Neoreactionaries and the moral bankruptcy of the progressive

We do not have to listen to any barbarian, left or right, who presumes to teach us what it means to be civilized.

Recently, when writing about the progressive left, I’ve reiterated what I think is something of a moral imperative: You do not have to listen to these people.

That is, when you are dealing with the moral admonishments of a movement that supports racism, antisemitism, terrorism, and genocide, you are under no obligation to recognize its right to make any argument whatsoever. Indeed, as progressive demigod Noam Chomsky once put it, by doing so “one has already lost one’s humanity.”

The other day, I was reminded of this while trawling the web for information on neoreaction. This far-right semi-intellectual movement explicitly rejects democracy in favor of reorganizing society along the lines of a tech startup with the CEO as a quasi-dictator.

I hold no brief for the neoreactionaries, but they are, at times, an interesting if ominous movement. Reading them is a bit like reading de Maistre: You know it’s monstrous, but precisely because it’s so antithetical to your basic principles, it can spin you off in interesting directions. At the very least, it forces you to defend those principles rather than simply reiterate them, which is always a good thing. It is only when it bleeds over into outright barbarism—such as sympathy for neo-Nazism—that you’ve got to draw the line and say I do not have to listen to these people.

I was put in mind of all of this when, amidst the trawling, I happened across a Current Affairs article from 2022, in which Elizabeth Sandifer, the author of a book called Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right, is interviewed. 

Sandifer is quite obviously a progressive and to say she loathes the neoreactionaries would be a profound understatement. Indeed, when she discusses Curtis Yarvin, who is probably neoreaction’s biggest “star,” she says: “I’ll make this fully explicit. I cannot encourage you enough not to bother reading this. You have something better to do with your life.”

Of neoreaction itself, she asserts: “We can just go ahead and call it fascism.” She goes on to accuse the neoreactionaries of crypto-racism and white supremacism, along with advocating an inhuman dystopia and mass murder. “They are going to kill millions of people,” she states, and “are actively taking over the world.”

Sandifer’s odd peroration, however, comes in the form of a great ode to the progressive street warriors, along with a confession that she was intoxicated when she came up with her ideas:

You talk about my being aggressive. I want to point out that I was sitting on a laptop in a comfortable room—smoking what, I will not say—while I wrote most of that book. I was in a very safe place. There are activists who are on the frontlines who are having these people screaming in their faces. There are activists who will go to jail and will get themselves killed in the long run continuing to stand up to these people, to do whatever it takes to make sure that these people do not take power and do not kill the people that they want to kill. And those are the people who were being aggressive. Those are the people who deserve praise. If my book has value it is that it will make people realize how bad the situation is, look up those activists, and get in that protest line and get their faces screamed at, too. Fundamentally, that’s what bravery and confrontation looks like, not writing a book about it.

Now, all of this is, to some degree, perfectly fine. Everyone has the right to decide precisely when they no longer have to listen to these people. Sandifer believes the neoreactionaries have crossed that line, which is certainly a legitimate position to take. Her claims that “they are going to kill millions of people” and “are actively taking over the world” are a bit over the top, but everyone has a right to hyperbole and, after all, one should never say: “It can’t happen here.” There is no doubt that neoreaction is, in many ways, quite dangerous. To that extent, Sandifer cannot be refuted.

However, for any successful argument, along with pathos (the emotional) and logos (the intellectual), there must be ethos (character). That is, the speaker has got to have earned the moral right to make whatever argument they are making. Sandifer certainly has plenty of pathos and a certain amount of logos on her side, but as a progressive, she has no ethos whatsoever. That is, she has no moral right to criticize the neoreactionaries or indeed anyone.

The reason is right there in her emotive tribute to the activist masses. When she hails the “activists who are on the frontlines” who “will go to jail and will get themselves killed in the long run” as the “people who deserve praise” and display extraordinary “bravery,” one ought to remember who she is actually talking about: The people who want to kill all the Jews.

As I said above, everyone has the right to hyperbole, but I do not think I am being hyperbolic. Progressivism’s armies of the night, the vast activist industry that can send thousands if not tens of thousands into the streets with a single word, the ones “on the front lines” who are “going to jail” for the struggle, are now wholly conscripted into the single cause of annihilating the State of Israel and ultimately global Jewry itself. We know this because they say so.

Indeed, the best thing about these people is that they cannot keep their mouths shut. We know exactly what they think and desire because they tell us. They shout “death to Israel,” “death to the Jews,” “from the river to the sea,” “by any means necessary,” and more besides. The indelible lesson of history, taught yet again on Oct. 7, is that we ought to believe every word they say. 

Moreover, the armies of the night prove their sincerity through their actions. They don’t just defame and demonize the Jews and threaten to attack and kill them; they actually do attack and kill them. The evidence of the antisemites’ honesty is there in the very Jewish bodies they have violated, brutalized, and destroyed. It is irrefutable.

Given all this, Sandifer’s pretensions of moral and intellectual superiority simply collapse. She may hate the neoreactionaries with every fiber of her being and she has reason to do so. But given her political loyalties and the nature of her heroes, she is just as bad as they are. She and the neoreactionaries demand the same response: We do not have to listen to them and we do not have to listen to her. We do not have to listen to any barbarian who presumes to teach us what it means to be civilized.