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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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I didn't vote for Trump, though considering I live in one of the least-swing states in the country, I didn't vote at all because I didn't think it would be worth the gas I would expend driving to the polling place.

In any case, Trump is president now.

When I was a kid at the time of Obama v McCain my nice teacher Miss Collins gave us a very simplified and seven-year-old friendly explanation of politics. In some countries, one guy got to be in charge and nobody else got any say. But America was different because we got to have elections every four years, which let the people choose who we wanted to be in charge. Everybody went into a booth and chose who they wanted to be president, and whoever got picked by the most people automatically won.

When I got a little older I started spending a bunch of time on various forums and image boards where I learned that actually democracy is fake and gay. It's all a sham. We live under the system/the Cathedral/the regime/whatever. Voting doesn't matter because no matter who wins, The Regime will never allow a true based right-winger to come to power.

This skepticism continued through the Trump years, with the explanation for his 2016 victory being that They were caught off guard. And of course his loss in 2020 was because the System was no longer off guard, and had fortified itself against the possibility of another Trump victory through means of gross election fraud. "There's no voting your way out of this." In the lead up to 2024, various RW voices, including many on this forum, insisted that Trump would never be allowed to take office again. Mysterious votes would be hauled out at 3:00 AM to ensure a Harris win. Or else he would be assassinated. Or once in office, he would not be permitted to actually do anything Basedâ„¢ by the Deep State.

Well, despite the universal opprobrium and opposition of every single group of people I've been assured are really running the show, variously journalists, left-wing billionaires, the CIA, other unelected federal bureaucrats, college professors, the Jews, NGOs, liberal white women, or some combination thereof, Trump won. "They were caught off guard" no longer remotely works as an explanation.

Trump doing mass firings of federal employees, mass deportations, and dismantling DEI, just like he promised. The libs are coping and seething, but they can't do anything more than that, and the reason they can't do anything more than that is because more people pressed the "Trump" button than the "Harris" button in the voting booth, and according to the magic piece of paper, this means Trump is in charge now. Democracy worked exactly like Miss Collins said it would. This literally happened, just replace Hitler with "woke DEI". As soon as it the results of the election were clear, the libs immediately acted in accordance with the magic piece of paper and handed over power, without any attempt at military coups, riots, Hail Mary legal endeavors, or even a lib January 6th. And no Deep State has stepped forward to prevent him from doing exactly what he said he would do on the campaign trail. The Magic Piece of Paper has spoken.

While this is a massive L for the libs, it's also a massive L for many reactionary theory of politics which have proven so popular in what can broadly be called the "dissident right."

Like what is the cope for this? Trump isn't a real right-winger, the System would never allow the election of a real right-winger who would restore seigneurial dues and reverse the industrial revolution? The System is just biding its time until it can do a reverse QAnon Storm?

All the based esoteric schizos gibbering about the Cathedral and ZOG and how everybody is a communist were wrong. Turns, they were the fake and gay ones all along, and my sweet normie liberal second grade teacher was right the whole time. Democracy is Real and Straight. Sorry Miss Collins.

it's also a massive L for many reactionary theory of politics which have proven so popular in what can broadly be called the "dissident right."

As a long-time Moldbug/Yarvin reader, this is a surreal take.

What Moldbug wrote back from 2008 to 2012 was that the Republican party was fake opposition, that Republican presidents were basically pretending to be a CEO while in fact all hiring and firing is done by civil service laws, broader ideology is set by the Cathedral, and the Republican president impact is minimal. The steering wheel was not connected to the rudder.

Moldbug's proposed solution was to use the internet to route traditional mainstream media power, and hold a "true election" where a majority elects a president who promises to exercise the full executive authority of the Presidency, as FDR and Lincoln did, and to cut through or ignore the strata of civil service rules, administrative state rules, to re-attach the steering wheel to the rudder, etc. etc. in order to break the oligarchical Cathedral/administrative state.

A lot of men on the right read Moldbug, did route around the Cathedral, did do a hostile takeover of the Republican party, and are now at least starting to attempt what he proposed. I'm still worried that they are going to declare victory way too soon and it will all go off half-cocked. But it is a promising start. The Trump administration has yet to go full-Yarvin, and to the extent they hold back I think they are more likely to ultimately fail.

In 1972, the Cathedral could slander and smear a president and the normal Republican would believe the Cathedral over the president. In 2024, this is not the case. In part this is because of the Internet, in part because the Cathedral itself has hemorrhaged talent and dropped kayfabe -- but also in part because Yarvin himself exposed the Cathedral for what it was.

It's like Yarvin said, "Ah, I diagnosed your problem, it is far more fatal than people think, and the cures other people are selling will not work on it. However, I think I may have a treatment that just might work ..." And the person then tries the treatment and starts feeling better, and someone else says, "Ah, Yarvin said you would die of this disease, but you are feeling better, he is discredited!"

In fairness to your view, though, Moldbug and the neoreactionaries have written a lot of stuff and have gone back and forth on what might actually work, what will be allowed, etc, as is to be expected in any longrun and wide-ranging conversation. Yarvin has waffled and said that maybe the medicine won't work, maybe you need a different medicine, etc. With regards to the 2024 election, there was a lot of disagreement in the dissident right about whether the Cathedral would be strong and unified enough to find or manufacture enough votes to overcome its deep unpopularity. Yarvin himself said he did not know. Yarvin also just emailed an apology for underestimating Trump 47 and over-estimating the strength of the Cathedral in 2024.

But overall, to see this as a massive L for reactionaries is ridiculous. What we are seeing is actually the fruition of 17 years of intellectual trench-work and public persuasion.

ADDENDUM:

Moldbug's diagnosis was that we don't live in a two-party system, we live in a system where the Republicans or the "right" are basically fake opposition. They are allowed to win small victories every now, in part to make their opposition look real, and in part to fix obvious problems of too much leftism, but they are never allowed to win on existential questions and in general the country moves to thee steps to the left for every step to the right. It's unclear if Trumps actions will amount to a full regime change and rightward shift on existential questions -- or if it will actually be a re-invorgation of the two-party system just as people were catching on to the fact that the Republicans were fake opposition. IN this scenario, there will be some right-ward shift on the craziest of the left-wing stuff from the past ten years, but the Cathedral will remain in-tact and the country will continue to move to the left after Trump leaves, and very little about our system will have fundamentally been altered or fixed by Trump.

Thus, Moldbug's analysis was and is correct, and as long as the Trumpist-right follows is prescribed treatment plan, they can defeat the Cathedral and cure the country. But if they go off the treatment plan and don't actually bother to follow through in enforcing these executive orders and in firing workers and taking control of the budget and defunding the NGO/academia/non-profit complex, etc, then all Trump will have done is to reboot the fake two-party system with a more exciting season of TV.

in part to fix obvious problems of too much leftism

You can't expect much more from democracy than occasionally fixing obvious problems of too much leftism or too much rightism. Other regimes have a hard time clearing that bar.

It's hard for me to understand how Yarvin's "true election" is significantly different from "a candidate who prioritizes stuff I prioritize." The reason the Bushes or Reagan didn't do mass deportations or try to dismantle the civil service isn't because they were just powerless puppets while Trump isn't, it's because that's not what they ran on. It's not like Bush said he was going to get rid of birthright citizenship and then said "psych!" as soon as he got into office. They may have been anti-immigration or anti-federal bureaucracy in comparison with their opponents, but they didn't make that their entire platform the way Trump did. When a candidate actually runs on those things, and gets elected...he does them.

As a side note, it's bizarre to me this "FDR was a dictator!" thing Yarvin returns to again and again. In the very "true election" piece under discussion, he notes that FDR's power was significantly circumscribed by the judiciary, and that he couldn't order someone arrested and shot if he wanted to. But he was still a dictator because...he got a lot of stuff done, I guess? Any dictator worth his salt wouldn't have failed to pack the court. FDR didn't even really control congress for the second half of his time in office, the Republicans and the southern Democrats regularly united to thwart his agenda, and it worked. It was hardly a "rubber stamp."