Men and the City 49: The Final Disillusionment

Trump will be the sacrificial lamb to the coming backlash.

Men in the city are disillusioned. Elections come and go, parties rise and fall, new coalitions are formed until they fragment, and new presidents, prime ministers, and chancellors promise change, and virtually all fail to deliver it so in the end nothing fundamentally does. Such is the ebb and flow of politics, as it always has been. Most of the time its oscillations blur into a seamlessness that’s almost machine like, assuming a life of its own, unresponsive and indifferent to humanity’s “whips and scorns.” Politics is supposed to be like this, to maintain a balance, however chaotic, that mean reverts, preserving the system at all costs until major shocks disrupt, discredit or destroy it. The Western System has reached such a moment.

Conservatives, naysayers, and blackpillers will decry “impossible.” The system never really changes except over eons of slow death, they scream, and in their world they are right. “Politics is the art of the possible” so the activists, analysts, pundits, and polemics scour the political landscape endlessly searching under every partisan rock, inspecting every scrap of political gossip to anticipate which way the machine will turn next. The mental fixation is so strong it is crippling to the imagination, to the impossible things beyond politics, to the metapolitical moment. Fortunate or otherwise, it is in the exogenous, invisible, unconscious and archetypal where the transformational events of history are born.

It is in the exogenous, invisible, unconscious and archetypal where the transformational events of history are born.

Societies rarely experience metapolitics because the process is so powerful, so destructive that nations either crumble or reset while traversing the chasm. Metapolitics can be crucibles of revolution (French, Russian Revolutions), civil conflict (Wars of German Unification, American Civil War), or they can be full scale wars (Thirty Years War, World War I, the Reconquista). Whatever form they assume, metapolitical moments are the product of profound changes in the psyches of men that linger beneath the surface of consciousness, ignored and barely noticeable, lying dormant but “flam[ing] with fire” until mysteriously and shockingly they strike the surface like a lightning storm. Such a fire has been burning in the minds of men in the city for some time and now we are beginning to see their fiery conjuring spring to life.

Solar Systems and End of Cycles

The election of Barack Obama was the Death of Conservatism. Just after the 2008 election a journalist named Sam Tanenhaus published a book by the same name which proclaimed that traditional conservatism had been overtaken by so called “movement conservatism.” “Movement conservatism” was a kind of revanchism according to Tanenhaus, a source of disruption and backlash rather than conservative reform. However, the deeper reality was that the ascension of Barack Obama represented the end of America’s founding demographic dominance since a majority of the majority of white Americans voted against Barack Obama twice and he won anyway. Essentially, Tanenhaus’ conclusion was half correct; conservatism died but so did America’s political system as we know it.

Barack Obama represented the end of America’s founding demographic dominance.

The long-standing trend in US politics for the last 50 years is the relentless erosion of DC’s political mainstream – the two-party system and the tentacled agencies they staff. Prima facie, this seems self-evidently false because both parties have entrenched themselves utterly beyond challenge. However, viewed from a different perspective, trust and confidence in both parties has worn to the nub, as has faith in democracy itself, the bastardized form that remains of it anyway. This development is a marked deviation from US political history, which has been defined by the predominance of one party or the other, not disillusionment with both.

A convincing model of the vicissitudes of American politics is the Political Solar System, a model invented by Sam Lubell in the 1950’s. In broad strokes, there tends to be a majority party, the sun, whose gravity holds everything in orbit including a minority party, the moon. A rough sketch of the history of the Republic can be divided into sun systems: Jeffersonians dominated from the early 19th century until the Civil War, the Republicans from the Civil War until the Depression, and Democrats from the Depression until Reagan’s “morning in America.” However, since roughly the 2000’s, as David Brooks wrote in 2011, “we are living in the era of two moons and no sun…neither party has been able to rally the country behind its vision of government.” More directly stated, we are living in an age in which the faith in America’s political system, in its democratic process and the parties who govern it has permanently buckled.

MAGA Moment

How does Make America Great Again (MAGA) fit into this model? Many would argue that 2016 frustrated the narrative above but the opposite is true. “Movement conservatism” spontaneously reengaged with the political system in the stunning election of Donald Trump, a polarizing populist who promised to Make America Great Again by realigning the institutions of power with the interests of a thinning and demoralized white majority. Suddenly, white Americans who had never voted before came out in surprising numbers to breathe life into the political system once again. Hopes were high that finally, after decades of disaffection with a corrupt political system the prospect of real, meaningful reform was here. As Trump’s efforts quickly stalled hopes faded into bitter cynicism.

The system leapt into action to subvert, undermine, and bottle up Trump’s presidency. Donald Trump’s primary focus was threefold: to stop illegal immigration and build a border wall, wind down America’s wars overseas, and reset trade relations with China to restore America’s rusted over industrial prowess. One could argue that he failed on all three. Illegal immigration did slow only to surge higher after Trump’s sabotaged reelection and a border wall was never built. Tensions with Russia and North Korea thawed momentarily but US forces remained in place across the world, and less than four years later America is on the precipice of fighting its first major war since Korea. Trade tariffs were put in place and maintained by Trump’s successor, but trade deficits continued to climb and manufacturing continues its multi-decade decline.

Trump was powerless to quell the discord and forced to abandon his agenda to protect himself and his family.

A stymied agenda was but part of the collateral damage. Underhanded tactics like phony Russian collusion investigations and impeachments, illegal intelligence spying, and seditious defections inside the bureaucracy were normalized by the system, penetrating even inside Trump’s White House Team. Resignations became the norm, media subterfuge intensified, and radicalized leftist organizations like Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Antifa looted, burned and bloodied America’s city streets. Isolated and lacking institutional support from his own government, Donald Trump was powerless to quell the discord and forced to abandon his agenda to protect himself and his family.

Trump Hopium and Nationalism’s Rise

Now Trump is back in the White House and so is the hopium, only this time with far greater enthusiasm and delusion. Perhaps Trump’s biggest supporters are a cohort of folks who think America’s problems are about policy rather than identity, cyclical rather than existential. The lion share of them are Boomer pragmatists: business professionals, political operatives, Wall Streeters, creatures of the status quo who have long benefitted from Wall Street's inflated asset prices and DC's government spending. A smaller pool are younger, more conservative types who are less delusional than defeated. For them, capitulation, what they call compromise, is the only way forward so Trumpism is a half empty glass of milk they choose to see as half full. Both have lost the pulse of America, downplay the demographic damage done to its desperate white middle class, and distrust or deride the intensification of “movement conservatism” birthed some twenty years before.

Trump’s agenda (to the extent one exists) and the motley crew he is assembling to implement it are virtually irrelevant in this schema. Events have already overtaken them: the US economy is structurally broken, government finances are tapped out, America’s decrepit and ill-staffed woke armed forces are already committed to war in the Middle East (maybe Ukraine too), and the US population is dangerously balkanized along racial lines. Immigration was last century’s problem; this century is about demographic survival. Worse, the US Government (USG) as constituted is functionally incapacitated; it can barely manage current operations never mind implement positive reformist change. A structural breakdown of government (end of entitlements, the military-industrial-complex, constitutional overhaul) is unfolding before our eyes to anyone who cares to pay attention.

Immigration was last century’s problem; this century is about demographic survival.

Do not despair over this somber state of affairs as the politicos do because remember they have lost touch and imagination. The imminent and certain fiscal demise of the USG, the destruction of the dollar’s monetary empire and world-reserve status, and the liquidation of America’s global military empire do not represent the destruction of America itself. These corrupted sinews of power represent anti-America, each component has been seized, subverted, and weaponized, not simply against the world but against the founding demographic, white America. When that happens, history suggests you have reached the metapolitical moment and so we have.

Trump is the sacrificial lamb to the God’s of end-of-cycle, to the reset of the Political Solar System. Peter Thiel said the media “never takes him seriously, but it always takes him literally. ... I think a lot of voters who vote for Trump take Trump seriously but not literally.” In truth, Trump is a conservative masquerading as a nationalist, not the other way around as the Left fears and the Right secretly hopes. Soon, rather like Buchanan before the outbreak of the Civil War, no one will take him seriously or literally, and the conservatives will wail in vain at his spectacular fall. Broader forces set in motion by the machine politics cannot be redirected by such a tragic figure. The system must crash and burn so a new one can emerge in its ashes, and that is precisely the project of America’s festering nationalism.

Trump is the sacrificial lamb to the God’s of end-of-cycle, to the reset of the Political Solar System.

Disillusionment and Reconstruction

Reconstruction is the project ahead but whom to implement it? Metapolitics unleashes unforeseen forces that only outcasts, cranks, and weirdos can envision from the depths of their unconscious. The only clues to its contours lay in the distemperment of young men, in the disempowered, the maligned, the hated, marginalized and the forgotten. For us, it is the Primal Horde of sexless men, the red pilled men of the city, the phalanx of disillusioned and hypermasculine Network Men gathering in online spaces like the Manosphere. These awareness machines are rousing the national consciousness by the millions. Thus, is born the Neo-Masculine Movement and its mission to renationalize America and the Western world.

Reconstruction will be an inversion. American history (and European) is littered with counter-trend extremism: the Great Awakenings, Abolitionism, Prohibition, Civil Rights, and most recently Wokism. Inversions are common to all societies because transformational social forces take so long to build up and do so in the imagination first, in the collective unconscious, in the archetypes of masculinity and nationalism. While these impulses grow stronger in the minds of men its imperceptible potencies go ever unnoticed and dismissed by the establishment, and that will be their undoing.

While these impulses grow stronger in the minds of men, its imperceptible potencies go ever unnoticed and dismissed by the establishment, and that will be their undoing.

Truly, an explosion is coming. The backlash from a scalding nation so long poisoned by propaganda, maimed by faltering standards of living, dismembered by phony wars, isolated and surrounded by foreigners, and disillusioned by the stench of a crime infested politics will be ferocious. War is coming, fiscal collapse is in process, and the fight for America’s national identity will overwhelm its lawless coastal cities as America’s paralyzed political system fails to restore order to the chaos. It is in the vacuum of civil disarray that nationalism will resurface, spontaneously and with reckless abandon. Don’t believe me, ask a young man across Europe or America what he thinks, or better yet, what visions he can imagine.

Subscribe for more on men, the city and Neo-Masculinity in turbulent times.