Author's note: Sorry to have left you suspended over a vat of quivering hair gel for the past couple of months. I've been busy with a Rule 2 project of extraordinary magnitude.
When I started this substack, I rashly declared that conservatism is not enough, that we need to turn back the clock. Yet in my last post, I wrote that we should run more moderate candidates. This appears to be a contradiction.
Have I cucked?
No. There's much more to the story. First, the mundane explanations:
The call for more moderate candidates applies to Blue and Bluish districts. Better to have a RINO that a Bernie or a Mansonite.
I have already presented some meaty ways to turn back the clock, but they take time. Some kind of short game is required to buy that time. I had expected we would get a Red Wave, given how far the Democrats have overreached. Oops! So much for a career in fortune telling.
The Democrats have overreached bigly. Al Gore of the 1980s was a Reactionary by today's standards. There are opportunities for stately country clubbers to talk about Common Sense while still calling for turning back the clock in some areas.
But those are the boring excuses. You should expect better of me, and you will get it. The magic begins with the end of the previous post, where I pointed out that there is more than one kind of moderate. Indeed, I showed it was possible to have two equally centrist candidates on the Left-Right spectrum who have completely different platforms.
To build a better RINO, we need to design in at least four dimensions. It's time to play some real 4D chess. And in the process we might even design some useful independents and even DINOs -- which can be rather useful on the Left Coast.
Beyond the Left-Right Spectrum
Two-dimensional political maps have been around since at least the 1960s. The oldest I know of is the Pournelle Chart, where he used love (or hate) of government as the x axis, and rationalism as the y axis. With Pournelle's chart both Nazis and Communists are on the far Right, but they differ greatly on the y axis, with Nazis being into tradition and personality and the Communists believing in rationally derived social science.
The more famous chart going back to that era is the Nolan Chart, pushed by libertarians to distinguish libertarianism from American conservatism.
(Apologies for the hand-drawn, and ungrammatical illustrations. I'm in a rush here. I need to get back to punishing our Silicon Valley Overlords for rigging elections.)
There, both axes relate to the amount of government meddling, albeit in different spheres: personal vs. economic. Back in the 70s and 80s the Nolan Chart did a decent job of distinguishing liberals and conservatives, but it did a terrible job of distinguishing Nazis and Marxists. Today, the Nolan Chart is utterly obsolete. It no longer distinguishes between American Left and American Right, since today's Democrats are more into censorship and meddling in personal affairs than Republicans, even the Religious Right.
I want to focus on some political projections you haven't seen before. They won't be perfect or complete, but they will reveal untapped niches for the lover of liberty, the Constitution, and the American Way. With these projections I'll eventually show you where to find reactionaries in unusual places, deep within the Blue Zones. Let us start with two different views of the Left-Right political spectrum. I'll start with a view from the fringe Right. Gary Allen in None Dare Call it Conspiracy complained about how the extremes of Left and Right were both totalitarian systems: Marxism and Naziism respectively. There was no place on the spectrum for those who wanted government small, no place for those who follow the US Constitution literally. Allen's solution was to make size of government the variable. Far Left meant totalitarian government; Far Right meant anarchy. Like the Nolan Chart, Gary Allen's Left-Right spectrum placed Nazis and Marxists together, but at least Gary Allen had the excuse of having only one dimension to work with.
However, Gary Allen's spectrum fails to describe the original Left and Right. Back in 18th Century France, the Classical Liberals sat on the Left! So let's try something else. How about economic egalitarianism for the far Left and love/defense of Aristocracy/Oligarchy for the far Right.
Once upon a time the Republican Party was stereotypically the aristocratic party. Think Bob Hope or Thurston Howell III. Or consider this relic I received back in 1984:
The stereotypes were once somewhat true. The Republicans used to be the urbane party, the party of blue bloods and Big Business. But it was never just blue bloods and Big Business. That has always been too small a coalition to win in a republic. So the Republicans had to have other coalition partners over the decades. The Republicans were the anti slavery party, then the anti racist party, then the prohibition party, then the anti war party, then the anti Communist party, and then the Moral Majority party. With this caveat in mind, let's combine the two Left-Right spectra above into a single two dimensional political playing field. Prior to Trump, the playing field looked something like this:
For most of my life, the Democratic Party was the party of big government and attempts to make the wealth distribution more equal. The Republican Party was the pro business and pro wealth inequality party, which was sometimes the smaller government party. Exactly how much small government cred the Republicans deserved is debatable. For example, Ronald Reagan gets some small government cred for reducing regulations and simplifying the tax code, but Reagan also filled up our prisons with the War on Drugs, and he did not contain government spending; he merely billed future generations instead of charging enough taxes. On the gripping hand, Reagan put an end to the Evil Empire, and so Reagan deserves most of the credit for Clinton's momentary balanced budget.
The Bushes, on the other hand, get no small government cred in my book. They squandered much of the Peace Dividend through unnecessary wars in the Middle East. The elder Bush gave us the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the younger Bush gave us the USA PATRIOT Act.
Notice the empty gap in the Upper Left of the diagram above. The Upper Left on this political map went long under-served by the major parties. About the only identifiable political factions solidly in this zone were right wing conspiracy theorists and followers of Henry George. For decades our political system had a systemic bias pulling this country Down and to the Right. Government grew and so did the wealth gap.
Since this trend was largely due to a bias in the two-party system, we should expect the true political center to be somewhere in the Upper-Left of this chart! It is possible to run candidates who are substantially different from both traditional Republicans and Democrats, and yet still be closer to America's true center.
I noticed this screaming opportunity about twenty years ago. I put together a programme and did a bit of test marketing before apolitical social clubs and found that the ideas played quite well. I then tried to get the Libertarian Party to widen its coalition to include candidates in this gap -- with no success. Since I lacked the resources to start yet another party, I downgraded my political activism to writing web sites (under my real name). And even that effort tanked when Silicon Valley shut off my traffic in 2020.
Meanwhile, someone else with rather more money and belligerence also noticed this gap. His name is Donald Trump. Donald Trump noticed the gap and has dragged the Republican Party in that direction. The wails of angst from Republicans who were in the Lower Right can be heard to this day.
That Donald Trump won the Republican primaries in 2016 was a surprise to me. That he won the general election surprised me not at all. Donald Trump was closer to America's center than Mitt Romney! Donald Trump was a new breed of RINO. Trump wasn't, and still isn't, a true Republican, as the Republican Party was defined for most of my lifetime. Trump represents a hostile takeover of the Republican Party by the Reform Party (and the old American Party of yore). And this is why Trump became the first Republican for which I ever voted for President. I didn't switch from voting Libertarian to Republican because of Trump's charm, good looks, or persuasion ability. I voted for him because of his policies. (That, and the Democrats have gone so far over the edge, that voting Lesser of Two Evils is crucial!)
Had he acted sooner, Trump could have run as a Democrat. His populism and his policies on trade and immigration have been supported by quite a few Democrats not that long ago. Remember Dick Gephardt? Remember the Lefty rallies against the WTO? Trump was a showbiz billionaire playboy with an outsize ego -- hardly the paragon of the virtues pushed by the Religious Right. Trump was pro choice on abortion not that long ago. And it wasn't that long ago that reducing our foreign entanglements was more of a hippie left Democrat position.
Trump is hated by old school Democrats today more for his style than the core substance of his MAGA agenda. (The globalist corporations which have joined Team D, however, do hate Trump for his MAGA agenda.)
However, to Trump's great credit, Trump stood by the party which nominated him for president. The Supply Siders got their tax reforms, and the Christians got a pro life Supreme Court.
Anyway, my point is: you can run candidates which support some of the key reactionary components of Trump's MAGA agenda while running as a RINO or even as a DINO(!) It's simply a matter of swapping out the rhetoric. Replace "nationalism" with "self-determination" and "obeying international law." You could even dust off some old peace signs if you are running as DINO. As for immigration, just talk about enforcing a National Picket Line, and raising the Market Minimum Wage. As for tariffs, just point out how Big Corporations dodge the corporate income tax through creative international accounting (a topic we'll explore later), and how having corporations with bigger economies than many countries is Un Democratic.
Trump himself could not do these things, as he had to play to the conservative Republican base. A RINO, a DINO, or an independent could.
And that's just working with two dimensions. I have some more coming in future posts. Stay tuned.
An issue with your graph (cool and interesting as it is) is that your axes may not be uncorrelated which may, alas, explain the gap: it may not be feasible to combine those elements in such a way. Not convinced of this, but still more likely than the discovery of a huge gap that no one thought of plugging.