Four Axioms of Practical Politics
There are four main axioms that the modern conservative movement has failed to understand. First, I will list them by way of introduction. Second, I will unpack each for the sake of clarity. I will content myself with defending these against specific objections on another day.
Please note that these are four axioms of practical politics—not of theoretical politics. Each of these can be argued to and, at some point, ought to be. However, I am skipping ahead to the “art of war,” so to speak, for the sake of getting on with things. Since it is fundamental to strategy that one knows his enemy, a people must face the facts of their enemies. Generations subjected to political correctness struggle with the fact that we have enemies. Coming to terms with their machinations will be even harder.
Admitting where we have been naive (a rare admission in human affairs) is the first step, but not the last. We ought to also avail ourselves of the analysis of the realities that can diagnose constant defeat and impending total demise. Such are difficult truths to hear for conservatives and even libertarians. But so it is. We will come suddenly nearer to extinction among the human race if we continue to refuse these realities. So the following is offered in the spirit of administering such tough medicine.
The Four Axioms Listed
Axiom 1. A constitution is a wax nose for the revolutionary ideology.
Axiom 2. A conservative party that cannot transcend that constitution is necessarily controlled opposition.
Axiom 3. Even the best of men in the military and law enforcement (following 1-2) will finally do the bidding of the revolution.
Axiom 4. Only separation from the central point can quarantine the revolution’s otherwise constant flow of power.
The Four Axioms Explained
Axiom 1. A constitution is a wax nose for the revolutionary ideology.
Radicalism exists in the mind of those who have already dispensed with the roots of ethical behavior. It is in the name. The Latin word radix means “root.” To be a radical is to be committed to uprooting the present order. More than that, the ultimate prize is uprooting the more eternal order. They are, as Russell Kirk put it, “enemies of permanent things.” Of course one cannot admit that right out of the gate. Hence the radical must make subversion in action and subtleties in speech his stock and trade.
Radicalism is a revolution from start to finish. It will accept nothing less. That is why it cannot be bargained with. Oh, it will make bargains. But it will only do so as temporary measures to lull to sleep the naive conservative who is committed to fair play. Now whether the terms of the present order are written in a paper constitution, or whether, as with the British, that constitutional order is an expression for the whole tradition of common law and so forth, that is all a matter of detail to the radical.
Now the conservative says, “We know all this already.”
Oh? Then why do you go on treating the radical as an equal partner in a civil sphere?
“Well, what do you want us to do”—he replies—“commit violence against those on the other side?”
On the contrary. You must first acknowledge that they are presently committing violence against one and all. Their “government” is in a state of war. They are no more a civil entity than a barbarian horde setting fire to an ancient village. When you appeal to the constitution, the radical laughs at you. You are still assuming that there is rational discourse happening. He does not really disagree with you about the meaning of those words. He is only buying time to dispense with it, root and branch.
“But,” you return," “We know all that as well!”
Indeed. Then why are you appealing to it? And to whom? You are simultaneously preaching to the choir and spitting into the wind. There is no “middle” that can be persuaded any longer. You are at war. Conservatives honestly believe that they are in a culture war—a cold war of sorts—but that is false. You are not in a cold war, but an actual war masquerading as a culture war. It is a hot war where the invaders have learned from their own failed past to slow down and work their opponents into downward spiraling cycles of polemical trances.
The existing culture is on constant defensive, incredulous at each new absurdity, confident that there is a reasonable, potential new audience that will see how insane the opposition is, forgetting that this opposition is already in charge of all culture-shaping institution and media. The sheer proliferation of each new market for the absurdities makes rational coherence on their part utterly irrelevant. And with each passing conflict, the revolution increases its numbers deep into the red states.
Do you honestly believe that when progressive courts legislate or when their unaccountable bureaucrats command people’s lives to be canceled and children to be torn from homes—do you honestly think that shouting, “But that’s not constitutional!” has any effect on anything at all? Will this be your script when you are lined up against the wall for the firing squad?
All of that aside. Adherents to a revolutionary ideology do not play by rules of the system. The system is what they are abolishing. Such people cannot be reasoned with. When they do smile and talk and shake hands and abide by election results, it is all a transitional ruse. The set of rules mean whatever he says they mean. For every law your originalist judges uphold, two laws sprang into existence by fiat from the progressive judges. The difference is that upholding the law struck no illegitimate fiat off the record; whereas each of his pronouncements are real advances. The triumph of the radical in the Courts is exponential and irreversible, and all by using the document that has a “fixed” meaning. No it doesn’t. Not on the real field of battle.
Axiom 2. A conservative party that cannot transcend that constitution is necessarily controlled opposition.
Controlled opposition requires no smoke-filled room, no grand conspiracy, no howling at the moon at the Bohemian Grove gathering. It is as simple as taking the ring the length of the field from the shire all the way to cast it into the fires of Mordor. Piece of cake, right? Why do we send so many little hobbits with the R next to their name to “drain the swamp” in DC? It is because we are suckers, plain and simple.
The latest candidate or think tank leader or podcaster or whoever else, may be as genuine as your grandmother when they set out on their grand adventure. But even if they do not sell out at the first sight of a World Economic Forum seminar, there are still ordinary bribes and threats as old as government itself. And as to those who slip through every one of those cracks to maintain their integrity, well, Washington D. C. is a town of over four million federal employees. Let me be plain. It is swamp with no drains on the inside. It isn’t getting drained.
Controlled opposition may be controlled by nothing more ingenious than the nature of the beast, though that beast be mighty Inertia. Just read Machiavelli. There are more ways to control an opposition party than by causing them to be “in on it.” What matters for our second axiom is just that “constitutional conservatives” have forgotten that a constitution is really only as good as its capacities to uphold rights already granted in nature by God. In fact, we might note (contrary to Sir Roger Scruton) that it is precisely a secular conservatism that wears one end of the constitution like shackles, while the radical bludgeons us all with the other end. What I am suggesting here is not to lower ourselves to the progressive’s legal relativism, but to recognize what we have evidentially forgotten—that the substance of the words of the Declaration of Independence is morally superior and logically antecedent to the whole of the Constitution or any of its parts. When Jefferson penned the expression,
“That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government…”
this necessarily includes the government that the subsequent Constitution formulated. That this is unthinkable to the constitutional conservative tells us everything we need to know about his morality and even the true object of his worship. He is a slave to the system in the truest sense of that phrase. Consequently he is less able to make natural law arguments. He has crippled his mind from being able to imagine means and ends that rise above the back and forth of the election cycle. He cannot think in terms of exit strategies or worst case scenarios.
Such a conservatism cannot be anything other than what Dabney called “the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader.”1 This is the plain reality that we have all come to accept about our conservative “leaders,” namely that they are not leaders in any true sense of the word.
Axiom 3. Even the best of men in the military and law enforcement (following 1-2) will finally do the bidding of the revolution.
This will usually offend conservatives more than what was already said about the Constitution, but it must be said. In the same way that holding up a Constitution as supreme cuts off our ability to transcend its interpretation with more immutable moral truth, so the unqualified canonizing of police and military robs the citizenry of the tools of using such force for the good of the people being attacked. Revolutionaries know how to weaponize the very agencies of force they pretend to detest. First weaponize the law itself. When such “progress” is the unquestioned orthodoxy, those with badges will do as they are told or risk being terminated, court-martialed, or shot.
We know that there are good cops and bad cops, just as there are good teachers and bad teachers, good contractors and bad contractors, and so forth with any other line of work. Why should law enforcement be the one realm that violates this bit of common sense? More offensive (but just as true), would you care to tell me at what point the young lad who got into the service for the GI Bill, or to see the world, or in the local police force—at what point did they become a constitutional scholar or a moral philosopher? No doubt some do make a good study of the relevant subjects. But imagine the best realistic percentages there and they are as outnumbered as our aforementioned idealists going off to Mordor.
While most conservatives were chanting “Back the Blue” during the 2020 riots, the police were still locking up law abiding citizens for mask violations and simultaneously running interference for BLM and Antifa. There were exceptions of course—the sherifs of Florida being the most shining example. The point is that military and police are an inert force in the hands of those who dare to wield them. The Left dares to do so and the Right does not even know what any of that means. This is not so much a rebuke to those in those fields, but rather to the passive spectator-sport that conservatives make of them. We cannot expect virtue of the long arm of the law if we leave the commanding of them to the revolutionaries.
The plain fact of the matter is that police departments and the armed services have been given no sufficient pragmatic reason to defend the life, liberty, and property of conservatives. Conservatives are all bark, but no bite. Or should we say all memes, but no resolve? Those with the badge have, on the other hand, been given sufficient motives to obey the revolutionary party. That latter party exercises power with great resolve. They make threats that they intend to follow through on; and short of the virtue and intellect requisite for civic order, those in power only understand power. The only other motive left (one that explains the majority of the rank and file servicemen) is self-preservation. Inferiors must obey superiors. Even majorities can be kept in silent isolation from others, never knowing to whom it is safe to speak.
Virtuous law enforcement desperately need local populations to speak for them—to liberate their instinct to resist tyranny, by setting them in motion through (1) social-media staged town hall meetings that make public who is on whose side, and (2) by candidates for local office that will make the doctrine of interposition front and center. This will simply squeeze local federal lackeys out and will expose their agenda. It will create a culture in local counties that will catch on and put real flesh on the “how to” of secession.
But conservatives lack the basic tools of reasoning and social interaction to even begin approaching this subject. The elites know this, and so make it their business to keep throwing red meat to the red states in the form of (1) controlled opposition candidates to “drain the swamp,” (2) military scares to hold Russia and China up as essential reasons why we all need to stay suckled to the teat of D.C., and (3) an endless array of divergent conspiracy fodder to siphon off and intellectually neuter the more intense young males. By setting out such a feast of red meat, the elite revolutionary class can keep the simple busy with all manner of faux moral seriousness.
Axiom 4. Only separation from the central point can quarantine the revolution’s otherwise constant flow of power.
It was Jefferson who said that the government that governs least governs best. The legacy of Reagan’s conservatism at least created a population that could agree to that. What the majority of that demographic doesn’t seem to grasp about either American history or the more immutable political realities behind it has been summarized as a battle between Jeffersonian and Lincolnian visions of America. Obviously this dichotomy was behind the Civil War. The upshot is this: You cannot have a government govern “least” if you insist on it governing more people and over more terrain. You cannot have it both ways. Personal liberty and empire are oil and water here. Actually they are more like fire and kindling (add gasoline to the analogy—which gasoline is a few generations of affluence and mindless entertainment).
Very well, “But how does secession halt the encroachment of power?” one may ask, “It seems like it would only provoke it!”
To answer this, I will need to introduce a concept that I call the “purity principle.” This principle says that in any case of righteous action in a sinful world, there can be no moderates holding the steering wheel, no multi-headed monsters, no divided house. The purity principle observes our Lord’s maxim that “no city or house divided against itself will stand” (Mat. 12:25). The empire-legacy conservative stares aghast at this. In his mind, it is the “United States” that is indivisible. Never mind that this invests a divine attribute into a secular nation. He has been trained to see “the nation” as that which would “fall” if the Marxists got their way. This romanticism blinds him to the stark reality that not much could be more divided than the flesh and blood population of our moment. And no two populations could be more violently set against each other. A more demonic and false unity could hardly be imagined.
At any rate, the purity principle understands that less is always more, if that less has single-minded masculine purpose. The purity principle was at the heart of all good Western political philosophy, and is at least one reason why democracy (especially big democracy) was always rejected. It knows the mischief that the devils make of a mob. The purity principle and the principle of subsidiary go hand in hand, because that which is more local is more unified. Less diffusion equals less confusion.
Beyond principles, there is the empirical reality that no historic people has ever salvaged their liberty by nurturing and preserving the very collective force which was destroying it, but precisely the opposite. Either an external force relieved the population by conquest, or else there was a secession of one or more of the oppressed regions. It is actually a normal feature of history.
All of this drives us to the real failure of nerve underneath the conservative’s limp wrist. He is not ready to let go of his most un-Christian view of human nature and history. He really has been bewitched by the Pollyanna spell of those “better angels of our nature.” He simply shouts decades-old platitudes (or posts them as memes) like the desperate throng of little whos in collapsing Whoville as if the collective Horton on the other end of the flower will hear and “do something” on the grand scale. “People are waking up,” he repeats. “The silent majority is finally” … finally, what? The first, second, and third silent majorities have long since died.
Will you boycott Disney? You should. Just understand that for every one dollar you save, ten new little non-binaries they will groom. Will you homeschool your children? You should. But know that for every ten of yours in an eighteen-year stretch, they will pump out thirty per class, per year, times four or more.
I take it that you are not homeschooling in math?
One of the more astounding reservations toward secession I have heard comes from those who quip that, “My own state is in danger of becoming blue!” The obvious force that such a response intends is that one is trading one tyranny for another. It doesn’t seem to occur to our would-be realist that this is precisely why you would secede and why it had better happen before that blue takeover becomes a final reality—heavy emphasis on the word final!
The bottom line is that people aren’t desperate enough yet to focus their energies where they can actually make a difference: on the local level. Americans have been trained to already live in a metaverse of sorts. We have spent roughly 70 years staring into screens and looking to magical places like Hollywood and Washington DC to find meaning in life. The connection between the individual moral actor and his real life community has been severed, so that even when people get “red pilled” and want to “do something” about their elite overlords, their only categories are the same routine of farming out their responsibilities of resistance to action figures like Trump to “drain the swamp,” without realizing that this is still playing their game. For many, any one or a few of the above four axioms rings true, but the attention span is so depleted from our miseducation and assorted cultural bling-blings that not one in a thousand can put the four together to draw the necessary inference.
Better wisdom comes from 2500 years of Western political theory. Whatever else the great political philosophers may have disagreed on, they all seemed to agree on one thing: Republics must be small. If a civil sphere gets too big, power naturally accumulates away from locales to demagogues. Long story short, whenever any organization becomes abusive or in any other way reaches a point of wickedness beyond repair, the only solution that has ever worked is for locales to secede from that centralizing beast. Poll numbers for secession were rising over 50% (over 60% in southern states) prior to the war breaking out in Ukraine. Most have likely forgotten that Brexit and Hong Kong were the main headlines in the weeks before Covid—hence Covid. The elites know what we refuse to know. Secession is the only thing that ends their Great Reset. And they don’t mind starting global famines or flirting with nuclear war to divert people’s efforts from it.
I should say that there are other political verities which are arguably of equal importance. For example, there are out of Robert Conquest’s “three laws of politics,” one that concerns us here. It is this—“any organization not explicitly right-wing becomes left-wing in the end.”2 Whether he would have seen it this way or not, that tendency is really only a reflection of the biblical doctrine of sin. Because of the way that sin works itself out in the social realm, there is something of a cultural entropy. It works just like physical entropy where there is a disintegration of energy and information. So in any social sphere there is a natural loss—a downgrade if you will—of available intellectual resources or activity. The Scriptures also speak about this in terms of a judicial action by God. As sinful man hates the light of truth (Jn. 3:19-20) and suppresses it (Rom. 1:18), so God gives them over (Rom. 1:24, 26, 28), to the darkening effect also called a “strong delusion” (2 Thess. 2:12). This is as true in the civil sphere as in any other sphere of life. Now how to factor in this as an “axiom” without it degenerating into pietistic red herrings I will leave for someone else to grapple with; but it is undoubtedly part of the mix.
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1. R. L. Dabney,
2. Robert Conquest cited in Roger Scruton, How To Be a Conservative (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 3.
