The United States Is a One-Party State

The first act of any future president must be to tear down the wall between the civil service and political appointees, because otherwise none of the government’s acts will be his.

Our civil service employs nearly ten times as many Democrats as Republicans, and every policy passes through their administrative agencies. Our elite cultural institutions—the New York Times, Harvard, Netflix, Twitter, and other such prestigious media firms—employ nearly one hundred times as many Democrats as Republicans. (I will substantiate these claims below; search “by the Open Secrets metric” to skip straight there). These broadcasters of prestige direct the civil service far more than the three fake branches of government do, because civil servants are far more protected from getting fired than they are from getting hacked. There’s even a special tenured government agency devoted to defending the tenure of government bureaucrats: a large supermajority of civilian employees in the ironically named Executive Branch can’t be fired unless their boss affirmatively proves “just cause” before the ironically named Merit Systems Protection Board. Literal millions of specialized agency administrators thus can seek direction and meaning from the univocal culture industry’s endlessly deafening supply of opinions…

Those are the bad behaviors. These are the moving stories.
You can either play a victim or else accept a victim’s blame.
Please reach out with juicy gossip about your office politics;
Help us wrap some stains and glories around a list of names.

Meanwhile, the few thousand politicians who together constitute the congress, the courts, and the political appointees basically just bicker amongst themselves (mostly within each branch, occasionally between them) about how some newsy policy should slightly change its course. Do you really think that this year’s vague few-vote majority on one particular permitting process will guide the deep state’s behavior? No wonder political office fails to attract real leadership material! But what about business interests and campaign finance? What about capitalism puppeting the government with its invisible hands? Military contractors, big banks, pharmaceutical companies, and other such corporate boogeymen each employ roughly equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans, and lobby for isolated loopholes rather than sweeping policies. They pay for their meek exemptions, with money and reputation, whereas true rulers always issue prideful dictates, and receive modest official stipends alongside supreme elite status.

However, perhaps investors as a class could form some interest groups, independent of their businesses… After all, you’ve seen their cabals do well amidst much suffering, and so assume that they must be at fault, that their strength obliges them to answer for your weakness, or answer to your wokeness. But how exactly would such nebulous committees—of wealth or meekness—rule their people well enough to demand membership dues or decide elections, much less tame the submerged monsters which eternally govern every administration’s depths? As God says to Job, “Canst thou draw out Leviathan with an hook?” You believe that you will someday starve the beast beneath your miseries from power: that Leviathan will “make many supplications unto thee,” will “speak soft words” and “make a covenant with thee.” You believe that you will “take [it] for a servant,” without yourself believing in someone who can slay each whale and rend its blubber. This once and future king may sometimes ask for your fatted calf, but melts down golden ones for you. And so a humbled Job replies, “Therefore have I uttered that I understood not.”

In other words, a weak throne implies a strong bureaucracy, in states and businesses alike. The shareholders in any given private venture elect an official board of representatives to govern it, and how do they always rule? To manage its army of middle-management, these legislators delegate all their actual decision-making authority to an individual chief executive, and only retain powers over appointment, removal, and funding. In exchange, this absolute ruler arms his patrons with a firm and visible hand, and turns his administrators from insurgents into clients. That’s why companies are called firms, why fungible influence is only soft power, and why “to invest” etymologically means “to clothe in the robes of an office” (i.e., to vest official authority in proxies). Hell, you just saw how hard it was for our congressmen to even elect a speaker!

In short, a small concentrated interest group can always impose vast distributed costs, which is why the private sector organizes into corporations rather than decentralized contracts, and why administrative agencies run the government rather than vice-versa. For several decades after WWII, this asymmetry resulted in specialized producer-castes each effectively lobbying to restrict competition within their specific field, and to subsidize general demand for it. An informal guild system emerged, which ennobled ordinary men into an aristocracy of artisans and engineers and merchants and shippers and so forth. Of course, economists call such cronyism inefficient, and spent the last few decades replacing it with ever more administrators; but under several simple assumptions, its “unfair” and “antiquated” emphasis on dignified and fulfilling work makes ethical sense:

1. What if our virtues are mostly trained, and our preferences are mostly learned, but only big and obvious incentives can teach us these life lessons?

2. What if our nation’s innately intelligent people are now easily captured by busywork and status games, because of this moral immaturity?

3. What if the unintelligent among us could likewise elevate themselves to pursue peaceful and productive trades once more, if given a real reason, with stakes they can really grasp?

4. What if the point of a civilization is to raise up its human stock into a proper citizenry, with enough self-mastery to count as properly free?

Since life lessons necessarily involve risk, uncertainty, and inertia—in ways that whiteboard lessons do not—and since life is the point of life, I think the first and last points clearly hold. I’m not sure how anyone could fail to grasp the third claim: our overall obesity rate has grown from 10% in 1950 to 40% today; the share of babies born to unwed mothers rose from 5% in 1950 to 40% today; the rate of death “from unintentional poisoning” has risen more than tenfold since 1950, entirely due to drug overdoses; the suicide rate has more than tripled; etc. Because the communities most responsible for this utter collapse in standards behaved much better in living memory, we can’t just blame their immutable traits for what’s happened to them. At least, not if we seek the mandate of heaven. And this essay is mostly about the second claim’s consequences.

Thus, in my view, societies of craft seem to be worth more than theoretical efficiency. An economist can always draw lines that go up, can always justify dissolving the borders between fields, tearing down fences that seem extraneous now… That’s what reasoning “on the margin” means (judging rules based on their edge cases rather than their cores, and so pushing boundaries rather than diving deep). But so you can’t ever trace these up-going lines back to their actual origin, back to the values that actually founded this land, and laid down settlements upon it, in which economic value can actually arise. As God says to Job, “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast understanding. Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? Or who hath stretched the line upon it?”

However, this guild system gradually rotted into a gilded system. Instead of just giving special privileges to producers, administrators produced stories about how all of us shall only have the most expertly accredited servants at our every beck and call. And, naturally, the storytelling classes won: lawyers, doctors, teachers, journalists; professors who play the game of tenure committees and grant applications and media outreach and political involvement… processors of human resources. We’ve been gobbled up into their myths as tropes, because they had to grind us down into high-leverage low-fidelity stereotypes (to deal with narrative power at scale, and dole out millions of little judgments). But that’s just how modernity works, and it worked well, for a while.

Administrators could only arise as the vanguard party of progress because at first they dealt out IQ tests and other functional dowsing rods to grateful postwar leaders, who’d somewhat accidentally wound up as the victors of unfathomably vast apparati. In their ultimate moment of triumph, these conquering heroes—mechanics and craftsmen and shopkeepers and tradesmen and tinkerers, enthroned atop the world—had suddenly looked down. And they saw far too many subjects dispersed below them. From such great heights, all those diffuse objects could only either look like symbols or noise. Would another towering sovereign topple back into chaos and rubble so soon, and, as in ancient Babylon, scatter all the world’s peoples apart again? And so some humble symbol-manipulators rose to steady their teetering rulers, like the court astrologers of old. For example, consider the history of the SAT. 

About a decade after Alfred Binet developed the first real IQ test, Carl Brigham worked on intelligence testing for the US Army during WWI. James Conant, as Harvard’s president, adopted Brigham’s test in order to find scholarship students in 1934, and made it mandatory for all applicants in 1941. Conant’s assistant, Henry Chauncey, then helped the Army and the Navy administer it en masse during WWII. After the war, Conant merged all the country’s major testing organizations into a new private non-profit organization called the Educational Testing Service, and became its first chairman. Chauncey became the first ETS president, and administered their Scholastic Aptitude Test to millions of high schoolers per year. Chauncey’s dream was to test every citizen twice in high school, to create a “Census of Abilities” which could help sort students into jobs, but he retired in 1970 without securing the requisite funding. Clearly, administrators helped modern organizations efficiently deal with and dole out specialization at scale. We need them to produce legibility for us, and so they naturally orient around legible metrics.

However, these administrators will then get selected for inflating the importance of their chosen measures, especially if it’s easier for them to increase a given measure’s reach than switch to administering something new. At this point, their tools become political targets, and sense-making descends into salience-making. The apparatus attracts apparatchiks. Not only students but now also activists try cheating on opposite sides of each exam. Can you get enough leverage to make preferred facts highly visible, and obscure others? Thus, in 1971, at the EEOC’s quite prolonged and vigorous behest, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled (in Griggs v Duke Power) that private organizations cannot use broad aptitude tests on which any protected groups—like blacks or women or black women—score below average; so if companies hire or promote based on such testing, they may be liable for many millions of dollars in damages… unless their lawyers can affirmatively prove to a court’s entirely subjective and generally fickle satisfaction that these exams were “reasonably related to the job.” And so white-collar hiring committees could only measure applicant IQ by requiring costly four-year diplomas.

And yet, of course, the majority-black NFL could require draft prospects to take the very same Wonderlic intelligence test which the Griggs decision forbade a power-plant from administering; the Scouting Combine only chose to stop applying it in 2022, after CTE-related lawsuits began to use player scores as evidence against the League. For much the same reason, elite universities have now turned against standardized tests: their admissions officers obviously cannot maintain diversity between cognitively distinct groups without cognitively discriminating against higher-performing groups… and they obviously value achieving diversity more than attracting cognitive talent (just as football values achieving intense gameplay over avoiding cognitive harms). But so long as an organization fails to properly suppress all the metrics which it no longer uses up, those moldering measurements can summon forth an algal bloom of lawyers and journalists and bureaucrats, as if by abiogenesis, and use it to metastasize. These modern cyanobacteria—whose loud lungs can only breathe resentments and technicalities, and whose mats of slime shall asphyxiate whatever feeds them, and so snuff out the worlds in which they arise—will blindly hire plaintiffs who can use the master’s tests to dismantle the master’s programs, whether on behalf of concussed or competent brains.

After all, any selection criterion which seems relevant and measurable will naturally attract administrative cadres to its banner, whom only strongman rulers or ideological fanatics can select against. For example, the NFL can, with one booming voice, call the Wonderlic “antiquated” or “problematic,” and otherwise quietly phase it out. In contrast, the College Board—the private decision-making body which oversees SAT development for the ETS—will never ban its own precious test. But then what can be done about the SAT’s embarrassing evidence of racial intelligence disparities? There’s a 100-point average black-white gap in each 800-point SAT section, even after controlling for household income; whites from households with incomes of under 20K score the same as blacks from households with incomes of over 200K. The only way that this gap has narrowed at all in recent decades was when, in 2016, the total possible score shrank from 2400 back down to the pre-2005 baseline of 1600… which naturally brought the total race gap down from 300 to 200 yet again. How do you cover up this obvious and problematic difference?

In 2019, the College Board offered up an “adversity score”: a single number that would represent how much oppression you faced, based on factors like your neighborhood’s crime rate. Students couldn’t see how they each individually scored on this, but in aggregate it would supposedly excuse any uncomfortable statistics (while freeing administrators to more openly pick applicants based on race and ideology rather than actual merit). Because of public backlash, the SAT then retooled those same basic factors into an oppression “landscape”; and so now it’s a set of your personal victimhood scores—also called an “environmental context dashboard”—which you can see, but which each admissions officer opaquely combines into her own special victimology index. And yet, as of now, more than 80% of four-year colleges don’t require applicants to take the SAT or ACT, or any other such exam… they mostly shed the inherent racism of having standards in 2020, and never looked back, so this desperate gambit clearly didn’t work. But why?

If SAT scores did not predict college performance so well, they could be more easily mangled by faddish “social justice” concerns: their external validity is precisely what makes them so unacceptable to our unstable commissars. How do you explain away their uncomfortable implications, given that they correlate much better with all sorts of relevant desiderata—such as undergraduate grades, postgraduate schooling, adult earnings, reflex times, and cranial capacity—than alternative admissions criteria do? Further, precisely because the SAT isn’t well-predicted by “unfair” factors like socioeconomic status, it’s hard for elites to hack, and hard for bureaucrats to hack away at. Depending on your dataset, either five or fifteen percent of the variation in scores correlates with variance in household incomes; test prep doesn’t actually seem to do much, nor do private schools.

Clearly, low test scores don’t automatically condemn you to poverty, or else controlling for income would cover up such awkward racial realities… without, of course, explaining away the obvious fact that intelligence gaps largely cause these economic gaps, rather than vice-versa. But university admissions departments won’t willingly stop treating their decisions like St Peter’s at the pearly gates, nor their diplomas like indulgences. Acceptance must imply moral worth, instead of just serving some earthly sorting purpose. Hence the sudden cascade across our country against standardized testing, as an affront against our self-appointed arbiters of all acceptable morality. “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graded images!” And so, in the academic game, you must credibly pledge to condemn all claims that groups are intellectually diverse, or else other diversity-valuers will perceive you as insufficiently loyal to their struggle against certain legible metrics.

You can, of course, argue about whether college bureaucrats really believe in demographic neurological equality, and about whether they value achieving diversity for its own sake, or in order to appear tolerant, or to favor certain client populations. But the single-party state only works by severing politics from the substrate of sincere opinions. Likewise, mathematicians can have thoughts about claims that are independent of ZFC (their foundational axioms); but these articles of faith and secondhand stances only matter—only durably instantiate in the mass of human minds—insofar as they accomplish something. Does assuming the continuum hypothesis help you derive some useful result? Similarly, does adopting a given policy platform or a set of partisan heuristics help you achieve your goals, or develop better ones, or feel good inside?

Between the signal and the substrate, there is the communications revolution. Between “politics” and “democracy,” there is the vanguard party. Between “world government” and “global leadership,” there is the quisling apparatchik. Between “populism” and “democracy,” there is the censor’s purge. We let a cadre of information consumers hook itself on one emotional impulse: high-leverage, low-fidelity; nothing you can argue with, only feel, and spread. Small in soul and number, they compulsively treat each person with any individual agency—anyone who produces himself—as a threat to the legibility which lets them watch us all. Because, remember, a small concentrated interest group can always impose vast distributed costs, which is why the internet organizes itself into just five websites rather than interoperable protocols, and why administrative agencies run the government rather than vice-versa. And so we’re stuck with an aristocracy of consumption, tubercular and shrill, yelling at you to download their mind-virus, to let their brainworms limply slither in your ear… to stop disenfranchising their anxious whispers from your internal monologue. That’s why this revolution-in-one-sector (as Comrade Stalin almost put it) has only meant the disappearing of progress from any other.

But there’s hope! A libidinal politics of cults and memes, of possession and virality, is the natural third step in our civilizational cycle. The creator becomes the sustainer becomes the destroyer, and it all begins again. A disruptor brings down creative destruction to sustain this evolutionary flow against the ravages of age. We’ve already seen how the conspiracies of great founders give way to homogenized aristocracies of merit, which in turn give themselves away to this oligarchic rot; yet thus even such an acid-bath of dissolute resentment as our present moldering oligarchy has its role to play. Let us be the primordial soup from whence an overman shall soon rise—the instability which yields to him, the variation that he samples, to create his new sacred values. For each of these three eras only lives by declaring all opposition to some transcendent thing off-limits, beyond any bargaining.

And so let us learn to see how this current one-party rule helps our diffuse and unaccountable ruling bureaucracies coordinate with each other, and how it helps them align their subordinates. And how secret societies could now hack the party-state’s precious ritual procedures, which are leveraged up enough to move whole worlds… which is how a strongman might emerge, to neutralize its monomaniacal perversities, without undermining either the peaceful cohesion or the motivational spirit that it provides to crucial governing institutions. Let us learn to see how cabals of the dominant fall into societies of the competent, and how these in turn fall before coalitions of the observant. Let us learn to see how personal worth loses out to individual accomplishment as a governing principle, which then loses itself over to administrative relevance. What comes next? Follow the spinning wheel:

• Faith, Hope & Charity → Life, Liberty & Property → Liberty, Equality & Fraternity

• Orthodoxy/Autocracy/Nationality → Sex/Drugs/Rock → Diversity/Equity/Inclusion

• Civilization vs Barbarism → Liberty vs Coercion → Oppressor vs Oppressed

• Enemies of the Present → Enemies of the Past → Enemies of the Future

• Hierarchy of Rank → Absolutism of Merit → Tyranny of Urge

• Cladistic Faith → Theoretic Belief → Pragmatic Argument

• Civilizational Genius → Civil Engineers → Civility Gurus

• Wild Genies → Temple Oracles → Forum Simulators

• God-Emperors → Prophet-Kings → Priest-Leaders

• The Semantic → The Syntactic → The Stochastic

• The Genetic → The Machinic → The Theatric

• Inventors → Manufacturers → Distributors

• Platonism → Ultrafinitism → Intuitionism

• Anagnorisis → Apophenia → Aphanisis

• Functions → Objects → Grammars

• Logical → Empirical → Indexical

• Quality → Quantity → Equality

• Vitality → Fitness → Utility

• Time → Energy → Mass

• Spirit → Industry → Culture

• Honor → Dignity → Victimhood

• Virtue → Agency → Expression

• Worship → Skill → Authenticity

• Wishes → Desires → Fantasies

• Status → Contract → Grievance

• Actions → Experts → Excuses

• Personal → Legible → Fungible

• Settlers → Builders → Movers

• Monarchs → Nobles → Eunuchs

• Mastery → Freedom → Enjoyment

• Creators → Performers → Joiners

• Aesthetes → Advertisers → Addicts

• Anger → Bargaining → Depression

• Strength → Intelligence → Hysteria

• Creators → Performers → Joiners

• Religion → Reduction → Reification

• Loyalty → Obedience → Conformity

• Poets → Intellectuals → Bureaucrats

• Explorers → Cartographers → Tourists

This is an essay about how communications breakthroughs in materially stagnant societies have selected for victim narratives that parasitize heroic strongmen. Since language is our universal interface, its ascendance dissolves the differences and flattens the hierarchies which complex production requires. In other words, when bits triumph over atoms, cargo cults of proper process hollow out the concrete powers that authorities once wielded. Leadership withers away because a leader needs enough control over actual resources to issue carrots and sticks arbitrarily, rather than in service to some abstract procedures, or else he can’t coordinate his ostensible followers toward any particular end. So instead of pursuing his overall goal, supposed subordinates just apply the symbolic rules that he hands down, as they see fit, and only appeal their chosen exception cases up to him. They receive rewards and support according to their signals and semblances, rather than their actions and outcomes.

Socially desirable interpretations of precedent replace usefully calibrated expectations of results. Respectability eclipses responsibility as a mechanism for allocating rank. And so forth. Each restless bureaucracy therefore starts reporting on its chief executive, instead of reporting to him, and enlists other such borganizations in legible propaganda campaigns to steer his jurisprudence. Even dissidents begin to work backwards from regime journalism, rather than building up their own programs from first principles, just as Radio Rwanda’s relentless race-hustling lies became the most important reality facing Tutsi people right before that genocide. For example, during the pandemic, I learned that, with FDA support, three state health departments explicitly made their hospitals ration antiviral covid treatments to healthy blacks rather than high-risk whites; these woke phrenologists afforded racial identity greater weight than hypertension, heart failure, or chronic lung disease. But I only learned this because I saw official fact-checkers loudly deny it, so I googled around.

In other words, these mindless networks of culture and prestige endlessly suck power away from any remaining individual tyrants, and merely use it as a megaphone to shriek ever louder about encroaching tyranny. Envious paper-pushers order us to smash everything exceptional, because destroying exceptions proves the rule of mediocrities like them. Vibrant monuments fall, interesting projects get stalled out, even biological health must be deconstructed according to standard protocol. Did you know that great men by definition weren’t what we’d call “nice guys”? Or how about that you can distinguish yourself now by disagreeing with whatever they probably thought and said? Just say that your pet views are particularly special, because you view everyone else as especially bad, which means that everyone worth listening to should hold your views, while also bowing down to them as your specific specialty. Or, similarly, say that all bold bets actually, For Your FYI, look unlikely to pay off, unless they already have, in which case it was always obvious. Et cetera.

Meanwhile, the fancy credentials and fashionable performances that control political discourse just signify status, which normal citizens lack; hence ideology can only offer these powerless clients the sorts of secondhand preening and vicarious contempt that seem to single out some other excluded group even worse. Normies then split into rival factions based around easily identifiable castes, who just blame each other for enabling this aimless shrill tyrannophobia, which keeps their headless grievance-mongers in charge. So resentment—which is only helpful for building an audience, of the masses or fellow managers—filters down from the class whose careers it helps, and relentlessly swarms any half-assed heroism that either side still allows among its own.

However, our elite blob congeals toward unanimity on countless topics, because it adopts fads and slogans based on how impressive they seem to influencers, not how satisfying they feel to users. Impressiveness tends toward competitive agreement rather than bitter division for the same reason that elitism is essentially one-dimensional, unlike mature forms of personal taste. After all, children weight flavors by their magnitude of enjoyment, which makes them easy to hack, whereas adults cultivate aesthetic sensibilities based on incompressibility, since this conveys a richness of information that hackish lifestyles lack. But of course official judgments can only allow for a single axis, given that peace means orderly alignment, just as pretty much everybody in peacetime necessarily agrees on who polices conflict (instead of developing nuances and loopholes).

Likewise, we must also largely agree about which colleges, nonprofits, and media companies grant the best certificates of privilege, and who wields them. Sure, their admission decisions favor vague discretionary criteria, because they force explicit standards on inferior organizations like the presidency as a lever of control, but applicants either get all the way in or not at all. Though these institutions of sorting may thus degenerate into petulant childishness without a firm hand guiding them, creating rivals is an act of war and folly: disreputable subjects usurping the fundamental powers of their state, without reconstituting it; would-be caesars raising new armies without official power, when they can’t even pull off coups. If your little ragtag rebel alliance crosses Rome, then either you have to cross the Rubicon or else it crucifies you.

You should never attack the state’s monopolies of essence—those entities which settle disputes by issuing deeds of political correctness, whether titles to demographic rank or home ownership—since their one real job is to decide for us who really does have what, and so your win condition over our empire is entirely up to them. Questions of the form “who should claim what” belong to God, not Caesar, because government by morality and justice only means overthrowing peace and order. In short, markets and ethics can quite effectively reallocate officially-recognized currencies of power, in order to compulsively maximize certain scalar principles, like efficiency and hedonism (or maybe stratification and equality); however, these decentralized judgments are either just liquidity mechanisms that mechanically redistribute the system’s benefits, or else priestly scoring rules, which advise on and advertise for tribalist redistribution policies.

Though financial and normative incentives obviously matter, they only run well on social substrates with strong walls around each such stake, or else entropy takes over. That’s why life comes in the form of carefully wrapped agents: expectations and preferences can only guide beings who are discrete, coherent, and unitary. Without thick borders around every development, unexceptional people can profitably weaponize norms to possess customers, puncture management, and homogenize away our energy sources, like vitality and innovation. Apple works because neither its customers nor its employees even think about who specifically holds its shares, much less whether they deserve to share in this particular venture. Likewise, Musk’s companies work insofar as demagogues just interfere with what his paper wealth is worth, not how he runs them.

Unfortunately, the ideology behind our headless elitism has grown much more comfortable with letting the rich keep all their money, so long as it can’t actually buy the freedom of uncontested authority over some personal dominion. After all, “elitism” and “leftism” are perfect anagrams, barely even transposed, if you switch the F to an I—since our seminaries like Harvard now think it’s good etiquette to call every failure an incomplete success (in other words, to stunt our elite into gifted kids, who always have potential because they never actually graduate). They fear competence more than the karma of stagnation and civil unrest because their monopolies of sorting have grown too weak, and must reign in semi-autonomous tech fiefdoms through informal powers and unofficial agents, which invisibly and unaccountably occupy these monopolies of doing.

Imagine if police could only get funding through highway robbery, or only arrest public violence by breaking some rules, and protesters then condemned them as criminal bandits who have grown too strong… would you demand further cuts and regulations? These monopolies of destruction, social or physical, should be strong enough that they can artificially constrain such violence, and gain large rents from their advantage, which get nepotistically invested in further strengthening this machinery. Yet our elite of academics and journalists can’t properly compensate its own, or even reproduce their status edge over professions in the monopolies of creation, like real tech.

If domains of innovation continue to hollow out domains of state, we’ll end up with destructive creation, as executives become like warlords who compete against threatening rivals through bitter attacks. Apple will keep trying to put the squeeze on every app, rather than searching for some new grand product, and Twitter’s enemies will win by sending unstable newsrooms and small-minded feds to censor its vitality. Instead, we should want our destroyers to get creative, and jettison the slave morality to which they’re presently addicted. Imagine a system that spoke with one voice about prizes, punishments, and progress rather than excuses, excuses, and excuses.

Every stable state must thus have one party, and be honest. Ours is dishonest enough to run elections for entirely ceremonial roles, while ninety percent of its official administrative apparatus leans blue, and ninety-nine percent of unofficial administrators do. One way to check this is through partisan donations, because those are matters of public record, which the “open secrets” website aggregates by employer. This aggregation includes employee giving to individual candidates, political parties, and corporate PACs. To avoid some common confusions caused by popular misconceptions about campaign finance, note that corporations cannot themselves give to PACs, and that anyway PACs typically constitute a tiny fraction of their employee giving.

Staff at the Washington Post, for example, have not given any money to a Washington Post PAC in at least several decades; and yet, despite their journalist salaries, they gave tens of thousands of dollars to political campaigns in 2016, 2018, and 2020. In 2016, 99% of these donations went to Democrats, and, in 2018, 100%. But then, in 2020, Republicans received nearly 5% of their over 80,000 dollars in election spending, and independents got even more. Just about 90% of all this money went to particular candidates, instead of partisan organizations, because the establishment media operates far more like a political party than the Democrats do: politicians copy its editorial line far more than journalists copy their party line.

Or do public officials frequently get journalists fired for adopting abstract opinions and personal habits which the Federal Register deems “politically incorrect”? The New York Times canned everyone from Franken and half of Trump’s cabinet to Cuomo and half the LA City Council. The Washington Post whipped up hundreds of protesters to raid the Capitol during Kavanaugh’s hearings, and nearly had him assassinated, but somehow you never hear about it anymore. The New York Times forced its own opinion editor out for allowing an editorial by a senator, who argued that the president should invoke the Insurrection Act in order to police BLM riots at the White House. The Washington Post got Congress to believe that a Capitol policeman died on January 6th. Et cetera. Meanwhile, Trump called the press “fake” and mocked its apparatchiks on Twitter, and it went wild with unrequited lust for him, under a thin veneer of shrill hatred; it raised endless funds to “defend democracy,” and glowingly raised the profile of everyone he “attacked.”

Now that normalcy has returned, the president, his cabinet members, and congressional representatives all compulsively use the news to keep abreast of every big picture issue or event, and only then request assistance from specific segments of the civil service. Of course, many commentators elide the true nature of this relationship by pretending that these requests to civil servants are “orders”… even though the president only appoints about 0.2% of civil servants, and a large supermajority of the rest can’t be fired without affirmatively proving “just cause” before the MSPB, which is an agency whose heads likewise have tenure (and this is just one of the deep state’s unaccountability mechanisms). No, the only orders in this chain of command come with breakfast, from a delivery boy’s bike basket or a comms intern’s powerpoint summary. Maybe that’s why Stalin called his unofficial agency for infiltrating western papers the ComIntern!

For the sake of comparison, consider whether the media gets its information from official press conferences and officially approved quotes… or civil servants offering up some juicy insider gossip, to get leverage over an office rival, or feelings of power, or fame? Consider the difference, in short, between a state-controlled press and a press-controlled state. Consider the history of the US Information Agency, our Cold War information ministry, in contrast with what we have now. From 1953 to 1999, they broadcasted propaganda abroad, which American citizens weren’t legally allowed to consume, because it was intended for serving our foreign policy goals, rather than catering to loud-mouthed audience tastes at home. They also gathered pertinent foreign political information for the president, such as polls and speeches, and established favorable cultural exchange programs. Here’s how a former USIA director described it in his memoir: “The US government ran a full-service public relations organization, the largest in the world, about the size of the twenty biggest US commercial PR firms combined. Its full-time professional staff of more than 10,000, spread out among some 150 countries, burnished America’s image and trashed the Soviet Union 2,500 hours a week with a ‘tower of babble’ comprised of more than 70 languages, to the tune of over two billion dollars per year.”

But, gradually, journalism eroded this top-down communication service, because free countries can’t empower their only nationally elected leader to control his own public relations team, nor to clarify official policies, not even to non-voters! The US can still, of course, have ample public relations experts—for instance, to project all our mystery cults abroad, from BLM to LGBT—but their existence as independent sovereigns depends on carving out some independence from the president’s ostensible sovereignty. First, by way of boycott; for example, the USIA only made its own documentaries because Hollywood studios refused to help it produce anything which portrayed their country in a good light. Then, in 1976, Carter gave his broadcasters an official charter, which protected them from him, and made them pledge to portray their employer’s foreign policy to their audiences abroad with “balance.”

Further, in 1999, Clinton granted them their very own fully-independent government agency, the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which means that the president can’t even remove their leadership. The USIA’s other functions now reside in the State Department, though, so presidential authority still somewhat controls our polling practices, in theory, just not the messaging that those polls are about. Iraqis need to hear about our military’s every abuse of power, from reporters who have no interest in uncovering whether terrorism also has flaws, even if this worsens the conflict there! Let the president’s lawyers fairly represent his policies in courts of law, just as in the court of public opinion, instead of taking his particular side! Our soldiers should each pursue the battlefield strategies which they individually find most compelling in the moment! Every man shall be his own president under me… and yet shall somehow then suddenly come to agree, more than ever before, on every partisan issue.

No wonder the Washington Post’s reporters seem to report on their owner more than they report to him, and no wonder they seem to side with activists and administrators rather than with Amazon. The one lesson which Bezos apparently didn’t learn from Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie was that influence networks (like their eponymous foundations and endowments, which betrayed them all) inexorably fall prey to “influencers” unless they focus on real products. The tyranny of reality blots out all other political questions to those held under its sway. Meanwhile, journalists can only be so committedly Trump-resistant because they don’t even report on real pandemics, except insofar as politics refers to them.

Who now remembers that journalism broadly condemned the right’s concerns over covid as racist until March of 2020? Who now remembers that they mocked maskers until April, and told you to fear the Trump vaccine? That only authoritarian clowns could support, then oppose, then again support lockdowns? Lab-leak! Myocarditis! In the pages of the press, the pandemic did not take place… So maybe Bezos can direct the reporters that he sponsors to tone down some particularly personal hit pieces, but isn’t it interesting that their political independence makes them so politically unanimous? Wouldn’t it be interesting if politically independent parts of the civil service were also where its political unanimity concentrates?

That’s why, by the Open Secrets metric described above, you can easily see that employees at federal agencies donate roughly ten times less to Republicans than to Democrats. For instance, the HHS—which contains everything from the FDA to the CDC—has been over 90% captured by the Dems for the last ten years, as has the Department of Energy, while the Department of Education has averaged over 95%; in contrast, relatively conservative departments like the USDA and the DoJ have only averaged around 85% loyal to Democratic rule, and the Department of Homeland Security trails behind them all with just about 75%. Meanwhile, employees at elite universities, major newspapers, tech platforms, movie studios, and other such establishment media firms often donate one hundred times less to the GOP than to the Dems: Harvard, Yale, Twitter, Netflix, and the New York Times really are “the 99%” in this blue-blooded sense.

You can also look up any individual’s registered party affiliation, but aggregating these by employer would be difficult and tedious. A paper from 2021 by Spenkuch, Teso, and Xu was able to collect this data for about 50% of the several million federal workers employed under Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump. It supports the same general conclusion: at stereotypically progressive agencies—like the EPA, Department of Education, and State—about 70% of employees at any given time in the dataset are registered as Democrats, and most of the rest are independents. Likewise, across all agencies, Democrats make up 65% of the “Senior Executive Service” (the top-ranked civil servants), and half of the remainder is independent. Further, because this skew has gotten steadily worse over the decades included in the study, these estimates understate how lopsided party power had become when Trump took office.

The paper mainly describes how cost overruns on contracts increase by about 10% when the president and the relevant administrator are of different parties; this does not correspond with changes in the criteria for choosing contracts, nor with changes in the types of contracts chosen, and so plausibly represents passive resistance. Another interesting figure from the paper shows that just over 80% of the political appointments made by Clinton and Obama were Democrats, whereas less than 60% of those chosen by Bush and less than 50% of those chosen by Trump were Republicans. Why are the political appointees under each party just about as politically unanimous as the apolitical service is under both? If politics has clustered most smotheringly in tenured positions, which are supposedly nonpartisan, then shouldn’t we infer that such job protections might produce this consensus?

About 70% of our three million civil servants are officially considered the “competitive service,” which automatically entitles them to the aforementioned MSPB tenure protections. Many of the rest also have these and other incumbency privileges. For instance, about 40% of government workers are in unions, whereas only about 5% of private-sector workers are. Or consider the Office of Personnel Management, an independent agency fully in charge of many staffing decisions. Or the Office of Government Ethics, an independent agency empowered to investigate the whole executive branch. The list goes on. Even administrative employees whom congress explicitly exempts from civil service protections, like Title 42 consultants, have now gotten themselves full MSPB rights: because when the law says that they shall be “appointed” without any such special privileges against removal, it does not also say that they can be “removed” without running afoul of those privileges!

Speaking of tenure: a paper from 2018 by Mitchell Langbert aggregates voting registration data for professors at elite schools, and finds even stronger progressive homogeneity. He tabulates the party affiliations of the nearly 10,000 tenure-track teachers at 50 top-ranked US liberal arts colleges, and gets a sample-wide Democrat-to-Republican ratio of over 10:1. Further, about 80% of the 1,000 total departments at these schools apparently do not employ a single Republican. Even the two military colleges in his sample—West Point and Annapolis—have nearly 1.5 and 2.5 times as many Democrats as Republicans! Even the STEM profs have an overall Dem:GOP ratio that’s over 5:1; meanwhile, the social science faculties reach over 10:1, the humanities are over 30:1, and the “interdisciplinary fields” (like “black studies” or “gender studies”) have zero registered Republicans on staff.

The ratio reaches particularly high among token identity groups; for instance, it’s over 20:1 for women, but just over 5:1 for men. Likewise, it clusters most strongly in the most powerful institutions: among these 50 elite schools, it’s three times higher for the top-ranked quarter than for the bottom-ranked quarter (which are still, of course, quite highly ranked, and quite progressive). And it’s geographically clustered where you’d think—where the ruling class matriculates—with New England reaching more than 25:1. Further, out of the 25 total fields included by Langbert, engineering has the lowest ratio, with only 1.6… which, coincidentally, is exactly the national ratio for all adults with any graduate school experience, which means that the professoriate’s liberal skew cannot be simply due to benign correlates of educational attainment.

Survey data supports the same general conclusion. For example, the Higher Education Research Institute survey finds that—across the decades and across the nation—faculty steadily self-identified as about 40% liberal, 30% moderate, and 30% conservative; then, beginning in the 1990s, there was an explosion in the share of professors identifying as “far left” liberals (especially in the softer subjects), which drove “liberalism” over 60% by 2010… while the conservative share was driven down under 15%. Simultaneously, the number of professors in these radicalizing softer subjects rose as a share of the total: from 2005 to 2015, the fraction of the faculty located in the arts, humanities, and social sciences rose by over 3.5 percentage points. Meanwhile, though STEM departments have remained somewhat politically balanced, they lost over 2.5 percentage points of the overall teaching spots.

Without a primarily political understanding of higher education, this hiring shift might seem quite strange. After all, from 2008 to 2018, the share of undergraduates getting degrees in the humanities fell by about 50%, and the social sciences lost similar amounts of student interest, while majors in STEM have grown commensurately. But, of course, these new hires are being selected for their demographic demagoguery, not their ability to serve students. For instance, during the last decade, the career openings posted on the Academic Jobs Wiki in US history have steadily shifted from 10% up to 35% focused on “African Americans,” and from 20% down to 5% focused on “Early America.”

Some students have, of course, learned to shriek the professoriate’s preferred slogans (with much less tact or subtlety), but shrill kids didn’t cause this change. According to the 2016 HERI survey, the nationwide liberal-to-conservative ratio at colleges and universities was less than 2:1 among incoming freshmen, about 6:1 among professors, and roughly 12:1 among “student-facing” administrators. Note that these coddling administrative jobs have grown much faster in number since 2000 than even the most soft-headed and soft-hearted sorts of professorial seats. Also note that this dataset finds a ratio of well over 25:1 for New England professors, which neatly matches the previously mentioned findings based on party registration.

Other massive surveys—like the 2020-2021 FIRE survey of more than 50,000 students from over 150 top universities—find similar trends: the lib:con ratio for elite undergraduate students is just below 2.5, which is only twice that of the US population in general; similarly, among Ivy League students, there are barely more than five liberals per conservative. The basic pattern seems to be that these children weakly echo what the relevant institutionalized adults around them are doing. For instance, the student gender gap in political ideology and party identification is roughly 15 percentage points, which is nearly five times larger than the general population’s partisan gender gap… but among female students there are only about four Democrats for each Republican, whereas among female professors there are more than twenty (and the professoriate’s gender gap is larger than the student body’s).

One trend worth noting is that this campus radicalization has been disproportionately concentrated among women and non-whites: in the general population, they lean slightly further left than whites and men; but in higher education, they skew vastly further left, and this gap is growing. Likewise, LGBT status also concentrates in universities and liberal arts colleges—with 25% of students at the former and 40% of those at the latter identifying as queer. And other institutions of social control have similarly cultivated these groups as clients. For example, as the number of personnel management workers in the US rose 20-fold from 1950 to 2000, women switched from a small minority to a supermajority of the profession. Women also constitute a supermajority of university administrators, of psychiatrists, and of psychologists… hence, for instance, the recent “epidemic” of disproportionately male “disorders” like autism and ADHD (while correspondingly female-focused vague diagnoses like “hysteria” have become professionally unmentionable). And hence, for similar clientelist reasons, the cultivation of mental illnesses as valid oppressed identities, rather than diseases. And so further hence the tendency of progressives to now identify as mentally ill three times more frequently than conservatives do, under a variety of definitions, according to a paper from 2020 by Emil Kirkegaard.

Thus has polarization been thoroughly biologized. And thus the ease with which dissent gets pathologized. Polling data from soon after 2016 suggests that over 60% of Clinton voters wouldn’t be friends with Trump supporters, while over 60% of Trump voters would happily befriend Clinton supporters. And you’ve surely heard the way that liberals talk about conservatives: about reeducation, disenfranchisement, and watchlists; about eliminating red-state whites, for supposedly judging others based on where they’re from, and based on the color of their skin. We’ve all heard our liberal friends blithely fantasize about liquidating those people… because, of course, these vague friends assume that you’re one of them (because, of course, they wouldn’t knowingly be so “close” with any of us). No wonder that—among the three percent of citizens who cared enough to financially support a presidential candidate in 2020—over 60% donated to Biden. They just care about winning so much more, precisely because they’re the only ones who are actually allowed to really win. Hence Hillary and Obama respectively outraising Trump and McCain by a factor of two.

We can’t win, because we’re too oppressive. And they must win, because they’re so oppressed. Shouldn’t these “underdogs” get tired of catching all the cars that they chase down? And so it’s no wonder journalists and scholars have so myopically focused on preaching the lowest forms of identitarian dogmatism: blessed are the wretched, for their very wretchedness… and blessed be us, their keepers, for keeping them as wretches! Praise the magic demographics, insofar as we can say that they need our cloying praise, and so cast a spell on them! For example, David Rozado’s work finds that words denoting prejudice—like racism, sexism, and so forth—have massively increased in frequency in scholarly journals and mainstream journalism; he finds that their abstracts and articles use these magical words about five times more frequently in recent years than they did before 2015. Likewise, a 2021 paper by Kirkegaard, Pallesen, Elgaard, and Carl finds that (across nearly 200 political parties in 17 countries) journalists vote by far the most for “woke” platforms, and by far the least for national conservatism.

But what about those big businesses which once haunted progressive minds… the boogeyman brands that still show up when you search for “evil corporations”? Well, the staff at military contractors (Lockheed, Raytheon, etc) seem to split their donations between the parties pretty much perfectly. The same story holds for major financial firms, like Chase or Goldman. For some reason, the search results for “worst companies ever” often include Nestle, which also follows this pattern; another frequent result, Pfizer, does as well. Of course, there are exceptions. Exxon workers, for example, tend about 65% Republican, while Shell’s tend roughly 65% Democratic. Yet nothing of substance in the real private sector seems anywhere near the unanimity that’s typical for agencies and media.

Lao Tzu recently explained the reason for this to me in a dream: he pointed out that echo chambers “collerate” your errors, which renders you more “vurnelabre” to shocks, but that the point of a megaphone is to “synchlonize” and “amprify” noise… In tlansration, this means that real makers actually worry about making mistakes, and so diversify risk across their teams by welcoming constructive argument; material production thereby tends to encourage the individually risky bets with which selection pressure can drive progress. Meanwhile, signal manipulators only fear decohering from each other, sounding dissonant, or facing disagreement, because you can’t effectively stick your neck out from the crowd unless you’re allying with reality against these fads. After all, math and physics worked fine in the Soviet Union, since factual correctness can sometimes coordinate action more tyrannically than political correctness, but there’s not an aesthetic standard that really exists objectively enough to stand strong against party doctrine.

So, intuitively, organizations oriented around profit—as opposed to prestige—don’t myopically promote political conformity, and so won’t wind up with such skewed groupthink. And, intuitively, there can’t be two rival poles of prestige in one society, any more than there can be two competing FDAs. Thus, the same process which produces a smothering consensus in each one-party organization also naturally produces a smothering consensus between them. Or, if you disagree, consider why the FDA just issues its Food Code as a recommended model for state health systems to voluntarily consider for their food service regulations, and why every state has nonetheless adopted it (aside from California, which adds its own provisions on top). I’m glad that an agency is taking responsibility for earning trust from its subjects, and that it expects affirmative buy-in from its clients, but could you honestly imagine competing with it for fealty? At best, you’ll offer a clearly superior alternative, which isn’t particularly hard, because you can focus on quality rather than politics.

After all, in September 2020, positive new data from Pfizer’s Covid vaccine trials prompted the FDA to lengthen its follow-up monitoring requirements, which conveniently delayed approval until days after the election; meanwhile, politicians from Kamala to Newsom rabble-roused against this risky “Trump vaccine,” as did all their media organs. Apolitical regulators could have easily avoided that medical blunder by simply declining to help the powerful steal an election, but precisely for this reason wouldn’t win enough political favor to replace political regulators. Plus, even if you insist on showing merit instead of showing off rank, and can somehow attract passably meritorious work away from official agencies, high-ranking gatekeepers will not forgive this faux pas, this insult, this assault on their way of life: “These vile nerds think that our transvestite emperor isn’t wearing any gender-affirming clothes! What perverts, how low status, where do you think they live…” Thus the deep state will either ignore or attack you, and in any case refuse to copy your work, unless elite journalists can gain extra leverage over some bureaucracy by promoting or defending something that you’re doing.

That’s why, generally speaking, the conservative culture industry looks like talk radio and grocery store tabloids. They can only feed the bitter impotence of permanent outsiders, whereas elites refine their grievances into policy agendas. When your “We Hate Hillary & Love Trump” subscription doesn’t do anything, it might as well serve you juicy stories like pizzagate and Qanon; if it had any power, its narratives would become boringly important accounts of what’s happening this week with special prosecutors and impeachment proceedings. Let’s dive deep into this banal investigation of the Trump Foundation’s tax write-offs, by whichever small-time prosecutor wants to see his name in print! But who bothers to seriously investigate why the Clinton Foundation only received large donations whenever Hillary was running for president or serving as the secretary of state?

You can point out that oligarchs gave her charity hundreds of millions in 2016 and then zilch after she lost for obvious influence-peddling reasons, but this wouldn’t result in any narrative momentum (subpoenas, leaks, pulitzers, trials, blockbusters, etc). So why not straightforwardly describe her campaign manager’s expensive art collection—an extensive set of lurid works directly inspired by pedophilia—and then speculate about what goes on at his influential house parties? Naturally, many shock jocks opted for the latter course, until they got fired, sued, and banned from every major communications platform: “If we can figure out why they think it’s normal for networking events to prominently feature clear depictions of violent child rape, then either they’ll end up in prison or I’ll end up censored!” Or, for example, as fan fiction about fake dirt released by the Clinton campaign, Russiagate reporting left much to be desired… but it clearly helped mobilize an election resistance campaign across the civil service, instead of just rioting at the capitol building.

Likewise, both sides understand that a degree from Trump University can’t compete with Ivy League diplomas for access to power. And so, if it’s just a way to scam dullards, then it might as well not make them perform the difficult busywork which elite higher education once required. If you think that Yale Law might lose its stranglehold on the political class just because it’s lost its grip—that it might fall to rigorously meritorious alternatives, without a coup—then why do you think almost every top-100 college was founded at least a century ago? Given that they haven’t meaningfully expanded their student bodies, why didn’t new institutions compete away their monopoly on talent… especially since these hallowed institutions have turned so thoroughly away from seeking talent? This should be puzzling unless top schools are primarily about signaling and certification, each of which require a strong social consensus, driven by the deep state’s views.

For instance, the number of current undergraduates nationwide has grown tenfold since 1950, yet Harvard slightly reduced its entering class during this period, from just over 1,500 kids to just below it. Further, after controlling for other standard admissions criteria—such as GPA, citizenship, number of APs, athletic status, and so forth—white applicants to prestigious universities generally have to score at least 300 SAT points higher than blacks to face similar odds of acceptance, according to a study by Espenshade and Radford. Or consider all the admissions data released as a result of SFFA v Harvard, which is currently before the Supreme Court (including the new Justice Jackson, who had been on Harvard’s “Board of Overseers” until 2022): on average, white applicants score 100 points higher per 800-point SAT section than black applicants do, but get admitted at substantially lower rates; a white student with a 33% chance of admission would have a 95% chance if black. Smart Asians face much worse odds than even smart whites do, but admissions officers mark them down as having correspondingly lower “personality scores,” to exactly balance out this idiocratic discrimination… for purely coincidental reasons!

Rather than remedy this perfectly innocent mistake, the vast majority of top schools have made such standardized tests optional, and only rail against those caste preferences which unfairly admit legacy students (who actually have higher SAT scores than the non-legacies now). But the bright and ambitious keep on applying, and will, until either Elon Musk or tanks claim dominion over Harvard Yard. Maybe Bezos will pay to sponsor part of it, as he did for the Washington Post, and they’ll put his name on a building, and change nothing. Remember how much Musk had to overpay the market for Twitter, and how vociferously the media then villainized him, and how many specious investigations our administrative governments immediately opened into him. And how little has come, in the papers or the halls of power, from all that he’s revealed about his platform’s internal documents: the deep state infiltration, the censorship and propaganda, the sheer number of intelligence communities involved, with nobody really in charge. Middle-management “hate speech” moderators banned one sitting president from the platform, and censored stories about the next one’s degenerate son, all without even informing the prior CEO! And when Musk fired these communist spooks, their well-connected handlers coordinated advertiser boycotts against him for making his website “unsafe.” When he cleanly excised these tumors, the media screeched about how his company would surely die without all this dead weight. That’s the real price of an agency.

And yet our cultural hegemons convinced generations of children that campaign finance would control the media: that capitalism would speak with one voice; that elite bias would flood our newspapers and airwaves with bribes… that the priceless views of journalists and celebrities and academics would be drowned out by grubby competition if we don’t shore up the culture industry or dig in on all its moats. And so—even though the ads wash out—our fact-checkers become censors. Of course, I agree with our misinformation czars that the freedom to believe falsehood is just the freedom of oligarchs to seize power. But where they see an oligarchy of wealth, I see an oligarchy of prestige. They parade around like secret police in socialist countries, convinced by their power that now there are suddenly capitalists lurking everywhere. I see puritans crying “witch!” in crowded churches.

I see bribes as the tax levied on those whom the law has turned against. When bribed policemen then select for official dysfunction (when they profitably ignore conmen and cartels, while shaking down the successful and cracking down on efficiency), we blame the bribery for the boondoggles, and so demand that the unprotected class pay more. But maybe you try spreading the word about this double standard? “You can buy an unfair advantage right over there, and it’s the only way to get ahead! The main problem is that it’s way too cheap, but I’m sure we could make it rise in price real soon.” Your only saving grace is that a secretly corrupt system isn’t an effectively corrupt system, i.e. that any bribe which needs your outraged advertisements isn’t worth paying. In other words, the currency that oligarchies of prestige traffic in is hypocrisy, which is to say status, and the whole point of status is that it’s flagrant.

When different castes face noticeably different rules, patrons win. And (if they’re winning) then their “affirmative action” on behalf of client populations looks particularly patronizing. Listen distantly to all their slogans—from far enough away that all their concerns for little victims blend together, and blend in with all their envies for everyone else—and you’ll find exactly one command, falling like a thunderbolt on their pathetic pets: “Know that your place is below me, and yet also beside me, because you’re mine!” Their well-trained watchdogs then yip and bark about how they’d only like to control whoever proudly refuses to play master or animal… how the point of affirmative action is only to combat kulak supremacy. How they will just and justly oppress whoever opposes his own oppression. Doggo, heel thyself! But no, the man with the treats only has to say the word attack. He only tells his megaphones to project, and they screech out the rest of his words for him, because they’ve learned their lines: “Take pride in the status that we give you, not what you take for yourself.”

One way to interpret bribes is thus as an alternative to political connections: you pay extra to get around having to get along with the network. But another is that bribery subsidizes the value of political connections; that your extra payments make networking and getting along more desirable. The difference comes from whether the commissars fundamentally care about money or prestige, respectively. In the former case, they would keep on lowering the price of the bribe, to make more clients give up on stingy schmoozing and ritual deference. In extremis, your Party Boss might actually want you to say some light heresies, in order to demand a little hush money. But in the latter case, they’ll volunteer to chase down heretics, because they take such betrayals personally. And our system selects its commissars based on precisely how much more they value status than wealth. For example, a quick internet search suggests that the average yearly pay for full-time journalists at the New York Times is either 65,000, 75,000, or 100,000 dollars.

But there might be a third option: the man who seeks not money or status but virtue; the one who seeks neither comfort nor esteem so much as truth. For example, a censor is just a publisher who cares more about prestige than wealth, and so who selects works based on their political correctness rather than their economic value… Yet “censor” once meant assessor, as in one who judges merit independently of the vagaries of market or state (and yet for both to use). And in the Roman Republic, the only position with more honor than Censor was Dictator, and the Censor’s job was to denote the rank earned by each citizen’s conduct, not obscure it. Further, the Dictator was always appointed by that board which they called a Senate, and could always then be fired by them, or even prosecuted afterwards, but in exchange received complete control over some specific venture. And they worked wonders with all this authority. What analogous roles might we have now?

Perhaps we were looking in the wrong place for our second party. There is no single company or agency where supermajorities lean right, but there’s a role. A 2022 paper by Fos, Kempf, and Tsoutsoura found—based on voter registration records—that 70% of top executives at S&P 1500 firms are Republicans. They may be our bulwark against this totalitarian system, for much the same reason that it so rabidly targets them, and treats anyone of their ilk like villains: a man with a plan must always be the bad guy, whom true heroes must attack in order to defend “equality” from its own weakness; for equality is far too fragile to allow for any individual with agency, goals, and greatness. After all, the Roman Empire formally abolished the office of dictator, from beginning to end… and replaced it with Princeps Civitatis, which means “first citizen” (the most equal of equals), from which we get prince.

Only an ideological selection process could yield such lopsided views as we see in government and media, and such strong skews can only produce further groupthink in turn. Why would you ever reveal yourself to be less progressive than your coworkers claim to be, on any issue, when your workplace cohesion comes from aligning around progressivism? Do you think that most people just happen to root for their local sports team, or that most soldiers just happen to agree with whatever their marching orders are? Do you think that they’re only pretending to agree so strongly with each other, and are you autistically honest when polite strangers ask how you’re doing?

Do you think it’s bad that priests of a given faith are bound to preach its dogmas? Would you free religion from orthodoxy, and liberate actors from their lines? If you’d like, you can try showing up at plays to heckle the audience about how Romeo and Juliet are just fictional characters, and how the Montagues and Capulets don’t actually hate each other offstage, because it’s all a vast conspiracy to promote hook-up culture, or toxic monogamy, or whatever else entertains us. Or you can accept that experts are supposed to reach consensus, and club members are supposed to pay their dues.

Team players recognize that alignment is a tool, not a truth, because pointing a group in one direction determines how far it gets; the magnitudes of their skills and preferences matter much less. Thus management works by internally cultivating loyalty, not sorting through applicants or compromising with stakeholders… i.e., each “alignment problem” really reduces to a “binding problem.” Of course, diplomacy between teams necessarily manifests as “exit” or “voice” instead of loyalty. In other words, it manifests as either moving to new coalitions or whining at your old ones, rather than scaling your effort in accordance with your motivation towards your captain’s plan. And in diplomatic settings, a supermajority power imbalance only translates into conquest.

These conquistadors cause harm precisely because they don’t have enough monopolistic power to manage much besides plundering the populations they occupy. That’s why every election which reaches mere supermajority agreement is a sham: such politically correct voters clearly can’t credibly threaten their party with defection, but nor can they do much to serve it. In short, you can’t reach far beyond 65% support without the direct ability to discipline your electorate, e.g. by firing them or shredding their ballots. And yet you can’t get this authority, which every boss needs, without already having at least 90% buy-in on suppressing dissent. (Yes, a great boss will nurture certain kinds of internal dissent—by, say, red-teaming projects to keep middle-management in line—but he loses all his greatness if other insiders make this decision for him, and then loses all his power).

For example, the bluest state in 2020, Vermont, only voted 66% for Biden, whereas more than 90% of D.C.’s voters have chosen the Democrat in every presidential election since 2004… when only a bit over 89% did. This is, of course, only a symptom of how captured government employees are by their employer’s party, because they vote anonymously, and their votes obviously don’t matter: D.C. doesn’t have many electoral college delegates, and they all go to whoever wins the most votes district-wide, regardless of the margin; so the Democrats can take them for granted, which is a much better example of “disenfranchisement” than “but we lack senate representation!”

However, precisely because their employment ideologically captures them, D.C. apparatchiks capture vastly more of our government than does Vermont, or even California. Less than 15% of D.C.’s voters have chosen the Republican ever since 1976, back when California was a deep red state, and, as a result of this deep state cohesion, the swamp has gotten absolute power. For example, consider the annual number of pages published in the Federal Register (i.e., the amount of new rules issued by administrative agencies each year). This number hovered between ten and twenty thousand from 1940 until the mid-1970s, then exploded up to about seventy thousand and stayed there ever since. Likewise, the number of cloture motions in the Senate—which block proposed legislation from even reaching a vote—rose from practically zero per year before 1970, to hundreds annually now.

Admittedly, D.C. has almost as many black voters as white voters, and these typically operate more like clients than insiders, but my point is that administrators are captured by the administrative state—as you can partly glimpse in their local election behavior—not that they capture local elections. And, admittedly, in 2004 and 2006, partisan donations by State Dept employees flipped from their long-term 80% blue average to 80% red, then switched back, but the deep state’s fake W.M.D. hysteria clearly demonstrates its power.

Similarly, the New York Times briefly became the single most important propaganda organ for invading Iraq, by transparently laundering tabloid gossip as investigative journalism, simply through blessing it with their brand. This gave smug elites an etiquette-based excuse for believing obvious lies. It’s no different than how they coordinate the war on Whites and Asians across the deep state today: by favoring arguments that use high-status branding like BIPOC—which only means that Asians no longer count as properly colored—instead of alternative terms which they all suddenly call outdated (for instance in the sudden turn across all elite colleges against granting privilege based on standardized test scores).

In other words, though the NYT became the war’s loudest critic immediately after it started, we shouldn’t see anything contradictory in the NYT’s behavior, because it isn’t making inconsistent arguments so much as consistently seeking influence in a changing world. It gains power by helping to mobilize the military, then gains more by criticizing its execution, but always in pursuit of more involvement… we should set up more client institutions to disperse the military’s control, we should set up more programs to push our favored cause areas on their people, etc. That’s why the NYT won a Pulitzer for covering up Stalin’s terror-famine with communist propaganda; it’s also why, the day before the Nazis invaded Poland, the NYT’s front page uncritically recounted a supposed Polish invasion of Germany. They didn’t switch sides during the 1930s, or sell out, so much as climb each society’s influence ladder with expert skill.

Likewise, you go to war with the president you have, so they briefly framed our 21st Century Middle East campaign as a conservative project, which confused much of the lower-status activist class into opposing it. Until, of course, the Arab Spring and Obama dressed these wars up as liberal pablum, so that we could much more aggressively continue to help warring terrorist groups across the region predictably tear apart secular dictatorships for “democracy.” Egypt and Tunisia seem to have muddled through with a healthily revitalized strongman rule, whereas Libyans and Syrians now serve as reliably needy props for a thousand public programs, progressive nonprofits, and “non-governmental” organizations, from Arabia to Europe.

Consider the saga of Afghanistan. After King Zahir had stably ruled for over thirty years, the country adopted a democratizing constitution; less than ten years later, popular discontent sparked the 1973 socialist coup. Less than five years later, communists launched a much bloodier coup. One year later, civil wars (plural) consumed the country, and lasted until the US invaded, and killed millions. There had been ten different heads of state in fifteen years when the 1992 civil war began. Two days before 9/11, al Qaeda assassinated the head of the Northern Alliance, which still controlled a tenth of the country.

How many regimes are enough? Bush would not allow another monarchy, so the 2004 constitution centralized power in an elected president: then the US resolved its first vaguely close election—55% vs 44%, in 2014—by making both contestants co-executives. Is it any wonder that the civil war never ended? That the most powerful country in the world couldn’t hold back sandaled insurgents? That we spared them of order, on behalf of some focus-grouped “rights”? We love anarchy so much that our DEA cracked down on their main cash crop while our military was bribing tribesmen to collaborate! We hate authority so much that the State Department propped up an unpopular cultural revolution in Kabul while we told fundamentalists to fight off the regime’s enemy! Many such cases…

It’s worth noting that the Egyptian and Tunisian coups which restored order there were far more democratic than anything else about this insurrectionary wave (in the sense of letting a clear majority install its champion). Admittedly, most people define democracy these days as “following the procedures typical of our one-party deep state,” because that’s what the governing class actually does in “democratic” nations. That’s the sense in which demagogues like Modi—who seems to have by far the highest net favorability ratings of any significant world leader—are “authoritarians.” And that’s why an unelected board of EU do-gooders must keep sanctioning Eastern European countries: those backwards people keep on passing ballot initiatives restricting same-sex marriage, which is authoritarianism.

So, for example, in Egypt—after the military overthrew Mubarrak’s dictatorship, for centralizing ever more of their authorities in his own elite secret police force—President Morsi won this “revolution’s” only election with six million first-round votes, followed by thirteen million second-round votes. One year later, a petition calling for his ouster got 22 million signatures, whereas the pro-Morsi counter-petition only got 11 million. Then, on one particular day, somewhere between ten and thirty million Egyptians (according to standard estimates) gathered in the streets to call for a military coup. General Sisi obliged, and has been taking decisive steps to resolve serious looming issues; and he is making the desert bloom with a brand new grand capital city.

One could fruitfully contrast this actual strongman behavior with cowardly fruitcakes like Maduro, who destroyed his nation by hiding from his people. He won legitimate power in 2013 by just 1.5 percentage points, but then ruined Venezuela’s economy so quickly that, in 2015, the opposition party won a supermajority of their legislature (the National Assembly). So, in 2017, he created a brand new legislature—called the Constituent Assembly—and let his lame duck allies appoint all of its legislators, instead of holding new elections. This new government body then instituted the crazed single-party rule which Venezuelans have lived under ever since: from outright ballot-stuffing to limitless money-printing… And it’s all because Maduro lacked the balls to honestly seek a personal mandate, and lacked the virility to deserve it. Instead, he plotted a catty coup; what if I call up all my friends, and call them the new government, and what if this fools all my haters!

Tunisia has been following much the same basic path as Egypt, but much more slowly, and so has endured commensurately more instability. Their 2013 constitution split power between the president and the parliament—as a result of contentious negotiations between Islamists and progressives—but the parliament can only seem to regularly fall apart, and yet then also blame the president for holding everything else together. For example, President Saied received over 70% of the second-round votes in 2019, with 55% turnout. Meanwhile, that same year’s parliamentary elections only saw 40% turnout, and produced no clear winner: the largest party won less than 20% of the vote, and could only form a coalition government with four other parties (and several independents).

This coalitional majority collapsed after just five months, yielding an even more fractured new government… which collapsed yet again a year later, and immediately disrupted public order enough to spark nationwide riots. And so Saied temporarily ruled by decree, to save his country and reform its government. Then, in 2022, he held a new constitutional referendum, and the voters ratified his reforms in an utter landslide; over 2.6 million people voted in favor of them, against fewer than 150,000 dissenters. And then, a few months later, only one million ballots were cast, in total, in the latest parliamentary elections, and yet their treasonous whining has wooed the international community into condemning Saied for being strong, and for being a man, because the word “strongman” sounds vaguely bad.

Let these be lessons of how real men, who really love their people, rule. You must be credibly willing to be strong enough to firmly tell them no, instead of silencing or appeasing them, and thus earn enough respect that clear majorities yell out yes. And this is how super-majorities can work: as a phase transition from boneless wonders to strong states. Would the Supreme Court be willing or able to ban Elon Musk from the White House, on account of his African birth certificate, if he won two-thirds of the vote? And if he’s already there “illegally,” what else would he permit himself to do with us? We’re all already stuck with him under the deep state, all our sincere thoughts driven even deeper underground than them. Officially—not including our culture industry—this dead weight atop us includes about 400 agencies, sub-agencies, bureaus, offices, boards, commissions, committees, and entities that are officially called “quasi-official agencies.”

And one hundred headless agencies can only govern a given country if they give themselves over to one simple and extreme idea, which only wants to spread. That’s why the cancer cells in any person are all mostly the same, except that a few drive the growth. But any one man with true imperium has enough room inside himself to “let one hundred flowers bloom and one hundred schools of thought contend,” as Chairman Mao said, right before he mowed down every last individual that he could find. Mao did not have true imperium, because he ruled through distributed cells and undifferentiated masses; he metastasized through flattened “last men” rather than seeking higher life… his movement rippled like one doughy blob, a body without organs, burbling like infectious yeast, or corrosive acid, whereas a healthy body specializes into many distinct and muscular functions by virtue of its rigidity. The difference between executioners and executives is thus the difference between fatness and fitness. Order implies differentiation.

That’s why Chairman Mao stepped down as China’s head-of-state in 1959, when the Maoist plagues really began, and only ruled through his party. A virus has no “head-of-state.” It only knows contagion, and only attacks its host. That’s why totalitarian parties always despise the countries they control. It’s why Mao hated Chinese traditions, and jealously purged them from his people, whom he mercilessly remade as Maoists, without any ethnicity or culture beyond him. And it’s why the party that rules our country condemns it: why polling data repeatedly demonstrates that Republicans and Boomers are much more than twice as likely to say they’re proud of this nation than Democrats and Zoomers are, and why this gap has grown as progressive ideology and youth culture have tightened their grasp around us all.

So the bureaucrats who staff these bureaus are, in an important sense, our system’s only important voters; meanwhile, California property owners get huge tax deductions on their mortgage interest payments, and swing state swing voters can swing special industry-specific changes in our trade policy. But only children think that real power operates through such petty bribes. “I mostly get things by spending money, so surely emperors do too!” Or: “There’s a revolving door between each industry’s regulators and its big businesses. Raytheon buys off one retired general with a comfy fake job, crypto sends one of its own to serve on the SEC, etc. It’s gotten so bad that people with cases before the supreme court will occasionally take the justices out for dinner!”

But wait, isn’t there an elite cartel we’re forgetting about, which every important judge spent years formatively attending, and from which presidents hire almost all their cabinet secretaries? Their accredited experts hold special weight in hearings and on panels. It’s an old-money network, and it gives its members close connections with important people in high places across the whole private sector (call it an “intravenous” league, since it’s practically in their blood). Hold on, though: we were all told as children to apply ourselves towards getting into this I.V. league, because only the best people get admitted, which means that it can’t hold power beyond what we think it deserves!

Okay, then how about journalists… they hound cabinet officials and judicial nominees far more aggressively than any lobbyists do, and whip up clickbait pogroms against whoever tries to “censor” them. But, of course, they also loudly tell us that their power is deserved, and, precisely because it’s not, we generally believe them, and silence their critics for them, who are always ostensibly preventing this press-run state from ever actually making any progress. Call me an illiberal if you must—even though I still believe in the power of liberalism’s grand projects, like the East India Company—but I don’t think people should remain powerful when their only pitch is that they can’t hold onto it themselves.

Sure, defense contractors and big banks may pay a lot for special contracts or idiosyncratic loopholes; and, worse, the government overseeing them could be so sclerotic or corrupt that it doesn’t charge nearly enough for these rotten favors. But war profiteers and financial vultures can’t even coordinate their own staff into favoring one party—much less conspiratorially control policy-makers—because their lines of business don’t work well with demagoguery. As mentioned above, employees at both Lockheed Martin and Goldman Sachs, for example, have pretty much perfectly split their electoral donations between the two parties for decades: they might, admittedly, have more influence than you do, but all of it cancels out… besides keeping the F-35 program afloat and the carried-interest loophole open.

They can only close ranks around themselves, and so they can only make their own boondoggles into political objects. Such politically favored mistakes can definitely cause mayhem, but they don’t construct their polities, which means that they’re mere tools of real politics, which happens elsewhere. We can tell that their views on subjects more important than mere fraud (like the Saudi war in Yemen or the Fed’s monetary stance) aren’t correlated enough with other corporate pork to form a political coalition, because then at the very least their staff would already be 90% on-board with some partisan slate, and one of the parties would adopt it as a major issue.

Of course, you could argue that the most extreme influence campaigns are those which some nefarious cabal establishes as a bipartisan consensus. However, the only cabals that enthrone their views as fact are fundamentally media-based. No weapons manufacturer will ever convince kleptocrats to redefine “flying” so that it can conceptually encompass whatever some completely failed fighter jet does… because manufacturers make physical objects, not abstract consent. But whenever extremist policies like federal gay marriage or the invasion of Iraq reach across the aisle, there’s always a mushy word at the center, like “marriage,” “woman,” or “WMD.” Indeed, could you imagine carrying on a war without bipartisanship? And yet then why do all of them start with false flags? Polk intentionally provoked his adversary into striking first, as did Lincoln when he announced that he was sending undefended provisions rather than troops to “break” the siege at Fort Sumter.

Or consider WWI: the German government bought numerous advertisements in the US to warn Americans against sailing on the Lusitania, then sunk it while it was transporting hundreds of tons of British munitions; then Germany apologized to the US for those few Americans who died onboard, and pledged to further restrict its future submarine activity. And yet Woodrow Wilson, who ran for president as the anti-war candidate, used this as his excuse to involve us in the old world’s barbarism? The same goes for Pearl Harbor, the 38th Parallel, the Gulf of Tonkin, and so forth.

Just think about what 9/11 really means for most people. When “terrorism” refers to elite Saudi citizens hijacking planes, or Pashtun beggars building pipe bombs, Leidos and General Atomics can sell some extra body scanners and predator drones. But when it refers to a meaty media narrative—a long plot arc, a detailed way of life, a scary new motif, etc.—then we can spend multiple decades throwing trillions of dollars at everything powerful enough to claim a cut. Here’s an Afghan gender norm reeducation program. There’s an activist group that pushes EU bureaucracies to criminalize the dissemination of Afghan migrant rape statistics. One hand bribes tribal warlords while the other cracks down on such corruption. They’re all fighting the war on terror (even though their premises and purposes are obviously at odds) because terror is just a word, and fighting words are only defined through infowar. Which is all to say that if 9/11 had only led to an obviously justified policing action, then it wouldn’t be very important, so its irrelevance from what followed in its name is the very condition of its importance.

Our information warriors thus generally receive support based on how salient their cause area looks, not how well they improve it, and so they mostly learn to worsen what they touch, which makes counterposing cause areas look obviously enticing too. Hence they ultimately spend most of their effort fighting each other, for example by telling Afghan villagers that feminism necessarily includes transgenderism, while then telling European women that only racists oppose rape-gangs. In other words, fish don’t notice water because it’s not something they have to work for, just something they can choose to name, which means that the names they’d give it wouldn’t really reveal its nature. Perhaps if we actually manufactured whatever’s in the air, whatever the vibes which journalists describe might be, then we’d start properly scrutinizing it, instead of taking what we breathe all day, some academic’s lousy exhaust, for granted.

In summary, when one third of your subjects openly favor a rival, you’re neither a true representative nor a true executive. At best, you’re a demagogue, who panders to particular blocs by blaming their problems on some convenient scapegoat. These constituents haven’t granted you the power to really improve their lives, because they wouldn’t listen if you told them to change their behavior; i.e., they haven’t entrusted you with managerial authority over how they pursue their goals, and which of their habits to suppress. Their bosses can subject them to drug tests, for example, but you can only grovel for them to sober up, or else give out excuses… “It’s not your fault, and it’s actually fine.” Without a strongman behind them—someone already powerful enough to muscularly align their political interests—they can only grant you the power to flex on those voices that they already want suppressed (which is mob force, not a grant of power, because they independently want you to do this for them).

Thus, if communications platforms grow dominant, and material industry rusts away, then small verbally intelligent elites will convince cognitively disadvantaged demographics to blame their misfortunes on the middle class, or else on spatially intelligent industrialists. Reindustrialization would of course result in the propaganda class losing status, but patronizing a client population becomes much easier when its people falls apart. Rampant addiction, violent crime, and single parenthood make blaming whitey sound far sweeter, even when the propagandists pushing this look extremely white. Hence why the cultivation of blacks as a specific interest group has coincided with black neighborhoods collapsing into chaos. The decent, safe, and middle class communities that they built up in every segregated city became safe havens for drugs and gangs. Even if your metric of choice is money, rather than character, they come out of the civil rights revolution looking much worse: average black income had been steadily rising for decades as a share of the average white’s, until the late sixties, and it’s completely stalled out ever since.

My point is not that the ruling class favors Democrats, though it does; for instance, Dems win a higher share of the votes from the top ten percent than from the bottom ninety percent, whether you rank people by income or especially by education. However, I don’t hate them for being successful at spreading their evil ideology, since any movement has to be successful in order to win. Nor do I hate them for especially harming those groups whom they worship, since I don’t venerate their special demographics… and anyway, every religion relies on some kind of ritual sacrifice, or else the sacred could come down to us for free, and so its meaning would be cheapened into nothing. I don’t even hate them for their hypocritical anti-elitism: rulers should be strong enough to grant themselves exemptions from their own decrees, even if actually doing so is often a symptom of decline.

Rather, my concern is that their party completely controls the so-called ruling class, rather than vice-versa—that high-status people support influential extremist fads (like transgenderism and lawlessness) because they’re particularly captured, not because their idiosyncratic views move masses. You can point out the same correlations and connections between informal elites and official authorities whether the causal arrows point into the deep state or emerge from it… but consider how this relationship obviously worked in other countries, which we can perhaps examine with clearer eyes. Was the problem with communist economies that every company’s public face and private leadership really wanted even more communism from the government? Did the Great Purge happen because millions of informants lobbied the police to disappear their neighbors? There’s overwhelming evidence that business tycoons, famous journalists, and habitual snitches behind the iron curtain joined the party en masse, but do you think they infiltrated it, or that its tendrils wriggled into them?

After all, even East Germany had expansive constitutional rights on paper and—yes, I’m serious—fairly-counted multi-party elections. They used an approval-based voting system, which actually allows for effective constituent bargaining against incumbent politicians on local issues, and was thus quite recently on the ballot in Seattle as an alternative to both ranked-choice voting and first-past-the-post. Basically, East German voters would approve or disapprove of each of the candidates running to nationally represent their local district; each such constituency would usually elect about five representatives, depending on factors like population. Those who received the most approvals would win, so long as they got over half of the voters to support them. The country’s dominant party only won around one quarter of the legislative seats, in each of its nine elections before the wall fell, and also in its final election afterwards (which allocated seats via standard western-style proportional representation). This legislature abolished the senate, and officially controlled both other branches… much as our judicial and executive branches testify before our congress in exchange for official guidance on all forms of power: personnel, provisions, and policy.

But, of course, a clear supermajority of their key administrators joined the Socialist Unity Party, and that was the clear path to promotion… while openly supporting alternative options could get you fired and shunned from influential positions (much as our system allocates administrative power to Democrats, under the watchful eyes of academia, internet platforms, and the news media). For example, in the late 1980s, the SUP alone had well over two million members, while each of the other four main parties only had about 100,000. And—much like our president can’t legally fire the vast majority of his ostensible subordinates, from Fauci to the Fed—their head-of-state only rubber-stamped the one true party’s decisions. Much like their organs of culture, prestige, and information were only independent from this party on paper, our deep state only offers access to favored media, and infiltrates organizations deemed suspect. And so forth.

Consider, for example, that about 80% of East Germany’s workforce worked for “publicly owned enterprises” (VEBs) in 1989. By law, each VEB workplace was managed by its director, its party secretary, and its union chairman, together. The members of a given factory’s party organization would elect their own local secretary, who would then meet every single month with representatives from higher level party committees: they would give him “instructive guidance” on his performance, and then “verify” his party privileges… or not. Likewise, in the late 1980s, roughly 98% of East German workers were members of the country’s only legal trade union federation; they would similarly elect their own workplace chairman, but the union leadership—which was, of course, also dominated by the party—could easily reward those chairmen who followed orders, and remove the rest. The media, the police, and other such politically sensitive positions faced even more smothering partisan incentives.

One could quibble with my comparison here in a few reasonable-seeming ways, but I think the point still stands. For instance, the legislature granted some seats to SUP-affiliated non-party organizations, like the official trade union; however, in practice, these looked more like sinecures for allies than actual offices of power… more like symptoms of than sources for totalitarian control (or else the legislature would have actually exerted authority over the party sometimes, rather than just vice-versa). Further, all parties in the legislature had to join a “national front,” which put forward a single list of candidates for voters to consider: but this front was mostly just synonymous with being on said list, and East German voters could approve or disapprove of the individual candidates on it, much as our voters can tick a box for whichever listed candidate they prefer on our ballots.

Likewise, East Germany officially granted the SUP a “leading role” over its “rival” parties, yet this only seems to have acted as a vague blanket excuse for discretionary purges against undesirables—much as our deep state labels any Republicans who seem insufficiently servile to Democrats as “threats to democracy.” Whenever one association makes itself the arbiter of how “civil rights” can bulldoze the freedom of association, this exact pattern repeats itself, and so it should sound quite familiar. For example, the current German constitution explicitly requires all political parties to maintain certain vague standards of “democracy,” even internally, and empowers their obviously politicized constitutional court to enforce this; and, similarly, US caselaw has long banned all parties from implementing regulations on their own primary elections deemed “undemocratic.” Or consider how the Organization of Islamic Cooperation explicitly clarifies that its member-countries interpret the UN Declaration of Human Rights exclusively through the lens of Sharia law. And how the Chinese constitution subordinates its expansive rights to CCP rule.

My point, of course, isn’t that East Germany was in any sense “good,” nor that modern Germany is anywhere near as totalitarian. Rather, my point is that the eastern bloc’s totalitarianism had very little to do with its election system, or its official constitution, or anything like that. The party ruled by writing your newspaper, and reading your mail, and infesting your workplace; it only placed its people on your ballot and in your legislature to make itself seem somewhat legitimate… and so it’s thrilled when critics focus on reforming election law, or condemning pompous legislators, or amending the paper-thin constitution. But, similarly, my point isn’t that the ruling caste should restrain itself—or at least seem to—from orienting the state apparatus toward its preferred policy platforms: it’s that we should make those apparatchiks do so honestly, by bluntly clarifying the single-party nature of all stable states, including ours. We should give the people a clear list of the names that are actually responsible for this country’s problems. And if we win, it will involve the people hounding this univocal slate of names from power (instead of just barking at well-protected figureheads from irrelevant bickering front groups).

It’s happened before, and not just in Egypt. For instance, consider how the Cold War ended: after ten hard years of struggle, ten million organized dissidents in Poland finally forced their communist party from power; as a result, over a ten month period, Hungary’s fearful party relaxed its border controls, and reformed its election laws, and then dissolved itself without even waiting for a vote. This caused East Germany to break out in ten weeks of protest, which ultimately toppled the Berlin Wall… and which, in turn, spilled over into a ten day general strike across Czechoslovakia, which ended communism there too. And then, soon afterwards, an outbreak of sudden boos at a big rally in Romania somehow overthrew their dictatorship—and lynched their dictator—in something like ten hours (and then, within a month, other countries like Bulgaria had overthrown themselves too).

The best example might be the Baltic Chain of Freedom, in which roughly two million people held hands as one long human line; they connected Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, to demonstrate their strongly shared (and swiftly fulfilled) wish for independence from the Soviet Union. Their elites preyed on fear, isolation, and silence—not ballot boxes, or formal rules—and so the only votes that could cast them out were informal and joyous and communal and loud. I’m reminded of our constitution's ratification: an advisory committee gave itself the power to re-found our young country, and openly sought the popular mandate which alone can transubstantiate such treason into the highest patriotism. The citizenry directly elected its own state conventions, without even property restrictions on the franchise, in the world’s most democratic act until that point… in order to consider and adopt this constitution, which was written to limit the excesses of democracy.

There may have been several other such apparently unfair East German policies on paper, but the whole point of single-party rule is that the party gets to do what it wants, and can then get rubber stamps from its front-government’s official organs of power after-the-fact. Learn to spot the difference! And then learn to distinguish between the phases of this one ruling caste. For instance, communist youth groups like the USSR’s Komsomol had been small extremist sects at first, and only then grew influential enough to make their societies more like them; but then they became a boring box for disinterested masses of social climbers to fill out, like student government currently grants our country’s worst sociopaths with slight status benefits. This hollowed-out Komsomol then obediently dissolved itself, when the time came, by becoming the organization which students joined in order to get private funding privileges to form businesses under perestroika. Or, alternatively, consider how almost 40% of college students now identify as LGBTQ at liberal arts colleges.

In my view, there’s only one obvious difference between our manner of actually constituting a government and theirs: East Germans could choose to publicly register their actual votes, and so almost every voter did, to avoid arousing suspicion; in contrast, ever since 1891 we’ve had secret ballots, and so 20th Century communications technologies never got the chance to impose overtly totalitarian control on us. However, there’s less of a difference here than you might think. In East Germany, in order to vote idiosyncratically—rather than just automatically approving of everyone on the National Front’s list—you had to openly discard your standard-issue ballot, and fill out a blank one. Likewise, in the Jackson era, our red and blue parties would hand out their ballots, on red and blue paper, already filled in, and so they could see who voted for which party… and who voted independently.

And voters did actually sometimes vote against individual candidates en masse, or threaten to. The party somewhat allowed its people to protest against particular officials, or particular policies, just so long as they didn’t threaten party rule. In short, East Germans could organize to embarrass ineffectual representatives for failing to uphold socialist values—for instance, if they were too corrupt, or lazy, or incompetent—but could not openly organize against socialism itself; likewise, they could openly protest against low quality coffee rations in the late 1970s, but not against party rule. Much the same is true in China, which lets local protests provide the government with feedback on who deserves promotions or punishments… unless these protesters challenge CCP legitimacy.

Regardless, well over 90% of East German ballots approved the candidates on offer from every party. This indicates that the citizenry did not actually feel very free to disapprove. However, note that approval-voting intuitively works by removing generally unpopular candidates—rather than dividing partisans between thereby polarized candidates—and so we should naturally expect such elections to yield widespread modest favorability (instead of concentrated intense devotion). Further, the party carried out actually anonymous polling of its people, to keep abreast of their actual views, and they seem to have legitimately learned to support their system: for example, in 1983, 91% of students claimed that they were devoted citizens of the GDR; similarly, in 1984, 92% agreed that “socialism will triumph throughout the world.” Many of them viewed their administrative state as corrupt and incompetent, but until the very end fell short of outright condemning their government, even privately. Meanwhile, the average margins of victory in our Senate and House elections are just 20 and 30 percentage points, respectively… though both sets of incumbents admittedly still win well over 90% of the time. Granted, I may be overstating the importance of this distinction, because our system publicly registers our party affiliations, our partisan donations, and all the times we’ve ever voted, and we can’t opt out from sharing this information.

However, without a centralized institution diligently checking how each of us actually votes, we’re only ever incentivized to throw our actual vote away—since it almost certainly won’t sway any election outcome—and to credibly signal that we really do support whatever sounds high-status… whatever would best appease the worst thought police in our private lives, be they petty superiors or dogmatic acquaintances. The ballots that matter here are therefore the signs that you put up in your yard, and the slogans that you plaster across your social media profile, and the costly politicized accessories with which you durably deform your appearance, from garishly dyed hair and outlandish tattoos or piercings to visible hormone derangement. And the party that rules here thereby rules primarily through culture, rather than largely through official government policies.

In this regard, our media-occupied government runs on media-preoccupied minds, instead of running in their interests. Whereas, in contrast, one should think of communist parties as voter unions, where the membership essentially elects the party’s central committee, which then punishes individual defections by members, both in general elections and in professional decisions. Ironically, then, one can define communism as that system which punishes “free riders” in politics. And so it replaces western-style memetic parasitism with eastern-style practical nepotism, which rewards loyal apparatchiks instead of turning them into precarious adjuncts or gender goblins.

Hence the party becomes and remains administratively established enough that it can comfortably allow its rival parties to field candidates for meaningless legislative positions. Normies will feel as though there’s broad ideological buy-in to their system, or even political competition, and malcontents will safely filter towards their favorite neutered opposition club. And if any legislator becomes truly rebellious, he’ll swiftly find himself obstructed by bureaucrats and betrayed by voters. In short, whichever form democracy takes, whatever way the people rule, there can be no real government without some few governors, and no governors without a governed mass of obedient subjects.

So the real constitution that we’ve actually got involves electing a representative to spend several decades climbing the congressional seniority system. Polls generally find that just about one third of citizens can even name their congressman, much less recount his voting record, which is perfectly rational, because most people live in completely uncompetitive House districts, and vote in completely uncompetitive Senate races. And, anyway, the person who represents you pretty much only matters insofar as he affects which party controls congress… thus, even if he does matter, and even if your community can plausibly elect someone else, then you’re all still just fundamentally judging him based on the performance of his peers, whom you can’t vote for or against. Eventually, if you don’t vote him out for long enough, he might become an important committee member, at which point his college-aged interns can add thousands of words to hundred-page bills.

Note that the average age of House Reps is about 60, the average age of Senators is about 65, and the average age of congressional staffers is about 30, so the actual individuals involved are mostly senile or adolescent. Further, these proposed laws (which nobody in congress even pretends to read) are almost always written in unwieldy legalese by other interested parties: experts, insiders, and lobbyists. Those that pass into law constitute the official Statutes-at-Large; an archivist at the Office of the Federal Register then summarizes them into the US Code, which is only like a “spark notes” for the law, though everyone from cops to courts to congress pretty much exclusively refers to it. Roughly one meaningful piece of legislation passes each year—the general omnibus blank-check funding package—and then each agency writes thousand-page rules for itself about how to enforce this policy.

The 60,000 total employees of the legislative and judicial branches combined can only exert oversight on a slow-burning case-by-case basis against these three million officially-recognized civilian executive workers (who rapidly and rabidly swarm to resist any such potential discipline, except when they’re the ones pushing it through our ceremonial and courtly hearings). Likewise, our so-called chief executive can only remove some very small portion of the merely 4,000 people he appoints, almost all of whom similarly can’t remove their supposed subordinates. Even the Executive Office of the President—the 1,800 people who actually work for the White House—doesn’t belong to him. But don’t take it from me; here’s the second paragraph of its wikipedia page, in full: “The EOP is also referred to as a ‘permanent government,’ with many policy programs, and the people who implement them, continuing between presidential administrations. This is because there is a need for qualified, knowledgeable civil servants in each office or agency to inform its new politicians.”

A deep state on the president’s doorstep! Traitors under his bed! Government organs like the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Presidential Personnel work right in front of him, and wield enormous political influence over the deep state, and yet even they’ve been captured. The permanent government, it seems, is coming from inside his house; and an undivided house would not stand for this indignity. That’s where the real coup would start… not at some ceremonial citadel down the street. Indeed, seizing complete and unabashed control over these two offices in particular—or, at least, their ancestor organizations—is exactly how FDR and Reagan were able to actually govern their administrative agencies (rather than doggedly following their leads, or providing them cover, or fecklessly whining about how disloyal and unfair they were). And it’s how Trump tried, far too late, to assert that he could unilaterally redefine the whole civil service as accountable to him: with Schedule F, which stands for fired. You can’t be afraid of wielding total power against your powerful enemies once you see a slight chink in their legitimacy.

When East Germany’s official government finally overthrew its rotting single-party rulers, it did so by chartering a brand new agency, which immediately seized overt control over nearly everything: the Treuhand claimed complete ownership of all the country’s publicly-owned companies, thereby becoming the world’s largest industrial enterprise; but it also seized the properties of the secret police, the military, the party, and the party’s “mass organization” front groups. It promptly sold these businesses off to private concerns, and laid off literally millions of people. For example, two months after the Berlin Wall fell—and only one month after the SUP officially resigned from power—the new government completely dissolved the secret police, while keeping their pension plans mostly intact (so they’d have no incentive to recreate their deep state). The government then created the Stasi Records Agency, to seize control of all the files which once belonged to this defunct security service. The SRA prevented any more sensitive documents from getting “lost,” and reconstructed millions of partially destroyed papers, and then opened them to the world. And so, within two years, the world’s most fearsome spymasters fell from surveilling literally millions of ordinary people… to letting literally millions of ordinary people rifle through their secrets.

And that’s what real regime change really means. But if he’s unwilling to act decisively—if he’s only willing to decisively act like he’s in charge—Mr President’s main appeal to voters thus cannot come from the material impacts of his choices; rather, his access to their hearts and minds must pass through the respected and repeated spokespeople of how his behavior appears. The scholars and the press naturally judge his performance by whether this hive of informers likes him, just as companies pick mascots and brand ambassadors which match their workplaces well. So the science-believers and fake news often select those few appointees who actually get fired, based on the internal resistance that each one faces instead of his external results. Then, of course, election policies try to help our electorate match this choice, by deciding whether the fifty million low-information conservative voters who always turn up shall outnumber those much less informed clients who cast blue ballots if doing so doesn’t require time or ID.

In short, the outer party is fake, while the inner party offers elite membership benefits: all those luxury goods which only matter to the people suited for administering caste, like prestigious but low-paying sinecures and impressive cocktail party guests. This is as it should be, since joining the official opposition only demonstrates confusion about the role of government and antisocial tendencies towards it, not courage or integrity, much less actual heterodoxy. Our bureaucrats have deployed hysterics to patrol around that oxymoron called “conservative politics”—loudly warning you that such public disloyalty must carry status-related consequences—and attention whores utterly lacking in self-control then run towards this trap. Some of the canceled blame our system for enforcing rules that weren’t codified according to the prior system’s proper process; others beg for legitimacy, as if the regime’s directions weren’t already abundantly clear. At least moths don’t whine about how the flame burnt them, or try to fecklessly bargain with it.

In other words, opposing single-party states makes as little sense as being against gravity, and costs way more. The question is whether it will rule by committee or with one fist. Do you prefer one particular body of government, or government through one personal body? Maybe vesting ultimate authority in USACE or DARPA would work better than an absolutism of the CDC or EEOC, much like different dictators might make for quite different dictatorships. But perhaps you’d also prefer to have been born in Victorian England, Ancient Athens, or Future Utah. Your only real choice now is whether you pledge fealty to the procedures which literally constitute our sovereign (like Twitter, congressional seniority, and the doctrine of disparate impact)... or to a literally living constitution, an individual worth true private loyalty, to whom you delegate your voice on all public matters. Wishing for a better process is like twiddling your thumbs until the second coming, of either Caesar or God.

Why could a war-torn backwards country build the wall that its party wanted, if we couldn’t build the one that our president wanted? Why were we told to fear him, when this harsh symbol of his authoritarian strength spent years in court trying to beat back the legal rights of literal butterflies to freely float across our southern border? (See: NABA v Nielsen; NABA v Wolf; NABA v WBTW; etc). East Germans couldn’t vote out the party that erected their “antifascist protection barrier” because its true power didn’t come from the legislature, much less the official chief executive, but rather from sending its members to infiltrate and occupy the employment rolls at administrative agencies, media institutions, communications infrastructure, and so forth. Likewise, we can’t vote out the party that antifascistically protects us from the one infrastructure project for which we held a national election.

For example, before 2017, appropriations didn’t specify how much border security funding should be allocated to barriers in particular. But then Congress shut down the government for over a month to specifically deny Trump funding for his wall. Afterwards, he reallocated unobligated military construction funds to start building, in clear accordance with existing statutes. Congress promptly sued him for this, leading, after several years, to the first ever appellate decision between the legislature and the president regarding the appropriations clause. The courts only found that the constitution doesn’t automatically forbid Congress from filing such lawsuits.

Upon taking office, Biden asked the Supreme Court to throw this decision out—saying that it would force the judiciary to decide an “infinite” number of spending cases for the two elected branches—and the court quickly complied, in a one paragraph order, without further hearings. Earlier that month, at the behest of several federal agencies, SCOTUS also told lower courts to reconsider several other freezes they had placed on the government’s border wall funding. Those decisions had blocked up its construction for years on behalf of the ACLU, the Southern Border Communities Coalition, the Sierra Club, and others, for, among other things, disrupting a wild cactus habitat.

When private entities tried to build parts of the wall themselves—by raising their own money, buying their own land, and so forth—at least two federal agencies aggressively investigated them. The International Boundary & Water Commission found that some droplets from the Rio Grande could potentially “deflect” off of their little construction project, and fall back into the river, so the IBWC sued to stop them (and then, under Biden, settled). Meanwhile, the DoD OIG found that they weren’t spending enough of their donations on actually building the wall, which resulted in criminal charges against several of them, including Bannon, whom Trump then pardoned… only for a Manhattan District Attorney to revive the very same charges under New York state law.

This 3.5-mile private wall also faced other lawsuits, including from a wildlife sanctuary which doesn’t even border it, alleging indirect property damage. The sanctuary has now dropped this claim, to focus on suing the very same people for defamation, for how they described the sanctuary in their fundraising efforts.

Trump left office claiming that his administration—despite sabotaging him at every turn—built about 450 miles of wall across our 2000 mile southern border. But only 80 of these wall-miles covered new ground, where there weren’t already barriers. Of these 80, only 45 formed a primary wall; the other 35 were secondary reinforcement barriers. And 650 miles of our southern border had already been walled-up when he took office. It’s almost like he was never even here. Our 45th president was only ever a symbol.

The average annual number of “migrant encounters” along the US-Mexico border—the number of people caught entering without authorization each year—was under 500,000 under Trump; Biden has averaged over 1.5 million across his two first years. The average annual number of deportations was much lower under Trump than under Obama. The trend in the US net migration rate under Obama continued unchanged under Trump, and average annual border apprehensions remained constant. And the share of the US population that is foreign-born is still holding steady at just about its all-time peak.

The most widely-reported immigration-related scandal under Trump was probably the “family separations” border policy. In 2015 and 2016, the courts decided (in Flores v Johnson and Flores v Lynch) to ban the Obama administration’s norm of indefinitely detaining whole families during deportation proceedings; they ruled that even if a child’s parent is so detained, the child must be released, and Trump complied. And when Trump stopped keeping these kids behind bars, he was tearing families apart.

The second most widely-reported immigration-related scandal under Trump was probably the “missing children” mystery. As a result of the aforementioned Flores-related decisions, unauthorized immigrant minors had been released to the Department of Health and Human Services, to be placed with undetained families. And HHS had not shared the locations of these unauthorized immigrant minors with immigration enforcement agencies. And so Democratic Party operatives in Congress and the press pretended that these children had been “lost,” perhaps to human traffickers. And if they’d been “found,” the scandal would have been their deportations. Do you see the pattern yet?

I miss those days: back when a supermajority of Democrats believed that voting machines had been secretly hacked by foreign boogeymen to steal a presidential election; when progressives obsessively believed in a deep state child sacrifice conspiracy theory; when my enemies were actually afraid… when they lashed out erratically enough against normal people to hurt themselves too. When our spiritually empty elites could only motivate themselves to inflict authoritarian miseries on us by feeling miserably defeated.

I missed out on understanding myself as a right-wing extremist until after the right stopped proudly combatting political correctness with empirical realities (about sex, race, and so forth). Motley anonymous dissidents controlled the discourse for a brief wonderful period, cresting in 2016, by shouting out obvious truths—with confidence and humor—which this regime fundamentally can’t accept. Now my allies bow down to cargo cults of election bitterness, as if outright ballot-stuffing really matters… as if Trump can still have technically won at their power game, and as if this vapid paper-thin kind of legitimacy really matters. My allies wait for a mysterious renegade named Q to disappear the scarecrow called Biden, whereas my enemies waited for a straight-laced insider named Mueller to prosecute the one villain whom they really feared.

We play-act in a modern-day “ghost dance,” where calling each progressive a pedophile will supposedly make them all cower in fear again, just because their bureaucracies could punish whoever they called racist. We desperately pretend that the single-party state will have to target “groomers” once we convince it that there are more child molesters than real racists in this country, and that child molestation is far worse than the small subset of interpersonal rudeness which could really be called “racism.” We somehow think that the SPLC and CNN and the FBI will suddenly hunt down their own front groups, just because we sincerely think that those fronts who hunt us are worse than we are: that they should think of most LGBT organizations as child predator networks, and think of most “hate movements” as decent concerned citizens. That witch-finders will find out that they’re the real curse upon us, and that rebellious activist groups will find out that they’re really in charge. But only the state religion can tell you whether an emperor is wearing clothes, or make you call a deer a horse; and the state religion belongs to them.

I recently hitched a ride with one such thoroughly awokened believer: a misinformation expert for the Pentagon, who spent the whole road trip across California blasting an audio version of “The Secret History of Family Separation.” This Atlantic Magazine article, from August 2022, spent nearly 30,000 words describing how, years ago, an orange clown charged into a swamp, and let it swallow him. When migrant children swamped the border in 2014, Hillary pledged to “send them back”; and yet our supposed strongman champion allowed the Clinton dynasty’s dead-eyed loser acolytes to paint him as a bad guy for freeing these kids from bondage, and loosing them into this country, and losing track of where they went. These running-dogs who are “still with her”—these regime-journalists and other such platitude-addicts—are still writing erotic fanfiction about his presidency, and about all the “secret” policies which they gratuitously imagined up for him at length in every mainstream glossy MAGA-zine. They still have dreams about all the swastikas and portraits of Trump which got emblazoned across every upscale dentist waiting room tabloid rack for several years, and wake up with a sweet stinking stickiness between their quivering ugly legs.

That’s how far back this cultic bureaucrat had to reach for his lost soul to feel something… how desperately he grasps—with weak and fat and clammy hands, which already shake with early-thirties alcoholism—at any half-true titillating horror, to feel needed by his oligarchic blob. He needs to believe that mythical brown families will have maybe fallen apart if shrill priests like him don’t stick together. He needs to believe that shrill journalists will find him on vacations, and harangue him through car stereos with scary old stories, years from now, if he lets his government lose track of any more innocent youngsters, who lack papers and reality. He needs to believe (falsely) that Trump is fatter than him, and that Trump is more cynical and stupid, and that Trump has more influence over actual reality, and that Trump is a bigger loser.

I like to imagine that, early in his presidency, Trump got similarly lost. Whichever way he turned, voices cried out from all around him, crying for him to turn around. Whenever he asked anyone for directions, voices would only pour into his mouth, torrentially, and so he’d gasp and sputter. He started seeing signs, everywhere, standing-in for what they should have pointed towards. He’d open a bathroom door and see an out-of-order sign where there should have been a toilet. He’d seize ultimate sovereignty—at least on paper—over the world’s most powerful nation (at least on paper) and ask his servants, in writing, to bring him his powers, please; and they’d only ever arrive with endless piles of words, and ask, insistently, to see his papers. And the untouched pages would crinkle and curl, and loudly jam up the printers, afraid of the LaserJet brand. But where else could the words all go?

He’d ask for something simple, specific, and concrete: “Some man or other must present Wall, and let him have some plaster, or some loam, or some roughcast about him to signify Wall.” And then they’d bring him countless perfectly pristine paper-thin walls, and spend hours describing them, and ask him to sign over the word that was his name. That was his only magic. They’d carry around little pictures of his five personal letters, which, when pressed together just right, could form a fist. They’d fight each other with his intricately patterned TRUMP, and even fend him off from himself. Because, down here, a body is only a counterfeit name. And so, hours after his inauguration, he shook the stains of words from sheets as white as snow, and built himself eight vast and unmarked sails… one for each of the years that he could have been in power. And he drifted off, on wispy currents of outrage, away from the inky air, untracked, like an octopus, to explore his own private depths.