CONTRA COSMOPOLITANISM

by James Lawrence

  

In common with many others in this movement, I see European racial self-defence as the foundation of the Alt-Right. This does not mean, as some would have it, that this foundation is also the pinnacle, or that the Alt-Right can be reduced to it and nothing else. But in a future where the European people have been replaced, and the civilisation of Europe no longer exists in any form distinct from the modernist anti-culture to which it gave birth, everything else good and true on the Alt-Right ends up reduced to so much meaningless blog chatter.

However, I have long been aware of a serious shortcoming in ethnonationalism, which runs through all of its discourse like cracks in a wall. On the one hand, most if not all of the ethnonationalist charges against ‘foreigners’ (blacks, Muslims, Jews etc.) are both carefully reasoned and backed up with solid facts. On the other hand, cheek by jowl with these, we find statements and assumptions about ‘our own people’ (white Europeans) that are not only arbitrary and slapdash, but do not even accord with basic common sense.

To flesh out what I am saying, let’s look first at Europe, where violent Muslim criminals are swaggering around like mediaeval Moors on a razzia. The European New Rightist can explain all of this with reference to social science, history and common sense, and further produce lucid arguments for viewing Islam as an intractable enemy of Europe. But when we ask why the leaders of Europe’s democracies do nothing about these Muslim raids, and indeed suppress popular opposition to them, we go from lucidity into ludicrousness. Imaginary mental illnesses like “ethnomasochism” and “xenophilia” are invented for the purposes of explanation, or else European elites are derided as weak-willed “cucks” who cannot stand up for themselves, a supposition that does not sit well with their ruthless denial of political power to white advocates.

In Guillaume Faye’s Why We Fight, European elites are described as “collaborators” with the existential enemy of Islam, which is designated as the primary foe of ethnonationalism. Collaborators - with an Army of The Prophet that came to Europe in rags, formed itself on our soil under favourable political conditions, and is literally fed and clothed at our people’s expense? Could there be a greater enemy within Europe that ethnonationalists, anxious to find and blame a suitably non-European final boss, are unwilling to see?

Go to the ethnonationalist movement in the United States, and you will receive an answer to this question, which is again a foreign body: the Jews, who are supposed to have seized control of Western culture and “distorted” it (Yockey’s phrase) towards universal altruism and racial suicide. In this view, the white ‘Aryan’ elites who hold power alongside these Jews are still cucks and ethnomasochists – and sometimes selfish, venal profiteers – but the impetus towards race-replacement emanates not from themselves but from an external source.

Don’t get me wrong here. A Jewish elite really has taken up positions of power in the United States and elsewhere in the West, and it really is characterised by extreme subversive and globalist tendencies, as is well attested by the work of Dr. Kevin MacDonald. As such, no-one who would understand the present long murder of Europe can afford to take a “see no evil” stance on this subject, although this is exactly what many ethnonationalists in Europe choose to do.

But let us introduce some realism here. The idea of a small minority holding everyone else in thrall only really makes sense in the context of a centrally-controlled totalitarian state, in which only the capture of a few key positions would be necessary – and yet the Jews could not even hold onto power in Soviet Russia, with its one-party state and heavily peasant population. The relatively loose and open Western system, with its reliance on elite consensus to relegate opposing views to low status, does not suggest that the Jewish elite alone could hold our society in subjection - unless we assume that most white Europeans are incredibly dullwitted and torpid, or else that the white European elites do not oppose Jewish subversion and are in fact largely working in tandem with it.

This latter explanation would certainly accord with history. The licensing of Jewish usury by many mediaeval European kings should require no comment. Hillaire Belloc in The Jews notes the early modern alliance of Jews with the Protestant North against the Catholic Church, and the later close identity of interests between Jewish financial power and the state of England/Britain, which favoured such an alliance due to its “cosmopolitan position...as the leading commercial state”. Benjamin Ginsberg devotes much of The Fatal Embrace to a detailed account of such Jewish-elite alliances old and new, with the intent not of misleading the goyim but of warning the Jews against the dangers of such alliances.

And this is where the ethnonationalist analysis of hostile power in the West, which all too often reduces to finding exotic names and putting them in brackets, breaks down. Where is the evidence that one group of hostile elites is dominant, and the other submissive? If the biological ‘Aryans’ in power defer to the Jews on certain issues like the ethnonationalism of Israel, what makes us think that they would demand ethnonationalism for “their own people” if they had more leverage over the Jews, when every statement from them points to their total lack of common identity with us? Where is the reason for supposing that the two elite groups are not in fact working in alliance, to pursue globalist purposes and squeeze out traditionalist and conservative rivals for power?

Masochist or sadist?

It seems that the majority of the Alt-Right, “Jew-wise” or not, is afflicted by a very large blind spot concerning biologically-European people who loathe our race, nations and civilisation. Surely this blind spot arises from the conventional ideology of ethnonationalism, which takes as its ideal the unity of elites and people based on a common ethnicity, and has made the common ideological mistake of parleying this ideal into a dubious “primordial fact”. Having taken this fateful step, ethnonationalism as we know it simply lacks the analytical tools to explain hostile elitism by ethnic “compatriots” except in terms of 1) inexplicable mental afflictions and 2) the intrigues of rival ethnic tribes.

To repeat, this is not to say that there are not plenty of rival tribes intriguing against us in the present day. But every one of them, including the Jews, came to us in rags at some point in our modern history, and were given opportunities to take power by the native Western elements that tended towards revolution, anti-tradition and cosmopolitanism. This is why those elements, which have now attained to a more explicitly anti-European form than ever before, deserve to be focused upon more closely by us.

Now, I do not want to be unfair to the ethnonationalists here. As early as the mid-1990s, John “Yggdrasil” Gardner noted the status yearnings that prevented white elites from uniting with the white working class. Kevin MacDonald has investigated not just Jewish machinations but also European psychology, albeit mainly in terms of its susceptibility to Jewish propaganda. Greg Johnson has commented on the issue as well. However, none of these leading figures has attained the status of a Marx-like guru whose instructions are followed to the letter, which means that we must judge the ethnonationalist movement by its general tenor rather than its “fine print”.

In these general terms, it is fair to say that ethnonationalism directs its focus onto other races while ignoring the role of enemies within our own race, and concentrates on the maxim “know thine enemy” to the point of seriously neglecting to “know thyself”. One even encounters rabid hostility by rank-and-file ethnonationalists to any mention of biologically-European villains, the assumption being that to mention them is to exonerate other actors such as the Jewish elite (it implies no such thing). White European elites can be invertebrate “cucks”, they can be blinded by the religion of equality, they can be driven by base economic and status motives, they can be evil and sociopathic at a personal level – but they can never be a hostile community unto themselves pursuing a collective anti-European agenda.

My purpose here is to challenge these assumptions, the reason being that they will almost certainly lead us to failure and defeat. Although some of us may have racial qualms about defining the progressivist white elite as a serious enemy, they have no such scruples with regards to us, and the following will hopefully go some way towards explaining why.

The Anti-European Identity of the Cosmopolitan Elite

Ethnonationalism, due to its ideal of social harmony based on common ethnicity, shares many unfortunate demotist fictions with liberal democracy. The common people are placed in the driving seat of society, as they embody the race and its collective interests, and they generate representative elites who serve these interests more or less competently. This leads to an extremely naïve view of the white masses, whose deus ex machina “awakening” (in response to foreign provocations or civilisational collapse) has been just around the corner for at least twenty years.

Of course identity and tribe are important. However, before we can talk about them in the present context, we must purge all demotist illusions about elites representing the people. For the purgative, we can go to the ‘elite theory’ school of thought, whose foundations were laid in the early twentieth century by Gaetano Mosca, Robert Michels and Vilfredo Pareto.

The main insights of this school are that 1) elites, not masses, drive societies; that 2) oligarchical elites arise in all forms of society; that 3) this happens not through the collective action of the people but through the universal ‘mechanics’ of social organisation; that 4) every ruling elite justifies its rule by a convenient legal and moral principle, called a ‘political formula’; and that 5) all revolutions entail the replacement of one ruling elite by another. James Burnham drew on the work of this school to produce his theory of the ‘managerial revolution’, in which he asserts that the old bourgeois and aristocratic elites of the West have been replaced by a managerial elite working under statist and corporatist political formulas.

Revising and updating the ideas of Burnham, Samuel Francis produced a detailed guide to the nature of the managerial elite in the form of his posthumously published book, Leviathan And Its Enemies. From this extremely rich work, we learn the following about the managerial elite:

• Managerialism arises from the requirements of social control in mass society, and can manifest in either “soft” (Western/social-democratic) or “hard” (fascist/communist) form.
• The managerial elite is concentrated primarily in the mass state, mass corporation and mass media, which do not “balance each other out” as in managerial apologetics, but instead represent a fairly uniform set of managerial interests.
• The managerial elite draw their power from control, not ownership, and are therefore much less bound to place and property than the older bourgeois and aristocratic elites.
• It is in managerial interests to disperse formal ownership as wide as possible, so that it cannot interfere with managerial control, and this manifests as universal suffrage in the state and diffusion of shareholders in the corporation.
• It is in the interests of the “soft” managerial elite to promote unrestricted hedonism and liberation of desires, contrasting with the self-discipline of the bourgeois elite, so as to break the control of traditional and bourgeois institutions over the masses.
• The managerial elite is selected for various skills that can be described as “manipulative” (of laws, technology, people etc.), and thrives on social change (e.g. mass immigration), which generally presents opportunities to expand managerial power.
• The managerial elite is reluctant to use direct violence, due to its preference for manipulation, and tends to use it awkwardly and often counter-productively when forced to do so.
• The managerial elite justifies itself by political formulas centred on the idea that “everyone should be subjected to the science of management”, and thus adopts a meliorist perspective that is very hostile to the idea of unsolvable problems and unchangeable human characteristics.
• The managerial elite has consistently taken a hostile line on the older bourgeois and aristocratic elites (which it replaced), but has been aided by finance-capitalism, which helped to sever bourgeois owners from control of industry and dematerialise private property into abstract electronic money.

Samuel Francis

All of this goes a long way towards explaining why Western elites behave in the way they do, but we are not there yet. Managerialism alone – even “soft managerialism” – cannot account for the vehement anti-European hostility of the present elite. (In any case, Francis himself stressed that any attempt to roll back managerialism in the context of mass society was quixotic, and that the likely result of successful Rightist activism would only be a transition from a “soft” to a “hard” managerial elite.)

To get the full picture, I suggest that we examine the globalist ideal in which the majority of the present Western ruling elite centres its loyalties, and the collective identity to which this gives rise. While choosing not to discuss this issue at length, Francis touches upon it in the following passage:

“[T]he expansionist force in managerial globalism is not the nation from which the managerial elite derives…but the elite itself, which increasingly becomes an autonomous global force, transnational and cosmopolitan in its ideology and interests, and...increasingly alienated from the historic institutions and values of pre-managerial society. Indeed, so far from representing the imperialist expansion of the United States or other Western nations, managerial globalism promotes the erosion of national power and national identity in the face of the expansion of the power of the transnational managerial elite...” (emphasis added)

It is quite obvious that the leftist subversion promoted by the Western managerial elite is directed at the institutions and ideals of the nation, and that attacks on globalist institutions provoke a reaction of conservative horror (to the point at which anti-Brexit elite rhetoric in Britain spontaneously mimics the tropes of conservative tabloids). But does this suggest an independent explanation for the animus of the Western elite towards the European race? Let me have a stab at it.

The dirty little open secret of modern globalism is that it descends directly from European colonialism (right down to the paternalistic expressions of self-sacrificing moral concern for non-whites). This colonialism was based on an unprecendented disparity of power between Europeans and the rest of the world’s races, and it is inevitable that this will – at the very least – even itself out in the modern era. The still mostly-white managerial elite occupying the bureaucratic-corporate power structures of globalism is faced with two important tasks: preventing attempts by Westerners to revert to anti-globalist nationalism within the political formula of democracy, and maintaining globalist legitimacy in a world increasingly populated by non-whites.

Adopting anti-white ideology allows two birds to be killed with one stone. On one hand, the political formula of ‘democracy’ that is essential to legitimate rule in the West can be subverted and redefined by appealing to the higher ideal of ‘world democracy’ (the old managerial trick of diffusing ownership). Perhaps more importantly, the goodwill of resentful non-whites can be won at the expense of the great mass of ordinary non-elite Europeans, as well as the remnants of older bourgeois and aristocratic European elites. All that must be done is to project onto these groups the sins of colonialism (“racism”) and the power presently enjoyed by the managerial elite (“white privilege”) - then ritually sacrifice them and their interests as conspicuously as possible.

This is not solely a matter of amoral self-interest. It has deep roots in the anti-traditional and progressivist element of Western culture, which in modern times has inverted the ethos of traditional Christianity, shifting the burden of sin to the social body and blessing those who attempt to purify themselves by “rising above” it. In Human Sin or Social Sin, Paul Dachslager quotes Richard Bland of Virginia, who wrote during the American Revolution:

“When subjects are deprived of their civil rights, or are dissatisfied with the place they hold in the community, they have a natural right to quit the society of which they are members, and to retire into another country. Now when men exercise this right of withdrawing themselves from their country, they recover their natural freedom and independence; the jurisdiction and sovereignty of the state they have quitted ceases; and if they unite, and by common consent take possession of a new country and form themselves into a political society, they become a sovereign state, independent of the state from which they separated.” (emphasis added)

Until relatively recently, this tendency to rise above the social body on the basis of a “higher” idealism could only go so far. If it attempted to take a collective form, sooner or later it would have to find a country and a people and sink back into the soil of nationalism, as happened even with the internationalist credo of Communism. But now that the rudiments of a corporate-bureaucratic-idealist global state have been brought into existence, a community of elites can centre itself in these structures and go on subverting nations and traditions ad infinitum, at least as long as they can keep their host populations from seceding into independence.

Such a group is no longer loyal to the nation-state, or to the civilisation of Europe, much less to the white race. It gives its loyalties to the globalist project, and identifies with the structures of globalist power; therefore, its members are no longer truly Englishmen or Germans or Americans or even Europeans, but Cosmopolitans or ‘citizens of the world’. They are, to all intents and purposes, a self-centred foreign body in our midst, which values our countries only insofar as they stand as outposts of globalist power.

It is absolutely crucial for people on the Alt-Right to draw a dividing line within the white race between Cosmopolitans, who identify with the globalist structure and project, and Europeans, who identify with race, nation and civilisation. This is not easy or straightforward, as the European identity is dormant and stigmatised at present, while the Cosmopolitan identity frequently hides itself behind platitudes, myths and globalist-friendly rewritten national histories. But it must be done, or else all attempts to wield white ethnonationalism as a weapon will result in that weapon falling apart or blowing up in our faces.

The White Scapegoat

As a foreign army on campaign draws traitors and mercenaries to its cause, the Cosmopolitan elite serves as the centre of gravity for an anti-European alliance in the West, which works to squeeze out pro-European rivals for power (whether these be managerial, bourgeois or aristocratic). We can term this grouping the Cosmopolitan Alliance, and identify the following major elements within it:

1. The Cosmopolitan elite itself (defined as a managerial elite loyal only to itself and to the globalist project; most of these are biological whites, but not exclusively so);
2. The Jewish diaspora elite in the West;
3. The foreign (non-white) presence in the West;
4. The domestic terrorist movement in the lower strata of the population, generally synonymous with the organised Left, whose function is to attack non-Cosmopolitan power structures and terrorise and humiliate Europeans (note: it is here that we can speak of “traitors”, “collaborators”, mental disorders, and sometimes a form of white self-loathing).

Now, it is perfectly legitimate to debate among ourselves over which of these enemy groups (in practice, usually [1] or [2]) has more power in this or that Western polity. But the reasons for viewing the Cosmopolitan elite as the crux of the alliance speak for themselves.

First, their power and presence is more or less consistent throughout the Western world (which is far from true of the Jews, who have a massive presence in the United States and a very small one in certain parts of Europe). Second, it would be impossible for a mere cabal of foreigners and Jews to rule the West with any semblance of legitimacy were it not for the Cosmopolitan elite. These can, as we have seen, play on an implicit assumption of white identity when it suits them, and can provide an illusion of continuity by rewriting national histories into a series of stepping-stones towards the globalist dawn.

The Strategic Focus of the Alt-Right

Let us return to the topic of the Alt-Right and the role of ethnonationalism within it. In its present form, the Alt-Right is a diffuse intellectual movement, which has won its converts so far through a simple willingness to tell forbidden truths. Strategy is, quite rightly, something of a dirty word in this movement, because it usually heralds some plan of action that requires us to dissimulate in some way: one example is the ‘mainstreaming strategy’ of feigning common ground with the enemy, and another is the equally insincere ‘Kursk Strategy’ of eating 70-year-old shit thrown at us by the enemy while gagging and trying to smile.

The Alt-Right should not try to adopt any strategy that straitjackets the free play of our ideas, or conflicts in any way with our mission to tell truths about human nature, political power, the Jewish Question, or anything else. However, thought is never turned into effective action without a transition to the simplest form of strategy, which we can term strategic focus: the identification of a single target on which to concentrate the majority of one’s energies. After all, the human eye works by focusing on a centre, albeit without excluding the objects in its periphery; and it is true of an individual that he can rarely achieve anything of significance without focusing on a single point. This is much more true of a metapolitical movement, which confronts formidable challenges of mobilisation and coordination, and must move directly along the rails of simple ideas.

Those of us on the Alt-Right who are inclined to draw up a laundry-list of grievances, grouping them under some catch-all heading like ‘modernity’ or ‘degeneracy’, typically end up getting nowhere. Those who choose the wrong strategic focus fare little better. The men’s movement, when it is simply telling forbidden truths, is an invaluable goldmine of insights on female nature; but when it tries to take action, it chooses to attack the disastrous strategic focal point of ‘women’, a full half of the population that men are biologically inclined towards protecting. This is why that movement not only accomplishes little externally, but creates a toxic internal atmosphere as well.

One reason why ethnonationalism plays such a vital role in the Alt-Right is because it has a relatively effective strategic focus, which we can term the foreign presence. Europeans are to be mobilised against the urgent threat of dispossession by foreigners, and many of the sundry ailments of our body politic – like the appalling behaviour of our women – can be remedied in train due to the internal need to pull together against the external threat. Mobilisation against external enemies is what human communities do best; and when the Jewish Question is properly acknowledged in ethnonationalism, much of the objective cultural degeneracy of the West can also be targeted, because secular Jewish elites took a leading hand in promoting it.

However, while a strategic focus on foreigners alone would be good enough to mobilise Arabs or Chinese, it is not suitable to the special conditions of Europe. As we have seen, it ignores or plays down the massive internal division in Western civilisation between nationalists and Cosmopolitans, embracing some of our worst enemies as misguided or afflicted fellow ‘Aryans’. Where it takes note of this division, it tends to blame it all on the Jews, to the point at which ethnonationalists will even accuse random comrades who disagree with them of being Jews. This gives rise to ruptures elsewhere, for instance the religious schism caused by anti-Semitic assaults on the Christian religion, which is as pointless as it is rancorous.

And these are just the internal problems. As we have seen, Cosmopolitans often rely upon an assumption of basic identity between themselves and ordinary whites: this allows them to identify as “virtuous” people who have overcome their parochial identities, it allows them to rule the West under the political formulas of ‘democracy’ and ‘meritocracy’, and it allows them to gain non-white goodwill through ritual sacrifice of lower-class European interests. All of these are reinforced by ethnonationalist cries for “white unity” - indeed, some of us could not be making it easier for them.

Pepsi Rebellion™

We also mentioned that “soft” managerial elites have an awkward relationship with the use of state violence. However, Cosmopolitans are mostly comfortable with the use of state violence to “protect racial minorities”, and every instance of such protection strengthens their alliance with such groups. Legislation against “hate speech” has turned ethnic minority groups into the metapolitical equivalent of heavily defended fortresses, and constantly making direct assaults on them is a good way to get mown down. This contrasts with the relative lack of protection surrounding the Cosmopolitan managerial elite itself, which is obliged to hide behind a set of illusions (theirs and ours), and must take a soft line on subversion and free speech so as to foment Pepsi Rebellion™ against non-managerial and non-Cosmopolitan power structures.

The ethnonationalist might reply that these difficulties could yet be overcome by a mass “white awakening”, and let us grant him this for the sake of argument. Let us say that some unprecedented foreign outrage (a difficult thing to imagine today!) caused a mass uprising of whites, powerful and widespread enough to make Cosmopolitan sentiment taboo, and that the representatives of this movement got themselves voted into high office and set about liberating Europe from the foreign presence. What would be the result of this?

The short answer is that public anger would soon weaken and start to falter. Pace demotism, the masses might be capable of “awakening” into concentrated anger for relatively short periods, but their default state is dissipation and sleep. Once the popular tide had receded, the institutions of managerial power might be short a good many Jews, but they would probably still be full of impeccably ‘Aryan’ Cosmopolitans – and these would sooner or later set about lulling, manipulating, guilt-tripping and disenfranchising the people back into a state of slumber, so as to start the whole nightmare of European dispossession over again. We can be sure of this, because the foreign presence in the West was born from the internal revolutionary and anti-traditional tendencies that have now crystallised into Cosmopolitanism – not the other way around.

Strategic focus cannot dissipate itself in the periphery, and nor can it project itself too far ahead. Given the difficulties of mass coordination, if the first step of your revolutionary plan is to do X, then you should resign yourself to the likelihood of X being the only step in your plan that will end up fulfilled – unless, of course, the accomplishment of X puts you in a favourable position to do Y. Unless we assume some primordial state of white racial unity just waiting to be restored, it is obvious that “shooting our bolt” against the foreign presence does not put us in a favourable position to remove the Cosmopolitan elite from power, or even curtail their actions in the long run.

My solution is simple. Modify the strategic focus of ethnonationalism, focusing primarily on the Cosmopolitan elite as the main target, and relegating the rest of the foreign presence and organised Left to its various projections. Call not for “white unity”, but for deep and visible polarisation between the Cosmopolitan elite and the European populations of Western countries, who are latent converts to our cause by dint of their ethnicity as well as their dependence on the nation-state. Look not to a mass “awakening”, but to a Rightist counter-elite, capable of using mass uprisings as well as other opportunities to supplant Cosmopolitans in positions of power.

This would not, of course, relieve us of the necessity of struggle against the foreign presence, which after all is colonising our nations. However, it would allow us to convert a great many more Europeans to our cause, many of whom suffer the parasitism of Cosmopolitan managers even if they have never had negative experiences with ethnic minorities. It would give us a great deal of tactical flexibility, allowing us to keep up our attacks regardless of how oppressive “hate speech” legislation becomes. And instead of charging into the fortified positions held by “victim groups”, and allowing the elites to swoop down on chargers and play the white saviour, we could attack the elite directly and force the less mobile and flexible victim groups to come to its defence – which, if repeated often enough, would swiftly dispel public illusions about the “morality” of their alliance.

Practical Strategy: Rejectionism and Liberationism

The concept of Cosmopolitanism, which works to sever the present ruling elite from the European population and polarise them against each other, is in my view crucial to the cause of the Right. As we have seen, the lack of such a concept has hampered the strategic focus of ethnonationalists to a certain extent. However, this muddying of strategic focus has been even more serious in the case of the majority of conservative whites.

Having failed to clearly distinguish the elite from the people, many whites who deplore the plight of Europe have simply thrown up their hands and sighed “we’re doing it to ourselves”. Where major political movements have arisen out of popular conservative anger, they have focused themselves upon abstract and universal targets: “statism” in the case of libertarianism, and “elitism” in the case of populism. As statism (i.e. managerialism) is probably a fact of modern mass society, and elitism is a fact of all societies everywhere, these movements have mostly proven quixotic and ineffective.

Not a useful outlet for white political anger.

The concept of Cosmopolitanism can be used as a bridge between the particularist focus of ethnonationalists and the confused political yearnings of conservatives, bringing them into a common understanding, and focusing the white anger behind libertarianism and populism by localising it in the present metapolitical war to rescue Europe. When this is done, the universal abstractions of populism and libertarianism are also localised and transmuted into anti-Cosmopolitan metapolitical strategies, which we can term rejectionism and liberationism.

Rejectionism is the ‘passive’ side of activism, suitable for what Antonio Gramsci called a war of position, in which the ruling elite has basic popular legitimacy and we are far removed from any positions of power that would allow us to carry on an open struggle against it. In such circumstances, which in our case may include stringent restrictions on openly criticising the foreign presence, we should lead with a negative critique of the ruling elite and try to push most of our people into a state of radical disillusionment.

Leading with negative attacks on the elite (i.e. before trying to convert our people to positive alternatives) widens the impact of our efforts, as more people can be converted to these positions. Focusing on the Cosmopolitan elite makes the task of corroding enemy legitimacy easier: Europeans can gain status points for graciously refusing to believe that Muslims or Jews have undue power over them, but no-one in the increasingly economically stratified West wants to feel like a mug or dupe of globalist interests.

The virtue of rejectionism is that it is cheap, easy, and permits us to engage in activism regardless of the severity of government persecution (even Falun Gong in China print rejectionist slogans onto commonly used banknotes). However, at no point should the Alt-Right content of rejectionism be concealed or denied. We want our people to associate all resistance against the current system with our movement, and for the elite to believe this and react in paranoid ways to all public discontent, so that their tame cuckservatives and Pepsi Rebels™ can no longer hope to co-opt such sentiment. To this end, we can identify true and useful critiques currently monopolised by déclassé elements of the Left, yet compatible with our own ideas (e.g. the Old Left critique of global capitalism), and take them over in such a way as to make them our own.

In brighter circumstances, in which rejectionist efforts have done their work and we have a means of attaining power, we can build up popular support and directly attack the elite through liberationism. If we can take control of the executive power in nation-states, as Marine Le Pen is presently attempting to do, our main priority will be to: 1) secede from globalist power structures that undermine the nation-state from above, and 2) counteract the foreign presence that does the same thing from below. But the present managerial class in the West will not allow either of these, so we must also 3) remove as many of them from the power structures of the West as possible.

This will mean abolishing vast swathes of the managerial state, particularly those in which Cosmopolitan influence has deeply embedded itself. As the name suggests, liberationism can take many practical suggestions on how to do this from libertarianism. In fact, we can even continue to refer to these policies as “libertarian”. However, the point here is not to strive for some pipe-dream of perfect anarchy; the point is, in the words of Sean Gabb who advocates a similar plan, “to smash the present ruling class”.

This entails taking a more realistic approach than libertarianism. Rather than declaring general war on “statism”, we would have to first ally with or build up influence in certain key institutions (or create alternatives to them, as we are presently doing with the media) and use them to attack our targets in conjunction with general public outcry against elite parasitism. This would, of course, presuppose the existence of a Rightist counter-elite capable of acting in such a way.

As Gabb notes, doing away with welfare as insisted upon by libertarians would be incredibly stupid, as it would give an instant groundswell of popular support to our enemies. But we could restrict the provision of welfare in our people’s favour, and convert it to pure monetary payments to those who need it, so as to keep its dissemination firmly in our own hands while throwing more of our enemies out of work. Another departure from libertarianism would be an attack on corporate power, e.g. by very high top tax rates as suggested by Yggdrasil, and the redistribution of spoils to our people.

Moreover, once our hypothetical counter-elite has established control over the much reduced state and set about remedying the crises of the West, what happens to the power structure in the long run is an open-ended question. If the pullulation of managerialism after our initial destruction of Cosmopolitan power can be held in check, then we will end up with something very close to the neoreactionary ideal: a state with increased power traded off against reduced size. If not, then we will end up with what Francis called a “hard managerial state”. The point is not to insist on one or the other, but to ensconce our own ideology as the sole legitimate political formula, so that any future developments or non-developments will take place on our terms.

Of course, all of this is far in the future (though maybe not as far as some of us are inclined to think), and I do not pretend to have described any of it in detail. However, I strongly believe that these are the questions we ought to be discussing on the Alt-Right.