In recent decades we have seen the rise of the so-called dissident right, an ideological movement made up of various right-wing factions, including neo-reactionaries, paleo-conservatives, the alt-right, the alt-lite, and various strands and flavors of white nationalism. What holds this movement together, if anything, is a contempt for mainstream conservatism, which the dissident right tends to regard as a kind of controlled opposition under the sway of the left. This dissident right could be regarded as the only genuine right-wing intellectual movement on the current political scene. Mainstream conservatism, which is conventionally seen as part of the political right, is only so in relative terms (i.e., it seems right-wing because it is to the right of progressive liberalism, which is rather far to the left). In absolute terms mainstream conservatism could be seen as a kind of centrism—or even as a mild, almost harmless form of leftism.
The political scientist Louis Hartz argued in his classic book The Liberal Tradition in America that “American political development occurs within the context of an enduring, underlying Lockean liberal consensus, which has shaped and narrowed the landscape of possibilities for U.S. political thought and behavior.” What this means in more ordinary language is that Lockean “liberalism” has been (until the last few decades) the dominant political ideology on the American scene—so dominant, in fact, that there has been little if any room for the vigorous growth of other traditions, such as those of reaction and radicalism. Now this Lockean liberalism that has dominated America comes in two forms: the first goes under the name of conservatism—which is little more than a rather cautious, one might even say timid, form of liberalism; while the second, sometimes referred to as liberalism proper, is a more restless, progressive form of the liberal ideology.
Hartz introduced his theory way back in 1955. Since then radicalism (i.e., “true” progressivism: which is to say, radical leftism, socialism, “anti-racism,” communism, etc.) has, through its ever increasing influence within American cultural and political institutions, become ever more powerful on the political and cultural scene. While it still may not be regarded as “mainstream” (because its principle tenets remain deeply unpopular), that hardly seems to matter. Large numbers of so-called “liberals,” either out of fear or secret sympathy, fall over themselves to do the deranged biddings of these radicals, which makes the radicals seem like they have most of the power.
So the political landscape looks something like the following. We still have the liberalism that Hartz spoke about, but it’s mostly confined to what is called “conservatism.” Conservatives are also sometimes called “right-wingers,” sometimes even far right-wingers, but this only makes sense in purely relative terms—in absolute terms, it’s mostly nonsense. For example, one of the country’s leading conservative intellectuals, Ben Shapiro, identifies as a classical liberal. Although Shapiro also identifies as an orthodox jew, his religious convictions, although genuinely “conservative” in the deeper sense of the term, have little influence on his politics and therefore count for very little. Shapiro is clearly a conservative liberal, and as such it would be ridiculous to regard him as a right-winger. The fact is, there exists no viable right-wing tradition in America, if by viable we mean having a significant effect on the political direction of the country. The three main political factions in America are conservative liberals, progressive liberals, and progressive radicals. The entire political establishment of America is, in absolute terms, on the center or on the left.
A genuine right-winger is a traditionalist and an anti-progressive and dedicated to preserving hierarchical, one might even say “aristocratic” institutions. Here’s the rub: in the absence of such hierarchical, “aristocratic” institutions, it is difficult to maintain a viable right-wing ideological movement. The power of such a movement requires an institutional foundation, such as a hereditary aristocracy, or a powerful and deeply conservative military, or religious, academic, or bureaucratic institutions firmly in the control of right-wing stalwarts. Without such a base for projecting power within society, right-wing intellectuals simply don’t matter either culturally or politically.
The radical left does not require a strong institutional base to become a powerful force in society, because even if it finds itself institutionally homeless, it always has at its disposal the ability to take over institutions through infiltration. This is a unique skill set that thrives within the kind of psychology most prominent among those attracted to left-wing ideological narratives. Because left-wingers tend to be high in openness and low in conscientiousness, these character traits correlate to those very skills of chicanery necessary to successfully take over liberal (i.e., non-radical) institutions. Since people on the left tend to be destitute of notions of honor and personal integrity, they have little difficulty pretending to be something they are not—and that is precisely what is needed to gain a foothold in institutions that are hostile to what these leftist radicals ultimately stand for. Moreover, leftists are remarkably tenacious when it comes to agitating for their various onslaughts against the established order and will let nothing short of violence stop them in achieving their political goals. They worm their way onto hiring boards and human resource divisions of bureaucracies and corporations and use their ill-gained influence over hiring processes to bring scores of leftist comrades into the institutions they wish to control. Thus within a liberal society where access to institutions is open to nearly everyone, selection mechanisms can develop which favor the advancement of progressive radicals over conservatives.
Let us imagine an individual who wishes to advance the cause of a genuine, uncompromising right-wing ideological faction. How is he to go about it? Attempts to promulgate right-wing ideology through mere persuasion will get him nowhere. If anything, voicing dissident right convictions only serves to get one canceled from ordinary society. Nor can right-wing activists hope to imitate the left by attempting a Gramscian “long march through the institutions”? Psychologically, right-wingers don’t have the necessary hard-wiring for such behavior. They have no great facility for pretending to be what they aren’t. Nor do they wish to engage in the petty office politics required to take over an institution through chicanery. This is why the right-wing, in order to achieve a position of power and influence within a society, must already have at its disposal an aristocratic institutional base, since infiltration via duplicity is just not an option for psychological that tends to be drawn to right-wing narratives. And so if aristocratic institutions don’t already exist, then there is no choice but to try to create them—but this is largely impossible. Right-wing institutions cannot necessarily be created from scratch. On the contrary, they must form organically (i.e., without anyone’s conscious intention), which can take decades, if not centuries. Since no such institutions currently exist in the West, a genuinely ideological right-wing movement is doomed to impotence and disfavor.
Why then does anyone ever join the dissident right? Psychological temperament plays a role, but it also stems, at least in part, with mounting frustrations over existing options. The dissident right, particularly in its more neoreactionary manifestations, is largely made up of those who have given up on mainstream conservatism and other forms of classical liberalism (such as libertarianism) because they have found it incapable of preventing the “leftification” of the West. The Youtuber “Academic Agent” (AA) presents an pertinent case in point. Only a few years ago, AA was a rather dry and efficient promulgator of classical liberalism and free market economics. But his increasing frustration with the conservative establishment’s inability to provide effective resistance to the left, in combination with a rather traumatic doxxing and subsequent dismissal from his position as a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Surrey in the Summer of 2020, has pushed him well into the ranks of the dissident right, where he has quickly established himself as one of the leading sages within the movement. In his new guise as one of the dissident right’s most important scholars he can often come off as cynical and defeatist. His disappointment with Boris Johnson, Trump, and other so-called right-wing or conservative figures has led him to conclude that stopping the left is nearly hopeless. In his anguish he has decided that the United States, with its neo-liberal/progressive elite, is the core of the problem, and that as long as America remains the world’s leading power, there’s little hope for the rest of the world. Western civilization has unfortunately entered a particularly dark and brutal winter season, but one day in a distant future spring will return with the hope for the emergence of a new, more vibrant, right-wing polity.
His readings (or perhaps misreadings?) of Burnham, Carl Schmidt, Julius Evola, Thomas Carlyle, Paul Gottfried, and Curtis Yarvin (among others) have turned AA against, not merely the worst aspects of the enlightenment and “liberal democracy,” but against these things in their totality. What is called “liberal democracy” is not only a “lie,” but is clearly, from AA’s point of view, the worst system ever. In a livestream debate with YouTuber Carl Benjamin (aka “Sargon of Akkad”), AA and his sidekick streamers suggested that China’s totalitarian political system might in some sense be less objectionable than liberal democracy because at least the CCP exhibits the virtue of transparency—i.e., you know who’s in charge and exactly what will happen if you challenge the state’s authority. Academic Agent and his cohorts also embrace the notion of the “uniparty,” which contends that all the major political parties in a liberal democratic society are basically the same. This is a hypothesis which neo-reactionary sage Curtis Yarvin has done much to promote. Yarvin argues, for instance, that there exists no significant differences between Democratic and Republican rule in the U.S.—that the ultimate outcome is for all intents and purposes nearly identical. This is of course an exaggeration—as we clearly see from the Biden Presidency, which has reversed and/or botched Trump’s policies on energy, the southern border, the Afghan withdrawal and the Nord stream pipeline to disastrous effect. Another common heresy within the dissident right is a tendency to regard Putin’s Russia, regardless of its obvious drawbacks, as nonetheless a preferable type of social order to what prevails in the democratic West. While almost everyone throughout the free world, whether on the right or left, deplores Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, there remain alt-right and neo-reactionary hardliners who continue to sympathize with the Russian side of the conflict. Academic Agent himself, although denying endorsement of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, can’t help admiring Putin’s “realism,” which he contrasts with the stark unrealism of the west and its horrid and shameful “boomer truth regime.”
Preferring Putin’s Russia or Xi Jinping’s China to the hegemony of the neo-liberal plutocracy shows a wanton lack of judgment. As bad as globalist neo-liberalism might be, it's not as bad as the totalitarianism and sheer thuggery of the autocracies of the Sino-Russian axis. China and Russia are huge rogue states bent on inflicting their criminality and brutality on the rest of the world—as is clearly seen in Ukraine. The fact that the neo-liberal regimes of the west, particularly America, have occasionally indulged in their own fits of roguery is nothing to the purpose. It is important to discern the differences between bad and worse. The United States’ invasion of Iraq, however deplorable it may have turned out to be, is not on the same moral plane as Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The U.S. was not trying to make Iraq into America’s fifty-first state. On the contrary, America policy was motivated by a rather idealistic—and ultimately stupid—desire to bring freedom and prosperity to the citizens of Iraq. It was a case of good intentions gone badly awry—whereas Putin simply wishes to bring Ukraine under the submission of an evil kleptocracy. It requires judgment, however, to make these decisions, and it's precisely this ability to make fine and subtle distinctions based on an intuitive sense of the world that is lacking among the acolytes of the dissident right.
It is the dissident right’s impotence—the fact that it lacks any kind of social, cultural, economic, or political support in the institutions of the West—that renders it vulnerable to these episodes of poor judgment. In one of the Academic Agent’s YouTube streams, his co-panelists spend nearly four hours whining about James Lindsay. What has aroused their ire against Lindsay? Mainly this: that he had the temerity to suggest that perhaps he should turn his critical skills, which so far have been mostly aimed at demolishing Critical Race Theory, on the dissident right. For daring to even consider such a venture, one of the panelists on the AA stream declared that he would, in effect, launch a “nuclear strike” against Lindsay (or anyone else who dared question the bonafides of the dissident right). Such hyperbolic rhetoric far too closely resembles King Lear’s wild ravings when, after being entirely disarmed by his two evil daughters, he clamored:
I will have such revenges on you both That all the world shall—I will do such things— What they are yet I know not, but they shall be The terrors of the Earth!
Hence do the powerless speak. It is rather absurd for intellectuals of the dissident right to complain when someone like James Lindsay launches a verbal attack against them. Because let’s face it: Lindsay criticized the dissident right in part because he can do so without bearing any significant cost. The dissident right is essentially powerless and can be attacked with near complete immunity. I imagine that if Lindsay was informed that he would be a victim of a metaphoric “nuclear strike” for targeting the dissident right, he would break out in laughter—for it really is quite a silly threat to make.
To the extent that the dissident right has any influence on the body politic at large, that influence is mostly negative. At its core, much of what passes as dissident right thought, particularly in its neoreactionary manifestations, is little more than the rationalization of impotence and demoralization. It is an expression of hopelessness translated into an ideology. For what, after all, constitutes the main contention of this ideology? Isn’t it merely that the liberal democracies of the West constitute a rigged game and that the best one can do, short of a violent revolution, is to wait for the cyclical nature of political systems to bring an entirely new elite to power. In practical terms, this means making no real effort to push the left out of the political and cultural institutions of the West.
Greg Nyquist is author of The Psychopathology of the Radical Left and The Faux-Rationality of Ayn Rand.
You are in the I didn't leave the left, the left left me phase of your life. The gate keeping position of we can't possibly entertain what you have to say because I think it's reprehensible and it won't play well with the general public is not a new phenomenon. Your typical position of if we just win some more elections and embrace true liberalism, we'll eventually turn them over to our side because facts don't care about your feelings. It's become very clear and apparent that the strategies of intolerance attributed by the left (For the 1000th time, it's not hypocrisy, it's hierarchy) is the way to go because negotiating with people who's life's mission is to undermine and subvert is by definition a dead end. I think what's become clear is that the Right recognizes the game for what it is, understanding that fighting back is a waste of time because of gatekeepers and disciplinarians of the conventional Republican sort, so accepting things for what they are and being unapologetically disdainful with anything on the Left is simply a nothing to lose strategy. As long as their are people who want to reign in others because anything not within the framework of the liberal center is out of the acceptable bounds, the shift will continue to snowball. They don't care anymore because they don't have to care anymore. It's become clear they have dropped the pretense of pretending to negotiate. At this point, it's do as I say because I said so and what are you going to do about it and a few silly elections is not going to change the trajectory. Remember the ethos, standing athwart history yelling stop. If you dissect that statement, it's a defeatist position of delaying an eventual inevitability. The right's entire raison d'etre is to push back but it doesn't possess the obsessiveness of the Left nor does it possess the will nor the focus to keep fighting (I just want to grill amiright?) The right in its current form just wants to be ruled by a benevolent state. The left wants absolute rule. And they are going to get it. The name of the game is entropy and that's not pessimism. It's a view of history that's spanned civilization over civilization. Irving Krystol (ex Troskyist) - Peter Hitchens (Another Ex-Troskyist) - Ronald Reagan (I didn't leave the left, the left left me!) - Donald Trump (Ex NY Democrat) - Even people like Dennis Prager, Bari Weiss, Dave Rubin, the list goes on and on. Starting to see a pattern here? Now, back to reality a run down:
Freedom of speech? Nope, not if you don't have the right politics. You will be shunned and removed from polite society and you might even lose access to your bank account and ability to transact
Freedom of assembly? Nice try. That's only reserved for state sanctioned protests. Those protests are not only permitted but are actually quite useful in intimidating the rest of the public into both doing as the left says and to change the actual policies in the left's favor
Human rights? Wait a few years and you'll be charged for defending yourself with a rifle. The left didn't get Kyle just yet but give it time and it'll happen eventually
Neutral Courts? Well that doesn't really work out now. If polite society doesn't deem your cause worthy, it won't be heard because of "latches". (The next Supreme Court lifetime appointee is now an explicit affirmative action hire with 1 year of experience on the federal bench and has multiple judgments overruled by appeals courts because it wasn't consistent with the Constitution but hey, don't worry. It's not like its a lifetime appointment or anything)
Family Rights? Well that's debatable because the teacher's union can decide what to teach your kids and what they will inevitably indoctrinate since the agenda is already set and trying to stop it is just going to make teacher's sneak it through. Graphic porn is available in libraries because hey who doesn't love a little progress
Cultural Norms? 50% marriages end in divorce. 50% of children today are born to single mothers. Pedophilia is now on the verge of a publicly appealing "minor attracted person). Children are now subject to sterilizing hormone injections by virtue of declaration for an ideological fashion trend by which is supported by the courts and threatened/enforced by child protected services (which in the 20th century would have been considered a crime against humanity)