The Legendary Dragon Alephwyr, named Alephwyr, BA

In light of recent events, I’m going to recode Obama’s 2 victories as a triumph of appeal of monarchical cult-of-personality charisma over fascism-lite. Obama got coded as “one of the good blacks” Blackish virtue signal so long as no real change to illiberalism called for.

Both coding voting for Obama as “proof I’m not racist” and coding voting for Trump as “defense against radical left antifa communists” are rationalizations of thinly denied basic dispositions. And you can’t blame disinformation/media bubbles either. This is who the country is.

If you’re comfortable with this 800lb egregorilla in the room, you’re fine. There are three possible natural reactions for those who are not fine with it: turn institutionalist-statist (impersonal state institutions as the , turn Straussian (noble-lie programmer) or Third Way.

I believe 2010s have demonstrated 3 truths: - democracy works (screw Thiel) - Straussianism doesn’t work (people aren’t that dumb, you can’t fool all the people all the time, you’re not saintly enough to lie nobly, there are no good emperors) - Industrial institutions are dead

So your real political choices are: - Accept your new 800lb fascist-lite egregorilla overload - invent better institutions - invent a third way to be elite that’s neither Straussian nor institutionalist - score a mansion; aka secure a tiny personal zone of political agency

Yeah this is a major faultline. Mercenary in the policy sheets, missionary in the charismatic streets basically.https://twitter.com/pixlpa/status/1324041539283156993 …

Yes, even though I’m not feeling this scenario in my gut, it’s now intellectually a clear possibility. The 800lb fascist-lite egregorilla will NOT be happy if the institutionalists buy themselves 4 more years by a razor thin margin that’s vulnerable to doubt-merchanting.https://twitter.com/gemorris/status/1324040401393717251 …

“Competent fascist” means media charmer who will pay lip-service to individualism. Don’t expect a Hitler-like figure. That’s for Germany. The “competent fascist” is a culturally specific archetype that you may not recognize till too late if you’re overindexed on foreign examples.