Reconciling the right
After an energetic start, the Trump administration has started to slow down. The most worrisome trend is its increasing tendency to focus its efforts away from public drama and toward “good government.”
If this trend continues, everyone currently in the administration is likely to end up in prison—or at least, spend the rest of their lives in legal meetings. Why? We’ll see in a moment.
Perhaps even worse, the administration has gone through an ugly public breakup with its largest, most energetic, and most creative supporter—who is now threatening to pour his energy into a literal third party, an idea as promising as a butter-fueled rocket.
What is going on? Who are we? What are we doing? Let’s review?
The regime
The current American regime was born in the de facto monarchy of FDR, which after his death became an institutional oligarchy or “meritocracy.”
Critical institutions in this oligarchy are both inside and outside the formal state: agencies, courts and Congress inside the line, nonprofits, press and universities outside the line. The “Deep State” is the body of the regime; the “Cathedral” is its brain. The complex web of financial and procedural connections between brain and body renders the symbolic distinction between “public” and “private” historically nugatory.
Only for-profit corporations are arguably independent of the government. But even they are enmeshed in a web of regulation and press that leaves them generally compliant. A defense contractor is effectively an agency and operates like one. Yet even a social network has no choice but to bend its public mind to the whims of the powers that be. These powers are decentralized powers. They are no less real for that, and much harder to kill.
Beyond this oligarchy, there is nothing. The hotbed of democracy, the Congress, has a 98% incumbency rate and a seniority The monarchical aspect of the old Constitution—the President—is largely symbolic. We saw this vividly when we spent four years with a senile President, without the public noticing or even being told.
The White House is much more than the President. The White House resolves interagency conflicts. Some mechanism is needed to resolve interagency conflicts. But if we assess that these decisions are pretty random anyway, that mechanism could be as easy as a coin toss.
A good test for the reality of political change is whether a man on the street would notice the change, if he didn’t read the newspaper. Using this test, few Americans could tell the difference between a Democratic President and a quarter. Alas, the Presidency is going the way of the old European monarchies, which in many countries have stuck around in symbolic form. There will always be ceremonies, banquets and photo-ops.
In the contest between this oligarchy and democracy, democracy always loses. Not only does public opinion not control the regime—the regime controls public opinion. In most cases, the mind of the ruled class can be counted on to follow the mind of the ruling class, if sometimes with a lag of decades. Fashion flows downward.
Even in cases where the people are stubborn—there is no country where mass immigration has ever been popular—regime ideology prevails at a policy level. And mass immigration is the final solution to the democracy problem. As Bertolt Brecht said: would not it be easier for the government to elect a new people?
The hobbit army
Today’s Republican Party is the voice of democracy, or as some call it “populism.” It exists to oppose the oligarchy. Or perhaps, to appear to oppose the oligarchy.
The spectrum between controlled opposition, ineffective opposition, and weak opposition is hard to measure. But ever since FDR chose Wendell Willkie, a Democrat until six months before the election, as his opponent in 1940, Republicans have been on this spectrum.
While Nixon and Reagan were certainly sincere in their populism, their administrations had no lasting positive effect on the regime—indeed, Nixon is responsible for affirmative action and Reagan for immigration amnesty. Could Democrats have sold these policies?
Trump is different. He started his first administration with enormous roars about crossing the Rubicon. Then he marched up to the Rubicon, sat down and fished.
It is not a healthy place to fish. Clouds of infected mosquitoes rise from this river. Trump spent the whole administration on the defensive. And when he finally fled, the bugs pursued him. The lawfare did not stop until he was elected again.
While the second Trump administration has not crossed the Rubicon or come remotely close, it is not sitting around and fishing. It charged in ankle-deep, momentarily terrifying the mosquitoes—who are at least on the defensive.
Moreover, the new administration even passes the man-on-the-street test—at least if we can believe the reports that deportation has decreased congestion on Los Angeles freeways. Migrants are no longer flooding across the southern border, and the administration may even complete a coast-to-coast fence (albeit cuttable in 90 seconds with an angle grinder).
But except in foreign policy, with the miraculous and almost accidental closure of USAID, no significant damage has been done to the regime. To the contrary: the opportunity to oppose Trump has rejuvenated it.
Four years of a senile President, plus a four-year hangover from the ecstatic great awakening of 2020, had done more damage to the regime than any Republican administration ever. As radical elite perspectives crossed over and went mainstream, they became stale. The regime lost its self-confidence and raison d’etre.
Now, with Trump splashing like a grizzly in the shallows of the Rubicon, not just bellowing loudly but actually doing huge, shocking things— slaying USAID, decimating the Education Department, immuring migrants in a cartoonish “Alligator Alcatraz,” suing even Harvard itself, etc, etc—mere self-defense has brought the regime’s animal spirits back to life.
The elven lords
America in the late 20th century is not divided by class. It is divided by channel. A hobbit is an ABC-NBC-CBS American. An elf is an NPR-PBS American. Left and right are literally the spectrum on your radio dial.
Most elves are “high elves”—faithful believers in the regime, or at least in its ideas. Worshipers of the Cathedral. But in the castles of the elves, nay even in their loftiest temples, new, seditious doctrines are heard. Who knows what face a man wears beneath his cloak?
These are the whispers of the new “dark elves”—from basement-dwelling X anons to the King of X himself. Who are these men—and their age-gap art-ho women? Some call them dorks. In reality, they slay. What do they want? A line from Ernst von Salomon comes to mind: “what we wanted, we did not know. What we knew, we did not want.”
Unfortunately, in Washington, or in any system of power, you are nothing unless you agree with yourself. The tech lords do not agree on anything—except that they disbelieve in everything. But that means they believe in nothing. And there is no flag of nothing.
The great schism
Right now, the opposition forces are in chaos—divided by personal and cultural rifts. Jeffrey Epstein emerges to challenge Adolf Hitler as the world’s most important dead person. Or is he dead? Many Americans are starting to suspect that they will never even know.
When the regime is united and its enemies are divided, it always wins. The regime is always united. The Democrats have perfect discipline. The Republicans have—no idea what they want. Some want this. Some want that. The Democrats all want the same thing—power.
One nice thing about people who just want power: they never take things personally. If you stab them in the ribs, for instance, they will do one of two things: either mercilessly plot to destroy you, or smile and wish you a nice day. There is no useful option in between. But try explaining this to some great elven lord who has not in decades felt the shiv’s prick?
Actually, the lord was not even touched. But one of his men was stabbed, brutally, in an alley—by some Neanderthal from the lowbrow faction that I’ve taken to calling the “Presidential Retard Caucus.” The Caucus, like all power players, loves to show its strength. The stabbed man? A homosexual. A Protestant. Something like that. Did it matter? He was the lord’s retainer. The lord was obliged to beef.
This sense of reciprocal loyalty is absolutely essential in the feudal world of the elf-barons. In Washington? If you want loyalty, get a dog. People get stabbed. It happens. Idk maybe hire him yourself.
This attitude, completely normal in the reptile enclosure of DC, where betrayal is oxygen, is completely despicable on the savannah of Silicon Valley, where loyalty is life. Without loyalty, a large organization cannot execute as if it was a single institution. Washington cannot execute, because it is not really an organization—just a pit of snakes.
If your goal is to clean up a snakepit, though, you have to learn the ways of the snake. If you need power, not for the usual self-indulgent and onanistic reasons, but because there is some important problem which power is needed to solve: learn from the masters of power. That their reasons are not yours makes them all the better example.
In general, the pattern of elf-lord failures in Washington is that they fail these types of “shit tests.” Lacking either an instinct or a doctrine for what to do when they get stabbed in the ribs, they yell, cry, complain, run away, fight, etc. To the experienced snakes in the pit, these responses all say the same thing: you are not a snake. This is a pit of snakes. You do not belong here.
And the elves are completely devoid of positive ideas. No one has ever taught them the ancient art of statesmanship. They can think only of cutting budgets.
Not that the hobbits are innocent in this schism! They are anything but innocent. Fundamentally, the hobbit is living in a dream—a kind of virtual Shire, superimposed on his senses by augmented reality, over the grim rotting Yookay that is everywhere around him. America has its own Yookay, with a helot class that speaks Spanish and not Urdu. Does he want the truth? He can’t handle the truth!
Even when the hobbit sees that he is not living in Norman Rockwell America, he is never far from the idea that “acting as if” will get it back. Hobbit politics is fundamentally a form of “manifesting.” Because this cargo-cult creed is incoherent and fake, any situation in which hobbit politicians are making actual decisions will be mercurial and unpredictable. In fact, as happened in February 2020, the high elves may have to turn their platform on a dime (“we have always been at war with Eastasia”) to navigate the hobbits’ mercurial turn.
How can these groups knit themselves into a single effective political force? I despair. Everyone despairs. And—
The brutal future
“I have seen the future,” sang Leonard Cohen, “and it’s murder.”
The staffers in the Trump administration have not quite absorbed the full reality of their predicament. Like Duke Leto in Arrakis, everyone in the administration—from Trump himself on down—is in a trap.
They have one and only one way to stay out of the jaws of this trap: *never lose another election*.
What most Trump staffers don’t realize is that, in the next Democratic administration, lawfare will be *industrialized*. Everyone who worked for the administration, everyone who took money from the administration, will be targeted. Think there aren’t enough prosecutors? There will be enough prosecutors. Thousands of trespassers were targeted after January 6. Trump appointees are not technically trespassing, but the principle is the same. When swine enter the temple, a great purification is necessary. This purification calls for blood—your blood.
The executive branch? No such thing. Everyone in every job in every agency has a mission which is defined by law. Didn’t follow the letter and/or spirit (either will do) of the law? You broke the law. And was there a budget involved? Uh huh. Thought so. You’re an embezzler. You’re a thief. To protect the public—you need to be in jail. You broke the law. This is America. Break the law—go to jail. Criminal! Thief!
The problem with the second Trump administration is that they’ve actually gotten their feet wet in the Rubicon. Like the crowds on January 6—this may not be effective opposition, but it is certainly not controlled opposition. Or at least, the control could be improved.
The answer
The answer is obvious. To see this obvious answer, we pull the camera farther and farther back. Suddenly, the writing on the wall pops into focus.