Notes on Right Wing politics

What if the real ___ is the ___ we made along the way? What then???

Usually, when someone titles something ‘notes on …’ it’s a mixture of humble bragging and pre-empting criticism along the lines of ‘this contains multiple unexplained jumps in logic and unjustified assertions’. It’s just notes, bro, chill out. A little tip of the trade for the noobs there. This post, however, is not ‘notes on’ it’s ‘Notes on’. These are just a bunch of things that would have been Substack Notes (if you don’t know, it’s like Twitter except better, but really worse) that I decided to collect in a post instead because things are busy with stuff. They are not connected, but they are not unconnected either. Instead, their connection is like the connection of two unconnected things. Know this.¹

1.

It’s easy to forget now, but the whole purpose of the Dissident Right, or whatever you wish to call it, when it got cracking amidst the wreckage of the project for the New American Century, was to try and make a Right Wing that was smart. Plainly, it has achieved the opposite, and polarisation by education (which is not the same as, but certainly correlates with, intelligence) has accelerated way beyond anything extrapolatable from prior trends. Nazi antisemitism was rather insane and led to some pretty self-defeating actions on the part of the Third Reich, but it did have a distinct use, namely to sublimate the dispute between progressive and conservative Germany by allowing Jews to stand in as a scapegoat for the sins of the former. Conversely, the American Far Right is now animated by a hysterical and literally murderous hatred of extremely normal white people - at least at first sight - like Alex Pretti. Even among the most committed antisemites, few exhibit obvious signs of understanding the constructive purpose of antisemitism, even in principle, as a tool for creating white unity. Instead, the road ahead seems to entail escalating demonisation of people with glasses who ride bicycles and enjoy ethnic food until it ends up in some kind of tackier version of the Khmer Rouge.

2.

One of the things that was supposed to have been settled a long time ago is that the Civil Rights movement was a victory of the more powerful over the less powerful. In the context of the bus that she was on, Rosa Parks was the less powerful actor, but that bus is not the correct frame of reference. Rosa Parks was picked by an activist organisation, which was funded by foundations that were, properly understood, part of the most powerful government in the history of the world and their opponents were a bunch of doomed hicks. The ability to create and distribute images that determine popular opinion is power; not the only form, for sure, but a very potent one, and it doesn’t just appear, but has to be cultivated through organisation of talent.

The Trump administration chose to make Minneapolis the site of confrontation for two extremely good reasons. The first is that the local and state governments were refusing to comply with federal laws to facilitate the deportation of illegal immigrants incarcerated for committing a crime. The second is that the state government had been exposed for facilitating organized mass fraud by the Somali community. These are two issues over which the Right can command the support of perhaps 80% of the American population. There is literally no more advantageous battleground they could have picked, which means that if they turned it into a defeat then it’s because they suck.

The strategy of the Left in Minneapolis was to create images and video of ICE agents attacking or killing sympathetic-looking victims. It’s not a very difficult tactic to understand, and it is not very difficult to understand what the appropriate response is, namely to not take actions that generate these images, but instead generate images that create the opposite effect (for example, victims of crimes committed by illegal immigrants in Minneapolis, contrasted to effective and peaceable administration of immigration policy in Texas). The online Right has managed to convince themselves of a different and completely insane thesis, namely that this was a test of their ability not to give into moral blackmail. All they had to do was respond to each image with a Chad face and eventually the Left would just give in or something. In other words, they didn’t even understand what it is they are competing for. People say theory is overrated compared to practice, but it beats memes.

3.

There is an account of Moldbuggism according to which it fundamentally states that the Right can never win in political competition. Stated like that, it is clearly wrong because you can easily find countries where the Right has won. In Turkey, Islamists won because demographics worked in their favour against the westernisers, and because Islam solved the Schelling point problem of what the anti-liberal thesis was supposed to be. An additional factor is that the Islamists were able to disrupt the westernisers’ ability to co-ordinate with liberal forces in the West itself by using the rhetoric of anti-imperialism. Turkish state media, similar to Qatar, gains international support, or at least acquiescence, by promoting left-liberalism for every country except Turkey.

Another example is our dear Israel. Of course, again, demographics here are key, as well as the decision of the Israeli Right to co-opt Judaism as its ideology after various daft experiments in the early decades of the State. The Left here has also been progressively more obstructed in its ability to coordinate with global liberalism by the disruptive actions of the pro- Palestinian movement. Another obviously important factor has been the consistent policy of Palestinian rejectionist groups in committing terrorist attacks, the objective function of which has only ever been to undermine the peace camp or anyone associating with, or associated with, it.

However, none of that is the most important thing. We could go through the whole world and look at all the examples, but already we should be able to see the common factor between Turkey and Israel: they are peripheral. People are worried about an exodus of Israeli human capital setting off an economic doomloop, and this is a legitimate concern, but the truth is that real elite human capital already left Israel. In large part, it just never came in the first place. The anti-Bibi movement is quite lame. Take Lior Schlein:

I think ‘mildly amusing’ is about as approbative as it gets. Real elite Israelis, if they haven’t left already, just don’t care that much. They can easily get just as good jobs abroad, and the frictional costs of immigration from language and cultural adaptation are not a big deal to them. The people who stay and fight are the people for whom staying and fighting is their easier option.

In America the precise opposite dynamic is at work. There are better (way better) places for the elite to retire to and holiday in, but there is nowhere better for them to prosper and jostle for status. Not only that, the elites and aspiring elites of elsewhere who decide they can do better come, if they can, to America and, at least nine times out of ten, it is the culture of urban liberalism that they will be joining. The strategy of overwhelming liberalism through mobilisation of the yeast is more promising the further away you are from the imperial core. You can argue about whether it’s really an improvement, but it’s a real thing that can happen. The closer you get to the core, the more improbable it becomes, until, eventually, it is merely absurd.

4.

One of the more important remaining open questions in the human sciences is to what extent the liberalism of mentally balanced, affluent people who have their life together is innate and to what extent it is culturally conditioned. There must be something innate to it, or modern states wouldn’t keep defaulting to left-liberalism as their operating system regardless of starting point. Noah Carl has dealt with this, and I have little to add, but I have an illustrative example.

Curt Jaimungal interviews various physicists and physicist-adjacent philosophers. I’m not sure I really learn anything much listening, but it’s nice to pass the time while doing boring things. It almost goes without saying that the people he interviews are 90% white and 90% male, but it occurred to me how comically absurd it would be if one of his interviewees refused to talk to him because he was an Indian. It is scarcely less ridiculous to imagine them spinning some tale about how they were from a different nation, and though they didn’t think either one was inferior, they preferred to be part of a community of kinfolk ineffably unified by strands of interlinking culture and blood stretching back and forwards over thousands of years nurtured in a particular soil and whatever. Of course, listening to a physics podcast doesn’t make me elite human capital, it makes me a sadact, but we should be able to agree that actual physicists are elite human capital. In the life of the mind, borders are just kind of dumb. This is not a new discovery. The absence of borders is very dumb, too, hence the most realistic patch to stop everything totally falling apart is Open Borders except for [racial epithet] if only someone can market it.

5.

Since Trump burst on to the scene, the most obvious and yet strangely difficult task has been to explain what Trump really is. One answer is, of course:

But we’re all big boys here. The most likely solution is still that Trump is the adaptation of the American political system to evolving demographic realities. Democracy - let us just agree to use the word - requires a Right-Wing party or coalition to periodically wield the instruments of government in order to (i) collect and safely siphon off opposition to the general progress of left-liberalism, (ii) to obscure power relations and allow for the Left to self-conceptualise as engaging in resistance in order to allow for permanent revolution and (iii) to clean up when the system overshoots and does a bunch of really dumb stuff. In the post-war era, the voter base of the Republican party was (a) conservative Protestants and (b) married white people who wanted to pay less in taxes. The decline of both groups as a share of the population to below the level at which the GOP could be electorally competitive at a national level required a new model to appeal, most specifically, to Hispanics and proles. It turns out that a kind of confused and bombastic soft white nationalism is the most effective tool for doing that.

However, I’m increasingly thinking that’s not what Trump really is. The other option is that Trump is the outward manifestation of a fundamental process in which the internet has rendered the Right-Wing opposition party too dysfunctional to do its jobs properly.² The system can no longer be provided with janitorial services because the people tasked with doing so are locked into an online feedback loop that is incompatible with even medium-term political manoeuvring. What should be happening right now is that the abundance liberals and Bari Weiss types cross the aisle and use the GOP apparatus to solve national problems caused by intra-Democrat dysfunctions, repeating a centuries-old cycle. But not only will the GOP not have them, they have no desire to join its freak show. As has happened before, a stable self-ordering social system has been broken by new communications technology. Democracy, against its own will, is thus forced to adopt a one-party liberal state as its crystallised form because no-one not insane enough is there to oppose it, and so the self-stabilising equilibrium of liberalism will have to become something brittle. What is brittle will break. If so, despite everything, the Dissident Right will have won after all.

1. I have been reliably assured that this is very profound writing.

2. I cribbed this idea from Jack Laurel. Subscribe!