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Political community
Alternative to political legitimacy.

In Manifest destiny, we showed how survival depends on one's ability to leverage one's selective advantage. What can we offer to the political scene?

We must question the assumptions of the paradigm. Questioning the legitimacy of a political order implies that we have a say in it. We do not question the legitimacy of a cloud, for instance, whether we approve it or not. We accept it as a fact. If we have a say in it, then its power partially comes from us, and its justification requires a benefit for us (in a voluntary exchange, according to its praxeological definition, both sides must expect to benefit).

Therefore, in the liberal order, all political relationships are transactional. Loyalty is impossible. Hierarchy is based on the current distribution of the spoils.

Legitimacy happens when the order is uncontested. But this definition does not imply a causal relation. In a similar way, instead of saying that people stay together when they are loyal, we may also say that people are loyal when they stay together.

Here is the key: when people are stuck together, they must behave civically as they cannot escape the feedback loop. We therefore propose that the healthy basis of a political order is not legitimacy but community. It may be relevant to point out the etymology of politics, Polis, the City. That is, a common living space.

Questioning the legitimacy of the political order is already an error if the error is that subjects can arbitrarily depose the nominal sovereign. One needs political liberty only if the political order is dysfunctional. If dysfunction arises from political liberty, we must then engineer a functional order without it.

Each political party proposes a different distribution of spoils in a liberal order. By espousing community instead of legitimacy, what is our selective advantage ? What can we propose that they are incapable of? Safety. Locally-invested people. High-trust, tightly-knit communities. The feeling of belonging in our land, among our people.