Vanguardism for the Right: Part 1

by Christopher Jolliffe

Christopher Jolliffe examines the challenges facing modern conservative movements in the West, highlighting the strategic dominance of leftist ideologies across cultural and institutional arenas.

Read part 2 here.

There was a time when every schoolboy knew the story of the Battle of Arnhem, where in 1944, British, Polish and American airborne troops found themselves surrounded in that Dutch city, waiting for armoured columns that never came. Immortalised in the 1977 film A Bridge Too Far, it was a lesson in the limitations of unsupported light infantry. When the Germans plunged into the Ardennes months later, they learned about the limitations of unsupported heavy armour. The salient point, in both cases, is that even the sharpest individual part needs the whole to function, that elements behaving independently and without logistical support is a recipe for defeat. Under these circumstances even the best Red Devil or Königstiger eventually winds up prey.

A similar model might be applied to the Right across the West, which very much finds itself behaving in a discordant and self-defeating manner whenever possible. This is in part because the Right is, by necessity, a broad church. No political compass, generally built by out-of-date soft centrists, can properly map the kaleidoscope that is Rightist thought, from Atlantic geniality to Lockean libertarianism to Francoism to Catholic Reaction to those other bits we best not talk about. 

Central to conservative electoral strategy since the 1970s, particularly in Anglosphere countries, is to appeal to Nixon’s ‘silent majority,’ to mirror William F. Buckley’s attempt to build a broad conservative front, to meld a respectable Right without recourse to “scowling primitives” or hijacking by “vulgarians.” Buckley, who in 1988 was described as having the “ability to hold on to stable and traditional beliefs even while [indulging] his instinct for change and variety,” was unable to pass that ethic on to the movement he helped create. Some paleoconservatives made their best efforts to popularise their own ideas — holding slogans with Eric Voegelin’s seminal “don't immanentize the eschaton” written across them — but they would have been better off remembering another of Voegelin’s aphorisms, that “the death of the spirit is the price of progress.” 

While the ‘68ers were busily getting inside the tent and fouling it up, there was a belief among conservative leaders that common sense and the will of the great mass of people, concerned by the direction things were heading, might be sufficient as a counterweight. This was the populist epistemology the neoconservatives put forth as they cobbled together that Rightist alliance that would banish the Left from political power in the United States and the United Kingdom throughout the 1980s, and one still employed by mainstream centre-right parties. It worked, and sometimes still works, at a surface level; it can deliver electoral victory. But the other battle — the one being fought for the soul of our thing — was increasingly neglected. “There is no such thing as society,” Margaret Thatcher declared. As the Financial Times recently put it, “doctrinal conservatives stormed the three branches of government handily enough, but not Hollywood, the publishing industry, academia and other trades that form our habits of mind without our knowing it.” Establishment conservatives often fight hard, but they always fight dumb. 

Right-wing politics was reduced to a rejection of post-industrial politics on economic grounds, notably in favour of supply-side economics and in opposition to the “confiscatory state,” and struggled to postulate a positive vision of the future beyond mere prosperity and a vague philosophical holding pattern. On the other flank, the respectable Right, ever wary of those who’ve read Evola or Spengler, were nervous that forthright cultural warfare would undermine their fragile consensus. 

Groping toward respectability-at-any-cost, ever a problem for the thoroughly class-conscious Tories in Britain, has coloured conservative politicians everywhere else ever since. Fear of stepping outside Overton’s window has meant that conservatives are fighting a permanent rearguard action, a rearguard fought against the darker chapters in Rightism’s history as much as the Left. Rearguards might be great for a fighting retreat, but they aren’t designed to take and hold ground. As a result, those on the Right have lost virtually every battle that mattered, outside of economics. We can quibble about how effective Ronald Reagan was on the social front, or how John Howard helped to revitalise Anzac Day, but those small victories are typically eclipsed when the electorate becomes bored and decides to vote for a change of air. No politician is immune to this sort of frivolity, which is why they seem terrified much of the time.

This model initially succeeded because the promises of proletarian revolution rang hollow in developed Western nations, outside France, in part because the workers always had enough to eat and could afford their own houses. The good bits of capitalism seemed available to everybody. If this were enough, and remained so, all would be well; but it is not, and has not, and man does not live on bread alone. 

Eventually all our productive elements wound up being sent to the Third World, and everything became value-adding or speculation. The gulf between the haves and the have nots has only widened since, and the middle class finds itself both expanded and hollowed out at the same time. Short-term thinking — decades seem short in the scheme of things — has made these economic victories look a little less convincing in hindsight. While this was happening, progressive elites were busy taking over everything else, because nobody seemed to be watching the gates. Populism might win short-term power, but it seems ineffective when it comes to long-lasting change, because at day’s end, elites still run everything. Failure to understand this is premised on a very deep deceit baked into all modern thinking, that of people power: that in contemporary representative polities, the people govern. Attempts to drive change from the bottom up, as Neema Parvini points out in The Populist Delusion, “amount to little more than an inchoate rabble.” He cites January 6 and the Yellow Vest movement as examples.

Populism is designed to reflect the mass to harvest its energy, rather than anaxias; hence, it struggles to make real institutional change along genuinely conservative lines, because the mass generally doesn’t think about these things. The mass is interested in financial security, sending their children to decent schools, and being able to generally live a good life; the connection made between these things, and the broader problems at the sharp end of power beyond election time, is often tenuous and poorly understood. The will is lacking for genuine restoration, because it cannot find expression among the mass beyond the superficial; a new lick of paint does the trick, a change from red to blue décor. Because the institutions of a nation shape the internal bearings of its population, and they remain unaltered, meaningful change is impossible. 

This sort of populism, even if we accept it can still work, is premised on conditions of life that are fast disappearing. Demographics, for example: not just ageing populations, but the fact those older cohorts are all that is left of that silent majority. Younger people, wherever they might originally hail from — part of the problem, and an obvious intention, of mass immigration — often feel little connection to the nation where they reside, and less to the particular features of its history, which they often regard as litanies of sin, sometimes against their own ancestors. Increasingly, they are not silent, much as we might wish they were. This, as much as limited home ownership, is why millennials seem to be bucking the once-assumed trend of conservatism increasing with age, and it does not help that the touchstones of life, once tightly grouped, are now kaleidoscopic, and younger people seem to be creatures of nowhere. They, susceptible to the nothingness of modern life, fall quickly for the internationalist causes de jour manufactured by today’s elite culture, be they about the weather or about human rights or whatever postmodern crusade sends out a siren call. Against this the establishment Right seems to think “it’s the economy, stupid” is sufficient, because they used it successfully, and once it was successfully used against them. Necessary maybe, but increasingly far from sufficient. A reduction of arguments to merely the material reflects the fact that the Right no longer know what they are about, that past successes have blinded them to present problems.

The Right needs vanguardism, because vanguards accomplish everything in politics. The Bolsheviks went from an electorally insignificant party to total control in the space of a few years. The French Revolution was powered by a small cadre of bourgeois lawyers, writers, and self-loathing aristocrats. Vanguards exist to channel popular sentiment — Rousseau’s “general will” — into concrete political victories. Without a vanguard, the Sans-culottes are nobody. Without the Sans-culottes, Robespierre was nobody. If I frighten you talking about revolutions complete with plenty of blood, I wouldn’t worry, at least not yet. There’s no stomach for it, which almost guarantees that there will be plenty of blood down the line. That’s not wishful thinking, merely comment on how great political upheavals tend to go. We are well overdue, waiting for “a single spark [that] will set off an explosion that will consume us all.” 

There are three ways through which power can be achieved in Western democracies. The first and most obvious is via straight-forward electoral victory. But electoral victory, as hopefully established, is fraught. This is in part because, as Andrew Breitbart famously quipped, politics is downstream from culture, in the American sense of the word. Institutions shape our thinking, particularly among those who don’t do a great deal of thinking. Elected governments often struggle through the mud in part because hostile or dysfunctional institutions, particularly the ones once called the civil service, behave in a distinctly obstructive manner. Take Donald Trump’s wrestling match with the State Department as an example. 

Or take the British Foreign Office, which once ran much of the world with only a couple of hundred staff, up until the Great War. Compare that to contemporary Australia, complete with an empire that expands to the Torres Strait, fielding a Department of Foreign Affairs with over six thousand employees. It must be difficult for these vast bureaucracies not to view themselves as the true receptacles of power in a world that loves committee above all else, and lives in perpetual fear of the Führerprinzip. So afraid are we of the Führerprinzip that those elected leaders must spend most of their time managing their image to secure re-election, daintily walking on eggshells, compromising wherever it is politically advisable, which is all the time. Naturally, these sprawling departments weather each new political administration as the rest of us weather feckless bosses we know will wander off to greener pastures sooner or later. 

Among conservative leaders who manage to win electoral power, that carefully cultivated image, sharpened by focus groups and fortified by armies of staffers, is under continuous attack by media outlets that are generally hostile. National broadcasters, it goes without saying, are very much unimpressed with recent conservative gains — for example, the No vote on the recent Australian referendum — and are liable to throw themselves into frenzied tirades, accusing the population of letting the elites down. The ABC and BBC, the media personification of the Longhouse, trade in this currency. The Murdoch press is suspicious of anybody who scratches their head about free market economics or the consequences of runaway globalisation. Only somebody with elephant hide and a deep war chest, like Donald Trump, can laugh about it. Those who haven’t been on-screen companions for much of the population prior to political life can never enjoy the kind of media immunity that this brings with it. We risk our elected leaders being celebrities forever, because that is the kind of Sans-culottes we get nowadays, and today’s Sans-culottes merely need votes, rather than storm the Bastille. 

Something strange similarly happens to those conservative leaders who find themselves cut off and surrounded after winning power in Western countries. This is the effect of that institutional power, similar to that worked on an undergraduate who walks into university with one set of nascent ideas and walks out with another. It is as hard to deny the smart set in political life as it is in social life. Those political figures talk about draining the swamp, but the swamp ends up draining them. Boris Johnson is a case in point. They move to the centre so surreptitiously it is as though they were never anywhere else. “We must govern for everyone,” they shout, but everyone is not the chattering classes. They just seem like everyone, for as the proverb has it, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. The Chinese version: the loudest goose gets the axe. 

It seems that the ground is not prepared for electoral victory, and that muddle-headed conservative leaders end up surrendering rather less gallantly than much of the 4^th Parachute Brigade at Arnhem. Without “an army of statesmen,” arriving like armoured columns, they end up prey to the existent lobbies and power structures that infest contemporary democracies. Some willingly step on the fumi-e. Whatever their reasoning, it is hard to feel good about the recent course of electoral politics in the West, even when ostensibly Rightist leaders have taken power through the ballot box, with a few exceptions in places such as Eastern Europe, where the cultural landscape is indeed very different.

The second option for seizing power might be called the Gramsci option, as it is an inverse version of exactly what the Left played successfully for many decades. The long march through the institutions, Rudi Dutschke called it, and you find reference to it everywhere. Conservatives were caught napping, busily setting a place for their sworn enemies in the name of fair play, and a sense of invincible hubris. Nobody saw the threat until it was too late; some still don’t. They came to the Rugby game thinking it would be played as ever it had, not realising their opponents planned to ruck with knives and the referee had been poisoned in advance. For their lack of forward-thinking, and their unwillingness to get Enoch-Powell-dirty in the culture wars, we owe our current state of affairs. 

Tom Hayden, author of the Huron Statement and one of the founders of that student-led pseudo-revolt, claimed that the “silent majority” was incompatible with rule by the people. He meant rule by his people, and his people, as that statement clearly declares, were after the means of ideational production. By virtue of institutional capture, the silent majority gradually wound up excluded from any avenue of power beyond the most basic electoral franchise, and those avenues of power worked increasingly hard to neuter popular will. The silent majority might vote, and they might be unhappy with certain things, but they lack the direction, power and will to meaningfully affect the institutions that increasingly shape our mise en scène. And nor should they. That’s why, in theory at least, they elect representatives. Those representatives are often dashed to pieces against those institutions: Trump and his immigration reform, for example. Curtis Yavin calls it the Cathedral, the systematic and seemingly automatic coalescence of progressive thinking in all our institutions; it’s hard to argue he was wrong. 

To win back the institutions through a campaign of infiltration and subversion — we might as well call it what it is — is only possible when your opponent is, in fact, napping. The Left are not napping. They guard those captured institutions jealously, knowing how they got there to start with. They are vanishingly unlikely to accept a Trojan Horse full of armed Helenes inside the gates. National Affairs estimated that, in the United States, the ratio of liberal to conservative professors has increased by 350% since 1984. In Australia, the ousting of Andrew Thorburn from the Essendon AFL club, by virtue of his involvement with City on a Hill church, is indicative that this is not restricted to government and higher education. Their version of tolerance is to quietly exclude people with different ideas, and loudly exclude them if those ideas get a little too forthright, or if there’s a possibility they’ll wield actual power. Many workplaces have that odd conservative type working there, and some make it into middle-management positions, but they rarely make it further than that. Structural inertia, you might call it, which can take generations to shift, as the other side dutifully discovered. 

Though the other side is a little disingenuous, and we give them too much credit, when we pretend that a few student revolutionaries on their own shifted the entire course of Western society. As K. R. Bolton puts it,

The ’68ers were mobilized to change societies according to the requirements of the establishment, against which these alleged radicals imagined they were revolting. As for their “revolt,” nothing could be further from actuality: they were the useful idiots of the system that they decried. Their purpose was dialectical: their aims were so nihilistic that the establishment was able to push its left-wing agenda in the name of “reform,” “progress” and “modernization,” which seemed moderate, even conservative, by comparison.

Hardly Che Gueveras on the inside, it seems; infiltration is made possible by institutional support in the first place, which is why Bill Ayers of the Weather Underground went from fugitive to prominent university professor. Much of that support comes not only from sympathetic academia but from market-driven engines of production and consumption, who are attracted to left-libertines because they make good customers; one reason we now have Pride Month. Getting their heads around the alliance between big business and leftist politics is tricky for many conservatives marinated in the thought of Austrian economists and Ayn Rand. Surely, as the Reagan era demonstrated, the free market is a panacea to our ills, not least of which is government overreach? Such a solution seems less likely today, and it is even less likely that large corporations are even remotely interested in Rightist political ends, many of which are anti-globalist in their outlook. Furthermore, such corporations are now beholden to the Environmental, Social and Governance Index, which is designed to discourage investment in problematic organisations. Once you’ve publicly floated your company, you’re at the mercy of investors and sometimes advertisers, as Elon Musk’s venture into Twitter/X demonstrates. At least he called it what it is: blackmail by another name.

There are strong pressures to conform to the governing ethos of international liberalism, and Robert Conquest’s adage, that any organisation not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing, seems to hold true here. That said, I don’t put much faith in big multinationals, who have proven time and again Thomas Jefferson’s claim that “the mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.” Good luck infiltrating the Tech Giants, who run their own version of the Cheka, busily enforcing “community standards” everywhere they go. Perhaps dying your hair purple and gaining several stone would be a good start, because unless you are made of very stern stuff, institutions end up changing you more than you end up changing them. 

The third way is to build alternate institutions that can assert dominance when those captured and corrupted institutions collapse courtesy of sacrificing competence for ideological loyalty. Here, Herbert Marcuse helpfully spells out the strategy:

The long march includes the concerted effort to build up counterinstitutions. They have long been an aim of the movement, but the lack of funds was greatly responsible for their weakness and their inferior quality. They must be made competitive. This is especially important for the development of radical, “free” media. The fact that the radical Left has no equal access to the great chains of information and indoctrination is largely responsible for its isolation.

How well they worked their medicine. Marcuse and his type saw the universities of the 1960s as ripe for conquest, and they were insiders looking out. Today those universities are teetering on the brink of catastrophe, captured by rabid ideologues and embracing a business model that is the twenty-first century equivalent of selling indulgences. They are further hostile to any kind of localism; they serve, in part, to launder a convoluted immigration process, which has made them Australia’s third largest money-maker. For our own students they have become enormous rackets that prey on the minds of the young, to produce fanatical devotees of the current order — at least so far as the humanities are concerned. Even if you’re studying STEM or something vocational, you’ll still have to jump through the various hoops to ensure no brain emerges unwashed. They have embraced barefaced sophistry and more or less given up on being the heirs of Plato’s Academy, and bear the name only out of ease of reference. 

To illustrate both angles of attack — taking over institutions, or proposing alternative ones — take the Ramsay Centre in Australia, a case of genuine conservative philanthropy, endowed by Mr. Paul Ramsay AO, who aimed to fund a centre for studies in Western Civilisation. One might think that History and Social Science departments in a Western country might be happy about this, but you’d be wrong. The Australian National University wouldn’t take it, despite the financial advantages, and the University of Sydney claimed they’d only do so to “contextualise and problematise” the thing, because of course. All this occurred under a conservative national government, amidst Commonwealth-funded universities. Here you can see the resistance to infiltration, and the paradoxical success of a program that incurred all kinds of hostility. Unfortunately, there was only one Mr. Paul Ramsay.

In the world of media, there are enough ostensibly conservative-oriented outlets to create the impression that the Right is ascendant, an impression that many liberals, who live in constant terror, are quick to cleave to. The truth is that many of these are shallowly milquetoast and regard the present problems as odd deformations rather than something in the DNA of our ethos. People who talk about “woke” as though it is a brand-new phenomenon, and not the teleological outcome of things they themselves often supported, misunderstand the problem. Tucker Carlson, who enjoys the rare gift of being able to speak to everyone, began veering in a decidedly reactionary direction and was cut loose by Fox News. This should raise some eyebrows about the loyalties of many of these large conglomerates. The Spectator, the oldest conservative magazine still in circulation, published an article not long ago in favour of mass immigration for the usual economic reasons. Many of these conservative media groups are the propaganda arm of the populist epistemology that has served in the past, but is unlikely to serve in the future; in this respect, they reflect the limitations of that metapolitical viewpoint generally. They are uniquely vulnerable to controversy, and the whims of investors. Thus the pressures mounted against them are not merely ideological but also profit-based, which is why so many now resemble tabloids and gossip rags, inane but safe. Investors worry that pressure mounted by the bigger institutions will annihilate their investment, because the bigger institutions, as we know, are occupied territory. Obscure smaller media groups and the work of dissident individuals, generally spearheaded by younger types, demonstrate fresh ideas, but these are limited in penetration, in part because of money. They are free of investor-driven knee-jerks, but operate in relative poverty as a result.

The problem of building alternate institutions, as Marcuse pointed out, is very much a financial one. As armies march on their stomachs, so the wheels of power consume vast quantities of money. Thomas Sowell once commented that conservatives were playing their B team politically; the A team was out making money in the free market. Perhaps he was right, though I am not sure I would call that A team particularly conservative beyond the barest of qualifiers. There are some exceptions; Mark Andreessen, for example, isn’t afraid to generously invest in platforms, such as Substack, that are ostensibly in favour of “free speech,” which increasingly, in our age of dissident argot, really means stuff that’s in opposition to the present zeitgeist. These tech types, who sometimes embrace libertarianism because content moderation is only an expense, remain so until the iron maiden starts to shut. For his trouble, Andreessen gets called a Nazi everywhere, and pressure builds on Substack to deal with its “Nazi problem”; you can see why others might be reluctant. Even if you front the money, there’s no guarantee that those who must decide what to do with it won’t crack under the pressure. 

At any rate, financial backing for left-wing projects, by the likes of Soros’s Open Society Foundations, dwarf anything the Right can boast of. Most of those conservative elites, part of the A team, seem content to invest in new properties and build new swimming pools rather than fight difficult and ugly battles, though they have less skin in the game than, say, somebody working a wage job, who cannot afford to buffer themselves and must live with the consequences of our increasingly miserable state of affairs. A cursory look at who funds Black Lives Matter, and to what extent, is enough to convince that whatever else that so-called A team is investing in, it’s not a Rightist vanguard. Such well-funded metapolitical organisations, subsidised by BlackRock and interested not only in participating directly in electoral politics but also in shaping the general mood, have almost no equivalent on the Right. The A team could do worse than, say, investing in this publication. 

Strong electoral power could bring about a legislated ‘clearing out’ of these bad actors, as took place in Hungary — formerly the base of Open Society Foundations — though that is predicated not merely on the will of those who would legislate such a thing, but what is indeed possible when one comes up against hostile institutions. Those obstructive bureaucracies, for example, are unlikely to smile on such a venture, seeing their own necks on the block next. It only reinforces the salience of Yavin’s Cathedral, at least concerning Western Europe and the Anglosphere.

But where responsibility is ceded, opportunity waits, and it is in the small organs of civil society that have all but disappeared that the Right can make itself felt. Recently the ABC ran an article that talked about the collapse of community organisations and managed to blame the failure of the Voice to Parliament referendum in Australia on, of all things, the atomisation of broader society. As is generally the case, they diagnose the problem half-correctly. We certainly are atomised, and while no new phenomena — think Arendt to Fight Club — it increases as the twenty-first century goes on. We have been pushed into the simulacra, into our holes and pods, and community life has been vapourised around us, particularly in the wake of the Pandemic. Londoners locked in their houses in 1665, provided they survived, eventually came out. Many of us never left lockdown. In addressing the fractured social landscape of contemporary life, something the Left can only manage in terms of socialised programs or cant about mental health, the Right can build an army in the dark. 

The Right has other advantages, too; in aesthetics, for instance, which is why the Left is so desperate to portray them as brutish skinheads at every turn. Generally speaking, the Right likes beautiful things, like classical and baroque architecture; the Left has Le Corbusier and Brutalism, the love of which has turned modern cities into soulless shells of their former selves. Leftists are alternately beanpoles or obese land-whales; the gym and physical fitness, as many opinion pieces angrily relate, have become bastions of right-wing thought. Good aesthetics, aside from being good on their own terms, are also a form of social proof. Many younger Rightists have abandoned the brittle populist epistemology of the neoconservatives, and found other, stronger brews to imbibe. To them, the story of the twentieth-century Right is one of defeat and rout, even if there have been electoral victories in the past. For them, the Establishment Right can promise very little. Their arena is the cultural and social one — a new globalised cultural populism that exists without leaders, without parties, represented by symbolism online — the arena the Establishment Right naively believed could survive a homicidal zeitgeist. They have zeal but lack institutional power. 

Against this the Left has institutional power, and a lot of money, but seems bankrupt in the world of ideas, which is a little surprising, given how hard they’ve worked to feed brainworms into everybody’s supper. Sure, they have BreadTube and a cornered popular culture, busily producing those over-funded Hollywood disasters, or streaming service propaganda like The Rings of Power or The Witcher, which few bother watching any longer. These exist to remind you you’ve been divested of your stories. There’s a mean-spirited cruelty to these sorts of appropriations, which causes the mask to slip a little; many can’t articulate quite what they mean, as they struggle to proclaim they aren’t racist, while feeling a little unsettled that Snow White isn’t, well, snow white any longer. Leftist showrunners can’t move the heart, because they deny higher things exist; for them, a solid strategy would be to retreat on this front to better defensive positions, but they are infected with the same hubris that once coloured conservatives. The poverty of their ideas about the world becomes more obvious by the day, as their fanatical attempts to cement that ideational hegemony, whether through popular culture or academia, become more pronounced, and more desperate. 

To exploit these vulnerabilities a Rightist vanguard must engage in the culture war; it must prepare the ground, to connect their ideas with the mass, as the 101^st and 82^nd Airborne prepared the ground for the amphibious landings that followed on D-Day. This is done in the world of letters, and as our intellectual worlds regress to hieroglyphic and oral forms, through the varied spaces on the internet like YouTube. As Keynes once quipped, many a free thinker is in fact bound to the words of a long-dead economist, and the same is true of the penetrative power of the ideas we articulate today. The Right is not lacking in such ideas, but finds it difficult to unite them with a heavily propagandised mass population, one increasingly composed of assorted stock that enjoy no special relationship to the countries in which they live, yet vote nonetheless. It is further hindered by the fact that the Right is riddled with infighting, which of course is natural for any differentiated group roughly pushing for discordant, if broadly similar aims. Nonetheless, it is for the mass — at least, geographically, culturally and nationally particular masses — that right-wing politics, though inegalitarian in its truest form, must be about, and certainly not for special interests, unlike many of our friends in the A team. Part of the reason the other side wishes to create a single globalised mass, aside from ease of commerce, is to break any purchase the Right might have when speaking to those particular groupings that still feel a sense of historical legacy. They have had some success in this, but particular features, renewed by the proximate nature of life, are difficult to totally eradicate. 

The mass by itself is undirected, unpredictable energy; that is all it can be. The mass has no virtue, at least not beyond the virtue of its individual members. Every manner of thought that deifies the mass ends up disappointed, some so much that they build camps to punish them, or starve them, or outright democide them. The mass will release Barrabas over Christ; the mass will watch daytime television and think The Project is profound. But elites must love the mass, not in a kitsch pseudo-egalitarian abstractive way, but the way a shepherd loves his flock. There can be no other way about it. The mass can only be the object of power, never the subject, which is why today’s democracy delivers such half-baked products. The elites cannot be of the people, but must be for the people, even if the people occasionally drag them through the streets. Our elites today are not for the people, but love pretending to be of them, while snickering at them. 

An example of sneering elite hubris, in the context of the recent Australian referendum, was well-captured in a recent article that appeared on The Big Smoke:

We among the inner-city, latte-sipping, over-educated cultural elite (we, supposedly out of touch with mainstream Australia, whoever the fuck that is) are voting Yes in legion. You can’t throw a rock in my bubble without hitting a Yes banner; we signal our virtues at an olympic level. Bravo, us. But we’re also a cadre that has memories, and when the next federal election cycle rolls around, the results are unlikely to go well for the Coalition …

… If you’re a voter who is undecided, or doesn’t know what the vote is all about, take a leap of faith and trust me when I say that it won’t mean anything bad for you, and is an actual progressive step in the right direction for those who need it most. It’s not a cure-all, but it will do, for now. A No vote just stops it all, which will make next Saturday a red-letter day for (among many), the fucking Nazis. This is not a side most would really like to be on.

The best the Left can do is call you a Nazi, and increasingly few of us care. You shouldn’t either; that’s their pornographic fantasy, not ours. For a mass beginning to wonder quite what has happened to their ostensible betters, finding an audience and hearing for truth in a world hostile toward it is difficult, particularly as the internet is less free with each passing year. It is easy to reach ever-shrinking existing audiences but hard to capture new ones. It is a process of quarantine, precisely how the other side likes it best. Nonetheless, this is the front that scares them most. 

“The culture war is a right-wing distraction,” they shout, as though the culture war isn’t what they’ve bent every muscle toward fighting for decades. They’ve won it so conclusively that many now take our totally untruthful and abnormal social and cultural world as given. When they start talking derisively about engaging in the “culture war,” it’s because they know this is a vulnerability, that our postmodern lives are anti-natural, and that this represents the possibility of the equivalent of a Normandy landing against their stretched Atlantic Wall. Directing matters back to statistical questions, minutia of policy, political personalities, and their various shibboleths of moral purity — equality, diversity, inclusion, etc. — veil the fact that any understanding of those things must come from a position of cultural warfare. Take a position and be unapologetic about it, but take the right position. They have to stake their ground on utterly ridiculous issues, like pretending not to know what a woman is, because otherwise they alienate elements of their Leninist alliance. An enemy that cannot tell the truth lives on borrowed time, but they can wreak untold damage in that time, and pendulums do not swing themselves. 

The trick is to direct the mass away from dope-like liberal prescriptions when they begin to feel the cracks forming in contemporary life, when the plastic and saccharine imaginings of progressives can’t provide satisfactory answers. This is done by vanguard reactionary thought penetrating into common parlance, away from the stifling and suffocating liberal orthodoxies that today are everywhere abroad. Most of us remember when we heard the first words of an obvious truth, one that we had not heard articulated quite so well, in public life. It was like getting a breath of oxygen after being underwater far too long; this is why Jordan Peterson, despite his limitations, became a cult hero overnight to millions of men who had grown up imbibing only lies. Nothing he said was terribly remarkable, aside from being truthful on subjects nobody else was comfortable discussing. As Orwell said, speaking the truth in a time of universal deceit is itself a revolutionary act. People are waiting to hear what they suspect is true, and while the truth might be a sword, and sometimes unpalatable at its pointy end, it is ultimately a liberating force. Believing this is what makes a Rightist what he is, because he believes that things like truth are not merely matters of relative perspective, and that we ought not to be a jesting Pilate who asks the question and doesn’t stay for the answer. Conventional Rightist populism — predicated on economic terms and believing that wokeism is merely an unnatural deformation of our otherwise serviceable current order — might be effective in the short-term, but is no substitute for fighting the deeper and more difficult battles, battles that cut to the very core of what life is about; battles that take a very long time and accrue casualties. We risk mistaking a strategy for the thing itself. Think not in political terms, but in civilisational terms. That’s what’s at stake, after all. 

It is in the establishment of alternate institutions in the cultural, intellectual and social world, and particularly ones that concern ideational matters, that the ground is best prepared for subsequent electoral victory, one prefaced on something deeper than the populism that has served in the past. This requires money, forethought, and naturally, a degree of courage. Electoral victory without institutional strength to fortify a galvanised mass — galvanised beyond that shallow populism that fades like the fidget spinner fad — seems doomed to limited success at best and outright failure at worst. Fight Overlord, not Market Garden; the first Ardennes offensive, not the second.

(The article was first published here.)