Redefining the Mainstream

2,720 words

French translation here

Author’s Note:

This is the text of my talk from the third meeting of the Scandza Forum which was held in Stockholm on April 7, 2018. The topic of the conference was taking white identity politics from the margins to the mainstream. As usual, I improvised a bit and departed from my prepared text. I wish to thank Frodi Midjord and the Scandza Forum team, the approximately 175 people who attended the meeting, and the Counter-Currents reader whose gift made this trip possible.

How can white identity politics make its way from the margins to the mainstream? There are two things we can do to make our ideas more mainstream. We can change their substance, or we can change their style, i.e., the way we communicate them. Obviously, it is self-defeating to change our beliefs to fit the mainstream. Indeed, the whole point of our movement is to change the mainstream to fit our beliefs. But although our core principles should be fixed and non-negotiable, we should be willing to be quite suave, supple, and pragmatic in the means by which we communicate them if we hope to convince the largest possible number of our people.

In my article “Against Right-Wing Sectarianism,” I argued that white identity politics has the best chance of winning if it breaks out of the Right-wing ghetto to which it is confined today and becomes the common sense of the entire cultural and political mainstream. If the legitimacy of white identity politics permeates the entire culture, the political realm will inevitably fall into line.

This political realignment can take place in two ways, exemplified by contemporary Poland and Hungary. In Poland’s 2015 national parliamentary elections, a number of Left-wing parties participated, but none of them got above the threshold for representation, so the Left ended up with zero seats in the parliament. In Hungary, by contrast, Leftist parties have some seats in the parliament, but even Left-wing Hungarians tend to be patriotic and sensible on issues of immigration and diversity. For instance, Gyula Thürmer, the leader of the tiny orthodox Marxist-Leninist Magyar Munkáspárt (Hungarian Workers’ Party), stated in an interview that the party opposed taking migrants and refugees from the Middle East because they would harm Hungarian workers and increase social disharmony by adding diversity. When the far Left and the far Right are united on issues connected with immigration and identity, whites need not fear political pluralism.

But whether political success follows the Polish or the Hungarian model, the aim of our movement today should be the same: to persuade as many of our people as possible of the legitimacy of white identity politics. We need to convince whites of every class, every educational level, every religious denomination, every shade of the ideological and political spectrum, and every subculture (right down to the Trekkies) that white identity politics is morally legitimate, practically feasible, and necessary for securing the things they love.

Obviously, the best apostles we can send to convert these different groups will be drawn from their ranks, since their target audiences can better identify with them. Thus we need to convert white identitarians of all shades and stripes and send them forth to set up platforms and communicate our message to others of their kind. We need to colonize every niche in the cultural and political ecosystem with custom-tailored pro-white messages, if we wish to convert as many people as possible.

So what can we do to accomplish this? A deeper question, though, is: do we need to do anything at all — anything different from what we are already doing? After all, the existing White Nationalist movement was not created and guided by some mastermind. Instead, it coalesced out of many independent voices that created platforms for themselves or colonized existing ones. Moreover, the growth of our movement has far more to do with the failures of multiculturalism than our own efforts at propaganda and organization. Events are arguing in our favor better than we are. Even if we do nothing, the same forces driving the rise of white identity politics might well break them out of the Right-wing ghetto and change the cultural and political mainstream in the same unplanned and decentralized manner.

But wouldn’t it be nice if we could give this process some intelligent guidance? Wouldn’t it be nice if we could network and cooperate with some of these emerging voices and platforms and organizations? Some benefits of cooperation include:

• learning from the experiences — and mistakes — of others
• not wasting scarce resources duplicating the efforts and competing with the events and products of other nationalists. We need cartelization, not destructive competition.
• adjudicating disputes in an equitable — and quiet — manner, or avoiding them altogether
• perhaps even collaborating with one another to accomplish tasks too great to accomplish on one’s own

To make such cooperation possible, we simply have to learn to work with people who share our views of white identity politics, but may not share our views on a whole range of other issues. And as our movement grows more successful in penetrating and changing the whole culture, it will eventually be the case that white identity politics might be the only thing that unites us.

Of course we will continue to have passionate opinions and disagreements on other topics. But we need to be willing to set these aside to work with others for the greater good of our race. That one simple trick is the key to ensuring the broadest possible cooperation and coordination among white advocates, creating a movement that is larger, more powerful, and more likely to be able to save our race.

By contrast, people who insist on combining White Nationalism with a list of Right-wing add-ons — who try to up-sell you a side dish of Orthodox Christianity, or Nordic paganism, or radical Traditionalism with your ethnoburger — who insist that these peripheral issues are essential to white preservationism, and who turn them into polarizing litmus tests and shibboleths, are guaranteed to create a smaller, weaker, dumber, poorer, and less effective — but more “pure” — movement, when we need to go in precisely the opposite direction.

Such behavior is often dismissed as “purity spiraling.” But purity is not a problem. The problem is failing to distinguish between what is essential and what is peripheral to white identity politics. We should keep our core principles pure. The mistake is to demand purity on marginal matters as well.

There is a difference between a political ideology and a political movement. A political ideology is defined by its first principles. A political movement is defined by its goals. It is possible for people to share the same political goals for a wide variety of ideological reasons. Insisting that we all have the same reasons is the source of sectarianism.

If our movement is to grow, we need to discourage such sectarian tendencies. Currently they are of the Right, because that’s where our movement began. But Left-wing sectarianism will inevitably emerge as our movement grows to encompass the whole political spectrum.

The best defense against sectarianism is to recognize the symptoms and check them when they appear in ourselves and others. We need to see sectarianism with an accurately jaundiced eye.

• Sectarianism is a sign of ignorance that needs to be corrected.
• Sectarianism is a sign of immaturity that needs to be outgrown.
• Sectarianism is a manifestation of what I call “honorable defeatism,” which is a self-defeating behavior pattern that can be discerned in education, employment, personal relationships, and politics. If a person is convinced that defeat is inevitable, he will no longer seek victory. Instead, he will seek to preserve his self-esteem by finding an honorable, face-saving excuse for defeat. He will also seek to preserve his sense of agency by taking defeat into his own hands. Thus he will defeat himself on a matter of high moral principle. Of course it is never so blatant as that. Honorable defeatism may be perfectly obvious to others, but it only works if you are not fully conscious of what you are doing. So learning to distrust your own inclination towards moralism goes a long way to suppressing this problem altogether.
• Sectarianism is exactly what the enemy would encourage in order to retard, disintegrate, and defeat our movement. We should never accuse people of being enemy agents without rock-solid proof. But we should have no hesitation to call out those who act like them.
• Sectarianism is a tired tactic of would-be movement “leaders” to build up their own brand or sect, to avenge themselves on their enemies, or to gain advantages over their rivals at the expense of the health and growth of the larger movement. We need to call them on it, every time.

If we train ourselves to spot the slightest sectarian tendencies, sigh disdainfully, and mutter “This again,” the problem will be significantly reduced.

But can we stamp out divisive and sectarian behavior altogether? Not really. We can’t expel people from a decentralized, largely online movement. Trying to bully people offline is a dumb idea, because whether you win or lose depends entirely on the decision of your enemy, which is not the sort of battle that intelligent men fight. Besides, there is really no way to keep a motivated person “off the internet.” But we can and should bar divisive types from our membership organizations and online platforms. We can’t prevent them from marginalizing themselves, but we can sure prevent them from marginalizing us.

Aside from keeping sectarian types at arm’s length, all we can do is call them out on their bad behavior and hope that they grow out of it. Then we need to get back to work. The best criticism, after all, is simply to do better work, knowing that it will accomplish more and attract the most perceptive and sensible people. So focusing too much on sectarian cranks with their sandwich-boards is itself a self-defeating distraction.

We also need to be realistic. In a growing movement there will always be fresh crops of the ignorant, immature, and self-defeating. But that’s actually a good problem to have. We want the movement to grow, so it will always be necessary to educate and assimilate newcomers. It would be nice if the world simply handed us disciplined political soldiers to work with. But we have to create them ourselves. This sort of education is what metapolitics is all about. Moreover, if the supply of new sectarian types magically dried up, the enemy would find it necessary to create them. Thus we will never be free of this plague, but we can reduce it, contain it, work around it, and, most importantly, figure out how we can win in spite of it.

Does the decision to set aside differences to unite the broadest possible coalition around advancing the idea of white identity politics imply that politics is our highest value, trumping religion, family, private life, etc.?

Yes and no.

On the yes side, I see nothing wrong with proposing that the center pole of our political “big tent” be white identity politics. What is wrong with making a political goal the highest value of an eminently political movement?

No, to the extent that politics is not the sole realm of values or life. You may place religion, family, and your personal life above politics. In fact, I hope you do. Not everyone can be a one-dimensional ideologue like me.

But, again, this is a political movement. Our political goals must come first, and the inessential issues that divide us must be set aside, so we can argue about them in the ethnostate. Because if we argue about them now, we will never get to the ethnostate.

We do have to be frank, though, that this “big tent” approach implies that a certain “liberal” tolerance will be an ingredient in our movement and thus will be “baked in” to the ethnostates we are going to create. For instance, if the movement tables religious differences, that means that religious pluralism will be built into our movement today and into our ethnostates tomorrow. Thus if people enter the movement with the aim of establishing some sort of religious theocracy, they are joining under false pretenses, hoping to trick people into fighting for a form of society in which they have no place. The same is true of such shibboleths as libertarian economics, “white sharia,” and murdering homosexuals. No sensible person will join a movement or a party if he suspects such hidden sectarian agendas.

Combating sectarianism should not be confused with a complete ban on criticism and debate in the movement. As I argue in my articles on the absurd attempt to create a taboo against “punching right” (here and here), criticism and debate are the lifeblood of a pluralistic metapolitical movement. But there’s a difference between constructive and destructive criticism. For instance, sectarianism makes our movement weaker. But criticizing sectarianism makes us stronger. We need to stop arguing about inessential matters, so we can argue about essential ones.

Many in our movement envision our path to victory on the Old Right model of a militant, hierarchical political party using both bullets and ballots to battle its way to power and then impose its program on society. But the conquest of political power has metapolitical conditions. At least some people outside the movement need to regard its aims as morally legitimate and politically feasible before it can hold a single rally or win a single vote. Those among us who regard politics as simply a matter of hard political power put themselves in the place of an invading army or Leninist vanguard party imposing an unpopular revolution by force of arms.

The more people who agree with a party’s aims, the less opposition it will face. This is obviously true of its natural Right-wing constituency. But it also applies more broadly — in fact, to the entire electorate. Opposition to our politics will decrease as its moral legitimacy increases throughout the whole of society. But what if our ideas become the common sense of the whole political spectrum? We know that this is possible, because it was actual not so long ago.

If we work hard enough to convert our people, there may come a point when it no longer makes sense to conceive of victory as the triumph of a particular party, because on the essential issues of white identity politics, all the parties will be on the same page. Just as every mainstream party today is on the same page about diversity and multiculturalism.

Such a consensus would transcend any particular political party and thus would have to be institutionalized outside or above the political realm. We need a network of metapolitical organizations to set and monitor the boundaries of political discourse. When people today speak of an “establishment” or a “deep state,” they are gesturing toward such agents of ideological hegemony.

In such a society, white identity politics would be the uncontested framework of the political mainstream. For those who are fixated on a particular Right-wing sectarian vision of society, this might seem like defeat. But a society in which white people — and only white people — are arguing about the same old political issues, like abortion, environmentalism, and taxes, is victory enough for me.

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