Tag Archives: Reaction

The Authoritarian Power Base

As I’ve written, political power is, in essence, the capacity for violence and the will to use it. The power of a leader comes from his authority over, his ability to command, those with the capacity for violence because they believe he legitimately has authority to command them.

American politics, democratic politics, is a battle over who has authority and legitimacy to command violence of the democratic state and to what ends it may be commanded. These battles do not result in civil war because Americans accept that the democratic state, regardless of who holds the reins, is the legitimate authority over violence as long as the democratic process of transitioning this authority occurs in a mostly legitimate manner.

This legitimacy is crumbling.

Trust in American institutions is declining across the board. Trust in democracy is falling. The legitimacy of the process of authority transition is declining, with many thinking the process is rigged by, depending on the partisan side, illegal voting, foreign interference, gerrymandering, the electoral college itself, voter demographic changes, etc. A significant minority would theoretically support a military coup, while a significant minority currently support a legal coup by the deep state. (And this is only what people are willing to say, if a coup happened, far more would go along with it than would willingly say they’d theoretically support it).

The legitimacy of the democratic process is collapsing. If the legitimacy of the process collapses, so to does the legitimacy of the entire system who’s entire legitimacy and authority rests on the will of the people.

It is possible legitimacy could be earned back by the current system, but given the increasing diversity of America and the bifurcation of America between the Amerikaners and the urban cosmopolitans and their clients, it is unlikely, barring a Trumpian miracle.

Once legitimacy has faded, so to will authority. Power will be up for grabs.

With power struggles becoming viscerally real in a way democratic power papers over, legitimacy and authority will have to be reestablished.

The neoreactionary project is to establish legitimacy and authority in a peaceful way, to transfer legitimacy, authority, and power to an authoritarian autocrat with minimal bloodshed and without a descent into chaos.

Of course, the peaceful transfer of legitimacy, authority, and power itself requires a certain level of legitimacy, authority, and power.

Back to the beginning, power comes from the capacity and will for violence, it is essentially, ‘how many men with guns with how much morale and support equipment can I bring to bear should I call upon it?’

The capacity for violence doesn’t have to be used to exercise power but it has to exist and the will and authority to command it must be there.

This means that any person or group who wishes to reestablish legitimacy and authority after the terminal decay of current legitimacy and authority will require a base of power, a group of men willing to obey and, if necessary, commit violence on its behalf.

This includes the great man trying to establish the neoreactionary bargain or any other group trying to establish some form of right-wing authoritarianism.

The good news for for right-wing authoritarians is that there is a large, well-armed, pre-built power base waiting to be led: the middle-American radicals. As I wrote in my last post, the MARs are the largest single political group in the US but are also also one the politically least powerful.

The MARs are ineffective because they are leaderless. Trump is not of them and isn’t really leading them, but he’s sympathetic to them and appealling directly to them, which is the the most pro-MARS any political player has been since Buchanan last ran. The MARs propelled him to victory when his play to them was essentially: I don’t hate you, I think your concerns are legitimate, and I will work to address them. Given the vicious reaction from the current establishment that even this relatively minor level of play to the MARs base had, it is clear that in our current system the MARs are considered an illegitimate outgroup by the powers that be.

The MARs are effectively an occupied people ruled by an essentially foreign establishment. The Cathedral is run by people with different values who hate them, or at best condescend to them (“why don’t those rubes vote for their own best interests?”). Given the vicious reaction to Trump’s appeals to the MARs (and to the Tea Party and NRA), it is clear that the current American ruling structure will attempt to destroy any attempts by the MARs for democratic redress of their concerns. Their lot is to ground down for the system.

A large, alienated, armed, directionless, occupied group is sitting there waiting to be led. All that’s needed is to supply them with a leader, a will, a direction, and there will be a power base to reshape America.

The MARs are the obvious target group for any right-wing authoritarian action. They are patriotic and they are armed. They are increasingly desparate and not particularly ideological, meaning that someone willing and able to provide them the good governance they need will be able to create loyalty, legitimacy, and authority among them. Their attachment to democracy and the system that is destroying them, is not particularly strong and is weakening, leaving them open to more authoritarian froms of government.

Any populist right-wing movement, should be working to organize, radicalize, and mobilize the MARs, that’s where they will find fertile soil for any potential right-wing mass movement.

But, right-wing populism will likely not succeed. Every populist MARs uprising within the democratic framework, from McCarthy to Nixon’s silent majority to the Tea Party, has been either crushed or subverted. Hopefully, Trump will succeed, but the likelihood is he will at most buy a few more years until collapse, a few judges to protect MARs from leftist vengeance, and have prevented war with Syria, Iran, and Russia (which are certainly  valuable in themselves, but are not going to change the tide we currently ride).

It also seems questionable whether a populist MARs movement outside a democratic framework will spontaneously arise. Despite the rhetoric, the MARs have proven to be overly long-suffering and law-abiding for us to expect 2nd amendment solutions in time for them to be effective. The current South African situation suggests that this long-suffering may last well beyond the point of no return.

Aside from concerns of feasibility, 2nd amendment solutions are something to be avoided if at all possible. Peaceful restoration is the goal, violent restoration, even if ultimately successful, is itself a partial failure, and there is a high probability of terminal failure should violent restoration be attempted.

Instead of populism, a better strategy is passivism. Build an elite class among the MARs, tap into existing MARs elites, and find allies with MARs-friendly elites, and build a network to create a leadership class the MARs will follow. Once this class has been built and has created the necessary legitimacy, a leader can be taken from it (or may arise spontaneously, as Trump did) and power can be peacefully transferred and restoration enacted.

Imagine what Trump could have done, could be doing, if, instead of having to rely on the deep state and eGOP to staff his administration and Twitter to spread his message, he had a ready built, legitimized set of loyal elites with a loyal power base to drop into any necessary role and have it spread their message. If, instead of having to spend most of his efforts on court politics and maintaining poll numbers, he could work at solving the US’ problems knowing his people were loyal to him and would support him.

He would be in a position to accept power and take upon himself the responsibility for restoration.

Given how much Trump has gained (or, perhaps more accurately, forestalled) with an isolated, hastily organized campaign filled with internal strife, working off little more than a single, fallible man’s charisma and ideas and a minor mobilization of MARs, think of how much could be accomplished if post-Trump, (2024, 2028, 2032), a true restorationist candidate ran an organized campaign centred around a well-led MARs power base fully organized and mobilized by a loyal, coordinated elite class with the purposeful intent of enacting restoration.

This would have a real chance of it being the true election that brings restoration. He would need to do little more than accept power.

Trump made the initial attempt at the Sailer strategy, he showed the way, now it needs to be fully adopted and implemented with the true election in mind.

The seed is there, among the MARs, who will grow it and pluck the fruit?

Power, Rights, and Illiberal Freedom

As I’ve noted before, power is the ability to enact one’s will.

Negative freedom is the ability to act according to one’s will without external constraint.

Positive freedom is the ability to act according to one’s will.

A right is a license granted by a higher (not necessarily divine) power to either act according to one’s will or enact ones will within a particular domain.

Notice how similar these definitions are, differing primarily in emphasis.

Freedom is a form of power, and power a form of freedom. Rights are a form of power granted from above.

Any right or freedom is necessarily an exertion of power.

Any right is conditional, and can be taken away by the granter of said right. The assignment of rights is an act of power of the superior upon the inferior.

Granted freedom, whether by court, law, or constitution, is not truly freedom, but a right. It is conditional.

All positive freedoms are necessarily granted, the provision of the ability to act is implied within the definition. Some negative freedoms may be granted, in which case they are not true freedom, merely another right, power bequeathed by the superior. Granted freedoms, freedoms as rights, liberal freedoms, are conditional upon the higher power granting them. They are constrained by that higher power and are therefore not true freedom.

As noted, power comes from, at base, the capacity for violence.

Rights are granted by a higher power with the greater capacity for violence; the superior grants his capacity for violence and his authority to his inferior.

True freedom is a form of power, and, therefore, comes from, at base, a capacity for violence.

True freedom is a reality, not a right.

The reality of whether a person or people has the capacity and will for violence to stay free.

True freedom dies well before any actual impositions on the people. It dies when reality becomes a right, and therefore conditional on a higher power.

Illiberal freedom is the freedom of fact, true freedom.

The Political is Personal

One of the features of the evolution to political liberalism was the replacement of ties of personal loyalty with ties of loyalty to abstract institutions and principles. Where once men swore personal oaths to lords, kings, and gods, men now swear oaths to flags, laws, and countries. The major exception being Canada, with the UK having an oath to both the Queen and to law and democracy.
The development of sovereign states following the Peace of Westphalia transferred loyalty from people, kings and lords, to the state. The development of ideology, the replacement of loyalty to people with loyalty to ideas, was another feature of liberalism. While political discussion and ideas existed prior to the French Revolution, it was only in the Age of Ideologies that loyalty to all-encompassing ideals become common-place.
At one point, the political was personal, based on ties of blood and fealty. Today non-local politics is impersonal, based on ideology and parties.
Abstract loyalty has become so commonplace, that it is hard to comprehend a political order without it, but is it necessarily good for man?
Personal loyalty gives man a sense of place, to know where he exists in hierarchy, while abstract loyalty is necessarily faceless and depersonalized. A man with personal loyalty always knows whom he serves, a man with abstract loyalty knows what he serves, but who is ever-changing.
Abstract loyalty is necessarily divisive. Once loyalty is placed upon ideology, then minor deviations of ideology lead to schism, hence, practically all ideologies being plagued by near endless infighting. If loyalty to an idea is paramount, there can be minimal toleration of those whose ideas differ, even mildly. On the other hand, personal loyalty requires only that one agrees who decides.
Abstract loyalty is a necessary precondition for liberalism and it may not be possible for liberalism to be undone without replacing abstract loyalty with personal loyalty.
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Interestingly, in contemporary politics, personal loyalty seems to be making a modest comeback in the US in the form of Trump and, to a lesser degree, Bernie Sanders.
Trump is not particularly ideological: his ideology, such as it is, is very loose, pragmatic, and undefined. We call it Trumpism because he cuts across traditional political ideologies so most labels don’t apply particularly well to him. His “conservative” critics make him out to be unprincipled, confusing ideological adherence with principles. He aligned himself against both major political parties, building his political success solely upon his own name and reputation.
Trump has built and continues to build a base of personal loyalty to himself outside the traditional abstract loyalties. He has identified himself with an Americanism set apart from traditional abstract loyalties.
I think encouraging this sort of personal political identification would help encourage restoration. American politics, being liberal politics, has always been heavily abstract with American political loyalty dedicated primarily to the Constitution and, post-bellum, the USG.
To bring about restoration, we need to develop personal loyalty in a restorer, to a king, that trumps loyalty to abstracts such as the Constitution and the USG.

Restorative Justice: The Nuremberg Option

Once we are victorious, justice will need to be enacted, both for the sake of justice itself, and to placate the baying mobs.

But victor’s justice can be damaging to the victor. Spilling too much blood, disorderly or mob justice, or simply enacting justice too strenuously or thoroughly can easily backfire and damage a society, particularly one undergoing a newborn restoration. Justice must be measured. Justice will be needed, I doubt restoration will be doable without the justified execution of thousands, but we can ensure that it doesn’t become unjustified execution or go beyond the thousands.

So, I will lay some groundwork for the implementation, based on the Nuremberg trials. Nuremberg was a clear example of victor’s justice, but it was measured and didn’t cause blowback, thus it provides a good basis for victor’s justice. Beyond the principles of international law it established (I will note here, international law is a farce as the international community is not sovereign), the trials worked based on two interrelated assertions:

  1. That some crimes are so great that they can be prosecuted retroactively even if they do not violate the existent law at the time of the offence.
  2. In such cases, only the offenders and major offenders were subjected to trials and potential jail or execution, while lesser offenders and followers were merely probated or restricted.

The first assertion is a secularized version of aspects of divine/natural law; God’s law is higher than man’s law, takes precedence, and is always applicable even if man’s law disagrees. Because of this, we can easily adopt the original version within our own ideologies. Part of the second assertion has already been raised by Moldbug; we retire and bar the whole of the present regime from public service, and furthered by me, where we execute some of the most criminal. It strikes a good balance between the practical and humane and the need for justice to be done.

These assertions are already fairly well accepted as legitimate, and so will be relatively easy to sell to all sides of the reactionary bargain. They also solve two legal problems we will face during the restoration: Most of the major crimes being committed (abortion, cultural genocide, the destruction of communities and the family, usury, inflation, etc…) are legal and most people are involved in them to some degree. By adopting the necessity of the application of divine law but restricting it to only the major offenders we can ensure justice is done, without going beyond justice.

A few practical examples: it would be impractical to bring justice to every women who had an abortion and every pro-abortion individual, so we can offer them a general amnesty (making abortion and the promotion of it illegal and punishable going into the future), while we can execute abortionists and the most vile proponents, apologists, and promoters of this evil. Jailing every banker would be a miscarriage of justice and politically untenable, but we could execute the main leaders of the federal reserve and jail the more predatory bank and credit card company executives. It’d be untenable to bring justice to every family court lawyer and judge, but an example could be made of the more despicable ones. And so on and so forth.

So, when the restoration occurs and the time for justice is at hand, the leader should establish, quickly and firmly, an orderly plan for justice based on these principles. These principles are, obviously, very broad and more work would definitely have to be done on the practicalities of implementing justice come the time, but I think it wise to have some basic principles of restoration justice established and propagated throughout reaction while we have the luxury of time and cool heads, so the restoration doesn’t get caught up in the moment and commit acts it will regret.

Lessons from Charlottesville

By now, you have heard of the Unite the Right rally in Charlotteville. You’ve probably also heard it turned into a gong show. We can lay blame on the police, politicians, antifa, the organizers, or whoever, but blame is not what this post is about. Also, I was not there, so my impression of events is formed by the first-hand accounts from Twitter, particularly Pax’s as he has gone in-depth on what exactly happened.

As my readers know, I’m an advocate of passivism. Lately, and somewhat hypocritically, under the heady rush of success the alt-right has been experiencing lately, I’ve found myself supporting activist activities. I overestimated how much legitimacy we actually had. I supported Unite the Right, particularly because of Pax’s involvement. As it turns out, things went exactly as passivism would’ve predict.

First, Trump and Sessions both denounced white supremacy, neo-nazis, hate, violence, bigotry, and racism and Sessions has sworn to crack down “to protect the right of people like Heather Heyer, to protest against racism and bigotry.”

This is bad for us, but not as bad as it seems on first glance. Neither specifically denounced the alt-right, its ideas, its constituent groups, or the actual people making up Unite the Right. No one seemed to notice this, which is one of the good things of the left’s inability to distinguish nazis and white supremacists from anybody else on the hard right.

Some are calling this a betrayal, but it is not. Trump and Session were never us, they were our allies with some common goals, but they were never a part of the hard, dissident, or alt-right. They’ve always been conservative civic nationalists. Anybody thinking they were us was fooling themselves. But they’ve treated us with benign neglect so far, which, all things considered, is good for us.

Unfortunately, the actions of James Field has given the media and left enough power to push their hands. So, we may no longer have benign neglect. We’ll see.

After the writing of the rest of this post, things took an awesome turn. Trump held a conference where he attacked antifa and supported the alt-right. Nazis are in for it, but we’re probably good for now. But we’ll continue on.

Second, it looked bad. The death and injuries gave the media ammunition against us; it will not play well among middle America.

Third, a rally is a display of power. A rally is not for building power, it is for showing power to widen legitimacy. Friday night with the tiki torches was great. We showed power, the left was truly afraid, we claimed the area, and we built legitimacy; it went perfectly. Saturday destroyed what was built on Friday. The police undercut us and delivered us to antifa, showing their power and undermining ours. It was bad.

Fourth, antifa displayed power. Antifa won and won hard on Saturday and they know it. This will embolden them.

Thankfully, this will be buried under the media cycle in a couple weeks. Things may get a little bit harder due to Trump and Session’s shift (if it’s truly a shift) and the emboldment of antifa, but as long as we don’t repeat our mistakes, it shouldn’t be permanently damaging.

So what lessons can we learn?

1) Most importantly, we should not pretend to power and legitimacy we do not hold. Having a rally go badly is far more damaging than any possible gain from a successful rally, as we just saw. Never hold a rally unless there is minimal chance of things going wrong.

2) The police, as a group, are not on our side. They will obey their masters. The police drove rallygoers into antifa. They purposefully (or through gross incompetence) set up violence. One twitter user, I don’t remember who, remarked that no cop even tipped off the rally about the betrayal the police were to visit on the rally. As well, Pax and a few others tried to get “civil disobedience” arrested, but the police didn’t accept the arrests and drove them into antifa. Do not trust the cops to protect our rallies or meetings. Do not trust them to protect the peace.

3) Planned and advertised rallies give the left and their supporters in the government time to plan. So, only make open, planned rallies where you are sure that either the police will act to protect the peace or where antifa will not have a free hand to destroy. So never make plans for future rallies in Democratic cities or states.

4) No swastikas, no sieg heils, no roman salutes, no red armbands, no public gassing/ovening jokes, whether its serious or meming for the lulz. This is not punching right, this is not virtue signalling, this is basic optics. Real life is not the internet, it is not 4chan. 90% of the population will react very negatively to nazi signalling IRL. This is not going to change in the foreseeable future. The media will pull the two people doing nazi stuff from hundreds and go “look they’re all nazis” and it will work to turn normal people against us. There is nothing to be gained from nazi signalling and a lot to be lost (same for any KKK stuff, but nobody seems to be doing that). The nazi well is poisoned.

5) Keep your cool. I don’t know whether Field’s attack was planned or if he just ended up trapped and panicked, but whatever happened, it hurt the cause a lot. Rally-goers need to keep their cool and not react disproportionately. Pax and others noticed that there was a blank shot fired during the rally. His hypothesis is that the police were trying to set it up so the right would fire on and massacre antifa. Thankfully, the right kept their calm. Keep your cool and don’t overreact. The left doesn’t care if their lumpenprol cannon fodder gets butchered; they will gladly sacrifice them if it gives them a weapon against us.

6) Stick together. My best guess is that Field was isolated, set upon, then panicked. It could have been avoided had Field not been isolated; he may never have been put in that situation or someone could have talked him down or prevented his panic. Don’t let people get isolated. Isolated people will be in danger and will either be hurt or hurt others in disproportionate way. Beforehand, set up a small squad structure. Make sure everybody has a couple of buddies who will stay with him throughout the rally. For those who come alone, set them up with a few people. However it’s done, make sure everybody is part of a small group looking out for each other and make it known to never abandon someone during the riot (unless he has been safely arrested; don’t start a fight with the cops). At the very worst, if you can’t plan anything better, have a box with numbers on paper and pass the numbers out as attendees enter, then tell everyone to stick together with those sharing their numbers for the rally.

7) Have a bug out plan. Nobody predicted this would happen, but now we know it can. So, any rally should have planned, safe escape routes (have at least one back-up in case your main route gets closed) should something like this happen again. Rallygoers should all be briefed on it (but not too far advance so it doesn’t get leaked). If a rally goes down like this again, use the route. Have a person (and some backups) ready to take control and lead the escape. Train a squad or two beforehand on how to make a spearhead to break through a antifa/police line if it comes to that.

8) Relatedly, have a transport plan. Set up beforehand a general area people will park, bus to, walk to, etc. to walk to the rally, or coordinate a bus or two or something. If everybody parks wherever, the chances of someone becoming isolated like Field did increases. If people all enter and exit from the same general area, then this provides some level of safety and order. Of course, if antifa finds out this area, this increases the likelihood of vandalism or violence leading up to extraction, but at least nobody will be trapped alone. If necessary, you can have a parking area far form the rally and organize a shuttle service/evac point to and from the rally.

9) Quality control. This will probably be hard to do in practice, it may be impractical, but we should try to find a way to control the quality of people at the rallies. To get to the point where ramming people with a car seemed like a good idea, Field had to have made a series of bad decisions, including isolating himself, entering his car into antifa territory, and punching the gas. Try to keep people who make poor decisions, who panic, or who lose their cool out of rallies, or at least position them so they can’t get into a situation where they can make bad decisions. I don’t know if this is possible, but it should be attempted. 100 calm, disciplined marchers is far more effective than 1000 people milling about in chaos.

10) The Friday march worked, and worked tremendously. The left was panicking in fear, the pictures and press turned out amazing, it looked cool, it projected power and self-control; it was a major win (promptly undercut by Saturday). This is what we should model future rallies on: minimal prior public notice, control and self-discipline, and a display of power. We asserted our control, everybody knew, on a very primal level, that the right was successfully asserting political dominance and building legitimacy.

11) Tactical leadership. Related to the squad idea above, every rally should have a set tactical chain of command, and all rally-goers should know to follow it. The police betrayal was unexpected, but had a command structure been set-up beforehand, rally leadership could have provided some order to react properly, punch through antifa lines and extract everyone with minimal harm and no deaths. If somebody refuses to follow a chain of command, boot him. We are the right, we value authority. At the bare minimum, announce to all rallygoers at the beginning, “these are Tom, Dick, and Harry, if things go badly they will lead us out. Obey them,” or pass out a few distinctive hats to leaders and announce to obey people with those hats if chaos erupts.

12) Start smaller. The rally made it clear we do not yet have the organizational capacity/skills to run a large, pre-planned rally given the obstacles presented to us. This is not a knock against any of the organizers or the job they did, but these capacities do not just spring from nowhere, they are built. So, instead of one large rally, we should focus on smaller, more particular rallies and get some people building experience in organizing, before the next large rally.

To summarize, for now we should focus on smaller, better planned, more disciplined suprise rallies (with torches). We should seek to emulate Friday’s march. The goal of the rally proper should be to march through and dominate an area, demonstrating that we have power over said area. Rallies should be a form of guerrilla political war.

However, the overarching goal and main focus of the rallies should be on building planning, organizational, and leadership capacities within the right. We should also be working on forming natural groups of men, so we don’t have to resort to the paper numbers method. The passivist building of bonds and capacities are far more important at this stage than the political benefits of a rally.

Once we have these built, then a few years from now, we can hold the Return of Unite the Right and display the legitimacy and power we have actually built.

On Political Rallies

Here’s a quick post on political rallies, as a short theoretical introduction to my coming post which will examine lessons to be learned from Charlottesville.

Here are basics I’ve stated before:

Politics is the use of power to distribute status and resources. Politics is power and all power is, at base, the capacity for violence. Capacity for violence comes from authority, the ability to command men to commit violence.  , men’s belief in your right to command them.

To succeed at politics you first need legitimacy. Then you turn that to authority, which you then turn to power. The accumulation of authority and power, in turn, further increases legitimacy and authority.

All political actions are either displays of legitimacy, authority, or power, or exercises of power.

Government is the exercise of power.

Voting is a display of legitimacy. Voting is the statement: ‘I believe the person I vote for has legitimate authority over me.” This is why naked dictators have hold elections where they win with 120% of the vote. It reinforces their legitimacy.

It is also a display of power. It is a ritualistic counting of heads; who would outnumber whom if political disputes needed to be resolved by violence. ‘I have 65 million people who believe I have legitimate authority and who would fight for me if violence began. You have fewer and would lose. Surrender peacefully’

Letter and phone campaigns, and petitions are the same. They are either displays of and appeals to authority (‘You have authority over me, please exercise it in a way I desire’) or displays of power (‘as you can tell from these letters/calls/signatures we outnumber you. Obey our demands’).

We hide these displays of power behind prettied-up democratic language, because politeness allows us to peacefully coexist. It is easier to accept others having power over you without responding with unlawful violence if you think of it as ‘the people decided’ rather than ‘my opponents displayed greater capacities for violence, so I submitted to them’, even though the latter is the unvarnished truth of democratic decision-making.

Onto rallies and protests specifically. Rallies are displays of power. To peel away painted-up democratic language, they are displays of tribal war, agnostic behaviour, two wolves sizing each other up before fighting.

We often hear the terms ‘people power’ or ‘direct action’, but we never realize the full depths of how primal and literal this phrase is. A rally is a naked show of force, a threat, a taunt. It states to your political opponent, ‘this is how many men we have who would commit to violence, do you dare fight or do you submit?’ On a primal level, all understand this, but, for politeness’ sake and in our muddled democratic thinking, we downplay how serious a rally is.

Knowing this, we can know the reasons for rallies; to assert power and control. To hold a rally is to say, ‘this area belongs to us.’ To hold a counter-protest is declare, ‘you do not control this area, we are willing to fight!’. If the rally continues, those holding the rally show they have the power over that area. If the rally is ended, the counter-protesters have shown the area truly belongs to them. Government agents stand in the middle, keeping the displays as just displays, knowing that whichever side wins the area truly belongs to the government.

You should never hold a rally unless you know you can conclude it. To fail at a rally is to show a lack of power, it shows your opponents are in control.

Legitimacy, Power, and Culture

We’ve heard it said, culture is downstream of power, or is power downstream of culture? Which controls the levers to the other?

As I’ve said before, power (the ability to force your will) comes from authority (the ability to command), which comes from legitimacy (people’s beliefs in your right to command).

The power/culture discussion is always off because it misses the underlying link between the two: legitimacy.

Power can do whatever it wants within its dominion. That’s the inherent nature of power. If you can not do what you want, you, definitionally, do not have power. The limits of power exist where you can no longer accomplish your will.

Someone with power over culture can change the culture to be whatever he desires. If multiple people have power over culture, the culture will be changed to wherever the limits of their power meet. Power creates, destroys, and changes culture.

Note: Culture is always, to at least some degree, organic, so power over culture is always widely distributed. No one ever has absolute power over culture.

But, power creates culture only insofar at it has authority. Culture is organic and of men. If men do not obey, there is no power and culture can not created, destroyed, or changed. Culture is only changed insofar as men allow it to be changed.

Men only allow culture to be changed, in so far as they think the change and the power causing the change are legitimate.

This is where culture influences power. Legitimacy comes from culture. If the culture holds to the Divine Right determines power men will obey power with Divine Right. If culture holds to patriarchy determines power, men will obey fathers. If the culture holds to popular will, they will obey democratically elected politicians.

Power is downstream of legitimacy, which is downstream of culture, which is downstream of power.

By changing culture, power can change what men view as legitimate, changing legitimacy, authority, and, ultimately, where power lays.

This is how power destroys itself. It changes the culture that made itself legitimate, which then changes what legitimizes power, changing the basis of authority, changing the power itself. Power changing culture undermines itself.

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Culture change is slow and difficult, so changing the method of legitimacy is slow and difficult. It is easier to destroy legitimacy than to create. Culture change is also unpredictable. When you destroy culture, what replaces it may not always be what you expected or hoped.

This is why revolutions are so turbulent and unstable and often end in a strong man: one can destroy the legitimacy of the present order, but creating a new order viewed as legitimate is time-consuming and difficult. When you destroy a culture and legitimacy, it is hard to predict what form legitimacy will take, hence revolutions often destroying their instigators.

In a legitimacy vacuum, the simplest form of legitimacy to create is martial: men naturally respect strength and strength is relatively simple to demostrate. A strong-man short-circuits the legitimacy-creation process by focusing the creation of legitimacy among a group of armed men through his strength. Once he obtains enough power through this specific legitimacy, he kills those who oppose him until they obey. He is then free to influence culture until another strong-man overthrows him or until he creates a more sustainable legitimacy.

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Power flows from legitimacy. Culture creates legitimacy. Power influences culture.

In a stable system culture will reinforce legitimacy which will reinforce power, which will in turn reinforce the culture. For example, the church supports supports divine right, which legitimizes the monarch, who in turn supports the church.

In an unstable system, power destroys culture (or its own legitimacy) and/or culture undermines power’s legitimacy. For example, enlightnment ideas and culture undercut divine right, the monarch mismanages power squandering legitimacy, and then revolution occurs.

No Enemies to the Right

I’ve seen No Enemies to the Right (NEttR) come under scrutiny over the last while, most recently and prominently by Land. I’m going to clarify the issue a bit.

As I’ve written before, we on the right should point our guns at our true enemies, the left, and, occassionally, the traitorous moderates. We should avoid turning on each other. We should avoid attacking allies, even if they are overzealous, degenerate, wrong on certain base principles, or if they have tactics we disagree with.

When first formulated, NEttR had a slightly different formulation though than simply not attacking fellow rightests. When originally used a few years back (can’t find the links), it meant no attacking people from the left. You could not criticize people for being more right then you, ie. you never criticize from the left, always from the right. For example, you don’t criticize a anarcho-capitalist for insufficent economic justice, that would be criticizing from the left. It instead you criticize him for the problems created by a lack of legitimate authority, ie. from the right. Criticizing a 14/88er for being racist is from the left and is verboten; criticizing a 14/88er for being a nationalist rather than a thedist is fine as it is from the right.

I agree with both the old formulation and the new formulation. In that there’s a difference between attack and criticize. You don’t attack someone else on the right, but you can criticize, as long as your criticism is that they are insufficiently rightward. You never attack or criticize someone for being insufficiently left. (Remember, right is order, left is chaos. Any criticism should be that the person is not sufficiently promoting order).

We should always be signalling right. But we should not become stupid about it to the point where we devour our own or promote stupidity. Ideological purity is nice, but don’t be concerned to the point where it becomes counter-productive. Attacking everyone for some minor ideological deviation will only alienate people. Instead, try to encourage and convince them towards your point of view with reason and argumentation. As well, continually trying to one-up others in a “righter than thou” holiness competition is to be avoided. This is not a status game.

NEttR does not mean that we can’t criticize, it means we can’t criticize people for being more right than us. In Land’s case, we should not critize the assassin for excessive rightward zeal or for being an extremist. We can criticize him for promoting chaos (ie: promoting leftism), for promoting evil, or for his actions being strategically or tactically unsound. The attitude to others within the right should be “I admire his passion for the cause, but he went too far by committing this counter-productive evil.”

Criticism of other rightests should always be internal. We should never criticize other rightests to leftists. Never virtue signal to the left. Our public attitude towards our extremists to the the centre and left should be the Mutt and Jeff routine. When talking about rightests we don’t agree with to the left, our general stance should be “While I don’t agree with him and he went too far, you have to agree that he has some valid points. Maybe we could appease people like him by adopting [something moderately right].” One of the major reasons leftists win is because rightests denounce their extremists (ex: abortion-clinic bombers), while leftists play Mutt and Jeff with theirs (ex: communist and Islamic terrorists).

Similarly, some allies are ideologically impure, degenerate, or otherwise distasteful in ways other extremism. Milo, Roosh, and Spencer (Edit: Looks like I was confused. My apologies to Mr. Spencer) are some of the bigger examples. In these cases, the old Bedouin proverb comes in handy: “I against my brother, my brother and I against my cousin, and my cousin and I against the stranger”. We are not biological family, but we are ideological family. Just as in a real family, we may not like or agree with some people, we may find their choices distasteful or wrong, but they are still ours. We have concentric ideological circles, and at each circle, we should always rally facing outwards. When someone in one those circles outside us gets attacked from the left, we should support them for what right thing they have. Allies are useful and we have few of them. Extremists and distasteful allies should be used not rejected. Once the restoration has succeeded, then we can sort out our internal differences.

Finally, loyalty is a two-way street. There is no need to help traitors. Those on the right who are constantly attacking other rightests, especially if they’re doing so from the left, or who betray their allies deserve nothing. Disloyalty is chaotic and disordered, it is leftist and these rules don’t apply to them; feel free to attack (but always from the right). If they repent, let off and allow them to prove themselves.

So here’s the basic rules of No Enemies to the Right we should all follow:

1) Never attack or denounce a fellow rightest. Entryists, traitorous “moderates” and R(ightests)INO are fair game.

2) Never attack or alienate an ally. If you dislike them, ignore them.

3) Rational critique is not an attack.

4) Rational critique is not personal. Keep personal drama private.

5) Criticism of rightests should always have the audience of other rightests. Never criticize rightests to leftists.

6) All criticism should be from the right. Never criticize from the left.

7) Always signal right.

8) This is not a holiness competition. Don’t don’t be stupidly excessive when signalling right.

9) Don’t denounce extremists. Remember, Mutt and Jeff.

10) Zeal is good and should be commended, stupidity is not and should be criticized.

11) Always rally facing outwards at our concentric ideological circles.

12) Support those attacked from the left, even if the person is more left than you.

13) None of this applies to the disloyal or traitorous.

Accept Power

A lot of the criticism of passivism comes from Step 2: Accept Power. Critics correctly point out that accepting power is a vague, almost magical, “something happens” that is undefined. Like Anti-Dem, I’m also highly skeptical we’ll convert the current elites in any significant number, but we don’t need to.

Accepting power is what we must do, and it is necessarily vague because I’m not a wizard, nor is anyone else in NRx. We can make predictions and educated guesses of what might happen in the future, but nobody really knows how any restoration will come about because there is no real model for how this happens.

Society moves by the combination of large, underlying, occult economic, demographic, and social forces, the occasional great man, and pure random chance, a combination that makes a joke of any planning for specifics.

The restoration will be a black swan event: an unpredictable event of highly improbable circumstances.

From the direction of the large, occult forces, we can discern that Western society is degrading before our eyes, but how this disintegration will play out is unknowable. All that is knowable is that institutional legitimacy, social bonds, and social trust are plummeting and a society without them is not a society that can maintain itself. Barring some major, unexpected occurrence at some unforeseeable point in the future, the illusion that is America will shatter and things will disintegrate in some way.

And that is all we can know. You can’t make specific plans because we don’t know what the situation will be. That’s why we do passivism. We build up our support, legitimacy, and strength, so that we are ready when opportunity presents itself.

Did Gorbachev and East German officials think the Berlin Wall would fall and the USSR would collapse because one official misunderstood a note? No. No one had any idea that the communist world would collapse so quickly and what stupid little event would set it off, even though everybody knew the USSR was decaying, hence Gorbachev’s earlier reforms.

After the collapse of the USSR, Harvard, USG, and their many imperial tools were on hand to economically rape Russia and install an American order under Yeltsin. There will be no outside force to install order, even rapacious order, after the US collapses. So somebody internally will need to restore order. That will be whoever has best positioned itself to respond to the black swan.

Social entropy in the US will not be reversed little by little, there is no internal or external power centre or force that can push an incremental reverse, such as the socialist media and the Soviet regime which supported the long march of American communists and liberalization. The introduction of mass propoganda through TV and radio and the introduction of mass education were singular historical events which the communsists took advantage of and we didn’t. We will have not have these advantages which allowed the left to win. The internet doesn’t present us the same opportunity due to its distributed nature and its already completed infiltration by progs.

If entropy is reversed, it will be reversed in one big reset, this will happen when the Cathedral’s legitimacy and authority disappears. What will trigger that and what the circumstances on the ground will be, is unknowable.

Then best strategy in this case is to build: build a power base, build legitimacy, and build authority so that when the black swan occurs, we are ready to move and have a set alternative to chaos. The great man will be whoever finds the right timing and uses what has been built to restore order.

I already quoted this, but I’ll do so again:

Hence the skillful fighter puts himself into a position which makes defeat impossible, and does not miss the moment for defeating the enemy. Thus it is that in war the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory.
– Sun Tzu

Those committing activism are seeking fights now and looking for victories afterwards. They wish to squander resources where they can not and will not win.

Passivism is about seeking victory through building and preserving resources and taking battle after victory has been achieved. That is why it is called accepting power. If we become worthy, ie: if we build our power bases, legitimacy, and authority to the extent necessary, then when the time comes, there will be nothing to do but for the great man to accept what is rightfully his. Lord Monck will walk into London unopposed and restore the king to his rightful place.

Alternatively, the more resources we squander now and the less we build, the greater the fight and the lesser the odds of victory will be when the black swan flies.

Activism

In the comments to my recent article on passivism, I’ve been accused of not defining activism, even though I did.

Activism is democratic politics. It is action by the people for the people to influence the people’s laws. Activism is necessarily leftist because it assumes the people should be involved in politics and in the power of the people to change politics, which are both inherently leftist concepts. In an ordered, right-wing society, the people do not engage in politics (at least, until society becomes disordered and the people throw a revolution), so there is no activism. Activism should be avoided for this reason alone.

Yuray has defined activism as well:

Per Google the definition of activism is “the policy or action of using vigorous campaigning to bring about political or social change.”

Activism is participation in the official political process, which the Brahmins at Google have found fit to define as “campaigning to bring about political or social change.” Passivism is not “doing nothing,” it is non-participation in the official political process.

Activism is people power. It is a part of democracy in which the people take political action, generally against the authorities or those perceived to be in power.

Democracy is inherently leftist. People power is inherently leftist. Activism is inherently leftist. There is no such thing as right-wing activism.

If you are trying to influence the people or democratic power structures you are not acting right-wing. You are acting like a liberal and are engaging in liberal democracy on liberal terms on the liberal battlefield. You are completely pwned and accepting your enemies’ frame.

The term for this is folk activism, which Moldbug borrowed from Friedman, while altering the meaning. Folk activists commit ostensibly right-wing activism. I say ostensibly, because even though folk activists may be pursuing nominally right-wing ends, they are legitimizing liberal and democratic values and the system that represents these values.

Some commented that writing and speech are activism, but they are not. Political writing and speech are only activism when it stirs (or is at least meant to stir) the people to action. Political philosophy is not activism. By calling political writing and speech activist you are accusing Plato, Confucius, or Hobbes of being activists, which is patently absurd.

Neither is building the mannerbund, institutions, groups, or families. These activities are generally non-political. Where they are political, they are only activist insofar as they participate in liberal democratic activities.

Activism is not synonymous with action. Activism is democratic action against (perceived) authority. Some action is activist, but much action is not. The right needs to avoid activism, as it further legitimizes liberal democracy, which is antithetical to right order, tradition, and right authority.

If you want to take action, then take right-wing action. Write anti-democratic political tracts that delegitimatize liberalism. Build order in your communities. Build institutions and/or gain power in them. Gain legitimacy and authority through action.

You’ll notice these right-wing actions are exactly what passivism encourages.