The Vitalists Are Worse Than Wrong—They’re Boring

A new essay from Bronze Age Pervert confirms a warmed-over worldview.

In case you missed it: Watch from the archives of the American Compass Podcast “What Comes After Post-Liberalism with Patrick Deneen.”

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An alternative subculture on the American Right, popular especially with some younger conservatives, excels at posting memes on social media, promoting themes ranging from bodybuilding to piracy. If this “alt-right” has a coherent worldview, it is best characterized by “vitalism,” which rejects core tenets of a liberal society and advocates dominance by the strong over the weak.

For all the long-form essays that the community publishes, though, the question has always lingered whether it has anything tangible to say about contemporary political and policy problems. The esoteric conversations in which members talk amongst and flatter themselves rarely make contact with substantive debates, perhaps for the good reason that when they do the results tend to be disastrous. Curtis Yarvin’s attempt to interact with the Manhattan Institute’s Chris Rufo devolved quickly into what Rufo noted were “childish insults, bouts of paranoia, heavy italics, pointless digressions, competitive bibliography, and allusions to cartoons,” ending in perhaps the most one-sided evisceration of a purported public intellectual that I can recall. And then there’s the Richard Hanania oeuvre. 

What if vitalism manifested in the real world is not just weak but the one thing even less tolerable to the vitalist: boring? What if its economics and geopolitics are basically just those of Paul Ryan, albeit with racist invective added for clicks?

Extrapolating from what the vitalists do say, the Heritage Foundation’s Evan Myers and National Affairs’s Howe Whitman have observed that the ideology in fact shares much in common with the liberalism it abhors. In an outstanding essay for First Things contrasting Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen’s conception of a post-liberal return to conservative values with the vitalist alternative, they write:

Real “common-good conservatism,” Deneen argues, neither widens nor abrogates the divide between the two classes. Instead, it cultivates the tension between the classes, nurturing noblesse oblige among a “self-conscious aristoi.” Unlike liberals, these elites are aware of their status, and unlike vitalists, they feel obligated to the “many” and serve a purpose greater than themselves.

…

Most contemporary understandings of the Declaration of Independence, Deneen claims, assert that “to secure our individual rights, we establish something common—our nation. Thus, that which is common (the nation), serves our differences (our rights).”

This inversion ends up reserving human flourishing for the elite, thus bizarrely echoing vitalism. Really, the only difference between vitalist and liberal elites under Deneen’s framework is that the former acknowledges its self-serving behavior and the latter does not.

Their subsequent essay for American Compass put the matter in more concrete economic terms:

Vitalism celebrates a few Übermenschen at the expense of the morass of “bugmen” (BAP’s term), the mean and small-souled genetic chaff. The eugenic strain from 20th-century fascist movements remains strong in vitalism: The bugmen and other warders of the Longhouse (our “matriarchal” society) ought to be trampled by the great ones; the lesser animals are food for the predators. The vitalist world is no country for average men.

Here vitalism bizarrely dovetails with a certain kind of liberalism, specifically the libertarian cult of the entrepreneur. … Like Ayn Rand and her acolytes, whose heroic model is the robber baron insatiably gobbling up all his puny competitors, many vitalists idolize Elon Musk: entrepreneur, corporate raider, and father of at least ten children with three different women.

This is sharp analysis, but it depends ultimately on inference. Maybe the vitalists have more to say than they are letting on?

Not so, confirms a new essay from “Bronze Age Pervert.” In “American Industrialization and China,” Mr. Pervert (“BAP” to his many admirers who prefer not to remind themselves they admire someone called “Bronze Age Pervert”) displays an oddly familiar economic sensibility, one commonly encountered among the more ill-informed and over-eager participants at the American Enterprise Institute’s Summer Honors Program.

His understanding of the debates over reindustrialization suggest a reading list confined mainly to “The Corner” at National Review, which leads him to believe that there is “little awareness in most quarters of American and European ‘industrial policy’ circles of recent Chinese advances” and that there exist “many ‘economic nationalists’ who think that the purpose of industry is to subsidize factories Producing third-rate beige plastic toilet covers that no one wants to buy.” This has not been the argument for years, and would not be characterized as the argument by anyone familiar with the remarks of Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, publications from American Affairs and American Compass, or the Reindustrialize conference just convened in Detroit. Great powers, said State Department Counselor Michael Needham at the conference, “need the mass productive capacity required to project power, secure commerce, and deter aggression.” U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer emphasized that “manufacturing is an underappreciated driver of innovation and productivity growth.”

Likewise, Mr. Pervert exhibits a market fundamentalist’s understanding of the global economy, where trade imbalances must be the result of market forces and the triumph of the strongest competitors:

The kinds of factories that could actually compete with Japan or China would need to be manned by men and women of a minimal intelligence and discipline that just doesn’t exist in an America of 2025 anymore in sufficient demographic weight. By this I mean that the United States now has frankly too many stupid blacks and hispanics who are unemployable and useless in a technological civilization.

Whereas the free-trade economist searches in vain for some “comparative advantage” that explains why certain countries have come to dominate certain industries, the vitalist tries to validate the outcome with racism. But the United States is not losing to China because of some superior intelligence or discipline in the Chinese workforce. Productivity in American factories is much, much higher than in Chinese ones. You can find a variety of efforts to measure the exact level but, generally speaking, China’s manufacturing output is about 50% higher than America’s, but China employs ten times as many workers in the sector to produce it. China’s labor advantage is not that Chinese workers are better, it is that the Chinese Communist Party exploits them ruthlessly. Most of China’s advantage has nothing to do with labor anyway.

No, the problem with U.S. manufacturing is not the quality of the American people. The problem is a global economy distorted by the policy choices of other countries to promote manufacturing and the policy choices of the United States to inhibit it. When American industrial policy does come into play, as with the CHIPS Act’s effort to promote advanced semiconductor manufacturing, Americans are proving they can hold their own. TSMC’s new semiconductor fab in Arizona has already bested the yields that the company achieves in Taiwan.  

The ironic result is that, interpreting economic outcomes as the inevitable result of market competition, Mr. Pervert lands in roughly the same position as AEI. He eagerly carries the torch for the idea that free markets and the profit motive are sufficient to support productive capitalism, which he says, “I suppose is good and in fact the point if you actually produce good things. Good things are, in economic terms, things people actually want to buy. These usually turn a profit, which isn’t a bad thing.” He rejects the “populist invective against finance and financiers because of all the parts of America’s ‘fake economy,’ it is probably the least fake.” Brave. Transgressive. Bronze-age.

The real culprit is “regulations,” which “make it very hard to start interesting businesses and products in America, in finance or in the development of physical goods.” Also, labor because “the introduction of advanced manufacturing technology and automation is prohibited by union regulations in most of America.” (Remarkable, seeing as less than 10% of manufacturing workers are represented by a union...) Ultimately, “the middle classes in America” are:

just impoverished and lacking in prospects of building wealth as a result of leftist redistributionist, anti-growth and antiwhite policies and the concurrent uselessness of the pre-Trump GOP exemplified in the pathetic Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney and that bunch.

But “regulations” and “redistribution” and “anti-growth policies” were the Paul Ryan diagnosis, placing Mr. Pervert squarely in the bunch he considers pathetic. Although that forgets the race-baiting. Mr. Pervert thinks the Romney-Ryan GOP was useless because it wasn’t sufficiently obsessed with race. Which brings us back to where we started: Can we interest you in Paul Ryan but with more attention-grabbing racial tropes? If that is what you think conservatism was missing, Mr. Pervert is your man. But I’d suggested ditching the transgressive provocation, in which case, well, we already have AEI.