Against Conservative Pessimism

T he right-wing Internet vocabulary is rife with “pills.” The red pill, originally a reference to the famous choice that Neo faces in The Matrix: “You take the blue pill, the story ends. . . . You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” The “red pill” has become the conservative version of “woke,” denoting ideological affinity and an awareness of what’s really going on behind the curtain. The blue pill is its ignorant and blissfully unaware counterpart. This initial binary has expanded to accommodate a vast array of digital capsules, ranging from the white pill’s hope and confidence to the clear pill’s “absence of political conviction” altogether. There is even a quantum pill, which stands for a sort of in-between state, seeing the future in what Spencer Klavan describes as “both an optimistic and a pessimistic way at once — like a quantum computer hovering at 1 and 0 simultaneously, or like Schrödinger’s cat, both alive and dead until observed.”

The most dire of all “pills,” however, is the black pill, a term that originally arose in online “incel” forums to describe an attitude of complete and totalizing nihilism — both a despair about one’s situation and a firm conviction that the existing state of things will not, and cannot, improve. Amid a growing alarm about the state of the country and Western civilization more broadly, this pessimistic outlook has become increasingly common in some corners of the Right. Conservative black pills come in many forms, from Rod Dreher’s culture-war defeatism to Patrick Deneen’s thesis that the rot in modern American liberalism traces all the way back to the Founding — that the “atomistic philosophy” underpinning the American experiment, in other words, was doomed from the outset.

And they aren’t exclusive to the traditionalist wing of the Right. “I am really struggling to think of a time when I despaired more for the country and had so much contempt not just for both parties, but the bases of both parties,” The Dispatch’s Jonah Goldberg tweeted in August. Never Trump writer Tom Nichols chimed in to agree: “Man, I wish I didn’t feel what you’re feeling about the public. That’s the source of my despair.”

There is ample reason to feel anxious nowadays, as many Americans across the ideological spectrum do. In a poll taken in early November, two-thirds of respondents said the country was on the wrong track. Expressions of patriotic pride have continued to plummet to record lows. The American experiment in self-government is facing serious challenges. American cities — ravaged by political violence last summer — are experiencing a resurgent crime wave the likes of which have not been seen for decades. Drug- and depression-fueled “deaths of despair” afflict rural communities. Our porous southern border is overrun. Abroad, our military engagements seem incompetent at best, catastrophic at worst. And some of our leaders no longer seem to think that we even deserve to stand up for our interests. From our most prestigious universities on down to our public elementary schools, the American education system is beset by a radical and corrosive ideology that teaches our children to despise the country they are poised to inherit. Meanwhile, many of our elites, including most of those who currently set our nation’s course, are not merely apathetic but rather actively hostile to the nation’s history, political system, and citizenry.

So, yes, grave concern is not only warranted, but rational. But is despair justified? The answer, I submit, is no. The problem with despair is that it is the easy way out. It is often more comfortable than hope. The black pill liberates those who take it from the burden of national loyalty. If America is beyond saving — or more radically still, if America was never worth fighting for in the first place — then why bother being emotionally invested in its future? The rational thing to do would be to jump ship.

And that seems to be what some corners of the Right are preparing to do.

On the one hand, for all their talk of institutionalism, the most committed Never Trumpers are often remarkably happy to engage in their own fair share of institutional arson when it suits them. Abandoning our political institutions is not the same as abandoning America itself, but it is still an admission of defeat — a fatalism whose logical conclusion is the decimation of the political institutions that have defined American politics for centuries. The Bulwark, for example, has resolved to destroy the Republican Party root and branch: “Burn it all down,” declared editor-at-large Charlie Sykes in July 2020. “The GOP Needs to Hit Rock Bottom,” agreed the title of a piece by Mona Charen, published around the same time. And it’s no longer just about Trump, either: Even affable moderates such as Glenn Youngkin are beyond the pale for The Bulwark.

Anti-Trumpist conservatives like Goldberg are not as sour on red America as The Bulwark is. But they have embraced the same pessimistic posture toward many legacy conservative institutions, from the Republican Party to Fox News. Despite his regular exhortations of the need for stronger political parties, Goldberg recently proposed a third-party alternative to the GOP: Presenting “a simple, Reaganite conservative platform combined with a serious plank to defend the soundness of elections,” such a party could run “non-Trumpy candidate[s]” to “play the role of spoiler by garnering enough conservative votes in the general election to throw the election to the Democrat,” therefore causing “the GOP some pain for its descent into asininity.” (This idea was argued against by various writers at National Review, including Michael Brendan Dougherty, whom Goldberg invited onto his podcast for a friendly discussion.)

On the other end of the conservative spectrum are those who have decided that America no longer deserves their loyalty at all. Some voices in this faction even openly express a preference for our enemies. “I’m at peace with a Chinese-led 21st century,” Sohrab Ahmari mused in a since-deleted tweet back in May. “Late-liberal America is too dumb and decadent to last as a superpower. Chinese civilization, especially if it recovers more of its Confucian roots, will possess a great deal of natural virtue.” Right-wing Catholic writer Jonathan Culbreath chimed in: “It’s clear that a lot of conservatives are misled by a hyper-Americanist propaganda about contemporary China, which, for all its problems, actually has something like a real conservative and traditionalist commitment to its past.”

Can it be that America has fallen so far that it invites unfavorable comparison with a totalitarian country engaged in an active genocide against millions of its own people? No — of course not. One need not deny the profound, even unprecedented, challenges that the American nation is facing to understand that America is still a better country than China, by any and every standard imaginable.

The Kyle Rittenhouse trial was an instructive episode. All the institutional progressive powers-that-be mobilized to undermine Rittenhouse’s access to impartial justice, from Big Tech’s censoring expressions of support for the teen and shutting down fundraising efforts to the legacy media’s outrageously biased and misleading coverage of the case. National Democratic politicians, up to and including Joe Biden, smeared Rittenhouse as a white supremacist. But in spite of everything, the jury delivered a just verdict of not guilty. Those who doubt the integrity of the American system or who have lost all faith in our traditions should have their optimism rekindled by the outcome.

The American tradition is the ideal foundation for a project of national renewal. The black-pilled arguments to the contrary are the product of the very decadence and modern malaise that those who fantasize about a Chinese-style regime are most critical of. It is a skewed perspective born from too much time in insular Internet circles, and not enough time spent outside in the real world.

The digital realm competes directly with the flesh-and-blood one; as our time in the former increases, our loyalties to the latter wane. This is what leads to apathy about the future of the American nation itself — an odd turn for the Right, which is supposed to be fighting to defend it.

Something like this logic compelled former Trump-administration speechwriter Darren Beattie (who was fired after it emerged that he had spoken at a political conference at which white nationalists also appeared) to recently — and outrageously — tweet: “I am not America First. I am talent, beauty, excellence first. If America is no longer a hospitable place to cultivate those virtues, I will gladly root for whatever place decides to fill that void.”

But America is not just a momentarily hospitable place to cultivate certain virtues. It is our country. We are a people, with a way of life that is undergirded by fundamental and eternal principles — but those principles alone are not what make our country ours. We are not merely autonomous individuals, free to forget and begin anew, but bound together. The American birthright comes with both rights and responsibilities.

Just where else would our nihilistic friends suggest we go? The rest of the West is in much worse shape than we are. China has set about building the world’s first techno-totalitarian state. America, on the other hand, still has the First and Second Amendments as well as powerful red states that are increasingly well situated to erode the dominance of national progressive-controlled institutions. Absolutist narratives of decline suffer from the same problem as absolutist narratives of progress: Both assume that History has an inevitable and predetermined direction. But it doesn’t. Don’t let any black-pill-peddling digital junkies convince you otherwise.