The Promises and Pitfalls of RETVRN

How to be a smarter reactionary

On reactionary twitter, you’ll often see memes like this.

What they are trying to get at is that life used to be much better than it is today. One can’t dismiss this kind of thought as isolated to a few corners of the internet. Trump’s slogan of “Make America Great Again” now tends to be a reference to his first term, but it originally played to a sense of deeper nostalgia. Blake Masters was echoing the online right when in 2022 he ran for Senate on the idea that American families should be able to live on one income, as they supposedly were more easily able to do in generations past.

Memes like the one above are very stupid, but they annoy me in a way beyond things that are stupid in more normal ways, and I think I know why. These reactionary types glorify masculinity and having a sense of agency, but then sit on the internet complaining that nefarious elites are preventing them from getting married and starting families.

That said, I do have a soft spot for some cultural reactionary views.