Conservative Underpants Gnomes

Reviewing John Gray’s review of Bronze Age Mindset

I used to watch South Park with my older brother all the time. I think it noticeably stopped being funny in high school. My younger brother never enjoyed it, his Zoomer dopamine receptacles permanently fried by the decades of cruel and constant psychological torture inflicted on his generational race through media.

When I read the latest hit-piece on notable internet poster Bronze Age Pervert, I found myself thinking of South Park again, in particular, the episode “Gnomes.” The episode features a hidden society of Underpants Gnomes, who sneak into peoples’ homes then steal and stockpile their underwear. Although they don’t have the exact mechanism charted out, they are certain that if they steal enough underwear it will end in profit. They even have a song.

This latest article attempting to repudiate the infamous Mr. Pervert was written by British philosopher John Gray. Gray was one of the most influential early post-liberal thinkers. He’s notable for his critique of humanism in the book “Straw Dogs” (which, though I haven’t read it, a friend told me was very good). His work makes the case for a cyclical view of history and rejects the idea of eternal progress that seems to underlie much of modern thought. He’s probably the most notable philosopher to actually attempt to respond to BAP’s book.

I say “attempt to respond” because the article just kind of sucks. It doesn’t bother to substantively engage with BAP’s book Bronze Age Mindset or the recently-published thesis of Yale PhD Dr. Costin Alamariu, Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy, which, though by a different author, deals with many of the same themes. Gray’s article is mostly name-calling. BAP’s ideas are treated as self-refuting. Simply by saying them out loud readers are supposed to know to reject them. “Not an argument” flashed through my mind several times while reading this. The tone of the article struck me as more bitter than anything else.

This bitterness is understandable when you look at the bestseller rankings of BAP and Alamariu’s books alongside Gray’s most recent work, Feline Philosophy (2021), which, when I checked it earlier today, was about 150,000 places lower on the charts than either of the books Gray criticizes in his piece. It seems clear that BAP and Alamariu’s ideas have certainly surpassed Gray’s in the public consciousness. It’s likely that Selective Breeding, only released several weeks ago, is already the most widely-read PhD thesis in the last several decades. Although Gray says BAP’s work will soon be forgotten, it appears Gray’s work already has been.

Most bizarre for me to see, at least, was Gray's sudden mention of superstar folk musician Oliver Anthony in his repudiation of BAP. Gray wrote:

Still, it will not be a celebration of Mycenaean pirates that fuels the next phase of American disorder.

In August, the song “Rich Men North of Richmond” debuted at No 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 – the first song to do so by an artist with no previous chart history. Sung by Oliver Anthony, a 31-year-old former factory worker whose real name is Chris Lunsford, the song tells of lives wasted in meaningless labour – “selling my soul/Working all day/Overtime hours/For bullshit pay” – while elites preen themselves on their progressive virtues. Since its release, a video of Anthony performing the track in the woods had racked up nearly 70 million views on YouTube.

The unprecedented success of the song has provoked outrage among leftists and liberals. Critics have accused the singer of racism and sympathy for slave-owners (Richmond was the capital of the Confederacy during the Civil War) and denounced Anthony’s claim to speak for working people. But the left gave up the struggle against class inequality a generation ago, replacing it with the self-serving poses of bourgeois identity politics, while liberals colluded with corporate capitalism in dismissing the dying communities of America’s post-industrial wastelands as retrograde sections of humanity. It is too late for progressives to regain working-class support.

In the years ahead American politics will be driven by the people dismissed as ugly, feeble and deplorable by Ayn Rand, Bronze Age Pervert and liberals alike.

This betrays the fundamental disconnect between many conservative (or at least anti-liberal) thinkers and reality. I’ve already said a lot about Anthony and his song. I won’t repeat it here, but the song didn’t really do much for me. I have no idea why people assume that a song like that becoming popular will be tied to positive real-world political outcomes. After all, the song is not a call to action. It’s a lament: the action has already occurred.

To me it seems like Gray’s statement depends on the Underpants Gnome logic you see from conservatives all the time: Libs “lose” the working class (or black people or Latinos or whoever) → ??? → conservative victory. For starters, it’s pretty silly to claim that liberals have even lost the working class. However much people may try to reframe the Trump movement, its animating spirit was the righteous anger of the downwardly-mobile middle class: Over-taxed, over-regulated, and culturally policed by people who contribute very little to society.

If you look at January 6 arrestees, likely representative of the most die-hard Trump supporters, demographics that were greatly overrepresented included small business owners, skilled tradesmen, and even people with graduate degrees. More than half were white-collar workers. There were Olympic athletes and former Navy SEALs. Although these people are not the “elite” in America today, they would be in any normal country. These were the sort of driven and ambitious people who propelled the American nation forward for centuries.

A lot of people seem fixated on the idea of the working class as a stand-in for anything that they like. The working class is portrayed as a bastion of traditional values, reactionary sentiment, and resistance to globalism. Although there are certainly large numbers of working class people who do represent that ideal, statistics indicate that the working class is not immune from the dysfunction that has infected every part of American life. They’re not even a reliable vote for Republicans. Americans making less than $100k a year broke significantly for Biden during the 2020 election. Looking at the election along race lines tells a much more clear story than along class lines.

Of course, none of this means that working class people aren’t important or that their interests shouldn’t be represented. Rather, it just goes to show that when you hear commentators talk about the solidly conservative working class, it’s mostly just jerking off. Years of media indoctrination have led people to associate legitimacy with the working class and therefore they fetishize it. Anything good is working class. Anything bad is bourgeois. It’s Marxoid bullshit but it’s also the only way people were allowed to express certain ideas in polite society for decades.

Even if conservatives won over the working class, it still wouldn’t repudiate anything that BAP says. BAP talks a lot about the importance of cultivating exceptional individuals. He is often bitterly criticized for this. However much people may complain, it remains to be seen how the shift to a focus on “working class” norms and interests will help the GOP. If recent elections have shown anything, whatever it is that’s been happening on the Right has been a complete disaster. Oliver Anthony won’t even admit that his music is enjoyed primarily by conservatives, even after they made him an overnight millionaire superstar. This is not the all-powerful populist movement that will take down the Biden regime once and for all.

A few weeks ago I finished The Glorious Cause, an excellent book about the American Revolution, and was struck by the enormous quality of the American revolutionaries. These were exceptional people, they seem superhuman. Looking back on any number of historical periods, the human capital available in America is simply stunning. You’ll find these minor figures whose lives were mini-odysseys and who have produced volumes of incredible work that are totally forgotten today.

I recently wrote an article describing “crowdsourced” popular movements versus elite-driven ones in the context of the Russian Civil War (1917-1921). As dysfunctional and incoherent as the anti-communist White Army was, led by remnants of the old Imperial system, it was infinitely more of a threat to the Bolsheviks and the Red Army than the massive popular anti-Bolshevik protest movements that followed the final defeat of the Whites.

Conservatives just fall in to the same Underpants Gnome logic again again. They think: the people are angry → ??? → the regime collapses. That middle step is by far the most important part of the equation. Not a lot of people can actually fill in those question marks. It takes huge amounts of organization, ability, and initiative. Public sentiment doesn’t necessarily change the world, special people do. I think that’s a core message of BAP and it’s also unambiguously true.

There were some statements in Gray’s piece that led me to believe he is (and this is being generous) simply out touch with what’s actually happening in America today. For starters, he complained that BAP “shows no trace of the reverence for the founders evinced by US conservatives, and hardly mentions the Constitution – a sacred text for nearly all Americans.”

Although I certainly like the Constitution, to claim that it’s a scared text for “nearly all” Americans is just delusional. Liberals, to they extent they are even aware of the Constitution, are openly hostile to it. This isn’t a small minority. There have been decades of court cases driven by liberals that have torn the Constitution to shreds in the modern era. They want to make it even worse. I don’t think I’m being too pessimistic when I say that probably far less than half of Americans have any real idea of what the Constitution actually is beyond a word that is frequently referenced in political arguments.

Then, Gray concludes his essay by saying:

Whoever succeeds in lodging themselves in the White House in January 2025 will preside over a failing state and a country descending into civil warfare. The hyperbolic liberalism of past decades will be locked in a deadly confrontation with the “populist” mass blowback that is its ever-present and lengthening shadow. The ensuing upheavals will not be pretty, but only fools have ever supposed that politics could be the pursuit of inchoate visions of beauty.

Again, this is a delusional statement if you’re on the ground in America 2023. It’s true that quality of life is getting worse in pretty much every respect, but if there are cracks in the armor of the regime, those certainly aren’t slowing down government abuse very much. As the regime has supposedly been getting weaker according to internet commentators, it has taken increasingly bold steps in suppressing political opposition. These steps have been met without any physical resistance.

Civil wars have sides. As much as people might say that it would be theoretically good if there was another side opposing the regime, one still has not materialized into being. I’m skeptical that one ever will. That doesn’t mean the situation is hopeless, only that people who are expecting a substantial deviation from normal politics will likely be waiting for a very long time. The eternal Red Dawn fantasy that so many are counting on to rescue American life from its mundane and seemingly endless decline is probably not going to come. We have to work with what we’ve got.

I think Gray will be correct that the coming tumultuous decades won’t be driven by beautiful people or ideas. Although Gray seems to relish this thought, believing it to be part of a larger “populist” uprising, I’m more skeptical. America is engaged in a race to the bottom. By trying to mimic popular sentiment, conservatives risk compromising a core element of their appeal: opposition to the decline of everything.

It’s easy to drop standards and assimilate into the larger underclass populating American today, ambiguous in virtually every respect. That’s not what most people, or at least most people who could theoretically be persuaded to vote for Republicans, want to do though. Republicans are much better off embracing the asperations and standards of historic American middle class. This is something that decent people of all incomes wanted to be a part of. It was a great vision and it made peoples’ lives better for centuries.

BAP just published a very good new article in the magazine Man’s World on the situation in Argentina that is very relevant to fetishization of the working class and resentment of troublemakers like BAP that you see in Gray’s critique. Over the last decade, the once wealthy and sophisticated country of Argentina has been experiencing freefall decline in quality of life along with mass migration and basket case economic conditions.

Argentina didn’t suffer some calamitous natural disaster or defeat in war, rather, there was out of control “populism” in the form of resentment of the ambitious. Entrepreneurs and professionals, those who typically generate wealth for themselves and society, are brutally taxed and politically disempowered compared to the “working class,” which includes many people who don’t work at all and pay no taxes. The best way to become rich in Argentina isn’t to start your own business, but rather to be a bus driver for 20 years or to just sell drugs. The results speak for themselves: ambitious young Argentines flee the country in droves and the government imports foreigners to fill the gaps. Buenos Aires, once the richest city in the world, is becoming a shithole.

I think philosophers like Gray, however incisive their criticisms of our current regime may be, just have huge blinders on that they’re not able to take off. They can’t adjust to changing conditions, and in fact they don’t want to. To admit that BAP is something meaningful to say today would be to admit that the “post-liberal” opposition so lovingly crafted by intellectuals over the last few decades was mostly toothless and shares many of the same problems of the system it criticizes. It’s time for people to look in a different direction: Up!