The idea for this work came to me in an instant, after I listened to one of Pete Quinones’ podcasts that, for all intents and purposes, ripped my cap right off.
What initially started out as a book concept quickly took on a technical mess (I take handwritten notes), and thus here we are.
There is, practically, no right wing in America. What we label as Right Wing, American conservatism, is not just “liberal” in the lower-case sense. It is Liberal, in the capital sense. For some, maybe even most people, maybe this isn’t a grand discovery.
But what might be a grand discovery, is what “right wing” really means.
Since the end of the Second World War, surely the most disastrous event for humanity since the Plague, to be honestly and earnestly Right Wing is more or less a crime - socially, if not legally. To be Right Wing is to be the second coming of a certain mustachioed Lieutenant, or at least a dues-paying member of a hyper-temporally and hyper-local defunct German Worker’s party from the early 20th Century.
At least, that’s what they say. And they got away with it for a long time, surviving off guilt and weaponized emotionalism to gain their monopoly across the entire West.
But if they’re wrong, what does it actually mean to be Right Wing? Look, I’m no genius or scholar. The people I follow are better educated and more talented than I am.
You can probably find many other sources with an answer more to your liking. This is just the view of one man who has been on an intellectual journey.
To be Right Wing is not to subscribe to a set of universal, specific policy agendas. It’s not to subscribe to any one of the 10,000 ideologies borne of the Enlightenment. It’s not the Republican Party platform.
To be Right Wing is to think in a certain way. What’s more, it is to feel a certain way. It is to understand time, place, and history a certain way. It is an understanding of the world and our role in it that differs fundamentally from the Liberal conceptions Americans are bombarded with from every voice and every screen.
Tradition plays an enormous role here. Kinship matters. Yesterday matters just as much as tomorrow. Where you are from matters, as does where you are, and where you are going. When you are from matters, as does when you are going. But that doesn’t mean Right Wing thought is limited strictly to returning to some idealized moment in the past. It is not strictly reactionary. Today, it means building a new and different future.
To be Right Wing in the West after 1945 is a bit like having a copy of The Road to Serfdom in the Soviet Union in 1980. (For those of you who are coming from libertarianism, you may find this anecdote amusing: The late, great Dr. Yuri Maltsev, who served as one of Gorbachev’s economic advisers, was involved in a little contraband ring that put Hayek’s banned book in the hands of his fellow Glasnost economists. Needless to say, this was extremely dangerous and brave.)
If you want to hear genuinely Right Wing ideas, you have to seek it out. In many cases, to buy Right Wing books means to shell out hundreds of dollars for copies long gone out of print. Nowadays, you can find voices on Twitter or Substack, but for decades, people were restricted to small publishing houses or underground newsletters.
To be Right Wing is to understand the full implications of the Fake News: Today’s Fake News becomes yesterday’s Fake History. This presents an enormous challenge for the Right Winger to even find the common ground needed for discourse with our veiled-eyed Liberal friends.
To be Right Wing is to automatically be understood - accused, shamed, attacked, de-banked, unpersoned - as “racist.” Yet, most people may be as surprised as I was, to find Right Wingers who actually do discuss race, don’t discuss it at all in the same terms as portrayed by the left. As a matter of fact, leading Right Wing thinkers view race as much more complicated and encompassing than “skin color”, and many even flatly rejected ethnic-based eugenics as vulgar, even low-IQ.
To be Right Wing is to begin with a completely different set of assumptions. It is the rejection of theories created by ideologues 20 minutes ago.
To be Right Wing is to feel. Not in a surface-level, emotional way, but a metaphysical way. Right Wingers have not forgotten metaphysics. Perhaps sense is a better descriptor, and perhaps we don’t have a way to describe it. But it encompasses the whole man and his capabilities, including that metaphysical connectedness to time, or place, or ancient blood and memory. It is being, not mere existence. A simple test: read of Christ’s Passion in the Bible, or read an historical account of some achievement of your ancestors. That is the feeling I get when I read about the victories of Frederick in the founding of Prussia, or the Rough Riders. Listen closely. Our ancestors speak to us through the ages, and the Right Winger can hear their voices.
Perhaps at base, to be Right Wing is to discern. It is to think in terms of quality, not mere quantity. To be Right Wing is to see reality and take it on its own terms. To meet the world as it is, not as it ought to be.
Most importantly, to be Right Wing now, as I write this in the Year of Our Lord 2026, means to belong to the culture-bearing stratum that can feel the Spirit of the Age.
This Substack is not meant to be a scholarly dissertation, or a history. It is an attempt to relay, by way of examples, how one might find themselves thinking “right.”
After I heard the aforementioned fateful podcast, I picked up a copy of François de La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims, which gave me the idea of collecting little gems from Right Wingers, history, and other sources that might help a reader order their thinking.
As I’m sure is the case with many others who went on this journey before me, this process led to a meaningful study of history writ large - and wouldn’t you know it, most of the “truths” I took for granted are flatly contradicted by the actual events. For this reason, much of the content here doubles as a reminder that, to be Right Wing means to quite literally experience a different reality than most of the people around you.
That realization is a jarring and frightful thing. But it doesn’t compare to the feeling of freedom, of being free of the weight of 10,000 lies.
I’m no expert, and certainly no genius. Any errors or sloppy thinking in the following contents are entirely my fault. I highly recommend subscribing to those that I follow.
This work is dedicated to Oswald Spengler and Samuel Huntington, Faustian men who were able to peer over the horizon and, heeded or not, announce the arrival of the future.
The Faustian soul is a tragic soul, because its desire for the infinite can never be fully realized in a finite world. It is a soul that is always striving, always seeking, but never fully satisfied.” (Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West)
“The eyes of the world see no further than this life, but the eyes of the Christian see deep into eternity.” - St. John Vianney
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"Our ancestors speak to us through the ages, and the Right Winger can hear their voices."
Profound way to put it. Really speaks to the visceral reaction I have to what's going on in the UK despite my never having been there.