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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?
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.
One of these days I will have to write my oral history of the Republican civil war, but today is not that day.
In any case that is not how I remember things going down.
What Trump did was accurately identify key fault lines that cut across large swaths of both the conservative and corporate sides of the Republican electorate as well as former Democrats who'd been alienated by the national party's embrace of things like open borders, decarceration, drag queens in pre-schools, and men in women's sports. IE "it's the economy stupid", bread and butter issues are what win elections. This should not have been such a novel insight but this is where the whole "skin in the game" element comes into play.
By the spring of 2016 it was already clear that the upcoming election would be a fight between the beltway establishment and some variant of the Tea-Party with Hillary Clinton representing the establishment. A vote for Hillary was a vote for more of the same, and for a large swath of the population who viewed the foreign, financial, and domestic policies of the last decade as just one massive fuck-up after another "more of the same" was not a compelling sales pitch. @faceh's rant about rewarding failure reflects much of the sentiment I heard from voters at the time. As such it seemed clear to me that despite being the favorites of the national party neither Jeb Bush nor Chris Christie ever really stood a chance. If a voter wanted business as usual, what did either of those two have to offer over Hillary? Accordingly the 2016 Republican primary looked like it was Ted Cruz's to lose. However, Cruz's campaign was hampered by the fact that he was a career politician with no real accomplishments to his name aside of being able to climb the party ladder. As such there was a lot of discussion at the state committee level about whether Cruz had the balls to fight the beast or would he become just another beltway stooge if elected.
something I don't think that a lot of our more liberal posters here really grasp is that despite their surface level similarities the internal organization and power structures of the Republican and Democratic parties are radically different. Republican state and municipal committees are more like independent chapters than wholly-owned subsidiaries.
Enter Trump, Trump doesn't have Cruz's problem, he's not a career politician, he has a portfolio of accomplishments he can point to, and for all the sneering from establishment liberals about him not being a proper gentlemen, there is no question in anyone's mind about whether he has the balls or stomach for a fight and by adopting the most popular planks of the Tea-Party platform he immediately made himself the front runner. Cruz and Trump would fight it out to the end, but the choice was only ever going to be between Tea-Party original recipe (Cruz and Rubio), and Tea-Party extra crispy (MAGA) with Rubio throwing his lot in with Trump putting an end to that debate.
Trump isn't "wearing the Republican party like skinsuit" so much as he is the brick that the electorate has chosen to throw through the establishment's window. You and others keep throwing around words like "destruction", "chaos" and "weaponized incompetence" like this wasn't the plan from the start. It's only "incompetence" if you define "competence" as supporting a top-down liberal order.
This misapprehension of the message being sent by electing Trump is why the keep stepping on rakes. "Oh my Lord he's breaking norms and doing things without checking for permission, this is chaos!"
Honey if the politicians are upset that's valued added.
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