You love freedom. You respect the rule of law. But over the years, the political class has eroded your freedom and enacted laws that are at odds with these. Political elites have also set the conditions under which freedom and the rule of law will continue to erode. They pass laws that serve their interests and those of their favor-seeking donors. That means power goes on the auction block.
This is the rule of cronies.
We tell ourselves that elections are the means by which we oblige the political class to make necessary changes for the good of all. But this means we have no choice but to appeal to a corrupt political class that promises not to be corrupt. And that’s silly. Yet we try to vote harder every couple of years, then wonder why things never improve. So, our free republic has mutated into something else—an extractive managerial empire.
No matter which party is in power, the political class has every incentive to continue attacking freedom and the rule of law. Each claims they’re going to protect “our democracy” or hold power accountable. Both are deceitful. Neither respects our founding ideals. Neither seeks to restore institutions of lawful freedom. Combine perverse incentives with perverted ideologies, and you get a country run by sociopaths.
Therefore, we can no longer count on democratic elections to oblige the political class. We must turn to other means… What are the available means?
It would seem as if patriots are on the horns of a dilemma: a Second Revolution or a Patriotic Caesar.
A Second Revolution is costly, dangerous, and unlikely. It’s not just that revolutionaries would have to risk everything to restore a free republic. It’s that there are probably not enough virtuous revolutionaries to pull it off. At least not enough with balls. Even if you could pull together a hundred thousand people with guns and good ideas, it would be exceedingly difficult to organize them in such a way that would work to some positive effect. The media would howl about the “insurrectionists” as sure as night follows day. Men flying drones and Apache helicopters would jail them, mow them down, or send them into the hills…
So what about a Patriotic Caesar? This would have to be a president—someone with the strength and power to do what needs to be done to restore freedom and the rule of law. Yet this president would indeed be a threat to “our democracy,” because this is just doublespeak for the managerial state—you know, the status quo. Paradoxically, the Patriotic Caesar would have to circumvent the law to restore the rule of law.
So a Patriotic Caesar is risky and nigh impossible. The political class is too strong. A change in presidents is a change in caesars. We can’t count on a Patriotic Caesar to be patriotic enough never to get drunk on the power that working with the political class affords. The Patriotic Caesar, like the Members of Congress, would have to sell his soul piece by piece to get anything done. Yet anything he might get done by such means would never be enough. If there is an ideal mix of Patriot and Caesar, our current President is wildly out of balance.
But there might be a third way—a way out of the Patriots’ dilemma. It’s called underthrow.
If overthrow is a violent revolution, underthrow is a nonviolent one. Ever heard the saying “Ask for forgiveness, not permission”? Underthrow means creating permissionless networks that quietly build transparency, track the truth, attack unjust power, and build parallel systems of our own. We’ll not ask for forgiveness.
We are living in an era where it’s easier to adopt our own currencies, join our own communications networks, and avoid the inflation, taxes, and tyrants of the political class. We must migrate to new jurisdictions, develop our own mutual aid associations, and build our own startup societies outside the auspices of the political class.
If freedom lovers leave with one lofty idea, it’s this: Ideology is impossible because change happens within the adjacent possible. What’s that, you may wonder? Imagine you’re in a room with four doors. You can’t see what’s behind them yet, but opening any one reveals a new room—with new doors you could not have reached before. That’s the adjacent possible. It is the set of next steps available to you right now, based on where you already are. You can’t skip rooms.
You can’t skip to utopia.
Just as a world without the internet couldn’t have invented social media, a world without parallel institutions doesn’t get us any closer to our ideals. But once you’re in a new room, entirely new doors appear. Progress—whether in ideas or in your own life—moves by opening one door at a time. Underthrow is the only way through.
