Aaron McIntyre is the host of the Aaron McIntyre show on The Blaze and a frequent contributor at The Daily Caller. He s also the author of The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies, a book that explains how the Constitution failed us.
00:00:29.000I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience.
00:00:34.000Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose?
00:00:38.000If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved.
00:00:44.000War Room. Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon.
00:00:54.000Good evening. I'm Joe Allen sitting in for Stephen K. Bannon.
00:00:58.000Here at the War Room, we discuss politics a lot.
00:01:01.000You won't hear me weighing in very often, but this is a political show.
00:01:07.000One of the things that sets the War Room apart for many of our colleagues in the media is a very heterodox approach to politics.
00:01:17.000So you won't hear a whole lot of normie con rah rah rah cheering for capitalism, at least not in its rawest form.
00:01:26.000Nor will you hear anyone besmirching the working class as being impediments in the in the to the accumulation of capital.
00:01:38.000I think that that heterodox approach, the ability to hold multiple and sometimes contradictory ideas in tension and try to arrive at truth by way of that process is essential for anything like a valid political movement in the 21st century.
00:01:59.000Here to talk to me about politics from a very learned and heterodox position is Aaron McIntyre.
00:02:07.000Many of you are already familiar with him.
00:02:09.000He's the author of The Total State, How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies.
00:02:15.000He's the host of the Aaron McIntyre Show, a frequent contributor at The Blaze, fantastic writer, amazing thinker and a pretty good guy.
00:02:30.000So I would like to begin by talking about The Total State.
00:02:34.000Fantastic book, a lot of different ideas and different thinkers woven into a single piece to charge into the problems we have now in the 21st century with the managerial state and various other sorts of impediments to freedom.
00:02:53.000Can you tell the audience a bit about the thesis of The Total State and how you arrived at it?
00:02:58.000Sure. I think like a lot of people, I was just a very normal conservative listening to guys like Dennis Prager or Sean Hannity or these kind of guys on the radio.
00:03:09.000I knew that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were going to keep the government in check.
00:03:13.000We had the branches of government, all the things that we expect to hear from your average civics lesson.
00:03:19.000And then COVID hit and everything went insane.
00:03:22.000The churches were closed. Strip clubs were open.
00:03:25.000You couldn't go see a family member, you know, go to their funeral or see them in the hospital.
00:03:30.000But you could go riot in the streets if you were a Democrat.
00:03:33.000And it just became very clear as I looked around at all these conservatives who had told me my whole life, well, this is what the Second Amendment's for.
00:03:39.000And this is how we're going to protect our rights.
00:03:41.000And of course, the government will never overreach this stuff.
00:04:17.000And as I went down this road reading a lot of thinkers that I had never heard of when I was studying political theory in college,
00:04:24.000I started to discover there is actually a very robust right wing understanding of political theory that explained a managerial revolution that had taken over our politics,
00:04:34.000that had taken away the type of democratic republic that we thought we operated under,
00:04:39.000and had created an entirely new political system that was operating right under the surface of what we were supposed to be doing.
00:04:46.000And so my hope is that ultimately the book helped people understand why that happened and how ultimately we could fix it.
00:04:53.000I'd like to get into the philosophy and writings of James Burnham first and then move on maybe to Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land.
00:05:04.000But before we do that, your time as a teacher, how did that inform what you're doing now?
00:05:11.000Because I think your style on your show and your presentation in writing is both very complicated but also very accessible.
00:05:20.000And I'm just curious, do you see what you're doing now as a continuation of that process?
00:05:26.000Yeah, in a lot of ways, it's kind of getting to teach the classes I always wanted to and talk about the things I always wanted to.
00:05:31.000But that is, you're right, that's the through line.
00:05:33.000Whether I was writing as a local journalist, whether I was a teacher or what I'm doing now,
00:05:39.000it's always been about kind of trying to understand something more complex and explain it in a way that people can ultimately understand.
00:05:45.000And so I hope that's what comes through when I'm doing it in the show because, yeah, I am still using many of the methods that I would have used to try to pull in all of this information,
00:05:54.000condense it down into something that is usable, and then give practical examples that people can kind of take into their lives, hopefully.
00:06:01.000James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution.
00:06:05.000There's probably a number of people in the audience who aren't familiar with that work, probably a lot who are.
00:06:11.000My first introduction was through the late Christopher Zeman, the Z-Man, God rest his soul.
00:06:19.000And your work has fleshed that out a lot.
00:06:22.000Can you explain to the posse what James Burnham's central thesis was in the managerial revolution and how that informed your way of thinking about politics in America?
00:06:34.000So James Burnham is a really interesting figure because he's a former Trotskyite.
00:06:40.000He's trying to understand the different ins and outs of politics and how they work.
00:06:45.000He falls out of love with communism and famously becomes a very arch conservative.
00:06:50.000He joins guys like William F. Buckley and starting the National Review.
00:06:54.000Somehow his work has fallen out of favor with much of the conservative movement, even though he was really there in the founding of the new generation.
00:07:01.000But in his transition between his prior communist leanings and his conservative politics, one thing he kept an eye on was the way power worked.
00:07:11.000Specifically, he drew on a set of political theorists known as the Italian elite theorists.
00:07:15.000And really what he focused on was the interest, the separation of interest between the managerial elite and politics as we understand it.
00:07:24.000He recognized that whether it was under fascism or communism or liberal democracy, all major countries had to post-industrial revolution, centralize control of power.
00:07:36.000FDR is doing in some ways the same thing as Stalin is doing.
00:07:39.000In fact, sometimes they actually admire each other in the way that they're doing it.
00:07:43.000And so the American way, I think, is ultimately better.
00:07:47.000But he recognized that they were creating an entire class of people who had a new skill set, which was operating these large bureaucratic institutions.
00:07:55.000And because more and more of our society was scaling up, we were moving more and more of our investment in social structures into large bureaucratic institutions.
00:08:04.000And today we can't really think of much that isn't run by large bureaucratic institutions.
00:08:10.000But we can think of things like churches that traditionally would have nothing to do with this structure.
00:08:14.000Now we hear, oh, well, we want to run this more like a business.
00:08:17.000Our pastors sound more like TED Talk CEOs than they do people preaching God's word.
00:08:22.000And we just see this across every domain of society.
00:08:25.000And so because this has become our major organizing principle, the way that the managerial elite think, the way that they organize our society, the beliefs that they have about humanity, their anthropology, they all carry over into our daily lives in the way that we do things.
00:08:42.000They also handle the way that we, you know, they manage the way that we understand our government and the way that it operates.
00:08:48.000And so by better understanding what the managers are and what their incentives are and how they work through these bureaucratic institutions, it helps us to understand what has happened to our politics.
00:08:58.000Because Republican democracy cannot work in the same way that large bureaucratic institutions have to operate.
00:09:05.000These are two systems that are completely incompatible with each other.
00:09:08.000And so as long as we're ordering our society along this managerial axis, there's no way that we can follow the Constitution.
00:09:14.000So what we've done is create an entirely alternative way to operate our government whilst pretending that we're operating under the auspices of the original United States Constitution.
00:09:23.000When you say that they're incompatible democracy or constitutional republic, perhaps Republican democracy and the managerial organization of society, do you mean then that the managerial organization is always going to be top down kind of technocratic experts at the top dictating and not responsive to the grassroots?
00:09:45.000Or do you mean something else? That's what I take from it. But yeah, so the key with the managers is they need everything to basically fit into place, right?
00:09:53.000The efficiency, think of something like an assembly line, right?
00:09:57.000The efficiency you generate off the assembly line comes from the fact that people aren't making decisions, that they don't have agency.
00:10:04.000The efficiency of the assembly line is that you turn the humans into machines.
00:10:08.000They each perform a very specific task the right way every time.
00:10:11.000There's no outlier. They don't get to make, you know, they don't have any agency on that.
00:10:16.000It's all about following managerial procedures.
00:10:19.000That's a very mechanical way to think about human organization.
00:10:22.000And what they did is they took that assembly line understanding and they applied it to everything.
00:10:26.000This is why when you call into a service center, you get a bunch of people who are technically humans, but they're all reading off scripts.
00:10:35.000They're all running down specific answers.
00:10:37.000You can't get anyone who can actually go and fix a particular problem because nobody has authority.
00:10:42.000They're all relying on this managerial apparatus because that's what you have to do to scale up the operation.
00:10:47.000If you're just answering 10 questions, you can get really good questions answered.
00:10:51.000But when you have to answer thousands and millions of calls, well, actually, it turns out you can't and you have to standardize these things.
00:10:59.000Our Republican government system was built on the idea that every citizen would have their own virtuous input into the system.
00:11:07.000They all have their own responsibilities.
00:11:09.000They had to prove themselves of a certain level of virtue practicing in a particular way in order to participate.
00:11:14.000But you cannot cultivate virtue at scale.
00:11:17.000You can't do that when you need massive organizations to operate.
00:11:20.000And so what our elites have done is trained people to think more like machines, to operate more in the way that they would if they were sitting on an assembly line to now the point where people don't actually make decisions on who they're voting for, how the system will change.
00:11:35.000They simply participate in a process that kind of gives legitimacy to the change the managers have already decided on.
00:11:42.000Many people call this the deep state, and I think that's a good understanding of some of it.
00:11:47.000That explains the permanent bureaucracy that we've seen that Donald Trump and others are trying to dig out of the system right now.
00:11:53.000J.D. Vance will go on. Vivek Raswamy will talk about the need to dismantle these systems.
00:11:58.000But, of course, it reaches well beyond the bureaucracies.
00:12:01.000It also goes into our media, into our education system, our universities, our banks.
00:12:08.000And so that's why I think the total state is more helpful because it's what begins in the deep state that spreads through our entire society.
00:12:14.000Without lingering too long on the managerial approach to governance scaling, it seems that it's maybe not a necessary way to organize a society that has scaled up to the degree that our now modern society has.
00:12:31.000But I'm curious then, it's obviously a useful way to organize very large scale institutions, nations, empires.
00:12:41.000What are some alternatives that you see to the managerial approach to scaling?
00:12:46.000Is it another alternative approach to scaling or is it an abandonment of scale entirely?
00:12:52.000I think it actually has to be an abandonment of scale.
00:12:55.000So to be clear, Byrne was not decrying the managerial revolution.
00:12:58.000He saw this ultimately as the technocratic solution that was necessary to move things forward.
00:13:03.000Other thinkers like Sam Francis may have lamented what the managerial revolution had done to Americans.
00:13:10.000But once it had been done, he said, basically, this is now the only way we can organize at this point.
00:13:15.000We have what the very difficult decision.
00:13:17.000This is why this is the hardest thing right now.
00:13:19.000And this is what most people miss about this.
00:13:21.000We have to make a real decision about whether we want to operate as a republic, as an organic political entity, or if we think the scale is worth dehumanizing ourselves.
00:13:34.000I don't think there is an effective way to organize at this level without dehumanizing ourselves, without giving in to the managerial impulse.
00:13:41.000And this is far from the only – I'm far from the only person to assert this.
00:13:45.000Even some of the elite theorists like Gaetano Mosca talked about how civilization is always moving between the bureaucratic and the feudal.
00:13:53.000And there's always – you're always somewhere on this continuum.
00:13:57.000We're never staying in one state or the other.
00:14:00.000And so we're always moving towards one of these poles and then moving back.
00:14:03.000So there's a very natural give and take as we kind of decide as humans, oh, well, we want to centralize things.
00:14:36.000You're just pushing the dial towards independent communities, perhaps churches, schools, local governments as sources of meaning and order.
00:14:48.000Or would you like to see a radical deconstruction of the entire machine, which, you know, at least on my most fantastical days, I would actually like to see that.
00:14:59.000Well, I think one thing we can share in common is that we're both pro-human.
00:15:02.000What we're looking for is the is the human wins over the system.
00:15:06.000We don't want to be run by algorithms.
00:15:08.000We don't want to recognize AI is just the way the managers escape this problem.
00:15:40.000But I do think we should be, like you said, making very real and deliberate movements towards the human to making those choices that are local, that put the hand the choices in the hands of real people in organic communities.
00:15:54.000That's not going to be easy and there will be some sacrifices.
00:15:57.000But I think the people who do that are going to be much better off in the long run.
00:16:01.000The people that completely embrace this system and ultimately become dehumanized by it.
00:16:06.000You have written and talked quite a bit about Curtis Yarvin's ideas.
00:16:16.000As far as I can tell, you've always weighed his ideas against others and have been actually quite critical of his ideas at time at times.
00:16:23.000But in your book, you do weave his work in to the ideas behind the total state.
00:16:30.000Can you tell me a little bit about his influence on your thinking, what you've drawn, what value you've drawn from his work?
00:16:37.000Yeah, the real value of Curtis is he was really the only guy in the modern day who was working and in dialogue with this tradition.
00:16:46.000This James Burnham, Sam Francis and more importantly than the Italian elite theorists that they were building on.
00:16:52.000He was one of the few people who was really looking into that.
00:16:55.000And so I don't agree with every assumption he draws from them.
00:16:58.000But the fact simply that he was analyzing power in this way, understanding the mechanisms that were underlying our system, throwing away the kind of, you know, hopeful assumptions we had about holding on to exactly the same government we had back in the 1790s.
00:17:14.000He was very good at opening these things up.
00:17:16.000And so I think he's very valuable because he's ultimately a systems analyst.
00:17:21.000And that means that he's very good at tracing the contours of power and laying them out.
00:17:25.000Now, his prescriptions often, I think, leave something to be desired because he's ultimately a materialist.
00:17:30.000And so his solutions often don't factor in the human soul and the spirituality that I think has to be part of these solutions.
00:17:38.000But when it comes to really diagnosing the problem, he's very, very good at that.
00:17:42.000And he's so widely read and brings in so many thinkers that have been largely excluded from the right, even though they should have been predominantly in our mind when we're thinking through this problem.
00:17:51.000I don't see how you can exclude his work.
00:17:53.000You don't have to agree with everything someone says to recognize that the way that they're ordering the thought in the way that they're allowing you to explore other thinkers is very valuable.
00:18:03.000What do you make of his ideas on monarchy?
00:18:06.000And clearly, he doesn't necessarily mean a king with all of the royal decoration and ornamentation, although that's what it brings to my mind whenever he talks about the monarch.
00:18:16.000But he seems to mean more an abstract concept of an executive, a strong executive who cuts through the bureaucracy, who cuts through the, you know, complaints of the masses, we'll say.
00:18:28.000What do you make of that idea? Is it elitist? Is it useful?
00:18:31.000Well, it's all elitist. But to be clear, I'm fine with elitism in the sense that elites will always exist.
00:18:37.000I am a populist in the sense that I would like to do what is best for the people ultimately.
00:18:42.000But we have to recognize that the people will, for better or worse, always be led by a minority of the actual country.
00:18:49.000The organized minority will always lead the disorganized majority.
00:18:52.000And so that means what we want is not the elimination of elites, but a better kind of elite.
00:18:57.000And Curtis's idea is basically that what we have is a systems problem.
00:19:01.000And if we can just kind of organize everything under a single monarch, we'll have a much more effective way at operating the system.
00:19:08.000Now, there's a lot of arguments that are, you know, compelling around this, right?
00:19:12.000The fact that, as you say, it can cut through all the bureaucracy, you can cut through all the red tape, you can cut through the Gordian knot that seems to be our immovable system at the moment.
00:19:22.000And there's a reason that at the end of these kind of complex sclerotic oligarchies, we tend to get a strong man.
00:19:29.000You know, Oswald Spengler called this Caesarism, where you would have a Caesar figure that would arise when the money power, the oligarchy had kind of tied up the entire society and made it impossible for it to move.
00:19:40.000You would have this decisive figure who came in and cut through that.
00:19:44.000And so just historically, Curtis is probably right that something like that could be down the line.
00:19:50.000Whether we like it or not, whether we think that's great or not, this is the solution that people tend to fall back on when they end up in this scenario.
00:19:58.000Now, ultimately, is that the way that we want to order our society?
00:20:01.000Is that what really fits in the American tradition?
00:20:04.000Well, you know, a constitutional monarchy is what we had in England before we came over.
00:20:09.000And that's certainly a very different monarchy than, say, a god emperor.
00:20:12.000A lot of people think of the king having all kinds of power.
00:20:15.000But of course, in England, that wasn't the case.
00:20:17.000The king was actually rather constricted compared to other monarchs in the way that he could wield power.
00:20:21.000So would that in some ways be in line with our tradition? A little bit.
00:20:24.000But of course, America is also defined by throwing off that king.
00:20:28.000And so perhaps returning to a republic scaled down to the level where it can actually operate again could be an option.
00:20:35.000But the reason Curtis doesn't like that option is it requires virtue.
00:20:39.000It requires us not to look at the mechanics of the system, but also look at the spiritual health of the people.
00:20:45.000And he just doesn't think that we're in a place where we can rehabilitate the spiritual health of the people.
00:20:50.000I think that that unfortunately might be true, but I'm hoping it's not.
00:20:54.000And I'm not giving up on the human. I'm not giving up on that possibility.
00:20:58.000And so I respect his arguments. I think they're strong.
00:21:01.000I think that there is a possibility we might end up in that scenario.
00:21:04.000But we also could be in a scenario where these bureaucracies break apart with the we have more of a not so much a balkanization, but simply a perhaps a return to a far more robust federalism that exists in the United States in which we could create communities that no longer require these massive scales and therefore allow us to cultivate the virtue that is required for Republican government.
00:21:27.000But either way, drastic change on the level of what would seem like a revolution would basically be necessary at this point.
00:21:34.000We only have a few moments left before we go to break, but in the time we do have just to drill down on that idea, your experience of America and perhaps abroad.
00:21:44.000Do you see that diversification that some derided as balkanization, but a kind of individuation collectively on the part of different areas of the country?
00:21:55.000It's always been kind of the case, but it seems like the great sort has really brought it into focus so that Florida, your current abode, is quite different from California culturally.
00:22:07.000Do you see that happening right now? And do you see that as a good thing, both politically and culturally?
00:22:11.000Yeah, I think it's a really important thing. As you said, the great sort is happening no matter what.
00:22:15.000That's already occurred, especially post COVID. As we saw in Florida, it went from being a purple straight state trending blue to becoming a deep red state.
00:22:24.000And a lot of that was due to the fact that people simply did not want to live with the woke madness, didn't want to live with the COVID madness.
00:22:29.000They knew that Florida was different and they knew by physically relocating themselves into a geographic area next to people who shared their values, they could live the kind of lives they want to live.
00:22:40.000And this is really the lie that technology has told us that we could just live wherever we wanted and it didn't matter who our neighbor was and we didn't have to share anything because kind of this over identity of America would just solve those problems.
00:22:51.000But what we're doing is going back to a place where we live in real, robust, organic communities.
00:22:56.000It's still far off, but I see people building religious communities.
00:22:59.000I still see people building intentional communities with people who share their values.
00:23:03.000And I think that's ultimately the future of the United States.
00:23:06.000Yeah, that tension between nationalism, which is very, very important and localism, regionalism.
00:23:13.000It's going to be a very difficult problem that we will have the rest of our lives.
00:23:18.000But I really appreciate your approach to this as far as putting turning that dial back to the local as opposed to the kind of blob like homogenous one state.
00:23:31.000We'll be back after the break to talk more with Aaron McIntyre.
00:23:36.000We will return with some more esoteric topics, perhaps Alexander Dugan, Nick Land and even a bit of transhumanism, post-humanism and post-human politics.
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00:31:59.120Okay, Aron, I would like to return to an idea that we left off on.
00:32:04.660Curtis Yarvin, and I would say the majority of people in politics, whether they be philosophers or politicians or lobbyists, hold to a materialist conception of the world.
00:32:18.440Maybe not always philosophically, but in practice, their behavior in the world is based on material conditions, material analysis, and material responses.
00:32:31.440Now, you have argued quite often and quite strenuously that the spiritual supersedes the material.
00:32:41.820How do you see the spiritual, the human soul, and its relationship to God as a point of resistance in a way to understand, really, the total state?
00:32:52.940Well, when we are living in accordance with God's purpose, when we're following our telos, we can feel it.
00:33:00.480We can feel that we're acting in a way that makes us more human, but also connects us to the divine.
00:33:06.640We know that there's a transcendent property to what we're doing and an ultimate value that gives us true worth.
00:33:13.700When we're in a materialistic frame, we're just going through the motions, we're just looking to reach particular goals that have been laid out for us but are ultimately arbitrary.
00:33:23.160Oftentimes, it feels like we're not even in control of the process as we turn over our desires to mechanisms that otherwise are simply preying on them in order to derive what a direct material benefit that we gain.
00:33:36.280And so when our politics are oriented around what is good for people in their real lived lives as opposed to what is good for spreadsheets and maximalization of economic units, we can feel a real difference.
00:33:49.800Thomas Carlyle used to call this the condition of England question.
00:33:54.540We can become statisticians and look at different polls and different ways to measure whether people are doing well.
00:34:00.880But that doesn't actually tell us how people's lives are being improved or being destroyed.
00:34:06.440To do that, we actually have to understand people's way of life.
00:34:09.480We have to see what they value and see what their interactions between spouses and children and families and business owners and communities are.
00:34:17.580And that's really what helps us to gauge whether or not we are successful as a society.
00:34:21.500So I think reintroducing the spiritual is critical because if we don't do that, we just live in this spreadsheet materialistic world that turns us all into interchangeable widgets.
00:34:35.340The points about the dehumanization process of becoming a cog or a data point and also the transcendent spirit, the true value that lies within ourselves and the true value that lies beyond material phenomenon.
00:34:51.500We see God, but we run into a real problem in America and really across the modern world.
00:34:58.200Perhaps this is a perennial problem that goes back to the caves, but there are a lot of different systems of value.
00:35:08.800The spiritual perspective versus the material.
00:35:12.280And in the spiritual perspective, you get a wide range of viewpoints and value systems.
00:35:17.820And in the material perspective, the same.
00:35:19.500How do we approach American society in a way that can uphold those transcendent spiritual values without trampling on or oversaturating, homogenizing the rest of the culture?
00:35:36.940So if you look back, if anybody has ever had the opportunity to read Albion Seed, it's a David Hackett Fisher book about the founding folkways of the United States.
00:35:47.300And he identifies that there are four main groups that are initially settling the United States.
00:35:51.680And each one of them is, while we think of them as uniquely American, and we can identify a lot of the traits of the Quakers or, you know, the hill folk or, you know, the Puritans, we can see their legacy in the United States.
00:36:06.080Each of them were very distinct and they were radically different from each other.
00:36:09.080Often they had difficulty interacting with each other's way of life.
00:36:13.000And we recognize that throughout American history, the kind of just vast country of the United States and its federalization has allowed for us to kind of have this different regional texture to our communities.
00:36:24.720Now, after World War II, especially when we had mass communication, we have the train, we have the automobile, we have the airplane, all of a sudden our world got much smaller.
00:36:39.360And all of a sudden the desire to impose a homogenous culture came across America.
00:36:43.480Again, not that Americans didn't have many similarities, but now it became essential to crush out those regional differences to the point where we started sending the 82nd Airborne, you know, down to the South to make sure that they behaved the same way the North did.
00:36:56.120Now, a lot of people may say, well, that was worth it at the time.
00:36:58.720But recognize that ultimately this was a forced way to make people interact how you would like them to, not the way their community had done previously.
00:37:07.700And so that's ultimately, I think the answer is we could return to a system in which we trust our localities.
00:37:14.360We actually pretend like the 10th Amendment is in the Constitution and we allow states to operate the way they were originally supposed to, not as some subsidiary of the central government,
00:37:23.360but as a real living community, making decisions based on the ways that the people there operate.
00:37:29.200That way you're responding to the communities that are much smaller than this 50 state conglomeration we currently have.
00:37:35.080Before we go into the more esoteric, just a quick note on that.
00:37:38.620Do you think that, for instance, striking down Roe v. Wade and allowing states to decide their own policies on reproduction,
00:37:47.140the current rise of localized and state-level AI politics and even drug laws,
00:37:54.480do you think that this is an expression at the political level of that diversification and maybe even a way to amplify it?
00:38:00.000It's certainly a beginning, but of course, there's a lot, lot, lot more to do.
00:38:03.360We don't recognize, unless you've really been in the nitty-gritty of a lot of local and state politics,
00:38:08.440how deeply dependent these different municipalities and states are on federal funding and how much that determines all of their policies.
00:39:05.520How did you arrive at your critique of liberal democracy, and how do these thinkers really flesh out your response to the problems of liberal democracy?
00:39:18.520Well, a lot of people were taught that democracy just means freedom.
00:41:01.780And when you have that scale of democracy, what happens is it becomes very easy to manipulate the average voter
00:41:07.080because, well, it's not a group of people who are dedicated to defending the country and, you know, proving their virtue.
00:41:12.560It's just anybody. Anybody with a phone or a television can suddenly become a voter.
00:41:16.900And they get all of their news and information through the media, through education, through entertainment,
00:41:22.560the very forces that the managerial elite control.
00:41:25.440And so suddenly they control the liberal democracy and they are able to manipulate it however they choose.
00:41:31.500But it's even more powerful than that because now they're speaking with the voice of the people.
00:41:36.200A king was always strong, right? Don't get me wrong. Kings had power.
00:41:39.160But they were still only one man. They still had to get the barons.
00:41:42.680They had to get the lords. They had to get the other factions of society, the church, on their side.
00:41:47.860I mean, literally a large amount of Western history is just kings trying to figure out how they could possibly defy the pope, right?
00:41:54.700And that's where so much of our history comes from.
00:41:57.540But when you're an organization ruling in the name of the people, well, all of a sudden, who can deny the whole people?
00:42:05.440Who are you, one man, to deny the entire collective will of society?
00:42:10.560And we see actually that the rise of liberal democracies coincide with expansions of government.
00:42:16.140Actually, the more liberal democracy we've had, the bigger and more powerful governments have become.
00:42:20.720So very paradoxically, from what we've been taught, democracy seems to actually grow and justify large government total states rather than impede them in any way.
00:42:30.820And when you recognize this feature of democracy, this completely flips your understanding of why and how we should operate as a society.
00:42:38.640And when you say democracy, liberal democracy, I think it's important to make the distinction between that and the constitutional republic that was the American ideal in the beginning.
00:42:48.800As you say, something that was based on more local value systems, more on virtue than just mass appeal.
00:42:58.140And this is something, again, that all even the ancient philosophers, you don't need to read these new edgy philosophers, Curtis Yarvin or Dugan to figure this out.
00:43:06.560You know, we know that, you know, Aristotle told us that ultimately the democracy could become the most tyrannical of all governments.
00:43:16.080And the solution for him was a mixed government, a government much like our own that tried to bring in a little bit of monarchy with the executive, a little bit of the will of the people, ultimately with the Congress.
00:43:26.980And then something like the judiciary to mediate between the idea that we would have these different classes in society and they would be represented in different forms of government.
00:43:38.240This is what was actually supposed to restrict our government.
00:43:41.860But the problem is that because in America we don't really have these defined classes that existed in the old world, we kind of leveled all of these different branches of government that we're supposed to push against each other and represent real interests and spheres in society.
00:43:55.760We kind of melted them all down into one popular sovereignty force.
00:44:00.360And so now popular sovereignty runs basically all of our branches of government.
00:44:03.880There's nothing differentiating against them.
00:44:06.040And so this mass democracy has no real checks and balances in the way that our founders intended because we've melted down the distinctions inside our society that are supposed to fuel those branches, their checks and balances in the first place.
00:44:18.620You know, Alexander Dugan, the Russian philosopher and perhaps chaos magician, he argues that we're beyond liberal democracy, just as we've been beyond fascism and ultimately are beyond communism.
00:44:32.720Even if you do have states such as China or Venezuela that are ostensibly Marxist or communist, but really not really.
00:44:41.260They're just state capitalism or however you want to describe it.
00:44:44.620But his argument in the fourth political theory is that you can, in fact, retrieve something of value, perhaps from all of these systems and the traditional religious systems in order to combat what he sees as a globalist, transhumanist sort of future in which human beings are completely stripped of everything we knew to be soulful or even human.
00:45:06.320Are you working on your fourth political theory?
00:45:10.760Because he made it quite clear it's open.
00:45:14.920Do you see yourself as in line with that kind of project?
00:45:19.260You know, it's difficult because obviously Dugan is rightly a controversial figure.
00:45:24.480You know, he's very much tied to Putin and, you know, is in many ways providing the philosophical backing for many of the actions he's taking.
00:45:32.300And in that way, you have to be careful when you're reading his philosophy because I think he is motivated politically.
00:45:37.660I don't think it's just an objective look at these things.
00:45:40.260All of his answers just happen to fall into kind of the Russian empire and, you know, ultimately justifying the decisions they're making.
00:45:48.240So I don't want people to look at this and say, well, I'm on board with Dugan's political project because that is just absolutely not the case.
00:45:55.960However, I do think he does have some important insights into the moment we're in, many of which you're addressing there, that we really are already in a post-liberal world.
00:46:06.920And so if we're going to figure out how to bring a political philosophy together that can work in the modern day for the situation we find ourselves in, we do have to look outside of this kind of end of history, globalist liberal project.
00:46:21.460And we have to say, what are some of the things from older political theories that we might be able to take into the future, but maybe leave behind the things that were baggage that made them fail that we no longer want to be involved with?
00:46:34.420And how do we marry them into the modern day, into our own tradition, into our own way of thinking so they can be more successful?
00:46:43.800We're not just, you know, trying to return to a former time we cannot return to.
00:46:48.680But what we're trying to do is carry traditions that were lost, that were discarded by large-scale globalist liberalism intentionally in order to erode the self-reliance and particularity of different peoples.
00:47:00.740How do we bring that into our current day and marry it with kind of where we are at so they can move forward into something that hopefully can overcome our technological problems, overcome some of the problems of modernity that we find ourselves in, but can do so by bringing forward many of these traditions that we left behind?
00:47:18.380Unlike many people on the right, you have not neglected the issue of technology, particularly artificial intelligence.
00:47:25.840In our final remaining minutes, I would like for you to just give me a sense of what you're working on right now.
00:47:33.640When we last spoke, you were gracious enough to interview me and let me air my grievances against the Stargate Project and its backers.
00:47:42.160You talked about post-human politics, and I'm very curious by what do you mean by post-human politics?
00:47:52.180Where do you see political strategy and political life in the near or distant future in that regard?
00:48:00.320Well, as we already know, our ruling elites are very good at manipulating us through media and all of these things.
00:48:07.440And in a way, they're already kind of an algorithm.
00:48:27.160And that feels like where we're heading next.
00:48:29.580It's no longer necessary for even humans to manipulate us in the way that they have been doing through advertisement and history and propaganda.
00:48:39.140It can – we're already seeing this AI when it's deciding how to adjust different prices, different rents to squeeze people to the last little drop.
00:48:48.600That's already horrible and dehumanizing.
00:48:50.800But it's going to do it with your political beliefs.
00:48:53.140It's going to learn how to manipulate you, show you exactly what it wants you to see, drive you to particular actions.
00:48:59.480One of the visions that Alexander Dugan uses, one of the illustrations he uses, is the idea that a man used to send a text message.
00:49:06.580Now the text message will send the man.
00:49:24.140It's just become more and more sophisticated.
00:49:26.220Social media made it that much easier to kind of get a sense, take the temperature of political sentiment, and also to disseminate the propaganda.
00:49:33.500Would you say that this is a continuation of previous processes or do you think that AI and the advanced neural networks represent a kind of quantum leap in how post-human politics are conducted?
00:49:47.320I think it is a continuation, but it is accelerating rather quickly.
00:49:51.280We've removed human feedback almost from the process at this point.
00:50:00.020It takes that and immediately runs it back to – there's very little interaction you're having with the machine at this point.
00:50:06.440It's more or less driving the whole thing, and that is the concern technologically on the post-human political side that AIs will become major drivers, non-human forces that will be determining a large amount of our politics.
00:50:18.980But the other end of this is the Dugan end when he talks about the spiritual forces, that ultimately we're seeing a culmination of post-rational spiritual forces that are re-entering into politics.
00:50:31.200Reno calls this the return of the strong gods if you want a more American explanation of the same phenomenon.
00:50:36.700And so more and more, we're seeing choices that are being made, I think, on a spiritual level that perhaps we're not manifesting previously.
00:50:44.380And so I think both in the technological and spiritual realm, we're starting to see that non-human forces are on the move.
00:50:50.980Arn, I could continue this conversation for hours, but we are out of time.
00:50:54.800If you would, please let our audience know where they can find your work, where they can find your book, and what they can expect in the future.
00:51:01.460Of course, I've got the book pretty much everywhere you'd expect, Barnes & Noble, Books A Million, Amazon.
00:51:06.740The show is on The Blaze TV, and also it's, of course, on YouTube and anywhere you catch podcasts.
00:51:25.560All right, War Room Posse, we will be back tomorrow morning with more action-packed news and commentary with Steve Bannon back in the pilot seat.