Conservatism is Doomed to Fail, but Futurism Can Win

2,518 words

There were many factors that decided Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 Republican primary and general election: his panache (both figurative and literal), his appeal to independents, and his anti-establishment and national populist attitude all set him apart from the other candidates. But what also stood out and magnified those other aspects were his new ideas, or at least ideas that both sides of the political establishment had tacitly agreed to avoid.

Despite the fact that we can legitimately call Trump one of the most “Right wing” politicians in present-day America, at the same time to call him “conservative” would be tenuous, if not insulting. These two labels are apparently not totally synonymous, and it wasn’t until a New York playboy with a golden toilet entered the political scene that this was made clear to many people. But this revelation opens up opportunity.

While a conservative way of understanding the world is all well and good — things that have stood the test of time usually have a reason for doing so — at the end of the day, “conservatism” per se is not the future. The societal organization of our species is no less entropic over time than the universe we inhabit. The old order will inevitably give way to a new one. The only way to deal with time is to adapt and embrace the future. This is the will to life and the essence of futurism.

To understand why the Right is ascendant while, paradoxically, conservatism is dying, we must first understand conservatism within the context of time. In its virtue, conservatism is the preservation of that which is good, beautiful, sanctified, and just from the past, seeking to extend it into the present, and future. In its vice, conservatism is senility, staticity, a lack of creativity and dynamism, and the preservation of the status quo for its own sake. Despite this, what has ironically characterized modern conservative “greats” — Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, Pat Buchanan, Ron Paul, Donald Trump, etc. — was not only their conservatism, but their ability to sustain the goodness in the old, counter the evils of the present, and sell a vision of a more perfect future.

To the extent that they were great, they were still forward-thinking and often had radical ideas that made people believe that we can do better than the status quo. According to a recent poll, young men who graduate from high school are nearly twice as likely to identify as “conservative” as “liberal.” This is because they see a bright future in the new, post-Trump Right — not because they wish to wallow in the swamp of senile neoconservatism.

Out of the exciting 2016 election sprang a panoply of independent media figures and activists who — whether identifying as conservative, libertarian, nationalist, centrist, or even liberal — latched on to the energy surrounding Trump, even if they were not actually Trump supporters. This phenomenon even transcended national borders, most notably in England, France, the Netherlands, and Germany, and then expending to elsewhere. Such a diverse field was able to ride on Trump’s energy because what united them all was not the specifics of his policies, but rather populism and the radical new ideas that came with it, which often transcended Left and Right as well as authoritarian versus libertarian. “Make America Great Again” basically meant completely different things to different people within that populist historical moment. Libertarians could believe that Trump was one of them at heart, the nationalist Right could believe he was actually a “based and red-pilled” ultra-nationalist, QAnon believers could believe he was a quasi-messianic super-genius at work on a 4D chess strategy, and classical liberals could believe he was actually a milquetoast centrist. But what unites all these groups who would normally not vote Republican, or only do so begrudgingly, is that they saw and still see in Trump the potential for change which they know they’ll never from ordinary conservatives or the Left.

Besides a rigged election, Trump lost in 2020 precisely for the reason he won in 2016: He abandoned what had made him promising in 2016 in favor of the same old conservatism, which his advisers encouraged him to take up. He doubled down on this lukewarm strategy in 2020, as encapsulated by the new slogan “Keep America Great.” In other words, Being over Becoming. But few people believed that America was great in 2020 — the year of rioting, looting, COVID lockdowns, and a collapsing economy.

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The stagnant conservatism that we are all accustomed to from the major center-Right parties is not a viable option going forward, but neither is any form of liberalism or progressivism, despite the latter’s forward-looking outlook. Many, especially among Boomers and Millennials, turned to the Left out of frustration with the establishment, which each of their times was nominally “conservative.” But theirs was and is a false radicalism. The system was simply transmuting anti-system sentiment into pro-system action — “the system’s neatest trick.” To some extent they can be forgiven for this, as the Right is also often fooled by establishment conservatives time and time again. But I will refrain from discussing this further, as at this point Leftist ideology is a joke among thinking people who lack a vested interest in its perpetuation. Suffice to say that while conservatism is stagnancy, liberalism is degeneration. The concept of progress itself implies a linear path from the old and irredeemable to a pre-set goal, the end of history. But this point is simply the rational outcome of precisely that which makes conservatism unviable in the first place. Its original flaws are simply enhanced. Conservatism and liberalism are two sides of the same two-dimensional coin, an undynamic duo.

It is a sad fact that today, the future looks bleak. The people who run the world are clearly severely demented individuals who are out of touch with reality as they sit in their ivory towers. The future — at least the one they’re selling — has little appeal for the masses, as seen in the negative global reaction to the World Economic Forum and the response to the pandemic as propagated by multinational, supranational organizations. The truth is that life for a normal person under their planned regime has little appeal for these elites, either. We have seen some of its fruits already, such as the social credit system, which is similar to the one already in operation in China, only ours has been outsourced to publicly-traded corporations and the managerial elite that enforces the civil rights regime.

As for freedom of speech, at this point we’ve all heard the disturbingly Orwellian phrase: “Freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences.” In the future they have planned, as predicted by the Chinese science fiction writer Liu Cixin, men will be so feminized and emasculated that it will be difficult to distinguish them from women. Or, as claimed by Yuval Noah Harari claims — perhaps the most prominent futurist of our time, and certainly the most influential among the Davos globalists – the man of the future will be a “sexless” cyborg popping soma pills. This is assumed on the basis that once we realize that nothing metaphysical matters, we will finally be enlightened to the fact that pleasure, meaning, and happiness are one and the same. Unsurprisingly, this futurism has little appeal. Normal people don’t want to live like bugs in a hive city ruled by an army of girl-boss commissars and billionaires who are Nosferatu lookalikes — at least if they have other options. There must be a better way.

The Right struggles with a reactionary impulse that, while basically healthy, is counterproductive for what should be our long-term aims. Those of us who see the wrong direction in which the world is being led have correctly been preoccupied of late with the study of likeminded thinkers who were themselves interested in the nature of time and society, and who wished to “revolt against the modern world.” It has been reiterated time and time again that we need a “positive vision” before action is possible. How can we achieve a better future without any idea what it will look like, let alone a roadmap for getting there? Some well-meaning people who are inspired by thinkers of old (who were themselves facing the forces of decay) such as Joseph de Maistre and Robert Filmer go so far as to call themselves “neoreactionary.” This impulse, which wishes to distance itself from the toothlessness of “conservatism,” is, again, a healthy one. But it is going in the wrong direction. We can run from the future no more than the Left can run from the past. Indeed, those who call themselves neoreactionary, despite the term’s connotations, understand this and are attempting to devise new ideas, inspired by what worked in the past, that will perhaps shape the future once the Great Satan is no longer in our way. These include Curtis Yarvin’s “Formalism,” “Patchwork,” and “Neocameralism.”

Right-minded people struggle with the knowledge that, while we live in a time of high raw intelligence, it is also glaringly a time which lacks — and indeed, suppresses — vitality. The glory days of our civilization are long gone, and instead we get what is on the cusp of becoming a cross between China’s police state and Japan’s childproof nursery society, what Sam Francis famously dubbed “anarcho-tyranny.” But if our only counter to this trajectory is to rewind the clock, we’ll be back to modernity before long. The only path is forward but, unlike the Left, our vision must also take into account the lessons of the past and have a pro-human outlook on society.

Rightist futurism is not unprecedented historically, though to call it “Right” or “Left” may be reductive. Whether Left, Right, or transcending these labels entirely, the Italian Futurist movement may provide some insight into what Rightist futurism of the twenty-first century might look like. Futurism extolled the machine gun, masculinity, and high-speed cars. Their open letter to the world proclaimed that Italy was no longer an open-air museum. Many Italian Futurists saw in Fascism a potential for this new aesthetic and philosophical order. But Fascism failed, not because it was true to the Futurist ideal – indeed, Mussolini mostly ignored Futurism after coming to power — but because it betrayed Futurism in favor of rigidity and reaction. This was most evident in Italy’s incompetent, overly hierarchical military and their preserving of the monarchy and the Church.

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The WASP progressives of Teddy Roosevelt’s time, as well as the old Fabians, despite their nominal socialism and liberalism, may provide some inspiration instead, as they, too, were looking toward the future while maintaining a warrior spirit of adventure.

An illustrative example of this dichotomy between conservatism/reaction and futurism/new ideas is Donald Trump the politician versus Donald Trump the speaker. Trump as a speaker comes up with interesting new ideas, such as purging the bureaucracy and federal judiciary, establishing a new World’s Fair to be held annually in the United States, the building of “freedom cities,” ending birthright citizenship, allowing public funds to go to private education, and Hungarian-style pro-natal subsidies, among other things. Conversely, Trump as politician has few of these things in his official platform, preferring to talk about issues such as the economy, international relations, crime, and state-enforced sexual deviance. These issues are important ones, no doubt, but his positions are largely reactionary, merely seeking to bring the culture back to 2010. While these issues should indeed be tackled, I want to hear more about “freedom cities” and “baby bonuses.” Unfortunately, I doubt Trump will even remember these ideas, let alone enact them if he is reelected.

There’s a running joke on the Left that conservatives can’t come up with any new ideas. It’s easy to complain about the present and easier still to complain about the future. And if your ideal world is the suburban New York circa 1960, then you probably have a lot to be disappointed in. But can’t we do better than the decadent consumerist society that destroyed and looted Europe and spawned the hippie generation? At least the Left has the confidence to introduce new ideas, even if most of them are ridiculous.

Instead of fearing change, let us bask in the glory of technological advancement and the opportunities it brings. For example, despite its dangers artificial intelligence can eliminate almost all government bureaucratic jobs, meaning less tyranny and unprecedented economic prosperity through low taxes. The Internet has already made information freer than ever, to the chagrin of the powers-that-be, meaning that good ideas such as nationalism and anti-Zionism can go from being taboo to mainstream within a few years, especially among the youth. Telecommuting technology has likewise resulted in the further collapse of the anti-human hive cities in favor of rural and suburban areas. And improvements in nutritional science mean that, through supplements and education, anyone who is willing to do what is necessary could live a healthier life than humans in any other epoch. Farming robots could likewise make off-grid households and communities more attainable than civilian-grade solar panels already do.

These are only a handful of the new possibilities opened up by technology, as well as new ideas that don’t require new technology. They all have three things in common: they’re all attainable or already here; they’re all compatible with a distinctly Right-wing, pro-human future; and none of them are being talked about by mainstream conservatives, who only remain relevant by selling fear while never coming up with any lasting solutions to our problems.

After the start of the Israel-Gaza war, the Left is catching on to the fact that the Right indeed has some new ideas. In contrast to that which is strictly reactionary, a new wing, often inspired directly or indirectly by radically innovative thinkers such as Heraclitus (who later inspired Nietzsche and Heidegger), is gaining traction among those Rightists who reject the anti-human Left, but who are also repulsed by the “Boomer conservatism” of the Republican Party. The Polemos of Heraclitus and Heidegger, as interpreted by Carlos Videla, perfectly encapsulates this spirit of activity, vitality, and extolling of conflict, as well as the idea of national legitimacy, all through the concept of Dasein, thus leading to a legitimate showdown with the tribal other. The historical archetypes of this Weltanschauung are adventurous rogues such as Alcibiades and Hernán Cortés. Indeed, this philosophy, while inspired by the ancient aristocratic ethos, molds perfectly with what could be an aristocratic futurism that rejects the bourgeois in favor of the aristocratic-warrior ethos of Polemos.

This trend is a promising one because it does not negate the last 2,400 years of technological progress, nor the achievements of European civilization, and thus is not necessarily reactionary. Rather, it is like “vaporwave” in spirit — that is, it does not wish to simply turn back the clock, but is in fact reaching toward a radically new, almost alien future inspired not only by the past itself, but by hypothetical “alternative timelines” in which our civilization went in a different direction.

As demonstrated by Fustel de Coulanges in his magnum opus, The Ancient City, political paradigm shifts throughout history require a complete change in a belief system from the bottom up as a catalyst.