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This isn't how ideological groups work. They do not hold power by being all fanatics who would support the same policies regardless of their factual beliefs about the world. Nor do they have unlimited ability to hold onto power if public opinion turns strongly against them. There are some people like that, but they rely on support from the much larger numbers of people who buy into mainstream "anti-racist" arguments premised on factually incorrect beliefs. Most supporters of any ideology are aligned with it by some mixture of traits like factual beliefs, trusted information sources, formal principles, and informal biases. Many of them can be persuaded by chipping away at their factual beliefs and their trust in their current sources of information. If mainstreaming HBD failed it would be because the vast majority continued denying it, not because people accepted it and then just shrugged. Affirmative action doesn't have majority support already, it hangs on through disproportionate elite support, but that doesn't mean it can continue to do so even if you persuade a large chunk of public/elite supporters.
Compare to libertarians. In theory principle-based libertarians shouldn't even care how effective libertarianism is, right? The justifications are stuff like Freedom and the Non-aggression-principle, not effectiveness. But of course it's not a coincidence that they generally believe libertarianism is effective as well. There's presumably some libertarians who would, for instance, oppose conscription even if they sincerely believed it was the only way to prevent being conquered by a communist nation, or support open-borders even if they thought it would result in statists taking power or otherwise end in disaster. But most wouldn't, and in fact I've noticed a notable number of libertarians and ex-libertarians online who became alienated from hardline libertarianism based on stuff like believing that open-borders would end disastrously for liberty. And once you get into actually trying to set government policy alongside people who don't care about principled libertarianism, of course "Privatizing X will end terribly for everyone, but we should do it anyways because Freedom" isn't an argument anyone makes.
There’s a hidden, well, not so hidden, extra factor that keeps people in line. Open questioning of the narrative is a career limiting move. In fact if you want to get fired, probably the easiest way to do it is to be openly racist. Even if people quietly accept that some versions of HBD are true, they’re by and large isolated from each other and prevented from speaking by the knowledge that fighting the narrative is only going to mean poverty and shame. Even the outspoken critics of the blank slate are pretty careful about their identity unless they are in a position to get money exclusively from HBD adjacent communities. Persuasion doesn’t matter if open beliefs are going to ruin your career.
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Every regime in power by necessity, has to try and create ideological buy-in with the rest of the population, to draw in their support and compliance that provides them with the legitimacy the seek. But it doesn't have to broadly succeed to be able to remain in power. If you look at the approval ratings of the current administration in the US, I think it quite easily spells out that you can rule over your citizens and subjects, despite strong disagreement and not trusting any of their institutional organs.
With libertarians, there's a tradeoff between resilience and efficiency. Libertarianism works very well in near equilibrium systems, but struggles massively with radical shifts and systemic changes. A lot of inadequate solutions to problems that have politically been punted to economists to figure out often fail, because the nature of the solutions are hopelessly mired at the margins. They deal in smooth, frictionless, 'incremental' changes. When time runs out for gradual change to take place to settle to a solution and you need decisive action, you need the scale of change to take place that's truly revolutionary. In the modern technological world we live in, you need strategic top-down, decisive action. And that often comes in the form of centralized power and authority that can make large-scale, sweeping changes take place.
The problem with a lot of democratic societies is that they often show that they're unable of making effective top-down decisions that are proportionate to the severity of the problem. In fact, they were specifically designed to 'prevent' people from taking drastic actions. This is why at heart I'm an authoritarian and don't have problems identifying with fascist ideology.
How much do you suppose the average Tang dynasty farmer approved of the Emperor's bureaucrats? Or how the average Medieval English peasant felt about their local earl? Peasant revolts were not uncommon during the Middle Ages, but the people in charge remained on top (my go-to example of the German Peasants' War is but one of many). Oderint dum metuant. Superior coercive force goes a long way in keeping large numbers of people under one's proverbial boot.
I'm not sure if you're simply adding to my statement or disputing it. I fully agree with the point you're making here.
Adding some reinforcement to the quoted part — that was a rhetorical "you, the reader", not "you, Tretiak" in that first question; I can see, re-reading my comment, how that could be unclear. Sorry about that.
And maybe a bit of disputation on the necessity of "ideological buy-in with the rest of the population." Again, it seems like you mostly just need that from your military/enforcers, not powerless peasants (the long commented correlation between labor-intensity of warfare and levels of "democratization"). I mean, look at any time one group of people have conquered and subjugated another. (How much "ideological buy-in" did the Romans ever get from the Jews?)
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I disagree. "Public opinion" means nothing, "democracy" is a sham, the masses are powerless nobodies, the elite holds all the power…
For quite awhile, a good number of my friends pondered why the habit of empires is so persistent, even in nations that define themselves as free and open societies. The answer really isn't all that complex, I think. Every nation, no matter what character or political system they adopt, wants to maximize their share of power in the world. Why wouldn't they? That's the inherent structure of the international system. It's foundational to international relations theory (IR) as well.
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