The State of the State

From a post-Iraq invasion paper, The New Middle Ages to a New Dark Age: the Decline of the State and US Strategy (PDF):

National security policymakers are continuously challenged to ensure that the judgments and assumptions underlying policy, force posture, and provision are congruent with the international environment and the role the United States is playing within it. This has become problematic in the 21st century security environment characterized by complexity, connectivity, and rapid change.
This analysis offers key insights into what is a shifting security environment and considers how the United States can best respond to it. Dr. Phil Williams argues that we have passed the zenith of the Westphalian state, which is now in long-term decline, and are already in what several observers have termed the New Middle Ages, characterized by disorder but not chaos.
Dr. Williams suggests that both the relative and absolute decline in state power will not only continue but will accelerate, taking us into a New Dark Age where the forces of chaos could prove overwhelming. He argues that failed states are not an aberration but an indication of intensifying disorder, and suggests that the intersection of problems such as transnational organized crime, terrorism, and pandemics could intersect and easily create a tipping point from disorder into chaos.

The post-Apocalyptic scenario retains a powerful mythic charm that takes hold of men in their childhood and never completely lets go. We almost yearn for it. The political chaos, cultural degeneration and material comfort of the present mean it won’t go away any time soon–or until the apocalyptic becomes reality.

But how possible is that? Dr Williams’ paper quoted above is about the decline of the state. But we all know now that doesn’t mean a decline in the concentration of power or, forgive my disappointment, complete civilizational collapse returning us to a benighted state of nature.

Underlying the change from traditional geopolitics to security as a governance issue is the long-term decline of the state. Despite state resilience, this trend could prove unstoppable. If so, it will be essential to replace dominant state-centric perceptions and assessments (what the author terms “stateocentrism”) with alternative judgments acknowledging the reduced role and diminished effectiveness of states. 

This alternative assessment has been articulated most effectively in the notion of the New Middle Ages in which the state is only one of many actors, and the forces of disorder loom large. The concept of the New Middle Ages is discussed in Section II, which suggests that global politics are now characterized by fragmented political authority, overlapping jurisdictions, no-go zones, identity politics, and contested property rights.

There’s hope yet I’ll live out my fantasy of driving a Mustang around an abandoned LA a la Charlton Heston in The Omega Man.
But I suspect any dystopian future will be too crowded for that, for one, and technology has advanced too far.

Failure to manage the forces of global disorder, however, could lead to something even more forbidding—a New Dark Age. Accordingly, Section III identifies and elucidates key developments that are not only feeding into the long-term decline of the state but seem likely to create a major crisis of governance that could tip into the chaos of a New Dark Age. 

Particular attention is given to the inability of states to meet the x needs of their citizens, the persistence of alternative loyalties, the rise of transnational actors, urbanization and the emergence of alternatively governed spaces, and porous borders. These factors are likely to interact in ways that could lead to an abrupt, nonlinear shift from the New Middle Ages to the New Dark Age. 

This will be characterized by the spread of disorder from the zone of weak states and feral cities in the developing world to the countries of the developed world. When one adds the strains coming from global warming and environmental degradation, the diminution of cheaply available natural resources, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the challenges will be formidable and perhaps overwhelming. 

Order doesn’t break down so much as it devolves.

States, having reached the zenith of their power in the totalitarian systems of the 20th century, are in a period of absolute decline. The challenges from contemporary globalization and other pressures are neither novel nor unique, but are more formidable than in the past— while the ability of states to respond effectively to these challenges is not what it was. 

In a sense, states are being overwhelmed by complexity, fragmentation, and demands that they are simply unable to meet. They are experiencing an unsettling diminution in their capacity to manage political, social, and economic problems that are increasingly interconnected, intractable, and volatile. States are also undergoing a relative decline, challenged in both overt and subtle ways by the emergence of alternative centers of power and authority.

The forces that are dissolving state authority are the forces that will replace it. Order, of one kind or another, is established eventually.
If you find yourself trapped in some Muslim-held canton of Europe in the future, you will submit to your dhimmitude, official or otherwise, if you can’t get out. Police in Europe have already lost effective control over some neighborhoods. That doesn’t mean there’s no authority there. As this grows I expect eventually Muslims to gain control of official police duties in no-go zones, the white police having lost control of them, with subsequent problems issuing from them having a legally armed force.
Detroit and the black ‘hood have provided America with some training for dystopia-they are in fact just that. If the US succumbs beneath the hordes, history will set our end as beginning with the black riots of the sixties.

Stateocentrism tends to blind its adherents to the democratization and diffusion of coercive power to these nonstate actors. This has more recently been evident, for example, in a growing tendency to dismiss 9/11 as simply a blip rather than an indicator of a major change in world politics.6 Skepticism of this kind about the terrorist threat is unlikely to be dispelled by anything less than another major attack on the U.S. homeland. Yet, even without such an attack, these stateocentric perspectives are increasingly tenuous. Transnational networks and forces of disorder are seriously redrawing the maps of the world—and the lines that demarcate nation-states are becoming increasingly notional, if not wholly fictional. At the same time power and authority are moving away from states to other actors. These trends must now be examined. 

You know what else is redrawing the maps of the world making borders “notional”? The European Union and powerful non-state allies such as George Soros, whose obsession with browning the West contributes as a necessary condition to most of the factors the author cites as “…mutually interlocking and reinforcing conditions which give [global politics] a neo-medieval quality”:
“[m]ultiple or fragmented loyalties and identities”;
“inequality or marginalization of groups”;
“[t]he spread of geographical and social ‘no go areas’ where the rule of law no longer extends”;
“[a] growing disarticulation between the dynamic and technologically innovative north and the south”;
even “contested property rights, legal statutes, and conventions”, of course, which is commensurate at least with the rise of autonomous slums and no go zones.

And only an incidental mention of immigration late in the paper.

Hooray for Hollywood’s Demise

Political radicalization includes cultural radicalization, and just as we abandon old political institutions now seen as corrupted and hostile, we abandon similar cultural institutions.

What child of post WWII America would have thought he’d find himself rooting against Hollywood and the movies? Against football? Yet here we are. It’s not just schadenfreude that makes this a feel-good news item:

Hollywood is suffering one of the worst domestic March downturns in its recent history, according to the latest comScore box office figures. By Sunday, the month’s total box office intake was approximately $722.5 million, a 27 percent fall compared to the same period last year, with releases such as Pacific Rim Uprising and Tomb Raider failing to bring in audiences relative to their large budgets.

The month’s figures have also been significantly boosted by carryover revenue from February’s Black Panther, which has generated in $200 million this month alone and since become the highest grossing superhero film in history.

Hollywood and Poz-land’s all-hands on deck effort to promote Black Panther absorbed a lot of ticket dollars that would have went to other films. It of course generated much more of its own interest, which means this month’s numbers would be worse if not for the remarkable push to promote Panther.

Great efforts at uplifting blacks distort our politics, the economy and the culture. Panther has had a negative effect on the industry as a whole, even if its studio is making a killing now:

“A reliance on one title — namely Black Panther — to do the heavy lifting while a host of newcomers over the past few weeks have faltered to one degree or another has resulted in a deficit situation that will take some time to reverse,” box-office analyst Paul Dergarabedian of comScore told The Hollywood Reporter.

More, because, after all, we’re at war.

Let’s Fake a Deal

A lot of analysis or opinion in the media is a sort of veiled negotiation about what we the unwashed are allowed to believe.

That’s the impression I get reading this New York Times piece from David Reich, acknowledging race realism while denouncing “racism” (which is arguably impossible):

Groundbreaking advances in DNA sequencing technology have been made over the last two decades. These advances enable us to measure with exquisite accuracy what fraction of an individual’s genetic ancestry traces back to, say, West Africa 500 years ago — before the mixing in the Americas of the West African and European gene pools that were almost completely isolated for the last 70,000 years. With the help of these tools, we are learning that while race may be a social construct, differences in genetic ancestry that happen to correlate to many of today’s racial constructs are real.

The negotiation begins with the concession that a previously obscured reality has come into light and new terms are required.

I am worried that well-meaning people who deny the possibility of substantial biological differences among human populations are digging themselves into an indefensible position, one that will not survive the onslaught of science. 

I am also worried that whatever discoveries are made — and we truly have no idea yet what they will be — will be cited as “scientific proof” that racist prejudices and agendas have been correct all along, and that those well-meaning people will not understand the science well enough to push back against these claims.

Is there another subject that is so deliberately hamstrung? The scientific method demands we ignore the social pressures on us, even the overwhelming pressure to avoid racism. A true scientist would come at the subject of human biology with a deliberate detachment, as if he was a spaceman descending on an alien scene.

But the fear of exposure has become palpable. Here the author frets over whatever discoveries may come, for fear they’ll upset an increasingly delicate social construct holding race trivial. He even puts out the call for the “well-meaning” to prepare to refute these as of yet facts–to protect the status quo we must be ready, no matter how much it is contradicted by the challenge. Indeed, the more the status quo is challenged the more prepared we need to be whatever may come. It’s astounding to me that the educated and intelligent class of people Reich represents don’t see the absurdity in that “whatever” part. We are not to stand ready to accept the truth, but to repel it.

If Reich is representing liberal conventional wisdom here he could provide a mea culpa for its deliberate repression of this reality heretofore, but there’s still no incentive for that. So the concession that the respectable have been wrong this whole time is coupled with the demand we do nothing about it, that we ignore any implications of it that might upset the worldview that, still, represses this reality.

The orthodoxy goes further, holding that we should be anxious about any research into genetic differences among populations. The concern is that such research, no matter how well-intentioned, is located on a slippery slope that leads to the kinds of pseudoscientific arguments about biological difference that were used in the past to try to justify the slave trade, the eugenics movement and the Nazis’ murder of six million Jews. I have deep sympathy for the concern that genetic discoveries could be misused to justify racism. But as a geneticist I also know that it is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among “races.”

Acknowledging the reality of race while leaving the scare quotes around “race” is quite a contortion, but it’s essentially what Reich wants us all to do.

Oy J

Travis LeBlanc at Counter Currents:

Recently, FOX aired a program entitled “O. J. Simpson: the Lost Confession.” The program showed clips from a 2006 interview where O. J. Simpson talks “hypothetically” about murdering his wife Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman. The interview was originally intended to promote Simpson’s book If I Did It, his clumsy attempt to profit from his crimes without technically admitting to them. In between clips, FOX had assembled a panel of experts who offer horrified reactions to O. J.’s blunt confessions.

 The murders happened in 1994, about the time the first wave of political correctness was receding, and the old model of race relations promoting racial reconciliation rather than the current war of all against white was still in effect. All in all, the eighties appear as an innocent idyll compared to what we have now.
The trial and its result came as a shock to many if not most white Americans–specifically the obtuse and emotional way blacks reacted. At that time more white people had less experience with blacks than now; what they “knew” about them came mostly from television and film. The culture had carefully constructed this image of white and black as essentially the same and reconcilable. The vision and expectation was that we’d come together eventually, Rocky Balboa and Apollo Creed sharing a soul-brother handshake before saving the world from the Russians, or whoever would take their place.

We didn’t know we whites would take their place as the great global enemy.

The trial killed that optimist arc, or just revealed its falsity. What whites saw, though few of them would admit it then, and certainly no one with a microphone, was that blacks weren’t interested in reconciliation and aren’t really up to it intellectually or morally. Evidenced by the sight of a class of Howard law students erupting in cheers at the verdict–the best and brightest of black America were revealed as children with a mean streak and an utter lack of self awareness.

This reaction was universal in black America:

Counter Currents continues:

But what was mind-boggling for white Americans is how immune to evidence black Americans can be. The same New York Times article reported “The trial has had little effect on the public’s perception of Mr. Simpson’s guilt or innocence. In a Gallup Poll taken in July 1994, 62 percent of the adult Americans surveyed said the charges against Mr. Simpson were probably true and 21 percent said they were probably not true. In the recent CBS poll, 57 percent of those surveyed said Mr. Simpson was probably guilty and 18 percent said he probably not.” In other words, the more evidence of O. J. Simpson’s guilt blacks saw, the more convinced they became of his innocence.

Blacks’ view is that equality is when rich and poor trade places, likewise, justice is when we trade places and they stick it to us for a while. Of course both operate on the fallacy that racism, personal and systemic, cause black poverty and criminality. We retain this convention with a Soviet-level of resistance to empirical, historical and logical evidence. Objectivity. It’s a white thing. Whether a function of intelligence or just an innate behavioral characteristic of whites doesn’t matter. Black Americans will never embrace true equality of opportunity or the equal dispensation of justice:

Either blacks honestly and genuinely believed that O. J. Simpson was innocent and/or being framed for the murder of his wife as part of a racist police conspiracy, in which case they were dumb. Or blacks secretly knew O. J. was guilty but professed a belief in his innocence out of tribal solidarity. If that were the case, that would make blacks liars. Try to think of another explanation that does require blacks being one of those two things. You can’t do it.

The trial came like a fire bell in the night, and we went back to sleep. Now here we are.

Six Degrees of Literally Hitler

So far the clampdown on right wing speech continues to expand, with virtually no resistance from elected officials, including the president.

Not only are platforms shutting down political content, the old-fashioned means of chilling speech through public shaming has become more aggressive. Guilt by association gets more invasive and tenuous at the same time guilt gets easier to acquire and alternative right wing views spread. The Narrative holds.

Guilt by association lands easier and harder when the association is “literally Hitler”. Consciously or not the left now places a lot of energy on first identifying someone as beyond respectability, and then going out and picking off anyone who can be associated with him.

Thus, Vox calls out National Review for not applying the ideological scarlet letter to an article by the notorious Jason Richwine whose unearthed “Immigration and IQ” dissertation (PDF) got him fired from the Heritage Foundation:

On Monday night, the conservative magazine National Review published an article coming to the spirited defense of a University of Pennsylvania law professor who proclaimed that she had “rarely, rarely” seen a black student finish in the top half of her class. 

But the defense not only dramatically misrepresented what took place at Penn; it also neglected to include the author’s ties to that very same law professor, to the alt-right, and to his own racist views and past work for a website formerly run by white nationalist Richard Spencer.

Amy Wax testified to her personal experience teaching law:

During her remarks, Wax said, “Here’s a very inconvenient fact … I don’t think I’ve ever seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of the class, and rarely, rarely, in the top half. I can think of one or two students who scored in the top half of my required first-year course.” In his response, Ruger said that Wax’s views about black graduation rates at Penn were not factual.

We have a curious situation. Professor Wax is something like an accidental whistle blower. Ruger’s response was comic: it’s not true that few blacks graduate high because some do. Some reporters seem genuinely incapable of seeing the fallacy, but many must be silently accepting it. So a transparent fraud plays out with a wink. Note the mushy construct above: Wax’s “views” (not her first-hand experience) aren’t true or not, but “not factual”. Graduation rates remain closely held, the first-hand account of a professor is refuted with what is almost certainly a lie and the professor is demoted for snitching.

Vox recounts the case against Richwine and, since we’re talking about National Review, segues into, who else, John Derbyshire and his brilliant re-casting of the black slander that is known as “the Talk” about how to deal with dangerous white policemen.

Of course, there was a time when such views and background might have gotten one summarily removed from National Review (a publication for which I have written), which has long positioned itself as a leading conservative publication and was outspoken in its criticism of the white nationalist alt-right during the 2016 election.

In fact, that time was in 2012.

That’s when longtime National Review contributor John Derbyshire (a writer with a long, long history of racism who had even openly described himself as a “mild and tolerant” racist back in 2003) wrote a piece for the far-right outlet Taki’s Magazine titled “The Talk: Non-Black Version,” which one writer described as “kind of unbelievably racist.” In it, Derbyshire argued, among other things, that intelligent black Americans are “something of a luxury good, like antique furniture or corporate jets.”
That’s because, he wrote:

The mean intelligence of blacks is much lower than for whites. The least intelligent ten percent of whites have IQs below 81; forty percent of blacks have IQs that low. Only one black in six is more intelligent than the average white; five whites out of six are more intelligent than the average black. These differences show in every test of general cognitive ability that anyone, of any race or nationality, has yet been able to devise. They are reflected in countless everyday situations. “Life is an IQ test.”

Somehow the Narrative holds, despite the point-and-sputter method’s reliance on quoting verbatim ideas that sound eminently reasonable. Of course Vox is recounting an episode wherein National Review toed the line when editor Rich Lowry quickly cut loose Richwine. Not enough. With each new firing a new baseline is set; you’re certainly not going to go out and hire someone now who’s further right of someone you just fired, are you? Thus “progress” ratchets along.

Six years later, similar views are being espoused by another National Review contributor, who has previously written for a site dedicating to promoting the views of the alt-right and whose views were too extreme for the very conservative Heritage Foundation.

So Rich Lowry is called upon to be conistent:

I’ve reached out to Lowry, National Review’s editor-in-chief, and National Review Online editor Charles C.W. Cooke for comment and will update if I receive a response.

Social justice on the line, Mr Lowry.

Bush’s War on its Quinceanera

Matt Taibbi on the Iraq War fifteen years on:

But that’s not how our rulers sold the war to themselves. They weren’t overcome with emotion, or some post-9/11 yearning for vengeance. They knew what they were doing.

The Iraq invasion, one of the great crimes of this or any age and destined to be a crossroads event in the history of America’s decline, was instead a cold, calculated, opportunistic power grab, aimed as much at future targets, and even our own population, as at the Iraqi “enemy.”

As citizens, we haven’t started to reckon with any of this. We write it off rather than deal with it. In fact, when we think of Iraq at all, we often describe the invasion as a mistake. Embarrassingly, even I did this a few weeks back, talking about how we “blundered” into Iraq.

It’s understandable. There are superficial plot elements from the Iraq narrative we lean on to soothe ourselves that the invasion was caused by an unlikely confluence of accidents and errors, not the inherent venality of our system.

The mainstream’s embrace of Bush’s absurd and criminal invasion of Iraq bears for me a striking resemblance to its embrace of “diversity” or the problem of “racism” or any other element of the poz. It’s as if there’s a silent agreement that no one will challenge the operating assumptions because the end goal has been successfully framed as a moral imperative.

Taibbi goes through the well-known litany of US invasions and abuses of weaker countries (which from this vantage looks like one long squandering of the remarkable power and wealth the US held relative to the rest of the world at the end of WWII). For him all roads lead to a right-wing impulse behind this. For me, now, they all lead to the Land of Poz, where militarism is now quartered, and I see the affinity between them in the similarity of their methods:

The consistent thread throughout all of these foreign policy losses was our relentless, stubborn belief that would have succeeded, if only we’d been allowed to use more force and violence.

Likewise, diversity and equality are only failing because we haven’t tried hard enough. The Iraq War could only go on as long as people were willing to endure the cost and carnage. The Diversity War conceals its damage–indeed, recasts its negative effects, such as racial hatred, as proof of its necessity (like WMD)–and will go on.
For the time.