America’s Republican Guard

The split between the Republican media, the party organization, the party’s donors, and the party’s faithful foot soldiers has turned into enormous rifts. A minor candidate for the party nomination in the upcoming presidential election, Louisiana governor “Bobby” Jindal, suggested splitting the party. The leading candidate for nomination, Donald Trump, doesn’t much care for the party organization or have much of a need to lean on it for support.

Much of this frustration derives from a failure to understand the complexities of American history and the changes to our political structure which have neutralized the ability of the electorate to make much more than symbolic changes in the structure of the government through the means of the ballot box.

How Republicans have organized themselves is as an entity for the highly effective channeling of discontent among the population. They measure themselves more on their ability to produce electoral results and media ratings rather than results in the conduct of government. There’s an excellent reason for this: conservatives and other right-wingers have almost no representation among university professors, journalists, editors, the rank-and-file of powerful bureaucracies, public unions, think tanks, and other crucial organs of governance and opinion management. None of the prestige newspapers or magazines can be accurately called ‘conservative,’ and expressing even a mildly right-wing opinion is grounds for blackballing even from publications which were relatively moderate as late as the mid-2000s.

But the Republican party isn’t “useless.” It’s extremely useful as a tool of state. Without the Republican party, the government would have to render wider swaths of opinion as unacceptable as anything smacking of ‘racism’ or ‘sexism’ is today. Relegating limited economic dissent from the state’s favored program to an acceptable zone of debate is fine — because the state often does need to retract from some sections of society in order to preserve itself.

Alan Greenspan reformed Social Security because it was necessary to preserve the program, which is a cornerstone of the nation-state and the overall system of political control that it supports. It wasn’t something decided at the electoral level — not directly — because governance often requires making unpopular decisions. The People will always vote for pie for breakfast, cake for lunch, ice cream for dinner, and churros for dessert. This is why no government that wants to survive for long lets the People decide anything of any consequence — not even, really, who becomes the county dog catcher.

What the Republicans tell you is what you’re allowed to say at the current time. It provides a discrete identity template which you can apply to yourself which makes you more easily managed from above — if you conform to the known identity, you can be abstracted more effectively, in the same way that managers use job titles and descriptions to grease the wheels.

When someone responds incredulously to something that you say with “Wow, just wow! It’s 20XX!” it’s not a contentless retort. They’re actually trying to help you rejoin the totalitarian consensus to become a good citizen.

The American conservative opposition provides a useful frisson that helps people define the political middle, which is the comfortable consensus. Without the polarity, it’d be more challenging to map the territory of what’s permissible to say and think while remaining in good company.

The area of acceptable opinions tends to shrink as the years advance. An opinion that was acceptable or even the consensus in 2005 is no longer acceptable in 2015, and potentially grounds for legal action against you. Constitutions don’t stop bullets, and clever lawyers can always figure out ways around their supposed limits, which have never limited much of anything when reviewed over a long enough timeline.

Intellectual supporters of liberal democracy tend to argue that the state exists to enact the will of the people as measured by elections. In practice, it respects the will of the people only in so much as it’s influenced by the state’s direct and indirect organs of authority. You can have a will of your own, comrade — so long as you bend to the official truth, rather than digging around for subversive nonsense and causing trouble.

So, the contemporary conservative movement such that it exists is a bargaining organization with fundamentally low leverage. It controls no organs of political authority or prestige. It bargains on behalf of subject peoples against a far more powerful governing apparatus. It enjoys this privilege because the institutional left sees them as responsible negotiating partners, which they are — they’re people that they can work with, whose sensibilities they share, who live in similar cities, and uphold similar mores. In return for being good partners, they receive certain privileges. When they stop being good partners, those privileges tend to be revoked abruptly.

In the same way that the world has a universal death penalty for leaping in front of a speeding bus, the world grants American citizens no magical protections against the usurpation of what they conceive of as their rights. The state is that speeding bus, and complaining about the disregard of the bus driver for natural law doesn’t cause it to slow down. Deviating from the permissible consensus in public has certain consequences — ostracism and a loose embargo. And it’s important for people to know that — that they are not at liberty to believe and say what they like, and that their protestations of ‘inviolable rights’ are absurd.

It’s been useful to encourage Americans to believe that they have rights because it encourages them to comply with the law. Given that the people who run the state don’t believe in natural law or the rights of man (except when it’s useful to pretend to believe in them), it doesn’t make much sense to appeal to those rights in an attempt to get clemency from those rulers. In the meantime, the nation’s stalwart Republicans will continue to do what they can to keep Americans down on the farm, paying the salaries of all those public servants in Washington.

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