Political Philosophy

Political philosophy in these notes is structured as a contest between an Anglo-American logos machine — a Greco-Roman, natural-law constitutional order grounded in life, liberty, and property — and a managerial neo-liberal regime that the author diagnoses as a covert American National Bolshevism: a fusion of Rawlsian fairness, Popperian repressive tolerance, bioleninism, and a therapeutic state, dressed in the empty shell of the perishing Republic. Schmitt's friend / enemy distinction structures the diagnosis; Dugin's National Bolshevism supplies the conceptual mirror; Aristotle's four causes and his political-creature anthropology supply the constructive frame. The constructive program is a "New Conservative" turn that seizes state power to enforce competence hierarchies, public order, and broad middle-class prosperity, while replacing libertarian "spiritual nihilism" with an apophatic, magisterium-restrained imperium that can convert enemies rather than only defeat them.

Natural rights and the legitimate state

Three rights — life, liberty, property — are the irreducible content of the natural-rights claim. The state's purpose is "both to protect and suspend those rights depending on necessity." Legitimacy comes from the consent of the governed; an ideal state is one whose representatives, "educated, moral and enlightened," strike the right balance under separated powers. A citizen who cannot win politically and cannot leave must either submit or "become an enemy of the state and risk punishment." (raw/keep/natural-rights.md, raw/keep/summary-of-the-conflict.md, raw/keep/realities.md)

Six American constitutional orders are tracked — Revolution 1776, Convention 1798 (Marshall Court 1805), Civil War 1865, Progressive 1932, Imperial 1940, Civil Rights 1965 — each layered on the next, each reinterpreting what the prior orders meant. What comes after Imperial America is the open question. (raw/keep/natural-rights.md; full treatment in constitution-and-american-orders)

Diagnosis: the managerial regime as American National Bolshevism

The contemporary regime is not classical liberalism but a totalizing managerial order whose features the notes name explicitly (raw/keep/natural-rights.md, raw/keep/conservatives.md):

• Monetary mercantilism — mandatory use of the dollar in global transactions with profit repatriation to domestic financial markets.
• Bioleninism — promotion of less competitive people in exchange for political loyalty, producing a credentialed underclass dependent on the regime.
• Therapeutic state — no criminals or enemies, only patients with diseases requiring state intervention; dissent medicalized.
• Mandated diversity — population mixing as a wage-suppression and solidarity-solvent technique.
• Federal override of local enforcement — using federal money to overrule local laws and customs.

The genealogy: "Lincoln was our Lenin, Roosevelt our Stalin." The Empire was founded by Lincoln's suspension of constitutional protections during the Civil War; its structure was built by Roosevelt's wartime bureaucracy, "designed to preserve imperial power and prevent any exercise of constitutional oversight." The contemporary fusion of state power and corporate power is Atlanticism, with NATO the military arm and the Globally Systemically Important Banks the financial arm. (raw/keep/conservatives.md, raw/keep/four-groups-of-progressive-communism.md)

Reading Dugin's Metaphysics of National Bolshevism prompts the diagnostic question that organizes the whole project: "Have Americans, both on the right and the left, inadvertently adopted our own system of National Bolshevism that we fail to recognize because it inhabits the empty shell of our perishing Republic?" On this reading, today's politics is no longer a pragmatic argument over peace and prosperity but a contest over which state-imposed ideology will fill that shell. (raw/keep/grace-common-sense-and-natural-law.md, raw/keep/the-metaphysics-of-national-bolshevism.md)

"Liberals want to codify everything into a system that creates an ideal society. Opponents of Liberalism know that the ideal society doesn't exist and that we need to make room for God's grace, Common sense (Tradition) and Natural Law within the framework of the social order." — raw/keep/grace-common-sense-and-natural-law.md

Schmitt, Dugin, Rawls, Popper

The regime's operating system is read as a fusion: Rawls' justice-as-fairness + Popper's repressive tolerance = a totalizing politics that classes anything it dislikes as "intolerance" to be suppressed. Schmitt's friend / enemy distinction is the active weapon: the regime tags its opponents as "enemy" while presenting itself as universal humanism. (raw/keep/grace-common-sense-and-natural-law.md, raw/keep/conservatism-vs-neo-liberalism.md, raw/keep/paper-idea.md)

Dugin's right-wing Marxism is taken seriously not as model but as mirror: the very features Dugin identifies in National Bolshevism — eschatological mysticism, refusal to compromise, treatment of liberalism as the principal enemy — show up disguised in American managerial liberalism, except that the messianic content has been replaced by procedural managerialism. The conclusion is not that America should adopt Dugin's program but that it has unconsciously adopted a degenerate version, and naming that fact is the first step. (raw/keep/the-metaphysics-of-national-bolshevism.md, raw/keep/grace-common-sense-and-natural-law.md, raw/keep/trump-is-a-right-wing-marxist.md)

Classical liberalism vs. neo-liberalism

The proposed dialectic:

Classical-liberal freedom vs. neo-liberal identitarianism → resolved by cultural pluralism.

Cultural pluralism here means: communities free to self-organize, with the floor that even the least-advantaged community must be able to thrive through middle-class habits and policies. Universal prohibitions are reserved for practices with broad public support against them — "bigamy, pedophilia, usury, slavery, bestiality, murder and other historically odious practices that are detrimental to broad middle class prosperity." This is an extension of Rawlsian justice from individuals to cultures, but stops short of granting cultures full legal personhood, which the author sees as the trap of identity politics. (raw/keep/conservatism-vs-neo-liberalism.md, raw/keep/realities.md, raw/keep/socialists.md)

The rebrand: American conservatism as the logical outgrowth of classical liberalism, grounded in Aristotelian shared values, mutual benefit, and common enjoyment of public goods — not the contemporary fusionism of free-market economics + cultural traditionalism, both of which the author dismisses as "hamster wheel reactionary."

The New Conservative turn

Old conservatism — "less government to thwart the progressives" — has lost. The New Conservative seizes the reins of the state and uses them to impose competence hierarchies, public order, and broad middle-class prosperity. The international examples named are El Salvador, Argentina, Italy, Hungary, Russia, China — distinct in particulars, common in pattern: protect domestic labor markets over open immigration, favor productive investment over endless borrowing, reward competence over identity, accept that this produces inequality and that public order suppresses some expressions of liberty. (raw/keep/political-shift-to-new-conservative.md, raw/keep/political-objectives.md, raw/keep/the-choice-2.md)

Singapore (post-colonial competent administration) and Rwanda (post-genocide order) are the constructive exemplars. The contrast is "decadence, disorder, and decline" inside Atlanticism's redistributive consensus.

"The new conservative now sees their way forward as seizing the reigns of power and using the tools of the state to impose their own ideological agenda… The common thread… is a recognition of competence hierarchies over identities, the protection of domestic labor markets over immigration and a focus on productive investments in local industry." — raw/keep/political-shift-to-new-conservative.md

Aristotelian frame and the "logos machine"

The constructive backbone is Aristotelian. Four causes applied to the American Empire: substance (liberal hegemony), structure (Constitution + oligarchy), agent (foreign and domestic operatives), purpose (global American supremacy). Politics is the activity proper to political animals, ordered to a common good and a mean between extremes. (raw/keep/logos-machine.md, raw/keep/aristotle-s-logos-machine-draft-with-errors.md, raw/keep/ishmael.md)

The novel construct is the logos machine: a political-religious system that does not simply defeat enemies but converts them. Catholicism and the British Empire (at their best) are the historical exemplars; the proposed American version operates on the same principle.

"When we resist the temptation to separate people into friend and enemy and instead see our enemies as those capable of understanding the truth, we create the possibility that all people can be our friends. Political projects separate people into friends and enemies. Religious projects that operate logos machines seek to increase the membership in their operation." — raw/keep/logos-machine.md

The logos machine requires a magisterium to constrain the imperium. Without one, "any political order collapses into totalitarianism": positive law becomes the negation of natural law, and "human rights frameworks" cannot contain sovereignty because they are themselves products of positive law. The Catholic Magisterium and the U.S. Supreme Court are functional analogues — both restraints on legitimate power that lose their function when captured by the regime they were meant to bound. (raw/keep/inverted-empires.md, raw/keep/ishmael.md)

Plato, Hobbes, and the substitute creation myth

Plato is glossed as the "systematizer" — the temptation to codify everything into an ideal state, a temptation the author rejects in favor of room for grace, common sense, and natural law. Hobbes is named as the architect of the modern substitute creation myth: social contract theory replaces Genesis as the foundation story of modernity, recasting humans as atomized rational agents who consent themselves into existence rather than as creatures with a given nature. Rousseau is the theoretician of the influencer class — the new bourgeois who purchases status via state-backed credentials. (raw/keep/realities.md, raw/keep/conservatives.md, raw/keep/the-transition-from-metaphysical-to-material-order-renaissance-enlightenment-and.md, raw/keep/materialism-as-driver-of-revolution-innovators-vs-influencers.md)

The implication: the modern political vocabulary — rights, contract, consent, autonomy — is not neutral. It encodes a specific anthropology that the natural-rights baseline of the founding partly inherits and partly resists.

Libertarianism as spiritual nihilism

Libertarianism is named "spiritual nihilism" — even "spiritual communism" — because radical permission strips communal existence of meaning. "When you permit anything based on an ideology of freedom then you remove all meaning from the project of communal existence." Coercion must retain an educational and salutary function or it becomes mere oppression; there must also be room for innovation and error while common sense limits the damage. (raw/keep/conservatives.md)

This sets up an internal tension the notes do not fully resolve — the libertarian instinct to remove the state from religion, education, media, and propaganda is welcomed (raw/keep/new-cathedral.md, raw/keep/ishmael.md) even as libertarianism as ideology is rejected. The position seems to be: institutional libertarianism (deny the state these levers) plus communal authority (recover the magisterial restraints the libertarian tradition discarded).

Standing problems and unresolved tensions

• Founding reverence vs. founding contempt. Natural-rights primer (raw/keep/natural-rights.md) treats life-liberty-property and consent of the governed as foundational, while raw/keep/nothing-new-in-the-american-founding.md and raw/keep/the-choice-2.md insist the American founding contained nothing genuinely new (Romans had written constitutions, federalism, separation of powers, judicial review). The relationship between reverence for natural rights and contempt for founding mythology is asserted but not resolved.
• Logos machine vs. Schmittian decisionism. raw/keep/logos-machine.md wants to dissolve friend/enemy by treating enemies as potential converts; raw/keep/realities.md and raw/keep/the-choice-2.md instead demand an explicit enemy ("we need to make communists the enemy"; "there is only power"). The author oscillates between Aristotelian conversion and Schmittian decisionism without adjudicating.
• State imposition, good and bad. raw/keep/political-shift-to-new-conservative.md and raw/keep/political-objectives.md endorse seizing state power to impose competence hierarchies; raw/keep/conservatism-vs-neo-liberalism.md attacks neo-liberalism precisely for its totalizing imposition. The line between "good" and "bad" state-imposition is articulated only by appeal to outcome.
• Three Trumps. Trump is read variously as Gorbachev-figure unleashing collapse (raw/keep/conservatives.md), as right-wing Marxist reformer (raw/keep/trump-is-a-right-wing-marxist.md), and as insufficient ("just electing Trump doesn't do shit," raw/keep/the-choice-2.md). Three incompatible diagnoses coexist.
• Property absolutism vs. shareholder Marxism. The "Conservative Marxism / Shareholder Democracy" programme — mandatory employee stock ownership, wealth taxes — sits uneasily next to the property-rights absolutism of the natural-rights primer. (raw/keep/trump-is-a-right-wing-marxist.md, raw/keep/natural-rights.md)
• Restraint of oligarchs. The "constant problem" the British settlement never solved. Politically active fortunes and politically active foundations need to be destroyed; politics needs to become a small-donor activity. The mechanism remains unspecified. (raw/keep/natural-rights.md)
• Imperial transition. The middle class is materially dependent on the imperial system (cheap migrant labor, cheap imports, cheap credit, redistributive jobs); transitioning away from it without triggering collapse or autocracy is the open political question. (raw/keep/the-choice-2.md)
• Reading list, not argument. raw/keep/2025-05-23t07-40-54-458-04-00.md is a Thomas Aquinas College–style great-books list. It signals the canon the author thinks political philosophy must rest on, but contains no positions of its own.

Related

• constitution-and-american-orders — the layered American orders the diagnosis presupposes.
• empire-and-geopolitics — Atlanticism, the multipolar alternatives, "choose your empire."
• strategy-and-power — apophatic strategy and the question of how power is actually taken.
• catholicity — the magisterium that the imperium requires.
• american-religion — Christian Nationalism and Identity Politics as state-enforcing faith systems ("American Islam").
• distributism-and-graceland — broad middle-class flourishing as the practical telos.
• localism-and-federalism — federated identities as the operational layer.
• heresies-and-ideology-as-religion — communism, liberalism, libertarianism read as theological errors.

Sources

• raw/keep/natural-rights.md
• raw/keep/grace-common-sense-and-natural-law.md
• raw/keep/the-metaphysics-of-national-bolshevism.md
• raw/keep/political-shift-to-new-conservative.md
• raw/keep/conservatism-vs-neo-liberalism.md
• raw/keep/conservatives.md
• raw/keep/political-objectives.md
• raw/keep/the-choice-2.md
• raw/keep/logos-machine.md
• raw/keep/aristotle-s-logos-machine-draft-with-errors.md
• raw/keep/inverted-empires.md
• raw/keep/ishmael.md
• raw/keep/sainthood-in-a-civil-war.md
• raw/keep/realities.md
• raw/keep/summary-of-the-conflict.md
• raw/keep/civil-war.md
• raw/keep/four-groups-of-progressive-communism.md
• raw/keep/socialists.md
• raw/keep/trump-is-a-right-wing-marxist.md
• raw/keep/materialism-as-driver-of-revolution-innovators-vs-influencers.md
• raw/keep/the-transition-from-metaphysical-to-material-order-renaissance-enlightenment-and.md
• raw/keep/nothing-new-in-the-american-founding.md
• raw/keep/paper-idea.md
• raw/keep/choose-your-empire.md
• raw/keep/action-lumières-pour-un-centrisme-lumineuse.md