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)
Who regulates the oligarchs
A recent capture reframes the whole regime question as one about the regulatory function: who holds it, what legitimates the holding, and what restrains the holder (raw/inbox/2026-07-11t05-49-23-550z-regulatory-systems-of-governance.md). The historical claim is compact. With no monarch or pope left to restrain and regulate the oligarchs, the leader of the state moved into the role of ultimate regulator — and, lacking divine right as revealed by the Holy Spirit, had to find a new legitimation. Communism supplied one (protector of the rights of the people from predation by oppressors); fascism supplied the other (protector of the people from enemies of the people of the state). Each then acquires the incentive to manufacture its own justification: communism to create new oppressed peoples so the state's power can protect them, fascism to create new enemies so the people can be protected from them. (heresies-and-ideology-as-religion develops the pair as regulatory theologies.)
The nation is read as the institutional condition of that transfer: an arbitrary creation of modernity whose function is to protect the oligarch class from being restrained by a monarch or a pope. It emerges from a reactionary Protestantism whose object was genuinely reformist — both Church and state had been infiltrated by oligarchs who bought regulatory advantage by bribing officials, and the Bible was to serve as a kind of constitution against which the powerful could be held to account through more local systems of governance. The verdict on the attempt is unsparing: it mostly failed, because it is much easier and less expensive to corrupt a local government than it is to corrupt a large powerful government. (localism-and-federalism carries the challenge this poses to the localist program.)
American liberal democracy is read as the next attempt rather than the answer. Separation of powers and freedom of expression, mediated by popular elections, are designed to pit oligarchic powers against each other in a competition for votes while transparency limits them by exposing abuses; the voter then chooses the lesser evil. The design fails at a specifiable point: propaganda combined with mass media distorts the transparency into narrative, and the winners then use the state's redistributive powers to create financial incentives for continued support. The founding's anti-oligarchic intent survives this reading; what does not survive is the assumption that freedom of expression on its own constrains anybody.
The proposed answer speaks directly to the restraint-of-oligarchs problem this article has long flagged as unsolved. Two mechanisms are named. The first is removability: the regulator is local because regulation must happen where the people are, but he is appointed and removable by an authority with no stake in the local rent — "the local duke and archbishop overseeing more local counts and bishops plays the role of regulator and can be removed by the king or pope." The second is total transparency: making every financial transaction public and every act of the state reviewable by anybody, so that a regulatory advantage becomes very difficult to create or to maintain. The constructive arrangement that follows is the corpus's own triad in regulatory dress — a state that creates, broadens, and extends peace and prosperity through an inclusive regulatory framework informed by the revelatory truth-seeking mission of the church, promoting distributive justice and local control. (the-logos-machine, catholicity, strategy-and-power)
The mortal bargain: skin in the game as a third mechanism
A recent capture supplies a third mechanism, and reaches it by relocating the Revolution (raw/inbox/2026-07-19t13-33-34-303z-death-or-surrendered.md). The real Revolution was getting rid of the transnational regulatory power of the Catholic Church in the 1500s. The arrangement destroyed then is described as a separation of powers of a kind modern constitutionalism does not attempt: a global regulator plus a series of small political entities, which together made for a fairly stable system. Once the local sovereign could determine his own regulatory environment, it became very easy for local elites to create advantages for themselves — which is the corruption asymmetry above, dated and given an author.
The verdict on the arrangement that preceded it is stated without romance. Feudalism was not perfect, but it created a stable environment in which the regulatory and political framework could evolve gradually: what was lost in innovation was gained in predictability. That is a trade the compendium's own accelerationist and innovation-first registers are not used to conceding.
The mechanism is the capture's real contribution, and it is a claim about personal liability:
"The sovereign bargain was simple. The guy in charge made the rules but he had to die to protect them. The church operated on the same bargain."
Once the man in charge no longer had to die to protect his franchise, his incentives shift dramatically. He can outsource his military to mercenaries and his government to local bankers and merchants, at which point the sovereign's job becomes keeping the merchants and bankers happy so that he can pay the mercenaries. (money-debt-finance develops this as the political-military counterpart to the usury genealogy.) What follows is a cycle of regulatory fights between corrupt elites and angry peasants, in which revolution is the moment the angry peasants kill the old corrupt elites and become the new corrupt elites. The revolution solves nothing; it changes who gets to oppress whom. The proposed remedy is to restore the bargain — to make the man in charge defend his decisions with his life, which "kind of forces you to make the best decisions."
Read against the two mechanisms above, mortal liability is structurally different from both and worth holding as a third. Removability requires a remover whose office modernity abolished on purpose; transparency requires an enforcer who will not exempt himself first; the mortal bargain requires neither, because it is internal to the office rather than imposed on it from outside. That is why it is attractive, and it is the only anti-capture mechanism in the corpus that a single officeholder could adopt unilaterally.
Its weaknesses are equally structural and the article records them. The bargain selects for men willing to die rather than for men who judge well, which is a different virtue and not obviously the one a regulator most needs. It says nothing about who holds the sovereign to it — and the capture's own diagnosis is that the escape route is always available, since a ruler who can hire mercenaries has already stepped out of the bargain without anyone having released him from it. And it sits awkwardly beside the natural-rights baseline above: a mortally liable sovereign is legitimated by his exposure rather than by the consent of the governed, which is a different theory of legitimacy wearing the same clothes. The personal form of the same question — what a man is actually willing to die for, and Bertrand Russell's argument that he should never be willing to die for anything because he might be wrong — is developed in war-and-violence.
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, whileraw/keep/nothing-new-in-the-american-founding.mdandraw/keep/the-choice-2.mdinsist 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. The relocation of the Revolution to the 1500s sharpens the problem further: if the decisive rupture was the destruction of the transnational regulator, then 1776 and 1789 are both downstream events inside an already-broken arrangement. - Logos machine vs. Schmittian decisionism.
raw/keep/logos-machine.mdwants to dissolve friend/enemy by treating enemies as potential converts;raw/keep/realities.mdandraw/keep/the-choice-2.mdinstead 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.mdandraw/keep/political-objectives.mdendorse seizing state power to impose competence hierarchies;raw/keep/conservatism-vs-neo-liberalism.mdattacks neo-liberalism precisely for its totalizing imposition. The line between "good" and "bad" state-imposition is articulated only by appeal to outcome. The regulator genealogy sharpens the problem considerably: if the core modern pathology is that the head of state became ultimate regulator once nothing stood above him, then the New Conservative program of seizing the state to impose hierarchies is an exercise of exactly that office, and its defence has to be that the imposition is truth-oriented rather than that the office is legitimate. - Mortal liability vs. consent of the governed. A sovereign legitimated by his willingness to die for his own rules is legitimated by exposure rather than by consent, which is a different theory of authority from the natural-rights baseline. The two can be held together only if consent is what installs him and mortal liability is what disciplines him — which nothing in the corpus yet says.
- Predictability vs. innovation. The concession that feudalism traded innovation for predictability is a real cost the corpus's e/acc-adjacent and productive-oligarchy registers have not priced. Either the trade is worth making, in which case the innovation arguments elsewhere need qualification, or it is not, in which case the pre-modern arrangement is being recommended for a stability the compendium would refuse if offered on those terms.
- 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. Three mechanisms are now on the table — removability of local regulators by an authority with no stake in the local rent, total transparency of every financial transaction and every act of state, and the mortal bargain that makes the ruler defend his decisions with his life. Each has an obvious difficulty. Removability presupposes a universal removing authority, which the same capture says the nation was invented to abolish. Mandated total transparency is a large positive construction whose administrator is the first candidate for exemption, which is the selective-transparency counterfeit already named in empire-and-geopolitics. And the mortal bargain has no enforcer at all — the escape route through mercenaries and bankers is exactly the history it describes.
- 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.mdis 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; separation of powers as the machine that pits oligarchs against each other.
- empire-and-geopolitics — Atlanticism, the multipolar alternatives, "choose your empire"; transparency as one member of the counter-trinity.
- strategy-and-power — apophatic strategy, the transparency lever, and the question of how power is actually taken; the proscriber problem as the removability question.
- catholicity — the magisterium that the imperium requires; the Church as historical transnational regulator operating on the same mortal bargain.
- american-religion — Christian Nationalism and Identity Politics as state-enforcing faith systems ("American Islam"); the Deep State as fused regulatory magisterium.
- distributism-and-graceland — broad middle-class flourishing as the practical telos.
- localism-and-federalism — federated identities as the operational layer; the corruption asymmetry that challenges it.
- heresies-and-ideology-as-religion — communism, liberalism, libertarianism read as theological errors; communism and fascism as regulatory theologies.
- the-logos-machine — regulatory capture as the failure mode the architecture does not yet defend against.
- war-and-violence — the personal form of the mortal bargain; death or surrender and the Russell problem.
- money-debt-finance — the mercenary-and-banker pivot by which the sovereign escaped personal liability.
Sources
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