The Case for Political Engagement
The Black Pill/Accelerationist approach is one of the biggest things holding the Right back.
The Yarvin/Rufo debate exposed some very significant rifts on the Right. In fact they arguably are ‘the’ divide between the ‘Third New Right’, represented by Chris Rufo, and the ‘Dissident Right’, represented by Curtis Yarvin.
As I have called this ‘the’ divide, me siding with Rufo whilst calling myself ‘Dissident Right’ may be seen as a contradiction.
However, the difference is this: unlike Rufo, who retains a fundamentally Neoconservative view of liberal democracy, I think that ‘theoretically’ liberal democracy should be replaced with something better. This is because there are deep rooted issues with the principles of Social Contract Theory and universal suffrage that lead towards Woke conclusions, and the best way to prevent Wokeness from ever re-emerging is to break apart the assumptions that led to it, chiefly the doctrine that ‘all men are created equal’ and have ‘inalienable rights’.
However, I have a very different view on political engagement compared to most on the Dissident Right, most notably Curtis Yarvin and Neema Parvini (Academic Agent). I see people like Chris Rufo representing a necessary transitional stage towards the creation of something better, a little like Leon Trotsky’s notion of the ‘Transitional Program’.
My focus remains in the political arena and shaping political discourse, the ‘politics of the possible’. My detailed outlines for alternatives to our current system (like I started with my analysis of Starship Troopers, and will expand on in later articles) are mostly just ideological thought experiments that may gradually, in a very small way, shift the political discourse in certain circles. However, I believe it is important to have some separation between the theoretical and practical, and in order to affect change, one has to work within the system that already exists towards tangible goals.
Now, I am not uncritical of Rufo, especially not his relationship with Dave Rubin and infamous ‘congratulations’ tweet. I am in agreement with Yarvin that his West Coast Straussian/Harry V. Jaffa ideology, what I called ‘Orthodox Neoconservatism’ in my ‘Factions of the Rightosphere’ series, is ultimately insufficient (though I don’t include Rufo in this faction, he is adjacent to it).
But I side with Rufo over the likes of Yarvin for the simple fact that he has DONE something, whereas Yarvin just complains and intellectualises. Theory is not a bad thing in isolation, but when it is dismissive of practical action, then it becomes problematic.
Despite Rufo’s ideological weaknesses, and not going as far as I’d like, I’m not going to pretend that those who aggressively advocate child mutilation and those who try to stop it, are just as bad as each other, or that trying to stop it is a futile endeavour.
Rufo has led DEI to be culled across Red States, for child mutilation procedures to stop and lawsuits to be filed. He has led to laws being passed to protect single-sex spaces and women’s sports, to ban grooming children into LGBT ideology. He has reshaped universities, exposed Claudine Gay’s corruption and spearheaded her firing from Harvard. He is now moving on to the repugnant Katherine Maher and the widespread Woke corruption of Wikipedia (an absolute pillar of the Woke monopoly on established truth that should have been tackled earlier in my opinion). I don’t think there is any other man who has done as much for anti-Wokeness as Rufo, we now know from his dreadful Presidential campaign that the genius moves of DeSantis in Florida were really those of his right-hand man, Rufo. Without Rufo, DeSantis is nothing special.
Yarvin’s attacks on Chris Rufo have not been new, and it’s been sad to see this row escalate as I think both men have important things to say. But the way Yarvin has treated Rufo has been very disrespectful. Rufo initially was very cordial and friendly in this disagreement, only for Yarvin to engage in ever more petty insults.
The ‘sit on your ass and wait for the collapse’ that Yarvin and Neema Parvini/Academic Agent represent, is toxic and counter-productive. Unfortunately, these individuals have a heavy pull on the direction of Dissident Right politics, whereas Rufo is seen as a somewhat shady ‘co-opter’, too ‘establishment’ and ‘Conservative Inc’ for the online base. Because of this, the outlook of the former two is rather common on the Online Right.
However, what the Black Pill Accelerationists do is make the strength of the Woke regime a self-fulfilling prophecy.
As Sam Delvin has said, there has been an overcorrection to the failures of the Alt-Right in the past 5-years. The Alt-Right believed in a purely populist approach, that all you needed was a mass movement generated through online memes, and then the Right could just storm its way to power, which is exactly what led to the disaster that the ‘Unite the Right’ rally was.
The crippling Big Tech censorship post-2016, and the fact that the anti-SJW movement failed and Gen Z failed to be the ‘Fourth Turning’, generated an increasing cynicism and aversion to political action to many on the Right. Anybody promoting any positive change was a ‘fed’. Any time they won a victory, it was ‘containment’.
But in doing this, they do the Woke job of demoralisation for them, discouraging others from doing anything, and allowing the Woke self-projection of it being a total leviathan to become true. They relish in their perpetually ‘oppositional’ and ‘dissident’ stance, whereby any success is not a real success, and is somehow a sell-out.
It should be obvious that Woke control isn’t inevitable. Erdogan in Turkey overthrew the Kemalist Elite, that was similarly very rigid and clamped down on the smallest dissent, something I will eventually do an article on. And even though it’s not a perfect analogy, as there were favourable conditions for the rise of Woke due to elite support, and the fact they have have now kicked down that ladder, the cultural left DID in fact change the culture and change the elites.
The idea that Woke power is inevitable and unbreakable is exactly what they WANT you to think. But if that was really true, why must they resort to extreme measures like social media censorship, de-banking, the Global Disinformation Index, and even literally raiding the premises of NatCon in Brussels? If they really were confident they were on the ‘right side of history’ and the ‘bigots’ were ‘destined to lose’, why all this hysterical talk about ‘fascism’? Does this seem like a secure, self-confident movement to you? Their smugness is simply a façade, their brash responses actually reveal an elite that is terrified of the ‘spirit of 16’. But yet the black-pillers are their biggest gift, as they make the narrative they want to be true, in fact true.
Yarvin says that ‘worse is better’ and that we just need to ‘wait for the collapse’. But when you have children attending a school which is teaching them to mutilate themselves, can any person in good conscience just ‘wait for the collapse’?
It is also untrue that political action doesn’t solve anything. Whilst Yarvin’s ‘rape/seduction’ analogy is good, it applies far less to Rufo, who has been a lot more effective at actually doing stuff whilst also bringing elite actors with him, than it does to Donald Trump, who really was ‘all bark and no bite’, producing maximum backlash but little policy change in return, but yet whom Yarvin seems better disposed towards.
There is also no guarantee that ‘waiting for the collapse’ will produce an outcome favourable to your normative beliefs, especially if you’ve made no attempt to build political institutions and get a section of the political elite on your side beforehand. Yarvin makes the same mistake as various Accelerationist sects of Trotskyism, that believe just like the Bolshveiks in 1917, events will mean that at the right place, at the right time, your small little band of intellectuals will be catapulted to power. Given they don’t really do any activism at all, perhaps an even better example is Posadism, a variant of Trotskyism that believed that nuclear war would automatically lead to global communism.
In regards to the ‘after the collapse, we take power’, your political enemies are thinking the exact same thing, that the collapse will catapult them to power. You need to be well-funded and well-organised to be able to take power when the time comes, or somebody else, somebody hostile to you and your beliefs, will take over that vacuum.
Lenin in fact didn’t shun political action within the system, and the Bolsheviks did participate in elections to the Duma after the 1905 Revolution. In ‘Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder’ he advocated for British Communists to work within the Labour Party, something ‘Militant Tendency’ studied closely and got quite far doing in the 1980s, and which I have talked about emulating with the Tories. The ‘collapse’ should not be something celebrated because none of us have a crystal ball to see if a post-collapse world would even be better. And as NRxers are generally thin on detail (‘Patchwork’ and Neocameralism were very interesting, but Yarvin has unfortunately abandoned it) as to what should replace our current regime, and certainly don’t try to make it happen, so they are just idealists with no plan of action.
The vast majority of people are apolitical. For most people, the result of not having transgenderism in schools will mean it doesn’t cross their mind, they are effectively ‘shielded’ from it. Most will not suddenly be pro-transgenderism because the government is against it, as most people think what they’re told to think, as the current Woke regime proves. Yes, the activist base will double down, but with sufficient planning, they can be outmanoeuvred, as Rufo has done time and time again, and like what Viktor Orban has done in Hungary.
Academic Agent talks about the ‘Rufo Reich’ and ‘Putting the Woke Away’ as if it’s somehow a bad thing. He falls into the post-Alt Right trap of thinking any victory is proof of co-option and betrayal, how the elites are always one step ahead of everybody else. But as an elitist who claims to ‘not be motivated by ideology’, shouldn’t Parvini be happy that a faction of the elite is coming to our side, as if elites are inevitable, what is the problem with this particular one, if it not ideological? The future he outlines in ‘Rufo Reich and Mecha-Bentham’ sounds like an almost irrationally optimistic view of where we’re headed, I WISH things could get to that point with as little effort as he suggests, and yet he treats it like it would be a BAD thing.
Related to black-pilling is this obsession with building ‘parallel community structures’, like Kruptos, who shuns political action entirely. Whilst I don’t think it’s a bad idea for ‘as well as’, it is impossible to just cut yourself off from the regime, as the Woke regime will tolerate no space for dissent, Civil Rights Law will come after you since free association was abolished in 1964. If you want to have the ability to start your own parallel community, you will need to get rid of (or at least significantly water down) Civil Rights Law, and that involves engaging in politics.
Richard Hanania’s detailed analysis of specific laws and court rulings, and steps to repeal each one, in his book ‘The Origins of Woke’ was such an uplifting change from the endless ‘we are powerless’, ‘the Woke are five steps ahead of us’ black-pilling. It made me think Hanania was indispensable as a movement leader, even though at the time I disagreed with him on virtually everything else, simply because he actually provided a roadmap to produce tangible results.
We need leaders who actually ‘believe’ that this evil can be overcome, for if we don’t, then what’s the point of this space even existing? If everything is outside of our control and there’s nothing we can do, why not just do something else?
I admit, we needed a course correction. An analysis of Elite Theory is helpful, and hopefully can stop the Right from having such a naïve notion of it being a ‘Weimar-Republic-like street movement’ that can catapult itself to power just by arranging it on 4Chan. But Elite Theory should be the opposite of powerlessness, it should be a manual by which to fight for change. We now know that a counter-elite is needed, so let’s build it! Let’s create our own fellowships, our own staffing organisations, our own NGOs, as Chris Rufo and those aligned with him are doing. Stop with this endless appeal to the MAGA and 4Chan base and start influencing mainstream conservative establishments, which Rufo has done. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, is now on our side, and regularly corresponds with Rufo, as does Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Kevin Roberts and The Heritage Foundation, and many others. Literally days after Katherine Maher was exposed, Congressman Jim Banks introduced a bill to defund NPR. Things are not hopeless, but it’s a case of looking at ‘glass half-full’.
This does not mean we should dismiss the strength of our enemy, but simply to believe they can be overcome, for if we don’t believe they can, how are we meant to persuade others? Who wants to join the ‘losers of history’, who themselves admit they are losers, a place of pessimism and doom?
The Dissident Right needs to engage in political action. I agree with Yarvin and Scott Greer that Rufo’s ideology has shortcomings; and there are cultural issues that Rufo dare not touch which, if not the start of a more far-reaching change, will mean that Rufo represents merely ‘one step back’ after the cultural left has advanced ‘three steps forward’, like the Reagan era.
However, Rufo has accomplished a great amount of things, and no, winning is not losing. Kids not being indoctrinated in schools is kids not being indoctrinated in schools. Exposing the rotten characters at the top of American institutions, and working with figures like Elon Musk, to restore free speech, will mean that our more radical ideas are able to gain traction later on. Rufo’s programme is what Trotskyists use to call a ‘transitional programme’, a program that seems moderate on the surface, but when you break it down, it leads to fear more radical conclusions.
Rufo has shown what’s possible. Let’s build on his successes, in order to go even further!
Some people just like whining, they don't actually want a solution.
I agree re Rufo. He has had far too little recognition for what he has achieved.
Unlike Hanania I can’t see any scope for direct repeal of US civil rights legislation but I can see scope to neutralise its effect by creating parallel legal provisions that overlap the same questions and then packing the courts so that we get what we want via judicial activism.
Funding/defunding of academe should be used to create a new intellectual class that feeds the bureaucracy and judiciary, and things like student debt relief and reparations paid for by confiscating the assets of hostile institutions, dissolving them in the name of ‘progress’. Lawfare should be used to selectively target hostile individuals for example by retrospectively criminalising plagiarism in state funded universities. The Democrats have shown the way here.
The critical learning point from LBJ and TB are to find ways to bind your successors indefinitely.