Thread by @Mssr_le_Baron

I recently read this book, "The Yankee and Cowboy War". I'd like to sum up the book and share some of my critiques, coming from one of the alleged "Cowboy" families. Essentially, it commits a failure of analysis common with many analyses - corkboarding.

But first, what is the Yankee and Cowboy War? The gist of it is that the conservative power in America, roughly what NRx calls "REDGOV", can further be subdivided into two groups: Cowboys and Yankees, with different material interests.

Cowboys is his name for a group as follows. Roughly, it is the military-industrial complex, its brain in the West, specifically the "Iron Triangle" of Orange County, California. It is the China lobby, the contractors, CIA-Ops Division, and the Pacific Empire.

Yankees, on the other hand, are composed of the WASP families, Wall Street finance power, the Irish-Italian Ellis Island electoral machines and their mafias, CIA-Intel division, the Anglophiles of Milner's Kindergarten, NATO, and the Atlanticists.

The politics of the 1960s and 1970s are framed as a shadow war within the clandestine state, what we would now call the "Deep State", and political shakeups and major events are skirmishes between these two broad factions over control of US institutions.

For instance, the credit attack on Hughes by its bankers becomes a Yankee-Cowboy skirmish. The Kennedies are assassinated one by one to keep Cowboy ascendency. Nixon's rise to power is framed as a Cowboy plot to wrest control from the East to the West.

It's an interesting thesis, and it's important to think of politics in terms of actors and material interests. But unfortunately, it falls prey to "corkboarding". Am I saying that the ties mentioned are all fake? Not at all, and most are real.

But the problem with drawing ties as simple lines is that with a couple lines, you can connect lots of people to each other. I can reach any politician or CEO in America with just a few skips of mutual dealings. This does not mean very much at all.

Instead, let's step back. In computer science, we have this concept called a "graph". A graph is a set of nodes connected by edges with weights in a network. Through graph theory, we can mathematize what networks look like. And the ruling class, like all power, is a network.

The fundamental currency of politics is power, which is the ability to deploy resources en masse, and the way to get resources at scale, fundamentally, is organization. Bringing many actors together. If we imagine every node as an actor, we can give them a weight for their power.

If the nodes are different players and their power levels, then what are the edges? The edges connecting the nodes are the relationships. And the weight of the edge is loyalty. Loyalty is a measure of how faithfully a node will carry out the will of another node.

The problem of politics is getting many high value nodes together and maximizing what you get out of them (how loyal they are to you). This is why Bioleninism is powerful - it builds loyalty.

The problem with corkboarding is that it draws ties disregarding the strength of the ties between them. Some deals are struck from loyalty and mutual sacrifice, from shared ties of group feeling. But some deals are just mutually beneficially to do.

In the Cowboys/Yankee theory, Watergate is brought about by the struggle between East and West, typified by Meyer Lansky and Howard Hughes fighting over who gets to influence President Nixon. Lansky is typed as the Yankee and Hughes the Cowboy.

But why is Lansky considered a Yankee? The connection between his mobsters and General Dynamics is well-known - you could say he was tied to the defense interests instead. Why are Irish machines considered Yankees when they existentially opposed WASP Republicans in the Northeast?

Because you can draw a line from anyone to anyone, if you start corkboarding, you can create any two arbitrary groupings. And they will look plausible - until you examine different sets of deals. Oglesby has Morgan and Rockefeller as "friends".

They were not friends.

Let's return to our graphs. What is a node? A node is a single political actor. But what does that mean? Fundamentally, it means a kind of organization. So what do the levels of political organization mean?

At the most basic level, you have the Individual, the Great Man (or less great). Here you have one person with their own resources and their own willpower to enact change and make decisions. Many political issues are decided by a single crank with an autistic obsession.

But to get more power, you need more organization, because power is # of People * Average Resources * Average Loyalty. The next political grouping, a very natural one, is the family or clan. This is a group of your literal family, but also close friends, your kith and kin.

The bounds of a family are defined, more or less, by everyone liking each other and having personal bonds. You are in each other's Monkeysphere. Dunbar. Like here is broad - you don't have to be friends on a personal level, but you do need to feel fond and act for mutual benefit.

But you already see the friction. People regularly fight with their brothers and break off ties with their close friends. The loyalty problem first introduces itself here. An individual is always perfectly aligned with their own goals and decisions. Any group has disloyalty.

You, pursuing your own crank vision, will always give 100% of what you are able to give, more or less. But your brother? Your mother-in-law? Let's say they give you 80% of their resources. You've vastly broadened your support base, but *what you get from everyone goes down*.

Above this in complexity is the tribe. Every step up in organization is an increase in complexity, with an increase in "waste". We'll get to this later. If your loyalty coefficient is how much you get out of your people, then what happens to what's you're not getting?

The larger the organization, the more power it has, but it doesn't scale linearly to the sum of its parts, but with diminishing returns. 1000 men might only be three times as strong as 10 men bonded as a warband.

A tribe is just a family of families. It's a linked ethnic group, where you don't have specific ties to any other tribemember, necessarily, but your family probably has ties to their family, and you act roughly as a unit.

When you start organizing tribes and families into a hierarchical structure, where there are now formal bonds of obedience between the head of one family and the head of another, such that you can shape a rough pyramid, you have feudalism.

Feudalism is essentially the human power default, where our instincts incline is, because it has a very good balance between efficiency loss and overall power, and is relatively low complexity. State capacity is a measure of how well a state can cultivate and manage complexity.

The Medieval period is feudal. But most warlord states are also feudal. The Early Bolsheviks? Feudal. An individual corporate department? Feudal. It runs off personal ties from manager to managed up to the top.

Past that, you have institutional power. In an institution, the ties are impersonal and dictated by some set of rules or laws which governs power flow. Rather than personal ties, people are loyal and obey laws issued from offices, where the office's holder doesn't matter.

Some prime examples of institutions are corporations as a whole and the judiciary system. But let me illustrate some efficiency loss. How much effort does an average corporate employee give? 20% ass? And how much actually advances corporate goals, vs corporate fiefdoms?

Institutions are highly inefficient. If they were a machine, they'd lose almost all of their energy to heat rather than producing work. But they also operate at unimaginably vast scales. Hundreds of thousands of people, millions of people - you can move these with institutions.

At the highest level of complexity is something which is arguably no complexity at all - ideology and faction. Here, direct ties dissolve entirely. Only a shared group idea motivates people, and they act, without orders, to advance it. Ideologies are the most complex of all.

They're also unimaginably *inefficient*. If you scroll through US political donors, you'll notice something. It's the size of a single large town. Donald Trump only has 77,000 large donors, people who gave more than $1000. Imagine that.

Even among Anglo individualists, you'd be an unimaginable skinflint and cruel man if you wouldn't spare $1000 for your mother or your sister or your father. But almost nobody is willing to do that for a politician.

The conventional donor class is about 200,000 people, leaning Democrat, with Democrats getting professionals more and Republicans getting small businessmen more. All millionaires. But what if you could extract lots of resources from people who aren't millionaires?

Instead of getting your crappy $5 small donations, what if you could get recurring donations for $27? And your pool was average government employees making $65k, baristas, anyone with a grudge? That's the genius of Bioleninism. It lets you get $27 *from 15% of the population*.

So what happens in the inefficiency? Roughly, inefficiency is organizational power that doesn't get captured towards the organizational goal, but is diffused into individual benefits. Corruption, incentives, slacking off - all of this constitutes inefficiency. Disloyalty.

"The Right isn't loyal." - @spandrell4

Fundamentally, the Left is obedient to its institutions, and the Right is full of disagreeable assholes who want to get paid, even the Normie Right.

@spandrell4 To return to the original NATO setting, consider Operation Gladio. Stay-behind units are fundamentally a form of intentionally leaked power crystallized so that future partisans can pick it up and get them. Those lootboxes are still out there.

@spandrell4 But what Gladio is imagined to be and what it manifested as are two different creatures. Gladio was supposed to be a way to sponsor rightist networks of power that could provide covert assistance against communist threats and invasion.

@spandrell4 Last year, I was in spaces with @hope_pead where we discussed Gladio, and he later shared some of his family spooklore with me. I have, essentially, NATO command lore.

What I found was essentially: "Huh, I don't think that was authorized. Or that. Or that."

@spandrell4 @hope_pead If organization is the art of conspiracy, call this the art of anti-conspiracy. Given a NATO mandate, Gladio is partly rightist support, but also partly socialist support, partly intra-Italian political squabbling, and sometimes the use of state force to settle personal feuds.

@spandrell4 @hope_pead Many of you are regular people wondering how to go from 0 to 1 in terms of power. Here's a piece of advice.

Find a place where power is leaking, and latch on, and you will grow strong.

@spandrell4 @hope_pead @threadreaderapp unroll

@vorozab @BabySealKiller_ Albion's Seed thesis