How Conservatives Can Win
The chaotic end to President Trump’s term will bring the usual blame and recriminations of defeat. In the coming months politicians, policy wonks, political entrepreneurs, and scam artists will jockey attention. Factions will split and argue over strategies and tactics to return the right to power. Some are anxious to again lose-like-gentlemen, others will scream about election fraud whilst begging for small-dollar donations, still others will hunt for likes with Bible quotes. All will be wrong. They will propose an impossible solution: conservative political success in the face of crushing cultural headwinds.
If there is a road ahead for the American conservative movement — a big IF — its political victories will come only after the establishment of a cultural and technological bridgehead large enough to sustain, nurture, and coordinate with political forces. It is an infrastructure project requiring patience, cunning, and a reordering of priorities away from the seen and obvious markers of political action toward the unseen and often-thankless work of institution building.
Cultural enforcers thwarted Trump’s political victories
The Trump presidency should prove with finality the futility of only fighting political wars. President Trump’s administration was by any measure a success, particularly compared with his recent predecessors. According to Bloomberg, real median household income grew almost $6,000 in Trump’s first three years, compared to $257 in the preceding 16 years. And despite COVID-19 hardships 56% of people said their families were better off than when Trump started. Every group, whether those lacking education, “historically underrepresented,” or “formerly marginalized” set employment records.
Pre-COVID, the economy added 7 million jobs. It wasn’t just economic. His foreign policy successes were stunning. He oversaw peace deals and avoided new wars, all the while strategically defending America’s interests. If that wasn’t enough, he was the first Republican president, maybe ever, to walk the walk on social issues. And he did this all whilst fighting a two-year special counsel investigation based on bar talk and an equally absurd impeachment.
Many responded, almost five million more people voted for him in 2020 than in 2016. Yet despite objective successes his approval rating never reached the lofty heights of incoming Barak Obama or post-Gulf War George H.W. Bush. Trump’s victory galvanized America’s cultural enforcers in media, technology, entertainment, education, bureaucracy, nonprofits, and big business. They formed a figurative wall around the White House to “otherize” him lest his presidency be “normalized.” These enforcers admitted his successes begrudgingly if at all.
He and his aides constantly fought attention-seeking Twitter-obsessed media. Silicon Valley’s oligarchs brainstormed ways to stifle him, banned his supporters, and neutered friendly media. Celebrities mocked his assassination when not hosting opponent fundraisers. Federal bureaucrats “resisted,” leaked his phone calls, penned anonymous op-eds, and spied on his campaign and administration. Public school teachers swamped kids with anti-Trump messages, professors mocked him in class when not publishing studies warning his rallies were literally killing people. Nonprofits and corporations joined in.
Improving the lives of millions simply forced America’s cultural enforcers to redouble their efforts. Cultural leftists saw Donald Trump as an existential threat to their self-identification as moral vicars protecting the historically oppressed and traditionally underrepresented from forces anxious to destroy them. Trump exposed as deceit the thing most important to them, their righteous self-regard. They had to destroy him. And not without Trump’s self-inflicted help, they did.
Biden’s victory will mean widespread cultural oppression
Biden’s victory has not brought reconciliation and repose but a determination no one ever again threaten the cultural left’s position as America’s moral arbiters. The immediate way is to stop Trump from effectively communicating to his supporters. But that is only the start.
The current tech-led censorship and political oppression will not relent. As the Parler episode shows, these enforcers not only want dissidents off major platforms but in digital exile. What began with now-familiar specious “terms of service” claims has spread to the few companies controlling the internet’s backend functions. Any business that contracts with dissidents no matter how apolitical their services will face harassment and become targets, especially public companies.
Killing the professional prospects of administration alumni and denying them book deals is another part of the effort. Revoking degrees is now fashionable having evolved from campus disinvitations and speaker shutdowns. These cultural enforcers aim to make dissidents societal nonpersons. If they succeed, the result will be one-party rule and the inevitable abuses that always plague these kinds of hierarchies.
If it needs saying, the cultural left’s aims here are repugnant to America’s founding values. Although banished from school as some byproduct colonialist thinking, America was the unlikely result of a specific and new line of thinking about human affairs favored in only a small part of the world. That thinking, expressed here most forcefully in our Declaration of Independence, includes the dignity and worth of the individual, the freedom to one’s own labor, freedom of speech, and self-government. That the rise of these ideas coincided roughly with the discovery of the New World is a miracle of history.
But the people who brought these ideas also brought the cultural ballast to support them. They put their ideas into practice through the Protestant work ethic and strong religious conviction. This separated the eventual-United States from other former New World colonies that had the same potential to become superpowers. Of course, slavery, will forever stain America’s story. Its inclusion in the original constitution as an economic compromise between agrarian Southerners and New England commercial interests mocked America’s Enlightenment ideals and nearly destroyed the entire project in less than a century.
Cultural enforcers market authoritarianism as ‘free market’
Nor is the cultural left’s tactics the simple product of the free market. This has become a favorite talking point about supposed freedom-loving people hypocritically reversing positions once on defense.
This conflates two very different concepts: corporatism and the Marketplace of Ideas. Corporatism is a malleable concept with applications ranging from West Germany’s social market theory to classic fascism. But as commentator Andrew Stuttaford states its core is the belief “society should be organized by and for its principal interest groups.” Corporatism here is a cultural strain that melds the interests of Silicon Valley oligarchs, the media, the Democrat party, the nonprofit sector, and big business to dictate societal rules.
Even if one believes tech oligarchs should be able to silence dissent through ever-changing “terms of service” legalese, the internet’s backend, which only a few companies will likely ever control, is categorically different, as even the ACLU recognizes. Shutting down one side’s arguments destroys the Marketplace of Ideas. This theory states that knowledge, truth, and best societal outcomes are only produced through hashing out ideas with the pen and not the sword. The marketplace theory has its roots with Enlightenment figures John Milton, John Locke, and Adam Smith. James Madison expressed it politically in Federalist 10.
As Milton wrote in Areopagitca, “Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions: for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.” Idea marketplaces cannot flourish and knowledge can’t be made if only one side speaks and competitors are arbitrarily silenced by a few jargon-filled paragraphs of a contract they may have no realistic choice but to sign.
Conservatives must understand the left’s playbook to counterattack
Before the right can counteract the current assault, it must accept a few basic premises. First, it must first understand the depth of the problem and the commitment of its opponents. Second it must understand the mechanism by which opposing forces operate and the incentives involved. Third it must adapt solutions outside the left’s control that don’t leave them vulnerable to a repeat of the same issues.
As commentator David Rubin said recently, “no one is going to save us.” The zeitgeist is the product of decades-long cultural pressures accelerated during the Trump presidency.
Saul Alinsky explained the cultural left’s plan five decades ago in the landmark book, Rules for Radicals. Although tactics evolve and constantly adapt to circumstance, the strategies remain a few simple maxims: (i.) all means are justified if you win; (ii.) attack, ridicule, and mock relentlessly, (iii.) embrace contradictions (hypocrisy), (iv.) politicize everything, (v.) infuse messaging with moral claims, and (vi.) scare the hell out of (and indoctrinate) children.
The cultural left is patient. It accepts small victories. Setbacks like Trump’s election only make it work harder. Over time this patience and commitment produces homogenous messaging across varying and diverse industries. For all of America’s vast expanse, units of cultural power are mostly produced in four places: New York (corporate media, big business), Washington, DC (corporate media, nonprofits, bureaucracy), San Francisco, (big tech), and Los Angeles (entertainment). Only academia and public education are geographically disparate. The extent conservatives counteract this messaging usually starts and ends with, ‘Wow, isn’t [insert any cultural force] so biased against us.’
The theories start with intellectuals in universities and nonprofits. The enforcers in media, social media, entertainment, government bureaucracy, and finally teachers unions turn the theories into digestible units of cultural power. Morality is always the central theme. The overriding message is social conformity. The merits of the theories and actual results they produce are ignored.
As I have written previously, cultural forces work through the economic principle of ‘concentrated benefits, dispersed costs.’ Cultural influencers can be anyone from movie stars, to reporters, to climate activists, to IRS bureaucrats. They distribute and exchange cultural units of power amongst themselves. These units manifest in the form of esteem, recognition, and solidarity within their cultural peer tribe or the other tribes. The more units one receives the more virtuous and important they feel.
The enforcers often collaborate in private online groups or email chains. Messaging around dramatic events is always presented as spontaneous reactions to injustice such as the George Floyd riots, David Hogg’s anti-gun crusade, Greta Thunberg’s climate activism, or most recently the cabal of interests that coordinated Trump’s downfall. The truth is sometimes later revealed. But regardless of clandestine origins, once messaging goes public it metastasizes organically.
Cultural enforcers disburse units of power through market signals in any number of ways: cable news clips, retweets, ‘likes,’ views, online discussions etc. To give one example, online political trade outlet, The Hill’s twitter feed has four million followers. The feed tweets around every three minutes. Most of it is clips, quotes, or poll results created by or favorable to the cultural and political left. Whether The Hill’s social media team (or any other similar feed) actually coordinates privately with cultural enforcers is irrelevant, the result is the same.
Through these methods the cultural left presents the public a unified front where every issue is a binary choice of moral or immoral. All nuance and acknowledgment of tradeoffs vanish. Listen to federal bureaucrats’ COVID advice no matter how contradictory or be “anti-science,” support open borders whatever its costs to the social fabric or support “concentration camps,” support the latest unprovable academic theory or be racist, and so on.
Public companies are tools of the cultural enforcers
Even those that theoretically should be immune from this sort of pressure partake. Having captured bureaucracy, media, technology, entertainment, and education one cohort that remained somewhat aloof were public companies. These companies wield cultural power via their size, wealth, and name recognition. Cultural leftists saw corporate power as a threat decades ago and began the quest to capture it. They have now succeeded with strategies most are oblivious to and using Americans’ own retirement money in the process.
Most people outside corporate boardrooms, securities law, or the business press have never heard the acronym ‘ESG,’ short for Environmental Social Governance. In short it is a set of amorphous standards with even more amorphous criteria that act as a proxy for leftist politics. C-suite executives are ‘encouraged’ to consider these factors in company decisions along with or in some cases in contradiction to shareholder value.
As Securities and Exchange Commission Commissioner Hester Peirce states ESG promotes, “[L]abeling based on incomplete information, public shaming, and shunning wrapped in moral rhetoric preached with cold-hearted, self-righteous oblivion to the consequences, which ultimately fall on real people. In our purportedly enlightened era, we pin scarlet letters on allegedly offending corporations without bothering much about facts and circumstances and seemingly without caring about the unwarranted harm such labeling can engender.”
Whilst shareholder activism has existed for decades, in recent years an industry of consultants, proxy advisors, and asset managers has formed to evaluate corporate ESG adherence. The consequences are real. BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager controlling $8.68 trillion including massive public and corporate pensions, endowments, and foundations. It has stated all investment decisions will now be fully ESG integrated. The cynical explanation is ESG funds attract order-of-magnitude higher fees so all this supposed concern about “sustainability” is actually about bottom lines. Regardless the message to CEOs is clear: play the ESG game or risk negative publicity, shareholder activism, and capital divestment that could cost your job. (Unsurprisingly, BlackRock alumni are already flocking to the Biden administration.)
An advert campaign can fail miserably, like Gillette demonizing masculinity, Budweiser going third-wave feminist, or the dumpster fire that is ESPN. Yet if it strikes the right chord with ESG overseers that may be irrelevant to corporate executives, at least in the short term. Shareholders are the only ones that lose.
Unchecked cultural power will lead to one-party rule and abuses
It’s not hard to see the dystopia that awaits. Cultural enforcers will target influential dissidents, for instance, Tucker Carlson, Jordan Peterson, Andrew Doyle via his fictional character Titania McGrath, Brandon Straka, or the Babylon Bee. Impact the national conversation in the wrong way and a political nonprofit will open a file on you. A 20-something recent college grad will review your public life to decide whether you’re too dangerous to ‘exist.’ If you are cultural enforcers will nonperson you. The call will migrate from nonprofits to allies in the media, tech, proxy advisors, asset managers, perhaps a friendly at the IRS. Not only will your social media platform disappear, but also your ability to communicate through email, bank, use a credit card, or any other life function involving a public company. Instantly, your ability to transact in modern society could disappear without warning. And good luck getting your daughter into that elite prep school or Ivy League college. Of course, all this will happen under the label ‘free market.’
Conservatives hoping a politician or law can solve this are a playing a game they don’t understand using rules designed for last century (or they’re grifting). Only when the right recognizes the gravity of the issue can it asses and counterattack.
Whilst wealthy conservatives should invest in backend internet services to compete with Amazon and Cloudflare, the only real solution is to embrace emerging technological innovations as a bypass around the current paradigm. Indeed, the right may need to eschew the current corporate governance structure altogether.
Web 3.0 offers the only viable alternative to digital exile
Conservatives must embrace the internet’s arriving next phase with its promise of user-driven and controlled governance. Commentators use the term “Web 3.0,” along with “blockchain,” and “crypto” in various contexts but at its heart is a fundamental reordering of the internet. The first wave commercialized the web in the 1990s. The second wave brought ‘walled gardens,’ where a few companies amassed wealth and power by controlling the technology ‘stack.’ At the bottom of this stack are people, the internet’s users. In the current model people exchange their online data — what they do, where they go, what they ‘like,’ what they say — for free services that provide the main modes of speech, entertainment, and commerce. Those at the top of the stack collect power and wealth by selling your online dossier to the highest bidder.
In theory Web 3.0 could reverse the stack’s power flow and return control to the individual internet user. This future web would allow everyone to negotiate with the tech oligarchs or leave their walled gardens completely with minimal disruption. The third wave could allow individuals to jump from decentralized applications or (dApps) built on top of blockchains freely and instantly while taking their data and followings with them. They could demand virtual currency for their time, attention, and even presence. Banning an individual or group could not happen instantly in a San Francisco boardroom but would have to approved by dApp users. Applications for this technology abound in media, entertainment, commerce, finance, even nonprofits and bureaucracy.
As cultural enforcers tighten their grip on Web 2.0, conservatives have no choice except to embrace this technology and utilize its potential. This will require patience, effort, and leaving the comfort zones the walled gardens provide. Fortunately, there are already working and precursor models that allow easier migration. People can start with the Brave browser. This is the brainchild of Brendan Eich, the Silicon Valley whiz and creator of JavaScript who Mozilla ‘cancelled’ because of a years-earlier political donation. Brave provides virtual currency, ‘Basic Attention Tokens,’ to view online adverts. These tokens accumulate in users’ digital wallets. Users can provide them to content creators, exchange them for gift cards, or cash them out. Brave allows user control of adverts and everything is privacy focused. Minds is an alternative social media network linked to the Ethereum blockchain that has resisted censorship pressures and focused on user privacy. Parler may soon return.
Cultural enforcers are actively trying to capture the internet’s next phase
Although a decentralized future where conservatives can speak and advance their cultural objectives freely is possible no one should think it will be easy. As usual the right is behind the curve and vulnerable to being marginalized in the internet’s third wave as it is now. Leftist blockchain conferences have occurred since at least 2014. Nonprofits constantly arise to promote leftist crypto policy goals in some form or another. Major philanthropists like the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation will fund them if they aren’t already (all already partake in ESG investing), not to mention corporate and government grants.
Michael Casey, chief content officer at Coindesk, perhaps the most influential crypto trade outlet previously wrote a hagiography of Che Guvera’s image. And he has called for crypto racial set asides as if blockchain is some kind of government program instead of a vast expanse of possibility for anyone with an internet connection and a desire to learn. As if to remove all nuance, a recent Coindesk op-ed sought, “Agreed principles and collective vision . . . to [ensure] the blockchain industry achieves aims such as greater financial inclusion, competition for the banking industry, and a reduction of costs and friction within supply chains.” Like the second web, this “collective vision” will have other uses once the visionaries control the infrastructure.
On the other side stand conservatives, sitting around waiting to be steamrolled again. Whether the technical infrastructure of the new web can unilaterally prevent this is an open question.
But given Web 3.0’s nascence, for once conservatives can write their own story. Free market nonprofits and policy shops should focus on the future internet where everyone can speak and associate freely instead of defending corporatism. Red state governors can explore ways blockchain can create efficiencies and limit bureaucratic influence, while acclimating their citizens to new technologies. Entrepreneurs can create companies and develop dApps that embrace new technologies in media, entertainment, finance, and commerce to counteract leftist influence. And ordinary people can migrate away from companies that don’t value them. There is no reason the 74 million Trump voters should use Google Chrome or Google search (or Gmail for that matter) except for instances when technical specifications require it. With exceptions, decent alternatives exist for almost every platform and service provided by technology companies that openly discriminate against half the country.
The road ahead will not be easy. The cultural forces aligned against American conservatives are powerful, vindictive, and relentless. It would be easy to follow the path of hoping to outvote the opposition enough to reverse what will be a depressing next four years. Or listen to the grifters claiming lawsuits, politics, or new laws will save them if regular people would just “pitch in” a little more (and then a little more). No new ‘Red Waves’ will change the underlying fundamentals of American society until a cultural infrastructure can support it. Conservatives must either adapt to the technological realities and face the cultural forces aligned against it or invite perpetual irrelevance and defeat.
Paul H. Jossey is a lawyer in Alexandria, Virginia, connected with him on Minds @crowdfundingandcrypto
