With regards to domestic policy (an area where I've got at least some evidence) I'm more skeptical. But then again, I take it the Cathedral does skim off the domestic pot, so maybe the effects cannot be observed domestically.

That's actually something I hadn't thought of. I guess my semi-conscious explanation for that was American "rugged individualism" but in retrospect that doesn't make half as much sense.

I'm also not sure I understand the whole "the past was in many ways better" notion - I can't think of many metrics by which this is true.

There are obvious areas of improvement, but I'm hard pressed to think of one which the Nazis or the Hapsburgs wouldn't have provided if they had modern technology. It's also not easy for me to speculate on the course of technological innovation in a monarchist or fascist world; that's more of a job for authors like Harry Turtledove. So in most of the obvious cases like life expectancy I think we can call it a wash.

In other places, we can see problems which only exist as a result of progressive ideology. The state of Africa, South America and much of Asia can be laid entirely at the feet of naive decolonization and parasitic clientism; even accounting for technology, much of the world's peoples likely led better lives as subjects of a foreign crown than they do under their "independent" nations. The mess we've made of the domestic economy, not to mention the world one, shouldn't be too much of a leap to ascribe to mismanagement. And even domestically, "liberated" women and "tolerated" minorities are consistently polled as being decreasingly happy over time, almost as if our progressive policies of equality were thrusting them into arenas they were fundamentally not fit to compete in.

The current dysgenic population shift is more ambiguous; I'd like to think that a Reactionary government could preserve or increase the value of our national stock, but there are also purely technological factors like the ease of birth control which are less amenable to regulation. Also ambiguous is Moldbug's democratic crime wave theory; his numbers show an order-of-magnitude increase in the murder rate over the last few hundred years, but the 18th century wasn't known for meticulous record keeping so that might be illusory. Yvain has some interesting posts calling the whole "Victorians were healthier!" meme into question at SlateStarCodex, so that theory has some holes also.

But to be honest I'm not that attached to the idea; it's interesting and more plausible than not, but I wouldn't be shocked if it was wrong either.

1) Is this different from other forms of corrupt or inefficient charity? What is specific to the Left? Could this not apply to any group who were after a cause which was not related to their own direct profit?

2) Can it be fixed by requiring more transparency and data collection to ensure that interventions are, in fact, effective? (To force the benefit to the Cathedral to be tied to how well its actions produce the results it claims to produce)...basically, can we try to hold Cthulhu accountable?

1. It is the prototype of corrupt charity, and that is why it is specific to the Left. A Reactionary government is not a charity; it is a business, and like any good business it never confuses its employees and customers with its shareholders (although compensation in store discounts or non-voting stock options is perfectly acceptable). When you try to run a government like a charity you are asking for trouble.
2. That's actually a simple fix, if one which is not particularly likely to be proposed. Anoint the Dean of the Harvard Law School as the Supreme Justice of the American Empire and give him power of appointment over the Federal Bureaucracy, name the Editor of the NY Times the Pontifex Maximus of the Church of Progress and have a synod to lay out the canon of responsible journalism, and let Jesse Jackson and his ilk reign as suzerain princes of their tribes. They wouldn't go Reactionary overnight, we might still have a Great Leap Forwards to deal with, but if Deng could pull China out of Maoism in one generation I'd give us even money on being a properly governed state within the decade.

After all, revolting against Cthulhu altogether will increase entropy, and for reasons obvious to both leftists and reactionaries that is undesirable.

Freezing a liquid (or, God forbid, depositing a gas) is hard work, and the entropy does end up increasing globally, but you can do it. I think our present situation is the result of a reversible reaction, and if it is we just need the right catalysts or raw power to push it back to completion in the other direction. At least that's my hope anyway.

Edit: Wow, I really just mixed up sublimation and deposition... must be bedtime.