How Many REAL Reactionaries Do We Need?
Less than you think
Here is the short and stupid answer: 1, as in me. No one else has to be a real reactionary (as defined in this substack) save for me.
No, I am not claiming political superpowers. Indeed, I'm admitting the opposite: I don't expect to convince anyone to agree with the entirety of my program. The All American Reactionary vision I'm pushing is fuzzy and cuddly. You cannot start with A is A and derive my Reactionary program from pure logic. The program comes from a mix of sentiment, traditions, economics, and political science. All four components are blurry. But the vision I'm now shooting for is one which was once mainstream, and I have strong reason to believe I know what went wrong. So this is a viable basis for a coalition.
Suppose the readership of this blog were to grow by three orders of magnitude. Then suppose we were to form some sort of organization and put together a political platform that we can agree on. How many candidates would we need to elect who entirely agree with this platform?
Zero.
This is good news, as the American political system was designed to keep pure ideologues out of office. (Today's Democrats have managed to go full on ideological of late through the un-American approaches of terrorism, censorship, corporate meddling, and ballot stuffing.)
Anyway, about that victory through zero ideal candidates thingy. Let's run a simulation. Suppose the Secret Society of Swell Reactionaries was to agree on a ten-point political platform. Let's see how we could get this platform through the U.S. Senate without a single senator completely agreeing with the platform.
To make this easy to visualize, I'm going to break out my go board, and let each tile represent ten senators who caucus together and vote the same way. Furthermore, I'm going to be a bit pessimistic and assume that it takes 60 senators to get anything new done. Letting a row represent an issue and white represent votes for the Reactionary position, we get for the first issue:
With just one issue, we need 60 pure Reactionary Senators and no more than 40 Progressive Nincompoop Senators. But let's throw in our second issue:
Now, we have only 50 pure Reactionary Senators. If I had shifted the Reactionary voting block further, I could have gotten the job done with only 20 Reactionaries -- to go along with 80 fence sitters.
By doing the simple shift again, with three issues we win all three issues with 40 pure Reactionaries, and 20 senators who are 2/3 Reactionary. Once again, with some shifting around, I could have gotten the job done with zero pure Reactionaries.
Anyway, let's look at all ten issues using the simplistic arrangement:
We win all ten issues with zero Real Reactionaries. Indeed, we get the job done with a Senate filled with all barely Reactionaries -- but Reactionary on different issues.
This scenario is a bit unrealistic. Even if we apply Rule 8 to the max, there will still be some Progressive Ninnies and hair gelled Santa Claus worshippers in the Senate. We will need some senators who are more than barely reactionary. For example, see what the Senate looks like after I did a bit of horizontal shuffling:
This is a realistic eventual goal -- if the Secret Society of Swell Reactionaries fully internalizes Rule 8 and applies it vigorously. Do note that Rule 8 is the exact opposite of the strategy embraced by Libertarians. The Libertarian Party achieved over fifty years of failure by trying to win a tiny number of races with ideologically perfect candidates. Instead, I propose supporting very impure candidates. Find the Reactionary issues which can get support in which districts and find candidates who will run on them.
Yes, this means supporting RINO, DINO, independent, or third party candidates in liberal districts. Replacing a Bernie Sanders with a Jimmy Carter or JFK is a huge upgrade. If a woke tranny worshipper is representing a heavily unionized hard-hat district, find a pro gun protectionist Christian union member to run against her.
Oh, and don't start with the U.S. Senate! I used the Senate for illustrative purposes. 100 is a nice round number and Senate districts cannot be gerrymandered, but the funds required are enormous.
Start with state house and local races. And make people pay attention to the counting in the process. As I wrote earlier, uncontested races make ballot stuffing easy to hide.
Coming Next
For the next three Rules I'm going to go deep into the issues and where to find the votes for them. The good news is that some of the votes can come from areas currently written off by the Republican Party. The bad news is that some of the things that need to be done will make Grover Norquist cry. Santa Claus is popular but he has mortgaged this country's future.
But before I move on to the next Rules I'm going to address the main weakness in the strategy above: we need something like three orders of magnitude more activists than there are readers of this substack. How do we fix that?