The Crime Issue and the Nation's Political Divide

Each helps explain the other.

My latest article is available at William M. Briggs’s superb Substack page, Science Is Not the Answer.

It’s called “Crime Issue Reveals the Real Source of Nation’s Political Divide,” and it finds that the two major political movements of our time have—somewhat to my surprise—consistent political philosophies behind them. One political party, the Democrats, represents its constituents’ political philosophy rather well. The other is much less effective. Please toddle over to SINTA and read the piece.

I appreciate the editorial introduction at the top of this piece. As it happens, I agree with our esteemed host about the civil rights era, and in particular the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. I believe that those laws were unconstitutional and unwise and unleashed awful consequences. I agree fully with Christopher Caldwell's analysis of that movement, for example.

This is one of those instances in which I mean to describe something without endorsing it--I refer to the Republicans' and Right's motives, and those may sound positive as I describe them, but their method was exceedingly unwise and in fact their motives easily led (and continue to lead) the GOP into big mistakes that destroy(ed) people's rights.

I was culpably unclear in not making the distinction between the captive Right (developed by cosmopolitan conservatives after the destruction of America First in the run-up to U.S. participation in World War II) and the new Right that has arisen since the consolidation of the Uniparty as exemplified by the two Bush administrations (and of course the Reagan and Trump administrations were strongly infiltrated by those elements as well).

The Contract with America and Tea Party Republicans set the stage for the current movement on the Right in political terms (and were swiftly destroyed), and its intellectual foundations can be seen in pre-WWII thinkers such as Albert Jay Nock, John T. Flynn, Zora Neale Hurston, Ludwig von Mises, and other prewar libertarians, and in intellectual descendants such as Samuel Francis, Ron Paul, Murray Rothbard, Patrick J. Buchanan, Paul Gottfried, Peter Brimelow, John Milius, etc. (Forgive me for leaving out any of your favorites.) The Dissident Right is, in my view, a salutary reaction to the capture of conservatism by the state. Since its inception in the 1950s, modern conservatism, as I have noted frequently in the past, has been devoted to conservation of the victories of the Left: the Managerial, Sexual, and Transnational revolutions and other such civilization-destroying and soul-sapping activities.

I think Matt is right to note that I am more in touch with the normies than most on the DR are. I do not, however, endorse the GOP line. Though I am an advocate of free markets, I hold that position as an advocate of liberty, not for consequentialist reasons. In fact, my Substack (

) and my op-eds, newsletter, and podcast appearances etc.) are full of observations about the Uniparty and my view that the GOP of recent decades has been a pretty dismal imitation of a party of protection of individual rights—though it could be one and should be one (in the sense that such a party is urgently needed). The description of the GOP as controlled opposition has been generally true.

Thus, I am open to criticism for giving Republicans too much credit for pushback against the state in this article. I believe that a growing portion of the Right generally understands the situation and the stakes, as described in the final paragraph of this piece, whereas its only plausible political home at present, the Republican Party, though "inclined to protect these individuals from the uses of force and/or fraud against them by government," as I write, has neither the courage nor devotion to those principles to manifest that movement in reality--yet.

I believe that the GOP's regularly demonstrated reluctance to defend individual rights results from long decades of corruption and outright rejection of the values and ideas of the pre-WWII right, that corruption constituting the real source of the Republicans' refusal to enage against the Left in full. Those pre-captivity Right values are now returning to the intellectual and political realm. It is up to people like us to drag a political party in the right (Right) direction--or somehow bring about a different party that truly represents us.

I may be overly optimistic in thinking that possible, though I hope that I am just ahead of the curve.