ANDREW JACKSON AND THE ANTI-CATHEDRAL

by Jonathan Peter Wilkinson

The American Republic was the greatest one ever. It was so because it developed a Tao. There was a complicated and necessary balance between the Libertarian and the Authoritarian. There was another equally important equipoise between the Classical Liberal and The Progressive. Each school of thought had its plusses and minuses. Through rigorous balance, the best was extracted from each and the crack-pot ideas of all were kicked remorselessly to the curb through an almost Darwinian perfection of the civic population. These four forces were famously described by Walter Russell Mead as Wilsonian, Jacksonian, Hamiltonian, and Jeffersonian.

While the mapping isn’t perfect (Walter Russell Mead was writing foreign policy commentary when he developed the taxonomy), it’s not too abusive a stretch to map Wilsonians to Progressives, Jacksonians to Classical Liberals, Hamiltonians to Authoritarians and Jeffersonians to Civil Libertarians. Banish one of these four vectors to the outer darkness and you get a disturbance in the force…

MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ, FOUNDER OF NEOREACTION

Michel Houellebecq: a boon to spellcheckers the world over.

by Brett Stevens

With Michel Houellebecq in the news for his novel, Submission, it makes sense to remember his roots. He has made his name writing about the tedium of modern life and fleeting glimpses of beauty, truth, and purity that tempt people from it. His usually tragic characters cannot realize that beauty because of their broken psychologies and neuroses.

Houellebecq burst onto the scene in 1997 with Whatever, a cynically humorous book — think Louis-Ferdinand Celine or William Burroughs — about the failure of modern life. The characters struggle through pointless and boring jobs, alienating sexual relationships and dysfunctional families, all while wandering through a 21st-century dystopian wasteland that is both beautiful in its ruin and crassly plastic in the assumptions through which most people survive.

THE REDUNDANCY OF THE DARK ENLIGHTENMENT

by Brett Stevens

We live in an age of trends. For this reason, people are constantly inventing new "movements" which claim to be different, but are at a logical level identical to the older ones. By "at a logical level," I mean comparing the structure and function or their ideas and not their surface appearance. Appearance is always misleading and geared toward concealing the fundamental sameness of things.

Currently the roiling trend on the internet is movements like the "Dark Enlightenment," "Neo-reaction" and "red pill" as well as various "third way" movements. Each proclaims itself to be a new and untested idea, knowing that its audience craves novelty. And yet, if you dig below the level of appearance and look at the structure of the arguments of each group, you find something very far from new.

However, these groups have a lot vested in not admitting this. First, they are saturated in the media of a time that demonizes certain beliefs as ignorant and bad. Second, they would lose their novelty, and thus their reason to exist as independent profit-producing entities (generally through advertising revenues from blogs). And finally, they'd take an ego hit, and who wants to do that?