What does right-wing “progress” look like, and why does it seem necessary to put progress in quotes? As a society, we seem to have a shared assumption that progress is what progressives do and we know, of course, that progressives are necessarily left-wing. In fact, it’s probably more accurate to say that the relationship between progress and progressives, and by proxy leftism, is simply tautological, which makes the question of right-wing “progress” seem absurd. Does this mean that what the Right accomplishes is instead regress? Given this framework, shouldn’t we just stop with the politicking, acknowledge that the progressives are by definition right about the future and give them the reigns of our sovereign enterprise?

But there’s a little bit more to this, if only because there hasn’t always been a group of people calling themselves “progressives”, but there has always been a wave of progress roaring through history, claiming victory after victory and leaving in its wake rainbows and safety pins.

This is, of course, Whig history–the natural result of the victors (Whigs), who were the historic precursors to contemporary liberals, writing our history books. But this raises the same question–across all of these historical victories we’re still faced with the left-right dichotomy, one side of which–the Whig side–represents progress, and the other something seemingly lost to time itself.

Progressives today aren’t shy about using phrases like, “I’m on the right side of history,” or, “Reality has a left-wing bias.” Is that really so? It raises a lot of questions, like that it seems apparent that history should be agnostic to “sides,” but I can understand the inclination given that, historically speaking, things sure seem to be trending whigward. The western Right acknowledges a form of this and instead of acting as “regress,” acts as a throttle for progress. If we take this idea seriously, it has an important implication: that both sides of the aisle invariably move in the same direction, but at a different pace. One interpretation of right-wing “progress,” then, might be measured by an ability to effectively control the speed of whiggery at a rate acceptable to the general public. But there are others.

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Here’s another observation of Whiggism: there’s no agreed upon terminal state. We can’t trace modern liberalism’s ideology to an end goal, frankly, because liberals do not strictly follow its movement’s ideological roots. This is becoming much more apparent today as prominent liberals attack the Enlightenment (once hallowed ground for Whigs) on the grounds of racism, or freedom of speech because racists and sexists should not be allowed to say racist and sexist things. This drive for justice, especially with regard to disadvantaged groups, creates an endless political raison d’être: so long as injustice can be found (real or imagined), the Whigs have a public mandate to perform whiggery.

This process is the first hurdle in coming to a terminal state. If my power depends on addressing injustice, then I must continually find and eradicate injustice–regardless of scale or outcomes. It creates blind spots toward absolute accomplishments, where we take for granted our quality of life relative to the rest of the world, and focus instead on the relative minutiae of our own microcosm. More worryingly, this motivation to find injustices is insidious, in that it incentivizes a form of rent-seeking. If you achieve power through the discovery and dismantling of inequalities, then you are necessarily incentivized to invent inequalities to maintain your power. Should you find yourself out of inequalities to equalify, you essentially lose your job and your power and status with it. Those with a taste for power find themselves reluctant to let go.

If the Left represents the stated drive for justice, what does the current Right represent? We can imagine this political process as an elaborate search function for a just world. It is the job of the Whigs to experiment with policy and drive the exploration of political outcomes, or world states. The Tories, then, are responsible for assessing the fitness of a given world state and ranking it relative to previous known states. There is a third variable of social unrest that drives the degree to which Whigs should experiment—this is often referred to as a temperature function. When temperature (social unrest) is high, elites often seize on the moment to make radical leaps between world states; when it is low, we take smaller, more conservative steps. This type of algorithmic search is known as Simulated Annealing and is used to avoid local optimums in favor of finding the global optima. In this metaphor, the Tories are to be the keepers of the best-known status quo, pushing back when nonideal states are presented and ideally settling on the optimal government, which is found when social unrest is so low that no more steps are desirable to take. This explanation seems stronger because it’s parsimonious with statements such as, “Reality has a left-wing bias,” where reality neatly progresses leftward until it finally settles into its unknown, but ideal state, while still maintaining a prima facie distinction between the political tribes.

But it is still parsimonious with the hypothesis that the “right-wing” isn’t a right-wing at all. It instead plays the role of a neutral observer, presiding over the Left’s progress. There’s still no independent concept of right-wing progress, but instead another way in which it is used to modulate Whig progress. For both of these explanations, there’s not a conception of a right-wing that exists as anything except a token of the broader Left.

Nevertheless, this feels like an appropriate metaphor for our modern governance. Perhaps it is right to accept that there is a “right side of history,” and that we march steadily toward it but for the gentle pushes back toward some trail laid by the Right. But what if the fitness assessment is broken?

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Perhaps I gave the game away when I called the right-wing Tories, but let’s keep going down that last line of thought. If the fitness assessment is broken, then all hope of good governance is gone. It becomes likely that we’ve already experienced a much more ideal form of government, and that it has gone and left in favor of whiggism. As such, it becomes impossible to steer the ship back toward safer waters in the face of unwanted political exploration, and it all but guarantees that we drift toward further Whig extremes.

This metaphor, a successful fitness assessor, requires two things: an objective, authoritative fitness metric, and legitimate power to steer the ship back when it goes astray. The Right has neither, but pretends at the latter, all the while not realizing that its steering does nothing but invigorate a Left that holds them in contempt.

In a sense, we have given the reins to the tautologically-driven progressives. They indisputably control our mainstream media and academic institutions, impelling whiggism directly into the lifeblood of the nation. The political Right is helpless against a public opinion molded against them from the start, and must resort to hiding their thoughts in shame–a so-called “silent majority.” As the mantra goes, reality has a left-wing bias.

But let’s go back to the roots, for after all, when Woodrow Wilson said, “European statesmen,” what he meant–and what was understood–was, “The Tories.” The fundamental political property of Whigs is the redistribution of power to the masses. The fundamental political property of Tories is the consolidation of power to the few. Here we have the political bull by the horns. A Whig will ride the division of power from parliament, to democracy, to as close as it can get to “cosmic egalitarian” anarchy. A Tory will reign power back in, preferring an autocratic government. We can take this one step further and describe the continuum between Tory and Whig as a gradient between order and chaos respectively, in which we currently inhabit some in-between state. This is why pure whiggery inevitably leads to collapse, as well as our answer to the question of right-wing progress. Right-wing progress is the establishment of order from a chaotic state. This is not the same as a regression from Whig values–many of those victories are won for life. Liberal progress often has the benefit of working as a ratchet–you can only push it one way. No earnest Westerner endeavors for the return of slavery, nor is there any reason to suspect they will in the future.

In this model, it is clear that whatever the Republicans, or CPAC, or other Western conservative parties are, they are not Tories. The grand irony in the Republican desire for states’ rights is that it is a further dissolution of power from the federal government. It is absolutely antithetical to the right-wing as it historically existed. So, when it comes to the heart of our governance–the manner by which we are ruled–the only conclusion we’re left with is that our modern political apparatus operates on a false dichotomy.

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It might seem a bit odd that the American Left (including the formal American Whig Party) has always been against states’ rights, but it should be considered contextually with the fact that America was founded as colonies of Whigs–explicitly given a free pass to get out of England, since they were unwanted by King James or the monarchists. As Daniel Defoe put it in The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters:

The first execution of the Laws against Dissenters in England, was in the days of King James I; and what did it amount to? Truly, the worst they suffered was, at their own request, to let them go to New England, and erect a new colony; and give them great privileges, grants, and suitable powers; keep them under protection, and defend them against all invaders; and receive no taxes or revenue from them!

These types of charters continued through the years, though from different kings, as simple tools to be rid of local nuisances. It’s not as if the factionalism goes away, but even so, America was founded by a common people with a common governing ideology. It was the ultimate experiment of political orthodoxy, and even after splitting into factions, their ultimate goals were always aligned; it’s just the particulars that differed.

And at least in this respect, it seems as though nothing’s changed. America is flanked by parties of Whigs, and worse, our fitness assessment is broken. These circumstances have dire implications in today’s sociopolitical discussions. What we’re seeing in America today isn’t a fundamental political breakdown–it is a form of leftist accelerationism–a massive renorming of Whig values–a dramatic, leftward shift in the Overton Window in response to a perceived failure of the slow and steady route. Just as Jeb Bush’s metaphorical turtle lost the race, it has become clear that the methodical neoliberal approach is insufficient for the march of the right side of history.

To go back to the Simulated Annealing metaphor, the temperature is sky-high, and the only socially acceptable direction to explore is to the Left.