A Test Case For Sovereignty

The Powers Behind Brown v. Board of Education

Dec 08, 2024

Power likes to hide itself. Other times, it comes right out and shows you who and what it is. But even when power shows itself through its functionaries, it is usually not clear, in the modern mass state, who is really pulling the strings. Carl Schmitt posed the formula most memorably. “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”1 Power is decisionist. Find the guy who makes the ultimate decision, and you’ve found power.

But the definition of sovereignty does not mean that anyone is actually in power. Schmitt himself believed that the political theology of liberalism had erased sovereignty as traditionally understood. In the liberal regime, “[t]he machine now runs by itself.”2 Complicating matters, the liberal-bourgeois regime that Schmitt wrote about in Political Theology was soon displaced in the managerial revolution which ushered in a new political elite. This new managerial elite derived their power—not from control of capital—but from control of the instruments of capital: managing the day to day operations of mass industry rather than owning the business as their capitalist predecessors had.

The revolution in mass and scale that ushered in the managerial regime obscures sovereignty even more than the previous liberal paradigm. In the managerial regime, those who control do not own. Those who own exercise no authority. The government is virtually indistinguishable from private corporations, international banks, NGOs, and the instruments of mass culture, including the universities and media. Even investment firms are indistinguishable from one another: Vanguard owns Blackrock and Blackrock owns Vanguard. Overlay atop all of this confusion a bureaucratism that emphasizes policy and procedure over action and personal agency, and the very idea of sovereignty begins to seem like the phantom of a by-gone age. It was this state of affairs that led two very different thinkers—Alasdair MacIntyre and Julius Evola—to a similar conclusion.

First, Evola.

Today’s leaders are caught in a tangle of actions and reactions that evade any real control; they obey irrational, collective influences, and are almost always at the service of special interests, ambitions, and material and economic rivalries that leave no room for a decision based on an enlightened freedom, a decision as an “absolute person.”3

Second, MacIntyre.

Our social order is in a very literal sense out of our, and indeed anyone’s control. No one is or could be in charge.4

Evola seems to hold out the possibility that there are men in charge who make decisions, only, those decisions are not their own. They are caught in a web of competing influences, ideologies, pressures from the masses, their own and others’ materialist ambitions, and a constant demand to respond to the latest event or report. As such, no true decision is ever taken.

An action, praxis, involves, as Aristotle notices, aiming at some good.5 A free decision—let alone for now an “enlightened” freedom—requires the agent to identify the good, resolve to pursue it, and then act in such a way as to intentionally pursue that good. But so often, decisions are not one’s own, evincing heteronomy, rather than autonomy, of the will. The “good” pursued was foisted upon the would-be agent by another. The “good” pursued is not even a true intermediary or ultimate good. It’s often indifferent or bad. The agent’s role in pursuing the false “good” is little more than rubber stamping the work of another or in playing a role as one cog in an enormous machine with hundreds, even thousands, of other cogs all straining together to move one inch toward the heteronomous aim. Where is sovereignty in that system?

MacIntyre sees the situation as even more hopeless for agency, and hence, for sovereignty. The managerial regime purports to rely on experts in social science who apply rigorous scientific techniques to determine the natural laws of human society. Then, they help the managerial elite use those laws to manage demand in the mass economy, manage supply through careful regulation of industry, and manage belief through propaganda. Because the laws are allegedly correct, managerial society is scientifically managed and everything runs extremely well… if the laws are correct. Fortunately for mankind, the managerial regime’s iron cage has no bottom—no foundation in natural law. The result, for the regime, is “a skillful dramatic imitation of … control…. The most effective bureaucrat is the best actor.”6

No one is in control. No one could be in control. At best, the managers are play-acting at wielding power and pretending to apply pseudo-science to the formulation of policy. The policy decides. Not the agents.

Who, If Anyone, is Sovereign?

Yet, theories suggesting an impotent regime are unsatisfying, not only because the inquiring mind desires a rational and elegant explanation for events, but because events of the last 30 years have had such consistent, seemingly purposive, results. Cthulhu always swims left. Endless mass-migration, global lockdowns, state sanctioned race-riots, two-tiered policing, mass censorship and surveillance, and never ending foreign proxy-wars fought in the name of sodomy, have become hallmarks of the contemporary managerial regime. These trends have either been persistent or have grown in prevalence.

Some theorists, taking a whole of society approach, have sought to explain the apparent purposiveness of this regime which, from the outside, appears to have no one at the helm. Curtis Yarvin and Neema Parvini offer mutually incompatible theories of sovereignty that will help frame the test case I investigate below.

Parvini’s thesis is that in the Octopus, ideology is downstream of power. Elites espouse certain ideas that are of no consequence because the elites pursue whatever course of action gains, preserves, and expands their power, regardless of how well or poorly any course of action fits with their expressed belief system. If changing their ideas is necessary to effectuate the ends of power, the elites make the necessary change. The elites who wield the greatest influence are those, in what Parvini calls, the Chest. The Chest is comprised of investment banks, central banks, and investment management firms like Blackrock. The CEOs of these institutions are not true-believers. They are pragmatists. They do what needs to be done to preserve and enhance their power.

Yarvin’s position is something like the opposite of Parvini’s. The managerial regime is a clerical oligarchy. As anyone knows, it’s the clerics who define legitimacy in their own Cathedral. And the clerics define legitimacy as the set of beliefs the clerics happen to hold. In the current regime, they happen to hold basically communist views. The clerics impose those beliefs through networks of prestige. By doing so, they are the head of the Cathedral; the chief authority. No other part of the system has substantial power over the clerics.

One aspect of power-systems, that Yarvin mostly avoids discussing, but that Parvini and many others are keen to notice, is group-interest organized around identity leading to the formation of powerful organized minorities. Since (i) the organized minority defeats the disorganized majority; and (ii) groups united by their class, race, ethnicity, or religion are typically more cohesive, and, thus, stronger, than groups lacking such unity; then (iii) such identity groups have good reason to conspire, i.e., to act in coordination to serve their group interests; plus (iv) since it would behoove such a group to hide this fact from the other groups so as to retain their power unchallenged; then (v) it would not be surprising if such a group or groups were pulling the strings of the machine from behind-the-curtain. Therefore, in any analysis of power, such special interest identity groups must be taken into account. Though, such loci of power should not blind us to other powers that may not have a basis in group identity or interest.

It should also be borne in mind that any given locus of identity may take precedent over another—class over race, say—at different points in time or even at the same point in time but with respect to different issues. On issues of war, for example, an elite might form around class, whereas, on issues of culture, race or ethnicity may be the more crucial organizing focal point.

The Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, discussed below, will serve as a test case to determine whether (i) anyone is in control, probing the truth of the assertions by Evola and MacIntyre, and, if so, then (ii) who exactly is in control, examining whether Yarvin’s, Parvini’s, or the identity models have better fit with the facts.

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The Significance of Brown

The exact anno domini of the gay race communist Global American Empire is difficult to pin down. Viable candidates include FDR’s first presidency in 1933, the USA’s joint victory in WWII with the USSR in 1945, and the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Brown was an event that stems from the first two century-defining events and is the sine qua non of the Civil Rights Act. Given that “Brown is the canon [of American law] as a whole” and led to the forced integration of public schools at gunpoint, it is as good a place as any to start an inquiry into power structure of the American Regime.

Brown stands for the twin pillars of the Civil Rights Constitution. First, that feelings of racial inferiority have constitutional status and protection in law. Second, that integration of the races is the solution to such feelings. Who established these principles? And how?

To anticipate what is demonstrated below, Brown was made possible by:

the donations of wealthy communists to the NAACP;
the efforts of attorneys hired by the communists and socialists that ran the NAACP;
the Carnegie foundation;
a Swedish socialist and social scientist who wrote an influential book cited in Brown;
a report, proposed and drafted by Jewish lawyers, followed by the lawyers at the NAACP, laying out the strategy that would culminate in Brown;
efforts by the Office of War Information (OWI) and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS);
fear of white Catholic ethnics;
the work of other social scientists who colluded with the OSS and OWI;
the appointment of progressive WASP and Jewish Supreme Court Justices to the Court by FDR, Truman, and Eisenhower;
disgruntled blacks, upset that Whites did not want to associate with them; and
progressive (read “communist”) ideology shared by elite WASPS, blacks, and Jews.

War Against Fascism Brings the WASP Industrialists, Jews, and Blacks Together

The Catholic menace was perceived as a threat, not only to the WASP elite in the early part of the 20^th century, but to their allies as well—the newly arrived Jews from Europe. Louis Wirth, a Jew, was born in small town in West Germany but moved to America and became a sociologist at the University of Chicago. He believed that the United States faced a problem in its Catholic ethnic enclaves, which made up a large portion of the cities of the Northeast and Midwest in the 1930s. Wirth spoke about this problem and gave lectures about it at symposia.

[I]nternal division and lack of cohesion of the Protestant denominations detracts from their capacity to play the role of a dominant group effectively, the relative internal unity and concentration of settlement of the Catholic groups in urban centers increases their capacity to act collectively and to develop an appropriate group consciousness.7

As war and total mobilization approached in 1940, the problem took on a new urgency. Cheap non-union labor was needed to run the war-factories of the United States. The Catholics were mostly unionized and harder to control because of their ethnic cohesion (Irish, Pole, Italian, etc.). The other source of cheap labor was American blacks. The bonus of hiring American blacks was that they lacked loyalty to foreign hostile nations and, apparently, lacked sympathy for fascism. “The unspoken assumption behind Wirth’s analysis … is that Catholics had a congenital weakness for fascism.”8 Wirth believed that the Catholic ethnics’ “national origin makes them suspect.”9

Wirth was not the only person to believe the Catholics were a problem. The Carnegie Foundation, then run by Alger Hiss, recruited socialist and feminist Gunnar Myrdal from Sweden to lead a team of sociologists to help solve America’s ethnic and racial problems. Hiss was a communist. An undercover priest called him the “most influential communist” in the State department. And it was Hiss at the origins of Myrdal’s An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, which the Court relied upon in Brown.

In the end Myrdal didn’t write much of An American Dilemma though. Wirth and his colleague Samuel Stouffer actually wrote the book. Both were members “of the psychological warfare establishment” centered at the University of Chicago.10

Louis Wirth was a seminal thinker for the OSS and the OWI during the war, and it was in this capacity that he came up with the policy that would eventually inform … Brown.11

The United States intelligence agencies believed that defeating fascism abroad necessitated defeating nascent fascism in Catholic ethnic enclaves at home. Wirth, Stouffer, and Myrdal supported this thesis with their research. War aims required the dissolution of Catholic ethnic enclaves in critical industrial centers and the importation of blacks to replace them—the so-called “Great Migration.”

The Court in Brown cites Myrdal’s An American Dilemma for all of the core propositions of its holding.

Separate educational institutions for white and negro students have “a detrimental effect upon the colored children.”
“The policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the negro group.”
“[A] sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn.”
“Segregation … has a tendency to retard the educational and mental development of Negro children and to deprive them of some of the benefits they would receive in a racially integrated school system."

In short, An American Dilemma argued that all the problems the Negro faces and creates, can be ameliorated by (i) economic and (ii) cultural changes to the Negro’s environment, and, most importantly, (3) removing discrimination by whites. [Myrdal, Gunnar, An American Dilemma (Harper & Brothers, 1944) 208]. The Court agreed.

Regardless of the truth and jurisprudential grounding—or lack thereof—for these claims, their original purpose was to give the air of legitimacy to the idea of “integration,” i.e., destroying Catholic ethnic enclaves in industrial centers to make room for southern blacks to support the WASP establishment’s desire for war against Germany. This policy of “integration … was what Lenin and Stalin would have called the Soviet solution to the nationalities question.”12 To wit, erasing the distinctions between the nationalities so that they no longer pose a threat to the hegemony of the ruling elite.

The agents in this process all had different aims. For the attorney Thurgood Marshal, the motivation was racial animus and resentment at the snub by the University of Maryland who denied his application to law school—in his own words, he wanted “to get even with the bastards.” Alger Hiss and Louis Wirth, as communists, agreed with Lenin and Stalin about the way to handle America’s ethnic dilemma: forced integration to destroy the power that homogenous but distinct groups hold in multi-ethnic societies. Myrdal was more of a garden-variety socialist and, as a Swede, was out of his element in U.S. racial affairs. He passed the buck to Wirth and Stouffer. The OSS and OWI were staffed by WASPS who hated Germans, Catholics, and fascism, and wanted to win the war. The military-industrial complex had clear incentives—cheaper labor, breaking up Catholic ethnic-led unions, and making millions of dollars from war production and government contracts. This confluence of aims came together to make for just one causal factor in the Brown story. But there are yet other causal factors to explore.

The Legal Arm of the Gay Race Communists—The NAACP

The NAACP was founded in 1909 by socialists including, inter alia, W.E.B. Dubois (the O.G. gay race communist), Henry Moskowitz (Romanian born Jew), Moorfield Storey (WASP of puritan stock), and Mary White Ovington (Unitarian, feminist, WASP, and Socialist Party of America member).

Donations came in from the Garland Fund founded by communist Charles Garland at the behest of socialist Upton Sinclair. Garland planned to refuse the inheritance of his father’s fortune. Sinclair talked him out of it. The NAACP was one of many beneficiaries of Garland’s pro-communist fund. Other donations came in from wealthy Jews, notably, Moskowitz, Lillian Wald, Rabbi Emil G. Hirsh, and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise.

The NAACP’s legal campaign to end segregation was launched by the funds from Garland, et al. The strategy for that legal campaign, to fundamentally transform the country through activist lawyering, was crafted by Nathan Margold. Margold, a Jewish communist, was recommended to the NAACP by Harvard Law Professor Frankfurter, another Jew who was soon to become a Justice on the Supreme Court. Margold was hired to work as special counsel for the NAACP from 1930-1933, during which time he drafted the Margold Report.

Margold’s Report argued for a boil-the-frog approach to desegregation: start with the less controversial desegregation of higher education first, and delay the desegregation of K-12 schools until later. The NAACP adopted his slow and steady approach, waiting to bring a case like Brown until 1950—seventeen years after the Report was penned.

Other than Marshall—who we’ve already seen was motivated by racial animus—the other black attorneys, Robert Carter, Oliver Hill, Charles Hamilton Houston, and Spottswood Robinson III, were all motivated by personal resentment at the pre-civil rights racial order—as the NAACP advertises. These black attorneys also allied with Jack Greenberg, a Jew, who went on to become a professor at Columbia.

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A Progressive WASP Supreme Court

The Warren court was essentially the Court as created by FDR. There were some exceptionally liberal Justices on the Warren Court. William Douglas, for example, is described as the most liberal Justice ever. Douglas appears to have been a crypto-communist. He sympathized with worker’s riots and attempted to save the Rosenberg’s from execution. The Rosenberg’s were convicted of treason for giving the Soviets intel on the atomic bomb. Douglas temporarily stayed their execution. A fellow-traveler? Seems likely.

Earl Warren was a lifelong progressive appointed by Republican President Dwight Eisenhower. Interestingly, Eisenhower was opposed to desegregation in 1953, defending southern whites’ opposition to integration over dinner with soon to be Chief Justice Warren. Warren didn’t agree. Eisenhower appointed him anyway. Cuckservatism is nothing new.

During backroom deliberations on Brown, the Chief repeatedly pressured the minority of Justices who wanted to dissent to unanimously sign-on to the majority opinion. Among them was Robert H. Jackson. Justice Jackson, nominated by FDR, was the chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials in the decade before Brown was decided. Under pressure, he and all of the supposedly pro-judicial restraint Justices signed on to Brown.

The court was almost entirely a WASP enterprise with important contributions from one Jewish Justice. The breakdown of the Justices by race, ethnicity, religion, and appointment, was as follows.

The Decision in Brown

The court had before it the question of whether or not the “separate but equal” doctrine, from the 1896 case, Plessy v. Ferguson, was consistent with the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to U.S. Constitution. The Court begins with the observation that the original public meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment is not clear because, basically, no one at the time ever imagined that the Fourteenth Amendment would apply to public education. Given that history, there was an obvious conclusion for the Court to reach: the Fourteenth Amendment does not prohibit free association in education on the basis of race. The Court evaded that easy originalist answer to the issue of the case in favor of promoting the prevailing ideology of its members and their class.

Most Justices on the Court were not textualists or originalists. So, it is no surprise that they hand-waived away the pesky text of the Fourteenth Amendment and its original public meaning. The Amendment says only that, “No State shall … deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Undoubtedly, if a law provides education for all students, whether divvied-up by race or not, it provides equal protection of the laws to such students. This answer, however, didn’t achieve the social engineering the progressive Justices wished for, so it was not addressed.

But because the schools in question in Brown were equal in all relevant educational respects (they were actually “separate and equal” in this case) the Court had to get creative in devising a reason to call them “unequal” and, therefore, contrary to the Fourteenth Amendment. That reason was the “feeling of inferiority” that separate schools create for black students. Myrdal’s (i.e., Wirth’s) An American Dilemma, was cited for this psychological proposition.

It is worth emphasizing just how incredibly gay this decision is. Because little black girls and boys, allegedly, had hurt feelings, separate schools were therefore unequal under the law. One can see the seed of childhood castrations in this very decision—“but my son’s feelings are hurt because you won’t castrate him, and hurting his feelings is unequal and, therefore, illegal!”

Thomas Sowell has shown that successful black students in elite black high schools were feeling just fine during the segregation era. The Court, obviously, cherry picked its sociological evidence to support its predetermined conclusion—the conclusion required by progressive orthodoxy, not the law.

Analysis: The Chest, The Cathedral, and Identity Groups—Who Decided?

Which men or entities, if any, decided the exception and opened to the door to forced integration in the United States? In one respect, FDR’s supreme court picks are the necessary precondition to Brown. At the time of Brown, his Justices made up a majority of the court—enough to give the NAACP what they were asking for. The GAE, in 1954, still very much belonged to FDR (also a communist, by the way).

But Supreme Court Justices are, in another respect, comically powerless. They can only decide the cases that come before them. They can’t invent cases out of whole cloth. Real power in Supreme Court decisions comes from knowledge of the balance of the court. With that knowledge and the means to fund litigation through its various phases in lower courts, social activists can get their case to the high Court in a posture where success is likely.

Brown never makes it to the Court without funding for the NAACP from Jews, Communists, and their progressive WASP sympathizers. This fact bolsters Parvini’s thesis that the Chest is sovereign. Here, the Chest was private capital and leftist-philanthropic organizations. Had these wealthy donors sent their money elsewhere, Brown may never have happened.

Furthermore, the research that gave the Court the stamp of scientific legitimacy was financed by the Carnegie Fund led by communist Alger Hiss. Without this research on which to base its opinion, the Court may have had a harder time reaching its conclusions. These two interventions by the Chest strongly support Parvini’s thesis.

But viewed from the lens of ideology, Yarvin’s thesis has evidentiary support as well. Why did Hiss and Garland disperse their resources to precisely the projects they funded and not others? They were communists. Fair enough. But why were they communists? Because all the prestige of the smart-sect, at that time, was with the communist cause. Why? Because clerics in the Cathedral ordained it to be so. Which clerics? Among many others, the very clerics and men of letters this article discussed at the University of Chicago, Harvard Law and Upton Sinclair himself.

Plus, all the Justices at the Court were free to decide the case however they liked. The POTUS had evened pressured the Chief Justice not to decide how he eventually did. Why did the Justices give the NAACP what they wanted? Because they were possessed by the same ideology—which, by 1954, had become the only acceptable view in elite circles in the U.S. That points Yarvin ahead of Parvini on the scoreboard.

Viewed, yet again, from the point of view of identity, the alliance between WASPs, Jews, and blacks, against Southern Whites and Catholic ethnics is unmistakable. The high-low-middle mechanism—when the elites ally themselves with the underclass against the middle-class—is clearly at work here. But why would these groups elect integration as their joint strategy? After all, integration has been a disaster for blacks as much as for any other group.

The needs of the military-industrial complex loom large over this alliance. And the intelligence services had their hands in the process as well. The American regime, from 1939-1954 and beyond, was set up principally as an anti-fascist war machine. The war machine made a lot of money, and it did so, in part, on the back of cheap black labor. This economic solution driven by the military-industrial complex gave: (i) the WASPs what they wanted (the weakening of the Catholic ethnics), (ii) the Jews what they wanted (membership in the WASP dominated elite), and (iii) the blacks what they wanted (the benefits of patronage and revenge against whitey). We haven’t mentioned him as a theorist under consideration here, but score at least one point for Howard Zinn.

But there is no “decision on the exception” in a loose alliance of general identity group interest motivated by economic conditions. Blacks pursuing materialist aims, WASPs acting out their religious and ethnic loathing, and entryist Jews seeking prestige, never amounts to a decision about racial integration. This is precisely the kind of non-decision that causes MacIntyre to lament that “No one is or could be in charge.”

In my view, the activities of the Chest, the military-industrial complex, the high-low-middle mechanism, and the strange, non-decisionist structure of the GAE, are all explained best by the Cathedral. At each crucial decision-point agents took action based on their beliefs. Garland and Hiss donated to the causes they donated to, not for an increase in power for themselves, but as idealists trying to actualize their utopian dreams. The NAACP lawyers, motivated by resentment, had black-liberation in mind as they labored year after year for their cause. The progressive Supreme Court Justices wanted to be on the “right side of history.” Agents with different beliefs could have made different decisions at each stage in the story.

This is not to say that any of these agents were angels. Leftist, progressive, and communist beliefs were the prestige-beliefs of the age. Everyone involved stood to benefit—at least as far as social proof was concerned—by believing and acting as they did. This raises an old debate between friends.

Sam Francis and Paul Gottfried come down on either side of this proposition: the elites believe as they do cynically, to secure their power—if they needed to reverse their beliefs to retain power, they would immediately do so.13 This question is impossible to decide in an absolute sense because we cannot know the internal states of all the agents involved in the story. Was Garland a true-believer or did he secretly love the thought of leftist journalists praising him in print editorials? We can never know, unless the private diaries of all of these agents are published (which, to my knowledge, they are not).

But without deciding the Francs versus Gottfried debate, we can still draw a few conclusions. Either belief or the desire to be seen to believe the right ideas as defined by the smart-set of the age, are the prime-movers in getting us to Brown. Either way, the clerics—those who create and sanctify the prestige-ideas of the era—are sovereign. But this kind of sovereignty is a phantom-sovereignty, since the clerics are far removed from the levers of power. This phantom-sovereignty is what gives the other theories—Octopus, identity group interest, and military-industrial complex—their salience.

In the end, then, for our managerial age, it is the Cathedral that gives us the distinct impression that “[n]o one is or could be in charge.” Not, at least, the way Alexander, Caesar, or Napoleon were in charge of their conquests. Such naked sovereignty operating in the full light of day is a relic of cultures in a different phase from our own—cultures not yet in the civilizational phase where individual men conceive a plan, decide upon it, and then personally smash the opposition.14 Let us pray that, someday, we are freed from the clerical-tyranny of nobody in particular and can see the re-emergence of real sovereignty.

The faithful among us know that, if not on earth, we are promised just such absolute and honest sovereignty in the beatific vision.

The Bureau of Bureaucratization

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