GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

The establishment of dynastic monarchies, while not to be completely ruled out, as it is the simplest way to guarantee the continuity of the sovereign power, cannot be relied upon as a means of selecting the person to exercise absolute sovereignty. Anyway, dynastic monarchies have always been problematic in this regard, as all it takes is one sterile couple to lay the groundwork for a civil war between those allied with the king’s nephew and those insistent that his mother-in-law’s son by her first husband is the true heir. There have been elective monarchies, but in what sense are they monarchies—sovereignty is certainly not absolute, and however carefully the electorate is chosen, it is sure to expand until we have a full-fledged democracy and therefore radically uncertain sovereignty. (We don’t hear much about elective monarchies, which suggests to me they have never been particularly successful, or established as a stable political form.) This seems to me the biggest logistical problem with absolute sovereignty, since if sovereignty must be completely in one set of hands, how does it peacefully get into another set of hands, as eventually it must? So, let’s try to solve it.

It is best to see sovereign power as either taken or given—and certainly never as simply extant in some body. Once taken, or received, it is held, until taken by or given to, another. (We can follow the chain of custody.) So, the theory of absolute sovereignty has to account for a repeatable means of giving power and for the least contentious way possible of taking it, when necessary. A ruler could give power to whomever he wants, but a responsible ruler would want to give power to someone who could hold it. We can, of course imagine that being his offspring, who has grown up as a prospective heir, has been trained and groomed for the job, imbued with the proper sense of responsibility, and so on. The purpose of primogeniture, of course, was to eliminate rivalries between the children of the monarch by creating criteria that placed the decision beyond their control (criteria that prevented there being a decision). As soon as we introduce the notion that the best must rule, and the foundation of kingly power no longer serves as a permanent legitimation of monarchical rule, we are confronted with the possibility of explosive rivalries, most obviously between the king’s children but then more broadly between his advisors, those discussed as suitable heirs or replacements, along with all the families and factions drawn into these rivalries.

The intractable nature of rivalries spread across the entire social order being the problem generated by the assertion of absolute sovereignty, it must therefore be made the solution. The more deserving the sovereign, that is, the more power is exercised by the most intellectually and emotionally disciplined individual, the more that sovereign will want the flourishing and interaction of similarly disciplined individuals just below the threshold at which a challenge to the sovereign seems like a good bet. The way to do this is always to be the arbiter in those rivalries—to set up, more or less explicitly, contests to see who is the best advisor, the best surrogate, the best administrator, the best theorist of political power, the best architect, artist, etc., and to be the final judge in these contexts. This is a very layered and indirect process—there would be contests over the best advisor for how to determine the best architect, etc.—but that is the art of sovereignty. Whoever is always the judge can never be judged himself, and if the ruler needs judgments regarding his exercise of power, he can set up a contest for that as well, one promoting both honesty and humility on the part of the contestants. These rivalries can reach deep into society, recruiting fresh talent to the regime, while encouraging a general sense of competitiveness, fair play and devotion to the regime among the people.

As part of his normal exercise of power, then, the sovereign creates and continually replenishes a pool of candidates for his replacement—there will be no outrage or even surprise if the man who has been credited with giving the king some of the best counsel over the past decades is appointed the ruler’s successor in his twilight years, or if the ruler feels his power failing. By the same token, there will be less shock if, supposing the ruler to become suddenly erratic and evidently a danger to the realm, such an advisor, with the support of others—the support of enough to make civil war impossible, or at least brief—were to take power and sideline the ruler. Such a seizure of power would be able to account for itself in terms of the recorded history of the regime, and reliable accounts of the ruler’s changed behavior. As always, these simple descriptions of what absolute sovereignty would entail make it obvious how different we would all have to be—rulers and ruled alike—for such a regime to work. I would assume that it sounds crazy to most readers. I accept that as a marker of the degree of transformation in consciousness and conscience that would be necessary to restore civilization at this late date. What we have utterly lost is the habit of deference, not as a means of squelching by precisely in pursuit of our highest aspirations—in other words we defer to others all the time, but always either grudgingly, or or in strict adherence to a set of rules formulated to make it look like one is acceding to reality rather than deferring to another, but almost never in free acknowledgement of another’s unquestioned eminence. Only the direst of circumstances will lead us to recover that.

Equality as a goal of human relations is chimerical and delusional. It’s just a way of organizing war parties. But inequality presupposes a kind of relationship that we could call “equality,” but need not, and better not, so as to avoid conclusion. If some humans are better fighters, workers, thinkers, etc., than other humans, that is only because all humans (and only humans, in the sense we mean) are to some extent capable of fighting, working and thinking. They are all in the same frame, in that case, meaning that we can see them all in relation to each other. Even more, insofar as we are interested in who is better at these activities, we accept that it is not immediately obvious—that is, we must have standards of measurement, such as contests and after the fact assessments of results in order to determine who is better. In order for the measurements to work, we have to suspend our assumptions about who is better, which is to say we “bracket” everything we know going into the relatively controlled situation, so that we can judge the participants solely on what happens there. Even, more, we want to leave open the possibility that people can improve, or worsen, and that, therefore, someone who is better now might be worse later. In this case, what we might call “equality” is an achieved, disciplined perspective, not a presumed attribute of human beings. The more we refine this controlled perspective, which is to say the less we assume about relative abilities based on the qualities (heritage, race, gender, wealth and connections, etc.) we come to deem irrelevant, the more we can imagine ourselves in pursuit of some degree zero of equality, where we will have identified and controlled for all of those distorting accretions on the ability we are trying to assess. But what we are really after in such cases is not equality, but symmetry, which is to say, the “aspect” under which we can look at everyone as identical except for this one ability or quality we want to bring into focus.

The more humans become disciplined and civilized, then, the more we need to find ways to place them in frames that enable us to create the symmetry the disciplines need to recruit their new members and assess their current ones. As science, medicine, law, pedagogy, management and all the rest of our specialized activities become autonomous and systematized, extra-disciplinary criteria for belonging become intolerable. It wouldn’t take a skilled doctor, interested in reducing the practice of medicine to some kind of method, long to realize that the son of a peasant might be as good a candidate for medical training as the son of an aristocrat. Insofar as the disciplines want a wide recruiting field, and insofar as the sovereign relies upon the disciplines, there will be a democratic component to the social order insofar as the sovereign will have an interest in making social mobility for the talented possible. Without all of the poor receiving at least some education, there will be no way of judging any of them for possible promotion (it would be almost impossible to identify geniuses out of a crowd of illiterates). Rags to riches stories generate more illusions about equality while hardening the lines of inequality by making the distribution of ability even less random.

There are broader, more informal modes of symmetry that pass for a kind of equality, such as the symmetry of conversation partners, conviviality, community and comradeship. In a well governed order, occasions will be created for sharing these kinds of symmetry across class lines; otherwise, they will serve as (sometimes richly satisfying) compensations for the less disciplined. For those who resist discipline, whether explicitly, tacitly or unknowingly (say, by developing ADD), the fear of losing out on such modes of symmetry is very likely a large part of the reason why—there’s no reason to despise someone who’d rather put in enough hours at a mindless job to make living and then hang out with his friends in the bar, rather than work 70 hour weeks to climb the corporate ladder. An advanced civilization allows for and even subtly encourages the creation of such spaces, and finds ways of recouping the “deviations” they represent—everyone knows the limitations of even the highly intelligent “straight arrow,” and the potentialities of the talented drop out who will find his way back into the system as an idiosyncratic irritant. Many won’t find their way back in, and will contribute little or nothing to an increasingly digital civilization. If they are left alone, though, they may find all kinds of ways of contributing to each other and enjoying a kind of equality (if we wish to call it that) that way.

There will always be a kind of feeling for equality, desires to enlarge those feelings, and resentment at the disciplinary forms, which will always have a degree of arbitrariness to them, that thwart such desires. Understanding these feelings and desires as the necessary illusions generated by disciplinary frames and and various local symmetries created in response to (or pre-dating) civilized order is essential to containing them. This is an argument for a kind of political formalism—having the most disciplined be the most attentive to their responsibility to rule, and making that rule as disciplined as possible—that continually works on framing the less formal elements of society. The more differences that can be framed, the more civilized the order, and the less necessary repression, and the less likely rebellion, becomes. To frame is to rule, and to target ways to enhance discipline is to frame. Redirect all blame of the other to the redressing of your vulnerability to that other—there’s no point to blaming the Left for anything, since we can learn to control the feelings of guilt and fear that the Left exploits and thereby disable it.

The most productive form the feeling for equality takes is that of play, which is a completely framed event: everyone in the act of playing knows that who they are in the act is completely defined by the act and everyone’s participation in it. There is symmetry, interdependence and togetherness, but to try and figure out whether everyone is equal would ruin everyone’s fun. So, framing is ruling and framing is playing. It’s ruling for the one who is both inside and outside the game, and being both inside and outside of the game is itself a form of discipline—being outside of the game you participate in is possible insofar as you know that the positions and moves in the game are ways of framing and channeling resentments that have their origins elsewhere and must be staged and unfolded in an orderly manner in order to be reconciled to reality. The sovereign, then, like Shakespeare’s Prospero, must operate on two levels: framing so as to contain and transmute into sovereign power resentments while entering the space of those resentments and allowing them to target, albeit merely symbolically, the center one occupies. If we are ever to have real sovereigns again, it will be a far more complex and difficult business than it ever was before.

In an article he wrote around the time his book Coming Apart was published, Charles Murray argued that the problem with the new “cognitive” or “symbol using” elite was that they didn’t preach what they practiced. In other words, these elites became (or in some cases remained—which is not a given) elites by following a clear life path, including abstention from addictive habits, hard work, career orientation, monogamy and intensive investment in children, while simultaneously denouncing “bourgeois culture” and privileging the cultural experimentation that perhaps some of them could afford in their youth but which is devastating for the less disciplined. My argument is in that spirit—if you have ever been successful at anything, if you have ever overcome setbacks and obstacles, think about how you did so: what kind of preparation (your own and others) was necessary, what kind of resources had to be summoned, how many new beginnings were required, what kinds of temptations (giving into to despair or all of the excuses for giving up or failing that are so easy to generate) had to be resisted, and what kinds of intellectual and emotional habits had to be formed (and what kind of work was involved in forming them). Insisting that such demands be imposed on anyone else who talks of wanting to succeed or complains of failure will do those people far more good than indulging their resentments against those who prevented them from being who they really should have been. The only people who are fit to rule are those who can sustain and convincingly exemplify such insistence in the face of the constant wailing of the less disciplined who, if their wailing goes for naught might find happiness in the more informal pleasures of equality.

Reactionary political thinking, which is characterized by the rejection of democracy and equality in favor of the promotion of and rule by the good (in the sense of proficient, intelligent and value adding as well as virtuous—keeping in mind the possibility of tension between the two senses) has, unsurprisingly, looked to the ancients (especially Plato and Aristotle and their medieval heirs) and evolutionary theory for its intellectual supports. Those who consider whites both the more intelligent and virtuous of the races can easily include their racial politics within the paradigm, but there is “aracial” reactionary thinking and there is also white-centered racial thinking that declines to supply external philosophical support of any kind to forming its agenda, so we can leave racial realism and human biodiversity out of this discussion. My purpose here is to show that the originary hypothesis can form the basis of reactionary political thinking, providing with a more powerful mode of theorizing than reliance on fairly stale Platonic and Aristotlean platitudes. The case needs to be made because Eric Gans has always presented originary thinking as politically liberal (in the broader, 19th-mid 20th century sense) and supportive of modern political categories (freedom, democracy, rights) and modern market society. I don’t deny that originary thinking is also compatible with liberalism, just that it only and intrinsically is so.

Now, my own version of reactionary thinking is “power to the disciplined, and disciplined power.” This formulation, dependent upon the originary hypothesis, seems to me far more powerful than any equivalent formulation using concepts like “virtue” and “good,” for the simple reason that “discipline” is a dynamic praxis rather than a quality, and from that follows far greater analytical precision and perspicuity. And “discipline” is just an extension of “deferral”—it is self-conscious, systematized deferral. I treat “deferral,” then, the way marginalist economics treat “marginal utility”—as a concept that singles out the distinctive and new (the emergent event), and turns it into a hinge upon which all of social reality turns. Market society itself is just a form of deferral: not just the deferral of immediate gratification (which allows one to spend money on years of education and sit quietly in classrooms and do homework instead of playing and then to go to work five days a week and stay focused on intrinsically uninteresting tasks or to learn advanced mathematics even though it’s easier to watch movies or play video games, etc.) but also the more easily overlooked deferral of not robbing the corner store because I don’t want to wait until the end of the week to receive what will anyway be a lot less money, or chopping down the telephone or electricity poles in my neighborhood and selling them for firewood or any of the other violent or disruptive behaviors that would make civilization impossible. (Or, for that matter, not killing my sister because she dates a guy I don’t know or approve of—because in a civilized order we need to interact peacefully with people we don’t know.) All these forms of discipline allow new values to be produced and recognized. Of course, the issue gets complex, because an advanced market system encourages its own form of indiscipline insofar as success in the marketplace yields power which can then be used to intervene in the marketplace in all kinds of ways that undermines one’s own discipline and thwarts the disciplined efforts of others. But, of course, that’s what simple concepts are for—to enable us to understand infinitely complex actual situations. But the point is that everything that we do, every thought and action, is a mode of deferral, and why not stick with the most fundamental concept and use it to reconstruct the more complex ones?

Now, the most consistent reactionary site on the internet (to my knowledge) is the blog, Reactionary Futures, to which I have referred several times. Reactionary Futures reduces reactionary political thinking to the conservation of sovereignty and the advice:“1) Become worthy; 2) Accept Power; 3) Rule”, a more minimal definition than found elsewhere; moreover, Reactionary Futures makes a point of distinguishing, in very hard line ways, his own thinking from that of “neo-reactionary” thinkers (like Nick Land’s Outside In, Brett Steven’s Amerika, Jim’s Blog, Social Matters and some other sites), and they reciprocate. So, there is a kind of debate and discipline here, one that I find far more interesting and free than more mainstream discussions.

Now, Reactionary Futures is familiar with Girard’s thinking, and considers it very important and supportive of the notion of “certain” sovereignty. This makes perfect sense—I don’t know if Girard ever endorsed modern democracy and notions of rights, or had anything positive to say about absolute monarchy (although he certainly believed that modernity loosened restraints on mimetic rivalry), but if human beings are thoroughly mimetic and endemically conflictual, it’s not a leap to conclude that only a single, clear, and disciplined authority will be able to prevent constant outbreaks of violence. Eric Gans’s thinking (which Reactionary Futures is certainly not familiar with) is a very different matter, though. Gans has laid out a clear and rigorous path from the emergence of the Big Man to the establishment of modern market society, and an alternative, and plausible, path would need to be imagined if the originary hypothesis is to provide intellectual resources for reactionary politics.

The Big Man evolved into the ancient empires, such as the Babylonian and Egyptian. The emperor is the model for the free individual that will later be generalized, subsequent to the Judaic and Christian revelations. Those revelations, then, were only possible in response to the unifications of large masses of humanity, sweeping aside local deities and rituals, transforming the emperor into a new, sacralized center. If all humanity is (at least potentially) united in its subjection to and worship of a single figure, then that unity and the equality of all as units relative to that center can be imagined as an enlarged reproduction (a scaling up, so to speak), of the originary scene. This revelation, made by the ancient Jews and and extended by Christianity, also had the effect of bringing the emperors themselves into history, as they themselves are nothing more than instruments of a divine will. This new sacrality or, really, post-sacrality because post-sacrificial, creates the reciprocity between equals that eventually takes the form of equal exchanges in the marketplace. There is a more strictly economic logic to this process as well, insofar as the asymmetry and instability of the gift economy (still grounded in the struggle between Big Men to outdo each other in the competition for prestige, followers, and power) reaches its limits and is replaced by the exchange of goods in accord with the stable medium of money, a process no one can control and which would automatically defer the deadliest struggles, those over centralized power.

My biggest question regarding this account has been, why should we assume the incompatibility of the empire with the exchange economy? The exchange economy never developed past a certain point in the ancient empires, but that could easily be due to the level of economic development; even more important, nowhere has the modern market emerged without a strong state that enforced law and order and property rights. You can say that the autocratic emperors and monarchs are replaced by elected officials accountable to the rule of law, but the fact remains that the ability and willingness to use force against criminals and rebels is always part of the repertoire of any state. Can anyone believe that, even today, even in the Western world, under a liberal democratic regime that has been around for over a century, a government genuinely unable to maintain order would be replaced or at least suspended by those capable of restoring order (if anyone is indeed capable)—and that it would do so to great public relief? A political theory has to have a way of accounting for the state—even an anarchist theory would have to account for how the things the state does would be done otherwise, or why they don’t really need to be done.

If there is always a state, there is always a Big Man because the state is always organized hierarchically (just like the military always is). Of course, in the modern world, every institution is organized hierarchically, and this is, needless to say, a source of great resentment. It is the notion of equality, modeled on what, in my understanding, Gans considers the elementary moral reciprocity of the originary scene, that generates this resentment. But a conception that generates resentment against a social structure (hierarchy) that is absolutely necessary and that, moreover, everyone, at least in their honest moments, will agree is necessary, must be a false conception. It is a protest against reality. We could say, well, “equality” is never to be implemented once and for all, we are always just approximating it, it serves as a kind of regulative ideal on existing institutions, etc.—but why? Are we getting closer to equality? Only in the sense that we are coerced more rigorously to mouth assent to each celebration of some inequality being overturned. There is certainly no objective sense in which we are becoming more equal—does anyone think that, say the janitor of a university would feel free to approach the university president and tell him he’s doing a lousy job? Or that any member of any elite feels obliged to feel the “pulse of the people”? The elites are at least as distanced and arrogant as ever—they feel free to tell the people they are a bunch of fascists for voting for Brexit or Trump. Still, at least they feel they have to talk to them (and pay attention to whom they vote for)—they don’t consider the hoi polloi to be quite subhuman, not yet. But the fact that any of us can, as linguistic beings, speak meaningfully, even if contemptuously, to each other, represents a kind of basic equality that is irrelevant politically. The Pharaohs spoke to their people, and, in some mediated manner, probably heard from them as well: social barriers pose no barrier to linguistic exchange, and the notion that the sheer possibility of linguistic exchange is a model for social relations in general may be a necessary illusion, but an illusion nevertheless. When we converse with someone, we may strive for maximum reciprocal transparency, spontaneity and vulnerability, but this doesn’t mean we want all our social interactions to be like such conversations.

Aside from the impossibility of defining much less achieving equality, there is no moral or ethical reason for equality (equal in what relation?–consumers and voters are not really in relation with each other) to be a model for social relations rather than the relations between teacher and student, expert and novice, innovator and user, the courageous and the obedient, discoverer and surveyor, etc. Indeed, it is those kinds of asymmetrical relations that better enable us to ask whether this person should be CEO, or President, or professor, or judge, or doctor, etc. Or even whether one wants them as a friend, neighbor or partner. There is moral reciprocity in each of these relationships, and even if they are asymmetrical at the moment, students become teachers, workers become managers, privates become generals, mere users become innovators, etc. And this can be modeled very well on the originary scene, insofar as we assume (and how can we not?) that imitation forms the originary scene just as much as it forms the crisis that made it necessary: the learning from each that must have taken place on the scene is the model for the asymmetrical symmetry that in every social interaction has one person yielding, even if provisionally, to another. It is remarkable that we have a social order, social theory, and pervasive social atmosphere that takes it for granted that we direct fierce hatred toward this not only inescapable, but beautiful reality.

It is not surprising that a mode of thinking that that sees every human step forward as a further excavation of our origins might have reactionary implications. The reactionary thinking I propose involves paring down a model of sovereignty to its most minimal, and fighting against everything that is in the way of seeing and presenting that model. And the model of sovereignty is, simply, sovereignty: someone who decides what it means to say friend or enemy, law abiding or criminal, loyal or treasonous, permitted or forbidden, and everyone knows who this someone is, what he decides, and that he can do what he decides. Sovereignty is not on the originary scene because it doesn’t become relevant until the Big Man creates a social center that is not simply a ritual center. But there is certainly a point on the originary scene when the momentum towards a violent resolution of the mimetic crisis is halted and replaced by the spread of the sign—that point or moment is what is retrieved and clarified in the emergence and preservation of sovereignty.

It’s time to try something along the lines of Machiavelli’s The Prince, or all those “mirrors for kings” they used to write in the Middle Ages—instructions and advice for restoring and maintaining sovereignty in the contemporary world. But as we’re quite a ways from having anyone resembling a new reactionary ruler, it seems like the “activist” or, as some neo-reactionaries would prefer, the “passivist,” is the only one who could use such a manual. I don’t really have anywhere near enough readers on any political scene to “advise,” though, and there are actually plenty of blogs out there with some very good advice (quite likely based on a lot more experience than I’ve ever had) regarding the kinds of political attitudes, actions and non-actions to take in resisting the consolidation of globalist/leftist political power. If “producerism” is to replace “consumerism” as a model for intellectual activity, though, political writing like all writing must be done performatively, pointing to its own participation in the concepts it constructs—writing within the originary scene, rather than about it. Lenin’s What is to be Done is probably the best combination of theoretical innovation, polemical precision and practical intervention in political practice ever written, and his model of “democratic centralism” (everyone within the organization has their say based upon the experience gathered from their own location in the field, but when the decision is made, everyone implements that decision with absolute obedience) is a good starting point for thinking about sovereignty, so this seems like a good model, but only if put in reverse, in a reactionary manner: if we think about reaction literally, as restoring, e.g., the heir to the royal line and of the deposed aristocracy, along with the established Church, etc.; or, for that matter, as restoring the same demographics of an earlier time; we would end up squabbling instantly and impotently about insignificant details or complete impossibilities; but if we think about reaction as a stripping of excrescences from a model of sovereignty that has certainly existed almost everywhere and that attained a kind of perfection (absolute monarchy concerned with internal order, the civilizing process and external differentiation) before (way before) revolutionary modernity demolished it once and for all, then setting ourselves the task of identifying and undoing all the sources of disorder all the way back to the original challenges to that (now abstracted) form of sovereignty—well, then we have a perfectly reasonable project of politically interested historical and cultural inquiry, and one that conforms to the fundamental insight of the originary hypothesis that all action is a form of deferral, which is to say, all doing a kind of undoing.

Since I don’t have a ruler, potential ruler, political organization or potential political organization to address, I’ll just address anyone who wants their speech to more closely approximate truth and their actions to more closely approximate sovereignty, and is willing to invest in the possibility that the originary hypothesis provides a uniquely valuable means of accomplishing same. As Schmitt said, sovereign is he who decides on the exception. So, in the US, there is a legal doctrine dictating that rights can be infringed if there is a “compelling state interest” in doing so. Whoever decides what counts as a “compelling state interest” is sovereign. Schmitt’s definition is highly minimal and easily operationalizable, but more follows from it. Sovereignty can be exploited and discarded, or it can be preserved: the former occurs when the sovereign power serves external interests, which is to say is sold to them; in the latter case, the sovereign’s existence depends upon the maintenance of sovereignty and so care is taken that all lines of authority can be traced back to sovereign decisions. The sovereign, then, wants everyone else to be sovereign in their own sphere—the most minimal and hence ideal form of sovereignty would be to do nothing more than to set and enforce the terms of all subordinate forms of power.

So, to speak for sovereignty is to be more sovereign—to treat all powers as sovereign, to treat their formal and real powers as identical (they allow for and therefore endorse everything done in their sphere), and initiate disciplinary spaces that would inform more fully sovereign powers. Within such disciplinary spaces, everything is on the surface: everyone in their sphere is either subverting sovereignty or making it more certain, and we can tell who is doing what simply by listening to and speaking with them. Every word out of every person’s mouth (or keyboard) is either a way of exhibiting and modeling sovereignty by bringing words and actions closer together or dispersing sovereignty by disclaiming the implications and consequences of one’s words. This is just a fully political form of the concept of discipline—the more disciplined you are, the more you want to represent things coming from you or touched by you as signifying you; the less disciplined, the more you want to palm off even what everyone sees you do as coming from elsewhere. So, the first thing to start undoing is all of those concepts and mental tricks by which what is within our responsibility as speaking, social and governing beings is farmed out to others and to various impersonal agencies.

The Big Man is the beginning of history and of all our ethical and political dilemmas. The Big Man disciplines himself so as to accumulate and ultimately break the gift economy by placing himself beyond any possible reciprocity. But in the meantime, he must be managing rivals, cultivating alliances, discovering norms and founding institutions, even if in minimal ways: what is not allowed to others must be allowed to him, and so he finds ways of formulating and enforcing this new ethical realm—and, then, recognizing the new desires his own innovations have inspired in others, and which must be incorporated into his own praxis. He institutes a system of discipline, first of all among the second-tier Big Men in his orbit, and hence the first form of sovereignty. Everything done in the space he governs is done, ordered, or permitted by the Big Man. The Big Man stretches imperative culture—the culture of asymmetry, of honor, of the demand that every act be collectively affirmed or negated—to the point where his own sovereignty is limited by events it has set in motion: wars and the rise and fall of regimes are outside the sovereignty of the Big Man become tyrant, which is the beginning of “declarative” culture: sentences that apply equally to every human being, big or small. What is said about the poor farmer can equally be said about the king: they both live and die, rise and fall, find grace and sin, etc. The declarative sentence as the Name-of-God is a logical conclusion of this process, a “purified” sentence that frames all narratives in the naming of the source of imperatives that come before any specific imperator. It is the Big Man who comes to realize that demands he makes of his gods, mediated through his priests, cannot be fulfilled, but some form of speech, cynical or prophetic, is required to make this part of the Big Man’s governance: the final form of discipline acquired by the sovereign, but accessible to everyone participating in that sovereignty, is to listen to those reminding you of the limits of your sovereignty and minimizing your sovereignty accordingly. (At a certain point, demands like “destroy my enemies,” “strengthen my hand,” “give me a sign,” “tell me what to do” are seen or felt to go unanswered, which means the answer is really just a restatement of what is beyond the limits of your power: I AM. But only someone relatively powerless could say that this limit does not simply imply a more powerful god of the same kind but a God of a different kind who is with everyone—I AM is something everyone can not say, and in not saying it be reminded of the limits of sovereignty.) Sovereignty draws both emulation and resentment toward itself, and in this way brings resentment to a central point where it can be overawed and reframed as unappeasable and hence transgressive if not “donated” to the sovereign. So, we must undo our deadly ambivalence toward inequality, the deadly desire for an even greater power to undo some more direct power over us. If you want someone to have the power to do that, you also want them to have the power to not care what you want. In that case, you want to become disciplined enough to be aligned with that power. But isn’t the best way of doing that to respect and seek to further formalize the powers you feel prompted to complain about?

Sovereignty does not presuppose ethnic homogeneity—the conditions under which the sovereign takes power may leave several ethnic groups within his territory; through carelessness or deliberation, demographic shifts might diversify the territory; the sovereign may have specific uses for particular ethnic groups; the sovereign himself might come from an ethnic minority, or even be a foreigner—there are conditions under which these arrangements might make a great deal of sense. But one thing the sovereign cannot do is ignore or deceive himself regarding ethnic and racial differences. Different groups, and different factions within each group, will be loyal (or disloyal) to the sovereign for different reasons, and rivalries within and between such groups will be major sources of both potential and danger. There might be good reasons for encouraging the dilution of groups, or for promoting their homogeneity and solidarity. Sometimes it will be preferable to address specific groups, and sometimes to subsume all within the category of “loyal subjects.” Still, having said all this, in the end most sovereign orders will have a core ethnic group, and sovereignty will be more secure the more it privileges this group and ensures its flourishing, and even more so if the sovereign comes from that group; it also follows that the restoration of sovereignty will most often begin as the self-defense and self-assertion of such a core group. Other arrangements must be considered somewhat deviant, and assumed to carry special dangers. At any rate, once we acknowledge that ethnic differences must be acknowledged, we can consider what kinds of acknowledgement conform to sovereign preservation. Each group’s specific contribution to the commonwealth should be acknowledged, and any movement towards a claim to sovereignty by a specific group strongly discouraged. Jettisoning some group and relying more completely on the core group is always an option, though, if sovereignty is threatened. What needs to be undone here is the war against stereotypes and prejudices—it is better that we know what everyone thinks about everyone else, and the more people realize that social order still requires various explicit and tacit negotiations between groups the more prepared all will become for a sovereign that can serve as the authority of last resort. Every individual is a sample whose appearance naturally leads to inquiries regarding the representativeness of that sample. But what also needs to be undone is scapegoating, not so much because it is harmful or hateful to particular groups as because it traduces the essential principle that all responsibility ultimately lies with the sovereign. This keeps ethnic conflicts within limits—even if you think one group is violent, another manipulative and greedy, a third lazy and rude, etc., you have to recognize in the end that insofar as these qualities corrode the commonwealth it is a sign of the need for further formalization of sovereign power—the sovereign cannot be said to be doing the “bidding” of one or another of these groups (of course, the sovereign might need to make this clear).

A reactionary politics has to have a way of talking about the economy. We can start here from the elementary observation that, barring a pure, stateless, anarcho-capitalist order, all economic activity has at least the tacit permission of the sovereign of the territory upon which it takes place. This right away implies that arguments for free trade are in fact arguments in favor of the government helping whoever will benefit the most from however “free trade” gets defined and encoded in law and government practice. Here, I’ll have to be tentative, but perhaps the best way for an absolute sovereign to control the economy is through government contracts for work on state property and the war machine (why not do away with euphemisms like “defense”?). The sovereign could set the standards for work done for his territory—quality standards, workplace standards, use of local materials and firms, environmental standards, etc.—which companies competing for that work would strive to meet, spreading those standards more widely, and establishing them as normative even when not obligatory. Of course, state contracts are a major source of corruption in contemporary society, but that’s in large part because people circulate back and forth between business and government (and other institutions) and so can benefit from all kinds of indirect and legal corruption (government officials going to work as lobbyists for companies they did favors for in office, etc.). If the sovereign must preserve his sovereignty in order to preserve his stake in the social order, and perhaps even his life, deals that strengthen potential rivals and generate contempt from the elites and the people will seem a lot less attractive. The sovereign must at least not let anyone get too close. Ultimately, we must, in our reactionary musings, presuppose a sovereign determined to survive and capable of doing so, to leave his state stronger than he found it, and transmit it to a suitable successor—otherwise, we would be imagining a sovereign who would be deposed to, eventually, give way to the kind of sovereign worth thinking about. In this case, what must be undone is “economistic” thinking, i.e., treating the economy as a separate entity and discipline—rather, we would think about the economy in a particular territory as oriented towards and deriving its general direction from a center interested in eliciting rivalries so as to raise the general level of discipline of the people.

Sovereigns will like patriarchy, which is just clear sovereignty in the household. They will also prefer an established Church, without necessarily outlawing other religions, if for no other reason than that the sovereign can’t seem to be indifferent to such an important matter; also, insofar as it is incumbent upon the sovereign to inculcate ever higher levels of discipline in his subjects, he should have institutional vehicles for conveying the best means and measures of that discipline. For the same reason, there would be a state school system, strictly subordinate to sovereign purposes, up through the university level—although here, as well, without necessarily excluding private systems. Needless to say, non-established institutions of worship and private schools would not be allowed to become centers of opposition—everything that happens in these places is also permitted by the sovereign. Here, then, we must undo centuries of liberal thought regarding the neutrality of the state in matters of belief—no state has ever, in fact, been neutral in these matters, and nothing could be more comical than the suggestion that our contemporary state leaves citizens to form their own opinions. We can tell the general tenor of accepted opinion under a competent absolute sovereign: aspire high, but ultimately for the glory of the sovereign; take as much responsibility for your actions as you can; recognize your superiors and be an example to your inferiors; be honest and comprehensive in your communications, just making sure to turn all observations into humble recommendations for the use of sovereign power rather than implied evidence of sovereign incompetence or malevolence; accept that while the sovereign is answerable, and on extreme occasions can be, carefully, so reminded, to the same intangible moral and intellectual power as the rest of us, how those accounts are kept are ultimately the sovereign’s affair. It’s the sovereign’s responsibility to enforce such a tenor of opinion, in whatever way best suits the conditions of the regime.

A movement of political reaction is, one, then, of cultural revolution. It is easy, in looking at the attitudes and ways of thinking proposed above as creating the elements of an absolute sovereign order within the current order of maximally confused sovereignty, to see how incompatible they are with either modern or postmodern subjectivities. It also seems to me obvious how superior they are, but that is the case that needs to be made, case by case. Perhaps we can sum it up in a preliminary manner as follows: in a democracy, everyone wants a sovereign that is absolute towards their enemies but virtually non-existent regarding themselves. It seems to me that a translation of virtually all political speech into sovereign terms—i.e., based on the question, what would the state have to be able to do in order to do what you want it to?—would reveal that this is the case. To cease thinking in these terms (to undo the fantasy that this oscillation of absolutisms leads to some salutary balance), and to imagine a state indifferent to what each of us would like done to our enemies and solely concerned with transmuting those rivalries into sources of the wealth and power of a sovereign who has staked his existence on preserving his sovereignty, would be to discipline our thinking in absolutely new and empowering ways.

Most commentators and, I assume, most citizens, are still in the habit of referring to the “American people” as the protagonist in the election drama: will the American people go along with this, will the American people support that, will this alienate the American people, etc. This is a habit that must be broken if we want to think about elections and American political life in general clearly. The reason why the Democrats are so confident that they can continue moving to the left without consequence is that they consider their demographic advantages to be insuperable. They have good reasons to think so. Think about the Supreme Court: on every significant question, everyone knows how the four leftist judges will vote—no one ever even speaks about whether Kagan or Breyer might jump ship on this case. On the other side, everyone distinguishes between the invariant and the variable: Thomas and Alito are reliable (and Scalia used to be)—although even here there have been disagreements—but Kennedy and Roberts are wildcards. The same is the case for the voters for each party. The Democrats will get 90% of the black vote, 70% of the Hispanic vote, 75% of the Jewish vote, 70% of the Asian vote. There is very little room for movement here (except, perhaps, among the very heterogeneous “Asian” vote)—maybe the numbers can go 5% one way or the other. This gives us important information about the number of American citizens who see identity politics, a massive welfare state and the vendetta against their “Amerikaner” (a term of I have taken from the Amerika blog) or “badwhite” enemies as more important than allying with the American middle. In fact, now that insistence on the enforcement of immigration laws makes one a “hater,” we can say that these are the voters opposed to America as a sovereign entity. On some level, they rightly realize that according to any rigorous and non-legalistic definition of “American,” they would be excluded, or at least “graded.”

All appeals to these groups (again, with the very minor exception of “Asians”) are as much a waste of time as making legal arguments to Sotomayor, Ginsburg, Kagan and Breyer—except insofar as some of the white voters you want need to salve their conscience with the recognition that some kind of gesture has been made. But that just underscores that a Trump victory (probably even more than any other Republican victory) relies completely upon winning a white landslide. Everything else is irrelevant: Trump needs something like 65% of the white vote to win. (Of course, the number varies according to turnout—obviously, if more white voters than usual come out, and they vote mostly for Trump, maybe he’ll only need 63% or so.) Whether he and his supporters say so publicly or not, if they don’t know this they are throwing the election. Now, we can get even more specific about the demographics—of the 2% or so of sexually “other” whites, at least 75% will vote Clinton. Among single women who see themselves as single women (i.e., not young women looking forward to marriage and family), probably 80% at least will vote Clinton. And how many fit that category—I’m not sure there are, or even can be, real assessments of that. (We’d have to factor in those who work for the government in some capacity as well.) But we can probably say that among normal, married with children, or expecting eventually to be married with children, employed in the private sector, with (or reasonably hoping to have) homes, etc., Trump will need something like 75%. Now, that’s a good way to focus your attention. How many people in this (most unequivocally “American”) category are already likely to vote for Trump, and how many would need to be won over? Whatever campaign masterminds Trump has could not spend their time more productively than on trying to answer that question. In other words, it’s not a question of what the “American people” think; it’s a question of whether there is enough of a constituency (a large enough super-duper majority) among normal Americans for restoring American sovereignty.

Now, Trump and his advisors can (and if they want to win, must) think like this, but it would be extraordinarily risky to speak like that, even in heavily “coded” terms. That itself is a large part of the problem. Last night, at the Democratic convention, a Muslim father of a soldier killed in Iraq attacked Trump’s proposed ban on Muslim entrance into the country. But if mass Muslim immigration, or increased Muslim presence at any level, poses a security risk, then a Muslim who sees himself as an American first of all would agree that we at least need to consider our policy toward further Muslim immigration. All that father was telling us, then, was that he considered his (merely potential) grievances as a Muslim more important than his obligations as an American—and that he was willing to exploit his son’s death to make that point. Even Trump will not make this uncontestable observation. Nor will he observe that those Hispanic citizens who vote on the basis of their support for leniency for illegal aliens are voting their ethnic interests over their duties as citizens and the good of their fellow citizens, even to the point of endorsing massive, systematic lawlessness. Something similar could be observed regarding every reliable Democrat constituency. But nothing like this will be observed, if for no other reason than that it will make it harder for Trump (or any Republican) to get to that 75% of normal Americans—that is, some margin of that 60% or so of the country must have their ethnomasochism (John Derbyshire’s term, as far as I know) appealed to before they can vote their own interests. Which means that we can narrow our election speculations even further, to that tiny margin where the right rhetorical and symbolic balance between white guilt and white interest must be struck. What this also means, though, is that we can tell when the country will really fall apart: when that balance can no longer be struck, or when it no longer matters: when white guilt and white interests are irrevocably, and unmistakably, at odds with each other—at that point whites will have to eschew white guilt or concede the right of non-whites and goodwhites to disregard their interests, even their lives, altogether.

If we were to begin to speak about the obligations of Americans and their differential attentiveness to their patriotic obligations (rather than endlessly demanding the “details” of “plans”), how would we do so? I’ll provide a sample. I’ve been curious about the inability or lack of interest of the leftmedia in going after Trump’s favorite slogan, repeated quite a few times in his convention speech: “America First!” As I have seen some media figures mention, this is a slogan with a “notorious” legacy, the name of a movement that, briefly, in the late 30s and early 40s, horror of horrors, argued for keeping America out of World War II. I would very much like to read a history of how the perfectly reasonable and patriotic Charles Lindbergh and his associates came to be tarred as near-Nazis for their efforts—it would teach us a lot about the history of image management and propaganda in the US (I would look for the red thread). For the left, running a campaign based on the slogan “America First!” is rather like running on “McCarthyism”—don’t these idiots know that we have banished these phrases and ideas from public life? I suppose that to others, though, it must sound so obvious and positive that, rather than being scandalized, most Americans are trying to figure out why this isn’t the slogan of every campaign—so much so, that the media has not yet been able to find a way to crack it. At any rate, here is perhaps the most “notorious” of all of Lindbergh’s speeches for the America First Committee, which lasted up until Pearl Harbor, at which point all its members unequivocally joined the American war effort (without even having to be ordered to do so by the Comintern):

http://www.charleslindbergh.com/americanfirst/speech.asp

Lindbergh, here and elsewhere, gives plenty of good reasons for America to stay out of the war—all of them debatable of course, which is why Lindbergh is offering arguments—and doing so in an honorable way, pointing out the consistency of his approach to the issue as opposed to the opportunistic propaganda of the pro-War side. He deals with the basic “ideas,” in other words, explaining why the war would, from America’s perspective, do far more harm than good. But he doesn’t stop there (where all of today’s Republicans and “conservatives” would insist we stop), and goes on to ask, who wants the US to enter the war, and why? Given that they represent a small minority, what makes their arguments so effective and, from Lindbergh’s perspective, dangerous? So, he lists three groups: the English, the Jews and the Roosevelt administration. Can anyone really disagree that these groups had powerful interests in drawing the US into the war? Lindbergh does not demean these groups (although he’s highly critical of the administration which, strictly speaking is not really a “group”) or characterize their interests as illegitimate—quite to the contrary, he understands very well why the British and the Jews would want the US to enter the war, and I see no reason to doubt, since I don’t see what he would have gained by it, Lindbergh’s expression of sympathy for the Jewish plight under the Nazis and his condemnation of their persecution. Nor could we refute his claims regarding Jewish influence in the media and entertainment. We could readily question his claim whether American entrance into the war would harm Jewish interests by weakening the tolerance upon which Jews depend—it didn’t work out that way, and Lindbergh is too generalizing here (“war always…”); we could also ask whether there were other groups (German Americans? Italian Americans?) who had a special interest in keeping America out of the war. All that would be fine as a rebuttal to Lindbergh’s argument, but the larger point is that his argument could not even be made today, and to see why, you would just have to see what my above observations on the Muslim father and Hispanics defending illegal immigration would look like extended a bit further along the lines modeled by Lindbergh’s analysis of the British and the Jews. (“It’s easy to understand why Mexican-Americans would feel closer to their brethren in Mexico, with whom they share ethnic and cultural ties going back many generations, then to their fellow Americans, and would wish to help them enjoy the advantages of life in the US, while increasing their own political influence and maintaining their Mexican roots…”)

Well, it’s not true that the argument can’t be made today—such arguments are starting to be made—it would be more precise to say that they cannot yet be made by a winning Presidential campaign. But the gap between the way political figures must think and what they can say can close—indeed, at a certain point, if it doesn’t, that gap will get wide enough so as to make political survival impossible; to put it another way, closing this gap is part of making sovereignty more certain. Of course, if both the SJWs and the patriotic right were to close the gap, they would make explicit that they no longer live in the same country. Ultimately, “law and order” and “crime” may, in fact, be code words for “white” and “black,” respectively; and “gay rights” and “feminism” may very well be code words for the destruction of monogamy, and “Black Lives Matter” for “kill whitey,” or “off the pigs.” The more people who know they are codes, the less they are codes. All arguments have a demography to them, and part of bio-politics is making the demography explicit, even explicit enough to make the arguments mere tokens. In that way we find out if they are in fact real arguments. Through this bio-political process we arrive at the same choice I have taken these discussions to before: either follow the path of least resistance of virtually any commonsensical line of inquiry and end up speaking in such a way that will transform the “conversation,” most likely catastrophically, or go about systematically eliminating “badthoughts” and “hatefacts” from your mind so as to reduce yourself to imbecility. Interestingly, if you choose the latter, the former will never occur to you, and so there’s no way to make an argument in favor of one or the other approach. It’s really just a question of what’s involved in living with yourself. At any rate, tracking that white guilt/white interest needle will be a good way of cutting through a lot of noise and measuring our progress or regress regarding sovereignty restoration—the more white interest can be spoken, even in the indirect form of anti-anti-whiteness, and white guilt silenced, the closer we are to restoration.