What Does It Mean To Be Right Wing?


The Nature of Order: Chapter 1

Defining The Divide

What exactly is the difference between left and right? A question I am sure, at one time or another, you may have asked yourself or even asked of someone else. This lack of definition and knowledge on this subject has created a vacuum for centrist political thought to dominate the right in both libertarianism as well as conservatism and draw people away from their right-wing roots. This issue has harmed not only libertarianism and conservatism but the right as a whole. It divided us along imaginary lines created, in no small part, by the infiltration of right-wing institutions by “former” communists. The figure above shows a slightly modified take on the four-quadrant political spectrum, this spectrum I will endeavor to show is both more accurate than the unmodified four quadrant political spectrum but still entirely inaccurate when understanding the delineation between right and left. Over the course of this chapter your understanding will change and so too will this figure. Fig.1

In my earlier youth I was so ill-informed I believed there was no difference between left and right. I believed like a great number of libertarians and conservatives that ultimately what separated these groups was trivial, that these groups were ultimately just representations of the major political parties, that they could be grouped by ideologies like fascism or communism, and that they were essentially two sides of the same coin.[1] Later, I came to the conclusion that this idea couldn’t be further from the truth. There is a fundamental difference between the right and left and it is not, by any means, an arbitrary distinction. It is a present and important difference that defines, in many ways, the very way we see the world.

Political Parties, Ideologies, and Principles

Often political parties, ideology, and philosophy are confused for one another. Some basic definitions are needed to talk about this topic effectively and clearly. It’s very easy for the left to default to calling someone a Nazi or a Fascist as an exaggerated term for someone who is right wing, when these are not only two distinct ideologies, but they are also not in fact wholly or intrinsically linked to the right. Similarly, it’s often a common refrain from the left that Republicans are right wing. This again, is a confusion and sometimes a contradiction in terms depending on the person they’re speaking about. To clear things up let’s walk through each of these terms and talk about what exactly they are.

Political parties are organizations that attempt to acquire and exert political power and influence. Their primary goal is to win elections, nothing more. Anything that would adversely affect their election potential will either be hidden or expelled. Political parties can be related to principles and ideologies, but they are not the same thing. The nature of politics demands that political parties be flexible and not so rigid as to not gain favor with the population of the area in which they are operating. As such, political parties are often a mesh of ideologies and independent beliefs or ideas. For this reason, a ‘conservative’ party in a left-wing area might be further left wing than a ‘liberal’ party in a right-wing area. These, in aggregate, can be more right or left compared only to one another. Is the republican party more right wing than the democratic party? Perhaps, but compared to what? These are important questions that anyone concerned about or researching philosophy must ask themselves. Most importantly I can think of no political party that is wholly right wing that exists in the world today and most likely because the nature of political parties prevents them from being so.

Ideologies are a collection of consistent ideas or beliefs that form the basics of a political theory that is not necessarily epistemological in nature. Similarly, ideologies can form under principles or without them. Ideologies are used to motivate actions toward a set of goals or objectives. Knowing this they are often used for ‘ought’ propositions. For example, “this town ought to be communistic to achieve equality” or “this town ought to be fascistic to achieve order” though not necessarily so. Extreme examples given but you should now understand. Ideologies can influence political parties but as mentioned above, rarely are they directly linked and exclusionary toward other ideologies. Subset ideologies are ideologies that fall under a primary ideology as the name would imply. Subset ideologies may incorporate disparate or even potentially contradictory ideas into an ideology breaking it from its guiding principle.

In this context, principles are values that serve as a guide for behavior or evaluation against ideologies. A guiding principle can be used to govern an ideology or a subset ideology. Guiding principles can be used to measure and exclude potentially deviant subset ideologies or ideas promulgating within an ideology or subset ideologies. Hopefully, now you can accurately gauge this chapter and use this understanding as we proceed onward.fig3.

The French and The Americans

Though it pains me, when speaking of left and right, the French National Assembly must be addressed. Left and Right as designations supposedly began as a result of the seating placement in the French National Assembly.[2] The defenders of the absolute monarchy sat to the right, and the proponents of a constitutional monarchy sat to the left.[3] If you’re on the right and especially an American, I am sure the idea of an absolute king is at first somewhat unpalatable and the idea of a constitution seems like a good one. From that starting point it’s important to understand that democracy itself was seen as a terrible idea of the American founding fathers.

Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.

James Madison
Federalist No. 10

This is of course eerily prescient of the future of egalitarian ideas and specifically those referenced above regarding the remanufacturing of man. The common response to this is that America was born to be a republic and not a democracy.[4] I, too, once trotted out this line. To me it was an all too important distinction that must be recognized. Later, I came to realize that the republicanism that the founding fathers attempted to use to combat the tendencies of democracy was not effective as they were based on a misconception of man. The founders realized they could not remake man so they would attempt to build a system to work with his nature, unfortunately it was not effective in doing so.

The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States. A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction in a part of the Confederacy; but the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of it must secure the national councils against any danger from that source. A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union than a particular member of it; in the same proportion as such a malady is more likely to taint a particular county or district, than an entire State.

In the extent and proper structure of the Union, therefore, we behold a republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government. And according to the degree of pleasure and pride we feel in being republicans, ought to be our zeal in cherishing the spirit and supporting the character of Federalists.

James Madison
Federalist No. 10

Reading the above, it is clear they were also too combating the maladies that befell republics and that these things have ultimately come to pass. It was indeed more difficult for these things to arise, but their remedies were far from cures. They could only put in place things to combat this tendency and not eliminate it. Through all their suffering and sacrifice the founding fathers simply were unable to combat the tendencies of men and without a proper understanding of the nature of man it was inevitable that, even with the best of intentions, this system would ultimately fail. This should not be seen as an attack on the founders, quite the opposite, given the time they lived in and the understanding they had their achievements were laudable even though they were unable to resolve these issues.

Returning to the French, we can see that those rallying for a constitution during the French revolution were also misguided, that is not to say that the monarchy was perfect or that it was without fault but that the push toward constitutionalism was in fact a degeneration of the natural order as it subverted a more natural hierarchical order.

Ironically, the very forces that elevated the feudal king first to the position of absolute and then of constitutional king: the appeal to egalitarian sentiments and the envy of the common man against his betters...also helped bring about the king’s own downfall and paved the way to another, even greater folly; the transition from monarchy to Democracy.

When the king’s promises of better and cheaper justice turned out to be empty and the intellectuals were still dissatisfied with their social rank and position, as was to be predicted, the intellectuals turned the same egalitarian sentiments that the king had previously courted in his battle against his aristocratic competitors against the monarchical ruler himself.

Hans Hermann Hoppe
A Short History of Man: Progress and Decline

It follows from this that while those sitting on the right side of the French National Assembly were more right wing in their overall goal compared to their opposition seated to the left, they were in fact not as right wing in comparison to someone who opposed a centralized absolute monarchy all together. This of course is a bit of an intentional oversimplification of the situation on my part, but the point becomes well illustrated.

Since this time right and left have evolved significantly in the political and ideological sphere but the essential distinction between favoring hierarchical order in opposition to egalitarian ideas is clearly still relevant, even when using this antiquated and often undescriptive reference to the French revolution and the French National Assembly.

The Left

The left subscribes to the ideas of egality, a leveling of the social, political, and natural qualities of man, and the world around him.[6] To them anyone who would seek to prevent that is an oppressor. To a leftist, nature itself is an “oppressor” because nature prescribes a need to act for human life to simply exist. Need to work for someone? Oppression. Need to raise your child? Oppression. Need to pay for things? Oppression. Need to be a woman to bear children? Oppression. The left believes hierarchical relationships are always unnecessary and that the nature of man is equality or that man should be made to be equal or “more equal.” “No Gods, No Masters” is a saying often touted.[5] This notion of some kind of ‘natural egality’ they can seek to achieve is entirely contrived. To be considered natural, the nature of man would have to be equal. In truth, man’s nature from the moment he is conceived is hierarchical; it is baked into his biology. He is subordinate to his parents before, during, and after birth. He is subordinate or superior to others in their skills, knowledge, intelligence, and physical abilities. This is the order of things.

Nature itself seeks to destroy him and yet it hasn’t because human beings contain an instinct to survive and survival takes work and hierarchical order. The moment you hunt an animal to consume its flesh or grow food to harvest you have created a hierarchical order. The very semblance of motherhood, fatherhood, and family is itself hierarchical. Of course, the left would want to destroy these things, it violates the very basis of their beliefs.

This idea is patently absurd even at a cursory glance. Man, in the state of nature, is born to a different culture, geography, and people. He is born with different means, different parents, different abilities, different talents, and different genetics. In the same way, the creation of artificial egality presupposes human nature can and should be molded, modeled, and fundamentally altered. What absurd position one would have to take to defend such an idea? That men are inherently equal, that the differences among us amount to little more than trivialities that can be readily dismissed or explained as “oppression?” How can anyone make such a brash a-priori assertion that men are equal when even genetically identical twins share their own unique experience even before birth? It can only be explained by the denial of reality itself in order to justify their immoral ideals to create that equality rather than recognize it. It becomes little more than a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Thus, it is the fundamental purpose of right-wing political philosophy to determine the nature of hierarchies and develop a theory around them and conversely for left-wing political philosophy to determine the nature of egality and develop a theory around it. That’s it, that’s all there is to it.

This seems simple in comparison to all those political ads, posturing, rhetoric, political positioning, and lengthy tomes about the political nature of man. Well...yes and no. There are further dynamics at play, namely those of the natural and the artificial.

The fundamental premise of an artificial hierarchy prescribes a ought-proposition to man, that he ought to be equal, subservient, or superior to another person regardless of his nature, and what actually is. Communism itself may be the penultimate example of this attempt by man to destroy the natural order. The ideologues of their movement said they wanted a natural equality and in every way they ended up with an artificial hierarchy.[7] Men of low status were transferred to positions of power, alleviating men of their wealth, families, tradition, language, culture, and lives. It attempted to crush the independence and spirit of man. It tore at the fabric of his belief in God. It tore nature asunder. This was an attempt, which the soviets even admit, to create a “New Soviet Man.”

“The shaping of the "human material" at their disposal into something higher—the manufacture of the New Soviet Man, Homo sovieticus—was essential to their vision of all the millions of individuals in society acting together, with one mind and one will, and it was shared by all the Communist leaders. It was to this end, for instance, that Lilina, Zinoviev's wife, spoke out for the "nationalization" of children, in order to mold them into good Communists.”

Ralph Raico
Marxist Dreams and Soviet Realities

The soviets did everything possible to erase their satellites of their cultural identities. They thought this was a clear first step to creating this new man, to build new you must destroy the old. Through Russification this was made manifest.[8] This attempt at shaping man into the image of the perfect communist was, of course, a fool's errand. It ignored human nature, the natural order, and perhaps most egregiously disregarded the beauty and history that is man for a dream of a manufactured automaton. This is something that cannot be ignored, this attempt to remanufacture man and to strip him of who and what he is may be one of the worst crimes against humanity the communists ever committed. It is absolutely critical to understand that this attempt to change man’s fundamental identity is not absent from modern leftist discourse and it certainly begins with molding man to fit an egalitarian ideology.

However, conservatives and libertarians are not immune from this type of mental construct, and in fact relay this view with gusto and conviction. They subscribe to the idea that men are inherently equal. Whether it be ‘equality of opportunity,’ equality at birth, ‘equality of outcome,’ or equality of one's existence makes no difference. They are all equally deluded. This was ever present in American policy of the 20th century with the idea of nation building and the melting pot. The idea that through war they could turn foreign nations into some mirror image of themselves. Similarly through immigration that those who came here would readily adopt their new homeland’s culture. Not to say these things are impossible at the individual level, even the communists had some success in molding minds, its vicious consequences on display to this very day.

If we take the case I have made here and extrapolate it to the first figure we see leftism collapses in on itself, going from a grid to a triangle of sorts.fig.4
We’re not done yet though.

The Conservatives

I am sure you may be asking yourself, how do conservatives fit into this notion of hierarchical order? As many on the right today have noted, what has conservatism conserved? Well, to be honest, nothing. To be fair to our conservative friends, it’s not entirely their fault they were not prepared for subversion and did not properly ‘gatekeep’ their beliefs and their institutions.[9] Where they ultimately failed was not only in failing to maintain or conserve the order that was established but also in not trying to further order society along natural lines, thus placing themselves constantly in a defensive or static posture.

For this reason, I cannot call myself a conservative, even though we most likely share many common beliefs. Conservatism is reactionary in nature because it is the stalwart gaze of the defender, a defender of the status quo. I am not only a defender and I certainly do not wish to preserve the status quo. For this reason, I am not a reactionary. Reaction necessitates waiting and for how much longer can we wait? We should be proactive and with vision strive forward. I want to reclaim the natural order, not preserve some shadow of it. This is what definitionally separates someone on the right from a conservative. The right cannot be reactionary if it wants to survive.

“All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.”

John O’Sullivan
O’Sullivan’s First Law

To phrase it differently, any organization not explicitly dedicated to the preservation of a natural hierarchy, will eventually see that natural hierarchy decay into an artificial one. Natural hierarchies are order and without natural hierarchy chaos will eventually ensue. One might even say it is similar to how the feudal order collapsed into absolute monarchy and then further into constitutional monarchy. Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe makes his case well that the period before the destruction of the feudal order was probably the closest we’ve seen to a true natural order. If the serf class had been integrated into the natural order or separated from it, it may have prevented the destruction of feudal society and prevented the rise of absolute monarchy in Europe. This “unnatural” class of people without any integration or separation and without action caused the destruction of that feudal order.

“Ironically, the very forces that elevated the feudal king first to the position of absolute and then of constitutional king: the appeal to egalitarian sentiments and the envy of the common man against his betters...also helped bring about the king’s own downfall and paved the way to another, even greater folly; the transition from monarchy to democracy...When the king’s promises of better and cheaper justice turned out to be empty and the intellectuals were still dissatisfied with their social rank and position, as was to be predicted, the intellectuals turned the same egalitarian sentiments that the king had previously courted in his battle against his aristocratic competitors against the monarchical ruler himself.“

Hans-Hermann Hoppe
From Aristocracy to Monarchy to Democracy
Pg.15

This was conservatism's fundamental error, to fail to adhere to the natural order, to adapt to artificial hierarchy and attempt to utilize and integrate what should be inherently anathema to them. Adopting position after position that was at odds with who they were in order to adapt to the artificial and thus were subverted. So conservatives, you must share some of this blame with the left because you too are the left.

Following from above, artificial hierarchies are also egalitarian in nature and thus are not functionally different from any form of egalitarianism. As a result the right collapses in on it’s self as well. fig.5

This weakness is rot, and they fostered its growth. The conservatives were shadows wrought with the mistakes of the past, that festered and boiled into what it is today. This grievous error is one they do not seem well positioned to either correct or even recognize. They abandoned the development of philosophy, economics, strength, and competition for compromise and artificial power.

To expand, the problem for conservatives was an attempt to conserve an ever-changing set of ideals or augment them with artificial power structures that the left had created. The conservatives played ball on the left’s home court. It cannot be said that today conservatives are still attempting to conserve what they were trying to conserve even ten years ago. In fact, as many have seen, they are conserving what the left was pursuing ten years ago. Hopefully, now this is clear as to why. This cannot change without a drastic re-alignment and development of understanding in what it means to be right wing.

More fundamentally, conservatives reacted without motive and reaction without motive is devoid of reason. Waiting for an event to occur in order to be its opposing voice, makes you weak. When they did this, they became left wing, they fostered the further development of an artificial hierarchical order which beget the destruction of organizations and of men themselves. Institutions were slowly converted. Universities, corporations, social clubs, hobbies, communities, grade schools, and entire communities were lost. Soon it will reach to the very core of nature, the family.

Today and tomorrow this will increasingly become more obvious as many social institutions are broken down, even the biological nature of man has and will be challenged. When what fundamentally makes us human is stripped away, what will be left?

Is conservatism a bad idea, from a strictly definitional perspective? After all, should it not be the conservation of the natural order, the preservation of tradition? What is tradition other than our historical order, beliefs, and culture? Does that not sound very similar, if not exactly the same, to a position of a natural hierarchy asserting its own dominance? No, conservatism itself cannot preserve that which it only attempts to defend. You cannot stand still in a tug of war, you are being attacked, pull the rope! The attempt to preserve any existing natural order is not enough! Stop begging for crumbs from the masters table. Again, it must be a conquering force bent on its dominance and expansion. Being only a defender is simply inadequate to this position and will force you to cede ground to the enemy. In ideology, stagnation when faced with artificial constructs is death. The left has learned this extremely well which is why their pursuits never end, they are not simply content with maintaining the status quo.

Further, tradition is not the idolatry of the past, but the preservation of what created it. Tradition is a complementary aspect to the natural order, but it is itself also totally insufficient to deal with artificial hierarchy and sadly it is often the first thing to be compromised away. Unfortunately, what conservatism has come to mean is little more than the worship of dust, the worship of sentiment, and things long since passed. It has become a statue standing guard at the gates of a conquered city, an effigy of opposition. It thus becomes the duty of the right to not only restore what our ancestors fought so hard to preserve but to proceed beyond.

On Power and Elites

Author's note: This section will be relatively short as I only wish to convey the general idea. I will delve further into these ideas in another chapter.

Thankfully today many conversations are being had about power and its influence. Aetheric knowledge on the right seems to have morphed from “culture is downstream from politics” to “politics is downstream from culture” to now “culture is downstream from power.” While this evolution of questioning existing dogma is quite nice to see, it fundamentally misses how all of these things interrelate and fails to explain anything in a useful way. This is the case because they’re all remotely true in their own way.

Modern politics, culture, and power are intrinsically related to artificiality. In a healthy system, politics nearly ceases to exist. There is no soft jockeying for power in an owned system, culture is evident, not derived, and power is seated with those naturally, morally, and justifiably suited to it, the natural elite. Politics is a means of attaining power, as we’ve already established. Power comes in two forms, that power which comes from the natural hierarchies established by a natural elite I.e. the natural order and power that is artificially created as the instrument of destruction to unify and equalize others.

This is why we see culture more easily thrive in local areas, and be more easily destroyed in urban areas, ultimately giving rise to unified “cultures” that are no more than a mishmash of different ethnic identities that form nothing intrinsically valuable or imminently worthy of preservation, a watered down uniculture of decay. Culture is born not of power but of separation, not of equality but of inequality. It is the disparation between human beings, the very nature of our unequal nature that gives rise to cultures.

Artificial power itself can be utilized to beat back the cultural decay of nations but it cannot be used to foster the remediation of any culture. As mentioned previously the egalitarian worldview must necessarily attain artificial power to institute egalitarian ‘reforms’ and as such artificial power is the cause of cultural decay not its remedy. Only through separation and breakdown of egalitarian power structures can the natural order be re-established. This must be the right’s goal.

Far too many have failed to understand that the development of natural order is power itself. Natural elites seek to hold to power even more strongly than artificial elites, but this can be damaged through the introduction of artificial means or actors that do not fall into the natural order. Put simply, if a politician loses his position, he will be grievously dismayed but when a man loses his land you may have a war on your hands. What is personal to the nature of man has more value to him, it is something worth dying for. Therefore, it is critical to attempt to reclaim the natural order wherever we can. This is not by definition artificial, it is the battle for the disintegration of what is artificial.

True power is the consequence of natural order. This is not to say that power cannot exist outside the natural order or that in defense this unnatural power shouldn’t be used, otherwise it would be evident to all that the state would simply cease to exist along with its artificial power, but outside of artificial hierarchies, natural order will sprout just as nature reclaims an abandoned road. Some on the left would call this a power vacuum, but it is merely the natural order re-establishing itself. It is this artificial power that destroys and must be converted or stopped by the means left to us. This does not exclude incremental efforts as long as those efforts move us in net total toward the natural order. Separation is just such a way forward.

Summation

Hierarchies, as they exist, can be constructions of men or of nature, the former artificial and the latter natural. It is the unique characteristic of a man of the right that he believes in the arrangement of men along natural lines, that this in turn creates the order of men, and thus natural hierarchies are the nature of order itself. He believes in the order of strength, the order of intellect, the order of wisdom, the order nature, and depending on your beliefs, the order of God. Each time men attempt to corrupt these natural orders it inevitably ends with disastrous consequences. It is in opposition to this where the tyranny of men lies. When men believe that the natural order can be subverted, that it should be altered, that they can arrange men according to their own whims in opposition to their nature, is the moment an artificial hierarchy is created and natural order itself is subverted. This is evident throughout modern as well as classical history and in many major religions, especially Christianity. What better example than Lucifer attempting to subvert God’s natural order? It’s hard to imagine.

Much in the same way that Ludwig Von Mises showed the distribution of scarce resources via a price system that ignores the nature of human action, and instead favors central planning cannot overcome the economic calculation problem so too will artificial hierarchies be unable to overcome the distribution of human capital, or what I shall dub as the hierarchical calculation problem. From this we can surmise that artificial hierarchies will inevitably result in the same problems as artificial price systems, with the misallocation of human capital. This seems to be indisputable then that if you accept the idea that scarce resources can and will be misallocated through central planning that human beings will also be misallocated to positions of power that they should not inhabit, often to disastrous results.

Artificial hierarchies aren't naturally hierarchical, as the name would imply, they are in fact forms of creating egalitarian ends for certain groups. Whether it be a political, racial, class, or any other group. The rising up of others at the sake of those who would naturally be at the top. Just as forced economic equality is theft, so too is imposed artificial order. The theft of the natural order from men must be halted.

So, what does it mean to be right wing? Essentially, when we sand away all the different layers of red paint, media narratives, ideologies, political parties, dead interpretations from the French, and boil things down to their basic level, we can come to the following understanding. Being right wing means you oppose egalitarianism in all forms, that you recognize hierarchies exist, that they are necessary, and that artificial hierarchies are ultimately egalitarian and produce egalitarian ends. You also recognize that these natural hierarchies are simply the ordering of persons, things, and ideas in concordance with the inequality of men. That the beauty of man is not an attempt to subvert order but thrive within it. We are the definition of order, but more specifically, the natural order.


You can find me on twitter here: https://twitter.com/enddemocracy

Citations

1. Read, Leonard E.. “Neither Left Nor Right” The Freeman:Ideas on Liberty, 2006, pp. 28-29

2. Bienfait, H. F., and W. E. A. van Beek. “Right and Left as Political Categories. An Exercise in ‘Not-so-Primitive’ Classification.” Anthropos, vol. 96, no. 1, 2001, pp. 169–78

3. Roberts, J. M. “The French Origins of the ‘Right.’” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, vol. 23, 1973, pp. 27–53

4. McMaken, Ryan. “Stop Saying ‘We're a Republic, Not a Democracy’: ” Mises Institute, 3 Nov. 2017, Mises.org/wire/stop-saying-were-republic-not-democracy.

5. Guérin, Daniel, and Paul Sharkey. “No Gods, No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism.” Vol. 1, AK Press, 2005.

6. Arneson, Richard. “Egalitarianism.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 24 Apr. 2013, plato.stanford.edu/entries/egalitarianism/.

7. Dobrin, S. “Lenin on Equality and the Webbs on Lenin.” Soviet Studies, vol. 8, no. 4, 1957, pp. 337–57.

8. Silver, Brian. “Social Mobilization and the Russification of Soviet Nationalities.” The American Political Science Review, vol. 68, no. 1, 1974, pp. 45–66.

9. Rothbard, Murray. “A Strategy for the Right: Murray N. Rothbard.” Mises Institute, 8 Dec. 2009, mises.org/library/strategy-right.








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