Amerika

Many people have taken to the internet of late to wail about how conservatism has failed, how Trump has failed, and how we all need to cluster together in little White Nationalist groups planning for the end. We hear this wailing a lot, and it is always popular.

It finds an audience because it is do-nothing rhetoric. “All is lost, give up now, and just do whatever you want while we wait for the end!” will always be popular among humans, because it lets each little monkey pose and being deep, significant, and important while being a nobody and doing nothing.

Former ages would recognize it as an excuse, rationalization, justification, or pretense. These are people who want a reason to avoid doing anything, so they come up with end-of-the-world scenarios. In reality, they want any excuse to stop feeling the need to act.

Scapegoating forms a part of the modern landscape. After all, the voters specialize in blaming the other side or the politicians themselves, despite the voters having the ultimate power over who goes to office in a democracy. They can blame the party system or “capitalism” if the other scapegoats fail them.

We like scapegoating because in an egalitarian system, everyone is a victim of something that makes them less than equal. If we find something to blame, it was not our fault that things went wrong, so we can keep on being equal without having any responsibility.

What are these people defending against? Mostly the hard truth that things can always be fixed. You exile the ruined people, and then remove burdens from the good so they reproduce more rapidly and fill your society with good people. Like pruning a garden.

People want an excuse to give up so they can go back to watching porn, binge-consuming television, earning money, buying junk, and pursuing whatever weird hobbies they claim give their lives meaning. Even if your hobby is being a far-Righter and collecting guns, this applies to you.

Those who say that conservatism have failed themselves fail to distinguish between the public conservative movement and the corporation, the GOP, that administers it, and conservatism as an idea. Yes, it got corrupted; everything does, in the hands of mob rule!

White Nationalism, National Socialism, et al., do not offer a complete political system or vision of society. You can be an ethnic nationalist and be a conservative — heck, this is part of the idea of conserving — but you also have other values as well.

Very few realize how much WW2 defeat the West. We won, but in order to do so, we had to invent this mythology of personal freedom in the West that quickly replaced our allegiance to the organic things, like culture, morality, family, heritage, and reality itself.

We become robots administering the ideology. “Does this increase equality and freedom?” If yes, it is good and must be promoted by any means necessary, no matter what gets destroyed; if not, it is bad and must be destroyed.

By the late 1950s, the American WW2 ideology of freedom, equality, civil rights, and anti-racism against Hitler had caught up with us. We gave up on the organic, which left only an ideology of equality, and that always swims to the Left. We began to move toward Communism, restrained only by fear of the USSR.

This basically killed conservatism, since it defends the organic. Quick-thinking people came up with a compromise — compromise always swims Left, because what most people want is anarchy with free stuff — in which conservatives would give up on the nation, but preserve their private lives.

In practical terms, this meant that conservatives became libertarians. They no longer wanted to stop the government from passing immoral laws, only to guarantee that they could sit out from these laws if they wanted to. Earn a good living, retreat to the suburbs, go to church, pay taxes, repeat.

The Left broke down that barrier with civil rights laws. Now you have to hire Leftists, have to let them into your neighborhoods, and let them into your churches, too, if they are minorities, homosexuals, or women. It is not hard to find enough Leftists from those groups to corrupt everything.

That put conservatism against a wall. Their gambit failed; it turns out that running away from the battlefield might save you from defeat, but it also ensures that you will not achieve victory if you keep doing it. At some point, you must stand and fight.

Your average person finds himself wondering what conservatism conserved. After all, his neighborhood is now a warzone, his neighbors plastic robot NPCs, his culture became pop culture garbage, his city a crime testing zone, and nothing seems to function that well in our society anymore.

He might ask himself why his wages began stagnating in 1965, and why so many other problems seemed to happen then. Perhaps he should ask what changes we made from 1960-1969 that seem to have destroyed the old America and brought in the new dystopian wasteland:

• Immigration. The Hart-Celler Act mandated constant third world immigration and relatively little from Europe.
• Civil rights. The Civil Rights struggle awakened the dormant 14A, which soon became used to batter down any resistance to having the diversity in your lap everywhere.
• Working women. Women started having jobs, going through professional education, and divorcing their husbands. This doubled the workforce.
• Entitlements. Since the 1950s, free stuff from government has been the biggest budget expense (not the military, or even wars).

As happens all the time in human groups, we tried to make everyone happy and as a result, took our focus away from being successful and redirected it toward making people equal and bringing in new people to be equal. This created a total disaster that has decayed into dystopia.

Did conservatives do this? No, they fought it, but the voters tended to punish those who fought, so soon we had only conservatives who were OK with all of these four things, but wanted to preserve your right to go to church if you wanted to.

Modern conservatives bleat on about free markets, strong defense, Jesus/Israel, and abortion simply because these are the only battlegrounds that are left. Everything else went off the table because it offended the civil rights and socialism trip that America has been on.

In my view, this trip ended some time ago, and we are just catching up. This country has spent itself into massive debt and destroyed its future with obligations to the past. Citizens have come to expect more free stuff every year, but now that free money chain has run out.

At the same time, consumerism has collapsed. All of those neat inventions that we have now came about from the 1920s-1950s, but with the evolution in technology, they have matured. We see planned obsolescence because most companies would otherwise have to massively downsize, since demand is not as high.

Think of it like a refrigerator. In 1920, this was somewhat of a luxury; by the 1950s, it was pretty commonplace, and by the 1980s, everyone had one. If refrigerators lasted fifty years, they might sell a million a year at this point, and people want them cheap now, since the technology is old.

Same way with computers. Back in the early 1980s, a computer would run you two to five grand (that is about six to thirty thousand these days). Now, you can pick one up for under half of that, and if it runs what you want, you never really need to upgrade.

Microsoft pretty much hit it out of the park with Windows 7. If not for security patches, they would have no reason to improve on that, since like Windows XP, people would just keep using it for several decades. Software has not changed either; what does Microsoft Office do now that it did not in 1997?

This means that the boom years are over. For a long time, you could invent a new technology that made life better, and end up building a huge corporation to sell it. Now, all the gadgets are known, and the variants among them are not that distinctive.

Consider a cell phone. In the 1980s, these cost thousands; in the 2000s, hundreds; now, people want one for $50 that does everything the thousand-dollar phone did a decade ago. Where are the nice fat margins from the past? They went away with time.

Modernity gave us a huge boost and a way to achieve prosperity. We made tons of stuff, taxed everyone, and then dumped the money on the poor so they could buy lots of stuff, too. The economy grew, we printed more money by taking on debt, and then repeated the cycle.

Those years of excess are over. So are the ones where politicians could get into office by promising free stuff; there is nothing left to give, short of going to full socialism, something that Whites resist, which is why they are being replaced in the West.

Even more, the rest of the world has now caught up to the innovations of Western Civilization. They have judicial systems, factories, and twelve-lane highways too. We can no longer cruise on the past, stuff invented centuries ago, by simply adding our own twist and getting rich.

Further, we have seen democracy run its arc; it starts with promise, but then destroys its citizens by driving them insane. When your vote expresses what you want, not what you think is best for your civilization, you become narcissistic and focus only on the self.

Over time, this leads voters to start voting for things to be given to them and taken from others, and for everyone to stop seeing their society as a civilization, but more like a job, school, jail, DMV, or other thing they attend where they are forced to comply. Consequently they rebel against it, usually by pretending to comply while ripping it off or doing a mediocre job.

Like Communism, democracy finds itself going down the rabbit hole of history. The changes since 1965 just show us how late stage democracy always ends: the system takes most of the wealth and imports foreigners to vote for its leaders, who try to hide the crisis by handing out bread and circuses.

People were content to tolerate this while it allowed them to continue making a good living and dwelling in nice places, but two things happened. First, it changed them: we are a coarser, crasser, and less independent population. Second, the battle between special interest groups ensured that no one would simply be left alone, as the 1960s conservatives — “Christian libertarians” — hoped we would.

Things seem bleak right now because all institutions have been taken over by the denialists who want to keep going down the modernism trail. You can either be a realist, and accept that change is upon us, or a denialist, and hope that we can go back to how things were just a decade or two ago.

My guess is that society will first head toward a type of “limited democracy,” where there is less government, government does less, and we have fewer laws and elections. The Tea Party movement, which was integral to the rise of Farage and Trump, recommended exactly this.

However, in a broader sense, a cultural wave against modernity is forming. People want to escape the hamster wheel of jobs, spending, and reacting to whatever disaster society has created which we now have to clean up. We want an end to infinite abyss topics like anti-poverty, anti-racism, anti-drugs, and wars for democracy. We just want normal life, and if others are left out, that is not our job to fix.

In the time period since WW2, government has grown fat and lazy on anti-poverty and anti-racism, specifically, and expanded to become all-controlling, especially of our personal lives. This was its high water mark, and the next act involves this being cut down to size.

If you ask your average functional person, as opposed to the person who is employed by government or dependent on its benefits, they will tell you that they want a minimal government: handles roads, defense, law enforcement, a few other things, maybe about a tenth the size of the current government.

They have no problem paying for school; it is cheaper than property taxes to “educate” everyone. They are OK with funding their own health insurance and retirement, or just having no health insurance and paying in cash, with a catastrophic policy and job insurance in case they get something chronic.

An ideal MinGov would not be libertarian, since libertarians ignore foreign policy and the need for protection of a central culture. Rather, it would not be micromanaging: it would set up incentives, then reward the good and punish the bad, but leave everyone else alone and not take their money.

This would provide fewer jobs than in our current economy. Every line in a book of regulations hires someone, usually to fill out form 420666-69(f) with the correct data and file it with the government agency. Someone gets hired at government, and at every company that does business in this area.

Other jobs are mandated indirectly. Affirmative action says that you cannot discriminate against minorities, so you had better show that you have hired them. You hire three people for every job, figuring two will do nothing. Costs skyrocket.

Many others are created by government action. Whole industries exist to service school loans, fill out tax paperwork, equip agencies, and help you navigate the bureaucracy. Millions of accountants, lawyers, and bureaucrats depend on you, but so do many more clerks, inspectors, and assistants.

Think of all the social workers, teachers, security guards, and engineers employed by government. Then all the people in private industry who are there to mitigate the impact of government and make sense of its infinite rules and penalties.

Cutting government would not mean touching defense, law enforcement, or infrastructure. It would mean increasing those things. But the three-quarters of our budget that goes to entitlements — payments directly to citizens — that cost more than the military or our wars? That would go.

Similarly would the idea that government is there to protect us from everything. We do not need the FDA; that came from a time before lawyers would actively sue reckless manufacturers into oblivion. We should keep NOAA, and maybe the FTC and FCC. They could be smaller by a long shot.

Government employees fear smaller, but as Trump would do it, for example, smaller government offers more opportunity. People take responsibility for tasks, which means that they can be blamed if they fail, but also, promoted if they succeed.

Current government hires forty people to do the work of one just so that no one can get fired for screwing up. On the flip side, the only people who get promoted are the ones who get noticed in the media, so careerist employees aim for fame rather than day-in-day-out solid function.

This would create a government where ideology does not provide a blank check. For a century, our government and voters joined hands to approve anything that claimed to help the poor or end racism. That meant billions flowing to whoever would sign on for these efforts and their corporate helpers.

Removing this would end most of the corruption in Washington. It would also deprive some people of their perceived reason for importance. The many little people always want some reason to be more important than you, as do those in pop culture and the bureaucrats.

All the people who need something other than what is real in order to succeed and be socially important like having infinite quests. These consist of a hopeless pursuit like ending poverty, since the situation can never be won, but also never lost. It just needs more money, every year.

We have lived under this system for a long time. We all know it is unstable. We are thirty trillion dollars in debt, nothing works, our citizens hate each other, and special interest groups including the diversity are tearing our power structure apart.

If the rise of COVID-19 taught us anything, it might be that we expected a final crisis or pandemic, and so the next likely candidate that came along, we assumed that was it. This served our new masters in China quite well, so the media jumped in with its neurotic fixation.

COVID-19 shutdowns will do something quite important in the long haul: they will end what is left of the consumer economies. All of those businesses living off of the largesse of people getting paid salaries and not worrying about retirement, healthcare, education, and so on, are dying.

In some areas, half of the small restaurants have already closed. Many of the boutique stores are going to go away as well, although they have held on by slashing staff and hours. Rent will come due, and eighteen months from now, a lot of business owners are going to see that the figures do not add up and never will again.

Ironically, COVID-19 gave us the break from the consumer economy that we wanted. More time at home with family, friends, community, church/forest, and hobbies reminded us of what real life was about. All the stuff that we used to do just cannot compare.

This means that what was dying — modernism: democracy, equality, socialism, entitlements, diversity, consumerism — has gotten a big push, and now we want nothing to do with it. It has become obsolete. It no longer serves a role.

Society will move on to a homestead economy like we once had. People will work some hours of the day, and spend the rest maintaining their homes, large gardens, and livestock. They will have chickens and pigs, maybe cows and goats to keep the lawn clean.

In their off hours they will also produce. Not in the Etsy and YouTube sense of making content for an audience of passive observers, but in the sense of growing foods, making pickled goods, pressing tobacco, brewing beer, handloading ammo, making furniture, or fashioning tools.

Instead of an economy routed through government so that it can redistribute money socialist-style in order to keep people buying disposable junk so that everyone can have a job, everyone will have a place. They will find a way to survive. They will have more time for life itself. Work to live, not live to work.

This means that people can stop pointlessly raging against capitalism and conservatism. We want these things, just in their original form, and not the bastardized version which has taken over our lives and wrecked them. Without the socialist and egalitarian agenda, we can have that.

As modernity crashes down with lack of political confidence, dying economies, enemies abroad, and a media, academia, and science complex that we no longer trust, we need a way out. That way, as it turns out, is to simply stop doing what does not work in our system, and to focus on life itself.

All of those things got slammed into the dumpster in 1965. In our zeal to be modern, democratic, and morally superior, we destroyed real life and replaced it with a plastic, repetitive facsimile that only fascinated the vapid. The rest of us endured. Soon we will be liberated, ironically, from what was supposed to liberate us back in 1965.

Tags: capitalism, conservatism, consumerism, modernism