America Faces Challenges, but Conservative Pessimism Unwarranted

The 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.

About the Author

Nate Hochman

Nate Hochman was a staff writer at National Review.

Featured Tags

Manage following

Conservatism

Conservatives

The 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.