It's not uncommon these days to hear of people getting frustrated with the left and embracing conservatism. The whole #walkaway campaign, which trended in 2018 leading up to the mid term elections, were exemplary of this.
This is an easy idea to sympathize with, and the stories are remarkably similar. Someone grows frustrated with the cringy protest culture and attendant narcissistic LARPy behavior so prevalent in left activist communities and they decide they've had enough of it. Worse still are the very real stories of abuse and rampant sociopathology within tight knit activist communities, of which the late Mark Fisher's Exiting the Vampire Castle is such an archetypal example. It's hard to remain sympathetic to the left when professional activists a-la Black Lives Matter and Antifa reduce all politics to civil disobedience and treat absolutely every engagement they have with other people and society as a whole as if it were a direct action campaign.
Today their names are legion: Dave Rubin, Laci Green, Candace Owens, to name a few who saw the light on the right and embraced conservatism or libertarianism as if it were the new religion.
And it's not new - many prominent early neoconservatives were disillusioned leftists. Ronald Reagan once famously declared that he did not leave the Democratic party, the Democratic party left him. Reagan Democrats were a segment of blue collar workers in rust belt states who shifted their allegiance to the G.O.P in the late 70s and through the 80s, resulting in Reagan's victories and an overall shift to the right in the political climate in that era. Many of these blue collar Democrats grew frustrated with the excessive anti-Americanism of the new Left and the excesses of far left groups like the Weather Underground.
Sound familiar?
It should. Make America Great Again was actually one of Reagan's campaign slogans, and there were widespread fears with Reagan then as with Trump now that he'd usher in an era of right wing authoritarianism. The religious right of Jerry Falwell stirred as many liberal fears then as the nationalist populism of Steve Bannon stirred much more recently. Swap out the new left for social justice warriors and the Weathermen with Antifa, and it becomes very apparent that though history may not repeat precisely - nobody would have accused Reagan of colluding with the Soviets, after all - it rhymes pretty damn well some times.
I understand why progressives lose faith and abandon the cause because I've been there. For me, it happened in the summer of 1998 after reading Warren Farrell's brilliant take down of feminism, The Myth of Male Power. In case you're not familiar with it, Farrell's work takes apart the idea that men have conspired to make everything so wonderful for themselves at women's expense, and asserts that the lot of most men throughout history has been powerlessness and disposability. Feminist claims to powerlessness and marginalization are contrasted with the realities of very real influence in corporate, academic and government bureaucracies in ways that should be familiar to any fan of much more recent figures such as Jordan Peterson or Sargon of Akkad.
Here's a thing about belief systems: once you lose faith in one part of it, the rest naturally and easily follows. At first I read more criticisms of feminism by authors like Christina Hoff Sommers, Camille Paglia and Daphne Patai. But from there I became what every alarmist Guardian article tries warning us about - reading Dinesh D'Sousa and Charles Murray on race issues and Robert Bork, among others, on the degeneration of society more generally. I'm sure I'd have been over the moon with Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern had they been going concerns back in those days. Jordan Peterson would have really struck a chord with me, back in the early 2000s when I gave up drinking via the Alcoholics Anonymous 12 step program. A short time after that, returning to college to major in business saw me devour the theories of Ayn Rand, Ludwig Von Mises and Milton Friedman.
Quite a jump for someone who'd been an avid Marxist and subscriber to communist newsletters only a few years previously.
And this a year before the Wachowskis - they were brothers back then - ever introduced any of us to the concept of what the red pill actually was. There was no 4chan or reddit back then. No manosphere, no YouTube and Nick Land and Mencius Moldbug were years away from blogging ideas that would appear so quaint and familiar to me when I finally did see them, much more recently. Hans Herman Hoppe's Property and Freedom Society was still a few years away likewise. Sometimes I wonder how I would have turned out had I known about these thinkers?
I'd spent long conversations with coworkers who were deeply influenced by David Irving and the Institute for Historical Review. This was in the late 1990s, and while the likes of David Duke and Jared Taylor were even then trying to give white supremacy a postmodern makeover, Richard Spencer and 4chan were still years out. While reconciling with Hitler, antisemetic conspiracy theories and white supremacy never interested me, such ideas didn't offend me as they would have a few short years prior either, and I saw in them a kind of kindred spirit to my own disillusionment and turn against leftist identity politics. I saw nothing wrong with engaging them honestly and fairly, leastwise.
As such, the current propensity to see leftists as self righteous, closed minded zealots wasn't exactly news to me come 2014, when such observations finally became mainstream. When the name and concept of the SJW became mainstream by the mid 2010s, I was that irritating fellow who was telling everyone "I told you so" and "this is what I've been saying for years now." In 2010 I stumbled upon a blog smaller then than this one is now, called Alternative Right, but by then it was too late.
Because by then, I'd seen through neoreaction as well. Not quite as dramatically as my loss of faith in postmodern college leftism, but every bit as substantially. The right wing was a scam. That'd become abundantly clear to me, beginning in the mid 2000s.
Why such a dramatic transformation a second time? Why return to the left when I'd abandoned it so thoroughly the first time?
Many catalysts. Perhaps the biggest one was that upon my graduation from college, I landed a job not in the corporate sector - which wouldn't touch a blue collar pleb like me no matter how educated I was - but in the unionized public sector. Being hired into a union that was seriously discussing job action caused a lot of what I thought I'd forgotten and left behind to come back. I faced the reality that my return to college after quitting drinking was owed as much to subsidized higher education and the subsidized cooperative housing I lived in as it had to any change of character by a means of a "higher power." The reality is that even if everyone had the most sterling, sober and Godly character and entrepreneurial spirit you could ever pray for, not to mention the cleanest rooms, there's only so much room in the corporate boardrooms of the nation, and sooner or later the well being of the rest of us has to become a material consideration.
While the right loves to dabble in "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" rhetoric, the ladders that did extend my way all came from the left. The lifelines that allowed the poor and destitute to rise into the middle class all had one name: Social Democracy. From there, it was simply a matter of going from denial into acceptance.
If Warren Farrell's Myth of Male Power was what red-pilled me, then reading Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America could be compared to the Architect's Chamber in the next movie, where Neo discovers that the cause he'd been working for and his own messianic role in that cause was every bit as much a part of the system of control he was fighting against as the machines and simulated reality were.
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| Western Civilization is in peril and privatization is your plan to save it? You really are a special kind of dumb, aren't you? |
"The trick never ages; the illusion never wears off. Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors; receive electricity deregulation. Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meatpacking. Vote to stand tall against terrorists; receive Social Security privatization. Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are rewarded in a manner beyond imagining."Here's another:
"There’s a reason you probably haven’t heard much about this aspect of the heartland. This kind of blight can’t be easily blamed on the usual suspects like government or counterculture or high-hat urban policy. The villain that did this to my home state wasn’t the Supreme Court or Lyndon Johnson, showering dollars on the poor or putting criminals back on the street. The culprit is the conservatives’ beloved free-market capitalism, a system that, at its most unrestrained, has little use for smalltown merchants or the agricultural system that supported the small towns in the first place...."None of this way of looking at things was new. Karl Marx, so loathed by the paleocons and neoreactionaries, actually did a better job of explaining cultural and societal degeneration than anyone on the right ever could have, because he wasn't afraid to call out their own sacred cows. From the Manifesto of the Communist Party:
"The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom – Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers. The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation."In short, untrammeled capitalism and its constant revolutionizing of production does more than any other force to destroy the western civilization, Christian religion, the nuclear family and other social structures that good or bad, the reactionaries have devoted themselves to.
As such, I now shake my head when I see the devotees of Warren Farrell and Paul Elam become apologists for laissez faire capitalism, the economic system that sees so many men chewed up and spat out, injured and even killed on the job per year. When I see these same conservative men vote for war mongering right wing governments that in turn send so many young men home in body bags. When I see paranoid conspiracy theorists stockpile guns for use against tyrannical government - and then go vote for governments that roll back civil liberties in the name of fighting terrorism. When I see the opponents of mass immigration and multiculturalism calling for more, rather than less capitalism, and later wonder why they are indeed going through a "great replacement" at the hands of globalists? Could it be because 3rd world and migrant labour is cheaper? No, couldn't be!
I shake my head when I see reactionaries lament being banned from social media platforms that are owned by the very corporations they want to deregulate and give tax cuts to. When they grumble about liberal media and Hollywood "degeneracy" without considering that media and film production companies are corporations that are doing exactly what these same rightists insist corporations do: Prioritize the bottom line and maximize shareholder value, and so respond to market signals and seek to expand their markets by catering to untapped demographics, like women, minorities and foreign countries. When anti-feminists come out as pro capitalist and then wonder why society comes to value women more as workers and consumers, as competitors with men and careerists, not as wives and mothers.
Of course, I have not lost my disdain for those elements of "leftism" that do warrant it. College SJWs and much of the online activist community in particular. Mark Fisher's attack on the Vampire Castle should resonate with all of us. Real advocates of social justice would do well to consider that whichever marginalized people they've chosen to champion won't get liberation from the boardrooms and corporate media of the nation either.
However, for reasons best explained above, I see capitalism as part of the problem, not part of the solution. If SJWs promote a world view that defines privilege entirely in terms of race and gender rather than in terms of economics, and lays the very real problems suffered by women and people of color entirely at the feet of white males, we might want to ask ourselves who really benefits from that? Why would corporately owned media find such a world view agreeable? Why are elite colleges so much more rife with "social justice" fanaticism than colleges still accessible to the working and middle classes?
I abandoned the left because I became convinced that it was hostile to whites, males, Christians and western civilization in general. I later abandoned the right for the exact same reasons. I don't condone the left's cultural masochism and hold it to criticism. But the right presents a much greater threat to "the west" than any but the most stupid extreme left ever will.
The left has irritating and self absorbed postmodern college professors and student activists who will chant slogans against western civilization and pull down statues of "problematic" historical figures. The right has cynical politicians who'll oversee the export of industry and capital out of western nations. The left will import huge numbers of 3rd world people, some of whom don't like us very much. The right will engage in the kind of "regime change" and parasitic global capitalism that causes massive population destabilization in the 3rd world that drives them not to like us, but come here in droves anyway, in the first place. The left may hold the Christian churches to a criticism they're reluctant to subject Islam to. The right will mix religion with business and politics in precisely the way the gospels warned against, that truly undermines the moral credibility of the Christian churches and leaves them bereft of defenders. At the fringes, the right will even idealize Hitler: a man who loved the white race so much he started a war that left tens of millions of them dead, the European nations in ruins and their overseas empires financially untenable.
With friends like these ...
The left is deeply flawed, and would do well to engage in a lot less grandstanding and a lot more self reflection. They can't profess to represent "the people" when they refuse to engage people in honest dialogue. But make no mistake, a right wing that endeavors to preserve the culture, values and identity of the west while privatizing, deregulating and outsourcing its financial and industrial infrastructure will never offer anything better.
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