Failure analysis is probably the most important component of progress in any area of human endeavor. Figuring out what went wrong, why it went wrong and then scheming how to prevent it from happening again, is how we move forward in business, science, technology and even social organization. After every election, the losing party goes through a period of self-examination in order to figure out why they lost. The old line about learning more from failure than success is true, as long as you actually learn something.

With Joe Biden launching his campaign in Charlottesville, now is a good time to examine the catastrophe of the Unite the Right rally in 2017. Now, the first thing to note that from the point of view of the Left, this was a great success. Almost two years on, it remains an emotional rallying point for all of the tribes in the fight against whiteness. It is why very old white man Joe Biden picked it for his campaign announcement. He wanted to let those tribes know that he is their man, despite his noticeable lack of vibrancy.

That is an important lesson of this event. Activism is always about rallying your side and depressing the other side. Everything else is secondary. Most of the dissident right is happy to forget about this event, while the Left has made it one of the key events in their narrative. Put the phrase “Unite the Right” into a search engine and you first get the Wikipedia page describing it as a rally by the worst people. An image search returns pics of Nazis and noble non-whites. For the Left, Charlottesville was a triumph.

That is the first lesson of the event. It was a failure. Many involved have yet to come to terms with that reality. Instead, they keep working to correct the record about what happened and who was responsible. This recent live stream by Richard Spencer is a good example. The fact that they keep thinking the facts matter says they still don’t understand what happened. To the Left, the facts are unimportant. What matters is they have martyrs and they have a bloody shirt to wave around.

Therein lies another lesson. For too many in dissident politics, this obsession with applying the blue pencil to the Left’s myth-making remains a liability. Conservatives have always fallen into this trap. While the Left is performing yet another morality tale, the Right is busy editing the script for accuracy. In politics, factual accuracy is only important if it advances the narrative. What matters, what always matters, is convincing the public that your version of reality is the most pleasing. The facts are just part of the set.

Beyond accepting that it was a disaster for our side, however you wish to define it, the question is why did it happen? Part of it was the people involved got caught up in the moment, so they stopped thinking. They really thought they were in one of those great periods of transition. Eric Striker actually makes that point in this episode of his podcast at around the 55-minute mark. Before the event, Spencer had posted his version of the Port Huron Statement. They thought the revolution was happening.

Another reason the event turned into a great piece of propaganda for the Left and a disaster for the Right is the organizers made the classic error of thinking the Left would abide by its own stated rules. This never happens, as the Left sees rules, laws and principles as conveniences that further their efforts. The laws are like the New York subway system. You get on and off as necessary. It is a means to an end, not an end in itself. For the Left, winning is always the end. They will never let the rules get in the way.

Conservatives have been making this mistake for as long as anyone reading this has been alive. American right-wingers always assume the Left has practical, tangible motivations and that they will abide by their own rules. After all, conservatives have practical goals and always play by the rules. You’ll notice that all of those Virginia democrats caught up in the black face scandal are still in their jobs. Even the serial attacker, Justin Fairfax, is still in his job. In the fight with the Left, there are no rules.

One lesson many on the alt-right have learned from the event is that all the people flying the “pro-white” banner are not the same. Those older groups, what is often called White Nationalism 1.0, are incompatible with the modern movements. Those guys remain stuck in the past, determined to remain in a sub-culture that operates on the fringes. Many of them are simply crazy or violent. There’s no need to disavow these people, but if you’re going to build something new, you have to break free from the past.

Charlottesville is a great example of why outsider movements need to first build small, in real life organizations. Holding a big public rally looks cool and gets a lot of attention, but it also draws a lot of lunatics and weirdos. In person organizing, especially in small groups, allows for careful vetting. If Jason Kessler had to apprentice in a local group for a couple of years, he never could have talked people into his venture. The goofballs with the Hitler flags could never get in front of the cameras at an alt-right event.

That’s the most important lesson of Charlottesville. Every war is a media war. This low-grade civil war in the West is about imagery and narrative. In Charlottesville, the Right allowed the Left to control the production, so they could control the narrative and the imagery. Future activism must always confound the preferred narrative, thus putting the Left on the defensive. The media organs of the Left are big and powerful, but they are not nimble or adaptive. That can be used against them with clever activism.

This AIM action over the weekend is a great example. Those aging commies in the audience were ready to celebrate their edginess until a bunch of young guys turned up to heckle and mock them. Instead of trading made up stories about their days fighting the man, they were being mocked as the man. The subsequent news stories sound like something to come from the Soviet press in the old days. The only thing missing from the reports are the words “hooliganism” and “running dog lackeys.”

In time, the tank will run dry on Charlottesville and it will cease to be a bloody shirt for the Progressive mobs. The lessons though can never be forgotten by dissidents trying to build an alternative to the current order. Mistakes have consequences. One of those consequences must be shrewder leaders and better strategies. Otherwise, the dissident right will follow the conservatives into the same dead end. The difference is there will be no cushy think tank jobs waiting for the losers of this political fight.

Confirmation bias is one of those universals that effects everyone. It’s natural for people to gravitate toward that which confirms what they wish to be true. No matter how hard you try to “be objective” you naturally prefer that which fits your biases. In the sciences, there are elaborate processes to correct for this tendency. In theory, having your work reviewed by peers, especially those with different biases, will correct for bias. It does not always work that way, but that just shows how tough it is to overcome our biases.

In the realm of public policy, there is no process for overcoming bias. In theory, public debate should work like peer review, but the people allowed into the debates tend to hold the same biases as everyone else in the debate. Every debate on crime, for example, excludes the important stuff, because of reasons. The result is a debate between people, who all agree that the important stuff can never be mentioned. Therefore, the public is left to hope that the people making public policy get lucky.

In theory, even if the people in charge all share the same biases, they have to face the public, which is supposed to be the acid test of liberal democracy. If the public is unhappy with what the politicians are doing, they vote in new politicians. This fear of unemployment is supposed to keep the politicians from straying too far from the consensus. As we see throughout the West, the reality is something different. Ruling classes all over the West are wildly out of step with the public, which is the cause of these populist revolts.

Part of the reason may be a feature of the managerial state that has emerged since the end of the great industrial wars of the last century. The political class is no longer part of the feedback loop that existed between themselves and the public. Instead, they get their information about public sentiment through policy experts and polling. When an office holder wants to know where to stand on an issue, he does not canvas his district or hold a series of constituent meetings. Instead he consults his staff of experts.

The result is something you in this rather odd post at National Review. The post is a long rebuttal to the main thesis of the book Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities, by Eric Kaufmann. The main thrust of the book is that white nationalists and immigration patriots should be allowed to participate in public debate. Since immigration fanatics and non-white identity groups get to participate, whites should get the same courtesy. That this is a radical idea at National Review is topic all by itself.

A clue that you are in an emperor’s new clothes moment is when the response to a simple suggestion is a graph, followed by thousands of words of commentary. That’s what you see from the writer. His answer to the complaints by whites about immigration, for example, is to claim that whites are not really complaining about immigration. In other words, instead of addressing the main argument, he attacks the premise. In effect, his point is the immigration patriots cannot participate because they don’t exist.

Now, it has to be said that the sorts of people writing for National Review live in terror that one day the Left will put their name on the wrong list. Therefore, their every waking moment is spent confirming the current morality of the Left. At the moment that means anything with the word “white” in it is bad and opposition to the brown hordes pouring over the border is immoral. Basically National Review is going on record saying this Kaufmann fellow and his crazy ideas about debate is a very bad person with bad ideas.

Putting that aside though, consider what Verbruggen is doing. Instead of looking outside to get a sense of what’s happening in the public, he consults a Gallup study, one that confirms his bias. Of course, the only people who read National Review these days are Republican Party consultants, who will use posts like this to convince their masters that there is no need to worry about their angry voters. After all, those torch wielding mobs outside their office really don’t exist. It says so right in that Gallup poll.

Of course, there is the fact that the response by these people to public unrest about immigration, way back when they threw open the borders, was a public relations campaign to anathematize opponents. Back in the 1990’s, when it was still possible for people like Peter Brimelow and John Derbyshire to post opposition to immigration on National Review, the public was comfortable being in opposition. Once opposition to open borders was declared immoral, the public stopped voicing concerns to pollsters.

In other words, the feedback loop in the managerial state now works like this. The power elite want some set of polices, so they hire top men from the managerial class to sell it to the public. Whether or not the public buys it is immaterial, they just need evidence that there is public support for it. Once they generate that, they are convinced and set about convincing policy makers to push the new policy. Of course, there is plenty of money to go around, so politicians are more than happy to believe whatever is fed them.

In the managerial state, the feedback loop is like something you would see in a business school model of a failing business. Senior management brings in a market research firm to tell them the problem is not management. Rather, it is positioning in the market place. The solution is to hire a new marketing firm to convince the market that the company’s products are the best. The same research firm then studies the results and reports back that everything is working. Meanwhile, the company sinks further into the red.

That may sound like a strange comparison, but take a look at this post in the Columbia Journalism Review about the new publisher of National Review. The collapse of National Review over the last twenty years has one direct cause, the embrace of neoconservatism and the abandonment of their core constituency. Instead of facing up to the fact that they have a bad product and a lot of bad managers, they are going to rework their website so they can create a safe space for engagement. Meanwhile, their site is a ghost town.

The apparent insularity of the political class is the result of being cut off from the normal feedback loops. When National Review had to scramble for readers, they had to know something about the public. When the political class had to canvas for votes, they met actual voters who told them about what was on their mind. Today, the entire managerial class is like a monastery, where everyone is trying to be the star of the choir or the best at illuminating manuscripts. They spend all of their time talking to themselves.

As an aside, the reason social media and website comment sections terrorize these people is it is there where the yawning gap between themselves and the public is most obvious. When National Review had a comment section, their writers saw plainly that the readers were not buying what they were selling. The solution was to get rid of the comments. On social media, the solution is to purge the platforms of anyone that upsets human resources. Our thought leaders can only take so much reality.

Sam Francis made the point decades ago that both political parties in America are far to the Left of the people who vote for them. The reason for that is the political center of the ruling class has always been to the extreme Left of the public. Cut off from the feedback loop, that center has now drifted out beyond the event horizon of most people. It’s why our rulers seem like strangers to us. It’s why writers for Conservative Inc. stagger around in a daze, years after having been jolted by their remaining connection to the feedback loop.

Outside of the various hives on the modern Left, it is generally assumed that the natural progression of democracy is toward some form of dictatorship. What starts as a sensible idea by sensible people leads to an expansion of the franchise to include a majority of people, who are not sensible. This inevitably leads to instability. The system first breaks down into factionalism and then becomes both corrupt and inept. The solution is the man of will, who will cut through the process and impose order on the chaos.

This is why the Founders were steadfastly opposed to democracy. They knew their history and their political philosophy. They also understood human nature. It is also why both sides of the Progressive order have rewritten history to have the Civil War as the second founding. Ben Shapiro cannot sing the praises of democracy if the authority to which he is appealing was opposed to it and to him. It turns out that democracy not only corrupts the present it must corrupt the past in order to legitimize itself.

One the problems with social cycle theory is it seems to blinker people into thinking that history not only repeats itself, but does so exactly. In the case of modern America, people think we are far away from Caesarism, because we have yet to have a Sulla. In other words, they assume the ascent into authoritarianism will follow the exact same path as past shifts from republic to empire. If present events don’t exactly fit the old template, then American has yet to enter that cycle, so there is no fear for an America Caesar.

This is a mistake, of course, as history does not repeat itself like a reboot of an old television franchise. Instead, the general pattern is repeated, but within the context of the age, along a different timeline. In the case of America, Lincoln was the Marius phase while the New Deal was the Sulla phase. Instead of a social war between the two, one phase ran its course, setting the ground work for the other, which in turn set off the process leading to where we are now. There’s no Caesar, but we see the signs of Caesarism.

For example, look at the general uselessness of the Congress. One party, the Republicans, are the sock puppets of global interests. In theory they represent the white middle class, the only people willing to vote Republican, but they are wholly owned by global enterprise. The Democrats, on the other hand, represent the spiritual aspirations of the global class. They feed at the same trough as the Republicans, but serve the female side of the global elite. They are the yin to the GOP yang.

This collapse of legitimacy results in a Congress that does very little. Instead, it relies on the Executive to do what it asks. The vast federal bureaucracy that Trump is struggling to operate is the real government of America. The FBI sedition scandal is a good example of the contempt with which the New Class holds the political class. They have no fear of either party in Congress, as they know they are powerless. Proof of that is the parade of people lying to Congress and never facing the consequences.

It used to be that defying the will of Congress had serious risk. Contempt of Congress was a weapon that could be used to put someone in prison. The last person that angered the Congress enough with their lying was Rita Lavelle. That was back in the 1980’s and she served six months in prison for contempt. Since then, Congress has been noticeably less willing to throw its weight around, to the point where the oligarchs feel free to lie in extravagant ways in front of House committees. They hold Congress in contempt.

What we have today is rule by a surprisingly small number of people. At the top is the global pirate class that owns the media, technology and finance. Under them are the lesser elites that rule over the academy, mass media, politics and foreign policy. This is the New Class, an elite within the bureaucracy that has a free hand in running the state, as long as they don’t anger their paymasters. At most there are a few thousand people controlling a few million person bureaucracy that runs the global empire.

Further evidence of this is what has been happening with Trump. The real power, the New Class, operating the executive bureaucracy, has no respect for him, so they happily do what they must to undermine his agenda. Instead of begging Congress to its job, he needs to figure out how to use the weapon that is the vast executive branch. Perhaps he is figuring it out, but thus far he has been unable to come to terms with this reality. The next Democrat president will not make the same mistake.

The Bolshevik Revolution was supposed to end up in a dictatorship of the proletariat, but instead resulted in a largely urban dictatorship of the nomenklatura, a term, derived from the Latin nomenclatura, meaning a list of names. The suggestion was that it was hereditary, rather than meritorious. Trotsky referred to it as a caste, rather than a class, as it looked more like the old Tsarist order, rather than something new. The managerial state described by James Burnham, has evolved into a similar sort of ruling caste.

This may be why we are now seeing similar displays of power that were seen in the old Soviet Union. The banning of books, the suppression of speech, the use of internal exile to intimidate dissidents, these are all features of the Soviet system now present in modern America. It could also be the result of minoritarianism, as both the Soviets and modern American see a disproportionate number of people in this ruling caste that are not part of the majority population. Therefore, they rule in fear of demographics.

Another point of comparison is how authoritarian rule that comes after some form of popular political system, whether communism or liberal democracy, is that it has firm control of the cities, but far less control of the hinterlands. Despite the mythology, the Soviet system was never able to fully control its territory. The Bolsheviks were reduced to weaponizing neglect, in order to keep the rural areas pacified. The American opioid epidemic is serving a similar function for the American New Class.

Again, historical analogies are never precise. The patterns we are seeing in modern America could also compare to a number of other historical examples. What matters is the macro pattern, where democracy inevitably leads to some form of authoritarian rule, based in the urban areas. That’s where we are now in modern America. The illusion of democracy has disguised the deep contempt the ruling elite has for the people, but that contempt is becoming more obvious. At some point, they will simply stop pretending.