Henry Dampier

From our responsible friends at Vox, we learn that private property is merely an expression of racism.

The Cathedral gets to win this one because the people who would otherwise want to defend private property are entirely hamstringed by the ideology and legal structure of civil rights. Centrist and left-leaning libertarians in particular, who might be inclined to defend the rights of suburbanites to maintain an exclusive place to themselves, are instead pushed by their prior ideological commitments to defend the raucuous mob.

Why exactly should anyone give a rotten dime to the Cato Institute if they’re unwilling to defend the most clear cut issues related to trespassing? You would have to be both rich enough to not care about wasting the money and dumb enough to not comprehend the issues involved here.

The entire point of private property is having the right to select who can and can’t make use of something. If you say that you can’t use even reasonable amounts of force in defense of property, then it’s not private property anymore.

Hamfisted Red propaganda makes its return as the state conscripts indoctrinated children to wave signs condemning the ‘intolerance’ of the inoffensive suburban bourgeoisie.

If anything, not enough force was used to clear the pool. To claim to uphold private property without being willing to use as much force as is necessary to demonstrate that claim is to give up the claim. Proclaiming that you support private property in the abstract, while condemning the defense of those rights in the concrete, is to be worse than useless as an ‘advocate’ of those rights. It is to say “I will defend this” while unchallenged, and then to back away when that principle is actually challenged. This is more obnoxious even than an open Bolshevik who openly opposes the existence of private property.

For conservatives, the unreliability of the state in defense of private property is a further difficulty. It’s embarrassing that private property owners have to make themselves so pathetic in relying on a uniformed agent of the state to defend their own pool. Given that the priestly authority in the US, bound up in the press, wants to obliviate the principle of private property selectively — particularly in cases like this — it’s going to be more challenging to prevent the US from receding to the third world mean.

For the press, events like these are teaching moments intended to shame the remnant middle class to part with their holdings, creating maudlin morality plays intended to break resistance to expropriation of all kinds.

The entire national press will censure one woman for saying “Go back to Section 8,” but it’s become crimethink to even conceive of something like “end Section 8” and “those who do not work should not eat.”

It may be true that the left is overplaying its hand in cheering on the mob of youths. The rising third world generation may have numbers on their side, but they aren’t really useful for much else other than mobbing things and whining on the internet. To that extent, the left is good at mobilizing discontent, but not terribly good at making those people productive.

Since the end of World War II, both sides of the Iron Curtain proclaimed to be internationalist. This tendency only consolidated after the collapse of the Soviet Union. We counselled our students to ‘think globally, and act locally.” The future would be one of increased global trade and cooperation under a framework of international law, with a peace guaranteed by the ‘hyper-powerful’ American military. Nuclear weapons would prevent the outbreak of overt hostilities between major powers.

This belief, while still pervasive, is fading away, but contemporary Western leftists — that is to say, the entire thinking-writing-and-speaking class, has turned its gaze inward, preferring to ‘act globally and think locally.’ This local thinking combined with rash global action has lead to the debacles in countries as far afield as Egypt, Libya, Iraq, and the Ukraine.

The way that ‘act global, think local’ works is that strategists, mostly in America, apply their local thinking about their own societies — usually a pastiche of egalitarian ideology, tinged with sentimentality, without the internal consistency of even a system like Marxism — and then apply it globally, while ignoring it in their immediate area.

So it is that a State Department bureaucrat who sends her child to a private school to protect her from bad influences coming from local Blacks at the public schools, can then support a pro-democracy policy abroad which she subverts at home through her own actions.

Similarly, at the same time as America faces increased economic and political competition from states dominated by a single ethnicity and inegalitarian political structure — like China — the former country doubles down on its ideological commitments to deny reality, pushing a multicultural ideal which no longer makes any decent geopolitical sense.

If you’re administering a global empire, it makes at least some sense to bring in some foreigners to your universities to be trained in global Americanism — so that they can administer the holdings. If there is no global empire anymore, it’s just importing a lot of incompatible people. Given that modern Americanism has come to resemble an ideological commitment to the destruction of the American empire, the political training that happens at American universities seems to do little other than strengthen a fifth column that has become so dominant that it’s hard to find educated people who aren’t, in some way or another, seeking to undermine the American national interest — whatever that means anymore.

The parochial left is losing influence abroad at the same time as it’s gaining in power domestically. While this is good news for foreigners, it’s bad news for the rest of us, as democracy-promotion goes local, having been frustrated everywhere else.

Conservative media outlets in the US are almost entirely concerned with electoral politics. While there are occasionally seasonal detours onto bureaucratic issues (like local bans on nativity displays — a point of conflict going back centuries in Anglo-American societies) and local crime stories, most of the air time on shows like Rush Limbaugh’s or channels like Fox News concern what elected officials are doing, and how campaigns are shaping up.

This makes the viewers obsess over what politicians are and aren’t doing, while keeping the focus current. News is supposed to be new, so when people spend their lives accumulating a stack of knowledge which is recent and shallow, divorced from the relevant context. The democratic mind winds up orbiting around ‘issues’ which are often the consequences of decisions made in previous decades or centuries.

For example, a pundit will talk about the ‘immigration debate,’ but will not usually bring up the directly relevant context of the predictions made by the Johnson administration at the time of the end of most of the immigration quotas, and comparing those predictions to the results of the policies of his administration.

Media channels create fictional — under the ‘reality TV model’ — narratives about politicians which tend to focus on their personalities, along with their stands on arbitrarily chosen ‘issues.’ These issues must be framed in a way that can be comprehended by the median voter while still exciting the party faithful.

In modern states, elected politicians tend to have rather limited influence. It’s not so much that there’s no difference between the political parties, it’s more that the politicians once elected have little influence over what bills get passed, what’s written into bills, and how the existing beureacracies are administered.

In effect, these political news channels act as cover and public relations for the real work of government, to create a greater sense of popular legitimacy. The hack around some of the crises of democracy has been to make it so that the people are only extensively polled and consulted on the selection of actors in the television show that purports to be about the American government.

Polling for the actual work of the state tends to be done to measure the effectiveness of what intellectuals and administrators already wanted to do. Even if public support for a proposal is low to start with, that’s just the baseline of opinion that administrators have to work with before they mount their effort to change society. Only rarely does widespread opposition to a proposal stop such an effort in its tracks — if it’s a high enough priority, popular consent can be engineered through the use of propaganda.