Psychological changes like that aren't private in their effects. They mean that people experience the world differently, and that means political change. The obvious social result of the tendencies described, given man's need for self-validation, is a sort of hipster liberalism: hedonism, self-involvement, rejection of settled distinctions, irony as a way to avoid impossible problems and turn contradiction to account, pretense based (like everything else) on nothing, equality that's not meant--wearing a John Deere cap and drinking PBR or whatever--as proof of superiority.
Hipster liberalism isn't particularly satisfactory, but where's something better going to come from? People fall into it because it's not clear where else to go in the present fragmented situation. It's not as if there's a well-formed mainstream grownup culture to glom onto or even a noticeable movement of opposition with something definite to offer. Where, as they say, are the heroes? How can you do better than accept the accepted view, since that's what there is, and then try to mitigate it through irony?
We have to start where we are, so for a lot of people the first step is to turn against the New York Times and the kindergarten teachers who provide our official theory of the good life by adopting a youth culture that's heretical and seems powerful because it's assertive and appeals to pieces of reality now officially nonexistent. They become pagans, Randians, white nationalists, or whatever.
When orthodoxy is stupid and inhuman then heresy is at least alive. It's good to know that particularities matter, masculinity has its points, "we" and "they" have functions, and not everyone is the same or equally deserving. The problem, of course, is that such recognitions aren't enough. America and the West need more than this recognition or that to restore a scheme of life that makes sense. For that we don't need bits and pieces of reality, we need the Whole Thing.
Taking what we have now and adding HBD or Nietzsche's superman or the masculine warrior image isn't going to do it for us. All of us are charter members of the reality-based community. So what we need is a grip on the reality of things in all its dimensions. That grip on reality is the basis of any civilization worthy of the name. It follows that for us what is needed is a radical turn toward the basic understandings that made the West, in a form capable of sustaining themselves as a tradition. It is to the recovery of that tradition--to radical traditionalism--that any serious movement of the right should aspire. Hence, I believe, the slogan of this site.
