“Future of the West: The Two-Faced God” Part I: Detectives and Decline
Describing Dashiell Hammett’s noir detective character The Continental Op, literary critic Steven Marcus inadvertently captures the reactionary. Both detective and reactionary emerge from profoundly disordered societies. Their gut tells them something is amiss, that their circumstances are fundamentally unsatisfying. Each finds himself waking up to a world of falsehoods, where natural inclinations are everywhere subverted, where human flourishing is derailed or destroyed, and where truth is buried under mounds of error. With little to nothing left to ‘conserve’, the reactionary becomes a deconstructionist, a detective, stripping away contemporary liberalism’s false legitimations.
There are several branches of reactionary thought, but most if not all share at the core an antipathy for the money-power, a sacral understanding of culture, affinity for hierarchy, and some degree of hero-worship. These threads persist regardless of any particular riffs or permutations. The reactionary, through churchism, nationalism, vitalism, traditionalism, or some combination thereof, struggles against liberal nihilism, the deracination of romantic visions and immaterial goods. In short, reaction rejects the myth of Progress.
Modern decadence rarely takes the form of lavish balls or orgiastic retreats. Instead, it is characterized by exhaustion, the desocialization of pleasure and thrill, anhedonia. Late cartographer of capitalism Mark Fisher describes the latter vividly as “the soft narcosis, the simstim eternity, the comfort food oblivion of Playstation, all-night TV and marijuana.” All forms of fulfillment eternally forestalled by gluttony, onanism, and the general inability to disconnect from our ever-present digital dopamine drip. Contemporary reaction, then, often originates as a backlash against passivity, consumerism, sterility, physical weakness, and all the other rotten fruits of disenchantment.
While it is no doubt true that many past eras surpassed our own in virtue, beauty, and spirituality, it is impossible to return to the same set of social, economic, and technological conditions that shaped the past. A Bushism summarizes the issue well: “I think we can agree, the past is over.” The challenge, then, is to fashion a society out of postmodern clay, in which natural virtues again flourish. The reactionary mind must attune itself to the particular ailments, conditions, and advantages of postmodernity.
Until very recently, this was an apt description of the Western world. But as liberalism works itself pure and intersectionality marches through the institutions, it also reintroduces the West to metanarrative. From the Enlightenment’s murder of myth, through to the Enlightenment’s death, we have arrived again at an era of myth. As the United States continues its transformation into an ideological state premised on gender gnosticism, anti-whiteness, and anti-nationalism, liberalism’s hyper-moralism becomes clearer.
Today, the West is returning to the political as such, to a state of polemos, the social warfare that punishes, purges, and partitions. Yet the regime’s tendency toward anarcho-tyranny, as well as postmodernity’s general liquidity and chaos, lends extra potency to reaction’s promises of order, beauty, and the sacrosanct. These developments are a great boon to reaction. Politicization is a preferable outcome for the reactionary, and one step closer to the outright conflict necessary to effect social rejuvenation.
With normalcy demonized at every turn, the West finds itself in another Prohibition era. The person who honors his ancestors, obeys God, and admires traditional mores participates in “collaborative illegality.” Societies of illegality, where day-to-day life becomes a radical state of affairs, are fertile ground for reaction. Confrontation is everywhere preferable to obfuscation. If, as detectives, reactionaries are emergent byproducts of decline, then we should expect them to proliferate as decline accelerates and the spirit of polemos enlarges.
The scuttled America First Caucus recently proclaimed America as “a nation with a border, and a culture, strengthened by a common respect for uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions,” and decried mass migrations disruption and disintegration. The media backlash to the term ‘Ango-Saxon’ was both predictable and educational. America, as it was perceived by the Founders and most subsequent generations, no longer exists.
The Confederates are clarifying here. If we considered the United States as an Anglo-Saxon civilization, which incorporated other ethnic groups into this civilizational fabric, the Civil War was a tragic conflict between kin. If being American means identifying with a vacuous, chimeric liberalism, then the Civil War was an existential battle between the supposedly chthonic horror of racism and the ever-perfected march of reason. This is exactly how the ruling elite perceives the United States: a polity on an ideological mission to liberate the world, whatever form that liberation may take in each succeeding generation. America’s refusal or inability to recover a moderate and reasonable ethnos is nothing less than suicidal. If immigration continues and there is no American identity aside from vapid cosmopolitanism, the money-power will continue its disintegration and rulership over the United States.
A bleak portrait, perhaps. But so is a crime only halfway solved. As a detective continues his investigation, to be called on amid a crumbling society of illegality, so does the reactionary continue forward. He is often the fortunate benefactor of Providence, that sublime knife which eternally slips loose Gordian knots. The Gracchi brothers’ assassinations by the optimates and their mob paved the way for Caesar; Jacobin excess unwittingly opened Fontainebleau’s doors to Napoleon, and Europe’s midcentury dirge kept Iberia under reactionary rule until the third Christian millennium. If Buchanan began transforming American conservatives into reactionaries, and Trump made reaction politically viable — if even for a moment — we can reasonably hope reaction will maintain its historical relationship with decline, and be nourished by decay.
With that and all the above in mind, we may sketch a vision for an Occident shaped by reaction. As with reaction generally, it will be a romantic vision. After liberalism’s society of illegality inevitably buckles under its own weight, the regime’s simultaneous reaction emerges triumphant. The inevitable degeneration of republics into oligarchies reaches its climax: the ‘one and the many’, king and peasantry, president and people, triumph over ‘the few’, optimates, oligarchs, regime Brahmans, and the like. Porous borders are shut, capital is disciplined and reordered to serve national rather than global, financial interests. Liberalism’s atomization buffet is shut down for good, the policies and laws that annihilated the family are overturned, gender is reembodied, and voluntary infertility is a dwindling artifact, a bygone object of derision. The past, which Fisher calls “forever lost and forever insistent,” is insisted upon, and revitalized through new modes of government, old sacraments, and the erection of monuments that honor the past and promise the future.
If this sounds fanciful, it’s because it is. No clarion call to ‘build’ can make the path any straighter or the course any clearer. What reactionaries may take solace in, however, is the organic nature of human societies, the predictable decline and rejuvenation of civilization as superorganism, history’s countless overthrows and about-faces. When it happens, it will seem as if it couldn’t have happened any other way. Georges Sorel speaks to this through Vincent Garton’s translation, prophesying: “We would very much need a Mongol conquest to effect the rebirth of great art, today enslaved to the barbarian tastes of the plutocracy.” Accordingly, only terminal decline produces successful reaction.
A reactionary West will emerge from the same organic historical process that has carried reaction to power again and again: the Hamiltonian battle between, on one side, ‘the one and the many’, and on the other, ‘the few’, from revitalized conceptions of ethnos, thymos, and telos. In the vain hope of identifying and reestablishing a timeless and just social order, the Western Man today must dig through refuse and rubble and investigate the gleaming scraps and trinkets he finds underneath. He must do as the noir detective does — live within and struggle against the society of illegality, case by case, until there are no more crimes to be solved, no deconstruction and reconstruction to be undertaken. He must exist as something ‘natural’, beyond reason and beneath society, so that when the time comes, when Providence cuts the Gordian knot, he will be ready to lend his labor to monuments that honor the West’s past and promise its future.
