John Victor is one of zeroth positionism’s best communicators. During his John Mark days as a video creator he demonstrated this by taking the concepts of natural law in Curt Doolittle’s highly technical formulation and translating them into plain English, often applying them to current events. This approach created broad appeal even among normieconservatives. Unfortunately, attempting to leverage this appeal by doing a joint IRL event with the “Boogaloo Boys” created a contretemps for which many on the dissident right excessively blamed John. This combined with the outcome of the 2020 election caused him to go dark for a couple of years. At the time he did so it was uncertain as to whether he would ever resurface. To the great delight of his fans he has done so recently with a fresh screen name and a new book: How To Fix America’s Political System – Wisdom for Government System Design from History, Science, and the Bible.
His mention of the Bible in the subtitle minimizes ambiguity as to who the target reader is. John grew up as an evangelical Christian and Christian conservatives were John’s target viewers in his John Mark days. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that this mention is not just to grab his target reader’s attention, but refers to extensive chapter-and-verse quotation of the Bible in support of his thesis: That the law of the Bible is natural law, and therefore should be made the law of the land as enforced by a new, re-engineered constitutional government. Non-Christian conservatives and libertarians will still enjoy the book’s sections on the Bible, however, because in these sections he extracts our supreme precept of secular ethics: Don’t steal. This is the eighth of the Ten Commandments. A great insight John makes is that the four commandments surrounding the eighth are also prohibitions against theft on what he considers to be various forms of property. Adultery, for instance, is theft of the sanctity of marriage. Christian conservatives especially will delight in Victor’s call to make Christianity America’s official religion, while avoiding the church socialism of theocracy. He justifies this Biblicly by drawing attention to the fact that the Ten Commandments lead with stating the nation of Israel’s proper relationship with God. The book is also sprinkled with illuminating explanations of what literal translations of certain passages mean, such as how the Hebrew word translated as “honor” in “honor your father and mother” means “pay attention to the outcome of their choices”. This reveals the Fifth Commandment to be the Biblical source of Chesterton’s Fence: You ought not always make the same choices as your ancestors, but before you deviate make sure you understand those choices.
Victor pays special attention to the choices of conservatives’ most celebrated ancestors: America’s Founding Fathers. While appropriately deferential, Victor is vigorous in taking the Founders to task for the Enlightenment errors that caused their constitution to fall short in achieving its intended purpose. He balances this with commendation for their implementation of what the Enlightenment did get right, as well as of the Fathers who were more cognizant of the Enlightenment’s errors. The meat of Victor’s book is a set of proposed reforms to the Constitution derived directly from natural law. The core problem of the original constitution is not only that it did not ban leftism (the ideology of theft) outright, but it also did not have proper enforcement mechanisms to preserve itself. The original constitution contains no provisions for the punishment of officials who violate it. The new fortified constitution he describes contains multiple such enforcement layers, going far beyond the failed internal “checks and balances” of the current constitution. Framing this discussion is a lucid, powerful, and insightful paradigm Victor introduces: Stopping Power vs Starting Power. Stopping power refers to the power to stop certain behaviors. Of crucial importance is the reform that recognizes that such power should not be at all limited to the government in enforcing natural law among the people, but should be unlimited among the people themselves in giving them the power to bring any government official who violates natural law to court subject to harsh punishment. Starting Power, however, which is the ability to start new ventures like a foreign expedition, is extremely dangerous in the hands of government and therefore should be extremely limited.
An Enlightenment belief that Victor obliterates is that putting Starting Power in the hands of the people through a legislature is desirable, because the great majority of the people are terrible at political initiatives for reasons that Victor lays out thoroughly. If government is to have any Starting Power at all, it should reside exclusively in the hands of the executive branch, a branch run by an executive with direct operational control over it like a CEO does with a corporation. A key change Victor proposes is to make the CEO long-term rather than short-term. If this sounds monarchical it’s because it is. The starting power entrusted to the king under this scheme is limited to a short list of enumerated functions however, and wise to the republican sensibilities of American conservatives, Victor refers to this executive not as a king but as a “Long-term CEO” throughout the book (the only time he uses the word king outside of Biblical citation, in fact, is where he recommends against labeling the executive as a king in the fortified constitution). Restoring long-term executive rule, in combination with lavish compensation and harsh punishment for corruption, greatly realigns the incentives of the executive with the nation’s long-term objective interests.
The science that Victor cites draws heavily on the Moral Foundations framework popularized by Jonathan Haidt. Victor simplifies the framework by classifying the population into two personality types: Type R, who are those who, due to being low in agreeableness and higher in systematizing cognition, are able to think critically enough to preserve and grow the nation’s capital, vs Type E, those who are high in agreeableness and higher in empathizing cognition, whose political tendency is is to consume capital. Victor masterfully flips what appears to be a blackpill in the fact that Type Es greatly outnumber Type Rs, into a whitepill, which is that for Type Rs to rule Type Es is the historical norm and is easily achievable again when Type Rs today cast off the Enlightenment falsehood that majority opinion matters.
The book isn’t perfect; libertarians will have some quibbles with what Victor believes is the ideal purview of government, especially at the Federal level. In particular they will object to his characterization of the Federal Reserve system as private, when in reality it is a state-dominated partnership with nominally private banks. Even the private elements of the system are not those that would be found on a free and fair market in banking. Victor recommends that a monopoly on money production be given to the treasury only, presenting seemingly false alternatives between government banks and private banks controlling money production. For most of history, however, money has been produced independently of both, and even within the age of banking we can retain the benefits of free market money production while prohibiting the practice of banks of counterfeiting receipts of money so produced (so-called “fractional reserve banking”). Such prohibition, both in the form of voluntary self-regulation on the part of banks as well as statute, has sound historical precedent. This counts very little against the book, however, because Victor’s target audience is decidedly not the majority of libertarians, and to his credit on this matter, Victor does at least state at the end that the constitution will require the money produced by the treasury to be sound. Another anomaly in the book is that despite John’s distillation of natural law as prohibition on all forms of theft, and his defining of the conservative instinct as “anti-theft” (accurately in my opinion), he retains enshrinement of taxation in the fortified constitution, albeit with the improvement of an explicit cap on the percentage of national output to be taxed. Taxation is regarded by many as a form of theft, however, including many conservatives among his target readers, not just anarcho-capitalist libertarians, and the arguments for treating taxation this way are formidable. The discussion of taxation in the book would benefit greatly from either addressing this objection, or from recommending no Federal taxation at all, as in the Articles of Confederation. In his proposed revision to the First Amendment Victor incorrectly states that it’s illegal to shout “fire!” in a crowded theater; this was a hypothetical example given in the 1919 Schenk Supreme Court decision that upheld restriction on distribution of anti-war literature. This decision was overturned in Brandenburg vs Ohio in 1968, however. This error does not at all vitiate the overall case Victor makes for banning public advocacy of leftism, however, and the case he makes is quite sound.
The flaws are minor, however; it is the monumentally important ideas that Victor conveys, in combination with the book’s highly conversational, accessible style, that make this work shine with sheer brilliance. The book’s core reforms that it proposes are so important, in fact that it is not an understatement to say that the fate of Western civilization itself hinges upon whether the right-wing in America rises up and implements at least a close approximation of them. This is why I unreservedly recommend this book as the most important political book any conservative alive today will ever read.
