Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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Be Wary of Crowds

Delacroix - Liberty Leading the People
Delacroix – Liberty Leading the People

The default mode of political organization within democracy is the ‘movement.’ Movements exist to either form political parties or to influence them to develop certain policies.

Movements form when superior men conspire to create them. They require minimal leadership talent to start (because most democratic people will follow a socially dominant man who takes initiative without reservation). The goal of a movement is to create a bureaucracy, which will then reward the leadership with power, money, and sinecures to reward to their cronies.

Even anti-democratic ‘movements,’ like fascism, fall into this social organization out of habit and by following the examples conditioned into them by early education. As children, citizens (even those who attend private school) are first socialized into the adult world by listening to lectures among their ‘equals.’ Disorganization and informal social groupings are standard in the academy.

It doesn’t need to be outside of schools, but habits require strength to break. By default, we’re conditioned to form crowds.

It’s in social organizations that need to actually achieve goals (like corporations and the military) that the law permits us form hierarchy with defined social roles. Without this measure of laissez-faire authoritarianism, we’d all be forced to return to the trees within months.

On the internet, groups tend to fall prey to the ‘eternal September‘ effect. Open entry into a group leads to a decline in value, as the leadership loses the ability to maintain a coherent society as numbers increase without regulation.

This is because open entry is a moronic principle by which to run any organization. No corporation on Earth — even staffed by the most incompetent idiots — operates on an open entry policy for hiring. To state that all that’s needed to join an organization is to bleat an intention to join, and perhaps to fill out a perfunctory form, is to say that the organization’s values are worthless.

It’s because of this that it’s wise to be skeptical of any banner that anyone can hoist. Exclusivity marks value worth defending.

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Can Neoreaction Avoid Libertarian HIV?

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Patri Friedman, noted ex-polyamorist and Seasteading pitchman, has taken an interest in creating a ‘politically correct’ neoreaction.

Jim writes often about entryism — the corollary of Robert Conquest’s second law of politics as retold by John Derbyshire. Reproducing it here:

Any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will
sooner or later become left-wing.

This has been evoked regularly on Twitter and elsewhere with reference to libertarians, who themselves have been infested by essentially left wing thinkers of various kinds. Part of this owes to the character and works of Murray Rothbard, who is libertarianism embodied in all of its aspects, good, bad, and ugly.

As retold by Stephan Kinsella, the word ‘libertarian’ dates only back to the 1950s and 60s, as Leonard Read and Rothbard tussled with each other for leadership of what remained of the classical liberal remnant after World War II.

The muddled nature of libertarianism today owes to the muddled nature of its beginnings in excerpt from an article by Dean Russell:

Here is a suggestion: Let those of us who love liberty trademark and reserve for our own use the good and honorable word “libertarian.” Webster’s New International Dictionary defines a libertarian as “One who holds to the doctrine of free will; also, one who upholds the principles of liberty, esp. individual liberty of thought and action.”

Russell, with a boy’s innocence, attempts to unite liberals, conservatives, and classical liberals under the same umbrella. While he stated overt opposition to leftism, the simplistic formulation of the ideology left open the entrances to anyone who could figure out the clever rhetorical crannies into which leftism could sneak into.

Rothbard himself allied with the new left during the 1960s, establishing a journal called ‘Right and Left.’ This strategy ultimately failed, because the left is insane and evil:

“To put it bluntly, the convention was a disaster. As Rothbard feared, many of the SDS libertarians were infected with extreme left- ism. One of the left-wing libertarians denounced “all academic economists” and the wearing of neckties as great evils which the libertarian movement should focus on destroying.”

It’s for this reason that Hoppe hews to the later Rothbard, in advocating for explicit rightism, to the exclusion of the leftists. It’s because, by bitter experience, his teacher taught him that the original formulation of ‘libertarian’ was doomed to incoherence and neutralization by the left.

This is rather serious. John Payne recounts

“Former Barry Goldwater speechwriter Karl Hess, who had been converted to anarcho-capitalism by “Confessions of a Right-Wing Liberal” and conversations with Rothbard, but had drifted toward anarcho-socialism in the interceding year, sealed the conference’s fate when he spoke on Saturday night. Wearing Fidel Castro-style battle fatigues and a Wobblie pin adorning his hat, Hess roared out to the audience, “There is no neutral ground in a revolution. . . . You’re either on one side of the barricade or the other.” He proceeded to implore the crowd to join him in a scheduled anti-war march on Fort Dix the following day.”

Truly, there’s little that’s new in history.

Considering that libertarianism isn’t even a century old, and that it became subverted within its first two decades of existence, it’s sensible to avoid going down the same permissive & disorderly path that it did, to avoid suffering the same fate in the same manner.

The promiscuity of ‘libertarian’ as a term, and the promiscuous nature of many of its institutions, give it something a lot like Human Immunodeficiency Virus, but for an ideology. This is the case for all ideologies permissive to leftism, and to all ideologies that appeal to the leftist psychology, defined as it is by ressentiment, which popular followers of libertarianism are prone to (as criticized frequently by Hoppe).

The solution to this is to not hop onto any leftward social trend that appears merely because it’s both growing fast and dislikes the current government. Discriminating against people that would create a kinder, gentler, more politically-correct neoreaction doesn’t mean destroying them — just ensuring institutional separation and clarity of language.

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Shooting An Elephant

The Republican party serves as a resource sink for the right wing. It’s a token resistance to the left, which temporarily delays the general ruination of the country, if that. The neocon faction, which has suffered catastrophic losses since the financial collapse that footed  the Bush II presidency, was more a different varietal of mainstream leftism than representative of rightist thought.

The right wing tends to blunt itself when it pursues democratic political power, because winning elections requires ideological dilution, as is taught in any political science course. I’ll stop writing now about why the GOP sucks, because this should be review for most of you.

The Republican party can never again gain national authority as in the manner that its ‘base’ wants it to, because, as Mitt Romney noticed during his campaign, roughly 47% of the country is reliant on transfer payments from the state to make ends meet. The real number is probably higher, given that many private companies rely on government contracts.

As more people have realized this, the media organizations that used to be at the fringe has begun to supplant the former guardians of the mainstream right. I’ve regarded with trepidation the professionalization of radio crank Alex Jones, although he’ll never land accounts from major corporations.

Conservatives like Glenn Beck have started their own companies in an attempt to profit from the trends in the American political right, and often run ads like this one, elucidating the finer points of prepping for social collapse. The content tends to orbit around an obsession about redeeming the Republican party, electing ‘true conservatives,’ and various articles that excite right-wing bellyfeels.

Destroying the GOP is the best way to undermine support for democracy on the right. The reason for this is that, without hope for electoral success, the rank and file of the right will be forced to abandon their hopes for electoral redemption. When the typical “Joe Plumber” recognizes that it’s fruitless to go to the polls or to send money to their favorite politician, the GOP will fold in more states, which cedes to progressives the right to ruin more towns and cities in the service of their ideological goals.

This would limit the available options of the right wing population to either accept destruction or secede. Cutting off the option of winning elections, and making it obvious that it’s no longer possible to win elections, is key to achieving this goal.

While this is a hazardous political strategy to pursue, the risk makes possible the winning of a political contest, that as David Brin points out, will confer hundreds of years of benefits to the winning side.

I favor a rope-a-dope strategy as a method of dealing with the left. Encourage their fixation on winning elections, because that’s where their strength will continue to be. Meanwhile, encourage cultural division and militancy. To the extent that the right attempts to dominate a country that is essentially left-wing (and doomed), it’ll continue to waste resources on an un-winnable battle for the loyalty of a majority-worthless people.

Hugging the mainstream ropes and encouraging the left to deplete its energies is likely to make them weak and fractious enough to destroy over a long enough timeline.

The older generation of right-wing media personalities are stuck in the loops that they have trained themselves into — that of winning elections, and then failing to implement the policies that their constituencies actually want.

Further, it’s important to convince the Stanley Druckenmiller types that their noble campaigns to keep the American government from killing itself are fruitless. Delaying crisis is counter-productive. Instead, hand the left the rope with which it shall hang itself, and win the loyalty of the people who are still productive. Partition the country in such a way that the left is left with all of the liabilities and none of the assets of the United States, and you’ll have a strong set of countries to work with.

You want a left bureaucracy struggling to maintain the Detroits and Clevelands of the world, while right free-states maintain ownership of states like the Dakotas and Texas. Tying up the Federal government in ‘humanitarian interventions’ within its own useless territory will misdirect Federal energies to such an extent that it can’t suppress competitor states effectively. That goes as much for the rest of the world as it does domestically. Each Camden, NJ within USG’s purvey limits its ability to achieve its ideological goals, or to extend control over hostile domestic territories.

One major issue that the mainstream right has is that it appeals primarily to an elderly demographic that has much to lose and little to gain from the euthanasia of the Federal state. Ignoring this entire demographic, who will actually perish without regular deliveries of Medicare-financed drugs, is important to maintaining an exit trajectory. Leaving the mainstream right with an audience of 70-year-old Lipitor addicts is a worthwhile goal.

This demographic is what powers the current GOP, and it’s difficult to displace them. As inflationary economic policy annihilates this slice of the country (for ill) and depletes standards of bourgeois morality both in the US and abroad, elections will become even less important than they already are. What’s important is to have a sane alternative in the works by that time, to prevent President Comacho figures from capitalizing on the social failure.

In the meantime, constructing a parallel set of affiliated cultures can make it possible to accumulate the necessary capital (human, cultural, financial) to successfully partition the United States.

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