Politics in North America is sometimes described as a battle for the center. As well it should be. The principle of “moderation in all things” is one of the most elemental human virtues, since it speaks to the heart of what it means to be human and to be able to function as one along with other human beings. Merely physical systems self-stabilize deterministically and automatically through the workings of purely physical mechanisms, without having to think about or put any effort into it. The maintenance, within the human body, of stable and steady states of critical system variables such as body temperature, pulse and respiratory rates, etc. is carried out by means of autonomic processes which operate beneath the threshold of conscious awareness and aren’t amenable to direct conscious control in any case.
The exact opposite is the case with social systems, which succeed in holding their internal states within ranges of variance narrow enough to stave off self-destruction and maintain existential continuity as distinct entities exclusively by means of volition and will, which in turn must be appropriately guided by ethical principles that can be apprehended only by means of conscious thought. The moral admonition to do nothing to excess, and to strive to find a golden mean between extremes, is something that is absolutely indispensable to the ongoing existence of any society, which would otherwise be about as viable as an infant incapable of regulating its core body temperature or breathing without interruption.
Existentially vital though they may be, the virtues of moderation and temperance are far from fashionable these days—rather ironically, given that the middle classes that built the societies of North America into what they are today staked their claim to legitimate social paramountcy on their self-image as the very living embodiment of the golden mean, occupying a sociological sweet-spot between extremes of poverty and luxury, barbarism and decadence, and the moral turpitude they perceived in both the proletariat and the traditional ruling classes. They were serious about this claim, and accordingly cultivated the values and sensibilities of austerity, sobriety, and self-restraint for which they became renowned. They loved peace, order, and good government (a phrase that actually appears in the text of the Constitution of Canada) above most everything else, and saw any sign of excess and intemperance in personal conduct as dangerous, tasteless, and, in a male, contemptibly effeminate (hence the stereotypical image of the flamboyant homosexual). They defined the rights and freedoms they so jealously claimed in terms of a Stoic conception of voluntary conformity to objective universal norms of conduct before which the desires of the individual were to be made to yield.
The Stoic theme of subjecting the passions to reason was re-imagined in terms of the value of “common sense” as a moderating principle of conduct, according to which the sensible course of action in any given situation is to find a middle ground between senseless extremes. Finally, the middle classes boasted that they had discovered, in constitutional government, a way to side-step extremes of anarchy and despotism and govern with equanimity for the good of all in a politics conducted, as Conrad Black once put it, from the thirty-yard line, with political radicalism seen as an eccentric affectation of intellectuals, students, and artists, something that no self-respecting businessman or politician gets mixed up in or pays any attention to.
The past sixty or so years has seen all this progressively thrown out the window. One counterculture after another has appeared on the scene in open revolt against bourgeois respectability: a Bacchanalia of drug abuse, polymorphous perversity, and all sorts of pointed excess in art, style, and ideas; these countercultures invariably end up spreading far beyond the Bohemian cliques in which they germinate and become mass-market phenomena. The culture industry has taken it upon itself to vindicate the subcultures of assorted dregs of society as legitimate expressions of personal “identity” and as a positive force for healthy social “diversity” in the face of an oppressively homogenizing white middle class norm (“whiteness”).
These subcultures are promptly imitated by the counterculture, which itself is promptly incorporated into the cultural mainstream, with the result that the tattoos, body piercings, and styles of dress that once were reserved for the likes of criminals, prostitutes, and homosexuals are now conventional fashion items. In the field of food and drink, a parallel process has seen a remarkable shift away from traditional notions of refinement defined in terms of a preference for light and delicate flavors to a tendency to seek out flavors as strong as humanly possible, as evidenced in the proliferation of designer hot-sauces, overly-hopped craft beers, cask-strength single-malts, and grotesquely over-sized Nicaraguan cigars with seemingly enough nicotine to kill a pet, all presented in intentionally crass packaging.
The Stoic values that sought to cultivate, above all in men, unflappable emotional reserve, a sober and serious gravitas that scorns the frivolous and foolish, and voluntary ethical adherence to baseline pro-social norms on an honor-system basis, have all been subjected to withering critique and extensively undermined. Psychotherapy decries emotional “repression” as unhealthy and accordingly diagnoses the classic “strong silent type” of man as pathological, perhaps even dangerous; men are exhorted to learn to express and talk about their feelings as readily and effusively as women. Austerity, modesty, and unassuming quiet dignity in comportment are reassessed, in self-help literature, as so many stigmas of the unimaginative and unambitious dullard, the “beta”, who is told that, if he is to have any chance of getting the girl he likes or the promotion he wants, he will have to learn to stand out, which means learning to be more flamboyant, more boastful, more rude, and more obnoxious in general.
This literature instructs individuals of both sexes, but especially women, to always put their own desires and interests ahead of those of others, and to learn to see their own conscience, and the pro-social values in its contents, as a sort of internalized occupation force that oppresses them, an enemy to be defeated in the struggle for personal liberation and growth. The individual is to do whatever it takes to get ahead. This is part of a more general process that sees ethical self-government give way to a legalism in which individuals hold themselves only to the letter of the law, and that only to the extent that they can’t get away with evading it, while at the same time exploiting the law as a weapon against their competitors and otherwise get their way (“lawfare”).
In politics, the wholly cynical and amoral spirit of careerism and lawfare finds expression in the tendency of the parties of the Left to altogether eject the ethical substrate of the democratic polity in terms of baseline universal norms of respect for opponents and their rights, reasonably serious commitment to the common good and to political neutrality in public administration, and the gentlemen’s agreements between the parties to forego the use of such tactics as might become destructive to all the parties and to the state—all of which hitherto served as moderating principles designed to keep partisan antics from getting out of hand and endangering the ability of the state to function. The leftists now deploy as standing tactics against their enemies censorship, attempts at getting people fired from their jobs, mob actions, physical assault in the streets, and a constant blare of outrageous calumnies and wildly over-wrought rhetoric ridden with profanities and delivered by journalists that, abdicating their former aspirations to the status of professionals and accordingly bound by professional ethics, no longer even pretend to be unbiased in their reporting.
It goes without saying that the leftists as a group reject ethical universalism, and make it clear that they have no intention of holding themselves to the same standards they punctiliously hold others to. When in office, the parties of the Left treat the public power as though their own private property, as evidenced for example in the Obama Administration’s use of the tax department to harass political opponents in the U.S., or, in Canada, Trudeau’s recent policy requiring recipients of federal funding to sign an attestation supporting the Liberal Party position on abortion as a condition of eligibility.
Finally, while the value of political centrism continues to hold, more or less, the political mainstream has been infiltrated by radical ideologies and extremist organizations such as Black Lives Matter that originated within the counter-culture and accordingly are much less interested in good government than they are in taunts, transgression, and provocations against the white middle class people and values they despise; and the infamous holiness spirals of these movements proceed under the assumption that the most extreme position is always the correct one.
The countervailing forces against intemperance, meanwhile, are themselves intemperate. The libertine revolt against bourgeois propriety and common sense predictably unleashed a plague of criminality, addiction, and sexual misconduct that was in turn countered by its Puritanical mirror-image in the form of zero-tolerance crackdowns on this and that, mandatory minimums and three-strikes policies in penal sentencing, gun bans, sexual harassment and speech codes on campus and in the workplace, etc. All of these measures make an ostentatious show, in the interest of proving that authorities are “getting tough on [social problem]”, of throwing out standards of proportionality, judicial discretion, procedural and evidential barriers to conviction, and other time-honored means of moderating the administration of justice, and/or cast a net that is as wide as possible and thus captures those who haven’t actually done anything wrong or even been accused of doing so.
Where common sense once would have held it obvious to anyone with half a brain that it’s a bad idea to tell dirty jokes in mixed company, hit on co-workers, or use racial slurs or other fighting words in the presence of anyone you’re not actually trying to pick a fight with, now diversity officers and HR personnel have to stand in for common sense and are distressingly wont to discipline those with unpopular political opinions right along with the actually disruptive.
In politics, the response on the part of the Right to the aggressive dirty pool being played by the Left has also been immoderate, polarized into vicious extremes of pusillanimous deficiency and reckless excess represented by the Never Trump tendency of establishment conservatism and the populist alt-right respectively. The former respond to the spate of bullish leftist provocations with shamefully abject craven capitulations on almost every point, with only nominal reservations, or none at all; the latter, with counter-provocations in the form of frivolous and irresponsible bluster and revenge-fantasies about armed uprisings, civil war, mass expulsions, and throwing opponents out of helicopters, in a sort of politicized version of locker-room trash-talk broadcast over the Internet where everyone can hear it.
The last, and potentially most pathogenic, imbalance is a polarity, within the body of the citizenry, between good and bad people. The ethical corruption outlined above is by no means a pandemic that uniformly infects the entire social body. Many, probably most, people continue to go through life voluntarily doing the things they are expected to do, and in good faith expect others to; they make a reasonable effort to treat others the way they would like to be treated, and to refrain from doing things that would destroy society if everybody did them. They have a very high-minded sense of fair play, and believe that the rules ought to apply the same way to everybody. They are more concerned with enjoying their own rights than with invading the rights of others, and more interested in providing for their families and in living conventional middle-class lives than they are in the minutiae of law and politics. They believe the things they read, and that they have a good-faith right to rely on the information therein; here again their high social trust levels are in evidence.
In short, the good Americans are salt-of-the land types. Left to fend for themselves in a modern democratic political arena in which it is supposed to be entirely up to each citizen to see to it that his interests are represented and his rights upheld, but where not everybody has the wherewithal or disposition to effectually do so, the salt of the land stand as sheep in a slaughterhouse. Those who self-moderate their wants and desires and put the good of the group first, who act in good faith and expect others to do the same, who believe that some things are wrong even if allowed by law, and that the law itself exists only to right wrongs and injustices while binding equally on all, and who believe in a general obligation to speak the truth, are quite simply no match for those who give free rein to the Freudian id, defect the second they think it to their advantage, cry out in pain as they strike, do whatever they anticipate authorities will let them get away with, cynically exploit the rules and procedures of justice to get the id what it wants, and lie brazenly and effortlessly as though as a matter of principle.
Every human society without exception, to be sure, has its share of bad people. But liberal democracy both nurtures and amplifies the potential for bad in man and mobilizes the bad people against the good ones in a uniquely morbid way. The annals of human history, especially of populous and urbanized civilizations, are full of all sorts of spectacular forms of disorder, excess, debauchery, brutality, corruption, and viciousness that far exceed anything found in North America on any truly widespread basis. But no other civilization of which I am aware has ever taught, as official doctrine, that vice is more virtuous than virtue; that dubious distinction belongs to our civilization, and the liberal/leftist ideologies that have taken the place of established religion there.
Liberalism/leftism doesn’t merely tolerate vice, and nor is it just too feeble to be able to stop it. Its cult of the self touts as virtuous what the wise men of every age and race of Man hitherto agreed was vicious; it regards ethical self-moderation as contemptibly self-abnegating, common sense as Nietzsche’s “iron cage of errors,” and public morality as a principle of pure despotism that represses and brutalizes the human spirit.
Liberalism/leftism should by no means be confused with traditional subaltern rebellions of the sort that in spite of themselves end up affirming and reinforcing the very moral and social order they seek to challenge, e.g. traditional populist tumults and rowdy student antics whose participants unintentionally prove to themselves and everybody else that they are yet incapable of self-moderation, or never will be, and are therefore destined by the nature of things to be put into order by superiors to whom they are rightfully subordinate. The exact inverse is the case here. Liberalism/leftism asserts the moral superiority of inferiors over superiors whose own authority is deemed illegitimate “privilege”; this qualifies the erstwhile inferior as the rightful superior of his superiors and morally better than his betters. Traditionally, the student who curses out a teacher commits gross insubordination, knows it full well, and can expect prompt punishment. Under liberalism/leftism, the same student, by giving offense, signals that the teacher is his rightful subordinate; he in effect gives his teacher a lawful order in the very act of appearing to defy him, which apparent act of defiance is actually a victory dance.
Right off the bat, we can see that liberalism/leftism is not quite the subaltern revolt it claims to be, but a perverse ruling caste ethos. Hence the ostentatiously self-identified “oppressed,” notoriously, in fact either come from elite backgrounds or are being inducted into the ranks of the social elite. This ethos systematically both encourages bad behavior on the part of elites as a status-maker in an inversion of traditional norms of noblesse oblige that once held elites to higher standards of well-tempered decorum than plebs and holds out to non-elites the possibility of access to elite status, if they are willing to throw tantrums and otherwise act every bit as badly as the traditional child or other subaltern proving his inability to order himself. Such a proven inability today enhances one’s claim to social precedence as opposed to detracting from it, and is a sign of fitness for authority as opposed to a disqualification.
There’s more. Liberal/leftist ideology embodies a really remarkable internal contradiction between its Bacchanalian licentiousness and moral nominalism/relativism on the one hand and an unrelentingly fanatical moral absolutism it inherits from its Puritan pedigree on the other. In much the same way that an argument premised on a contradiction can derive any conclusion from its premises, the contradictory combination of moral relativism and moral absolutism upon which liberal/leftist doctrine rests rigorously implies, in the leftist’s own eyes, that anything he does is moral by definition.
The infamous tendency of leftists to say one thing and then do or say the opposite can’t be properly understood as hypocrisy. The hypocrite concedes that what he does is wrong, but goes ahead and does it anyways; the principle itself remains intact and unaffected. Leftists rather believe that they are entitled to create and modify moral principles by pure fiat as they go, and as circumstantial interests dictate. Unlike the hypocrite, they don’t think they’re doing anything wrong. On the contrary, the very suggestion strikes them as incomprehensible and deeply offensive, and not unreasonably—since who makes the rules can’t very well break them, and licentiousness is meaningless as an indictment of the conduct of those who really do have a license to do anything.
It isn’t hard to see why liberalism/leftism is at once a magnet for the world’s worst people and a technology for producing more of them. To top it all off, leftism gives the bad Americans a standard and a cause around which to rally and associate, in the same way that criminals will associate into gangs based on a common preference for a brand of motorcycle, a style of music, or some other subcultural element. But here the gang assumes the form of a political movement with the common cause of seizing the levers of state power as opposed to selling dope and riding Harleys. The will to power thus takes on a life of its own as the formal objective of an entire movement, an emergent property as opposed to the sum total of the ambitions and desires of disparate individuals, which are harnessed and mobilized in the service of a perpetual cause that goes beyond any individual in particular. The political gangsters, obsessed with power and willing to do whatever it takes to get it, and organized under a banner that keeps a perpetual quest for power in steady motion where individuals by themselves might falter or fail no matter how personally ambitious, have accordingly built up an impressive racket, enormous and complex to the point of the unfathomable, and manned by full-time specialists drawn from the ranks of the bad Americans.
The good Americans, for their part, effectively stand defenseless against this racket—the Cathedral—and are indeed scarcely, if at all, even aware of its existence and its workings, which are so internally elaborate and impenetrable as to continue to puzzle the most sophisticated among the Cathedral’s opponents, who still debate among themselves just where the whole thing begins and ends. The typical unpoliticized or semi-politicized good American doesn’t even have a clue. To make things worse, this latter set of good Americans, as a group, itself remains fiercely attached to obsolete iterations of liberal/leftist ideology that retain some vestigial high-moral teachings and principles within them and were long ago discarded by the Cathedral accordingly, but are nonetheless and easily exploited by the Cathedral in order to advance items of its power agenda that it cannot legitimate directly. Words like “tolerance,” “civil rights,” and “equality,” which the good Americans understand in terms of fair play, compassion, and orderly day-to-day social relations moderated by the Golden Rule, are ritualistically invoked in Cathedral talking points, but endowed with a very different secondary signification that not everybody in the audience understands, and that most of them would reject if they did, but are prevented from grasping by a good-hearted but naïve tendency to assume that, since they themselves act in good faith from good motives most of the time, everybody else must be doing so, too.
The Cathedral thus conceals its agenda in plain sight, for the most part successfully; and the skeptics, refuseniks, and contrarians among the good Americans who for whatever reason won’t get with the Cathedral program quickly find out that they lack the resources and other wherewithal to be able to stop it, and indeed really have no idea even how, since most of them have budgeted their time over the course of their lives to pursuits other than scheming to grab power and visit mischief on their fellow man.
If they are naive enough, their opposition assumes the self-defeating form of “folk activism” which, missing the vast iceberg beneath the immediately visible tip of the Left as manifested in its street protests, assumes that dissidents can effectively oppose the leftists with similar street-level antics, only to find the same massive legal-political machinery that supports, from behind the scenes, the leftist stunts they seek to imitate unleashed against them with a terrifying fury the haplessly ineffectual folk activists stand no chance against. Or, with only slightly less self-defeating naïveté, they lend support to the established and nominally conservative parties—blithely unaware that, while these parties often actually do form governments, they are controlled opposition in or out of office, little more than conduits that link the state with pariah economic sectors and interests the Left regards as too vile to touch personally (e.g. resource-extraction, corporate tax relief, etc.); these self-described “socially liberal but fiscally conservative” parties make it unambiguously clear with this statement of intent that they have no intention of challenging the Cathedral.
In both cases, and as painful as it is to admit it, we can see that there is an unfortunate but substantial kernel of truth in Nietzsche’s quip that the meaning of the word “good” overlaps with that of “stupid,” and in the Left’s derisive characterization of the political Right as “the stupid party.” On the other hand, these observations are true only to the extent that the meaning of the term “smart” correspondingly overlaps with that of “sociopath.” From this point of view, those conservatives who urge rightists to desist from taking effective but ethically unprincipled courses of political action, although in fact much more interested in pleasing their social betters on the Left than in their vaunted principles, and rightly derided as “cuckservatives” accordingly, are nonetheless onto something diabolically real. For if the rightists learn to play, within the existing democratic two-party system, real political hardball and become sociopathic themselves in the process, any victory over the bad Americans will come at the absurd cost of the corruption of the morals of the whole body of the people, as opposed to just a part of it, as is still the case right now. They will have destroyed the nation in the very course of saving it. The bad guys will still have won.
The dilemma makes clear that the democratic polity as it exists in North America is dying and will soon be dead. It has become structurally unsound and fatally imbalanced and cannot possibly recover whatever capacity it may once have had for self-moderating equilibration between its internal factions. It presently stands in roughly the same position as a person with a sprained ankle in one foot and three broken toes in the other trying to maintain his balance, and with about the same likelihood of success. The edifice will topple and fall, followed by a period of dysfunction that will escalate until it reaches a hard limit it cannot exceed and is resolved by the reconstitution of the state and the achievement of a new social equilibrium.
It seems intuitively plausible , extrapolating from present trends, that the process will unfold as follows. The parties of the Left, which already vehemently refuse to acknowledge the possibility of legitimate electoral defeat and the legitimacy of any government formed by their opposition, and don’t for a minute believe in anything they say about the value of “democracy” and the “rule of law” when it comes to themselves, will simply set aside judicial rulings and other legal obstacles in their way, suspend democratic elections or ignore their results, abrogate constitutional rights, and set up a one-party state as soon as they are in a position to. The political Right will be caught unprepared by this development, and between feeble (or altogether non-existent) cuckservative party opposition and equally ineffectual folk activism won’t be able to counter it successfully. The new regime, however, will find itself in a permanent and ever-deepening crisis of legitimacy coming from two fronts at once: from the Right for obvious reasons, but also from the radical tendency within the Left that has already infiltrated the mainstream parties, and will inevitably butt heads with the existing elites of these parties.
These elites are made up of serious businessmen and career politicians; they are bad Americans, but their capacity for malfeasance is moderated by rational self-interest and the attending reluctance to kill the cows that provide their butter. They are worldly figures who understand that the real world is held together by mutually-interested deals, and that sometimes you have to compromise in order to make a deal. By themselves, they would govern in a corrupt but more or less sensible manner. The radicals, though, are animated by the spirit of transgression that must always find new limits to exceed in order to remain in a state of titillated arousal, and by the Gnostic fanaticism that, scorning the real world, looks forward to a final, fatal apocalyptic confrontation to be followed by the advent of Voegelin’s immanentized Eschaton. There is no compromise or cutting deals with these guys. They are not merely bad, but completely unhinged, indeed insane. They are interested in power but not in governing; they are wholly indifferent to potential socially and self-destructive consequences of their actions when not enthusiastically looking forward to them. They will demand that the party outlaw Christianity and the private possession of firearms for starters, and meddle in the internal affairs of the business enterprise with the effect of diminishing corporate profits and GDP growth accidentally or on purpose.
All of this, of course, will profoundly deepen the legitimation crisis, and adduce economic crisis to it for good measure; and once the radicals get what they want, they will demand more of it, and still more again after that. The party elite will, out of self-interested fear, eventually feel compelled to draw a line and refuse to give it to them- and at that point, the merely bad Americans will be promptly muscled out of the party by the worst, who will unleash a torrent of calumnies and mob actions against the elite, which for its part will find itself in the same hapless position the cuckservatives occupy right now.
The ousted party elite will have no choice but to throw its lot in with the illicit networks of the dissident Right, presently embryonic and tiny, but by that time snowballed into formidability in the course of assimilating more and more of the present ranks of centrists as the latter are expelled from above-ground public life and the idea of centrism as known right now recedes into memory. Business leaders, too, will become much more receptive to the Right than they are now as more and more of them find themselves with no representation in the state, and as the internal operations of the business enterprise become severely hampered by direct meddling in e.g. the composition of the boardroom and executive-level ranks, and by an immediate presence, in the very place of business, of radical activists empowered to act as officers of the State and running around bothering people and getting in the way as directly and as badly as they possibly can, as opposed to traditional indirect regulation of the business environment from afar.
Both the former party elites and the business leaders, constantly hectored and harassed when not actually ousted from their own organizations and perhaps even made categorically unemployable under total diversity (no white males allowed), will bring into the Outer Right the vital resources and skill-sets it still lacks as of right now. Conversely, there will be less and less to distinguish the state from an asylum run by its inmates; once things have deteriorated to the point where the Army finally decides it cannot continue to take orders from this civil authority any longer, the bottom falls out, and the state dissolved and reconstituted.
The reconstituted state will be able to restore centrist and moderate government, since it will have what the present state lacks, which lack is the etiological root cause of the problem: a Moderator in the form of a final and personal authority that, towering above all the fractious and clashing particular interests and partisan factions as the embodiment of the unity of the state, will order and moderate their relations where they have lost the ability to do so themselves. He will authoritatively and decisively settle their disputes with the sort of equanimity and disinterested objectivity that can only obtain from a man in a position of lofty superiority over all the contending parties and in no way responsible or beholden to any one of them, and thus able to authoritatively discern and pronounce the whole and impartial objective truth over the one-sided and self-serving claims and pleas of interested parties, and arrive at equitable settlements between them where each party would very much like to get its way at the expense of the other.
That the Moderator must be a flesh-and-blood person wielding irreducibly personal authority, and in no way accountable to those whose relations it is his function to moderate, needs to be underscored. Under present arrangements, the final authority of the land is a faceless State apparatus, a corporate actor that, since it is a fictive person, can’t actually do anything until it is staffed by political and administrative personnel that act on its behalf- which means that the State, which is supposed to act for the good of all, is in practice controlled by whoever it is that wins elections or otherwise successfully jockeys for position within the State apparatus. This guarantees that in actual practice, the public power becomes the instrument of particular interests and weaponized so as to advance those interests at the expense of others, which in turn must either constantly scheme to seize the state apparatus so that they can do the exact same thing themselves, or simply resign themselves to being oppressed and exploited by those who are supposed to be their equals. The end result is ironically much like the Hobbesian war of all against all the state is supposed to have put to an end to- but with the difference that one’s rivals are much more formidable when they come against you armed with the apparatus of state-monopolized coercion than they would be under their own power. Imagine, if you will, a judicial proceeding in which the judge’s seat was vacant and waiting to be filled by whichever of the litigants succeeded at placing himself in it so that he could decide the outcome of the case to which he is a party, and dispatch the bailiff to enforce the ruling accordingly The idea seems like the stuff of farce- but it is exactly the operating principle of our vaunted “democracies”.
Unlike a fictive corporate person, a real live personal ruler can act without first finding executive functionaries through which to do so, and thus can’t be weaponized and exploited as an instrument by factions the way a bunch of positions that need to be filled by incumbents can. On the contrary, the Moderator will, from his overarching position of superiority, restore equitable balance between all the particular interests and factions. As the embodiment of the organic unity of the state, the Moderator will see to it that all the legitimate economic and other interests and sectors of civil society will find an appropriate place in the body politic and be secure in that place (even though it may not be the place they want), unlike the present, unstable, and socially destructive all-or-nothing system that sees certain interests given inordinate consideration while others are neglected, or shut out of the state completely, all depending on which party wins this election cycle.
In particular, the Moderator, like a pastor protecting his flock from wolves, will create a safe environment in which the good Americans will be free to live their lives and enjoy their liberties without fear of predation from the bad Americans carried out via weaponized State power seized through the democratic political process, and without having to constantly fight for their right to exist in a political arena in which they are ill-equipped to play and at risk of becoming corrupted if they do. Contra all the high-sounding but disingenuous democratic exhortations to “civic participation”, it most certainly is not the responsibility of the common man to spend all of his time defending his rights against incursions from Cathedral parasites released from productive work in order to make a handsome living from bothering other people, when he has business to attend to and a family to feed. On the contrary, it is the responsibility of the state to see to it that his enjoyment of his rights is taken for granted, not something that he must incessantly vindicate against other people socially no better than he is (for, as an old juridical theory had it, whoever has to assert his rights every single time out doesn’t have any).
I should probably make it clear that the Moderator, although he protects the weak from the strong and the good Americans from predation and oppression by the bad, should not be thought of as some fashy demagogue leading a populist revolt against elites. To be sure, he may well publicly affect the part in order to expedite his ascent to power and rally the people behind him when he comes down hard on the Cathedral, but that part isn’t the one he will actually play once his power is secure. First, the Moderator, who stands above all social classes and secures the equilibrium of an organic social unity made up of all the classes bound together in harmonious balance and organic interdependence, isn’t some kind of Marxist or other class warrior and isn’t about to lead a revolt of one class against another and thus dismember the very body politic whose unity it is his task to secure.
Second, an organic unity of any type is organized hierarchically. Equity is not the same thing as equality. Rich people, and the professors, judges, civil servants, and other people of dignity who staff the present Cathedral system, have no reason to fear for their lives and their dignity as long as they acquiesce to the new scheme of things. On the contrary, whatever special dignity they may legitimately claim will be formalized and secure- which will free them from their present need to constantly, through conspicuous virtue-signaling and holiness-spirals, strive to distinguish themselves in a Liberal democracy that does not and cannot legally recognize anyone’s claim to special social status. In any case, Restoration is not the first step down a Gnostic road to an immanentized Eschaton paved with the skulls of millions of victims of revanchist mob actions, mass executions, and other atrocities which are irrelevant and utterly abhorrent to the ends of Restoration, an inherently moderate and centrist project that is all about securing order, stability, and normalcy, not the attainment of redemption in this life (“progress”).
Finally, the fascist or other demagogue properly so-called is a rebel styling himself as the first amongst rabble leading a revolt of the latter against a patrician elite, and whose charisma consists of grandstanding braggadocio in the form of a theatrics of impulsivity, recklessness, excess, vulgarity, and above all, shows of raw power and brute force conspicuously and wholly untempered by any moderating principles of prudence, foresight, restraint, respect for legality, or willingness to negotiate. The latter values belong to the patriciate, and define it as the rightful governing class in everyone’s eyes- including, in the final analysis, those of the rabble itself as the rabble-rouser’s antics invariably lead to catastrophic consequences and so end up proving to everyone that the rabble are fitted by Nature to take orders and not give them. It is evident that the demagogue is the very polar opposite of the Moderator, who is the patrician of patricians, more elite than the elite, and the very incarnation of law, order, and reason in the face of a society gone bananas, and whose job it is to subdue the mob and reduce it to order, not to encourage it.
On that note, a few words concerning the ideal character of the Moderator. Liberals and cuckservatives rightly scorn and reject rabble-rousing populism for all the reasons we have just examined, but neglect that the opposite of the grandstanding hamfisted brute force of the demagogue- namely, effete impotence- is itself, I have said already, immoderate and a form of excess, a sign of distempered times. The ostensible political centrism that, all too often, is a justification for pusillanimous lack of fortitude, or a self-serving desire to keep up appearances at fashionable cocktail parties, and which facilitates the skewing of the center further to the Left than the Left itself was just a few years ago, all in the interest of signaling “respectability” by groveling before radicals who reject the very idea, is no centrism at all. It is, in fact, a form of lawlessness, anarchy, and extremism- for law without force is a nullity, and to forfeit authority out of sloth or lack of conviction is to put society in the same anarchic place as the revolutionary overthrow of authority. Centrism rigorously conceived, as we saw at the outset, means the ability to lay down the law and forcibly put men and things in their proper place in its order and keep them there; it means keeping social life centered around its optimal norms of functioning (analogous to homeostasis in the biological organism) and preventing entropic drift from the golden mean towards chaos and dissolution (analogous to pathology and death in the biological organism).
Force and right are the constituent elements of sovereign authority; and for centuries liberal dogma has taught, pace John Locke, that the two must never be combined in the same person, since it would unleash a despotic and destructive will to power with terrifying social consequences much worse than anarchy. The toxic fruit of this hallowed liberal doctrine of “separation of powers,” by means of which the natural and personal rule of kings was replaced by the artificial and faceless apparatus of the modern Leviathan, can be seen in the figure of the hot-headed fashy demagogue on the one hand and the ostentatiously high-minded but ineffectual cuck on the other. Both represent twin manifestations of authority mutilated and made unwholesome by extirpating one of its two indispensable components. The fascist who concurs with Nietzsche that Christian morality is contemptible, for whom prudence and foresight are mere synonyms for cowardice, and who deploys as much violence as possible, preferably with as much illegality as possible, in showboating coups d’autorité designed to impress upon his followers what a fearless bad-ass he is, is the product of force detached from right. Meanwhile, the cuck who agonizes endlessly over “muh principles”, and moreover infallibly interprets the principles of prudence, legality, moderation, etc. to dictate acquiescence to will of the enemy with a compliant bow in any given situation (as though to prove the fascist was right all along), is what you get when right is detached from force.
Both fascist and cuck are unhinged extremist personalities- the latter no less than the former, as evidenced by the cuck’s irrational hyperextension of his principles into vicious extremes of absurdity. Each extremist personality is unwholesome in the strict sense of the term, a half-a-man unworthy of power and unfit to be trusted with its exercise.
The Moderator, by contrast, is all man, a real man, one in whom force and right are wholesomely unified and balanced. Since he is the personal embodiment of force and right, ideally it should be manifested in his character and in his public bearing and comportment. The Moderator is tough as nails, but fair; ruthless, but not cruel; merciful, but not weak; willing to do what it takes, but not sociopathically amoral; unwaveringly resolute but not a fanatic, leaving room open to negotiate to his advantage. Unlike the cuck, he bears within himself a fearsome capacity to visit harm- but unlike the fascist, he visits harm only on the basis of prudence and according to principles of natural and divine right as he discerns them. As judge, legislator, and executor, he is the champion and protector of the people, but also its faculty of reason. His public style, then, ought to neither be that of a boorish loud-mouth nor a simpering bow-tied milquetoast, but should project strength under rational self-moderation and control, calm and measured constancy as against unstable twin extremes of excitable impulsivity and anxious indecisiveness. He should project seriousness, sobriety, severity, gravitas, and the self-command that is the badge of one’s ability to successfully command others.
Rightists can help pave the way for the rise of a leader with the character and the power to save the state from itself and restore order to a society in which everybody seems to be going bonkers at once through a long-term plan of strategic action and non-action.
In terms of non-action, they ought, in the interest of letting the two-party democratic system go through its ultimately unsustainable paces to its demise, to withdraw support from the established parties, and do whatever they can in a greater or smaller way to call things by their real names and see to it that partisanship and party politics become synonymous, in political parlance, with extremism and placing factional interests before the common good. In particular, they should maintain a pathos of distance from the recent populist turn in mainstream conservatism. The danger is that neo-populism may prove a winning formula for the conservative parties that will at once provide governance only slightly more congenial to the national interest than cuckservativism, if at all, and moreover enable the re-branded conservatives to gain and hold onto power long enough to see the parties of the Left disintegrate under the influx of radical elements before they can ascend to power and then contribute their indispensable fair share to the collapse of democracy as outlined above. This would amount to nothing more than a version of “kicking the can down the road”- something that is in nobody’s true interests seeing as how, even if neo-populism does turn out to enable the conservative parties to hold onto the reins of formal legislative and executive power in the foreseeable near future, the Cathedral will continue to run everything else, and the manners and morals of the people grow worse accordingly.
As to action: rightists should continue to discretely cultivate networks across as much of the terrain of civil society as possible; there is little I can say here that hasn’t been said already. Finally, they should also continue to reflect in the abstract on the ideal character of the new statesman and his cadre, and more concretely to develop leadership training and self-improvement programs designed to systematically cultivate the character traits of the men who will lead the nation back to normalcy and its former heights. There is a wealth of old books and traditional material on this subject. For example, the writings of Lipsius and Bolingbroke—waiting to be reactivated and made to live again, with their timeless insights rearticulated in more modern discourses and techniques of leadership training and self-help.