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| "Maybe if I just keep on becoming more irrelevant I will somehow become relevant again." |
by Ryan Andrews
Back before the Alt Right was a collection of internet personalities with twitter accounts and online video diaries, when it had actual websites which published actual articles, the original Alternative Right webzine had a running feature called STIHIE (“So this is how ends’). The idea was to highlight examples of the contemporary West’s decadence and depravity so farcically dispiriting that it must signal a civilization that is (mercifully) reaching the end—Juggalo gatherings, people twerking to classical music (Buttoven, if I recall), etc. The Alt-Right of those days would have diagnosed the West’s hysterical response to the Wuhan flu for the pathetic last man spectacle that it is.
But the Alt-Right of today seems content to shelter-in-place for months on end, simply because a nasty bug is going around. Richard Spencer likes to swat-away the ‘it’s just the flu’ narrative by enlightening us on the nature of exponential increase. But that is irrelevant. I am willing to set aside the "valid" arguments—such as the one that we are just kicking-the-can-down-the-road (unless we are prepared to endure this hell off-and-on for at least the next year-and-a-half), or that the virus is not nearly as deadly as originally feared. Let us also set aside the fact that, breathtakingly, we still have not confidently nailed down either the virus’s fatality rate or its contagiousness.
I say that even if we accept the worst case scenario of 2.2 million dead Americans as gospel, that is not worth the indefinite suspension of virtually all public social life. Three million Americans die every single year. That means that the worst case scenario would not even double our national death total. And that assumes zero overlap between Covid-19 deaths and those that would have occurred anyways, which is utterly implausible—this is not the Spanish flu bro, the average age of the covid-19 victims is ‘round about the same as the average life expectancy. If we assume only a very modest overlap in virus deaths and the deaths already baked-into-the-cake, we are looking at 1.5% of Americans dying over the course of the year instead of the usual tic-under 1%.
Yeh, it's a big deal, I agree. But it is a big deal in the sense that addressing it should be the dominant, overwhelming focus of our medical industry, and the government should be ready to build hospitals in a hurry. It is not a big deal in the sense that it should dominate the lives of the rest of us.
There should have been PSA campaigns reminding us to wash our hands and cough into our elbows; maybe we could have installed more hand sanitizers in public places (remember those?), suspended senior center activities, and generally encouraged seniors to take extra precautions. And if things got really bad at the peak, suspended mass gatherings. It is a horrible thing, but it is not such an existential crisis that we should be banning eating at restaurants and going to movie theaters, closing schools, and forbidding children from playing with their friends, all while risking a second great depression.
That is being such a sniveling lover of life that you are afraid to live it.
The old Alt-Right would have been writing about the grim possibility that the residue of our extreme last man hysteria will stick with us long after the pandemic has passed. As with Russia-gate and Ukraine-gate, the media will not admit that they overreacted. Nor will the government. Nor will much of the public. I fear that, as in the East, from now on any large public gathering will always include people wearing protective masks.
NPR has a new special corona show in which a medical expert answers callers’ questions. The other night a woman called in asking if we should be practicing social distancing every winter, because, y'know, the flu kills a lot of people. And the doctor did not dismiss it out-of-hand. The idea of a "chain of virus carriers" eventually leading to someone dying has taken-hold in the public mind. It will soon dawn on them that every mass public event probably leads to the death of someone. Every flu season may be reason enough for the authorities to trace our movements. And because the population is getting older, every pandemic, even every flu season, will be deadlier than it would been otherwise.
Not that we should overly romanticize the old Alt-Right.
There would have been plenty of stupid takes in other directions. Many of the physical ailments more common among Blacks that seem to have caused higher virus-mortality rates in that group are problems inherent to being raised in the city.
In some ways too sterile, while in other ways too dirty, an urban childhood is not ideal for the human immune system. Recalling the Alt-Right scene of yore, I can easily imagine this inspiring some goofy think-piece on reversing industrialization and urbanization to return to an agrarian, preferably feudally-based, way of life.
But the silly reactionaries of then look like brilliant visionaries next to what has become of the Spencerite wing† of White nationalism.
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| In the beginning when we were winning |
Now, he has decided to "own" the conservatives by endorsing socialism. Thus, every valid criticism he has made of right-wing myopia applies twice as strongly to himself and his clique.
Socialism is inextricably of the Left, while nationalism is inextricably of the Right.
It is true that, strictly speaking, there is no necessary contradiction between the two, but nor is there any ideological logic that leads from socialism to nationalism. There is a way in which nationalist ideologizing can lead to socialism. Nationalist solidarity can be coherently funneled toward socialism, but the logic does not move the other way. From what I can see, the nationalist, as a nationalist, will find no support for his ideas within the ideology of socialism; socialism, as socialism, is ideologically devoid of any nationalist potential.
That leaves the pragmatic case for aligning with the socialist left, which is:
- White nationalism needs to attract a better class of people, people who are not stupid and reactionary conservative haters
- "Cultural Marxism" is a dumb meme; Neoliberalism is the real source of our problem
On the front end, there are kernels of truth in both of these observations, but that is swamped by the stupidity of their prescriptions on the back end.
Of course, we should not allow the cowardice and narrow-mindedness of conservatism to shape our movement, but attempting to ride the wave of socialism’s dead-cat bounce is hardly a bold vision for the future.
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| Intersectionality means always having an excuse for being a loser. |
Spencer seems to be under the impression that the contemporary American Left, broadly speaking, is made-up of three wings—the establishmentarians, the intersectionalists, and the socialists. His implication is that these three are approximately equal in size, or at least all are very large.
In reality, the intersectionalists are the vast majority, not in the sense that most left-of-center Americans’ opinions are in-step with those of critical race theorists or even The New York Times op-ed pages, but in the sense that their politics are informed by reasons of minority interest group grievance, either on behalf of themselves or out of ‘solidarity’ with the aggrieved.
The other two wings do exist, but it is difficult to separate them out from intersectionalism. The corporate establishment side of things more or less allows the intersectionalists to do their thinking for them, except and until it gets in the way of their profits and/or their electability. And the socialists, almost to a "non-gender specific" human, are dedicated intersectionalists. Their socialism is an extension of their intersectionalism. And this is perfectly natural; socialism is piece of a larger left-wing logic of equality and sameness.
The fact that economic socialism has a much longer lineage than most intersectionalist concerns is owing to the fact that its grievances are more obvious and universal. But like all leftism, it is coming from the same unhealthy place of revolt against the natural and just inequalities of the world.
Moreover, most so-called socialists are not really socialists anyway. When you strip away the ‘socialists’ who really are just people who want some more gibs and those who intuit that socialism is in some way an ally against those rednecks and cocky-looking frat boys who do not take the time to know and appreciate their ‘personal truth,’ et cetera, the remaining number of actual socialists is fairly small, while the number of anti-woke socialists is tiny.
Yeah, I’m sure there are many socialists who "just go with the intersectionalist flow," who are not especially committed to the anti-White stuff either, but link with that side because their issues are given a greater hearing there. But why should we see such people as any more worth targeting and compromising with than your average right-of-center guy? By any reasonable standard they are more hateful, resentful, and irrational people—and generally a lot less successful in life.
In his cluelessness, the novice who calls himself a socialist just because he wants more gibs takes a much more rational position than an actual socialist.
In both the real world and the theoretical world, capitalism creates greater wealth and freedom than socialism, and that’s that. No political question is more firmly settled than that one.
If your position, especially in the year 2020, is that the private ownership of the means of production should be abolished, it is only because you are a hater. It is only because you resent that some people have so much more than others; it is only because you resent the idea that some people can be so much more powerful than others. Or/and it is because you are a jaded shithead who resents that the market values someone or something that does not affirm your worth, or something that you simply think is "tasteless."
Dissident Righters should not want to be associated with such hateful losers. If you think that the baseline floor of what the state provides to each of its people should be higher, fine, maybe so. If you think that the state should guard against the prospect of an individual or industry becoming so rich and powerful that he or it threatens the sovereignty of the state, I think that is right. Placing limitations on others is sometimes a necessity, but it is never a moral course worth pursuing for its own sake. The state should never be used to drag everyone down to the same level, in any realm of life—including economics.
As for the line that socialists are not to blame for Cultural Marxism, I am not sure where they are going with this. The idea that Neoliberalism is the beginning and end of the problem is obviously just wrong. There is a clear straight-line between the ‘theorizing’ of Marxian-influenced critics and the intersectional multiculturalism of today, even if a mushy sort of left-liberal attitude has probably been more decisive in landing us in this mess.
But that is mostly beside the point anyway; the Cultural Marxist meme is not really an origin narrative, but instead a rhetorical analogy. Likewise, when left-wingers label conservative Christian moralists as ‘Jihadists,’ they are not saying that their ideology is derived from Osama Bin Laden. The implication of the anti-Cultural Marxism meme narrative pushed by the Spencerites is that the socialists are impotent...therefore we should hitch our wagon to them?
The Left, now and forever, is utterly hopeless as an impetus of a radical ideology. The beginning and end of the leftist ideal is equality. However it gets started, and whatever path it takes, any radical Leftist ideologizing must end in the exact same place:
- Everyone should have the same
- Everyone should experience the same
- Everyone should be the same
In other words, its end result is impossible in all circumstances and undesirable to all people.
In a deep sense then, the Left can have no life of its own. It must have a preexisting context because it can only be a critique. At the end of the day, it can not be the superstructure, it can not be the ideology, it must exist as a virus on its host. The virus may affect our course very dramatically, maybe in some ways we like, maybe in some ways we hate, but it can not be the essence of an social order. It is not capable of that.
The fundamental and fatal ideological flaw of the Left is that it does ideology backwards. It does not abstract from something concrete, as ideology should do. It instead starts with an abstraction that it would impose on concrete life. Yet, because it does not start with the concrete, it can not really be abstract either. And so it can only be a critique.
The leftist ideal is so abstract that its abstraction does not come from life, instead it amounts to an elimination of life, and thus it can never be followed all the way to the end.
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| A thinner version of the fat kid above? |
On its face, this sounds like a criticism that can be leveled at any ideology—i.e. that the world will never perfectly conform to one’s ideology—but this goes much beyond that. It is not simply that the perfect leftist ideal is unattainable, it is that is undesirable, even to leftists. Therefore, they do not truly have an ideal. And that problem is unique to them. Liberals may understand that perfect liberalism is impossible, but he does not think it is undesirable. The same goes for nationalists, the same goes for any popular ideology that is not of the Left. Other ideologies are not inherently relative, their answer is their answer regardless of context. Whereas the Left is so inherently relative that they do not even have an ultimate answer.
This, I believe, is a large part of the context by which we should view the last 100 years or so of “radical” leftist theorizing. It is interesting and telling that the Left has become so enmeshed in something they call ‘theory.’This is a nebulous no-man’s land between ideology, a false (mostly armchair) empiricism, and glorified policy wonkery.
‘Theory,’ in all its types over the decades, is but an extended cope with the fact that not only did Marxism fail, but radical Leftism itself is ultimately an ideological void. It is easy for us to miss because we have our own crushing losses to worry over, but the Left is in every bit as sorry-a-condition as we are. Žižek’s cope that we attribute every action undertaken for the benefit of others to the spirit of communism is every bit as pathetic as the conservative who claims that his side invented civil rights.
For a very long time, the Right has been a comparative failure at abstract ideology relative to the Left because it has been too-tied to concrete preferences. But as a certain someone in the movement was once fond of saying, these things are dialectical. Our concrete preferences give us the advantage at abstract ideologizing if we would but take it.
Principles are abstractions, but they are abstracted from lived reality.
We are in a position to abstract those principles, and they are not. Permanent revolution is intrinsic to the Left not because they are radical, but because radicalism is always outside their grasp.
Unlike them, we are radicals. We are calling for a state based on fundamentally different premises than what we have now. Unlike the Left, we can not sit back and critique the existing order for failing to live up to the vulgar ideals of people who have never thought through their ideals. Our long-term project is not to inflect our given circumstances this way or that; we are out to entirely change the basis of the state, therefore we are radical by definition.
Even if we would change far fewer things than the Left, even if we would leave every single piece of society and politics in place, except we would have an ethnostate, that one thing we would change is an absolute change, and so the ideological case for that one change must be a radical ideology. And a radical ideology is not achieved by mashing together two ideologies and calling it a "third position."
A radical ideology must be in-line with itself from start to finish, all its logic follows from its ideal. Speaking neutrally and objectively, any nationalist ideology must be, and is, derived from the starting-point of the egoist individual. This sounds like it is verging on liberalism. And I know many on the alt right hate and misunderstand liberalism almost as much as do the Left. But that is the only starting-point; a logical nationalist ideology does not necessarily have to follow a perfectly liberal course from end-to-end, but it can only begin with the individual, no matter if it is conscious of this or not.
At its most basic, every nationalist ideology can only believe that there are certain things the individual should want but that he can not accomplish on his own—such as to perpetuate himself, sometimes ‘at the expense’ of others—so he joins with a nation to achieve those things, and makes a state to preserve that nation. He needs to be part of a larger group, but ultimately that group exists for him.
I fully concede that a nationalist can logically be a socialist, even be a socialist on account of his nationalism—we are all one as a nation, blah, blah, blah. But again, socialism as socialism gives no support to nationalist ideology, it can only come in after the fact—like a virus. And, now setting-aside my neutrality, I do not want to see it come-into-play even then, at least not in a high viral load.
The nation-state should exist to do and be what the individual is not capable of, not to stop him from having those things he is capable of attaining on his own. Socialism is of the Left because it follows the same flaw of eliminating a realm of life, rather than abstracting from it.
Leftist ideology does not understand that difference and competition are what make the individual’s life worth living. Nationalism should be about protecting and enhancing the life that the Left would eliminate. It is depressing and inexcusable to me that the Spencerite Right should be parroting left-wing critiques of liberalism. The Left resorts to silly non sequiturs about ‘the individual not existing prior to society’ because they lack an independent foundation for themselves; we do not need that nonsense, our ideal is life-affirming, we can argue it straight and direct without hiding behind a ‘context.’
As a liberal, I do not have much interest in policing what talking-points should be off-limits to white nationalists—unlike the Spencerites. If a nationalist wishes to make the ugly pragmatic argument to socialists that national homogeneity is the best chance for socialism, I don’t care. Just as I don’t care if they make the same pitch to libertarians. But don’t come back at us who are already white nationalists and tell us that we have to be socialists to be proper forward-seeing white nationalists.
And don’t lecture the rest of us on how closed-minded we are when all you are putting forward is a silly and toxic reboot of fascism.
Besides, it is not necessary for white nationalism to even have a position on economics. Not that every white nationalist must be a single-issue thinker, but we are not in the unfortunate ideological position of the Left. Our ideal can stand on its own-two-feet. Perfecting the rationale for that ideal should be our focus. There is no need for us to take a position on every little issue that comes along.
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†I do not call them Spencerites to slight anyone, or suggest that they take marching orders from Richard. It is simply that he is the most prominent of them, and I do not know what else to call them. No disrespect to Matt Parrot or Keith Woods, but Spencer is the only name on the socialist right that I can assume the reader knows. At this point, ‘alt-right’ is not specific enough for the reader to know what I am talking about. Though ‘critical racist theorists’ has a nice ring to it.
Ryan Andrews is the author of The Birth of Prudence
