Category Archives: Culture Wars/Current Controversies

The Last Temptation of the Evangelical Right 2

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Electoralism/Democratism, Left and Right, Religion and Philosophy

I generally hold to the obviously heterodox view that, contextually speaking, Donald Trump is the most liberal president the USA has ever had (though Barack Obama was more liberal on some social issues like the environment and transgender rights, and Jimmy Carter was more liberal on some foreign policy issues like international human rights). It is therefore interesting that his biggest supporters would be some of the furthest right sectors of US society, such as the religious right and the racialist right. Imagine Hugh Hefner or Larry Flynt running for president in the 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s with followers of George Wallace, Jerry Falwell, or Pat Robertson as their biggest backers., and you have a rough analogy to the present situation. This article by a neocon evangelical and former member of the Bush administration explains why. During the George W. Bush era, I said that Dubya did not govern any further to the right than LBJ, and Trump is much further to the left.

By Michael Gerson

The Atlantic

ne of the most extraordinary things about our current politics—really, one of the most extraordinary developments of recent political history—is the loyal adherence of religious conservatives to Donald Trump. The president won four-fifths of the votes of white evangelical Christians. This was a higher level of support than either Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, an outspoken evangelical himself, ever received.

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Anti-White Politics is anti-Revolutionary Nonsense Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Left and Right, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism, Race and Ethnicity

An interesting M-L-M critique of the critical theory oriented “Left.” I don’t agree with his general ideology but I agree with his assessment of “identity politics” as having no real value other than to create divisiveness that will have the effect of undermining the system (“destabilizing the imperialist core”), thereby making anti-imperialist victory more likely. That’s why I have spent so much time promoting all kinds of fringe, freakazoid movements and ideologies, and favor the most extreme, ridiculous or insane political candidates. Weaken the system at its core. Another thing I like about Jason is that he recognizes that the “revolutionary potential” of the First World is minimal to non-existent. I agree with his assessment of the Third World at the focus of anti-imperialist revolution, even if I don’t share his Marxism.

 

 

American Anarchy: Intense Photos Of The Early 1900s Reign Of Radicalism In The U.S. Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies

American political conflict isn’t quite what it used to be. The American Revolution, the Civil War, the labor wars of the late 19th/early 20th century, and the racial/cultural revolution of the 1960s make today’s “polarization” and “incivility” look pretty tame in comparison. Today’s “political conflict” is Yankees vs. Red Sox, not the Weimar Republic. Even events like Charlottesville are more a gang fight or a riot by sports hooligans than political combat. All across the US, urban street gangs make the Alt-Right/Lite and SJWs/Antifa look like tenth rate amateurs. In 2017, there were 17, 284 homicides in the US. At most, 34 of these were committed by political extremists, only about half of those murders were actually politically motivated. We live in an age of “bourgeois bitchiness” (the rivalry within the  upper middle class between Reds and Blues) and “tiddlywinks radicalism” (virgin basement dweller “fascists” vs triggered snowflake “leftists”).

Mckinley Assassination Anarchists

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What Happens When Trump Falls? Reply

by • American Decline, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Electoralism/Democratism

I find it fascinating that Donald Trump, a man who personifies the perfect hybrid of 1960s/70s hedonism and 1980s/90s greed and materialism, would emerge as a conservative hero, with the religious right and social conservatives being his biggest backers. If there are any snowflakes left who still think some right-wing Christian theocracy is on the horizon, they need not worry. Trumpism represents the Latin Americanization of US politics (a high stratified class system where open corruption is the norm in politics) rather than “A Handmaid’s Tale.”

By Rod Dreher

The American Conservative

TheBlackRhino/Shutterstock

Ross Douthat has a good column today, about how Trump’s grift has been paradoxically cleansing. He argues that Trump’s claim that he would go to Washington and “drain the swamp,” while only ever plausible to those eager to be a mark, is now impossible for anyone to take seriously:

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Why the 1968 Revolution Has Become Normalized: A Thought Experiment Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies

Many older people, or those familiar with Western political history in the 20th century, will remember that 1968, exactly half a century ago, was a revolutionary year in the sense of uprisings that occurred throughout the Western world (and elsewhere). A brief summary can be found here.

The three most significant forces that were associated with the 1960s upheavals were the anti-Vietnam War movement, the civil rights movement, and the sexual revolution. Let’s try this thought experiment. Let’s say we could travel back in time and inform a New Left activist (say a protestor at the 1968 Democratic Convention) of what the world of 50 years later was going to be like. What would we say?

-The Cold War would eventually end, as would the arms race between the USA and USSR. In fact, the USSR itself would end, and the former Soviet republics and Warsaw Pact nations would become (mostly) liberal democracies, with China becoming the leading international financier of America’s public debt, and America becoming China’s major export market.

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Why Social Justice And The Far Left Are Doomed To Collapse 1

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Electoralism/Democratism, Left and Right • Tags:

Some interesting commentary from Tim Pool.

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Social Justice And The Far Left Are Doomed To Collapse due to internal inconsistency within itself. They advocate for the rights of groups at odds with each other and for positions that can’t be brought together. You can’t advocate for Abrahamic fundamentalists while also advocating for the rights of women and other marginalized groups. You can’t support health care for all but also open borders as resources are finite Social justice groups and feminists constantly fight among themselves over issues yet still try to bring in more groups and ideologies. We are left wondering which is the real feminists? Second wave feminism? Third wave? Fourth?

Trump’s Great Wall is Trump’s Great Stall? Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Electoralism/Democratism, Immigration, Left and Right • Tags:

Ann Coulter, as everyone knows, is a staunch conservative and immigration hawk. But she correctly perceives that Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric is largely a ruse intended as raw meat to be thrown to his base. Coulter’s examination of electoral politics correctly perceives that the future belongs to the ascending forces represented by the alliance of the techno-oligarchs and the new clerisy (as I have been saying for almost 20 years). By any reasonable standard, Trump is one of the most liberal presidents, if not the most liberal, that America has ever had. Anarchists, libertarians, anti-statists and anti-authoritarians need to get over the “rightwingophobia” that is common in our circles, and start focusing on who the enemy will be in the future.

Every day that Trump does not keep his promises on immigration, thousands of immigrants turn 18 and start block voting for the Democrats, while thousands of traditional Americans die off. Florida and Texas are about five years away from turning solid blue. Trump was our last chance. After this, the country is never going to elect a Republican president again.

Yep. As I am not a conservative, I am not at all unhappy about the prospect of never electing a Republican President again.

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Relative Threats: The ADL and Extremist Murders in 2017 Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies • Tags:

This is a pretty good debunking of the claim that there has somehow been an epidemic of extremist murders in recent times. Read the full critique here.

So the actual evidence shows that some ideological extremists are also mentally unstable or sketchy people in general, who end up getting involved in violence, whether as a perpetrator or a victim. Who could’ve guessed?

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Weimar Reenactors (Alt-Right and Antifa) Have Nothing on Medieval Reenactors Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Left and Right

Medieval reenanctor dies after 7-foot-long lance spears his abdomen. Civil War and World War Two reenactors can apparently get pretty wild as well.

By Dana Hedgpeth

Washington Post

A Virginia man, who was playing a Medieval knight during a reenactment performance, impaled and killed himself with his seven-foot-long lance.

Peter Barclay of Woodbridge, Va., a retired Army lieutenant colonel, died after he was impaled with his lance in a timed competition Saturday in Williamstown, Ky. Barclay was a longtime and active member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, according to the group’s president John Fulton.

Fulton said the 52-year-old was competing in an equestrian game at the Kentucky event inside a large pavilion while spectators watched. In the game, riders had to pick up their lance from a hay bale and then ride, using it to pick up a paper plate.

Barclay, who performed under the name “Master Terafan Greydragon,” had the lance in hand, picked the paper plate off the ground and was finishing the course when the accident happened.

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A Resident’s Bill of Rights: Fixing Immigration While Protecting Communities Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Immigration • Tags:

This is probably the best and most comprehensive set of proposals for immigration reform that I have seen to date in the sense of upholding humanitarian values, while giving due consideration to everyone’s interests.

By Nathan Smith

My fundamental convictions have not changed: I support open borders. And yet one can’t tilt at windmills too long without feeling a sense of futility and even foolishness. We may have had an impact. We have been noticed in high places, a little. But of course there is no prospect of open borders being adopted as official policy in any of the world’s developed countries anytime soon. Meanwhile, there is room for reasonable hope that immigration policy will move quite a ways in the right direction, and for reasonable fear that it will move far in the wrong direction, in the coming years, and it’s far from clear that advocating open borders is the best way to help accomplish the former, or avoid the latter. To advocate open borders, assuming, as seems likely, that that aim cannot be achieved for decades at least, can only help indirectly, e.g., by expanding the “Overton window,” and might plausibly hurt, by provoking a restrictionist reaction against an open-borders bogeyman. For those idealists who really want to know what justice demands, we’ve explained that. I’d be happy to explain it again, debate it, whatever. But the value of refining the case for open borders still further seems doubtful until there’s evidence that people exist who really want to do the right thing, have read what has been argued so far, and are still unconvinced. My impression is that among people with a thorough exposure to the public case for open borders, as it has been made here and elsewhere, the insufficiency of the arguments offered is not a very important factor in any failure to persuade. Some of the unconvinced just aren’t very smart, while more aren’t good enough to do the right thing when they start to see it, so they bluster and stonewall and scoff.

So in this post, I’m going to attempt something a bit different, involving an unaccustomed degree of compromise. I’m going to lay out a policy platform that, while falling well short of open borders, lies, I think, at the radical end of what might actually find a coalition to carry it through to success in the United States in the near future. It doesn’t institute open borders. If passed, deportations would still occur, and billions who would benefit from immigrating would be excluded from the territory of the United States permanently from birth. Indeed, the centerpiece of this proposed policy, the Residents’ Bill of Rights, wouldn’t increase at all the number of people enjoying a definite legal right of residence, much less a path to citizenship. But it would ensure that all those residing in the United States would be treated a little more justly. It would make it harder to backslide into a harsh enforcement regime or a reduction of immigrant numbers. It would give the foreign born, however they got there, a certain dignity and a certain security. It would cause many acts of wickedness, many violations of fundamental human rights, to cease. It would give conscientious Americans the right to be substantially less ashamed of the way their government treats immigrants. At the same time, by empowering immigration skeptics to act locally instead of nationally, it would appease some of their more legitimate fears. It would not institute open borders, but I believe it would help to prepare the way.

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The Left Case against Open Borders Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Immigration, Left and Right • Tags:

A leftist writer discusses the history of leftist opposition to open borders.

By Angela Nagle

American Affairs Journal

efore “Build the wall!” there was “Tear down this wall!” In his famous 1987 speech, Ronald Reagan demanded that the “scar” of the Berlin Wall be removed and insisted that the offending restriction of movement it represented amounted to nothing less than a “question of freedom for all mankind.” He went on to say that those who “refuse to join the community of freedom” would “become obsolete” as a result of the irresistible force of the global market. And so they did. In celebration, Leonard Bernstein directed a performance of “Ode to Joy” and Roger Waters performed “The Wall.” Barriers to labor and capital came down all over the world; the end of history was declared; and decades of U.S.-dominated globalization followed.

In its twenty-nine-year existence, around 140 people died attempting to cross the Berlin Wall. In the promised world of global economic freedom and prosperity, 412 people died crossing the U.S.-Mexican border last year alone, and more than three thousand died the previous year in the Mediterranean. The pop songs and Hollywood movies about freedom are nowhere to be found. What went wrong?

Of course, the Reaganite project did not end with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Reagan—and his successors from both parties—used the same triumphalist rhetoric to sell the hollowing out of trade unions, the deregulation of banks, the expansion of outsourcing, and the globalization of markets away from the deadweight of national economic interests. Central to this project was a neoliberal attack on national barriers to the flow of labor and capital. At home, Reagan also oversaw one of the most significant pro-migration reforms in American history, the 1986 “Reagan Amnesty” that expanded the labor market by allowing millions of illegal migrants to gain legal status.

Popular movements against different elements of this post–Cold War vision came initially from the Left in the form of the anti-globalization movements and later Occupy Wall Street. But, lacking the bargaining power to challenge international capital, protest movements went nowhere. The globalized and financialized economic system held firm despite all the devastation it wreaked, even through the 2008 financial crisis.

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How Would a Billion Immigrants Change the American Polity? 3

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Immigration • Tags:

This article by Nathan Smith is the best analysis of the immigration issue that I have seen to date in terms of nuance, honesty, and depth. He argues that there would be both tremendous benefits and tremendous costs if the borders of the United States were to be opened completely (where moving to the USA from another country would be no different than moving from California to Texas or from Virginia to Maryland). Smith summarizes his analysis as follows:

In short, I think the most wild-eyed predictions of the open borders optimists will come true, and to spare, but I think a lot of the forebodings of the grimmest open border pessimists will also prove more than justified.

He ultimately comes down on the side of open borders, primarily on the grounds that the Global South would be the net winners on the economic level. See a critique of Smith’s position by Robert Montenegro here.

By Nathan Smith

OpenBorders.Info

A couple of years ago, I wrote a post called “The American Polity Can Endure and Flourish Under Open Borders.” I would not write that post today. The American polity might endure and flourish under open borders, but I wouldn’t claim that confidently. What changed my mind? A greater familiarity with the theoretical models that are the basis for “double world GDP” as a claim about the global economic impact of open borders, especially my own. It turns out that these estimates depend on billions of people migrating internationally under open borders. Previously, my vague and tentative expectations about how much migration would occur under open borders were akin to Gallup poll estimates suggesting that 150 million or so would like to migrate to the USA. Others may disagree, but I was fairly confident at the time that the US polity was robust enough to absorb 150-200 million immigrants (over, say, a couple of decades) and retain its basic political character and structure. I do not think the US polity is robust enough to absorb 1 billion immigrants (even, say, over the course of fifty years) and retain its basic political character and structure.

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C-Realm 534: Roots of Division with Keith Preston Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Left and Right

A discussion with the C-Realm podcast. Listen here.

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KMO welcomes Keith Preston of Attack the System back to C-Realm Radio to talk about the current political and social division in the United States. Keith first offers a technological explanation for the intensity of the social animosity on display in public discourse. He then delves into the history of left and right political movements in the US to describe in more detail how we came to our particular historical moment.

Rebel Yell 330: Keith Preston, Attack the System Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Left and Right

A recent interview with the Rebel Yell podcast. Listen here.
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Direct Download

Rebel Yell 20181110 330 Keith Preston, Attack the System

This is Rebel Yell – a Southern Nationalist podcast of the Alt-Right. I’m your host Musonius Rufus. Joining me are my cohosts Mencken’s Ghost and Ryan McMahon. For our 111th episode of Rebel Yell, Mencken and I speak with Keith Preston of Attack the System.

And check out his podcasts Kick the Puppy and Unraveling Political Theory.

The Trouble With White Guilt 4

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Race and Ethnicity

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

White Guilt is a very serious affliction in this country. Its symptoms include cultural appropriation, political correctness, and obsessive NPR consumption. Fall is peak White Guilt season, wedged between our country’s most cherished celebrations of genocide, Columbus Day and Thanksgiving. A common misconception is that White Guilt is a mental illness. While it can cause delusions in more severe cases, White Guilt is actually a completely natural response to conspicuous consumption, particularly when this addiction to material garbage is built on an ancient Indian burial ground.

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