The Cult of Consensus

¶The enemy here is nebulous. The Republicans. The Democrats. The capitalists. The socialists. This or that class, race, religion. The enemy is none of these things. There’s the financial class. The legal class. The political class. The managerial class. They’re all positioned in such a way that the optimal thing for them to do is to feed into each other’s dysfunction. Here, too, the common people are forced by circumstance to make decisions they are not happy with. The enemy is the entire constitutional settlement and the class ecosystem it has generated and which sustains it. That is the Regime: this system we live under that we all help self-perpetuate, whether through action or inaction. You could replace every individual within it, and the outputs for every purpose that matters would remain equally as dysfunctional so long as the reward functions remain identical.

¶The Constitution was written at the scale of the original thirteen states. Even then, it wasn’t entirely unproblematic and its ratification was not an easy process. The founders left us with a mountain of technical debt that only compounded as America grew. The constitutional order has no good internal mechanism for adapting to changes in scale. Every expansion of the state has required some kind of hacky workaround or a full-on crisis. Many say they love the Constitution, but this is like the woman who has fallen in love with her captor. To prove their love, they point to the amendments, changes tacked onto the constitution to attempt to fix something that is fundamentally broken. What they love is a civic mythology.

¶The core of the Constitution itself is a dysfunctional 18th-century compromise. That compromise is the entire basis that this multi-headed system of exploitation is predicated upon. The Constitution is the God of the Regime, through which all its authority is justified and carried out.

¶A theology cannot be reformed from within on any timeline that matters. The constitutional order could theoretically be amended, restructured, or reinterpreted. This has been done many times before, slowly, inadequately, lagging lifetimes behind social reality. The pace of internal reform is structurally insufficient to the scale of our dysfunction. The pace of dysfunction only accelerates, accumulating and multiplying further dysfunction. It is impossible to reform the current system from within at scale, within time, before this whole house of cards comes falling down on us and we get left with a successor we didn’t choose.

¶The Regime has no publicly intelligible telos beyond perpetuating itself. If at one point it possessed a telos, that has been interpreted away into nothing but dry ink on old parchment. Every crisis response, every policy, and every expansion is reactive, a patch on a patch on a patch. When sovereignty is hidden, no named decision-maker exists who could design anything purposefully.

¶The law is the whore of consensus. She gets passed around by every lawmaker, every oligarch, every faction that needed something from her, and we’re the ones left violated and degraded.

¶When every faction has agreed the law is legitimate regardless of whatever it produces, regardless of who benefits, regardless of who pays, regardless of any intended design, this is the Cult of Consensus: the theology that transforms faction negotiation into popular mandate, degrades law into compliance product, and calls the result the will of the people. You agreed, everyone agreed, therefore, no violation occurred.

¶The men who passed her around, the men who wrote the laws, they do not live under them. The oligarchs who purchased her do not suffer her pain. Those who decide do not pay. Those who pay do not decide.

¶It was the intention of our Founding Fathers that no man be above the law. That was the promise of the rule of law. Of course, like most of our laws today, this promise was kept literally without being kept in spirit. The Regime, as usual, behaving like a spiteful genie. The founders failed to recognize that there was a third position. The political class today may not be above the law, but neither are they under it. They are adjacent to it. Subject to the text while being insulated from its full weight. The men who vote to send soldiers to war do not send their sons. They send yours. The decision to go to war is made by those who will not fight it. They decide. You pay. This is the separation of stake from consequence. They call it “democracy.”

¶This is not democracy. This is not even a republic. Res publica: the public thing, the state held in the people’s name, for the people’s interests. The republic was converted into private property held by an unnamable owner. The class that decides what you pay for owns what your payment produces. They retire into the firms that benefit from the policies they wrote. Their children are credentialed into the same positions. Their assets appreciate by the same legislation they write. It’s feudal logic.

¶The Regime is an authoritarian state, though it refuses the title. This hidden government, the paraconstitutional class that acts sovereign but refuses the burdens of sovereignty’s responsibility, performs democracy while delivering oligarchy. It is Orwellian, and it is not named as such so long as there are bread and circuses. But what happens when depression hits, when the bread has run out and the circus skips town? It is not unthinkable. Over the long term it becomes certain. What then? The Regime has no contingency. We are chained to a sinking ship. The question is not whether it falls, it’s what we have to stand on when it does.

¶America today is a country of financial speculation, regulatory arbitrage, litigation, and rent seeking. This is the behavior the Regime rewards. What happened to the America of builders, creators, producers? The America of industrious ambition and honest work? That America was outlawed. The presence of depression, pessimism, and nihilism is no shock. The hard overcorrection against explicit authoritarianism bore us this hidden authoritarianism and its rotten fruits. In trying to prevent the return of the Named Tyrant, the liberal constitutional order made sovereign power unnamable, which guaranteed it would migrate to the unaccountable paraconstitutional structures. The system of “checks and balances” was always self-defeating. Power remained and it moved to the places where visible checks and balances would never be possible. They learned the lesson of the 20th century better than you did: never hold power visibly. Never be the thing history will judge. The Regime believes hiding behind manufactured consensus will shield them from consequence forever.

¶They will be made the lesson of the 21st century.

¶A state is not more democratic for hiding power from the people. Though the power is in more hands, they are not the people’s hands; these hands are disguised from the public. Sovereign authority resides today in the margins of the constitutional order, in the seams between the offices where formal powers are said to be separated. This is not democracy. For a government to be truly democratic, power must be visible, answerable, and accountable to the public. Public officials cannot be held publicly accountable when it is always someone else’s responsibility. The people cannot impeach a process, vote out a consensus, or demand accounting from a faceless committee. The people can, however, judge a leader whose responsibility is made clear before them. The liberal promise was never that no one would govern; it was that those who would govern would do so under the eyes of the people. Sovereignty diffused, hidden behind a fog of various institutions, can never be held to the people’s account. A republic run by anonymous private interests is not a republic. Democracy demands visible sovereignty. It demands that responsibility is publicly accountable to the people.

¶The Enlightenment thinkers were right about the degeneracy of hereditary rule. However, in abolishing this, they abolished ordeal with it. Consequence was replaced by procedure. The test of reality was replaced by administered examinations. This was the systemic dismantling of every mechanism by which the West had historically produced leaders capable of governing. Consequence has been insulated at every level. The Regime is the terminal expression of this project. Financial risk is socialized. Physical risk is regulated away. Reputational risk is managed through credentialism. The political career proceeds from law school, to staff position, to office, without a single point of contact with reality. The man who has never risked anything governs men who are no longer permitted to risk anything either. The Regime has produced a society where every consequence must be reversible and everyone replaceable. It is not just the death of competency but the death of meaning.

¶Will has a name. It can be praised, blamed, succeeded, opposed. Will produces decisions for which someone is responsible. A committee only produces the vector sum of the pressures applied by its members. This is why the Cult of Consensus exists: the committee needs a theology that ratifies its outputs as legitimate, because the outputs have no author. This is why the system runs on reward functions instead of decisions. A reward function is what decides when no one decides. Will is what overrides functions in service of a greater plan. Without Will, the reward function is the telos by default. The Regime is the first political form ever invented that has no driver but only a stochastic optimizer sliding down whatever slope the geometry of pressures happens to present. Its policies are the local minima of factional gradient descent. The Regime’s officeholders are not leaders in any meaningful sense. They are instruments of an optimization process in service of a machine no one has control over.

¶This is why nothing about our government feels designed. It isn’t. The Regime simply slides down the path of least resistance. The duopoly fights, but neither party rules. Policy is reactive with no telos. Sovereignty diffused into nothing in particular. The Cult of Consensus produces “decisions” no one made. The political class adjacent to the law. No true succession method. No sovereign office even to be succeeded. The Regime is something worse than a conspiracy of hidden masters. We have the emperor’s clothes, but there is no emperor. There is no man behind the curtain. Those who pretend to decide are all just cogs in the machine like the rest of us, yet they reap the rewards as if they owned us.

¶The process has become so corrupt that we have a persistent legitimacy crisis. Anyone who makes it to the top within the current system is tarnished by the very procedure that was supposed to legitimize them. Without anyone who could be seen as legitimate, we have nobody who could reform the system from within. Without reform, the process only gets more corrupted. This is what happens when no one decides.

¶The alternative cannot simply be a better optimizer. What comes after the Regime will not just be a more efficient committee, a wiser consensus, or a smarter algorithm. The successor will be what the Regime cannot do: decide. It will be a body whose responsibility is visible, whose consequences are paid, whose hand is known. The republic has been betrayed. Someone must avenge her.

¶We refuse to be nothing more than cogs in the machine. We Will what the Regime cannot Will, decide what the Regime cannot decide, and name what the Regime cannot bear to name.

¶We govern in advance of what we govern. Naming precedes the fact, the fact follows naming. The Founding Fathers did not wait for King George to permit their declaration. They named themselves a people, and then fought to prove it. Naming is the first political act.

¶We hold ourselves to be judged. We hold ourselves to be opposed.

¶The Regime hides because it cannot bear direct judgement. We declare that the only legitimate authority is the authority that can be seen, named, and answered for. We stand in plain sight before you.

¶We will avenge the republic.