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How Republicans can reward their friends and subvert their enemies
Politics is patronage
If you’ve never encountered a Boomer conservative discussing the manifest unfairness represented by programs like affirmative action, you are truly missing out. Decades of television (read: propaganda) have removed their ability to fix this. All they can do is whine about nonexistent meritocracy. It is easy to pick on Boomers, but this mindset is ubiquitous across the political spectrum. Left, right, and center voters all possess a deeply held belief that here, in our house, we do things fair, and we do it for freedom, with liberty and justice for all; or if we don’t, then we should.
The problem is that those in power do not believe this, and no matter what rhetoric they trot out, they’ll always use their positions to enrich friends and damage enemies through patronage. This approach is not restricted to the left or to “bad people”; it is how political sausage gets made. Since leftists have captured Western institutions of power (universities, media outlets, big cities, and federal agencies), the left has grown fat on this sausage while the right starves. Well, it’s time for the right to get its fair share of pork.
What might right-wing patronage look like?
Picture a made-up 51st state: New Statesota. NS is just like the other 50 states: It has a few blue cities with purple buffer zones marring an otherwise red canvas. Liberal politicians pour federal money into the blue cities, causing them to grow like tumors. This creates a feedback loop that expands the base of support and strengthens liberal politicians, who can then pour in even more funds.
It’s in our interests to pour money onto the red canvas. It’s okay if some of it runs into the purple buffer; it’s undesirable but not intolerable for it to flow toward the blue cities. It’s good for the blue elites to be apoplectic that money is getting dumped on the “undeserving” reds. We want some of those Havel’s greengrocers to consider putting on the ol’ MAGA hat for the good of the family and their business.
How can we do this?
For your consideration, we submit a framework called the Constitutional Credit System.
Leftist patronage is a messy network
Today, Americans with the correct combination of ideological underpinning and socially relevant pedigree are empowered to cavort as statesmen. They talk at crowds, meet with donors, and reward a preferred slate of experts, advisers, and constituents — all in service of perpetuating a long-standing charade called Democratic politics. At its core, this charade is a systematized process of participants seeking the highest spot possible while rewarding friends and punishing enemies along the way.
The political system is a coin with two very different faces. On one side is representative democracy controlled by the popular will. On the other is a messy network of patronage — sinecures, titles, and relationships. The two sides are only connected by the inescapable fact that they are collocated in time and space.
Unlike social welfare programs, we don’t need a massive apparatus of academics to generate a false consensus on a bunch of barely-truths and white lies. We just need to build a simple, constitutionally compliant system for rewarding right-wingers for doing right-wing things.
The right doesn't get anywhere near the latitude for largesse and sinecure that the left does. In fact, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find even a meager handful of Big Letter Organizations that get patronage from the Outer Party (the RNC) and not the Inner Party (the DNC, aka the Liberal Mafia).
The FTX List is a good example of this process. No one is going to get money from Distribution Central unless the Inner Party says they are allowed to. Even if some handful of supposed “true conservatives” attempted to divert cash toward “good institutions,” it’s just not going to happen. Precious few good institutions exist; the Managerial Elite has seen to that.
But what about good people? Do they still exist?
Ask the devout on our side of the spectrum, and you’ll get a lot of answers. Ask the atheists, and you’ll get just as many answers, but worded differently. Ask anyone, “Who is good?” and you’ll get an overcomplicated framework that always reduces to “none are righteous except those that I personally know to be righteous.”
And that’s fine; that’s how we are wired on the right side of history. But if you tasked some AI with putting out the great survey that collected everyone’s home-brew hierarchy of goodness, you would probably come up with a rough approximation of the "mostly good,” and we posit that this approximation would overlap pretty well with the mostly right.
So can we actually reward those who vote right, look right, and think right?
Yes, and it will actually be relatively easy to do it.
Right-wing patronage can be simple and efficient
Here’s a widely known, well-worded, and completely disregarded bit of prose from the late 1700s: We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
This is the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States of America. This little blurb is about as high-minded as you can get. What the Framers were thinking by setting the bar this high is anyone’s guess. Create a 4D image in your head of “the people” and see if they have been living up to this statement. All are called; few make it. But that's only because the right has completely unfair ideological beauty standards.
Here are 10 simple qualifications for someone who should get government money without having to ask for it. This person should actively:
Perfect the Union
Establish Justice
Maintain domestic Tranquility
Maintain the common defense
Promote general Welfare
Secure Liberty for Posterity
Maintain the unofficial militia
Protect against unreasonable search and seizure
Promote speedy, public, local, and informed trials
Promote free speech
This is a right-wing grab bag. Sure, a smattering of leftists may qualify for some of these, but just as affirmative action and welfare assistance always seem to magically land on the DNC party faithful, there must be some way to do what God and our ancestors want, which is to reward your friends.
Each of these 10 convictions is a kernel of almost limitless patronage and sinecure for the deserving. In our society as it is currently configured, the deserving are largely on the right. We just need a system that rewards them.
What might this system look like?
This system needs to be simple and honest. It should require minimal effort: minimal effort for the credit receivers, minimal effort from the credit providers, minimal thought from the gatekeepers, and minimal explanations for the courts. Much of this will arise from conforming elegantly to the contours of the Constitution, and we really do want it to be promiscuous as a preacher’s daughter in terms of who it applies to (read: lots and lots of nice, churchgoing men).
This system needs to be defensible in court. It needs to be structured from constitutional square zero and stay well within those confines, because the moment the total state senses this, it will come after it.
This system needs to start small and develop quietly and quickly. It should be packaged inoffensively, politely shared with red-state governments, and deployed rapidly.
This system will be full daylight: no secret amounts, opaque components, or hidden recipients, as every aspect will be publicly available for review. Misusing or stealing money that everyone can see and track is very hard.
The biggest lesson of social welfare programs is that if you get your program running, even experimentally, you exponentially increase the number of “widows and orphans” in your armory to deploy in the presence of cameras when the bean counters come knocking. Once a system like this goes into effect, people will want it to stay effective. The goal is to target the broadest range of the rightest people in a constrained region that they dominate.
Gaming the state for fun and profit
Keeping it simple, the Constitutional Credit System should have a number of qualifying applicants equal to or slightly smaller than the number of right-wingers in the area of application from Day Zero. This means it’s built to match what the citizens are, rather than something they aspire to be.
We should build a test that right-wingers are already acing and that liberals are mostly failing. We need a scoring system in which the reds will be disproportionately represented on the profitable side of the filter and the blues are disproportionately left out in the cold. We should require that candidates have to “check enough boxes” so that liberals cannot merely get money for checking just a few.
Are you a credit to your community in a way that respects the spirit of the Constitution? You get a credit! Have you been a credit to your community for X number of consecutive years? You get more credits!
Some ideas for the grading rubric: The recipient must 1) be an American citizen, 2) pay property taxes, 3) be married, and 4) be a natural parent. The system should identify recipients and send them their reward for being constitutionally correct without the recipients having to apply for it, which is relatively easy, as each of these things is already tracked as well as rewarded individually during tax season.
We don’t need to build out the whole rubric now, but let us state clearly and shamelessly: We are devising a game that right-wingers are most likely to win just by being right-wing.
Are you a credit to your community in a way that respects the spirit of the Constitution? You get a credit!
Have you been a credit to your community for X number of consecutive years? You get more credits!
Maybe you’re the leader of a local Boy Scout troop or the organizer of a local farmers' market. Maybe you volunteer at your church regularly. Married, with children, and a property taxpayer, you are a credit to your community, which promotes the general welfare and provides for the common defense. You get a credit! A few, actually!
Think of this like a tax refund but with a pair of extra steps. We already give tax benefits to married couples; we already give child tax credits; we’re just combining these statuses and expanding them tactically to reward productive behavior that is actually good for our communities. You get more of whatever you subsidize, and we want more productive, constitutionally spirited behavior.
And who doesn’t love tax refunds? Surely, certain politicians looking to attain or maintain office would enthusiastically support modified tax refunds for their voters.
It’s going to be hard for the Boomer conservatives to even fathom why a system like this would be desirable, much less necessary and proper, but we need to sidestep, ignore, and/or mitigate this reaction decisively. The Boomer is too busy playing with his speedboat to sit through a lecture on the decline of America and the loss of prospects for future generations.
Anyone who realizes what time it is knows that habits and practices that should be restricted to friends, like courtesy, propriety, and compassion, are things our adversary uses to beat us bloody, rob us blind, and harm our children, figuratively and in far too many cases literally. But there is still a lot of pain tolerance in the broader right. Many will not at all like the idea of abusing their wonderful system of color-blind meritocracy to reward the right for being rightward.
Start sending checks to these chuds, however, and watch how quickly they call their congressman should the program ever find itself on the chopping block of the state budget inquest.
Implementing right-wing patronage can be efficient, too
We do not have the array of culture war superweapons available to the Cathedral, so we won't be able to use the institutions and methods that brought us programs like Gay Marriage Is an Unalloyed Good or Illegal Migrants Are All High-Value Contributors or Crime Is Actually Just Poverty / The Price of Freedom / The Legacy of Slavery.
We have talented writers, exceptional thinkers, specific deep pockets, and the will to power. We need to leverage these few but effective assets to get this program properly dressed to impress with its best suit on, and we need to find a selection of predominately red states with the right set of characteristics to deploy it effectively.
It should be noted that the social welfare system as we know it was forced into being in the midst of a massive outpouring of social distress. There were many detractors and critics who tried to stop it for very good reasons. But no matter what facts and figures they assembled, the opposition could not stop urbanites from demanding “free money for existing” after they had gotten a taste.
Conservatives had no hope of explaining to poor people that more and free money wasn't going to change a single blessed thing, at least not for the better. The social welfare advocates knew this; their only strategy was to get enough gatekeepers to believe that they were helping fix society, and the dynamics of self-enrichment did the rest.
But they were trying to boil the ocean. We are going to warm up a pond. We don’t need everyone on board with this idea. We don’t want a bunch of professor types extolling the virtues of the Constitutional Credit System. All we need is:
The precise number of theorists and writers to craft the actual program policies;
The targeting and acquisition team to give us a list of viable candidate states/regions;
A collection of influencers with the tenacity to sell water to thirsty people;
A well-placed local administrator exercising some basic human judgment — though this may not even be necessary. Ideally, the system is tight enough that even a DEI hire in the statehouse can’t help but send the checks to the chuds.
Unlike social welfare programs, we don’t need a massive apparatus of academics to generate a false consensus on a bunch of barely-truths and white lies. We just need to build a simple, constitutionally compliant system for rewarding right-wingers for doing right-wing things.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s a lot more ground to cover. Arguments and analysis must take place. Details need to be filled in. It’s quite likely that any intelligent person hungry for advancement and keen to take back our country has already figured out how to pilfer this idea, reconfigure it, and get it going. And that’s excellent. Let a thousand programs blossom.
This idea is going to take a coordinated effort. To move the Constitutional Credit System from the imagination onto the drawing board and into the construction and sale phases will take experienced minds and an array of skills. That's where you come in, patient reader. The CCS needs subject matter experts in policy and process, accountants, and constitutional lawyers. It requires political facilitators and active and former staffers at local, state, and federal levels. It needs storytellers and propagandists, artists and designers. With your help, it can be transformed from a promising idea into a magnetic policy proposal that attracts the necessary signatures of any desk it’s slid across — be it by executive action or detailed argument in chambers. With the coordinated effort of talented people, the CCS will replicate, scaling up and down as it gets configured for individual districts, towns, cities, and states.
“Make America Great Again” — this phrase that each of us sincerely believes implies one of two things: renovation or construction. The CCS is the tool kit that enables us to begin reframing the political landscape by the vision of those who originally framed it.
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