NOTE ON Nº 1

The Effects of Good Government in the City, by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, 1338–40, in the Palazzo Pubblico, Siena, Italy.

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In this inaugural issue of New Occident, we begin from the premise that modern political speech finds impolite: regimes do not meet their citizens first in arguments, platforms, or statutes. They meet them in what surrounds them, presses upon them, and trains them before they ever learn to name what is happening. The built world is an instructor that never sleeps. It teaches by repetition and by scale. It instructs by what it honors with endurance and what it treats as temporary, by what it permits to stand upright in form and what it allows to slump into the merely functional.

That claim, once granted, has consequences that cannot be contained inside architecture alone. If a people is formed, then politics is never a purely juridical enterprise. It is a contest over the grammar of public life. Cities and institutions educate the soul toward reverence, measure, respect for hierarchy or toward cynicism, base appetite, and resentment. The point is not that every feature on every building necessarily preaches something profound. The point is that public form habituates the citizen to certain expectations about reality itself.

Modernity’s favorite evasion is to treat these questions as matters of taste, thereby rendering the civic realm officially innocent. When the public square is declared value-neutral, the citizen is left to discover, after the fact and at great cost, that neutrality is not a description of political life but a strategy within it. The built world does not become neutral because a bureaucracy calls it infrastructure. It becomes a teacher without a curriculum, which means it teaches by accident, and accident is an education in incoherence. The citizen trained by incoherence eventually experiences coherence as an imposition.

This brings us to a second, colder thesis that runs through the issue: the liberal political vision is not a solution to political conflict but a coercion designed to hide where conflict is decided. The modern mind prefers to imagine that the state is an office, law a machine, sovereignty a signature appended to a rule, the decisive act reduced to competent administration. Yet even the most elaborate apparatus of these political procedures cannot abolish the fact that a legal order presupposes a normal situation it cannot generate by norms alone. When normality fractures, someone must decide what counts as the emergency, who may act, what must be preserved, and what guarantees can be suspended in order to preserve the whole.

That is the sense in which no political order is neutral, and it is worth making the claim carefully, since it is often uttered lazily and denied just as lazily. Neutrality can exist as a local virtue, but neutrality cannot exist as the essence of a regime. A regime must decide what the rule is, what counts as a relevant difference, what ends the law serves, which threats are tolerable, which are existential, what degree of disorder will be permitted in the name of liberty, and what degree of constraint will be imposed in the name of survival. Even the decision to call them neutral is itself a decision about what may be spoken and what must be concealed.

The modern legal imagination often treats the exception as a deviation from real legality. The argument pressed here is harsher. The exception clarifies the meaning of the normal precisely because the normal rests upon prior acts of consolidation and continuing acts of preservation. This is not an invitation to permanent emergency. It is a refusal to pretend that legitimacy is produced by procedure alone, since procedure cannot conjure the world in which its own predicates make sense.

Once that veil is lifted, the question of formation returns with a vengeance. If politics cannot be reduced to paperwork, then the citizen cannot be reduced to a consumer of rights, and the nation cannot be reduced to an economy in motion. The issue therefore insists on measures of public health that resist abstraction: whether marriage can be pursued without despair, whether children can be welcomed without panic, whether ownership is sufficiently widespread to keep citizens upright rather than dependent, and whether work confers dignity rather than humiliation. That set of concerns is not an aesthetic hobby. It is the skeleton of a political economy that remembers man’s nature and therefore refuses to govern him as if he were a number. It also names, without embarrassment, the moral capacities that a serious nation expects from its people: loyalty, sacrifice, reverence, and craftsmanship.

Here the magazine’s posture is unapologetically of the Right, and it is so for reasons deeper than partisan alignment. A civilization that wishes to endure must be able to speak of rank, duty, and limit without flinching, because the attempt to abolish these realities does not in fact abolish them. It merely ensures that they return in degraded and dishonest forms. The state still has hierarchy, but it simply calls it expertise. The market still has hierarchy, but it simply calls it price. Liberal culture still has dogma. but it simply calls it tolerance. A regime that will not name its principles becomes more, not less, susceptible to manipulation, since its operative commitments must be smuggled in under moralistic euphemisms rather than argued as first principles.

It is in that spirit that we include, near the close of the issue, an excerpt from a seminal early twentieth-century writer on race and democracy. The excerpt is printed as a specimen of a certain kind of political prose and a certain kind of argument: blunt, categorical, unwilling to flatter the democratic conscience, and resolute in drawing distinctions modernity prefers to dissolve. The author insists upon separating race, language, and nationality as distinct orders of analysis, and he argues that a fixation on linguistics and custom often overstates environment at the expense of heredity. He then turns, with characteristic severity, to the political effects of universal suffrage, contending that democratic administration tends toward the elevation of the average rather than the selection of the excellent, with a consequent standardization of type and a diminution of genius.

One may reject the biological premises of that tradition. One may reject its rhetoric or its hierarchy of human nature. Yet, the excerpt remains illuminating in at least two ways that matter for our purposes. First, it forces the reader to confront what democracy denies about itself: that mass rule has an inherent gravitational pull toward leveling, that it prefers what is legible to what is great, and that it often treats excellence as an affront because excellence implies standards the majority did not authorize. Second, it models a kind of sentence-making that modern political writing has largely forgotten: prose that states what it means, argues from definitions, and proceeds as though truth does not need to ask permission to be spoken.

This editorial posture explains the selection of topics across the issue without requiring us to point at individual pieces as discrete exhibits. The throughline is not a catalog of themes; it is a single insistence, applied across different domains, that public life is built, not merely administered. Architecture trains citizens in the visibility of order. Jurisprudence reveals the inevitability of decision when normality breaks. Political economy either fortifies the family and the local order or dissolves them into dependence and mass management. Religious and moral claims, denied at the level of official doctrine, return by bureaucratic means.

The Right’s task, as we understand it, is therefore not exhausted by electoral victory, important as that may be. It is the reconstruction of formative institutions capable of producing a citizenry fit for self-government, which means a citizenry capable of discipline, capable of approbation and of distinguishing between what is noble and what is merely loud. The alternative is familiar: a people trained to crave permission, to mistake appetite for liberty, and to keep the human being small, distracted, and governable.

We publish New Occident because we do not accept the idea that history is a one-way emancipation from inherited form. We do not accept the idea that beauty is private and therefore politically irrelevant. We do not accept the idea that sovereignty can be dissolved. We accept, instead, that a civilization’s fate is written gradually in what it builds, what it forbids itself to admire, what it permits itself to despise, and what it quietly trains its sons and daughters to consider normal. If this inaugural issue has a governing intention, it is to restore seriousness: seriousness about man, seriousness about rule, seriousness about form, seriousness about the price of civilizational continuity.

— Editor-in-Chief