American Mind: Retrieving Greatness for a Digital Age

Editor’s Note: This is a work in progress.

James Poulos:

“Today’s remarkably deep and swiftly expanding debate on the Right is caused by the rise of digital technology to a formative position in our psychological and social life. Already, the perceptions and sensibilities of Americans have been reshaped so profoundly by our new digital environment that critiques of mainstream conservatism which could not gain traction just a few years ago now command the initiative.

These developments are at the leading edge of a wholesale transformation of Western politics. “So much of what holds the identity of the ruling class together,” I explained in my essay introducing The American Mind, is “the product of its rise to power in a shared context that digital technology is destroying.” …

What else can explain ruling-class convictions that journalists who communicate securely and confidentially are saving democracy, while citizens who do so are destroying it? That ordinary Americans cannot be trusted to use their own smartphones, but meritocrats forced to kneel before the altar of post-gender gnosticism and the throne of egregore occultism must alone be trusted to determine which memes are good and which evil?

Making a detective’s investigation into the strange mystery of the West’s recent and unfolding “metaphysical crisis” leads us to conclude that the sudden triumph of digital technology has caused people to perceive that the mode of rule constructed around them is ineffective, counterproductive, illegitimate, and obsolete …

That’s why, on the scatterplot of the 2016 electorate now making the rounds online, the upper left quadrant, economically “left” and socially “right,” is full of people, while the bottom right quadrant, economically “right” and socially “left,” is about as empty as an abandoned cruise ship. Of course, the point of the matrix is that these labels themselves no longer make the sense they did in pre-digital times. That elite, confronting the “unthinkable,” responds by doubling down on its abstractions, and insisting that only the adoption of its ethics can save the world. Established intellectuals demand a return to a power that has lost its potency, and a time that isn’t coming back. “

Basically, I agree with the big picture that James Poulos is painting here. American culture used to be highly local. The mass media used to be highly decentralized. The “mainstream” was divided into regional cultures rather than the 24/7/365 cable news cycle. In the Jim Crow South, few people read any of the national magazines like Newsweek or U.S. News and World Report and most Southerners got their news from the editors of local newspapers who supported the Southern way of life.

Everything began to rapidly change in the late 20th century. The United States became a global empire after the Second World War which made segregation a point of international conflict in the Cold War. The rise of radio, film and television and the consolidation of newspapers into conglomerates concentrated the power of the mass media in the hands of a tiny elite in New York City, Los Angeles and Washington, DC for a generation. It is would be an understatement to say that the “electric-age ruling class” smashed and reprogrammed our culture. Suddenly, the “mainstream” was created (SPOILER: it did not exist before the 1950s) and being considered legitimate or having authority came to be associated with being on television. This “electric age” elite which grew accustomed to lording it over not only the American Heartland, but the entire Western world had the power to control and shape the narrative.

As the mainstream media was consolidating and moving toward the apex of its power and influence around the time of Watergate, the interstate transportation system was being created. The bulldozer was transforming the landscape of the South to create the Sunbelt economy. Millions of Southerners moved off the farm between the 1940s and 1960s into the South’s new urban centers like Dallas, Atlanta and Charlotte. Florida went from being the smallest Southern state to one of the biggest after the invention of the air conditioner. In the span of a generation, the South became urban and industrialized and the Jim Crow system was shattered by the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.

I’m using the South as an example to illustrate the big picture, but what went on here in the late 20th century with the Boomer generation happened nationwide. Millions of people were on the move. The country became unsettled and grew more and more deracinated over time. The consumer culture created by late capitalism invaded the family and millions of women entered the workforce. Eventually, the country began to grow ever more atomized, angry and alienated and after the rise of the internet and digital technology in the 1990s and 2000s the rebellion began against the “electronic age” elite which preferred to keep things that way: fat, dumb and content to consume the latest X Men movie.

Who is this elite though?

James Poulos studiously dodges the question. It will suffice to say that the South ruled the Union until the War Between the States. As Southerners lost power within the Union in the 1850s, we developed a stinging critique of Northern liberal democracy and free-market capitalism. After the defeat of the Confederacy though, the South was crushed and reduced to colonial status and was really never heard from again. Lincoln and his successors remade the Union in the image of the Yankee.

The Yankee elite had a great run which lasted from the time of Lincoln to around the JFK presidency in 1960. It was JFK who redefined America as a “nation of immigrants” in a 1958 book that he penned for the ADL. The Yankee system of liberal democracy and free-market capitalism ultimately proved to be their own undoing because the the East, the Midwest and the West, but not the South which was dirt poor until the 1950s, was flooded with millions of European immigrants. The North became ethnically and religiously diverse in a way that bypassed the Anglo-Protestant South.

By the mid-20th century, Jewish immigrants had became wealthy enough to challenge the Northern WASPs for political and cultural supremacy in the United States. They allied themselves with other insurgent groups like Irish Catholics and blacks in the Democratic Party. After the Second World War, the meritocratic system was adopted and the floodgates to the American elite were opened and the Jews poured in en masse into the Ivy League universities and rose to the top of the American social and economic pyramid where they have been entrenched in power ever since.

The United States is currently ruled by an aging, hostile Jewish elite that is afraid of the declining, alienated and increasingly resentful White majority in Middle America. We’re also now brimming with racial minorities like AOC and Ilhan Omar who were imported as an insurance policy against a revival of Nazism and who have been taught since birth to resent the White majority. Digital technology has broken the ability of the Jewish elite to bamboozle the masses with the television. It turns out that being glued to Jewish-controlled television channels and entertained by Jewish-produced Hollywood blockbuster movies was passing a phase of history. As James Poulos notes, all the great questions like “who are we” and “who am I” for White people can no longer be repressed. He carefully avoids saying that only White people are forbidden from asking and answering questions like that these days.

What’s going to happen when the Jewish elite comes crashing down? It doesn’t have the wealth, numbers or the technology to maintain its cultural and political hegemony forever. It was a lot easier to rule a fat and happy country with three television networks that was 80% White than a poor and angry one with the internet that is 50% White. I think it could go a number of ways. It could be a hard landing and a very nasty scenario in the context of the mass unemployment of the next twenty years which will be generated by automation. Alternatively, I can imagine a scenario in which White people are allowed to reassert their own identity and reconnect with their heritage and it turns out to be a soft landing because everyone will be much richer in the future and no one will work anymore because our robotic slaves will basically be providing for all our needs. In such a world, the racial and cultural powderkeg could be mysteriously defused because artificial intelligence will become the new source of anxiety.

I believe it will be in the best interest of everyone to avoid the RAHOWA, to ease the Jews out of power and to deal with this massive economic change caused by the rise of the robots. The 20th century was horrifying and devastating for Europeans and I would rather not repeat that mistake. Instead of doing that, we should be creating the world of the Jetsons so that everyone can enjoy a life of luxury and leisure, but this honestly all depends on how our existing elite prefers to go out.