Of Dog Catchers, School Boards, and Presidents Voting Thelema into Office

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

Grab a seat. Trust me. I fully admit my ADHD may have hit a ceiling with this one. I am really all over the place. And, for once, I’m not going to apologize for the semi-brain-dump feel of this offering. We’re just going to roll with it. I’ll do better next week. Maybe.

In the United States, this is Election Week. In over fifty years, I don’t think I’ve lived through a more contentious set of elections than I have these last two. I realize many say that each administration is “the devil” compared to the previous one, but the reality is most people just don’t like change.

Not A History Lesson

I remember having arguments with my dad over Bush, Jr. and how I thought Bush was a terrible human being—and, yes, that whole election with him and Gore was a mess. Turns out Bush, Jr. was a horrible president. In growing older, however, I’ve realized sometimes people can be awful at their jobs, hold radically different values, and still be decent human beings at the same time (or at least some of the time).¹I’m not going to lie and say that I don’t wonder if there aren’t some terrible people in the current race who lack any redeeming qualities under the politics, but (a) I’m going to keep moving on from here, and (b) this doesn’t negate my point in the next paragraph at all (See footnote 3). They are still siblings, spouses, parents, and partners beneath all the politics.

I chose to pick on Bush, Jr. for a reason. When I was younger, yet still a decently mature adult, he was my first “antichrist president.”²It probably should have been Reagan, but I was too young at that point to understand the reality of politics in any real sense past “my parents voted for some dude.” He bungled the 9/11 response, the attack on the United States through which I lived intimately, up close and personal. I have strong feelings about those events and the response that we, as a country, gave in return both domestic and foreign. However, Bush, Jr.—whatever one may feel about his political opinions, his responses to 9/11, or any other aspect of his administration—was (is!) just another Star in the company of Stars.³Stop and think about this for a moment. The Book of the Law doesn’t offer us exceptions for our personal prejudices. “Every man and every woman is a star.”—even those we don’t like, even those we don’t get along with, every bully, every murderer, and, despite the late J. Daniel Gunther’s angst, even every genocidal maniac. It’s a bitter pill sometimes.

But I look at the last decade and wonder how the political train ran off the rails. How did we go from two parties trying to push us down the road of democracy to the rise of fascism being palatable to the masses?

In 1960, Vice President Nixon stated in his debate against Senator John F. Kennedy, “our disagreement is not about the goals for America but only about the means to reach those goals.”⁴“CPD: September 26, 1960 Debate Transcript – The First Kennedy–Nixon Presidential Debate.” Commission on Presidential Debates. Accessed October 19, 2024. https://www.debates.org/voter-education/debate-transcripts/september-26-1960-debate-transcript/. There are plenty of other examples of politicians working to be outright kind and civil to each other in debates. They have a different vision of how to reach the goals they believe most Americans want for our country, but suddenly we ended up in this cesspool of extremism.

If it’s not about people—they’re all stars, right?⁵Afterthought: When I started this post, I thought this was where I was headed—more of a meditation on people than ideologies—and then it shifted gears, as you’ll see. I think it’s still important, ultimately, but doesn’t absolve people from the engagement of politics.—and it’s about politics, then what’s wrong with our politics? Where did this extremism come from?

Or maybe our country was always drowning in extremism. It just hadn’t come to the surface in quite this way. Or maybe it doesn’t matter if you study history or not, every generation or so, people are doomed to forget about how extremists of one flavor or another shit all over the place and caused a ruckus.

There have always been factions in politics, and quite often more than just two. We spend so much effort looking at it from a conservative-liberal divide and I’m not so sure that’s entirely accurate. I’m not here to give a history lesson—you can get that elsewhere—but I’ll only say I find it amusing that classical republicanism has little to do with what comes to mind when I think “Republican” today and was the liberal ideology of the era. For the most part, it appears for the longest time the major divisions were over “large government” versus “small government” and all that goes with those ideas.

The Progressive Movement or A Progressive Moment

Then we hit the so-called “Progressive Era.”

What I read through so many of these “angry young men” statements is this antagonism of the Progressives, of the Progressive Movement. But a careful look at history tells us there really hasn’t been an evolving progressive movement so much as a series of shifting progressive moments that have been capitalized upon by loosely connected ideological coalitions. This is what has made progressivism both successful and difficult.

Every progressive moment has a sense of paradoxical prudishness to it. Many see progressivism as attempting to enact liberal reforms, and these have benefits for society-at-large, certainly. Social, educational, political, and economic reform all tend to come from a progressive push. But it is always reactionary, and there is a purity culture underlying progressivism that sweeps up liberals and conservatives alike into the angry mob of retribution against the purity of progress itself. No one is safe from a progressive “Thou shalt not” statement. Ever. It doesn’t matter which side of the political fence you stand.

I find it interesting that every step forward isn’t so much about conservative vs liberal policies, but conservative andliberal policies vs progressive policies. However, for every set of progressive policies that appear to push society forward better in some manner, there is always a dark side to it. That’s what I find unusual and something I’d not noticed despite having seen all this material before.⁶Yes, I’m aware this list is fairly reductionist, but I hope you get the drift. It’s a quick and dirty overview, not a formal history lesson.

• A late–1800s and early–1900s progressive moment gave us women’s suffrage and first-wave feminism but at the cost of Black disenfranchisement. The movement of that moment also advocated for the compulsory sterilization of the “mentally unfit” (eugenics) and a global interventionist ideology.

• Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, a progressive moment offered the rise of (successful) social welfare and community work programs to alleviate the Great Depression and its residual effects, it also determined poverty to be a long-term opportunity for government intervention at an individual level rather than a crisis to be resolved at a social level. The progressive movement of the moment promoted anti-prostitution laws that did help (some) decrease crime but also gave rise to an increase in urban xenophobia and poverty-as-moral-judgment which ultimately backfired and increased crime.

• A progressive moment of the late 1950s and into the 1960s gave birth to the Civil Rights Era (and its movement) but also raced into the 1970s with the advent of apocalyptic evangelicalism that dumped our country straight into the arms of the Heritage Foundation.

The Heritage Foundation Moves In

Since the Heritage Foundation started in 1973, they have spent all their time working to change not just the dialogue between politicians but also the nature of the conversation itself. It took a while, but politics—and I can only really discuss my views of politics in the United States specifically—was fundamentally altered from two different visions of political emphasis for governing the United States seemingly aimed at a singular goal of overarching democratic success into a single focus and emphasis on an agenda of theocratic universalism and the undermining of either party by moving away from that democratic focus.⁷This is not to suggest no other fundamental differences between the Republican and Democratic Parties in the United States. There are, of course. However, there was a time when differences came down more to fiscal and social/moral differences that one could point to the separation in religious values between conservative and liberal voters rather than existential issues dividing voters today.

You can say the Democratic Party attempted to hold off most of the policies from the Heritage Foundation put into play by the Republican Party but did it? The Heritage Foundation did a very good job of staying in the shadows for half a century, yet the Democratic Party has spent its political capital avoiding building stable structures that “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”⁸“The Constitution of the United States: A Transcription.” National Archives. Last modified August 14, 2023. https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript.

But I don’t want to spend my time pounding on the parties here. We’re about to find out who our next president will be in the next couple of days. Half our country is holding its breath, the other half is raging. But what about moving forward? For the most part, there is so little talk about real politics in occulture. Most of it is head games and extremism. On one hand, we get Rune Soup and Scarlet Imprint doing their best impressions of sociopaths. On the other hand, we get political infants who want Liber Oz, anarcho-communism, some form of primitive socialism, Temporary Autonomous Zones, juvenile rebellion masquerading as anarchy, or anything else from the philosophical mold in their mental basements.

Yet, here’s the thing: I don’t think the Heritage Foundation has been fighting against the Democratic Party or “liberalism” as much as it has been fighting whatever happened to be the progressive moment while steadily working toward its moral agenda of dominating the socio-political field. I surmise the Republican Party has merely been a convenient vehicle for its agenda and if the Democratic Party were to suddenly find that same agenda serviceable, it would do just fine as well.

What Now?

What is the counterbalance to all of this? I’m going to be honest: I’m not sure, but I’m interested in trying to find out what works.⁹In 2025, I’m going to introduce you to wicked problems. And I’m going to tell you why I think Thelema gives us the framework for working with them while “magick”—as found on YouTube channels and Patreons—just runs the gullible around on hamster wheels. But also why I think the Heritage Foundation focused on wicked problems while writing reams upon reams of policy documents. I’m interested in how three fucking guys sat in a room fifty years ago and the organization they started that day changed the face of the United States Supreme Court, grabbed the ears of Republican and Democratic presidents alike, yanked the rights of half the country away overnight, and fundamentally changed the fabric of jurisprudence in this country. All of that in less than six decades.

And I can tell you it wasn’t because they sat around debating about what happened to the rugs at 65 Chaplet Row in 1923 or how to spell “magic(k)” or “(k)chaos” or which directions to circumambulate some halfassed plywood boxes in a temple space or worried about whether or not the HGA is a shoulder goblin or a “presence” or just another fancy name for your soul.

They put all that trite shit aside and got fucking busy.

No, Really. Now What?

Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not one of those strange nationalists who think the United States is the one, true light of the world. We had enough of those in O.T.O. to sink the ship into irrelevance. But I think those “founding fathers” had some good ideas, and I don’t think just because they got some things wrong or they had some messed up values sitting alongside these good ideas we should just toss out what they got right (or mostly right).

As much as this will sound almost too simple, this isn’t rocket science. It’s about justice, domestic tranquility, common defense, general welfare, and liberty for now, and for the future of citizens. And I’m going to see these through the lens of Thelema—because, of course, I am.

Look at these as rays of the Law: light, life, love, liberty.

• Justice is the light by which we shine our way forward: “Every man and every woman is a star.” That’s the metaphysical basis of our Way, and justice, true justice, is the foundation of any good society. And that starts with the recognition of the individual and their place in society with rights and privileges as individuals.

• Domestic tranquility and common defense go hand-in-hand here as life and the protection of that life, both civil and political.

• The general welfare is the expression of love as individuals in a community, locally and nationally. I don’t think this has enough discussion, both in our general body politic or in our political discussions within occulture.

• Liberty is, well, liberty and the expression and protection of that liberty, now and for posterity.

We can turn the discussion of each of these as complicated as we want. And I don’t think these particular points above are the end of the discussion either. I merely threw them out here because the discussion has to start somewhere. In the end, we may toss them out and end up with something entirely different. Grand! Let’s do it! As long as we’re doing something!

We can debate the endless nuances of rights and privileges. We can talk about the advantages and disadvantages of various types of governance until the cows come home. Outside of running away to colonize another land—something that isn’t likely to happen in 2024 or any decade after, and has a whole Pandora’s Box of problems to go with that plan—open revolution is also not a likely solution with less than 5,000 people calling themselves Thelemites on the planet.

Come On, Seriously, Now What?

I keep coming back to the mind-boggling success of the Heritage Foundation. In 1973, it started with a $250,000 contribution.¹⁰I don’t have 250 grand to toss down, but if I ever do—who’s with me? Are you willing to step up? By the early 1980s, less than a decade later, their contributions had only grown to $1mil. Even in 2022, the Heritage Foundation was only bringing in a little over $100mil in revenue. They are one of the smallest “think tanks” around. Yet they have such a huge influence because they had a plan and they stuck to it slowly and steadily.

What does that verse in the Book of the Law say? “Lurk! Withdraw! Upon them! this is the Law of the Battle of Conquest” [AL 3.0a-d]. I think there is some wisdom here.

But what did they really do this past year that pissed people off? They wrote a 1,000-page document on what they would change in government.

That’s it.¹¹Though it’s the ninth time they’ve done it, I should add, since 1981.