September 08, 2009
In some ways, the success of Michelle Malkin’s latest book might also be seen as a success for the Alternative Right. A regular columnist for VDare, Malkin has a reputation of being something of a rabble rouser on the issue of illegal immigration. If nothing else, this has left her with an enemies list that closely resembles that of many of this site’s contributors.
But Malkin is not really one of us. In many circles, Malkin is most well known for her bizarre defenses of concentration camps and her status as token minority chick for the minority chic media. When appearing on television, it is usually in the role of brazen GOP shill—a role she appears to relish. All in all, Malkin is a figure of little value to serious opponents of the multiculturalist welfare state.
Though I have not yet read Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies
The fixation with “corruption” in the political process is something I have never understood. The willingness of governments to screw their population bases by any means necessary is well documented and goes back to the rise of agriculture. Civil servants and state representatives using and abusing their power is a staple of political life.
To the extent that discussions of corruption are being put forward to stamp out hypocritical stances and expose the federal leviathan, they may have some worth. But this is not the tone movement conservatism takes when pointing to the corruption of liberal elites. Quite the contrary, the State conservatism of the GOP seems to take the position most associated with modern liberalism—everything would be OK with big government so long as the managers are right (pun intended). This line of thinking explains the continued popularity of the pro-government growth Ronald Reagan and defensive attitudes many conservatives still harbor about the disgraced and deposed Richard Nixon—a man who governed to the Far Statist Left of Mr. Obama himself.
Our own Richard Spencer has written several times on the In State We Trust tendencies so common among the faith-based social engineers that make up much of the Republican Party. This observation is an important one because it so clearly illustrates what the actual goals of Malkin and friends are—discredit the overtly managerial project to push the covertly managerial project, replace the PC police with the morality police, and install a divinely inspired caste of bureaucrats in the place of the current crop of dangerous “moral relativists” (especially those pesky folks in the State Department that might have insufficiently Christian views on the biblical role of Israel in the pending return of Christ). Corruption is just a buzzword to bludgeon political enemies rather than the indictment of mass politics that it so obviously is.
The truth is, widespread government corruption is a net positive for anti-statist conservatives. The inescapable fact that both Left and Right subscribe to the politics of graft and moral shallowness is not something that should be applauded, but it is something that should be readily obvious to anyone paying attention. Corruption is notable precisely because no political party or governing philosophy has a monopoly on it. Like unfettered technological “progress,” it is an inevitability of the modern condition that must be attacked at its core. That core is not the Democratic National Committee. It is the State.
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