If Only You Knew...

We are here taking stock at the edge of the abyss. The terrible face of our adversary gazes down upon us; raw hateful power be thy name. There’s a great meme that gets the gist across: The caption reads, “If only you knew how bad things really are.”

The last three or so years have been eye opening all around. The learning opportunity is there, if only one is willing to use it.

Reactionaries have been vindicated – to a degree. The whole internet neo-reactionary scene have been stating forthrightly for some time that activism is folly, that it is a leftist rallying tactic undertaken after they had already acquired institutional advantage, and that the essentially nascent right needs to focus on logistics and human-social capital building. At least these are what I take away. This is the thrust of the ‘Benedict option’ as I see it – becoming warrior-scholars or ascetic workers and building networks from scratch, with the rub that most of us should be finding wives and making families as well. The old right is dead, the center right is a lie, and we are all that is left to undo the ruination of our families, communities, and civilization.

No one from on high will save us. All of the old safety nets that people look to – their elders, their leaders, and their churches – are corrupt, fraudulent, or decrepit and incapable of embarking on this project. Elders floundered for so long that they are hopelessly wayward and of no use. Even many so-called right wing people do not fully grasp the stakes of things and will resort to small-mindedness, jockeying for position in a small pond, and personal squabbles. All of which ultimately need to be set aside or settled in ways that don’t set us back as a whole. We youth must get serious in the coming years. In tough times only the iron-willed survive.

Neo-reactionaries were talking about coming to grips with the realities of power quite some time ago. Whatever his faults – and they are many – Moldbug and guys like him were saying these sorts of things ten years ago. The current reactionary right has surpassed the understanding of nrx circa 2008, but it has taken shocks to make us realize the full necessity of the project. It took a lot of deep reading and soul-searching. The short of it is that our enemies control all of the key nodes of influence in society. As I’ve said elsewhere, this is a wrinkle for the ‘red v. blue empire’ frame, and for the notion that there is a right wing revolt in waiting. To shamelessly quote myself:

We cannot blithely assume that the police, military, and like […] are ‘our guys.’ In all likelihood, given that the enemy controls the narrative that comes out of the mass media, entertainment, arts, and academia as well as most major corporations, we’re in a bind where all of the system’s incentives both financial and ideological are going to pressure these guys that rightists have a natural affinity for to stomp down on the right’s necks. We need to come to grips with reality – the West is occupied country. […] If things were to get hot tomorrow […] the least worst off [would be our enemies].

What one does in power, foremost, is secure one’s own power. To further this, one should reward friends and punish enemies. Achieving stated goals helps. Some subscribe to the ‘constant crisis’ school: never solve problems too well, lest one run afoul of public goodwill in so doing or merely lose purpose, better to keep crises constantly brewing. It’s a very cynical view and not altogether necessary for good stewardship (being in fact detrimental to good stewardship), as in reality crises tend to come about from a combination of natural factors and conflict within and without. In reality one doesn’t have to worry about solving every problem since there are some things which are almost intractable, and some things which have a cyclical nature.

All of this should sound familiar to seasoned reactionaries and it’s building to a point. Donald Trump and frankly moderate nationalists across the West generally fail to secure their power to the extent they gain any, and they also fail to reward friends and punish enemies. The Western meritocracy which folks once believed in is essentially dead. The point of affirmative action, diversity programs be it in immigration or employment, and various pro-“minority” welfare policies are to tie into the rewarding friends and punishing enemies bit; the left is both rewarding their friends and punishing their enemies more effectively for the past four plus generations than the right. It is this combined with their grasp on key nodes of power and institutions that explains their dominance, despite the fact that they do not necessarily have a majority of the population. People are flexible when you can engage in mass disinfo and PR campaigns or simply rig votes.

So far the most successful moderate nationalist group outside the former Warsaw Pact has been Lega Nord, and one should note that they started out as a separatist party as their name implies, and their members still have only one foot in Italian unity. They [quite rightly] see the unified Italian state as having historically been dysfunctional, and especially with the removal of Mussolini and effective rule of his ilk, the country has since been moved to the whims of internationalists and consequently a vile southerly direction which the north associates with crime, filth, and wretchedness. To be fair to [Italian] southerners, their baser tendencies are exaggerated in modernity by the Post-War International Order.

Note that whatever ground level support existed at various points to actually hamper the left’s reward/punish tactics, all political will was absent. People do not believe they live in a Chicom or Soviet style system, but for all intents and purposes they do, and the pretense of democratic republicanism is pure social control.

I don’t know if this is something which is intuitive to leftists and anathema to rightists, but it seems that conservatives either through birth or instinct have a distaste for this. They have to get over it. Some degree of nepotism and leveraging social networks for advancement is the way most of the world outside the West has worked and still works, and because the West is falling in line with the rest of the world, this is becoming a facet of the West increasingly as well. The great lie is that social mobility is paramount or that one merely needs qualifications, skills, and smarts to make it. The reality is that our society increasingly privileges social ties – damn the actual skills and intellect, as to be recognized in practice one must go behind impenetrable trade regulations and social networks whence they are concentrated.

This is almost tautological – an increasingly financial economy where the FIRE sector dominates is built upon interpersonal relationships and those who have the best relations to extant money and power win in virtually every sector of the FIRE economy. The modern highly financialized market has tended toward something between zero and negative sum. Moreover, the well-paid FIRE professions as well as high professions are cloaked in trade restrictions and regulations written in previous generations for the express purpose of keeping newcomers out. Worse yet, what if social signaling or being dyed in the wool left is a major correlate to success in the FIRE sector? What if education and social control broadly are intentionally designed to socially atomize young people and keep them from forming these networks?

To put it simply, people of previous generations like the ‘greatest generation’ and boomers entered the professions and shut the door behind them, the consequence being that everything from becoming a professional pilot to a trial attorney or doctor in the US requires saddling oneself with years of unnecessary indoctrination at university and hundreds of thousands in debt. Regardless of how “well-meaning” this might have been to start, it has taken a clearly malign turn and has vicious consequences. Would-be professionals domestically go through the university degeneracy pipeline. Foreign-born professionals in these high prestige trades are becoming more common because they are more plentiful due to the high native barriers and as a cost cutting measure.

This all spells economic gloom for middle America. Nothing new there for the dissident right. We’re all familiar with that. Trump’s economic recovery, his ‘yuge performance’ was a sham and most of the jobs were mediocre service jobs and went to minorities and immigrants regardless. Until there is a serious reaction, the hollowing of the West in economic and in demographic terms will not be reversed and current elites have no interest in being part of that reaction. Indeed they’re viciously opposed to it. Little of this is new however; a reversal of these trends would mean higher wages (price of labor) and higher prices of certain goods. This is anathema in a world of mountains of plastic dreck.

Where do we go from there? What political prescriptions can we form based on this picture so far?

Trump should spend the remainder of his term pursuing aggressive and audacious action. He ought to be bold. He ought to pursue his original campaign goals, and take stock of the damage done to his support base and governance ability and seek to shore up these deficiencies. After all, most of his energy in 2020 will be spent campaigning. At this point, there is nothing for him to lose. He either wins – or he loses everything, and his enemies will take away his wealth, ruin his family, and make an example of him as a wayward billionaire oligarch to ensure that others don’t try and peel off against the power structure in the future.

The Trump of 2015 and 2016 is what is needed, not the Trump of the past two years. Even as grating as his mannerisms were, we at least had the feeling that maybe there was some hope that he would accomplish something policy-wise in terms of delaying actions, or deal a deathblow to a sickly and fake GOP.

In all likelihood, even if Trump wins in 2020 – which he may well given the nature of the opposition – he stands at the moment as a failure. At the moment, he is a resounding rebuke of party politics, boomer conservatism, lying in with the cosmopolitan-Semitic crowd, and “do something” bullshit. The cost to supporters has been high for all sorts of things from merely wearing MAGA hats to attending rallies and posting positive messages on social media. He has done nothing to remedy this physical and financial attack on his supporters. This belies what I call the co-option/destruction/subversion cycle which is endemic to right-wing politics.

As I’ve said elsewhere, virtually every major real and effective right-wing figure in the West has succumbed to that cycle over the past 70 or 80 years since the establishment of the Post-War International Order (Globohomo). As we see with Trump in real time, the Left is trying multiple tactics to subvert and destroy him, and it appears he is probably fully subverted. Even if they don’t manage to destroy him, the most likely course from here on out is that he will be ineffective if not on net beneficial to their ends for the remainder of his term, and his Jewish son-in-law will probably inherit most of the family assets which aren’t bluster, credit, or fraud. That is a startling change from someone who in 2015 was running on a slightly moderated version of Pat Buchanan’s old campaign platform.

What does it entail to put the things laid out here into practice as an executive? It turns out loyalty matters more than qualifications, and the most qualified people are often the most indebted to the system. Someone with modest qualifications but known loyalties is a far better pick for a cabinet than Ivy League grads, corporate executives, or military generals. A Kentucky colonel is better than a full bird colonel. Governance ability is inversely correlated to status under globohomo. Someone who is smart and sharp but inexperienced can always learn.

If one were to come in control of assets with substantially hostile surroundings, one should try to make the environment as friendly as possible. That means first firing those your enemies appoint, or whom your enemy has made loyal subjects; and second, it means bringing increasing numbers of your own people to take over vital tasks over time. Your people should be indispensable to the function of the organization. Money at every level should flow into your guys’ hands whenever possible, including awarding contracts and tax cuts on the basis of political loyalty. One also has to punish transgression. If one allows flagrant wrongdoers to go about unpunished, their examples demoralize your people and promote further transgression.

One also has to be willing to push to the brink – or past it. Calculated risks are a necessity. There must be a certain tempo to things of course. One cannot necessarily come out from day one at a fever pitch unless one has the support base built up to do so. That risks blowback. But one has to continuously apply pressure against one’s enemies or they will pressure you, and the pressure is always going one way or another. There is rarely a static equilibrium in these things.

Ideology is ultimately a way of getting people to subsume their natural interests to something constructed. This construct may be a web of approximate interests, in which case the ideology is roughly a good thing, because it will serve a broad group and will serve them all fairly well. In any case ideology should be seen like anything else as a tool and not godless religio as it has become. Without ideology there are merely very messy and complicated clusters of interest groups overlapping and vying at various points. Ideology is a simplifying and cohering measure, but one limited in its truth [generally]. The trap of the selection of ideologies served now is that it is largely crystallized from prior eras, or from hostile elites and xenos, and at any rate it fails utterly to capture the interests of those whom it is supposed to serve.

As a brief side note, I stated before that the reactionary right is a nascent movement. Why is this? Some have proposed that we step into the shoes of the center-right factions in the US (the place that matters) and the rest of the occupied West as a viable institutional strategy. The events of the past three years have essentially proven what some speculated years ago: despite that many in the center-right parties are spineless and feeble, they can always summon enough heart to stomp on would-be upstarts to their right taking over controlled opposition setups and, if need be, engage in some scorched earth simply to deny the reactionary right the field altogether. Whatever infiltration people engage in has to be far subtler than that of generations past. Infiltration of their institutions probably won’t work, in fact, and we have to likely be satisfied with burning them to the ground with everything else.

Uncle Ted was correct in more ways than one. He was correct about many of the ways that industrial society has become toxic, as well as that we are by far oversocialized and that this itself is toxic, and he was also correct that the left has become or maybe always was powerlust wrapped up in ideology. Going forward, the right – or whatever we call ourselves – we have to deal with the fact that we effectively have no power and the cosmopolitan-Semitic elites want us dead and dispossessed. I support delusion as a coping mechanism, but only so long as it does not impede long-term survival. We cannot delude ourselves as to our station or our prospects.

Wake up and smell the ashes.