What Mainstream Right Gets Wrong
Martin Stepan, Speech from NLI Fall Conference 2023 (Boston)
I assume all of us here see various ways in which the left is completely delusional, and I don’t intend to waste our time by rehashing it. However, I want to address the principles that the mainstream right, which today consists of libertarians, shares with the left, thus inevitably helping their side. I’ve touched on some of these in the introductory speech, but it deserves to be driven home.
Equality is perhaps the most obvious one. In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson states that all men are created equal which is a rather unfortunate wording for what was meant as nothing more than a contradiction of divine right of kings. Founding fathers restricted the right to vote to property-owning men and immigration to white men of good character, which was understood to require good breeding, not to everyone, which shows to what extent they really believed equality of men. Clearly, on none but the most trivial metrics like number of limbs will any two individuals be equal and since groups are composed of individuals, it also follows no two groups will be equal, and rare honest social scientists out there have been forced to admit that stereotypes keep turning out to be a very accurate measure.
Most people outside of the left accept this and why there will no equality of outcome between individuals or groups but then demand equality of opportunity. The problem with this is that every opportunity is also outcome of other things and to demand equalizing of opportunities is to demand opportunities be taken from people who have more of them to give them to people who’ll likely waste them or else use resources that could have been better spent elsewhere to produce those opportunities. It’s opportunity communism.
Related to this, mainstream right either tends to oppose discrimination or, when they’re at least consistently libertarian, claim that bigots are punishing themselves by not hiring people based on characteristic like sex and race, but this again denies that groups are different and that these characteristics therefore provide for sufficiently accurate predictions of relevant traits, that cutting out a whole category of people may just be worthwhile and the so-called bigots are making a wise choice.
In general, whenever we’re seeking to produce equality, it means we’re not trying to produce equilibria. As Luke says, equality reduces each to their weaknesses, compatibility elevates each to their strengths. Nowhere is this more apparent than with the two sexes that add by far the most value to the relationship and to society by doing what the other sex cannot do.
Pursuit of happiness is another unfortunate Jefferson’s selection of words, showing influence of French philosophy. Happiness, like all other emotions, is a measurement of changes in state of our interests, always indicating some sort of perceived gain or loss. Ideally, happiness should measure some sorts of progress towards long-term goals which in turn should be in alignment with preservation and prosperity of the family, community and society. But as Goodhart’s law states, when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Our chemical receptors are easy to fool and seeking happiness for its own sake justifies drug abuse, sexual degeneracy, hedonism of every sort, irresponsibility, evasion of all self-control and rejection of any training.
Individualism. It’s contrasted with left’s collectivism. It seems absurd on its face to suggest as a real alternative seeing as individuals cannot stand against a united collective. In fact, that’s the entire reason for evolution of cooperation, groups always win. However, both individualism and collectivism are very ambiguous and refer to various concepts that are conflated into one. Collectivism can admittedly often involve parasitic tendencies like demand for support of free-riding group members.
The mainstream right is correct in opposing this, but their notion of individualism consists of individual self-determination which is fraught with all the issues we’ve pointed out regarding pursuit of happiness and ultimately amounts to irresponsibility for all things common, best epitomized by the boomer generation, yet it still requires collective insurance. It also offers nothing to vast majority of people that is collectivistic by nature, leaving these people up for grabs for the left, while still letting them use individualism to justify their terrible life choices. If you tell people they can be anything, most will pick the cheapest option.
Furthermore, the demand that individuals shouldn’t be treated as a member of their group despite the accurate stereotype amounts to treating them as a much more inaccurate stereotype of the entire humanity which leads to race to the bottom because in the end, if we’re not allowed to assume which people can be trusted or which of them can perform based on their group memberships, we’re forced to assume none of them can or construct expensive roundabout ways of figuring it out such as the education system. Of course, we know that this is not what the left wants, what they want is everyone be treated as white people without having to demonstrate white standards of behavior. Likewise, any group behavior, whether emergent or coordinated, is something we’re supposed to ignore because it’s just a coincidence that individuals doing it share characteristics.
Consent-based morality. On the surface, there’s nothing wrong with limiting our interactions with an expectation of consent, the voluntary aspect of reciprocity, but there are several problems in how it’s applied. First, that’s often where the expectations end, which, as is the consistent theme here, allows for all sorts of hedonistic, disgusting and otherwise harmful behavior. Second problem is how it’s enforced. If you’re from a more protected class of people, then in various scenarios you get to withdraw consent retrospectively and blame the other party for their actions. This is most obvious with rape accusations from women that previously agreed to sex.
Third problem is that it’s used in tandem with individualism to justify being very selective about which expectations of consent are legitimate. When a community doesn’t consent to drag queen story hour in their town, that doesn’t matter because they don’t have to attend. When a neighborhood doesn’t consent to some type people moving in, that doesn’t matter because they’re not literally moving into people’s houses. When a father doesn’t consent to some guy sleeping with his daughter because he can see he’s just trying to use her, that doesn’t matter, it’s not him sleeping with the guy. And where this always ends up, it doesn’t matter that a parent didn’t consent to having his child’s genitals mutilated, the child itself consented to the groomer.
Unity is something centrists demand back, longing for the past era, missing that criteria for it are long gone and restoring them would take doing things currently considered unacceptable. Specifically, unity requires sufficient cultural, religious, linguistic and ethnic homogeneity and at this point, all these are gone. Getting rid of all the people who shouldn’t be here aside, our only option is separation and ensuring different groups cannot impose on each other.
Democracy is yet another sacred cow. Abuse of the term by the regime should be obvious as it appears according to it, there’s no greater threat to democracy than doing what people want, and democracy must thus be fortified by any means necessary, including stealing the election if a wrong person gets elected. Alas, premises of democracy are flawed even when working as promised, something that has been recognized since the ancients, and it only gets worse within contexts of universal franchise and representative democracy.
If we don’t have unity and shared interests, we’re no longer voting on priorities of and investments into shared goals but on competing interests, making voting a proxy for warfare. If the outcome doesn’t correspond to likely outcome of actual warfare, the group that could win by warfare but keeps losing elections is incentivized to switch to the former.
The notion that majority of people is the best judge of anything just because they’re a majority, that they would vote for long-term interests of their country rather than looting from more productive classes of people has failed almost every time it has been tried and only ever worked reasonably well when franchise was limited to responsible productive men of shared heritage who shared long-term interests. Unfortunately, the impulse to expand franchise for all the wrong reasons is ever present.
As for representatives, like everyone else, they represent their own interests first and foremost and they have every incentive to represent special interests, including foreign nations, who either pay the most or have the most effective blackmail if this isn’t outweighed by very harsh punishment for betraying their constituents. Short term limits, which many claim are somehow supposed to fix some of the problems only add to them by giving representatives higher time preference, ensuring their incentive is to blame their predecessor for every problem, looting as much as they can in their time in office and letting their successor deal with whatever’s left after them. There’s no reason to still have representatives in the information age whatsoever.
What about freedom? Why would we oppose freedom? But freedom from what? There’s no generalizable freedom, it must be from something. And when two people with a different ethnic, cultural and ideological background talk about general notion of freedom, chances are high they’re not imagining the same freedom at all. An obvious example is free speech. Today, it’s understood as freedom from accountability for what we say with a few exceptions, allowing all sorts of lies and filth, even as the so-called private companies suppress and block truth while claiming to be a public square. However, this interpretation of first amendment is an invention of last century, abused by subversives. Founding fathers intended speech from compulsion and prior restraint, not from accountability. This is just one example how notion of freedom is open for use of justification of freedom from all responsibility and accountability and from every conceivable limit, including those inherent to nature. Thus, a doctrine of permanent liberation has emerged, and it is really nothing but disguised Trotskyism.
Rights. The usual distinction we hear is between negative and positive rights, with the former merely limiting what must not be prevented or limited and the latter compelling others to provide some sort of resources or service, sometimes reframing it as a privilege. However, this distinction is somewhat artificial as negative rights themselves limit all behavior incompatible with that protected by the particular right and thus making everyone pay the opportunity cost of not engaging in it. They also necessarily compel someone to police this, if not by prevention, then certainly by catching and punishing the perpetrators. This is the same issue we saw with different freedoms.
I’m by no means saying this is bad, merely trying to reframe the notion of rights as a trade. Right to live means giving up freedom to kill, right to property means giving up freedom to steal and so on. These are the costs most of us will gladly pay. But then we get rights not to be criticized and offended which then limits our right to tell the truth. While libertarians are capable of recognizing costs of what they call privileges, like the left, they ignore costs of the negative rights. Framing rights as something free then justifies their endless expansion while the freedoms thus taken away are hidden.
The most obvious instance of this is the Civil rights law and its European alternatives that ban discrimination in job hiring and accommodation on basis of various traits that accurately predict ability and behavior. In theory, everyone gets a right to associate with other people but in practice, it’s a loss of right to dissociate from people you don’t want around you, that you don’t want to serve or hire. The ever-expanding notion of human rights is an example of this on global scale, potentially justifying war on and imperial expansion into any country that doesn’t provide whatever human rights mean in the current year.
What all these notions have in common is that they simultaneously appeal to both the independent productive middle and working classes and to the clients of the regime composed of dependents, degenerates, foreigners and undesirables of every sort, thus enabling the regime to justify providing to its loyal coalition of clients by stealing from the productive people in a typical high and low vs. middle strategy described by Bertrand de Jouvenel on grounds that those productive people find very hard to argue with.
I’m certainly not trying to imply we should respond to the left by instead trying to get rid of every right and freedom, merely that these are unacceptable as ends in themselves and when we invoke them, we need to be very careful and very specific, state the purpose and limits beyond which they don’t apply. We do want equal application of natural law, but we want unequal policies that elevate everyone’s strengths. We do want people to be able to pursue happiness within limits of not imposing on their long-term future and interests of others. We want recognition of individual merit and heroism in the service of family, community and nation. We want country of sufficiently similar people such that they can actually consider themselves a nation. We want voting limited by concurrency via separated houses for different groups of people, such that they cannot impose on each other, and we’d like a monarch who feels a sense of ownership over the country and behaves accordingly. We want people free from all unnecessary impositions, including impositions of parasitism, deceit, promotion of vice, degeneracy, addiction and association with people they’d rather not have around. We want mutually insured natural rights with no compulsion to insure those who in no way return the favor.
More importantly, we want maximization of agency so that as many can be free in the way that classical liberalism promised, conditioned on responsibility for self and commons. This will ironically require imposition of training in youth as expectation of independent development of agency and responsibility has proven to be a total failure, something which again benefits the left whose entire platform is pandering to the infantile. Further, people that aren’t responsible for the commons cannot have any political power and people that demonstrate inability to be responsible even for themselves need to be placed under authority of someone capable of responsibility for them instead of giving more power to the state that will inevitably be used to undermine agency of everyone else as well.
Contrary to all the modern narratives, ensuring preservation, improvement and prosperity of a nation is the whole purpose of having a country in the first place; a nation should not be considered an economic zone for the benefit of anyone in the world. There’s no doubt that many will call this fascism, and we shouldn’t get defensive about this; the “straw man” of fascism:
has been used for suppression of all masculinity and all law and order
involves zero examination of the merits or problems within real fascist regimes
merely justifies communism and anarcho-tyranny
Indeed, if critics crying “fascism” were capable of a closer examination of actual fascist regimes, they would undoubtedly see them to be relatively similar to those based on classical liberalism when compared to what passes for liberalism today.
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