Saturday Commentary and Review #81
The New American Right, Brexit Betrayal and Immigration, China's Expanding Influence in Pacific and Australia, NASCAR Loses Its Soul, Australia's DEEP Archaeological Past
Reformers and radicals on the American right have had a very tough time these past few decades, and have lost every single major battle that they have conducted against both Democrats and Republicans. One need only look back at the debacle that was the Tea Party, heavily libertarian and constitutionalist in orientation, only to be swallowed up whole and then de-fanged by the mainstream GOP that co-opted them with ease. These types, often derided as “unpatriotic” by the victorious neo-conservative elements that had infiltrated the American right, were forced to retreat and lick their wounds, waiting for another opportunity to try and steer the USA in their direction.
There is no need to discuss Trump much here for the simple fact that we have heard and read everything that there is to say. Nevertheless, supporting him in 2016 meant supporting the 5% chance that something could happen to crack the facade of the USGov and the country’s elites, creating an opening for change. That wasn’t going to happen with any other GOP candidate that year, nor with any Dem candidate either. So everyone rallied around Trump because what they wanted was a revolutionary. Instead, they got a reality TV show host. It was still worth trying. No shame in that whatsoever.
The catastrophic subversion of the Trump Administration combined with his horribly inept hiring meant that American right wing reformers and radicals had to go back to the drawing board. Despite there being an entire (and profitable) conservative ecosystem around “owning the libs”, smarter types realize that the real “own” comes when you actually are the ones pulling the levers of power.
There is also a generation shift happening: Millennials and Zoomers have no time for Reagan-era conservatism, and do not believe that what is good for big business is necessarily good for America. They have also learned that holding your own side to your principles but not insisting that the other side adhere to the same rules of the game means that you are always on the defensive and are always losing (with the consolation prize being that you can scream “HYPOCRITE!” at them as they rack up another win). Boomer Conservatism is a dead end. It has lost. That realization is dawning on many, despite Sean Hannity doing his best to constantly reanimate the corpse as Tucker Carlson cringes.
This new American right, opposed to Boomer Conservatism and not embarrassing apologists for Donald Trump, is now getting noticed by the mainstream in US media. These journos are not sure what to make of it, as it is a rather large tent, with many conflicting streams under it. The lazier types will denounce it as “White Supremacy” or “Fascism”, which is to be expected. Others are taking a deeper dive, and are focusing on two key individuals: Curtis Yarvin and Peter Thiel.
The Big Tent:
But the people these pieces describe, who made up most of the partygoers around me, were only the most buttoned-up seam of a much larger and stranger political ferment, burbling up mainly within America’s young and well-educated elite, part of an intra-media class info-war. The podcasters, bro-ish anonymous Twitter posters, online philosophers, artists, and amorphous scenesters in this world are variously known as “dissidents,” “neo-reactionaries,” “post-leftists,” or the “heterodox” fringe—though they’re all often grouped for convenience under the heading of America’s New Right. They have a wildly diverse set of political backgrounds, with influences ranging from 17th-century Jacobite royalists to Marxist cultural critics to so-called reactionary feminists to the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, whom they sometimes refer to with semi-ironic affection as Uncle Ted. Which is to say that this New Right is not a part of the conservative movement as most people in America would understand it. It’s better described as a tangled set of frameworks for critiquing the systems of power and propaganda that most people reading this probably think of as “the way the world is.” And one point shapes all of it: It is a project to overthrow the thrust of progress, at least such as liberals understand the word.
The dissent:
This worldview, these worldviews, run counter to the American narrative of the last century—that economic growth and technological innovation are inevitably leading us toward a better future. It’s a position that has become quietly edgy and cool in new tech outposts like Miami and Austin, and in downtown Manhattan, where New Right–ish politics are in, and signifiers like a demure cross necklace have become markers of a transgressive chic. No one is leading this movement, but it does have key figures.
For those wanting to familiarize themselves with Curtis Yarvin, just check out the interview I did with him not too long ago here.
More Big Tent:
This New Right is heavily populated by people with graduate degrees, so there’s a lot of debate about who is in it and whether or not it even exists. At one end are the NatCons, post-liberals, and traditionalist figures like Benedict Option author Rod Dreher, who envision a conservatism reinvigorated by an embrace of localist values, religious identity, and an active role for the state in promoting everything from marriage to environmental conservation. But there’s also a highly online set of Substack writers, podcasters, and anonymous Twitter posters—“our true intellectual elite,” as one podcaster describes them. This group encompasses everyone from rich crypto bros and tech executives to back-to-the-landers to disaffected members of the American intellectual class, like Up in the Air author Walter Kirn, whose fulminations against groupthink and techno-authoritarianism have made him an unlikely champion to the dissident right and heterodox fringe. But they share a the basic worldview: that individualist liberal ideology, increasingly bureaucratic governments, and big tech are all combining into a world that is at once tyrannical, chaotic, and devoid of the systems of value and morality that give human life richness and meaning—as Blake Masters recently put it, a “dystopian hell-world.”
This is where it gets rather interesting:
Vance described two possibilities that many on the New Right imagine—that our system will either fall apart naturally, or that a great leader will assume semi-dictatorial powers.
“So there’s this guy Curtis Yarvin, who has written about some of these things,” Vance said. Murphy chortled knowingly. “So one [option] is to basically accept that this entire thing is going to fall in on itself,” Vance went on. “And so the task of conservatives right now is to preserve as much as can be preserved,” waiting for the “inevitable collapse” of the current order.
He said he thought this was pessimistic. “I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left,” he said. “And turn them against the left. We need like a de-Baathification program, a de-woke-ification program.”
“I think Trump is going to run again in 2024,” he said. “I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”
“And when the courts stop you,” he went on, “stand before the country, and say—” he quoted Andrew Jackson, giving a challenge to the entire constitutional order—“the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”
This is a description, essentially, of a coup.
This cohort recognizes that one cannot walk away from the public square and wish to be “left alone”, because a) you won’t ever be left alone and b) you are ceding that ground to the opposing side by walking away. The capture of the levers of state power is required to introduce, formalize, and sandbag the changes that you want to make and preserve.
I am certain that the mainstream journalist set will coalesce around the narrative that Peter Thiel, by way of funding a new right ecosystem that is separate from existing ones, will be painted as Koch Brothers v2.0 despite the repudiation of the politics pursued by them. This is where the real action on the right is at the moment, and it is worth keeping a closer eye on.
Pity the poor British prole.
#Brexit was as powerful a populist political earthquake as was Trump’s victory in 2016. Unlike the latter, Brexit has not been undone by the powers-that-be. The UK was freed from the dictates of unelected Brussels bureaucrats, and the course was clear to reassert British sovereignty. One major part of this desire to reassert British sovereignty was to stop the powerful tide of mass immigration flooding the UK, at least in the minds of the largest cohort that voted for Brexit.
One cannot understand the UK, and especially England, without understanding its history of rigid class structures and politics. This centuries’ old conflict colours every aspect of their lives. For the upper middle class and the rich, the proles and lower working classes are a foreign people. That’s why it’s rather easy for their political class to ignore the lower classes when the coast is clear, and that’s why the UK Conservatives are quite content in ramping up immigration to the UK, despite the desire to reduce immigration to Blighty being the most popular reason as to why people supported Brexit in the first place. This is the proverbial “stab in the back”.
The gulf between the average Brexiteer and the Boris Johnson set:
Johnson and his ilk dreamed of accelerated globalisation; a large proportion of Brexit voters, if not the majority, wanted to put the brakes on globalisation, not hit the accelerator. In particular, they objected to one aspect of globalisation that Johnson has always been enthusiastic about: immigration. I wondered if Brexit might lead to great bitterness and disappointment, a promise of all things to all men. It was probably just as well, I consoled myself, that it looked like we wouldn’t win.
It is perhaps only now that this disappointment is finally being realised. ‘I can’t think of one Brexit promise that has been kept, novelist Tony Parsons tweeted recently. ‘Not one. Slashing taxes? No. Reducing energy bills? No. Taking back control of borders? No. Making a bonfire of EU regulations? No. This Government has broken every big bold Brexit promise. Ever feel like you’ve been cheated?’
The UK has swapped out the “Polish Plumber” in favour of the Commonwealth citizen of the former empire:
Leave won, now we have control, and we see the results— almost record numbers of new arrivals, in particular from outside the EU. This includes ‘239,987 work-related visas granted, 25 per cent higher than in 2019,’ 90% of which were non-EU. The number of students also rose hugely, up to 416,000 a year, an increase of more than half the 2019 figure, many of whom will of course stay after their studies end. The Tories’ points-based system has opened up half of all UK jobs to overseas workers, with lower salary and skill thresholds. This is something the British Government itself advertises in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country.
Whereas in the days before Brexit, the biggest block of migration came from eastern Europe, now we have returned to the days of the Blair years: the number of visas to Pakistani nationals has increased 255% since 2019, to Nigerians 415%, and Indians by 164%. As of last year, ‘Pakistan was the most common country of birth for both non-UK born mothers and fathers for the first time since 2009.’
Economist Jonathan Portes says the system is ‘(broadly) working’. But Boris Johnson has now promised further relaxation of migration from India (population: 1.3 billion) and says that Britain is short of ‘hundreds of thousands of workers’.
Just before Christmas the Government also announced plans to further relax immigration rules for care workers — an already very badly-paid job, and a move condemned by Labour, although they are not exactly in a position to start throwing stones on this one.
On the origins of anti-immigration sentiment in the UK:
Something of a myth has since grown that Ukip voters were protesting eastern European immigration, which was a direct product of the EU’s free movement rules, but the party’s huge jump in support took place before A8 migrants began arriving in large numbers. The overwhelming majority of Blair-era migration came from outside Europe, including large numbers who were able to take advantage of their relaxation of family migration. This was nothing to do with the EU; it was a deliberate choice by the British Government.
The Ukip vote hugely increased from the 1999 to 2004 European elections, ironically thanks to the European Parliament’s use of PR, making it the only ballot in which British voters had a real say. Ukip voters were protesting less about eastern European migration — their share of the vote barely changed from 2004 to 2009, the period of the great Polish wave — than that from the developing, and to use very un-English directness, Islamic world. We don’t say that because it sounds unkind — bad vibes, not a good look — but that was the reason.
The most troubling kind of migration was family reunion, in which people from Pakistan, Bangladesh and other countries were able to migrate through marriage. It caused huge integration problems, further boosting the diaspora with the culture of the old country, including its language and religious conservatism. It was the opposite of integration: husband and wife were not only almost always from the same ethnic group, but often the same family. This migration was explicitly favoured by Labour, encouraged by ‘community leaders’ who were able to deliver votes to the party.
The result was the increasing problem of segregation, especially in the north, where some towns overtook US rates of separate existence. The downsides of diversity — terrorism, honour killings, grooming gangs — were so obviously disastrous that it took society’s most powerful taboo to suppress meaningful debate. New social prohibitions had to be created to avoid noticing these problems. All of this, not the Polish plumber, led to the great agitation over immigration, and the rise of Farage.
The Conservatives have different interests, of course:
Meanwhile the Conservatives were in a good place, with their greatest election victory in 30 years, in part winning many seats because of immigration (or, at least, Labour lost them because of it). Now freed from those famous Brussels shackles, they could have become the party of what the plurality of Brexit voters wanted — high wages, social solidarity, a secure and affordable place to raise a family. Instead, they’ve decided on another course — and now they can’t blame Europe anymore for their choices.
So the almost comical result of Brexit is that immigration is set to continue at record levels, except that rather than coming from Poland or Romania, new arrivals will mostly hail from Asia and Africa. To the Global Britain Brexiteers the huge economic costs and hassle of leaving the EU may be entirely worth this, but it’s safe to say they do not constitute a huge number. Indeed, both Leave and Remain voters prefer European to non-European immigration, and would both like far lower levels than this Government is currently allowing.
I sympathize with the Brits who voted for Brexit, but one cannot have a global centre of finance without liberal immigration policies to lure those types in. And one is going to have a very, very tough time putting a lid on the power of corporations, banks, and finance and their desires for workers and profit if you allow your country to become a global centre of finance.
Just like American right wingers are doing (as mentioned in the first entry in this weekend’s Substack above), UK righties are going to have to do a re-think as well.
Australia is in an uproar with the announcement of a security deal being struck between China and the not-too-far away Solomon Islands. Australia has every right to be concerned about Chinese expansion and encroachment in the South Pacific due to the sheer size and economic and military power of China. No one can begrudge the Aussies this. Chinese investment in Australia is huge, especially in its large and important mining sector. For many, this is tolerable. But when combined with the presence of the Chinese flag in the neighbourhood, concerns are warranted.
With the rise of China and the USA’s “Pivot to Asia”, the Pacific Ocean is becoming a theatre of competition. China seeks to open up the seaways to not only lessen the American squeeze that it currently is in fear of, but also to create a buffer and move towards becoming the regional hegemon. For the USA, the Pacific should be an American lake. This rivalry will colour the next few decades, and lesser and smaller countries in the region will become more important to the two great powers as they jockey for position.
This can be a very dangerous situation for these mid-sized and smaller countries, but it also creates many opportunities, both political and economic. The economic opportunities come about for neutral powers in that Beijing or Washington can offer investment in their countries as a way to buy them outright (or off). The political opportunity comes in the way of the USA looking away from how you run your own country’s affairs because they want your state on their side. For Australians not content with their liberal establishment, this is where the opportunity lies.
The shift:
But the stakes rose significantly for Australia last month when a leaked draft security agreement between China and the Solomon Islands confirmed Beijing’s intention to deploy military and police to the country, and to secure a potential supply base there for its warships.
Both sides of politics consider this to be an unwelcome development for Australian national security. It also highlights that a “business as usual” Australian approach to the Pacific is no longer enough.
The Solomon Islands setback:
As the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade acknowledges, the Pacific Step-up actually builds on over half a century of “sustained engagement” in the Pacific.
This bipartisan history takes in Labor government initiatives such as the 2008 Port Moresby Declaration, a landmark Australian commitment to work with Pacific nations on economic development and climate change. It also includes the resulting Pacific Islands Partnerships for Development, aimed at improving health, education and employment outcomes in the region.
Since 2013, we have seen fresh determination in Canberra to counter Chinese strategic inroads in the region, as well.
These initiatives include the Coral Sea cable, which provides secure telecommunications to PNG and Solomon Islands, and Telstra’s government-backed investment in regional telecom company Digicel.
While these are aimed at improving regional infrastructure, they are also clearly designed to deny Chinese firms such as Huawei access to the sensitive regional telecommunications sector.
If these have been tactical wins for the current Australian government, China’s deal with the Solomon Islands is undoubtedly a setback. It has prompted serious concern in Washington and other capitals.
The big picture:
But his foreign policy address to the Lowy Institute in March struck a different tone. The prime minister depicted Australia’s neighborhood as a geostrategic theater brimming with threats, rather than a place of collaboration or opportunity. He was speaking to a domestic audience against the backdrop of Russia’s war in Ukraine, but they will have been listening in the Pacific, too.
Last year, several Pacific leaders and senior community representatives expressed real disquiet in the aftermath of the AUKUS announcement about what they saw as a disrespectful lack of forewarning and the impact of growing strategic competition on a vulnerable region.
Australia, firmly within AUKUS, has taken the obvious side. The Solomon Islands may seem inconsequential to most of us, but this Chinese security foray far away from its own shores opens a new chapter in the great power rivalry in the Pacific.
If you were a boy in the 1980s in North America, you would almost certainly have spent some of your time on Saturday afternoons watching CBS or ABC and their selection of sports. I think it was ABC that used to show competitive bowling (I know that “The Wide World of Sports” was their franchise), and my father would sometimes watch it as he was active in a Croatian bowling league in Southern Ontario.
You’d also catch NASCAR on those days.
Next to the Stars and Bars of the Confederate Flag, there is nothing more quintessentially southern to me than NASCAR. This was popular southern culture, unapologetic, unique, and entirely their own, foreign to other Americans, and even more foreign to foreigners like myself. I never bothered watching it, but could respect not only the drivers themselves, but the people and culture surrounding it.
When a culture (or sport) becomes too popular and too successful, it runs the risk of becoming co-opted and losing its soul in the process. Growing up in Canada, I saw this with professional hockey, specifically the NHL under Commissioner Gary Bettman. Where the 1980s was full of characters (many wearing no helmets, some others barely able to skate and wholly reliant on their fists to get ice time), the trade of Wayne Gretzky to the Los Angeles Kings heralded the end of a more innocent and soulful era, and ushered in the new soulless corporate one that dominates the sport today. Judging by this piece in TAC, NASCAR seems to have undergone the same transition as NHL hockey, losing an important part of itself in the process.
These modernizing forces accelerated after Earnhardt’s death, and partly because of it. The crash marked the moment when NASCAR undertook a deliberate transformation to make itself more commercially appealing, more scientifically managed, and less distinctively Southern—the opposite of what Earnhardt stood for. We are living with the consequences today.
Much like the Gretzky trade as the key inflection point, the death of legend Dale Earnhardt on the track changed NASCAR forever.
Dale Earnhardt and Soul:
The stereotype of NASCAR as a redneck sport contains a grain of truth. American stock car racing originated with bootleggers in the Carolina Piedmont, running moonshine and dodging the revenue man. Early races took place on dirt tracks, and with no formal organization the rules could be anarchic. In 1947, in an effort to bring order to the chaos, a gas-station owner corralled a group of race promoters in a Daytona Beach hotel bar to draw up a uniform set of rules and a governing structure. The National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing was born. Its first race was held at Charlotte, NC, in 1949, on a dirt track. Asphalt would come a year later in the first race at Darlington, SC. The sport’s earliest icons were recovered moonshiners from the region like “the Last American Hero” Junior Johnson.
Dale Earnhardt was a product of this rough-and-tumble era. He grew up in Kannapolis, a textile town in the North Carolina Piedmont—the name is Greek for “city of looms.” He dropped out of high school in ninth grade and worked odd jobs around town, including as a mechanic and a welder. In his twenties, he later said, his family “probably should have been on welfare. We didn’t have money to buy groceries.” He raced as an amateur, working on his cars in the garage in his mother’s back yard. He lived in a trailer next door.
Earnhardt’s appeal was not just his humble background but the gruff persona that it formed. Compare him to fellow NASCAR legend Richard Petty, who is tied with Earnhardt for the most championships of all time (7). Both had fathers who were drivers, but Petty descended from NASCAR royalty. Lee Petty was a successful driver and the sport’s first three-time champion. Ralph Earnhardt’s success was limited to the dirt track races of the Carolinas. By NASCAR standards, Richard Petty was clean-cut—a father of four married for nearly fifty years. Dale Earnhardt had two divorces before the age of twenty-five, and for years he couldn’t pay child support. He was a gambler, often borrowing a few hundred dollars on a Thursday to buy tires and parts for his races on Friday and Saturday, betting that he would win enough to pay off his debts by Monday.
The first change after his death was in regards to “safety”:
Starting in 2001, NASCAR made sweeping reforms in four areas. The first was safety.
Earnhardt had been the fourth driver to die in eight months across the sport. His death prompted NASCAR to build a $10 million, 61,000 square foot research & development center in Concord, NC, the next town over from where Dale grew up. Gary Nelson, then managing director of competition, was tasked with running the center and implementing new safety rules. His mandate, in the words of a NASCAR spokesman, was to change the sport in “a true scientific fashion that matches today’s times and technology.” He started by putting foam barriers on all NASCAR tracks and mandating Head & Neck Support (HANS) devices for all drivers.
By far the biggest change Nelson spearheaded was the so-called “Car of Tomorrow.” The product of five years of development, the car was four inches wider and two inches taller than the previous standard. It was deliberately designed to be slower, with a thicker, more box-like bumper and a more upright windshield to increase drag. The driver’s seat was moved four inches to the right to make it safer in a crash. The Car of Tomorrow debuted in 2007 and was mandated for all cars in 2008.
NASCAR enthusiasts hated it:
Fans hated it. They mocked the Car of Tomorrow as “a flying brick with a wing.” Kyle Busch, the first driver to win a race in one, declared from Victory Lane, “They suck…. It’s hard to drive and hard to set up.” The backlash was so severe that NASCAR punished dissent. Driver Denny Hamlin was fined $25,000 for complaining about the car in public. Nevertheless, fans and drivers grumbled that it handled worse, looked terrible, and completely changed the way drivers had to approach their races in terms of strategy.
But the car rated highly on all the metrics that the suits cared about. It was safer and also cheaper, and it led to more competitive, tightly packed racing because it was slower. So they stood their ground.
NASCAR introduced a new technological contraption to enforce standardization: a laser inspection system dubbed “the Claw” that fit over the new cars and regulated the chassis down to the thousandths of an inch. Teams whose car failed the Claw inspection were slapped with $100,000 fines and multi-race suspensions.
This article is both long and excellent. Continue reading it to learn about the structural, commercial, and cultural changes that were also introduced and that have stolen the soul of NASCAR.
We’ll end this week with another great entry by Stone Age Herbalist from his excellent archaeology Substack, this one on Australia’s Deep Past.
Australian prehistory has remained a constant enigma since it was first contacted by European explorers in the early 17th century. Confusing physical descriptions and lack of familiarity with the region led to many speculations about who, when and how the people of Australia ended up so far away from the rest of humanity. Ever since the debate has raged about how many times Australia was colonised - once, twice, three times, multiple times from many different routes? Since the mid 2000’s the consensus has been reached that Australia was settled once, by the ancestors of the modern Aboriginal peoples. But this cosy vision is a paper-thin veneer, plastered over centuries of foment. Let us turn then to the problem of Australia.
Read the rest here, and check out the other articles on that Substack as it’s great.
Thank you for once again checking out my Substack. Feel free to leave a comment below if the mood strikes you. Hit the like button and use the share button to share this across social media. And don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t already.
Sorry for being late! I was travelling this weekend, so please do forgive me.
Hit the like button, use the share button to share this across social media, and don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already.
Lastly, leave a comment below if the mood strikes you.
Political movements can only be counted on to replace one set of parasites with another. Doesn't matter if they call themselves revolutionaries, reactionaries, populists, or opportunists.