Amerika

One of the bedrock principles of conservatism is localism, or having a solution as close to and specific to the situation as possible. This contrasts the ideal of those I will call City People, who want one rule to apply to everything, so that they can argue from this rule about what “ought” to be instead of what is. In the city, one succeeds by forcing others to do your bidding; in the country, more realism is required.

The City People are always the same: not producers so much as those who are taking advantage of opportunities, they thrive when a task is narrowly defined through rules and laws, but would not survive a night in the open forest. Thus they are ruled by both a desire for opportunism, and a pervasive fear. This drives them to demand more laws, more standardization, and more government power wherever they go.

The ultimate goal of the City People is to produce something like East Germany: a place where everyone is guaranteed employment, so all are safe from crime, and the government takes care of everything, but individuals can succeed by operating within those narrow definitions of laws, rules and ideology. They will deny this if you tell it to them, but then they end up there.

Consider modern hellish environments like New York City. To live there, one must have either a fair amount of money or choose housing in a ghetto. Social services are abundant but mediocre. Jobs are easily acquired by jumping through the right hoops, and there are few consequences for getting it wrong unless one is foolish enough to take a risk, which every candidate for a job knows is a bad idea. Go with the flow. Keep the opportunistic gravy train flowing and beat back the endless problems caused by this approach with more laws.

In another twenty years, New York will resemble East Berlin. The government will have expanded radically through the votes of the urban poor, who never met a benefits program they did not like… the rich will be taxed to absurdity, and will respond by moving away or moving their income away. This will leave government squeezing the middle class, as has happened under Obama to the USA as a whole, and this will put the city in a death spiral: tax less wealth more to fund an ever-growing parasite pool.

The same thing destroyed Communism. The Soviets created what they saw as an ideal state, but it had a fatal flaw: it was unproductive because it squeezed its most productive people the most, encouraging them to drop out and do the minimum. In the meantime, it kept promoting people who made careers out of not taking risks and saying the right thing to make the audience happy. This made it incompetent, arrogant and unresponsive.

Rome went out the same way. In an effort to maintain power, its leaders employed mercenaries and imported labor. This group then became their biggest supporter and also, a parasite pool because it was funded with money extracted from ordinary Romans. At some point, those stopped trying, and the system hit the pavement.

In the American South, people recognized that the City People are like drunken children. They are so concerned with what they want being forced on other people that they have no time to consider what its actual effects will be. They live in a world where if you can con the waiter into giving you a free appetizer, or snow your boss with praise and then suggest something that worked at another company, you win. To them, the question is not “what will happen” but “what do other people think of this.” It is all appearance.

The South suggested two types of localism: first, that rule in the South should occur in its individual communities, and second, that the virtual locality of people who were not infected with the City People disease should be able to escape that mentality by creating an entirely different society nearby. In other words, rules from New York were no good in Alabama, and City People ethics were not either, because in Alabama they were trying to get away from that corrupt and infectious mentality.

Of course, that could not be allowed by the City People. Competition of this sort would make the city lifestyle look as disgusting as it is. So the City People found a victimhood-equality narrative involving slavery to pick a fight with the South; we know it was not from caring for African-Americans because the City People were perfectly content for those to live in ghettos and company towns in virtual slavery. It was a desire to crush the people who escaped the city.

Brexit shows a similar desire for localism: the people of the UK do not want to follow the opportunistic but sheeplike bureaucrats of the EU into a multicultural East Germany (from which Angela Merkel originated). They cannot articulate what they actually want, which is natural because very few people are good at getting to the core of any issue, but they know they do not want the vision of hell that has become apparent.

And in the UK and Europe, the City People — who we might identify as Crowdists — have been gnashing their teeth and rending their clothes. They want the easy opportunism back where if you call someone a racist, they give you money and power. Those days are ending and with it, the only relevance the City People have is fading. They produce nothing and take no risks. They are the bureaucratic calcification which destroys human societies, and when exposed by the light of actual competition on the basis of real-world results, they fail every time.

How dare white people act in self-interest, in a world where every other group does so? How dare the UK refuse its wealth and power to the bigger group, which wants nothing more than to expand itself at the expense of others? Indeed, in this egalitarian age, refusing a parasite its imagined due payment is seen as a crime!

And yet, the South rises again. People want to step off the train to East Germany with BMWs that the EU represents. They can finally visualize that this is the destination of the train. In the US, people are seeing that the 0bama train leads to a national Detroit or Baltimore. We want off too. Let us rule ourselves, and let us break away from the rest of humanity and its failures, because they are parasitic and will destroy us.

The South did not want war and white people do not want a race war. But this is what they are going to get. It always ends this way, when societies go down the path of egalitarianism as Rome and Greece did before us. We were warned, but too arrogant to listen. Now, we are listening, and ready for the final battle.

Tags: brexit, eu, localism, race war, secession, us