The Republican Party, the conservative movement—these are our enemies, we kept muttering amid the sad CPAC gathering of GOP robots and clowns. This petty hierarchy of shills, time servers, and girlish men (and boys) is supposed to represent a movement of principle—of people—and embody real opposition to established power arrangements and to the Left? What a bunch of unadulterated hooey.

The difference between Us and Them is not philosophical or intellectual. It is much more basic. Besides our heightened sense that the conservative movement is a top-to-bottom failure, we simply have too much backbone to function as obedient servants in their crummy, impotent army. We can’t pretend to be excited by corny candidates. We can’t get aroused about fighting Islamofascism. We can’t accept a vague, pantheistic Constitutionalist essence in place of actually obeying the Constitution. We’d choose Jeremiah Wright’s black nationalism before we’d ever get caught up in some Howdy Doody version of “Multiculturalism Lite.”

If you’re young and on the Right and want to take meaningful political action, heed Richard Spencer’s advice and just walk away from the conservative movement. Forget you ever took it seriously. Find someone else to talk to. Talk to anyone who will listen. Don’t concede to anyone that there is anything basically decent about the GOP and its propaganda machines. There isn’t. And it’s not a matter of simple disagreement on matters of policy. We differ from the phony Right at a moral and biological level.

Yesterday I happened upon Rod Dreher’s remark that “the gist of what’s wrong with Limbaughism is that it’s right-wing Rousseauism.” After a long moment staring blankly at the screen and absorbing this information, I had to conclude that Dreher and I inhabit separate universes that each contain a public figure named Rush Limbaugh. Dreher’s Limbaugh apparently represents a cluster of beliefs coherent and sophisticated enough to associate with the legacy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In my galaxy Limbaugh is simply a fat thug, and no right-thinking person would dignify him with a nobler characterization. I would not hesitate to exchange our Limbaugh for Dreher’s. I don’t know what activities this Limbaugh shade is involved in, but if he’s furthering the cause of something called right-wing Rousseauism he’s clearly doing something interesting and worthwhile. Obviously he’s informed by something other than an inexhaustible need to boo liberals, the same way drunken rednecks jeer the referees at the minor league hockey games I attend.

No one who’s really fighting believes we’re fighting Rousseauism, or any ism. We’re fighting cowards and time servers. End of discussion.

Growing up I never sensed anything interesting being channeled by the culture of Comic Book Guy. I assumed Adam West basically captured the super-hero genre. I stuck to Calvin and Hobbes.

So I was surprised when Taki’s Magazine revealed to me the starker side of comic books—the reflections on power relationships that can end up in tremendously bleak places. My sense of discovery piqued, I asked my pop-culture mentors for more, and quickly read Watchmen. The film adaptation of this series opens on Thursday. It will be the most interesting such film of the past year, with an extreme right-wing nationalist nutcase functioning as its main protagonist. Rorschach trudges through a blighted urban landscape, defiantly applying his brutal vigilante justice in a world being made decreasingly sane and controlled, he discovers, by an intensely-focused, Hellenistically-informed anarcho-tyrant. And, well, tyranny triumphs, fully, unambiguously, and without shame—except for a distant, fugitive contingency that Alan Moore left hanging in the air in the final frame.

Twenty years before Eric Holder was uttering dark and unacceptable words as Attorney General, he was serving as an associate judge of the Superior Court for the District of Columbia, a job Ronald Reagan gave him.

Barack Obama advanced through the latest stages of his career by giving post-Christian, post-bourgeois society the redemptive figure it aches for orgasmically. It was a fine, fitting performance for an audience that never questions the purity-of-heart of its global democratic elites.

Next to him, Rod Blagojevich looks like a ballplayer with single-A ability who thinks he should start the next game in Yankee Stadium. That, or a more inept Boris Badenov.

For the bitter Republican in your family: the “Yes We Can” Barack Obama Commemorative Collector Plate.

Let’s play a game: I’ll say a word, and you say whatever comes into your head first. Ready? The word is: Africa.

Was your first thought “the biggest repository of untapped potential in the world”? No? Did it have anything to do with untapped potential?

I’m afraid potential was not the first concept that fired my synapses. It was somewhere down the list, after pirates, cholera, Barack Obama’s bigamist father, genocide, and civilizational decay.

I don’t want to sound like too much of a downer. I wouldn’t even have thought of cholera and pirates. It’s just that I read the news today.

You know, there were some critics of these Einstein-from-Africa educational projects. They “didn’t think that students would rise above the remedial level.” They were proven wrong, though, since “the project has been recognised by the African Union, and this year earned Turok a $100,000 TED, at the Technology Entertainment and Design conference.” Makes sense. Some idiots think it’s unlikely that Africa is best thought of as a pool of untapped genius, but the regime of bureaucrats and experts say they’re wrong. Paper beats rock, rock beats scissors, and PC opinion beats everything.

The Limbaughs and Hannities of the world are pointing and shrieking at Rahm Emanuel’s remarks about opportunity in crisis. But Emanuel is merely enunciating a conventional idea that is basic to contemporary managerial rule. If GOP talkers want to rail at someone for developing this tactic they should learn about the New Republic-type liberals who grouped around Woodrow Wilson and FDR. My favorite is Rexford Guy Tugwell, who understood the opportunity the liberal regime had squandered during World War I.

“We were on the verge of having an international industrial machine when peace broke,” wrote Tugwell. “Only the Armistice prevented a great experiment in control of production, control of prices, and control of consumption.”

Emanuel is just a little ahead of the curve. Robert Higgs should send him a thank you note for effectively distilling the Ratchet Effect in a candid little moment.

I’m inclined to oppose the idea of an automaker bailout, but I didn’t adopt this attitude by erecting a libertarian Principle and throwing overboard everything that didn’t measure up. Smells like . . . Leftism.

There may be no cure for Jacobin libertarianism. But with effective treatment its symptoms can be controlled. Once daily find a mirror and while gazing into it recite “The case for the bailout is not contemptible” one hundred times.

Peter Hitchens has plenty of appropriately-directed frustration about a country exalting an “undistinguished and conventionally Left-wing machine politician” as a “sort of secular saviour.” Perhaps, though, he ought to be taking the Leftist Idea of America more seriously. As several nimble and astute paleos frequently remark, in a crucial sense America is not disappearing but becoming more and more itself—a notion, a proposition, a concept. No worthwhile opposition can afford to ignore how fundamentally a left-driving egalitarianism is rooted to our very existence. It simply won’t do to burp about how menacing the Democrats are every time we witness another spectacular example of our own social and political decay.

There are plenty of non-liberal/neocon observers whose understanding is more complex and common-sensical, and whose voices, added to the mix, would help facilitate a wider and more realistic appraisal of social and political reality. Steve Sailer is the most obvious example. His book on Obama is a treasure trove of insight, as well as a store of basic facts about the man and his background that our crack squad of mainstream political journalists habitually avoids and ignores.

The finest single piece of writing on the Obama phenomenon appeared as a draft on Dennis Dale’s blog. He’s taken it down, but it was so good it is worth mentioning even if it never reappears to the public. In “Deconstructing Barry, Part I” Dale presented Obama’s campaign as pure kitsch, quoting Milan Kundera:

Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.

All politics contain an element of kitsch, wrote Dale, but Obama’s (continuing) campaign, stripped of its non-essentials, is kitsch. This fact, and the fact of Obama’s success, speaks volumes about the state of our collective imagination, about The Way We Are Now.

I’ve also been reading able, idiosyncratic remarks by Chilton Williamson, Jr. and Tom Fleming. And of course, Taki’s Magazine is fortunate to have Paul Gottfried as its leading house guru.

But none of this high-caliber commentary is going to have any wider significance or influence in the short or immediate term, outside of a few crummy right-wing blogs. Sailer writes in his Acknowledgements that his book is no threat to anyone’s current political interests, but that “It may have an effect on historians a generation from now.” He might as well be speaking about anyone to the right of National Review, a loose constellation of individuals who lack the resources to affect the national imagination. Richard Spencer is a nonrandom example of what we can do with what we have—he is making a valiant effort on a tight budget and producing a sleek, super-intelligent webzine. Yet Taki’s as currently constituted will never have a primary or even tertiary hand in establishing media talking points.

What we need in terms of the practical present, as Paul Gottfried has pointed out, are national newspapers and television stations with which to air a distinct, authentic, and intelligent right-wing message. This means someone will have to solicit the backing of one or several wealthy patrons who will not flee at the first whiff of PC controversy. Such favor cannot be located and obtained in an afternoon. It is a long-term project requiring the sustained and single-minded effort of someone who believes in the possibility of success.

Having obtained reliable funding and a national media outlet, the people in charge would then have to withstand pressure from within their own ranks. They would have to tolerate the variety of allegiances and attitudes that exist to the right of the political/journalistic establishment and avert fratricidal ruin. They would need skin thick enough to withstand the criticism of libertarians, paleos, traditionalists, Protestants, Catholics, atheists, agnostics, and anyone jealous of competing worldviews. So far Taki’s has set a pretty good example in this regard.

I’m not one to criticize those who are more inclined to a contemplative state and an avoidance of messy presentism. We all have to do what makes sense to us, and I can forgive those who imagine that flirting with deep-pocketed donors would just be part and parcel of another embarrassing “conservative movement.” But if someone with different instincts and high degrees of charm, ability, and perseverance could land a heavy-hitting media concern then right-wing viewpoints would suddenly be worthy of mainstream insult and hatred. As things are the Right does not even attract the acknowledgement of disdain.

I can’t say I’m able to make sense of these learned conservatives who are voicing their support for Obama. If you truly favor one of the two suits generated by our electoral system, then you probably do not need the conservative label to capture the nuance and distinctiveness of your views and attitudes. And if on the other hand you are truly dissatisfied by rituals of “choice” that have displaced authentic exercises of citizenship, but must mouth support for a certain candidate to please polite company, you may have other problems. Perhaps participation in a contact sport will help you worry less about ingratiating yourself to your peers and acquaintances.

I’ll visit my polling place tomorrow and write down Chuck Baldwin’s name. And if there is a public work detail appointed for campaign sign removal on Wednesday, I will be joining.