The Left has done so much damage so quickly that many people find it hard to develop a coherent alternative worldview to oppose it. I think there’s an easy and obvious one (Christianity), but for those who oppose the Left but merely like the forms of European, Christian civilization without believing in Christ, there’s a strong temptation to become a Pure Reactionary, a term I’m just inventing for convenience for this post. I’ll be contrasting them with another term I’m inventing, the Conservative Coward. As I indicated by citing Christianity itself, there are other responses to Leftism but the Pure Reactionary and Conservative Coward are probably the two dominant forms, the former growing faster every month and the latter dying out.

As I said in a previous post, I think Gab is great and I’m glad that it’s a genuine free speech platform. That means, however, that you’re going to get all of the people who were banned from other platforms congregating in one space, and that makes it the easiest place to access Pure Reactionary thought. Following are a few examples contrasting these two types.

Race

If the Left accuses a conservative of being a racist the Conservative Coward apologizes whether he hated someone for his race or not. The Pure Reactionary is tired of apologizing and will do one better; he’ll openly embrace hatred for other races. For example, see this comment on Gab:

Power

The Left believes force makes right and then pretends to care about things like natural human rights and the intrinsic value of human life. The Conservative Coward tries to work with the Left, always, always imagining that the Leftist is sincere when he speaks of rights. The Pure Reactionary adopts the Left’s Will to Power utilitarianism and simply wants to use force to make right.

Here’s a “Christian” on Gab saying as much when I suggested power doesn’t make right:

Liberty

The Christian virtue of liberty has been perverted since the Enlightenment by the Left. The Cowardly Conservative embraces whatever the Left calls “liberty”, such as when David French endorsed drag queens reading to children in public libraries as reflection of the founding of America. David French is one of the chief Cowardly Conservatives.

The Left doesn’t believe in liberty, but libertinism, because libertinism leads to slavery to sin and vice. This is useful, since the Leftist oligarchs think they know best how to run civilization from their thrones and it’s a lot easier to run things when you have slaves rather than free citizens running around.

The Pure Reactionary hates liberty as much as the Left. Liberty for him is a liability; better to compel obedience to law than to allow bad choices. Despite such autocracy always ending in misery, he’s sure he can do it right. Many times, the Pure Reactionary will use the Old Testament law as his standard because it has more rhetorical weight than its humanist descendants. Christ died to fulfill the law, but for the Pure Reactionary, we all need to fulfill the law too, and the state needs to compel us to do so. Hence:

Parting Thoughts

You’ll notice a common theme here in that many of these Pure Reactionaries claim to be Christians but display the inverse of the fruit of the spirit. Their ideological commitments are defined for them by the Left; the Left says A and they respond Not-A. The Left says Not-A and they respond A. You get the idea.

This makes them the inverse, mirror image of the Left. They have all the self-righteousness, all the hate, all the wrath, all the vice of the Left, but they have different sins they tolerate and different sins they anathematize. The Left will banish you from public life for hurting the wrong person’s feelings. The Pure Reactionary would love to banish you from public life for saying we maybe shouldn’t be so fast to banish people from public life.

There is a way forward, but it’s not to find an equal and opposite error.