Dang.

I have a notion that in your schema you might get some mileage by separating out the military governance node from the actual professional military, some kind of selection mechanism for veterans, but I haven’t thought much about the details. My preliminary vague notion would be veteran’s councils determined by lot who review recommendations for medals for valor and distinguished service, awardees to constitute the ruling body in some way.

But this is all nice and theoretical. I think the current US system would be pretty darn robust if you gave states their senators back and based the franchise on marriage and childbearing (hey ho the religious folk), veterans with honorable discharges (hey ho the military) and taxpayers paying above a certain amount a year (hey ho the commercial types). Depending on where you set the tax level, these voter groups would largely be the same people.

“This is obviously a political raw nerve of a very interesting kind. To be zoomed in on, I think.”

ZOOMING. Because they don’t know what it’s gonna do. And not in 2037.

What Finbarr is saying is true as far as it goes. Actual Truth is more complicated.

It would be lovely if everyone believed in unreality, but when reality has confronted you in harsh pastels, unreality never looks the same again.
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I don’t know either.

I think absent any leadership at Flag rank you’re looking at initial fragmentation. Hopefully you’d be looking at Starship Troopers. It can always get worse.

You understand that post USSR Russia is a dark, gangster & KGB version of Starship Troopers, yes? And common in History.

“I’d expect each of the three factions to desire to increase their own power and wealth at the expense of the other two factions and the general population.” — This is the only reasonable Constitutionalist assumption, and the only reasonable assumption of political theory in general. In the absence of divine intervention, or a counter-factual utopian world, the only checks are:
1) Internal, through strategically fragmented government (durable division of powers)
2) External, through patchwork pressure, primarily Exit.
Any scale-free political theory can be expected to lean on both (although the former is emphasized here).

Yes, it’s difficult.

The reason that triangles are far more stable than binary divisions, of course — and indeed more stable than any other arrangement — is that domination by any one node requires a preponderance of power over both the others combined. Agreed that the military poses special problems, but these have been practically dealt with many times before, and tend to be over-stated by reactionary intellectuals (when was the last time that a prosperous commercial republic fell prey to a military coup?).

Well, the probability of each of the three faction’s hegemonic potential being equal and precisely balancing out are extremely remote. The default would be for the military to be by far the most powerful. Unless there is more to your plan than is in your post, and there are actual mechanisms to ensure military loyalty to the constitution, I’d expect the military to achieve dominance within a generation. This would not be the worst scenario in the world – but if that is the end result, you might as well just give the military full power from the start.

If somehow the three factions actually do balance out, I wouldn’t expect the result to be all that great for the populace. The military would want a bigger budget and special privileges for the soldier caste. The pulpists want low taxes and the right to extract monopoly rents (why on earth do you assume that pulpists would be “extreme laissez-faire”?). I can see a deal being struck where the capitalist pulpists get the right to form monopolies and extract more profit, while the military gets more tax revenue.

Overall, I just don’t see the benefit of the triarchy system. I’d expect each of the three factions to desire to increase their own power and wealth at the expense of the other two factions and the general population. Either one faction wins, and that faction can rule as a stationary bandit over the land. Or the three factions compromise and together extract as much wealth and exert as much power over the general population as they can. Either way, I don’t see how this an improvement over regular old military dictatorship or regular old rule by bureaucracy.

The Monarchical alternative is simply to say: “Assume the nightmare has happened,so we can relax.” Anything other than Hobbesian despotism is going to be nerve-wracking, that’s just the way it is.

“The fact that the US military today shows no interest in a coup today — under a hooligan regime run by abusive progs — surely counts against the menace the Trike would face. Military coups are very rare in functional societies, and it doesn’t require weapon-locking to prevent them”

The U.S. military today is firmly under the command and control of the Cathedral-dominated civilian government. The cathedral is running a textbook operation on how priests can dominate the soldier caste. Every soldier spent his childhood in schools indoctrinating in him in the glories of democracy, the constitution, and civilian control over the military. To become an officer, you need a four-year cathedral degree. Gaining further promotion in the modern military has moved to an automatic formula. Guess which of the three following factors are part of that formula: a) successfully waging war, winning battles and gaining military objectives b) taking graduate-level cathedral courses (*any cathedral courses* it could be Marxist Theology or what not) c) maintaining a spotless record of avoiding censure for collateral damage. If you guessed b) and c) you are correct. There is also the J.A.G. corp – a cathedral thought police force embedded right within the army, maintaining control. All high level officers must have their promotions improved by Congress. And the President calls the shots at the top, and can fire any officer for any reason.

The above is what any civilian government must do to maintain control over a military. A cultural code must be indoctrinated at every level. This code must be enough to outweigh the “band of brothers” effect. Loyalty and ideological committment must be rewarded, disloyalty punished. Soldiers shouldn’t even *think* about disloyalty, because they know that suggesting mutiny to any non-sympathetic person could result in total ruin. Coordinating a coup becomes impossible.

As far as I can tell, you are removing all of these checks and controls over the military.

The most likely outcome is that the military budget will ratchet upwards until it becomes bloated and expensive as the government of today’s Washington. When the military needs money for any reason (maybe there is a war that it needs to fight, maybe it needs to match the naval build up of a rival, maybe it needs a new fleet of stealth fighters equipped with the latest technology) the Pulpists will need to give the military a bigger budget. Now imagine that later on the Pulpists want to shut down obsolete bases, disable unneeded weapons systems, lay off excess troops, etc, all to save money and keep taxes lower. At some point budgets will be tight – budgets always get tight. The military will resist the budget cuts, and they will resist the cuts as a united front. Since the military controls its own culture, it has no problem creating an us-against-the-Pulpists-culture (“Why should those rich bastards pay so little tax while veterans are having their pensions cut?”). The top generals will conspire privately, and decide to threaten the Pulpists with force should they not comply.

The above scenario cannot happen in the US because a mutinous American general cannot count on fellow generals being anti-democracy. If a mutinous general proposes an anti-cathedral/anti-civilian coup to a pro-cathedral general, the mutinous general will be ratted out. He will be fired and disgraced, and will probably get jail time. Since a coup needs dozens of generals to succeed, the probability of the conspirators getting ratted out is far too high for anyone to dare attempt a coup.

But if the military controls its own culture and promotions, generals would have no fear of privately suggesting a coup. Even if their fellow generals disagree, they won’t rat out a buddy, nor would that be cause to deny a promotion. Privately, such talk will be acceptable. Thus when the military, some day, has a real grevience, the climate will be right for organizing a mutiny and seizing power.

There are of course a number of other vectors of attack to your system. If the Theonomists manage to prevent a military coup, and gain power themselves, they can use their judicial power to expand the law to make it say whatever they want (as the higher courts have done in the U.S.)

The Pulpists have their own quite obvious attack path. Does your system have any sort of anti-trust laws? If not, expect the cabal of capitalists running things to combine into massive trusts and monopolies. They will then use their control over industry and information portals to exercise total power over the country. There will be formal mergers, back channel deals, agreements, and shared blacklists. Did a Theomist official do something to piss off the Cabal? Maybe he suggested introducing anti-trust laws? That Theomist will have a fun time using his credit card, buying an airline ticket, or logging into his email… Did an employee try to organize a union? He will not only be fired, but he will be blacklisted from employment in any Cabal owned business, and blacklisted from employment in any business that does business with a Cabal owned business.