The other day, on some of our content, we had a troll attempt to sling mud. They abided by the same exact pattern we see with every troll, who were triggered because what we were saying threatened one of their underlying fictional operating systems. Not to mention one of their multiple nested cults which they are in. We encourage you to listen to our previous insight titled "Regressive Reactionaries" because that is the pattern. Which is that we have never seen an American imperial advocate, meaning regressive, otherwise called a heavy "right winger" leave a proactive, or insightful, or considerate comment. Instead, the comments are always, always, always reactionary.
The term reactionary is very precise, and when applied to those who claim to call themselves conservatives helps us overstand what is really happening beneath their false slogans and their terrible policy which hurts the average person, including themselves. A reactionary is not simply someone who holds traditional values. A reactionary is someone who defines themselves by opposition to change, someone whose entire political energy comes from the desire to reverse history, to roll back the clock, to resist the forward momentum of culture.
In America, conservatism has always been a peculiar hybrid. Before we were born 45 years ago, at its noblest, it was about conserving the liberties enshrined in the Constitution, conserving a suspicion of centralized authority. But in its current darker manifestation, it is reactionary: clinging to a mythical past — whether it be the 1950s suburban idyll, or the frontier individualism of the 19th century and seeks to impose that simulacrum of stability upon the present.
The problem is that time does not flow backwards. Novelty is the very nature of existence. Change is not a choice, it is the ground state of reality. To be reactionary, then, is to place oneself in a posture of perpetual resistance to the inevitable, like a person who insists on rowing upstream while the river of history flows toward the ocean. The more fiercely they row, the more exhausted and embittered they become, and the more they lash out at those who ride the current with ease. And the more the current regime gets more wanna be authoritarian against the American people.
This is why American reactionaries so often become entangled with said wanna be authoritarianism. To hold back the tide of novelty, they turn to rigid hierarchies, to strongmen who are really pathetic, weak men, and to myths of purity. They convince themselves that if they can only freeze the cultural flux, then meaning will return. But meaning never comes from freezing the dance of history (HIS story) let alone the mystery (MY story). Meaning comes from participating in it.
So from a self-development standpoint, the American conservative, insofar as they become reactionary, is tragically engaged in a losing battle against the very fabric of time. Their fear of change, and make no mistake, they are fear based, blinds them to the possibility that change is not annihilation, but transformation. And this is why we would argue that the true radicalism today is not the reactionary fantasy of going back, but the courage to go forward.