Many of the same people who once fiercely supported Reagan and opposed moral relativism and nihilism have come to embody the ethic of Thrasymachus, the cynical Sophist in Plato’s Republic who insists that justice has no intrinsic meaning. All that matters is the interests of the strongest party. “Injustice, if it is on a large enough scale, is stronger, freer, and more masterly than justice,” he argued.

Yeah, I know the Republic and he's right that Plato was right that this sophistry is bad.

The United States under Trump is dark, aggressive, and lawless. It has become, in the words of Representative Ogles, a predator nation.

Yeah, right. We're a predator nation. Our taxes pay to secure the international shipping of the entire world for free -- which this guy insists we keep on doing forever -- but we're a "predator nation."

I think you are giving a pass to behavior that would make you apoplectic if the other side were doing it. — RogueAI

Except the other side was doing it repeatedly. Politically motivated violent rioting, invading federal buildings, even trying to set them on fire. All of it. And supported by Democrat rhetoric. That was the summer of 2020. That had been going on for the whole season prior to the January 6th incident. That moment was the Right going apoplectic about the Left's behavior.

Any Democrat politician has to toe the line on certain policies to win the primaries. No matter how telegenic a person is, they're not going to the Democrat nominee if they don't check certain boxes: pro-choice, pro-gay rights, pro-environment, pro-gun control, pro-immigration, etc. — RogueAI

You'd think so, except that, as I've pointed out, Harris was rhetorically aligned with America's longstanding immigration laws, not against them, not trying to change them. So ... maybe not on immigration.

Also, nobody's anti-environment. But blocking oil pipeline construction just burns more oil to transport the oil. Electric vehicles are just coal-powered cars. Corn based ethanol was idiotic. Wind and solar do not scale. If any of you really believed in any of this climate change alarmism stuff at all then you'd be cheerleading a fast track to a nuclear+hydrogen energy future because that is the only real, scalable answer to it, assuming it is a real problem and not just a scam. But Leftists are so hostile to nuclear and so duplicitous on multiple other issues and so obviously using the same tactics on this one that you should be able to understand why I, not being a scientist, would get suspicious.

If Trump doesn't give the stolen election "fight like hell" speech on the morning of Jan 6th, do you think the rioting still happens? — RogueAI

Look, there was some rioting. Rioting's bad. The people who did that should have been treated the exact same way as the rioters from the George Floyd protests of the previous summer -- the exact same way, to the detail, because they did the exact same thing.

Before January 6th, I would have absolutely said, "Leftist riot. We don't. That proves we're morally superior." Which makes January 6th uniquely embarassing for me as a moment when my side did lose the moral high ground and showed we belonged right down in the same filthy dirt as all those rioters from the previous summer. It did make me ashamed to be a Republican.

HOWEVER, January 6th was not an organized plot to carry out a coup against the United States government. We know this from lots of evidence but more fundamentally, anybody who's going to be honest about right wingers in America knows that these are not the kind of people who are going to try to do anything like that and leave their guns at home. I could believe that some right wing protesters might have tried to take over the government by force, but not if they weren't armed. These are the kind of people who think you should take your guns with you to the grocery store and you're telling me they intended to take over the government without guns!? That simply did not happen. It's not in their character. To be absolutely clear -- they might do it, but absolutely not without bringing their guns. It's not something they would forget, if this was the plan. Anyone who really knows these kinds of people knows they are absolute gun nuts. It's not just a stereotype, I swear.

As for Mr. Trump, his clear intention was to hold a peaceful demonstration outside the Capitol, asking Congress to vote against election certification which is a real decision made by Congress and therefore within what American citizens can demonstrate about both legally and morally if they want to. But I personally wasn't and wouldn't have been out there because I don't believe it would have done any good even if they did have a peaceful protest at that juncture.

The narrative that Trump encouraged a violent attack on Congress is libelous and relies on deceptive edits of his speech, linking remarks from about an hour apart to digitally construct a whole new sentence. That is a really vile lie. What Trump actually said might not have been the wisest or the truest, but he never said that crap. Furthermore, Trump tried to get on TV to tell the crowd to dispurse and go home. Maybe too late, but he did, because a physical invasion of the Capitol building was not anticipated. Maybe it should have been anticipated, but it wasn't. They couldn't see the future and didn't think of it, unfortunately.

Understand, they had a mindset that Republicans just don't riot ... because they're Republicans. It's conventionally just not something Republicans do. It just wasn't thought of by the Trump people as something they even needed to worry about. And I wish that had been true. I mean imagine, a "conservative riot" -- it sounds like a contradiction in terms! I really think part of what happened that day was a failure of imagination.

Some of the Jan6 prisoners got sentences and treatment far in excess of what they actually did. Understand, these people deserved some time in jail. But not years. Not in solitary. It did get really disproportionate, especially when compared to how the George Floyd riots had been handled the previous summer -- a context which was in every single rioter's mind that whole day. Rioting had been normalized as a political tactic and "the hell with the rules if the Democrats don't have to follow them." That is what every single one of them thought. And you should be able to see why a reasonable person could get to thinking that.

1) What if there is no right or left in any meaningful sense? — Mikie

There just is, and this might be a good topic for a new post: to explain why the old category model that originated with the French National Assembly is still very, very applicable to the present day and indeed is more poinient than ever now that the Nick Fuentez types are going explicitly anti-liberal and so are more clasically right wing than the Buckley fusionists were.

I might also make a case for why we need to replace the "Libertarian - Authoritarian" scale on the Political Compass Test with a "Liberty - Security" scale, because the "Libertarian - Authoritarian" naming convention is a dead giveaway that the compass and test itself is designed by and for exclusively libertarians. Nobody calls themselves an "authoritiarian" but concern about security is a human universal, just as at least some concern for liberty is. The Political Compass Test should be a diagnostic tool for ALL political beliefs, not a polemic one to argue for libertarianism.

The problem with the political compass isn't the left vs right axis -- it's the other axis!

2) I’m surprised you didn’t give much time to the financial crisis and the Tea Party movement that followed. I think that (and Occupy) accounts for the different “populist” streams we currently see, with Trump riding the wave of one and Bernie the other. — Mikie

This is very true, but this event only caused immediate political change for the Left. The Right did not have an immediate reaction other than to scramble to fit it into their existing narrative: blame any problem on government overreach, no matter what's really happening. That's what the libertarians did in response to the 2008 financial crisis and, at least for the short term, the other right wing factions let them do it. So, for the Right, it wasn't a catalyst for major political change. But wow, on the Left it sure was! This is, again, something I have difficulty articulating without getting polemic, not being a Leftist myself, but if I was writing the story of the current American Left, instead of the Right, then the 2008 financial crisis and the Occupy movement would be a major transformative event!

Remember how popular Sarah Palin was for a large group of people? — Mikie

Oh, hell yeah. I felt like I wasn't really even voting for McCain -- I was voting for Sarah Palin. She brought all the energy to that campaign and putting her in the forefront of it was smart, because having a woman in charge broke every negative stereotype. That was strategically brilliant. Too bad it didn't actually succeed.

That’s where the ruling power is. Trump — for however different he is in many ways — hasn’t really strayed from the very policies that have been championed for decades: tax cuts, deregulation, small government, privatization. Same old, same old. — Mikie

I know. You're not wrong -- and this is the real problem with Trump. Not that he's a Nazi. Not that he's secretly a Russian asset. Not that he's a pedophile with Jeffrey Epstein. Not any of that stupid crap. That he's precisely all the things he says he is -- a rich New York real estate mogul and reality TV star.

If the Democrats had a young, handsome, non-gay white male version of Bernie Sanders to say that, especially if he had a legit family with kids, then he'd be in the White House right now. Policies wouldn't matter. Appear normal, be JFK, appear genuinely more in touch with the voters than the other guy, that's all.

I'm not afraid to give that advice because I'm pretty sure the Democrats aren't going to do it. Because aesthetically, the person I'm describing is pretty much J. D. Vance.

This is always strange to me, and before we go further, I want to ask if you think the 2020 election was stolen and if you think Trump tried to steal that election. — RogueAI

Q: Was the 2020 election stolen?

A: Technically yes, but crucially, not through mass vote fraud. That is Trump's mistake. An electoral college majority of American voters really did vote for Biden. However, real American elections involve more than just counting slips of paper on election day. The whole 2020 campaign season was heavily manipulated by mass social media censorship, more than any election ever was before and by every major social media company in one exclusively partisan direction -- for Biden. The most obvious smoking gun we have on this is the Hunter Biden laptop story. The October Surprise of 2020 -- the most explosive and entirely true political story of the whole campaign, brought forward by the New York Post, a 200 year old bastion of American journalism founded by Alexander Hamilton -- was systematically suppressed by this totally impenetrable megacorporate monopoly / cabal all acting together in completely aligned and coordinated ideological lock step. That's where the election was stolen -- not on election day, but by depriving the American people en masse of the ability to talk to each other, deliberate about this election and make up their own minds. The gatekeepers of truth utterly failed us during that whole period, putting their own agendas over any sense of objectivity or integrity. And the subsequent buyers remorse during the Biden administration was real.

Maybe Trump's response to this problem has been misguided and disproportionate. But he's not wrong in the basic belief that something fishy was going on -- not just on that one day, but for that whole year.

I see Elon Musk buying X as an attempt to address this problem and it has been making a difference, but one billionaire breaking the monopoly doesn't address the underlying systemic causes of this mass institutional failure. I was once a true believer, but Boomer Conservatism cannot address see or think in systems and that absolutely kills it for me. Long term, policy is going to have to address this large scale civilizational problem that is far bigger than just one election.

Q: Do you think any of that constitutes an illegal effort on Trump's part to stay in power?

A: I don't care about it very much frankly. I think Mr. Trump was acting foolishly but I can also see why he and many around him thought there was something fishy going on. I think Mr. Trump sensed something really crooked was going on in this election -- and it was -- but he misidentified where, probably because he's an old guy who doesn't understand technology. And it is a huge problem that he didn't and apparently still doesn't have enough responsible people around him to push back and stop him from going as far as he has on this whole mass vote fraud thing, no matter what evidence comes out. For him to keep hammering on this and not shut up about it is embarassing, I admit it. Even if he was right, which he isn't, it's a bad political strategy and a distraction from the real villain of 2020 -- BIG TECH!

I actually respect how Mike Pence said no to Trump's alternate electors scheme. Alternate electors, as I understand it, would be a way to address mass vote fraud if it was in fact going on (which it wasn't) and Pence was correct to identify that this was an inappropriate move by Trump, not because it was illegal or even immoral but because it was based on materially false premises.

I just wish Pence hadn't then gone on to keep making a big stink about it for years afterwards. That kind of tarnishes the achievement in my eyes.

I also feel like we need to recognize the world that Trump was acting in. We were dealing with a situation in which the people involved had materially substantiated reasons to distrust the institutions of consensus generation across our whole society. There was a system-wide cascade failure of epistemic credibility, where no one could trust anyone anymore -- one from which we still haven't fully recovered.

You should know that from the outside BOTH parties in the US are very much Right Wing. — I like sushi

This only means that neither party is explicitly Communist nor socialist in its policies. On the one issue of economics, libertarianism has dominated in both parties for a long time.

But the American Left is very, very far from center on social issues -- and that's what I care about. It gets its leftism not direct from Marx, but from the Frankfurt School & critical theory. Which is, despite not being economic, still very far from anything any reasonable human on Earth could consider centrist.

Did you vote for Trump in 2024? — RogueAI

Over Kamala Harris? Over any Democrat? Hell yes I did. I had to hold my nose a little because of some problems with Trump, but as far as I am concerned, if your reality denial is so deep that you can't say what a woman is then you have to be kept out of power over anything anywhere ever, no matter how trivial.

You didn't mention the conspiracy theory lunacy that has taken over much of the Right. Don't you think that's a big problem? — RogueAI

Frankly, no. Ever heard of Snowden, Wikileaks, GameJournoPros, JounoList, Madoff, Epstein, Sam Bankman-Fried, the laptop from Hell or the Twitter Files? Hell, have you ever heard of Watergate?

How many documented credible disclosures does it take for basic pattern recognition to start working for you?

The age of conspiracy theory is over. We are now living in the age of conspiracy fact.

he had our Dear Leader pegged as a narcissist years ago — Ciceronianus

Conflating Trump to Kim Jong Un is just ridiculous. In another twenty years, you will see Trump in the same way Democrats currently see George W. Bush, as who you'd prefer to have over the current guy. Not because the future guy will be genuinely more extreme but just because you have no real long term perspective.

Who is a good exemplar of non-libertarianism on the right? Do Trump’s tariffs count? — Joshs

Nobody's real consistent on this and I see this as a newly emerging political category. It's not strictly identified with Trump but there are a few things Trump has done that push this way which I see as positive -- but also mixed in with other negative stuff from Trump which pushes the other way too sometimes.

One thing I see as positive is Trump's proposal from just this week that big institutional investors buying up single family homes should be regulated. That is NOT OK with the Buckley types! That is NOT "free market" at all! But it seems like it could be the right direction, depending of course on how it's implemented becuase we haven't found out a lot of details yet.

On the tariffs, I'm not sure. Tariffs definitely aren't libertarian, because tariffs are taxes and libertairans are for cutting taxes. So raising tariffs is definitely a non-libertarian move -- I'm just not sure it's the right one because Trump's version may be going too far on it and may not be adequately judging which imports to levy the tariffs on strategically enough. On top of this, Trump kept going back and forth on his public plans for tariffs, probably as a negotiating tactic when dealing with foreign leaders, but this did cause a lot of short term economic damage, possibly more than was necessary. So while I'm not opposed to tariffs as one tool of government in principle, I'm not sure Trump is going about this the best way he potentially could and remain reserved about it because it could backfire. I don't know. Tariffs as a policy are inherently a long term play with known short term costs.

I do think some kind of digital bill of rights for Americans which outlines what we do get to be able to do with technology would be something we need for the future. It should involve loosening up IP law (which libertarian philosophy says we should do but the libertarians themselves will almost never talk about) and placing mandates on technology companies which guarantee user rights for repair, customization, backups, tinkering, etc. Something that aligns incentives to structurally protect free political speech online and to foster innovation by preventing technological enclosure. That's really important for me personally -- and that's really really not "free market" compatible.

They’re despicable to you not because they aren’t taking an honest, principled stance but because they aren’t as conservative as you are. It shows how fringe Trump is that even you don’t like him. — Joshs

No, it's because their criticism isn't constructive. They're bitter about their ideas not being in vogue -- specifically because their libertarianism on economics, which you also oppose, has manifestly failed in practice and they still haven't accepted the reality of that failure. The rest of it is all camoflage IMV

(later edit: OK, maybe not every one of their critiques is non-constructive, because heaven knows it's easy to point out real flaws in any administration, but this is definitely the overarching impression I get of the current National Review types)

The Left finds them useful now not just because they hate Trump but because the Left has internalized the same libertarianism on economics, so long as they agree with the sexuality and color of the people on the executive board of the corrupt megacorporation and the DEI quotas are met.

If I thought these people were ever going to be able to truly revitalize the Buckley fusionist coalition and it could work and they had a viable strategy to reign in Big Tech and if all it cost was contracting a case of TDS then that would be great news for me! It'd be a very high reward, low risk proposition. The trouble is that I know they can't do that -- libertarianism CANNOT meaningfully coherently explain what's wrong with Big Tech. Nothing they can propose which fits within their ideological framework can address the problem.

Now I don't think Trump necessarily solves this problem either. But Trump functions to widen the Overton window, which is desperately needed if anyone's ever going to emerge with a plan that actually can solve this. These old guys are trying to narrow the Overton window, which is precisely the opposite of what's needed right now to face the real problems of the current generation.

I think first it should be noted the fears that are typical for present day populism: take the replacement theory, for example: that the evil elites want to replace ordinary people. — ssu

The Great Replacement exists in a quantum state.
If you say that the Great Replacement is real, but is a good thing, then this is an argument that is allowed to be taken seriously and given real credence.
But if you say that the Great Replacement is real, but is a bad thing, then that is dismissed as a racist conspriacy theory which is beneath rational discussion.
The exisence of the phenomenon as a statistical fact is subject to epistemic uncertainty a lot like Shrodinger's Cat until the moral evaluation is brought forward to frame it, thus collapsing the waveform. Only once the speaker's morality is observed do their statistical facts become distinguishable as reality or conspiracy theory.
In this way, the fact of the existence of the Great Replacement is determined, not by statistics, but by moral evaluation and rhetorical framing.

That aspect of the Left's argument on this is utter bullshit. Settle whether it's happening or not first, which should be strictly based on the data, before we go evaluating it as good or bad or neutral.

Here's the thing on the demographic shift: I am perfectly happy to replace certain categories of whites whom I don't like with browns. If the browns coming in are family oriented Catholics while the whites getting replaced are wokist vegans with alternative sexuality from San Francisco, then I say hell yeah, let's have more browns. What I really don't want is criminal or slave class browns coming in to replace blue collar working class whites, in a way that I think of as more about class than race. I'm OK with bringing in non-whites as long as they are the kind of non-whites who are going to help build a civilization and not the kind who are going to tear one down.

But fundamentally, completely apart from any ideology which says there's anything particularly special or superior about whites, absolutely nobody should be expected to just accept a system which is deliberately, maliciously stomping on their people's faces, no matter what color they are, no matter what period of history it is and no matter whether academic elites say they get to count as "historically marginalized" or not.

I gave you a chance to get beyond the ‘you guys vs us guys’ rhetoric when I gave you a long list of the kind of people you said in your OP that you endorsed as thoughtful role models of Buckley-National Review political thought. I explained that none of them had any problem making a distinction between executive overreach and straight-out autocracy. They all placed Trump in the latter category. Most of the figures on that list have explicitly singled Trump out as exceptional among U.S. presidents in the degree, explicitness, and persistence of his autocratic instincts, not merely as “another flawed president” or an intensification of familiar abuses of power. — Joshs

What they're really doing, in my view, is kind of despicable, because National Review today would rather flat out side with the rabid lunacy of the woke Left than work with a flawed but politically viable Right-leaning leadership. I don't see today's National Review as genuinely constructing anything new: all they ever do is criticize and their criticism is empty.

Trump is not a "threat to democracy" unless the term "democracy" means "permanent, one-party rule by the Democrats." There's going to be an election in 2028. There's going to be a peaceful transfer of power, no matter who wins. Things are going to be normal.

They repeatedly emphasize features they regard as unprecedented in the modern presidency: the open denial of electoral legitimacy, — Joshs

That's only because it's usually the losers who waste oxygen on complaining about the legitimacy of past elections they lost. But complain they do, as the Democrats in fact did in 2000 and again in 2016 when "Russian bots" and Cambridge Analytica were the reason for Trump's victory, not Americans dissatisfaction with the status quo.

the personalization of state institutions, — Joshs

Trump is a real narcissist, naming things after himself instead of after past historical figures, which is in real bad taste but not deeply significant long term.

the systematic attack on independent courts and the press as enemies of the people, — Joshs

About the courts: You attack the courts whenever Trump appointees didn't rule your way, most notably in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. That's normal whenever the ruling doesn't go the speaker's way and not significant.

As for the press, Trump is absolutely right about the press and you're even willing to accept that as being right when the same words, with nouns swapped out, come from leftists regarding FOX News, politicall talk radio and anywhere else that isn't perfectly aligned with your politics.

I've seen firsthand the kind of lies the Leftist press constantly do, where a gathering of thousands versus a tiny contingent of 16 was selectively photographed and narratively framed to make the sides look evenly matched. They are the enemies of the people, they chose to become the enemies of the people and it was past time someone said it.

There's no such thing as a political independent, let alone a politiclly independent journalist.

the use of office for personal loyalty rather than institutional fidelity, — Joshs

This is something Democrats have always done and which Republicans, if they ever want to do more than setting speed limits on Democrat policies, cannot avoid doing. Frankly, Trump can't do this fast enough as far as I'm concerned -- not based so much on personal loyalty to Mr. Trump, but making appointments based on ideological alignment with the larger project of the American Right is something that strategically cannot be avoided for them if they like still existing culturally in the long term -- and it's something Democrat administrations have never shied away from doing.

Will, in particular, has framed Trump as the first president to govern as though the Constitution were an inconvenience rather than a binding structure. — Joshs

Actually, I would identify that as not being the most recent Republican President, but instead as having been the first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln.

And I actually like Lincoln. I think naive Constitutionalism is one of the false premises that has to be let go of on the American Right. The Constitution was made to serve the people, and not the other way around.

I have no problem in accepting that a broad swath of the American public always harbored autocratic instincts, but that until the past 50 years this segment was hidden within a mixed electorate characterizing both parties. — Joshs

When FDR massively expanded the powers of the executive branch and when Obama said, "I have a pen and a phone" you clapped like a circus seal and never gave the implications of that expansion a second thought. This is just pure partisanship, not rooted in a genuine suspicion of executive power. The same thing is good when your guys do it but bad when the other guys do it.

On the other hand, you do have a legitimate insight that there seem to be "two Americas" -- and the division is not just about means nor even about ends, but is increasingly about epistemology. We don't even have shared facts anymore.

They are extremely far removed from any political, ethical, social or scientific values that I and the majority of those living alongside me in my urban community relate to and thrive within. — Joshs

Oh please. Science is downstream from money which is downstream from values. You get whatever science you fund. If the Nazis fund science, you get Nazi science. If the Communists fund science, you get Communist science. If the Capitalists fund science, you get Capitalist science. There are no such things as "scientific values" produced independently of the real deciders of the kinds of questions scientists will be given the funds to research. Scientists are trained monkeys in lab coats with delusions of grandeur, not leaders.

One area where I see the American Left as correct is that Trump really did lose the 2020 election and his continued insistence that he really won it is blatant reality denial -- always a serious problem. On the other hand, I'm not really prepared to take this critique seriously when it is coming from people who are themselves so deep into reality denial that they cannot answer basic questions of trivially observable mundane everyday reality like what a woman is.

I guess the big elephant in the room I haven't talked about is immigration -- but the reality is that immigration is not officially a partisan issue. Officially, Kamala Harris argued not that American immigration law is inherently racist and evil, but that American immigration law is just fine and that the Biden administration was doing a great job of enforcing it. Look it up: that was her stance.

As such, if I was to do apologetics for the Trump administration's immigration enforcement, it would seem like I am arguing with a strawman, because Democrat politicians have not been willing to explicitly embrace the open borders rhetoric of their base. The press will do it, but never the politicians.

Trump's actions on immigration are just a more consistent enforcement of existing laws that both parties voted for and neither party was willing to repeal and that's all.

Some of the rhetoric and new policy direction has been trying to reform the system in order to make enforcement practical, because we can't spend months arguing in court to deport every individual when it took only minutes for them to enter. The policy will need to adjust for the reality that the overall migratory flow direction needs to be outwards, not inwards, at least until we've got things settled. But none of it has been all that radical: it is all based on existing American law with longstanding bipartisan support.

This isn't just a right wing action and it's ridiculous to smear Trump as extreme for doing the exact same stuff as Obama and Biden, just more consistently.

You can have a welfare state xor you can have open borders, but you can't have both.

Buckley himself was not exactly an enthusiastic supporter of the Civil Rights movement when it counted. — Joshs

When did it count? Did it count in the early 1960s or over the long term course of the next half century. You're still playing "gotcha" by trying to dig up old quotes in order to character-assassinate Buckley and not trying to gain an understanding of the historical reality of the Republican party, what they really believe and why these people believe the things they do. That's the point I'm trying to make, not to run historical revisionist apologia for the personal character of William F. Buckley.

Maybe I expressed the conservative movement's embracing of liberalism on race in a way that was a little revisionist about the early 60s, but what I'm trying to articulate is the actual content of the ideology that formed a core tenet of the movement by the time they really got into power: that all men are created equal. I may need to revise how I discuss this, but I'm not imagining the fact of this as a core tenet.

Buckley rejected Rand’s insistence on absolute rationalism and her rejection of tradition and religion as arbiters of morality. — Joshs

I think Buckley rejected Rand's atheism -- which is not synonymous with rationality and rejecting it is not an anti-reason project -- and Rand's moral framework of altruism being evil, largely following Whittaker Chambers on this.

Many of the most direct and scathing attacks on Trump I have read have come from old line National Review conservatives like David Brooks, Peter Wehner, David Frum, George Will, William Kristol, Charles Krauhammer, Michael Gerson, Ross Douthat , and many others. These conservatives were the first to raise the alarm that Trump is ANYTHING but a normal politician, and that his playbook is explicitly autocratic and a direct threat to the survival of American democracy — Joshs

National Review had changed a lot by then, no longer being the central vangard of the broad movement that it once was, no longer representing the cross section of different factions it once did. But even still, the real cause of these people's alarm isn't that Trump really is so extreme (that's ridiculously overblown) but that the massive success of Trump does stand as a public indictment of the older ideology of National Review (and what remnants of it are still represented by its current editors) as dying, on a civilizational level. Doctrinaire retrenchment of Buckley fusionism is not going to save the American Right. In my opinion, only a new construction can -- and it's going to have to be a lot more flexible.

As an old-fashioned socialist, it's clear to me that "the left" lost its way when it turned from class (working class, ruling class conflicts) and toward identity -- all the woke crap of gender, race, etc. I am also an old fashioned gay, the sexual liberation era immediately post Stonewall. "We" (whoever belongs in that collective noun) weren't interested in gay marriage and family and trans identity (etc). I'm still not (though at 80 years old, it's now kind of irrelevant). Whether one is gay, straight, some sort of transgender, male, female, and so on is only personally important. Economics trumps identity. — BC

That is exactly the situation on the American Left but unfortunately, I'm not able to tell them this as a friend and they absolutely aren't going to hear it coming from an enemy. But the reality is that left wing identitarian politics is exactly as toxic, corrosive and dangerous as white nationalism on the American Right ever was. Ditching that -- for both sides -- is going to be a precondition for ever reaching across the aisle for Americans to work together on anything ever again.

Horseshoe theory is real.

Is it gospel? Probably not, but the gospel truth is pretty hard to find. — BC

Oh, absolutely. I recognize here that what I'm doing is articulating an opinionated interpretation of political history and that this isn't the only valid one that could be constructed. But I would argue that it is a valid one -- that when we say "American conservative" we mean not just conservatism as a perrennial mindset which exists in every society, but a very specific, historically contingent ideological stack -- one which Reagan was in and Nixon was out. One which I still admire, despite no longer fully believing in. And one which, in the 2010s, has shown clear signs of expiration. It now needs a replacement, just as it replaced the previous American conservatism before it.

This is an ideological stack which was preceded by influences from people like Whittaker Chambers and Russell Kirk, was first articulated and formed into a coalition by William F. Buckley, was championed into national public office by Ronald Reagan, was further popularized by Rush Limbaugh, started to break under the attempt to redirect it under George W. Bush and finally has broken against the reality of Woke Capitalism in the 2010s having openly demonstrated the faillure of Buckley fusionist conservatism to deliver on its own promises, combined with Trump's far less intellectual populism making it seem not just wrong, but irrelevant to current events.

Milton Friedman's doctrine of market self-correction -- Adam Smith's invisible hand -- has been definitively discredited by seeing what happened to Americans freedom, especially during COVID. The people still preaching that crap, I now see as fundamentally unserious, not willing to base their beliefs on data from the real world. This time, the rich really are getting richer and the poor really are getting poorer. Libertarian economics has to go.

I think Gore Vidal was quite right. The "property party" isn't about the working class owning a car and a house (if they are lucky). — BC

I think real historical Communist regimes really were against the working class owning a car and a house and were simultaneously just as supportive of societal elites owning a limo and a mansion as any Capitalist regime ever was and the reasons for this are structurally unavoidable. All they did was a reshuffling of elites in such a way as to discard merit as a criterion for elite status. That killed their project.

And that's also why the current year wokists project is also doomed.

It's about the rights and prerogatives of the wealthiest class who own and control capital wealth -- stocks, bonds, factories, income-producing properties, businesses, and so on. The 1% is not a new group in American society; the rich we have with us for a long time, generally calling the shots. — BC

That's not just American society: that's every society. That's the Golden Rule: "Whoever has the gold, makes the rules."

I'm not at all confident in utopian schemes which make grand claims that we can somehow get away from this near universal reality of human life. I would instead be inclined to look at policy to align incentives so that the reward of wealth stays linked to socially constructive and morally positive behaviors.

The Left has an ideological crisis right now too, but I honestly have difficulty articulating it in a non-polemic way, since I'm not one of them myself.

It is just a fact that American blacks are in fact responsible for many of their problems -- just like American whites are in fact responsible for many of their problems. Not all, but many. The narrative that systemic oppression is to blame for every single problem anyone ever has ever is indefensible. And this is a truth that every group is eventually going to have to acknowledge about itself if they're ever going to truly become real citizens, not just formally, but morally. Real citizens aren't just victims of circumstance -- they're moral agents.

But it's true that Buckley didn't come right out of the gate with support for the Civil Rights movement initially. It was a transition which took some time. But the point is that it was a real transition. And not just for Buckley personally, but for his movement. It wasn't a cynical plot to fool minorities into voting for Republicans in order to get white nationalist policies passed once in office. It genuinely became not just acceptable and not just a historically contingent strategy, but fully internalized institutional dogma.

I feel like I should maybe clarify why I perceive Vidal as having Communist sympathies: It's because his rhetoric on Vietnam went so far, to what I perceive as such an extreme, that he seemed to regard Soviet expansion as a totally reasonable option for people and not as a threat at all, neither short nor long term. It wasn't just that we should stay out of foreign wars: Soviet domination was just a different way of organizing resources to Vidal, which to someone on the Right sounds like a claim that the Holocaust was just a different way of arranging train schedules.

Maybe Vidal wasn't really a Communist sympathizer: maybe he was just another Chamberlain who let his rhetoric against the Vietnam war go too far on occasion. But combining that with his extreme views on sexuality which seem not just hedonistic but intentionally subversive and the result is that I don't perceive him as really being right-of-center at all.

I see debating the wisdom of pursuing particular war policies as reasonable, but doctrinaire pacifism as absurd. My approach to war would be informed by Thomist just war theory. If you go over just war theory and explain why a particular cause for warfare is good or bad, that'd pretty much be how you'd persuade me one way or the other on it. But I see total pacifism that isn't historically contingent on the specific injustice of a particular cause as unserious because incapable of sustaining a real human community. Talk like that is parasitic on those who provided the material security to allow that kind of talk.

a religion strongly based on war. — Athena

War is a universal human default expierence. Your constant assumption that pacifism is somehow the norm is false. Pacifism is a luxury belief that grows up under air conditioned circumstances among people who have never dealt with real life.

I know what philosophy is. I have a BA in it. The fact that my post does discuss particular candidates and electoral cycles means it doesn't qualify as being political philosophy itself and I know that. You're right about that part.

However, the point I make in the essay is the need for a new unifying political philosophy on the American Right. Understanding the recent history I discuss would be a prerequisite for developing any such theory. It's an essay about why political philosophy is needed, who needs it and where it's needed. So even though it's technically more politics than philosophy, it is an essay about the necessity of political philosophy, which does make it relevant to political philosophy.

I clicked "join" many years ago but just didn't participate much at that time.

I don't know who you're talking about but whatever. You're clearly neither liberal nor democratic.

Now, if anyone wants to talk about WW2 nostalgia then I'm all for that, outside of politics. I could talk about WW2 cinema like "Sargeant York" or "Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon" and how great the golden age of Hollywood and old timey radio was. I'm a huge fan of Wolfenstein 3-D to go shoot the Nazis. But uh, that's cause, y'know, they represent actual Nazis. Knowing that a woman is an adult human female doesn't make someone a Nazi.

Hitler actually was bad, mkay. But he's so ridiculously overused as to have gone beyond absurdity into an absolute iron clad rule that bringing him up in any context that isn't firmly historical deserves only mockery and no apology at this point. You've played that card too many times. It's worn out. You need a new Satan.

Christian nationalism is the attitude that all Americans should be Christian. — frank

Then the "nationalism" part is redundant, because Jesus said, "Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature."

The people who are worried about "political Islam" are also anti-Semitic, homophobic, racist, and sexist. And they publicly praise Adolph Hitler. — frank

The people who are worried about "anti-Semitic, homophobic, racist, and sexist" are lunatics who think every politician from the party opposite theirs is literally Hitler, no matter what they say, no matter what they do. Always Hitler. And not even any other monster of history like Stalin, Mao or Pol-Pot: always always Hitler and only Hitler. Every time all the time Hitler everywhere Hitler everyone is Hitler.

Have you ever considered mixing it up a little? It doesn't even have to be a Communist dictator. How about mentioning Mussolini, Franco or Pinochet?

It's likely to be Vance's Christian nationalism in 2028 if the Republicans win. — BitconnectCarlos

"Christian nationalism" isn't a clear idea either. I'm a Christian and a civic nationalist -- does that make me a Christian nationalist? The press wants to make "Christian nationalist" a pejorative label and that's why a politician as smart as Vance won't touch it -- not until or unless he is in a situation where he gets to define what the term will henceforth mean. Otherwise, it is just going to be abused by the Leftist press to category-launder him in with some random fringe nutcase somewhere by changing what "Christian nationalist" means the next day after he says he is one.

Conservatives today are deeply concerned with mass migration and political Islam rather than free market capitalism. — BitconnectCarlos

They haven't yet become willing to acknowledge the fact of the failure which has ocurred. Libertarianism offers no defense against Woke Capitalism and that's why it has to go.

No, actually. You've been wrapped up in your own side's propaganda. We know what governance under Buckley conservatives is like, because it is played out history now. They've had a trifecta multiple times and that shows their real policy. Accusing them of not being liberal on race IS a conspiracy theory contradicted by real world evidence. They were in fact not racialists. Past tense, where we now have absolute knowledge. That's not speculation. That is history now.

Can you see seriously any elements of the US right going agaisnt the corporations? — Tom Storm

They already have, if Disney counts. You would not believe how much and how many people hate Amazon's Rings of Power on a zealous, religious level. I really think the American Right is ripe for explicit anti-corporatism to take hold.

All that stuff about Big Tech, wokeness, shipping jobs overseas and DEI: that's not really about women or brown people. That is about corporate HR.

But it isn't enough. They won't make the reasons explicit yet that libertarian economics (lack of regulation) is the problem. I am hoping soon they will get there.

Is there really a right wing and a left wing in the US, or was Gore Vidal right when he said, “There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat”? — Tom Storm

It's amazing how that one debate of Buckley v. Vidal in 1968 continues to define American politics!

Vidal was just a Communist bemoaning the fact that neither American political party was explicitly Communist because both of them preferred living over dying. I notice Vidal was absolutely protective of his own property and the profits from his book and film royalties. Vidal's life illustrates Conquest's First Law: "Everyone is conservative about what he knows best."

What do you even want in a political party that doesn't protect property at all? Bread lines? Purges? Gulags? Chernobyl?

I'm willing to move left on economics ... but within some limits.

As I see it, we need to protect private individual property from corporate overreach, not abolish private property!

Trump doesn't seem to be a conservative, he's more of a radical. — Tom Storm

I don't know if Trump is radical enough for me.

Or are they just a showbiz distraction? — Tom Storm

Like Gore Vidal was? He was clearly part of the show if anyone ever was, not above it.

Aren't some of the debate guys also canaries in the coalmine? Testing sometimes appalling positions to see if the public has an appetite for them? — Tom Storm

I can't say there are none, but that is in general not the problem you're facing.

What is your potion on corporate power in general? — Tom Storm

That is, I think, my main point. The Right needs to go anti-corporate in a big way. Wall Street abandoned us in 2008, then actively persecuted us from 2014-2024. It is time they got what's coming to them: a massive regulatory backlash. An American right wing actually willing to wield political power because it has ditched libertarianism to reign in and stop Woke Capitalism.

Speaking of disappointment, Ben, your comment addresses nothing specific in the video. — Art48

OK fair enough, but am I right about the initial impression? Is this just garden variety Reddit atheism from the 2000s or do you have a thesis which is actually new, or even somehow develops that premise further than others?

By the way, it's not required for your position to be new in order to have merit for someone else. Just for me to be interested in it personally.

Exactly. Once you downplay and subvert the function of language to define itself and fix its terms, you destroy the ability of two communicants to coalesce on a shared understanding. Once you try to argue that “woman” need not mean the same thing to me and to you, today and tomorrow, then why bother trying to clarify anything? Whatever is clarified is not actually clear, and the words used to clarify it are not clarifying. — Fire Ologist

I would usually not want to bring up Matt Walsh because he's not philosophically deep and the politics he normally espouses are neither original nor interesting. The Daily Wire people are not only shallow but still not critical enough of the dogmas of the old Conservative Inc faction for my taste.

But Walsh was right about this one thing. What you just said is the central thesis of his mockumentary, "What is a Woman?" If it was OK to cite Michael Moore's documentaries in the 2000s, then turnabout is fair play. Walsh directly hit the very heart of the issue dividing our civilization.

This is for people who are really trying to dissect the phrase and think about it in non-political way. — Philosophim

OK, I can see how my argument won't seem constructive to you because it doesn't accept enough of your basic premises to help you refine it. But I think what you're really doing here is smuggling in the deeply, inherently political and pretending you can treat it as non-political, in order to establish norms which make trans political victory inevitable. And by "inevitable" I mean that one can't even say one diasgrees, not just because it's against the rules but because this aims to take away the words necessary to even express the idea. Meaning, "trans" language use is Orwell's Newspeak.

Nazis -- assuming we're talking about the very real 1930s-40s political force here and not your leftist fantasy -- would be an example of the kind of people who needed killing, as Churchhill and Roosevelt correctly pointed out. America's military-industrial complex is what beat the Nazis.

If we're ever going to talk about Nazis then let's keep it historically grounded in who the actual Nazis were and why we fought them, not indulge in self-serving self-righteous current year political metaphor & revisionism.

I'm a Foucault guy, so my narrative tends toward discursive power.

Foucault was a critical theorist which puts him in this same post-Marxist / neo-Marxist space where social idenities replace economic determinism as the drivers of oppression, which formed the academic and ideological grounding for the current anti-liberal "woke" worldivew.

Now personally, I'm against that entire worldview, but that doesn't mean that all of the critical theorists were completely devoid of insight either. For example, Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" while I strongly disagree with his main thesis, does raise some valid ancellary points. Maybe Focault does too: I haven't read him.

And this post is an attempt to get away from that.

My argument is, you can't. This isn't a position which only seems political on the surface, but underneath it is making a good faith sincere general point about language. The reality is: this is politics all the way down, with nothing underneath but more politics. The politics of the trans movement is doing aren't there to serve their preferences about language as a goal: their preferences about langauge are only a means to their overtly political ends.

Has someone done that?

Yes, yours did that, which is what my argument about the age of consent demonstrates.

> "Ah, excuse me I don't see how the story of Ham can have any merit."

The idea of linking Ham to Africans is a later addition, not from the original story at all. The original story was saying something completely different from that very modern spin by white racialists. But at the same time, the Bible does not assume or even permit your modern quasi-Marxist moral framework in which slavery and colonialism are the prime historical evil to which all other evils are lesser. Just like how the Bible doesn't support the white racialists modern moral framework, it doesn't support yours either. So while you're wrong to attribute this white racialist moral framework to the story of Ham in the Bible, you're not wrong to have gathered that the Bible in fact does have a different moral framework from yours. It just isn't the same one as the white racialists.

> "Those stories are about worshiping a God of war,"

Sometimes people need killing. I'm not a pacifist.

> "leading to our very offensive culture"

Sometimes people should be offended.

> "in the US prepared for the Military-Industrial Complex and acts of war that violate international agreements."

I'm not a globalist either.

What the Book of Mormon is doing to white racialism is far more devastating than what you're doing. What you're doing is an external attack: rejecting the basic premises and asserting your own alien moral framework to judge the position from outside. What the Book of Mormon is doing is accepting the basic premises and moral framework and then showing, from the inside, how completely unworkable the position is. (which emerges near the conclusion of the narrative) And that is far more powerful than an external attack could ever be.

But again, it also isn't compatible with your quasi-Marxism so that doesn't mean it's necessarily on your side, except for also by coincidence being very clearly against 19th century white racialism as you are.

I admire William Blake's work on this actually and also Emerson, Lake and Palmer's surprisingly sincere and heartfelt rendition of it.

But the Book of Mormon is a little different, because Blake is using poetic license, while the Book of Mormon contains zero poetry. (that's not a critcism: it's a genre categorization. The Bible has poetry within it while the Book of Mormon does not contain any)

Also, the Book of Mormon claims that certain events surrounding the United States in particular are the literal fulfillment of some of the prophesies of Isaiah.

If you have a theory of language which appears to break down as soon as you swap out a few simple nouns, then I'd say that's a pretty strong argument against your theory of how we should be approaching language.

Words mean things! Or, as Richard Weaver put it, "Ideas have consequences"!

I recently encountered on another forum a really absurd argument, that, "It's not politics: it's human rights."

That's just so completely absurd, because human rights are the most political thing in the entire world. There's literally nothing more political in all of human capacity for thought than the concept of human rights.

Our society has normalized a great deal of what I call "category laundering" to pretend that the most obviously political things aren't political, right along with the absurd category laundering of men being women and vice versa.