EXTREME POLITICS

If you start telling people your hobby is politics, they’re going to ask you tough questions. Right now, in America, the question “What do Conservatives believe?” is one of the toughies.

Why is that — well, the conservative movement has gone through many mutations as it has tried to find a way of competing with its more popular liberal opposition. It’s hard to figure out exactly what it stands for at this point.

Historically, Conservatives originated in the ancien regime — the old way of doing things that had worked for thousands of years. This meant an artistocracy, a caste but not class system, a feudal approach to wealth, a unity of religion and science, and so on. When you read about medieval Europe, ancient Rome, ancient Greece or ancient India, you’re reading about this type of society (Plato addresses this in his cycle of civilizations under “Aristocracy.”)

American conservatives tend to define themselves by the oldest regime that country has, which happens to be what in European history would be seen as liberal, just like the French Revolution was. Our Founding Fathers were radicals of the time — Deists not Christians, hell-bent on autonomy of the individual, believers in free speech and No Kings. They weren’t liberals, however, in the modern sense. They recognized that most people shouldn’t have the vote, saw differences between genders and races, did not trust atheism and disliked social welfare. They were a hybrid of the European liberal, the homesteader and the old Conservatives.

The root of the term “conservative” means to conserve, and originally, that included the environment. Usually, it is applied to cultural values, as in conserving the family, the sanctity of marriage, and so on, because in a pluralist society anyone who has a strong values system that isn’t all-inclusively cool with “just do whatever you want man” is at a disadvantage. This applies to both conservatives and, when they demand we take hard action on the environment, liberals, because at that point each group has started demanding individuals sacrifice personal autonomy for collective action. But that’s another story.

Breed conservatism with anarchy and you get libertarianism, which is a type of Social Darwinism that believes that if we just let the markets regulate everything, there will be no need for government. Their critics point out that every single inch of the earth will be covered in advertising at that point, so it’s definitely an issue with two sides.

Today the lovely people at the Republic of Texas, who I’ve been interviewing about beliefs and the direction they’re taking their secessionist movement, sent me a document about the balance between “freedom” and “self-responsibility,” and this is what I think characterizes third-generation American conservatism: an emphasis on the values of the founding fathers with the methods of successful resistance to pluralism, which is a “don’t make me pay for the mistakes of others” attitude derived from libertarians.

The document is linked below.

So there you have it, folks… Conservatism is conservation, which right now means anarchy plus capitalism plus defensive irresponsibility in the name of freedom. If that seems baffling, consider this: conservatism, like extreme liberalism, is incompatible with the “do whatever you want, man” attitude of pluralist societies. Would Stalin or Lenin have agreed to that, either? No, of course not.

And this article is short, and only covered the moderate conservatives. The far-right — are they conservatives? That question in itself is too deeply entrenched to provide anything but “yes and no” right now, but it’s a fascinating one, since when you stop seeing the far right as conservatives, you see the essence of their periodic social appeal — and their willingness to do what conservatives are afraid to say they’d like to. (To be fair, the left has the same affliction, but that’s also a much bigger issue.)

Self-Responsibility

After the first two decades of environmentalism, a problem arose: people sympathized with the environmentalists, but didn’t see the root of the problem. Further, they were terrified of more Government regulation and didn’t want another group vying for power in Washington and Brussels. So, out of the consternation that followed, the Deep Ecology movement was born.

We believe that true ecological sustainability may require a rethinking of our values as a society. Present assumptions about economics, development, and the place of human beings in the natural order must be reevaluated. If we are to achieve ecological sustainability, Nature can no longer be viewed only as a commodity; it must be seen as a partner and model in all human enterprise.

We begin with the premise that life on Earth has entered its most precarious phase in history. We speak of threats not only to human life, but to the lives of all species of plants and animals, as well as the health and continued viability of the biosphere. It is the awareness of the present condition that primarily motivates our activities.

We believe that current problems are largely rooted in the following circumstances:

• The loss of traditional knowledge, values, and ethics of behavior that celebrate the intrinsic value and sacredness of the natural world and that give the preservation of Nature prime importance. Correspondingly, the assumption of human superiority to other life forms, as if we were granted royalty status over Nature; the idea that Nature is mainly here to serve human will and purpose.
• The prevailing economic and development paradigms of the modern world, which place primary importance on the values of the market, not on Nature. The conversion of nature to commodity form, the emphasis upon economic growth as a panacea, the industrialization of all activity, from forestry to farming to fishing, even to education and culture; the drive to economic globalization, cultural homogenization, commodity accumulation, urbanization, and human alienation. All of these are fundamentally incompatible with ecological or biological sustainability on a finite Earth.
• Technology worship and an unlimited faith in the virtues of science; the modern paradigm that technological development is inevitable, invariably good, and to be equated with progress and human destiny. From this, we are left dangerously uncritical, blind to profound problems that technology and science have wrought, and in a state of passivity that confounds democracy.
• Overpopulation, in both the overdeveloped and the underdeveloped worlds, placing unsustainable burdens upon biodiversity and the human condition.

As our name suggests, we are influenced by the Deep Ecology Platform, which helps guide and inform our work. We believe that values other than market values must be recognized and given importance, and that Nature provides the ultimate measure by which to judge human endeavors.

Deep Ecology movement

This was a more sensible approach because it came closer to a whole vision of a new society to replace the past, in which we the people can see our activities continuing in an altered form.

In extreme politics, we have to deal with the threat people feel from any new form of regulation. They hear NO when we talk about important things; they are accustomed to government and social welfare groups obstructing their lives, not empowering them.

Deep ecology aims to get around this by telling the truth about the root of the problem — too many humans, zero focus on the human-environment interaction as a fundamental part of our society; it’s sort of a tag line we add on to things like “oh and it’s green so you get tax credits” — and also suggested a different order, based on a spiritual concept of harmony and love.

Interesting; beats the hippies for radical, that’s for sure.

PRESERVATION OF TRADITIONAL VALUES AGREEMENT

Knowing that in the modern time, the tail (technology, individualism) often wags the dog (all of us living together in civilization), we collect these declarative values for the preservation of our cultures that arose before human consciousness, and by all inclinations, will preserve us where our technology and bureaucracies fail. To endorse this document is to endorse the RIGHT OF individuals to pursue these values, not these values as a SINGULAR form of government for all. They are:

1. Right to determine sexual role models and roles. We can say monogamy, polygamy and/or homosexuality are natural.

2. Right to ethnic self-determination, and if need be, ethnic segregation.

3. Right to speak the truth even if it is offensive to others.

4. Right to our own religious practices.

5. Right to regulate and govern our food, medicine and recreational drugs.

6. Right to ostracize or eject members from our community who violate this credo.

If you approve of our right as INDIVIDUALS to live by the above, please affirm this document with “yes, we support the Preservation of Traditional Values agreement” below, your organization, and the date.

CORRUPT

More perennial philosophy attempts from moderns.

What most political systems want is derivability. You, the citizen, get given a simple principle, and using “common sense” — actually, they mean knowledge of the physical and pattern order of our cosmos — you can then derive how the other rules work.

Capitalism for example is simple. Earn money, and then anything that doesn’t affect others directly is legal.

Same with morality. Don’t hurt anyone else. Defer if conflict arises. All principles can be ascertained from a quick scan of memory and some thinking.

For more complex societies, like those with hierarchy and customs and consensual values — the situation is more complex.

Although the idea of an independent candidate makes most laugh, Ron Paul has redefined the political spectrum with his candidacy. While Paul is running as a GOP candidate, that does not obscure the position that he takes, which is clearly beyond what either major party can accept. He is for all practical purposes an indepedent.

We laugh at independents because we know that most Americans have taken one side or the other, and use that idea set as common ground with others to drum up public support for their businesses, personalities, films and books. You can convince anyone you’re a friendly good guy by being liberal and permissive, or convince those experienced enough to be cynical that you’re a realist by drawing a clear line between what’s acceptable and not. It’s more than a political view; it’s a definition of your personality, and a reflection of the audience to which you want to appeal. In a more cynical statement, we want liberal neighbors and conservative bankers and lawyers, because those are the personalities who either leave us alone or work carefully with our money, respectively.

With this in mind, Paul’s success is nothing short of amazing. Candidates like Nader and Badnarik appeal to a small few who are already alienated, but scare off most voters because the single-minded single-solution approach they have taken does not address a range of problems. Paul took basic conservative values, and applied to them a traditionalist twist as interpreted through the mechanism of modern libertarianism. He is both recognizably part of something we would like, which is a solid and moral conservative leader, and a bridge to a new way of thinking about government.

This new method relies not on dividing the political spectrum into good and bad, and fighting the bad while promoting the image of the good, but on removing the easy breeding ground for behavior that leads to bad. While conventional Republican doctrine is that we must fight bad, and liberal doctrine is that bad is misunderstood and need more nurturing, Paul’s doctrine is that bad arises where the good give it space. He suggests we strengthen the good by eliminating their bureaucratic responsibility to support the breeding ground for bad. It’s more akin to natural selection than the Nanny State created by most Republicans.

While at first it seems relentlessly pro-capitalist, Paul’s theory reduces capitalism to a means to an end, with his outright attack on usury culture and the form of moral inattention that allows large corporations to strike from behind government as a shield in the name of civil rights. He suggests instead making the individual less obligated to those corporations, thus removing their shield, while cutting out the illusion that government is here to help. By doing so, he makes capitalism secondary to the question of individual survival and the ability for the smarter among us to escape the rest.

We could then construe Paul’s division of the world into smarter and less smart, and honest and parasitic, and see his basic statement as an unwillingness to support parasites — or the well-intentioned bureaucracy that comes about through our fight for good versus evil. He knows that the more territory a government commands, the broader the lowest common denominator gets, and because there is a single entity trying to provide for all this people, how rapidly government becomes a defender of the broadest rights to existence. In effect, this makes it support parasites and crusade against biologically more intelligent people who will naturally try to escape the masses of clueless television zombies.

In this sense, Paul is not only a defender of the oldest form of conservatism, which encourages not commerce but a strong positive leadership, but is also an endorser of indirect soft eugenics. Allow natural selection to work for us, Paul hints, and the endless stream of criminals both white collar and street level will slacken, because what they rely on is a society of chumps who will defend their right to do nothing of import and excuse their criminality in the name of fighting good and evil.

Garden variety libertarianism has never reached this level of clarity because it focuses too much on the good/evil split of personal and civil rights, insisting on increasing those to absurd degrees while ignoring the fact that giving good people rights equally gives those rights to bad people, who will then wreak havoc as best they can. Paul’s Libertarianism is focused less on rights than a single right: that of honest, intelligent people to use their income to support their own families instead of the breeding of proto-criminal idiots.

When we see this clearly, it becomes obvious that Ron Paul, like the best of politicians who unite opposing factions into a singularity, is an alternative to the left/right split of American politics. He is conservative but unwilling to moralize over individual behavior because he believes that nature will sort out what morality cannot. Let the individual do what he or she wants, Paul’s theory goes, because those who act according to conservative values will prosper and the others will fade away. Avoid worrying about both fighting evil, and defending the rights of those who want to behave like idiots; let the natural consequences of their actions judge them.

What right and left have been able to agree on, over the past thirty years, is that our present path is fraught with error because we are ruled by cynical, corrupt and avaricious corporations and bad government. Both sides agree that localization, or smaller local governments handling problems, is superior to a large federal bureaucracy trying to come up with one average solution for 300 million people of different regions, cultures, intelligences, values and goals. This is why natural selection localized libertarianism of a less-than-embracing attitude toward capitalism has infused the extremes of both left and right.

For example, when we look at the National Anarchist parties gaining precedence worldwide, we see people who are basically liberal in outlook but have come to believe that a localized, national state is the best way to defend their culture. The rise of nationalist Bolshevik parties in Russia also shows this “third way,” and more of these leftists are endorsing a Paul-style post-dogma doctrine: do not crusade against evils, but give them no subsidy at the expense of the rest of society through the mechanism of the bureaucratic state.

On the far right, the only interesting activity has been the rise of the Libertarian National Socialist Green Party, a pre-Paulite conservative libertarian outfit, and the change of the American National Socialist Worker’s Party toward a “traditionalist” outlook that emphasizes cutting ties with the parasitic and nurturing the best of an organic population toward a localized, ethnic-cultural state. In these changes, we see the far right drifting away from the idea of constant warfare against an enemy toward a doctrine of defending the best against the obligation to support the potentially parasitic.

Another way of looking at this is to divide society not between haves and have-nots, but between those with the personal organization and intelligence to be haves, and those who lack these probably biological traits. The former can rise given a chance to show their abilities, while the latter are not composed enough to ever rise, and so will always try to find ways to invent obligations of the former group to subsidize the latter. The potential haves know they are outnumbered, so instead of tackling the potential have-nots directly, they’re cutting them out of the benefits plan.

This allows those who are personally organized, intelligent and driven to build for themselves a nice life and to have happy, healthy families. They don’t want to wage war against the potential have-nots, but they also don’t want to spend their tax money on keeping these people alive to cause trouble. Let nature sort it out. If the potential have-nots are able to organize themselves into a society, and support themselves, they then become potential haves and eliminate their own threat potential. If not, well, who wants to pay for those who will then turn against us? Support the best and ignore the rest.

In running for president, Ron Paul acknowledges that he has a slight chance of winning. What matters more than winning the public show of the presidency, however, is in winning the hearts and minds of the smart people in our television-and-minivan-blighted nation, and convincing them that a politics of denying the support of idiots through Nanny State bureaucracy is more productive than another war against potential have-nots in the style of the war on terror, the war on drugs and the war on crime.

Instead of another misdirected war, Paul tells us, we should return to the roots of conservatism, which is a connection to nature and the natural process. That he has communicated this to so many, and united supporters from both left and right, is the real triumph of Ron Paul’s candidacy and surpasses anything that can be done in a single presidential election.

***

Chris Stevens is a writer for CORRUPT who specializes in the political clash between Platonic and individualistic politics in the modern time. He can be reached here.