Whilst pedestrian in its rehearsal of common knowledge, and inane in its tortured liberalism, this article helpfully schematizes the arena of Anglophone racial politics, at least on its defining black-white dimension (and accidentally). By counterposing the tradition of Black American self-advancement (represented by Booker T. Washington) with that of Afro-Marxist agitation (represented by W. E. B. Du Bois), it implicitly describes an ideological quadrant.

1. To side with Du Bois against Washington is the position of the radical Left.

2. To seek a reconciliation of the two is an agonized equivocation, tilting inevitably to Leftist advantage, of the kind that has predominated in the development of Anglophone political culture. This is is position of the author, of mainstream liberalism and conservatism, and of progressive Cathedralization.

3. To admire Washington, whilst repulsed by Du Bois, is the neoreactionary stance Outside in defends.

4. To dismiss both Washington and Du Bois as irrelevant Black nonsense is a departure into confrontational White Nationalism, of a kind that has no imaginable reach beyond itself.

Thomas Sowell, as the most articulate inheritor of the ‘outsider’ Washington tradition, is the emblem of this racial ideology test today. Neoreaction is indisputably mostly a White thing, but if it is to have any additional significance whatsoever, Sowell has to be supported. There’s nowhere further Right he could possibly go, except into some species of Black ethnomasochistic suicidalism — and we should know, more than anybody, that’s a corner no one should be backed into.

Neoreaction, as it tends to extremity on its Dark Enlightenment vector, frustrates all familiar demands for activism. Even if explicit anti-politics remains a minority posture, the long-dominant demotic calculus of political possibility is consistently subverted — coring out the demographic constituencies from which ‘mobilization’ might be expected. There is no remotely coherent reactionary class, race, or creed — it painstakingly explains — from which a tide-reversing mass politics could be constructed. In this respect, even the mildest versions of neoreactionary analysis are profoundly politically disillusioning.

When demotist ideologies have entered into superficially comparable crises, they have forked into ‘realist’ compromisers and ‘terrorist’ ultras. The latter option, which substitutes a violent intensification of political will for the erosion of the extensive (popular) factor, is an especially reliable indicator of demotism entering an idealist state, in which its essential ideological features are exposed with peculiar clarity. Terrorists are the vehicles of political ideas which have been stranded by a receding tide of social identity, and are thus freed to perfect themselves in abstraction from mass practicality. Once a revolutionary movement becomes demographically implausible, terrorists are born.

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When political polarization is modeled as a game the result is Chicken. The technical basics are not very complicated.

Reiterated Prisoner’s Dilemma (RPD) is socially integrative. An equilibrium, conforming to maximal aggregate utility, arises through reciprocal convergence upon an optimum strategy: defaulting to trust, punishing defections, and rapidly forgiving corrected behavior. Any society adopting these rule-of-thumb principles consolidates. When everyone norms on this strategy, individual and collective interests are harmonized. Things work.

Chicken is very different. Someone blinks first, so the trust-trust mutual optimum of RPD is subtracted in advance. Rather than the four possible outcomes of a single PD round (A and B do OK, A wins B loses, B wins A loses, A and B both lose) there are just three possible outcomes (A wins B loses, B wins A loses, A and B both lose extremely). In Chicken, it is the avoidance of outcome three, rather than the non-existent chance of PD outcome one, that moderates behavior, and then asymmetrically (someone always blinks first).

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By 2037 the harsh phases of The Upheaval have finally ended. Western Eurasia is ruined and confused, but the fighting has burnt out amongst the rubble. In the Far East, the Chinese Confucian Republic has largely succeeded in restoring order, and is even enjoying the first wave of renewed prosperity. The Islamic civil war continues, but — now almost entirely introverted — it is easily quarantined. No one wants to think too much about what is happening in Africa.

The territory of the extinct USA is firmly controlled by the Neoreactionary Coalition, whose purchase is strengthened by the flight of 20 million Cathedral Loyalists to Canada and Europe (incidentally toppling both into terminal chaos). The Provisional Trichotomous Council, selected primarily by a process of military promotion and delegation from within the major Neoreactionary  guerrilla groups, now confronts the task of establishing a restored political order.

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Even prior to the twitterization catastrophe, and the terminal disintegration of thought into nano-particles, symphonic orchestration wasn’t obviously emerging as an Outside in core competence. One unfortunate consequence of this deficiency is that highly persuasive blogging ideas get endlessly can-kicked, unless they can be easily pulverized.

“Blogging ideas” doesn’t mean anything grandiose (those type of thoughts splinter anything in their path, and bust in), but rather highly medium-adapted discussion packages, which present things in a way that racks up hits. The relevant example right now is — or rather ‘was to be’ — The X Fundamental Disputes of Neoreaction (‘X’ being an as-yet undetermined number — optimally of surreptitious qabbalistic significance). That puppy would have been clocking up views like Old Faithful, but confusion reigns, and patience has run out. Into the shredding machine it goes.

The principal provocations for this spasm of impatience are two posts on the topic of monarchism, at Anomaly UK, and More Right. The Great AUK post is structured as a science fiction scenario, modeling a future monarchist regime, whilst Michael Anissimov’s MR defense of “traditionalism and monarchism” is organized dialectically. Both serve to consolidate an affinity between neoreaction and monarchist  ideals that was already solidly established by Moldbug’s Jacobitism. It would not be unreasonable to propose that this affinity is strong enough to approach an identity (which is quite possibly what both of these writers do envisage). So the time to frame the monarchist case within a question, as a Fundamental Dispute of Neoreaction, is now.

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Each encounter with the phrase “government shutdown” sparks a detonation of euphoria. It could get quite distracting.

More here (with useful chart, and some acute comments).

Rick Moran, trying to stir up some gloom, makes the whole situation even more delicious: “And the hell of it is, the hard right wing in the House that has been pushing this futile strategy are not going to be blamed for the cave-in. It will be those who are deemed insufficiently supportive of a cause that never had a chance to succeed who will probably suffer the consequences.”
— Federal cardiac arrest and the accelerated disintegration of the GOP? Bliss was it in that twilight …

Words of wisdom from Obama (via):

The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies. … Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that “the buck stops here.” Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.

As a symptom of things hitting the buffers, this Michael Walsh article is vaguely encouraging. It speaks unreservedly about the “collaborationist Republican Party” but eventually loses itself in the pseudo-conundrum:

How a political party cannot sell Freedom and Liberty and Leave Me Alone to a formerly free people is beyond me …

Could it perhaps be because democratic party politics has exhaustively demonstrated its incompatibility with “Freedom and Liberty”, “Leave Me Alone”, and a “free people”?

Handle has an excellent post up on this, referencing Nydwracu, who has made a momentous project out of it. It’s huge, and old, and quite impossible to summarize persuasively. It’s also impossible to avoid, especially for the Outer Right.

Steve Sailer told a joke that I’m going to mangle. A monstrous alien invasion assails the earth, and people have to decide how to respond. The conservatives say, “What’s there to think about? We have to get together to defeat this thing.” Liberals respond: “Wait! They probably have good reasons to hate us. It must be something we’ve done. Until we work out what that is, we should prostrate ourselves before their grievances.” Finally the libertarians pipe up: “Do they believe in free markets?”

An obvious quibble arises with the libertarian punch-line: if only.  Libertarians have predominantly demonstrated an enthusiasm for alien invasion that is totally detached from any market-oriented qualification. As their argument goes — the alien invasion is the free market.  (We’ll need to return to this, indirectly.)

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Moldbug’s latest has triggered a wave of discussion by emphatically re-stating the long-standing thesis:

America is a communist country.

The supporting argument is richly multi-threaded, and I won’t attempt to recapitulate it here. Its dominant flavor can be appreciated in these paragraphs:

When the story of the 20th century is told in its proper, reactionary light, international communism is anything but a grievance of which Americans may complain. Rather, it’s a crime for which we have yet to repent. Since America is a communist country, the original communist country, and the most powerful and important of communist countries, the crimes of communism are our crimes. You may not personally have supported these crimes. Did you oppose them in any way?

Whereas actually, codewords like “progressive,” “social justice,” “change,” etc, are shared across the Popular Front community for the entire 20th century. They are just as likely to be used by a Cheka cheerleader from the ’20s, as a Clinton voter from the ’90s.

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