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Our rationalist-adjacent 'friend' and (perhaps?) sometimes lurker mister Curtis Yarvin has another new substack article out, titled The Situation and the Solution..
It's a long article, and follows his typical style of being quite doomer about the political situation, lamenting how weak modern men are, and generally telling us that for REAL regime change we need HARDCORE monarchy, with no letting up.
However, he does make an interesting point, which dovetails nicely with something @coffee_enjoyer said downthread, as I'll quote here:
Moldbug agrees that fun is one of the missing elements in modern white culture and politics. He recommends replacing a modern 'soft party' with what he calls a 'hard party,' partially by making things fun:
What I find most interesting is Yarvin's vision of a 'hard party app', where people sign up to an app for their preferred political party, and then the political party gamifies political action. If you sign up, download the app, and pay your dues, you get basic party affiliation. If you go vote in an election or two, you get a badge. If you go and engage in some activism or political volunteering, you get an even doper badge, level up, or whatever.
Yarvin sees this gamification as a way to essentially recreate the old, militaristic political parties of the past, for modern men's sensibilities. He understands that modern men are much softer and weaker, so instead of continuing to try and make people angry and pissed off, which hasn't worked, he wants the right to play towards the fun that it can be to band together to fight your enemies.
While I don't always agree with Yarvin's extremely pessimistic take on right wing politics, I have to admit that the app idea is incredible! This is one of those ideas I read and thought... huh, why don't we already do this in politics?
I'm sure there are some reasons, but especially now that Yarvin has posted about it, I wonder how long it will take for political parties to adopt this app-style, gamified setup. And, I wonder how that will change the political game as we know it?
Weird inconsistency for him. Usually his spiel is about how making things more restrictive and exclusive them better. Like the urbit project.
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He starts out talking about the full sovereignty enjoyed by British parliament, but then goes down a rabbit hole with some pie-in-the-sky, untested, cyber-punk app idea. Why not go with what you know works (and has worked for 700+ years). Call a constitutional convention with the express stated purpose of switching the US over to a parliamentary system. Everyone hates the current system. I bet you could get support from a lot of unexpected corners. You can call the prime minister the president if you want, for the sake of the hard core traditionalists. But otherwise, it would be a clean sweep.
For the record, I prefer stability over all of this. But if you are going to do something, copy an existing model and implement it well. That's how China is eating our lunch. We might as well eat someone else's.
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I see Yarvin is once again back to LARPing as a psycho.
Political campaigning, much like military campaigning, is 99% tedious and unglamorous shit, and even the exciting bits are quite often exciting in the wrong way. Militaries resolve this by not allowing soldiers to quit (and, often, by not allowing them to refuse to participate). Political parties don't have such tool kits available, so they have to resort to cheap carrots. Which is to say, we already do what Yarvin proposes, just not through an app. Politics, especially local politics, operates heavily on a prestige economy, where you can climb the ladder just by being willing to show up and do boring organizational work.
The problem is that Yarvin is wrong. Most people don't crave this level of political engagement. Trump's big success is with low-propensity voters who are like 50/50 on whether they can be fucked to fill out their entire ballot in presidential election years. Votr^tm badges are not going to persuade them to commit massive amounts of time and effort in political ground game. They want to watch the game, they don't want to be out on the field getting demolished.
An app as an organizing tool would have limited utility, anyway. You could rally the grunts, perhaps, but an open registration tool would be hilariously vulnerable to sabotage and subversion.
It has worked. The problem confronting Trumpism isn't that its supporters aren't motivated. It's
a) they have a ceiling of 51% of the vote, meanwhile about 40% of the country wouldn't piss on them if they were on fire and the marginal Trump voter will desert or stay home once it becomes clear he won't/can't deliver on his fanciful promises.
b) the gaps between their promises, their ideas, and their competence are insurmountable (but that's populism for you).
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Because the two party FPTP system has produced incumbents who do not benefit from a more engaged voting base. Democracy is fundamentally evolutionary rather than intelligently designed, those currently in power have been produced by the current system, and changing it means undermining their own success. Using an app-style gamified setup would alter the makeup of the electorate, and that would change who gets elected.
Every member of congress won a party primary voted in by people who currently vote in party primaries, then won a general election won by people who currently vote in general elections. Altering the makeup of the electorate will result in fewer incumbent members of congress being reelected.
The makeup of the electorate can be changed only when one or another existing faction within the party seeks to change the rules to benefit themselves, or when an outside force appears that hacks the evolutionary created rules. Trump(ism) was such a force: Trump did not have majority support within the existing Republican electorate when he announced, but he was able to hack the system and stack enough wins to become inevitable before a single competitor could be settled on. The primary had settled in the past into a mix of formal rules and customs where a lineup of evangelical conservatives and a lineup of moderates would run a series of primaries until settling on two champions to duke it out. Trump stepped into this structure, which was not created and negotiated for the purpose of the MAGA faction seizing power, and hacked it by inventing the MAGA faction which transcended these boundaries. It was both radically more socially conservative than the evangelicals on immigration and anti-feminism, and radically less socially conservative on gays and the sexual revolution more generally; he combined an aggressive nationalism which appealed to NatSec neocon moderates, with feigning a libertarian anti-interventionist condemnation of nation building adventures abroad.
Such a solution to political party engagement will exist where and when it benefits the existing power bases, and not otherwise. What allowed the MAGA faction to hijack the existing Republican party and skinsuit it was that it hacked the system in an accidental ambush not by elaborate plan.
Further:
Is already really close to how things work now if you show up at the local level. You do small things, which gain status, pretty soon you can do bigger things. It just happens in real life, and less legibly to those used to sitting behind screens and getting XP for completing quests.
Where I disagree with Yarvin's essay is that I don't think MAGA has failed, I think that the hard MAGA faction within the Trump administration has specifically come to the realization that they will not have time to build anything before they lose and run out of steam. What they do have time to do is destroy. They can't build a new international order, but they can so undermine the reliability of the United States as a partner that no future neocon administration will be able to find willing patsies and partners. They can't actually build an American manufacturing base, but they can destroy the decades old system of international cooperation such that it cannot easily be rebuilt. They can't rebuild the federal government, but they can make it an unreliable and annoying place to work. I think that DOGE and MAGA have achieved a great deal of destruction in the federal government through weaponized incompetence and chaos, and that it will not be rebuilt in our lifetime.
PS: I don't know if he's lost his fastball or I just lost interest, but I find Yarvin increasingly unreadable lately.
The app idea runs counter to the concept if "skin in the game." What would actually work is an organized paramilitary counterpart to Antifa, with actual ranks and unforms and hierarchical privilege, responsibility, and accountability. However the SA are still such a potent memetic vaccination it probably couldn't happen until some time after the last Boomers are gone.
Antifa functions by being anonymous, and also by being a motte-and-bailey. You cannot build an above-ground paramilitary, particularly not a right-wing one, in the United States without it being it becoming infested from top to bottom with feds and other saboteurs, and every member ejected from polite society.
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Just what our society needs, more screen time!
If anything, I would support the direct opposite: make politics boring and difficult again.
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I had the exact opposite reaction. I think everything in the article is excellent up until the app idea. It's totally unnecessary. Trump could have marched over government. People vote for the president and expect them to lead. If "the law" is in the way then get it out of the way.
You don't need it to staff government. If you set out a competent agenda you will get talent from everywhere.
People just need/want to vote once and have it fixed. For 99% of people that is the appropriate level of engagement. You need an American Bukele, perhaps with a stiffer temperament, but instead they got Trump.
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It is not specifically in the form of an app but these kinds of symbolic incentives for voting already exist? Stuff like I Voted stickers and campaign buttons have been popular in the United States for decades. My own state (which has primarily mail-in elections) even offers downloadable stickers to put on your social media. I'm fairly sure, though I haven't done it myself, political campaigns hand out similar things for volunteering and so on. Is it supposed to be the app-based part specifically that's innovative? Or some different verbiage that's more motivating? Maybe tying it all together as a unified progression? I wonder if at some point you run into state laws restricting the giving of a thing of value in exchange for some of these activities.
Unrelatedly, a bunch of his ideas about how to operate a hard party to take power are just straight up illegal in the US today. Political Parties Are Illegal in the United States describes many of them. If your plan requires you to first takeover a substantial fraction of state governments to change their election laws so you can have the political party to take over the state, I don't think your plan is very good! People have thought before about making the kind of party Moldbug envisions. It turns out we used to have them and they kind of sucked so we largely made them illegal.
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Honestly, I think we should replace Congress with this app.
I think this is where I'm going to take a moment to shill my personal vision: let's amend the apportionment act of 1929.
I don't know if the house of representatives having 1,000 members would be an improvement, but I'd like to see what would happen.
A while ago I kicked around a concept of political representation that hinged on dunbar's number
Basically: You choose to join a group of 100 people. These 100 people can live anywhere, it's just the group you're a member of. You can leave your group if another is willing to accept you.
Every group, let's call it a "century" after the Roman military unit, is a member of a higher level group of 100 centuries (call that a "meta-century" for now), and each one elects a representative into the meta-century. Just like individuals, the representative can choose to make their century a member of a different meta-century, if that meta-century is willing to accept it. The meta-century chooses one representative into the meta-meta-century, and so on until you have one president.
Every century would be essentially sovereign with respect to every individual who is a member, including up and down the hierarchy.
I have no idea how well it would work but it would ensure that every single person is contained within a political unit below dunbar's number, which I think is a good property.
It might be slightly more practical to say:
A normal-size group comprises 71–140 people.
An undersize group comprises 51–70 people. Within one month it must become a normal-size group, by either merging with another group or taking on new members individually.
An oversize group comprises 141–200 people. Within one month it must become a normal-size group, by either splitting into multiple groups or bleeding off members individually.
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Weak. Return to the original apportionment ratio of 1-30,000. Bring on the Small City of Representatives.
(It would make gerrymandering harder and less impactful, though the dynamics of an 11k member house would be very weird)
Ackchually, according to the United Nations you don't hit "city" status until 50,000 people, so this would just be a mid-sized town.
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Trying to imagine the sheer logistics of this. A roll call vote like the vote for Speaker would (assuming each vote takes 5s) take ~16 hrs to conduct.
I don't see why roll call votes are necessary. Just use an electronic tabulator like they used to poll the audience on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
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I imagine you'd end up with a house-within-the-house that dealt with the vast majority of business.
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Recursive sub-parliaments?
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Imagine the committee appointment drama.
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I've done the math, and if we kept up with the original intent, we'd be close to 1776 congressmen right now.
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I will admit, I've wondered before about the feasibility of making the people into the "fourth house" of government. I feel like introducing an app where the people get a veto on all bills, budgets, etc. and make the margin for blocking a flat 50% of those who vote on the bill. I guess the major problem is that it introduces a bias to inaction, but I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing.
I think if there's one thing the US constitution doesn't need, it's another veto point. Congress has basically abandoned legislating, leaving actual lawmaking to the Supreme Court and the Presidency. It doesn't need another thing stopping it from doing its job.
So the reasoning behind it in my eyes is that the government keeps doing things that (almost) no one wants. Like, I don't doubt it's popular with the actual people in office, but most people would be very happy to cut off a large amount of foreign aid (especially to Israel).
Up here in Canada, we had a recent bill (C-12 I believe, but it may be C-2) which was basically "close down the borders, but also give warrantless search powers to cops." Our most recent budget included lines that basically said "our government can arbitrarily exempt any business it wants from following the laws." I think a bit of stalemate when the government tries to spend money is a good thing.
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I'd say most of the law making gets done in the bureaucracy. And technically that bureaucracy is under the presidents authority, but reality is a much different picture. The supreme Court handles a tiny minority of disputes that are interesting to legal nerds. But they rarely make much of an impact. The only ruling I can think of recently that impacted me was their handling of homelessness.
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