Kawanable Kyōsai’s Night Parade of One Hundred Demons - 1890
I am normally a fan of Janan Ganesh, a wry opinion columnist at the Financial Times, whose opinion columns, compared to American ones, manage to cut in a way one can’t find elsewhere. From going after the upper-middle class to defending bachelorhood, he manages to address topics in a way that at least lets me think about the issue from a different angle.
Unfortunately, due to personal experience, I have a small quarrel with one of his most recent columns. His piece on reactionaries, unfortunately, missed the mark.
On March 31st, Mr. Ganesh wrote a column called “Where did all the reactionaries go?” which is about how he views that people with reactionary mindsets simply do not exist in public life anymore.
Some choice lines include:
Having read Frank Costigliola’s new book about the old grouch, I come away with a question: where did all the reactionaries go? Where is the elitist, pessimistic, anti-modern vein of thought that, in the US, also went by the name “paleoconservative”? Where are the fogeys?
Or:
But no civilised society can go without reactionaries. This has something to do with their occasional wisdom: lots of them opposed the Iraq war. It has far more to do with the style they bring to public life. The ones I have known tend to be wry, convivial and at ease with ambiguity. (Kennan was both a moral traditionalist and, as they say, a hard dog to keep on the porch.) Precisely because they don’t view politics as all that important next to eternal human nature, they come alive on aesthetics and other subjects. A modern rightwinger would ban TikTok to set China back in the epic struggle for mastery of the world. A reactionary would ban TikTok because it is ghastly.
From personal and professional experience, this column is straight-up wrong. Far from this present age being a dark age of reactionaries, arguably, we live in a golden age of reaction, where, people are free to choose whichever period in time they want to return (or retvrn, in the memetic spelling).
Want some “elitist, pessimistic, anti-modern” thought? Look no further than Bronze Age Pervert and his followers, whose beach-Nietzsche have taken the internet and staffers of Congress (Republican) and the (Trump-Era) White House by storm. Don’t take it from me, Michael Anton in the Claremont Review of Books would agree that for a certain type of young conservative, it is the world of BAPism that young conservatives live in, and not the bow-tie conservatism of William F. Buckley and his intellectual descendants.
Longing for Paleoconservativism? The American Conservative just had its 20th-anniversary edition come out! Despite the controversy involving Rod Dreher, they are still trucking and considering a sitting senator (JD Vance) who essentially got his political start from Rod Dreher blogging about his book for TAC. Influence-wise compared to the Iraq War days, they are in a strong position of intellectual influence on the right.
Prefer a more religious type? From First Things to publications like The Post Liberal Order to The Josias, a Catholic political theory known as integralism has been theorized quite vigorously over the past couple of years that rejects the split between church and state, and that state power is intrinsically bound with spiritual power. Its most famous exponent, Adrian Vermeule, is not only a professor at Harvard but is on the council of the Administrative Conference of the United States, an independent federal agency within the executive branch that provides suggestions to help federal agencies run more effectively.
Desiring something more … technocratic? Well, Curtis Yarvin and the idea of the ruler as CEO got you covered! Want to sprinkle a little Albert O. Hirschman in the mix? Balaji Srinivasan and his idea of network states theorize a world where the ability to exit is simple, and the power to start new nations, at least digitally, is one that most people will have access to.1 You will not even have to leave your home to exit, just buy out your stake in a given online community, and transfer it to another one that has the bespoke set of views you want to follow.
The surge in thought has gotten so that entire centers in universities exist to track the phenomena.2 Major newspapers from many angles have written about the people and institutions that make up these movements. Vanity Fair with James Pogue has devoted not just one, but two separate long-form print articles with detailed interviews going over these types of movements.
The point of listing all these sub-groups is simple. Far from these people being obscure figures, their ideas make it into national news publications and into the minds of not only people who make policy but business people as well. While it is unlikely you will get say, an integralist politician directly elected to a U.S. office, the staffers of a conservative Member of Congress have more likely than not read works by an integralist or any other type of reactionary.
To be charitable to Mr. Ganesh, the 21st-century world of reaction is a bit of an intellectual bubble. With the exception of the integralists and historically Curtis Yarvin, one does not see reactionaries go out into the world and convince the center. Part of it may be because they lost the power to debate the center due to “cancel culture,” but that seems unlikely, given that we live in a golden age of indie writing. Considering that these people are one search away, it is strange that Mr. Ganesh wondered where they all went. It is intellectually uncurious to claim that reactionaries have disappeared, given in some sense, they are more inside the house then ever before.
A small note
Ever since I started my job back in late 2020, I have not used my Substack as much given that I have been writing for work. Most recently, I wrote for American Affairs on the history of tracking foreign investment in the United States. I will be updating this newsletter off and on again.
For the best primer on the idea, I defer to my colleague Antonio García Martínez in his review of the book in Tablet Magazine: To Live and Die for the Network State.
My friend Julian Waller, a professor at GWU, is one of the best intellectuals in the business in tracking these movements. I highly suggest reading his work to get a reasonable assessment of what is going on.