THE PRESIDENT AMERICA DESERVESGregory Hood · April 22, 2015
RADIX JOURNAL
“It’s time” for Hillary, and who can disagree? It doesn’t matter that no one who isn’t being paid to say it sincerely believes she can lead the country. She is precisely what the American system is designed to produce.
Mencken said of American government:
“All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre—the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”But the “American Nietzsche” was too optimistic. Leaving aside the assumption that the weaker sex would never assume the mantle of chief magistrate, Hillary is something far worse than a downright moron. She is a successful functionary, an exemplar of the diversity nomenklatura that will dominate the state until the Republic receives its merciful final rest.
She is just smart enough to know how to game the System and remain relevant but retains the protective stupidity necessary to prevent career-destroying intellectual curiosity. Like Obama, our famously multicultural president, she speaks no other languages (even Bill can manage some casual German). She shows no evidence of a grounding in the Western Canon that a liberal like Robert Kennedy could boast, and has produced no speech or written work that has lasted beyond a news cycle. In short, she’s an effective schemer and nothing more.
But this is precisely what the culture demands, and no one should make the Republican mistake of confusing the lack of enthusiasm for Hillary’s candidacy with a lack of support. Rarely has a candidate so perfectly fit the times, as we witness the consolidation of a frankly anti-White, anti-male, and post-American political culture.
Madam President will represent the consolidation of Obama’s accomplishments. It seems almost absurd to remember that part of the messianic promise so many people saw in Barack Obama was his supposed aspiration of “not a red America or a blue America but a United States of America.” Of course, seemingly every week we receive new revelations about the resentful, brooding charlatan we have elected as our President. The “post-racial” America Obama was supposed to usher in faded by the 2010 midterms.
But what conservatives have never understood is that much of the country is now largely comfortable with abandoning “post-racial” illusions, so long the racial conversation focuses on white males as a unifying enemy for the coalition of the oppressed. After all, if you are a smart enough white man, you can escape the Eye falling on you by either leading the mob or claiming a new identity as an oppressed homosexual or a blue-eyed “Hispanic” leader.
Conservatives rage, accurately, that the “liberal media” never “vetted” Obama and still refuse to do so. It’s true that any random dudebro who makes a “sexist” joke on Twitter will have his history explored more thoroughly than the President, but it’s questionable whether even the most through media vetting would make a difference at this point.
Movement conservatives have largely been proven correct about Obama’s radical past, but liberals sensed Obama’s hostility towards what Peter Brimelow calls the “historic American nation” all along. That is why they voted for him, after all, as did most non-whites and especially most African-Americans.
Obama’s greatest accomplishment wasn’t healthcare reform or withdrawing from Iraq—it was breaking down the sense among leftists that there was any sense of limits. The President’s unilateral abolition of immigration laws has been met with indifference by the Beltway Right and even now, leading “conservatives” host Spanish language interviews conceding they will do nothing to reverse it. Opposition to gay marriage has gone from consensus to career ending within one presidential term. And while the President is only marginally responsible for driving these kinds of transformations, he is the first President to openly align with what can be called the anti-American Narrative.
The history of the United States is a shameful episode that must be redeemed by the eternal progression towards equality, the sole saving grace of the American Experiment. By rhetorically and financially aligning the federal government with “Social Justice Warriors,” the President has transformed the culture of critique into the governing ideology of the state.
Conservatives keep harping on our “anti-American” President, expecting the masses to rise in righteous fury and outraged patriotism. What they don’t understand is that many Americans, and certainly the most educated Americans, share this Narrative. America is something to be overcome.
As we saw in the 2008 campaign, Hillary will have some trouble navigating this new culture. As a Baby Boomer, her politics resemble that of her husband, who mastered the art of subtly winning over soccer moms and office drone dads who fussed about keeping taxes low, stock prices high, and violence out of the suburbs. Clintonian politics is about managing the economy while triangulating against a center-right culture. Both Hillary and Bill still act like they are trying to avoid the fate of Gene McCarthy even though we are in an age where separate gender bathrooms is practically a hate crime.
She’s already been tripped up by this before, notably in 2008 when she said she had more support among “working, hard-working Americans, white Americans” than Obama, leading to sputtering fury among the chattering classes. For other politicians, it might even have been career ending.
Of course, Bill Clinton’s famous “Sister Soulja” moment, when he supposedly told off black radicalism, would be suicidal today. And the corporate liberalism and overt opportunism of the Clintons, devoid even of the rhetorical idealism of the Obama Presidency, makes it difficult for Hillary to channel the kind of passive aggressive posturing that passes for progressive campaigning. No “if I had a son” statements from the Clintons anytime soon.
But if there’s one political rule that applies to the Clintons, it’s that salvation lies in scandal. Just as Bill Clinton’s impeachment paradoxically ended up strengthening him, so have Benghazi, the email scandal, and perhaps even the foreign fundraising scandals actually added to Hillary’s reputation. When we don’t even bother with the pretense of idealism and the rhetoric of racial reconciliation has been replaced by frank anti-white hatred, someone who can con the System and stick it to the (conservative white) Man is worthy of respect and adulation by those who derive their American identity from a song by Rihanna.
It’s not that White progressives don’t know about Benghazi, or illegal immigration, or the collapse of the American military. It’s that they don’t care. America is a vehicle that allows the fulfillment of the egalitarian ideological agenda. The lives of its citizens, its traditional culture, and the integrity of its institutions have no inherent value. As Hillary herself put it, “What difference does it make?” That’s a far more relevant national motto than E Pluribus Unum or In God We Trust.
Naturally, Identitarians can’t afford to care about “America” either. This country has betrayed its patriots too many times. Post-Obama, it’s hard to regard those European-Americans who still sacrifice for a state that hates them as anything other than suckers who are tragically misguided at best, and positively harmful to their own people at worst. A growth in American prosperity or influence only leads to increased resources and ability for the American power structure (or, more accurately, those who govern the American power structure) to undertake new aggressions against European populations around the word.
But the predictions of “collapse” and the confident dream that Balkanization or secession will soon be upon us belies the reality that the United States of America is stronger today than it was even before Obama’s presidency. This is just going to keep going for a long, long time and the hard reality is that most people are just going to want to be allowed to make money. The rent seekers of the Parasite Class will continue to skim off the top, but the American economy generates so much wealth that even a population of millions of Zoe Quinns and tens of millions of Trayvons and Gentle Giants can be sustained for decades.
The test of democratic leadership is to create and manage grievances, use them to justify programs that build your political following, and somehow create enough economic growth that you can keep paying for all this. In the short term, you might actually help some of your constituents; in the long term, you’re running your society into the ground and creating a culture of dependents and weaklings. But what do you care? Democratic man doesn’t want warriors who win respect through bravery or leaders who call to the best within us; he (or more likely she) wants administrators who can keep the whole thing stumbling along.
One of the great truth of American politics is that on any given issue the Left is generally right on the specifics and the Right is correct on the larger picture. A specific government program will usually accomplish its goal of providing some kind of assistance to whatever group it is trying to help. It will also introduce more subtle cultural effects and incentive problems over the long term that will create even larger problems, thus requiring greater interventions. This is a systematic problem of democracy, leaving aside whatever your preferred explanation for “cultural distortion,” be it Jews, Protestants, Christianity, capitalism, or all of the above.
Those who receive concentrated benefits will always be able to organize and defeat those who pay diffuse costs. And as Plato warned us thousands of years ago, there’s no end to this cycle besides tyranny. It’s just that instead of Caesar (which would be welcome), we’ll get Anita Sarkeesian wielding Imperium.
The true danger is that technology may allow the Kali Yuga to be perpetuated indefinitely. The age of victories is over and Manifest Destiny is a thing of the past. We will conquer no new frontiers, accomplish no great deeds, and achieve no new destiny. We will simply redistribute the bounty our ancestors’ sacrifices have secured. Furthermore, we will denounce their accomplishments lest we too be called to sacrifice for something that doesn’t have a bar code.
It’s fitting that current American heroes, those soon to be honored on currency or with monuments, are no longer people who had agency or expanded the power of the nation, but were simply victims and mascots for whites who made a moral claim for resources that were to be provided by others.
What American democrats (small d) need is someone who won’t rock the boat and who will pay lip service to the anti-white and anti-Western ideas our society has largely internalized. At the same time, he or she will keep the corporate gravy train going, intervene around the world to preserve the global financial system (without getting Americans too riled up with uncontrollable feelings of nationalism or militarism), and administer the System competently enough to prevent any real disruptions.
That is why Hillary is the candidate of choice. She’s a “victim” who gets paid half a million every time she speaks. She’s a strong woman whose chief accomplishment is overlooking her husband’s infidelities. She’s a champion for the “American middle class” who has spent her entire life making sure it will no longer exist. She’ll outsource the running of the economy to the Fed more or less like her husband did. And even her own supporters don’t pretend otherwise.
Devoid of inspirational qualities, bereft of qualifications, utterly useless in any system or setting besides the 21st century First World managerial state, Hillary personifies our society like no other person before or since. If the Presidency is to be a kind of Affirmative Action monarchy which cycles between various tokens for different races, genders, and sexual orientations, let her have it. Let the triumph of an empty pantsuit stand witness to the failure of the great experiment in self-government.
Waking Up From the American Dream? As Hillary’s supporters would say, “It’s Time.”
http://www.radixjournal.com/journal/2015/4/22/the-president-america-deserves(Additional links embedded in article.)
“Obama’s greatest accomplishment wasn’t healthcare reform or withdrawing from Iraq—it was breaking down the sense among leftists that there was any sense of limits”
