To Mayberry, Minerva, or the Matrix?

“I recalled a noise in the chimney … but it was in reality Uncle William / downstairs composing” — Canto LXXXIII, Ezra Pound

This winter is the hundredth from the first of three Pound and Uncle William would spend together in a Sussex cottage:

Pound sailed to Europe in search of a community, a society of poets who would share the secrets of their craft with one another. Even more, he wanted to know the man he considered ”the greatest living poet.” When Olivia Shakespear (Pound’s future mother-in-law and Yeats’s former lover) finally brought Pound to one of Yeats’s Monday evenings in May 1909, he set out to establish just Yeats and himself as London’s most exclusive literary circle. Pound sometimes tried to convince his younger friends that Yeats was a stodgy old man who needed a push into the 20th century; he boasted of several revisions he made in poems that Yeats published in Poetry magazine in 1912, but the unruffled Yeats described the changes as ”misprints.” In reality, Pound coveted the honor granted to him by his close association with Yeats, and he inevitably deferred to the older poet on questions both poetic and political. ”Noble” was the word Pound continually used to describe Yeats, and he wanted to be part of that aristocracy.

It’s even more interesting to imagine their life in the cottage, Pound reading occult books aloud to the elder poet whose vision was poor, Yeats voicing private doubts about the conflict unfolding just a few dozen miles across the water. To cut a long story short, the elder died in the South of France, after producing some of his best work (just over 75 years ago, in fact). The younger had periods of despondency and possibly insanity, and was obsessed with “usury” until the end of his life, part of which he spent broadcasting for Mussolini. Longenbach writes that, “despite his cocky statements to the contrary, Pound was fascinated by Yeats’s netherworld of ghosts and spirits.”

These were both men of the right, though their work is still scandalously taught in English departments worldwide (perhaps the Modern Language Association can address the oversight at next year’s conference, between panels hosted by the security state). The first thing you begin to notice about the politics of Anglosphere modernists is how contradictory they are — John Harrison’s review is fine, whatever his own predispositions. It is a fact that the politics of the right is more diverse than the left, which is merely a spectrum from more to less extreme. That is one reason this seems like a better ideological map than the Nolan Chart. Wyndham Lewis savaged James Joyce, and the first issue of The Blast is essentially an attempt to stake the Anglo-American world’s claim to modernism, in contrast to Marinetti, the Italian. A Tibetan separatist and a neoconfederate have less in common than Brezhnev and a Clinton voter. Duh.

Anyway, this is all by way of elaborate analogy for my suspicion that the newest entrants onto the right-wing political scene behave in a way that resembles the younger of the stone cottage pair. I’m speaking of course of the neoreactionaries, who have, if nothing else had a similarly outsized ratio of output to press recently.

Reactionary (n): Not just a word for party infighting anymore

Cards on the table: I’ve read most of Moldbug, keep tabs on a few dozen of these folks, and have published three of them. There has been a profusion of bloggers in the last year or so calling themselves neoreactionaries. A canon has been compiled. They enliven my reading, and I’m glad they’re out there. Yes, we’re talking about people who specialize in thoughtcrime, but there’s a funny lighthearted cultishness to it (not literally, contra Mark Shea, who doesn’t know when he’s being messed with) that reminds me a lot of a more erudite version of the 4Chan of several years ago.

The novelty of being sympathetic to monarchy has been the hook for most of the coverage, beyond the usual lazy dismissals, but this is also somewhat misleading. Of the three in Adam’s piece, two live in the Bay Area, one is a transhumanist, the other a programmer (though that’s underselling it), and the third writes from Shanghai. Patri Friedman is apparently interested, and promises an “anti-racist, anti-sexist” version (no longer director of the Seasteading Institute, he remains involved with free cities, which is important). Their ‘exit’ dilemma is less finding a white homeland, and something more like shrugging the wired man’s burden. In Moldbug’s case, the monarchist historiography and neocameralist future thought-experiment are two sides of the same “Janus-faced,” as Land puts it, construction, and the latter needn’t necessarily involve restoring the Stuarts. “[T]he combination of a critique of progress with a recognition that simple reversal is impossible.”

One of Paul Gottfried’s more resonant critiques of the contemporary right is that its various manifestations basically consist of jumping off and staying put at various points in the long decline of Western institutions. For example, the neoconservatives warming up to the New Deal, opposition to which up to that point being something that almost all of the right shared. Arthur Brooks once wrote a short book with Pete Wehner about the “morality of democratic capitalism.” With the emphasis on statistics and a vaguely Straussian/gnostic worldview, it’s occasionally tempting to think of neoreaction as the creature that was bound to stalk through the right’s doorway after the neoconservatives shifted the emphasis toward social science and away from literature and political philosophy. They can’t be conservatives because they got off the Zeitgeist express way too long ago to even see it, and what plumes of smoke they can still make out are just exertions toward its inevitable, hellish terminus.

So, at least for the ones residing here, there arises the question of the legitimacy of the American regime, which for a reactionary consists first of taking the blood alcohol level of the drunk gorilla at the helm of the American bulldozer. Bear in mind that some of the more complicated tests can only be administered intravenously, and a mere swat from the beast can be career-ending. Right-thinking liberals are like Dian Fossey, just returned from the jungle, perhaps a bit surprised that her country is progressive enough to allow apes to operate machinery, but convinced of its good intentions and happy to ignore its bloodshot eyes and take its puking out the cockpit door as a sign that he’s at least civilized enough not to do so in his own lap. Conservatives are the people that think everyone will be alright if we clear the area and let Koko sleep it off. Reactionaries are people who know that if he becomes a danger to himself and others, someone will have to put him down.

Are they getting ahead of themselves? Adam, as usual, puts it better than I could:

I’m sure one could draw on enough credible social science to make a case that the Swiss canton system is on the verge of collapse [ed — I think we can count on the EU for that], but given that that system is among the oldest in the world, I think we should extend it the benefit of the doubt.

The same courtesy, to a much lesser degree, should be extended to the American institutions of democracy.

These are good conservative observations, but two thoughts: It seems clear that  American government is more or less predicated on the suspicion of extending that courtesy. We are a nation founded on manufactured crisis — from the largely trumped-up grievances of the Declaration of Independence, to radical religious doctrines, to our indebted Virginia Founding Fathers‘ propaganda efforts — with a federal constitution, built on such tensions, which is no longer operative. Second, the right appears to be growing suspicious of politics by democratic means. More on that later, but read Adam’s concluding paragraph:

Institutions are particular to times and places; they emerge organically and take feedback from, and provide feedback to, the populations that comprise them. The thick space where most people live their lives is not really a binary between complying with government and exercising property rights. Instead there is a vast, invisible web of norms, institutions, and implied obligations that make human social life possible on the scale that it exists at present. If order is your goal, do not start from first principles and try to build the perfect, orderly government. Instead, look to those institutions that have lasted. Rather than seeing yourself as above them, participate in them.

I presume this means my colleague will begin his militia exercises as soon as he procures a SAFE Act-compliant firearm.

Allow me to relate the sense of two conversations I’ve had in the last several months, one with a progressive Catholic Naderite, and the other with an older neoreactionary blogger. After a long discussion with the former about decentralism, the 10th Amendment, decline, and other things, he posed the question of what type of crisis would be significant enough to, shall we say, fray the bonds of union, into open hostilities. He proposed that it would be some sort of Katrina-level environmental disaster, which would be used to justify some sort of legislation insisting upon micro-monitoring energy use and restrictive resource management, which states would then reject, seizing federal land, and so on. It’s not pleasant to contemplate.

The second conversation addressed among other things the biographical politics of what neoreactionaries whose backstories we had something of a sense of. They map more or less neatly to the various strains of thinking this, uh, unusually self-aware movement has identified. The technophiles, largely atheistic with an interest in artificial intelligence and the singularity, and the more traditionally-minded merely trying to get, as he put it, back to Mayberry. Maybe a little later if we could have a president like Nixon. The high-tech strands are typified by the San Francisco-based Mike Anissimov, a transhumanist, who’s quickest on the draw with Evola quotes, most keen on the Habsburgs, and is not especially disposed to the idea of secession.

He once jumped on me on Twitter when I mentioned American reactionaries, proclaiming something about America being a “revolutionary” “demotist” country, and that there’s no such thing as an American reactionary tradition. At which point the thought entered my head that perhaps Mayberry is at odds with transhumanist monarchism. To say Anissimov is combative on Twitter is putting it somewhat mildly, he dug through my feed and found that I had been hanging out with liberals, and went on a rant about the corruption of beltway culture, and this is after I published the guy (writing on the relatively harmless topic of weed legalization). His errors are extreme, and Adam goes into others (and Handle responds to some of them here), but they may be somewhat representative.

Elephants are an endangered species too, you know

The Tea Party has much the same problem, you’re never quite sure if they’re on Mayberry’s side, or their own. Certain politicians are as good as one can expect them to be, Mike Lee for example. But signs point to the cause heading into Eric Hoffer’s third stage.

The ones that remain appear to be more and more committed to things like Article V conventions and nullification. Things are happening that scramble America’s usual political categories (progressive federalism was a big thing two years ago). This is a painful process for the GOP, and it requires excising deeply-held revolutionary pieties — American exceptionalism, our untarnished virtue in the conduct of war, the justice of the original American secession. The patient may not survive. Most reactionaries, neo- or not, are convinced that shooting the elephant is for the best, along with the gorilla.

A big reason why this crisis is so painful is the story of the American founding the Tea Party likes to tell. Yuval Levin is fighting a valiant rearguard action on Edmund Burke’s behalf against a conservative movement that idolizes terrorist mullahs like Thomas Paine. He explains it all here (starting at about 52:00):

Part of the reason for the book is to offer a different intellectual history of ourselves. Intellectual history is very important to conservatives. We define ourselves that way, in a way that the left just doesn’t. Too often, when conservatives in America reach for intellectual history or for philosophy, we reach for the most radical version of the story of the American founding.

To which Patrick Deneen wryly responds, “once you need to draft Burke into the battle, you have probably already lost the war.” In other words, if you’re a conservative, you might not be immune. The virus may still be inside you.

Somehow I don’t see amnesty improving this situation — Bryan Caplan notwithstanding — which is fundamentally an identity crisis. You know you’re on the path to ex-libertarianism when it no longer seems strange that the most libertarian parties in Europe are restrictionist. Tyler Cowen thinks there must be something else going on here.

Adam Bellow, who published but didn’t sign The Bell Curve, put it this way in 2005:

A new generation is rising, and while they may eschew the conservative label, they will undoubtedly challenge the stridency and dogmatism of their liberal parents and teachers. … We are your bastard children, and as long as you deny us, you will continue to spawn rebels who reject you.

You didn’t think you’d get through this without having to read about secession, did you?

The smarter lefties have already wised up to the neocolonial scheme that is a charter city:

After witnessing Romer deftly euphemise the practice of colonialism into “some arrangement that’s a little bit like an escrow account, where you [ie, Africa] put land in the escrow account and [a] partner nation takes responsibility for it”, one is left wondering whether the economist might rehabilitate other relevant archaic practices, such as the slave trade.

Sort of shocking they’d have a TED Talk on neoreaction, isn’t it? But this is an illustrative example. The secession envisioned here is along the lines of Singapore, not the Old South, but to this writer, they’re the same thing. If you start with free markets and common law, slavery can’t be far behind. That’s one reason to be cynical about Patri Friedman’s “non-racist,” version of neoreaction; it’s still racist.

Whatever it is, it’s much more pleasant than the type of neocolonialism pre-9/11 Jonah Goldberg used to write about:

I think it’s time we revisited the notion of a new kind of Colonialism – though we shouldn’t call it that. I don’t mean ripping off poor countries. I don’t mean setting tribes against one another and paying off corrupt “leaders” to keep down unrest. I mean going in — guns blazing if necessary — for truth and justice. I am quite serious about this. …

We should spend billions upon billions doing it. We should put American troops in harm’s way. We should not be surprised that Americans will die doing the right thing. We should not be squeamish, either, about the fact that (mostly white) Americans will kill some black Africans in the process. … The British Empire decided unilaterally that the global practice of slavery was a crime against God and man, and they set out to stop it. They didn’t care about the “sovereignty” of other nations when it came to an evil institution. They didn’t care about the “rule of international law,” they made law with the barrel of a cannon.

When people like Goldberg or Rich Lowry or, my god, Victor Davis Hanson, take up the legacy of civil rights and equality as a conservative cause, the program they understand those values to endorse is almost always bad. The Jacobin editor above would probably agree with that, though she probably wouldn’t admit a freely-ceded charter city would be any better.

The thought leading class hasn’t wised up to what they’re promoting, though. From the perspective of my friend over at Causes of History, a big free cities advocate, the idea is to count on them not realizing until it’s too late. And at any rate, he says, the overriding concern is the establishment of free institutions, which are good for everyone.

The future probably depends to a significant extent on whether our present global leadership takes the Jacobin editor’s view, or the charter city’s. The writer’s biggest conceit is that her side isn’t the more powerful one. The weight of economic scholarship, and the growth potential, may be in the long term on the side of the secessionists. But the record so far hasn’t been good:

Minerva was the brainchild of international developer Willard Garvey, pioneering global investor John Templeton, and entrepreneur and yacht designer Seth Atwood. Like today’s Silicon Valley tech leaders, the three friends saw the ill effects of governments quashing opportunity and dreamed of an alternate environment where individual rights would be respected and entrepreneurship could flourish unabated. They set out to find an unclaimed piece of property well outside the territorial limit of any country.

In 1970, Atwood identified the Minerva reefs, 260 miles from Tonga, and 450 miles from Fiji. The three agreed they would keep the project under wraps, and Garvey contacted Michael Oliver, who had been involved in previous new country efforts. …

Unfortunately, Oliver proved far less reserved than his backers, and in early 1972, despite having not yet established a habitable toe-hold, he filed a “Declaration of Sovereignty” with the U.S. State Department. As reported by the New York Times, the following month, Tonga – some think at the behest of the U.S. State Department – laid claim to the reefs.

I can’t resist pointing out that today China is buying influence in Tonga’s military dictatorship.

These experiments of living, as it were, are interesting ideas and we should wish them all well, but small, defenseless nations tend not to stay sovereign for long — especially, in the case of seasteading, if you don’t have a flag state. This makes them about as plausible as Mars colonies, which Charles Krauthammer and Jonah Goldberg also wanted to create at one point (they departed from the new secessionists in thinking these Mars expeditions should be funded by taxpayers, which says pretty much all that needs to be said about pre-9/11 neoconservatism).

The Union is dissolved!

Here’s Bill Kauffman, in Bye Bye, Miss American Empire:

“As the empire accelerates through its welcome decline, real patriots of all shades and shapes will hold with redoubled fastness to the cherishable pieces of our lorn and lovely land: its little places, its accented regions, its history-echoing, blood-seeded ground. … The camp guards of contemporary politics will tell you that secession is based in fear or isolation. I say it flows from love and from hopefulness, from the belief that ordinary people, living in cohesive communities, can govern themselves, without the heavy hand of distant experts and tank-and-bomb-wielding statesmen to guide their way.”

This is a very different view of the future from, say, the transhumanist mind-meld of some neoreactionaries (who largely think, not without good reason, that technology and cultural degradation have eclipsed this kind of localist thinking. I’m not so sure). Rod Dreher calls it the Benedict Option. Kauffman’s book is the one you need to read for a history of American secessionist movements other than the Confederacy. It’s timely too, since town halls in what could one day be the State of Jefferson have been drawing hundreds over the last couple of months. Silicon Valley is up for it. Schism is in the air.

A Jeffersonian assertion of self-government is a pretty different thing than shrugging the wired man’s burden. The latter, as with Minerva, or seasteading, seems largely commercial and utopian, rather than the result of festering misgovernment — in the West it’s usually related to a faraway authority that won’t let them use the natural resources with which their communities were blessed, as in the Alaska Tea Party of 1911, AKIP, or the original 1941 grievances of the Jeffersonians. Or a lack of representation in state government, which goes for rural communities everywhere.

To a Salon reader, or Mark Shea, the more populist type is forever, inexorably, till decline do us part, tainted by the Civil War. (Free cities are just too strange for them to be properly outed as neoconfederate.) But that’s because they don’t want you to hear about — or, to use the identity politics parlance, they “erase the histories of” — such noble causes as Hawaiian royalism (Down with the cruel tyranny of the Jones Act!), Guam separatism, and getting Alaska that referendum she never got (truly, this is the left at its ugliest).

It’s not even close to a rare or transgressive observation that the present government is undergoing a crisis of political legitimacy. Congress’s approval rating is in the teens on a good day. The administration has claimed the right to kill citizens extralegally, and the president rewrites his healthcare law on what seems like a daily basis. Is it possible that the administrative state has become unmanageable, and the only option is to dismantle it, or leave? Naturally, Washington’s nomenklatura and their gophers in the press (including FBI water-carrier Bob Woodward ) will not take kindly to those who choose either option. We would all like to believe the Constitution remains the document by which we are governed, but there comes a time to put aside childish things.

My point is reaction, especially in America but elsewhere too, occurs along the eddies and channels of public life, and there’s very little that can be done to either push it along or stop it. It’s songs sung in Allegany County about shooting whoever tries to dump Mario Cuomo’s nuclear waste there, or community policing in Oregon after federal timber subsidy cuts forced them to gut their sheriff’s department. Or something like what Rand Paul wants to do to Detroit.

Alan Mendenhall puts things into perspective:

The stigma attached to the word “secession” in America undermines the very prospect of secession in all parts of North America, but the fact of the matter is that all political orders come to an end.  Although it is hyperbolic to suggest that secession is imminent or in the air, as it were, or that America is nearing the end of its lifespan, there is a possibility that in my children’s lifetime or in their children’s lifetime the political bands that tie America together will become unloosed.  Let us hope that the process is voluntary and nonviolent.  Such is the goal of secession properly conceived: the peaceful and consensual separation of the coercive institutions that bind people together.

To leave one’s country is still an ‘exit,’ whether or not you’ve left your hometown. Only a tyrant would force you to stay. The upshot of being ruled by mediocre men is that we’re unlikely to encounter one willing to assume three quarters of a million deaths as his legacy for preserving the Union, to Rich Lowry’s unending disappointment. It’s hard to imagine the president marching on Montpelier if the Second Vermont Republicans had gotten their way. The DOJ is leaving its hands off Colorado and Washington’s weed, anyway.

Pat Buchanan has written about the contemporary right that, “we are of the Vendee.” Which is to suggest it is composed largely of doomed peasants. Many of those peasants were and are probably smelly and unpleasant, and didn’t know much about artificial intelligence or the singularity, but they remained loyal to the throne.

As for the neoreactionaries, they should bear in mind the man composing downstairs, that aristocratic Irish patriot, may be the greater poet. And that Judas’ great sin was kissing the King in front of the federals.