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I don't think these people are genuine reactionaries because genuine reaction doesn't consist in activism. It consists in being reactionary. De Maistre had a saying about this- something like la contre-revolucion est le contraire de la revolucion n'est pas la revolucion contraire(I am aware my French sounds like illiterate drunken ebonics to a European and I'm covering the meaning, not googling it to copy-paste).
Lefty de-growth advocates are mostly not the opposite of the revolution. Like maybe a hippy commune growing organic vegetables is, but the apartment dweller who does lots of yoga and worries constantly sure isn't. To be a reactionary consists first in living according to older mores, not first in pushing for change.
Defining reaction that way would seem to produce some pretty strange results. It would mean that none of the prominent writers and internet microcelebrities one normally thinks of as reactionary get any credit for their writing or public persona (they may be reactionary in their private lives, but Moldbug's writings wouldn't count one way or another). You would also have to conclude that lots of people with progressive liberal politics are more reactionary than certain conservatives (90% of Boston Brahmans would count as more reactionary than Milo Yanopolis). This is also the first time I've heard this requirement put forward for being a reactionary. To be honest it seems like it is the result of cope. Reaction is so far out of the Overton window that its proponents know they can never make headway, and saying, "a real reaction just goes his own Sigma Male way instead of trying to make change in the world," is a good way to feel better about it. It also rhymes with all the "politics is personal" stuff you get from progressives, which is pretty interesting (though I'm not quite sure what relevance it has to the position, just something I noticed).
Well yes, the essence of counter-revolution is to live the opposite of the revolution and to spread itself by living it. It's not to provide flowery justifications for it. I don't think of moldbug or milo as particularly reactionary, right wing though they might- my grandpa worrying about how my generation is screwed 'because there's going to be too many blacks to deal with' is an actual racial reactionary, not Steve Sailor talking about 13/52.
And the self described reactionary DR doesn't seem to have much contact with these people. There are communities- and I belong to more than one of them- where right of the American overton window ideas are the norm. Keyword- communities. Le contraire de la revolucion is not an individualist sigma grindset, whatever that means. It's a community, and communities triumph by growing.
Would I like the bible to be the most important book in our public school curricula, the repeal of the 19th amendment and women's lib, and criminalization of homosexuality? Yes. But that in isolation doesn't make me a reactionary. Reaction is a totalizing identity and without commitment to the bit it's just a revolution from the right. Maybe something fascist adjacent, if anyone could ever define that word.
If that was how most people thought of the term, we would hear the Amish and Mennonites and Hasidim laid out as the primary examples of reaction in our society, but we don't. Instead reactionary writers are much more likely to be referred to as reactionary. I think you have a way of using the term which doesn't match up with how everyone else uses it. If you want a term for what you are talking about, I think "trad" fits much better.
Anabaptists and ultra-orthodox Jews aren’t reacting to anything, they’re just like that.
The most relevant group of reactionaries in the modern US are evangelical Christians, who are in fact reacting to secular society by living according to the values it conflicts with. That’s not to say they’re necessarily doing a great job, but they’re a much better example of a reactionary than someone like Moldbug or some other long winded writer.
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