i think we need a distinct name for this, the negative reactionary, i don't want to refer to a past because it is better for me or mine or my values, but because it is worse for my enemies. 1/

i don't think an "ordinary" reactionary necessarily thinks they personally would be better off, but they do think the people they think of as good and best, perhaps justified as most capable of leading, would rise in the hierarchy. /fin

* revert…

yeah, i think guilded-era restorationists qualify as reactionaries. but i think they are a small, albeit much too influential, group. the people they finance pursue objectives consistent with theirs, but do not conceive of the project the same way. 1/

“libertarian futurists!”, the reactionaries laugh, checkbook in hand. /fin

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

i guess we’re arguing definitions. i don’t think “once stable” can be a criterion, the reaction is to revealed instability. wanting to repeal something is in a way trying to go back to a past, but i don’t think that captures it. 1/

when we talk about “right-wing reactionaries” we bring to mind people upset by the overturning of old hierarchies, wanting to reoverturn hierarchies back. 2/

but i guess what motivates my little provocation (obviously that thread was a provocation) was a conjecture that this is in fact the motivation of a lot of self-styled centrists. 3/

that is, they are not so much animated by a project of justice or equality, the arc of history they so went on about. they were at the top of a social hierarchy, and what they’re after is just getting that back. 4/

some people of their broad class (think prominent tech people) work to retain social position by joining the new winning team. others for whatever reason won’t do that, so want their team to win again. 5/

some evidence for this is the very same people were all-in on identitarian approaches to social justice when that was the tactic Hillary Clinton adopted to simultaneously ward off challenges from Bernie and Trump. now they dismiss those approaches as “the groups”. 6/

one wonders whether the justice part ever had anything really to do with it. /fin

an interesting fact of our moment is that the only political faction who are literal reactionaries are the people who style themselves centrists, moderates. 1/

the right is now radical, pursuing a vision as novel as it is horrid. its goals have some relationship to an idealized past, but only like steampunk has some relationship to history. 2/

socialists, progressives, social democrats, greens, national or subnational liberationists, all of these tendencies are overtly going for something new. 3/

only one influential faction that styles itself center has for its project basically return to as things were, before tumultuous changes. its project is a return to Clintonism, or Obamaism (are they synonyms?). they may be wise or unwise, but if the word has any meaning they are reactionaries. /fin

one point to add about the French situation is that the role of France’s unusually strong Presidency has meant the issue is not too much representation or change but too little. 1/

the public’s dissatisfaction with Macron destabilizes potential parliaments, prevents emergence of new parties that might otherwise form workable coalitions with the Macron-unhappy parties. /fin