I only recently learned what a “groyper” is - you may or may not be familiar with the term?
 
From what I can tell, a groyper is a hardline white nationalist.  Often anti-Semitic, groypers are hostile to mainstream conservatives.  To the extent they have a coherent agenda, groypers seem more national socialism than free-market capitalism.
 
Having been involved in the conservative movement for three decades, I’d hesitate to call anyone with such views conservative.  Indeed, I’d argue people that think like that are essentially hardline leftists. 
 
A generation or two ago, what it meant to be conservative tended to be defined by a small circle of influential thinkers. Figures like William F. Buckley Jr. and Russell Kirk articulated what it meant to be one of us.
 
Today, of course, it’s more complicated. One of the consequences of the digital revolution we’re living through is that anyone can define (and brand) themselves however they like.
 
If a small but loud group of groypers - whose ideas are as ugly as the green frog meme they inexplicably rally around - insist on calling themselves “conservative,” there’s a real risk that they end up shaping, in the public mind, what conservatism actually means.
 
Things aren’t helped by the fact that as in the early days of the printing press, when pamphleteers produced all sorts of scurrilous tracts, the digital revolution is still in the phase of rewarding all sorts of attention-seeking drivel.
 
Look at the mess that the left has got into in recent years, as it has been forced into taking indefensible positions.  From denying basic biology (no, a man cannot become a woman) to calls for defunding the police, progressive politics in both America and Britain has increasingly been shaped by its most extreme and unrepresentative activists.
 
The groypers might turn out to be little more than a passing meme, but here’s why I worry about the long term direction of politics in America and the wider West.
 
The world we live in is the product of the idea that all people are created equal. 
 
That’s not to say that we are all the same.  But it does mean that we are all of equal worth, and that we should be treated equally under the law.
 
When Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence, the principle that “all men are created equal” was a radical, revolutionary idea.
 
By the time Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed of a color-blind society where people are judged “not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” that same principle had become the established moral orthodoxy.
 
Somewhere between Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 speech and the present day, the political left abandoned the ideal of equality before the law.  In its place emerged a new framework: one that measures a person’s intrinsic worth by their position in an ever-shifting hierarchy of victimhood.  Under this neo-Marxist lens, immutable characteristics - race, sex, sexuality - now determine moral value, assigning guilt to the so-called oppressors and virtue to the so-called oppressed.
 
This is what spawned leftwing ‘woke’ ideology.  Critical race theory, critical gender theory, and related doctrines took root in academia, then seeped into corporate HR departments, government bureaucracies, and the public sector at large.
 
That is why, for years, American university admissions offices and major corporations have openly discriminated on the basis of race - often under the banner of “diversity” or “equity.”  It is also why, in my native England - the country that gave the world the ideal of common law (a law that is genuinely common to all) - the legal system now explicitly grants preferential treatment to individuals with certain “protected characteristics.”
 
What if we are now witnessing the emergence of a mirror-image, right-wing “woke” ideology?  What if voices on the right begin to say, “Very well - if we are no longer permitted to believe that all are created equal, then let’s not”?
 
The progressive left has spent decades attributing unequal outcomes to systemic oppression.  What happens when the right stops arguing about the fairness of the system altogether and instead attributes those same unequal outcomes to inherent differences?
 
I fear the left may one day soon come to regret ever abandoning the principle that all of us, without exception, are created equal.
 
A few years ago, Joseph Henrich’s book The WEIRDest People in the World made a compelling case that Western exceptionalism is real.  Westerners, he argued, are genuinely psychological outliers: markedly more individualistic, analytical, guilt-oriented, and trusting of strangers than the rest of humanity.  These peculiar traits, Henrich contends, are what turned the West into the primary engine of modern science, innovation, and prosperity.
 
I happen to agree with much of Henrich’s analysis, although I am not convinced of his explanation. 
 
The danger is that if the universalist view of human nature is abandoned - if the left’s hierarchy of victimhood is answered by a right-wing hierarchy - much of the traditional conservative narrative collapses with it.
 
We conservatives must be more ruthless in policing our own boundaries.  We cannot flirt with ideas that are as big a threat to conservatism as socialism, and pretend they are our ideas.