The Sociology of Barack Yarvin Obama - Part 4
The Sociology of Barack Yarvin Obama - Part 4
Anti-Reform Conservatism: An Infantile Disorder
I didn’t intend for this series to become about Yarvin but the two subjects of Obama’s sociology and the Neo-Reaction dovetail with each other — and I lack intellectual discipline. Rather than draw this out forever, I dumped the rest of my observations here so that, moving forward, I can clear my mind and focus on my wheelhouse: group narcissism.
WARNING: excessive tl;dr follows.
This FINAL article looks very briefly and perhaps for that reason, unfairly, at Yarvin’s criticisms of conservatism, populism, and radicalism, then turns to another brief and unfair treatment of his alternative proposals for reactionary activism. This is all preparation for what forms the bulk of the article: an exposition of my own views on conservative or reactionary political strategy.
Links to the rest of the series:
Conservatism and Populism don’t work ….unless?
We’ve seen that Yarvin, much like Obama, Parsons, and Talbott, has his own universalistic determinism in the Jouvenelian theory of modern power. Does he resemble our three globalists in other respects? His evaluations of American conservatism and populism are somewhat similar.
Like our three Anglo-American globalists, Yarvin views conservatism mostly as a naïve or confused reaction to the strains he sees as necessarily accompanying a deterministic systemic process, although he differs from the globalists in that he apparently believes some of their concerns are justified. But justified or not, conservatives are naïve for Yarvin because of their incapacity to effect lasting conservative change:
A conservative is one who, rather than simply rejecting the revolutionary tradition of democracy, finds some effective way to contaminate it with reality, thus producing a weak but somewhat effective simulation of archaism out of basically anarchist materials. Conservatism always appears, because it is easy. And it always fails, because it is weak and fraudulent.
Tough medicine for conservatives like this abounds in Yarvin’s work, and I think we can all agree for good reason. Conservatives become in his analysis a sort of legitimation machine for the worst aspects of democracy:
A conservative is someone who helps disguise the true nature of a democratic state. The conservative is ineffective by definition, because his goal is to make democracy work properly. The fact that it does not work properly, has never worked properly, and will never work properly, sails straight over his head. He therefore labors cheerfully as a tool for his enemies.
[Conservatives] believe that democracy is best used as a tool to make the government act less like a democracy, i.e., to not be socialist. Socialism is the stable state of democracy, for obvious reasons. By making the people universally dependent on the State, their minds as well as their bodies can be controlled. The conservative thus spends his time agitating for un-democratic policies in a democracy – his goal is reactionary democracy.
Yarvin seems to see populism as a more democratic or middle-class variation of conservatism, much like Talcott Parsons and Obama:
[Populism] uses the tools of democracy to appeal to the inchoate urge of the petty-bourgeois or kulak class for law, order, and national power. In the long run, this is a great way to persuade your aristocracy that it needs to smash the bourgeoisie. Not a fortunate result, and not the only way that real power has of resisting this feeble attack, either.
He initially presents populism in a more favorable light, remarking that, “in the short run, it can improve things, sort of, for a little while.”
But then Yarvin cautions that excessively democratic populism leads to Hitler, which is bad. This brings him back to conservatism. It turns out that conservatism is effective and useful at curtailing the excesses of democracy that you find in Hitler and Bolshevism.
Conservative parties perform a valuable service in slowing the decay of the Structure, moderating the acute, fulminating sepsis of revolutionary democracy, a real danger for any state at any time, inter a mere chronic degenerative disease. They can resist, they do resist, and they should resist. No one living today can even imagine the horrors that would have seen America and the world had the US been captured by revolutionary Bolshevism in the 1920s…However, once the ultimate futility of the movement is understood, its attraction becomes quite limited. At the very least, it needs an offense to go with its defense.
So maybe conservative reform isn’t so bad after all. In fact, Yarvin’s main problem with conservatism is that it is too populist: it focuses too much on recruiting “Amerikaners”, a term he uses to denote the lower- and middle-class American conservative voter and connote the destruction of the South African white everyman at the hands of progressive moralists. As we’ll see below, Yarvin’s alternative to this strategy is to mostly focus upon recruiting elites while occasionally leveraging the fervor of Amerikaners.
But what of radical conservative or reactionary activism?
Mirroring leftist activism doesn’t work, except when it creates Hitlers, and then it’s bad
Yarvin argues that mirroring leftist activism in any of its forms is a losing proposition for conservatives. By leftist activism, he means everything from antifa tactics to starting third parties, making campaign contributions, and working for NGOs. His reasoning is that such activism triggers defense reactions that strengthen the Modern Structure:
If there is one thing progressives are good at, it is identifying and targeting a competing activist who is attempting futilely…, to out-mafia the mafia. Right-wing activism acts as a sort of adjuvant to the Structure’s immune system. It activates every possible defense mechanism. Some of which are really quite nasty.
In general, I agree that certain forms of right-wing activism are quite beneficial to the progressive culture industry. Trump breathed life into the New York Times and the alt-right basically saved progressive gossip journalism while reviving economic leftism from its identity politics-induced sedation.
But Trump and the alt-right also breathed life into the evangelical and conservative Catholic and Zionist culture war positions, each of which had been widely discredited during the George W. Bush administration, suggesting that populism is also essential to the “respectable” conservative movement. It also coincided with Yarvin’s own rise to public prominence.
(As an aside, and in defense of Yarvin’s analysis, remember that you’re supposed to think of the triumph of ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s leftist culture war positions known as the “Great Awokening” solely in terms of some conspiracy by capitalists to stop “Occupy” or Obama communists to implement Maoism, and not at least partially as a result of the enormous failures of Evangelicals, conservative Zionsts, and Catholics during the Bush admin, which alienated multiple generations of conservative voters, myself included.)
Also, another thing Yarvin suggests we should worry about with counter-activism is:
Hitler
Yarvin’s unsatisfactory position here is: Leftist political strategies can create Hitlers if they do work, which is bad, but also such strategies don’t work and only strengthen the Modern Structure.
What is to be done?
Echoing Obama’s universal determinism, Yarvin’s strategies are all over the place but not without merit. His strategies surround passivism, infiltration, and corporatism.
Yarvin points to National Socialist Germany, Rhodesia, and South Africa as examples of failed reactionary or conservative states. In contrast, he points to the Amish and Hasidic Jews as successful examples of conservative movements in America. These groups have very clear, existentialist views of American politics and understand that they can’t reform America without compromising their principles or destroying themselves. Consequently, they’ve chosen total withdrawal from conservative reform and activism (this is not strictly true of the Amish and Hasidic Jews, in my opinion – both vote and engage in activism like hiring Mexican immigrants to pose as Hasidic Jews to protest pride parades).
These groups don’t trigger the progressive immune system like conservative activism and therefore don’t strengthen the Modern Structure. Yarvin concludes that passivism is an essential part of a new reactionary program.
What Yarvin’s passivism ultimately means isn’t entirely passive. For example, in a more lighthearted section of his book, he endorses a sort of sartorial revolt against the machine where neo-reactionaries signal to each other with WASP tweed jackets.
In general, his strategy is to effect a cultural coup against the Modern Structure without triggering its defenses and thereby secure the delegitimization of the democratic and “Puritan” components of American legitimacy. This is to be achieved by appealing to Burning Man bohemian elites instead of Amerikaners. Burning Man elites can in turn persuade institutions of the Modern Structure to overthrow the rule of Amerikaners and the Puritan “Brahmins” the Amerikaner’s popular sovereignty legitimates. Yarvin at one point suggests Giuliani’s New York is an example of this approach. This is an interesting conclusion given the former mayor’s subsequent career trajectory.
In general, Yarvin is hostile to Amerikaners:
I would trade the entire red-state population for a quarter of the Burning Man attendees – because, if I had the latter, I could easily get the former back. Again, political actors naturally recognize their natural leaders. Forge the spearhead, and the spear will show up on its own.
Yarvin often stresses that this activity is to be wholly legal but simultaneously advocates for overthrowing the Constitution. At a minimum, this means lawyers can’t participate in his program, but perhaps that’s by design (well played, Yarvin.) It should be noted that progressive lawyers like Sanford Levinson and Bruce Ackerman figured out a way around this professional obstacle by advocating for new constitutional conventions or Maistre-Sieyes-Schmitt-style decisionistic “Constitutional Moments” like the Civil Rights Movement, which legally overthrow the Constitution.
Neo-reactionaries are also supposed to “infiltrate” structures of power like corporations and disseminate “alternative narratives”:
They can be infiltrated. The [neo-Reaction] is a dream squared; but it’s never too soon to start infiltrating. (In fact, just the fact that you’re reading this pretty much makes you a sleeper agent…)
Neo-reactionaries are also supposed to “develop secure, reliable and anonymous inside sources within the Beltway” and create alternative “corporatist” institutions and communities for them. This has the effect of “compromising the loyalty” (no lawyers allowed again) of a given Modern Structure agency and ensures better understanding of the way the mechanism works. Indeed, infiltration is part of a program that makes sense to me, though not for the purposes of sowing disloyalty to the Constitution or mirroring Scientology tactics!
Yarvin also suggests developing intelligence on the Modern Structure through a counter-cultural institution Yarvin dubs the “Antiversity.” I agree with Yarvin that it would be useful to establish a decentralized database that “proctoscopes…every agency, unit, or acronym within USG” to create a knowledge base about the Modern Structure. Based upon my understanding of the GAO, not even the Modern Structure itself can accomplish such a task.
Although neo-Reactionaries are radicals, they are not to participate in the culture wars.
Needless to say, regardless of the passivist’s personal background, the steel rule bars any political affiliation with either “red-state” or “blue-state” sides of the “culture war.” How is this a tactical advantage? Two armies of rabid, determined, frothing-at-the-mouth cadres are available – and the passivist chooses – neither?
Yarvin then, somewhat curiously given his fears about a new Hitler, turns to Hitler’s party, the NSDAP, for an example of something that works. He discusses what he calls corporatism which just means alternative, non-Structure sources of authority and culture, and calls for the creation of such corporatist structures. In a sense he echoes Carl Schmitt’s Hegelian pipe dream vision of the NSDAP as a “Movement” that penetrates the State and People but does not eliminate the unique functions or characteristics of either. While Schmitt later learned the difficult lesson that this kind of liberalism is generally frowned upon by the Movement, Yarvin hopes that discouraging Amerikaner participation can avoid this obstacle.
The neo-Reaction is therefore an elitist passivist movement that eschews traditional activism and political participation in favor of creating an alternative form of legitimacy to popular sovereignty and puritanism, the creation of which requires narrative infiltration of the Modern Structure and the formation of parallel corporatist structures.
Criticism and a defense of reform and radical activism
The nitpicking found above and in what follows isn’t intended as a total repudiation of Yarvin but rather a justification for moderating and tweaking some of his positions.