The Case for a Folkish Elite
Whoever Picks Up This Sword Will Rule
If you prefer the audio of this article, click here.
The H-1B Controversy
Elon Musk has recently come under fire over importing skilled foreign labour through the H-1B visa program in the US. This situation illustrates the fault lines within the fragile MAGA alliance, but it also shows the way forward. The problem is that in order to see that way forward, you need both a clear-eyed understanding of power dynamics and a solid grounding in folkish theory. Imperium Press and this blog together give you these tools.
Often I write as though the audience has read every Imperium book as well as the 250,000 words and counting in this blog. In this article we will make everything explicit because elites don’t have time to read all that. And yet if they did, they could be more than rich. They could be immortal.
Any serious political observer understands that the left has been stacking wins basically unopposed longer than any of us have been alive. This was formalized by Robert Conquest as Conquest’s 2nd law—any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing. This has been understood since the French Revolution at least, and the principal theoretical question in politics has been to explain why this law holds. Several years ago a very smart writer who calls himself “Spandrell” answered that question, and the short answer is that all liberal praxis since the French Revolution has been some variant of what Lenin did.
Loyalty Over Competence
Lenin was able to topple a thousand-year old political tradition by hacking the social calculus. He figured out that what people care about most is status, and that if you offer status to people who can never get it any other way, you will have yourself an army of foot soldiers loyal unto death. This is Leninism, and it works by offering upward social mobility to people whose class puts a hard ceiling above them. The modern variant that we know as wokeness—which Spandrell called bioleninism—is the same idea, but applied to people whose biology puts a ceiling above them. By enfranchising the gender-confused, the malformed, the sexual deviant, the ethnic minority, the habitually criminal, etc. you get the same loyalty but on steroids.
Anyone who has ever run even a small company understands the value of loyalty and obedience. Yes, of course you need competence, but competence without loyalty isn’t worth much. Too many cooks spoil the broth. The vast majority of people in an organization are not there to be strategists or idea people—they’re there to do what they’re told. This is why militaries work on the principle of absolute loyalty and obedience, and for a military, performance is a matter of life and death. This is critical to understand—the competence crisis is first and foremost a loyalty crisis.
The reason why woke organizations outcompete non-woke is partly due to legal incentives,1 but this is not nearly the whole story. It’s mostly because they offer people of middling talent the only way up the social ladder, so these people will go to war for the company values. They will work long hours for little pay, sometimes even for free (cf. activists) in exchange for merely symbolic victories of dunking on their enemies. They love the company. The company is life. They are true believers.
This situation has created the competence crisis. By systematically enfranchising the least competent but most loyal, liberalism has drained institutions of competence and has imposed transaction costs at every point in the social structure. Meanwhile it has pushed the demographic with the most competence—conservative white males—to the fringes. By telling them to take a knee to ethnic competitors and to defer to female voices, it has removed all the skin they had in the game. Now if you want anything done by this demographic, you have to pay top dollar, because our societies are neither of, nor by, nor for them. The persistence of this situation over three generations has produced the most catastrophically low EROI2 in living memory. We have better technology than ever in history and yet the cost of basics like family formation, housing, healthcare, education, and transportation have risen steadily over time.
This erosion of the basic preconditions of society has made America less competitive, but it has also opened up opportunities for a counter-elite who can come in to fix the problem. The counter-elite who does manage to fix the problem will be the one who understands that the competence crisis is first and foremost a loyalty crisis.
America needs to take a good, long look in the mirror. In just 30 years, it has gone from the sole world power to one great power among many, because it has lost the loyalty of its native stock, who are its greatest source of competence. Society cannot function as a unit amid wasteful ethnic struggles for dominance. China is starting to eat our lunch because it can function as a unit, because there is no question but that China is for the Han and everyone else there is along for the ride. Its not that they’re stealing our intellectual property—that is a weak excuse. They can only steal our IP because we can’t do anything about it, and we can’t do anything about it because they are powerful. And they are powerful because they are folkish.
The Looming Downgrade
The 2024 US election was that moment where the security state made peace with a Trump presidency, and it did so because even though Trump is distasteful to it, Trump represents the return of meritocracy. Despite the optimism, this will not be enough. Resentment over white male domination of professional spaces will not simply abate because America needs to get serious. What Elon Musk calls the “woke mind-virus” is so entrenched in the bureaucratic culture of the US civil service (what some call the Deep State), that DEI and other competence-destroying initiatives will simply be repackaged into other forms. Even if Trump and Musk come in, start firing civil servants, breaking up cliques, and shuffling positions, this will barely scratch the surface. Trump is a negotiator, not a Caesar, and we won’t fix the problem by bargaining it away.
So we would be wise to expect a continuity between the actions of past and present administrations. Anti-white and anti-male policies will continue and thereby so will the competence crisis, but let us note something interesting—over time this crisis has reduced the government’s overall effectiveness, and that includes its ability to impose its federal directives at the state and local level. Several examples come to mind. We might point to the standoff in 2024 between the federal and Texas state government over installing razor wire along the US-Mexico border.3 We might point to Arizona’s Proposition 314, approved only months ago, which allows local police rather than ICE to arrest illegal migrants, opening the way for jurisdictional challenges.4 Going back a little further, one might think of the inability of the US federal government to enforce vaccine mandates.5
Whereas the security state seems more powerful than ever, successful challenges to federal authority are increasing with time, not decreasing. The situation is not unlike in the late Roman empire, or in at the late end of the Egyptian New Kingdom, where official records state that Egypt won every battle it ever fought, but those wins kept getting closer and closer to the capital.
It may be hard to see now, but authority is beginning to devolve to a more local level, and because this devolution is driven by structural factors, we have every reason to expect that it will continue. What is only a trickle of local autonomy right now will turn into a flood as the competence crisis deepens, and as America is further taxed by challenges to its imperial dominance abroad. Over time, the DEI-addled civil service and legal system will find itself less and less able to enforce the will of the centre, and local authority will find itself more and more independent.
Perhaps somewhat dramatically, we can say that the centre of our social order is in the process of collapse. The pundit class is aware of this in a rather unconscious way, which it frames in epistemic terms as the “post-truth” era. We no longer speak the same political language, obey the same basic moral imperatives, nor even frame the world by the same concepts. It would not be a terrible exaggeration to say that we are heading toward a world of postmodern technology but feudal social structure, where people obey local authority and clothe themselves in a local identity, and pay very little heed to anything beyond that.
As the centre of our social order devolves in the coming decades, various competing centres are going to emerge to fill the void. As empire crumbles, we get warlords. Except war is not what it was in ancient times—men no longer march into war with pikes and muskets, but with social media accounts, LLMs, encryption, and blockchain. War is now highly abstracted from the front, and is carried on as informational warfare, what military analysts call 5G or unrestricted warfare. These competing centres will be organized around a strongman, as they were in ancient times. But today that strongman will not be a military general as before, someone who can wage 1G warfare, but someone adept at 5G warfare. A “tech bro”.
War is not now, and never will be, completely abstracted from hard power. This “tech bro sovereign” will of course need to wield hard power, just as the US federal government does today. But just as the federal government does, his sovereignty will lie in the wielding of more abstract power. Anyone can take up an AR-15, but it takes a man of specialized skill to command men who can do that. And it takes a man of still more specialized skill to disrupt the communications and logistics of other such men. And it takes a man of still more specialized skill to insulate his generals from that, and to insulate his people from disinformation. At every stage of abstraction from the front, fewer and fewer men can do the job, until you reach one man—the sovereign. This is the local strongman of the future. A Caesar who can wage cyberwarfare.
Personal vs. Procedural Power
There is another element to the power of the strongman beyond technical capability, and this is the more decisive element—his personal power. Trump is not a technocrat, but he is the closest thing in the West to a living, breathing sovereign precisely because of his personal power. When he speaks, half the country obeys. If he says someone is an enemy, they treat them as the enemy. Trump has no real formal power, but the mere fact that he says something should be, is often enough to make that thing happen.6
Contrast this to the impersonal rule of the Biden administration and the US civil service. Here is a system with an executive so weak that for all intents and purposes there is no executive. This is the true spirit of liberalism—a “rules based order” which governs by impersonal procedure, which is committed to the “rule of law” where the rules themselves rule, and where the system runs automatically and without a head that is anything more than symbolic. People with a bureaucratic mindset are incensed to an irrational degree by Trump, because he represents the opposite of all this—he represents the rule of a man with a will which cannot be algorithmically reduced to mere procedure. Unlike Biden, Trump can’t be replaced without replacing the whole system, because he is the system.
But Trump is a liberal, which means that he is at least sentimentally (if not ideologically) committed to this impersonal proceduralism. Trump’s worldview is filtered through personal relationships and through people. His idea of America is not so much freedom, individualism, and rule of law, as it is Andrew Jackson, Dwight Eisenhower, and Henry Ford. His Americanism is an uneasy marriage between the impersonal ideology of liberalism and the personal power that has made him into perhaps the most effective politician in the world.
The pro-America message in all three of Trump’s campaigns is not a belief in some abstraction like freedom or opportunity. In keeping with the personal nature of Trump’s worldview, the core message is that he stands for the “forgotten man”, which was mentioned both in his 2016 victory speech,7 and on the 2024 campaign trail.8 The source of Trump’s untouchable personal power is twofold: 1) he can effortlessly humiliate the forgotten man’s elite enemies, but much more importantly, 2) Trump embodies noblesse oblige—the idea that his elite status carries with it obligations to his folk. Whether or not Trump actually believes in this, it’s enough that the forgotten man believes that Trump has his interests at heart, that he speaks for him.
However Trump made a serious blunder recently. When Elon Musk chafed against American nativists with his celebration of the H-1B program, Trump stayed out of it at first. But when Elon unwisely pressed the point and “went to war” against the nativists, he dragged Trump into the fray, which resulted in Trump siding with Elon against the forgotten man. This showed that Trump does not truly believe in noblesse oblige, or at the very most charitable, Trump is deluded about who the forgotten man is.9
It does not take a genius to figure out that Trump is not folkish—that he is not loyal to an ethnic folk—but in rejecting folkishness explicitly, Trump has angered the forgotten man. This man will forgive Trump, but only because of Trump’s track record of acting, however incidentally, in his own ethnic interests. When Trump dunks on Elizabeth Warren for pretending to be an Indian, when he deputizes Tom Homan to humiliate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a congressional hearing, his base sees people who look like them chastising people who don’t. If this base of forgotten men were to disappear, so would Trump’s personal power. These people are fiercely loyal to him because the ladder of social mobility has been kicked out from under them precisely because they are conservative rural whites, and he at least implicitly holds it up to them. The source of Trump’s personal power is folkishness.
Excalibur Lies Waiting
The combination of folkish noblesse oblige with technical competence has a name—we call it Caesarism, after the man who most famously employed it. The whole apparatus of ideological liberalism—from the security state to the civil service to the legal system—is not built around competence. It is not built around fairness or impartiality. It is not even built primarily to govern at all. The apparatus of ideological liberalism, especially in the post-WWII era, has been designed specifically and solely to prevent this Caesar figure from ever arising. That is all it is competent at.
For this reason, liberalism has neglected its actual duties and has turned its society into a factory that produces nothing but ideological anti-fascism. This is a deep structural problem within the ideology of liberalism itself—in its allergy to personal power, it is fundamentally anti-reality. As a result, we would be negligent to think that good intentions and a vague plan to start firing some social justice harpies will fix this. The whole structure is rotten and needs to be torn down right to the foundations.
Thankfully, the very incompetence inherent in ideological liberalism is accomplishing this task for us. As the West descends further into the competence crisis, authority will continue to devolve to more and more local levels. As this happens, local strongmen become more and more independent, and this is accelerated by technological advancement. As technologies like encryption, blockchain, and cryptocurrencies evolve, it becomes harder and harder to enforce civil rights laws that prevent free economic association, while central authority attempts to enforce them less and less effectively with a Janissary class of diversity hires.
The lesson of Leninism is that minimal competence plus maximal loyalty is more effective than maximal competence plus minimal loyalty. Nearly a century of bioleninism has produced a situation where the most competent are shut out from positions of power—it has given them reason to be loyal to a Caesar. Wokeness has produced a powder keg where we are about to see what maximal competence plus maximal loyalty can do. This is Excalibur lying on the ground, waiting to be picked up. The apparatus of liberalism is doing all it can to stop this today, while rendering it more and more inevitable tomorrow.
The most competent demographic in the world are Celto-Germanic men from northern and central Europe. They began as tiny tribes in antiquity and eventually took over the world. Now this demographic is systematically disenfranchised because truth hurts, and this has reawakened their latent tribalism. Meanwhile, the ideological structure that disenfranchises them is collapsing under the weight of the Bow of Ulysses. Modernity is simply too heavy for anyone but this folk to lift. The first man of great means to realize what an opportunity is sitting and waiting for him—his name will live forever.
Civil rights law is upstream of all manner of un-meritocratic practices such as ESG, DEI, quotas, etc.
Energy return on investment. The cardinal measure of economic efficiency.
We might point to Trump’s contribution to the Jan 6 2021 march on the capitol. https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/how-trumps-words-directly-impact-his-supporters-behavior-176318
Blue-collar white Americans.
"Trump is a negotiator, not a Caesar, and we won’t fix the problem by bargaining it away." Excellent! Trump's '24 acceptance speech said everything. He acknowledged that the society was at its throat without explicitly acknowledging that this contention is racial/ethnic in nature. What was his solution? His solution was economic prosperity. He guaranteed this was the remedy for he himself had done it in his business. At the same time, the oligarchic faction that came to his aid, and found leverage with his being compromised by lawfare, media warfare, and economic troubles, has the exact same outlook. Andreesen, Thiel Musk and those guys think that the solution is more tech. More tech means more efficiency means economic growth means solving all of our problems.
This is Spengler/Evola's plebian Merchant Order. These guys are classic technocrats who are horribly educated. Every time they speak they take some little historical fact or trend and make it an absolute truth that is far from truth and reality. So that is the marriage. We have a terribly un-educated revanchist elite that has formed an alliance with Trump. They share a viewpoint that prosperity is the sole good of a society. So, it follows, that efficiently distributed porn, gambling, garbage ideas, and petty time wasting devices are a net good because, well, it, "produced wealth."
This is a plebian led Merchant Order whose cultural spreading mechanism is an unprecedented low in the civilizational cycle - a sub-plebian order with thugs, animalistic sexuality, pidgin and slang, anti-decorum and all manner of the profane celebrated and exalted.
No economic growth will fix that. We've been governed by the principle of amassing more wealth, (well concentrating it into fewer hands), as the highest and even sole good for well over a century. This oligarchy is incredibly strong. We cannot pretend otherwise. However, this article does point out its weakness - a weakness that could quickly become fatal. Even this oligarchy relies upon a system to create its wealth through IPO leverage and pensions, individuals, debt monetization as its backstop. That system is, ultimately, a fraud and its poster-child is Ramaswamy and even Musk's paper wealth though he does command a traditional and competent organization in the form of Space X. Once one or a set of handsome, high IQ, White men whose spirit is virile and burning hot with the fires of Northern Europe speak openly and act clearly on behalf of their folk, this system is finished and those Men will rule.
Although it will be difficult, we can't rely on a portion of the existing elites changing their views. As the example of Musk shows, there are strong incentives for current elites to keep the system essentially the same, even if they're open to altering aspects of it. After all, they rose to prominence in a fundamentally liberal-democratic system, so why would they want to destroy it? We must aspire to become elites ourselves, building up our own parallel system.