What makes Peterson's material appealing to so many people?

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Demanding a return to patriarchy — as many in the alt-right, incel, and men’s rights activists communities have done, and as Peterson himself has done — aren’t particularly transgressive behaviors. Indeed, one might say they remain explicitly culturally sanctioned. But the Petersonian narrative is one that allows adherents to identify themselves as dangerous (even sexy) transgressive figures without making actual demands on them.

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In writing this essay, I neither wish to condemn those who in good faith hunger for meaningfulness nor to condone the far-right political stances into which men like Peterson steer their followers.

The hunger for meaning, for surety, for “order” — to use Peterson’s well-loved term — is a legitimate one. So, too, is the aesthetic appeal of perceived counterculturalism: the idealized rebel who defies bourgeois social norms. The irony, of course, is that many of the young straight white men who see themselves as “countercultural” because of their “political incorrectness” are doing little more than reinforcing the status quo.

But how is it that right-wing movements capitalize so effectively on both?

The “aesthetic” mode has long been associated with right-wing movements
So what am I talking about when I talk about the “aesthetic” appeal of right-wing movements? German culture critic Walter Benjamin, in his in 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” writes that right-wing movements, which reach their zenith in fascism, represent “the introduction of aesthetics into political life.” While Benjamin is writing about fascism specifically here, his argument encompasses reactionary and right-wing movements more broadly.

While left-wing movements, he writes, work by advocating for “affecting the property structure” of capitalism, right-wing movements offer the masses a chance to “express themselves” while keeping the social order largely intact.

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That does not mean that Peterson is right (the actual content of his self-help book is sufficiently vague and ill-defined that it’s really impossible to say he’s right or wrong); nor that we should all become traditional Catholics; nor (of course!) that the racism, sexism, and outright Nazism that defines so much of the alt-right is excusable.

However, understanding why these kinds of movements are attractive to a wide variety of people who consider themselves, accurately or not, to be disenfranchised demands a serious engagement with the aesthetic and emotional appeal of what, for lack of a better term, I’ll call traditionalism: largely but not exclusively right-wing movements loosely defined by the rejection of modernity and promise of return to a better time. (I’m distinguishing lowercase traditionalism from capital-T Traditionalism, Evola’s more technically conceived occult movement.)

This form of traditionalism is what Peterson talks about when he writes in 12 Rules that “we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion- and even nation-centred cultures” and that we must “find sufficient meaning in individual consciousness and experience” by revisiting “the great myths ... of the past.”

What traditionalist movements do, in their various ways, is provide adherents with two sensations. The first is the sense of the mythic. To be a believer is to live in a world of gods and monsters, good and evil, chaos and order. The world has an inherently meaningful and exciting structure.

The second is the opportunity to participate in that movement: a participation that blends the security of belonging to a cohesive group with the thrill of cultural transgression. To be a traditionalist is, increasingly, to be countercultural.