On November 1, as everyone saw, a Learjet 60 smashed into the West Palm Beach asphalt at 600 miles per hour, just six miles from Mar-a-Lago. The pilots and passengers, including a tech entrepreneur and his young family, barely had time to scream. The accident struck some of us as an apt, albeit twisted, metaphor for the MAGA crash which happened two days later.
After a wild blue-sky joyride over Venezuela, which earned ten million TikTok hits, the pilot pushed on into a Persian tornado. Thus ended the latest attempt to escape from communism with American characteristics. I jest, of course. It is absolutely wrong to blame the crash on the Iran war. All that did was raise gas prices a dollar or two. An earthquake, or anything really, could have roiled the oil market. No one would have noticed – at least, not politically. Republicans remain addicted to the myth of the rational voter. Or at least, the normal voter.
This is understandable. Republicans are America’s normal party and have been for more than 100 years, since Warren Harding coined the word “normalcy.” Find an American who would call himself “normal,” and I’ll show you a Republican. At least, a potential Republican. Harding was elected in the sober aftermath of our first deranged progressive world crusade. Alas, like Donald Trump, he proved corrupt. The thrill of sobriety wore off. Many such cases.
The key fact of American elections is that most Americans do not love their permanent government
I assure you that everyone involved in the Iran war decision thought they were doing the right thing for America. I used to be a neocon. I understand. Through a certain narrow lens of geopolitical strategy, it was a bold, risky decision that might still pay off. But politics is everything – history is the history of politics. And even if you are not interested in history, history is interested in you.
It’s worth remembering how we got here. Normal voters elected a narcissistic, flamboyant hotelier with a deeply normal soul. The deep state trembled and so America returned to a serene, senile ice cream-eating boomer. This was too much, so why not the hotelier again?
This time the hotelier, not as young as he once was but never a stupid man, had a clue (sort of) and a plan (sort of). The plan was called “Project 2025.” Since the death of the last American dictator, the executive branch had been the servile creature of his permanent Congress. FDR’s true successor was not Truman – a small and stupid man, chosen for both his normalcy and his incapacity – but the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946.
Normal Americans were not told that this had happened. A lifetime later, they started to figure it out. The hotelier, this time, was not content to preside over the real APA regime with photo-ops and press releases, like the costume-jewelry “kings” of modern Europe. He and the writers of Project 2025 intended to actually run it – using all the strange, rusty levers that the APA left lying around. And Trump had capable young people to work them, inasmuch as they could be worked. And the levers did work – some of them – sort of.
Project 2025 was the Learjet. The smoking hole it left can now be seen. The new Speaker of the Texas House is a Chinese communist who has declared political war on the “oppressor” white race. Good times. Even much-needed aspirin, now, is made in China. This future was written in 1945 and follows with mathematical rigor from its axioms. What will the next weird crusade be? It will probably make George Floyd look like Lawrence Welk. We won’t need aspirin. We’ll need Thorazine.
The fundamental fact of American elections is that most Americans do not love their permanent government. We know this because the Democrats are the party of the permanent government, and most eligible voters do not vote for the Democrats. Unfortunately, they have two ways of expressing this: voting for the Republicans, and abstaining. In a country with a solid nihilist majority, the nihilist vote is split.
For example, 18 percent of eligible voters aged 18 to 29 voted for the Democrats in this midterm. Some 73 percent abstained, while 8 percent voted Republican. When compared with the number of eligible voters from the US census, it seems that 67 percent of voters aged 18 to 44 abstained. Even among the peak government-believer 65+ group, 29 percent abstained.
In the midterms, just 3 to 9 percent of 2024 Trump voters (depending on the state) swung from Republican to Democrats. The swing voter still exists. But he is dwarfed by the abstainer. If you believe in the newspapers, the right way for Republicans to get more votes is to be less nihilistic: act more like Democrats, appeal more to the swing voter, and return to their old submissive uniparty ways. But there are as many as 25 times more disengaged, nihilist abstainers as engaged swing voters.
Getting the abstainers to vote is an engagement problem. Funding is not the issue – Elon Musk dumped at least $445 million into all the usual tools. Boomer ads on the boomertube. Junk mail. Door-knockers. He might as well have sent it all to a Nigerian prince.
Step back and think about the problem in Silicon Valley terms: not voters, but users. Suppose you’re shipping a new app. How do you acquire users? TV ads. Junk mail. Door-knockers. Some rando knocks on your door. “Have you heard about our new app?” No one in Palo Alto could possibly think this would work.
There are three parts to fixing this: organization, motivation and strategy. Organization: set the bar higher. Accept the problem. Turn voters into users. Get them to literally install an app. Why is there no Republican app? Why is there no Trump app? Every voter has a phone. It’s insane. I don’t mean “Truth Social.” I mean a voter-assistance app. All it does is wake up whenever there’s an election, and tell you how to vote. Voting is a game – an augmented-reality game. Play the game. Enlist in the Trump Army! Win badges! Become an officer! Connect with your Republican-leaning friends. Nag them, even. If we want to get really ambitious, make it a neighborhood app: NextDoor, but based.
The Democrats are masters of vote harvesting. They don’t need an app. Their voters are different: not normies, but elites and clients. Elites are self-motivated, mostly with bizarre Bluesky-tier lies: Trump and Jeffrey Epstein are eating babies, etc. Clients are harvested. Clients have actual communities – the Democrats embed organizers. (If we could get back to in-person voting, they would have to herd their clients to the polls. They’d do it, but it wouldn’t work as well.)
Voting is a game – an augmented reality game. Play the game. Enlist in the Trump Army! Win badges!
Motivation: tell a compelling story. Why would you enlist in the Trump Army? It’s a rebel army. You’re a rebel. Your mission is to help destroy an oppressive regime that you hate and fear. Why should you hate it? Why should you fear it? You should be immersed in this story. You should be able to watch it on TV. Streaming or even broadcasting. Why is there no TrumpTV? Why does Trump have to get his message out through enemy media and neocon boomer Fox?
Yes: there is X. There is great content on X. There is also a great confusion of garbage, slop and nonsense. There is no message. There is no discipline. If you want to capture the state, build the state. The “MSM” is state media – not a state-controlled media, a media-controlled state. Same difference. Build your own state media! Make it better – snappier, fresher, funnier and, above all, truer. Lies can get clicks, but they can’t build power – not for us. In the USSR, no one could build Radio Free Europe. We don’t even have that excuse. It just costs money. And no, it’s not going to make money. It’s going to make power. Did giving $445 million to political consultants make money? It didn’t even make power.
And above all, the story needs to be energizing – which means it needs the energy of truth. Instead, Trump inhabited the lie. He pretended to really be the President. If you listen to either him or his enemies, he had the powers of FDR. “Almost unchecked,” said the WSJ. In fact, he could barely do anything with the rusty levers – and he used them quite effectively.
Trump is not really the president of the US. He is not really the CEO of the executive branch, like the Constitution says, like everyone believes. Did he tell anyone that? Did he challenge it at all? Of course not. He played into the trap, not out of it. He had ushered in a new golden age, he said. He had made America great again, already – on the way to making it greater. Meanwhile, people walked down the street and saw nothing different, because nothing was different. There was no path from reality to fantasy.
Trump is really the President of the world. He played the foreign policy game. With what result, we see. But hardly any voters care about foreign policy. The American Century – the great dream of conquering the world and turning it into America – is dead. Foreign policy, at least conventional foreign policy, is no longer a vote generator.
There is still unconventional foreign policy. Using the empire can’t create votes. Smashing the empire, with an “American Gorbachev Doctrine” – dismantling our infrastructure of international supervision, aka the State Department – might. By declaring that any country can have whatever government it wants (revoking the current “American Brezhnev Doctrine”), and making the concrete changes to prove this promise real (closing and selling all the embassies), the President could change the domestic balance of power in countries across the empire.
We would see new patriotic leaders all across Latin America, Europe and even Africa. New Bukeles, Orbáns, Kagames, unchecked and unafraid. And Americans, like Russians in 1990, would see the whole world throwing off American race communism. As in the USSR, that would have a tremendous domestic effect: reverse soft power. But this is frame breaking. The Trump administration was elected to break the frame. It chose to operate inside the frame, and push its edges. This should not be tried again.
Strategy: when we pull the lens back and look to all of history, we notice a striking fact. Left and right can both win. But there is no case, ever, of the right winning incrementally. Incremental action from the right can slow the left, but not stop it, and when slowed, it merely prepares itself for the next crusade. The right can only win in one step.
The American Century – the great dream of conquering the world and turning it into America – is dead
The fundamental asymmetry of right and left is that the left is entropic: disorder and chaos. The right is extropic: order and construction. Entropy can be slow (corrosion) or fast (combustion). Order can only be fast. You don’t incrementally clean your room. Victory for the left is a curve: the integral of energy over time. Victory for the right is a spike: an energy threshold, like launching a rocket. “He who makes half a revolution digs his own grave.”
Rebellion is a great narrative. We’re all rebels now. It’s in our culture. It’s in our DNA. But as good as rebellion is at creating support, something else is even better: momentum. Not the vegetarian momentum of governing well, but the carnivorous momentum of destroying the enemy. Today the administration has negative momentum. That sucks. We’ll have to turn it around.
As Napoleon said, in war – or politics – “the moral is to the physical as three to one.” He meant morale. Victory creates morale. Defeat destroys it. The Democrats do not actually believe in anything. They believe in power. Victory is a flywheel: momentum generates power, power generates momentum. Osama bin Laden understood this perfectly: “When men see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they like the strong horse.” We showed al-Qaeda and ISIS that they were actually the weak horse – and where are they now? When you win, your enemies lose their spirit, surrender in droves and become your friends.
Trump did not beat the Democrats, but he beat “Woke 1.0” – for now. It’ll be back. It’s still there, integrated like a herpes virus in our institutional DNA. But we saw it work. The flywheel was running for the first two months of the administration. Then he settled down to govern, and lost. Win again! And next time, don’t let the flywheel stop.
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