentials from Angry White Dude:

Who does the Republican establishment view as it’s biggest threat? The socialist Democrats hell-bent on destroying America? A foreign power? No, the Republican establishment views the Tea Party as their enemy number one. It should. The Tea Party movement is the traditional, conservative wing of what’s left of the Republican Party. Which is why the movement is despised by the Repub elites. The only group that hates the Tea Party movement worse than the mainstream propaganda media or the Democrats is the wussypants Republican Party. The GOP establishment doesn’t want change in Washington. It wants the status quo. With them in power, of course.

… and the main conclusion, in a nutshell:

The only way America can survive and turn this sinking ship around is the total destruction of the GOP elite leadership.

[Discuss]

Nobody familiar with contemporary Western societies can be intellectually challenged by the idea of a great dialectical resolution to the problem of liberalism. Coercion and liberty are fused in a political order that directs authority towards the maximization of choice without consequence. Stupidity is sacred, and neither tradition nor natural necessity has the right to inhibit it. Preserving the freedom to fathom the limits of dysfunction in every direction is the primary social obligation, with the full resources of Leviathan behind it. If that’s not exactly where we are, it will be soon.

Against this backdrop, Neoreaction emerges as a de-synthesizing impulse, splintering along multiple paths, but especially two. In reacting against authoritarian irresponsibility (or ‘anarcho-tyranny’) it tends to a restoration of the Old Antithesis: either hierarchical solidarity, or a ruthless dis-solidarity (and as it undoes the progressive dialectic, ‘either’ fragments into ‘both’ — separately). Only the state protected irresponsibility of resolved Left-liberalism is strictly intolerable, because that has been historically demonstrated to be an engine of degeneration. Neoreaction, initially conceived, is anything else.

Continue Reading

Whenever three-fourths of the public says government is the country’s biggest problem, that majority includes millions of non-ideological independents and moderates who just want to see American optimism and prosperity restored. They are more open to the conservative message now than they have been since 1980. So, don’t screw it up, Republicans.

They’ll screw it up.

Some foundational wisdom beautifully restated by Handle:

… the long history of progressivism in general is most quickly summarized by an enthusiasm to reject the old, time-tested social institutions originating in undesigned traditions as obsolete anachronisms and replace with them with new, more ‘enlightened’ innovations rationally constructed from first principles.

The Rightist view of human nature is often described as ‘tragic’ or ‘realistically pessimistic’.  Whether one on the right sees man as ‘fallen and totally depraved’ or merely a ‘hairless ape’ makes little difference in regards to the conclusion of what is required to regulate such a creature’s behaviors.  And that prescription, unfortunately but inescapably for most people, involved a certain amount of severity of consequence. There is pain, harshness, punishment, impoverishment, and so on, or at the very least an effectively salient terror of the credible threat of these things.