Make Civilization Great Again
Technology, Culture, and American Perestroika
As consequential as the inauguration of President Trump might seem, the result of the election in purely political terms is nowhere near as important as a cluster of technological and cultural factors that enabled it. The legendary Breitbartism, politics is downstream of culture, applies now as it possibly never has before.
The time has passed to recount the campaign and dissect the immediate political implications: who should be hired, who should be fired, and the like. What I want to evangelize for is an appreciation of the terrain we have inherited and on which this battle was won. This is not for reasons of intellectual masturbation, removed from political action for fear of getting one’s hands dirty. It is rather quite nearly the opposite. It is to embrace that politics is downstream of culture and to encourage getting one’s hands maximally dirty and affect the course of history not for the next year but for the next century. Not for the policy of this administration but for the Overton window of every to follow.
I will outline how I believe the opportunity ought to be seized in both dialectical and rhetorical terms. Dialectic matters for the sake of intellectual coherence and consistency. The regime’s primary propagandistic goal is to make it impossible to think in a way that could result in opposing its goals: a kind of stochastic Sapir-Worfian terrorism. We must understand what is happening and why at as fundamental a level as possible. Rhetoric matters for the sake of effective communication. Only a minority have the bandwidth to engage in dialectic, and only rhetoric will affect cultural — and therefore, ultimately political — change.
***
Though a great deal has changed since Trump first ran in 2016, I would point to two shifts in terrain as fundamental, and even here there is some essential overlap. Firstly, the embarrassing capitulation of virtually every major public institution before the authoritarian and censorial degeneracy of Covid hysteria, with its offshoots in BLM, coerced medical experiments, and election interference. The Long March through the institutions had been accomplished years, if not decades, earlier. Yet its result had always retained an air of seriousness and legitimacy in the mind of the median voter. From roughly 2020 to 2023, however, this image was eviscerated in a depraved euphoria of power, greed, stupidity, and incompetence.
Second, while the actions of these institutions certainly merited this reaction on the part of the public, the timing fortunately coincided with the solidification of the shift in the cultural zeitgeist from mainstream to independent media: centralized to decentralized, broadcast to peer-to-peer. This meant that these various crimes could be brought to the attention of the public practically immediately and could not be effectively concealed as perhaps they would have been in decades past.
Of course, efforts at censorship were made, but the executors were evidently blind to the new media dynamic with a Streisand Effect around every corner. The more they censored, the more the censorship itself became the news. The less effective the censorship became, the more zealous the propaganda, and hence the more roundly mocked. Questions raised by 10-second snarky soundbites from regime puppets on CNN were answered by 3-hour-long discussions on The Joe Rogan Podcast with guests who could evidently think for themselves. This is the relatively novel regime euphemism of “disinformation” in a nutshell: an immune response to its control of the media slipping away. Of course, Elon Musk buying Twitter, easily the most important political event of the 21st century, was the final nail in this coffin and explains why the regime has furiously turned on him.
***
To what end was all this propaganda, we might ask? Whom does “the regime” serve? While variously characterized as “the elites” on the one hand, “woke” on the other, and all manner of synonyms for “leftist” in between, I prefer a blunter approach that we have a golden opportunity to embed in the discourse: these people are communists. Dialectically questionable, sure, but a rhetorical kill shot. We need not get bogged down in the details of implausible grand conspiracies linking illegal immigration to grooming of children to the military-industrial complex and whatever other sensational corruption in between. We need only to recognize a natural human tendency to seek to selfishly extract the product of functioning, dynamic, sustainable, excess-producing prosocial institutions, to lie and project about one’s means and motives in doing so or otherwise distract unwanted attention, and to form protective political coalitions with others doing the same.
For all their calling everybody else “Nazis” (Projection! Distraction!) they are themselves communists, plain and simple. They have been increasing their parasitic extraction from civilization for the better part of the last century, and only in the past four years or so has their momentum ceased and gone into reverse. Their extractive tendencies went into undeniable overdrive, people noticed in such a manner as could not be distracted or projected away, and the regime’s ability to propagandize that this is Good Actually™ vanished in a puff of condemnation and mockery.
Furthermore, this reputational self-immolation has triggered a fracture in the regime’s base of institutional support. What Balaji Srinivasan calls the “grey tribe”, as distinct from red and blue, was formerly within the blue fold, mostly for loosely cultural reasons effectively reinforced by regime propaganda. But now there is a split. The likes of Bill Gates, Reid Hoffman, and others with questionable travel habits, along with the workforces of organizations whose primary economic function today is to rent seek, have become entrenched as blue. On the other hand, the likes of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and others who like to actually build things, to contribute prosocially to capital formation and the advance of civilization, have recognized that the parasite industrial complex has become such an asinine burden to productivity that it simply must be opposed. Hence, they have gone red.
Consider, as a timely absolution and worthy of an extended excerpt, Marc Andreessen appearing on the New York Times’ Matter Of Opinion podcast with Ross Douthat, explaining in amusingly tactful and regime-friendly terms his gradual realization that communism is a parasite on a functioning America. Commenting on artificial intelligence, in which Andreessen Horowitz has venture capital investments to the tune of billions of dollars, but alluding to knowledge of similar occurrences in virtually every other industry:
Andreessen: Ben [Horowitz] and I went to Washington in May of 2024. We couldn’t meet with Biden because, as it turns out, at the time, nobody could meet with Biden. We were able to meet with senior staff. So we met with very senior people in the White House, in the inner core.
We basically relayed our concerns about A.I., and their response to us was, “Yes, the national agenda on A.I. We will implement it in the Biden administration and in the second term. We are going to make sure that A.I. is going to be a function of two or three large companies. We will directly regulate and control those companies. There will be no start-ups. This whole thing where you guys think you can just start companies and write code and release code on the internet — those days are over. That’s not happening.”
We were shocked that it was even worse than we thought. We said, “Well, that seems really radical.” We said, “Honestly, we don’t understand how you’re going to control and ban open-source A.I., because it’s just math and code on the internet. How are you possibly going to control it?” And the response was, “We classified entire areas of physics during the Cold War. If we need to do that for math or A.I. going forward, we’ll do that, too.”
Douthat: But that is a national security argument. That is an argument about China, right?
Andreessen: Yeah, but national security is also the death of democracy. Maybe I’ll give the devil his due here. I believe, in their view, they really think they’re defending democracy. I mean, they’re trying to strangle it to death in the name of defending it, but I think they literally believe it when they say Trump is Hitler. By the way, it appears Obama doesn’t believe Trump is Hitler anymore, because he was joking around with him at Jimmy Carter’s funeral.
A lot of these guys, the fire’s in the eyes. And look, it’s not even just the U.S. It’s the rise of UKIP. Brexit was an equally shocking, alarming thing. The rise of Nigel Farage. The German party AfD, it’s obviously the Nazi Party 2.0. And so this superheated rhetoric and actions between 2021 and 2024 just went completely bananas.
So we came in on May ’24, at the very height of that, and we said, “Oh, my God, they’re going to kill us. They’re going to kill our companies. They’re going to kill open source.” By the way if you kill open-source A.I., you also kill all academic research, so the universities are going to be completely cut out of the loop …
And jumping ahead just a little to the conclusion of this train of thought:
Andreessen: The political dimension of it, overwhelmingly. I mean, it was just crystal clear. You can see it in the eyes. You can see it in the words. You can hear it in the words. You can see it in the behavior. We have a lot of Democratic friends of good standing who are major donors in both the Biden campaign and even the Kamala Harris campaign. They came back with the same reports. It’s completely consistent, which is that social media was a catastrophic mistake for political reasons.
Because it is literally killing democracy and literally leading to the rearrival of Hitler. And A.I. is going to be even worse, and we need to take it right now. This is why I took you through the long preamble earlier, because at this point, we are no longer dealing with rational people. We’re no longer dealing with people we can deal with.
And that’s the day we walked out and stood in the parking lot of the West Wing and took one look at each other, and we’re like, “Yep, we’re for Trump.”
And there you have it. “Nazis”, “democracy”, open-source (in instantiation but also in spirit), social media, the Internet: the panoply of communist regime theology laid bare by a defector radicalised by its overwhelming tendency to chaos and stupidity. Of course, such types will still have their oopsies and are not entirely to be trusted, but their economic incentives ought to at least be appreciated. On the other hand, discovering the economic incentives in all of this of the likes of Gates, Hoffman, and other nomenklatura is left as an exercise for the reader …
This sets up nicely that I don’t think the “red/blue” dichotomy is particularly helpful given it roots the shift to the new in the paradigms of the old. Let us not forget that Robert F Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard are key contributors to Trump’s Avengers, and that Musk, Andreessen, and even Trump were once proud Democrats. Astonishingly, the wing of war-profiteering neocons who for decades had made the official Republican platform little more than a lame and self-contradictory joke were triggered by Trump to defect to the regime perfectly in advance of the regime’s electoral defeat. And in another novel anachronism, deeply socially concerned useful idiots now find themselves in complete theological agreement with the likes of Pfizer and BlackRock, obfuscating any helpful mapping to or from “the party of business”. While still nominally “red” and “blue”, and for institutional reasons unlikely to change any time soon, the realignment at hand is far more important than any clichés we may risk inheriting from these labels. It is more than political. It is upstream. It is cultural.
***
In a nod to the obsolescence of red and blue, Srinivasan has labelled the emerging factions the “orange” and “green” party, in reference to Bitcoin and fiat. While I am well known for doing so, I won’t evangelize for Bitcoin here as I think the technological and cultural shifts in question are more fundamental still and that Bitcoin, like Trump, is a consequence. “Collectivist” versus “Individualist” likewise come to mind but strike me as still focusing the framing too much at the level of politics rather than technology and culture, as I insist is more important.
At the level of dialectic, I prefer the motifs of “top-down” and “bottom-up”, in the vein of James C Scott, Jane Jacobs, Friedrich Hayek, Wendell Berry, and others of a similar ilk in our own time, not to mention as intrinsic to the founding vision of the United States, embodied in particular in Federalist 10, Anti-Federalist 17, and the Virginia Constitution. Functioning, dynamic, sustainable, excess-producing, prosocial institutions can only ever emerge in a bottom-up fashion, through the experimentation of free individuals as to what does and does not work in a social setting; the forming of consensus by observation, reason, and empathy: and the belief in the virtue of abstention in pursuit of a positive-sum outcome.
Civilization is a bottom-up phenomenon. Communism is its top-down reversal.
Pilfering the excess can happen at the margin, per individual initiative, but a functioning bottom-up institution will definitionally function to stamp this out. To institutionally corrupt such a process we require a top-down breaking of real consensus and imposition of a manufactured one, be it by violence, propaganda, or both. This necessarily destroys knowledge, depreciates competence, consumes capital, and impairs the flourishing of civilization. It requires a static view of human action and little to no faith in individual decision-making. Like any parasite, it can last only so long as its host’s growth matches or exceeds its own.
If it doesn’t, however, we can readily predict several reflexive contributors to a spiral of state-sponsored decay: namely, violence in service of the propaganda and propaganda in service of the violence. Anybody agitating for the acquisition of real knowledge or the maintaining of appropriately prosocial customs must be made an example of. This situation is known as “anarcho-tyranny”, a term coined by political theorist Sam Francis. Roughly speaking it means the coinciding permissiveness of the regime towards random violence perpetrated by degenerates with zealous enforcement of the most trivial, antisocial, and even self-contradictory rules against productive citizens.
***
What has happened in the past four years can be explained in these terms far more cleanly than any other; certainly those of regime propaganda and even of the old “left/right” framework. Covid hysteria and BLM were explosions of violence and propaganda so extreme as to dramatically overtake the excess production their conspirators consumed. Productive citizens were denied the simplest of dignities in the name of “safety” while mobs of degenerates were allowed to wantonly ransack in the name of “justice”. Actual, literal health was demonized, while self-evidently dangerous and unnecessary experimental therapies were championed and an overdosing criminal was canonized. The forming of consensus by observation and reason and the acquisition of real knowledge was officially banned in the name of venerating antisocial criminality and top-down diktats speaking for The Sicence™ as a false god through false prophets. Every major institution proudly threw its weight behind this orgy of destruction, lending to this violence and propaganda becoming so deranged and the natural resistance to the imposition of anarcho-tyranny so widespread as to push a critical threshold to a new medium of information acquisition, and of consensus formation, such that the regime has lost a great deal of its prior social control.
As an example timely to the election, consider Peanut the Squirrel, whose story I won’t recount as I assume the reader is familiar. Peanut’s abduction and killing is textbook anarcho-tyranny, as Isaac Botkin’s tweet below concisely captures:
But Peanut also speaks to the novel power of decentralized media to surface the story, to catalyze memetic momentum, and to channel righteous fury with the regime through a symbol that simply cannot be argued with: charge it as unserious and we reply you don’t get why it matters; try to take it seriously and we reply you don’t get the joke. To engage is to lose — precisely the ethos that must be adopted going forward, and the framing that must relentlessly be enforced with every meme that follows.
Peanut also provides the ideal conceptual link between dialectic and rhetoric. The above is a dialectical analysis, but Peanut “worked”, so to speak, because of memes. Dialectic may work at the margin, in private. But it cannot be the basis of a cultural campaign channelled through hard-won new media channels.
For the first time in living memory, civilization is back in the ascendancy and the parasites are in retreat. This must only accelerate. We must spend at least the next 50 years routing, humiliating, and mocking them at every turn, drawing them out like leeches, memeing them, defunding them, confusing them, scattering them; shattering their protective political coalitions and instilling a permanent feeling of chaos and panic such that total capitulation and conversion is the only viable option. We are going to Long March them right back out the institutions. If they won’t leave, we will build new institutions that obsolete theirs, leaving them to squeal and die while minimizing the collateral social and psychic damage.
If they want to be taken seriously, make them have 3-hour long, unscripted conversations with interviewers known to be hostile to the regime. If they wheel out “celebrities”, yell “Diddy” until they scamper back offstage. The real celebrities are the independent journalists and commentators broadcasting over Twitter, Substack, and podcasting, and the anonymous Twitter users blasting out the memes that turned a murdered squirrel into a pivotal issue in a Presidential election. “Celebrities” will no longer be astroturfed talking heads compromised by child sex trafficking. We have always known rappers are retarded but in the beautifully timed wake of the Diddy fallout we have learned they are paedophiles as well. We can harness this momentum to finally yank the cultural North Star of masculinity away from their degeneracy and back to family men; to controlled aggression in protection of innocence and away from its metaphorical and literal rape. This is all to say: we primarily need rhetoric. Meme them until they cry, then make memes of them crying.
And so, I return once again to the potent slur of “Communist”, to which I suggest the counterpoint, “American”. De Tocqueville’s essential reading of the novel wonder of American culture (not politics, but culture), while anachronistic to force through a “liberal” or “conservative” lens, was rather as thoroughly as had ever been imagined a bottom-up exercise in the construction and maintenance of social institutions. JD Vance echoed this point in his election-week appearance on The Joe Rogan Podcast, cogently remarking,
“The entire modern Democratic party grew up in an era where there was consensus … they grew up in an era where social trust was just so much higher. And I think that a lot of them are trying to reimpose that social trust from the top, not recognizing that that high level of social trust came organically from the way American society worked. And if you have people trying to reimpose it from the top it degrades the very thing you are trying to create.”
As opposed to this potent rhetorical arsenal, “Republican” and “Democrat” carry too much unhelpful baggage. For one, there are Republican Communists and Democrat Americans. For another, a key component of the rhetorical initiative I am proposing must be Christian forgiveness. We must remember that while the party-level Communists absolutely must be purged, probably the vast majority of Communist sympathizers are, as mentioned above, simply Lenin’s useful idiots; not nomenklatura or even apparatchiks but basically decent, kind, sincere people too agreeable to resist the prior onslaught of regime propaganda, or too wilfully ignorant to realize their livelihood is predicated on parasitism. As Zero HP Lovecraft graciously put it, they are mostly “victims of a deception which has been going on since before [they] were born.” It is remarkably convenient that the regime’s metastasizing religion has as a core tenet that sin is permanent and apology perpetually necessary. By comparison, the American creed is welcoming.
More generally, I strongly suggest a focus on exactly this kind of positive messaging. This is easily forgotten, especially the deeper into dialectical analysis we slip as conniving dissidents, but is fundamental to effective politics. This tactic will be particularly effective for the unfortunately large cohort whom the regime has quite literally terrorized into existential dread over a carousel of issues coded as socially liberal — not so much libertarian as libertine — and who know all too keenly how close to excommunication they are at any and every moment should they fail to adopt the latest regime diktats. We know well the kind of pandering that creates and then caters to this demand is a race to the bottom of delusional nonsense, so rather than trying to explain why life without parasitic regime coddling won’t be a dujourophobic nightmare, explain instead why life will be amazing. Let the regime stumble into framing the choice for them as between fearmongering and hopemongering, and imply as strongly as possible that forgiveness, reconciliation, and, dare I say it, progress, are only even conceivable on the side of hope.
To the greatest possible extent, the cultural revolution we seek to install must not lament despair absent any context but offer hope as an alternative. Contrast censorship with debate. Contrast sickness with health. Contrast ugliness with beauty. Constrast weakness with strength. Contrast war with peace. Contrast decay with prosperity. Contrast alienation with family. Contrast Communism with America. The reader hopefully recognizes that the dying spasms of the regime’s propaganda machine in the final stretches of this election were to shift all messaging to “Nazis” as a kind of braindead Heil Mary. Paint a picture of the future that is fucking awesome, as BitPaine suggested below on the eve of the election:
So much for the content. As for tactics, Trump truly is the exemplar; the greatest of all time at forcing coverage. Once an emblem of esoteric wisdom, it is now more or less a trope that the left doesn’t argue in order to reasonably put forward a point, but rather to force the acceptance of a framing. This was possible (easy, even) in a Communist paradigm of centralized media but clearly this is no longer the case. My biggest fear as to the potential stillbirth of the cultural revolution we are on the cusp of initiating is the temptation to take this bait; to think, for example, that now that the election is won and we have the numbers behind us, we can finally win the argument that the left are the real racists, or that there are market-based solutions to the climate crisis or whatever other complete and utter nonsense legacy think tanks are tank thinking this very moment.
Reject. The. Framing.
They are Communists. You don’t argue with Communists. You protect yourself and your family from their machinations and you laugh them out of public spaces. As Carl Benjamin astutely notes,
“leftism is essentially a civilisational shit-test the right keeps failing, when what it ought to do is just simply refuse point blank any request and create the world it thinks ought to exist.”
We now have the media apparatus to effect, and we have the living, breathing case study in Trump of infuriating the regime by not even bothering to engage except to briefly mock. Beautiful, high-status people support MAGA. This is just a fact; to argue is to prove one’s low status. Consider as an example (arguably as a proof) that while every other Republican in living memory pathetically apologized and explained away their supposed racist, sexist, thisphobic and thatphobic sins, in contrast, Trump consistently shifted the vote of every minority demographic despite a nonstop regime media operation to smear him as a bigot.
Reject. The. Framing.
To the extent you want to actively engage, say something funny, insulting, and even nonsensical, and let them waste their time explaining themselves while you move on to something serious. DDoS them with memetic warfare and watch their silly little minds melt such that they might frankly just get out the way of the real work that needs to be done to revoke anarcho-tyranny, to create the world that ought to exist, and to make civilization great again.
***
The cultural and technological terrain has shifted from enabling top-down, static, antisocial, propagandistic, extractive, technocratic social engineering to get away with it, so to speak, at the expense of the progress of civilization. The Communists are finally in retreat. As Aristophanes less graciously put it while furthering Zero HP’s commentary, “as productive people, we shouldn’t suffer being nagged all the time by unproductive people into caring about stupid shit that doesn’t matter, while the important shit that does matter is all falling apart.” The future is productive. The future is dynamic. The future is American.
As remarkable and catalytic a historical figure as Trump is, we must recognize he is nonetheless an effect of these changes, not their cause. While unavoidable and even beneficial to a large extent, we should avoid the celebration attaching itself too entirely to his singular personality. We know he is fundamentally a grifter. And, of course, it is possible he will surround himself with regime apparatchiks once again and achieve little to nothing of political worth. Affecting politics is downstream of affecting culture.
Trump’s re-election does not so much create as it confirms an opportunity we would do best not to spurn. By properly appreciating these shifts, we can embrace that this is not an end but merely a beginning.
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