The Principle
The Worthy House, and Charles Haywood in particular, published an excellent article about a month ago that I have been meaning to share. It is about the “No Enemies On The Right [NEOTR]” principle.
Find it here. Here are the 10 key points of the principle:
1) The only present real-life goal of the Right which matters is total, permanent defeat of the Left. All else, including any possibility of the future flourishing of mankind, depends on this defeat and is downstream from it.
2) The Left are those individuals, entities, organizations, and systems animated by Left ideology.
3) Left ideology is the ideology that is the essence of the so-called Enlightenment. This consists of demands for total emancipation from all bonds not continuously chosen, combined with forced egalitarianism, all in the belief these principles will lead to an actual utopia, a heaven on earth.
4) The Left is the enemy of mankind. An enemy is, as Carl Schmitt said, an “adversary [who] intends to negate his opponent’s way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one’s own form of existence.” An enemy is not someone with whom you merely disagree on strategy, tactics, or aesthetics.
5) At this present moment, the Right is properly defined as anyone and anything not Left. The Right is extremely diverse in belief, relative to the Left. This is irrelevant, at least today.
6) Disagreement and animus, and therefore conflict, among those on the Right will always exist; this is the nature of man and politics. What to do with respect to such conflicts should be evaluated solely with the criterion whether any given action serves to defeat the Left. This does not mean one cannot say “I don’t like your tactics,” “I don’t like your policy proposals,” or, for that matter, “I don’t like you.” It does mean that no person on the Right needs to “be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one’s own form of existence,” because only the Left threatens our existence, and that most imminently. Therefore no action towards anyone on the Right should ever seek to, or threaten to, stop that person from earning a living or from being a full member of society (what is sometimes, though the term is not very helpful, called “cancellation”).
7) Some disagreement on the Right is helpful to achieve our common goal; some is not helpful but not destructive. Either way, disagreement on the Right should always be conducted in a way that does not benefit the Left, but rather advances the goal of the Right to permanently end all Left power. Usually, this means necessary disagreement should be done as privately as feasible. However, the default position with respect to someone with whom one disagrees on important matters should be ignoring that person, if he brings nothing to the political table, or cooperating with him where it serves to defeat the Left.
8) Occasionally, as with the so-called Intellectual Dark Web or “classical liberals,” some on the Left may espouse some principles or policies of benefit to the Right—not to help us, ever, to be sure, but to help themselves. Cooperation with such people to achieve limited present political ends should not be rejected. But because the primary loyalty of such people is to the Left, we should always realize they are, and always will be, eager to destroy us at the first opportunity. They are our enemies, and always will be, unless they change themselves and reject the premises of the Left.
9) NEOTR is not a permanent principle. When the Right gains power, and the Left is utterly defeated, there will be enemies on the Right, because disputes will arise about how to exercise that power. This is simply the nature of human political action.
10) NEOTR could be phrased in different, longer, more complex ways, making subtle distinctions. These have philosophical value, but they undercut a first principle of politics, which is that winning must take precedence over intellectual hair-splitting. We should stick with the clear, simple formulation of NEOTR.
Haywood starts the article with the reasoning behind why we need a principle like this and then goes into common objections.
Before you object, check to make sure he has not already answered your objection.
Go read the full thing. It’s a good piece. I’ve commented on most of these bullet points at one point or another myself (including some just recently, like #3 for the Enlightenment, #5 for defining the Right, and #7 with my dissident critique of secular materialism, of which Haywood himself would be included—But note I am still sharing his articles and praising his work here because NEOTR).
#8 is especially important, because this covers the “questionable” people like Elon Musk, Rubin, Ben Shapiro, Prager, and the rest of the classical crew. They are not our allies. Use them for their worth but remember that they are not “on the Right”, so they do not apply to the principle. Trust your actual right-wing brothers, not some gay guy, dual citizens, or billionaire centrists. These guys will never allow #1 to come to pass.
It would be tremendously helpful for our cause if everyone genuinely on the Right (see point 5) would adopt this mindset.
The modern Right is a lot like post-1800s Christians: We spend more time fighting each other than fighting the true enemy.
Let’s collectively decide to face the true enemy first and with most of our might, and maybe dedicate 5-20% of our energy rebuking one another. I’m not against edifying, disagreeing, and discussion, but that should never be our primary focus when our situation is becoming so dire. We either work together and win or bicker and die alone.
We are in a fight for our very existence. Let’s perhaps secure our existence first and then hammer out trivial policy differences later.
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