Although a great deal of what I write could be characterised as insanity straight from a carpet biter in his Führerbunker, I am not constitutionally a right-wing person. I would never join the Conservatives or UKIP—or even a more right-wing organisation. This is because I am nothing like the typical person who joins these parties, the typical rightist—and I find them unpleasant to interact with, although I acknowledge that a lot of what they say is true.
This is due to temperament, I have high openness to experience—partly an explanation for why I will even entertain views from the radical right—and I am also INFJ; and this is a type that wants to mediate and understand where people are coming from. The typical conservative person—by constitution, not by ideas—tends to be the resentful suburban dad, whereas the typical far rightist tends to be a “corporal” with high ethnocentrism. The right is characterised by people with low openness to experience and high conscientiousness—the opposite to my personality. However, this is about the type of person and not the ideas they adumbrate. So, for example, the people I just described also existed in the Soviet Union. Guess what they did in the Soviet Union? They enforced and policed the Soviet system—for them any order is better than any chaos, and they have point; the collapse of the USSR was chaotic.
This personality type, when politicised in the West, tends towards masochism and resentment—a distinctive rightist resentment, as opposed to leftist resentment. It is the suburban dad who mutters under his breath, “Is that so, eh? That’s the latest thing, is it? Are we even ALLOWED to say that?” whenever his teenagers regurgitate some banal propaganda point. Conscientious and with low openness to experience, he dutifully serves a system he despises because this is what people have “always done” and what it takes to “get on”.
Now, obviously, these traits are essential to any functional society, but in Western politics they produce a masochistic and resentful type. As social conformists, rightists struggle to articulate their disagreement with the prevalent ideology because they know this could make them social pariahs; hence they growl impotently at their families—or, as a neighbour of mine did, after muttering darkly about his daughter’s behaviour, buy an Alsatian to reduce their impotence and provide a companion who actually does what they tell it to do.
Since the rightist is conscientious, he becomes masochistic; he always wants everything “done right”, even if it is perfectly obvious that the system he works within is stacked against him and that his opponents despise him and manipulate the rules around him with Machiavellian finesse. “Surely, we can open a reasonable dialogue with the left?” says the rightist, treating his opponents as if they are himself; of course, they have no desire to cooperate with him, only pretend to, and so the rightist ends up burned, bewildered, and even more resentful.
In some cases, the interest in “facts and logic” and conscientiousness melds in with a dislike towards women. “The leftists are women! They’re emotional and illogical,” says the rightist; now, there is some truth to this assertion. Yet it is not the whole truth; for the leftists are logical, except they start from different premises and are—the senior leftists, anyway—perfectly aware that they are engaged in rhetorical manipulation. The leftist foot soldier who has swallowed the rhetoric may indeed seem like an emotional woman, since all rhetoric aims for the emotions. However, the people who develop the rhetoric are perfectly aware what they are about; and it suits their purposes very well—given how they use women as a human shield, through feminism—to have a right that complains about “feminisation”, “feminine lack of logic”, and so on. For they know that they can turn to the masses and say: “There, we told you, these people hate women. All they do is complain about women and femininity.”