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Because the former makes you fight well in war (a la Iran), or because the former by itself will grant you the latter?
Capacity to accept extreme sacrifices helps whether you are fighting or not fighting. I agree with you, I think, that such a capacity does not in and of itself guarantee victory, peace or prosperity, but the good life runs on sacrifice, and if individuals or collectives are not willing to make those sacrifices personally, they will sooner or later run out of other peoples' sacrifices, in a similar way to how socialists inevitably run out of other peoples' money.
Horatius accepts dying well with a spear in hand, facing the foe. Christian martyrs die well, refusing to fight on principle. Either of these are, I think, valid expressions of accepting sacrifice, of the sort durable peace and prosperity are built on. But what you seem to be pointing to in this thread is that there is a sort of illusory sacrifice, where mere indolence masquerades as principle: "not organizing and not compromising is my principle. How about a fruitless gesture instead?" I would point out that there's also a similar illusory sacrifice pursuing violence-for-its-own-sake; CatgirlKulak and the Israel-Palestine conflicts seem like good examples of this failure mode.
Sacrifice is necessary, but waste is not sacrifice, and an inability to distinguish the two leads to disaster. Are we not fighting because it is not time to fight, or are we not fighting because fighting would be scary? Are we not fighting because fighting is wrong, or are we not fighting because we are too comfortable?
I have a chronic argument running with @CapitalRoom and @The_Nybbler on this subject for some years now. They argue that the time to fight has passed us by, and seem to want either fighting now, or an admission that fighting will never happen. My position is that while the current position is miserable and undignified, we are in fact moving in the correct direction, and endurance continues to be the correct choice.
In your opinion, what does organizing look like? What does compromising principle look like?
I agree with much of this. Sacrifice is necessary for any important endeavour - in a strike, for example, an employee forfeits pay because they hope to get more later, or even out of pure spite to send the message that they aren't willing to put up with intolerable conditions simply because it's technically still better then the alternative.
I've sacrificed to some degree for politics. I had a very hard time for a year or so, and put myself into some very difficult positions, trying to stop my local part of the university falling to wokeness. I held out for a decent while, and perhaps I blunted the worst of it, but I mostly failed. I failed in part because I ignored the advice of my working class formerly-leftist co-conspirator to go after the people in question for having pretty unsavoury associations with local left wing movements. There was a pretty good chance we could have caught them between being disloyal to the cause and affirming anti-semitism in front of the university. I said, "we don't do that, even though they do", and my friend respected my judgement, but I'm still a little haunted by that failure and the consequences of my desire to do the right thing.
In general, my belief is that political power is based on having both a popular element and a machine. A popular element alone is powerless: they can vote, but they can't choose the options on offer, they can't force the power structures of their country into giving them more than token gestures, and authority figures will be punished for appealing to them. A well-funded, well-oiled machine alone is weak: they can push, they can lobby, they can have quiet conversations, but if politicians are forced to (or want to) disclaim them and their desires in public, they will be limited in what they can achieve. So you need both.
I think this is what @Soteriologian refers to as Zerglings and the Overmind, respectively, and that's what I mean by 'organising'.
The main problem of politics is that maintaining both of those things requires you to do stuff that is icky. So for building a big popular movement, you often want someone like a Trump, whose achievements and gumption I genuinely respect but who I also consider dishonest, venal, and rather thick. You need to be able to cut through by exaggerating, you need to be able to fudge and distract when an issue is going to split your coalition, you need to be able to push your sins and failures onto a loyal follower so that you can be the beloved figurehead, etc.
For maintaining your machine, you need money, power, favours. You have to be able to work with some rather grim people. You have to give up stuff you feel strongly about in exchange for stuff you feel more strongly about. You have to enforce negative consequences on some people who are perfectly nice and probably decent in their way, because they are fighting on the other side and you need to signal that people should be careful before they try that or you simply need to get allies into their seats.
Look at Trump's 1.8 billion fund: it was clumsily executed, but it was the beginnings of being able to fund a machine that could give aid and comfort to Right wingers who fall in battle, the same way that the Democrats gave aid and comfort to all those people who ended up with Yale tenure. And it was scuppered because older senators' revulsion at the graft involved surpassed their desire not to have the country by run by Leftists.
Being a politician means being a sin-eater, for a cause worth it. That's their sacrifice. And it's why I have very little patience for the "do what's right and die free" brigade, because they're actively undermining these efforts and the wellbeing of their countrymen to maintain their own personal feelings of virtue. I don't mean that anything goes of course - when all's said and done, you still do have to be better than the other lot and not just axiomatically so, or what was the whole thing for?
Within the constraints of my own sense of self-preservation and a somewhat conflict-averse personality, I believe in pragmatism. That means you don't affirm pretty things that are no use and don't help, and it means you don't martyr yourself (or others) for nothing because that doesn't help either. Sometimes it might be time to die on that hill, but pick the hill carefully and remember that living on the hill in a pretty hobbit-hole is better.
"Be ye wise as serpents, and innocent as doves" is closer to what I try to aim at, though admittedly with a ratio of 2:1.
Well spoken and well reasoned. I'm curious what of the above @JeSuisCharlie would disagree with.
If I were to disagree with @Soteriologian's thesis, I think I would start with this part:
The basic nature of the problem he's pointing out here is undeniable. Blues are mobilized, organized, and integrated into an overwhelmingly powerful machine. Reds are none of these things, and thus their ability to secure or effectively wield power is appallingly limited.
On the other hand, I think there is incontrovertible evidence that this reality is visibly eroding over time, as Reds do in fact mobilize, organize, and integrate for the purposes of fighting for and wielding power in a serious fashion. I think Reds' position is better now than it was two years ago, better two years ago than it was four years ago, and so on, in a pretty clear straight line back to the eruption of the current culture war in 2013-2014.
@Soteriologian gestures at the enormous power of the Media, and in fact the media is enormously powerful... only, that power is a bare fraction of what it once was, and is pretty clearly sliding toward zero.
Blues used to brag about their ideological stranglehold over the entertainment industry, but that industry has become a laughing-stock being actively scavenged by a new industry of not-Blues.
Blues continue to revel in their ideological stranglehold of the education industry, but that industry is in serious decline, and I hope to live to see its expiration.
Blues reveled in their political dominance, but that dominance appears to me to likewise be coming apart. The Overton window continues to expand beyond the narrow constraints they attempted to enforce. @Soteriologian is correct that Reds as a collective are not to the point of embracing real conflict theory toward Blue society, but it seems obvious to me that we have been moving significantly and steadily in that direction for years now, and that this trend seems unlikely to me to stop for the foreseeable future.
It also seems clear to me that these significant improvements in the Red situation were not driven by "Overminds" like Yarvin or Hanania, but rather by exactly the sort of slow, grinding, tedious, grass-roots common-knowledge-generation @Soteriologian is dismissive of:
He is correct that pointing out the unworkable hypocrisy of Blue social systems is unlikely to secure short-term tactical victory. What it can and has done, I think, is generate steadily increasing capacity for meaningful resistance to those systems, by building a long-term shared understanding of the fractal wretchedness of the system that currently rules us. A good example of this, I think, is Spencer Pratt's run for mayor of LA. One might argue that such a run is quixotic, as he is almost certainly not going to secure the office. On the other hand, what his run offers is a stark reminder, from this day forward, that things might be otherwise than they are, a spotlight on the responsibility of those he ran against and those who voted against him for the continued misery and filth in which they cocoon themselves. One might argue that Red resistance is currently insufficient to turn the tide because of the failures of previous generations to do what was necessary; I think it will continue to be insufficient right up until it becomes decisive.
As for "Overlords", Hanania in particular seems constitutionally incapable of recognizing and cooperating with this process, apparently due to being too enamored with the existing formalities of power as they have heretofore been arranged. I would level a similar critique against Yarvin, but he appears to me to employ somewhat more humility and ideological flexibility than Hanania, who seems more inclined to picking a hill to die on.
Consider the following:
Do you agree with this assessment of the events of Jan 6th? If you had a magical button that could erase the events of Jan 6th from the timeline, would you press it? I'm confident Hanania would, and if he would not it would be because he thought it was a net-harm to his populist enemies. I would not, because it seems to me that the outcome has been and will likely continue to be of net-benefit to Reds. Reds as a tribe did not abandon the J6 protestors, and many of the Red leaders who did do so have subsequently been coordinated against by the tribe as a whole. In fact, J6 looks an awful lot like exactly the sort of "real power" discussed above in the reactions to Mangione, doesn't it? And where did it emerge from? Certainly not from Hanania and his ilk.
Angela Davis probably thought she was "crossing the Rubicon" when she provided material support in a terrorist action that resulted in the murder of a federal judge. Was that a wise move on her part? Under most normie analysis, it shouldn't be, but can we argue with the results? @Soteriologian scorns "rightoids" "getting themselves arrested" while "agents more intelligent than they are running circles around them", but isn't this exactly the sort of action you seem to be arguing for?
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