Understanding the Left – A Case Study from Micronationry

No matter where they're at, these people are always the same

Originally published on August 27, 2019.

Over the past several years, many on the Right, whether dissident or mainstream, have begun to wake up as to the true nature of the Left. While it has taken longer than it really should have, an increasing number of normiecons are starting to figure out some things, such as that people on the Left aren’t interested in “fair play” or “following the rules.” It’s taken so long because most conservatives, especially older ones, were habituated to a previously prevailing political climate in which there was at least an idealised public consensus that these traits were how you “did politics right.” You were supposed to play fair, rationally debate policy proposals, and then have an open and honest vote on them. The failure to do so was what most charges of public corruption revolved around. The ideal may not have always been realised, but at least it was there.

However, the last decade or so have seen a sea change in the way politics in the United States have been conducted (I can’t personally speak for other nations, but given what I’ll be saying below, I think I can safely say that they’ve also seen the same trends) [Ed. note: I have since been proven correct in this]. This roughly coincided with the formal political ascendancy of a new guard of progressive politicians and “thought leaders” epitomised by Barack Obama, even though he was actually fairly moderate compared to many of them. This generation of progressive was forged in the second wave of cultural Marxist radicalism that came to dominate American universities in the 1980s and 1990s, thus allowing progressive academics to poison a generation of American students. After an incubation period lasting a couple of decades while these former students worked their ways up through their organisational hierarchies, the new progressivism burst on the scene. No longer interested in at least pretending to “play fair,” this new breed fully grasped that power is something to be taken and used, not restrained through sentimentality. And taking it and using it has been what they’ve done since, despite the complaints and the huffinpuffery of staid old conservatives used to the old order.

Many people were surprised because they weren’t paying attention to the trends around them, trends which were apparent to the discerning observer even while these new progressives were being crafted in the devilish forges of a subverted academia. For those of us who interacted with them even while they were still students, there were clear indicators as to what these people were going to be like, if you could only observe them in an environment similar to the one they were being groomed for.

See, radical progressives cannot help but act the way they do whenever they have the power and the opportunity to do so. When put into places where they can wield power, they will invariably use it to try to subvert and destroy. For me, this was first made apparent through a now largely-defunct online hobby known as “micronationry.”

What was micronationry? Well, it was a pastime for political nerds (which I was, back when I still cared about “politics,” per se) that reached its heyday about twenty years ago, and which involved people creating their own online nations, involving websites, forums, and so forth. It was somewhat like an extremely primitive version of NationStates, except with very little in the way of objective rules for how economics and the like would work, or even how people should behave. Essentially, a “founder” would create a GeoCities website (I told you this was a while ago), give it a name, throw together a flag and a national anthem and a forum, and then start inviting people to participate.

Generally speaking, there were three different types of micronations – monarchies, (semi-)functioning republics, and communist “peoples’ republics.” The first of these, the monarchies, were basically just LARPs. The founder would call himself “King such-and-such” and then start handing out various titles to his friends like they were Skittles. They’d post pictures of themselves in what they thought looked like aristocratic regalia, and generally spend their time online trading electronic seigneuries back and forth. Amusing in its own way, but offered little in the way of having anything to actually do, so these generally didn’t tend to grow much beyond the circles of friends of their founders.

On the opposite end, you had the “peoples’ republics” which were usually started by Marxist groups from some university or another. These were also LARPs, though of a different sort. Typically, these had absolutely no grasp of economics and you would find them claiming that they could equalise wealth, nationalise all industries, drive out all the rich people, tax at 95%, provide universal welfare, health care, and the like, while also maintaining full employment and 10% economic growth per annum. But hey, who could tell them it wouldn’t work? They got to invent their economic numbers out of whole cloth, after all, just like everything else about their nations.

The really interesting micronations were those in the middle of the spectrum, the ones that really and truly did make the effort to be functioning republican systems with federalism and elections and all that. These were the ones I participated in. Typically, they tried to instill a level of realism, with some participants even giving their own time and effort to attempt making rational simulations of economic and demographic cycles and the like.

Here is where I get to my point about observing the Left in a simulation of its natural habitat.

The thing about each of these micronations was that they would generally work right up to the point where the various assorted progressives would infiltrate in sufficient numbers to take over. And that pretty much always happened. Each of these virtual republics would come equipped with a constitution which, much like “real” constitutions, was supposed to be the agreed upon rules that everyone was supposed to abide and which governed what could and could not be done in the simulation. Well, because they were crafted by normies, these constitutions assumed that fair play and rational dialog would be the rule, so they always included standard provisions about free speech and forbade excluding people on the basis of ideology or politics.

Of course, just as we’re now seeing in real life, all that these types of provisions did was to give the Left opportunities to manipulate procedural outcomes for their own ends. And this they did, in ways which are eerily similar to what they’re doing to the USA and other western nations now.

First, they would try to recruit as many of themselves in as they could through organised recruitment drives (which ran afoul of an unspoken but generally accepted “rule” for these sites) until they reached the point where they could consistently get themselves elected at least half the time. This probably sounds familiar since this is exactly what the Left is doing via “refugees” and immigration today in real nations.

One of the main goals would then be to get themselves appointed to judicial positions, since (dumbly following the American model) judges, while not being appointed for life, were appointed for what were very long terms in the context of these simulations. And judges, as Moldbug noted, hold the summum imperium – everything has to jump to their whim, even though this isn’t explicitly constitutionally stated to be the case.

Having obtained control of legislatures and the executive part of the time and the judiciary most of the time, the lefties would then begin to pass laws that altered the simulation in ways that would continue to make it easier for the Left to extend its power into other areas. For instance, because many of the individual provinces in a simulation might still be in the hands of “normal” players, they would pass laws that reduced the scope of powers that provincial governments could exercise, and use their judges to rule these changes “constitutional,” even though they obviously were not from a purely textual standpoint.

Likewise, when individual players would complain, prominent progressives would accuse them of “hate speech” (yes, this was a thing even back then) and “sue” them, bringing them in front of the Supreme Court (by whatever name it might be known in a simulation). The court would invariably find the defendant guilty and punish them by restricting their ability to participate in the simulation, the idea being that he or she would become frustrated and leave.

If worse came to worst and the Left controlled the chief executive position, the progressives would then take the final step and declare a coup. They could do this successfully because the chief executive position usually included access to the “keys” to the forum and website (i.e. the passwords and usernames), which they would use to lock out all the non-progressives and ban them from the forums. At this point, the virtual republic would be converted to one of the “peoples’ republics” and all the former non-progressive citizens would scatter to find homes in other, non-subverted, virtual republics.

I’m sure all of this seems very familiar, because it’s essentially the same pattern we see the Left following today. Subversion of formal governing structure through irregular, dubiously constitutional means which are then legitimated by the judiciary. Criminalisation of dissent via claims of “hate speech,” which are used to “socially justify” the punishment of dissidents. We’ve even seen the three year long (failed) attempt by progressives in the USA to perpetrate a coup attempt against a lawfully elected president, attempting to use the Mueller investigation to “steal the keys” to the US government. The only thing that remains – and which really wasn’t a feasible option in an online nation made up entirely of electrons – is the sort of violent overthrow against a non-progressive government that seems to be the final endgame for progressives when all other subversion attempts fail. Of course, it’s not like they haven’t already been violently attacking the United States government.

What we need to understand from all of this is that this is the natural modus operandi of the progressive Left. These things are what they do. You know the old saw that “power corrupts,” as if office seekers were naturally good people who are then perverted by power? Well, throw it out for the whiggish rubbish that it is. The reality is precisely the opposite – the Left gains power this way because of the fact that the corrupt are seeking power. It’s not as if these people get into positions where they can exercise power and then it goes to their heads. No. They seek out positions of power specifically because they want to implement exactly the type of process detailed above and are perfectly willing to disregard or procedurally manipulate whatever impediments might stand in their way. They don’t “play fair” because they don’t see any reason to and never had any intention of doing so to begin with.

The root of it all goes back to the principle of democracy itself. What must be fundamentally understood about democracy is that it is not actually about letting the masses have a say in their own governance. Instead, it is a way of using the masses as a pragmatic source of power for corrupt demagogues to install themselves as rulers, without any higher mandate from God or tradition. Indeed, democratic systems (even ones which style themselves as “republics” or “constitutionally bound”) invariably turn into oligarchies, usually with some titular autocratic head. This is due to democracy’s inherently chaotic nature which makes it naturally devolve into factionalism through the division of power, allowing opportunists like today’s progressive Left to step in and gather up the pieces of power into their own hands. Democracy and political corruption go hand in hand specifically because democracy tends invariably toward omnipoliticisation of every area of life, which makes the stakes that much higher and the fruits of power that much more tempting for unscrupulous types such as modern progressives.

If the Left could not help itself when dealing with ephemeral electronic nations existing entirely in cyberspace, they certainly aren’t going to restrain themselves when seeking to acquire power over real life nations. The only way to effectively combat them is for the Right to drop all of this “fair play” nonsense and force the Left to face opposition along the lines of the new rules which it has itself adopted. At this point, normiecons need to understand that we’re not ever going to be going back to the mythologised past of perfect, constitutionally restrained limited government. That hasn’t really existed since 1865, and it’s dubious that it even existed in the USA after the 1830s, by which time nearly all of the states had implemented universal manhood suffrage (i.e. were far along the path to full democratisation). It definitely isn’t going to exist in any conceivable future for the United States.

Accept this reality and channel it in the directions which are more amenable to a return to traditional Anglospheric modes of legitimate authority, or else cede the playing field to the Left and face a globohomogayplex communist dictatorship of the proletrannieat. Those are really the only two options at this point. The one thing I can say for the monarchial micronations is that while they were overall boring to simulate and had little attraction for prospective citizens who were not already friends of the king, at least they tended to be stable. They were really quite insulated from being subverted by the Left, unless they were actually hacked by some lefties (which was pretty rare, seeing as how that is a prosecutable real life cybercrime). In the same way, the only really reasonable way to stabilise western societies and bring them back from the brink is to restore legitimate, monarchial authority that operates along traditional modes appropriate to each separate national society. For as long as the West pursues “the god that failed,” the door will continually be thrown open for those like our progressives to subvert and destroy our societies.