Sociology of the dissident right

From a critical to a practical philosophy

Populism made a spectacle out of the 2010s, this decade, the 2020s, seems to be having a tenser and eery atmosphere. One thing can be said for sure: Everyone has developed their view of populism, be it vulgar or philosophical. More importantly, while 2016 saw a right confident in populism, and a moderate left scared of it, now most consider populism to be a delusion.

Neema Parvini is one of the first contributors to the new platforms, in his case YouTube, that has gone over to writing books, and actually succeeded. His book The Populist Delusion is one of the first steps of the dissident right (which, as we will see, is a political space, not a movement). His books being a scientific and relevant (as it takes into considerations practical political problems of the author and people around him) study of populism by applying elite theory of the tradition of Wilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca; in writing the book, he had in mind the populistic optimism so prevalent in the 2010s, and it was, at least indirectly as a result, also a retrospective reflection about the surge of populism and the optimistic promises it brought, with the following disenchantment. The great change from alt right to dissident right is first and foremost a linguistic change so as to differentiate the old from the new, but underneath is a more important change: The change from populism to elitism as a paradigm of this space on the right.

Why talk about the dissident right? This needs to be answered because the internet, being historically not even a baby, is starting to intertwine with politics, and not only as a tool of instituted power, but also as a room for the different movements of atomized social tribes, the remnants of the liberal and bourgeois “civil society”. The first reason is that the other part of the right, that is prevalent in politics, Academia and prestige journalism, has become increasingly dependent on ideas developed by freelance thinkers such as Neema Parvini or Curtis Yarvin. Postliberalism, for instance, while sociologically made up mostly of university professors of elite status (who live of taxes, this cannot be forgotten) are influenced both consciously and subconsciously by political realism in the tradition of Samuel Francis or James Burnham and even, while they might say the contrary, by the mantle of Murray Rothbard, who was one of the first to see the importance of appealing to the working class rather than the intelligentsia. Political realism and Rothbardianism, both founding elements of the dissident space, have feed such a variety of changes in the instituted right wing that, for those of us terminally online, it seems that conservatives and moderate right wingers are mostly reacting to the dissident right, rather than the other way around. Secondly, the dissident right while not particularly strong as an intellectual movement when compared to other ages, exists in a world where ideas are so amazingly scarce and those still prevalent like “capitalism” or “critical theory” so out of touch (not in and of themselves necessarily, but by virtue of the current theorist just repeating their application of the theory in the same pattern as before, loosing touch with the flux of History) that anyone that talks the language of XXI century reality immediately gets wider attention than it might be expected at first. In other words, the prevalence of the dissident right in discourse outside and inside of it is proof that ideas are important for man, and high demand paired with low supply is excellent for profit.

What makes it difficult to talk about the dissident right is that it is a space and not a movement. It is not a political party or a lobby, nor is it even a intellectual school, nor is it a tradition. Dissident righters might appeal to Elite Theory, Austrian Economics, Race Realism, Paganism or Catholicism; in the end, there is no school any of them have gotten access to, they are mostly freelancers without juridical status, it is a mess, basically. “The dissident right” however, understood as a space, has a much longer history than most of the dissidents might even recognize. With so many historical events being digested by reading news, being historically oriented becomes difficult, and so the dissident right is always trying to distance itself internally and externally. Internally, every day is a chance for some dissident to say that they are no longer x, but rather y; and therefore no longer of the dissident right, but of some other even smaller and more alienated group. Externally, every week is a chance for everyone to say why a previous political iteration of the right, such as the old right, the alt right or now even Curtis Yarvin, have been surpassed. The problem with this constant search for a worldview is that they make thinkers into fashions, rather than traditions, and so race realism becomes the trend of the 2010s, while elite theory becomes the trend of the 2020s. There is need for understanding.

Some, on this space, are starting to understand that the problem is not the ongoing disagreements, this are after all signs of good health, at lest of the mind. Nor a problem of action, since party politics has given way to party machines, it makes no longer sense in a postcommunist-social democratic world to orient oneselves towards parties. The problems of the dissident right are sociological. Simply put: The dissident right is too atomistic.

Individualism is a meaningless words most of the time, for some it means anarchy, for others freedom. A not so dense word is atomism. the dissident right has a vicious habit of developing, rather than methodological individualism, sociological atomism: One man, one school, one political philosophy. The dissident right, as a common space where certain ideas are held tightly, becomes a plurality of dissidents. every week someone on Twitter says that they are no longer on the dissident right. But what does it even mean to be part of the dissident right to start!

This essay is meant to define what the dissident right is, but it will not define the dissident right by its ideas, rather, it will do so by use of sociology.

The dissident right, when studied sine ira et studio ignoring newspapers or the latest political crisis that happened online, is two things, first and foremost: A place and a process.

If the dissident right was a political party it would be a problem for it to be a space, but this is not a problem for a forum. The dissident right exists to address a practical problem: Certain people want to exchange ideas that, in their mind, if made public, would lead them to social ostracism. In this sense of being a place the dissident right can be compared to a pub. While now declining, marriage has been a considerable founding block for the majority of the male population, there are certain marriage issues that men want to share with fellow men who are probably facing or have faced such problems. The pub, in this sense, has the pragmatic role of being cathartic, of alleviating tensions. This could be extrapolated further: Men need their own space to do male things, and females need their own space to do their female things. To not share everything, for all ages, has been the trick to share life till death may free man and woman apart.

Finishing the metaphor, a group of people need an outlet, but in the case of the dissident right, it is intellectual first and foremost. One of the problems of an online forum is that the boundaries of the internet, limitations so as to know what is prudent or foolish to share, are still being drawn. But the situation remains: The dissident right exists because there is a common uneasiness and desire to satisfy it.

This all sounds nice, but also naïve without adding a very important detail: The dissident right is political, it is radical. How can a radical political group be compared to something innocent like a pub? For starters, the relationship between bars and politics is very important so as to understand plenty of political movements. More importantly, however, the dissident right is a proof that man is a political animal, people talk about politics first and foremost because they want to, not because they have to. Not only Socrates and Plato, but also the lads at the pub need to talk about what is good and bad, what is virtue, etc.

That the dissident right is a forum for a radically politically oriented group means, sociologically, that the dissident right presupones a priori norms and conventions. While Pagans and Christians disagree on the dissident right, they start from certain presuppositions: They both consider the current world decadent, they both want, in a wide sense, a better world, they both want in one way or another to return to tradition, they both struggle to touch grass, etc. For two different rational animals to start a conversations they need a common language, and a common language is much more than a system of signs, it is to share a common world. Speakers do not only have in common that they use “english” or “latin”, they also share language games, and language games are even stricter than human laws. Without custom there is no law, not the other way around. All the shared ideas that dissident righters presuppose when they discuss, such as being against Wokstery, wanting to make the West great again, etc. All can be better solved by dissident righters themselves, not a sociologist. Sociology cannot be, truly, social engineering because it studies living societies, and to socially engineer the pub (not the building of course, there is no pub without “the lads”) is to kill it. But here, the second topic appears: The dissident right is a process.

The dissident right has no defined plan or agenda because it is making the whole thing up as they go, in other words, they are improvising. The great Ludwig von Mises taught the invaluable lesson that human action is entrepreneurial, and with this loaded economic lingo, he just conveyed that creativity is not somethings man develops as a luxury, but a necessity to survive, and also that the future is uncertain because it is infinitely open. The dissident right did not strictly speaking start with substack or after Joe Biden took over, it has taken, succeded and broadened a forum that can be traced, at least, in American Politics to the 90s, when paleoconservatives and libertarians met, and possibly even further back. It is also searching, at least from time to time some dissidents, to go beyond politics, and do things in a directly socially instead of by the virtual mediation. An example is the “Old Glory Club”. Some see it as a more artistic space, like Madame Z (although she tries to distance herself from the label) or even Curtis Yarvin. Others, like Walt Bismarck look at finance and helping younger generations. Basically, from a common root as a political forum it streches out like branches of a tree into all the smaller worlds of human culture.

A process has an ending point, the thing with the dissident right is that it is still undecided. Some voices say that the dissident right is already dead, but this is to speak in a too theoretical and removed sense. The fact that so many that take distance from the dissident right are still discussing, even if just to hurl insults, is proof that they are still taking part. That some dissidents move on to other projects is to be expected, you cannot be all day pubbing, even if you conceive it as a worthy pursuit; there is no utopia on earth. But a more interesting question is what can kill the dissident right, and here the answer is simple: Atomism and intellectual anarchy.

Atomism was already defined. It is not meant here in the philosophical sense, it has a sociological definition: One man, one school, one political philosophy. Disagreements will always happen, human communication fails from time to time. But ideas have historically never been developed in a dark room, not even René Descartes did such. Some, remaining nostalgic, would like a return to non digital mediums, and there is some truth to their daydreaming, insofar as one cannot be “terminally online”, in internet lingo. But the fact remains that to start and find people one often goes first to the internet, at least in this the Age of Information. Even those moving on to more communitarian outlooks like Fiddler’s Greene were able to use the Web as a forum, and still keep touch with it.

Secondly, intellectual anarchism, the only truly bad form of anarchism. The sociologist might diagnose this malaise and trace it back to the Romantic period and the idea of the Genius, more aptly put, the mythology of Genius (Faustianism for the masses basically). But here the danger is one very profane, but truly threatening: The hunger for originality. Let it be said in plain English: The only original thing in man is sin, the rest is cooperation with the fruits of nature, his neighbour and the grace of God. There is such a terrible habit of negativity that Yours Truly will evaluate, will make a value judgement (the Weberian is shocked!) even if the sociologist is supposed to remain value free in his claims. much of the clashes and fights on the dissident right, and the alt right, have to do with the present Western World being a world of lone childs and nuclear families: We have lost the habitual closeness with people, therefore, we have lost patience to deal with humans (the proliferation of couples with pets and no offspring is one of infinite signs). Having brothers (the more the better) or going to a place like the military or getting married and having children all develop a capacity to tolerate all the minor inconveniences of other people, even sharing a room (the high middle class does this less, so those who go on to lead society are the most impatient with humanness). The constant infighting and clashes on the dissident right all stem from all us sons of this age to develop this common habit of patient humanity. In other words, dissident righters need to stop taking themselves so seriously by searching for their own brand and accept that homo homini lupus is both wrong and dangerous, that man is a potential friend and ally (Saint Thomas Aquinas) or, at bare minimum, his only tool to satisfy his perennial uneasiness (Ludwig Von Mises). In the words of Carl Schmitt: Homo homini homo.

To study sociologically the dissident/alt/old/radical right we have discovered that the best framework to understand what the Dissident Right is cannot be an ideology, instead, it is a human forum, a means of human action, a non technical means (on a technological medium) of cooperation. But, by doing that, we have also discovered that the dissident right manifests the general tendency of Civil Society, by all modern political theoreticians (Tocqueville, Montesquieu, etc.) considered the health of politics, I.e.: That without which no law or political order could prosper. to decay into urban tribes and tribes, in turn, into atoms. Also, the whole problem of atomization is found to be, at heart, very basic. When intellectuals talk about the atomized individual of the Postmodern world they mention Capitalism, Technology, Social Media; but they do not go to the root cause, that would persist beyond the aggravating circumstances. The root cause is of course the elemental philosophy, product of the anthropology of modern political or contractual philosophy, that man is social not by his nature but by contract, and therefore believing that all negative interaction must be avoided, at all cost, because it is a nuisance to the sphere of the individual. When truly, such nuisances are facts of life and proof of good health, that other people are not there to make us confortable, they exist, and that is what we can do with it. But no, it is even simpler, we have lost social skin: the elemental habit of being patient with the small differences that appear in the ordinary world. The problems of the dissident right are civilizational, not political, put bluntly: They are problems of courtesy, manners and conventions; not of intellectual anarchy, atoms and fatal originality.