Communists used to talk a lot about “Theory”. It was considered a duty of all Communists to “read theory”. It is likely that many of them were bullshitting — as is only reasonable, frankly. But that’s what you sign up for. This sort of obsession with theory is obviously ridiculous and is sort of reminiscent of the “Natural Philosophy” that people used to use to decide how nature worked before the scientific method became popular. Nevertheless, they liked to dangle it over the heads of their political enemies. “You haven’t read theory like we have. You are uneducated and lack the necessary credentials to talk about this argument”.
Right-wingers would try to respond by saying yes, they do have theory, but nobody could ever agree on what this theory was. Some said that the Holy Bible was the “theory” of the Right, or maybe the Catechism of the Catholic Church, or maybe just the general writings of Christian theologians. This is probably a correct response, not in the sense that it is right but in the sense that it is the response Communists deserve. They are effectively getting mad at you for not reading their theological tomes, so it is fair to respond in kind. But obviously right-wing non-Christians exist. But even this group can’t agree at all on what “theory” is. The Trads point to Evola. The Fascists point to Sorel. The Nietzscheans point to— well, isn’t it obvious? And the Lolberts point to Austrian economists. This is probably the second most reasonable way to respond, because when Communists are told that they are religious they deny it and say that Communism is economic, or if they’re really feeling fancy they will call it a “science” (pfft, maybe in the sense that palm-reading is a science). But obviously there are right-wingers of pretty much every economic school, including bizarre ones like Neo-Feudalism or Guild Socialism.
A lot of the intellectual right is also just not interested in “theory”, because they really prefer talking about numbers than words. Left-wingers are more verbally tilted and wordy academic fields tend to be far more left-wing than STEM. This is not always true, as there are many wordy right-wing authors, but is a general trend. But I digress.
The reason why this is the case, is because there really isn’t such thing as “Rightism”. I’m seeing this term get used more often, but it’s not being used correctly because the political right is a big-tent coalition against Leftism. And Leftism, unlike Rightism, is ideological. Leftism is distinct from the Left-Wing, and self-identified Leftists make it very clear that they don’t consider mainstream Liberals to be Leftists. Liberalism on its own isn’t necessarily Left-Wing. It’s more of a tabula rasa. It has manifested itself throughout history in the form of populism, elitism, racialism, egalitarianism, progressivism, and conservatism. It has no real founder. Locke is often cited as such, but Locke fell almost completely out of relevance during the 19th century. There is a very early split between English and French Liberalism, with English Liberalism’s roots (along with Locke’s beliefs) being difficult to fully distinguish from the preceding period of Calvinist Republicanism. The problems continue when we look at later figures influential to Liberalism. Idealists like Kant and Hegel had very different worldviews from the Empiricist-Nominalists like Locke and Hume. Liberal thinkers also didn’t view themselves entirely as being revolutionary in their ideas. Montesquieu and Jefferson traced their political roots back to antiquity. For the former, the Romans and Polybius. For the latter, the Anglo-Saxon Folkmoot.
Leftism is mostly derivative of Marx, in my opinion, but Kropotkin and Bakunin are also contributors. Other 19th-century non-Marxist socialists did not have any stronger of an impact on the left than they did on the political right. Utopian Socialism is pretty much irrelevant today as far as I know — those variants of it which exist are not related to its older forms, but outcrops of Marxist Scientific Socialism. Proudhon and Blanqui arguably influenced the political right more than the political left, establishing the groundwork for Boulanger and Sorel. It’s not necessarily always an accurate interpretation of Marx, but it has a strong lineage connected to him nonetheless. Marxism and its numerous children, in their own little ways, provide the source for Western Progressivism as it exists today. Wealth redistribution is good not necessarily out of a sense of charity, but out of the false belief that workers are entitled to a certain amount of wealth by virtue of their labor, and that the bourgeoisie are not producers but thieves who ought to give their money back in the form of taxes. This is completely different from the Rawlsian justification for wealth redistribution, which goes something like “people don’t deserve to suffer for innate characteristics or circumstances of their birth”. It really demonstrates how far we’ve come (or more accurately in my opinion, fallen) from the initial Greek notion of Justice, but I digress… Other things are also justified under Marxist pretenses, rather than Liberal ones. In my opinion, the Social Sciences have a relatively minor role in creating “Woke” but a large role in post-hoc justification of it. Take any anthropology-related gen-ed in college, and I think you will probably find this to be the case. It really started with the end of WWII. I’m not a huge Neema Parvini guy, But he has a pretty decent video on the Allied backing of Western Marxists in the Denazification process, if any of you are interested. There is also no shortage of e-Stalinists to harp on about the collaboration between Trotskyites and Western Governments. It is possible that Trotsky himself was an FBI asset. He was a slimy fellow, but you have to give him credit. He got his skull punctured with an ice pick and fought the guy off, only dying in the hospital the next day.
The leg-up Marxists got in academia, both due to this state support and due to a certain ethnic group with a fondness for Leftism emigrating out of Europe en masse around this time… Put them in a perfect position to reorient Anthropology, Sociology, and History around Marxist notions. Culture-History was thrown out for Processual and Post-Processual Archaeology, the former being more subtly materialist and the latter having much more evident Marxist elements (would recommend
’s interview with STJ on this topic). History from Below defeated the various top-down and progressive theories of history prominent before the war. This was not just a change in philosophy of what we derive the most knowledge from studying, but furthermore of what we ought to study. See my post on elite-focused history on why this is all quite ridiculous!"But You Would Have Been a Peasant"
Since the end of World War II, the Left-wing Academic ascendancy has been strongly focused with moving away from “great man history” and history focusing on the elites, and towards a more holistic view of history which focuses on the lives of “everyday people” and explains historical events away as products of material conditions, rather than hinging on…
It was this change in historical and anthropological thought which encouraged Psychologists and physical anthropologists to downplay the existence of race and population differences in phenotype frequencies. It was now somewhat necessary to do so, in order to uphold the new theoretical framework. Marxists did not initially reject the gene — Marx recognized differences in races, but in a sort of odd way simultaneously imagined people within groups to be tabula rasa. Under Stalin the regime promoted the deadly falsehood of Lysenkoism in order to avoid the terror of the gene. Hereditarianism was also rejected explicitly because it would harm race relations which had just been sorta-kinda-barely put to bed by the 60s Presidents. Nixon had this to say on the matter:
“I have reluctantly concluded, based at least on the evidence presently before me … that what Herrnstein says, and what was said earlier by Jensen, is probably … very close to the truth, […] There are geniuses within black groups. There are more within Asian groups … This is knowledge that is better not to know.”
The Civil Rights Movement was, again, probably not caused by Marxism but relied on Marxism and increasingly Anti-Colonialist Maoist arguments in order to prop itself up. The most famous civil rights advocates in American history were either Marxists or sympathetic to the cause at some point during their activism. Rosa Parks attended CPUSA meetings with her card-carrying husband, and was essentially a trained agitator. W.E.B. DuBois was an open Maoist by 50s, and held ambivalence towards the Soviet Union prior to that point. MLK was a CPUSA collaborator with clear Left-wing sympathies. Malcolm X was Communist in his youth, but had seemingly grown out of it as he became more focused on Islam. He still aligned himself with anti-American forces, but to call him a Communist sympathizer might be a bit much. He sympathized with the Islamic world, which found friends in the Red countries. After the death of X, Black Radicalism became dominated by the openly Marxist-Maoist and much more violent and ugly Black Panther Party of Huey Newton. The CPUSA had been involved in the Civil Rights movement for decades, funding the defense of the Scottsboro Nine in 1931.
All of this was happening while Communist militias were ripping apart the remnants of European colonial empires, and justifying it with either Maoist or Leninist theory depending on who was sending them their weapons. The Communist MPLA overthrew the Portuguese. The Rhodesians fought against both the China-backed ZANU and the USSR-backed ZAPU. In South Africa, the ANC’s development relied on its close alliance with the South African Communist Party. Anti-Imperialism and Anti-Colonialism became the new war cry of the international Left, and it eventually spread to the accused countries. Today “decolonization” is an integral part of Leftist thought in countries that are currently getting colonized by waves of foreign immigrants. In Latin America and the Arab world you do see the continuation of Socialist-Nationalist movements which had previously characterized the far right, likely to placate the religious majority. What makes these left-wing populists different from right-wing populists? Well, a few things, but one of the big ones is simply that they were warmer towards Marxists instead of being axiomatically anti-Marxist.
Back on the topic of the intelligentsia, I don’t think it’s even worth going into that modern gender ideology relies on Frankfurter and Postmodernist scaffolding in order to intellectually justify itself. As far as numbers go, a bit shy of 1 in 5 Social Science academics are self-identified Marxists, with a quarter of Sociologists being Marxists. I have a hard time believing more than 5% of Economists are Marxists, the one field of Sociology that Marxism claims descent from. It’s among the least left-wing fields in academia. This is a large percent considering that Marxism is both wrong and unpopular, suggesting that these fields were heavily influenced by Marxism in their development.
Point being, “Social Progressivism” as it exists in the current year is generally some form of Liberalism with varying degrees of ideological influence from 20th-century Marxism. Virtually everyone who identifies as a Leftist is either a Marxist or someone who, through the theories of Social Progressivism, is heavily influenced by Marxist ideas (perhaps more than they realize).
The political right has no such philosopher who they can consider their rock, and this makes sense, as the right has historically come into being as the preceding regime, and this regime took many different forms based on the country. People often say that being right-wing means being pro-hierarchy while being left-wing means being anti-hierarchy, but “pro-hierarchy” is not an ideology. The differences between people on the political right tend to be centered around how this hierarchy will be structured, which is kind of a big difference when you believe (as you should) that hierarchy is an inevitable characteristic of social organization even in societies whose mission is to abolish it. These differences are reflected on a smaller level in Western politics. The left-wing is less ideologically diverse than the right-wing. Feeling a certain way on one topic, given this certain way is associated with the political right, is less predictive that you feel a certain way on any other topic.
If there is anyone who should call themselves “The Rightists”, it should probably be the capital-T Traditionalists, and all of the religious groups which more or less agree with them. It is this group which believes essentially in Restoring Order, restoring cosmic “rightness”, in a manner quite distinct from utopian or salvation-based ideologies. This is not etymologically the same as the political right, whose name just comes from which side of the assembly people were on in Revolutionary France.
P.S. I’m reading Beowulf right now, expect my next post to be a review.
I was going to mainly comment what was written in the very last paragraph here. I actually have an article planned on the true nature of Rightism, as what exists right now is a fractured and disassociated conglomeration of various factions that lack definability.
This is the primary and most insurmountable problem that the Right faces, the issue of definition. I myself can define the Right as the orientation towards ontological propriety, but this is because I myself have invented these terms to be able to describe Tradition and its relationship with political thought. They are not widespread terms, which means that the rest of the world is left to discussing the Right in inferior terms. According to some, Right means “hierarchy”, to others it means “preservation of the status quo”, to others it means “authority”, to others it means “religion” in some general sense; the most egregious offense is that to some, the Right means Liberalism, especially taken in its modern definition. There is difficulty in assigning a precise term to the Right, is what I mean to say. The Left does not suffer this problem. Even the dumbest of people can say that the Left means equality.
The way this is a detriment to the Right in modern discourse is because the Right becomes some undefinable obscurity, whereas the Left is something simple. It’s “equality” vs some obscure conglomeration of notions including hierarchy and race and authority and nationalism and religion etc. Ironically, it is using religion as the jumping off point which is likely to be the least successful, because it does not speak the same language as other political terms. It’s then easy to say that he who can’t define his terms is wrong.
But we can define them. The true fight is equality vs ontological propriety.
To dust off an old phrase, what "unites the Right"? If the Right Wing spiritual Peasant defines it as "hard work"; and the Right Wing spiritual Merchant defines it as "Capitalism"; and the Right Wing spiritual Warrior defines it as "racial heredity, nationhood, masculinity", or as some kind of dogmatic formalism; and the Right Wing spiritual Priest defines it along the lines of "authentic religioisity"; the Man says it is leading a family, and the Woman says it is being a wife and a mother; what is the uniting factor? It is that each of these understands the Right as it relates to their spiritual predisposition, which is to say their archetype, their principle, and they understand a Right Wing civilizational mode to be the one in which their archetype becomes actualized through proper praxis. The Right is united in a strife for ontological propriety.
It is absolutely necessary that every person on the Right understands this unifying principle, because it determines how exactly how they interface with other people on the Right, and how they proliferate Right Wing ideas to those not yet initiated into them. The Left says "you can do whatever you want to do", the Right says "you can do what were made to do", and this is strong messaging, as the Left gives an indefinitude of dissatisfying options, while the Right gives people a purpose. This is the kind of rhetoric that should be employed by the Right, but it can only be done so if the Right knows its identity as thoroughly as the Left knows its.
Neema parvinis book on elite theory is pretty good. Also, that part about marxists infiltrating academia really reminded me of how neocons (many of whom were trotskyist) also infiltrated many conservative magazines and think tanks. it’s insane how small a group of people they were but they were so organized that they managed to pull it off