Reactionary Tory Principles and the Present Day “Right”: Part One

The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that in an isolated system, the universe as a whole being the largest example of such a system, the level of entropy will increase over time. While this is technically a statement about energy moving from an ordered and usable state to one that is disordered and unusable, the popular understanding of the Law as saying that everything eventually breaks down is not wrong. Translated into poetry, William Butler Yeats’ lines “Things fall apart/the centre cannot hold/mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” (1) is a decent approximation.

That this Law is valid when applied to history ought, with certain qualifications, to be considered a fundamental reactionary principle. By history, of course, I mean the history of human civilizations, and one qualification is that the Law must be applied in a particular rather than a general sense. Speaking of any given civilization, the creative energy that was put into building it eventually runs out and the civilization enters into a period of decline. Those who are familiar with Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West will recognize in his theory of the life-cycle of civilizations – although he called them cultures – what the history of human civilization in general looks like when the Law of entropy is applied to each civilization in particular. The other qualification, is that, as with any other application of this Law including its original usage in physics, it is a property of fallen Creation which in no way binds the Creator. The decline of a civilization can be and often has been retarded and even turned around by a religious revival. This is why there is no essential conflict between the reactionary’s anti-Whig understanding of history as moving in a downward direction towards decadence, decline, doom, and destruction and his call to “turn back the clock.” Whether the reactionary recognizes it or not, the latter is really a call for religious revival, a call to turn back to God.

The opposite of this reactionary principle is the idea that the history of human civilization, apart from any divine input, is an exception to the Second Law and is constantly moving towards a higher order, greater freedom, and maximal human potential. This is the idea of progress to which all forms of modern thought subscribe in one form or another. The nineteenth century Whig interpretation of history which treated all of past history as one long preparation for liberal democracy was one well known version of the idea of progress. The neoconservative Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man was an updated edition of this version. As Eric Voegelin (The New Science of Politics, 1952) and George Grant (Philosophy in the Mass Age, 1959) observed this idea was produced by inappropriately transferring to the history of human civilization the attributes of God’s redemptive history which transcends the history of human civilization and culminates in the Kingdom of God. The result of this transferal is the substitution of the Kingdom of Man for the Kingdom of God and Grant, who pointed this out in his first major book, devoted the writing side of his career to contemplating the consequences of this substitution in the modern, technological, age.

A quick glance at the mainstream “right” today will tell you that it has entirely abandoned the reactionary principle in favour of some form of the idea of progress. In Manitoba our most recent provincial election just took place a day prior to the request for the dissolution of Parliament launching the next Dominion election. Provincially, the status quo was more or less maintained, with the majority of seats held by Brian Pallister’s Progressive Conservatives. Note the adjective in the party’s title. During the campaign Pallister’s PCs – the initials are even more appalling than the adjective by itself – used “Moving Manitoba Forward”, previously used by the socialists, as their slogan and ran ads urging voters not to let Wab Kinew’s New Democrats turn back the clock. In this context, of course, turning the clock back does not mean a religious revival, a recovery of worthy elements of the ancient and Christian traditions that were lost or damaged in the transition to modernity, or anything else a reactionary would mean by the phrase but rather a return to the policies of the previous Greg Selinger government – huge deficits, high taxes, long emergency room wait times, and general mismanagement of the public health care system. It speaks volumes of the mainstream “right” in this province, however, that it would rely so heavily on the language of progress to sell its platform to the public.

There is also a growing right outside of the mainstream. If we compare it to the mainstream right on an issue by issue basis we find that overall it is much to be preferred to the mainstream right. In Canada today any stronger position against abortion than “I am personally against it, but I believe it is a woman’s right to choose” has been almost completely pushed into the non-mainstream right. Any position on immigration stronger than “we need secure borders and to enforce our border laws” such as the suggestion that legal levels of immigration are way too high was pushed out of the mainstream right in all Western countries decades ago. To say that selection of immigrants is the prerogative of the country admitting the immigrants and that Western countries need more prudence in exercising that prerogative because not all cultures are equally compatible with our own, although common sense and until about sixty years ago non-controversial, is now regarded by the entire left and the mainstream right as beyond the pale. Speaking these truths about immigration has become the signature issue of most of the various forms of the non-mainstream right.

This “right” too, however, seems incapable of speaking its truths in any language other than that of the left. Take the movement behind Brexit in the United Kingdom, the Make America Great Again movement that put Donald Trump into the presidency of the United States, and the movement represented by Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party here in Canada. All three of these movements are populist. Populism is a style of politics in a democratic state that involves appealing directly to “the people” and vilifying the governing elites. A populist conceives of the policies he promotes in terms of “the will of the people” and prefers direct democracy over representative democracy. Each of these aspects of populism is an obvious characteristic of each of the three movements that I have specified – even though, ironically, it is due to representative democracy having been given the upper hand over direct democracy in the constitution of the American Republic that Donald Trump is now their president.

Indeed, the association between the non-mainstream right and populism is such that many people today think of populism as being naturally and inherently right-wing. It is not. Populism’s natural home is on the left. The idea of “the will of the people” is the very fiction upon which the left was historically based. It is what Jean-Jacques Rousseau called la volonté générale and was incorporated by the French Revolutionaries into the sixth Article of their Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

Indeed, the very concept of “the people” is a fiction, for it has no consistent meaning. When a republican speaks of “the people” he means all citizens of the republic, governor and governed alike. A populist, by “the people”, excludes the elite. A lot of leftists use “the people” to mean “the poor” and exclude “the rich”. Hitler, by “the people” meant German-speaking Aryans. “The people” can mean whatever the person invoking the name of “the people” wants it to mean and therefore it means nothing at all. It is an expression, like so many others in the leftist lexicon, which is defined not by its designation of a corresponding reality, but by its usefulness as a tool for justifying violence and seizing and exercising power.

By contrast, kings and queens do not traditionally speak of “the people” but rather “my people” or “our people.” This wording is clear and definite – it means the monarch’s subjects – and expresses the traditional relationship between sovereign and subject in which feudal allegiance and familial ties are connected, kings and queens being both the liege-lords of their realms and the fathers and mothers of their large extended family of subjects. A true man of the right, a reactionary, is always a royalist.

To our list of reactionary principles we can add that pure democracy is the worst form of government, and that direct democracy as opposed to representative democracy, is the worst form of democracy. These principles are the opposite of all modern thinking, which is what makes them reactionary, but they are demonstrable.

Imagine a group of twenty people. One of them, Bob, puts forward to the rest of the group, the proposition that another of their members, Joe, should be beaten, tortured, mutilated, and killed for their amusement. The proposition is debated and they decide to settle it by taking a vote. Fifteen vote in favour, five against. The outcome is rather rough on poor Joe, but it was a democratic decision, fair and square, majority rules.

While that example is rather absurd and extreme, it illustrates what is wrong with the popular modern thought that democracy is the ideal form of government. If, however, you were to make one slight adjustment to the illustration and have Bob put forward the proposition that since Joe, who is quite wealthy, has so much property, and the rest of them, who are rather poor, have so little, it is only fair that they confiscate Joe’s wealth and distribute it equally among themselves, you would no longer have a situation that would be highly unlikely to arise in real life but a small-scale depiction of what is called economic democracy or socialism.

This problem with democracy has been recognized since it was first invented by the Greeks in ancient Athens and is one of the reasons why Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle condemned democracy as the worst form of government. Alexis de Tocqueville described the problem as “the tyranny of the majority.” Modern thinkers believed that the solution to the problem was to combine democracy with liberalism – the idea that government is itself subject to the law and that the law must recognize the natural, inalienable, rights of the individual. When men like John Locke and John Stuart Mill first proposed this doctrine they saw it as a restraint on the power of government to oppress. Today, centuries later, we are surrounded by an abundance of examples of how the doctrine of liberalism can be the basis and justification of state oppression. To give but one, we are now living in a day when someone can get in trouble with the law for using the pronoun “he” to refer to someone born with a penis on the grounds that it violates the individual’s inalienable “right” to choose his/her/its/whatever own gender.

What is also apparent in our day and age is that while “the tyranny of the majority” is a problem unique to democracy, the tyranny of the minority over the majority is just as much an element of democracy as of an outright oligarchy. Interestingly, the best example of this is the very issue which the non-mainstream right insists on framing in leftist, populist, terms. The populist, nationalist, “right” is not wrong in saying that Western countries have had too much of the wrong kind of immigration and placing the blame for this on “the elites.” What they don’t seem to grasp is that the guilty elites are democratic elites qua democratic elites.

Every organized society will always have an elite. There will always be a minority in any society that steers and directs it. This is what Robert Michels called “the iron law of oligarchy” (Political Parties, 1911) and it is true of all forms of society, no matter how democratic they might be in theory, and it does not make a difference if the democracy is direct or representative. In a true direct democracy, where every single question of public policy would be decided by a popular referendum, the ability to persuade the majority to vote its way most of the time, would be in the hands of a minority, and they would be the elite. The elite that actually wields power is not necessarily the same as those nominally in charge. Thus in a representative democracy the elite may be those who have gotten themselves elected into public office or it may be a hidden minority who have the ability to control elected officials. The nature of the society has as much of an effect on the nature of the elite as the nature of the elite has on the nature of the society.

Bertolt Brecht’s poem The Solution (1959) was intended as a criticism of the Communist government of East Germany’s suppression of the uprising of 1953. The poem’s ironic conclusion “Would it not in that case be simpler/for the government/To dissolve the people/and elect another” has frequently been borrowed as a critical description of the motives behind Western governments’ liberal mass immigration policies. The criticism is apt, but my point is that it is only a democratic society that provides its elites with an incentive for trying to “dissolve the people/and elect another”. An oft-heard argument for democracy is that it allows us to periodically “throw the rascals out.” One can see the appeal in this but the flipside is that it gives the political class a motive to “do unto them, before they do unto you.”

It is hardly a coincidence that radical, demographic transformation producing, mass immigration was introduced throughout the West in the 1960s – only a decade and a half after the end of the war in which the United States had emerged as the predominant power in the West. The United States, which had been led into the First World War by a President who wanted to “make the world safe for democracy” and who therefore insisted on driving the Hapsburgs and the Hohenzollerns from their thrones paving the way for the rise of Hitler, was able after the Second World War to introduce radical democratic changes throughout the West whether by forced re-education in the former Axis countries, the bribery of the Marshall Plan re-building assistance among the European Allies, or the dependence of both upon the American nuclear arsenal as a deterrent against the threat of Soviet invasion. The Americanization of the West led almost immediately to the spread of liberal mass immigration. Here in Canada, Tom Kent, an important Liberal Party strategist in the days of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau and one of the men who spearheaded the radical changes to our immigration policy in the late 1960s, as much as admitted to the Brechtian motive of maintaining the Liberal hold on power by dissolving the old electorate when he said that it was done to break up “Tory Toronto.”

If the radical immigration the West has been suffering from for decades is due to what Christopher Lasch called “The Revolt of the Elites” and that revolt in turn is the result of the triumphant ascendancy of American-style liberal democracy in the post-World War II Western world (2) then the insistence of the non-mainstream right on using the left-wing language of populism, democracy and “the will of the people” to combat this kind of immigration seems like a major strategic error.

I must point out, before concluding this essay, that the preceding strong criticism of democracy is not a criticism of the institution of parliament. As noted above, the true reactionary right is royalist, but no king or queen has ever governed without a council of advisors, and the institution of parliament has been a part of royal government in Christendom for over a thousand years. Parliament as an institution is democratic, but not completely democratic, and its virtue, historically, was that it incorporated a form of representative democracy into royal government in a way that strengthened the latter while diluting the many negative aspects of the former. While this virtue has been greatly lessened by the triumph of Whiggism the problem is with the Whig principle not with the institution. The Whig principle is that parliament is the democratic safeguard against royal tyranny. The Tory principle – the reactionary principle - is the exact opposite of this – that in parliament royal authority is the safeguard against democratic tyranny. The Tory principle is the true one.

In Part Two, I shall, Deus Vult, consider the reactionary principle that religion is the foundation of civilization in opposition to the liberal idea that the secular retreat from religion is the foundation of civilization and we shall weigh the mainstream, neoconservative, right in the balance of this principle and find it wanting.


(1) From The Second Coming (1919).
(2) Lasch would presumably disagree strongly with my explanation. The full title of his final, posthumously published, book was The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (1996).

Welfarism

“Where a great proportion of the people are suffered to languish in helpless misery, that country must be ill policed, and wretchedly governed: a decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization” – Samuel Johnson




What does a “decent provision for the poor” look like?



Many people today would answer that question by describing government programs that are intended to ensure that nobody in our society falls below a minimum standard of living. Such programs would include unemployment insurance programs that provide people with income in the event that they lose their job, social security programs that provide people with income when they are too old to be employed fulltime, social assistance programs that are designed to ensure that low-income families have adequate shelter, clothing, and food, and government health insurance that ensures people have access to health care if they cannot afford to pay for it themselves. All of these programs and others like them, taken together, comprise what we call a social safety net.



Is this social safety net what Dr. Johnson had in mind when he made the remark I have placed in the epigraph of this essay? More importantly, is the social safety net the answer to the question of what “a decent provision for the poor” looks like?



Neither question can be answered with an unqualified yes or no. The social safety net did not exist in the form in which we are familiar with it today in the eighteenth century. A “decent provision for the poor” would seem to involve, at the very minimum, some way of ensuring that the basic necessities of life are available to all, and circumstances might sometimes dictate that this must take the form of government assistance. The problem is that that the social safety net as it exists today is virtually inseparable from the welfare state. While there is much that can be said, both positive and negative, about the social safety net, the welfare state is definitely not a “decent provision for the poor.”



We will consider the reasons why this is the case momentarily. First we need to define our terms so that we understand what exactly we are talking about. The welfare state is not just another name for government assistance for the needy. It is an idea about the nature and purpose of government, an idea which calls for a particular model of the social safety net. The concept of the welfare state is that government’s purpose is to ensure the well-being of the people it governs. This concept calls for a social safety net that is highly centralized, i.e., organized and controlled by a country’s central state. Even when regional and local authorities are involved in the practical administration of the programs of the welfare state it is understood that they take direction from and are the agents of the central government. The relief programs of the welfare state are not thought of as emergency measures to be undertaken when all else has failed but as active measures to eliminate the evil of poverty from society.



It is the elements just described which make the welfare state what it is and distinguish it from other forms of government social assistance. The criticism that is to follow pertains to the welfare state as described and viewed as a whole. It is not a criticism of particular social programs, such as assistance to widows with dependent children, nor is it a criticism of government assistance in general. Each government social program should be evaluated on its own particular merits and demerits, which evaluation is way beyond the scope of this essay. As for the general concept of government assistance we will take is as being granted, by all except the most cartoonish of stereotypes, that providing for those in genuine need is a good thing and that sometimes this might require the involvement of the government.



Why is the welfare state not a “decent provision for the poor”?



For the same reason that prescribing a treatment that does more injury to the patient than his actual disease would have is bad medicine. Primum non nocere is a Latin saying that expresses an ancient principle of medical ethics – first, do no harm. The welfare state is not “a decent provision for the poor” because it harms the people it is intended to help.



How does it do so?



One way in which the welfare state harms the people it is supposed to be helping is by undermining the family. Christopher Lasch called the family a “haven in a heartless world” (1). What Professor Lasch meant by this was that the family, in which there exists a union of love and authority, provides a shelter of psychological and emotional support, comfort and security that has become all the more necessary as other areas of human life have become more and more filled with conflict and stress. The family is all of that, and more. Everybody needs the support it provides but the people who need it the most have always been the poor and the needy.



What sort of effect would we expect the welfare state to have upon the family, a positive or a negative one?



Those who believe in the welfare state, unlike classical socialists (2), have long tried to sell their idea as one which will benefit families. It is difficult, however, to see how the welfare state could ever have had anything other than a deleterious effect upon the family. Throughout history the family has been not only the emotional haven that Prof. Lasch described but the primary means of economic support in times of hardship and need. If someone had a need that he could not meet himself, he looked to his relatives first and if for some reason they were unable to help, he then turned to the church and to his local community. Under the welfare state, however, the government takes over this role from the family. The architects of the welfare state may not have been consciously aware of this but it is the inevitable outcome of the concept of the welfare state.



The welfare state that we are familiar with today was built in the twentieth century, although it had forerunners in the social legislation of the late nineteenth century. It is very much a product of the age of centralization, of the concentration of power and authority within a country’s central government, and it bears the image of the age which begat it. The welfare state is the state that considers the wellbeing of those it governs to be its responsibility and reason for existence. When government takes a new responsibility upon itself it must take it from someone else and with the responsibility it assumes the power and authority that goes along with that responsibility. A large part of the process of modern centralization involved the central government taking upon itself the traditional responsibilities of regional and local authorities and so assuming much of their power and authority along with the responsibilities. In the case of the welfare state, by taking upon itself the responsibility for the wellbeing of the people it governments, it has taken upon itself a responsibility that has historically and traditionally been born by the family and in taking that responsibility, it has therefore assumed much of the family’s power and authority. The only effect we can reasonably assume that this would have upon the family is to weaken it.



We come to the same inevitable conclusion when we approach the matter from a different angle. The members of a family are related to each other by blood, marriage and adoption. Each relationship within the family comes with a set of mutual obligations. A father and mother, for example, are obligated to care for, provide for, and bring up the children they brought into the world, and those children are obligated to honour, respect, and obey their parents and, when their parents can no longer care and provide for themselves, to do so for them. The more the members of a family accept these obligations with a sense of duty that is fueled by love the stronger the family will be.



So what happens to that sense of duty when government takes over these obligations? What happens when the government takes over control of the schools from local school boards and parents and begins to incorporate more and more of the training that had traditionally been reserved to parents into the school system? What happens when the government so completely takes over the role of providing for the elderly, with its pensions, social security plans, and assisted living facilities that no responsibility is left to their adult children? Does the loss of this sense of duty make for a stronger or a weaker family?



The answer to those questions should be fairly obvious, but if perchance it happens to have eluded somebody, he need only open his eyes and look around him. The state in which we currently find the family is surely evidence enough that the effect of the welfare state on the family has been a deleterious one. (3) It is also evident that the poor and needy have been hurt the most by the weakened condition of the family.



A second reason why the welfare state is not a “decent provision for the poor” is that it separates obligation from relationship.



The obligation to help the needy was traditionally diffused throughout society. It was not distributed evenly but this did not mean that it was unfair. Obligation went hand in glove with relationship. The obligation to provide for the needs of a helpless infant fell upon his parents and if they were incapable of meeting that obligation for some reason or another it then fell upon their nearest relations. Obligations were not equal but were greater or smaller depending upon the closeness of the relationship. Within the Christian church, for example, a particular congregation would have obligations to help the needy throughout the church catholic, stronger obligations to the needy in its own diocese, and the strongest of all would be to the members of its own parish. People would have greater obligations to their friends and neighbors than to strangers and greater obligations to members of their own community than to members of a community miles removed from them.



The welfare state changed this. It took all of those obligations and concentrated them into one large collection and placed it upon the central government. The central government now administers and pays for programs to help the widow and orphan, the sick and elderly, and others in need. Since the government has no money to pay for those programs except what it receives in taxes the obligation does ultimately return to us but now it is separated from relationship. The taxes we pay are not assessed based upon the degree of our relationship to the needy recipients of welfare programs but upon our level of income.



Therefore under the welfare state we are as obliged to support someone who is completely unknown to us, who lives on the other side of the country, who we have never met and are never likely to meet as we are to support our own brother or sister who has the same need. This is more significant than it might appear at first. It is not just that obligations are easier to bear in the context of relationships and that obligations without relationships breed bitterness and resentment, although both of these things are true and important. What this means is that the welfare state is an instrument of social atomization.



Traditional society is organic in nature. It is not just a random group of individuals, its members are connected to each other through a number of different relationships each of which has its own unique set of mutual expectations, rights and obligations, out of which relationships the various groups, levels, and layers of society, beginning with the family, are formed. Social atomization is the process of breaking down traditional society by absorbing its duties and powers into the state and reducing its members to a collection of isolated individuals. The pulverization of society like the breakdown of the family affects everybody negatively but hurts the poor and the needy the most.



A third reason why the welfare state is not a “decent provision for the poor” and the last reason we will consider in this essay (4) is that the welfare state kills genuine compassion and charity.



The welfare state is portrayed by its advocates as the embodiment of compassion and charity. It is nothing of the sort. You can personally display compassion and charity towards someone by giving of yourself, your time, and your resources to help that person in a time of need. A group of people can display a collective form of compassion and charity by voluntarily pooling their resources to help people out who are in need. The welfare state does not and cannot fall into this latter category of collective compassion.



When you are called upon to personally display compassion towards another person it is in circumstances in which you have been personally confronted with his need. If you persuade several people you know to join you in helping another person to do so you ordinarily must acquaint them with the particular need. In both cases you are helping real people who you are aware of with their actual needs and problems.



The welfare state is the exact opposite of this. It is not particular real needs of particular real people that it is interested in. The welfare state deals with generalizations – poverty, homelessness, illiteracy, etc. – as abstract problems to be solved by finding the right formula. It does not have to persuade people to voluntarily give their resources to support its programs because they are funded by compulsory taxation.



The welfare state actually kills charity and compassion. When the government tells people that it has taken responsibility for the well-being of all members of society and that it has created programs to solve problems like poverty this puts a damper on people’s sense of “other people are suffering, I should do something to help” and generates the idea “it’s the government’s problem now, not mine”. This is especially true when they find their taxes have skyrocketed to pay for the enormous expense of the welfare state.



As with the decline of the family and the atomization of society, the loss of genuine generosity, compassion, charity, and benevolence in society, hurts the poor and the needy more than anyone else.



The welfare state is not what a “decent provision for the poor” looks like.



(1) Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (W. W. Norton & Company: New York, 1995). When this book was first published in hardback (Basic Books, 1977) Lasch, who was Professor of History at the University of Rochester, had the reputation of being a conventional radical or leftist. The book received laudatory reviews from conservatives like Nathan Glazer and George Gilder and condemnation from leftists like Mark Poster and Edward Shorter, prompting Lasch to write a preface for the 1978 paperback edition, explaining how both sides had misunderstood his book as being reactionary in nature. By the time Lasch died in 1994, however, he had well earned a reputation as the “social conservative of the left”. This book is a scholarly look at the recent history of the family, its interaction with its social environment, and its impact upon the psychological health of its members, and a largely negative critique of the theories of social scientists who diagnosed the family as causing psychological illness, and offered their “expert” advice as to how to correct this.. Lasch’s sympathies were with rather than against socialism, and he sees the “capitalist” as standing behind the social scientist, using him as a means of extending his control over the private lives of workers, but his concept of the family as a shelter from the conflicts which rage in other aspects of life, is nevertheless a valuable one. “As business, politics, and diplomacy grow more savage and warlike, men seek a haven in private life, in personal relations, above all in the family—the last refuge of love and decency.” (p. xix)



(2) By “classical socialists” I mean nineteenth century socialists, who believed that farms, mines, factories and other “means of production” should be owned collectively by society. Today, the word “socialist” is more often used to refer to a supporter of the welfare state than someone who believes in collective ownership. Nineteenth century socialists were not a homogenous group. While they all believed the private ownership of property was the source of all evil and that its elimination would bring some sort of Paradise on earth, many believed in violent revolution whereas others believed in using the legitimate political process. Some, like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, believed in the family, while most, like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels regarded it as a source of oppression to be abolished in the socialist revolution, an idea which survived into the 20th Century and influenced both the sexual liberation and the feminist movements.



(3) This is not to say that the welfare state is the sole cause of the decline of the health of the family in Western countries. Industrialization brought about the era of mass production in the late eighteenth to nineteenth centuries. With the era of mass production came rapid population growth and migration from rural areas to urban centres. Prior to the era of mass production, Western economies were centred around agriculture, and the production of other goods was largely in the hands of craftsmen, who worked out of their homes, who had learned their skills by working with their fathers, and who passed their skills on to their own sons in the same way. This kind of economy was good for the health of the family because it allowed them to put down deep roots in local communities. The shift to mass production changed this. Production of non-agricultural goods was removed from the home to the factory, a large part of the population was uprooted, and the planting of roots was discouraged by factory owners who preferred a mobile and atomized work force. All of this played a major part in the collapse of the stability and security of the family. That industrialized mass production and the welfare state are both major contributing factors to the decline of the family is a fact that may not seem to make sense at first. This is due to the confusing terminology of the twentieth century. In the twentieth century socialism came to be identified with the welfare state and capitalism came to be identified with the free market of economic liberalism and these combinations, socialism/welfare state and capitalism/free market were regarded as the polar opposites of each other. The reality is far more complex than this simplistic dualism would indicate. Socialism began in the nineteenth century as a left-wing (progressive, revolutionary) response to industrial mass production. The term “capitalism” was first used as a derogatory label for industrial mass production by the socialists. Economic liberals eventually claimed the term as a label for the free market of their theories, but industrial mass production had not been the product of the free market or of a government policy of laissez faire. The process of concentrating power and authority into central governments was already a couple of centuries old and these central governments played an active role in the transformation of their countries from rural/agrarian economies to urban/industrial economies. The same central governments later developed into welfare states. Industrial mass production (capitalism) and the welfare state (socialism) are therefore best regarded, not as the opposite poles of an ideological spectrum but as two stages of the modern, highly centralized, state. Both stages introduced changes which threatened, weakened, and undermined the family.



(4) There are many other reasons, of course. Charles Murray’s Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980 (Basic Books: New York, 1984) is a study of the American welfare state that shows how many American welfare programs in that era not only failed to solve the problems they were supposed to solve but in fact made them worse and contributed to many other social ills as well.

GTN Tory Classics No. 8: First They Came for the White Supremacists...

The essay that follows was originally shared through e-mail and Facebook on May 27, 2009. This should be kept in mind in reading the essay because there are many time references such as “this week” and “last year” which mean “this week” and “last year” as of the day the essay was written.

In 2008 a young couple here in Winnipeg had their children seized by the Child and Family Services after a teacher called CFS to report that the couple’s daughter had come to school with a swastika inked on her arm. The case finally made it to the courts in May of 2009. I wrote this essay the week the case opened. I had been disgusted although not surprised, earlier that week, with the commentary that had appeared about this case in the Winnipeg Free Press. The newspaper’s progressive columnists seemed to have been having a contest to see who could call the loudest for the cruficixion of the couple in question.

Child and Family Services is a government agency that I have long detested. It exists for no purpose other than to undermine parental authority within the family. Yes, I know that on paper their raison d'être is to deal with cases of child abuse. They are notoriously incompetent at handling this task however. There are clear cut cases of child abuse where all sane people would agree the government must step in to protect children from abusive parents – cases of sexual abuse and cases where the parents deliberately injure their children. This sort of thing the police can handle without the help of an agency staffed with arrogant social workers.

CFS, like similar agencies elsewhere, was not created out of a need for a special agency to deal with such cases. It was created because the increasingly totalitarian state wants to control our lives from cradle to grave and to do so it requires control over the raising of children. Thus the creation of agencies like the CFS, which exist to let parents know that it is by permission of the state that they are allowed to raise their children, that the state will be monitoring them, and that they will lose their parental privileges if they step out of line.

In this instance, where the CFS intervened because of a complaint about the family’s political views, it was a clear cut case of political persecution. This is something that we all should have been outraged over. It does not matter that the swastika is the symbol of an ideology, National Socialism, that all sane people consider to be repugnant. All sane people also consider Communism to be repugnant. If, however, a child were to show up in school with a hammer and sickle inked on their skin, does anyone seriously think a teacher would have called the CFS to complain? In the extremely unlikely event that happened, and the even more unlikely event that the CFS, staffed with people who were spoon-fed Marxism in their social “sciences” classes in university, actually took children out of a home because its parents were Communists, how do you think the columnists in papers like the Winnipeg Free Press would respond? Would they demonize the parents in print the way they did with the parents in this case? Of course not. The moment they got wind of such a thing happening they would be screaming “McCarthyism” as loud as they possibly could.

As the case progressed in the courts, further allegations of a different nature were made against the parents. Surely, however, such allegations cannot be considered credible coming from the CFS. It had taken children out of a home because of the political views of the parents and was now trying to cover its tracks.

The title of this essay is, of course, an allusion to Martin Niemöller’s famous poem “First they came…” Niemöller was a Lutheran pastor in Germany who ended up in Dachau in WWII. The poem describes how the Nazis came for the communists, trade unionists, and Jews, and he kept silent being none of those things, and then when they finally came for him there was nobody to speak out for him. The reference to this poem struck me as an appropriate title for two reasons.

First of all, the act of the government taking children from a home because of the political views of the parents is far closer to the evil of the Third Reich than the mere use of the swastika symbol.

Secondly, progressives have devoted much effort over the last several decades to instilling anti-racism in us. This effort has been largely successful and one of the results is that now most of us turn a blind eye to evil when the victim can be shown to be a “racist”. Marxist thugs prevented a controversial speaker from giving a lecture at a university where he was invited to speak to people who wanted to hear him speak by blocking access to the lecture hall, shouting him down and intimidating his would-be audience? Ah, but he is a “scientific racist”, so that means the anti-racist thugs were just expressing their “freedom of speech” rather than denying the lecturer his. The owner of a website is brought before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal and charged with violating Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act for something that was posted on his website, and he now faces a hefty fine, legal bills, and a gag order? Ah, but it was racist material that posted on his website, so it doesn’t matter. Children are taken away from their parents because of the opinions of their parents? Ah, but their parents hold racist opinions so it doesn’t matter.

So long as we continue to think this way, government agencies and thugs will continue to be able to do whatever they want to people, so long as they label them “racist”.

“But the parents really were racists, in this case,” someone who misses the point completely will object, “they identify themselves as white nationalists and drew a swastika on their daughter’s arm.”

Christopher Lasch, the “social conservative of the Left” who was professor of history at the University of Rochester until his death in 1994, wrote the following about such people:

The problem of racial intolerance is closely linked to fanaticism. Here again there is a good deal of complacency and self-righteousness mixed up in the fear of intolerance. The thinking classes seem to labor under the delusion that they alone have overcome racial prejudice. The rest of the country, in their view, remains incorrigibly racist. Their eagerness to drag every conversation back to race is enough in itself to invite the suspicion that their investment in this issue exceeds anything that is justified by the actual state of race relations. Monomania is not a sign of good judgment. But whether it spring from self-righteousness or panic or a mixture of the two, the assumption that most Americans remain racists at heart cannot stand up to close examination. The improvement of racial attitudes is one of the few positive developments of recent decades. Not that racial conflict has subsided, but it is a serious mistake to interpret every conflict as evidence of the retrograde outlook of ordinary Americans, as a revival of the historical intolerance that has played so large a part in our country’s history. The new racism is reactive rather than residual, let alone resurgent. It is a response, however inappropriate and offensive, to a double standard of racial justice that strikes most Americans as unreasonable and unfair. Since opposition to an “affirmative” double standard is routinely dismissed as racist, one reaction to this insult, from working- and lower-middle-class people harassed by affirmative action and busing and now from college students harassed by attempts to enforce politically correct language and thought, is to accept “racism” as a badge of honor, to flaunt it, with studied provocation, in the face of those who want to make racism and minority rights the only subject of public discussion. (Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites: And the Betrayal of Democray, New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1995, pp. 90-91)

Here, in his last work, Prof. Lasch demonstrated far more insight into what makes these people tick than most typical leftists.

Canada and the USA, and virtually every other Western country have, after WWII, introduced:

1) Anti-discrimination laws. These forbid racial discrimination on the part of private businesses and property owners in certain situations. In practice they tend to be only enforced against whites.
2) Affirmative action policies, in which schools and employers discriminate in favour of non-whites against whites. These can either be imposed by the government or actions taken by companies themselves to ward off the threat of lawsuits under anti-discrimination laws.
3) Forced racial integration for lower and lower-middle class whites.
4) Liberal immigration policies that seem to be designed to deliberately alter the racial demographics of the countries that practice them.

These policies were all introduced by progressives. Conservatives should be the effective voice of opposition to these policies and the injustices contained within them. We have failed to be such and as long as we continue to fail those who are not willing to suffer in silence under such injustices will find other, less wholesome, movements and ideologies to speak for them.


First They Came For The White Supremacists…


By Gerry T. Neal
May 27, 2009

The big news this week, is the opening of the child-custody case that started last year here in Winnipeg, when Child and Family Services took a girl and boy into custody after the girl’s teacher reported that she had been sent to school with swastikas and racist words drawn on her skin. Following the seizure a debate arose over whether or not the state has any business taking children out of their homes because they don’t like the views of the parents. Now the legal answer to that question in Canada is going to be settled by the courts. The moral and just answer to the question, however, lies in hands other than those of the Canadian legal system.

That answer is clear, and that answer is a resounding no. When the government says that you cannot think a certain way, that you cannot hold a certain opinion, or that you cannot convey your thoughts and opinions to others, they are engaging in something called thought control. Thought control is the mark, not of a legitimate and just government, but of a totalitarian and tyrannical one. The most oppressive regimes of the 20th Century, the Communist governments of the USSR, Red China, Cuba, North Vietnam, Cambodia, etc. all engaged in thought control.

So, for that matter, did the Third Reich.

Which makes it all the more ironic the government is using people’s fears of Nazism as the basis for their experiments in thought control. What was it about Hitler’s regime that made it so terrible? I always thought that it was the fact that the Third Reich was a tyrannical regime with secret police and a fanatical leader-worship cult that encouraged people to turn in their parents, neighbors, and friends if they were suspected of disloyalty to the state, in which freedom was non-existent and the state was in the hands of a gang of petty thugs who ruled by fear. But apparently I was wrong. Everyone else seems to think it was because Hitler was a racist.

Stalin, who was our ally in WWII, ran the same kind of totalitarian state as Hitler. In fact Stalin’s regime killed more people, operated more prison camps, and ruled more ruthlessly than Hitler’s did. Communism’s total record of bloodshed, human suffering, and oppression makes Hitler’s look pretty small in comparison.

Yet you can be an avowed Marxist and remain respectable in academic circles. You can hang up the flags of murderous Communist regimes, wear T-shirts glorifying Communist mass-murderer “Che” Guevera, and praise Castro and Mao to high heaven, and nobody will say anything about it. Or, if somebody does say something about it they will be drowned out by the cry “MCCARTHYISM!!!”

The name of Senator Joseph McCarthy has become synonymous with “witch-hunting” but McCarthy never attempted to use the power of the state to persecute people merely for holding Communist views. He was dealing with a legitimate security problem – the infiltration of the American federal government by agents loyal to a hostile power. We now know, since the mid 1990’s declassification of the VENONA Project transcripts, that the problem was worse than he thought.

That is a remarkable contrast with the professional anti-racist “watchdog” groups and their liberal allies in the media and the schools. These people want the government to take action against people, not for violence, not for acts that hurt others, but for holding racist views. They want it to be against the law to express certain opinions. They want the courts to hand out harsher sentences for beating people up because of their skin color than for beating them up because they were being lippy and obnoxious. Now, apparently, they want children removed from their homes and put in the custody of the state, because the parents don’t kowtow to what liberals and the government say everybody is supposed to believe about race.

On Monday, as the custody case began before the Manitoba Court of Queens Bench in Winnipeg, social workers from Manitoba Child and Family Services informed the court that the girl had told them that “black people don’t belong” and that “black people should die” and that she gave a graphic description of how to kill a black person with a chain and spiked ball.

That’s pretty nasty stuff. Is this really what the parents in question were teaching their children, however? Or is this a case where the social workers at Child and Family Services, convinced by their ideology that “those evil racist Nazis” talk that way, interviewed the girl in such a way as to get answers that confirmed their own preconceived ideas. The latter is by far the most likely explanation. So likely that I would call it a certainty.

If you find that to be preposterous then you are obviously unfamiliar with the way social workers and government agencies like CFS think and operate. Ignorant, young idealists, enter social sciences programs in universities where their professors stuff their heads with Marxist ideology, and they emerge to take jobs with government bureaucracies convinced of the righteousness of their mandate to invade the private lives of ordinary people and boss them around for their own good. That is how the social worker is made.

The ideology the social worker is taught, identifies certain ideas and attitudes as pathologies that are harmful to society. These are ideas that are transmitted primarily by families, churches, and small communities, and which until very recently were universally regarded as healthy and normal. This reclassification of normal ideas as mental diseases provides a justification for government agencies to interfere in the workings of other societal institutions. It also allows those doing the state’s dirty work intruding on people in their homes, spying on them, and taking their children away, to feel good about themselves, to think they are doing something for the greater good.

In reality they are just obnoxious busybodies on a power trip.

What are these ideas that are being pathologized?

Do you have feelings of patriotic attachment to the ancestral people from whom you are descended and to the land they live in? Once considered one of the highest of virtues by the poets of our language, this attitude is now condemned as “racism”. Do you think that men and women have different natures leading them to behave differently and take different roles in society? If you do, you are now considered a “sexist”. More recently recognition of the obvious fact that the complementary nature of the sexes makes heterosexual coupling the norm, and same-sex attachments the exception, has been pathologized as “heterosexism” or “homophobia”.

These new ways of looking at old ideas began in the 1940’s and 50’s as part of a deliberate program on the part of neo-Marxists, such as those belonging to the Frankfurt School, to delegitimize the culture they believed was standing in the way of the revolution and the utopia they desired.

Obviously, this tactic is working well for the neo-Marxists. It is truly frightening how many young people are buying into their nonsense. Far more frightening than the thought that somewhere out there some family might be teaching its kids to admire Adolf Hitler.

More frightening yet, though, is the future of society if the government is allowed to take children away from their parents because the parents are “racists”. If it is “white supremacists” who have their children taken away today, whose children will be taken away tomorrow?

Populism Part Three: Treacherous Elites

In Part One I explained why I don’t like the “Occupy Wall Street” movement and why, although I agree with many of the specific policies they support, I don’t much care for the populist “Tea Party”. In Part Two I objected to the core concept of modern democracy – that the will of the people is sovereign – as being a version of “might makes right” and to populism – the kind of movement which attempts to gain influence by the strength of numbers through accusing elites of betraying the public interest – because it unleashes the violence and domination through force which is inherent in the concept of popular sovereignty. Not wishing to be entirely negative, I have briefly mentioned a few of the things I, a traditional Tory, support. These include the classical idea that good government consists of harmonizing the good of the whole with the good of the parts and balancing the good of the individual with the good of the community, the good of the few with the good of the many an idea enshrined in the concept of a mixed constitution, of which the British/Canadian parliamentary monarchy is the outstanding example. Populism, which makes the democratic “will of the people” the dominant principle, is the enemy of the harmony and balance enshrined in our tradition of parliamentary monarchy.

There is a question, however, which needs to be asked. If populism is defined as a movement which purports to speak for “the people” against “the elite” and accuses the elite of betraying or conspiring against the public good, what should our response be when the populist is right about the elites?

This is very important question. Elites are easy targets for ridicule, attack, and outright scapegoating. This is partially due to the fact that the numbers of the elite are by definition few. It is also due to the fact that there is a widespread if ethically wrongheaded notion that it is “fair game” to attack the very rich, the very powerful, the very skilled, and the very strong in ways that would be considered unfair and even bullying if done to the poor and the weak. For this reason, we would do well to take populist accusations against elites with a grain of salt. In doing so, however, we must not fall into the mistake of thinking that elites can never be guilty of the accusations populists level against them.

This is especially important today because we live in an era in which evidence of elite betrayal abounds on every side. An obvious example can be seen in the way several large banks and corporations, which were on the verge of failing three years ago when the American economy did a nosedive following the bust of the housing bubble, asked for and received bailout money from the American government, then turned around and gave large bonuses to their executives, even while laying off thousands of employees.

As annoying as this example of collusion between arrogant economic and political elites to enrich themselves at the expense of the public is it is by no means the worst example of elite betrayal. Other examples include the inflation tax, the outsourcing of jobs, the mass importation of immigrants, the attack on traditional moral values and culture, and the loss of national identity and sovereignty due to official multiculturalism policies and the construction of a new world order.

The inflation tax is an effect of the expansion of the money supply. When the money supply is expanded the value of money per unit decreases relative to the goods and services which can be purchased with money. Since takes a while for the market to adjust to the expansion of the currency the first people to use the new money – governments and banks – are able to spend the new money when it has the purchasing power per unit of the old currency. As it circulates it loses purchasing power - and so does the money in your wallet and in your bank account. This amounts to a transfer of wealth from you to politicians and bankers.

The erosion of the value of our money and savings which is inflation is most noticeable to people when prices of consumer goods which everybody purchases on a regular basis begin to rise. If these prices do not rise – and even go down – it will take longer for people to notice that their money is not worth as much as it used to be. There are ways of keeping the prices of consumer goods down in periods of inflation. You could find a way of increasing production for example. Or you could move your factory to somewhere where there is an abundant supply of cheap labour and few regulations. Or you could import an abundant supply of cheap labour into your own country.

The first option is the best. In the right set of circumstances a businessman can introduce new technology which speeds up and increases production in his factory by so much that he can lower his price per unit, while increasing both his overall profit and the wages of his workers.(1) There are limits, however, to when and where you can do this. In recent decades corporations have opted for the other two methods with the help of governments who have made free trade agreements and passed liberal immigration policies. Academic elites have joined political and economic elites in this because if there is one area where “capitalists” and “socialists” come together it is in support of free trade and liberal immigration.

Liberal immigration policies tend not to be received well by the people of the country whose government introduces them. And for good reason. Such polices look suspiciously like an attempt to put into practice Bertolt Brecht’s bad joke about “dissolving the old people and electing a new one”. (2) To prevent widespread discontent with large scale immigration from threatening the entire program the political, academic, and media elites have engaged in a decades long campaign of positive and negative propaganda. The positive propaganda in favour of multiculturalism presents “diversity” as a good to be desired for its own sake. The negative propaganda uses terms like “racism” and “xenophobia” to intimidate critics of wide scale immigration and multiculturalism.

Here is how the negative propaganda works. To most people the term “racism” conveys the meaning of an irrational dislike of somebody else for no reason other than that his skin colour is different from your own. Similarly, the term “xenophobia” means an irrational fear of strangers, of people who are different from you. When the government, schools, and media constantly use these terms to explain away opposition to liberal immigration and multiculturalism they are taking what is in fact a perfectly healthy, normal, and rational way of thinking and pathologizing it, i.e., declaring it to be a mental disorder. Thus the fact that people have an entirely legitimate right to be concerned that their government is actively trying to replace them, their children, and their grandchildren with immigrants is buried under mountains of abusive name-calling.

This proved to be so successful a method of silencing criticism that it was used elsewhere. All of a sudden, all sorts of ordinary, rational ideas were now given nasty labels and treated as mental defects. Do you believe that the most fundamental division of labour among human beings, between women who bear and raise children and men who protect and provide for them, arises naturally out of the simple biological fact that women are the ones who get pregnant and not out of an all-male conspiracy to oppress all women? If so, you are a “sexist” or a “male chauvinist”. Do you believe that the fact that men have external tube-shaped genitals and women have genitals that are openings which are the right size and shape to put the male genitals in and the fact that doing so is the means of propagation of the species means that men are made for women and women for men? Then you are now a “homophobe” or a “heterosexist”. At least in the eyes of the elites in charge of the news and entertainment media, the educational system, and the state.

To summarize the charges so far, the actions of banking and political elites have eroded peoples’ savings through inflation but corporate elites have kept prices relatively low by outsourcing jobs and importing cheap labour with the help of laws passed and treaties signed by political elites while academic and media elites have, with the support and backing of the other elites, attempted to sell this to people in the ideological package of “multiculturalism” and have browbeaten those who weren’t buying with accusations of “racism”. The actions of the elites in each of these cases is an unjustifiable betrayal of the common good of the societies to which the elites belong

What would motivate elites to turn against their own societies in this way?

Christopher Lasch, who was professor of history of the University of Rochester until his death in 1994, in his final book wrote that the American “privileged classes” had:

[R]emoved themselves from the common life. It is not just that they see no point in paying for public services they no longer use. Many of them have ceased to think of themselves as Americans in any important sense, implicated in America’s destiny for better or worse. Their ties to an international culture of work and leisure—of business, entertainment, information, and “information retrieval”—make many of them deeply indifferent to the prospect of American national decline. (3)

This is also true of the elites of other Western countries. It is notable that the decades in which everything described above has taken place saw the integration of economies on a continental (Common Market, NAFTA) and global (GATT, WTO) scale and the establishment of quasi-governmental bodies at the global level (the UN, the International Court, etc). While the kind of conspiracy theory that suggests that this 20th and 21st Century movement towards a new world order is entirely the result of plotting carried out in secretive meetings of the ultra-elite should be regarded as overly simplistic at best it would be erring in the opposite direction to absolve the elites of all active complicity in this new direction history has taken. The idea that the emerging new order on the global scale might be the means of achieving utopian goals such as world peace and universal prosperity is a vision far more common among the elites than among other people. Hence the transfer of elite loyalty that Lasch noticed, from particular communities, societies, and countries to this new international order.

Having pointed out several ways in which elites – political, academic, economic, etc. – have betrayed the common good of our societies, and offered the transfer of elite loyalty to the emerging international order as an explanation, this leaves us with the question of how to respond. I phrase it that way rather than “what to do about it” because I am not such an optimist as to assume that something can be done about it.

Populism, at least in the sense we have been looking at of a mass movement demanding that the will of the people be met, is not the answer. In parts one and two, we saw how populism and the concept of popular sovereignty are threats to prescriptive, constitutional order. Yet our objection to the new world order and the actions of the elites described above is based upon the fact that these things also threaten the constitutional order and common good of our societies. To use the one to fight the other is like trying to douse a fire with gasoline.

In the previous essay I distinguished between two senses of the word “democracy”. There is modern democracy, which knows of no mixture with other principles or elements, but which insists upon the will of the people being absolutely sovereign. There is also however, the kind of democracy in which the constitution prescribes that elected representatives of the people participate in the governing of the country alongside aristocratic and royal elements. In this kind of constitution, democracy is balanced by other principles which are just as important, and is one element of many.

It is the idea that the “will of the people” is sovereign which is the problem with modern democracy and it is this idea which makes populism a dangerous movement and a threat to constitutional order. Is a populism conceivable that does not include this element? A populism which confronts elite misdoings by insisting, not that the “will of the people” be submitted to, but that their rights within the established order be respected and not violated?

These questions are not mere exercises in semantics. When a movement is built on the idea that the will of the people is absolute and must be obeyed there are no limits to what the movement will demand. The will of the people must be provided by the leaders of the movement – for the people have no will of their own – and populist movements of this nature are the means by which one elite, deriving its strength from its skills in rhetorical manipulation of the masses, challenges another which derives its strength from its wealth. In such wars of the elites, the good of the community is likely to fall by the wayside.

When a popular movement is based upon the idea that a community and a society is established for the common good – the good of all its members – and is therefore based upon a set of mutually understood and respected rights, privileges and obligations between the individuals and the groups which make up the community, there are limits to what the movement can demand. When it charges elites with betraying the common good and demands that the rights of the people be respected it must itself respect the tradition and constitution to which it is appealing.

It is the common people who are hurt the most when the social and moral order of a society collapses. It is the common people who are most dependent upon the security and stability an established, permanent order provides. When law and order breaks down and crime rates soar it is not the elites who are the primary victims – it is people in the middle and especially the lower classes. When traditional morality comes under attack, illegitimacy rates soar, and marriages break up, it is again the lower classes who are hit the hardest because these things are major contributors to multi-generational poverty.

Yet in spite of all of this, populist movements which purport to speak for the common people against the elites, frequently embrace revolutionary rhetoric and conceive of themselves as being against the established order of society.

Populism, because of its revolutionary potential, is naturally a left-wing phenomenon. There have been right-wing populist movements in the 20th Century, but the kind of popular movement I am suggesting here must be something different. It would have to have a populist element – it is challenging the elites after all – but this cannot be the dominant element. It must be a very small-p populist, conservatism, rather than a right-wing populism.

Exactly what such a movement will look like in actual practice is something that remains to be hammered out. It will require a great deal of serious thought as to what exactly a counter-revolution, Maistre’s “opposite of a revolution” looks like. All of this is outside of the scope of this essay, as is the question of whether such a movement could possibly succeed. (4) We must not confuse the categories of “that which it is possible to succeed in” and “that which is worth doing”, however. Fighting for what is left of our civilization and the moral and social order it is built upon, is always worth doing, even if doing so permanently relegates us to the realm of what the late Samuel Francis, borrowing an expression from Leonard Cohen, called “beautiful losers”.

(1) Lets say you own a factory that employs 10 people and produces 500 units of product a day. That is 50 units of product per employee. You sell the product at $15 a unit receiving a total of $7, 500 for a days worth of product. You pay your employees $150 a day each, which works out to $18.75 per hour or $3 per unit of product. In total you pay them $1,500 a day, and you have $1,500 of other expenses a day. This leaves you with $4,500 profit per day. Now, imagine someone invents a machine that increases the productivity of your plant by 300%. Your factory now produces 1,500 units of product a day. You lower the price of your product to $10 a unit. You are now receiving $15,000 for a days worth of product. You triple the wages of your employees to $450 a day each which brings your payroll up to $4,500 a day. The cost of purchasing and running the machine causes your other expenses to go up to $2,000 a day. Your profit is now $8,500 a day. You have increased your profit, while becoming an unusually generous factory owner who pays his workers $56.25 an hour, and cutting the cost of your product at the same time.

While the numbers I placed into the hypothetical example above are absurd fictions the point remains valid. Under the right circumstances, through increasing productivity, you can make profits and wages go up while lowering the price of your product. This does not mean, of course, that it can be done under any circumstances, with any product. The great blindness of many present day liberal (capitalist) economists has been their belief that man’s science and technology will solve every problem and continue to lead us into a future of ever increasing prosperity for everyone.

(2) Bertolt Brecht was a 20th Century German poet and playwright of Marxist convictions. After the Soviets and the East Germans suppressed a popular uprising through force, he wrote a poem entitled “The Solution”, the English version of which can be read here: http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-solution/ . The final sentence of the poem, the question “Would it not be easier/In that case for the government/To dissolve the people/And elect another?” is for obvious reasons, widely quoted among opponents of present day, large scale, liberal immigration.

(3) Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995) p. 45. In this book, which was completed while the author was dying and published shortly after his death, the author argues for a number of ideals, such as egalitarianism which I do not share, some of which I consider to be quite foolish, and against some principles, such as the principle of hierarchy which I would regard as essential to a functioning civilized society. He approvingly quotes Orestes Brownson’s call for the abolition of hereditary property on the grounds that it is incompatible with democracy. Lasch (and Brownson) may very well be right about this but the abolition of inheritance is even more incompatible with Lasch’s own view of the family as a “haven in a heartless world”. One of the main concepts of The Revolt of the Elites is that meritocracy and the ideal of “social mobility” are responsible for sidetracking America from its original vision of egalitarian democracy. What these concepts actually do, Lasch argues, is give the elites the idea that they are wealthy on the basis of their personal merit alone and therefore are under no obligation to contribute to the common good. While there is some truth to this, I, who do not believe equality to be desirable in anything other than a right to justice from before the law, would argue for social mobility precisely for the reason that it helps validate a stratified society, which is desirable for other reasons. Despite all this, Lasch’s argument that the detachment of current elites from any sense of belonging and loyalty to their societies has led to their support for liberal moral, social and cultural agendas that are against the common good of their societies, is a helpful one.

(4) Full consideration of this question must involve thought about the very nature of history itself. Modern thinking about history has been dominated by the concept of progress in various forms, from the Marxist view of history as a constant struggle between the “haves” and the “have-nots” destined to culminate in the classless, property-less, society of communism, to the Whig history of theory in which events are constantly moving towards universal, peaceful, liberal democracy. George Grant, in Philosophy in the Mass Age, described how this concept of progress arose through the secularization of the Christian view, inherited from the Hebrew, of history as time given meaning as the flow of events towards ends determined by God. In the modern concept of progress, man has replaced God as the determiner of the ends of history. To believers in this doctrine, it is foolishness to resist the flow of history, and wickedness to attempt to move against the flow. This is the doctrine held by the elites who are overseeing the dismantling of traditional, Western civilization and the construction of the new global order. While I do not accept the doctrine of progress, especially where it identifies historical inevitability with justice (“it has to happen this way therefore you are wrong to oppose it”) a mere negation is not enough. What is needed is an alternative understanding of history.