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The Rise Of Reactionary Politics And The Decline Of American Normalcy
We are watching a tremendous political radicalization take place in the United States.
That radicalization has been most obvious on the Left, but there is a concomitant movement that is happening on the Right.
That splinter movement on the Right is being massaged by some of the people who have some sway in the conservative movement, at least in the commentariat.
It’s important to point out how one leads to the other, because that is the pattern in American politics. Politics generally is incredibly reactionary. People tend not to respond reasonably to provocations that are unreasonable, and they tend to swivel into their own unreasonable positions, and the pendulum swings back and forth.
It is a rarity to find a moment of clarity and reasonableness in American politics, even if the people who constitute the vast majority of the American body politic are normies.
Americans want a strong national defense, but they don’t want tremendous interventionism. Americans want a traditional value system, but not one that has the government snooping in their bedrooms. Americans want a system of laws that makes sure that there is a basic level of social safety net, but they do not want the government taking tremendous amounts of money away from them and regulating their businesses out of existence.
That’s what polls show every single time. America is a very politically normie country. A Center-Right country is where you would place America on the map, if you were creating a spectrum of countries from far-Right to far-Left.
And yet our politics right now seem to be revolving around the polls.
The reason it is revolving around the polls is because the Democratic Party has increasingly made it clear that there is a population they do not like: white Christian males. That is the population that must be targeted.
It wasn’t always this way inside the Democratic Party. If you go back just about 20 years to the John Edwards campaign in 2004, you’ll find a socialistic-leaning campaign in terms of its economic policies. But the Edwards campaign certainly didn’t suggest that white Christian males were somehow bad. In fact, Edwards would openly campaign as a person who was apparently religious (Of course, in his personal life, it turned out the man had many, many foibles).
I was a very strong opponent of John Edwards. But the Democratic Party has moved dramatically on just who they are targeting. That’s the reality, and it’s coming out in so many ways. It’s clearly evident.
It’s self-evident in everything from the Mamdani candidacy, which is oriented against white Christian males, to the mainstream politicians in the Democratic Party. For example, yesterday Nancy Pelosi was giving a speech at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, and she started talking about Republicans and Christianity. Hilariously, she broke into a southern accent while she was doing it.
Nancy Pelosi has true scorn for traditional biblical values. She considers herself a Catholic, but the reality is she does not hold any values in common with Catholicism, most certainly not on the social side. She’s a radical advocate for abortion, transgenderism, and same-sex marriage, all of which the church decries. Thus, she mocked Republicans and their relationship with religion, saying:
“You know, people of faith who go to church on Sunday and pray in church on Sunday and prey on people the rest of the week. What is this? What is this?”
The scorn Nancy Pelosi has for religious conservatives who go to church on Sunday and disagree with her on politics has led to a massive backlash.
The same thing is true in terms of race. The entire Democratic Party swiveled in favor of DEI, which was the idea that America is a systemically evil country that benefits white people and that any racial disparities in outcome must be attributable to a system that benefits white people at the expense of black and brown people.
That led to a response in terms of policy that essentially targeted and disadvantaged white people. It also targeted minorities who were too successful, like Jews and Asians.
The basic idea was that meritocracy was a guise for power, meritocracy was a lie, and that actually meritocracy was a system that benefited white people at the expense of all others.
The Democratic Party repeated this ad nauseam. This is what the entire Black Lives Matter movement was really about, obfuscating the relationship between actions and consequences in favor of the idea that all shortcomings in life had to be due to a white supremacist system, and, therefore, white people had to be punished by the system.
And that triggered an identity-based response from a lot of young white men, particularly.
This is the language of the Democratic Party: people of color are being targeted by white people; Christians are predators. People who are white are the oppressors.
That is the basic matrix through which democratic politics has been refracted in the United States. That means that the coalition for the Democratic Party has been minorities, young people, and, in particular, young liberal white women.
Why young liberal white women? Because they’re not young white Christian men. This is not just anti-Christian and anti-white, it also tends toward the anti-male.
There’s a reason the Democratic Party has been losing young males hand over fist. They decided to feminize their party by attacking men as part of this evil superstructure.
The final sort of peculiar outgrowth of the anti-male movement, of course, was transgenderism, which was the idea that there is no such thing as manhood.
There’s been an overt attack on masculinity from the Left for several decades at this point, that if you let men be men, that will end with a discriminatory society that puts women underfoot, that men have nothing to offer to women at all, that the best types of men are the men who leave their masculinity behind.
When you say that Christianity is inherently anti-LGBTQ, that it’s just a guise for discrimination. When you say that churches are bad, and when you say that white people are the cause of a white supremacist system, and that any disparate outcome is just evidence of innate white supremacy and innate white racism; when you say that maleness is driving America into the gutter and that we need to wipe away male supremacy even as males begin to underperform in college and commit suicide at higher and higher rates as they fall into depths of despair, you end up provoking a response.
And when you provoke responses, many of them tend to be untethered. Add on top of that the anti-Christian, anti-white, anti-male agenda that the Left has increasingly pushed. Also, add to that a pro-censorship agenda. That’s the idea that if you speak out against this stuff, you’re outside the Overton window, you’re at risk of being kicked out of every public space, kicked off of every public space for the great sin of saying that men are not women, or that the system is not white supremacist, and that maybe certain people are underperforming because they’re making bad decisions in their life.
The Democratic Party wants a restricted informational sphere so as to ensure that their way of viewing the world is the way that the world is viewed by everyone.
And then they added one more thing on top of that: an extraordinary amount of gaslighting.
If they say, “DEI is great and we should absolutely advantage people on the basis of their sex and their race,” and you then say, ”Maybe they’re not qualified,” they call you a racist. That’s the gaslighting. They say something. You repeat it back to them, and then they tell you the thing you’re saying is actually racist or bad. That sort of gaslighting is just typical now of an extraordinary part of the Democratic Party.
The Democratic Party’s been playing with these forces for so long, it’s now too late for them to dissociate from those forces.
And all of it scares the hell out of a lot of Americans.
And it should because it is indeed radical stuff.
But as the Left has moved further to the left and embraced further radicalism as that has happened, you’ve seen an identitarian movement arise on the Right.
If someone is opposed to Christianity and Christians because they’re “bad” and “terrible,” the normal response is to live Biblically, because the best disproof of that sort of slander is to live a Biblical lifestyle. Go to church; be good to your family; be good to your community; take care of people. The best response is to live well as a Christian. That is indeed the response of most Americans.
When I was growing up, the response to the claim that America was a white supremacist country was to counter that America was a meritocracy. And meritocracy is good because meritocracy benefits everybody. That would be the normal response.
The normal response to censorship is the Constitution. You want to censor? You can’t actually censor what I have to say, thanks to the government.
Does that mean there aren’t social consequences for particularly egregious views? Of course not. That’s called normal life. You don’t have over the homeless schizophrenic for dinner who is screaming about the moon. You don’t invite the neo-Nazi who lives down the street over to have a nice chat with your kids, because those are views you don’t want in your home.
That’s normal. That’s not cancellation. It’s not censorship. Censorship is a different thing. That is the normal response to being gaslit by people who are lying to you.
But in politics, the normal response is to smile very often. And people get frustrated. And because people are frustrated, what they tend to do is respond in kind. And this is how you end up with a horseshoe theory.
So if the Left says that white Christian males are the problem, the response winds up being that systems should only benefit white Christian males, not meritocracy. Meritocracy goes by the wayside because, after all, somebody has to win and somebody has to lose.
Thus, you’ve seen the rise of white identitarian politics. This is a fragment of the Right, not nearly the whole Right. It is not the mainstream on the Right. It is gaining increased traction on the Right, thanks to the apparent total inability of anybody on the Right to speak morally on these issues in a serious way.
Instead, there has been the attempt to massage this burgeoning feeling into a normality or legitimacy, the idea that if the Left is going to practice gaslighting and dishonesty, we too should practice gaslighting and dishonesty, that it doesn’t matter what we say as long as we achieve victory. Power is the only thing, and thus, calling other people out is now considered a form of censorship.
Criticizing a view is considered a form of censorship, which, of course, is really stupid. Criticism is not censorship. Stopping criticism, in fact, is a form of censorship. But the idea is that as long as you are on “my side,” it doesn’t matter what predations and idiocies you are spouting, as long as you are on “my side.”
Now the question becomes, what is “my side”? If I’m a person who responds with traditional Americanism to the idiocies, excesses and evils of the Left, with Biblical values, meritocracy and the Constitution, and if you say instead what we should respond with is a sort of pagan dishonesty, a DEI for white Christian males, discarding the Constitution in favor of a bizarre feeling of authoritarian tyranny, and I say, “You’re not on my side, clearly, we disagree about all the key issues,” then I get accused of “breaking the unity against the Left.”
But here’s the problem. If you agree with the Left by adopting this kind of identitarian politics, you just want a different class of people to benefit. How does that align with what most Americans want, and what that conservatism has historically stood for?
Unfortunately, this is the nature of our politics: reactionary politics.
The answer to the problem is to have a normie revolution, where people speak out in normal ways about the things that most Americans want, 80-20 issues. The vast majority of Americans believe in freedom of religion. The vast majority of Americans, even if they themselves do not go to church, believe that going to church is a generally good thing. The vast majority of Americans do not believe in governmental censorship, but they do believe in a certain sort of social standard whereby bizarre, outlandish, and evil views don’t necessarily receive a place at your dinner table.
Most Americans are very much in favor of meritocracy because that is a path forward for the entire civilization, and in fact, a path forward for those who work hard.
But if no one is going to articulate those principles, what you will end up with is a debate between the worst of the excesses on all sides, and people will just keep ping-ponging off each other. The pendulum will keep swinging wildly from side to side, and at no point will that 80% in the middle ever be receiving what they are asking for, which is just normality.
Americans have been begging for normality for at least 25 years in this country, begging for some semblance of a basic, normal life, and it’s not being given to them.
If we keep going down this path, if we keep radicalizing and counter-radicalizing and radicalizing and counter-radicalizing, the middle won’t survive in America.
And at that point, the things that I think most Americans care about, the things that I care about, the Constitution and meritocracy and freedom of religion and checks and balances of power and freedom of markets, all those things will go by the wayside because when the radicals predominate, it’s the normies who lose.
At some point, the normies are going to have to stand up and say no.
Cooler heads and wiser heads are going to have to prevail.
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