Speaking the name
One of the central theses of Moldbug is that America is currently a one-party state, and that party is the Cathedral. “The Cathedral”, of course, is the name for the esoteric inner mechanism by which coordinated rule is achieved without explicit external coordination, to be distinguished from the various exoteric proxies by which the Cathedral actualizes its rule. That’s why the one-party rule of the Cathedral has not coincided with the domination of the Democratic Party, but rather has tended to advance even when Republicans (the nominal opponents of the Democrats) held power. But this is all in Moldbug; I want to go someplace stranger.
In the Bush era, there was talk of a “permanent conservative majority”. During the Obama era, there was hand-wringing about the demographic doom of the Republican party and the imminent permanent ascendance of the Democrats. Now, the fact that equal and opposite predictions were made within just a few years of each other is usually taken as a sign that all the people making these predictions are full of it. And they could be right. But let me offer a different take.
These predictions were a form of unconscious meme magic. And what these people are attempting to do is speak the name of the thing that is coming into being.
The Cathedral is dying. Once it was named, it was inevitable that it would die; its power came from the fact that it was unnameable and unknowable. By the same token it could only be named once its power was beginning to wane. “The owl of Minerva flies only at dusk.” And what struggles to come into shape in its wake is explicit one-party rule, the end of the system of covertly managed two-party democracy and the emergence of a overt single-party autocracy. The twenty-year-old mantra that one party or the other is doomed is an incantation, a spell, a sigil drawn upon the collective unconscious: the old order is doomed, let the new order arise.
I don’t exactly know how Donald Trump fits into this. But whatever is happening, it sure is happening quickly.
