Handle is definitely not the worst candidate to provide some insight into what “neoreaction” ought to mean:
In the case of the French Revolution the bloody results were terrifying and horrific, and it is from that event that we get the terms for three different types of anti-progressive op positional responses: Right, Conservative, and Reactionary.
This is really oversimplifying, but very roughly, ‘Right’ was in favor of changes, just different changes and for different reasons that those of the leftists. ‘Conservative’ was more pragmatic and intuitive than ideological, and favored keeping the traditions and institutions that remained, and stability for its own sake, having seen the awful consequences of implementing all those recent radical reforms. A ‘Reactionary’ says that conservatism is just yesterday’s progressivism (thus today’s left is just tomorrow’s right), and contains the seed of the same problem which will inevitably bloom into exactly the noxious weed it claims to want to prevent. A reactionary then is in favor of radical change to reestablish and restore the status quo ante. Instead of just being yesterday’s conservatism, reactionaries seek to ideologically justify and explain the practical basis for the wisdom undergirding the prior regime. And what naturally accompanies that project is the attempt to explain the root causes of what went wrong with the new system and why it resulted in such atrocious excesses and led to political and economic catastrophes. Filmer, de Maistre, and Chateaubriand are typical examples of classic reactionary thinkers. Many later counter-revolutionaries and anti-Socialists shared similar ideas.
Ok, now fast forward to the political and ideological context of late 20th and early 21st century America. The dominant ideology of the elites and the state is an updated form of progressivism combined with New Left identity politics, and we see not three, but two kinds of anti-progressive opposition. The ‘Right’ (not really, but let’s roll with my somewhat inaccurate framework here) in this case might be the classical liberals and libertarians, who are ok with plenty of rapid, radical changes, but often different changes that what the progressives want, and on the basis of a very different set of principles. The conservative movement is numerically dominant, but intellectually vapid and incoherent and generally ineffective, and again is often merely ‘slower progressivism’, getting dragged along the same ride. I’m glossing over lots of subtleties and cross-fertilizations here, but let’s keep going.
Now, yes, there are plenty of conservatives that might seem ‘reactionary’ in that they want to roll things back to some prior point, but the numbers of these follow a diminishing decay curve with a half life period between every right-wing heyday. Some want to go back to 1994 , some fewer to 1985, a fraction to 1963, some to 1953, and perhaps there are still a few who would go all the way back to 1931 or 1912. Maybe even one or two dozen to 1860.
But you won’t find hardly anyone who go all the way to 1760, that is, to the pre-revolutionary regime, like the French Reactionaries argued for. There is no #ThomasHutchinsonWasRight hashtag. That’s because the revolution and democracy and, yes, the progressive aspects of the national origin story and evolution, are baked into the cake of American Conservatism.
But, with a few noteworthy (though probably temporary) exceptions, American Conservatism had been failing for a long, long time, and during the freewheeling heyday of unmoderated and high-quality political discussion on this new-ish thing called the internet, anti-progressives were ‘reacting’ not just to the excesses of the progressives, but of the apparent inability and often unwillingness of the American right to do anything about it, even when they enjoyed majority support and formal political power.
And one of the plausible conclusions was that the fault lies in democracy itself. Now, even the founders knew that, being familiar with the history of classical antiquity, and they tried to establish a system to contain democracy running amok in various predictable ways. The vast majority of American conservatives like to believe the founders generally succeeded with the Constitution enshrining a vision of limited government and a society of free individuals, and that if people continued to revere and obey that document in good faith, things would be fine. That’s what 99.99% of the American right still believes.
But the other point of view is that the Constitution failed, and was doomed to fail, because a document cannot enforce itself if the people who matter don’t want to obey. What they will want to obey instead is the dominant social ideology, the tenets of which are incompatible with the Constitutional structure, which will be circumvented with whatever hand-waving is required, whenever it stands in the way. If one really wanted to address the root of the problem, one would have to accept some very unpopular ideas about human nature and political reality, and give those pre-enlightenment political theories and structures another look and a fair hearing. And one would do so from the perspective enlightened, as it were, by all the latest advances in the study of human social psychology, economics, political science, and so forth.
This is a species of Reaction, but it’s also different because new. Hence, neoreaction.
The whole point of checks and balances was to make a system that would work even if most people attempted to disobey part of the time. Play the interests off against each other.
It’s unrealistic to expect too much from people. But if you work with human nature as you find it, you might just succeed. It seems to me that this has a better track record than anything else that’s been tried.
If something sort of works but could be better, consider more of it. The checks and balances approach seems to help a lot. Let’s have more of it. The more the people in power are fighting with each other, the less energy they have to prey upon us.
The worst case is if the powerful factions come to a sustainable stalemate and declare a truce. Then at least the terms of the truce will constrain them.
That’s where the next level of neoreactionary argument comes in. The giant thumb on the scale for measuring “success” of government design has been the existence of the United States. Give the most productive people on Earth ownership of a continent with no other civilized people on it and they’re going to become massively rich (hence powerful) even if their government is badly designed as long as it’s not disastrously badly designed – like communism.
Ultimately it comes down to a counterfactual – American success comes from classical liberal government vs American success comes from demographics plus opportunity (and classical liberal governance doesn’t prevent this but it does degenerate).
But you won’t find hardly anyone who go all the way to 1760, that is, to the pre-revolutionary regime, like the French Reactionaries argued for. There is no #ThomasHutchinsonWasRight hashtag. That’s because the revolution and democracy and, yes, the progressive aspects of the national origin story and evolution, are baked into the cake of American Conservatism.
I don’t think that represents any sort of failure on the part of American conservatism, as Handle seems to imply. The rigid, hereditary class structure of pre-revolutionary Europe had it’s flaws. The rampant nepotism, lack of social mobility, the resulting resentment and class conflicts…these were not small problems!
I don’t think that represents any sort of failure on the part of American conservatism, as Handle seems to imply. The rigid, hereditary class structure of pre-revolutionary Europe had it’s flaws. The rampant nepotism, lack of social mobility, the resulting resentment and class conflicts…these were not small problems!
Either extreme, I would say, has its own equally catastrophic problems.
If a landed aristocracy has absolute power, entrepreneurialism never gets off the ground, the world remains perpetually in a landlocked preindustrial stasis, and we’re extinguished by the inevitable terrestrial extinction event.
If rags-to-riches entrepreneurs have absolute power, we get tremendous churn with outright disrespect for continuity of culture, government, and blood, and insane government because the poor have more pressing interests than teaching the subtle art of governance beginning from the cradle on.
We need some sort of hybrid, which is very difficult indeed, because the two groups mix like oil and water, but I would venture that the English public schools did a pretty good job.
“Give the most productive people on Earth ownership of a continent with no other civilized people on it and they’re going to become massively rich (hence powerful) even if their government is badly designed”
It begs the question of what makes one society more productive than another, and just how you separate that from the forms of government they tend to have.
But aside from getting rich, there’s not getting dead. Here is where Montesquieu does far better than Robespierre.
Let’s compare apples to apples:
“It is not chance that rules the world. Ask the Romans, who had a continuous sequence of successes when they were guided by a certain plan, and an uninterrupted sequence of reverses when they followed another.”
Focusing on the last paragraph…this failure of the Constitution was predicted early on by John Adams.
“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion . . . Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
“Give the most productive people on Earth ownership of a continent with no other civilized people on it and they’re going to become massively rich ”
But, outside a few petrostates, natural resource endowment has very little correlation with industrialisation and wealth! And even today, primary goods account for only a fraction of US GDP.
John Adams missed the real point there. No society is perfectly moral, least of all one who thinks of itself as perfectly moral. Puritanism is collective moral narcissism.
“Cursed is he who trusts in man.” – Jeremiah 17.
There is no righteousness to be found here on Earth. So says the Bible, and all experience corroborates it on this point. Give me checks and balances, to manage the unrighteousness.
Natural resource endowment does correlate with wealth, but only in a very limited sense. It’s one factor among many.
If natural resources didn’t matter at all, colonialism would never have been necessary. If natural resources were all that mattered, colonialism would never have been possible. There’s a reason Europe conquered Africa, and there’s a reason Africa didn’t conquer Europe.
Now we’re discussing the empirical question of government design and the historical record is very clear that “checks and balances” do not do what was advertised.
Steve, what’s your basis of comparison?
It’s not a question in this case of “basis of comparison”; it’s a question of “checks and balances” as an idea simply not working as advertised. Congress doesn’t jealously guard its powers; it ceded them to the executive and writes legislation that contain suggestions as to what the bureaucracy should maybe make as rules.
The president doesn’t control the presidency, as seen with the open revolt against Trump.
What actually happens is that rather than pointlessly fight each other, the people in government come to an accommodation and unite against outsiders. No man willingly goes along with the idea of checks and balances.
It most certainly is a question of basis of comparison. In this universe, it’s unreasonable to expect anything to work all the time. If it works better than anything else, that’s all that matters.
If it works at all, then more of it will work better, and less of it will work less well.
Going at it from the end of “design the government” is a mistake. You can’t “design” your way out of basic human corruptability and malfeasance, not over the course of generations. The most enlightened government ever designed can fall into corruption and chaos simply because the people who founded it are not going to be the people running it in two or three generations, and from that stems the basic root of the problem: It’s people. Fallible, corruptible, human people.
If you took Nazi Germany and ran it with decent human beings that weren’t inherently evil and corrupt, then you a.) wouldn’t have the Nazi Germany we remember, and b.) would probably have a decent place to live. Same-same with the Stalinist Soviet Union. Likewise, the government structure bequeathed to us by the Founding Fathers is going down in flames around us because of the people running it–Despotism and corruption is ever with us, and no “enlightened design” is going to fix that.
You want a good government? Concentrate on the people running it, and making up the citizenry. We have failed, across a very broad spectrum, to ensure that our citizenry is up to the job of running this place. Some of that is by design of the corrupt (see education for examples of what they’ve been doing), and some of that is down to simple failure to pass on values, mores, and practical understandings across generations.
For example–Trying to tell today’s kids why it’s a bad idea to not have a citizen-based militia-style military won’t work; you want them to grasp that, and work out the implications, they have to have had the experience. And, the experience that taught us that lesson is a.) somewhat obsolete in the face of today’s military condition, and b.) not being produced by our system. For something like the vision of the Founder’s to have worked, over the long haul, you needed the cultural and situational conditions of Switzerland to be present, and the values/mores passed down the way they were in Switzerland.
Bad government comes out of bad culture and people participating in it. Good government comes out of good civic culture and good people taking part in all that. The fundamentals of design with that government influence things, but the reality is that if you take a government designed by the angels, and then try to run it with people? LOL… I give it a max of five-ten generations, and you’re going to find it having problems. A major part of those problems being from people saying “Wow, there ought to be a law…”, and “Well, the government did so well with that problem that they can solve this one, too…”, when the plain fact is that the government can’t solve shit stemming from culture, like the collapse of the inner cities here in the US.
A wise man once said politics is downstream from culture. But what’s culture downstream from?
Culture is downstream from what goes into whatever it is we talk about when discussing the effect of nature and nurture. Whatever component of our genes and biology goes into behavior at the individual level is going to affect culture when it gets expressed in group behavior.
It’s an important consideration. I’ve seen just enough of various cultures to conclude that all cultural mindsets are a kind of brainwashing. Brainwashing depends on denying the victim a basis of comparison until his mental habits are set. People under 25 years of age are still malleable – expose them to new ideas and you can blow their minds.
Expose them to enough different ideas and some of them might actually start to think for themselves.
The fundamentals are set for most before they hit school; whatever influence nurture has ceases about the time the kids are out of toddlerhood. I don’t think there is all that much effective influencing to be done with young adults, having spent a considerable amount of time trying to fix the results of bad parenting as expressed by the progeny thereof trying to become decent soldiers.