Soviet Affairs Desk, 11/29/2021
It will be helpful for the purposes of this waste of your precious reading time to think of the political spectrum not as a two-dimensional line that is stationary, but rather one that is spinning. The far left and far right ends of the spectrum orbit the center at great velocity, and so long as the center remains robust, it cannot be torn apart by the lunacy at the orbital fringe. The political center is a place for reasonable disagreements to be resolved through mutually beneficial compromise; for opposing forces to come together and make things happen or—as is preferable—to get absolutely nothing done.*
Insofar as it is preferable (again, mutually beneficial) for a structure or system or marriage or body politic to remain intact, then yes—the center must hold. I am guilty of making this affirmative assertion with regards to the United States of America. But that was all the way back around 2017, when I still believed the political hysteria could be quelled with reasoned conversation and debate; back when I could not imagine the balkanization of our glorious Union. A lot in the world has changed since then, including my mind.
What happens to a nation when the mass or momentum or some other science-word of one or both of the political fringes becomes so great that they begin to pull the center apart? There is clearly a critical point beyond which it becomes stupid and then downright dangerous for the center to attempt to hold on. (Some would say that’s how civil wars are started.) Leaving the center does not have to mean heading right or left. It could mean walking or running away at full speed in any other available direction, since we happen to live in three spacial dimensions (shut up you String Theory freaks; you’re useless).
In my case, I fell through the bottom of The Center, plummeting into…let’s call it an open space where nothing is off the table. I was there, in The Center, and then some things happened and I read some books, and then I was not. Yes, I was a no-good rotten centrist for most of my life. By inclination, meaning I’ve always been able to see both sides of any given issue and, left to my own devices, I have a hard time coming down in favor of one or the other. Sometimes I can sympathize with both sides, or sometimes neither one means a jot to me. French author of depressive realism Michel Houellebecq calls it “political atheism.” I call it apathy. At times it feels like strategic apathy, but the simple truth is that I was born fucked up.
It’s hard to maintain apathy in these wonderful times of ours, even strategically. Especially if a sudden curiosity about history suddenly sets up shop inside you, and you can feel the eons of human misguidance and evil vibrating in your marrow. I came of age in the ‘90s, when history was history—or so we thought, lulled by Francis Fukuyama’s rose-tinted assertion that history had ended, i.e. that fascism and communism were dead and that the dragon slayer, liberal democracy, could rest on its laurels for all eternity. What happened to that dream? Did Lockheed Martin’s stocks drop into the toilet, necessitating the ginning up of some new international conflicts? Did a cabal of corporatist-globalist neoconservatives seize the reigns of power and dupe us into a never-ending war with an ever-shifting enemy and no borders? Whatever the case, history is not history anymore—history is now. If we ever make it through, the volume of books that will be written about this immunofascist moment will be…voluminous.
And the center will be gone.
And that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Just think! Would you rather come to physical and/or financial blows over a rotten marriage, or find some way out of it that causes the minimum possible carnage? (Won’t somebody please think of the children?!) The marriage between right and left here in the U.S. has grown so rotten that the continuity of the spectrum has dissolved, leaving the political fringes to make eyes at terrorism, the center to revel in a solipsistic Dionysian corporatist circle-jerk, and everyone else standing around wondering when famine will come.
What is the center now but a money printer running on Modern Monetary Theory, or what the dearly departed Norm Macdonald might have called “fucking communist gobbledygook”? What is it but a gilded political aristocracy ruling by fiat and ransacking the economy to pay for theatrics that few are watching anymore and even fewer believe are real? Washington D.C.: a life-sucking metroid gobbling up a confederation of people—most of whom, in their heart of hearts, just want to be free.
What is the first step toward freedom?
De-cen-tra-li-za-tion.
Not that D.C. has a history of just letting states secede peacefully, but that is where it has to start. SGTOW. States Going Their Own Way. Your average Californian and Texan hate each other’s guts. There is nothing for them to say to each other; they have no more in common than, say, an Israeli and a Palestinian; the split is irreconcilable. Why force them to live together? Especially when with each passing mandate imposed from on high, the cost of this coerced coexistence tips ever closer toward violence? (Federal tax yield, that’s why.) It may be the case that a secession will trigger an extreme immune response from D.C., ending in effusive wreckage. Or it may be the case that our federal government has grown so decadent that it has lost the political will to enforce this rotting marriage. It took seventy years, but the Soviet Union dissolved at last when the center—Moscow—went bankrupt, and thus lost the political will to use tanks to quell the revolutions in all of their vassal states. It was up to the states to quell their own revolutions. And, so decadent and demoralized by the naked lie of communism were these states (Romania, for instance) that come 1989 not a single one did any quelling. The revolution unfurled like a flag; everyone save cretins and absolute fucking losers stopped pretending to be communist, and peace was had. (You can read all about it in this super awesome book.)
I was going to try to shoehorn in some bit about Niall Ferguson’s The Square and the Tower, a network theory of history, but it didn’t happen. I went off on a tangent and didn’t come back. Anyway, in this book, Ferguson analyzes the historical tension between hierarchies (centralized) and networks (decentralized). It is clear that hierarchies, over time, have a tendency to embrace tyranny, and that networks can be used to destabilize and dismantle them. Why? Because the head of a hierarchy is a clear target, and if it falls, so falls the hierarchy. Whereas in a network, although some nodes will inevitably prove more powerful than others (Pareto’s power laws are fucking everywhere), striking at any given node is unlikely to destabilize the network as a whole.
Ferguson did not train his eye on the tension between hierarchy and network in the history of the U.S. (perhaps because besides being a historian of the finest calibre he’s also a lousy Statist), but his analytical framework easily applies. And Nassim Taleb did apply it in his own way in his book Antifragile, in which he details how hierarchies like nation-states are fragile because they do not gain strength from being sress-tested, whereas a confederation of states is more robust—antifragile, in fact—because stress-testing makes them stronger. For instance, if one state tries something and fails, another state can learn from that mistake and avoid it; and if one state tries something and succeeds, another can mimic the success.
So: America’s original strength lay in its decentralization—in the fact that it was not in fact one nation but a voluntary union of sovereign little nations: a network. With each passing year since the conspiracy we call the drafting of the Constitution, that sovereignty has been eroded, with the federal government—a hierarchy—granting ever more power unto itself while grinding the network of states under its heel. This tension has reached the breaking point before (the Civil War comes instantly to mind), and it probably will again. Maybe soon. And yes, D.C. cannot help but react punitively.
They’ve got most of the money and all of the tanks—but do they possess the political will to quell a secession? Or will they finally shrivel up into some pathetic, bankrupt little rump state and, as The Lobster so eloquently put it in a recent chat on The Rubin Report, “fucking leave [us] alone”?
*I am of the mind that political leaders—insofar as we have any use for them**—should be unpaid, and should meet only rarely, and should be stripped of the power to write new laws because the only thing any new law is good for is stripping people of their natural rights.
**But really: We have no use for them.
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