Over the last few days, we’ve seen some seemingly amazing developments emerge from the muck of electoral politics.
In Argentina, their latest Presidential runoff led to the sharp and pointed rise of Libertarian leader Javier Melei. A self-described anarcho-capitalist whose charismatic loathing of leftists, libtards, and shitlibs, has lionized him in the eyes of the liberty sphere. A presumptive W for the good guys and a baby step towards ‘based world’.
And to make sentiments even more optimistic, less than 72 hours later, the slow drip national populism of Geert Wilders won out after 18 years of persistence. The Dutch elections, taken at face value, have shown that the Freedom Party’s message of euro-skepticism, anti-immigration, and economic nationalism is finally (after many hard lessons and needless hardships) being understood as self-evident realizations of multiculturalism gone awry.
This is not even to mention the pending elections of Donald Trump in America, Pierre Polievre in Canada, the Freedom Party in Austria, and the potential for the populist right to make huge gains in the European Parliament elections of June 2024.
But as Christopher Hitchens once brilliantly stated:
“Heroism breaks its heart, and idealism its back, on the intransigence of the credulous and the mediocre, manipulated by the cynical and the corrupt.”
A stern reminder that although the wind is seemingly at our backs, we need to stay soberly aware of the overarching potential for disappointment and betrayal.
And I get it. We want to believe that some modern incarnation of the “great man” will step up to a podium and will based world into existence. That with an undeniable amount of charisma and logical argumentation sway the masses into supporting a nationalist freedom agenda.
And this is the crux of the problem. This will not happen.
Regardless of how many departments Milei abolishes, how many boatloads of migrants Meloni turns back, or how big a wall Trump builds, we still face the inevitable pushback from the enemy class. The ones who will rally the midwits and bureaucrats into a frenzied state of revolt against anything that will be long-term beneficial to various national interests.
A couple of recent examples should suffice.
Here in Ontario, Canada, those of us on the right were enthusiastically boosting all of Premier Ford’s out-of-the-gate policies that seemed to leave the left reeling. This included stopping a depraved sex-ed curriculum, eliminating a cap and trade environmental scheme, resisting a carbon tax, and slashing the size of Toronto’s Byzantine city council.
But when Covid hit, all bets were off. Instead of sticking by a tried and true conservative formula of personal responsibility, bodily autonomy and medical privacy, the most prominent example being the DeSantis administration in Florida, Ford instead opted to go full commie.
In this, he oversaw one of the most stringent and vile lockdown and vaccination regimes in the Western world. One that saw the small businesses he championed bankrupted, free market economics brushed aside for corporatism, and his dissenting party members expelled.
Premier Ford, often derided as “Trump North”, turned out to be just another morally bankrupt elite who could be rolled by capricious mobs and moneyed interests.
We could also take a look at Trump’s first-term legacy.
With so much promise for reversing the trends of mass immigration, perpetual deficits, and big tech collusion, we ultimately got little in the way of concrete policy to advance libertarian populism. Indeed he was the one who drove the national debt to new heights, ramped up the military-industrial complex, and despite his initial instincts, was hoodwinked by the biomedical security state into supporting Fauci, lockdowns, and Operation Warp Speed.
There are also the examples of Italian PM Meloni and her reluctance to address the north African migrant crisis, the successive impotence of British Tories, and the flailing presidential campaign of Governor DeSantis.
This is all to say that though the appeal of owning the libs and giving the media a bloody nose is generally satiating, it’s really just empty calories.
The greatness of a bold, nationalistic, and liberty-motivated governance structure has yet to be realized while Cthulhu swims ever leftward.
And with every new development, we get a breath of fresh hope.
But we have to remember that hope is an act of optimistically receiving an unestablished set of future events. An emotional reaction to a chain of unknowable dominoes that we desperately wish to fall in our favour.
It's in one sense an optimistic appraisal that gives us the will to move forward. Conversely, it’s tinged with a childlike ideal of naiveté.
And this is where the political, constitutional and legal realities bump up against the hope we so desperately want to materialize.
Indeed, all of these reformers and “far right radicals” like Milei, Meloni, Poilievre, Wilders, La Pen, and Trump will inevitably have institutional and geopolitical restrictions placed on them the moment they gain power. An overwhelming majority of which are leftist in nature.
So the extent to which they can install the policies they campaigned on remains largely a matter of hope for their spiritual supporters. Parliamentary coalitions, constitutional safeguards, and waning democratic appeal subject their based worldviews to a rigorous set of procedural hoops they have to navigate through.
And this is all assuming the ever-encroaching army of militant leftism just sits back and watches. We know they will not.
For as HL Mencken reminds us:
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins. All of them imaginary.”
We know that despite a string of liberty-minded policy victories the intelligentsia, the media, the corporate oligarchs, and the establishment political elite will marshal all of their resources to halt the march of freedom and representative democracy.
One only need look at the example of Trump’s beleaguered presidency where the whole system acted in concert to delegitimize and denigrate his administration. Even going so far as to try and cynically frame a sitting president for treason.
But examples like this should serve as an important reminder to not sit back on your laurels and smirk about how we really owned the libs on that one thing. And yes of course we should openly savor every juicy instance of schadenfreude that comes our way. But short of an unrelenting push towards based world we will be left enduring the welfare-warfare ideologies espoused by the Macrons, Trudeaus and Bidens of the world.
Recall that this is precisely how our enemies think of the game.
Their revolution never ends and they’ll never get deterred by short-term setbacks. They play the long game of institutional capture and early childhood indoctrination and won't be satisfied even if they implement digital social justice totalitarianism.
Our victories are their fuel to fight onward.
Their victories leave us demoralized, atomized and resentful.
Remember that the ones who want to win will always beat the ones who want to be left alone.
So the red pill is that regardless of what wild policies politician X may be pursuing, they are destined to be curtailed, abandoned, struck down, or otherwise diluted by political forces outside of the populist right’s control. A completely foreseeable game of two steps forward and one step back in the fight against leftist domination.
The black pill is that we will be let down. Milei may want to chainsaw a dozen governmental departments, Trump to build a wall, and Poilievre to abolish taxpayer media, but in our heart of hearts, we know it won’t happen the way we want it to. When we fantastically forge ahead with our bold plans despite the ravenous cackles of the leftist rabble. A single political leader, party, or movement will not save you.
The white pill is that as a movement, liberty-minded people have something to believe in again. A transparent and forthright policy prescription coupled with a principled and strong leader will resonate down the line and translate into future action. The reverberations of the Ron Paul revolution in 2008 speak volumes about this political reality and the long-term gains of adhering to this path.
A path that will leave you undeterred by setbacks, day-to-day battles, and the long slog of political change. A clear course of action and philosophical consistency will inevitably foster greater engagement and the will to keep fighting.
This is to say that projecting your highest hopes and becoming despondently misanthropic afterwards, is a surefire path to the self-flagellating darkness of disillusionment.
So take the recent geopolitical developments towards populist nationalism with cautious optimism, and look to build off them for perpetual gains towards based world.
Only the sustained and dedicated application of forward momentum will nudge us in the right direction.
A few words of wisdom by the Bouncing Souls may suffice. In a song called “Kids and Heroes” they ask:
“Hey, where did it go?
Everything we fought for, and everything it meant
Maybe we were just naive
But I still believe there are only a few things that really belong to me
Who I am, who I was, and who I want to be
Hey, where have I gone?
I used to be the one looking for the hero in some far-off place
Blindly ever forward, never knowing all along
The truth was right there in my own song”
So be the valiant hero and not a childish believer.