According to a popular misconception, the idea that politics is divided between a left and a right dates back to the early days of the French Revolution in 1789, when the supporters of the ancien régime sat on the right side of the Constituent Assembly, and the radicals and revolutionaries sat on the left. If you know anything at all about how humans have traditionally structured our world, you’ll know that this is bullshit. The left-right divide is older than the French Revolution, and also older than the monarchies of Europe. It stretches deep into our prehistory. It might be older than the human species.
Things that resemble the left-right spectrum do seem to show up a lot, in strange corners of the world. The people of the southwestern United States have traditionally organised the universe along the four cardinal directions. So, for instance, among the Zuni, the west is associated with the colour blue, the bear, the coyote, redtop grass, the clans named after those totems, priesthood, archery, and water. The north has yellow, the pelican, the grouse, the oak, their clans, the cactus band, warfare, and air. Other people have a similar system, but populate it differently. For the Ojibwe, the west is black and associated with buffalo, deer, and death. For the Navajo, west is yellow, feminine, and abalone shell. You can see traces of the same thing even when directions aren’t involved: In Australia, the Wakelbura divide the entire phenomenal and mystical world between two moieties, Wutaru and Mullera. The sun is Wutaru, the moon is Mullera. Emu and bandicoot are Wutaru, dog and kangaroo are Mullera. Honey might be either Wutaru or Mullera, depending on which type of bee produced it. When a member of a Wutaru clan dies, his body must be exposed on a platform made from the wood of a Wutaru tree.
This stuff is not restricted to primitive societies. Medieval chronicles referred to the coast of Dalmatia as ‘Red Croatia,’ because in the Slavic cardinal system the south is red; the original homeland of the Croats was ‘White Croatia,’ somewhere near the Carpathian mountains. In the twentieth century, there was a region of Outer Manchuria, up against the fringes of Korea, that had been settled by people from the opposite end of the Russian Empire; they called it Green Ukraine. East is green. And the Australian system should not be unfamiliar to anyone who’s encountered a Romance language. In French, a book, an arm, and a coat are all masculine, while a page, a leg, and a jacket are feminine. Spanish distinguishes between a masculine knife, el cuchillo, and a feminine spoon, la cuchara. Here is the trap left for the slightly smart. Knife: violent, penetrating, penis, man. Spoon: receptive, containing, vagina, woman. Completely wrong. The masculine objects do not belong to men and the feminine objects do not belong to women; the universe is cleaved by a division as cosmic as the one between Wutaru and Mullera. Biological sex is just one minor feature of grammatical gender; men are just another object, like books, arms, and coats, that belong to one side of the invisible line that organises the world.
It’s the same with left and right. The actual directions are just an echo. The political division came first.
Look at left and right handedness, which are already a metaphor. The right: dumb, majoritarian, conformist, constantly confusing itself for nature. The left: a pesky and persecuted minority, always trying to invert the settled way of doing things, and usually making things difficult for everyone else. Jesus separates the sheep (obedient, herdlike) to his right from the goats (wilful, questioning) to his left. Later he ascends to Heaven, to sit by the right hand of God. In Tantric traditions, the more orthodox sects are dakshinachara, or right-handed. They emphasise balance, serenity, and austerity. But there’s another path to the godhead, which seeks out the universal mind through chaos, delirium, drunkenness, and sex; this is the vamachara, or left-hand path. Yang is on the right. Yin is on the left. This stuff has been woven into the way we move through the world for a very long time. When a band of chimpanzees moves in formation across the forest floor, alpha out front, notice which side his most senior lieutenant takes. In 1789, the monarchists would never have agreed to sit on the left side of the Constituent Assembly, because they were already on the right.
Still, every few months, someone emerges to declare that the left-right model of politics is obsolete and we need to scrap it for something else. A popular replacement is the division between inside and outside: inside you have the neoliberal consensus and its armies of smug, credentialed ideological clones; outside, the teeming horde of unvaccinated maniacs. Repeated attempts to build some kind of left-right populist coalition of the outside. The problem, though, is that as soon as representatives of the outside gain any kind of political power, they become, to some degree at least, insiders, which means that instead of a neat circle you have to plot your politics on one of those four-dimensional cubes that’s continually folding in on itself. Another model is the one based on speed: there’s an accelerationist politics that wants to propel us forwards into fully automated gay space communism or the AI crypto hustle thunderdome, and a regressive politics that wants to pull the emergency brake of history or retvrn to some plague-ridden late medieval idyll. Obviously I’m very interested in the idea that politics is ultimately a question of controlling the flow of time, but since time has continued to move at exactly one second per second regardless of who’s in power, it doesn’t feel like a particularly useful model. Thomas Friedman once tried to divide the world into ‘web people’ and ‘wall people.’ This is pleasingly insane. We could try out some others. A political spectrum split between the Party of the Sun (Leninists, reactionaries) and the Party of the Moon (liberals, anarchists). Maybe in the background there’s the unimaginable politics of the stars. Or we could divide the world between birdism, migratory, globalist, and beastism, rooted, wallowing. It’s fun. But if you want to actually understand reality, I still think the old left-right model is the only one that makes sense. As I’ve written before, politics is only really meaningful if it can be plotted on that axis. Dig into anything that claims to be entirely off the map, and you’ll usually find there’s nothing but fascism and styrofoam inside. There will always be a right. There will always be a left.
But even I can admit that lately, things have been getting weird.
These terms are differential; they only have meaning relative to each other. The actual content is indeterminate. Most of the time left is the opposite of right, and vice versa. But every so often, we go through a period of crisis, in which all our politics go gooey and swirl together like an insect in a chrysalis. What comes out afterwards is usually, in terms of the previous setup, a contradiction in terms. Last time it happened, we ended up with conservatives trying to radically reshape all of human society according to their utopian vision, while the left were reduced to sitting around getting misty-eyed about the good old days of postwar social democracy. Another mutation appears to be happening now. Entire ideologies are going extinct. New ones sprouting, soft and pale, like mushrooms on a fallen tree. What emerges afterwards will still be a left and a right, but they won’t look anything like the left and the right you know. They’ll look like this:
Left: Elite human capitalism
There is going to be a woke 2. I’m not good at much, but I am usually ahead of the curve on the precise trajectory of wokeness. Already in 2021 I was writing that ‘the ideological frenzy of the last few years is starting to die down. People are quietly, guiltily removing the pronouns from their email signatures. Last Thanksgiving, there were slightly fewer articles about how to hold your uncle personally accountable for three hundred years of American racism.’ About a year later, I was the first person to write about the phenomenon entirely in the past tense. Now, everyone else has caught up, which means that somewhere, woke 2 is already gestating, in one of the hidden wombs of the world. For a while, I thought we still had an opportunity. If woke 2 is inevitable, maybe a few ideological entrepreneurs can get in on the ground floor and point it in a less obnoxious direction than the last version. You can have a lot of leverage when you’re early. But I think it’s already too late. The next iteration is already half-formed, and it is a wet unborn monster, worse than anything we could have imagined.
If we are about to see the emergence of woke 2, it’s because woke 1 fulfilled an important ideological need, which is now going unmet. It’s boring to keep harping on about the nature of wokeness in 2025, so I’ll be brief: its function was to justify the position of the ruling classes in a way that doesn’t acknowledge the actual substance of that position, which is the property relation. In place of the exploitation that undergirds the world, it presented a vast mishmash of various forms of prejudice, hatred, and exclusion, which could be embodied in entirely ordinary words, hand gestures, or sometimes large and inert rocks. (In 2021, a racist boulder was removed from the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.) It is not easy to be a good person, it takes a level of scrupulous ritual observance usually only found among ultra-orthodox Jews. But as it turns out, the most conscientious and sensitive people are in the ruling classes. They are more egalitarian than everyone else. This is how companies that make machines for scooping out the eyes of African war orphans ended up lecturing their workers on how to be less oppressive.
It was all very clever. Unfortunately, it turned out that people respond very, very badly to this kind of moral condescension. The backlash has been so intense that it’s now socially acceptable to espouse outright skull-measuring scientific racism in public. If our object is to build a more egalitarian society, woke 1 was an incredible failure. But that was never the point. Which is why woke 2 will be the dialectical synthesis of the smug hectoring of wokeness and the skull-measuring scientific racism that replaced it.
For most of the last century, progressivism has implied at least some kind of vague rhetorical commitment to egalitarianism. But there’s no necessary reason why the two should always go together. In the nineteenth century, nothing was more progressive than eugenics. In Dostoevsky’s Demons, Shigalyov can imagine a liberated, scientific, progressive future in which ninety percent of humanity is reduced to total slavery, and not see any contradiction. Rather than continue going through the rigmarole of inventing egalitarian alibis for a fundamentally unequal society, the mainstream centre-left might just find another myth. Currently, the ideologies of explicit hierarchy are mostly found on the right, but there’s nothing keeping them there. We are in a gooey age, where all boundaries disappear.
Maybe the greatest ideological entrepreneur of our era is Richard Hanania. Far more than any of his competitors—Curtis Yarvin, Bronze Age Pervert, me—he seems to prefigure the politics of the future. Hanania is a columnist and the president of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, which is something he made up with his friend Eric. His ideological trajectory has gone something like this. Fifteen years ago, Hanania was an outright white racist, writing sentences like ‘White nationalism is the only hope that part of what made the American nation great will survive somewhere.’ He believed that white people form a distinct genetic unit with particular qualities, such as IQ, that make them, on average, intrinsically better than other people. (Hanania is Palestinian. According to the US Census Bureau, this makes him white. Historically, others have disagreed. There might be more than one reason he wrote all this stuff under a pseudonym.) Later, he moved into the more mainstream right-wing media, publishing various forms of anti-woke blather, some of which has informed the policies of the current Trump administration, without much to indicate that any of his underlying beliefs had changed. But slowly he started to notice something. He believed that white people were smarter and more capable than everyone else, but most of the smart and successful individuals seemed to believe in some kind of liberal anti-racism, whereas most of the people who agreed with him seemed to have small pools of custard in their brains.
In the last few years, Hanania has made a kind of aretaic turn. Instead of the white race, he now believes in a universal herrenvolk stratum of ‘elite human capital.’ He now supports gay marriage and trans rights, because gay and trans people tend to be wealthier, more liberal, and higher IQ, and because openness to sexual minorities seems to be a trait of elite human capital. He supports abortion, and quotes Jessica Valenti while doing so. He opposes Trump and the MAGA movement, because they’re all plainly morons. He no longer opposes mass immigration, because it provides a wider talent pool from which elite human capital might be drawn, even if it’s statistically likelier to come from some groups than others. He likes Jews. He has rearranged his Hitler particles into an almost perfect facsimile of liberalism, with just one piece missing, which is the assumption of a universal human dignity. Perhaps relatedly, he also believes that he, as an instance of elite human capital, could easily write a Jacobean tragedy as good as any of Shakespeare’s, if he had a few days to learn all the old-timey words.
I hate to say it, but I think this thing might have legs. The centre-left is hollowed out, it’s empty, its current best idea for 2028 is just running Kamala Harris again in the hope that things go differently. That space is there to be filled, and what makes elite human capitalism potent is that it doesn’t just flatter the position of the ruling classes—they have plenty of options on that front—but also provides the materials for an entirely new round of shrieking moral priggishness. It’s not hard to imagine a future in which your HR department will force you into annual trainings on your moral duty to build and develop your human capital. You are not a soul, or an ends in yourself; you are an instrument. Be the best instrument you can be! Celebrities drummed out of public life for displaying low-human capital traits. Listening to music without headphones on public transport. Drunk driving. Don’t you know the harm that causes? Do better! Be better! Maybe in a few years you’ll accidentally use a non-EHC word in conversation and everyone around you will start grimacing. A muscular, technocratic, progressive, elitist, and utterly philistine left. It really could work. But not for Hanania himself. After all, he used to be an outright white supremacist, and what could be less EHC than that? Our present might be able to forgive him. His future will not.