524. The marrying maiden (VII)

Canada’s truckers recently made a rare protest from the right; although it was substantial, it was not really felt. The reason: right-wing people do not do protest—the right does not demonstrate, it is non-demonstrative. The right is masculine: men do not protest a situation, they take action to resolve a problem. Women and children protest: emotionally appeal to father or husband to fix a situation. Hence university students, still adolescents, protest so much—they have semi-autonomy yet are still dependent in many ways, not being fully formed; protest seems a legitimate means to effect change for them.

The right is not equipped to thrive in a democracy, especially not in a full democracy. The right is anti-rhetorical; it eschews emotional appeals and manipulation—it just gets on with it. Democracy is about emotional rhetorical appeals—the very thing rightists consider undignified and irresponsible. Hence the right will sometimes say that the Gulags should be commemorated on an equal level with the holocaust, but they never mean it. To use a massacre to emotionally manipulate the public—to identify with the victims—stands outside rightist thought.

When they were moved by the police Canada’s truckers fell to their knees in Christian prayer and supplication. Yet the left are better Christians than the Christians; they have taken Christian pity to its logical conclusion—the truckers, some being old-fashioned Christians, treat their opponents as Roman centurions; actually they face post-Christians, nobody will pity the truckers—they are not weak enough to be pitied. When they fell to their knees they only earned contempt; they are not truly pitiable, cannot play the pity game if they wanted.

So the right is never at home in a protest; the leftist turns out with perfectly produced signs, whereas rightist protest signs always look “schizo” or amateurish—since these are people who do not appeal for someone else (the state) for help and are less interested in presentation. The right will sometimes call the left “Nazis”—deploy the swastika in a mocking way—and it never works; and this is because the practical let’s-crack-on-freedom-entails-casualties attitude is masculine—and Hitlerism was masculine. To say freedom matters more than total vaccine coverage is to say: there might be casualties, but freedom requires sacrifice—and, anyway, perhaps it would be better to winnow the herd naturally...

Strictly, the truckers were not “protesters”—they took action, blocked roads. Truckers also took action in Chile in 1973 against a Marxist president and in Britain in 2000, the latter being a lesser-known event that led to the army being deployed to deliver petrol. The left protests, whereas the right stages coups, putsches, and blockades; i.e. it takes action—indeed, the Chilean truckers struck in tandem with a military coup. The fantasy that there could be a “Nietzschean strike” or a “capital strike” was widely put about by Ayn Rand, yet she was spiritually leftist—responsible people see no point in a strike, only leftist agitators think like that.

Truckers know that if they wanted they could collapse the supply chain; being responsible people, they will not be that ruthless—only the left thinks that quasi-religious political goals should be achieved “by any means necessary”, the right is more reasonable and wants to negotiate on specific issues. Yet the truckers—along with the military—will go further than, say, a corporate middle-manager who votes Conservative; he is less free than a trucker, since he lives in a world of appearance—only ideologically-approved speech grants promotion, whereas nobody cares what a trucker says. He may privately agree with the truckers, but he will rarely openly support them—if he did he may well lose his position. Only groups like the Hells Angels, regressed to virile barbarism, would consider “total collapse” actions—yet being a primal horde they are, unlike the truckers, without the power to break society; they can smash up a corner store, but no one would trust the Angels to run the supply chain in the first place.