Long ago, I used to be an idealist. I used to look at things and say the world should be this way—that it ought to be this way—and I held to that with conviction. But over time, dealing with different people and different groups and being brutally honest with myself about how the world actually operates, I came to understand that it’s far more complex than I believed. And that realization changed everything for me.
I spent years trying to police the characters around me—people who turned out to be profoundly dishonest, literally criminals, scammers, grifters, frauds, charlatans, adulterers, and drug addicts. And most of these people, ironically, existed in the religious right wing, of all places. I became disillusioned. I realized I didn’t belong in that space, not because I had failed, but because I had been operating under a false set of assumptions about the people involved and the nature of the movement itself. I was applying idealist standards to a world that does not run on idealism.
But here’s the irony: leaving politics made me more clear-eyed about it. Standing on the outside, like a Machiavellian coach watching from the sidelines, I can now speak honestly, whereas those still inside the game cannot. They can’t speak truthfully because honesty would unmask them and expose their actual agendas to their enemies, and that’s a risk they simply cannot afford to take. Their position inside the political arena is also their cage.
For someone like me, who has stepped out of that arena entirely, there’s no such cage. I have no agenda to protect, no coalition to hold together, no narrative to maintain. That freedom is precisely what allows me to call out what I see clearly and without apology.
And what I see, clearly, is an enduring clash between two types of people: the idealist and the realist.
The Idealist
So what is an idealist? An idealist looks at the world and declares, “This is how it should be.” He sets extraordinarily high standards and then measures everything and everyone against those standards. On the surface this sounds admirable, but in practice, those standards get in the way. They prevent the idealist from doing what’s necessary because what’s necessary is almost never consistent with a fantasy vision of how things ought to be.
White nationalist circles are the clearest example of this failure in modern politics. They are, at their core, deeply idealistic. They hold to impractical and wholly ineffective means of achieving their goals—goals which, by their own admission, they have never come close to achieving in sixty years. Sixty years! You’d think that after six decades of unbroken failure, there would be some reckoning, some willingness to reassess and adapt. But no. The idealist can’t do that. To change strategy feels like a moral compromise. And so they insist, year after year, decade after decade, on the same unworkable approaches, because to them, the purity of the method matters more than the result.
This is the defining flaw of the idealist: he’d rather be righteous in failure than effective in victory. He refuses Machiavellian means at all costs, even when those costs include his own absolute destruction. There’s something almost tragic about it, but tragedy doesn’t change the outcome.
The Realist
The realist operates from an entirely different premise. The realist doesn’t begin with a vision of how the world should be. He begins with an honest assessment of how the world is, and then he works from there. He understands that political reality is not a blank canvas on which to paint a dream but a complex, living system of competing forces, interests, and human tendencies that must be navigated with caution.
Take America as the example. We’re not getting a homogeneous, White America back. The ship sailed long ago. We’re not going to undo decades of diversity, multiculturalism, and demographic transformation through wishful thinking or militant posturing. The idealist can’t accept this, and so he is paralyzed by it, raging endlessly against a tide that has already come in. The realist accepts it, not with resignation, but with clarity, and asks the only productive question available: given where we actually are, what can actually be done?
My answer to that question is what I lay out in my book, The Fractured State, which presents my political theory of Neofederal Unifism. The framework is not a fantasy. It is not larping. It is a structural solution, a way of reorganizing America such that distinct groups, whether defined racially, ethnically, or politically, can each have their own spaces to exist and govern themselves in peace. It’s implementable. It’s voluntary. It simply requires people to read it, understand it, and execute it. That’s realism applied to politics: not dreaming of what cannot be, but building what can.
The Clash
Now we arrive at the heart of the clash. The idealist and the realist are not simply different personality types. They represent two fundamentally different relationships to power, and only one of those relationships ever actually produces results.
The idealist rarely, if ever, runs the world. He sits at the margins of history, articulating visions of how things could or should be, never quite managing to make them so. He’s paralyzed by his own standards. He can’t compromise without feeling corrupted. He can’t adapt without feeling like a traitor to his cause. And so history moves without him, indifferent to his purity.
The realist understands that power is not given to those who deserve it; it’s taken by those who are willing to do what’s necessary to obtain it and wield it. World-changing figures throughout history—an Alexander the Great, a Napoleon, a Hitler, or a Stalin—didn’t succeed because they were the most virtuous men of their era. They succeeded because they were willing to be ruthless, adaptive, strategic, and utterly unsentimental about the gap between the world as it was and the world as they wanted it to be. They didn’t wait for conditions to be perfect. They worked with the conditions they had.
Why Idealists Lose
The idealist’s fundamental error is that his goals do not translate to human nature. He sets his standards at a height that most people—who are, at best, mediocre—cannot reach and will not reach, let alone be able to sustain if they are reached. He appeals to the best of humanity and is perpetually disappointed when humanity does not show up. The realist accepts the flaw of the people, works with what he has, and builds from where he actually stands rather than from where he wishes he stood.
That’s the difference, ultimately, between fantasy and pragmatism. And pragmatism will always win over those who take no action at all—who are so paralyzed by their dreams that they cannot escape the nightmare directly in front of them.
I was an idealist. Now I am not. And the view from this side is far clearer. I’m so real about politics now; I realize there’s no point for me to even play them.
