The Time is Now

Throw out your clocks; the time is now.
The danger's at our door.
In arms must we remember how
To do our Fathers' chore.

The foreign, incommensurate
Must leave our hard-won land.
Cavaliers, Confederates
Have died where we must stand.

Take we the knife not by the blade
But with a proper grip.
The Good Lord who from dust us made
May ever guide our ship.

Sons of pioneers, be wise:
Hate not the coming flood.
Be heroes in your fathers' eyes;
Be worthy of your blood.

Notes on status and America's castes

nydwracu has recently told us regarding a college he's attended:

My guess would be that about a third of the students actively supported Universalism [let's call these folks type 1], about half passively supported it, believing it in the sense that one believes in Christianity on Sundays [type 2], and the rest disagreed, but kept their heads down [type 3]. The former two numbers increase with time served there.

This indicates that even among Brahmins there is not universal support for Universalism, and - as we'll shortly read - that this support is not, and does not have to be, truly passionate or congruent with one's actions.

I should note that here in Southeast Texas there are fewer type 1s and 2s, due to there being fewer Brahmins - though there are many Vaisya type 2s - and a mass of folks who are roughly type 3, but there is something of a gradient between Vaisya type 2s and aspiring Brahmins, and between types 3s and those who more or less "get it". With smatterings of Brahmins and Optimates, this area is almost evenly divided between Helots, Dalits, White Vaisyas, Antyajas, and non-White (mostly Asian) Vaisyas. This last group may be named as a seventh caste, but it bleeds into Helotdom, especially in more recent South Asian immigrants, and White Vaisyadom, due to White-Mestizo/White-Asian intermarriage. White Vaisyadom here, itself bleeding into Antyaja lowness, isn't doing so great - what would one expect, in relation to our great-great-grandfathers' age? - but it's perhaps in better condition than in Blue States.

All this diversity, and in particular the outnumbering of Brahmins by non-Brahmin Whites, means, however, that it's harder for Brahmin status to see acknowledgement outside the local Cathedral organs. I've also noticed, in mixed-race groups excluding Blacks, a general sentiment that Blacks are something of an odd race out and ought to be separate, and, indeed, that miscegenation is acceptable so long as it be not with them. Among all races, ideas of racial separatism or hierarchy and HBD aren't as hard to explain as to your average Brahmin, though - of course! - Whites are the ones with the biggest objections to it, albeit only when in large groups. In smaller groups and particularly one-on-one, they're willing to admit what they see.

nydwracu continues:

Part of it is plausibility. People exposed to one coherent narrative from sources they take as authoritative will begin to believe that narrative, especially if they don’t have the resources to notice its flaws. But part of it is that many parts of America are theocracies. It is made very clear by the structures of power what is to be believed. Universalist theocracy has no problem with its subjects taking Universalism as Sunday religion. Ruling Universalism is not Ingsoc; it requires its subjects to go through the motions of conforming, but doesn’t care whether or not they truly believe, or even whether they act according to the ruling belief system.

When Sunday-believing a memeplex confers status, that memeplex will appear much more powerful than it is.

A good tactical goal would be to break the association of Universalism and high status. The Cathedral relies on its soft totalitarianism. The less negative incentivization dissent carries, the more dissent will be observable. Crocodilism plays a key role in the maintenance of the appearance of consensus: dissent is associated with both inherent low status and with low-status groups. If you aren’t a Universalist, you must be a fedora-wearing MRA, or a bitcoin libertarian, or an inbred neo-Nazi!

There are innumerable ways to display dissent and to project an image; as these are engaged, mockery of Universalist extremists as low-status will become simultaneously easier and less necessary. Caste reconciliation can be attained as the fanatics are singled out.

A brief history of the Cathedral

On the makeup and development of the brain of USG4. Responding somewhat to these posts, as well as going over what I've said here.

Lothrop Stoddard's foretelling

Lothrop Stoddard largely predicted the situation in which the White peoples find themselves today; Radish Magazine has recently done an excellent treatment of his insights and their place under Cathedralism. Here I read the final chapter of The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920), adding occasional commentary, primarily regarding the need for the West to rally once more under the Cross.

The problem of the city

For the reactionary, there is trouble with cities - mass settlements of men and capital - as there is trouble with anything so mass. I've noted before the curious position of Frankfurt School types like Adorno, who champion mass politics yet despise mass culture; in the city thrives the germ of both. New blogger raptros_ presents the issue thus:

the question is: can cities be anything other than degenerate hellholes? or is the city incompatible with life under the Tradition?

let’s review what we know about cities today, during this time of Kali Yuga. some cities are beautiful. most cities are ugly. all cities are filled with degeneracy and violence. not very promising so far, but remember that the Traditional society is long dead. however, said the anti-city reactionary, move people out of the city, into country life, and they’ll return to the Tradition pretty damned fast. this gives us the strongest form I’ve seen of the anti-city claim, thus defining the ends of the debate:

-anti-city reaction: cities must be abandoned in favor of life close to the soil in order for Tradition to be restored and the degeneracy of the modern world to be defeated

-pro-city reaction: cities can be built to orient society to the transcendent (i.e. basically implementing Evola’s definition of Traditional society)

the anti-city group, while being much smaller (AFAIK), has the jump on the pro-city crowd: the former’s got a defined aesthetic -  that of the countryside, of the farm, of the village (etc). the task, then, for the pro-city types is to imagine an aesthetic for a city of the Tradition.
by the way, such an aesthetic is what we’ll need if we (in America, that is) want to provide a workable cultural alternative to the Cathedral, and such an alternative really is the best hope for defeating it. (what’s that, defeating it? well, I’m pretty sure I’ve already said I think we’re screwed if we don’t. can trying and failing be worse?)

More and more I find myself leaning towards the former end. A movement of young men of Tradition out of the cities, if history's examples are any good, will see favorable conditions; pioneers, it has been noted, have many descendants, and fecundity correlates with religiosity, to the muffled chagrin of many a Brahmin. Indeed, looking at current patterns of Brahmin and Vaisya concentration, we see much backing for the idea that a return to the countryside is our best bet. As JayMan points out:

Liberals are concentrated in old-colonial states, in places without much space to expand into. The reddest states on the other hand are areas with wide open stretches of land. Conservatives represent the “family oriented” progeny of pioneers. It is this that is perhaps the largest contributing factor to the baby gap that Steve Sailer discovered. Not only are people living in blue states discouraged from breeding by the high cost of living, they are less inclined to do so because their ancestors lived in areas that had no room for expansion for a long time. We can see what by looking the fertility rates of liberal (and sparsely populated) northern New England. The U.S. states of Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire have plenty of land and low land values, but aren’t very fecund. These places do not have much money, as this area lacks large cities. But then, this is also true of the empty Western states, such as Idaho, South Dakota, and Wyoming. The fertility in these Western states doesn’t seem to be so encumbered. The population in upper New England is largely composed of the original colonial stock; they lost their fast-breeding inklings long ago[.]

But let's consider the other end: what would the city of Tradition look like? The question should be answered in a separate post. We know for sure, though, that it will require much more legal restriction than the town or the village. nydwracu reminds us that this is already the case:

The trend in America is toward cities filling up with people who push liberal ideas everywhere else, but promote authoritarianism at home. Subsidiarity failure, benefiting the Cathedral. NYC wouldn’t vote Bloomberg for president; anywhere else, he’d be too racist for New Yorkers.

So we need to consider another question: do we want to appeal more to Vaisyas or to Brahmins? If the latter, taking the cities is the advisable attempt.

I say we post up in the country and form thin, flat agglomerations at most. From Fitzhugh, a Virginian original and no avowed agrarian, we find articulate support:

Large cities, like New York and London, are great curses, because they impoverish a world to enrich a neighborhood. Numerous small towns are great blessings, because they prevent the evil effects of centralization of trade, retain wealth and population at home, and diffuse happiness and intelligence, by begetting variety of pursuits, supporting schools, colleges and religious institutions, and affording the means of pleasant and frequent association.

Universalism: the winning political formula

Universalism is the world's most successful – if you count success in millions dead – religious sect. What makes it so lethal to its enemies is that isn't just a religion but a political formula – that is, a moral basis for political power, in this case that of the US government, whose nucleus, the Cathedral, is made up of the press and universities. But that government was not always a neopuritan bureaucracy.

The first government of the United States – we'll call it the First Union – was formed in 1777 under the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, which established a “firm league of friendship” between thirteen sovereign States. The political formula, then, was the consent of the States. The Second Union, established twelve years later, had a stronger central power structure; for example, the office of President of the United States in Congress Assembled, a mostly ceremonial position which had been held from 1781 on, was reformed into that of chief magistrate. This government had popular sovereignty, more or less, as its political formula, as did its successor, the Third Union, which emerged from the War of Secession. This government augmented executive power and weakened federalism – as Mencken put it:

The American people, North and South, went into the War as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects . . . what they thus lost they have never got back.

The Third Union kept, however, the written constitution of the Second, as did the next government of the United States. This one was firmly established in 1933, but its defining features – cologuing businessmen and intellectuals, military interventionism, and nascent Universalism - appear two decades earlier; it is under Wilson that the marks of the Fourth Union begin to creep in, a collectively sentient gangrene upon the limbs of older forms. Wilson establishes the precedent of ostensibly humanitarian foreign policy – whence the term Wilsonianism – and starts the Union upon the course of adopting Universalism as its political formula. Mencius Moldbug has written briefly on its history:

Universalism is the faith of our ruling caste, the Brahmins. It's best seen as the victory creed of World War II, and it's easy to connect to the various international institutions born in that victory, which Universalists still regard as sacred if occasionally stained by human frailty, much as an intelligent Catholic sees the Roman Church. (It is not a coincidence that "catholic" and "universal" are synonyms.)

Universalism is actually already the name of a Christian doctrine, the doctrine of universal salvation. This idea, that all dogs go to Heaven and there is no Hell, is best regarded as an extremist mutation of Calvinism, in which everyone is part of the elect. The modern idea of universal salvation comes to us from Unitarian thinkers such as Emerson, and forms the second half of UUism, whose devotees are, needless to say, Universalist to perfection. (It's an interesting exercise to compare the tenets of UUism to those of "political correctness.")

The Universalist synthesis united two American traditions that in the past had sometimes been at odds. One was the ecumenical mainline Protestant movement, exemplified by institutions such as the Federal Council of Churches, whose most daring theologians were moving toward humanism. The other was what might (with homage to Edward Bellamy) be called the Nationalist movement, a vast raft of secular pragmatists, socialists, anarchists, communists, and other reformers, who flocked to the German-inspired university system that developed in the late 19th century, becoming a sort of roach motel for bad ideas.

(One of the most sensible of the Nationalist philosophers, William James, seriously proposed paramilitary forced labor as the cure for all social ills - in 1906. Oh, Billy, if only you knew! And the utopia of Bellamy's enormously-influential Looking Backward (1888) is essentially the Soviet Union.)

While these groups had generally cooperated in the Progressive Era, there were some tensions - for example, over Prohibition, which the secular Nationalists found hard to swallow. These eased substantially in the New Deal, largely due to the brilliant coup in which Progressives captured the Democratic Party, their former opposition, and converted it into an extremist Progressive movement - while repealing Prohibition. FDR even had a book called Looking Forward printed under his name.

The various groups within the Nationalist movement, however – poor name, but Bellamy deserves the mention – were much less homogeneous than the ecumenicals were before the First World War, and Moldbug errs in calling them all reformers. These folks were often revolutionaries – reformers perhaps in the sense which includes Anabaptists. Many of them were anti-war but not generally opposed to violence, the anarchists in particular having a fondness for propaganda of the deed – that is, terror and blood for utopia. This nasty double tendency was an obvious blight upon the efforts of the more melonheaded among them – after all, they were heretics! No good progressive can oppose making the world safe for democracy – that is, terror and blood for utopia (whoops). Their ability to fuel serious labor unrest was also a threat. They were to be swept under the semantic rug of Bolshevism and the rug burned.

So what we'll call the upper Left – the pietists – needed to get rid of the rowdier elements of the lower Left, and the War was a perfect opportunity. Wilson conducted raids and had numerous anarchists, socialists, and pacifists deported – playing Nature for the evolution-by-selection of the new Brahmin species. Revolutionary socialism subsequently declined in popularity in the United States. And so Puritans won out over Quakers, the Union over the unions, and a new political formula was successfully being instilled. Many organs of the lower Left were in fact steadily made to converge with the nascent progressive mainstream, in a movement correlative to Brahmin generational development. For example, from a 1920 publication by New York City's Institute for Public Service:

The Nation and The New Republic, New York City, have printed many articles and editorials which pictured bolshevist theory and practice as less anarchistic than extreme critics have painted; and these magazines insist that they have been pro-fair-play not pro-bolshevist.

The Nation and The New Republic are now, of course, just another couple of stained glass panels in the Cathedral. Now compare an example from a family of our ruling caste: as well in 1920, Thomas W. Lamont was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Partner of J.P. Morgan & Co. from 1910, he unofficially advised Presidents Wilson and Hoover – why not Harding or Coolidge between them? I do wonder! – and helped formulate the Dawes Plan and the Young Plan. In 2006, his great-great-nephew ran for US Senate as a Democrat. Between their genes lies one Corliss Lamont, whose Wikipedia article is notably longer than that of his financier father and – a bit more notably - contains the following sentence:

As a part of his political activities he was the Chairman of National Council of American-Soviet Friendship starting from early 1940s.

It's worth lingering a moment upon the sight of this – ahem – progression. Foseti has done a bit of excavation on the elder Lamont:

Ron Chernow’s book, The House of Morgan, contains a couple of nuggets that we will need to finish our brief portrait:

In extreme cases in the 1930s, the House of Morgan would function as an unfettered government in its own right, conducting secret foreign policy at odds with that of Washington.

In less extreme cases, the House of Morgan would simply direct Washington’s foreign policy.

One more quote, if you’ll indulge me:

His son Corliss, a socialist and later a professor of philosophy at Columbia, saw his father’s foreign-policy views as spotless: "Although my father was a successful banker, and a Republican in politics, he was in essence a liberal, particularly on international affairs."

Following the death of JP Morgan, Lamont eventually emerged as the de facto head of JP Morgan bank. He also conducted US foreign policy, except for rare instances in which USG disagreed with him, in which case he conducted the foreign policy of his choosing anyway until USG changed its mind (sometimes it took a while for USG to catch up to Lamont). Lamont negotiated the agreements that ended WWI and the subsequent plans that dealt with the problem of German reparations. [. . .] He also went to Harvard, naturally.

His socialist son – don’t forget the "National Council of American-Soviet Friendship" – thought he had "spotless" foreign policy views . . . and Lamont was arguably running US foreign policy. Was this in your history book?

Even during the First Red Scare, there are hints in official and semi-official documents of an important element of applied Universalism, the principle of guided popular sovereignty – we might also call it paradoxical democracy – which presents the educated and refined, being superior purveyors of the faith, as the proper interpreters and editors of public opinion. In other words, too much democratic freedom might result in a dreaded loss of democratic freedom. From the same publication from 1920 cited earlier:

Opposition to radical ideas and radical spokesmen has gone farther than verbal criticism; meetings and parades have been prohibited; the public exhibition of the Red Flag which was adopted by the Russian and Hungarian bolshevists and the German extremists called Spartacides has been forbidden; men have been put in jail for speaking at meetings, and even for being present where pro-bolshevist views were expressed. Alien sympathizers have been deported. Unquestionably disorders in America have been inspired and aggravated by bolshevic propaganda. Popular resentment against this is in danger of going too far in curtailing individual liberty.

With that last sentence we see the paradox; popular resentment, though, had to be allowed to be thrown against some ideological enemy, and the progressives on the move into power in the 1910s did not enjoy the fortune of having fascism as an available scapegoat. Indeed, the Cathedral of the time – or what thus far existed of it – has itself a certain institutional, fascistic feel, with more official government presence where you'd today expect nominally private groups, such as – what a name! - non-government organizations. The press-university circuit was not so tethered in those days; the Committee on Public Information was formed in 1917 because the New York Times was not yet prepared to do its job. From the January 1918 edition of Boys' Life, the magazine of the Boy Scouts of America:

Through specially prepared pamphlets, every citizen, indeed every boy, every girl, every man, every woman, and every child is to be kept informed about the war in such a way as to make all feel that they are in partnership with the Government at Washington. The Boy Scouts of America are going to have an opportunity of rendering real patriotic service in this program as aides to the Committee on Public Information under the slogan “Every Scout to Boost America as a Government Dispatch Bearer.” We are to help spread the facts about America and America's war. We are to fight lies with truths.

America's war – and with that the Third Union looked forward to certain demise. This was the kind of propaganda Edward Bernays salivated for. Bernays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud and helped popularize his uncle's ideas in the States. He worked for the Committee on Public Information and attended the 1919 Paris Peace Conference at the invitation of Wilson himself. Bernays quite clearly explains the doctrine of guided popular sovereignty in his book Propaganda (1928):

No serious sociologist any longer believes that the voice of the people expresses any divine or specially wise and lofty idea. The voice of the people expresses the mind of the people, and that mind is made up for it by the group leaders in whom it believes and by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion. It is composed of inherited prejudices and symbols and cliches and verbal formulas supplied to them by the leaders.

With such minds on their side, the pietists and cartelists gradually absorbed more and more of the lower Left. Indeed, the American Student Union, a Communist group formed in 1935, voted in 1938 to move from pacifism to supporting FDR's foreign policy on collective security grounds. This generation of Brahmins were still divided between Stalinists and those of a less totalitarian persuasion reminiscent of the decades prior. The former, however, were the ones in charge, and they fought a war for Communism and won. Moldbug continues on the convergence of the pietists and the Nationalists:

After WWII, there was no longer any visible quarrel between these factions. Any views which contradicted Universalism became socially unacceptable in polite society. Progressive Christianity, through secular theologians such as Harvey Cox, abandoned the last shreds of Biblical theology and completed the long transformation into mere socialism. Nationalism also becomes an inappropriate term, as with the growth in American power it morphed into internationalism and, as most now call it, transnationalism.

The next Brahmin generation, who tended towards Mao over Stalin, spawned such groups as the Student League for Industrial Democracy, reformed from a group which had merged eleven years earlier with the American Student Union. This League changed its name in 1960 to the Students for a Democratic Society, to whom the 44th President of the United States is indirectly linked through Bill Ayers. Welcome to the desert of the Real.

Les rebelles seront punis / Groupons-nous et demain / Les États-Unis / Seront le genre humain

That pamphlet from the Institute for Public Service in New York contains at the back an adorable diagram comparing the Soviet government with that of the United States:

Note the dotted line on the Russian side - if this chart were fully accurate, the American side, for 1920 and for today, would include a good number of such dotted lines; in the latter case, it would be almost entirely made up of them. That's progress.

Ideography, pseudology, propaganda

It's rare that you hear sarcasm from politicians. Hearing one speak, you sense a sociolinguistic barrier whereby humanity is kept to a minimum. The issues they address, and the ways in which they address them, are far reduced from what would be either acceptable or expected from a non-politician. To be politically correct is, more or less, to sound like a politician. They have a strictly limited language-game - of course, they themselves do not set these limits; the press and the universities do, more or less.

A language-game, quite simply, is some subset of a language that is used within a certain sphere of activity - a context-dependent collection of names. So the way you talk to your spouse involves a different language-game from that you use with your co-workers; different words are used, certain words may mean different things, and even the grammar may differ.

Language-games vary in complexity. We communicate with pets, for example, with rather simple language-games, involving mere commands, and at most the rudiments of syntax. Some language-games, or sets of words within a language-game, are ideographies - that is, they are meaningful not just within a certain context, but specifically a certain ideological context.

Modern and postmodern political discourse are full of ideographies. As nydwracu explains:

In short, an ideography in the political sense is a set of ideographs: terms assigned a particular emotional load by an ideology for use in its rhetoric.

So ideographs tie emotions to abstract concepts. They are a kind of thought-terminating cliché or semantic stopsign, serving to sever a line of inquiry, to arrest any further analysis.

They may function as applause lights - words like "freedom", "democracy", "equality", etc. are often used to indicate to an audience that it's time to cheer. They can also be used oppositely - "racism" and "homophobia", for example.

Many of these ideographs are also pseudologs. A pseudolog is either a word that ties something real to something unreal, or ties something common to something rare or excessive. A strong pseudolog does the former, and a weak pseudolog the latter.

Take for instance "democracy", as it is commonly used: the idea is that the People as a collective shall have power, but the reality is that power is inevitably held by a small minority no matter the form of government, and that in representative or even direct democracy, the tendency is for this minority to be largely made up of shitty people. Hence democracy is a strong pseudolog of what I consider to be kakistocracy (rule by the worst).

However, since "democracy" is used variably and is easily qualifiable as a term, we might say that a word more precise, such as isocracy, is potentially even more pseudological. But since it is not in common use and is rarely if ever applied to anything that exists, it is in practice merely a fantasy word, and not a pseudolog.

Weak pseudologs, again, make a link not between real and unreal, but between typical and extreme. These, too, are common in contemporary social and political discussions - "sexism", for example. What does this word actually mean? In feminist usage, anyway, it falls upon what we'll call a linguistic blind spot: it takes something so universal that it has never really had or needed a name - that is, the understanding that men and women are different and thus require different standards of judgement - and links it to the extreme of misogyny. "Misogyny" is itself similarly abused these days; the language-game of feminists is one which brings words like "man" and "rapist" closer together. Again, weak pseudology: semantically embedded exaggeration.

An even better example of a weak pseudolog would be "racism". This word, too, hits a linguistic blind spot: it connects very common things which have no specific words (racial solidarity and/or recognition of socially significant racial differences) - to something extreme (racial hatred and/or violence).

The use of ideographs will often seem absurd to readers outside the ideology to which they belong. An average American going through Nazi political material would almost certainly find the references to Volksgemeinschaft, das Führerprinzip, and Jewry to be, at the very least, disorienting, similar to the feeling one gets when traveling to a foreign country and finding that the toilets have foot pedals instead of flush handles. But then, so would the average Nazi upon hearing the constant references of Western political material to the somewhat isomorphic concepts of liberty, democracy, and fascism. For an example closer to home, consider the reaction of the average American ‘liberal’ (I’ll dispense with my usual scare quotes from here on out; just keep in mind that, contrary to my usual practice, all terms are to be taken in their usual American senses) to Newt Gingrich’s “secular socialism” routine.

There is certainly a conceivable degree of incommensurability between ideographies, but not more than between the ideologies underlying them. We may also find that one ideology can come to dominate through the use of its ideographs by other ideological factions.

It is reasonable to expect that in such an arrangement the favored ideology would be that which originated or most applies the shared ideographs. Indeed, this is exactly what we see: Universalism is of such force that its ideographs spread beyond nominally progressive ideologies. Back to nydwracu:

Can an isomorphic example, of a conservative reaction to a sound bite applying the liberal ideography, be constructed? It is possible to come close, with, for example, the constant charges of racism leveled at just about every conservative figure and movement, but there is one crucial difference: liberals don’t respond emotionally to “secular socialism”, but conservatives most definitely do to “racism”. In fact, as the conservative line on affirmative action demonstrates, “racism” is just as much a part of the conservative ideography as the liberal one. And, for that matter, the white supremacist one: David Duke uses it.

Pretty pervasive ideograph we have here, if a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan uses it to deliver the exact same emotional load as Tim Wise. They both agree that racism is a Bad Thing; the only difference is in the definition. Duke wants to apply it to Wise, and vice versa. Any debate between the two (ignoring that, in reality, at least one of the two would have to be carted off by security five seconds in) would almost certainly consist mostly of redefinitions of the term, and other ideographs common to the American political arena. These semantic games are common: witness the attempt of Roger Scruton, one of the few conservatives with two brain cells to rub together, to split the positions he disagrees with that can be supported by the positive ideograph “liberty” into a new, negative ideograph, “license”, instead of rejecting the ideograph altogether.

It is clear, then, that in addition to the conservative ideography, there exists an ideography shared by just about the entire American political arena, which I will call the American ideography. Its contents include, on the positive side, liberty, equality, freedom, democracy, progress, fairness, and justice, and on the negative side, racism, fascism, and anything related to Hitler.

Mainstream American conservatism has no ideographic boundaries, and thus its ideological ones are easy to traverse. We're seeing on the level of the language-game a manifestation of Robert Conquest's Second Law of Politics: Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.

The astute reader will, by now, have picked up on an omission: nowhere have I mentioned liberal ideography. There is a reason for this omission: there may be a few minor differences, but at least on the major points, the liberal ideography is the American ideography. Most ideographs used by liberals are also used by conservatives, and with the same intended effect. (This is less so on the alt-right; one of the many instances of convergent evolution between Mencius Moldbug and the European New Right is their explicit refudiation of that ideography.)

Now consider the history of the American ideography. Its terms’ associations have changed consistently, and in a consistent direction: leftward. Equality under the law became equality of opportunity, and is now becoming equality of outcome. Freedom from the tyranny of a single, unelected, overactive monarch became freedom from fear and want, and is now becoming freedom from any sort of moral judgment of all but the most repulsive forms of libertinism. And so on. Considering the structure and history of this ideography, and its identification with ‘Americanism’, there can be no American Right. The American ideography does not hold promise for conservatives, and yet they do not challenge it; in fact, they do the opposite, and in doing so, sign their own death sentence.

That is the failure of conservatism.

The ideological/ideographical changes which have consistently moved America (and the West generally) leftward have deep roots. They were already prominent in the era of Abolitionism. George Fitzhugh notes in his 1854 Sociology for the South that "slavery is a form, and the very best form, of socialism", but also that "Socialism is already slavery in all save the master." Thus we see a dialectic of slavery whereby Abolition leads to a liberal reconstitution of the abolished practice:

Abolition is the first step in Socialism: the former proposes to abolish negro slavery, the latter all kinds of slavery - religion, government, marriage, families, property - nay, human nature itself. Yet the former contains the germ of the latter, and very soon ripens into it; Abolition is Socialism in its infancy.

So Socialism is a classic strong pseudolog, associating the abolition of dominance with totalizing submission. And the dialectical interplay goes even deeper:

...the world is divided between two philosophies. The one the philosophy of free trade and universal liberty - the philosophy adapted to promote the interests of the strong, the wealthy and the wise. The other, that of socialism, intended to protect the weak, the poor and the ignorant. The latter is almost universal in free society; the former prevails in the slaveholding States of the South. Thus we see each section cherishing theories at war with existing institutions. The people of the North and of Europe are pro-slavery men in the abstract; those of the South are theoretical abolitionists. This state of opinions is readily accounted for. The people in free society feel the evils of universal liberty and free competition, and desire to get rid of those evils. They propose a remedy, which is in fact slavery; but they are wholly unconscious of what they are doing, because never having lived in the midst of slavery, they know not what slavery is. The citizens of the South, who have seen none of the evils of liberty and competition, but just enough of those agencies to operate as healthful stimulants to energy, enterprise and industry, believe free competition to be an unmixed good.

So liberation forms a sociological Malcolm Effect - basically a recurring reset of the Butterfly Effect; sensibility to initial conditions moves us beyond the Edge of Chaos to endure disorder until a new equilibrium is reached. I conclude, looking at the repeating pattern of which Abolition and the War of Secession make up merely one iteration, that the Left - both as a set of ideas and as a language-game - is either an agent of sociopolitical meta-instability or an expression of it; and more directly, that developments in the field of propaganda have corresponded closely with the pattern. With that in mind, let's examine further this leftward trend.

The Abolition crusade and the War of Secession came three generations before the advent of modern public relations - that is, propaganda in 20th-century form. Propaganda did not see a significant change in technique until the entry of the United States into the First European Civil War, and this also marks a major change in the language-game, and specifically the ideography, of US politics. Note Woodrow Wilson's words to Congress in 1917:

We are glad, now that we see the facts with no veil of false pretense about them, to fight thus for the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples, the German peoples included; for the rights of nations great and small and the privilege of men everywhere to choose their way of life and of obedience. The world must be made safe for democracy.

The Founders of the US were not fond of "democracy" - however different in actual fact, they preferred the term "republic" and argued against "democracy". The fact that Woodrow Wilson is here using its furtherance as a reason for war is therefore of great significance. It indicates a shift in the American ideography. As book records show us, Wilson made his address to Congress at the time of a sharp general uptick in the use of his chosen word. We also see that it has tended to show such surges in frequency during war since then, but not before:

In April 1917, the month he made that address to Congress, Wilson created the Committee on Public Information to sway American public opinion in favor of military involvement in Europe - in other words, to propagandize. Working with the Committee was Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud, who went on to lead the rise of modern public relations.

In his 1928 Propaganda, Bernays makes unqualified use of the word "democracy" from the first page, but it's clear that he isn't referring to isocracy:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.

Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet.

They govern us by their qualities of natural leadership, their ability to supply needed ideas and by their key position in the social structure. Whatever attitude one chooses to take toward this condition, it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons—a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty million—who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.

He later says:

No serious sociologist any longer believes that the voice of the people expresses any divine or specially wise and lofty idea. The voice of the people expresses the mind of the people, and that mind is made up for it by the group leaders in whom it believes and by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion. It is composed of inherited prejudices and symbols and cliches and verbal formulas supplied to them by the leaders.

Bernays thus explains the then-recently emergent public relations profession as practiced by what he terms "the new propagandists", which he distinguishes from the older sort by their calculated use of classical and operant conditioning:

If you can influence the leaders, either with or without their conscious cooperation, you automatically influence the group which they sway. But men do not need to be actually gathered together in a public meeting or in a street riot, to be subject to the influences of mass psychology. Because man is by nature gregarious he feels himself to be member of a herd, even when he is alone in his room with the curtains drawn. His mind retains the patterns which have been stamped on it by the group influences. A man sits in his office deciding what stocks to buy. He imagines, no doubt, that he is planning his purchases according to his own judgment. In actual fact his judgment is a melange of impressions stamped on his mind by outside influences which unconsciously control his thought. He buys a certain railroad stock because it was in the headlines yesterday and hence is the one which comes most prominently to his mind; because he has a pleasant recollection of a good dinner on one of its fast trains; because it has a liberal labor policy, a reputation for honesty; because he has been told that J. P. Morgan owns some of its shares.

It is not sufficient to understand only the mechanical structure of society, the groupings and cleavages and loyalties. An engineer may know all about the cylinders and pistons of a locomotive, but unless he knows how steam behaves under pressure he cannot make his engine run. Human desires are the steam which makes the social machine work. Only by understanding them can the propagandist control that vast, loose-jointed mechanism which is modern society.
[...]
The old-fashioned propagandist, using almost exclusively the appeal of the printed word, tried to persuade the individual reader to buy a definite article, immediately. This approach is exemplified in a type of advertisement which used to be considered ideal from the point of view of directness and effectiveness:

"YOU (perhaps with a finger pointing at the reader) buy O'Leary's rubber heels—NOW."

The advertiser sought by means of reiteration and emphasis directed upon the individual, to break down or penetrate sales resistance. Although the appeal was aimed at fifty million persons, it was aimed at each as an individual.

The new salesmanship has found it possible, by dealing with men in the mass through their group formations, to set up psychological and emotional currents which will work for him. Instead of assaulting sales resistance by direct attack, he is interested in removing sales resistance. He creates circumstances which will swing emotional currents so as to make for purchaser demand.

If, for instance, I want to sell pianos, it is not sufficient to blanket the country with a direct appeal, such as:

"YOU buy a Mozart piano now. It is cheap. The best artists use it. It will last for years."

The claims may all be true, but they are in direct conflict with the claims of other piano manufacturers, and in indirect competition with the claims of a radio or a motor car, each competing for the consumer's dollar.

What are the true reasons why the purchaser is planning to spend his money on a new car instead of on a new piano? Because he has decided that he wants the commodity called locomotion more than he wants the commodity called music? Not altogether. He buys a car, because it is at the moment the group custom to buy cars.

The modern propagandist therefore sets to work to create circumstances which will modify that custom. He appeals perhaps to the home instinct which is fundamental. He will endeavor to develop public acceptance of the idea of a music room in the home. This he may do, for example, by organizing an exhibition of period music rooms designed by well known decorators who themselves exert an influence on the buying groups. He enhances the effectiveness and prestige of these rooms by putting in them rare and valuable tapestries. Then, in order to create dramatic interest in the exhibit, he stages an event or ceremony. To this ceremony key people, persons known to influence the buying habits of the public, such as a famous violinist, a popular artist, and a society leader, are invited. These key persons affect other groups, lifting the idea of the music room to a place in the public consciousness which it did not have before. The juxtaposition of these leaders, and the idea which they are dramatizing, are then projected to the wider public through various publicity channels. Meanwhile, influential architects have been persuaded to make the music room an integral architectural part of their plans with perhaps a specially charming niche in one corner for the piano. Less influential architects will as a matter of course imitate what is done by the men whom they consider masters of their profession. They in turn will implant the idea of the music room in the mind of the general public.

The music room will be accepted because it has been made the thing. And the man or woman who has a music room, or has arranged a corner of the parlor as a musical corner, will naturally think of buying a piano. It will come to him as his own idea.

Under the old salesmanship the manufacturer said to the prospective purchaser, "Please buy a piano." The new salesmanship has reversed the process and caused the prospective purchaser to say to the manufacturer, "Please sell me a piano."

It's easy to see how such methods could come to dominate cultural trends - Bernays certainly did. He took advantage of womens' high from gaining Suffrage to help get rid of the taboo at the time on women smoking and thus boost sales of Lucky Strike cigarettes; he outdid himself on making the color green fashionable for a time; he overthrew a government and marketed bananas - for the same client. He made truer and truer what Fitzhugh remarked in 1854:

Trade is a war of the wits, in which the stronger witted are as sure to succeed as the stronger armed in a war with swords. Strength of wit has this great advantage over strength of arm, that it never tires, for it gathers new strength by appropriating to itself the spoils of the vanquished.

Bernays in fact operated on similar principles to those of Fitzhugh, believing that some men were meant effectively to act as masters by directing our ideas and actions through the practice he describes of string-pulling. But his effect was silently to push American culture further along its visible leftward path. The things Bernays understood, and the models he used, were steadily absorbed into the mainstream, applicable as they were to nearly any industry. He thus contributed to what amounted to a restandardization of standardization itself. Not a generation after Bernays wrote Propaganda had the marketing of movies, radio, and television alike developed a homogeneity of technique. As Theodor Adorno of the Frankfurt School describes in 1944:

The sociological theory that the loss of the support of objectively established religion, the dissolution of the last remnants of pre-capitalism, together with technological and social differentiation or specialisation, have led to cultural chaos is disproved every day; for culture now impresses the same stamp on everything.

[...]
Movies and radio need no longer pretend to be art. The truth that they are just business is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce. They call themselves industries; and when their directors’ incomes are published, any doubt about the social utility of the finished products is removed.
[...]

But any trace of spontaneity from the public in official broadcasting is controlled and absorbed by talent scouts, studio competitions and official programs of every kind selected by professionals. Talented performers belong to the industry long before it displays them; otherwise they would not be so eager to fit in. The attitude of the public, which ostensibly and actually favours the system of the culture industry, is a part of the system and not an excuse for it. If one branch of art follows the same formula as one with a very different medium and content; if the dramatic intrigue of broadcast soap operas becomes no more than useful material for showing how to master technical problems at both ends of the scale of musical experience – real jazz or a cheap imitation; or if a movement from a Beethoven symphony is crudely “adapted” for a film sound-track in the same way as a Tolstoy novel is garbled in a film script: then the claim that this is done to satisfy the spontaneous wishes of the public is no more than hot air.
[...]

The ruthless unity in the culture industry is evidence of what will happen in politics. Marked differentiations such as those of A and B films, or of stories in magazines in different price ranges, depend not so much on subject matter as on classifying, organising, and labelling consumers. Something is provided for all so that none may escape; the distinctions are emphasised and extended. The public is catered for with a hierarchical range of mass-produced products of varying quality, thus advancing the rule of complete quantification. Everybody must behave (as if spontaneously) in accordance with his previously determined and indexed level, and choose the category of mass product turned out for his type. Consumers appear as statistics on research organisation charts, and are divided by income groups into red, green, and blue areas; the technique is that used for any type of propaganda.

So as Bernays and Adorno both describe, the applied propaganda mechanism allows for the creation of markets - that is, the creation of crowds - ready to be advertised to in some differentiating way. This manufacture of faction allows for the manufacture of trend - a divide-and-conquer approach, focusing consumer attention and thus maintaining some degree of stability in an unstable system. It allowed for a high degree of sameness to be kept under various names. And in politics - as Bernays called it, "the first big business in America" - this would soon be fully realized as well.

And in the 1960s, the culture industry did something truly spectacular. Civil Rights, feminism, hippies, the SDS, the Situationists, and countless other forces were directed against "the establishment" - and the establishment simply absorbed them. Give a rebel a record deal, or a book deal, or a weekly talk show - turn his radical, subversive ideas into saleable soundbites - and you'll find the dog does little more than bark. Better yet, make his memory sacred in State ideology. John Lennon was free to make Harrison Bergeron-esque proposals because they were the opposite of threatening to the system. This was the triumph of left-wing capitalism - a combination whose two components hate each other, yet keep each other alive.

But since the half or so of America who did not fully accept these new values did not simply go away, they themselves formed a market to be sold to on the basis of not being part of the other group. These two broad factions, "liberal" and "conservative", could be set against each other through continual mutual framing, and thus were new cultural lines drawn. This is reflected in our current governmental structure - as Mencius Moldbug puts it, red government versus blue government. But today we also have the Internet, which has brought acceleration and decentralization to the transmission of propaganda. We would expect, then, a degree of fragmentation. People today easily place themselves in ideological bubbles. Through Facebook, YouTube, and thousands of online forums, people form communities and coalitions through which one's understanding of history, of the news, and of politics, is framed. There are anarcho-primitivists and 9/11 Truthers and Maoists and hundreds of other virtual factions, each with its own language-game. But the majority of them agree, no doubt, that "racism" is bad and that "rights" are good.

So we must ask: what keeps the American ideography, and the ideography of the Internet-connected world in general, so left-wing? What maintains Godwin's Law? What can we do to better our current trajectory?

There are numerous answers to these questions, some obvious and some not. Their provision I leave to the reader and to future posts.