The High-Low Alliance

The horror, the horror

This is the third (overdue - sorry) part of a series introducing key concepts in political theory, with the goal of giving Jewish fundamentalists the vocabulary to talk intelligently about a Jewish state.

The first two parts of this series looked at concepts introduced by by academics from the Italian Realist, or ‘Elitist’, school of political theory, the most important representatives of empirical political theory. In this installment, we will look at another rule of politics which was derived through similar methods, but from a quite different source: Bertrand de Jouvenel’s rule of centralisation through a High-Low alliance against the middle of society.

Bertrand de Jouvenel, as well as meriting an (((Early Life))) check, was a prolific writer,. who, in between an impressive career in womanising, managed to have a hand in most of the important Right-Wing political movements of the 20th century, and not a few of the Left-Wing ones too. His political though is the subject of significant controversy on the internet far-Right, and the most ambitious work it has produced to date is an attempt to completely reconstruct political theory from the ground up using de Jouvenel as the foundation. Because de Jouvenel was at various points a monarchist, a socialist, a fascist, and a melancholy liberal, his intellectual legacy will always be contestable, and it’s not my purpose here to intervene in that debate. Rather, I will try to briefly describe his most important insight and some of its implications.

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The High-Low alliance is actually very simple to describe, but once understood it significantly changes your understanding of a wide variety of social phenomena. It is not intuitive because the world we live in is - necessarily, as we shall see - a product of its operation, and the interests of the powerful have at each stage been served by disguising its operation.

In any society, as we have seen, supreme power is held by a small proportion of the population. However, it is never possible, for simple logistical reasons, for this power to actually be exercised by the members of this oligarchy. The oligarchy must, therefore, rule through a larger group of intermediaries who exercise its commands on a day to day basis throughout society. Tax collectors, policeman, judges, administrators and the like are not really part of the true ruling class, but they are also not exactly part of the ruled class either. Indeed, ordinarily speaking, it is is the lower-level functionary that is in a relation of power and submission with the broad masses of the governed. They form an inevitable ‘Middle’ in between the ‘High’ who rule, and the ‘Low’ who are ruled.

The default assumption is that the High and the Middle are in an alliance against the Low, in which the former uses the latter to extract resources from the workers/peasants in exchange for sharing some of these resources with them. Indeed, for society to function on an ongoing basis, something like this relationship must operate.

However, there is an inherent problem with this relationship. The rulers of the society are at any given time trying to increase the amount of power and resources at their disposal. Even if they are not personally motivated by power and money, which is rare, they are locked in conflicts with the ruling classes of other polities, and have no choice but to maximise the amount of resources they have to devote to this conflict.

One way a regime can expand is to incorporate new territory, but since the world has been inhabited for quite some time, this itself almost always requires competition with other regimes. The ruling power, therefore, has no choice but to turn inward and draw more of the resources of the nation to itself. When it does so, it almost inevitably finds that the opposition to the centralisation power comes not from the bottom of society, but the Middle, whose interests are directly threatened by any attempt from the center to change the existing state of affairs to its own advantage.

Because the need to centralise power is constant, the tension between the High and Middle stratums is also constant, with the former always on the look out for ways to take more direct control, and the latter jealously guarding its privileges and searching for ways to render the ruling power as impotent as possible. In this structural conflict both sides will develop different ideologies to justify their interests, which, over time, they will come to believe in with more sincerity, even fanaticism, as the generation of those in on the joke shuffles off to the grave.

In this High-Middle conflict, however, those at the top have a trump card: call in the Low. In all societies, the ranks of the ruled massively outnumber both the ruling elite and the intermediary class put together, but their lack of organisation prevents them from leveraging this numerical superiority. What the ruling elite can do, however, is directly provide this organisation itself, directing the lower orders to attack those immediately above them. Whenever this is done successfully, the Middle of society is powerless to resist, indeed they are typically lucky to escape with their skin in tact. With this trump card played, the ruling power centre can then reconfigure social arrangements in a way that suits it better (e.g. to take one common example among many, by replacing hereditary local officials, with salaried bureaucrats who can be fired at will). Thus is forged the High-Low alliance.

The High-Low alliance is another societal tendency that has such strong incentives to happen that it can be practically considered a societal law. This does not mean it operates evenly at all times. One common historical exception is that the Middle will make its own appeal to the lower orders, creating a Middle-Low alliance against the ruling elite. However, since a society cannot actually do without a ruling power, a successful Middle-Low alliance will inevitably result in a section of the Middle forming a new ruling elite, reconstituting the High-Low alliance in a newly vigorous form. The best example of this is the French Revolution.

By contrast, the High-Low alliance forms a stable, self-reinforcing pattern that can, and does, endure for centuries on end, given an extra injection of fuel whenever the geopolitical situation requires. If the ruling elite in any given country is unable, either out of ideological scruple, or simple incompetence, to mobilise the lower orders to vanquish internal opposition then there are always others willing to take their place. The Russian empire, repeatedly humiliated in conflict, plagued by rebellion, and in a state of outright collapse was reconstituted by the one of the most fanatical group of egalitarians history has ever seen into a global colossus whose grip extended from Berlin to Hanoi.

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I have mentioned above some historical examples of the High-Low alliance in action, but once you have this concept available you will start to see it everywhere in History, because it is everywhere in history. Every Single Time you find an example of an oppressed group being liberated, or of class privileges being levelled, you will find country where power is being centralised. Every Single Time you stop to look into a popular movement you will find ‘curious’ and ‘paradoxical’ ties with those at the very highest places of society.

History viewed through this lens quickly takes on a intensely depressing air. States will compete with each other by promoting internal social revolution, with no apparent end, ever. Moreover, at each iteration of the process, the central power shrouds it in ever thicker layers of lies, creating the illusion of spontaneous and grassroots social movements while hiding its very existence behind a vast maze of fake constitutional structures whose function is to launder the true dynamics of social change. The ‘neoabsolutist’ sect that grew out of the fracture of classical NrX proposes solving the problem by giving the central power what it wants: an unlimited ability to centralise power unimpeded so as to dissuade it from indulging in the dysfunctional, increasingly psychotic, forms of centralisation under camouflage. The terrible truth, however, is that what the central power wants is what it already has: the ability to generate new oppressed classes at will and then expand its powers by liberating them, all the while training attention on powerless figureheads.

When De Juvenal first formulated the theory, he did so at a time when it looked like aggressive competition between centralising states with radically egalitarian ideologies* was sending millions of men to die in combat, and legitimating savage, unrestrained violence against soldier and civilian alike. He worried, not unreasonably, that the result would be the end of civilization and a reversion to primitive barbarity. That didn’t happen because, in short, one combatant in the death match won, but even global dominance, for as long as it lasts, cannot stop the High-Low dynamic manifesting itself in ways that are less violent, but increasingly anti-human and often just plain crazy, because no power center can ever be secure enough to abandon it.

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As usual, I will close with a few scattered about observations about the specific relevance of this concept for Jewish statecraft.

The first is that Jewish history is no exception to the principle of the ubiquity of the High-Low alliance as a fundamental structural feature of society. The prophets articulate an agenda consisting of two consistent planks: (1) the urgent necessity to centralise all sacrificial worship in the temple in Jerusalem and to destroy all other sacred sites and (2) attacking the wealthy and their oppression of the lower orders. Jewish kings are praised or condemned based upon how enthusiastically they implemented this agenda, which, as a matter of simple observation, constituted a centralising programme in which the downtrodden were conscripted to remove intermediate sites of power. It is often said that Judaism is uniquely characterised relative to other religions by the revelation of Divine Will through history, and this is somewhat true, but this necessarily means that God is revealed through historical processes that actually happen rather than fictional ones favoured by liberal Jewish writers.

So, also, in exile, we find repeated examples of Jews taking part in a High-Low alliance as friends of the central power. At first sight, it seems to defy explanation that Daniel and Nehemya, survivors of a practically exterminated border-state are hanging out at the royal court, until one understands that the Babylonian and then Persian courts faced constant, intractable opposition from the multi-racial aristocratic classes of their empires, which they mitigated by, among other things, promoting weaker clients at the periphery. Similarly, in the second exile, time and time again, monarchs have employed Jews as a way of circumventing social orders resistant to centralisation, most notably using them to introduce monetary economies that made centralised resource extraction infinitely easier. It’s not always pretty, but it’s how we got our temple back, and it will be part of how we get our temple back again too.

None of this obviates the very real need in a future Jewish state to, at least, tame the High-Low alliance and stop it from manifesting itself in anti-social and anti-Jewish ways. My ideas on this are not presently very well developed, so I will leave it there for now.

* Racial nationalism is internally egalitarian