“Trump did WHAT?”

If you have been following Trump's second term, you have likely either heard or said this phrase quite a bit. The basis of Trump's second term, such as it were, seems to be pure contrarianism and controversy baiting. They seem to be uninterested in coming off as professional or making people feel confident in the direction of the country, let alone to want to join his political group. Indeed, the decisions of this administration are alienating even to his long-term supporters.

Traditional ways of understanding political groups have completely failed to explain MAGA or how the political landscape is evolving. The most popular “educated opinion” on all of this is a Marxist perspective, despite the Marxist perspective either being completely wrong or so vague that it lacks descriptive (or predictive) power. If we are to act effectively in the reality of this new political world we need a new political philosophy.

The philosophy that I call “Shadow Politics” can be summed up in this elevator pitch: “Political groups don't exist to solve problems, but rather to create problems.”

If the elevator ride were a bit longer, and I could give a slightly more accurate pitch, it would be this: “The primary objective of a political group is to perpetuate it's own existence by ensuring that it has continued relevancy, not to effectuate political change“.

Shadow Politics suggests that we need to pay closer attention to the thing behind politics, or the thing that casts the “shadow” that we call political ideology. We need to consider the non-political reasons that people might choose to join a political group (perhaps without even realizing it). Doing this is critical to fighting antisocial political groups such as fascists – I posit that fighting fascism on a political level is ineffective and completely misses the reality of why fascists exist. We need a new form of action that addresses the meta-level of politics.

In this essay, I will explain my theory both on a “macropolitical” scale (relating to entire political ideologies and groups) and a “micropolitical” scale (relating to how individuals associate with political groups). I will also demonstrate how this theory explains both the rise of the “woke left” and the “antiwoke right”. I'll also discuss the shortcomings of other political theories.

A political ideology is like a living organism composed of cells. The cells give rise to the macroscale phenomena of the organism, but the organism itself exercises control over the cells, in the form of the environment in which the cells live. In this way, the causality between cell and organism is intertwined – one cannot understand the organism without understanding it's cells, and one cannot under the cells without understanding the organism. Despite this, we consider the behavior of cell and organism separately so as to escape this quagmire of causality.

(Because of dual-causality, what I'm about to say may seem non-sensical – therefore, I beg you to read the section on micropolitics, to understand the other side of the equation, before you write me off as a schizophrenic)

Like any organism, a political ideology tries to survive. Death of the organism is defined as the point in which it loses homeostasis - the point at which the behavior of individual cells becomes disordered and no longer gives rise to collective, organized behavior. In nature, death of the host might mean death of the cells, but in politics, the “cells” (people) will, of course, live on – this is where the analogy between organism and ideology ends.

Unlike cells, people are not bound together with sinew and bone, and thus may float from place to place, untethered from other people, which is, of course, not conducive to organized action. Thus, the task of the ideology is to keep all of it's people together under the same umbrella.

First, there must be a center, or rallying point, for the group, a clear divide between self and other. This center is the set of values around which the political group revolves - they could be specific policies, philosophies, ideas, or aesthetic sensibilities.

Secondly, the ideology must keep everyone in that center and motivated to act in it. Ideologies have a number of tools at their disposal to do this. Ideologies can control where followers look, what they perceive, and how they react to what they perceive.

For example, there are now many newsblogs that cater to people in certain political groups, providing a biased and slanted view of the world. This is an example of how ideologies control where followers look. Even if they aren't reading a biased newsblog, the tendrils of ideology extend even deeper, into the particular things that people notice in the world. For instance, leftists classically can't look at the world without noticing an apparent tapestry of oppression, that goes unnoticed by non-leftists. Finally, the ideology shapes how people react to the things they notice, usually in a negative way. The appearance of these signs to the individual continually reinforces the worldview of the ideology, meaning that to leave the ideology would be to live in contradiction to “reality”.

Here is the dilemma that political parties face:

• If the center is not popular enough, then no one will want to join it
• If the center is too popular, then there will be no reason to join it

Both outcomes lead to death for the political ideology, because people will no longer act in an organized manner. To avoid this, effective and long-lasting ideologies straddle the line between being too popular and too unpopular.

If an ideology is becoming too popular, there are a number of things that it can do to become more unpopular:

• It might change it's political position away from ideas that have become milquetoast to ideas that are more socially repugnant.
• It might cause it's followers to act in an antisocial way. For instance, it's followers could engage in vandalism, acts of violence, terrorism, and general thuggery.
• It might directly address their opposition through covert means, in a way meant to go over the heads of their own party members. (I call this reverse dog-whistling “human-whistling”)
• And finally: It might bring about it's perfect dual, the true manifestation of it's opposite, and all that it considers to be evil: The group's shadow.

I borrow the notion of “the shadow” from Jungian psychoanalytics. According to Jung, the shadow is the repressed ego, the opposite of Self. Jung warned about the consequences of projecting our shadow onto the world, and especially others, and urged individuals to reckon with their shadow before it consumed them. (By the way, Jung was careful to point out that the shadow was not evil, just the self's opposite. The shadow therefore might actually be the good guy, if your Self happens to be wicked)

The shadow of the group is probably a projection of the group's collective shadow, all of the things that it's individual members consider to be evil, the things that they see in the night when nothing is there. Naturally this too is influenced by the control structure of the group.

How does it project it's shadow onto the world? It might continually do and say outrageous things, and then state that anyone who is opposed to those things is an element of the group's shadow. It might also foster a baby counter ideology by providing it with the strict delineation between self and other that it requires.

One might criticize my macropolitical theory on the grounds that I ascribe conscious intent to something that lacks a brain. It is true that a political group does not possess a supernatural spirit. However, like in real organisms, the appearance of consciousness is an emergent property of the interaction of self-interested cells.

Man, too, may be an element of a group that gains an emergent property of intent. Consider a mob. No one man is responsible for the mob, indeed, no one man even desires that the mob should do anything. And yet, the mob could be said to have intent. It could be said that the mob is uncomfortable being squeezed in a tight quarter, and that it desires to expand and become diffuse. The individual man only wishes that he could maintain a comfortable distance from the people around him. Thus, the desires of individual men can influence a group's behavior and goals in an unconscious way.

There are two types of politically-minded people. The first type are people whose allegiance is to a particular set of policies, not to a particular political group. I call these people “issue voters”. The second type are more in line with a particular political group than with any particular policy. I call these the “groupies”.

(The tricky thing is that no-one can really distinguish between groupies and issue voters. No one thinks they are a groupie, and yet it seems that there are some people who are. Some people are definitely issue voters, for instance, a Jew is likely going to be opposed to antisemitism, because the alternative would be suicide. Yet, because of the control mechanisms that I spoke of in the previous section, a groupie might think that he is an issue voter. The distinction really doesn't matter, I'm not trying to cleanly divide these two groups of people, just trying to make it clear that I am aware that some people really do only care about particular issues)

Why might someone become a groupie for a political group? There are two reasons. First, they could be exposed to a stream of propaganda from the group that convinces them that this group is correct. They could fall under the thrall of the control mechanisms that the group utilizes. I'm sure this happens in some cases.

Yet this doesn't explain why people would willingly choose to consume information that they know is biased. We shouldn't take it for granted that a person who is linked to some news article from a slanted publisher won't immediately drop their allegiance to that publisher when exposed to an article of the opposite political persuasion. Indeed it seems that people actively seek out these biased institutions and refuse to consider alternative perspectives.

This is the problem with Democrat's (and others) push for “fact-checking”. I am not opposed to fact-checking, I particularly like X's system of additional context. However, I think it completely misses the point of why people fall for false narratives: people want to believe in them. Providing “additional context” is only a roadblock on the way to the thing they want to believe.

Why would a person not want to know the truth? The reason is that a knowledge of the truth may interfere with other personal goals.

I first explained this theory in my 2024 article about politics and media. See heading: What is the disease?

Humans have an innate desire to Be Something. This state of Being Something is attained by finding the balance between two axes:

• The Axis of Connection: Man wants to be genuinely appreciated and seen. If he is connected with many people, he is just one person amongst many, and thus he doesn't get much authentic appreciation (High Sameness). If he is all alone, he is not appreciated by anyone (High Contrast).
• The Axis of Self: Man wishes to be a Thing that can move without dissolving. If he stays the same forever, he is like a stone: unchanging and dead (High Constancy). If he transforms constantly, he is like water: constantly changing and also dead (High Change).

The ideal place for man to be is in the center of this chart. He should have a few people with whom he shares a genuine bond, more than outsiders. He should also understand who he is but be comfortable with evolving into something new.

One of the ways in which man addresses an imbalance in the chart is to turn to political groups, in order to form a proxy sense of self. If a man feels as though his life is changing too quickly, he may turn to a political group such as conservatism to regain a sense of constancy. Likewise, if a man feels too stuck in life, he might turn to liberalism. If a man feels too connected to others, he might turn to extremism, and if he feels too isolated from others, he might turn to altruism.

Even if the bases for the particular things he believes are false, the effect of believing them is gaining a sense of balance. More specifically, the political group offers a feeling that counters some other feeling that the individual may have. I call the feeling that a political group offers a “group feeling”.

We can now understand why political groups “want” to continue to exist, rather than to accomplish the political goals that they rally around. The members of that political group want to continue to have the group feeling. If they won, the group would dissolve, as would the group feeling.

One might wonder: “If the political group won, wouldn't everyone be returned back to the center of the chart?” They would if the things that caused them to feel out of balance were purely political. The truth, however, is that many of these problems do not have political causes. In my 2024 article, I talk about how the “media-state” creates a feeling of sameness, and I point out that even if the right-wing won, the media-state would still exist, and the exact same feeling of sameness would persist.

If I were to get up on my soapbox for a moment, I would tell you that the only way to find this balance is to search for it within yourself and outside of these political groups. I would tell you that these groups sell a weak and unstable sense of self. It's cheap – it doesn't require you to go on a possibly painful spiritual journey to find, and yet the consequence is living a miserable and contradictory lifestyle.

We can now also understand why political groups suffer when everyone agrees with them. They suffer from their members having an excess of Sameness. The political group will therefore lose it's relevancy and it's group feeling, and members will go to other political groups to get their group feeling fix.

Like many of my thoughts, the concept of shadow politics came to me as I was trying to understand modern US politics. In particular, I was trying to understand how fascism, which I consider to be one of the worst possible political ideologies, had managed to gain a foothold among the population. More broadly, I was interested in how a liberal society had produced so many people that were opposed to liberalism.

I've been using the word “liberal” quite liberally, so I should probably clarify what I mean. I am convinced that there is no word in the English language that has suffered more than the word “liberal”. If you ask two people what the word means, they will give you two different, and even contradictory, answers. I think Wikipedia's definition is pretty good:

Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, the right to private property, and equality before the law.

Liberalism is not the same thing as Leftism. Leftism is mostly a reflection of Marxism, which ideologically is opposed to least one of these tenants (private property) but practically is opposed to all of them. Some people have used the term “classical liberalism” to distinguish between leftism and liberalism, but I think that's stupid so I don't do it. We already have perfectly good words to refer to both of those concepts, thank you very much. Thankfully, leftists have begun distancing themselves from “liberals”, which will hopefully make all of this clearer.

The basic tenets of liberalism are so broadly agreeable that it's hard to even imagine anyone being opposed to them. Yet it was not always this way. Consider that prior to the civil rights movement, which was only a few decades ago, black people were not afforded the same dignities as white people. Furthermore, prior to feminism, men and women literally lived in completely separate worlds.

The broad agreeableness of liberalism makes it extremely powerful, as everyone can be a part of it. Compare with white nationalism, which clearly can only be joined by white people, or anti-Catholicism, which can only be joined by non-Catholics. This collective pooling of power across a vast array of walks of life can make it nearly unstoppable - quite literally, “diversity is our strength”, or, if you prefer, a bundle of sticks is not easily broken.

This broad agreeableness, while being liberalism's greatest strength, was also it's greatest flaw. As I outlined in the section on micropolitics, in at least some circumstances, people choose political parties based off of a desire for emotional regulation. The flaw with liberalism is that being broadly agreeable leads to an excess of Sameness.

Consider two statements. One person stands on a soapbox and declares: “All people are equal! Black people should be afforded the same protections as white people!” No one will praise you for that statement, because everyone already believes it. The statement is as uninteresting as “the sky is blue”.

The other person stands atop the soapbox and declares: “White people will pay for their crimes in blood! Let us rise up in glorious revolution against our white oppressors, not with words, but with extreme violence!”. Most normal people (yes, including most black people) would consider this statement to be utterly repugnant. Yet it will be, at least, interesting. It will be clear that this person stands for something. Indeed, there will be a small community of individuals who find this messaging special and will validate the messenger.

We see that while one statement is clearly better than the other¹⁾, it does not confer the same beneficial emotionality. This is at least part of the reason why revolution and destruction of the status quo became so important to those seeking justice. It was not enough to reform the system to be fairer and more just – the system had to be destroyed. Leftism already offered such revolutionary narratives in the form of the Marxist understanding of the world put forth by postmodernism, so it was inevitable that a Leftist movement would emerge amongst the youth. This is the origin of what is today sometimes called the “woke left”.

(I should clarify that this isn't the only reason. I think some people really were so mad about the oppression that they faced (understandably so) that it turned into burning rage against the status quo. Here's the problem – political groups tend to ratchet up the emotional response of their members. They will never encourage vulnerable people to find peace, but rather they will feed their inner turmoil forever. This is my biggest critique of political movements)

One question that traditional leftists often ask is why the aim of communist revolution was “replaced” by an emphasis on social justice. They surmise that the answer is that “the elites” did this to stop the coming revolution. The real answer to this question is easy if you subscribe to my theory of shadow politics – the aims of the woke left were simply more contrarian than the aim of communist revolution. Basic marxist ideas points had seeped throughout culture for many years, to the point in which some of the ideas became truisms – “the man is holding the people down! the people gotta rise up!”. Meanwhile, the woke left has the same benefit as white nationalism, in that certain people simply can't be a part of the movement (or, if they do, are held in extremely low esteem, and forced to be a ceremonial scapegoat)

Furthermore, even if it is unachievable in practice, it is at least possible to imagine what a communist revolution and state would look like. This means that communism is substantially less contrarian than the woke left, whose aims are frankly almost incoherent. For instance, what does it even mean to “abolish the patriarchy”? what is “black trans revolution”?? how would police abolition actually work???