These gods had the same interests as the citizens themselves, and in times of war marched to battle in the midst of them. [...] In the combat the gods and the citizens mutually sustained each other, and if they conquered, it was because all had done their duty. - Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City, p. 123

By The Imperium Press - July 15, 2024

Within hours of the Trump shooting, the internet had burst into a general inferno of conspiratorialism, some of it more fantastical, some less. As the dust begins to settle, it is clear that this is bad news for the liberal democratic machine, who can’t seem to stop losing no matter what happens. But we will get to that. The dust has not yet quite settled, and the situation is still volatile.

As always, we are here to help you zoom out and take the long view of what’s happening. In this article we will draw together a few threads that we have been working out on this Substack. By the end you will see that what has happened is a very big deal indeed. But let us begin from the beginning.

The End of History

We are, almost all of us, civic nationalists today. We have spilled a lot of virtual ink laying out the groundwork for an alternative to civic nationalism, but this has met with some resistance even by the right, and even by the ethnonationalist right. Old habits die hard.

The basic formula of civic nationalism is that your tribe is your belief. You are more connected to someone because they, like you, believe in equality, the divinity of Jesus, or for that matter, in Odin. Blood might matter, sure. But for the civic nationalist, blood without belief can be abandoned.

Liberals are the ultimate civic nationalists. Even if they’re not nationalist at all, they still have a “tribe”, and that “tribe” is what we call propositional—their core identity is a set of propositions which they affirm as true. Their real family is a community of shared belief. This is why liberals are much more likely to end friendships and even families over politics. Their tribe is their belief.

Liberals exist only epistemically. Once you grasp this, liberal intolerance becomes perfectly rational, and not at all a contradiction—questioning their ideology is questioning their existence, because there is nothing behind them but a set of beliefs.

Epistemic pluralism is an existential threat to the liberal. Because he exists only epistemically, for people who reject his core propositions to live near him is as threatening to him as it is for you to live with hostile foreigners who want to kill you. In fact, he is far more extreme than you on this count. Because ideas are not geographically bound and spread virally, the fact that even one person who rejects his core propositions exists at all somewhere in the world, is an existential threat. All propositional identity is like this—to feel secure, it must hunt down and exterminate everything that is not itself.

Liberalism, as the ultimate propositional identity, waged this war of extermination from the French Revolution to what we call the “End of History” in the 1990s. The fall of the Soviet Union marked the fall of the last alternative to liberalism. At that point, no real opposition to liberalism existed—we lived in what we shall call the epistemic longhouse. Sure, China was nominally “communist”, but even Deng Xiaoping didn’t care if the cat was black or white as long as it caught mice. From the beginning of time to the End of History, each political great power had its own set of concepts, imperatives, and political language, and none could truly understand the other. By the turn of the 21st century, even a Chinese communist, a Muslim theocrat, and a secular humanist spoke the same political language, obeyed the same basic imperatives, and framed the world by the same concepts. The epistemic worlds of mankind had been growing fewer since at least the Axial Age, and now we had finally collapsed them all into one, which we call “modernity”.

But it is not given to man to know the gods’ will. Somehow, inexplicably, impossibly, the epistemic longhouse of modernity began to fracture.

Epistemic Divorce in Real Time

Liberalism cannot survive pluralism. Conventional wisdom considers liberalism pluralistic, but this is to misunderstand it. It is ethnically pluralistic. But it is epistemically absolutist—it can brook no ideological opposition. Any serious questioning of liberal ideology is a “threat to democracy”, even when that threat is elections themselves. Liberalism responds allergically to questioning of any kind.

Ironically, modernity itself has produced conditions that the epistemic longhouse which we call liberalism, cannot survive. It is important that we understand these conditions before moving on to Trump.

Some of the conditions that undermine the epistemic longhouse result from the triumph of liberalism itself. Liberalism is allergic to pluralism, so the barest whiff of ideological opposition sends it into a sneezing fit, trying to expel the virus. The machine is thin-skinned, so in response to even the mildest threat it overreacts like a hypochondriac in a hospital ward. It may enact totalitarian measures such as those seen in 2020, or it may import loyal voting blocs en masse from the third world. These reactive measures then undermine social trust in elites and social institutions more generally. This collapse of social trust pushes normal people into “echo chambers”, which makes the machine yet more insecure, so it enacts totalitarian measures, etc.—we have here a vicious circle brought on by liberalism itself, a circle which balkanizes people into separate epistemic communities and breaks the hegemonic hold on information.

Other conditions that undermine the epistemic longhouse are technological. Before the 2000s, mainstream media enjoyed a monopoly over public opinion. But the rise of web 2.0, which blurred the line between information creators and consumers, broke this monopoly. The rise of Myspace, YouTube, Twitter, and other platforms provided people with alternative sources of music, video, news, etc. And as it turned out, vestigial media such as cable TV and The Guardian were woefully overpowered by millions of superior creators. Mainstream platforms began haemorrhaging money, and in a bid to survive, they developed the paywall model which rewarded paying customers with premium content. The effect was that the likes of The Guardian paid less and less attention to normal people, as it had done in the golden age of monopoly. The nature of the paywall model forced them to kowtow to only their most committed and fanatical user base, causing these mainstream platforms to themselves become more fanatical and extreme.

By the mid-2010s, the growing divide between separate epistemic domains could not be ignored. The 2016 campaign and election of Donald Trump exacerbated this divide by prominently platforming someone whose political beliefs were from a generation before, someone who was opposed—however mildly and inoffensively—to the liberal consensus of infinite “progress” forever. The result was a reflexive convulsion that forever undermined Americans’ belief in civil political discourse. In the totalized proposition nation—where belief is identity and identity is belief—half the country came to regard the other half as mortal enemies. We had arrived at the epistemic divorce.

The left understands the epistemic divorce in its own crude and hysterical way as the ‘post-truth’ era, which it thinks was inaugurated by Trump talking about “alternative facts”. In reality the epistemic divorce has been a long time coming, and the Trump presidency was simply when the differences became irreconcilable. At this point it became clear that divorce was inevitable, and the ‘post-truth’ era has been one prolonged spasm of a dying civilization, an animal twitching at the side of the road.9

By the middle of Trump’s first term, social trust was on life support. All this was bad enough until . . .

[SNIP]