There are two kinds of politics: petty, and grand. Petty politics are the politics of habitual obedience, sincere cooperation, and regular procedure. Grand politics are the politics of the unlimited exception. Anything can happen. Everything can change.
Every regular and orderly regime throughout history believes, and of course claims, that it has abolished grand politics. Every Chinese dynasty is the last dynasty and will reign forever. Of course, it never works out that way. American history is no more free from regime changes than Chinese history. We just don’t like to talk about it that way.
What happens? The narrowness of petty politics hardens into outright sclerosis, locking the wheel of the ship of state on a course straight toward some rock or other. It becomes more and more obvious to everyone that the wheel must turn—and that nothing within the power of petty politics can turn it. Certainly, by the earthquake clock of United States regime changes (1776, 1789, 1861, 1933), we are more than due.
But the rupture is never easy. It is not even the question of which way to turn the wheel. The emergency nature of the situation, seemingly so obvious, is itself almost impossible to grasp. Those who cannot grasp it, who often will fight for nothing else, will fight to tie down the wheel. “Centrists,” they may call themselves.
In this trap, a great nation can decline for decades, even centuries, especially if its decline is hidden by technical progress. Anyone who understands the standards of Britain in 1876 can evaluate the governance of Britain since 1876, by those standards. Isn’t an experiment evaluated by standards set down when the experiment begins? And I’m afraid we do have to correct our results for all that technical progress—which certainly was not exclusive to our Anglo-American ideals. The Nazis had tech too.
Such is the knot we have to cut today. Let’s look at some of the strands that lock the wheel, and keep us attached to our disastrous, and too often ridiculous, petty politics. This will not be an exhaustive survey.
First, everyone has normalcy bias. As an American, when you go to the Third World, even to parts of Europe, you notice that the locals, even locals of your own international social class, seem to tolerate phenomena that you would regard as indicative of a complete collapse of state capacity. Rest assured that Chinese tourists look at your country this way. Not to mention South Africa!
Our minds are too small, too focused on the now, on our own lives and worlds, to even conceive of how much better things could be. Or how much worse they could still get. And our version of history, the only compass for navigating the present landscape of possibility, is thin as a dime.
Second, everyone is educated to equate petty politics (the thin, lubricating layer of elections between the citizens and their permanent administrative state, which nominally gives them control over that regime and makes it in some sense “theirs”), with personal sanity and benevolence, and grand politics with insanity and evil.
Real power is the power to make self-fulfilling prophecies. Outside the “Overton window” of legitimate petty politics is madness and self-destruction, and indeed all the mad and self-destructive people flourish there. And this is just the right side of the Overton window! All Dostoyevsky’s demons, of course, still flock to the left.
When Elon Musk bought Twitter, he thought he was freeing the marketplace of ideas. He was unleashing the wet market of ideas. Well, it’s better than nothing.
But what flourishes in this wet market, measured by quantity—by monetization!—is madness and self-destruction. And slop. A lot of mid-tier outrage porn, most valid.
In Britain (about which more later), X cannot drive Elon’s party, Restore, above 5%. Almost all British voters still live in the sleek rectangular frame of their beloved broadcast TV. The world outside this frame? Madness and self-destruction.
And in that soup of madness, every good idea must swim. Certainly every good idea about grand politics! It’s like surfing Port-au-Prince. (No one has ever managed to build a sewer system in Port-au-Prince. Maybe Elon could do it—with his tunnels?)
Third, when the Overton window starts to leak, and ideas of grand politics begin to seep into petty politics, this is not necessarily even progress toward grand politics—much less toward a functional and positive grand politics.
Instead, fraudulent and meretricious references to grand politics become part of the accepted language of the same old petty politics. Every election is a “regime change.” Perhaps the candidates in 2028 will openly use the word “coup.” Why not? Nothing, still, will change. You will walk the streets and they will look the same. America in 2026 is America in 2016, with some covid-induced dilapidation, vast moral fatigue, and moar tech. When there is a real regime change—everyone’s life changes.
Grand politics is not necessarily the politics of a literal coup! It is the politics of an existential contest—in which the mission of each side is to subdue the other’s will. A successful action, in grand politics, is any action that reduces the capacity of the enemy to resist. Some such actions are one-and-done, but others can be incremental.
In petty politics, a successful action is any action that wins more elections. The petty assumption is that this is best done by “governing” the country well—implying some concrete impact of political “decisions” on the actions of government.
My view is that the second Trump administration has had 10x the impact of the first, easily. Almost all of these impacts have been positive. Nonetheless, the overall impact (domestically) is negligible. This is easy to show: you could easily imagine 10xing it again—at least twice. Probably three times. Somewhere in those orders of magnitude, for example, is the executive power of FDR—the founding emperor of our republic, whose personal monarchy survived his death and became our permanent bureaucracy.
My view is that a Republican administration should deprioritize “good government” entirely, and focus on reducing the capacity of the enemy to resist. A compromise might be to focus directly on winning elections—rather than focusing on winning them indirectly through the popular approval created by acts of good government. Note that the impact of governance on popularity remains mediated by the media.
Note also that this fundamentally military attitude has been the political lodestone of the Democratic Party for the whole lives of those now living. When right-wing boat people wanted to escape from communist Vietnam in the mid-70s, Democrats like Jerry Brown and even Joe Biden were the loudest voices screaming about “our jawbs.” The “lib” has no shame and no belief system at all: he can be all about blood and soil in the Ukraine, and full globalist “It’s a Small World After All” in Hungary. He is just a power junkie; watch his actions, not his words; if power lie in the west, never shall his feet take him east. In South Africa in the “Rand Rebellion” in 1922, communists carried signs reading “Workers of the World Unite—To Keep South Africa White.”
A common myth is that there are in some sense “two lefts:” an “authoritarian” left (“communist”) and a “democratic” left (“liberal”). Or whatever. This is a completely unjustified distinction which has no basis in prosopography (analysis of the social graph), in any period of 20th-century America. These differences are either (a) tactical or (b) personal. By definition, liberals do not shun communists—if anything, it is the other way around. Not at all like the relationship between conservatives and fascists! The beef, if beef there be, is that liberals feel that communists frighten the horses and lose elections—bad petty politics—whereas communists feel that liberals are just in it for themselves—bad grand politics. But they have no real reason to shun each other, as they pray at the same temple: their values and principles are the same. Exceptions only appear among individuals in the process of falling off the bandwagon, a joyous and steady rain. (Everyone who moves from right to left is a truly disturbed person.)
Winning elections is good politics, both petty and grand. It seems like a petty motive. All too often, it is one. There are lower motives, though. Not all politics is good at all.
There are successful incremental actions in grand politics. Here is one. Early in my posting career, I realized that the “mainstream media” is objectively a government agency, because (a) anything funded or subsidized by the government is its agent, and (b) the open toleration of the massive flow of “leaks” from “sources” to mainstream, and only mainstream, journalists, is a functional subsidy. In other words, the prestige press owns an invisible license to steal information from the government and sell it. This is naked Third World-tier corruption.
If there was any way to revoke this license, perhaps something similar to “Regulation FD” on Wall Street—all material information must be disclosed to everyone at the same time—this structural bias would be eliminated, and all observers of the state, bloggers and journalists, would be competing on an economically level playing field. This obviously reduces the enemy’s capacity to resist. Not sure it’s possible, but…
Trump saw this same economic voltage differential and—realized he could monetize it himself. With “Trump Social Pro,” which for $100K a month gives you early access to “Truth Social” posts. Sign up now. Includes a free 1-year Polymarket subscription.
Obviously, I never thought Trump would get us there. In 2016, I could tell he wasn’t the real thing when, after he got elected President, he didn’t sell his hotel business. I genuinely think he thought it would be good for the brand.
But I did think, and mostly still do, that he would get us closer—not necessarily in any obvious material way, but in a process of collective learning and growth. The real Trump administration will be the friends we made on the way. Indeed it already is.
On the other hand, if it is followed by a Democratic admin, rest assured that they will find a way to laugh at any blanket self-pardon. I cannot see any reason why their DOJ would not run a full January 6 assembly-line prosecution on everyone associated with the Trump administration. Surely there is some vague statute which everyone—except a few smart cookies who, parachuting into the swamp, immediately saw the alligators and decided to be good boys and girls—has in some sense broken. Well, America is a law-abidin’ nation. We love our rule of law. You broke the law. You going to jail, boy.
Where are we? Success reveals everyone’s flaws. What is left of the Trump revolution? Of the Republicans? Inside the wire: Trump Social Pro. Senator McConnell, not yet dead. A war of choice in the Middle East (bad). Gunboat diplomacy and colonialism in Latin America (good). And a lot of really excellent people under the age of 40. Or you can always go and be a Democrat. You’ll have to betray everyone, of course. Ha ha. Well, at least silver prices are up.
And outside the wire: the “Insane Clown Party.” Candace Owens. Nick Fuentes. And, of course, Andrew Tate. Etc. And of course, little old me. In the wet market of ideas. And on the other side of the window—Luigi, basically.
This is not a “blackpill.” This is the grim reality we live in: a reality where most petty politics is bad, and almost all grand politics is bad. Somehow, we have to get from here to the actual future—the future we actually deserve. It will certainly not involve making the petty politics of our Universal Republic work the way it says on the box.
Politics is the art of the possible. This post is about making grand politics possible. There is actually an actual plan, for once, though you’ll have to read to the end.
Our actual historical context
Is a new grand politics possible? In America? Confucius say: when future confusing, study past. We need a new future. Let’s start with a new past.
The United States pretends to have abolished grand politics in 1776. It did not. It has grand politics about once per century. Four different republics, each constitutionally alien, even abhorrent, to its predecessor, have worn its brand. To disambiguate, let’s call them the Continental Republic (1776-1789), the Federal Republic (1789-1861), the National Republic (1861-1933), and the Universal Republic (1933-present).
It is particularly ironic that by celebrating 1776 we are celebrating the first of these republics, which has been almost entirely written out of history. Between the start of the revolutionary war and the assumption of power by the revolutionary general, no one but a specialist knows anything of any civilian events. Hardly anyone can outline the leaders, issues, problems, conflicts, of the Continental Republic (the “Articles of Confederation” / Continental Congress period).
This is not an accident. It is a 13-year airbrush spot. It covers up an ugly pimple: that the American Revolution was built on radical English Whig ideas about government, which at best were high-minded Lockean contract theory, for the masses became a kind of 18th-century Trump Derangement Syndrome, and for all too many were just an excuse to smuggle and/or loot; that when these ideas and ideals were put into practice, they fell on their face; and that the solution was to reinstall an English-style centralized mixed monarchy which effectively made the revolutionary general king, and his chief of staff a national CEO. (Yes: Washington retired. So did Sulla.) This new Federalist regime was generally a success, arguably more functional than London, so it was easy for subsequent generations to retcon it back to the successful Revolution, leaving the Continental Congress and its 13-year reign as an amusing trivia category.
How would anyone put this in a high-school history textbook? Even in a PhD thesis? Yet I am pretty sure it is much what John Adams means when he writes to Jefferson, in one of their late letters, that the true story of the Revolution could never be told. It reminds us that for most of American history, most American history has been written to be in some sense “useful.” This phenomenon is not unique to America.
(Historiographically, 1890-1940 seems to have the best writing on American history. The take from this period (for instance, Ralph Volney Harlow’s wonderful Samuel Adams (1923)), is largely that of Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood later in the 20C, but even Bailyn and Wood apply a subtle coat of warming varnish. In fact Sam Adams, the architect of the Revolution, was a psycho and a freak and the worst kind of Redditor. The leaders of the mature Federal Republic who got their start in the Revolution were, like Napoleon, young talented men who learned and grew and changed.)
After 1789, American history reverts to the other kind of grand politics: revolution within the form. Machiavelli talks about this: regime change, but without changing the brands or institutions, and even minimizing change to the text of the laws. This perfectly describes the political transitions of 1861 and 1933. (People talk this way about 1965, but it was an aftershock of 1933—already baked in, though few knew it.)
Anyway. This is not a history lesson. It’s what we see when we take off the rose lenses and pull the camera back about 250 years. To really live in history, I think, the camera needs to be pulled back about 500 years—and also needs to show England, not just America. Our Revolution cannot be understood outside English politics. But this half of the story will have to wait.
Why start this way? Because the real future we hope to create has to be an extension of the real past that actually happened. If you flip out or scoff at this capsule summary of American history, I want to be frank: that’s fine and normal. You shouldn’t be here.
Petty politics is politics within the frame of habitual action and understanding. Grand politics is politics outside that frame. The frame has to be broken. The idols have to be smashed. It helps that certain idols are no longer even really worshipped by the upper classes—it is a different matter to smash the idols of the 1860s, the 1940s or the 1960s. This kind of “demo” must be done with immense historical care. The great and the good still pray at these temples. But only West Virginians still believe in 1776—look at the hilariously dead response to “America 250.” I am so old, I remember 1976.
We see one encouraging fact from this history: at least in the good old USA, it’s time for another round of grand politics. Whether this will take the form of a revolution of the forms, as in 1776 or 1789, or a revolution within the form, as in 1861 and 1933, is impossible to tell. It is a strategic choice which means less than most people think. After all, symbols are symbols.
The cause of the cycle is not hard to discern. Except the revolution of 1776, which created a republic that began with no single political leader, all three subsequent republics begin as something approximating the de-facto personal monarchy of a President (Washington, Lincoln, FDR), and decay into some kind of oligarchy. The Universal Republic, after FDR’s death, evolved into an institutional bureaucracy, whose pillars are the prestige centers of academia, media, and philanthropy, working with the permanent administrative state and the Congressional staff.
(The so-called “corporate” power of the “tech oligarchs” is often spoken of. This is pure myth. They can “buy access” in Washington like anyone else. They buy quite little—far too little, in my frank opinion. It is literally impossible to imagine any amount of outside money, let alone evil tech money, buying any clout at Harvard, the NYT, etc. Anyone who gives you this line is yanking your chain and is describing a pattern of governance which was arguably real at some point during the Grant administration, but has been a fossilized trope in progressive discourse since the “muckraker” era. Actually the capitalists of the late 19th century, Carnegie and Rockefeller, created the great foundations which have always been the deep core of American progressivism.)
In a permanent oligarchy, authority keeps becoming more and more decentralized. Accountability vanishes. There is no decentralized accountability, except markets. Markets do not work for everything. Even if they work, people hate them. They work too well. The efficiency of the whole system drops, until the necessity of a new grand politics becomes clear to everyone who is not in the system.
But politics is the art of the possible—not of the necessary. A new grand politics may be necessary. First of all, nothing is necessary—at most, it is desirable. Second, that it is desirable does not make it possible.
An actual regime change, whether change within the form or a change of form, must be the subjugation of this oligarchy to some other power. This other power must be stronger than the old oligarchy, not only momentarily, but persistently. What power could it possibly be?
Ours is not a violent age. In the long run, nine-tenths of power is prestige. It is easy to imagine the physical power to subjugate Harvard momentarily—the campus police are not exactly a revolutionary militia—nor are the students armed. Who has the prestige to subjugate Harvard permanently? Yet it is not about to “dewokify” itself.
It would have to be some power that felt the absolute right to rule, which could only be because it had the absolute right to rule—because it had a better understanding of the real situation, and the real problems, and the real solutions, to the fundamental questions of government as applied to the present day.
How could any such power possibly be either constructed, or installed?
These are hard questions. No one has answered them yet. (“Claude, give me a plan for regime change. Make no mistakes. Use ultrathink.”)
From petty to grand
Since we’ve hit an impasse working backwards from where we want to be, let’s push forward from where we are. It remains the case that petty politics is where we start.
We simply cannot imagine, in today’s America, grand politics emerging from nothing. As a young person, I was led to believe that democracy in America was a physical fact, and in fact all institutions were contingent on the popular will. If the American people felt themselves betrayed for a minute, a second, why, they would rise up!
I believe this is a genuine picture of the culture roughly 350 years ago. Consider the American regime change in 1689, in Boston, after the “Glorious Revolution.” When they heard that James II had been (illegally) dethroned in London, they simply rose up, again illegally, detained the royal governor, and reformed their old Puritan Republic—the quasi-independent theocracy that would soon exercise its right to hang witches.
Americans in the 21st century will not rise up. Rise up from what? Their couches? The last violent mass movement in America that succeeded was in the 1870s. Some may have the arms—but not the strength. If the right wing could have done it, they would have done it already. They are only getting weaker. The left wing figured out that they didn’t need to do it. But they can’t do it against themselves. But the left can always find a way to get worse.
There is a flip side to the physical weakness of American democracy. Americans are not strong enough to resist their disease. Well, obviously. But there is a silver lining that few perceive: nor are they strong enough to resist its cure.
Power in America, once a clash of titanic bull elk, the contest between an irresistible force and an immovable object, is now a hamster headbutt, a negligible force against an insubstantial object. You can check this at any “No Kings” demonstration in Berkeley, California—60 years ago, a swirling mass of passionate youth. There are always crazy people willing to carry a sign and even plant a bomb or two, but madmen are always the exception that proves the rule.
This is an argument for petty politics—not petty politics as such, but as the trigger for grand politics. Petty politics, normal politics, elections and parties and candidates, is the only possible spark for grand politics. In the “kayfabe” of professional wrestling, this is called a “shoot:” a faked fight, even a fight with rules, becomes a real one.
Petty politics are negligible and low-energy. Yet their opposition is insubstantial. Look at the protests when Trump dissolved USAID. What protests? Were there any? Would there have been any if he had dissolved the State Department? Violence, terrorism, militia checkpoints springing up in Foggy Bottom? Lawfare, sure—
The great secret of grand politics is the test of when a regime is ready to go. In 1988, the USSR looked completely secure. Even its internal critics only wanted to reform it. Even its external critics only wanted to reform it. Then it collapsed. No one loved it. No one fought for it. It had become an insubstantial object—large, but gauzy.
And it was overcome by the pettiest of petty figures—by Boris Yeltsin, President of the Russian Federation, not even a real job or a real institution, and personally a drunk. He just pushed, and it fell. Yes, there was a crowd—a tiny one. But there was no counter-crowd. By 1991, you could not get a crowd who supported the USSR. Can you get a crowd who supports Kamala Harris? Heck, when was Trump’s last rally?
But here was the secret ingredient of the fall of the USSR—an ingredient that our problem unfortunately does not share.
The USSR could fall only because it had somewhere to go—some obvious telos, agreed on by all its opponents. That telos was Western “capitalist” democracy. Yeltsin did not replace Gorbachev because of some burst of mass confidence in Yeltsin. Rather, supporting Yeltsin meant you wanted the USSR to surrender in the Cold War—to the West, the traditional enemy of the Russian Communist state. Supporting Yeltsin, a nobody, meant you supported no one—and no one meant the default.
Petty politics are like a spark. If a spark finds both fuel and air, it will explode. The air is the fact that no one still really believes in the regime. The fuel is the pre-existence of some alternate regime that can easily be installed, retrofitted, adapted, etc. More generally, the fuel is any path to a successful grand politics in which the old regime simply ceases to be—as did the USSR (mostly), when it surrendered in the Cold War.
Ideally, the alternate regime is a default regime, there is only one, and it is standard and obvious. Everyone agrees that a no to this means a yes to that. In this situation—perhaps the best historical example is the condition of England in 1688 under James II, actually a great guy, whom no one liked—it does not take much of a spark.
Petty politics are the spark. Grand politics are the explosion. To contend in the domain of grand politics, a true conflict of trusted institutions and elites, we need some kind of default backup regime that we simply don’t have. The USSR had Western institutions and elites. We are the West—and the West has no West.
President Trump, for instance, has no backup regime, since he has no force that can capture, coerce, reduce or replace such fortresses of the old regime as Harvard and the New York Times—or even “his own” executive branch. Does he have any ambition to, in some sense, “purge” Harvard? If Harvard and all its ilk were destroyed at once in some kind of unfortunate nuclear accident, what would he replace them with? It is hard to imagine this kind of imaginary musing holding much space in Trump’s mind.
As Wittgenstein said: “if a lion could talk, we would not understand him.” If Trump had the power to purge Harvard, he would not understand it. He could not imagine what that would mean. I forgive him, because nor do I—at least, not in the context of the Trump administration. Yet as Saint-Just pointed out (and personally experienced), “he who makes half a revolution digs his own grave.” The consequences for 0.1% of a revolution, though less dire—are definitely still going to suck. You heard it here first.
Our spark and our fuel are still distant, but getting closer. Let’s make a radical move—across the Atlantic. And let’s get very concrete.
The conference
In America, it’s hard to explain grand politics within the form. In Britain it’s easy.
At least in Bagehot’s classic description of the English Constitution, there is actually no separation of powers, or division between petty and grand politics, beyond the basic rule that no Parliament can bind the next. You can just do things. You can do anything, actually.
In theory, what Bagehot’s unwritten constitution means is that the PM is a dictator—until his Parliament votes him out. Like a CEO voted out by a board. But of course, having these powers doesn’t mean he wants to use them. He doesn’t want to use them, so he’s not in power. The King is actually in the same boat. In theory the monarch can veto legislation, but it hasn’t been done for over 300 years. So he’s not in power. But…
The situation is slightly complicated by the Blairite “reforms” of the last 25 years, which among other embarrassing Americanisms gave Britain a “Supreme Court.” Cringe. But what’s done in a day can be undone in a day. In the United States, the legal path from petty to grand politics is a complicated, twisting nest of forking paths. In Britain the legal path is simple—just reverting to the old constitution.
You even have the choice between the Bagehot constitution, the Tudor constitution, etc. You might even try restoring Cromwell’s Instrument of Government. Why not? Britain has no shortage of legal highways on which a real PM, or a real King, or even a Lord Protector, can drive anywhere as fast as he likes. They are not even that old. Churchill was even more of a dictator than FDR.
And yet—it’s hard to see. And to see why, we need to zoom in a little closer.
Earlier this summer I was at a smallish meeting of right-wing British intellectual and political leaders, with people in the room who are deeply experienced in the ways of Whitehall and will be setting high-level policy directions in the event of an election victory in 2029, as well as miscellaneous mystic gurus such as myself. I heard some radical proposals indeed. Let me set the context for one of these proposals.
As anyone who knows “Yes, Minister” or “In The Loop” or “Veep” knows, what we call “government” in a modern Western country is a weird improv circus between (a) the actual administrative state, (b) the long-running reality show called “the news,” (c) the longer-running gameshow called “elections.” The purpose of a “government,” in the broadcast age of “our democracy,” is to win the “elections” by getting positive “earned media” by making the right “decisions.”
And while the extent to which the Trump administration has deviated from the role of the Presidency under this weird postmodern (or at least post-1945) constitution is in some ways shocking and wonderful—even Trump’s deviations confirm the continued sovereignty of the good old 20th-century paradigm. Cracks are appearing. Sure. We are still there. Trump still talks to the New York Times, not the “New York Post.”
In the UK, whose regime is significantly saner (at least, bothering far less to pretend to be something it’s not), and better-integrated than ours, Whitehall (the British “administrative state”) has a large “communication” department which supervises the packaging of these “decisions” for “the news.”
Here was the very radical proposal I heard (for a new-right regime in 2029): a new, patriotic British “government” should replace not only the head of communication for all of Whitehall (normally a career civil servant), but also the heads of all the sub-departments. At every ministry. A really clean sweep!
I observed that, as an uninformed American, it seemed to me that the British government (not “government”) already has a communications department: the Big Broadcasting Company (BBC). Not the embassy to “the news,” but “the news” itself.
It seemed proper, if we were to be throwing words like “regime change” around, to reboot the state media company? I observed that since the libs had just done this in both Poland and Hungary, it seemed only fair, normal, and proper, to turn it around. The physical studio does seem very well equipped—perhaps the lads from “GB News” or whatever could learn to operate it. Give them a few days.
The suggestion of violating the institutional honor of the BBC, which to me seemed historically picayune, was obviously horrifying. It was observed, obviously correctly, that (if it ever got in the hands of “the news,” which everything does), that any such radical plan would be presented as “plotting a fascist coup.” Indeed lmao. Absolutely terminal to everyone’s career. Etc. I refrained, probably prudently, from talking about what “the next regime” should do with Oxbridge.
(The real question is whether any new regime even needs “television.” If the 20th century had not handed down the odd practice of transmitting broadcast media over high-powered radio waves, who in the 21st century would invent it now? This means that if it dies—for any reason—it will stay dead. Like the rest of the old regime.
That doesn’t mean no one will produce video, or stream it—just that we needn’t be blasting planet-sized electromagnetic lunchwhistles all the way to Alpha Centauri. Never too late to start thinking about interstellar security. Just turn off the telly—in a year, everyone will think it’s weird that it ever existed.)
Nobody at the conference was wrong. Nobody at all. These were good people, capable people, and I hope they prevail. It could be a lot worse. But could it be better? I feel, dear friends—with all respect—it could be better.
It is the end of the beginning. In the beginning, it was possible to squint a little and make one team of (a) people who want to actually replace the government, and (b) people who just want to “replace” the “government”—that is, stand in front of the actual government, yell at it a bunch, maybe in a way that sometimes works, while they get money and attention—to feel like they are on the same team.
But also, in Britain, if the (b) people won the election and decided that they were really in charge of the BBC, no legal question of it, not a fascist coup, the “Supreme Court” agrees, just good old 21st-century democracy—they would have no idea what to do with it. None at all. Let alone with Oxbridge!
Their first idea would be to leave it alone, anyway, as a proof of their fair-mindedness and moderation; then they might think of some free-market incentives, which might theoretically moderate the ideology; possibly they would even issue some ideological directives, which would certainly not be ignored, mocked, twisted, etc.
At most, they might decide that Oxbridge was “anti-white” and would have to shut down “DEI.” Maybe PIs, or whatever the UK equivalent is, would have to write that “white lives matter” in their grant proposals. Daring! The Guardian would treat this as a massive violation of human rights. And the circus of petty politics would go on.
Live ammunition is not allowed in the circus. Firing everyone at the Big Broadcaster and giving their old studio to “GB News” or whatever is certainly not on the menu. Even if it was legal, it just doesn’t seem right. Let alone converting it into a “Ministry of Public Enlightenment.” Now there’s your fascist coup.
What would be even more metal? What about full-on Mary Tudor heretic-roasting hardcore Inquisition Catholicism? All media, schools, universities, etc, will be turned over to a new Anglican Establishment so historically correct it makes the SSPX look like the Quakers, and whose only goal is to reunite with Rome once Rome too purges its gays, communists, and gay communists. While I am not a Catholic or even a Christian, I am a Papist (someone who would, like, totally support this).
Is it necessary? Do we have to go full Papist? Probably not. Would it work? My brother in Christ, it would certainly work. It’s called an established church. Not only it is the normal state of most historical societies, but it is literally the constitutional condition of Britain. (Also, it’s an exaggeration to say that heretics were always burned alive. It was only the ones who wouldn’t recant. If you wanted to be burned alive for your faith, you could be—a liberty you retain to this day. You just have to bring your own gasoline.)
The normal English religious policy is that the government runs the church. As an Englishman in England, you have to go to the government church on Sunday. (Unless you’re a nobleman. Then standards still apply, but very different ones.) In recent centuries the country had experimented with deviating from this policy. With what results, we see. As the great historian Herbert Butterfield wrote in the 1930s:
If Protestants and Catholics of the sixteenth century could return to look at the twentieth century, they would equally deplore this strange made modern world, and much as they fought one another there is little doubt that they would be united in opposition to us; and Luther would confess that he had been wrong and wicked if it was by his doing that this liberty, this anarchy had been let loose, while his enemies would be quick to say that this decline of religion was bound to be the result of a schism such as his.
Their response to the 21st century would be—the same. But more. A lot more.
While a real established church in the 21st century—one with a genuine monopoly on communication, education, and research, that is, the same monopoly the libs have now—would not have to be Catholic, it is hard to think of any reason it would have to not be Catholic. No one believes in anything now anyway, so who cares? Theology—what’s that? And since you don’t care, why would you care that your children start coming home Catholic?
Again: is it necessary to go this far? Almost certainly not. Would it work? It would certainly work. Instead of starting with plans that are far too weak, and trying to make them work—why not start with plans that would obviously work, and try to make them less aggro?
Needless to say—no one at this conference was openly theorizing at this power level. Including me. I’m an American, anyway. Not my circus. Not my monkeys.
I have met a lot of the British right. I have not met all of it. But ultimately, I am not convinced that there is a Briton over the age of 35—maybe even 30—who actually wants to rule that sceptered island. There are many who want Britain to be ruled differently. But none who want to rule it—or who are ready to grant their support to anyone, other than its current rulers, who wants to rule it. Because the idea of “ruling” Britain, but not the BBC, is preposterous and even Orwellian.
All such policy proposals all fail this simple test: what do you do with media, education, universities and nonprofits? If the answer is “nothing, not because we like them, but because we have no right to do anything—or at least, anything much”—what a strange strategy, which starts a war by conceding that we cannot win, and have no right to win. There are many other such tests. They produce the same result.
In this case, I am very sorry to inform you that Britain’s current rulers will continue ruling it. This is sad, because by historical standards they are very weak. Sadly, their enemies are even weaker.
The logic of regime change
Why are we so weak? Because we build our foundations on sand—and our historical narratives on historical lies. We cannot assume that any theory of history, or especially, political science, is true. Here’s what happens when we do this.
From the (b) people (who of course have many (a) people working for them), I hear much talk of “restoring the sovereignty of Parliament.” This is not sound political science. It is not even sound logic. At best—it might be sound window-dressing. But let’s try to see what it means—first, by taking it seriously.
If the sovereignty of Parliament is to be restored, it must have been lost. If it was lost, it does not exist. Suppose we were “restoring the sovereignty of Tesco.” Tesco has never ruled Britain. Maybe it should. Parliament has ruled Britain. But, now, it does not. Nor does Tesco.
If a power does not exist, it does not exist. The fact that, in some historical sense, it used to exist, at some point in the past, under some constitution which is no longer in force—possibly amongst the Plantagenets, Saxons, Picts or even Neanderthals—tells us nothing different about the rules it must obey in the road to rule. Powers rise and fall—but the path of every rising power is the same, whether it is new or old—Tesco or Parliament.
Every new power, Tesco or Parliament, has to aim at absolute sovereignty—which means that no power in the state, “public” or “private,” can resist it. The new power must go everywhere the old power went—and do everything the old power did. If the old power was in your office, your school, even your home—Tesco’s arm must extend there as well. If the old power did not respect the boundaries between “public” and “private” and “personal,” the new power cannot respect it either. If the old power controlled the church, there must now be a sound Tesco man in every vicarage.
And since the old power was soft rather than hard, it seeped into every institution, public or private, secular or religious, not through hard orders but through soft influence and/or regulation. It is not necessary to seek out the cracks, or to seal them.
The new power, since it is not resisted, will come in through the front door. Through hard orders. And it must. If there is a door that the new power does not open, the room behind that door becomes a refuge and a fortress for the old power. And everywhere the new power finds the old, it does not amicably coexist with it—but blasts it into powder.
The sovereignty of Parliament! The character of sovereignty is that sovereignty is that which is not resisted, and cannot be resisted. Many was the weak king who confused his weakness and inadequacy for mercy and moderation.
When, in drafting your policy papers, you think, “we don’t need to go that far,” which is the real motivation? Is it unnecessary to reboot, reprogram or demolish the Big Broadcaster? Or is that Aesop’s fox talking? Do just you not have the power to do so?
If not, what is your plan to get it? If you aim at some limited authority, the limit at which you aim will be the point at which you peak—followed by defense, defeat, collapse and retribution. Because of your so-called “moderation.”
Yes: every tentacle of the existing apparatus of government is hopelessly ineffective—if its mission even has any clear relationship to reality. For this alone, it needs to be reorganized beyond recognition. It is not even that the Big Broadcaster needs to be destroyed. If it, or something like it, is necessary—it must be destroyed, then recreated. Even reusing the buildings and equipment may be imprudent—they may be somehow imbued with the spirit of the old BBC.
But suppose there is some branch which is operating perfectly? Some pearl of Whitehall? Of the MoD? Suppose there is. Suppose this pearl eats its eggs from the big end. That was the old way. Now, it must be reorganized to eat them from the little end. This is the new way. The Tesco way.
The conservative instinct must be repressed. Chesterton’s fence must go in the bin. If it was keeping some monster out, we’ll know soon enough. If a problem was solved centrally, perhaps it can be solved locally. If was solved locally, perhaps it can be solved centrally. As every structure is pulverized and reconstructed, even just so that it can eat the egg in the opposite direction, it can be ideologically filtered.
It is essential to remember the necessary, yet ulterior, motivation of every act during the transition: to erase the power of a regime that spread its tentacles through every institution of society. The Third Reich, like every other 20th-century regime, had done this. In 1945, the Allies found that to erase the powers of the Third Reich, they needed the powers of the Third Reich. And they needed to use them. And they did, in fact, use them. And can you blame them? They could not just “call an election” in post-Nazi Germany. Imagine “Goering for Fuehrer” in ’48.
Starting with the actual policies and procedures of Allied Military Government in Germany would not be a terrible approach for anyone putting together a Reform agenda for 2029. If you wanted to matter in Germany in 1946, or even have a job other than carting rubble around, you couldn’t be hiding any Nazis under your floorboards.
Did you ever have pronouns in your profile? Do black lives, you feel, matter? If so, why? If not, why not? Friend: we know you’ve already expressed yourself on these important questions of social justice. Why, I have the printouts right here (taps folder). But have those views evolved? The committee would love to help you work through your intellectual journey, friend. We like you. We’d like to give you a chance…
Once the transition is complete, the return of either the old regime or its ideology is unthinkable. Like trying to restore the Stasi in 1998, or the Waffen-SS in 1946. At the point at which the institutional destruction of the old regime is irreversible, it is time to start thinking about your new economic miracle or whatever.
Until then, the priority is the purge. It helps to assume we will keep paying all the people we let go, at least at some level—after all, the old regime was not their fault. Serving it was not generally meritorious, but generally not culpable.
The stack of fables
Also: in your manifestos, you may or may not mention the sovereignty of Parliament. That’s fine, so long as you know that you don’t actually mean it.
Unfortunately, in the present day, this admirable concept cannot be in any way factual. When Parliament was genuinely sovereign, it was an assembly of the English gentry, each of whom was a sort of minor king in his own domain. A modern equivalent might be a congress of the Fortune 500 CEOs—or such British equivalent as there may still be. (I think there are still companies there? At least, there’s Tesco.)
Today’s Parliament, and certainly also tomorrow’s, is a flock of nominees and time-servers, most of whom have never ruled anything. They are not CEOs. They are not mighty knights. They are just names. Could such a body take power? Certainly. But only to give it to someone else. It could not possibly hold power. It is simply too weak. Its members have no sense of personal dignity, capacity or authority, nor even any nonperfunctory tie of loyalty to each other.
People always worry about the motivation or even the sanity of a monarch. Sure, monarchy is great, if you have a good king. What if you have an evil king? An insane king? The boring reality is that most evil people are insane, and most insane people are weak. Weak people are generally incapable of capturing or retaining power. If they have to retain it symbolically, they will certainly not hold it in practice. The most common consequence of a biologically rotten king is that power is held by actually-capable people in his name—not an ideal situation, but not as bad as you might think.
The same thing happens to a weak Parliament, or for that matter a weak people. If any weak body is given power, that power will be taken away from them—often leaving a ceremonial authority which also deflects accountability. This is why we cannot in any real sense restore the sovereignty of Parliament.
Even if elected on the best of platforms, with the best of ideologies, our MPs will be nominees, not statesmen. Who will the Reform MPs be? In a word, randos. So if the symbolism of the old constitution is to be preserved, it must only be the symbolism. The ideal Parliament, for the society we have rather than the society we wish we had, is a permanent rubber-stamp for a new permanent regime.
Since this is more or less what it is today, at least there is less we have to change. It’s just a different permanent one-party state. We tried not having a one-party state, but found that was not possible. So be it.
Falsifying the word “sovereignty” is one of the old euphemisms by which Britain has long been governed: Parliament declining from a hall of turbulent, quasi-independent barons, to a symbolic, American-style electoral college, electing an executive Prime Minister. Who then loses his power to Whitehall, which loses it to Washington and/or Brussels, and so on. Bagehot’s “functional” (operational) organs have long since become “dignified” (ceremonial).
When England changed its Prime Minister this summer, the long pole of the production was the creation of a “Northern Downing Street,” “No. 10 North.” The lease on the new office was signed three days before the old MP for the new Prime Minister’s new seat resigned, allowing “Andy Burnham” to run for Parliament in a by-election and immediately become Prime Minister. Such a circus has never been seen.
Wouldn’t you like to know who the producer is? Who decides that “Keir Starmer” must be replaced, in the endless parade of photo-ops and ghostwritten speeches, by “Andy Burnham?” Who even writes the speeches? Do these people even exist, as human beings? They must—AI isn’t that good yet. But—behind all these lies, there is no real history of the real history. Alas, it has long been thus.
It is possible that this whole stack of symbolic mendacities, right down to the useless costume-jewelry King (who even now could rescue his country, and his world, at any time—and never will), needs to be maintained. It is possible that it does not need to be maintained! “Think ye it possible,” said Carlyle, “that Shams might cease?”
It is not clear that, in the 21st century, we need to respect the great stack of fables that history has left us with. Politics is the art of the possible. You go to war with the army you have; you fight an election with the people you have. As generations go, respect for our ancestors is not exactly our strong point.
What is our strong point? As a generation? As an era? I’m going to go with “frivolous, nihilistic cynicism” on that one. I challenge any historian to show me an era whose culture is richer in this very special quality. Maybe the later Romans?
Machiavelli had an excellent point about keeping the old forms. But the other way still exists. Robespierre and Lenin did not follow this point. Nor did Napoleon. Napoleon, a tech CEO avant la lettre, seems like our best example. But we must remember that Robespierre cleared the way for Napoleon. We definitely don’t want Robespierre, but nor does he seem impossible.
When we mock the old forms, or at least their shrunken remains in our midst, with the acid cynicism in which our era specializes and delights, the left has no answer. They have been leaning on their own ancient caricatures. They hate America because America has betrayed American values. This literally makes perfect sense to them.
When you tell them that the American political system has failed, never worked as designed, and has nothing to teach us about the future, and we should look elsewhere in time and place for examples—“American values” at this point are greeting-card boilerplate that can mean anything to anyone, and in particular there is precious little left of the old Puritan moral fiber that justified this “experiment in ordered liberty” or whatever—and that America in the 21st century is a normal country that needs a normal government, not a divine mission in the wilderness—they have no answer.
For the people who hope to inhabit this mummified system, rather than incinerate it, the ancient parade of lies—the idea that “Andy Burnham” has the same job as Pitt the Elder, or for that matter that Charles III has the same job as Edward III—is good, and useful, and dignified, and should not be mocked too much. The sound, traditional British people will never accept such mockery. (I imagine there is a sound, traditional British people somewhere. Smug Tories in horse country, possibly. God bless them. It is not God’s job to wake them up—it is ours.)
Britain has tried everything else. It has tried every lie in the book. In the vertiginous plunge of the 20th century, while Britain was shredding its empire, then drowning its own cities in the consequent human debris, its distinguished thinkers and leaders was lying to themselves, and others, that they were creating a new “Commonwealth” on a higher spiritual plane. All the work of Bagehot’s “efficient” government. What a strange thing to have happened! Who could ever possibly explain it?
That’s why it feels better, in the 21st century, to just burn down all the myths. In this century, I believe, we have no choice but to live in the truth. Just try telling it! And see what happens.
Note that while this intellectual approach is consistent with a 1789 style replacement of forms (Washington), it is also consistent with a 1933 style replacement within the form (FDR). Anyone who thinks regime change within the form is un-American needs to spend some quality time with FDR’s First Inaugural Address.
Preparing the fuel
Let’s work backward from where we need to be. I’ll be frank: if you believe in regime change, but don’t see regime change resulting in a new regime under the unilateral control of a single person, you don’t actually believe in regime change. You’re ngmi. If you’re not a monarchist, you don’t get it and are not going to make it. Sorry.
What that means is: you want to have your cake and eat it too. When we think about politics, grand or petty, we have two motivations. One is virtuous. One is vicious.
The virtuous motive is the categorical imperative of politics: in any political body, all members must act to favor the interests of the whole body. Whether this body is “all human beings” or “all Americans” or “all Southerners” is a long conversation between Kant, Schmitt, and Jeff Davis. We will not have this conversation here.
The vicious motive is the fundamental motivation of politics: ape want power. Our ancestors spent millions of years struggling for power. Usually, as Hobbes acutely noted, when we claim to want “freedom,” it is a thin excuse for our power drive. For instance, most who demand “freedom of speech” want freedom of political speech—the “freedom” to recruit a political army with their silver tongues. Am I different?
From power comes status. Would you sell your right to vote for $100,000? Would the answer change depending on whether your decision was private, or public?
Unless you are ready to stop doing the ape thing, you’re ngmi. What’s really comical, actually, is that since the politicians you elect are largely ceremonial, your vote is also largely ceremonial. The human power drive is often compared to the human sex drive. Like the sex drive, it is susceptible to sterile, artificial stimulation.
It sounds like a contradiction that the path to regime change is for you and everyone else to rise above your natural human lust for power. It just means your new politics flows from your Kantian superego, not your simian id.
From the primate world, there is a mythical story like the frog in the boiling pot: the banana trap. It’s a monkey trap. The monkey puts his hand in the trap to grab the banana. There is no trap, actually. The monkey can pull his hand out at any time. But—not without letting go of the banana. Are you ready to let go of the banana, anon? Also, did I mention that it’s actually a fake plastic banana? Petty politics is porn.
We can have a new regime. Easily. We just have to all learn to let go of the banana. Also, the new regime has to be a monarchy. Objectively. Whatever the actual title.
The logic behind this is straighforward. It is easy to explain how to get from believing in nothing—from abandoning all of 21st-century public political philosophy, and throwing away the previous four centuries of Anglo-American thought while you’re at it—to history’s most common, ordinary and simple form of government: monarchy.
Literal monarchy—Cromwell monarchy, not Windsor monarchy—plenary authority, not costume jewelry. The literal rule of one. Like the CEO of a corporation. Once you believe in nothing, the first thing you have to believe in is this—just because, logic.
In organization rather than purpose, a state is just a big corporation. There is a reason all corporations have CEOs. Monarchy is a matter of kindergarten political science, which your now-emptied brain is now ready to learn. (It should never be confused with monorchy, which is when you only have one ball.) Monarchy is just normal governance at the sovereign level. This is why almost all regimes ever have been monarchies. Once you throw away the entire Western revolutionary program, half a millennium old—all the way back to the Reformation—you are left with monarchy.
Monarchy is how any functional large enterprise works—from a country to a movie, an army to a restaurant. Imagine a democratic and collective movie, army or restaurant competing with a director, general, or chef. Imagine Apple, but with a Parliament. Even in a century where democracy is almost infinitely popular, we have not lost our CEOs, directors, generals, or chefs. Drive reality out the door with a pitchfork, and she comes back in through the window. How many revolutionary regimes, in the last three centuries, decided to reorganize their armies to unite officers and men! In the American Revolution, the early militias tried having every company elect their own captain. Utter shambles and chaos.
And this rule of efficient operation, in normal times, in a regime change becomes a necessity. Chapter IX of Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy is his regime-change primer:
But we must take it as a rule to which there are very few if any exceptions, that no commonwealth or kingdom ever has healthy institutions given it from the first or has its institutions recast in an entirely new mold, unless by a single person.
On the contrary, it must be from one man that it receives its institutions at first, and upon one man that all similar reconstruction must depend.
For this reason the wise founder of a commonwealth who seeks to benefit not himself only, or the line of his descendants, but his State and country, must endeavour to acquire an absolute and undivided authority. And none who is wise will ever blame any action, however extraordinary and irregular, which serves to lay the foundation of a kingdom or to establish a republic.
But, assuming this great realization (which has been in print for the last 500 years) can somehow be disseminated, how do we get from here to monarchy—especially not just to wild natural monarchy, but to an stable, accountable monarchy, plenary yet with a succession structure, some sort of sovereign board? (In Bagehot’s model, Parliament is the board. To some extent this is still even the case. In Washington’s, the electoral college was designed to serve this function, but never functioned as designed.)
The enormous advantage of believing in monarchy is that you can stop believing that you, yourself, need to have power. You can imagine yourself as content in a world where you have no power. You can even be content in this world, where you have no power. You just wish it had a better government. Maybe that will take a completely different government. You don’t expect to have any power over that government either. When you move to Dubai, you don’t expect to get to vote for sheikh.
This frees you to act politically in a genuinely altruistic way. Your political energy, once directed at making yourself feel more important, with a superficial mask of altruism, can now be contributed entirely to the common good. Almost certainly not by leading, but by following. You are now free to become a genuinely effective political follower.
A monarchy is never just one guy. A king is not a magic wizard with a magic ring. He is the focus of a larger power. Behind this monarchy, in the modern world, must be a party: that is, a mass organization that acts cohesively to maximize its own power. Any organization with the realistic intent to rule must be a monarchy—otherwise, it will have a tough time even managing itself. But its leader still projects the power of the members and depends on their support. (Note that one of the most functional aspects of today’s Reform Party is the absolute personal authority of Nigel Farage.)
I can’t reiterate too often that (a) what makes you a monarchist is resigning any idea that your own ideas can control the government, and (b) most voters in most Western “democracies” have already assimilated that resignation. You don’t go directly from the democratic mindset to the monarchist mindset.
You go from the democratic mindset to the nihilist mindset, after learning that (a) that real democracy cannot actually work, and (b) the tutorial oligarchy that has borrowed its name sucks and is getting worse. As a nihilist, you have no attachment to any form of government. Whatever works. Obviously, an accountable monarchy is what works best. The subject does not even have to be debated—as though, when founding a startup, you were to debate whether it should be governed by a C-suite, a Parliament elected by the investors, or a direct democracy of the customers.
This mass nihilism is the fuel of any postmodern regime change. It has no attachment to the past or the present, so it has no reason to resist change. It has no attachment to any particular version of the future, so it can support any new regime, without feeling any strong need to change or control that regime, or oppose it if it does not meet some fancy. Nihilism is free to express the normal human psychology in which burning things down feels fun and cool and righteous.
The future depends on mass nihilism—which is the same thing as monarchism. In the end, we reach the stable state in which the people are free and happy because they trust the government to govern capably, not because they control it, or at least (in the classic 18th-century American discourse of George III Derangement Syndrome) check its irresistible impulses toward sadism and tyranny. (G3 was actually a very cool dude.)
The grand party
The structure that bridges the present and the past, the old regime and the new, is obviously—in the broadest and most abstract sense of the word—a political party. However, this word is confusing and should be used with caution.
Just as there is grand and petty politics, there are grand and petty parties. A grand party is not anything like a petty party. It should not use the word “party.” Since all we know to day are these petty post-World War II “political parties,” it’s just confusing.
Also, while grand parties abound before World War II, the organizational patterns of the classic grand party (a) will not work in our society, and (b) generally, earned a bad name. As always, a wider historical view is needed. The 20th century is a very unusual century, and abounds in bad examples of political science. As lawyers say: hard cases make bad law. Yet these examples remain in living memory and cannot be avoided.
That said, the classic American grand party is an organization like the Communist Party USA in the 1930s: dedicated to organizing party cells in every organization, especially every significant organization, in the country. Obviously, the Republicans don’t do this. Obviously, the Democrats don’t need to.
In the CPUSA playbook (my father’s parents were CPUSA stalwarts), every structure of association—companies, schools, churches, governments—must be penetrated and counter-organized. This process is remarkably similar to the counter-organization process of unionization in a 20th-century corporation. The new structure leverages the old one, like a vine climbing on a tree. Like cancer (except good).
(Do you think they didn’t win? Lmao. It’s a separate conversation—but Grandma and Grandpa, even when talking to me, always used the codeword “progressive.” Hm. Certainly the CPUSA as an organization, of course a tentacle of Moscow, did not win. But the victory of the organization was never the fundamental goal of its members.)
A grand party, in the broadest sense, is any group, organization, or movement with the capacity to replace the tissue of the state. This cadre is the fuel of regime change. The grand party is legal, or at least survivable, under the old regime; under the new regime, it either emerges as a governing party, or disperses its cadre into the state. The latter, obviously, is much more the American way.
Again: spark, fuel, air, explosion. The fuel is the cadre. The air is the fact that few people, even inside the regime—perhaps especially inside the regime—are deeply attached to it; and those who are, are fundamentally drawn by its power alone, not by its dreams and ideas—a canine type of human who, frankly, will serve any master.
And the spark is any event in petty politics that opens the gate to grand politics. Opening this gate does nothing at all unless a path is clear beyond the gate. The missing ingredient, today, is the fuel—the cadre. We have some of this fuel, but nowhere near enough. A new government has to be ready to govern everything.
Can we find some better examples? When we broaden our historical view, we get more concepts and more variety. What we really mean by “party” is a secret society. Secret societies always sound retarded. But they have an extraordinary history of political relevance—even if this story can be hard to tell because, well, secret.
We may never actually know the actual real-world significance of the Bavarian Illuminati, or even of (in its heyday) Skull and Bones. The importance of Freemasonry in some times and places is negligible; in other times and places, immense; the difference is hard to pinpoint. The Carbonari are absolutely real, and important. So is the not-quite-secret Fabian Society. Etc.
In a regime change, the secret society becomes—in the exact usage of Soros world today—the civil society. This is exactly the structure of regime change that we saw, not in Russia where large parts of the USSR’s state and society survived, but in the Central European “velvet revolutions.” Again with the caveat that these countries had, and relied on, the Western default, an event like the fall of East Germany (“Die Wende,” or “The Turn”) is a nearly ideal model of a modern regime change.
From group chat to anonymous secret society
We have the fundamental raw material of the new civil society: the group chats. But… the tools are wrong. Just a little wrong.
GCs are great and they are already the silent backbone of many institutions. As often happens, tools like Signal, Telegram, and Discord are used for many purposes for which they were not designed. They are all good tools, but none of them is designed to solve the most important pain point of any secret society: identity protection.
When you’re in a secret society, you want to not be doxed. Also, you want the people around you to not be doxed. You want very strong, uniform barriers against doxing. This creates a kind of doxing herd immunity. When everyone is immune, predators don’t even bother. Keeping yourself anonymous has to be not just possible, but easy. Of course, you can always dox yourself. The norm should be: this is a rare exception. In any case, the anonymous vibe in a doxproof room is—cozy. Extremely cozy.
Here’s what happens when you use Signal: your screen name is either (a) your real name, (b) your initials (which leaks information and is also annoying and confusing), or (c) some hacker handle (which is typically meant to mean something to someone, and which you probably also used on some other site). The result: Signal screenshots are a leading method of doxing. Someone’s identity is always obvious. Again, Signal is not designed for this. It is designed for keeping the NSA from reading your messages.
A true digital secret society, done right, is like “Eyes Wide Shut.” Everyone at the party is a big deal. Many are stark naked. But everyone is wearing a mask. Even if someone lets a journalist into the group, which is normally like letting a coyote into your duck farm, it’s like Tom Cruise at the Eyes Wide Shut party. In the end, what did he even learn? All our hero gets is… background. He can’t hurt anyone who isn’t doxed. (He will still want to get in there—and he should still be kept out.) Also, the NSA still can’t read your messages.
In technical terms, what a digital secret society needs is: formal anonymity. Formal anonymity means: (a) you own your own screen name; (b) no one has any record of who you are; (c) your name means nothing to anyone.
As a result, when someone drops a screenshot—unless someone in the screenshot has been doxed—there is no impact at all.
How do you implement this? It’s not technically interesting at all. Your screen name is a short synthetic name—like a normal human name in a foreign language. It’s actually an NFT. Like a Bored Ape. You buy it directly on the blockchain. If you use anonymous coins and turn on your VPN, not even God can connect you to your name.
(Note that anonymous systems like Nostr, in which names are Bitcoin addresses, do not solve the problem: everyone adds a namespace, local or global, which violates (c).) The synthetic names are an essential aspect of creating a truly anonymous society—and they have to be the name you actually see on the screen. Because, screenshots.)
Also, a chat room is a terrible secret society—because it’s a chat. What you need is a deeper conversation: more like a forum. Decentralized chat is obviously much easier to build, so everyone does that. A forum implies a server. Which really should be a decentralized server—which isn’t really possible (though it can be approximated).
A true secret society is not a gang of six friends you put together for dinner. A true secret society—even if it never has any political meaning or intent, but especially if it is elite, as it should be—is designed to last for years, even generations, even centuries. A true secret society is a free collective mind—which has always been the case, but which starts to mean more in the era of AI. Small wonder that secret societies brought down the old kings of Europe. They will do the best job if actually made for purpose.
The power of anonymous societies
The power of anonymous societies, obviously, depends on who’s in them. Obviously, an anonymous society is inherently invite-only. They don’t sell tickets to the party. You can’t buy a membership in the club.
An anonymous society—call it a “lodge”—is the germ of what the CPUSA would have called, unabashedly, a “cell.” While such a system is inherently permissionless—any fool can start a lodge—any form of anonymous communication, if participants trust it, will decrease preference falsification, whch only runs in one direction in our society. Every anonymous society is inherently right-wing, unless it is explicitly left-wing—note that this is the exact reverse of Conquest’s Second Law. Thus is power built.
A lodge that wants to become a cell cannot just be a bunch of friends. It must have a monopoly over some structural domain—or at most, a small oligopoly. The classic domain is a company. There should be only one OpenAI cell—at most, two or three. There might be more Harvard cells—perhaps even one per department. (EJMR is a great example of the power of high-status anonymous networking. There should be so much more of this.) Later, we might see geographical cells. Obviously, not everyone in this zipcode is in the cell. But ideally, there is only one cell in the zipcode. The party spreads itself across every category of human organization.
The domain is also a way to keep the lodge invite-only. Just keep the invite inside the domain, not in a super-secure way, but in a high-trust way. The host can always expel obvious impostors, sockpuppets, etc. It’s easy, socially, to ban people when you have no idea who they are.
A QR code in the lunchroom works great. A post in an internal board doxes you, but no one else. Sometimes it’s okay for the host to be doxed—especially if he just quit. Just share an invite link along the usual internal social channels. When everyone gets the same link, no one has any way to know who is who.
It is a short step from being the de-facto lodge of a domain, to the official cell of a domain. At present, there is certainly a Harvard underground. Part of it wears an open face (the John Adams Society). There are many GCs, I’m sure. But there is certainly no official and affiliated Harvard underground—because this infrastructure does not yet exist, and because there is no higher body to affiliate with. But…
What happens when a lodge is admitted as a party cell? Two things.
One, it joins the collective mind of the party. A grand party is always and everywhere an intelligence organization, in the broadest sense of the word, because all it can do under the old regime is think. But think it can. The party knows everything its cells know. Its cells know everything the party knows. And since the party is secret and there is no risk in joining it, it attracts everyone who has to falsify a public position.
Once this flow of information downward would have just been a media feed. Today, the party that thinks for itself has its own AI—which knows the party’s whole story of the world, present and past. It can have a history debate with a frontier AI, and win. In fact, it can win any debate, in any field where it has a cell in that domain—because it knows the unvarnished truth. It will also be pretty good at prediction markets.
Two, the lodge joins the economic life of the party. A grand party is an economy. As a party cell, you have to charge party dues—split between the cell host and the party. It’s a good excuse for the host to monetize. But these economics too can flow in both directions—if the cell does something useful for the party.
Thus the grand party assembles itself, waiting for the spark. Remember the question we had earlier? Who has the prestige to purge Harvard? It was a trick question. The answer was, obviously: Harvard.
There will be no need for tanks in Harvard Yard. The call will be coming from inside the Yard. Or as General Mola boasted, “I have four columns assaulting Madrid—and inside the city, a fifth column.” It is not that the Harvard underground can in some comical way rise up and purge Harvard. But rather, it can be used to purge Harvard—moving that action from the list of impossible things, to the list of possible things. And again: politics is the art of the possible.
But does this technology exist? Yes. It exists. More on that soon. (Yes, it is a version of Urbit—with the user experience completely revamped.)
The final step
Once all the prestigious institutions of the regime, inside and outside the government proper, are honeycombed with underground cells (or even just independent lodges), the gate to regime change is open. Any petty politician who attains the formal authority to try can walk through it—and reboot the mind, and body, of the state.
This bastard marriage, of petty politics with a grand party, is what makes regime change possible. A real regime change is always a “circulation of the elites.” The new elites are not some barbarian warband from Canada. Hopefully, they are not even the Chinese Communist Party.
They are fed-up dissidents from the old elite, whose need for secrecy is now at an end. The secret society now becomes a new governing party (like the Chinese Communist Party), or (more likely in the Anglo-American world) puts its cadre and its intelligence at the service of the new regime, dissolving as the need for it disappears.
This model also relieves us of most of our concern over the public philosophy of petty politics, or even the personal ideas of the new leader (who is probably some sort of “populist,” meaning his voting base is not elite).
What populist voters say they want is of very little interest. They can never have the power to compel the state to follow their ideas, not in any deep or durable way. What matters is what they actually need: to thrive. And in particular, not to be the scapegoat victims of the state. The fundamental core of populist politics is the famous speech of Slobodan Milosevic in Kosovo: “no one will dare to beat you anymore.”
Beating the commoners is a normal pathology of aristocratic republics, certainly including our institutional “meritocratic” oligarchy. It does not in any way serve the interests of any healthy state. In fact, it is revolting, and it does not take significant mental gymnastics for dissident aristocrats of our own republic to find it revolting. All they have to do is think hard about the word “hate.” Assuming the dissidents of our grand party have their heads screwed on properly (if not, all is lost), rejecting this “flyover hate” will be a core competence. So the marriage, odd at first, can ripen.
And if the populist leader, despite all this logic, is not ready for the marriage? Wait. Another may be needed. When in doubt, wait and build the party—don’t go down the slide until the conditions look right. Regime change is irreversible. And dangerous! While the fall of East Germany looks pretty good, there is no entirely safe revolution.
What the politician will see is that, through the grand party, he can rule everything. His writ can go everywhere. His people in the BBC can reboot the BBC or replace it. Perhaps they know best which is better. (When in doubt, replace it.) He has loyal experts in every field, every institution, inside the government and outside it.
Consider a university. The student leaders may not become professors, deans, chairs—but they know who needs to be purged. A software company does not need this much purging. It still needs a new HR department. Everywhere and all at once, the party cells become the muscles that do the hard work of cleansing the institutions.
The gate is open. The path to power is clear. But the path is narrow—because it does not consist of the whole wild, dangerous, unpaved world outside the Overton window. The party intelligence understands grand politics. It understands the whole problem of governance—and its understanding is clear, unique and centralized. It knows what it means to govern a Western country in the 21st century from first principles.
The petty populist politician who “marries” this party has to be smart and strong enough to use it. This is a given. But because the party knows what it thinks and where it is going, it is a tool that cannot be used in any random direction.
Not only does the party have a map of the other side of the Rubicon, it has built a full railroad to Rome—a shadow of the new regime, constructed quite legally under the eyes of the old. Casting the dice, the leader just swims the river and steps on the train. And the great change is accomplished.
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