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Notes -
Given the (pretty good, IMHO) case Michael Lind lays out in this Tablet piece about how demographic trends still strongly favor utter dominance by the Democratic Party, what can people on the right do, then? Note, I'm not asking what the Republican party does, which is move left to capture moderate voters so to remain electorally viable (per the median voter theorem and Duverger's law); I'm asking what voters who care about the policies that would thus be abandoned, as opposed to the "politics as sports" folks who are happy just so long as "their team" beats the other guy.
To @100ProofTollBooth, @2rafa, and the others:
What, really, nobody can come up with anything other than some form of "join a religious group (for instrumental reasons, even if you don't believe) and hunker down" Benedict Option, where you just try to avoid being crushed utterly until… what, Judgement Day?
Say what you will about @FCfromSSC's usual over-optimistic canned response ("Just defy the Federal government, brah. They can't do anything to you if you don't accept their legitimacy; the bullets in that FBI agent's gun will bounce off you once you stop respecting Federal authority!"), it's at least a proposal for winning, as opposed to merely slowing the losses and trying to avoid total defeat (and poorly, at that).
You don’t do it waiting for judgment day, you do it so that when the opportunity arises, and it may well do, you can eventually seize power. Not of the whole country, but of some kind of defensible territory. Look at the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. The Jews waited 2000 years. But if you have a tight knit group, with money, that practices endogamy, that produces children, eventually you may well have the opportunity to exercise some kind of power. And on a more practical and immediate note, it also allows you to impose your own kind of order on a community, preserving a space for yourself and people like you even as the wider nation might shift radically.
And how many other minority groups ended up assimilating and dying out? There's a survivorship bias here.
That's a lot of "ifs." Especially the money part, these days; but also endogamy (few manage it, and are often under suspicion, save maybe the Hasidim — who have the advantages of being Jewish — and the Amish — who are seen as "quaint" and harmless) and producing children.
Only as much as the broader society allows you to.
Until the government decides to crush your communities, arrest your leaders, and take and "residential school" indoctrinate/assimilate your children.
Fine, yeah. But consider how many times the Soviet Union used extremely harsh measures to try to eradicate ethnic identity and still failed at doing so. Nothing is guaranteed. But the option is still better than either (a) fighting impotently and getting crushed or (b) doing nothing and guaranteeing failure.
Again, the only alternative is coup-complete and in that case the far right just doesn’t have the necessary amount of elite human capital versus the center and left as Tracing and others have (in my opinion) persuasively argued.
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