by Brett Stevens on November 3, 2019

It is difficult to orient oneself when the ground keeps slipping beneath you. That might well describe this time, where political activity seems chaotic because it reflects a cultural battle that began long ago, in the 1990s.

During the previous decade, most of what had been happening with the culture wars went on hold. Carter screwed up badly and the media covered for him, since he was a True Believer like them, and then Reagan came in with a simple plan of Libertarianism, social conservatism, and beating the Reds.

The Left reprised their activities from the 1960s. Reagan became the new Hitler, despite having no Hitlerian attributes, and everyone who was “good” was mobilized — celebrities, academics, scientists, journalists — to constantly rail on how he was a nutcase who was going to end the world.

As it turned out, Reagan got the Soviets completely correctly, seeing them as an incompetent evil empire who could be goaded into self-destructing. Their weakness in the area of providing consumer goods plagued them because the entire world was living well on the industrial agriculture and manufacturing boom, but people in the Soviet Union could barely afford enough beets to make borscht. From a political standpoint, the worst aspect of this was that in theory, people would not need to fight over money in a Socialist paradise, but would simply get everything free in exchange for working.

Although there were political stumbles, ultimately what took the Soviets out happened when their citizens realized that they were living stone-age lifestyles compared to people in the West. Blue-jeans, Coca-Cola, rock ‘n roll, Hollywood, and McDonald’s became weapons of cultural warfare. Feeling like the kid in the corner who could not afford candy, the Soviet citizens became even more inclined toward low performance. Disasters like Chernobyl, which everyone knew about despite the news blackout, the uprising in Poland, the shooting down of KAL 007, and other crises which were muffled became elements of discontent. When Mathias Rust landed his small plane in Red Square, having flown in through the much-vaunted Soviet air defenses without detection, it seemed to announce the impotence of the old men trying to grind socialism into function through increasing militarism, espionage, and censorship.

On the surface, Reagan won. Stirring under the surface however the Leftist machine had gained total power. It unified an audience based on the idea that conservatives were intolerant, paralleling the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, and vaulted Bill Clinton into office with a promise to repair race relations in the style of LBJ, JFK, and FDR. He did this by establishing a new idea of not just tolerance but Black-first politics, essentially replacing American culture with Black culture in the eyes of the world. This resulted in the adoption of hip-hop by normal Americans, a loosening of social standards, and the formation of a party crew who wanted to smoke weed, have sex, and basically be libertine in the way they heard about on their gangsta rap records. Just as the Republicans skunked the Soviets with the more freedom and cool stuff in the West, the Left beat back the Right by portraying them as being intolerant of the ongoing party.

Things were good, back then. Cheap Chinese goods made everyday life more affordable, but even more, computers really kicked in, thanks mostly to Bill Gates standardizing desktop operating systems and the homebrew Linux operating system which took UNIX out of the mainframe lab and into embedded devices. Suddenly, we had even more consumer stuff, and it was good and cheap, and in the eyes of the Leftist base, this meant that we could stop doing all of that struggle and hardship we had during the Cold War and just let the good times roll. Clinton loosened lending, dumped money into the economy, issued tons of regulations that “created jobs,” and encouraged Silicon Valley to go hog wild, and this created a huge wealth boom that only ended when a government minority lending program tanked the housing market. That took the rest of the economy with it, but the real story is that the economy never really came back. The wealth had gone to China, taxes had risen across the board, and prosperity had left us to go into government and come out through those nice fat government checks.

People started to detect this, so they elected George W. Bush, who had a triumphant first term and then decided to fight a police action in a place that loves fighting, death, and destruction. While our armed forces performed well, there can be no victory when you take over a place and pledge to stay there until democracy works. The locals will sabotage it simply to have you keep footing the bills, going home after working for you in the daytime to shoot at you at night. The second Bush term produced a massive loss of confidence as a result, the sick economy never came back and had another hiccup, and in a tantrum the voters elected Obama. What got him elected was the Clinton machine, funded by China and internationalist NGOs, which again mobilized a massive cultural wave against the Right, this time using political correctness to style anything except total acceptance of civil rights, diversity, homosexuality, and drug use as not just the opposition but wrong, morally bad, evil, and Hitlerian. The Reagan-era Leftist playbook worked, and conservatives had not figured out a way to follow up to Reagan, so they tried to imitate him, which made no sense in the post-9/11 world.

Much as the cultural wave succeeded, however, in the late 1980s and 1990s a counter-protest began. These were people who were less political than concerned that modern society had become bad, simply because it was now wrapped in rules and red tape and revealed the raw ugliness of the mob. When people form a group, opinions devolve to the lowest common denominator, and people revert to the fear and libertine desires that one might expect from animals which have lost their way, and so are indulging in food, sex, revenge, theft, and laziness out of a panic at the inscrutable future. While most of society was reprising the 1970s and indulging in a consumer festival of epic proportions, the saner ones were objecting to how controlling and conformist society had become, not to mention that it was based on the illusion of accepting everyone, which basically means that we abolish standards and become mediocre. Immigrants poured into the country under Clinton and Bush under the excuse of being a boost to the economy as the Boomers retired, taking whatever they could seize and making huge amounts of money in the stock market with the dot-com booms. While on the surface everything was glorious, under the surface the people who were discontented were no longer stereotypical losers, but the bright and creative. They were excluded by the conformity, which now added political correctness to office politics and the sickeningly indulgent victim culture which had enwrapped the USA and Europe. It was suddenly not just acceptable to mention being raped, abused, or enslaved, but seen as a badge of courage, especially as we were celebrating the Black and homosexual experience, even as we covertly replaced Blacks with Mexicans in many areas.

That 1990s spirit carries on to today; in many ways, the world stopped developing in the 1990s, since our technology has not really done anything new, nor have we found anything other than the mix of liberal democracy, civil rights, and entitlements which became the standard in the early 1990s as the social conservatism of Reagan receded under the cultural wave. The big change involves the founding heritage Americans, who picked up on not just identity politics (sometimes called white nationalism or white supremacism) but the cultural wave, figuring that we could style the Left as the new Soviets and not be wrong. Now the revolutionaries of the 1960s and their ideological descendants were in control and making a mess of things, so it was time to mock their inflexible dogma and a narrative as blacked-out and lacking credibility as the Soviet attempts to hide Chernobyl. The Right had no idea where to go after Reagan, but now, it finally started getting its guts back with an anti-demographic replacement, social conservative, anti-entitlements, and anti-globalist platform. Essentially, most Americans woke up to find that the 1990s really had radically changed this country and Obama had wrecked the economy and our international strength, and that if we did not start undoing Leftist policy from the 1960s-1990s we were going to crash out hard.

This in turn prompted another offshoot, since the Right thrives on internal competition because it has no ideology and instead relies on gut instinct and realism, which wanted us to go back further. In the 1920s, many conservative writers sounded the alarm that WW1 was not a war, but a permanent state into which we had descended. The Civil War era push for civil rights was already transforming America, the government and urbanization had become too powerful, and all of our traditions and normal ways of life were being swallowed up and replaced by a plastic, anonymous, honorless, and nastily individualistic modern life. People became neurotic because there was a huge disconnect between the official message and what we experienced in daily life, consumerism made life ugly and brainless, and our leaders increasingly made symbolic gestures and gave out free stuff instead of attacking problems. WW2 made us get our act together, briefly, and we ended up on top of the world by having the only standing economy, but the rot was deep within. Modern life was morally, intellectually, spiritually, and existentially unsatisfying because nothing had a point except ideology and money, and neither of those resonated with the traditional American values of productivity, creativity, independent thought, and finding some kind of balance and peace with the universe by appreciating nature and the intensity of existence. Modernity in fact aimed to dull the intensity of existence, replacing it with everyday fears and worries, while the media kept us in a state of WW2-style militarization with wars on drugs, racism, Satanists, and global warming. Instead of the pioneer spirit, we lived in fear of stepping out of line, and political correctness took that to the next level.

For those of us who started writing back in the day, the big point was that modern society had inverted natural life and in its place erected a horror just as bad as Communism, National Socialism, or Fascism. The System™ had become more important than reality; the ideology had replaced common sense, logic, and any notion of continuity with what America had been. The Leftists revealed themselves to be the same fanatics who executed whole families after the French Revolution on the word of anonymous informants, and they had made it clear that their endgame was to keep society in the 1990s forever. We had been hoping that like the Cold War, the 1990s was a passing phase, simply because it made a vapid and soulless society which mirrored the accusations of Left against the Right in the 1980s. Now, finally, people are speaking out against this, using social conservatism — family, culture, genetics, caste, faith, customs, nature — as the basis of a new movement which aims to stop our ecocide, stop demographic replacement, and get us out of the crazy internationalist Leftist movement which includes globalism and diversity.

We are using the cultural wave, and it is changing things faster than expected. These are changes at the bottom of a pyramid of cause and effect, so they do not manifest directly in political, economic, and social changes, but more in the discarding of faith in the old way of life and a recognition that it is hollow and destructive. This means that big changes are afoot, and if we suffer now, it is from not dreaming big enough. When I look at the news, I see indicators like bits of bright wood floating in the surf, but there are massive forces churning below that remain invisible. These forces mostly consist of the reaction to the leading edge of failures by liberal democracy, not only in the markets, but in the existential discontent that has rocked the West since WW1 and finally come to a head. Not only is life miserable, but our societies openly hate on us who are descended from the founding groups, and this pushes too far against even the mildest-mannered person.

The people currently in charge of the Regime have no idea that this is coming, just like Brexit and Trump caught them by surprise, but this is always how it is with any group that has an agenda and narrative. They are focused on symbolic victory, not understanding reality, and reality consists of long arcs of cause and effect with many grades of nuance in the middle, all of which are oblivious to people thinking in 2D categorical imperatives like the Regime defenders. Their plans have failed, and they have no idea, because all of them live in cushy government jobs where they have enough money to scatter around to buy off the ghetto, taxes, rising costs, and increasingly dysfunctional services. Public healthcare terrible? Go to a specialist at the cash price. Neighborhood full of violence? Hire private security to keep your gated community safe.

This is how humans think, on the personal level: they want to personally avoid the crisis, rather than undertake the (relatively) minor changes required to avoid society falling apart. The people who end up in charge of a regime are always like this, because they may be vicious, but basically they are the same kids who sucked up to the teacher and got good grades even though the material was drivel. They are conformists, obedient, me-firsters above all else who understand that obedience means material reward to them, and this is the only kind of reward they recognize, since they are disordered minds leading to them barely having souls. Empty within, and grasping voraciously, they consume everything around them in their quest for power, and will never see change coming because they are too busy “succeeding” at their “careers” within the Regime.

We are in for a heck of a ride. Everything that people currently think is wise, is idiocy; much of what they consider to be insane, impossible, unlikely, implausible, and unreal is in fact real, but we have suppressed it under waves of democracy, media, and popular opinion (which like all things succumbs to entropy and tends toward the lowest common denominator) for a century. Just think: a century ago, WW1 was just ending; a century before that, the Napoleonic Wars had just ended, kicking off only eleven years after the Leftists assumed power, then ran that system into the ground too with high taxes and so much equality that no one did anything. The same sea change that the Left once wielded is now upon them; as they say, the problem with having a guillotine is that some day it comes for you. The axeman has come for the Left, and the hysterical screeching and bad behavior we see now in the media is the attempted manipulation by the entitled who have succeeded in this system and cannot conceive of it ending. Things will get nasty for awhile, and then we will get a chance to repatriate all the ethnic Other and then, to filter our own people by sending all of our Leftists, insane, criminal, perverse, and stupid/incompetent to Venezuela. The remaining 160m Americans will have a lovely time.

Anyway, on to the news, or “signs of the decline”:

Tags: linkpost, pipe meditations

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