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Notes -
Your Victories are Temporary, Theirs are Permanent
The most important thing lesson reified by recent political events is that while conservatives can win by democratic means, they cannot rule by them.
This is the single absolute lesson of the last fifteen years of democratic populist conservatism, from Meloni to Orban, from Bolsonaro to Trump. Progressive victories are eternal and irreversible, conservative victories are limited and ephemeral.
Understanding why requires only a cursory glance at the underlying constitutional mechanics of every major Western or Western-adjacent democracy (the same also applies in large part to many non-Western democracies, like India, although they have their own local differences).
The 20th century saw the construction of a number of constitutionally protected edifices that make conservative governance effectively impossible. These include, but are not limited to, the ECHR and European Union and the integration of the first or both into the constitutional structures of pretty much all European countries, the CRA in the United States, the emergence of supremely powerful progressive Supreme Courts in Canada, Italy and elsewhere, forms of devolution that strip precisely the powers from national governments required to implement conservative policies, and the emergence of a vast legal sector - particularly in the Anglo countries - designed to stymie policy implementation by using much of the above.
For example, adding a new citizen requires only that a single administration (which probably didn’t win the support of an absolute majority of voters even once, depending on where we’re talking about) admit and naturalize - via work or family visa, refugee status, legalizing illegal migrants, whatever - a single individual. Stripping someone of citizenship almost always requires constitutional change, in some cases unambiguously (eg second gen birthright citizenship in the US) but in many other cases (many EU countries) practically, because appeals to the ECHR, constitutionally enshrined, will almost always be won by appealing parties except in - and sometimes even in - the most egregious cases. This is occasionally possible for actual terrorists but certainly not for large migrant groups. This inherent imbalance - progressives can easily add a million citizens, conservatives can never remove a million citizens - cannot be addressed by democratic means, because national-level extreme supermajorities are very unusual in democracies. It is coup-complete not because reactionaries can never get into power, but because they cannot exercise the power that their democratic majority should rightfully give them.
Even where legislation was passed by the regular process rather than constitutional amendment, the entire construct above allowed for the insertion (as in the CRA) of vast amounts of new and powerful law into the existing constitutional framework in a way that became impossible to reverse. Additionally, longstanding small-c conservative norms like the US senate filibuster, an unwillingness to repeal previous passed laws, the existence of ‘economic conservatives’ who don’t care about culture, crime or safety and so on, prevented the reversal in any case of radical laws passed during times of bizarre, panicked or propagandized national sentiment. Squeamish quasi-conservative politicians winnowed majorities into minorities on any possibly radical piece of legislation that even sought to temporarily or partially reverse anything.
This is the situation Western conservatives find themselves in now. The center-left have established a system where - because of the constitutional, legal and social systems and customs that they created or exploited in the 20th century - any conservative government or administration can play only in a small sandbox, limited in power and with the knowledge that anything they do can be washed away at the next election. Even lightly chipping away at one of the sandbox’s walls requires the legislative energy of an entire term, and all the while they can accomplish nothing else, must contend with moderates in their own faction, and any wider economic, geopolitical etc issues that any government has to manage, and then usually fail at repealing anything anyway.
Sometimes, in countries with systems in which the left has alienated a huge traditional voting bloc for religious-cultural reasons (Turkey and India) an ambitious leader can somewhat accomplish some things democratically, or quasi-democratically by preserving an absolute legislative majority for 10+ years, which is enough to finally hack away at the aforementioned. But the Anglo countries are not Turkey or India (yet anyway), populations are too fickle, they have longer democratic traditions, and the center and left are more powerful.
Future conservative movements must therefore consider very carefully what they can and must do, after winning power legitimately by democratic means, to ensure the neutering of non-compliant institutions and the ability to rapidly consolidate extraconstitutional power to effect significant change, by whatever means.
'Yet anyway' except not in the way you mean.
The American red tribe is the largest group in the developed world which is replacing itself. Over a long enough timescale, this becomes your 'huge traditional voting bloc for religious-cultural reasons'.
And the left cannot simply adapt to the red tribe; their own children are joining its culture as a higher percentage of teens and young adults are from a red tribe background. This part is already happening, by the way- look at the pop charts. SEC football is the hot new trend, even in pretty blue tribe areas. A baseline level of hostility is the bare minimum for keeping their own children from defecting- and as the demography gets more and more tilted, they need to ramp up the hostility more and more. This is structural.
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Too bleak by half.
I'm experiencing some dissonance because things in Florida went approximately how I expected: reversion towards the mean but overall the GOP held on to power across the board. And frankly they 'deserved' it, the state has run amazingly well and they've passed meaningful, decent legislation. I was quite accurate and felt pretty gratified as the result came in (quickly, as usually).
Yet both Texas and NH in particular caught me off guard. I knew Talarico had a shot, so was braced for that. Didn't even realize that Abbott was at risk, much less for a blowout.
And NH did the inverse, the Republican Governor held on but the state congress swung in dramatic fashion. Not sure what exactly happened on the ground there to motivate that in particular.
And on top of that, results for most of the ballot measures, the tax caps, the bans on trans athletes, the ID requirements to vote... sure read like an endorsement of GOP policy platforms. With the gaping exception of datacenters, which didn't so so well.
Voters seemed pretty schizophrenic in what they were actually asking for this time around. Moreso than usual?
The most parsimonious explanation really does seem to be: gas prices.
That seems to sum up why voters were punishing the GOP pretty much everywhere, whilst still backing the 'competent' ones that delivered during their terms and supporting ballot measures that presumably reflect their true preferences and priorities. I've actually downgraded my assessment of the rationality/literacy of the median voter as a result of this, sadly. It wasn't exactly high before.
What that means is they'll probably swing hard back the other way when nothing really improves with the new boss. I don't see any reason to think that the Democrats will somehow fix their own structural issues in two years.
But I did just realize that this probably means an influx of even MORE people and money into Florida if the Dems start doing their normal playbook. Wheeeeee.
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This seems like a rather hysteric reaction to republicans committing a series of self-owns after electing the most incompetent maximalists they could find. If democrats stay in power, it will be because they've elected people who are less incompetent and less maximalist-- which is exactly what you should want. If, however, they make the exact same mistakes-- the pendulum will swing back, and republicans will have another chance.
"Implement popular, competent policy" shouldn't be rocket science, and yet politicians keep trying literally everyhing else and then reacting with surprise.
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You could write the same thing from a left-wing perspective. It used to be that many democratic countries - even western ones - had substantially socialist economies, with the state an active agent in the economy, public ownership or stewardship of many sectors and major companies, and public-sector unions and employees being the dominant representatives of a powerful and organized labour movement.
Now, thanks to international organizations and agreements, it is impossible to actually have a left-wing government. Want to nationalize a strategically important firm? Want the government to manage a crucial economic sector? Think a natural monopoly should be serviced by a state-owned company rather than private equity?
Sorry, you signed economic treaty #142495 with the international Fuck You Organization. That's actually illegal. There will be a fifteen-year court case in some international court run by countries that hate you, and in the meantime the bond market has decided you're actually a major lending risk. Look, I'm sure you'd love to manage your own country's economy, but the rest of us have decided that it's not really in our interests for you to do so, so please give control over to our team of experts so they can carve you up and take it all for themselves.
Now there is actually a thesis that ties everything here together: countries across the world have seen their legislatures abandon exercising their power, and ceded instead. To the executive, to the courts, to unelected institutions, to foreign organizations, etc. There's nothing stopping them from retaking that power, except that they don't particularly want to do their job, and the vagaries of culture and ideology in a globalized world have stopped them from working together effectively.
I'm reminded of when we had the PVV-led government in the Netherlands. They couldn't even raise the speed limit. The civil servants just blocked it, despite a parliamentary majority. They would've had to start replacing the civil servants, at which point there'd be court cases, at which point they would've had to start to try to pack the courts, for which there isn't even a legal mechanism AFAIK. It would've essentially required a self-coup. To raise the speed limit. Let alone try to do anything of actual importance. I can't help but conclude that the government is fake in much the same way that Iran's elected government is fake. The elections are real but the elected people have no real say in anything if the institutions disagree.
You're right that this doesn't just apply to "the right", but to anything that opposes the globalist institutional consensus, and that old-timey socialists would run into the same problems if any were elected. That doesn't make it any better.
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This does not follow the last few years.
The crux of the argument of the dominance of left-of-center parties in the administrative apparatus is basically the mix of personnel-are-policy and the long-march-through-institutions. This was a decades-long process to establish, even under favorable conditions such as the American New Deal coalition and the European post-war center-left consensus parties. Not only did it implicitly rely on consistent political dominance to manage the selection pressures over time, it also required a general public trust in the political neutrality of the administrative state and the corresponding reluctance/opposition to politically-motivated removals during those right-of-center electoral wins. The left marched through institutions, and the right didn't actively try to weed them out because that Wasn't How Things Are Done.
As political trust in establishment parties and their bureaucratic states has crashed since the 2008 financial crisis and other policy blunders, the willingness of parties to conduct politically-motivated removals of not-so-apolitical bureaucratic obstacles has increased on both sides of the Atlantic, and so has the public acceptance/tolerance of it. This isn't even 'right only' thing, such as where DOGE was managed a blatantly choreographed frighten-and-buyout downsize plan, or Argentina where Javier took a chainsaw to the peronist welfare-patronage state. This is even on the nominal left, see the ongoing attempts in Poland by Tusk to purge the recaltrant remnants of the PIS, or UK Labor civil-war to purge the Corbynistas. Various have won or lost their various elections, but even yesterday the American election didn't hinge on the DOGE layoffs. Heck, the US Democrats have and probably will continue to publicly run on the prospect of packing the Supreme Court and professionally targeting people who worked with the Trump administration.
The premise of permanent political control of the bureaucracy when a party leaves is dissolving before our eyes. Bureaucrats can increasingly be fired on suspicion of political defiance rather than be left to coordinate cliques, and so can bureaucrats who generally wouldn't think of themselves as bureacrats. There are going to be certain categories of government workers who are harder to replace than others due to various established hiring or dismissal restrictions, but this is a matter of rate of change, not inability. Again, see the Democrats strategizing on how to capture the Supreme Court, and notice how most concepts of how to avoid the same tactics being reversed against them rely on some form of 'and then we never lose power again.' They are nowhere near the first political party in the western hemisphere to plot out how to capture the courts, and they are not going to be the first to overcome all the reasons why it's reversible.
And what that means is that the 'small sandbox tax,' as bounded and implied by the term-energy needed to counter institutional capture, is in the process of equalizing, not solidifying. Almost twenty years ago, a Democratic administration might inherit the DOJ Civil Rights Division. In two years, they will be purging it, just like how Tusk the Europhile is trying to purge the Euroskeptics in Poland, or the post-Meloni left will be undoing her appointees in the system.
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I think this is what Dennis Mangan used to call "Despair Porn." Yes, there's a ratcheting problem, but (1) there are other issues in play (differential birth rates; internal conflict; etc.); and (2) history shows that some progressive wins are temporary (e.g. prohibition and abortion)
I mean with abortion we have lost on it on most ballot measures. Minus a few states. I think there is some truth to what he is saying.
I'm not sure I understand your point here. I'm simply saying that in 1973, progressives had a huge win on abortion -- abortion was recognized as a right everywhere in the United States. After years of tireless effort and a good deal of luck, that right was recently rolled back, at least to some extent. This seems to go against the idea that the Left's victories are permanent.
They’re permanent as far as public opinion and culture goes. Just legal Overturning roe might be a short term gain, but if states restablish the right state by state via ballot. Your back to square one to a degree. I can’t see the public getting more conservative on any real issues.
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So our only hope is ASI to emerge in under Elon's control. In that case there will be some cause for optimism for the west's fate.
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Rush Limbaugh’s words continue to echo: “When Democrats win, they’re in power. When Republicans win, they’re just in office.”
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