This essay will serve as the script for my next video:
The Political Spectrum
You might think that only people can be left-wing or right-wing, and that wouldn't be unreasonable. Only people can make policy, vote, and act. But whether a person is left-wing or right-wing is better determined not by the policy they like, but the principles which lead them to like that policy. There's lots of arguments about what left or right mean in a political sense, which is obviously not helped by the biases that people bring going into the discussion. I am right-wing and am not scared of admitting my own biases which come with that, but it's important to know what the principles of left or right are in a value-free sense before you then go on to apply values.
Value-free, it is fair to say, a left-wing person prioritises equality and a right-wing person prioritises order. There’s obviously much grey area in this, as a quintessential left-wing society was Russia in the Soviet Union, but when led by Stalin's ferocious iron fist, it does appear to have been a very orderly place. And quintessentially right-wing societies such as European medieval kingdoms had their nobility quite strictly follow the “noblesse oblige”, the chivalric principle that the nobility should care and provide for the peasantry, and work together in dignity and harmony.
Examples and Contradictions
I believe that a person's preference for equality or order is more important in determining their label than the actual policies they choose, as there can often be contradictions. In Britain for example, leftists are often very happy for certain religions to have greater protections and sprivileges than others, and plenty of middling rightists love the quote-unquote “free” National Health Service. My reason for believing this is a near-total distrust of the average voter's ability to follow their principles over the incentives they are given by the media and other dispensers of influence who they essentially outsource their decision-making and opinion-forming to. The average voter does not think about their vote as rationally as they just do what they're told.
This is all to lay some groundwork to go back to my original point: human institutions and events can themselves be left-wing or right-wing depending if their DNA is inherently designed towards equality or order, and today I want to look at revolutions and coups with the explicit purpose of assisting right-wingers, and especially libertarians who don't like to acknowledge they're right but are certainly opposed to all forms of leftism like Marxism, in identifying what modes of political and societal change are designed to work for them, and that trying to use the methods designed for your enemy is like trying to shoot them whilst you're looking down the barrel of your own gun.
I'll cut to the chase because I need to address the obvious objection very quickly: Revolutions are left-wing, coups are right-wing. Yes, I know, the American Revolution! This event sits in a whole lot of grey area, but I'll explain the black and white before we dissect that particular example.
Dissecting Methods
Revolutions are touted as being “by the people, for the people”. This is almost never the case though, as all actualised radical political change comes from a ‘circulation of elites’, where an organised minority of middle-class and upwards competing elites supplant the currently ruling elites. Think of the Bolsheviks supplanting the Romanovs. The 1917 Russian revolution was not “by the people”, it was by the Bolsheviks commanding a large army of angry peasants, and you could perhaps say it was “for the people” as it was for the purpose of pursuing policies of equality over order. Leftist revolutions always result in a counter-elite taking charge such as Castro, Mao, even the anarchist ones such as Makhno. While of course it seems contradictory to have anybody in charge at all in a society trying to focus on equality, this doesn't deserve more time than a throwaway comment as dunking on it doesn't help us achieve our objective, and as I've said, all actualised societies have grey areas.
A coup on the other hand is ostensibly honest. It is when military elites use their power to create a circulation and supplant the ruling elites. They can do this for populist reasons, declaring their will to “obey the people”, but here I invoke the disconnect between principle and action. The coup is the story of Ceasar, William I, Cromwell (not when fighting the king but when dissolving the Rump Parliament), William III, Napoleon, and Pinochet. Plus, to a lesser degree, the big men of the 1930s. Franco won a civil war which is similar but different, and the other 2 used political force but mostly leveraged the democratic process.
The true coups listed above are often devastatingly quick. The generals smash down the gates of the council headquarters with their cavalry, round up the leaders, and take their place. Any fighting between competing military forces is usually measured in hours or days, avoiding the widespread social chaos with civilian factions fighting on the streets in a revolution. The reasons why this is a fundamentally right-wing event is that it is a method of forceful elite circulation which is designed to avoid chaos, which is to say, preserve order. There is no claim of equality as the highest leaders of militaries are nearly always members of the deep aristocracy, and while they will always argue that their rule is better for “the people” than the rulers before them, they are obviously there to make decisions themselves and nobody is fooled otherwise.
So there we have our basic outline of the two events. Revolutions are violent political actions which seek equality at the expense of chaos, and coups seek order at the expense of inequality. To complete objective before I finally go back to examining the American revolution, does it make sense why I wanted to bring this to light? The real populist delusion among the right is that if enough of “the people” “wake up” and “overthrow the elites to lead themselves”, what would that look like as it was happening, and what would the result be? Violent political action focused on “the people” is a revolution which creates chaos and is geared towards providing left-wing results because chaos is a feature of left-wing action. So many American QAnon Republicans AND libertarians who should know better clamour for bloodshed on the streets, faction warfare against their neighbours, and no idea who would be there to stabilise and lead society if they managed to win. It's the most ridiculous and infuriating thing to have to hear, especially when there is an actually viable option which has worked many times before is on the table.
Military people are predisposed to being right wing. Despite serious problems in western military structures due to progressive fifth columns being planted inside them, this fact remains and literally always will out of principle. Warfare doesn't even entertain a thought about equality,as no soldier or commander is interested in fighting a battle where they don't believe they have a significant advantage over the enemy, or else you're just seeking to lose. A soldier is never interested in making their army weaker in order to “level the playing field” within it, and so are unlikely to want that for their society at large. The military is a huge fortress of power in a society and is one by definition aligned with the values of the right. Far and above Parliament, Congress, Universities or the media, the military is the fortress we must first regain total control of, and launch attacks against other fortresses from there. It is the fortress with gates most wide open to us, and in the most advantageous position for us to pursue our objectives as, paradoxically, it is the way to achieve radical social change with the least amount of chaos and bloodshed. Moan about the problems with it all you want, but this fact does not change. If you want chaos and death between neighbours instead, you're in no position to morally grandstand here.
I might have to follow up later with a video or article about the further nature of the military, because I have reasons to believe that it seriously behooves right-wingers to climb the ranks of Reserve forces rather than Regulars, but I'll have to say the reasons why another time. For now, back to America.
1776
First of all, being called a revolution doesn't mean it infallibly is one. The Glorious Revolution of William III in 1688 was a coup, perhaps the very definition of one. Whilst I oppose this event, I can't lie and must say it was perhaps the closest to the Platonic ideal of a coup we've ever seen. William's army, assisted by Parliament, faced barely a whiff of resistance as it marched towards the throne, and when he found it empty, he took his seat and 99.9% of the kingdom had no idea it was even happening until long after it had happened. That doesn't sound like a revolution, does it?
The American revolution is still a different beast entirely. I would say it did begin as a revolution, with ragtag bands of peasant factions such as the Sons of Liberty staging protests and agitations, and the little-remembered factional violence between Separatists and Loyalists, particularly fierce and chaotic in the southern states where communities and families were wrecked by it. This first portion of the revolution is the period romanticised by the American conservative and libertarian; see the veneration of the “Minuteman”. But the fact is undoubtable that farmers with muskets could never have defeated the Crown. It was Washington’s Continental Army which did. To dispel another populist warfare myth here quickly: it likewise was not the pyjama-clad Viet Cong who wore out US forces in Vietnam. It was the North Vietnamese Army, which the Viet Cong supported, supplied and trained by the superpowers of Russia and China, who resisted American forces long enough for the war to lose sufficient political capital back home. This is again mirrored in Afghanistan: the Taliban did not “beat” the US-led coalition; the coalition never had any intention of a dominating victory, and the Taliban had no intention of going on the offensive and kicking them out, they just had to play the waiting game which was always stacked in their favour.
The American revolution may have indeed been a revolution to begin with, and like the communist ones it was still led even in the early days by competing elites, and you all know their names. They’re called the Founding Fathers. These elites, who were from middle-class to aristocratic European stock, who built or run the major American universities which still stand, led the major churches, and had a great deal of wealth through land and business. But when Washington seized the initiative and turned this revolution into an organised and rigorously hierarchical force, waging pitched battles with the organised supply lines and standardised equipment of a real army, it grew out of a revolution and into a civil war, which itself can be described as the prolonged and broad cousin of a coup, which is swift and narrow. If you don’t like the application of that term because there would be another civil war a century later, I would ask, why? Take a look at the English civil wars of Parliament against Kings Charles I and II and you’ll see Parliament looks a lot like the American colonists in this picture, and the New Model Army the reflection of the Continental Army.
Conclusion
A right-wing revolution is an oxymoron, and if you’re a libertarian or conservative, you’re right-wing whether you like it or not. There’s no use in being scared of that label which your enemies tell you is a bad thing. Why should you listen to them? And why should you play their rigged game known as democracy? We’re past the point of political reform in the west and the only way out of this mess is through. The only options we have are: converting counter-elites to our side - people who already have power and are hindered by the current rulers, such as Elon Musk and the tech tycoons, or even the withered but still living aristocracy who were themselves cycled out by the managerial elite - or becoming the counter-elites ourselves. The latter is, in my opinion, unfeasible.
Tech projects which are explicitly about achieving political aims, such as Bitcoin, can only become a flash in the pan, at least while the fortresses of power controlled by the ruling elite are as united as they are. Economists tell the media that Bitcoin is bad, the media tells the masses and the legislators that Bitcoin is bad because the experts said so, then the masses obey their orders and vote to regulate Bitcoin. These regulations can often be worked around, especially in this example, but there will never be a Bitcoin revolution as long as the ruling elite has the unity and the will to suppress it, which they absolutely do. The only thing that can work in such a climate is, as Yarvin put it, tanks in Harvard yard. I think that in an ideal world these would be Tesla’s Cybertanks, but if the unbroken history of coups is to hold, it would be Abrams and Challengers. I think we have to reconcile ourselves with the use of military force to get our enemies out of power and our friends into it, or we could be looking at centuries more of subjugation, decay, and tyranny.
I’ll say again that if you protest against this notion, I challenge you to provide an alternative solution which is realistic, has mass historical basis, and doesn’t create more bloodshed and chaos. Until that pops out of thin air, take it easy.