What's in a win?

The right is good at losing. We’ve done a lot of it over the last 70 years, and some of us have developed a taste for it. There is a whole cottage industry built around the fact that conservatives loved to be shocked and horrified by the excesses of the ascendant left. Go on any social media app and within a few clicks you can find pages and pages of content exactly like this.

However, I and many others are tired of losing. The culture war is no longer a disagreement about the details of how to organize society but a war of belief. We have moved from discussions about taxes, social programs, and the economy to debates on the fundamental questions of reality. You could share a neighborhood with people who disagree with you about tax policy, but can you with men who want to sterilize your daughters?

The stakes are rising.

If you’ve ever had the displeasure to go through business school, you’ll be familiar with the acronym SMART. This abbreviation stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely. SMART is a rubric used to assess the relative worth of a plan or goal. The more SMART your goal is, the more likely you are to achieve it.

In this essay, I am primarily concerned with the M. That is measuring our goal. Our goal is to win, or really to stop losing. To do so, we must define what winning looks like. The right-wing can achieve victory when it becomes adequately organized to gain power and employs that authority to reward its supporters and punish its opponents.

You can boil all of Elite Theory down to one idea: The Organized Minority. This concept, first described by Gaetano Mosca, states that all but the most primitive societies are ruled by a minority of organized men. In any contest, the organized minority will win over a disorganized minority. From this, we can define power as synonymous with organization.

For an example look at the Electoral Justice Protest of January 6th, 2021. Despite outnumbering the Capital Police by a significant margin, the activists were defeated. Not only did they lose the day, but many of them are currently rotting in jail. The Police were an organized force who defeated a numerically superior foe.

Curtis Yarvin defined winning as a situation that increases your power or decreases your enemies. Given our definition of power, we can rephrase him slightly. Winning is when we become more organized, and our enemies become more disorganized.

The Right loves to chase after false wins. These are events that give the same emotional high as winning, without any change in power or organization. This is easiest to see in the anti-woke media analysis sphere. These types of pundits love to parrot the phrase ‘go-woke go-broke.’ In simple terms, the slogan conveys the belief that when companies promote politically correct or liberal ideologies, it will negatively impact their products' sales and overall success. Oftentimes they will tout the failure of any one movie or show as an example of a win.

But these victories are hollow. There is no transfer of power. Woke corporations keep making woke products. This trend has been intensifying for at least 10 years and shows no signs of stopping. No matter how many of these franchises, movies, or television shows ‘go broke’ nothing changes. If this was a path towards victory, clearly conditions would have changed.

What this does provide conservatives is the feeling of winning. You get to feel the rush of an enemy bested. However, this is nothing more than political cotton candy, real enough to trick the tongue but no substances to sustain the body.

Once you have organized and gathered power, the next objective is to use it to improve your position. This brings us to the fundamental mechanism of politics: rewarding friends and punishing enemies. Many conservatives will balk at this, but this is an essential concept our enemies already understand.

We can see this maxim in action if we examine the campaign to defund the police. The left is organized and capable of wielding power. They use this power to punish their enemies ( the police) and reward their friends ( social workers who will replace beat cops). This move takes resources from opponents and diverts them to supporters. This is how they purchase loyalty to the DNC. We can see this is a wise use of power because it begets more power. The left is not concerned with the fact that cities are becoming more dangerous as a result of this drive. Their objective is power and they have achieved that goal by defunding the police.

As I’ve said before, the situation is dire. I lay the blame at the feet of a runaway left. To push back, rightists must change how they conduct themselves. If old methods worked, we would not find ourselves losing the culture. We cannot allow ourselves to be distracted by imitations of victory. A successful right-wing movement can triumph by efficiently organizing itself, gaining political control, and then using that power to reward its supporters and penalize its adversaries.