Conservative Activism

 

I subscribe to online emails from Chris Rufo: he sent me an article that he wrote on 1/9/24, entitled, The New Right Activism, a manifesto for the counterrevolution. Rufo is spearheading or is very central to the conservative cultural and political counterrevolution against Leftism’s political and cultural revolution which has largely displaced our historical culture, and Progressive true believers seek full, radical overthrowing of our traditional political arrangement. We conservatives must work to thwart and end their revolution with this counterrevolution (peaceful and legal of course).

 

I will quote from Rufo’s article and comment on its content.

 

Rufo (R after this): “The Right is reorganizing. Most intelligent conservatives, especially younger conservatives, who joined the political fray at a moment of sweeping ideological change, already recognize that familiar orthodoxies are no longer viable, and that ideas without power are useless.”

 

My response: I am not sure what are these specific, familiar orthodoxies are that Rufo is discrediting but if they are Leftist doctrine, okay, if they are traditional American religious, cultural, normative, political, and economic values, I beg to differ.

 

He is right that ideas without power are useless. We must not just be armchair critics of the Left but must organize and get involved to fight their growing influence.

 

R: “The Right doesn’t need a white paper. What it needs is a spirited activism with courage and resolve to win back the language, recapture institutions, and reorient the state toward rightful ends.”

 

My response: Amen. What I love about Rufo is his excellent writing: he knows what the problem is, and he knows what the solutions are, and he knows how to articulate implementation of these productive solutions for implementation, in words that are tight, direct, simple, and powerful.

 

R: “This essay will introduce the basic principles of this activism: where it begins, how it might work, and what it must do in order to work. It is not ‘conservative’ in the traditional sense. The world of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century liberalism is gone, and conservatives must grapple with the world as it is—as status quo that requires not conservation, but reform, and even revolt.”

 

My response: Amen. I would like to add two provisos to the legal and gentle cultural and political revolt against Progressive hegemony, that Rufo is advocating. First, they need me, my Mavellonialist conception of the average citizen as an anarchist-individuator/individuating supercitizen. With such powerful, informed, fearless, wise, organized masses of tens of millions of classically liberal activists running and manning the Rufoian counterrevolution, it would make the likelihood of a victorious counterrevolution much more likely, powerful, deep, lasting and irreversible for decades into the future.

 

Second, a few months ago Rufo suggested that we need educated, credentialed, expert elites in culture and politics to make this counterrevolution go and be sustainable. I countered then and now that the common people not elites need to make this counterrevolution go. To make this new paradigm work, it is required that each or most citizens, each as an anarchist-individuator supercitizen, recognize and life as if each of them is an actual, potent, living, breathing, powerful, empowered paradox—1/2 elitist and/or aristocratic in confidence, competence, and original thinking of an excellent, incisive kind combined her other half (of her assumed identity), her common person status as one of millions of Americans, with a willingness to be one of the democratically living masses, roughly equal in political power. In this way we can have our constitutional, laissez-faire republic with needed elitism worldview built into the psyche and identity of each citizen that renders them able to run the country and obey those that they vote in to run the country for them.

 

R: “We don’t need to abandon the principles of natural rights, limited government, and individual liberty, but we need to make these principles meaningful in the world of today. The older conservative establishment, assembling in ballrooms and clubhouses, has marginal influence over public orthodoxy because it lacks the hunger and grit to contest it.”

 

My response: It is so true that RINO/UniParty/Swamp-Dwelling/Wall Street Journal/Chamber of Commerce/George Bush Republicans are too tired, jaded and invested in the Progressive program to do much to oppose its finishing its victorious march across the American cultural and political landscape. I would adjure Rufo and the other neo-conservatives to blend their values and ideology with Mavellonialist political theory to engender in the young and the middle-aged a hunger for power, change and restoration of the American Way that would be a powerful, reform engine, without degrading into a mass movement.

 

We need the hunger and grit of the true believer, without their fanaticism and violence, and the way to acquire this is to urge each citizen to live. To think and to participate politically as an individuating supercitizen. No contented, individuating supercitizen could ever be reduced to being a zealous myrmidon and intellectual slave to any mass movement, holy cause, or dictating guru or demagogue.

 

R: “The energy is with a new generation which no longer accepts tired platitudes and demands a new set of strategies geared towards overcoming the regime—the opaque and coercive set of psychological, cultural, and institutional patterns that has largely replaced the old constitutional way of life.

 

This movement is in its youth, and it has the virtue of aspiring more than the drab, euphemistic world of ‘diversity and inclusion’; it has the ambition of reestablishing a political vision that goes beyond procedural values and points toward higher principle.

 

The first step is to admit what hasn’t worked. For fifty years, establishment conservatives have retreating from the great political tradition of the West—republican self-government, shared moral standards, and the pursuit of eudaimonia, or human flourishing—in favor of half-measures and cheap substitutes.”

 

My response: I admire his goals—the restoration of constitutional republicanism, shared Judeo-Christian moral stands, and this pursuit of eudaimonia or human flourishing—especially in the mode of individuating supercitizenship.

 

R: “The first of these substitutes is the self-serving myth of neutrality. Following a libertarian line, the conservative establishment has argued that government, state universities, and public schools should be ‘neutral’ in their approach to political ideals. But no institution can be neutral—and any institutional authority aiming only for neutrality will immediately be captured by a faction more committed to imposing ideology. In reality, public universities, public schools, and other cultural institutions have long been dominated by the Left. Conservative ideas and values have been suppressed, conservative thinkers have been persecuted, and the conservative establishment has deluded itself with impotent appeals to neutrality.”

 

My response: Rufo is right, that neutrality is not possible or desirable. Each institution, its managers and its student, citizens or customers should have an announced bias or preference; otherwise, the lack of substance and opinion leaves those inhabiting the institution susceptible to take over by authoritarian, repressive, intolerant ideologues like Progressives are.

 

If the participants in an institution have their announced value approach, but are individuators and supercitizens, but not collectivized, fanaticized true believers in and ardent pedalers of their mass movement, their holy cause, then individuators will have a bias, publicly shared, but will not insist upon universal conformity to their orthodoxy as the price of participating in the institutions at all. Where there is no metanarrative with its healthy, objective values presented as the hallmark values and culture of the status quo regime, this vacuum leaves and opening for totalitarian zealots and their ideology to come swooping in, taking over everything.

 

R: “The popular slogan that ‘facts do not care about your feelings’ betrays similar problems. In reality, feelings almost always overpower facts. Reason is the slave of the passions. Political life moves on narrative, emotion, scandal, anger, hope, and faith—on irrational, or at least subrational feelings that can be channeled, but never destroyed by reason. As sociologist Max Weber demonstrated more than a century ago, politics does not, and cannot, operate on facts alone. Politics depends on values and requires judgment; political life is not a utilitarian equation—and nor should we want it to be.”

 

My response: Rufo’s warning that conservatives cannot be arid, detached, armchair analysts who see themselves above the fray of political activism, and the muddy, sausage-making reality of grinding out legislation and public policy based upon negotiation and honorable compromise in the sweaty, dirty public arena.

 

People have feelings and worry. They require values, an appealing, idealistic story that comforts them, their insecurities, their worries, and anxieties. We can give our citizens solid reasons, emotionally satisfying values that accompany a corresponding cultural and political story that inspires, and fulfills.

 

Rufo: “Finally, the conservative establishment has appealed to the ‘free marketplace of ideas,’ and the belief that the ‘invisible hand’ will rectify cultural and political problems organically. But the formation of culture does not proceed like the production of cars, and cannot be conceived of in the same way. The chief vectors for the transmission of values—the public school, the public university, and the state—are not marketplaces at all. They are government-run monopolies. In truth, the hand that moves culture is not an ‘invisible hand’ but an iron hand clad in velvet—that is, political force.”

 

My response: We conservatives must stay engaged in reality: in running institutions of all sort, public and private. But, we must engage in running America, and taking it back, as politically active and politically dominant individuating supercitizens—that is how we stay in the game, and steer the game of playing politics and culture on our terms, not Progressive terms.

 

R: “The adoption of these myths have rendered the Right ineffective, to the point of cementing, as opposed to contesting, the status quo of Leftist hegemony. The radical Left ruthlessly advances through the institutions, and the Right meekly ratifies each encroachment under the rubric of ‘neutrality’. In view of the social and cultural wreckage this dynamic has wrought, it is not merely a matter of preference but a matter of urgency to beak it. To do this, a new approach is required.”

 

My response: I agree with the Rufo that the Right is hapless and ineffective—just look at Schumer running circles around the acquiescent creature McConnell. It would help neo-Conservative counterrevolutionaries like Rufo and Dennis Prager if they could redefine the complete, unflinching socialist juggernaut that is Leftism marching across all that is Western and American. They speak with one voice; they echo each-others’ lines, and they are on the march to take over the world, to rule with a global monarchy, cultural Marxism is their holy cause, and their mass movement is what Leftism is. If conservatives, Republicans do not unite, and right now, and fight back with vigor, firmness of purpose and tireless resolve and energy, all will be lost about our marvelous Western civilization, perhaps forever.

 

R: “The New Right activism must focus its efforts on three domains: language, institutions, and ends.

 

As the Gospels state, In the beginning was the Word—and this is true also in politics. Modern political movements have always started with writing: with pamphlets, manifestos, and other publications. The New Right has already generated a high degree of innovation in this respect, spread across a growing network of publications, podcasts, literature, and visual arts. The point is not only to shape the meta-discourse as a matter of ‘general culture,’ but to attack the discourse directly on individual issues—in other words, to engage in agitprop.”

 

My response: In the beginning was the Word, the creative, rational divine consciousness of the Mother and Father, the blessed Creators of this world. Rufo is right that renewed, modernized cultural, normative, religious, and political Western and American philosophy must be written, printed and expressed to the masses to pull them away, if possible, from the political and Communist mass movement that has now such a strong grip on their psyches.

 

But, as individuating, supercitizens, with Mavellonialist theory blended into the fresh thinking and communications from the new Right thinkers, spearheading this cultural and political counterrevolution.

 

But we must do so by speaking truth, not propaganda. For we must get our message out, but it must not be by propagandizing and brainwashing gullible masses to switch sides and hide inside a Rightist mass movement. We need to win them one at a time, as free-thinking, intellectually bold and awakened individuators. That is how we take back America for good in an honorable, ennobling fashion.

 

R: “Agitprop doesn’t mean sacrificing the truth, but, rather, channeling the truth, toward victory. Postmodernist theorists who reduced politics to ‘language games’ may have overstated the case, but they were right in one respect: language is the operative element of human culture. To change the language means to change the society: in law, arts, rhetoric, or common speech. The Right must build a new vocabulary to overcome the regime’s euphemistic rule, which enacts abuse of power through abuse of language. The point is to replace contemporary, ideological language with new, persuasive language that points towards clear principles.”

 

My response: We on the Right must control language, definitions and insist upon socially, culturally, institutionally, legally, and politically expressing our natural right to speak freely publicly as we see fit, with the words we use. If Mavellonialist thought is mixed with what Rufo and others are brewing up, we have a chance to lay out our philosophy, our counter-metanarrative, in clear, simple coherent argument that the public can understand, and rally around, should they choose to.

 

R: “From language begins a longer process of legitimation. A movement gains legitimacy by taking territory in discourse, the adoption of its discourse by society’s elite, and eventually, through elevation of its discourse into law. Win the argument, win the elite, and win the regime—that is the formula, which traces the path from the pamphlet to power.”

 

My response: Close but insufficient Mr. Rufo. We publish our metanarrative, but we also introduce a new moral theory and theory of citizenship, an introduction of a new kind of citizen. If we can teach a generation of voters and moral agents to self-realize as positive anarchists and supercitizens, powerfully, continuously engaged in running the country from the bottom up, as proponents and restorers of our constitutional republic—free market-based at that—then we have a new class of extraordinary, high-thinking, participating, organized supercitizens that are that moral and political ideal: all elite in morals, political sophistication and original thinking (shedding the need for elites to guide, rule and instruct the masses under an emergent new elite of rightists intellectuals) and yet roughly coequal commoners that will run and boss their elites, their government, their politicians, their church, their businesses, the mass media, their universities, their social groups, their work places.

 

Let me rework Rufo’s brilliant but limited plan: win the argument, win the masses (the new self-promoted elite and commoner all rolled into each individualistic supercitizen) who will overthrow and boss around all existing elites, and then they politically and culturally grab a hold of the regime and run it for generations to come.

 

You see, Mr. Rufo, moderation is the spiritual and moral good natural and supernatural law of the universe: only the true contradiction, the private and publicly serving individuators supercitizen, that living paradox—extraordinary human being, elite in all ways, and yet one commoner among 330 million equals, other fellow Americans, elite-commoners all of them.

 

This is the new, Mavellonialist revision of the role played by the American citizen, as envisioned by God and the Founders, is how the Rufoian counterrevolution is best implemented and preserved.

 

R: “Institutions are where the word become flesh. The men who shape the discourse must understand that above them stand the statesman: men of practical affairs who govern, legislate and rule. The activist must not forget that he is doing politics, not literature, and balance his desire for intellectual purity with institutional reality, He must work to legitimize his language in an environment that is often hostile to his wishes and resistant to any change. At time, he must conceal his radicalism in the mask of respectability.”

 

My response: Mr. Rufo: we must move carefully at this juncture. Lenin is the one path from this fork in the road that may well take over and pervert our just counterrevolution into a mass movement with its yet to be named guru or demagogue and her lieutenants ruling their howling mob of true believers. Lenin and Hitler all hid their destructive, wicked ideology and radicalism under the mask of respectability until they were so powerful and entrenched, that they were unstoppable in implementing their totalitarian, utopian hell upon the suffering, misled masses.

 

Let us take the other correct fork in the road. We want the people to shape the discourse and take over and run this movement and do politics as their permanent job and duty as individuated supercitizens. We want to replace Leftism with a conservative constitutional republic but the day of elites of any kind running the people anywhere is a dinosaur that just needs to go extinct.

 

R: “In the end, the work of politics is the work of practical statesmanship. Those who ignore this reality by appealing to abstract principles always limited their effectiveness. When Thomas Paine wrote The American Crisis, he felt the breath of British soldiers at his neck. He understood the Revolution had to defeat its enemies on the battlefield and he looked to George Washington as the only man that could do it.

 

In our time, some conservatives believe it is enough to lay claim to ‘individual rights’ and ‘limited government’ as a substitute for managing the state. I, too, support individual rights and limited government, but the decisive political question concerns the securing of these rights. Who will do so? And, even if it is limited what is the proper role of government? These are the issues which are ultimately at stake.”

 

My response:  Rufo is quite correct that good conservative must take over our government, institutions and culture and run them, without taking our foot off the gas, for generations, perhaps centuries. He should lay out his effective program for successful cultural and regime change yanking the reins of power from Progressives and putting in power all over American society, at all levels, conservative individuating supercitizens.

 

Each supercitizen would operate on the dual ethical-political dictum that it is the moral and political natural right and natural duty for each agent and citizen to self-realize and grow as a ceaselessly hyper-active, super tune-in, obsessively involved patriot that runs his country on all levels of government operation all the time—every day of his life--until each one dies. That is what the good deities and Good Spirits demand from each of us and they will settle for no less excellence of individual excellence, and patriotic involvement in running the country. The people are elite morally, educationally, intellectually, and their active participation is how they run the government, and, negatively their common exceptionalism cancels out anyone gaining much power over anyone else.

 

If Rufo will buy into a moral and educational program to raise up 200 million individuating supercitizens, over the next 40 years, then they will install and keep his regime change back to constitutional republicanism humming along until well after 2100.

 

R: “We can agree with Lock that humans enter into society and institute government to secure their natural rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But the twentieth century disrupted this arrangement: the state became engaged in a project to reshape society in its own image. For a hundred years, conservatives have tried and failed to reduce the size of government: as a percentage of GDP, the American state today is larger than the Chinese Communist state, with no sign of reversing course. Nineteenth-century liberalism is dead and cannot be restored.”

 

My response: Nineteenth-century liberalism is near moribound, but it can and could be restored and improved if we add Mavellonialist political principles to the reform push.

 

R: “The activist must begin with status quo reality: the institutions which today shape public and private life will exist for the forseeable future. The only question is who will lead them and by which set of values. The New Right must summon the self-confidence to say, ‘We will, and by our values.’

 

Conservatives can no longer be content to serve as the caretakers of their enemies’ institutions, or as gadflies who adopt the posture of the ‘heterodox’ while signaling to their left-wing counterparts that they have no desire to disrupt the established hegemony. Rather, the New Right needs to move from the politics of pamphlets to the governance of institutions.”

 

My response: Amen.

 

R: “We must recruit, recapture and replace existing leadership. We must produce knowledge and culture as a sufficient scale and standard to shift the balance of ideological power. Conservative thought has to move out of the ghetto and into the mainstream. And we must be capable of resisting, and perhaps even embracing, a constant barrage of media coverage, with a hundred negative stories for every positive one. In other words, we must risk ruin in pursuit of victory.”

 

My response: I agree.

 

R: “Why would anyone embrace these risks?”

 

My response: We are the children created by the good deities and they send their Good Spirits among us to nudge, coach, encourage and demand that we fulfill our dual obligations (ethical and political) as rational egoists, and self-realizing supercitizens, to lead virtuous, holy private lives while running all institutions, formal and informal across the country, not matter how dangerous, painful, or costly. We risk all to improve all for ourselves and for future generations because that is our divinely mandated duty and telos.

 

R: “Fame, revenge, and power have all been powerful motivations in political life in the past, and they remain powerful today. But in order to realize the ultimate promise of the political, there also must be something higher—a telos.

 

The language of ends has almost vanished from American life, and this disappearance supplies the greatest opportunity for the New Right. Because of its religious adherence, the Right still has access to the language of ends—the language of God, or, in its more contemporary form, ‘Nature and Nature’s God.’ My conviction is that ends will ultimately triumph over means; men will die for truth, liberty and happiness, but will not die for efficiency, diversity and inclusion.”

 

My response: I agree, very eloquent and inspirational. Our ends are to serve God as individuating supercitizens in this glorious, rekindled laissez-faire constitutional republic.

 

R: “The best way to counter the degradations of American institutional life is to remind the public of the fundamental purpose of these institutions, and to communicate that purpose. What is the purpose of the university? What is the purpose of a school? What system of government will guide us toward human happiness. These questions provoke doubt and anxiety in the current regime. And no wonder. The idea of happiness, properly understood, can be revolutionary.”

 

My response: I am all for the counterrevolutionary reform of our institutions, but, to add to Rufo’s reform, I suggest that the rights, power and interests of each individual within and without every institution in America in the world, trumps generally the group interests which are institutionalized with collectivist ethics, collectivist economics, collectivist institutionalism and totalitarian or authoritarian polities ruled by elites, experts, specialists and intellectuals.

 

We do need institutions but they should be down-sized, right-sized but strong and efficient and meant to mesh as well as possible with the personal agenda of each anarchist individuators supercitizen so that inevitable conflicts and disagreements mostly can be ironed out to the satisfaction of most of the people most of the time. The life of each citizen as an individuating supercitizen is a life of a moral agent that is flourishing and happy, and that is tangibly and imaginatively revolutionary.

 

R: “The current regime has poured trillions into welfare programs, ideological production, family recomposition, and psychotherapeutic, but Americans are more miserable than ever. To again demand happiness—Aritstotle’s eudaimonia, Jefferson’s Declaration—cuts straight through all our postmodern dilemmas. Our regime has lost all sense of why it exists. The men who can discover this North Star will have everything they need to motivate others to pursue political life: a motivation which may be obscured but cannot be extinguished. They will begin to great process of recapturing the language, the institutions, and ends of American life.”

 

My response: Very eloquent and sensible.

 

R: “The most important virtue of our time is courage.”

 

My response: Mr. Rufo, you and Dennis Prager nailed this, but Dennis laments that postlapsarian humans lack courage. I suggest that people naturally seek refuge, direction, and supervision from elites. This is due to their wicked natures, their groupist instinct or self-loathing, selfless self-sacrificing personal interest for sordid group interests and objectives.

 

With religious and ethical training of the young to lead lives both holy and virtuous as individuating, rational egoists, with God’s light in their heart, it will be much easier for each young person to feel brave, courageous, though prudently not reckless with their lives and prospects.

 

A supercitizen majority of fearless, courageous individuals will not be cowed by federal police, by secret police, by oppressive elites, or much of anything else. With the right religious and moral training, the average citizen can learn and train herself to live courageously. Her motto would be do not tread on me, or give me liberty or give me death.

 

R: “In America, there is plenty of grumbling, anxiety, and quiet opposition to the capture of the culture. The activist must accept that he cannot make men courageous, but he can change the system of incentives so that those in quiet opposition—to put it bluntly, the cowardly—make different decisions. The activist must accept the inevitable frustration of victory: there will be those who adopt his positions after it has become safe. This is the price of courage, which sometimes only his closest compatriots will understand.

 

This must be enough. For every Paine, Washington, and Jefferson, there are a hundred nameless men who spilled in, and blood, for the fight.  In our time, the Right will soon be confronted with a choice: to submit to the current regime, to revitalize the vision of the Founders, or to forge ahead into an unknown order. My commitment is to the old means and to the old ends, as much as we can rescue them. This will require the spirit of brotherhood, sacrifice, daring, and selflessness. As the fight begins, we will learn and adapt. But one thing is clear: the fight is here.”

 

My response: The fight is here. We must do our part, including selfless dedication to the general good while self-realizing simultaneously, because the most heroic, self-sacrificing patriot is a great soul, seeking his self-interest most of the time, but doing what he has to regardless of cost to protect the homeland and American Way of Life, if need be.