Recently I came across this little gif on twitter, which while crude, does offer an effective visual as to what purpose the current Republican Party apparatus serves in the United States. Simplification of the political actors, NGOs, interest groups, and the wealthy aside, it raises a fundamental observation of why we can’t go backwards. However, I think people using the gif that is shown below think for some foolish reason that Republicans are here to stop things or somehow turn back the clock. It does show, however crudely, that our current batch of American Conservatism has done little to stop anything anywhere, although one could question if it has ever succeeded at all.
Although I am also a fan of the more technical version of this ratchet moving, which includes a vital piece needed for the above mentioned graphic to properly function according to reality.
The fixed spring adds the appropriate missing piece, but we’ll get into that later.
I am not the first writer or observer to note that the leftist march of “progress” is like a ratchet, each turn of the ratchet taking us further while gaslighting the public and telling those who are raising reasonable objections that they’re just participating in the slippery slope fallacy. This happens for a variety of reasons, primarily by being in control of institutions that are the main providers of incentives. These incentives, both economic and social, show groups eager for status and power what to do that moves the ratchet leftward. This is seen by encouraging new scientific dogma through peer review and consensus making to ensure that racism is a public health crisis that can be quantified, even if their studies cannot be replicated.
But how the hell does one become a part of the Pawl in the first place?
A Philia for Apostates
Mainstream progressives, atheists, and moderates (dare I say “centrists”) are always first on the chopping block when it comes to the leftist ratchet, primarily because their rightward opposition has either been effectively neutered by the existing power structure, or its rightist opposition is too busy containing itself with unnecessary knife fighting and ego tripping but more on that later. It is these individuals, who are usually self-identified liberals, who are now the prime targets of the current progressive ideation because they adhere to notions of a “Marketplace of Ideas” rather than “Speech is Violence.”
The “Intellectual Dark Web” which is far more than just a loose connection of personalities and disaffected liberals are the prime example of this. Whether it be the issue of “forced speech” in Peterson’s case or Evergreen College in 2017 for Bret Weinstein (although his brother isn’t doing so bad as the former Managing Director of Thiel Capital either), one can distinctly recall many of these personalities being the sensible, liberal opposition to the civilizational suicide contagion of progressivism. They had found themselves in an awkward spot, not on the right yet not on the left either. Although many of them, ranging from James Lindsay to Jordan Peterson, have found themselves awkwardly in a center-right position that would have been acceptable on the left just decades prior.
Auron MacIntyre explains this as well.
The right tends to follow neoconservative leadership for a very simple reason: In America, progressive credentials determine social and moral standing. Those with the skills for modern technocratic and media-driven leadership tend to acquire them at institutions that transmit progressive values. Those who have most recently fallen from grace are also closest to the progressive zeitgeist and therefore closer to power and prestige.
After all, Neoconservatism was just a disaffected bunch of Trotskyists anyways, a claim not just held by many on the right, but even Francis Fukuyama made this claim three decades ago. However, it is not just the love of apostates that is a unique phenomena out of this current ideological whirlwind of progressivism and reaction,\ but rather, it is a built-in feature that exists within the ratchet leftward, that the pawl, the Republican party, the “center-right” as it were, are meant to be the factor of democracy containing its more extreme elements on the right.
Containment as Designed
While the heading here seems obvious, the question becomes why. In making an idol out of enlightenment democracy, we find ourselves longing for the stability of the system. That form of stability “normalcy” or “the adults are back in charge” that is propagated by both sides of the mainstream political spectrum enables the adage coined by Michael Malice, that conservatives are just progressives going the speed limit. It is the primary reason why we see no major reversals of what’s to come, the argument of “settled law” and why today’s far right deplorables are probably just 90s Democrats.
However, one only needs to go back to The Atlantic in 2017, wherein the Atlantic Council’s Uri Friedman discusses how center right parties help contain and fight against its radical right fringes. This of course comes from Daniel Ziblatt, the author of Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy.
Friedman writes:
Ziblatt also documents how conservative parties have repeatedly struggled to confront radical right-wing forces that pose challenges to democracy. And he articulates a theory for how all this contributed to the breakdown of democracy in 20th-century Germany and the blossoming of democracy in 19th-century Britain. Where conservatives in Western Europe have developed strong party organizations—maintaining control over the selection of candidates, the financing of campaigns, and the mobilization of grassroots activists—democracy has historically tended to be more stable, he argues. The study of conservative parties offers “a framework to understand European history,” Ziblatt told me.
Ziblatt argues that Trump, Hitler, and other right wing fringe figures that rise to power and prominence are aberrations, just as Marine Le Pen lost when many center-right party voters went for Macron or didn’t vote at all.
American writers have made similar observations. George Hawley’s 2015 Book, Right-wing Critics of American Conservatism, highlights a similar historical trend of American’s dominant right wing, the fusionist neoconservatives of the William F. Buckley years. still maintain the spot as king of the hill. This was written before Trump, mind you, but it covers individuals ranging from John Derbyshire to Joseph Sobran alongside attempts to categorize those ranging from Lew Rockwell to Rod Dreher. Hawley notes how prominent firings, or expulsions from the National Review and effective ostracization of The John Birch Society demonstrates Ziblatt’s thesis.
However, I am not a fan of democracy. I am not a fan of watching Republican Politicians, many in the same decades long career, support the outright banning of gay marriage choose now to vote for the codification of homosexual marriage?. (Does anyone seem to remember just twenty years ago that the big fear was George W. Bush pushing a constitutional amendment to keep marriage within its heterosexual confines?) Between the effective consensus making apparatus of media, government, academia and advertising, anyone who actually stands close to their beliefs, will inevitably be tossed out.
The slight benefit, however, although it serves no salve, is that the internet age shows that no one is truly canceled as those that are can always make a possible comeback.
The Spring
So, in the above referenced graphics, we saw the pawl being held in its place by the fixed spring to keep it in place. This is what keeps the pawl serving its job ensuring we can never go backward. In the GOP in the United States, its most liberal member will still have a massive partisan gap to overcome with the most conservative Democrat. However, this political speciation doesn’t stop the “uniparty” or political convergence when it comes to making sure the system actually functions.The House GOP can talk about defunding the IRS agents or capping defense spending, but this is nothing more than theatrics as they have no control over the White House, the Senate, or the Civil Service. Their loudest proclamations have no power to accomplish anything that would substantially push the system in a rightward direction. Their actions are just that: Procedural. Kabuki. Theater.
The spring holds it in place, keeps it tightly positioned. The focus of the Pawl itself is nothing without the spring. The spring of acceptable discourse, the Overton window, and the incentives to stay in line (kompromat, insider trading, etc), all of which make it profitable to not want to be seen as the bad guy. Democracy, in a total media state, means it is better to be the media darling or be with the mob than it is to stand with principles. Ethics my dear, aren’t found too often in politics. Mr. Smith goes to Washington, only to inevitably be tempted, photographed, and blackmailed into voting against his principles. Matt Gaetz or Jim Jordan are good examples of this, whether its allegations of underage girls or being aware of sexual abuse and wrestling scandals.
The spring of containment, to work off of Ziblatt’s thesis (an interesting one with some explanatory power, partially why the GOP is all on board to condemn anyone to the right of Rand Paul) explains why millions of dollars are spent each year on the subject of “deradicalization” or producing confidential informants to make the dissidents in America look like armed extremists. From the Viper Militia to the recent Whitmer Kidnapping Plot, the damning indictments never account for the actual facts of the case.
The other aspect of the spring that irks me is when individuals claim to change things from within the system.
A movement’s leader would need to, according to Mr. Carson Wolff the Seventh (great name btw). need to have the disposable capital and the will to do so. Trump had that, but did not follow through when it came to governance. Even Elon Musk in his wealth is still subservient to the federal government by the nature of his contracts, tax breaks, and Twitter being one of the largest hubs wherein governments, both American and foreign, engage in information warfare and espionage on a daily basis.
Even the NYT’s article on Rufo highlights some of the key problems about trying to take the leftist strategy.
Rufo often talks about the “long march through the institutions,” a phrase coined by the German socialist Rudi Dutschke in 1967 but frequently attributed to the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci. Thwarted in their hope of imminent revolution, the new left of Dutschke’s generation sought instead to bore into political and cultural institutions, working within the system to change the basic assumptions of Western society. Rufo’s trying, he said, to “steal the strategies and the principles of the Gramscian left, and then to organize a kind of counterrevolutionary response to the long march through the institutions.”
However, it is important to note that just as much as the left gatekeeps, the establishment right does too. There are Claremont Fellows and people at Hillsdale who know who you and I are, dear reader, and would like us to stay in our little space on YouTube, Odysee, Telegram, Twitter, and other online ghettos while the big, credentialed adults speak. I want their jobs, or better yet, I want them to actually do something. Yet the nature of keeping those with plans and the organizational know-how is essential.
Eugyppius makes a good point here too.
Additionally, even if you wanted to pull the yoke back and tell educational institutions to stop encouraging kids to castrate themselves or to have Christian Churches not be inhabited by demons under the guise of “drag,” the spring snaps you back to its happy center-right position in case you wanted to try a leftist approach to politics. To take from Murray Rothbard, quote;
Another alternative right-wing strategy is that commonly pursued by many libertarian or conservative think tanks: that of quiet persuasion, not in the groves of academe, but in Washington, D.C., in the corridors of power. This has been called the "Fabian" strategy, with think tanks issuing reports calling for a two percent cut in a tax here, or a tiny drop in a regulation there. The supporters of this strategy often point to the success of the Fabian Society, which, by its detailed empirical researches, gently pushed the British state into a gradual accretion of socialist power.
The flaw here, however, is that what works to increase state power does not work in reverse. For the Fabians were gently nudging the ruling elite precisely in the direction they wanted to travel anyway. Nudging the other way would go strongly against the state's grain, and the result is far more likely to be the state's co-opting and Fabianizing the think tankers themselves rather than the other way around. This sort of strategy may, of course, be personally very pleasant for the think tankers, and may be profitable in cushy jobs and contracts from the government. But that is precisely the problem.
One needn’t be as libertarian as Rothbard to highlight how trying to be a Fabian or a Gramscian doesn’t work for the dissident parts of the right, and under the current paradigm, the dissident right will always exist because fellows like Pedro Gonzalez will listen but not take the advice on what is necessary to solve the problem. However, you reach a problem when it comes to what is necessary. What I might find necessary to fix our ills may be different from yours, the question becomes if the opportunity arose, do you have the will? Even Michael Anton will tell you, as will anyone on the right, that we are not the men, ideologically or biologically.
Breaking the Pawl
The obvious question becomes, “how do you break the pawl?” Or better yet, “how does one break the spring?” How does one effectively escape the Overton window, or avoid being snapped back into the discursive kayfabe that makes up our day-to-day talking head politics?
When reading up on how various types of Pawls break, the answers definitely varied, which makes this metaphor somewhat difficult. So far, however, the answers that I have read up on appear to correlate rather well with some current political thought.
Acceleration - bring the ratchet up to a speed so fast that the pawl wears down and is effectively useless.
Freezing - a rapid onset of cold temperatures can effectively break the pawl, either by having the spring snap or by getting it so cold it snaps when trying to move.
Misuse - Attempting to go the opposite direction with enough force that the pawl breaks.
Numbers Two and Three can be something along these lines. Acceleration I feel, needs no introduction.
Misuse (#3) involves infiltration, entryism, and trying to take existing infrastructure and repurpose it for the desires of actually trying to turn the clock back. Historically done the most often; however it does not seem to work lest major stress on the system takes place. However, the Trump administration, for the shock that he was and still is as a haunting specter of politics, seems to have shown the resiliency of the ratchet.
Freezing (#2) would be something that doesn’t seem expected, such as a coup, major collapse of infrastructure (catabolic or otherwise) that leaves a power vacuum, wherein things are frozen in a particular place, where if we were to try and go leftward things might just snap. You could have had this with January 6th, 2021, but God doesn’t like it when you play pretend. However, this could also mean being in a deep dark winter of “how bad things are” that would have individuals wanting a thaw, rather than wanting to enjoy yet another frigid bitch telling them how to behave themselves and what kind of stove they should own.
I will be honest and say that this requires more thought, most of the conversation seems to be working within the framework of a bloodless revolution, although even the cleanest of regime changes still had tanks on the ground and fire on parliament buildings. As someone who lives in arguably the most powerful geopolitical entity on the face of the earth, I too wouldn’t want to accelerate on the “give war a chance” argument. Although it isn’t death that I fear, it is the judgment seat I’d stand before afterwards.
I will write a second part to this piece in the coming weeks, but your feedback and support will help as I try and think this out. After all, the “leftist ratchet” could just be a poor linguistic tool, but then again, there are powerful people who are turning things in a certain direction.
Very good piece. The intro ratchet gif was so compelling I had to subscribe to read the whole thing