Julian Adorney is Wrong About The Dissident Right
We're not primarily motivated by resentment, but resentment is sometimes right and good.
A couple months ago
published an article at in which he critiqued the Dissident Right.Adorney talks about his own life story, his experience of child abuse and the peace that he found through Christianity. He says he used to get in political shouting matches with strangers on Reddit. It’s unclear whether he considered himself to be part of the Dissident Right at the time. The core of Adorney’s argument is that the Dissident Right is motivated by resentment, and resentment is always bad.
First, I don’t think that characterization of the Dissident Right is accurate. Adorney’s evidence for his claim that the Dissident Right is driven by resentment is that they oppose the government. But mere opposition to the government is not the same thing as resentment.
But there’s a much more important point: Why precisely is resentment bad? One is resentful when one believes that one has been treated unjustly. That belief may be accurate or inaccurate, but to dismiss resentment wholesale is to dismiss the idea of justice.
When Wokeism was taking off and people online began to criticize it, there were two different lines of criticism. One of these lines of criticism, popular with an older crowd, was that wokesters were “snowflakes” who had a “victim mentality.” This critique never made any sense to me. If it actually were the case that police were murdering innocent black people with impunity, then one should be morally outraged about it. If that were actually happening, then it would make a lot of sense to march in the streets and demand major changes to policing. The only coherent response to wokeism in my opinion, was the other line of critique, popular with a younger audience: the police are not actually killing innocent black people. The gender pay gap is not real. The claims of Black Lives Matter are lies. Black people are not treated unfairly by society, in fact it’s the exact opposite. White people are discriminated against in college admissions and hiring, and juries are biased against white people. The problem with wokesters isn’t that they have a “victim mentality,” it’s that their claims are not true.
I don’t think that people should wallow in resentment. But we need to be very careful when critiquing resentment, especially in a political context.
Suppose you’re a peasant in the Aztec empire in the year 1460. Every year, your village must send 5 people to the Aztec capital to be sacrificed. You must also send large quantities of corn as tribute. Your brother was sacrificed last year and eaten by the priests. Your cousin was taken by an Aztec warrior as a sex slave. Your baby son died of malnutrition during a famine after you sent all your corn to the capital. I’m sure many Aztec peasants deeply resented the rulers - and they were right to resent them. The emotion of resentment exists for a reason.
But an Aztec version of Adorney could say that the Aztec peasants should practice “radical acceptance” of Aztec rule. “Acceptance can feel like weakness, but [Adorney] believe[s] it’s one of the most courageous things a person can do.” Faced with brutal oppression and naked evil, the peasants “resentment can feel justified. But that doesn’t make it right.” “Only when [the peasants] do the hard work of letting go” of their futures, of their children, of justice, can they escape “a well of anger.”
Apart from his views on resentment, Adorney does not seem to be very familiar with the Dissident Right. Adorney claims that “nearly the entire Dissident Right call themselves Christians,” which is false. Many dissident right figures identify as pagans and are explicitly critical of Christianity. Keith Woods believes in Platonist philosophy. Jared Taylor consciously avoids discussing religion because it is so controversial within the movement.
The problem with Adorney’s anti-resentment approach (which is certainly not unique to him and is actually very widespread) is that it is entirely oriented towards feelings rather than reality. It is just another manifestation of the therapeutic society. Don’t care about reality, care about “our sense of safety or control.” The question is not whether some injustice has actually occurred, the question is how people react emotionally to it. The petitioner who claims that an injustice has been done should not be given an impartial hearing to determine whether he is owed a redress of his grievances. Instead he should be subjected to a psychological interrogation and dismissed if he is found to have a “victim mentality.”
To reiterate, I actually don’t think that resentment is the primary motivator of people who fight against injustice. But even if it were, I don’t think that would necessarily be a bad thing. The emotion of resentment exists for a reason. Justice matters.
A very thoughtful article!
I think you're right that I probably don't know the DR as well as I think I do. When I said they were mostly Christian, I was pulling from a) the DR folks who have "Christ is King" in their bios or similar), and b) a statement by Colin Wright that the DR is basically "Christianity+" (a reference, I believe, to "atheism+"). But I could have been mistaken about the extent to which the DR is Christian! I know, among other things, that Hunter Ash for instance wouldn't call himself Christian.
I do disagree with you in that I see resentment and injustice as very separate issues. I think that you can acknowledge injustice without feeling resentment about said injustice. That's why, for instance, I opened my piece by stating several of what I see as injustices.
But I am curious: how do you personally see resentment as benefiting you?
I think you can still say that “justice” maybe matters too much to a lot of people though on the populist right and left. My elitism is the primary reason I could never be with any populist movement, but I also just consider it petty and pathetic that someone who votes for Trump for instance could be driven hysterical over illegal immigration or transgender story hour and the basis of their thinking is simply that the “elites” all betrayed them—same with the populist left which is just as ridiculous with their obsession with “billionaires” rigging the economy and their fixation on, to the point of fetishization of, racial and sexual minorities. Like I care about fairness as much as the next guy, but I would say people care about it so much that it’s temperamental and their resentment is to blame these days. So I side with that Adorney guy philosophically. I expect and demand more from human character than what we’re getting. And to me everyone is a spoiled fucking infant. And everyone who went nuts during the covid lockdowns. Like I hated the lockdowns too. It didn’t make me irate at my government though. I was more angry with how afraid everyone was of getting a disease that only posed a serious risk to old people. It’s the cheapest thing to me to blame your government or the economy for all your personal issues and failures.