Tag: Curtis Yarvin

Ancient European History – Part 3

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In H. G. Wells’ “The Outline of History,” He writes a couple of paragraphs at the conclusion of his description of the Fall of the Roman Empire.   He discusses the phenomenon of “Caesarism.”

“But while the smashing of the Roman social and political structure was thus complete, while in the east it was thrown off by the older and stronger Hellenic tradition, and while in the west it was broken up into fragments that began to take on a new and separate life of their own, there was one thing that did not perish, but grew, and that was the tradition of the world empire of Rome and of the supremacy of the Cæsars. When the reality was destroyed, the legend had freedom to expand. Removed from the possibility of verification, the idea of a serene and splendid Roman world-supremacy grew up in the imagination of mankind, and still holds it to this day.

Ever since the time of Alexander, human thought has been haunted by the possible political unity of the race. All the sturdy chiefs and leaders and kings of the barbarians, who raided through the prostrate but vast disorder of the decayed empire, were capable of conceiving of some mighty king of kings greater than themselves and giving a real law for all men, and they were ready to believe that elsewhere in space and time and capable of returning presently to resume his supremacy, Cæsar had been such a king of kings. Far above their own titles, therefore, they esteemed and envied the title of Cæsar. The international history of Europe from this time henceforth is largely the story of kings and adventurers setting up to be Cæsar and Imperator (Emperor). We shall tell of some of them in their places. So universal did this “Cæsaring” become, that the Great War of 1914-18 mowed down no fewer than four Cæsars, the German Kaiser (= Cæsar), the Austrian Kaiser, the Tsar (= Cæsar) of Russia, and that fantastic figure, the Tsar of Bulgaria. The French “Imperator” (Napoleon III) had already fallen in 1871. There is now (1920) no one left in the world to carry on the Imperial title or the tradition of Divus Cæsar except the Turkish Sultan and the British monarch. The former commemorates his lordship over Constantinople as Kaisar-i-Roum[274]; the latter is called the Cæsar of India (a country no real Cæsar ever looked upon), Kaisar-i-Hind.”

 

Mr. Wells had his finger on something.  There is a fascination, not with the reality of the actual Roman Empire, but with the fantasy of it as this just, omnipotent, supremely competent and efficient ruler and government.  Now as any student of that era knows this was an almost polar opposite of what the empire actually was.  The oligarchs who reaped the lion’s share of the benefits from the empire’s permanence were heartless creatures who thought of the poor (slave or free) as nothing but animals to be harvested in every way imaginable.

And maybe this gives us a clue as to what kind of government we’re supposed to have.  We’re looking for a system where the humans aren’t treated like animals.  The first thing that comes to mind is the evolution of Socialism and Communism as secular stand-ins for the Christian church.  The “love your neighbor” part of it puts us in mind of the utopian brotherhood that Marx and the other socialists touted as their goal.  But of course, we all remember how those experiments end; death camps, oligarchs (commissars) and bread lines.

The opposite is capitalism with a capitol K.  And we’re currently living through that right now.  And once again we get oligarchs.  But this bunch just send our jobs to China and tell us to stop having children to “save the planet.”  So somehow, we’ve got to figure out a third way.

 

Different thinkers have tried to come up with different ways to allow representative government to more satisfyingly express the needs and will of the people.  Robert A. Heinlein thought that the vote should be restricted to veterans of the armed services.  Some have thought that only people with children should be able to vote.  And, of course, women think they’re the only ones qualified to vote.  There have been schemes whereby the number of votes you have should be based on things like how much you pay in taxes or receive in government benefits.  In other words, the more you pay into the system the more you get to decide.

There’s one guy named Curtis Yarvin who believes we need a monarch who should be chosen and overseen in the same way that a company selects and oversees a CEO (Chief Executive Officer).  In some ways this is an interesting idea.  The concept becomes a little fuzzy when he tries to describe what the equivalent is to the Chairman and other members of the Board of Directors.  But he’s right in the sense that the leader of this country needs much more authority in order to get things done.  It seems pretty clear that our system of checks and balances between the three branches of government have failed to produce good governance.  The bureaucracy has become bloated and arrogant and need to be pared back radically.  The judiciary is a hornet’s nest of special interests and influence peddling as are the Houses of Congress.  And the stalemate between the Left and Right is maddening to anyone who wants this country fixed.  We seem to be at a dead end.

What’s the answer?

Sour Fisking in the Arena

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I was reading a recent essay by Curtis Yarvin called, “Heroin Liberals and Cocaine Conservatives.”  Yarvin is a clever writer and he made some entertaining comparisons between what liberals get out of believing in their narrative (anesthesia) versus what conservatives get from their narrative (hope).  Clever stuff.

But later the essay focuses on one particular conservative story.  He fisks an article that Chris Rufo wrote in the aftermath of his part in the recent ousting of Harvard president Claudine Gay called, “The New Right Activism.”  This was a manifesto announcing the counterrevolution that Rufo declares as having already begun and he talks about what it must be, “The Right doesn’t need a white paper. What it needs is a spirited new activism with the courage and resolve to win back the language, recapture institutions, and reorient the state toward rightful ends.”

Later on, he says, “Rather, the New Right needs to move from the politics of pamphlets to the governance of the institutions.    …   We must recruit, recapture, and replace existing leadership. We must produce knowledge and culture at a sufficient scale and standard to shift the balance of ideological power. Conservative thought has to move out of the ghetto and into the mainstream.”

This is all very general stuff.  And Yarvin is very unconvinced about all aspects of what Rufo says in his manifesto.  And he’s quite snide about the fact that Rufo has one of his degrees from Harvard Extension.  And he portrays the manifesto and by extension Rufo’s writing in general as merely salesmanship for his books and career.

Yarvin is a good writer and he is clever and some of his points about tactics may be true.  Perhaps replacing institutions is smarter than trying to reconquer them.  Maybe.

But I detect a certain aroma of sour grapes in this article.  Sure, upending Claudine Gay isn’t going to change the world.  It may not even make the next president of Harvard less beholden to the DEI orthodoxy.  But the point is Rufo has been involved in direct action in several cases.  Down in Florida he’s been involved in purging a state college; New College of Florida, of DEI, critical race theory, LGBTQ orthodoxy and all the other ills that infect modern colleges.  He’s accomplishing something that hasn’t happened before.  He’s taking back an institution from the Left.

Of course, it is necessary to see how this experiment proceeds.  Will a new board make New College of Florida a successful learning environment?  If it does, I can see how other states will learn from this effort.  And if he fails, there will be things learned too.

I always liked Teddy Roosevelt’s essay on the “Man in the Arena.”

“Let the man of learning, the man of lettered leisure, beware of that queer and cheap temptation to pose to himself and to others as a cynic, as the man who has outgrown emotions and beliefs, the man to whom good and evil are as one. The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer. There are many men who feel a kind of twisted pride in cynicism; there are many who confine themselves to criticism of the way others do what they themselves dare not even attempt. There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief toward all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement or in that noble effort which, even if it fails, comes second to achievement. A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticize work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life’s realities—all these are marks, not as the possessor would fain to think, of superiority, but of weakness. They mark the men unfit to bear their part painfully in the stern strife of living, who seek, in the affectation of contempt for the achievement of others, to hide from others and from themselves their own weakness. The role is easy; there is none easier, save only the role of the man who sneers alike at both criticism and performance.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

This is not to say that intellectual ability is nothing.  But as things currently stand, what we are lacking is not ideas, it’s results.  DeSantis and Rufo and some others are actually trying to change things for the better.  I’m more than willing to hope they’ll succeed.  As far as manifestos, I’ll check back on his progress from time to time.  If he continues to score winds, I’ll begin to believe in the revolution.  Maybe I’ll join him on the barricades.  Maybe.

Curtis Yarvin Doles Out Some Holiday Pessimism

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My favorite neo-corpora-monarchist provides one of his maximalist essays on why technology isn’t going to save mankind and in fact may do the opposite.

“Johannesburg and Kinshasa have the same technology level as Palo Alto and Berkeley. 

…

The implicit premise of techno-optimism is that technology drives civilization. To fix any and all of the problems of society, just get out of the way of technology.

Across history, do we find this premise to be true? 

…

It seems clear that the Third World is, in the medium term at least, humanity’s future. The barriers that separate the First and Third Worlds are geographical accidents or legacies of the 20th or even 19th century. Everywhere they are visibly crumbling.

In even the medium term, the problem of curing the Third World becomes equivalent to the problem of preserving the First World from whatever is ailing the Third World. Indeed it is not hard to find recognizable patches of Third World inside the First. If this does not strike you as the most important historical problem of our period, more travel may be indicated—or at least, just read a Paul Theroux book.”

And then it goes down hill from there:

“Historically, civilizations of last men tend to fall when they are overrun by barbarians. Technology can artificially forestall this fate—but as Hannah Arendt put it, every new generation is its own barbarian invasion. Barbarians may not even be needed. In the end, Walter Benjamin prophesied, the last man will simply put himself to death:

Humanity’s self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.

Indeed, if present trends continue, “voluntary human extinction” seems likely to become a live political issue within our children’s lifetimes. You laugh.”

Merry Christmas from Curtis Yarvin?  Interesting but pessimistic and long read.

Well, Maybe

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I get an e-mail whenever Curtis Yarvin writes a post in his Substack; Gray Mirror.  Now Yarvin is a lunatic but an engaging and clever lunatic.  His answer to all of the ills of our society is always the same; install a king.  So, I’m always a little daunted when I consider reading his posts, not least of all because they are usually between five and ten thousand words long.  Yikes!  Luckily this one was on the low end of that range.

It was a gentle chiding of Richard Hanania for becoming a moderate.  I guess Hanania was being attacked in the media for being an alt-right partisan in his younger days.  Well, who wasn’t?  Anyway, after a few thousand words to ridicule the concept of classical liberalism Yarvin gets down to his bottom line.  Any and all progress against the woke left is hopeless because the oligarchy protects it and the only way to get rid of the oligarchy is with a king.

Well, maybe.

So, because our representative democracy has been hijacked by an oligarchy, according to him we should welcome a dictator.  And you wonder, how did that work out for the Romans?  Julius Caesar and Augustus were pretty good.  But after that, what a nightmare.  How do you keep the king from being a madman or an incompetent?  Yarvin has this idea that it would be like some kind of CEO for the country and there would be a board of directors who could hire and fire the king.

Well, maybe

But I’m guessing that stuffing that board would be like stuffing the Supreme Court.  And truth be told the board would be the oligarchs and they would just choose one of their oligarchi-est oligarchs to run their show.  And how in hell do you get something like this started?  No, there is no way out that way.

What seems to be the case is that we are heading for a crisis.  The old system and the way that it works is reaching a breaking point.  Those in charge seem to have a plan to permanently make the voting system just a rubber stamp for their regime.  And at the same time, they want to change the class system in this country from a middle-class dominant model to a feudal system with the peasants working for the oligarchs.  And to be totally honest it sure looks like they’re way ahead getting their plan done.  A big chunk of the millennials and zoomers have serf written all over them.

Well, maybe.

But the best laid plans of oligarchs and serfs oft time go to hell in the real world.  I still think it’s too soon to just throw in the towel.  The demolition of the American economy is preceding at such a breakneck pace that it is somewhat possible that a popular revolt might miraculously sweep the Democrats completely out of power long enough to allow actual representatives of the people to make drastic reforms and restore our interests.

Well, maybe.

After reading about the FBI gunning down that old guy in Provo, Utah I’m not feeling so chipper today.  I know the radical nature of the killing should help to delegitimize the institutions like the FBI.  And it probably does.  The man as described was obviously no threat to anyone.

“Neighbors who spoke with the Deseret News described Robertson as a markedly different person than what he portrayed online. One person called him a “teddy bear” known for his woodworking who would sit in the same seat at church every Sunday; another said he was barely mobile, weighed nearly 300 pounds and was unable to walk without a cane. He would drive to church, despite it only being about 200 yards from his home, because he had so much trouble moving around.

Neighbors also described a harrowing scene, with dozens of agents converging on the Provo house, rifles drawn and hiding behind bulletproof shields as flash bangs exploded.

“I just can’t believe that this man warranted that kind of response,” said Travis Clark, who lived up the street from Robertson.”

It makes me sick to think that the FBI has become a secret police agency, no different from the Stasi and the KGB.  In fact, worse than those organizations.  At least the KGB wouldn’t have allowed BLM and Antifa to burn down their own cities.  But maybe it will be this kind of gestapo tactics that convinces a solid majority of the American people that our “leaders” are really our overlords now and need to be replaced with something better.

Maybe, maybe not.

Tough day to be optimistic.

Witness to a Friendly Quarrel

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Back on Monday the 27th of February I found a link in my mailbox to Curtis Yarvin’s substack, the Gray Mirror, with his latest post.  It was a critique of Ron DeSantis’s efforts to replace the woke management of a small state college in Florida (called prosaically, New College of Florida) by replacing the board of trustees with conservatives.  DeSantis put Chris Rufo and some other conservatives on the board and told them to excise the cancer of wokeism.

Yarvin tells a parable about how a drunken man chops down the mighty oak that shades the town square in some mythical Lithuanian town and the townspeople decide to replant the rootless trunk.  But the wise man goes and scoops up acorns and plants them around the fallen tree’s stump.

Further on Yarvin explains that DeSantis and Rufo trying to reform Florida colleges is the town trying to replant a dead tree in the ground.

“The fallacy of replanting the tree is to believe that the past is something we can just have back. It isn’t. We can be inspired by the past. We can want a beautiful oak tree in our town square. But we live in the present and we have no oak tree, just raw lumber. We can build the future under the inspiration of the past—but it is not the past. And we have to be patient enough to wait for it, or we are just losers. Press F to pay regrets.”

But the wise man (according to Yarvin) is anyone who tries to build a new culture from the ground up by supporting coffeehouse artists in New York City that somehow aren’t woke.

“Do you want to win? Or do you want to wring your hands? Where did wokeness start? Among the cool kids. In the Village arts scene. To hear the story the world will be telling itself in 50 years, always listen to New York now. The future always starts at the center and at the top.”

So that’s one side.  Today I read a rebuttal by Rufo.  He calls Yarvin’s take “right-wing doomerism.”

“Yavin’s basic theme is that the progressive-managerial state, or Cathedral, is so powerful, that any action to challenge it will end up reinforcing its power. This is right-wing doomerism—if the beast is all-powerful, better to adopt the position of a prey animal and do nothing.

But I’m more optimistic than this. The takeover of New College has already changed the dynamics in higher education. We have a strong new president who has a mandate to change the administrative and academic trajectory of the institution. You’ll see changes in the next 120 days.

…

I believe in an uncompromising new conservatism that attempts to restore the authority of the people over their government—and lay waste to woke institutional capture. The Republic is not yet dead. We have a duty to do whatever we can to save it.

I’m ready to fight—and win.”

Okay, so there is definitely a lot of rah-rah stuff here.  Rufo is cheerleading the efforts his people are making in Florida and anticipating victories and gains that won’t happen for years, or maybe decades.

But, so what?  The progressives worked at this poison for over a hundred years.  They worked away diligently and steadily.  And the results have been astonishing.  Horrifying, yes, but astonishing.  So why should we expect that our results won’t be slow and incremental.  As TomD said back a week ago or so in a comment “One step at a time is how we collectively got here and hopefully how we will get out.”

Sure, in my more pessimistic moments I fear that Yarvin is right.  The Elites control everything and they have all the money.  We can’t possibly win.  But then I think, “Then what have we got to lose by trying to win?”  So, I’ll take Rufo’s side in this cordial quarrel.

He’s making his play.  Let him finish it before we start declaring him the loser.  I hear DeSantis plans to roll out the same idea at other Florida state colleges.  They’re talking about eliminating things like gender studies and DEI and even affirmative action.  For all I know DeSantis is the next Pericles and Florida is the Athens of the new world.  It’s certainly no stranger than the original Athens having happened.

How in the world do you get the Plato, Aristotle and Thucydides from a bunch of bronze age barbarians like the Dorians toppling Aegean civilization and celebrating it in epic poetry?  Truly, the Afghanis aren’t that far removed in culture and lifestyle from the 9th century Dorian invaders.  Predicting the Parthenon from them seems a bloody miracle.

Maybe we’ll get a miracle too.  Our enemies aren’t geniuses they’re just better organized and better funded.  There is such a thing as luck.  And luck rewards persistence and intelligence.  It’s like the old saying, “God helps those who help themselves.”  If you’re just willing to lay down and die then you’ve already decided your fate.  Luck isn’t going to pull you off the ground, put your sword back in your hand and strike down your enemy.  You’ve got to try.  So, let’s give DeSantis and Rufo the benefit of the doubt and all the help we can think of.  Let’s cheer them on and provide all the rah-rah we can muster.

If DeSantis can turn around the Florida state colleges it’ll make guys like Abbott in Texas envious and might start a movement to clean up all the Red-State state-colleges.  And after that maybe it’ll spread to the grammar and high schools.  See what I mean?  Rah-rah is easy.  And it’s cheap.  What’s a few electrons rattling around in my computer?

Anyway, I’ll bet on DeSantis and Rufo in this quarrel.  Right wing doomerism just isn’t my cup of tea.

05JAN2023 – Just a Regular Old Thursday.  The Calendar’s full of Them

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As the tragicomedy of Kevin McCarthy continues to unfold in the Emerald City of Oz, I was tasked with filling out and presenting my documents to Cthulhu’s minions inside the precincts of the nightmare corpse-city of R’lyeh.  Well maybe it was the Dunwich town hall.  But there was definitely a lot of eldritch horror somewhere close by I can assure you.

My hand was a virtual claw from having to sign my illegible signature hundreds of times to the various documents.  I was made aware of the 11 billion separate types of discrimination that Dunwich recognizes and prosecutes along with the blessings of diversity, equity and inclusion that seem to seep out of every document that I was forced to read.  It was inspiring.

It was a particularly dreary day weatherwise, drizzling and forty degrees, but I was kind of happy to foray out into the world just to convince myself it was actually still out there.  Apparently not having a Speaker of the House hasn’t managed to disrupt the space-time continuum.  And the zombies wandering around town looked neither more nor less mindless and homicidal than usual.  So, all’s right with the world.

Maybe I’m becoming acclimated to the present levels of dysfunction and unreality in the world around me.  I noticed it didn’t rankle me as much as it used to.  Of course, that could mean I’m becoming zombified myself.  But whatever the cause it eased the pain while moving around town.

I read a post by Curtis Yarvin on his Substack that referenced Heinlein’s story Waldo.  Now Yarvin is a neo-monarchist who is mostly interested in the political situation we find ourselves in.  But he’s also a technologist and here he hypothesizes that one of the more promising areas of technological progress could be in providing human/machine interfaces that allow humans to utilize their manual dexterity at different scales and remotely.  So, he sees a sort of virtual reality setup where a surgeon could utilize microscopic equipment as if he were the size of the miniaturized characters in “Fantastic Voyage.”  Or a gigantic machine hundreds of feet long could be controlled by a human with the point of view of a giant.  His premise is that human intelligence and dexterity after proper training is much more responsible and skilled than an AI.  After reading about some of the failures of self-driving cars he may be correct.  I never thought Robert Heinlein and Curtis Yarvin would intersect in this version of the multiverse.  But there it is.

Will Cain did an interview of Tucker Carlson.  What I found interesting was Carlson’s answer to what had red-pilled him.  He described his mindset as we went through the Iraq War (from 1:36 to 3:19 in the video) and I found myself remembering a very similar evolution.  I went from believing that we were there to make America safer to eventual disillusionment and a sense of absolute betrayal by the Republican establishment.  And Carlson echoed that.  I didn’t watch the whole thing yet because it’s too long but that little snippet stuck in my mind.  Millions of people in this country feel totally betrayed by the Republican party and will never forget that.  And that is the reality that gives me hope.  If people as different from each other as Tucker Carlson is from me can both come to essentially the same point of view about our political system then it must be the truth.  And if it is the truth then I’m finally working from correct assumptions.  And that is what I’ve been trying to achieve all these years.  It’s not that the truth guarantees that things will work out.  It’s that basing your actions on false assumptions guarantees failure.

As this was finishing up I se that McCarthy is still furiously negotiating to buy off his enemies with committee seats and promises of accountability.  Ah, what a circus.  We really should require all of Congress to wear the red nose, baggy pants and size 20 shoes.  And the Speaker should always arrive at the podium in a tiny car.  As I said in a comment on the last post, we must be terrible people to be sentenced to leaders this atrocious.  Robespierre and Caligula were paragons of sanity compared to the bozos we’ve got working for us today.

Well, that’s enough.

To Paraphrase Huey Lewis and the News, “It’s Hip to be Unwoke.”

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According to the New York Times there is a troubling trend among some avant-garde kids to assume the trappings of traditional institutions, like the Catholic crucifix, and defy the virtue signaling mantra of their generation’s elite guardians.  So, the Times is looking for a sleuth to ferret out the details of this heresy and hopefully expose the malefactors so that they can be properly punished and then allowed to recant and declare their love for Big Brother.

This New York Times project is described in an article in the City Journal that goes on to try and explain these young rebels as the first fruits of a rebellion of the young against the dominant culture which in this case is the current all encompassing orthodoxy of woke-ism.  In other words, these young people are organizing a counter-culture against what used to be described as the Left’s counter-culture against western civilization.

The author states: “Few things are more natural for young people than to push back against the strictures and norms of their day, even if only to stand out a little from the crowd and assert their independence. A counterculture forms as a reaction against an official or dominant culture—and today, it is the woke neoliberal Left that occupies this position in America’s cultural, educational, technological, corporate, and bureaucratic power centers. In this culture, celebration of ritualized, old forms of transgression is not only permitted, but practically mandatory. Dissent against state-sponsored transgression, however, is now transgressive. All of what was once revolutionary is now a new orthodoxy, with conformity enforced by censorship, scientistic obscurantism, and eager witch-hunters (early-middle-aged, zealously dour, tight-lipped frown, NPR tote bag, rainbow “Coexist” bumper sticker, pronouns in email signature—we all know the uniform).”

Apparently, these young rebels can be found in trendy areas of lower Manhattan and their cachet as members of the avant-garde worries the gatekeepers of public morality at the Times and the author equates this worry with genuine peril that the youth among the elites could be corrupted and driven over to the dark side where one day they would produce a new consensus to shift the balance of power away from the monolithic progressive world view.  And a new regime could populate the Deep State with acolytes of the Dissident Right.

Well, I don’t know about that.  I know that Curtis Yarvin is interested in the lower Manhattan scene being discussed and he is of the opinion that the only way to neutralize the Deep State is to peacefully displace it with a new elite.  But in both of these examples I wonder at the circumstances and the time line that would bring about such a transformation.  Some kids in Manhattan adopting Christian symbology isn’t a bad thing but what is the larger significance?  Do these young people hope to change the values that guide modern life?  Are they looking to traditional values to give meaning to their existence?  And how many people are we talking about?  A handful, a few thousand or a growing trend?

And what will be the reaction of the gatekeepers?  I’m sure they’re already busy looking to siphon off any discontented teens with a Tik-Tok influencer who sports a trans-friendly pseudo-Catholic rosary that involves anti-Pope Francis’ official rainbow seal of approval.

I guess, on balance, any fear on the part of the official organs of the state like the Times is a good and promising symptom.  Therefore, I won’t rain on their parade.  But I think I’ll wait to celebrate until I see some larger more widespread evidence that the Zoomers have begun to rebel.  Possibly the “Let’s go Brandon” cheers (or their actual words) at football games could be interpreted as the first real sign of popular unrest of the young against the Left.  But I’ve assumed that was more of a reaction to the COVID lockdowns by the Biden administration and not a general anti-woke reaction.  We’ll need to see clearer signs such as voting trends or support for traditional institutions like religion and marriage.

But I’ll end by saying that anything that hints at the young abandoning the woke cult is encouraging.  Even if it’s a minority movement, it’s a start.

Curtis Yarvin Gives an Example of Winning the Battle and Losing the War

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I was reading an article by that highly intellectual critic of the social order we live under, Curtis Yarvin.  If you are unfamiliar with his writing, Yarvin’s analysis of the oligarchic nature of the American power structure is in many ways observably correct.  And although his writing style and his elitist perspective are sometimes maddening, his ideas are very often illuminating.

In this case he was writing about Elon Musk’s offer to buy Twitter and bring it private.  The gist of the argument was that because, potentially, Musk could completely control Twitter’s policies and actions toward the public it was a rare chance for a pure strategic victory against the Left.

And to contrast it with a tactical victory that eventually led to a strategic defeat he relates the decades long struggle against crime in New York City.  The familiar story relates that under decades long liberal rule New York grew more and more crime-infested until by the late 1980s there were over 2,000 murders a year and the whole city was besieged by petty and serious crime.  People were leaving the city by the hundreds of thousands and public confidence had evaporated.  This set the stage for a law-and-order Republican, Rudy Giuliani, to win the mayor’s office on the strength of a promise to restore law and order through stringent policing methods.

And it worked.  For more than twenty years Giuliani and Bloomberg who came after him, were able to maintain New York City at low levels of crime.  Levels that hadn’t been seen previously even in less chaotic times.  New York became a livable big city and thrived financially and culturally.  But what had not changed was that the majority of New Yorkers were still progressives who deep down in their souls resented the fact that this criminal justice system ended up incarcerating mostly black criminals.  Since their logic told them that somehow this wasn’t fair, they were never happy with the system even if it saved them from a tidal wave of crime.

So, after they became complacent about crime and when the George Floyd moment came New Yorkers were glad to have the excuse to abandon effective policing.  And the rest was inevitable.  Now the city is more dangerous than ever and trying to get back to where they were a few years ago seems politically impossible.

Yarvin’s point was that the tactical victory by Rudy Giuliani allowed for the strategic defeat that came afterward.  In other words, allowing conservatives to do the dirty work for the progressives doesn’t alter the beliefs of the progressives.  It only enables it.  It never leads to permanent change.

And I saw the same thing in Massachusetts during the 1990’s.  The Democrats would crash the state fiscally with bleeding heart programs and corrupt practices and then the Republicans would have to clean it up.  But they would never get any credit for the changes.  And as soon as the ship was righted they would be replaced with another round of dysfunction.  At best the Republicans were a relief valve that kept the whole insane machine from exploding.

Well, this is an old story.  But Yarvin’s emphasis resonated with me.  Winning a battle and losing the war was not something that should be done.  What we can’t afford to do is patch up the Left’s system.  We need to let them utterly fail at what they do.  We need to exclude them from some endeavor as completely as is possible and then make that endeavor an undeniable success.  And then keep them out of it.

Where I see that already happening is at the state level.  Places like Florida and Texas and other states need to change their laws to make them uninviting for progressives fleeing from California and New York.  And they need to protect themselves as completely as possible from the federal government.  In that way they can build their own system and reap the benefits while excluding the Left.

Places like California and New York need to be completely abandoned by the Right.  They need to crash completely.  As I like to portray it, they need to reach the level where cannibalism is the dominant lifestyle of the inhabitants.  Things need to get so bad that eventually the Leftists simply die off completely.  And all that is left are normal human beings.

The point is victory is only victory when it weakens your enemy and strengthens you.

Curtis Yarvin Muses on the Lessons of Afghanistan, But Not the Way You Think

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Yarvin isn’t thinking about the strategy that brought us to Afghanistan and kept us there for twenty years.  He’s thinking of what it means to have a Deep State that would prefer to stay there forever because they want to endlessly expand their influence and scope to include the whole world.  Yarvin’s take on what could be done about this boils down to the American people providing the President and his party with a mandate to take a wrecking ball to the executive branch and reconstitute it at a much, much smaller scope.

And who disagrees with that on our side?  But how exactly do we get a majority of honest men in the Congress?  It seems impossible.  I think the only way it happens is if a President declares a state of emergency and using extralegal action fires the whole executive branch and uses the military to keep the government functioning while he rebuilt the government on a sane basis.

It’s nice to talk about draining the swamp but to do it would require an army and a general without fear.  Mr. Yarvin needs to provide the plan for how to do something that we all agree needs to be done.