What it would mean to lose

This election is such a powerful spectacle because tomorrow night will conclusively disprove so many people’s model of how the world works.

We are about to learn whether anarcho-tyranny can smoothly transition to ordinary tyranny.

Openly authoritarian regimes can more or less openly rig elections, but our system doesn’t work that way.

The anarcho-tyrannical approach to elections:

• Make fraud impossible to detect

• Blast public messaging that we have to Do Whatever It Takes because Democracy Is On The Ballot

• Assure the public that voter fraud is a myth — which means there’s no need to investigate it — which means that theoretically if a person wanted to do it, they would probably get away with it

The purpose of a Baathist or North Korean election is not really to convince the populace that the regime has consensus support — only that it has consensus compliance.

An anarcho-tyrannical election is a more robust and efficient generator of public legitimacy, assuming people buy it — but it also has weaknesses that a political upstart can exploit.

Also, the people and institutions that rise to the top of a fake-and-gay media-managed democracy are not the people or institutions generated by straightforwardly authoritarian systems.

It’s not clear whether Public Relations Americans are cut out to institute Bolshevik Terror — or whether the habitual obedience rendered to a media-managed democracy can be exchanged 1:1 for coercive obedience once the electoral system’s legitimacy has been discredited.

The question that we are about to answer is whether any of those distinctions matter.

Anarcho-tyrannical electoral fraud is adaptive in several ways:

First, it’s almost impossible to produce a smoking gun. There’s nothing technically illegal about the prolific generation of ballots, or the loosening of the chain of custody on those ballots. These are matters of election law that Democrat-controlled institutions have “legitimate” power to decide.

And even if one of your local surrogates gets caught stuffing ballots, there’s no way that any one crime will be dispositive on the outcome of the election — so you can simply hang that one official out to dry, and stick to the narrative that electoral fraud is Safe, Legal, and Rare.

Second, this form of electoral fraud is not symmetrical: Republicans can’t simply build their own ballot-harvesting operation, because it requires population density to scale — and it can really only be staffed by immigrants and underclass voters with a low threshold for petty lawbreaking.

But it’s not a conspiracy — it’s a consensus understanding.

The steal in 2020 was a matter of routinized, bureaucratized, petty fraud with no explicit promise of reward. It depended on thousands of people sharing an unspoken confidence that “everyone was doing it”, and that they would get away with it.

And sure enough, every institution of political and metapolitical power rallied around “respecting the outcome”, including Trump’s own party and Cabinet.

This time, the picture is much more complicated — and Trump is promising to aggressively prosecute “Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials” who committed electoral fraud if he wins.

For their part, the machine has promised to “disbar and discredit” attorneys who represent Trump on election integrity issues.

So it’s the Double or Nothing Election — but the raising of the stakes favors Trump.

Both Trump’s personal associates, and the segment of the population that he represents, were already up against existential risks. Threatening them does not really introduce any new disincentives — the penalty for being late is the same as the penalty for rebellion, and we are already late.

But it does make things a little scarier for the petty bureaucrats on whose shoulders the D political machine now rests — especially if they believe their own hype that we’re going to do things to them that have never been done before. Are they sure that they’ll still be in charge in January? Are they sure that everyone else is sure?

If Trump loses the election, it will mean the total & permanent closure of the American political system.

Kamala Harris was practically grown in a lab to demonstrate the limits of manufacturing consent — the ultimate act of political creation ex nihilo.

She has no positive personal or professional accomplishments, she’s disastrous in interviews, she has never won a competitive political race, she wasn’t chosen by Democrat voters, she has not articulated a political agenda, she represents a deeply unpopular incumbent administration, and the electorate is most radicalized on the issues (immigration and cost of living) on which they trust her least.

The only issue that has generated any enthusiasm for Kamala Harris is abortion: an issue that Donald Trump can’t even pretend to care about, and never made any gestures toward, even in the primaries. So not only is she fake — the opponent her base is voting against is also a total media confabulation.

It’s a maximally fake campaign, on every conceivable dimension. If the political process cannot reject a candidate like that, then the political process is meaningless. If they can still steal an election under these circumstances, they can steal an election under all circumstances.

We’re about to learn what kind of country we actually live in — and no one, not even the system itself, knows for sure.

We are in uncharted territory, and USG is continually, blindly probing its own limitations. They are still acting as if the election matters, and they could lose it.

A Kamala victory would reveal to USG that they no longer have anything to fear from electoral politics, because there will never be an election harder to steal than this one. Kamala is a uniquely weak and unpopular candidate — but more importantly, they can consolidate their gains with even more mass immigration and even looser electoral oversight. Entropy is self-accelerating.

An American blind idiot state with even less fear of revolt will slam on the gas. Uncontrolled spending will beget hyperinflation, which will justify expropriation. Uncontrolled immigration will beget social collapse, which will justify crackdowns. The worse the state does, the better it will do.

A certain type of right-wing guy loves to push all his chips into this view of the world, because declaiming the absolute power of our enemies and the futility of action makes him feel smart and clear-eyed and world-wise while absolving him of any responsibility to act.

Maybe that type of guy will be right tomorrow.

But I believe the machine is going to fail.

DNC is asking a less enthusiastic and more divided Left to commit a bigger fraud than last time, under less advantageous conditions (no COVID) and against a more vigilant enemy. You might believe it’s still possible for them to steal it, but you’d be hard pressed to argue that it will be easier.

I think they threw everything they had at Trump in 2020. Many ground-level Democrat election workers are likely thinking the same thing, and they need to be fully convinced. The less they believe it will work, the less it will work.

I think the story of the last eight years is not the consolidation of managerial systems of control, but their failure — and a mob of unimaginative bureaucrats scrambling for alternatives.

The instruments of media-manufactured consent are falling apart in their hands, and USG is trying to hot-swap them for more nakedly coercive tools — but the exact traits that made them apex bullshitters in the old regime make them comically incompetent and unintimidating in this new one.

These are the same type of people — and in some cases the exact same people — who ran the Clinton Administration in the heady 1990s, when the world was green, and America was a free country, and we were all normies.

They aren’t actually any more evil or more powerful than they were then — they’re just more frightened.

The good news is the bad news, which is that nobody is in charge, and nobody knows what they’re doing. Which means that, regardless of who wins or loses, we should be taking a short position in the present system and building for what’s next.

Join us at exitgroup.us.

EXIT News

• On last week’s full-group call, we heard from Tanner Guzy on the role of aesthetics in human cultivation and winning the culture war.

• This week’s full-group call falls on election night, so we’ll have a virtual watch party throughout the night — no specific programming, just watching the Big Game.

• Working groups are back — two-hour blocks to knock out small projects together. Bring something you’ve been putting off, and lets get it done. (Members can check the group calendar or the #announcements channel for the weekly schedule.)

• Dallas airsoft meetup was a success — the boys are indifferent to pain, standing back and standing by, we don’t know what they’re capable of, etc.

• Bay Area Meetup this weekend (11/9). EXIT members will have a family barbecue and hike up in Napa Valley, followed by a cocktail hour for Substack subscribers. RSVP link below the fold.