Tag: authoritarianism

1,860 words

I enjoyed Fred Reed’s April 24 essay “Ignorance, Its Uses and Nurture,” which refers to universal suffrage in anything larger than a small town as a “crackpot” idea. In a mere thousand words, Reed painted the American public as entirely incapable and unqualified to understand United States foreign policy, let alone vote on it. Therefore, he concludes, the entire democratic system is a sham. Yes, the statistics he presents bolster his point admirably. But maybe not as much as epic burns such as this one: (more…)

George Grant

1,844 words

George Grant’s Lament for a Nation was most obviously wrong in its immediate predictions about Canada. He thought that Anglo-Canada would seek direct annexation by the dynamic American Republic. Many of his errors stem from a conflation of economics with cultural and political destiny.

Even now that Canada is almost entirely economically absorbed into the United States, annexation remains a fringe position. Most Canadians opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the 1990s; the draw of consumption could not overcome national attachment, even one as meaningless as ours. (more…)

2,861 words

In December of this year, Ilya Somin reviewed Christopher Zurn’s book Splitsville, USA: A Democratic Argument for Breaking up the United States, which was published in May. Somin offers several good-faith critiques of Zurn’s position on national divorce, and even praises Splitsville as “. . . the most significant, fully developed, and intellectually respectable, defense of the claim that breaking up the union is actually a good idea.” Somin’s main concerns are the feasibility and effectiveness of a national divorce. As a staunch proponent of national divorce myself, I would like to reply to Somin’s counter-arguments. (more…)

The US House Select Committee on China meeting earlier this year. The members of the Committee all have one trait in common: none is an expert on China.

1,175 words

I confess that I am a bad American. Yes, I pay little attention to Congress. Why? Because it seems to me little more than a storefront operation for the powers that count in America: Big Pharma, the military industry, Wall Street, and so on. They make policy. Congress just announces it. Nor do I much read the Constitution, a document in tatters that has little obvious connection to American life. (more…)

4,453 words

Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

It is during and after the First World War that reinforced concrete was incorporated into political programs as a “progressive” building material. The Futurist Antonio Sant’Elia inspired an entire generation of so-called “brutalists”: Le Corbusier, Buckminster Fuller, and members of the movement called De Stijl. Jappe cites Futurist proponents of concrete cities: (more…)

2,583 words

Whenever a conservative or Right-winger accuses Leftists of acting like the Party from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the unerring refrain from the Leftist chorus is “Don’t you know George Orwell was a socialist!” The implication is that, especially in these politically polarized times, Orwell is the property of the Left. He wore their uniform, and so Right-wingers are, by invoking his name, committing a kind of theft.

Orwell’s best-known writings, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, are dark satires of that exact attitude: A man’s thoughts ought to belong to a political faction, and that political faction has some sort of right to them. (more…)

1,211 words

“Ain’t no time to wonder why, whoopee we’re all gonna die.”
— Country Joe McDonald, “I Feel-Like I’m Fixin’-To-Die Rag” (more…)

2,443 words

Make me, make me your victim,
Resistance is only a symptom. . .
Of bigotry
You are so guilty, so
Make me your victim. (more…)

8,536 words

Wilhelm Reich
The Mass Psychology of Fascism
New York: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1946

What makes Fascists tick? Wilhelm Reich said he had the answer in his groundbreaking book The Mass Psychology of Fascism. (more…)

N. C. Wyeth, The Burning of the Bounty, 1940.

1,466 words

For men on the Right, observable truths about the state of Western civilization intersect like the threads of an unraveling tapestry. We see order giving into chaos; tyranny and anarchy converging and becoming indiscernible in the stew of nature, oppression, freedom, injustice, security, peace, and conflict. (more…)

2,272 words

Nature is a temple, where the living
Columns sometimes breathe of confusing speech;
Man walks within these groves of symbols, each
Of which regards him as a kindred thing.

— Charles Baudelaire, “Correspondence” (more…)

8,561 words

Emmanuel Todd
Lineages of Modernity: A History of Humanity from the Stone Age to Homo Americanus
Cambridge, England, and Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2019

Much of today’s dominant globalist ideology derives from development theory, a body of thought which shares with Marxism the view that economic relations are the basis of social life and sees the races of mankind as fundamentally equivalent beneath the superficial cultural differences which have arisen over history. (more…)