IN PRAISE OF DECONSTRUCTING RACE AND GENDER

by James Lawrence

The year 2018 has only just started, and it’s already shaping up to be a very bad year for the proponents of the “horseshoe theory”. Last week, classical liberal and horseshoe enthusiast ‘Sargon of Akkad’ took on Richard Spencer in a three-hour Youtube debate – and not only made a fool of himself from the beginning, but had to be helped later on by SJW and male cat lady Kevin Logan, who according to Sargon’s theory should have sided instinctively with Spencer. The peddlers of watered-down red pills on the periphery of the Alt-Right must be wondering how long they can stay in business, taking money for blowing hot air at the Left while dismissing as “collectivist” and “immoral” the only sociopolitical movement that can actually fight it.

So let’s be magnanimous in victory, and throw the poor beleagured gatekeepers a vaguely horseshoe-shaped bone for them to crow over. Here it is: what if the Alt-Right stopped directly resisting progressivist efforts to “deconstruct” race, nation and gender, and instead started turning these critiques to its own advantage?

Contrary to the horseshoe-mongers, this would never require us to adopt Leftist philosophical premises. The importance of deconstruction and ‘critical theory’ in general lies in the social consequences of its rhetoric, not in the tomes of its fraudulent and incoherent theorists. This rhetoric amounts in practice to a form of pervasive signalling against the groups and concepts underpinning the social order, with the goal of encouraging maximum disunity and defection within them, so that society can be fragmented into a mass of atoms incapable of resisting managerial-plutocratic control.

Why not simply oppose this rhetorical assault? Firstly, in spite of our argumentation, the sticks and carrots of authority all work to stop us from enforcing loyalty to the groups and concepts under attack. Secondly, the very fact of an existential threat to these groups and concepts should hint at weaknesses and contradictions within them. Ironically enough, the real fault lines are usually located in the aspects of a concept left un-deconstructed by the progressivists – indeed, in the very ground they are standing upon in order to perpetuate their demolition campaign.

Take, for instance, the concept of the white race in the American Empire. According to progressivists, ‘whiteness’ is intrinsically linked to colonialist exploitation of non-whites, and this identity is therefore uniquely illegitimate (which is why one critique of white identity makes an argument for black identity in a footnote to its very first paragraph). All whites live their lives marinated in unearned racial privilege, for which they ought to feel guilty, and make amends by supporting state-sponsored discrimination in favour of non-whites. Whiteness is artificially normalised and lionised, so all cultural output must be filled with hagiographic portrayals of non-whites to correct this. And as whites are at the top of the racial power structure, only they can be truly “racist”, which is why group organisation on a racial basis is only acceptable for non-whites.

For progressivists, “deconstructing whiteness” means pointing out and criticising all of this, as well as lecturing the rest of the white population on their moral responsibility to submit to some form of atonement. But when the majority of whites get to holler back – and they have certainly found their voice in recent years – they reply that colonialism is over, whiteness is just one group identity among all the others, “racism” is a kind of clannish animosity found in all racial groups, and “privilege” does not accrue to whites uniformly or exclusively. The progressivists respond by concluding that the majority of whites are just plain wrong, that they don’t understand history or morality or whatever, and continue hectoring them. In other words, they abandon any pretence to critique and deconstruction, and content themselves with imposing their own master narrative.

Instead of taking up the opposite narrative, and futilely trying to erase the sincere experience of white guilt, why don’t we just do away with the monolithic concept of ‘whiteness’ altogether? After all, as Mencius Moldbug observed a decade ago, the white population in the American Empire is fundamentally divided: by social caste, culture, political faction, and relation to non-white minorities. People are loyal to these castes and factions, and identify with them, whereas this cannot be said of ‘whiteness’ anywhere outside the editorial staffs of a few racialist websites.

"White saviour" dreams lead to "white guilt" nightmares.

Now, in light of Moldbug’s observations, could it be possible that some whites really do relate to non-whites in an intrinsically neo-colonialist manner – as members of the economic classes employing cheap foreign labour, as commanders of the progressivist political faction that mobilises blacks and immigrants as auxiliaries, and as believers in the globalist project that continues the old imperialist racket while pretending to repudiate it? Can we not also say that these people not only possess unearned privilege, but also privilege linked to race, in the sense that they stand atop a white social structure and that their role as benefactors to non-whites is conditioned by this? And is it not also true that the subtle and hypocritical racial prejudice of the “white saviour”, so frustratingly ineradicable, is unique to this group of whites and has no place in other racial groups?

All of this only becomes untrue when it is extended beyond this category of whites: to those lower-class members of the race who see immigrants as competition for jobs and services rather than hired help, and worry about how to avoid black ghettos rather than how to manipulate them for political purposes. These whites relate to non-whites in a tribalist manner, not a neo-colonialist one, and one-sidedly dredging up areas of history in which their ancestors gained some transitory benefits from colonialism does not change this. Of course, if you like, we can lump their behaviour into the category of “racism” as well – but it does not depend on exploitation, produce any privileges worth the name, or differ in essence from tribalist sentiments in pre-colonialist and non-white societies.

Here we see a common result of deconstructive critique: a narrative claiming universal validity turns out to be quite parochial and self-interested in reality. In speaking of unearned privilege, pervasive racism and the ineradicable stain of colonialist history, progressivists accurately describe their own experience; but in projecting this onto the majority of whites, they displace their guilt into self-righteousness, and turn “atonement” to their own advantage. Affirmative action for “disadvantaged” minorities (no East Asians please!) is a classic patronage system, which only causes serious pain to whites with few opportunities in life; and banning whites from racial organisation might help blacks and others goad them with impunity, but not as much as it helps progressivist elites keep their own necks out of nationalist ropes.

We see more progressivist self-interest masquerading as high moral virtue when we turn to my own country, in which the object of our critique is the British nation. On this miserable once-great island, even the national flag is loathed by progressivists and regarded with suspicion by the authorities; and if there is still plenty of media twittering about Britishness, the purpose of this is only to neuter the national identity of the people by associating it with foreign immigrants and globalist abstractions like “tolerance”. The rhetoric of deconstructive critique, by producing scepticism towards the idea of a shared national community in which the interests of the elite are merged with those of the people, has no doubt smoothed the path for the new upper class to impose its nation-destroying consensus of neoliberalism, globalism and mass immigration.

But when this class wants to virtue-signal at the public’s expense, all this scepticism and contempt directed at the nation suddenly goes out of the window. During the migrant crisis, when politicians, public figures and left-wing organisations tirelessly lectured the British public on the need for surrender compassion, practically all of them came out with some or other variation on the mantra “We Must Do More”.

Who exactly is this “we”, kemosabe? If you spend decades on end attacking the national community, and loudly disavowing any responsibility to it that would interfere with your modern-day blackbirding and political gerrymandering, don’t be surprised when most people in the nation no longer accept your presumption to speak for them.

The fact that the British people no longer consider themselves bound to the elite is indicated by the fact that several prominent virtue-signallers, such as the obnoxious celebrities Bob Geldof and J.K. Rowling, were castigated as hypocrites for failing to house migrants on their own expensive private properties. (One of these even responded by citing “language barriers” and “alien culture”, the sort of thing routinely shouted down as xenophobic when voiced by ordinary Britons.) But this hardly begins to deconstruct the outrageous pretence to virtue that hides under a false conception of national unity – and is constantly reinforced by misguided nationalists who think it necessary to keep asserting that unity.

Source

Consider the social underpinnings of left-wing political affiliation in Britain, which in the present day almost always goes hand-in-hand with virtue-signalling on behalf of refugees and asylum-seekers. Perhaps the strongest redoubt is formed by the one-quarter of British employees who belong to the public (i.e. state-employed) sector, which furnishes most of the membership for the trades unions affiliated with the progressivist Labour Party. The universities, most of which are subsidised by the state, are filled with progressivist lecturers whose ideas find a ready audience in a mass of unproductive students. There are more left-wingers in the female population than among males, again partly because women are a majority of public employees and a higher percentage of benefits recipients; and ethnic minorities, a more-or-less reliable source of Labour support at the ballot box, are also disproportionately dependent on the state (see the chart on the left). Atop this state-dependent and non-net-taxpaying support base sits a well-heeled progressivist upper class – most visibly represented by self-enriching politicians, tax-dodging celebrity virtue-signallers, and the state-suckled journalists and producers of the BBC – hectoring the exasperated tax-serf population on its supposed lack of generosity to migrants.

Take away the fig-leaf of common nationality supposedly holding these two groups together, and the illusion of moral virtue against stubborn parsimony simply melts away. What we see instead is a cynical attempt by those in power to indulge in personal status-signalling, and create new patronage structures in the process, at the expense and inconvenience of the productive majority. It is all quite analogous to the neoliberal racket of “privatised profits and nationalised losses”.

I am not arguing that we do away with the concept of the nation per se. What I am saying is that this concept, larded with self-destructive contradictions as it presently is, must be broken down into its basic components before it can be reconstructed in a stronger form. Instead of asserting unities that exist only in our own minds, we should proceed with this deconstruction according to honest observation of reality.

In the case of semi-artificial nations such as Britain or the United States, we should look first for the ethnic groups underpinning them: these represent autonomous social forces centred on the people, whereas the ‘patriotic’ mythology surrounding them is mostly the creation of the state and ruling elite, and can only be used against us now that state power has fallen into progressivist hands. In Britain, then, we must speak of the English, Scottish, Irish and Welsh peoples; we can do the same for the native populations of European countries; and we can coin the term Americaner for the European-descended population of the United States identifying as ‘American’.

At the core of each of these groups, we find those people within them who still think and act as members of a nation (regardless of whether they are part of our movement, or indeed politicised at all). However, around these people in whom the nation still lives and breathes, there swarms a vast mass of individual atoms who have practically reverted to the self-contained existence of vegetables in a field. We might refer to them, slightly pejoratively, as “white mannequins”, as we do not know which colours they will end up wearing when they are inevitably reabsorbed into a wider group.

Both of these groups must be distinguished from the progressivist ruling elites who constantly attack and subvert the nation – and, regardless of their biological origin, have in effect ceased to be a part of it, having transferred their loyalty ‘upwards’ to the globalist power structure and ‘downwards’ to the non-white world majority. Calling these people globalists and multiculturalists, as if they have shallowly adopted these ideas in the manner of a college kid cycling through ideologies like socialism and libertarianism, understates the extent to which they identify with these new centres of loyalty. A better term would be cosmopolitan – and in order to fully evoke the idea of a pseudo-national identity, let’s not forget to capitalise it as Cosmopolitan.

#NotYour(((FellowWhitePerson)))

Finally, there should be no confusion as to the identities of the ethnic minorities living in the West. For people on the Right, this is an obvious point in every case except that of the Jewish people – who are, of course, far overrepresented among the Western elite and always in the vanguard of anti-nationalism, yet seem to find it to their advantage to keep up a tiresome and dishonest obfuscation of the question of their ‘whiteness’. Since we have helpfully agreed to deconstruct whiteness, these people can now only be identified as Jews, or in some cases as Cosmopolitans.

Those who have followed my argument up to this point should be able to anticipate much of what I have to say on the subject of gender. Undoubtedly the #MeToo scandal has exploded into a misandrist moral panic, driven by hysterical and vindictive women jockeying to play the victim over “unwanted sexual attention”. But the earlier stages of the scandal, which exposed media elite perverts like Harvey Weinstein, did the service of allowing us a rare glimpse behind the curtain: having long known that progressivists project their own sins onto the rest of society, we finally got to see what exactly they had been projecting onto ordinary men during their many campaigns against “rape culture” and “toxic masculinity”. Although the women currently driving #MeToo have been herded back into the usual scattergun attack on all men, and are doing a good job of obscuring the depravity of progressivist and Jewish elites from the general public under a smokescreen of meaningless noise, it is easy enough for us to distinguish the behaviour of the Louis CKs and Weinsteins from the petty masculine infractions twittered over by these melting snowflakes.

Anyone who doubts the role of this projection in the war on men should take a careful look at this article, by an achingly right-on Progressivist of Colour. Here, a cloud of self-flagellating misandrist outrage obscures a clever attempt to downplay the actions of sex-abusing big names like Louis CK – along with, perhaps, whatever has caused the author to write sentences like “we are all active contributors to rape culture” – by arbitrarily projecting these misdeeds onto the entire male population. I am not saying that everyone outside the progressivist citadel is a saint; but with its media priesthood (both male and female) exposed as utter hypocrites, and self-described male feminists constantly making the headlines for paedophilia, rape and sexual assault, it makes more sense for us to prejudge a moralising prog as a closet pervert than it does for him to prejudge us as “toxic contributors to rape culture” or whatever.

However, the deeper motives for progressivist misandry cannot be reduced to such projection. In order to get at them, perhaps we must go as far as to deconstruct the concept of binary gender itself.

Let’s be clear on this: “deconstructing binary gender” does not mean “agreeing with anything that progressivists have to say about non-binary gender”. Obviously it is absurd to suggest that gender is entirely divorced from sex, that genital mutilation and crossdressing can turn a man into a woman or vice versa, that an individual can simply decide which gender he/she/zhit wants to be today, or that the rest of society must be compelled by legal violence to join in these fantasies. But I do not see why the Alt-Right must follow senile conservatives into an overly simplistic view of gender, when one of the most interesting Rightist works on the subject – Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character – had the following to say on the subject:

We assign sex to human beings from their birth on one character only, and so come to add contrary ideas to our conceptions. … Is it really true that all women and men are marked off sharply from each other, the women, on the one hand, alike in all points, the men on the other?

There exist all sorts of intermediate conditions between male and female – sexual transitional forms. … In the same fashion we may suppose the existence of an ideal man, M, and of an ideal woman, W, as sexual types, although these types do not actually exist. Such types not only can be constructed, but must be constructed. As in art so in science, the real purpose is to reach the type, the Platonic Idea.

In light of modern genetics (Weininger wrote in 1903), we cannot deny that sex is determined in a binary fashion – but we can still apply Weininger’s insight to the categories of psychology and behaviour, and use the word gender here, without endorsing the idiotic claim that the one is wholly divorced from the other.

Progressivists hate Weininger for his writings on women, but love the idea of non-binary gender, because they see in it another weapon to batter down the social order. But just as Cosmopolitans, a selfish group in reality, must stand upon the concept of the nation in order to project an illusion of virtue, feminists can only make their sweeping generalisations about men and women on the basis of a binary gender model. Let’s take a look at how we might break this down.

In his post on the socio-sexual hierarchy, Vox Day extends the popular classification of males into Alphas, Betas and Omegas, adding such categories as Deltas, Sigmas and Lambdas. Now, this has attracted a great deal of criticism, much of it admittedly quite fair: first that Vox has gone too far and overtaxed a rough working model, and second that both the original and new classifications rely too heavily on female approval of men as a criterion. But even if everything else had to be thrown out of the window, Vox’s definition of the Gamma male (expanded upon in several of his articles and comments) would stand as a true archetype, one that seems to be popping up all over the present-day West by some sort of asexual reproduction.

Gamma male John Scalzi

While lack of success with women is common for Gammas, it is psychological and behavioural traits that really make the type. The defining psychology of a Gamma is the “secret king” mentality, i.e. egoism divorced from any objective measure of status. Although it has been said that masculinity, unlike femininity, is a ladder on which men strive and compete, a Gamma can never touch that ladder: any overt striving or competition would open up the possibility of defeat, while a pose of exalted non-participation preserves the delusion of constant victory. If ever defeated objectively in some matter, a Gamma will persuade himself otherwise through all sorts of mental contortions, which were satirised as “spiritual victories” in the Chinese author Lu Xun’s True Story of Ah Q.

A good example can be found in this blog post by progressivist Gamma male John Scalzi, in which he claims superiority over “quivering bro-puppets” for not “collapsing into a pile of testerical insecurity” after being outlifted by his high-school-aged daughter. In a normal middle-aged man, being humiliated at weightlifting by a girl would cause feelings of insecurity, which might spur him to get into shape and surpass her in order to salvage his pride. But Scalzi lays claim to that pride fraudulently, so to speak, by feigning indifference, and redefining this posture as a mark of true inner strength and maturity and spiritual victory blah blah blah.

Gamma behaviour follows from this mentality and reinforces it at the same time. In place of open and honest competition, a Gamma resorts to petty one-upmanship, snark and backbiting, and lacks the ability to take lampooning in good humour or let conflicts go after he has been worsted. He worships females one minute, loathes them the next, and plagues the objects of his affection with obsessive behaviour such as stalking. In a position of authority or leadership, he is an unmitigated disaster. Although Gamma is synonymous with cowardice, it would be a mistake to confuse this with non-violence: just take a look at the article “My liberal white [Jewish] male rage”, by a self-confessed coward with obvious Gamma traits, and take note of the reaction he gets when he divulges his bloody Männerphantasien to his fellow male progressivists.

Could it be possible that what we are calling a ‘Gamma male’ is best understood as an intermediate gender form – a male who shows some of the thought processes and behaviour patterns of a female? This would explain the increasing numbers of Gammas in the soft environment of the modern West, and it would enable us to understand Gamma traits – backbiting, timidity, lack of conflict resolution, the desire for high status without the need for accomplishment – according to a unified theory. We could even save on words altogether by expressing the concept of the Gamma male through the following symbol:

Now, while Gamma males are found in many walks of life and are quite vocal on the internet, they are especially numerous in progressivist causes such as feminism and social justice. Indeed, progressivists have long hoped for men to become feminised, uncompetitive and “secure in themselves” – but just as the masculine female has acquired the vices of men without any of their virtues, the feminine male has turned out to be a mix of violence without courage and lust without attractiveness. And it is this awkwardness and impairment, which also results from biological conditions such as Kleinfelter Syndrome, that is the true state of those “sexual transitional forms” that find themselves too far removed from the poles of male and female.

Predictably, the response to the bitter fruits of revolution has been to double down, and continue the hunt for Trotskyite saboteurs in the form of a comically stereotyped “toxic masculinity”. But if there are real human motives driving the participants in this moral crusade, they are probably 1) the resentment of progressivist Gamma males for all masculine men without exception, and 2) the revulsion of progressivist women for the behaviour of these very same Gamma males around them. The masculine male plays only a bit part in this scenario, serving as a canvas for the projection of sicknesses that do not belong to him.

Once again, we see a narrow and flawed progressivist narrative shorn of its universal pretensions. The social justice shriekers are not fit to tell us anything about “toxic masculinity”; they can only furnish us with a devastating case against toxic male femininity. And we can apply the same reasoning to masculinised women vs. their feminine counterparts: Weininger remarked that all the female writers and feminist agitators have succeeded only in voicing the thoughts and desires of masculine women, while the feminine woman remains eternally silent. To what extent do masculinised feminists dominate their feminine “sisters” by the violent methods commonly attributed to men, without tempering this with any sort of love or generosity? Have feminine women not passed from a society designed to ensure their self-fulfillment as mothers to one in which they are held in a barren subjection, often under the direct management of masculinised women, who either boss them about in the workplace or pay them a meagre wage to scrub their toilets and take care of their children?

To sum up, I have tried to demonstrate two points in the course of this argument. The first is philosophical: if we cannot impose a positive doctrine of society, we have no need to fear a negative critique as long as this is pursued without hypocrisy, for the social basis of the Alt-Right is far more durable than the standing of the progressivist upper class. The second is practical: a deconstructive analysis and rhetoric, based in our own principles, can act for us as a sort of metapolitical shield of Perseus. We need not worry about making our own worldview heard above the constant squawking of the fake news media; just perfect a few ideas and arguments, present them as logical conclusions to the dominant narratives, and all the exquisite poisons prepared for us by progressivists turn back on them and corrode their own legitimacy.

Don’t be surprised, though, when the new upper class reacts to this with the self-righteous tantrums of a brat forced to share his favourite toys. Just look at what happened when ordinary white men on the internet got hold of the tactic of transgression, whereupon the splendid fun of épater le bourgeois turned into the lumpen social menace of trolling, and suddenly hurting people’s feelings became tantamount to physical violence. If the Alt-Right takes up deconstructive critique in force, expect this practice to be renamed to “concept-murder”, and banned from public discourse as a Russian-Chinese plot against Our Great and Prosperous Democracy.