Michael Anton: The Pessimistic Case for the Future

July 22, 2023 Hunter Wallace Conservatism, Culture, Degeneracy, Liberalism, Politics, Populists, Progressives 17

This is a very good summary of our present moment from Michael Anton. I’m sure pretty much everyone here would cosign it. This has been the radical view for at least twenty years.

Compact:

“Recently, I was asked to make the “pessimistic case for the future.” I present instead more of a “pessimistic take on the present.” The future, while imminent, is obscure. The present, by contrast, is knowable. This is also not so much a “case” replete with exhaustive evidence—there isn’t space for that, nor is there a need—as a quick tour through our present hell. No one who thinks “everything is fine” will be persuaded otherwise. Those who see the seriousness of our problems hardly need proof. Nor have I made any attempt to be evenhanded, much less philosophically detached. My account is perforce one-sided. I hope it is wrong. … ”

You should read it in light of the Turchin and Howe books.

The remarkable thing here isn’t what Anton is saying in his new book. It is that he is saying it. Conservative elites have been radicalized. Millions of ordinary people have been radicalized. It has also all happened in the span of about eight years. It has rapidly accelerated under Joe Biden.

According to Neil Howe, the United States entered a Crisis era around 2008 which will last until the mid-2030s. The country should be focused on fixing the long neglected problems of the “outer world.” Contrast the substance and tone of Anton’s article with what passed for the mainstream conservatism that you might remember from National Review or The Weekly Standard circa 2005. At some point between 2005 and 2023, we crossed into a new era. The political rhetoric has become far more strident, apocalyptic and revolutionary on the Right. The Obama presidency feels like a distant memory.

If this is the view that the mainstream Right now holds of the Left, how does it not eventually end in conflict? How might looming events like Donald Trump being incarcerated or losing the 2024 election be interpreted in this paradigm? How does the temperature of our politics cool down? How does one side start arresting their opposition and maintain much less restore trust in the system?

I’m just asking questions. Who aside from Abraham Lincoln in the Civil War has arrested and jailed his political opponents? Woodrow Wilson and Eugene Debs? Debs was a minor party candidate who didn’t have the support of over a third of the country. Americans also had a common culture at the time in spite of all the riots and immigration. It was the Age of Innocence.

“This, then, is the pessimistic case for our present and future. Assuming present trends continue is said to be a logical fallacy. But assuming they won’t, especially when they’ve been worsening for two generations, is wishful thinking. … ”

Two generations isn’t a long time.

The present trends of cultural disintegration, polarization and political instability can’t continue in the long term. Once it reaches a certain threshold, instability devolves into conflict. Conflict resolves polarization by vanquishing one side or the other and establishing a new normal.

Note: I have noticed a lot of people are brooding about the future lately.

17 Comments

  1. “Once it reaches a certain threshold, instability devolves into conflict. Conflict resolves polarization by vanquishing one side or the other and establishing a new normal.”

    We are in the Third Reconstruction right now. Every American Reconstruction has been a systemic, if not deranged purging of whites. The Yankees did it in 1865-1877. Lincoln’s Marxist and liberal heirs did it again in the late 1950s through the 1960s to dissolve the remaining white structures that remained in place after the Civil War. Now that nothing is left stopping them and the betrayed white backlash of the 1980s is totally spent, we are having the Third Reconstruction of 2009-Now to finally and literally attack whites as such. All of this is a logical progression of Lincoln’s foolishly naive initiatives.

    So, yes, there is a side being vanquished and it is the white race as it exists in America and thereby the world due to the global reach of American power. Trump was so viciously transformed into Goldstein because he dared to give whites a voice in the middle of this Third Reconstruction, regardless of how contingent and tepid his outreach. Just barely give a hint to whites and look at the reaction. The “new normal” being established isn’t actually very new; it is the same old Black Worship. We are simply “fortifying” the new civil religion. Christopher Caldwell discussed all this very well in his recent book.

    https://www.historians.org/teaching-and-learning/teaching-resources-for-historians/sixteen-months-to-sumter/newspaper-index/new-york-herald/nigger-worship-and-its-consequences

    The future is an ever more consolidated worshipping of blacks, ever increasing anarcho-tyranny resulting from elevating blacks into authority, ever more systemic incompetence within Black Run America, and ever more oppressive purging of whites.

    Personally I’ve turned to God and lay my fate into his hands. The 2022 midterms were disturbing. Biden is arguably the worst president in the modern post-1945 era. The economy is an inflation choked disaster, and we are on the brink of nuclear holocaust, and half of the country *still* voted for Biden and saved the Democrats because of abortion – because despite all the other crisis, what mattered was reserving the right to terminate your children, your future. And that brings me to what the future really holds – the demographic cliff caused by the sexual revolution you covered here:

    https://occidentaldissent.com/2022/06/20/michelle-goldberg-is-feminism-losing-cultural-vitality/comment-page-1/

    When we begin that descent into oblivion, which I think we are doing right now with how Millennials and Zoomers are totally, if not proudly barren despite entering or already being in middle age, the system will collapse. The stagflation will be incomprehensible because of the ratio of young to old. Deflation alone will not happen because central banks will do everything they can to keep the currency afloat. So, what you will see is a conjunctive intensification of anarcho-tyranny in society and stagflation in the economy. Economically that cannot reverse until productive capacity is liberated, which requires the demographic pyramid to be returned to its normal state after being upside down, which means women go back to doing their jobs as endowed by nature. They will never do that voluntarily because we’ve seen what they really are in the Onlyfans and Twitter era. They will have to be forced by circumstance. De-population as official top-down government policy will try to keep their self-sterilization going for as long as possible if not only because those responsible are rabid, resentful ideologues.

  2. Be of good cheer, alliances are forming and the regime change will come externally.
    If you can see the skyline, move.
    Everyone will finally be equal in the 7500 degree mushroom cloud.
    Si se puede!

  3. Keep your kit clean. Store your ammo according to specs. It can go bad easily. Obey all the laws. But when it breaks down, have no mercy. You will be the future.

  4. Hahaha you dumbass, you think Boomers dont think destruction is pending.
    They will be the first to shoot.

    • @Jaybo,

      Perhaps, once they take a few puffs from their albuterol inhalers, put on their corrective lenses to see objects at a distance, and their arthritis meds allow them to squeeze the trigger.

  5. The future predicted failure is the failure of neo-liberalism and the failure or Reaganomics, Anton is a fellow at a neo-liberal think tank, Claremont Institute. Take a look at all the people lining up in front of churches for food, favoring the rich over the general public is a disaster and these people who sold this idiocy to us must pay. Anton is telling you, his ideas and the ideas promoted by his kinds of people, neo-liberals, Reaganites, are failures, and he is right.

  6. People are already snapping, and the DR is the first to disavow.

    I imagine a White man finally breaking bad on some niggers and some bud-light boycotting Jason Aldean patriotard with his concealed carry stopping him because “raycism bad.” Unless the judeo stranglehold over White America’s hearts and minds is broken, this country will end up worse than Sweden, Britain, and South Africa.

    Whites must start defending those that defend themselves, and HATING the traitors in our own race.

  8. We know it needs to be burned.
    It needs to be burned down to the foundations.
    The foundations of 1776.
    The foundations of normalcy.
    The foundations of morals.
    The foundations of health.
    The foundations of sanity.
    The foundations of rationality.
    The foundations of common sense.
    The foundations of adults in the room.
    The foundations of decency.
    The foundations of of being able to expect a world and a behavior that makes sense and its good for humans.
    We know it needs to be burned.
    It needs to be burned down to the foundations.
    So we can cart away the poisonous ashes to be buried deep in a cursed patch forever evil never to be visited again.
    So we can build on the old, solid foundations, once again.
    So we can have a Constitutional Republic, once again.
    So the late Constitutional Republic the United States of America (July 4th, 1776 – November 3rd, 2020) can be brought back, re-founded, re-dedicated to the American way.
    So the Statue of Liberty can stop crying.
    So the children can grow up without any kind of “transing”
    So that wokeness is killed for good never to return.
    Death to the woke.
    Death to pedophiles.
    Death to groomers.
    Death to leftoxenomorphs.
    No part of it.
    No part of woke.
    No more religion of leftoxenomorphism.
    No more feminazism.
    No more misandry.
    None.
    Anathema to wokeness.
    Abhorrence to wokeness.
    No more abominations.
    Find something leftoxenomorph and destroy it.
    That’s a motto to add to human life.
    Find something leftoxenomorph and destroy it.
    NO matter what.
    Just kill it. All of it.

    • @Front…

      You forgot : ‘Death to Alphabet letters’, ‘Death to Toilet Paper’, and ‘Death to Moths and Holly Hock leaves.’.

      The latter was the most glaring omission, as Holly Hock leaves have always been a threat, or, at least, to all who dared to research the matter…

  9. PROCRASTINATION SETS IN…

    I feel neither pessimistic nor optimistic, for while I understand we have some very serious problems, I know from my own life, and from the lives of those around me, the possibilities for recovery and renewal are endless.

    The central dilemma we have is that many have just awakened and are trying desperately to figure out where exactly we are, how we got here, and what, if anything, can be done.

    These people are joined by an even larger number of people who know perfectly well what has happened and what must be done, but, because of self-interest, are wary of wagering it, in any way or form, beyond a very private complaint.

    Then there are those who recognize what is going on, are prepared to take some honourable steps, those chiefly around voting.

    Voting, however, as has been clearly demonstrated over the last decade, is not likely to be a remedy, because many states are refusing to clear up their systemic poll vulnerabilities.

    In essence, the whole nation is at the edge of the pool unable to bring itself to dive in, for fear of cold water.

  11. “””…lot of people are brooding about the future…”””

    Normies began to realize that current times are not one another messy period but something extraordinary and serious.

  12. https://www.bitchute.com/video/2J2Etmkq22Av/

    What do you people think about this, I have actually tested it myself with an Android Tablet with unnamed MAC addresses enabled in developer mode, also with an old iPhone and a BLE scanner, tons of unnamed Bluetooth MAC addresses popping up everywhere in a crowd, with addreses leading to no know manufacturer.

  13. FYI, Michael Anton’s missive is as a contributor to “Up From Conservatism: Revitalizing the Right after a Generation of Decay” by Arthur Milikh” (Editor). But the sense of dread is universal on the DR and its extensions in the Normie Traditionalist Right.
    The truth is that none of us can know what comes next, because as we cannot yet see down to the subatomic level to witness matter and energy interact in real time, and even if we could, we cannot understand what it means without quadrillions of observations of those interactions. So we are all guessing, based on our limited genetic capacity and the culture and technology as it exists today.
    The liberated among us think they are now the higher power in the universe, that is, God, due to their control of the levers of authority, communication, coercion, and even commerce. But as wisdom, based on the humble understanding of human limits, does not fit into their worldview, they will fall, as has all selfish materialists throughout history.
    Good (caring about others) wins in the end. But the victory usually arrives after the masses pass away. So life is in reality nasty, brutish, and short, as Hobbs surmised.

  14. Be wary of Michael Anton- he is either a secret agent for the other side, or has ingested more liberalism and incorporated it into his outlook than he imagines. Proof? First , note how he prominently features black faces whenever he displays a photo referencing “our people”, Also he never misses a chance to vilify Boomers as the source of all that ails us. Insert the word “Jews” for “Boomers” to understand what’s really driving change in our society. Anton is either misleading us intentionally, or is too stupid to know what’s really going on in America today.

  15. Very good essay by Michael Anton. Everything he wrote is true, but being a VDARE type of conservative, he doesn’t name names. When the inevitable SHTF, normies should know who to hang from tree branches and light poles.

    Too bad it won’t get a much larger read from normiecons; not that anything could reverse the inertia of decadence, decay, and degeneracy at this stage of rot.

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