What unites neoreaction?

Firstly, why neoreaction, rather than reaction?

Because the principles and social organization that we want to restore are completely dead, available only in dusty old books whose language is a little bit strange. We are not reacting to the latest outrage, but to outrages that were a fait accompli a hundred years ago. Since what was an fait accompli a hundred years ago has led to the disastrous consequences predicted, the possibility now opens of reversing what was supposedly irreversible. The Neoreaction is heavily influenced by books long, long, out of print, and previously inaccessible.

Neoreactionaries, all of them, respect the past. Traditional solutions derive from Nature, or, some would say, from Nature’s God, and embody unspoken and difficult to explain wisdom. Sweeping them aside was apt to have disastrous consequences, and, in substantial part, did have disastrous consequences.

Reactionaries, all of them, are realists, seeing the real, not the official truth.

Neoreactionaries, all of them, recognize that races are different, the sexes are different, and man is a hierarchical animal.

Neoreactionaries, all of them, regard the official truth, the Cathedral as highly unlikely to have any connection to the truth, indeed as evil and insane. If all academics and the New York Times agree on X, the neoreactionary assumption is that X is likely to be a lie. The only way one would get such agreement is if it is enforced, and, if enforced, must be untrue.

That being said, what divides neoreactionaries?

Christian Traditionalists are just not all that neoreactionary, even though they are supposed to be faithful to a very ancient book. Everything the Christian Manosphere, such as Dalrock, says about trad-cons tends to be somewhat true of Christian Traditionalists. The left would imagine the Christian Traditionalists as proposing a Christian Theocracy with fire and brimstone, and that each variant of Christian Traditionalism proposed to burn each of the others at the stake, but even those who do in fact propose a Christian theocracy, such as Bruce Charleton, want a King, not a priest, at the top. They are alarmingly willing to render unto Caesar not only what is Caesar’s, but also what is God’s. Saint Paul wanted the Church practices to symbolically and socially enforce male supremacy. Women were to be silent in Church, and in Church dress in a way symbolizing modesty and submission. Today’s Christian Traditionalists, reasonably enough, shrink from such a blatant confrontation with the Cathedral. They hope for a Caesar that will permit them to be more authentically Christian, but have no great inclination to stick their heads out when today’s Caesar prohibits key parts of the New Testament.

If Bruce Charleton had his King, and the King mandated Mormonism, Bruce would gladly be a Mormon, if Greek Orthodoxy, he would be Greek Orthodox, if Restoration Anglicanism, he would be Anglican. Any King that mandated something that was not violently unchristian would be an improvement for Bruce Charleton.

Ethno-Nationalists, like Christian Traditionalists, tend to be not all that reactionary. An ethno nationalist typically believes that if we adjusted borders to get some predominantly white nations, and if our ruling elite was ethnically homogeneous, we would be fine. A neoreactionary thinks our problems are too serious to be solved in that manner.

The Ethno Nationalist correctly observes that Jewish members of the elite tend to think of themselves as non white, and hate whites. Indeed they hate whites and Christians so much that if destroying the white race and Christendom destroyed the Jewish race and Judaism, as seems rather likely, they would be fine with that. The Ethno Nationalist however fails to observe that our ruling elite has hated whites and Christendom even back when it was ethnically homogeneous and nominally Christian. Nineteenth Century Whitehall imperialism was anti colonialist, an attack on eighteenth century British colonialism. Anti colonialism goes back to the nineteenth century British gentry sneering at those that got rich in India. Until 1950 or so, there were few or no Jews in the ruling elite, yet it still hated whites and Christendom.

Thus the Ethno-Nationalist tends to say, “Let us turn the clock back to 1950”, while I say, 1800. In the great debate about whether Nazis are left or right, the answer is that Nazis are 1950s leftists. The Zietgeist has moved leftwards since then. Although as recently as 1950, our ruling elite thought of leftism as a form of Christianity, indeed as more Christian than regular Christianity, nonetheless as early as the War Between the States, the Christian left was aware that its religious beliefs differed radically from traditional Christianity, and were correspondingly hostile to traditional Christianity.

Suppose we magically got whiteopia borders – nation states that were all white, and indeed each of a single white ethnicity. And suppose government employees in powerful positions were also all of single ethnicity. (Suppose we fired all the Jews.) Government employees would still be fireproof, thus power would still be diffused. Being diffused, we get rule by consensus. Jim’s rule of large committees applies: That consensus will always wind up dominated by the evil and the insane, which is to say the left. To maintain the appearance of democracy the government needs to manufacture or import an electorate that will vote for what it is going to do anyway, which is how we lost ethnic homogeneity in the first place.

Still, turning the clock back to 1950 is a good start, and as far as I can tell most Ethno-Nationalists want to make government employees fireable at will, so my primary disagreement with them is that they underestimate the scope of the problem. Purging the civil service and the voter rolls is easier done, and more likely to be effective, than adjusting borders.

If we adjusted the borders, which is what the Ethno-Nationalists want, and ensured that the ruling elite was ethnically homogeneous, the fundamental causes that got us into this problem would still be acting. The government would still suck in pretty much the way it sucks now. On the other hand, making public servants fireable at will would go a long way to fixing things. We would then merely be stuck with an army of fatherless children and single mothers voting for handouts.

By and large, fatherlessness is a bigger problem than race. We would get more mileage making it hard for the fatherless to vote, than hard for the black to vote.

To the Christians in the neoreaction, the Masculine Reaction seems to be in favor of social decay. Heartiste claims to be a minion of Satan. But, in fact Heartiste is not in favor social decay. Rather he is against males being required to take the traditional male obligations unreciprocated in a society that is in decay, against white males attempting to carry carry the impossible burden of a society that has already collapsed. Absent socially and legally enforceable contracts, love is war. All is fair in love and war. Heartiste and company represent sex realism, as the HBD branch of the neoreaction represents race realism.

Obviously Neoreactionaries do not favor a society in which each individual pursues his best interests without regard to the costs that he imposes on others. But in sex and reproduction, we have such a society. It is possible to establish, by force of character and reckless will to power, a family with different rules, though it is a lot easier if one’s starting material is an aristocratic girl brought up in a profoundly conservative family within a profoundly conservative society. For most young men today, that is not an option. Marriage is collapsing, even among the white elite, even among those white males whose income is high enough that marriage to them is higher status than marriage to Uncle Sam the Big Pimp.