Maverick Philosopher

Populism Reload: An Interview with Steven K. Bannon

Steve Bannon talks sense. See if you don't agree: 

Mark Granza: Let’s talk about the “Deep State“. The term is widely used by people on the Right to describe the network of bureaucrats and organizations secretly running the country behind the scenes. Is this in your experience an accurate description of what’s going on in Washington?

Steve Bannon: I think the nomenclature is important to get right. I would rather call it the “administrative state”, which is really a fourth branch of government never intended by the founders and, quite frankly, the American people. The Administrative State’s purpose, and really the Progressive Left, is to take over all functions of government through these agencies. Up until now they could issue their own regulations and laws, and now they control even their own law enforcement, whether it’s 87,000 IRS agents or these jackbooted FBI or the EPA, with armed security and guards. So our big focus should be its deconstruction. It needs to be taken apart brick by brick. You saw how out of control this was with the CDC and FDA when the pandemic hit, with Tony Fauci as the face of the administrative state that ruled without permission to be questioned. And it’s not that we don’t need an FDA or CDC, but they definitely have to be heavily repurposed. I would say the national security and the intelligence apparatus and part of the legal one are what we would more traditionally think of as a “deep state”, probably best personified in the first Trump impeachment. If you remember all that kind of fetish about the interagency process and the sacramental nature of the way those things should work when Trump was President, that was really the Deep State saying that Trump was unacceptable because deeply he did not believe in those processes. He did not believe in their function, nor their policies.

You can tell this now with Ukraine, these groups have their own goals. It has captured the American national security and foreign policy apparatus, and it needs to be defeated. They don’t believe in the Constitution, they don’t believe that a commander in chief should be able to make his own decisions. You know, I’ve advocated from day one that we need another Church Committee. In the 1970s, after Watergate, after Vietnam, after the assassinations and all the turmoil in the streets, it was determined that the FBI and the CIA had crossed the boundaries of what their mandates were on both surveillance of Americans, infiltration of groups, and all of their tasks really. And so you had the Church Committee set the modern structure for the FBI and CIA as a consequence. But I think that’s been blurred over time. You clearly still have a lot of nefarious activity going on and a lot of stuff that needs to be reviewed. I think we need to get back to that; a total revamping, rethinking and rejuvenation of these apparatuses, whether it’s the NSA, CIA, FBI, DOJ, the military or the armed forces. I’ve spent eight years as a naval officer. My daughter went to West Point. She was with the 101st Airborne Division and deployed to Iraq. So we are all big patriots and huge believers in serving in the military. But things have gone way off track and we definitely need to, not just take a hard look, but have massive reform at those levels.

Mark Granza Interviews Blake Masters: 'Woke' Capitalism and Kyle Rittenhouse

(Related: my Substack article, The Trial of Kyle.)

Here is the interview.  A couple of excerpts:

Mark Granza: A decade ago most people would have considered ‘Woke Capitalism’ a contradiction, and probably laughed at the idea. Today, nobody questions its existence. Do you think there are there inherent characteristics within Capitalism that transform it into a progressive machine, or are corporations simply responding to the ideological demands of the political class?

Blake Masters: Capitalism works. It’s a really good system for generating wealth. The problem with capitalism is that can work too well in a sense, it can create the conditions for people to grow complacent, which ultimately, as Ross Douthat has written, contributes to the sort of decadence we’re experiencing today. Capitalism’s an incredible engine of material progress, but it’s not a self-contained moral system. It has its own incentives, but those incentives aren’t always necessarily correlated with a conception of the good. Companies under capitalism just respond to profit incentives. If you act on them you’ll generate a lot of wealth, but it won’t tell you what to do with that wealth, which is why a parasite like Wokeness can basically spread and take over. An example is offshoring. Maybe it’s good for GDP, but if you have too much of it, that’s clearly really bad for the country and most people living in it. It crushes the middle class by sending jobs overseas by the millions. But such are the incentives that the capital owners are responding to. So I think problems like Woke Capitalism, or ‘globalization’, are actually much older and bigger problems than people think. Because you can’t just be a capitalist country, because a country is not just an economy. You also need a conception of yourself as a nation, as a people, and as a culture. And that’s what America is increasingly lacking today.

BV: The last three sentence are very important. A country is not just an economy. Do libertarians understand this? Not to my knowledge. They want to reduce everything to economics when it is the history, heritage, and culture of a nation that provides the framework within which a successful economy can operate. Or is the rule of law an economic concept?  How about the concept of citizen?

Mark Granza: I’d like to move from here to the issue of Justice in America. You were a vocal supporter of Kyle Rittenhouse before and during the trial. What do you think the fact that Kyle (as opposed to someone like Gaige Grosskreutz) was the one being prosecuted says about the US justice system?

Blake Masters: I think we’re very close to a two-tier justice system, if we’re not there already. Look how differently loyalists and dissidents are punished today. The Kyle Rittenhouse case was simple. The ruling class hated that a young man defended himself with an AR-15 because it contradicts their official narrative. And so they did everything they could to punish Kyle. The FBI literally withheld high-resolution version of the footage from Kyle’s lawyers, because it basically clearly exonerated Kyle and they found that inconvenient. Now I think the jury’s decision to acquit Kyle of all charges showed that you can still get sort of a fair trial in America, that there’s hope. But again, that only happened because in this case, there happened to be extremely clear video evidence in his favor. If there weren’t, Kyle would be in jail for life. So this case is a wake-up call. It’s crazy that Rittenhouse, and not his attackers, was on trial at all. Contrast that to how the BLM and Antifa looters and rioters who committed violent mayhem during the summer of 2020 – nothing happened to them! And on the off-chance one of them did get arrested, then-Senator and Vice Presidential candidate Kamala Harris was there with her bail fund, just waiting to bail them out. Meanwhile, the January 6 protestors, many of whom were not violent at all, are treated like terrorists, with some being held without trial in solitary confinement and others getting sentenced to many years in prison. If we don’t do something now, the rule of law will soon be gone forever. Anyone who questions the left’s narrative is going to be hunted down. I truly believe that. That’s what we’re fighting against.

BV: Again I say that the last three sentences are very important. 

^{Blake Masters gives a speech next to Donald Trump, December 2021.}

Edward W. Farrell on Populism

An impressive essay by an old friend of this weblog. Excerpts:

Populists feel betrayed by the movers and shakers of the world who they faintly hoped were working in their best interests but were actually working in the interest of something else. What is this "something else?" Nothing less than a perfectly homogenous world untroubled by nationality or biology or religion, a world superficially diverse in ethnicity, race, and sexual orientation but lockstep in rigid ideology and hatred of dissent; a world, oddly enough, that's perfectly suited to fuel the engines of global commerce which feeds the global lust for feel-good distraction. The down payment for this perfect world is the perfect elimination of populists. Populists have discovered this by observing the inexorable erosion of their accustomed way of life over several decades along with the livelihoods that once supported their freedom of self-determination--all to the tune of "things are getting better all the time."  When they have the temerity to ask "getting better for whom?" and become too loud to be ignored, or God forbid they support a Trump, they receive a scornful lecture that they're working against their own best interests, which they are too stupid to understand. But they understand what this means: shut up and quit interfering with the best interests of your employers, their employers, all the government wonks that tirelessly work to support the wealth brokers to whom everyone grovels, and everyone else who knows nothing except that you and your kind are an albatross hung on civilization's neck.

[. . .]

Identity Politics and the Transformation of Civil Rights My discussion here is based largely on Christopher Caldwell's The Age of Enlightenment, though of course he cannot be blamed for any tangential interpretations or conclusions I've drawn from it.

The path of race relations since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 reveals the true depth of the chasm between progressives and traditionalists. The traditionally-minded American sees America as exceptional: a beacon, "the city on the hill," built on constitutional foundations that are wise, sound, and unprecedented. In this view civil rights was never intended to alter American exceptionalism or the foundations that supported it. Rather, civil rights was seen as an effort to bring blacks, oppressed first by slavery and then by discriminatory Jim Crow laws in the South, into full citizenship with the majority of US citizens with all their attendant privileges and opportunities. The ultimate goal here was "race neutrality," a concept whereby race would no longer be a factor that lead to discrimination or preferential treatment.

By 2020 it became obvious that many progressives had something entirely different in mind. They did not share the vision of America as a "city on a hill;" rather, they believed racism was central to America's ethos and that all of its institutions were racist. Racism had not so much to do with individuals and their treatment of other individuals. Racism was "built into" all of Americas laws and institutions; in fact, the notion of race neutrality was simply a dodge that perpetuated white power. And the progressive goal of racial equality (as opposed to neutrality) demanded that the institutions, laws, and cultural ethos that supported white power be destroyed or otherwise rendered harmless to its victims. Identity politics became the means of determining which group was the most oppressed and thus stood first in line for their share as white power was dismantled and redistributed.

How did this divide come about?

Read the rest.

A Sane Populism is not an Anti-Intellectualism

Here is a statement that is not only extreme but also manifestly false:

In fact, you could wipe society’s table clear of every writer, artist, actor, musician, professor, dancer, reporter, tastemaker, producer, influencer, teacher, lobbyist, politician, everyone on TV, everyone who doesn’t get their hands dirty, and our world would keep turning just fine. 

If there were no trucks, there would be no truckers. If there were no automotive technology, there would be no trucks. If there were no engineering (applied physical science), there would be no automotive technology.  If there were no theoretical physics, there would be no applied science. If there were no pure mathematics, there would be no theoretical physics (in the technologically implemental, post-Galilean sense of the term).  If there were no people who never got their hands dirty, there would be no pure mathematics. And there would be none of this if there were no philosophers.

It all began with philosophy, the attempt to know man and world by the use of reason applied to the data of experience.  If there were no philosophers, we would still be retailing cosmogonic myths.

And if there were no philosophers like me, there would be no one to explain all of this to you, something I have just done, in an admittedly inadequate bloggity-blog sort of way, without getting my hands dirty.

That being said, I fully support the peaceful and eminently democratic  protests of the Canadian truckers and their American confreres.

And I heartily condemn the anti-democratic fascists of the Left, both here and to the North, who use the power of the State to suppress individual liberty, and then engage in the Orwellian subversion  of language to cover their tracks and gaslight the citizenry.

For example, the foolish Justin Trudeau, prime minister of Canada, claims that the trucker protests are racist. But what does race have to do with them? Nothing. When he's done misusing 'racist,' he will go on to misuse 'domestic terrorist' and 'insurrectionist.'   What sort of person is terrorized by the blaring of horns? What does terrorism and insurrection have to do with these legitimate and eminently democratic peaceful protests? Nothing.

And isn't Trudeau famous for his asseveration that "Diversity is our strength"?  One who dissents from fascist clamp-down is holding a view diverse from that of the fascists.

What does Populism Threaten?

First posted on my Facebook page on this date three years ago.

 

....................................

 

POPULISM is a threat to a leftist internationalism that rejects national borders and denies to nations the right to preserve their cultures, the right to stop illegal immigration, and the right to select those immigrants who are most likely to prove to be a net asset to the host country, and most likely to assimilate. There needn't be anything white supremacist or white nationalist about populism. (By the way, white supremacism and white nationalism are plainly different: a white nationalist needn't be a white supremacist.) And of course there needn't be anything racist or xenophobic or bigoted about either nationalism or populism. It is a mistake to confuse nationalism with white nationalism, a mistake deliberately promoted by leftists.

 

Populism in the style of Trump is not a threat to liberal democracy as the Founders envisioned it, but a threat to the leftist internationalism I have just limned and which contemporary 'liberals' confuse with the classically liberal democracy of the Founders. It is also quite telling that these 'liberals' constantly use the word 'democracy' as if it is something wonderful indeed, but they almost never mention that the USA is a democratic republic. Our republic has a stiff backbone of core principles and meta-principles that are not up for democratic grabs, or at least are not up for easy grabs: the Constitution can be amended but it is not easy, nor should it be.

 

Those who think that democracy is a wonderful thing ought to realize that Sharia can be installed democratically. This is underway in Belgium. Brussels could be Muslim within 20 years. Let enough Muslims infiltrate and then they will decide who 'the people' are and who are not 'the people.' The native Belgians will then have been displaced. Ain't democracy wonderful?

 

Let enough illegal aliens flood in, give them the vote, and they may or more likely will decide to do away with the distinction between legal and illegal immigration as well as the one between immigration and emigration. Ever wonder why lefties like the word 'migrant?' It manages to elide both distinctions in one fell swoop.

 

A sane and defensible populism rests on an appreciation of an insight I have aphoristically expressed as follows:

No comity without commonality.

There cannot be social harmony without a raft of shared assumptions and values, not to mention a shared language. There is need of cultural coherence. A felicitous phrase, that. Our open, tolerant, Enlightenment culture cannot cohere and survive if Sharia-supporting Muslims are allowed to immigrate. For their ultimate goal is not to assimilate to our ways, but to impose their ways on us, eventually replacing us.

 

Can you show I'm wrong?

Rush Limbaugh (1951-2021) and the Depth of Disagreement

As a philosopher, I am more interested in the nature of disagreement than in the particular things we disagree about. Why should our disagreements be so bitter and protracted?  But the particular bones of contention are fascinating too. At the moment, there is wild disagreement over the assessment of Rush Limbaugh's remarkably influential  career.  Here's a little sample. Andrew Klavan:

I liked Rush Limbaugh. I only turned on his show out of curiosity, so help me. But to my surprise, I did not find him evil in the least. He was just talking sense, really. Freedom. Constitutional limits on government. What was wrong with that?

Plus he was funny too, really funny. How could I not be delighted at the fear and loathing he inspired in the great and good? During my long absence from America, the great and good had become such smug, small-minded, and provincial little people, it was a guilty pleasure to watch them writhe on the flame he lit beneath them. For decades, feminists had called men “pigs.” Now Rush called them “feminazis,” and they threw their aprons over their faces and sobbed about his lack of civility. For decades, race-mongers had blamed an innocent generation of whites for a history that they hadn’t made, and now Rush mocked the mongers with wicked impressions, and declared it was time for black Americans to get on board the freedom train with their white fellow citizens.

It was beautiful. Courageous. The kind of radio magic I’d grown up with. And it changed me, or at least helped me change. Rush gave a joyful voice to the new thoughts I didn’t even know I’d had.

On the other side, Zack Beauchamp:

Obituaries for talk radio host Rush Limbaugh, who died on Wednesday at the age of 70, have frequently described him as a “conservative provocateur.” This is technically accurate but euphemistic, akin to calling Bashar al-Assad a “controversial leader.” Limbaugh’s stock in trade was bigotry and offense; his career-long defining trait was a willingness to channel the conservative id in unusually blunt and crude terms.

But I'll give the last word to Tammy Bruce:

Rush was not a monster, he wasn’t evil, he did not mean people harm, he wasn’t a bigot, or any of the other smears lobbed against him by my leftist associates. I liked him very much, and while we disagreed on many things (then) he was nothing has he had been painted 4/ 

In my conversations with him, we talked about the issues and despite the disagreements, he also took time to give me advice about hosting, style, connecting w the audience, etc. He encouraged me and gave me advice that made a huge difference in my career… 5/ 

He approached me and everyone else as separate individual worthy of respect and with a desire to help and inspire. Regardless of the fact that I stood for everything he stood against. It was a generosity of spirit you would never see on the left 6/ 

The impact of realizing that I’d been lied to about Rush was significant, but that as a conservative he represented more of what I felt was valuable & important was a revelation. He made it possible to even consider that which is what made him so dangerous to the left 7/ 

During this time as an activist leftist, it was talk radio, the audience, & meeting Rush Limbaugh that was the undeniable trigger making it possible for me to rethink my alliances & eventually leave the leftist establishment 8/ 

It wasn’t just Rush, but I’d also been lied to about conservatives in general, realizing that by speaking with callers every day who were conservative & responding fairly & w curiosity to my arguments on the air. Rush made that medium, & experience, possible 9/ 

My leftist associates begged me not to go into talk radio. I eventually realized they were so opposed because of what I would learn. That leftist effort to deny access to ideas & info continues w even more vitriol & punishment for those who dare to challenge leftist lies 10/ 

Rush created the potential of the medium, and set the tone for entertainment, analysis & education. Honest conversations open to everyone is anathema to the left which is why they’re obsessed w creating fear & the cancel culture 11/ 

The ugliness of the left will be seen throughout today & the days to come in response to the death of Rush, an American titan & defender of conservative values. The left is ugly & horrible but it is exactly their nature & should serve to remind you the importance of our fight 12/ 

The good news is, Rush not only changed our lives by helping us understand the imperative of freedom & generosity, but he now serves as an even more essential example for all of us 13/ 

Rush may be gone, but now it’s up to all of us to continue his commitment to our great nation. Thank you sir, for the time you took with a arrogant & smug LA leftist feminist, one of the millions of lives you changed for the better.

The Threat of Populism

What does populism threaten?

It is a threat to a leftist internationalism that rejects national borders and denies to nations the right to preserve their cultures, the right to stop illegal immigration, and the right to select those immigrants who are most likely to prove to be a net asset to the host country, and most likely to assimilate. There needn't be anything white supremacist or white nationalist about populism. (By the way, white supremacism and white nationalism are plainly different: a white nationalist needn't be a white supremacist.)  And of course there needn't be anything racist or xenophobic or bigoted about either nationalism or populism.

Populism in the Trumpian style is not a threat to liberal democracy as the Founders envisioned it, but a threat to the leftist internationalism I have just limned and which contemporary 'liberals' confuse with the liberal democracy of the Founders. It is also quite telling that these 'liberals' constantly use the word 'democracy' as if it is something wonderful indeed, but they almost never mention that the USA is a democratic republic.  Our republic has a stiff backbone of core principles and meta-principles that are not up for democratic grabs, or at least are not up for easy grabs: the Constitution can be amended but it is not easy, nor should it be. 

Those who think that democracy is a wonderful thing ought to realize that Sharia can be installed democratically. This is underway in Belgium. Brussels could be Muslim within 20 years.  Let enough Muslims infiltrate and then they will decide who 'the people' are and who are not 'the people.'  The native Belgians will then have been displaced. Ain't democracy wonderful?

Let enough illegal aliens flood in, give them the vote, and they may decide to do away with the distinction between legal and illegal immigration as well as the one between immigration and emigration. Ever wonder why lefties like the word 'migrant?' It manages to elide both distinctions in one fell swoop.

A sane and defensible populism rests on an appreciation of an insight I have aphoristically expressed as follows:

No comity without commonality.

There cannot be social harmony without a raft of shared assumptions and values, not to mention a shared language. There is need of "cultural coherence." A felicitous phrase, that. Our open, tolerant, Enlightenment culture cannot cohere and survive if Sharia-supporting Muslims are allowed to immigrate. For their ultimate goal is not to assimilate to our ways, but to impose their ways on us, eventually replacing us.

Can you show I'm wrong?

The Populist Surge in Italy and Elsewhere

Immigration, both legal and illegal, is perhaps the central issue of our time. Robert W. Merry:

And, of all the issues roiling Europe these days, none generates more political force and energy than the immigration crisis—representing a direct threat to the very definition of the West as well as its cultural coherence and health. The globalist elites don’t get it, even now, but their days are numbered. It is noteworthy that the two political institutions seeking a coalition government in Italy represent some 69 percent of the March 4 vote. That’s a lot of populist sentiment, and the elites may be able to chip away at it if the coalition stumbles, but they won’t be able to reverse it. The country is set upon a populist course for years to come.

Bill Galston, who is no populist (his latest book is entitled Anti-Pluralism: The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy), nevertheless understands the wellsprings of populist movements. “Throughout Europe,” he writes, “immigration is at the core of the populist critique of the liberal democratic order.” He notes that Orban in Hungary, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, France’s Marine Le Pen, and Matteo Salvini “all have highlighted the EU’s stance on immigration, raising important questions about economic globalization, political transnationalism, and cultural liberalism.” He adds that dismissing these concerns as simply retrograde is “counterproductive.” Instead, Europe’s leaders will have to take them seriously—“while offering better answers than unscrupulous demagogues like Orban can muster.”

Why should populism be considered a threat to liberal democracy? It is a threat to a leftist internationalism that rejects national borders and denies to nations the right to preserve their cultures, the right to stop illegal immigration, and the right to select those immigrants who are most likely to prove to be a net asset to the host country, and most likely to assimilate. There needn't be anything white supremacist or white nationalist about populism. (By the way, white supremacism and white nationalism are plainly different: a white nationalist needn't be a white supremacist.)  And of course there needn't be anything racist or xenophobic or bigoted about populism.

Populism in the Trumpian style is not a threat to liberal democracy as the Founders envisioned it, but a threat to the leftist internationalism I have just limned and which contemporary 'liberals' confuse with the liberal democracy of the Founders. It is also quite telling that these 'liberals' constantly use the word 'democracy' as if it is something wonderful indeed, but they almost never mention that the USA is a democratic republic.  Our republic has a stiff backbone of core principles and meta-principles that are not up for democratic grabs, or at least are not up for easy grabs: the Constitution can be amended but it is not easy, nor should it be. 

Those who think that democracy is a wonderful thing ought to realize that Sharia can be installed democratically. This is underway in Belgium. Brussels could be Muslim within 20 years.  Let enough Muslims infiltrate and then they will decide who 'the people' are and who are not 'the people.'  The native Belgians will then have been displaced. Ain't democracy wonderful?

Let enough illegal aliens flood in, give them the vote, and they may decide to do away with the distinction between legal and illegal immigration as well as the one between immigration and emigration. Ever wonder why lefties like the word 'migrant?' It manages to elide both distinctions in one fell swoop.

A sane and defensible populism rests on an appreciation of an insight I have aphoristically expressed as follows:

No comity without commonality.

There cannot be social harmony without a raft of shared assumptions and values, not to mention a shared language. Merry, above, speaks of "cultural coherence." A felicitous phrase, that. Our open, tolerant, Enlightenment culture cannot cohere and survive if Sharia-supporting Muslims are allowed to immigrate. For their ultimate goal is not to assimilate to our ways, but to impose their ways on us, eventually replacing us.

This is happening in Europe, Belgium being one good and chilling example. Muslim culture, however, is inferior to ours (on balance, not in every respect) and it is our decadence that blinds us to this fact. Suppose you are a benighted relativist who cannot or will not comprehend what I just wrote. Still, a nation has a right to its heritage and its culture. This is why there cannot be open borders. We have every right to preserve our culture just as Muslims have a right to preserve theirs.  

In sum:

1) Immigration issues will drive our politics, and not just ours, for the forseeable future.

2) The populist juggernaut will be hard to stop, and not just here.

Addendum (5/21):

Bill Keezer recommends Civilizational Jihad in the USA: The Practicum. You will find it very interesting, if that's the word.