The upside of economic decline

Perhaps I gave the impression of dissatisfaction that no decent solution will be reached regarding the debt limit on my last post. I should clear that up. You see, reactionaries, being about as far from power as they can possibly be, are what we'll call 'long volatility'. That is, if things go seriously sidewise, it tends to favor us relative to the status quo. Truly counter-revolutionary ideas and programs are rarely adopted in good economic times, instead, they return, like the gods of the copybook headings, when things fall apart and the center can not hold.

The long game for the reactionary is one I've already described---have more children than the adversary, protect them from subversion, and subvert those of your adversaries. The medium term game is to gradually push the limits of discourse in our direction and to destroy, undermine and subvert the hostile organs of the culture. But there's another game also. Thing thing about this game is that you rarely if ever will get to play it by appointment, so you can't exactly PLAN to win this way. This game is being prepared to take decisive action to improve the position of your faction if things go seriously nonlinear. Will they? I don't know, but there are plenty of candidates for truly disruptive events in our near and mid-term future. My current optimistic view of this decade is as a higher-tech rerun of the 1970s. This sort of thing is why Napoleon is said to have generally asked of prospective officers---Is he lucky? By this he meant that fortune tends to deal a very mixed hand and some surprising, and to the hyper-rational, even crazy events that the prepared can capitalize on.