With the ascension of a new Sovereign and the recent controversy surrounding the coronation, the British republican movement has reared its ugly head once more, spearheading a renewed debate as to the Royal Family’s ‘relevance’ and ‘value-for-money’ in 2023. Throughout the day we were bombarded with news coverage of anti-monarchist activism, primarily from Republic and their leader Graham Smith. However, with their focus on democracy and the ‘need for modernisation’, left-wingers fail to fully appreciate the Monarchy’s national function.
Having existed since the kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England, Britain’s constitutional monarchy has been able to develop organically and overcome numerous challenges (from wars and republican dictatorship, to callous individualists like Edward VIII). With a basis on preparing the heir apparent from birth, many of our kings and queens have been embodiments of duty and moral courage – the late Queen Elizabeth II being a prime example. Indeed, alongside an organic and family-based system comes an inherent sense of national familiarity and comfort – they provide the British people with a unifying and quasi-parental figure, and almost a sense of personal connection with the other royals.
As well as this, the institution acts as a crucial barrier against the danger of democratic radicals and the idiocy and ineptitude that resonates from the Commons. Our entire political class seek to further their own interests, and with the Lords having seen terrible reforms under Blair, the Monarchy is left as the People’s last defence against the whims of power-hungry elites.
They also act as a link to Britain’s past and cultural heritage, as a source of national continuity. The Monarchy embodies our religious character with the Church of England, as well as nature of constitutional government with the different organs. As Sir Roger Scruton eloquently put it, it acts as ‘the voice of history.’ This point fundamentally speaks to the Left’s opposition to the Monarchy’s continuation. They can shout about equality and elected decision-making, but their attack on the Royal Family is inherently an attack on Britain’s history, which they vehemently despise. They want to tear down Britain’s unifying soul, and replace it with some soulless political office, one with no roots in national history or organic development.
The renowned Edmund Burke spoke of the need for national myths, a library of inspiring stories and a rich historical character. This is what maintains a nation’s identity and keeps the people united. It is for this reason (amongst others) that he so fiercely opposed the French Revolution, responding with Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790. These idealist revolutionaries could topple the Bourbon dynasty and establish a new ‘progressive’ society, but based on what? What would these ‘unifying’ ideals be? Without a solid foundation that had developed and grown organically, what could people possibly hold onto?
Now from the perspective of left-wingers, the transition to a republic would merely be a political one – simply making politics ‘more democratic and egalitarian’. A referendum would most likely be called, people would vote, and the Will of the People would be obeyed absolutely. Consider their preferred alternative, most likely a presidential system. We would be burdened, like so many nations, with yet another incompetent, weak, and self-interested hack at the top – an office created by and for the existing political class to monopolize, the final step in achieving a grey managerialist Britain.
But such an event would in truth represent so much more – a fundamental shift in Britain’s identity. Constitutional monarchy is our one national continuity and forms the basis of our mythos. All else is transient – politicians, the values of the day, social debates. Through the royals, Britons throughout the ages maintain a living link to past generations, and to our Anglo heritage as a people. Once again quoting Scruton, ‘they speak for something other than the present desires of present voters’, they are ‘the light above politics.’
The royals are especially important in Britain’s climate of national decline, with an assortment of failing institutions, from the NHS to the Civil Service to the police. It is increasingly evident that we require a national soul more than ever – to once again enshrine Britain’s history. We can’t survive on the contemporary values of ‘Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion’, on the NHS, Bureaucratisation, or record-high immigration levels. A return to order and stability, faith and family, and aggressive nationalism is the only way forward – Britons need to feel safe, moral, unified, and proud.
This Third Carolean Era has the opportunity to revitalise the role monarchy plays in peoples’ lives. By making it more divine, more mystical – alongside a conservative revolution – we can ensure Britain’s soul remains whole and pure.
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We Need a Che Guevara of Our Own
The title might be misleading at first, but there is a good reason for that. To understand the needs and opportunities for the contemporary Right, we first need to understand what got the Left into power at first.
Enter Che Guevara, or more exactly, enter Ernesto Guevara de la Serna.
For anyone in either the free-market or the classical conservative sphere, the travel log of his motorcycle trip around Latin America should be a required reading. Not because it is an historical account of the radicalization of one man, who from well-educated Argentinian bourgeois doctor went to terrorist, revolutionary and guerrilla leader, but because it shows the seeds of how a simple man with ideas (albeit in his case, the worst ones) can become an archetype, a religious icon for a set of beliefs.
Even for someone like Murray Rothbard himself, Che Guevara was someone worth of interest, to the point of writing a highly critical but yet prophetic obituary for him, and Rothbard, of course, was right, because Che Guevara has probably become the most well-known political figure in recent Latin American history, and outside of the developed West, that is, the US-led Anglosphere and Western Europe, his face and his name have become synonymous with armed struggle, with guerrilla warfare, with an utopian socialist ideal that knows no limits nor boundaries.
His death at the hands of the Bolivian Army, helped by the CIA, in a failed attempt to spark an agrarian Marxist revolution in the Andean Altiplano, only contributed more to his already legendary status among those who oppose the ideas of freedom and civilization.
In practice, his death made him a martyr of the Left, a religious symbol of a revolution that never came but is always presented as the gospel of egalitarianism. Say what you want about Che Guevara, say he was a killer and a terrorist, and you will be right. But that doesn’t take away the fact that Che was ready to die for his ideas, and in fact did so.
The Right, neither conservative nor libertarian, doesn’t have a single person who has gone to such extents. We don’t have martyrs, and our beliefs are not religious. We may think of the self-immolating acts committed by the likes of Alex Jones or Kanye West as martyrdom for our causes, like free speech, but they are nothing but counterproductive folk activism.
In fact, our beliefs, are quite the opposite to a religious fanatism, for they are rooted in the reasonable analysis of history, nature and society, and as such, the results of our ideas, even if adequate on a long term, are not easy to sell to high-time preference masses, who have become used to receive subsidies from governments and have internalized the propaganda created by the corporate-managerial class that works in tandem with policy-makers.
Our society is deadlocked between an individual struggle for freedom and an organized struggle for power, and our times are stranger than ever, for they represent what Francis Fukuyama still insists is the End of History, but look closer to the civilization end stage described by Oswald Spengler in his Decline of the West magnum opus.
The problem is that if we take either Fukuyama’s or Spengler’s words for granted, we’re still left without some key elements to understand the mechanics of our age: liberal democracy is indeed the dominant system all around the world, but it is not liberal (for it is not generous, as defined by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, and because it creates false, unstable prosperity out of heavy taxation, inorganic monetary emission and general government intervention of the economy), nor it is democratic (for it allows everyone to vote, no matter who or what “the People” is or is intended to be, and reserves power only for an unelected managerial class.)
If this account of facts is remindful of James Burnham’s ideas, it is because he, like Spengler, identified elements of our current collapse, and tried to predict its future by equating the imminent managerialism of the West with Soviet Stalinism and Italian fascism, and in many senses, Burnham was right, and Western managerialism has indeed become something akin to fascism, although without the nationalism, as Lew Rockwell has repeatedly warned us.
But where does that leave us and how is Che Guevara connected to all of this?
Simple: for Burnham, as well as for Spengler, as theorists of Western collapse, the system that would be in place in the endgame of civilization would depend on strongmen like Cecil Rhodes to work smoothly, for they, as the Great Men in History described by Thomas Carlyle, would be the only ones able to take the reins of power to direct society.
This mention of Cecil Rhodes is not random, because he could probably be considered the best example of how a Great Man idea must be compensated with a sound understanding of historical processes, and because Rhodes, like Che Guevara, was strongman, a tactician and a born leader. In Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s words, he was a natural elite.
From an English boy with poor health, the son of an Anglican priest, he became a mining magnate and then an important politician in South Africa. His talent for business allowed to thrive and prosper, and his short stay in Oxford University shaped his worldview into one of British dominance and influence.
In the same fashion as other strongmen before him, Rhodes was elevated into the highest prestige in his last years and after his death, with the British colonies he helped to acquire getting named after him (not unlike Bolivia being named after Simón Bolívar), with his South African estate becoming the campus for the University of Cape Town, and with his large fortune left to fund the Oxford scholarship named in his honor, which has helped educated thousands of politicians and enterprise heads from all around the Anglosphere, with the original intent of shaping them to think in the same way Rhodes himself thought about a British-dominated world.
But his legacy hasn’t prospered as much as the almost religious veneration Che Guevara has acquired, for the idea of Rhodes, the imperial businessman and politician, once respected as an ideal of the British Empire, has now become anathema even in the very institution he attended and donated his fortune to, for the gospel of egalitarianism cannot allow the veneration of natural elites, in their own times and contexts.
Che Guevara, on the other side, by living fast and dying young, by focusing and sacrificing himself to his ideas, created a myth around and about himself, a myth that men like Cecil Rhodes could have never even achieved.
And now, in our Populist age, where political and business leaders emerge out of the polarization of ideas and beliefs, where strongmen and magnates like Ron DeSantis and Elon Musk can lead thousands of supporters and yet still have troubles to hold or exercise power in their own spheres of influence, the question remains: what are we missing that the Left does have?
We may not realize it, but the Left is currently lacking this key element: they don’t have natural elites, they don’t have caudillos, they don’t have true leaders.
In their inflation of their egos, they have elevated the likes of Klaus Schwab and Samuel Bankman-Fried into their demigods, and when the societal collapse they have caused themselves may finally come, they won’t be able to prevent it or to mitigate it.
But here is where and when our duty becomes clear: if the Left is a fanatic religious movement focused on enforcing egalitarianism, and if the Left has had its martyrs like Che Guevara, then our fight, just as Rothbard said, must also be a religious crusade, one for the defense of freedom and civilization.
But to fight such a fight you don’t only need fighters, you need leaders, tacticians, strategists. Not everyone can be one, because our natural differences make us spontaneously inclined to different activities and positions in life, but extreme circumstances do create extreme leaders.
Ernesto Guevara did not become El Che from day to night, he was transformed by his trip around Latin American, radicalized by the poor living conditions of his fellow men, and engaged by the common identity of a single continent from the Rio Grande to Patagonia. It just happens he took to wrong path and he fought for the wrong ideas, and instead of prosperity to the masses, the only things he brought were death and misery, in Cuba, in Angola, and in Bolivia.
His face, now a symbol, still represents carnage and poverty wrapped around an utopian ideal, but ultimately proves the point of this essay: Che was, and still is, a symbol.
We, in the Right, cannot take him for our side, because it would be incoherent and counterproductive, but we must understand what made him as such. Che emerged under the most unlikely conditions and circumstances. Our Che will probably emerge from the most unlikely of the places as well.
Because if one thing is true, that our conflict with the left is indeed a religious fight against a fanatic progressive dogma, then we will also need leaders and martyrs, just like Che was for the Left in the past. We need a Che Guevara of our own.
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The Tory Leadership Wedge
As the Conservative Party leadership contest has unfolded, an issue wedge has gradually been inserted into its surrounding discourse. What is an issue wedge? It is a tactical device, not an organic manifestation, that is designed to divide ongoing political issues in a specific way. More specifically, it is meant to override organic political divisions with an arbitrary political division which favours the political agenda of the wedge-driver(s).
The problematic nature of the wedge is not its divisive nature. Quite the opposite, the problem of the wedge is that it denies all forms of political division; all political division except the form of division established through the wedge.
Division is the nature of the political; as Schmitt says: “the distinction between friend and enemy”. Where there is division, there is the opportunity for deliberation and conflict, and where there is deliberation and conflict, there is opportunity for change. When the opportunity for change is taken away, all that is left is the status quo. I refer to this as a wedge, rather than “depoliticization” for the sole reason that I am concerned with a specific instance of depoliticization, rather than depoliticization as a phenomenon. Whether it is understood as a strategy to create distance between governments and responsibility for implementing policy, an attempt to remove politics for the formulation of policy, or the more general practice of curtailing the agency of non-governmental actors, depoliticization is underpinned by the idea of removing things from the political arena, inoculating them against political critique, challenge, or change. Who decides what issues are removed from the political arena? That itself is a political matter, and more the focus of this article.
In this case, Tory Leadership discourse has been fractured by a Costalivin-Culture War wedge. In short: you must choose between solutions to Costalivin or fighting the Culture War. You are not allowed to support both.
Are you concerned by the police’s indifference to violent crime, or their willingness to harass normal individuals? Do you approve of vandalising and destroying taxpayer-funded statues of British icons? Are you concerned illegal immigration and immigration-led demographic change? Do you find the idea of “trans children” just a tad ridiculous and possibly very damaging?
If you care at all about these matters, you are a culture warrior; a low-status, GBNews-watching, Leave-voting, Union flag-waving culture warrior. If you are a culture warrior, you are indifferent to the cost-of-living crisis. If you are indifferent to the cost-of-living crisis, you are condemning the nation to poverty and suffering. If you condemn the nation to poverty and suffering, you are evil, and so on. Focus on Costalivin, categorically ignore Culture War. If you don’t categorically ignore Culture War, you are categorically ignoring Costalivin. In summary: you can challenge the status quo, just not all of it.
Who decides what aspects of the status quo may be challenged? Supporters of the status quo. Surprise, surprise! Wedge-drivers drives the wedge. By dividing Costalivin against Culture War, attributing public interest to the former and distraction and subversion to the latter, the wedge-drivers hope to ensure that the public are cut off from politically engaging with cultural issues under the guise of public interest.
When called out on their wedge-driving, the wedge-drivers insist they are merely prioritising The Issues. This disguise is immediately betrayed by the fact that priority implies multiplicity. One can have multiple priorities and stratified priorities are nevertheless priorities. To reduce any ambiguity, just note that the wedge-drivers (God save them) have taken it upon themselves to decide our priorities for us.
Discussing cultural issues is, according to the wedge-drivers, definitive proof of having no solution to Costalivin; discussing immigration, crime, censorship in public life, etc. is necessarily a diversion. Given the shallow, often non-existent Costalivin solutions of the wedge-drivers, it can just as easily be argued that their attacks on “Culture Warriors” is also necessarily a diversion.
The wedge-drivers aren’t necessarily conscious of their wedge-driving, but their mentality is generally the same. “Those stupid culture warriors and their divisive Us VS Them tactics. We need to push them out of the discourse so then people like us, those worthy of political participation, can get on with discussing “The Priorities”. It is effectively a way for political participants (especially political commentators) to pull rank on each other.
If Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak were giving speeches about nothing but “men in the women’s bathroom” or “[REDACTED] nonsense in our universities”, that would be one thing. However, despite the crippling un-remarkableness of both candidates, I don’t think it has come to that. Criticising a candidate for failing to have an agreeable answer (never mind a solution) to a concurrent political issue is different to criticising a candidate for having no answer (or solution) to a concurrent issue.
Members of the Tory Party, and the nation collectively, are affected by Costalivin and Kulturkampf (albeit in different ways) and should be allowed (perhaps, expected) to demand effective solutions to both, which necessarily entails the freedom to criticise candidates that fall short of their expectations without being accused of second-hand genocide and in need of censorship, ostracization from the political sphere, etc.
The wedge-drivers don’t want cultural matters to be in the political arena because it would make these matters contestable. By coming out in opposition to the deliberation of these matters, they reveal themselves to be supporters of the status quo; a status quo which denies deliberation and conflict over these matters, leading to the imposition of whatever can be imposed.
Keep in mind: none of this is the same as arguing that certain things are, as a matter of fact, mutually exclusive or heavily contingent on one another. Indeed, wedge-drivers seem blissfully ignorant of the fact that economic policies do have social implications.
It’s one thing to suggest that liberal government handouts, legitimised in the name of responding to a crisis, will drive immigration (legal and illegal) and if one is concerned by the latter, the former is ill-advised. It’s another thing to demand political participants self-censor their concerns about immigration because the wedge-drivers (journalists, policy wonks, commentators, etc.) have decided that talking about immigration is “Culture War Nonsense”, etc.
It is a matter of fact that mass immigration increases demand for houses and that, without any means of placating increased demand, already eye-watering housing costs will increase as well. Given this, one would imagine such a matter would be of interest to Costalivin Warriors, but it isn’t. Why? Because, as I mentioned earlier, earnest solutions are not the “priority”. It’s about preserving a dimension of the status-quo that has come under an ever-increasing amount of criticism.
In summary, the Tory Leadership wedge is an attempt to deny political choice at a time when people need it most. We should not have to choose between low taxes or low crime. We should not have to choose between constructing nuclear plants or controlling our borders. We should not have to choose between building more houses and defunding border-dodging NGOs. We should not have to choose between abolishing the Town and Country Planning Act (1947) and abolishing the Equality Act (2010), etc, etc.
This attempt to declare a state-of-exception on political discourse itself must be resisted. We must not allow wedge-drivers to give the British people the illusion of no alternatives. People are quick to note British democracy’s negative turn; the increasingly common habit of voting for “the least bad option” rather than “the good option”. Though they are right, I fear this is becoming an understatement. Not only is our politics degenerating, so too is our political commentary. The sorry state of our politicians creates political deprivation. The wedge-driving from many in our political commentariat not only makes this deprivation worse, it adds insult to the initial injury: expecting people to listen to you whatever you have to say, after having whittled down almost all their means of response.
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On Truth and Democracy
O Tempora, O Mores (L., “Oh the times, Oh the customs”), is an apothegm attributed to Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 – 43 BC), a Roman statesman, attorney, philosopher, and scholar. In his First Oration against Catiline (63 BC) that he delivered in the Roman Senate, Cicero deplored the sorry condition of the Roman Republic, and particularly the Roman citizen, Catiline, who had conspired to foment an insurrection, intended to overthrow the Roman government and Cicero himself, who was at that time serving as the Head-of-State.
The perspectives expressed by Cicero could be ascribed to the sorry state of the virulent political climate and the dysfunctional political parties in our society, which have become dystopian and farcical for the following reasons.
First, it and they have devolved into cults of personality (cult, L., cultus, “worship,” “homage,” “devoted attention to a person or thing”) populated by sycophants (Gk., sycophantes, L., sycophanta, “informer,” “slanderer,” “servile flatterer,” “show the fig” [a vulgar gesture]).
Second, fueled by the toxicity of an unbridled social media, the raison d’etre (Fr., “reason for being”) of many politicians has become self-aggrandizement and power, to the determinant of public service and the commonwealth.
Third, rather than deliberate the substance of issues, they rant, demonize their critics, and employ every fallacy of argumentation in their rhetoric, most frequently argumentum ad hominem (L., “argument against the person”).
Fourth, more willingly than seeking common ground and common cause, they resort to demagoguery, contentiousness, mendacity, litigiousness, and extremism.
Fifth, they are barren of any discretion, decorum, propriety, civility, and self-control.
And sixth, their hypocrisy is unbounded, as they deny any allegations against them and divest themselves of any responsibility or accountability, by assuming a posture of victimization, devoid of any semblance of shame, guilt, remorse, or contrition (“I have done nothing wrong;” “I am innocent;” “It’s politically motivated;” “It’s a witch hunt”).
Collectively, it and they could be described metaphorically as a “ship of fools.”
Das Narrenschiff
Sebastian Brandt (circa 1457-1521) was of Germanic heritage and earned a doctoral degree in canon and civil law from the University of Basel. He served as Imperial Counselor, Judge, and Chancellor under the Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian I (1459 – 1519). His most famous monograph, written as a humanist and satirist, was entitled Das Narrenschiff (Gr., “ship of fools”) (1494). Allegorically, it railed against the hypocrisies, weaknesses, political intrigues, and vices that were manifest during his lifetime. The author wrote that the ship was laden with and steered by fools. It wandered the ocean aimlessly, but by happenstance sailed to Narragonia, where they encountered Grobian, the patron saint of vulgar and coarse people.
To paraphrase the motif of the allegory, the author described the shipmates and crew as deranged, demented, frivolous, and oblivious; who were floating with the prevailing winds; and who were unhinged, unanchored, and unmoored. The author argued that they were in desperate need of statesmanship and leadership, to restore the ordinance and rule of reason and the ordinance and rule of law, grounded in truth, virtue, excellence, sound judgment, ethicality, and morality. The allegory is remarkably descriptive and prescient of the contemporaneous political climate and the political parties in our society.
The Past is Prologue
William Shakespeare (1564-1616), an English playwright, poet, and actor extraordinaire, in his tragicomedy The Tempest (1610-1611) wrote:
“Whereof what’s past is prologue, what to come,
In yours and my discharge.”
Dialogue between Antonio and Sebastian; Act 2, scene 1, lines 253-4One interpretation of that dialogue is that what had previously happened set the stage for what will follow, and will be the stuff of which our greatness or our fallenness will be made and measured. A cynical interpretation of that dialogue is that we will remain mired in the improprieties, imperfections, misinformation, and disinformation of the past. That notwithstanding, despite the dysfunction, farce, and fantasy that pervades the current political climate and the political parties in our society, both can be mitigated by a courageous, resolute, and willful intent. Consider, in that regard, the Four-Way Test.
The Four-Way Test
The Four-Way Test of the Things We Think. Say, or Do, is an ethical and moral code for personal and professional conduct and relationships. It was composed in 1932 by Mr. Herbert J. Taylor (1893-1978), a business executive and civic leader. It was adopted by Rotary International in 1943, as a standard and a code of conduct by which all communication and interpersonal behavior should be measured and judged.
When we hear or read an assertion in whatever venue, includingsocial media, it must always be analyzed rationally, logically, and skeptically, to discern its validity. The Four-Way Test is applicable in that regard:
- Is it the Truth?
- Is it fair to all concerned?
- Will it build good will and better relationships?
- Will it be beneficial to all concerned?
Common sense, prudence, and temperance dictate that if the assertion violates any of those tenets, that it is invalid; that it must be rejected; and that it must not be repeated, disseminated, or propagated.
Certainly, it may be advisable to research any assertion via other sources to confirm or refute its validity. Certainly, each of us enjoys freedom of speech/opinion, freedom of conscience, and liberty of choice. Nevertheless, those freedoms and choices imply a responsibility and an obligation to ensure that the assertions and our responses to them are truthful and valid. The intent of such an analysis is to preserve the integrity, honesty, veracity, wellness, health, and safety, of ourselves, our neighbors, our communities, and our commonwealth.
Audent cognoscere veritatem (L., dare to know the truth”).
It is incumbent upon each of us to apply due diligence upon public officials and proper vetting of their assertions. We must critically inquire of and critically analyze the credibility of those individuals and the validity of their assertions. Our allegiance to and support of them must be rational, justifiable, and meritorious (L., meritorious, “deserving of reward,” “worthy of praise or honor”), and not irrational, vacuous, and meretricious (L., meretricious, “pertaining to a harlot,”). Fellow citizens, ubi sumus itiones? (L., “where are we going?”). Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), attorney-at-law, statesman, and the Sixteenth President of the United States of America, at the Illinois Republican State Convention in Springfield, Illinois, in 1858, paraphrased a citation from Holy Scripture — a house [nation] divided against itself cannot stand. Liberty, freedom, and democracy require a united, virtuous, informed, and engaged citizenry. With resolution and diligence, such citizens could dramatically transform the political climate and the political parties in our society by acceptance and application of the Four-Way Test.
By way of summary, the following quotation is very apropos:
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted upon its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
Preface, A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
