I am once again asking you to read this passage from "The White Generals"

Please

I first mentioned Richard Luckett’s book “The White Generals” in my (brilliant) essay Revolutionaries vs. Counterrevolutionaries. The book is the best and most readable high level overview of the Russian Civil War. In light of the hair-pulling from certain corners of the Right (most of whom opposed Trump in the primary) over Trump’s statement declaring that abortion was no longer a federal issue and expressing moderate views on abortion, this passage from the book’s bitter ending came to mind:

In 1917 nothing could have been further from the Bolshevik intentions than the creation of a standing army. Yet by 1920 they had 5 million men under arms. This, again, is an indication of the importance of the war on the Soviet outlook. The Soviet State as we know it was, in the phrase so often employed by Russian writers, ‘forged’ in the Civil War.

The war had no such unifying effect on the Whites. Only Wrangel learnt from it, and he came too late; the other White leaders merely demonstrated their failure to understand and, lacking understanding, they proved unable to remedy it. Their failure is, to an extent, understandable: the business of revolutionaries is revolution, but the business of counter-revolutionaries is seldom counter-revolution. Revolutionaries are born into their condition. Counter-revolutionaries have it thrust upon them.

It does not follow from this that counter-revolution is doomed, or that the Russian counter-revolution, in particular, was doomed. To accept this is to accept a deterministic view of history for which there can be no warrant in any account of the events. The Whites failed as much as a result of their military mistakes as anything else, and these military mistakes were frequently the product of stupidity and carelessness. The Reds made mistakes also: in exclusively military matters they made far more than the Whites. Their greater degree of political organization permitted them more latitude in this respect; in contrast, the Whites sacrificed political consolidation for the lure of immediate military gains, and the proceeded to throw away the advantages won in the field.

Given the White failure to organise politically, their achievements are all the more remarkable. It may be that the answer to their political problem was the one which Lenin gave them, by his insistence that the only alternative to the Communist dictatorship was the return of the Tsarist regime. It was a belief that he persisted in until the end of his life, and an argument that he used with great effect for the purposes of propaganda. After the Civil War, when the statement had come to be regarded of axiomatic, he used it with devastating results: the revolt at Kronstadt in 1921 - which was, in fact, a munity by men who could all be loosely classed as Communists - was against the party leadership. Therefore, Lenin argued, it must be a White Guardist plot and Tsarist in its aims. It was nothing of the sort, as Lenin knew full well, but what he had said served its purpose.

Had the Whites unilaterally declared themselves for a monarchist regime before it was too late for the declaration to be of use, they would probably have lost some of their adherents. Their gains would not, at first, have been tangible, but in the long run they could have been very considerable. The speculation is valueless except insofar as it leads us to consider why they did not make such a declaration. The answer is implicit in the Whites’ refusal to pre-empt the expression of popular opinion through the Constituent Assembly. This decision did the Whites no good, but it reveals an aspect of the movement that the prejudices of fifty years have always served to obscure. It was this scrupulousness that made the open Greater Russian objectives of the Whites so severe a disability; the Soviets, pursuing the same aim covertly, did not allow the good repute of their cause to be sublimated by the implication of such a policy. The practice continues.

I think many people still don’t really understand the stakes of what’s going on right now in America. If they did, you’d probably see a little more impulse control. The internet has had a lot of positive effects but the worst one, at least for political organizing, is incentivizing public sniping, and shitstirring, and drama. The public microscope and impulse to criticize make it increasingly difficult to get anything big off the ground, and you need something big to change the world for the better.

You can always find a fault with someone if you don’t like them. You can come up with a compelling reason to oppose most decisions. And yet, despite whatever people may theorize about this or that topic, everyone who is vaguely rightwing still needs Trump to win in November. No one (except Leftists who want to kill you and destroy the country) benefits from attacking Trump. There is no principled reason for any conservative to oppose him. Things are really bad now and they have the potential to get much worse quickly. It’s important now to coalesce around what we have, and what we have is Trump.

I’ve certainly been part of the problem before, but now, even if I’m upset about something someone else who’s nominally a friendly said or did, I really try to keep it to myself. There are always going to be exceptions to this, of course, but in general we need a lot less criticism and a lot more action. Oftentimes people feel the impulse to criticize because they can’t build anything of their own and critique is the only thing they could ever bring to the table. That’s not very helpful after a certain point. We reached that point a long time ago.

I might be preaching to the choir here, but I really do think more discipline is required, especially from big people like the ones who are complaining about Trump making a politically necessary decision. As society gets dumber and less mature, you see more mere reaction and more flailing. A far more enlightened attitude to adopt, and I might do a full essay on this phenomenon at some point, is MAGA Fatalism. As Trump always says: “We’ll see what happens.”