I went down the rabbit hole with some contemporary reactionary writing recently. Wild trip. One thing I like about the reactionary writing style is the overwrought, mystical tone (not snarking here - I am being serious). Some impressions:

One thing I said out loud at one point was "man, it always comes back to eugenics." This really bothered/bothers me, because we've been conditioned to associate the term eugenic with Nazi death camps.

Indeed, I think this explains why:

1) the knee-jerk response to a lot of modern reactionary writing is to dismiss it as Nazi

2) modern reactionary writing does, in fact, attract a lot of people with at least Nazi-adjacent views

but in a broader sense, the core concepts underlying neo-reactionary writing are not inherently racist or eugenic in the Nazi death camp sense. It is really about the inevitability of selection pressures.

The idea that selection pressures are an inevitable fact of the human conditions is not super controversial (shouldn't be, anyway). This is a core pillar of The Lessons of History and the Durants won both a Pulitzer Prize and a Presidential Medal of freedom for their work.

Pretty mainstream accolades (admittedly, the Durants would probably be cancelled today, which is pretty ironic considering their strong progressive impulses)

The other thing that strikes me is that for all that the distaste for postmodernism, the reactionary concept of the Cathedral is a very postmodern construction.

The pomo equivalent is the idea of a discourse that is validated over time by institutions within a society. The funny thing about pomo haters who don't understand pomo ideas very well is that this is EXACTLY what they are complaining about.

"Pomo ideas are dumb. What idiots. Man it sucks that all these pomo driven institutions shape the terms on which we are permitted to discuss any social, economic or political issue."

The smarter reactionary writers realize this, of course. I have a soft spot for the Cathedral formulation of the whole thing because it's gothic and super evocative and I think in general we'd probably all benefit from some neo-gothic mysticism in our lives.

The reactionary writers have some very interesting things to say about weak, large government versus small, strong government also.

The IDW people would probably cringe at this but I think the pomo framework actually works well for analyzing the conflict between the IDW and the mainstream. The whole thing is a conflict over the validity of various discourses.

Yes, there are sub-conflicts that can actually be subjected to the scientific method in terms of generating falsifiable hypotheses and whatnot. But that's not what anyone is hot and bothered about.

I actually think the reactionaries are going to get their day in the sun. Because I think we are headed for a period of chaos and disorder as we move from a unipolar world governed by a neoliberal consensus to... something else...

And in periods of chaos and disorder people will gravitate toward the wondrous, orderly, neo-gothic architecture of reactionary thinking.

Something that is not discussed enough about neo-reactionary writing is that the largest unit of social organization in this school of thought is NOT the nation-state. It is a basically the city-state.

This is REALLY important. It is probably impossible to actually end up here without some global catastrophe that wipes the slate clean (or close to clean).

I can't claim to speak for the neo-reactionaries, but I suspect their take would be that this is inevitable... that our modern, (postmodern? hehe) neoliberal nation states will eventually tear themselves apart