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.