What Techera means is that GOP voters can’t seem to get typical GOP politicians to use their positions to do what their voters want done, or what would be in the long term political strategic interests of those voters.

And that’s because the big donors and party bosses and fickle swing-voters don’t want those things to get done.

In solid districts, maybe miffed voters can be scarier to the local politician than donors and bosses via primary challenges (e.g., AOC booting out DNC establishment favorite Crowley, but turns out she had some big help too). In purple and increasingly blueing districts, forget it.

But let’s say by some miracle you got a crop of scared-straight GOP Senators with at least 41 votes and the filibuster holds, or a majority in either house.

Fortunately you don’t need elites – or even people as ‘elite’ as we currently have – for what Techera would want them to do. That is, for how it would have to actually play out. Which is what Al Gore called ‘political terrorism’, but involves no threats of violence, only voting.

But voting in such a way that it means certain social death, which is perhaps worse than actual death for many elites, and thus not something you could get an elite to ever do, anyway. Which is, of course, a big reason they don’t do what Techera wants now.

So you don’t need elites, but you do need martyrs, and shahid is no job for elites. If you’re going to have elites, you want them unknown, hidden away, sending secret orders to the martyrs to carry out. Otherwise they’ll get whacked.

For a shahid, you want a loyal and reliable true believer with either heroic disregard for all he has to lose, or better, nothing to lose, (i.e., a loser), who, like a drone, is just competent enough to get the vote-bomb to the target, and who will obey orders without question, willing to stand firm like an inflexible hold-out juror.

You would also like this person to not be corruptible or able to be bribed, especially with ‘strange new respect’ rehabilitation.

That’s a tough issue. Groups which use organized violence punish defections with personal violence. Social pressure is the comparative advantage of your opponent. In that domain, they have better carrots and bigger sticks.

The religious can bribe you with the afterlife, but the GOP doesn’t have an afterlife.

Well, not an actual afterlife. But there is perhaps “the life after”, that is, if by some miracle your team wins, then in “the life after” that win, you will not actually be a martyr, but an attempted martyr. That’s like the guy, even if he’s a loser, who throws himself on the dud grenade to save his buddies, not knowing it’s a dud. He’s still a hero, which is why they have that exact scene in the Captain America movie. And then loser becomes a huge winner.

So that’s the “Loser to Captain America” offer as incentive. You are asking people to throw themselves on grenades. No one knows if they are going to be duds or not, but probably not. Anyone who throws himself is still a martyr if you lose and it blows up, and hero if you win in the off-chance it doesn’t.

As it happens, this “successfully recruiting support from society’s losers by promising them higher status if you win” strategy is not altogether without historical precedent.

The trouble is, the GOP can’t promise “the life after”, and not even “the life between this election and the next one”. To really be able to deliver, one has to win so big that one doesn’t even have to worry about ‘the opposition’ anymore. That’s also not without historical precedent, but I don’t think it’s what Techera has in mind.

Republicans almost never follow through by using their electoral victories to practice politics.

Indeed. Does Mr. Techera even notice that he is confused? The essay provides no evidence in favor and much to the contrary.

This, then, is the first step—encouraging and compelling our own elites to act politically and publicly for our sake.

When the first step of your plans for a comeback in the culture war is to assume that you haven’t lost the culture war… Um. You lost the culture war. That means, almost by definition, that you have no power whatsoever to encourage or compel the victorious elites to do anything, or to shame them, except with their own weapons (accusations of racism) which they immediately deflect back at you.

Often there is nothing like a polemic to puncture someone’s smug assertions. In the hands of a certain type of scholarly it can have considerable scholarly merit.

The canard that “we represent the True Voice of the People ™” is obnoxious and empirically wrong when Sanders supporters say it, and it’s just as much so when Trumpists do.