Author: Titus Quinctius Cincinnatus

Anyone who has been following the recent cultural movement by SJWs and People of Colour™ to undermine the last vestiges of traditional Western civilisation in both Europe and in the Anglosphere has seen the attempt to discredit our remaining institutions by declaring them “white supremacist.”  Building upon their efforts to use Charlottesville, Richard Spencer, and “Neo Nazis” as a foil, practically everything related to the history, institutions, traditions, religion, and heroic mythology in the USA and other Western nations has now been morally reprobated by our modern day Puritans on the radical Left.  America’s police and criminal justice system is white supremacist since blacks and browns find themselves disproportionately caught up in its clutches.  America’s educational system is white supremacist for not granting Harriet Tubman equal time with Thomas Jefferson.  Christopher Columbus has been relegated to the status of mass murderer and genocidal Nazi for merely discovering the American continents.  Figures and institutions in European nations are similarly condemned.  Even such abstractions as logic and reason are openly ridiculed and condemned as white supremacist by anti-white PoCs spearheading the cultural marxist movement to destroy Western civilisation.

On many levels, one cannot blame the white nationalists for reacting as they do.  When someone is – literally – trying to destroy your culture and civilisation and people, it is natural to want to fight back and to expel the intruders, especially when the intruders have a much greater tendency to be socially dyscivic criminals, rapists, welfare mooches, and general troublemakers.

As much as it pains me to agree in any way with the SJWs, however, they are correct in their bare assertions about the white supremacist nature of our institutions.  It is in their reaction to this, in their efforts to undermine and overthrow these institutions, that they are grossly negligent and worthy of our condemnation.  Allow me to explain what I mean.

Let me begin by dispensing with the ridiculous civic nationalist notion that the West, while built by white Europeans and their descendants, could have been done by anyone.  This is not at all the case.  Whites – Europeans and their child stocks – are different people from others.  The fundamental reality about human biodiversity as it relates to whites vis-à-vis everyone else is that they are generally higher IQ than most everyone except for the northeast Asians, and they are generally more aggressive and inventive than the northeast Asians.  Whites combined these and other traits – intelligence, aggressiveness, individualism, inventiveness, speculativeness, and others – to develop a unique set of cultures (Western civilisation) which is really quite different from every other civilisation that this world has produced.  Western civilisation, and by derivation the cultures of its various substituent clades and subclades, is the product of this broad genetic group of people whose inborn traits acted in synergy with their religion and culture and languages.  It could only have been created by these unique combinations, and it cannot be maintained without any or all of the components of these same combinations.

As such, it IS fair to say that institutions in white countries were built by white people and FOR white people.  Hence, they ARE white supremacist in the sense that they operate on essentially white, European-derived norms and assumptions and were created as a result of centuries, and even millennia, of experiences and the agglutination of successful traditions.  White cultures were made for white people, and as recent history continues to show, they only work for white people.  The SJWs and racial grievance-mongers in the radical progressive movement are not incorrect in recognising these facts.

Where they are incorrect is in asserting that there is anything wrong with this.

In point of fact, there is absolutely nothing wrong – not a single, solitary, blessed thing – with whites developing institutions that work for them, even if it leaves other peoples (at least those who refuse to assimilate to white standards of behaviour and mindset) at a disadvantage when trying to navigate within white-originated societies.  The same can be said for any other group of people.  It is equally legitimate for east Asian cultures to structure their societies in ways which reflect their traditions, preferences, and assumptions, even if whites or blacks or browns may often find themselves mystified when trying to manoeuvre their way through.  The same goes for the Indians, for the Muslims, for the Africans, for the Latin Americans.  This is why we have different cultures, and (generally speaking) different countries to go with them.  A place for everyone, and everyone in his place, and all that.

Not surprisingly, this fact has been recognised widely even within this planet’s long history of imperialism.  While conquerors always assert political dominance over their weaker enemies – assessing tribute or slaves or territorial concessions – it is rather rare for imperialists to actually try to eliminate the cultures of their prey and replace them with their own.  The Romans did not do so.  The British did not do so.  The Romans were content to let the Gauls continue to be Gauls, and to operate under their own laws and mores.  The British generally did the same in India and Africa and any other place where the natives were already thickly settled and displayed native cultures.  Typically, the imperialists did not try to navigate these native cultures, but neither did they try to force those they colonised to adopt their own norms.  Individuals may do so, and advance in the imperialists’ own system, but it was not made obligatory to do so.

This is what makes the situation with our modern day SJWs so different.  It can fairly be said that “middle America” and “village Europe” are under occupation by a hostile culture – this being the cosmopolitan, deracinating, post-liberal culture of the transnational élite and their SJW underlings.  SJWism itself seeks to destroy traditional white cultures, those belonging to the “wrong sort of white people.”  I’ve pointed out previously that SJWism is itself a form of cultural imperialism, and it has been elsewhere observed that even the most inane of left-wing causes are really just ways to humiliate and compel submission to SJW culture.

However, SJWism is still essentially a white culture.  All of its assumptions – the goodness of democracy, the equality and fungibility of all peoples, the essential materialism of all its social and economic positions – are basically those of white modernism and flow from the direction of historical forces in play for centuries.  As a result, even SJWism is white supremacy – as the ACLU recently found out.  Thus, the racial grievance movements fabricated by the progressive Left, once they began breaking the chains of their alliance with white leftists, have begun to openly demand that even white liberals “shut up and listen” and fall prostrate before Big Black and Aunty Aztlán.

The problem for these folks is that they find white civilisation, in its entirety, to be structured against them.  And it really is.  After all, if you’re a black who still carries (however subconsciously) a good deal of West African derived culture, then white institutions like patriarchy (patrilocal marriage, men as the primary providers, etc.), private property, the rule of law, and other European-derived social standards will seem somewhat foreign and rankling to you.  This is doubly the case when your distant native cultures (still passed on to you in diluted form even after centuries of contact with whites) originally worked for a low IQ population with low time preferences and high aggression.  In Africa, men could hunt while the women did the “grunt work,” and could fight to the death if “dissed” by other men.  In a high-IQ, high time preference white rule of law culture, this doesn’t work.  When black drug dealers kill each other over turf or honour, they go to the white man’s jail.  (Most) whites see this as entirely just.  Many blacks see it as an affront.  Whites tend to not be sympathetic to a black thug who robs a liquor store and then tries to take away a police officer’s gun, getting shot in the process.  Whites see it as justice served.  Blacks see it as a swipe at their tribal identity and dignity.

And the thing about culture is that it is pervasive.  Despite what many seem to think, culture is not just a matter of  superficialities like “exotic” foods or manners of dress.  Instead, cultures from top to bottom are shot through with interlocking sets of assumptions, mores, traditional modes, and taboos which cannot simply be transferred piecemeal.  In many ways cultures are all or nothing – either you adopt the whole thing or you are left outside.  Cultures are perfectly adapted to sort between the in-group and the Other.

This is why the racial grievance quacks in our Western societies know they have to completely undermine Western civilisation in toto if they are to replace whites as the ruling power in our own countries (and make no mistake, that is exactly what the end game is for the transnational élite, because blacks and browns are generally more pliable and easily cowed than whites are).  No vestige of white, European civilisation can remain.  Hence, the laws and morals must be destroyed.   The statues and heroes must be overturned.  Our history, and especially the classics upon which our traditions and assumptions are built, must be erased from knowledge.  Shakespeare must be replaced with Audre Lorde (I’d never heard of her, either).  Whites must be browbeaten into accepting their own evil and the banishment of their civilisation.  When the white nationalists argue that white genocide is planned, the honest and informed person is hard-pressed to counter their assertion.

This underlies the related claim made by People of Colour™ that “whites don’t have any culture,” presumably because we didn’t dress up in feathers and eat human hearts at our festivals.  Obviously the assertion is ridiculous on its face.  The professional PoCs know this, which is why they’re spending so much time trying to undermine white cultures by simultaneously flooding us with hostile, inassimilable third worlders while seeing to erase every expression of exactly these cultures.  But they have to make the claim if they are to justify these erasures.

The problem isn’t that whites don’t have culture, but that their cultures are too successful, and are practically irresistible when matched against anyone else’s.  Again, whites are different from other peoples, and their cultures will reflect these differences.  Even pre-modern whites, basically everyone from the classical world to medieval Europeans living prior to the Renaissance, thought and acted differently than did other traditional societies.  The Greeks were very different from non-Europeans.  So were the Romans.  So were the Germans who adopted Christian Roman culture.  So were, for that matter, the pagan Vikings.  And so on.  Even the most religiously-minded of Europeans was more rational (though not rationalistic or materialistic) than practically all non-Europeans on Earth during those times.  Whites naturally do philosophy and science and theology and technology, and this is reflected all across their cultures and in Western civilisation.  This is why logic, reason, and even the concept of objective truth itself are now derided as “white supremacist.” These allow whites to do the things that they do. Even when white Europeans were being distempered by modernism, their cultures were still more successful than those they encountered during the march of European imperialism.

Thus, when the professional PoCs talk about “fighting white supremacy,” what they really, actually, truly mean is “overturning Western civilisation,” since that civilisation was built by and for white Europeans and their kindred peoples who colonised major portions of the globe.  Objectively speaking, Western civilisation is superior.  Both in its underlying features and in its overt, empirical results, the West is more successful, more “fit” (in the biological sense of the term) and has brought the world a great deal of underappreciated good.  To see this overwhelmed and destroyed by the machinations of the globalists would be a tremendous loss to humanity.  While there are many elements of the West that need to be unpozzed and restored to their traditional goodness, the overarching structure itself must not be allowed to fall.  If the West falls, high civilisation goes with it.  Hence, we need to recognise that white supremacy, in the sense described above, is not only not bad, but is in fact very good, and very necessary if we are to retain Western civilisation in any sort of recognisable form.

 

This article was originally published at Neo-Ciceronian Times.

I’m sure that a lot of folks in the alt-Right, of whatever stripe, are feeling pretty black-pilled right at this moment. As well they should, because the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville was a disaster.  There’s no way to get around that. Don’t take what I’m about to say in the post below as “punching right”. Rather, understand it as me giving some well-meaning, and I believe much needed, counsel.

What everyone who is interested in this needs to understand is that the reason the Unite the Right (UTR) rally was a failure was because it completely neglected to take into account 4GW (Fourth-Generation Warfare) principles which can very easily be applied to civilian situations remaining at conflict levels below outright armed conflict.  In fact the leadership at UTR and during the subsequent chain of events once the rally got started broke just about every rule of 4GW that could have been broken.

My advice for any serious alt-Righter of any stripe who wishes to avoid future debacles like UTR would be to first, first, FIRST read Victoria by William Lind, and then familiarize yourself with Lind’s other materials on this subject.  If you haven’t done this yet, then stop what you’re doing, alt-Right involvement-wise.  You’re only going to hurt, not help your cause.

However in the meantime until you can do this, I’ll provide a few pointers as overview.

One of the cardinal principles of 4GW is that before you ever set foot on the battlefield you should already be tilting the battlefield in your favor.  Don’t fight the kind of battle the enemy wants in the place that the enemy wants to do so. So my first piece of (probably unheeded) advice would be to stop having rallies in the first place, at least of the kind that are likely to degenerate into brawls with antifa and BLM.

The fact of the matter is that right-wing activism always fails.  You’re not going to be able to steal a page from their playbook and turn the Left’s game against them.  This is because the Right does not have the institutional support of the politicians, bureaucracies, and other elements of the state apparatus. As a result, antifa can get away with beating you because the police will arrest you when you fight back.  In fact, the police may openly side with the antifas, as they did in Charlottesville.  Is it fair? Of course not. But life isn’t fair, so get a helmet.  Earlier this year, I thought there might be a chance that the legal climate for legitimate self-defence against antifas might be changing, but I have since revised that opinion in the negative direction. So the question is, why show up armed with sticks and shields if you’re not going to be allowed to use them without getting a criminal record?  Why give unsympathetic news media the opportunity to tar you dishonestly to millions of viewers across the country?  There are other means by which antifa and BLM can be countered (more on this below).

However, if Alt-Righters are bound and determined to continue to hold rallies, then they need to make some changes to how they operate.

First, your organisation needs to be decentralised.  When you’re the 4GW non-state actor in a conflict, it is not in your interest to give the hegemonic state enemy (in this case antifas, BLM, academia, the news media, and in many instances, the actual state) one or a few figureheads against which to strike.  Stop organising these very-publicly advertised rallies to be headlined by a few “big names” like Richard Spencer.  Instead, develop a heterarchic organisation based around small, local groups of trusted men (like, say, a männerbund).  Each group should have a leader who coordinates with other group leaders.  Be a distributed network rather than relying on a small number of centralised nodes.

Next, your organisation needs to maintain tight control on attendance and the activities of those attending.  Grow the organisation by vetting and integrating trusted individuals, not by throwing the gates open to large numbers of people who just “show up” for rallies.  Having a mentally unstable individual like James Fields just show up, be handed equipment with your group’s logo on it, and then turn around and run somebody over, giving the Left a massive photo-op, was a completely unforced error.  Additionally, this may also help you to avoid infiltration by law enforcement agencies, who will try to encourage violence and other lawbreaking.

Third, you need to plan what you’re going to do, and have contingencies in place, before you ever step into your cars to drive to the intended location.  This planning needs to go beyond the “show up here, walk here” level.  Group leaders need to have the layout of the entire area to be invested before they ever go in.  If the police show up “here” and try to bulldoze you into the arms of waiting antifa, then an escape route is “there.”  The area also needs to be “prepped” – teams of undercover spotters should be in place the day before to mark signs of antifa or other Left activity.  Find out where the ones with cars are parking and get license numbers and other info.  Perhaps even be on hand to photograph them before they “mask up.”  These spotters can double as “outrunners” immediately prior to and during the event.  Use unobtrusive, easily hidden two-way radios (or earbud-based systems like Spy Ear, if you can afford them) to keep in contact with those inside the action, warning of antifa and police movements.  As a 4GW actor at a force disadvantage, you can never have too much current information.

Speaking of information, you must, must, MUST control the flow of information into, out of, and about your rally.  We already know that all mainstream media outlets will be hostile to you and are going to present a distorted, one-sided view of the event.  It is imperative to have your own sources of information production and dissemination ready.  Do everything you can to counter the propaganda prior to your rally.  During the rally, be sure that you have multiple, disparately-placed sources recording the event and (this is important) streaming all photos and pictures to a secure server offsite, since antifas want to take away phones that could be used as cameras to record their activities.  Even better, use “spy” cameras which can be hidden on your person and record events without having to hold up a video camera or smartphone.  Have some of the spotters mentioned above embed near MSM journalists and try to blend in, thus allowing you to record events from the same angles as the media themselves.  The more of this information, the better.  Be creative.

Now, to move on to some other areas.

If you want to be successful in opposing the Left and advancing the alt-Right agenda, then you must be willing to operate within a realpolitik framework.  And rule #1 for realpolitik is this – you deal with the situation you’re in as it is, not as you’d like for it to be.  Relatedly, you need to understand the difference between social media and the real world.  The things you might do or say and think are funny on Twitter are often times not things you want to do or say in front of MSM television cameras.  We need to be ruthlessly pragmatic here.

This brings up an important point, which is that optics are everything.  I know a lot of folks in the alt-Right don’t like the term “optics” and think it is “compromise,” or even “cucking.”  However, to paraphrase James Carville, there’s a term for people who don’t care about optics, which is “loser.”  Frankly, people who aren’t serious about optics aren’t serious about winning.  Optics determines what millions of people – the people you’re hoping to sway if you’re smart and serious – will see, regardless of whatever the MSM and leftie outlets might say.  What do I mean?  I mean stop waving Nazi flags around and wearing t-shirts with quotes from Adolf Hitler and doing Nazi salutes.  Even if you mean it entirely ironically or non-seriously, nobody watching TV at home knows that.  If you’re actually a genuine National Socialist, well, understand that you are NOT, under any conceivable circumstances, ever going to rehabilitate the image of Nazism in the United States or other Anglospheric countries.  It will not happen.  You can cry about it, call people “cucks” for pointing out the obvious, or whatever else.  But people that we beat in a war that they declared on us first are not going to garner any sympathy outside your own circle.  Very, very few people whose Grandpa Bob fought the Nazis on Omaha Beach are going to side with you or want to be associated with any movement that even has a whiff of you around.  That is reality.

We know the radical Left is going to call us “Nazis,” regardless that it (most of the time) is not true.  They call everyone Nazis.  They call mainstream Republicans Nazis.  They call the NRA and gun owners Nazis.  They call all white people Nazis.  What’s not important is trying to virtue signal your way out of being called this by actually punching right.  What is important is making your case, while demonstrating via your optics that the accusation isn’t true.  Let folks see that it’s not “Nazi” to oppose white genocide and stand for the rights of whites, but that it’s merely what any right thinking, reasonable person would do.  Giving people the impression that you actually are a Nazi negates this entirely.

This illustrates two somewhat overlapping principles of 4GW, which are to maintain the moral high ground and to not harm the “civilian” population whose support you need and from whom you should be trying to draw resources.  In the United States and other Western nations today, if people perceive you to be an actual Nazi, you will not have the moral high ground.  If, on the other hand, they perceive that you are being falsely and unfairly accused of such by obvious liars, then you will have the moral high ground.

Hence, the next point is this – whether you like it or not, if you intend to get anywhere, you need the normies.  So don’t scare them.  There’s a reason they’re called “normies,” and this is because they are the norm.  They’re the mainstream.  Where they are at represents where the Overton Window is presently at.  And you have to be able to move the Overton Window before you can open it in your own house.

Hence, as much as it might pain some folks to do, the Alt-Right – if it is to actually sway large numbers of people, which is still important in our technically-though-not-really democratic system – must seek out areas of common ground with the broader Right – the alt-Lite, the free speech libertarians, the paleos, and so forth.  Identify areas of commonality such as opposition to antifa/BLM violence, opposition to one-sided application of laws, opposition to leftist attacks on free speech, etc.  Find things that normiecons will care about and focus on those things when dealing with normiecons.  Most normie conservatives won’t care that a white nationalist got de-platformed during a press conference.  They will, on the other hand, care that antifas are burning US flags and beating up cops in Seattle.  Meet the Alt-Lite where they’re at and use the Cernoviches and Posobiecs for the things they’re good for.  Instead of isolating ourselves, isolate the neo-Cons and the GOP cucks instead.

“But,” you might be saying, “I don’t like normiecons because they’re dumb and easily led herd animals!”

True.  They are.  But they can be woke with the right kind of red-pilling.  It took me a few years, but I transited from normiedom to NRx, and there are many others out there who can potentially make the jump to genuinely alternative Right circles as well.

The trick with most of the FReeper-style normiecons will be to reach them the right way.  We’ve already established that most normiecons are easily led.  So lead them.  Put the rope around their harness and draw them, step by step, out of the corral and into the real world.  One good way to do this is to understand the distinction between dialectic (argument) and rhetoric (appeal to emotion), extensively discussed by Vox Day (example here).  While normies may not be swayed by intellectual arguments presented in forums such as Social Matter (which are generally reserved for higher-level woke individuals), they may well be swayed by intellectual arguments disguised as emotional appeals which present dialectical facts and truths in a rhetorical way (which is why good memes are so effective).  Hence, what they “feel” in their heart will match what they “know” in their head and “see” with their eyes.  I cannot emphasise enough the importance of combining these two facets every time you deal with normies in any arena, whether online or in real life.

Further, activities of the Alt-Right designed to counter antifa/BLM more robustly than just through words on an internet forum must be geared towards gaining and keeping the moral high ground. Say you want to get back at the radical Left for pulling down Confederate statues by knocking over one of theirs.  Quick: make a decision – do you knock over a statue of Martin Luther King Jr. in Montgomery or a statue of Lenin in Seattle?  The right answer is Lenin in Seattle.  Even though they may do so wrongly, most normiecons still lionise King and think he was “a force for good.”  On the other hand, they all hate Lenin.  So if you knock over Lenin’s statue, not only did you do something many normiecons wish would happen anywise, but the Left doubly condemns themselves through their subsequent efforts to defend the statue and to criticise its toppling.  The optics on that will be radical Left fruitcakes defending an anti-American Communist who, directly or indirectly, murdered millions.  The wokeness would move from just a relative few folks on the Alt-Right to millions of normiecons.

On the other hand, if you topple the statue of MLK, you just handed the Left and the MSM the opportunity to saturate the airwaves for weeks with racist, white supremacist destruction of the statue of an “America hero of the civil rights movement.”  That would be stupid.  Don’t do stuff like that.

In closing, it ought to be obvious that the sclerotic, predictable strategies currently employed by the Alt-Right are not working anymore.  The Left has obviously adapted to them, and failing to anticipate this and to understand the ground they were on led to the shellacking the UTR ralliers received last Saturday.  The key is to develop more decentralised, more agile methodologies drawn from the principles of 4GW.  Knowing these principles, however, is only half the battle.  The other half is applying them intelligently in a way that maintains and keeps the leftist enemy always reacting while never able to act independently.  How individuals and small groups do this is, of course, up to them.  A final concept which is often applied by Lind when talking about 4GW is the use of auftragstaktik, roughly “mission orders.”  This principle essentially amounts to a unit being given an order to achieve a goal, while being left with the flexibility to determine the means of going about doing so.  This principle avoids the rigidity of top-down control that can hinder and even paralyse efforts to obtain the desired end.  In other words, alt-Righters who want to fight the Left can do better than to simply repeat what’s already been done.  Use 4GW principles, apply auktragstaktik, and be innovative.

 

This article was originally published at The Neo-Ciceronian Times.

It’s apparent to all discerning observers that the present state of affairs in the United States, as well as other Western nations, will not be able to continue for much longer.  As our “leaders” continue to grow more and more out of touch and disconnected from increasingly large majorities within their respective citizenries, the prospect of collapse, or at least some pretty severe dislocations, in Western societies grows increasingly likely.  Honestly, if the American and other Western governments stay on the path they are currently on, I don’t see how they can avoid facing severe fourth generation warfare (4GW) challenges from their own people, much less from the various foreign elements which they are busy importing.  Western governments are busy delegitimizing themselves in the eyes of the core elements which make up the backbones of their nations, and they won’t be able to stand a full-on loss of legitimacy for very long.

The question which naturally arises is, “What will replace these governments once they fall?”

Many observers fear that the current “democratic” governments (which are essentially transitional in nature) will be replaced by heavy handed totalitarian regimes.  This may be a defensible notion for many of the Western European nations which have largely been successful in disarming their own citizens.  For the United States, I find this less likely to be the case, though the last grasping elements of the current politico-financial cabal may attempt to go that route.  However, and in spite all of the various federal police forces and any help from UN “peacekeepers”, it is doubtful that FedGov would have the personnel resources to sustain the sort of attrition it would face for very long.  This is doubly so considering that it is not altogether assured that the remaining non-homosexualized, non-transgenderified, non-mercenaried portion of the US military would go along with FedGov attempts to establish a totalitarian state, especially if it means suppressing their fathers, brothers, and cousins back home in flyover country.  Besides, forcing grown men to parade around in ruby red high heels so as to satisfy the revenge fantasies of fat lesbian desk generals is not the best way to assure their loyalty to you when you find yourself in the lurch.

So it’s not likely that a breakdown of federal legitimacy and power in the US will lead to a successful imposition of the total state by force.

However, we should also understand that those folks out there who think that such a collapse would inevitably lead to a “reset” back to the constitutional republic of Ted Cruz’s fantasies are labouring under a strong delusion.  Collapse and dislocation won’t lead to a restoration of the pure constitutional republic of yore as founded in 1789.  It’s increasingly apparent that it shouldn’t either.

While embodying many good ideas and serving as a worthwhile effort at self-government, the fact is that the Constitution suffers from some severe ideological defects that made its eventual negation practically inevitable.  Though designed as an instrument for dividing power and restraining government, its “Enlightenment” origins meant that it would rest on a foundation which was inimical to these goals.  The philosophical background from which the Constitution arose was one that assumed two essentially unproven and unprovable hypotheses: the inherent goodness of man and the primacy of reason in man’s intuitions.  These fundamental bases always placed pure devotion to the Constitution in a somewhat precarious state vis-á-vis the concurrent claims to the Christian origins and foundation of the United States.  These two currents – the Christian element arising from the Puritan foundation of New England followed by the spreading of evangelical, “enthusiastic” Christianity throughout the eastern seaboard by the Great Awakenings on one hand, and the Enlightenment, essentially rationalistic and deistic ideas underlying many of the assumptions made in the Constitution on the other hand – have always stood apart, even though many Americans have refused to recognize this and have tried to tie the two together intimately.

The problem with the Constitution, from a purely organizational standpoint, is that it lends itself far too easily to democratization.  This democratization is a function of the inherent assumption that the people, from whom all power derives, according to Enlightenment theory, will act both nobly and reasonably.  Yet, as American history has shown time and time again, neither of these have ever truly been substantiated.  Indeed, American constitutional history since 1865 has been a tale of the steady march of democracy, with the attendant ability of the people to vote themselves largesse from the public treasury despite the detrimental financial, moral, and social effects this will always have.

Democracy is an inherently unworkable system of government.  Many historians and political scientists make a fetish out of democracy, and laud the original Athenian democracy as an undiluted good in world history.  This ignores, however, the serious issues which the Athenians’ contemporaries had with the democratic system of that polis and others like it; dissent which cannot merely be chalked up to envy or a lust for tyranny on the part of Athens’ enemies.  Indeed, democracy’s classical critics tended to oppose that system of government specifically because it was dangerous and prone to abuse, instability, and unpredictable swings in behavior caused by the momentary passions of the ochloi, the masses.  Let us not forget that it was the vaunted Athenian democracy which waged wars of aggression against its neighbors (including other democratic states like Syracuse), which murdered and enslaved nearly the entire population of Melos for refusing to pay a relatively small sum in tribute, and who eventually put to death Socrates, the father of classical-era philosophy, in a fit of childish pique from the masses.

Classical writers both Greek and Roman tended to divide the various types of government into three overall types of systems: monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy.  Depending on the particular writer, these types could be further subdivided in variants and mixed-mode systems.  The intervening centuries have brought little substantial innovation to this system of classification, so it is the one I will use going forward.

Back to our question at hand – what is likely to happen should the United States collapse – we can see that democracy will most likely cease to be a going concern.  Indeed, democracy is largely what created the problems that have led us to the point that we’re at.  So the choice will be between one of the two other forms – monarchy or aristocracy.

The important thing to keep in mind is that you can’t have strong forms of both of these existing in a polity at the same time.  It has long been noted that the enemy of monarchy is a strong aristocracy.  After all, the king cannot exercise plenary authority when a bunch of little kings are running around dispensing justice and maintaining private armies within their own domains.  Either aristocrats are strong and the monarchy is weak (perhaps an elective or constitutionally limited form), or the monarch is strong and aristocrats are reduced to being courtiers, to ornaments at the king’s court.  The most typical examples of this would be the gradual reduction of aristocratic independence in European states such as France and Spain which was necessary before absolute monarchies could exist.

It necessarily follows from this that aristocracy is what we can consider to be the “traditional” form of government, while strong, centralised monarchy is the innovation.

Even in ancient Greece, one of the first things that tyrants did when they usurped control over a polis was to drive out or otherwise destroy the prominent aristocratic families in the city.  There is always the example of Periander, the tyrant of Corinth, who sent his servant to Miletus to find out the formula for success from that city’s tyrant, Thrasybulos.  As Thrasybulos and the servant walked through a field of wheat, the tyrant said nothing, but would reach out and snap off the heads of wheat which stood out above the rest of the plants.  The servant soon got the point – to be a successful monarchical ruler, you needed to cut down anybody else who stood out above the masses of the common people.

Now, many neoreactionaries support a return to a monarchy.  I would tend to disagree with them, instead favoring a return to some form of oligarchic republicanism, which I believe provides the best mix of a rule of law system and the division of power among several competing members who balance out each other’s ambitions.  What I would have in mind would be a division of power similar to the old pre-reform Roman republic, or perhaps what was seen in the Dutch or Venetian republics – a small group of oligarchs whose interests are bound up with the success of the nation and the common people as a whole (unlike today’s “aristocracy” in the West, whose interests are largely inimical to the people constituting the nations in which they exist).  In such a system, these oligarchs guide the ship of state in such a way that the nation prospers, which necessarily placates the common people, without hazarding the nation to the vicissitudes of democracy.  The state is subject neither to the whims of one unaccountable man, nor to the whims of millions of morons who are just smart enough to figure out which circle to push the pin through so as to vote themselves more welfare and other largesse.

All of this is important because whenever an empire (such as, say, the United States of America) falls apart, it almost always devolves into a patchwork of statelets which originated because of the efforts of local notables to restore order and to regain a measure of the legitimacy formerly enjoyed by the now-defunct empire.  This pretty much means that an aristocratic system will arise.

History records numerous cases of this, only a few of which follow:

• The collapse of major Egyptian dynasties would often lead to the restoration of independence to the various nomes up and down the Nile, which would have to then be reconquered before a new strong dynasty could be established.

• The fall of various Mesopotamian empires would result in a new city becoming the centre of power, while the peripheral areas would fall away and regain independence, again requiring reconquest if a new empire was to be built.

• When Alexander died, not only were large parts of his empire divided among the Diadochi, but many portions regained independence under native rulers or as free city-states with their own aristocratic rulers.

• The fall of the Western Roman Empire saw statelets formed by various Germanic chieftains who occupied formerly Roman land, some of which eventually became the states of early medieval Western Europe.  Notably, many native Roman notables also seized the opportunity to establish their own domains, especially in Brittany and wherever the Bagaudae were strong.

• The fall of major Chinese dynasties would result in the rise of smaller, petty warring states vying for supremacy.  Confucius lived in one such time, during the fall of the decrepit Zhou dynasty and the reassertion of the various Chinese dukedoms.

So how does this apply to our current situation once America (and perhaps the rest of the West) collapses?

The first thing we need to understand is that, within the successor states to the United States, we will not likely see monarchy arise.  Instead, we’ll see the country break up into component regions of various size and stability (some perhaps comprising multiples of the current states), under local aristocratic control.  In Red areas, some pre-collapse legitimacy will remain because these states and localities were more successfully and legitimately governed.  However, in most Blue areas, the trend toward their becoming complete basket cases – already quite evident – will continue and will contribute to their complete collapse and reorganisation, barring any outside interference.

Culture is enduring and America’s culture is and always has been republican. As a result, it is likely that following an initial bout of local strongmanship in the less successful areas which will be put down by the better organised successors, the aristocracies that arise will not take the form of quasi-kings exercising absolute rule over smallish statelets.  Rather, the aristocracies that arise will likely be highly-restrictive republican oligarchies, with the franchise being restricted to white males who meet some sort of stringent property qualification.  Our culture will not allow for absolute rulers to exist for long; hopefully it will also not allow for the foolishness of democracy to replant itself either.

While there will be many who want to restore the old constitutional forms, in the event of a collapse, it will likely be very apparent to most of the survivors that the US Constitution of 1789 cannot be reinstated, at least not without heavy redaction.  For instance, unlimited religious liberty, with its penchant for being used to defend those who abuse its protections so as to destroy us, will be one of the first things on the block.  In its place, we’ll see Christianity –  probably without preference for a specific denomination – become the de facto state religion, with tolerance being extended to minority religions who don’t actively seek to kill us.  The judicial branch – long the font of injustice and arbitrary political gamesmanship at the behest of the SJWs and other left-wing groups – will likely also find itself so thoroughly reformed that it would no longer be recognisable as the Article III institution of the old Constitution.

Obviously, I am not claiming to be a prophet, to see the future before it happens.  What I’ve written here are merely speculations, ones which I readily admit are tinctured with my own personal preferences of what I think ought to be (but which, as a result, I do think would be the most likely).  One thing that I do think is pretty clear is that the current course of the West cannot hold forever, and that when it does fall apart, the product will not be the neoliberal “end of history,” it will not be more democracy and secularism and equalitarianism and all the rest.  Rather, the future will be less democratic and more authoritarian.  And this will perhaps correct many of the errors into which the West allowed itself to be led these recent decades.

For decades, the Left has had a very powerful rhetorical weapon in its arsenal, one which they wielded to great effect until very recently.  This was–as the reader can probably guess–the accusation of “racism” against their opponents.  It was effective because there was no defense against it.  If a certified bon penseur accused you of racism, that was it.  You were tarred irrevocably.  Your name was mud in academia, politics, or in your chosen vocation.  Its appeal was entirely emotional: racism = bad, so if you’re accused of racism, then you must be a bad, bad person.  Nobody wants to be associated with bad, bad people so an accusation of racism effectively isolated its target–it was Alinskyism in action.  Nobody who counted was going to come to the defense of the bad, bad, evil racist.  And nobody was going to listen when the bad, bad, evil racist tried to rationally explain what they were saying, the facts that they used to arrive at a conclusion, and so forth.  Being accused of “racism” by someone in the appropriate victim group or one of their “leaders” in the movement was the equivalent of the radical Left’s neutron bomb; it leaves the shell, but destroys the substance of its target.

Of course, the thing which any cuckservative Republican politician fears the most–much more so than being accountable to his constituents–is being tagged with the “racism” label and having it hinder his reelection.

Yet, like any weapon which is overused, it loses its effectiveness over time as opponents develop defenses against it.  That’s what we’re seeing now.  That’s why 2016 is the year racism died; the year in which “racist” and other similar epithets ceased to have the rhetorical effect which they once did.

Because its power is rhetorical, the negation of that power also rests in the realm of rhetoric.  And because its effectiveness rests on intimidation, it can be rendered ineffective by a steadfast, strong-minded refusal to be intimidated.

This comes as no surprise.  It’s an open secret that the term “racism” basically has no meaning beyond “you said or did something a social justice warrior didn’t like.”  An increasing number of white people are starting to not care about being tagged with it.  After all, within the past few weeks, we’ve found out or been reminded that you are racist for:

• Disagreeing with Obama
• Disagreeing with any other Democrat
• Saying that “all lives matter”
• Questioning any SJW narrative, even if race plays no role in it
• Being a white guy with dreadlocks
• Referring to chocolate-infused bread snacks as “brownies”
• Pointing out that fake “hate crimes” committed by black or Jewish college students were…committed by black or Jewish college students
• Refusing to rent your property to violent ex-felons
• Opposing gun control
• Supporting gun control if it means young black males won’t get to own guns
• Being born white

It’s rather apparent why nobody with any sense takes charges of  “racism” seriously anymore.

The effectiveness of the “racism” slur was not because of its accuracy, but because of its emotional impact, which made it the perfect tool for SJWs to use as a signaling mechanism to bully their opponents.  Everyone knew that SJW charges of “racism” were bilious nonsense.  But everyone else also knew that being accused of it, even falsely, could be a career-ender.  Nobody knew that others thought the same way as they did, so everyone was isolated and thus silenced.  It’s like the Soviet Union right before it collapsed–everyone in the Soviet Union knew their system was unsustainable, but nobody wanted to say so for fear of running afoul of the secret police.  But then the dam broke and the whole system was swept away.  And then everybody openly said what they had known all along, which was that the system had been failing for years.

The SJW name-calling has become less and less effective as more and more people begin to discover the alt-Right and become “red-pilled”.  That’s not surprising.  As I’ve pointed out previously, one of the key factors in red-pilling is the acceptance of truth, facts, and reason, regardless of where they go or to what conclusions they might lead.  So it’s obvious that if the power of “racism” is to be completely broken, then the alt-Right needs to double down on the diffusion of “hate facts” into the West’s social consciousness, rather than drawing back from doing so.  The reason isn’t so much to educate people who don’t understand these “hate facts”, but rather to openly declare them so that these people will know that there are other people out there who think like they do.

The reason why the radical Left uses terms like “racism” to isolate wrong-thinkers is because they know that when people are isolated, when they don’t believe anyone else around them believes as they do, they will often conform to what they perceive to be the dominant belief around them.  This was demonstrated by the Asch conformity experiments back in the 1950s.  In these experiments, a test subject was placed in a room with several other people, who were all part of the experimental team.  The subject was shown a paper with three lines of different lengths printed on them, and then another paper with one line, the length of which matched one of the three lines on the first paper.  The subject was asked to tell which of the three lines the other, single line matched in length.  The trick, however, was that all of the members of the experimental staff would purposefully choose the wrong answer.  The test was to see whether the test subject–who always chose the obviously correct answer–would recant and change his or her answer to conform to what everyone else was saying was the right answer.  It was found that many of the test subjects would do so. They would go along with what they knew to be the wrong answer, just to conform to what they perceived to be the majority belief around them.

The Left has used its rhetorical epithets to great effect to silence opponents, and then to induce in them Asch-like responses of conformity.

But there’s more to the story.  When other people were included in the experiment who answered the same way as the test subject (i.e. “confederates”), the test subjects became much more resistant to conformity.  This was the case even when only one confederate was introduced.  The ability of a majority to bend a minority to its will was greatly reduced when that minority had even a small amount of support from confederates.

This is what has started to occur in 2016.  The dam began to break earlier this year when the alt-Rightish Republican candidate Donald Trump refused to walk back comments he had made about illegal immigrants.  Widely condemned as “racist” by the Cathedral media, he nevertheless stuck to his guns.  The result?  He took the lead in the primaries and never lost it.  Rank-and-file voters rewarded him with victory in the primaries, and gave him the Republican nomination (presuming that the cuckservatives don’t figure out a way to steal it from him through convention shenanigans).

What’s interesting is not so much that Trump rose to prominence by refusing to cave to the SJW-driven political correctness conflict initiated against him, but why he prevailed in that conflict.  Why is it that despite so-called “misstep” after “misstep,” Trump seemed to be immune to every effort by the media and the political establishment to cow him into submission by casting him as “racist” (as well as other allied terms like “sexist” and “homophobic”)?

Simply put: Trump doesn’t scare because Trump doesn’t care.

They could call him whatever they liked–he didn’t care.  He didn’t grovel or cower, he doubled down and threw it right back at them.  The Cathedral [I prefer “Synagogue” -Ed.] punditry this year were simply astounded and dismayed by Trump’s overturning of all the accepted rules of the political game.  Essentially, these rules exist for the purpose of hobbling any candidate who would go too far off the reservation and begin to say things that really challenged the Cathedral’s status quo.  A Republican can be “edgy” by saying we should cut taxes a few percentage points.  Calling for a wall to keep out illegal aliens and taking a stand for a reinvigorated American nationalism are outside the pale.  Yet, all of the media’s usual tactics at keeping politicians docile failed with Trump this year.

Why?  Because there are a lot of people who are simply getting sick and tired of the whole “racism, etc.” racket.  So when Trump stood his ground, he served as a rally point for all of these people, and they, in turn, fed into his sense of broad-based support for his words and actions.  The media could call him a “racist” all they liked, it only began to have the opposite effect: he grew more popular, not less.  His refusal to back down drew attention, which in turn caused more and more people to be exposed to his actual ideas, instead of the media’s caricature.

In other words, Trump was basically acting as a nationwide (and indeed worldwide) “Asch confederate,” letting the incipient proto-redpillers out there know that they’re not alone.  This, in turn, has fueled the rise of the alt-Right–with all of its non-conformist, reactionary, and politically incorrect ideas–into the national consciousness to the point that the Cathedral media and other organs have begun to feel the need to deal with it instead of ignoring it.  This is why the Overton Window has been moving in our direction on a number of issues such as illegal immigration, Muslim “refugees”, and the defense of Western civilization in general.  It’s why we saw a successful Brexit last month, and why Austria will most likely elect a nationalist president this fall, provided they can keep their election honest this time around.  The Cathedral may still succeed in using raw political force to stifle these rebellions, but they will do so without having majority support from an increasingly rebellious populace.

And this will be in large part because their old rhetorical weapons are rapidly losing their edge.

The key to breaking the power of the SJWs does not lie in counter-protesting or otherwise mimicking the Left’s activism, which is bound to fail.  Rather, it consists in continuing to red-pill those who are red-pillable at the demotic level, while building and/or strengthening our own alternative support sources–churches, männerbunden, citizen militias, and the like.  These support structures should follow a loose, “distributed system” approach toward organizing and working together; no single head which can be crushed and the movement broken.  We will know that we have achieved success when someone can be fired for being a “racist” for something completely unrelated to their job or their company, and that company is forced by a mass of negative feedback to rehire that person and refrain from further punishing them.  Success will be achieved when the SJWs are no longer able to do what SJWs do.

The title of this post may come as a bit of a shock to a lot of folks who have been observing events over the past few years.  How can I say that social liberalism – by which I largely mean the homosexualism, the transgenderism, the abortionism, the aggressive feminism, and the rest of the anti-human, anti-civilisation agenda of the culturally marxist Left – has no long-term prospects?  Haven’t they been sweeping all before them?  Haven’t they successfully imposed gay marriage on an unwilling population?  What about the success in forcing transgenderism onto the military, as well as society at large?  Despite the best efforts of the “religious Right,” isn’t abortion more entrenched as “the law of the land” now than it has ever been?

The answer to these questions is, “Yes – but it doesn’t matter.”

First things first, however.  The reason cultural, social liberalism has risen to the fore in recent years is because “conservatism” has been a complete, utter, embarrassing-to-even-be-associated-with-it failure.  It’s pathetic.  There’s no getting around it.  And the reason for this is because “conservatives” are weak-minded, weak-willed, and weak-kneed.  They have no stomach for conflict, and they break the first time someone lobs a PC-conflict epithet at them.  In short, conservatives conserve nothing because they’re wimps.  They spent too many decades playing the inside-the-beltway games, and they’ve become accustomed to enjoying the crumbs the progressives throw to them.  This is why all of these DC “conservatives” can find the “courage” to rally against Trump, but not once in seven years have they ever put up any sort of substantial fight against Obama, Eric Holder, Loretta Lynch, or anyone else on the progressive, SJW Left.  But sure, Ted Cruz and Mike Lee can get kudos from the National Review crowd for refusing to support their own party’s presumptive nominee, because he’s “racist” and wants to stop the Amnesty Express.

So, trusting in conservatives to “make things better” is a fool’s errand.

But back to the issue at hand.  We find ourselves facing a progressive SJW regime which appears to have almost total control of America’s government, as well as its academic, commercial, and social institutions (much the same could be said for other Western nations as well).  How can this not represent long-term prospects for social liberalism?

Here’s how.

What we need to understand is that social liberalism – homosexualism, transgenderism, and all the rest – is an inherently unstable transitional state, to present an analogy drawn from the energetics of chemical reactions.  In reaction dynamics, a transition state is a configuration along the reaction pathway at which the potential energy is the highest.  This state is an ephemeral, intermediate configuration known as an activated complex, and in irreversible reactions, it will always proceed on to the final product(s) of the reaction.

In social dynamics, the sort of radical social libertinism we see today represents just such an unstable, intermediate form.  Let’s face it – the things that represent the socially liberal SJW agenda are unnatural.  They require great amounts of energy to both produce and then to maintain.  The reason the radical Left has had to take such a top-down, forced-evolution approach in imposing its agenda and then in punishing those who deviate from it is because their agenda would never have developed on its own.  It takes tremendous energy to create such deviations from a traditional society.  By applying that energy (i.e. by forcing the reaction), they have generated a social state which reflects their desired worldview, but which is energetically unstable and will quickly proceed to an energetically more favourable product.

Assuming that the current reaction pathway is irreversible (i.e. we’re never just going to “go back” to the way things were before), there are two likely possible results (i.e. reaction products) which will occur once this unstable transition state breaks down.

The first is that we will fall into a totalitarianism of some sort, which will include the almost complete rollback of the social liberalism the Left has been pushing.  As noted above, the “SJW social libertine” transition state is unstable.  It is that way for a specific purpose.  The Left knows that their agenda of homosexualism, feminism, etc. serves to break down and destroy traditional morals and society.  This has been used to great effect previously by the Left.  Three particular examples will suffice.

• The breakdown in morals in the Weimar Republic as a result of the progressive social reforms of the 1920s
• The decriminalisation of homosexuality and other deviancies like abortion and divorce by Lenin in 1917
• The radical progressive social liberalism instituted in the Hungarian educational system by the Communist Gyorgy Lukacs during the brief Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919.

In each of these cases, radical social “reforms” were instituted that were not dissimilar to what we’re seeing today – homosexuality was promoted, traditional masculine and parental authority were grossly undermined, abortion was encouraged.  However, in each of these cases, the libertine attitudes were quickly and inevitably replaced with the exact opposites.  In Germany, the rise of Nazism soon saw rigid clampdowns on this newfound social “freedom,” with homosexuals finding their way into the death camps along with Jews.  Hungary similarly saw social clampdown as their restored constitutional monarchy drifted into the orbit of fascist Germany and Italy.  In the Soviet Union, Stalin recriminalised homosexuality in 1933, and even adultery became illegal in the Soviet Union.

Social liberalism destabilises societies.  Once the destabilisation is no longer needed – the old traditional society has been done away and the New Order of whatever sort is put into its place – the destabilising elements will be removed by the totalitarians.  They’re not going to have a bunch of queers and cross-dressers tearing up THEIR new creation, after all.

So one end of the current reaction path the SJWs have put us on is a stultifying totalitarian system in which the SJWs will be themselves forcibly suppressed.  Little consolation, of course, to the rest of us who would also be living in constant danger of the gulag.

However, there is a second possible reaction product that can arise from this transition state, though it will also be significantly different from the sort of liberal democratic “end of history” scenario envisioned by the neo-conservatives.

This is the restoration of a traditional society, one that will not be like the old which has been done away with, but which will still seek to return to the old ways as much as possible.  Of necessity such a system will be austere and will not be to the liking of libertarians and other ideological fantasists.  This traditional system may end up being itself corruptible (as all things having to do with man are), yet it will involve a significant return to what was good about the past, even if the political forms are different. Two general examples here will illustrate.

First, you have the establishment of the Principate by Augustus after his victory in the civil wars in 27 BC.  Augustus established a monarchy in everything but name, even while his propaganda arm professed that he had “restored the Republic.”  Yet, the old aristocratic republic was never again to be.  The late Republic had become a moral cesspool.  Corruption, greed, bribery were rampant, as were sexual vice and excesses among the nobility.  These contributed to a breakdown in legitimacy not dissimilar to what we see in the West today.  When Augustus took power, he really did not act as a heavy-handed dictator.  He sought to at least give the appearance of adhering to constitutional forms as much as possible, and he was sparing in his use of the penal powers of the principate.  Augustus did, however, institute quite a bit of moral legislation designed to restore the virtues and morals enshrined in Roman reverence for the old Republic – the Republic of Cato and Marcellus and Aemilius Paulus.  Marriage was encouraged, as was having numerous children.  Women were returned to their traditional roles in Roman society.

The Principate under Augustus certainly was not a restoration of the old Republic, but it was a restoration to a more traditional form than the Republic had devolved into previously.

The second example I would point to is the “second religiousness” predicted by Spengler.  Spengler identified the second religiousness phase as representing both the decline of a civilisation, but also its rejection of the “rationalism” phase (which does not necessarily meet the dictionary definition of “rational”) which has rejected the traditional religion, which has been exactly what we’re seeing today with SJWs and their rejection of traditional Christian morality.

So the socially liberal transitional state does not need to decompose into a totalitarianism – it can finish its reaction pathway as, well, reaction.  This reaction will not be a return to “the good ol’ days.”  In fact, successful reactionary movements (which have existed, by the way) never are.  But they can return to something that is at least compatible with the old ways and morals, and which may end up actually becoming a new phase of a civilisation.  The degeneracy and collapse of late Roman civilisation in the Western Empire led directly to medieval civilisation, whose degeneracy and collapse, in turn, led to modern Western civilisation.  The degeneracy and coming collapse we see on the horizon for the West may simply represent the coming transition to a new civilisational form pursuing a linear trajectory from our own, with its own traditional forms being established off of our own.  It will almost certainly involve great dislocations – economically, socially, militarily – but the cycle will repeat.

Either way, the current state of affairs will not last forever, or even for a significantly long time.  SJWism and other elements of the radical progressive social agenda simply cannot exist for very long.  They’re too unstable and unnatural.  It is part of our job as traditionalists to try to steer that inevitable collapse in the direction we want (reaction, tradition) rather than in the direction intended by the globalists and progressives (leftist totalitarianism).

Inequality among men is as natural as breathing or eating.  Understanding this truism will generally save a person about 90% of the frustration that they would otherwise feel towards human societies and political systems. Never in the history of mankind – not even in the most hopelessly utopian of efforts by social levelers – has this natural inequality ever truly been overcome.

The natural outcome of these inequalities (and I am speaking here within national and cultural bodies, not of relations between them) is that elites will always arise.  Within nations, aristocracies will always occur for a variety of reasons.  Even within democratic systems, Robert Michel’s Iron Law of Oligarchy will operate, ensuring that a leadership caste rises to the top to effectively dominate the politics and social system within a nation or political subunit.  Looking to classical history, we see that even in places and at times when rampant democratization took place (e.g. Athens from ~525 – 350 BC, late Republican Rome), the initiative for these efforts arose not from the demos themselves, but from popular (and generally aristocratic) leaders who wielded the people as a weapon for gaining political power.  Let us not forget the Cleisthenes, whose reform of the Athenian constitution set that city on course for direct democracy, was of the aristocratic Alcmaeonid family; Julius Caesar and other late Republican leaders of the populares came from aristocratic senatorial families.

No less a democrat than Thomas Jefferson himself said, “There is a natural aristocracy among men.  The grounds of this are virtue and talent.”  Though Jefferson was (obviously) a vigourous opponent of formal aristocracy, his statement is nevertheless true, and explains why aristocracies – elites within societies – originate.

Aristocracies generally originate and evolve during periods in which a society is expanding and growing, and thus needs the expansion of its leadership caste.  It is during these periods that “new blood,” generally demonstrating a mix of intelligence, talent, and audacity, is given the opportunity to assert itself and join the previous hereditary elite, if such already exists or hasn’t been overthrown (in which case, the “new blood” replaces the old).  This nobility is generally made up of those with the courage, cunning, skills, and enterprise to seize opportunities that present themselves and to motivate men to follow them to glory.  This is, in a nutshell, pretty much the story for the establishment of the feudal aristocracies that evolved out of the Germanic conquests of western Europe after Rome fell.  In many cases, petty chieftains or enterprising warriors were able to establish themselves in the new lands and initiate dynasties that lasted, in some cases, for centuries before being absorbed into the growing medieval nation-states.  The Counts of Anjou, for instance, established a county that produced many illustrious members, such as Fulk III (the Black).  Indeed, the great duchies, counties, and baronies largely began as statelets carved out by the ancestors of those whose names we are more familiar with from medieval history.  At least at the times they gained power, aristocrats were true to their titles – they were the best and the brightest in their societies.

However, we need not think of aristocracy solely in the sense of hereditary nobles bearing titles and coats of arms.  Even nations in the West which have more robust republican or democratic traditions and which either decimated or else consciously avoided the older-style hereditary aristocracy (such as France and the United States, respectively), still possess elites who have risen to the top of the political and social systems in place.  In our systems, these elites generally rise through a combination of statesmanship, education and scholarship, and juridical capabilities, though not a few have entered the “democratic” aristocracies through prowess in warfare and their natural leadership abilities.  In these cases, membership tends to be more fluid and less hereditary, though the presence of multigeneration American political clans from the Adamses to the Kennedies and Bushes shows this to not always be the case.

The problem with aristocracies is that they tend to become decadent and degenerate.  To them often applies quite well the plaintive words of Horace,

“Time corrupts all. What has it not made worse?
Our grandfathers sired feebler children; theirs
Were weaker still – ourselves; and now our curse
Must be to breed even more degenerate heirs.”

This most closely applies to hereditary aristocracies whose membership is much more closed to new blood, as the European aristocracy became.  Not only do the morals and the capabilities of such lines tend to degenerate, but very often their genetics do as well – witness Charles II, the last Habsburg king of Spain, a man who could barely chew his own food because of the extreme genetic deformity of his jaw and who was virtually ignored by his own advisors and regents.  So-called “democratic” aristocracies are not immune to this degeneration; however, their degeneracy tends to take on an institutional and systematic form, rather than familial and personal.  What degenerates is not necessarily the individual members, but the “aristocratical system” set into place by the ruling class.

As an aristocratic system degenerates, its members become more and more unworthy of the position to which heredity or connexions have placed them.  This is certainly the case with the present “elite” which we see in the United States and other Western nations.  Traditionally, the democratic elites in the Western nations that adopted some form of republicanism or parliamentary democracy in the 18th and 19th centuries were – despite the “democratic” nature of their systems – genuine elites.  Those who really rose to the top in terms of esteem and respectability were men who genuinely had the best interests of their nations at heart, and who had the statesmanship, education, and intelligence to guide their respective ships of state.  Unfortunately, this aristocratic system degenerated as well, and led to the present crop of “elites” have now completely broken with this tradition.

Starting in the late 1960s, these “elites” (which we would identify today as the “progressives” and other left-liberals who largely dominate the political, media, educational, and other culture-driving institutions) began their Gramscian “long march through the institutions”.  Through the intervening decades, they were able to usurp control over these from the traditional elites who guided them previously.

This “elite,” however, is fundamentally different from the earlier aristocracy which guided our politics and institutions.  Membership in the current progressive elite is not derived from ability, intelligence, a genuine classical education in the humanities, or the ability to learn and apply the law.  Rather, membership in this group is centered about one thing – adherence to (or at least submission to) the progressive ideology.  The more closely a progressive holds to the doctrinaire ideology of socialism, communism, and cultural marxism, the more successful they will be.  While earlier elites were typically characterized by such things as martial virtue, statesmanship, and classical education, the present progressive “elites” do not embody any of these traits.   Indeed, the typical progressive is diametrically opposite to these.

Progressives are, to put it frankly, stupid and unlettered people.  While they like to think of themselves as “educated” (and may indeed possess multiple degrees from educational institutions, degrees which they could only “earn” because other progressives were in power to grant these to them), the average progressive is grossly ignorant about a wide range of topics that are vitally important to the possession of true leadership abilities.  Progressives, by virtue of their transnational and globalist leanings, cannot by definition be “statesmen,” since that term necessarily implies devotion to the guidance of a nation-state.   In many cases, progressives are actively hostile toward the military, cultural, and political success of the nations over which they exercise influence.

As a result, we must recognize that these progressive “elites” are a wholly and completely unnatural phenomenon.  Natural aristocracy is based on the inequalities of abilities, intelligence, daring, and other qualities that exist between different people, and which allow those who possess them to rise to the top, if they will exercise these natural advantages.  Because claims to elite status made by progressives rely solely on unthinking subordination to an artificial ideology, their “aristocracy” is also artificial.  This aristocracy exists because it tries to bend reality to meet the demands of ideology, rather than the other way around.  This explains why, in places dominated by these progressive elites, so many stupid, unworthy, and outright ridiculous people nevertheless rise to the top in the system.  This amply explains how people like Barack Obama, Loretta Lynch, Justin Trudeau, Angela Merkel and others like them end up where they are today.

These people are wholly unworthy of their “elite” status.  At least on a subconscious level, this is widely recognized, and it explains why there is so much growing opposition to them in just the last few years.  Having reached the point where they are so ridiculous that their unnaturalness can no longer be ignored, a backlash appears to be in the offing. Will the impending Trumpening of the United States represent the beginning of the end for the current progressive, transnational, globalist, anti-western “elite”?  The rise of the nationalists all across Europe, as well, suggests that the end may be nearing for the elite status of the progressives.  Now is the time for those on the broad alt-Right to prepare themselves to emerge as the new aristocracy that replaces the old, much as the German chieftains replaced Roman senators all across Gaul, Spain, Italy, and Britain fifteen centuries ago.  We are the new blood, and now may well be our time.

Everyone knows that there is a cultural divide in the West.  However, many people have difficulty identifying exactly what it is.  It is widely assumed that the cultural divide is between “us” and “the foreigners.”  While it is true that immigration is hard at work creating ever-expanding pockets of non-Western cultural zones across North America and Europe, these are largely exogenous and have a relatively small impact on the consciousness of the average American or European.  The cultural divide that I am talking about is much more indigenous and systematic.  It is the divide between white North Americans and Europeans who hold to their traditional cultural folkways and those who do not, and who are actively trying to supplant those traditional cultures.

Much has been said in recent years about “cultural marxism.”  I won’t go into the details of the origins of cultural marxism in the German Frankfurt School of social theorists, or how their ideology eventually morphed into the cultural marxism of today (which largely occurred during the drastic social changes of the 1960s and 1970s).  Suffice it to say that cultural marxism, as it is manifested today, essentially consists of a deconstruction of Western civilisation accompanied by doctrinaire multiculturalism and political correctness.  The intention is to undermine and destroy the bases upon which Western, capitalistic, bourgeois society is founded (the “marxist” part), and seeks to do so through the means of capturing the moral and informational “transmissive” elements of society – education, entertainment, religious institutions, news media, etc. (the “cultural” part).  Mixed in with this is a large element of Antonio Gramsci’s theory of “cultural hegemony,” in which a dominant ruling class in a culturally diverse nation exerts its influence to impose its culture onto the rest of society (more on this below).

Despite the arguments of many on the Left, it is readily apparent that cultural marxism is real, and that it is at work among those on the Left.  This is especially the case with the SJWs (social justice warriors), who serve as progressivism’s “shock troops” for enforcing “progressive” values onto the rest of society.

Make no mistake, “progressives” really and truly do embody a very different culture than that held by traditional Western populations.  They are not–emphatically not–more or less like us, with just a few quirks.

What is SJW culture?  Probably the best (and most humourous) explanation of it can be found at Christian Lander’s website Stuff White People Like.  Within the 136 entries he made (before he sold out and went corporate, maaaaan), he satirised the predilections of “The Right Kind of White People” (i.e. SJWs and other progs), while contrasting them with “The Wrong Kind of White People,” (i.e. the rest of us).  The right kind of white people like Barack Obama, environmentalism, Birkenstocks, and Starbucks.  The wrong kind of white people like tractor pulls, country music, blue jeans, and voted for George W. Bush.  The right kind of white people want Bernie Sanders but will settle for Hillary.  The wrong kind of white people are rooting for Trump. The divide between traditional Americans and SJWs extends to musical tastes, which restaurants they will eat at, which stores they will shop at, and literally everything else.

This culture embodied by progressives has its origins in the cultural revolution of the late 1960s, and (as we all know) represents a marked departure from traditional American culture.

In a perfect world, there wouldn’t be a problem with this, since we could all just live and let live.  However, as I’ve pointed out before, you can’t ever really and truly have a multicultural society; not when there are multiple nationalities living under the same roof, and not even when people who are ostensibly members of the same nationality are, either.  Multiple cultures cannot coexist in the same geography at the same time – one will supplant the other, either through eradication, or through some form of assimilation (e.g. conquest followed by deculturation).

This is where Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony comes into play.  Gramsci posited that the ruling class in a nation will pursue culturally hegemonic goals by imposing its own values onto the lower classes and engineering their acceptance as the “natural order” of things.  For most of American and Western history, this was not particular problematic because the elites and the masses generally shared the same set of cultural underpinnings and assumptions anywise.  Hence, this imposition of cultural values on the masses was not onerous, and indeed, could even be beneficial when it improved the morals and manners of the rougher elements of society.

Gramsci himself talked about cultural hegemony as an observation. From his Marxist viewpoint, it was what the bourgeois and aristocratic classes imposed on the masses so as to maintain the so-called traditional and capitalistic order of society.  However, today’s cultural Marxists have turned it around. Instead of despising it as something that capitalists and traditionalists do to them, it has become something they want to do to traditionalists and other “reactionaries”.

However, cultures can’t co-exist for long. This is why the SJWs are working fervently to extirpate the remaining vestiges of traditional societies in the West.  They view themselves (unfortunately, not without reason) as society’s elite, and therefore view their mandate as the imposition of their own culture onto the rest of us. “Enlightening” us is their holy duty, and in many ways, theirs might be considered the “Beta man’s burden,” bringing civilization to the old-fashioned, traditionalist Fuzzy Wuzzies.  Their ambitions are not simply political, they are holistic–all of society, from top to bottom, must be transformed by their culture.

Hence, SJWs are culturally imperialistic.  Remember when Americans were beating Native American children in Indian schools for speaking their native languages?  The SJWs destroying the small business of a Christian who refuses to service a gay “wedding” is the modern day equivalent.

SJW culture was specifically created to subvert and overthrow everything about traditional culture–Christianity, morality, private property, masculinity, nationalism, social order, and all the rest.  Literally every single thing on their program exists to try to topple some aspect of the old order.  The whole point to SJW tactics is to impose their new order, their culture, onto us from the top down.

One of the greatest services that Pat Buchanan performed for America in his discussions about immigration  was to emphasize the place of culture in that conversation.  While talk about the subject generally tends to revolve around questions of legality versus illegality, crime, and its impact on wages and jobs–and these are all important matters, mind you–discussing the impact immigration has on America’s culture has found much less of a place at the table. 

The reader may find himself asking, “Why are you talking about culture again?  How come you’re always harping on that subject?”  The answer is because culture is important.  Culture is, in fact, more important for the long-term direction of a nation than are its electoral politics, its economic choices, or its foreign policies.  Different types of governments, economic booms and busts may all come and go, but the culture of a nation will set the tone for how the nation responds to and weathers these things.

I’ve discussed before how inseparable a culture is from the people who bear it.  When large numbers of people live together in community, they develop unique cultures that are then perpetuated for generations upon generations.  Culture is among the most persistent of factors in the human experience.  The culture of a people is usually only changed by either eradicating that people (the least desirable means) or by putting into place active, vigourous, systematic efforts at loosing them from their former culture and embedding them into a new culture (assimilation). 

By all rights, talk about culture should impact the American national discussion on immigration.  It doesn’t, but it should.  The reason for this is because we are currently in a situation where, rather than assimilating foreigners to our own culture and mores as formerly happened, we are instead seeing our traditional Anglo-Saxon culture being weakened and undermined by millions of unassimilated foreign entrants, largely from Latin America.  These immigrants have reached a critical mass of numbers such that they are forming large pockets of Latin American (primarily Mexican) culture on our own soil.  This is not at all surprising.  Whenever a nation pursues a policy of accepting massive numbers of immigrants while refusing to require them to assimilate themselves to our folkways and culture, you will see what we’re seeing take place today.

Cultures as holistic, all-encompassing entities cannot exist in the same place at the same time.  One will always come to dominate the other for any number of good or bad reasons.  What we’re seeing throughout the American Southwest, as well as in inner cities (and not so inner cities) all across the country, is the Mexification of large swathes of American geography.  Because post-1965 America has pointedly refused to require assimilation, we’re finding that in areas where the majority becomes Mexican, the culture becomes Mexican as well. 

This is not a good thing.  My firm belief is that all cultures are not equal.  Intrinsically speaking, some cultures are better than others, for objective and quantifiable reasons.  Cultural equalitarianism is simply not an intellectually valid belief.  This being said, I will then apply it by saying that I believe America’s Anglo-Saxon derived culture is better than the various Latin American cultures we see entering our land.  This is not to say, obviously, that Latin Americans themselves are bad people. The problem is not the people themselves, but the cultures that they carry with them.

An honest assessment suggests that Latin American cultures contain a disturbing number of pathologies that make them incompatible with tradition American Anglo-Saxon culture.  They tend to encourage a subservient, even obsequious, attitude towards government, with its caudillos and jefes, that makes Latin Americans more naturally socialistic.  Latin American cultures tend to reject the right of self-defence, thus making them more likely to disarm their populations.  They have a much higher tolerance for corruption, both political and private, than do Northern European-derived cultures.  Latin American cultures tend to be low trust cultures. They tend to place less value on education, scholarship, and innovation.  They tend to be more socially stratified and have less tolerance for individuals who seek to better their social and economic statuses.  Because there is little cultural tradition of consensual self-government and orderly transfer of governmental power, much of the history of Latin America (as well as a lot of what we still see today) involves a cycle of revolution followed by dictatorship followed by revolution followed by dictatorship…

What I’m describing above goes more deeply into what “culture” actually is than does the rather superficial sense that most people have, meaning things like “ethnic foods, ethnic clothing, and musical styles” that they can gawk at when visiting an ethnic restaurant.  “Culture” encompasses the way a group of people tend to thinking, feel, and act about…everything.  It defines their responses, how they interpret social and interpersonal stimuli from the world around them.  The superficial view of “food and music” as culture is merely the tip of a deep, deep iceberg (see below).

If we continue to see Latin American cultures displace American culture in increasingly large regions of our own country, we’re eventually going to see the United States become Latin American in culture.  And that means that all the cultural attributes that made America what she historically was, and the successes that those attributes brought, will no longer be there to sustain continued American success as a polity. 

What happens when America finishes becoming the sort of low trust society like we see across Latin America?  What about when we become as corrupt as is typically seen south of the border?  Will investors want to park their money here, knowing that an American caudillo might well nationalise their assets to curry favour with an increasingly socialistic population?  What happens to America’s research and development culture when the value we place on education reaches Latin American levels?  How many Nobel laureates in the sciences has Latin America had?  The answer: from Mexico to Tierra del Fuego, they’ve had a total of six, the same number as Belgium alone.  As I’ve pointed out before, we can’t expect our Constitution–uniquely English in derivation as it is–to survive long in a non-Anglo-Saxon cultural setting. 

Simply put, if Mexican society is so bad that it has already run off a full quarter of its own population, why on earth would we want to transplant the same thing here on our side of the border? 

This is why the American people need to get serious about regaining control of our immigration apparatus back from the current gaggle of globalists, internationalists, and chamber of commerce-style plutocrats who currently use it to provide for themselves a virtually limitless supply of cheap labour to be used to both save them money and destroy traditional America. What to do about the immigrants from south of our border? Plainly, we must send home the vast majority who bring no special skills or knowledge to our society while working assiduously to assimilate and fold into our own culture those who do bring to the table skills or talents we are interested in, and who are allowed to remain here. We really do need to make America America again, by studiously preserving our own unique (and successful) culture as a gift to our posterity. 

Immigration–both legal and illegal–is one of the hottest topics in American politics today.  Despite the widespread perception that Donald Trump created the current wave of anti-immigration sentiment in this country, it has actually been around for quite a while before him. Trump merely served to catalyze this sentiment’s departure from the shadows and into the limelight, an opening of the Overton Window, if you will.  However, Americans have become increasingly disenchanted with our broken and anti-American immigration policy for over two decades.  Mark Krikorian was writing about the need to restrict immigration back in 2008.  Before that, the American Right successfully pressured Congress into rejecting–if narrowly–George W. Bush’s effort to push through amnesty.  Even before Bush’s administration, Pat Buchanan was laying the groundwork for a return to an America First immigration policy by focusing his discussion both on jobs and on culture. 

However, with the ever-increasing likelihood that the Trumpening of America will become a reality, it’s time to transition from simply calling for “less immigration” toward a more constructive view of how our immigration policies actually ought to be reformed and crafted.  What would the elements be of a genuinely rational immigration policy look like?

First, any immigration policy must, must, must revolve around the fundamental premise that it operates for the good of this nation and the people of this nation.  It will take America’s needs into account.  The mere desire of people from other countries to come here will not, and should not be, a concern.  If America needs you, you may come in.  If we don’t, then that’s too bad.  The assessment of these needs will be realistic and rational, and will be based on what will benefit us.  This will be the premise that drives everything else.  Ideally, it would be coupled with long-term policies designed to encourage Americans to enter the STEM and other fields which currently constitute most of the “need” for ever-expanding H1-B and other visa programs.  Make spaces for Americans first, and then fill in the holes with talented foreigners.  Likewise, first priority of access to the “low skill” labor market must be given to the millions of Americans who have been displaced by cheap foreign laborers who have essentially destroyed our wage scale.

Second, and related to the above, the restricted access to America’s job market must be coupled with efforts to guarantee the quality of the immigrants for whom the doors are opened.  While we do not really need millions of low-skill, no-education Paco-the-lettuce-pickers, we certainly could use some Robertos with doctoral degrees in organic chemistry.  The system must have rigorous “quality controls” in place.  This isn’t unprecedented.  Even back in the “good old days” of mass immigration through Ellis island and all that, we turned away all kinds of people who didn’t meet the criteria we were looking for or who were thought to be potential detriments to our society–the criminally inclined, those with low IQs, those with diseases, those who were suspected of not being willing to work.  So today, we must take greater steps to screen out known criminals, those with low IQs, those with no special skills, and so forth.  Our policy on immigration should be that those who do come here should enrich, rather than dilute, the quality of our society. 

Third, we should do away with “short term” immigration.  If someone comes here from abroad to live and work, then there should be the intention on their part to actually go all the way and become Americans.  This will increase their ties to and loyalty for this nation.  Only the seriously committed will want to come.  Those who just want to make money and send it home will be less able to do so.  Those who come to work for a few years and then carry our industrial and technological knowledge back home will be excluded.  On the other hand, those who wish to entrust themselves to America and become one of us may do so.

Fourth, assimilation must be mandatory.  Any sane immigration policy must recognize that there is no such thing as “magic soil.”  Mere geographical location does not impart a new outlook on life.  If someone is going to become an American, then they must become an American, not a “technically” American who is really still a foreigner in heart and spirit.  It is common to speak of “ugly Americans” who go overseas and then expect everyone in foreign countries to cater and adapt to them.  We should end the phenomenon of “ugly Mexicans” and “ugly Vietnamese” and “ugly Nigerians” who immigrate here and then form ethnic enclaves, expecting that the signs and the ballots will be printed in their native languages, that Americans will bend over backwards to avoid offending any of their cultural sensitivities, and all the rest.  Diversity destroys a nation, and we must not allow it among the immigrants we allow to come in.  Both those yet to come under such a policy, as well as those already here, must be strongly encouraged to assimilate, learn English, adopt our mores, and so forth.  Failure to do so according to quantifiable measures should result in termination of any visas and green cards.  There must be a conscious deracination of any foreign elements and their absorption into the social body of America.   

Fifth – and this really should go without saying – we must adopt a zero tolerance policy towards illegal immigration.  Build the wall.  Enforce the laws against hiring illegals.  Deport illegals as they come in contact with law enforcement.  Encourage self-deportation.  Strictly oversee welfare programs to ensure that nobody here illegally is receiving a dime.   Doing these will not be nearly as expensive as the long-term costs of not doing them.   One commonly expressed policy idea that should not be coupled with this is that of permanently excluding all who have ever come here illegally.  Such a policy would actually serve to retard the repatriation of illegal immigrants as it would remove from them the hope of being able to return legally some day, and hence make them more determined to evade the enforcement of the laws.  In the spirit of the points above, if there are people here illegally but who genuinely would make serious positive contributions to our society, my belief is that we should allow them to do so–as they obey our laws and come here in the manner that we have prescribed. 

Really, while I am sure that these suggestions would be met with howls of indignation in many circles, I don’t really see them as anything other than a simple restatement of common sense. Of course a well-reasoned immigration policy will look to our needs first, will encourage national unity, will reject the divisiveness of “diversity,” and will act to protect the interests of the “Average Joe” Americans who constitute this nation. Whether all, or even any, of these goals would be met post-Trumpening is anyone’s guess. However, these ought to be put out there into the marketplace of ideas so that they can serve to leaven the discussion on immigration with a little common sense.

Tim Dunkin blogs at Neo-Ciceronian Times.