The Rise of the LinkedIn Right

How the smartest guys in the room became the latest American Hick-Libs

Recently I have been writing more angry Twitter threads than SubStack posts. Events in my personal life are taking an emotional toll, and it’s easier to bang out something on the phone than to take the time to write an article properly. Still, Twitter is a bad habit. So this time, I am collating my ruminations here, hopefully in a more thoughtful form for your reading pleasure.

Broadly, I have found that, whatever the specific controversy in question, the drama on Twitter has almost entirely concerned conflicts between different groups in the“anti-woke” sphere online; with old-guard radical dissidents and their younger recruits hashing it out with more respectable newcomers looking to give select ideas a more mainstream appeal.

Does the right wing, as it exists, need a radical transformation? Do we dissidents need to get more respectable, "put on our big boy pants", and start appealing to the institutions that we have raged against all these many years?

There certainly are a lot of new voices on the online right saying so in 2024.

However, it wasn’t until recently that a fellow SubStack writer, Anglofuturist, pointed out that these new voices, comprising such luminaries as Richard Hanania, Antoly Karlin, Nathan Cofnas, Rachael Haywire, and even former alt-right e-celeb Walt Bismark formed a new a collective perspective unto themselves. This group that Anglofuturist called the "Elite Human Capital Right”, or what I prefer to call  “The New Secular Right” (NSR), presents itself as the best push-back against progressive excesses and the path back to more pragmatic solutions to problems as they exist.

What does this New Secular Right (NSR) believe? It’s hard to say exactly. But they have a very consistent style. They are optimists. They love tech. They believe in eternal progress. They think A.I. will solve our problems. They find woke ideas to be cringe and anti-science. And, often, they attack some major pillar of the progressive worldview, usually either promoting the ideas of “Human Bio-Diversity” or objecting to our recent trans-insanity. Moreover, the New Secular Right believes the way to restore reason to modern governance is by appealing to the elite mainstream, creating a reform movement in the highest institutions, and taking back power to make the necessary repairs to our society, keeping its core governing fixtures intact.

Sounds like a tall order. But don’t fear, the men and women (woman?) of the New Secular right are just the solution. You see folks, they are very very smart. Not only that. They are hip. They are cool. They are effective. They have the connections and are "close to the levers of power". They are just the kind of people to make these new dissident ideas fashionable again, not like those Republican dullards or online incels.

After all, is there anything more dumb than a traditional right-winger? Worse, a RELIGIOUS conservative with low trait openness? Not according to the luminaries of the New Secular Right. The idiocy of the right-wing (in either its mainstream or dissident form) is their favorite subject, as can be seen from my SubStack feed, filling up with variations of "Why Republicans are Stupid" think pieces, again, and again, and again, and again, and again.

It’s getting a little tiresome.

But then again, I do understand the criticism. There is a stupidity problem on the right. The luminaries of the NSR are not wrong about that observation. Not only is the right wing virtually absent from mainstream academia and other governing institutions, but ordinary right-wingers, even those of relatively high intelligence, commonly return to cringe forms of political and cultural behavior. Preferring disconnected self-assurance and nostalgia to more honest portrayals of the world, and frequently looking to anti-intellectual grifters as leaders, the modern conservative movement never misses the opportunity to embarrass itself; always arriving to the scene a day late and a dollar short.

The conservative tribe has its admirable qualities to be sure, but we are very far away from something that looks like an alternative ruling class. And this, if nothing else opens up the space for something different.

In 2024 the left is exhausted. Slowly, its more intelligent members are losing their conviction. The claims that the mainstream doubled down on during their five-year TDS fever dream are looking increasingly tenuous. And the mainstream is feeling the need to rhetorically reposition itself. Moreover, in the wake of the recent campus protests against a certain non-protected protected group, a set of deep-pocket political donors are now in the market for new clients.

The perfect opportunity for entryism? Certainly, that’s what people like Richard Hanania are hoping for.

But how is right-wing entryism supposed to come about given that almost all the ideas the right promotes are anathema to professional advancement in the mainstream?

Well, one must tread carefully, selecting only the right ideas, and picking up the right politically homeless groups without alienating any others with out-sized power. And here the NSR walks a fine line.

So, in comes a moderated acceptance of "Human Bio-Diversity" paired with half-hearted assurances that it won't disrupt our sacred post-civil rights liberal order. Out goes the promotion of traditional religious and sexual morals, not quite compatible with elite sensibilities. Calls for order and a solution to urban decay are prominent, whereas criticism of our financialized economy and mass immigration are pushed to the background. And, while almost everyone in the NSR scorn progressive identity politics, few have much criticism for the identity politics of our greatest ally in the Middle East (especially if they hail from an ethnicity that ally is warring against).

Of course, your results will vary from person to person in this crowd, but these general positions are somewhat consistent, consistent enough to make for a rather reliable application of the friend/enemy distinction. And this combination does work to get appearances on podcasts and some acceptance in the mainstream media. However, the perspective never seems to fit together since the NSR worldview always comes off like it was crafted by a marketing focus group rather than organically evolving from experience or first principle.

For this reason, the NSR possesses an undeniable "pick-me" energy, directly complemented by its tendency to borrow its political tropes from Silicon Valley corporate culture. Everywhere in the New Secular Right, there is an emphasis on competence, pragmatism, and the notion that the quality of an idea largely depends on the intelligence and dynamism of the people who believe it.

In fact, the members of the NSR seem to less frequently address the quality of their ideas and much more frequently direct attention to their ideas’ high status. As Imperium Press summarizes the opinions of Richard Hanania and Antoly Karlin (referring to them as the"alt-centre"):

The alt-centre metathesis can be formulated as a syllogism:

1. Liberalism is the worldview of the most competent people

2. The most competent people are most likely to have true beliefs

3. Therefore, liberalism is the most truthful worldview.

Furthermore, many others in the NSR sphere extend Hanania and Karlin's attitude towards "liberalism" to other cultural tropes common to our current ruling class, most notably Walt Bismark's obsession with the Big-5 personality trait "Openness", which he invariably treats as a badge of personal greatness rather than a mundane personality category shared by a significant part of the ordinary population.

At some level, I understand the impulse to imitate the patterns of powerful men. It’s the most natural human political instinct. But what you see in the NSR is cargo cult meta-politics operating at the highest level. Sure, ruling-class CEO super-geniuses are all high-openness liberal secularists with urban cultural sensibilities; but then again so is every Berkeley-area morbidly obese transgender polycule member who resembles a Genestealer Cult reject. You would do just as well believing that you are a high-agency individual because both you and Elon Musk are Leos.

Moreover, while we are obsessed with imitating the aesthetic features of our elites to get closer to the “levers of power”, might we overlook the flaws of the present ruling class who are, by most accounts, driving our civilization directly into the ground? As a student of elite-theory politics, I am all about learning from the select few who can get things done. But at what point does elitism itself blind us to understanding the requirements of the present moment?

That might be a tough question for the NSR, as elitism seems to be a core part of both their style and substance. And always throughout their writing, there is an unmistakable self-promotional quality to the extent that I sometimes expect to see a LinkedIn profile hovering at the end of their articles.

In fact, the New Secular right feels exactly like modern anti-progressive ideas were forced through the LinkedIn meta-filter

For those non-wagies reading, unfamiliar with this scourge, I might need to provide some background on the phenomenon of LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is a business social media site founded in 2002 by one of the infamous PayPal mafia members, Reid Hoffman. Initially trying to be a digital version of the business card, LinkedIn slowly became the default website to look up resumes, post jobs, and promote business opportunities. As a wage cuck myself, I have found the site to be very useful in job searches, its SEO isn't bad, and looking at a client's LinkedIn Profile before reaching out is a DeFacto best practice. And in this capacity, LinkedIn is a useful tool.

However, dear reader, have you ever taken a moment to breathe in the TRUE culture of LinkedIn? You know, read the public feed, engage d with the comments, and perused the automated messages appearing in your inbox?

Take a moment and try. Ok, that's enough. It's not healthy to look into the abyss for more than a few minutes at a time.

And to be sure LinkedIn is a spiritual abyss: the blandness, the saccharine nihilism, the happy banal HR sociopathy, and chirpy mewling optimism. It's the digital form of the American Psycho business card scene, with an updated progressive HR veneer, and way dumber dialogue.

People used to call LinkedIn “work Facebook”, by which I think they meant it's a mindless website where people gab about their work lives. But LinkedIn isn’t really about work in any meaningful sense. Of course, people talk about working on LinkedIn. Oh, how they love to talk about working! No matter the shitty job, no matter the grueling hours, every post will report nothing but a banal dedication to excellence and professionalism as well as the approved HR values of diversity, equity, and inclusion. No one has a bad job on LinkedIn, and they are always giving 110% of their effort to their employers, deriving true meaning from scrubbing latrines and filling out mindless spreadsheets. It’s just this kind of challenge that lets the denizens of LinkedIn live “their best lives now.”

And it goes without saying that there are never any real problems on LinkedIn. There are no personal conflicts, no hard negotiations, and no difficult decisions. There are no intractable barriers or challenges that can’t be overcome. There are no post-mortems or deep structural issues with a company’s business model. All problems exist to be “crushed” (always with the most standardized and manager-approved approaches) and then celebrated afterward in an outpouring of “can-do-spirit”. I guess this kind of verbiage is technically “talking about work”, but it’s much less about work and much more about the propaganda the modern workplace tells people about itself.

LinkedIn is not a discourse space where professional issues get addressed. It’s a negative discourse space where real problems are covered up, so a narrativized fiction can be created just in time to grab the next gig. Every hard decision and question of ultimate consequence is pushed off indefinitely into the future, all questions of fault and culpability are shoved into an inaccessible past, impervious to judgment. You will learn nothing and understand nothing spending your time reading and posting on LinkedIn. But don’t worry, you will look very good to future employers in the meantime.

And it’s just this vacuous saccharine Silicon Valley optimism that I associate with the work of the New Secular Right, whether its their eagerness for approval, their refusal to examine deeper cultural issues, or their fascination with proposing too cute solutions that never look very realistic. And, whenever picking up a new article by Hanania or Cofnas, part of me expects to see it prefaced with some standard social media corporate pitch like:

"How we fixed our culture’s wokeness problem using this one neat trick."

or

"Why transhumanism is going to help humanity CRUSH its quarterly performance reviews".

But maybe I am being a little too uncharitable with this characterization.

Undoubtedly, younger and more optimistic readers may be curious why I am being so critical of a group that would otherwise share many of my essential political goals, perhaps posing some pointed questions.

Dave, don’t you always say that we need more institutional support? What is the real problem with entryism? Especially by an ostensibly right-wing group copying the necessary cultural tropes to earn ruling class approval! How could you be against a project like this?

Well, in the abstract, ignoring the scorn poured on people like me from Richard Hanania and his ilk, I really don’t have a problem with the NSR’s project as it stands. Entryism does have its place. And I wish the Nathan Cofnases and the Walt Bismarks of this world the best in their future endeavors.

However, I believe my younger critics might need to manage their expectations around entryist projects which so devoutly try to accommodate the cultural and political sensibilities of the present ruling class. Because, aside from securing a little cash and opening up some interesting opportunities for those who come after them, the New Secular Right will do little when it comes to moving people away from the bad ideas that currently dominate our modern age.

I can explain.

Let's review the facts on the ground, starting with what time it is. We aren't in the 1970s anymore. Mainstream institutions aren't looking to onboard a lot of new voices, in fact, we are suffering from elite over-production. Richard Hanania might find his way into a comfy sinecure. But there isn't going to be an opening for a new generation of right-wing thinkers, especially since modern academic and media organizations are filled with activists who make employing dissident intellectuals, even those sugared with the accommodating pretensions of the NSR, very difficult.

But what about the power of one heroic individual to convince, or even train, a new generation of right-wing intellectuals in the mainstream media or academy? Certainly, this is in line with Nathan Cofnas' vision. But while the vision of being the lone witness to develop a new school of thought inside a hostile institution is not entirely misguided, its modern prospects seem to be pretty poor.

First, in case anyone is unaware, people have tried this already. There have always been a few dissidents sprinkled throughout the mainstream trying to slow-roll red pills. Immediately, one might think of figures like Kevin MacDonald and Pat Buchanan, who operated as semi-pariahs in their own fields. However, the approach of infiltration is never quite as effective as one would hope. And this failure is no better demonstrated than in the work of men like Steven Pinker and the rest of the moderates associated with the Heterodox Academy.

Long-time readers will know that Steven Pinker is a favorite example of mine since his work was so formative in my early intellectual development. Suffice to say, the man's public career perfectly demonstrates the point at hand. Pinker entered explosively onto the scene in the early 2000s promoting a range of ideas loosely surrounding the concept of “Human Bio-Diversity”, an idea considered anathema to progressive politics. However, for the last two decades, Pinker has spent the lion's share of his political energy supporting institutions dead set on promoting group equity, in contravention of his original thesis. Thus, to date, Pinker’s main effect on the mainstream has been to convince intelligent people who notice group differences in theory that they are correct to do nothing about it in practice, and justified in throwing other noticers under the bus if they break rank politically.

Now, in all likelihood, Steven Pinker is a supremely dishonest person, but his example shows us something essential about the nature of the problem at hand.

First, everyone should understand that it is impossible to talk your way to victory, even inside elite institutions dedicated to discourse. This is because new intellectual paradigms don’t win through argument, they win by bringing in a new generation of thinkers who believe in a different way of approaching problems generally. Here the main goal of any unorthodox thinker is not to develop a theory from which will come policy, but rather to teach a new generation of operators, and to model a different spirit which a ascendant elite might embody when governing the institutions in their charge.

This was always the challenge for the old-guard dissident minorities in the academy, from Arthur Jensen to Steven Pinker. They could win debates. They could even gain concessions. But they couldn't educate; mainly because they couldn't model success properly. Ultimately, it didn't matter that these dissident thinkers could get every reasonable faculty member to admit the reality of HBD behind closed doors when every graduate student rising through the ranks could see that this idea was a career dead end, and every undergraduate was being taught the exact opposite.

And even if, as Nathan Cofnas hopes, dissident intellectuals employ alternative means to recruit an intellectual class via appeals to the factual basis of HBD, very little will come of it. At a basic level, to educate dissenters, you need to model a certain unapologetic untouchable confidence, which is very hard to project while imitating the cultural tropes of the mainstream. Furthermore, and at a more fundamental level, the plan to recruit a new elite from the mainstream using "facts and logic" falls into the classic trap of trying to argue people out of ideas that they were never argued into.

After all, as I am fond of saying, the culture war is a war of belief, and I don't mean a belief about population statistics. It's a question of religious calling. The progressive beliefs win because they form a religious basis for the lives of their followers, the only religion that can be consistently transmitted through government educational institutions. This is a pretty banal observation at this stage, but the natural implication is that no meaningful intellectual ground will be gained against “wokeness” until an alternative viable spiritual ethos comes onto the scene.

And despite their secularism, I think at some level the more serious thinkers of the NSR understand the necessity of a broader moral ethos to guide an alternative elite. But where to begin?

Perhaps that ethos is liberalism?

That’s a tough sell. In 2024 post-civil rights liberalism is a joke. And classic liberalism, of the true 18th-century variety, brings in all sorts of presuppositions totally out of sync with the NSR's modern sensibilities.

Perhaps the new ethos might just be an appeal to rationality itself?

While this kinda works for the “Slate Star Codex” crowd, this isn’t an actual ethos. Case in point, Scott Alexander never claimed to have a moral framework, just an epistemological one. And no one is inspired by oblique references to Bayes rule.

Maybe some ethos could be built around a vague appeal to progress through technology?

That seems to be more in line with what the NSR believes at an intuitive level.

Things get better, “line goes up”, humanity itself becomes less wrong. That's the inevitable course of history, and if you support their ideas, and well, probably hire them, the road to sunny uplands will continue indefinitely. But don't think too hard about deeper philosophical problems at the core of our civilization, or ultimate questions about purpose. Just comply with expert practice and get with the program. 

In other words, we have returned to the spiritual ethos of my LinkedIn feed.

But is that so bad? Putting aside my own distaste for happy-clappy Silicon Valley corporate culture, what’s wrong with an ethos built on optimism, no less optimism for technology? After all this was the world that the 20th century promised us.

Well, the problem is that no one believes the promise anymore. The dream that those early 19th century luminaries imagined, and which the California tech pioneers tried to continue, is dead. And despite their own cutting-edge ambitions, the New Secular right have become the Blue-state version of the American Hick Lib.

For those unfamiliar with the term, "Hick Lib" is an internet neologism describing people from rural (red) communities who adopt urban (blue) political and cultural norms, usually making a point to counter-signal the mores of their native community publicly. Of course, rural people have always moved to the city and adopted its culture. That's been the norm since the beginning of the industrial revolution. However, the term "Hick Lib" gained particular prominence in the 2010s as the culture war became more vicious, and the paths to upward mobility narrowed. Whereas previous generations of ex-rural Americans were distinguished by being more successful than their counterparts who stayed home, many Millennials who followed this pattern often ended up in similarly economically depressed circumstances just with a seething political resentment for their native culture.

The cruel irony of the modern Hick-Lib is that they are trying to join a party that is well and truly over. There is no clear path to the professional middle class left open to any random white guy with a college degree, and the avenue to creating a career by ideologically counter-signaling one’s native religion and ethnicity is rapidly disappearing. There is just too much supply and too little demand for these types of people. Thus the ability to imitate the urban progressive ruling class as little utility beyond just moral bluster. And so they diminish in strength, wondering what exactly happened, endlessly trying to catch a trend that everyone else can see is over.

But the tragic essence of the Hick-Lib is not simply a product of one particular declining middle class chasing the failing promises of a particular defunct political movement. It is the mode that awaits all orphans of a progressive mentality. Everyone tries to follow the eternally rising line, sacrificing whatever they can for the benefits that it promises in the future. At first, the spirit of progress pays out, but then things change, the dividends dry up, and its followers are left circling its empty forms, like natives imitating American soldiers, hoping that the planes will come and bring valuable cargo.

And the same fate awaits the techno-optimists of the New Secular Right as it does for the “johnny-come-lately” woke midwits they mock, all followers of a dead progressive god.

In either its technological or political form, the cult of progress is organized around the notion that there is some simple and inevitable force driving history; somehow always advancing, always winning, and always corresponding to human well-being while never requiring any application of human wisdom. As such, an implicit teleology is created from the passage of time itself, wherein each generation moves closer to a promised Edenic state where all human potential is realized.

For students of deep history, this progressive story sounds fanciful and not so subtly modeled on certain forms of late reformation protestant Christianity. Nevertheless, progress (in one form or another) has been the reigning religion for the last two hundred years and only now seems to be fading.

The core difficulty with progress in the 21st century derives from an asymmetry between the way progress is supposed to operate, and the way progress does operate. Progress is supposed to be guided by some level of human judgment. For every move in the “forward” (progressive) direction, a step of evaluation is needed to ensure that the change improves the condition of mankind generally.

For example, few leftists, save for the most pig-headed revolutionary Marxists, genuinely believe that there can be no wrong-headed political change in a progressive direction. Reform can be excessive. Revolutions can go wrong. Not everything that the freedom fighters tear down should have been destroyed.

Furthermore, not every development of technology is necessarily benign. No one who has read any serious science fiction can’t conceive of a technical invention that poses a risk to the human race. And it doesn’t take much imagination to anticipate some scientific development that, if widely implemented, would lead to the imminent extinction of all life on the planet.

Therefore, for technological or political progress to actually benefit humanity, some form of discernment must be in place to separate the good developments from the bad ones. But is such a process of discernment in place?

Perhaps it was at one point, but certainly not anymore.

In 2024, no change in a "progressive direction" can ever be denied, nor undone if its results are demonstrably harmful. Since progress itself has become the only basis for determining goodness, the standards are always retroactively changed to declare the new progressive development a success in hindsight, even if it clearly failed to bring about the promised benefits and manifestly harmed the human race. And, on the off chance that people notice the evil caused by the implementation of this progress, all attempts to fix the problem or restore some healthier state will be dismissed as futile.

“Don’t you know that you can’t put the genie back in the bottle?”

Eventually, what emerges is a ruling class possessed by a sycophantic over-eagerness to hop on the bandwagon of the next “new thing” by exaggerating its benefits, minimizing its harms, and suppressing all legitimate concerns that might stand in its way; the spirit of the LinkedIn feed made manifest.

Every new progressive proposal is sold in a spirit of optimism. We are masters of our destiny trying out this new brave development which could make things so much better. We must try the new thing, let people decide for themselves, and make judgments accordingly based on the benefits it will undoubtedly deliver.

However, when the progressive proposal is implemented and normalized, the tone becomes fatalistic. We aren’t in control. We can’t make decisions or judgments, and what’s done is done. Furthermore, the proposal is no longer up for debate. It doesn’t matter that it didn’t deliver its promises, and it doesn’t matter that it made everything worse, the thing is just declared good, for its own sake.

The pattern is so easy to see it’s comical.

The introduction of no-fault divorce, designed to create a space for more happy marriages, just dissolved marriage itself, across the board. The introduction of the sexual revolution, promising to let men and women love each other more freely, just led to men and women hating each other and, paradoxically, having less sex overall. Furthermore, I also would be remiss if I didn’t mention the illustrious history of the LGBTQ movement, which, while proposing to normalize queer relationships, just ended up queering normal relationships and exporting gay pathologies to society generally.

I think a large part of what it means to be “right-wing” in 2024 is to notice these degenerative patterns and to seek a way to break from them. And certainly, in theory, the members of the NSR like Cofnas, Hanania, and Walt Bismark understand the issue, at least when it comes to new progressive political ideas. Still, given their dismissiveness of social conservatives generally, and their broad unwillingness to engage with ideas that radically break from the philosophy of the Enlightenment, I question whether their worldview can confront the problem adequately, especially when it comes to addressing similar false promises offered by technology.

For example. one of the biggest developments of the last ten years, frequently unremarked upon, is the growth of a general pessimism about technology. No one is excited about A.I. or drones or NeuroLink, even though these developments were once imagined as exciting, and even fun, in the Science Fiction of the late 20th century. As Isaac Young points out, early cyberpunk had a certain heroic dimension to it, but when was the last time a piece of technology generally made you feel empowered, or even heroic?

I can tell this is a rather academic question for a younger man like Isaac. However, as an older Millennial, I distinctly remember the last technological developments that made me feel more powerful, namely, the iPhone and Facebook.

In hindsight, looking back from the present year, it’s very hard to communicate the level of manic public enthusiasm that greeted these developments. Discovering Facebook in college was like discovering that you had a new superpower. Suddenly you could keep track of everyone, monitor and commemorate parties, and even discover new and cool social events going on around you. You didn’t need to be in a clique, you could be in every clique, all while keeping up with your high-school friends, and keeping tabs on the girl you were planning to ask out.

Similarly, the iPhone’s arrival on the scene felt like the introduction of some wonderful science fiction invention. There were so many things it did. So much productivity it could unlock. And if you happened to be one of the early adopters, you felt like James Bond armed with Q’s miracle devices, walking among ordinary civilians.

Fast forward 15 years and I don’t need to tell you the ultimate consequence of these technologies. Despite its initial promise of making social interactions and friendship easier, Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook ultimately lost me more real-life friends than it ever gained me. Moreover, Facebook’s more purified Social Media successors tore through the American social fabric like a hot knife through butter. Dating is now harder than ever. Fewer people have real-life friends. And youth sub-cultures have essentially disappeared. And all of this is not to mention the wonderful benefits brought to our society by Steve Jobs’s iPhone, which probably has robbed more productivity from the economy through distraction than it ever provided through expediency, while driving a massive mental health crisis in America’s youth.

But is there any recognition of these problems from our technocratic leaders? Is there any concession that the products they release, and touted as miracles, have in fact delivered the exact opposite of what they promised? Is there any contrition? Is there even any real effort to debug the issues created before we allow the same technologies to deform an entirely different aspect of human existence?

Of course not. We just have to treat the problems introduced by previous developments like they are a natural part of the scenery, impossible to change, and which couldn’t have ended up differently. Maybe it’s always been that way?

Ultimately, the only thing that really matters are the new developments on the horizon which will inevitably be amazing, solve all of our problems, and have no unintended consequences. “Don’t ask questions. Just consume product and get excited for next product!” might as well be the epitaph of Silicon Valley.

In the meantime, what all modern people desperately are looking for in their leaders is some acknowledgment of the crisis that the last generation of tech has caused and some indication that a solution is being sought.

It’s not that modern people don’t want to believe in technology, we have all just seen too much to blithely swallow this propaganda whole anymore. And in the meantime what people really want to ask is:

“Can you fix the problems caused by this new technology? Can you restore the social vitality we remember from before the advent of the iPhone and social media? Can you heal our communities and fix our broken dating market? If these technologies are really beneficial as you say, then show us the benefits promised by the PREVIOUS generation of products. Show us that this process has a purpose. Show us that your methods are directed and that there is some conscious intelligence ruling these patterns rather than the mindless cult of ‘line-goes-up!’. If you can’t, why should we believe that your new technologies will be good for our society in the long run?”

We might ask these questions. But we will never get an answer. Neither Silicon Valley nor its financial masters have had answers to hard questions like this for a generation. There isn’t even any vitality remaining in them, just an effeminate desire to go with the flow. Perhaps a reason to wonder why anyone would want to imitate this type of spirituality to begin with?

However, at this point, I am far afield from the original topic, namely the sundry thinkers making up the New Secular Right and their broader project. Certainly, I can imagine a reader might think that I have missed the mark with this essay. After all, what of the NSR have I really addressed here?

The irritating parts of their writing style? Their vaguely progressive spiritual ethos? The spiritual poverty of their Silicon Valley techno-optimistic worldview?

Altogether those criticisms are pretty abstract, and manifestly separate from many of the practical policy positions supported by Hanania, Cofnas, and Karlin which I agree with.

But in many ways, these more abstract problems are the most important ones for our present time. The purpose of any intellectual movement is to evaluate the critical issues of their given age to comprehend the questions of the Zeitgeist, and to formulate meaningful answers. And in this task the New Secular Right certainly fails.

The challenge of this modern moment is not a matter of policy correction. The question of our time is not which slightly modified technocratic order will achieve the misguided objectives our leaders have slouched into during a moment of absent-mindedness. And the solution is certainly not to copy the perspectives of the present ruling class or flatter them into giving you a seat at the table. Mankind isn’t looking for an adjustment, it is looking for a new ruling authority, and no such accommodating approach can possibly provide this.

In many ways, the mistakes of the NSR remind me of the mistakes made by young men trying to woo women by slavishly accommodating their wants. The hopeless male suitors think they are giving the women everything that they desire through supplicating to their whims. They couldn’t be further from the mark.

What women are seeking in men is the same thing our society is looking for in a new elite, the same thing that all lost humans look for when in positions of vulnerability. They want a ruler. They want someone who can direct their actions and control their excesses while still according them the dignity which they deserve. They want someone to tell them “No”, and mean it. And they want someone to direct them towards a larger purpose which they cannot yet see.

In this way, the New Secular Right is aligned almost entirely in the wrong direction. A prospective aristocracy doesn’t demonstrate its superiority by mocking the stupidity of rural conservative rubes, it just demonstrates its inability to understand noblesse oblige. And a prospective dissident movement isn’t creating change by imitating the forms of the current technocratic class, because the whole point of a dissident movement is to expose the flaws of the current elite and subsequently earn the right to rule over them.

All of this is not to dig too viciously at men like Walt Bismark or Nathan Cofnas. I certainly enjoy their writing, and I hope, perhaps, to work with them in the future. Nevertheless, despite their stated ambitions, it always feels like these types of secular thinkers aren't nearly ambitious enough.

To build something meaningfully different our hopes must be broader, and our reach must go farther. The role left open in this modern moment is not that of a court jester performing novel heresies for the king, nor that of a simpering counselor trying to earn the privilege of his contrarian opinions. Rather, the crown itself lies in the gutter unused, and proper order has fallen by the wayside.

Any true change must begin by understanding this impoverished state of mankind, recognizing the ugliness of the modern world, and offering up a new spiritual solution to restore the order so long denied to humanity. We must not submit to the illusions of the world but confront them, and in doing so create a model for its new masters.

Very much a tall order. But here, at least, is a solid beginning.