Why every single constituency of the anti-Left is useless
California is mooting a “one time” (lol) tax on residents whose net worth exceeds $1 billion, amounting to 5% of their total assets.
The tech libtards with the courage of their convictions are promising to stay and eat the tax, but Chamath Palihapatiya estimates that $1 trillion in billionaire wealth has already left — not to speak of corporate wealth — mostly to Texas.
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For all leftists’ talk about the unaccountable power of the Tech Oligarchs, they’re being routed without a fight from their home: a city whose wealth and power they can credibly claim to have built (at least as a class), and which is among the most beautiful places on earth.
This is, of course, a death-spiral move for the state of California — but the real puzzle is this:
For what they’ll spend on relocation costs alone, the tech exiles could have bought the entire California political system in perpetuity.
The last San Francisco mayoral race involved around $34M including all candidates, as well as independent spending. The gubernatorial contenders in 2022 spent about the same, maybe a little less (Newsom was a lock). The California legislative races (state house and senate) combined probably total $250M. The sum of spending on ballot measures is about $400M, with another $500M for the US House and Senate.
Based on these expansive, generous estimates, the entire California political system costs, at most, $3 billion per election cycle.
If you wanted to be the dominant donor in every single California political race, in every cycle, you might have to budget $75M per year. In a pinch, Elon could cut that check all by himself — he donates more than that to his charitable trust every year for tax purposes.
A more disciplined operation, focused on key races and ballot initiatives, could get all the juice it needed for half as much. And that’s if you want to lock up the whole state — stabilizing San Francisco politics would be a rounding error.
In short: any one of the wealthiest Silicon Valley billionaires could (in theory) transform California’s political landscape all by himself.
If Big Tech organized as a class, they could do it effortlessly, at personal costs they would hardly notice — but it’s obvious to anyone with even passing familiarity with these people that they will never do anything like this.
Elon Musk is by far the most radical and iconoclastic of the Silicon Valley billionaires, and he’s nowhere near this — which would, itself, be an embarrassingly petty exercise of political power by the standards of the wealthiest men in history. (Or even in comparison with the industrialists of the turn of the 20th century.)
There’s no point in jerking off about how dumb this is, and how we’d do a better job with their money — but it’s worth asking why their wealth seems to mean so little: even if they have no grand vision to instantiate, you’d think that at least they’d be able to avoid getting run out of town by spiteful mutants.
You can come up with structural excuses for this:
The wealthiest Americans are smaller relative to the state, and less concretely tied to its coercive function, than historical aristocracies.
The wealthiest man in America contributes ~0.1% of US tax receipts (and the dollar empire is much bigger than US tax receipts), while the most powerful rebel baron in 1215 held around 3.5% of England’s “knight’s fees” (a handy combined metric of land, military levy, and tax revenue.) States are just way bigger and more powerful than they used to be, relative to any one person.
Also, shares in a tech company aren’t the same kind of wealth as lands that support a knight and his retinue. Tech wealth is a claim on future cash flows that are meaningfully contingent on a) the stability of the stock market, b) the stability of the dollar, c) the stability of global trade, d) continued availability of credit & funding rounds, e) favorable media coverage, etc.
The fakeness of the global economy is an underrated source of its strength. No matter how many Fedbuxx a billionaire has on the computer, he can’t meaningfully abscond with them, or use them to destabilize the system — the Fedbuxx are the system. They have no meaning outside of it.
But these are, of course, fake excuses:
As long as the system keeps humming, they (and you, anon) might exchange Fedbuxx for real-world goods and services, which can be converted into power.
George Soros bought colossal political power that was just lying around, that nobody cared about, by funding nationwide DA and judicial elections for a couple million dollars a year — far less than the largest individual donor to your local college football team.
At the time of this writing, a private entrepreneur has (allegedly) secured all of Haiti’s natural resources and ports for (purportedly) a modest 8-figure sum.
Moreover, Elon himself controls the US military’s orbital launch infrastructure, and therefore its access to space — especially if that domain is ever contested, and new assets need to be put into orbit quickly. This means that the efficacy of America’s exquisitely-integrated weapons systems would depend on Elon continuing to do his patriotic utmost in a crisis. That seems like a lot of leverage!
And yet, Elon, who ought to be the most powerful man in America by any conventional standard, seems to post pretty much exactly like a guy who owns a car dealership. Look at the hypocrisy, look at the double standards, the Woke Left has truly gone insane this time.
The tech billionaires aren’t alone in this — basically every powerful national figure upon whom we might stake our hopes thinks and talks the same way.
A moralizing explanation is just incorrect, as well as unhelpful: these people aren’t risk-averse; they certainly aren’t lazy. Sure, they aren’t Achilles — but they aren’t up against Hector, either.
If they felt that it was right to obtain real power, there’s little doubt that they could — and that’s what is in the way.
Elon is the best example, but it’s true of all of them: he is very comfortable (and skilled) at exercising power in the form of money.
This is not to say that “all he cares about is money.” Elon is a genuine romantic, in the way that tech people can be.
But like virtually all of his class, he is a genuine spiritual libertarian, all the way down to his balls, which means that the only human relations he understands (or regards as fully legitimate) are legible, voluntary, reciprocal transactions between individuals — which is to say, money transactions.
Within that world, though, among people who know and respect such things, he is widely regarded as Napoleonic in his ability to inspire (and demand) excellence from extraordinary people. If it can be extracted with the promise of money (or the threat of being fired), Elon can extract it.
The problem is that basically every significant question that we face now lies outside that moral framework.
As technology shrinks geographic distances (and expands moral/psychological ones), the space of public shared values has collapsed — and with it, the things that can be settled by “the market” (i.e. voluntary mutual agreement.)
Everything in the West has become Politicized — fewer and fewer aspects of everyday life conform to a common framework under which we can agree to be governed, within which we can cooperate voluntarily.
One perspective must rule, and the other must be ruled: that’s politics.
Politics can, in fact, be understood as “the set of human questions that cannot be settled via voluntary reciprocal transactions between individuals in a free market”.
In other words, politics is violence.
It includes direct violence, like fighting wars and killing criminals, but also taxation and regulation, which are backed by the threat of violence. It is, definitionally, the domain of coercive power processes.
Markets, meanwhile, are the domain of power processes beneath the aegis of the political — where the role of force is occulted.
Neither party in a market transaction applies coercive force — but only because an unseen third party applies force against both parties, insuring their respective property rights, enforcing contracts, etc.
What makes a libertarian a libertarian, morally/spiritually/temperamentally, is the belief that there ought not to be any outside power process.
Libertarians reach the (important) insight that all politics is violent, and thereby conclude that politics is illegitimate as such.
The heart of this moral frame is that power (“force”, “aggression”, “coercion”), is definitionally evil, and definitionally contraposed with freedom, which is good. To the degree that power is exercised, freedom is abrogated.
Huge swaths of people who call themselves “conservative” — virtually everyone we would call a “sympathetic normie” — is actually libertarian in this dispositional sense. The Republican politician, if he is animated by any ideals at all, is animated by libertarian ideals.
“Small government”, “the Constitution”, “the rule of law” — these are all different ways of saying, “I should not be in charge, because no one should be in charge — we should all just play by the mutually-agreed rules, so that all transactions can be voluntary and reciprocal.”
To be clear: their stupidity on this point is the only reason they are not leftists.
In fact, his stupidity is almost (but not quite) the only thing that binds the anti-Left coalition together.
I’ll explain why in a second, but first let’s talk about why this is a stupid thing to say and believe.
The first problem with this frame is that power, like matter and energy, is conserved.
The problem was well-understood by the Romans 2,000 years ago.
We can say that a ruler should “obey the Constitution”, but the Constitution cannot be obeyed — it does not have an intent, except maybe James Madison’s, and he’s not here to explain himself.
So someone has to evaluate whether the Constitution has been “obeyed”. Is it James Madison’s intent that is sacred? Should we conduct a seance?
Maybe we accept that Madison was a mere mortal — is there some magic in the words themselves, something God-breathed? Even then, scripture is not self-interpreting: which prophet or priest is authorized to discern the divine will from the words, and why them?
No matter what theory you have about what the Constitution is and what it means, in the end you are left alone with the words on the page. Theocracy doesn’t mean “rule by God”, it means “rule by priests”. “Rule of law” means “rule by lawyers”.
No matter what Rube Goldberg machine we construct to govern us, it will be composed of human beings — and in the final analysis, some human being has to decide what to do.
Power is always conserved, because someone always decides.
The second problem with this frame is that power and freedom are synonyms.
Because someone always decides, there is no such thing as “being left alone”.
“Leave me alone” is a command, and the power to command works the same regardless of its content. Either you are strong enough to make uncooperative people do what you want, or you are not.
The man who says “I just want enough power to defend my rights” is, in fact, saying “I want enough power to impose my will on everyone who disagrees with me about what my rights are”.
You may insist on using power defensively, but you can’t insist on having power defensively. A gun means the same thing in a home defense as it does in a home invasion: “Do what I say or I am going to kill you.”
There is no special category of pure, righteous, NAP-compliant power that works some other way.
The tribe across the valley wants your land; you want to keep it. These are symmetric, mutually incompatible claims, and they are not self-enforcing: someone is going to decide.
And, in general, that person is not going to be you.
Because threats to individual rights come in the form of mobs/armies, virtually every person who has ever lived on earth has owed their freedom (such as it was) to a guarantor — a sovereign who organizes collective violence.
By definition, this cannot be a voluntary arrangement, because the whole reason to outsource your security to a sovereign guarantor is that he can deploy more coercive power than you can. That’s “what you pay him for”, so to speak.
If the sovereign lacks the power to revoke your freedom, then he also lacks the power to defend it: they are reciprocal expressions of a single capacity.
This doesn’t mean that your relationship to the guarantor must be abusive, or even adversarial.
In fact, being ruled by a sovereign who roughly shares your values and political interests is what most people mean by “freedom”.
Being aligned with the sovereign means you are free to do all the things you actually want to do, and — just as important — it also means you are protected from competing claims that you regard as predatory, criminal, and tyrannical. His sovereignty is your sovereignty.
When Hollywood libtards say they feel more free in Canada or the UK, they mean it: the fact that you do not feel free there is part of what makes them feel free, and vice versa — because your notions of freedom involve symmetric and mutually incompatible claims.
Leftists understand all of this intuitively.
They understand that force sets the default of all social and cultural questions.
Everything you take for granted as a freely chosen, reciprocal relationship — your job, your mortgage, your marriage, your relationship with your children — is, in fact, shaped by the invisible architecture of force that defines all the parties’ options, expectations, and legal rights.
You love your wife, and your wife loves you — but your community’s collective tacit knowledge of divorce law colors how and when and why you got married, what your mutual expectations were, and how you were taught to cooperate.
There is no neutral way to “referee” sociocultural questions like:
what is a woman
what is a marriage
what tradeoffs should be made to ensure public order
who is (or ought to be) “equal” to whom, and on which axes of comparison
who has which rights to what property, based on which historical claims
The system cannot be neutral — these questions will be answered in the law — in one person’s interest, and against another’s.
The system only feels neutral when it conforms to your moral intuitions and doesn’t get in your way. The Woke are Correct when they point this out.
Leftists are power-hungry because they see the world’s answers to all these questions as badly upside-down, and so they want the power to change the world — and they’re not so afraid of screwing it up. It’s already screwed up.
This is the one sense in which leftist perspective is more sane and healthy than yours and mine.
A conservative or a libertarian (which is to say, most of Trump’s voting base, and ~100% of his institutional support) is a liberal who just doesn’t want to go where liberalism is obviously headed.
But because he has no alternative moral framework to justify imposing an alternative trajectory, all he can say is “no”. He wants to stop the world so he can get off.
Many of these are smart people, and many of them have heard these arguments before: power is conserved; the rules are not self-interpreting; someone always decides. A surprising number of these guys have read Yarvin.
But the conclusion — Therefore, we need to make sure we are the ones who decide — is the problem.
In that directive, the conservative is denied recourse either to scriptural or constitutional exegesis — he cannot derive his justification for action from any outside consensus understanding. Neither Madison nor Paul can take the rap — he has to own his decision.
He has to say “actually, my moral and spiritual intuitions about the way things ought to be are simply correct, and I’m going to insist upon them — not just for me, but for everyone.”
He looks out over the edge of that cliff, and his head swims. To say that, and mean it, is very near his bedrock definition of wickedness — the Ring of Power.
So he flees back into the maze of procedure and authority, looking for someone to tell him what to do. Maybe we just haven’t done enough to Insist Upon virtuous judges and politicians and administrators. What if we Insisted Harder? Has anyone tried that?
Relatedly: this is why Western conservatism (and Christianity) has been eaten alive by postmodernism:
If the text does not supply its own interpretation, then you are, ultimately, left alone with your discernment — which is to say, your judgment, intuition, feelings, even taste. You may say, “I am too wise and humble to trust my spiritual intuitions” — sorry, friend, that’s what you’ve got.
It feels like an almost unsolvable problem: we are who we are, and the billionaires and politicians are who they are: you can’t insist upon a moral conviction that isn’t there.
And yet, if there were not some glimmer of will in these people, we would not live in such polarized and angry times.
What unites all these disparate factions of the “anti-Left” is the conviction that something about our present condition is intolerable.
They have a nagging feeling, in mounting tension with their liberal principles, that sitting on their hands and letting These Fucking People take over the world is a sin for which they will not be held guiltless.
And why is that? Why can’t these good, Christian men just renounce this fallen, wicked world, and let the Bolsheviks have it? Why do they experience anguish of conscience at the thought of doing that?
In short: because they are fathers.
Your son is not a market actor. He doesn’t get to pick his school, his friends, his neighborhood. He can’t move his operations to Texas, or Mars.
He is hostage to whatever institutional environment his father tolerates. And right now, that institutional environment wants to destroy him, body and soul.
So, if you want a permission structure, here it is: whatever indignities you may be called to suffer personally, you are not authorized, as a father, to sacrifice your child to Moloch. You do not have the right to allow that to happen.
You will not be able to say, in the Judgment, “I was so afraid of doing my job wrong that I decided not to do it at all”.
If we are called to protect our loved ones, then we are called to subdue their enemies (again, that’s what “protecting” means, if it means anything — “leave me alone” is a command.)
And if we are called to subdue their enemies, then we are called to govern — someone is going to decide, and it cannot be these enemies, so it must be us.
That may seem impossibly far off, but look back at the math at the top of the post:
The normiecon money flowing into your state college football team — forget about the tech money — would be enough to carve out breathing room, if it were in the hands of people who were not afraid to govern.
It’s a long road, but not impossible: crises are coming for these hostile institutions no matter what we do, as they buckle under generations of accumulated ideological contradictions. I’m not saying we should wait for things to fall apart on their own — they won’t (at least, not in any way you’d want) — but volatile and disorganized conditions amplify the power of organized, well-positioned actors.
The question is, who will build and organize for power? Who will be in position to govern when these institutions no longer can?
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