How I Became a Reactionary

A long, strange trip, but one which did not involve drugs

In this article, I would like to take a journey with the reader. This journey will be the one that I took throughout my intellectual life which eventually led to my becoming a reactionary. I hope that it may serve as an example and an encouragement to emulation for those who may find themselves in similar circumstances such as I was.

Pragmatic Conservatism

My “ideological” journey began in my undergraduate years when I started to become politically aware. At this time, I would say that I largely reflected the politics of my parents, which were essentially Midwestern, populist, and pragmatically conservative. In the first election in which I was able to vote (the 1994 midterm) I, of course, voted Republican and was elated when the GOP took control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives. In 1996, I was a supporter of Pat Buchanan during the primaries because his populism and nationalism appealed to me even then.

However, most of my beliefs were still essentially based upon the habits of my upbringing rather than on any well-grounded philosophical worldview. I was pro-life because my family was, I was against high taxes because my parents were, I supported Republicans because that was who my folks had always voted for. I grew up in a household where “ultra-liberal” was (rightly) a swear word. Yet, none of this was rooted in any type of philosophically consistent weltanschauung.

The Turn toward Libertarianism

Towards the end of my undergraduate studies, I began to be introduced to libertarianism as a distinct and philosophically all-encompassing belief system. To be honest, libertarianism filled an epistemic void. This exposure to libertarianism occurred within the context of my participation in my university’s College Republicans and in the Model United Nations program (while I graduated with a chemistry degree, I seriously considered switching to political science at one point and ended up minoring in it). Indeed, there were a couple of individuals in particular in Model UN who provided a serious education for me in libertarian thought through both our conversations and their suggested reading materials. Being that I knew them through Model UN, this libertarianism took on a globalist slant, with the result that by the time I graduated with my undergraduate degree, I was basically a libertarian-leaning neoconservative. The people in the College Republicans with whom I had formerly butted heads because of my isolationism and nationalism were pleasantly surprised at how I had turned out by the time I graduated.

This was where I was at when I went to graduate school in 1998 to continue my studies in chemistry. As a libertarian, I basically had little use for “social issues” of any kind, accepting that “whatever floats your boat” was perfectly fine. Religion? It’s fine for some folks – I had grown up going to church but largely gotten away from it during college – but it shouldn’t inform government policy. I was basically a Jack Kemp / Steve Forbes economic Republican at this point. I could handle going along with the Religious Right if it meant getting tax cuts and more capitalism, but thought traditionalism was just another form of “big government.”

However, a funny thing happened on the way to going Galt.

Into a Cognitively Dissonant Conservatism

In February of 1999, I trusted on the Lord Jesus Christ as my Saviour, calling upon Him in repentance for justification and then following Him in the obedience of baptism. This was a life-changing experience and one which began the radical reorientation of my politics as well as my personal life and service.

As I began to study the Bible (and I make no bones about the fact that God’s Word must inform the politics of any believer), my “political type” began to transition away from godless libertarianism and toward a more “typical” conservative Republican profile. I became pro-life. I began to oppose the gay agenda. I also became more overtly constitutionalist, rather than just being a libertarian who happened to agree with the Constitution on many points.

Unfortunately, I also began to imbibe many of the neocon and civic nationalist tropes that are so common in conservative circles. I was an enthusiastic supporter of George W. Bush. I supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq because it was the “patriotic” thing to do. I fully believed that “anyone can be an American” if they have the right paperwork because of our magic dirt. Because I read from a lot of mainstream Evangelical sources, I held to an essentially heretical egalitarian, anti-hierarchical, soft feminist worldview (which was actually at odds with that of the independent, fundamental Baptist church of which I was a member). I was imbibing a good deal of materials and teaching which contradicted many of the biblical principles which I was learning at church as a new Christian. At this point, I was essentially an ideological clone of someone like Ben Sasse or Jay Nordlinger.

I was seeing what many of the big-name Christian “leaders” said about these issues, yet was contrarily also seeing what the Bible itself said, both as I read it and as it was exegeted in my local assembly. This, of course, created a good deal of cognitive dissonance. Between 2006 and 2007, this cognitive dissonance began to resolve itself. As I grew in the Lord, I began to reject this egalitarianism and other aspects of what I would now refer to as “Americanism” and “civic nationalism.” While the gift of salvation might be equally available to all people, I began to see that beyond this, there was no such thing as equality, whether between individuals or between different races or nations of people. Hierarchy was, in fact, ordained by God at all levels, within and without the churches. Patriarchy was God’s plan for the family and the marital relationship. Believing these things was not “anti-Christian,” but was merely going against the heretical and foolish teachings of mainstream Evangelical leaders who were more concerned about being accepted by the world than faithfully teaching God’s Word.

Human Biodiversity and the Discovery of Inequality

After I had been growing in these realizations for quite a while, I discovered Steve Sailor’s website and plunged into the world of human biodiversity. Reading what he had to say, it just rang true to what I was observing in the world around me (i.e. it smacked of reality), while the egalitarian notion that human beings are interchangeable simply did not have any intellectual credibility for me anymore. What Sailor and other writers said was more genuinely in line with Scripture and Christian tradition than was most of the so-called “Christian” teaching on issues like race and nationhood, which essentially rested on nice-sounding platitudes and little else.

Around 2009, I found and began to read other dissident Right outlets such as Taki, Vox Day, Fred Reed, and John Derbyshire. However, at this time I was still politically pretty much a mainstream conservative Republican, perhaps with some eccentricities. This was the year that I began to write for several middling-sized “constitutional conservative” type online commentary sites, mostly about constitutional and social issues, with the occasional field trip over to the economic side of things. For obvious reasons, I tended to stay away from topics relating to nationalism or race issues.

However, I was still essentially a believer in democracy and the capacity of democratic action to effect real change. I would have cloaked it under the typical argumentation about “constitutional republicanism,” but it still rests on fundamentally democratic activity. For several years, I played the democracy game, writing about the various social ills that afflicted our country or expositing on the Constitution and how it ought to be applied, but still essentially closing most of my articles with calls for my readers to “get out there and put your congressman’s feet to the fire!”

Questioning Democracy

This was yet another area of cognitive dissonance that needed to resolve itself. By 2015, it was very apparent to me that civic nationalism, which is implicitly built around a democratic framework, simply could not continue much longer. Immigrants weren’t assimilating in large numbers, America was not a successful melting pot, and this was plainly obvious no matter how often globalist leaders in the Republican Party wanted to pretend the opposite. Because the result (civic nationalism) was flawed and unworkable, the foundation upon which it essentially rested (democracy) was also suspicious. As I began to really think about these matters, it became quite apparent that you could not have democracy and mass immigration at the same time. Further, neither of them was individually conducive to effective government or long-term national survival. Mass immigration is simply another way of saying “invasion.” Democracy is an unstable form that has consistently failed to survive more than a couple of centuries wherever it is tried.

Around this time, I discovered a website called Traditional Right, and even began to occasionally contribute to it on topics related to immigration and nationalism. At the same time, I began to slowly disengage from the mainstream conservative sites I was writing for (relationships which I eventually ended completely). Through TR, I was exposed to more genuinely reactionary ideas relating to authoritative government forms, nationalism, localism, etc. as well as to the principles of fourth generation warfare (4GW) and how it can be applied in civilian circumstances.

Still, I needed to go further. I knew that democracy was a joke, but what could replace it? Monarchy? (laugh)

Finding Neoreaction

Actually, yes.

Early in 2016, I began to discover genuine, hardcore neoreaction – Moldbug, Social Matter, and the Dark Enlightenment. THESE gave the answers I needed – about power relationships, about government stability and forms, about the evils of democracy, and so forth. Finally, I had found the sources which fully resolved the dissonances between what I (deep down) knew to be right at a visceral level and what I was still vestigially holding onto due to past experiences. Tradition, order, hierarchy, aristocracy, authority, religion, inequality – THESE are what the West was built upon and are wherein her genius lies. Here were the intellectually satisfying answers that I had been seeking for years. Around this time, I began to write my own blog, the Neo-Ciceronian Times, as a synthesis of the neoreactionary, ethnonationalist, and traditionalist strands in my thinking.

In summary, my journey to neoreaction is probably a fairly common one - for those who make it at all. It’s been remarked that libertarianism is a surprisingly common avenue which eventually leads, if not necessarily to neoreaction proper, then at least to the more decisive side of the dissident Right. Further, while there are many who were formerly on the Left who have seen the light and come over to the dark (enlightenment) side, I would wager that it still has more appeal for those who are already on the soft Right or who are classical liberals (i.e. American conservatives). For me, however, neoreaction brought about the resolution of a number of contradictions which I knew, intellectually, were contradictions but which bargain bin conservatism and libertarianism were simply unable to do anything about.