Grow Up - An Open Letter to the Political Right

Taking Responsibility in a World Led by Children

This post will be a deviation from the normal patten here at The Red Ensign and is addressed to the international political right rather then simply a Canadian audience. The twin pillars of the moral character of political leadership are power and responsibility - the two are inextricably connected. Over the past decade the right has become very interested in the former but has neglected proper discussion of the later. It’s time to rectify that deficiency. It’s time the political right grew up. This piece will first show by example that the Right has been accepted intellectual and political leaders with a childlike view of their relationship to their followers. I will then attempt to offer some insights into what responsible, adult, leadership might be like.

The Children

Jordan Peterson & the Canadian Right

This week, Jordan Peterson put on what has to be one of the most clownish performances I have ever seen from a figure who styles himself as a serious political thinker and leader. It’s the “The clip that launched a thousand tweets", almost all of which focused on the ephemeral layer of it’s intellectual absurdity, and some of which reflected on the man’s great fall.

The more fundamental issue here is “why does Peterson have the platform he does, and what should be on it instead of this farce”? To answer that question requires us to recall the three great mantles that Peterson took up very publicly to get where he is:

1. Leadership of political advocacy against compelled speech in Canada, and perhaps for free speech more broadly.

2. A paternalistic role facing the hordes of deracinated, fatherless, young men, trying to recover themselves.

3. Leadership of the political coalition in specific opposition to Justin Trudeau, and especially the Truck Convoy, which he very publicly supported.

If we check in on those who followed where he lead on any of these three causes, we find a trail of ruined people in his wake - ruined people for whom JBP is not using his current massive platform to advocate for. Whether it’s Meghan Murphy, who followed JBP’s lead, and specific political advice in transgressing speech mandates from the Canadian government only to find herself in informal exile and subject to a frozen bank account; the “Coutts 4”, who followed JBP’s advice to lead protests to petition the Trudeau government for redress of their grievances against the COVID regime, and spent years in prison without trial for their trouble; those who followed Peterson in his role as a political advocate have not only found misery for their trouble, but have followed a leader who is running clown shows about the ‘woke right’ rather than advocating on their behalf.

Jair Bolsonaro & the Brazilian Right

This pattern repeats itself throughout the modern right from top to bottom. Our next example is Jair Bolsonaro, who was president of Brazil from 2019 to 2023. Bolsonaro, a former military officer, lead a campaign in 2018 focused in which he promised to address Brazil’s rampant criminal disorder, deep-seated social and economic leftism, and the political corruption that has enabled both for years. In the final round of that years election cycle, Bolsonaro gave a speech to thousands of supporters where he promised to "arrest, purge or kill ‘reds’ and ‘petralhas’”. There could be no miscommunication with his supporters; in 1946 the Brazilian military removed by force the Communist leadership of the country and ruled undemocratically for 44 years.

Over the course of his 4 years in government, Bolsonaro allowed the administrative state, and especially the supreme court, to systematically outmaneuver him; culminating in the release of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva from prison to run as his opponent, and win in an election with highly questionable electoral procedures. In the days following his loss in the 2022 election, Bolsonaro’s supporters flooded into the streets calling for a military intervention to amend the results. As the police violently cleared the crowds … Bolsonaro sat enjoying himself in a Miami KFC. Today, Bolsonaro and dozens of other members of his government face a carefully organized campaign of legal persecution for the coup that never was.

Tommy Robinson & The Commentariat

In the aftermath of the heinous murder of several children in Southport (UK), a significant fraction of the online right commentariat including men ranging as widely as Tommy Robinson & Charles Haywood encouraged participation in street protests to seek redress of grievances from the government of Kier Starmer. There were two obvious questions to be asked at the time; first, why would Kier Starmer respond to street protests as an indication of discontent more positively than to other forms of registering grievance? Second, would the regime impose a cost on those who participated? While the first question remains ambiguous, the UK regime arrested 1,233 people, including 219 minors, involved in what they called a riot in the aftermath. Many of these people are now serving long prison terms after expedited court proceedings that are highly questionable in the legal traditions of the UK.

There is no current evidence that Kier Starmer’s government has any intention of redressing any of their grievances against migration. There is no current evidence that an alternative elite has been able to make use of the tyranny of the Starmer government in a contest for sovereignty. Those people’s lives were ruined for no purpose, and it was eminently foreseeable at the time that it was likely to turn out that way.

What Does Responsible Political Participation Look Like?

A key element that separates good political leadership, at any level, is the genuine assumption of responsibility for the people to whom you are offering leader. Here are a couple of key elements that have been missing from the right at all levels over the last decade or so:

1. Assuming Responsibility for the Nation

A key element of stepping into genuine leadership of a political unit is assuming responsibility for that people as they are, not as you wish they could be. By this I mean both that leaders have an obligation to make law fit for the people as they are, but also that leaders have an obligation to treat seriously the previous commitments of the leadership of that people, even if they disagree with them. For example, a hypothetical new responsible king of Canada would have to manage the anti-American sentiment in the country on the one hand, while holding in the other hand the reality that a productive relationship with the US is essential to Canadian prosperity. He would have to take on the crisis of meaning among the Canadian secular libs as his problem to be solved, even though it was not of his making, isn’t a problem among his supporters but rather his political opponents.

2. Political Advocacy is a Binding Contract

The moment that a man assumes a position of political leadership either by formal process or by the act of advocating for actions where it is reasonably foreseeable that others would follow, he enters into a binding contract with those he leads. That man is thereafter partially responsible for the foreseeable consequences to his entire coalition of the things that he advocates that they do. This runs the gamut from social leadership which suggest lifestyle choices like choices in education, marriage, and career; to the more classically political acts like advocating for a particular choice of political leader or encouraging acts of protest. Given this reality, it is doubly important to distinguish between reporting/analysis and policy advocacy. Equally, a political advocate or leader has a moral duty to, along with those he led, live inside the consequence of the actions he helped to bring about. For example, I have repeatedly and publicly highlighted the prospect of Alberta separatism as part my analysis of the political future of Canada, but I have not advocated for it, and it is unclear to me whether actual separation would be good for the people of Alberta, and I would not participate in the consequences of that choice.

3. Policy Advocacy has an Audience and a Context

One of the most comical moments in the history of the online right occurred this spring, when members of the American Dissident Right saw one of the policies they had advocated for for more than a decade implemented, and then rushed to explain why it’s imminent failure as a policy couldn’t be blamed on them. What Moldbug’s pre-emptive Mea Culpa fails to do is admit guilt in advocating for a policy without regard for the audience that might take that advocacy seriously, and the context in which they might implement his recommendations. At an analytical level Moldbug has been correct for 15 years in the insight that politics precedes economics with regard to human organization, and for that reason unthinking free trade has always been foolish. But when you spend 5 years going on podcasts saying that everything great about America happened during a period of high tariffs, and then only mention the context when somebody takes tariffs and uses them to seriously damage his political position come out and write about the limitations to the argument and the present political context.

Political advocates have a responsibility to those who follow them to consider the political context into which their ideas might be injected. A political decision that would marginally improve the lives of a group of people in the short term, but would also lead to political marginalization and inability to use power in the future, is bad policy. It’s advocates are guilty of malpractice and their followers will suffer for it. An adult version of advocating for trade policy reform looks like “tariffs are a potentially useful tool to try to reshape global trade flows, deal with some of the risks inherent in globalization, and improve the condition of the working class”, rather than “America was at it’s best with high tariffs”.

A New King? or a New Meme?

So can the political right develop a relationship with it’s leadership class that demands a basic level of responsibility? Or are we doomed forever to be sold Meme-coins by those on whom we would place a crown? Only time will tell, but as the geopolitical situation for the Western World darkens around us, it is time to ask for more.