I'm Still Right Wing

Do not mistake my contrarianism for centrism

Many people have reached out to me recently suggesting that instead of building an Alt Right 2.0 it would be better and more accurate to call myself “Alt Center”.

This is an understandable thought. Most of my essays here on Substack have taken a stance in opposition to conservative sensibilities and today’s GOP. I was also brought back to relevance by Richard Hanania, who identifies with the centrist label. He’s obviously the major figure I’m closest to in ideology and temperament, so it’s not surprising people would likewise classify me as centrist.

But I am still very much a man of the right, and probably always will be. I am just as right wing as I am alternative—each of these labels is meaningful and indispensable.

AR2 is currently aligned almost perfectly with Hanania Thought because we have precisely the same goals, enemies, and coalitional rivals in the short to medium term. But his long term focus is different from mine, and in a few years I suspect he and I will disagree on many things, because I am broadly to his right.

But what does it mean to be right wing? And how can someone identify with that label when he’s very openly a degenerate urbanite who disparages Middle America?

Those are the questions I’ll answer in this essay.

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Lots of people try to sound smart by saying the right vs. left distinction is meaningless. This is obviously a bad take. This binary has stuck around so long for a very good reason: it has tremendous explanatory and predictive power.

You can generally tell from someone’s face and clothes and speech patterns whether they fall on the left or the right, and once you know that, you can generally predict how they feel about a whole host of issues.

It is certainly highly contextual—someone far right today would be far left in medieval France, and a Californian rightist might be a Texan leftist—but so is literally any other system of classification. Within a fixed political ecology you can generally compare two people and determine who is more right or more left.

In the context of American politics I am definitely to the right of 90% of people, because I believe the following things are true.

Hierarchy is inevitable and mostly good

Some people are naturally a lot more capable than others. IQ plays a big role in this, but so does individual agency (how much control you have over your actions) and vitality (how much energy / verve you have to accomplish challenging things).

Differences in ability will inevitably lead to enormous inequality in all dimensions of observable human success, including power, fame, money, and sexual access. But this inequality also can stem from good vs. bad luck at the individual level, as well as from simple nepotism or ingroup bias, and most people have the intuition that people who benefit from luck or bias shouldn’t get to lord their status over others.

The problem is that it’s practically impossible to disaggregate merited from unmerited achievement, because everyone’s road to success is inevitably a conglomeration of talent / hard work, luck, and connections. But everyone is biased, and the successful “natural elite” will put more weight on the first factor, while unlucky and talentless losers will put more weight on the last two. This creates resentment and envy among the proles and contempt in the elite. And it’s from this dynamic that the left-right binary emerges.

The leftist view is that social, political, and economic inequalities should be compressed as much as possible—usually through coercive state action. The idea is that the state can and should reduce “power asymmetries” (i.e. protect marginalized groups from exploitation by the powerful) by putting its thumb on the scale.

The rightist view is that all power structures necessarily create elites, but any egalitarian state leveling action can only create a “shadow elite” of bureaucrats, DEI apparatchiks, academics, journalists, “fact checkers,” and “mental health experts.” The rightist sees these shadow elites as far less meritorious and virtuous than their predecessors, and a lot more dangerous because they aren’t honest and straightforward about their desire for power. He therefore seeks to minimize the power of this “shadow elite” and maximize the influence of the “natural elite”.

In other words, hierarchy is inevitable, but you can only get a virtuous elite if you create a formalist and explicit power structure where everyone can pursue his self-interest in an honest and straightforward and predictable way that at scale benefits the collective (Smith’s “invisible hand”). To most modern rightists, that power structure looks like an orderly and competently governed free market.

Of course, it’s easy to be right wing until you’re too poor or weak to participate in the elite coalition and are yourself marginalized. If left unchecked, the natural elite have a tendency to keep shrinking everyone else’s share of the pie, and will start kicking out weaker coalition partners until they go too far and provoke a leveling backlash. This is what happened during the Gilded Age, ancien régime France, and in the late Roman Republic—the extreme fat cats overreached and alienated too many lower status elites, and ended up much worse off for it.

This isn’t as possible nowadays, as industrialization and mass literacy / enfranchisement have left most rightist parties catering to the petit bourgeoisie instead of capitalists or aristocrats. America in particular is so wealthy (and culturally polarized) that both parties now cater to different factions of the “mass affluent” top quartile—the GOP to small business owners and the Dems to suburban professionals. There isn’t really a politically credible appetite for leftism in America.

But to the extent there is one, it is illegitimate and destructive and needs to be squashed. America is a society that makes it enormously easy to become wealthy and successful if you just show up and try. This is a country positively brimming with wealth from sea to shining sea.

For instance, I know a girl in her early twenties who made $70k last year cleaning houses and dogsitting for rich people. Anyone who wants to increase her taxes is eternally my enemy. This is a chubby Mexican girl who definitely wasn’t coasting off her looks, and she probably has a 104 IQ. If you can’t achieve that what’s your excuse?

You literally just need to show up.

Sadly, a lot of people manage not to show up, simply because a life of easy pleasure and zero struggle has numbed them into a permanent state of dissociated impotence.

Which brings me to my next point…

Individual vitality requires pain and struggle

People don’t feel enough pain in the modern world.

There aren’t any negative consequences for failure these days because liberals have been fabulously successful at creating a kinder, softer, and gentler society. This wasn’t achieved through a leftist nanny state so much as through the lowered standards and complacency that inevitably follow extreme abundance. We are so wealthy that the margin for error has expanded towards infinity and nobody feels the need to try anymore. Everybody gets a second chance and no one is held accountable.

Therapeutic culture in particular has gotten out of hand over the past decade. Everyone is talking about their “spoons” and “headspace”. Every middle aged woman is crippled by pain and claims to have fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue system or long covid. Every zoomer girl in her early twenties thinks of herself as a literal child because of retarded memes about the prefrontal cortex.

Teenagers and young adults are taking far longer to achieve traditional milestones of adulthood and nobody is pressuring them to grow the fuck up and contribute. And old people are even worse—we let them drop out of society two or three decades before croaking, and give them massive pensions at the expense of young workers in an unsustainable ponzi scheme nobody is willing to reform.

Meanwhile there are too many addictive dopamine traps that make it almost impossible to concentrate and take advantage of the incredible opportunities surrounding us. Girls are enslaved to social media and guys are enslaved to porn. There is too much infinitely novel content at our fingertips and everything is becoming a hyper-addictive Skinner Box algorithmically optimized to keep you consooming. This is just going to get worse as VR and AI continue to improve.

I want us to colonize Mars, but I genuinely worry humanity will go extinct before then. Not from nuking each other to death, but from withering away in VR blowjob pods and AI boyfriend simulators. Or just from getting extremely fat and retarded and helpless and requiring robots to do everything for us. Wall-E has always been the scariest dystopia to me, because it seems like the only realistic one.

Humanity can always solve problems that cause us pain, but how do we solve problems that cause us pleasure? How on earth do you assemble the collective will?

The free market will always develop technology in accordance with what people want. That’s been a very good thing for most of history, but it becomes genuinely dangerous when you enter the realm of hyperreality.

Can a mind evolved for apples truly handle a Snickers bar? Can a mind evolved for saggy cavewoman tits handle Sydney Sweeney Simulator 69? I honestly have my doubts, and that’s where I could conceivably part ways with Hananiac libertarianism.

People are just too happy and it’s making them miserable. Not to mention impotent to the point of paralysis. Our hedonic treadmills have all been blown to smithereens, especially since covid. No wonder everyone’s slamming Adderall right now.

And I’ll freely admit to being a tremendous hypocrite on this point. Four years of remote work and daily Uber Eats deliveries have left me pampered like an Ottoman princeling. Doing difficult things I don’t want to do has become a lot harder for me because my life is so enjoyable and easy. I don’t think banning remote work or food delivery is the answer, though. At this point people like me just won’t let you.

The answer is to channel more of our wealth into glamorous and aspirational megaprojects. The issue we have right now is dopamine addiction, and everyone knows the only way to fight addiction is with another addiction.

Let’s get society maniacally addicted to doing big and bold and impressive things. Space colonization is an obvious candidate, but fuck it, let’s also terraform Antarctica and the Australian outback. Lets build a bunch of mile-high skyscrapers. We need to go balls to the wall and give everyone a reason to be excited and try hard again.

We could also revitalize society by seriously raising the stakes. Which brings me to…

Prosocial conflict should be encouraged

Competition is always a good thing—it makes both the individual and the tribe sharper, tougher, leaner, and less complacent.

It’s also the only thing stopping the malaise described in my last point from engulfing everyone’s brain and turning them into a fat inert coomer. The top quartile of American society is insanely competitive and obsessed with accumulating wealth, getting famous, and looking young and beautiful. This competition can cause a lot of negative psychological effects, especially in teenage girls, but it’s probably the only thing keeping us from going full Wall-E so I can’t disparage it too hard.

With almost everything in life, easy come means easy go. This is due to basic human psychology—when you never had to fight for something and it didn’t cost you anything, you tend not to value it as much, whether it’s a woman or a job or a country. You are infinitely more likely to throw it away in a high time preference flight of fancy, or just take it for granted until reality slaps you in the face with its big smelly cock. It’s like building a house on a foundation of loosely packed sand—the slightest tectonic shift will obliterate everything.

I don’t think it’s good for a nation’s soul to not have any serious external threats, as America has enjoyed since the fall of the USSR until very recently. This causes a kind of malaise and existential discontent—people need something to fight against or they turn inward and either begin hating their countrymen or hating themselves and engaging in horribly self-destructive behavior.

This will make me sound like an edgelord, but a massive conventional war with China over Taiwan would honestly be good for the soul of America. It would make us realize that our extreme wealth and abundance has a cost and needs to be won with iron and blood. I believe Americans would be up to the task. It will be a grizzly thing and I’m probably young enough to get drafted if we’re short on zoomer manpower, but I still would support something like this if it means revitalizing the American spirit.

I also support a high level of ordered internal competition within the tribe. This is why I am so contrarian and enjoy dealing in hot takes. There is a time for building consensus—when you are directly marching off to face a rival and need a united front. But that is not the posture you should take in “peacetime”, and in most cases an “iron honing iron” approach to internecine squabbles will emergently produce significantly better takes that are more virile and competitive in the marketplace of ideas.

Mainstream society’s communicative norms have gotten too feminine and indirect. People are too focused on “reading the room” and policing their own language for problematic implications or unprestigious cultural coding. Everyone is far too concerned with being cool and fitting in. Verbally adroit men on the right need to understand what is happening with this and call out liberal men for adopting the rhetorical techniques of teenage girl / gay bullies whenever they fall into this behavior.

Which brings me to…

Sex roles are inevitable and mostly good

Men and women have different capabilities on average, as well as vastly different experiences that make them look at the world in completely different ways. They also have lots of blind spots about the other’s experiences and perspectives. Downstream of these differences the sexes also have different values, different priorities, different hopes and dreams, and different fears and anxieties.

Because of these differences, I think society would be better if we became a lot less androgynous and stopped pretending men and women are the same. We should talk openly about gender differences and accept them as a fact of life.

I’m optimistic on this front because I notice this happening already among Zillennial and Zoomer women—they’ll say things like “girl moment” in a way that Elder Millennial and Xer women never would have. Women born 1970-1990 are the only ones who buy blank slate ideology on sex. In 1990-2000 you see a tapering off, and then after 2000 they’re hardcore gender essentialists.

Obviously a lot of zoomer girls are trans/enby or Dworkinite political lesbians or xanax-popping sex negative Red Scare girls who call things “tiresome,” but they’re all essentialists. The trans/enby ones are there because essentialist trans ideology crowded out tomboyism, and the other gals understand their problems and frustrations as those of women. You never hear dumb shit like “gender is a social construct” like you did from girls born in 1988, and this is a massive improvement.

But one additional change I’d like to see is society becoming more formalist about The Patriarchy, which I define as the set of sex norms dictating who is considered valuable by society and who has access to power.

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I’ve long maintained that the most important difference between the sexes is that men display much more variance in their personality traits, talents, and overall quality as a person. Obviously the male bell curve for IQ is wider, but this is just one small part of the picture, and is usually overblown by IQ maximalists. This phenomenon is driven far more by differences in agency and risk appetite.

Men are much more “Faustian” than women—they are more likely to “roll the dice” and pursue a life strategy that’s high risk and high reward. Men have more control over their actions under extreme duress, and will make bigger sacrifices and break more eggs to reach the top. Whenever a woman does this (Cleopatra, Eva Peron, Elizabeth Holmes) it’s seen as exceptional and somewhat glamorous, but for elite men such behavior is par for the course and you’re just a pussy if you don’t act like that.

It’s hard to quantify this phenomenon, but if you take into account the scalability factors of leadership, my impression is roughly that the best women are 10x as capable as the worst women, while the best men are 100x as capable as the worst men.

Even stupid and lazy women can generally be pressured into not falling below a certain threshold, but a huge proportion of guys will just sit around smoking weed or jerking off all day (or become criminals) if the incentive structure is bad. Society quite rightly perceives these men as completely worthless, and they have such low prestige that advocacy on their behalf will cause their allies to lose prestige by association. We probably have a deep primordial impulse to never feel bad for low status men, because we need the bottom cohort of men to be incels for eugenic reasons. Just as men “roll the dice” more in their personal and professional lives, nature “rolls the dice” more with men genetically, and the least adaptive traits are supposed to die out.

Meanwhile, womb scarcity and higher male sex drives mean that even when a woman is a loser, we typically don’t perceive her as such if she’s still young—particularly if she’s cute and comes from a good family. With a decent upbringing and education and face a girl can easily live an aimless bohemian life for a decade and then marry a doctor at 33. Women simply have a high “floor” on how much they are valued (with the tragic exceptions being women in the bottom 10%, like downscale prostitutes and very obese women, who are valued about as much as a 30th percentile man).

But with this high floor comes a low ceiling. Even the most capable and ruthless women like Hildawg and Cleopatra tend to get outmaneuvered and overwhelmed when playing at the very top level. These women have an enormous tolerance for conflict compared to the average male, but up against hyper-aggressive narcs like Trump or Caesar Augustus they crumple like a tissue.

Sadly, even if they were equally capable, sexism would always be an intractable obstacle for such women. The traits and behaviors that let you handle conflict at an elite level usually make women unlikable.

This isn’t because such traits *are* likeable in men, it’s just that when a capable man exhibits them it’s usually too intimidating for you to hate him, whereas from women it feels like hectoring. Incidentally, this is also why teenage boys need a father around to serve as disciplinarian—it’s pretty annoying to follow the orders of someone much smaller than you with a high pitched voice, especially for a pubescent male.

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These distributional differences in ability, social value, and access to power are what feminists call The Patriarchy, and I agree with all of the things feminists say about it. I just think these things are inevitable and mostly good and eugenic, including the infamous “ways The Patriarchy hurts men”.

Because I appreciate hierarchy, I am comfortable with society more or less burning away the bottom 15-20% of men. Let them rot in prison, or give them porn and weed and a UBI and let them disappear. Most of these guys are pretty contemptible when you meet them, so it’s no great loss.

I also don’t want to expend too many resources making things better for guys between the twentieth and fiftieth percentiles. They need the right incentive structure to discourage excessive violence / indolence, and you shouldn’t let more than half of them become incels (we’re getting close to that and should be careful), but you need to generally let these men suffer, or else society will become dangerous and inefficient.

The real question is how you handle men between the fiftieth and ninetieth percentiles. Should you encourage monogamy so these guys can easily find wives and become more productive as a result? Should you adopt a highly unionized economic structure with high marginal tax rates to build a robust middle class? Or should you instead enable the top decile of men to hoard women, money, and power, largely at the expense of this upper-mid cohort (since the bottom half of men are losers either way)?

In other words, should your incentive structure raise the floor of male motivation to invigorate plebs, as you saw in postwar America, or raise the ceiling as in classical times or post-Tinder neoliberal modernity to drive elites to the heights of Alexander / Caesar / Musk? I think this is an open question and reasonable people can disagree.

The key thing is that moderate and high value men are the people you need to motivate with carrots and sticks. Women always obey society’s prevailing mores because they like to follow instructions and fit in, and you’ll always have a rabidly dysfunctional bottom quintile of men. But men in the middle and on the top are a lot more elastic and agentic, and you can pull a lot of levers to change how they behave.

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I want a more formalist (and therefore rightist) understanding of Patriarchy because I think people would be less miserable and could negotiate sexual politics with less hostility if they better understood the above dynamics.

I think a lot of Xers and Millennials were hurt badly in their professional life and love life because they were taught that the world is a lot more androgynous than it really is. Zoomers have mostly overcome these deceptions, but I think there is more acrimony between the sexes than there needs to be because the truths of Patriarchy are delivered to young people as unsettling “redpills”—disruptions to comforting lies about human nature they were told as children.

I think if we were more candid about the nature of men and women with children at an early age we could better contextualize these things with a more mature adult perspective, and help children develop the coping mechanisms that we ourselves use to handle these things. Even the unavoidably painful lessons will be easier to hear at thirteen than twenty-three.

We also should do away with androgyny in the workplace. A lot of corporate environments are too feminized these days, and this is making the workplace less efficient. We absolutely shouldn’t drive high performing women out of corporate America, but we need to stop slowing things down for men to accommodate women’s lower tolerance for conflict and risk. This will naturally cause a lot of women to leave, and this should be accepted.

We also need to make it more culturally acceptable to flirt with your female coworkers. Waiters etc. still do this, but white collar men have turned into giant pussies (especially since #MeToo), and this is causing the incel rate to soar. The decline of “third places” like churches and pubs means work is one of the few places to interact with people these days, so if you can’t ask out your coworker you are basically forced onto the apps. This is bad for society and needs to be reversed.

Men also need to display more leadership in their love lives.

I often hear men complaining about women not being submissive enough, and this always seems retarded to me because there is clearly an enormous appetite among women to submit and always has been. Women hate dealing with stressful situations and love having a man come in to fix everything. If you pay a girl’s bills and handle all conflicts in her life she will usually be perfectly happy doing whatever you say.

The issue is that men typically find the responsibility that comes with leadership onerous and annoying. When men demand “submission” what they usually mean is “stop nagging me” or “have lower standards”. They don’t realize women specifically get mean and bitchy when you don’t let them submit because you’re acting way too soy and submitting to you would be like handing the steering wheel to a toddler. These guys don’t have the leadership ability, financial resources, or stress tolerance to inspire real submission in a girl, so they just impotently complain or take the passport bro Columba Bush bargain bin route.

We need to raise men with more of an understanding of the female desire to submit. It has to be cemented in the male brain that this is just an expectation women have of you. Men will have a better idea of how they’re supposed to approach women and eventually we’d see considerably less animosity between the sexes.

That said, I don’t necessarily advocate #tradlife. I believe the man should pay the bills and open doors and pickle jars, but I don’t see this as a political or culture war thing so much as a dynamic that makes heterosexual courtship more enjoyable for almost everyone. It’s almost more a performative or fetishistic thing that people do as a sort of extended foreplay to create a gender polarity that makes sex better.

I personally think it’s hotter if the woman doesn’t work, and think most people would agree with me. The idea of my wife having a “boss” or stressing about “deadlines” is groace. But I also don’t think a one income family is a good idea for most people in the modern world, as it usually will make you kind of poor. The man needs to be solidly upper middle class for it to make sense. You should be able to afford a nanny and maid so she doesn’t get bored and can use her education for more bigbrain housewife activities like volunteering / planning events / participating in high society.

In my opinion, it’s best for your average woman with a professional husband to get a part time job doing something she finds enjoyable. The goal isn’t to bring in necessary income, but to keep her occupied and let her buy things she really wants but hubby thinks are stupid. But most of the time it doesn’t make sense for a woman with a successful husband to have a “career”.

Meanwhile, women middle-middle class and below should probably work full time in most cases. These days most non-credentialed white collar jobs are incredibly feminine and she will probably find the work much more enjoyable than cleaning poop and puke all day as a nannyless housewife.

The “trad” lifestyle (and sexy gender polarity in general) needs to be seen as a luxury of the upper classes. It’s an elite thing to have a trophy wife. Among the proles women have always been sturdier and more of a provisioning force.

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These are the things that make me right wing.

I think you can see it’s pretty clear I’m not a centrist, and have some huge philosophical disagreements with centrism that are pretty intractable.

That said, I am temperamentally nowhere near your average “conservative”, and fit in a lot better culturally with liberals. This means I occupy a position in the overall discourse very similar to that of centrists, and will be able to find common ground with both parties in day to day life. In that sense I am somewhat “rhetorically centrist”.

Hopefully this helps to clear up any ambiguities related to my overall position.