During the summer of the 2020 Antifa and BLM riots, select members of the Great Unwashed stormed the grounds of my longtime family condo in the Kalorama section of Washington, D.C., in a thick ooze of gelatinous body mass that loudly vibrated with the usual potty-mouth patois of “millennials,” i.e., late Rome’s deaf, dumb, and blind kids urging Gaiseric to the gates. They positioned themselves at two main entrances of the building while attempting to smash its exterior wrought-iron-barred windows and massive front doors in a dazed and confused outrage over Trump’s postmaster general, who lived there. (What the kerfuffle was about, exactly, I no longer recall but will assume that les cheques du stimulus of that free-sh*t belle époque had eluded the sweaty clench of their collective fat fist.) With our trusty manager and so-called concierge crouched down and cringing behind security cameras, there suddenly appeared in the lobby the calm silhouette of an elegant woman, verging on elderly but beautifully dressed and athletically alert, gliding assuredly toward the main door, golf club in hand.
This particular building, once home to White House cabinet members, ambassadors, the equestrian mistress of a Saudi king, and a renowned classical musician who risked his neck decades ago rehabilitating artists tortured by Reds, was now inhabited by Squishy Libs who erstwhile stayed locked in their Caesarstone palaces of doom, shaking like bunnies. In a good burst of bravura, the grande dame swung open the door and told the crowd where they could shove their Molotovs and, if they persisted, the golf club as well. The police, sorry adjutants of Mayor Muriel Bow-wow that they are, never showed up, and the uprising eventually tapered off. In Los Angeles at the time, I later heard that my neighbor, the reserved she of old Brahman stock, played the praetorian for many weeks thereafter as the building’s security, despite other incidents of this nature, was never improved and the only contribution of our rich-squatter libtards was to ask if they could offer her something as she patrolled the grounds. The answer was inevitably the same: “a scotch.” Some months later she went in for cancer surgery and did not return. No one has replaced her since.
Oh, WASP, whither goest thy sting? What happened to the ice blue bloodlines you once kept so sangfroided? The consciousness of class you kept so well bonded? Whither the intolerance, the discipline, the frugality that knew luxury and the luxury that rejected ostentation? Genteel hypocrisies more than compensated for by the patrician sense of public service? How I loathe the persistent conviction I have that the principles that made this country great are now those at the very root of its decline: liberty, individualism, self-invention, the spirit of innovation, the practice of benevolent acceptance, your tired/your poor, etc., etc. In reflecting upon this decline, my conclusion is that such subversion, such a perversion of ideals, has come about by way of cultural erosion, specifically that belonging wholly and totally to the Anglo-American tradition. Let’s be honest. When we wail about “the America we’ve lost,” what we mean is the country that was predominantly Anglo-Saxon in foundation, structure, tone, and tint such that hardworking continental degenerates like my own family would be able to flourish in its soil, and if not “easily” then certainly to a far greater extent than anywhere else. I am convinced that the quiet desperation that is overwhelming the rational portion of this country’s population is not, at the source, political, economic, or ideological in nature, but cultural: that of closet Anglophiles longing for the Anglotopia of a dimming Anglomondo that once burned brazenly and beautifully.
It was a world that, at the heights of its expression, formed a ruling class that one could admire. If the WASP had the social and corporate upper hand, it was a hand extended to anyone who played a good squash game. Growing up in Grosse Pointe Farms the granddaughter of irate Slavs, I remember fondly the lore of Tonnancour, a series of vintage articles inspired by the eponymous and now-demolished estate of Theodore Parsons Hall, a great Detroit entrepreneur, that detailed the lives of the gentlemen-industrialists who settled in Grosse Pointe prior to and alongside the auto barons. There was James McMillan, a shipping and railroad magnate who was one of the first grandees in the U.S. to appoint a black man a vice president; there was John Newberry, who took Detroit’s industrial development “from a cool, spring daybreak” and transformed it into “a blazing midsummer’s afternoon” while pouring art treasures into the city’s soon-to-be-great museum. I recall the cold academy along our lakeshore drive and a teacher speaking of the “High Episcopalian manner” of T.S. Eliot and the afternoon reminiscences of my mother’s pride in having worked in NYC for Time during the twilight years of the Henry Luce legacy, when that publication’s mission was “to raise the level of education of the masses.” Prince Serge Obolensky, who died in Grosse Pointe, wrote admiringly in his memoirs of the WASP culture of the Hudson River Valley, describing a world around him made up of those who “thought about everything, said very little, and just got on with it.” I live in Milan, lived many years in Vienna, and come from an ancestral background best described as “Byzantine,” yet for all the gorgeous roar and gloom of the Catholic and Orthodox churches most familiar to me, there is a place in my heart for the elegant austerity of a certain kind of country Protestant church. “St. Paul’s ‘He who will not work shall not eat’ holds true,” wrote Max Weber in the famous book whose title expressed an entire Anglo worldview that changed the course of history.
Then there is Anglo sporting life and its constituent expression in the patriotic calling of pedigree. Growing up around boats, I spoke a few years ago at the New York Yacht Club on the lost art of the Scottish sailboat architect William Fife III and was introduced to the life and work of the late Olin Stephens, considered by many as the most important boat designer of the 20th century. A mastermind of the America’s Cup, he was just as renowned for being the kind of old-fashioned gentleman of modest mien who tirelessly promoted others. An Upper East Side friend of Princeton-Cambridge-Knickerbocker Club extraction speaks nostalgically of the great days of George Plimpton’s salon on East 72nd Street, when the heirs to family fortunes large and small did things like start publishing companies, launch literary journals, build hospitals in war zones, and endow great libraries with great works. Then, of course, there is the arrogant charm of that quality known as preppy, copied by many, innate to few. One must admit that the most attractive towns and cities in America are resolutely Anglo in their historic character, an appeal that is universal and thus perhaps the reason Michelle Obama lives in Martha’s Vineyard and Oprah Winfrey in Montecito.
The drab white left and its minority whipping class consists of the worst people in the world. They are the worst because they have fostered a culture that encourages destroying the things they secretly admire and promoting the things they privately hold in contempt. The left cannot stand being reminded of achievements it has never achieved and thus assumes moral superiority in order to circumvent personal integrity. Unfortunately, the most destructive representative of this phenomenon is today’s watered-down WASP, who insists upon milquetoasting his heritage into soggy oblivion by taking the best of his traditions and putting them to work in the service of his own self-subversion. It is a curious state of affairs.
We need the old snob appeal back, the Puritan fortitude, the club-that-won’t-have-you refusing to see this country roll over and play dead to a lewd and lurid globo-communist takeover, if for no other reason than the fact that life in this country worked a whole lot better when American life was far more Anglo-Saxon. Enough said.
]]>As attention turns to the future presidential election in 2024, it might be time for conservatives to think along radical lines if only to come to terms with the fact that, as things stand, it no longer matters who is president. By deliberate design, the presidency means nothing while the executive branch is everything. Should the candidate be a Trump, that candidate’s hands will be tied behind his back; if cut from the cloth of Biden, it is more sock-puppet imbecility. If the candidate is a combination of Reagan, Theodore Roosevelt, Eisenhower, James Madison, Russell Kirk, Churchill, and Edmund Burke fused into one philosopher-king, it still will not matter. The governance of our grand experiment has been reduced to a faceless shadow executive utterly without accountability; that body’s feckless annex and amen corner called “Congress”; and a medieval guild that makes up our Supreme Court, in whose pasty hands the liberty of an entire nation is subjected to degrees of benevolent-to-diabolical ideological whim.
This must be kept in mind as supremo candidate-of-choice Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is viewed as the white knight of the Republican Party for 2024. Some conservative caution is in order here. Things are at a point where it is far more important that he remain governor of Florida than to be elected president of the United States, as he is far more powerful as governor than he ultimately could ever be as president. In an American utopia, the governor’s likeness would be multiplied in state capitals across the country, and the occasional mutant Newsom- or Cuomo-tard would find himself all the more exposed, embarrassed, and subject to more direct, popular wrath than ever. By contrast, in the America we are currently left to live with, Mr. DeSantis’ presidency would be thwarted, Trump-like, at every turn by a Washington that just does not deserve him. While the governor is a far more seasoned and nuanced political player than Mr. Trump, the deep-staters, their liberal useful idiots, and their allied milquetoast Republicans all secretly despise the highly educated and effective Mr. DeSantis much more than they do the former president. Most of all, it is only because of his independently powerful leadership as governor—far more than any influential congressional conservative—that Washington is reminded to stay in its place. And Washington, Mr. DeSantis knows, has no intention of staying in its “place.”
The idea of the individual states of this country having superior status to the federal government was the traditional Anti-Federalist position. Sadly for our educated public, the names George Clinton, George Mason, Elbridge Gerry, and Patrick Henry—as well as the pen names of “Cato,” “Agrippa,” and “Centinel,” who anonymously wrote their prescient essays in such papers as The New York Journal and The Independent Gazetteer of Philadelphia—have slipped down the rabbit hole of national memory. These thinkers were never against a federal constitution per se, but against the expansive building blocks of provisions delegating powers to the national government (and it was they who insisted upon a Bill of Rights). Following ratification of the Constitution, their movement did not disappear but was gradually transformed into a kind of loyal opposition. The “Madison Synthesis” attempted to recast old Federalist responses to the Constitution in terms of the central role of state legislatures as public forums; President Martin Van Buren (1837–1842) became the champion for what he called the “Anti-Federalist mind.”
But there was a significant inherent limitation in this way of thinking. The Anti-Federalist outlook envisioned a smaller republic based on the belief that republican government was suitable to a relatively small territory and a mostly homogeneous population. James Winthrop of Massachusetts expressed a common view when he said that “the idea of an uncompounded republic on an average of one thousand miles in length and eight hundred in breadth and containing six million inhabitants all reduced to the same standard of morals, of habits and of laws, is an absurdity and contrary to the whole experience of mankind.” The name of Montesquieu carried great weight with these thinkers, and the eloquent French philosophe taught that republican governments were appropriate for limited territories only. In effect, the Anti-Federalist model befitted the likes of Switzerland, not a future world hegemon.
Thus we arrive at an overcentralized, delusionally reckless federal government that could not care less about the country’s national security; that sees in its citizens conspiratorial enemies of the state; and that appears to be steering itself straight into total globalist surrender, now but a few years off. This situation can only be circumvented by the sinewy self-stewardship of excellent governors. Indeed, the Renaissance city-republics offer great lessons in the art of strategic maneuvering, and Governor DeSantis has something of this statecraft magic coursing in him, a quality desperately needed nationwide. The Dukes of Milan come to mind in considering the Florida governor’s success, an achievement incessantly pestered by the Beltway bogeyman looming like a salivating Holy Roman Emperor over a plump principality.
The Duchy of Milan, one of the five major centers of power in 15th-century history, was marked by assassinations, usurpations, and several restorations. The tumult notwithstanding, its leaders created one of Italy’s largest and most prosperous realms despite being subjected to relentless external intrigue (in addition to authoring many of their own).
There isn’t the space here to detail the intricacies of shrewd Lombardian polity, but just a few points are pertinent to the theme of this essay. The great epic of Milan’s noble rulers—the Visconti (1277–1447) and Sforza (1450–1535) families—is the story of how a naturally rich, entrepreneurially advanced, and critically located region grew into a modern (for its time) meritocracy that for centuries was sandwiched between papacy and empire, between city-states and elusive alliances, yet forged a regional identity and independent level of success that exist to this day. To take the example of one of the best known of these dukes, Francesco Sforza put productivity ahead of privilege, nobility, and nepotism, and as a result of this foresight the greatest expansion of industry, of navigation, of irrigation, and of Lombardy’s famous banking networks developed in that state. He reduced the centralized power of the old nobility and the church, and sought support from a flourishing middle class; he was also the first European ruler to follow a foreign policy based on the concept of the balance of power. Of this Lombardian tradition and legacy the historian Douglas Dowd wrote in his 1961 study The Economic Expansion of Lombardy 1300–1500, “The heights reached by the dukes were the result of a great human effort of patience, ingenuity, and alertness to market possibilities.”
It is fascinating history, one that has nothing to do with a modern constitutional republic born out of the Anglo-Saxon/Scottish Enlightenment. Yet it is one that may have everything to teach a malfunctioning constitutional republic that is subverting its own enlightened self-governing foundations. This country will fail unless individual states produce dynamic leaders who assert themselves as independently as possible, loyal to national identity but refusing subservience to Washington—to shadow governments, renegade neocons, ethereal congresspersons, and woke flights of federal judiciary fancy. Whether 500 or five years ago, the continued existence of an imperial power depends upon the lifeblood of dynamic states, and upon destroying those states once that life has been drained out of them.
It cannot be stated enough: Governor DeSantis is more powerful as governor of Florida than he would be as president. The political activism of conservatives should be directed more aggressively toward securing great governors than worrying about an office that has effectively ceased to exist.
]]>Once upon a time there was a dashing Russian prince who died in a beautiful American town. The world had known him, in the later bloom of his adult years, as a wealthy New York entrepreneur, publicist, socialite, and man about town, the toast of Manhattan society, the husband of a Romanov, then of an Astor and lastly of a Grosse Pointe industrialist’s daughter, the graceful Detroit suburb being his final resting place and later the auction site of his art collection of Russian treasures. Upon his passing the world media covered the event, detailing the belles soirées, bons mots, and bon ton that animated the life of this popular but mysterious noble, a town and country chronicle of names and titles of transatlantic dynasties, between the aging charms of the Old World and the youthful ambitions of the new one.
Yet behind this sheen of glamour, there was a quality about the prince that was somewhat inscrutable, intangible. He had been a hero. But a hero of two worlds, two civilizations, and, in a sense, two centuries, in Russia and America. A childhood companion of the young Tolstoy counts, a constitutional monarchist trained in British law, and a member of an early-20th-century generation of aristocratic reformers in Russia, his culture was rooted in St. Petersburg at the height of that city’s pre–World War I glory; as the economist Cecil Hirsch wrote of the era before the Great War and of the descent of Russia into a bloodbath less than a decade later: “The world that disappeared in 1914 appeared, in retrospect, something like our picture of Paradise.” The prince found himself at the center of the convulsions: Oxford-educated, he was a captain of the Imperial Chevalier Guard under Tsar Nicholas II, the legendary heavy-guard regiment originally organized by Catherine the Great. Having distinguished himself on horseback, he escaped to Crimea during the Bolshevik Revolution and led a horde of Tatar horsemen against the Red invasion of that peninsula. No sooner did the news of his counterrevolutionary successes reach Moscow, than a plump bounty was placed on his head. Then, in a series of midnight-train adventures that then prompted his derring-do escape to Switzerland in disguise, the prince made his way to that country, later to make his way to the United States. Once an American citizen, he was in all the way: He enlisted in the Army at the outbreak of the Second World War at the age of 50 and later, as a lieutenant colonel, was selected by William Donovan of the OSS to lead the landing and Allied capture of Sardinia, where 20,000 German troops controlled the island and where an Italian garrison of nearly a quarter million men was stationed. He made his first five jumps in the summer of 1943 as the oldest paratrooper in Army history; all the while the bounty on his life remained in force by Moscow. While outmaneuvering Germans on the island, the prince was assigned to carry letters from President Roosevelt, from the Italian king, and from Prime Minister Badoglio to the garrison commander, General Basso, ordering him to surrender. A few days later, Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr. arrived with a token occupation force led by this Petersburg aristocrat and formally accepted the surrender of the 270,000 Italian troops on Sardinia.
Later the prince returned to the New York high life, working in public relations and advertising, the extent of his anti-terrorist, anti-totalitarian achievements on two continents for two civilizations known but to a few. He died in the Detroit suburb in 1978.
The life story of Prince Serge Platonevich Obolensky is superficially an adventurous chronicle of an exceptional man. On another level it is symbolic, within the person of this one individual, of a once-conceivable Russian-American relationship now destroyed. The prince was the best of both countries, both worlds, merged as one mindset and outlook: the wizened, aristocratic survivor of “History,” on the one hand, and the energetic, optimistic idealist (at least as America meant at the time), on the other. The prince had been personally decorated by Tsar Nicholas II, whose statues were remounted in Russia a few years ago. He was honored by General Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose warning of the military-industrial complex has been realized in establishment foreign policy (“neocon”) expression. As a symbol of what-was and what-could-have-been, the Russian noble is spiritually representative of what the country now must become.
The harmonization of two powerful Christian civilizations united against the fascisms and totalitarianisms of the 20th century might have been a lost ideal of that time. In the past two decades, such an ideal reconfigured to confront anti-sovereignty globalism, terrorism, leftism, and cultural Marxism was briefly possible in the early days of Vladimir Putin, who extended an olive branch to the U.S. in the wake of the disaster that was, ultimately, Yeltsin. Now, in foreseeing the likely aftermath of this current war, and of the presidency of Putin, it is imperative that Russia look back to the future for its own survival. In this regard, an enlightened monarchist prime minister and a tsar would be the most important step the country could make since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Constitutional monarchy will preserve the country and restore its prestige; liberal democracy, which the West will push, will be its soft demise.
Russia was despised by certain elements in the West long before that country’s invasion of Ukraine got underway. By “certain elements” we mean three concentrations of power: first, the neocon foreign-policy establishment (Washington-based and Europe-wide), which did not get the “sober Yeltsin,” in New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof’s phrase, that it wanted in Putin, who, for better or worse, asserted a sovereign geopolitical will that clashed with U.S. interests. The second element is straight economic, one that seeks, among other things, an advantageous position in Russia’s enormous natural resources, estimated at $83 trillion by the World Bank. Russia’s economy is small, and now obviously very damaged. But under Putin’s tenure, the country’s fiscal efficiency, low debt, and high gold reserves have been admittedly exemplary practices, while its threats to dismantle the dollar as a reserve currency are perceived as threatening. The third element is the nihilistic left churning away in the rising sewers of the West, which sees in Russia a far too conservative, too illiberal, too “Christian” cultural identity that rejects, among other things, the kind of diversity and open-border society permeating the countries graced with the once-dignified status of “liberal democracy.”
Of these three elements (which I categorize together as “globalism” in the fullest sense of defining that word) it is this last that poses the biggest threat to Russia, though they essentially work in tandem just as they are within the West’s decline.
Let us first define what is meant by this “cultural dimension” and Western “decline,” etc.
(1) While U.S. cities are falling apart at warp speed, and one cannot enter a subway without fear of being pushed to one’s death by a night-of-the-living-dead maniac, Russia’s two major cities, Moscow and St. Petersburg, were on their way to becoming the next London and Paris; their metros clean, well-maintained, and in many cases architecturally beautiful, not plagued by menacing homeless.
(2) While our “Christian Church” is either a Protestant playground for holy-woke indoctrination or is embodied in a Pope whose controversies and political activism have inspired contempt among devout Catholics, the Orthodox Church is a strict Christian church that knows its place, stays in its place, and is largely scandal-free.
(3) While we have numbskulls canceling culture and a minority-obsessed pseudo-left ideological movement seeping into our schools, Russian students were required by Putin to read three works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; the Russian president oversaw the construction of the first memorial to the victims of Stalin—the giant “Wall of Grief,” unveiled in 2017—and he restituted the statues of monarchs around the major cities.
(4) While mantras of “diversity” and “tolerance” pile up along with body counts in U.S. urban hellholes and racial hostility is more aggressive than ever, Russia’s 20 million Muslims have been living in a stable society, the Chechen problem healed rather remarkably some years ago, and the well-being of Jews in the country has been such that in 2012 Ronald S. Lauder praised Putin for the relative lack of anti-Semitic attacks in the country.
(5) While our government is swimming in trillions of dollars of debt and Fed-enabled pseudo-capitalism, Russia was, prior to recent events, fiscally in good shape. Though a small economy, Russian debt has been low as a percentage of GDP (about 19 percent). The country’s gold and foreign currency reserves covered at least twice the amount of that debt, and Russia is one of the largest accumulators of gold, running neck-and-neck with China for first place. In addition, for years Moscow has been expressing its unwillingness to remain at the monetary mercy of the U.S. (specifically, President Putin’s longtime economic adviser Sergei Glazyev), and its conservative economists here have predicted during that time that Moscow’s outspoken dismay with dollar hegemony could mean gold being used as a possible currency-war weapon.
(6) While American education is in an abysmal state and the National Center for Education Statistics recently stated that over the past decade there has been no progress in either mathematics or reading performance in the U.S., Russia was seeing a surge of investment by private entrepreneurs/oligarchs to establish world-class schools; one of these new academies, Letovo, scored the highest mean IBDP (International Baccalaureate Diploma Program) scores in the world.
(7) While the U.S. is demoralized by identity and gender politics, professors and teachers fear for their careers in the event of using the wrong pronoun, and men and women are increasingly hostile or sterile toward each other, Russia is, shall we say, old-school. By law, the country does not permit what it calls “gay propaganda” (for example, exhibitions and events cannot be publicly advertised as gay, nor are “parades” allowed, etc.), and marriage is officially defined in the constitution of the country as that between a man and a woman. (Specifically, a constitutional amendment of 2020 is defined as “a defense of the institution of marriage as a union of a man and a woman; the creation of conditions for a decent upbringing of children in the family, as well as for the responsibilities of adult children to care for parents.” The U.S. State Department responded by hanging a rainbow flag outside the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.)
We have here just a brief glimpse of two civilizations tending toward opposite directions, at least one keen on overtaking the other. If Washington and its vassals want Russia to be on its knees and under its control, internal disintegration is key, of which Putin, to his credit, has been aware. During the 2017 unveiling of the monument to the victims of Stalin, he stated: “We must never again push society to the dangerous precipice of division.” That division will follow should the West take the lead and maneuver a select hand puppet such as Gary Kasparov or Mikhail Khodorkovsky to commandeer the helm. In view of such a possibility, one thing will keep Russia from an inevitable divide-and-conquer, and that is the “monarchy, interrupted” of over a century ago.
“Ten years of such economic development as Russia has witnessed in the ten years just passed will make her enormously stronger than she is today,” wrote economic historian Charles Conant in 1899. He added: “Thirty years will make her almost irresistible.”
Despite the American belief that Russia lurched from Ivan the Terrible to Trotsky/Lenin/Stalin to Putin, the years between 1890 and roughly 1911 constitute those that best represent Russia at its peak, even with the grave social unrest (the Menshevik Revolution, the reactionary autocracy of Nicholas II) subverting the progress. There was a liberal monarchist–Oxford-educated reform culture that permeated the best in class of the country’s leadership. The aristocratic prime minister Pyotr Stolypin was one of the country’s best statesmen in history, cited with Alexander Nevsky (first) and Josef Stalin (third) in Russia-wide polls as the nation’s all-time “greatest.” Western-educated aristocrats with names like Obolensky, Nabokov, and Galiztine constituted the best and brightest of legal reformers; Russia was a fiscal model for the world then, led by two astute finance ministers, Count Sergei Witte and Count Nikolai Bunge, both architects of Russian capitalism and through whose management the country survived the economic turmoil of the Crimean War, the Russo-Japanese War, the later Russo-Turkish wars, impending Balkan Wars, and not to mention the land-reform domestic dramas of the early 20th century, with the country’s finances intact.
As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has written: “Stolypin’s reforms produced astounding results within a few years. Between 1906 and 1915, thanks to the efforts of Stolypin’s farmers, the productivity of crops nationwide grew by 14 percent, in Siberia by 25 percent. In 1912, Russia’s grain exports exceeded by 30 percent those of Argentina, the United States and Canada combined.”
The Bank of Russia at the turn of the 20th century was one of the most sound banks in Europe. The country possessed the first- or second-largest gold reserves in the world up until the outbreak of World War I. According to The Economist of May 20, 1899, Russian holdings were 95 million pounds sterling of gold, while the Bank of France held 78 million sterling worth; the Imperial Bank of Austria-Hungary 30 million sterling worth of gold; and the Bank of England 30 million sterling worth of both gold and silver. That Russian bank once required 50 percent to 100 percent gold backing of all notes issued. “Russia up to the very moment of rupture [with Japan, 1904–1905] was working imperturbably at the progressive consolidation of her finances,” reported Karl Helfferich of the University of Berlin, at a meeting of the London-based Royal Economic Society in December 1904. “Even in years of industrial crises and defective harvest, her foreign trade showed an excess of exports over imports more than sufficient to compensate for payments sent abroad. And, as guarantee to her monetary system she has succeeded in amassing and maintaining a vast reserve of gold.”
To most Americans at the time, the Russian Empire was a half-civilized state, populated by the oppressed victims of a military tyranny or sacrificed to barbarian swarms. “Whatever warrant for this conception may have existed in the past, it is rapidly ceasing to be true,” wrote the English historian Charles Conant in 1912. “Russia organized the machinery of her economic system in a manner to make her the early and dangerous rival of the great industrial nations; banks for assisting peasants and mechanics of small means are rapidly spreading over Russia.” He continued, “The finance minister opened a peasant bank and credit, and there are plans for the central bank to support rural banks, as in Germany and Austria.” Banking historian Eugene Patton wrote in a 1911 article for the Academy of Political Science in New York: “The growth of the Russian savings deposits has been phenomenal in recent years.”
In addition, the Russian Empire had industry. The world’s first two-cylinder steam engine was produced in imperial Russia; one of the world’s first tracked vehicles was invented by Fyodor A. Blinov in 1877; an early electric car was created by well-known engineer Hippolyte V. Romanov in 1899; and in the years preceding the 1917 October Revolution, Russia produced a growing number of Russo-Balt, Puzyryov, Lessner, and other vehicles, held its first motor show in 1907, and competed at Monte Carlo and the San Sebastián Rally (15,000 kilometers in Western Europe and Northern Africa in 1913). The country also produced an airplane with a wingspan to rival that of Boeing. In the 1920s, the Soviet Union and Germany negotiated agreements that allowed Germany to violate the Treaty of Versailles by building military aircraft and training German military pilots in the USSR. This provided the Soviet Union access to the latest aviation technology developed during the tsarist period and prevented them from falling too far behind the West in this crucial sphere. The future father of one great chapter of aviation was born in Kiev, in 1889, and 1912 marked the rise of Sikorsky’s career in that empire.
Space limits dissection of what soon was to follow and the end of the monarchy at Ekaterinburg. While the Romanovs were dismembered and doused in acid, Trotsky was on his way to New York to find funding by Wall Street bankers, and a few years later much of that Russian gold would make its way to the coffers of the New York Federal Reserve as reported, for example, in one issue of the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bulletin in 1921. That bank was headed up by William Boyce Thompson, a good friend of Trotsky and himself known as “the Red Wall Streeter.” A strong Russia was wanted neither by the communists nor the capitalists. The same is just as true today.
What was killed off in 1919 was set in motion again in 1991 when cronies and globalists pushed Russia from Gorbachev to Yeltsin and into the hands of Putin, whose sovereign posture became intolerable to our establishment. Today, the country will survive its sanctions, survive the necessity of a pivot to the East. But it will not survive if it is attacked where it is strongest and most vulnerable at once as a nation: its soul. The next incarnation of Russia must venture back to liberal monarchy—liberal in trade and commerce, monarchical in tradition and Christian identity. “You, gentlemen, are in need of great upheavals; we are in need of Great Russia,” said Pyotr Stolypin at the end of his Duma (parliamentary) speech on May 24,1907. He was assassinated by political opponents four years later in Kiev. Those words are the epitaph of his grave, and they are the echo of a country whose spirit never died but still awaits resurrection.
]]>Long ago, in a universe of sane fiscal policy far, far away, there existed an institution, then new to the world of international banking and finance, called the Federal Reserve Bank, whose primary concern of the day—the day being its official charter on Dec. 23, 1913—was to have very large reserves of cash backed by even larger reserves of gold that were enough “to earn the public trust.” It was an unusual kind of organization, where simple policy directives such as “safety and sound judgement,” “lawful money,” and “normal monetary order” possessed none of the sophisticated reasoning of “zero-interest-rate policy,” “helicopter money,” “Target Asset Relief Program,” and “quantitative easing” that characterized the Bank’s latter-day ne’er-do-well progeny. Few American bankers at the time really even wanted a “Fed,” fearing that the public—and the bankers themselves—would not understand what its mission was not: that is, to not be an endless source of easy credit and bailouts. Indeed, it was altogether another world.
That world, in turn, had prestigious ancient bloodlines in the old country. A Venetian law of 1403 on reserve requirements became the basis of U.S. banking law on deposits of public wealth in the late 1800s. The once mighty Bank of France was wisely admonished by its founder, Napoleon, never to allow France to be a debtor nation, only a creditor nation. The Bank of Russia once held the highest gold reserves in the world at the turn of the 20th century, and went through the Crimean War, the Russo-Turkish War, and the Russo-Japanese War with its finances intact and sound fiscal policy. Classic Switzerland, with “unlimited liability” private bankers (not “private banks”) and debt-ceiling ratios, had larger bank reserves than the U.S. in the first half of the 20th century. The U.S. continued to keep the flag flying of this tradition in the form of the July 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement, which was established upon worldwide trust in U.S. financial discipline. Central banks in Europe held dollars, rather than gold, based upon the post–World War I gold exchange standard (different from the “classic” 19th-century gold standard). “Its indispensable core function was to impose a rough discipline on each nation to live within its means,” as the economic historian David Stockman wrote in The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America (2013). When President Richard Nixon eliminated this last vestige of the gold standard in August 1971, “it unshackled the central banks in a manner never previously experienced in modern financial history.”
Fast-forward to the present day, where the U.S. economy is at the complete mercy of the Fed’s money-printing machines and lack of monetary restraint that are killing off real capital in a way no communist could dream of. This distortion of fundamentals has turned markets from industrial barometers into speculators’ casinos and has perverted long-term corporate frugality into cheap money addiction and bailouts-on-demand. With origins in the actions of then Fed chairman Alan Greenspan during the Long Term Capital Management and dot-com crises, the pseudo-private Fed has been (digital) printing money like mad, going way beyond its original mandate as a “banker’s bank” and lender of last resort.
For over ten years, the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee has pursued a policy of near-zero short-term money rates. Ostensibly intended to ‘stimulate’ the economy out of the 2008 crisis, economic consumption and demand for credit remained anemic, while debt levels in the industrialized nations ballooned. Then there were those kwazy bailouts-turned-corporate bonuses of AIG, Goldman Sachs, GM and Citigroup, among others, that rather dimmed Wall Street’s luster. But the die was cast. Since then, the Fed has metastasized into a monetary Hydra, massively intervening in the economy in four main ways: First, by allowing Wall Street to borrow almost without limit and to use that money to buy back stocks, thereby artificially pumping up stock valuations; second, by encouraging dangerous short-term fiscal habits by way of these unaccountable windfalls in times of emergencies, thus replacing the need for healthy cash reserves and re-investment; third, by participating in the buying, directly or indirectly, of securities, municipal bonds, investment-grade corporate bonds and junk bonds; fourth, by becoming the life support system for zombie companies–an absurdity almost reminiscent of old broken Soviet factories propped up by the state. These, in fact, are on the increase, kept afloat by low interest rates and extending more credit. (This is particularly bad in Europe where the European Central Bank has a bailout guarantee program for zombie industries).
All this could not play into the radicalists’ strategies more beautifully. To begin with, when the inevitable crashes and recessions result, such events will be blamed on the excesses of “capitalism”. If there is a vast bailout of mismanaged corporations versus proportional relief for the general population, it will be blamed on the evils of “capitalism”. No, not the statist matrix of Fed-Treasury-White House-Congress-Bankster mafiosi, but this ethereal punching bag of the resentful intellectual, “Capitalism”. This, in turn, will allow the usual chorus of media and monetary-policy morons to cheer on the well-greased grip of the invisible hand of state control over the economy–smarmily ignoring the fact that such perverted intervention is the fundamental cause of the problem. In this world, it matters little what is Left or what is Right—only what is center—as in central, as in bank, which will function as easily in a socialist system as a capitalist one because it effectively renders them one in the same. It will make no difference if Marx, Mao or Herbert Marcuse is commander-in-chief as long as the distorted Dow keeps climbing. To put it in the vernacular, Wall Street has become the market equivalent of Bernie Sanders’ “Free Sh*t”. Topping it all off, of course, is the fact that the five main Big Tech companies leading this economy are explicitly Left-leaning in ideology, such that an ever-expanding “market economy” must implicitly accept those companies’ ever-expanding political influence.
Yet there you are, a conservative defender of “free market principles,” who can’t, won’t, and wouldn’t leave this stock market, thereby trapped into supporting an increasingly statist system. Gotcha!
The Bernie Sanders analogy is hardly far-fetched. “Modern Monetary Theory” (MMT) the au courant fiscal school of thought on the left that is creeping its way into respectable editorial pages, is the still-born brainchild of one of Sanders’ advisers, Stephanie Kelton, a professor. This view maintains that a country that borrows in its own currency cannot default because the central bank can always print more money to cover it. Citing social stability as its main goal, this theory offers nothing by way of preserving the economy’s productive capacity. It is this kind of thinking that has created two economies in the U.S.—the Wall Street economy and the so-called Main Street economy.
Having said that, one must be wary of any attempt at a “populist” revolt against Wall Street–the Gamestop phenomenon– through the adoption of the same fallacies of Wall Street. According to one New York-based banker, while there may not be any systematic risk to what is going on, he believes that the Reddit/Wall Street face-off is evidence of further distortions caused by irresponsible actions of central banking–or “malinvestment” as the Austrian economists call it. In other words, Gamestop is a symptom not the disease. Or, as the economist Sven Heinreich, who writes the excellent NorthManTrader blog, simply put it in a January 28 tweet: “Hey, Federal Reserve. You have created this circus. This one is on you.”
To many, of course, Fed-bashing is a cultish thing that Ron Paul types go for, and a concern of little consequence. After all, since bottoming out in 2009 up through 2019, the market went up 300 percent. In addition, over the course of Covid-19 with world economies failing, the combined market capitalization of world equity markets grew $25 trillion to cross a record $100 trillion for the first time in history in 2020. What could be so wrong?
Yet, these are the distortions at work. For, at the time of this writing, S&P earnings have collapsed by one-third. Meanwhile, according to the Congressional Budget Office, as of Oct. 1, 2020, the publicly held federal debt exceeded the size of the U.S. economy. In total, we are sitting on $74 trillion of public and private debt. Then there is sheer confusion as to what the state of industry actually is. Tesla might be the car of the future, but is its market capitalization really $600 billion when it makes half a million cars a year, while that figure accounts for the market cap of the global powerhouses like Mercedes, Toyota, and Volkswagen and the lesser players who together make 70 to 80 million cars a year?
Now the Fed is expected to intervene everywhere. “When there’s a new crisis, will the Fed intervene with yet a bigger balance sheet?… So the question, to my mind, is where does it end? And I don’t know,” stated James Grant, founder and editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, as quoted in Barron’s, Nov. 2, 2020. A peak moment in this tragedy was when Mr. Walter Zimmerman, the head of technical analysis at ICAP, a major institutional broker, described in a research note a proposal for the creation of a cabinet-level unit in the U.S. government, with a name straight out of Monty Python: “The Department for the Study of Unintended Consequences.” This would consist of nongovernmental experts charged with critiquing all proposed government policies. Heading up the list would be the Federal Reserve, whose sole policy, he writes, has become “to act as a bubble machine for equities.”
In a word, one cannot have capitalism when there are no capital markets and the Fed has destroyed them. Capitalist prosperity of the real sort—just like the other American ideal, constitutional governance—is under an existential threat, yet this situation is neither new nor was it unforeseen. In this wretched scenario, it could be argued that should populists ever storm Washington, D.C., again, it shouldn’t be the Capitol building they attack, but the Eccles Building on Constitution Avenue. Because it isn’t just the “socialists” who want to finish off the economy but the “capitalists” themselves.
]]>The main failure of the rise of the conservative right in America has been its fear of producing its own brand of cultural elitist in the style and substance of the well-bred Reactionary. Its cultural contribution has produced no aesthetic vision, no artistic sophistication—only the cult of commentary, endless commentary. There we stand after all this time: no film studios, no high-end literary publishing houses, no museum board of directors of consequence, not a single Ivy university under our influence, no “great editors” of the Buckley–Hilton Kramer or even Lewis Lapham–George Plimpton variety; no Condé Nast, no sitcom/dramas of interest save so many rather twee “aristocratic” nostalgia series lavish with bygone-era minutiae.
In short, our conservatism contains none of the cerebral heft and fervor possessed by the late, great 20th-century “Man of the Right” (his counterpart, the Albert Camus class of the “Man of the Left”). We are devoid of that generation’s intellectual anarchy; the art-obsessed, multilingual proto-Fascist who could create poignant works of abstract grandeur and literary grace that fused language and love of beauty with intransigent political views. Their class was one of spiritual courage and daring—and they would have had nothing to do with the right as it’s known today.
Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, T.E. Hulme, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, D.H Lawrence; the literary and art movements known as Futurism, Vorticism, and, to an extent, Expressionism… These monstres sacrés and their institutional expression raged from the margins of the general leftward drift of that totalitarian century and championed patriotism, nationalism, industry, and, via the traditionalist strain, monarchy. They regarded democracy with revulsion and saw in any kind of Mussolini-to-Franco range of dictator a prince-tyrant and future savior of that ever-flickering twilight known as “the West.” They were subversives desperate for authority, but of a heroic variety: classical, mystical, and unapologetically übermenschlich. “We wish to glorify war—the only health of the world,” wrote F.T. Marinetti, founder of the anarcho-industrial art movement known as Futurism, last showcased at a spectacular exhibit at the Guggenheim in 2014. “Militarism, patriotism, the destructive arm of the anarchist, the Beautiful Idea, the contempt for women…” This was the movement’s rallying cry and creed. But it produced masterpieces.
The poets, artists, publishers, and editors gathered around these diverse “right-wings” made up a formidable intellectual force. It was a mix that ranged in aesthetic ethos from Hulme, the “mercenary of modernism” and war veteran who famously fought Bertrand Russell on the battlefield of metaphysics, to T.S. Eliot writing his seminal “Tradition and Individual Talent” in 1919, to Yeats the romantic nationalist defending the “racial supremacists” of the Irish cause, to Wyndham Lewis declaring: “You as a Fascist stand for the small trader against the chain store; the nation against the super-State, the creator against the middleman….” To be sure, these artists had their reprehensible excesses. But it was from a weighty arsenal of intellectual artillery that they fired their shots into the vacuum of an apocalyptic and terrified age.
Their principal literary and art movements were known as Vorticism and Futurism, as referenced above. The latter, formed under the specter of World War I by such artists as Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Gino Severini, and Tullio Crali, was a colorfully nihilistic descendant of Cubism and forerunner of one powerful strain of Expressionist painting and cinematography that exalted “the Machine,” the urban fortress and military combat in a style that was hard, geometric, violent, and utterly captivating. Vorticism, led by Pound and Lewis, was its London-born literary version that took root in “Ulster politics, labor unrest and the pending European conflagration,” while its short-lived flagship magazine, Blast, was the subject of respectful New York Times and Times of London feature coverage for its well-educated outlandishness and star writers.
Despite this unmoored mix of tradition, radicalism, Beauty-with-a-capital-B, war lust, anti-Statism, the small town, and the Industrial Age, “conservative” and “populist” this generation of the right decidedly was not. “My goal,” stated Pound famously, “is to save the public soul by first punching it in the face.” Yet it is in that decidedly populist statement that one finds the particular genius of this intellectual generation. For, in the name of Art, they were so far to the right they ultimately gathered at the outer banks of the left. That is to say, the tactics, the passion, the scholarship were as intensely energized a collective force as those of their totalitarian mirror opposites. Their ultimate contempt, just as that of their Socialist-Communist counterparts, was directed against the venerable “man on the street” and his slight superior, the suburban bourgeoisie. Given this shared contempt, the “suburban anti-Semite,” as Allen Ginsberg called his later-life friend Ezra Pound, regularly published the best left-wing writers in Blasta: The likes of Sydney Webb and Henri Bergson were featured alongside John Galsworthy, Benedetto Croce, and Lytton Strachey.
This mindset is what lent their Fascist or “Fascist” leanings a universally attractive bent. The objective of the Vorticist movement, a kind of right-wing Bloomsbury Group, was “to create a definitive force against amorphous thinking” whereby Pound tasked himself to become the prime mover of modern poetry, prompting the decidedly un-rightist Carl Sandburg to credit Pound for doing “the most of living men to incite new impulses to poetry.” Pound, for whom Mussolini was a kind of latter-day Sigismondo Malatesta, cuts a sympathetic figure because of his assistance to writers of all political hues. The power of art was placed before that of politics, and therefore “the right” resonated—deeply, emotionally, and so memorably. It was this aesthetically democratic mindset (of a group at times far more hostile to democracy than to that of any looming Red menace) that left that generation of right-wing intellectual a lasting, shadowy appeal, if not influence.
Such has been the main failure of conservatism in America—the lack of appeal to Imagination and of the ability to leave behind works of lasting emotional impact. In a word, it fails because it does not have the creative courage of the mad, bad highbrow right of generations past. It is all grassroots and no bloom.
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