Tucker Carlson rang in the New Year with a controversial monologue on the failure of American government to address a fundamental problem of modernity: the breakdown of families, and the growing hopelessness of those who are neither intractably poor nor insouciantly rich. Unlike nearly every other “conservative” today, however, he spread the blame around, heaping as much of it on free-market fundamentalists as on the neo-Marxist uplifters of the hegemonic Left.
Where the modern Right gets it wrong, says Carlson, is in its faith in what might be expressed as a syllogism: a) economic growth is the greatest good; b) free-market capitalism is the best path to economic growth; and therefore, c) correct public policy should always prioritize non-interference with market capitalism.
Carlson makes it very clear that he disagrees: “Anyone who thinks that the health of a nation can be summed up in GDP is an idiot… Market capitalism is not a religion. Market capitalism is a tool, like a staple-gun or a toaster. You’d have to be a fool to worship it.”
Neoreactionaries have for some time questioned the free-market syllogism that Carlson critiques here, and it’s refreshing to see such heresy put forward on the public airwaves. For his sins, Carlson has been getting it from both sides: from the Left for his defense of traditional families and support for what Amy Wax has called “bourgeois values”, and from Conservatism, Inc. for free-market apostasy. (You have to hand it to the guy: he isn’t afraid to stick his neck out.)
Now the blogger “Spandrell”, whose insightful commentary has for years been influential out here on the dissident Right, has published a substantial post expanding on Carlson’s theme.
Spandrell begins by examining available strategies to push back against the neo-Marxist coalition-building he has called Bioleninism. If you don’t know what Bioleninism means, you should read about it here, but Spandrell sums it up in his current post as follows:
As we all know, the political left, born out of the chaos of the French Revolution, came of age when Karl Marx produced a working formula: class struggle. You go find the low status people in your country, tell them the world is divided in two sorts of people: them, and the guys on top of them. The guys on top are oppressors, the guys on the bottom are oppressed: if you, the oppressed follow me, we’ll turn the table, “liberate you’ i.e. grab their stuff and their status and give it to you.
Then after WW2 the Western left realized that the oppressor/oppressed template worked much better with groups disadvantaged biologically than with mere social class. Hence we got Bioleninism. The industrial worker who was so much into socialism could after all become a manager, or start his own company and not be so interested in socialism anymore. Happened all the time. That’s not a good deal if you’re a leftist politician. You want your underlings to stick around and be loyal, and the underclass doesn’t feel so oppressed if there’s not an underclass anymore. Of course, you can change class (in modern Western societies), but you can’t change biology. The average racial minority, the sexual deviant, the mentally ill, the fat cat lady, those will always be low status, always feel oppressed. That’s firm, absolute loyalty right there.
So: how can Bioleninism be resisted? By forming a counter-coalition out of whoever Bioleninism can’t seduce:
How do you deal with Bioleninism? The only workable strategy was formulated by Steve Sailer decades ago: if the Left is the Coalition of the Fringes, the Right must be the Party of the Normal. In the US, where demographics mean that the minority-supported Democratic party will by 2025 or so have a rock-solid electoral majority, that meant the Republican Party becoming the party of White people. It’s taken a while, but as the critical date when Texas flips blue approaches, the Republicans have slowly, if somewhat unawares, moved in that direction. Hence, Donald Trump.
Of course the Right has to do a lot of work before that change of direction is complete. The Left is more flexible and responsible to change, because its basic formula is simple. They’re the party of the oppressed. If things change they just need to change the identity of the oppressed, and they’re set. Easy. The Right though, can hardly be the party of the oppressors. At its core, sociologically, the Right is the party of the people who wanna be left alone. That’s not a very exciting way of running a political movement, though, so they must always come up with random reasons to justify their attachment to the status quo. The usual are traditional religion, which is useful as it doesn’t need to be justified, and has centuries of history fighting the Left, long a force for atheism. There’s also nationalism, to the extent it is allowed to exist post-WW2, which tends to be the refuge of secular, masculine people who dislike the Left’s push for egalitarianism.
And of course, capitalism. When the Left was primarily about economic socialism, about state-control of the economy, the Right had a very strong Schelling Point in free-market ideology. Opposing socialism made for good politics for non-leftist people, it has a ready source of funding from business owners. And it just makes a lot of sense. Socialism is a very stupid economic policy, which produces poverty. And nobody likes poverty, least of all the poor. So the political Right in much of the Western world, and even out of it, became mostly a coalition of religious people, nationalists, and business owners. God, Country and Capital.
This tripod — which corresponds well to another influential concept of Spandrell’s, the neoreactionary “trichotomy” — soon came, unsurprisingly, to be dominated by the Capital faction. And capital wants to be free. This, argues Spandrell, is what gave rise to the idiomatically American ideology known as Libertarianism.
Libertarianism is what you do when you realize that the government is socialist by definition. Socialism being the control of the economy by the government, well, yes, odds are the government is going to want to control the economy. So if you don’t trust the government to respect your interests, then you go libertarian. You do that because you are a business person and have an actual reason to want the government to get away from your business. Or you do that if you are opposed to the government for other reasons, say cultural reasons, and just want to signal your distrust of the government. Libertarianism came from both sides of that. Not by coincidence, much of libertarianism came of the American South after the Civil Rights movement. US Southerners realized the US Federal Government wanted to destroy their culture; and many of them became free market fundamentalists as a way to oppose that. That again connects with the 3-way coalition of religious, nationalists and capitalists that has formed the Political Right for decades.
Libertarianism has deep roots in America’s founding philosophy. At its heart is the natural-rights theorem that the only legitimate government is that which rules by the consent of the governed; the general principle by which this leads to libertarianism is the idea that since we all have non-overlapping things we are willing to consent to, we maximize consent by minimizing the range of aspects of our lives over which government may exert power. Given that government relentlessly seeks to increase that range, the libertarian finds himself consenting to less and less over time. In essence then, libertarianism becomes increasingly a yearning for what NRx calls “Exit”. But its flaw is that it seeks Exit in situ, without actually going anywhere. This might have been possible in a simpler time, but in the modern technological “synopticon” (to borrow a term from Victor Davis Hanson), mere libertarianism — personal libertarianism — is doomed.
Except, that is, where libertarianism coincides with power. There being two major axes of power in America — the Bioleninist ruling coalition, and Capital — liberty can be the reward of loyalty. For the Bioleninist faithful, that reward is generally paid out in liberties having to do with present enjoyment and consumption: in particular, freedom from traditional cultural and sexual restraints, and freedom from the need to make one’s own way in the world. For Capital’s troops, the reward is freedom from economic and cultural supervision. And now we see something new, but unsurprising: “woke corporations” trying to play both sides. This needs to be called out — and that’s what Tucker Carlson has done:
Well, Tucker’s speech basically said this alliance was over. The alliance of God, Country and Capital has achieved some electoral victories over the decades, but it has failed miserably at the only important task: the Culture War, influencing the behavior of the people so that they form stable and moral families. The Left has destroyed traditional culture bit by bit, and neither Nixon, nor Reagan, nor Bush, nor anyone, has been able to do stop it even by an inch. And why is that? Has God failed us? Do the people not love their Country? No, it’s the other guys. Capital has betrayed us. The libertarians have been playing a double game, and they are now pretty much the enemy. They haven’t just surrendered, or been neutralized. Capital today is perhaps the biggest force of the Left. They’re the biggest enemy.
Spandrell asks, with an inner quote from Carlson:
If Capital is now Woke, if the Left has successfully captured the capitalists, why should the Right be nice to them? Because muh-free markets? That was a means, not an end. The goal of the Right is, again”¦
The goal [of government] is to have an economy which makes it possible for normal, average young people to marry and have kids.
Or in other words, to ensure a future for our children. There’s another version out there in 14 words.
Spandrell concludes:
What the Right needs to do now is to reflect on how the Left was able to capture Capital and turn it into its most lucrative constituency. Any successful country needs a business community, and the capture of the West’s by the Bioleninist left has been so unexpected that still many people refuse to believe it. But happened it has, whether by political coercion, infiltration, or just mere cultural prestige. We better think carefully on what happened, how to reverse it, and use the same tools for our own cause.
How did it happen? Infiltration, certainly — and there’s always Conquest’s Second Law, which says that “any organization not explicitly right-wing becomes left-wing over time.” But mainly it is just that capital is a weathervane, which turns as the cultural winds blow. That it is a force of the Left today, when it wasn’t in 1955, just tells you that the Left has changed: having abandoned economic Marxism for Bioleninism, it is no longer a natural enemy of Capital. But far more importantly: it tells us that here in 2019, the Left has won.
The questions Tucker Carlson has raised are what the Right needs to be thinking about right now, above all else. Read Spandrell’s essay in its entirety, here.
8 Comments
I’m skeptical, Malcolm, that posing these questions as Carlson does will do the Right all THAT much good, for I suspect the answers will be disappointing. Or to put it more honestly, the answers are perhaps already fairly clear and we don’t want to acknowledge them – that the ability of the state to improve life for the left side of the Bell Curve in the 21st century, while perhaps not negligible, is limited. The usual Carlsonian, Trumpian, paleoconservative solutions: protectionism, sticking it to the media, even a Wall will do little or nothing to lift up the white proles I’ve known in Pittsburgh or my hometown in the Midwest.
And allow me to call b.s. on a common mantra you’re hearing a lot lately, that the American economy prevents the working class from marrying and having families. This is just false. There are lots of reasonable paying jobs out there in construction, electric work, plumbing, and so forth that can enable Americans to form families. They just have to be frugal and delay gratification, living in apartments and condos for longer than they may desire, for example. Older generations of the working class understood this necessity for the old-fashioned virtues: stoicism, an acceptance of inequality. Rather than promoting a restoration though of the wisdom of our elders, I fear that so many in the Dissident Right want to take the easy way out by espousing technocratic solutions (ironic that, considering the contempt they have for elites and cultural Marxists). This will just create more bitterness as a result of unfulfilled expectations, with nationalist populists demanding institutions do things that cannot reasonably be done.
Let me add a little qualification to the above. Certainly I agree that it’s good Carlson is thinking outside the box and challenging shibboleths, allowing in fresh air. Alas, there doesn’t appear to be a comparable figure on the Left in the media, which perhaps says something.
“Older generations of the working class understood this necessity for the old-fashioned virtues”
Older generations had a wall of tariffs, nobody else in the world even close in terms of industrial base and capital, extremely stingy immigration, 120 million less people, an overt racial hierarchy that actually favored whites, no political correctness, men and women were not socio-economic rivals. I could go on.
The more I read your comment the angrier I get, so I’ll stop here.
Jason, “Alas, there doesn’t appear to be a comparable figure on the Left in the media, which perhaps says something”
To the left, matters are already settled so there is no need for a figure like that.
Jason, AG,
You’re both right. AG, all the things you say about what gave working men a chance in days gone by are indeed true.
Jason, I believe it is also true that there are very scant prospects for, as you put it, the “left side of the bell curve”. What a government might realistically do about that, especially in the face of advancing technology, is hard to say.
Even that which is simple and obvious — secure the border and stem the flood of low-wage immigration — may not be possible.
Don’t pull that crap on me Anti-Gnostic. If you disagree with me fine, but spare me the childish petulance. Did you even consider what I wrote, that there still remain lots of opportunities for even the working class? Do you deny that there are unglamorous but decent jobs in plumbing, construction, medical technology fields, etc.? And if you want to mention our 19th century forbearers, frankly they would be rather disgusted by our whining, our victimization, when our lives – including those of the American white working class – in most ways are much, much easier than theirs.
Certainly assisting the white working class will be a challenge in the coming decades Malcolm, requiring mechanisms like a guaranteed income I suspect, with all of its accompanying risks. If Carlson (or somebody like Charles Murray, who proposes the replacement of our current safety net with a $13,000 yearly grant – I think – to lower-income Americans) can help out with this endeavor that would be salutory.
Some perspective though is in order, in my mind, both about the limits of what the government can do and how this needn’t prevent the underclass in exercising their agency. For economic life currently isn’t that dire – to repeat yet again the job opportunities are out there. That somebody like the Anti-Gnostic above, who denies this freedom of will to white proles because – among other reasons – they are no longer racially favored suggests how decadent and weak parts of the Dissident Right have become.
Jason,
Again, I think you’re both right. A-G is right in that the “playing field” was indeed very different then, and there are many reasons why conditions were more favorable for family creation, cultural stability, organic hierarchy, and social cohesion. I don’t think he was denying freedom of will to white proles, so much as acknowledging that social and economic conditions are much less favorable — nay, downright unfavorable — to them now.
You are right in that it is necessary to adapt as well as one can, and to blame externalities as little as possible. To be resourceful and self-reliant in order to survive was indeed considered an essential part of respectable adulthood in those bygone days, and I have no doubt that men and women of previous generations would, as you say, be disgusted by the amount of whining and victimization we see all around us. You are right also that at a time of low unemployment it should be possible for most people to find dignity in purposeful and necessary work.
But coming back to A-G’s side of the argument, we have to see also that competition by waves of immigrants, both skilled and unskilled, have driven wages down in every economic stratum; that cultural changes have driven a great many women out of the childbearing marketplace and into competition with men; that corporate globalism has wiped out millions of the industrial jobs that used to be the foundation of family-building in blue-collar America; that there is no person more reviled and despised in 21st-century America than the working-class, heterosexual, culturally traditionalist white male, and no person to whom more doors are currently (and very intentionally) closed. It is something that this class of people are just going to have to find a way to deal with — and the more ignored, marginalized, reviled, and excluded they are, the uglier the reaction will become, because they are still our nation’s founding stock, and their numbers are legion — but to point all of this out is not merely whining.