READING NOTES #4
The null hypothesis won 2020, or, Why Curtis Yarvin is so confused.
Perhaps everyone but Steve Bannon has passed the point of believing that the 2020 election still has a chance of being overturned. Not so much a lack of evidence as the impossibility of pulling off an unwieldy manoeuvre and the immense static in the system that works to repress any such possibility of success. As Matt Christman puts it,
If people DID treat it [the Texas case] as a harbinger of constitutional collapse they would realize that there is absolutely nothing they can do about it, so they’d go back to treating it like no big deal. Why not just save the extra step?
In other words, the surfeit of historical evidence that voter fraud is the rule and not exception in America, especially since the introduction of EVS, means that confronting this issue would be too costly for the dealer’s house, which was of course stacked up on this very swindle to begin with. So ‘save the extra step’. But, at the same time, removing the ‘extra step’ (assuming this is possible) also removes all tension in the system, which oscillates between stasis and what Ross Douthat borrowing from Joan Didion calls the ‘dreampolitik’ of Trumpian soft reform. If politics is just the best entertainment money can buy in the US, then knowing there’s nothing one can do about it would be to remove politics altogether—and our entertainment.
And that’s something one can’t, straightforwardly, do.
This lack of understanding around the nature of politics as text helps to explain the confused ambiguity of Curtis Yarvin’s autopsy of ‘2020’. The politics of politics—pretty much the only true content of the political—is this signature vacillation between hope and entertainment (reform), on the one hand, and realism and acceptance (stasis, formalism), on the other, and everything Yarvin writes is basically a misreading of this situation, or a way of vanishing into the gap.
Here is how Yarvin’s latest opens:
Vae victis! If the election was indeed stolen, it was stolen fair and square. Whatever happened is as final as Bitcoin. 2020 remains a chef’s kiss from history’s meat-kitchen. You do get a year like this every few decades.
The Supreme Court has sent a clear and lovely Schmittian message. No court or other official authority will ever consider the substance of Republican allegations of voter fraud in the 2020 elections. All will be rejected on procedural grounds by the courts, and mocked with maximal hauteur in the legitimate press. Maybe some agency will even have to go through the tiresome kabuki of investigating itself.
These tactics will always work. They always do. There will never be any kind of neutral, official, systematic or forensic investigation into any real or apparent irregularities—not even one that goes as far as the comical 2016 Jill Stein recount.
The election was stolen: so what. This is Yarvin playing the absolute acceptance card, the get over it card, the didn’t-I-tell-you-nothing-was-going-to-change card. There never will be, he says, any justice when it comes to voter fraud. Having established that he is a hardcore eliminationist realist in the field of political swindle, Yarvin rather strangely collapses at the very end of the article back into precisely what he would claim to have never entertained: Douthat’s ‘dreampolitik’.
While Charles Maurras called the defeat of France in 1940 a ‘divine surprise’, our short, hilarious Trumpenreich was a divine marketing experiment. The world-historic purpose of Trump was to validate the market for dreampolitik.
With Trump as his instrument, God has taught us beyond any doubt that, fucked as America may be, fucked as America is, we still have a market for dreams. Indeed we are so fucked that only dreams can save us. We’re going to need better dreams, though.
The adoption of Douthat’s ‘dreampolitik’ is noteworthy here, not least because the way Douthat himself uses the term is quite specific:
This postelection division of the Republican Party extends and deepens an important trend in American politics: The cultivation of a kind of ‘dreampolitik’ (to steal a word from Joan Didion), a politics of partisan fantasy that so far manages to coexist with normal politics, feeding gridlock and stalemate and sometimes protest but not yet the kind of crisis anticipated by references to Weimar Germany and our Civil War.
For Douthat, ‘dreampolitik’ means merely the politics of pure fantasy that the out-of-touch Trump supporter entertains with regard to the election result: the Trump supporter is simply dreaming if he thinks that Biden did not win. But Yarvin, who presents himself at first glance as hard-line political realist, wants a dream politics to be, quite simply, the holding open to the ought that counters the is, even if just in the form of an industrial embrace of fantasy. He doesn’t just want dreams, he wants fantasy. In fact, he doesn’t just want fantasy, he wants better dreams.
Caught as he is between is and ought, but unable to account for what explains their dual appearance, Yarvin, the Biden supporter, ends up being no different from the most impassioned supporter of Lin Wood and Sidney Powell. He dreams to dream better, and writes like one, but ends up just sounding dumb.
In effect, Yarvin’s Achilles heel is his formalism: he says that we should not should (is not ought), but then says what we should do is just accept the sovereign as is (corruption), but this begins to dissolve the is and ought which means you can’t really say anyone is accepting anything . . . so in fact the bedrock of that formalism is Johns Hopkins’ longitudinal Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth and nothing else, if you know what I mean.
But linking back to an old Moldbug essay, we find some real gems on the whole business of evidence. For example:
When the sovereign is the story, I claim, the sovereign is he who selects the null hypothesis. What is a null hypothesis? Have you ever seen the phrase ‘no evidence that’? For instance, there is no evidence that voter fraud has a significant impact on American elections.
The rest of this older essay—from 2012—is a brilliant analysis of much of the real trouble underlying the present election, and the for now dying out evidence scandal. It is Biden, in reality, who has wielded the null hypothesis, making the strong claim, aided by a chorus from the media, that there is zero-evidence of voter fraud. And as Moldbug already explained in 2012:
You can change your mind too. Maybe you’re just the first. However, the null hypothesis is what the sovereign orders you to believe, at least until evidence (which should promptly be brought to your master’s attention) convinces you otherwise. Since the sovereign also sets the bar for how much evidence it takes to convince you otherwise, he can order you to believe in pretty much anything short of outright arithmetic violations. All he has to do is set the null hypothesis to his desired outcome, then set the burden of proof impossibly high.
This is precisely what has happened in the last month or so. The bar was set impossibly high from the word go for anyone but the DNC-MSM complex. The Trump team were simply outnumbered and outmanoeuvred in their rhetoric. He who asserts there is absolutely zero evidence of voter fraud in this election puts a pin on the null hypothesis that can, in effect, never be taken off. Team Biden owned the null hypothesis from election night onwards, with the help of Fox News’ announcement of Arizona, and therefore owned Trump to just that extent.
As one of Yarvin’s minions puts it:
Since the Wednesday morning after the election, it has been quite clear that Biden had a strong carry trade, and Trump had an anti-carry trade. Something fairly large had to happen to change the answer. The Supreme Court case with Texas was my last bet on what that something large might be. Related to my post earlier this year on how Republicans can’t get their appointed judges to stay conservative, the answer was depressing, if not surprising. The number of ways the outcome can change at this point is small, most of them would be highly alarming if they occurred, and not many of them seem to hinge upon a great new empirical analysis of voter fraud being written by me.