The Thermidorian Faction and the Election of 2024

Part A: Is Anyone in Control of Electoral Fraud?

A current topic of discussion among the sane is the role of factionalism in the US Left and which faction, if any, has the upper hand. In a recent exchange at Jim’s Blog the discussion turned, as it has often lately, to the question of the power of the Thermidorians, the left’s relatively “moderate” faction. (The word Thermidorians comes from the French Revolution; the history needn’t detain us.)

Jim said, “recent events indicate that Team B, the Thermidorians, have the upper hand. Likely outcome: Trump is allowed to win.”

And at Founding Questions a commenter says, “They’re going to have to let Trump win, aren’t they? Or at least, some faction of Juggs is going to be actively clearing his path.”

I don’t think so. Trump is too unholy to leftists, and the adherents of the leftist religion are too numerous and dispersed.

So I’m making this prediction: Trump will be the GOP nominee, but won’t be allowed to win the general election.

One way or another the election will provide meaningful data on two questions. One is the extent to which electoral fraud is centralized or decentralized. If Trump wins the general, I will cheerfully concede that fraud is centralized. That’s the only way the reigning fuckheads could control it. That would also be a large shock to my worldview, which is always interesting. My current worldview assigns very low probability to the fraud being centralized.

On the other hand, if Trump doesn’t win the general, that tells us that either (a) fraud is decentralized, or that (b) it’s centralized but the Thermidoreans aren’t in control. That’s the second question: which leftist faction, if any, is in control?

Part B: If They Were Smart

At the Founding Questions link the host says, “IF they were Smart, they’d Fortify the Erection for the BOM [Bad Orange Man]. He takes all the blame for the inevitable bad shit that’s coming down the road…” Quite. I’ve been thinking along the same lines for a couple of weeks.

Here’s the scenario, which could only work if one faction is thoroughly in control: They know they have a lot of problems incoming: the obvious looming clusterfuck of trying to wage war against Russia and China simultaneously, as well as playing military games in the Middle East and everywhere else, the inevitable crash of US Treasury securities (who knows when, but sooner or later), and other domestic problems, e.g. even parts of the left are now admitting that open borders might not be so wonderful(!).

So if they have a reasonable amount of foresight and control, they could let Trump win, crash the Treasury market, back off from games of nuclear chicken with peer and near-peer powers, and do whatever it is they decide to do about immigration. They could let Trump machine-gun immigrant babies in the street on video, or whatever, and then cry insincere tears about how terrible it all is.

Doing all this on Trump’s watch would solve an immense amount of problems the left has and let them blame it all on Trump and ideas and policies associated with him. It would be ideal from their point of view.

But I don’t expect any of this to occur because I think the evidence points to “factionalism plus dispersion” as the Occam’s Razor explanation of everything that has happened since at least 2020. The fraud is far too decentralized, I’m pretty sure. But we’ll see.

The Legitimate Purposes of Consensus Narrative

I just finished re-reading Bruce Sterling’s Zeitgeist, a book about “narrative,” consensus reality, language, and the whole post-modernist (Po-Mo) thing. It got me cogitating, by God.

Consensus reality has several purposes. A main one, which the Po-Mo crowd ignores as far as I know, is establishing protocols for coordination and communication.

(Or if they do acknowledge it, it’s only to cast it in the most malign possible way: “The power structure perpetuates itself, locking us all into the social reality of the white male capitalist heteropatriarchy!” Pshht, I wish.)

Look, bitches: It doesn’t matter which side of the road we drive on, but we have to pick a side and everyone must drive on the same side. Similarly, it doesn’t matter, within reasonable limits, what constitutes a normal, polite speaking volume (as opposed to hostile shouting). But it does matter that we all agree on this so that we can talk to each other without half of us thinking the other half is trying to start a fight. Same for the normal physical distance between people talking to each other. How close can two men get before it becomes rude and an attempt by one of them to get into the other’s space and start a fight? Or how close can a woman stand to a man before it becomes an attempt to seduce him? Within certain limits, there’s no One Right Answer to these questions. What is important is that we all agree on an answer so we can communicate with each other without social chaos. You probably want to be able to converse with me without my punching you in the face or grabbing your tits because I misunderstood your intent.

Another example: I read that hundreds of years ago in Europe, rolling one’s eyes did not indicate exasperation, but lust. LOL, just imagine the zany hi-jinks that could result from that particular misunderstanding.

This is one of the things that consensus reality accomplishes. (It does other things too, some good and some bad.) If the consensus narrative identifies Mao Tse Tung as A Bad Person, then if I say, “That politician is just like Mao!” then you understand that I’m saying, “He’s bad!” You may not agree, but you comprehend my point. Similarly, if the consensus narrative identifies Mother Theresa as A Good Person, then if I say, “You’re just like Mother Theresa!” then you understand that I’m complimenting you, not insulting you or making some mysterious point about fluid dynamics in an antimatter plasma. By the way, apparently Mother Theresa was arguably not all that “saintly” and perhaps something of an attention addict who would metaphorically hop in front of any camera in her vicinity. But with a well-understood consensus narrative, it doesn’t actually matter whether that’s true; you still understand “You’re just like Mother Theresa!” as a compliment and not an insult. It helps us communicate.

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As a footnote to all this: 99% of the “affirmative consent” stuff that is apparently screwing up young people’s sex lives these days is evil leftists deliberately being socially destructive, getting off on totalitarian bossiness, and trying to get to the left of other leftists in the leftist holiness spiral. But I suspect 1% of it comes from socially clunky people trying to deal with the communication protocol problem by means of what amounts explicit contractarianism. The whole “May I now caress your left buttock?” thing – GOD, THAT’S SO FUCKING AWKWARD! – may be the only perceivable solution for people who are uneasy with the fact that social reality has a certain inherent fuzziness and ambiguity. Consensus reality is a large part of the solution to that communication problem because it (for example) establishes what is normal, routine physical contact – the handshake, the high-five, etc. – and what is seductive physical contact. It functions better than the explicit consent approach because it’s fluid, flexible, and involves more communication channels than just the verbal (tone of voice, body language, facial expressions, etc.). Also it doesn’t have the painfully clunky, inhuman, and robotic, “May I now kiss your neck?” etc., which is like an 800-series Terminator trying to be seductive. Human beings cannot become aroused by behavior that’s so mechanical.

The explicit consent crowd will say, “But what about the truly ambiguous cases? They exist; you just admitted it!”

Yes, they do exist… which is why normal, traditional seduction proceeds slowly. That gives both parties enough time, and several occasions, to back out.

The reason we didn’t have the explicit verbal consent thing before circa 2010 isn’t that society was one big rape prison for women; it’s that the human race had learned its way to a set of conventions that worked for actual humans. Those conventions differed from society to society, naturally, and that’s the main part of my point. But no society settled on “May I now fondle your breasts?” (ugh!) because that doesn’t work for human beings at all.

Serendipity from teh Interwebz

I was going to save these links and comments for a Miscellany post but they’re kinda long for that.

A couple of days ago I got a hit from extradeadjcb.substack.com and by sheer luck I stumbled upon the link in the comments here; a commenter had linked to The Role of Ideology in Leftist Violence. (Thanks for the shout-out. By the way, why does WordPress only tell me the basic site the link came from, and not the specific page within that site? And why didn’t it tell me when the link was originally created (in October 2022), but only couple of days ago when (I guess) someone clicked on it? WTF?)

Anyway, as I was hunting around on that site I found a bunch of good stuff. I’ve found a lot of good stuff ‘pon teh Interwebz lately. Coincidence or something else? Maybe Clown World is getting so obviously, performatively insane that its insanity has hit some kind of critical mass and everyone is like, “Aww, fizzuck this shizzisnit.” One may hope.

As I was martingaling my way through this substack site I came across e.g. this post where he casually tosses off this FUCKING GEM on feminism:

We no longer have any cultural vocabulary for a hierarchical relationship that is not tyrannical.

Damn. What an apt observation. Just saying it and forcing everyone to spend three seconds thinking about it would revolutionize our entire political culture.

Unfortunately he doesn’t totally get it (pardon me, dude, if you’re reading this, but this is important). Here’s the whole paragraph:

Second, they’re [women] afraid of being tyrannized. Nobody actually wants to be humiliated or hurt or exploited. Women enjoy feeling “owned”, but we no longer have any cultural vocabulary for a hierarchical relationship that is not tyrannical, so the idea of being owned & the idea of being abused are deeply connected. There’s a fear that if that desire is ever defined as anything other than “kink” – if it is ever permitted to escape the bedroom – that it would mean literal, actual, unsexy slavery.

The phrase “literal, actual, unsexy slavery” is a man thinking, reacting, and speaking as a man. And this is well and good, because a man should think, react, and speak as a man. But women are not men. In many ways, women are profoundly alien beings from the Circinus Galaxy. Slavery is not the horrifying catastrophe for women that it is for men, because while a male slave’s average reproductive success drops, a female slave’s average reproductive success rises. Evolutionarily, men had to be horrified by the idea of being enslaved, and fight it to their last erg of energy, or they were out-selected. Women who were enslaved… oh, well, whatever. Read porn, I mean romance, written by women themselves. You will not find one example – not a single one – of “unsexy slavery.” You will find more examples than you can count of sexy slavery.

The author of this site is a Mormon, and I don’t know the Mormon teaching on How We Got Here – maybe evolutionary psychology is verboten or something. But verboten or not, it’s the truth, and you can’t understand important topics, such as human sexuality, without it.

There’s another gem in this post, where (among other things) he gives a good kick in the teeth to the idiotic notion that “communication is the solution to most of our problems.” Actually, as he says, it’s arguably the opposite when it comes to people on the political left and right. The Internet enabled each side to really see what the other side thinks and wants. The left realized we are never, ever going to believe that they are the best and the brightest, and willingly submit to a totalitarian government with them in charge. This was quite a shock to them, because their personal narrative is that they’re just the tits. And the right realized that the left wants to enslave us all (their moderate faction) or to kill us all (the leftist faction where all the energy and drive is). It’s good that we know this about them, but communication definitely didn’t cause us to all hold hands and start singing This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land ’round the campfire.

The Intended Audience of Leftist Rhetoric

A couple of days ago I got a hit to my post The Role of Ideology in Leftist Violence. Coincidentally there was a relevant point made at Founding Questions at the same time (more on that in a second).

So this is a good occasion to signal boost this topic. It’s an important point that people on the “right” often overlook: the importance of the intra-left focus of much leftist rhetoric.

Leftist rhetoric has (at least) three purposes. The first two, which are fairly obvious, are (in no particular order):

(1) To gain numbers. E.g. lefties say to women, “You’re being oppressed by men! Support us and we’ll give you lots of goodies – we’ll affirmative-action you into jobs, give you ‘welfare’ support so you can bear alpha males’ children without having to marry disgusting betas, etc.”

(2) To confuse, distract, and disarm those they’re attacking. There are several variants of this. Moral disarmament by means of saying “You’re guilty because of the history of (blah blah) so you should let us win this particular battle (whatever the battle du jour is).” There’s also the bullshit salami-slicing gradualism: “Look, we just want this one thing; after that we’ll stop.” Which always turns out to be a lie, of course. Etc.

This is all pretty straightforward. A less obvious aspect of leftist rhetoric was brought out in an exchange at Jim’s place a year or so ago:

(3) A significant amount of leftist rhetoric is directed at other leftists. Leftists spill a lot of ink to establish “My faction is correct and all the other factions are wrong and should defer and submit to us.” Those doctrinal disputes are both the terrain on which leftist conflicts are fought and the prize that is being fought over: Who has the One Right Answer? Consider as an example the current ideowar between third-wave feminists and the trans crowd.

Fun fact: more than a hundred years ago, when the communists in Russia were just another revolutionary group hammering out their policies and strategies, a small, minority group of commies started calling themselves Bolsheviks, which literally means “men of the majority.” The tactical advantage of calling yourselves this, if you can get enough other commies to believe it, are obvious. (By the way, Wikipedia retcons this history, not surprisingly.)

The relevant quote at Founding Questions focuses on a different aspect of intra-left communication: “The Journalist doesn’t think in terms of causality, or in terms of real-world effects; it simply never occurs to her that her Narrative might cause actual Real World people to do Real World things. They — Real World people; Dirt People — never cross her mind at all. Her Narratives aren’t directed down; that is, at Dirt People. They’re always directed up — at her fellow Cloud People…”

I would only amend that last “They’re always directed up” to “They’re often directed up and/or across” i.e. at other leftists. Severian at FQ emphasizes the internal leftist virtue-signaling aspect of intra-left communication, while Jim emphasizes the function that internally-directed rhetoric has in intra-left power struggles. The difference is one of submission versus an attempt at dominance. When your average journalist at a local paper writes about the problem of “racism” in the local (blah blah) industry, she’s just creating an item that she can cite on her resume when she wants to change jobs. It’s pure submission: Look, I wrote this piece on “racism,” I’m a goodthinkful leftist; you should hire me. In contrast, when trans activists and old-school feminists duke it out rhetorically, they are not submitting to each other. They’re fighting. Each one is trying to prevail over the other, to beat the other faction down into helpless defeat.

Leftists don’t give a flying fuck at a rolling donut about the truth value of their doctrines. So why do they care so much about doctrine? Because the stakes are power, which is all that leftists care about, up to and including life and death. Robespierre had his head lopped off by his fellow revolutionaries. Stalin killed innumerable hordes of his fellow Commies. Leftists of different factions are still physically attacking each other.

Above I wrote “Those doctrinal disputes are both the terrain on which leftist conflicts are fought and the prize that is being fought over.” But the doctrinal disputes are the terrain of the conflicts only as long as the conflicts stay sub-violent. Lefties being lefties, they always become violent sooner or later. The ideological wars to the knife are vitally important because they draw up the battle lines in preparation for the literal wars to the knife.

The Twenty-First Century Started on January 1, 2000

I’m re-reading Bruce Sterling’s Zeitgeist – more on that in an upcoming post – and at one point in this novel, which is set in 1999, the Dad and the girl have a discussion about when the twenty-first century will “really” start. It reminded me of my intention to give the smug Very Clever Boys on this topic the ontological hotfoot, something I’ve been meaning to do for a while.

The twenty-first century started on January 1, 2000.

“Oh, no it didn’t!” you say. “It started on January 1, 2001.”

Oh yeah? Step forward, sugar-tits, and let’s do this. You might want to make sure your health insurance premiums are paid up first, because what’s about to happen to you is going to be more instructive than pleasant.

Why did the 21st century start on January 1, 2001?

“Because there was no Year Zero. You have to start counting in the Year 1, and if you count off a hundred years (which is the definition of a century) starting with the Year 1, you’ll see that…”

Whoa, stop. Where do you get the notion that there was no Year Zero? Of course there was.

“No there wasn’t!”

Sure there was. You just said there was a Year 1.

“Exactly.”

So the year before that was the Year Zero.

“But no one called it that at the time!”

Did anyone call the Year 1 that at the time?

(Static, blue screen.)

As long as you’re just standing there with your mouth hanging open, I’ll continue. If we are committing ourselves to not allowing an “official” calendar until some large number of people start using it, we probably can’t say our dating system started until a couple of centuries after Jesus’s birth. By that standard, the 21st century probably won’t “officially” start for another few hundred years.

What’s your standard for when there are “enough” people using a given dating system, anyway? At what critical mass of humans is it enough for the dating system to become “official” or “real” or whatever? And is it a raw number of people, or a percent of the human race? Either way, your preferred answer is almost certain to lead to something obnoxious and confusing. Suppose you maintain that a dating system isn’t “real” until 10% of the human race uses it. And suppose that our current dating system didn’t hit 10% of humans until, say, the year 453. Then you’re committed to claiming that the 21st century will start in the Year 2453. And let’s be realistic: I know you’re not willing to maintain that.

I’m not going to let you worm out of this, kid. You’ve either gotta be consistent and say that we won’t be in the 21st century until like the year 2453, or you’ve gotta allow that there was a Year Zero and we’re perfectly entitled to start marking centuries from that year.

Since there obviously, undeniably was a Year Zero – even if no one called it that at the time – the 21st century started on January 1, 2000.