Mitch McConnell
Article
Mitch McConnell is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between September 17, 2021 and December 07, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “gets thwarted by checks/balances/Mitch McConnell”; “Even Mitch McConnell has admitted he has only “a 50-50 proposition” of winning”; “the Mitch McConnells of the world”. It most often appears alongside Twitter, Ukraine, democracy.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: September 17, 2021
- Last seen: December 07, 2023
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Twitter (3 shared issues)
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- Ukraine (3 shared issues)
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- democracy (2 shared issues)
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- facebook (2 shared issues)
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- Hillary Clinton (2 shared issues)
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- Russia (2 shared issues)
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- Substack (2 shared issues)
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- Trump (2 shared issues)
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- 6 insurrection (1 shared issues)
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- 1700s (1 shared issues)
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- 1950s (1 shared issues)
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- 2024 elections (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Gurri talks a lot about Center and Border, but barely even mentions Left and Right. Once you reintroduce these, you have a solution to nihilism. The Left can come up with a laundry list of High Modernist plans that they think would solve all their problems, and the Right can do the same. Then one or the other takes control of government, gets thwarted by checks/balances/Mitch McConnell, and nothing happens. No American Democrat was forced to conclude that just because Obama couldn't solve all their problems, the promise of High Modernism was a lie. They just concluded that Obama could have solved all their problems, but the damn Republicans filibustered the bill. Likewise, the Republicans can imagine that Donald Trump would have made America great again if the media and elites and Deep State hadn't been blocking him at every turn. Donald Trump himself tells them this is true!
Polls this year look bad for Senate Republicans. Pollsters’ simulations give them a 22% chance (Economist), 34% chance (538), or 37% chance (RaceToTheWH) of taking power. Even Mitch McConnell has admitted he has only “a 50-50 proposition” of winning.
The problem in 2013 was that conservatism was a movement for maximally uncool old people - the Mitch McConnells of the world. Lots of young people were tired of wokeness and looking for somewhere to run, but they needed some sub-form of conservatism that could credibly claim to be younger and edgier than McConnell-ism.
Neoreaction hoped to become that sub-form. It asserted weird crazy things that Mitch McConnell would never go along with, like that we should be ruled by a king. Sometimes it flirted with racism or theocracy, which were scandalous. Nobody knew what to make of it.