Know your enemy

The right-wing case against 'no enemies to the right'

Earlier this week, my friend

Kruptos

wrote a fascinating defence of the principle of 'no enemies to the right’.

NETTR calls for us to cease policing those more radically right-wing than ourselves; to stop publicly criticising them, denouncing them, and exposing them.

Charles Haywood has done much to promote the principle in the last year, following his dustup with

Rod Dreher

. He described the central aspect of NETTR in a debate hosted by IM-1776:

Any contentious discussion with those on the Right, wherever exactly they may fall on the spectrum of “not Left,” should instead be done privately and be strictly tactical, to agree on how may we cooperate to achieve our joint ends. We may occasionally choose to ignore some on the Right, as charlatans, simpletons, or fools, or simply too different, even malevolent, in their beliefs, but attacking them publicly only serves to make it harder to reach our end.

I sympathize with the animating spirit behind this principle. It is true that some of the more cynical and self-interested figures on the Right undermine the movement and cause terrible damage by offering up the victims of their gatekeeping to the Left for cancellation: doxing them and slandering them with poisonous accusations of racism, homophobia, and so forth. Stopping this is essential.

However, the ‘no enemies to the right’ heuristic is unhelpfully crude, and suffers from structural flaws which I will outline below. I am writing about this subject as I consider the ability to effectively navigate the political dynamics of a contentious space like this one an essential asset of any ascendent nobility.

In the place of NETTR, I will offer what I believe is a more targeted and useful strategy.

Peter Paul Rubens, Saint George and the Dragon

The first issue with the principle is that it is not clear which modern ideological position is the most rightwards.

Strictly speaking, there is a case to be made that absolute adherents to the orthodox doctrines of the major Abrahamic religions - in my case Catholicism - represent the ultimate rightwards end of the ideological spectrum.

The church has absolute laws, a divine hierarchy, and preaches eternal punishment. It is a doctrine that demands complete submission to the good, the beautiful, and the true - in both physics and metaphysics, this life and the next.

If we understand the Left as those willing to embrace disorder in the pursuit of equality, and the Right as those that embrace hierarchy and inequality in the pursuit of order, then I believe there is a strong case to be made that Catholicism - in its traditional form - represents the ultimate refinement of the Right.

Others would clearly reject this categorization. They might point to fascism or some kind of murderous cult as being ‘further right’. I’m not convinced that the materialist doctrine of fascism is purely right-wing, nor am I convinced that nihilistic murderous fantasies are either. But I would completely understand where my critics were coming from. Being ‘right-wing’ is more a vibe than a strictly defined categorization.

It is therefore unclear who is allowed to criticize who. I would certainly reject the notion that the faith I have devoted my life to merely represents some arbitrary midpoint on a left/right slider. No! Whatever true Christianity is, it is not a ‘happy medium’ - it is an absolute, uncompromising expression of its principles.

The terms ‘right’ and ‘left’ carry enough meaning at the macro scale to help us conceptualize the grand trajectory of politics and belief. I am not suggesting that they are useless concepts or that we cast them out. But they are not precise enough to rely upon for the purpose at hand. They are too crude to navigate the relative differences between specific agents.

Why then does the left-wing equivalent of this principle - no enemies to the left - work for progressives?

It works because ‘progressives’ are only interested in destruction, and destruction always points in the same direction. It’s only a question of how fast it happens.

This means that although left-wingers might have internal differences about how quickly and how deeply they want the dissolution of structures and limitations (heterosexuality, borders, monogamy, patriarchy, etc.) they are fundamentally unconcerned about how quickly their leftmost fringe wants to move. They know they’re all ultimately on the same journey towards John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ utopia, destroying everything that they encounter along the way. The slower moving progressives will catch up in the end. There’s no need for internal strife.

Conversely, right-wing thought is necessarily particularist and exclusionary. If I want to ‘build the wall’ and re-establish the border, only certain people are going to be allowed in. If we are trying to build order, rules, and obligations - the question of which specific order to pursue is central and cannot be avoided.

To embrace hierarchy is to say ‘this person is above this person’. To assert rules is to state ‘this is right and this is wrong’. This particularism makes vigorous and public debate necessary. There are very real differences between different factions on the right, and they will not all be neatly resolvable behind closed doors.

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There’s an interesting exchange in the Charles Haywood vs. Daniel Miller debate on NETTR about what our fundamental goal is:

[Charles] What is our end? That is easy — winning. What is the winning condition? It is the total, permanent defeat of the Left, of the ideology at the heart of the Enlightenment, with its two core principles of total emancipation from all bonds not continuously chosen, and of total forced equality of all people. When this defeat is accomplished, Right principles, those based in reality and recognizing the nature of man, his limitations, and his capabilities, can again become ascendant.

[Daniel] This objective is itself utopian and therefore, in a sense, Leftist. Evil, which is part of human nature, cannot be destroyed. At best it can be restrained. Every historical effort to eradicate evil has accordingly reliably generated catastrophes, whether under the name of the Left or the Right, or some other name.

Here I have to disagree with Charles - or at least to offer a clarification. The total defeat of the Left might be a grand ambition of ours, but the arc of history will not be so neat as to follow a well defined sequence of events in which the Left is nicely defeated, and once that’s wrapped up, we can debate the question of what comes next.

The power of the Left will recede at different paces in different regions and geographies. As this happens, in the pockets of the greatest opportunity, we should be continuously building order, rules, and power. This is already underway in certain places. The question of which order to build is already upon some of us, and must be debated and resolved.

The fact that NETTR places undue primacy upon the nebulous, modern, theoretical concept of the ‘Right’ rather than on specific and particular ideologies leads even principled thinkers like Kruptos down confused pathways. In his piece he accepts that he will have to commit ‘evil’ acts and be a ‘racist’ because this is, in some sense, what it means to be ‘right-wing’. No!

Giving any credence whatsoever to modern secular condemnations like ‘racism’ is a mistake. They should be rejected and ignored entirely. Inhabit your own conceptual frame!

NETTR also establishes an unstable incentive structure that will lead to perverse outcomes. Adopting this principle means ensuring that the only party that is immune from criticism is he who is understood to occupy the maximally ‘right-wing’ position. As we have established, given how poorly this position is defined and how stupid some people’s interpretation of what being right-wing means, this is sure to encourage spiraling and idiocy.

However, as I said at the beginning of this piece, I do believe the underlying motivation for establishing NETTR is the right one: the abolishment of self-aggrandizing and hugely destructive denunciations on the Right.

I propose that we establish a more specific prohibition than ‘no enemies to the Right’. I would advocate for something closer to ‘no feeding the Left’.

At the moment, the Left holds all the power to cancel someone. They have the media, HR departments, and civil rights law on their side. Therefore when someone on the Right wants to unperson an adversary, it is very tempting to serve them up to the Left.

This is the specific action that should be completely impermissible on the Right: not contentiously disagreeing with another right-wing party, but framing the contention in a mode that is intended to attract left-wing intervention.

Kruptos is right to refer to the Overton window. Bad actors in our sphere call attention to the fact that their interlocutors are outside the Overton window, point them out to Leftist commissars, and then run for cover. In its worst form - sorry Rod Dreher - this includes doxing, to really destroy their lives.

The problem with relying on Leftist power for cancellation is that it results in a decline in the overall power of one’s own side.

If disagreement between two right-wing parties is conducted properly, they would argue civilly in front of an audience, and the party with the more compelling argument would gain in support and the less compelling party would recede in support.

The Right would gain through this process of refinement, becoming more compelling over time.

The reason that antagonism fails catastrophically when an appeal is made to Leftist power is that progressives become the judges of right and wrong, and through cancellation, they remove the offending right-wing party from the struggle permanently.

Allowing Leftists to be our judges has both a dysgenic effect on which ideas survive and yields a total reduction in power (since right-wing actors are removed entirely and permanently).

What we need instead is a standard of discourse that allows for open debate in front of an audience, but that refines, strengthens, and nourishes us. As this process continues, the sphere only grows in strength.

I think

Dave Greene

provides really excellent rails for such a discourse to take place, in a recent piece called 20 Rules for “Frens”:

My preferred way of addressing this issue relies on a three-stage process that I call DIS:

De-escalate, Intellectualize, and Separate.

First, de-escalate, make sure that you try to remove emotion and explicit attack on the honor or other allied individuals or communities.

Second, intellectualize the problem by framing the disagreement as a contention over factual matters or some complicated ethical contention. Frame the task to properly STATE the disagreement in a way that your opponent agrees with and develop a commonly understood list of what each side wants and the lines each can't cross.

Finally, separate, develop space for each moral system to operate and rules that can prevent the disagreement from escalating further. To the extent that there is a disagreement over boundaries, seek arbitrage from a third party or higher authority.

With this framework, political division can still be allowed, purity spiraling minimized, without opening too many cracks for progressive subversion.

I very much look forward to arguing with you all.

Stay in the fight my friends.

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Sic transit imperium,

Johann