At The American Spectator Richard Shinder, “the founder and managing partner of Theatine Partners, a financial consultancy,” was listening to talk radio and didn’t like the loyalty tests with regard to Trump and DeSantis.
there would likely be a roughly 90 percent policy overlap between a second Trump term and a prospective DeSantis administration… What the radio exchange starkly exposed is that in our current political climate, tribalism supersedes all else: not only ideology, but also the likelihood of victory.
He went on to discourse about the Western Narrative.
Overcoming millennia of feudal servitude, mankind — as far back as the Magna Carta, later embodied in the Declarations of Independence and of the Rights of Man, and detailed in the writings of Hobbes, Locke, Smith, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and other Enlightenment rationalists — gradually freed itself from the serfdom and tribal designations (both actual and socially defined) ensuing from circumstances of birth and origin, and vigorously championed individual liberty.
Over the last couple of years I have been pushing a counter-narrative: that the Enlightenment was all about educated intellectuals setting up a narrative for the rule of the intellectuals; that the rule of the educated resulted in the bloodiest world wars in history; that the rule of the educated featured the two bloodiest slave states in history, courtesy of Stalin and Mao; that its over/under political formula of we-the-educated allied with the lower classes against the oppressor middle class is as brutal and monstrous as anything in world history.
And fundamentally, I argue, inspired by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt’s notion of the political as the distinction between friend and enemy, the celebration of politics as the royal road to justice is a lie. Politics is tribalism, straight up, and leads directly to injustice at best and pogroms at worst.
If you want less tribalism then you need less politics; you need less government; you need a society in which the denigration of the opposition is shamed, the use of government for gifting your supporters is disgraced, and the practice of ordinary social cooperation in a host of voluntary organizations that have nothing to do with politics is celebrated and honored.
You would go on to say that “activism” is an educated-class conceit; that NGOs are jobs for the overeducated; and the administrative state is an abomination.
And that would be just a start.
Of course, there would still have to be politics, because there would still be friend and enemy. And the practitioners of politics would still be insulting each other like Trump and DeSantis. Maybe there would still be political militias like AntiFa and the Proud Boys and the dreaded white supremacists of which you’ve heard tell, but maybe their mostly peaceful protests would be civilized into a new form of professional sports.
But how would this happen? The likeliest prospect would be the utter disgust with the educated class following the economic disaster of Net Zero policies, followed by populist nationalist governments all over the world. And because ordinary middle-class people are not that interested in power it would provide an opening for a regime that was not that interested in power.
But I’m not holding my breath.