The onion

[To be published eventually on quaslacrimas.wordpress.com - eventually.]

A word on terminology.  It is most natural to speak of the entire onion as a political party: its members are partisans, it has a party platform, it competes in a party system.  But there are two ways in which party is potentially misleading.

1. The party may have formal institutions it controls (or is attempting to control) which only some party-members belong to; some of these institutions may themselves be legally incorporated as “political parties”.  In ordinary language we call that institution the “party” (and consult its records to determine whether someone is a member or not, etc.) this may create ambiguity between the party (i.e., the onion) and the parties it control. A more vague word like movement conveys this relationship better than party, so I will use both terms to be clear.
2. The outer layer of the party is composed of people who try to keep their relationship to it ambiguous.  Again, in ordinary language a “party” is sometimes understood as containing only officially enrolled members; so it may be unclear that party refers to all the party’s layers, not just the inner layers are public about their affiliation.  Here too movement will prevent confusion.

I assume for the sake of simplicity that the entire set of problems at stake in political competition can be divided into a number of discrete topics or issues, and on each issue there are a range of possible positions a citizen might take.  An ideology is a set of theories, values, principles, revelations, or whatever else might touch many different political topics at the same time; in brief, the topic of an ideology is all the other topics.  Someone’s ideology leads him to take a complete set of positions on political topics.

A party’s platform takes the form of a complete set of positions on political topics, but it should not be thought of as the positions of its members, or the result of its members ideology.  The members may have a variety of ideologies and privately support a variety of position-sets.  A party’s platform is a public pledge in political competition, and functions as a coordination point for all party members as well as potential voters, donors, and other supporters.  The platform need not be extremely explicit or extremely precise, but party members do need to agree on whether there is consensus that the party is pursuing a certain position.  In addition to this internal consensus within the party or movement, party-controlled institutions may also publish manifestos which commit that institution to specific positions in explicit language.

While this may seem a little elaborate, it is important to be able to talk clearly about party’s platforms and their members’ positions with respect to each issue because the layers of the party are indexed to the different issues its members care about, and a party member may “inner” with respect to one issue and “outer” with respect to another.

Extremism: Disavowing Moderation

At the center of the “onion” for any given issue are those who are genuine extremists with respect to a certain issue, I.  Whether they think I is important or unimportant in the larger political picture, whether they talk about it a great deal or not, their preference with respect to I is the most extreme right-wing possible which is possible with respect to I — that is, the position which is most shocking to progressive pieties, the one that is most reviled and abused by the mass media, the one that is consistently portrayed as blasphemous and damnable by the agents of the Cathedral.  The point is not so much that genuine extremism with respect to I is the Cathedral’s least-favorite possible outcome (although it probably is), but rather that it is the most vilified position.  Much of the Cathedral’s informal power comes from the ability to diminish opponents by associating them with it.

Next to genuine extremists, surrounding them at the core of the onion, are tactical extremists with respect to I.  A tactical extremist’s preferred outcome is not as extreme as a genuine extremist’s.  No matter: the tactical extremist does not want to give his opponents the chance to drive a wedge between him and the genuine extremist.  When the Cathedral attempts to portray his position as genuinely extreme, in order to revile him and frighten potential supporters, the tactical extremist refuses to defend himself against such a portrayal.

Ordinarily when someone’s opponents accuse him of advocating a course that is immoderate in some way (too risky, too cautious; too credulous, too skeptical; too extravagant, too stingy), he will defend himself by claiming moderation.  He will explain exactly the way in which his course approaches the Golden Mean, and distinguish between his position and the genuinely immoderate alternatives (real or hypothetical) with which he has been unfairly conflated.

In everyday life, claiming the mantle of moderation is an obvious move. For one thing, when you need to select a means to an end the decision usually can fail to achieve the end due to either of two symmetrical errors, so the instrumentally rational course actually does steer the middle path between Scylla and Charybdis.

It can even be good to have alternatives to hold up against your position; the contrast clarifies the issues.  If the only thing that really matters is getting a group to see clearly which means to an end is most efficient, then disavowing your friend’s “extreme” proposal highlights the difference between his proposal and yours, thus illustrating how your proposal approaches the Golden Mean (or deviates from it, if you blundered).  If there are no alternatives to disavow, you might want to find a devil’s advocate to offer objections — or invent some yourself! (This is argumentum in utramque partem or, more broadly, prolepsis, a key aspect of the classical theory of forensic rhetoric.)

But the Golden Mean does not translate easily into the language of politics.  In politics good and bad are not purely a matter of finding the right means to a universally agreed-upon end, for one thing, so there is no general reason to think mediocre political positions would have any special virtues.  Furthermore, policy determine the fate of nations over the course of years, even over many generations, and so a policy enacted at time t is only the starting point for further debate at t+1, t+2, and so on.  Policies are path-dependent; a concession to “moderation” now is the starting point for further concessions later.

But worst of all, politics implies conflicts between multiple people, and in massively multiplayer conflicts success requires pooling the talents and influence of many people.  In a many-sided conflict, the winning side will inevitably contain allies who do not see eye-to-eye on absolutely everything.  The allies can’t all get their way on absolutely anything ([]winning is complicated), but this is irrelevant.  If they tried to work alone, none of them would get their way on anything.

We observed that when groups face instrumental decisions in everyday life, the fact that you stand alone against the others, defending ideas that contrast with theirs, your isolation does not weaken the force of your suggestions; nor does criticizing a friend’s ideas to illustrate your own prevent the two of you from joining forces once the group chooses a course of action.  But in politics, disagreements are a source of potential conflict, and an obvious strategic target for adversaries who want to disrupt cooperation between two parties (by forcing them to face alternatives where they will inevitably make different choices).  The more salient the disagreements within an alliance become, the more they disrupt the alliance.

As a result, when a political ally is attacked for extremism, or you are conflated with your more-extreme ally as a means of vilifying you, distancing yourself from your ally (that is, making your disagreements with him highly salient) does not make the flawless logic of your political principles stand out with crystalline clarity!  The disavowal only makes it harder for the two of you to cooperate on this issue — and on other issues as well, including some issues where you are more extreme than he is, because no longer trusts you not to backstab him in the future.  If the alliance fractures you have no support, and then you lose.

Claiming political moderation (especially when you are, indeed, more moderate than your opponents claim) certainly has some real advantages, and you sacrifice these if you refuse to defend yourself.  But the more you minimize the differences between you and your allies (and their salience), the more stable your alliance becomes.  The ultimate defense against the divide-and-conquer strategy is to refuse to acknowledge any disagreements whatsoever with one’s more-extreme allies; even to actively imitate them, to make it impossible for an outsider to tell the difference.

If the adversary cannot see the fault-lines between various factions, he has no idea what alternatives he could offer that would shatter their unity.  Thus, erasing all signs of division prevents him from engineering divisive situations in order to makes the divisions salient.  It can even deter him from making accusations of extremism in the first place!  To the extent that an adversary accuses you of extremism mainly to shame you, smear your position, force you to moderate, and disrupt your alliance, he’ll stop making the accusations when he realizes that you aren’t ashamed and you won’t disavow.

Thus, the tactical extremist imitates his genuinely extremist comrades as a tactic to eliminate any chance of a split between the core of the party: his own layer of tactical extremists, and the hard core of genuine extremists.

The political logic of tactical extremism is most attractive to people who were relatively, but not maximally, extreme to begin with.  These people have the least to gain from clarifying their true position (or from trying to pass themselves off as centrists) and the most to loose from a fracture.  One does not need to be extremist at all to practice tactical extremism.  It is, after all, a tactic, and its value is dictated by its contribution to the overall success of a political movement rather than by the alignment of the movement’s principles with one’s own.  (However, as I’ve []mentioned previously, it’s easier to pretend to hold a position when it’s closer to your actual position.)

Partisanship and Moral Authority

Surrounding the extremists with respect to I are the party loyalists.  Party loyalists acknowledge (if pressed) that their own views are different from the views of the extremists (which may also be the movement’s official position on I).  However, they do not obsess over their own unique view and its special distinguishing traits.  The most loyal among them may not even volunteer their own views on I unless asked directly.

Party loyalists know the extremists’ views backwards and forwards, they understand the underlying principles/arguments/evidence, and they are comfortable defending them.  They do not necessarily always (or ever) try to convince others that I-extremism is the correct position.  But they do defend it as a reasonable position, which is worthy of consideration and whose adherents deserve a fair hearing.  They praise it, they admire it, but ultimately loyalists find their own position more compelling.

This means that loyalists acknowledge disagreements that could hypothetical expose the alliance to a divide-and-conquer strategy; but they are small disagreements, their salience is low, and they are theoretical in nature.  The loyalist may think the extremists are factually or logically mistaken, but there is nothing vicious in the purity of their principles, and much to admire.

As a result, a party loyalist never concedes moral authority to his opponents.

[At this point the original draft had a discussion of concessions and virtue signals which you can find in Social Matter, "Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Virtue Signals"]

Everyone else who officially aligns themselves with a party or movement’s goals with respect to I — we might as well call them partisans — also avoids sending virtue signals, and tries to counter-signal where appropriate. (If you actively grant moral authority to the principles underlying opposing political movements, what’s the point of saying you belong to your own?)

The major point on which this outer layer of the official party can be more flexible than the loyalists is whether they wish to defend their parties extremists.  Partisans should not attack or criticize extremism with respect to I, nor should they make any other moderate gestures that could be interpreted as virtue signals.  But they can say something like “My preference is this, other members of my party disagree with my preference and I disagree with theirs; but I fully support my political party’s platform, and we are all working together to achieve that platform, not because we like each other’s I-positions.”

Because a partisan who finds it inconvenient to defend other members of his party cannot attack them, he must become a master of evasion, incongruity, and even absurdism.  Leftist partisans are quite good at this.  Bring up inconvenient facts about the Left’s harmful policies or violent tactics if you want to goad a leftist into demonstrating his evasion techniques!

“America really needs to change after Dylan Storm Roof’s attack, don’t you think?”
“I’m very concerned about the disproportionate rates of interracial crime, especially rape.”
“Wait… what? We’re talking about Dylan Storm Roof. Aren’t you ashamed to share political goals with a mass-murderer?”
“Look at those clouds! Looks like we’re in for quite a bit of rain. The plants sure do need it, don’t you think?”
“Hey, condemn Dylan Storm Roof. Say you condemn him.”
“Did you know that adult intelligence is 50%-80% heritable (narrow-sense)?”

This dialogue may seem heartless to you.  In a sense it is.  But if you substituted “Stalin,” “Mao,” “Che,” “Bill Ayers” or any one of hundreds of other leftist “heroes” for Dylan Storm Roof, you could have a substantially identical conversation with any principled progressive.

That’s why we never waste our time begging them to condemn their ideological allies.  They have us well-trained: they know where it’s going, they won’t take the bait, and so they rarely have to endure aggressive attempts to bait them.

Inside-Out

Beyond those who officially present themselves to belonging to a movement, we have a final layer: the fellow travelers.  We might say these sympathizers are of the movement, but not in it.  They are a continuation of party politics by other means.  As far as their true position on issue I is concerned, fellow travelers (ideally) agree with the party platform just as much as the average partisan does.  They are just as eager to see the party win.  But they can advance the goals of the party without the burden of open allegiance to it.

Fellow travelers use their organizational freedom to create ambiguity about their ultimate goals (and about those of their political allies).  They hopscotch back and forth along the border which separates the movement from the rest of the political world.  When you collect all of their statements about their relationship to the rest of the movement in a bullet-point list… well, it often sounds dishonest.  Or amusing, depending how much of a sense of humor you have about the ugliness of politics.

Despite this ambiguity, a fellow traveler does not virtue signal or attack his own side’s partisans; he does not want to confer moral authority on his adversaries.  Fellow travelers do care about being seen as reasonable, though, so they need to find creative ways to signal moderation without attacking his own side.

They can gain advantages of signaling moderation without compromising their allies, because they do not speak for their allies. (Their moderation does not dilute the purity of the rest of the party, in other words.) But a fellow traveler can also act as a sort of haruspex, interpreting the arcana of the movement for average sheep who would never dream of actually talking to a thought-criminal.  The fellow traveler is more moderate, signals balance, and offers himself as an intermediary, a sort of honest broker.

One oracular function of the fellow traveler is to offer creative interpretations of what is actually going on in the movement that make it much more palatable to the sheep than the Narrative’s interpretation.  The mainstream media report that the movement is near-satanic; the extremists carefully cultivate this diabolical aura, and the other partisans try not to mess up their hard work.  The fellow traveler finds the audiences that are most in thrall to the Narrative and least likely to benefit from exposure to counter-signals and other shock-and-awe tactics, and gives them a completely new story to work with.

A basic technique for these “sympathetic readings” is to claim that the party is (almost) entirely made up of partisans.  In other words, all those extremists are just a tiny minority.  The media, he explains, like to find these nuts and plaster their faces on every TV screen in the U.S.A. in order to frame their opponents as satanic. (Which, of course, is entirely true.)

Besides stressing (and perhaps misestimating) their numerical inferiority, he may also raise the question of whether the extremists are shills or narcs or something else entirely.  Sometimes he will do this by insinuation, pointing to examples of actual false flag ops designed to discredit principled movements.  He may even believe he has evidence of internal subversion; but the core of his argument is usually that no one could be as diabolic as the Narrative claims the parties extremists are, because even if they were, they wouldn’t be so open about it.  So if the Narrative is correct and the extremists are demonic, then they aren’t loyal members of the party at all!

“If the Narrative is correct, then these extremists aren’t loyal” exemplifies a recurring feature of fellow-traveler rhetoric.  The media believes the extremists are genuinely loyal to the party, and the fellow traveler is lying to get gullible sheep to support evil policies.  The extremists themselves know that they are loyal, and usually assume the fellow traveler is lying to discredit them and seize the momentum of the movement for his own ends.  But re-read his statement: is it false?

Remember, there are two ways for an if-then statement to be true.  Maybe his audience doesn’t think very closely about truth-conditions.  No matter: he gets them to the right destination.  Fellow travelers’ use ambiguity artfully to lay out a golden thread that will lead ordinary people around a thicket of prohibitions.  He can lead them to taboo conclusions without ever mentioning any taboo.  He can coax them down a path paved with clichés and common wisdom but pointed towards unpopular heresies.

The ambiguity which the fellow traveler cultivates does mean, of course, that these political tricksters can never quite be trusted.  There is no way to be absolutely sure that he is not playing his own game, other than the results he gets.  And the ambiguity is hard on them, too.  They do not receive the same sense of belonging that official partisans do, and they are constantly under attack from both sides.  In the past century, the pattern is that fellow travelers typically either become disenchanted with politics over time, or drop the mask of the trickster and move into one of the inner layers of the party.

Overview of “the onion”

To review the structure of a political party with respect to issue I,  starting from the outer layers and working into the core:

1. No virtue-signals, some counter-signals, but dismisses genuine extremists as a tiny minority and/or shills.
2. No virtue-signals, many counter-signals, refuses to denounce extremism w.r.t. I, but will not defend it.
3. No virtue-signals, many counter-signals, actively defends extremism w.r.t. I, but acknowledges that this is not his own view.
4. Refuses to defends himself by claiming moderation w.r.t. I, to avoid any possible split from genuine extremists
5. Genuine extremism w.r.t. I.

Beyond the fellow travelers, entirely outside the party, there are three groups who must be consigned to the outer darkness:

1. Those who virtue signal to gain status
2. Those who actively stigmatize extremists to gain epistemic or political authority
3. Those who help bolshevism

Anyone who is not willing to at least work as a fellow traveler - or simply shut up - with respect to every issue in the party platform should not be considered part of the party at all.  Cooperation with them should be minimized.  They are little more than political mercenaries, and should be treated as such.

In a time of war, no state should be above hiring mercenary factions if having the support of the mercenaries (and denying it to the enemy) will make the difference between victory and defeat.  But every payment one makes to the mercenaries transfers resources from one’s own command structure to a mercenary captain’s.  Over time, there are enormous advantages to building up one’s own, independent military infrastructure rather than relying on others.

Besides, sometimes mercenaries backstab you (which is terrible).  And their incentives always push them to backstab you right at the worst possible moment (which is even worse).  Even if no actual backstab occurs, the very possibility means that giving mercenaries any strategically sensitive task whatsoever creates uncertainty.  Constantly hedging an overall strategy to minimize the risk mercenaries pose cripples an army’s flexibility.  That the mercenaries get a seat at the negotiating table if the enemy surrenders is just as bad.

On the whole, while it may be necessary to cooperate with these outsiders from time to time, the party takes an aggressive attitude towards them.  They are mocked, ridiculed, and subjected to heavy criticism.  Ideally, the attacks cause them to rethink the virtues of virtue signaling, and they gradually move into the role of fellow traveler.  This isn’t always possible, of course; sometimes they join the other side or simply fall quiet.

In this, too, the outsiders resemble mercenary companies: that is to say, armed bands operating in the interstices of the state system, loyal to no political authority, riding from town to town in search of potential employers and defenseless victims.  During the age when these little war-parties were common, local authorities would hunt them down and chase them off whenever they could.

(Historically, increasingly-powerful states eventually successfully eliminated most freelance marauders.  Maybe the same will be true of the political system!  The mercenary companies of consultants and pundits have plundered the people and billed the politicians for at least a century now, but they can only operate at the interstices of the party system.  As previously chaotic political territory is settled by partisans, they will start to maintain order and the marauders will lay down their arms.)

This overview of party structure has been extremely abstract.  Even if movements and parties do exist which have the structure I have described, they will be complicated in ways that surpass a full description, because of interactions between the party’s structure with respect to each of the various issues.  Party members, remember, may be extremists with respect to one issue but merely partisans with respect to others.  Some members may have more than one persona, and thus occupy different layers of the onion on a single issue: for example, one could be a tactical extremist with one’s friends, a partisan with one’s co-workers, and a loyalist among family.  Finally, people may take an overall stance on the party or movement itself, or on some theories which tie together several of the positions in its platform, or on just about anything else; and here, too, there may be extremists, loyalists, and so on.

This complexity shows the practical difficulty of “no enemies to the right” as a policy; it is not always clear whether this means no enemies who are in one’s movement, no enemies who are more extreme than oneself overall, or no enemies w.r.t. issue I whose views (w.r.t. I) are more extreme than one’s own.  The minimal requirements are those I have outlined, defined mainly with respect to whether one is willing to attack/defend extremists on an issue-to-issue basis.  But some, who are meta-extremists or meta-loyalists with respect to the party, will go even further and refuse to ever attack anyone who is more extreme on most issues.

All of the considerations I have mentioned that lead the party members to refrain from criticizing or condemning each other are mainly relevant in the public sphere.  While the party is weak, members will still feel the same impulses to virtue signal in private discussions, and so they must continue to rein in their critiques in private; but after the first few dozen purity spirals partisans should be as critical as possible in their internal conversations, to keep their thinking fresh and their rhetoric clear.