A darker colour

There’s a joke in Goth and elsewhere that goes something like: “I’m only wearing black until they invent a darker colour.” They even have a T-shirt about it now.

Now Right-wing politics has its equivalent that (way behind the curve as ever) I only discovered yesterday is actually A Thing, as the kids are calling it these days.

It’s called the neo-reactionary movement or the Dark Enlightenment.

Some of you chaps out there in Rightwingland are probably muttering something like “Yes, and?” about now; being up-to-date web surfers of the Right and you have long since known about this and gone something like either:

“Meh; nutters,” or

“Yep, this might actually be an answer to/a definition of what assails us all,” but A) “It can only lead to something worse,” or B) “I’d better keep quiet about this and do my best to help its project on the sly before our common foe starts to strangle it at birth the way they tried with all the other “New Rights” that anyone invented or discovered since Gramsci did his thing.”  

I don’t know if I agree with it yet and if it is indeed true in the sense of, you know, pre-Marxist truth. Can you choose not to agree with truth? Do I agree with gravity, for example or merely accept it as inescapable? After only a few hours of (gin-soaked) browsing I’m not sure if there is anything hopeful about it at all, but it’s tickled me and seems to rub the right, i.e. the wrong people up the wrong way.

TDE has the right enemies. So there’s that.

And of course anything that paints me by my own standards as little better than a bleeding-heart-pinko liberal has got to be worth a look.

Anyhoo, give it a look if you like: there doesn’t seem to be much of a crossover into the kind of Right-wing blogs I tend to haunt, albeit in a much more scaled-down way these days.

But it does beg (and sometimes overtly poses) the question: “What use is conservatism if all it seeks to do is to preserve the mistakes of the recent past?”

When did any conservative in power truly turn the clock back by one second, let alone the calendar by a single year? I think I’ll read on. Perhaps I’ll get the T-shirt. Unless the Dark Enlightenment is more of a members’ club tie thing, or a coat of arms sort of deal.

Picture from here.