Intellectual Punditry is not the Answer
Conservatives intellectuals little to offer in the battle to save the west
YouTuber and documentarian Lauren Southern recently released a video detailing her misadventures on the dissident right. Before her one year sabbatical from political activism in 2020, Southern had the opportunity see the seamier side of the dissident right. I’m not going to divulge any of the details, nor attempt to determine the truth of every one of Southern’s claims. There is enough verisimilitude and documentation in Southern video to show that, at the very least, her claims are mostly true. Quite a few of the leading intellectuals, pundits, and celebrities on the so-called right are figures of questionable character, morals, and trustworthiness. While this hardly comes as a surprise to those of us familiar with the kind of individuals who tend to rise to the top of intellectual movements, it’s still disappointing. Why should the right-wing, with all its high ideals about character, tolerate intellectual leaders who often behave little better than grifters and sociopaths?
Broadly speaking, the answer to this question must be divided into two parts. The first part derives from the fact that these pundit/celebrities on the dissident right whom Southern talks about in her video are all intellectuals of one sort or another. The late historian Paul Johnson warned us to “beware” of intellectuals. They are mostly a bad lot. The typical intellectual spends the better part of his career devising rationalizations for various moral, cultural, and ideological agendas. Even when these agendas have good things in them, it is not entirely honest nor proper to rationalize them. Rationalization involves finding facile and meretricious reasons for believing in notions that correspond to our moral, social and aesthetic intuitions. A political and social movement with great and noble aspirations must be based on something more intellectual rigorous and honest than mere rationalization.
Neither the political right nor the more broader anti-left (i.e., conservatives, libertarians, and disaffected liberals) will ever gain much traction against the globalists and radical leftists who dominate the institutions of the West if their agitations remains primarily intellectual and rationalistic. The course of history is not determined by the petty wranglings of word merchants, but rather by the character types that tend to prevail within the ruling elite. If positions of authority in a given social order are dominated by weak and ignoble individuals overwhelmed by dysfunctional psychopathologies, that social order will eventually fail. The efforts of intellectuals are useless against the psychopathologies of elites.
So the fact that the pundits of the dissident right are primarily intellectual in their social function constitutes a very definite first strike against them. The second strike against them is found in those very processes of societal selection that choose which character types will likely assume dominance within the intellectual elites and which types inevitably will find themselves unceremoniously “deselected.” It turns out that there exist a great many more people eager to earn a living as an ideological commentators than any society, no matter how wealthy, can support. The top positions within the commentariat are therefore highly coveted and the competition for them is very fierce. This not only leads to back-biting and jealousy among the competitors, but it also favors the selection of highly competitive types—of people who, in terms of their fundamental personalities, will tend to be low in the character trait of agreeableness. Disagreeableness is a trait commonly found in criminals.
Last September I published an article entitled “Is Conservatism a Grift” in which I argued that the intellectual institutions within the conservative movement—e.g., the think tanks, the magazines, the websites—were guilty of wasting valuable resources. While hordes of conservative and the dissident right intellectuals have been busy in recent decades crafting rationalizations on behalf of various libertarian and right-wing ideological talking points, the left has been hard at work infiltrating and eventually capturing the nation’s most important political and cultural institutions. If either conservatism or the dissident right wish to make inroads on leftist power, they have to shift resources from intellectual punditry towards practical efforts aimed at purging leftists from American institutions. It’s not enough, for instance, to get critical race theory and transgender ideology removed from the schools. The ideas at the core of these movements, however objectionable they might be, aren’t the chief problem. No, the fact that nation’s schools are staffed by administrators and teachers who wish to impart such toxic ideas to the nation’s youth constitutes a far more dire threat: because as long as radical leftists remain in control of our schools, they’re going to continue pushing their horrid agendas at every opportunity. Right now, because of all the controversy, the radicals in control of our schools are on the defensive and may have no choice but to bow to public pressure. But in a few years, when the conservative backlash has spent all its energy, you can be sure these radicals will be busy at work surreptitiously reintroducing CRT and transgender ideology into the curriculum. Conservatives will find themselves back at square one facing yet another long uphill battle to prevent the radical left from propagandizing the nation’s children with their vicious and deadly nonsense.
In recent weeks it has been reported in Axios that former President Trump and his top allies have formulated a plan to purge potentially thousands of civil servants from the federal bureaucracy:
The heart of the plan is derived from an executive order known as “Schedule F,” developed and refined in secret over most of the second half of Trump’s term and launched 13 days before the 2020 election…. Personnel and action plans would be executed in the first 100 days of a second term starting on Jan. 20, 2025…. They intend to stack thousands of mid-level staff jobs. Well-funded groups are already developing lists of candidates selected often for their animus against the system — in line with Trump’s long-running obsession with draining “the swamp.” This includes building extensive databases of people vetted as being committed to Trump and his agenda. The preparations are far more advanced and ambitious than previously reported. What is happening now is an inversion of the slapdash and virtually non-existent infrastructure surrounding Trump ahead of his 2017 presidential transition. These groups are operating on multiple fronts: shaping policies, identifying top lieutenants, curating an alternative labor force of unprecedented scale, and preparing for legal challenges and defenses that might go before Trump-friendly judges, all the way to a 6-3 Supreme Court.
Now this is an approach that has a chance of working. As long as the globalists and the radical leftists remain entrenched in their institutions, political victories will remain short-lived and ephemeral and real and long lasting reform will continue to elude the anti-leftist majority. In short, we either drain the swamp or the left will succeed in its mission to destroy the West. The intellectuals and pundits of conservatism and the dissident right have little to contribute to the de-leftification of our nation’s institutions. If anything, they are just a distraction. The real business of saving the West involves, not ideological web spinning, but fighting for control of the West’s most vital institutions.
Greg Nyquist is author of The Psychopathology of the Radical Left and The Faux-Rationality of Ayn Rand.
Makes me think of Leon Trotsky in the 1930’s. He hated the stench of Stalin’s built-up bureaucracy.