The Inner Meaning of Revolution

"Carvalho's study of the revolutionary mind has been well regarded in Brazil by people such as Roberto de Oliveira Campos,^[11] Paulo Francis,^[12] and Bruno Tolentino.^[13]

He sees a characteristic of the revolutionary mind in the inversion of the perception of time. He says normal individuals, based on common sense, view the past as something immutable and the future as something that can be changed (it is contingent, as de Carvalho puts it). However, the leftist revolutionary sees the utopian future as a goal that eventually will be reached no matter what and the past as something that can be changed, through reinterpretation, to accommodate it.^[14]

Carvalho also points out that because the revolutionary believes implicitly in a future utopia where there will be no evil, this same leftist revolutionary believes that no holds should be barred in achieving that utopia. Thus, his own criminal activities in achieving that goal are above reproach.^[14]"

Wiki, Carvalho

Inevitable Crash of Progress

Most of my readers will be able to call examples of this trajectory easily to mind, and a fair number will have experienced at least a small part of it themselves. I’ve come to think, though, that in the years immediately ahead of us, it’s going to be almost impossible to miss. Plenty of belief systems will have to deal with repeated disconfirmation, but the one that’s likely to get hit the hardest, and may well produce the biggest crop of pathological behavior, is the established religion of the modern industrial world, the belief in the inevitability and goodness of progress. I suspect, rather, that the refusal to recognize and deal with the end of progress will become a massive social force in the decade or so ahead of us, and that the great divide in American society during those years will not be the one between left and right, or between rich and poor, but between those who have accepted history’s verdict on our fantasy of perpetual progress, on the one hand, and those who cling to the fantasy despite all disconfirmations, on the other. Since refusing to recognize the fact of decline is a good way to get clobbered over the head by one or another of that fact’s manifestations—a point that the inhabitants of coastal North Carolina are likely to find out the hard way one of these days—those who choose the path of denial may be in for a very rough road indeed.
Archdruid Report

What Happened to America?

"The struggle of bankers for control of America is an enduring theme in American history since the founding. Defeat of the southern aristocracy during the Civil War unbalanced the political balance, giving Northeastern bankers unprecedented dominance. They used this to implement a policy of tight money. The resulting shortage of currency reduced much of rural America to barter (cattle sales to the Indian Agents were one of the few sources of cash in the West; eastern villages were reduced to barter with general stores as clearinghouses). This resulted in a boom-bust pattern of growth and deflation which almost exterminated the small farmer and merchant classes. The results were a massive concentration of wealth and power, continuing until they overreached themselves. The political convulsion of the Great Depression restored a more balanced distribution of political and social power. Starting in the 1980′s the banks gradually rebuilt their political influence with both parties by means of massive campaign contributions, armies of lobbyists, and well-funded advocates at think-tanks. This effort produced large gains:"

Source

This is over-simplification of sort (if nothing else, by default, since there are many other things to be mentioned and discussed in this vein); however, certainly the Civil War (including Lincoln's Land act which altered education in this country) marked the beginning of a "sea change" that we are seeing in fruition since about 1960. At the very least, the Civil War was a watershed in which the intermediate institutions (Robert Nisbet) began to be subservient to the federal power, thus imbalancing the organic substrata of government and the social edifice. If intermediate institutions were imbalanced by the War, then they were liquidated during the century which followed. Perhaps (one might think) technology made this process inevitable? However, it is interesting that the progressive argument for technology embraces "conservation" the instant that technology is introduced into the debate. Technology is by definition the application of intelligence to Nature with the method and theory of science. How (then) can we fail to consider the results and plead inevitability? What else is government for but to either encourage, or resist, the Zeitgeist? Since the Civil War, America has not really known a government or elite that was willing to critique itself; the "liberals" (in other words) are faux liberaux - they substitute a critique of "reactionaries" (conservatives, fascists, racists, populists, nationalists, etc.) for the proper self-critique of Socrates, who said "know thyself". This should define the essence of classical liberalism; but it does not. Instead, it becomes either self-hating and other-hating in a destructive form, rather than self-critical in a true sense. America has not known a self-critical moment in a long time. Since we have not engaged in this past time, we substitute ersatz critiques which center around scape-goating someone or something else (see Rene Girard). Hence, the rage for progress, democracy, technology, etc. at the expense of "bad" societies (there is always a bogeyman out there). This is an actual religion, and it is being conducted from the halls of the moneychangers. The Revolution must go on.

Another take on America

Evola again on America.

The Americans are the living refutation of the Cartesian axiom, "I think, therefore I am": Americans do not think, yet they are. The American 'mind', puerile and primitive, lacks characteristic form and is therefore open to every kind of standardisation.

This reminds me very much of Ortega y Gasset's primal fear that America, far from representing "what was best in Europe" or being another focal point of civilization in a varied mode, actually was a barbarian superpower lacquered over with a thin veneer of technological apparatus.

America is not immune to history.

Raised Up and Cast Down
Archilochus, fragment 130 (tr. M.L. West):

It all depends upon the gods. Often enough, when men
are prostrate on the ground with woe, they set them up again;
and often enough, when men are standing proud and all seems bright,
they tip them over on their backs, and then they're in a plight—
a man goes wandering, short of bread, out of his mind with fright.

The same, tr. Guy Davenport:

Attribute all to the gods.
They pick a man up,
Stretched on the black loam,
And set him on his two feet,
Firm, and then again
Shake solid men until
They fall backward
Into the worst of luck,
Wandering hungry,
Wild of mind.

The text is uncertain. The following is from M.L. West, Iambi et Elegi Graeci, Vol. I, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971; rpt. 1998), p. 51, with his critical apparatus:

τοῖς θεοῖς †τ' εἰθεῖάπαντα· πολλάκις μὲν ἐκ κακῶν
ἄνδρας ὀρθοῦσιν μελαίνηι κειμένους ἐπὶ χθονί,
πολλάκις δ᾽ ἀνατρέπουσι καὶ μάλ᾽ εὖ βεβηκότας
ὑπτίους, κείνοις <δ'> ἔπειτα πολλὰ γίνεται κακά,
καὶ βίου χρήμηι πλανᾶται καὶ νόου παρήορος.

1 ita cod. S (hic unicus): ἰθεῖα (sc. δίκη) Hoffmann: τοι ῥεῖα Schneidewin invito metro: τέλεια Hommel (Gymn. 58, 1951, 219): alii alia: possis πείθοι' ἅπαντα

4 κείνοις Blaydes: κίνουσ᾽ S: κλίνουσ᾽ Valckenaer (postea interpungens) δ' addidi post h.v. lacunam stat. Meineke

5 χρήμη S: χρῄζων C. Gesnerus gravem suspicionem movet quod statim in secundo versu proximi excerpti (= Theodect. fr. 16) stant verba minime corrupta φήμη πλανᾶται

Economic Imperialism

It is long since that I realized that Walmart, Home Depot, and the like are the avatars of the “soft fascism” of which you speak. Somehow I have developed the impression that Rand was never quite as exercised over government-corporate collusion as she was over the bogeyman of “collectivism,” which is the brush with which social atomists tar every institution that transcends the individual -being precisely what public corporations do. Indeed, the law that gives to corporations the rights and prerogatives of individuals is one of the chief means by which the same have siezed the reins of the economy. In Rand’s magnum opus Atlas Shrugged, the enterprises which are to stand as exemplars of the operation of her economic principles are all privately-held companies (if I remember correctly) headed up by her erstwhile ubermenschen -including the very mannish, pants-wearing Dagney Taggart. Their amoral power religion is economic nihilism in action, despite the scent of “natural law” she wishes to impart such patent Darwinism. I’ve often remarked that Rand is nothing if not watered-down Nietzsche, sans the literary talent. Her books are low melodrama, and she was obviously stylistically influenced by television’s crudity and the mass-hypnotic cinema. In fact, she began her American career as an unsuccessful screenwriter.

Of course, even in Rand’s time, her portrayal of the corporation was disingenuous, and did not reflect the chief forces of the marketplace at work -forces which were engineered to undermine the operation of true market principles. Inter-corporate and public-private collusion literally defines the economic system of the United States in modern times. The social-economic insensitivity of the publicly-owned corporation is defining: the free play of economism, that is, the exclusion of all considerations other than profit maximization in economic activity, and the prioritization of economic values above all other values in society. This characteristic of corporations is practically guaranteed by public ownership. The drive for passive income (wealth without production or work) is at the heart of this historical anomaly.

We are deracinated in a way that disconnects us from our progeny. If we think of the future at all, we think of it either in private terms, or through the medium of that abstraction called “the people.” Oddly enough, the population of Europe tends to remain more fiscally conservative on a personal level than does that of North America, yet we think of Europe as “socialist.” Americans carry far more personal and household debt than do Europeans, and money is more cheaply gotten here than it is there. In Europe, there is something very shameful, still, about being deeply in debt. Thus we see that there are genuine psychological differences. The Americanization of Europe is eating away at these personal values. The “socialism” or “social democracy” of Europe is the result of the institutionalization of a kind of high sentimentalism that is but the degraded modern form of noblesse oblige. In America it is called “fairness,” a more egalitarian, classless term to be sure. Thus, America is headed down the path of a deeper and more profound economic fascism, while at the same time retaining none of the essential personal conservatism of the common European. It is a deadly combination. We are seeing the outworking of debt-based consumerism in our own generation. We no longer need speculate about its effects. Now the prevalent error among the intelligentsia is two-fold. One form of the error is progressivist: the expectation that public outlays from the printing presses can effect their utopia of “fairness.” The second and related error is to expect that putting in place certain controls short of a complete overturning of the “money powers” will avert the approaching catastrophe. Certain forms of Christianity contribute to this misapprehension through their post-millennial and ahistorical optimism. History has ended in this view, and man can only expect gradual improvement of conditions (economic and social) until we arrive at the Church’s millennium. Such thinking represents a profound misunderstanding of the biblical passages on which this eschatology is based. Super-added to this belief in “controls” (also referred to as fiscal conservatism) is the belief that the effects of our historical deviation from sanity will express themselves in a linear fashion as extrapolated from currently observed phenomema, whereas the hard reality is that a geometric or even exponential worsening of conditions is now almost certainly unavoidable -resulting from our abandonment of God’s laws, and our abandonment of restraints upon the money powers. God will not be mocked, and our fraudulent money economy will soon be seen for what it is -if it is not already. Domestically there still seems to be the continued belief in the nostrums offered by political charlatans. Overseas there is more realism.

You are correct to think of colonialism as nothing but trans-racial imperialism. Quigley has shown that it is no more than liberalism at work on a global scale, and was never animated by a sense of racial superiority, but rather by a sense of cultural-civilizational obligation. Rhodes and his circle were not race supremacists. They were “enlightened liberal globalists,” as you correctly point out. The program of “uplift” was intended to make of the African and Indian an equal within the white in the imperial project -which was a precursor to Lincoln’s notion of a “proposition nation” -that is, to be English is a matter of belief and not birth. All imperialists think this way of necessity. Imperialism is nothing more than the embassy of, the foreign policy of economism. Rudyard Kipling left us a literary record of this thinking in the “White Man’s Burden.”

Anonymous Correspondent

"Nostalgia"?

An argument against "nostalgia" for the past.

"There is an element of cultural and religious slumming involved, one that has its origins in petit-bourgeois malaise concerning the monotony of modern life. We have tricked ourselves into thinking that our daily life is so boring, so full of tedium, that something needs to step in to provide us with a means to escape it. Most people alleviate this by spending or buying something. Look only to the structure of television commercials: you can eat/drink/acquire this and you will be both satiated and healthy, indulging and responsible, etc. Those of more exotic tastes (the market is always pleased to indulge any taste as long as you have the money) will delve into other opportunities for personal fulfillment. These include exercises in medieval piety, Eastern monasticism, meditation, Gregorian chant, monarchist politics and other less popular boutique items. Instead of going to the pound and finding a dog or a cat for a pet, some people go to the zoo or a llama farm. Some people want a chinchilla; some want a goat. The mechanism is the same: find yourself in something that you can acquire outside of yourself in order to continue to blissfully ignore the social relations that actually govern your life. These are not exercises in wisdom but rather in self-deception through self-absorption."

I agree with this critique, yet "nostalgia" must always be part of the arsenal of the good life, for it lies buried in the present, and to what else can one appeal to exercise the lost art of memory?

"Man has to love the past in order to remember it." ~ Valentin Tomberg

Christopher Lasch points out in the magisterial Once & Future Heaven (A History of Progress) that "nostalgia" is the only category for the past which "moderns" are capable of conceiving. That is, they simply cannot imagine a people or person or nation or entity with more than a sentimental connection to the past (which was not morally wrong or even evil). Anything else is "fascism". This (of course) virtually abnegates the entire corpus of Western canonical literature (eg., Wordsworth, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Coleridge, Bossuett, etc. to pick a few notable examples). I would argue that (from any "realistic" standpoint) man has to be able to connect past and future and present. If he is unable or unwilling to do so, spiritual death results.

William Watson, Home-Rootedness:

I cannot boast myself cosmopolite;
I own to "insularity," although
'Tis fall'n from fashion, as full well I know.
For somehow, being a plain and simple wight,
I am skin-deep a child of the new light,
But chiefly am mere Englishman below,
Of island-fostering; and can hate a foe,
And trust my kin before the Muscovite.
Whom shall I trust if not my kin? And whom
Account so near in natural bonds as these
Born of my mother England's mighty womb,
Nursed on my mother England's mighty knees,
And lull'd as I was lull'd in glory and gloom
With cradle-song of her protecting seas?

Second World

America is no longer "First World". & We are starting to know it.

Thank you, Progress. What, in God's name, is this "Progress"?
Well, Progress is truth, light, peace, love & justice (especially Economic).
So, who would oppose such a thing.
God only knows. Reactionaries, coteries of bankers and autocrats, congeries of racists. That sort.
How do we know these people are execrable? Surely you don't mean to suggest...?
They oppose Progress. That is enough.
Isn't this just a question of power, then? Your enemies, defined as evil.
They aren't "my" enemies. This is a natural process. No one is coordinating it. It is destiny.
Mmmmm. No one? How does one discern this natural process?
Whatever conduces to Progress, naturally.
That's a tight little circle, there.
It's a natural process. Process & Progress.
So, how would we know if this was going awry? If it was highjacked? Or off the rails?
It would not Progress.
If it does not Progress, should we wait?
No, we should act.
Who is "we"?
Those who are in favor of it.
I thought you said this was a natural process.
It is. It occurs naturally.
Supernaturally.
Oh, no. Naturally. It works all by itself.
Except when we have to make it happen.
We mainly just don't obstruct the magic.
Is it ever not magical?
I've never seen it happen.
Thank you for your time.

Message received. How about turning to someone with something to say?

"-- or perhaps not -- this is one of the central themes of Borella's The Sense of the Supernatural. He is a French Catholic esoterist, completely orthodox in his thinking, as far as I can tell. He points out that it has only been in the last two or three centuries that we have developed this strict demarcation between "nature" and supranature, which means that the point-circle is taken to be the ultimate reality, instead of the cross-circle."

Rosenstock-Huessy took this line, with his "traject" and "preject", opposing (like all good thinkers) the worldview of Descartes. Apparently, Schuon has fleshed it out. The problem is that the Western world has this hangover binge that we seem to want to continue (that being the nature of binge drinking). "Progress" is a mental stopgap word for something we can't define; it is the object of mystification & dogmatic worship of the most dangerous kind. Orwell would say that it is a word used to hide our lack of understanding. "Progress" (through quantification) is of course, what Descartes' Reason is intended to achieve. And any fool can see the circle it leads to. Any fool, but the fool living through Progress.

Much better to worship the living God, whose insanity is wiser than the cunning of "Progress".

Progress, Or Come Again the Thunder

Rather than pontificate about the decay of the Empire ex cathedra ad nauseum, I have set myself the task of sketching the nature of the beast, since it is not quite dead, quite yet. My patron saint George Parkin Grant is dead, so that is my excuse. What is this Progress that we speak of? Christopher Lasch made an admirable start in exploring its roots and precise nature, in which he concluded it had (counter-intuitively) little to do with Christianity (except perhaps the postmillenial kind). He also observes that it is the degradation of the bio-sphere, our Homer's "Black-Kneed Earth", not merely into a Thing, but a Thing which is running out of room, that is undermining the psychological certitude of modern Progress. And yet, despite this - or maybe because of this! -

"What is less often remarked is that impermanence appears to assure a certain continuity in its own right when conceived as an extension of the self-correcting procedures of scientific discovery, which allow the scientific enterprise as a whole to flourish in spite of the constant revision of particular findings. A social order founded on Science, with its unnverving but exhilarating expansion of our intellectual horizons, seems to have achieved a kind of immortality undreamed of by earlier civilizations."

This is his most important remark in the Introduction of True & Only Heaven. What is more eternal than denying the eternal with the raised fist forever to the heavens? Even Goethe embraced this "truth" of titanism. Science (pure) pursues knowledge like a priestly caste, and distances itself from what the proles do with it. Can this be done indefinitely, or must Science begin to assume moral responsibilities for the knowledge it makes available? Do we want them to do so? In other words, Science has effectively written off its bad assets as part of the "shite" which exists self-evidently, and argues that less and less will exist insofar as we continue to give it our support. The triumphs go to it, and it alone. This is a version of the medieval argument concerning God and the existence of evil, or closely related to it. Does it work?

As much as I would like to engage in optimistic energy over the future (IronMan anyone?), the best minds believe that it is too much to believe, and certainly too little to hope for.

On the contrary, we (as Christians) assert that Science is a wonderful servant, a dangerous mistress, and a false god. The problem is that the steps between these progressions or stages is slippery and unclear. The parable of Thoth (re-told by Neil Postman) comes to mind. America's problem isn't political, it's technological/political. We are a barbarian landscape laminated with the veneer of tech apparatus. Both "Left" & "Right" increasingly take this as their starting point (except for the radical fringes, which is where Red Toryism can help). As always, mein Herr Nicholas Gomez Davila says it better:

"The reactionary is, nevertheless, the fool who takes up the vanity of condemning history and the immorality of resigning himself to it. Radical progressivism and liberal progressivism elaborate partial visions. History is neither necessity nor freedom, but rather their flexible integration. History is not, in fact, a divine monstrosity. The human cloud of dust does not seem to arise as if beneath the breath of a sacred beast; the epochs do not seem to be ordered as stages in the embryogenesis of a metaphysical animal; facts are not imbricated one upon another as scales on a heavenly fish. But if history is not an abstract system that germinates beneath implacable laws, neither is it the docile fodder of human madness. The whimsical and arbitrary will of man is not its supreme ruler. Facts are not shaped, like sticky, pliable paste, between industrious fingers. In fact, history results neither from impersonal necessity nor from human caprice, but rather from a dialectic of the will where free choice unfolds into necessary consequences. History does not develop as a unique and autonomous dialectic, which extends in vital dialectic the dialectic of inanimate nature, but rather as a pluralism of dialectical processes, numerous as free acts and tied to the diversity of their fleshly grounds. If liberty is the creative act of history, if each free act produces a new history, the free creative act is cast upon the world in an irrevocable process. Liberty secretes history as a metaphysical spider secretes the geometry of its web. Liberty is, in fact, alienated from itself in the same gesture in which it is assumed, because free action possesses a coherent structure, an internal organization, a regular proliferation of sequelae. The act unfolds, opens up, and expands into necessary consequences, in a manner compatible with its intimate character and with its intelligible nature. Every act submits a piece of the world to a specific configuration."

Welcome to Nemesis, Nietzsche. I give you the Don Colacho, Catholic counter-insurgent in the war of ideas which you helped to make seem eternal. Now that Nietzsche is dead, back to business. Against Schmitt & Agamben modern polemicists are sharpening their iron.

"In chapter 4, where I analyze the idea of 'miracle,' Schmitt's metaphor for the state of exception, I ask whether these identifications are themselves remnants of earlier debates in political theology about the status of the extraordinary – god and miracle or divine agency – in the ordinary human world. [...] Schmitt and Agamben's 'state of exception,' I think it is fair to say, has captured the imagination of contemporary political theory. In this chapter, I seek to loosen its hold on our imagination by pluralizing the particular political theology on which Schmitt's account is based and from which it draws sustenance."

But what is "pluralizing the particular political theology"? What does this mean? Is this some kind of imaginary third way? It's telling that this author feels the need to address Schmitt and Agamben, who are both driven with defining authority and power in democracies. Perhaps a fool's errand, but a brave one.

In the matrix of secular liberal-democracy, encroaching across the planet with engines & apparatus of power, the "state of exception" increasingly becomes normative. And the citizenry wishes it, for they benefit from this normalizing. As Grant said, "orgasm at home, napalm abroad".

In the distance, I still hear the thunder.

Soft Totalitarianism

For some time, I have thought this myself-
"Most of ‘apocalyptic’ literature, warning us of the dangers of totalitarianism, such as Huxley’s Brave New World, Orwell’s 1984, and Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, warn us of a fascist government (Orwell’s Animal Farm of course warns us of socialist totalitarianism). But whether the authors warn us of a communist or fascist dictatorship, they all perceive totalitarian societies as based on non-subtle (overt?), masculine force. They all have failed to envision a totalitarian society that was subtle, seductive, and feminine. The most successful totalitarian government in history has been the United States. Using feminine coercion rather than masculine, the U.S. has accomplished much more than Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini or any other 2-bit dictator ever hoped to accomplish.

In Fahrenheit 451, my favorite of the apocalyptic novels, Bradbury correctly notes that a totalitarian government must, if it is to maintain itself, kill history. There must be no historical consciousness; there must only be the reigning government, which has always been, and always will be, world without end. In Bradbury’s novel, the government kills history by burning all books from the past."

Just yesterday, I read in my nursing book that "results of progress may cause old ways of thinking to not apply anymore". The question here is not, what is ideology doing in a nursing book, but what kind of ideology has succeeded in making itself its own rationale? If Progress makes everything "not work anymore", then OBVIOUSLY we need more Progress. My boss the other day opined that America would not "go down the drain" but that we just needed more "creativity". I am sure everything will be fine.

Here is a liberal definition of fascism:
"Robert O. Paxton, a professor emeritus at Columbia University, defines fascism in his book The Anatomy of Fascism as: "A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."

But this definition fits La Raza quite as well as the smeared Tea Party. It also fits the NAACP.

Chris Hedges nails it. Liberal policies have CREATED a pre-fascist, as well as a proto-fascist, polity in America:
“It is time for us to stop talking about right and left,” McKinney told me. “The old political paradigm that serves the interests of the people who put us in this predicament will not be the paradigm that gets us out of this. I am a child of the South. Janet Napolitano tells me I need to be afraid of people who are labeled white supremacists but I was raised around white supremacists. I am not afraid of white supremacists. I am concerned about my own government. The Patriot Act did not come from the white supremacists, it came from the White House and Congress. Citizens United did not come from white supremacists, it came from the Supreme Court. Our problem is a problem of governance. I am willing to reach across traditional barriers that have been skillfully constructed by people who benefit from the way the system is organized.”

This is perfectly correct. And in fact, the relationship between Liberalism and Communism is far more complicated than this (given that National Socialism and International Socialism can be related as well):
"Moreover, this social mismatch has been entirely rectified. What the bohemians of Greenwich Village believed in 1923, everyone in America (and the world) believes now. The beliefs of an ordinary Calvin Coolidge voter would strike the ordinary John McCain voter as outlandish, ridiculous, insane, and often downright evil. America has no surviving intellectual tradition besides progressivism - which is no more than a synonym for communism. (My own grandparents, lifelong CPUSA members, used "progressive" as a codeword all their lives.) Communism is as American as apple pie, and America today is a completely communist country. As Garet Garett put it 70 years ago, the revolution was."

As Moldbug notes, the relationship between Liberalism & Communism is, well, "complicated".

It is not only complicated by Empire and Imperial politics, as well as such things as the results of the Civil War, it is complicated by religion & class divisions, as well as the money market situations (in which some Americans have a very vested interest, and are getting richer than anyone in history).

What seems fairly clear is that "Fascism" is a definition that everyone agrees is "bad", but almost no one agrees upon. This of course doesn't mean that general contours aren't there, or that some counters/markers can be identified with some safety. However, once a definition is agreed upon, MANY different polities or groups can fit the label. American business, for instance, is largely operative at the behest or at the service of government. Wall Street and Beltway have a CLOSE relationship. Is this not "corporate fascism"?

Another complicating factor is American transcendence over ethnic/cultural norms. When a race with a homogeneous culture constitutes a base, it can potentially "go" fascist (as Serbia did with Milosevic, who was "socialist"), but it is also a potential barrier or bar to Imperial/Global Fascism on the scale displayed in the post Berlin Wall era. Putin-era Russia, therefore, is both proto-fascist on an internal level, but is a barrier to global fascism in the external sphere. And proto-fascist formal polities can often prevent a "pre-fascist" mentality from blossoming among the "volk", a situation which we can only envy in America, where liberal over-kill and looting of the state for the benefit of the elites and a "new people" have effectively created a "learned fascism" among heartland peoples. Franco, for instance, managed to have the forms of fascism, without the power thereof, and in so doing kept Spain from radicalism of the Right or Left.

It's complicated. Basically, what we have in America is a situation of control flowing from the bureaucratic elites downward, channeled into the ferment of the progressive masses. These masses are directed by forms of political correctness into the proper channels, and the religion of democracy guides the rituals and forms in the upper crust, while providing the "bread and circus" faith from below in the masses. The engines of Science & Empire function to keep the brew fermenting, but more and more raw material (read "colored people") are being thrown into the crush. They, too, will be assimilated, and the product thereof may be a mixed race/culture with all of the worst characteristics of the donors. Like decaying DNA, our polity seems to suffer a degrading with each generation, both intellectually and morally. And in our case, the original blueprints are up for questioning as well. Were the Founding Fathers really wise to create a "proposition" nation? If so, have we done well in the battle to keep it?

Our current America is a giant corporation, with the CEO as president. The dollar is stock. And the shareholders are squabbling ferociously. Arguably, this is a pre-fascistic situation, with proto-fascistic forms already in place to guide us. To what & where?

Anyone for "Red Tory" tea?

Conservatives worth their salt should concentrate on creating the alternative base (whatever it costs, whatever it entails) that will preserve the country in the coming Winter.