They don’t like us, we shouldn’t care

The British Right must abandon ‘respectability’

Back in 2016, Michael Anton made the case that America’s right-wing intelligentsia should back Trump in ‘The Flight 93 Election’. At its core, the essay’s argument was simple: that the Right had to stop playing the role of noble loser in public life; that it should stop trying to compromise with liberal universalism. Instead, the Right had to forthrightly play to win — even if it meant burning bridges, and losing institutional respectability.

As with most things in British political life, the British Right is around ten years behind the American Right in accepting this obvious truth. In America, the Right’s flagship events see the Vice President state his contempt for ‘androgynous idiots’. By contrast, Britain’s most significant right-wing gathering saw Kemi Badenoch waffle on about ‘classic liberal values.’

The American Right openly celebrates the fact that no-one likes them, and they don’t care; that they’re in the business of enacting civilisational change. By contrast, to this day, the British Right is governed by a pathetic neurosis; a fear of being disinvited to dinner parties, or snubbed by Roula Khalaf and the Financial Times.

The entirety of Britain’s Parliamentary Right (with a few glittering exceptions) still cravenly seek the approval of the managerial apparatus and legacy institutions which hate them. Many of them even agree with a lot of the consensus opinions within journalism, academia, and the judiciary. It should be no surprise that a random draw of serving Tory parliamentarians and advisors will likely serve up a sex pest, a drug abuser, or both.

But this infatuation with ‘respectability’ and ‘moderation’ even paralyses those among the British Right of mostly sound character and judgement. An ongoing need to maintain institutional respectability results in a watering down of policy and messaging into woolly, inchoate platitudes that mean nothing and fail to connect with the public.

Much of this comes down to the modern obsession with ‘comms’, which is elevated into an arcane art by those of middling intelligence. The ‘Comms Theory of Government’ holds that you need to treat policymaking as an art of cost minimisation; of trying to continually balance between throwing red meat at the plebs, and maintaining credibility in front of key stakeholders.

The problem is that the ‘Comms Theory of Government’ isn’t applicable to the Right. The Windsorite political order governs because it enjoys the fruits of decades of institutional and media capture, along with a robust patronage network from commandeered endowments and the largesse of status-seeking global elites. The centrality of compromise and moderation in ‘comms’ is only applicable because the Windsorite state believes, out of inertia, that public discontent is not a problem. Its preoccupation is necessarily focused on stopping dissent and fragmentation within its coalition.

That’s not a consideration for the Right. To co-opt the language of a business studies degree, the Left’s operating model is business-to-business — about keeping intermediaries on-side. The Right? It must be direct-to-consumer. If there are no institutional intermediaries that will support it, it necessarily has to instead focus on appealing directly to the masses with simple, easily understandable policies and principles.

As a result, any attempt to compromise and castrate policy development and language through respectability is, by necessity, going to hobble the Right. It results in inchoate policy that can’t be communicated to voters, and no clear principles or identity that allows voters to get a sense as to what a party and its representatives back.

The median white Briton has an IQ of 100. Just about everyone who’s not a standard deviation above that is going to vote based on one of two things: social proof, or guttural agreement with a position. The Right is not going to win based on institutional social proof; ergo, the focus should be on the quality and clarity of the policies being sold to voters.

I have great affection and respect for the editors and fellow contributors to Pimlico Journal. But, as with many intelligent and erudite rightists, there sadly is this tendency — even here — to be overly cautious and to cede this ground; to accommodate liberal ethics and epistemology, and to focus on finding clever ways to be euphemistic and put forward subtly subversive, discrete policies while maintaining a kayfabe in the eyes of think tankers, parliamentarians, and donors.

As Trump and Vance have shown, it’s perfectly possible to win based on positions agnostic to institutional respectability. This has been cathartic to see. For most intelligent rightists, one of the most appealing parts of our scene is the opportunity to shed the ethics and epistemology of the professional managerial class.

But I’d go one step further: the rejection of the norms of nuance, universalism, and respectability in our politics is the only hope we have to connect with the public and achieve national revival.

Humans intuitively classify information according to prototypes or exemplars. When we encounter something new, we classify it by comparing it to other, similar things we’ve encountered in the past. That is, people don’t classify information based on ‘if… then…’ conditions on their logical content. Instead, we intuitively use a ‘vibes’-based mechanism of clumping things together based on their intuitive ‘closeness’.

Word salads, euphemisms, or technocratic minutiae aren’t compatible with this system of intuitive classification. And the problem is that it’s this intuition that primarily informs decision-making — typically, the role of reason is to rationalise and explain after the fact. So, by making it difficult for people to intuitively classify and emotionally respond to a policy position, the quest for respectability makes it difficult for the general public to care about what we are proposing.

This is the ingenious way that the cordon sanitaire has boxed the Right in for decades: by forcing rightists to speak in an alien way that makes it hard to intuit their position, most voters fall back on social proof. The only way to break this stalemate is to refuse to play the game in the first place. The quest for respectability and ideological contortion must end, and we have to be willing to state our positions in a way that knowingly and consciously breaks with respectability. The Right’s political program should be consciously built around basal positions that are easily intuited and categorised by virtually the whole native electorate.

What does this mean in practice? ‘Close the borders, fix the roads, and hang the nonces.’

Should these three things be the limit of our ambitions? Of course not. But they’re extremely easy to intuit, and most of the things we want are extremely close — or at least adjacent — to them. And that’s good enough, because most voters consider that closeness to be as good as — if not better than — a logical consequence of these positions. A movement that wins based on these positions is one that has, in practical terms, complete freedom of action to act out the New Right’s agenda.

That’s because, along with the mandate of the voters, victory for a political program that self-consciously repudiates ‘respectable’ norms and habits will have a huge psychological impact on agents in the system. Rightists will have validation that the old bureaucratic-managerial norms of the Windsorite state are completely inapplicable and invalidated. And without psychological deterrence, control of hard power is all that really matters.

If some judge tries to put up a legal challenge? We’ll remove them.

If some civil servant tries to block us? We’ll confiscate their pension.

If some quango or NGO tries to subvert us? We’ll shut them down.

By explicitly rejecting the legalistic and bureaucratic smoke and mirrors of the ancien regime, things that were logically on the table suddenly become psychologically palatable. And it goes both ways, with demoralisation and loss of confidence blowing apart any idea of using respectability as a cudgel.

All the precepts, ideals, and institutional guardrails of the respectables are paper-thin. They only have power over the Right so long as we care about them. But it turns out that we can just stop caring. And doing so doesn’t just improve the retail value of what we have to offer — it will be essential to us actually delivering on any of our ambitions.

It may be a decade late, but the British Right must accept we are close to the point of no return in our own Flight 93. Neither Labour, the Conservatives, nor (at present) Reform will fix the demographic rig. The Boriswave will acquire permanent residency, and eventually citizenship; the rape gangs will continue to roam free; the fortnightly mass murderers will hack away.

If respectability allows these things to happen, then why should we be respectable? We should learn a thing or two from Millwall FC: these people will never like us; we cannot allow ourselves to care.

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Image Credits: BillyBatty at en.wikipedia, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0

This article was written by Pimlico Journal contributor Thurston Hyde. Have a pitch? Send it to pimlicojournal@substack.com.

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