Politics | Revolt, revolution, and radicals

The Internet, roots, and the future of the West.

Tom X Hart
Nov 1 · 18 min read

The word “radical” is derived from the Latin for “root”. Radicals are, in proper usage, only of the right; it is only the right that wants to get to the root of things, even if the roots are dark and bloody – perhaps especially if they are so. It is the right that asserts that there are eternal metaphysical or natural laws that guide human development. Deviation from these laws can be tolerated to an extent, but, ultimately, as the Bible has it, “the wages of sin is death”. These laws are the roots of things.

Civilisations, individuals, and societies should be likened to trees. The tree can grow mighty branches that intermingle and mix with other trees and the external environment, but it can only do so if the roots are strong and vital. We can only mix and tolerate other peoples, religions, and societies if we are confident of our roots – if our roots begin to falter, our ability to mix with others and sustain beauty is undermined. Eventually, even life itself is undermined. Our roots are rarely pretty and, like mankind’s history, our roots may be ugly – thick with murder and blood. The ugliness is, however, necessary if we are to have a softer and beautiful side.

Radicalism and integrity go together; indeed, since integrity (wholeness) is essential to beauty we must also say that nothing can be beautiful if it is not also rooted. The integral system cannot allow deviation from the roots because this is synonymous with the introduction of error or asymmetry into the system. At the root of things there is great energy, but there is also a sense that there is an ineffable “something” – whether that is God or nature – that underpins our symbolic world and is the source of all real value. Every movement away from the roots is a corruption of the sign and widens the gap between symbolised and reality. In economics, we debase a currency when we print more paper money at will, and this gap between the signifier and signified underlies all radical concerns.

There are many ways we can go to the root of things. Psychologists like Jung and his contemporary explicator Jordan Peterson want people to examine their psychic roots and come to terms with their aggressive, tribal, and animalistic natures in order to survive and find meaning in life. The goal was, as Jung said, to live in a psychological state where a person was “as above, so below”: roots and branches working in harmony. Poets like Ezra Pound were concerned about the value of words and the debasement of the currency – he obsessed over usury and inflation.

Libertarians of the Ron Paul variety take a radical interest in the US Constitution, demanding that today’s politics gird as closely as possible to the document’s original terms and intentions. Those people with an interest in biology and breeding, like the founder of eugenics Francis Galton or the contemporary pop eugenicist Edward Dutton, want to maintain the vital genetic and racial roots of a nation or civilisation – usually to increase intelligence and beauty in the population. Philosophers like Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Diogenes the Cynic all wanted to get back to the most primal and early versions of Western philosophy – as with Ezra Pound, Diogenes, the son of a banker, was especially worried about the value of currency. In literature, figures like Solzhenitsyn, who issued the injunction “live not by lies”, force propagandists and people who debase language to become more honest.

However, there are few people who can pursue integrity in all things. To produce a scientific theory, a novel, or a physical body of great integrity is a large enough goal for most people – though the goal of a “healthy mind in a healthy body”, a whole man, is probably within everyone’s reach. For most people, the completely integral life is reserved for the world of religion or art – both of which are intimately connected.

The man of absolute integrity – of absolute rootedness – is a saint (or, perhaps, someone like Christ or Buddha). He is a terrifying figure, since in his adherence to the root he refuses to make any compromises. We see intimations of such radicalism in people like Van Gogh; they spin out of society because society is – being the branches rather than the roots – not radical enough to contain them. Even if a person is not very radical, the point remains that every society, political system, and individual must retain – even if very marginally – a connection to the root that sustains them, no matter how much they deny it.

The number of men who are political or religious radicals in any society is, accordingly, limited. If you want to “get along” in society in terms of money and success, then you must compromise – a radical makes hardly any compromises. The Taliban plays a radical role for Islam; although most Muslims would not endorse what the Taliban does, there is still an element of respect among most Muslims for the Taliban’s implacable stand for the purest form of Islam possible. Without their contributions to defending the roots of Islam, the whole religion – especially under assault from Western materialism – would die.

Similarly, in the West, those people with an interest in traditional Christianity and the classical world represent radicals for Western civilisation – a role that was taken on, in practice, by the fascists in the 20th century. Corresponding movements exist for all religions and civilisations, but the emergence of radicals into prominence – especially in politics – is always a sign that something has gone wrong.

Radicals appear, as with the case of the Taliban, when the civilisation or religion is under threat or stress (the atheistic Communist occupation of Afghanistan in the case of the Taliban). They represent a last redoubt against total collapse, and the mass of people only turn to them in the most dire circumstances. Prudent government should ensure that a “radical correction” is not required, but government is not always prudent – sometimes people turn to radicals when it is already too late to save the whole.

In the British case, for example, Winston Churchill – a radical figure in his militarism and love of empire – was scorned by most moderate people in Britain for years as a bloodthirsty warmonger. It was only when Britain was under existential threat from Nazism that the British threw over the “reasonable” Neville Chamberlin – a man defined by his compromise at Munich – and replaced him with the radical Churchill. Hitler was a radical for Germany, and it took a radically British man, Churchill, to effectively deal with the threat to Britain’s existence.

However, in normal times, men like Churchill are generally regarded as “mad” and “unreasonable” – as soon as peace was declared, Churchill was evicted from office. He was simply not a “normal” man, and he was abnormal because he was abnormally normal – the radical is perverse because he is transgressively normal in his lack of compromise and adherence to the essence of normality.

There can’t be such a thing, strictly speaking, as a Marxist radical. A Marxist radical would be a person who went to the roots of Marxism, a person who worked from The Communist Manifesto and Capital without any reference to later contributions to Marxism. They would maintain that later iterations of Marxist theory have been distorted or lost the essential truth that Marx first conveyed in his writing.

If such a person exists, outside the realm of academic specialists, then they have become a conservative, perhaps even a reactionary. What Marx wrote, especially in his private correspondence with Engels, regarding racial differences and human sexuality would be regarded as outrageously reactionary today.

Aside from this, Marx’s theory, at root, has largely been surpassed by social and economic developments; it is a theory for the Industrial Age, and an attempt to return to its roots would simply be a detachment from reality or, alternatively, a conservative or reactionary desire to return to the Industrial Age. In truth, Marx’s ideas were surpassed even in the time of Lenin, and, in fact, much of what Lenin and the Bolsheviks did was to mythologise Marxism – the last thing they wanted to do was to return to the roots of Marxism and destroy their myth. Marx was never properly studied in the Soviet Union, because the proper study of Marx would have exploded the country’s ruling ideology. Ultimately, Marx did not elaborate many fundamental truths, and so there is nothing for a radical to find in his works except a lesson in sophistry and poor reason.


We should speak, therefore, of the revolutionary left and the radical right. There is no “revolutionary right” and there is no “radical left”, except insofar as those words are used in a jumbled fashion. I suppose that, being radical, I am pushing for the roots of these words to take precedence over any social corruption that has occurred through political argument. To demand that the word be used in this way, in accordance with their roots, is itself a radical and rightist act.

Admittedly, there are those on the right who speak of “revolutionary conservatism”, but they, it seems to me, are mostly drawn from a neo-fascist or post-fascist position that is itself, relatively, to the left and not particularly radical. The fascist is simply a socialist who wants socialism for “his sort” (usually an ethnicity or race); a race consciousness in place of the Marxist class consciousness. His outlook is still orientated towards a utopian future, not a radical past. Indeed, the fascist is keen to forget the past so as to forge a utopian future; hence the fascist disdains both orthodox religion and established aristocracy.

The radical is a man in revolt, and a revolt is not a revolution; it is actually the opposite of a revolution, though, again, people tend to use the terms sloppily and interchangeably. But there is a reason why the arch-aristocrat Julius Evola speaks of a “revolt against the modern world”, neoconservatives have their “Rebel Media” brand, and libertarians dream of a “tax revolt” or “second Tea Party”. The confusion arises because the revolt and revolution are both acts that involve the use of violence, force, and extra-legal measures to achieve political goals. The difference lies in the underlying assumptions behind these acts. The revolt is an attempt to return a political system to a natural or metaphysical order from which it has deviated. The revolution is an attempt to overturn the natural or metaphysical order, supposedly permanently.

The mythological man in revolt is Robin Hood. He is a man who is of noble birth – he is Robin of Locksley Hall – who is forced, due to bad King John’s misrule, to become an outlaw in Sherwood Forest. The right generally supports the rule of kings and authority, but just because it favours law and order does not mean that it favours whoever wields force. To suggest that the right blindly supports the police, the priests, and the king whatever they do is a mere leftist slander. Indeed, if we look at the history of Scandinavia, as described by de Jouvenel, we find that customary law allowed a freeman whose home was violated by the king or the king’s men without reason to bind together with his fellow freemen to overthrow the king. This is what Robin, a man in revolt, was doing when he fled to Sherwood Forest. The true aristocrat is forced to turn outlaw against usurpers; he follows the spirit, not the letter, of the law.

The Age of Enlightenment ushered in an age of revolutions – as we understand the word in the modern sense – but it also contained one notable exception, a revolt of a kind that we still call a revolution: the American Revolution.

The American Revolution, as Hannah Arendt observed, is a special case; it might be more accurately termed the American Revolt than the American Revolution. I often have hard words for the American Revolution – especially its slogan “all men are created equal”, which seem to me to be a statement in stark defiance of reality that has laid the ideological foundations for many of America’s current problems. However, the American Revolution was less utopian than the French, English, and Russian revolutions; it was strongly influenced by the Age of Enlightenment, but there were reasons why it would not follow the same course as these other violent attempts at political change.

These reasons are twofold: firstly, America did not have a large landless underclass, such as existed in the Europe, and – except for the slaves – was largely composed of men who could best be described as propertied freemen. Whereas in Europe resentful lawyers and ideologues could stir the landless and propertyless mob against the middle class and aristocrats, the Americans had no such class to enflame.

America’s frontier meant that it was always possible to “light out for the territory” if all was lost, and those men who left for the frontier were either killed in the attempt to “make it” or became propertied frontiersmen themselves. Propertied frontiersmen do not want anarchy and destruction, they want a government that conforms to long-established traditions and liberties. They are analogous to those Scandinavian freemen who band together against the king when he encroaches on their property.

Secondly, as observed by Mitchell Heisman, the American revolt was as much an ethnic dispute as it was a revolution based on social groups. In particular, America’s Founding Fathers conceptualised themselves as defending Anglo-Saxon liberties that were being impinged upon by an arrogant, corrupt, and overbearing Norman aristocracy.

Since 1066, the salient political division in England had been between those Anglo-Saxons fighting for their liberties and the Norman occupiers who lorded it over them. The Normans, it must be remembered, even refused to speak English for hundreds of years. They were a people apart, and, even to this day, the descendants of the Normans remain major landholders in England (look out for those fancy French names). The American tradition of individual rights is itself merely a codification of the “rights of Englishmen” that were found in the British constitution and were hard won through native intransigence (at least, that’s what the legends said). Contrary to popular belief, Britain always had a constitution; it was merely uncodified and unwritten – and it was given shape by Anglo-Saxon complaints and protest against Norman overreach.

The tension between Norman (eventually largely Catholic) aristocrats and Anglo-Saxon (eventually largely Protestant) freemen remains current, albeit in a distorted form, in contemporary English culture and political life. When the arch-Brexiteer Nigel Farage, himself partly descended from Protestant Huguenots, rails against the snobbish and self-consciously elitist Brussels bureaucracy or the Hampstead set, he is appealing to the folk memory of the Anglo-Saxon put upon by Norman arrogance. After all, the Normans were, in a sense, Frenchified Germans (“North men”), and so English hostility towards the French and the Germans is more than a memory of the Second World War and Napoleonic Wars. The English revulsion towards the French language is, in part, a historic revolt against the language of the Norman oppressor. The European Union, chiefly a Franco-German project, is almost, in the English unconscious, “1066 on steroids” – a return of the dreaded Normans.

The American Revolution should be seen as a revolt aimed at protecting these liberties that were perceived to be under threat from the “new Normans” in London. The French and Russian revolutions, by contrast, proposed new rights – often positive rights (e.g. the right to work) – that violated the metaphysical and natural order, so devolving into utopianism and catastrophe.

For these two reasons, America, of all the Enlightenment revolutions, has endured and succeeded. She did not descend into the absolute bloodshed and anarchy of the English Revolution or the French Revolution. Now, admittedly, the American Revolution was supported by the Whigs in London, so it was not entirely untouched by Enlightenment utopianism. Indeed, it was, in sense, an American correlate to the English Glorious Revolution (1688) – an extension of Whiggish (liberal) influence. It is just that America, like England, implemented a more constrained version of Enlightenment thought than other places.

America has succeeded so well that, as with the Roman Republic, she has become an empire and entered a crisis period. The frontier closed a long time ago, and all alternatives – from outer space to inner space (psychedelics) – have failed to satisfy the burgeoning population of America. Furthermore, America has, since immigration reform in the 1960s, opened herself – and her generous dole – to the world. In doing so, she has created a social class that was previously marginal in America but very familiar to Europeans: a propertyless group largely dependent on the state’s largess to survive. This group, egged on by lawyerly and priestly ideologues, attacks America’s propertied middle as the beneficiaries of “white supremacy” and “white privilege”. This is less to do with race and more to do with a replay of those revolutionary energies that were found in France and Russia in the last three centuries and are now relevant due to America’s new situation as an empire.

If it wasn’t pitched in racial terms, then this dispute would be pitched in terms of social class – or perhaps even sex and sexuality. The particularities are not important because the general thrust of decay and the revolutionary temptation are not derived by the purported cause so much as the social interests of those engaged in politics. America’s class relations were, from the first, racialised due to slavery and so it is no surprise that attempts to overturn the American Way should proceed in racial terms. The same situation did not pertain in Europe, though, due to mass immigration and Europe’s subjection to the American empire, a similar dynamic is emerging on the continent.

America is, in any case, a good example of what successful revolt looks like. When a group of people manage to break away from a corrupt and decadent body – restoring themselves to the root of things – they can achieve remarkable advances. What we are living through at the moment may well be the point where America breaks herself apart, with a smaller group seeking a more or radical or purer type of Americanism separate from the current ossified empire.


Revolutions are always based upon a deceitful assumption: the promise of the revolutionary is that natural and metaphysical order can be permanently overturned by violent political action. This is simply not possible – even if we exclude a metaphysical order to our universe, we humans are constrained by our biological nature as animals. We cannot simply stop behaving as intelligent apes by fiat, and we cannot cheek Darwin.

Revolutions are, in actuality, synonymous with collapse and disorder. A characteristic of the left, connected to its priestly roots, is that it is a movement of rhetoric and sophistry. To disguise what actually happens is its speciality, and this is why adherence to the etymology and origins of words is a radical act that annoys the left. The existence of “political correctness” is itself an attempt to police and distort language and the expression of language in such a way as to conceal reality; it is an attempt to deviate from the roots of words. This is true even of the term “revolution”, a term that has, since the Enlightenment, been detached from its original meaning and given a complexion that is not linked to reality. The use of “revolution” in the contemporary sense – a change in the political order – dates from the Glorious Revolution; itself a blow against the established order by the Whigs. The revolution is taken by the left to mean an exit from history; it is an end to rotation and repast – a final bloodbath that leads to utopia.

The term revolution, as understood in Medieval times, was connected to the ever-turning wheel of nature and fortuna – luck. The wheel rotated as the seasons changed, always returning to its starting point, and, in a similar way, a man would have to bear the turns of the wheel of life – from fortune, to penury, and, hopefully, back again. This eternal worldview was connected to ideas of an ordered universe supervised by an all-powerful deity and backed up by Aristotle’s observations of nature. In short, the word “revolution” used to mean exactly the opposite of the left means by it today. The revolution, like the revolution of a wheel, went round and round without end.

The roots of this view go even deeper into Roman history, where the annual festival of Saturnalia, somewhat similar to April Fool’s Day, allowed servants to change place with masters. The revolution is conceived as a permanent Saturnalia where the servants will be masters forever, but this is impossible. As George Orwell observed in Animal Farm and Vilfredo Pareto noted in his sociological works, servants in power merely become new masters. We cannot escape hierarchy, we can only ensure that the hierarchy is functional and subject to minimal corruption.

The actual moment of revolution is usually a moment of societal collapse. The “revolution” of the left’s imagination is in actuality an interregnum where anarchy and disorder reign. What the left means by “revolution” is simply the use of political violence to overthrow the existing order when that order has decayed to such an extent that it can no longer exercise authority. What follows is not a “new order” but a general disorder that continues until a man – usually a fairly brutal man of the Stalin or Napoleon type – takes power and stabilises the situation. Although the rhetoric of revolution may be used to close the period of anarchy and disorder, this is merely the cloak worn by a new elite. The revolution itself was never more than the final collapse of order, and, as in the Medieval sense, “the revolution” is just a revolution back to a more primitive form of order.

Similarly, the term “radical” was perverted by the 1920s so that it no longer meant “connected to the root” but rather “root and branch reform” – or, more violently, “to tear up by the roots”. It is in this sense that a book like Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals (1971) was written. What is meant by radical reform in this case is action that will tear the existing society up by the roots; it is a promise to kill the existing society, not to preserve its most vital aspects and restore it to vigorous growth. Understood in this way, the promise of “radical reform” must be seen as very threatening indeed: it is a promise to exterminate and murder.


We are living through a period of revolt and radicalisation. From Dutch farmers driving through the streets of Amsterdam to Brexit to the gilets jaunes to Trump’s “deplorables”, there is an activist spirit in the air from the right that has been absent for many decades.

Depending upon the gravity of the situation, these revolts may eventually combine, as happened in Chile in 1973, with those elements of the military and security complex who are disturbed by the West’s chronic crisis and stagnation. A rightist revolt in modern times would probably combine these novel populist revolts, mediated by social media, with disillusioned sections of the military. The man in revolt is not, we should note, always successful; after all, Robin Hood only came out of Sherwood Forest when good King Richard returned from captivity in the Holy Land and pushed out wicked King John.

Robin alone could never win, even if he was – as in the case of many Internet anons – a fearsome outlaw.

At the same time, the forces of the left continue to push the West away from the roots of things. An interesting paradox of our age is that the Internet, itself a root network, is simultaneously a vehicle that removes people from their social roots while also speeding up a greater movement towards the radicalisation.

This process, partly encompassed by Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas of territorialisationand and deterritorialisation, is an expression of the way the world of techno-capital can completely destroy and uproot an activity – the act of creative destruction – and, simultaneously, re-make a new order from that destruction.

The automobile is a good example of this tendency, since it completely disrupted traditional rooted life in the early 20th century and yet almost immediately established a new order of motorways, service stations, and even courting rituals (making love on the backseat away from the prying eyes of elders). The faster the automobile uprooted people, the faster it established a new root network – the motorways – and a quintessential national experience: the American road trip.

Governments across the West are currently obsessed with questions of “radicalisation” and “deradicalisation”, particularly of ethnonationalists and Islamists. Millions of pounds, mostly wasted, is being spent in an effort to “deradicalise” people. The mode of radicalisation is, very tellingly, the Internet itself – engagement with the Internet, the root network, is in and of itself a radicalising experience. To be an Internet user is to be a radical.

The obsessive use of the Internet is itself a male preserve: the male role – the priest or warrior – has always been to guard the root of things. Accordingly, it is on the Internet that we find earnest European reverts to Islam sharing their favourite nasheeds or recent converts to Catholicism (“tradcats”) picking over Vatican II in disgust or discussing the best place to hear a Latin Mass. All efforts to deradicalise people will fail because the very nature of engagement in the contemporary world is the Internet: it is a radicalisation process.

The Internet allows people to inhabit a world where the old roots are broken: nation, family, and religion are shattered by instant global communication. The rise of furries, transsexuals, and the decline of the nation state and feelings of national pride are all connected to a sense that we are “one world” online and that our very biological nature is fluid – gender fluid, as some may say.

At the same time, this great uprooting of identity has been accompanied by a return to our deep territory – a return to the roots. Old books, previously sidelined, reanimate on social networks and bring eternal ideas to new eyes. The Internet as a mass phenomenon is now about 30 years old; it took this long to get “everyone” online in the Western world. In the 2010s, we had an intimation of the ways in which this technology will pull us from our roots and also act a powerful reactionary force. The ructions over Brexit and Trump are only the start of this process: its completion, a remaking of the West, lies in the 2020s.

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