Thread by @psychosort

Populism, correctly understood, has only one commandment:

Delegitimize the ruling class.

There are many people who want to delegitimize the ruling class, but dislike many mainstream populists, and that's understandable. I certainly have policy disagreements with mainstream populists. I think its a mistake nonetheless to dismiss populism.

This thread is for the libertarians, centrists, classical liberals, and IDW out there. The populists will enjoy it too, because its nice to watch someone who was wrong about you change his mind.

You might have noticed a few puzzles or contradictions in politics. I certainly have. Here are a few to get us started:

A rule of thumb is that any person or institutions who holds power is good at something. At least it's good at holding power. If it's good at holding power despite being bad at what you assume it does, you should question your assumptions.

This is true most obviously with public health authorities. I would not blame anyone for assuming at the start of 2020 that public health authorities exist to protect the health of the citizenry.

Then they implemented destructive lockdowns based on wildly wrong projections. They obstructed the vaccine with bureaucracy, then mandated it. If you think the vaccine works, you should be outraged at their obstruction which killed a hundred thousand people.

This is the "invisible graveyard", or the people who have died because of the negligence of public health. No one was fired for obstructing the vaccine.

A tragic-comedic but lesser-known event happened in early 2020. This was the test-and-trace phase where closing airports and borders, combined with quickly identifying cases, could have worked. It obviously did not, but the reason why is astounding.

The CDC mandated that all tests be done at a single Georgia lab. It banned all other tests. That is already stupid, and slowed everything down. The test was also wrong. It was not just inaccurate, but wildly reporting false positives. It was the worst of all possibilities.

It doesn't matter what your ideology is, that is objectively terrible. You can be as liberal or conservative, libertarian or socialist, and still realize that was a total and complete failure. Who was fired? No one.

At this point you should recall the rule of thumb? Maybe public health does not protect the public health of the citizenry. If you can't get fired for screwing up the tests so badly, what can you get fired for?

You could get fired for suggesting there is even a possibility that the virus originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That's something you could get fired for. People making much more confident and extreme claims about ferrets and minks and wet markets were valorized.

You are fired for nonconformity and intellectual inquiry. You are protected for obstruction and negligence causing death. The one commandment of public health is conformity. Kindly, it is a PR agency; not so kindly, it is a cult.

The second puzzle is legacy media. At this point no one thinks they report the truth, but maybe you think they report stories for sensationalism and clicks. Ok.

This might be true about conservative outlets actually, they're pretty clickbaity and good at it too. But there are plenty of stories, even left-aligned stories, that see no coverage.

Where was the #MeToo outrage about Epstein? It was consciously shut down. npr.org/2019/11/05/776…

Similar stories from the early pandemic, to inflation, to the amber heard trial, were downplayed or dismissed. Plenty of clicks and ad money was left on the table for conservative media to scoop up.

Also, those stories were all true. In case you somehow still think legacy media is supposed to report the truth.

Let's go back to our rule of thumb: how does the NYT still exist and wield influence despite all of this? The same can be said for CNN and MSNBC.

@balajis calls this the school of fish strategy. It works similarly to public health, except the NYT is not accountable to the government or the people. It sets the rules of conformity, creates the flag to rally around. thenetworkstate.com/if-the-news-is…

It's ability to maintain power is directly downstream of its ability to quickly unify a mob. In the internet age, to recruit an army. Its most important metric is the speed of conformity.

So far, all of this is canon within the libertarian/center-right/IDW. Now, I'm going to deviate. The big idea that animates hatred of populists from these groups is the idea that they would be even worse.

I'm going to borrow another idea from @balajis : constraint vs. restraint. A constrained group is one whose action is limited by what they can get away with. A restrained group is one who could be worse if only they were willing to be.

The important fact is that a group constrained on an issue literally could not be worse if replaced with another group with equal power.

Maybe you think the populists would spend worse and create worse inflation if they were still in power. Let me tell you, the republican senate has many sterner budget hawks than joe manchin or kyrsten sinema. Constraint.

Another worry the sheer stupidity of some of the reasoning, especially around anti-vax and stop the steal. I'm going to extend the constraint vs. restraint model using what I call **effective stupidity**.

In the world of politics, its illogical to care about someone who is wrong about something but does not act based on it. We are not be in a moral panic about astrology, even if it is completely wrong and stupid.

We should be similar unconcerned about insane people in straightjackets, who are literally **restrained** from doing anything for their insane beliefs.

Now, let interlude by saying that if youre old or have comobidities, even if you aren't hurting anyone else, you'd still be better off yourself if you take the vaccine. Seriously. If you've gotten this far I might as well try.

For pro-vaccine people like myself, we should ask ourselves who limited the vaccine more. From my limited exposure, I have no heard a single vaccine skeptic call for a ban on vaccines.

Who did call for a ban on vaccines? Eric motherfucking Topol. In september. Amidst one of the worst covid waves that was only accelerating, where the vaccine could have saved the most lives, and after there was ample evidence for any statistical thinker.

If you are pro-vax the FDA has done more to obstruct the world you want to live in than Bret Weinstein or Robert Malone. Think about that for a few seconds.

Anthony fauci and eric topol are effectively more anti-vax than either of them. Their actions did more to reduce the availability of vaccines than the entire anti-vax movements, who have not tried, let alone succeeded, in getting the vaccines banned anywhere.

Finally, let's look at libertarian, center-right and IDW movements. I agree and identifying with parts of all three. I would like many of their policies to become reality. I assume they would too.

Very few of their policies have become law, and many social progressive policies that directly oppose them have. Someone like Desantis, who is populist leaning, was much more effective in implementing those policies.

So is the libertarianism/IDW/center-right movements bad at everything? No! They're good at sticking around. Why are they good at sticking around?

The last psychiatrist writes that omnipotence is the refuge of the utterly powerless. Their main purpose is to create a narrative that major legacy institutions, which reminder are 100% downstream of conformity and 0% downstream of what you think they do.

Some people use the term "controlled opposition" which I think is wrong, at least in the literal sense. I don't think they are getting cheques from social progressives. Like TLP, I think it simply feels good to believe that you have power, even when you don't. That is the point.

I am actually quite am optimistic person, despite all of this. "Well all these things are wrong, and yet life is still alright. Imagine what life could be like if we fixed these things."

But obviously that is not reached by being overly confident about how much power you have. One clear example of their lack of power is what @AuronMacintyre calls "hierarchy, not hypocrisy"

A common phrase is "imagine if the left did this?" This was said about dense crowds in the BLM protests, despite COVID restrictions. It is now said about monkeypox. It is being said about the raid on Trump.

The assumption is that legacy media or bureaucracies have consistent standards. If they had consistent standards, they would be accountable to violating those standards. They violate them all the time, and they're still around! Weird how that works.

This is because those consistent standards do not exist. They simply treat conservatives worse than liberals, whites and asians worse than blacks (and by the way, hispanics you're next if you keep voting for republicans), etc. with each identity group.

By the way they already consider you (libertarian, center-right, or IDW person) the enemy, which they call conservatives, even if you aren't conservative.

They also obviously railroad genuine economic progressives and marxists like Adolph Reed and Freddie Deboer. Most of all look at how they brutally savaged Bernie Sanders. Is this the face of neutrality or tolerance?

Because the ruling class does not believe in neutral principles, they do not believe in following the law if they are not forced to. Once again, constraint, not restraint. The only way to impede them is constraint, which is restricting their power.

This leads us back to the one commandment: delegitimize the ruling class.

One last qualm, exemplified by this article by @RichardHanania, is that conservatives are too focused on personalities instead of ideas.
richardhanania.substack.com/p/liberals-rea…

As I have said before, “Powerless people talk about ideas. Powerful people talk about events. The most powerful people talk about people”.

By the way, a synonym of this statement is "personnel is policy", which almost every washington elected official and staffer agrees with.

This is the inversion of a common saying: “Stupid people talk about people. Smart people talk about events. The smartest people talk about ideas.” Honestly, I get it. Celebrity drama and gossip is incredibly lame. I would be bored if I talked to people only about those things

In reality though, policies mean nothing without the people to enforce them. Institutions are made of people. Changing the institution is impossible without changing those people. I mean replacing them, not convincing them, which won't happen.

This can be replacing the people in the institution, like replacing Joe Biden with Ron Desantis, or it can be replacing the whole institution, like replacing the NYT with Substack.

Nothing else you do will change the NYT or public health or any other legacy institution. They are not downstream of any of the things you assumed they were downstream of. They are downstream of the ability to raise a mob, or to conform to said mob.

The path to libertarianism or classical liberalism or IDW or even David French's milquetoast policy reforms all **necessitates** that legacy institutions be delegitimized.

In other words, it's not just that the populists are not your enemy. It's not just that you should not spit on them or fear monger about them. It's not just that you have a natural alliance with them.

You are already a populist. By necessity. By constraint. Not restraint.

All that I ask is that you act accordingly and rationally to your own principles. By my own analysis I don't expect all or even a majority of you to be swayed. But I expect some of you.

Listen more carefully to @AuronMacintyre, @SohrabAhmari, @ChristinaPushaw, @emeriticus, Curtis Yarvin, @DavidSacks, and @RonDeSantisFL.

@AuronMacintyre @SohrabAhmari @ChristinaPushaw @emeriticus @DavidSacks @RonDeSantisFL Even if you disagree with their ideas, remember restraint vs. constraint. Remember that on almost every issue that matters, they are more constrained than the ruling class. And on some, you might find yourself agreeing with them.

Damn this is a long thread, and it only exists cuz of that tweet that said "most articles should be threads"

P.S. feel free to tag more populists to follow, I'm just beginning to engage with this subcommunity and if I left you off there's a good chance I never heard of you, sorry.

omg how could I forget @bog_beef @Maarblek @CovfefeAnon! Follow them too!

@bog_beef @Maarblek @CovfefeAnon @threadreaderapp unroll