modern politics and the new class

Post-World War 2 politics seems bewildering. The old political divisions such as left and right don’t really seem to explain any of it satisfactorily. Perhaps the answer is that we need to think sociologically rather than politically.

Of course sociology is a dirty word to most self-styled conservatives but it can offer us some useful insights.

Post-WW2 politics is quite different from the politics of the preceding century. It’s just as class-based but what has changed is the nature of the classes. For Marxists there was the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Class membership was based on power and wealth and was strongly hereditary. Most people were born into their class and remained there.

A new class took power after the Second World War. They were the spiritual descendants of the intellectuals who who worked so hard to destroy civilisation in the 18th and 19th century but with some crucial differences – they were now much more numerous and they were no longer obscure professors, penniless students or failed writers. They had gained access to power. They were now senior bureaucrats, influential journalists, lawyers and career politicians. Some sociologists refer to them as the new managerial class. They saw society as something that needed management, and if necessary micro-management. And not just economic management, but social management.

They were not like the old bourgeoisie. They were not necessarily rich. They did not necessarily own factories.

Importantly, they were not born into this new class. Membership was gained  by going to the right universities and doing the right sorts of degrees and by subscribing to the right kind of thinking.

These are people who, whether they were born in a mansion or a hovel, now see themselves as belonging to a superior class. The class markers now are not wealth or birth but membership of a class that sees itself as an intellectual elite. They believe they are set apart from the masses by superior intelligence, education and virtue. In fact they see themselves as an Elect, predestined to rule.

What is important in political terms is that for the past half century or so virtually every politician regardless of supposed party allegiance has come from this new managerial/intellectual class. We no longer have different parties representing different class interests We now have different parties that all represent the same class interest. Which explains why the policies of the major parties are more or less interchangeable. It explains why there is no discernible difference between Tony Blair and Theresa May, or between Bill Shorten and Scott Morrison. It explains why Americans keep electing different presidents but end up getting the same misgovernment.

The nature of this managerial/intellectual class has other consequences. These are people who believe they have a duty to manage other people’s lives. They also believe they have a duty to police public opinion. They are the superior people and they know what’s best for the rest of us. If we don’t agree then we must be made to agree. It’s for our own good.

hope, alternatives and Jeremy Corbyn

I’ve been spoken before about my theory that in order to have hope people need to believe that viable political alternatives exist, even if those alternatives are rather unattractive. During the Cold War people disgruntled by life under communism could console themselves that a viable alternative existed in the West. And people disgruntled by life under capitalism could console themselves that a viable alternative existed in the Soviet Union.

Brexit was largely motivated by Britons’ belief that a viable alternative to the EU was possible. That’s why the political establishment has worked so tirelessly to destroy Brexit – in order to teach the British voters that they are not ever going to be given an alternative. That’s why so much effort has been put into opposing Trump. The fact that Trump has achieved nothing doesn’t matter – what matters is that Americans must be taught the lesson that real democracy means you get to choose between two candidates approved by the Establishment, two candidates whose policies are in fact pretty much identical. Americans most learn that an alternative is not permitted.

Which brings us to the current well-funded campaign to destroy Jeremy Corbyn. Now I’m not suggesting that Corbynite Labour is a great alternative, or even a good alternative, but it does at least represent some alternative. Which is why powerful interests have decided that Corbyn must go. It is unthinkable that British voters should be offered anything resembling an actual alternative.

Once Corbyn is destroyed the Labour Party will return to Blairitism, which is of course in every way indistinguishable from modern Toryism. Once again Britain will be a genuine democracy with two absolutely identical parties alternating in power, and with the British people properly trained to vote the way they’re told to vote.

antiracism at home, racism abroad

A subject I’ve touched on before is the extraordinary hypocrisy of the modern West. In our domestic policy we have elevated antiracism to the status of a state religion. But when it comes to our relations with foreign countries, countries which are sovereign states, our policy seems to be one of hysterical xenophobia and even out-and-out racism.

We go into paroxysms of guilt at the thought that a non-white person’s feelings might be hurt in our own countries but we think nothing of bombing non-white countries that have the temerity to want to run their own countries their own way. And we never stop lecturing foreigners on how they ought to treat their own citizens, even as the West becomes more and more a cultural and moral sewer.

Peter Hitchens offers an interesting recent example.

https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2019/01/peter-hitchens-think-flogging-drug-dealers-is-barbaric-we-could-soon-be-doing-much-worse-here-1.html

A British citizen has been arrested in Singapore for drug trafficking. He visited Singapore and knowingly and deliberately broke the laws of that country. As a result he is likely to be punished by flogging. That’s the penalty under Singapore’s laws. The fact that Singapore has tough laws and actually enforces them is well known, and should certainly have been known to a young man who was expensively educated at a fancy school in Britain. Now the British government is protesting. How dare Singapore presume to have its own laws and presume to expect people visiting Singapore to obey those laws! How dare Singapore presume to have different laws from Britain!

Whether one thinks that flogging drug dealers is a good idea or a bad idea is immaterial. This is Singapore and the fellow was given a fair trial and convicted in a Singaporean court. Whether the British government approves or disapproves of Singapore’s laws is irrelevant. Britain should mind its own business. But it won’t.

Similar things have happened in Australia. The Australian government has in the past protested when Australian citizens have been tried and convicted in Indonesian courts and then sentenced under Indonesian law, for offences committed on Indonesian soil.

There is a breathtaking degree of arrogance involved. There is an assumption that only western values and western laws and western ways of doing things are valid. The West assumes it has the right to impose its values on the non-western world.

No wonder non-western countries despise the West.

If we want to argue that we in the West should be allowed to retain our own nations and our own cultures then we do need to take a long hard look at our behaviour towards other people’s cultures. If we believe that we deserve to be permitted to cherish our cultural values then we need to accept other people’s rights to cherish their cultures, even if we don’t happen to like some aspects of those cultures. It isn’t our business. The days when western nations would routinely send a gunboat to bully non-westerners into doing what they’re told should be behind us.

As Steve Sailer never tires of pointing out, we need to stop Inviting the World but that can’t happen until we stop Invading the World. And we need to stop imposing our cultural values on the world.

why we need more instability

We are used to the idea of political stability being a good thing, but perhaps there are times when it is highly undesirable.

At this point in time the globalist-liberals have society moving in the direction that suits them. All they need to do is to keep the momentum going and in fact to a large extent they don’t even need to do that. Their agenda will keep rolling steadily forward under its own momentum.

So naturally what the globalist-liberals want is political stability. They do not want anything that will threaten the stability of the current situation since the current situation suits them perfectly.

What this means is that if you are an opponent of the current regime then logically what you want is political instability. You want to undermine the foundations of the present regime, just as every revolutionary movement has sought to do. The objective has to be not a change of government but regime change. The overthrowing of the existing political settlement.

In the past revolutionary movements sometimes aimed at regime change by force. For various reasons this is not an option for western dissidents today, and for various reasons it would be very undesirable even if it were possible. But revolutionaries can be perfectly bloodless. The social revolution of the 60s and 70s was non-violent but it succeeded in overthrowing every accepted social value.

We need our own social revolution. And to get it we will need to destabilise things.

Which means that when we vote we need to keep this in mind. There’s no point in voting for the person you think will make the best prime minister or the best president. Democratic and parliamentary systems are designed to ensure that there is no possibility of someone reaching the top who actually has the ability to be a good and effective leader.

So whichever way you vote you’re going to be get a lousy prime minister. My feeling is that therefore it is best to vote for the candidate or party most likely to create instability in the system. In Britain today that probably means Jeremy Corbyn. He might well be a terrible prime minister, but he might help to create the kind of political chaos that is needed to bring down a rotten system. In fact one could argue that Theresa May is doing a terrific job right now in laying the foundations for anarchy in the U.K. – with any luck she might deal the system a fatal blow.

I’m adopting here the view attributed (probably wrongly) to Lenin, the famous “the worse, the better” argument that holds that the worse things get the better from the point of view of bringing down the system.

In Australia the best hope of destabilisation is certainly Pauline Hanson. Her recent attempt to get the Senate to pass a motion saying that it’s OK to be white was the kind of masterstroke that is needed. He not only knew the motion would fail, she was counting on it. By voting down the motion the Senate has made it clear to ordinary Australians that as far as the system is concerned they are the enemy. It was a brilliant way of undermining public faith in the political system.

When there’s no realistic hope of reforming the system all you can do is to try to weaken it as much as you can. In such a situation the most attractive candidates to vote for are the most massively incompetent ones (like Corbyn) or the ones who know they are outsiders and are prepared to act accordingly (like Hanson).

the problem of Britain, the problem of nationalism

The western world as a whole is in a state of crisis but while things are bad everywhere they seem to be particularly bad in Britain.

All western countries today have problems with their elites but Britain is unique in having elites that are not merely treacherous and corrupt but motivated by seething hatred of their own society, their own culture, their own heritage. Britain’s rulers, its political establishment, its elites, are united in one thing – they all believe that they have a duty to hate Britain.

This hatred seems to have permeated the whole nation. Quaint old-fashioned beliefs, like believing in a duty to love your own country, are virtually unknown.

Even Britain’s “far right” “nationalists” don’t seem to love Britain. Their loyalties seem dubious at best. They might hate immigrants, and some immigrant groups in particular, but that’s not really enough of a basis on which to build actual nationalism. To build a genuine powerful populist nationalist movement you have to have something a lot more positive to offer. Opposing immigration and multiculturalism certainly can be, indeed must be, vital parts of such a nationalist movement but they are not enough. You need to capture people’s imaginations. You need to give people something worth sacrificing for, because people want something that is worth sacrificing for.

There is no sign of this kind of positive nationalism in Britain. Even Brexit was essentially a negative thing. Brexit was important and worthwhile but it wasn’t accompanied by any real enthusiasm for a new positive direction.

Why don’t Britons love Britain?

I’m inclined to think that at least part of it was the shock of losing the Empire and being reduced to the status of an American vassal. The whole idea of British-ness suddenly became pathetic. Britannia no longer ruled the waves. The sun had well and truly set on the British Empire. Britain’s last attempt at an independent foreign policy in the Suez affair ended in humiliation at the hands of the U.S. and Britain thereafter accepted its rôle as Washington’s lapdog. If you were a member of the British ruling class it must have seemed that there was simply nothing left worth ruling over.

There’s an interesting awareness of this in one of John le Carré’s best-known spy thrillers. The British spy who has sold out to the Soviets is not motivated by personal greed and he’s certainly not motivated by any belief in communism. During World War 2 he realised that Britain was becoming an American puppet state and he decided that by serving Britain he was really serving the United States, and he decided that he’d rather serve the Soviets than the Americans. I found that motivation to be oddly plausible.

The British ruling class may have developed an ambivalent attitude towards their new American masters, a mixture of fawning admiration and bitter resentment. And therefore an ambivalent attitude themselves, despising themselves for their servile obedience to Washington and perhaps dealing with this by despising their own country for being so weak. British nationalism seemed to be a futile waste of time.

It may also have affected the ruling class’s attitude towards the working class. The British ruling class always hated and feared the working class but at least in the days of Empire they felt that the poor served a purpose. The Empire always needed cannon fodder. Without the Empire the working class seemed to be a useless menace.

I don’t claim to have definitive answers but I do think we need to ask ourselves why our elites became so hostile, and why the British elites took that hostility to their own nation to such extremes.

the Culture of Mockery

One of the things that has fatally weakened western civilisation has been the Culture of Mockery. This has been particularly the case in Britain.

Take a look at British popular culture over the past half century. It’s nothing but a sustained campaign of mockery of traditional Britain. Back in the 60s we thought this was being done by the counter-culture – by bold avant-garde nonconformists attacking the Establishment. But it wasn’t. It was the Establishment doing the mocking. Tearing down everything that ordinary Britons cared about.

The British people still haven’t figured out that it’s their own Establishment that hates them. The political, cultural, financial, bureaucratic Establishment. The hilariously misnamed Conservative Party. Even the Church of England, which has nothing but contempt for actual Christianity. Even the Monarchy, which has stood by and cheerfully watched while the country was trashed, occasionally rewarding the worst traitors with a knighthood or a peerage.

It’s not the global left that has destroyed Britain – it’s the British Establishment.

Never underestimate the absolute loathing that people like Theresa May have for everything Britain once stood for.

Of course the Culture of Mockery has undermined all western societies, but it has assumed a particularly virulent form in Britain. The British elite has waged a continuous and all too successful war on Britishness.

how the culture war could have been won

You can divide people into two categories, the civilisation-preservers and the civilisation-wreckers. The civilisation-wreckers have taken various forms but the most dangerous of all are the Social Justice Warriors with which we are too familiar today. The real question is – why have the civilisation-wreckers been so much more successful than the civilisation-preservers?

A major reason is that the civilisation-preservers are generally speaking fairly ordinary people. They have jobs. They’re married. They’re raising kids. They have only a limited amount of time to devote to politics.

The civilisation-wreckers on the other hand are usually unemployed. Or they work in academia, which is the same thing really (at least in most of the humanities departments). Even if they’re married they usually have one or even more commonly no kids. They have lots and lots of leisure time to devote to political activism. In practice ten civilisation-wreckers can achieve more than a hundred civilisation-preservers simply because they can devote their whole lives to the task.

The sad thing is that this situation, this massive over-supply of activists with time on their hands, is not natural. It has been manufactured. And it could have been stopped.

Anyone who has had to deal with an infestation of household pests such as ants knows that the only way to eradicate the problem is to find the nests. It’s the same with SJWs. Fortunately in the case of SJWs we know where the nests are. They’re in academia mostly, in the bureaucracy and in NGOs and the media (especially the government-owned media like the BBC and the ABC). And they’ve been breeding there for decades.

Over the past decades supposedly conservative governments in Britain, Australia and the U.S. have had ample opportunities to solve this problem. All they had to do was to cut off the supply of oxygen, in other words cut off the funding. Would-be SJWS would them have been forced to find real jobs in the real world. They would then not have had all that leisure time for political activism (some of them might even have abandoned their SJW beliefs after encountering the real world).

This would not have been a complete solution of course. Some of the nests in the media would certainly have survived and some of the useless university departments handing out Mickey Mouse degrees would have found alternative sources of funding. But it would still have achieved quite a lot. The supply of SJWs funded by the taxpayer with unlimited amounts of free time could have been reduced radically. The SJW menace might have been contained.

And those supposedly conservative governments in Britain, Australia and the U.S. have done nothing. They have allowed SJWs to continue to proliferate. The worthless NGOs still thrive, the Women’s Studies and Gender Studies and sociology departments continue to get funded to churn out unemployable misfits intent on destroying our society, the bureaucracy has not been reined in and the BBC and ABC still spend billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money on civilisation-wrecking.

There is an obvious conclusion to be drawn from this. Those so-called conservative governments never did intend to win the culture war. They never even intended to fight it. Worse than that, they have been not merely passive spectators but in many cases have worked actively for the forces of darkness. Those conservative political parties need to die.

revolutions and democracy

Rebellions were not uncommon during the Middle Ages. There were quite a few. They all had one thing in common. They all failed. Peasants with pitch-forks don’t do very well against well-armed disciplined soldiers (and even medieval soldiers were well disciplined compared to a mob of peasants with pitch-forks).

The ruling class wasn’t too worried. There was no real threat to the social order. They made sure they always had those well-armed disciplined soldiers on their side.

Then things started to change. In the late 18th century a peasant’s revolt actually succeeded. OK, the French Revolution was much more complicated than just a peasant’s revolt but the important thing is that the social order really was overturned. The ruling classes started to get nervous.

From then until the mid-19th century (1848 being the celebrated Year of Revolutions) there were more revolutions. They met with mixed success but the fact that any of them enjoyed any success at all was enough to send a chill up the spines of the ruling classes.

Some way needed to be found to nip this revolution business in the bud. The answer was democracy. Parliaments and congresses already existed but they were not the slightest bit democratic. Now they would be made democratic. Now the peasants wouldn’t be tempted to resort to pitch-forks. They would have a say in the government.

Of course it goes without saying that the ruling classes did not have the slightest intention of allowing those nasty smelly peasants (or those nasty smelly and increasingly numerous workers) to have an actual say in the government. It was all a game of make believe. Representative democracy was in fact a system set up to ensure that the people would never actually be asked for their opinions. The people would be passive observers but they would think they were active participants. Instead of manning the barricades and cutting off aristocrats’ heads they would vote. Their votes would be meaningless. That was the whole point of the exercise.

It worked very well indeed in countries like the US, Britain and Australia. The masses became docile and compliant. They believed the lies about democracy. They kept away from pitch-forks.

This has turned out to be very unfortunate. Sometimes the only way to persuade the ruling class that the people are seriously angry and discontented is to man the barricades. But we now have a population so drugged by the illusion of democracy that they will never man those barricades, even when their ruling class has declared war on them and intends to destroy them. Instead they dutifully show up at the polling booths, filled with the touching belief that if only they can throw out that nasty Mr Tweedledee and his Liberal Conservative Party (or his Democratic Republican Party) and vote in that nice Mr Tweedledum and his Conservative Liberal Party (or his Republican Democrat Party) then everything will be fine.

In the latter part of the 20th century the ruling class really did declare war on us. And we did not take to the streets. We did not man the barricades. We voted. We are now paying the price for our naïvete.

is evil a useful concept?

A recent post at A Political Refugee From the Global Village asks the question

“…is evil a word it is very useful for historians to use?”

The post is mostly concerned with political leaders to whom the word evil is routinely attached, which basically means Hitler and (much more rarely) Stalin. The point does however have a wider relevance. It has become increasingly common for people to regard those with whom they have a political disagreement as evil. Even more disturbingly perhaps it has become common to dismiss those who voted for those “evil” politicians as evil as well.

This practice is not confined to one end of the political spectrum. The most spectacular example at the moment is liberals regarding Donald Trump as some kind of comic-book super-villain. But there are plenty of conservatives who see Hillary Clinton in the same light. I’ve even encountered British conservatives who seem to think Jeremy Corbyn is some kind of Bond villain.

And of course anyone perceived as being an enemy of American foreign policy (like Vladimir Putin) is considered to be evil incarnate.

The trouble is that once you dismiss someone whose political views you dislike as evil you give up any chance of understanding what makes that person tick, of understanding why they hold those views, and you give up any realistic chance of comprehending the reasons that so many people support (or supported) that leader.

This might sound like I’m arguing for moral relativism but I don’t think I am. Some political views have produced great evil in practice and some political leaders have led their nations (and sometimes the world) down paths that have been so catastrophic that evil does seem like a reasonable way to describe the results. But the fact remains that once the evil label is applied it is no longer possible to understand the motivations.

Politicians are by nature corrupt and vicious but the frightening thing is that at the same time many really are True Believers. It is necessary to understand what it is that they believe in. It is also necessary to understand what motivates those who vote for them.

It might be comforting and emotionally satisfying to think that our enemies are simply evil but that doesn’t help us to oppose them effectively. If you can’t get inside your enemy’s head you cannot predict his actions.

It’s also somewhat dismaying to see the evil label bandied about in reference to entire groups of people, whether they be Brexit supporters or Remainers or white people or Muslims or Christians or Russians or any other group. It’s useful to understand the motivations of our friends. It’s absolutely vital to understand the motivations of our enemies, or those we see as potential threats. From our perspective it is possible that our enemies really are doing evil but they certainly don’t see it that way. Very few people wake up each morning asking themselves what evil they can do today. In a frightening number of cases they actually wake up asking themselves what virtuous things they can do today. Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people with a burning desire to do good. Liberals have all but destroyed civilisation through an excessive desire to do good.

the culture war accelerates

Those of us who deplore the social decay of the West have for many decades now become accustomed to the basic strategy of the Cultural Left. It’s been a strategy of gradualism. Push for radical social change but do it slowly enough that nobody really notices what’s happening, and ordinary people don’t get scared enough to resist. The boil the frog slowly approach.

All that has changed in the past few years. We’re now seeing a whole new strategy. It’s a strategy of pushing radical social change as far and as fast as possible. The Cultural Left no longer cares if the frog notices how hot the water is getting. It’s a strategy of relentless all-out attack on every front.

This change really became obvious when, with the homosexual marriage issue still not quite decided in their favour they were prepared to launch an all-out offensive on the trans front. The usual expectation would have been that they would wait and consolidate their victory in World War G for a few years before launching World War T.

Partly this is because the Cultural Left believes (correctly) that they are very close to final victory in the culture wars. There is no longer any need for caution. Now is the time to press home their advantage. Now is the time to crush the last few isolated pockets of resistance.

Of course another reason is that Brexit, the jump in support for the Front National in France and the Trump election win revealed the existence of pockets of resistance that were slightly larger than the Cultural Left/globalists had suspected. Their obvious intention now is to crush this resistance mercilessly, to ensure that such annoyances as Brexit and Trump can never happen again.

While the culture war accelerates we’re also seeing an extraordinary quickening in the pace at which western “democracies” are embracing totalitarianism. The major political parties (all of them) no longer even pretend to believe in actual democracy or any semblance of freedom of thought. In alliance with Big Business they are moving with terrifying speed to destroy any hint of opposition to the globalist/SJW agenda.

Time would seem to be running out rather quickly for the West.