Thoughts on Radicalism

How intransigent power structures deal with outsiders

What causes someone to become a political radical?

It’s an important question because radicalism is not an attractive way of life.

When your beliefs are fundamentally opposed to The System and can’t be pursued through normal coalitional politics (which is how I broadly define radicalism) then The System will punish you for holding them in a way most people can’t really handle.

You might get fired from your job. You become “that guy” at parties and family events. You become undatable to women of a certain social class.

And you can’t really blame The System for this; all institutions want to maintain themselves, so they create incentive structures to motivate the right behavior in people. When you don’t take their carrots, they give you the stick. When you start ignoring the stick, they try to unperson you to prevent you from influencing anyone else. And for the most part this keeps people in line, as any Roman provincial governor or Antebellum planter or SPLC hatelist curator circa 2013 could tell you.

But power gets addictive after a while, and the powerful have a tendency to grow arrogant and underestimate traditionally marginalized enemies even as conditions on the ground change.

This makes powerful people overplay their hand by tossing aside annoying coalition partners, spending political capital on humiliating people they dislike instead of further cementing their control over institutions, refusing to transition power to younger generations even in their extreme old age, and hoarding resources even at the expense of people nominally on their side.

This has the effect of inspiring radicalism (again defined as politics outside traditional venues in pursuit of goals antithetical to mainstream power structures) among people who no longer feel like obedience and industry will lead to a good life.

Radicalism can mostly be offset with bread and circuses when it’s only poor people who feel this way, but when you start alienating lower-tier elites with a good education and leadership skills you seriously threaten your own grasp on power. Eventually these marginalized elites will conclude that you’re so selfish and autocratic that chaos is preferable to order—that it’s better to take their chances allying with the mob to overthrow your regime. And that’s when your goose is cooked.

Interestingly, the powerful seldom recognize their relative decline, since the “inside faction” inevitably builds and reinforces its power on steady reliable ground while the “outside faction” has to organize in the jungle using new and untested tactics and resources. This means that from the perspective of the insiders, they are only *growing* in strength, even if their position is actually getting weaker by the day.

What’s more, the insiders usually manage to smash the first few manifestations of outsider discontent, since in these early stages the outsiders are inexperienced and led by the least valuable “discarded insiders” from the elite coalition. These early successes make the insiders overconfident and arrogant, further encouraging bad behavior and inspiring some more farsighted and magnanimous elites to break ranks and join the outsiders. But the insiders keep turning up the temperature while holding the lid ever more securely to the pot, until the whole damn thing explodes.

As usual, we can look to Rome for a great example of this.

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During and after the Punic Wars, Rome’s patrician elite (often called the “Optimates”) began to consolidate power and advance their position, building up enormous latifundia while politically marginalizing first the plebs and then equestrians and eventually even lower status or politically contrarian patricians.

For a while this worked out fine, because following Hannibal’s defeat the young and virile Republic was virtually unopposed, and could treat the Mediterranean as its playground. There was still a lot of meat on the bone in Greece, Spain, and Africa for everyone to get rich. But some people naturally got a lot richer than others, which meant long term problems for the Republic.

And so in every subsequent generation you had proto-Caesar “Populares” like the Gracchi popping up within the system. These figures—usually elites themselves—recognized that a crisis was bubbling up and sought to preserve the Republic by reversing patrician power consolidation and redistributing wealth via land reform or debt relief. But the Optimates were able to crush these figures because they were very good at manipulating poor people via controlled opposition and strategic use of the dole. These tools let them marginalize minor elites very effectively, and nobody from these “middle ranks” was talented enough to fight back.

At least not until Gaius Marius emerged.

Most people know of Marius from the eponymous military reforms, but he also was an important political figure in that he was the first Popularist leader who actually dealt a serious blow to the Optimate power structure. As a minor elite (a poorly educated equestrian from the backcountry—broadly comparable to a Red State boat store owner) who dominated the era through sheer merit and saved the Republic on multiple occasions, he probably could have used his political capital to roll back patrician oligarchism and save the Republic if he really wanted to.

Alas, he didn’t really want to. Marius came to power late in life and mostly ruled like a selfish and petty old man. He flagrantly broke political norms and used power in a revolutionary way, but this was mostly for his own personal aggrandizement. He provoked the Optimate leader Sulla into marching on Rome not by proposing any sweeping populist reforms, but by using his clout to seize command of the Mithridatic Wars at an age where he had no business leading an army. Then when Sulla left for Greece he riled his supporters into seizing control of the capital, but this didn’t go anywhere because he was too old and senile to lead, and just gave Sulla justification to brutally oppress the Popularists in retaliation once he returned.

Yeah, Gaius Marius was the Donald Trump of his day.

Marius knew how to mobilize the plebs, and was talented enough to win short-term victories against an elite that didn’t see him as especially threatening and never fully mobilized against him because of how selfish he was. But the moment he overstepped in a serious way they came down hard, and he fed his supporters into a meat grinder.

Marian incompetence marginalized hardcore Populares for a generation because Sulla was actually a capable and forward-thinking leader, who unlike Joe Biden had the good sense to retire at a sensible age. He also passed a bunch of constitutional reforms to further cement Optimate power by politically castrating the plebs, and gave some ostensible concessions to lower elites by dramatically expanding the Senate (while ensuring in practice power would remain in the hands of a more select group).

But most of Sulla’s reforms would be undone pretty quickly, as the decades following his death would see the emergence of his lieutenants Pompey and Crassus—both very Trumpian figures—as leading men in Rome, and they quickly rolled back most of the Sullan constitution. Pompey in particular emerged as a Popularist leader because his relative youth and status as a minor elite gave him a personal incentive to buck the Optimate line, but as with Marius the Optimates knew he was far too selfish to ever be a genuine radical. If they gave Pompey the superficial glory and status he craved he could be placated until someone newer and shiner emerged to draw the mob’s attention, which would force Pompey into the Optimate fold to maintain his status.

This, of course, is precisely what happened when Julius Caesar launched his campaign in Gaul and gradually supplanted the aging Pompey as Popularist hero. Pompey began to see Caesar in the same way Trump saw DeSantis in 2021, but in this case the young hot shot was the more charismatic and daring one.

We all know what happened thereafter. But it’s interesting to compare Caesar to his predecessors and consider why his achievements were so lasting in comparison.

A big part of it is that Caesar wasn’t just some upjumped equestrian hick like Marius or Pompey who was insecure in his status. Men like that could be bought off by The System and integrated within it given sufficient land and praise and a good marriage to some broke patrician’s hot daughter. But Caesar was an aristocrat with absolutely impeccable ancestry—his clan Julia was reputedly descended from Venus herself.¹

This ancestry imbued Caesar with a sense that he genuinely deserved to rule, so unlike Pompey and Marius he was didn’t need to waste political capital on his own prestige. That’s certainly not to say Caesar wasn’t motivated by prestige, but most of excesses in this realm came after he defeated his most formidable enemies and had obtained absolute power. As a young man he always had the good sense to choose power over glory. For instance, when the Optimates forced him into choosing between running for consul or accepting a triumph, he famously opted for the former.

You just don’t have the same need for public adoration when you’re descended from Venus. Pats on the back from some old man don’t mean that much to you either, nor does the promise of marriage to an airheaded patrician thot who is at best your social equal. That kind of security gives you a lot more freedom to pursue your own interests.

More importantly, it makes the Optimate elite look like absolute shits when they close the door on you politically, and even try to prosecute you after a successful campaign in Gaul that brought tremendous wealth to the Republic.

The Optimates weren’t just closing ranks on people outside their social class, they were unjustly punishing one of their own—both because he was rising higher than any of them could, and because he was using his power and wealth to empower the common man and advocate for reforms that would unwind the post-Punic oligarchy and stabilize the Republic in the long term.

A lot of longtime Marius fans probably knew he was half-senile and overreaching when he tried to steal power from Sulla, but if you were a fan of Caesar it felt like his enemies were going after him in his prime and immediately following a tremendous service to the Republic for which he deserved to be venerated. All this because he was a class traitor with a magnanimous concern for the average Roman!

The Senate felt they could get away with this because they had been fairly successful in suppressing or co-opting all proto-Caesars. They did not see the significance of a High Elite becoming Popularist leader and couldn’t fathom how their selfishness and sort-sightedness was starting to fray even the inner core of their coalition.

The Optimates’ past successes and tremendous latifundia wealth had created a culture of intransigence and overconfidence among them that in turn produced a gradually expanding “black hole” in politics as the common man didn’t get his needs met. When the Gracchi tried to fill that hole they were outmaneuvered and crushed and the black hole just grew larger. Figures like Marius and Pompey exploited it for their personal benefit but didn’t actually fix anything, so the black hole continued to grow.

Finally it got so big that it started sucking in the best and brightest patricians, who turned to radicalism as they found common cause with the mob over an increasingly pedantic and obstructionist Senate.

And that was the death of the Republic.

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We’ve established that people turn to radicalism when they believe they can’t get their needs met using conventional structures. So how does The System deal with this?

Generally when elites see a new species of radicalism emerging they respond to it in several stages:

1. Marginalization - Politically isolate, silence, and unperson radicals by making it low status to hold their beliefs and by punishing mainstream figures who give them any kind of platform. This is usually effective in the short term but ineffective in the long term, as it creates a sense of underdog moral righteousness in the suppressed group that can power them through hardship, while denying them an “off-ramp” back into the mainstream. This is what the Optimates did to the Gracchi and similar Popularist leaders in the immediate post-Punic era when they were riding high and the rot hadn’t fully set in. It’s also how the post-war American “bipartisan consensus” handled white identity politics from roughly 1962 (when Buckley started purging the Birchers) to Trump’s election in 2016.

2. Integration - Co-opt the radicals and make your interests their interests. Bribe their leaders into selling out and steering the rank and file into a false consciousness where they perceive your victory as a success even when you don’t do anything for them. This is how the Optimates dealt with Pompey and Marius (at first), how the GOP has historically mobilized the Religious Right, and how the Dems maintain Kim Jong Un margins with black people. It’s also how the GOP establishment tried to handle Trumpism from 2016-2018 before basically losing control to the populists.

3. Realignment - Open ranks to the radicals and let them into your coalition, at the expense of whatever current coalition partners won’t tolerate their presence. This is what happens when radicals are starting to win and elements from the existing power structure want to maintain as much influence as possible. This started happening to the Optimates after Pharsalus and continued well into the reign of Augustus. It’s also what’s been happening to the GOP since Trump took over—the Republican establishment has stopped punching Right on culture/race so it won’t get pushed out and can retain some influence on fiscal and foreign policy, but its clout when compared to Trumpism is palpably weaker by the year.

A successful radical movement will typically “land” somewhere between Stage 2 and Stage 3. The most serious grievances get addressed and the most capable radicals are placated and “off-ramped” back into the political mainstream, while the dysfunctional losers and most extreme fringe are tossed aside. Connections will be built with mainstream allies, and this widens the Overton Window on your own side, at the cost of increasing society’s overall political polarization.

If you’re a radical leader, getting placated/bought off in some dignified and broadly acceptable way is a practical medium-term goal. You want to give your people the freedom to join mainstream coalitions and influence policy in exchange for votes.

It’s obviously fine to have an ambitious and unrealistic goal to motivate your base—when you shoot for the moon you land among the stars—but you shouldn’t conceive of anything less than that goal as failure. At the very least you should accept that most of your followers will likely be comfortable getting bought off even if you aren’t, and have the self-awareness to accommodate that when necessary.

If you’re an elite in an existing power structure you really want to prevent people from radicalizing. You need to give people—even people you hate—off ramps to stop them from looking for an answer outside the system, because those answers are going to be a lot worse for you in the long run.

Everyone who produces something useful in society needs to feel like they have a seat at the table to influence policy and participate in the broader discourse, or they will inevitably start to participate in ways you find even more illegitimate. If you don’t want to deal with them in either case, the only workable alternative is to expel them from society altogether, in which case you’ve come down on the side of partition.

Sure you can temporarily marginalize the first signs of resistance like the Gracchi or the Birchers, but eventually selfish yet talented demagogues like Marius/Pompey or Trump will emerge to exploit these people for their own purposes and seriously damage the Republic as a result. Eventually you might see the emergence of a Caesar-like figure² who can actually lead your enemies to success.

But as stated before, most people do not want to be radicals. They might want to LARP as extremists in their own political circles to seem edgy or hardcore, but this is just to have fun and express an identity. They have no interest in adopting beliefs that actual hard power structures find offensive and will punish them for. They only do this when they feel like their back is to the wall.

If you give them a way to pursue their interests from within the system they will opt for that instead, saving you a lot of time and resources in the long run.

1. In fact, Caesar’s bloodline was so revered that his aunt was one of the aforementioned hot daughters—as a young girl she was married off to Marius, and this is what gave him status as a genuine Roman elite. In exchange Marius gave the destitute Julia family the resources it needed to regain prominence in the Senate.

This wouldn’t last long—Sulla confiscated a lot of Julian wealth in his purges—but Caesar was able to pull exactly the same move with his daughter, marrying her to Pompey to cement their alliance and acquire the resources needed to build a career in the tremendously expensive world of Roman politics.

2. Obama was arguably a minor example of this for black people. For Trumpian populists, imagine a figure like Elon Musk with Vivek’s charisma and DeSantis’s administrative skill