A Long and Largely Unnecessary Introduction
Apparently, the Republican Party has been rethinking their tactics in light of what was clearly a humiliating electoral and ideological defeat in the 2012 Elections. I do not much care for the GOP. They are, first and foremost, a vehicle for getting individuals into positions of government power. [I.e. a bad thing] However, as “democratically elected leaders” they are forced to take certain vocal positions on issues which are of concern to voters. When the ostensibly “small government” candidate loses to the “big government” candidate, electoral politics becomes an [imperfect] indicator for the ideological disposition of the masses.
Libertarians would like to believe the GOP stands a chance of winning if only they became more like them. That is to say, if they became fiercely consistent in the application of their ideas, humble in their social engineering schemes, and less belligerent to foreign governments. Perhaps they are right. But even if they are, will this still be true years from now? Is the United States actually becoming more Libertarian? or is this an illusion brought on by an increased popularity of a fringe movement within the Republican core itself? If your “median” voter is actually sliding leftward, dragging the country with him.
Someone such as myself who can remember what was said and done in decades past, even if I wasn’t alive at such a time, notices a largely unambiguous trend of the growth of the power of the Federal Government, from one administration and congress to the next. Each change with sufficient time becomes the status quo and is therefore defended by its former opponents. The default assumption, therefore, ought to be that freedom is becoming less popular.
There are a few seeming contradictions to this. At this point in history a majority of Americans support, for example, gay marriage. Recently a majority of Americans polled supported legalizing pot.
This may just be my bias, but I don’t see this as necessarily meaning Americans look favorably towards the idea of government doing less for them. There is a difference between opposing an intervention out of principle, or mere distrust of the enforcement, and simply becoming ambivalent about a particular lifestyle. The rationale for gay marriage can either be “Equality” or “I don’t care” — neither of which is explicitly anti-statist.
To the non-progressive the very idea that things are slipping away from them, and in such a manner as is irrecoverable, is quite frightening. As such few among them are willing to believe it.
What I am going to try to do is show a way which could *probably* defeat progressivism as an ideology. In the process perhaps the non-progressive can begin to grasp why they have been so unsuccessful for so long. [That is, assuming what I am about to say is true.]
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The Argument
No one asks how to do something unless they think there is some benefit to be had from doing so. Likewise “How to defeat progressivism” implies that progressivism is something that ought to be defeated, without immediately providing a valid reason as for why. This is not because progressivism is an idea so wrong or absurd that it does not require any refutation; it has countless numbers of self-identified adherents, and countless more de-facto ones.
I am moving past that point. What you are about to read hinges on the assumption that progressivism is destructive in most every sense for society, to the extent that its ideals are made common through thought and law. If you are a progressive you likely regard this as a completely arrogant assertion, which I agree it is. What may surprise you is that even if you are a progressive, I genuinely believe you’ll find my proposal for defeating your ideology quite acceptable. You may find it so acceptable in fact that you might consider sharing this argument with your anti-progressive friends, in hopes that they’ll actually try it.
But before we reach that point we’ll have to clear quite a lot of prior ground, and as such this this “How to” will consist of several parts. We’ll start with what I call non-starters, that is, solutions that are being attempted and/or have been suggested, and must be shown as useless and discarded so that precious energy and time is not being wasted. The second part explains my solution and why I believe it will work, if it were attempted. Part three deals with miscellaneous objections, this section can be amended as this HT is distributed and receives additional feedback. Part four deals with whether or not my solution is feasible, that is, whether or not it could be carried out. The fifth and optional section deals with the aftermath of the solution, that is to say, what is to be done after the few years that our solution is being carried out.
Before any of that I should add that I will frequently speak of “non-progressives”, who is it exactly that I am referring to? The three main groups I have in my mind are what are called in the United States “Conservatives”, “Libertarians”, and a third mostly obscure group known as the “Alternative Right”, while these three groups are often more at each-others’ throats than they are in agreement, they’re not terribly indistinguishable in the eyes of progressives. And in that regard, their fates are somewhat linked.
Part I: The Non-Starters
This section on non-starters is going to offend many conservatives and libertarians, or at least upset them if they aren’t already consumed by cynicism. Therefore let me repeat myself: What I’m about to say is designed to save you energy and time. Good solutions cannot be found until the popular [i.e. ineffective] ones have been swept away.
Argumentation:
The argumentation method as I call it refers to any kind of propaganda, in neutral terms referring to the dissemination of political ideas, right or wrong. This includes literature, videos, documentaries, debates and discussions of various kinds. This method is also preferred by self-described Libertarians. While it would not be a good idea to cease entirely producing non-progressive propaganda, this method can never succeed at converting a sufficiently large number of people to affect policy outcomes. It will at best only succeed at converting the very intelligent or the very crazy. [not implying of course that the two camps are mutually exclusive.]
Why won’t it work? Here are a few reasons.
First, ask yourself Mr. Non-progressive who it is that disagrees with you. Government officials obviously disagree with you, the overwhelming majority of the [respectable] press disagrees with you, the overwhelming majority of the university departments of social sciences disagree with you, and the teachings of public schools disagree with you. Now ask yourself if you were an average human being with no prior knowledge or interest in politics, whose word would you take first: that of every respectable pillar of knowledge in society, or… the awkward non-progressive?
That is a fairly straight forward question with an obvious answer. The Lesson: It doesn’t matter the slightest how good your arguments or research is. The overwhelming majority of human beings are incapable of the kind of independent thinking needed to come to conclusions so greatly at odds with the contemporary zeitgeist. They’re not dumb for doing this. Since personal knowledge is so limited, going along with whomever or whatever is perceived as expert opinion probably works more often in day to day life than it doesn’t. The advice of a physician may be horribly wrong, but on average it is probably less likely to be wrong than someone of average intelligence trying to reason independently through the whole of medicine. — Aint nobody got time for that.
Relying on experts works well most certain situations; we wouldn’t have evolved intellectually authoritarian minds otherwise. That doesn’t mean it can’t be disastrous elsewhere. [E.G. politicized nutritional science in the 70s and 80s telling Americans to eat more carbs and partially hydrogenated oils.]
Libertarians, are [not unreasonably in my mind] stereotyped as hyper-autistic, solipsistic, and anti-social. You probably came to libertarianism because you either place zero or even negative value on academic rank or title. [Also with a love of conspiracy theories tend place greater trust in outsiders, but these sorts of people will always be a minority]
But here’s the second reason. Any ideology which can provide solid or semi-solid justifications for taking resources from a “them” group and giving it to an “us” group is inherently more attractive to anyone who can imagine themselves as an “us” – however defined.
It’s true that by the same reasoning, it’s also less attractive if you perceive yourself as a them. Then again it’s entirely possible to falsely imagine oneself in one sense or another an “us” whilst ignoring the various ways in which they constitute a “them” – and is that not precisely what the majority of Republican voters over the age of 60 have done? They decry government run healthcare whilst vigorously defending they’re slice of the cheese, i.e. Medicare and Social Security, and in doing so succeed in utterly discrediting themselves whilst helping to keep the entire progressive edifice whole and, well, progressing.
Progressivism is, at least as of 2013, more respectable, more attractive than its so-called rivals.
This isn’t a fool-proof case against argumentation; such a thing could occupy an entire essay. But for those of you still clinging to the idea of education let me remind you that Libertarians have been engaged in argumentation since the late 60s, possibly earlier if you include people who didn’t go by the name. Yet things have gone along as if they never existed. Fifty or more years of propaganda has not yielded fruit of any noticeably size or flavor. The solution I am proposing could, in theory, destroy progressivism within no more than eight to ten years. Young people who came to Libertarianism within the last five years or so are quite possibly ignorant of the fact that their movement is hundreds of years old, and like conservatism has had fewer long term successes than can be counted on a single hand.
Mind you that non-progressive scholarship and argumentation is necessary and indeed essential once the destruction of progressivism creates an intellectual void which needs to be filled. However, such scholarship will not itself produce that void.
I believe my solution can produce such a void.
Politics:
“Politics” is more the conservative answer to the progressive problem, though recently Libertarianesque candidates have become bolder, but I digress. The political method is simply the practice of trying to undo progressive policies by getting electoral majorities of non-progressive candidates in office. The previous few paragraphs were spent attacking a solution held precious by Libertarians; the next few paragraphs will be spent attacking a solution held precious by Conservatives.
If you accept the idea that argumentation cannot work, the absurdity of the political solution follows almost immediately from it. Just as ideas which deny people the chance at free things are less attractive, so too are political candidates. If a candidate does oppose free lunches, he can only do so by speaking about it in the most vague and circuitous of terms. Any group that feels specifically threatened by a candidate, presumably because he or she explicitly targeted the programs which benefited them, will immediately oppose said candidate to a much stronger degree than his or her remaining supporters would.
This idea is not original, it is known elsewhere as the law of concentrated benefits and diffused costs.
So for example, while the majority of Americans support cuts to government spending over tax increases, there is not a single government program perhaps barring foreign aid that a majority of Americans are willing to cut specifically. This makes sense if we imagine that each program funded by the Federal Government has some constituency who would be willing to expend far greater resources per-person than you to convince the public that these expenditures are necessary and wholesome.
An Aside:
Conservatives I know tend to blame the failure of their candidate PURELY on negative media coverage and media bias rather than the inherent unpleasantness of non-progressive policies. They then reason that if only they can “beat” the media they can win.
This attitude doesn’t really contradict or in any way invalidate my position that a non-progressive cannot win an election. The media can influence elections without being influenced in turn by elections.
My point is simply that if someone goes on national television specifying specific budget cuts [of a genuine nature] or reductions of X Regulations, that person just made several enemies without really making any friends he wouldn’t have not gained had he simply equivocated on the issues.
Second, look at poll data of current generations of young Americans, that will tell you what the future will look like. While it’s probably true that dissatisfaction with government has grown, except in the most unique of circumstances this is not an adequate proxy for people’s willingness to embrace non-progressive ideas. That is because signs of societal, political, and economic deterioration can usually be perceived as being the result of something other than what one supports. That is to say, young progressives may be increasingly dissatisfied with the present government in spite of it becoming more progressive, because they can always:
1. remain unaware of the long term political trends
2. think that whatever problems exist are a fault of something other than their system and/or
3. Feel upset because politics is not becoming progressive enough
The above section is important enough to warrant emphasising, we’ll return to it in our solution.
Second, consider the fact that collectively the groups which vote democratic and which embrace progressive ideologies have a much higher birthrate than those who embrace non-progressive ideologies. As the saying goes, demography is destiny.
I’m going to link to an open letter written in 2010, for the sake of context, it was written after the 2010 midterm elections. If you’re a conservative or even a libertarian, and you don’t have a deeply dark sense of humor like I have, this letter will probably infuriate you. However the sort of people who can learn from their enemies will find it instructive in gauging precisely how impossible their task is.
More anecdotal evidence: If a progressive president can win an election with a roughly 7.5-8% Unemployment rate [and mind you a far more dismal labor participation rate], how bad does the economy need to get for you to win an election? How bad would it have to get for you to win an election ten years from now when the demographics are more progressive now than they were in the past?
Indeed. How very bad would things need to be? I shouldn’t spoil the fun though, that comes later.
Mind you I’m not claiming that after 2008 No Republican administration or Republican congress will come into existence. I’m saying that if it does, it will only be because enough republican candidates were able to make their rhetoric sufficiently amenable, and by amenable, I mean progressive. This may be satisfactory to a number of Republican Politicians but to people with a memory that can hold more than a months’ worth of historical data at a time, it is quite unsatisfactory.
Another thing: all of this ignores another important fact. Winning elections is not the same as changing government policy. The election is only the first battle; you then have to carry through on your unpopular promises. This means more or less waging a second war against the federal bureaucracy as well as anyone outside government who perceives their livelihood as being threatened by changes to the status quo. Again, concentrated benefits and diffused costs. The only non-progressive things I’ve managed to see ever accomplished in a non-progressive administration are selective tax cuts. And tax cuts without budget cuts do more to harm the reputation of a low tax government generally than they do to actually improve things.
Oh and wars don’t count, especially not wars for democracy. Progressives wage and have waged plenty of wars.
I’ll ask one final point before abandoning this issue: To what extent does the GOP party of today resemble the democratic party of yesterday, as far as the government policies it defends?
At this point I haven’t even gotten into my own solution and I’ve succeeded in doing nothing but offending progressives, libertarians, and conservatives. I apologize for this. I’ll go through one final non-starter and then we’ll reach the moment you’ve been waiting for.
However, if at this point you’re still not convinced that Politics and/or argumentation is a waste of time. I can point you to the following works by a Blogger called Mencius Moldbug. If you can understand my writing he should not prove too much of a challenge.
For Libertarians: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2008/01/open-letter-to-ron-paul-supporters-part.html
For Conservatives: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2012/11/romney-he-sucks.html
Violence:
The fact that I [And I’m not alone here] am even considering the idea of violence as a “solution” is probably evidence for most progressives the extent to which non-progressives have fallen from grace into the black pit of insanity and extremism.
To them I would re-frame the issue as follows. Animals, even non-predatory animals, can become quite vicious when they realize they have exhausted all measures of escape. That is, when flight is no longer an option, fight is all that’s left. Expect to see more talk of fighting as more non-progressives see the futility of the current popular strategies.
Or perhaps they’ll never learn.
Nevertheless, Americans are an unusually optimistic people, and the idea of hopelessness doesn’t sit well with them. Thus, the idea of going 1776 on the current Government sounds increasingly attractive to people who have started to realize what I have been saying in the above paragraphs, certainly more so than throwing up one’s arms in despair. Notwithstanding, this kind of militancy needs to be discouraged; it will not work except under the most controlled of circumstances.
Conservatives are more than happy to proclaim and libertarians are generally quiescent on the point that the United States armed forces is the most powerful military organization on the planet at this current time; even if they think it harmful and generally inefficient. Guerilla warfare can be extremely obnoxious for a standing army, but this kind of warfare entails voluntarily enduring the worst kind of hardships. That is to say, may appear attractive to a third world inhabitant but this is only because they have almost nothing to lose. The wealthier a country the less willing its inhabitants will be to engage in behaviors which threaten what they already have.
As both an insult and a compliment, Americans are on the whole wealthy and spoiled, and so stand to lose a great deal if they went barrel to barrel with the US Army. It’s easy to see that they won’t do it unless they are either reduced to third world poverty or the only alternative to a heightened probability of death is a certainty of death.
There’s also a public image problem. As has been discussed elsewhere, the instruments for molding public opinion are in the hands of your enemies. If you initiate violence on the government, either to overthrow it entirely or to simply resist federal laws, you will be putting yourself in the wrong. In fact your PR is probably so dismal already that even if the violence you engaged in was purely self-defense, you would find yourselves demonized. Case and point: George Zimmerman.
It’s not impossible to overthrow a government, or to secede from it, but it must be done in the knowledge that the military will not intervene on behalf of the status quo. This was the case during the collapse of the USSR; what made the revolutions of the late 80s and early 90’s effective where previous revolutions had failed was the fact that the military did not intervene. If you wish to violently [or, perhaps, non-violently] nullify the power of the US Federal Government, you need some assurance that the military will not intervene, and this is again a matter of willpower on the part of a progressive government.
Are progressives so confident in their system that they are willing to use violence to keep people a part of it? Or have they lost hope?
Part II: The Solution
The moment you’ve all been waiting for.
The way to defeat progressives is to give them complete, total, and unambiguous control of the United States federal government, and let them do whatever they want with that power.
If you’re confused right now it’s not because you misread that last sentence.
Now before you dismiss me as crazy, [If you haven’t done so already] I’ll say now that there is a method to my madness.
Progressives by and large don’t view themselves as being “in control”. It is for this reason that regardless of the extent to which government policy reflects their ideals, whatever problems manifest themselves can never be seen as a result of their actions. Present economic woes or the general decline of civilization can always be blamed on the interference of the Republican party, a secret corporate plutocracy, or some other oppositional group. Also, since no Republican has ever openly confessed of their impotence: i.e. that all they are capable of doing is either slowing down progressive legislation or passing progressive legislation of their own, [E.G Medicare Part D, No Child Left Behind, etc.] they do nothing to shatter this view of the world.
The only thing that will put progressivism on the defensive, and place them in a position of moral and intellectual retreat, is make this mis-comprehension of reality as difficult to hold in one’s mind as is humanly possible.
That is to say, No progressive will lose faith in the correctness and righteousness of their position unless and until it is made crystal clear to everyone that one, they are in power, and two, they are the problem.
This can only be done if they are put in a position of absolute and unquestionable power. Ideally, every government office, even ones that are of mere symbolic importance, should be occupied by progressives. One equally good alternative is for the Republican Party to announce it will no longer vote “nay” on any bills introduced by progressives, of any kind.
As long as the non-progressive political forces make it clear that they are no longer an obstacle to progressives getting their way, our solution has been carried out.
I refer to this counter-intuitive solution as the Kill or Cure.
We can directly contrast the “Kill or Cure” what is going on now. The GOP’s opposition to the Obama administration and the agenda of the democratic party has prevented the passing of a few laws, but has not reversed any of what was accomplished in the first two years of Obama’s term, nor will continued opposition likely have this effect given the intense unpopularity the Republican party has put upon itself for its interference.
As a small thought experiment, imagine if in 2010 the GOP Congress decided to let the president to continue to do whatever he pleased, perhaps pressuring the president to begin enforcing the provisions of the Affordable Care Act prior to the 2012 election. Imagine if they had pressured quite consciously for higher taxes? If they had done this either as a means of proving a point, or lied and claimed they were strong-armed into supporting the President’s Agenda, who would be blamed for the next two years leading into the presidential election?
I think some conservatives are now starting to feel quite vindicated that the provisions of “Obamacare” are now being felt. The SOA has basically removed all shadow of a doubt that the law will make health insurance more expensive, and the rules the law imposes are already creating noticeable waves in the labor market. How or why non-progressives haven’t realize the sheer golden implications from these observations is beyond me.
“But wouldn’t that destroy the economy” – I said I would cover objections in another section, but this is immediately relevant.
Yes, it would, and that’s the point. You want to massively increase the size of government in a very short span of time and you want this increase to coincide, more or less, with a total economic meltdown. This is what would happen if progressivism were worth destroying. You want to, in effect, manufacture a crisis that no non-progressive could be blamed for except insofar as they failed to stop progressives from getting what they want. Better still, if we announce that our intention, or “Kill or cure” is designed to destroy the economy, anyone who criticizes us is admitting that progressivism is poison.
It does put the ball in their court, true. But really the ball has always been in their court. The difference now is that we are dictating their moves, in a manner of speaking.
In short:
Progressivism needs to become the understood status quo, in a sense, it must become conservative. Any criticism of the status quo hereafter becomes a criticism of the people who represent the status quo; this would take a few years, but not as long as one would think. I said earlier I believe my solution would succeed in defeating progressivism within eight to ten years, if progressive policies are pursued with sufficient intensity, I think that is roughly the maximum amount of time that the suffering could be endured by the American populace before a sufficient number of them have “given up” so to speak.
Side Benefits to the Solution:
There’s still more to this than meets the eye. I’ve said above that the chief obstacles to non-progressivism are a progressive dominated press, University system, and public school system. I’ve also argued that if every group receives a handout of some kind, no one will want to cut any specific benefits even if a general reduction in benefits would prove a net positive for them. Deliberately crippling the American economy solves some but not all of these obstacles.
The Austerity Problem:
The United States Federal government cannot fund itself unless it can tax and borrow. Conservatives for several decades running have generally ignored the importance the ability of the Government to borrow as a key ingredient in maintaining an exponential spending growth. The reason starving the beast fails is because the US Government’s bonds are considered the safest investments on the planet, they can borrow cheaply so long and only so long as the perception of the United States as an economic powerhouse is maintained. If the illusion of invincibility were removed, the USFG would be just another banana republic trying to monetize its own debt. The higher the tax rates the more sluggish growth of the real economy must become, and also the more difficult it will be to get any additional revenue from raising taxes further.
Imagine how a private investor would feel about buying US Bonds when half or third of the Government’s congress has announced that the reason they’re sitting on their bum doing nothing is because they want the current government to bankrupt itself. Many conservatives and libertarians are undoubtedly squeamish about actually trying to bankrupt their currency, since they’ve spent decades trying to avoid that inevitability. But bankruptcy solves the problems caused by trying to impose austerity politically on the citizens. [We’ve seen with Greece just how unpopular forced austerity can be] If the government flat-out can’t borrow or tax to cover its expenses, how people feel about austerity is entirely irrelevant.
Weimar Hyperinflation? It’s a possibility, I myself am more inclined to side with the people who say that debt-deflation is inevitable, and maybe hyper-inflation could follow. But supposing the government did try to print its finances. Who would be in a better position to handle such an outcome: the people who are expecting it or the people who are not? The people with social capital or the people without social capital? Also, paying people off with worthless money is a kind of austerity.
The point of all this would not be to enact vengeance on government dependents [rich and poor], though there is a pinch of poetic justice in this outcome. Nor is it to keep people in a state of misery indefinitely. It’s to make the point that was being made countless times before: The purpose of a balanced budget is not to provide less, but first and foremost to avoid a situation where far worse losses must be endured.
Also, Progressives can no longer provide their constituents with employment, corporate or private welfare, or any money worth more than the paper it’s printed on, it’s lost a valuable asset.
Mind you I don’t harbor any delusions that all or even most dependents will see bankruptcy this way. There will always be people who want to go back to the way things were regardless of the impossibility. However what we can do is make that view as cognitively dissonant as possible in light of the tragedy, and any anger they feel will likely be more evenly distributed amongst those who were put in charge and those who refused to take charge.
Given that the crisis is inevitable, no one will learn from the mistakes of the past if the history is permitted to be written that a failure to raise taxes, or some other failure to intervene, was the cause of the coming misery.
Also, while a vacuum of goods and services once provided by the State is a serious problem, but it is also an opportunity, it will compel people to figure out mechanisms and social relations to handle these problems largely in the absence of politics and legal monopolies.
The Universities:
The intimate connection between American universities and the labor market is a relatively recent historical phenomenon. I won’t go into the arguments for why the economic benefits of college are based on dubious statistics, or why job accreditation could operate at lower prices and higher quality than exists currently, since such views are probably already held by the majority of non-progressives. What I will say is that our non-interference solution would deal a decisive blow to the American university system.
Keeping in mind the effect that our solution would have on US Government finances, we can reasonably infer that after several years of suffering the university system will face pressure from two sides. On the one hand, the pressure for the US Government to abandon guaranteeing student loans or transferring money from taxpayers to banks to universities to maintain exorbitant tuitions. From the other side, a growing mass of unemployed or underemployed youths will put the lie to the idea that people “need” college.
The bankrupting of America’s universities will in all likelihood result in a general downsizing in their societal importance, particularly in the soft-sciences where progressivism is most concentrated, and that is a key benefit to our solution. I cannot imagine American universities coming out of an impending crisis without receiving heavy scrutiny. That is, without being identified not only as one of the chief constituencies which benefited from bad policy but which also functioned as a bodyguard for the kinds of ideas which brought the country to its miserable state.
Mind you I think regardless of what non-progressives do the University System as we know it is doomed. Lectures and textbooks can be mass produced online for minimal cost and there is no evidence that online course-work [when it is possible, obviously the hard sciences require physical infrastructure for laboratories etc.] However what we *can* do accelerate this process.
Heads I win, Tails You Lose:
Supposing that progressivism is correct in its assessment of the world, generally speaking, then technically the solution will produce better results than what its initiators supposed. The neat little trick about the “killor cure” is that if the fundamental premise on progressivism is wrong, the long term results will still be positive on the whole.
Part Three: Objections
The objection of feasibility is a special objection which deserves its own section, since it entails describing the mechanism by which I think the solution could be implemented. But these are other objections.
Objection 1: This Strategy is Immoral
What good words could be said about someone who was willing to bring his or her own civilization to the brink of destruction just to prove an ideological point?
While I do support the idea of non-progressives acting the role of a villain who openly profess to a conspiracy aimed at destroying the United States, [Using progressivism of course], such a proclamation is inherently dishonest. Given what I have said about politics, argumentation, and violence is correct, the truth is that Non-progressives have no power what-so-ever to prevent or alter the course of events within the next few years. However, they still have the power to do is decide the time frame over which this damage is dealt, and also to an extent they can manipulate the historical context in which the damage is perceived.
It’s always harder to learn from history when variables are confounded, and in the case of current events, republican interference is a
That is all that is being done, it is not sabotage, it is merely cleaning one’s hands of the mess that is bound to unfold [in one respect] for the sake of the historical record.
Also, because additional impositions of progressive policy is a question of ‘When’ rather than ‘if’, by implementing a massive dose of progressivism within a short span of time we the non-progressives are probably reducing the total level of suffering.
In short, remind yourself that you’re not causing anything that isn’t already doomed to happen.
You’re not causing a crisis, you’re doing what you can to make it clear who is to blame.
Objection 2: Acclimatization
One objection I received was by consciously adopting a policy of extreme progressivism; it would end up acclimatizing to the new conditions and would defend it at the status quo. I unfortunately deleted the precise comment this individual made and so I can only paraphrase what they said.I apologize if this is a misrepresentation.
I think the idea that people generally support the status quo, whatever that status quo is, is true. However I think this is a stronger argument against the dangers of not implementing my solution.
Assuming as we have that we can’t change what is to become, it is far more likely that Americans will become accustomed to living poorer lifestyles [materially and spiritually] if the current path of expansive government programs being imposed every few years were maintained. As I’ve said elsewhere in my mind’s eye it would take no more than a decade for progressivism to discredit itself.
To analogize, think of boiling a frog. The more rapidly the temperature change is, the more likely the frog is to try jumping out, and visa-versa.
Part Four: Feasibility
The question of feasibility centers on whether or not non-progressives are able to get the Republican Party to follow through on the solution. First of all we should establish that feasibility is always relative. The question is only whether or not this solution is more feasible than anything else, not whether it is “Feasible” in some general and abstract sense.
The notion of feasibility is only worthwhile to those who think the solution is an effective one. So from here on we will assume that everyone who has read up to this point agrees with the solution and is now only curious how it could be done.
The problem is that the Republican Party and anti-progressivism are not one in the same. The Republican party is a party of politicians, first and foremost. Republican Party politicians want to hold offices and wield power, and this solution requires they set those goals aside.
Because republicans want to continue to win elections, they will strategize. To do this they will be forced to take more progressive positions on issues which would otherwise render them unelectable, whilst simultaneously deceiving their original constituents into thinking that they, ideologically speaking, still have a chance at “Taking Back America”, and all the while the Country will continue along its predetermined course.
Now, for one thing, the solution of non-interference can take on a few different forms. The most ideal form would be for the Republican Party to remain in office but vote present and make it’s motivations for why they are doing what they are doing clear. Less ideal but still effective would be for the Republican Party to disappear as a political entity, and this strategy does not require non-progressives to directly engage the Republican Party.
This less ideal form of the solution only requires that enough republican voters be convinced of the correctness of our position in order to abandon voting [This how-to already consists of a portion of an argument for why voting is a waste of time, but more can be done than was shown here to convince people of this] If a sufficient number of republican voters abandon voting, the Republican party is more or less finished, and progressivism will soon follow suit.
This task is vastly easier than convincing people through argument why progressivism is wrong. Most conservatives, for example, are already told that the reason they lose elections time after time is because the Press and Universities are fronts for the Democratic Party, and because the Democratic party can sell votes without compromising their principles [Since vote selling is itself the principle].
In fact, it is the likes of Rush Limbaugh that in some respects have an inherently harder task to provide a kind of false hope to conservative voters to keep them working for the Republican Party [and pushing the country ever-leftward] All We have to do is show that by their own world view, their task is impossible. If they can keep people’s hopes up in such a precarious balance, it can’t be that difficult for the likes of us to tear that hope down. [For their own good of course]
Convincing republican voters that pushing back against progressivism harms them in the long run involves putting forward a controversial thesis, but this thesis is buttressed by a series of smaller ideas almost all of which the average republican agrees with.
Additionally, my solution is also unique in that it is the only meme of its kind which one could convince progressives to spread voluntarily. Progressives want their policies to be enacted, and I in this HT have provided them with a tool they can use to convince their political enemies that it is in their interest to allow their policies to be enacted. They don’t have to believe that progressivism is destructive to want the kind of outcome that people like us predict.
Convincing libertarians should be even easier, since they are probably more experienced with political disappointment. Point out that unless the universities and the press are disgraced, their scholarship will do them no good, thereafter your task is done. [Essentially what I have said in the paragraphs of part one]
Finally, it’s worth noting that my solution is not entirely without precedent. At least one republican politician has come close to saying what I am suggesting here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYdfquHXXic
By the way I’ll add that while there may be no connection, the time this interview took place was roughly two weeks before I had posted on Rand Paul’s Facebook page, advocating the GOP allow the Democratic party to raise taxes.
If at least one senator can take this idea seriously, it has got to be more plausible than what is being attempted as of late.
Part Five: Addenda
There are two final points I would like to make
The first is that the defeat of progressivism will not be as accentuated an event as one might imagine. I do expect this solution will cause many people who once held to progressivism to abandon it, but I also suspect that the change that progressives will go in evaluating their own beliefs will be more akin to a Catholic who ceases to believe in god but continues to attend church services out of habit.
We don’t necessarily need progressives to openly abandon their ideas, we only need fence sitters to reject progressive answers, and for progressives themselves to internally lose faith in their system, it’s not a conversion, but it’s about as close as you’ll get.
The second part is that people need to get past the idea of “Taking Back America”
The United States is an enormous landmass that consists of an extremely diverse group of people; this is true in every sense of the word “diverse”. Your goal should not be to recreate the politics of the entire landmass that has already been transformed beyond recognition, even after progressivism has been disgraced. This is a waste of energy and time.
What you need to focus on is changing only those areas which have the best chance, by virtue of the sorts of people who live there, to embrace a non-progressive political system.
You don’t have to convince the remaining progressives to have your vision of government imposed upon them¸ all you need to do is convince them to LET YOU LEAVE. By leave, I don’t mean immigrating to another country, I mean separating the United States along progressive and non-progressive lines, something that should have been done many years ago.
“America” as it exists in the imagination of what I call Americanist-Conservatives is first and foremost an idea, a concept. That concept can be applied anywhere on the globe and what ultimately matters is that there is some place where likeminded people can live without the fear that democratic majorities will strip away their rights and dignity in the name of equality, social justice, or other forms of totalitarian niceness.
Having such a country, even if it is the size of Rhode Island, is infinitely better than sharing a continental government with people who despise you.
Of course, we’re not nearly at the point where one can respectably speak of such matters. But imagine instead a scenario where progressives have become deeply demoralized by the failure of their system to keep its promises, where the economy has already collapsed and where sovereign bankruptcy is an observation rather than a bold prediction.
The idea of separating on peaceful terms would sound much more attractive then, would it not?
Maybe you disagree with this last part, it’s not an essential feature, but I still consider it worth considering.
