The real Great Reset

Why West Coast dissidents are better than East Coast traditionalists.

Raised as a true believer in the Global American Empire’s outer marches, born as the grandson of two Party members and the son of a Foreign Service Officer, and having long craved a lifetime subscription to International Jew magazine which for some shameful reason does not even exist, my only intellectual interest is in the ancient cult of leftism that rules the world, and how to kill it—without killing any actual people.

For as an International Jew subscriber I have no taste for killing—for the clean bright blood the blond beast tastes as he licks his avenging victorious sword. When Meyer Guggenheim stepped off his boat in Brooklyn to securitize 6 million akum shkotzim, the first and only word he said was “Shalom.” The Jew fights with words and money; all I have is words; with words will I bid my enemy lie down; with words will I bind him, with words will I drug him, with words will I drown him. And when I win, my voice will be tired—but my hands will be clean.

Then again, I’m only a half-Jew. And the wrong half. So, I mean—whatever it takes. Maistre says that the counter-revolution is not revolution in the opposite direction, but the opposite of revolution; like Burke, he compares revolution to a butcher, and counter-revolution to a doctor. And every doctor is sometimes the surgeon.

Yet no surgeon will cut one useless millimeter of healthy flesh, place one random stitch, or drill one hole just for fun—unlike last century’s Frankenstein revolutions. This is my dream of the fate of my old enemy, this cult which was my father and my mother, the world’s religion against which some vision or delusion has turned me. Everything of the enemy’s body is saved; nothing of his mind is kept. Every hand is clean; every pain is numbed; every wound will heal.

How can this surgery be done? Why must it be done? What will be its result?

The life and future of our nation, as in any terminal condition, has narrowed to this single surgical question: the radical resection of American leftism, in both institution and ideology, both phenomenon and etiology. The real “Great Reset” can only mean the deleftification of America. Fasten your seatbelts, kids!

Not only must the growth be thoroughly excised—we must be unable to imagine its regrowth. “Not just the fruit, but the leaves; not just the leaves, but the wood; not just the wood, but the roots; not just the roots, but the water and the dirt.” But not one gram of healthy plant, healthy earth or healthy stone.

And all this with clean, not bloody, hands! But when we make a mistake, and see a spot or two of red, we quiver; we step back; we must remember the hands of the enemy—which, through that enemy’s own eye, are not just clean but golden. They are not clean. They were never clean. They were gilded—with words. And under that gilt—

When Ylvisaker came to Rosedale

For while our weapons are words, so are our enemy’s—and he has money, too. This enemy is no blond beast—not exactly Hitler. The enemy is, to use the broadest and simplest and most anodyne word, leftism.

What is leftism? Leftism is a contradiction in terms: organized disorder.

A fire is organized disorder. It appears to be a living thing with shape and structure. But it is made of nothing but chaos. But like a living thing, it can be killed; like a living thing, it can kill. We speak of fighting fires, as if they were living things; and all living things are organized.

American conservatives like to think of American leftism not as a fast dangerous fire, more a slow, humiliating rot. It is that too, of course. But it is also a beast. While it may not be blond, it has teeth. It too has its saws and knives, and loves to test them.

Leftism’s bread and butter is to bind and drug with words, after which the metal jaws may take their play. The whole experience is a pleasure—I am no stranger to the joys of wild, dangerous words. And what sigma male hasn’t wanted to play Dr. Moreau? Anything can be a fun experiment! “Not to suck up drink—that is the law.”

Let’s look at a concrete case of American organized disorder—the killing of the old, pre-1950 cities—through the eyes of one of this fire’s master architects—or arsonists—Paul Ylvisaker (weird name, but not Jew—Norwegian—as Critical Race Theory tells us, the Norwegian is the Scotsman of Scandinavia), of the mighty Ford Foundation.

Typical Norwegian behavior—from a 1989 interview:

YLVISAKER: The wealthier people had already escaped to the suburbs, and again, you had that confrontation of those who hadn't made it or those who had barely made it. So that was a different level of, of fear, it meant that maybe your neighborhood would be destroyed or be taken over, or whatever, but that fear was a very gut fear, the other was more of a general apprehension.

INTERVIEWER: Was that fear driven by race, or was it inevitable that when people try to share limited space they—

YLVISAKER: It's inevitable. And I think that's one thing that we in the United States haven't been good [at talking] about.

Inevitable! To see what he’s talking about, read the whole thing—or read this standard social history of Ylvisaker’s “demographic transition,” a chronicle of the collapse of a Texas neighborhood codenamed “Rosedale,” written in the ‘90s by a random sociology professor in Podunk, Illinois, frozen in this thread which Twitter will someday delete:

Fear has transformed the lives of Rosedale’s elderly. Fear dominates them emotionally and spiritually. Fear shapes their everyday activities and life choices. As a result of fear, neighborhood life and culture have changed. The elderly have discontinued various routine social events in which they used to engage. They have converted their homes into fortresses and withdrawn from social contact.

But what could they be afraid of, these oldies—these “antifa” who won WWII?

The criminal acts involving Rosedale’s elderly are distinguished by their bold and brazen nature. Victimization in Rosedale is characterized by aggressive and blatant acts of street confrontation.

Neighborhood street crime is unsophisticated. It is not disguised or camouflaged. It is not clever or well-conceived. There are no ingenious or shrewd schemes to swindle or flimflam the elderly. There are no nimble-fingered pickpockets or cunning extortionists in Rosedale.

Crime simply consists of forcibly taking what belongs to the elderly. The face-to-face rip-off is the modus operandi among the thieves of Rosedale. Crime against the elderly is conspicuous, noted by an exaggerated display of lawlessness, an open defiance of the elderly’s personal and property rights.

Street crime is perpetrated in a manner that flagrantly disregards established institutions and sanctions. It is careless and indiscreet. Those who victimize the elderly assume the role of bully: the strong taking from the weak.

On the streets, adolescents seize the personal possessions of the elderly. Like predators, they forcibly overwhelm them and steal bags of groceries, wristwatches, purses, wallets, cash, and social security checks. The elderly are pushed down, shoved, and beaten. Some have been pulled out of cars, assaulted, and robbed.

Anything owned by the elderly is fair game for the predators of Rosedale: their possessions, their dignity, their lives. Household break-ins take place in broad daylight and the dead of night. In some cases, household robberies are executed while the residents are away. In other instances, adolescents simply break down the doors, ransack the house, and, if resistance emerges, they assault or kill their victims.

Groups of six to ten adolescents have been known to knock at the front and back doors simultaneously. Before the elderly person in the house has had a chance to determine who is outside, one of the doors is broken down and the terror of robbery is unleashed.

Many robberies are accompanied by violent assault, rape, or murder. During the first four years of this study, victimization had become so rampant in the community that news media frequently used terms like “crime wave,” “paralysis of fear,” “terrorization,” and “prisoners of crime” to describe the surges of lawlesness that periodically swept Rosedale.

Oh, that. You’ve heard about that. Well, sort of. Sad! But it couldn’t happen again... not in America…

How are you bound by words? The above text—from a sociology textbook, I remind you—probably struck you as shocking, explicit and concrete—at least, compared to the bloodless steel abstractions of the cold architects of these events. Not to mention the standard Wikipedia treatment.

In fact the whole passage is one long euphemism. It describes, in fact, a civil war—in the country in which I live, in the lives of those now living. This fire, which burnt all our cities, not just this one, is now reduced to smolder; yet few dare touch its embers. (And half of what contained it was that it simply ran out of victims—mostly because those victims, in Ylvisaker’s own words, “escaped.” Protip: if people have to “escape” from you—at least consider the possibility that you’re doing something wrong.)

Yet this would be the strangest civil war in human history—for the author’s words, as read literally by some ignorant alien, describe a civil war between generations. As you read the passage, you translated the euphemism automatically without even thinking. This is how even you, dear reader, can be drugged by words.

The gay-incubus theory

And how was this fire contained, for a moment—for a generation, at least, an eyeblink in the life of a great empire? By politics. By democracy. By populism. Quoth Ylvisaker:

For a while, there was a period of kind of an outburst of political leadership, but again, after a while, the majority in America controlled the agenda, and they controlled the concerns of political leaders, and so there was a reversion, gradually, it was a reversion to the “Let's do business the way we've always done business.”

Meaning: the people, in the Republican counter-revolutions of the ‘80s, rose up and decided to do business the way, until the ‘60s, their government by the people, for the people, of the people, and for that matter all other governments always and everywhere who had not fallen into the hands of this Norwegian demon had always done business. Which was: to punish crime.

At least, sort of. At least to knock it way down, and create the “carceral state.” And leftism, as it does, “being water,” gave way before this force—for a generation, at least. And the crime wave of the ‘70s seems, like this narrative, alien and impossible, something that could not have possibly happened. Yet it did. It’s in the textbook.

And—having actually accomplished something big and important, having actually put out or at least contained the fire in our burning cities, not that much combustible was left to save—these people, these poor country Republicans, these dolts and peasants and fools, actually thought they’d won. That’s what happens when “the majority controls the agenda.”

And they went home to their grills, and grilled their burgers, and watched their college football… meanwhile, their enemy, being smart, moved back in to the newly-revitalized classic real estate. The cons had not won. They had merely survived—for a little while.

I often imagine leftism as a kind of gay incubus. Jaded by normal slumber, he invests in chloroform; the deeper his paramours drift off, the deeper now he can penetrate them. And his treasure-chest, his superstore of love, is the coma-ward… his victims, in their deep and druggy dreams, feel; reality touches them, at least a little; a strange sensation of pressure, even a bit of pain; constant bleeding hemorrhoids, which never go away… how about some cream? A little cream, sir, applied gently from behind?

These spasms of half-aware, or at least hundredth-aware, counterrevolution terrify the incubus. An incubus always has a guilty conscience. Much as he revels in his nightly visits, he is just as terrified as any Rosedale oldie—of being found out. He prefers his sleepers sound; and when they twitch, he jumps. He is as skittish as a UFO.

This spasm is easily mistaken for victory; so indeed, in the conservative twitches of Nixon, Reagan and Trump, it proved. You are not actually pursuing him. He is guilty; so he flees. You can startle and scare him; an actual hunt is something else, let alone the kill and its processing. You are weak; you have done nothing; you will do nothing. Often the best way to bind you is to convince you that you’re winning; and the more convincing the illusion, the stronger the ligature.

The East Coast program

But what is to be done? At a recent secret symposium of traditionalist and dissident intellectuals, I can exclusively reveal, the matter was actually discussed. While almost everyone agreed on the present condition and predictable course of Western society, a clear division arose on the actual solution.

Opinion was split into two irreconcilable programs, which we may call East Coast and West Coast. Generally, the East Coast cure is optimistic and incremental; the West Coast cure is pessimistic and catastrophic. Let us illustrate the rap battle between East Coast optimism and West Coast pessimism by caricaturing its contradictions.

From the West Coast perspective, the East Coast traditionalist is a coward, a grifter, even a collaborator. From the East Coast perspective, the West Coast dissident is no more than an unhinged, dangerous lunatic. Each ideology suggests that suppressing the other is much more important than any concrete action against the enemy.

Recently a leading East Coast trad, one Micah Meadowcroft, in response to a bracing injection of hardcore pessimism, did us the service of laying out the optimist program. Here is the plan—the twitch, the spasm, the shriek of pain, the grito as the Mexicans say—that will get the incubus off our backs:

I am telling you to take over school boards, to accrue social and financial capital and to use it, to run as much of your town as you can, to treat book groups like cadres, to take over municipal waste management, to make your community self-sufficient, to get out the vote, perhaps even to protest, civilly disobey, and become friendly with organized crime. 

Well… I mean… there’s a lot to unpack here… isn’t there?

For instance, I do like the emphasis on waste management and organized crime. It even feels vaguely BAPtist. We could speak of a new “Sopranos conservatism”—born with no shortage of memes. And the idea of selling dissident books with multi-level marketing is also inspiring—to be taken up once Amazon is finally gleichgeschaltet.

However, I would avoid protest and civil disobedience—as I recall, some people tried that a few months ago. It is truly astonishing that neither side can recognize that there is nothing abnormal about a regime which hunts down antigovernment protesters, locks them in a hole where they are beaten, and punishes them with harsh exemplary sentences for “disrupting a government proceeding.”

Meadowcroft’s extremely bad advice on this subject reminds me of an ex-girlfriend I had around when he was born—who told me a story about an ex-boyfriend of hers. A libertarian pothead (many such cases), he was busted for growing pot in his front yard. Why? Because “it’s just a plant.” Meredith’s sensible advice, that while it is just a plant, said plant might grow just as well in the back yard, went unheeded. Praxis is hard.

Finally we reach the real nugget of meat—or protein, at least. “Take over school boards, and run as much of your town as you can.” A little cream, sir? Oh, and that Norman Rockwell chestnut, “get out the vote.”

When was it that you learned the politicians you elected had almost no control over the actual government? Every time the incubus licks your neck with his heroin drool, you seem to forget it again.

No suggestion better summarizes the still-drugged stupor of the East Coast optimist. No longer asleep, he is still waking up—but he may take some time in finishing that.

Which is a pity—since, contrary to popular belief, no time is better for action than now. Time is not growing our muscles; this is a false and fatal notion of the Whig; time is rotting us, and rotting our strength. Which strength we still have some of—“though much is taken, much abides”—and we should use it as quickly as we can. Without going off half-cocked, of course.

But our East Coast man still needs to fall backward into the bathtub a few more times. When we dunk on him, it is for his good and ours. Awake he will be a doughty fighter. In his present condition he is still in a dream. He thinks in the logic of the dream; and he advises his readers to act in the logic of the dream. In the logic of reality these actions will be useless, counterproductive, or even dangerous.

He dreams that the system is real—like a monarchist who wants to restore Tudor England by advising Prince Charles to reign like Henry VIII. Charles III can dream all the dreams he wants; it is not his job to be a Tudor king—it is his job to be a 21st-century Kardashian celebrity king. If you are advising Charles III on how to do a job he does not have, you are thinking and acting in the logic of the dream.

Where in America is there a public-school system which is actually run by its local school board? Where in America is there a public-school system which does not use the same textbooks and teach the same ideas with the same methods? Sure—if you get this useless gig, your views on the new bond issue and capital program will be heard.

The idea that a school board controls the content of the curriculum is a revolutionary one—a tiny and useless revolution in a teacup, orders of magnitude too small to succeed and orders of magnitude too small to matter if it did succeed. Indeed with great energy, it may succeed in making your town a national laughingstock—if there is one trick the enemy knows, it is how to laugh weirdos like you out of the room. You really might as well just put on a tricorner hat and chase the redcoats out of Concord, with your musket. Isn’t there a top you can spin to realize that you’re still in a dream?

Perhaps some giant textbook company can be coaxed to print a run of a bowdlerized elementary curriculum, a “Texas version” with its race-porn dial turned down from 11 to 6. (Vulgar race-porn should not be confused with Critical Race Theory, a science.) This, at the state level, is the best you could possibly do.

Where in America is there a city which is actually run by its elected officials, or the voters who elect them? I was hanging out in Austin recently, where some civic pillars of the community (in America today, of course, there are hardly any actual communities—the word “community” is generally one of two things, irony or langue de bois), in a mighty spasm of optimistic energy, passed a referendum to ban camping on the streets. Truly this is how the West will be saved! The long Untergang is ending!

From the California perspective, these little mini-Californias in the heartland—aside from their truly dreadful weather, bugs, etc—are often super-embarrassing, like any fashion victim who is ten years behind cool people like you. I informed my Austin friends, some of whom had lived in SF at the time and just forgotten—the Inception conservative is impossible without the Memento conservative—that ten years ago, in a city which is cool both culturally and thermally, we had actually tried this.

And, as in Austin, we won. And, as in Austin, what happened in SF when we won? Why, absolutely nothing at all. Our victory was writ in water—because we, the people, passed a mere law—in a country which has not for a half-century been ruled by law.

What we really meant was to act. What we really meant was to run the homeless out of town. How else would we get rid of them? Is there anywhere we want encampments? Austin, it is true, invited its problem by actually making street camping legal. Surely it can just click the ratchet one step back?

But the beautiful blue snowflakes of Austin would never vote to hire a bunch of tough Texas sheriffs to chase out the bums with their billyclubs. Once this “community” has arrived, there are only three ways to get rid of it: viciously harass these people until they give up and “ride the dog” to an actual progressive city; round them up and put them in some sort of concentration camp; or shut down the social services they use.

The voters of Austin will never approve any of these policies—not even close. And even if they did—it wouldn’t matter. The judges of Austin would never approve them. Again, these are Kardashian elections, not Tudor elections.

In fact, the real control of the Austin voters over the police and other Austin city employees is almost zero. We can see this by conducting a thought-experiment: suppose Austin was not in the United States but in the Roman Empire, in its earlier “Principate” phase.

A city of the Principate was genuinely self-governing—with the small exception that it could not have its own military or foreign policy. If it wanted to decree the death penalty for begging, there was no Roman Supreme Court to slap it down. The city fathers of any such Roman city would have no trouble in suppressing organized disorder. (The primitive Roman tents were also much harder to pitch, especially on concrete.) But in an American city, any attempt at the local suppression of disorder is no more than mindless, reflexive stabbing at the “Close Door” button.

The funny thing is that when you talk to these East Coast optimists, they cheerfully admit that the actions they recommend are, in themselves, completely useless and ineffectual. Their theory—a Whig theory they have unconsciously internalized—is that this useless action is still good, not just it because makes them feel busy and effective and excites their readers and tickles their donors, but because it is a sort of exercise. It is a baby step. It will make them stronger, for the next, bigger, assault on the enemy. Once they rest a little…

For any conservative who is not living in “Memento” and knows the history of his own cause, nothing could be farther from true. It is true that, for the left, useless actions can be good and stimulating and make further action easier—but this is only because the left is organizing disorder. Epsilon disorder still makes more disorder epsilon easier. The right is creating order—and epsilon order is utterly useless. Even if it’s free.

And it isn’t. Where is the “Tea Party” now? The actual effect of ineffectual action on the right is what psychologists call learned helplessness. Rats hate to drown—if a rat is swimming around in a water tank, and finds a platform he can stand on, he will leap onto it with excitement. If the platform then submerges automatically, and this cycle repeats a few times, the rat will not even bother to climb up. Here is a clinical model of depression, in the rodent.

Winning the sit-lie election in SF, then seeing the law do nothing at all, did not excite SF conservatives (such as they are) to greater achievements. It did not stimulate and energize them. It depressed and enervated them. Once they realized they could do nothing, they stopped doing anything.

When you invite conservatives to ineffectual action, you are burning out their energy. You are taking a scarce and vital resource that is essential to any actual victory, using it to make a little money, have a little fun and write a little prose, and pissing it away on the ground in a way that helps no one or nothing—yes, objectively, you are the very sinner in my West Coast caricature. I wish it wasn’t so!

The West Coast program

The West Coast dissident is not really a pessimist. He is an optimist. He is a pessimist about your plan, trads, of taking over the school boards etc. He is an optimist about…

Obviously, he is an optimist about his plan. But who isn’t? One way he can manage the conflict of interest is to present his plan in the form of something that happened somewhere else in the past.

This example will not be quite right for us now, because it comes from them there; on the other hand, it will be real. Or mostly real; following Carlyle’s example with Dr. Francia, we present the story as it should have been—and mostly was, kind of.

Our story takes place in the so-called “Arab Spring,” in a little country called Egypt. The Arab Spring was a systematic infliction of organized disorder, by a new generation of State Department officials less willing to make unprincipled exceptions to their “West Wing” principles for the sake of “stability,” across the Arab world. Only the strongest and stablest regimes survived this evil wind of change.

Egypt was ruled by an ancient, odoriferous dictator, Mubarak. Once someone at State got the words “Mubarak must go” onto Barack (no relation) Obama’s teleprompter, Mubarak had no choice but to go. If they’d carted President Obama off to Germany, tilted him upright and had him say “Merkel must go,” they probably could have started a civil war in Germany. Few or no living men have seen the limits of “soft power.”

Egypt, like all Third World countries, has a globalized “smart fraction” aristocracy with Egyptian passports, American diplomas, and Davos ideas. These people hang out in a little island on the Nile called Zamalek—so let’s call them the Zamalekites. Fans of the “Arab Spring” show may remember “Google Guy,” the Google marketing manager who symbolized Egypt’s inspiring transition to democracy—the perfect Zamalekite.

Democracy? The reasoning was as follows: democracy is the best form of government; the best government is government by the best people; and the best people are the Zamalekites. Therefore, the best government is government by the Zamalekites.

Of course, these people are only 0.5% of the Egyptian population. Heck—they’re only 20% of the American population. Don’t worry! There are ways to solve these things. And yes, we can still call it “democracy.”

In Egypt there are two other voting blocs: the lower-middle class, who are always the support base of populist “big men” like Trump, Hitler or Mubarak, and the lower class, the eternal Egyptian fellaheen, who support this awesome, spooky, and extremely based organization called the Muslim Brotherhood.

Comparing Micah Meadowcroft’s “book-club cadres” to the Muslim Brothers is like comparing the Girl Scouts to the Hells Angels. For one thing, the Brotherhood is almost a hundred years old. You can’t say the Brothers aren’t patient.

So the idea at State was that “democracy” in Egypt would work as follows: the people would elect the Brotherhood. Then the Brotherhood, being ignorant religious fanatics, and having no idea how to govern a modern country such as the new dynamic Egypt, would become “moderate Muslims,” and turn all the actual decisions over to their big brother Zamalekites—who in turn, if they needed any “advice,” would find it served in generous portions by the Embassy. One old knot in the hair of the Global American Empire would be combed out sleek. Is this not progress? Turning Egypt into Idaho?

Unfortunately, things did not work out this way. The Brothers were indeed elected—the problem, though, was that they seemed to actually believe all this “Muslim” stuff. While they had no idea how to govern a modern country, they also had no inclination to put the Zamalekites or the Embassy in charge.

Instead, they governed… bizarrely. And everything went to hell. The Mubarakites were mad because the tourists weren’t coming. The economic trouble trickled down to the fellaheen. Even the Zamalekites were out of the frying-pan and into the fire.

Fortunately, the Mubarakites were not Americans. They had no significant exposure to the great American tradition of constitutional democracy. They had not read Jaffa or Jefferson, Dewey or Kirk, Hayek or Scruton.

The Mubarakites, though occupying much the same social and economic layer as the American kulaks who supported Trump, had a gigantic advantage: better leadership. Moshe Dayan said that the secret of Israeli victory was fighting against Arabs. Politics too is fighting; a different event, with different rules. In the politics event, the Arab, especially the Egyptian, is just a beast. Critical Race Theory often shows you difficult truths you don’t necessarily want to hear.

Since the Mubarakites had better leaders than our kulaks, they chose a better strategy. Most of our political strategists see only two strategies: exit and voice. Actually there are three: exit, voice, and reset.

Voice is the exercise of power or influence over the present regime. Reset is the replacement of the present regime with a successor regime. The action of Allied forces on the governance of Germany in 1945 was not voice, but reset.

Before a regime can be reset, the old regime must be defeated. There are two kinds of reset: capture and transfer. In the uglier but more common case of capture, the force that defeats the old regime is itself the new regime. In the delicate yet elegant case of transfer, the transitional force is separate and ephemeral.

The Mubarakites kulaks of Egypt—quite spontaneously, I would like to think; you may read the real story, or such as Wikipedia knows of it, but I will tell it as if it was pure— came up with a simple solution: a movement called Tamarod.

Had the Mubarakites been into voice, they might have tried to influence the Muslim Brotherhood—reducing the hours of Islam in the high-school curriculum, or the size of the stones to be thrown at adulterers, or whatever. Had they been into exit, they might have all flocked to the mouth of the Nile and set sail on traditional reed boats, like Thor Heyerdahl.

Instead they were into reset, and their goal was to replace the Brotherhood regime. The method of Tamarod was simple, and carried out with simple technology—in 2013, the Internet was not yet universal among these simple Egyptians. Using phone trees and other Amway-tier social-network technologies, Tamarod coordinated the Mubarakites in a very simple operation.

The goal was to get more than half of Egyptian voters to sign a petition with a simple message: “we do not like this government. We would like another, please.”

A people that has lost the right to send this command, and see it obeyed, has lost its popular sovereignty. Once popular sovereignty is lost, the only way to recover it is to find some way to send this command, and have it obeyed.

This was especially easy in Egypt in 2013. Egypt in 2013 had a feature that America lacks: an existing institution prepared to become the next regime. This was of course the Egyptian army—also the backbone of Mubarak’s regime, not really something you want to put up against Israel, but retaining many based British Empire traditions, and more than adequate to deal with any number of mullahs.

The purpose of Tamarod was to organize the Egyptian people into using their popular sovereignty to transfer power from one regime to another—from the Muslim Brothers to the Egyptian Army. Any kind of reset (transfer or capture) is unconditional—no organ of the old regime can offer any resistance at all to the new—and total—the new regime, like the old, is an unlimited government responsible to no separate power.

When we compare the strategy of Tamarod to the strategy of American conservatism, we are struck by a number of obvious advantages. First, any reset solves the problem in one step—the Brothers have no more influence over the government. Second, a transfer means that whatever movement makes the reset happen is disposable—it cannot be corrupted by ambition, since it itself will not obtain any power; and the new regime will also have clean hands, since it does not seize power but merely accepts it.

Third and most important, this real Great Reset uses energy efficiently. Tamarod asked its supporters to win in one step by doing one easy thing, one time. This is normally how an election is supposed to work—but there are elections, and elections.

The Americans of old, even if not always a virtuous community, were always a rowdy bunch—always spoiling for a fight, physical or political. A shortage of democratic energy was not a big problem of constitutional engineering. The problem was the reverse: there was too much energy—so any misfire could blow up the engine.

The grill-Americans of today just want to grill. They do not want to capture power. They just want to be left alone. They do not want to play-act some Norman Rockwell painting. They just want to win. They need Tamarod, not the Sons of Liberty. They want to transfer power from the present dangerous clowns to some sane authority. They do not want to govern; they just want to be well-governed.

Not that they know this is what they want! But as Henry Ford said, his early customers would have said they wanted a faster horse. A new product category is always hard. And if it’s such a good idea, why have we not seen any kind of an American Tamarod?

This strategy is indeed the strategy of the West Coast pessimists: reset, not voice. We are pessimistic about voice, but optimistic about reset—specifically, transfer. But there remain three large obstacles to overcome before a reset is possible.

The first obstacle is that Americans, not being Egyptians, have an essentially mystical conception of collective action. Americans, especially cons and/or trads, see politics as an ethical exercise that summons shared virtue. In reality, politics is a civic amplifier which focuses the unarmed energy of a people to maximize its collective impact.

The second obstacle is that Americans, not being either Egyptians or historians, can only define prudent collective action as voice. They can elect their school boards, etc. Americans do not understand transfer—they think that if the people take power, they have to keep power (which today’s American people are quite incapable of doing).

Americans see any form of reset as capture or revolution: the seizure of power by an organized rebellion which itself evolves into the new regime, like the National Socialist German Workers’ Party or the Symbionese Liberation Army. Revolution is the two-stroke engine of regime replacement, inherently dirty, unsafe both for the incumbent and the rebels—though in the end, history is often dirty and unsafe.

The third obstacle is that Americans, not being Egyptians, Burmese or Thais, have no military which knows how to govern its own country. Americans cannot exercise their popular sovereignty to transfer power to a new regime—they have no such institution. They have a Plan A, but no Plan B.

All of these obstacles, the West Coast dissident asserts, are solvable. More important, they are solvable quite safely and legally under the present regime. While an American regime change is not ready to happen, it is ready to be made ready to happen—and there is no reason to delay this, since America gets weaker every day.

Best of all, all these obstacles can be solved by the conservative and traditionalist intellectuals themselves. All they have to do is fall backward into the bathtub a few more times. It is not especially hard to understand why reset is better than voice, and transfer is the best kind of reset.

And as for designing an alternate regime designed not to capture power, but to accept power—who better but conservative and traditionalist intellectuals?

Needless to say, such a regime (which must actually be built; but which must be designed before it is built) has nothing to do with the old 20th-century government. There is no reason for the new regime to share any architectural feature of the old. Why would it even have school boards? Not a rhetorical question.

But do Americans, even American kulaks, even want to replace their government? No, of course they don’t. They are sensible people. Sensible people don’t waste their time on wanting anything impossible—why would they? If they had a Plan B, they might want a Plan B. But since all they have is a Plan A, all they want is a faster horse.

Learned helplessness is reversible. Once there is a real platform for the rat to climb onto, he just has to be persuaded to do it. To solve our political problems, all we have to do is to build a platform and persuade enough Americans to climb onto it.

Moreover, who is always trying to convince Americans, especially American kulaks, that all their political problems can be solved by voice—basically, by shouting louder? These very same political intellectuals, whose strategy for victory is to just make their voters angrier and more noisy. It certainly drives up their click rates.

This is, in fact, the job of any pundit. Picture how much more intellectually exciting, even if the work was never used (as with most designs), we could make the job of designing the next regime—let alone of building it, at least to the point where it can be quickly and effectively activated by the popular will (ideally in an election).

This work will take plenty of money and talent. This money and talent, right now, is invested in convincing grill-Americans that they don’t need to do any such work, since shouting more loudly at their local school-board meetings will surely do the trick. This money and talent, right now, is objectively on the side of the gay incubus. Cream, sir?