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Empowerment Equalizer
SSaragian
Antony Sammeroff
Ann Sterzinger
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busterjames
cainusmaxus
Craig FitzGerald
David Heleniak
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Keith Preston
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ljp711
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Jack Donovan
Rachel Haywire
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Michael
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Noonan
S E Pearson
Rachel Haywire
Nexus X HumectressBy Keith Preston
In the essay, “Liberty and Populism: Building an Effective Resistance Movement for North America,” written in 2006, I made the following observation:
Ultimately, we may at some point be able to combine the Green, Libertarian, Populist, Constitution, Natural Law and other minor parties into a single party,… I would suggest calling such a party the “Federalist Party” for several reasons. First, there is precedent for this from American history. Second, it accurately describes what the internal structure of the party should be. Third, it provides a model for the general types of institutional arrangements we should seek to develop. Perhaps our party flag could be an anarchist black flag with the snake from the “don’t tread on me” Gadsen battle flag embroidered on it.
It is now time to begin the application of the core strategic ideas outlined in such ARV-ATS documents and “Liberty and Populism” and “Philosophical Anarchism and the Death of Empire.”
Since the above was written, at least two proposals have been put forward concerning how the type of meta-party described above might be organized and what it’s orientation might be. The most elaborate plan of this kind has been advanced by Ryan Faulk’s All Nations Party. The ANP is a proposed pan-secessionist party that would have ethnic separatism as its primary, though not necessarily exclusive, orientation. Another such proposal is Joe Kopsick’s Pananarchist Party USA, which seeks to advance the concept of non-territorial governments within a general individualist anarchist framework. While both proposals are a commendable efforts to open dialogue and engage in strategic formulation on this question, in both instances there might also be a bit of overreach.
Twenty-five percent of the US population currently expresses at least casual sympathy for the idea of a secessionist movement in their own region or locality. The principle objective for those of us who have embraced the pan-secessionist strategy should at this point be the awakening of this sleeping giant. The question is how to we turn this mass of 80 million passive sympathizers into a mass of active sympathizers? The first thing that should be recognized is that most of these 80 million potential constituents are not adherents of extremist or exotic ideologies. Instead, the bulk of the opinions held by these people are likely to be rather close to the mainstream on most issues.
There is no evidence that there is a sizable constituency for ethnic separatism within any ethnic group. To be sure, there is a tiny but outspoken minority of people within all ethnic groups who advocate for ethnic separatism, but the sum total of all ethnic separatists within all ethnic groups would still be a tiny fraction of the 320 million people who make up the US population. It is also true that there are many people who practice de facto ethnic separatism, but this largely reflects the economic and lifestyle choices of individuals, and is a far cry from advocating de jour ethnic separatism as a matter of ideology or moral conviction. While it is certainly true that ethnic separatists can also be pan-secessionists, it is unlikely that a pan-secessionist meta-party (PSMP) that advances ethnic separatism as a primary value will win a great deal of sympathy.
Likewise, it is unlikely that a PSMP that is primarily oriented towards the promotion of an esoteric or exotic ideology will gain much of an audience. While there are certainly plenty of historical precedents for such concepts as non-territorial governments, such ideas are also culturally alien to the overwhelming majority of persons in North America. Therefore, it would be unwise to adopt an ideological stance of this kind as principal strategic objective.
However, the concept of secession maintains very powerful roots within mainstream American history, culture, and politics for reasons that are too obvious to require discussion. Further, secession is a tactical concept that can be embraced by movements of any ideological, cultural, ethnic, religious, or economic orientation. How then should a PSMP organize itself?
The All Nations Party idea of a PSMP that functions as a umbrella for a set of constituent parties and regional or local secessionist movements that have their own interests is generally a solid one. However, I would suggest that at the meta-party level the PSMP should have only two stated objectives:
1. Promoting, advocating, legitimizing, and legalizing the right of secession by regions and localities from larger governmental units.
2. Promoting, advocating, legitimizing, and legalizing the right of minor parties to participate in public elections against the present two-party duopoly.
From this basic starting point, the constituent parties and secessionist movements associated with the PSMP would have every right to advocate for whatever philosophies or issues they wished. For example, the PSMP would have no position on foreign policy. If a collection of red state secessionists wished for the red states to go to war with ISIS, then so be it. The PSMP would have no position on economics. Presumably, for example, there would be both advocates of socialism and capitalism within the PSMP. The PSMP would exist only for the purpose of defending the rights of constituent groups to form their own parties or secessionist movements advocating for any ideas that they wished, and to strip away political and legal barriers to both competition in public elections by minor parties and secession by regionalist movements. This is does not in any way mean that any constituent party, organization, or movement of the PSMP would abandon or even downplay any of its other issues. It simply means that the PSMP would provide an organizational umbrella for the advancement of the interests of all minor parties and secessionist movements at the collective level. Within the framework of the PSMP, socialists would still advocate for single-payer healthcare, libertarians for tax cuts, social conservatives for the pro-life cause, and social leftists for LGBT issues. The PSMP would no doubt include many constituencies who were otherwise antithetical to each other, such as the Prohibition Party and the U.S. Marijuana Party.
In this sense, it must be understood that the PSMP would maintain both macro-level constituencies and micro-level constituencies. At the macro-level, the PSMP would have only two constituencies: the 25% and growing number of Americans who sympathize with the idea of secession, and those who prefer alternatives to the two-party duopoly. At the macro-level, the PSMP would exist only to promote the two issues of third party rights and secessionist rights, and these issues would be promoted in the same way that proponents of marijuana legalization, gay marriage, gun rights, gun control, the right-to-life or abortion rights have promoted their own issues. At the micro-level, the PSMP would have many constituencies, i.e. the constituencies of its component parties, organizations, movements, and the issues raised by each of these. Obviously, the opportunity would arise within such a scenario for a infinite variety of conflicts between the various constituents of the PSMP, and such conflicts are to be expected. Therefore, mutual agreements among the PSMP constituents would have to be formulated in order to maintain the common peace to the greatest degree reasonably possible. The most practical approach would be for the various constituent forces to simply agree to stay out of each other’s backyards. For example, the constituents forces that trended rightward would agree to focus their organizing and recruiting activities on the “red” demographic sectors of the US, and the forces that trended leftward would agree orient themselves towards organizing among the “blue” sectors.
At the national level, the presidential candidates of the PSMP would run solely on the two core principles of the PSMP: advocating for the rights of third parties, and the rights of secessionists. Preferably, the presidential ticket would be split between the Left and Right. For example, the presidential candidate might be from the Socialist Party or the Green Party, while the vice-presidential candidate would be from the Libertarian or Constitution Parties. Further, the Left/Right split ticket should be reversed every four years. For example, in the 2016 election the presidential candidate might be from the Left with the vice-presidential candidate might be from the Right. In 2020, the presidential candidate would then be from the Right while the vice-presidential candidate would be from the Left.
All other candidates of the PSMP would run on joint tickets of both the PSMP and their respective constituent parties. For example, the candidate for the governorship of Massachusetts might run on the tickets both the PSMP and the Socialist Action Party, and a comparable candidate in Texas might run on the tickets of both the PSMP and the Objectivist Party. Once again, in order to avoid overlap, rival constituent parties and organizations would mutually agree to stay out of each others backyards. Additionally, the candidates from minor parties and secessionist movements might also be combined at times. For example, a candidate in Georgia might stand simultaneously for the PSMP, Constitution Party and the League of the South, while a candidate in Oregon might stand for the PSMP, Green Party and Cascadia.
An approach of the kind that has been outlined above would serve multiple purposes. One would be to simply awaken the sleeping giant of potential secessionist sympathies among one-quarter of the U.S. population, and to challenge the Democratic-Republican two-party duopoly. Yet another would be to create a forum where many different kinds of people with otherwise opposed philosophies would be able to work with one another against the common enemy. A third would be to create a prototype for the kind of system that might exist following the inevitable demise of the present system, a decentralized system based on the principal of self-determination for all.
Of course, the emergence of a PSMP of the kind described above would also receive a great deal of criticism from a variety of sources. The critics would include ideologues and sectarians of both the left and right, the professional anti-rightist cottage industry, anti-leftists of a comparable nature, avowed statists and totalitarians, neoconservatives, jingoists, the party hacks of the system’s parties, their kept media, and, of course, the overlords of the system themselves. So be it. Revolutionaries without enemies are not revolutionaries at all.
Of course, some from the general anarchist milieus will object that party politics is antithetical to the wider anarchist values of rejection of the state. I previously address this question in “Liberty and Populism,”:
Some anarchists will no doubt object that my approach reeks far too much of a reformist/electoralist outlook. While I certainly respect this point of view, I believe it is unnecessarily sectarian and archaic. The classical anarchists often advocated boycotting elections and for good reason. In most of the countries where the classical anarchist movement existed on a scale of any significance, the “right to vote” was either non-existent or the franchise was very limited. Even in nominal democracies like Switzerland and America, women and other large population groups were denied the vote. Even at that, many Spanish villages elected anarchist mayors and village councils in the years leading up to the civil war. I believe modern anarchists need to develop an approach to this question that is relevant to the nature of modern states and modern societies. The approach I favor is one of cold realism and pragmatism. It is indeed possible for ordinary people with conventional levels of resources to be elected to local and state offices in many parts of the US. Persons who achieve some level of success in this area are then in a position to influence appointments to other positions of influence. This can be very important as a means of keeping the worst elements away from seats of power.
It should also be pointed out that the PSMP would be merely a means to an end, and not an end unto itself. It would merely be a vehicle for promoting and popularizing a wider subversive agenda. Further, it would create a framework that would allow anarchists to reach out to and connect with people from all over the cultural and political spectrum, and experience the opportunity to work with a vast array of dissidents as equal partners towards common goals. Anarchists would would have the opportunity to embed themselves in the PSMP for the purpose of pursuing a more radical line and the advancement of more extraneous issues that are among the unique concerns of anarchists. Just as the myriad of constituent parties and movements of the PSMP would maintain their own objectives, and pursue those objectives within other contexts, so would anarchists do the same. Specifically, anarchists might concentrate their own efforts on local politics, and strive for the achievement of political preeminence in an increasingly greater number of cities, towns, and counties. Two, three, many Christianias, Marinaledas, Mondragons, and Kobanis could begin to proliferate. Meanwhile, the prototypes of South Africa’s conservative Orania community and Liechtenstein’s libertarian monarchical micro-nation provide models of how Anarchists and the Left might peacefully co-exist with the Right. Further, there might be a parallel pan-anarchist federation that co-exists with the PSMP, and functions as a base of activists and organizers for the PSMP. The relationship between the pan-anarchist federation and the PSMP would be comparable to the relationship between the FAI, the CNT, and the Anti-Fascist militias during the period of Revolutionary Spain.
The general demographic and electoral base of the PSMP would be that which has previously been outlined in “Liberty and Populism,” though periodically modified in order to adapt to changing trends. The PSMP would then emerge as a populist alternative political force perhaps comparable to Italy’s Five Star Movement, or the recently formed coalition in Greece between Syriza and the Independent Greeks. There is also the further possibility of the PSMP embedding itself in the major parties on the ground level. For example, Norman Mailer’s secessionist “left-conservative” Democratic candidacy for mayor of New York in 1969 is one example, and Larry Kilgore’s secessionist conservative Christian Republican candidacy for Senator from Texas in 2008 is another example.
The PSMP and the Pan-Anarchist Movement
Within the context of the PSMP, the pan-anarchist movement would then work to advance its wider body of strategic and political ideas such as core demographic theory, fourth generation warfare, libertarian populism, inside/outside strategy, left/right/center tripartite strategy, alternative infrastructure, cultural organizations that would replace the state’s social infrastructure, the 25 point platform, building coalitions of anti-state interest groups, a peoples’ economic front, legal defense organizations, civilian defense organizations,expanded cop watch and neighborhood watch programs, tax protests, civil disobedience campaigns, Kevin Carson’s “political program for anarchists,” Larry Gambone’s “populist groundswell” and decentralist economics, a coalition against consensual crimes, a prisoner amnesty movement, a libertarian common law system, a Norwegian approach to criminology, a Swedish or Swiss approach to foreign policy, the city-state system, and much else.
Once again, none of this meta-political or meta-strategic program implies that any of the myriad of anarchist, libertarian, anti-statist, anti-authoritarian, or decentralist factions would abandon their preferred issues. As I wrote in “Philosophical Anarchism and the Death of Empire” concerning the concept of “anarcho-populism”:
Hence, what I am proposing is a new strategic paradigm and, to a certain extent, a new school of anarchist thought that I call “anarcho-populism”. This new brand of anarchism would draw on the other schools in various ways. The classical anarchism originally developed by Proudhon would be its foundation. Like anarcho-socialism, anarcho-populism would be anti-capitalist and pro-class struggle. Like anarcho-capitalism, anarcho-populism would endorse property, markets and the independent sector as an antidote to statism, corporatism and welfarism. Along with leftist-anarchists, this new anarchist tendency would support political freedom and cultural self-determination for racial minorities, women, gays and the like but would not seek to mindlessly glorify or privilege these groups or demonize white males. Along with primitivists and eco-anarchists, anarcho-populism would seek to preserve the natural environment, but without the misanthropy and anti-tech hysteria of much modern environmentalism. Like national-anarchists, anarcho-populism would endorse the right of traditional racial, ethnic, religious or cultural groups to self-preservation and political sovereignty and cross-cultural, cross-ideological alliances against the NWO, but would seek to branch out into “mainstream” society rather than seek out reclusive isolation from the modern world.
Presumably, every libertarian faction would continue to focus on its primary areas of concern, from sovereign citizens to anarcha-feminists, and every faction could maintain its own sub-organizational identities within the context of the pan-anarchist federation as well. However, organizing and advancing the PSMP might serve as a common project and rallying point for all libertarian factions.
The main thing that is needed as this point is action. It is necessary for activists to step forward and being applying the ideas that have been outined above. How did other movements that have achieved a great deal of success, or at least size and recognition, begin? How did the marijuana legalization movement being? The gay marriage movement? The Tea Parties? The anti-Vietnam War movement? The civil rights movement? The religious right? The modern American conservative movement? Surely, there are things that can be learned from each of these.
How is this new party fundamentally different from Rothbard’s Libertarian party? Isn’t this the same idea: create a populist anarcho-libertarian party and run in elections in order to spread your propaganda?
You have the same strategy, almost the same philosophy, and will be appealing to exactly the same demographic.
Do you think we have more liberty today compared to when the Libertarian party was founded?
Is the state we live under more or less powerful and dangerous today vs 1980?
So we have many more libertards, but far less liberty and a much worse enemy.
In other words: FAIL.
TOTAL SURVEILLANCE POLICE STATE=FAILURE.
So this is a proven failure strategy, and usually those strategies fail. Just to make sure, you want to create a loser coalition out of loser third parties that lose elections, so as to advertise your anti-state propaganda by losing state elections with losers. Make sure you also dress up in bizarre costumes and speak in your own secret anarchotarded language so no normal person can even follow you, and don’t forget to invite all your racist jew baiting friends. What could possibly go wrong?
Meanwhile the first revolutionary war of Eurasianism is going on in Ukraine. The secessionist forces just had a winter offensive that smashed the enemy position and have encircled and cut off nearly half of the Junta’s army. No seriously, we have a Secessionist war going on right now, and the secessionists are clearly winning. Turns out there is a revolutionary movement behind them.
In Syria, against all the odds and every enemy, the Kurdish Anarchists have defeated the dreaded ISIS that routed half of the Iraqi army, and have liberated themselves from state control. Turns out there is a revolutionary movement behind them.
Maybe these would be better models to look at?
In Rothbard’s day, you didn’t have a quarter of the U.S. population sympathizing with secession.
Your criticisms are well-taken, but I’m not sure how a “North American Eurasianism” would be any more popular or politically marketable.
Also, how would you go about transferring the model of the Ukraine or the Kurdish anarchists to North America? These are entirely different situations.
The main strategic objective I am interested in right now is awakening the 25% of Americans who sympathize with the idea of secession, more than pushing any one ideology. The big question is how do we go from having 25% passive or casual sympathizers to building a 25% of serious or active sympathizers? And how do we then grow that 25% into a majority? Merely publicizing and popularizing the concept of secession is the first step. Developing an alliance of minor parties around the non-ideological issue of minor party interests is a means of getting otherwise opposed groups working with each other against the System while creating a forum for the spread of more radical ideas.
We are not ready for an actual secession on the model of the Ukraine. No region of the USA presently has a secessionist majority. Even something like that did exist, the feds would move to suppress it. Secession is not possible until we have at the very least the support of the majority of the people in a majority of the territorial USA. And we are certainly not ready for an armed struggle on the Kurdish anarchist model.
I don’t suggest directly transferring the models, but rather studying them, because they actually work. You are trying to grapple with the organizational question, and a failed model like the Libertarian party model is not a good place to start.
While there are many examples of revolutionary parties making good use of electoral politics, the libertarian model is an electoral party that fails to win elections. Rebranding this model as “Secessionist” doesn’t really change anything, but it has the added bonus of bringing up all the nasty old racial baggage of the fringe right. That will sure help with the populism, hoss!
If your model is an electoral party, the real organizational strategy is to lose elections. The hope is that you can spread propaganda during this process. The libertarians have been doing this for decades. They helped lower taxes for the super rich, but during this time period the state has grown massively and the American people have become far more docile and submissive to state intrusion and abuse.
The value of this strategy is not evident. The increasing danger of the enemy it failed to oppose is now omnipresent. Will you still be waiting for John Galt in your razor wire cell?
It is unclear why you think parties that are highly sectarian and who are bitterly opposed to each other would want to form coalitions. Your mania for pan-coalitionism is not widely shared and the dominant trend in fringe politics is in the opposite direction. Bringing every failed third party in under one tent just means a really big failed third party, in any case.
Here we have the big problem: You recognize that the mass demographic you are after isn’t going to be reached with exotic boutique ideologies or radical subcultures, but your whole party is composed of fringe political parties and various anarchists. That is a mix that will fail on a fundamental level. See occupy.
What these objectives would mean in practice are presumably: running third parties, filling lawsuits, filling petitions, putting measures on the ballot, lobbying to get laws changed, building local coalitions, etcetera.
In other words: running the state rat maze, filing out idiot paperwork, chasing the filing deadlines, dealing with idiot government employees, reading law books full of nonsense, appeasing donors, kissing up to slimy politicians, and following all the rules and playing docile.
How attractive is such work actually going to be to the ATS cadre demographic, whatever that is? What kind of anarcho gangster barbarian is really going to go door to door to get petitions signed? What happened to the ruthless Darwinian struggle? What happened to fourth generation secessionist warfare with plastic guns and stuff?
How many cadres do you actually have who would want to deal with stacks of government paperwork or election lawyers?
Here again you are caught in the contradiction: you recognize the desperate need for anarchism to break out of its stale enclaves and into real politics, but the means that is supposed to accomplish this is composed of people with extremely esoteric politics, most of whom are bitterly alienated from mainstream culture.
I spent years as a left anarchist banging my head on this same wall, and I wish I had an answer for you, but I just don’t see how a motley crew of national anarchists, secessionists, third party cranks, libertarians and left anarchists are going to be able to interface with 80 million people from mainstream America. Your cadre pool is drawn from the extremes by definition.
Then somehow the failed electoral party will spark a mass movement. Do you have some Messianic myth to explain this? We have failed electoral parties already. How exactly is the electoral failure of a pan-secessionist party going to cause the people to rise up?
If the only real politics your movement has come from the fringe factions, and presumably the American people will remain as uninterested in these fringe political projects as they have always been, how is this going to become populist?
Despite whatever poll numbers, secessionism and third parties are not burning concerns for any large number of people. Radical movements are built around burning concerns that have a significant base.
There’s a crucial difference between the idea of the PSMP and a group like the Libertarian Party. The LP exists solely for the purpose of promoting an abstract, universalist ideology. In that respect, they are no different than door to door religious missionaries. They’re looking for converts. The PSMP idea is about promoting the interests of third parties as an end unto itself, rather than the specific purpose of promoting the various philosophies of all these parties, although that is something each individual party would retain as its specific goal.
Now in my particular case, there is a wider motive as well, and the motive is to demonstrate the fundamental hostility of the two-party monopoly to genuine competition, thereby delegitimizing the system, and simultaneously using the “third party front” as a vehicle for promoting more radical ideas like secession.
“It is unclear why you think parties that are highly sectarian and who are bitterly opposed to each other would want to form coalitions. Your mania for pan-coalitionism is not widely shared and the dominant trend in fringe politics is in the opposite direction.”
You may be right, although the unifying thread would be the advancement of third party interests in and of itself, not the specific philosophies of these parties.
“You recognize that the mass demographic you are after isn’t going to be reached with exotic boutique ideologies or radical subcultures, but your whole party is composed of fringe political parties and various anarchists. That is a mix that will fail on a fundamental level. See occupy.”
Yes and no. The problem is that radical ideas that eventually become mainstream usually start on the margins and work their way towards the center. When the Stonewall Rebellion happened, who would have ever thought that decades later gay rights would be an institutionalized mainstream movement? Where was the anti-Vietnam War movement in 1962?
“What these objectives would mean in practice are presumably: running third parties, filling lawsuits, filling petitions, putting measures on the ballot, lobbying to get laws changed, building local coalitions, etcetera.”
Well, for better or worse, that’s just how real world political activism is done. I actually think a good model to follow here is the marijuana legalization movement which developed itself largely by doing the very things you are describing.
“What happened to the ruthless Darwinian struggle? What happened to fourth generation secessionist warfare with plastic guns and stuff?”
We’re not at that phase yet. That’s in the far distant future.
“I spent years as a left anarchist banging my head on this same wall, and I wish I had an answer for you, but I just don’t see how a motley crew of national anarchists, secessionists, third party cranks, libertarians and left anarchists are going to be able to interface with 80 million people from mainstream America. Your cadre pool is drawn from the extremes by definition.”
That’s why the radical vanguard needs a populist issue they can latch onto, and a culturally coherent strategy, like secession.
“Radical movements are built around burning concerns that have a significant base.”
That’s a problem at present. There aren’t ANY issues that have a significant base, rather there are lots of issues that have a smaller base of their own. The closest anything comes is “The Economy” but no one really agrees what the problem with the economy is or what, if anything, to do about it.
If ATS had thousands of activists, what I would want them to do is start trying to create ballot initiatives for secession in states and localities (again, just like the way the marijuana legalization movement has advanced its own interests using the same strategy). This would be an interesting project for anarchists and other radicals of all kinds rather than endless arguments over arcane bits of theory or the latest trend in “social justice.”
Also, I don’t know that there is any need for one single populist issue for a society of 320 million people. Rather, there can be many such issues related to specific constituencies and demographics. Some people might want to secede because they’re opposed to Obamacare, and others because they’re opposed to endless wars, and that’s fine.
I’d say one of the main things I’ve learned from watching other radical groups is what not to do. For example, the left-anarchists in North America push the “anti-racist” line to the point that they throw themselves at minorities like rock star groupies. The problem is that’s never gotten them anywhere in decades of trying. Most minorities correctly think they are morons and their movement is still just as white bread as it ever was.
As you mention, the libertarians allow themselves to be co-opted by the right-wing of the ruling class with all of their rhetoric against taxes and business regulation.
The general Left only cares about social issues and is easily co-opted and pacified.
The “far right” isn’t even worth discussing.
But the secession idea is a much more radical concept. It’s not something the ruling class can merely co-opt. No system can co-opt its own overthrow. The US ruling class fought the biggest war in its history to prevent a mass secession in 1861.
A group of anarchists that came along and started pushing ballot initiatives calling for secession, like other groups might have initiatives for or against pot legalization or gay marriage, would at the very least get a lot of attention. Much of it would be negative attention, of course, which I’m fine with. “There ain’t no such thing as bad publicity.”
Imagine the headlines:
“Anarchist Extremists Push Ballot Initiative to Secede from the United States.”
“Anarchist Minor Party Candidate Calls for Overthrow of the Government”
If headlines like that appeared on the front page of the New York Times or Washington Post or the CNN or FOX home page, I’d be thrilled.
At this point in the game, I actually think it’s more important to merely publicize the cause, and gain the support of the militant minority who already has a foot in your camp anyway than it is to win over the masses. That has to come later.
This gets to another issue that I’ve given to considerable thought to. I don’t think we should try to dress up our ideas with a lot of “nicety nice-nice” do-gooder rhetoric in only to appear non-threatening and make ourselves more socially acceptable. Yes, we want to reach the 25% and then some, but what we want to do so in a way that IS polarizing, provocative, radical, inflammatory, controversy-generating, hostile counter-rhetoric generating, etc.
Among my biggest influences in this regard with the Yippies Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. They were the two most famous anti-Vietnam War leaders, and for a reason, i.e. they were inflammatory, shocking, outrageous, etc. not because they were well-mannered, neatly groomed do-gooders.
http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2010/03/hoffman-rubin-clips.html
http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2010/03/jerry-rubin-on-phil-donahue.html
Here are some more thoughts on this:
Imagine if we had hundreds of anarchists running for local offices like city councils and mayors on a platform similar to what I call the “Mailer model.” http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2009/05/stormin-norman-decentralist/
Imagine that we simultaneously had thousands or tens of thousands of activists pushing secessionist ballot of initiatives, just like the marijuana legalization initiatives, only with the even more radical idea of secession which would be the de facto dissolution of the USA. The sheer propaganda value of this would be worth its weight in gold so to speak, regardless of the specific outcome in the immediate sense.
Meanwhile, there are many other activist related projects that anarchists could simultaneously pursue as a means of building a popular base (for instance, the stuff I wrote about in “Liberty and Populism” and “Philosophical Anarchism and the Death of Empire”).
What I am suggesting here is nothing new. It is what has been called the “dogcatcher strategy.” http://www.lewrockwell.com/2000/11/gary-north/the-dogcatcher-strategy/ (I’m sure some people wouldn’t bother to read the article I just linked to because it was written Gary North)
We use the anarchist/secessionist Mailer model/dog catcher strategy as primary propaganda tool, and we use the activist models outlined in “Liberty and Populism” to build a popular base. The third party alliance and pans-secessionism are part of the latter.
However, I will also try to put this as succinctly as possible. What we need first are much better quality anarchists than we have now. For instance, I have no interest whatsoever in working with people who do not wish to move past this usual left/right red/blue Dem/GOP racial/cultural/ideological finger pointing. People who want to continue to perpetuate or participate in all that are of no interest to me, and this includes right-wingers as well as left-wingers.
We need a movement of anarchists that are:
1. Genuine revolutionaries (i.e. committed to actually overthrowing the ruling class) rather than do-gooders.
2. Ecumenical in their radicalism (i.e. not just about ideological hair-splitting like you would find in some philosopher’s club)
3. Committed to moving past the usual left-right finger pointing. That stuff represents two wings of the system, and anyone who can’t look past it is worthless. This includes right-wingers as much as social justice warriors.
4. Committed to a pragmatic, Machiavellian outlook that is actually about achieving tangible victories. This necessitates certain kind of populism over the long haul.
Until we have more anarchists in this vein, then all of this is purely an academic question. Hint: These two recent pieces by Hans Hoppe and Kevin Carson are examples of what not to do:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/09/hans-hermann-hoppe/smack-down/
http://c4ss.org/content/35931
Whereas here is a presentation by “Jay Cypher” that is at least a partial indication of what to do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2qDql5SGHY
This kinda happened to me once. Never again. Especially now that they know I’m associated with ATS!
High technology. No Joke there is a device test in the US and China like warp drive, image private companies like Bigglelow mining in space and workers from several different countries sending money home or governments on Earth sharing the revene, kind of like the royality system form Oil profits. Less force taxation and a welfare state from the royalities. There is no immirgation problem since the average South Korean or Mexican now has decent money even if there job doesn’t pay that well and Mexico and the Philpines can sent people to high school and college educated more from the royalities from mining the asetiords. Also, the Hyperloop could make it possible to live in Needles and worked in Los Angleles Las Vegas since it now only takes 30 minutes to travel to either place, Making housing more affordable without a lot of government money. Also, Bill Gates mentions that teakettles could mean all the third world is educated online for grade school to even college. This is Sam Konkln the Third, the late argorist anachists Idea of the market getting around the state to eliminate the state..
ATS has the advantage of a clean slate on the organizational question, and of living in a revolutionary era. You should benefit from that by studying the cutting edge revolutionary models that work. Not so that you can try to cut and paste them into ATS like a bunch of cargo-cult Marxists, but so that you study and learn from effective models that actually exist. The loser third party model is not on the list.
Of course the movement should be open to as many allies and alliances as possible, but in actual practice it has to focus its limited resources like a laser beam on singular tasks, one at a time. A movement that is in favor of everyone and everything is in favor of no one and nothing. Pan anarchism is fine as an ideal of openness and autonomy, but as a strategy it points in a million contradictory directions. Tactical flexibility is excellent only at the service of a strategic unity.
The basic and inevitable strategy of any pan anarchist or pan secessionist movement in America is the destruction of the state. This is a viable strategy, and has been carried out since time immemorial. What is delusional about the anarcho-right is that it seems to think this event is going to happen all by itself. Instead the state grows more powerful and dangerous by the day.
This ultimate strategy is the question that the organization must answer. That answer must not be a rigid scheme but a constant dynamic driven by the means at hand and the conflict before it. The central nervous system of the movement is the cadre. The muscle and bone of the movement is the mass. The first task is to build both. Until you have both, it is inane to think you know how the organization will work.
With the data from WordPress, Facebook, and the polls, you should be able to identify the basic demographics you already have some traction with. Now you need to think long and hard about who these people are and you need to study them. Then you need to find a massive state intrusion and abuse that a significant number of them are afflicted with, and visibly hate. This is the first fight. It is from such struggles that you get both the cadre and the mass of a real movement. It from such struggles that you get real legitimacy.
I understand that if you listen to enough Hank and drink enough Jack you can blame the north for your nasty southern police state, but the pig who has Hoss up on drunk driving charges again, and the child snatching social worker trying to confiscate his daughter are both state or local employees. Instead of trying to get him to vote for a loser third party, you should be trying to incite resistance in his real life and visibly picking fights with his actual state enemies. He has so many of them at this point that you can take your choice.
What you’re suggesting seems to be very similar to another strategy I’ve considered, and that is identifying a “wedge issue” that stirs up people’s passions against the state, but for which there is no mainstream political representation. It’s an idea I originally picked up from some libertarians in the 90s who wanted the LP to make drug legalization into the party’s wedge issue. At the same, I didn’t see what the point was because it was already the issue that libertarians were famous for anyway.
I agree that identifying the most viable constituencies and issues are the main order of business. We had a fellow who posted here for a while who suggested ATS position itself as the vanguard of the radical right. Another who suggested we make police brutality/Ferguson into our main issues. The problem I saw with the former idea is that the radical right is a shrinking demographic that is swimming against the historical tides. It’s better to ride a wave that’s in ascendency, IMO. The problem with the latter idea is that no one around ATS originates from the urban African-American lower class or lumpenproletarian culture. No cultural connection=no political connection.
We would need an issue that appeals to young people because part of the goal is to build cadre that can be developed over time. We need an issue that the two major parties are addressing and can’t co-opt, and we need something that is oriented towards an ascendent demographic.
The issue in the Ukraine was that you had ethnic Russians seeking to seceded from the Ukraine, and essentially rejoin Russia or set up an ethnic Russian state of their own. The closest thing to a comparable situation in North American would likely be the “reconquista” movement in the Southwest, e.g. Mexican-Americans and Mexican immigrants who regard the Southwest as the rightful territory of Mexico. In fact, I suspect this issue is the real reason why the Southwest has a higher percentage of secessionist sympathizers than any other region.
The issue with the Kurdish anarchists is that their struggle emerged within the context of the wider Kurdish independence struggle. The Kurds have long been a nation without a nation in the sense of being dominated and occupied by others. The closest thing to that in North America would obviously be the Native Americans and First Nations.
For some time, of course, I have argued that ethnic minority independence movements in North America would be a natural constituency of pan-secessionism. But that doesn’t solve the numbers problem. What about everyone else?
A major problem I seen in this strategy is that by uncritically working with dissidents to overthrow the state, is that what replaces the current order will be worse for example of Stalinists or Neo-Nazi’s or the Aztlan.
The fallacy of this option can be seen with the Mensheviks and Left SRs who collaborated with the Bolsheviks. In the end what they got was worse than the Tsar. You really cannot work with some people.
This is a question that comes up often when I present these ideas, and it’s not really one that I’ve done a very good job addressing.
As a general rule, my position is that a “popular front” strategy should exclude any group from an alliance that is militarily capable of imposing a worse system than what we have now. This is turn requires making a rational assessment of the relative strength and tactical advantages of “rival revolutionaries” as well as System forces.
The main issue in Russia is that the Bolshies had control of the army, which they were able to obtain through their more effective infiltration and organizational tactics. In Spain, the main issue was that the Communists actually had the Soviet Union backing them, a major advantage that the other factions did not have.
There are other groups that need to be excluded from a revolutionary alliance because they either bring nothing worthwhile to the table, or they are simply more trouble than they’re worth.
For instance, in the context of the PSMP or whatever, I’d be in favor of excluding the American Nazi Party, National Socialist Movement, the Lyndon LaRouche organization, and the Revolutionary Communist Party. Not only are these groups ideologically objectionable, they have no support other than tiny bands of cultists and freaks, and they are abhorred by everyone else. And they would be an extraordinarily disruptive force if included in any political coalition.
In fact, this was the main point I was making in the “Is Extremism in the Defense of Sodomy No Vice?” article. In my observation, these organized “LGBT” groups are an extremely disruptive and divisive tendency in any larger movement they enter into. They almost always begin making demands for special recognition of their agendas, and create chaos if they’re not able to have their way. Most leftists are willing to indulge that out of sympathy and political correctness, but not me. Individual gay people or civilized “LGBTs” are welcome, of course, but not neurotics and sociopaths who are just using political movements as a context for acting out. I’d say the same thing about any other habitually divisive or disruptive PC faction, or right-wing faction as well.
But the real danger comes not from the “official suspects” but from opportunists who turn unexpectedly or remnants of the system trying to maintain power, or elements within the system attempting to seize power for themselves. For example, if the US federal system were really threatened with a Soviet-like collapse, the main thing I would be worried about would not be the Aryan Nations or the North Korea groupies from Workers World, but a coup by the military and/or the federal alphabet soup agencies.
Nice to see your clarification. I also share your concern over rouge federal agencies trying to reclaim the lost US Empire, when it falls. Yeah LGBT action groups and the Aryan Nation are definitely out.
Yes. Some people often assume that the idea behind pan-secessionism is to recruit anyone and everyone into some kind of grand alliance against the system no matter who they are, what they do, or what their objectives are.
But that’s not really what pan-secessionism is about. Instead, pan-secessionism is about creating a political realignment that brings the various libertarian, anarchist, anti-statist, decentralist, anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist forces to one side, with the various state-centric or totalitarian forces being the opposition.
Yes, there are people who are anti-system but have horrifically statist objectives of their own. The idea is to marginalize those and make them irrelevant through the creation of a serious libertarian-oriented opposition force. The Nazis and Commies would then remain marginal freaks and nothing else.
Of course, there are varying degrees in this dichotomy. Not everyone is either an anarchist or a avowed totalitarian. Instead, the idea is to bring the forces who trend libertarian in one direction, and mount a resistance to the totalitarians.
Nor is this about cultural differences per se. For example, some left-wing critics of ATS dislike us merely for taking a tolerant or conciliatory view of people who happen to be non-leftists on cultural issues, irrespective of what their political views are. In their view,everyone must be a cultural leftist. But that’s not my approach at all. I’m only interested in people who want to move past the usual left/right liberal/conservative red/blue racial/cultural fingerpointing, and start trying to find practical solutions, not “final solutions.”
I’m not saying that popular frontism cannot work, but that one must carefully execute it. The Spanish Civil War is illustrative. Both Franco and Negrin had to form ideological coalitions. Negrin failed to weld a workable alliance and Franco succeeded.
Does the Faulk’s “All nations party” even have a functioning website?
Ryan doesn’t seem to have been very active with that project. It makes for an interesting prototype, however.
He gets very easily distracted with making tit-for-tat video responses to people that annoy him on various topics, unfortunately. Plus, his subscriber base seems to have wanted the ANP Youtube channel to be a continuation of his earlier stuff, so he fills that channel up with those videos instead of putting them on his old channel.
So this “party” is merely an idea, and one so virtual that even Ryan wasn’t very interested in it… Somehow I don’t see this kind of Facebook subculture turning into anarchist “boots on the ground” anytime soon.
Akira’s comment about trying to figure out exactly who our supporters are is right on the money, if we’re going to go ahead with the idea of a Pan-Sec meta-party. (I think a lot of the ideas for non-electoral pressure groups and such, that take up most of the theorizing in the core documents are superior to a meta-party, but it’s worth a shot)
If we’ve got even a single worker that could be paid with the donation money, that has the goal of registering the party and maybe purchasing some crappy office somewhere, that’s a huge step forward, even if it doesn’t seem like it. People generally feel an obligation to actually do something with property that they buy for such a purpose, and won’t let it fall by the wayside like happens with so many web-based projects.
We ought to try and use WordPress data (though maybe I have an unreasonable expectation of what the webmaster’s data can provide), or take a look at who’s liked the ATS FB page, to build up as big of a contact list of names and email addresses as we can. This can be expanded with contacts from National-Anarchist sites, or any other gathering places for non-PC anarchists that we know of, and eventually, it can be expanded to include non-anarchists.
Categorizing the people on the email list by ideology might be useful, to figure out who might be a good fit for the leadership cadre of the various ideological sub-groupings within the party. There are obviously alot of people with hard-to-categorize belief systems, but we’d eventually run through all those people, as this gets bigger and bigger, and start mostly bringing in people with fairly conventional Dem/Repub beliefs.
We have a number of different aspects of a revolutionary movement getting mixed up here and it is useful to untangle them.
The first is ideology, which is the main subject around here and as far as anyone with modern revolutionary politics usually goes.
The second is the organization, a subject that the fringe right has always been deeply retarded about (excepting William Lind and a few others). The classic hard leftist organizations are unions, mass political parties, electoral parties, and revolutionary parties. The classic libertarian organizations are the mail order scams and the marginal electoral party.
The third question is the coalition. ATS is unusual in having spent a lot of time and energy looking seriously at this question, which is otherwise almost completely ignored on the anarcho-right. It would be interesting to hear how your WordPress data lines up with your proposed coalition.
The fourth is the total strategy: IE what you are trying to ultimately accomplish, and how you are going to get there. Almost everyone has an idea of their ideal end state; almost no one has any new ideas about how to get there.
Rule#1-Focus on models that actually existed, and that actually worked.
Some Facebook page pretend party is just internet noise. Failed third parties have failed. The history of revolutions is vast, and in fact most of them were “right wing” as the pre-enlightenment revolutions tended to be religious or nationalist revolts.
Rule#2-People, Ideas, technology, in that order. -John Boyd. For a revolutionary movement the technology is the Organization.
Rule#3-While there is a priority; this is not a “step-process” as you have to answer all of these questions half way before you can see the final forms of each, as they are deeply interrelated.
Rule#4-Hybrids rule the world. Build snowmobiles and build them for the roads in front of you, not the road behind you or the map in your head.
Hezbollah has a Khomeinist ideology, a Leninist organization (notice Nassaralla is the secretary), a strategy of Islamic revolution, and the resistance coalition. The PKK has an anarchist Ideology, a Leninist organization, a strategy of ethnic separatism, and an ever shifting series of murky alliances and coalitions of convenience.
My own position on the organizational question is somewhere between Nestor Makhno and Victor serge, but I recognize that such a model requires political soldiers, a species of man long extinct in the west and utterly unknown to libertarianism.
The Facebook revolution is a product. You can go on buying it if you like. Disposable politics are fun and entertaining, and they will always have more for sale. The Facebook revolution breeds political consumers. I don’t know what you do with them, but you have so many… Seems like you could do something more than you do…
If you could just package secession up in a box and sell it at the Walmart you would have it all tied up. Unfortunately, real secession means a civil war, and the last one was unimaginably brutal. Since then the balance of military power has so shifted to the Federal Government that the only plausible scenario is one where the American Military itself splits, which would mean a civil war so destructive that no country would be left behind.
The anarcho right has always been mainly virtual, but at that level it is large and successful. It has spread and grown in a very postmodern environment. Realistically you don’t have the kind of base to build a political party with, much less a revolutionary one. Furthermore the American fringe right is so absolutely and completely retarded on the organizational question that it would turn into larouchism or ARI in any case.
So the anarcho right should probably stay virtual and somehow figure out how to become a virtual menace to the state. Julian Assange has demonstrated a radical new theory of information warfare in practice and done real and very serious damage to the American Empire. His model looks a lot more dangerous and interesting than another third party that loses elections.
For example you could focus on public school resistance, and create a website where students could anonymously post videos of their idiot public school teachers and hang out and chat about school resistance, download the ATS Trench coat Mafia Sabotage Manual, etcetera. This could be expanded into darknets for organizing resistance groups and mass actions. The mere existence of such a project would cause liberals to panic and froth at the mouth. MSNBC would do a special report and crash your servers with the traffic.
Public school resistance is a great issue because almost everyone who went to one is a potential supporter. Furthermore you are aiming at the young and turning them subversive at an early age. A lot of tech nerds with money bitterly hate the public schools, and properly packaged you could quite possibly kickstarter fund school resistance projects.
We may be getting a bit ahead of ourselves by focusing on the minutia of organizational strategy. The first step is to simply win the war of ideas, and this means merely publicizing the concept of pan-secessionism and the other strategic concepts that we talk about here. We don’t really have the numbers at this point to make any kind of comprehensive organizational structure into a viable project.
As I have said before, my goal is to promote all forms of non-totalitarian anti-system resistance until all of these currents collectively become a political majority, and this includes a wide variety of ideological currents as well as individual issues. I also wish to promote the pan-secessionist concept as a meta-strategy among all resistance movements until it approaches a de facto consensus among the wider body of dissident currents, along with related strategic concepts like the city-state system, “power to the neighborhoods,” etc.
So the real first step is the dissemination of information on a more massive scale. Vince has previously suggested the idea of a collage of websites promoting these ideas to an ever greater variety of demographics, issue-based activists, or political tendencies. I think if ATS were to have paid agents, as Noonan recommends, then the first step would be to merely have a full time webmaster whose responsibility is the creation of websites, blogs, and social media accounts for this purpose, and the maintenance of these. Before we can have effective organization of any kind (whatever it will eventually be) we have got to have the numbers to make this viable. This is where the demographic analysis that Akira and Noonan have suggested would come in handy. We can’t really have a PSMP that means anything if no one has ever heard of pan-secessionism as a concept.
I like the school resistance idea that Akira has suggested as well. I think that might be a way to attract the interest of a lot of young people who might be moved towards pan-anarchism/pan-secessionism eventually.
Noonan: “Categorizing the people on the email list by ideology might be useful, to figure out who might be a good fit for the leadership cadre of the various ideological sub-groupings within the party. There are obviously alot of people with hard-to-categorize belief systems, but we’d eventually run through all those people, as this gets bigger and bigger, and start mostly bringing in people with fairly conventional Dem/Repub beliefs.”
Right. Cultivating the leadership corps is the first step in organization, and to a large degree that’s what ATS has been about. And we will need a leadership corps in each of the ideological subgroupings you refer to. The goal is then to spread out the organizing/organizational base towards people with more conventional beliefs.
“(I think a lot of the ideas for non-electoral pressure groups and such, that take up most of the theorizing in the core documents are superior to a meta-party, but it’s worth a shot)”
It’s not really a matter of either/or. The pressure groups might eventually become the activist and constituent base for the PSMP.
“Since then the balance of military power has so shifted to the Federal Government that the only plausible scenario is one where the American Military itself splits, which would mean a civil war so destructive that no country would be left behind.”
Yes! I am glad to see you recognize that the splintering and dissolution of the US armed forces has to be our ultimate strategic goal. This is absolutely essential to the victory of the revolution. It is vitally important to build dissident networks within the ranks of the armed forces and among veterans.
The pan-secessionist project also needs a critical mass of hard-core anarchists who are always pushing the envelope. For instance, I would like to see something like a dual organizational structure emerge. Something like the PSMP might include more conventional forms of activism, even electoralism, such as applying the Mailer model on the local and regional level, or doing what the Free Staters and Liberty Movement people have done in New Hampshire, or to a lesser degree the SVR. But there would also be a hard-core anarchist movement organized independently of all that, although some of its activists might also be embedded in the PSMP, that was constantly agitating for more radical positions and against potential statist deviations.
Interesting discussion.
Re. the question of organization and the organization of anarchists in particular, what do you think about the “social insertion” concept associated with especifismo?
Is a FAI type organization (which would presumably influence a larger union or political propaganda group) a possibility in the USA? It seems like there are alot of practical obstacles standing in the way of the rough ideological consensus that the FAI achieved and which arguably played a role in their success. The Spanish anarchists were able to communicate information via their autonomous newspapers and more importantly via the CNT. 21st century has the technology required (the internet) to communicate information but internet communication, written correspondence, and face to face communication have different dynamics.
Cynthia McKinney has brought up the idea of a traveling left/right radical town hall where local community radicals of different stripes get together and speak frankly without worrying about lawsuits or political correctness. Unfortunately, even this tactic is susceptible to state infiltration. On the other hand, it seems like it might become harder for the state to actively infiltrate (in the tradition of conintelpro) and get away with it as surveillance technology becomes more advanced and available to citizens as well as governments.
“Re. the question of organization and the organization of anarchists in particular, what do you think about the “social insertion” concept associated with especifismo?”
The concept of building alternative infrastructure that I’ve discussed in the past is very similar to the social insertion idea the especifismo tendencies formulated. In fact, it was in part influenced by it, and by other things like the fourth generation warfare model.
“Is a FAI type organization (which would presumably influence a larger union or political propaganda group) a possibility in the USA? It seems like there are alot of practical obstacles standing in the way of the rough ideological consensus that the FAI achieved and which arguably played a role in their success.”
I don’t think the doctrinaire anarcho-communism of the FAI is applicable for North America today. I think it’s certainly possible to have a large anarchist federation similar to the FAI but it would have to be more ideologically diverse. It would more likely resemble the synthesist anarchist tendencies or simply anarchism without adjectives. Obviously, the main barrier would be the rivalries between different anarchist factions, and the fact that many anarchist factions do not recognize others as “true” anarchists.
“The Spanish anarchists were able to communicate information via their autonomous newspapers and more importantly via the CNT. 21st century has the technology required (the internet) to communicate information but internet communication, written correspondence, and face to face communication have different dynamics.”
Yes, indeed. A major issue right now is the need for anarchists to move off the internet and into the realm of action, and the fact that the internet is a forum that breeds all sorts of sectarian rivalries.
“Cynthia McKinney has brought up the idea of a traveling left/right radical town hall where local community radicals of different stripes get together and speak frankly without worrying about lawsuits or political correctness.”
Really? I didn’t know that. Interesting.
“Unfortunately, even this tactic is susceptible to state infiltration. On the other hand, it seems like it might become harder for the state to actively infiltrate (in the tradition of conintelpro) and get away with it as surveillance technology becomes more advanced and available to citizens as well as governments.”
That’s a never ending problem, unfortunately.
Currently Ryan Faulk’s All Nations Party is working from the assumption that the United States should be forcibly partitioned into 15 countries (give or take a few) based on the major ideological, ethnic and religious groupings of the country. The party should come to power in Washington, and then everyone will be forced to pick a country that suits them best. People would be reimbursed for the value of their property, and people over a certain age or terminally ill people would just be allowed to run out the clock where they live.
This seems pretty antithetical to libertarianism, as Ryan himself has admitted.
And in terms of Joe Kopsick’s Panarchist Party, while he seems like a cool guy, his activism seems to be mostly confined to writing and reposting articles that are relevant to panarchist theory. Maybe they have a private email list where they’re actually working on getting the petitions going to register the party, I don’t know.
So it seems to me that we’d need to try and re-orient Ryan’s party towards true anarchism, which is sovereignty of independent neighborhoods, rather than several giant countries based around the top 15 ideological divisions.
Yes, I agree. The best model for us to utilize would be the city-state, “power to the neighborhoods” concept that Norman Mailer originally came up with.
The ANP idea is too focused on race, IMO. While many Americans may practice a kind of de jour “racial separatism” in the sense that most of their immediate circle of associates are of the same race, ideological racial separatism doesn’t seem to get much traction among people of any race. It’s usually regarded as a far out and unnecessary if not dangerous concept. Pan-secessionism seem to attract a large following among racialists, and that’s fine, but that certainly can’t be the definitive issue if decentralist/pan-secessionist idea is going to develop a mass audience.
Besides, at this point in US history, political affiliation is far more of a dividing line than race. http://www.vox.com/2015/12/7/9790764/partisan-discrimination Race issues are a subset of what makes the partisan divide what it is, but it’s only one issue among many, along with geography, culture, religion, social class, occupation, education level, age, and who knows what else.
I also think the “panarchist” concept of competing governments in the same geographical territory is also something that sounds bizarre and incomprehensible to many people. It’s not something I’m theoretically opposed to. I just don’t know how politically marketable.
However, secessionist city-states and federations of independent neighborhood are ideas that most people are able to pick up on more quickly.
The main problem for us is that we have two dominant political tribes that are both oriented towards achieving full control of the central government. http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/
The Left wants a totalitarian humanist regime that imposes ostensibly progressive values on all other institutions, on local communities, and the rest of the world. The Right wants an authoritarian nationalist regime that wages perpetual war against the “turrrrissts,” illegal immigrants, radical Muslims, criminals (particularly black criminals), keeps homos from getting married, keeps trannies out of the ladies room, fights the influence of leftists, repeals Obamacare while protecting Medicare, and pursues a wide range of contradictory agendas (limited government and permanent war, a balanced budget and lower taxes, supply side economics and reduced unemployment).
Our best hope is probably the emergence of a libertarian-oriented Grey Tribe, and the growth of secessionist movements generally, like those in Texas, Cascadia, and Vermont. https://paxdickinson.wordpress.com/2014/10/27/the-rise-of-the-grey-tribe/
http://attackthesystem.com/2015/01/17/awakening-the-sleeping-giant/