There is a debate raging within conservativism between mimicry and merit, and the resolution of that debate will determine far more than which political factions gets to distribute the lion’s share of political spoils.
Following the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down racial preferences[1] in college admissions – a practice that punished high-achieving students of all races – a prominent “conservative” writer named Helen Andrews took to social media, and then the pages of Compact Magazine, to ring the false alarm.
Her complaint? That meritocracy is actually a “death spiral.” She argues that an influx of Asian students into elite universities brings a toxic “grind culture” and hypothesizes that the rising popularity of Southern colleges is essentially “white flight” from Asian educational norms.
Most of us in “the Middle 83.56%” are happy to ignore unserious people on social media, or even in Compact Magazine (which I’d never even heard of) before a couple of days ago. But what happens when an entire political movement decides to defect to tribal instincts rather than relying on objective reality?
Well, it’s quite simple, actually: You get the American Neues Rechte (the so-called “Woke-Right”).
The indispensable British comedian Jimmy Carr was recently challenged by an audience member to “define Communism.” Carr responded with the classic definition espoused by followers of that peculiar religion: “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.”[2]
And then he explained the one teeny problem with Communism as a religion:
Yeah, it just doesn’t scale. Everyone is a communist. All of you are communists with your family. If you’ve got kids, you’re a [expletive deleted] communist at home. Each according to their needs. You take care of them. Of course you do. And as things get wider, in your local community, you might be a socialist. Try and help everyone out. And then you get up to nation state level and you go, yeah, [expletive deleted] those guys.
Carr is not mistaken: Every human being on earth has in-group preferences, and those preferences don’t magically begin at the exterior borders of the United States[3]. Oregon, thank God, is not California; and that is a basic fact of “reality.”
In-group preference are hard-wired into everyone. And, just like everything that’s hard-wired into us, our inclination toward our in-group can get hijacked.
Increasingly, the dividing line which is being used to separate us from each other is between Collectivists and American Individualists. Or, if you prefer, between those who wish to exploit the “Interior Lines” of power for their own purposes; and those of us who intuitively understand that no man will ever be truly free as long as he owns a slave.
The Universal Human Journey Toward Cooperation
In his essential book on comedy, Born Standing Up, the great American Steve Martin defines his journey toward becoming a comedian: “I was not a natural. I was a student. And I had learned a truth: the logic of the millisecond.”
To Martin, truth might be a necessary precondition for human connection, but logic is the only basis for human cooperation.[4] The genius of Martin’s phrase (“the logic of the millisecond”), is that he is arguing that comedy – and by extension, the Way of Balance – is not just about “telling the truth.” To Martin (and to me), success in life is, fundamentally, about puzzling out the structural mechanics of reality.
Politics is worth studying in this context because politics is where “the structural mechanics of reality” often go to die. It has been said that “sincerity is the most quality for any politician to master—because once you can fake that, you can fake anything.” It should therefore not be too surprising that the ill-defined and ever-shifting tactical “distinction” between “Left” and “Right” made by grifting members of our National Legislature has always been a distinction directed more toward concealment than illumination.
The logic that they are trying to conceal? Just the subtle and complex (and almost entirely apolitical) process by which 340,000,000 very lucky individuals open-heartedly work to nourish and sustain this radical experiment in self-government that we have inherited—a process for which professional politicians provide almost nothing except Diavolos.[5]
And maybe the power-brokers in our National Capital were right…for a while: An era which began with the United States manufacturing ⅔rds of everything on earth[6] was an era in which the United States could do whatever it wanted, whenever it wanted, and to whomever it wanted.
For a while.
But the Imperial exercise of power tends to be far less stabilizing than the Republic’s prudent exercise of discretion, and we might want to consider what is happening right now…and the “hard landing” it is inevitably leading us toward when “the World” decides to stop financing the profligate deficit spending that is the Elite Establishment’s sole remaining claim to legitimacy.
Meanwhile, Americans of every stripe have simply stop believing the Elite Establishment’s lies, which has only compounded the crisis of legitimacy which has created a power vacuum. And since Nature abhors a vacuum, the Lunatic Fringe has sensed our weakness as their opportunity: Like an opportunistic parasite, a symbiotic Woke-Left/Neues Rechte alliance has aggressively colonized the (largely self-inflicted) wounds of a distracted and divided Body Politics. They are now focused on one common goal: To turn America into a fractured, ungovernable wasteland.[7]
Onto that heaping pile of manure, the Neues Rechte is piling the racialism and “America-last” mentality that their allies on the Woke-Left have already piled high enough. The Neues Rechte, believing in no First Principles except “Doest what thou will” looks at the Woke-Left and sees that they were able to build a pile of manure so high that they were able to seize the “Commanding Heights” of our culture; and, in true Woke-Right fashion, they ask themselves, “Wow, limitless power would be great!”
As Dennis Saffran brilliantly pointed out in Minding the Campus, Ms. Andrews is simply repurposing the exact same stereotypes used by the Woke-Left to justify discriminating against Asians in the first place. The only difference is that Andrews wants the Collectivized “beneficiaries” of racialism to be her favored group, completely ignoring the moral hazard which caused the Grown-ups to reject racialism in the first place.
To Ms. Andrews, “white students” are cast as the Victim, with her casting herself as the Hero and those of us who honestly believe in the ancient Wisdom of the Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14-30) cast as the Villain.[8]
Neues Rechte agitators seem determined to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, so at least they are recognizable as Republicans. For years, “Progressive” admissions officers defended their de facto quotas by painting “disadvantaged kids”[9] as “creative” while dismissing Asian applicants as “textureless math grinds.” And for years, they got away with it. And just as the illogic of the approach has reached critical mass, segments of the Neues Rechte are adopting the exact same rhetoric—because the reality of individual merit threatens their grift.
If garden-variety American Exceptionalism and individual merit aren’t good enough anymore, on what exactly is the Woke-Right basing its ideology?[10] Do they honestly believe that the fragility, incompetence, and hubris of America’s Co-opted Institutions of Centralizing Power prove that Woke-Left identity politics is worth mimicking?
Perhaps the 8.22% of Americans who have pledged their souls to Die Neues Rechte truly believe that “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” But the Middle 83.56% of us believe otherwise. My Dad always used to say of himself, “Well, Bubba, at least I can serve as a bad example.” (And like all Dad, mine wasn’t 100% wrong.) But his self-awareness exemplified the common characteristic of the Grown-up: An ability to honestly think about – and logically analyze – one’s own thinking.
Within the echo chambers of both the Woke-Left and the Neues Rechte, ideology controls. And by “ideology,” I mean a model of reality in which facts are violently subordinated to theory.
Why would anyone encourage people to ignore reality? Well, it’s simple: Ideologues cannot maintain their grift unless they can sell the public a reductive, collectivist lie: Every problem can be reduced to a Hero (the politician who wants your vote), a Villain (“them”), and a Victim (the collectivized voting bloc the politician’s advisors are trying to activate).
If the maximization of Individual Autonomy in a manner not inconsistent with the Common Good matters to you,[11] this approach is both insane and useless. In the real world in which “the Middle 83.56%” of us live, there is no “us” and “them.” There are only the Grown-ups – those who understand that the sole purpose of politics is to enable us to live in peace alongside those with whom we will never fully agree – and the Adolescents, those whom we must safeguard and guide wisely until they become Grown-ups.
Adolescents demand binary simplicity; Grown-ups synthesize complex truths. We have no choice. We are responsible for them, and therefore we are accountable to them—whether “them” means our Adolescents, our Ancestors, or Remote Posterity. It doesn’t matter how annoying our Adolescents are, because Grown-ups don’t have the luxury of defining ourselves as “Anti-Adolescents.” Life is too complex for that.[12]
Take, for example, the ultimate foundational text of Western civilization. In Matthew 5:44, we are commanded to “love our enemies.” Yet, this is the same Christ who made a whip of cords and overturned the tables of the money changers to cleanse the Temple (Matthew 21:12-13).
The Ideological Adolescent looks at this and declares it an unsolvable contradiction, working backward to prove their own biases like a corrupt judge. Conversely, the Grown-up sees a compendium of wisdom that has survived two millennia precisely because it holds two truths in tension: Loving your enemies does not mean you must condone their bad behavior or allow them to profane that which is sacred.
You can turn the other cheek when someone slights you as an individual (Matthew 5:39), but a civil society is perfectly authorized to bear the sword against those who present an existential threat to its stability (Romans 13:3-4).
Even Christ on the Cross, the ultimate symbol of mercy, did not rebuke the penitent thief for acknowledging that temporal justice was being rightfully served (Luke 23:40-41).
So we must ask ourselves: Do we want our nation guided by Adolescents or Grown-ups? (And let us not mistake chronological age for maturity; a significant percentage of the political Activists I have encountered across the spectrum are elderly adolescents).
The Collectivists on the fringes offer only the exhaustion of perpetual hatred and demographic warfare. American Individualists perform the harder, quieter work of genuine love.
So let them traffic in hatred and let them convict themselves. The wider world doesn’t need lessons from us about hatred; they’ve got a huge head start.
Believe it or not, the wider world desperately looks to America – that Shining City on a Hill – to experience, however vicariously, a world in which the Grown-ups have the courage to discipline our own Adolescence. And if we want to know why we are underlings, well the answer is easy to find within our canon:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars/ But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
Written by Daniel Zene Crowe
[1] Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, 600 U.S. 181 (2023).
[2] A note on doctrinal precision: While Carr correctly identifies the colloquial understanding of Communist dogma (“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”), this phrasing actually describes Karl Marx’s purely theoretical “higher phase” of utopian society.
In his 1875 Kritik des Gothaer Programms (“Critique of the Gotha Programme”), Marx conceded that in the “lower phase” of transitioning out of capitalism, distribution must actually be tied to individual contribution because – as any stable adult recognizes – individuals possess unequal physical and mental abilities. The modern push for “Equity” catastrophically attempts to mandate the utopian identical outcomes of the higher phase without acknowledging the brutal reality of unequal ability required in the lower phase—a biological and economic reality that cannot be willed away by ideological fiat.
[3] Our National motto, after all, is E pluribus unum, which is just a fancy Latin way of saying, “Out of many, one.”
[4] Like the cooperation that Martin succeeded in creating between his audience and himself. Martin didn’t want to copy Henny Youngman with the performative artificiality of setup-punchline-setup-punchline-setup-punchline. Instead, Martin abandoned punchlines entirely, because he theorized comedy was actually a cathartic process by which a group achieves unity. Tragically, Martin’s revolutionary approach to comedy became impossible when he realized that crowds were now coming to hear Steve Martin say his famous lines.
Martin walked away from his immensely lucrative stand-up career in 1981 and essentially never looked back. He realized that performing for stadium-sized crowds destroyed the intimate, interactive “logic” of the event he had spent a decade perfecting. The deindividuation killed the art.
[5] In the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, the term is ha-Satan (the adversary or the accuser). When Jewish scholars translated the scriptures into Greek (the Septuagint), they used the word diabolos (from which we get “devil”). Diabolos literally translates to “the slanderer” or “the one who throws across to divide” (from dia– “across” and –ballein “to throw”). It is the perfect linguistic root for political operatives whose sole function is to manufacture division to justify their own parasitic existence.
[6] After the rest of the world went crazy and got most of their own populations killed off in the Second World War.
[7] In all fairness to the Neues Rechte, who needs logic when getting rich is so much more profitable?
[8] Don’t worry, we’re used to be misunderstood. “If the world hates you, realize that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, the world would love its own; but because you do not belong to the world, and I have chosen you out of the world, the world hates you.” John 15:18-19.
[9] But only the right kind of “disadvantaged kids,” of course.
[10] I mean, other than imagery that is largely (and, seemingly, insincerely) stolen from Traditionalist Catholicism.
[11] An ideal which the Way of Balance holds is the only reason Americans even tolerate government.
[12] Although only dumb humans are inclined to also make things complicated.
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