In fracturing countries, extremists tend to consume the moderates.
When the population and the various power-factions are generally satisfied with the course of things, moderation, or at least tolerance mixed with complaining, tends to do well.
When dissatisfaction is common, extremism finds the waters to be more hospitable than they were previously.
The left singularity accelerates when leftist factions flank one another from the left until the usual starvation and civil conflict follow.
Flanking maneuvers work so well on the human animal because our eyes are plopped on the flat fronts of our faces. We’re vulnerable from the back and the side. We can only focus on one or two things at a time. The mainstream left is mostly focused on keeping the mainstream right contained, and the mainstream right also performs that function, because it’s really just a mislabeled faction of the left.
While the focus of those factions is on training the Amerikaners in what is acceptable to say and believe, the same controlled opposition can be hit from the right. The easiest opening get this started is to demoralize the people who manufacture the American conservative identity group, and otherwise run interference on their attempts to keep right-leaning professionals and others in line.
Professionals are especially sensitive to events like the Brenden Eich purging, because it means that when they achieve their career ambitions, there’s a solid chance that they will lose much of what they’ve worked for in life owing to their anodyne associations with mainstream conservative opinion. If mainstream conservatives can’t even protect a prominent technical executive like Eich from being fired, they’re worse than useless and deserve no money or support.
They deserve derision and destruction, instead.
At an even higher level than the professional classes which make up the subscriber bases of niche conservative magazines are the donors and attendees to conferences of the higher class right-leaning foundations. These foundations, too, are useless to their donors, and these facts should be made completely clear to the men who lard their coffers to no effect.
Given that the left is becoming more aggressive, and will continue to become so, the reaction emerges as an attempt at creating a countervailing force. This is one of the reasons why it tends to intimidate and occasionally panic leftists, whereas they see conservatives as mostly safe punching-bags who will back down whenever they’re directly challenged.
Attacking the GOP through the primary process has been attempted, and it has failed. That attempt is the ‘Tea Party.’ It was easy for the GOP to absorb that attack — it even gained from it, because it temporarily revitalized the enthusiasm of the party base, giving them hope that they would gain some real power from it.
The better way to think about it is that voting is to power as pornography is to sex. Power over territory is what the Amerikaners want — seek that, instead of the cheap substitute which lacks the substance. The democratic process is all about providing the vicarious fantasy of power to the average man. The real thing is better.
I take your point, certainly, on a national level.
Do you think it worthwhile to put effort into politics & organization on the state level?
State parties tend to be much more right-wing, both in words and deed. And (at least I believe) actual competence seems to be more rewarded than Fox News-style empty showmanship, in general.
State governments are of course undercut, directed, and beholden to USG on any number of significant funding issues, and are not sovereign.
But do you see a point in time where sovereignty is a possibility, and it is therefore worthwhile to put effort into creating as much of an efficient and competent state government in the meantime (no matter how hamstringed by USG progs) in order to accept the sovereignty when it comes?
Or will even the most right-wing state organizations always be wrecked by the degenerate national-level Fox News party?
I despise anonymity, but this post reminds me that we have to protect ourselves.
Two threads here I find worth pulling: (1) taking advantage of the mainstream conservative inability to protect its loyalists, and (2) putting effort into politics at the state and even local level. Jared Taylor raised this second point at NPI’s recent Beyond Conservatism summit and it made complete sense to me. Sometimes I feel we get absorbed by our status as thought criminals and forget that the very strength of our ideas is that, to many ordinary people, they are so taken for granted that they are boring. This attitude is more likely to exist at the local level, which is a foundation on which state-level power is built. Richard Spencer derided this strategy as beneath him–paraphrasing: “We aren’t going to win by running for dog-catcher.” But what makes Spencer important and valuable in some areas also what makes him ill-fitted for other necessary work.
I would say rolling up from the local level is the only way that these things happen.
Romance has its place, but you don’t run for dog-catcher to become dog catcher. You do it to be able to put pressure on the mayor.
Rolling up from the local level is suited to entryism from the right, so that’s a valid method. We need attacks on every front, while the mainstream right keeps the mainstream left pinned down in the massive Kubaki battle.
Or is it Kabuki?
https://youtu.be/5ZQSpMiaaxk
Yup.
I ran for school board a couple of years ago. Don’t get me started on local politics. The TL;DR version: democracy doesn’t work. It’s broken and corrupt all the way down.
I’ve seen some of these types of people speak at local political events, and they tend to be more liberal (even in red states) than most standard-issue liberals by a wide margin, regardless of party affiliation.
They are very righteous about the money.
The people you speak of (involved in school board / local gov) seem more liberal than liberals because they are by and large people with 1) A decent sense of public duty and responsibility or 2)a self-aggrandizing sense of wanting people to think they have a decent sense of public duty and responsibility.
In either case, for many generations “responsible”, “public duty”, etc., have all been defined in a progressive manner.
So, even in Red States, to be responsible in local government is to be progressive in local government. “Making your community a better place” means progging it out.
They are largely a group of people who are hardworking and dedicated and want to do the right thing. Since the right thing has been defined for generations by the left, they will become liberals (no matter how they may start out).
And to modify my comment somewhat, school board is an entirely different story. Not a chance there.
You can be a fiscally responsible local government official and maintain general ideological neutrality.
But the public school system has been progged since the beginning. And there’s no local body that could change that.
This sort of helps to explain some of the behavior I’ve seen by local republicans. The rhetoric in their campaign stuff might be all about small government, but when it comes to something about raising funding to dig a drainage ditch, they’re regular gentlemen just working to get responsible things done at taxpayer expense.
The issue when I ran was the closure of local schools and the building of a new school. The powers that be, both lib dems and republican, supported building. The political newbies opposed it. The newbies were also a mix of libs and conservatives.