Among American political thinkers, there’s a tendency to try to restrict politics to intellectualism — to the realm of ideas rather than the more complete realms like life, aesthetics, behavior, religion, and morality. The general idea goes that if your side can win the ‘battle of ideas,’ then your favored political order will triumph — that all else is downstream from the intellectual, rather than the more holistic philosophical point of view that takes into account more influences on the masses of political animals.

The Misean liberal view is actually rather broadly shared outside just the Miseans, in part because it also won over Hayek, and thereby won over the Reagan and Thatcher ‘revolutionaries’ of the 1980s:

When liberal ideas began to spread to central and eastern Europe from their homeland in western Europe, the traditional powers—the monarchy, the nobility, and the clergy—trusting in the instruments of repression that were at their disposal, felt completely safe. They did not consider it necessary to combat liberalism and the mentality of the Enlightenment with intellectual weapons. Suppression, persecution, and imprisonment of the malcontents seemed to them to be more serviceable. They boasted of the violent and coercive machinery of the army and the police. Too late they realized with horror that the new ideology snatched these weapons from their hands by conquering the minds of officials and soldiers. It took the defeat suffered by the old regime in the battle against liberalism to teach its adherents the truth that there is nothing in the world more powerful than ideologies and ideologists and that only with ideas can one fight against ideas. They realized that it is foolish to rely on arms, since one can deploy armed men only if they are prepared to obey, and that the basis of all power and dominion is, in the last analysis, ideological.

In this way, there’s sometimes a sense — especially in the capitols of power, finance, and influence — that you can have unusual ideas while simultaneously looking like and assimilating into the culture of the people who disagree with you in profound ways.

This is ultimately a disappointing way of life, sometimes interrupted with moments of good humor and connection among the people around you — the last vestiges of the short-lived Anglo-American tradition of toleration —  but one that leaves the odd person out feeling isolated, perhaps slightly deranged, because one needs to smile and laugh, even pretend to believe certain things, even when one would wish not to.

What Mises missed in at least some of his writing and his approach to promulgating theory is that ideology isn’t everything. What people do with their lives, how they behave, how they comport themselves, what they believe is beautiful, how they worship Gods or demons — all of these things matter, and not all of them can be encompassed within ideology, especially because many of these things have been encoded into our bodies in a way that we can’t shake.

The test of this strategy is whether or not it succeeded.

The conservatives who lead the temporary counter-attack against the failures of the 1970s almost entirely succeeded on the intellectual level. They then proceeded to achieve none of the rest of their goals, and were out-classed by intellectually inferior opponents, who have proceeded to engulf, neutralize, suppress, and even pervert their opponents. When the USSR collapsed, it almost looked like leftism was in collapse, and pragmatic, sane, even quasi-responsible liberal governance was returning to the land, which would produce something like Utopia soon enough, maintained by a precision bombing here and there.

It wasn’t fated to be, and the gods seemed to have found the hubris of that time more than a little funny, and in need of a comic series of political corrections.

In political fundraising, the cool line to use now is… “are you with me…?” — ‘me’ being the celebrity-idea of the politician.

And so are most of the meaningless articles and hot social issues of today. You’re either with Team Tranny and Team Young Boys Kissing or you’re with the evil ones on the other team. In conflict, reaction time matters, and more than most other things. The time for evaluation shrinks to milliseconds. Can you be identified correctly in the time between cognition and a reflex action?

“How do you feel about an 11 year old boy slipping some tongue to his classmate after the soccer game?”

That’s a test. A quiz, even.

The answer is either that it’s a beautiful, higher expression of love — or sickening. The ‘correct’ answer is that it’s a glorious herald of the rainbow future. If you’re not willing to conform to that, then you’ll at least be intimidated into silence and withdrawal from your local society.

Plenty of people are caught in the middle — they may have different ideas inside, and some misgivings or a lack of faith in the new symbols — but they also have trouble going over to the other side, which is perhaps just as foreign if not more so.

In war, the failed state of politics, no one gives a shit about how you feel on the inside.

If you look like you’re on the other side, you’ll be treated as a member of the other side, because in conflict, people have no time to do a background check on the person that they’re shooting at. If you look like you’re on the other team, they’re going to treat you like you are. If you live in the same state or city as the other team, they’re going to assume that you’re part of the opposition, and are otherwise going to be suspicious of you (and rightly so).

Life’s not fair, and what’s typical is for people to have no freedom of conscience. America’s just regressing to the human mean: especially as it brings in more foreigners who have no tradition whatsoever of tolerance, and works to integrate them into positions of power more aggressively.

Unfortunately, the option for those caught in the middle may not be whether or not to be silent — it’ll be the usual, which is “on your feet, or on your knees” — the choice being less in the whether, but the how, you want it to go.

When civil conflict is brewing, it becomes urgent to verify how loyal your neighbors are likely to be in the event of such a conflict. It’s important to suss this out, because you don’t want those neighbors causing any trouble or dragging their feet in case the political situation becomes serious.

The most inexpensive way to get people to verify beliefs is to participate in some sort of ritual with a cost which is otherwise useless to demonstrate loyalty to one group or another. Before open conflict, it’s important for each group to get a sense of its own strength as compared to the rival, so that each side can figure out where and how to attack, using what means.

An effective example is a hate-ritual in which everyone gets together to sling invective against the rival group which they want to get rid of or otherwise eliminate from the polity. Whether or not the content of this is true or false doesn’t really matter, because the purpose of the effort isn’t to discover the truth, but to build internal cohesion while beating back the perceived enemy.

The American left and the institutions it controls, suffering from serious internal issues (from financial problems to lack of purpose to lack of morale to demographic difficulties) wants to use a certain class of people as scapegoats, because the utopia that these institutions promised is not coming to being, and never will. There is this sort of belief within the left that if they get rid of the doubters, they’ll be no more doubt, the faith of the flock will become purer, and therefore that faith will move the mountainous obstacles in the way of the realization of their perfect world. This is impractical, but the way that most idealists tend to think — preferring the malleable world of ideas to the more practical world of reality.

It’s important to stop seeing this political conflict as an occasion for debate, and to see it for what it is — a physical conflict, as all political conflicts are ultimately physical conflicts with a lot of rules tacked onto them to limit how messy it gets. The left has a certain barbaric lifestyle which requires more warm blood and more warm bodies to convert into obedient workers, priests, and soldiers.

Unable to achieve its goals through legal means, the state increasingly turns to the tyrannical abuse of law and the use of blatantly criminal proxies to destroy more of its opponents. Intimidation is a much more effective means of limiting this sort of abuse of power than debate or complaint. Effective political orders do a better job sorting people according to culture, ethnicity, religion, and political inclinations. Jumbling everyone together leads to pointless conflict.

In some ways, we should encourage the left begin to begin mandating Party membership for certain industries, in the same way that certain parties have done in many other times throughout history. This is a formalized way of cleansing dissenters from institutions — it’s transparent and orderly — rather than relying on soft and poorly-legible methods of terrorizing people.

It’s time for the left to make employment contingent on the weekly recitation of a Party platform and the wearing of some distinctive piece of flair, like maybe a rainbow shoulder band  a “Bush Sucks” pin, mandatory castration for men, and a hysterectomy for the women. There’s no need to go to the trouble passing a bill for this new law: just sign it in through executive order, and announce it with a rap video broadcast on Youtube.

Silicon Valley, although it’s been instrumental since World War II in driving innovation in the US, is really America’s best answer to what happened to the country economically in the 1970s, as destructive monetary policies and scleroticizing bureaucratic liberalism became ascendant. The new beliefs in equal representation in the workplace and fairness over excellence tended to be subverted on the west coast.

The region and the influential institutions there (like Stanford) were willing to sacrifice William Shockley’s reputation and career to the beasts in the east, and after feeding the man to them, they were mostly granted some leeway to discriminate in hiring based on effective intelligence.

Speaking of intelligence, the long-standing links between Silicon Valley, the military-industrial complex, and America’s signal intelligence organization, the NSA, have also been helpful in fending off the regulatory state. So have all the enormous donations to the Democratic party as well as the warm relations with the Bill Clinton / Robert Rubin team, the cooperation of which made the modern commercial internet possible. Without the tax incentives and deliberately light regulatory hand placed on the web, there’s no way that these industries could have grown in the way that they have in the last couple decades.

It’s not even particularly clear that any contemporary president could tolerate an independently minded Treasury Secretary. The last time one of them tried to be responsible, he was sacked and publicly excoriated. So now, the only people who can be considered for such jobs are servile cronies who don’t even make a pretense of taking a helpful long-term action.

Over the last several years, the relationship between Washington (and its orbiters) and Silicon Valley has become more strained. This strain seemed to become worse when many prominent executives went to the White House to issue personal complaints following the repeated embarrassments created by dissidents/traitors like Edward Snowden and the rest. This has been countered recently with Washington demanding that network security be nationalized, which would force these companies to give up a lot of autonomy in return of what would probably be much less security.

Further, the public humiliation and libel of one of the co-founders of Palantir in the pages of the New York Times Magazine is an important indicator of how willing people in Washington are to dispose of some of their closest partners in building and maintaining its global surveillance network. For context, Palantir is a company that, among other functions, makes it easier for our friends in the intelligence agencies to make intercepts and publicly available data more intelligible in a social context to analysts and other spook types.

So, why is Washington and its friends giving so much guff to its own creation? Probably because the level of political talent at the highest levels in politics is declining, so they are doing stupid and self-destructive things. Allowing economic competition also puts pressure on many of the Democrats’ other corporate clients. “Disruption” sounds cool when it’s lifting the values of government pension funds, but it sounds awful when it’s vaporizing a corporation that lards your campaign coffers and employs your constituents.

Silicon Valley likes to portray itself as maverick and independent — the digital frontier — but it’s really more of a protected romper room. Washington can destroy what it created at any particular time, and can use that capacity to push the companies there this way and that way.

The pressure to make the digital economy more like the decaying and destroyed corporations that play by the rules is increasing in part because Washington has more ideological dependents that it needs to get jobs for in order to maintain its power base. They know that these profitable firms could afford to employ more useless people in profitable make-work jobs. Using the press and other means of intimidation, they can get what they want.

Some people are upset and incensed by this, but really it’s just another halfway-competent sovereign hungry for golden gooseflesh.

This notion that the American right should ride to the defense of a business community that, politically and in terms of the inclinations of most of the rank-and-file, are in the tank for the Democrats, is just ridiculous. After the same business community, as one of its first major political initiatives, tries to open up immigration even further (solidifying the power of the left permanently) — and fails — it starts feebly making motions to get support from the same people that it has contempt for.

Democrats throttling their own supporters to death should be mostly seen as a good thing, even if it’s having deleterious effects on enterprises which have done a fair amount of good for the world. The other advantage to this is that it encourages the others to watch an obese and crazy Titan devour some of its own children.

And, frankly, even if the American right wanted to defend the Valley against the same hungry hungry horde of feminists eager for make-work jobs, it couldn’t do it, so they’re really locked in a cage of their own making with a beast that they’ve been feeding for years.

Hope all that time smoking dope and building the perfect Harry Potter-themed polyamorous community made you tough enough to handle an insane monster eager to rip out your guts and bite your head off.