Written by Here at the Radical Agenda, we pride ourselves on thinking outside the box. Our defining characteristic as Right wingers is not so much our conservatism as our nationalism, and of course our unyielding reactionary contempt for the Left.
This is not to say that we lack any conservative impulse. We know as well as anyone that if something isn’t broke, there is no sense in attempting to fix it. In the name of so-called “progress”, Democrats keep trying to “fix” elections, race, and gender. In this pursuit, they seem to be getting exactly what they want, but the honest observer cannot say that they are making life any better, and they themselves seem more miserable with each successive victory. So, conservatism surely has its place as an element of one’s political repertoire.
But we also know at least two things about the present. It is intolerable, and it is the product of the past. Thus it would seem to follow, that repeating prior behavior is a roadmap to an intolerable place. So, with all due respect to tradition, we find ourselves determined to blaze new trails.
Then again, there is an argument to be made that nothing is really new in this world. A timeless bit of wisdom from the Bible, in Ecclesiastes 1:9, reads “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.”
Many have fancied themselves inventors before they got to the patent office, and all experience has shown that even those of us who do study history, are no less doomed to repeat it. Or at least, something that rhymes with it.
Reconciling these paradoxes is itself a perennial issue in politics, and every other field of human endeavor. The old saying that “The more things change, the more things stay the same” is a cliche for a reason. Man perpetually longs to alter his circumstances, usually for the better. He does not reach a point of satisfaction and rid himself of all uneasiness and cease to act. Yet man is a natural creature, and thus he has what can be called “human nature”. This nature is a limitation on his capacity to innovate, and attempts to create change beyond a certain degree can only lead to that most common of human conditions, which we call death.
The term “progressivism” has become almost as bastardized in the modern common parlance as has “conservatism”. Far from seeking progress, self styled “progressives” are dismantling civilization into a Hobbesian hellscape, red in tooth and claw as much as in ideology. Marketed as Utopians, and often even granted this by their opponents, these Trotskyites are in fact incapable of happiness. Their concept of progress is entirely destructive, in that whatever is, must not be. They seek perpetual revolution, and it is only the destruction of the current moment, combined with the inevitability of the passage of time, that they are oriented toward the future.
People have come to think that conservatism and progressivism are distinct ideologies which encompass all the tenets of a political party. Indeed, many think of politics in the Untied States as being precisely this. There are the “progressive” Democrats, and the “conservative” Republicans, and based on your point of view, one of those parties is the good party, and one of them is the evil party. Either the good, progressive Democrats are trying to improve mankind toward his destined perfection, and those evil conservative Republicans keep thwarting their plans out of bigotry, or those good conservative Republicans try diligently to preserve our beautiful country, which those evil “progressive” Democrats are always busy trying to ruin.
This is, in a word, silly. Nobody really organizes their lives or thoughts in this way. We all want, in varying degrees, to progressively improve the things we see worthy of conserving. We change, in degree, but not in kind. Political extremists long for what is often described as “revolutionary” change, but whether they obtain the reins of power through ballots or bullets, the most they can obtain are larger or smaller degrees of largely cosmetic alterations to a fundamental and permanent order. They might kill lots of people and destroy lots of things. The people impacted by their zeal might have their lives turned completely upside down or snuffed out entirely, but in the end, one still must produce more than he consumes, and there are still two complimentary and opposite sexes, which cannot be altered by nebulous conceptions of “gender”.
All of which is to say, there are, however loosely defined, some limits on what is even conceivable, in politics. What is actually possible is even more tightly constrained, and what is probable falls inside a still smaller boundary.
Limits of Means to Power
To even find opportunity to act within these constraints at all requires obtaining political power. To lay hands on this prize, the means are fundamentally limited to three categories of action. Persuasion, deception, or force. None of which are mutually exclusive, and successful strategies typically combine the three.
Fundamentally, force is inescapable. The exercise of political power is the legitimization of force. Say what you will about the communists, but Mao was largely correct in his observation of power’s origin. Setting this aside, the difference between revolution and terrorism is who writes the history. For this reason, and others, history teaches us nothing if not that people can, and all too frequently do, obtain political power by force of arms.
But force does not negate the requirement of persuasion. The legitimization of force is a question of perceptions. No government can operate without a certain degree of enthusiastic public support, and a much larger degree of acquiescence. To rule, even with an iron fist, one must persuade the governed that the ruler is at least not the worst case scenario, and this can be a heavy lift if you’re running around killing everybody who talks out of turn. To even acquire the manpower and resources to topple the prior regime, one must persuade men to risk and forfeit their lives and freedom for the conflict, which is a greater burden to meet, though in smaller numbers, than obtaining the acquiescence of the general public.
Historically, deception has proved useful in such affairs. The study of revolution is near exclusively a study of communism, which has at its core the most dishonest of all conceivable political promises: that man may be freed from his own nature and that of his environment if he inflicts enough suffering upon others.
Elections, largely perceived today as the only legitimate means of obtaining power, are, when properly functioning, designed to be measures of persuasion. One asks the public for their votes, and tries to persuade them that he is the best use of this scarce resource. Typically, he is opposed by at least one competitor for this resource, who makes the contrary case.
One need not necessarily win the election himself to wield political power through persuasion. It is quite well enough, perhaps even preferable, to have influence over people who win elections, or even to hold a position within the political apparatus or civil service. Every contributor to a newspaper or television news production, every social media star, is influencing both the electorate and the elected.
Perhaps another day we can do an entire episode on non-elected political power, but, in the final analysis, democratically elected governments are designed such that the policy makers are answerable to voters. Lasting, sweeping change, requires legislative authority. Judicial nominations, regulatory control, and enforcement discretion, all flow from elected executives. Thus we are met with the stubborn fact that some proximity to the electoral process is an inescapable component of any political strategy, with the possible but by no means certain exception of armed revolution, which we will now rule out for us, for obvious and not so obvious reasons.
Force is still necessarily a part of the equation, not only because the winner of the election will wield the power of the State, but because the loser will be physically removed from his office if he declines to accept the results. Unless he gets the armed forces to back him, but that involves force all the same.
While an election without deception is theoretically possible, we do not live in theory, we live in the empire of lies, in which truth is treason.
Deception, in addition to its role in the prior to categories of action, may also be the primary element of a political strategy, such as in the case of voter fraud or election tampering. It necessarily involves some persuasion, in that one must typically convince the governed that the deception did not occur or was not of outcome determinate scale. Ultimately force cannot be separated from it both for reasons inherent in all matters of State and for the high likelihood that one will need forcibly incapacitate those who detect the fraud, such as happened with the January 6th Defendants.
With our narrow and overlapping categories of action now defined, we have one more step to go before we attempt to apply this analysis.
Who Are We?
I keep on saying “we”. Who are “we” – or, perhaps better said – who is “us”? What common goal defines membership in the group I reference for purpose of political action?
If you have been paying attention to me for awhile, you already understand that I am working my way up to advocating participation in the Republican Party. But since I do not consider myself to be on the same team as Adam Kinzinger or Liz Cheney, a Republican voter registration is not sufficient for our purposes.
Nor can we describe ourselves as “movement conservatives”. Not that most people who do, really can. Self described conservatives today, with a few rare exceptions, know little of William F. Buckley or Russell Kirk, much less Edmund Burke. The “free speech absolutism” mindlessly parroted by self described conservatives today in their complaints about social media censorship and Democrat tyranny more broadly, is not something that would fall from the mouth of one who had read God and Man at Yale.
Nor would one who had read The Conservative Mind be so in thrall to the “free market absolutism” mindlessly parroted by a rival faction of self described modern conservatives, in response to the same subjects. Conservatism, properly understood, does not consider itself powerless to stop a transnational criminal enterprise from wrecking the country, just because it files articles of incorporation, and allows people to buy shares of it on the New York Stock Exchange. These people sound a lot more like Murray Rothbard than Richard Weaver, and while we all owe Ron Paul a debt of gratitude, there are good reasons why people don’t vote for candidates who promise not to help them.
More to the point, as touched upon at the beginning of this discussion, conservatism is not a holistic political philosophy, but a constituent element of all political philosophies. This fact is what gives rise to the two factions just mentioned. Free speech and free markets are not compatible, and thus cannot be absolutist members of the same coherent thought process. These are different ideologies which merely have a constituent element in common.
Everybody wants to conserve something, and while it is an unfair oversimplification of conservatism to say that it merely protects the status quo, that has become its function as of late, and we have no interest in becoming the protectors of prior revolutions.
Certainly, none of us can be accused of being neocons, though I would argue we can learn more from them than most of my listeners would guess. Giving the devil his due, Irving Kristol and friends may very well have saved this country from a permanent Democrat majority, by shunning Misesian economic orthodoxy, and isolationist foreign policy. Given its ethnic origins, we ought not be surprised that neoconservatism paved the way for a rootless, corrosive, globalism, and all of its accompanying domestic ailments, but since it taught the American Right to come to grips with the New Deal and stop scaring voters by threatening social security, we might do well to tip our hats.
Speaking of the ethnic origins of neoconservatism, one way I could convey my point is by referring to “us” as “what was once called the Alt Right”. This shortcut would save me some keystrokes and convey much of my point. But the Alt Right lost, and while we can blame the disreputable acts of non-adherents for this fact, that is not going to change the outcome. Moreover, the failure of the Alt Right has more in common with the failure of conservatism than most adherents of either camp would like to admit.
While conservatism monomaniacally focused on “standing athwart history yelling stop”, the Alt Right’s myopic focus on the Jewish question left everything else blurry. Since the targets of this entirely reactionary contempt understand full well the implications of it, they were able to mimic its patterns, infiltrate the movement, predict the behavior of its adherents, and control, subvert, and ultimately eliminate them from the political contest. Whatever the merits of this movement, we cannot repeat its errors.
Like conservatism, anti-Semitism is not a philosophy, much less a political strategy. It is a predictable reaction to a peculiar state of affairs with an identifiable cause. The present analysis makes no value judgements about it as one constituent element of a worldview, except to say that is what it is, one constituent element. Like conservatism, attempts to create an ideology out of a single constituent element results in social conflict among adherents, because they are not all actually on the same side. They simply have one constituent element of their worldview in common, and even their conception of that element can vary dramatically from one adherent to the next.
This was exploited to devastating effect against the Alt Right. A paper in the Journal Nature, described a strategy for “combating online hate” which proposed having social media platforms introduce artificial users whose purpose was to try and force interactions between what they called “hate clusters” with the explicit intent of causing them to fight and destroy one another.
Policy 4 exploits the fact that many hate groups online have opposing views. The policy suggests that the platform administrators introduce an artificial group of users to encourage interactions between hate clusters that have opposing views, with a view to the hate clusters subsequently battling out their differences among themselves. The authors’ modelling demonstrated that such battles would effectively remove large hate clusters that have opposing views. Once put into action, policies 3 and 4 would require little direct intervention by the platform administrators; however, setting opposing clusters against each other would require meticulous engineering.
While I am not accusing the organizers of the event of anything, it should come as no surprise to us that our downfall more or less began at the “Unite the Right” rally. As the pressure was ratcheted up in the wake of that event, the Alt Right became a circular firing squad, and never recovered.
Monomaniacal anti-Semitism is often perceived as a pathology, and not without some justification. Any honest observer of political movements centered on anti-Semitism has surely noticed if not confessed, that that whatever the merits of those movements, and whatever the percentage of quality people could be counted among the adherents, a substantial number of their adherents turn out to be among the worst sort of people. Better than Democrats any day of the week, but terrible nonetheless. A surprising number of those terrible people happen to be Jews, or to be financed by Jews, themselves. This should tell us something about tactics if not ideology.
When centered near exclusively on a single outgroup, other problems go unnoticed, or at least uncorrected. Not the least of which are severe character flaws in adherents. Since anti-Semitism attracts violent resistance, this might be considered more feature than bug at some stage of the movement’s development, because prosperous well adjusted people tend to avoid activities that carry the risk of beatings, bankruptcy, prison, and murder.
This could be dealt with through competent leadership, but exacerbating this problem is the fact that the power wielded by its targets tends to fall heavy on precisely those leaders. This decapitates organized movements, and sets those deeply flawed, and now battle hardened, adherents, loose with no productive outlet for their contempt. This lends itself to “leaderless resistance” ideations, which is a thinly veiled euphemism for terrorism and other forms of criminal violence. Such acts are encouraged and even celebrated by the targets of anti-Semitism, in large part because it aids in bringing the force of the State down on those who would see them dislodged from power.
A successful political movement cannot simply “power through” such obstacles, and insistence on doing so is akin to the conservative pathological insistence on “losing with dignity”. There is no dignity in losing. Losing is what has facilitated our repeated humiliation, and we have learned all that loss has to teach us. These pathologies have to be overcome, and in our case that begins with a conscious decision not to outwardly center our worldview and action on the undesirable behavior of an ethnic minority.
To be clear, I am not talking about the familiar refrain of “trying to sneak up on the Jew”. Ethnocentric outgroups will always view us as their enemy no matter what we do, and we will not overcome their enmity by way of deception. If we are accomplishing anything, they will see right through that tactic and treat us identically to if we were holding torches and making Roman salutes. What I am talking about is goal oriented behavior, intelligent risk/reward calculations, and giving people who are not members of those ethnocentric groups the the ability to associate and do business with us without risking their lives and fortunes.
One does not typically insist on walking around in crime ridden minority neighborhoods preaching the gospel of George Lincoln Rockwell. Not least of all, because it carries the significant risk of being beaten or shot to death without any substantial chance of reward for that risk. It is not entirely dissimilar to say, that if one wants to use certain services for political purposes, or to develop contacts in a given organization, that he would be prudent not to introduce himself as a National Socialist. Not because of anything pertaining to the merits of national socialism, but because it would be contrary to his purposes. The more this individual wants to spread his ideas, the more restraint he needs to show in his actions, because changing other people’s opinions is an exercise of political power he has not yet obtained.
Obvious Race Realism
Of course, it is not quite so simple to just shut up about one’s political views, especially while engaging in political discussions. It requires more than an effort to infiltrate an organization for all but the most skilled operators to do something like this. One must actually reorient his focus, so that his interactions seem sincere, because they are.
Fortunately, I do not think this is nearly so heavy a lift as some might suspect. I have already done it. I had to spend three years in prison to do it, but I do not think that everyone need go through this. My understanding of the world, and how race interacts with politics, has not changed, fundamentally. I just don’t find it useful to spend a great deal of time focusing on the subject. That conclusion came in part as a result of a compulsory change in my routine media consumption, from the ecosystem of Telegram and Gab, to Fox News, conservative talk radio, the Wall Street Journal, and reading many books that had little to say about race. I consumed commercial media, and filtered it through my existing understanding of how the world worked.
There is a limit to how much useful information a person can consume on the subject of race. Reading the collected works of Kevin MacDonald, Adolf Hitler, and Charles Murray should more than suffice for this purpose. Once one has this information incorporated into their worldview, the aim ought to be to work it into the underlying assumptions of new information, and share the underlying assumptions by engaging with others on the more topical subject matter of the day, from this perspective.
This is a sort of reverse engineering of political propaganda, but if you think about it, this is how most people learn most things. By inference. If you sign up for a class, you might want to be told directly about the subject matter, but most people are not anxious to be preached to. They far prefer to believe that they figured the world out all on their own, and ideas formed in this way are more durable than those that are conspicuously inserted in the mind by others.
A powerful example of this is provided in the subject of the Ukraine conflict. Zelensky is willing to fight to the last Ukrainian, in large part because he is not a Ukrainian. Get that idea into the head of somebody who is skeptical of Joe Biden’s Ukraine policy, and soon you will smell the burning of the gears. You can’t explain this to the average person by starting the conversation with Holocaust denial. You have to meet people where they are, remain within their comfort zone, and then change the boundaries of that zone before you go outside of them.
Rules For Hegemony
We would all do well to learn from the tactics of the Left. They didn’t begin by trying to transgender the kids. They appealed to the values of normal people, and then gradually distorted those values to the point that even people who disagreed with their conclusions, tended to give them the moral high ground. Their recent excesses, in the form of race riots and classroom pornography, were born of the echo chamber that emerged from the hegemony purchased with prior restraint. Now they get to steal elections and burn down police stations on camera with no fear of harm to their reputations, much less being prosecuted.
Meanwhile, you can’t protest at the Capitol, count on the authorities to prosecute criminals who victimize you, or have a PayPal account.
They are winning. You are losing. We need to learn from them.
In his book, Rules for Radicals, Saul Alinsky says the following about the art of communication;
It does not matter what you know about anything if you cannot communicate to your people. In that event you are not even a failure. You’re just not there. Communication with others takes place when they understand what you’re trying to get across to them. If they don’t understand, then you are not communicating regardless of words, pictures, or anything else. People only understand things in terms of their experience, which means that you must get within their experience. Further, communication is a two-way process. If you try to get your ideas across to others without paying attention to what they have to say to you, you can forget about the whole thing.
Later in the same section;
In mass organization, you can’t go outside of people’s actual experience. I’ve been asked, for example, why I never talk to a Catholic priest or a Protestant minister or a rabbi in terms of the Judaeo-Christian ethic or the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount. I never talk in those terms. Instead I approach them on the basis of their own self-interest, the welfare of their Church, even its physical property.
If I approached them in a moralistic way, it would be outside their experience, because Christianity and Judaeo-Christianity are outside of the experience of organized religion. They would just listen to me and very sympathetically tell me how noble I was. And the moment I walked out they’d call their secretaries in and say, “If that screwball ever shows up again, tell him I’m out.”
Communication for persuasion, as in negotiation, is more than entering the area of another person’s experience. It is getting a fix on his main value or goal and holding your course on that target. You don’t communicate with anyone purely on the rational facts or ethics of an issue.
A great example of this for the Right is the news stories coming to us from school board meetings and elections in recent years, over critical race theory and transgenderism. Parents do not want their children to be indoctrinated with bizarre sexual nonsense from pedophile groomers. They do not want their children to be taught anti-White race hate.
But they don’t want to be branded Nazis or lose their jobs, either.
Anyone who helped those parents protect their children became their best friends, and anyone who stood in their way became their worst enemy.
Which category do you think you would fall into, if you showed up at that meeting, and used your time at the microphone to discuss the ethnic background of Magnus Hirschfeld?
There is scarcely any more persuasive figure in politics than a concerned mother. These scenes scared the life out of Democrats to the point they had their spies in the FBI target these mothers as terror suspects. When that headline broke, the public was rightly outraged.
These events have been fortunate for the Right, in that they are shifting the “spectrum of allies” discussed by Johnathan Matthew Smucker in his book “Hegemony How To”
If we are presently too feeble a force to win the fight today, what can we do today so that tomorrow we will be a little stronger, and the day after that, a little stronger still?
Before we can wield power for change, we need to build and align that power. The addition of the word align is necessary here because it is not only a matter of building our own power from scratch. Certainly we do need to build some of our own explicitly progressive political organizations, but constructing a political force is just as much about aligning with existing groups and institutions.
To think about where we are now and where we want our trajectory to take us, picture a tug of war, in which one side seems to be winning handily. But when a few key actors switch sides, it suddenly shifts the balance of forces and momentum. In a case of a regime and its challenger, the old regime may suddenly find itself weakened, perhaps beyond recovery, while a challenger alignment finds itself potent, its strength ascending, the “tug of war” moving in its direction. Now, let’s complicate our binary metaphor. The problem with the idea of an actor “switching sides” in a tug of war is that such a complete defection from one pole to its opposite is unusual in the real world. While such dramatic conversions are not unheard of, they are quite rare and we cannot rely on such dramatic individual conversions. The good news is this: to win politically you don’t have to win over your most ardent opponents.
The “spectrum of allies” graphic below provides an instructive map of our spectral “tug of war.
Shifting the spectrum of allies is about moving people and groups—leaders, influentials, social bases, institutions, polity members, new and hitherto unmobilized actors, etc. —over just one notch closer to your position. Groups working on specific campaigns can use the above “spectrum of allies” as a strategy tool, by identifying (and then writing into the “pie slices”) specific social bases, institutions, and leaders that could potentially shift the balance of power. Perhaps the most crucial category shift is the pulling of passive allies into the active allies category, as this brings an influx of volunteers and resources, substantially increasing the alignment’s immediate capacity for collective action. For example, when pre-movement civil rights leaders and their small nascent organizations pulled (i.e., activated) black churches, students, barber shops, etc. from the passive allies to the active allies category, suddenly all of the pre-existing infrastructure, resources, and social capacity of those constituencies and institutions went to work for civil rights, dramatically boosting the burgeoning movement’s capacity and reach. Probably the next most important shift is in winning over neutrals, thereby pulling them into the passive allies category. The Freedom Rides were designed precisely with this in mind. SNCC leaders knew that many students in the north were sympathetic but inactive (i.e., they were passive allies). By creating a way for hundreds of these students to become actively involved—by riding in integrated buses to segregated southern states, and then lending a hand to voter registration drives—they not only increased the civil rights movement’s capacity by bringing in more active participants, they also caught the attention of the families, friends, and broader social networks of those northern students, thereby pulling many thousands of people— including many “politically connected” people—from the neutral to the passive allies category.
If an emerging movement or alignment succeeds in effecting important shifts in these categories (passive allies -> active allies, neutral-> passive allies), it may be approaching a tipping point, where passive opponents start losing their conviction-they are “neutralized”-and the active opposition eventually loses its base of support. If challengers can keep up their spectrum-shifting trajectory – if they can weather countermoves, counter-attacks, and perhaps repression – their opponents will eventually find themselves isolated and thus weakened to the point of retreat or capitulation. Of course none of this is easy. There are many obstacles, structural, cultural, social, and psychological-that tend to prevent individuals and institutions from aligning with and adding their energy to a collective effort or challenger movement. Overcoming these obstacles usually takes good planning, hard work, and savvy- and success is still never assured. But however hopeless the present situation may seem, we have to always remind ourselves that our success ultimately depends on a growth trajectory. Progressives will not- we cannot- make the kinds of changes we envision with only a small active force. There Is a danger of getting stuck on a “low plateau”- where our capacity is limited to that of a small number of .. usual suspects … We might even become comfortable on this plateau, where all the faces are familiar, and everyone thinks more or less like us. But we have to figure out how to climb higher.
There is a tremendous amount of wisdom in that passage, which we’ll address presently.
Party Politics in the United States
America has a two party political system. This is not a mere perception of the electorate. It is not ideological. That is the system we have. It is established in law and fact. Electoral districts are drawn based on territory and population, and within those jurisdictions, winner takes all in elections. If the winner gets one more vote than you, you are the loser, you lose completely, and there is no participation trophy.
The two parties are, at least in theory, adversaries, and on the rare occasions that they work together, one or both of their constituencies are typically furious.
This differs from other parts of the world and different times in history, with parliamentary systems and proportional representation. In these places and times, the people of an entire state or federation of states, vote for a party, and that party sends representatives to a legislative body that elects the executive. In these systems, minority parties can wield tremendous power by joining governing coalitions.
This opportunity does not exist in the United States.
In most parts of the country, the two parties have further arranged the laws to prevent independent and third party candidates from even getting their names on the ballot. Either through massive fees, or petition requirements, these candidates face obstacles which often prove insurmountable.
Even in places with relatively lax ballot access laws, where one need only pay a nominal sum to gain ballot access, even low information voters are informed enough about how the system works that they refuse to waste their vote by casting it for a candidate who has no chance of winning the election.
Media outlets, if we try to imagine honest ones operating in our political system, have no reason to convey the messages of inconsequential candidates because they are fundamentally unnewsworthy. Partisan news outlets, which it should go without saying are more common than honest ones, may occasionally make the strategic decision of promoting a candidate perceived to pull votes from their party’s opponents, in the hopes that the candidate may “play spoiler” in the election, to the benefit of their party’s candidate. But they will not grant the candidate so much coverage as to create a serious possibility of the candidate actually winning, because that is borderline impossible in our system, because their audience would likely change the channel rather than be inundated with irrelevant information, and because they themselves are invested in the two party system.
These challenges are exacerbated by campaign finance regulations, which limit how much a supporter can give to a candidate they favor. If the candidate himself is wealthy, he can spend as much of his money as he sees fit. If the candidate merely has the support of wealthy benefactors, he cannot spend their money on his campaign beyond a certain limit which typically is designed to be inconsequential. While campaign finance regulations are marketed as a means to prevent corruption in politics, the effect is precisely the opposite, by cementing the media’s position as gatekeeper, and granting electoral advantage to dishonest candidates who find more “creative” ways of using others’ resources beyond contribution limits.
Left and Right
The coherence of a two party system stems in part form the fact that, while there are challenges that attend to defining it which are beyond the scope of this reading, there has often if not always emerged throughout time and geography, what can be referred to as a “Left Right Paradigm” of politics. The terminology stems from the French Revolution, a situation the description of which I will provide as a quote from a post at TheConversation.com;
Left and right are old labels, dating back to the French Revolution. In 1789, the National Constitutive Assembly met to decide whether, under France’s new political regime, the king should have veto power. If so, it queried, should this right should be absolute or simply suspensive, for a period of time.
When voting, supporters of the absolute veto sat on the president’s right, the noble side. According to Christian tradition, it is an honour to be seated at the right side of God, or to the right of the head of the family at dinner. Those who wanted a highly restricted veto were seated on the left.
Thus, the layout of the room took on political significance: to the right, supporters of a monarchy that sought to preserve many of the king’s powers; to the left, those who wished to reduce them.
As a general matter, the Right is more accepting of hierarchy, while the Left is more intent on levelling. Either can be seen as more or less “liberal” than the other, in the classical sense, this being a relative term describing the degree of government coercion requisite to impose their respective standards on a given population. Your humble correspondent holds the view that the Right, however forceful it needs to be to establish order, will always be more “liberal” in this sense, because its aims correspond to reality and human beings are at least capable of living according to Right wing standards. This stands in sharp contrast to the Left, whose unrealistic fantasies lead to perpetual catastrophe, and are invariably met with demands for more State coercion with each successive failure, eventually giving way to an all pervading tyranny, as the levellers come to despise the citizenry for their rejection of the project.
This being the case, the Right, which is by no means of a single mind, must form what are often uncomfortable coalitions to defeat the Left. This is because, lacking any meaningful standards, the Left has historically had less trouble making the sort compromises electoral coalitions necessitate.
In the American two party system, we have a Left wing Party, nominally Democrat, more accurately described as communist. We also have a wholly inadequate Right wing party, called the Republicans, whom one might flatter by describing as speedbumps.
Reasonable people find this state of affairs intolerable, and demand alternatives. Should one present itself as viable, your humble correspondent is all ears, but this writer remains unpersuaded that the proposals presently on the table meet this standard. If we rule out the option of armed struggle, as any sane man must, at least while speaking under his real name, our only means of influencing public policy is to influence the electorate, the elected, and those who derive their powers therefrom.
Third Parties
Since failure to name the organization will result in accusations that I am waging a thinly veiled attack on it, I should make specific reference here to the National Justice Party, or NJP. But most of what I am going to say has already been said about the Libertarian Party and the Constitution Party on the Right, and of the Greens and other third parties on the Left. There is nothing new about independent political parties in American politics, and since I think the NJP does good non-electoral work, I would just as soon leave them out of this analysis. They are reluctantly brought up because people will assume I am talking about them if I don’t talk about them specifically.
There can be no doubt that the NJP has made substantial accomplishments, most of which I surely remain unaware of on account of the conditions of my incarceration. Among the successes I can name, they range from the charitable – raising money to purchase Christmas presents for White children, to the organizational – getting large numbers of like minded people to show up and act collectively, to the ideological – in the spreading and refinement of ideas. Within what might be described as the “far right”, the NJP doubtlessly wields social if not political power.
I can imagine that in due course, the NJP might have other accomplishments, such as serving as a useful legal and financial vehicle to accomplish goals not normally considered the purview of a political party, by taking advantage of legal privileges and immunities granted to this peculiar sort of institution.
I never begrudged the Traditionalist Workers Party for taking on the form of a political party, and I have no quarrel with the NJP for structuring its legal organization in this way.
So far as elections go, there are states like New York, which have the unusual feature of cross endorsement, where a candidate’s name may appear on the ballot for a single office more than once under different party lines. Usually, this means if you vote Republican or you vote Conervative, you vote for the same candidate. Nothing is lost by voting for the minority party, and Republican candidates seek Conservative cross endorsement so they do not miss out on those comparatively few party line votes. While this has not had the effect of rescuing New York from Democrat hegemony, it has earned the Conservative Party a seat at the table of Republican Party politics, wielding more influence than they likely otherwise would as a mere faction of the GOP.
But New York’s cross endorsement law is very unusual. In most places, third party candidates can only help those parties whose positions they oppose most vehemently, by attracting voters from the larger and more closely aligned party, to deprive that viable party the benefit of their ballot. The benefit thus naturally accrues to the viable opposition party, whose platform consists of open borders and transgender toddlers.
The NJP is not presently engaged in this sort of political activity. They are thus not prone to criticism of that sort of activity, yet. But from what I can gather, there pervades throughout the membership and sympathizers of the organization an understandable contempt for the Republican Party. Should this contempt manifest itself as an organized and successful effort to deprive the Republican Party of electoral victories, they will become a convenient tool of the Democrat Party. I hope they do not do this.
I have some personal experience with this sort of activity. Not long after my first steps in political activism, in the year 2010, I ran for the US House of Representatives in New York’s 1st congressional district as a Libertarian Party candidate. I originally intended to seek the Republican and Conservative Party cross endorsements as well, but being a political novice with the meager support of a near non-existent Libertarian Party, it quickly became obvious I would not have a chance of accomplishing this goal.
In fact, I never even made the ballot as a Libertarian. I had to run a write in campaign.
The vote totals were as follows
- Tim Bishop (D) : 98,316 votes – or – 48.67%
- Randy Altschuler (R): 97,723 votes – or – 48.38%
- Write-in: 5,968 votes – or – 2.95%
New York does not read the write in votes unless the total number of write ins has the potential to alter the outcome, so I have no idea how many of those 5,968 votes were for me, but I am unaware of any other write in candidate in the race.
Tim Bishop was reelected with less than 50% of the vote, and shortly after this, Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law.
This did not improve my relationship with the Tea Party groups, many of whom understandably blamed me for giving this winnable seat to the Democrat.
At the time, I took credit for doing so. I felt powerful for having done so. I did not think Mr. Altschuler was a good candidate, and I still do not think he was or is. But the 2010 midterm elections were a big win for the Republican Party elsewhere, which Barack Obama subsequently described as a “shellacking”, and this shellacking likely saved us from his Cap & Trade carbon taxes, under which “electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket”.
Should the Libertarian Party have enjoyed more such “victories”, Barack Obama would have continued to have a free hand with a compliant Democrat majority for at least another two years. To advocate this with knowledge of the implications is a thinly veiled advocacy of accelerationist terrorism, and a willingness to harm the public in the hopes of distant future political gain. One who pursues such a strategy must be prepared to do so under guise of deception, because the public will not reward with political success, the persons or parties they see as having brought this misery upon them intentionally.
The Primary Challenge
Those dissatisfied with the Republican Party will state, in various versions, certain slogans familiar to anyone who has dealt with Libertarians in the past. Lines such as, “The Republicans do this” or “The Republicans don’t do that”. As if the Republican Party (or any other party) were its own agent with its own will.
The most cursory examination reveals the fault in this thinking. It is the same error made by anarchists who begin similar statements with “the government” in place of “the Republicans”. A Party can only only do as its participants direct it to do, just as a government only does what the party in control of it directs. One who advocates the abandonment of the Party due to the actions of those in charge of it, creates by his actions a self fulfilling prophecy, just as does the eligible voter who boycotts elections. He leaves control of the weapon to the very people he blames for his dissatisfaction, and according to a certain line of reasoning, forfeits his right to complain.
The more dissatisfied one is with the behavior of the Republican “establishment”, the more his rational judgement should guide him towards becoming it. Among the benefits of having a party system institutionalized, is that the rules for participation in the Party are established by law. Those laws may vary from place to place, but they do not generally permit the party to disenfranchise eligible voters who register as party members, and thus with effort similar to what it takes for one to spoil an election, one can commandeer leadership positions in the Party apparatus.
Without even doing so, every Republican nomination for public office is subject to primary or caucus elections, in which, again, any voter who registers party affiliation is eligible to participate. It takes fewer votes to win a primary election, and fewer still a caucus, than it takes to win a general election. If you cannot win one of these contests, there is no reason to expect you can win a general election, and thus third parties are not only destined, but usually designed, to lose, and often to play spoiler. It is infinitely more viable a strategy to court registered Republicans to vote for one’s chosen primary candidate, than it is to encourage those same voters to abandon their party to support a non-viable third party or independent candidate. This is because the stakes in a primary are typically and correctly thought of as lower than the general, because most primary voters rightly consider any party member a better option than the candidate of the opposition party.
But, to court those voters, one must not be an enemy of the Party. If one’s stated purpose is the destruction of the Republican Party, he can scarcely blame party members for rejecting his bid for leadership or nomination for office. To pursue his course, he must endear himself to these primary voters, and to do this he must emphasize those points he has in common with them. He must appeal to their own self interest, and even their vanity. Where he differs from them on a particular policy position, he must be able to articulate not why that voter is wrong, nor even why his position is more correct, but rather the coherent reasoning which sheds light on the fact, that his position is more conducive to that voter’s non-negotiable demands, than alternative courses of action.
His candidacy must furthermore be conducive to the overall strategic success of the Party, because no elected official can conduct public policy without a governing coalition. He is rightly discouraged from standing on some espoused principle to the benefit of the opposition party. If he believes the party strategy is wrong, he can wield only so much influence as he has earned, toward changing it. To earn that power, he must have proven willing to pursue strategies he disagrees with for the good of the party, just as he will demand that other party members who disagree with him, pursue his strategy once he has obtained power.
Some might say the above stands in contrast to lived experience. The Republican Party’s critics on the Right point to nominations like Mitt Romney, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, Liz Cheney, and Adam Kinzinger, as evidence that the Party is hopeless. In this, they illustrate the error of their own thinking. The problems we all recognize with these names, is that they behave like, and come to the assistance of, Democrats. These “Republicans In Name Only” (RINOs) are disloyal to their Party, and are accordingly held in contempt by most Republicans.
That these RINOs manage to obtain positions of influence within the Party anyway, is a subject of considerable controversy, but it must be remembered that no informed participant in politics is aiming for perfection. This analysis does not conclude that having an R next to one’s name makes one a good person. We are seeking to move things in our preferred direction by whatever degree we can manage. If some Citizen of Utah is sick of Pierre Delecto marching with Black Lives Matter rioters, they should put on a suit, and put in the effort, toward seeing him defeated in a Republican Primary. Until that happens, the informed observer is compelled to admit that we would not be better served by an open Democrat in his Senate seat, or for that matter, Evan McMullen.
The Overton Window
If you’ve been listening to the Radical Agenda for any considerable period of time, you have heard me discuss the concept of the Overton Window at some length.
If you’re new to this concept, the Overton Window is the range of socially permissible discussion topics. Shifting the Overton Window means changing that range in a manner more favorable to one’s position and less favorable to one’s opponent. For example, it is currently permissible to discuss race through the lens of what has been called “Critical Race Theory” but not through the lens of genetic or biological determinism. There is an effort underway by parents of schoolchildren to make CRT an unacceptable frame of reference, and this is moving the Overton Window in a direction unfavorable to the Left. The people who are conducting this effort do not want to move the window all the way to biological determinism, but I am of the opinion that they will not be able to prevent this from happening, due to a certain natural progression of comprehension.
While our ultimate goal is the change in public policy, this is impossible without our proposed policy positions becoming first, acceptable to discuss, and second, widely accepted truth. Right now, one risks being assaulted and imprisoned on fake charges for discussing our ideas. I have proven willing to risk my life and freedom to change that state of affairs.
I take this so seriously, that I am also willing to admit when I was wrong.
My conception of the means by which to shift the Overton Window used to be that one ought to stake out a more extreme position than he actually holds. To push the range of allowable discussion by making, as forcefully as one can, a case that one has little to no expectation of achieving in any foreseeable time frame, in the hopes of achieving a lesser position, under the guise of compromise.
In this thinking, I was influenced by some words of wisdom by a man calling himself Bill Marchant, who wrote on a blog called Northern Reaction. In an August of 2016 piece titled “Don’t Punch Right“, Bill makes the following observation;
The idea behind that is that anyone doing something to the right of you is “good” and anyone doing something to the left of you is “Bad”. It does NOT mean “Don’t punch anyone ON the right”, because that would not allow us to criticise people like Paul Ryan or Ted Cruz. Those people are on “The Right” as it currently stands in the American political spectrum, but they are to the left of you and I. “Criticise anyone not exactly as right as me” is cuckservative logic and doesn’t work. “Don’t criticise anyone on the right” encourages a leftward shift as more and more “somewhat rightwing” people are accepted into what I will call the “mainstream Alt-Right” while noting the irony of that phrase. The only effective strategy, the one leftists have perfected is to not criticise anyone to the right of you. This pushes the Overton Window to the right.
So if you see someone criticise Milo because He’s gay or something, don’t defend Milo unless Milo is to the right of you and the criticism is coming from the left. Because criticism directed at Milo for being insufficiently rightwing pushes the Overton Window in the same way Milo’s existence does. Yes, Milo is probably pushing the mainstream further right on some issues, but defending him does nothing to further the cause besides allowing the cause to move leftward.
That does not necessarily mean you have to actively engage in criticism of Milo. I don’t always. But it does mean that you should let those to the right of you do it. Because that’s what works.
While there is a lot of wisdom here, it took awhile for me to realize the problems with this. Among them, that really awful people could shield themselves from criticism by staking out absurd positions like cheering on mass shooters, then accusing anyone who questioned the wisdom of such a course, of “Punching Right” or “Optics Cucking”. Combined with the general attitude in the Alt Right that piercing the veil of anonymity was the ultimate betrayal, this allowed people who did not sincerely share our views to turn us into cartoon Nazis, which had the effect of putting us so far outside the Overton Window that normal people had no idea what we were even talking about. All they knew about us was what they heard from Leftists, and this had the effect of moving the Overton Window back Leftward.
Bill figured this out before I did, but I wasn’t keeping such close track of his material when, in February of 2018, Bill wrote a piece titled “Bystanders, Language, and Rallies” in which he made the following observation;
Disclaimer: I’ve said, many times before, don’t punch right. And I’ve mostly kept quiet, as people to my right (I guess? I’m not sure how monarchism and national socialism interact on the ol’ spectrum) make what I believe to be unforced errors. I’ve spoken to a few of these people privately, but I feel like I’m obscure enough and this is an apolitical enough point that I can get away with it, just this once. Alright, enough disclaimers. On to the main event.
Middle America, even white, right wing middle America, doesn’t like Hitler. Shocking, I know, but it’s true.
The broad American public has ideological antibodies that, when you talk about Hitler, pop up and replace “Hitler” with “Bad Guy!”
This may be the most powerful example of these ideological antibodies, but there are many of these triggers. “Antisemite” = “Nazi” = “Hitler” = “Bad Guy!” I’m not going to list all of them. You know what they are.
You need to avoid hitting those ideological antibody triggers. Outside of very odd circumstances (like talking to teenagers on 4chan), you’re going to get the “Bad Guy!” label, and the person you’re talking to will discount everything else you have to say.
I’m not sure if this was intentional or accidental, but during Trump’s campaign, the Alt-Right learned how to short circuit this immune response. I’m going to use Pepe in August 2016 as my example. If you use a cartoon frog as a stand-in for Nazism, no one will believe you are being serious, and whatever else you say will be able to slip by with it. Crucially, though, this does not work forever.
There are three groups that you need to think about when you choose your language. There is your Ingroup (The people who are on your side), your Outgroup (Journalists, politicians, rootless cosmopolitans, whoever your enemies that will never join your cause are), and the Bystanders (Everyone who does not fall into the other two categories).
If you want to say things that would normally trigger ideological antibodies, it needs to be understandable to the Ingroup and non-threatening or unintelligible to Bystanders. Whether the Outgroup understands or not doesn’t really matter.
Pepe, in August 2016, was understandable to the Ingroup (The Alt-Right). Pepe, by that time, was also understandable to the Outgroup. But Pepe was a mystery to the vast majority of Bystanders. So when Hillary Clinton got up on stage and claimed that a cartoon frog was a symbol of evil racism, the Outgroup nodded along, the bystanders thought she was having a stroke or something, and the Ingroup laughed hysterically, because they knew how crazy she would sound to the Bystanders.
Fast-forward to today. By now, many of the bystanders know that Pepe is, in fact, used by the Alt-Right. And the Alt-Right is racist = Nazis = Hitler = Bad! So someone coming out today and saying that Pepe is a symbol of racism would get far fewer confused looks from the Bystanders than Hillary’s speech did.
Think about this in relation to the Alt-Right’s “operations” since Trump’s inauguration. Before Trump’s election, if someone called the Alt-Right “Nazis,” the bystanders would mostly be confused. “The old Nazis are gone. The Neo-Nazis are trailer trash types with tattoos on their faces. These guys don’t look or act like the old or new Nazis. Yeah, they say some similar things, but it seems to be mostly in jest.”
Then, after Trump got elected, some people decided it would be a good idea to start looking and acting MORE like Nazis. I’m not just talking about Richard Spencer saying “Hail Victory” in a speech. One weird incident does not make a movement Nazi-like. The problem was the rallies.
You know who has rallies? Nazis.
He goes on to complain about rallies at some length, but we’ll skip ahead a little bit. Marchant continues;
This article is mostly intended for those people who say “They’re gonna think we’re Nazis anyway, so we might as well embrace it.” No. That’s dumb. And I’ll tell you exactly why it’s dumb.
Who is “they”?
Joe Sixpack in Alabama won’t have heard of you, and certainly won’t be calling you a Nazi. The “they” that will think you are a Nazi no matter what is… The Outgroup! As I mentioned earlier, it does not matter what the Outgroup thinks! You will never convince the Outgroup to your side, that’s what makes them the Outgroup!
So, yes, you are correct, the Outgroup will always think you’re Nazis. But the Bystanders certainly won’t. And if you don’t look or act in a way that easily ticks off Nazi boxes in the Bystanders’ heads, the Outgroup will just look dumb for calling you that! Unless, of course, you wear swastikas, speak German, goosestep, rally in large numbers, and yell about Jews. Then the Bystanders will think that maybe the Outgroup has a point.
Think about this in terms of what I quoted from Smucker earlier in Hegemony How To. The “Spectrum of Allies” concept. Let’s say that the man Bill describes as “Joe Six Pack in Alabama” is neutral.
Your actions can either move Joe into the passive allies category, or the passive opposition category. Work harder and he can become active in either camp.
If you tell Joe you’re a Nazi, he’s going into the opposition column. It doesn’t matter if you’re right. It doesn’t matter if Hitler did anything wrong. What matters is Joe’s frame of reference, in which Nazis are not a 20th century German political party with legitimate complaints, but cartoon villains who murder the innocent because they are possessed by demons.
On the other hand, tell Joe that you are his fellow Republican; tell him that, just like him, you want to defeat those evil Democrats; that you share, rather than oppose, his values; and you have just placed yourself into Joe’s active allies category, quite independently of his decision making processes. This is great for Joe, who has always known he was right, and is happy to have someone recognize this.
Now that you are allies with Joe, you can have more meaningful discussions with him, and gain his trust. You might even suggest new ways of defeating the Democrats, like by fighting identity politics with identity politics.
Perhaps more importantly, the more people like Joe who you have on your side, the less power people like Mitch McConnell have over the Republican Party. Mitch McConnell is your active opposition in the Republican Party, and you will not render him your ally. You can, however, render him passive, or even neutral, if by attacking you he will incur the ire of people like Joe.
The recent Alabama Senate primary provides a brilliant example of our point.
In the 2022 midterm elections, Lisa Murkowski was challenged by fellow Republican Kelly Tshibaka. Alaska has so few Democrats as to make the general election a Republican Primary, because a Republican was going to win no matter what. The only question was, which Republican? It would either be Tshibaka or Murkowski.
This is hardly something the Senate Leadership Fund, McConnell’s Super PAC, needed to spend money on. The Democrats were defending the thinnest conceivable majority in the Senate (50/50 w/ VP Harris breaking the ties), but that year’s election had Republicans defending more Senate seats than Democrats. Allocation of campaign finances was crucial to determining who would hold the Senate majority, and if Mitch McConnell was a good team player, his PAC’s resources would have gone to defeating Democrats.
Instead, McConnell spent over $6.1 Million attacking Tshibaka to help Murkowski, who, it should be kept in mind, voted against Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, and for Ketanji Brown Jackson’s. Murkowski is notoriously disloyal to her Party, and Mitch McConnell’s decision to back her, while abandoning competitive contests like the Arizona race between Masters and Kelly, arguably resulted in Democrats increasing their Senate majority, at a time when Republicans had a chance to gain control over the chamber.
And it is small consolation that Republicans managed to eke out a thin majority in the House. Sure, a united Republican majority in the House can block the worst parts of Joe Biden’s agenda, but cabinet and judicial confirmations are a Senate power. So whatever your views on race, be sure and pray that Clarence Thomas remains in good health.
This presented a tremendous opportunity to attack McConnell from the Right, but only for those who were loyal Republicans. Since McConnell’s offense was in his disloyalty to his party, an outsider attacking him for it lacks standing and credibility, and is seen, rightly, as someone who is only trying to sow discord within the Party.
Put in Smucker’s terms, Mitch McConnell shifted his spectrum of allies in a disfavorable fashion. Active and passive allies of McConnell’s who supported him for partisan reasons, now have less partisan reason to support his efforts. Those allies are currently up for grabs, but only to people who can appeal to partisan interests.
Who can deny that our movement could benefit from obtaining power at the expense of Mitch McConnell?
Unfortunately, we are not today in a position to reap this windfall because we have made exceedingly poor investments of our meager political capital in the time preceding this tremendous opportunity. If we want to reap the next such opportunity, we have to change our behavior now.
Shifting the Overton Window cannot be done when one is so distant from the building that they cannot be seen with binoculars.
One must be able to participate in the discussion before he can propose a change of subject.
Nobody takes advice from their adversary.
Conduits of Influence
I will never win a popularity contest.
Maybe you will. As a writer with little measure of who precisely reads my material, it is impossible for me to say. But my statement is true for most of us.
Winning elections is a specialty, and it is one which has no necessary connection to expertise in public policy. Candidates are recruited on the basis of image, and groomed and trained by teams of professional manipulators. Millions of dollars are invested. Entire media empires are erected around controlling the outcomes.
You and I can aspire to such heights, but it will be quite a climb. Whether we ever reach that altitude or not, our goals are well served by getting our ideas in greater proximity to the people who are actually winning the elections and making bureaucratic decisions.
This happens, to some extent, organically. When you are spreading memes on social media, for example. The meme power of the Alt Right in 2016 was intense. We could all feel it, and we eventually started to see these ideas bubble up in unexpected places. We definitely influenced Trump and those around him, and Tucker Carlson has surely been impacted as well. They went on to spread those ideas, in a substantially diluted fashion, to millions of other people. Elon Musk has surely since been influenced. I probably shouldn’t get started on Kanye West…
This is huge stuff, and we did it while having fun. Imagine what could happen if we were more calculating?
In Trump, Tucker, and Elon Musk, we have some version of our ideas in the highest echelons of American life. They don’t just wield power themselves, they influence the masses tremendously. Just as importantly, they themselves are influenced BY the masses. Influence, properly understood, is a two way street.
If we try to think of this visually, we can picture beneath Trump, Carlson, and Musk, a certain faction of the Republican Party, particularly in the House of Representatives. People like Matt Gaetz, Chip Roy, and Marjorie Taylor Greene. They are more accessible than Trump and Carlson, but they have access to Trump and Carlson. Aside from the power they themselves wield, this makes them a conduit of influence to the former President and the top show in cable news.
I don’t know about you, but even they aren’t going to be coming to any of my parties anytime soon, and how Nick Fuentes gets these meets is beyond me. So, I would very much like conduits of influence to them, and this, I suspect, is very achievable.
There are people in our circles who attack Trump for any number of things, with varying degrees of merit to the complaints. Tucker Carlson gets less of this, but there’s always somebody who insists that if you’re not screaming about joooos all day, that you’re complicit in White genocide. Criticism is one thing, but to make these guys your enemy is insane.
Between you and them are millions of people we can influence. They are getting watered down ideas from up above, and their frame of reference is being made permeable to us by this. In 2015 they (and I) would have told you that tariffs were just tax hikes, and their views on immigration were largely moderate. But now they are keenly aware of “the other” and the idea that people who are “not us” are dangerous.
Probably 75% of them still think “racism” is evil and probably 95% still think it’s okay to “punch Nazis”, but they know that “Trump supporters” are “Patriots” and therefore “Good”.
Now, you can introduce yourself as a Nazi who hates Trump if you want to, but these people are not going to listen to what you say after that.
Better idea:
Be a fellow Trump supporter. Don’t pretend: BE!
Then, ask them if they’ve seen Tucker Carlson’s interview with Charles Murray on Fox Nation.
If not, offer to show it to them.
If they watch it, offer them a copy of Murray’s book “Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America” which, at 157 pages, is a lot easier to digest than “The Bell Curve”.
Another great intermediate book is Pat Buchanan’s “Suicide Of A Superpower: Will America Survive To 2025?“. The title of the book (published in 2011), asking if America will survive to 2025, makes this the perfect time to offer this to people. Anybody who has been paying attention to politics for awhile, has heard of Pat Buchanan, and unless they are watching MSNBC all day they don’t think he’s a Nazi. Many Trump supporters read Buchanan’s syndicated columns, and consider themselves to be on the same team as him.
So let them stumble across this bit of wisdom in his book, and then talk to you about ethnonationalism;
If ethnonationalism has been behind terrible crimes, have not great crimes been committed in the name of religion? Do we therefore decry all religions? “Nations are the wealth of humanity, its generalized personalities. The very least of them wears its own special colors, and bears within itself a special facet of divine intention,” said Solzhenitsyn.
We may deny the existence of ethnonationalism, detest it, condemn it. But this creator and destroyer of empires and nations is a force infinitely more powerful than globalism, for it engages the heart. Men will die for it.
Religion, race, culture, and tribe are the four horsemen of the coming apocalypse. But let us give the last word to Professor Jerry Muller: “Americans… find ethnonationalism discomfiting both intellectually and morally. Social scientists go to great lengths to demonstrate that it is a product not of nature but of culture…. But none of this will make ethnonationalism go away.”
That passage is from the last page of Chapter 8. Chapter 9 is titled “The White Party” and makes the case that the Republican Party is the party of White people and ought to embrace this.
Sound familiar?
Keep The News, I’m Here For The History.
I read a very interesting book in prison by Matthew Continetti titled “The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism“. Continetti married the daughter of Bill Kristol, and traces his political roots back to the American Enterprise Institute, and the Weekly Standard. He hates Trump and thinks conservatism has gone astray by failing to embrace the “blessings of immigration”.
While Mr. Continetti might not be the best source to take our cues from on what it means to be Right wing, his abhorrence of racism gave an interesting dimension to what was otherwise an excellent book. Hardly a chapter went by without some mention of race realism entering the conservative movement. As he describes it, the valiant defenders of freedom always defeated these monsters, even if it meant giving the country away to the Democrats in the process.
His descriptions of these conflicts were not particularly detailed. These sort of people never can be, because to do so would be to give away the game. Some could be summarized as “So and so did racism, and had to go bye bye”.
But as one who had already been informed about the nature of this conflict on the Right, the frequency of these realist insurgencies, which I had not been fully aware of, was inspiring to me. Our movement is not so new as many have been led to believe. We have been a repressed faction of the Republican Party for over a century, and it is only by joining forces with the opposition Party that our internecine rivals have kept us as such.
People like Mitch McConnell say there is “no place in the Republican Party” for us, and so many on our side believe him. The truth is, people like Mitch McConnell make these utterances aspirationally. This is something they would like to see become true, rather than something that actually is. They live in constant fear knowing that we could displace them at any moment, and that without constant effort on their part, we will.
Continetti’s book ends victoriously with the 2020 defeat of Donald Trump, and proposes a conservatism that is “acceptable to elites” going forward, so that this type of thing does not again become necessary.
That makes Matthew Continetti a bad Republican, and speaking as a Republican myself, I was rather enjoying the White Party. So I say Matthew Continetti and his “elites” can either show some loyalty, or go the way of the Weekly Standard.
This is our Party. We are not infiltrators. They are, and given their brazen double dealing under Trump, I figure it’s only a matter of time before your average primary voter figures this out.
Let us hasten the day.
If you leave me a voicemail, I might play it on the air and respond to you. (202) 599-7386