I just finished reading Scott Alexander’s “The Anti-Reactionary F.A.Q.”, a critique of the emerging online neo-reactionary movement by Scott Alexander (who probably would fall under some other weird niche of online idiosyncratic politics¹, but more liberal). First section was a bit weak, but rest of it was quite good.

At the core — which he sort of gets to — I think the problem with NRx types is that they see cultural shifts that have occurred within the past couple decades within a specific (often elite) milieu and extrapolate the negative consequences of this to the entirety of modernity.

Moldbug is welcome to his opinion on what is or isn’t one of the most pressing concerns facing humanity (I would have said a couple of brain-dead Internet thugs from Gawker beating up on a random Twitter celebrity isn’t one of the most pressing concerns facing humanity, but to each his own) but I wonder if Moldbug notices that merely his unconcern on [gay marriage] makes him in let’s say the 95th percentile of most Progressive Americans who have ever lived. 95% of Americans throughout history have been quite certain that eradicating sodomy was one of the most pressing concerns facing humanity, and boy did they act on that belief.

In fact, if we put a Reactionary in a time machine headed backward, and made it stop when the Reactionary was just as racist, sexist, et cetera as the US population average at the time, I predict they wouldn’t make it much past the 1970s. Go into the 1960s and you get laws banning colleges from admitting both black and white students to the same campus (one helpfully specified that the black and white campuses could not be within twenty five miles of one another).

Now, there’s no problem with this – except for Nixon and disco, the 1970s were no worse than any other period. But Reactionaries insist that all Progressivism since 1600 has been part of one vast and monstrous movement – maybe a religious cult, maybe a sinister power-play, maybe just the death throes of the western intellectual tradition – dedicated to being wrong about everything. And that a very big part of this vast movement focused on race. And when they have to whisper “Except we agree with 99% of what it did, right up until the past couple of decades, and in fact they got it right when everyone else was horribly, atrociously wrong”, that is – or at least _ should be_ – kind of embarrassing.

When you actually dig into the core of what the biggest grievances of writers like Moldbug are, there’s not much there that can’t be addressed by a revived intellectual conservatism. Their problems with conservatism seem to have less to do with anything fundamental to conservatism itself and moreso just the modern state of a conservative movement which has lost a lot of its intellectual grounding.

Neo-reactionaries do the same thing I see a lot of leftists doing, where they think that by making enough links back, you’re proving a level of fundamentality that necessitates throwing the baby out with the bathwater, allowing you to circumvent a large chunk of nuance.

In that sense, I think political operators like Bannon are more on the ball, less concerned with realizing Moldbug’s utopian planning or dismantling liberalism, but instead incorporating the general attitudes into mainstream conservative discourse.

A rough theory I have right now (although I can’t say how confident I am in it yet), is that modern political movements will often start with a range of thoughts, proposals, and ideas, but when it comes time to actually integrate it into discourse and implement it, it’s often distilled down to one idea or component. As democracy is pluralistic, monomania is the route to political influence. Taking power means not writing the platform but the plank.

Even as Marxists failed to realize socialism, the capitalist world could still take notes from Bolshevik modes of planning, welfare, and political organization. Radical feminists could fail to supplant liberal feminism while still having specific concepts such as sexual harassment become mainstream. In the case of the neo-reactionaries, their legacy is the theory of the Cathedral: this aforementioned exposition on the self-reinforcing dynamics underlying modern progressive elite circles. Conservatives, under the influence of actors like Peter Thiel and Tucker Carlson, have plucked out this specific understanding of how progressive ideology works, leaving the rest to be squabbled over by internet nerds.