Why I’m Not a Neoreactionary
Written by John Glanton Posted in Uncategorized
I was going to kick off this post with all manner of unkind caricatures of my fellow travellers on the Right. Was going to call them all sorts of names: D&D nerds, Quixotes, hipsters, crypto-libertarians. The works. But then I decided trafficking in such obvious hyperboles for the shock value of it was beneath my dignity as a contributor to an august and venerable publication like Social Matter. And besides, even though I’m relatively new to the scene and I haven’t exactly made it through the canon, the neoreactionaries I’ve interacted with are to a man good guys. It turns out that we see eye-to-eye on a lot of issues, which was surprising. I’m a stubborn, contrarian Southern Baptist, and I’m not used to finding myself in agreement of any sort with folks from the smart set.
Even without name-calling and cheapshots, though, there are some points where the neoreactionaries and I diverge. And one I’ve just alluded to. One point is that neoreaction isn’t exactly friendly towards us Protestants, unrepentant ultra-Calvinists that we are. In fact, they’ve arrayed all sorts of historical and theological arguments against us, some pretty convincing, that we are implicated in this giant egalitarian mess that is modern progressive governance. These arguments occasionally needle me, but I say to myself, “Fair enough.” I don’t look back on that Unpleasantness in the 16th century with any sort of relish myself. I wish we’d all stayed under the same roof—ideally one steepled gracefully over vaulted ceilings and stained glass windows.
A second, related point of divergence is more serious, though. I think the neoreactionary critique has a tendency to overrate the importance of the history of lofty ideas and to underrate the importance of changing conditions on the ground. You see this in their condemnations of Protestantism, as well as their much more pointed antipathy to democracy as a political theory. I mean I hate contemporary American governance as much as the next guy. I think our country is a bloated, bureaucratic, centrally-administered monstrosity, one that a surfeit of corn-syrup-fed, TV-raised headcases stumble around in, tragically enfranchised. But I don’t see its current manifestation as a straight shot by any means from our “founding principles,” even admitting that the fathers probably let Jefferson squeeze more French radicalism into the Declaration of Independence that they ought to have.
A lot has happened since 1776, and I don’t think all, or even most, of what has happened in America has been driven by ideology of any sort. Rather its been driven by a whole host of more mundane processes. For instance, there has been the gradual urbanization of America. And there has been a massive explosion in population as well. These trends weren’t caused by our shared worldview, but they certainly caused our shared worldviews to change. There has been the steady march of technology, as well, and the nationwide mobility that such technology supports, and the erosion of community life that naturally follows such mobility. (Much of what we call “atomization” is a direct consequence of a nationally mobile middle class whose daughters and sons move hither and yon across the country for good portions of their adult lives, chasing education and then employment.) Contraception would be another example of a technological innovation with tremendous downstream effects. As would digital data storage. Furthermore, there have been wars both at home and abroad that have turned our national fortunes in unpredictable ways. There is also economic history to be interrogated, even though I’m not particularly qualified to do so. But needless to say the banking and financial interests that now exert such influence over our politicians got there in spite of the man on the street, not because of his warm affections. Even landmark cultural shifts that happened through established political channels, such as the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, seem to be more the work of political elites than popular sentiment. To blame these sorts of things on suffrage seems to me to be accusing the tail of wagging the dog.
We could go on. All the aforegoing seem to make a paltry list. I’m sure you could brainstorm on your own some rumblings in this sublunary realm that have produced ramifications as significant as those engendered by the creeping egalitarianism inherent in the truths we hold to be “self-evident,” by the moral fanaticism ascribed to our Puritanical roots. That’s the point. The point is that etiology on this scale is incredibly complex. When you’re talking about an arc as gigantic as the rise and fall of a civilization, you’re necessarily talking about a boggling mass of factors, trends, events. And, while, yes, ideas matter, I have a hard time believing they matter that much. I have a hard time believing they’ve steered us steadily to where we are today. That they’re the most important entities to blame.
And this leads me to what is perhaps my only legitimate complaint against neoreaction proper, the one imprecation I’d hurl at my otherwise agreeable (and totally unsuspecting) colleagues. My complaint is that neoreaction is at bottom an intellectual critique, whereas I’m interested in a concrete resistance. I can see the appeal in understanding the precise social mechanisms that made Western civilization great, but I would prefer to devote more energy to halting the dispossession of flesh-and-blood Westerners in their own countries. I can see the appeal in puzzling out with exactitude the pathologies that afflict the minds of our elite, but I would prefer to puzzle out ways to run them out of town. And we can amuse ourselves with the metaphysical fineries then.
This is, of course, why I continue to style myself as a conservative rather than a reactionary or a neoreactionary or, hell, a Southern traditionalist. I know that conservatism in the mainstream is an embarrassment and conservatism in the abstract is more of an attitude towards novelty than a coherent and standalone philosophy. It’s not an ideological move but a tactical one. As democratic as this sounds, I believe the means to resist an overreaching government are out there, distributed among the people: different types of expertise, organizational skills, existing networks of affiliation, armaments if necessary, manpower. And I think a majority of those people have always and probably will always consider themselves conservatives, as a sort of demonym. So I don’t see the point in renouncing their tribal name. The gains in philosophical accuracy aren’t worth the loss of personal relatability. We need these people in our camp. We need to be in theirs.
Maybe these ramblings might seem like an odd entry for an otherwise Rotherham-dominated week. But in a way this post is Rotherham-inspired. I don’t know for certain of course, but it seems to me that we’re reaching new levels of criminal malfeasance by the powers that be in Europe and America. If we’re not being thrown to the wolves outright, we are at least being to left to our own devices against them. And while I think that much of the critiques from our quarter are compelling and cogent and necessary, I think it would be advisable to start making more practical steps towards bracing for impact as well.
One possible path for expansion here: “neoreactionary” is an adjective used with the word “conservative.”
In other words, a sub-type. Conservative is a broad philosophy based on picking our choices by what has worked in the past; the opposite is liberalism, or picking our choices by what people desire, feel and conjecture.
A neoreactionary is two things: a conservative who realizes that to fulfill conservatism, he must go very far back in the chain of events that brought us to the present and revoke 1789 in France itself; and second, that an engineering approach can be taken toward government instead of trying to “socially engineer” its citizens, which is the liberal approach.
The sooner neoreactionaries and conservatives mutually realize this, the sooner we get your action: consensus among the natural leaders in society, a tipping point and critical mass, and a resulting sea change as the demographic becomes powerful. Democracy or no, that’s how power shifts happen.
OK, so, here are the problems I see in this.
1) You say “intellectual critique” like that’s a bad thing. But force without intellectual direction is just random brutality. Force in service of what? Directed against who, precisely? With what aims? Where do we even start, if not with intellectual critique? Aren’t we putting the cart before the horse here?
2) Yes, I understand that a deep thread of republicanism runs through American identity, of both the yankee and dixie variety. But if you believe that you can keep that and not watch your society degenerate even further, then I think you need to up your dosage of the red pill. Sorry, I just don’t believe in the ability of the southern ubermensch to keep a fundamentally flawed system from gradually imploding. Let the south go, and they’d head toward disaster more slowly, to be sure – kind of like how American conservatives hang on to the tail of progressivism providing some token drag – but they’ll just end up in the same place eventually. Put the same forces in play, and sooner or later you’ll get the same result.
3) Speaking of which – democracy, capitalism, protestantism, urbanization, individualism and atomization, a technologically-based society, mass media, secularism, feminism, gay rights, sexual libertinism, social leftism, the welfare state – these are all interconnected forces that fall under the umbrella of Whigism and aren’t as easily separated as you make them out to be. It’s tempting to think that we could stop the entropy forever by getting rid of one or two of them and keeping the rest, but unfortunately, that’s too good to be true. At best, you could maybe keep dramatically scaled-back versions of a couple of them, held in check by serious hard power (not “social disapproval” soft power). Anything else is a pipe dream.
4) Yes, ideas do matter that much. Want to see the difference that ideas make? Look at North and South Korea.
It’s easy to point the finger either at other people (yankees) or at seemingly-impersonal forces (technology, urbanization) as the cause of the problems you face. But don’t forget that even technology and urbanization are ideas, and don’t forget that you’re virtually genetically identical to those yankees who you so dislike (just as the North and South Koreans are virtually genetically identical) – the only real difference between you and them is the memetic baggage you carry with you.
Civilizations, cultures – these are just accretions of ideas. A culture is no more than a set of methods for solving the problems of being in human form; tested, proven, and passed down from one generation to the next. This is why something being a “social construct” isn’t a bad thing so far as I am concerned. Wanna know what isn’t a social construct? Living in a hole in the ground, scrounging for berries, running from hyenas, and dying of dysentery before you’re 30. Everything else, from building huts and gathering in groups for protection to the Labor Theory of Value, the works of G. K. Chesterton, and the art of yosakoi dancing, are social constructs, are culture – are ideas.
Even the South, as you present it, is a set of ideas. If it’s not, then it’s just a place where people scrounge for berries.
So again, without ideas, force is just pointless bloodletting. Which ideas shall it be, then?
Of course intellectual critique can be a bad thing, especially if it’s done in the face of impending existential threat. And of course “random brutality” is to be avoided. But I more or less know who my enemies are, and a lot of folks around me are waking up to them as well. So I’m for spending less time pondering game theory and more time creating game plans. But obviously you’re welcome to do what suits your tastes.
As for the rest, we’ll just have to disagree. I think a lot of the things you attribute to Whigism or Leftism or what have you are more parsimoniously explained by fairly mundane processes and phenomena. And I think that intellectual types tend to overrate the importance of whatever their pet issues happen to be out of a kind of professional confirmation bias. But if you want to see all human society, politics, activity, etc. as downstream of our philosophies, that’s no skin off my back. My purpose in writing this is the same as the purpose in most my writing, to try to stake out positions for those people who are already sympathetic to them but maybe haven’t heard them articulated. It’s not primarily to engage folks committed to different positions and convert them.
After all, that’s the exact sort of ideological back and forth I think has, well… strictly limited utility.
But wait a second – without critique, how do we even know that we are facing an existential threat? I remind you that the left thinks that what’s happening is great – that it’s all “progress” on the eventual road to a perfected future – so by no means is it simply self-evident that things are going badly. If it was, then a high percentage of people wouldn’t believe the exact opposite, which they do.
Also, it’s all very well and good to say that we should be oiling our guns right now, but without critique, how do we know who we ought to be shooting at? This is no small matter at a time when most “conservatives” think that this country’s problems can be solved by shooting at distant Muslims, or worse, at Russians. You say that you know who your enemies are, and maybe you do, but even if that’s the case, you could still be committing the third of LaVey’s Nine Satanic Sins – Solipsism. In short, you could be using yourself as a yardstick by which to judge most people, and making the mistake of assuming that this will work well because everyone is more or less as smart and as attuned as you are. I assure you, this is a bad assumption. Most people need to be pointed in a direction before they start blasting away with their six-guns. And at this point, unless we want our direction to involve a bunch of Glenn Beck-listening yahoos locking and loading in order to solve the country’s problems by trying to shoot Putin for Muh Izrull, we need critique – badly.
With no philosophy to guide him, the man with a gun is just another James Holmes or Elliot Rodger. With bad philosophy to guide him, the man with a gun is just another Mao Tse-tung or Pol Pot. You need philosophy, and good philosophy at that.
> But needless to say the banking and financial interests that now exert such influence over our politicians got there in spite of the man on the street, not because of his warm affections. E
I thought the NRx view was that “the Cathedral” of Ivy League pseudo-Christians manufactures public opinion. So the men on the street are controlled by banking and financial interests. i don’t think NRx believes that the public came up with these egalitarian beliefs on their own.
>I’m interested in a concrete resistance
Me too. NRx agrees with me intellectually, but my pragmatic side is left wanting a list of action items. My current plan:
1. encourage people to use and exploit welfare systems so that they fall out of favor
2. vote for libertarian/tea party-leaning republicans
3. donate to Project Prevention and Planned Parenthood (for the Eugenic effect)
4. avoid giving money to illegal immigrants (restaurants or home-cleaning services)
I wish there was something more substantial to do.
There is something very substantial you can do. Go to church. And stick around after mass. And read C.S. Lewis and Chesterton (it doesn’t matter what specific book, read the mystery stories for all I care).
Concrete resistance will be more effective if you know where and when to pour the concrete. I think neoreaction is helping with that.
I do have a bone to pick with this:
The point is that etiology on this scale is incredibly complex. When you’re talking about an arc as gigantic as the rise and fall of a civilization, you’re necessarily talking about a boggling mass of factors, trends, events. And, while, yes, ideas matter, I have a hard time believing they matter that much. I have a hard time believing they’ve steered us steadily to where we are today. That they’re the most important entities to blame.
Yes. Yes. Things are contingent. So you’d expect over a very large number of battles for power for a suitably large amount of time, to see a bit of randomness in the outcomes. And you don’t. You see a strong bias toward the left winning. For at least 400 years. Only a tiny bias is necessary to produce big results over a large amount of time.
Also it is not so much that ideas matter (yes, of course they matter), but that social status matters. And progressivism from its beginnings has been an ideology that confers social status for the wrong reasons. It’s not the content of the ideas so much as it is that you win status by pushing (often intentionally) the boundaries of ideas. Radicalism, for its own sake, is rewarded; maintenance of the status quo is, irresepective of its truth value, punished.
I can’t speak one way or another about the track record of the left over the past four hundred years. But what I do know is that the attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs associated with contemporary leftism are subject to all sorts of explanations, only some of which involve ideological developments over time. Sexual license, lack of faith, general anomie, I think these are simply part of the civilizational cycle. They’re the sort of phenomena that flower in times of massive prosperity and stability wherein the whole spectrum of selective pressures have been eased. Virtue has a hard time coexisting with plenty. The rich man has a hard time getting to heaven. These are truths, constants that come into effect regardless of where the philosophical winds of the time happen to be blowing.
And oftentimes as well, the devolution in ideology follows rather than precedes civilizationial catastrophe. There is a sense in which feminism was an aggressive agenda with rational agents behind it. But there is also a sense in which it was an opportunistic infection made possible by the hitherto unimaginable leisure that 20th century American life afforded to women. Is this a victory of the left? Sure. That’s one way to view it. But it’s also something much more banal.
A more definite example is the fat acceptance movement. It’s a favorite target of people on our side (myself included) because it illustrates so perfectly the madness of modern egalitarianism and social justice. It’s pure progressivism. But it’s hard to pin the obesity epidemic that preceded fat acceptance on progressivism. The etiology of that particular epidemic is pretty complex. And obesity’s attendant leftist ideology only sprung up after it had already become epidemic. Fat acceptance symbolizes a sort of surrender to it, yes, but it’s not responsible for it.
This is one way in which evo-psych or paleo derived critiques of modernity actually run counter to neoreactionary ones. As you yourself are wont to point out, humans are not biologically or psychologically well-prepared for modernity and so they struggle in all sorts of ways that look like (and often are, in fact) degeneracy. But this degeneracy doesn’t flow from any particular moral or intellectual failure. It’s simply the vicissitudes of time, chance, and nature acting upon feckless people caught up in them. I think y’all call that the judgment of Gnon.
Anyway, you and I are probably in pretty close agreement on all this. We both agree that progressivism, viewed as a sort of mind virus, is a model with explanatory power for any number of our current ills. I just think it has less than you give it credit for, and you think it has more than I do.
John, there is so much in this post that one could really write several books to give a proper response to it. But several points:
1) Like you, I too would like to see more action on the ground but the problem is, as other commentators have noted, is how exactly to act? When you look at the phenomenon of Conservatism at a deeper level you begin to realise that many conservatives are not actually conservatives at all, rather, they are simply slower moving radicals. Getting these guys to act is actually supporting the Left wing cause.
2)What exactly is conservatism? I think this is perhaps the most important question to answer at this moment. With all due respect, temperamental conservatism is rather “content -lite” and draws no real delineation between it and progressiveness. Can you, for example, support gay marriage and still be called a conservative? If not, why not? Part of the reason that the left has marched on relentlessly is because when conservatives have been put to the test they’ve not been able to really articulate any convincing and logical argument against it. The majority of conservatives have no principals just delaying tactics.
3)I think a critique of Protestantism should be not confused with a critique of individual protestants. In my opinion there is a lot wrong with Protestantism but I will also say that there are a quite a few things right with it. Whilst I’m Catholic, I realise that my own Church has several serious intellectual and institutional failings, which in my opinion, have inadvertently facilitated the rise of the Left. I think both Protestant and Catholic failings need to be thrashed out further in my opinion.
4) I think you raise an important point about the role of technology as a driver of social change. I think that this factor has been very poorly understood amongst traditional conservatives. Some things are here with us to stay and turning back is not an option, not because I don’t want to turn back, but because a reversion to agrarianism, for instance, would result in widespread famine, death and destruction of society. Scaling is not always linear, and I don’t think agrarian social policy morphs well onto the modern industrial society. Even the Amish, with their outward “agrarian traditionalism” are the beneficiaries of modern medicines, which in turn are a product of industrial society.
Part of the rise of the Left, in my opinion, is that it was better able to provide “solutions” to the problems of mass industrialisation and population explosion that occurred at the end of the 19th C. It gained traction because the Right simply had no answers to the novel living arrangements that came about.
Thinking may be boring but the problem is that there’s not been much thinking in conservatism for a long time.
All fair points, John. I suspect that one of the major flaws of neoreaction, and the root of its weakness on concrete action, is that while it has a fairly concrete idea of what it is against, but it has only an abstract notion of what it is for. Sure we want to tear down Progressivism, but for whose sake will we take up our torches and pitchforks? Who will fund us in our endeavors? Who will be in power after we’ve run the bums out? To these questions, though each neoreactionary may have his own ideas, neoreaction itself has offered no answer.
Also, neoreaction seems to be constitutionally opposed to the kind of populism and rabble rousing necessary for political action in the present context. Elitist do not appeal to non-elites very well. A serious challenge for neorection is to find a way for it to be relevant and effective in the era of democratic politics.
1. You are criticising an explicitly anti-political style of analysis for not being a practical plan of action. That’s like wanting a bird, being given a cat, then criticising the cat because it can’t fly.
2. Your closing sentence is poorly explained (why would being effective in a democratic context be a priority for an anti-democratic movement?)
3. If there is no attempt to rein in, or otherwise counter, female hypergamy, there can be no solution to universalism. Women are half of the population, and they have an explicitly counter-civilisation sociosexual strategy, and they have co-opted both progressivism and conservatism to further it.
Another problem with neoreaction is that there is no single and unified notion of what it is even supposed to be. For some it is merely a gaggle of guys gabbing about how awful the world is and hoping that will fix everything; for others it involves both a critique of existing society and a serious attempt to remedy its ills. Some are enthralled with speeches and majority decision; others appreciate the value of iron and blood.
Technological advances and all sorts of other non-ideological things made modernity possible, but modernity became lethal when it combined with bad ideas.
Right now there are grown men in the West who look and act like children and spend all their spare time and money on a) alcohol b) drugs c) video games d) other media e) whores.
But this is not inevitable. Lots of grown men in the West still act like men. Many of them have beards. Many of them still follow that old-timey religion. Many of them join armies. Many of them fish and farm like their grandfathers did. Many of them still honor their ancestors. Some of them even volunteer to fight in places like Ukraine. Some of them set up training camps to teach others self-defense and history. Some of even the most pampered, wealthy, holier-than-thou sons of Whigs are tearing apart the Whig worldview with righteous fury and trying to reestablish the old order.
Ideas are important. If we had good ideas, we could coexist with modernity healthily.
If you’re looking for a “concrete” set of actions, there’s a simple recourse to the Church Fathers, especially St. Paul, who told us to set up alternate, parallel social structures with high barriers to entry, like the early Church. People respond to the incentives of their particular social institutions, not to the dominant ones, (ie. they are concerned with status among the people they interact with regularly, not that of strangers) so we know this works. Dean Kelley’s “Why Conservative Churches are Growing” is a good study of this effect, that not only are “strict doctrine” churches more successful at maintaining membership, but they are more attractive to potential converts than liberal “lax doctrine” churches. I spoke with David Campbell (co-author of “American Grace,” the dominant liberal tome on religion in America) a few years back about this, and he dismissed Kelley as an “economist,” but he failed himself to address the rapid collapse of Episcopal, Methodist, Unitarian, and UCoC groups. His explanation was that this was a “complicated effect.”
This is where most mainstream religious conservatives get it wrong: you cannot save the reprobates. Those who “curse the Holy Spirit in their hearts” are beyond reason, beyond understanding, and beyond hope of anything except divine intervention. Barriers to entry must be high, or you retain those who dilute the doctrines, the freeloaders, and the lukewarm Christians and you lose the people who matter, the faithful.
Hence my solution is the ultimate Protestant one: a hyper-fractionalized congregationalism. The Enemy cannot use its favored tactic, namely infiltrating the leadership, and any corruption is limited to one congregation at a time. Congregationalism makes it more possible for a few people of exceptional merit to exercise the most power within their spheres. This is the theology of resistance: small cells of fighters who are too numerous and too dissociate to be stamped out by force. It requires vigilance on the part of church leaders to maintain the strictness of their doctrine, but in the end, people are drawn to congregations that have high “authenticity factors”, to quote Kelley, and the high barriers ensure that those who stay are dedicated, rather than the low-commitment parishioners of the liberal faiths.
Kelley also describes a Roman Catholic version of this theory, which he calls, “ecclesiolae in ecclesia,” but you Catholics can do that reading yourselves.
As Sam Francis (another Protestant Southern Traditionalist) wrote, “I place more emphasis on the concrete forces of elites, organization, and psychic and social forces such as class and regional and ethnic identity than on formal intellectual abstractions and their ‘logical’ extrapolations as the determining forces of history. Ideas do have consequences, but some ideas have more consequences than others, and which consequences ensue from which ideas is settled not simply because some ideas serve human interests and emotions through their attachment to drives for political, economic, and social power, while other ideas do not.”
John, I understand your criticisms of Neoreaction. Intellectual debate is great fun and deconstructing the pathologies of the Left has value. However, it does occasionally strike me as fiddling while Rome burns. As a Southerner like you, I’d also like to see more about how we are going to retire that team instead of just analyzing all the game film. I’m also a cradle Episcopalian who ended up Southern Baptist (and may very well end up Anglican), so I find the Catholic extremism annoying. Why a traditionalist would want to support a church that is trying to catch up with the postmodernist weltanschauung just as quick as it can makes no sense to me either.
Despite all of this, I’m flabbergasted why you persist in calling yourself a “conservative”. Being a conservative implies that there is something worth preserving. You have two left wing parties running things. The main difference between them is one is pushing the latest and greatest Marxist tomfoolery while the other is the party of our ancestral enemies and pushes a milder Marxism of the previous generation. Our ancestors bequeathed to us a limited republic which has morphed into a “democracy” and is well along the transition into a ochlocracy and into a despotism. Each generation another layer of churches is peeled off the onion by the postmodernist paradigm. Our families are being destroyed by the Cathedral’s feminism, homosexuality, and mass immigration. Our very Southern identity is being destroyed by a vicious program of cultural genocide with only a thin line of heritage groups fighting a rearguard action.
In short sir, what exactly do you propose we conserve? Traditionalism and Reaction are the only ways forward. Maybe Southern Reaction won’t exactly look and smell just like its’ yankee cousin. We are a separate people and have always marched to our own drummer. But we also have a tie to blood and soil that few others in this “proposition nation” could understand, never mind match.
I reject the notion there is nothing worth conserving. There is always something worth conserving, and if you cannot see it, you’re thinking too big.
Complaints about a lack of specific political agenda miss the mark entirely. Neoreaction is self-consciously not a reactionary movement. It hopes to inspire reactionary movements; crucially ones that will actually work. It is an absolutely unquestionable neoreactionary principle that democratic politics is controlled by the elite; short of controlling that elite there is no solution in democratic politics. Period.
Now neoreactionaries are working on gaining control of that elite, more specifically creating a competing elite pole, that is cooler, wiser, attached to reality with both feet, and (MOST CRUCIALLY) not gameable by Holier Than Thou.
As for specific (theoretically achievable) policy recommendations, Neoreaction is replete with them: deeply regressive child tax credits; constriction of the franchise; secession; true election; separation of education and state; end fiat currency; roll back 1964 CRA; implement rational self-interested immigration policy. If you don’t think Neoreaction has recommendations, you haven’t been paying attention; if you think any of those recommendations are achievable through normal democratic politics you also haven’t been paying attention.
I am reminded of something James Beattie, a 18th century philosopher of common sense once remarked about people who make grand historical analysis:
-Essays: On the Nature and Immutability of Truth, in Opposition to Sophistry and Scepticism.
So, while we judge that there is an ongoing civilisational decline in the West in general, but it is nothing unremarkable in the total history of mankind in so far as decay and renewal are part of the natural process of human societies and nations. And even in the midst of a general decline one can still note many good features still remaining in a society without attributing everything to some new Fall of mankind in history apart from the first Fall at Eden.
I’ll reiterate one point that I could’ve been clearer on originally:
I don’t really call myself a conservative out of ideological conviction. I think most the critiques of conservatism mentioned above are accurate ones. Mainstream conservatism is just progressivism a couple decades behind, yes. Mainstream conservatism has for while now lacked major intellectual endeavor, yes. It’s been co-opted by neocons. And the conservatives on the ground have inherited a nasty suite of either progressive or grossly commercial assumptions and frames from their turncoat and moron “thought leaders.” All true.
(Moreover, I think that actual conservatism is more an attitude towards novelty and human limits than a coherent ideology to begin with. But that’s neither here nor there.)
None of this has much to do with why I call myself a conservative. I call myself a conservative because that’s how the folks I grew up around identify themselves. My family, a lot of my friends back home, the people I went to church with. We’re conservatives.
Coming home off the internet with some new label like reactionary or traditionalist or what have you (even though both I and they have a natural affinity for the ideas these words stand in for) resembles nothing, to me, so much as coming home from college and telling your parents that you’re a vegan socialist pacifist now because the worldview they raised you with is outdated and mean and dumb. I’ve got all the hippest perspectives, mom and dad. Let me school you on them!
Ultimately, I think that I have a little bit to offer the people around me. I can help articulate positions that I think are in their group interest, and I can demonstrate how a lot of progressive assumptions have crept into their rhetoric and rendered it poisonous to those group interests. But that’s a fairly limited skill set. The bulk of their coming efforts, if they come at all, will come from them—through existing networks, hierarchies, organizations, personalities, etc. I want to be a part of those efforts, so I’m going to fall in line with all those people, under their banner, rather than to try to induce them to rally to mine.
This all strikes me as the common sense approach.
Just call yourself a Reactionary then. Reaction’s legacy goes back to De Maistre, not Moldbug. I myself am an Orthodox extremist in the vein of Codreanu.
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