Failure analysis is one of those things that most people do every day, but they don’t think about it that way. Much of what passes for a work in a modern corporation is exception handling, which is just solving the problems that occur when the normal business processes fail in some way. No one calls customer service to tell them that they are happy with the product and have no complaints. Those departments and the people in them exist to figure out what went wrong and remedy it.
At a higher level, smart people making big salaries spend their days trying to understand why complex systems produce unacceptable results. There are people who spend every day studying plane crashes, looking for the cause of the failure. Pretty much every quality control program is just failure analysis. The idea is to measure success against some ambitious standard and then look for the causes as to why the standard is not currently being met.
The one area of life where failure analysis is seldom used is politics. When the goals are not met, and they are never met, no one asks “How come this policy did not work as we expected?” Conservatives, for example, never think about why their side loses almost every fight with the Left. The ones they win are the ones the Left does not care about all that much, like moving commas around the tax code. In some cases, like emptying the jails, the conservative victory was really an own goal.
In conventional politics, this is fine, as failing is often a career enhancer. Failing up is such a common phenomenon in Washington that it is the norm. That’s because a politician failing to deliver for his voters is usually doing so with the blessing of the inner party or powerful influencers of the party. Success and failure within an established political order is defined as helping or harming the establishment. Modern Washington cares only about maintaining their cultural and political hegemony.
Outsider politics and reform efforts play by a different standard. Their very existence depends upon them succeeding. The same is true for outsider politics, where the game is to alter or overturn the status quo. Failure in these cases not only means there is no change to the established order, but often the reformers and their supporters suffer serious consequences. It’s why understanding failure is paramount for outsider politics and political reformers. Mistakes can be lethal.
Strangely, there is very little failure analysis in the graveyard of right-wing resistance to Progressive aggression. For close to seventy years now, all efforts to stop the Left’s march though society have failed, and no one bothers to think about it. Instead, it is just more calls to keep doing the same things over and over. Today, for example, so-called conservatives keep bellowing about the constitution, while they sit at home obeying lock down orders.
If there is going to be an alternative to the liberal democratic order, it must start with first accepting that all past efforts failed. That’s a difficult emotional hurdle for most, because it means questioning important assumptions. It is much easier to keep repeating the same chants than to honestly question your own beliefs, but if the trajectory of American politics is going to change, it must begin with accepting that the past is a graveyard of errors.
That’s what the show is about this week. Putting it together, it quickly became clear that it is a very big topic. I could probably do a couple hours on every segment. The failure of Buckley conservatives could be a multi-part Dan Carlin series. Sixty-five years of failure is a lot of failure. Still, a good first effort is to introduce the concept and maybe get people thinking critically about what has been tried and why it failed. The reason we are here now is the prior efforts did not work.
This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. Spreaker has the full show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android commies can take me along when out disrespecting the country. I am on iTunes, which means the Apple Nazis can listen to me on their Hitler phones. The anarchists can catch me on iHeart Radio. I am now on Deezer, for our European haters and Stitcher for the weirdos. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below.
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This Week’s Show
Contents
- 00:00: Opening
- 02:00: The Study Of Failure
- 12:00: The Recitation Of Failures
- 22:00: The Buckleyites
- 32:00: The Paleocons
- 42:00: The White Nationalists
- 57:00: Closing
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The current approach to failure analysis on the dissident right seems to be to sit on our hands and complain that we weren’t given power in 2016 by a system that even then (according to our narrative) is enemy controlled.
These complaints, in addition to the aburdity of Charlottesville, how it was organized and mismanaged, and of course Orange Man who is bad have contributed to this childish butthurt mentality that is reflected on this site, and all other formerly Altright platforms.
The conclusion of the mentality is to do nothing, because doing anything is too risky.
So nothing is being done about the destruction of monuments, no community outreach and community building, no passive resistance no activism etc. none of even the low risk activity we can be doing.
Basically its been a surrender of the public space wholesale, with nothing to show for it but a complete 180 from 2016 where we are all supposed to now vote for Biden out of spite or not vote at all and let our cities burn, wear our masks and take unemployment cause all the jobs are being destroyed in the name of a phantom virus that Basically doesn’t effect the young and healthy.
I don’t know what to make of it. Fatalism isn’t in my nature. But thats what this seems like.