Greenblatt and the Limits of Soft Power

The ADL is not the Final Boss

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Sovereignty is an evergreen topic of debate in our spheres, and much of this is down to confusion over what it is and how it works. But the recent row between Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL and Elon Musk over control of Twitter clarifies the issue.

Twitter is a pillar of the regime’s operations—it’s used to measure and shape public opinion and to discipline rival castles,¹ to use the Jouvenelian terminology. It can’t be replaced or abandoned, but nor can its role be formalized lest it be subject to legal restrictions. It served the regime best as a vaguely private entity under the control of the managerial elite. Letting Musk capture this castle has been a serious blunder since he is clearly not a team player, probably he is simply a political independent who hails from a country where his own ethnos is currently being genocided.

The dynamic is well summarized by Neema Parvini in his article Elon Musk vs. Jonathan Greenblatt, which I urge you to read in full. In it, Parvini shows that the ADL’s soft power is running into hard limits, and this greatly clarifies the nature of sovereignty—how political authority works and what its relationship is to moral authority.

The ADL is one of the prime enemies of the radical right because its mandate is effectively to blunt white racial consciousness. It’s often thought that the ADL is in the driver’s seat, that the ADL is not simply one castle among many, but the sovereign itself, the power behind the throne, that can bring even the executive to heel. It is a moral authority—the supreme moral authority of our time, to be sure—but the ADL has only soft power.

Soft power is impersonal power—it appeals to ideals. Hard power is the opposite, it is personal power—it appeals to interest. The iron law of oligarchy ensures that hard power is always concentrated. So popular sovereignty, the idea that the people are the highest authority, relies on the assumption that soft power is upstream of hard power, that men are governed by impersonal ideals. Zoomed in far enough, this can appear to be the case. On any given day, soft power holds society together; people mostly police themselves, according to custom. As the story goes, the ideals themselves are in the driver’s seat and the solution to our problems is to announce better ideals clearly and publicly enough, at which point change will spontaneously happen.

Greg Johnson describes this in his article Might, Right, & Sovereignty as “talking our way into power”. Since the psychopaths with their hands on the machinery of the state won’t be talked out of power, talking our way into power must mean convincing enough normal folks to get out and force the psychos out of power; it means a kind of bottom-up social change driven by the people themselves. It means that soft power (salus populi) guides and directs hard power (lex suprema).

This is not what we’re seeing. We’re seeing the moral authority (ADL) run up against a little node of decision (Musk) and come up short. Musk wields something closer to hard power than Greenblatt. He is the face of American public-private partnerships, especially military tech partnerships, so he can’t be replaced without a cost. He can’t afford to run afoul of the American military complex, but it would be risky to alienate him. For better or worse, Musk is himself a load-bearing structure of “democracy”.

Now Musk has acquired another major castle, and the ADL has told him that he must play ball—he has simply decided to say no. What is Greenblatt’s move? Greenblatt has soft power but no hard power, so he has leveraged Musk’s peers such as Tim Buckley and Larry Fink, who do wield something closer to hard power—Greenblatt’s move is to appeal to a higher court. He is not telling Musk’s advertisers to drop him, he is asking. “Never Again” is the lex suprema of our time, and yet it is reduced to appealing to authorities to get things done. This is a battle of wills, and Greenblatt’s will is all but irrelevant, because while he is the embodiment of the supreme law, a law cannot be sovereign.

Sovereignty always culminates in a will, a terminus ad quem beyond which there is no higher court of appeal. In politics this will is characterized by the decision—this is the key insight of absolutist political ontology. The essential feature of the sovereign is that it is not bound by anything beyond the will of the gods and the laws of physics, not because it shouldn’t be bound, but because it can’t. Jean Bodin’s formulation of sovereignty is the locus classicus, and it’s worth quoting him at length on this point:

Augustus’ successor Tiberius commanded that favours granted by dead emperors should have no force unless successors should acknowledge them […] and if the prince is not bound by his forebears’ laws, how could he be bound by his own? For one can indeed do the bidding of another, but no man can command himself. Pomponius says “there can be no obligation arising from the will of the one promising,” which reason is certainly not only plausible, but also necessary to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the prince cannot be bound by his own laws and ordinances. For just as, according to the canonists, popes cannot bind their own hands, so neither can the supreme prince, nor the highest magistrate, nor any private citizen, give decrees or commands to himself. Hence that clause affixed to the end of all laws and edicts: “because it has so pleased us.” So that it may be understood by all that laws, although just, depend on the will of the one commanding them.²

None of this in any way makes sovereignty incompatible with the good of the people—in fact, the sovereign who does wrong by his people will be punished by the gods. But it is to the gods alone that he must render account. Sovereignty is not a matter of being a swell guy, of having the right beliefs, or of a compact between ruler and ruled. Sovereignty is not primarily a matter of should but of can.³ And the sovereign cannot be bound by a law because otherwise he is subject to someone who is not—to the true sovereign.

Greenblatt is bound by a law, the law that governs our world, what Adorno called the new categorical imperative⁴—he is this law made flesh. And yet, Greenblatt is himself subject, because he must appeal to a higher will to enforce the law. This is not to deny the obvious power of the ADL and the organized Jewish lobby, it is simply to understand that soft power must finally resolve in some form of hard power or it is empty. Soft power without hard power is like a cheque written to a bank account that is closed. The cheque does not acquire value from self-evident force but because someone is willing to stand behind it.

Liberalism is the erasure of personal will from politics, and its populist iteration substitutes for personal will a fictional “general will” that is neither metaphysically nor politically sound. But sovereignty is a matter of will, so this erasure of will simply obscures who actually is in charge, hence we are systematically deceived into thinking that the ADL, the SPLC, that universities, the SCOTUS, the media, or Google are really in charge. The replacement of the current sovereign with one who serves the interests of the people is a noble goal. How can that ever happen with a worldview that erases the sovereign?

Musk has opened up an imperium in imperio, a “state within a state”, however embryonic. It remains to be seen whether he has the stuff of a king—don’t bet the farm on it. But in the substitution of ideals for men as the engine of history, although its goals are noble, populism ensures perpetual defeat. Change will come from someone like Musk, and it is the task of the radical right to forge itself into a weapon that can be wielded by such a man in our people’s interests. It seems like talking our way into power has become our main strategy, which mostly just funnels radical energy away from institution building. But then, institution building comes with far more risk than talking, so one wonders whether that isn’t exactly the point.

1. An unofficial power, one of the sovereign’s deputies that it uses to rule.

2. Bodin, Six Books of the Republic, book I, ch. viii.

3. The issue of should is fleshed out by the question of legitimacy, and I have addressed this question in the articles Charles III and the Problem of Legitimacy and The Ancestral Principle. In sum, legitimacy is a matter of being the author of a people, or having inherited office from that author.

4. “Hitler has imposed a new categorical imperative upon humanity in the state of their unfreedom: to arrange their thinking and conduct, so that Auschwitz never repeats itself, so that nothing similar ever happen again.” Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, vol. vi.