Social Matter

For a little while now, my responsibilities in real life have been piling up in such a manner that my lavishly compensated position as a Social Matter columnist has had to take a back seat, which is regrettable, I know, to my four or five avid fans here. You know who you are. My plan was to try to coast through June or so, but, in the light of the recent crystallization of neoreaction, I’ve decided that now would be the best time to vacate that position.

My neoreactionary colleagues here have been very kind to allow my somewhat vanilla conservative commentary to populate these pages alongside their high theory of reaction. And I’m certainly grateful to have had the opportunity to share their audience of the disaffected Right. I also regard the formalization of their leadership, aims, etc. as a positive development, a move towards movement. Even this particular site is taking strides, promoting NRx heavyweight Henry Dampier to editor and recruiting NRx heavyweight Ryan Landry to Sunday column duties. All in all, then, I couldn’t be happier for everyone involved. But ultimately it’s not my scene, and I think it’s an opportune moment to stop playing the remora to its shark.

The bone that I’ve gnawed at most consistently over the last year here is that of the rhetoric of the Left, namely its deep and abiding mendacity. I’ve tried to point out in so many ways that its a gross error to take the critiques of social justice as good faith intellectual arguments that deserve to be met with good faith intellectual arguments of our own. I’ve tried to point out that the frame of these arguments itself—in which concepts like “racism” or “homophobia” are tools of a vast, white, cishetero conspiracy to maintain its cultural hegemony rather than simply largely irremediable and frequently adaptive features of human psychology—was formulated in such a way as to corrode the values of traditional America and Europe, to corrode the heritage of Christendom. And so even if the belief in the validity of these concepts is sincere (and not, as so often is the case, shameless rentseeking or convenient rationalization), the ideas themselves are poisonous and misguided. And I’ve tried to point out that a major failure of conservative discourse has been to accept these frames uncritically, which renders it impossible to stake out any truly conservative position.

What I’ve been less specific on, though, is what positive steps the Right ought to take. For the simple reason, of course, that I don’t really know. I know how bankrupt the thought and the criticisms of our cultural enemies are. What I don’t know is the ins and outs of a master plan to retake ground from them. I know what paths are dead ends. I don’t know the way forward.

It’s not really as hopeless as that sounds, though. The go-to protocol in quandaries such as this is to hearken to the counsel of your forebears, your elders, and your betters, to be faithful in the stewardship of what small parts of this uncertain universe God has entrusted to your care, and to patiently seek after the sort of wisdom needed to divine the correct path. All that and also to keep your powder dry. So that will be my plan for the foreseeable future. (Don’t worry. I’ll be sure to pass along any grand epiphanies I might have to Social Matter.) That’s how I’ll attempt to find my way forward, and I’ll be keeping an eye on neoreaction as it attempts to find its.

All you readers have my sincerest gratitude. God bless.