First source: popular tradition. Among uneducated white people, ie Republicans, there remains some hazy folk memory, vague, idealized and distorted, of the way California (and America in general) was governed when it was a synonym for prosperity etc. This tradition was once a governing tradition, equipped at the top end with an elite that had the talent and experience to rule. You can see it in, say, the McKinley administration, or as late as the Harding-Coolidge reaction. San Francisco is covered with wonderful, wildly incongruous, Late High American Fascist statuary from this era.
Regardless of their merits as a governing caste, the people who erected these statues are dead. Their modern equivalents, such as any are, are no one’s definition of a new ruling elite. Michael Savage is no Chauncey Depew. Any system of thought that must tailor its clothes, even reluctantly, to this audience is unlikely to turn out a suit that fits well on the truth.
Like the political thought of the late Unionist era, modern mainstream or “neo-” conservatism is an endless goldmine of truths, half-truths, insights, myths, and evasions. Conservatism can be very informative. It should not be swallowed as a pill. It requires processing and filtration. Like anything, however, it is easily believed in its entirety by fools. And a lot of fools vote.
The increasingly proletarian nature of the modern conservative movement produces a corresponding puerility, fatal to any attempt at sovereign gravitas. This pattern of prolation is seen everywhere in the late Right: the decline from Robert Taft to Sarah Palin, Enoch Powell to Nick Griffin, Metternich to Hitler, Sir Edward Carson to Johnny “Mad Dog” Adair. Is this the meme train you want to be on? Is this the mandate of heaven, or the manhole to hell?
Second source: corrupt interests. Venality is by no means inconsistent with good government — indeed, the quality of government in the UK seems to have declined almost in lockstep with personal conflicts of interest. Britannia became mistress of the world in an era in which both offices and elections were regularly bought and sold. Personal venality, for all its faults, tended to unify the interests of office and officeholder, and often increased responsibility.
But corruption today tends to consist of institutional conflicts of interest, which exhibit none of this benign quality. Besides, not even UR is perverse enough to idealize corruption. We will leave this decision source condemned by definition.
Third source: official expertise. By far the most significant source of decisions in the modern American system of government is something called public policy. In the 20th century, it was discovered that the task of governing, thought in all previous centuries to be an art requiring wisdom, talent and experience, is in fact a science, like chemistry or card-counting. This set of sciences is often described as the social sciences, a slippery name if I ever heard one.
For every class of decision a modern government makes, from diplomacy to economics to issuing fishing licences, there exists a caste of scholars in the social sciences, carefully selected for their race, gender, intelligence and/or political reliability, who use the methods of science — which, as you may know, split the atom and put a man on the moon, and is absolutely infallible — to divine the correct public policy. None of these professors is in any way, shape or form responsible for the success or failure of these policies — generally the latter. I swear I am not making this up.
Moreover, our scholars have mastered the instruments of public communication. They are treated as generally infallible sources by individuals known as journalists, who tell the public (or those of the public who still listen to them, rather than Michael Savage) what to think, hence how to vote.
This third decision source is in general the primary positive force in government today. Public-policy scholars generate a set of policy options, which can be promoted or resisted by the first two means. Even corruption, being sly by definition, inside the Beltway generally goes cloaked in the form of scientific public policy. Policy also flows into the legal system, of course, through the invisible cloaca of case law. Because its power is not seen as power per se, it can seep in through every crack.
It is here that we must part company with many of our naive, but reasonable, readers. If you are an educated progressive of normal, moderate opinions, you are probably operating under the belief that the basic problem with the system of government you observe, whose bad results are by now apparent to all, is that the third source (which is proper and legitimate) is constantly being thwarted and frustrated by the first and second (which are improper and illegitimate).
Au contraire, mon frère! America has been in the grips of the third source — the logothetes, the scientocrats, the professional planners of men — for three quarters of a century. The true rulers of our country are the professors, the journalists, the mandarins. Any feeble twitch of resistance from the continent squirming in their talons is promptly magnified, through these exquisitely sensitive and powerful information organs, into the most hideous and awful oppression. Leading you to the belief system above — so convenient to this mode of mastery.
And in this age — the age of the New Deal and the Brain Trust, neither yet ended — what has become of America? Well, for example, before the Brain Trust, Detroit was America’s fourth largest city. After 75 years of progressive public policy, it is a charred, savage ruin. Who, exactly, is responsible for this? Herbert Hoover? The Liberty League?
Inasmuch as the first and second sources — politics and corruption — have played a significant role in the period, that role has often been to moderate, test and restrain the river of lunacy flowing out of the ivory tower. But the net effect of these sources remains negative, because their continued existence — however minor — allows a regime which is predominantly that of public policy and social science to evade responsibility for its own epic incompetence, as demonstrated obviously and beyond any doubt by actual results.
In 1899, Chauncy Montgomery M’Govern of Pearson’s magazine called Nikola Tesla the new wizard of the west and discussed his ideas for solar-thermal generation and — yes — wireless transmission: