i don’t think the people you’re calling reactionaries want a wealth / birth elite back, though. nick fuentes, ben shapiro, candace owens, jd vance, donald trump. these people don’t represent the apex of a prior hierarchy. they were either subordinates or also-rans then. 1/

the main relationship the contemporary right has with, say, William Buckley is adopting race as a kind of totem of hierarchical position. it’s like Trump is a poor man’s version of a rich man, a steampunk version of the 1950s is their idiot version of a world they could stand atop. 2/

that’s why i do think reactionary is the wrong word for them. they were not winners of any past. they were losers then, losers through the neoliberal period to, were casting about in the early 2010s for some outsider politics to latch onto, that’s all MAGA really is to them. 3/

i don’t deny that old school reactionaries have latched onto them. a whole universe of quiet KKK sympathizers rides along with Candace Owens but has a tree in mind if she gets “uppity”. 4/

those people are reactionaries — they sat atop a Jim Crow racial hierarchy, lost that position, want it back. but i don’t think that characterizes most of the politics of the contemporary right wing. 5/

right populism criticizes the former neoliberal center not so much from an overt claim of white supremacy, but from a claim of liberal hypocrisy, of failing to honor ideals they too thought they bought. when you said antidiscrimination you just meant people could discriminate against me. 6/

obviously that all bleeds and blurs into over white supremacy you can characterize as reaction. if you were discriminating against people who look like me but people who look like me were still disproportionate at the top, maybe that just means we’re genetically better. 7/

it’s an easy path a lot of them have now tread. but i think it’s a misreading of that movement that it started there. like a poison seed, an old form of American reaction, antebellum in fact, has sprouted and taken firm root. 8/

but the soil was fertilized by something quite new, and that new thing is still the dominant part of the “alt right” or MAGA or whatever, although i’d guess it has little defense against and will easily succumb to the culture and hierarchy that championed chattel slavery. /fin