Beware the Hegelians of the Right

Thesis, antithesis, and boiling frogs, oh my!

Doom sells. Scholarly dissertations describing the forces we face get restacked and subscribed to at a much faster rate than articles describing potentially practical action. None Dare Call it Conspiracy soled 5 million copies.

True, gloom is often warranted. We should study our enemies and not underestimate them. And when the cheerleaders spout incorrect talking points or adapt Santa Claus Economics, wet blanket tossing is definitely in order. Ditto when anti-Malthusians write as if the Earth could support a trillion people in comfort with liberty.

Gloom is good -- in its proper place.

But the Cheerleaders also have their place. Once the battle has been joined, fear and doubt can be destructive and/or deadly. Or as the Bible teaches:

Deu 20:8  And the officers shall speak further unto the people, and they shall say, What man is there that is fearful and fainthearted? let him go and return unto his house, lest his brethren's heart faint as well as his heart. 

Well, political campaigns are a mostly peaceful alternative to military campaigns. For the United States the big day is Tuesday (tomorrow as I post this!). The difference between the Republican and Democrat slate of candidates is huge. This is not like the "not a dime's worth of difference" days. Trump may have bumbled during his first term, but he's still trying to restore the America that Was. His opponents believe the America that Was was evil and need to be transformed and/or replaced.

There once was a time to criticize our options. For example, I voted for DeSantis in the primary. He lost and bowed out. Afterwards, I was ambivalent between the options of Trump and RFK Jr. Trump was vulnerable to lawfare, and whereas RFK Jr. was saying a nice mix of populist, environmental, and libertarian rhetoric, his history is...suboptimal. But Trump has survived the lawfare, and RFK Jr. has endorsed Trump and taken his name off the ballot in swing states.

For Tuesday, Trump is our only hope.

Act accordingly and vote tomorrow if you haven't already. And get your sane friends to vote as well. Though it is double plus late in the game, if you have friends still sitting on the fence, I have provided some arguments for the MAGA agenda which Trump is not making:

And I have some rock troll quality memes available to give Kamala supporters pause:

This truly is a situation where every vote potentially counts. Act.

And now, to address the objections.

Voting is a Collective Act

Western North Carolina was recently wrecked by raindrops. Every one of those raindrops was by itself insignificant. The flooding was a collective act by billions of raindrops.

Likewise, elections are won by the collective effect of millions of insignificant votes. Voting is a collective act. Individually, voting is an irrational act, a waste of time on par with buying lottery tickets. Elections are decided by those who act "irrationally," by those who act altruistically, mystically, if you will. Hyperrationality and Objectivism are thus incompatible with winning elections (or wars).

Embrace the woo woo. Join the tribe who saves this country. Take the time to vote.

So What if Trump Wins?

If Trump wins the vote, victory is not guaranteed. The Democrats still have lawfare options up their sleeves. The Tree of Woe has laid out the possibilities in perhaps his gloomiest post to date:

This Election, Prepare for the Unexpected

Vote anyway. The more votes Trump gets, the weaker the Democrat case is. Vote even if you are in a deep Blue or deep Red state. Treat the popular vote total as important. We could really use a strong moral victory on top of a game-the-rules victory.

Neoliberal Feudalism

notes other reasons for gloom:

Neoliberal Feudalism's arguments have merit. Vote anyway. Partial success by our side is better than continued success by today's Demoncrats. And this brings me to the title of this article. There are those who think that Less Bad is worse that More Bad. Follow the link to Neoliberal Feudalism's note. Notice the ugly responses to my comments (by other commenters, not Neolibral Feudalism).

Hegel, Marx, and Boiling Frogs

According to G.W.F. Hegel, history is a manifestation of the World Spirit, a spirit which learns by testing ideas to their extremes. First, test the original idea, the thesis, then its opposite, the antithesis, and then come up with a winning synthesis based on lessons learned. And anyone who doesn't believe that history has a conscious spirit is an irrational poopy-head.

Marx built upon this solid philosophical foundation. Marx fretted about workers being alienated from their work by modern industrial processes and deep divisions of labor. But did Marx fight against such dire economic forces? Was he a mouth-breathing Luddite who opposed these forces? No! He went with the flow. Division and economics of scale are inevitable forces of history! Centralization is the Way and the capitalists are cashing in on it. The solution is let the capitalists do their thing -- and then take away their winnings once monopolies are the norm. What's the difference between government ownership of the means of production vs. a few oligarchs? Not much!

For Marx, the way out is Through. Push that centralization to the point of inherent contradictions, then have a Dictatorship of the Proletariat give the profits to those who do the real work. And once the government owns everything, the government will no longer have any reason to exist, so it will just wither away.

Or something.

Marxists tend to get rather cagey on the withering away part. Those who demand clarity are either sent to gulags or are referred to monstrous tomes of Marxist gibberish. I'm unsure as to which fate is worse.

I doubt that there are many Marxists in the audience, but there are writers in this corner of Substack whose thinking is disturbingly similar in one aspect. Behold, the Boiling Frog metaphor, and despair!

If you put a frog in a pot of hot water, it will immediately jump out. If you put a frog in cool water and then slowly raise the temperature, you can cook the frog without it jumping out. But if you heat the water too fast the frog will notice in time and jump out.

Applied to politics, this metaphor suggests rooting for doom. Make things bad fast enough, and The Sheeple will wake up and notice -- just like they noticed during the FDR Administration, when the federal government grew at a stupendous pace, or during the Civil War, when the Lincoln Administration printed greenbacks and levied an income tax.

People do react to surges of excess government, but the reaction is rarely as big as the initial surge. Governments grow during crises, and [sometimes] shrink during the interim. Notice how Americans nearly elected a third party candidate (H. Ross Perot) after the Soviet Empire fell, and even the Democrat (Bill Clinton) declared that "The era of Big Government is over."

To make things better, let's make things better. Bad times feed big government.

But for persistent fans of the Boiling Frog metaphor, think back to the events of the past few years. The Demoncrats have ignited a big pile of thermite under the Frog's pot of water. During the [Jill] Biden Administration, the United States has gone from respected superpower, to a fag flag waving international farce. They have floated the idea of a Ministry of Truth. They have opened the floodgates to invaders and given them billions in welfare benefits. They dialed the affirmative action knob up to eleven. The Biden cabinet is a literal freak show. They nominated a Supreme Court Justice who doesn't know what a woman is. They have gone full-on pro abortion and pro castrating confused children.

If that doesn't wake up The Frog, nothing will.

Actually, the Frog has awakened a bit. There are former active Democrats writing pro Trump and anti current administration blogs here on Substack. Trump is polling better among racial minorities than any Republican since Eisenhower.

This is our Boiling Frog moment. Let the water get any hotter and the Frog is cooked.

Go Vote.

Victory Matters

True, simply voting in national elections is not enough. I have never argued that it was. I adopted the nom de plume Fabius Minarchus for that reason: voting is only part of the game, and often a small part. There are children to raise properly, businesses and investment funds to boycott, local governments to reform, churches to reform -- or build, etc. But sometimes the national vote really matters. This is one of those times.

Today's Democratic Party is not the party of JFK, Jimmy Carter, or Bill Clinton. There are members of that party who think it still is, but the leadership has turned the party into the party of George McGovern and Charles Manson -- only gayer.

Meanwhile Donald Trump has pushed the Republican Party partway into the Populist Quadrant. Remember what I wrote about Marx. Suppose Marx was not a Hegelian and took a straightforward approach to worker alienation. He would have become a populist instead of a delusional socialist. While the industrial revolution increased economies of scale in many respects, the electric motor and the personal computer decrease economies of scale. The raw accumulation of capital also decreases economies of scale. (For an independent craftsman to compete with an assembly line, it requires having tools sitting idle.) It is possible to have an economy heavy with independent business owners and farmers if we try.

Trump has not pushed the Republican Party completely into the Populist Quadrant, nor have I even fully stated my high tech Luddite vision. [Some of] Trump's policies are but the next step -- in the right direction. We've had enough Antithesis thank you very much.

Furthermore, I expect more from a second Trump Administration than the first. The first time around Trump was kind of clueless when it came to personnel. He notoriously relied on signals of personal fealty instead of ideological agreement -- and was betrayed by back-stabbing betas as a result. This time around he's building a team of allies instead of ass-kissers: RFK Jr., J.D. Vance, Tulsi Gabbard, Elon Musk, and maybe even a Libertarian. These are willful people, not easily controlled, but they have a proven record of pushing parts of what it takes to Make America Great Again.

Now do your part, and vote accordingly.

And that includes ye negative naysayers. If ye vote and it still doesn't push Trump over the top (and/or a Republican majority in Congress), ye are entitled to a neener dance. Show me your "I voted" sticker and I'll link to your Nana Nana Naa Naa post.

And then I'll get to work figuring out how to win back America despite a Harris victory. This will be a harder task, requiring many more paid subscribers. Prepare to pony up.