* It’s absolutely nutty. No disrespect intended, Steve – you have been fighting a lonely and important fight for a very, very long time. You were the only “raycisss” I ever read when I was a leftist, a decade or more ago, and you surely qualify as one of the intellectual godfathers of the AltRight. (I don’t even know, were you writing for Spencer/TakiMag back when he was originally trying to make the term “Alternative Right” happen?)
But you have little to do directly with “neo-reaction”. No one he mentioned has anything to do with neo-reaction. Not only was the Douthat essay he cited not about neo-reaction, I wouldn’t be surprised if Douthat has never heard of neo-reaction. It seems like Tyler Cowen has vaguely heard the term a few times, got a mistaken understanding of what it went, and ran with it.
* The fact of the matter is, neo-reaction consists of frustrated libertarians who have realized that people will never democratically institute their absurd ideology. So rather than re-think radical liberalism, they rethink representative government. Naturally, they also have a lot of dislike for blacks, who are very antagonistic to them politically as having very tribal, unliberal worldivews. They are also antagonistic to them socially, being urban-dwelling criminals.
Honestly, the fact that neo-reaction is a species of liberalism makes it mostly incoherent- it tries to criticize the regent ideology on utilitarian grounds. Moldbug’s beef with modernity was city-crime, thought-blindspots wrt to race, etc. He criticized it on the guns and butter issues which modernity excels at.
Because neo-reaction is essentially benthamite in values (and in intellectual pedigree), it also makes it the most appealing branch of the alt-right for liberal journalists and academics to interact with. No one thinks moldbug and Justine tunney are closet brownshirts, or their radical libertarianism could lead to anything like Hezbollah. Its just bay area weirdos playing dress up.
* Steve, did that description of Neoreaction seem to describe your own views accurately? In the dissident-right sphere, the term neoreaction comes out of the works of Moldbug and Land, which in turn is based on Carlyle, Froude, Maine, Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Jouvenel. So by that definition of Neoreaction, Cowen’s piece is way off.
But it seems like what Cowen did is define Sailerism, and then apply the label “neo-reaction” to describe your own general world view. In that sense the piece seems to be more on the mark. He still missed pretty badly in his first point — it’s not just culture that matters, it’s genes and culture.
* I’ve never really thought of you as explicitly NRx.
But I suppose I might have to classify you as operationally in agreement with NRx, and highly influential compared to anyone else in the NRx sphere.
In other words: yes. You’re NRx to about the same extent that Nietzsche is NRx.
To be utilitarian, I will say this: if people googling NRx found Steve Sailer as their first gateway drug to NRx, that would be better in 95% of cases than if they got referred to, for example, Nick Land or Steve Hsu.
* I think you’re Sui generis.
I certainly don’t think of you as neoreactionary, but you are probably the only figure on the alt-right generally that each sub-group (NRx included) admires and identifies with.
* Swift, Hobbes, Aristotle…. this fella has lumped you in with some big fish. High praise indeed.
I suppose history could give you the same name recognition.
But only if we win.
* As a commenter there suggested, the neo-reaction is more of a subset of the alt-right, while his list of people is much broader. For me, what puts the alt in alt-right are three principles taken together:
1) Intelligence and many behaviors have a genetic component
2) Culture and institutions matter and some are better than others
3) Humans have a tendency to see the world in terms of in-group and out-group and that’s very hard to change.
Lee Kuan Yew fits this when he says that multi-ethnic nations don’t work well because of (3) and so it’s better to have single-ethnic nations
Robert Putnam does not. Even though he believes that trust matters for the quality of life in nations (2) and diversity reduces trust (3), he argues that this can be easily overcome by education (contra 3)
This still allows for quite a bit of variation. In the blogging world, I see Sailer and Moldbug as having very different views on the world although they would likely both subscribe to 1-3 (but that’s enough to get you excommunicated from civil society)
Neo-reaction defined narrowly (say, as described by Scott Alexander) seems kind of goofy and hard to tie to an intellectual tradition.
* I think Steve is too down-to-earth to be NRx, and too nice to be #AltRight. His stubborn insistence on noticing things has made him a hero to us all, though.
* Neoreaction is a rejection of the Enlightenment narrative that both liberals and conservative have bought, which is used by the elites to oppress the people.
The Enlightenment narrative was never coherent and never made sense. Even in times of the Enlightenment, it was only a political tool for the bourgeoisie to fight the Ancient Regime elites. Once the new bourgeois elite won the fight, the Enlightenment narrative became the official ideology of the land and people was brainwashed with it from the crib to the grave, by schools, books and any other cultural artifact. This way, an incoherent and contradictory ideology was imposed on the population, not using arguments but by using repetition and hinting that thinking otherwise made you a bad person.
Several centuries of brainwashing made the thought of rejecting the Enlightenment narrative unthinkable. But without seeing the world as it is (instead of seeing it like our fantasies want it to be), it is impossible to stop the decline of Western society.
This may appear very abstract, but I can type an example real quick. According to the Enlightenment narrative, all men are equal and all cultures are equal. As a result, importing massive amounts of Muslim people in Europe is no big problem, because these people are equal to the European people.
If you think otherwise, you are a racist, a religious fanatic, a contemptible human being that wants some races to oppress others. So your opinion doesn’t count and if you dare to tell it in public you will be ostracized, as a guilty of heresy, so your heretical opinions don’t corrupt the general public. Who are you going to believe, the official ideology or your lying eyes?
The list of thinkers that Steve wrote are very different between them but all of them reject the Enlightenment narrative, which it is considered today “the truth and the good” but it is only a very specific ideology of a specific period in the period of decadence of a specific civilization.
* Neo-reaction seems a reasonable term, for a growing political movement that is close to but perhaps not identical to Alt Right. The progressive agenda of the post-war liberal consensus has spiraled out of control and lost contact with the empirical evidence on a range of important policy problems. For example, affirmative action policy is now entirely out of step with empirical evidence — and in fact empirical evidence is explicitly forbidden in affirmative action policy unless it confirms the (false) orthodoxy. Open borders policies are completely undemocratic and ignore the wishes of the people in several countries, including the USA. Neo-reaction refers to the new, quite different reactive movement against this out-of-control “liberal” elite agenda. Neo-reaction is entirely separate from the the William-Buckley-style free-markets conservative movement.
* Steve Sailer is alt-right but not NRx. NRx being a constituent part of the alt-right, but by no means are all alt-rightists NRx. Basically the acid test for NRx is hereditary monarchy good or bad.
While we’re on this topic, here is my proposed definition of Alt-Right:
One is Alt-Right if one’s rightist politics are chiefly motivated by some form of anti-egalitarianism, AND one is at least less than comfortable with identifying one’s self with the incumbent categories of rightist politics.
When I floated this definition at OD, someone responded to me stating that he was disappointed that I didn’t include some race based entry barrier.
I have to clear something up before everyone gets confoozled. Don’t be all Rossington-Collins Band-like up in here and misunderstand me.
My proposed def of alt-right isn’t me wishing with my heart, it’s me observing and thinking and concluding with my brain. IOW, I didn’t include any racialist-exclusive implications in my def NOT because I want it that way, but because that is the way the alt-right is currently constituted and presenting itself. If a movement can comfortably fit Anglin, Moldbug, Roosh and Jared Taylor into it, as the alt-right does, then you have to conclude that explicit white racialism or explicit anti-Semitism isn’t a distinguishing characteristic and neither one is a sine qua non entry barrier. At that point, you have to find another through-line, and I think I have.
The fact that there’s no race-based entry barrier into the alt-right is the source of a lot of contention, and is why a lot of people who are alt-right, to the extent that they fit the definition of it, don’t like the term at all. And that’s not even counting those of us who are strongly if not extremely opposed to, and paranoid about the J tribe. That crowd doesn’t like the term alt-right all precisely because the net is cast too wide, or if they like it, they think that it should only apply exclusively to them.
As for me, I do think the lack of a race based blocking bug is a problem.
* The probability that someone sympathizes w/ folks who call themselves neo-reactionary is at least 50% if that person accepts HBD.
Otherwise it is roughly zero.
HBD is central because if true then conventional wisdom is wrong about most everything of consequence.
And it is true.
No other insight claimed by someone like Moldbug is as certain to be true or as consequential.
So nowadays neo-reaction is HBD.
But that just shows how stupid it is to try to ideologically classify people spaced by centuries. Steve talks HBD not because he’s got some fetish for the past and hates gadgetry and is scared of new ideas but because it’s the lowest hanging fruit in [The current year!].
If Steve were born in the 1880′s we know what he’d be – a progressive like his boy Galton.
* To quote Upton Sinclair: It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it.
* Neoreaction seems to attract people who have trouble keeping their abstractions separate from reality. Viz, the overlap between libertarians and neoreaction. It’s the late-night-dorm-discussion of rightishness. Granted, some like Moldbug are smart and put a lot of thought into their ideas, but re-booting all of society or starting new religions is not serious.
Cowen’s summation is wrong but useful to him and his ilk because they want to define and dismiss dissent from the ruling narrative. People like Unz and Razib Khan don’t even fit the broader term alt right, let alone neoreaction. However, if the TCs of the world spent their time dealing with all the individual issues rather than pigeon-holing people, they wouldn’t have time to think up more “because economics” reasons to support immigration.
* Steve Sailer is barely ever quoted as a neoreactionary thinker and so far as I know he has never described himself as such. The two most prominent modern NRxers are Mencius Moldbug (Curtis Yarvin) and Nick Land.
* “They both seem to be intent on destroying the world. But maybe Camacho more accidentally? The most dangerous contrast to Trump is that Camacho actually realizes he needs advice from other people, and knows that he’s not the smartest guy in the room. Also, not a racist.”
This expresses their anxiety in a nutshell. Camacho can be managed. He knows he is not the smartest guy. He can take advice. As Prince, Camacho will listen to the vizier/advisor whispering in his ear. And this, sadly, is an eternal problem for Jews in the Diaspora: relying on a personal, private, off-the-record relationships with the Prince to resolve community problems.
* I wouldn’t say that Moldbug is a bad writer, just a voluminous one. Try reading his inspiration – Carlyle – if you want to test your patience with an idiosyncratic style. Moldbug is comparatively less fatiguing.
His division of society into five classes – the Brahmins (educational/technocratic elite) who ally with the Dalit (negro) and Helot (illegal immigrant) lower classes against the Optimates (the old-money elite) and the Vaisyas (the gainfully-employed) is perceptive. It bears some resemblance to Pareto’s theory of elites, and to James Burnham on the “managerial revolution.” Joel Kotkin has developed a similar analysis in his book The New Class Conflict (2014), seemingly without his being aware of Moldbug or Moldbug being aware of him.
Moldbug traces the intellectual ancestry of the ascendant Brahmin class to New England Puritanism. In this he reminds me of Santayana, who remarked that the Boston liberals of his day were just exponents of a Puritanism bereft of its Christianity, so that its fanaticism and moral vanity were all that remained of it.
He is not a monarchist, but believes that democratic politics are inherently unstable (so did Aristotle) and always end in one faction trying to manipulate the franchise to give itself the advantage. The latest example of this is of course the importation of millions of “ringers” to become future Democrats. So, elective governments cannot be reformed and made to conduct themselves responsibly simply by restricting the franchise to taxpayers or property owners, as it was in the nineteenth century. Sooner or later the temptation would again arise among politicians to “dissolve the people and elect another,” and we’d be back in the same old fix.
Moldbug’s idea of a stable political order is to break the world up into thousands of city-states like Liechtenstein or Singapore, owned by their rulers (who could be individuals but more likely would be joint-stock companies). If you didn’t like the one where you were you could move to another, voting with your feet. The term he uses for this is neocameralism. The original cameralism was an Austrian version of mercantilism, expounded by the Graf von Hornigk, J.J. Becher, and the Baron von Schröder; it was adapted to the principalities of the Holy Roman Empire, which they wanted to be run like country estates, for the profit of their owners, but on a grander scale.
This seems to me to be the weakest part of his œuvre. He has good aperçus about human nature, inherent inequality and the hierarchy of society, the failings of today’s managerial/academic elite, and the methods they use to exert control. Among the best parts of his blog were the extensive quotations from and links to the works of 19th and early 20th century writers who have fallen from favor or even from our general awareness, not because they were wrong but because they don’t fit modern politically-correct expectations.
* The AltRight is everyone on the Right excluded from the current power structure and its worldview. Lots of odd little groups that exist mainly online in their own little spheres (though they have recently begun cross pollinating intellectually.) It’s like the endless subgenres of electronic dance music or Heavy Metal in a way. Exponents could happily blather on about the essential differences between Hair Metal/Death Metal/Stoner Metal, but to someone outside looking in it’s all just the same noise.
NeoReaction is the goony poli-sci/philosophical subset of the AltRight. The founder and principle exponent is definitely Moldbug. It seems like every other current within the AltRight bastardized and adopted a lot of his terminology and analysis without pining for a return to monarchy or his fetish for ending Democracy.
I lump people like you, Kevin Macdonald and Derbyshire in with the EvoCon section of the AltRight. Not overly philosophical per say, more about looking at scientific data/news/history and offering policy prescriptions within the Democratic framework or a widening of the current worldview.
* The only thing all these guys have in common is they deviate from liberal/humanist thinking. Aristotle, Franklin and probably Montesquieu can arguably be lumped together as emprirical realists or noticers, while Heidegger and Nietzsche are non-egalitarian critics of right-wing liberalism and Christianity. Steve would be most prolific blogger in the tradition of Aristotle and Franklin, while Radix would probably be the go to site for those who like Hiedegger and Nietzsche.
* Crimethink is a lot easier when you see thousands of posts on a news thread saying the same thing. It was a lot harder a decade ago when it was just Steve, Vdare, Majority Rights, maybe a few others specific sites such as Jihadwatch and of course the anti-Semitic WN sites such as Stormfront. If one tried posting crimethink on news comment sections or elsewhere it would usually get deleted.
There is lots to notice in addition to HBD. Reality of Islam, origins of PC, communism, I’m sure there are others.
* MOLDBUG: This stuck elevator reminds me of the status of nineteenth-century German society, as Schopenhauer once said. Can it be that we do not move? Of course! However, this poorly constructed elevator could only exist under a democratic society. Under a proper monarchy, everyone would be on the appropriate floor already, and rare movements between floors would be easily accommodated by occasional use of the stairs. Further, in predemocratic societies, the use of stairs kept everyone in sufficient good health, preventing the oblate geometries that most American men find vexatious.
ROOSH: Have you *ever* been laid?
FRED: (pushes emergency button and pulls out a bottle of Padre Kino) Yeah, we’re stuck, second floor. I’ll wait.
*
1. America is not becoming a better nation. The American nation has been invaded and swallowed up by a liberal multicultural empire that is distinctly inferior in almost every way to the nation it has conquered and suppressed.
2. This is blatant stupidity. Slavery was never a white invention and most rape in the USA is committed by blacks. White gun violence rates are equal to Holland; blacks are entirely responsible for the high US gun violence rates.
3. The USA has no tendency towards drunkenness; at 9.2 liters per capita per year, it consumes less alcohol on average than nearly every European nation and ranks 46th globally.
4. This isn’t even an argument, let alone a convincing one. It’s an appeal to personal incredulity combined with political correctness. Whether it seems highly unlikely or not, the fact is that an absence of white men has reliably correlated with a failure to imitate the successes of white culture.
America doesn’t have to be a global policeman and there is no way to “make immigration work”. Innovation is not about numbers; see Scotland and the Industrial Revolution for just one obvious example.
This is not a serious critique, let alone a convincing one. If these are the “problems” with neo-reaction, then obviously we should all be neo-reactionaries. Tyler Cowen is more intelligent than the average cuckservative, but he is still too cucky to abandon his emotional commitment to equalitarianism.
Every philosophy must sooner or later choose to accommodate or reject reality. Progressivism, liberalism, libertarianism, and conservatism all require the rejection of readily observable reality. That is why they are doomed to eventual failure and irrelevance.
* Sailer comes across as a moderate who covers the wacky cultural marxist influence on our society and points out the inconsistencies of their agenda. Most moderates probably would feel the same if they noticed all the garbage spewing from the left. Steve has an extraordinary memory of what America was like 30+ years ago and thus can analyze the trends better than others. Since he remembers what the leftists were advocating 30 years ago, he is better able to show how they have been proven wrong. Few moderates would have the courage to write like Steve, even if they did take notice of the incoherent leftists agenda.
Steve is on the side of Americans who have been harmed by the Leftists abandonment of economic issues. This includes most Americans, Black, hispanic and white. He seems to have genuine concern for the oppressed, which in the past was a leftist concern. He pints out the damage the leftists agenda has caused to working Americans and seems to oppose the billionaire class which promotes the culture wars, and divides Americans.
* Whatever neoreaction is, Steve Sailer does not belong there. Please consider the following :
1) The Alt-right is a Generation X, Millenial thing. Steve Sailer is a late boomer.
2) They come from either a liberal/apolitical or libertarian background. Steve Sailer remains basically a Reagan Democrat.
3) They were recruited either through the Manosphere ( Roosh, Roissy, Vox Day) or through Mencius Moldbug. I doubt Steve Sailer is even remotely interested in either of those movements. ( Moldbug is unreadable).
4) Most read Steve Sailer and are interested or proficient in HBD lore.
4) some are monarchists, some are “minarchists”. Steve Sailer is a unionist Republican .
5) Many want to split up the USA, and relocate minorities. Steve Sailer is a citizenist.
6) Some are Christian, some are atheists. Steve is a lukewarm or merely cultural Catholic.
To sum up, the only thing in common between Steve Sailer and neorectionaries is an interest in HBD and being to the left of the NY Times. Despite the obvious differences, all neorectionaries are devoted Steve Sailer readers.
