Counter-Currents
The Counter-Currents 2014 Summer Fundraiser
Countering the Leftward Drift
Greg Johnson
The Grand Canyon: proof that great changes can be wrought over long timespans by gentle, sustained pressure
691 words
The Counter-Currents 2014 Summer Fundraiser kicked off two weeks ago today on our fourth anniversary. So far, we have received 13 donations totaling $1,561.08. Donations ranged in amount from $2 to $534.08. I want to thank all our donors for their generosity.
The latter amount was arrived at by a rather unusual method. One of our donors took a number of buckets of loose change that had been piling up for years to a coin sorting machine. He got an Amazon.com gift certificate for the full amount and sent me the code. Since Amazon sells practically everything, this princely sum was basically as good as cash.
Our goal is $40,000, so that now means that we have $38,438.92 left to raise by Halloween. With your help, we’ll make it.
* * *
Many of our readers wonder why politics and culture seem to drift ever further to the Left. People on the Right have been pondering this issue for a long time. In 1897, Robert Lewis Dabney saw this drift and predicted the triumph of women’s suffrage based on his estimate of its conservative opposition:
This is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution; to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader.
The reason for the Left’s continued success is twofold.
First, Leftists understand the importance of fundamental ideas, whereas Rightists generally do not. Leftists find it easy to argue Right-wingers into submission because Rightists generally have minds stocked with Left-leaning ideas that they are too intellectually complacent to question. All Leftists have to do is aid Rightists in drawing the conclusions of their own unquestioned premises.
Second, Leftists understand the importance of sustained effort in shaping culture and politics, and they are willing to support it. For instance, The Nation magazine has been on the vanguard of the American Left since it was founded in 1865. For decade after decade, The Nation has been moving the parameters of debate further Leftward. And it is just one of hundreds of such institutions. Yet, in all that time, The Nation has made an economic profit exactly one year. The Nation could not exist without the support of far-sighted donors, who understand the importance of metapolitics in laying the foundations for political change.
You want to counter the Leftward drift, you have to set up metapolitical institutions on the Right. And if you want Counter-Currents to be around in 150 years, moving discourse and politics in the right direction, then you have to support us this year, because if we don’t make it to year 5, we won’t make it to 150. That’s why we need your support today.
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Please give generously!
Thank you for your loyal readership and support.
Greg Johnson
10 comments
Laws should self-expire, sunset, automatically, but they don’t. The default mode of law is to exist forever, once passed.
So the left always wins if they get any kind of concession.
If the default was to expire every ten years, the left would be fighting the same battle over and over again. Vigilance should be baked into the system.
Instead, it is built into culture and personalities who can be made to fade away by ideas and sustained efforts to get concessions. That is why the left works on culture and the slow march.
The present institutional mechanism, the default nature of the law, rewards this strategy.
“Conservative” opposition is spread thin, too many things to oppose, too many cracks in the dam; nothing is ever abolished.
http://lawlimits.org
“Laws should self-expire, sunset, automatically, but they don’t. The default mode of law is to exist forever, once passed. ”
Just like the politicians that pass them…
Why the leftward drift? Because after two weeks, C-C readers have contributed the resounding total of about $1500.
“The reason for the Left’s continued success is twofold.” / “First, Leftists understand the importance of fundamental ideas, whereas Rightists generally do not.” / … / “Second, Leftists understand the importance of sustained effort in shaping culture and politics”
I think the real reason for the Left’s success is that they are led by ruthless Jews, who do not behave like European gentlemen. And what drives the Jews is racial animus against Whites. It is more powerful than any disinterested ideology.
I’m not sure about the importance of the left-wing effort in shaping culture and politics. What the Jews understand is the importance of fear, intimidation, censorship, coordinated vilification campaigns. They understand the importance of buying up or co-opting the media, the politicians, the judges, and the public institutions, so as to vilify, fine, and jail respectable White people who believe in decency and in protecting their White nations.
The real Jewish goal is not to convince White people that race replacement is good for the Whites. That would be an impossible task. The real goal is simply to shut us up.
And our priority, in order to organize ourselves and defend our collective existence is to speak up publicly and break through the Jewish censorship and intimidation. We don’t have to develop sophisticated ideas. We need to state the obvious: the emperor has no clothes, there is a Jewish elephant in the room, race replacement isn’t good for us, and so on. But still, it’s true that we need money. It we could launch a TV network, things would change dramatically. In the meantime, we have to do with modest Internet websites.
Ho hum. I could write your comments for you. They take the form, “We should ignore everything except the Jews.” I don’t know if you think the Jews are the sole cause of our misfortune, but you certainly turn up your nose at every nuance that is proffered to you.
I will reformulate: I have my idea about who is the cause of our misfortune, but whoever it is, my main point is that, as I see it, our rulers do not depend so much on ideas and propaganda as on censorship and intimidation. They also use their direct control of the media and the public institutions, even though they don’t have total control. So, it is a dictatorish system. They ignore public opinion. They just try to stifle dissent.
And in the past, when they were still in the process of taking power, and still pretended they believed in free speech, I think their efforts were focused on infiltration, co-optation and buying up people and newspapers, more than on spreading ideas. Their propaganda was only the tip of the iceberg.
You are (1) being disingenuous, and (2) flat out wrong about what maintains the current power structure. Your model of human behavior boils down to people being motivated not by ideas but by greed and fear. Which boils down to a mechanical rather than an intellectual problem, i.e., we just need to change the incentive structures of society and everything will be fine. But even if the current system of incentives broke down or changed, we would not have a White Nationalist society because our people do not want a White Nationalist society. Not yet, anyway. It is our goal to make them want that, so that when the present system can no longer contain dissent, the next system might be White Nationalism. When the regime is maintained by nothing but greed and fear, it is brittle and hollow. A swift kick or a strong wind would collapse it. But that will not do us any good if people simply want another, perhaps less blatantly evil and unstable form of the same system.
You are a useless commentator here, so I am banning you.
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It looks like the Dabney quotation cited above wasn’t actually written in 1897. It appears in the essay titled “Women’s Rights Women,” in Discussions by Robert Lewis Dabney, ed. C. R. Vaughan (Mexico, MO: Crescent Book House, 1897), 4:496, and a footnote indicates that it was first published in The Southern Magazine; no original date of publication is given. Dabney’s Discussions can be found at archive.org.
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