The political right is always literally occult; it is the hidden force in politics. The reason for this relates to the nature of the left. The left is a malfunction of a society’s religious instincts, it is an illness in the priesthood. In the contemporary world, this priesthood consists of the intellectuals. There are very intelligent people on the right, but there are almost no intellectuals. The intellectual takes the priestly role in our society; he is trained by the same institutions that once trained Christian priests. His litany—racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and on—is the litany of a priest; he is using rhetoric to make the masses feel sorry for their sin, to control them. The modern priest is resisted by the absolute atheist—the disciple of Nietzsche—who knows that though intellectuals think themselves without God they are still religious; they cannot be otherwise, to be religious is in the nature of the biological organism that is the under-man. The Nietzschean, knowing that there is no Christian or Platonic God, no great beyond, instead seeks to canalise those religious instincts that he knows exist in the under-man so that those instincts increase our power and capacity for action, not reduce it. The other resister of the priestly elite is the out-of-date priest: the traditional Catholic, the evangelical minister, or even, as with Jordan Peterson, the classical liberal. These different beliefs are merely earlier iterations of the same illusions, but, as it happens, these earlier illusions, formed in harder times, are closer to reality than the latest illusion.
In the modern world, the intellectuals driven by envy—envy fed by their blind rhetoric—and swaddled in the safety of technological decadence advocate policies that will destroy the West itself. It is a status game for them: they push down on the crude deplorables below—the middle and lower-middle classes insufficiently versed in the latest rhetorical positions—and they also attack those remnants of the old order above them, the ultra rich and, in Europe, the remains of the blood aristocracy. They are true believers and they are locked in the cataract of their delusions. They compete with each other as much as with other social groups, and those who fall behind the times, the heretics, are the most despised. They create doubt and doubt is the great enemy of illusion. The man who stands still—who claims that feminism or socialism or equality was achieved in 1975 or 1995–must be swept away as an abomination; he thinks himself a progressive, a leftist, or a socialist—he has become a conservative, simply by standing still in his illusions.
The priest explains society to itself; he provides our morals and style. Art and religion were once one: music was for the church, a fresco was for the church, and a statue was for the church. This has never changed; it is only that our priests have changed our God. So the right must always appear unlettered and bumptious and crude—Nixonian or Trumpian—because the people who grant us style, our musicians and actors and priests, are the other camp. The right has intelligence—often more intelligence than the left—but it does not have intellectuals. It does not have the people who tell our story: hence it is occult, it is hidden—and, in turn, it takes an interest in the literal mystical occult.
The right has practical men—it has soldiers and aviators and plumbers—but such men are so practical as to be without religion, since religion is a womanly affair. Their technical knowledge can be directed to destroy the very societies they build, since the priesthood, the directors of the society, have become deluded and convinced themselves that the society which birthed them should die. Tyrants in the 1970s sent their brightest students abroad to study engineering and science, not the arts; they knew that if they allowed their students to study other subjects they would import a new religion. Wisdom.