1. Not Mencius Moldbug:

But a king–a king without any real power, that is–is such an ennoblingly arbitrary, such a tender and organically human institution. It is easy to give our loyalty to someone whose only claim on it is an accident of heredity, because then it is a free gesture of spontaneous affection that requires no element of self-deception, and that does not involve the humiliation of having to ask to be ruled.

Instead, that is David B. Hart, in a bracing attack on democratic leadership. Read the whole thing.

Possibly related:

At least King George had authority. And because people knew who he was, he might have even been more accessible.

2. Not Steve Sailer:

The message of the book, in headline form, is that Germany is becoming smaller (thanks to the familiar story of a falling birthrate among native Germans) and stupider (thanks to the fact that educated Germans are having fewer children and the fastest growing part of the population are poorly-integrated Muslim immigrants). That “stupider” is, of course, contested and has led to accusations of a flirtation with eugenics–of which more later.

The book is Germany Abolishes Itself, by Thilo Sarrazin. I have quoted David Goodhart’s essay about it.

Goodhart writes,

Nowhere in Europe is the gap between public opinion and published opinion as wide as in Germany. And nowhere has public policy been more influenced by a 1960s generation, post-national, society-is-to-blame kind of liberalism. Yet this “official” liberalism has never reflected the way people live and think, even in the German chattering classes.

Here in the United States, one thing that strikes me about my most liberal friends is how conservative their thinking is at a personal level. For their own children, and in talking about specific other people, they passionately stress individual responsibility. It is only when discussing public policy that they favor collectivism. The tension between their personal views and their political opinions is fascinating to observe. I would not be surprised to find that my friends’ attachment to liberal politics is tenuous, and that some major event could cause a rapid, widespread shift toward a more conservative position.