Replace the Regime With This One Weird Trick

A closer look at "Enclavism"

In response to a recent article—in which I proposed a new series on future, typically right-wing alternatives to the current rotten and debased liberal-democratic government (the same one that’s battening on the fast-vanishing vitality of the West)—I received many fantastic leads and new ideas.

I especially wish to thank

Simplicius The Thinker

for alerting me to the concept of Distributism, and

Max More

for mentioning the intriguing ideas of Tom W. Bell and Max Borders. I’d like to explore all of these ideas, and many more, in future articles.

Continuing the series today, however, I’d like to discuss the concept of “Enclavism,” an “alternative framework of government” that the pseudonymous Kaisar has been evolving over at The Hidden Dominion. As with Haywood’s Foundationalism, Enclavism seeks to address the multiplying failures and inadequacies (that’s being generous) that the liberal-democratic Regime is manifesting as it staggers into ever more advanced degrees of senility and irrelevancy.

But whereas Foundationalism was designed as very much a political manifesto and system, Enclavism is a kind of political technology that is meant to tackle a very specific problem: degeneracy and decline, and the seemingly inevitable cycle of civilizational collapse.

Kaisar makes this clear when he advocates for Enclavism as “an alternative government form that is resistant to anacyclosis;” in other words, it is intended to break that cyclic (d)evolution that all states seem subject to, a process the historian Polybius referred to as anacyclosis (ἀνακύκλωσις), the “cycle of political revolutions” or “cycle of constitutions.”

Living in the fertile political tumult of the Mediterranean Basin during the Classical Period—with its bewildering constellation of kingdoms, city-states, democracies, republics, leagues, amphictyonies, and empires—it’s no wonder the Greeks devised a sort of grand historiography that still serves us well today. Spengler, after all, wasn’t the first great thinker to analogize the birth, growth, and death of civilizations to the life-cycle of living things.

In the theory of anacyclosis, Polybius contends that a state or civilization describes a certain arc through time—proceeding from a state of nature, to rule by kings, which degenerates into tyranny; the tyrant is deposed eventually by a confederation of aristocrats, but the ensuing aristocracy devolves into an oligarchy. The subsequent emergence of an economic middle class leads to the overthrow of the aristocracy in favor of a democracy, but the ossification of this form of rule into a plutocracy inevitably leads to an ochlocracy—mob-rule and chaos.

Got that? Damn…there’s a lot of “-crats” and “-cracies” in that paragraph.

Anyhow, in the final stage society dissolves, a state of nature reappears, and the whole process begins again. Rinse and repeat.

It’s easy to get the sense that, in the modern West, we are poised on the precipice of that very abyss at the bottom of which lies mob-rule and the eventual dissolution of our civilization; just ask the beleaguered citizens of Paris or most large American cities, where the mythical “state of nature” doesn’t seem all that mythic any longer. Either way, we certainly seem to be situated nearer the less-pleasant nadir of Polybius’ cyclic scheme.

And that’s where Kaisar’s Enclavism makes its entrance. His new governmental dispensation is intended to confront the problem of decline head on, and hopefully avert the inevitable collapse of our culture and civilization that we all sense is practically inevitable at this point. It all reminds me very much, in a way, of the opening chapters of Asimov’s famous science fiction epic Foundation, in which the founder of the new science of “psychohistory” aims to shorten the impending dark ages that will follow the inevitable collapse of the Galactic Empire.

In many ways, Kaisar’s Enclavism is much more ambitious: the goal is to prevent the collapse altogether.

“Each modern government is destined to collapse given enough time. We need a new government form that addresses the issues leading to the cycle of collapse with an explicit goal to prevent it from happening. To preserve our people and culture.

Obviously, we can’t create an entirely new government form and address all of its possible future problems and intricacies. So instead, our goal is to create a working, practical framework for a government designed to withstand the test of time.

This means it is a framework. Not a strict political manifesto…”

The name derives from the need to “enclave” or build a parallel state or community that is in a condition of sejunction from the modern world, and therefore operating outside of the anacyclosis to which the other world governments are subject.

“It is culturally and cyclically unique. Non-degenerative. Hence, an enclave.

Yet, it also has a dual meaning. We want to form parallel Enclavist communities and Enclavist economies in current societies to help resist against cultural and moral decay. Hence, enclave (again).”

So, how will Enclavism work?

This is where the crux of the matter lies, and my information is drawn from this article on Enclavism published on The Hidden Dominion. Of course, you can read it yourself to learn more about this novel political framework; as with Haywood, Kaisar has promised a forthcoming book to lay out his political theory and system in greater detail.

But as I understand it, Enclavism is designed to be a mélange of existing and known political systems, with the idea of creating an overarching checks-and-balances system to “cycle-proof” this new form of government, and hopefully pave the way for a recrudescence and renaissance of Western culture and civilization. In general, it will be a rule-by-many form of government, a republic of sorts, but with important safeguards introduced in light of the manifest failure and degeneration of the liberal-democratic republics that form the modern West.

(And I may be stretching the definition of republics here, since the governments of the West bear about as much relation these days to a true republic as did the myriad Leftist “People’s Republics” and “Soviet Socialist Republics” that spread like a bad case of gonorrhea during the twentieth century.)

The basic pillars of Enclavism are numerous, but they seem reasonable and even necessary. For one thing, it will require a total restructuring of government, with a vetting of qualified and virtuous representatives to establish a new “elite,” so to speak; there will also be mechanisms for selecting a leadership based on merit, with rigorous checks and balances to restrain the worst instincts of and to eliminate problem leaders. The “Deep State” or unelected bureaucratic apparatus will be eradicated through the use of subsidiarity or devolution to a local level; accountability measures will be set in place at all levels of society, and immigrant invasions and demographic replacement will be halted immediately and where possible reversed altogether.

Meanwhile, steps will be taken to establish a form of “contributor” or weighted voting, the usurpations and abuses of unrestricted capitalism will be curtailed, business and economic practices will be subordinated to the interests of the community or nation, law and order will be reestablished, and excessive power will be stripped from central governments and relocated at a local level.

There is, of course, much more to this new political framework than what I could reasonably address here. Kaisar touches on everything from the need to rebuild a higher culture, methods of holding influential non-state actors (financial elites, the media, culture-shapers such as Hollywood) accountable for their destructive actions, the importance of regenerating community and combating degeneracy, mechanisms for fettering the worst excesses of democracy, and even—in something called “Dominionism”—a stab at imagining a new economic model.

In sum, Enclavism consists of eleven core policy elements: 1) revive a healthy culture; 2) establish robust accountability measures for all levels of society; 3) depose our current hostile “elites” and replace them with a more congenial aristocracy; 4) rebuild local communities; 5) eliminate degeneracy with extreme prejudice; 6) safeguard historical rights and freedoms against the usurpations of centralized governments; 7) sap the power and prerogatives of the plutocrats and predatory financiers; 8) instill a sense of civic unity and nationalism; 9) ruthlessly decentralize government, so that it is “bottom-up” rather than “top-down;” 10) reform the electoral system so that the votes of those with more skin in the game have greater weight; and, finally, 11) implement vigorous checks and balances.

As with any proposed novel political dispensation, the determined critic can suss out issues and flaws with Kaisar’s Enclavism. For one thing, I am unsure how the system would be implemented; if it is designed to be a kind of autarkous state, totally separate from the globalized, liberal-democratic world oikoumene, it’s unclear to me how such a system could grow to encompass an empire the size of the United States, or any other Western nation, which certainly seems to be Kaisar’s ultimate intent. I’m also not entirely sure that I’m comfortable with the idea of a political framework that is totally proof against collapse—for one thing, I fear the possibility of cultural, political, and intellectual stagnation, and I’m terrified at the thought of a state crystallizing into a sort of eternal tyranny that’s completely insulated from the shocks of history.

I already fear something of the kind has happened with the present liberal-democratic Regime in the West, so I’m not sure I’m fully onboard with the idea of a collapse-proof civilization. Sometimes, as we can see in our own historical situation, the promise of eventual collapse is the only hope there is.

But these are, in some ways, relatively minor issues, and perhaps they reflect only my own peculiar neuroses. Nevertheless, I salute Kaisar—as I did Charles Haywood—for taking the time and effort to imagine an alternative political system, and having the courage to put the damn thing out there and let it stand or fall on its merits. There’s a lot to sink one’s teeth into with Kaisar’s Enclavism, and I look forward to hearing more about it in the future.

The system we’re currently saddled with is rigid, fossilized, inflexible, and shockingly corrupt; perhaps it’s not entirely the fault of the system itself, but it has been so thoroughly parasitized, and its once robust health so terribly compromised, that it’s past time to put the old boy down once and for all, if for no other reason than to do him a kindness.

It served us well in the past, more or less…but that was then, and times have changed. We’re living in a revolutionary age now, and it may be that Kaisar’s Enclavism, or something like it, will point the way to a more peaceful, a more prosperous, and a more hopeful future for ourselves and our civilization.