The problem that the Dissident Right has, in a nutshell, is that its political "sweet spot" is located next to a very high cliff, and the movement has a tendency to overrun that point and plunge to its doom.
Most of what the Dissident Right wants is perfectly acceptable to the vast bulk of normies.
I became aware of this fact even before I helped found the Alt-Right in 2010 with Richard Spencer and Andy Nowicki. The Alt-Right, of course, now lies broken-backed at the bottom of an extremely steep cliff, but back in 2006, when Britain had an actual ethnocentric nationalist party making waves, the mass-market newspaper the Daily Mail ran an extremely enlightening article about the popularity of its dissident right-wing policies:
Peter Kellner, the chairman of the YouGov polling organisation that carried out the poll, commented:
Despite these positives, the problem the BNP had was that the voters suspected—with plenty of help from the media and possibly the Deep State—that it was just a Nazi party masquerading as a British Nationalist party, and that what they were really after was imposing a thuggish version of Hitlerism on Britain.
Where could they possibly have gotten that idea from?
The fact was that the BNP, despite some attempts to modernize the party in the direction of modern ethnonationalism, did in fact have an organic connection to unmistakable Blackshirt and Nazi types. People like Colin Jordan were never wholly expunged from the movement's roots.
Here's an illustrative photo to give you a flavour of the man:
And here's a little passage from his obituary:
Jordan was one of the co-founders of the the original BNP in 1960, and even after he split from it continued to be linked to a lot of other people in British nationalism who ended up in the BNP Mark 2, when it was refounded in 1982. I could write a short book or a very long article on other Nazi-esque characters associated with that incarnation of the BNP. Instead, let me just show you one of them briefly talking about his favourite reading material:
This is why the BNP lost. Not because people didn't like their policies—the 2006 YouGov opinion poll shows otherwise—but because people liked their policies all the way up to a point where they feared these popular policies would suddenly transmute into something else that they clearly didn't like, such as tyrannical and extremely unpatriotic Naziism.
What we need is some sort of graphic representation of what I am referring to. In the visual model improvised below, there are two axes—the horizontal one denotes degree of ethnocentrism, the vertical one the degree of popularity with the voters.
As you can see, the more ethnocentric a political party is the more popular it is likely to be, until it finally reaches a point where "too much ethnocentricism" creates a sudden collapsing effect. Naturally this point would vary from country to country and era to era.
The shape of the graph is like a mountain with a gradual slope on one side and a sheer vertical drop on the other.
Successful nationalist or ethnonationalist parties tend to mount the slope but avoid going too far.
Partly successful nationalist or ethnonationalist parties tend to mount the slope but then either (a) water down their message and go backwards or (b) overshoot and plunge off the cliff.
The most unsuccessful nationalist or ethnonationalist parties tend to start at the wrong end of the graph and never surmount the enormous cliff face opposing them.
So, let's flesh out this very basic model with a little detail.
If a political party came along and supported, say, the following five positions, one after another, it would be likely to attract increasing support from normie voters (as long as "unnatural" methods weren't used to suppress its natural popularity):
With each successive policy the party's platform is sure to become more popular and to threaten the globalist, pro-mass-immigration status quo.
This is the pattern largely revealed by the 2006 YouGov poll on BNP policies.
However, as a nationalist party's policies become increasingly ethnonationalist, the amount of necessary discrimination between the in-group and the out-group is increased. The effect of this is increase the likelihood of the party being perceived as inhumanist and tyrannical. Such perceptions of negativity then directly cut across the positive perceptions caused by its ethnonationalism. If this paradox is not carefully managed, the suspicion and fear grows in the general public that the party is edging ever nearer—or is secretly beholden—to something akin to Naziism or other extreme forms of ethnonationalism that severely curtail personal liberties and promote disturbing individuals to positions of power.
In the YouGov poll, this is most clearly shown on the question of denying all immigrants the right to bring further members of their family into this country.
On the face of it, this is a perfectly reasonable thing to do because chain migration can greatly boost an immigrant population and thus greatly magnify the problems caused by multiculturalism. Indeed, despite decades of globalist propaganda pushing them in the opposite direction, 52% of the respondents still supported the policy. But there is obviously a simplistic anti-humanist element to dividing families ("tearing families apart") so that when the policy was revealed to be one of the policies of the much-demonised BNP, support for the measure dramatically drained away to just 9%. By contrast, support for the policy of halting all further immigration only dropped from 59% to 48%.
The disparity here is because stopping further immigration is more abstract and therefore less anti-humanist than preventing someone already legally in the country from re-uniting with family members. That seems somehow cruel and triggers notions that these policies are leading towards the "Naziist" cliff edge, which the associations with the BNP greatly strengthened.
In the model I have presented in my graph, the trick for any nationalist party is clearly to stop at the top of the "cliff of popularity" and avoid taking that extra step over the edge. Number 6 on the graph would be any policy that is logically or ideologically connected to healthy and morally defensible ethnonationalism, but which evokes the unhealthy and morally indefensible negatives of tyrannical and thuggish power.
Such policies will, as I pointed out earlier, depend on time and place, but hypothetical examples might include the following:
As for the new "Great White Hope" of British ethnonationalism, Mark Collett's Patriotic Alternative, they have already managed to jump off the cliff edge without ever have built up the popularity the BNP and other more successful ethnonationalist parties did.
Colin Liddell is the Chief Editor of Affirmative Right and the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the famous and the dead. Support his work by buying it here.
Most of what the Dissident Right wants is perfectly acceptable to the vast bulk of normies.
I became aware of this fact even before I helped found the Alt-Right in 2010 with Richard Spencer and Andy Nowicki. The Alt-Right, of course, now lies broken-backed at the bottom of an extremely steep cliff, but back in 2006, when Britain had an actual ethnocentric nationalist party making waves, the mass-market newspaper the Daily Mail ran an extremely enlightening article about the popularity of its dissident right-wing policies:
A majority of people back the British National Party's policies, according to a poll released today. But the YouGov survey found that many people disown the policies once they are associated with the BNP.
The poll comes ahead of local elections next week when there are fears the BNP could make an electoral breakthrough.
It found that 59 per cent of people supported a halt to all further immigration to the UK - one of the BNP's main pledges - when they were not told of the far-right group's association with the policy.
Among those who were told that it was a BNP commitment, support for the policy was only 48 per cent.
And 52 per cent of those who took part in the survey agreed that all immigrants should be denied the right to bring further members of their family into this country. But when told it was a BNP policy, support fell by 9 per cent.
Overall there was 55 per cent support for BNP policies until people were informed of the party's stance, when backing dropped to 49 per cent.
More than a third of people, 37 per cent, said they would seriously consider voting for the BNP's policies in an election. But identifying the BNP with the policies caused support to fall by 17 per cent.
Even the BNP's most hard-line ideas gained the backing of tens of millions of Brits, with a third supporting the stance that non-white British citizens are inherently "less British than white people" and 48% supporting the idea of "encouraging immigrants and their families to leave Britain."
Peter Kellner, the chairman of the YouGov polling organisation that carried out the poll, commented:
The results demonstrate that the BNP is tapping into some widely-held views, but that the party suffers from a negative image. If the BNP were able to erase this view, it could make significant gains in the upcoming local elections. This may explain what is happening in certain localities where the BNP now polls strongly.
Despite these positives, the problem the BNP had was that the voters suspected—with plenty of help from the media and possibly the Deep State—that it was just a Nazi party masquerading as a British Nationalist party, and that what they were really after was imposing a thuggish version of Hitlerism on Britain.
Where could they possibly have gotten that idea from?
The fact was that the BNP, despite some attempts to modernize the party in the direction of modern ethnonationalism, did in fact have an organic connection to unmistakable Blackshirt and Nazi types. People like Colin Jordan were never wholly expunged from the movement's roots.
Here's an illustrative photo to give you a flavour of the man:
 |
| Colin Jordan (centre). Bonus points for naming the men on either side of him. |
And here's a little passage from his obituary:
But Hitler – "this wondrous man" – was always Jordan's primary focus. He asserted that there was "no reliable evidence whatsoever" that six million perished in the Holocaust. His attachment went far beyond mere hero-worship, extending into the realms of spirituality. Discounting Jesus as "the counterfeit Christ of the Christians", Jordan described Hitler as "messiah" and "saviour", and as a seer and priest who brought a "message of salvation". In a 1989 essay he declared: "The crucifixion of his creed was by the spears of baleful war alone, devoid of higher sanction from any worthier creed. His was the spiritual victory." He went on to forecast Hitler's "resurrection" as "the spiritual conqueror of the future".
Jordan was one of the co-founders of the the original BNP in 1960, and even after he split from it continued to be linked to a lot of other people in British nationalism who ended up in the BNP Mark 2, when it was refounded in 1982. I could write a short book or a very long article on other Nazi-esque characters associated with that incarnation of the BNP. Instead, let me just show you one of them briefly talking about his favourite reading material:
This is why the BNP lost. Not because people didn't like their policies—the 2006 YouGov opinion poll shows otherwise—but because people liked their policies all the way up to a point where they feared these popular policies would suddenly transmute into something else that they clearly didn't like, such as tyrannical and extremely unpatriotic Naziism.
What we need is some sort of graphic representation of what I am referring to. In the visual model improvised below, there are two axes—the horizontal one denotes degree of ethnocentrism, the vertical one the degree of popularity with the voters.
As you can see, the more ethnocentric a political party is the more popular it is likely to be, until it finally reaches a point where "too much ethnocentricism" creates a sudden collapsing effect. Naturally this point would vary from country to country and era to era.
The shape of the graph is like a mountain with a gradual slope on one side and a sheer vertical drop on the other.
Successful nationalist or ethnonationalist parties tend to mount the slope but avoid going too far.
Partly successful nationalist or ethnonationalist parties tend to mount the slope but then either (a) water down their message and go backwards or (b) overshoot and plunge off the cliff.
The most unsuccessful nationalist or ethnonationalist parties tend to start at the wrong end of the graph and never surmount the enormous cliff face opposing them.
So, let's flesh out this very basic model with a little detail.
If a political party came along and supported, say, the following five positions, one after another, it would be likely to attract increasing support from normie voters (as long as "unnatural" methods weren't used to suppress its natural popularity):
- Ending political correctness and hate speech laws that penalise native people
- Celebrating national identity, history, patriotism
- Halting further mass immigration
- Maintaining the core population as the dominant majority
- Supporting those non-natives who want to return home to return home
With each successive policy the party's platform is sure to become more popular and to threaten the globalist, pro-mass-immigration status quo.
This is the pattern largely revealed by the 2006 YouGov poll on BNP policies.
However, as a nationalist party's policies become increasingly ethnonationalist, the amount of necessary discrimination between the in-group and the out-group is increased. The effect of this is increase the likelihood of the party being perceived as inhumanist and tyrannical. Such perceptions of negativity then directly cut across the positive perceptions caused by its ethnonationalism. If this paradox is not carefully managed, the suspicion and fear grows in the general public that the party is edging ever nearer—or is secretly beholden—to something akin to Naziism or other extreme forms of ethnonationalism that severely curtail personal liberties and promote disturbing individuals to positions of power.
In the YouGov poll, this is most clearly shown on the question of denying all immigrants the right to bring further members of their family into this country.
On the face of it, this is a perfectly reasonable thing to do because chain migration can greatly boost an immigrant population and thus greatly magnify the problems caused by multiculturalism. Indeed, despite decades of globalist propaganda pushing them in the opposite direction, 52% of the respondents still supported the policy. But there is obviously a simplistic anti-humanist element to dividing families ("tearing families apart") so that when the policy was revealed to be one of the policies of the much-demonised BNP, support for the measure dramatically drained away to just 9%. By contrast, support for the policy of halting all further immigration only dropped from 59% to 48%.
The disparity here is because stopping further immigration is more abstract and therefore less anti-humanist than preventing someone already legally in the country from re-uniting with family members. That seems somehow cruel and triggers notions that these policies are leading towards the "Naziist" cliff edge, which the associations with the BNP greatly strengthened.
In the model I have presented in my graph, the trick for any nationalist party is clearly to stop at the top of the "cliff of popularity" and avoid taking that extra step over the edge. Number 6 on the graph would be any policy that is logically or ideologically connected to healthy and morally defensible ethnonationalism, but which evokes the unhealthy and morally indefensible negatives of tyrannical and thuggish power.
Such policies will, as I pointed out earlier, depend on time and place, but hypothetical examples might include the following:
- Immigrants who don't want to return home should be coerced into doing so
- Marriages between natives and immigrants should be forcibly dissolved
- We should seek inspiration from the work of 'an Austrian painter' in our dealings with the Jews
As for the new "Great White Hope" of British ethnonationalism, Mark Collett's Patriotic Alternative, they have already managed to jump off the cliff edge without ever have built up the popularity the BNP and other more successful ethnonationalist parties did.
______________________________________
Colin Liddell is the Chief Editor of Affirmative Right and the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the famous and the dead. Support his work by buying it here.
