Political life is inevitably disappointing because all political movements contain contradictions. Democrats see themselves as champions of the working class, but their party leans toward the highly educated; Old school Republicans talk about freedom from big government while tolerating predation by large corporations. Whenever anyone makes an argument about how society should function, they run the risk of being a hypocrite because reality is messed up. So perhaps the New Right's contradictions are simply commonplace.
Field shows that this is not the case. The contradictions of the New Right reflect a unique gap between thinking and reality. For example, the word “nationalist” may have found its way into Trump’s vocabulary due to the widespread influence of “nationalists.”The Virtue of Nationalism“, a book published a month before the Houston rally by philosopher and political theorist Yoram Hazony and received acclaim among conservatives. Its central claim is that the world is a better place when it is made up of individual nation-states, each with its own individual culture and history; such societies are more stable, achieve more, and make unique contributions to humanity as a whole. This is not unreasonable. But Hazony takes this idea very far. In abstract terms, he argues that according to him view, there is a black-and-white choice between so-called imperialism and national sovereignty. Hazony suggests that the concept of national sovereignty, in turn, can be traced to the struggle of “biblical Israel” to maintain its political independence and religious freedom.
Hazony's concept of nationalism appears to have influenced Trumpism; The National Conservatism movement, which Hazony helped found, counts Vance, Marco Rubio and Josh Hawley among its supporters. There are all sorts of problems with justifying the idea of statehood, even in general terms, using the example of Israel. But the biggest problem with Hazony's theory, Field writes, is that it “is not connected to real-world history.” In fact, many countries have prospered without being so monolithic, and there are shades of nationalism, multiculturalism and liberalism that allow countries to prosper without making black and white choices. Moreover, it is simply a fact that the United States is home to people from different places, with different cultures and views. There's really no point in applying Hazony-style nationalism here. The signal intellectual mistake of the new right, according to Field, is that it allows “abstractions to drown out the simple truths of the real world.” You can't deport half of America.
The New Right has a lot of very abstract ideas – not just about nationhood, but about human nature, God, virtue, gender, technology, the “common good” and much more. One way to understand this penchant for abstraction, Field writes, is to look at a book like this: “Ideas have consequencesWeaver's point, Field argues, was that “without transcendental metaphysics . . there is nothing to limit political licentiousness, and there is no reason why people should be good and truthful.” We might doubt it; we might point out that being unsure of what is right and wrong certainly does not make you a nihilist. (In fact, the opposite is probably true.) However, many conservative intellectuals have since been convinced that “moral relativism” poses a serious danger to civilization.
If for some reason you believe that moral uncertainty is nihilism, then you urgently need to find transcendental metaphysics. This may mean going to the Greeks, or the Romans, or the Bible, or some other authority and claiming that whatever you find there is transcendentally true. Unfortunately, since we are stuck in modernity, it is always possible to disagree with what is transcendental; It is also easy to accept new transcendental abstractions into your pantheon. And so someone like the influential far-right provocateur Costin Alamariu, aka Bronze Age Pervertor BAP, may offer an alternative version of ancient history in which people once lived freely in the Bronze Age but are now trapped in a cage of “gynocracy.” This view, outlined in the widely read book “Bronze Age mindset“, is hardly metaphysical. But it can easily be added to the storehouse of abstract ideas that seem to some people to be transcendentally true with a capital T. (Vance follows the Bronze Age pervert in X.)
