#caesarism

[azspot]

German conservative Oswald Spengler saw Caesarism as an inevitable (and welcome) tendency written into the cycles of history. Spengler prophesied that, as Western civilization’s dynamism waned — with mass media and the power of finance undermining political authority — individual men unrestrained by ideological commitments and wielding unprecedented personal political power would come to dominate society.

Kings of Capital

[techniche]

Through money, Democracy becomes its own destroyer, after money has destroyed the intellect.

Oswald Spengler (The Decline of the West, pg. 396)

Caesarism grows on the soil of Democracy...pg, 396

[arcticdementor]

Plutocracy: The Alternative to Caesarism?

Thoughts on Elon Musk Buying Twitter, and the Simple Case for Rich Guys as the Answer to Neurotic Bureaucratic Tyranny

In his response to my “Why is Everything Liberal?”, Scott Alexander noticed that I made something of a case for Caesarism. The argument goes that democracy can’t represent the will of the masses, who are indifferent to politics and busy with their own lives. It must therefore reflect the views of an activist/bureaucratic/journalistic class. Some call this the “managerial class,” but I don’t like that term as I think it’s too broad and implies that everyone with a college degree or who works in a white-collar profession is actually taking part in running society. In reality, it’s a very small group that matters, and there’s nothing that guarantees that whatever we call this bureaucratic class will have political preferences that if enacted will help rather than harm society. So, under right-wing Caesarism, you have Erdogan or Orban do the full-time job of making sure that the art museum isn’t smearing menstrual blood all over the floor, criminals aren’t being released without bail, and your kids aren’t being taught to question their gender identity, because that’s not the kind of society most people want to live in and that’s what you get if you don’t do anything and leave these decisions to “civil society.” Instead of being ruled by say an unrepresentative 1-2% of the population, you put your trust in one man and his lieutenants who are presumably less neurotic and subject to certain mind viruses than those who would otherwise be running things. That allows everyone else to go about doing things like starting families, going on vacation, and developing hobbies instead of bothering with politics and becoming like the activists who want to ruin everything.

All that being said, I’m more inclined to political realism than I am a political philosopher, and I think it’s unlikely that we’ll get anything resembling a functioning Caesarism in American politics. The country is too big and diverse, and power is too divided across the three branches of government, between them and the administrative agencies, and between the feds and the states and localities. For better or worse, we’re stuck with “democracy,” i.e., rule by a small class of people rather than a strongman. Moreover, even though it sometimes seems that almost anything is better than being ruled by wokes and corona hysterics, we have to respect the historical record here, and it provides little basis for thinking that dictatorship is a good alternative to democracy in the long run. Until recently I thought China was a major counterexample, but it’s still sticking with Zero Covid. Of course I’d favor using executive power to go after federal employees and force them to behave differently when feasible, but regulations of any great complexity and depth will require a reliance on left-wing bureaucrats and judges to interpret and enforce the law.

…

So democracy is bad, and the alternative is probably bad too and unrealistic. But Elon Musk buying Twitter suggests another way.

It’s been funny to watch the left-wing meltdown over the news, and enjoy the backlash to that meltdown. The fact that the left has come to define democracy as “whatever we want to do in the moment” is probably too obvious to go over at this point, though Freddie deBoer is always worth reading. More interesting is a certain kind of moderate and populist-conservative response that doesn’t like the path that Twitter has taken, but argues nonetheless that the fate of free speech shouldn’t depend on the whims of billionaires. According to one author writing in The Spectator,

Wouldn’t it be better if we re-integrated liberal norms about free speech into elite education and the media? That way, progressives might stop perceiving free expression as a right-wing talking point and remember how central it has been to social progress…Twitter rediscovering neutrality is unlikely and intensified regulation perhaps undesirable but either is better than relying on the benevolence of billionaires.

Yes, the best possible solution is that everyone becomes reasonable and everything starts working well. But in the real world, institutions are subject to pressure, and almost all of that pressure is constantly coming from one direction. And the fact that it’s the same in every country – that the mind virus of wokeness infects the bureaucratic class of practically every developed Western democracy – indicates that there’s something deeper going on than simply the people who believe in liberal norms losing in a marketplace of ideas.

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In this model of the world, wokeness is just bureaucratic and institutional responses to whoever causes the most destructive riots and cries the loudest, an insight that can be applied to democracy more broadly. In an ideal world, executives at Twitter would just read well-argued pieces in online magazines like The Spectator and become convinced that free speech is important. I think that’s unrealistic because we did not get here through argumentation, but through a small minority of activists making the most noise, with the ostensible justifications for whatever institutions have wanted to do to cave in to their pressure coming later. It would be a mistake to see the post hoc justifications themselves – a genuine commitment to equity, an attempt to overcome past discrimination, defending the lives of “trans kids,” etc. – as driving the phenomenon of wokeness or most other Current Things.

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When it comes to questions like how to moderate speech on Twitter, in the end a decision is going to be made somewhere. To simply say “I don’t want billionaires doing it,” is not an answer. Would you rather it be the Twitter “Trust and Safety Council”? What kind of people are drawn to such jobs? Or should it be government that regulates speech? If you think so, be honest and make the case for the wisdom and benevolence of federal bureaucrats, and the journalists and activists who have the most influence over them. That is not a winning argument, at least for non-leftists, which is why those who want government to play a large role here tend to have trouble explaining how the specifics of their preferred system is supposed to work.

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In summary, while reserving the right to elaborate further at some point in the future, I’ll just note that a short case for plutocracy, or rule by the wealthy, can look something like this. The concept of “democracy,” is at best too ill-defined to be a guiding principle for governance, as can be seen by the fact that there are wide disagreements about what the concept even means, with differences between tribes predictably reflecting political divides. We have to make a choice regarding who gets to decide important questions. Caesarism says let one man leading the government do it, but that has well-known problems and is inconsistent with the American political tradition. Plutocracy has the fewest problems, mainly because rich guys are smarter, less neurotic, and have higher testosterone levels than activists and bureaucrats, and they have achieved their success through market processes, which is more indicative of an ability to solve problems than success in academia, government, or activism. Someone who builds rocket ships, or founds PayPal, or gets oil out of the ground is likely to have better ideas on how to run society than someone who has successfully navigated a bureaucracy or whose career has been based on succeeding at “peer review,” or writing words on paper that are approved by other people who have also gotten where they are by writing words on paper that were approved of by others who wrote words on paper, etc. Moreover, unlike Caesars, economic elites can’t start destructive wars on their own. Plutocracy is not a perfect system, but if one rich guy just buying Twitter solves the problem of internet speech against the wishes of nearly the entire bureaucratic class, we will have to consider that a strong argument in its favor.

[techniche]

Our Western world, America and Europe, is threatened with Caesarism on a scale unknown since the dawn of the Roman Empire. In order to see this threat in its proper perspective, we have to assess the relationship between America and Europe, and define their historical destinies. It is the contention of this book [The Coming Caesars] that expanding democracy leads unintentionally to imperialism and that imperialism inevitably ends in destroying the republican institutions of earlier days; further, that the greater the social equality, the dimmer the prospects of liberty, and that as society becomes more equalitarian, it tends increasingly to concentrate absolute power in the hands of one single man. Casesarism is not dictatorship, not the result of one man's overriding ambition, not a brutal seizure of power through revolution. It is not based on a specific doctrine or philosophy. It is essentially pragmatic and untheoretical. It is a slow, often century-old, unconscious development that ends in a voluntary surrender of a free people escaping from freedom to one autocratic master.

Amaury de Riencourt (The Coming Caesarsm, Introduction, pg.5, 1957)

[techniche]

Our Western world, America and Europe, is threatened with Caesarism on a scale unknown since the dawn of the Roman Empire. In order to see this threat in its proper perspective, we have to assess the relationship between Europe and America, and define their historical destinies.

Amaury de Riencourt (The Coming Caesars, ‘Introduction’, pg. 5)

[arcticdementor]

Holy war is coming, as the poz gets ever more extreme, ever faster, and our ruling elite increasingly uses state coercion and the FBI to accomplish political outcomes, coercing fellow members of the political elite for political reasons.

Have to bring a gun to a gunfight, and a faith to a holy war.

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Whites are detribalized, and contrary to the white nationalists, “white” is not a tribal identifier. Whites are wolf to whites. A religion, defining religion broadly to include things like communism and poz, is a synthetic tribe. To win, we need a faith.

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One can deduce ought from is, which is exactly what the Book of Solomon and the copybook headings do, what every reasonable person does in practice.  If one is a strict atheist materialist, then “good” is what game theory and evolutionary psychology tells us that we should desire in our  kin, our friends, and the character of those that we should ally with.  If God created the world then “is” was created by God, and cause and effect a manifestation of the Logos.  And if a Christian, then cause and effect manifested as  wholly man, and that man ended Talmudic legalism, ended the practice of deducing “ought” from some other “ought” taken as given and absolute and then deducing ever sillier and ever more repugnant conclusions from the first “ought”, whether one takes that given “ought” as the “greatest good for the greatest number”, or takes as that given “ought” that one should not boil a goat in its mother’s milk.

The expulsion of the Jews by the Romans illustrates the Divine Logos telling us “The letter killeth but the spirit giveth life” The divine will manifested through entirely natural causes, because the natural order of the universe reflects the will of God. And the spirit of the law, being manifest in cause and effect and manifest in the natural order, needs to be understood with reference to natural law, game theory, and evolutionary psychology. When the Jews obeyed the letter of the law while massively violating the spirit of the law, they were, in accordance with prophecy, expelled from Israel – which reflects the will of God and divine prophecy, but also reflects the fact that if you violate the spirit of the law, you will get into stupid wars with your neighbors, and eventually war with one of your neighbors that happens to be a six hundred pound gorilla. The Jews got into war with Rome not because of corrupt Roman tax collectors, oppressive taxation, harsh Roman law enforcement, and all that, but because they were so scrupulous about avoiding contamination by blood that they wound up getting covered in the wrongfully spilled blood of a Roman cop whom they murdered in the performance of his duty while he was attempting to impartially enforce a just, reasonable, and necessary law that applied to everyone. Which would not have led to war had they not felt so very righteous about it because they were being so faithful to rule about avoiding blood – so faithful to it that they spectacularly disregarded the commandments on coveting, theft, and murder. Attending synagogue while avoiding walking on ground contaminated by chicken blood was so terribly important that they could do anything they liked to accomplish these holy goals, including theft and murder, and their great determination to accomplish these holy goals demonstrated their superior holiness.  And their stubborn self righteousness over this incident eventually and predictably led to the Romans going Roman on them.

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Chaos is coming.  Chaos is already here, and will get a lot worse.  Eventually order will be restored through Caesarism, that being the cycle of history.  I hope this happens soon, with Holy American Emperor Trump, but if it does not happen soon, it will happen eventually, possibly after a century of blood and ruin.

When it starts happening, and I hope it is beginning now, we should catch that tide and sail it to victory.

Revolutionary movements never get anywhere without backing from a substantial faction of the elite. So what section of the elite is going to back us?

Warriors need priests, and priests need warriors. We are always ruled by priests or warriors, so they tend to struggle for power, priests destroying the military, instead of sustaining it and giving it cohesion. The recent stupid wars where the military fought for no sane, useful, or achievable purpose, with one hand tied behind its back, were attacks by the priesthood on the military, as was insourcing logistics, putting camp followers in military uniforms.

To explain these stupid wars, people say they were fought for Israel, but if fought for Israel, would have been fought to win, rather than lose. If fought for Israel, we would not have women in the military, Israel would not have women in the military, we would not have kicked Israel out of Gaza, and logistic workers would not be wearing warrior uniforms.

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The time of Ceasarism approaches. Caesar, Napoleon, or Augustus will need priests who say and believe his rule under God is right, because God said so, because a one stationary bandit is better than mobile banditry, and because one King three thousand miles away is better than a thousand kings three miles away.

[arcticdementor]

I think there’s also a distinct possibility that the authoritarian leader who rises from this disorder and chaos is from the right. Furthermore, that possibility doesn’t bother me as much as it used to. Let me be clear: my first preference is for the continuation of the republic with all the lofty principles and virtues that entails. But my second choice in a world no longer held together by shared ideas on virtue or by binding principles is, I suppose, some form of benevolent, traditionalist authoritarian. I don’t think this is particularly shocking; I suspect most leftists would prefer (as an alternative to small-r republicanism) some sort of *left-wing* authoritarian. Everyone wants a powerful strongman as long as he’s our strongman. What does shock me about myself is how resigned I’ve become to the inevitability of some sort of Emperor to follow the Republic. And, yes, I know where totalitarianism leads, even if you start with a “good” totalitarian. I hope my kids can live out their days with more types like Augustus and Trajan and Marcus Aurelius than, say, Nero or Caligula. Could we just have economic and military stability plus some basic standards of morality and public decency? I’ve given up on these things coming around organically. I hope the next Emperors protect our established institutions.

“Nate J”