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Moldbug is correct when he says leftists understand power and the right does not. I bet these protests go nowhere, despite being entirely justified (especially compared to the Floyd protests). In fact, this justification is why they'll go nowhere: the right can only rally when something verifiably bad happens, and even then barely muster the gumption to care. The left, in contrast, doesn't give a rat's ass about the facts on the ground: the incident is useful to the cause, and we're going to milk it for all it's worth because what we actually care about is The Movement, not the incident.
There really is nothing similar to The Movement on the right. The left retains all moral authority to itself: as long as your actions are in service of the movement, nobody cares whether your actions are legal or not. Loot the Nike store, raze the Starbucks, shoot the United Health CEO, whatever: you may be a criminal to The System, but to The Movement, you're a hero! The right does not retain any moral authority to itself. All it can do is appeal to the existing laws and say, "See, the immigrant with a knife stabbed somebody! That's against the law! The police should ARREST him, and and... maybe even DEPORT him." Yeeeeah, one of these two teams is going to trounce the other.
I think the reason for this is that the left does actually have an overarching narrative that compels the assent of and motivates the actions of its adherents. That's not to say it's true or accurate, any more than Islam being able to compel suicide bombers means Mohammad actually flew to heaven on a winged unicorn. But the narrative is there, and it inspires loyalty and action.
The right, in contrast, has no Movement, especially not one that compels moral authority over the state to any relevant degree in #currentyear. There are two wings of the right: the actual tradcons (which look like this), and the Nazis (which often LARP as tradcons and look like this). If you bomb an abortion clinic or a migrant detention center, there will be no rallying to your defense by women with hundreds of thousands of likes inquiring when the conjugal visits will begin in your prison, there will be no photographer taking Renaissance photos or featuring your drip in Time magazine. Now, I know Luigi is unusually attractive, and the Clavicular worldview is to attribute the fanfare to that. But let's be real: if Luigi had shot a leftist figurehead, this is not the reaction he would have received. Luigi's cuteness is useful to the movement: the movement is not subservient to the actions of the most cute, as the Clavicular model would contend.
Can the right figure out how to claim moral authority? In its current incarnation, I doubt it. What the right is missing is the right side of the Bell curve: they have plenty of Zerglings, but no Overmind. In fact, I'll go so far as to say a lot of the Overminds they do have are false, in the sense that I think incidents like Jan 6 are setups to get rightoids to clown themselves into getting arrested. They think they're crossing the Rubicon with Caesar, but they're really just being goaded into making fools of themselves by agents more intelligent than they are running circles around them in their fog of war.
Moldbug is wrong (as he often is) in that he is trying to cram a fundamentally anti-technocratic and anti-materialist ideology into a technocratic materialist frame-work.
Yes, the left defines morality in terms of what what helps the movement, as long as your actions are in service of the movement they are good and just. And that is why they often end up building mountains of skulls.
Moldbug (and yourself it would seem) see the failure of "the right" to follow a similar playbook as proof that they are "stupid" or just "don't understand" when the truth is that they simply have vastly different ideas about from whence power comes, and what constitutes "morality" and "moral authority". If HlynkaCG or David Friedman were still here they would be banging on about Hobbes, and the diverse origins of assorted legal systems, but they aren't, so in their stead I pose to you the following questions...
Why would anyone feel a need to "claim moral authority" when they know for a fact that they already have it?
What value is there in an "Overmind" when every man is an agent in his own right?
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.
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.
"(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.
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