Power sustains itself/The elements of sovereignty

People like Hanania Montana come up with all sorts of explanations for “why leftists always win”, e.g.

1. Leftists are just smarter (has more elite/midwit human capital).

2. Leftists are just more motivated/agentic, have message-discipline etc.

3. Leftist ideology has some natural advantages, e.g. appeals to empathy or some ethno-parochialisms

4. “Leftists don’t win at all, what are you saying? It’s actually AUTH-RIGHT CORPORATIONS NEOLIBERALS in charge” (section 2.2.3).

While 1, 2 and 3 all have some truth, the fundamental issue is simply—the Left is currently the Global Ideological Regime; while right-wingers are more like scattered, disorganized rebel groups. You can of course ask how the Left came to become the Regime (section 3.5)—but asking in present tense “why are Left-liberals the ones in charge?” is the same as asking “why is the government in charge and not some random rebel group?” or asking about any network effect. Power (that is, possession of the elements of sovereignty) sustains itself.

To be clear: if right-wingers are to defeat the Regime, we will need far more competence (elite/midwit human capital, motivation/agency, message-discipline, svayaṃbodha/positive vision, śatrubodha/antibodies). This is necessary, but not sufficient. The Regime always has the defensive advantage: it will never be overthrown by rebels dumber than itself, but it may also be able to sustain itself against more competent rebels on account of its pre-existing power.

How might one identify a regime?

2016-24 in the U.S. was filled with such brazen displays of power. A disabled man who joked online “the President’s in town, better get out my gun!” was visited by the FBI and shot dead without questions, while leftists had joked with impunity about murdering Trump etc. an innumerable amount of times. Those who protested against COVID lockdowns were brutalized while Black Lives Matter rioted on the streets, burning cities down. Those who stormed the Capitol were given brutal sentences and the event was near-universally condemned as a dark day in history, while leftist activists would routinely storm state capitols whenever they felt like it, and even created an “independent country” (CHAZ) in Seattle that led to several people getting murdered as the zone ended up getting ruled by criminal warlords. Academics deliberately delayed the COVID-19 vaccine, killing untold numbers of people, to prevent Trump (whose “Operation Warp Speed” was responsible for the vaccine’s development) from benefiting from it politically during the 2020 election¹. The Trump administration when in charge of a trifecta of presidency, senate and house, cannot do anything remotely comparable—right-wingers cannot censor anyone like the left used to do to them; they have still not even been allowed to deport a terrorist-sympathizer like Mahmoud Khalil!

For much of Indian history, the BJP and RSS were treated the same way. Peaceful devotees at Ayodhya were fired upon, Right-wing activists were framed for Islamist terror attacks², and in general the party was simply ostracized as an illegitimate political force. Even now in power in the elected government, the BJP could not fathom of doing anything remotely comparable to Congress/Left-wing leaders (apart from killing the actual green and red terrorists), because it does not have the sort of full-spectrum dominance the Left once did—it faces incredible resistance and scrutiny for something as simple as putting Umar Khalid (who was directly responsible for the Delhi riots) in prison, or even refusing a visa to some random leftist academic (which have even just been an administrative rejection for all we know).

However, this is only one form of power, and to focus solely on hard power is inappropriate when discussing ideologies—the Left did not always have so much hard power in the West as it did during the Biden administration. We would also like to adopt a more “reductionist” point-of-view, analyzing the actual sources of this power in the first place.

4.1.1Ideological Aether

But this is incomplete. For one, an ideology is not only defined by the specific moral claims that comprise it, also the question of what things or claims are more emphasized by a society. If you pick up an Indian history book from the 1960s, it has a very different—dare I say, Faustian—feel to it than a book from today, even if the books are only comprised of objective facts. The values and common sense implicitly held throughout society—not only by the ideologues but also by normies and even the rivals of the regime—and the choice of what is emphasized, are named the Ideological Aether.

4.1.2Institutions

The institutions upholding this civic religion, whether through soft or hard power, are named the Institutions. We enumerated these in section 2.1.5: the state, the “Deep state” (unelected bureaucracy, courts etc.), media companies, the film industry, social media, books, education, academia, tech companies, corporate power, influential people, even a country’s military or 3-letter agencies or “hard power”... these are the “fortresses/commanding heights of cultural and political power”, the “Cathedral” or “Hegemony”.

4.1.3Śatrubodha or antibodies

4.1.4Svayaṃbodha or doctrine

Indeed, the lack of a coherent ideological doctrine is one of the main failures of even successful right-wing movements: Lee Kuan Yew brought Singapore from a third-world backwater into the richest nation in the world, but can we really expect that his successors will live up to his ideals? Perhaps it will for a while, due to the “if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it” mentality present in the society—but that may eventually run out and Leftist and Muslim supremacist influence may seep in. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union is long gone, yet communism remains—the Caliphates are long gone, yet Political Islam persists.

4.1.5Experts, Consensus and Ijma/Sadācāra

4.1.6Constituencies/client groups

However in order to be competitive, there must still be some groups whom the ideology builds a coalition of to serve—and they must at least think it benefits them; these are the Constituencies/Client groups. Of course, in the case of Left-liberalism, it is not actually to their benefit (section 3.1.3).

4.1.7Elite and Midwit Human Capital

4.1.8Zakat or Self-servingness

Finally, there is a particular characteristic of Left-liberalism I have not seen articulated frequently before: it demands that everything in society must serve its cause. Movies should have a “social message” (i.e. left-wing values), hires in academia must write “diversity statements” describing what they have done for the party, companies must engage in “corporate social responsibility” (i.e. support left-wing social causes), film celebrities must “speak out” (in favour of the left-wing position), science and engineering students must study the humanities (i.e. learn left-wing frameworks of history and sociology), stories of scientists and entrepreneurs are no longer honoured as they were in the past and in countries with less Left-liberal dominance except when they can be made to fit a “breaking the glass ceiling” narrative or suit a political agenda. Our only heroes are the heroes of equality and diversity, the activists.

Ultimately it is this society-wide payment of Zakat⁴, that serves as the real source of “financial capital” for the Ideology, including but far exceeding formally partisan funding networks like USAID and Soros. When some company—say, Tata—or rich widow or whoever wants to do “corporate social responsibility”, they automatically donate to Left-wing groups, because it is pre-established in the Ideological Aether that that is what “doing good” is all about. Similarly when a movie-maker or instagram influencer or even a kid in a school play wants to give a “social message”, they automatically give Leftist social messages, they automatically pay zakat.

Zakat is practised by different ideologies to different extents. Classical liberalism did not practise it at all, thus it lacked yet another element of sovereignty. Hinduism places itself (Dharma) as one of the Puruṣārtha, balancing the service of itself against other the other goals in life—zakat in Islam is similar. Left-liberalism is completely totalizing, asking at every step: “How can we make this serve the ideology?” and even engaging in positive moral policing (i.e. demanding people must do certain things, participate in various social trends etc. or face consequences—as opposed to negative moral policing which merely forbids some things).