The Nihilism of the Ruling Class (Excerpts)
Curtis Yarvin
December 16, 2022
American Resistance: The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation
By David Rothkopf
Public Affairs, 288 pages, $29
......In every country in the developed world, representative democracy is dead. In its place, we have oligarchy. The way our oligarchy works is very simple. While hymning “democracy,” it has to disable actual representative democracy. It does this by disabling the control of the chief executive over the executive branch.
Broadly speaking, the procedure, budget, and personnel of the agencies is specified by law. Law, of course, comes from the legislative branch. What does it matter if the Founders would never have recognized a 12,000-page appropriations bill, voted on without being debated or even being read, as “law”? The Founders are dead. (Also, they were racists.)
The legislative branch is still nominally democratic, of course. But the nominal power of the voters over Congress is attenuated by five factors. Together these tame the stormy waves of open-ocean democracy to gentle glassy harbor swell.
The first is that incumbency exceeds 98 percent in the House and 90 percent in the Senate. The second is the seniority system, which ensures that sporadic breaches in incumbency produce no serious changes in policy. The third is the fact that Congress has delegated its authority broadly to the agencies. The fourth is the internal continuity of the Hill staffers, plus the external continuity of donors, lobbyists, and activists. The fifth is that no one has any real emotional connection to any election besides the presidency; so the Congress is largely chosen according to who has the largest budget for lawn signs. The sixth… do we need more? The whole Hill is one great fortress against democracy.
It is necessary to pretend that democracy exists. Yet democracy, to the extent that it still has strength to do anything, can only act through the form of monarchy—by electing a populist leader.
If the voters want to be as powerful as possible, they have to focus all their energy on a single point. Therefore, to pretend that democracy is real, it is necessary to pretend that monarchy is real—in the United States, to pretend that the president is really, genuinely the chief executive of the government. The “leader of the Free World,” or something.
In theory, the president steers the White House, and the White House steers the agencies. But the reality is that all meaningful oversight over the policy, budget, and personnel belongs to the Congress. Agency staff do not testify before the president.
And once legislative authority is subtracted, no significant executive authority is left. As Rothkopf explains very neatly in his very true book, the president cannot make DC change its course in any significant or lasting way. He simply does not have that right under the law as we know it.
So the voters, who only really care about the election for the presidency, have no such right under the “law” as we know it. Yes, they could change the law by changing the Congress—but the House, which the Founders designed to be the lungs of democracy, is suffocated by incumbency. Even the Senate, originally designed as the anti-democratic side of Congress, only has a 90 percent incumbency rate. Of course, its six-year staggered terms are another anti-democratic measure. Congress as an institution has a popularity rating that hardly ever breaks above 20 percent, and often menaces the 10 percent line. No one really cares, and it doesn’t matter.
Dear Americans, this is why your vote in the big election doesn’t count. The election isn’t stolen on Election Day, in the voting machines. It is stolen later, in Washington. It isn’t even stolen by any person who you can scream at. Rather, it is stolen by design—and the designers are long since dead.
It works like any con: If you lose, you lose. But if you win, you don’t win. Like a child on a ship, you get to sit in the captain’s chair and spin the captain’s wheel. But you are not steering the vessel.
*****
Let’s let Rothkopf explain to us how it actually works—through the story of Executive Orders 13769 and 13780. We are zooming in on the stolen election—by zooming in on the exact way in which the legislative and judiciary branches, both oligarchic in form, steal the intended constitutional power of the monarchic-democratic presidency.
We first need to remind ourselves that we are looking at a rare exception in which the law gives the president explicit power to set public policy. This almost never happens:
By proclamation! Like a king! Fear not, Americans (and future Americans)—that was only the 1952 Immigration Act. Then, we were learning about Communist infiltration of the water supply. But by 1965, we had learned that It’s A Small World After All: “No person shall receive any preference or priority or be discriminated against in the issuance of an immigrant visa because of the person’s race, sex, nationality, place of birth, or place of residence.”
Psych! President Trump couldn’t simply proclaim, like a king, that some “class of aliens” should be restricted because he “deemed” it “appropriate”—just because that same class, or something like it, had done 9/11 on rubber-stamped tourist visas.
The president is not a king and cannot proclaim or command—even when explicitly allowed by law!—because the government does not work by command. No—there has to be a process. There is always a process—and the process is dictated by law. As Rothkopf explains:
Again we see O’Brien glorying in his power to turn 2+2 into 5. The final outcome of this absurd Kafkaesque process, completed at the start of 2020 right before Covid made it irrelevant, included microscopic loopholes like an exception for cases in which the foreign national
seeks to enter the United States to visit or reside with a close family member (e.g., a spouse, child, or parent) who is a United States citizen, lawful permanent resident, or alien lawfully admitted on a valid nonimmigrant visa, and the denial of entry during the suspension period would cause undue hardship.
In the end, all this squeezing—in 2017 much decried as an American Kristallnacht—resulted in a tiny ort of special-case bureaucracy being applied to a few special cases, in a US immigration system which remains a noxious heap of orts. And Rothkopf, liking this result, gloats.
This is how the voters who voted for Trump had their votes stolen from them. They were not electing the leader of the Free World, or even of the US government. They were electing a figurehead who could do no more than occasionally disrupt the operations of the US government. This is how the wire from the voting machine to power is cut.
None of this proves that Trump’s immigration policy is right, or the deep state’s immigration policy is right. It just proves that oligarchy is boss over democracy.
*****
...But America is not England, nor is she Rome. Perhaps these ideas of monarchical government are alien to our sacred American tradition? Well, kids, as it happens, the deep state is the ossified corpse of an American monarchy—the New Deal, the personal regime of FDR.
Rep. Raskin, the constitutional and historical scholar, is the son and political heir of Marcus Raskin, who was himself an acolyte of core New Dealer Rexford Tugwell. Harold Ickes, Tugwell’s colleague, described how FDR’s regime “kept things going when Congress wasn’t in town”:
This is not a world of government by process. It is a world of government by command. FDR ran DC as if he were Elon Musk. He was surrounded by little kings like Ickes and Tugwell. They got things done. In fact, they literally conquered the world.
Things have changed; a monarchy has become an oligarchy. Yet it would be a mistake to view the Rothkopfs and Raskins as acolytes of oligarchy. Now and then, they are acolytes of—what is. They are acolytes of power—in every place, in every time, in its every luscious form. Rep. Raskin, the “constitutional scholar,” would be a diehard New Deal cult-of-personality FDR Stalinist.
No, they do not believe in democracy or oligarchy. They believe in nothing. Nothing is true to them, unless it is useful. Nothing is useful, unless it makes them powerful. History and law and logic and the Constitution and morality have one lesson for them: Might makes right. Whatever is strong is true, legal, constitutional, and right.
Ultimately, Rothkopf and his party are practicing Nietzcheans and Machiavellians—not in the philosophical sense, but in the colloquial sense. Power has consumed them.
Their faith is nihilism—and only nihilism can defeat them. To pretend that they believe in anything, even to offer contrary arguments, is simply to play their game.
https://compactmag.com/article/the-nihilism-of-the-ruling-class
December 16, 2022
American Resistance: The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation
By David Rothkopf
Public Affairs, 288 pages, $29
......In every country in the developed world, representative democracy is dead. In its place, we have oligarchy. The way our oligarchy works is very simple. While hymning “democracy,” it has to disable actual representative democracy. It does this by disabling the control of the chief executive over the executive branch.
Broadly speaking, the procedure, budget, and personnel of the agencies is specified by law. Law, of course, comes from the legislative branch. What does it matter if the Founders would never have recognized a 12,000-page appropriations bill, voted on without being debated or even being read, as “law”? The Founders are dead. (Also, they were racists.)
The legislative branch is still nominally democratic, of course. But the nominal power of the voters over Congress is attenuated by five factors. Together these tame the stormy waves of open-ocean democracy to gentle glassy harbor swell.
The first is that incumbency exceeds 98 percent in the House and 90 percent in the Senate. The second is the seniority system, which ensures that sporadic breaches in incumbency produce no serious changes in policy. The third is the fact that Congress has delegated its authority broadly to the agencies. The fourth is the internal continuity of the Hill staffers, plus the external continuity of donors, lobbyists, and activists. The fifth is that no one has any real emotional connection to any election besides the presidency; so the Congress is largely chosen according to who has the largest budget for lawn signs. The sixth… do we need more? The whole Hill is one great fortress against democracy.
It is necessary to pretend that democracy exists. Yet democracy, to the extent that it still has strength to do anything, can only act through the form of monarchy—by electing a populist leader.
If the voters want to be as powerful as possible, they have to focus all their energy on a single point. Therefore, to pretend that democracy is real, it is necessary to pretend that monarchy is real—in the United States, to pretend that the president is really, genuinely the chief executive of the government. The “leader of the Free World,” or something.
In theory, the president steers the White House, and the White House steers the agencies. But the reality is that all meaningful oversight over the policy, budget, and personnel belongs to the Congress. Agency staff do not testify before the president.
And once legislative authority is subtracted, no significant executive authority is left. As Rothkopf explains very neatly in his very true book, the president cannot make DC change its course in any significant or lasting way. He simply does not have that right under the law as we know it.
So the voters, who only really care about the election for the presidency, have no such right under the “law” as we know it. Yes, they could change the law by changing the Congress—but the House, which the Founders designed to be the lungs of democracy, is suffocated by incumbency. Even the Senate, originally designed as the anti-democratic side of Congress, only has a 90 percent incumbency rate. Of course, its six-year staggered terms are another anti-democratic measure. Congress as an institution has a popularity rating that hardly ever breaks above 20 percent, and often menaces the 10 percent line. No one really cares, and it doesn’t matter.
Dear Americans, this is why your vote in the big election doesn’t count. The election isn’t stolen on Election Day, in the voting machines. It is stolen later, in Washington. It isn’t even stolen by any person who you can scream at. Rather, it is stolen by design—and the designers are long since dead.
It works like any con: If you lose, you lose. But if you win, you don’t win. Like a child on a ship, you get to sit in the captain’s chair and spin the captain’s wheel. But you are not steering the vessel.
*****
Let’s let Rothkopf explain to us how it actually works—through the story of Executive Orders 13769 and 13780. We are zooming in on the stolen election—by zooming in on the exact way in which the legislative and judiciary branches, both oligarchic in form, steal the intended constitutional power of the monarchic-democratic presidency.
We first need to remind ourselves that we are looking at a rare exception in which the law gives the president explicit power to set public policy. This almost never happens:
Whenever the president finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.
By proclamation! Like a king! Fear not, Americans (and future Americans)—that was only the 1952 Immigration Act. Then, we were learning about Communist infiltration of the water supply. But by 1965, we had learned that It’s A Small World After All: “No person shall receive any preference or priority or be discriminated against in the issuance of an immigrant visa because of the person’s race, sex, nationality, place of birth, or place of residence.”
Psych! President Trump couldn’t simply proclaim, like a king, that some “class of aliens” should be restricted because he “deemed” it “appropriate”—just because that same class, or something like it, had done 9/11 on rubber-stamped tourist visas.
The president is not a king and cannot proclaim or command—even when explicitly allowed by law!—because the government does not work by command. No—there has to be a process. There is always a process—and the process is dictated by law. As Rothkopf explains:
The process of meeting the legal criteria that [Trump administration officials] had ignored led to the effort being bogged down in the courts for a year and a half. It was during this period that officials of DHS, at State, and elsewhere in the government began to do what they could to defuse what several characterized as to me as the “fundamentally racist” origins of the executive order.
US law bans religious discrimination as a reason for denying entry into the country. But it does allow the president to act to protect national security. So an alchemy took place that made a repulsive piece of legislation [sic—an executive order is not “legislation”] somewhat less odious. In concert with the courts, officials worked to come up with national-security criteria that could enable something like the original executive order (which ended up being redrafted two more times) to take effect.
Like the philosopher’s stone, which in ancient legend could be used to turn base metals into gold, there was something about the often dreary, often invisible work of government, the touch of the “deep state” that could turn the repulsive and unconstitutional into government policies that were at least legal and more morally acceptable.
Again we see O’Brien glorying in his power to turn 2+2 into 5. The final outcome of this absurd Kafkaesque process, completed at the start of 2020 right before Covid made it irrelevant, included microscopic loopholes like an exception for cases in which the foreign national
seeks to enter the United States to visit or reside with a close family member (e.g., a spouse, child, or parent) who is a United States citizen, lawful permanent resident, or alien lawfully admitted on a valid nonimmigrant visa, and the denial of entry during the suspension period would cause undue hardship.
In the end, all this squeezing—in 2017 much decried as an American Kristallnacht—resulted in a tiny ort of special-case bureaucracy being applied to a few special cases, in a US immigration system which remains a noxious heap of orts. And Rothkopf, liking this result, gloats.
This is how the voters who voted for Trump had their votes stolen from them. They were not electing the leader of the Free World, or even of the US government. They were electing a figurehead who could do no more than occasionally disrupt the operations of the US government. This is how the wire from the voting machine to power is cut.
None of this proves that Trump’s immigration policy is right, or the deep state’s immigration policy is right. It just proves that oligarchy is boss over democracy.
*****
...But America is not England, nor is she Rome. Perhaps these ideas of monarchical government are alien to our sacred American tradition? Well, kids, as it happens, the deep state is the ossified corpse of an American monarchy—the New Deal, the personal regime of FDR.
Rep. Raskin, the constitutional and historical scholar, is the son and political heir of Marcus Raskin, who was himself an acolyte of core New Dealer Rexford Tugwell. Harold Ickes, Tugwell’s colleague, described how FDR’s regime “kept things going when Congress wasn’t in town”:
The discussion of subsistence homesteads led the president to say something about his proposed setup for public works. Apparently he has in mind to set up quite a large Works Board…
He said that there would be one man in charge of procurement (evidently having in mind Admiral Peoples), one man in charge of labor, and one man to keep track of the schedule. Over the whole setup he would be in charge. He said that in England the Prime Minister was Chairman of the Works Board.
I believe his plan is unworkable. I don’t believe that there can be a successful administration through a board, especially a large board such as he proposes. Here is the biggest program on record in the history of the world in peace times, and in my judgment, the administration will break down or else it will find itself in the hands of one man, just as I took over control of the Public Works Administration that he set up in 1933.
This is not a world of government by process. It is a world of government by command. FDR ran DC as if he were Elon Musk. He was surrounded by little kings like Ickes and Tugwell. They got things done. In fact, they literally conquered the world.
Things have changed; a monarchy has become an oligarchy. Yet it would be a mistake to view the Rothkopfs and Raskins as acolytes of oligarchy. Now and then, they are acolytes of—what is. They are acolytes of power—in every place, in every time, in its every luscious form. Rep. Raskin, the “constitutional scholar,” would be a diehard New Deal cult-of-personality FDR Stalinist.
No, they do not believe in democracy or oligarchy. They believe in nothing. Nothing is true to them, unless it is useful. Nothing is useful, unless it makes them powerful. History and law and logic and the Constitution and morality have one lesson for them: Might makes right. Whatever is strong is true, legal, constitutional, and right.
Ultimately, Rothkopf and his party are practicing Nietzcheans and Machiavellians—not in the philosophical sense, but in the colloquial sense. Power has consumed them.
Their faith is nihilism—and only nihilism can defeat them. To pretend that they believe in anything, even to offer contrary arguments, is simply to play their game.
https://compactmag.com/article/the-nihilism-of-the-ruling-class
