Populism is the Way

Unless you enjoy grovelling

You cannot have Objectivist utopia and democracy at the same time. When the wealth gap grows sufficiently wide, The People will vote for some kind of wealth transfer. This is rational self-interest in action.

Some thinkers on the far Right thus suggest that democracy has been a mistake, that we should go back to monarchy and/or some kind of aristocracy. "Mencius Moldbug" made the case famously in his incredibly wordy "Unqualified Reservations" blog. I read bits of similar thinking here on right wing Substack.

I find such thinking interesting, but beg to differ. I may be a Reactionary, but I'm an American Reactionary, one with roots that go back to the Jamestown colony. I find the idea of grovelling to aristocrats to be unacceptable, and even the thought of being an aristocrat to be distasteful. I don't like wearing fancy clothes, and the minuet appeals to me even less than disco. I'm writing here to restore the Old Republic, or an approximation thereof.

I will admit, however, that our system of representative democracy is indeed failing. As Theophilus Chilton points out, shady elites are using the illusion of democracy to carry out their agendas. The burden of proof is thus with he who wants to defend democracy. I accept this burden. But note that I am not here to merely defend democracy in America, I'm here to restore it. See Rule 6, for example.

True, democracy comes with the price of some sort of constraint on the wealth gap. No full-on Austrian Economics without a sympathetic Austrian Emperor to enforce it.

Herein lies the rub: small-d democratic calls for equality without respect for property and justice lead to disaster. People differ greatly in their abilities and ambitions. You cannot have "from each according to his ability" unless there is sufficient "to each according to his exercised ability." Today's Democratic Party has gone into full-on Harrison Bergeron mode. Their notions of "Equity" are not compatible with modern civilization -- or even ancient civilization.

These are disturbing times.

Disturbing times inspire disturbing solutions. Neoliberal Feudalism wins Disturbing Reactionary of the Year Award with his call for winding the clock back 2000 years. Christianity is the root cause of all this communism with all this lovey-dovey calls for aiding the poor. To restore excellence, we must restore Pagan contempt for the weak.

It is my Christian duty to offer rebuttal. Also, this provides a good intro for the populist Rules to follow. For these Rules will be just as disturbing to Bush and Romney style Republicans as Neoliberal Feudalism's contention is to Christians. Should I get my way these authoritarian country-clubbers will need to get with the program, or don drag attire and join the Democrats.

First, some correction for those reactionaries who have overshot the mark:

Aristocracy IS the Problem

Who is behind all these woke prosecutors who are implementing the Clockwork Orange Strategy?

That would be George Soros. Rumor has it that he's very very rich.

Who pulled out the rug from under Parler? Who keeps the Washington Post (Democracy Dies in Darkness) alive?

That would be Jeff Bezos, hardly a hero of the proletariot.

Who rigged the election against Donald Trump in 2020?

That would be Big Corporate America in general. They brag about it. There's even a book!

And how about that World Economic Forum? It's a bunch of super rich schemers who fly in private jets and call for a future of bicycles and bug meal for the rest of us.

Dear readers, we do not face a return of communism. We face a future of corporate feudalism. Stay within your 15 mile boundaries, peasants!

And for those who hanker for hierarchy, allow me to call your attention to the second most medieval institution in the United States: academia. Latin incantations, multiple levels of initiation, robes and rites, and an economy not of money, but of honors and privileges -- it's everything a cheerleader for the Middle Ages should want.

But it's woke. Very woke. Possibly the very source of wokeness.

The Democratic Party Isn't

Here is a useful secret: the Democratic Party is no longer liberal, even in the modern sense of the word liberal. Today's [anti] Democratic Party is the party of billionaires and bureaucrats. And some real liberals are starting to notice. We can use this.

The Democrat Party's rhetoric may sound egalitarian, but their agenda isn't. Their product is fake -- trans equality, if you will. (Stealing from John Carter.)

What are all these degrees in Intersectionality and assorted Critical Theories, anyway?

They are degrees in complaining, advanced studies in creative grovelling.

"Mirror, Mirror on the wall
Who is the most pathetic of them all?"

As for Identity Politics, this is classic Divide and Rule.

We Have Been Here Before

In a grovellocracy, who holds the real power?

Look at the paintings of French aristocrats during the peak of French monarchy. Versailles was like a convention of Liberace impersonators, only more fabulous. Rumor has it that Benjamin Franklin had a naughty good time while he was ambassador to France. He may have been old, fat, and full of gout, but a least he was a man. Target rich environment, baby!

As for those pagan Greeks uncorrupted by Christian notions of equality, they could be pretty gay as well, even if they had manly muscles.

And as for those pagan Roman aristocrats...Ew! Just ew!

Now consider today's tranny craze. Neutering children in the name of conformunism is nothing new. Imperial China was run by the deepest of Deep States, and the top of their Deep State consisted of eunuchs. Complete eunuchs. Both thingies cut off.

Middle Eastern emperors were fond of letting eunuch servants run their empires as well. The prophet Daniel was likely such a eunuch. See chapter 1 of the Book of Daniel.

Grovellocracy figures in fiction. See:

• The character Smithers in The Simpsons

• The Scarlet Pimpernel, the world's first sissy superhero. (Note the connection with the aforementioned Liberace impersonators.)

• Wormtongue in The Lord of the Rings

• Demolition Man in its entirety. A metaphorically gelded society, led by a character played by Nigel Hawthorne, who was both gay in real life and famous for representing the Deep State in the most excellent Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister series.

The Market for Egalitarian Action

Long before the Revolution, the colonies which would later become the United States had an abundance of land and capital with respect to labor. As a result, wages were high compared to Europe. In order to have cheap servants, the rich had to resort to slavery.

Benjamin Franklin -- our first populist intellectual -- had suggested that we restrict immigration in order to preserve this happy situation. Some of Franklin's thoughts found their way into Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations [see Chapter IX].

When we won our war of independence, land west of the Appalachians was opened up, so notions of immigration restriction were tabled. We had lots of Indian land to steal, and could thus use additional tax paying Europeans to occupy said lands and build our empire.

Eventually, the frontier closed. The bargaining power of labor with respect to capital and landlords diminished. Leftist political movements arose. The Progressive Era began, followed later by the New Deal.

(We had a similar dynamic for environmentalism. When English settlers first colonized this land, the abundance of nature was overwhelming. Nature was something to be conquered and exploited, not preserved. As the frontier closed, calls to preserve the remaining wild lands arose. Think Teddy Roosevelt and the early hunter funded conservation organizations.)

A Political Realignment

What does the Left-Right political spectrum mean? For those on the Left, Left traditionally meant being for The People and against oligarchy. For those on the Right, Left meant Big Government while Right meant Liberty.

If we apply both definitions, we get the following political map.

(Regular readers have seen this before, but sometimes repetition is in order.)

The 20th Century Left-Right spectrum ran diagonally from the lower-left to the upper-right. In the lower left you had New Deal liberals and assorted socialists. In the upper right you had people like Ronald Reagan and Steve Forbes. America's two-party system looked something like this in the late 20th Century:

The Democratic Party was the party of Big Government and Big Labor, with a few outliers from the South. (Jimmy Carter was just as big a deregulator as Reagan.) The Republican Party was a coalition of those who truly wanted smaller government and rule of law, plus corporate interests, country clubbers, and the Religious Right.

Note how the upper left quadrant -- the populist quadrant -- was largely ill served by either political party. We had a bias in our two-party system pulling the country down and to the right -- into the serfdom quadrant. Logic would dictate that the country's political center would be somewhere in the populist quadrant (if we center the graph to whatever the status quo is at the time we are considering). There is a reason why H. Ross Perot nearly became the first third party candidate to win the White House since Lincoln. He had to drop out of the race temporarily and choose an utterly unprepared running mate in order to lose.

I realized twenty years ago that the country was aching for a new political party to occupy the populist quadrant. I even wrote a worst-selling ebook on the subject under my real name. Alas, I lacked the resources to do much more.

Donald Trump had rather more resources, and he used them to drag an existing party kicking and screaming part way into the populist quadrant.

Part way.

And that kicking and screaming factor also proved to be a problem. Trump could only get bits of his populist agenda passed in Congress, even when Republicans had majorities.

Meanwhile, Corporate America -- once part of the Republican coalition -- teamed up with the wackiest elements in the Democrat coalition in order to defeat Trump.

The reasons should be obvious looking at the map. The populist quadrant is as far as possible from the corporate serfdom quadrant. So of course some of the country club Republican elements should go full-on anti Trump. As for the clown show, note that the populist quadrant is adjacent to what we called liberalism in the late 20th Century. Indeed, the original liberals -- the classical liberals -- were in the upper left quadrant back in the day. So today's Democratic Party needs to get votes from deviants and tribalists.

The Problem with Populism

My introduction to populism was in high school. I grew up in the days of energy crises and truculent Iranians. So as an aspiring mad scientist it was natural for me to respond to a classified ad in a science fiction magazine for free energy patents. I got more than I asked for:

I got the book with free energy patents, but I also got a couple of thin paperback books: None Dare Call it Conspiracy and The Rockefeller Files, along with a note saying that we can defeat the evil Rockefellers by harnessing free energy.

None Dare Call it Conspiracy was weird and mind-blowing. The public schools had taught me that we had to choose between Big Government or Big Corporations commanded by tycoons and old money families. Yet here was a book saying that the true enemies of capitalism were the robber barons and their offspring. The robber barons and international bankers wanted to replace competition with corporate fiefdoms. Both communism and fascism were their tools. Anything to make governments run deficits was a good thing. More interest money for the international banks and the Already Rich.

It was a thrilling tale. But more supernatural horror than action thriller.

Horror fiction has limited appeal to me. I am a man of action, not paralysis -- at least in my own mind. (I identify as a man of action, if you will.) And so my eventual instinctive reaction was to pick apart parts of the narrative.

For example, there were the termite charts. The authors presumed that a 5% interest in a corporation was a controlling interest, and that if the daughter of the owner of 5% of Corporation A marries the great nephew of the 5% owner of Corporation B, then those corporations are effectively merged.

Whoa! We're doomed!

I don't like being doomed.

And so the idea that a lockstep coherent conspiracy could be pulled off based on such family ties soon struck me as unbelievable. I could find evidence to back my instincts. Watching my extended family manage the family farm after my grandfather passed away was sufficient evidence. Blood relation does not guarantee lockstep unity. And there there was the history of wars between related monarchs providing plenty of other data points.

And so I got my mind out of the conspiracy mindset after a few weeks of exciting darkness.

But the idea that you could mix smaller government and a distrust of the rich stuck. And I found more evidence to back the notion when I got to college and actually read some Adam Smith. Smith and the early classical liberals were solidly in the populist quadrant.

This is not to say that conspiracies don't exist. I've participated in a few myself and I have been thwarted by conspiracies as well. Conspiracy happens, but secrecy is an overrated super power.

And enforcing a conspiracy sufficient to plant explosives in the World Trade Center or fake the moon landing requires WAY too much coordination without enforcement to be believable. I can believe the CIA or the Mafia keeping a big secret, but construction crews or mass quantities of engineers? No way!

Here's a quick course in Conspiracy 101. Do you have Bond Villain wealth? Here is how you carry out your eeeevil plans without needing self-sacrificing henchmen. Look around for existing fanatics who already want to do what you want done, more or less. Give them money and let them do their thing. Lather, rinse, and repeat. This is how the Koch Brothers built the libertarian movement in the 70s and early 80s. But the Koch Brothers could not control those they funded! The Koch Brothers' beneficiaries bit back whenever the Koch's tried to exert influence directly. The very term Kochtopus was coined by recipients of Koch money, not by liberal conspiracy theorists.

I suspect -- with less evidence -- that George Soros is playing a similar game as the Koch Brothers. Soros may have more direct control, as conformunists are easier to control than libertarians. But I suspect that those throwing fire bombs at night are a bit hard to control.

Ditto for the scions of the super rich. The independently wealthy have the ability to say No.

This is one of the weaknesses of populists: putting way too much emphasis on looking for hidden villains, and not enough on putting forth a positive program. Yes, there are villains. But the search for the Ultimate Villain rarely bears fruit -- it does bear laughable fruitcakes, however.

On the other hand we do seem to be living the the endgame prophesied in None Dare Call it Conspiracy. All this gay conformunism feels like The Conpiracy has come out of the closet in more ways than one.

On the gripping hand, where are the Rockefellers? Today's evil conspirators are just as much into destroying the works of John D. Rockefeller as the counter-conspirators who sold me the free energy patent book.

Here's the deal: looking for the top of The Conspiracy is a losing game. Far better to look for sociological (and possibly supernatural) dynamics, and, better yet, focus on the remedies, not the villains. Expose the True Villains, and The Sheeple will shrug. Offer something better than corporate serfdom, and millions will listen.

And that something better needs be something other than just a leader. A movement that is too dependent on a leader triggers a national immune response that goes back to our Founding.

Needed: a More Principled Populism

Conspiracy theorizing is a dead end even if you stick to the conspiracy theories which are true. Suppose freedom loving space aliens were to abduct George Soros, the House of Rothschild, the World Economic Forum, and a thousand other top villains of Alex Jones' choosing. What would happen?

Rather little, I suspect. Though we are careening down the path of corporate serfdom, titanic forces are already in play. There are millions of people who are actively working for the agenda. The Man Behind the Curtain can be just as ineffectual as the Wizard of Oz, and they can still win.

We need positive populism, and not just a great leader. Trump deserves enormous kudos for his hostile takeover of the Republican Party, and for his grit in withstanding the attacks of the powers that be. But Trump's reliance on personal branding upset many, including libertarian-leaning conservatives of my personal acquaintance. Moreover, his reliance of shows of personal loyalty backfired bigly.

Personnel is policy¹, and Trump was slow and chaotic in getting his people appointed to executive offices. Part of this was due to Trump's personal style -- he's more of a deal maker than a manager. But the other reason is critical: we need a more theoretical populism. We need think tanks and college departments filled with nerdy academics writing pretentious papers on how to shrink government while bringing the wealth gap down to something compatible with democracy.

Politicians need talking points and detailed legislative proposals. Presidents need a farm team for assorted undersecretaries. And college educated voters need a coherent Narrative to go with populist policy positions.

I am not a think tank and I don't play one on TV. But I do have enough ideas that think tankers can start with. Behold the Rules in the pipeline:

• Rule 9: Debt is Dumb

• Rule 10: Tax Thine Enemies

• Rule 11: Exploit the Environmentalists

• Rule 12: Study and Teach the Old Testament Law

• Rule 13: Reinvent Antitrust

Four out of five of these Rules are populist. And yes, Rule 12 is a populist Rule. The Law of Moses has explicit commandments against rent-seeking, and a welfare system centered on providing startup capital to the poor.

Answering a Few Objections

Any real libertarian reading this -- including some subroutines still running in the back of my brain -- will shudder at the talk of taxation and antitrust. Yes, I am talking about "initiating force for political and social reasons." Deal with it. Even if we were to abolish all government next week, we would have lots of force being initiated. Criminals, vandals, and revolutionaries exist.

And even with the perfect combination of armed citizens and private protection services, there would still be the effects of past injustice. Does any land have truly clear title? Is any major corporation truly untainted by past subsidy or slave labor in its supply chain?

Many years ago I became a libertarian because I valued freedom. Freedom is not identical to liberty. The struggling single mom doing extra shifts at the greasy spoon to care for her children in an Objectivist utopia is less free than a single mom waitress in a Swedish style welfare state. And when corporations become too big and too few they gain government-like power. In the past few years the amount of direct censorship by government was tiny compared to that from Google, Facebook, and Amazon.

Wealth differences are power differences.

The sweet spot for freedom is a mix of limiting both government and corporate power.

This does not mean that utopia lies at the upper-left corner of the liberty-equality graph. I'm aspiring to become a tycoon myself. Someone needs to give Mark Zuckenberg some serious competition.

There is little freedom in a completely egalitarian society. People differ in ability, ambition, and time preference. Stored wealth is freedom to act without permission.

What I am saying is that the optimal state of freedom is somewhere in the upper left quadrant compared to what we have today.

Finally, for those Continental Reactionaries who object to democracy, a few parting thoughts. I will freely admit that our system of representative democracy is going into a failure mode. We are facing scaling issues, as I mentioned in Rule 6. Also our two-party system struggles badly when there is a paradigm shift. (A better voting system could fix that problem, but that's an article for another day.) And our government has a long history of breaking treaties and other promises to other nations.

Monarchy is supposed to provide stability and long term thinking. A king should think of his grandchildren when adopting a policy. It is a nice theory, but does history bear it out?

Roman emperors debased the currency to the point of needing price controls. The rulers of Spain squandered the immense fortune brought home from Mexico and Peru in order to campaign for Holy Roman Emperor. King John sold England to the papacy.

To see examples of fiscal restraint, look to the classical liberals who dominated British politics in the 1800s. Or look to Andrew Jackson -- a populist -- who actually zeroed out the national debt.

1. Morton Blackwell of the Leadership Institute, if memory serves.