This is the text of a 45-minute address I delivered last night to a group of sensitive young men and women at a local university. It was intended to be a provocative examination of the conservative propensity to fail hard. Why are conservatives so infatuated with defeat? Read on and find out…
I’m fascinated by failure. Why do people fail? Do people fail because of character or circumstance? A mixture of the two? Are some people born to fail? Is failure sometimes inevitable or is it always possible, in some sense, to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat?
And here’s a happy question: Is everything we do really, on examination, a kind of failure and the only thing we can hope is to get better at failing? Like Samuel Beckett said—“Fail. Fail better.”
How very profound, how very Irish.
My interest in this isn’t merely academic. I’ve known plenty of failures in my life—people who’ve failed, I mean—and having lived close to 40 years now I’ve also failed some myself. One of my more notable failures was starting a PhD in anthropology at Cambridge, only to quit a week into the fieldwork because I suddenly realised I didn’t want to spend the next year living in a Buddhist monastery and I was rather attached to my hipster beard and man-bun, which the monks and nuns were just itching to remove. I was itching too, but only because it was 40 degrees with 100% humidity and the two pairs of trousers I’d brought with me were Cheap Monday black skinny jeans. In my defence, it was 2012.
If you’re right wing today, the issue of failure is an acute one. Because, for the most part, that’s what the right wing does. It fails. Even when it wins, it somehow manages to fail—to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Of course, you have to be honest with yourself and others if you actually want to identify this issue, let alone get a grasp on it and do something about it. And right-wingers are some of the most dishonest, deluded people around. Just look at the behaviour of “Rupert Lowe” and his supporters, who insist he’s the second coming of a certain failed Mitteleuropan art-school wannabe and that einsatzgruppen, led by Stürmbannfuhrer Mark Wilkes, aka Zoomer Historian, will soon be roaming the British country rounding up everyone with even a drop of foreign blood in their veins.
If millions must go, millions will go!
The truth, of course, is that Rupert Lowe is a fusty old Thatcherite with a fat yellow dog and the beginnings of dementia; his tweets are written by an autistic and by all accounts repellent man called Alistair Harrison, with the aid of the free cheapskate version of Grok; and the cohort of “based reactionary Tradcath zoomers” acting as his online vanguard were all trying to work for Robert Jenrick and Nigel Farage three weeks ago. As one of them said to me, mano-a-mano, over the summer, “If Nigel had just given us all jobs, none of this would be happening now.”
Recently, I started a series of essays on Substack because I wanted to give shape to some of my more persistent, more troubling thoughts about right-wing failure. I’ve come to believe that there really is something we might call the right-wing or conservative character and that it does, unfortunately, predispose right-wingers and conservatives to fail. My basic idea is that this character has itself been shaped by a long century or more of failure. It’s recursive. I call it a trauma-response, like learned helplessness or the conditioning of Pavlov’s poor mutts, which continued to kick out even when the evil scientist finally stopped electrocuting them. Provocatively—insensitively, perhaps—I christened these traumatised types, “the raped.” In doing so, I wanted to see if the pain of recognition could elicit a violent response. Lo and behold, I got plenty of angry DMs after I posted the first essay, which rather proved my point.
Here’s my favourite: “I have taken the trouble to send you this message because I would just as soon cut my balls off as pay you to comment on your incredibly revolting Substack. You have absolutely no concept of the meaning of the word conservatism. May I suggest you have no idea what you are talking about and that you shut the fuck up? Have a nice day.”
By the sound of it, the sender had already cut off his balls. Somehow, despite the massive pool of blood at his feet, he just didn’t know it.
I was on to something, I was convinced.
*
There are many places we could begin. I’ve had long conversations with a good friend of mine about this. He believes that, if we really want to know why failure is ingrained in conservatives, we must go back to the Glorious Revolution, which gave us the useless Jacobites who in time became the useless modern Tory Party, and then we should consider the Canadian Empire Loyalists who fled the American Revolution and have been impotently LARPing ever since, and of course we should think about the French Revolution and the “glorious” and “noble” defeat of the monarchists. Indeed, my friend describes Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France as “the first example in history of cuckold porn.” Remaining with France, he reserves particular scorn for Henri V, Comte de Chambord, the man who had a golden opportunity to restore the Bourbon monarchy, but instead completely bottled it.
My friend’s words again: “In 1870, after the fall of the Second Empire, Henri had the first chance in generations to restore the monarchy, regain the throne of his ancestors and fulfil the will of the majority of the people. And he pussied out, claiming that he could never claim the throne if the flag of France was the tricolour flag of the Revolution. So the crown was offered him, and he angrily slapped it down. The result was the Third Republic, which was seventy years of brutal humiliation and violent oppression for the royal family, the aristocracy, the Catholic Church, and all of the traditions that the king was supposed to uphold, and as a result, the French Revolution was permanently institutionalised. Thanks to this faggot, there is no going back. Henri is truly the King of the Raped. He humiliated his people and led them to their doom, right into the hands of enemies who hated them and wanted to hurt them.”
Ouch. But the truth sometimes hurts. Really bad.
I think there’s a legitimate project here: to trace the formation of conservatism as a modern political mindset back to its roots in the crushing defeats of the European monarchies and to find the first instances of the dumb, no-good, self-defeating reactive tendencies that plague right-wingers to this very day; a literal genealogy of failure. But my project, at least right now, is a tad more modest. I’m just identifying some of the more abject things I see today when I look around at the sorry state of the right in the US and Europe and trying to make a little sense of them, assuming I can stand the smell of poo for long enough without passing out.
You’ll notice that I’ve used “conservative” and “right-wing” more or less interchangeably so far. I’m not unaware of the sometimes quite radical differences between the two, but nevertheless I think there’s still a common core of behavioural traits that unite the two, even when their aims and attitudes differ; and even when they’re attacking each other, as we see most often when conservatives “punch right,” and the right-wingers engage in purity-spiralling and accuse the conservatives of cucking, being bought and so on.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think being right-wing or wanting to conserve stuff is bad, per se. In fact, the default attitude of mankind, for the vast majority of history, has been to preserve what was handed down by the ancestors and to resist change, even by death if necessary; the Old Believers in Russia locked themselves in their churches and set fire to them rather than make the Sign of the Cross in a new way. It’s only in recent centuries, beginning in Europe, that novelty has acquired an intrinsic value—the modernist “shock of the new”—and a life all of its own. In fact, it’s become self-justifying, but nobody really knows why. People just know if something’s new, it must be good.
As I argue in my latest book, The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity, basic conservative and right-wing attitudes are encoded in humans at the biological level, including in the messenger molecules we call hormones. Apply testosterone gel to a man’s arm, and he’ll reliably show greater parochial altruism—greater kindness to his own tribe, greater hostility to enemies—and he’ll also be more comfortable with things like inequality and hierarchy. If you want a base-level distinction between the modern left and right, hierarchy is your hinge. The leftist project seeks out and flattens all hierarchies, believing them to be illegitimate impositions on a man who is born free but is everywhere in chains. The right, by contrast, seeks to ensure the correct hierarchies are maintained—because hierarchy is natural—and to ensure everyone occupies the correct place within their relevant orders. But the biology of politics is a very controversial subject, for reasons that don’t require a great deal of knowledge to understand.
So: My starting point is some remarks by one of the most acute observers of political psychology in recent decades, Theodore Kaczynski, otherwise known as the Unabomber.