January 6, 2021 was a calamity, much bigger than the one you’re thinking of.
To set the record straight at the top: I abhor political violence coming from any quarter. Those who fought with police and broke into Congress, and those who directly incited them, should be punished according to the law, just as those who besieged courthouses, burned cities, and incited that violence across 2020 should have been.
My opposition to political violence is on the principle of the matter certainly, but also practically. Political violence almost always backfires on the desired objectives of its participants. This was true of the Black Lives Matter riots; after George Floyd’s death, support for BLM spiked to an all-time high. After weeks of rioting, burning and looting, support for BLM ebbed to levels lower than before the tragedy. On January 6, the Congressional invasion shattered all opposition to Democrat party consolidation of power. It is now almost complete. The seine net, laid carefully over years of concerted effort, has been closed. Here’s what that means.
If you haven’t heard of purse seine fishing, it involves using a very long net weighted on one edge and buoyed on the other so that it hangs vertically in the water. In open water commercial fishing, massive seine nets are set in a circle thousands of yards in circumference. After the net has been so set, the bottom of the net is closed in order to trap the fish between the net and the surface, and the top of the net is then drawn in to harvest thousands of fish en masse. It’s a massive, slow moving and flexible trap.
How has the trap been set for us? Welcome to the ‘Long March through the Institutions’. First some back story:
Socialism was invented, proposed and executed in the 20th century on the premise that the ‘engineered society’ 'with ‘scientific politics’ would deliver humanity from the errors of history; if the right people—sufficiently committed to Socialist precepts—were given enough power, they could deliver universal equitable prosperity and peace to all mankind.
From 1914-1975, a wave of Socialist revolutions took place, with the victors implementing Socialist economic agendas at the point of a gun. Two unanticipated results emerged from these experiments:
The vicious nature of the people required to win such revolutions resulted in a massive amount of political violence. The military bloodshed was just the beginning of that; civil liberties were eviscerated in the interests of bringing about the ‘workers paradise’, on the promise they would be restored later. Secret police institutions were set up to guard against ‘counterrevolutionaries’ and dissidents. ‘Reeducation’ camps were set up to corral, intimidate and punish opposition. The cost in lives was in the hundreds of millions. As described above, the vicious results of the supposedly idealistic and beneficent political theory caused a backlash in countries more wedded to the anachronistic principles of personal liberty and limited government.
Even when sufficiently implemented, Socialist economic theories failed to deliver the promised prosperity. The high water mark of Socialist economics occurred mid-20th century, as dozens of nations in all economic strata implemented the required confiscation and redistribution of wealth, and placed ideologically ideal candidates in charge of industry. Gone was the ‘capitalist’ idea that individuals and companies would vie with each other in a free market system to provide society’s goods and services. Instead, economics would be planned, built and controlled from a core set of elites. These supposedly wise, good and powerful individuals would deliver the prosperity required, and make sure it was distributed equitably. These economic experiments were attempted around the world, in countries which experienced violent revolutions, and in ones which acquiesced quietly. Universally, these experiments failed to deliver: nations from Soviet Russia to Eastern Europe to China to Cambodia experienced famine and deprivation. Softer attempts such as in the Nordic countries and Western Europe were dialed back quietly and free market reforms brought prosperity back to these nations as they went. Almost all ‘collective ownership’ of industry has been withdrawn.
By the late 1960’s, even as the US began to lose the Vietnam war against Communist opposition, it had become clear that the Communist program of Socialist revolution was never going to work; other than Russia, no industrially developed nations overthrew their capitalist oppressors as had been envisaged by Socialist theorists. The workers were just too well compensated by Free Market economics to unite in a violent overthrow.
Socialist proponents proposed new strategies: Critical Theory and the ‘Long March Through the Institutions’.
Recognizing that economic grievances were insufficient to the purpose of motivating large numbers of people to overthrow the superior economics of the Free Market, Critical Theory sought to create and incentivize blocks of people to adopt other grievances, and to propose Socialist solutions to those problems: racism, sexism, environmentalism, transgenderism, etc, to add to the classical economic grievances. To be clear, there are valid grievances in all these areas, and true social progress requires us to recognize and redress those problems. Critical Theory’s objectives, however, require that those grievances remain front and center in society as a permanent and growing state of crisis, until the Socialist utopia has been realized, at which point Peak Equity will be declared and you might not want to say otherwise publicly. CT’s proposed solutions always point to increasing centralized power, and only to those individuals sufficiently pure in their Socialist programming, or at least to those submissive to them.
The ‘Long March’ sought to execute a slow-rolling Socialist revolution using alternative vectors; whereas the original, failed attempts started in the fields, factories and academies with farmers, workers and students dropping their work implements and picking up weapons to conduct death and mayhem in the streets, they would instead spend their lives using their daily duties as weapons themselves to capture those institutions, purge dissidents and non-believers, and then turn those institutions against others not yet captured—the goal is a collapse of the capitalist system, not by its own inefficiencies as had been experienced by Socialist economics, but by sabotage. If sufficiently sabotaged, it was theorized that Socialist economics would finally work as no competing example would remain. The concept of ‘opportunity cost’ would be erased, as whatever the actual economic result, we would never know what another system could have delivered given the same inputs. The counter example of Western prosperity was at the core of the failure of the Soviet empire. This cannot be tolerated.
Through the last 50 years in the US and to similar degree in the rest of the West, the ‘salami slicing’ of society into blocks of opposition to free market capitalism, the consolidation of power into central governments, and the capitulation of various institutions has progressed: the Universities went first, infiltrated as they already were. The Democrat party went quickly as well, followed by increasing numbers of Republicans who sought to color Socialist solutions with Free Market watercolors to maintain the appearance of opposition. Spasms of liberty such as the Reagan era, fall of the Soviet/Warsaw Pact system only made the Long March longer, it did not thwart it. The Trump years accelerated it, as Trump’s personal weaknesses allowed media to maintain a four-year-long sense of crisis that climaxed in 2020.
Key to the success of the Long March, as with any revolution, was the capture of the means of communication. In the violent revolutions it meant that trucks of well-armed men would arrive at all the radio and TV stations at the moment of a coup and force their disinformation across the airwaves, proclaiming their power and good intentions, and blaming any adverse results or problems on their opposition. American media companies have capitulated to the Long March incrementally, thwarted only by the Free Market expressions of the Internet through Youtube, Facebook, Twitter and other individual websites and applications. Those companies were one by one captured by the Long March.
In the last few years, the captured institutions started to exert ever greater social pressure to ensure the success of their version of events: the Narrative. The Narrative acknowledges only the most helpful or inobscurable facts, while ‘debunking’, ignoring, perjuring and blocking all countervailing information, sources and speakers. Dissident perspectives are not sought, welcomed or tolerated, and dissidents have found themselves progressively blocked by the Revolutionista communications behemoths. True to Long March theory, it started with the weirdos, progressed to the obscure, and is now cancelling mainstream opposition to the Narrative.
With the capitulation of the last remaining Republicans after the Jan 6 riot, the purse seine loop is now closed. Time to draw the bottom of the net.
Prepare to see opposing voices disappear from public settings. Civil liberties to be squelched under terms like ‘objectionable’, ‘hate speech’, ‘disinformation’. Bank accounts to be frozen arbitrarily, jobs to be lost on spurious grounds. Given the massive size of America’s power, economy and influence on the world, this capture will not require Gulags; it will become a Gulag in its entirety. One in which prisoners, workers and prison guards all coexist in the same camp, with rights, earnings and even life necessities determined by fealty to the Narrative and the powers that control it.
I hear your objections:
You can leave.
Of course, escape is possible. Lovers of Liberty can leave and find somewhere else more amenable; but that will only delay the ultimate result. Socialism does not tolerate variation.
What about the courts?
A lot of judges openly support the Socialists’ objectives, and will make any judgement in their favor with any rationale: see Judge Sullivan blocking the dismissal of charges against Gen. Flynn, which he had no right to do. Others are institutionalists, meaning they will do what they perceive as necessary to protect the power and prestige of their own institution—which given the pervasiveness of the Narrative, they can be safely ‘guided’ to the desired results: see the transformation John Roberts from Republican originalist to leftist sycophant, or the failure of a single court to actually hear evidence on any of the election fraud cases (they were 100% dismissed on technical grounds without evidentiary hearings). I guarantee the Supreme Court, packed or not, will not be any check on Leftist power in the coming years.
Given the metastasizing web of US laws and regulations, our courts have become an effective means of providing an enforcement mechanism for the Elite, as prosecutorial discretion and other judgement calls result in arbitrary prosecutions targeting political opposition: see Roger Stone’s conviction for ‘lying to Congress’ while James Clapper was given a prominent voice at CNN after provably doing the same thing—not even a question of a charge.
What about the military? Surely they wouldn’t tolerate such a takeover?
In the US, civilian control of the military is a paramount principle, for good reasons. They will not thwart political power, which now lies entirely in one party’s hands.
But Democracy? Surely if the story of the capture is true, enough people will object and change the political direction?
This is the genius of Critical Theory: bottling people who would normally have divergent perspectives and self-sourced personal objectives into controllable echo chambers where reality will not easily penetrate, crisis and partisanship can be cultivated, and ‘the greater good’ always wins over self-interest. If A divided opposition is an ineffective opposition. This is also why the capture of all communications is so important; why Parler has been banned from our Smart Phones; why so many individuals’ and organizations’ accounts have been purged from social media. Anyone sufficiently successful in thwarting the Narrative must be silenced in order to maintain the milieu: the ecosystem of information that fully surrounds and informs us, that we can only perceive and question with great effort and principle.
But surely, the final and most valid objection pleads: there’s no physical violence here, and after all, if 51% of people acquiesce, Democracy is satisfied if not Liberty. Maybe even the economic results will be tolerable, and we can all forget the Free Market system that for a time seemed so effective?
My answer to this: if what you were proposing is an observational experiment in effective results for Socialism and Free Market(ish) Capitalism, the closest thing possible to that happened in the 20th century, and Capitalism won in a resounding crash of the Berlin Wall. In the last 30 years, the growth of free markets have delivered an incredible drop in worldwide poverty even as the Long March concluded its power move and began to exert that power. Do you think that after ultimate power has been achieved, once opposition has been silenced, after the net has been drawn, you will have the ability to decide differently? That we can reverse all this and return to status quo ante? That the powerful will decide they were wrong and release their grip? I fear you will find that your own security in the new world we are becoming will depend greatly on your own obeisance to those to whom you have entrusted power. When it comes for you, you will quickly find the truth of what I’m saying here. Power’s only real objective and option is to maintain that power.
Is there no hope then?
It is slim. The net isn’t yet closed. If opposition can quickly consolidate in large numbers, we can maintain the independent communications channels, we can reward free market efforts, companies and individuals, we can escape the Critical Theory salami slicing by combining into a single block of people dedicated to our shared Liberty who will not be silenced. We can liberalize the institutions. But we have to act now. If we don’t, we will never recover the capability to object. After enough time, we may not even remember what it was like to be free.