MARGINSTREAMING

by James Lawrence

The concept of a Right-Left spectrum of political ideas contains a measure of truth, but is all too easily spun into a justification of established power. As most people are naturally inclined to reject extremes for compromises, they are led to think of those in power as a “Goldilocks option” between those on the far ends of the spectrum, whose exclusion is rationalised as a consequence of their own extremism. 

Since our European Goldilocks presently finds herself gagged and shackled to her chair, poisoned by her ideological gruel, and assaulted by foreigners in her bed, we can surmise that it is these so-called “moderates” who are the true extremists. To make sense of this, we must move away from the judgementalism of the “political spectrum” towards a concept based purely on the facts of hegemony and marginalisation, namely that of the centre and the periphery.

But let us flesh out this concept a bit more than is customary. Let us imagine the “political terrain” as a fertile and well-cultivated expanse of land, ringed around with an unevenly fortified wall, which in turn is encircled by a further expanse of undesirable wildernesses and steppelands. In the centre of the lands within the wall stands a ruling Citadel; on these inner lands from the Citadel to the wall subsist the teeming masses of the People; and on the marginal outlands beyond the wall there are various tribes of Barbarians. 

Basic topography of the Western "political landscape".

The Citadel corresponds to the political-corporate-bureaucratic ruling class and the privileged elite, whose members alone experience politics as a “free debate” or “consensus”. Although the Citadel represents an entrenched seat of power, it wants everyone else to think of it as a natural part of the landscape, and its inhabitants as having been chosen by the People through such impersonal processes as elections, the market and social necessity. It broadcasts these messages to the People in propaganda waves bellowed out over the inlands, but convinces fewer and fewer of them over time as its own inhabitants visibly consolidate their power.

The People, corresponding to the mass of Western citizens, get their information from the Citadel by default and engage in political matters only intermittently, which causes them to manifest themselves as a half-somnolent herd. However, it would not be accurate to say that the people have no political agency at all; rather, they are allowed certain initiatives and demands as long as these are channeled through the rules of “respectable discourse” laid down by the Citadel. But although the People do not have the potential to defeat and supplant the Citadel by themselves, in times of crisis or unrest they might throw the gates open to one or more tribes of Barbarians, who will then be presented with a rare opportunity to effect a revolution.

These tribes of Barbarians in the outlands correspond to radical political movements, which mostly originated within the wall and were exiled beyond it after they exceeded Citadel-approved limits. The Alt-Right is numbered among them, but so are various others such as anarchists, “deep greens”, and much of the Old Left. The disadvantages faced by the Barbarians are formidable: divided into mutually-hostile tribes, placed in irrelevant and marginal positions, and prevented from communicating with the People unless those People deliberately go looking for them, under normal circumstances they possess the weakest political influence of all three groups. 

Hairy radicals with big ideas.

Paradoxically, however, the radical principles that divide the Barbarian tribes also represent the only possible sources of political legitimacy outside the Citadel. In times of crisis when the Citadel is resented, the steppelands of the Barbarians become the “moral high ground”, and the outcasts might be welcomed through the gates as saviours of the People. Because the mandarins in the Citadel are not stupid, they have placed some Tame Barbarians (SJWs, feminists, anti-whites etc.) just outside the wall, and paid them enough money to whip up a highly visible show of opposition on the steppe. This way, the real Barbarians can be harried and intimidated without the need for direct Citadel repression; angry young men who go off to join the Barbarians will be picked up and put in the unwitting service of the Citadel; and the People will open the gates to their “saviours” only to be delivered right back up to their masters.

As redolent of the dreaded “LARPing” as this analogy might seem, it clarifies more than a few grey areas of the metapolitical struggle in which we are engaged, particularly with regard to the perennial Alt-Right debate between mainstreaming and vanguardism.

Framed in the terms of our analogy, the mainstreaming strategy can be envisaged as an effort by a group of Barbarians to sneak inside the wall, mingle with the People, and pose as a mere popular deputation conducting politics within approved limits – plotting all the while to either overthrow the Citadel or open the gates to fellow Barbarians “as soon as the enemy’s back is turned”. It should be easy to see that this is not a very good idea.

Double-dealing is best left to the professionals in the Citadel. Displays of friendship and respectability towards Citadel mandarins not only confuse our own rank and file, but would also count as serious black marks with the People in the event of widespread popular unrest. A stance of principled opposition and contempt towards the Citadel is itself a vital aspect of Barbarian legitimacy (and it is a sad fact that this stance is often pulled off more convincingly by Tame Barbarian poseurs than by those who truly represent oppositional forces).

Mainstreaming appears a more viable prospect when renegades from within the Citadel (Nigel Farage, Donald Trump) find it expedient to win over the People by flirting with Barbarians, but caution should be exercised here too. These people are a blessing to us precisely because they save us the trouble of mainstreaming, pushing the “mainstream” closer towards us. What we should never do is attempt to “meet them in the middle”, for principles are like ancestral swords, easily traded around as curios by Citadel mandarins but invested with fundamental importance by the Barbarians. These patrons can do much for us, but choosing to rely upon them in lieu of our own strength would not be a wise course of action. 

No deference to mandarins.

What of vanguardism? Perhaps it could be conceived as a strategy of proudly remaining on the steppe, focusing on the internal unity and strength of one’s Barbarian tribe, and using a mixture of persuasion and patience to convince a majority of the People behind the wall to come over to its side. This is a much more honest and less self-defeating approach than mainstreaming, and may well be an essential prerequisite for any radical movement, but in itself it cannot be expected to pave a route to political victory. 

One reason for this is that the emphasis on standing fast in radical positions pulls us away from direct political action, and towards a more or less passive waiting for crises to develop behind the wall and open up opportunities. Although this is not necessarily a bad thing when “political action” equates to mainstreaming, it threatens to defeat the object of building an internally united vanguard, by removing or downplaying the constant struggle with the enemy that is more useful than anything else for cultivating such unity. The further a Barbarian tribe removes itself from the Citadel, the more splittism, infighting and egotism will devour its ranks.

Another weakness of vanguardism is that it can do nothing about the problem of operating on a radical fringe divided into a multitude of Old Leftists, anarchists, "deep greens", libertarians, religious fundamentalists and others, in addition to the astroturf SJW movements offering various forms of fake rebellion. This situation is, in one sense, nothing new, but it is also deeply debilitating, due to the fact that no single grouping holds anything close to a monopoly on the “radical option” in Western politics. 

The problem of division.

In order to open the gates to a tribe of Barbarians, the notoriously fickle and inattentive People must possess at least basic knowledge of who they are and why they oppose the Citadel. Although we tell ourselves, just like all the others, that the crisis of the Citadel will “inevitably” wake the People up and send them rushing into our camp, it is more likely that such a crisis will merely induce them to grasp blindly at any anti-Citadel ideology that seems to promise salvation. If there are too many alternatives for the People to keep track of, then there are effectively no alternatives to speak of; and if this is the case, no number of crises will produce anything other than a defiant doubling down on the part of the Citadel (as we saw with the 2008 financial crash).

In light of this, perhaps the best option would be to move from a preliminary vanguardism to  something that might be semi-humorously described as “marginstreaming”: expansion within non-mainstream territory, achieved by absorbing certain key positions of other radical groupings while reducing others to irrelevance, with the goal of achieving the greatest possible monopolisation of the “radical option” in Western politics by the Alt-Right.

In the terms of our analogy, this is nothing other than the essential prelude to a successful Barbarian invasion of civilised lands: the long, difficult,and (to others) deceptively irrelevant wars by which one tribe with a higher vision and stronger will destroys or absorbs all the rest, conquering most or all of the peripheral wilderness before moving on to greater prizes. Success in this endeavour will be achieved when, for a majority of the People, obedience and “politics as usual” equate to the Citadel and the Tame Barbarians, and rebellion and the “radical option” equate purely and simply to the Alt-Right. That is the popular consciousness that must be achieved before any crisis of legitimacy can be used in our favour, and needless to say before any “storming of the walls” can take place. 

Marginstreaming circa AD. 632, not-so-entirely irrelevant to the Roman and Persian "mainstream."

This is bound to throw up more than a few misunderstandings, so we had better deal with the most serious ones now. First of all, the worst possible way to interpret such an approach would be as a call to friendship between the various groups of radicals on the fringes of politics and their united action against the common enemy, as Alain de Benoist once suggested with his “alliance of the periphery against the centre”. Genghis Khan would not have lasted long had he tried to smooth over the divisions between tribal leaders on the Mongolian steppe by pacifistic means, and nor will we if we are ever fool enough to try it. 

Although we should aim at as much harmony as is feasible between the major groupings that constitute the Alt-Right, we should understand that the leaders of ideologically opposed groups will usually be too intransigent to work with us. Accordingly, we should meet those rival tribes with swords rather than olive branches: once they have ceased to have a separate existence, we can absorb the worthy elements of their rank-and-file membership, specifically those principled young men full of desire to change an unjust world.

Does this, then, mean that we should sally into the dark corners of the internet and argue with anarchists and Old Leftists until we are blue in the face? Of course not; as the mandarins in the Citadel have always understood, no political enemy can be defeated by debate, which on the contrary signals respect. In politics and in our analogy, enemies are eliminated either when they are repressed – something that the Citadel alone has the privilege of doing – or when the ground is stolen from under their feet. 

This means that we should expand into the “ideological territory” of other non-mainstream groupings, laying claim to their positions as far as they are based in truth and compatible with our own principles, and incorporating them into our own movement while their original holders either join us or are left to wither on their own.  

Appropriate tactics against rival Barbarians.

This “conquest of the outlands” might begin with the critique of global neoliberal capitalism that constitutes the most fertile property of the Old Left, as well as certain ecological positions held by the “deep greens”. Not only is our own critique of the Citadel dangerously incomplete without these perspectives, but they themselves can also be enriched and strengthened by the forbidden truths of the Alt-Right. Beyond this, other opportunities for expansion certainly exist; but it should go without saying that we should take a different strategy towards the Citadel’s Tame Barbarians, who must be directly attacked and exposed for what they are. Once we have absorbed everything worth learning from the Old Left, the route for a decisive moral attack on SJWs, feminists and anti-whites will be opened up as well, for the pet causes of these groups are all supported by big business and facilitate the concentration of wealth into the hands of a small globalised elite.

As we have explained, none of this will have much significance if it takes place in isolation from the People, and thus direct political action inside the wall cannot be neglected. However, given that a frontal attack through the voting system is still not possible in most of the West, the model for political action should be the Barbarian raid: cheap, easy, negative attacks, which spread doubt about the Citadel and Tame Barbarians in the popular mind while winning notoriety for us. One method with which I myself experimented, mostly for the sake of gauging popular attitudes, was a public boycott of the 2015 British General Election on anti-political class grounds. A smarter move might be, say, a flagrantly nationalistic attack on a business that employs immigrant labour over native workers, for this would force the pseudo-radical Left to either abandon its role of policing public discourse or openly fall in with its corporate masters. However, the main thing is to hammer the anti-Citadel message into the People’s minds, a task in which repetition trumps finesse.

Appropriate tactics against Tame Barbarians.

One thing that is clear about such a strategy is that it does not require us to deceive ourselves or others. While acquiescing to Citadel shibboleths debases us, opening ourselves to valid critiques of corporate rapacity and environmental degradation is just a matter of extending our perspective beyond the deceptive certainties of monomania, something entirely consistent with our growth from a few single-issue protest movements to a complete alternative view of the world. However, it may yet be possible for the Alt-Right to lose its soul through marginstreaming, for example if it were to try to absorb all radical positions good and evil and thus degenerate into a hollow and incoherent contrarianism. This can be guarded against by means of a simple rule of thumb: accept nothing that is in fundamental contradiction with our core principles. We do not need to lay claim to all of the territory on the “periphery”, and indeed it would be inadvisable to do so; positions that are incompatible or just plain wrong will have to be left alone (I suspect that this will be the case with anarchism and certain aspects of libertarianism, though others may feel differently).

The Alt-Right is not the biggest or richest tribe in the outlands, but we have an unique advantage over all others: we can conquer, but we cannot be conquered. Every radical movement that accepts the egalitarian lie as a valid foundation has put on a mental straitjacket of ever-multiplying taboos, which keep them from the borders of our territory like the crabs in a pot keep each other from freedom. Thus, for example, when faced with the very real ways in which replacement migration facilitates corporate power, Old Leftists can only bleat nervously about “scapegoating” or "obfuscation of the real issues". 

We, rooted in truth, can expand; they, chained by opinion, can only stagnate. That is why we, the stone most violently rejected by the Citadel, can become the capstone of the counter-force that defeats it.