Isegoria

“The ideas made it,” Pat Buchanan says, “but I didn’t”:

A quarter-century before Trump descended into the atrium of his Manhattan skyscraper to launch his unlikely bid for the White House, Buchanan, until then a columnist, political operative and TV commentator, stepped onto a stage in Concord, New Hampshire, to declare his own candidacy 10 weeks ahead of the state’s presidential primary. Associating the “globalist” President George H. W. Bush with “bureaucrats in Brussels” pursuing a “European superstate” that trampled on national identity, Buchanan warned his rowdy audience, “We must not trade in our sovereignty for a cushioned seat at the head table of anybody’s new world order!” His radically different prescription, which would underpin three consecutive runs for the presidency: a “new nationalism” that would focus on “forgotten Americans” left behind by bad trade deals, open-border immigration policies and foreign adventurism. His voice booming, Buchanan demanded: “Should the United States be required to carry indefinitely the full burden of defending rich and prosperous allies who take America’s generosity for granted as they invade our markets?”

This rhetoric — deployed again during his losing bid for the 1996 GOP nomination, and once more when he ran on the Reform Party ticket in 2000 — not only provided a template for Trump’s campaign, but laid the foundation for its eventual success. Dismissed as a fringe character for rejecting Republican orthodoxy on trade and immigration and interventionism, Buchanan effectively weakened the party’s defenses, allowing a more forceful messenger with better timing to finish the insurrection he started back in 1991. All the ideas that seemed original to Trump’s campaign could, in fact, be attributed to Buchanan — from depicting the political class as bumbling stooges to singling out a rising superpower as an economic menace (though back then it was Japan, not China) to rallying the citizenry to “take back” a country whose destiny they no longer dictated. “Pitchfork Pat,” as he was nicknamed, even deployed a phrase that combined Trump’s two signature slogans: “Make America First Again.”

“Pat was the pioneer of the vision that Trump ran on and won on,” says Greg Mueller, who served as Buchanan’s communications director on the 1992 and 1996 campaigns and remains a close friend. Michael Kinsley, the liberal former New Republic editor who co-hosted CNN’s “Crossfire” with Buchanan, likewise credits his old sparring partner with laying the intellectual groundwork for Trumpism: “It’s unclear where this Trump thing goes, but Pat deserves some of the credit.” He pauses. “Or some of the blame.”

Buchanan, for his part, feels both validated and vindicated. Long ago resigned to the reality that his policy views made him a pariah in the Republican Party — and stained him irrevocably with the ensuing accusations of racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia — he has lived to see the GOP come around to Buchananism and the country send its direct descendant to the White House.

“I was elated, delighted that Trump picked up on the exact issues on which I challenged Bush,” he tells me. “And then he goes and uses my slogan? It just doesn’t get any better than this.” Buchanan, who has published such books as The Death of the West, State of Emergency, Day of Reckoning and Suicide of a Superpower, admits that November’s election result “gave me hope” for the first time in recent memory.

New York magazine has written a remarkably fair profile of Steve Sailer, The Man Who Invented Identity Politics for the New Right:

After Mitt Romney’s 2012 loss to Barack Obama, the Republican establishment undertook a rigorous postmortem and, looking at demographic trends in the United States, determined that appealing to Hispanics was now a nuclear-level priority. And yet their successful candidate in the next election won by doing precisely the opposite. The Trump strategy looked an awful lot like the Sailer Strategy: the divisive but influential idea that the GOP could run up the electoral score by winning over working-class whites on issues like immigration, first proposed by the conservative writer Steve Sailer in 2000, and summarily rejected by establishment Republicans at the time. Now, 17 years and four presidential cycles later, Sailer, once made a pariah by mainstream conservatives, has quietly become one of the most influential thinkers on the American right.

Sailer himself says that he’s really not much of an inventor:

I’m more of an analyst. My contribution perhaps is to explain the inevitability of identity politics and to recommend prudent policies for moderating their impact.

He also notes that the article doesn’t link to anything it cites, so he provides his own references.

Enoch Powell gave his infamous Rivers of Blood speech on April 20, 1968. Here’s how the BBC reported it:

The Conservative right-winger Enoch Powell has made a hard-hitting speech attacking the government’s immigration policy.

Addressing a Conservative association meeting in Birmingham, Mr Powell said Britain had to be mad to allow in 50,000 dependents of immigrants each year.

He compared it to watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.

The MP for Wolverhampton South West called for an immediate reduction in immigration and the implementation of a Conservative policy of “urgent” encouragement of those already in the UK to return home.

“It can be no part of any policy that existing families should be kept divided. But there are two directions on which families can be reunited,” he said.

Mr Powell compared enacting legislation such as the Race Relations Bill to “throwing a match on to gunpowder”.

He said that as he looked to the future he was filled with a sense of foreboding.

“Like the Roman, I seem to see the river Tiber foaming with much blood,” he said.

He estimated that by the year 2000 up to seven million people — or one in ten of the population — would be of immigrant descent.

How did that prediction pan out?

The Census in 2001 showed 4.6 million people living in the UK were from an ethnic minority, or 7.9% of the population.

Here’s the opening to the actual speech:

The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils. In seeking to do so, it encounters obstacles which are deeply rooted in human nature.

One is that by the very order of things such evils are not demonstrable until they have occurred: at each stage in their onset there is room for doubt and for dispute whether they be real or imaginary. By the same token, they attract little attention in comparison with current troubles, which are both indisputable and pressing: whence the besetting temptation of all politics to concern itself with the immediate present at the expense of the future.

Above all, people are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even for desiring troubles: “If only,” they love to think, “if only people wouldn’t talk about it, it probably wouldn’t happen.”

Perhaps this habit goes back to the primitive belief that the word and the thing, the name and the object, are identical.

At all events, the discussion of future grave but, with effort now, avoidable evils is the most unpopular and at the same time the most necessary occupation for the politician. Those who knowingly shirk it deserve, and not infrequently receive, the curses of those who come after.

(I’ve mentioned this speech before.)

“If the history of the world is but the biography of great men, as Thomas Carlyle put it, the history of Britain since the 1960s is but the biography of two great men and one woman,” The Economist declares, apparently channeling the spirit of Mencius Moldbug:

As Labour home secretary from 1965-67, Roy Jenkins took the government out of the bedroom with a series of liberalising laws on divorce, homosexuality and censorship. As Tory prime minister from 1979-90 Margaret Thatcher unleashed the power of markets. The main job of their successors was to come to terms with these twin revolutions: Tony Blair converted Labour to Thatcherism and David Cameron converted the Tories to Jenkinsism.

Before Brexit it looked as if that was it: the party that could produce the best synthesis of Thatcher and Jenkins would win. But today a third figure hovers over British politics: a man who was born in 1912 — eight years before Jenkins and 13 before Thatcher — but whose influence seems to grow by the day. One of Enoch Powell’s most famous observations was that “all political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at some happy juncture, end in failure.” His political life is enjoying a posthumous success.

Powell put two issues at the heart of his politics: migration and Europe. He convulsed the country in 1968 when he declared in a speech in his native Birmingham that mass immigration would produce social breakdown — that “like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood.” And he campaigned tirelessly against the European Economic Community. These two passions were united by his belief in the nation state. He thought that nations were the building blocks of society and that attempts to subvert them, through supranational engineering or global flows of people, would end in disaster.

Powell didn’t have the same direct influence as Thatcher or Jenkins. Thatcher was prime minister for 11 tumultuous years. Jenkins lived his life at the centre of the establishment. Powell spent only 15 months of his 37-year political career in office, as minister for health; nothing of substance bears his name on the statute books. In his new book, “The Road to Somewhere”, David Goodhart, a liberal critic of multiculturalism who has been accused of “liberal Powellism”, thinks that his “rivers of blood” speech was doubly counter-productive: it toxified the discussion of immigration for a generation and set the bar to successful immigration too low (no rivers foaming with blood, no problem).

Yet Brexit is soaked in the blood of Powellism. Some of the leading Brexiteers acknowledge their debt to Powell: Nigel Farage regards him as a political hero and says that the country would be better today if his words had been heeded. Powell lit the fire of Euroscepticism in 1970 and kept it burning, often alone, for decade upon decade. He provided the Eurosceptics with their favourite arguments: that Europe was a mortal threat to British sovereignty; that Britain’s future lay in going it alone, “her face towards the oceans and the continents of the world”; that the establishment had betrayed the British people into joining Europe, by selling a political project as an economic one, and would betray them again. History has also been on his side. David Shiels, of Wolfson College, Cambridge, points out that, in Powell’s time, the questions of immigration and Europe were distinct (the immigration that worried him was from the Commonwealth). Europe’s commitment to the free movement of people drove the two things together and gave Powellism its renewed power.

Just as important as his arguments was his style. Powell was the first of the new generation of populists cropping up across the West, a worshipper of Nietzsche in his youth, a professor of classics by the age of 25 who nevertheless considered himself a true voice of the people. He believed that the British establishment had become fatally out of touch on the biggest questions facing the country and used his formidable charisma — insistent voice tinged with Brummie, hypnotic stare — to seduce his audiences.

Zoroastrianism might be called the obscure religion that shaped the West:

It is generally believed by scholars that the ancient Iranian prophet Zarathustra (known in Persian as Zartosht and Greek as Zoroaster) lived sometime between 1500 and 1000 BC. Prior to Zarathustra, the ancient Persians worshipped the deities of the old Irano-Aryan religion, a counterpart to the Indo-Aryan religion that would come to be known as Hinduism. Zarathustra, however, condemned this practice, and preached that God alone – Ahura Mazda, the Lord of Wisdom – should be worshipped. In doing so, he not only contributed to the great divide between the Iranian and Indian Aryans, but arguably introduced to mankind its first monotheistic faith.

The idea of a single god was not the only essentially Zoroastrian tenet to find its way into other major faiths, most notably the ‘big three’: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The concepts of Heaven and Hell, Judgment Day and the final revelation of the world, and angels and demons all originated in the teachings of Zarathustra, as well as the later canon of Zoroastrian literature they inspired. Even the idea of Satan is a fundamentally Zoroastrian one; in fact, the entire faith of Zoroastrianism is predicated on the struggle between God and the forces of goodness and light (represented by the Holy Spirit, Spenta Manyu) and Ahriman, who presides over the forces of darkness and evil. While man has to choose to which side he belongs, the religion teaches that ultimately, God will prevail, and even those condemned to hellfire will enjoy the blessings of Paradise (an Old Persian word).

How did Zoroastrian ideas find their way into the Abrahamic faiths and elsewhere? According to scholars, many of these concepts were introduced to the Jews of Babylon upon being liberated by the Persian emperor Cyrus the Great. They trickled into mainstream Jewish thought, and figures like Beelzebub emerged. And after Persia’s conquests of Greek lands during the heyday of the Achaemenid Empire, Greek philosophy took a different course. The Greeks had previously believed humans had little agency, and that their fates were at the mercy of their many gods, whom often acted according to whim and fancy. After their acquaintance with Iranian religion and philosophy, however, they began to feel more as if they were the masters of their destinies, and that their decisions were in their own hands.