Charles Haywood of the Wordsy House joins me to talk about Rob Dreyer's new book, "No Allies to the Right: How to Deal with the Right's Most Dangerous Man on the Right" and why he thinks Rob is the most dangerous man on the right.
00:02:11.460I wanted to bring you on because I talked a little bit about kind of your situation with Dave the Distributist on our streams about friends and gatekeepers.
00:02:22.380But as we were getting into the conversation, I realized, wait, I know this guy.
00:02:27.700So, I figured it would be a good idea to have you on.
00:02:31.160So, maybe we could start a little bit at the beginning.
00:02:33.640It seems like the thing that got this started was your assertion of a principle, or at least, if not a principle, an idea, that no enemies to the right.
00:02:47.700This phrase seems to have triggered Rob Dreyer into writing about you.
00:02:53.220I think that's kind of where things kicked off.
00:02:55.340Could you catch people up a little bit if they're not familiar?
00:02:58.440I mean, I feel a little bit bad punching up on Rob Dreyer because he's so very punchable and people have been punching on him a lot recently.
00:03:07.320In fact, I think everyone's familiar with the famous meme of the pink-haired woman, or I think she was pink-haired, screaming after Trump was inaugurated.
00:03:17.420And someone said that his friends on the left think of Rob Dreyer as the right-wing equivalent of that woman.
00:03:23.820So, I feel a little bit bad adding to the cacophony of people beating up on Dreyer, but I think this is important.
00:03:29.840I like Dreyer, and I think he's done a lot of valuable work, though I think, as you also correctly identified with Dave, the distributist, performative outrage has become his thing.
00:03:41.180But focusing on the narrow question of no enemies to the right, Dreyer apparently, and I honestly have never gone and looked into the details,
00:03:49.080because as I said in a piece that I wrote later, I don't care, Dreyer led a witch hunt against a guy who I believe was headmaster at a classical Christian academy that I believe some or all of his children attended in Baton Rouge.
00:04:03.100And in typical Dreyer fashion, who likes to say that anyone to his right is ipso facto a bad person, he was leading this witch hunt against this guy.
00:04:15.320And I just commented on Twitter, I saw it pop up because I follow Dreyer, and I commented on his lengthy screed,
00:04:27.040And as you say, this kind of triggered Rod, you know, Rod, pretty easy to trigger, I guess, but, and I know Rod somewhat, I'm an acquaintance,
00:04:34.720though he blocked me on Twitter, and I'm pretty sure I'm off his Christmas card list now.
00:04:39.480So I still do pay $300 a year for his sub stack, because, you know, I can't help myself.
00:04:46.040But he wrote a piece basically saying that people who say this are very bad.
00:04:53.320They're, you know, Nazis, and just generally just terrible human beings without naming me, referring to the Twitter comment, but without naming me.
00:05:01.320So the excellent online magazine, I Am 1776, suggested a dialogue between me and Daniel Miller discussing this question.
00:05:11.300And so he wrote this, and I thought my section of it was pretty pithy and pretty punchy, and he published it, maybe two weeks after the original thing.
00:05:21.220I actually assumed that Dreyer would just ignore it, but instead he went all, you know, crazy and started writing lengthy screeds with giant pictures of myself picked deliberately to make me look bad.
00:05:31.940I mean, it's very hard to make me look bad, but, you know, it brought me down to like a six or a seven on a ten scale, and it was very offensive to me.
00:05:37.900And so, but more to the point, he made Nazi references to me and compared me to indirectly to Oswald Mosley, you know, the leader of the British black shirts, the fascists, the run up to World War II.
00:05:51.680And, you know, just generally, and he didn't, of course, a single time address a single point that I had made, which were very detailed and very lengthy, about the importance of this tactical principle.
00:06:01.580No enemies to the right. Rather than engaging in this, he maundered on and on about supposed, but non-existent, personal invective, and how I was a Nazi, and that Nazis are bad.
00:06:13.380It was very kind of tiresome and disappointing, frankly.
00:06:15.540Yeah, and like you said, I don't want to focus so much on the back and forth, Jared, because A, it's got a little feel of drama, and B, like you said, easy, easy target, no fun.
00:06:28.740I think that your discussion with Miller was far more nuanced and productive, because it was an actual discussion.
00:06:36.860And everyone should read it if they haven't.
00:06:38.120Yes, absolutely. If you haven't read the actual discussion, you can go to IM1776 and check it out there.
00:06:45.640But I wanted to, because we kind of touched on the topic, and because I think this is an interesting time for the right, I think there are a lot more mainstream people who are fed up with what's going on,
00:06:57.400and they want to listen to different voices and look at different ways of approaching issues.
00:07:03.740I think more people are paying attention to this space, and so I wanted to give you a chance to kind of flesh out in a longer discussion kind of what you meant by this,
00:07:13.820and at the end of this, kind of start pointing to what victory might look like, because as I was reading this discussion and looking at kind of the back and forth between you and Dreher and others,
00:07:24.620I started thinking to myself, what do people actually think that victory looks like?
00:07:28.740Like, what does that endgame actually look like to them?
00:07:33.540And I would be interested in kind of exploring that a little bit with you.
00:18:33.840Yeah, I think it's very difficult for people to understand that as a priority to then, you know,
00:18:42.120like I said, I think it's very difficult for people to understand what victory looks like.
00:18:45.780But I don't want to skip to the end there for that yet, because we'll talk about this in a little bit.
00:18:50.040So the next criticism that Miller has that I think a lot of people would, you know, would maybe agree with or find useful is your characterization of the Enlightenment.
00:19:02.300This is obviously something I've been critical of, so my audience probably wouldn't be shocked to hear someone criticize the Enlightenment.
00:19:09.900But for a lot of people, especially mainstream conservatives, this sounds kind of insane.
00:19:14.180And Miller kind of brings up that the Enlightenment, he says your definition is too narrow.
00:19:19.800It's not noticing a lot of the other things, the freedoms and rights and positive civic consequences of the Enlightenment.
00:19:30.680Could you go a little more into why you've narrowed the Enlightenment down to kind of those two factors and why the rest doesn't really apply in your mind?
00:19:37.820Sure, because all the good things that people claim for the Enlightenment, or that is, propagandists for the Enlightenment have claimed since the beginning in an attempt to add a desirable sheen to their nasty product, are things that have nothing to do with the Enlightenment.
00:19:54.300So the rule of law, for example, people sometimes, you know, ludicrously talk about as being part of the Enlightenment when that's something that was part of the West for a thousand years, two thousand years, whatever.
00:20:09.220I mean, you know, it is the case that the Oriental despot is a stereotype in Western thought for good reason.
00:20:15.720Like essentially all stereotypes, 80 or 90 percent of it is true.
00:20:18.860That is, outside of the West, the rule of law has not been a thing, generally speaking.
00:20:22.920But inside the West, it has been a thing.
00:20:25.180And of course, occasionally honored in the breach.
00:20:28.680But the fact is that things like the rule of law, natural rights, scientific accomplishments, the scientific revolution, none of those things have anything to do with the Enlightenment.
00:20:39.160I mean, you can get into hyper-technical sub-arguments about whether Francis Bacon's desire to improve man's estate is a precursor to the Enlightenment, and whether we should focus less on scientific progress and more on spiritual progress or something like that.
00:20:54.580But the fact is that the propagandists for the Enlightenment, you know, people like Rousseau, basically, you know, French philosophes who, of course, ultimately led to the first instantiation of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, there's instantiation in the real world.
00:21:09.400We're all focused on primarily emancipation and egalitarianism.
00:21:14.080They wanted their definitions might have been slightly different than people might say emancipation today, but they basically wanted to free people of what they thought of as irrational bonds, which in reality are merely recognitions of reality.
00:21:27.380And so there may be some variations on that, but fundamentally, the things that people claim are part of the Enlightenment are simply not part of the Enlightenment, because they all preceded the Enlightenment, and in a few cases probably came along in parallel.
00:21:42.560And you can also argue about, like, the Scottish Enlightenment, whether that's really part of the Enlightenment, or that some of the things that political reforms that came along with that might or might not have been desirable.
00:21:52.340But those things aren't focused on the core of Enlightenment principles, which, again, are emancipation and egalitarianism.
00:21:59.380And I actually, it's funny, like in 2018, I did a review, you know, on my site, my primary thing is book reviews, or rather, my thoughts masquerading as reviews of other people's books.
00:22:09.760And I did Steven Pinker's Enlightenment now, where I castigated Pinker at great length for exactly this error, that is telling us, lying to us, that the Enlightenment is the thing that produced all the good things of the modern world, when in fact, what it's done is produced all the bad things of the modern world.
00:22:30.400Well, it's a wig history with a genesis right around the Enlightenment, right?
00:22:37.220Like, you've just, you've got, you know, there was this dark time, and then suddenly rationalism, or rationality was birthed into the world, and it fundamentally altered the, you know, the understanding of humanity and the way it could act.
00:22:51.840And, you know, moving forward, you know, that was always, you know, going to create a never-ending, you know, progress that now has caught up with the people who worshipped it, and now they're complaining about kind of the end state of that progress.
00:23:07.840But they don't seem, seem to kind of understand that that was the natural conclusion, the inevitable conclusion of kind of their ideology.
00:23:16.840I guess, actually, it might be interesting for a second.
00:23:19.400I've made this argument a few times, but sometimes it's nice to hear someone else make it a different way, and I think you'd probably be pretty good at it.
00:23:25.840What is the problem with emancipation?
00:23:28.840What's the problem with a consent-based morality?
00:23:31.320What's the problem with freedom for everyone?
00:23:34.020Well, because it leads to societal atomization, and, well, there's two problems.
00:23:39.340One is that it leads to societal atomization, and a society that is atomized is never going to be a successful society.
00:23:47.120You can't have a society that operates successfully without having people enmeshed in a web of unchosen bonds.
00:23:57.440And the second reason is that an emancipatory society denies reality.
00:24:02.440So, for example, when you pretend that there is no unbreakable bond between mother, father, and child, but instead that's something that has to be chosen, or you can have two fathers and a child, this is just a fantasy, a denial of reality, a form of insanity.
00:24:19.040And so, because any form of forced emancipation ends in that latter, that is a complete denial of reality, emancipation is bad.
00:24:29.380And, of course, a stock rejoinder is, well, didn't we emancipate the slaves kind of thing?
00:24:35.360I mean, there are forms of unjust behavior that need to be remedied by justice, but that has nothing to do with emancipation in the sense that the Enlightenment used it.
00:24:46.140I mean, you don't want to be Rousseau, who had something like five children that he put in an orphanage, and most of them died, or something like that, because he didn't want the unchosen bonds of having to relate to their mothers and those children.
00:24:59.940And that's just a kind of, you know, particularly nasty example of the core thought of the Enlightenment, which is, don't burden me with these unpleasant, unchosen bonds.
00:25:09.860You know, and these things are unpleasant.
00:25:12.220I mean, the fact is that emancipation is pleasant and sweet if you're a person who has resources and power.
00:25:57.880I mean, there's many other problems with emancipation and the theories and the political philosophy of the Enlightenment.
00:26:03.620But in some ways, the most glaring one is the fact that our society is literally killing itself.
00:26:09.700You know, you don't need much more proof than that, that a political philosophy is a dead end.
00:26:13.780Yeah, you know, Christopher Lash does a great job of talking about this in Revolt of the Elites, about how the elites have chosen an ideology for that might work purely for themselves advantageously and applied it kind of to the larger world.
00:26:32.520So, you know, they're not going to suffer the consequences.
00:26:34.640They have the material resources, the intellectual firepower, the, you know, the different, the standing in the hierarchy to not suffer significant backlash, at least for some amount of time from adopting this ideology.
00:26:47.700But by spreading it to the masses, they've kind of doomed them because the vast majority of people can't live in this way.
00:26:53.720And by promising everyone that you could by simply kind of dissolving, you know, societal structure with this universal asset of consent, consent based morality, you you've ensured kind of the destitution of a large portion of people.
00:27:08.060It's really intoxicating for people to believe that every that really, you know, upper class living is just a function of, you know, material wealth.
00:27:19.260And eventually everyone will be able to have that and be able to utilize it.
00:27:23.400But the truth is, that's not the only thing that makes that happen.
00:27:26.080It's not the only thing that allows these people to enjoy some of the lifestyles that they do.
00:27:30.140And pretending that everyone is just going to create, you know, have this, you know, luxury automated space communism is going to and then be completely freed of all these bonds and be able to choose everything they want and have no repercussions was just a great way to ensure misery for the vast majority of people.
00:27:46.100Yeah, I mean, the vast majority of people need and want guardrails and the reductio ad absorbum, of course, of this idea is the is the Marxist idea that if we emancipate everyone from various bonds, then everyone will be an Aristotle or Mozart and we'll all work one hour a day.
00:28:07.420And people will, in all their free time, which they will will be totally unconstrained, they will develop superhuman talent.
00:28:23.440Everybody needs to have limitations placed upon him.
00:28:25.800It is true that some of the people who are most notable in history are the people who rejected that and proceeded to make their own reality, say Napoleon.
00:28:33.740But Napoleon, you know, we can't all be Napoleon and nor should we want to be Napoleon.
00:28:40.840It's just an interesting historical artifact.
00:28:43.300Yeah, you have to be 5'7", which is a real deal breaker.
00:29:05.240So, if we need these boundaries and these guardrails, right?
00:29:10.880If it's so important to impose these, then why shouldn't we just show everyone how important they are by constantly applying them to anyone who steps out of bounds on the right?
00:29:23.280Like, if that's good for society in general, why isn't that a good specific political tactic in this instance?
00:29:31.100Because the kinds of boundaries, you know, unchosen bonds I'm talking about are not fundamentally political ones or political beliefs.
00:29:38.220There are things like marriage and children and normal sexual behavior and don't rip people off.
00:29:49.960And ultimately, these things are enforced not by law, though you can, in fact, legislate morality.
00:29:55.900I mean, you can very effectively legislate morality, but you can't only legislate morality.
00:30:00.340Things have to be enforced from within the society by stigma.
00:30:03.700But when we're talking about enemies on the right or political enemies more broadly, those things are not unchosen bonds or emancipation in the same sense that we're talking about.
00:30:15.700These things are tactical, in essence.
00:30:17.740And, yeah, they're related in some ways kind of to political philosophy.
00:30:23.100Both these things might be subsumed within the broad heading of political philosophy.
00:30:26.440But the people on the right that I disagree with, whether on specific political beliefs or on tactics, it's not an emancipatory thing.
00:30:37.720And I also think that one should have a very broad opinion of the types of things that you're willing to tolerate on the right.
00:30:46.740But by tolerate, I mean just not get into arguments unnecessarily about.
00:30:52.780And that kind of also cuts against the idea that this has any relationship to emancipation on a societal level, which is a core political philosophy of the Enlightenment.
00:31:04.580Now, some people might say, but no enemies to the right, a lot of you guys spend plenty of time attacking mainstream conservatism, attacking what many people call, you know, Con Inc., going after, you know, I don't know, the Sean Hannity's of the world.
00:31:20.180Isn't that a betrayal of your very principle?
00:33:03.940But I think it needs to be, in every instance, carefully scrutinized as to whether it's necessary and whether you're doing it for useful purposes or for some other purpose, like self-aggrandizement or because attacking the left is difficult and dangerous and attacking someone else on the right isn't difficult and dangerous.
00:33:22.720And it gives you that sweet dopamine hit when, you know, the Twitter likes go up.
00:33:27.020You know, I mean, you have to consider why you're doing it.
00:33:52.720You know, they're they're actively taking steps to to harm the right.
00:33:56.940And I don't think that they qualify as the right because their their job is to to control it, not to actually lead it.
00:34:05.100They have no actual intention of bettering the lives of the people who they're supposed to be representing or leading.
00:34:11.200And so I don't feel bad going after those kind of people at all.
00:34:14.680There are other people who like you're talking about, maybe with Rod, you know, who have good intentions and in many ways could be aligned.
00:34:28.720Like you're talking about that that is a serious problem that continuously holds up the right.
00:34:32.500And if you just let it sit there, then it's then it's a serious problem.
00:34:36.940And in those cases, it's better if possible to come alongside and make it a teachable thing rather, you know, even if it's public rather than maybe a direct attack on intentions, which which I think I don't think you made any attack on intentions there.
00:34:53.520But I think that's really important for people, because the more I run into these people, the more I interact with a lot of these people, the more I am surprised how many I think genuinely just didn't don't understand the problem.
00:35:07.180But like, it's very easy, I think, maybe from kind of our corner of the Internet, that's been a little more on the on the edge of kind of the theory stuff and what's going on to say, oh, every everyone like this is just completely controlled opposition.
00:35:21.220They're they're disingenuous. They're just grifting, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:35:25.500And, you know, fair. There are there are people who do that.
00:35:28.200I'm not saying there aren't, but I'm just saying you'd be surprised at how often in those interactions people just genuinely didn't understand a misstep they were making and how a correction from someone who has the right ant smell, who is on side, is actually very useful and is actually taken on board for those people when they feel like it's coming from the right place.
00:35:51.220Well, I think that's absolutely right. And I think that as the right gains power, which, of course, I mean, this is probably beyond the scope of our conversation today, but I maintain that that is is likely to happen in the near future.
00:36:02.440These kind of conversations become more productive. They build on themselves.
00:36:07.140I wouldn't quite go so far as to say you'd see some kind of preference cascade, but I think you would see more productive unity on the right than you tend to see now.
00:36:16.840I mean, this is part of the problem of being a fractured and largely not defeated, but relatively powerless group that you tend to have arguments among each among yourselves.
00:36:29.580I mean, famously, Eastern, I'm half Hungarian, and my grandfather was was heavily involved with the Hungarian emigre community.
00:36:39.540That is emigre meaning post people who left after the communists took over in 1945.
00:36:45.060And and, you know, the joke used to be that emigre arguments were so vicious because the stakes were so low, you know.
00:36:53.260And so, I mean, my grandfather didn't. He was a he was a very wise man and indulged in these kind of things.
00:36:58.960But a lot of people did. And so I think there was a problem like that on the right.
00:37:02.740I think weirdly or paradoxically, having more power encourages growing up behavior.