In our previous episode, we looked at liberty and equality as a 2D political playing field. That's only two dimensions, and you were promised 4D chess. Here, we explore religion and personal morality as a third dimension.
Once upon a time, the Left was hip, edgy, and pro liberty on many personal matters. This is part of the definition of Liberal on the libertarians' Nolan Chart. This picture is wildly obsolete. Today, the Babylon Bee is edgier, funnier, and more counter-cultural than Saturday Night Live or Hollywood in general. Today the Democratic Party is the puritanical party; the Democratic Party has been taken over by demoncrats, by puritanical satanists.
These are frightening times. But this scary new arrangement also spells political opportunity. The free speech liberals of yore, those earnest readers of John Stuart Mill, still exist. But they are now deemed to be DINOs, cowed potential pariahs in their own party. Furthermore, the Democratic Party was once the home for devout working class Catholics. Some of them remain within said party. They are likely unhappy with all the rainbows. The same holds for many religious African Americans, who yet remain faithful to Team D, though many are not happy with the tranny worship and other anti Christian themes embraced by the Democratic leadership these days.
Using previous axes, we can get two different 2D projections:
The first projection is mostly academic, but it might be useful when trying to get/keep libertarians on board. And it is also worth taking to campuses and mainline Protestant churches which have gone Lite. Liberty requires a substantial gap between that which is frowned upon and that which is made illegal. Shame and shunning should be the first resorts for discouraging naughtiness.
The second chart has the most potential to seriously change the political landscape. There are many devout poor people who are dependent on the welfare state. Getting them to vote Republican is a challenge, despite the potential of the MAGA agenda to raise the market minimum wage. Getting them to vote for moral DINOs in the primaries, or for Christian liberal independents in the general, is definitely possible. Doing the new party option might work in certain inner city districts, as long as Republicans stay out of the lower level races, and accept that they are the vote stealing third party in such districts.
How about a Liberation1 Party? The platform might include:
School vouchers
A Citizen Dividend to gently make the welfare to work transition
Reasonable sentencing reform (more on this later!)
More humane prisons, like they have in Western Europe
Compensation as an alternative to prison time for minor offenses
Increase the budget for public defenders and speedier trials
And maybe some repackaged MAGA bits which can be easily sold as a means for raising wages
In other words, focus on making Black lives matter [too] the right way. Do not talk welfare cuts when running in poor districts! The goal here is to advance some good ideas to a hitherto written off demographic, and to make inner city races competitive. More competition means less corruption.
I'll have much more to write on targeting this demographic in future rules. Stay tuned.
A Sense of Life
Before leaving the Christian/moral dimension, let's swim upstream from electoral politics for a bit. Let's look at values, the underlying Sense of Life.
As previously mentioned, Hollywood's naughtiness used to be fun...or at least appeared to be fun. (Adultery has some serious downsides even without divine judgment, especially for the children.) Today, the satanists are more earnest and self-sacrificing than the Religious Right.
This evolution from hedonism to wicked angst worship was predicted by C.S. Lewis. He wrote that the devil will use pleasure as a temptation, but he doesn't like to.2 He prefers to get people to do the wrong thing without reward. And that's what is happening in today's "entertainment" industry. This brings me to a related plot, more philosophical than political:
Since political values spring in part from underlying philosophical and moral positions, it pays to dwell on the above chart a bit. I got my first libertarianish impulses from reading C.S. Lewis as a child. I later went off the deep end reading Heinlein and Rothbard. As I move towards the end of middle age, I find myself reverting to my old roots: the mix of conservatarianism, nature appreciation, and the ethical hedonism of C.S. Lewis. Self-sacrifice is not intrinsically moral. Indeed, self-sacrifice for a bad cause is a purer form of malevolence than evil inspired by greed. The latter is contempt for others; the former, evil for its own sake.
In That Hideous Strength C.S. Lewis features a set of villains that strongly resemble the villains in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. The heroes differ greatly. Rand's heroes talk a bunch about Rational Self-Interest, but for the most part they don't have much fun. Francisco D'Anconia blows the family fortune pretending to be a playboy without getting laid. John Galt lives as a borderline bum. When Rand's heroes engage in sex, the scenes are more disturbing than sensual. C.S. Lewis' Christian couples have better sex lives.
Sex sells.
And yes, here in the non fiction world, a return to heterosexual monogamy as the norm3 would improve the sex lives of many. Getting the endocrine disrupters out of the environment (Rule 4) would help as well.
OK, Liberation Party looks an awful lot like Libertarian Party. Whether this would poison the Liberation Party brand from the get-go is an interesting question. As for the Libertarian Party, it needs to fade. Pure libertarianism is too extreme to sell, and libertarians do a much better job of doing real politics when doing so under a different brand. Recall the Ron Paul R3volution.
See Chapter 9 of The Screwtape Letters, for example.
For those new to this Substack, note that making marriage viable at a younger age has been a running theme. Rule 5 is all about reforming education so that more people are ready to start a career soon out of high school. And Part 2 and Part 3 of Rule 5 includes some hacks to get the next generation of the intellectual elite out of college faster. Rule 1 and several rules to come would raise the market minimum wage. We need entry level jobs which pay enough to support a family if we want to restore monogamy as the norm.
This installment is an interesting mix of ideas. Am I the only one having trouble viewing the plots on a mobile device? When I view this in Google's email browser or the Brave browser, the plots are nearly invisible, apparently because I've selected Dark Theme. They only become viewable in another browser which isn't set to Dark Theme.