Beyond Elves and Hobbits: The Right can and must fight the culture war.

But let us assume, as Yarvin supposes, that the Left manages to reveal the Right’s powerlessness on Dobbs, forcefully maneuvering around an apparently solid Supreme Court ruling. Yarvin implicitly assumes that this is the end of the game and only to be expected. After all, we were playing on their board, using their rules, and they set the clock.

But of course, such actions by the Left would radicalize the other side. The Right’s voters have been promised for decades that if they just showed up and voted, they could get the President who would appoint the Supreme Court justices who would repeal Roe v. Wade. After numerous Presidential elections, bruising Supreme Court confirmation fights, and judicial betrayals, those voters suddenly discovered that, even after they do everything they’re told, it doesn’t matter? That the system is, to quote a recent former President, rigged?

This realization would lead many of them to reject the system entirely, which could open up many new possibilities for action. If the hobbits realize that even when they win, they lose, they will demand another regime. As a result, the specter of well-organized hobbits who no longer accept the legitimacy of the regime will strike fear into the heart of its defenders. Yarvin is correct to say we must define wins as those that make future wins easier—but he is wrong to assume that Dobbs cannot be that kind of victory.

A similar logic underlies the appeal of Trump to many of his more sophisticated supporters. Trump was too unfocused to take control of the executive branch and “drain the swamp,” but he did make the regime reveal itself and its mechanisms of power in a way that it had not previously been forced to do. This revelation radicalized a great number of both hobbits and “dark elves” to oppose it in ways they would never have before. The establishment’s coordinated reaction to this opposition has been ferocious, but there is no reason to believe that the establishment will have the last word.

Furthermore, Yarvin’s counsel is misplaced because he himself is talking to an elite audience. Happy hobbits who just want to grill aren’t reading Yarvin—or me for that matter. He is selling quietism to the wrong audience. The pseudonymous Lomez, creator of the Passage Prize for dissident creators on the Right, captures the dynamic underlying this issue of audience by describing “a totally independent status economy” as “the counter-elite we need.” I have written about the need to develop this counter-elite at length. Yarvin also overestimates the excellence and competence of our elvish rulers. “Modern millennial progressives are emotional wrecks—unprofessional and incapable of enjoying things that don’t flatter their sadistic political urges,” as one online commenter observed.