The Man is a Lion, I used to say " Trump is the hero that we need but not the hero we deserve " But this is not true as the events of the 13th demonstrate.Is it not that the hero is more Worthy when unlike those imaginings we foolishly cling to he struggles with foibles and is still capable of the higher virtue. Hail To The King!
Trump was actually kept down for around a minute before the secret service let him up, which you don't see on most vids, so he had some time to plan/contemplate the correct response (Jared Taylor, of all people, pointed this out on Unz Review.) It was the right calculation from a PR perspective but perhaps not as instinctive/spur-of-the-moment as people think.
I'd also mention that pre-modern aristocratic societies have had plenty of episodes of ethnic cleansing and genocide to their name, especially after adjusting for population size. I'm well aware the current regime is unsustainable, but 'deranged mob' vs. 'god-emperor' are not the only two options here.
I disagree with this take. When something traumatic like this happens, your body's hormonal response goes crazy and the Limbic system takes almost complete control over your brain.
You see how people are wired in those situations. This is why the standard response to someone losing control in response to stress is to leave them alone for about 30 minutes, the time it takes for your bodies adrenal glands to remove the adrenaline from your system.
Well I saw it live, and to be quite honest with you I just came to deeply despise democracy as a concept because of how much history I studied and how incompetent and stupid this system in itself is: I want to be ruled by my betters not my lessers and as such I don’t fancy the crackhead having the same political influence as the doctor.
I think you will find everyone everywhere is out of empathy at this point, I don’t really think Trump has it in him to be a “Emperor” again: if anything he’s equivalent to a Gracchi brother who survived, I still think it’s the best option for your American state either way, as for while it wasn’t a “spur of the moment” descision it was still quite fast and Trump still stood up knowing of the possibility of a second shooter, I’m surprised you’d go that far to discount what’s a pretty legitimate instance of bravery.
As for ethnic cleansing and genocide…I’m not really sure what that has to do with what I said in this comment, I don’t have a strong opinion about such a loose term, wars and atrocities are common place in history and are often as justified as unjustified, you can’t hate on those things existing without hating reality as it is in itself, nothing changed in the fabric of this world since the enlightenment delusion became a commonplace luxury belief, the same incentives are still perfectly valid and hence are still there, the same psychology is still there, the same logic applicable, the same reasoning ever present, man only really changed in his ways in recorded history ONCE and it was a very important change: it was when our Lord God Jesus Christ redeemed mankind and by his death and resurrection metaphysically changed man, for better or worse the religion of Christianity introduced the concepts that lead to the creation of the most successful societies in history, outside of that, everything else remains the same and you should be fairly grateful iron and Bronze Age logic doesn’t apply anymore, going medieval would be a instance of progress at this point in time since going to the enlightenment was a form of regression and decadence.
Either way I much rather have an aristocratic government than a democratic one.
"As for ethnic cleansing and genocide…I’m not really sure what that has to do with what I said in this comment"
That was more a general response to Dave's remarks about democratic politics indicting civilian populations for the crimes of their leadership, not so much a response to you specifically.
"Well I saw it live, and to be quite honest with you I just came to deeply despise democracy as a concept because of how much history I studied and how incompetent and stupid this system in itself is: I want to be ruled by my betters not my lessers and as such I don’t fancy the crackhead having the same political influence as the doctor."
I understand the frustrations, and I agree that some restriction/adjustment of the franchise is probably going to have to be introduced- I've suggested elsewhere that citizens should, e.g, get extra votes based on the children they raise without state support, or maybe that voting rights should be earned in the same way you need to earn a driver's license. Most of the arguments for not allowing children to vote would logically extend to a substantial chunk of the adult population if the reasoning were applied consistently, although no-one disputes the moral imperative to take care of children.
The problem is that I look around at the autocratic regimes of the 20th/21st century and I broadly don't see evidence for dramatically better governance. Moldbug has been rather bullish about China under the CCP, for example, which is a government that has consciously destroyed their own demography through fertility restrictions and engineered a housing bubble an order of magnitude larger than subprime. Communism is a confounder here, sure, but this is not a system we should be looking up to.
China is, if we take the Machiavellian definition of “democratic”, a true democracy, in practice at least, because when I say I hate democracy I mean to say that I hate democracy as per the Machiavellian definition, by that definition any system, state or government that derives its justification for legitimacy of rule from the principle of “popular sovereignty” is by definition “democratic” what happens in practice however under those systems is that “democratic” is always a justification and pretense, what often happens is that demagogues obtain power by manipulating mobs, and then over time oligarchs and wealthy groups and people patronize the best demagogues who rule the largest mobs to aid them in the benefit of their benefactors, it’s just an endless trail of corruption, and thus according to the Machiavellian school(and to myself) there is no real difference between Bonapartist dictatorships, communist states, democratic liberal republics or any other country whose ruling government and state are lead by “the people”.
I do not wish “the will of the people” to play any part whatsoever in government or rule, because “the will of the people” amounts to vibes that change on a whim, I want the principle of authority by which a government is judged to be “objective competency and virtue” as it was in aristocratic states.
I would argue that aristocracies derived legitimacy from hereditary social status, not objective competency and virtue per se (the rule of pure short-term meritocracy was one of the animating demands of the french revolution, and a major reason for why Napoleon's armies were so effective.)
If you're going to use the machiavellian definition of democracy then it's hard to imagine any non-democratic government emerging in the forseeable future, nor do I see how any government can be justified by anything beside the collective well-being of the people governed, even if effective governance can require short-term sacrifices for the sake of long-term growth ('tough love', as it were.)
In any case, this doesn't negate my argument that Moldbug singling out the CCP as an example of hyper-competent autocratic governance seems pretty misplaced to me. Even corporate CEOs need to answer to a board of directors and shareholder meetings.
Short term meritocracy creates a lack of loyalty in those promoted.
Also wdym? The well being of the people governed is achieved by aristocracies more often than by democracies, and is in fact one of the biggest advantages of such a system, the masses just don’t get political rights but that has little to do with their well being, only an absolute monarch or a staunch military aristocracy can fix the present problems in our societies, guild systems would also be a welcome addiction with the presence of a corporate model being a great way to give the masses some limited participation without compromising the system by corruption.
I've advocated political violence once in my life.
During COVID I felt that the restrictions of government had reached a point that were "unconstitutional" in not just a legal but spiritual sense. I felt that while I could normally stomach losing political contests and having policies imposed on me that I disagreed with even strongly, there was a class of "rights" beyond all that which nobody could touch. In fact having such a class of rights is what makes it easier not to become consumed by politics.
I kept wondering "when is someone going to assassinate Fauci?" "When is a mob going to beat a school board to death?" "Why the hell has my church agreed to suspend communion?" "Why don't people tear down these barriers and just live?"
And then after wondering this for months...leftists just did all that in the name of hating white people and destroying property! And we all just sat around and let it happen. The the authorities supported it while they policed children hugging mothers at funerals and made toddlers wear masks all day!
I always thought of Jan 6th as "the covid riot". Whatever was going on in the head of the people actually doing that, I wondered why it didn't happen 1000x over for the last year.
I can't understand the assassination of Trump because I can't understand someone objecting to him that much. Not a rational person, even a person who doesn't want him to be president. I reject political violence in basically all cases. But I do feel like the Americans of 100 years ago simply would not have put up with that shit in 2020.
“I can't understand the assassination of Trump because I can't understand someone objecting to him that much.”
We’re probably too different politically to agree on this, but the false elector plot that some people got convicted for recently, the Eastman memo, and “hang Mike Pence” are the key factors to understanding why people could think Trump ought to be assassinated.
During his Jan 6th speech Trump talked about the “legitimate electors,” aka the false electors in the elector scheme and that's why they were trying to pressure Mike Pence.
I personally think that if Trump had tried his bs in the 1700s, the founding fathers would've executed him for treason without a second thought.
You might not agree with the logic, but that's the thought process.
Looking at the history of American elections, trumps isn’t even the most controversial and they didn’t hang any of those people. Some got to be president in at least as contentious a situation.
Anyway, Trump was president for four years and we didn’t become a dictatorship. So it’s just hard for me to understand how someone could come to the conclusion that it would happen this time.
It’s clear to me that senior democrats don’t even buy their own line. They have supported Trump and MAGA in republican primaries for political gain, and they’ve refused to moderate at all on anything to cut into his electoral popularity. That’s not how you act if he’s a threat to democracy, it’s how you act if you think he’s not a threat at all but talking about it might win you an election.
Could someone stupid not get the joke, sure. But as I said I can’t understand how a rational person would.
"Looking at the history of American elections, trumps isn’t even the most controversial and they didn’t hang any of those people. Some got to be president in at least as contentious a situation."
My history is admittedly pretty lacking. This is an important rebuttal to consider. Got any names for me?
"Anyway, Trump was president for four years and we didn’t become a dictatorship. So it’s just hard for me to understand how someone could come to the conclusion that it would happen this time."
First step of a dictatorship (assuming starting democracy) is subverting an election, but even if he didn't declare himself dictator for life after that, it would still be treason and the overturning of an election. I agree that I don't think Trump's odds of becoming a dictator are very good, but it's not about the odds, it's about intent and the risk. For an analogy, Trump was drunk driving our democracy. Didn't kill anyone, most likely was going to make it home fine, but it doesn't change the intent of the crime and it doesn't change the risk. Though that analogy isn't quite perfect, because Trump was intentionally trying to overturn the election, which in the analogy is actively trying to kill someone, and not just trying to drive home.
"It’s clear to me that senior democrats don’t even buy their own line. They have supported Trump and MAGA in republican primaries for political gain, and they’ve refused to moderate at all on anything to cut into his electoral popularity. That’s not how you act if he’s a threat to democracy, it’s how you act if you think he’s not a threat at all but talking about it might win you an election.
Could someone stupid not get the joke, sure. But as I said I can’t understand how a rational person would."
It can be the senior democrat line, and they can be all manner of morally repugnant and disingenuous, and it can still be true. If you're the president of the United States with a cultish following, you falsely claim that you won the election, and you try to overturn that election, you intentionally put the democracy of the entire United States at risk for purposes of subverting that democracy.
People accusing Trump of 'drunk driving our democracy' need to explain how Biden allowing 7 million illegal border crossings, disgorging criminals from the prison system and allowing hundreds of thousands of violent BLM/Antifa rioters to get off with ~300 prosecutions isn't demonstrating vast contempt for rule of law.
Any person could see that something fishy went on with the 2020 election. So the natural response becomes: Show me that they were the actual votes.
The institution closed ranks and gaslit people using appeals to authority as if that means something.
So they couldn’t verify chain of custody of mail in ballots. Which fundamentally means they don’t actually know the vote count. And that’s the tip of the iceberg.
Of course you would question that. A reasonable person would.
Or you could make up a story about Russians, waste years undermining a president and even make videos with major actors asking electors to reject Trump. But that’s not undermining democracy apparently.
The trouble with many people in the Left’s intellectual class is they don’t realise Trump is just a proxy for most people. In fact it’s better because he talks like normal people even though he’s a billionaire. He’s brash but funny and connects with people.
And so when he asks: there’s something up here?, many have already asked that and he is confirming that.
Trump plays in the pocket behind the everyman’s beat.
Whether he’s effective at it is a different story. But those thinking he’s a dictator or will be have been gazing a bit too much at their navel fuzz kingdom.
Yes, ideas degrade entropically as they slide down the bell curve and that is A cause of the problems we face right now, but it is not the ONLY cause and I would argue is not even the PRIMARY cause of the outbreak of leftist political violence.
Here, we need to return to Moldbug.
"Reality is the perfect enemy: it always fights back, it can never be defeated, and infinite energy can be expended in unsuccessfully resisting it." Progressives are fundamentally and definitionally fighting against reality, or more accurately, Natural Law. They built metropolis' in the desert, cities 10 ft below sea level, houses in flood plains, ocean-side resorts at the low tide line. They built countries based on enlightenment propositions, Sang a New Church into Being and Gathered Us In by attempting to Draw the Circle Wide. They draw the circle wide by removing more and more definitions of what should be included in that circle to the point where the circle was so wide, it contained nothing.
The Church is a Lindy, 2000 year old (and exactly 2000 year old) proposition that never suffered from the phenomenon you described in your essay. The bible contains many condemnations of witchcraft. Witch hunts were not a thing until the 16th century. Islam is a lindy 1400 year old proposition that likewise never suffered from bell curve sliding, and so on and so forth. This bell curve sliding seems to be a phenomena almost exclusively associated with left-wing ideas and nothing else.
The left-wing descent into democratic violence is not primarily due to the bell curve slide, but instead due to the left wing project itself approaching the limits of its ability sustain itself. They are sustaining their assault on Natual Law by burning fuel and building ever more complicated systems to keep their own instability under control. The Left's last, for lack of a better phrase, Hail Mary, is to try to create an AI-based algorithmic and financial Panopticon to stabilize this thing, and the initial results have been disappointing to put it mildly.
The fundamental cause of the Left Wing democratic violence is a deep, primal understanding that the Left's project is failing while at the same time the remaining convinced of their own self-righteousness and moral superiority.
Regardless of this disagreement between us, you and I are united in the solution to build durable IRL communities while engaging with the political system and cultivating a network of counter-elites to give us space for these communities to flourish.
"The Left's last, for lack of a better phrase, Hail Mary, is to try to create an AI-based algorithmic and financial Panopticon to stabilize this thing, and the initial results have been disappointing to put it mildly."
Indeed. The cycle of empire will go on as it has since the beginning of time, which means our modern global civilization will eventually fall apart just as so many civilizations in time past have. Because it is global and built off of much more sophisticated technology than has been seen in time past, our elites believe they can stabilize it through effectively mitigating those aspects of human nature which result in the natural decline of large-scale empires.
The fatal flaw in their reasoning is that technological systems are produced by humans. Thus, as a product of human nature they are still bound to its flaws.
"Presently, in America, the path to virtually all professional jobs involves spending tens of thousands of dollars, and years of one’s life, to attend institutions of higher learning that are effectively progressive seminaries." Well said. Children of the Enlightenment think they have stepped outside of religion and they have not. They tie themselves to a sturdy mast so as not to succumb to the siren song of Christianity. What do they tie themselves to, in all that education?
"Despite what the luminaries of the secular enlightenment hoped, there is no such thing as peaceful political discourse outside of a shared set of moral values." We can have peace if we tie ourselves to their mast.
You have of course read William Briggs' essays on the fallacy of thinking we can live together in human society without values being imposed? Good for beginners like me, climbing out of the wreckage of the discourse the left has imposed on our country.
John Gray's "The Two Faces of Liberalism" also does a fantastic job of dismantling liberal attempts to create theories that don't involve moral impositions
Thus is the fate of late stage civilization. though even if it is not necessarily desired doesn't this rhetoric and actions speak to some vital element Within the spirit of the age? For when civilizations die formally of decay I think they go out with whimper not a bang. I don't think that Romulus Augustus inspired the same feeling that the orange man has. I think this points to a hope that when our civilization dies something new will be born with some resemblance as all children do to their parents but something that will continue on. Or at least that is my secret prayer
Another fantastic article, and one that will shape how I think about the current moment. I’ve been struggling with the discourse over the assassination and the cancellations in the aftermath. My head told me to cancel my enemies. My conscience said something was off. I refrained from commenting until I saw what you had to say, and I think you’ve once again done a phenomenal job teasing out elements of a problem I didn’t know were there.
You could tease out 12 more articles by detailing ideas you've expressed here. I hope you do.
Here's one section that grabbed me: "But we do not have a righteous government in place, and these low-class dimwits aren’t violating any social norms they are aware of, in fact, by publically expressing this violent rhetoric they are trying to conform to what they see as community norms."
As Catholics, we believe that the need for a Communion of Persons is written on our hearts. Social media has taken that desire and twisted it into a dark version. The more angry we are on twitter, the more likes we get, the more we build a rapport with others based on violence and hate, the closer we feel to a community. It's diabolical.
This probably made the best case for why "canceling the cancelers" is a waste of time, though I'm not sure what else the right could've and should've done in that moment. Maybe the issue is the right's lack of imagination on what its aspirations actually are.
I think you did a really great job here of encapsulating how my views on trump have also changed over the years without becoming sycophantic. Well said.
‘We don’t want to engage with online cancelation campaigns not because they are, in the abstract, immoral, but because they are practically beneath our aspirations.’
Great article overall but I don’t think this is quite right. Punishing peasants effectively has the effect of detaching the peasant class from their ideological overlords and is worthwhile for that reason. It’s certainly not a panacea, and doing it may make us feel impure to the point of disgusted, but it is tactically effective, at least in a narrow sense, and until we can aim for and score greater goals it will have to do.
The left is more correct than the mainstream and in agreement with Nick Land that mass democracy is a system by which the left wins slowly, as opposed to all at once in a Bolshevik revolution. Any evidence the right is winning or effectively resisting this process is evidence that democracy is not in fact being realized:
"Democracy and 'progressive democracy' are synonymous, and indistinguishable from the expansion of the state. Whilst 'extreme right wing' governments have, on rare occasions, momentarily arrested this process, its reversal lies beyond the bounds of democratic possibility. Since winning elections is overwhelmingly a matter of vote buying, and society's informational organs (education and media) are no more resistant to bribery than the electorate, a thrifty politician is simply an incompetent politician, and the democratic variant of Darwinism quickly eliminates such misfits from the gene pool. This is a reality that the left applauds, the establishment right grumpily accepts, and the libertarian right has ineffectively railed against."
There was something inherently noble in the manner by which Trump faced what he knew could be his death.
In that moment as you said he revealed a stronger character than what we knew he previously held, and likely than what he knew he had, great article.
We live in interesting times, the tendency from here is escalation.
The Man is a Lion, I used to say " Trump is the hero that we need but not the hero we deserve " But this is not true as the events of the 13th demonstrate.Is it not that the hero is more Worthy when unlike those imaginings we foolishly cling to he struggles with foibles and is still capable of the higher virtue. Hail To The King!
Trump was actually kept down for around a minute before the secret service let him up, which you don't see on most vids, so he had some time to plan/contemplate the correct response (Jared Taylor, of all people, pointed this out on Unz Review.) It was the right calculation from a PR perspective but perhaps not as instinctive/spur-of-the-moment as people think.
I'd also mention that pre-modern aristocratic societies have had plenty of episodes of ethnic cleansing and genocide to their name, especially after adjusting for population size. I'm well aware the current regime is unsustainable, but 'deranged mob' vs. 'god-emperor' are not the only two options here.
I disagree with this take. When something traumatic like this happens, your body's hormonal response goes crazy and the Limbic system takes almost complete control over your brain.
You see how people are wired in those situations. This is why the standard response to someone losing control in response to stress is to leave them alone for about 30 minutes, the time it takes for your bodies adrenal glands to remove the adrenaline from your system.
If that's true, I'll walk it back.
Well I saw it live, and to be quite honest with you I just came to deeply despise democracy as a concept because of how much history I studied and how incompetent and stupid this system in itself is: I want to be ruled by my betters not my lessers and as such I don’t fancy the crackhead having the same political influence as the doctor.
I think you will find everyone everywhere is out of empathy at this point, I don’t really think Trump has it in him to be a “Emperor” again: if anything he’s equivalent to a Gracchi brother who survived, I still think it’s the best option for your American state either way, as for while it wasn’t a “spur of the moment” descision it was still quite fast and Trump still stood up knowing of the possibility of a second shooter, I’m surprised you’d go that far to discount what’s a pretty legitimate instance of bravery.
As for ethnic cleansing and genocide…I’m not really sure what that has to do with what I said in this comment, I don’t have a strong opinion about such a loose term, wars and atrocities are common place in history and are often as justified as unjustified, you can’t hate on those things existing without hating reality as it is in itself, nothing changed in the fabric of this world since the enlightenment delusion became a commonplace luxury belief, the same incentives are still perfectly valid and hence are still there, the same psychology is still there, the same logic applicable, the same reasoning ever present, man only really changed in his ways in recorded history ONCE and it was a very important change: it was when our Lord God Jesus Christ redeemed mankind and by his death and resurrection metaphysically changed man, for better or worse the religion of Christianity introduced the concepts that lead to the creation of the most successful societies in history, outside of that, everything else remains the same and you should be fairly grateful iron and Bronze Age logic doesn’t apply anymore, going medieval would be a instance of progress at this point in time since going to the enlightenment was a form of regression and decadence.
Either way I much rather have an aristocratic government than a democratic one.
"As for ethnic cleansing and genocide…I’m not really sure what that has to do with what I said in this comment"
That was more a general response to Dave's remarks about democratic politics indicting civilian populations for the crimes of their leadership, not so much a response to you specifically.
"Well I saw it live, and to be quite honest with you I just came to deeply despise democracy as a concept because of how much history I studied and how incompetent and stupid this system in itself is: I want to be ruled by my betters not my lessers and as such I don’t fancy the crackhead having the same political influence as the doctor."
I understand the frustrations, and I agree that some restriction/adjustment of the franchise is probably going to have to be introduced- I've suggested elsewhere that citizens should, e.g, get extra votes based on the children they raise without state support, or maybe that voting rights should be earned in the same way you need to earn a driver's license. Most of the arguments for not allowing children to vote would logically extend to a substantial chunk of the adult population if the reasoning were applied consistently, although no-one disputes the moral imperative to take care of children.
The problem is that I look around at the autocratic regimes of the 20th/21st century and I broadly don't see evidence for dramatically better governance. Moldbug has been rather bullish about China under the CCP, for example, which is a government that has consciously destroyed their own demography through fertility restrictions and engineered a housing bubble an order of magnitude larger than subprime. Communism is a confounder here, sure, but this is not a system we should be looking up to.
China is, if we take the Machiavellian definition of “democratic”, a true democracy, in practice at least, because when I say I hate democracy I mean to say that I hate democracy as per the Machiavellian definition, by that definition any system, state or government that derives its justification for legitimacy of rule from the principle of “popular sovereignty” is by definition “democratic” what happens in practice however under those systems is that “democratic” is always a justification and pretense, what often happens is that demagogues obtain power by manipulating mobs, and then over time oligarchs and wealthy groups and people patronize the best demagogues who rule the largest mobs to aid them in the benefit of their benefactors, it’s just an endless trail of corruption, and thus according to the Machiavellian school(and to myself) there is no real difference between Bonapartist dictatorships, communist states, democratic liberal republics or any other country whose ruling government and state are lead by “the people”.
I do not wish “the will of the people” to play any part whatsoever in government or rule, because “the will of the people” amounts to vibes that change on a whim, I want the principle of authority by which a government is judged to be “objective competency and virtue” as it was in aristocratic states.
I would argue that aristocracies derived legitimacy from hereditary social status, not objective competency and virtue per se (the rule of pure short-term meritocracy was one of the animating demands of the french revolution, and a major reason for why Napoleon's armies were so effective.)
If you're going to use the machiavellian definition of democracy then it's hard to imagine any non-democratic government emerging in the forseeable future, nor do I see how any government can be justified by anything beside the collective well-being of the people governed, even if effective governance can require short-term sacrifices for the sake of long-term growth ('tough love', as it were.)
In any case, this doesn't negate my argument that Moldbug singling out the CCP as an example of hyper-competent autocratic governance seems pretty misplaced to me. Even corporate CEOs need to answer to a board of directors and shareholder meetings.
Short term meritocracy creates a lack of loyalty in those promoted.
Also wdym? The well being of the people governed is achieved by aristocracies more often than by democracies, and is in fact one of the biggest advantages of such a system, the masses just don’t get political rights but that has little to do with their well being, only an absolute monarch or a staunch military aristocracy can fix the present problems in our societies, guild systems would also be a welcome addiction with the presence of a corporate model being a great way to give the masses some limited participation without compromising the system by corruption.
I've advocated political violence once in my life.
During COVID I felt that the restrictions of government had reached a point that were "unconstitutional" in not just a legal but spiritual sense. I felt that while I could normally stomach losing political contests and having policies imposed on me that I disagreed with even strongly, there was a class of "rights" beyond all that which nobody could touch. In fact having such a class of rights is what makes it easier not to become consumed by politics.
I kept wondering "when is someone going to assassinate Fauci?" "When is a mob going to beat a school board to death?" "Why the hell has my church agreed to suspend communion?" "Why don't people tear down these barriers and just live?"
And then after wondering this for months...leftists just did all that in the name of hating white people and destroying property! And we all just sat around and let it happen. The the authorities supported it while they policed children hugging mothers at funerals and made toddlers wear masks all day!
I always thought of Jan 6th as "the covid riot". Whatever was going on in the head of the people actually doing that, I wondered why it didn't happen 1000x over for the last year.
I can't understand the assassination of Trump because I can't understand someone objecting to him that much. Not a rational person, even a person who doesn't want him to be president. I reject political violence in basically all cases. But I do feel like the Americans of 100 years ago simply would not have put up with that shit in 2020.
“I can't understand the assassination of Trump because I can't understand someone objecting to him that much.”
We’re probably too different politically to agree on this, but the false elector plot that some people got convicted for recently, the Eastman memo, and “hang Mike Pence” are the key factors to understanding why people could think Trump ought to be assassinated.
During his Jan 6th speech Trump talked about the “legitimate electors,” aka the false electors in the elector scheme and that's why they were trying to pressure Mike Pence.
I personally think that if Trump had tried his bs in the 1700s, the founding fathers would've executed him for treason without a second thought.
You might not agree with the logic, but that's the thought process.
Looking at the history of American elections, trumps isn’t even the most controversial and they didn’t hang any of those people. Some got to be president in at least as contentious a situation.
Anyway, Trump was president for four years and we didn’t become a dictatorship. So it’s just hard for me to understand how someone could come to the conclusion that it would happen this time.
It’s clear to me that senior democrats don’t even buy their own line. They have supported Trump and MAGA in republican primaries for political gain, and they’ve refused to moderate at all on anything to cut into his electoral popularity. That’s not how you act if he’s a threat to democracy, it’s how you act if you think he’s not a threat at all but talking about it might win you an election.
Could someone stupid not get the joke, sure. But as I said I can’t understand how a rational person would.
"Looking at the history of American elections, trumps isn’t even the most controversial and they didn’t hang any of those people. Some got to be president in at least as contentious a situation."
My history is admittedly pretty lacking. This is an important rebuttal to consider. Got any names for me?
"Anyway, Trump was president for four years and we didn’t become a dictatorship. So it’s just hard for me to understand how someone could come to the conclusion that it would happen this time."
First step of a dictatorship (assuming starting democracy) is subverting an election, but even if he didn't declare himself dictator for life after that, it would still be treason and the overturning of an election. I agree that I don't think Trump's odds of becoming a dictator are very good, but it's not about the odds, it's about intent and the risk. For an analogy, Trump was drunk driving our democracy. Didn't kill anyone, most likely was going to make it home fine, but it doesn't change the intent of the crime and it doesn't change the risk. Though that analogy isn't quite perfect, because Trump was intentionally trying to overturn the election, which in the analogy is actively trying to kill someone, and not just trying to drive home.
"It’s clear to me that senior democrats don’t even buy their own line. They have supported Trump and MAGA in republican primaries for political gain, and they’ve refused to moderate at all on anything to cut into his electoral popularity. That’s not how you act if he’s a threat to democracy, it’s how you act if you think he’s not a threat at all but talking about it might win you an election.
Could someone stupid not get the joke, sure. But as I said I can’t understand how a rational person would."
It can be the senior democrat line, and they can be all manner of morally repugnant and disingenuous, and it can still be true. If you're the president of the United States with a cultish following, you falsely claim that you won the election, and you try to overturn that election, you intentionally put the democracy of the entire United States at risk for purposes of subverting that democracy.
A rational person would view that as very bad.
People accusing Trump of 'drunk driving our democracy' need to explain how Biden allowing 7 million illegal border crossings, disgorging criminals from the prison system and allowing hundreds of thousands of violent BLM/Antifa rioters to get off with ~300 prosecutions isn't demonstrating vast contempt for rule of law.
Any person could see that something fishy went on with the 2020 election. So the natural response becomes: Show me that they were the actual votes.
The institution closed ranks and gaslit people using appeals to authority as if that means something.
So they couldn’t verify chain of custody of mail in ballots. Which fundamentally means they don’t actually know the vote count. And that’s the tip of the iceberg.
Of course you would question that. A reasonable person would.
Or you could make up a story about Russians, waste years undermining a president and even make videos with major actors asking electors to reject Trump. But that’s not undermining democracy apparently.
The trouble with many people in the Left’s intellectual class is they don’t realise Trump is just a proxy for most people. In fact it’s better because he talks like normal people even though he’s a billionaire. He’s brash but funny and connects with people.
And so when he asks: there’s something up here?, many have already asked that and he is confirming that.
Trump plays in the pocket behind the everyman’s beat.
Whether he’s effective at it is a different story. But those thinking he’s a dictator or will be have been gazing a bit too much at their navel fuzz kingdom.
You only covered half of the issue here Dave.
Yes, ideas degrade entropically as they slide down the bell curve and that is A cause of the problems we face right now, but it is not the ONLY cause and I would argue is not even the PRIMARY cause of the outbreak of leftist political violence.
Here, we need to return to Moldbug.
"Reality is the perfect enemy: it always fights back, it can never be defeated, and infinite energy can be expended in unsuccessfully resisting it." Progressives are fundamentally and definitionally fighting against reality, or more accurately, Natural Law. They built metropolis' in the desert, cities 10 ft below sea level, houses in flood plains, ocean-side resorts at the low tide line. They built countries based on enlightenment propositions, Sang a New Church into Being and Gathered Us In by attempting to Draw the Circle Wide. They draw the circle wide by removing more and more definitions of what should be included in that circle to the point where the circle was so wide, it contained nothing.
The Church is a Lindy, 2000 year old (and exactly 2000 year old) proposition that never suffered from the phenomenon you described in your essay. The bible contains many condemnations of witchcraft. Witch hunts were not a thing until the 16th century. Islam is a lindy 1400 year old proposition that likewise never suffered from bell curve sliding, and so on and so forth. This bell curve sliding seems to be a phenomena almost exclusively associated with left-wing ideas and nothing else.
The left-wing descent into democratic violence is not primarily due to the bell curve slide, but instead due to the left wing project itself approaching the limits of its ability sustain itself. They are sustaining their assault on Natual Law by burning fuel and building ever more complicated systems to keep their own instability under control. The Left's last, for lack of a better phrase, Hail Mary, is to try to create an AI-based algorithmic and financial Panopticon to stabilize this thing, and the initial results have been disappointing to put it mildly.
The fundamental cause of the Left Wing democratic violence is a deep, primal understanding that the Left's project is failing while at the same time the remaining convinced of their own self-righteousness and moral superiority.
Regardless of this disagreement between us, you and I are united in the solution to build durable IRL communities while engaging with the political system and cultivating a network of counter-elites to give us space for these communities to flourish.
"The Left's last, for lack of a better phrase, Hail Mary, is to try to create an AI-based algorithmic and financial Panopticon to stabilize this thing, and the initial results have been disappointing to put it mildly."
Indeed. The cycle of empire will go on as it has since the beginning of time, which means our modern global civilization will eventually fall apart just as so many civilizations in time past have. Because it is global and built off of much more sophisticated technology than has been seen in time past, our elites believe they can stabilize it through effectively mitigating those aspects of human nature which result in the natural decline of large-scale empires.
The fatal flaw in their reasoning is that technological systems are produced by humans. Thus, as a product of human nature they are still bound to its flaws.
"Presently, in America, the path to virtually all professional jobs involves spending tens of thousands of dollars, and years of one’s life, to attend institutions of higher learning that are effectively progressive seminaries." Well said. Children of the Enlightenment think they have stepped outside of religion and they have not. They tie themselves to a sturdy mast so as not to succumb to the siren song of Christianity. What do they tie themselves to, in all that education?
"Despite what the luminaries of the secular enlightenment hoped, there is no such thing as peaceful political discourse outside of a shared set of moral values." We can have peace if we tie ourselves to their mast.
You have of course read William Briggs' essays on the fallacy of thinking we can live together in human society without values being imposed? Good for beginners like me, climbing out of the wreckage of the discourse the left has imposed on our country.
Yeah it’s good
John Gray's "The Two Faces of Liberalism" also does a fantastic job of dismantling liberal attempts to create theories that don't involve moral impositions
Thus is the fate of late stage civilization. though even if it is not necessarily desired doesn't this rhetoric and actions speak to some vital element Within the spirit of the age? For when civilizations die formally of decay I think they go out with whimper not a bang. I don't think that Romulus Augustus inspired the same feeling that the orange man has. I think this points to a hope that when our civilization dies something new will be born with some resemblance as all children do to their parents but something that will continue on. Or at least that is my secret prayer
Another fantastic article, and one that will shape how I think about the current moment. I’ve been struggling with the discourse over the assassination and the cancellations in the aftermath. My head told me to cancel my enemies. My conscience said something was off. I refrained from commenting until I saw what you had to say, and I think you’ve once again done a phenomenal job teasing out elements of a problem I didn’t know were there.
You could tease out 12 more articles by detailing ideas you've expressed here. I hope you do.
Here's one section that grabbed me: "But we do not have a righteous government in place, and these low-class dimwits aren’t violating any social norms they are aware of, in fact, by publically expressing this violent rhetoric they are trying to conform to what they see as community norms."
As Catholics, we believe that the need for a Communion of Persons is written on our hearts. Social media has taken that desire and twisted it into a dark version. The more angry we are on twitter, the more likes we get, the more we build a rapport with others based on violence and hate, the closer we feel to a community. It's diabolical.
Thanks. These ideas will be developed in my blog, but they are also being developed by a ton of other people in this space.
"And despite his wealth and confidence to operate inside elite circles, there was something about him that was distinctly low class".
Isn't that more fitting for an American order (aristocratic or otherwise)? "High class" is a European / British aspiration.
This probably made the best case for why "canceling the cancelers" is a waste of time, though I'm not sure what else the right could've and should've done in that moment. Maybe the issue is the right's lack of imagination on what its aspirations actually are.
Thank you for a thoughtful and eloquent essay. 👍👍
Cheers
Great article. I too have beef with destiny. https://open.substack.com/pub/thecommoncentrist/p/destiny-is-wrong-about-centrists?r=2wu590&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I think you did a really great job here of encapsulating how my views on trump have also changed over the years without becoming sycophantic. Well said.
Destiny gone wild! Recently found ancient footage shows OG "brutal" Brutus with bloody knife and blue hair.
Thanks for the essay.
‘We don’t want to engage with online cancelation campaigns not because they are, in the abstract, immoral, but because they are practically beneath our aspirations.’
Great article overall but I don’t think this is quite right. Punishing peasants effectively has the effect of detaching the peasant class from their ideological overlords and is worthwhile for that reason. It’s certainly not a panacea, and doing it may make us feel impure to the point of disgusted, but it is tactically effective, at least in a narrow sense, and until we can aim for and score greater goals it will have to do.
The left is more correct than the mainstream and in agreement with Nick Land that mass democracy is a system by which the left wins slowly, as opposed to all at once in a Bolshevik revolution. Any evidence the right is winning or effectively resisting this process is evidence that democracy is not in fact being realized:
"Democracy and 'progressive democracy' are synonymous, and indistinguishable from the expansion of the state. Whilst 'extreme right wing' governments have, on rare occasions, momentarily arrested this process, its reversal lies beyond the bounds of democratic possibility. Since winning elections is overwhelmingly a matter of vote buying, and society's informational organs (education and media) are no more resistant to bribery than the electorate, a thrifty politician is simply an incompetent politician, and the democratic variant of Darwinism quickly eliminates such misfits from the gene pool. This is a reality that the left applauds, the establishment right grumpily accepts, and the libertarian right has ineffectively railed against."
Okay, but what set of recent non-democratic governments have been particularly effective at resisting or curbing state expansion?
Monarchy