Populism Needs Leaders

And therein lies the problem...

A couple of days ago I saw this tweet from one of my long-time mutuals,

The event which this is referring to is a recent fight that took place in Glendale, California between antifa scumbags and a group of concerned parents (primarily Armenians) who don’t like that the school district is trying to foist off even more troon propaganda onto their children.

Now, I understand the sentiment being expressed. After all, if the large majority of the people want something (or don’t want it, as the case may be), then that should be determinative, right? Isn’t that the heart and essence of democracy, which our current Regime professes to love so much? And make no mistake, the transgenderism agenda, especially when it’s directed towards our kids, is very unpopular. No matter how much the Regime celebrates it with pride flags and political leverage, there’s no changing the fact that most people don’t want their children’s sexual organs to be mutilated in the cause of population control, or affirming mentally ill weirdos within the Left’s intersectionality alliance, or whatever other combination of things may be driving this agenda.

But let’s be frank - that’s not how this works at all. Democracy - including the “we’re a republic, not a democracy” type of democracy that nevertheless utilises popular voting and participation - is ultimately always going to be a failure. Popular forms of government, especially as they are expressed within a liberal milieu (which nearly all of them are these days), rely upon unrealistic, fallacious assumptions that end up being unworkable. Democracy faces a scaling problem whereby what might work in a New England-style townhall meeting just isn’t going to function in a continental-wide polity with 330 million people and vastly contradictory ways of life. This would be the case even if all 330 million were part of an ethnically homogeneous, high IQ population - the fact that they’re not simply makes the system degrade that much faster.

But the biggest problem is that democracy, popular government, egalitarian forms, are easily hackable. It’s extremely easy for bad actors to play upon factional strife to create divisions within the mass of the people, thus allowing them to capture political power via oligarchic control of particular factions. Naturally, when something like that is easy for bad actors to do, bad actors will do it. Democratic forms often evolve into oligarchies as a result, making their original democratic claims nothing more than a sham.

This is not to say, of course, that because popular government is a joke that populism needs to be. While the masses shouldn’t really play much (or any) of a role in political decision-making, it is still incumbent upon good autocratic leaders to watch out for and act for the benefit of their people. In many cases, the masses should actually get what they want when it is within the bounds of rightness and reason to do so. To use our example above, the majority of the people who don’t want trannies to mutilate children have the right instinct on this issue because that instinct points to what is intrinsically, objectively right. When the oligarchic deep state Regime continues to act directly contrary to that will of the people, it bleeds legitimacy and exposes itself as enemies of the people.

What was said above, however, presupposes the existence of leaders who would emerge to give direction and coherence to the otherwise scattered and contradictory impulses of the “popular will.” Such leadership requires a moral fibre that allows it to do things which need to be done, even when they run counter to what may even be long established practice. When such leaders do appear, they can galvanise the people of a nation into action and overturn the machinations of oligarchic elements acting for the benefit only of their factional constituents. This can be the case at any level, wherever a group or organisation or nation finds itself under the sway of an oligarchic “Regime.” Populist leaders can act as a shield for the people against oligarchic abusers.

One recent example that I personally know of occurred in a local church pastored by a man I know. So for some back story: This pastor only recently (around three years ago) took the bishoprick of this church. Now, for many years this church was what you may call a “family run church” in that there was a group of extended family members who founded the church decades ago, who filled all of the church’s offices, and who had a history of hiring and firing previous pastors on the basis of whether those men did what the family told them to do or not. Even though they formed a fairly small minority of the church’s total membership, because they never allowed a pastor to really act to bring unity to the church, they were always able to bully the rest of the membership into acquiescing to what they wanted.

Well, this pastor I know ended up running afoul of this. A few months ago, he had led the church into allowing another church without a building to use his church’s facilities - something which the family opposed, but which the rest of the membership supported, voted for, and ended up putting in place over their opposition. He was also instituting new outreach programs for the church such as a children’s program and door-to-door evangelism. The family didn’t like these either because new people were being added to the church, thus diluting the family’s already minority status. Further, a couple of the older members of the family passed away, cutting their numbers even further.

So the family set about trying to get rid of him. Church elections were coming up and one peculiarity in this church’s constitution is that the pastor has to face a “vote of confidence” which requires him to get 75% of the vote to retain his position (i.e. a 26% minority could remove a pastor if they want to), a provision which was added as an amendment at one point in the past specifically to allow this family to more easily remove pastors when they wanted to. Well, the night of the election comes and he gets 68% of the vote - a large majority, but still falling short slightly only because this family brought in several nominal members to vote against him, people who only showed up in church services every few months, just often enough to not fall onto the inactive membership list.

Now the problem with putting dumb minority provisions like this into a constitution is that eventually you’re going to get put into a situation where you try to act on them. Obviously, the large majority that voted to keep this pastor were disgusted. But then a funny thing happened on the way to the unemployment line - this man refused to abide by the results. It helped him that there was another provision in the constitution which flatly contradicted this amendment by saying that a 2/3 vote was needed to remove a pastor - and the amendment never superseded or otherwise nullified this original provision. To make a long story short, because this pastor stuck to his guns, demonstrated leadership for the large majority of the people in the church, and resisted that family oligarchy, he ended up staying, the family members who had been causing the most trouble by backbiting and gossiping for months were voted out of the church, and the power of that family over the church was broken completely. By all accounts, this church has now had its sweet spirit and active service for the Lord restored, which had been quenched by the behaviour of the bad actors involved.

The point to this anecdote is that leadership really does matter. A majority - even a large majority - may want something to happen, but if they don’t have a polar axis about which to coalesce, this desire doesn’t mean anything. This was the case in a small church and is equally the case in our continent-spanning empire.

But (surprise surprise) we’re not the only ones who know this. The Regime is fully aware of this fact as well, which is why they work so assiduously to prevent any kind of popular leader from emerging on the Right. Donald Trump has been the only genuinely populist leader that the United States have seen in several generations, and the only one who has emerged during our period of global empire. He was the only one who managed to truly rally the great mass of middle Americans to break the Regime’s hold - however temporarily - on power. Certainly, he was not perfect. Yes, he failed to realise much of his agenda. But he did also manage to push a lot of it through. Further, his lasting importance was found in the moral plane - he gave America’s white, working- and middle-class majority a place again, reinstilling in them a sense of confidence and purpose. In short, he gave the chuds a voice - and for that the Regime will not ever forgive him or forget his transgression.

That, of course, is what is driving all of the contrived “Trump indictment” nonsense we’re currently seeing. The Powers That Be want to use any means to keep him from being able to run again (after all, rigging national elections, while obviously doable as we’ve seen, come at a cost in legitimacy). So he must be neutralised.

But he’s not the only one. Why does it seem like every promising young Republican politician ends up turning into an establishment schlub in a not too extended period of time? How did Ted Cruz, of all people, go from socially conservative culture warrior and darling of the Religious Right to shilling for the gay agenda? How come no establishment Republican figure can find the courage to do something as simple as opposing open and obvious vote fraud? Why do so many Republican politicians actually seem like they’re actively trying to dynamite their own party’s ability to exercise real power in pursuit of its ostensible political agendas?

It’s because they’re controlled opposition. But more than that, they’re controlled opposition that’s designed to channel dissent against the Regime into pathways where it will be rendered completely impotent. This way, the Regime can dispense (for the most part) with open repression of populist, anti-Regime sentiment and activity (which tends to accelerate legitimacy crises and extrapolitical backlash). In its place, controlled minority party figures can be propped up who perpetually give the chuds the promise that if they just “vote harder” they’ll “get ‘em next time.” Of course, even when these figures are occasionally allowed to occupy high office, nothing ever really changes and “next time” never comes.

They, of course, become controlled opposition by cooption. Any promising Rightist who looks like they might emerge as a right-wing Schelling point comes under pressure to conform to Regime diktat. While they may be allowed a little temporary latitude in certain areas, anything that’s really important to the Regime will require them to kiss the ring if they want to get any further in their careers. They can stake out a few relatively “safe” conservative positions to appeal to normiecons, but nothing that would actually advance a genuine populist agenda that could undermine overall Regime goals, either foreign or domestic. And if they won’t kiss the ring, well, they can always be discredited and destroyed politically. We should probably be grateful, at least, that we’re not to the “assassinate the Regime’s political opponents” stage of our collapse yet (for the most part).

So the quandary for the Right is that a truly populist movement which would appeal to and benefit the broad swath of America’s working and middle classes is not something that’s just going to “happen.” It needs leadership, it needs a rally point, but to have this, it needs people who won’t become Regime lackeys six months into the process. Some way or another, the broad Right needs to find some way to develop an alternative incentive structure that can compete with what the Regime offers. Now, as we edge our way closer to collapse, this will both become easier (because the Regime will gradually run out of resources with which to coopt potential competitors) as well as harder (because the Regime will increasingly act out of desperation, making it less predictable). As decentralisation occurs, alternative power centres (such as blocs of states, for instance) will emerge and make it easier for this movement to take place. The best bet for the Right is to keep our eyes open and take these opportunities and identify these potential leaders as they come.