The omnipresent heirs of the Blob, have drunk the hemlock of decline
It’s Day Two of the National Conservative conference and the commercial opportunities for t-shirt production are very real. A favourite was this from Prof. Gwythian Prins: “So many, particularly in the establishment, and the omnipresent heirs of the Blob, have drunk the hemlock of decline.”
But seriously the gathering was a potent brew of the sinister and the cretinous. Let’s see if it’s possible to prise them apart?
Some criticism has been raised about the casualness with which the F word is used by Bella in relation to these people. Evidence of actual fascism – as opposed to “right-wing populism” (the distinction is blurry) can be gleaned from mapping them against Umberto Eco’s Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism – in which he identifies fourteen features of fascist ideology which are constant across time. Here’s three that jump out:
“To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country. This is the origin of nationalism. Besides, the only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies. Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged.”
“Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology, insofar as it is fundamentally aristocratic, and aristocratic and militaristic elitism cruelly implies contempt for the weak.”
“A cult of action, as celebration of aggressive masculinity, an intolerance of criticism, a fear of difference and outsiders, intense nationalism and resentment of national humiliation.”
Certainly these themes are all there – swapped and referenced by speaker after speaker – some coded some less bashful. A sense of being besieged, often by imaginary enemies that flit between ‘boat people’, the left, sexual deviants, hidden ‘elites’ or just ‘foreigners’ is an ever-present.
Confused and confusingly a ‘contempt for the weak’ is also present and sits oddly with the talk of hidden elites. The NatCons are both common people and themselves elites, they are both extremely guarded about their own networks and funding and simultaneously fearful of ‘hidden forces’ in society (often code for Jews or the threat of racial impurity or the Great Replacement Theory). A common thread that joins MAGA and Brexit is of course the straining ‘resentment of national humiliation.’ This too is an irony for Prof. Prins: and his “omnipresent heirs of the Blob” who “have drunk the hemlock of decline” – as a central obsession of the NatCons is indeed a profound sense of their own decline.
The threats are everywhere. One, of course is the EU. Here Kevin Roberts the President of the Heritage Foundation:
“Today, the EU embodies the cultural chauvinism, spiritual decadence, and strategic incompetence, and tyrannical ambition that have hurried the continent into chaos for millennia.”@Heritage‘s @KevinRobertsTX at #NatConUK pic.twitter.com/qh508Rdnbu
— National Conservatism (@NatConTalk) May 16, 2023
The sense of imminent threat is everywhere, but also nowhere. Michael Anton explains:
It’s hard to specify what threatens to consume the entire West.
Is it “wokeism”?
Is it the media?
Is it the administrative state?
Is it the university-NGO-international busybody
complex?I would say that it’s all of the above.
-Michael Anton at #NatConUK pic.twitter.com/WIEx5Y1GRK
— National Conservatism (@NatConTalk) May 16, 2023
Anton formerly served as a senior national security official on the National Security Council under Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump. His most recent book is, The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return (Regnery Publishing, 2020).
Anton also expresses the links being nurtured between the British and American far-right movements, funders and think-tanks, all brought together to battle the ‘globalist Borg’:
I can’t stress enough how much Brexit buoyed us Trump supporters in the summer of 2016 and how much all of us Anglophiles were enthused to see Britain standing up for herself against the globalist Borg.
-Michael Anton at #NatConUK pic.twitter.com/K0eQtK8aWu
— National Conservatism (@NatConTalk) May 16, 2023
If much of this sinister, a lot of it is just deeply delusional. The whole event just aches with regret and self-deception. Here’s Gwythian Prins with a masterclass in both:
Britain shines as a beacon wide across the Commonwealth.
Many remember the British legacy with fondness, while the British people no longer believe in themselves.
-Gwythian Prins on “Cultural Disarmament and Foreign Policy” at #NatConUK pic.twitter.com/awww0mrmKy
— National Conservatism (@NatConTalk) May 16, 2023
To recap we are both brilliant and ‘Great’ but also under constant and imminent attack by hidden forces that control everything, except we do, or we should anyway. We are both caring but also ‘fuck the poor’.
[thanks to @free_musick for the image]
We are supported only by our readers. We don't have corporate backers and we don't take advertising, so we rely entirely on your support.
Help to support independent Scottish journalism
It is a classic ‘divide and rule’ strategy. Via the omnipresent right wing media, an ‘other’ is identified – e.g. East Europeans, Asians, Africans, ‘immigrants’, Irish etc, etc as the ’cause’ of the misery people are genuinely experiencing because of low wages, poor public services, etc, which are decisions made by powerful groups under the rubric of ‘cutting waste’, ‘austerity’, slashing red tape’, ‘driving down costs’, ‘taking our jobs, houses, women, etc’ etc.
The aim of all of these strategies is to transfer wealth and power from the majority of us to the very wealthy. “Maximising profit” is a legal requirement for businesses and so, for example, if water companies discharge sewage into rivers and get fined, this is passed on to customers and money is not invested in improvements to sewage management systems because these incur costs which mean less profit.
A ‘celebration of aggressive masculinity’: men afraid of their own shadow, they project their unconscious preoccupations on to those, the moral superiority of whose positions they recognise and fear.
For ‘the globalist Borg’ read most of us ordinary people whose hearts are in the right place.
It is increasingly clear to me that these men, whose power and influence we see promoted, paid for and fostered by the extremely wealthy, are wholly driven by fear of losing their habit of male entitledness and superiority. The women who join them are traitors to their sex.
Arthur Schopenhauer summed it up well
“The cheapest sort of pride is national pride; for if a man is proud of his own nation, it argues that he has no qualities of his own of which he can be proud; otherwise he would not have recourse to those which he shares with so many millions of his fellowmen. The man who is endowed with important personal qualities will be only too ready to see clearly in what respects his own nation falls short, since their failings will be constantly before his eyes. But every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud adopts, as a last resource, pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and glad to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.”
This one sums up what will happen on the “they’re turning into Nazis” front
“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”
And my favourite (which more and more I’m walking the walk on)
“There are two kinds of people in this world. Avoid both of them.”
That’s my new mantra, thank you for that.
@Tom Ultuous, well, truth isn’t the only thing that’s ridiculed.
I’m wondering, since this event seems to suck up to the USA to a denture-removing degree, which nation are its attendees ostensibly proud of? I suppose the capitalist vultures behind these thinktanks realise they have to make some effort to make this look less like a foreign-backed coup and more like indigenous Jingoism, but wasn’t that rather the point of Brexit for these people: to take the client status of the British to USAmerican Empire down to a more blatant level of open servility?
With you there. As far back as 30 years ago I can remember a Scottish Loyalist spouting anti-EU garbage and talking about becoming the 51st state. Another one (a bin man) stated the EU minimum wage could “cost this country jobs”.
Tom, love the quotes.
So what do these creepy Nat-C’s want exactly? Plenty about who is to blame for society’s problems, but little to aspire to. What’s the vision?
Could they all take themselves off to an island, erect strong borders (high walls, razor-wire) and patrol them with tanks and gun-boats. Kick out any elites, wokes, decadent intellectuals, people without family-values, the weak, the dependant etc. Build a thriving utopia of sovereign individuals all doing sovereign individual stuff that produces great wealth and happiness. No namby-pamby health care or mutual support infrastructure. No whining minimum-wage labour-force doing boring stuff that doesn’t matter. Just a dog-eat-dog paradise of Darwinian apex predators doing what they wilt.
Can they all go now please? They’ll love it.