What Kind of Governing System Would I Prefer?

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the scaling problem with democracy, which was essentially that once you get above a certain (relatively small) polity size, democracy quickly becomes functionally unworkable and prone to being “hacked” by bad actors. In the comments, one reader asked me to detail what kind of a system I would prefer (since democracy obviously isn’t it!). Because I’m always on the lookout for material to write about, I thought this was a grand idea and resolved to write about it after clearing out my docket. So I’m going to endeavour to answer this question in the paragraphs below.

Before I dive right in, I’m first going to discuss some fundamental bases that inform my understanding of what a government “should” do and be. Then, I’ll get to answering the question in two different ways – what my “ideal” preference would be and then what I (more realistically) think could or would actually be feasible in some kind of a scenario where America, or a significant chunk of it, got a new government. I like to think that I’ve got enough common sense to know that the two probably don’t have a great deal of overlap, unfortunately.

Collapse is Going to Happen, Like It or Not

Regular readers know by now that I am a big fan of the demographic-structural theory (DST) proposed by cliodynamicist historians such as Jack Goldstone and Peter Turchin. The reason I find it so interesting is because of how intellectually satisfying it is. Most theories of history are linear and progressive, and their proponents often struggle to force a progressive narrative onto otherwise cyclical and chaotic series of historical events. Demographic-structural theory, through its explicitly cyclical approach to understanding the rise and fall of empires, not only makes more sense intellectually, but also has the added advantage of having a great deal of explanatory power. The theory closely fits what we actually observe from the empirical evidences we have available and can then be successfully applied to analyses of the histories of other polities as well.

In addition to explanatory power, DST also has predictive power as well. While DST is not deterministic in an absolute sense, it’s quite apparent from the observable cycles of history that pretty much all large states, regardless of cultural, economic, or political vagaries, follow the same general set of paths around very similar strange attractors. Because of that, when you see a large state (such as ours) exhibit certain political, demographic, and social behaviours, you can predict where things are going to go from where they are currently at. While specific incidental and extrinsic events within a cycle may not be predictable, general trends most certainly are.

Ideology and Time Preference

Among intellectual trends, things like group IQ, the genetic component to IQ, and allied topics are one of those areas that is grossly out of fashion right now. Progressives, building upon centuries of blank slatist error, are enforcing the creed of perfect interchangeability among various people groups, a dogma that is necessary to buttress their argument that disparate outcomes between different groups are solely due to “White racism” and “systematic bias.” Yet, the fact that different people-groups possess different traits and characteristics, including differences in group averaged intelligence, is one that many people intuitively grasp. The continued popularity (as I can see from the backend views and other statistics) of two articles relating to this subject that I wrote nearly six years ago demonstrates this. The official suppression of this area of inquiry is a shame because it has great explanatory power for all kinds of issues ranging from crime rates to socioeconomic performance and beyond. Really, if you don’t understand or accept group differences in IQ, then you won’t ever really be able to grasp many things we see from the social sciences.

Once such thing that I’d like to talk about today is ideological breakdown amongst our population and how this impacts why broad ideological groups in our society act the way they do. But to reference this difference, I want to focus on an important second-order effect of intelligence, this being time preference. For those who may not be familiar with the concept, time preference describes an individual’s willingness (or lack thereof) to forgo immediate pleasure or profit in lieu of pursuing goals or activities which provide greater reward later on. High time preference is when a person wants it now, low time preference is the opposite.

The Scaling Problem in Democracy

In today’s post, I’ll be explaining why it is that we don’t really have an American republic anymore and why we won’t be getting one back anytime soon. To do this, however, we’ll need to address the question of democracy, which as Hans-Hermann Hoppe noted is the god that failed. He calls it this because many in our modern world treat “democracy” as an idol which cannot be questioned, even as it consistently malfunctions and makes the modern world worse and worse. Now, I’m sure many normie conservatives are right now rolling out that trite old standby “We’re a republic not a democracy!” But…we’re really not, or at least not anymore. Indeed, we haven’t really been one since even before the Civil War, as there were already growing trends toward the vast broadening of the suffrage (beginning with universal manhood suffrage) as early as the 1830s in some states.

The problem is that in a liberal republican form of government (which is what our Founders bequeathed, as opposed to the more reasonable form of aristocratic republic that was seen in ancient and medieval times), there is always going to be a drive towards greater and greater extension of mass participation. As such, the devolution of this type a republic into a democracy (which is really just an oligarchy that uses mass participation as a legitimising structure for elite goals), is almost inevitable via mechanisms I will describe below. Through its use of democratic features such as elections and public opinion, liberal republicanism will fairly quickly be subverted and turned into a vehicle for oligarchic manipulation, even when a particular system (such as the American one) attempts to use written constitutions and law as a brake on such tendencies. This is pretty much the uniform testimony of post-Enlightenment republican across the western world.

Right Wing Self-Organisation

One of the common complaints that you often hear from people on the dissident Right is that “the right wing has no organisation!” To a great extent this is true, at least on a local and demotic level. The organisation that does – at least overtly – seem to exist is found at the establishment, official, and federal level, yet rarely “organises” anything meaningful for the genuine Right. So this organisation, for the average Joe trying to simply live his life without constant harassment from the woke Left, is ephemeral and has little positive impact on his situation. There’s a great deal of functional difference between a coopted political party organising fundraisers and getting out the vote for establishment candidates and genuine organising that gets John Q. Chudlic involved in a way that can affect the actual course of events.

Yet, these same blackpillers who decry the lack of right wing organisation will often turn around and criticise when right wingers do try to organise at the local level. After all, the government doesn’t like it when people organise. You may draw some scrutiny. The FBI might put you on a list (as if anyone worth their salt isn’t on a few already). They definitely don’t like people forming militias (or neighbourhood watch programs or whatever else you want to call them). You might get INFILTRATED! And even if these aren’t the specific concerns, you still have the folks who counsel not to even bother. The Left has such total control over all the institutions that any right wing organising will be nipped in the bud, so why even try? If you’re gonna do anything, you better try to do it through official channels, political parties and established politicians and the like.

So You Don’t Think Woke Progressivism is a Religion?

You may not have been aware of it, but a religious revival has been sweeping America for the past few years. However, rather than the old-time religion of Christian piety, it’s a new religion with new idols and a new direction. Yet, not entirely new – it’s the latest phase in an evolving revolutionary belief system that has consciously set itself against every aspect of traditional American culture and society. Whereas earlier progressivism made an effort to appear to integrate itself into earlier American paradigms even as it was acting to overturn them, the current religion of Woke Progressivism has completely excised itself from any pretension of respect for previous Americanism.

Some on the Right balk at the terminology of referring to woke progressivism as a “religion.” After all, hasn’t the modern Left been characterised by a rejection of religion? By an increasingly overt atheism that not only denies traditional religion, but actively subverts and mocks? Yet, unlike European modes of leftism that have remained more within the boundaries of orthodox Marxism-Leninism, official atheism has never been able to gain more than a toehold in the United States. The American temperament is a religious one and therefore requires some object of piety towards which it is directed.

The Left Is in a Precarious Place

This past week has not been kind to the exoteric progressive Left’s agenda. In quick succession, lefties have seen the highest court in the land hand them losses on religious school funding, gun control, voter ID, the repeal of Roe v. Wade, and then school prayer (and they could potentially take another L later this week in the case of West Virginia v. EPA). The thing about this is that these losses are not merely symbolic – as important as that would be in and of itself for undermining the Left’s carefully cultivated image of inevitability. Instead, many of these cases revolved around issues of substantive law and legal doctrine that the Left thought it had gotten settled decades ago, but which is now very much unsettled. As a result, the carefully constructed legal superstructure that progressivism had used the courts to build is being undermined.

As the demonstrations around the country this past week and various wild-eyed pronouncements from prominent lefties on social media and in the news have indicated, they’ve not been taking these reverses very well. Indeed, the level of insanity being displayed in some circles is absolutely mindboggling, especially as a result of the Roe v. Wade repeal. You’ve got lefties bombing crisis pregnancy clinics, talking about sterilising themselves and their kids, threatening sex strikes, and publicly humiliating their own children.

Acceleration

Acceleration, in the power political sense, is one of those concepts that for a long time languished in the ghetto of NRx theorycel circles. However, over the past couple of years, it has broken out into the mainstream and even normies largely understand what it describes now. Much of this is because they’re getting to see it take place in realtime as we watch the Regime continue to start fires everywhere and then spray gasoline on them. The Left in general has been rapidly accelerating the rate at which it foists off ever more radical social changes and political strictures onto the rest of the country. Contrary to what common sense and political truism from earlier times should have told them, rather than going for measured change that acclimatises people to their agenda, the Left is now flying full steam ahead on all fronts, regardless of what backlash and pushback they receive.

Why might this be? It’s because of the Iron Law of Acceleration – the more you accelerate changes in a sociopolitical system (especially unpopular changes, as most of the Left’s social agenda really are), the more you have to keep accelerating to prevent it from all falling apart. The train has to keep going faster at a faster rate because if someone pulls the air brake, the whole thing will derail. If you give the political opposition (in this case us) time and space to organise resistance, they might just find a way to stop everything. This has been the rule for most sociopolitical revolutions since 1789 – if you’re gonna go, go all out as fast as you can and effect the changes you want before anyone can mount a credible defence.

What the Coming Collapse May – and May Not – Look Like

The perennial topic that seems to keep coming up over and over in Dissident Right circles is that of the coming collapse. Will it happen? If it does, what will it look like? Once it’s done, what will the results entail? Burning questions, one and all. I’ve been known to talk about this question myself over the years in conjunction with applying Turchin’s demographic-structural theory (DST) to Current Year America. Honestly, it’s on everybody’s minds specifically because it is obvious that the current system is so broken that it cannot continue much longer.

Yet, there are always a few folks who don’t like to think about it, and thus don’t like for you to think about it either. A good example of this was one I saw on Twitter yesterday via a tweet from Mystery Grove Publishing,

Now, I was actually kind of glad to see this because – being honest here – my creative well was running a little dry this week and I was struggling to come up with something to write about. Mystery Grove has admirably stepped into the gap to provide some assistance. So let’s get crackin’.

Democracy the Sham

We’ve been hearing an awful lot about “democracy” lately. We keep learning that it can only be promoted through the universal use of unaccountable ballot drop boxes that allow people to vote six or seven times. Congress is currently holding hearings about the grave threat to democracy presented by flyover country types wandering around the Capitol building that their tax dollars pay for. We even overthrew a popularly-elected government in Ukraine in 2014, and are trying to provoke a war with another nuclear-armed nation to keep it in power, all in the name of democracy.

Of course, the commonality between all of these examples (as well as many others that could be given) is that they are demonstrations of the cynicism that surrounds most “democracy talk” in our modern world. In point of fact, whenever anyone in a position of power in modern worldwide globohomo society talks about “democracy” (including the street-level antifa dreck who enjoy official institutional support for their “activism”), they don’t really mean it. Or rather, they are redefining the term in a way that differs from the way the regular Joe is used to thinking of it. Instead, the term is used as a signaling phrase to connote anything that is officially Regime approved and must be placed outside the realm of questioning.