Over at National Review, Victor Davis Hanson reads us a litany of national woes. He has chosen as a preface a too-familiar epigraph:
“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.’
”“ W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming’
The article begins:
Things are starting to collapse, abroad and at home. We all sense it, even as we bicker over who caused it and why.
Indeed they are, and indeed we do. (Why, you’d almost think Professor Hanson had been spending time in one of the Internet’s darker corners.)
Elsewhere, Heather Mac Donald comments on the sharp uptick in violent crimes in our nation’s urban centers, as a consequence of what has been called the “Ferguson Effect”:
Almost any police shooting of a black person, no matter how threatening the behavior that provoked the shooting, now provokes angry protests, like those that followed the death of Vonderrit Myers in St. Louis last October. The 18-year-old Myers, awaiting trial on gun and resisting-arrest charges, had fired three shots at an officer at close range. Arrests in black communities are even more fraught than usual, with hostile, jeering crowds pressing in on officers and spreading lies about the encounter.
Acquittals of police officers for the use of deadly force against black suspects are now automatically presented as a miscarriage of justice. Proposals aimed at producing more cop convictions abound, but New York state seems especially enthusiastic about the idea.
The state’s attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, wants to create a special state prosecutor dedicated solely to prosecuting cops who use lethal force. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo would appoint an independent monitor whenever a grand jury fails to indict an officer for homicide and there are “doubts’ about the fairness of the proceeding (read: in every instance of a non-indictment); the governor could then turn over the case to a special prosecutor for a second grand jury proceeding.
This incessant drumbeat against the police has resulted in what St. Louis police chief Sam Dotson last November called the “Ferguson effect.’ Cops are disengaging from discretionary enforcement activity and the “criminal element is feeling empowered,’ Mr. Dotson reported. Arrests in St. Louis city and county by that point had dropped a third since the shooting of Michael Brown in August. Not surprisingly, homicides in the city surged 47% by early November and robberies in the county were up 82%.
(In my grimmer moments, which are not infrequent, I’d have to wonder whether the “Ferguson Effect” is in fact an unintended consequence. To chalk it up to mere stupidity and unwisdom on the part of our elected officials would be the more charitable assumption, but the case for doing so is not persuasive.)
Recently I was invited to join a monthly discussion-group for the “Dissident Right”; it’s a convivial dinner-and-drinks affair at an “undisclosed location” in New York. The guest lecturer last month was a prominent conservative intellectual, and the author of several books. He gave a very engaging talk, but with a dispiriting message: there is simply no effective right-wing political opposition in America anymore, and no “critical mass” from which one can be expected to arise. Even as the ostensibly “conservative” GOP holds the upper hand in both houses of Congress, the nation moves faster and faster to the Left. And as others have pointed out: even if they wanted to, the Congress and the Judiciary simply cannot respond rapidly enough to the actions of an aggressive Executive — Congress because of the democratic limitations of a large legislative body, and the difficulty of assembling filibuster- and veto-proof majorities, while the Judiciary can initiate nothing at all on its own. Moreover, we are in such a late stage of this “progressive” disease that we are long past the point where a presidential victory, even by an actual conservative, can make any long-term difference to the morbid prognosis.
Furthermore, we are in the late stages of a kind of decline that is inherent in democracy itself, in which a gradual expansion of the franchise, culminating in universal suffrage, leads inexorably to short-sighted governance, the consumption of future assets for present-day luxuries, and the general dissipation of a nation’s vigor. As Fitzjames Stephen wrote in 1874:
The substance of what I have to say to the disadvantage of the theory and practice of universal suffrage is that it tends to invert what I should have regarded as the true and natural relation between wisdom and folly. I think that wise and good men ought to rule those who are foolish and bad. To say that the sole function of the wise and good is to preach to their neighbors, and that everyone indiscriminately should be left to do what he likes, should be provided with a ratable share of the sovereign power in the shape of the vote, and that the result of this will be the direction of power by wisdom, seems to me the wildest romance that ever got posession of any considerable number of minds.
So, here we are, in a runaway train, with a foolish and angry mob at the controls. We have not the numbers to storm the engine. What to do? Neither Hanson nor Mac Donald offer any prescription.
The historically literate reactionary’s answer is: nothing. We can do nothing, other than to hope we survive the inevitable wreck, to learn from our mistakes, and perhaps to carry something forward.
Writing at Outside In, Nick Land explains (my emphasis):
Neoreaction, as it tends to extremity on its Dark Enlightenment vector, frustrates all familiar demands for activism. Even if explicit anti-politics remains a minority posture, the long-dominant demotic calculus of political possibility is consistently subverted ”” coring out the demographic constituencies from which ”˜mobilization’ might be expected. There is no remotely coherent reactionary class, race, or creed … from which a tide-reversing mass politics could be constructed. In this respect, even the mildest versions of neoreactionary analysis are profoundly politically disillusioning.
Because of the reactionary’s emphasis on organic and traditional societies, the idea of any sort of reactionary activism based on revolutionary compulsion — an externally applied force that, history shows, generally assumes the form of terrorism — is a self-abnegating absurdity. Therefore, Mr. Land argues:
Demotist activism finds its rigorous neoreactionary ”˜counterpart’ in fatalism … Rather than attempting to make something happen, fatality restores something that cannot be stopped.
There’s a word for what Mr. Land prescribes: horrorism.
It is thus that the approximate contours of the horrorist task emerge into focus. Rather than resisting the desperation of the progressive ideal by terrorizing its enemies, it directs itself to the culmination of progressive despair… It de-mobilizes, de-massifies, and de-democratizes, through subtle, singular, catalytic interventions, oriented to the realization of fate. The Cathedral has to be horrified into paralysis. The horrorist message (to its enemies): Nothing that you are doing can possibly work.
“What is to be done?’ is not a neutral question. The agent it invokes already strains towards progress. This suffices to suggest a horrorist response: Nothing. Do nothing. Your progressive ”˜praxis’ will come to nought in any case. Despair. Subside into horror. You can pretend to prevail in antagonism against ”˜us’, but reality is your true ”” and fatal ”” enemy. We have no interest in shouting at you. We whisper, gently, in your ear: “despair’. (The horror.)
That’s enough for now, I think. Enjoy your weekend.
