The Path Forward for America

Embracing Pragmatism and Disillusionment

There was an excellent, recent discussion between Michael Anton and Lafayette Lee, hosted by IM1776. The dialogue is extremely long, involving a 13,000 word exploration of American and classical history: probing into the problems of contemporary America, excavating the philosophical origins of current ideological tensions, and questioning how to escape from our ongoing predicament — trapped inside a hostile, corrupt, dying global Empire. 

The American Nation: Resurrections — IM (im1776.com)

Lafayette Lee delivered a brilliant and eloquent perspective, and I agreed with him on virtually every point. 

Michael Anton’s performance fell short of his usual brilliance, which came as a disappointment to me. He struck a frustrated, exhausted tone. A message of resignation that America had reached this condition, mixed with a lack of clear answers, and condemnation of the vulgarity and pessimism of ordinary digital anons. In truth, he sounded like a grumpy old man scolding younger generations for their frustration with the status quo. 

But I think Michael Anton captured the zeitgeist of the conservative movement, which is defined by a sobering realization that America’s institutions have been fundamentally corrupted and have betrayed the foundational ideals embodied by the United States Constitution — followed by stages of grief, horror, despair, denial, anger, bargaining — a rollercoaster of emotions which culminates into a sense of helplessness and confusion.

Searching for answers, how to save America. 

Michael Anton ends with a concise message: He doesn’t know what to do. But clearly something needs to change. 

"Nor is any of this to say that rote application of the rhetoric of 1776 is going to save us now. I already made clear that I don’t believe that. What will save us, I am not sure I know. As noted, I have some ideas, but I don’t want to bring the Eye of Sauron down on me or on any of the institutions that so generously and graciously support me. So, for now, I will stick with theory, written esoterically, so that, for those geeky enough to try to find them, inklings of my speculations can be teased out of the surface."

—Michael Anton, The American Nation: “Resurrections”

The American Nation: Resurrections — IM (im1776.com)

During this conversation, Michael Anton pointed out the horrors of civil war, the impotence of “voting harder”, and the irrelevance of armed revolution. All of these reminders are helpful to consider; no matter how bad life seems, it can always get worse. And as annoying as the fake, debt-based economy of America and the feminized tyranny of a passive-aggressive surveillance state can be, this current situation is paradise compared to the nightmare of a widespread civil war, with random violence and gruesome massacres occurring at unpredictable intervals. 

So we return to the realization that the status quo is dysfunctional, and steadily degrading. But America’s political system is designed to safely insulate the machinery of permanent bureaucracy from any interference committed by the popular electorate. All legal solutions are forbidden. And there don’t seem to be any viable criminal solutions, either. 

Violent rebellion is a useless dead end. When the Unabomber carried out his mail bombing campaign, he was attempting to delay the progress of technology. He succeeded in achieving notoriety, wounding or killing a couple dozen victims, and drawing attention to his manifesto. Now his works are read on the Internet, as digitized pdfs. Ted Kaczynski was a math prodigy, and a perceptive writer, but he illustrated the limits of violence — a brief and impotent publicity campaign marked by negligible political impact. 

Global imperial decline is too big of a problem for any one man to reverse.

Collective action problems require group coordination. 

Group coordination is strictly constrained by law. Antifa and the George Floyd protests were allowed to terrorize blue cities during the Summer of 2020. Trump supporters were imprisoned for walking through the Capitol Building, after police politely escorted them inside. 

So, violence is not the answer.  

FrogTwitter is a leading indicator of imminent cultural trends, and the poasters are usually somewhere between six months to three years ahead of the curve. Digital news arrives much faster than the legacy media of television broadcasts, or newspapers. But more importantly, the truth becomes obvious longggggg before ordinary crowds are willing to accept it. Unpopular epiphanies are greeted by reflexive denial. 

Most conservative Americans want to hide from reality and pretend that everything will be okay if they simply keep voting harder. That desire to obscure terrifying problems, also prevents effective solutions, because the populace refuses to admit that anything is wrong, much less coordinate to solve any ongoing crisis. 

To me, the solution seems both obvious, and inevitable. 

Whether we do anything, or not. 

America is traveling down a path that leads to the gradual breakdown of the status quo, and although the trip may detour… or loop back into lengthy digressions, all routes lead to the same eventual destination. 

Our velocity may slow, or ACCELERATE, and the details are malleable, but the outcome involves a diminishment of the American periphery as China threatens Taiwan, Russia threatens Ukraine, the Houthis threaten the Suez Canal, and the military protection of the once-feared American Empire increasingly appears to be more comedic than formidable. 

The parasitic caste which rules America is doing their best to steal as much as they can, as fast as they can, from a sinking ship. They inherited this nation from more competent predecessors, and they’ve done their best to systemically purge any remaining shreds of competence from their ranks; prioritizing loyalty and DEI to consolidate political control. 

America is exhausted. It needs a reawakening… a rebranding… revitalization… reempowerment. 

But even now, ordinary citizens remain in denial, and will complain about inflation, but pretend to be confused about the Bigger Picture, in order to justify their continued passivity. 

We know America’s institutions are deeply corrupt, and that institutional reform is impractical under the current system of government. 

But as trial lawyers often say, “It’s not what you know, it’s what you can prove.”

The path forward for America is quite obvious. It’s just boring, costly, disappointing, anticlimactic, time-consuming, painful, exhausting, and inefficient. 

Two missions must be achieved:

1.) Prove the legal system is hopelessly corrupt, by working within the legal system and repeatedly failing according to all formal mechanisms of legal redress, in order to demonstrate beyond any reasonable doubt that a more surgical fix is needed. 

2.) Build a decentralized network of parallel institutions, in order to protect citizens from bureaucratic punishment, to coordinate future endeavors, and to build the alternative which will replace the obsolete, crumbling status quo.

Chris Rufo is single-handedly winning against academia and the bureaucracy. He is far down the path of proving that the existing mechanisms of institutional patronage and prestige are designed to prevent effective reform. Can he achieve total victory? No, I don’t think so. And I’d love to be wrong. 

But every frustration is a step in the right direction. 

It’s not enough to know America’s political, judicial, legal, financial, military, regulatory apparatus is rigid and hostile to human considerations. Truth must be demonstrated publicly (to people who prefer to pretend that everything is fine.)

In an ideal world, America would wake up — today. All our problems were inflicted by humans, and can be solved by humans. A wise, effective sovereign, backed by ten thousand competent men, could transform America in one year into the world’s dominant power. And an internally functional, productive, inspirational economy. 

Unfortunately, that’s not going to happen. 

The best-case scenario would be that the system fixes itself… that Donald Trump and Elon Musk and Erik Prince assemble a counterelite to purge the bureaucracy, redirect America’s policies, arrange a peace in Ukraine, and begin to impose order upon the chaos of the Global American Empire. 

The worst-case scenario is something along the lines of: In 2024 another election is stolen from Trump, hyperinflation reaches dizzying levels, China sinks an American carrier in the Pacific Ocean, Ukraine escalates out of control, mass immigration triples… and American Normie conservatives are radicalized in numbers large enough to provoke an overreaction by the domestic bureaucracy, but too small to achieve anything other than ruining their own lives. 

I don’t see that scenario happening, either. 

My prediction is continual stasis and incremental, dysfunctional decline (marked by increasing riots among the vassal states of the West, and regional conflicts along the geopolitical imperial periphery (in buffer zones such as Israel, Ukraine, Taiwan), which were previously suppressed by the diplomatic influence or military power of the American Empire) until around 2030-2032, when enough Boomers have retired (and are drawing upon their long-promised pensions and medical plans) to cause a debt crisis. 

TLDR: None of this is going to impact your personal life. Nobody is coming to save us, and even if they did, they are not going to arrive anytime soon. 

You have plenty of time to improve your own life: find romance, get rich, raise a family, learn a foreign language, invest in real estate, travel the world — there’s enough time to chase your own dreams and achieve them. 

But waiting on an external savior guarantees disappointment.

If you had tried to tell an ordinary American in 2003 that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were a lost cause, or in 2007 that the housing economy was fake, then most people would’ve rejected you. It was a tough sell. Today, these heresies have become the conventional wisdom. 

That’s a good way to think about America’s problems right now. 

Today’s rebels will be tomorrow’s establishment. 

Today’s blasphemies will be tomorrow’s traditions. 

All of this seems stressful to live through, and it is, and it does matter, but worrying and agonizing is counterproductive. In a few years, the mainstream will catch up to what fringe poasters are discussing today. And unfortunately, the human tendency to crave mass delusion to hide from imperial decline is one of the primary obstacles to enacting any kind of proactive solution. 

If you want to know what you should do with the time you have, the answer is to BUILD. Build your life, build your dreams, build your families, build friendships, build your community — build a parallel brotherhood to conquer this feminized status quo. 

Because you have a long time of living through deceit, dysfunction, and stagnation until the situation changes.