Simple Political Theory

Mostly Burnham in Very Few Words

Three things make you win in politics:

1. Making laws in your favor

2. Saying things that the public likes

3. Saying things in a way the public likes

To do this you must:

1. Make unpopular laws

2. Lie to the public

3. Be respectful of the public

Almost always you pick two of them

Neo-conservatism = 1,2

Establishment liberalism (we’ll get to this later)

Libertarianism = 1,3

Wokeness = 1,2

MAGA = 2,3

Effective altruism = 1,3

This is because the public rarely likes laws that benefit you (the politician). They don’t even always like laws that benefit themselves or the country as a whole. To settle this conundrum you need “true believer” elites. These are the people who implement the laws, repeat your press releases, and maintage your image. They are the people who obstruct adversarial laws, debunk adversarial lies, and tar your adversarial’s image. You need a message that resonates with these people, that makes them true believers in the first place.

• Wokeness: 

  • The majority are racist. 

  • We have to pass laws to make them not racist. 

  • We have to lie to them to stop them from being racist.

  • As hard as we try, we cannot respect the racist voters.

• MAGA: 

  • Donald Trump is the best.

  • He is the best even if he sucks at governing. 

  • People who don’t like him are the enemy of the people, so we should lie about them and their arguments. 

  • Try to be charismatic, funny, and relatable like Donald Trump.

• Effective altruism: 

  • If we don’t pass these laws, humanity will literally go extinct. 

  • We’re going to treat everyone as rational and capable of making evidence based decisions. 

  • Therefore we aren’t going to lie to them and are generally going to be nice (ponzis aside).

It would be very convenient if we had a movement that outsourced the lying and respecting the public to paid actors and then make whatever policy we wanted. We should make that a separate branch, call it the executive branch. We should then make the best paid actor we can find the symbolic figurehead of that branch. We can even let the voters decide who the best paid actor is. But all the actual policy is made by unelected, unfirable bureaucrats, who are our true believers.

In this way, establishment liberalism is able to do all three. It wins. Congratulations to establishment liberalism. For everyone else, better luck next time.

Because establishment liberalism is so based on using paid actors to enrich themselves, they can swap out who the paid actors are. They don’t have to espouse establishment liberalism. They can be woke, neo-conservative, or any other ideology as long as they don’t mess with our true believers (who are all establishment liberals) or our attempts to seize more power.

Let’s say hypothetically you are not an establishment liberal. You must really dislike winning. Or at least you care less about winning and more about things like telling the truth, not going extinct, being able to live a normal life, not living in a dystopia, not creating new pandemics, et cetera. Well the reason why you lose so much is because you care about those things instead of caring about winning.

“Well what if I want to be a good person and also win?“

You’re in luck. With modern technology, establishment liberalism is becoming less viable because the public is better at noticing when you lie to them. But it doesn’t make the three steps less important, it only makes establishment liberalism works at doing them.

In my view, the way we get out of this is message-mindset fit. Loosely based off of product-market fit, message mindset fit is a political narrative that truthfully appeals to voters, while also resulting (intentionally or not) in consequences that accrue power. So far, no such narrative exists in the present, and its pretty difficult even to find examples in history. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “New Deal” might be one example. To the extent that communications technology allows us to reveal preferences, finding a new message-mindset fit may be more likely in the past. But it is still up in the air.