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Nah, I'm not a Moldbug fan, but he is correct here.
The right historically has not had such difficulties with this. The US colonists said, "You will not tax my stamps and tea, and if I catch you doing so, I will shoot you." These are not envious leftists or commies. They had a sincere, coherent political model that they were willing to pursue -- not just to the point of sacrificing their own lives, but to the point of sacrificing the lives of those who disagreed with them. They prioritised their movement and their vision above that of the governing state, and they were willing to back that with as much violence as they could muster.
That is, in fact, what winning looks like.
What are you talking about? The "Founding Fathers" were absolutely leftists. They were liberals, the left of their day. The Sons of Liberty and the Boston Tea Party were left wing acts of terror. Sam Adams was the Luigi Mangioni of his time. George Washington was the exact same sort of leftist filth as Tyler Robison. Every single signer of the DoI was a vile traitor to their rightful king.
Remember how the terms "left" and "right" in politics came to be in the first place. That these people are at all considered "right wing" nowadays is only because of how much further left Cthulhu has swum. The very existence of the USA is one of the prime examples of how the left has been winning for centuries. Indeed, for the past 250 years, America has been the primary font of the leftist cancer eating away at Western Civilization.
I mean, if you want to define any insurrection against the established order as innately leftist, sure. From a monarchist viewpoint, there's little difference between 1776, 1789, and even 1917. But the Americans -- both now and then -- view their revolution as quite distinct from these others. Call me a liberal if you must, but I find their case compelling.
The problem with Monarchists is they have to answer for kings like, well, the current king of England, who is overseeing the replacement migration of his own people and outright celebrating it with foreign holidays. Is rebellion against this monarchy "leftist" or "liberal"? Who is the left and who is the right here? I think the terms just lose all meaning.
And it's not like "Oh, well this is an exceptional case, nobody historically could have imagined having an idiot monarch like Charles," because, yes they could. This happens all the time: finding yourself in the position of having an idiot as monarch is the problem with monarchy, and has been so for all of recorded human history.
No, not any insurrection; just those in the direction of the "Enlightenment" project. An insurrection against a modern, liberal democracy — yes, even one with a powerless, figurehead "king" (in name only) — to restore the pre-liberal order, and install a real monarch, would be the exact opposite of leftist.
I am an American — at least by birth and citizenship.
Charles is not a real king. No figurehead "monarch" deserves to be considered such. A real king does not merely "reign" in some symbolic sense, he rules. He wields real power over his kingdom. Of all the so-called monarchs of Europe, only Prince Hans-Adam II appears to be the only real one. Indeed, I'd say Kim Jong-Un is more of a king than any in Europe.
This gets at one of my deepest disagreements with Curtis Yarvin. Not to go all "no true monarchist" and all, but he continually shows that he doesn't understand kingship or aristocracy at all. His CEO "King" who answers to a shadowy cabal of anonymous "shareholders" (everyone forgets that part), and who maintains the loyalty of his troops through tech tricks like "cryptographic weapons locks" is not a king. And Yarvin has repeatedly waxed poetic about the "aristocratic qualities" of himself and his social class, while never even holding back his disdain for all thing martial.
A real aristocrat is, first and foremost, a knight. It is their martial virtue that makes them "the best." An aristocratic class always begins as elite warriors, and even when reduced to mere administrators, they still thought of themselves as warriors first. (I could go on about this at length, from Tang China's sword laws, to Hagakure, to Downton Abbey, and to why World War I utterly devastated the aristocracy of Europe.)
And every new royal dynasty begins with a warlord. Liu Bang. Augustus. Alfred the Great. Charles the Hammer. William the Bastard. Temüjin. Abdulaziz Al Saud. (Even Kim Il-sung, depending on how you define it.) Nobody sat around armchair theorizing in an ivory tower coming up with "the divine right of kings" or "the mandate of heaven," then set out to establish a new form of government on the basis of those theories (the way liberal and leftist governments have been made). No, men forged kingdoms with the sword, and then the legitimating theories like the above were created to justify them later. The deed precedes the creed. To quote this tweet:
The way we get a real right-wing government isn't by convincing people to become trad-caths, an entryist "long march" through academia, silicon valley billionaires building charter city "network states," or posting youtube videos droning on about Gramsci and repeatedly boasting about how much smarter this makes you than the "slopulist" plebs. No, it's the current order collapsing into anarchy and civil war, followed by one or more strongmen bringing order at the point of a gun. (And thus, the proper thing for a monarchist in the west is either to 1. join the military, the police, or otherwise develop martial skill; or 2. do whatever he can to accelerate the inevitable decay of our system to hasten than collapse (traditionalist accelerationism).)
Charles III going the way of Charles I would almost certainly be a step in the right direction for the UK.
Was there some dynastic mishap or did you meant to write Europe rather than England?
Yes, I meant Europe. Sorry, that was a brain hiccup. Fixed.
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I agree with your presentation on kingship and the origin of its authority, and that Moldbug doesn’t really "get" it.
That said, you're still left with the age-old problem of "What happens when the sun sets on the sun-king?" Enlightenment philosophy was developed and trounced everything in its path for a reason! In the same sense that true kingship is ultimately grounded in conquest and social Darwinism, I point to the triumph of liberalism over older thought modalities and say, "Behold, your king."
Finally, there are a lot more problems with kingship today than there were in the Enlightenment era, because the nature of battle has changed. What is a knight in the face of an autonomous drone swarm, where each unit that can kill him and his brethren costs less than his monthly salary? What is a knight when his bank account can be frozen on the whims of a bureaucrat?
Whatever a knight is in 2026, it looks nothing like a knight from medieval Europe. And a true king surely more unrecognisable still.
But then again, I suppose a true king, by definition, would figure all this out.
"O Come, O Come, Emmanuel and ransom captive Israel"
Well, the Dreaded Jim has actually had a lot to say on this, particularly with the lessons of the Ukraine war. Specifically, the limits of communication links and autonomy means that drone swarm proves most effective with a skilled, mobile elite operator providing human guidance from nearby on the battlefield. Specifically, he's argued that these men in fact represent the emerging "new knights."
How did knights historically deal with either a lack of cash on hand, or an obstructive clerk? For that matter, need I mention traditional aristocrats' disdain for commerce (and banking)? How many were cash-poor? How much of their wealth was in either land holdings, castles/fortresses, and their military equipment? How Germanic kings were described in sagas as "breaker of rings" or "foe of gold"? What need does a king have for a bank account — when he needs something, he just holds out his hand, and some loyal subject places it in that hand.
As others have pointed out, money isn't power, power gets you money. The wealthy never truly rule, because wealth is too easily expropriated; and thus, the rich end up beholden to whoever defends them from expropriation (either with the sword, or with a faith that condemns such taking). Thus, society is ruled by either warriors or priests. Our modern problem is priestly rule.
(Again, this is a problem with Moldbug. He spills enormous amounts of digital ink detailing exactly how the current priestly "brahmin"/"elf" elite are ruling terribly… and then proposes solutions that are all about making that very same elite's rule permanent, while trying to design technological mechanisms to exclude warrior rule forever…)
Your narrative is rather... motivated, I'd say lol
Kings and gold are more tightly associated than Indians and the Ganges river, and there have been no shortage of kings throughout history who were extravagant spenders, e.g., Nero. Heck, even in the New Testament, the association between money and kings is abundantly clear: "Shew me a penny. Whose image and superscription hath it? They answered and said, Caesar's." (Luke 20:24). And it's not like this is some story concocted by the Jews: coins did, in fact, have Caesar's image on them, and this is not a matter of any historical dispute.
Further, the association between knights and banking is also... well, not exactly a story the Jedi would tell you (my young apprentice). The Knights Templar were basically an international banking cabal, thriving on using religious pretense to dodge international commerce restrictions.
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Except they didn't. As David Friedman and many other Libertarian Scholars are fond of pointing out, the end-result of the American Revolution was not a transfer of power from the King of England to the Continental Congress, but rather a rectification of De Jure (on paper) authority with the reality on the ground.
A "rectification" settled by shooting the British army until they fled back to England.
The point is that a Venn diagram of the most wealthy and influential men in the colonies pre Boston Massacre in 1770 and post Constitutional Convention in 1787 is practically a circle, thier power didn't come from "shooting the British army until they fled back to England" they already had it.
How many wealthy and influential Royalists lived in the Colonies before the Boston Massacre? How many lived in the Colonies after the revolution?
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"(We) Live Free or (You Will) Die" works great, I don't think anybody doubts that. The problem is that it's mythologised until people believe that standing up and declaring your willingness to die for freedom makes you free, rather than being able to back up that declaration with overwhelming and coordinated force.
This is why conservatives are constantly trying to do what the Left does (protests, pointing out hypocrisy, public mourning of horrible murders) and are baffled when they don't get the results the Left gets.
EDIT: Whatever power those men might have thought they had was on sufferance from the British until they were able to fight off the British, if you prefer to put it that way. If the British had put down the American Mutiny (as it might have been dubbed) then things would have been very different, and we would now agree post hoc that those wealthy and influential men in the colonies had been standing on unstable ground.
And this is where Friedman and his disciples would point out that "the myth" is true. There is a very real sense in wich being willing to die does in fact make make you free. Someone can put a gun to your head but they can't make you do anything if you are sincerely prepared to eat that bullet.
Nor would i say the right is "baffled" so much as we have different reasons and motives.
And I think that's very beautifully polished bullshit. "Free to die" is a very different kind of freedom from "Free to live a happy and prosperous life doing all the stuff you (plural) think I shouldn't do" and people are overwhelmingly interested in the latter. Presenting the former using the same word as the latter is somewhere between a category error and slippery rhetoric, depending on the speaker's motive.
If you are prepared to eat a bullet rather than obey, all you're doing is saving your killer time and potential future complications while they take your stuff, pour the ashes of your fathers in the river, and deface the temples of your Gods. As we see from the statue of Robert E Lee.
Personally I want to die fat and happy, surrounded by friends, disciples and twelve loving grandchildren who will further my beliefs and family story.
The latter is built on the former. Without the former, the latter disintigrates.
Because the former makes you fight well in war (a la Iran), or because the former by itself will grant you the latter?
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It is good that we have been able to speak plainly.
Sorry, I'm not trying to be a dick, although I know it's coming out that way, I'm just wearied of the endless conversations on the Right which run approximately:
A: we need to actually organise and compromise on our principles to get results.
B: not organising and not compromising is my principle. How about a fruitless gesture instead?
A: will it help? it never has before
B: the willingness to make a fruitless gesture even if it won't help is the most important thing in the world
A: that sounds like no. do you actually care about making any real change in circumstances?
B: not if it would require me to do anything I'm not already doing
It's very frustrating when half the people who agree with me on concrete things that are going wrong would literally rather eat a bullet than help me try to fix them, or even rather than admit that what they've been doing hasn't got anywhere.
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