The role of conservative parties in a democracy

It is actually what you think

Nature abhors a vacuum. During the euphoria of the opening months of TrumpReich 1.0, we had Boldmug to short the vibes market, but now - under his implausible pseudonym ‘Curtis Yarvin’ - he’s cucked out and hedged his bets. So a new Jew had to step into the breach. No, not me, Nathan Cofnas:

The American right has no coherent message or ideology besides being against the left. It has no good answer to the major issue of our time, which is the question of lingering race disparities. We have almost no effective institutions. We control literally zero serious PhD-granting universities. Even universities in solid red states remain in the hands of our opponents. Among graduate students and assistant professors at elite institutions, our representation is very close to zero percent. The right has been shut out of editing Wikipedia—the most influential source of (alleged) information in our society. Conservative culture revolves largely around figures who are some combination of grifter, crackpot, criminal, conspiracy theorist, anti-Semite, or racist-in-a-bad-way. We produce virtually no art, music, or literature. Right-wing discourse is dominated by people doing “physiognomy checks” on each other, calling Democrats pedophiles, and telling people not to get vaccinated and that they can cure their cancer with ivermectin. None of this was changed by the election of Donald Trump.

Cofnas is right and everyone else is wrong, but his model isn’t right. Ideology is secondary; structure is primary. To use Yarvinian imagery, trying to fix society by proposing a new ideology is like trying to pump up a hotair balloon at a bodega by doing something involving coercive anal sex with an elephant. Perhaps that wasn’t entirely clear. If so, just follow this link to a pamphlet from 1876 about how everyone in the Treasury is fake and gay.

But I jest. For what Cofnas gets wrong, see Spandrell. I’ll focus on reviving the corpse of authentic non-deviationist Boldmug thought. Yes, we are doing an Althusser,¹ and not a moment too soon.

The cleanup crew

The simplest form of the blackpill, what we might call the rightoid theory of demoralisation, is the concept of ‘controlled opposition’. Essentially, right wing politicians don’t achieve anything because they have already been bought off or blackmailed by they. But this black pill is fake (sorry, fake), because the obvious implication is that you just need to find a non-controlled opposition. This leads to the schizo-cycle. You used to go to Alex Jones to find out who was controlled opposition, but then you found a guy who is even more red-faced and queerly eloquent and he says that Alex Jones is himself controlled opposition. Eventually, the only man you can trust is an outright overt mental case. Ain’t nobody buying his black ass.

The next step up, which we’ll call vulgar moldbuggism, or maybe Yarvinism, is that the system of incentives is set up in such a way, that regardless of intention, everyone acts as if they were controlled opposition. In short, we don’t need feds, because they do it for free. There are two basic forms of this: Conservative inc. and the Stuckment, which have their own, quite different, ways of channeling righteous and unrighteous energy alike into the same avenues, either pointless or actively strengthening the regime.

Now, this is true, but it is not the whole truth.² Quoth the raven:

Conservative parties perform a valuable service in slowing the decay of the Structure, moderating the acute, fulminating sepsis of revolutionary democracy, a real danger for any state at any time, into a mere chronic degenerative disease. They can resist, they do resist, and they should resist. No one living today can even imagine the horrors that would have seen America and the world had the US been captured by revolutionary Bolshevism in the 1920s, an event not at all outside the realm of counterfactual possibility. Question: why did this not happen? Answer: conservatives.

Conservatives achieve plenty of things. Eisenhower purged the American state of Russian agents of influence (formal and informal) who had successfully handed over eastern Europe to Stalin, China to Mao, and the A bomb to communism. Reagan ended stagflation, cut the top rate of income tax by two thirds, smashed union power, and saved social security. Giuliani and Bloomberg slashed murder in New York by 80%, beat the mob, and cleaned up the subway.

If we look at the lasting achievements of conservatism, we find that they have two things in common: (a) they are plainly good things absolutely and (b) they are good things for the democratic system. If we look a bit closer, we find another common thread: they are all things that parties of the Left tried to do and failed because of insurmountable opposition from internal interest groups. Callaghan and Carter were the original monetarists; Truman knew well the full horror of what Harry Hopkins and Harry Dexter White had done and tried to correct; Ed Koch was a ‘liberal with sanity’ fatally hobbled by liberals with insanity.

The role of the conservative that emerges is that of the hired help. Zippy Catholic explains:

As a result, the function of conservatism in society is to preserve and protect liberalism from its own excesses. Conservatives are the abused enablers of progressives and always will be, mopping up the vomit and excrement after the drunken binges to make sure that they can continue.

The only way to put an end to the self abuse is to fully realize and accept the truth: that liberalism and leftism just are the same thing.

And to add injury to insult, conservatives don’t just get to mop up the poo and toss out the bums, they get to take the blame for the heads they have to crack doing it. And you always have to crack some heads, especially if you’re just kind of winging it.

Trannies

Let us focus briefly on a case-study of great contemporary political salience: ladyboys. Steve Sailer famously predicted in advance that this would become the next big thing, which he did through his unique, impossible-to-imitate method of carefully reading the news and not being a disturbed headcase. But why trans and not some other thing, and why then and not some other time?

In one sense, trans rights is just an application of the general principle of equality to the particular case of men who want to chop their knob off, but because equality is an objectively retarded and self-contradictory political principle, it can be applied to an infinite variety of cases with equal (that is to say, no) justification. Robin Hanson was not too long ago spitballing about redressing the well-known and fairly severe disadvantages faced in life by men who are short and bald. This did not become the next big thing.

As with all things, there are a few factors, but the most important one is autogynophiles. For those who don’t know, these are men who achieve sexual arousal by dressing up as women, looking in the mirror and fantasizing about having sex with themselves. Some of them get so obsessed with this that they want to have surgery. Now, autogynephiles are a relative small proportion of male-to-female trans (most of whom are just extreme pansies) but they have an excess of certain stereotypically masculine qualities - aggression, extroversion, drive, will to dominate - that make them punch above their weight. And punch they do. For example, here is the onetime highest-paid female CEO:

More to the point, here is billionaire investor and philanthropist Jennifer Pritzker:

For full details of ‘her’ role in engineering the trans movement see here. Of course, not every autogynephile activist can be a successful (((businessman))), some are convicted child rapists, have tattoos on their faces, are convicted child murderers or people who spend their time detailing lurid fantasies about brutally murdering JK Rowling.

The point of all this unpleasantness is that the whole trans episode is essentially a case of really genuinely messed up sick people hijacking the mechanisms of leftism, by employing incredibly crude tactics that essentially boil down to being very dedicated and psychotically horrible. The biggest joke, as Sailer has pointed out many a time, is that almost invariably whenever these people had political opinions prior to putting on a wig, they were right wing, and often majorly right wing. A phrase I would occasionally hear growing up was ‘he’s to the right of Genghis Khan’; autogynephiles are the only group on earth who can be plausibly said to make Temüjin look like a wimp.

And this is no incidental point. The most obvious grotesquery of the trans moment, namely burly untalented men winning sports events by pushing over women, or punching them in the face, is not only revolting generally, it’s specifically most revolting to normie lib white people who aren’t insane. In fact, the only people I have ever seen who were able to summon up any kind of enthusiasm about it are niche alt-right weirdos enthusiastic that at least some white women are finally getting their comeuppance.

When we move from the silly spectacle to the real tragedies, it’s libs who have overwhelmingly been the victims. I don’t know anyone with trans kids; I don’t think I even know anyone who knows anyone who has trans kids. It’s something I read about on the internet, and that is the experience of nearly every conservative. It is invariably liberal towns which have mass outbreaks of gender dysphoria hysteria, where parents have to confront unhappy 14 year olds who have been groomed online to threaten suicide unless they get puberty blockers. The scam clinics and witch doctors exposed by Abigail Shrier and Matt Walsh made their money by wrecking the lives of liberals, not conservatives. As to the ‘when’, it comes down to nothing more complicated than technological advances which made transdom for the first time a feasible option as a mass movement.

I think there’s a better than even chance that a lasting achievement of the Trump vibe-shift is that the trans movement is permanently relegated to fringes of society. That’s a good thing, absolutely, but it’s a good thing most specifically for liberals and, at the risk of being cringe, for the ‘regime’. It’s regime spring cleaning, not regime change. You can look back not too many decades and see a more gruesome parallel in the constellation of leftist movements that sought to legalize paedophilia. Read about Gabriel Matzneff and then check out who wrote the 1977 petition to abolish age of consent laws, and then pinch yourself to check you’re not on a bad acid trip. But, as incomprehensibly awful as elements of this episode are, sober historical analysis demonstrates it to have been a parasitic and temporary excrescence on leftism, not a part of its physis.³ Every half-decade, the rightoids warns us that this time they are going to legalise paedophilia, and, each time, liberalism expresses itself in more strident stigmatization of age-differences in sexual congress, or even attraction.

Why not be loyal?

You may ask, after all this, what am I even bitching about? Firing DEI officers so that people can go to work without being terrorized is a good thing, telling trannies they can’t propagandize to kids is a good thing, stemming the chaotic flow of derelicts across a border is a good thing. Have I not just arrived at the normie centrist observation that democracies function in part because conservative parties are always on hand to reign in the excesses, smooth off the rough edges, and make sure the wagon doesn’t fall off the road?