A Modest Proposal for Strategic Empathy (draft)

As soon as I started paying attention to political rhetoric, it was clear to me that the right wing was marginalized. All discourse has been framed so that the right seems uncaring, if not hostile, while the hostility of the left is obfuscated or justified. (I know “the left” is not a perfect descriptor of the enemy, but I will use it as a shorthand here.)

The reason why this works is very simple and obvious and I feel like I am insulting people’s intelligence by saying it, but it really appears that so many on the right either do not understand this or act as if they do not. This reason is that, if other people know, or are made to believe, you intend to harm them or make them worse off, they will try to defend themselves from the perceived threat, find allies, and retaliate, if they can.

If some people benefit at others’ expense, then putting an end to that would antagonize the beneficiaries. Doing so requires making those who are being exploited understand how they are being victimized and that they have a right to fight back. Persuading the exploiters that what they are doing is wrong is very much secondary.

I might say that all political rhetoric is a matter of telling people who their enemies are. By convincing enough of the right people that your enemies are their enemies, you then have a consensus that they need to be defeated. You can act against the enemies with no doubt or conflict among your allies. Being seen as hostile is entirely identical to losing, in the context of relatively peaceful domestic politics in which such hostility is not immediately backed by real violence.

This is especially so when such perceived hostility is against immutable aspects of someone’s identity. Those made to believe they are the target of such hostility see no choice but to respond in kind. This is why the left calling everyone racist, misogynist, -phobic etc. has worked as well as it has. The right has played into the enemy’s framing by either accepting their terms and moderating and saying things like “the left are the real racists” or by leaving doubt that they are not whatever monstrous caricature they say they are. We have been trapped in a murder versus pacifism dialectic.

I have come to realize that nearly every idea which is considered far right is absolutely correct in the right context. It was only the problem of such positions being framed as actively hostile against various groups which prevents this from being obvious. This is overcome by understanding how they actually do not necessarily make any innocent people worse off.

I should clarify, it is not every single fringe and foreign victim group the left props up for whom there needs to be strategic empathy, but the average westerner who believes in freedom, fairness, and human rights, which all developed naturally from the need to resolve conflict.

All of this might be changing. Such far-right views are spreading through the internet. With the 2024 election, it seems as if the left has been defeated. However, there are still ways to go in mainstreaming the true right. Also, this is all because it has become undeniable that civilization is being destroyed and there are real victims of leftism. Things should not have to get worse and I want to humbly assert that things should not have needed to get this bad.

I am truly frustrated that anyone can be aware that mainstream opinion is totally hostile to what he strongly believes is true without seriously wondering what he and others with the same views have been doing wrong. The people who have understood how our civilization is being destroyed have some responsibility for failing to create a consensus against the enemies. I should not disparage those who bravely spoke out on these matters long before the “vibe shift“ and were slandered by dishonest enemies who would have done so no matter what, but there should have been a better rhetorical strategy which reframes the debate. I am not claiming that I would have done better, but I want to explain how I would begin to formulate an approach for doing so.

In order to reframe every past, present, and future debate, one needs to always be able to present non-hostile or even mutually beneficial ways of achieving his political ends while also not compromising. In this way, the enemy would then be put in the position of declaring hostility by rejecting peace. Even if a mutually beneficial solution is not immediately feasible, simply raising the possibility may be enough to reframe the debate by showing that the enemy is also not proposing such a solution, that they fall greatly short of real progressivism in any meaningful sense, and that the situation is zero sum at the moment and someone has to lose and you have at least as much of a right to fight for your interests as your enemies.

Figuring out what such non-hostile mutually beneficial solutions look like in reality requires a critical view of conflict and aggression in politics. This is why I believe the way so many have rejected Austro-libertarianism is a mistake. In rejecting the stupid tendencies of libertarians, they ignore how voluntaryism shows a different dimension for de-escalating conflict which is not fully considered by other ways of viewing politics, in which the scope of state power can be negotiated, not just policy ends. This means considering possibilities such as real federalism, secession, and privatization, not as optimal outcomes, but as some of many ways of resolving political conflict or rhetorically reframing debates. If nothing else, it allows for thought experiments which show additional ways of going beyond the liberal frame, which might work in private discussions with above-average IQ people who are still stuck in it, as it did for me.

With that being said, I actually believe many of the former libertarians, to whom much of what I have written is in response, more or less have proper strategic empathy. The value of such a theoretically rigorous approach may not be that great, but I will try to show how it may be useful on the margins and how there is a danger in falling back into uncritical low-dimensional ways of approaching these matters.

I can use many examples to show what I mean. If you say you are against democracy, the average person thinks you are saying you want a government to rule with force against which there is no recourse. You should be able to say that no one is absolutely powerful. All rulers need to negotiate and compromise with various interests. You should be able to hypothetically consider how this can go as far as some completely renegotiating their relationship to a government through secession in some form, in order to see how a government, democratic or not, is not so different from a voluntary private association which is not expected to be neutral and egalitarian, but either way you still prefer that it serve you and your friends rather than your enemies.

Consider any or all societal ills for which one might get called a lolbert for not wanting to be banned, but for which the mainstream would call you a fascist for opposing with any seriousness, such as addictive drugs, no-fault divorce, abortion, contraception, pornography, usury, more than just illegal immigration, the normalization of homosexuality, or whatever else. Rothbardian libertarians are not the reason why there is no will to eliminate these things on a large scale (not yet, at least. Here is where I try to tell them how they could avoid messing things up if they were to ever get significant influence). Perhaps such will will exist someday, maybe soon, but it does not at the present moment, and even if that changes, many things can go wrong.

Perhaps those with uncompromising radical positions on these issues can participate in mainstream discourse by adopting a rhetorical strategy of saying things to the effect of:

“My friends and I are going to privately, locally, and voluntarily protect each other from these evils. We truly believe these things are harmful and we protect people from them because we care about those people, not because it is fun or profitable in the short term. Those for whom we do not use our limited time and resources to protect are those whom we care about less. Protection from these evils is an economic good requiring scarce resources to produce and no one is necessarily entitled to it.

We would like to protect the entire nation from these evils. If there can be an overwhelming consensus on this, then perhaps the government can help protect the nation, but there are many wrong ways of doing this. It would be a form of welfare program after all. For this reason, we would be open to considering whether it is possible for such government policies to be voluntary somehow, but also because, if some people insist that they do not want to be protected, there is a limit to how much of our limited time and resources we are obligated to spend on doing so, so we will leave them alone so they will not feel as much need to agitate against our movement and we can focus on those who want to be protected.

However, those who do not want to be protected would need to meet us halfway in figuring out how we can fulfill our different preferences without conflict. Otherwise, there is a point where they can be considered hostile actors intending to inflict those evils on our people. If there is no practical way to make such protection voluntary, I might still support such policies because protecting people is more important. If something goes wrong in the enactment of such large-scale prohibitions and whether or not they are repealed as a result, my friends and I will continue to work to protect each other on our own.”

This way, such radical right-wing positions are presented as preferences which do not need to meet the burden of proof which absolute imperatives would need. The question of where exactly to draw a line in any of those issues, such as the question of which drugs should be banned, would also be a matter of preference which do not immediately require rigorous justification. Perhaps more compelling than an intellectual argument against these evils would be someone leading by example and being seen gambling his own resources on the belief that protecting his people from them is better in the long term. Those in opposition would be put in the position of interfering with the freedom of people to protect themselves from degeneracy.