Local Leadership and Legitimacy

You go with what you know...

With this post I’d like to continue somewhat in the vein of my post about localism and collapse from a couple of weeks ago. If you’re a world famous Twitter commentator such as I am, you spend a fair amount of time on that platform and see a lot from both sides of any discussion that takes place on /ourside/. In the discussion about America’s impending collapse and possible coming civil war, there are a lot of folks - many of whom (notably) seem to be grifters who have a vested interest in the current media/political status quo and can’t bear the thought of it going away - who profess to believe that such a thing simply could not happen. One of the arguments they subsequently make from this is basically that even if it could, where would /ourside/ find any leadership to guide the process?

On its face, this would seem to be a valid criticism. After all, there is basically nobody in power at the national level in the nominal Right who wouldn’t cling to the sinking ship of state with their last fingernail. It’s hard to imagine any elected or appointed Republican at the federal level, or even many at the statewide level, who would actually take the plunge should true civil collapse and subsequent decentralisation start becoming a reality in the United States. So in this, at least, they have a point.

But the problem is that this objection completely misses the point as to what secular collapse and attendant decentralisation even mean. In such a situation, central authority and the individuals holding leadership within it become less and less relevant the more the wheels start to come off. This is especially the case within a federal type of system such as ours in which states are already intended to be semi-autonomous (and could revert back to being even more fully so with minimal effort). They’re ready-made power centres that exist outside the central government and thus as breakdown occurs, it really would not be that important who fills political and military roles within that central government. Indeed, due to the makeup of our federal system, in an actual breakdown situation, your state leadership will be more important than whatever figurehead occupies space in DC.

The issue with genuine demographic-structural collapse situations is that decentralisation isn’t always going to stop at the provincial (er…state) level. Historically, decentralisation only stops at whatever level can still produce local leadership that is viewed as legitimate by the bulk of the local population. So in some states, such as a Florida, you may have a broadly popular governour and state government that is representative of the majority of the people in the state and is so in such a way that this support is at least fairly evenly distributed across the state. In such a case, the state would likely stay together as a political unit and emerge from any intervening turmoil with a fair degree of unity. But in other cases, such as in Oregon, you have a wide swathe of the state that is essentially ruled by an ideologically alien regime that the hinterlands can’t wait to get out from under. In those cases, the state government may well lose control over those areas and see them either strike out on their own or attempt to join themselves to more amenable nearby units.

In any hard reset collapse situation, expect the rise of leadership to be local and spontaneous. Some of the grifters might argue that this couldn’t happen since we don’t already see it happening, which is rather beside the point. It isn’t happening yet because it doesn’t need to happen yet. Most of the people who would emerge as local leaders around which post-collapse political units would rally are basically just local notables still operating within the present system. They might be your local sheriff, your local city council, business owners, or neighbourhood watch captains. Once that system breaks, they’ll be the ones positioned to fill any subsequent legitimacy vacuums. And frankly, most people really are not sitting around just waiting for civil society to fall apart so they can step in and be a local warlord.

It has often been observed the United States has virtually no social cohesion anymore. Yet, this is really only partially true. At the national level, yes, the only thing holding the country together culturally is a stultifying mass consumerist culture which, overall, is more harmful than helpful. Historically, cultures are more naturally and reasonably regional and localised, and this is the case with the USA. Despite the “peasant girl in wheat field” fetishists who burble about how “America has no culture,” the fact is that it actually has several broadly regional cultures. As a result, in much the same way as our federal system makes it theoretically easier to break apart politically, so our regional culturalism (as well as the basic ethnogenesis that distinguishes normal White Americans from the progs) would make it easier for states and regional coalitions to come together after a collapse event.

Keep in mind that what I’m saying here is not merely theoretical. There is a great deal of historical precedent from the past history of large empires undergoing secular collapse and dissolution, so it’s rather silly to say that it couldn’t happen here. The histories of various Mesopotamian empires all involve large territorial empires decaying and seeing everything outside their cores secede, only for a new empire to arise and have to put it all back together again. The same pattern follows for ancient Egypt, which saw several of these cycles take place. So also with China, India, Byzantium, and the rest. Even the rise of the Frankish empires after the fall of the western Roman Empire can be thought of as a continuation of this pattern.

One particular case that applies more specifically to our question of local leadership and legitimacy is that of the Hunnic Empire which flashed brilliantly but briefly into existence under Attila, but then disintegrated just as quickly afterward. The Huns were a nomadic group that poured off the western Eurasian steppe into eastern Europe near the beginning of the 5th century. Under the dynamic leadership of Attila, they quickly and brutally established themselves as overlords over the Goths and other Germanic groups all around the Middle Danube and the Hungarian Plain.

Now the sheer mass of people and the number of tribes that the Huns incorporated into their empire was such that there was no way the Huns could directly rule them. So they would rule through local nobles who were usually appointed after the original tribal kinglets had been eliminated. In this way, the Huns thought to keep these leaders of the various peoples beholden to them for their position. It worked for as long as Attila was alive, but when he died in 453 his empire quickly fell apart. It was basically a speed run of demographic-structural collapse.

The interesting part is not that the Hunnic Empire fell apart so quickly, but that it fell apart so smoothly, at least for those who were directly a part of it (the effect this had on the western Romans over the next century was a bit more sanguinary, of course). After Attila’s death, the various tribes and tribal confederations essentially reverted back to independence. The reason for this is because they had, because of Hunnic necessity, retained a noble ruling caste who, by virtue of being installed into power, had been superficially loyal to Attila but who also quickly broke away and used their local legitimacy to begin to establish their own power and dynasties after he was gone. In other words, they had local legitimate leadership in place and ready to go when the opportunity to use it arose.

There is no reason at all why the same thing couldn’t or wouldn’t happen in the United States were a major legitimacy crisis or other shock to the system to take place. It wouldn’t have to be something that rises to the level of the post-apocalyptic, of course. And let’s be honest - the likelihood of the current national “leadership” in the United States and other western nations undergoing a legitimacy crisis brought on by a combination of their incompetence and incontinence is pretty high.

Does anyone really think this horse-faced nag deserves to be in power?

Yet, despite their general fecklessness, The Powers That Be are cunning enough to realise the truth in what I’ve been saying above. That’s why they work so hard to stifle right wing organisation while also trying to coopt into the system as much potential leadership at the state and local levels as possible. Break up dissident networks from which vanguard leadership could arise while tying as many local notables as they can to their wagon - that’s the name of the game. Any that won’t play ball can be defamed and undermined using the media and the law “enforcement” apparatus of the state to harass and investigate them. They know that they have a lot better chance of keeping on top of things, even when final collapse comes, if there are fewer people who can fill the power and legitimacy vacuum created by failures in Washington DC.

In chaos/complexity theory, one of the basic principles is that of a system’s sensitive dependence upon initial conditions. What this describes is the fact that chaotic complex systems are deterministic in the sense that their evolution is completely directed by their current conditions (i.e any seeming randomness in the system is only “apparent”). Even slight changes in those conditions can result in increasingly large changes in the overall system the further you get from the point of departure.

My point with this is that local and regional leadership that arises early on in collapse crisis situations will have an outsized role in setting the direction for the future evolution of any post-collapse demographic-structural system, at least in a broad and overarching sense. Once the ball starts rolling it’s easier to change its direction before it begins rolling too fast. This is why, despite TPTB efforts at disrupting networks, /ourguys/ need to be organising and preparing to emerge as, or at least to counsel and work with, local leadership once the time comes. The old NRx adage applies here, “Become worthy. Accept power. Rule.” Historically, local leadership in devolutionary circumstances came to the fore because they were already spiritually, dispositionally, and materially prepared to do so, even if simply by virtue of being members of the natural aristocracy. In times like these it does us well to be like the children of Issachar who “were men that had understanding of the times” (I Chronicles 12:32). Let the discerning reader be ready to step into the breach if and when the time comes.