No matter who wins, you lose

For some of us, watching newly minted Republican tech bros giddy at the thought of a Trump win fills us with a painful nostalgia. There’s a sadness but also a burgeoning frustration while reading their posts. A friend recently pointed out that my social media posts seemed “cynical.” Another called to ask if I was OK after I exclaimed, half joking, for the repeal of the Nineteenth Amendment. These friends underestimate the severity of the political blackpill some of us have swallowed.

We’re angry — yes! We’re angry because those who promoted all the bullshit — all the diversity, equity and inclusion, all the “woke narratives,” all the infantile socialism, all the petitions to the establishment — are not sorry enough. Many do not even acknowledge their role. Remember how many people were canceled, how many people had their livelihoods destroyed? How many children and young adults we let be castrated? Our worst enemies could not have dreamed of so successfully damaging the West. 

What happens to progress — that vital ingredient of civilization — when meritocracy is denied? Did anyone spend five minutes thinking this through? Scores of us who had the decency to call it out in the last political cycle left San Francisco because we were ostracized by the same people now acting like pseudo-“based” heroes. I struggle to empathize — and grant credit to any grown man who once supported Hillary Clinton. 

Remember how many people posted a black square for a criminal and embarrassingly called it activism? 

You do not feel sorry enough, you do not feel bad enough — and you now call on the rest of the country to applaud your vision. It’s far too late. It took a president to be publicly senile for many to see the light, and now you smugly mock the millions who are but a few steps behind. 

Where were you the last few years? On the eve of the election, it’s too late.

In the 2016 presidential cycle, many of us experienced some of the excitement the new Republicans are experiencing now. Apparent to us: Hillary was terrible — and the media was constantly lying about Trump. Remember Charlottesville, that Trump speech that proved to the world that Trump was really, really racist? All you had to do was give the clip thirty more seconds of your time to realise the media engaged in barely concealed propaganda. For those who paid attention to these tricks, the debunking won us over, because we thought, “well, Trump must be a threat to the establishment for the media to be playing such bad games.” But these events also caused dismay and despair because they showed that the minds of many of our peers had been reduced to bundles of emotions rather than capable of critical thought. 

We are so much worse off than the Athenians during their similar stages of decline. Thucydides once wrote, “The Athenians, who were the most democratic of all the Greeks, were also the most prone to make mistakes, for they were always in a hurry to decide, and were swayed by the emotions of the moment.” The political satire of the poets in Athenian theaters heavily influenced the city’s political decisions, just as TikTok and the Guardian sway millions of malleable minds now. I wrote this in my last political lament in 2020, and I repeat it now — at least the Greeks had Euripides! At least their cathartic political release was lyrical and masterful. You can’t say the same for CNN.

America’s ongoing wars in the East (welcome Ukraine and Israel!) are our Sicilian Expedition, the murmurs of an eternal Holy War that will lead to our downfall. Just like in Athens, different factions and interest groups privately vie for power in a campaign without victory conditions. Whoever controls the theater controls the politics — and the masses love it because it’s entertaining; it’s tribalistic. Voting makes people feel important. “I Voted!” exclaims the sticker on their chest, the acrylic polymers of the glue seeping into their skin. I voted! I voted! 

An oligarchy masquerading as a democracy always wants more of its trappings — more voters, more expansion of the state, more dependency-inducing welfare in all its shades. Every handout recipient becomes incentivized toward further looting, toward “expansion of program.” Of course the Democratic Party wants to allow non-citizens to be voters. None of this is about giving people rights; it’s about distracting people while reducing rights over the long run. That people fall for it, over and over, is a heartbreaking tragedy… worthy of Athenian theater but for its garish inarticulation.

America’s Founding Fathers, those thoughtful great men (yes, men can be great) who once explored governance and politics across scores of public debates and eloquent letters, understood that democracy, in its purest form, would lead to the tyranny of the majority through self-interested institutions swaying public opinion. As John Adams warned 200 years ago, “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”

When the masses direct political outcomes, it’s in the state’s interest to keep them stupid and unaware. In America, state schools destroy the curiosity and ambition of children by design, hoping that they too will grow up to be New York Times subscribers. The stronghold of the state over the media is by design, to influence public thought to achieve the private interests of an oligarchy that has been selling out America for years. Elon Musk attacks the mass media, but the root of the mass media is a flawed democratic system. You might imagine that more of these new Republicans will be anarcho-capitalist libertarians in about four years. 

True democracy is found in markets, voluntary actions and exchanges between people free from coercion. Yet your tax dollars are forcefully channeled towards agencies that would rank as the worst-performing startups of all time. Most people recoil at the thought of such a statement; they’ve been cuckolded by their government into believing it’s best able to handle complex systems. State as Benevolent Leviathan has assumed the role of God in the lives of so many, with voting as the ultimate prayer. When markets are reduced by the state, democracy has dwindled, regardless of all the tweets and special stickers. 

I cast my mind back to my time in SoCal in the summer of 2021, at a serene golf course hotel, the kind of well-maintained establishment that only seems to still exist in Republican districts. We were there for the Claremont Institute’s Lincoln Fellowship, an annual program teaching political philosophy, statesmanship and the American founding — the irony of being there as an Englishwoman was not lost on me. Several of the class, students and faculty, were already involved with the Trump transition. These were high-integrity and thoughtful people, the kind that would spend a good piece of summer studying and debating political philosophy. Many of us were hopeful. Yet we watched, over a four-year term, as almost nothing positive happened. Government bureaucracy was, again by design, too strong and resilient, with barricades in place to prevent anyone from attempting radical changes or cuts. We watched as some faculty would later be “canceled” for claiming that parts of the 2020 election seemed manipulated.

More of these newly naive, bushy-tailed Republicans should be wary of this outcome even if Trump does win. Federal spending didn’t decrease under Trump last time, just as it can’t now. What do you think one man and a few “based” people can do against hundreds of rotting bureaucracies? Do you think the inertia of a late-stage empire can be turned? Can even a single entitlement program be meaningfully cut? Game theory dictates otherwise — and remember the playbook. Reflect on how many historical emergencies have been a smokescreen for institutional bailouts, how many clever transfigurations have occurred of unforgivable institutional failure into ever-greater centralization.

Yet, people pass out invites for election viewing parties, naively confident that the results will get called the same night and that somehow material change in their preferred direction subsequently awaits. The theatrics continue. What happens when the legacy media calls Kamala the winner, and the citizen media — mainly led by X — cries out against it? Will the masses believe the NYT or Elon? The international witch hunt to discredit Elon, the most distinguished industrialist of our age, serves the goal of ensuring the media falls in line with institutional desires. What will Polymarket do when they’re leveraging a Judge Judy oracle system conducting a Keynesian Beauty Contest to determine the outcome, one that they could manually override if they so chose?

For many of us, 2024 feels like a repeat of 2020, where we sat in disbelief and watched Joe Biden miraculously jump up in votes just when he needed it. It was to be expected if you knew what was at stake. Covid-19, probably the weirdest social experiment done on large swathes of humans in recent history, came under a Trump term; more of us should expect life to get weird if he is, for some reason, permitted to win again. Those who advocate for Trump now need to think long-term. What dismal socialist counter-reaction will it set us up for?

We can only imagine what Gavin Newsom’s 2028 presidential campaign might be like, armed with hundreds of vapid Kamala-Harris-types as his aides, demanding Trump’s presidency be abolished in the wake of a recession or war caused by the previous actions of their own party. What an opportunity to finally return America to its caring democratic flavor of socialist slavery. It’s in many institutions’ interest to let Trump win, at which time the wheels can come off and show just how bad life could be under those who advocate against the expansive state. You are not blackpilled enough.

People laugh at the “paranoid crypto-anarchists,” those building tools that inadvertently or deliberately divert value and power from central institutions. We can have as many Government Accountability Departments as Elon wants (the joke is we already have them), but nothing will loosen the power of the state more than decentralizing control over money and information itself. The path to self-sovereignty won’t come from fake ballots or angry tweets but from individuals removing more of their assets from a system that hates them. 

What’s left of America, just like Athens, will collapse in some form. Sadly, the wrong votes were cast a hundred years ago. The US economy is now propped up by an incomprehensible national debt. Neither candidate will reduce it by a dollar, and compound interest will soon rule everything around us. How readily could financial markets be permitted to tumble a little into Trump’s victory? Will the Fed enthusiastically uphold its Ponzi scheme under a Trump presidency? Will Kamala win because — as the theater always warned us — the show must go on? Time will only tell. It’s our duty to prepare more of those around us, not just by encouraging them to vote and giving them hope that a ballot can save us, but by making hedged decisions in the somber reality that it can’t.