When you think of the right wing of American politics, your thoughts perhaps scan a spectrum of things that are at least vaguely associated with this and the last centuries. The “neoreaction” is something else — a “fever swamp of feudal misogynists, racist programmers and ‘fascist teenage dungeon masters’ gathering on subreddits to await the collapse of Western civilization.”
We should take this a bit more seriously than we are, writes Park MacDougald. Maybe.
As the twenty-first century gets darker, politics are likely to follow suit, and for all its apparent weirdness, neoreaction may be an early warning system for what a future anti-democratic right looks like. So what is neoreaction, then, exactly? For all the talk of neo-feudalism and geeks for monarchy, it’s less a single ideology than a loose constellation of far-right thought, clustered around three pillars: religious traditionalism, white nationalism, and techno-commercialism (the names are self-explanatory). This means heavy spoonfuls of “race realism,” misogyny, and nostalgia for past hierarchies, leavened with transhumanism and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Unsurprisingly, they don’t always get along.
MacDougald’s is a long essay on some of the luminaries of the movement, particularly Nick Land, and well-worth twenty minutes of your time.
The “proles” of the movement, as Land apparently calls them, look much like the disillusioned dreamers who used to drift into sects, cults and factional “closed systems” such as Objectivism and Scientology. But now all the quasi-private spaces are going away, and you can hear them thinking, they can see you listening, and everyone feels one another’s breath on their necks.