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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It would be one thing if the Democratic party merely struggled with this, but the bigger problem is they don’t seem to understand it. They treat the Republicans like tough negotiators, like they’re even remotely interested in doing politics. Republicans think of their opponent as an obstacle to be plowed through; it’s not a discussion and it’s not a compromise.
What kind of leverage do the Democrats have in this situation? The recent record-breaking federal government shutdown was what came from a stalemate when the Democrats at least tried to hold their ground, but then a critical mass of senators folded, in part because they felt the weight of principles that the Republicans don’t have to worry about.
I’m not arguing that backing down was the right thing to do—it was a monumental mistake—and I’m not even arguing that it was all principled. I think much of it was due to the same selfishness that was likely to have put the heat on Republicans, too, if they’d held on. But the point is that, in any case, the Democrats just couldn’t hold their breath forever, where the GOP could. There was no upper limit on, for example, how many people could die from lack of food stamps or healthcare before they cared even a little bit. They are the party of shooting their hostages.
The right is immune to charges of hypocrisy, specifically because they don’t have principles. They complain about, for example, left-wing cancel culture only because they know that the left are vulnerable to complaints. It puts them on the back foot, forces them into a position of defense. Then, when the right achieves power and begins cancelling their opponents with much greater zeal and vigor, the left call them hypocrites while the center smugly points the finger at the left and says this is their fault, this is nothing but fair turnabout.
Neither is correct. In truth, the right are not hypocrites. Hypocrisy is when a contradiction occurs between one’s stated principles and one’s conduct. Without principles no contradiction exists. To the right, left-wing cancel culture isn’t wrong because it’s an immoral or unfair thing; It’s wrong because it results in the right having less power. Right-wing cancel culture results in the right having more power, so it isn’t wrong, but is in fact right and good. There is no conflict here, it is entirely internally consistent.
You can see their strategy if you look for it. You can see how they maintain control of the frame. Out of power, the right feigns victimhood because they know the left are vulnerable to appeals to principle. In total power, they abruptly cease participating in liberal institutions, close themselves off, and begin acting as a sovereign aristocracy.
Liberal society will respond by acting as though both teams are still playing the same game under the same rules. They will make a show of pointing to the rulebook. They will act like frustrated pet owners continually coercing a badly domesticated animal toward the litterbox. But the right will just keep shitting on the rug because they know you will clean it up every single time.
The right learned early on the benefits of nonparticipation. Donald Trump was compelled to apologize after the Access Hollywood “grab them by the pussy” tape leaked—it didn’t kill the scandal, and it was the last time Trump ever apologized for anything, even the stuff that’s much worse (which is most of it, these days). Elon Musk set his companies’ email to auto-reply to press inquiries with a single poop emoji. The press, following rules and principles, is compelled to reach out for comment and to detail literally the response. The right took great delight in the print media’s self-imposed humiliation as it was constantly reporting “received poop emoji.”
The Trump government’s press briefings are farces, nothing more than theatre and performative nonparticipation. House Speaker Mike Johnson consistently responds to all questions about Trump’s scandals by pretending he’s never heard of them. They have largely replaced the press pool with ZeroHedge, InfoWars, The Daily Wire, and independent far-right toadie influencers like Benny Johnson and Tim Pool, who don’t ask questions so much as feed prompts.
Again, the liberal establishment feels compelled to act as though what’s happening is that the right is doing a bad job of following the rules, instead of recognizing no rules. The media and the Democratic party are thus stuck on a treadmill of making concessions to make it feel like this is an operational, if temporarily dysfunctional, bipartisan government. This forces us all to view everything through the right’s frame even when the story is critical: Drone strikes on Caribbean fishermen are wrongheaded foreign policy decisions. Nazi symbolism in official government social media is unconventional and crude public messaging. Outright securities fraud is controversial market manipulation.
When you look at the big picture, the Democratic party has been reduced to what is essentially a controlled opposition, permitted to exist to give the illusion that there are two teams in the game, but in reality, they are completely shut out of the federal apparatus. The Trump administration is an opaque box run by right-wing think tanks and multibillionaire ideologues like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. The only information that comes out of the box is curated propaganda not far removed from the superhuman legends of Kim Il-Sung propagated to the citizens of Pyongyang.
The left’s path out of this mess isn’t clear and it’s definitely not as straightforward as fighting fire with fire. The paradox is that, despite the almost universal disadvantage that results from having principles, I’m kind of a principles guy, and so are most people. It has been suggested that the most obvious solution is to just sort of, well, become Trump, abandon the rules as he does in order to fight on level ground.
The big problem with this idea is that this assumes the public desires that kind of clown show. The Republicans might have wrangled the election in their favor but they don’t remain in power due to the popularity of what they’re doing—Trump in his second term is a historically unpopular president. The GOP have burned their popularity mandate and must now rely fully on the institutional power they now possess.
Without public support, they’re now walking the scaffolding without a safety net. They have their stride and their balance, but also new vulnerabilities.
The most important challenge for the left isn’t that they have principles—just that they lack strategy. They remain stuck in the right’s frame, following the rules to the letter, trying to play the cleanest game possible, focusing on setting themselves as an example that the right absolutely will not follow.
There’s no rule that says you can’t have both principles and strategy. Maybe the combination will be a stronger alloy. The worst option is to go the Chuck Schumer route and wind up with neither.
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S Peter Davis
