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and telling your parents that you’re a vegan socialist pacifist now because the worldview they raised you with is outdated and mean and dumb.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.

They who form opinions concerning the manners and principles of the times, may be divided into three classes. Some will tell us, that the present age transcends all that have gone before it, in politeness, learning, and good sense ; will thank Providence (or their stars) that their lot of life has been cast in so glorious a period; and wonder how men could support existence amidst the ignorance and barbarism of former days. By others we are accounted a generation of triflers and profligates; sciolists in learning, hypocrites in virtue, and formalists in good-breeding; wise only when we follow the ancients, and foolish whenever we deviate from them. Sentiments so violent are generally wrong; and therefore I am disposed to adopt the notions of those who may be considered as forming an intermediate class; who, though not blind to the follies, are yet willing to acknowledge the virtues, both of past ages, and of the present. And surely, in every age, and in every man, there is something to praise, as well as something to blame.

-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.

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.

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.

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.

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.