“This doctrine of the natural growth and origin of society is the distinctive Tory doctrine of England, the very opposite to the theories of Locke and the Fathers of our late Republic. In adopting it, we begin a great conservative reaction. We attempt to rollback the Reformation in its political phases; for we saw everywhere in Europe and America reformation running to excess, a universal spirit of destructiveness, a profane attempt to pull down what God and Nature had built up, and to erect ephemeral Utopias in its place. Liberty was degenerating into licentiousness, and “anarchy, plus the street constable” stared us in the face. We lead off in a new reactionary Reformation, and Christendom must follow our lead, or soon be involved in social chaos and confusion.”
–George Fitzhugh, The Revolutions of 1776 and 1861 Contrasted, 1863
Occidental Dissent is a reactionary website.
We revere the past which was vastly superior to the present for White people in America. We’re not interested in “conserving” the status quo. We’re carrying on the tradition of George Fitzhugh and Southern conservatism here, not William F. Buckley and Eastern conservatism.
“Why might a conservative become a reactionary?
That question has been much on my mind in recent years, as the ranks of conservative intellectuals has thinned out, with some shifting leftward and many others taking a leap into the outright reactionary politics that has flourished on the right since Donald Trump took over the Republican Party back in 2016. …”
It has been clear for decades that there is nothing of value in mainstream conservatism. Fusionism, which is the theory of the mainstream Right and attempts to combine “liberty” with “virtue,” has been proven to be incompatible with the preservation of virtually anything that is worthwhile about this country.
Over the past twenty years, American culture has steadily decomposed much as we always said it would. The “mainstream” has steadily become more anti-White and culturally degenerate while the political victories of mainstream conservatism have translated into nothing but tax cuts for multinational corporations, gains for Our Greatest Ally in the Middle East and welfare for the military-industrial complex. Nothing really changed on this front either even during the Trump presidency.
Lil Nas X represents “mainstream” culture in America. If you politically lean to the Right, why on earth would you want to “conserve” this culture? Why wouldn’t you question the status quo?
“A similar dynamic can be seen on the right, though of course with the ideological polarities reversed. Adjacent to the center and rubbing shoulders with the most modest liberal reformers are conservatives who don’t oppose change entirely but seek to enact it slowly and deliberatively, with new policies and programs rooted in long-standing norms and traditions, building on those foundations without uprooting or tearing them down. Then, further out to the right, one finds groups that define themselves by resistance to change and look back fondly to the past in the hope of reviving aspects of it by reversing some recent trends. Finally, on the far right, are those who believe corruption and decay is so far advanced in the present that there’s little or nothing worth conserving. These are the reactionaries — figures who define themselves by their intensely negative reaction to the appalling moral and political circumstances that supposedly surround them. …”
Is this really what the political landscape looks like in America?
If you look only at our views on social issues, then you could call us the “far right” because our social views are very conservative. If you were to look only at our views on economics or foreign policy though, you would place us very close to the “far left.” Generally speaking, we are socially conservative and economically populist, which is to say, we are moderates. People like Charlie Kirk who are socially conservative and fiscally conservative are much more likely to be Republicans.
The real Center in this country is populist and working class. The professional managerial class or the overclass has its own smaller Center which is where the Pew Research Center’s “Solid Liberals” and “Core Conservatives” overlap. The Democratic and Republican establishment wings are the liberals. The people who are angry and disaffected are the vast middle of the country outside of the liberals.
Who are we talking about here? PMCs with college degrees who are concentrated in affluent suburban or urban neighborhoods are liberals. That’s who voted for Joe Biden.
“Then there’s the path of reactionary political engagement.
Convinced that there is nothing much worth conserving in the present and unwilling to accept stepping back from the political fray, the post-conservative right embraces outright destruction, taking direct and merciless aim at the corrupt, and corrupting, institutions and ideas they see all around them. Where the far left sees a revolution as the first step toward undertaking a great leap forward, the far right seeks a counter-revolution that would make possible a leap both forward and backward. First it seeks to tear down the world as it is — or rather, it looks to empower any political force that promises to smash the existing order. Then, once the abomination of the present has been swept away, it hopes to be able to reconstruct a world of virtue, piety, authority, and obedience atop the rubble. …”
In addition to reaction which holds that the past was better than the present and that progress is returning to the way things used to be, we have harnessed to our mast two other powerful ideas.
We have nationalism which is defined as “identification with one’s own nation and support for its interests, especially to the exclusion or detriment of the interests of other nations.” We also have populism which is defined as “a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups.” In contrast, PMCs are defined by their values which are political correctness or wokeness, elitism, globalism, cosmopolitanism, antiracism and modernism.
“Reactionary politics is also irrational when it is judged on its own terms — by its capacity to achieve the goals that ostensibly motivate it. When in all of human history has the impulse to lash out at and tear down a decadent status quo produced anything other than unspeakable cruelty and tyranny? Far from laying the groundwork for a return to a golden age of recovered virtue, it leads everywhere to its opposite: a renaissance of barbarism. …”
In reality, there are long stretches of American history in which what Damon Linker would describe as “progress” have been beaten back and outright reversed by ferocious reactionary resistance. The South became more reactionary and conservative from the time of Jefferson until the culmination of this trend in the Confederacy. In the wake of the Redemption, the South became more conservative and reactionary again from the late 1870s down to the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.
Note: Colin Woodard’s book Union describes this reactionary drift from the end of Reconstruction through the resurgence of ethnonationalism in the Woodrow Wilson presidency.
Be no more…no less racist than the Chinese in China…
I used to have a subscription to The Week. It was an informative and well written publication, but it was so predictably left wing and jewish that I eventually dropped it. They still occasionally send me a free issue hoping I will re-subscribe.
I never embraced the idea of being a reactionary because there’s no going back to some idealized past. Being a revolutionary seemed like the only way forward. But most revolutions are funded and fomented by the rich and powerful to advance their own interests, not those of The People. The only good revolutions I can think of offhand were in Germany in 1933 and Hungary in 1956. The 1959 revolution in Cuba and the 1979 revolution in Iran were not without justification either.
@Spahn…
“I never embraced the idea of being a reactionary because there’s no going back to some idealized past. Being a revolutionary seemed like the only way forward.”
Not being from The South, looking for King Arthur’s Court is not yore thang…
Ivan- I’ve asked HW to purchase and read Farrell’s “God, History, and Dialectic” time and time again. I’ve also mentioned the fact that the Filioque and the inversion of the Augustinian ordo theologicae, is the root of all the errors and problems we have in the West.
But, like a good Augustinian Monk (he thinks of as nigh-infallible) did, the dupes of the West continue to prate on about ‘tradition’ without jettisoning the very philosophical heresy that gave us all of this gobbledygook, in the first place!
As Farrell has stated, in no uncertain terms: “Christian civilization—or what remains of it—stands, apparently exhausted and irreparably divided, on the uncertain terrain of a century’s and millennium’s finish, ill-prepared to carry any cogent or consistent witness into the third millennium and twenty-first century of its dispensation. This is because the equation of “Western European” with “Christian” civilization is itself founded upon a schism which resulted in a kind of cultural and historiographical heresy.” – http://www.anthonyflood.com/farrellghdprolegomena.htm
Spawn is the ultimate reductio ad absurdum of this mindset (i.e., the modern era)- thinking himself self-contained, a god in his own mind, he LOATHES the past, because to him it means slavery and stupidity, whereas to those possessed of the Pnevma, it means ‘light, and health, and peace.’
They do not even pretend anymore that they are somewhat different from Soviet communism. Similar articles with the word reactionary appeared in the Soviet media 35 years ago.
That inside us there are people who do not want to reform the Soviet system but are ready to destroy modernity and throw us back in the dark era.
This is actually good news. Abstract fear mongering al la “without us there will be end of the world”. is always sign of systemic disintegration and weakness. Your political bureau seems to be as old and sick and brain dead as our one was.
@Juri…
Yes, our current system and leadership, and, as well, the state of our nation, are frighteningly similar to the Soviet Union, around the time of Gorbachev.
For the last years I’ve not cared much for reactionaries, the idea of ‘good enough for my grandfather, good enough for me’, struck me as being really stupid. I believe there are people who want to cling to the past because they don’t have enough emagination to come up with anything else.
Reactionaries often confuse the country with the government, or the military, in their mind the military has to be cheer leaded for, like a local football team. I’ve taken to calling these people Mr. and Mrs. J Evil Superpatriot, they have 3 U.S. flags in the backyard in case you messed the 8 in the front yard. And a we support the troops sticker on the front of the car in case you didn’t see the one on the bumper.
This type of mindless patriotism is always a drain on what the right might have accomplished. Standing at attention for another war helps helps the average American not at all. Wars are also the main way that the unelected police state has grown itself. They wrap themselves in the flag and then nobody can question them. .
@Copperhead…
I tend not to refer to those who wrap themselves up in the flag, and, thus, refuse to see what is going on, as ‘Reactionaries’, but, rather, ‘Status-Quoists.’
If you look inside yourself, however, it is not hard to understand these people – they are determined to be comfortable, and, to achieve that – in the face of dissipation, dissolution, and destruction – they insulate themselves by wrapping gobs and gobs of sentiment around the blindness they feign to have about failing norms and institutions.
And, yes, you are right – the kind of ‘mindless patriotism’ is the very antithesis to the spirit which founded it.
Unfortunately, however, that spirit which arises from a nation will ebb and flow, just as does a vineyard that produces different qualities of the same seeming wine, in different years and decades…
“Conservative intellectuals” aren’t considered to be as such in 2021. To be recognized as an “intellectual conservative” you are required to abandon just about everything those people would have held 50 years ago. So this is the Left simply trying to redefine the common people of the country as Nazis for being what they have always been.
The Judeo-masonic radicals are seeking to impose tyranny, wage a kind of domestic war on white Americans if they do anything to resist, including vote the wrong way. Vote the wrong way and they’ll steal the election, and call it an “insurrection” when you protest.
DC is controlled by a criminal gang, and the patience of the American people has been exhausted.