There are different right-wing tribes, with distinct values.Β§
While the two-party system in the united states encourages us to treat them as
a block, the right is no less fractious than the left, andβ¦
There are different right-wing tribes, with distinct values.
While the two-party system in the united states encourages us to treat them as
a block, the right is no less fractious than the left, and we forget this at
our peril. Any political party is a tenuous marginal cease-fire between groups
that would otherwise be at each otherβs throats.
Just within the republican partyβs core mainstream (not counting the more rare
and elaborate forms whose flowering during the Obama administration made them
news items), we have several breeds.
Thereβs ivy-league conservatives, who are wealthy and educated. Generally,
they make decisions based on a free-market ideology and a sense that they live
in a meritocracy β after all, the system as it exists has elevated them and
their family, so it canβt be that wrong. Randian objectivism became a hit with
this group way back in the 50s and 60s. Some of the people currently in this
group are former hippies who embraced capitalism later in life; others are
people who were Birchers in the 60s. Hillary Clinton would be of this group.
The unifying attributes of this group are wealth, education, and a belief in
the moral good of the free market; secularism varies here but is almost
entirely irrelevant, because public shows of faith are in poor taste.
Then, thereβs new-wealth conservatives β people with a blue-collar background
who subscribe to the same belief in free-market ideology and meritocracy, but
without most of the cultural and intellectual trappings as the ivy-league
conservatives. The first generation of any lineage in this group would,
generally, be someone who worked up from a lower-middle-class background and
became wealthy, and believes themselves to have become wealthy due to Horatio
Alger style preserverence rather than through luck. Objectivism landed here in
the 70s and 80s, where it cast off some of its anti-religious aspects. The
children of the lineage can become ivy-league conservatives if they are taught
to respect tradition and ettiquite, but otherwise remain new-wealth
conservatives. Donald Trump is of this group. The unifying attributes of this
group are wealth, a focus on the idea of meritocracy, a lack of βtasteβ and
βsubtletyβ, and a distain for people who they see as βcheatingβ.
You also have the rural poor, who may be one or the other but are often both.
They work off a model of the new-wealth conservatives, and are often
explicitly against the ivy-league conservatives. The religious sentiment and
anti-intellectuallism usually is focused in this group. Objectivism came to
this group via the prosperity gospel in the 80s and 90s, and this group
doesnβt generally associate it with anti-theism.
Among the new types (which are not necessarily new, but are instead newly
important), we have:
Accelerationists β marxists who believe that the best way to bring about a
communist utopia is to be as capitalist as possible, so as to hasten the
inevitable breakdown. They may consider themselves leftists, but they behave
in a way that is indistinguishable from the far-right.
Neoreactionaries β people with a nostalgia for an idealized version of
centralized absolute power. A lot of them think that the best way to bring
about the emergence of a global centralized power is to make democracy &
capitalism collapse by exploiting the flaws in the existing structure, so as a
result neoreactionaries and accelerationists are in alignment in working
together in acting economically far-right despite not believing in economic
far-right policies.
The βalt-rightβ β a mix of various smaller groups, mostly dominated by people
who subscribe to a dumbed-down version of the neoreactionary ideology, with
some of the anti-capitalist stuff removed. The alt-right is neither
intellectual nor anti-intellectual but pseudo-intellectual; as a result, they
are at odds with both the anti-intellectuals (because they consider themselves
intellectual) and the intellectuals (because theyβre resistant to examining
their beliefs). They circulate material from neoreactionaries without having a
clear understanding of it. Often they have a perspective that combines
objectivism in its anti-theistic dimension with social darwinism and
scientific racism. They are not neo-nazis, because they donβt really have an
interest in tradition. There are lots of engineers in this group.
Right-libertarians β a mix of objectivists of various stripes, people whose
fully justified paranoia about government (as the best-armed group in their
vicinity) can be easily overwhelmed with invented paranoia about foreign
invaders, and people who simply have a much greater faith in free markets than
in other social constructions. This group was part of ground zero for
objectivism in the 50s and 60s, when libertarianism was mostly
undifferentiated, and starting in the 90s this group had an influx of people
from the much more religious βrural poorβ group. I classify anarchocapitalists
under this banner, no matter how much they might complain. Sole unifying
attribute: distrust of power.
Actual neo-nazis β these guys never went away. Social darwinism,
traditionalism, and pretty explicit anti-intellectualism, with a strong racial
& xenophobic component, characterize this group. They havenβt been part of
mainstream discourse or a large block for a long time, but some of their ideas
get circulation via other groups.
Right now, you canβt win an election by targetting only one of these groups.
To win, you need to at least get the big three older groups. Some of the newer
groups are gaining numbers and power, particularly in places like California.
If you go to a university, the conservatives around you will generally not be
of the rural poor variety: a university education would be expensive and of
dubious value to that group. All other groups (with the exception of the
neoreactionaries, who consider universities to be a propaganda outlet for
democracy and capitalism, and neo-nazis, who consider universities to be
smearing the good name of Hitler) would be well-represented at universities;
accelerationists would actually be overrepresented β there arenβt many of
them, but they are all university-educated and most have been university-
employed.
By John Ohno on December 13,
2016.
[Canonical link](https://medium.com/@enkiv2/there-are-different-right-wing-
tribes-with-distinct-values-991578d8b367)
Exported from Medium on September 18, 2020.
