history – Ralph Waldo Porcupine

An open Election-Day letter to the Left

November 6, 2018 Ralph Waldo Porcupine

In writing about politics, I always try to imagine how my writing will read if the current political situation– regardless of which side currently holds power– is reversed, and to write accordingly. That consideration doesn’t affect today’s open letter to the Left, whose main party I expect will most likely at least take the House in today’s elections.

Dear Left,

This is something you won’t want to hear, especially on a day like today.

Your ambition is limited by cold, hard facts that you can neither change nor dismiss.

I can understand how you thought otherwise. Things came so easily that the stars beckoned. “The End of History” seemed no hyperbole. You controlled entertainment, news and academia, and relied on those things having that cultural influence to make your arguments and change people’s minds. But now the monopolies enjoyed by those institutions has been shattered by technology– especially the Internet.

Entertainment’s fragmentation began in the late 1970s with cable television, though as usual, no one could see it yet. Airwaves were limited and rights were held by an oligopoly, making almost a monopoly out of broadcast television. Technology continued its march. Home video arrived. VCRs, and later DVD players, meant that people could build up libraries of their favorite old shows, providing eyeball competition for new shows. Then the Internet arrived and broke everything wide open. Hollywood’s top levels have always been like tenure at Harvard, with a hierarchy, strict control over professional mobility, and rich, rich rewards for the Elect. Talented actors, like graduate students and adjuncts, have always greatly outnumbered the places at the top. But now anyone can put out entertainment on their YouTube channel.

News? The mid-to-late-20th century era when newspapers became few and very profitable was an historical anomaly, created by the long, slow decline of newspapers as a result of technological alternatives. Television and radio, its partial immediate successors, were as mentioned above even more of a monopoly due to their limited airwaves, but then the Internet, which reduced production and distribution costs to almost nothing, completed the process.

Academia? The economics have been hijacked by academic unions and bureaucrats, and the content by the politically correct, with overproduction causing degree inflation and galloping credentialism. Inevitably the Internet struck here too, with Massive Open Online Courses and places like Wikipedia and Youtube instructional videos, information’s chief cost became nothing more than a minimal level of time and effort.

You have gotten fat and lazy, both intellectually and politically. You have forgotten how to argue. In particular you’ve forgotten that in order to persuade someone, you have to speak the same language as them. Bill Clinton knew how to do that. Surrendering at least part of your identity narrative will be needed for that to happen, and unfortunately for you, identity is the last thing most people surrender. You’ll be able to find reasons why you don’t need to.

Finally, in the midst of all this unfocused political energy, you’ve forgotten that people hate what they hate over twice as much as they like the equivalent amount of good. If you try to accomplish too much with marginal political tricks– “phone and pen”, “50.1% making mandates for sweeping social change”, or the Supreme Court acting as a sort of unelected super-legislature– you will suffer from the one three-word sentence that limits your ambitions more than anything else: ENEMIES BUILD UP.

Even if you regain both the House and the Senate today, and the Presidency, somehow, tomorrow, there is still nothing you can do about how people feel about you. You can’t wave a wand and make them not enemies, or not dedicated to fucking you over in revenge. Your favorite labels, created back in your cultural-hegemony days, are burning out by abuse and overuse. You can’t take away your enemies’ votes.

Are there such relevant things as the Electoral College, the Senate voting being by equal representation per state, and gerrymandering? To be sure there are, but they are not that significant. The entire significance of those structural factors is to affect exactly how much ambition you can have and how many enemies you can make before you are stopped by the buildup of toxicity. Public opinion is the true battleground, which is why the collapse of your means of swaying it is so catastrophic for you. Structural factors like gerrymandering won’t change the fact that you need new ways of swaying it. (I predict that at some point, Hollywood will begin to produce entertainment sympathetic not to Trump but to his supporters, perhaps even at the cost of killing some sacred cows of the Left on the way.)

Is this true of the Republicans also? Yes. They can’t take away your votes, or shut you up, or make you not hate them.

It’s still more a problem for you than for them. Over the past fifty years, you’ve gotten most of what you ever wanted in terms of cultural victories. If politics is now a stalemate, a political trench war of attrition, with the same few yards being taken and retaken, back and forth, then reversion to the mean in results is unavoidable. The policy victors of the past fifty years– the free-traders, the cultural Marxists, the tax-cutters, the gun rights people, the warmongers, and so on– will be forced to surrender territory until a new equilibrium is reached.

Sincerely,

R. W. Porcupine

P.S. Don’t even think about impeaching Trump unless you have something more substantial up your sleeve than is commonly known, unless you want to be lumped in with congressional Republicans in 1996 and birthers. Trying to retroactively undo election results is lazy, narcissistic and harmful to American democracy, regardless of how self-righteous you feel.

How does Trump actually compare with Hitler?

September 23, 2018September 23, 2018 Ralph Waldo Porcupine

Donald Trump is not Hitler.

Lots and lots of people on the Left go on and on about how he is Hitler, about how fighting Trump is as righteous as fighting Hitler, about how he’s fascist, about how he’s a white supremacist, yada yada yada. Sorry, no. Not even close.

Hitler published a book of his intentions before coming to power in which he said what he was going to do, and by and large it was a good guide for what he tried to do. Donald Trump has a couple of mediocre and probably ghostwritten books about business, which talk chiefly about dealmaking. If you were going to try to find the least Hitleresque approach to forming relationships that there is, “negotiation” would surely have to be up there at the top. Can you imagine Hitler writing a book titled The Art of the Deal? No, it was the narcissistic “My Struggle” (that’s what Mein Kampf means). Can you imagine Hitler negotiating with Mexico? No, sir– he took over weak neighbors. The only negotiating he did was with strong ones, like Russia or England.

Hitler made German law more or less whatever he willed, becoming supreme dictator. Donald Trump has done nothing at all to take away the power of Congress or state and local governments. Hitler militarized Germany and created new secret police loyal to him. Trump can’t even control the FBI. Hitler otherized Jews, gay people, Gypsies, Christian Scientists and so on, took their property away, took their rights away, had them rounded up and put in concentration camps, and butchered them in vast numbers. Trump kissed black babies, put a gay-pride banner on his lectern, loves Mexican food, and so on. (Try imagining Hitler doing that to the people least like himself in 1930s Germany.) Trump has done absolutely nothing to persecute Americans. True, he has pushed for the Wall and urged a strong stance on illegal immigration, but that’s pretty mainstream, to the point where Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were urging it not that long ago. (Both voted for the Secure Fence Act of 2006, establishing a physical barrier along hundreds of miles of our border with Mexico.) Sure, his government has separated illegal-immigrant families temporarily, but there aren’t many, it caused a scandal, and at that rate he’ll only catch up to Hitler in a couple hundred years.

The ironic thing is that in the thing that has caused all this hyperbole– a superficial extrapolation of the historical situation that led to his rise– there is a valid parallel: the degree of populist rage with the powerful.

Even in the years leading up to the 2016 election you could see that sort of thing in the rise of Occupy Wall Street on the Left and the Tea Party on the Right, though it shocked a lot of people that it would go as far as Brexit or Trump’s election. (Nor do we now know how far it will go.) In shock, 2016 itself resembled nothing so much as the Great Peasants’ Revolt that followed the Reformation, though thankfully without violence. Released by Martin Luther’s fracture of the Catholic Church from hundreds of years’ worth of tension created by “a corrupt Latin-droning popery”, as Herman Wouk put it, hundreds of thousands of German peasants rioted and pillaged, before being put down violently. “Only Luther, before Hitler,” wrote Wouk, “ever so wholly spoke with the national voice to release plugged-up national rage”. But today, instead of raging against some modern-day analogue to the perennial scapegoats of Europe, the Jews, who were demonized by both Luther and Hitler, or some analogue to the victors of World War I, who had imposed swingeing reparations requirements on Germany in punishment for the first war, the Trumpist rebels were revolting against the rulers of their own country: corrupt -ism-spouting Mandarins imposing both a morality artificial and alien to many ordinary Americans, and self-serving economic arrangements on a country that in a two-party system captured by elites had never really had the opportunity to vote in a referendum about either. Popular culture managed to sell this arrangement for a while, but could not maintain it in the face of technological change and the Left’s neverending ambition.

Predictions

Trump himself will pass from the scene in one way or another, but the Overton Window is well and truly broken, and the elites will not be able to fix it any time soon. Including at some point among people on the Left who despise and oppose Trump, America will be on its guard against attempts to steer talk away from “undiscussable” issues. The Left’s best chance to recapture the cultural hegemony it enjoyed in the second half of the 20th century will be by influencing companies like Google or Facebook– but there is already pushback against their influence there. The Democrats will return to power at some point, because that’s just the way it works. But, as is always the case in democratic history, the real question will be “who won the arguments?”

Political IEDs

July 28, 2018July 28, 2018 Ralph Waldo Porcupine

One of the things I hate most about moralists is the way they lie about the past. I don’t mean that I hate that they lie about the past– lots and lots of people do that. I hate the way they do it. They apply the moral standards of today to the people of the past and hate on them for not living up to moral ideas they’d barely heard of and which would probably have gotten them lynched or ostracized from their communities. Which today’s moralists, with 20/20 hindsight, assume they’d have blithely ignored in their thoughtless, narcissistic righteousness, had they lived back then, instead of caving in immediately, as their conformity and activist piety today suggests they would have.

The timing and success of moral movements, such as abolitionism, is to me a function of societal wealth. How much work must one trade to get the basics of life? That’s societal wealth. Societal wealth, I believe, is a function of population growth plus technological advances in manufacturing, transportation and communications, with free-market ideas facilitating trade as much as possible. It’s as though “morality” or “compassion” is one of the higher levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The more your basic needs are taken care of, the richer you feel. The richer you feel, the more receptive to moral arguments you are.

It must necessarily follow that economic conservatives are the true natural allies, in effect, of social liberals.

Some years back, I was at the house of a friend of mine who’s a fan of military history and a gun collector, and bullet technology at the turn of the century was what we were discussing. Spitzer bullets (the pointed-nose kind that most rifles fire these days) had been invented and were known to be better in many ways. But, my friend told me, they couldn’t be used in repeating rifles back then until they invented the vertical-feed magazine, in which the bullets are above or below one another, which displaced the horizontal-feed magazine, in which they’re in a line (for example, in the Spencer rifle diagram above). “Why is that?” I asked.

“Because if you put spitzer bullets in a horizontal-feed magazine, you’ve basically built a bomb,” he explained.

What he meant was that if spitzer bullets are in a line in a gun, the pointed nose of each bullet will act as a firing pin for the cartridge in front of it. They’ll all go off in a string and in a confined space like deadly dominoes.

So– to return to the train of thought above– what happens if Trump does put in place the tariffs he has threatened, and it increases the cost of living…and people become less receptive to moral arguments as a result, and more parochial, and they vote for more tariffs?