The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return

by Michael Anton

For instance, many want to punish America for its alleged sins but also continue to reap benefits from America’s historic productivity—as if a prostrate, anguished America can keep producing at anywhere near its accustomed clip. All this makes the future uncertain, and likely tumultuous.

There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.

May we not even say that that form of government is the best which provides the most effectually for a pure selection of these natural aristoi into the offices of government? This

Birth matters in two fundamental ways: to whom one is born, and where.

“assortative mating”

“If you can choose whether to be born rich or smart, choose smart.”

The cause is that nature has created men so that they are able to desire everything and are unable to attain everything. So, since the desire is always greater than the power of acquiring, the result is discontent with what one possesses and a lack of satisfaction with it.

Their solution is, first and fundamentally, to transform the United States into a deracinated economic-administrative zone with one-size-fits-all “rules,” whose surface impartiality masks an unbending bias toward capital over wages, management over labor, words over actions, ideas over things, the new over the old, cosmopolitanism over the familiar, foreigners over the native-born.

The twentieth-century Russo-French philosopher and bureaucrat Alexandre Kojève, borrowing from Marx and especially Hegel, articulated this vision and named it the “universal and homogenous state.” This is the end state the ruling class seeks.

In other words, in where and how it lives, in what it consumes and where it shops, the ruling class pays through the nose to experience America as if the calendar still read 1955—and a particularly upscale 1955 at that. In its professional life, it works hard to make sure that you can’t afford to live the same way. What Americans of all classes—admittedly, at varying degrees of elegance—could enjoy throughout most of the twentieth century is now available only to the rich, whose ethos is: identical pods, box stores, processed junk, and drive-thrus for you but not for us.

Rivaled only by drugs, porn is moreover the ultimate standing refutation of the libertarian idiocy that everyone is best-off maximally free from any authoritative guidance to wallow in whatever body- and soul-destroying solvent he likes so long as it “doesn’t harm anyone else.” Of course, every vice harms someone else—from the loved ones who suffer in sadness watching addicts waste away to the communities rent by dysfunction, from the societies that must make do with fewer productive citizens to the taxpayers who subsidize pathology and then fork over more to clean up the wreckage. Libertarians, acutely attuned to the value of a dollar, are moved by that last consideration, but can only snark at the others.

What kind of leaders harm their own citizenry by design? The answer is: ones with reason to fear them, who wish to strip them of any restiveness that might coalesce into threats to elite rule.

Just because our ruling oligarchs have made your lives terrible doesn’t mean their porn and drugs will make you feel better—much less be better. They make you worse. Which is what the ruling class wants: you, on a couch, fat, ill-nourished, out of shape, stoned, playing games, watching porn, and consuming their cheap garbage—on credit. And hence no threat. Don’t give them the satisfaction.

[T]he propitious smiles of Heaven, can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right, which Heaven itself has ordained.

Want to feel better? Be better. Act better. Live better.

“His point was that if the transformation of the world economy lifts four people in China and India out of poverty and into the middle class, and meanwhile means one American drops out of the middle class, that’s not such a bad trade,” the CEO recalled.

“So if you’re going to demand 10 times the paycheck, you need to deliver 10 times the value. It sounds harsh, but maybe people in the middle class need to decide to take a pay cut.”

The ruling class demoralizes the citizenry first and most obviously by impoverishing them. Not literally starving them, but cutting wages, outsourcing jobs, importing foreign competition, driving up the cost of housing and other essentials—in short, eroding their standard of living.

to drill into young, potentially patriotic Americans that they must never, ever, feel proud of their country’s achievements, but also that they damned well better feel guilty about its sins—real, imagined, and exaggerated.

“If it’s irrational to be proud of past actions we personally didn’t do, why should we feel guilty about things we didn’t personally do?”—the response is: shut up and feel as you’re told.

there is now hardly any school in the nation, public or private, that does not indoctrinate students to hate their country: some because they’re the villains of its gruesome story of rapacity and oppression, others because they’re told they’re the former’s victims.

For most proponents, the end state—the goal—was always demoralization. A demoralized population is unlikely to rise in its own defense, to assert its rights, to insist on a say in how it is governed, or to demand a share of the future. From the ruling-class perspective, if you’re not already one of them or capable of becoming one—preferably to serve them in ways that make them money and/or solidify their rule—they have no use for you.

They either don’t care about or are actively hostile to your needs, wants, and tastes. Most of all, they want you to sit still and shut up. And then die, preferably without reproducing.

Just look at what some of those people tend to choose—or would, if they were allowed to: carrying guns, praying in schools, preventing the public library from hosting “Drag Queen Story Hour.” Some are so obdurate as to prioritize their own religious superstitions over others’ fundamental right to a wedding cake.

Leftist "immorality"

conservatives have this one right. Be this as it may, the net effect of the New Deal and its successor programs has been to accustom people to rely on outside forces for their “needs.”

To these people, welfare recipients are clients—in effect, a market—and so the more the better.

First, once you start filling the marketplace with free or cheap money, prices inevitably rise. The economists have a saying: “Too much money chasing too few goods.”

We’re giving away “free” money, and we’ve made it extremely difficult to maintain a modest, and formerly within-reach, standard of living without free money.

The free-stuff constituency is large and growing. The more unfair, unbalanced, unequal, and winner-take-all our economy becomes, the larger this constituency will become and the more it will transcend traditional Democratic voting blocs and make inroads among Republicans.

Indeed, the popular left-wing slogan “Justice delayed is justice denied” implies exactly that: justice exists, can be known, and can be achieved.

To the Wokerati, rectifying “injustice” is a vocation. Vocations don’t just end; they are lifelong. We may here pass over as a side issue the fact that much of the “injustice” the Wokerati rail against, none have ever suffered personally.

of others in order to give their lives moral purpose. For some, building families, strengthening communities, worshiping God, enjoying friends, and tending to their own are simply too pedestrian to provide real meaning.

It’s not so much that this newfound enthusiasm for justice replaced faith as it supplanted the old type of faith—for the new version is no less a faith, however secular and “rationalistic” its adherents believe themselves and their beliefs to be.

Or to be more precise, there is a moral hierarchy on which agitation occupies a high rung, but merely holding the right opinions is enough to secure a spot on the ladder. Whereas to hold the “wrong” opinions—say, to believe the biblical teaching on marriage—even if one behaves irreproachably in every other respect, is to be a Bad Person.

A lot of folks are making a lot of money off all this “empowerment,” the root meaning of which turns out to be “indulge oneself.”

How many “injustices” that pose no threat whatsoever to the ruling class still lurk in the woods, waiting to be slain, to die unmourned and unmissed, with no adverse or unintended consequences? How long before the Wokerati take up an enthusiasm that the oligarchy considers a dagger pointed at its very heart? So long as all the destructive energy is aimed at tradition, religion, and culture, the ruling class aren’t worried:

the other half figure they can wall themselves off from whatever downsides may arise from acid-washing away all historic supports for productivity, morality, and order.

A—perhaps the—distinguishing characteristic of the Wokerati is the firm belief that their utopian vision carries no disadvantages. There are no trade-offs. Every (American) tradition upended, every (Western) culture destroyed, every (biblical, especially Christian) religious tenet discarded leads only to broad, sunlit uplands.

Tall gates and armed guards can protect one to an extent, but if there’s no one left capable of producing the goodies, what will be left to spend all that money on? Who will pilot that G650—and to where?

To the Avengers, consistency is not merely the hobgoblin of little minds but an obstacle to be bulldozed.

“No one says or believes that!” goes the cry, “and only a racist would suggest that anyone does!”

“All I want for Christmas is white genocide.” Then,

Nothing makes a “conservative” squirm more than being confronted with explicitly anti-white rhetoric. They try to pretend they didn’t hear and, if that fails, forbid any mention of what they heard. It’s a kind of intellectual-rhetorical Stockholm syndrome.

If America is the culmination of Western white civilization, as everyone from the Left to the Right declares, then there must be something terribly wrong with Western white civilization.

The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballets, et al, don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history;

For one thing, the right is much better self-policed. Indeed, over-policed. As the Jeong incident illustrates, the left never jettisons one of their own over mere words, no matter how inflammatory or evil. But the right betrays its own all the time, over trivialities. All the left has to do is raise a stink and demand a scalp, and here come the “conservatives,” knives out, sharp and eager. Trent Lott buttering up a senator of five decades’ standing on his hundredth (!) birthday? Git ’im!

In seeking endless purges of their own ranks, the “conservatives” not only think they are imitating the Great Man; deep in their hearts they hope that today’s left will praise them just like they praise Buckley (but only for purging). It’s incredible that anyone with even an indirect, passing familiarity with the left could possibly believe that, but all you have to do is read one G-File to see that some do.

For example, (black) conservative activist Candace Owens retweeted some of Sarah Jeong’s rants nearly verbatim, replacing “white” with “black” for rhetorical effect. Owens’s account was suspended; no such action was ever taken against Jeong.

In a Harvard Magazine article entitled—with admirable clarity—“Abolish the White Race,” he wrote that “[t]he goal of abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed white supremacists.”

that it’s not enough for oneself to succeed; others must also fail.