Elon Musk has recently come under fire over importing skilled foreign labour through the H-1B visa program in the US. This situation illustrates the fault lines within the fragile MAGA alliance, but it also shows the way forward. The problem is that in order to see that way forward, you need both a clear-eyed understanding of power dynamics and a solid grounding in folkish theory.
Any serious political observer understands that the left has been stacking wins basically unopposed longer than any of us have been alive. This was formalized by Robert Conquest as Conquest’s 2nd law—any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing. This has been understood since the French Revolution at least, and the principal theoretical question in politics has been to explain why this law holds. Several years ago a very smart writer who calls himself “Spandrell” answered that question, and the short answer is that all liberal praxis since the French Revolution has been some variant of what Lenin did.
Lenin was able to topple a thousand-year old political tradition by hacking the social calculus. He figured out that what people care about most is status, and that if you offer status to people who can never get it any other way, you will have yourself an army of foot soldiers loyal unto death. This is Leninism, and it works by offering upward social mobility to people whose class puts a hard ceiling above them. The modern variant that we know as wokeness—which Spandrell called bioleninism—is the same idea, but applied to people whose biology puts a ceiling above them. By enfranchising the gender-confused, the malformed, the sexual deviant, the ethnic minority, the habitually criminal, etc. you get the same loyalty but on steroids.
