The Joy of Losing

Buddhist monks create great mandalas of colored sand, which they then destroy. By this method, they learn to embrace the transitory nature of material life. But there is another lesson, much more important, and inverse to the doctrinal one: that the artist persists.

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The Republican Party failed to deliver to voters the economic change (change is not even the right word: revolution might be) necessary to transform the bureaucratic, sclerotic American economy into something resembling a functioning market economy that can deliver a house and an income to a person for a reasonable amount of work. Because they failed to do so—caught as they were between an uncooperative, geriatric Congress and a boomer class that profits from the impoverishment of young and middle-aged people—large numbers of 2024 voters simply stayed home, allowing Democrat loyalists, including immigrants, old and young women, and minorities, to sweep the midterms. Even more important: large numbers of Trump 2024 voters defected and voted blue. I am not going to litigate the order of reasons: we all have a sense of what they are.

What I am going to suggest is what we do next, with a Republican President and a hostile, blue Congress.

Understand that Donald Trump has an enormous opportunity: he is President for two more years; what he does in these two years will shape his legacy and the Republican Party; and we must do as much as possible to win back the voters we lost, to set up a Republican for 2028 and weaken the Democrats. These two years should not be lame-duck years. They should be energetic, passionate, vicious years of absolute pragmatism and selfish service to young people. Boomers are gone. Last night, the boomer vote died. It’s OOOOVER. Boomers cannot give you red walls. Demographics have changed too much. It’s Brazil time, baby, and so we must play the game of Brazil. We must shelter our most lucrative industries (AI, oil, and the military-industrial sector) from left-wing mania. We must shield our right wing with our left: we must, in short, all become ruthlessly pragmatic Huey Longs. We must do socialism with our left hand, to shield America with our right. There is no way out but through.

And btw: I am not talking about the pathetic, sissy Sohrab Ahmari–style Catholic socialism: I am not trying to advocate that we reinvent the 1950s. History moves in only one direction. I am responding to @bronzeagemantis (BAP) for that reason: I agree with him that we must unlock the vital energy and passion of American men to survive. We must create a situation where as many young people as possible are as free and liberated as possible, as free to create and build as possible.

And to do that, we must learn from the K I N G F I S H. We have to shamelessly, ruthlessly give people things.

Where to begin?

Student Loan Forgiveness

Donald Trump should fire Education Secretary McMahon immediately. She represents every reason Republicans lost. She is totally unqualified and has done essentially nothing about education policy but gut the department and lightly spar with DEI at the federal level. She has a job because her husband supported Trump. This old lady is running the Department of Education because of a personal connection to Trump. The universities are farther left than ever, and she’s publicly MIA. Trump’s executive orders have been much more important for shaping education than her time at the Department of Education.

Replacing her with a ruthless pragmatist is a good idea: I would even argue for giving Bessent her job. Then he should reach out directly to the Dem Congress and negotiate student loan forgiveness. We have to do this for several reasons. First, to free up creative energy and capital: to make our young, ambitious people free from vast sums of debt. Second, to rip away a good, strong, left-wing issue that will—inevitably—come about anyway if they win the Presidency.

If we do debt forgiveness, that will upset lots of boomers, and lots of lobbies that love student loan debt. But who cares? Trump has two years left. It is time to Make America Great Again, and to do so in a way that frees up the creativity and passion of young people, our only hope of escaping the geriatric Republicanism and Islamosocialist progressivism that await us. And, yes, this would make things a little easier on people’s wallets.

The idea is we use our left hand to shield our right. By focusing on this policy, we will distract Democrats, possibly saving our tech allies from their ire and fury, while burning bridges with lots of people who no longer, truly, matter—and who are, in fact, terribly selfish people. Trump won running to the left of Clinton on many issues. Time to return to form. Don, if you’re listening, it’s time to make a deal.

Housing, Housing, Housing

We cannot play this retarded game of chicken with boomer housing prices and young people’s needs for homes anymore. Something must give. The responsible right-leaning approach would solve two issues: first, by incentivizing people sitting on their homes to sell; second, by making it easier for people who are actually responsible citizens to buy. I think a realistic program we could establish with a blue Congress would be a generous federal mortgage program for citizens who are first-time buyers, but there is another element to this that is more important: incomes. A cheaper mortgage means little if young people cannot earn enough to qualify, and subsidizing buyers without raising what they earn only rewards boomers more. As to raising incomes, I suggest expelling every single visa worker, taxing remittances, and going after employers. We have to create labor scarcity. No matter the price. This must take priority over everything.

Party Organization

The Republican Party, and Yarvin is right about this, is a hostile organization which has done great harm to the right despite being barely a party at all. They ran a Potemkin election in 2024 because they hated Trump, and they still do. So, we need a new, real party, a new, real organization, with real member lists and dues and organizational infrastructure: we cannot piss our time away listening to Peter Thiel lectures in Nashville (as I wrote here, his antichrist stuff is just prole “chud uncle” politics repackaged in a highbrow vernacular for his adoring fans). How stupidly Victorian and bourgeois that whole affair was.

The relationship between the rich and the rising is essentially inverse to what it should be. One thing that’s been on my mind for a year now is Helen Andrews saying, “If you can’t get funding, it’s because what you’re doing is probably not very good.” I think that’s retarded and self-serving. It strokes the egos of patrons, who often become patrons for that reason alone. I read good work every day on X from people who can’t get funding. I see retarded left-wing people buying homes and literal O-1 visa immigrants employed on the right. Getting funding and being good are totally unrelated. Time to drop that idea, forever.

On that, a word on Musk and X DOT COM: X dot com is retarded and out of touch with the American people, who now, if they are normies, are almost entirely just on TikTok, Threads, Insta, and—super important—YouTube. The internet is splintering. And that splintering is only going to accelerate. X in particular has become a negative for the right, because, first, Musk promotes retarded people on the right (like Gad Saad and DataRepublican) and, second, the algorithm incentivizes engagement farming by big accounts, which makes doing anything of intellectual or ideological merit impossible. Third, X gives us hopium and copium whenever we want it. X gives us a false picture of the right and the world.

Combine that with essentially frozen follower counts on any real dissident-right account, and you get an environment where, as BAP and so many others, like Captive Dreamer, have complained, race politics becomes cuck porn, which distracts from real politics. X can either become a political tool of Elon Musk or be a free-speech platform in a world where, increasingly, no one has anything good to say.

We are essentially begging to patronize Thiel and Musk instead of Thiel and Musk patronizing US. And even good rich people, like Palmer, are not FUNDING intellectuals and writers—though that’s much less important than funding an ORGANIZATION that does political work. There are now good, strong, right-leaning organizations working to achieve good goals, but there is nothing like the DSA, which has regular meetings, conventions, and goals. They have agendas. We do not have an agenda, and so good ideas, like going after remittances or employers instead of stormtrooper raids, are sidelined while bad ideas, like hiring Noem, go mainstream. We need a real influence operation, and we need people to pony the fuck up to make one. And it needs to employ, with great freedom, lots of young people on the right. To essentially pay people to politically agitate: this is what the left does. The right does not.

In another article I wrote, Towards a Dark Cathedral, I commented on how the USIP is entirely empty. The building is all but abandoned, renamed for Trump and used for the occasional ceremony. DOGE did not lead to a right-leaning USIP, but to none. This is a good summary of Trump as a whole: attack and do not build. Very ironic, considering he’s a real estate mogul. Why doesn’t Eric Trump have a political organization? Why don’t Karp and Thiel have a club or association, with staff and members? Where is the Vanceguard HQ? Why is that a meme and not a joking name for a real thing that would exist for any real political movement desiring real goals?

We have the political organization of a 19th-century political party, which is much worse than having the political organization of a 20th-century Bolshevik movement: the kind the DNC and the DSA have.

So, I agree with Yarvin: “…Republicans need to take the next two years to organize an actual political party. Winning the Presidency is not enough. Even winning Congress is not enough, as we saw in 2025 and 2026.”

Deliver for Your Clients, and Those You Want to Be Your Clients

Trump has not delivered for young people. The world is essentially the same for young people as it was right after COVID: applying for jobs is nearly impossible if you are not an educated woman or minority; housing is impossibly pricey; the world you grew up in, truly, does not exist; and the future seems more hostile and unknowable than ever. We are like animals in a zoo, abandoned by our keepers during a hurricane. We run and scream this way and that, without realizing our tracks make a circle. And the zookeepers laugh from their cushioned chairs, somewhere in a basement.

We have to create opportunities for real freedom and wealth: so yes, I agree with BAP that we need to enable business ventures in Africa and Latin America, and I agree with BAP that we need to aggressively recruit the best and brightest of Europe to come to the United States. The problem with the vanishing population of highly intelligent, individualist people being distributed all over the world under governments that hate them is that, practically, they can’t do anything together.

And realistically, a good place to begin is resettling the South, especially Texas and Louisiana. We need to secure the emerging hyper-industrial triangle if we want any chance of being a wealthy, strong country in the future.

In sum: we lost last night because the Trump administration did not deliver enough to young people to keep them voting. The Trump administration has lost touch with large numbers of voters. A sclerotic Republican Party hoped the spectre of troons would be enough to get people to go to the polls, and it was not. The age of boomers delivering is over: the day of the zoomer has come.

There is currently no party or political infrastructure that exists to deliver this needed message to the Trump administration, and no, we cannot simply hope Vance is scrolling X and sees this.

To win now and in the future, we must transition from a movement to a party, and a viciously determined and organized one at that. For the next two years, Trump should use every power of the Presidency to deliver and to open opportunities, while protecting the right with appealing compromises and deals that deliver for young people, even at the cost of boomers, and at the cost of some right-wing political commitments. We must flank the left from the left and build the right in the world. We have to strike deals and compromises that the Republican Party would not pass but a blue Congress would, while bringing in as much talent and intellect as we can and organizing it as well as possible.

By this method, we will persist.

Namaste.

CODA

Quite a while ago, I wrote an article, “Will Trump Become Joe Biden?” that feels eerily prescient now. To quote from that:

“Young people cannot get work. Wars in Europe and the Middle East are draining the aging President’s attention, energy, and political capital. The most important and ambitious programs find failure in the highly partisan judicial system, prompting cries to ignore the judges. Inflation, which the administration is not taking seriously, viewing it only as a political tool, is draining Americans’ wallets. Despite some minor reforms, no major action is being taken on housing policy, student loans, or any of the other generational crises that are driving young voters to radicalism.

“Inside the White House, yes-men and timid staffers often refrain from telling the President the truth: their poll numbers are slipping, the economy is struggling, and their landmark bill has, for some reason, not made life better or more beautiful for regular Americans. Competent leaders, often identifying with newcomer factions within the party, are in a constant struggle against the Old Guard, which appears to be dedicated to niche foreign policy issues and is unmovable on critical issues. So, the triumphant President struggles on, unaware of the depth of their failure and incapable of understanding how he could fail when he has done so much, and given so much, to this damn country.”

“The American economy is fundamentally broken. Graduates leave school to find themselves in a country without opportunity, while the more fortunate ones often find themselves overeducated and underemployed, stuck halfway between full adulthood and permanent childhood, unable to buy a house, afford a child, pay down their debt, and yet slowly growing older. So, they become politically radical. In response to the terrible corruption revealed during a childhood financial crisis, others, frustrated by the distance between their ambitions and their opportunities, move far to the left. Some simply hate the world and its beauty in all its forms. Others, tracking the Total Fertility Rate like meteorologists track the weather, panic. Yet even more, those who never thought about the fertility rate once in their life see the H-1B program pushing them out, move right, and demand net negative immigration: remigration. Although deeply divided on where to go and what to do, they are united by the common fact that they cannot live the lives their parents did. They never hear a baby cry. They never hold a child. They still dress up for Halloween, and not for their children’s amusement. Some have somehow etched new life and families into the world, and they make it, though they cannot quite explain how, and they don’t exactly know how long their luck will last. Things feel as if they are kept together by rotting rope, nearly hollow now on the inside.”