As detailed in the previous article, the two broadest political tendencies respond to modernity’s crisis by following radically divergent paths, their points of divergence rooted in philosophy. The left has a surer footing. They have a philosophical school, they have thought leaders, they have organisations. They know what they want, they know their place in the world, they are armed with a theory to interpret its features, so onwards they march. Meanwhile the right struggles, because the right is cast by necessity in the role of the reactionary: the one opposed to the way things are going. The reactionary seeks flight, constantly defending ground, never gaining. This is simply because the reactionary has lost the moral Mandate of Heaven. Society does not turn to the reactionary to learn what it means to be and do good. The right lacks as strong a centre from which to build outwards as the left has secured for itself. The left has usurped the right to dictate the ethics that support society, and this is what birthed the right-winger. Recall Evola’s dictum that the sane person of yesteryear was, if we apply modern terminology, a right-winger, whereas the most popularly identified precursors of the left were fringe religious fanatics. When the left entered the stage, it pushed its enemies to one side, and “the norm” became “the right”. On that day, the modern reactionary was born. And more than two centuries later, after a long process of moral recalibration, the reactionary is naked and alone in hostile territory. The left won for itself the right to redefine the ethics of the world.
The last great roar of right-wing politics in the US is known under the name “Moral Majority”. It strikes the ears as a cry of pain when you situate it in its context. The youth had been converted to the left. Their moral centre had shifted. Their idea of “being a good person” was now defined by the left, not Christianity. The right-wing had lost. And in a last desperate attempt, they cried out, “but we’re the majority!” They were not. American Christianity is fractured as a matter of identity, and evangelical Christians proved they overestimated themselves as a unified block. This American example illustrates very succinctly why the right is always losing. Right-wingers have lost the moral majority.
What political representation does the right even have? In Europe, most right-wing parties are groupings of liberals who make excuses for capitalistic depredation. So great is the right’s defeat born of its loss in the battlefield of philosophy that, to get elected, it needs to be no more than a fanged imago of its opponent. Every time a right-wing party wins an election, the practical considerations are usually what gets them the victory. “Right-wingers get things done”; the unspoken part is: “so hold your nose and vote for them”. People will vote right for their economic policies, hoping that some right-wing ruthlessness will create jobs and grow the economy, people will vote right for their social policies, having become altogether too fed up with immigration and hoping that some right-wing ruthlessness will curb the tide, and people will vote right to punish the left, hoping that some right-wing ruthlessness will balance things out after a term or two of left-wing softness. But people won’t vote right for the right’s unmatched moral convictions, excepting some cases of very hardline Christians, who aren’t a significant enough voting block for government-forming in any European country of which I am aware (the Christians who get a government in office are never the hardliners). The right has, even when winning, successfully cast itself in the role of the villain. And there is no anti-liberal essence to most right-wingers, once you cut through all the groveling apologia for capitalism, the free markets and “freedom”. They’re just liberals playing the villain. Modernity’s values have triumphed, the left rides modernity like a beast with a kindred soul, everything is judged according to their dictates, and the right, fails again and again to redefine terms—in the sparse cases of its trying, of course, as in most cases, it is content to be merely a liberalism redder in tooth and claw.
The right was driven to such desperation precisely because it realised the reactionary is born to lose. Best to say “we’re the real liberals” and try to live by the new rules. The notion of redefining the ethical terms of modernity has been largely abandoned. You won’t get elected that way. And to claim moral superiority, on its own terms, over the left? That is unimaginable. It is impossible for the right to openly claim moral superiority over the left because the right stood by and watched the idea of progress redefine the moral centre entirely. And so the right-wing team is forever playing all its matches on the left’s home turf, and the left walks into every championship match knowing with absolute certainty the trophy will never leave them. After the Second World War, the new world had a new and very delicate balance, but one thing that surely emerged, solidified beyond any doubts in the 1960s, is a triumphant left taking hold of the West’s moral centre from the right. Right-wingers haven’t gone extinct; they might even score victories here and there. But they have ultimately lost to the left, because the left alone gets to define the ethical terms society is to follow.
Whenever the right offers against the left its claim of moral superiority, it is gesturing at something external to it, usually Christianity in the West. But the left, when it offers its claim of moral superiority, is drawing on the very lifeblood of its own heart: the idea of progress. This is why the right cannot be said to offer any moral alternative, why it cannot even be imagined that it may do this in the modern day. To gesture broadly at “Christianity” does not make the right a barycentric ethical point that will compel all around it to enter its orbit. It merely shifts the centre, and to what? To which Christianity is the right even gesturing? So far from a right-wing world are we that not only is separation of Church and State as sacrosanct as the Church itself was a millennium ago, but for a right-wing party to so much as pick a denomination to marry into would be catastrophic, because the voter is non-denominational. So it is caught in a loop, forever broadly gesturing towards “Christianity” and “traditional values” and a host of such mealy-mouthed slogans with smoothed edges. Who triumphs yet again but progress? The state has submitted to the desires of the marketplace, and the Dominus is the mass of faceless shoppers. Shoppers for politics as for all else. Never shall the shopper be offended, and so all offerings will be maximally milquetoast. The “Christianity” the right points to whenever it wants to pretend as if it had any claim to moral supremacy is no more than chintzy souvenir. The real church may be in bed with the government, depending on the country, but that’s just business. Nowhere does anything like philosophy come into play, nowhere is the question of taking the ethical reins of society asked in earnest.
Christianity cannot offer the right refuge until the right can demand a Christian theocracy and not be seen as maniacally evil by the common man. It is evident to all that the common man would see as maniacally evil anyone claiming Christian theocracy as a political end goal. In other words, as long as the ethical map of modernity remains in place, everyone will be judged according to the God of progress, not the God of Abraham. Christians who get excited about this or that right-wing party because of “values” or whatever else corporate slogan has been repackaged for political use, are drowning in their own interminable naïveté. There are no religious parties, unless they’re extremely fringe, the kind that elicit laughter or cringing at the ballot box. If you are religious, your needs will not be met by a system that relies, philosophically, upon materialism. If you take issue with the system, the only serious course of action is open rebellion against society as it stands, with the goal of replacing its very pillars. Your ethics have no place in this world beyond pandering to squeeze a vote out of you.
A materialistic theory of existence, when lived as experience and used as bedrock for creating a society, demands, by itself, nothing but YOLO. Life is for the living, and all that. Everything else is colour. To see how the left’s approach at colouring materialism wins so decisively, we must understand how it stole from Christianity an eschatological program. In a nihilistic void, the left can promise you salvation, without need of God. The transhumanists can even promise you their version of immortality and theosis. The only thing you must do in return is accept progress as your God. And progress can be the Good because modernity has already oriented itself morally by finding its evil. The counterpart to the materialist metaphysics of progress is the materialist Satan, Nazism. And despite the endless and endlessly imaginative grotesqueries into which Nazism-the-boogeyman has been twisted, there is, surprisingly perhaps, a profoundly true core to this bipolar image of moral modernity: Nazism and Progress are fundamentally the two opposing sides into which the political metaphysics of materialism has settled. The Great Enemy of progress is merely an alternative way to implement materialism as a theory of life and politics. Right-wingers are caught in a trap; if they so much as try to make a move outside the liberal paradigm, they will be stepping into the role of Satan prepared for them. The right is tolerated only insofar as it doesn’t go against liberalism. If it does, it will be tried as a Nazi, which to say Satan for modernity. But what modernity defines as Satanic is kindred to it, which means the “unique vision” of the right-wing in the mirror of liberalism, is but another nihilistic ontology. Modernity’s Satan is as nihilistic as modernity’s God. It’s a trap shut on both ends, and in the middle lies a bed of poison. This miserable state of affairs is not simply because the right-wing “lost a war”, as in the Second World War; it is because it lost the war of metaphysics, depriving it of the power to dictate to society its ethics. It can now dance to liberalism’s tune or be shot as a Satanic Nazi. Unless it finds a third way, the right is stuck playing a game its enemies have designed.
It might seem I have merely restated old Nietzschean aphorisms–Gott ist tot, what else is new. And though I do recognise Nietzsche’s prophetic vision, I am not saying the same thing he says. He is right, the madman, that the blood of the Christian God is on the hands of the moderns. But he is wrong that this requires us to replace him with the Superman. The nihilistic void will never be beaten back from within. Only with the right weapons do we stand a chance, and modernity, that most honey-tongued of Devils, has convinced us that its terms are inescapable. No God, therefore man. We need not fall into this trap, us who live to see the most terminal decline of the West.
Thinkers like Nietzsche and Heidegger make a crucial mistake: being caught up in the maelstrom of maturing modernity, they imagine the birth of something truly novel. Nietzsche wrote that he had “come too early”, yet remains assured the old ways are done, indeed he turns this assurance into a characteristically forceful exhortation. Heidegger insists that the Greek metaphysical process is at its end, and that a truly new God for the new age will come, one who will be secular. They were swept away by the steamy-breathed spirit in an era when one could see city streets transform to accommodate automobiles when one’s grandfather would have lived in an 18th century world. Prophets of a new, unseen before reality emerging from its chrysalis were blinded by the light that the 20th century cast. Nietzsche saw it clearly from the 19th century, and enough to be blinded. The awful truth is that liberalism’s triumph is banal. Nothing new has been born—it’s just a materialistic atheism split into various cults. Christian morality survives, but we know now there is no way through. This is it, to the end. Technological progress exists for consumption alone, stripped of all awe. The romanticism of the Futurists has led nowhere—airplanes are cages and not even motorcycles are exciting anymore among the young. We are realising, still bathed in the afterglow of the 20th century, that it’s very much whimper and not bang.
Who then are to be our prophets? Do we have a philosophy to follow, and do we have philosophers to instruct us? Can a counterproposal be raised against modernity? Does the right have any role to play in this? All these questions hinge on the ability to believe. So long as we have it, the answer is a potential yes, waiting to be incarnated. We will not be saying “yes” to life as process, but as essence, brought down into our world of surfaces from the world of depths. If we can do that, we can succeed. All that separates us from arming ourselves against the crisis of modernity is belief. The belief Nietzsche called “unworthy” and was certain had been lost forever. The way out of nihilism can only go through a fire that will rekindle belief. A philosophy, not a sophistry. A religion, not a secular web of taboos. Only if we reject the notion that the metaphysical project is dead can we survive the trek. Our advantage is that we know modernity leads to a slow decline and not to an explosion of novelty. That is, of course, unless we give in and let modernity win. The left believes it has tamed modernity. The right deludes itself into believing it can do the same. That way lies death.