Ideology, Who Needs It?

And just what is the ideology of the Dissident Right? The Science isn't settled.

The Tree of Woe has taken a break from mere contemplation and thrown down the gauntlet: he has made the case that we need an ideology.

No, Really - What is to Be Done?

He makes a strong case. Organizations can be infiltrated, corrupted, or in the event of dystopia, made illegal with members sent off for reeducation. He then cites Lenin's three things necessary for a revolution:

1. An advanced theory of revolution must have been formulated by a revolutionary political party;

2. The revolutionary political party must have created vanguard fighters guided by this advanced theory; and

3. The social and economic conditions of late-stage capitalism must deteriorated to the point that the working class is ready to led by the vanguard fighters.

While I am all in with adapting the methods of the International Communist Conspiracy to infiltrate and redirect the corrupted institutions of our society, the list above bothers me. I am a Christian and a family man. I am thus loath to contemplate violent revolution. Call me a gurly-man if you wish, but I'd note that most men of the Right have similar reservations.

Instead of waiting for the system to collapse, I'd rather take advantage of the peaceful permanent revolution provision built into our system: elections. And this is where I have a problem with tight ideology. I spent many years active in a group that mixed Leninist vanguard thinking with electoral politics, and the results were dismal. Behold the list of electoral victories by the Libertarian Party and despair.

For this reason I have made a point of presenting several Big Tent visions, something that a majority of voters in a majority of districts can get behind. The first was simply turning the clock back to a happier time:

One objection to a Big Tent vision is that it's hard to muster passion from something that isn't particularly radical. Read the post above, it's filled with passion and bile. It's easy to muster because the woke Left has gone way outside the Overton Window of just a couple decades ago. It's easy to be passionate about the ordinary because both political parties have gone Full Retard. Just look at the current budget deficit.

But the exact same turn the clock back vision can also be presented in a cuddly friendly manner for the benefit of those with more delicate sensibilities:

Nostalgia is perhaps not enough. Some definition of what was good about the Good Old Days is perhaps in order. One element is that we used to be more populist in our economic policies:

But since we lose some country club Republicans by going populist, we need to pick up votes from somewhere else. I suggested that we target the most Reactionary demographic of all, the environmentalists:

And at this point we run into some problems. Our Big Tent has expanded to circus tent proportions with potential circus like consequences. Such is the cost of putting together a movement big enough to win elections.

We can keep the tigers from eating the clowns by keeping them separated. In electoral politics this means running different types of candidates in different districts. Instead of putting forth a complete Reactionary program to the entire country, promote parts of the program to different localities.

Very Machiavellian. To pull off Machiavellian, we need an Inner Party, and Inner party that's as cunning as serpents, yet innocent as doves. That's what I am trying to build here. (Subscribers who go to the private chat associated with this substack will find instructions for joining an ultra private place where we can talk shop at a more detailed level, away from the All Seeing Eye of Google.)

Also, an Inner Party is needed for coordinating decorruption (or replacement) of corrupted institutions using techniques similar to those of the International Communist Conspiracy.

The Inner Party can be Smaller Tent -- as long as its members grok the need for Fellow Travelers to make a Big Tent complex for actually winning elections. (The Libertarian Party could have been such an effective Inner Party. It does a great job of educating members, on both ideology and political activism. Libertarians can do effective politics when they are not doing it under the banner of the word "libertarian." Think Ron Paul R3VOLution for an example.)

So maybe a tighter ideology for the Inner Party could be useful. Something to keep us working together effectively vs. bickering and dithering, but not so tight as we become Borg and end up drinking Kool-Aid.

So I'll take up the Tree of Woe's recommendation and look deeper into ideology.

What is an Ideology?

Being a recovering tunnel visioned ideologue, I shall present a someone cynical definition of an ideology. An ideology consists up to three aspects:

1. Core values. What do the adherents of an ideology truly want? For some ideologies the values are explicitly stated and advertised. For others, one set of values are advertised to the general public while the true motivations go under stated. (For example many Republicans of the Country Club variety sing the praises of liberty and smaller government, but what they really want is tax cuts for themselves.)

2. Rationalizations supporting those core values. These can be religious, philosophical, or justifications in terms of other values that follow from the core values. Rationalizations can serve to radicalize and enforce party discipline, or serve to win the hearts of those who currently hold other values to be more dear.

3. A model of reality that facilitates crafting actions to fulfill the core values. By actions I mean both political platform and political strategy.

The second component is optional. An ideology which lacks or downplays the second component is often labeled Consequentialist. The upside of being consequentialist is that one avoids scholastic style arguments and vain attempts to cross the Is-Ought Barrier. The downside is that a consequentialist ideology is more susceptible to self-interested factions which do not place a high priority on the General Welfare.

Let's look at several ideologies using this breakdown. For Marxists it would be something like:

1. Core values: Equality is the highest moral value.

2. Rationalizations: Labor Theory of Value proves that rich capitalist are evil exploiters.

3. Model of reality: Something about Dielectical Materialism and Class Interests. When a society builds up enough capital, we don't need capitalists any more, so let's kill the parasites and have a worker's paradise. Philosophy proves that violent revolution followed by a Dictatorship of the Proletariat is inevitable. The job of the Party is to simply help things along. Also, let's throw in a Blank Slate theory of human psychology. All that territoriality that you observe in people is actually an artifact of an evil system. Under the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, we can create a New Socialist Man.

Note that the second component is objectively wrong, and the third component is both wrong on human psychology and woefully incomplete. Marx did not fully specify what the Dictatorship of the Proletariat was supposed to do. This led to successful revolutionaries winging it after achieving victory, and modern Marxists saying that True Marxism has never been tried.

Students of Marxism and/or actual Marxists will find some flaws in my description above. If any of ye are reading this, please elaborate in the comments.

Now I'll turn to an ideology that I am far more familiar with: libertarianism. Libertarianism has two main ideologies which have roughly the same program. The first ideology is moral:

1. Core values: The under stated core value is liberty in and of itself, and a deep dislike of government. The widely advertised core value is eliminating initiation of force on the part of government. For those of the Rothbard School, eliminating the initiation of force by government should be the only political value.

2. Rationalizations: Something about self-ownership. Or maybe it's something about A=A and Man is a Rational Animal. Or, for the less philosophical, just apply the same moral standards to government that you apply to any other individual or institution. Anyone who thinks that taxation isn't theft should be invited to tax their neighbors and see what happens.

3. Model of Reality. Members of the Rothbard School take the Austrian School of economics' subjective theory of value very seriously. Value is ordinal, not cardinal. And the only valid metric of someone's ordering of values is Revealed Preference. Who can say that conquest by a foreign power is worse than paying income tax? Ceteris paribus, eliminating the income tax reduces the initiation of force, therefore we need to switch to donation funded military this week. And let's abolish the Federal Reserve, go on the gold standard, and default on the national debt and Social Security obligations while we are at it. Anyone who disagrees is a thief and a poopy head.

(And yes, I have been called something like thief and poopy head by the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Maybe I'll link to it in the private chat area.)

The other major school is the Consequentialist libertarians.

1. Core values: Choice and prosperity are great!

2. Rationalizations: There are stacks of economics books extolling how great free market economics is. Duh! As for those who dislike having choices, there is always the option of joining a cult or commune, even in Libertopia.

3. Model of Reality. You get what you pay for. In a market based system people get to choose what they want to pay for. Voting is a terrible measure of what people truly want. See Public Choice economics. (And let's also downplay the problems of monopoly profits, rent seeking, public goods, and the backward bending supply curve for labor.)

I have more sympathy for the Consequentialist school. I heartily recommend David D. Friedman's The Machinery of Freedom even though I do not agree with all his arguments and conclusions. There are difficulties with shopping for legal systems, especially in the same geographic region. And what's to prevent private protection agencies from merging and becoming a government? But these are scientific questions, and thus compromise is possible in the light of inconvenient data.

For moralist libertarians, compromise is rather more difficult.

Many, if not most, libertarians adhere partially to both schools. Libertarian ideology is largely rationalization for a love of liberty. That is, they don't like being told what to do at gunpoint. As a result, many libertarians do the gamma bob and weave when debating with an authoritarian. Does more liberty result in a bad consequence? Switch to a moral argument!

Back in the day I managed to lose many an argument doing just such bobbing and weaving. (I got better.) For extreme examples of such bobbing and weaving read Mary Ruwart's Simplistic Short answers to the Tough Questions. How to Answer Questions Libertarians are Often Asked and Healing Our World. The Other Piece of the Puzzle.

When I was still trying to make the Libertarian Party into a real political party that can win elections, I wrestled with these issues and got articles published in Liberty and LP News offering ways to reconcile the two schools and move forward. I'll link to some of these articles in the private chat area.

For the mainstream political parties, there are more ideologies per party, and they are rather more muddled. And some of the ideologies are simple naked self-interest.

1. Core value: I want a special tax cut.

2. Rationalization: I will pay you to give me that tax cut.

3. Model of Reality: "Everyone" else is getting special favors. What's the harm in one more?

Such is the problem with an overly big tent, especially one without enough ideologues to keep the focus on the General Welfare.

And rather too often, there is confusion between rationalization and theory of reality. For example, the Reaganoid/Grover Norquist ideology is something like:

1. Core value: Me want tax cut!

2. Rationalization: Taxation is evil, except when someone else is paying for a program I like.

3. Model of Reality: The Laffer Curve proves that if I get a tax cut, government revenue will increase.

So how does a Reaganoid respond with tax cuts leading to larger budget deficits? Answer: by doing the gamma bob and weave. (Anyone who thinks that our government couldn't collect more taxes needs to take a look at Europe. Duh!)

For mainstream liberals of a few decades ago we'd have something like:

1. Core value: We want more equality and lots of government programs to solve current social problems.

2. Rationalization: You don't want to spend government money on this important problem? You are a stingy meany-poo! Also, Keynesian Economics proves that we will go into an economic death spiral if we don't keep stimulating the economy.

3. Model of Reality: Bureaucracies do what they are told and are largely above the greed that infests the private sector. Also, faith in the Blank Slate. We just need more education to fix human nature.

(Hmmm, should I have categorized Keynsian Economics under Rationalization or Model of Reality? )

Now for the fun bit: what is the shared ideology of the Dissident Right?

Perhaps the most controversial, and most shared, aspect is the nationalism. I'm going to extend that a bit and suggest localism in general. So we have:

1. Core values: We want to live with our own people. We want a sense of Place and want to be ruled by people like us.

2. Rationalizations: Leaky borders lead to higher crime. Open borders lead to war and empire. Ecotopia and open borders don't mix. Diversity mandates are creating a competency crisis. Democracy does not scale.

3. Model of Reality: Many of the solutions are obvious: build the Wall, deport the illegals, stop bombing countries we don't understand, etc. I would throw in breaking up cities into urban villages. And maybe even breaking up the high population states.

While I agree with the above, it is not why I am here. I want to build a movement around a different ideology:

And it just happens that the Dissident Right has the highest concentration of people that already share this ideology and are either politically active or are gearing up to be such.

I want to build a movement around the core value: Freedom.

Freedom vs. Liberty

Freedom and liberty seem like synonyms. In common parlance, they often are. Indeed, a political party sensibly built around liberty as a core value could work. Liberty is a core American value, after all. A realistic libertarian party's ideology would be something like:

1. Core value: We want more liberty!

2. Rationalizations: Taxation is theft. It may be necessary theft, but it should not be resorted to lightly. And free markets produce huge amounts wealth, enough wealth that we can afford to solve most problems which don't have a market solution with private charity. And finally, the players in government are not above the rules of economics. Government does not solve all Public Goods problems.

3. Model of Reality: Need a recognition that eliminating even bad government programs can have bad consequences. Some programs need to be phased out gradually. And we need to pay off the debts run up funding past bad programs and needless wars -- as well as the necessary wars. The big tax cuts are a future benefit of scaling down government. And the Lesser of Two Evils Dilemma is real. Either focus on voting system reform or on uncontested races.

Such a sane Libertarian Party might have a chance to win real elections and affect public policy. Once upon a time I attempted to turn the Libertarian Party into such a sane party. I had partial temporary success, but it was nowhere near good enough. (Details in my private chat area.)

But over the years I slowly learned that liberty should not be the core value. The core value should be freedom. There is a difference, though it took me many years to learn it.

I got my first lesson WAY back in high school, back in the days of gas lines, disco, and Malaise. I saw an ad for a book of Free Energy patents in the back of a magazine (either Science Digest or a science fiction magazine; I forget which). When the package I ordered arrived, there were a couple of bonus books thrown in:

(The copy of “None Dare Call it Conspiracy above is not the one I got back in high school. That copy ended up in the Soviet Union. Therein lies a tale…)

None Dare Call it Conspiracy was an eye-opener. It mixed a call for smaller government with a call for reining in the ultra rich. The pair broke all the rules that I was taught in school. But then there conspiracy aspect; that put me in a dark place for about a week. Then my critical brain circuits cut in. The idea that anyone can control corporate America because they have third cousins with five percent shares struck me as ludicrous upon reflection. I'm part of an Old Family myself, and have seen the squabblings over the family estate up close. And blood relationships most definitely do not guarantee political coherence! Remember your last Thanksgiving family gathering.

Though I soon disagreed with the core Narrative of that book, the data points exposed by that particular Reality Tunnel stuck. And so did the explanation for including those two conspiracy books with the book of free energy patents. The publishers wanted to fight the Evil Rockefellers by getting people off the grid and off their dependence on oil. I liked that part. It's now part of my Green Old Deal.

My next bit of enlightenment came from the Loompanics Book Catalog -- which proudly represented the lunatic fringe of the libertarian movement. Among the deadly martial arts books, books on lock picking, and books on how to found your own country was this gem:

The book was not copyrighted. You can find the core essay here.

OK, the idea of abolishing work is a silly idea, and this is a silly book. But as a silly person, some of the core messages sunk in.

• Millions of people get more direct orders from their bosses than they get from the government.

• Before the Surveillance State got into full gear, there were cameras pointed at employees in fast food restaurants. And today, some computer related jobs require that employees work on machines with keystroke loggers installed. Hideous.

• Many of our recreational activities -- hunting, fishing, gardening, crafts -- are the "work" tasks of primitive societies.

I got my next jolt of enlightenment when doing an all-nighter putting up campaign signs in front of polling places. (A waste of time, by the way. There are better uses of both time and campaign signs.) Around 4 am my partner in politics and I stopped at a Denny's for some coffee and calories. Our waitress was talkative and asked us if we knew of a church in the area that could help her out. She was single and had adopted a couple of blind kids and was in need of something (I forget what).

This got me thinking. In an Objectivist utopia this waitress would have maximal liberty: her taxes would be super low and she could do what she wanted as long as she didn't hurt people or violate their property rights. But she would not be free! She would still be trapped putting in long, inconvenient hours at Denny's just to barely scrape by. She would have more freedom if she lived in an oppressive Scandinavian welfare state!

Finally, soon thereafter I joined a small church that got me excited about religion. And there was Jesus hammering away at the Pharisees for oppressing the poor. And here I was working to end the welfare state.

Eventually, it clicked. Liberty is freedom from slavery, government oppression, and others who initiate force. Liberty is a component of freedom, but freedom is something bigger. Freedom is about having options -- good options. Not options such as the choice between death by hanging and death by phaser.

Obviously, there is no state of perfect freedom. We are constrained by the laws of physics, biology, and the fact that we now have roughly 8 billion people on the planet. But we can do rather better than either Libertopia or Bernietopia.

While capitalism has huge advantages over socialism, many of those advantages stem from choice and competition. When merger mania reduces the number of corporations, or mutual fund mania puts a small clique of money managers in charge of the nation's corporations, corporations assume government-like power. This is what the Dissident Right often gets and the Reaganoid Right and many libertarians don't get.

My mission here is to separate the Dissident Rightists who want to do something constructive from those who prefer to wallow in Black Pilling, Ghost Dancing, Conspiracy Theorizing, and Joo Blaming. The zombie remnants of the International Communist Conspiracy are winning by default -- not by secrecy, deviousness, or even help from Satan. (They may well be doing things in secret. They may well be devious. They most likely are getting help from Satan. But we have tools available against all of these things if we use them.)

My freedom based ideology does overlap significantly with my earlier attempt at defining an ideology for the Dissident Right. Idealistic libertarians want a market for services now provided by government. Much as I enjoy and promote David Friedman's works, the objective fact is that many government functions are natural monopolies.

On the other hand, history provides plenty of examples of competitive government by having many independent jurisdictions. Independent city-states with a shared culture have been known to produce Golden Ages. Ancient Greece peaked before it was politically united. And Western Europe in general created the modern age and came to dominate the world because it had a combination of shared culture but multiple independent polities. (China had many advantages over Europe, including lack of a Dark Age, and better economic incentives for peasants. But China suffered from being too united. Stagnation provided stability.)

I earlier equated Freedom with Choice. But Choose Your Own Government has a price. As I have pointed out in earlier posts, with wide open borders Bernietopia has to offer welfare to the entire world. Bernietopians thus don't get the benefits of their welfare state. They don't get bum free streets in return for their high taxes.

On the other hand there is no Choose Your Own Government if borders are completely closed.

The closest viable approximation to the libertarian ideal is governments with toll gates. You can choose your own government, and your own society, by shopping. There needs to be a price for changing polities. Freedom isn't free. This is what the Reason folks do not get.

If you love your childhood home, you shouldn't have to be Excellent or World Class in order to stay there and keep your home as you remembered it. Those who want to join your version of utopia should have to audition to fit in. You should have the right to discriminate against those who violate the norms of your small piece of the planet.

Those who want to create a new type of society should have to pay a price for the chunk of the planet they want to use for their social experiment. This was easy in the early years of this nation as we had a frontier. (Correction: it wasn't so easy for the American Indians, who were losing their bountiful lands to provide that "frontier.")

My freedom ideology thus includes most of the core Dissident Right's shared ideology, but it also diverges bigly from those who find Tarnsman of Gor to be a utopian novel. Grovelling to a truly local strongman may well be better than living under a nominal democratic government which is in fact a globalist cabal, but I'm rather partial to true local democratic government. I'm an American Reactionary. Let us recall our original founding document:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.- "

The word "happy" originally denoted a situation, not an emotion. In Le Morte D'Arthur a happy situation led to "great cheer" while a sad situation led to "great dole." "Pursuit of Happiness" was not some sort of New Age rubbish; it was about being your own boss or at least choosing your boss. This idea of freedom being more than liberty was understood by our Founding Fathers and is thus core to the original American Way.

Not only that, this notion can also be found in the Law of Moses. The line between employee and slave was a thin one in the Old Testament Law. The default setting was owning your own farm or business, and there were several reset provisions in order to give people several chances at being their own boss. I'll dive more deeply into this when I get to Rule 12: Use the Divine Wisdom.

So for the Freedom ideology that I'd like to build an Inner Party around is:

Core values: Freedom. Duh! If you like grovelling -- either doing the grovelling or having people grovel to you, this ideology is not for you. Likewise, if you are deep into using the Might of the State to do social engineering on others to impose your values, you are in the wrong club. Let the trads have their Mayberries and let the hippies have their communes. Let those who want to keep temptation at bay have their dry counties, and let those who enjoy firing up have their party towns.

Rationalizations: A freedom based ideology is compatible with many forms of conservatism, both conventional and dissident:

• A free agent based society is a society filled with people used to taking responsibility. This is much more compatible with the Second Admendment than a socialist or wage serf society.

• Sexual morality requires earlier marriage. This requires higher entry level wages.

• As already mentioned, a populist economy is far more compatible with what the Bible calls for than our current mix of centralized government and centralized business.

• Are deep debtors truly free? I think not, and neither does Dave Ramsey. Paying down the national debt and discouraging leverage are very compatible with both Ramsey's personal philosophy and the dreams of the gold bugs.

• A society with high bottom wages requires less in the way of welfare programs. This is the path to repealing ObamaCare and moving welfare responsibilities back to the states and private charities.

• The freedom to choose your own government to a greater degree is very compatible with the core Dissident Right ideology once we recognize that shopping for government requires shopping.

Model of Reality: Here's where the real work is! The idea that we can shrink the government and shrink the power of billionaires at the same time is alien to the Reaganoid Right and a large fraction of libertarians (broadly defined at that).

But the idea of smaller government and smaller wealth gap is not a new one! Adam Smith was in the populist quadrant in his day. Once upon a time the smaller government movement ideology was called Liberal. Liberals slowly morphed into the liberals we see today because the followers of Adam Smith didn't get everything right. Sometimes this was due to neglecting aspects of Smith's work; sometimes it was due to holes in classical liberal thinking.

Back in the 1700s White America [to be] was considerably more egalitarian than White Europe. Part of this was due to Black slaves filling bottom class roles. But the bigger factor was that the English colonies in America had a high ratio of land and capital with respect to labor. Adam Smith wrote on this, and Smith was inspired in part by Benjamin Franklin, America's original anti immigration politician.

This country has retained some populist traditions since, but the Republican Party went through a phase of being rabidly anti-populist. Nixon abandoned basic market economics by imposing wage and price controls, while also gutting the original purpose of our farm programs: preserving the yeoman farm tradition. Reagan gutted antitrust, granted amnesty to illegal aliens, and started work on NAFTA. During the 80s, the Republican mantra was to equate freedom and capitalism with tax cuts for the rich and letting hair gelled psychopaths with MBAs gut America's corporations in order to extract shareholder value. But at least they decided that deficits don't matter, and that mortgaging the country so that yuppies could afford more BMWs was the way to go.

It took H. Ross Perot to inject some sanity into the political debate. But either Perot wasn't completely sane or he was truly visited by the Men Behind the Curtain.

Populism has another chance with the rise of Donald Trump. Trump represents a partial takeover of the Republican Party by the Reform Party. He brought Perot's National Picket Line agenda back to the fore, but has let the psychopathic country clubbers continue to mortgage the nation.

Our first task is to provide an intellectually defensible populist agenda and push it to the think tanks, talk show hosts, and the Republican grassroots activists. We need intellectual honesty here. Alas there are some Inconvenient Truths:

• Deficit spending is a subsidy for the Already Rich. And there is no way to balance the budget without either tax increases, defaulting on the debt, or euthanizing Social Security recipients. Do the math. Go to the web sites of your least favorite government agencies and add up their annual budgets. (And remember that a significant part of the Department of Energy budget consists of managing our nuclear weapons and making sure our civilian nuclear power plants are safe. You might want to keep these functions.)

• Monopolies happen. Even unnatural monopolies. Even without government subsidy. Back in the day this country had a monopoly on cigarettes. Some kind of antitrust measures are needed.

• The backward bending supply curve for labor is real. Higher income workers have more bargaining power than those just getting by. We have thousands of years of historical data showing that people will sell themselves into serfdom or slavery if economically desperate enough. Some kind of labor regulations, income floor, and/or safety net is required for a free society.

• Renting land is lucrative. Those who have a surplus of land can use the earnings to buy up more. Without active counter measures we will end up with some form of corporate serfdom, with most people crammed into apartments and kept off the land. It will take active measures to stop the World Economic Forum's dystopian dream.

• Perfect competition isn't. For free agents you get a brutal race to the bottom. For corporations, perfect competition leads to monopoly.

Ouch! The ghost of my younger pure libertarian self is snarling and waffling.

On the other hand:

• We can and should simplify the income tax enormously. Progressive does not have to be as complicated as what we have now.

• We can and should cut income and labor taxes for ordinary Americans. The national income tax was originally meant to be a surcharge for the rich, a supplement to our core system of tariffs and excises. We should go back to that.

• The bottom income tax bracket should be small and broad. We can have a flat tax for the 95% and still have a tax system that is more progressive than what we have today.

• Regulation is overhead. Overhead increases economies of scale. The simplest antitrust measure is to exempt smaller businesses from non safety critical regulations.

• Access to cheap capital is one of the big advantages available to big corporations. Creating a better small cap stock market is in order. And maybe community banks should be allowed to take equity positions in local businesses.

• Credentialism hurts the poor. It shouldn't require a degree in cosmology[*] in order to braid hair. (We need some other means for preventing the Race to the Bottom.)

Part of the mission of Rules for Reactionaries is to provide the intellectual infrastructure needed for a freedom agenda based on a Model of Reality that actually matches Reality.

The Tree of Woe is doing something very similar with his Physiocracy project. You should read his work as well as mine. He has done a woeful amount of research. He likes reading hard books. (I'm lazier/dumber. I read enough of the literature to get the gist and then run some use cases.)

The other required part of our model is how to implement a Freedom agenda. Here, the Dissident Right is all over the place: some wallowing in doom; many exposing conspiracies, real and imagined; others concocting elaborate explanation, some of which are theoretically interesting; others rooting for the breakup of the United States; some calling for monarchy...

Call me a naive Boomer, but I believe we can still make this democracy thingy work. Twenty years ago I test marketed parts of the Freedom ideology. I gave speeches describing the agenda to a couple of ultra-normie civics clubs. The speeches were very well received. Where I got push back was among active partisans -- Republican, Democratic, and Libertarian. The market for these ideas is huge, but the organization is lacking. Two decades ago I wanted to launch a new third party to take advantage of this market, but I lacked the budget. And the only easily identified pool of activists were either fanatical Georgists or conspiracy theorists with racist tendencies.

Given how we now live in the endgame predicted by None Dare Call it Conspiracy -- only gayer, some association with conspiracy theories doesn't look so bad these days. And given how the woke call everyone who doesn't hate White people a racist, it's sunk cost, baby! (Though I still say that indulging in racism is a serious moral and strategic error. The Freedom agenda has a great deal to offer Black America, even though it does include deweaponizing civil rights laws.)

Mind you, I still actively disbelieve in any kind of Grand Unified Conspiracy theory. What we face is more of a network thingy:

The World is Run by SPIN

And while there are some evil secret conspiracies out there, most of the villains are right out in the open:

The Future They've Chosen For Us

Here's the hopeful bit: the bad guys have been winning by default. How many politicians with gravitas do we have running on a Freedom agenda? J. D. Vance? Who else?

For years, the lower classes have been given the choice of:

• "I want to create an alphabet soup of dehumanizing government agencies which will take care of you."

• "I want to take away your welfare check and lower the minimum wage. And I want to eliminate the capital gains tax because only earned income should be taxed."

Is it any wonder that we have both bloated government and a wealth gap in the Gilded Age range?

Where are the politicians who are saying:

• "I have a plan to raise the market price for your labor. And if you don't like working for The Man, I have a plan to make it a whole lot easier to be your own boss. As for that budget deficit, there are a whole bunch of billionaires who are voting Democrat. Obviously, they want to be taxed more. I'll oblige them. I can be bipartisan at times."

As for the educated upper middle classes, they've been utterly sold on the dangers of global warming. You aren't going to change their minds with today's Republican talking points. No political campaign or party has the budget to overturn years of indoctrination by PBS and academia. What these people are hearing from politicians is a choice of:

• "Global warming is a dire crisis! We need to act NOW! Fortunately, I have a 4,368 page plan to fix the problem which will cost $20 trillion dollars over the next decade. There will be sacrifices. The American Way of Life is simply not sustainable."

• "Global warming is a dumbass hoax put out by scientists who want more grant money. Vote for me and I'll cut the price of gasoline. A man shouldn't have to hold a second job in order to fill up the tank on his GMC Battlestar."

Where are the politicians who are saying:

• "My Democrat opponent has a plan to fix global warming that is ridiculously expensive and bad for the environment. But at least it won't work. My plan is an order of magnitude cheaper, good for the environment and compatible with the American Way. And I'll throw in a plan to make your dishwasher work again without polluting our waterways while I'm at it."

It's that easy.

And that hard. We have pamphlets to write and distribute, talks to give, street theater to perform, candidates to train, networks to build, organizations to create or infiltrate, and arguments to have on the finer points of the Freedom ideology.

Let's get to it.