What is the Right?

Many of us call ourselves “right wing” instead of “conservative”, because we don’t want to think of ourselves as passive or reactive.

We aren’t just trying to conserve, to hold on to some dying stasis (or resurrect a dead one) — we’re active, vital, we have a vision that isn’t just anti-liberalism.

Unfortunately, that isn’t true of the Right in the aggregate — it basically is just anti-liberalism.

To the extent that any of us has a real answer to the question of “what right wing beliefs actually consist of”, our answers generally take the shape of whatever historical institution we would like to reconstitute from the acid of modernity.

For many, the vision isn’t even as concrete as that, because their right wing politics are entirely downstream of their disgust with their societies’ present trajectory.

They just know they hate the way things are going right now — and only later do they cast about for some prior mode of human life to RETVRN to (whose details they generally don’t think about very carefully.)

“The Right” or “Reaction” is supposed to be more serious than mere conservatism, because it recognizes that 2025 America is the natural unfolding of the ideological premises of 2015 America, which are deterministically bound to the cultural conditions of 1995 America, thence to 1965 America, and so on.

But that critique is at least as much a problem for a neo-Jacobite or neo-Optimate or neo-Neolithic caveman as it is for Nancy Mace.

The further you propose rolling back the clock, the more fanciful it is to imagine reconstructing the conditions that created your ideal society — and even if you could do that, you’d just end up right back here.

Besides which, victory on those terms is neither possible nor desirable — “winning” would mean building yourself a zoo, where, by design, nothing new happens or can happen.

The most successful conservative movement in the world is the Sentinelese.

Conservatives are “addicted to losing” because they understand this. You can’t actually go to war with Time and Entropy. History cannot actually be reversed, or even slowed down.

The online argument over dating, immigration, and “hard work” reflect the difference between conservative and Right Wing sensibilities.

Conservatives encourage engagement with the world as it is. Go get a job at Panda Express. Buy a decomposing ruin in an inner-city free-fire zone. Stop worrying about “body count” or “false paternity”, and shoulder the burden of godly masculinity.

The situation is what it is, and you must do the best you can within that framework.

The right wing response to this is simply “No” — and maybe “Go to hell”.

Reactionaries are not exactly serious about rebooting Classical Greece or the House of Stuart or Medieval Catholicism or the Old South — but they are serious about rejecting the compromises demanded by the present.

History is invoked mostly to make the case that “it hasn’t always been like this” — that the current political and cultural defaults are not the only way humans have ever lived, and that history does not bend inevitably toward progress.

In fact, history may bend toward entropy and dissolution. The sacrifices demanded to stay abreast of new technology, new economic systems, and new social arrangements may not be worth making — in fact, staying “competitive” and “adaptive” may be a fate worse than death.

Scott Alexander describes reactionary politics as “not argument but poetry”, and that seems basically right.

What unites the various factions of the right is a common revulsion at the decay of their societies, and loathing for the various species of decomposer who feed on it.

If conservatives are “rooting for the corpse”, reactionaries are just having a funeral.

For obvious reasons, it’s very difficult for a movement constructed this way to coalesce around a positive vision for the future. Atavistic politics gain traction precisely because there appear to be no acceptable forward trajectories.

We see nothing encouraging in the future ahead of us, but we can’t go back — and even if we could, our visions of the idealized past are almost as far from one another as they are from the present.

But this gloom depends on the assumption that entropy is a real constraint, which it isn’t — at least, not at the scale of human societies.

Entropy is a hard constraint of thermodynamics in a closed system — but we live in a wide-open system, flooded with enormous quantities of free (uncaptured) energy.

Humanity consumes roughly 16 terawatts of electricity per year. The sun delivers roughly 11,000 times that amount of energy (173 petawatts) to the earth’s surface every second. We are nowhere near the thermodynamic (or even Malthusian) limits of human complexity.

The thing that we’re all at war with — gay race communism, “the blob”, globohomo, The Cathedral — definitely feeds on the breaking of bonds, the decay of complex systems into simpler and lower-energy states.

In this narrow sense, our civilization is undergoing an “entropic” process, the decay of a dead thing — but the only reason the decay is inevitable is because it’s dead.

In the natural world, that is not the end of the line. The decomposers are themselves consumed by other living things, which can be arbitrarily complex, and increasing in complexity.

Human civilization is neither on an eternal upward trajectory, nor an inexorable slide into yeastlife. The “death” of individual states, societies, and systems of government is inevitable, as the conditions that created them change and they lose coherence — but there’s no reason the things that replace them must be lower, uglier, meaner.

More importantly, the dead have offspring.

Customs and laws are lifeless by nature, like idols, incapable of adapting to new circumstances. Roman law couldn’t make the Goths Roman, just as an American constitution couldn’t make Liberians American. Eventually all human laws outstretch their utility, falling to people and places and times where they no longer make sense.

But cultural and lineal continuity extends across the collapse. The law, the state, the political or economic system may be useful to the people, but it isn’t the people.

Americans are the cultural and lineal heirs of half a dozen empires that rose and fell in Europe. Whether you think of the death of these empires as a tragedy depends on whether you think they died without heirs — if the potential they represented was simply snuffed out, or if it took on new and beautiful forms in response to new conditions.

But whether you view it as tragic or not, children never replicate their fathers. The purpose of sex is to create new life, to proliferate variety, precisely so that refinement and adaptation can take place. You aren't supposed to live forever — not even through your kids.

In both the metaphorical and literal sense, this should be the animating principle of the Right: not permanent stasis, but the cultivation of worthy heirs.

Because we live in a dying empire, we have to think explicitly about what we can preserve in the embers — what is beautiful for its own sake, what is adaptive to the new conditions — and pass it to our children deliberately.

I want to cultivate my children so that they are more than equal to the future, so that they will have the freedom of action to create and experience beauty. I want them to find excellent and admirable spouses, and raise children who are excellent and admirable, both by nature and by culture.

I am “right wing” to the extent that I want the state, the culture, the law, the economic system bent to those ends, or burned to the ground.

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EXIT News

• On last Tuesday’s full group call, we heard from Marmot on how to get a tech job in the toughest market in decades — how to get around automated gatekeepers and get your resume in the hands of someone who will actually read it. Recording will be made available soon for Substack subscribers.

• On tonight’s full group call we’re going to showcase a handful of internal EXIT projects.

• Upcoming full-group calls:

  • 01/21: Bog Beef of the Good ol Boyz Podcast on Patronage

  • 01/28: Indian Bronson on family offices, back-channel networking, the Christmas War, etc.

  • 02/04: Book Club on Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson.

• Upcoming Big Ideas Calls (Wednesdays at 9PM ET)

  • 01/15: An attorney who helps entrepreneurs establish generational family businesses

  • 01/22: EXIT Scouting Revival: showcase of existing work by the EXIT guys on a scouting alternative, and organizing meeting to plan next steps.

  • 01/29: General Social Hour

• Member Meetups:

  • 01/11: Richmond, New York City

  • 01/15: Salt Lake City

  • 01/17: Seattle

  • 01/18: Washington, DC

  • 01/20: Dallas

  • 02/07: Houston

• Dallas members will be touring a potential coworking space Friday, 01/24.

• RSVP link for pre-inaugural DC Cocktail hour (1/18), below the paywall for Substack subscribers. EXIT cocktail hours are a great opportunity to meet your local guys, and see if the full group is right for you.