🔒 The Right Has No Principles, Only Strategy. That's Why They Keep Winning.

A little while back I posted a note on Substack, referring to arch-conservative Rod Dreher’s friendship with Vice President JD Vance and their respective attitudes toward the Nazi-adjacent groyper movement—Dreher denounces the groypers but says Vance’s attitudes toward them are “private.” They would be, of course, owing to Vance’s tactical collaboration with  neo-Nazis on Twitter in the lead up to last year’s election.

 It was maybe an hour before groypers found the note and started replying to me, telling me that nobody on the right is under any obligation to denounce anybody, especially on the right, and especially as advised by the left.

 And they’re absolutely right.

 Now that the Republicans are in complete power, with the intention of stopping the pendulum and staying there forever, it makes no strategic sense to publicly speak out against anyone who isn’t to the left of Trump on the political line. Ideally, they wouldn’t communicate to the public at all, just as they have ceased communicating with the Democratic party in any meaningful sense.

 The fundamental difference between MAGA, or the New Right if you want to call it that, and everyone else including, I believe, the Old Right, is that they’re fundamentally operating under a completely different set of rules. Or to be more accurate, the right doesn’t have rules. They only have strategy.

I’ve written before about how these people have reverted to a primordial ethic from before ethics existed, Nietzsche’s master morality, the law of the jungle. When you think of morality you think of what’s right or wrong according to your principles, but what do right or wrong mean when you have no principles? To the Trump right, what’s right is simply what wins the game and what’s wrong is what loses it. It’s not so much that might makes right—might is right. Power is synonymous with rightness. Being right means being in charge, in the same way that, to the principled, being right means being good.

 These people aren’t interested in nurturing a society or even running a country. They’re interested in owning it.

 The problem, fundamentally, is that the two sides are playing two different games on the same field and with the same equipment. If you think of a game of basketball, the normal approach to sport is that the rules are the point of the game. It’s the journey, as they say, not its destination,  just like the point of any novel worth reading is its story, not its ending. But what if, to the other team, the point of the game is “getting the ball in the net?”

 Well, think of the options available to you now. You can pick up the ball and just run with it. You can use a cannon to fire the ball into the net. You can bring a gun onto the field and shoot the other players. What can the other team possibly do here? They could respond in kind, drop all rules, and just get the ball in the net, but they don’t want to play whatever that is. They want to play basketball.

The completely asymmetrical attitude to the game is what puts the left at a severe disadvantage. They want to win, as is the goal of any game, but they don’t want to win by any means whatsoever, like the right does. The right isn’t even playing a game: Both left and right recognize that there are two teams involved with this, but the left recognizes this in the frame of “sport” while the right recognizes it in the frame of “war.”

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