By Nate Hochman
Tuesday,
November 30, 2021
The right-wing Internet vocabulary is
rife with “pills.” The red pill, originally a reference to the famous choice that Neo faces in The Matrix: “You take the blue
pill, the story ends. . . . You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and
I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” The “red pill” has become the
conservative version of “woke,” denoting ideological affinity and an awareness
of what’s really going on behind the curtain. The blue pill is
its ignorant and blissfully unaware counterpart. This initial binary has
expanded to accommodate a vast array of digital capsules, ranging from the
white pill’s hope and confidence to the clear pill’s “absence of
political conviction” altogether. There is even a quantum
pill, which stands for a sort of in-between state, seeing the future in what
Spencer Klavan describes as “both an optimistic and a pessimistic way at once — like a
quantum computer hovering at 1 and 0 simultaneously, or like Schrödinger’s cat,
both alive and dead until observed.”
The most dire of all “pills,” however, is
the black pill, a term that originally arose in online “incel”
forums to describe an attitude of complete
and totalizing nihilism — both a despair about one’s situation and a firm
conviction that the existing state of things will not, and cannot,
improve. Amid a growing alarm about the state of the country and Western
civilization more broadly, this pessimistic outlook has become increasingly
common in some corners of the Right. Conservative black pills come in many
forms, from Rod Dreher’s culture-war
defeatism to Patrick Deneen’s thesis that the rot in modern American liberalism traces all the way back
to the Founding — that the “atomistic
philosophy” underpinning the American experiment, in
other words, was doomed from the outset.
And they aren’t exclusive to the
traditionalist wing of the Right. “I am really struggling to think of a time
when I despaired more for the country and had so much contempt not just for
both parties, but the bases of both parties,” The Dispatch’s Jonah
Goldberg tweeted in August. Never Trump writer Tom Nichols chimed in to
agree: “Man, I wish I didn’t feel what you’re
feeling about the public. That’s the source of my despair.”
There is ample reason to feel anxious
nowadays, as many Americans across the ideological spectrum do. In a poll taken in
early November, two-thirds of respondents said the country was on the wrong track.
Expressions of patriotic pride have continued to plummet to
record lows. The American experiment in
self-government is facing serious challenges. American cities — ravaged by
political violence last summer — are experiencing a resurgent crime wave the
likes of which have not been seen for decades. Drug- and depression-fueled “deaths of
despair” afflict rural communities. Our porous
southern border is overrun. Abroad, our military engagements seem incompetent
at best, catastrophic at worst. And some of our leaders no longer seem
to think that we even deserve to
stand up for our interests. From our most prestigious universities on down to
our public elementary schools, the American education system is beset by a
radical and corrosive ideology that teaches our children to despise the country
they are poised to inherit. Meanwhile, many of our elites, including most of
those who currently set our nation’s course, are not merely apathetic but
rather actively hostile to the nation’s history, political system, and
citizenry.
So, yes, grave concern is not only
warranted, but rational. But is despair justified? The answer,
I submit, is no. The problem with despair is that it is the easy way
out. It is often more comfortable than hope. The black pill liberates
those who take it from the burden of national loyalty. If America is beyond
saving — or more radically still, if America was never worth fighting for in
the first place — then why bother being emotionally invested in its future? The
rational thing to do would be to jump ship.
And that seems to be what some corners of
the Right are preparing to do.
On the one hand, for all their talk of
institutionalism, the most committed Never Trumpers are often remarkably happy
to engage in their own fair share of institutional arson when it suits them.
Abandoning our political institutions is not the same as abandoning America
itself, but it is still an admission of defeat — a fatalism whose logical
conclusion is the decimation of the political institutions that have defined
American politics for centuries. The Bulwark, for example, has
resolved to destroy the Republican Party root and branch: “Burn it all
down,” declared editor-at-large Charlie Sykes in July 2020. “The GOP Needs
to Hit Rock Bottom,” agreed the title of a piece by Mona
Charen, published around the same time. And it’s no longer just about Trump,
either: Even affable moderates such as Glenn Youngkin are beyond the
pale for The Bulwark.
Anti-Trumpist conservatives like Goldberg
are not as sour on red America as The Bulwark is. But
they have embraced the same pessimistic posture toward many legacy conservative
institutions, from the Republican Party to Fox News. Despite his regular exhortations of the need for stronger
political parties, Goldberg recently proposed a third-party alternative to the GOP: Presenting “a simple,
Reaganite conservative platform combined with a serious plank to defend the
soundness of elections,” such a party could run “non-Trumpy candidate[s]” to
“play the role of spoiler by garnering enough conservative votes in the general
election to throw the election to the Democrat,” therefore causing “the GOP
some pain for its descent into asininity.” (This idea was argued against by various writers at National Review,
including Michael
Brendan Dougherty, whom Goldberg invited onto his podcast
for a friendly discussion.)
On the other end of the conservative
spectrum are those who have decided that America no longer deserves their
loyalty at all. Some voices in this faction even openly express a preference
for our enemies. “I’m at peace with a Chinese-led 21st century,” Sohrab Ahmari
mused in a since-deleted tweet back in May. “Late-liberal America is too dumb and decadent to
last as a superpower. Chinese civilization, especially if it recovers more of
its Confucian roots, will possess a great deal of natural virtue.” Right-wing
Catholic writer Jonathan Culbreath chimed in: “It’s clear that a lot of conservatives are misled by a
hyper-Americanist propaganda about contemporary China, which, for all its
problems, actually has something like a real conservative and traditionalist
commitment to its past.”
Can it be that America has fallen so far
that it invites unfavorable comparison with a totalitarian country engaged in
an active genocide against millions of its own people? No — of course not. One
need not deny the profound, even unprecedented, challenges that the American
nation is facing to understand that America is still a better country than
China, by any and every standard imaginable.
The Kyle Rittenhouse trial was an
instructive episode. All the institutional progressive powers-that-be mobilized
to undermine Rittenhouse’s access to impartial justice, from Big Tech’s censoring
expressions of support for
the teen and shutting down
fundraising efforts to the legacy media’s outrageously
biased and misleading coverage of the case. National Democratic politicians, up to and including Joe
Biden, smeared Rittenhouse as a white supremacist. But in spite of
everything, the jury delivered a just verdict of not guilty. Those who doubt
the integrity of the American system or who have lost all faith in our
traditions should have their optimism rekindled by the outcome.
The American tradition is the ideal
foundation for a project of national renewal. The black-pilled arguments to the
contrary are the product of the very decadence and modern malaise that those
who fantasize about a Chinese-style regime are most critical of. It is a skewed
perspective born from too much time in insular Internet circles, and not enough
time spent outside in the real world.
The digital realm competes directly with
the flesh-and-blood one; as our time in the former increases, our loyalties to
the latter wane. This is what leads to apathy about the future of the American
nation itself — an odd turn for the Right, which is supposed to be fighting to
defend it.
Something like this logic compelled former
Trump-administration speechwriter Darren Beattie (who was fired after
it emerged that he had spoken at a political conference at which white
nationalists also appeared) to recently — and outrageously — tweet: “I am not America First. I am talent, beauty, excellence first. If
America is no longer a hospitable place to cultivate those virtues, I will
gladly root for whatever place decides to fill that void.”
But America is not just a momentarily
hospitable place to cultivate certain virtues. It is our country. We
are a people, with a way of life that is undergirded by fundamental
and eternal principles — but those principles alone are not what make our
country ours. We are not merely autonomous individuals, free to
forget and begin anew, but bound together. The American birthright comes with
both rights and responsibilities.
Just where else would our nihilistic
friends suggest we go? The rest of the West is in much worse shape than we are.
China has set about building the world’s first techno-totalitarian state.
America, on the other hand, still has the First and Second Amendments as well
as powerful red states that are increasingly well situated to erode the
dominance of national progressive-controlled institutions. Absolutist
narratives of decline suffer from the same problem as absolutist narratives of
progress: Both assume that History has an inevitable and predetermined
direction. But it doesn’t. Don’t let any black-pill-peddling digital junkies
convince you otherwise.
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