What Trump’s Election Means for Identitarianism

baldeagle [1]2,336 words

Last April, I wrote an article for Counter-Currents called “What Would a Trump Presidency Mean for Europe? [2]” In it, I — like so many others in our neck of the political woods — predicted that Trump would win the election, and I discussed the impact I thought his victory would have on the situation in Europe.

Now that Trump has indeed won the election, and now that we have had a couple weeks to see his first steps as President-elect, I want to revisit the topic, but expand it to a slightly broader vista.

As a result, this article is about the implications of Trump’s win for Identitarianism as a whole, worldwide, and is split up into six areas or conclusions.

One: The Counterculture Has Entered the Mainstream

One of the most fascinating and inspiring aspects of Donald Trump’s ascendancy to the White House was watching the vast counterculture that grew up around his campaign. I, like the rest of us, was raised to always associate the Left with counterculture, and anything that was “cool,” “edgy,” or “rebellious.” However after four straight decades of the Left dominating our society, and with the Democrats selecting Hillary Clinton (a stodgy, establishment dinosaur) as their candidate, it is not shocking that the Trump campaign finally extinguished that sorry narrative.

Indeed, we saw the rise of poetry, music, art, and esoteric frog-inspired religiosity associated with Trump’s name. It would take multiple articles to even begin cataloging this phenomenon, but with Trump’s victory that counterculture has at least in part been catapulted into power along with him. This was a remarkably swift transition — the equivalent of if Eugene McCarthy had ridden the hippy movement to the White House in 1968, only more so.

Now, by saying that I do not mean to imply the counterculture and Trump’s administration are one and the same. Both this counterculture and the Alt Right (the two overlap to a significant but not complete degree) are distinct organisms that will continue to thrive regardless of what happens with Trump’s presidency. Moreover, should Trump turn his back on the Identitarian issues that fueled his rise, these forces will be the first to oppose him. Furthermore, the regressive left still controls public K-12 education, the universities, the media, the tech industry, and a million other things. Their co-conspirators on the globalist right share power with them nearly everywhere else. This means Identitarianism is still squarely in the “rebel” column.

Nevertheless however, with the Presidency being the most visible and symbolic power center in America and the world, to ignore the counterculture’s presence in that spotlight would be naïve. As so many within it have jokingly declared since November 8th, “We Republicans now!”

Two: Progressive Politics Did Not Get Time to Jump the Shark

This is one big negative of Trump getting elected, as Hillary winning might have finally pushed progressivism over the edge, and sent blue hair, ear gauges, and the “transgenderism movement” into the dustbin of history. With Trump winning the election we will instead have to suffer through the doubling down of such elements. Effete male liberals will get even lispier, angry feminists more irate, and the Left in Europe will virtue signal even harder by increasing the numbers of Muslim “refugees” they let in, just to show how superior they are to us ignorant, racist Americans. Aging punk rock “rebels” like Green Day will chant anti-Trump attacks identical to those of his most powerful corporate-establishment critics. Just as bad, we will have to suffer through the return of Bush-era liberal icons such as Jon Stewart (or Jon Leibowitz, as Trump correctly calls him), and Michael Moore.

Three: America Just Became the New Staging Ground for War in Europe

Donald Trump is more red-pilled about the situation in Europe than any American politician in our lifetime. He has said that Angela Merkel’s policies are “crazy” and have “ruined Germany.” He has also commented extensively on “no-go zones,” mass-rape, and all the other horrors of Muslim immigration. This is significant in several ways.

First and foremost it is important because it creates a far more favorable atmosphere for people to speak out against what is happening in Europe. I, for one, am much more comfortable writing about European politics, and advocating for regime change in Western Europe and the repatriation of Muslim citizens, now that Trump has been elected. The contrast is sharp. Most Identitarian authors writing about Europe for websites like Counter-Currents and others could be arrested if they lived in Sweden or Germany. We have been blessed already with far greater freedom of speech in America, but Trump’s election solidifies this ground tremendously. The election of Clinton might have very well meant the opposite.

trumplepenorban [3]

Americans and Europeans will now be able to interface to even greater extents to fight for the survival of Western Europe. American websites will better be able to serve as a platform for European dissidents who oppose mass immigration. Europeans who seek self-defense or paramilitary training will have an easier and more comfortable time coming to America to learn those skills. Cultivation of American-European Identitarian ties can be a healthy, open process, as the goal of ending the Muslim-facilitated destruction of Europe is now shared by the United States’ executive branch.

On the government level we will see the same exact scenario play out. Already, Trump has been working more closely with Nigel Farage than with Theresa May. Already Steve Bannon has reached out to the National Front in France — and, interestingly enough, not to Marine Le Pen the more mainstream party leader, but to Marion Le Pen her more firebrand and Identitarian niece.

I hesitate to allow myself too much hope in this regard, but it seems commonsensical to assume the Trump administration will attempt to push Western Europe away from the brink of suicide and back to politics of survival and rationality. All this should give those in Europe great hope.

Four: White Political Self-Interest Has Re-Emerged in the West

For many years white people in America voted entirely based on non-tribal, non-racial interests. I am amenable to the argument that in a real “civic nationalist” America — one that seeks to downplay racial differences and solidify national cohesion at the expense of racial identity — this is a good thing. The problem is of course that progressives made that impossible. They did so through (1) the implicitly and explicitly anti-white ideologies of progressive-Marxism that they pushed, and (2) their successful attempts at winning elections through whipping up anti-white animus among non-white voters, not to mention white guilt and white self-hatred among upper middle class whites.

With all these factors in play white American voters finally realized they had no choice but to vote based on tribal, racial interests as well. Van Jones called this “whitelash” in the days after the election, and sought to portray these voters as the typical “hate-filled racists” we have heard about a million times before. In that regard he was wrong — as their choice had nothing to do with “hate” — but he was right they were voting based on racially (or at least tribally) conscious reasoning. They resented the media regarding them as hicks and rednecks, they did not want Muslims coming to America and replicating what was happening in Europe, and they did not want their grandchildren to be minorities in their own country. Ann Coulter had been writing about these issues for years, but Trump was the first Republican candidate to come along and actually speak to them, and in so doing he created a tidal wave of support that brought him to the White House.

What is even more important however is what effect this will have from this point forward. I hesitate to posit too clear a future, but I do feel that now that they have embraced such voting patterns they are not going to want to return to where they were. I think the era of McCain/Romney Republicanism was very demonstrably ended in this campaign. The Overton Window has shifted, and if Progressives continue doubling down on the demonization of average White people, I think these White voters will only be pushed further in this direction. They may not stay huge Trump fans — the body politic is notoriously fickle, and presidents’ poll numbers nearly always decline during the course of their office — but this Identity-based voting will stay with them beyond the political zenith of any one leader.

Five: America May Stay a Majority White Country

As progressives never tired of declaring in recent years, America has been sliding ever closer to being a minority-white nation instead of the majority one it has been since its founding. They confidently repeated the demographic predictions that would see whites become an ever-shrinking piece of the population, and rejoiced at such prospects. And they seemed to have every reason to, as most folks (regardless of their thoughts at the prospect) assumed only a miracle could forestall such a development.

Donald Trump, however, could very well end up being that miracle. His opposition to illegal immigration and (what seems like) his distaste for legal mass-immigration might just mean that America’s demographics stay roughly the same over the next few decades. Or, at the very least, that we do not see mass demographic replacement on par with Western Europe.

The effects of this would be many but are also somewhat hard to tease out. One thing common sense would tell us would be affected is our relationship with Mexico. A return to static demography may mean that instead of a 2050-era America being a vast multicultural state with a large number of Hispanics identifying with a homogeneous and culturally strong Mexico next door, we instead see a more traditional dynamic in which a white America balances out against a Hispanic Mexico, especially if Mexico’s likely economic growth acts as a magnet drawing Mexican-Americans back into its borders.

Similarly such a demographic picture would have implications for our relationship with Europe. It seems rational to posit that a majority white America several decades from now would have much stronger relationships with the (hopefully) still homogeneous nations of Eastern Europe, rather than with the multicultural Western European nation-states a multicultural, Hillary Clinton-crafted America would side with. This will depend of course on whether there are Western European nations left at that point that are not fully Islamic though. Given the likelihood of European elites doubling down on national suicide as a politico-religious response to Donald Trump’s rise, that question is as fluid as ever.

Six: The Importance of Meme Warfare and Alternative Media Has Been Established

This has been called the first election won by memes, and I honestly do not think that is hyperbole. Trump won almost 50 electoral votes by a combined total of 160,000 ballots, and there are certain pro-Trump websites that might have influenced that many people alone.

In terms of alternative media, Breitbart made a massive splash over the course of the campaign and the election, showing that a rogue third party news source with little mainstream credibility could build a massive audience rivaling CNN, NBC, etc.

On an individual level we saw something very similar. A number of relatively non-mainstream writers and commentators, such as Scott Adams, Mike Cernovich, and Ricky Vaughn (to name just three), had impacts vastly outsized compared to what we might have seen in past elections. There was also of course the rise of the “Alt Right” and its relevance in the Trump campaign, which deserves an article (or book) in its own right.

Also of revolutionary importance was the impact of leaks and the alternative media involved in their publication. Not just Wikileaks — who the Democrats sought to blame on Russian espionage — but other groups such as DC Leaks and Project Veritas as well. These groups and the information they provided allowed Americans — particularly White rust-belt Americans who had been voting Democratic for decades — to see just how dirty and treasonous their politicians were. They recognized that their needs and concerns were the last thing on the mind of the effete Progressive liberals who were running the Democratic Party, and as a result quite logically switched their votes to Trump.

Finally, all of this was compounded by the despicably one-sided coverage the mainstream media gave of the election. Much has already been written about this and the fallout that has resulted from it, but suffice it to say the overall information landscape shifted violently in 2016 — to the benefit of Identitarianism, and to the detriment of establishment cosmopolitanism.

This hopefully portends further shifts in this direction. This is a subject that fascinates me because of the profound (and positive) implications it would have both for our people and for us as writers/thinkers/meta-politicians. It is quite possible that by 2020 or 2024 certain YouTube channels and websites will have greater clout than formerly “famous” mainstream journalists. Certain websites might have more viewers see their livestreams than CNN has viewers of its television station. There might be many Breitbarts representing a variety of Right-wing ideologies, and the combination of these sites, and all these other mediums and figures, could shift the political discourse to a degree that drastically changes conditions across the Occident.

Conclusion

2016 has been the most fluid, interesting, and hopeful political year in my lifetime. It has opened up possibilities undreamt of even two years ago. Whether or not Trump succeeds in “making America great again,” the forces unleashed during his campaign have revolutionized the Western political landscape, provided excitement and hope on an unprecedented scale, and opened up the bounds of the possible to an extent few thought possible. Trump’s victory will have a pronounced impact on Identitarianism, but of greater importance still will be Identitarians’ ability to harness those bounds and in doing so dictate the course of future events. If 2016 serves as a point from which to extrapolate, there should be justified optimism in that regard.

About the Author

Julian Langness is the author of Fistfights With Muslims In Europe: One Man’s Journey Through Modernity [4], and the editor of europeancivilwar.com [5].