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It's Edmund Burke vs. Thomas Paine for the 50 millionth time. "Slowly and carefully prune away the rot" vs "Revolt and replace the institutions entirely". Jesse/Trace are advocating for the former, and interestingly enough much of the current conservative crop falls into the latter mindset, despite Burke being probably one of the most central figures to Anglosphere conservatism.
Not to go all Hlynka, but the modern right somewhat dovetails with the left in the sense that they have largely shifted from a Burkeian mindset to a Paine-like one overtime. I partially think this is the right seeing how successful revolutionary, scorched-earth tactics were on the left, and realising that advocating tactics characterised by stability and moderation don't work when you're fighting with people who really would like to (possibly violently) overhaul society. But more broadly, I think revolution is attractive to a general political coalition when they're heavily ousted from institutions and placed on the back foot, whereas gradual change that prioritises stability is preferred when these coalitions' beliefs are tolerated within said institutions - the risks and costs of overhauling the system in such a case just outweighs the potential benefit of marginal status gains. The likes of Trace are attempting to appeal to a gradualist version of conservatism that looks like a worse and worse value proposition as time goes on and the left's Long March through the institutions becomes increasingly apparent.
Personally, despite differing with conservatives on many things, I espouse a lot of heterodoxy that's anathema to progressives and would happily warm my hands on the embers of the torched institutions.
I'll just point out here that if you don't want to build a mountain of skulls, some of those institutions will need a replacement at least moderately close to ready before you torch them.
Of course; there are obviously many load-bearing institutions that can't be burned to the ground without many disastrous ripple effects. But there are also a great number of institutions and/or subfields - including many of the Truth-producing academic fields and news sources which are most crucial to the spread of the ideology - which are not hugely critical to baseline functioning, and are kept alive in part through public money that frankly shouldn't be going towards producing propaganda-disguised-as-science with infinite degrees of freedom. Arson of these institutions is a public good, in my opinion.
There is, indeed, a reason I said "some of those institutions".
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How is torching these institutions going to produce a mountain of skulls?
There are certain institutions which, if removed for an extended period, will result in a modern society rapidly depopulating due to the heavy optimisation required to sustain modern population densities. Military, police, public utilities, hospitals, pharmaceuticals, agriculture, plus the tax collection apparatus to fund some of these, and a pipeline to train people to do these things. I'm not saying you have to preserve the specific institutions that currently do these things, but "torch them all now and then start figuring out how to replace them" won't cut it. You cannot take them all offline for months without a mountain of skulls; it'd be the Great Leap Forward all over again.
Not coincidentally, most of the institutions you've mentioned are least-penetrated by wokeness. Police, particularly outside cities, are notoriously not woke. Burning down the police in cities gets you the 1980s back again... but so does letting the wokeness continue to spread. Public utilities and agriculture... not woke at all, so far as I know, except perhaps marketing departments. Burning down hospitals and pharmaceuticals gets you a small pile of mostly old skulls at worst. In pharma's case you probably just have to burn down the marketing department anyway.
Burning down pharmaceuticals means that a bunch of currently-negligible bacterial infections become big threats again, and illnesses mostly-eliminated by vaccination start to come back. The worst-case scenario is probably another plague epidemic with non-modern fatality rates (there is plague in the USA; it's just very treatable with antibiotics), although modern garbage disposal might be enough to keep that at bay (pneumonic plague does spread human -> human, though).
Do not underestimate their value just because you don't have to use them all that often; IRL, maintaining a good state can be really, really cheap compared to the bad state (see: iron lung argument).
And you do still need university-equivalents to train the chemists, although this is admittedly far less urgent.
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I mean, there are definitely woke-captured institutions we cannot simply go without. Medical schools, for example.
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The problem with “slow reform” as a process is that it rarely actually solves the problem. It’s failed often enough that I think once an institution reaches a certain point of brokenness that it’s probably better to slash burn and rebuild than to go slowly simply because going slowly often means those opposed have a chance to regroup and defend the rot in various ways. It’s why I think DOGE is absolutely brilliant— the axe is against the tree before anyone can figure out what is happening. Had it been the same sort of slo2 reform were used to — forming commissions, holding hearings, and going line by line, most of the problems— the bad science, the corruption, the waste, and the lucrative sinecures — would be quietly shuffled into other parts of the budget before DOGE could do anything. Move quickly and they cannot fight back.
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Huh. If that's actually the case, I think the realignment might be painful in the short term but very good in the long term. The left has lately been the party of "incremental improvement isn't the way, tear it all down and replace it with something better", which is not a great philosophy when the left is the party which controls the institutions. If we could get a realignment to where the party that runs the institutions actually wants to preserve and improve those institutions, that'd be great.
Of course given that we live in the clown world, maybe the right will manage to actually take over our institutions over the long term while retaining a culture of fighting against "the deep state" (that is now their deep state).
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