Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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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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Dreher and Noble Lies

Nick Land and Occam’s Razor have posted their reactions to Rod Dreher’s post in the American Conservative that stated that acknowledging biology is politically dangerous.

While I disagree with Dreher’s position, I think that he’s correct in saying that, were the USG to admit that much of its post-WWII domestic and international policy have been built upon shams, and that much of the social science staff throughout the West consists of sham artists, that there would be stunning levels of political disruption, which would probably spiral into civil conflict, perhaps even civil war.

Rarely do people involved in maintaining a major political lie admit that is what they’re doing. Writers like Dreher consciously suppress conflict in the present by concealing valid information, but by doing so, they guarantee a far worse ‘correction’ of the social structure later. Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile explores this theme, and comes out against the maintenance of shams, because it’s a highly destructive practice in the long run.

The ‘Austrian economic calculation problem’ method of thinking also impugns this strategy as a sort of method of intellectual price-fixing — doomed to fail, certain to cause errors to multiply, and to spark deadly conflict in the future.

Land makes light of Dreher’s fears, and Occam attempts to calm his anxiety. Pretending as if the breakdowns of the various progressive lies will be largely benign for everyone involved isn’t a realistic prediction.

While forbidden knowledge doesn’t directly result in ‘genocide’ (a recent term that only entered wide use post-war), the retaliatory rage and political dysfunction that results from the unwinding of countless lies does often result in political dissolution and war.

The result is not likely to be Auschwitz redux, however. The term ‘genocide’ and the United Nations diplomatic framework put in place to freeze in place American hegemony for-ever-and-ever only came into being after a series of genocides all over Europe perpetrated by all sides of the war that created all the homogeneous nations west of the iron curtain.

That Hitler was able to conquer the liberal Weimar Republic, sympathetic as it was to the ideals of 1789, is more an argument against the ideals of 1789 than it is against anything that might threaten the preservation of those ideals. The modern American state is probably closer to the revolutionary idyll than Weimar was, so I understand Dreher’s hitlerexia nervosa. Building a social order that’s resilient to Hitlers seems more sensible than attempting to deal with every little corporal that decides to declare himself first among brothers in a nation of brothers. The 1789 way of doing things is demonstrably vulnerable to such degenerative modes, as was broadly understood in the West since antiquity.

As soon as a clear and permanent majority develops under democracy, some variant on Napoleon/Hitler/etc. is inevitable. This is one of the reasons as to why we see such a scramble by minority groups in democracies to hamper majority populations and to ally with other minorities — they know that permanently losing the kulturkampf means permanently losing the kampf proper.

Majority rule so often means minority expulsion or mass-murder that it’s practically axiomatic; derivable via first principles or plain observation.

This is the situation that the former American majority finds itself in, and why the Dark Enlightenment finds purchase now and not ten yeas ago, whereas the other mind-virus strains from which its thinkers have synthesized it could not infect more than a small portion of the population, most of whom were cranks with compromised mental immune systems anyhow. Now that the stakes are obvious to anyone with eyes to see, politics looks less like sport and more like a battle for survival.

It’s a pathetic accident of history and low education standards that ‘democracy,’ which confers power to the majority, has been somehow identified with friendliness to minorities.

To the extent that the Dark Enlightenment dismantles popular lies at a faster rate than was possible before, it’s not a benign force — from the perspective of the people who make comfortable livings off of those lies, like most of the people living in Washington DC. It may even be dangerous to the millions of upstanding, productive people who have adapted to a high parasite load, even if they don’t enjoy all the squirming tapeworms sharing their intestinal tract.

The Dreher position, which is more widely shared than most will admit, is ‘responsible’ to the present, but destructive to the future of more than 20 years from now, in the same way that the lies of the ’68ers caused immense destruction as those ideas hardened into opportunistic demotic policy.

In this, the superior position is the one which accepts a temporary period of strife to make more durable and organic orders possible. While yes, this will devastate the lives of millions of people (just as the implosion of the USSR hollowed out millions of sad lives), it’s preferable to the alternative of catastrophic collapse.

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