As a characterization of neo-reaction (not as his own point of view), Tyler Cowen writes,
If you are analyzing political discourse, ask the simple question: is this person puking on the West, the history of the West, and those groups — productive white males — who did so much to make the West successful?
My thoughts.
1. Various sources credit me with popularizing the term “neo-reactionary.” However, the links go back to this post from 2010, which today strikes me as quite confused. I wrote,
Other writing in this vein ranges from the best-selling (Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism) to the obscure (Mencius Moldbug’s old blog posts) to somewhere in between (Arthur Brooks’ The Battle, which I still have not read.)
To which, the current me says “Hunh?” I do not know what I meant, and reading the rest of the post does not help.
2. Let us follow Tyler and say that a major role of political ideology is to attempt to adjust the relative status of various groups. The extreme ideological combatants are the post-modernists and the neo-reactionaries.
The post-modernists seek to elevate the status of women, minorities, and nationalities they view as oppressed. They want to knock down the status of American white males. Neo-reaction can be thought of as expressing the feeling that the status re-alignment has gone too far and needs to be rolled back. A middle ground might be that the status re-alignment to date is fine but that further denigration of white males would be going too far.
3. I would like to elevate the status of people who work in the for-profit sector and reduce the status of people who work in the non-profit sector. Instead, we seem to be intent on reversing the status-change that Deirdre McCloskey says helped produce the Great Enrichment.
4. Consider the principle of “welcoming and assimilating outsiders,” which I think of as central to American success. I believe that we are seeing dangerous extremism against that principle. The neo-reactionary does not want to welcome outsiders. The post-modernist does not want to assimilate them.
5. Of course, every adherent to an ideology seeks to elevate the status of those who share that ideology and to downgrade the status of those with different ideologies. That is why it matters that journalists and academics are overwhelmingly on the left. This means that the institutions of the mass media and higher education are inevitably and relentlessly going to seek to lower the status of conservatives.