Winter Before Spring

Why The New Right Will Be Greater In Its Death

This is a continuation of this article, where I respond to Tyler Cowen’s critique of the New Right and review their strengths. This part discusses their weaknesses. 

Recall my description of the populist movement:

When I interact with populists, there is only one red line for collaboration or even friendship. You can disagree on economics, abortion, and even immigration, so long as you recognize the one commandment: the ruling class is illegitimate.

This is an obvious strength, but also an obvious weakness. The greatest strength of the New Right is bridging different economic and cultural views with political theory. A realist understanding of political theory does not give clear moral direction, instead placing convergent goals, like freedom and political power, at the centre. The failure of ruling institutions is reason enough for integralists, nationalists, centrists, libertarians, monarchists, and even marxists to gather around a common table. It’s impressive that social progressivism is so out of touch that it has united a millennium of historical conflict against it. 

The New Right is very diverse. Contrary to popular belief, diversity is a weakness, not a strength. Practice looks like theory: NR differences are a powder keg. A recent example is Curtis Yarvin’s critique of Dobbs, the Supreme Court case that overturned Roe v. Wade and allowed governments to legislate on abortion. As he described it, “A huge L”. Yarvin made a reasonable strategic critique of prioritizing Dobbs. This sparked an enormous reaction which mainly did not address Yarvin’s political concerns, but simply expressed instinctive anger. These pre-rational instincts are vital in politics. They are not erased by political theory, only temporarily satisfied. So in a truly ironic predicament, the survival of the New Right is dependent on the ability to make a genuinely diverse group cooperate. 

Do You Know What Time It Is?

A common refrain in New Right circles is “Do you know what time it is?” As per Michael Anton:

2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees. 

Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.

I outlined my differences with Anton a few days ago. I’ll repeat it, since I think this difference is particularly important:

I would say that when it comes to openness to discussion and ideology, Anton is right, but when it comes to tactics and effectiveness, Yarvin is right … When it comes to Trump, who I believe has on net frustrated dissident energy on ineffective whims, there is a significant upside in drawing red lines.

While I do think the level of persecution is significantly lower than that of the Soviet Union, I also believe it is far from zero and that the difficulty in resetting it to zero is greater than in the Soviet Union. This is crucial in a cost-benefit analysis of the New Right, since it greatly restricts tail events. The ability of the right versus left to convert is absurdly asymmetric. Democrats were able to convert a few true rape allegations against Hollywood Democrats and many false rape allegations into a permanent bureaucracy of kafka trials across private and public institutions. When Republicans try to do something on abortion, they are widely rebuked and may even lose a chance at the senate. 

Asymmetry is no reason to be sloppy. It is precisely because of this asymmetry that the New Right must be disciplined and focused. Curtis is both a more credible (within the NR) and knowledgable person to make this critique:

For the overdog, making the underdog mad is an excellent tactic—it is a way to induce “fear biting,” a violent response to nonviolent abuse. Observed casually, this creates a superficial narrative in which the underdog looks like the instigator. Self-flattering narratives are often built out of casual self-observation. You actually believe your own victim narrative, even when you bullied the underdog into a corner; he desperately nipped at you; then you methodically tore his throat out. In fact, you’d like to file a police report… you may be suing his estate… you’re not usually one to litigate, but…

For the underdog, making the overdog mad makes the overdog more powerful and dangerous to you, the underdog. You do not want your overdog to become more powerful and dangerous. You want him to become more apathetic and unguarded.

This is the fundamental tension of the New Right. Is it possible to be ideologically diverse and strategically coordinated? I don’t know. Do you know what time it is? 

The Dissident Glue

Hanania is skeptical of the term dissident. Aesthetic questions aside, I think it’s beneficial in a utilitarian sense. It enables cooperation that would otherwise be completely impossible. Like the studies in Garett’s book, a strong common goal is crucial to make true diversity work. But asking what time it is can only go so far. 

Hanania’s practical critique is also correct:

On the right, too many people seem to make being a “dissident” central to their identity. When covid vaccines were developed, I was disappointed to see that some of those who were most sensible in rejecting PC nonsense surrounding race and gender became anti-vax. Many of them also believe that the 2020 election was stolen. I suspect that in some cases they started out by realizing how crazy academia and the media were on matters of race and sex, and then overlearned from that and developed a heuristic of “always trust right-leaning people on the internet over whatever CNN and The New York Times are saying.” That sometimes works, but it’s not the best way to go through life.

It is true that a lot of NR conspiracy thinking serves the role of a “load-bearing fiction”. Even though it’s most likely that progressive donors such as George Soros aren't intentionally trying to destroy the country, people who believe that are going to vote for better district attorneys than those who believe in systemic racism, which is all things considered a far more insane conspiracy theory by several orders of magnitude. Of course it’d be better if everyone voted for DAs who do their job for epistemically sound reasons, but at least the DAs they vote for do their jobs. 

As an aside: Many real life decisions are like this. You are often caught between reasonable things supported by people with terrible arguments and obviously destructive things supported by people who can write reasonably structured op-ed pieces. Like Hanania, I think there’s some psychological effect that makes it difficult to support the former, especially in public, but I don’t know too much about this. If you have this insecurity, just know that I consider you as feeble if not more than the people you have contempt for. I hope that motivates you to be a bit more brave. 

The big question is whether this increases or decreases the net amount of cooperation on solutions which actually work. I can’t tell you about the future but so far, I’m mostly unimpressed with elected officials, but somewhat impressed with NR organizations and funding structure. The latter might be an infohazard, but I’ll keep you up to date with public developments.

The Libertarian Question

I think the NR is a bit too skeptical of Libertarians, especially on regulatory reform, which they’ve been ahead of the curve on for decades. Hanania also has this article about how Reagan almost crushed wokeness. There are certain individuals, like David French, who get lumped together with Libertarians, but who really don’t hold Libertarian principles at all. Some famous Libertarians such as Tyler Cowen “don’t know what time it is”, but I don’t think the NR should see them as enemies more than some random guy who just wants to grill. And many other Libertarians do know what time it is. 

Math

Probabilistically, I think the odds that the New Right survives in its current form for 8 years is very low, below 5%. A way to bet on this is as follows: with 1:19 odds, in 2030 either:

• the National Conservatism Conference will not be run OR

• one of the major factions of speakers at National Conservatism Conference 3 will be absent from the speaker list at the the first NatCon that year

In other words, while the gunpowder may not ignite in a few years, in the long run the probability that it ignites with enough severity to cause a split is >95%. This is a classic exponential distribution on the number of possible conflicts, which while I don’t have an exact number on, is probably on the order of magnitude of dozens, if not hundreds. You could also argue that this has already happened with the Common Good Conservatives, although I didn’t go to their conference due to scheduling conflicts and I have no clue how strong or permanent this divide is. 

Why The New Right Will Be Greater In Its Death

Short answer: intelligence and direction. 

My experience at National Conservatism Conference 3 was that the quality of the median individual and the quality of the median conversation were both incredibly high. The NR is able to attract people with the ability to make high-quality analyses and build the norms for them to exchange those ideas effectively, both of which are difficult tasks. I particularly attribute the latter to Italian School realism. While the local unity will fade, the possibility of calling up someone from a different faction with a wildly divergent walk of life and coordinating using these norms remains. An analogue might be early YCombinator, although at a larger scale. Even if no public united front remains, creating that mutual understanding and exchange will be a worthy use of Thielbucks. 

A common language that describes reality as it is, shatters myths which have long held back libertarians and conservatives, and creates a mutual understanding should not be underestimated. To me, it seems there are several impactful problems in political theory that no one else is even remotely beginning to address. The most significant is that many political institutions have the opposite function as they publicly market themselves as having.

The finale of this series will be about exactly what the enemy of the NR is and why I think that enemy unites a maximum tent coalition of at least two thirds of the country.