Amerika

The National Review has disgraced itself over the past decade, most notably by firing John Derbyshire and recently by endorsing Emmanuel Macron over Marine Le Pen, but sometimes it touches on interesting issues.

Peter Spiliakos explores the lack of an identifiable platform for populism and how this makes the Right weak and disunified:

It is a little different on the right. One economics, you have what might be called “degenerate Kempism.” It is a combination of tax cuts for high-earners, cuts to entitlements spending, and increased low-skill immigration. On the other side, you have people who think of themselves as being on the right but who reject some or all of that.

The great advantage of degenerate Kempism is that most of the political talent, social capital, and money is on the side of this agenda – the money being the least important of the three factors. It is the default of the GOP lobbyists, donors, and most of the center-right politicians who came up through business or the professions.

It is difficult to see the common ground between the more elite degenerate Kempists (and I’m not helping with the labeling) and the populists. The degenerate Kempists want what they want. They are willing to make temporary retreats but will push on any door to cut any tax on the job creators, to cut domestic spending, and to answer the call of the affluent for cheaper low-skill labor. The populists have only the vaguest idea of what they want, and some of that is contradictory.

The Right has always been a “big tent” that includes all of those who resist the creeping infiltration of Leftism into every area of our society. The most honest Right are the monarchists, who think equality is insane and modernity is a horror. But now the big tent is working against the Right.

Populism is best defined as defense of the organic nation — the people, the culture, the ideas, the religion — against the formalized structures of egalitarian, bureaucratic government and its collusion with industry.

This idea overlaps somewhat with the notion of ending entitlement spending and cutting taxes to shrink government, but is incompatible with one issue that the Kempists endorse: immigration. Populists realize that immigration is ethnic replacement of the founding population, a form of soft totalitarian genocide.

If the Right has a future, it is in giving the “fiscal conservatives” some of what they want through sabotaging the tax base and entitlement programs, but also recognizing that diversity has failed because diversity can never work. Paradoxical policies always collapse.

Even more, the Right has a new lease on life through its anti-Establishment position. People dislike incompetent and manipulative authority, and they are seeing that the Left prefers strong authority in order to gain complete control so that it can advance its ideology as the One Way for our future. The Old Establishment tried to resist that and was destroyed, and the New Establishment is far worse than they were.

We do not have to live as slaves to a runaway ideological death spiral. Instead, we can simply speak up and oppose it: Leftism does not work, and government inevitably drifts Leftward, so it is time to physically remove government as much as possible, and replace it with culture, charity, private industry and the good people among us who have always done the best thing without needing ideology to instruct them.

Tags: degenerate kempism, ideology, new establishment, old establishment, populism, rightism, the establishment