Volk Politics

This article is bullshit. Muh constitution, muh horseshoe, muh “the people asserting their self-interest and historical property in the nation they created are A MIRROR IMAGE OF the ones trying to tear it down and parcel it out so they can be holier-than-thou”, muh classical liberalism, muh “if only we are principled”, and strawman upon strawman, with a parting shot at the banjos.
No Goldstein, you are the real leftist.

It occurs to me that my previous comment may have been a little intemperate.
I’m glad you noticed. Having read his (sadly now defunct) blog for years, the idea of Jeff Goldstein as a “real leftist” (or “pro-BLM”) seems quite silly. His analytical demolitions of leftist conceits were often a highlight of the week. I, for one, miss them.
As I said in a previous thread, there are real concerns about porous borders, demographics, the failure to assimilate, ethnic balkanisation, criminality and lawlessness, generational welfare dependency, the endless accusations of white devilry, etc. Subjects we’ve touched on here more than a few times. There’s also the fact that bad social and political decisions, often inspired by leftist conceits, may ultimately leave one painted into a corner with no good options in terms of correction, only marginally less horrible ones. Which is why one should be wary of the left’s negligent unrealism.
I’m just not sure how addressing any of the above concerns is helped by a hair-trigger tribalism and swarms of morons sending obnoxious racial tweets to people they assume are Jewish – sorry, (((Jewish))) – and therefore, apparently, suspect. So far as I’m aware, despite the surname, Jeff isn’t in fact Jewish and yet the anti-Semitic slurs have piled up on his doorstep quite quickly. And this isn’t a case of ironic trolling or a few aberrant loons; this is something more.

Hullo David,
I liked the article from Jeff Goldstein, but it seems a trifle naive to me.
American exceptionalism, which neither Barack Obama nor Donald Trump understand or can articulate, was born of our founding. This exceptionalism is found not in its genetic makeup (after all, we fought other white Europeans for our independence) but in a collage of Enlightenment ideas our Founders pulled together to create what became our national portrait.
I mean… is he ‘avin a larf? I’m not even sure where to begin with this one. I had a history teacher once, a twitchy, irascible little guy. He used to get a throbbing vein on his forehead and his face would turn a remarkable shade of crimson when we got things badly wrong.
Then he’d scream and throw jotters while shouting “RRRRUBBBIIISSSHHH!”
I don’t mean to be all “how can you have any pudding if you don’t eat yer meat?” but Anglo Saxon derived limited constitutional government is the pudding.
These Enlightenment values didn’t coalesce at random. The US founders weren’t delving into a pick n mix of Chinese, Swaheli and Eskimo political and legal traditions to build that collage.
Can’t have that sort of confection without the right meat first. If the US was colonised by Syrians, Somalis, or Sontarans it’d be a very different society with very different ideals.
Which is what’s happening now. Apart from the Sontarans. But if an armada of unpleasant and suspiciously Welsh aliens showed up over a Hillary Clinton occupied White House, she’d definitely let them all stay.
To reclaim our birthright, we need only reclaim the Constitution.
Eh. Rilly? Is it a magic constitution? Can you wave it over double digit IQ Guatemalan hillmen or pygmy negritos and – presto changeo! – they’ll turn into Jeffersonian republicans?
This seems like a bad plan, if you can call it a plan. It reads more like extolling the virtues of prayer though. If you say the right words piously enough, disaster might be averted!
I don’t mean to be unkind to prayers, they can’t hurt. But God helps those who help themselves.
Jeff’s idea that constitutional autism will save America has already been tested in the political marketplace, and failed.

Having read his (sadly now defunct) blog for years, the idea of Jeff Goldstein as a “real leftist” (or “pro-BLM”) seems quite silly. His analytical demolitions of leftist conceits were often a highlight of the week. I, for one, miss them.

How about if I phrase it as follows? Goldstein is firing rightwards. I’m not saying he’s cheerleading for BLM any more than Orwell says pacifists are cheerleading for Germany (although they sometimes did); I’m saying that the net result of Goldstein’s actions is to the benefit of the left much as British pacifists were Fascist advantage on net.
The send-off about incest and banjos could have come out of the mouth of any leftist lampooning rednecks; it’s not the sort of thing a conservative would ever say about Marxists.
Leftism is historically characterised by blank slatism, Lysenkoism, the New Soviet Man, and the fantasy that you can regulate people into being good rather than have to deal with inborn human nature; Goldstein asserts a similar fantasy that proclaiming the Constitution loudly enough will americanise non-americans, and you mustn’t listen to the alt-right saying that race and genetics counts for something.
Never mind the inconvenient fact that Goldstein’s beloved federalists, founding fathers, declaration of independence, and early constitution were quite loud on the Rights of Englishmen, of admittance to America only of free whites of good character, and how ‘Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people — a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs’.

How about if I phrase it as follows? Goldstein is firing rightwards.
Presumably, then, that isn’t allowed, irrespective of what lies to one’s right? Would Jeff be more principled if he mocked tactics and conceits on the left but excused and even championed much the same tactics and conceits if mouthed by people ostensibly on the right? Is that how it works?
I forget where I saw the quip “you call us Hitler, we hurl a swastika”, but I think it sums up much of the situation… all restraint is breaking down… It’s part indiscriminate retaliation…
And hence the unpleasant taste it leaves in the mouth. As underlined by Jimmy’s “ Jews like Goldstein,” immediately above.

I don’t understand the principled conservatives of America anymore. The lost the culture war. They lost badly. They keep losing.
There’s an old joke about the Scotland football team manager being asked if he’s planning any changes.
He replies “Naw, I’ll stick with the tactics and players who’ve let me down before.”
Conservatives lost the Culture War as surely as drugs won the Drug War. The – plan, if you can call it that – is to keep retreating while insisting whatever the Left captured 10 years ago is the new Line That Must Not Be Crossed.
I saw a lot of Ted Cruz in his quixotic run for the presidential nomination, and his strategy seemed to be “This time with feeling!”
We’re only a few years away from these chaps declaring polyamorous transgender marriage for babies to be a Conservative Value.
The root of this comprehensive failure is probably their desperate need to be respectable. As if the Left will stop calling them racists if only they fellate the memory of Marxist race hustler Martin Luther King earnestly enough.
But Mel and Kim were right.

If the US was colonised by Syrians, Somalis, or Sontarans it’d be a very different society with very different ideals.
Errrr . . . If the US was colonized by Which individual members of [ insert assorted cultural references ] doing said colonization???
For merely one of many handy examples of why the rather required precision, with the recent final reports on the the New Year’s attacks in Germany, what is thus rather established instead of casually noticed is that the criminals totaled about two thousand altogether, and that two thousand or so having to be assembled from several cities worth of attackers.
In turn, the fantasy of the right wing—and therefore extreme—is basically OMG The Non Europeans Got Into Germany And All Is Wrong!!!!! where such hysterical screaming very much requires that the rest of us can’t do the simplest form of math: Actual arrivals in Germany were apparently somewhere around one million, so that the two thousand criminals come out to about point two percent . . . not even as much as two percent, but point two percent.
A very easy—and perfectly correct—observation is that the newcomers are not those they have arrived among, and therefore are not interchangeably identical, and also among the immediate reports of the attacks in Germany were the equally immediate reports of refugees being quite opposed to the criminals who were clearly quite separate from them and separate from the natives.
Therefore, the issue is never where some general lot comes from, the issue remains what the individuals then do.
Equally the same, of that equally extreme and limited left wing instead of right wing, a quoted bit is indeed that . . .

This counter-trend, make no mistake, is every bit as identitarian as anything Edward Said ever wrote, and just as toxic. Said enormously influenced Western academics. His Orientalism laid out the case for identity politics, declaring who controls particular group narratives and how, and who and what comes to count as “authentic” and thus permitted to represent a given identity group and its (collectivist) narrative. Identity politics necessarily brackets and minimizes individualism. As with much the Left does, it remains policed by a kind of mob shaming and an enforced intellectual correctness that is linguistically incoherent.

Sooo, instead of Said, or whomever may get quoted by the right wing, yes, for we conservatives who are thus annoyingly bookended by the merely right wing or merely left wing, there is indeed David Cannadine. Or, very particularly, Cannadine’s observation that Said is full of it and therefore that one may note and then relatively ignore Orientalism, because the reality is Cannadine’s Ornamentalism

Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire is a book by David Cannadine about British perceptions of the British Empire.[1] Cannadine argues that class, rank and status[2] were more important to the British Empire than race.[3] The title of the work Ornamentalism is a direct reference to Edward Said’s book Orientalism, which argues the existence of prejudiced outsider interpretations of the East, shaped by the attitudes of European imperialism in the 18th and 19th centuries. It has also been argued to borrow tones from the title of Joseph Scumpeter’s “Imperialism and Social Classes[4] which some historians see as the origins of the ‘Ornamentalist’ perspective in academic history’

—That last pulled from Wiki . . .
David—Thompson, that is—has that very nice link in the upper right that he would like you to make use of. Granting in turn that I’m about to quote from the Amazon.com site, rather than UK, commentary for the book is also entertaining:

His argument apparently has taken his PC readers so much by surprise that they cannot comprehend it, but to someone, like myself, who lives in Hawaii, it is a commonplace. Hawaii was colonized by Americans, not Britons, but they behaved exactly the same — despising, or at least keeping their distance from, the commoners; but happily intermarrying with the ‘natural’ aristocracy. Once Hawaii became a republic and the aristocracy was extinguished, they stopped intermarrying with them, as all natives were then ‘common.’
This little story from the islands was written large in the British Empire. Cannadine does not pretend there was not a color line, but he notes — and any Australian would say, ‘Right, mate!’ — that the elite in the metropole despised the white colonists more than the black elites they chose to cosset and use in the policy of indirect rule.

How about if I phrase it as follows? Goldstein is firing rightwards.

Presumably, then, that isn’t allowed, irrespective of what lies to one’s right?
Of course it’s allowed. And then one should expect to get lumped with leftists by one’s right, and receive corresponding hostility.
Would Jeff be more principled if he mocked tactics and conceits on the left but excused and even championed much the same tactics and conceits if mouthed by people ostensibly on the right? Is that how it works?
Jeff would probably be more principled on that score if he first stopped *using* tactics and conceits of the left like snarking about incest and banjos. But I fear a fuller argument here would be getting deep into the weeds of mixed metaphor and overstretched analogy.
—
But Mel and Kim were right.
Who?

Who?
Brace yourself.

I should point out that in the article I link to upthread, the comparison between the Conservative establishment and the Washington Generals, (who turn up every week to get thrashed – indeed humiliated – by the Harlem Globetrotters), is probably racist.
Apt, but probably racist.

This is merely an article about group-think. He seems to always be alluding to the idea that sharing a sense of identity or common understanding is somehow faintly reprehensible. That doesn’t seem so Conservative to me. There is a time for belonging and a time for questioning. The great questions of politics are based upon this idea. His only response to the question of identity crisis to those who feel that their identity is threatened, is for those people to clump together with people outside of that identity in order to err.. regain a sense of identity. That seems to me to be the central tenet of leftist thought. He isn’t saying anything new about radicalism either is he. All that really happens is that if radicals gain more ascendency in a political narrative or movement, then there are the inevitable ruptures, sunderings and subsequent re-groupings. I don’t feel he’s answered anything really, but has only alluded to some abstract solutions. He talks about the impossibility of cultural nativity, but then mentions the birth of the American idea as the inspiration for a sense of collective identity.He talks in another faintly sniffy way about national identities being ‘local’, but doesn’t appear to have any problem with America being a nation separate from the rest, even to the extent of ‘exceptionalism’. Going by his own precepts, that also suggests a certain desire for a kind of superiority, wouldn’t you say? By the way, I’m an Englishman, and I don’t care much for jazz, sushi or basketball. I like cricket, tea, Constable and G K Chesterton. Does that make me a gauliter of the worst stamp?

Jeff, you ignorant slut!
The trouble here is that JEFF! would rather curse the darkness than light a candle. He’s had a lot of practice cursing the darkness, and it’s what he’s familiar with, as the left have cut the electricity and then been putting out the gas lanterns and flashlights one by one. Objectively, candles provide pretty poor light – just as simple reaction and clinging to one’s “tribe” are poor vessels for enlightenment – but fellow feeling and understanding one’s neighbor and nation a la Kipling’s description of how he understands his fellow from his own land are the basis of the trust of community.
Other people have lit a candle. JEFF! in this metaphor has been looking at the worst things lit *by* it and is complaining that the sudden light and smoke both irritate his eyes – he wishes to extinguish both. Rather than see a use for light (in this metaphor, revived patriotism and self-interest), he creates calumnies against it because he hates the smoke so very much. It’s the wrong sort of light, you can tell by the smoke, he explains. Must put the candle out before our eyes are ruined or someone catches the drapes on fire.
JEFF! has been in the funhouse mirror world of Twitter too long. The world where all feelings of national pride are held by enthusiastic racists and all enthusiastic racists are Nazis – or purport to be. On poking his head above water he offers himself a wholly false choice between “Nazi” and “respectable”, picks the “obvious”, then tries to content himself on how this could have happened by playing a perverse version of Dorothy Parker’s Who Goes Nazi by trying to figure out who has been a secret Nazi all along. Why, of course it’s been those hick Southerners. None other!
Wrapped in the warm blanket of his own ironic bigotry, he goes back to sleep.
The alt-right has been a nascent movement for some time, and to believe it (like the Tea Party) can be smothered by the Alinsky tactics of tearing down its respectability – from the right! – is foolish in the extreme. It has arisen because the interests of the Tea Party were not met, and other interests long buried have become more painful and risen once again. It is a force of last resort which has no respectability to lose, so any attempt to defuse it without understanding it is not only foolish, but an insult.
William F. Buckley was largely the mold for conservative commentary and left his imprimatur on the movement of respectability, education, wit, and calm reserve, but he did not lack in passion – nor was he a blind man. The political will of conservatism depended on recognizing the pains and travails of those without a voice (just as the left pretended to do) and offering practical intersect between first principles and needs. Needs best served most often by standing in the way yelling “stop”, but also clever enough to recognize means to ends.
The modern writer’s class has held onto that repectability, education, wit, and reserve label as it’s the comfort held when they’re with their lefty friends – “I’m actually better than you at those things you pretend at” – but somewhere has lost all meaning of what they should actually be doing with themselves. By failing to control what is and is not respectable through real guidance in the cause, they’ve fled the battlefield. “I’M RESPECTABLE!” screams JEFF! as he turns and realizes the footsoldiers in the ranks behind look… peevish. Could JEFF! have spent time on how nationalist-leaning motives best serve the country? Or rather than decrying BLM, explored ways of recovery for the crushed manufacturing base? Musing about profiling – whether it’s worth the cost in some cases? No, because the next thing is that you’re a Derbyshire and un-personed. Better to ignore where Taki is succeeding and dismiss any attempt to route that sort of thing through better angels. I’ve held JEFF! up here as an example, but he’s been better than most – which may be one reason he hasn’t realized how exceptionally toxic the Kristols and other have become.
To conclude: JEFF!, “you’re just saying that because you’re a bigot” has never once won an argument. It has ended many, and what comes after is not continued good feeling between parties involved. You had an opportunity to use tools given to you for the restoration of conservatism, freely given, but got in a snit because of mean things that teenage trolls were saying. You dolt.

They (Jews) are the most successful group in America, wielding enormous power in proportion to their real number, and yet they seem to foster a deep resentment toward the founding stock that created the country in which they prosper.
I’m reminded of the masthead of Heeb Magazine in its heyday, which pleaded with anyone who had contacts with the Jews who control the media to please get in touch with them. Personally I look forward to having enormous power in proportion to my real number.
Speaking as the author of yesterday’s essay about cultural Marxism in The Federalist, the aggressively secular and bonkers-leftist Jews associated with it were a marked exception to the gently secular and moderately liberal Jews who came here in the 20th century. The latter were assimilationist and worked their asses off, precisely out of respect to the people who founded the country. My people went to Dallas, of all places, where they encountered no anti-Semitism to speak of because Texans understand what hard work and respect look like.

@Franklin: Noted, but he arguably had the political capital to do so. Anyone proposing to lose to Hillary in order to (in theory) hand the rebellious elements a defeat and excise them from politics has not gamed things out very well. A conservative movement can only function so long as it is seen as other than useless. I grew up since near infancy watching Firing Line, reading Buckley, Novak, Cal Thomas, and even George Will, but there is a gap between what Buckley’s movement was meant to be and the the self-sabotaging sinecures of a moribund faux-intelligentsia.
For the record, throwing anti-Semites out of the party was absolutely required, but the Bircher affair… we’ve had some long-term repercussions. It is imperative to be lucid when one is an anti-Communist, which the Birchers were not, but in the conservative movement’s enthusiasm for finding a common-ground national face, all anti-Communism for decades was funneled into foreign policy and what might be termed anti-Russian public posture. Anti-Communism within the domestic sphere was strangled in the crib and this enabled the Gramscian March like little else. Worse still, such conflicts for direction of conservatism and efforts to displace what came to be known as paleo-conservatism helped the spin of Goldwater as some type of radical and put in place Johnson’s Great Society.
So, while I hold Buckley high as what the movement was, I cannot hold him completely faultless – nor can I claim that throwing out all nationalistic tendency at this time in history is a reasonable act. Nor still are his supposed successors of his stature as an original thinker or leader – they couldn’t lead an infant to a diaper-changing station.

It’s a question, then, of how to correct those problems, to whatever extent is practical, without indulging in knuckleheaded racial tribalism and “indiscriminate retaliation,” or generally being an arse.
David, I suspect that we share a broadly similar – in many ways a very ‘English’ – temperament. However, with every insult and outrage that is visited upon us I find myself growing less squeamish about the possibility of losing the odd baby with the increasingly foetid bathwater that is accumulating. I do fear the time may come when we are forced to take sides: I know where I should be standing, and even if some of my fellows turn out to be not as appetising as I’d like I’m pretty confident their company will be preferable to abject surrender.

David, I suspect that we share a broadly similar – in many ways a very ‘English’ – temperament
Yes, I think that may be part of it. I’m not temperamentally inclined to the kinds of crude tribalism on show. But for me it’s not an issue of manners, status or fretting about how one seems in supposedly respectable company, and certainly not for the benefit of people who will scold and name-call anyway because that’s what they do. It’s the narrow and emphatic ‘with us or against us’ mindset that jars, the quest for purity, especially when it repels so many people with whom one has common ground. When partial dissent and even measured qualification is met with instant denunciation and (((crap like this))), it’s not a happy state of affairs. Nor does it bode well for a glorious future, of any hue.

The first and most important difference between us and them is we’re us and they’re them.
True Conservatives are just about the only people in history, aside from libertarians, who can’t figure that out.

I’m not onboard with Vox, certainly. That being said, if it’s taking a crazy person to raise buried issues, just how sane is the common discourse in the first place?
On the other hand, Franklin, Milo certainly doesn’t believe you ought to be gassed – ‘twould be rather odd if he did. I’d tend to regard him as more influential in the real world than Ted Beale without question. I would like to take people on board for white identitarianism only out back and shoot them (metaphorically), but if it’s impossible to figure out where the line is other than letting the left come up with one, we’re going nowhere fast. Which is why I think a fight for the leadership and influence over the (very broad) alt-right *base* (perhaps not the alt-right itself) is more productive than to put everybody possibly carrying an imagined alt-right contagion in a box and nuke them.
A lot of people out there are really worried. The alt-right has picked up on some of their worries in a semi-credible way. The answer is not to channel hatred of some elements of the very loose alt-right into a with-us-or-against-us request to either sit down and shut up or be called mean names. Anyone wondering where the with-us-or-against-us drawing of lines on alt-right twitter came from needs look no further than the ongoing Crusade of Our Betters to control. It’s reactive – a mirror of many purges of old. A whole spectrum from the Buchanans to the Derbyshires have been ejected, silenced, and – most importantly – left to grow, outside.
It’s no use pointing out to people acting like a peasant’s revolt that they’re dragging things toward feudalism when there are actual landed gentry being rebelled against. So to speak.

Hal – Actual arrivals in Germany were apparently somewhere around one million, so that the two thousand criminals come out to about point two percent . . . not even as much as two percent, but point two percent.
Good point. You’re more likely to win £25 on the Lottery than be raped or murdered by a Muslim.

@Sporkatus: Milo and I followed each other on Twitter, before he was ejected for wrongthink. I’m also led to understand that as soon as he started speaking for the Alt-Right, large segments of the Alt-Right disowned him. That is what it is. Your point –
A whole spectrum from the Buchanans to the Derbyshires have been ejected, silenced, and – most importantly – left to grow, outside.
– is well taken, and I very much subscribe to the notion of considering people one at a time. That said, we’re talking about a movement in which (according to Beale, who would know) the Overton window includes the Final Solution. Is blanket disgust a wholly inapt response to that?

@David: Fistbump transferred to TCP/IP. Should arrive shortly.
@Franklin: Blanket disgust is certainly apt, and it’s hard not to let disgust color things. I for one am deeply disgusted by George Will’s fetishization of baseball. Jokes aside, I do not have any associations other than being white (ish) and American southern causing people to generate malformed malediction toward me, so I can’t begin to imagine.
It is deeply unfortunate that lines are drawn as they typically are, given that the Jewish friends I have are (per axiom) quite conservative in their matters of expertise. Politically, doctrinaire to middling leftists all, despite no personal advantage (several are poor) – they’re not Part Of The Conspiracy, certainly, but the long-term poisoning of the Marxist movement in the upper middle class has left its mark. On the other hand, they are absolutely not the New York Set or the Hollywood set.
These people are not The Jewish Issue, they’re my friends, and not more leftist than anyone else in their social set and upper middle class backgrounds – but they’re visible, leftist, and Jewish, which is enough to seem to make them seemingly an identified type. Which for someone unhinged looking for a villain behind the curtain…
On the other hand, the anti-semitism of the far left has been so rampant for decades that it isn’t even contained or confined to areas – though some show concentration. Zombie’s photo-essays of events in Berkeley are enough to curdle the blood.
It’s certainly true, isn’t it – that axiom that all forms of crazy eventually come back around to conspiracies of THE JEWS. I comfort myself that a movement of outcasts containing a few crazies must have some inevitability in that until the next (true) Buckley comes along.

I was hoping this discussion would come around to Star Trek.

I was hoping this discussion would come around to Star Trek.
The night is young.

I said once, regarding Joy Karega, that eventually all anti-rationalist movements conclude that The Real Problem Around Here Is The Jews.

Hey Lisboeta, your vegetables are less than perfectly washed of sand and soil, so by the same token I’m sure you have no grounds for complaint if served gravel for dinner. Right?