In Defence of Prejudice

Without boundaries, distinctions and aversions, concepts such as loyalty and love become incoherent.

Written by The Westering Sun.

Those seeking to defend Western civilization have typically turned to conservatism. Yet despite broad popular support, conservatism has failed to arrest civilizational decline or withstand the managerial sabotage of the West’s symbolic order. This failure cannot be explained through weak leadership or bad decisions, though these undoubtedly played their part. Conservatism failed because it surrendered the terms of engagement.

Liberals and leftists often take satisfaction in portraying conservatism as less intellectually rigorous than systems like liberalism or Marxism. But the “sophistication” of these ideologies largely reflects their construction from abstract principles designed for systematization. Conservatism, by contrast, is more like a disposition than a system. It involves instinctive attachments to custom, tradition and inherited ways of life.

There are, of course, countless works that expound conservatism as a coherent and credible philosophy. Many date from the second half of the twentieth century, when conservatism underwent significant intellectualization. This transformation was driven in part by free-marketeers and former leftists who became the architects of neoconservatism. They produced a large body of books, arguments, and policy programmes that helped conservative elites to compete in the procedural language of the liberal media.

This process offset an inherent tendency within conservatism towards defensive philistinism—a suspicion of intellectualism sometimes mistaken for fidelity to tradition. It also yielded genuine policy achievements, in both Britain and America, while helping clarify key distinctions between conservative and progressive worldviews.

Yet the intellectualization of conservatism helped mask the ascent of a deeper symbolic cowardice: the refusal to defend what could not be justified in liberal-rational terms. As a consequence, conservatives who could not—or would not—translate their commitments into procedural or universalist language were gradually excluded from the elite discourse policed by the media, academia and managerial institutions. This was despite the fact that their values were often far closer to those of ordinary conservative voters.

In the United States, this culminated in the marginalization of traditionalism and paleo-conservatism by new forms of conservatism palatable to managerial rule. Though partly shaped by fusionism—the Cold War-era alliance of traditionalists, libertarians and anti-communists—the broader postwar conservative coalition increasingly came to be dominated by neoconservatism, whose missionary creed drew symbolic energy from liberal internationalism and American exceptionalism. As various commentators have observed, its roots were not in America’s heartlands, but in the anti-communist milieus of ex-leftist New York intellectuals.

The structural asymmetry of Western politics

In The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler described how liberal democracy dissolved the organic bonds of nobility, estate and tradition that once underpinned Western governance. Over the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, these came to be replaced by mass parties organized around programmes, abstract rhetoric and systematic ideologies.

The new system demanded a new elite. The old aristocratic elites were drawn into this alien framework and forced to play by bourgeois rules—becoming, in Spengler’s words, “bourgeois-ized without being bourgeois”. Later, bourgeois conservatives themselves were outmanoeuvred by the rising liberal-managerial class, whose technocratic versatility and institutional dominance gave them control over the West’s symbolic order.

As conservative elites adapted to managerial norms, they grew increasingly detached from the emotional heart of conservatism: its allegiance to inherited traditions, values and identities. The result was a movement incapable of conserving anything, because it no longer possessed either the courage or the vocabulary to name what was truly sacred. Over time, this produced a widening gap between conservative elites and their base, ending in open revolts and the rise of populist-right parties across Europe and the Anglosphere.

This evolution was not just a moral failure on the part of conservative elites. It was caused by the structural demands of mass democracy and mass communication, which shape the language of political legitimacy in a way that forces conservatism to become a procedural echo of liberalism, defending tradition only insofar as it can be rationally justified—rather than embracing it as an intrinsic good.

In this new order, ideas do not prosper according to their truth or organic resonance, but on their capacity to be abstracted, repeated and operationalized at scale. They must be defended with slogans, metrics and universalist principles—forms of argumentation that can be processed by bureaucracies, debated in public forums, and amplified through media systems. In other words: the content of managerial ideologies. By contrast, tradition, custom and affective attachment do not scale well, and cannot easily be translated into procedural form without losing their force.

This means that even discounting overt bias in the bureaucracy or civil service, there is a structural asymmetry in Western political discourse that favours ideologies like liberalism and socialism. The modern public sphere rewards abstract, universalist and ostensibly neutral arguments that conform to its procedural grammar. Hence conservatives’ attachment to particular identities, customs and loyalties is fatally compromised as soon as they accept the legitimacy of a discursive environment that formats all claims in procedural and abstract terms.

Conservatives lose the moment they accept the authority of the mass-mediated public sphere: a realm that strips political expression of its affective, particular and sacred character. In such a system, even the simplest declarations of love for one’s country must be reformulated in the language of rights, freedom or democracy—as if organic belonging required justification.

This is why mainstream conservatism has failed even when electorally successful: because winning office means little if you have already ceded the symbolic ground on which real power depends. It also explains why the groups most resistant to the liberal-managerial order (such as Salafist enclaves or the Orange Order) are those that remain structurally illegible to it. They reject the procedural terms of the liberal public sphere and refuse to translate their affective attachments into language the regime can process or reward.

Resistance cannot flow through the very channels that enforce abstraction and dissolve identity. The choice is either to submit to procedural containment, or cultivate symbolic orders that defy managerial legibility.

The wisdom of prejudice

The future of the Right depends on rediscovering a worldview based in sensibility rather than system.

Traditional conservative thought was grounded in prejudice. Today, this term typically connotes crude bias or irrational hostility. But its original political meaning—shaped by Edmund Burke and later revived by thinkers like Roger Scruton and Russell Kirk—was somewhat different. Scruton defined prejudice as simply “the set of beliefs and ideas that arise instinctively in social beings, and which reflect the root experiences of social life”. Kirk described it as “pre-judgment, the answer with which intuition and ancestral consensus of opinion supply a man when he lacks either time or knowledge to arrive at a decision predicated upon pure reason.”

In this sense, prejudice is a form of latent wisdom, which distills the habits and preferences of our ancestors, shaped by trial and error over generations. Burke interpreted such traditions as the outworking of divine providence, a view that Kirk echoed: “Providence, acting through the medium of human trial and error, has developed every hoary habit for some important purpose”. But for most people, affective attachment is its own justification. One does not need to believe in Providence to support a sports team or love one’s children. One just does.

While thinkers like Scruton and Kirk sought to rehabilitate prejudice as a form of inherited wisdom, they also seemed compelled to understate its darker connotations. Such efforts can only go so far without denying the difficult realities of human nature. Liberals are not wrong when they observe that prejudice involves more than intuitive loyalty or love for our own. It also implies boundaries, distinctions and aversions. Indeed, without these, concepts such as loyalty and love become incoherent.

Many on the Right have acknowledged this. Carl Schmitt argued that the friend/enemy distinction forms the fundamental axis of politics, giving political life its very structure. Samuel Huntington made the same point in more anthropological terms when observing, “It is human to hate. For self-definition and motivation people need enemies: competitors in business, rivals in achievement, opponents in politics. They naturally distrust and see as threats those who are different and have the capability to harm them.”

If we understand prejudice in this fuller sense, then everyone, as the Romantic writer Charles Lamb put it, is “a bundle of prejudices – made up of likings and dislikings – the veriest thrall to sympathies, apathies, antipathies”. For exactly this reason, all peoples tend to be naturally conservative, until their settled preferences and aversions are disrupted by dislocation or upheaval. The classic case was Britain’s Industrial Revolution, which uprooted traditional communities and eroded inherited ways of life. Many contemporaries predicted that widespread unrest would follow, and their fears were largely vindicated. It gave rise to new modes of political agitation and social conflict that have remained characteristic of modernity, and arguably persist in mutated forms to this day.

The Age of Replacism

While conservatism has adapted itself to rationalist frameworks, it has completely failed to resist the deeper transformations of modernity: the drift toward abstraction and individual autonomy. At times, conservative elites have even endorsed these trends by celebrating demographic change, substituting inherited identities with abstract ideals, and reducing economic life to metrics and markets shorn of higher purpose.

The populist and dissident right often note how conservative and liberal elites converge into a so-called “uniparty”. This convergence is real, but it does not arise solely from betrayal or bad faith. It reflects a deeper accommodation to the rules of the managerial order, where political survival requires fluency in the language of liberal-rationalism and compliance with the norms of the mass media.

The ideological convergence of elite discourse has been accelerated by technological developments—from the pill to the smartphone—which have almost invariably served to corrode intimacy and social cohesion. As Western populations are taught to pursue personal autonomy and self-actualization, they find themselves detached from the shared traditions and relationships that once anchored everyday life. Once collective bonds dissolve, a pervasive sense of fragmentation takes hold, and Western man finds himself isolated, uprooted and increasingly fungible—an interchangeable part in a depersonalized system.

At the same time, technology has expanded the reach and intensity of managerial control, furnishing new tools of surveillance, behavioural manipulation and ideological enforcement. It has also strengthened the hand of the West’s civilizational rivals, with demographic pressure and economic entanglement used to exploit a civilization that has perfected technique while forfeiting its soul.

One prophet of this depersonalized world is the much-maligned French writer Renaud Camus. His concept of replacism is routinely dismissed in mainstream discourse as a conspiracy theory, and recently led to his being banned from entering the UK. Yet while often associated with migration and demographic change, Camus’s critique is far broader in scope.

Replacism describes modernity’s relentless homogenization of cultural, social and symbolic life: a process in which inherited forms are systematically displaced by consumerism, technocratic governance and market-driven efficiency. In this sense, it is the ontological method of managerial rule, which replaces tradition and identity with globalized, standardized and ostensibly rational alternatives. It severs people from their historical and affective attachments to place, heritage and identity.

Seen through this lens, the concept of replacism is less a paranoid reaction to demographic change and more a critique of modernity’s entire epistemological framework. And it helps account for how conservatism became just another variant of managerial ideology.

Just as replacism exchanges deeply rooted identities for interchangeable, universal forms, the procedural discourse of liberal rationalism compelled conservatism to abandon its instinctive foundations in favour of abstract justifications. By accepting these terms of engagement, conservatives unwittingly participated in the replacement of their own worldview, transmuting an ethos of belonging, tradition and prejudice into something that must prove itself in the language of reason and utility. And this will continue to happen: for once conservatives embark upon this path, their capture by the managerial system is inevitable.

Comfort and complicity

Across the West, financial incentives, prestige systems and symbolic norms have produced a structural asymmetry in style and strategy that favours the Left over the Right.

The managerial order apportions social prestige and financial security based on symbolic compliance. Liberals and social democrats thrive in this system because they align with its core values: proceduralism, universalism, technocracy and abstraction. For those with the right skills, entry into the elite—and the comforts that come with it—becomes a relatively straightforward matter of ideological alignment.

This has complemented a long-standing strategy on the Left, which trained its cadres to maintain the appearance of respectability while subverting institutions and building para-political infrastructures (including front groups, NGOs and activist legal bodies). Taken together, these behaviours amount to a latent strategy for elite reproduction.

The Right, by contrast, has historically been associated with capitalism, inherited wealth, and the defence of continuity against revolutionary upheaval. This fostered a longstanding assumption—both among aspiring conservatives and the wider public—that right-wing politics could offer a safe and respectable path to power and prosperity through absorption into existing elites. But this has only remained true as conservatism has emptied of substance: as it has become performative and procedural.

Under the current order, the only tolerated conservatism is one that makes superficial gestures towards tradition while affirming liberal shibboleths such as diversity, equality and technocracy. In this way, managerial conservatism can persist in the media, think tanks, and high politics as a kind of ornamental opposition, while leaving the regime’s sovereignty untouched.

For conservatives who sincerely wish to defend the West, conventional politics has become a trap. In the modern order, elite prestige is governed by institutions that demand symbolic compliance—and it is withdrawn the moment one questions foundational liberal dogmas. Dependence on prestige institutions therefore means surrendering the ability to defend anything of enduring value.

Modern secular conservatism has lost both its relationship to the transcendent and its sense of tragedy. Just as this allowed it to be ritually defanged by managerialism, the more radical Right has been structurally exiled from elite politics in every major Western country. The Right therefore exists in a double-bind: become respectable and neutered, or defiant and outcast.

Unless conservatism can learn to sacrifice without expectation of reward—to endure reputational ruin, social marginalization and professional exile—it will remain what it has become: a client ideology of managerial power, upholding the regime even while pretending to oppose it.

Yet the experience of the Right outside the mainstream helps reveal the futility of sacrifice without strategy. While much of the Right has been forced to embrace outsider status across the West, it has often struggled to construct parallel institutions or articulate a vision of elite formation. Lacking a coherent strategy for re-entry to elite politics, its resistance to Western decline remains aesthetic and ineffective.

Historically, the Western Left was symbolically aligned with rupture and risk, and internalized a quasi-sacred myth of political martyrdom. This spirit was epitomized by the German revolutionary Eugen Leviné’s refrain that Communists are “dead men on leave”, a posture that made sense when Communist militants posed a real threat to the old bourgeois-aristocratic order, and often paid for their convictions with imprisonment or death.

But under managerial liberalism, the symbolic economy has inverted. Radical leftists now enjoy cultural permission to perform dissidence while remaining adjacent to power through academia, the media, NGOs and public sector bureaucracies. Their myth of martyrdom coexists with institutional pathways to prestige and reward. The Left’s rhetoric of sacrifice is simulated and subsidized within structures that grant it safety, salary and symbolic capital.

Leviné’s communist heirs are not dead men on leave, but tenured academics on sabbatical. Instead, the sacrificial logic he articulated now applies (both symbolically and materially) to those genuinely excluded from mainstream politics: populists, traditionalist Christians and segments of the dissident Right.

But unless its defiant posture is anchored in institutional form and directed towards elite renewal, the Right will remain a witness, not a force of change. A strategy for power demands more than sacrifice. It requires a vision for elite formation—the telos of any serious political movement.

From managerial conservatism to mythic rebirth

The ongoing dismantling of Western civilization can feel inexorable, but it continues to meet resistance. It is not easy to reprogramme human nature. Emotional attachments to home, family, community and nation stubbornly persist, even amid accelerating social change.

The enduring need for belonging helps explain the rise of populist and nationalist movements across the West. These movements typically vow to defend the objects of our affective loyalty and to restore a semblance of social cohesion. And though establishment conservatives turn away aghast, those with eyes to see can recognize something natural and even inevitable: the deep-seated longing for civilizational continuity and organic order.

Spengler foresaw that Western man would eventually outgrow his worship of reason and his faith in party programmes. What was once the mark of progress would become an outmoded relic of an exhausted age. In time, he argued, the over-rationalized politics of the West would give way to a Second Religiousness: a spiritual revival echoing the faith that animated the West in its springtime of youth. He predicted future generations marked by “a new resigned piety, sprung from tortured conscience and spiritual hunger,” who would turn away from the “steel-bright concepts” of reason and progress in search of the ineffable and eternal.

Signs of this spiritual hunger are evident across the West, as the heirs to its broken inheritance search restlessly for meaning in a wasteland of fragmentation and loss. They call us to reclaim the wisdom of prejudice as the emotional and cultural foundation of a meaningful life.

The future of Western civilization hinges on the rise of a new elite that can answer this call, while avoiding the language traps of managerial rule. It must recover prejudice as the counterweight to the centrifugal forces of modernity, and speak in a voice that restores the sacred amid symbolic ruin. Most of all, it must reforge a living myth through which the West can remember what it was.

This essay is adapted from one published on The Westering Sun.

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