The decade-long story of the Alt-Right can be summarised as a tale of ascent, peak, and fall, which has presently come full circle and arrived back at square one. The decentralised structure destroyed by Richard Spencer during 2016-17 has reasserted itself under the name of the Dissident Right, while the rump Alt-Right that still cleaves to Spencer's leadership has taken up the role of the sixty-year-old neo-Nazi stuckment. The external fortunes of the Right have improved, in the sense that greater numbers of people now accept its ideas, but also worsened, in the sense that the government crackdown on those ideas has intensified. One thing has continued progressing in a more or less linear direction, and that is the destruction of the West.
There is no point in using words like "blackpilling" to dismiss those who ask whether the whole thing has not been a failure. The point we should be making instead is that a failed endeavour is not necessarily futile, as long as we can draw lessons from the experience and slough off the wrong thoughts and wrong actions that contributed to our failure. This is what I am trying to do, and although imparting all of my thoughts on the subject will require a few longer posts, this one will point out three of the more obvious lessons.
There is no point in using words like "blackpilling" to dismiss those who ask whether the whole thing has not been a failure. The point we should be making instead is that a failed endeavour is not necessarily futile, as long as we can draw lessons from the experience and slough off the wrong thoughts and wrong actions that contributed to our failure. This is what I am trying to do, and although imparting all of my thoughts on the subject will require a few longer posts, this one will point out three of the more obvious lessons.
Lesson #1: Those who warned us that democratic politics is no longer a viable option have been vindicated.
If the Alt-Right at its peak (around 2015 or so) can be said to have achieved anything, it would be contributing to the election of Donald Trump. At the time I thought this was a great victory, but I wrote very little directly touching Trump, because I didn't want to jump on his hype train and then be forced to recant when he failed to deliver on his promises.
Admittedly, nothing could have prepared me for the sheer brazenness of what we have seen over the past two years. Constant blockage on the promise of a border wall; a huge media defamation campaign; constant secret police interference; open sedition whipped up by the Gilded Resistance and the antifa terrorist mobs; and finally, the very advance of thoughtcrime repression that was anticipated from a Democrat presidency, and motivated people to vote Trump in the first place.
My natural reaction to this (and to the travesty of Brexit) has been to tune out those who like to talk about the revenge of democracy and the people's will, and to begin paying more attention to those who warned us that liberalism and democracy were leftist rackets all along. One of these is Mencius Moldbug, who told us that democratic politics in the American empire are manipulated by a progressive 'Cathedral' composed of the academy, the media and the bureaucracy. For a time, the rise of Trumpism and the successes of the Alt-Right in using leftist tactics against the Left seemed to disprove this, but in the long run the diagnosis has been vindicated. And although Moldbug is not nearly as strong on prescription, we can at least take from his work the lesson that the only election worth having would be a referendum on abolishing democracy.
If Trump is now being pinned down and neutered by the Cathedral in a way that is more visible than ever before, then the obvious way to snatch victory from this defeat is by using it to wake people up. We would do this by pointing out that the game is rigged, actively red-pilling the intelligent and open-minded, and passively corroding the allegiance to democracy in the minds of the majority. And we would be careful to separate this critique of democracy from personal and emotional attacks on Trump. The status of "Donald Trump" as a focal point for popular dissent was not gained by a few rash promises, but built up in the course of a media promotion campaign dating back to the 1970s, and preserving it in some form will make it easier to set it against older focal points like "The U.S. Constitution" and "The Popular Will".
To give credit where it's due, even the Breitbarters are taking a few baby steps towards this end, by harping on the themes of the "Deep State" and the "Swamp" obstructing Trump's agenda. But many in the Dissident Right - and particularly in the rump neo-Nazi Alt-Right - would rather sit in place, throw a tantrum, and retard any progress against the popular faith in democracy by distorting everything into a simple narrative of betrayal by Trump. Having helped to destroy the Alt-Right by volunteering to corroborate the media narrative on "neo-Nazi Trump supporters", these big brained nibbas now think it's a good idea to work in tandem with the media again, by backing up its narrative on "Trump the conman duping his supporters".
These people know no solution to the danger of being co-opted except for purity-signalling, so inevitably they are turning their paranoia on Trump's character, because he is not a True Believer who throws up Roman salutes and dresses in artefacts from Ernst Röhm's gimp dungeon. And as they insist on refracting their view of progressive power through a critique of Jewish power, they cannot fire any shot at the enemy that is not redirected onto Trump's own Jewish connections. Hence they are forced to conclude that this man haemorrhaged billions of dollars in personal wealth, and turned himself into an international hate figure being harassed and sniffed at by all sorts of government spooks, just so he could "shill for Israel"! Admittedly, there may be more cunning motives at work: perhaps the unemployable beggar-leaders in the rump Alt-Right are hoping to pick up a few shreds of shattered political loyalty once the orange piñata has finally been whacked to death.
Don't get me wrong here. I can see why it's tempting to dump on Trump at the moment. I'm not saying that anyone should feign approval of his climbdowns, or go along with the delusions of the 4D chess crowd who were stupid enough to take the "God-Emperor" meme seriously. I'm not even saying that anyone in the U.S. should necessarily vote for the man if he continues on his current trajectory. By all means chase after as many meme candidates as you want, though you shouldn't expect them to be able to do anything more than Trump has if they ever get into office.
All I am suggesting is a return to sanity on Trump, and to scepticism on the system that has brought him to his present state. Yes, he is no True Believer - but this is a good thing, because it means he spent his life building a property empire, not playing sugar daddy to the sort of incompetent folk activists who now rail against him on Twitter. He is by all accounts a sleazy, obnoxious businessman who wanted to be POTUS, and achieved his wish by exploiting a gap in the market. But his campaign and victory against all odds has unnerved the Cathedral, which is now in a moral panic about the political loyalty of billionaires as a class, and will surely conjure up criminal charges against Trump or his family upon his departure from office so as to make an example of him. Even if his entire policy agenda comes to nothing, he has still done incalculable damage to the manufacured social consensus, by forcing the controllers to expose themselves and giving millions of people official permission to say and think things that were once beyond the pale. The fact that he will not be forgiven for any of this should give Trump a strong incentive to do what his supporters want, get re-elected, and finish the fight he started. So if he isn't doing this, the obvious inference is that he can't do it, or that the deck is so stacked against him that he thinks he has more to lose than gain from trying.
We can fault Trump for coming into office with the wrong attitude, trying to compromise with his enemies, and making a pretence of presiding over a hostile system instead of taking steps to liquidate it. But most people in the Dissident Right are no less naïve: they would be satisfied if Trump carried out his promise of building a border wall, despite the fact that (as the Chinese will tell you) a wall is only as reliable as the officials left in charge of it. Even supposing that Trump used the U.S. Army to build his wall, if he wanted it to be anything more than a sop to Republican voters and a refreshment stand for new Democrat ones, he would have to keep the troops mobilised and point them in the opposite direction: towards the bureaucracy, media corporations, and other nodes of power infested by the leftist priesthood.
Imagine for a moment how that might unfold, and you have grasped the roots of the problem. Trump cannot implement post-democracy, in part because there is as yet no credible body of theory laying out the reasons and optimal procedures for doing so. And his conservative supporters would not follow him, because they still believe in liberalism and democracy, and are constrained by all sorts of low-caste religious taboos decided by the logic of liberalism: do politics by the rigged rules, work hard to finance the system of patronage without receiving a penny out of it, and above all do not touch the Brahmins and their temples. We have an opportunity to change this in the present day, although it seems that some of our former comrades are going to do all they can to hold us back.
Lesson #2: There are not one, but two, major poles of controlled opposition on the Right.
Another learning experience for me has been the opportunity to observe, at close hand, how the Alt-Right in its decline (late 2016 and onwards) regressed from something original and interesting into a neo-Nazi clown show of the type that has failed to accomplish anything for six decades. The early days were suffused by a desire to get away from the neo-Nazi white nationalist movement, a.k.a. the stuckment, and do things differently. This started to dissipate when Andrew Anglin repackaged the stuckment to younger people as something new, exciting and fun, and the decline proper began when Richard Spencer staged the Heilgate incident at NPI 2016, which allowed the media to transform the Alt-Right into the factual corroboration of their own smears against it.
A major problem was that the Alt-Right saw only one pole of "tame" or "controlled" opposition: mainstream conservatism, a.k.a. cuckservatism. Everyone knew from experience that neo-Nazis were failures, but their basic sincerity was taken for granted, whereas cuckservatives were traitors and the most important thing for a bona fide Alt-Righter was to never ever "cuck". When the movement filled up with the young and less experienced, and the rise of Trump started to convince people that the rules of the game had changed, the neo-Nazis took advantage of this blind spot. Under the slogan "don't punch to the Right" (a subtle corruption of "no enemies to the Right"), they reorganised the movement into a dysgenic status hierarchy, in which they were entitled to one-way deference from everyone else simply by virtue of identifying as "hardcore fascists". The paper-thin reality of this signalling was exposed when actual repression began against the Alt-Right, and these internet Nazis swiftly evaporated into the aether or sank into suicidal depression.
In retrospect, the Alt-Right's one-sided definition of "cucking" gave too much credit to neo-Nazis, and - I say this through gritted teeth - too little to conservatives. The court eunuch (conservative) can be sincere and think he is doing good, sacrificing his honesty and putting up with servitude, so that he can whisper a few ignored words of sanity into the mad tyrant's ear. The court jester (neo-Nazi) can also be sincere and think that he is doing good, putting himself at the mercy of the tyrant's whims, so that he can shout the impolite truths allowed to all jesters. Regardless, both of these types - the Stuckment and the Cuckment - are tame controlled opposition, whether most of their members know this or not.
Neo-Nazism as we know it begins in the 1960s with George L. Rockwell, trolling the media as part of a strategy to break through a publicity blackout on far-Right parties. Although Rockwell's tactics were a failure, they at least had a rationale in the postwar era, as the mainstream media in those days practically determined the nature of reality for most people. But what is the justification for using these tactics today, when they are not only rendered obsolete by our ability to communicate online, but also help to roll back this advance by justifying crackdowns on our internet presence? When Spencer resorted to the Nazi clown dance in order to bait the media into anointing him as the leader of the Alt-Right, it was ambition and not strategy that prevailed. And this provides a starting point for taking a more critical look at the motives of stuckmenters.
The thought of publicly identifying with the most hated symbols in the West fills ordinary people with horror, and leads to the conclusion that anyone who takes this plunge simply must be sincere, authentic and completely divorced from any thought of making deals with the enemy. But there are plenty of opportunities for deal-making, for "Nazis" are the scarce commodity that the media wants to pin upon all its domestic and foreign enemies, and anyone who volunteers to corroborate the smear (and spread it to others by association) can expect to be hyped into a sort of notoriety easily mistaken for credibility among dissidents. Doing so becomes tempting after a dissident figure has passed a point of no return, and cannot expect to return to society by any amount of cucking (hence the maxim "if they say you are X, you may as well become X"). And once this dependence on clowning for the media is established, legal pressures and other tricks from above can be used to tie the shackles tighter, creating a nice powerless little stuckment that serves to hoover up potentially troublesome people and get them into all sorts of trouble.
This brings us to activism and street-marching, the other sacred tenet of the stuckment, whose proponents are fast running out of excuses for leading young men into ruin. If those tempted onto this path doubt the evidence for the uselessness of Alt-Right activism, then they can simply refer to the events of 2017: the Alt-Right stuck to the rules and won every major street battle against antifa, but ended up a crippled wreck, because these engagements were pretexts for one-sided media defamation, legal punishment and funding attacks against the non-patronised side. Is it blackpilling to reason that if the Left can rig democratic politics, then it can also rig popular uprisings?
Lastly, I should say a few words on the subject of infiltration, but I'm not going to speculate on which neo-Nazi stuckmenters are actually government agents. That is unnecessary, because it is accepted that such agents have been active in the stuckment from its beginnings, and this means that its traditional modus operandi is full of the accumulated contributions of these agents. This may or may not explain why these people 1) pressure comrades to prove their racial purity by sending personal genetic data to leftist corporations; 2) challenge each other for status by asking "what have you done for the movement?", which means doxxing yourself and doing the Nazi clown dance on camera; and 3) respond to every fabricated accusation against dissidents with "agree and amplify", deliberately muddying the waters and allowing the media to claim factual evidence for its lies. With so many neo-Nazis doing all of this in perfect sincerity, paid government agents may as well pack up and learn to code at this point.
So how are we to avoid controlled opposition? Tailor everyone's opinions to a narrow Golden Mean defined by the writings on this site? Follow the cuckservatives in ritually denouncing the fascist era and tabooing all reasoned discussion of it? In both cases, the answer is no. All we have to do is to stop signing up for rigged games, and practice a standard code of omertà against the media, which includes the avoidance and shaming of typical 'presenting' behaviours designed to attract the cameras.
"But that ends up with all talk and no action!" Admittedly, I think this would be a good thing for the online Dissident Right, if only because it badly needs some plausible deniability to weather the deplatforming wave. But why not reverse the principle in real life, and practice action without talk - actions that are not blabbed to journalists, or advertised to all and sundry in an attention-whoring way before anything substantial has been set in motion? Wouldn't this eliminate most opportunities for media libel, and purge the Right of narcissists and edgefags who promote themselves at the expense of the greater good?
"But such actions could never be meaningful enough!" Well, there you are. If you cannot do anything meaningful without the media, this is an admission that you have no power, and the best option is to work at changing this before you think of courting enemy attention. What you can do without the media may feel insignificant, but at least it is authentic; all else is an illusion generated by a magnifying glass in the hand of a powerful enemy. If you choose to stand under that glass in the hope of gaining stature, don't be surprised if you end up being burned to death instead.
Lesson #3: The truth is the most useful strategy at this point in time.
Turning to look at the Alt-Right in its ascent (roughly 2009-2015), I can identify at least one fundamental flaw that may have contributed to its fall: the movement was based not on a new truth, but on a new strategy.
Because older Rightist movements died on the hill of electoral politics, the Alt-Right styled itself as a metapolitical force. Because older organisations were vulnerable to splittism, ideological purges and personal attacks on leaders, the Alt-Right emerged as a leaderless and amorphous Big Tent, which grew stronger on splittism by spawning more loosely-affiliated blogs and factions. Early successes led to excitement about these methods, but in hindsight, we should have remembered that they were necessities and not virtues.
One problem created by the Big Tent ethos was that several different idea-systems were thrown together, with little regard for whether they truly meshed together, and a committment to diplomacy and open-mindedness had to be maintained to keep it all in one piece. I for one would have been happy letting the hundred-flowers ethos play out until someone came up with a worthy solution to our problems, but others found it insincere, and wanted a quicker route to ideological certainty. They achieved it by progressively reducing the Alt-Right to white nationalism, which acted as the de facto core of the movement from the beginning, but was in fact a reductionist and paranoid ideology that had only invested itself so deeply in the Alt-Right because it had failed so spectacularly on its own. As the success of the Alt-Right boosted their confidence, the white nationalists began to purge out all influences (like Guénon, Moldbug, etc.) that could not be reduced to "racial interests".
But what really doomed the Big Tent was the growing self-consciousness of the Alt-Right, which turned so many of its minds away from their own projects and towards a grand strategy encompassing the whole movement. This led to a great deal of worrying about the essence of the Alt-Right, the direction of the Alt-Right, who could and couldn't be in the Alt-Right, who should be the leader of the Alt-Right - in short, all the bullshit that we could safely shove on the back-burner as long as most people were minding their own business. The election of Trump popularised this, by uniting the Alt-Right's factions around a focal point ("get Trump into office"), and then taking away the focal point while leaving the desire for unity behind. Spencer's disastrous centralisation of the Alt-Right gave much of its rank-and-file exactly what they wanted.
Unfortunately, while I held stubbornly to the Big Tent ethos in my posts on this site, I got carried away very early on with all sorts of nonsense about the grand strategy of the movement. For example, I often referred to the Alt-Right as a "metapolitical army", which I've since realised is a terrible metaphor for a loose conglomeration of masked strangers in cyberspace with a wide open door to defectors and infiltrators. I was also far too credible in dealing with others who talked of strategy, as can be seen in my all-too-reasoned rebuttal to the neo-Nazis; a better article would have just pointed out that the neo-Nazi "strategy" was an excuse for Spencer to paint himself as a leader, Anglin to sell his brand of political forbidden fruit porn, and a bunch of posturing shut-ins to create a signalling hierarchy on the internet. That was another failing of mine in those days; too much polite Big Tent diplomacy rendered to people who deserve none at all.
But there was a reason behind this. Unlike many others who started an independent blog or project and eventually got dragged into the Alt-Right's orbit, I started writing for the Alt-Right's founding site in 2012, and I did so because I knew the movement was based on a strategy and wanted to contribute to refining that strategy. To be specific, I wanted to promote the theme that runs through all of my previous articles on this site: the principle of focusing negatively on the Western ruling elite, described as "cosmopolitan" or "managerialist", and engaging only secondarily with non-whites, women, homosexuals, and other groups mobilised by this ruling elite against us.
There were several reasons why I chose this point of view. At bottom, I believed that it was an accurate view of the forces destroying Western civilisation (no anti-Semite having proved able to persuade me, without recourse to far-fetched anachronisms, how "the Jews" could have created the liberal ideology that was responsible for their own emancipation from the ghetto). There was also a desire to promote the true and lasting unification of the Alt-Right, by folding its various single-issue ideologies into a single focus on the common enemy. Finally, there were many strategic concerns at work. Personal experience had taught me that arguments against the ruling elite tend to be accepted by normies far more quickly than arguments against minorities or women, and these arguments are also far less susceptible to repression as "hate speech".
I stand by this insofar as it was based in truth, but I regret the excessive focus on strategy, and the wrong assumption that "the movement" was some sort of intelligent being capable of responding to strategic advice. Most people in the Alt-Right didn't listen to me, as they preferred the cruder strategy of blaming the Jews, and so the only lasting effect was to render my own arguments too simplistic and propagandistic. Although there is a place for propaganda, allowing it to infect analysis too deeply just gets in the way of of building up a highly accurate view of the progressivist secular religion - which, considering that this religion relies heavily upon an illusion of moral legitimacy, is arguably the greatest possible weapon against it.
The burden of a strategic focus became heavier as I started to delve into authors like Spengler and de Jouvenel,
drawing out insights that were not exactly favourable to the Alt-Right's articles of faith, but still feeling the need to
make some sort of optimistic conclusion or extract some sort of strategic benefit. As a result of this skewed focus, there is a great deal in my earlier writings for which I can no longer vouch unreservedly. It is simply not good enough to present a narrative of wicked elites and (presumably) virtuous nationalist people, even if much of it corresponds to the facts. The liberal rot extends much further throughout the West than its vanguard, to the extent that most forms of nationalism and conservatism are ridden with it, and I am growing tired of the need to compromise with it in order to maintain a Big Tent that has already been ripped to shreds.
So from now on I am just going to do my best to state the truth as I find it, regardless of whether this comes across as blackpilled, or leads to conflict with other people's sacred cows. And this focus on truth over strategy may, in fact, be the most effective strategy at this point in time. If we have tried and failed to maintain a Big Tent, a natural change of objective would be towards trying to build up a smaller group underpinned by a stronger foundation in truth, which can later expand and make conversions. But to do this, it will be necessary to build our positions on firmer ground, and pay more heed to the deep ideological rifts in the Dissident Right.
