The Unipole Called Whiggery
Or, how hypocrisy has become civilisation’s greatest virtue.
One political concept, filed down to its essence in union between the politics of America and Great Britain, denominates everything crucial in geopolitics. It is called Whiggery.
What Wikipedia will tell you, British or American, about Whiggery is not the full picture of it, but rather a historical pretext for what is actually the first comprehensive union of politics and psychology outside of the trappings of organised religion. I’m not kidding: this is a really big deal, and you’re living and breathing this invention of the Anglos every single day, in ways you might never have imagined.
Before I carry on into the meat of it, let me disclaim my bias: as far as I know, I am an Anglo through and through. I am not Scandinavian, nor Germanic, nor any other Continental let alone anything further except for the original Anglo-Saxon mixture that all Britons by this point share. This has been reflected in family trees mapped by hand on all sides of my family, as well as by induction on the part of genome analytics companies I have spit to. Additionally, I am an informatician—this is my profession at heart, I knew since I first laid eyes on a computer—and so I am well-predisposed to the age of information that we live in, with all of its trappings of espionage and engineering alike. Even knowing its faults I find some degree of personal pride in the advent of things like FVEY. What can I say? It’s my bag!
Let us abbreviate the history then for clarity of my own claim about this with the opening sentence of the Wikipedia article:
Whiggism or Whiggery is a political philosophy that grew out of the Parliamentarian faction in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms and was concretely formulated by Lord Shaftesbury during the Stuart Restoration.
Like any functioning political philosophy, Whiggery was concerned with the host of issues of its day. These revolved around the turmoil of the Reformation and its intersection with Parliament and the Crown, and suffice it to say, the Whigs had some very precise views on where the buck should stop about that.
Whiggery was no ordinary political philosophy, though. In much the same way crustaceans must shed their skin to be able to grow, most active political philosophies must also go through such a vulnerable and expensive phase in order to reform themselves, and alas, many do not survive that period of weakness. Whiggery is unique in that it does not need to shed its skin to both retain its constitution and adapt to new realities challenging its providence upon the issues of the day. It is no accident then that Whiggery has not only survived, but thrived like no other to the chagrin of the rest of the world’s old aristocracies into the present day. Of course, you wouldn’t immediately recognise it now—names are a frontline item of transformation to suit the realities presented—unless you knew what to look for.
Where other political extents are like Precambrian fronds, Whiggery is a living, breathing thing. You might even call it an animal, in contrast to more inanimate life forms that predate it. Whatever the allegory, Whiggism is the language through which originally British—and now American—hegemony reigns. Much as people may talk a big talk about a ‘multi-polar world’ or the manufacturing prowess of a rapidly depopulating China, all of these things are doomed. Whiggery is an objective thing to be observed whether you adopt its premises or not, and that is what I am bringing to you now to identify. What is China intent to do in the face of this? They are a flower doomed to photosynthesise in the face of a herbivore. Even poisons are but a stopgap to the difference in nature — there is a food chain here, and Whiggery is found at its top.
People have countless unproductive discussions about Whiggery under the guise of Pax Americana, or American imperialism, depending on your mood and what programming you’ve been ingesting lately. A huge bulk of this is undigested remarks of an unacknowledged Whiggery behind it all. What can be said of neoliberalism, or neoconservatism, upon the canvas called Afghanistan? Less enlightened polities simply heap slurs upon the public of America, as if they were a rigidly coherent nation-state where the orchestra is always kept in tune. This could not be a grosser, nor more insulting, misunderstanding of what is happening here.
Aspiring reactionary acolytes like Curtis Yarvin have coyly slandered the Whig hegemony we all live under, by writing profusely about the ‘Whig historiography’, using postmodern deconstructionist tactics to treat the ethos of this great political leviathan as a construction of hard fiction by self-serving aspirants to power. This is totally futile, and Yarvin will not live to see the blossoming of whatever alternatives he has proposed, assuming he believes in any of them. (In fact, he may well live to see them all die violently, with men like Eisenhower sent to photograph the remains.) In the arrogance he acquired from his upbringing, he found a false belief that the Whig open-mindedness could be weaponised to destroy itself. Unfortunately, this is a very common mistake made by Continental thinkers, as it involves taking a Whig at his word. Nothing could be more foolish than thinking a Whig must either be honest, or be a liar, and nothing else. Whigs will slander you until Kingdom come, and then they will win, not because they were the loudest, but because somehow, without writing 50-mile long treatises on shit one learns spending too much time in the library at an Ivy, they knew that neoreaction, monarchism, or whatever else Yarvin might try to sling, are dead ends. Somehow, they’re not fazed by appearances in the New York Times, or contrivations of social media to fake popularity, even though by all measures the party of Progressives has never been more lost. One could say that the Whigs here have God on their side, but more concretely, they just have a better understanding of the purpose of faith and virtue. Bad things are bad for a reason. It sounds so painfully simple but here we are bearing it out in some of the biggest and most complex political wars known to history.
To bring it back to Earth a bit and substantiate this idea with history, we can look to the birth of the American Whigs. Here is the first major example of true, isolated Whiggery at work:
Before and during the American Revolution, American Whiggism, in a deeply ironic reversal, weaponised Whig political philosophy about the social contract enforced by the right of revolution against both the Whig-dominated government in Westminster and the Hanoverian monarchs.
So I contend then that the true meaning of Whiggery is not the long defunct consortium of issues known under the legible political banners of the Whigs in America or Great Britain, nor even necessarily the political successors of such (like the American Republican Party), but rather this sort of semi-invulnerable, transcendental political reformation within a single political constitution. That act is the call of the Whig.
In American electoral politics, the heritage of the Republican Party proved no obstacle whatsoever to the Whig within all patriotic Americans in turning Whiggery into a role to be played alternately by both ruling parties in its two-party system. In fact, the hand-off of this metaphorical football is what political theorists consider an incrementing of the successive series of American ‘Party Systems’, beginning with the Second Party System ushered in by the American Whig Party itself. Let us enumerate:
The First Party System came from the Patriotic Old Whigs of the American Revolution, followed by
The Second Party System, coming from the Jacksonian populism and nationalism vis-à-vis manifest destiny, followed by
The Third Party System, coming from the Unionists and their fight to end slavery in the course of the Civil War, followed by
The Fourth Party System, coming from the rise in American financial primacy and the advent of early Progressive politics, followed by
The Fifth Party System, coming from the Great Depression and World War II, followed by
The Sixth Party System, coming from a realignment forced by the social revolutions that characterised the 1960s, which we live in to this day.
Many have speculated that we are fast arriving into another turn to a Seventh Party System, and although I think that is soon, it is too soon yet to say, and for one reason: each turning is led by a Great political underdog working under the ethos of Whiggery. Americans’ obsession with underdogs in media is not a mere byproduct of religious or cultural dissent, nor is it an invention of Hollywood; it is a reflection of the most basic patriotism we all share. We count in our hearts Washington, Jackson, Lincoln, both Roosevelts, and JFK for this reason: they wielded political primacy with what the public genuinely saw as purity of heart, hearkening to the old Arthurian legend of Excalibur, though they may not consciously realise it.
We know much in fact about these people as they present closer in history to the present day that disabuses them of such romanticism, but it must be understood that Whiggery has a consciousness all its own, and it does not care supremely for mere facts. Perhaps it could be thought of as a kind of egregore, a thought that persists in the explanatory vein of Darwin simply because it can survive and reproduce. Many political philosophies do this. But what offers the flexibility of Whiggery as well? There aren’t many challengers for that.
Whiggery dispenses with the notion of face in a humble and earnest submission to God that the Whig’s bill of issues is pure and noble in intention. This is why the world enjoys a hollow laugh at the expense of Anglo embarrassment on the world stage, even as our primacy invariably persists: while you may find it funny that we prance around metaphorically naked, you have not noticed your vulnerability in being conventionally invulnerable. We have been benefitting from this earnestness in the context of commerce for centuries, bringing us riches the Mughals and the Aztecs could hardly dream of. Was it really so unbecoming for us to be naked? Have you really thought through the ramifications of your judgement? I think it’s a laugh to be followed by a whimper, because no matter how much face you might save, people can still deduce if you are worth dealing with or not. A Whig frontloads these concerns for his own benefit, saving everyone time, energy and risk. He is volunteering information unprompted because he has a higher understanding of the greater dynamic at hand, and knows it can only profit him in the long run. A more modern rendition from Warren Buffett: “you can’t make a good deal with a bad person.” This was in the context of him bragging about how much he doesn’t have to spend on lawyers. You figure out the rest.
In contrast to this generous frontend of charity, the backend of Whiggery is the embrace of pure chaos. The American Armed Forces echoes this practise in its many halls of office, quoting an unknown German officer from one of the World Wars:
The reason the American Army does so well in war is because war is chaos and the American Army practices chaos on a daily basis.
Again we see this in the Cold War, with a somewhat more amusing quote from a Soviet cable:
A serious problem in planning against American doctrine is that the Americans do not read their manuals, nor do they feel any obligation to follow their doctrine.
I myself often unwittingly practise this, in lieu of a day job when I am between errands and am lost in enjoyment of the comfort of my car. I despise routing myself automatically with map software and plot my own route mentally everywhere I go, so I may learn the roads and retain my independence in navigation. But when time is permitting, I find myself taking all sorts of detours for the hell of it all, and I do not even know which way my next turn is going to be until I am taking it. I only have a rule to not look lost like I don’t know where I am going – the rest I leave up to God. And I did the same thing further going on walks downtown in the days before I had a car: often my mother would ask me where I was headed, and I had to reply so many times that I do not know that I snapped at her once. Do I really need a destination, or can the hunger of my belly and thirst of my veins carry me all the way? If I ever have an intelligence detail, I hope you guys end up having as much fun with this as I do. (You probably won’t. Sorry. But at least you’ll understand.)
On the front, a Whig is a thorough and sincere Platonic Apology to God, offered in contract to his fellow man. In the back, a Whig is a conspirator with God, lighting the fires He shows him and following His way. There is no inconsistency with this. There is great power in this. So, in the patriotic Anglo tradition, residing now in the political body of America, I am a Whig. I don’t expect people to fully grasp that, and that’s the point, albeit in a very obscure way. Whiggery is the successful political application of the Enlightenment virtue of self-evidence. It is no accident that you hear these words echoed by the Framers and Martin Luther King Jr. – that is the call of the Whigs. It’s how we know who stands among us. What face is there to save when the truth is self-evident? We think there is no face to save at all.