Get Comfortable in Discomfort

Or we will lose it all

The Only Lever Left

Politicians do what they do for one of three reasons: it serves their self-interest, it serves an ideal or ethic they hold, or they fear what happens if they don’t. Every mechanism a political movement builds is really an attempt to operate one of these three levers. The American right has tried to build machinery for all three, and largely failed at all of them — not for lack of effort, but because of the underlying structure of the game itself. Understanding why is the first step toward actually using the lever that remains.

Lever One: Self-Interest

The reflexive answer to political betrayal is always the same: raise more money, build a bigger PAC, out-fundraise the other side. It’s the wrong answer. The deep problem is that even the right’s own money routinely serves against the base’s stated priorities: the largest single pool of organized conservative money in 2024 spent tens of millions elevating a primary challenger and opposing the eventual nominee outright.

This is a coordination problem before it’s a resource problem, and coordination problems are the proper subject of game theory, not accounting. Political money only functions as an accountability lever if everyone holding it is playing toward the same payoff. When a coalition’s largest donors are optimizing for a different equilibrium than its base — international free trade over national interest, procedural stability over confrontation — their spending isn’t a lever for the base at all. It’s a competing move in a different game being played on the same board. Worse, the infrastructure on the other side doesn’t just fund elections; it maintains a standing market for anyone willing to defect, offering consultancies, television appearances, and fellowships to establishment-right figures who make the jump — a standing offer the right’s own institutions have nothing comparable to match. And the institutions that actually confer legitimacy in American life, the university system foremost among them, aren’t a contest at all. They’re close to a monopoly, and no PAC check rents a seat at that table. The imbalance in capacity to provide a soft landing for champions when they lose and election or appointed position in power, and to keep them on ice for the next opportunity for their movement to grab levers, is even greater.

Lever Two: Ideal and Ethic

If the money problem is really a coordination problem, the natural next thought is that shared conviction could substitute for it — a coalition doesn’t need matching bank accounts if it has matching principles. This runs into the oldest problem there is with democracy: faction. The right doesn’t have just one faction. It has several, each starting from a genuinely different first principle. The nationalists will be forever warring with the international free-trade bloc. The populists will forever war with the institutionalists, and so on.

A coalition that disagrees at the level of first principles cannot use “the ideal” as an enforcement mechanism. The wild swings of the GOP platform, and nearly achieved amendments, consistently show this truth. We are a long, long ways off from establishing a first-principles consensus. Surveys consistently show a smaller and smaller percentage of Biblical Christians in the culture, and even fewer steering policy, and that very simply means democratic mechanisms and relativistic ethics rule the day.

What’s Left: Fear and Taboo

That leaves the third lever, and it turns out to be the one actually suited to a coalition that can’t out-spend its opponent and can’t agree on first principles. Taboo doesn’t require big money, and it doesn’t require philosophical consensus. It requires only a bright line and a very public consequence for crossing it.

The mechanics are social, not financial. A taboo functions through common knowledge: it isn’t enough that a violation happened, or even that most people privately disapprove of it — the deterrent effect depends on everyone knowing that everyone else knows, knowing a response must follow, and a willingness to inflict that cost on the defector. This is why quiet disapproval never disciplines anyone and public, unmistakable consequence does. It converts private disapproval into a coordinated, predictable social fact, which is the only kind of fact a rational political actor actually updates on. It is the mechanism by which Cancel Culture overthrew our culture, but run in reverse.

This is a republican mechanism rather than a cynical one. The classical republican tradition never assumed elections alone would keep representatives faithful to those they represent; it assumed ongoing civic vigilance — citizens noticing and responding to betrayal between elections, not only at the ballot box every two or four years. A representative who correctly calculates that nothing meaningful happens to him between elections, regardless of what he does, has in the fullest sense stopped being accountable to anyone. Restoring that accountability without waiting for the next cycle isn’t a departure from republican principle. It’s a return to it.

There’s a philosophical objection worth preempting here, because it will be raised: doesn’t a coalition that punishes internal dissent become the very intolerance it claims to oppose? That should be answered simply that “tolerance is not a republican virtue.” Of course, republicanism implies limited and small government, but the smaller a government is to be the greater is the realm that must be policed by culture and social mechanisms.

Consider also the coalition’s actual objective, which isn’t merely to survive but to shift what’s culturally and politically thinkable — what Gramsci called hegemony, the capacity of a dominant order to make its own assumptions feel like common sense rather than one contestable position among many. The right cannot presently contest hegemony institution by institution; it doesn’t hold the universities, the credentialing bodies, or the major foundations, and it isn’t going to acquire them in a single election cycle. But hegemony has a precondition that’s easy to overlook: internal coherence. No coalition projects its assumptions outward as common sense while its own representatives remain free to defect from those assumptions whenever convenient. Enforcing the boundary internally, consistently and visibly, is the precondition for counter-hegemonic work, not a substitute for it — the fight over what the country considers thinkable starts with the fight over what your own side considers acceptable.

None of this requires universal buy-in to work, which is the last illusion worth dropping. Research on mass civil resistance movements — most notably Erica Chenoweth’s studies of nonviolent campaigns against entrenched regimes — has found that sustained, active participation from a strikingly small share of a population, often cited around 3.5%, has been sufficient to force major political change, far more reliably than passive majority sympathy ever was. The logic does transfer to internal control of organizations and movements: a small, committed, consistently active minority willing to act reliably will outweigh a much larger body of people who merely agree in private and do nothing. A taboo doesn’t need the whole right to enforce it. It just needs to be enough to produce pain points.

That points to how the mechanism should actually be built. It cannot be diffuse. “The party betrayed its principles” costs no one anything; a specific person losing an election, endorsements, or social standing is what changes future behavior, because incentives are personal even when the offense is collective. Nor can it try to catch everything at once. Self-dealing in one form or another is likely common enough that a movement trying to police all of it simultaneously will exhaust itself and deter nothing. You eat an elephant one bite at a time, not in one bite. The selection has to be strategic: prioritize the betrayals that cut against the base and the platform in the most direct, consequential way, and let the deterrent effect radiate outward from those examples rather than trying to manufacture consequence for every infraction everywhere at once. Not every violator needs to be personally taught – they have the capacity to learn from example.

Building this means giving up two comforting illusions: that conservative money will eventually catch up, and that conservative unity will eventually cohere. Neither is coming on any timeline that matters. What remains is a mechanism the right actually has the standing and the numbers to run, provided it’s willing to run it: identify the betrayals that matter, make the consequence personal, make it public, and make it reliable enough that the next representative considering the same move already knows how the story ends.

Abandon principled do-nothingism. Get comfortable being uncomfortable. Get familiar with confrontation. That’s the only way we reshape the apparatus into something capable of saving America.