The situation and the solution

"Don’t be the monkey mom who carries her dead baby everywhere."

The story now seems clear: the second Trump administration is a tragedy. Let’s talk about what this means, and what can be done about it.

A tragedy is not any random shitshow. A tragedy has a formal story arc. The laws of tragedy are strict. Losing is not enough. Losing is not a tragedy—unless you could have won.

Losing by accident is not even a tragedy. Tragedy must be inevitable. Defeat must proceed from a tragic flaw. Etc. All the standard rules.

A tragedy requires heroes, and their heroic journeys. Anyone who knows anything about the Trump administration knows that, for the most part, it is made of real human beings who spent most of their teens and/or twenties being relentlessly persecuted—socially, professionally, and often officially—for daring to see reality clearly. I don’t think it’s possible to understate the number of really amazing human beings who have taken jobs in the Trump administration. The friends we made along the way, etc.

Alas! The hero’s moral victory is not enough. Dead, but moral, heroes are everywhere. And living villains not easily buried. The victory we need is a physical one. Indeed, if I had to choose between a physical and a moral victory, I would pick the former. But the combination is irresistible and irreversible—and I do not think we have to choose. But unfortunately, we don’t have the combination.

We could win. But we’re not winning. It’s actually a really important difference! I know that sounds weird. But it’s the essence of tragedy.

Heroes don’t win just because they’re heroes, nor villains lose because they’re villains. This is the “just world fallacy”—arguably a version of Christianity, but a heretical and incorrect version. A classic tragic flaw!

Truly, all our failures and defeats can be said to proceed from the simple theological error that “God mend all.” Whether this unfounded assertion is more wrong as Christian theology, or as rationalist atheism, is hard to say. Nothing is clearer in life, or in history, or in theology, than that “God helps those who help themselves.”

Are we really losing? Where are we now? I hate to say it, but it looks like the administration has already lost. That said: a lot of people have counted out Donald Trump. I don’t intend to be one of them. But—

The situation

All the energy the admin had was Rubicon energy—and the potential to couple that energy with actual execution. This energy could only exist during a transitional period. Now that the administration has stabilized and integrated itself, consummating its weird arranged marriage with the Deep State, there is no place for Rubicon energy. The Senate, an antenna increasingly tuned to the next election rather than the last, is more and more openly defiant.

The administration failed, collectively, to realize that (a) the excitement of potential real change was how all its crackling political energy was generated, and (b) the energy would stop if the offensive stopped moving. And Rubicon energy is hard to turn back on again—far harder than to kindle in the first place. The only thing that might do it now is some kind of very sharp conflict or crisis.

Once it loses either house in the midterms, (80% probability as I write), the admin is permanently on the defensive. At this point, the Rubicon is far out of reach and any mention of it is immediately put down to either mental insanity or criminal conspiracy. Nixon could perhaps have crushed the New Deal state in 1969, even in 1973—certainly not in 1974.

A regime change, like a shark, can’t stop. It can’t even pause. If it does X this week, and blows everyone’s mind, it needs to do 2X next week. Shock and awe is a drug. All drugs create tolerance. A revolution only succeeds when it can respond to any level of tolerance by ramping up the dose, keeping its sense of surprise—until it is clear that no trace not only of the old regime, but even of the old way of life, can remain.

The old way of life! Yes: in a true regime change, everyone’s life changes. The event that looked impossible until it happened will seem inevitable in retrospect: exactly like the fall of the USSR.

How can we tell if it’s a real regime change? Many expectant fathers experience this type of uncertainty in the peripartum period. If your wife wakes you up and says, “I’m worried that my water may have broken,” her water has not broken. If she wakes you up and says “my water broke,” put a towel on the seat and drive her to the hospital.

If you have to ask, it isn’t real. Here is an illustration from a strange foreign country.

The UK is in a political situation like nothing in its history. In 2029, if you read the latest polls, Labour will entirely cease to exist, and Nigel Farage will have a supermajority with the full powers of Parliament—essentially the powers of Mussolini. “Parliament can do anything,” the English legal maxim used to go, “but turn a woman into a man, or a man into a woman.” I’m not kidding. They said this.

For good or for ill, the 21st century has done away with this exception to the exception—meaning that Parliament is 100% sovereign. It holds the full Schmittian exception. On paper. Of course, the King also holds the full Schmittian exception, or “royal prerogative”—legally, he can do anything. On paper. Customarily, he does nothing. For Americans: I am not making any of this up. As for Parliament—customarily—

The realization that not just Parliament, or the present Parliament, but representative democracy itself, has like so many powers in history, from the King of England to the citizens of Rome, lost its sovereignty for good—came to me when a bright young lad, who like many bright young lads aspires to join this bright though distant Nigellian England, was talking to me about structural reform in UK social policy.

I observed a simple, obvious fact: the problem isn’t just that the UK is a bizarre 20th-century international-socialist state. I mean. It is. But also: the way this cancerous transnational pansexual post-communist rainbow waqf, styling itself “His Majesty’s Government,” delivers “social benefits” to its “Britons,” is a perfect icon of misrule.

You see, England (forgetting devolution—I can’t even) is not one big self-governing community. Oh no! It is a flourishing garden of democracy in which every cozy little hamlet has its town elders, its leading merchants, its poets and its playwrights, and of course its own little Parliament for these worthies—which is called a “council.” If you have ever been to the wrong side of London, outside the so-called Banana, you may expect to see the charming new villages erected, for the Britons, by their wise and beloved councillors. One sees Elrond, at Rivendell, in a robe, supervising the very curlicues on the eaves. (Not all benefits are delivered locally—the NHS is one thing—but many are, including housing, including housing of migrants. Obviously, rejecting them is not an option.)

Alas, these “council houses” turn out to be what we Yanks call “projects”—itself a hopeful, futuristic, scientific, 20th-century word. Lol lmao. Evacuate all the humans and their pets, then burn it all down with fire. If anyone complains about the smoke, remind him where it’s coming from. Suggest he maybe just not breathe till Tuesday. He may still object—he is probably an architect, or a sociologist. Detain him at once.

When “social services” meant the Elizabethan Poor Law (a most prudent and charitable piece of legislation, I must say), and social services were provided by a universal established church (the most obvious idea in political science), keeping them local made sense. As transportation has abolished not only geography but also community, leaving the labels on the map as just—labels on the map, any sense of local governance becomes retarded. The only possible exception is homogeneous ethnic communities—“segregation,” a concept everywhere odious to the regime, though very difficult to stamp out.

And actually, council policy is not at all democratic, because it is all set by mandates from Whitehall. Nor is it even really implemented locally, as I understand it—but by giant national contractors. Everything about this “council” system is fake and a larp. Its only function is to anesthetize any Englishmen remaining in the country into somehow believing that it is still running the operating system of its forebears.

Obviously, PM Farage should just shut the whole thing down and consolidate it into a central authority, councillors and all. Which then could be, you know, reformed. If anyone complains, what will Nigel do? If they are loud, he can put in his AirPods. If they are violent, they can be violent in St. Helena. Lovely place I hear. Sovereignty is a beautiful thing.

Whereas how would anyone reform this sprawling, fraudulent octopus of “council” services? I pointed this out to the young lad. He agreed heartily. Of course. Then he asked if I had any insights into structural reform in UK social policy. Alas, I did not.

To a young English gentleman trained in the best English mandarin tradition, abolishing the “councils” in a 2029 Generalissimo Farage regime seems about as plausible as renting out Buckingham Palace to shoot a porno. To an American, it looks like a no-brainer. Which of us is seeing clearly? It is easier to imagine regime change in a foreign country, because your head isn’t saturated with the present-day reality. I think it’s a no-brainer.

The world is not flat and you are not English. You are an American. How can you correct for your American equivalent of this reality-distortion field, and tell whether a regime change is a real regime change?

Unfortunately it is very hard to define an effective positive test for a power transition, because there are so many ways for power to camouflage itself in illusions. But if obvious structural reforms are not undertaken simply because of structural inertia, you probably have not brought enough power to the table. Therefore, it is easy to define a negative test—just by translating this “council” illustration into American.

Here’s one way to know you haven’t had a regime change. There are still 50 DMVs.

Are there still 50 DMVs? Is there any reason, other than history, that there need to be 50 DMVs? Are the states really the “laboratories of democracy?” In… motor vehicles? Is there an “Arkansas way of driving?” (Don’t answer that last one.) No? All no? Then you haven’t had a real regime change. Go back to sleep. Nothing ever happens.

If you are still indulging in any kind of “but actually there need to be muh 50 DMVs,” you are coping, just like that poor English lad. You just didn’t bring enough power. Sadly, regime change is like reaching orbit—even if you brought 99% enough power, you’re cooked. Literally!

In an American regime change: take the American version of this Elrond “council” kabuki—tricorn hats, Davy Crockett or Harriet Tubman, Declaration, Constitution, even the ancient and holy Administrative Procedure Act of 1946—and treat it like an Arkansas miscarriage. Chuck the plastic bag out the sunroof. The possums will get to it first.

Just assume the sale, and act with the energy of an occupying army. Nationalize and rationalize. Feed the old mag tapes into Palantir. Pension off the timeservers. Let Jared take care of the land and buildings. Picture a new national DMV run like a YC startup. Your driver’s license is national and has a public key. Picture everything in Washington working that well. Like, Estonia well. Like, even, better than Estonia. What’s between us and that, fellow car enjoyers?

Nothing but a few million lib bureaucrats—who could be enjoying the sun in Cuba. In a real regime change, it’s all win-win. The real secret of regime change is: once you win, the staff of the old regime becomes harmless. Individually or collectively. Even the military personnel. In fact, they are often not just harmless, but actually useful. Just don’t keep them in their old jobs—or even their old fields.

Moreover, accepting the real commitments the state has made to its servants, who were not at fault for serving a different regime which no longer exists, is accepting the mantle of continuity of the state. It is possible to change the regime and repudiate any or all commitments of the old regime, but it is usually not wise. A Bolshevik vibe.

Better to see regime change as a buyout. For successful minions of the old regime—inside or outside the formal government—their old jobs had both status and value. They were both noble ranks, and sources of income. They spent their careers building up that rank and paycheck. To simply erase these things is a pointless injustice.

The staff must be recognized and compensated. The organizations—“public” or “private” must be dissolved, like any dead company. The experiment of putting new politicians “in charge” of old agencies, with their old procedures and personnel, is concluded. Only the deluded expected it to work.

Enough with these fantasies! And back to grim reality. The grimmest, most tragic thing is that we even got a real glimpse of this future. In the winter and early spring of 2025, we saw the potential for true, absolute change in little flashes of energetic reality. Agencies and programs were swept away. Washington had never seen anything like it! Not since before the war, anyway.

While even measured by headcount, this destruction did not amount to a tenth of the administrative state as a whole, much less the entire regime, it was not nothing. There was “struggle, iron, volcanoes.” Real, bony flakes were spalling off the old dinosaur. It was exciting—and that excitement, much more than any tangible outcome (even closing the border) was the real achievement.

The cycle was working: the energy generated power, which generated damage, which generated energy. Unfortunately there does not seem to be much of this shock-and-awe energy left—and during its time, it accomplished 0.001% of a regime change. Also, it had to proceed under the standard narrative pretense of “saving taxpayer money”—a pretense it even sometimes believed. The soft-money regime is a rolling financial disaster that has spent the last century rotting out America. But you’re not going to fix this by “cutting spending.”

Governing well, even the biggest, realest “wins,” is not a measurable win. At least, it is not inherently a win. No possible substantive change is significant. You may think it is, but this is only because you are looking through a microscope. The purpose of this microscope is to persuade you that you don’t need to do anything.

An example: immigration. The Trump administration has made changes to the American immigration changes that have led to a delta of millions of migrations. Replacing a net human influx in the low 7 figures, with a net human efflux in the low 7 figures, sounds pretty real. It is. It sounds like it matters. It does not! It is significant only in a relative, narrative, microscopic way.

Because: how much power does this vast expulsion of human mass actually generate? At a core political-science level, generating power means: you did a thing which made some, or ideally all, future things easier to do. On the actual path to power, the real problems are the problems whose solutions make all future problems easier to solve.

In the context of a short-term political strategy, only changes in short-term power are significant. How many fewer votes will the Democrats receive in the 2026 midterms, because of this immigration achievement? And Trump’s other achievements?

Very few, I suspect. If any. And clips of ICE cruelty theater make great propaganda for the enemy. All government is cruelty, if you look closely enough—but that microscope, too, is a trap. And the Internet is a great microscope.

Changes in long-term power also matter—and immigrants, though they don’t generally vote, create future voters. This is how they got California. The “emerging Democratic majority.” But Trump’s numbers, in an absolute and long-term context, are tiny. The US has not seen real mass immigration yet—or mass remigration.

Biden’s wild open border, with its human ant-trails winding up through the Darien Gap from every hive on the planet, is closed. Yay! It can as easily be opened again. Indeed it can be opened much wider! And if we lose again, it will be. It only takes one judge to decide that “no person is illegal”—and this is far from the only bureaucratic way to skin that cat. The symptom has not been even durably cured. It’s still a fail.

The border is not the only thing that will be opened much wider, if you had anything to do with this little failed revolution. They will prosecute everyone, for anything. They will treat Trump appointees like January 6 trespassers. Even if you held some obscure cultural or scientific position. And who knows if they would be wrong?

Indeed, I hear more and more about actual, straight-out corruption in the admin. I’m sure it’s nowhere near Biden or even Clinton levels—but they can get away with it and we can’t. And while Clinton was better at it than Biden, he was not as much better as Biden is better than Trump. Corruption is not just about the government losing money, but also about it degrading the legal fabric—so the less brazen, the better.

And for what? For any prospect of victory whatsoever? The administration’s fundamental decision to walk only between the velvet ropes was taken long before Trump was inaugurated, or even elected. Although it was probably always negligible, the administration’s ability to truly capture Washington receded literally hour by hour after the inauguration.

Even in October, Trump could have used the shutdown to take control of the Fed—asserting the strong legal case that Humphrey’s Executor was wrongly decided, a matter already before the Court. Constitutionally, the President has unilateral command authority over the whole Executive Branch. He could use this power to fund the government directly from the Fed, for example by minting the “trillion-dollar coin.” The idea that Congress can create or manage executive agencies is a travesty. “Laws” that infringe on the President’s normal executive discretion are no laws at all.

This would make it straightforward to abandon the Gordian project of reforming the agencies in the simplest possible way: by spinning up new ones. Which is more or less what FDR did! By the time that the Congress realized that its shutdown was actually a suicide note, and restored Treasury funding to the old “executive” (really an administrative/legislative) branch, the new executive branch would already be up and running. And the old one would already be withering on its cut vine.

Instead, the shutdown deal reversed all OMB’s reductions in force. That was the end of the revolution. A year before the midterm, the Hill already holds the whip hand in Washington. As the Russians say: “we hoped it would be different, but it worked out like always.”

Last winter’s shock-and-awe Trump is vanished now. The administration is simply too well-integrated with the permanent government. This marriage is terrible, but it is still a marriage. The windows Trump would be breaking are now “his own.” This is why existential action is only possible at the beginning of a presidential term. That said—it would not be the first time Donald Trump had done the impossible. But—

Trump’s tragic flaw is purely Shakespearean. It is the opposite of the accusations constantly hurled at him. Trump does not actually want full power. Rather, he is afraid of it. And it is not just him. He is actually far less afraid than the people around him.

Who wouldn’t be? Almost everyone. And most of the rest are fools. You should be afraid of power the way you are afraid of riding a motorcycle—if you have never ridden a motorcycle or even read anything about it. Trump is actually riding a motorcycle, and riding it at unprecedented speeds. He puts his energy into not crashing, not into wishing he had more rocj on the back of his bike.

Moreover, Trump cannot want absolute power. His voters do not want to give him absolute power. Ultimately, he works for them.

Moreover, it is not that the voters even want absolute power for themselves. They are not jealous of their ultimate sovereign authority. They are afraid of it, too. The tragic flaw is not just Trump’s. The tragic flaw is America’s.

And yet: besides absolute power, everything else is just a way to lose. That’s just where we are in history now.

If the GOP loses the next Presidential election, Trump will spend the rest of his life in court or in jail. This will also be true of all prominent Trump supporters, appointees, donors, etc. This will be an all-you-can eat barbecue of fully-funded lawfare and endless fawning PR. Every Democratic prosecutor in the country will find a way to do her part in cleaning up the ruins of Trumpism. That is, rounding up and bayoneting the defeated veterans. Surely something Trumpy must have happened in her district? MAGAts are lurking everywhere. Cut and sterilize.

The American red states will be treated like the Scottish Highlands after 1745. I exaggerate. Slightly. And as for the American populist voters, all the wealth, power and energy of the real America, which is coastal America, blue-state America, cool America, will be directed at making sure they never, ever get another chance to vote their way out of this one. And in the face of this looming future? It’s December, a year after the election, and “making America great again” turns out to mean—the 50-year mortgage. A strong GDP print. Whatever. The new golden age!

Rubicon energy cannot coexist with self-congratulatory boasting. One can make a revolution from the street, while boasting of the golden future. One cannot make a revolution from a throne of brass, while boasting of the golden present—especially with such brassy gold. Once you pretend to have won, you’re stuck with that lie.

Rubicon energy provided the entire margin of victory that created the Trump administration—because Rubicon energy is fun. The regime should be leaning into this, not leaning out of it. But they suffer from the novice motorcycle failure mode of “target fixation.” The more of a headwind they feel, the more they lean out of it—going so far as to echo New York’s new communist mayor about “affordability.”

This is pure Gerald Ford mindset. (Why isn’t there a Gerald Ford musical on Broadway? Gerald!) 21st-century elections are not about convincing thoughtful, independent-minded American citizens that Your Shiny New Government Is Now Doing a Good Job. They are about recruiting voter armies and motivating them to act. On the right, winning means activating low-propensity voters. On the left, it means harvesting (at best) the passive, apolitical voters.

Even the “swing voter” is fickle and disengaged—not some passionate, yet ambivalent, newspaper-reading citizen-centrist wonk. Who cares about statistics. Grain production. Or something. This ideal voter, Soviet in his statistical pedantry, is so negligible as to be unimaginable.

Affordability! I suppose East Germany had a problem with “affordability,” too. The solution was not low-interest Trabant loans. The solution was crushing every existing institution or organization in the German Democratic Republic into fine gray dust with a sound louder than God. At least, that was the first step in any conceivable solution—to “affordability,” as well as many other problems in the East German polity (about which there was not nothing good).

What excites the Gen Z voter of today? Vibes, and above all—victory. What’s a turnoff? Cringe, and above all—defeat.

The Republicans have already returned to their usual level of youth popularity—a good measure of their excitement generation and potential for power. Holden Bloodfeast III is back in his wheelchair, selling infernal devices to the State Department. Life would be easier, maybe even more lucrative, for the Republican Congress if they did not have to be in the majority. But what can you do? That will get fixed soon, anyway.

Here is how they beat you. Besides outright cowards, traitors and grifters, there are two main tricks. One: they convince you that you’ve won, when you haven’t won anything yet. You declare victory, and lose. Two: they accuse you of something you need to do, but aren’t yet doing. You deny it, and lose.

This cure for power was perfected long ago with the institution of symbolic monarchy. The Merovingian or Hanoverian king would enjoy all the trappings of royalty, with none of the power. I always used to wonder how so many dynasties, in so many periods and regions, had been convinced to surrender their kingdoms while maintaining their thrones. The same thing has happened to our republic. It has happened (despite his best efforts) to the President. And it has happened to the voters.

Oligarchy (“meritocracy”) has cucked both monarchy and democracy (“populism”). We prefer pretending to be in charge, to actually being in charge. Like any 20th-century ceremonial “monarch,” we are scared of power from head to toe, President to peasant. On the streets, we are the best of husbands. In the sheets, we are nowhere near man enough for our wives. Power will only be serviced by the Deep State or the Cathedral. The sneer with which Washington obeys the Trump administration, when it really must, is the sneer of a woman who wants her husband’s child—but not her husband. This is the “marriage” between institutions and politicians.

How does this trap work? Fundamentally, the upper class sees itself as a subordinate class, and the middle class sees itself as a dominant class. “Progressivism” is the universalist faith of the upper class (with an exception from universalism for its own clients’ tribalism). “Conservatism” is the ideology of the middle class. Conservatives fail because they can never see that America is actually not their country. Liberals win because they can never see that America actually is their country.

The splinter of deference that the administrative state affords a Republican President or Presidential candidate—a delicate kabuki that dates back to Wendell Willkie—just enough relevance that he feels genuinely important, but not enough to do systemic damage—is part of the delicate engineering of the post-Roosevelt political system.

The more genuinely the Republicans, the President or the voter, feel they have won, without any actual prospect of winning—the deeper they are in the trap. We’re winning, and winners can’t be rebels. Our Constitution is intact, after all! We must preserve our threatened Constitution. But at least we have it. Sad! These people have nothing. The Judas goat is already leading them up the ramp.

Since they are so easily convinced that they have won, our conservatives are weak and passive in resistance. Since they are so confident that they are the daring underdogs, liberals stamp out this weak resistance with the heroic energy of a (very lucky) rebel.

This mating of rebellious energy with universal, historic hegemony is a terrifying mix. This same pattern is seen from the trailer park to the Oval Office. Trump and his administration, in “power,” are the Atreides on Arrakis— down to the assassinations.

The energy that made Trumpism possible is the energy of this illusion breaking down—and conservatives breaking free from the cult of the Constitution. From the rites of the ancestors, a Confucian might say. There is more than a little Confucius in the American normiecon, with his respect for the ancient and sacred forms and processes of government, which are apodictically correct above all criticism. The rites!

But in history there is a time to be a Confucian, and a time to be a Machiavellian. Confucius himself, who lived in no simple times, would agree.

Machiavelli will tell you: there is nothing left of the ancient rites. The altar is no longer sacred. The old gods are departed. The temple of the state is a trap—a haunt of demons and monkeys. Your sacrifice is not even holy. It is a cruel blasphemy.

Conservatives: your wife has barely let you kiss her in years. Yet you keep paying for her abortions. It’s a problem. But it’s not the problem. It’s a symptom of the problem. Yes. Marriage is sacred. Earth calling! You don’t have a marriage. You have a fetish.

The solution: a real political party

As President Milei of Argentina has pointed out: we need to take all the power. If we don’t have the power, they have it.

This has been the attitude of all successful regime changes in history. It is also increasingly the attitude of the “young right” in the 2020s—all around the world.

But what does this attitude mean for practical politics? First of all: what is the goal? Let’s assume that actually winning takes much, much more power than even the second Trump administration, at its start, put out. How much do we actually need?

If an example from the lives of those now living is needed, here is one that went too far (in my view), but is considered totally legitimate (by everyone): Allied Military Government in Germany, in 1945.

Some might say AMG’s “denazification” process did too much to wipe out the previous regime. Few (today) would say it did too little! Start by copying that—then tone it down, where that feels safe. All the old plans and procedures are easy to find.

But how could this happen? How could we generate this much power? 1945 was the result of total war and devastating invasion. America cannot invade itself. It cannot even have a civil war—but not because everyone became too enlightened, just because neither side could “get it up.” Whether you find this reassuring or depressing may depend on your own testosterone level. The political energy just doesn’t exist.

The energy does not exist. That is, it does not exist spontaneously. Faith in spontaneous action is the hallmark of the late 20th-century conservative. God will take care of it, or something. The political energy does not naturally exist. This does not mean it cannot exist. That means it needs to be engineered. So, let’s engineer it.

America needs a new kind of political party, which is actually an old kind of party: a hard party. A hard party is a party designed to take unconditional control of the state. A hard party is a party in which all members delegate 100% of their political energy to the party’s command. Joining a hard party is a political marriage, not an election-night hookup with any random politician whose name on a lawn sign catches your eye.

A hard party is a legal private organization whose goal is to become the ruling party of the next government. Like the CCP in China. Its voters will elect this government. Its officers will staff it. Its donors will host its state dinners. Its ideas will become the official ideology—the official truth. They had better actually be true!

A one-party state? Yes. We tried not having a one-party state. We ended up with a one-party state. Right down to the DEI commissars in every office, public or private.

It was a one-party state that pretended it wasn’t a one-party state. It was a one-party state—but not like the CCP or any Marxist-Leninist 20th-century party, run on Lenin’s principle of “democratic centralism.” It was genuinely decentralized. This categorical distinction, while not without its virtues, was also not without its vices. Ultimately, it did not result in a more open society.

In any case, only something can beat nothing. A decentralized one-party regime, such as we today endure, cannot be replaced by any new decentralized regime—one-party, two-party or zero-party. At least, all attempts to do so have failed, and I cannot see any way to do it. Maybe I’m an idiot. Idk.

I do see how to do it with a centralized party, though. “Democratic centralism.” As Deng Xiaoping said: who cares if the cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice? All we know is: the cat we have doesn’t catch mice. We don’t seem to be able to train it to catch mice.

Maybe this is because it’s such a sweet and special cat. Maybe this is because it’s not actually a cat, but a rabbit. Maybe we don’t need a special cat. Maybe we just need a regular cat. It’s a deflating realization, I know. Maybe we could even get a regular cat, but have a rabbit too? Maybe. Maybe we’re getting tired of finding mouse turds in our Cheerios. Maybe just start with the cat?

(I even know this is possible in the 21st century, because there is one “young right” party that is doing it, as far as I can tell quite successfully—Mission, in Brazil. Not that they are following some blueprint of mine. They just had the same obvious idea. As I write, they’re at 7% on Polymarket for 2026—which is pretty cool.)

A 21st-century hard party can’t be your grandfather’s paramilitary ‘30s street militia. While the hard parties of the early 20th century could only coordinate with uniforms in the street, the hard parties of the early 21st century can only coordinate with pixels on the screen. Again, there are two kinds of hard parties: physical, and virtual. In a virtual hard party, the only “direct action” is voting.

While they would have used our tools if they had them, we cannot use theirs. We’re just not strong enough—and the first part of winning is knowing your limits. They were far more broadly capable of both violence and obedience than we are. We are what we are, and politics is the art of the possible. A 21st-century hard party will take lawful power in a lawful and peaceful way. That’s what’s possible. Nothing else is.

What’s possible is: apps. We like apps. We use apps. The party of the future is: an app. The card-carrying member of the past is the monthly active user of the future.

These virtual hard parties—at least, to their users—are not just any apps. They are fun apps. They are ARG apps: augmented-reality games. An augmented-reality game means: in the real world, you do a task. In the app, you get a badge. Experience points. Something. We can of course imagine physical tasks—but none of them are realistic, other than voting.

All political parties and/or machines are devices for generating votes (and performing other democratic actions). The old system of 20th-century broadcast politics is… old. Are people really going to be reading the LA Times and watching CBS News in 2050? Which is more realistic—that, or voting apps designed to “brigade” IRL elections?

Why do people vote? There is always some psychological motivation for voting. A: participating in the citizenship process of our democracy by expressing a sincere, well-informed, and prudent concern for the well-being of the republic. B: firing a shot in a cold civil war, defending your faction of the republic from another, whether reactively or proactively. You are either a micro-statesman, or a micro-soldier.

Once the political life of a republic has been reduced to B, the republic is dead. The only question is which faction, organization or party prevails absolutely. A hard party is what you need when you finally abandon the illusion of A, which is the illusion of the dead republic—which did not die yesterday or even last year. It died before your parents were born. Don’t be the monkey mom who carries her dead baby everywhere.

The most fundamental reality is: once you are at B, there is no choice. B is actually the only real first step toward A. If elections are a good thing—the party, once it wins, will hold its own elections. If they are not—the party will not. Who cares if the cat is black or white?

Once we realize we are at B, we can properly assess the emotional motivation for voting. Voting is fun and exciting. So is war. Voting is symbolic war. Also fun and exciting: raiding an enemy tribe, catching them asleep, slaughtering their fighters, and leading their women and children home in ropes to their new lives as slaves—carrying the remains of their husbands and fathers, already in steaks for the party. Since this is the way Homo sapiens lived for millions of years, it must be possible to activate the motivational instincts behind this behavior, even just on your iPhone.

Chimps do not even do slavery. Chimp war is just chimp genocide. With plenty of chimp torture, though neither is conducted in a scientific way. Chimps do not talk, so we cannot know whether they find chimp war exciting and (on the winning side) fun. It sure looks like it, though. Here in Silicon Valley, we know how to speak to our customers’ inner chimp—generally without any war, torture, slavery or genocide. Therefore: it is puzzling that we would be having any kind of engagement issues.

The emotional motivation for voting is the expression of power. Because a hard party is actually designed to take power, it can provide much more of this chimp vibe. Since it is real, it is much more fun than participating in 20th-century politics, which is fake. So it can create much more engagement.

The fundamental user experience of a hard party is that being a member does not feel like being a leader. It feels like being a soldier. This is fun too—just fun in a different way. These forms of engagement should not be confused.

In a mob, and in a soft party, everyone feels like a leader. Everyone is asked to contribute their “opinions” on the “issues.” Who cares? This is a “displacement activity.” It is not useful or necessary to anyone. An army is much stronger, man for man, than a mob. Being a low-ranking member of a hard party feels like being a private in an army. Which is also fun, especially if no one is shooting at you—but in a different way. It also provides a useful metaphor for your app badges.

A hard party is a private organization—legal, underground, or both—whose goal is to become the governing party of the next government. Like the CCP in China. Its voters will elect this government. Its officers will staff it. Its donors will host its dinners. Its ideas will become the official ideology—the official truth.

A one-party state? Yes. We tried not having a one-party state. We ended up with a one-party state. Right down to the DEI commissars in every organization, public or private. It was a one-party state that pretended it wasn’t a one-party state.

If this historical experiment tells us nothing about political science, what are we even doing here? The solution is not pretending that we can have another kind of state. The solution is doing what we have to do, and doing it well.

This new one-party state is a different government. Its first step will be to peacefully yet irreversibly scrub the old regime away—till the paint is gone, and the metal shines. Nothing will be left of any existing institution with any incentive to further resist the new regime. Even the old government buildings should be taken down, unless of real historical or architectural value. As the Allies in 1945 saw well, symbolic destruction is as important as structural destruction.

There is certainly a functional overlap between all governments. In some cases, this next regime may temporarily reuse the facilities, or even contract with the staff, of the old administrative state. But its authority will be plenary—reserving the unconditional right to revise all actions, decisions, and promises of the old regime.

You have paperwork from the old regime? Great. What does it mean? Idk depends. While any transition must be as orderly as possible, a hard party has no platform or program for any incremental reform in government. It only thinks about (a) how to capture plenary power and (b) what to do with it.

Plenary power is the unconstrained capacity for arbitrary decisions. They are not constrained by some document, database, orgchart, etc, issued or maintained by the old regime—whose annotation of society is now void. The new state must also “see like a state”—but it must see completely anew.

Absolute unity of action is the only way to accomplish this goal. A hard party works because it is a laser, not a flashlight. The difference between a laser and a flashlight is not a difference of degree.

Everyone in a hard party, member, officer or donor, delegates all their political power to the party. As a member, you vote at the party’s direction in every election for which you are eligible. You do not need to pay attention to the names, platforms, ideas, etc. You are not even supposed to. When you vote, or otherwise act politically, you follow the party’s directives.

The result is that you do far less political busywork than you were supposed to be doing as an “informed citizen”—and have far more political impact. All you do is to install the app, give it notification privileges, and when there is an election—just do what it says. The voting game is a military tool—with ballots instead of bullets.

As an officer, your task is to serve the party through your work. Your first job is to excel in your work, whatever it may be. After the regime change, as a party officer, you are prequalified to serve in the new regime. This makes large organizations much easier to spin up. It also makes them easier to control—if you are expelled from the party, you obviously also lose your government job.

To become an officer, you have to apply! You pass a test. You pass an interview. You serve at the party’s pleasure. You will accept any task or position it may assign you. Any member or officer may be expelled at any time. The only thing about this that changes when you win is that the party now commands the state, and may offer you a role in its staff. Before then, don’t quit your day job—and do hide your power level. Officers also pay party dues and perform party tasks.

In any large, elite company or other private organization—or public organization—there will be a cadre of party officers. These officers, concealing their identities, organize a covert party cell within the organization. The goal of this cell is to be so excellent, and so helpful to each other, that they naturally take over the company. (Being the best people, anyway.) A crucial step is reached once the party controls hiring, and another when it controls HR in general. To form true cells, officers need not just organizational tools like a voting coordination app, but actual espionage tools.

After the transition, officers may be assigned positions in the new regime. While they will start without any subject-matter experience, this is usually not just fine, but actually optimal. In most cases, competent generalist ignorance is far preferable to specialized domain experience in the old regime. Experience in doing the wrong thing is almost impossible to get out of your head. Even loyal officers who were undercover in the old regime should probably switch departments. Even if the role of the agency matches an old agency 1:1—unlikely and, frankly, suboptimal—it is easy to harvest the policies and procedures of the old agency with AI.

As a donor, you give the party money and get back tokens. The tokens are votes in a Supreme Soviet, or something. You get to vote them if you’re current on your party taxes. Which are 2% of what you pay the government. Or something.

Finally, a real political party speaks with its own voice and thinks with its own mind. If you are a consumer of news, you get your news from the party. If you read books, the party writes them. If you use AI, the party has trained its own AI. If you look things up on an online encyclopedia, the party has its own Wikipedia fork. If you like to think about history, your party tells you what history books to read. If you like movies, all the best writers and directors are in the party—for good reason, as it may well fund their productions. If you have children and are in a position to manage their education, the party has a program for that—several, in fact, depending on religion.

And of course: a real party has a party doctrine. Well before it takes power, it knows exactly what it will do with power. This doctrine is not the collective opinion of the party members—it is a document written by the party leadership. The summary is public. The actual plan is private. Once it has been implemented, it can be released.

What is the use of a real party? Let’s look at it in two stages of its lifecycle: before taking power, and after taking power.

Taking power: without a hard party

Imagine you’re the President. But you don’t have a hard party.

Without a hard party, you have neither the tools needed to capture political power, nor the tools to use it.

Without a hard party, you have no cadre of officers. So you have enormous limitations on staffing a new regime. If office-seekers are not vetted for loyalty, your administration is filled with snakes. If they are vetted for loyalty, the process is an enormous bottleneck full of office politics and weird false negatives. You don’t even have the option of replacing the old government—you don’t have the staff for it. All you can do is fill your “Plum Book” jobs, and even this takes more than a year. The answer is simple: this work should have been done a long time ago.

Without a hard party, you cannot even think about controlling other politicians. Your influence over your own party in Congress is very weak. You cannot replace or even threaten senior Senators or Representatives. They always have the infrastructure to win their primaries. Running for Congress is fundamentally artisanal. Primary candidates need to walk in off the street and build their own infrastructure.

Actual, passionate voter engagement is negligible even in Senate elections. It’s all lawn-sign spending plus a few soundbites. Anyone with a pulse can call himself a “Republican.” If you badmouth him to the press, the press will sense a rift and give the “maverick” good press. It’s all so tiresome.

You don’t have the tools to capture political power because your supporters are not efficiently delegating their power to the center. Your electorate is a mob, not an army. Inasmuch as they care, they care about feeling individually important, not collectively effective. The whole experience of the virtual mob politics that is democracy today is 5% reality and 95% political entertainment—pointlessly stimulating the human power instinct, in a way that reminds us of both spectator sports and literal pornography.

So your supporters, even your most passionate supporters, rarely vote in midterms, and almost never in in primaries. Even when they do vote, they don’t understand why they should be focusing on loyalty, not “candidate quality.” You actually haven’t even told them that they need to give you more power—forget telling you how.

Without a hard party, in a country governed by media, you have no communications infrastructure of your own—you are relying on your enemy to reach your supporters. Wtf. You may have sympathetic media businesses. You have no way to control their reliability or quality. They can and will mix your propaganda with absolute garbage, which will turn off many of your most valuable potential supporters, especially in the highest social classes. There is absolutely no solution to this problem.

Taking power: with a hard party

With a hard party—democracy isn’t pornography. The voters can actually take power.

Imagine you do have a hard party. Suppose it has 15 million loyal members. Suppose party members are reliable votes in every election—federal, state, local, tribal—general and primary. This is not a large enough party to take power directly. It cannot win elections on its own. However, it is large enough that it represents a significant power. Let’s look at how this power can work.

In every election, the party supports exactly one candidate. All party members automatically vote for that candidate. Period. It’s verified—if you don’t at least go to the polling place, and give the app your location (let alone take a picture of the ballot), no voter badge for you. Your new party friends will notice, and wonder. You might even get kicked out. What were you even thinking? Makes zero sense.

Result: even when the party is 10% of registered voters, it represents one of the most significant voting blocs in any constituency. Perhaps comparable to Poles in Chicago. (Gays also did this in 1970s San Francisco.) And because the party has party discipline, this block swings perfectly. The secret of democratic political science is: collective solidarity punches WAY above its weight.

In every election, the party uses its own decision processes to direct the actions of its own voters. If it wanted to have an internal “primary,”it could. But this would be retarded. In any case, those actions include party registration.

If the party thinks it can have more positive impact, in some district, in the Democratic rather than Republican primaries, its members will be ordered to register as Democrats. Why not? “Democrats” and “Republicans” aren’t real parties—hard parties. They are just labels. Who cares about labels? We care about winning.

In 2025, Somalis had the electoral power to elect a Somali mayor of Minneapolis. But the vote was split between the Darood and the Hawiye tribes. Since the Hawiye would rather serve a Jew than a Darood—guess what tribe won? If the Somalis had all held a Somali election, then all voted for the Somali winner—Minneapolis might be on its way to, like, full Islamic law right now.

This level of membership in a hard party does not provide predictable victories in national elections. It does not enable the President to literally select his own Congress, and order them to rubber-stamp his agenda. It may be sufficient to achieve the same result, though, if managed adroitly. In any case, here in Silicon Valley, growing from 15 million to 50 million users has never been the hardest problem.

With 50 million members, the President can win almost all Congressional elections at the primary stage. Once he wins the national election, he does not need to play around with executive orders. He can write legislation on Thursday, and get it passed by Tuesday. He can pack the Court. He can win the game, not forever, but for a generation. He can actually make America great again.

Suppose you have 50 million members, but you’re not the President? It doesn’t matter. You can make anyone the President. It doesn’t have to be a real job. He’ll do what you say. He doesn’t have a choice. The USSR actually had a decorative President. As for your Congress, it will be like the Supreme Soviet, or the European Parliament: a meaningless conversation of nonentities. On the Hill, the whole party will have one staff. Every Representative or Senator will vote with the party, every time.

Moreover, with 50 million users, there is no need to rely on Congressional, state and local candidates to walk in the door. They do not recruit themselves. They are cast, like AOC—and the less political experience, the better. Like backbench MPs in the UK, they are just there because the position requires a face and a name. It should be a pretty face and a reasonably stainless name.

The winning candidate is not a “statesman” or “lawmaker” in any sense—just a paper nominee—so anyone concerned about “candidate quality” is yanking your chain. Since this is the way it is anyway, why not work with the reality?

Taking power: the user experience

But will Americans actually go for this? Idk, but—

Since politics is the art of the possible, real political professionals operate in the noise floor of engagement. People still care about the headliner election—the Presidency. The idea of 21st-century voters who still have an emotional attachment to the undercard events—Congress, state politics, etc—is increasingly implausible.

The idea of going from this to some kind of 1930s blackshirt Communist-Fascist torchlight-march death-squad democratic-centralism leader-oath party is, I admit, comical. We can barely get our diehard supporters to vote in the midterms at all. Much less just tell them who to vote for! It seems out of reach of normal political engagement techniques. 100% of your political energy? Impossible!

From a Silicon Valley perspective, Republican engagement techniques are at the spam or chum level. Everything is on the level of goji berries and “doctors hate this one weird trick.” When your ideas appear next to those ads, you know you’re cooked.

This is obvious to everyone. It is also obvious to everyone intelligent that there is no way out of this trap. But everyone has it wrong.

A hard party works because a hard party is actually fun. The torchlight marches were fun, too! A hard party is a game. So were the ideologies of the 20th century. Do you think it wasn’t fun to be a Nazi? A Bolshevik? Or do you think it’s just as fun to be a Republican? People will do anything, even vote—you just have to make it a game. Voting for Republicans is as fun as a cardboard pizza. A hard party is fun because a hard party is real. It’s not something you can only trick boomers into believing in.

In the 1930s, there was no Internet. There was only the street. Your shirt was your uniform. Often, your skin was your uniform. Fascist or communist torchlight parades were still a game—but the street was the only place to play that game.

In the 2020s, the streets are empty. We are all inside on our phones. We need political machinery that is designed for now, not for 1930 or even 1960. The 20th-century political system is an epiphenomenon of the 20th-century media-education complex.

For most of the 21st century, it will be inconceivable that you expect anyone to vote for you unless they have your app on their phone. A voter is a user. A user is anyone you can reliably notify. If you can make their phone ding or buzz, they’re a user.

Why would any supporter not be a user? 75 million “supporters,” who nonetheless don’t support you enough to let you tell them what to do? Even in a political capacity? (It’s not at all the same as having 75 million Twitter “followers,” with an algorithm between you and them. A tweet cannot convey the necessary level of commitment and urgency—nor can text-message spam. Your mailing list is not a user base.)

On election day—any election, anywhere in America—everyone’s phone will buzz. Everyone’s phone will look at their location and calendar and tell them where, when, and how to vote. They will go to the voting booth. They will make the piece of paper look like their screen. They will take a picture of the piece of paper. They will receive a badge in the app. (Mail-in ballots can also be used, if they still exist—but this is somehow less fun.)

This is easier, not harder, than what they have to do now! The simple act of mechanical voting, which is far more powerful from their previous independent voting, permanently relieves them of all other civic responsibilities.

They do not need to follow the “news.” They do not need to read about the “issues.” They do not need to know about the “candidates.” Voting is not some time-consuming, stressful Norman Rockwell exercise of deep moral choices. They made one big vote: joining the party. The actual act of filling out ballots is data entry.

Eventually they will be relieved from even this responsibility. The party will just upload its membership database to the election server. Nothing could be easier. The ultimate 21st-century voter experience: you vote once, for one party or leader, permanently and transitively.

Yes: transitively. Once you have chosen Trump as your leader, for every election in which you are eligible, you automatically vote for Trump. If Trump, himself, is not interested in being the next chief animal control officer for Volusia County—he must know someone else who would be great in the role. You automatically vote for this person. You never need to even learn their name—much less their curriculum vitae, moral character, animal-control record, etc.

What would you do with that information? Double-check if Trump made a good choice? Your commitment to His Trumpness is permanent. Until you change your mind, of course. You can reregister as a fanatical Gavin Newsom believer. Whatever.

But the fundamental principle is: the less you can change your mind about it, the more powerful your vote is. Again: the less you can change your mind, the more powerful your vote is—because the more power your vote is giving away. Using your political power in a representative democracy means delegating it to a representative. The less conditional, uncertain or divided this delegation is, the more powerful your support is.

This theorem, though obvious, is so counterintuitive that it’s hard to think about it too much. Think of a vote as an arrow: if you shoot the arrow, you lose the arrow. When you are thinking about “candidate quality,” you are stabbing with arrows. If you want to create collective power, shoot your shot—and leave it shot. It’s true—when you delegate power, you give it away, which means you don’t have it anymore. Vote to be powerful—not to feel powerful. That’s the big secret.

People miss this easily because they are concerned about their political struggle with the other party, not about the struggle of politics itself (democracy) with civil society (oligarchy). Having more elections strengthens the voters’ control over the politicians. But it weakens the politicians’ control over the government. The latter effect easily dominates the former effect. This is also why “term limits” do not work for populism.

If the power of the representatives is fixed and absolute—there is no way to decrease it. But if the elected politicians are competing with some other force, the power of politics itself—which means the power of democracy itself—is very much in question. And isn’t that the only question at all, these days—democracy versus oligarchy?

“A republic, if you can keep it,” said Franklin. Today it is—a republic, if you can get it back. And while you might barely be able to muster the strength for an instant to get it back—you have nowhere near the strength to keep it. No—you have to get it back, then instantly give it away. To a one-party state which will have the strength to keep it.

This may sound implausible. It is implausible. It is not, however, impossible. Nothing else is possible. These are the equations. I didn’t make them. I just found them. If you find any errors, let me know. These equations do predict that what we are trying now will not work, which now seems evident.

Even President Trump has nothing like the powers of a real CEO—but imagine how little power he would have if he had to be elected every day. Polling is bad enough. And obviously, if the President could be elected for life, he would be far more powerful. If the American voters cannot be trusted with the power to elect a president for life, a new FDR, with what power can they be trusted? Not that much, I guess.

It’s going to be hard enough making America great again. With the powers he has, within the present system, it’s like asking President Trump to build Trump Tower with a toddler’s sand toys. While Trump is a leader rather than a builder, Elon Musk could hardly do better. He didn’t build Starship with sand toys, either.

Most conservative pundits instinctively try to make their audience angrier. This is their incentive: red meat for the audience. This is how you grow an audience. But making people angrier does not work. It does not increase the amount of power all these people project toward Washington. It does not deepen their delegation. Maybe it makes them slightly more likely to vote. But that’s a binary outcome. The rhetoric of democracy is constantly implying that angry people might take actions beyond voting, as they would in 18th-century or 19th-century America. Spoiler: they won’t.

Americans do not need to be angrier. There is enough anger. Indeed, it would have shocked any 19th-century pundit, or even most 20th-century ones, to see how 21st-century voters tolerate and even admire governments and ideologies clearly and explicitly hostile to their own long-term interests, and even short-term interests. (For liberals, it is actually a moral faux pas to vote according to your own interests.)

To project more power toward Washington, Americans just need to be more organized. They just need more effective political machines. Instead, we still conduct our politics as though everyone was watching the evening news and got the newspaper thrown on their door by the neighbor’s kid on a bicycle. Larping that world will not bring it back.

What will bring it back is: being more collectively effective than our enemies. The first step is understanding who they are and how they are organized. While we will never work the same way they do, we have to understand the left’s capabilities and match them.

Taking power: the opposition

Essentially, the American left is a hard party, and always has been—for the lives of those now living. It doesn’t have a voting app, but it doesn’t need one.

Probably, in 2020, the libs did not hack the voting machines. But if they could have (and gotten away with it), they would have. Generally, they got away with, and get away with, everything they can—and everything is designed to let them get away with everything they can. There are no moral impediments to this tendency, which is not even conscious.

Because the American left from Bill Clinton to Bill Ayers is one thing—and American leftism, though not in any way centrally organized, behaves like a hard party, because all of its core beliefs are evolved to maximize power—it has no fundamental beliefs. It has only one meta-belief: power. This is how it can do “no enemies to the left.”

What can leftist decentralized coordination achieve? No one who lived through 2020 can forget the difference between February 1, when the hive mocked the QAnon fringe xenophobic obsession with the “Kung Flu” and reminded us that, according to science, the real flu was the real danger; and March 1, when we were suddenly in a Michael Crichton film and had to preserve our precious bodily fluids. Wasn’t that something? And the transition was—barely acknowledged. It was weird. At the time. But it is weirder in retrospect.

And the weirdest thing: what created this change was not any event in the pandemic. It was an unexpected decision by the mercurial Donald Trump. He came out, unexpectedly, as a Covid dove. So the left had to become Covid hawks—which they all did. Instantly! (Only Sweden defied the flip—and they had the best results.)

Everyone turned on a dime as if under some kind of wireless control. Like with a chip. In their brains. As if they were bees. A frightening, unhuman, decentralized intelligence. Previously I had thought the ending of 1984 was unrealistic.

The “hive mind” is a real thing. The left can act with an insane decentralized unanimity typically seen only in the insect kingdom. The “hive mind” is a real thing. Hive politics has a prehensile flexibility which no sincere mind can process. It can be for blood-and-soil nationalism here, and full Disney globalism there. Morally nihilistic at its core, it will do anything it can get away with. Justice is always on its side. This why all leftists, however moderate, have “no enemies to the left”—not that they will never throw a comrade off the bus, but that’s always just personal.

(That attitude extends all the way to the most prestigious peaks of the “center right”—consider the distinguished conservative thinker Robert George, of Princeton, and formerly Heritage. While Tucker Carlson is too much for the exquisite conscience of Professor George, he is proud to be photographed with Cornel West. Okay.)

What is the role of the intellectuals in this situation? It is to explain to everyone that the only task of the American right, or the right wing in any Western country in the early 21st century, is unilateral, unconditional and permanent state capture for a completely new regime. Any victory short of this, unless it is a tactical step in a strategic plan to achieve this, is actually a defeat and very likely a disaster. And since we can’t automatically do the hive-mind unconscious coordination thing, we need actual, effective, well-engineered coordination mechanisms.

They have a party line! A long time ago, it was centralized. Now it’s decentralized. Since decentralized conservatism does not work, we need a centralized party line.

Unconditional state capture cannot be achieved by the same mechanisms as constitutional participation. As a normiecon, you think of Washington as your narcissistic, impossible, insufferable, and also alcoholic mother-in-law. If you have no choice but to deal with this person, your job is to lead her to reason and maybe even sobriety. Some kind of intervention. But she’s family and you have to respect that.

While that’s a reasonable attitude in this situation, it’s not the real situation. The real situation is: your real mother-in-law died in the 1990s. What you are calling “Doris” is a 6200-year-old Egyptian vampire—real name: Khemon-Ra.

You cannot, as you expect, “have an intervention” with Khemon-Ra. “She” is not a “narcissist” or even an “alcoholic”—just your basic Chalcolithic vampire. You have to hammer a wooden post into its heart and out through the shoulderblades. During this process, it may be harder to restrain than you think. Call the friends you’d call if you were moving. Have them wear what they’d wear if they were helping paint the kitchen.

Political power follows a simple formula: e=mc^2. Energy is mass (number of supporters), times commitment (what they’re willing to do—will they vote? Donate? Pick up a gun? Strap on a suicide vest?), times cohesion (how organized they are). We need to maximize this number, E.

In the 21st century, commitment is almost dead. We can’t fight that trend. To beat it—we need to be better than ever at cohesion. We don’t need to be angrier. We just need to be more organized.

But to organize ourselves—we need to live and operate in 21st-century political reality, not some 18th-century pretend fantasy (which actual 18th-century statesmen, if they could see, would laugh at).

And we need to stop thinking politics is about anything but power maximization. When our enemies accuse us of thinking this, they are both “projecting,” and trying to stop us from doing it ourselves.

We need to do it, and do it better. What we do will not look like what they do, because we are different. But the principles of political engineering are timeless and objective.

The hard party: in power

Until we win, the only goal is winning. That’s a critical element of hard politics. What is the right time to take full power? As soon as you can, and never before.

I am convinced that Trump could, theoretically, have done anything in the week after his second inauguration. He did not have either a plan or the human infrastructure to execute it. But he did? I think he could have acted arbitrarily without any resistance, on a perfectly legitimate theory of coequal sovereignty of the branches—simply because of the weakness of his opposition. As Napoleon pointed out, it is important to concentrate all energy in the decisive place and time.

But unquestionably, control over both the legislative and executive branch is the gold standard of legitimate regime change in the American constitutional system. With 50 Senators and the White House, you can appoint as many Supreme Court justices as you like. Game over. Therefore, this is the target to shoot for.

As soon as its power is plenary, the party moves swiftly to take unconditional control of the old civic institutions. Its goal is to shut down the old government and spin up a new one, with minimal structural overlap and minimal disruption of service.

This does not mean filling “political” appointments—except for legal reasons. (Legal questions are always a matter of legal “boots on the ground.”) Whether these appointments have to be made or even confirmed, nothing should impede the concrete flow of the transition.

During the transition, the new state has six main tasks.

First: preserve all essential service points.
Second: centralize all executive-branch resources and payment rails.
Third: federalize all organizations trusted, empowered or subsidized by the state.
Fourth: federalize the whole financial system, cashing everyone out for dollars.
Fifth: federalize all state, local and tribal governments.
Sixth: biometrically identify every human being in the country.

These measures give any new regime complete modern sovereignty. While this level of unconditional centralization is not necessarily what we are shooting for in a new regime, it is necessary in any transition process. Any kind of unstable, divided or limited authority is extremely dangerous until the whole operation is complete.

These measures eliminate all instabilities and put the new regime completely in control of the state and the country, while allowing life to continue more or less as usual in the short term. In the long and even medium term, it will have to change dramatically and in the direction of sanity—but in the short term, no one should be given any rational reason to freak out. They will have enough irrational reasons.

Most important: unless it is part of a realistic political path to a plan on this scale, partial authority is a political temptation to be resisted. Game theorists know the definition of a good move. A good move is a move that makes all future moves easier. Every action on the path to power must leave the rest of that path more plausible.

Regime change is not butchery. It is surgery. The patient must be either anesthetized, or strapped down. In 1945 in Germany, the patient was strapped down—restrained by overwhelming violence. We don’t have that option, so we need anesthesia.

Anesthetic means eliminating all outlets for structural resistance. In power, as so much else, opportunity creates energy. The deader an old regime gets, the less support it has—because the vast majority of its support was not support, but merely ambition. When the tree falls, the vines collapse. Nothing smells worse than a dead regime.

Support for National Socialism in Germany was, after June 1945, confined to a small and harmless minority. Historical necrophilia will never be more than a niche fetish—and the freshly dead are the most repulsive. The more irreversible the demolition of the old regime, the less it can resist or return. Any incomplete erasure of old power structures is an outlet for structural resistance.

The patient, politically asleep, does not need to be strapped to the operating table. The surgeon, intent on doing the most good and the least harm, can make haste without rushing, or worrying about how his scalpel feels. His consent is durable: there is no immediate way to revoke it. There is no way the patient will try to get off the table with his liver half-connected.

If centers of potential resistance are not instantly cleared from the map, they create their own energy, and become centers of real resistance. A right-wing regime change needs to run the table from the break. As an extropic system, time is not on its side.

Entropy is naturally gradual and/or self-sustaining: fast revolution, or slow subversion. Extropy is the opposite. A right-wing regime change is a spike of political energy that crosses a threshold and jumps the system to a new, benign stable state.

This spike takes more energy than many think, but it needs to be sustained only momentarily. And this energy is not chaotic, inconsistent violence—but peaceful, irresistible force. This will rapidly develop its own stability—but only if it is irresistible. It must demonstrate this irresistible character in every area of life.

Who does all this reorganization work and how? How do we keep the government working, while completely restructuring it? What does the transformation look like, operationally? It’s a big topic—hard to do it justice in a little Substack post. But…

Generally speaking, the machinery of the old state can and should be operated externally, from its systems and documents. It is not generally necessary to insert people in the existing offices, or even new users into the existing computer systems. Ideally, existing IT systems can be frozen and used only as a resource. The exception is essential service points—which must be carved from the carcass of the old regime.

The new state should not be operated from the old capital. It should be operated from a closed military facility—under roughly the same rules as wartime Los Alamos. Staff live onsite without even public Internet access. The whole base is a SCIF. Staff with families bring their families. All staff must be party officers—although it is easy to imagine an accelerated entry path for essential specialists.