Three Reasons Deradicalization is a Non-Issue
We Won This Round — How We Win the Next
If you prefer the audio of this article, click here.
One year ago, Imperium Press was the subject of a hit piece by The Guardian—the regime seemed to be fully in control. Now, Trump is bullying the left with executive orders and presidential pardons. The lid has been lifted on USAID, which was revealed to be a giant money laundering scheme designed to redirect taxpayer money into left-wing causes. The Secretary of State will reduce USAID staff from over 10,000 down to 294.1 Even some of the worst people, such as Cenk Uyghur and Ana Kasparian, are switching gears as they see the winds shifting.
What a difference a year makes.
But despite all the optimism, some in the dissident sphere worry that this all may throw a wet blanket over the radical energy that has built up since 2015. Is letting Trump and Musk have their way not just taking some of the bite out of dissident politics? It’s quite an understandable worry—we have been losing so long that we distrust winning as somehow secretly losing even harder.
In general, deradicalization worries tend to share one thing: commitment to reforming the system. Often this commitment envisions an electoral path to victory, with the belief that at some point people will demand change if things get bad enough, and if only we redpill the normies hard enough. It is the mapping of the 2016 alt-right strategy on to the reality of 2025. In a word, it is a belief in democracy.
Surely the path to reclaiming our countries will not be smooth. Surely the regime will strike back—in fact it already has.2 Surely we will encounter setbacks. But we have very good reasons to think that over the long term, worries about deradicalization are misplaced, and we should not spend much energy on them.
Reason #1: The Enemy Isn’t As Strong as You Think
For at least a generation now, the regime’s play has been to deplatform and prosecute illiberal thinkers rather than to refute them directly.3 This has required massive lawfare and an ocean of career bureaucrats, regime loyalists who add nothing—and less than nothing—to the value proposition of Western countries. As a result, not only has the regime collapsed the effectiveness of Western governance structures in, you know… governing, but they have also collapsed the political formula of Anglo countries: that of fair play, transparency, and public discourse. Now even the man in the street sees that his government is a Rube Goldberg machine employing layers of talmudry that accomplish nothing but keeping the “far right” out of power.
As a result, liberalism is dying a slow death. It is dying in the hearts of the elites. Now only the most cynical elites like Ben Shapiro or the most naïve elites like James Lindsay believe in classical liberalism. It is also dying in the hearts of the masses. Now that Trump has started abusing presidential powers to steamroll the establishment, the man in the street has acquired a taste for Caesarism. He understands that you need something more than neutral rules to clear out a bunch of parasites—you need a man for that. But we will return to this. It is enough to see that the centre-right is all but dead and this bodes very ill for the regime4—illiberalism is becoming thinkable, and more than thinkable.
The regime is now attempting to make peace with illiberalism, and it doesn’t know how. Case in point: the New York Times interview with Curtis Yarvin.5 While some radical right influencers reflexively commented that this was evidence that Neoreaction was regime-friendly right from the start, they clearly did not watch the interview. When Yarvin points out that democracy isn’t a thing, that monarchy is just how governance works, and that feudalism is not such a bad idea, the interviewer doesn’t even try to mask his contempt. At one point he sputters in exasperation over Yarvin’s recourse to historical examples which put him out of his depth.
The New York Times did not print “Democracy is Dead” over Yarvin’s face as a 4-dimensional chess move to deradicalize the right. They did so because they had no choice, because we forced it to. They realize that illiberalism is too big to ignore, that it has currency with people who have real power, that these ideas are dangerous, and that they had better get out in front of them. This was their attempt at damage control, and it backfired. No one who isn’t a pathological progressive will find Yarvin uninteresting and his interviewer insightful. This was a straight up loss.
The regime has been forced to abandon or severely downplay several of its key myths:
That America is not an empire
That democracy is a real thing
That history bends in the direction of left-wing “progress”
It cannot be overstated how much of a blow to the establishment it is that even one of these might come into question, much less all of them.
Your enemies have had it all their own way through all of living memory. No one alive today remembers a time when liberalism had to argue a serious case against anything that was not itself. No one alive today remembers when non-liberal assumptions held sway at all. No one alive today remembers when “illiberal” was a neutral adjective and not a term of abuse.
As a result, your enemies have become intellectually soft. They are unable to set their worldview on solid foundations. They can’t even imagine alternatives to their unstated assumptions. They rely on slander rather than argumentation. And now these approaches have come back to bite them. Soft lands make for soft men, and your enemies have had it easy for three generations. Meanwhile, the political formulae they rely upon have been eroded by their attempts to avoid rather than engage in debate.
Reason #2: Even If They Are Strong, the Right Won’t Go Quietly
No one doubts that the establishment has taken a beating. This is, after all, why Trump was brought in—to make flyover Americans buy back into the system. And yet, we have good reason to think that this will have little effect on the radical energy emanating from the right.
The first reason why not, is that this radical energy is not coming from ordinary flyover Americans, nor from the masses anywhere. Radicalization is a vanguard action by a rising intellectual counter-elite. And by this counter-elite I do not mean Larry Ellison or Sam Altman. The radical right leads, and the tech bros follow. Not because they’re secretly our guys (though they do read us)—Neema Parvini has done several excellent videos on why they’re not our guys.6 They follow the radical right because venture capitalists are beholden to reality, and the cream of the radical right perceives reality better than anyone else.
To be sure, the radical right has a lot of growing to do. We are not where we need to be intellectually. And we are certainly not where we need to be institutionally. But warts and all, we are the intellectual vanguard in the 21st century. And radicalization continues apace because although Trump is throwing red meat at his base, his base is not the vanguard.
America can put the radical left away but it can’t put away the radical right, because unlike the radical left, the regime does not fund, train, promote, and shape the radical right. What is driving the rise of the radical right is not patronage, but social issues that liberalism itself has wrought.
To take one example, let us look at the economy. Any functional economy must take on a pyramidal shape with primary industries dominating at the bottom, above which are fewer secondary industries, then even fewer tertiary industries, then yet fewer quaternary industries, with still fewer quinary industries at the top.
The reason we have globalism in the West is that no Western nation has this structure, but the structure is required for an effective political entity, and so the effective political entity of these “nations” must be expanded. If your nation’s economy is too heavily weighted toward the top of the pyramid, then your “nation” also includes those other nations that fill out the bottom of the pyramid, because your sovereignty depends on them.
Unless Trump’s America returns to autarky, globalism will never be defeated, and unless globalism is defeated, radicalism will continue to emerge from the right. As the mishap with Musk and Vivek over H1B migrants illustrated, the “based” counter-elite is still positioned in direct opposition to nationalism of the kind that would truly short-circuit the radical right. We will know if the regime gets serious about deradicalization because it will be willing to recast the American economy from the bottom up—nothing less will tamp down the flame of radicalism.
And this brings us to our third reason that radicalism is on the rise.