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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?
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.
I would like to second the linked post about political parties (as understood in the rest of the democratic world) being illegal in the United States. This is something where Americans don't realise how weird their political system is - in most of the world, parties make their own rules for how they select candidates.
One of my not-widely-held views is that Duverger's law is not the main explanation for the US two-party system - other FPTP countries have fewer serious parties than PR countries, but they don't normally have exactly two (Canada, the UK, and India all have systems with two dominant parties but the smaller parties consistently get seats in Parliament and aren't going anywhere).* The big difference between the US and other FPTP countries is that in the US the easiest way for an outsider to run for President is to capture one of the existing party lines with an outsider primary campaign, whereas in other FPTP countries the easiest way is to set up a new party. Ballot access laws in the US are a relatively small part of the difference - the main one is that the primary system makes it easier for an outsider to skinsuit an existing political party.
If the US had a Commonwealth-style political system, the Republican party would have kicked Trump out - in the same way Kinnock kicked Militant out of Labour in the 1980's or the Tories kicked out their remaining pro-EU MPs between 2016 and 2019. He would have had to do what Farage did, and set up his own populist political party.
FWIW, I think that political parties which can police their own political boundaries are a good thing and skinsuit candidates are a bad thing. The American system appears to produce worse candidates than allowing party organisations to select candidates, and there is an obvious reason for this - if you are a professional politician or a serious activist, you are a lot more motivated to take electability and competence into account when voting in an internal party election (being in power is a lot more fun than being in opposition) than you would be as an armchair supporter. American primaries are either successfully managed by party insiders so they don't actually function as open primaries (the The Party Decides thesis), elect the candidate with the most cash and/or name recognition, or elect an ideologically pure candidate who is going to turn off the median voter.
* Any discussion of two-party systems gets confused by the period c. 1945-1980 where almost every democracy including Germany (PR) and Australia (AV) had something close to a two-party system because of the dominance of class-based politics.
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