Right Action and the Right's Reaction

Finding our way out of the Reactionary Right's identity crisis

In the wake of the attempted assassination against President Trump, the political right wing has seen a resurgence of energy, but there is one particular expression of that energy that has exposed many self-proclaimed right wingers to be disenfranchised leftists— that is, people who, in their hearts and character, are no different from the type of person found on the left and the only difference between them is surface level political beliefs. Beyond simple differences of opinion about their preferred economic and social policies, they both embody the same destructive force that leads to further dissolution and decay. When they have power, they tend to use it in identical ways. 

As I’ve watched playing out on social media the various arguments for and against “giving the left a taste of their medicine”, there is a recurring sentiment that emerges. It is the feeling that while the right’s aims are good and noble, its tools are too weak to get the job done, that its hands are tied by its own principles. This belief has tended to result in the desperate but erroneous conclusion that the right must adopt the left’s tactics if they are ever to go on the offence and stop retreating. Saul Alinksy wrote in his Rules for Radicals to “make the enemy live up to its own book of rules” and this is a tactic that has undeniably been quite successful for the left. The temptation for the right to use it at the first grasping of political capital is understandably tempting. 

Some on the right would like to adopt the left’s tactics for the simple reason that they would like to win and they are sick of feeling like their lot in life is to be perpetually on the losing team. Furthermore, they are angry and thirsty for revenge. This is not a new phenomenon and one that, over time, has resulted in a confusion of ideas and values among the political right, which is now a “big tent” that is not really much of a home for genuine right wingers, but provides shelter to all manner of pseudo-right wingers and counter-leftists. As this attitude has proliferated, the right has become more and more like the left, becoming overrun with leftist ideas and values that merely have the window dressing of the right, but none of the substance. This has allowed the subversion of the left to encroach deeper and deeper into right wing territory, and is largely ignored or denied by those who participate in it, entranced as they are by the political theatre.

Many on the right, especially within American politics, believe that the purpose of the right is meant to confront and counter the ideas of the left. And here we find the crux of the matter. The right wing nowadays is almost solely a reactionary movement. It is entirely oppositional and has no independent vision of its own. It is “the left, but slower” or “the status quo” or “Enlightenment liberalism”, and it has little to no ability to establish for itself an independent initiative or framing that isn’t defined by its fight against the left. What primarily defines the modern political right is being “against the left”. It still maintains a love affair with all things modern: democracy, equality, rationalism, and so forth. This is due to centuries of subversion which has resulted in very few people having any clear idea of what the right could and should be independently, so thoroughly have traditional paradigms been memory-holed. And so for these people, these disenfranchised leftists, these pseudo-right wingers, these counter-leftists, politics is just a confusing maze of various flavours of leftism, which they often don’t even recognise as such. So complete is the “reign of quantity” in this age that most people cannot even fathom any other paradigm than that of modernity, which is what leftism actually represents at its core. Certainly they cannot conceive of anything resembling metapolitics.

One reason I believe Julius Evola is such an important thinker for today is that he clearly illuminates, across all his writings, what it means to stand in opposition to what the left represents. He offers a crisp and inspiring vision of traditional values in stark contrast to the values of modernity. Part of the problem of the right is that they simply do not know what it really looks like to be opposed to the left. We are raised from birth in a liberal modern worldview and never shown any alternative, so it is hardly surprising that the right has “forgotten” what it is supposed to be. If all one ever knew were twilight and night, he might think twilight and night are opposites, since he has never seen the full light of day. But once he has seen the day, he recognises that twilight is just an earlier phase of the night. It is only when one steps out of a modern worldview that one can recognise the political right as a less developed form of the political left.

This is why the political right tends to be “the left but slower”. Both the left and the right are on the same downward trajectory, the only difference is that what we call the left got on the slide first. But the right will necessarily reach the bottom, too, by virtue of having gotten on the same slide. The political right will continue to corrode and “conservatism” will continue to adopt the same policy positions that the left had only a generation prior. In most western countries, there is hardly anything at all resembling a truly right-wing party. At best, they are “centre right”. And this is inevitable for an ideology that is purely based around reacting and cannot set its own agenda.

Thus, the right suffers from a tactical lag. The right isn’t failing to achieve victory because they won’t adopt leftist strategies, but because they are in a position where their very existence is defined by reacting to whatever agenda the left has set. This results in a certain frenzied fanaticism and disorganised activity in the lower sense. The tactical lag is often felt as a sense of “running out of time” and that good character is a luxury that can no longer be afforded. This is strange, because the right frequently indulges in lamenting the moral decadence of modernity, while simultaneously finding every excuse as to why they cannot or even must not bother to cultivate moral character within themselves. 

Julius Evola wrote in A Handbook for Right-Wing Youth:

“Those who harbour illusions about the possibility of a purely political struggle and the power of this or that formula or system, with no new human quality as its exact counterpart, have learned no lessons from the past” 

And also: 

“People who delude themselves today about the possibility of a purely political struggle and about the power of one or another formula or system, who do not possess a new human quality as a precise opposing vision, have learned none of the lessons of the recent past.”

Evola apparently considered this point so important that he makes it twice in the same chapter. The human quality he refers to is a type of inner being that is diametrically opposed to that quality which is embodied by the modern mass man— and the quality of the mass man is the fundamental character of the leftist. This means that in order to achieve any true victory, one cannot ever sink to that level, because to sink to that level is a loss in and of itself, and it is a loss so profound and complete that no meaningful victory can be had even on a more shallow plane.