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Matteo Luca Andriola:

L'alt-right è un movimento realmente transnazionale?

Un mio amico mi ha segnalato questo libro, 'The International Alt-Right: Fascism for the 21st Century?' (2020), di Patrik Hermansson, Simon Murdoch, Joe Mulhall, David Lawrence, ricercatori del gruppo di difesa antirazzista HOPE not hate. Di solito non si giudica un libro dalla copertina, ma una breve scorsa su Internet mi ha confermato che della storiografia anglosassone non bisogna fidarsi. Perché? Sul sito della casa editrice viene indicato

«L'alt-right è un movimento realmente transnazionale e questo libro è unico nel proporre una prospettiva veramente internazionale, delineando l'influenza delle idee e dei movimenti europei, nonché lo sviluppo e l'atteggiamento dell'alt-right verso paesi diversi come il Giappone, India e Russia. Esamina gli affluenti ideologici che si sono coagulati per formare l'alt-right, come la supremazia bianca, la blogsfera neo-reazionaria, la Nuova Destra Europea [la galassia intellettuale che fa capo al GRECE di Alain de Benoist, o in Europa intellettuali come Robert Steuckers, la Quarta Teoria Politica eurasiatista di Alexandr Dugin, ecc. che per la politologia americana è un tutt'uno, nda], la manoshere ["uomosfera", cioè l'attivismo neomascolino] anti-femminista, il movimento libertario, e la cultura dell'odio digitale esemplificata da meme offensivi e trolling. Gli autori esplorano le opinioni dell'alt-right su genere, sessualità e mascolinità, antisemitismo e Olocausto, razza e QI, globalizzazione e cultura, nonché il suo uso della violenza. L'alt-right è un movimento di estrema destra completamente moderno che utilizza tecnologie all'avanguardia e questo libro rivela come usano criptovalute, crittografia, hacking, "meme warfare", social media e il dark web.»[1]

Insomma, senza aver letto il volume, ho capito dove vuole andare a parare il team di autori, tutti infarciti di cultura libdem post-strutturalista americana. In sintesi, questa "alt-right" internazionale, spesso indentificata con la figura di Steve Bannon, è o no una forma di fascismo del XXI secolo?

A naso, senza aver letto un solo rigo del libro ma limitandomi al riassunto che ricorda molto la sintassi del collettivo WuMing, dico di no. Nel fascismo storico ad esempio, vi è l'uscita dall'ordine economico liberale col corporativismo, che è anche un modello di rappresentanza organica della società per categorie sociali. E' figlio, checché ne dicano i tradizionalisti, della Modernità e dello Stato-Moderno. Non a caso, secondo lo storico Emilio Gentile, il fascismo fu una via italiana al totalitarismo, «un fenomeno politico moderno, nazionalista e rivoluzionario, antiliberale e antimarxista, organizzato in un partito milizia, con una concezione totalitaria della politica e dello Stato, con un’ideologia attivistica e antiteoretica, a fondamento mitico, virilista e antiedonistica, sacralizzata come religione laica, che afferma il primato assoluto della nazione, intesa come comunità organica etnicamente omogenea, gerarchicamente organizzata in uno Stato corporativo, con una vocazione bellicosa alla politica di grandezza, di potenza e di conquista, mirante alla creazione di nuovo ordine e di una nuova civiltà»[1]

E' un fenomeno irripetibile, inquadrabile in tutto e per tutto nel XX secolo e figlio della palingenesi collettiva della prima guerra mondiale, che forgiò una generazione in quella che Benito Mussolini definirà come “trincerocrazia”, mito fondativo di una nuova gioventù che tornava a casa dopo quattro anni di trincea. Il fascismo mussoliniano è figlio della Grande Guerra, l’evento che ha mutato per sempre la storia, l’Europa e il mondo, e senza la quale non avremmo avuto né il nazionalsocialismo in Germania né la Rivoluzione d'Ottobre in Russia. E' nel suo mezzo, e qui aveva ragione Ernst Nolte, che scoppia la “europäische Bürgerkrieg” (1917 - 1945) fra due diverse concezioni del mondo, fra quella materialista storica incarnata nel marxismo-leninismo a quella romantica, idealista e volontarista incarnata dai fascismi. E' quel carnaio a creare l'idea che sarebbe nata un’aristocrazia guerriera venuta fuori direttamente dalla gerarchia della trincea, la trincerocrazia, cioè

«l'aristocrazia della trincea. È l'aristocrazia di domani. È l'aristocrazia in funzione. Viene dal profondo. I suoi «quarti di nobiltà» hanno un bel colore di sangue. Nel suo blasone ci può essere dipinto un «cavallo di Frisia», una fossa di trincea, una bomba a mano.»[3]

Francamente, nell'uso di «meme offensivi e trolling» in uso nel mondo anglosassone o da parte degli utenti simpatizzanti di Donald J. Trump non vedo alcuna weltanschauung eroica e soprattutto postliberale. L'alt-right è, invece, organica alla mentalità anglosassone alla pari di altri fenomeni come i teo-con (ricordiamo McCain, la Pallin e il Tea Party?), che sono l'estrema destra del liberalismo. Ne più e ne meno. Una mera governance autoritaria dei rapporti di classe.

Non dimentichiamo che la storiografia e la politologia anglosassone ha coniato il concetto astruso di “islamofascismo”. Secondo il New Oxford American Dictionary, consiste in «un controverso termine che equipara movimenti islamici con i movimenti fascisti europei dell’inizio del Xx secolo». Utilizzato soprattutto dai neoconservatori come «un vuoto termine di propaganda», nato ai tempi dell’amministrazione Bush[4]. Un concetto simile lo espresse James Gregor, professore di Storia contemporanea all’Università di Berkley, il quale, intervistato per il periodico di destra “Lo Stato” alla fine degli anni Novanta in occasione della nuova edizione del suo libro Il Fascismo. Interpretazione e giudizi, sostenne addirittura che il fascismo non era più da considerarsi un fenomeno europeo, ma che esso sarebbe sorto dall’Est, dall’Asia e dal mondo arabo, identificandolo nei governi antioccidentali e in tutti quei movimenti antiamericani:

«Questo sentimento [nazionalista, n. d. a.] si trova in molte nazioni in via di sviluppo, che non desiderano diventare come gli Stati Uniti, paese che disprezzano pesantemente. Basta pensare all’Iraq, che non vuole certo diventare una società consumistica, bensì ambisce ad esprimersi come nazione. Lo stesso meccanismo si può applicare alla Libia di Gheddafi… Non sto dicendo che Gheddafi e Saddam siano fascisti, ma solo che alcune premesse sono comuni. Il mondo è oggi diviso in paesi sviluppati e potenti – anzi, prepotenti – e altri paesi possono diventare delle “cleptocrazie”, come la maggior parte dei paesi africani, o sviluppare una forma di fascismo: leader carismatici, partito unico, mobilitazione di massa.»

Accennando allo sviluppo di un nuovo patriottismo nei Paesi dell’Est, presente in forze fra loro diverse, dal Partito Comunista della Federazione Russa di Gennadij A. Zjuganov fino a movimenti nazional-patriottici neozaristi – che dal 2000 vediamo svilupparsi anche in seno a Russia unita, il partito di governo del presidente Vladimir Putin – Gregor prosegue:

Ho scritto recentemente un libro sul marxismo-leninismo, e ho indicato alcune somiglianze con il fascismo, che sembra oggi diffondersi nell’ex Urss dopo il crollo dell’Impero sovietico. Quando si ha a che fare oggi con i Russi, si nota che la loro prima preoccupazione è la restaurazione della grandezza della Russia. È esattamente lo stesso spirito che animava i primi fascisti, a cui non bastava la “Italietta”, perché aspiravano ad un ruolo di grande potenza mondiale. I russi oggi hanno paura di ammettere che il marxismo-leninismo ha fallito nello scopo di rendere potente la nazione sovietica, e sono disposti a prendere un’altra strada.[5]

Indicativa la didascalia al centro dell’articolo: per lo storico nel XXI secolo questa nuova forma di fascismo «Farà proseliti in Asia, Russia compresa! Anche Castro, Saddam e Gheddafi sono discepoli (maldestri) di Mussolini». Se è comprensibile la fascinazione di una certa destra radicale e di certi ambienti nazional-populisti di destra per la figura di Vladimir Putin, l’inserimento di Fidel Castro nel novero dei “discepoli
(maldestri) di Mussolini”, è sintomo dell’esistenza di inesattezze e approssimazione tutta anglosassone che tendono ad avvallare la tesi liberale – nata con Hanna Arendt – sulla compatibilità fra nazionalsocialismo e socialismo reale e la relativa “reductio ad hitlerum” di socialisti senz’altro non inquadrabili nell’alveo fascista! Afferriamo inoltre – se uno storico come Gregor è arrivato a includere Saddam, Gheddafi e pure il comunista Castro nel calderone dei “fascismi” – perché oggi, per certi libdem progressisti, l’alt-right è fascismo!

Diverso il discorso della Nouvelle Droite o la Quarta Teoria Politica di Aleksandr Dugin, che è una riattualizzazione della konservative Revolution, che non punta alla creazione di uno stato totalitario (a differenza del fascismo, che è figlio della modernità) ma piuttosto organico, federale e continentale, pescando dal pre-moderno, dall'arcaismo, dal tradizionalismo, dai valori iperborei, dalle identità ancestrali che il cosiddetto "mondialismo", figlio della post-modernità, sta cancellando. L'alt-right invece è strettamente legata alla mentalità liberale e ai modelli di produzione capitalistici. Insomma, certi storici americani è meglio che studino altro!

[1] https://www.routledge.com/…/Hermansson…/p/book/9781138363...
[2] E. Gentile, Fascismo. Storia e interpretazione, Laterza, 2002, pp. IX, X.
[3] B. Mussolini, articolo pubblicato su Il Popolo d’Italia il 15 dicembre del 1917.
[4] J. Sobran, Words in Wartime, in http://sobran.com/columns/2004/041111.shtml, 11 novembre 2004.
[5] Il fascismo tornerà. Ma dalla Cina, intervista a James Gregor, in “Lo Stato”, 6 gennaio 1998, p. 17

What is the Alternative Right?

By Greg Johnson

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com

Author’s Note:

This is the opening essay of a forthcoming anthology called The Alternative Right.

The Alternative Right does not have an essence, but it does have a story, a story that begins and ends with Richard Spencer. The story has four chapters.

First the term “Alternative Right” was coined in 2008. Then the Alternative Right webzine was launched on March 1, 2010 and ran until December 25, 2013. When it was first coined, the Alternative Right simply referred to an alternative to the American conservative mainstream. When it became the name of a publication, it functioned as a broad umbrella term encompassing such schools of thought as paleoconservatism, libertarianism, race-realism, the European New Right, Southern Nationalism, and White Nationalism. By the time the Alternative Right webzine was shut down, however, the term Alt Right had taken on a life of its own. It was not just the name of a webzine, but a generic term for Right-wing alternatives to the conservative mainstream.

The second chapter is the emergence in 2015 of a vital, youth-oriented, largely online Right-wing movement. This movement encompassed a wide range of opinions from White Nationalism and outright neo-Nazism to populism and American civic nationalism. Thus this movement quite naturally gravitated to the broad generic term Alt Right. The new Alt Right threw itself behind Donald Trump’s run for the presidency soon after he entered the race in 2015 and became increasingly well-known as Trump’s most ferocious defenders in online battles, to the point that Hillary Clinton actually gave a speech attacking the Alt Right on August 25, 2016.

The third chapter is the Alt Right “brand war” of the fall of 2016. The Alt Right “brand” had become so popular that it was being widely adopted by Trumpian civic nationalists, who rejected the racism of White Nationalists. White Nationalists began to worry that their brand was being coopted and started to push back against the civic nationalists. The brand war ended on November 21, 2016 at a National Policy Institute conference with the incident known as Hailgate ^[2], in which Richard Spencer uttered the words “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!” and raised his whiskey glass in a toast, to which some people in the audience responded with Hitler salutes. When video of this went public, civic nationalists quickly abandoned the Alt Right brand, and the “Alt Lite” was born.

The fourth chapter is the story of the centralization and decline of the Alt Right, largely under the control of Richard Spencer. This period was characterized by polarization and purges, as well as the attempt to transform the Alt Right from an online to a real-world movement, which culminated at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 11–12, 2017. Both trends led the Alt Right to shrink considerably. Some abandoned the brand. Others abandoned the entire movement. The remnant has retreated back to its strongholds on the internet. As of this writing, there is no fifth chapter, and the Alt Right’s future, if any, remains to be seen. Like cancer, there may be no stage five.

1. The Invention of a Brand

The Alternative Right brand first emerged in the fuzzy space where the paleoconservative movement overlaps with White Nationalism. The term “paleoconservatism” was coined by Paul Gottfried, an American Jewish political theorist and commentator. Paleoconservatism defined itself as a genuinely conservative opposition to the heresy of neoconservatism.

The paleoconservative movement was a safe space for the discussion and advocacy of everything that neoconservatism sought to abolish from the conservative movement: Christianity, tradition, America’s white identity, an America-first foreign policy, immigration restriction, opposition to globalization and free trade, the defense of traditional/biological sexual roles and institutions, and even—although mostly behind closed doors—biological race differences and the Jewish question.

Aside from Gottfried, the leading paleocons included Samuel Francis, who openly associated with White Nationalists; Joseph Sobran, who was purged from National Review for anti-Semitism and who also openly associated with White Nationalists; and Patrick Buchanan, who stayed closer to the political mainstream but was eventually purged from MSNBC for “racism” because his book Suicide of a Superpower ^[3] defended the idea of the United States as a normatively white society.

William H. Regnery II (b. 1941) is a crucial figure in the rise of the Alt Right because of his work in creating institutional spaces in which paleoconservatives and White Nationalists could exchange ideas. Lazy journalists repeatedly refer to Regnery as a “publishing heir.” In fact, his money came from his grandfather William H. Regnery’s textile business. The conservative Regnery Publishing house was founded by Henry Regnery, the son of William H. Regnery and the uncle of William H. Regnery II. (In 1993, the Regnery family sold Regnery Publishing to Phillips Publishing International.)

In 1999–2001, William H. Regnery II played a key role in founding the Charles Martel Society, which publishes the quarterly journal The Occidental Quarterly, currently edited by Kevin MacDonald. In 2004–2005, Regnery spearheaded the foundation of the National Policy Institute, which was originally conceived as a vehicle for Sam Francis, who died in February of 2005. NPI was run by Louis R. Andrews until 2011, when Richard Spencer took over. Both the Charles Martel Society and the National Policy Institute are White Nationalist in orientation. The Occidental Quarterly is also openly anti-Semitic.

But at the same time Regnery was involved with CMS and NPI, he was also working with Jewish paleocon Paul Gottfried to create two academic Rightist groups that were friendly to Jews. First, there was the Academy of Philosophy and Letters,[1] ^[4] of which Richard Spencer was reportedly a member.[2] ^[5] But Regnery and Gottfried broke with the Academy of Philosophy and Letters over the issue of race, creating the H. L. Mencken Club, which Gottfried runs to this day.[3] ^[6] The Mencken Club, like the Charles Martel Society and NPI, is a meeting ground for paleoconservatives and White Nationalists, although it is also friendly to Jews.

Richard Spencer began as a paleoconservative, entered Regnery’s sphere of influence, and emerged a White Nationalist. In 2007, Spencer dropped out of Duke University, where he was pursuing a Ph.D. in modern European intellectual history. From March to December of 2007, Spencer was an assistant editor at The American Conservative, a paleoconservative magazine founded in 2002 by Scott McConnell, Patrick Buchanan, and Taki Theodoracopulos in opposition to the neocon-instigated Iraq War. By the time Spencer arrived, however, Buchanan and Taki had departed. After being fired from The American Conservative, Spencer went to work for Taki, editing his online magazine Taki’s Top Drawer, later Taki’s Magazine, from January of 2008 to December of 2009. Taki thought his magazine was stagnant under Spencer’s editorship, so they parted ways. With money raised through Regnery’s network, Richard Spencer launched a new webzine, Alternative Right (alternativeright.com) on March 1, 2010.

The phrase “alternative right” first appeared at Taki’s Magazine under Spencer’s editorship. On December 1, 2008, Spencer published Paul Gottfried’s “The Decline and Rise of the Alternative Right ^[7],” originally given as an address at that year’s H. L. Mencken Club conference in November. Spencer claims credit for the title and thus the phrase “alternative right,” while Gottfried claims that they co-created it.[4] ^[8] The Alternative Right in decline is, of course, the paleoconservative movement. The Alternative Right on the rise is the more youthful post-paleo movement crystallizing at the Mencken Club and allied forums. The Alternative Right webzine was to be their flagship.

The Alternative Right webzine had an attractive design and got off to a strong start. I particularly respected Spencer’s decision to publish Steve McNallen and Jack Donovan, important writers who were anathema to Christians and paleocons. But after about six months, the site seemed to lose energy. Days would go by without new material, which is the key to building regular traffic, and matters were not helped by the site layout. Instead of simply putting new material at the top of a blog roll, the site had a host of departments, so one had to click six or eight links to discover that there was no new material. After doing this for a couple of weeks, readers would stop coming, waiting to hear about new material by email or on social media. By the beginning of 2012, Spencer had lost interest in editing the webzine. On May 3, 2012, he stepped down and handed the editorship to Andy Nowicki and Colin Liddell.

However, in 2013, Spencer was embarrassed by negative press coverage of one of Liddell’s articles and realized that he would always be linked to Alternative Right, even though he no longer had control of its contents. On Christmas day of 2013, Spencer shut Alternative Right down without consulting or warning Nowicki and Liddell. The domain address was repointed to Spencer’s new webzine, Radix Journal, which would never become a household name. Then, after another strong start, Radix too slumped into a low-energy site.

Nearly four years of articles and comments at Alternative Right—the collective contributions of hundreds of people—simply vanished from the web. Nowicki and Liddell salvaged what they could and carried on with the Alternative Right brand at blogspot.com, although their site had few readers and little influence. In 2018, embarrassed by the decline of the Alt Right brand, they changed the name to Affirmative Right.

Spencer’s greatest mistake in shutting down Alternative Right was not his high-handed manner, which caused a good deal of bitterness, but the fact that he pulled the plug after its name had become a generic term. Just as the brand “Xerox” became a term for photocopying in general, the brand “Hoover” became a verb for vacuuming in general, Sony’s “Walkman” became a generic term for portable cassette players, and “iPod” became a generic term for portable mp3 players, the Alt Right had become a generic term for a whole range of radical alternatives to mainstream conservatism. Imagine Xerox rebranding with a weird sounding Latinate name like Effingo once it had become synonymous with its entire industry.

The beauty of the Alt Right brand is that it signaled dissidence from the mainstream Right, without committing oneself to such stigmatized ideas as White Nationalism and National Socialism. As I put it in an article hailing Alternative Right to my readers at TOQ Online:

I hope that Alternative Right will attract the brightest young conservatives and libertarians and expose them to far broader intellectual horizons, including race realism, White Nationalism, the European New Right, the Conservative Revolution, Traditionalism, neo-paganism, agrarianism, Third Positionism, anti-feminism, and right-wing anti-capitalists, ecologists, bioregionalists, and small-is-beautiful types. . . . The presence of articles by Robert Weissberg and Paul Gottfried indicates that Alternative Right is not a clone of TOQ or The Occidental Observer. (Not that anybody expected that, although some might applaud it.) But that is fine with me. It is more important to have a forum where our ideas interface with the mainstream that to have another Occidental something-or-other.com.[5] ^[9]

Obviously, a term as useful as Alternative Right was going to stick around, even after being abandoned by its creator. Writers at Counter-Currents, the Alternative Right blogspot site, and even Radix kept the concept of the Alt Right in circulation in 2014 and the early months of 2015, after which it caught on as the preferred name of a new movement.

2. The Emergence of a Movement

The second phase of the Alt Right was quite unlike the first. The new Alt Right had different ideological origins, different platforms, and a radically different ethos. But it rapidly converged on White Nationalism and carried off some of its best ideas, as well as the term Alt Right. Then it became an international media phenomenon.

In terms of ideology, the first Alt Right was heavily influenced by White Nationalism and paleoconservatism. But the new Alt Right emerged largely from the breakdown of the Ron Paul movement, specifically the takeover of the libertarian movement by cultural Leftists, which drove culturally more conservative libertarians to the Right. (In 2009, I predicted that people in the Ron Paul movement would start moving toward white identity politics, so I sponsored an essay contest on Libertarianism and Racial Nationalism at The Occidental Quarterly, which I edited at the time, to develop arguments to ease the conversion of libertarians.[6] ^[10]) Other factors driving the emerging racial consciousness of this group were the Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown controversies, the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the beginning of the migrant crisis in Europe.

The first Alt Right emerged from a milieu of dissident book publishers and print journals, quasi-academic conferences where speakers wore coats and ties, and middle to highbrow webzines. The new Alt Right emerged on social media, discussion forums, image boards, and podcasts, with the webzines coming later. The most influential incubators of the new Alt Right were 4chan and 8chan, Reddit, and The Right Stuff, especially its flagship podcast, The Daily Shoah, and affiliated discussion forums.

The new Alt Right also had a very different ethos and style. While the first Alt Right published reasonable and dignified articles on webzines, the new Alt Right’s ethos was emerging from flame wars in the comment threads below. Whereas the first Alt Right cultivated an earnest tone of middle-class respectability, avoiding racial slurs and discussing race and the Jewish question in terms of biology and evolutionary psychology, the new movement affected an ironic tone and embraced obscenity, stereotypes, slurs, and online trolling and harassment.

There were also generational differences between the two Alt Rights. The first Alt Right was the product of a Gen-Xer under the patronage of people born in the Baby Boom and before, who actually had memories of America before the cultural revolution of the 1960s and the massive demographic shifts after 1965, when America opened its borders to the non-white world. The new Alt Right consisted primarily of Millennials and Gen-Zs, some of them as young as their early teens, who were products of a multicultural America with rampant social and familial decay, sexual degeneracy, and drug and alcohol abuse. The first group tended to be conservative, because they had memories of a better country. The latter group had no such memories and tended toward radical rejection of the entire social order.

In 2013, I argued that White Nationalists needed to reach out to significant numbers of white Millennials who had graduated from college during the Obama years, often with crushing debts, and who found themselves unemployed or underemployed, and frequently ended up living at home with their parents.[7] ^[11] I believed that White Nationalists had better explanations for and solutions to their plight than the Occupy Movement, and this “boomerang generation” could be an ideal “proletariat,” because they were highly educated; they were from middle and upper middle class backgrounds; they had a great deal of leisure time, much of which they spent online; and they were angry and disillusioned with the system, and rightly so.

As is so often the case, our movement’s outreach gestures went nowhere, but the logic of events drove these people in our direction anyway. Boomerang kids became a core group of the new Alt Right known as the “NEETs”—an acronym for Not in Education, Employment, or Training. When these NEETs and their comrades focused their wit, intelligence, anger, tech savvy, and leisure time on politics, a terrible beauty was born.

The Gamergate controversy of 2014 was an important trial run and tributary to what became the new Alt Right in 2015. Gamergate was a leaderless, viral, online populist insurrection of video gaming enthusiasts against arrogant Leftist SJWs (Social Justice Warriors) who were working to impose political correctness on gaming. Gamergate activists turned the tables on bullying SJWs, brutally trolling and mocking them and relentlessly exposing their corruption and hypocrisy. Gamergate got some SJWs fired, provoked others to quit their jobs, and went after the advertisers of SJW-dominated webzines, closing some of them down.[8]^[12]

Gamergate is important because it showed how an online populist movement could actually roll back Leftist hegemony in a specific part of the culture. Although not everyone involved in Gamergate went on to identify with the Alt Right, many of them did. A leading Gamergate partisan, for instance, was Milo Yiannopoulos of Breitbart, who later gave favorable press to the Alt Right and is now a prominent Alt Lite figure. Moreover, Alt Rightists who had nothing to do with Gamergate eagerly copied and refined its techniques of online activism. Indeed, I would argue that Gamergate was the moral and organizational model for the Disney Star Wars boycott of 2018, which tanked the movie Solo ^[13] and cost Disney hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue.

One of the best ways to understand the evolution of the new Alt Right is to read The Right Stuff and listen to The Daily Shoah from its founding in 2014 through the summer of 2015, when Donald Trump declared his candidacy for the President of the United States. The members of The Daily Shoah Death Panel began as ex-libertarians and “edgy-Republicans” and educated themselves about race realism and the Jewish question week after week, bringing their ever-growing audience along with them. In February of 2015, Mike Enoch attended the American Renaissance conference and afterwards started calling himself a White Nationalist.

By the spring of 2015, this new movement was increasingly comfortable with the term Alt Right.

When Donald Trump declared his candidacy for the US Presidency on June 16, 2015, most White Nationalist currents found common cause in promoting his candidacy. Trump advocacy encouraged cooperation and collegiality within the movement and provided a steady stream of new targets for creative memes and trolling, and as Trump’s candidacy ascended, the new Alt Right ascended with him.

In July of 2015, in the runup to the Republican Primary debates, the new Alt Right scored a major victory by injecting a meme that changed the mainstream political conversation: “cuckservative.” The inception of this meme was at Counter-Currents when on May 2, 2014, Gregory Hood referred to “cuckhold conservatives like Matt Lewis.”[9] ^[14] At this point, many in the media and political establishment realized that a genuine alternative to the mainstream Right had arrived.

The new Alt Right became skilled in using social media to solicit attention and promote backlashes from mainstream media and politicians. This attention caused the movement to grow in size and influence, reaching its peak when Hillary Clinton gave her speech denouncing the Alt Right on August 25, 2016.

An older generation of white advocates saw the notoriety of the Alt Right as an opportunity to reach new audiences. Jared Taylor, who was never thrilled with the Alt Right label, wrote about “Race Realism and the Alt Right.”[10] ^[15] Kevin MacDonald wrote about “The Alt Right and the Jews.”[11] ^[16] Peter Brimelow spoke at National Policy Institute conferences. David Duke began circulating memes.

Although I prefer to describe myself with much more specific terms like White Nationalism and the New Right, I always appreciated the utility of a vague term like Alt Right, so I allowed its use at Counter-Currents and occasionally used it myself. But whenever I use “we” and “our” here, I am referring to White Nationalism and the New Right, not the fuzzy-minded civic nationalists and Trumpian populists who also came to use the term Alt Right.

Some have dismissed the Alt Right as a Potemkin movement because it was small, existed largely online, and grew by provoking reactions from the mainstream. But this ignores the fact that America is ruled by a tiny elite employing soft power propagated by the media. So if the Alt Right is somehow illegitimate, so is the entire political establishment. The new Alt Right was a perfect mirror image of the establishment media: it was a metapolitical movement that promoted political change by transforming values and perceptions, but it was promoting change in the opposite direction by negating the establishment’s values and worldview.

The Alt Right’s particular tactics were dictated by the asymmetries between itself and the mainstream media. They had billions of dollars and armies of professional propagandists. We had no capital and a handful of dedicated amateurs. But new software gave us the ability to create quality propaganda at home, and the Internet gave us a way to distribute it, both at very little cost. The establishment’s vast advantages in capital and personnel were also significantly negated by the facts that the multicultural consensus it promotes is based on falsehoods and can only cause misery, and the people who control it are weakened by arrogance, smugness, and degeneracy. They are easily mocked and triggered into self-defeating behavior. Our great advantage was telling the truth about liberalism and multiculturalism and proposing workable alternatives. As long as we could stay online, and as long as we attacked from our strengths to their weaknesses, we went from success to success.

But many in the movement were not psychologically ready for success.

Notes

[1] ^[17] https://philosophyandletters.org/ ^[18]

[2] ^[19] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/hes-spent... ^[20]

[3] ^[21] http://hlmenckenclub.org/ ^[22]

[4] ^[23] Thomas J. Main, The Rise of the Alt-Right (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2018), p. 63.

[5] ^[24] Greg Johnson, “Richard Spencer Launches Alternative Right,” TOQ Online, March 2, 2010, https://web.archive.org/web/20161204105956/http://www.toq... ^[25]

[6] ^[26] The essays appeared in The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 11, no. 1 (Spring 2011).

[7] ^[27] Greg Johnson, “The Boomerang Generation: Connecting with Our Proletariant,” Counter-Currents, August 23, 2013, https://www.counter-currents.com/2013/08/the-counter-curr... ^[28]

[8] ^[29] For a fuller account of Gamergate, see Vox Day’s SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police (Castalia House, 2015).

[9] ^[30] Gregory Hood, “For Others and their Prosperity,” Counter-Currents, May 2, 2014, https://www.counter-currents.com/2014/05/for-others-and-t... ^[31]

[10] ^[32] Jared Taylor, “Race Realism and the Alt Right,” Counter-Currents, October 25, 2016, https://www.counter-currents.com/2016/10/race-realism-and... ^[33]

[11] ^[34] Kevin MacDonald, “The Alt Right and the Jews,” Counter-Currents, September 13, 2016, https://www.counter-currents.com/2016/09/the-alt-right-an... ^[35]

[12] ^[36] George Hawley, Making Sense of the Alt-Right (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), p. 68.

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Travels in Cultural Nihilism

Author(s): Stephen Pax Leonard

In 2015, the magnitude of the migration crisis was such that the future of Sweden, the country that had welcomed more migrants than any other country (on a per capita basis) and that is frequently described by the UN as the ‘best country to live in in the world’, looked less than certain. Its neighbour, Norway, began preparing for its collapse. And yet, the majority of Swedes approved apparently of the changes imposed on their model society.

The essays in this book attempt to deconstruct the ideology of this liberalist multiculturalism. However, the essays’ thematic focus reaches far beyond Sweden, addressing topics as diverse as political correctness, the psycho-cultural problem of groupthink, the threat of Islamism, infringements on the freedom of speech and the flawed democracy of a federalist Europe. What ties all the essays together is an urgent need for a new kind of green conservative thinking that can more effectively challenge the discourse of globalisation, the ideology of liberalism and that can prioritise the local over the global.

There is some evidence that the tide is beginning to change. In one of the most momentous events in living history, Britain voted to leave the European Union. Political parties that wish to preserve national sovereignty have gained in support. With the referendum result, Britain can perhaps begin to look ‘over the brow of the hill’ to a more independent, outward-looking and free future. But for countries like Germany and Sweden which struggle with a liberal guilt complex, it is not yet clear whether their people will break free from the liberalist ideology, and grasp once again basic common-sense. Or whether they will become in the name of ‘multiculturalism’, the new failed States of the European Continent.

Titans are in Town

Author(s): Tomislav Sunic

Titans are in Town consists of a novella and cultural essays by Dr. Tomislav Sunic. In the novella and his essays, Sunic discusses the state of Europeans in their postmodern wasteland. Confronted by endless interracial chaos, Europe longs for the return of Titans. Based on Friedrich Georg Jünger’s seminal 1944 work Die Titanen, the dormant Titans represent the only salvation for slumbering Europeans. The Titans’ unexpected return from mid-earth will start a resumption of Europe’s greatness.

Sunic’s protagonist Held in his novella struggles to maintain his dignity amidst a dystopian landscape in which consumerism, alien migrants and a never-ending struggle against nobility of character are unceasing. Confronted by decay all around him, he fervently hopes for the return of Europe’s Titans as foretold by the ancient Greeks. They will augur an age in which Indo-European values are restored and degeneracy forever extinguished. These final days will reassert European mythos as superior to Judeo-Christian values. Held is an Everyman for the Current Year and his struggles are reflected in the experiences of today’s Europeans.

Dr. Sunic also includes essays concerning the current degradation present within contemporary education. Intended for curious students, he discusses such topics as literature and politics along with tragedy and mythos in ancient Europe and the modern West. Titans are in Town also offers a guide on what to read in order to better understand Europe’s ancient patrimony of myths and lore. Excavating through the rubble of high culture, Dr. Sunic capably depicts pathways towards real learning for young Europeans.

World State of Emergency

Author(s): Jason Reza Jorjani

Apocalypse. In its original Greek sense, the word means “revelation.” Over the course of the next several decades, within the lifespan of a single generation, certain convergent advancements in technology will reveal something profound about human existence. Biotechnology, robotics, virtual reality, and the need to mine our Moon for energy past peak oil production, will converge in mutually reinforcing ways that shatter the fundamental framework of our societies.

It is not a question of incremental change. The technological apocalypse that we are entering is a Singularity that will bring about a qualitative transformation in our way of being. Modern socio-political systems such as universal human rights and liberal democracy are woefully inadequate for dealing with the challenges posed by these developments. The technological apocalypse represents a world state of emergency, which is my concept for a state of emergency of global scope that also demands the establishment of a world state.

An analysis of the internal incoherence of both universal human rights and liberal democracy, especially in light of the societal and geopolitical implications of these technologies, reveals that they are not proper political concepts for grounding this world state. Rather, the planetary emergency calls for worldwide socio-political unification on the basis of a deeply rooted tradition with maximal evolutionary potential. This living heritage that is to form the ethos or constitutional order of the world state is the Aryan or Indo-European tradition shared by the majority of Earth’s great nations — from Europe and the Americas, to Eurasia, Greater Iran, Hindu India, and the Buddhist East.

Dissident Dispatches

Author(s): Andrew Fraser

An Alt-Right Guide to Christian Theology

Dissident Dispatches is about Christian theology. It also gives voice to the ethno-patriotic concerns now fuelling the growth of the secular Alt-Right movement. Both reject the ongoing spiritual degeneration and concomitant demographic displacement of every white European ethno-nation.

The author, Andrew Fraser, has studied and taught history and law at leading universities in Canada, the United States, and Australia. He was born a British subject when people of British stock still counted as one of Canada’s two “founding races”. Indeed, at that time, there was no such thing as a “Canadian citizen”.

A “late loyalist” in his own personal development, Fraser deplores the ethno-masochistic eagerness with which far-too-many other WASPs still spit upon the graves of their ancestors.

He recognizes, however, that it is not enough to mourn the loss of once-secure and legitimate ethno-religious identities. Nor will politics alone save us. Dissident Dispatches outlines the fundamental elements of the Christian ethno-theology sorely needed by the Alt-Right if it is to halt, much less reverse, the rising tide of colour.

Dissident Dispatches identifies the main currents in modern Christian theology responsible for the moral and spiritual collapse of both the Anglican Church and Christendom more generally.

Given the rusted-on secularism of the Alt-Right, the book offers a critical comparative analysis of the major alternatives to a Christian ethno-theology; namely, the political theology of popular sovereignty and the cornucopian civil religion of perpetual progress.

Across a wide range of issues in systematic and practical theology, in bible studies and church history, the essays collected here provide the basic ingredients for the counter-revolutionary theology of Christian nationhood needed in contemporary debates with Christian universalists and disingenuous white liberals.

The book counters the Christophobia endemic among neo-pagan white nationalists with an intellectually respectable Christian apologetic as well as a biblical hermeneutic informed by both “kinism” (aka covenantal creationism) and “preterism” (aka covenant eschatology).

But Dissident Dispatches is more than a theological treatise. It is also a personal memoir.

The author, Andrew Fraser, is a racially aware, former law professor who became a theology student at a divinity school in suburban Sydney, Australia. He discovered there a multiracial college community of professedly Christian teachers and students promoting the postmodern cult of the “Other”. There, to be Christian is to celebrate the fact that Australia, Canada, the United States, even England, are no longer “Anglo-Saxon countries”.

Following in the author’s footsteps from one class to another, the book provides insight into the academic and personal problems likely to face pro-white students engaging in politically-incorrect speech or behaviour in a divinity school anywhere in the white, English-speaking world.

The author has considerable personal experience on the receiving end of politically correct thought policing. Early on, Dissident Dispatches explores the background to the one-year suspension meted out to the author for “offending” faculty members and/or female and ethnic students by the allegedly racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic remarks made by him in classes and seminars.

Dissident Dispatches is the unplanned product of the culture shock experienced on all sides when an Alt-Right senior citizen cum cultural warrior decides to rattle his politically-correct bars by going to a theological college run by a church often confused with the Communist Party at prayer.

Yockey: A Fascist Odyssey

Author(s): Kerry Bolton

Francis Parker Yockey, herald of Western resurgence, sought to apply the philosophy of Oswald Spengler to the problems of post-1945 Europe. Yockey’s ‘Cultural Vitalism’ provides an organic and enduring method of analysis for the life-course of Civilizations.

Yockey: A Fascist Odyssey is the first sympathetic, full-length biography of this enigmatic figure. It analyses Yockey in his historical context: a post-war Europe divided between American plutocracy and Russian Bolshevism; the Europe of scaffolds, ruined cities, and Cold War confrontations.

Drawing on FBI and other state files, hitherto unpublished archives, and numerous personal interviews with those involved, this biography introduces a wealth of new material. The Allied ‘war crimes trials’ and the Communist Prague trials, both of which Yockey personally observed; opinions on Yockey by Sir Oswald Mosley, Ivor Benson, Adrien Arcand, and other important thinkers; the founding and activities of Yockey’s European Liberation Front; the genesis and impact of Yockey’s greatest writings; profiles on Yockey’s colleagues and followers; the use of psychiatry as a political weapon against dissident Rightists; the background to Yockey’s arrest, trial, and suicide — these subjects, and many more, receive unique treatment in this comprehensive biography of a political visionary.

Foreword by Tomislav Sunic.

The Alt Right Perspective

Mencken Club Address

By John Derbyshire

Ex: http://www.hlmenckenclub.org

Good morning, Ladies and Gentlemen. My title is “The Alt Right Perspective.” I assume this means that I should tell you what the Alt Right is, and how Alt Righters see the world.

That’s unfortunate because I don’t actually know what the Alt Right is. Casual acquaintances—neighbors and such—sometimes ask me if I am Alt Right. I never know what to say. Am I? Pass.

Some of this is just temperamental. I’m not by nature a joiner. I don’t feel strong affinity with any sports team or church. I’m not an Elk or a Shriner. I’m just not a herd animal—not well-socialized. I’m the little boy calling out that the Emperor has no clothes. (Although I’ve always thought that story would be more true to life if the little boy had been chased down and lynched by a howling mob of well-socialized Goodthinkers.)

The rest is Englishness. We English don’t do ideology. We leave that stuff to our more erudite continental neighbors. In matters social and political, we default to compromise and muddle. The nearest thing I have to an ideological hero is George Orwell, whose ideological position could fairly be described as reactionary-Tory-patriotic-socialist.

There’s some overlap between the last two paragraphs. I have utmost difficulty following any kind of ideological script. Sooner or later I always bang my shins against the boundary fences of ideological orthodoxy.

On race, for example, I get incoming fire from both sides. Goodthinkers point’n’sputter at me for my negative comments about blacks; race purists snarl at me as a race traitor because of my marriage choice.

Has my email bag familiarized me with the expression “mail-order bride”? Oh yeah.

It doesn’t help that I’m a philosemite, although I don’t much like that word. It sounds a bit cucky and patronizing. I prefer “anti-antisemite.” On any terminology, though, many self-identified Alt Righters would consider me off-reservation on this point alone.

So it’s no use looking to me for exposition of an ideological program. To present my assigned topic honestly, I therefore thought it best to seek out someone who believes he does know what the Alt Right is, and who has spelled out his knowledge clearly but concisely.

I settled on the blogger Vox Day who, in August last year, put forth a 16-point Alternative Right manifesto that has been much discussed, and translated into umpteen languages.

Here are Vox Day’s 16 points, embroidered with my comments

1. The Alt Right is of the political right in both the American and the European sense of the term. Socialists are not Alt Right. Progressives are not Alt Right. Liberals are not Alt Right. Communists, Marxists, Marxians, cultural Marxists, and neocons are not Alt Right. National Socialists are not Alt Right.

No argument from me on that, although I don’t know what a Marxian is. Typo for “Martian”?

2. The Alt Right is an ALTERNATIVE to the mainstream conservative movement in the USA that is nominally encapsulated by Russell Kirk’s 10 Conservative Principles, but in reality has devolved towards progressivism. It is also an alternative to libertarianism.

I’m fine with that one, too; and I’m glad to have been prompted to re-read Kirk’s principles. He was big on prudence: the word, or its derivatives, occurs nine times in the ten points, which Kirk included in a book titled The Politics of Prudence. This inspired a section of my Radio Derb podcastlast week.

I liked Vox Day’s batting away of libertarianism, too, though I think at this point it’s kind of superfluous. My impression is that libertarianism has succumbed to an intellectual version of the Aspidistra Effect. That is to say, it has moved down-market. (The aspidistra is a potted plant that decorated wealthy households in Victorian England. By the time Orwell used it in the title of a novel a generation later it had been taken up by the lower-middle classes, and of course abandoned by the gentry.)

It used to be that if someone told you, “I am a libertarian,” it was at a gathering of conservative intellectuals, perhaps even at the Mencken club. You could then get into an interesting conversation about what kind of libertarian he was: Classical, Objectivist, Paleolibertarian, …

Nowadays if you hear those words it’s probably some smart high-schooler speaking; and if you try to drill down further he freezes.

3. The Alt Right is not a defensive attitude and rejects the concept of noble and principled defeat. It is a forward-thinking philosophy of offense, in every sense of that term. The Alt Right believes in victory through persistence and remaining in harmony with science, reality, cultural tradition, and the lessons of history.

That’s OK, except for the word “philosophy.” Let’s not get ideas above our station here. Aristotle had a philosophy. Descartes had a philosophy. Kant had a philosophy. What the Alt Right has is an attitude.

4. The Alt Right believes Western civilization is the pinnacle of human achievement and supports its three foundational pillars: Christianity, the European nations, and the Graeco-Roman legacy.

I think the Jews should have gotten a mention there, since half of the Christian Bible is about them. That’s a kind of fielder’s-choice point, though.

5. The Alt Right is openly and avowedly nationalist. It supports all nationalisms and the right of all nations to exist, homogeneous and unadulterated by foreign invasion and immigration.

No problem with that. We should, however, bear in mind what a knotty thing nationalism can be. There is a case to be made—a conservative case—for big, old, long-established nations resisting disaggregation. Does Catalan nationalism trump Spanish nationalism? Does it do so even if only half of Catalans wish to separate from Spain?

That kind of nitpicking doesn’t belong in a manifesto, though. For these purposes, Point 5 is fine.

6. The Alt Right is anti-globalist. It opposes all groups who work for globalist ideals or globalist objectives.

Again there are nits to pick, though again this isn’t the place to pick them. When the slave traders arrive from Alpha Centauri, or an asteroid hits, or a supervolcano pops, we shall all become globalists overnight.

7. The Alt Right is anti-equalitarian. It rejects the idea of equality for the same reason it rejects the ideas of unicorns and leprechauns, noting that human equality does not exist in any observable scientific, legal, material, intellectual, sexual, or spiritual form.

Yes-s-s-s.

8. The Alt Right is scientodific. It presumptively accepts the current conclusions of the scientific method (scientody), while understanding a) these conclusions are liable to future revision, b) that scientistry is susceptible to corruption, and c) that the so-called scientific consensus is not based on scientody, but democracy, and is therefore intrinsically unscientific.

It’s what? The word “scientody” is not known to dictionary.com; nor is it in my 1971 OED with supplement; nor in my 1993 Webster’s.

I tried digging for etymologies, but got lost in a thicket of possibilities. Greek hodos, a path or way; so “the way of science”? Or perhaps eidos, a shape or form, giving us the “-oid” suffix (spheroid, rheumatoid); so “science-like”? Then there’s aoide, a song, giving … what? “Harmonizes like science”? Or maybe it’s the Latin root odor, a smell; “smells like science.”

In any case, all three of the “understandings” here are gibberish.

a) There is a large body of solidly-established scientific results that are not liable to future revision.

Saturn is further from the Sun at any point of its orbit than Jupiter is at any point of its. A water molecule has two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. Natural selection plays an important role in the evolution of life.

I promise Vox Day there will be no future revisions of these facts, at any rate not on any time span he or I need worry about. (I add that qualification because there are conceivable astronomical events that could alter the sequence of planetary orbits—a very close encounter with a rogue star, for example. Those are once-in-a-billion-year occurrences, though.)

b) “Scientistry”? Wha?

c) The scientific consensus is unscientific? Huh? And why is the consensus “so-called”? There usually—not always, but usually—is a scientific consensus. It occasionally turns out to have been wrong, but it’s a consensus none the less, not a “so-called” consensus.

9. The Alt Right believes identity > culture > politics.

Again, not bad as a first approximation, but this ignores a lot of feedback loops. Has politics not affected culture this past 72 years in North Korea? Did not North Korea and South Korea have the same culture a hundred years ago?

10. The Alt Right is opposed to the rule or domination of any native ethnic group by another, particularly in the sovereign homelands of the dominated peoples. The Alt Right is opposed to any non-native ethnic group obtaining excessive influence in any society through nepotism, tribalism, or any other means.

As several commenters pointed out, the Iroquois and the Sioux might have something to say about that. Bitching about historical injustices is such an SJW thing, though, I can’t bring myself to care. I’m fine with Point 10.

11. The Alt Right understands that diversity + proximity = war.

Again, there are nits to be picked. Diversity per se is neither good nor bad. Numbers are of the essence.

I’m a salt-in-the-stew diversitarian. I want to live in a society with a big fat racial and ethnic supermajority: somewhere north of ninety percent. Small minorities of Others can then be accommodated with friendly hospitality and accorded full equality under law. (I don’t say they necessarily will be; but they can be.)

That’s the kind of country I grew up in, 1950s England. It’s the kind of country the U.S.A. was in 1960, just barely: ninety percent European-white, ten percent black, others at trace levels.

Vox Day is using the word “diversity” in its current sense, though: as a code word for massive, deliberate racial replacement. In that sense his equation, and the embedding sentence, are both correct.

12. The Alt Right doesn’t care what you think of it.

Yee-hah!

13. The Alt Right rejects international free trade and the free movement of peoples that free trade requires. The benefits of intranational free trade is not evidence for the benefits of international free trade.

I’m an economic ignoramus, but I’d like to see a good logical proof of the proposition that free trade requires free movement of peoples. I am sincerely open to being enlightened on this point.

14. The Alt Right believes we must secure the existence of white people and a future for white children.

I doubt there is an existential threat to white people. I’d be content to secure the existence of a racially self-confident white race—one not addled by ethnomasochism—and by a future for white children free of schools, colleges, and authority figures telling them they are the scum of the earth.

15. The Alt Right does not believe in the general supremacy of any race, nation, people, or sub-species. Every race, nation, people, and human sub-species has its own unique strengths and weaknesses, and possesses the sovereign right to dwell unmolested in the native culture it prefers.

Hmm. That’s a bit kumbaya-ish (or “-oid”). No doubt the Bushmen of the Kalahari are much better at hunting with spears than are Norwegians or Japanese. As Greg Cochran points out, though: “innate superiority at obsolete tasks (a born buggy-whip maker?) doesn’t necessarily translate to modern superiority, or even adequacy.”

What do the “unique strengths” of the Bushmen, or of Australia’s aborigines, avail them in the world we actually live in? On the plain evidence it looks very much as though some “races, nations, peoples, or sub-species” are better able to cope with modernity than others. The less-able seem to agree. Great masses of them prefer not to dwell in their native culture, but in someone else’s. Boats crammed with such people have been crossing the Mediterranean from Africa for the past few years. The revealed preference of these people is not their native culture.

16. The Alt Right is a philosophy that values peace among the various nations of the world and opposes wars to impose the values of one nation upon another as well as efforts to exterminate individual nations through war, genocide, immigration, or genetic assimilation.

I get the point and agree with it; but again, reality is knottier than this allows. “If you desire peace, prepare for war,” said the Romans, who knew a thing or two about human affairs.

That’s Vox Day’s sixteen-point definition of the Alt Right. There have been other Alt Right manifestos from other quarters; here for example is Richard Spencer’s.

Supposing this is a fair picture of the Alt Right perspective, am I on board with it? Do I belong to the Alt Right?

As you can see from my comments, I have plenty of quibbles, and I’d prefer to get my manifesto from someone acquainted with the elementary principles of scientific inquiry.

Still, it’s not bad. I can sign up to most of Vox Day’s points.

Yes, I’m on board … until I bang my shins against a fence post.

The Alt Right Among Other Rights

By Keith Preston

Ex: http://www.hlmenckenclub.org

Speaking about the intricacies of different ideological tendencies can often be a bit tedious, and certainly a topic like the Alt-Right can get very complicated because there are so many currents that feed into the Alt-Right. I know that when I spoke here last year I was speaking on the right-wing anarchist tradition, which is a highly esoteric tradition, and one that is often very obscure with many undercurrents. The Alt-Right is similar in the sense of having many sub-tendencies that are fairly obscure in their own way, although some of these have become more familiar now that the Alt-Right has grown in fame, or infamy, in the eyes of its opponents. Some of the speakers we have heard at this conference so far have helped to clarify some of the potential definitions of what the Alt-Right actually is, but given the subject of my presentation I thought I might break it down a bit further, and clarify a few major distinctions.

What is the Alt-Right?

The Alt-Right can be broadly defined as a highly varied and loose collection of ideologies, movements, and tendencies that in some way dissent from the so-called “mainstream” conservative movement, or are in actual opposition to mainstream conservatism. Of course, this leaves us with the task of actually defining mainstream conservatism as well. I would define the conservative movement’s principal characteristics as being led by the neoconservatives, oriented towards the Republican Party, and as a movement for whom media outlets like Fox News, talk radio, and publications like National Review and the Weekly Standard are its leading voices. Outside of the framework of what some here appropriately call “Conservatism, Inc.,” we could say that there is an Alt-Right that can be broadly defined, and an Alt-Right that can be more narrowly defined.

The Alt-Right broadly defined would be anything on the Right that is in opposition to the neocon-led Republican alliance. This could include everything from many Donald Trump voters in the mainstream, to various tendencies that have been given such labels as the “alt-lite,” the new right, the radical right, the populist right, the dark enlightenment, the identitarians, the neo-reactionaries, the manosphere (or “men’s right advocates”), civic nationalists, economic nationalists, Southern nationalists, white nationalists, paleoconservatives, right-wing anarchists, right-leaning libertarians (or “paleolibertarians”), right-wing socialists, neo-monarchists, tendencies among Catholic or Eastern Orthodox traditionalists, neo-pagans, Satanists, adherents of the European New Right, Duginists, Eurasianists, National-Bolsheviks, conspiracy theorists, and, of course, actually self-identified Fascists and National Socialists. I have encountered all of these perspectives and others in Alt-Right circles.

Milo Yiannopoulos

Under this broad definition of the Alt-Right, anyone from Steve Bannon or Milo Yiannopoulos all the way over to The Daily Sturmer or the Traditionalist Workers Party could be considered Alt-Right. In fact, ideological tendencies as diverse as these have actually embraced the Alt-Right label to describe themselves. For example, Steve Bannon said at one point during the Trump campaign in 2016 that he wanted to make Breitbart into the voice of the Alt-Right, but then I have also encountered people who are actual neo-Nazis using the Alt-Right label to describe themselves as well.

A narrower definition of the Alt-Right might be to characterize what is most distinctive about the Alt-Right. In this sense, the Alt-Right could be characterized as a collection of tendencies that is specifically oriented towards some of kind identification with European history and tradition, and regard Europe and, by extension, North America as part of a distinct Western civilization that was developed by European and, predominantly, Christian peoples. Consequently, the Alt-Right tends to be much more oriented towards criticizing ideas or policies like multiculturalism, mass immigration, and what is commonly called “political correctness,” than what is found among mainstream conservatism. This is in contrast to the Left’s views, which are increasingly the views of mainstream liberalism as well, and which regards the legacy of Western history and culture as nothing but an infinite string of oppressions such racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, xenophobia, patriarchy, hierarchy, nativism, cisgenderism, speciesism, and the usual laundry list of isms, archies, and phobias that the Left sees as permeating every aspect of Western civilization. Presumably, other civilizations have never featured any of these characteristics.

In this way, the Alt-Right is obviously in contrast to mainstream conservatism given that the so-called “conservative movement” is normally oriented towards what amounts to three basic ideas. One idea is that of the foreign policy “hawks,” or advocates of military interventionism for the ostensible purpose of spreading the Western model of liberal democracy throughout the world, whose greatest fear is isolationism in foreign policy, and which is a perspective that I would argue is also very convenient for the armaments manufacturers and the Pentagon budget. A second idea is a fixation on economic policy, such as a persistent advocacy of “tax cuts and deregulation,” which in reality amounts to merely advancing the business interests of the corporate class. And the third idea is a type of social conservatism that is primarily religion-driven, and has opposition to abortion or gay marriage as central issues of concern, but typically gives no thought to cultural or civilizational issues in any broader or historical sense. For example, it is now common in much of the evangelical Protestant milieu, as well as the Catholic milieu, to welcome mass immigration, as a source of potential converts, or as replacement members for churches that are losing their congregations due to the ongoing secularization of the wider society. In fact, the practice of adopting Third World children has become increasingly common within the evangelical Protestant subculture in the same way it has among celebrities and entertainers like Madonna or Angelina Jolie.

Predictably, there has been a great deal of conflict that has emerged between the Alt-Right and the mainstream conservative movement, with many movement conservatives and their fellow travelers going out of their way to attack or denounce the Alt-Right. In this sense, the attacks on the Alt-Right that have originated from mainstream conservatism essentially mirror those of the Left, or of the liberal class. For example, the Associated Press issued a description of the Alt-Right that was intended for writers’ guideline policy purposes, and which reads as follows:

The 'alt-right' or 'alternative right' is a name currently embraced by some white supremacists and white nationalists to refer to themselves and their ideology, which emphasizes preserving and protecting the white race in the United States in addition to, or over, other traditional conservative positions such as limited government, low taxes and strict law-and-order. The movement has been described as a mix of racism, white nationalism and populism ... criticizes "multiculturalism" and more rights for non-whites, women, Jews, Muslims, gays, immigrants and other minorities. Its members reject the American democratic ideal that all should have equality under the law regardless of creed, gender, ethnic origin or race (John Daniszewski, Associated Press, November 26, 2016)

While the above quotation is from the Associated Press, I do not know that there is anything in it that could not have come from the pages of not only The New Yorker, The Atlantic, or the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report, but also from the pages of the National Review, Weekly Standard, the Federalist, or a Prager University video.

As for some specific examples, writing in The Federalist, conservative political scientist Nathanael Blake stated that “Christianity and Greco-Roman philosophy, rather than race, are the foundations upon which Western Civilization was built,” and suggested that the Alt-Right is actually attacking the legacy of Western Civilization rather than defending the Western cultural heritage. These questions have become a major point of contention between cultural conservatives and the racialist right-wing. Writing in National Review, David French (Bill Kristol’s one-time proposed presidential candidate), called Alt-Right adherents "wanna-be fascists" and denounced “their entry into the national political conversation.” I suppose the difference between the views of David French and the views of the Left would be that the Left would say that the Alt-Right are actual fascists, and not merely “wanna-be” fascists. Presumably, this is what separates the mainstream Right from the Left nowadays.

Writing for The Weekly Standard, Benjamin Welton has characterized the Alt-Right as a "highly heterogeneous force" that "turns the left's moralism on its head and makes it a badge of honor to be called 'racist,' 'homophobic,' and 'sexist'". Based on my own experiences with the Alt-Right, I would say this assessment by Welton is largely true. In the National Review issue of April, 2016, Ian Tuttle wrote:

The Alt-Right has evangelized over the last several months primarily via a racist and anti-Semitic online presence. But for Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos, the Alt-Right consists of fun-loving provocateurs, valiant defenders of Western civilization, daring intellectuals—and a handful of neo-Nazis keen on a Final Solution 2.0, but there are only a few of them, and nobody likes them anyways.

Jeffrey Tucker, a libertarian writer affiliated with the Foundation for Economic Education, describes the Alt-Right as follows:

The Alt-Right "inherits a long and dreary tradition of thought from Friedrich Hegel to Thomas Carlyle to Oswald Spengler to Madison Grant to Othmar Spann to Giovanni Gentile to Trump's speeches." Tucker further asserts that Alt-Right adherents "look back to what they imagine to be a golden age when elites ruled and peons obeyed" and consider that "identity is everything and the loss of identity is the greatest crime against self anyone can imagine."

Whatever one thinks of the Trump presidency, it is highly doubtful that Trump actually draws inspiration from Hegel.

Writing in The Federalist, a libertarian feminist named Cathy Young criticized a Radix Journal article on abortion that criticized the pro-life position as "'dysgenic,” because it supposedly “encourages breeding by 'the least intelligent and responsible' women." So apparently, it is not enough to simply favor abortion rights. Instead, one has to be “pro-choice” for what are apparently the “right reasons,” such as a “woman’s right to choose,” as opposed to “bad reasons,” such as eugenic practice. This line of thought is in keeping with the fairly standard leftist viewpoint which insists that motives and intentions rather than ideas and consequences are what matters, and the standard by which people ought to be morally judged.

Richard Spencer

Another interesting aspect of these criticisms is that the mainstream conservatives have attacked the Alt-Right by using leftist terminology, such as labeling the Alt-Right as racist, sexist, fascist, xenophobic, etc. But a parallel tactic that has been used by mainstream conservatism has been to denounce the Alt-Right as leftist. For example, at this year’s gathering of CPAC, or the Conservative Political Action committee, Dan Schneider, who is currently the executive director of the American Conservative Union, an organization that hosts the annual CPAC conference, criticized the Alt-Right as “a sinister organization that is trying to worm its way into our ranks,” insisting that, quote, “We must not be duped. We must not be deceived,” and said of the Alt-Right:

“They are nothing but garden-variety left-wing fascists..They are anti-Semites; they are racists; they are sexists. They hate the Constitution. They hate free markets. They hate pluralism. They despise everything we believe in.”

This sounds very similar to the rhetoric that often comes from the far left where dire warnings are issued concerning the supposed threat of fascist entryism into leftist organizations. For example, there is term called the “the fascist creep” that is used by some very far Left antifa and Maoist tendencies to describe what are supposedly ongoing nefarious plots by “fascists” to infiltrate and co-opt leftist movements, and steer these towards fascism. Ironically, this conspiracy theory is very similar to traditional anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about how Jews supposedly infiltrate and take over everything, and manipulate institutions in order to advance all sorts of supposed nefarious plots. It would appear that the far Left, and apparently increasingly mainstream conservatism, has developed its own rhetoric about the “fascist conspiracy” as a counterpart to far Right fantasies about the “Jewish conspiracy.” Perhaps we could characterize the former as the “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Thule.”

Jeff Goldstein, writing in The Federalist on September 6, 2016, suggests that, quote, “the Alt-Right is the mirror image of the New Left,” and describes the Alt-Right “an identity movement on par with Black Lives Matter, La Raza, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and other products of cultural Marxism.” Goldstein further says of the Alt-Right:

The Alt-Right is a European-style right-wing movement that is at odds with the classical liberalism upon which our country was built, and which the Left has redefined as “Right.” That is to say, the European “Right” is mapped onto a political spectrum different than our own. Our “right” — conservatism or classical liberalism —is dead-center on our spectrum, no matter how persistently the Left tries to claim otherwise. It is constitutionalism, which incorporates federalism, republicanism, legal equity, and a separation of powers.

These comments are fairly representative of the rhetoric used by mainstream conservatives who attempt to either portray the Alt-Right as leftists, or label the Alt-Right as fascists and then claim fascism is really on the Left. The general argument that is made by mainstream conservatives in response to the Alt-Right is that “true” conservatism or the “true” Right is actually veneration for the Enlightenment-influenced ideas found in the Declaration of Independence, veneration of the Founding Fathers, and reverence for the Constitution as a kind of secular Bible. Parallel to these claims is the idea of America as a “propositional nation” that has no roots in any kind of history, culture, or tradition other than just a very vaguely defined “Judeo-Christianity.” This idea of what “conservatism” supposedly is basically amounts to being for so-called “limited government,” so-called “free enterprise,” “individualism,” and various other vaguely defined abstractions, plus policy preferences like a so-called “strong national defense” (which is often just a euphemism for the neoconservatives’ foreign policy agenda), and various center-right policy prescriptions like tax cuts, opposing Obamacare, opposing affirmative action, opposing gun control, opposing abortion, opposing gay marriage, supporting school vouchers, and other ideas we are all familiar with.

Nina Kouprianova

These policy preferences will often be accompanied by silly platitudes like “Democrats are the real racists,” or dubious and often flagrantly false claims like “Martin Luther King was a conservative,” or that foreign policy hawks are the real friends of feminists and gays because of their opposition to so-called “Islamo-fascism.” At times, Democrats will be labeled as fascists and anti-Semites because of their supposed pro-Islamic views, or because some on the far Left are pro-Palestinian. Taken to extremes, there are characters like Dinesh D’Souza who would probably claim that the Democrats crucified Jesus.

The representatives of “Conservatism, Inc.” will also give lip service to opposition to attacks on free speech and academic freedom in the name of political correctness, but they are very selective about this. For example, their defense of the politically incorrect does not extend to anti-Zionists like Norman Finkelstein. On the immigration issue, while there are some mainstream conservatives that are immigration restrictionists, it is just as common that the proposed method of reducing illegal immigration advanced by mainstream conservatives is to make legal immigration easier, on the assumption that the only problem with illegal immigration is its illegality. A defining characteristic of mainstream conservatism when contrasted with the Alt-Right is the total lack of seriousness, or any kind of solid philosophical or intellectual foundation that is displayed by mainstream conservatism.

The Alt-Right is more of a meta-political movement than a political one, and the specific policy proposals that are found among Alt-Rightists vary enormously. I do not know that it would even be possible to draft a platform for an Alt-Right political party because the Alt-Right contains so much diversity of ideas. However, the Alt-Right is far more serious about ideas than mainstream conservatism in the sense of having an understanding of the reality of demographic conflict, recognizing the difficulties that are associated with rapid demographic change, understanding the reality of class conflict as well as cultural and civilizational conflicts, understanding that Western liberal democracy is particular to the cultural foundations and historical circumstances of the West, and not something that can be easily transplanted elsewhere, and concerns that mainstream conservatives normally have no perception of, or do not take seriously.

I will end my presentation by pointing to an observation by Professor George Hawley of the University of Alabama, who suggested that the Alt-Right may pose a greater threat to progressivism than the mainstream conservative movement. I would agree that this is true, but only in the sense that the mainstream conservative movement poses no threat to progressivism at all. I would argue that far from being a threat to the Democratic Party, mainstream media, the corporate class and the cultural elite, the mainstream conservative movement is actually partners in crime with the progressives. The Alt-Right at least proposes ideas that are an ideological threat to progressivism even if this small size prevents the Alt-Right from being a political threat, at least at the present time.

The Alt Right Among Other Rights

This is the text of a lecture I gave to the H.L. Mencken Club on November 4, 2017.

By Keith Preston

Ex: https://www.attackthesystem.com

Speaking about the intricacies of different ideological tendencies can often be a bit tedious, and certainly a topic like the Alt-Right can get very complicated because there are so many currents that feed into the Alt-Right. I know that when I spoke here last year I was speaking on the right-wing anarchist tradition, which is a highly esoteric tradition, and one that is often very obscure with many undercurrents. The Alt-Right is similar in the sense of having many sub-tendencies that are fairly obscure in their own way, although some of these have become more familiar now that the Alt-Right has grown in fame, or infamy, in the eyes of its opponents. Some of the speakers we have heard at this conference so far have helped to clarify some of the potential definitions of what the Alt-Right actually is, but given the subject of my presentation I thought I might break it down a bit further, and clarify a few major distinctions.

What is the Alt-Right?

The Alt-Right can be broadly defined as a highly varied and loose collection of ideologies, movements, and tendencies that in some way dissent from the so-called “mainstream” conservative movement, or are in actual opposition to mainstream conservatism. Of course, this leaves us with the task of actually defining mainstream conservatism as well. I would define the conservative movement’s principal characteristics as being led by the neoconservatives, oriented towards the Republican Party, and as a movement for whom media outlets like Fox News, talk radio, and publications like National Review and the Weekly Standard are its leading voices. Outside of the framework of what some here appropriately call “Conservatism, Inc.,” we could say that there is an Alt-Right that can be broadly defined, and an Alt-Right that can be more narrowly defined.

The Alt-Right broadly defined would be anything on the Right that is in opposition to the neocon-led Republican alliance. This could include everything from many Donald Trump voters in the mainstream, to various tendencies that have been given such labels as the “alt-lite,” the new right, the radical right, the populist right, the dark enlightenment, the identitarians, the neo-reactionaries, the manosphere (or “men’s right advocates”), civic nationalists, economic nationalists, Southern nationalists, white nationalists, paleoconservatives, right-wing anarchists, right-leaning libertarians (or “paleolibertarians”), right-wing socialists, neo-monarchists, tendencies among Catholic or Eastern Orthodox traditionalists, neo-pagans, Satanists, adherents of the European New Right, Duginists, Eurasianists, National-Bolsheviks, conspiracy theorists, and, of course, actually self-identified Fascists and National Socialists. I have encountered all of these perspectives and others in Alt-Right circles.

Under this broad definition of the Alt-Right, anyone from Steve Bannon or Milo Yiannopolis all the way over to The Daily Sturmer or the Traditionalist Workers Party could be considered Alt-Right. In fact, ideological tendencies as diverse as these have actually embraced the Alt-Right label to describe themselves. For example, Steve Bannon said at one point during the Trump campaign in 2016 that he wanted to make Breitbart into the voice of the Alt-Right, but then I have also encountered people who are actual neo-Nazis using the Alt-Right label to describe themselves as well.

A narrower definition of the Alt-Right might be to characterize what is most distinctive about the Alt-Right. In this sense, the Alt-Right could be characterized as a collection of tendencies that is specifically oriented towards some of kind identification with European history and tradition, and regard Europe and, by extension, North America as part of a distinct Western civilization that was developed by European and, predominantly, Christian peoples. Consequently, the Alt-Right tends to be much more oriented towards criticizing ideas or policies like multiculturalism, mass immigration, and what is commonly called “political correctness,” than what is found among mainstream conservatism. This is in contrast to the Left’s views, which are increasingly the views of mainstream liberalism as well, and which regards the legacy of Western history and culture as nothing but an infinite string of oppressions such racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, xenophobia, patriarchy, hierarchy, nativism, cisgenderism, speciesism, and the usual laundry list of isms, archies, and phobias that the Left sees as permeating every aspect of Western civilization. Presumably, other civilizations have never featured any of these characteristics.

In this way, the Alt-Right is obviously in contrast to mainstream conservatism given that the so-called “conservative movement” is normally oriented towards what amounts to three basic ideas. One idea is that of the foreign policy “hawks,” or advocates of military interventionism for the ostensible purpose of spreading the Western model of liberal democracy throughout the world, whose greatest fear is isolationism in foreign policy, and which is a perspective that I would argue is also very convenient for the armaments manufacturers and the Pentagon budget. A second idea is a fixation on economic policy, such as a persistent advocacy of “tax cuts and deregulation,” which in reality amounts to merely advancing the business interests of the corporate class. And the third idea is a type of social conservatism that is primarily religion-driven, and has opposition to abortion or gay marriage as central issues of concern, but typically gives no thought to cultural or civilizational issues in any broader or historical sense. For example, it is now common in much of the evangelical Protestant milieu, as well as the Catholic milieu, to welcome mass immigration, as a source of potential converts, or as replacement members for churches that are losing their congregations due to the ongoing secularization of the wider society. In fact, the practice of adopting Third World children has become increasingly common within the evangelical Protestant subculture in the same way it has among celebrities and entertainers like Madonna or Angelina Jolie.

Predictably, there has been a great deal of conflict that has emerged between the Alt-Right and the mainstream conservative movement, with many movement conservatives and their fellow travelers going out of their way to attack or denounce the Alt-Right. In this sense, the attacks on the Alt-Right that have originated from mainstream conservatism essentially mirror those of the Left, or of the liberal class. For example, the Associated Press issued a description of the Alt-Right that was intended for writers’ guideline policy purposes, and which reads as follows:

The ‘alt-right’ or ‘alternative right’ is a name currently embraced by some white supremacists and white nationalists to refer to themselves and their ideology, which emphasizes preserving and protecting the white race in the United States in addition to, or over, other traditional conservative positions such as limited government, low taxes and strict law-and-order. The movement has been described as a mix of racism, white nationalism and populism … criticizes “multiculturalism” and more rights for non-whites, women, Jews, Muslims, gays, immigrants and other minorities. Its members reject the American democratic ideal that all should have equality under the law regardless of creed, gender, ethnic origin or race (John Daniszewski, Associated Press, November 26, 2016)

While the above quotation is from the Associated Press, I do not know that there is anything in it that could not have come from the pages of not only The New Yorker, The Atlantic, or the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report, but also from the pages of the National Review, Weekly Standard, the Federalist, or a Prager University video.

As for some specific examples, writing in The Federalist, conservative political scientist Nathanael Blake stated that “Christianity and Greco-Roman philosophy, rather than race, are the foundations upon which Western Civilization was built,” and suggested that the Alt-Right is actually attacking the legacy of Western Civilization rather than defending the Western cultural heritage. These questions have become a major point of contention between cultural conservatives and the racialist right-wing. Writing in National Review, David French (Bill Kristol’s one-time proposed presidential candidate), called Alt-Right adherents “wanna-be fascists” and denounced “their entry into the national political conversation.” I suppose the difference between the views of David French and the views of the Left would be that the Left would say that the Alt-Right are actual fascists, and not merely “wanna-be” fascists. Presumably, this is what separates the mainstream Right from the Left nowadays.

Writing for The Weekly Standard, Benjamin Welton has characterized the Alt-Right as a “highly heterogeneous force” that “turns the left’s moralism on its head and makes it a badge of honor to be called ‘racist,’ ‘homophobic,’ and ‘sexist'”. Based on my own experiences with the Alt-Right, I would say this assessment by Welton is largely true. In the National Review issue of April, 2016, Ian Tuttle wrote:

The Alt-Right has evangelized over the last several months primarily via a racist and anti-Semitic online presence. But for Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos, the Alt-Right consists of fun-loving provocateurs, valiant defenders of Western civilization, daring intellectuals—and a handful of neo-Nazis keen on a Final Solution 2.0, but there are only a few of them, and nobody likes them anyways.

Jeffrey Tucker, a libertarian writer affiliated with the Foundation for Economic Education, describes the Alt-Right as follows:

The Alt-Right “inherits a long and dreary tradition of thought from Friedrich Hegel to Thomas Carlyle to Oswald Spengler to Madison Grant to Othmar Spann to Giovanni Gentile to Trump’s speeches.” Tucker further asserts that Alt-Right adherents “look back to what they imagine to be a golden age when elites ruled and peons obeyed” and consider that “identity is everything and the loss of identity is the greatest crime against self anyone can imagine.”

Whatever one thinks of the Trump presidency, it is highly doubtful that Trump actually draws inspiration from Hegel.

Writing in The Federalist, a libertarian feminist named Cathy Young criticized a Radix Journal article on abortion that criticized the pro-life position as “‘dysgenic,” because it supposedly “encourages breeding by ‘the least intelligent and responsible’ women.” So apparently, it is not enough to simply favor abortion rights. Instead, one has to be “pro-choice” for what are apparently the “right reasons,” such as a “woman’s right to choose,” as opposed to “bad reasons,” such as eugenic practice. This line of thought is in keeping with the fairly standard leftist viewpoint which insists that motives and intentions rather than ideas and consequences are what matters, and the standard by which people ought to be morally judged.

Another interesting aspect of these criticisms is that the mainstream conservatives have attacked the Alt-Right by using leftist terminology, such as labeling the Alt-Right as racist, sexist, fascist, xenophobic, etc. But a parallel tactic that has been used by mainstream conservatism has been to denounce the Alt-Right as leftist. For example, at this year’s gathering of CPAC, or the Conservative Political Action committee, Dan Schneider, who is currently the executive director of the American Conservative Union, an organization that hosts the annual CPAC conference, criticized the Alt-Right as “a sinister organization that is trying to worm its way into our ranks,” insisting that, quote, “We must not be duped. We must not be deceived,” and said of the Alt-Right:

“They are nothing but garden-variety left-wing fascists..They are anti-Semites; they are racists; they are sexists. They hate the Constitution. They hate free markets. They hate pluralism. They despise everything we believe in.”

This sounds very similar to the rhetoric that often comes from the far left where dire warnings are issued concerning the supposed threat of fascist entryism into leftist organizations. For example, there is term called the “the fascist creep” that is used by some very far Left antifa and Maoist tendencies to describe what are supposedly ongoing nefarious plots by “fascists” to infiltrate and co-opt leftist movements, and steer these towards fascism. Ironically, this conspiracy theory is very similar to traditional anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about how Jews supposedly infiltrate and take over everything, and manipulate institutions in order to advance all sorts of supposed nefarious plots. It would appear that the far Left, and apparently increasingly mainstream conservatism, has developed its own rhetoric about the “fascist conspiracy” as a counterpart to far Right fantasies about the “Jewish conspiracy.” Perhaps we could characterize the former as the “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Thule.”

Jeff Goldstein, writing in The Federalist on September 6, 2016, suggests that, quote, “the Alt-Right is the mirror image of the New Left,” and describes the Alt-Right “an identity movement on par with Black Lives Matter, La Raza, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and other products of cultural Marxism.” Goldstein further says of the Alt-Right:

The Alt-Right is a European-style right-wing movement that is at odds with the classical liberalism upon which our country was built, and which the Left has redefined as “Right.” That is to say, the European “Right” is mapped onto a political spectrum different than our own. Our “right” — conservatism or classical liberalism —is dead-center on our spectrum, no matter how persistently the Left tries to claim otherwise. It is constitutionalism, which incorporates federalism, republicanism, legal equity, and a separation of powers.

These comments are fairly representative of the rhetoric used by mainstream conservatives who attempt to either portray the Alt-Right as leftists, or label the Alt-Right as fascists and then claim fascism is really on the Left. The general argument that is made by mainstream conservatives in response to the Alt-Right is that “true” conservatism or the “true” Right is actually veneration for the Enlightenment-influenced ideas found in the Declaration of Independence, veneration of the Founding Fathers, and reverence for the Constitution as a kind of secular Bible. Parallel to these claims is the idea of America as a “propositional nation” that has no roots in any kind of history, culture, or tradition other than just a very vaguely defined “Judeo-Christianity.” This idea of what “conservatism” supposedly is basically amounts to being for so-called “limited government,” so-called “free enterprise,” “individualism,” and various other vaguely defined abstractions, plus policy preferences like a so-called “strong national defense” (which is often just a euphemism for the neoconservatives’ foreign policy agenda), and various center-right policy prescriptions like tax cuts, opposing Obamacare, opposing affirmative action, opposing gun control, opposing abortion, opposing gay marriage, supporting school vouchers, and other ideas we are all familiar with.

These policy preferences will often be accompanied by silly platitudes like “Democrats are the real racists,” or dubious and often flagrantly false claims like “Martin Luther King was a conservative,” or that foreign policy hawks are the real friends of feminists and gays because of their opposition to so-called “Islamo-fascism.” At times, Democrats will be labeled as fascists and anti-Semites because of their supposed pro-Islamic views, or because some on the far Left are pro-Palestinian. Taken to extremes, there are characters like Dinesh D’Souza who would probably claim that the Democrats crucified Jesus.

The representatives of “Conservatism, Inc.” will also give lip service to opposition to attacks on free speech and academic freedom in the name of political correctness, but they are very selective about this. For example, their defense of the politically incorrect does not extend to anti-Zionists like Norman Finkelstein. On the immigration issue, while there are some mainstream conservatives that are immigration restrictionists, it is just as common that the proposed method of reducing illegal immigration advanced by mainstream conservatives is to make legal immigration easier, on the assumption that the only problem with illegal immigration is its illegality. A defining characteristic of mainstream conservatism when contrasted with the Alt-Right is the total lack of seriousness, or any kind of solid philosophical or intellectual foundation that is displayed by mainstream conservatism.

The Alt-Right is more of a meta-political movement than a political one, and the specific policy proposals that are found among Alt-Rightists vary enormously. I do not know that it would even be possible to draft a platform for an Alt-Right political party because the Alt-Right contains so much diversity of ideas. However, the Alt-Right is far more serious about ideas than mainstream conservatism in the sense of having an understanding of the reality of demographic conflict, recognizing the difficulties that are associated with rapid demographic change, understanding the reality of class conflict as well as cultural and civilizational conflicts, understanding that Western liberal democracy is particular to the cultural foundations and historical circumstances of the West, and not something that can be easily transplanted elsewhere, and concerns that mainstream conservatives normally have no perception of, or do not take seriously.

I will end my presentation by pointing to an observation by Professor George Hawley of the University of Alabama, who suggested that the Alt-Right may pose a greater threat to progressivism than the mainstream conservative movement. I would agree that this is true, but only in the sense that the mainstream conservative movement poses no threat to progressivism at all. I would argue that far from being a threat to the Democratic Party, mainstream media, the corporate class and the cultural elite, the mainstream conservative movement is actually partners in crime with the progressives. The Alt-Right at least proposes ideas that are an ideological threat to progressivism even if this small size prevents the Alt-Right from being a political threat, at least at the present time.

Bannon: un guénonien à Washington D.C.?

Ex: http://www.dedefensa.org

On a déjà beaucoup parlé de Stephen Bannon, ce “conseiller stratégique” du président Trump et, semble-t-il, le conseiller le plus écouté jusqu’à être considéré, – selon certains points de vue, – comme l’éminence grise et l’inspirateur de Trump. L’on sait également que Bannon a déjà beaucoup suscité de commentaires avec certaines de ses conceptions, notamment et précisément son idée selon laquelle il faut “détruire tout le Système” (cette expression étant une interprétation de certaines déclarations et écrits, qui s’éclaireront plus loin). (... Et nous laissons bien entendu de côté les sornettes insupportables de médiocrité, issues des complexes et obsessions postmodernismes, sur son prétendu “suprémacisme blanc” et le reste. Ce faisant, nous laissons les esprits forts et flics de la postmodernité jouer avec leurs poussières.) Or, voici un texte particulièrement intéressant à cet égard, que nous comptons utiliser comme une des références pour un prochain F&C consacré à la question que soulève le cas Bannon, du point de vue de notre civilisation et de son destin dans l’arrangement cosmique du monde... Pas moins, chers lecteurs.

Le texte est d’Alastair Crooke, dans Consortium News, le 10 mars. Nous connaissons Crooke que nous avons souvent cité, et qu’il nous est arrivé de rencontrer pour mieux apprécier ses qualités. Nous ferons deux remarques à son propos, qui situeront parfaitement l’appréciation que nous en avons, et par conséquent une façon de voir ce qu'on peut accorder de crédit au texte que nous examinons.

• Cet ancien officier du MI6 devenu conseiller du Haut Représentant de l’UE Solana au début des années 2000, a choisi ensuite la voie très difficile de l’indépendance en créant son institut dit Conflict Forum. Basé au Liban puis replié sur l’Italie, Crooke poursuit un chemin ardu, sans soutien institutionnalisé, caractérisé par une rupture avec la pensée dominante, ditto le Système. Ses positions sont évidemment elles-mêmes en rupture complète avec la doxa-Système et sa carrière nous garantit que ses jugements sont nourris de la rigueur et de l’expérience professionnelles qui lui sont naturelles.

• Crooke est un homme affable et doux, au jugement rationnel et d’une très grande culture, qui a l’habitude d’observer les divers problèmes soulevés par la Grande Crise générale du point de vue d’un érudit particulièrement versé dans les conceptions liées à la pensée de la Tradition. Il est un de ces esprits qui commentent les événements en ayant comme référence les grands courants philosophiques qui l’intéressent. Très grand connaisseur des questions de l’Islam, hors des analyses hystériquement artificielles sur l’“islamisme” extrémisme-terroriste et l’“islamophobie” qui lui répond, – caricature postmoderniste contre caricature postmoderniste, – on peut très bien lors d’une discussion avec lui se trouver entraînés dans une réflexion commune sur le néoplatonisme sans avoir le sentiment de se trouver hors-sujet.

Ce qui passionne Crooke dans la personne de Bannon, et par conséquent dans la sorte d’influence qu’il exercerait sur un Trump qui apparaîtrait lui-même intellectuellement bien plus conséquent qu’on ne croit, c’est la conscience qu’a le personnage de la profondeur vertigineuse de la Grande Crise. L’intérêt que présentent la personnalité et l’expérience de Bannon est qu’il a lui aussi, de son côté, à côté de positions théoriques très marquées, une expérience professionnelle également très marquée des instruments fondamentaux, déstructurants et dissolvants, de la postmodernité et du Système, ; il a en effet travaillé à Hollywood comme scénariste et réalisateur (son film Generation Zero) et à Wall Street, chez Goldman-Sachs, avant de passer à Breitbart.News.

(C’est une démarche courante aujourd’hui, qui demande une grande attention de la psychologie, une grande souplesse de l’esprit et de son jugement. Ce qui peut être d’abord perçu comme des signes de compromission avec le Système du point de vue des antiSystème, peut également, par éventuelle inversion vertueuse et suivant une enquête éclairée, être vu au contraire comme des instruments d’une connaissance éventuellement décisive de l’adversaire, “de l’intérieur”.)

Bannon est extrêmement influencé par les travaux de deux commentateurs de la sorte que nous nommerions “crisologues” tant le concept de crise (crisologie) est au centre de toutes nos réflexions, Neil Howe et William Strauss, auteurs de An American Prophecy, en 1997. Les deux auteurs adoptent une approche de l’actuelle situation, – la grande Crise se faisant déjà sentir dès la fin du communisme avec la mise en cause radicale de la notion de Progrès, – qui se réfère aux théories cycliques de la Tradition. « [Leur] analyse rejette les promesses des historiens occidentaux modernes de développement social et économie linéaire (progrès continuel et déclin) ou chaotique (trop de complexité pour révéler n’importe quelle direction). Au lieu de cela, ils adoptent la vision d’à peu près toutes les sociétés traditionnelles : que le temps social est un temps cyclique dans lequel les événements sont significatifs seulement dans la mesure où ils sont caractérisés par ce que le philosophe Mircea Eliade nommait “reconstitution”. Dans l’espace cyclique, une fois que vous avez écarté les accidents accessoires et sans signification, ainsi que la technologie, il vous reste un nombre limité de conceptions sociales, qui tendent à se répéter selon un ordre bien fixé... »

Les deux auteurs identifient quatre phases (quatre Turnings) dans le cycle, High, Awakening, Unravelling et Crisis, – étant entendu et étant évident que nous nous trouvons dans une quatrième phase du cycle donné qui voit évoluer notre civilisation et notre destin. Bien entendu, cette schématisation est irrésistiblement identifiable comme étant de type guénonien, c’est-à-dire selon la référence classique, et considérée par Guénon lui-même comme “universelle” du Manvatara hindouiste des quatre âges (Or, Argent, Airain et Fer), et référence effectivement de la Tradition et de toutes les doctrines qui s’y rapportent. Bien entendu encore, cette sorte de conception s’oppose d’une façon fondamentale et universelle à toutes les idées et conceptions de type moderniste. On a là, bien entendu toujours, une clef solide et fort bien ciselée pour expliquer la haine absolument diabolique, – le qualificatif sonne bien et juste, – qui accompagne Trump, son administration, et bien sûr son conseiller Bannon identifié comme le Diable en personne. (Ce qui est somme toute inacceptable comme on le comprend aisément, car il doit être admis que le Diable ne peut supporte ni admettre d’être plagié ni imité de quelque façon que ce soit...)

Dans les conceptions de Bannon, et puisque nous nous trouvons comme toutes les traditions s’accordent à le penser dans une fin de cycle, à la fois crisique et catastrophique, il y a comme une pressante et impérative nécessité d’aller jusqu’au bout de la catastrophe. Il se trouve, observe Crooke, que cette conception rencontre, ou se rapproche en la croisant, de certaines conceptions de Trump lui-même, exprimées dès 2000, selon l’extrême probabilité d’une catastrophe économique, financière et sociale, avec l’idée implicite de la nécessité de cette catastrophe pour parvenir à une sorte de “renaissance”.

(On pourrait penser qu’il y a là une idée qui pourrait aussi bien trouver sa symbolisation triviale dans l’expression que Trump employait pour indiquer qu’il allait attaquer la corruption, le clientélisme, etc., de l’establishment. “Drainer le cloaque” pourrait aussi bien s’appliquer à la nécessité de porter la Grande crise à son extrême catastrophique.)

On comprend l’intérêt de cette analyse, surtout dans le climat actuel qui ne cesse d’évoluer vers un catastrophisme quasiment opérationnel, laissant loin derrière lui les seules craintes de crises parcellaires, n’affectant qu’un seul domaine, et qui sont finalement des crises “rassurantes” pour le Système as a whole (comme celle de l’automne 2008, par exemple). Il y a maintenant plusieurs années qu’on ne mesure plus les possibilités de crise aux seuls chiffres du chômage, de la Bourse ou de la croissance, mais que le sentiment général est celui d’une crise de civilisation en train de se préparer ou déjà en train de se dérouler, affectant par définition tous les domaines, un bouleversement à la fois métahistorique et eschatologique.

La question que soulèvent ces réflexions concerne bien entendu la signification réelle de la politique Trump, ou de ce qu’on perçoit comme étant une antipolitique, sinon une non-politique, – ce qui est un objet de très nombreuses interrogations et supputations depuis deux mois. (Trump est-il prisonnier du Système ? Trump a-t-il capitulé devant le Système ? Trump est-il un faux-nez du Système ? Trump est-il un comploteur ? Trump est-il un crétin? Trump est-il fou ? Etc.) Dans le chef de cette “politique“ qui a les allures d’une non-politique, peut-on concevoir que la politique de Trump soit une démarche volontaire à la finalité aussi vertigineuse, et peut-on concevoir qu’on puisse définir et accomplir une politique qui soit le contraire du concept de politique, accompagnant un processus de destruction-reconstruction, de chaos-renaissance, etc. ? Bien entendu, on voit combien cette sorte d’hypothèse s’accorde avec l’observation que nous faisons souvent du processus de surpuissance-autodestruction caractérisant le Système. Il y a là un courant d’hypothèses qui tend à s’orienter vers les attentes intellectuelles, sinon spirituelles, qu’a fait naître le développement des événements depuis quelques années (depuis 9/11, depuis l’automne 2008, depuis le “printemps arabe” de 2010, et singulièrement depuis le “coup de Kiev” de février 2014 et jusqu’au Brexit et USA-2016 avec Trump).

dedefensa.org

Steve Bannon’s Apocalyptic ‘Unravelling’

by Alastair Crooke

Steve Bannon is accustomed to start many of his talks to activists and Tea Party gatherings in the following way: “At 11 o’clock on 18 September 2008, Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke told the U.S. President that they had already stove-piped $500 billions of liquidity into the financial system during the previous 24 hours – but needed a further one Trillion dollars, that same day.

“The pair said that if they did not get it immediately, the U.S. financial system would implode within 72 hours; the world’s financial system, within three weeks; and that social unrest and political chaos could ensue within the month.” (In the end, Bannon notes, it was more like $5 trillion that was required, though no one really knows how much, as there has been no accounting for all these trillions).

“We (the U.S.) have”, he continues, “in the wake of the bailouts that ensued, liabilities of $200 trillions, but net assets – including everything – of some $50-60 trillion.” (Recall that Bannon is himself a former Goldman Sachs banker).

“We are upside down; the industrial democracies today have a problem we have never had before; we are over-leveraged (we have to go through a massive de-leveraging); and we have built a welfare state which is completely and totally unsupportable.

“And why this is a crisis … the problem … is that the numbers have become so esoteric that even the guys on Wall Street, at Goldman Sachs, the guys I work with, and the Treasury guys … It’s so tough to get this together … Trillion dollar deficits … etcetera.”

But, Bannon says — in spite of all these esoteric, unimaginable numbers wafting about — the Tea Party women (and it is mainly led by women, he points out) get it. They know a different reality: they know what groceries now cost, they know their kids have $50,000 in college debt, are still living at home, and see no jobs in prospect: “The reason I called the film Generation Zero is because this generation, the guys in their 20s and 30s: We’ve wiped them out.”

And it’s not just Bannon. A decade earlier, in 2000, Donald Trump was writing in a very similar vein in a pamphlet that marked his first toying with the prospect of becoming a Presidential candidate: “My third reason for wanting to speak out is that I see not only incredible prosperity … but also the possibility of economic and social upheaval … Look towards the future, and if you are like me, you will see storm clouds brewing. Big Trouble. I hope I am wrong, but I think we may be facing an economic crash like we’ve never seen before.”

And before the recent presidential election, Donald Trump kept to this same narrative: the stock market was dangerously inflated. In an interview on CNBC, he said, “I hope I’m wrong, but I think we’re in a big, fat, juicy bubble,” adding that conditions were so perilous that the country was headed for a “very massive recession” and that “if you raise interest rates even a little bit, (everything’s) going to come crashing down.”

The Paradox

And here, precisely, is the paradox: Why — if Trump and Bannon view the economy as already over-leveraged, excess-bubbled, and far too fragile to accommodate even a small interest rate rise — has Trump (in Mike Whitney’s words) “promised … more treats and less rules for Wall Street … tax cuts, massive government spending, and fewer regulations … $1 trillion in fiscal stimulus to rev up consumer spending and beef up corporate profits … to slash corporate tax rates and fatten the bottom line for America’s biggest businesses. And he’s going to gut Dodd-Frank, the ‘onerous’ regulations that were put in place following the 2008 financial implosion, to prevent another economy-decimating cataclysm.”

Does President Trump see the world differently, now that he is President? Or has he parted company with Bannon’s vision?

Though Bannon is often credited – though most often, by a hostile press, aiming to present Trump (falsely) as the “accidental President” who never really expected to win – as the intellectual force behind President Trump. In fact, Trump’s current main domestic and foreign policies were all presaged, and entirely present, in Trump’s 2000 pamphlet.

In 2000, Bannon was less political, screenwriter Julia Jones, a long-time Bannon collaborator, notes. “But the Sept. 11 attacks,” Ms. Jones says, “changed him” and their Hollywood collaboration did not survive his growing engagement with politics.

Bannon himself pins his political radicalization to his experience of the 2008 Great Financial Crisis. He detested how his Goldman colleagues mocked the Tea Party’s “forgotten” ones. As Ms. Jones sees it, a more reliable key to Bannon’s worldview lies in his military service.

“He has a respect for duty,” she said in early February. “The word he has used a lot is ‘dharma.’” Mr. Bannon found the concept of dharma in the Bhagavad Gita, she recalls. It can describe one’s path in life or one’s place in the universe.

There is no evidence, however, that President Trump either has changed his economic views or that he has diverged in his understanding of the nature of the crisis facing America (and Europe).

Tests Ahead

Both men are very smart. Trump understands business, and Bannon finance. They surely know the headwinds they face: the looming prospect of a wrangle to increase the American $20 trillion “debt ceiling” (which begins to bite on March 15), amid a factious Republican Party, the improbability of the President’s tax or fiscal proposals being enacted quickly, and the likelihood that the Federal Reserve will hike interest rates, “until something breaks.” If they are so smart, what then is going on?

What Bannon has brought to the partnership however, is a clear articulation of the nature of this “crisis” in his Generation Zero film, which explicitly is built around the framework of a book called The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy, written in 1997 by Neil Howe and William Strauss.

In the words of one of the co-authors, the analysis “rejects the deep premise of modern Western historians that social time is either linear (continuous progress or decline) or chaotic (too complex to reveal any direction). Instead we adopt the insight of nearly all traditional societies: that social time is a recurring cycle in which events become meaningful only to the extent that they are what philosopher Mircea Eliade calls ‘reenactments.’ In cyclical space, once you strip away the extraneous accidents and technology, you are left with only a limited number of social moods, which tend to recur in a fixed order.”

Howe and Strauss write: “The cycle begins with the First Turning, a ‘High’ which comes after a crisis era. In a High, institutions are strong and individualism is weak. Society is confident about where it wants to go collectively, even if many feel stifled by the prevailing conformity.

“The Second Turning is an ‘Awakening,’ when institutions are attacked in the name of higher principles and deeper values. Just when society is hitting its high tide of public progress, people suddenly tire of all the social discipline and want to recapture a sense of personal authenticity.

“The Third Turning is an ‘Unravelling,’ in many ways the opposite of the High. Institutions are weak and distrusted, while individualism is strong and flourishing.

“Finally, the Fourth Turning is a ‘Crisis’ period. This is when our institutional life is reconstructed from the ground up, always in response to a perceived threat to the nation’s very survival. If history does not produce such an urgent threat, Fourth Turning leaders will invariably find one — and may even fabricate one — to mobilize collective action. Civic authority revives, and people and groups begin to pitch in as participants in a larger community. As these Promethean bursts of civic effort reach their resolution, Fourth Turnings refresh and redefine our national identity.” (Emphasis added).

Woodstock Generation

Bannon’s film focuses principally on the causes of the 2008 financial crisis, and on the “ideas” that arose amongst the “Woodstock generation” (the Woodstock musical festival occurred in 1969), that permeated, in one way or another, throughout American and European society.

The narrator calls the Woodstock generation the “Children of Plenty.” It was a point of inflection: a second turning “Awakening”; a discontinuity in culture and values. The older generation (that is, anyone over 30) was viewed as having nothing to say, nor any experience to contribute. It was the elevation of the “pleasure principle” (as a “new” phenomenon, as “their” discovery), over the puritan ethic; It celebrated doing one’s own thing; it was about “Self” and narcissism.

The “Unravelling” followed in the form of government and institutional weakness: the “system” lacked the courage to take difficult decisions. The easy choices invariably were taken: the élites absorbed the self-centered, spoilt-child, ethos of the “me” generation. The 1980s and 1990s become the era of “casino capitalism” and the “Davos man.”

The lavish taxpayer bailouts of the U.S. banks after the Mexican, Russian, Asian and Argentinian defaults and crises washed away the bankers’ costly mistakes. The 2004 Bear Stearns exemption which allowed the big five banks to leverage their lending above 12:1 – and, which quickly extended to become 25:1, 30:1 and even 40:1 – permitted the irresponsible risk-taking and the billions in profit-making. The “Dot Com” bubble was accommodated by monetary policy – and then the massive 2008 bailouts accommodated the banks, yet again.

The “Unravelling” was essentially a cultural failure: a failure of responsibility, of courage to face hard choices – it was, in short, the film suggests, an era of spoilt institutions, compromised politicians and irresponsible Wall Streeters – the incumbent class – indulging themselves, and “abdicating responsibility.”

Now we have entered the “Fourth Turning”: “All the easy choices are back of us.” The “system” still lacks courage. Bannon says this period will be the “nastiest, ugliest in history.” It will be brutal, and “we” (by which he means the Trump Tea Party activists) will be “vilified.” This phase may last 15 – 20 years, he predicts.

Greek Tragedy

The key to this Fourth Turning is “character.” It is about values. What Bannon means by “our crisis” is perhaps best expressed when the narrator says: “the essence of Greek tragedy is that it is not like a traffic accident, where somebody dies [i.e. the great financial crises didn’t just arise by mischance].

The Greek sense is that tragedy is where something happens because it has to happen, because of the nature of the participants. Because the people involved, make it happen. And they have no choice to make it happen, because that’s their nature.”

This is the deeper implication of what transpired from Woodstock: the nature of people changed. The “pleasure principle,” the narcissism, had displaced the “higher” values that had made America what it was. The generation that believed that there was “no risk, no mountain they could not climb” brought this crisis upon themselves. They wiped out 200 years of financial responsibility in about 20 years. This, it appears, captures the essence of Bannon’s thinking.

That is where we are, Bannon asserts: Stark winter inevitably follows, after a warm, lazy summer. It becomes a time of testing, of adversity. Each season in nature has its vital function. Fourth turnings are necessary: they a part of the cycle of renewal.

Bannon’s film concludes with author Howe declaring: “history is seasonal and winter is coming,”

And, what is the immediate political message? It is simple, the narrator of Bannon’s film says: “STOP”: stop doing what you were doing. Stop spending like before. Stop taking on spending commitments that cannot be afforded. Stop mortgaging your children’s future with debt. Stop trying to manipulate the banking system. It is a time for tough thinking, for saying “no” to bailouts, for changing the culture, and re-constructing institutional life.

Cultural Legacy

And how do you re-construct civic life? You look to those who still possess a sense of duty and responsibility – who have retained a cultural legacy of values. It is noticeable that when Bannon addresses the activists, almost the first thing he does is to salute the veterans and serving officers, and praise their qualities, their sense of duty.

It is no surprise then that President Trump wants to increase both the veterans’ and the military’s budget. It is not so much a portent of U.S. military belligerence, but more that he sees them as warriors for the coming “winter” of testing and adversity. Then, and only then does Bannon speak to the “thin blue line” of activists who still have strength of character, a sense of responsibility, of duty. He tells them that the future rests in their hands, alone.

Does this sound like men – Bannon and Trump – who want to ramp up a fresh financial bubble, to indulge the Wall Street casino (in their words)? No? So, what is going on?

They know “the crisis” is coming. Let us recall what Neil Howe wrote in the Washington Post concerning the “Fourth Turning”:

“This is when our institutional life is reconstructed from the ground up, always in response to a perceived threat to the nation’s very survival. If history does not produce such an urgent threat, Fourth Turning leaders will invariably find one — and may even fabricate one — to mobilize collective action. Civic authority revives, and people and groups begin to pitch in as participants in a larger community. As these Promethean bursts of civic effort reach their resolution, Fourth Turnings refresh and redefine our national identity.”

Trump has no need to “fabricate” a financial crisis. It will happen “because it has to happen, because of the nature of the participants (in the current ‘system’). Because the people involved, make it happen. And they have no choice to make it happen, because that’s their nature.”

It is not even President Obama’s or Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s fault, per se. They are just who they are.

Trump and Bannon therefore are not likely trying to ignite the “animal spirits” of the players in the financial “casino” (as many in the financial sphere seem to assume). If Bannon’s film and Trump’s articulation of crisis mean anything, it is that their aim is to ignite the “animal spirits” of “the working-class casualties and those forgotten Americans” of the Midwest, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

At that point, they hope that the “thin blue line” of activists will “pitch in” with a Promethean burst of civic effort which will reconstruct America’s institutional and economic life.

If this is so, the Trump/Bannon vision both is audacious – and quite an extraordinary gamble …

Alastair Crooke

José Javier Esparza

"De la nueva Derecha a la "alt-right"

seminario metapolítica

Ponencia de José Javier Esparza en el Seminario de metapolítica 2017:
"De la nueva Derecha a la "alt-right"
www.seminariometapolitica.wordpress.com

Jason Reza Jorjani

Identitarian Ideas IX

Red Ice TV

Jason Reza Jorjani speaks at the Identitarian Ideas gathering in Stockholm, Sweden.

Where Conservatism Went Wrong:
A Review of The Great Purge: The Deformation of the Conservative Movement

By Spencer Quinn

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com

Review:

Paul E. Gottfried & Richard B. Spencer (eds.)
The Great Purge: The Deformation of the Conservative Movement ^[2]
Arlington, Va.: Washington Summit Publishers, 2015

All political movements need a history, and such histories, if well-constructed, almost always coalesce into myth. Once mythologized, a movement’s past can inform its present members about its reason for being, its need for continuing, and its plans for the future. And this can be accomplished quickly – and without the need for study or research – in the form of what Edmund Burke called “prejudice.” “Prejudice,” Burke says ^[3], “is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, skeptical, puzzled, and unresolved.”

Prejudice is a time-saver, in other words, and it puts everyone on the same page. These are two invaluable things for any movement which aims to effect political change. For those who wish to participate in any of the various factions of the Alt Right and learn its history and myth, they do not need to go much farther than The Great Purge: The Deformation of the Conservative Movement.

Edited by Paul Gottfried of the H. L. Menken Club and Richard Spencer of Radix Journal, The Great Purge discusses the march of the once-mighty American conservative movement towards the abject irrelevance it faces today. This took about fifty years, but the villains of this inquisition managed to purge conservatism of its conservatives and replace them with a globalist elite which kowtows to political correctness. The villains, of course, are National Review founder and publisher William F. Buckley (an unflattering photo of whom graces the book’s cover) and a cabal of refugees from the Left known as “neoconservatives.” The Great Purge, as Spencer tells us, is less a “full chronicling of these purges,” and more a “phenomenological history of conservatism. It seeks to understand how its ideology . . . functioned within its historic context and how it responded to power, shifting conceptions of authority, and societal changes.”

The book presents seven essays, with a foreword by Spencer and an afterward by VDARE.com founder and former National Review writer Peter Brimelow. In between, we have essays from established Dissident Right luminaries such as Gottfried, William Regnery, and John Derbyshire. Sam Francis, perhaps one of the godfathers of the Alt Right, who passed away in 2005, contributes a comprehensive and quite useful philosophical treatise on how mainstream conservatism devolved into the toothless friend of the Left it has become today. Rounding out the remainder is American Revolutionary Vanguard founder Keith Preston, professor and writer Lee Congdon, and independent author and scholar James Kalb.

So, according to myth, William F. Buckley founded his conservative magazine National Review in the mid-1950s and revitalized a flagging conservative ideology. At the time, liberalism in its various forms enjoyed near-complete hegemony in academia, enough to prompt scholar Lionel Trilling by mid-century to announce that conservatism, at least as it had been embodied by what we now call the Old Right, was dead. Buckley, along with other conservative thinkers such as Russell Kirk and popular authors like Ayn Rand, proved that reports of conservatism’s death were a tad overstated. Thanks to Buckley, conservatism now had the intellectual heft to resist the Left, both foreign and domestic. As Spencer describes it, this entailed promoting free-market capitalism over Soviet Communism, erecting the Christian West as a bulwark against Soviet atheism, and pushing for an aggressive foreign policy both to thwart Soviet militarism and promote the interests of Israel. The New Right was born.

Enter the neocons. Disenchanted by the manifest failures of Communism, these former Leftists, led by Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, began testing the waters in conservative circles by the 1970s. The neocons shared much of the New Right’s anti-Soviet belligerence and loyalty towards Israel. Having given up on the New Deal and other big-government initiatives, the neocons were equally uncomfortable with free-market capitalism. Sam Francis quotes Irving Kristol at length, describing how the welfare state should not be eradicated, but altered to create a “social insurance state.”

Most importantly, the neocons promoted a Wilsonian “global and cosmopolitan world order” which sought to greatly increase America’s role in foreign affairs, often through military interventionism. In particular, democracy was the great talisman which could civilize the world – whether the world wanted to be civilized or not. Bolstered by their faith in the Democratic Peace Theory, which posits that democracies do not wage war upon each other, the neocons transferred the messianic fervor of Communism to democratization and never looked back. Lee Congdon’s entire essay. “Wars to End War,” rails against such “morality-driven foreign policy” and how it co-opted conservatism almost completely. “Pluralism, (human) rights, and democracy,” as stated by Charles Krauthammer, became something of a rallying cry for the neocons. Against such high-minded egalitarianism, which opened the door for feminism, gay rights, race-mixing, and other by-products of democratic freedom, the traditional conservative arguments began to crumble.

Congdon quotes Pat Buchanan as defending true conservatism when he wrote in 2006 that America is bound together by “the bonds of history and memory, tradition and custom, language and literature, birth and faith, blood and soil.” This is an outright rejection of the neocon claim of America being a “proposition nation” in which citizens are “bound by ideals that move us beyond our backgrounds,” to quote George W. Bush from his first inaugural address. Essentially, if you believed in putting America first, or had no interest in foreign wars, or took the libertarian ideal of limited government seriously, or (most importantly) professed a tribal or familial fealty to the white race, then you had no place among the neocons or in the New Right.

And there to police you and expunge you into the wilderness, if need be, was none other than Mr. Buckley himself.

Both Paul Gottfried and William Regnery provide first-hand accounts of the purges, as well as some historical perspective on them. For example, according to Gottfried, Buckley banished the John Birch Society from respectable conservatism in the 1960s not because of anti-Semitism, but because the Birchers expressed insufficient hawkishness against the North Vietnamese and in the Cold War in general. This point is echoed later in the volume by Keith Preston. It seems that any anti-Semitic aspect in the early victims of the purge was purely incidental.

That didn’t remain the case, of course. What I find most striking and ironic about The Great Purge is that the “racist” infractions of many of the purge victims were so slight, so indirect, and so buried in one’s past that to summarily expurgate a person on those grounds required almost Soviet levels of behind-the-scenes machinations and ruthlessness. Gottfried explains that his offense was to merely assume a leadership role in the H.L. Menken Club, which gives a platform to people “who stress hereditary cognitive differences.” For this, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) severed all ties with him. Another example is Joe Sobran, who was labeled an anti-Semite by Buckley and banished from the National Review in the late 1980s because, as Gottfried explains, Sobran “noticed the shifting meaning of ‘anti-Semite,’ from someone who hates Jews to someone who certain Jews in high places don’t like.”

William Regnery relates how he had been banished from the ISI as well, an organization to which his grandfather, father, and uncles had very close ties for many years. Regnery’s offense? He spoke at an American Renaissance study group in 2005 and promoted “building a sense of racial unity.” For this, he faced an anonymous charge from ISI and was tried among his peers, only one of whom voted to keep him on. Seventeen voted to expel him, and expelled he was.

Another person who pops up a lot in The Great Purge is Jason Richwine, a junior researcher who lost his job at the Heritage Foundation in 2013. It was discovered that his approved doctoral thesis from years earlier contained a fully supported statistic which pointed to the lower than average IQ of many immigrant groups. For this, and for fear of causing too much consternation among Leftist elites, the Heritage Foundation determined that Richwine had to go, his permanently sullied reputation notwithstanding. Certainly, mainstream conservatives know how and when to eat their own – unlike the Left, of course. As Regnery aptly points out, “Media Matters would never have cashiered a researcher on the strength of conservative ire.”

This only cracks the surface of the damage the Bill Buckley mentality has done to the Right over the years. John Derbyshire and Peter Brimelow relate how their more deliberate infractions got them evicted from the movement. Keith Preston describes how, despite the New Right’s professed desire to limit government, it did absolutely nothing to stop its near-exponential growth. In The Great Purge, Buckley and his epigones are called nearly every name in the book, from cowardly to cannibalistic, yet Regnery attributes much of this betrayal to something a little more mundane: complacency. Buckley and his people were simply unwilling to give up their cushy lifestyles in order to combat the Left in any meaningful way. As a result, they put tight leashes on anyone who did.

Perhaps the biggest surprise in this volume is the thirty-five page essay from Sam Francis, which was written back in 1986. Francis, who suffered his own purge from The Washington Times in the 1990s thanks to Dinesh D’Souza, provides a philosophical vocabulary to explain the fall of conservatism in America. It was the slow usurpation of the Old Right, in other words “traditionalist and bourgeois ideologies, centering on the individual as moral agent, citizen, and economic actor” by a “managerial elite” which did in conservatism. This “managerial humanism,” according to Francis, espoused

a collectivist view of the state and economy and advocated a highly centralized regime largely unrestrained by traditional legal, constitutional, and political barriers. It rejected or regarded as backward, repressive, or obsolete the institutions and values of traditional and bourgeois society – its loyalties to the local community, traditional religion and moral beliefs, the family and social and political differentiation based on class, status, and property – and it articulated an ideal of man “liberated” from such constraints and re-educated or redesigned into a cosmopolitan participant in the mass state economy of the managerial system.

This certainly is an apt description of the Left, and as more and more neocons joined the conservative movement, the more apparent it became that they were bringing this managerial humanism along with them. This cultural shift, of course, had deleterious effects across the board for the Right, not least of which was separating it from its stated purpose and weakening its resolve to combat change. In characteristic form, Francis ends his essay with a prediction, this one quite dire:

If neoconservative co-optation and the dynamics of the continuing managerial revolution deflect the American Right from [its] goal, the result will not be the renaissance of America and the West but the continuation and eventual fulfillment of the goals of their most ancient enemies.

If The Great Purge has any flaws, it’s of omission, which isn’t really a flaw since Spencer copped to it in his Foreword. This book is not a history, but rather a collection of reminiscences and musings on the state of the Right. So, it’s not surprising that many things are left out. Still, I wish more detail had been provided in places. It is possible, for example, that there was more to the Sobran affair than what Gottfried and others provide. Sobran’s split with Buckley may have spoken as much to Buckley’s sincere philo-Semitism and his desire not to appear anti-Semitic as it did to Sobran’s desire (or need) to speak out against Israel. The whole thorny issue of whether or not this constitutes anti-Semitism was covered thoroughly (and perhaps ad nauseum) in In Search of Anti-Semitism ^[4], Buckley’s 1992 recounting of the affair. But it would have been nice to hear a different perspective from one who was around back then.

Further, The Great Purge seems to let Buckley off the hook for not banishing the John Birch Society because of anti-Semitism, yet fails to mention (at least in my reading) any mention of Buckley’s early purge of writers from The American Mercury, which was, in Buckley’s words, “anti-Semitic.” Therefore, Buckley showed his philo-Semitic stripes early on, and that may have informed some of his attitude vis-a-vis the John Birch Society.

The Jewish Question in general is also never explored. While not absolutely necessary to the subject, I’m sure it would have been interesting at the very least, given how eighty to ninety percent of the neoconservatives named in the book are obviously Jewish. Really, it’s impossible not to notice the nigh-homogeneous ethnic makeup of the neocons who appear over and over in The Great Purge like a gang of irrepressible supervillains. Such a list renders parenthesis-echoing utterly superfluous: Irving Kristol, Norman Podheretz, Charles Krauthammer, David Frum, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Seymour Lipset, Ben Wattenberg, Elliott Abrams, Michael Ledeen, Max Boot, David Gerlenter, Allen Weinstein, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and Paul Wolfowitz.

You could practically host a baseball game with such a lineup. And is it all a huge coincidence? Well, I guess we’ll just have to wait for the sequel to find out.

In the meantime, however, The Great Purge does a magnificent job of myth-making for the Alt Right. It spells out our origins and purpose, and describes the challenges and betrayals the older generation of conservatives had to face while remaining true to the nationalist, traditionalist, and racialist ideals which made Western civilization great to begin with. Most importantly, The Great Purge shows what happens when you give up on winning and instead compromise with the enemy. You eventually become him. And at no point will your pettiness and spite become more apparent than when you turn on your own.

On sait que l’élection de Donald Trump à la présidence des Etats-Unis a été un séisme politique d’ampleur globale. Mais le changement serait encore plus radical et plus profond si nous assistions, dans un futur proche, à un renforcement continu du mouvement dit de « Alt-Right ». Cette dénomination recouvre un courant intellectuel de droite aux facettes multiples, dont les adhérents constituent le seul groupe perceptible sur l’échiquier politique américain à avoir soutenu ouvertement Trump et à l’avoir ovationné.

Il faut cependant préciser qu’il n’y a aucun lien organique entre cette « Alt-Right » et Donald Trump, dont la rhétorique et les exigences sont bien plus inoffensives et bien moins idéologisées que celles de cette droite alternative. Cependant, Hillary Clinton, la candidate battue de ces élections présidentielles, n’a pas pu s’empêcher d’essayer d’identifier Trump à la « Alt-Right ». Ce genre de calomnies se nomme la « culpabilisation par association » dans le langage politique anglo-saxon. Mais cette tentative a eu des effets contraires à ceux espérés. Hillary Clinton a tenu un très long discours où elle a cité longuement tous les « méchants » qui soutenaient son adversaire. Elle faisait usage, dans ce discours, des injures politiques habituelles de la gauche et de l’extrême-gauche (« raciste », « homophobe », « sexiste », etc.).

Hillary Clinton n’a pas obtenu la réaction qu’elle escomptait. Donald Trump n’a nullement été freiné dans son élan, sans doute parce qu’il n’y avait pas moyen de prouver qu’il avait un lien quelconque avec les animateurs des cercles qualifiables de « Alt-Right ». Du coup, grâce à la maladresse d’Hillary Clinton, le mouvement de la droite alternative a été connu dans toute l’Amérique et est devenue l’objet de vastes débats. Les pages de la grande toile de ces groupes alternatifs très peu connus ont été visitées à grande échelle : elles ont battu tous leurs records de fréquentation et les médias « mainstream » se sont mis à parler des initiatives, colloques et conférences de la « Alt-Right » et ont invité leurs représentants à répondre à des entretiens. Métapolitiquement parlant, on peut parler d’un tournant historique et peut-être même décisif.

L’Alt-Right ne se borne pas à fustiger le Zeitgeist, l’esprit du temps, marqué par le gauchisme. Elle brocarde aussi l’établissement conservateur conventionnel et les vieux Républicains. Elle considère que ces derniers se soumettent trop facilement aux diktats du politiquement correct, ce qui a pour corollaire qu’ils n’osent pas aborder les vrais problèmes de la société américaine, qu’ils ne se hasardent pas à adopter un « race realism », un « réalisme racialiste ». Cette réticence fait du mouvement conservateur conventionnel un « tigre de papier », condamné à échouer à tout bout de champ, parce qu’il abandonne continuellement ses propres positions et ses propres intérêts pour ne pas devoir subir les pressions habituelles, lesquelles ont évidemment recours à l’insulte classique de « racisme ».

Le philosophe et politologue Paul Gottfried avait naguère, bien avant le buzz déclenché par le discours anti-Alt Right d’Hillary Clinton, réclamé l’avènement d’une « droite alternative », différente du « conservatism mainstream ». Son appel à une « droite alternative » a été entendu : plusieurs publicistes l’ont repris, dont Richard Spencer, le fondateur de la boîte-à-penser « National Policy Institute ». Aussitôt Spencer baptise « Alternative Right » le magazine en ligne qu’il crée dans le sillage du discours de Gottfried, lui conférant aussi le diminutif de « Alt Right ». Tout le mouvement contestataire de l’idéologie libérale-gauchiste dominante et du conservatisme timoré reçoit alors le terme générique de « Alt Right ».

La droite alternative voulue par Gottfried au départ, lancée par Spencer dans la foulée, reproche, pour l’essentiel, aux conservateurs traditionnels de ne pas se poser comme les défenseurs des Américains de souche européenne, alors que ceux-ci constituent leur unique base électorale potentielle. C’est en fait le cas dans tous les Etats européens aliénés par le multiculturalisme où les minorités ethniques étrangères votent presque toujours pour les partis de gauche.

L’Alt Right américaine est constituée d’une variété de groupes très différents les uns des autres. D’une part, nous avons des revues et des maisons d’édition qui ne se distinguent guère des nouvelles droites française ou germanophones, dans la mesure où elles entendent se poser comme des initiatives sérieuses et intellectuelles. D’autre part, nous avons des personnalités qui s’adonnent à la moquerie et à la satire. Citons, en ce domaine, le comique « RamZPaul » (photo), les séries de caricatures « Murdoch Murdoch ». L’humour que répandent ces initiatives-là est, bien sûr, politiquement incorrect, et de manière explicite ! Parfois, il est espiègle et seulement accessible aux « initiés ». Les tenants de gauche de la « religion civile » américaine y sont fustigés à qui mieux-mieux, sans la moindre pitié. Personne n’oserait un humour pareil sous nos latitudes européennes.

Cette audace est possible grâce à la constitution américaine qui interdit explicitement de punir, par le truchement de lois régissant les opinions, l’expression libre et sans entrave de celles-ci, alors qu’en Europe les législations liberticides sont acceptées sans sourciller. Ainsi, les publications scientifiques des milieux de l’Alt Right sont autorisées, même si elles abordent des sujets brûlants comme l’anthropologie biologique. Sur ce chapitre, les productions du groupe « American Renaissance » sont particulièrement intéressantes pour nous, Européens, qui ne bénéficions plus d’une liberté de recherche en ce domaine spécifique du savoir.

Georg Immanuel Nagel,

Article paru dans zur Zeit, Vienne, n°3/2017, http://www.zurzeit.at .

„Die Rückkehr der echten Rechten“ – Im Gespräch mit Daniel Friberg

DS-TV

Daniel Friberg, 1978 im schwedischen Göteborg geboren, gehört zu den wichtigsten Vertretern der rechten Publizistik in Europa. Der von ihm mitgegründete Arktos-Verlag (www.arktos.com) hat sich international durch die Veröffentlichung von Werken bedeutender Denker der „Neuen Rechten“ wie Alain de Benoist, Guillaume Faye oder Alexander Dugin einen Namen gemacht. Der frühere Manager und Business-Analyst gründete auch den metapolitischen Think-Tank „Motpol“ und ist Herausgeber des Internetmagazins „RightOn“ (www.righton.net). Vor wenigen Wochen erschien sein Buch „Die Rückkehr der echten Rechten“ in zweiter Auflage als Lizenzausgabe der Stiftung „Europa Terra Nostra“ (ETN). DS-TV hat mit Daniel Friberg am Rande des ersten „Freiheitlichen Kongresses“ der ETN-Stiftung in Mecklenburg Vorpommern Ende Oktober, wo er einen mit Begeisterung aufgenommenen Vortrag hielt, unterhalten – über sein aktuelles Buch, die Bedeutung von Metapolitik und alternativen Medien für die politische Rechte, den Siegeszug von Donald Trump in den USA und dessen Auswirkungen auf Europa.

Für den Ausbau von DS-TV, vor allem die Beschaffung weiterer Technik, brauchen wir Ihre Hilfe. Spenden Sie unter dem Verwendungszweck "DS-TV" an NPD, IBAN: DE 80 1005 0000 6600 0991 92, BIC: BELADEBEXXX

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Erkenbrand Conference

European Resurrection: Identitarianism in Europe

Red Ice Radio

Red Ice will be live streaming the Erkenbrand conference that is taking place in Rotterdam, Netherlands. The theme is European Resurrection: How Identitarianism Will Shape the Future of Europe.

Millennial Woes, F. Roger Devlin & a third mystery guest will be speaking on Tuesday the 27th at 7 pm Central European Summer Time / 1 pm Eastern Daylight Time / 10 am Pacific Daylight Time.

Bart & Michael - Erkenbrand: The Alt-Right in the Netherlands

Red Ice Radio

Dutch Alt-Right activists Bart and Michael have taken the initiative to set up regular meetups in the Netherlands people concerned with the future of Europe. Their first conference, Erkenbrand, will take place in Rotterdam at the end of September and include guests such as Millennial Woes and Roger Devlin.

We begin with a few necessary introductions, including a brief mention of the upcoming Erkenbrand conference in Holland. We then delve into the ongoing demographic crisis in the West. Although this topic is certainly commonplace within the Alt-Right, there has been very little coverage on the how it has affected Holland in particular. Thankfully, Bart and Michael are more than willing to fill us in. We learn that Holland, much like the rest of the West, is being flooded with non-European immigrants. Major cities like Amsterdam are already nearly half non-Dutch; the countryside, unfortunately, is beginning to undergo a similar transformation. We also discuss Geert Wilders, the establishment right, and whether or not we will be able to save our countries through the political process.

In the members’ hour, we begin by discussing the vital role that networking plays within our movement. We consider the fact that many aspects of Western culture – history, myths, art, etc. – are currently being altered or, in some cases, blatantly removed for political reasons. Bart and Michael then tell us more about Amsterdam. Thanks to 100 years of socialist rule, the Netherlands’ capital has become overrun with prostitution, drugs, and crime. We also discuss how liberalism’s promotion of tolerance has effectively created a culture of indifference, in which people now consider it moral to allow immorality. The show concludes with a consideration of the steps that need to be taken to preserve the West.

Guest's website: http://www.erkenbrand.nl

Listen to the second hour of this show and get full access to our archives at http://redicemembers.com
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