The purpose of the GOP is to run interference for the left to make it easier for said institutional left to administer the state, and through its administration of the state, the rest of the society. Criticizing the GOP for performing its function is confused — there’s no other role for it to play, considering its non-representation in important institutions like government bureaucracies and, more importantly, universities.

The GOP functions to contain discontent among the population, to channel it into useless issues, and to tell people what they’re allowed to believe and express without provoking social opprobrium and legal consequences.

Wanting to replace the GOP with a new party would just mean taking over its function — which is to perform as a catcher, political policeman, and misdirection apparatus for the state — really not terrible work if you can get it, but nothing like actually controlling the state or changing the methods by which it operates.

Deliberately breaking the ability of the Republican party to field national candidates is worthwhile for this reason: because it deprives the American state of a critical tool for keeping a large section of the productive population down on the farm and working hard to pay for all those free pills and free hot pockets and subsidized rent vouchers.

On this theme, giving people in the GOP the opportunity to display their value to their masters is useful for both parties. When spoilers like Donald Trump earn high polls, it’s a sign that they’re not doing their job properly, that the cattle are getting restless, and that the political policemen need another ‘Benghazi!’ style shiny object to redirect their attention away from more important things.

It’s also important to remember that throughout American history, the parties that have been able to bring the entire country underneath its apparatus of economic extraction and cultural management have tended to dominate smaller groups — the broad appeal worked, as we know from the gradual introduction of new nationalistic ideologies which evolved from ‘America the WASP frontier’ to ‘America the shining beacon for Whites of all Christian denominations’ to ‘America the White’ to ‘America the universal colorblind ideal-nation,’ the political parties which have been able to assemble the most numerous and wealthy supporters have tended to succeed against those which have made more narrow appeals.

The American conservative movement is, broadly speaking, an administrative arm of the left that acts to consolidate the political gains of the broader leftist faction. They make sure that recalcitrant citizens get with programs affirmed in the 1940s, 1960s, 1970s, or at other points in time, to say little of planks of the program established earlier in the 20th century. They permit some quibbling over new developments in international leftism, in exchange for unquestioning obedience to the larger platform which has already been implemented.

In the end, democracies consume themselves, as federations become unstable and break into mobs made up of people without common interests. Creating political structures that create and maintain common interests among people is very hard indeed, and most fail to do so (democratic or otherwise).

When economic and political conditions in your nation-state are declining, you have a couple options: you can either face up to the crisis and make the changes necessary that could make recovery possible, or you go through an extensive messaging campaign to portray decline as advance.

One of the more reliable methods — used extensively by 20th century states — is to attempt to make inferior substitutions appear to be better than original superior product. In this way, you try to portray something like plastics which leak some chemical or another into food as superior to cheap glass or clay containers. Another example would be portraying cheap grain-based diets as healthier than diets high in fat, because the governing system has an easier time producing the former in the quantity desired by the masses.

Similarly, the new ‘digital’ culture, pushed most strongly in the United States, has been portrayed as superior to the old ‘bigoted’ culture in the territory which was destroyed by various misguided social and legal innovations like Civil Rights. You might not be able to walk downtown Baltimore safely at night anymore, but you can chat with people anytime you like on a portable super-telegraph that you can carry around with you.

Instead of owning equity in a home in a neighborhood that you can be reasonably confident will appreciate over time — given a stable legal order that respects property rights — any investment into real property is likely to be either interfered with or expropriated somehow. Either some politically connected buyer will be super-empowered with paper money to devalue your investments, some government agency will move bandits into your neighborhood, or the factory in your town will be shuttered by the EPA for environmental violations and the DOL for improper management practices, which will then depress the value of your real investments.

Modern propaganda is largely an exercise in misdirection — getting people to pay attention to irrelevant things to massage away discontent or nervousness about the stability and long term prospects of the regime. Certain groups of prestigious people, like bankers, are even paid to lie about financial conditions, to make them seem better than they really are.

Accounting structures are, everywhere and always, highly manipulable without extensive legal control and supervision. States have, always and typically, tended to play fast and loose with these structures. It’s the abnormal society that can support a state which mostly keeps accurate books, because usually the temptation is to fool with them to gain some advantage or another.

When faced with a troublesome reality, propagandists will often make simple matters appear to be more complex than they really are. They’ll bring up irrelevant facts &  issues, play games with numbers, and otherwise make it difficult to have a straight conversation.

Ultimately, though, narratives don’t really collapse — institutions do. Before Saddam’s government fell, his PR guy was still doing his job up until the last hour of the last day. What the PR guy says is irrelevant compared to whether or not the people propping up the regime believe what the PR guy says.