I am a right-wing progressive.

A tiny bit of self-indulgent bitching, then we’ll get to it.
If you’re truly interested in ideas, if you’re an ‘intellectual’, you shouldn’t be afraid of being ‘scooped’, but you shouldn’t be reliant on surveying what other people with less distribution are saying to then pass it off as your own thinking without reference. It is annoying, but completely unsurprising, to see this from Compact Mag riffing on a (much better) substack. My real gripe—skimming them—is that Conti seems to still think there is a future for ‘Conservatism’ to play the role of a good loser (it’s 2024!), and Lyons doesn’t seem to understand what a world without entropy-tolerant Liberalism looks like, only imagining horror.
So in the interest of staking out my own territory and more than defending, but asserting right-wing progressivism is correct, and that utterly passé Conservatives (who are Liberals) and Liberals (who are Liberals) are wrong, humor me telling you what right-wing progressivism is, as the term’s Sire.

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If you survey the condition of the Occident you see all kinds of strange contradictions. This is where all the meaningful science happens. This is where we pretend that men in dresses are women. The political structures allow for people from The British Isles, the Indian Subcontinent, European Continent, the land of the Rus', the Arabian Peninsula, the expanse of Cathay, and others to work very hard together and be rewarded immensely for feats of industry and commerce whose scale is measured in millions and billions (even trillions). Yet they are terrified of saying the ‘Wrong Thing’ lest it all be taken away from them by an unholy mix of social censure, maliciously enforced procedure, even law.

Nothing new, but what gives? Why is the San Francisco Bay Area of California, which ought be the greatest of America’s crown jewels, so far below its potential?

Is it that the people there are stupid? Hardly. That part of Southern California collects some of the most intelligent and high agency people on earth, ever. But it can’t seem to get its act together. Every month, new wonders (or hints of them) from OpenAI or a defense company in ‘the Gundo’ and every month, headlines of social crumbling, the congealing of newly spread human detritus. They are ruled by the demands of Liberalism. But why aren’t they able to rule in its stead?

The French philologist, Georges Dumézil, making a study of Indo-European societies proposed that one of the features that distinguished them was a formal division of three social functions:

• Sovereignty - the creation and sustenance of what Gaetano Mosca called the ‘political formula’; the legitimated self-conception and orientation of society towards certain ends. The people responsible for this are the ‘priest class’.

• Military - the performance of martial duties, of warfare, providing the immune system of the body politic; overseeing how the society responds to threats inside and out, this would be the duty of the ‘warrior class’.

• Productivity - the actual work of quotidian and aspirational life, furnishing society with its weal; the fatted calf, the earthen wares—paper for scribes and battle axes for warrior—all of the commercial life of the ‘merchant class’.

In my Indic branch of the Indo-European tradition, these are the Brahmin, the Kshatriya, and the Vaishya. Entire endogamous family lineages are organized on these lines. Our last names, very frequently our vocations when we cross the Black Waters, even the shapes of our faces and physiques tell of this history. The Chhetris still join the military. The Brahmin is constantly coding, talking, or both. Vaishyas in America are all over from every 7/11 to every tech company.

Peter Thiel often speaks about the Reagan Coalition (most recently with Tyler Cowen here in Miami, but previously with John Heubusch) in this way:

"What was working in the '80s and how can one somehow recapture some of that?" And if you reflect on it, it is actually somewhat of a mysterious question how anything ever worked or how did the Reagan coalition actually work. And my simplified version of the Reagan coalition is that it was this coalition of social conservatives, defense hawks and free market libertarian types. And how did they actually cohere or what does the priest and the general and the millionaire, what do those three people actually have in common? If they meet in a smoke-filled room and hatch out their plots, what do they actually talk about?

And I don't think it is detailed policy wonkery ala Paul Ryan. I don't think it is some sort of passive aggressive nihilism ala Mitch McConnell. And what I would submit that they talked about that's very substantive and that was the key to the Reagan years in some ways was, with the priest, the general and the millionaire, what they have in common is that they're anticommunist and that was the key part of the Reagan coalition and that was the key of conservative republicanism in the post-World War II era in the 20th century. And if the Republican Party ceases to be anticommunist, it may cease to have a raison d'etre.

You feel it in your bones, don’t you? You’ve seen this among your own friends. You know them; the jock, the nerd, the business major. Everyone has expressions of these tendencies. Young men, when they have robust friend groups, tend to have a smattering of each of these types. They’re the best group chats to be in.

The alliance of nerds and jocks with a little bit of money behind them is something that calls out to us in history as a powerful combination. It’s DaVinci designing siege weapons for his patron Borgias. It’s Machiavelli painstakingly explaining how to do statecraft to someone better suited to it than he. It’s the US space program. Nerds and jocks together, with a little bit of money behind them:

Was this stuff ‘conservative’? Were they ‘traditional’? We might say so today but there’s a tradition of contemporary Soviet propaganda to give us the real answer:

I don’t think this one needs a translation.

No. The United States, in its post-War frenzy, peaking in the Reagan Coalition of anti-Communists, was anything but traditional, anything but conservative. It was radically (as in from the ‘roots’) progressive; though this was limited to technological progress. The Air Force until very recently still had a practice of teaching Christian doctrine on warfare to its nuclear officers, a nice little hold over the Cold War. You can almost hear the mid-Atlantic accents coming through a tinny-microphone talking about the Godless Communist Menace.

As is so often the case, our confusion about what the term ‘progressive’ means comes from a cutesy little conflation of technological progress and social progress, a mindset that of course, belongs to the Whigs (ask Dr. Samuel Johnson who the first one was) and their notion of progressive history. Good things come with change. Change happens over time. So the future is better than the past, and our traditions are worse than our innovations. It’s pat stuff, really.

Do you think Greg Conti, an assistant professor of politics at Princeton University, and Compact's editor-at-large, or N.S. Lyon’s—whom I know nothing about but again, wrote a superior (still wrong) article—have the mental fortitude to read that last link? The whole Open Letter? You, dear reader, may. It’s the real story of ‘progressivism’, and why it seems to have ‘infected’ every institution and edifice of American statehood. The calls are coming from inside the house.

I think there are basically two paths available to someone born in the latter part of the 1900s and beyond (that’s 1950 onwards!), an inheritor of all which came before, the story of the 1950s and onwards being a crumpling of that inheritance:

1. Spend a lot of time trying to reason with, criticize, reform, rehabilitate—you know, conserve?—the things, and those those who tear down the things, which came before. This gets you the full spectrum of everybody from Governor/Senator Mitt Romney grumbling about Trump’s ‘character’ not being good enough for his grandchildren to see to, uh, AtomWaffen. And they are on the same spectrum, ultimately. The ‘left’ is right about that. They actually do share more political priors and priorities than they do not. Sorry!

2. Forget about all of that shit and do something more worthwhile.

You’ll notice how 1. is that familiar morass of American politics where this leftwing journalist says that politician is a closeted Nazi and this right wing influencer balks at that functionary caught on camera saying something pedophilic. It’s endless. It’s got no resolution, except passing through the demographic modulo money lens of America’s elections and turnout games.

You may also notice that 2. is pretty sparse in its definition. What’s worthwhile?

UH-OH.

What is worthwhile? What is worthy of you? Who is worthy of you? For whom are you worthy? 2. is very scary to a lot of people because it strictly requires knowing who you are and what you want to see in the world because of that.

Here is the oldest Conservative Party (aside: they’re called ‘the Tories’, like British Loyalists in the US Revolution. Isn’t that odd? What would it mean if there were British Generals who were Whigs? You could look that up.) today

“It is the Conservatives that represent Modern Britain”, says Rishi Sunak, to cheers. The English poet Kipling once asked “What do they know of England, who only England know?” in a lament of his countrymen’s lack of worldliness. He may have had somewhat a different opinion of British Empire if he met Rishi.

But is this effeteness of vision and national self-conception new? Not at all.
Here is the 1955 mission statement of the National Review, written by Buckley:

One gets the indelible impression of a weakling pathetically crying out for someone to listen, please just listen!—while everyone else goes on doing things.

And that’s exactly what Conservatism as a political tradition, which begins with the post-World Wars Western world emerging denuded of religion, has done. It has meekly yelped and sometimes hollered as it is manhandled by a very clear vision of what is going to come next. You’d be forgiven for thinking it enjoys it.

The most accurate view of Conservatism ever offered—if you are one of my smart, beautiful, lovely, sweet, cherished female readers, please look away—comes from the Confederate era theologian Robert Lewis Dabney, writing here about the cause of women’s suffrage:

This is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is to-day one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will to-morrow be forced upon its timidity, and will be succeeded by some third revolution, to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader…The only practical purpose which it now subserves in American politics is to give enough exercise to Radicalism to keep it “in wind,” and to prevent its becoming pursy and lazy from having nothing to whip.

And conservatives still do this. It’s March of 2024 when finally, many of them have realized that mass illegal immigration is actually pretty important, and they do things, sometimes, like sharing this video of Bill Clinton (a Democrat!):

The takeaway from this is “Dang, look at how unreasonable the Democrats have gotten.” because they don’t remember Eisenhower just deporting millions of illegals. They don’t remember the history of the 19th century. If you point it out, they get uncomfortable. They’d disavow the 1790s Immigration Act—and in fact disavow it with exactly the same moral rhetoric (though less the motivated reasoning; they don’t want their own demographic replacement) a leftist would condemn America’s (paltry) immigration restrictions today. I.e. that it’s “racist”.

That’s right, we will mention Racism explicitly. We just mentioned Sexism implicitly. We might even talk about Ableism and Ageism and Nationalism and many other -isms that are what leftists say they are; wholly evil for upholding various unjust hierarchies, orders, and systems (of oppression, of course).

The astute reader knows where I’m going. When a reactionary (the most discontented and disillusioned form of a conservative) looks on what the left, or the establishment, or a certain breed of ‘progressives’ has wrought, despite all his polite objections and meaningful critiques, he gets very upset and says some pretty untoward and socially unacceptable things. Most of American politics—if you’ve been paying attention to it—is basically just this. A hilarious game where one tribe of white people or another tries to bait a different tribe of white people into advancing any kind of criticism of their insane goals of Leveling everyone by pointing out that, actually, men are not the same as women, or whatever, and thereby get every justification to call them Nazi scoundrels who must be purged:
The latter part looks and sounds like this, if you think I’m kidding about it.

Conservatives are trapped in this forever. They can never actually do anything to resist the demands of Liberalism because they are themselves Liberals.

They can’t resist what Liberalism demands of them, because they don’t really fundamentally object to Liberalism. It’s their own system, the one they were brought up in. It’s what all the wars were about, including the one that most reifies (Hollywood helps) their favorite conception of American Manhood, World War Two. Today they’re the less fashionable, less well-educated, less wealthy, and less mainstream bunch. Formerly—before the latter part of the 1980s and 1990s capture of credentialing institutions through public education (and thus the professional classes) bore fruit—they were the less fashionable, better educated (though most Americans weren’t that well educated anyway), wealthier, more mainstream bunch. Notice which variable remained the same.

By the way, Fashionability seems like a very unserious concept, doesn’t it? What’s au courant, what’s in-style, what clues everyone in you’re someone who is ‘in the know’—the stuff of girl’s magazines and gossip columns right? Why would it ever be related to power? Why did so many journalists, then US State organs get upset when Elon Musk purchased Twitter? What is Twitter, anyway?

Monkeys would love twitter, if they could read.

But we have to be clear about the point before getting lost in suggestive digressions about our primate natures: Conservatism, a post-War phenomenon, is completely incapable of offering any kind of alternative vision even as increasing horrors are visited upon Western and Global people. It is completely trapped, being somewhat like a river rock getting slowly eroded but trying not to be too quickly eroded, hoping it won’t, as a river flows over it.

This, by the way, is why Liberals so often deploy the “Nazi” accusation. The last civilization which stood any kind of chance against the current one was in fact literally Nazi Germany. When you try to ‘roll back’ Liberalism’s triumphs, you are by the geography of the plane moving us all a little closer to a live 1930s Berlin.

But do you have to be?

I think in a single image, this would be the easiest way to describe right-wing progressivism and why I think of myself as a right-wing progressive:

In short, I don’t think “a Retvrn to Tradition” is possible. Or even desirable. The history is too contingent, and of all the places it could have led us, it lead us here. The thing polluting my Twitter timeline right now, emanating from all kinds of sensible, thoughtful people is the spectacle of a different internet personality once again having subjected herself to a ‘gang bang orgy’. In olden days, a glimpse of stocking… And it’s true, you could turn it all off, except you can’t.
Even Elon Musk' had one of his kids get trooned out by the culture. Just how much money are you supposed to accumulate to protect yourself from this stuff?

What might look like a journey backwards in the plane is actually progress along a different axis entirely one that seeks a particular vision of the good, which emanates from a notion of what is worthy and worthwhile to do. It demands a serious introspection about identity, it demands a sense of what outcomes contribute to entropy and which ones stave it off. Right-wing progressivism is not about trying to forever laud the gravestones and cold hearths of the ancients, but organizing the emanations of human power; the martial power, the economic power, the priestly power, towards worthy ends.

What are those ends? Do you know what your identity is? Five years ago, ten tears ago, a thousand years ago, do you know what it was? Five years from now, ten years from now, a thousand years from now, do you know what it will be? Who are your people? What is the locus of your concerns and what is worth your while? Conservatism will not ask these questions of you, or ask them only partly.

I’ll share some things that interest me. I am interested in reversing these graphs:

The USA's suicide rates have been rising the fastest among its youngest people and are now at all time highs. This alongside the end of marriage and births is the story of the "success" of democracy, technology, markets, immigration; of the establishment for the last 30 years.You can have whatever beliefs you want, and justify your chosen ideology with whatever stories you want to tell yourself; but the reality is that the way things have been arranged causes growing numbers—the highest ever—of young people to not marry, and not start families and to kill themselves.

To me this indicates the need for the total replacement of our incumbents: incumbent people, incumbent schools of thought, incumbent institutions. As far as identity goes, you know, I mean, it’s in the name. I’m Indian. But I was born in the US and Americans are my countrymen, and the things that are happening to them happen now globally. I have high hopes for what AI and more automation might be able to do—in time—but right now we have exactly one way to produce a human mind that we can get everything from truly useful labor to meaningful stories and relationships out of, and we’re killing that off. Will our economies even sustain the energy production needed to keep up the data centers? Unclear.

Conservatism doesn’t have anything to say in this moment. It can only condemn IVF. It can only gripe about banning TikTok or ‘wokeness’ in language models. When offered chances to do more than audit the Federal Reserve but freeze it out with crypto, it rolls its eyes about internet funny money. It offers no alternatives. But there is something cosmically revolting about the people who are on the side of increased entropy, sometimes, as in that linked case, completely consciously. Why should they be tolerated to dictate things to us? Why should history end with them? There is nothing worthy in them, nothing worthy of the acquisitive Vaishyas, valiant Kshatriyas, and brilliant Brahmins among us.

Our ends are worthy, and we should pursue them without apology.