What Comes Next?

Regime Formation in a Time of Decline

What comes next for the West? I believe the ancient political theorists were right regarding political possibilities: who rules determines the regime, and there are not an infinite variety of ruling combinations. It is reasonable to limit oneself to the signposts of polity (democracy), aristocracy (oligarchy), and kingship (tyranny).

Everyone is tired of Our Democracy. Monarchy requires majesty, which no one today could conjure. Aristocracy requires warriors, whose worth is too diminished by technology. In a word: there is no direction we can go. Our time is the Time Without A Regime.

Our non-Regime

If a regime is good, then it requires effort. A regime could be called “the virtue of a people.” Most human beings are not virtuous, not because they try to be evil, but because they do not have what it takes to be good. It would seem, then, that it is possible to lack a regime because the people do not have what it takes.

It could be said that no one is stopping us from having a regime. We just aren’t good enough.

However, isn’t there an anti-regime force at work? There is a force that keeps us from disciplining (regimenting) ourselves, because such regime-formation is considered dangerous or evil. BAP described this phenomenon well in his book and on his show. Here is a quote from episode 83, where he describes the “Reddit mentality.” It is this mentality that works against any possible regime-formation.

Reddit is the forum of the intellectual acclimation to human domesticity. There you see the self-policed herd that wants to deem any deviation from the cult of domesticity as ineffably evil. … All modern eunuch morality sees bringing up the question of sovereignty as something evil or ridiculous. They try to laugh at it and mock it. It makes them very uncomfortable. Instead of contesting sovereignty, you must retreat to the communal, which is to say the woman centered social life, policed by consensus norms, and ultimately unable to ascend above domestic life and the blinkered vision it forces on men. It is a life under the unquestioned umbrella of a force that pacifies all and remains secret. You can never challenge or question it.

Put in plainer terms: nothing good can be organized; no one may depart from the Masses, from Mankind. All justifications for regime-formation are thwarted by appeals to the neediest and lowliest.

Let’s say you want to start a school, like we do here at MCC. It didn’t used to be a difficult thing: the most important part of any school are the professors. If you have the professors, it shouldn’t be that difficult. Today, however, if you talk about starting a school, a thousand government officials perk up their ears and ready their pens. Professional bureaucrats wag their fingers. Your desire to do something must get their authorization. Time, money, and life must all be needlessly spent in abundance.

In a regime, having fellow citizens is an augmentation of strength. In our non-regime, our “fellow citizens” are used by bureaucrats to bleed us dry. If you want to start a new society, like a school or a club, there is always unease, sometimes an outcry, and once in a while the government decides to attack you with lawsuits or the like. We hear speeches like this:

“Isn’t there someone, some demographic, some ethnic minority, you’ve forgotten? Where are your wheelchair ramps and signs; where are the counsellors; do you plan on leaving the learning disabled behind; there are too few speedbumps in your parking lot; these men you read… their race, their ideas, their sex, their excellence; have you thought about representation of diverse peoples and talents in this curriculum? Your curriculum looks like it is for the fulfillment of the students, but shouldn’t it be about ‘striving to change the world’¹? Shouldn’t education be for the oppressed?”

You’re in an all-male workout group. One of the guys has feminist tendencies, and he never misses an opportunity to assert the irrationality of excluding women from the group. “I guess women couldn’t do this!” “I guess this exercise is better for us without women around!” “I’m enjoying this beer more because women aren’t here.” Reasons why women might be excluded obviously occur to him, but he believes those reasons are forbidden. He is challenging the other males in the group to state plainly their evil reasons, to expose themselves. He believes exclusion is so unjust that if he can bring about a confrontation, he can force the group to “open up” and become less unjust.

You and your friends want to start a club; it is a success; soon, a guy shows up using terms like “insurrection,” “kidnap the governor,” “need for concrete action” and similar things. For some reason he likes Hitler. What has happened? The government has joined your club and wants a pretext to arrest you.

Ultimately, our non-Regime has a goal: unity with mankind. If you want to live in a country with borders, where the citizens enjoy the privileges of citizenship, you are asked “yes, but have you thought about all the suffering in the entire world? Isn’t it selfish and evil to want to withdraw from mankind?”

What’s next? Options, Burroughs, Fortresses –

The consensus seems to be that good men are limited in what is available to them. They can defect from mass democracy; but no one is replacing it. The American Empire, however Gay, is not getting replaced anytime soon. We may roll-back some of the G.A.E. with a Trump administration.

Let us put aside making predictions, or thinking up what concrete things can come next. If we do put that aside, we are left with what is actually predictable. “What comes next?” Regime-formation is what comes next, whether it be called a Superstitious Dreher-Option, a Christian Nationalist Burrough, a BAPian Fortress at the Edge of the World, or something else (a small school).

The point is this: good men want to form groups wherein their membership is a boon, where their fellow members are mutual helps rather than resentful scolds and dead weights. Formally, America still allows for such groups, legally and culturally, though it frowns on them and, if your group is a success, the government will try to turn your legally acceptable group into a criminal group that it is allowed to destroy.

There are going to be more and more groups of people forming Extra-Legal (not illegal) identities, identities that have no special legal standing but are explicitly permitted in America. The American Left wants to make these identities illegal.

Which Identity?

If you know you want to experience real citizenship, or real membership, then you know you want a regime. For some reason wanting a regime isn’t enough. You can’t have a group that’s the “good people group” It isn’t enough to say, “our purpose for forming a society is to Be Good, and we eschew all Naming or Identification outside of the fact that we are The GOOD People.” This is impossible; there is always some identity that attaches to the group.

You want a regime. A regime regiments to the good. But since you have to define what you mean by good, there is always a regime-identity: Nietzschean, Piratical, Stoic, Christian, Religion X, Y, or Z, American, Southern, and so on. If “the good” could be concretely established once and for all—and it evidently cannot—then you could establish it and start your new sect, The Good Guys. Since it cannot, there will always be identity.

The three existing identities that have power and will make up constituent parts of the next identity are: American, Christian, and Nietzschean. The Right should not let the Left claim any of these three identities.

The Three Identities

I’ll now just run through the three identities, briefly outlining the positive and negative of each. All three will eventually be subsumed into whatever comes next.

Christianity

“Christian” and other religious identities in America (and Liberal nations generally) have a long tradition, cultural and legal, of being tolerated by the government; the idea being, that only one’s citizenship is legally recognized, while the infinite variety of other identities (religious, ethnic, racial, etc.) are permitted and have no legal standing, i.e., there should be no benefit or penalty for being a Presbyterian.

The American Left has long fought against this, arguing along totalitarian lines: “it all matters.” You might think being rich or poor doesn’t affect your legal status as a citizen, but it does. Rich people can mold the laws by influencing politicians. And if you apply other identities to this basic schema, you get Western-Leftism/communism. White is rich; black is poor. Christian is rich; Jewish, Islamic, etc., are poor. Straight is rich; queer is poor. With this one simple trick our Liberal tradition was “subverted.”

While subverted, the tradition is still quite vibrant. I would say that Being Christian is the most direct and legally protected route you can take to breaking away from the Global American Empire. You even get the Tax Benefit.

Another upside to Christianity is that it is incompatible with egalitarianism. It’s impossible to read the Bible and think today’s moral categories are the Biblical moral categories; all intelligent egalitarians leave the Christian religion behind, as something that is outdated, even if well-intentioned. If it were possible to prove that Jesus and the Disciples were anti-slavery and pro-women, you have to admit they didn’t think patriarchy and slavery were sins in the way immoderation, theft, murder, cheating, lying, idolatry, sexual perversion and the like were sins. The egalitarian needs moral condemnations that are not found in the Bible.

The downside to making your breakaway group Christian is that you have to share that identity with other “Christians”; of all the American extra-legal identities, the Christians seem like the most self-policed group. I am myself partial to the Christian Nationalist Burrough idea; I like King Alfred the Great; but no one attacks the Christians more than other Christians. Too many awful people feel like they have a right to lecture you and drag you down if you say, “we are a group of Christians.” So, these are the upsides and downsides to going the Christian route.

Is it un-Christian to leave behind the label “Christian”? I don’t think so. It wasn’t un-Christian to take up additional labels like Baptist, Catholic, Presbyterian, Orthodox, etc., nor will it be un-Christian to reject many of the people who claim to be Christian. So long as the divinity of Christ is affirmed, faith rightly oriented, there can be no blasphemy in saying “we renounce the age and its Christianity, so that we can embrace what is and always will be true.”

Nietzscheanism

As BAP showed in his book, Nietzscheanism has the advantage of being able to speak very persuasively, and unapologetically, on the great issues of the day. Our discoveries in natural science are always uncomfortable to the Christian—there is a desire to show that Science and Faith “are compatible.” That’s not great. The Nietzschean doesn’t have to do this kind of thing.

While the Christian has moral categories that are not Modern—that aren’t feminist, or gay, or antiracist—their moral rhetoric and argumentation aren’t anti-Modern, aren’t well aimed at the modern evils. Nietzsche’s rhetoric is better aimed, especially at feminism. Nietzsche and BAP are guiding lights today because they can speak on the questions of the moment without any squirming.

An example of what I mean: With Nietzsche, you can quickly and effectively paint feminism and similar things for what they are: articles of resentment. Meanwhile, the Christians get bogged down in ridiculous superfluous debates. Instead of being able to simply explain the pathologies of cat-ladies, Christians are constrained to make arguments about the correct translations and valences of “helpmeet” Ezer Kenegdo in Genesis. Christian leftists pant, mouths agape, “did you see that Jesus taught women… he treated them like humans.” There is no theoretical need for debating such people. But Christians are practically required to at every turn.

Downsides of Nietzscheanism:

If there are fortresses at the edge of the world, do you have access to them? A few have been tried, but it seems nothing came of them.

Today’s Nietzscheans make a living by taking the message to the masses and then living off that. It’s priestly. (This is not a critique of BAP. If you could have his personal economy, living off the internet, you would too. The point is it’s something for a couple guys only. By its very structure, it cannot be “the next wave.” It’s extremely unique and necessarily will remain that way.)

Another downside: There is no theology or metaphysics in Nietzscheanism. I mean, there could be a Nietzschean form of these things, but they are not, strictly, Nietzschean. Heinrich Meier is being cheeky when he speaks of “Nietzsche’s aristocratic metaphysics.” Nietzsche failed to bring about a positive vision. In the words of Meier, “it’s just over.” What are we left with? philosophical concepts and, The path of the philosopher’s self-overcoming. That is, philosophy for the sake of philosophy, i.e., philosophy without any political project. Philosophy without a possible concrete manifestation. We get the all too abstract Philosophical Fatherland of Leo Strauss, Nietzsche’s greatest disciple.

The Philosophic Fatherland

There is always membership among philosophers, a society open to mankind, but rarely realizable. If there were a group calling themselves “the good men” it would be these. The philosopher is a blessing to all around him, but only incidentally; he is accepted on his own terms because his own terms are acceptable. -- I assert that the vast majority of people remain acceptable only because they rarely, if ever, live on their own terms, that when they try to live on their own terms, they become noxious beasts to those around them. Most people need regimentation, and this is a good thing.

Americans

An American can claim, as a matter of tradition, vitalism (Emerson, Poe, Walt Whitman), Christianity, and of course, American citizenship.

Too few know that Walt Whitman, writing under the pseudonym Mose Velsor, penned a 13-part vitalist and pro-masculine series of articles titled “Manly Health and Training.”

Then observe our suggestions—train—acquire for yourself firm fibres, a stomach clear and capable, the brain-action unabused, the stream of vital power full and voluminous, a bright eye, a strong voice, a proper degree of flesh, a transparent complexion—a fine average yet plus condition; and sympathy, attraction, and a heroic presence will follow.

And then there is Emerson, whom Nietzsche admired.

“Emerson: Never have I felt so much at home in a book, and in my home.”

We have Nietzsche’s copies of Emerson’s works. On page after page, he wrote in the margin “bravo.”

There is a vitalist streak in the American character. Americans are not importing something genuinely foreign to themselves when they decry petty resentment and praise manliness and the spirit of manifest destiny.

As for Christianity, it is the only religion for Americans. Americans are far more Christian than the former peoples of Christendom are today, so, while the great geniuses of Christianity weren’t Americans, it is the Americans above all who have been their appreciators and preservers the past 100 years. Americans are successfully “culturally appropriating” the Reformers, the Catholics, and even the weird desert sages revered by Eastern Christians.

Most importantly: it is the American identity alone that is required to face squarely racial communism and feminism. Since it alone is required, it alone is capable.

The greatest weakness facing both Christians and Nietzscheans is that people can don these identities and still speak idiotically about Civil Rights, i.e., they can really steep themselves in Christianity or Nietzsche without coming to grips with the leveling ideology of our day. Civil Rights was developed to overcome notions of Christian Righteousness and Nietzschean Superiority; and it overcame these indirectly rather than directly, i.e., both Christians and Nietzscheans have a hard time coming to grips with the Civil Rights logic and rhetoric.

That task is for the American to do. I will explain it in the next essay.

1. SJC, which used to keep newspapers off campus, now promotes Marxist activism in its fundraising letters. “We must not only observe the world; we should strive to change it.” Rotten. The “program” might still be intact, but all the Canaries in the Coal Mine are dead.