Traditionalists, Conservatives, and Reactionaries
There are three terms which connote general “right-wingishness” for most casual observers: traditionalist, conservative, and reactionary. The latter of these carries a widely negative connotation for reasons I hope to make clear below, while the other two are only negative contingent on your general political orientation. I will offer some distinctions between these terms and then some insights that can be developed from these distinctions.
Traditionalist: The Latin term traditio means “to hand over”. A traditionalist is one who maintains some belief, practice, or ritual that has been handed down to them by previous generations. They also, either actively or passively, hand these practices down to their descendants. The wide interval between children opening Christmas presents to bishops coronating kings are traditionalists.
Conservative: Conservatives intend to prevent certain traditional practices from interruption. They are wall builders. They might be the ones who put up Chesterton’s Fence. Conservatives presume the existence of some external force which may interrupt the ritual. These forces may be active and intentional or passive wear and tear from entropy.
Reactionary: Reactionaries seek to destroy anything which threatens the ritual. They are the cavalry battalion which sorties the bivouacked army besieging walls the conservatives may have built. They crusade against heretics and de-platform critics.
Each of these groups derives its purpose from the last. The conservative would not know where to place his walls, if there were no traditionalists maintaining a practice. Without walls, the reactionary would not know from where to launch his attack. The traditionalist does not require the other two to frame his identity, but may require them to prevent his annihilation. Likewise the conservatives identity does not depend on the reactionary, but his walls may not hold without the occasional crusading knight to defend them. Identity flows in one direction, and security flows in the other.
Naturally, one person can be described by all of these terms, or someone can inhabit one in its pure form. The pure traditionalist diligently performs his rituals. The pure conservative crafts defenses and apologetics for his chosen city. The pure reactionary seeks out his quarry and swiftly responds. Most will not be pure. The traditionalist-conservative or conservative-reactionary naturally perform complementary activities. Each role is presumably united by interest, but their behavior can be extremely varied.
There are several insights we can glean from this set of terms.
First, we can explain behavioral differences between people who are presumably “on the same side”. The reactionary likely carries the most negative connotation because of the destructive nature of his activities. The reactionary is inherently more threatening, as his methods (which might include violence) are less predictable. He may inadvertently tear down Chesterton’s Fence. Without a sufficient number of traditionalists or conservatives, we may not be able to afford the risks taken by reactionaries.
Second, since identity flows from the traditionalists, if the rituals are interrupted, the others will lose their orientation. Walls will get built around the wrong hills and innocents will be declared enemies. Those who maintain an intuitive hatred of the enemy (and conservatives who still want to keep something out), but lack any traditions to anchor them need something to rally around and putatively defend. In their desperation, they will seek after increasingly distant, hazy, and abstract ideals. These features of their bricolage tradition leads to dissension among the ranks, and possibly more endemic violence. If there is an intense revolutionary period, where a tradition is all but snuffed out, a future generation may attempt to resurrect it. What they create, however, could be a monster.
Third, though one can be several of these identities at once, certain conditions might make one lean into their comparative advantage. If one is no good at building walls or fighting dragons, then stay a pure traditionalist and let others do the fighting for you. If you’re a particular good fighter however the opportunity cost of you maintaining a tradition might be exceedingly high and it’s worth letting others carry on the traditions. An increasingly hostile world may encourage more to become pure reactionaries or conservatives, and increasing strain in this direction could break the relationship that maintains the flow of identity.
I’ll briefly conclude that I do not intend to connote that the putative enemies are always bad, nor that the tradition is always good. I simply seek to analyze these characters in a way that might help someone get a better grasp on the dynamics of those seeking to defend or practice a tradition, the broadly defined “right”. Several examples of these dynamics have likely already popped into your head, and admittedly my theory is a bit sloppy, but disambiguations like this are useful to get a handle on our own instinctive reactions to behavior we observe.
I think I'm generally in agreement there. The fundamental difference in the two orientations is the pull toward an existing past (tradition) or some imagined future (progress). Since the future hasn't occurred yet, there cannot be a currently existing tradition for the left to define itself around except for how it differs from existing traditions within their culture. It's an interesting divide, and one that always makes me wonder what the root cause of these value differences is, and if it is possible for humanity as a whole to hold them in a proper tension that doesn't descend into the same kind of violent cycle that seems to keep recurring in history.
A similar (and very low effort on my end) mapping could be seen on the left with theorists, progressives, and revolutionaries. Not meant to be exhaustive by any means, just riffing off the above.
Theorists - Discontent with the lack of justice in the world, Idealists seeking ways to change and improve the existing state of things. Implementation on a large scale isn't really their thing, more likely to experiment at smaller personal scale.
Progressives - Reformers. Much like the Conservatives they also try to push their agenda through the power of the state, but to remove fences instead of putting them up.
Revolutionaries - Let's burn this mother**er down. Basically the militant wing of change.