Editor’s Note:
This is a very important essay. Please read, comment, and share. — Greg Johnson
There’s no sense in mincing words anymore: The Alt Right has hit a wall and is presently faced with the hard task of pulling back and searching for a new course. The enemy media are (prematurely) claiming victory. Many progressives are hastening to vindicate the “antifa” domestic terrorist movement,[1] discarding the pretense that liberal misgivings about organized political violence hinge on anything more than crass utilitarianism.
My purpose here is to offer some thoughts on what has happened and how our side can hope to recover its ground. I do not wish to exaggerate the present difficulties, nor blame people in the Alt Right for suffering what is essentially a form of state repression outsourced to volunteer paramilitary groups and powerful corporations. However, repression by those in power is a constant for us; what has changed is the effectiveness of this repression, which used to meet with a fluid, agile and durable target, and now increasingly enjoys a sluggish, clumsy and brittle one. One major reason for this is that prominent figures in the Alt Right, protected by a widespread culture of hooting down internal dissent, took strategic and aesthetic decisions that ended up turning an antifragile movement into a highly destructible one.
Where the Alt Right was once proudly decentralized, it now seeks unification (and is, of course, more divided than ever). Where it once contained a constellation of anti-progressive elements, it is now reduced to an isolated ethnonationalist core spitting fire at everything else around it. Where it once employed intellectual quality and transgressive trolling to equally great effect, these polar opposites have lately been merged into a dull and stagnant rehash of Rockwellian neo-Nazism.
As many of these changes were made precisely so that certain individuals could enjoy leadership, it would be perverse to allow them to shirk responsibility for the results. That said, I am not accusing anyone of deliberate sabotage: those who employed these methods certainly believed that they would work. This is why a true analysis of the present state of affairs must look beyond mere personalities and decisions and identify the deeper fault lines in the ideological fundament of our movement.
Your Brain on Liberalism
To understand why the Alt Right is failing, we can start by asking a simple question: how do most people in it envisage the victory of the movement? I would anticipate receiving three basic answers: 1) a mass white awakening provoked by anti-white depredations; 2) the rise of a reactionary post-Millennial youth wave; and 3) a collapse of modern Western civilization that will destroy the ruling power structure at a stroke.
None of these scenarios correspond to reality. Anti-white depredations that would have seemed unimaginable a few decades ago have not provoked ordinary people into rebellion. “Generation Zyklon” might be fairly conservative, but they have little social and political power, and many cradles in the West have already been filled by the children of the imported neo-proletariat loyal to the Left. As for a civilizational collapse: even assuming that such a thing could happen, it would likely favor those who already possess disproportionate resources and entrenched power structures. The big winners of the Western Roman collapse were the barbarian invaders, the Christian Church, and (sometimes) the late Roman landholding elites who got to merge with the invaders; the bagaudae rebel groups in the provinces were simply suppressed by old and new rulers alike.
All of these Alt Right victory fantasies bear a common stamp of origin: they are liberal fantasies. This fact that should not surprise us in the least, given that liberalism enjoys near-complete intellectual hegemony in the West, and forms the common ideological bedrock of progressivism and post-1945 conservatism.
One of the fundamental pillars of liberalism is what we might call a democentric view of things. In this view, men are born free, then choose to enter into a “social contract” and set up a ruling authority in order to secure their interests. This implies not only that the ruling authority is the servant of the people, but that the initiative to drive history is in the hands of the people; those in power can only choose to fulfil or deny the popular will. Although the ruling elites may disregard their obligations and repress popular demands, this can only prove ineffective in the long run, as the will of the people “inevitably” takes the course of insurrection and restores the original social contract.
Contrast this with the anti-liberal view, which we can call cratocentric or “rule-centered.” In this view, all men are born into subjection (i.e., as children under the sway of parents); society arises from the expansion and agglomeration of families, as the cities of antiquity arose according to Fustel de Coulanges; and the authority of the ruler is no more dependent on popular consent than is the rule of a father over his children. The masses can assent to the commands of the ruling authority, or else negate them, but they do not and cannot take the initiative to change society. Repression by authority usually works as advertised, and where successful insurrections do take place, they do not spring from a spontaneous popular will but from the power schemes of a rival authority.
Although democentric ideas may possess ideological hegemony over the modern West, cratocentric ones still possess their ancient hegemony over human nature. And when we critique democentrism from a cratocentric viewpoint, we understand that it is not really an expression of “anti-elitism,” but an ideological weapon to serve the long struggle of liberal elites against the traditional elites of the West. Democentrism is toxic to the legitimacy of an aristocracy, and hazardous to that of a monarchy; but it is a useful smokescreen for anonymous plutocrats, and a positive elixir of health for the managerial elites whose business it is to control society in the name of the people.
What does all of this have to do with the present state of the Alt Right? Well, let’s come to the point: the liberal managerial class ruling the West preserves its own legitimacy by using manipulation and patronage to construct a democratic facade for its own exercise of power. When it wants to destabilize a foreign government, it funds a color revolution, or encourages an internal rebellion. When it wants to impeach a renegade US President, and anticipates the need to disarm his conservative supporters, it comes up with a media-constructed assault on public opinion masquerading as a spontaneous protest by school shooting survivors. When it wants to strengthen that impeachment effort by getting hold of some juicy photos of brown children being shot dead by border guards, it whips up a caravan of illegal migrants to storm the US border. And so on.
As these examples suggest, this manipulation does not always succeed, at least not directly. But it has created a strong illusion of unlimited popular agency that infects even the self-described enemies of liberalism, fooling them into a false view of how power is achieved and exercised. The tactics pursued by the Alt Right since Heilgate can be compared to a cargo cult, in the sense that they rely on recreating the democentric facade of liberal movements. Protest marchers chanting racialist slogans are our Black Lives Matter, street brawlers are our antifa, and neo-Nazis are our trannies and homosexuals demanding public acceptance for their shocking private fetishes.
Everything is in place—except, alas, for the decisive factor, which is the patronage and toleration of those in power. And needless to say, when these tactics fail, the defeated upstarts start to get depressed about the inability of their people to spontaneously defend their own interests. Liberalism is a potent drug indeed!
The Fascist Path to Power
In light of this, it is worth taking a brief look at the ways in which the fascist movements of the early twentieth century achieved power. Many of those pushing liberal cargo-cult tactics in the Alt Right believe that they are imitating fascism, and they hold out hope for a “white awakening” because they know that Hitler and Mussolini rose to power on the back of popular movements. However, a closer look at the history of these movements refutes the popular myth of a fascist rise to power by pure mass revolution.
Robert O. Paxton’s Anatomy of Fascism is of great use here. It discusses not only the successful fascist movements in Italy and Germany, but also the unsuccessful ones elsewhere, and distinguishes all of these from conservative authoritarian regimes that did not rely on the same radical and populist methods. It also separates out the stages through which a fascist movement must cycle in order to assume power. The aid of established power is needed at several points on the way.
The first stage begins long before the fascist movement is founded, and consists of the social, intellectual and political developments that contribute to making it a possibility. As everyone knows, the Great War and the rise of Communism in Russia were the most important preconditions for the original fascist movements. Less often appreciated is the role of what we would now call “metapolitics”: a longer process of mental preparation going back decades, in which the failings of liberalism and democracy were exposed and the decline of Western civilization was discussed. This smoothed the way for the creation of fascist movements in the wake of the Great War, but it did not guarantee their success (for example, fascism did not take power in France, although the French had experienced the longest period of mental preparation for it).
The next stage begins once the fascist movement is founded and consists of a process by which it roots itself in the social and political system—or, alternatively, fails to do so. Initially, the fascist movement seeks to maximize its popular appeal by creating a loose and amorphous “antiparty,” which serves to attract all sorts of people who possess wildly divergent interests but are united by a vague discontent. Later, although the movement continues to rally the people, many of these early followers end up being pruned off as alliances are made with existing social and political interests. In Mussolini’s case, this was achieved when the squadristi in rural Italy made themselves an indispensable ally of the big landowners, who were being squeezed between the laissez-faire liberal state and the socialists agitating their workforce. In Germany, Hitler managed to attract small businessmen and a few large ones to his cause, although most of these stuck with traditional conservatives (and certainly did not bankroll the NSDAP to the extent claimed by the Left). It is important to emphasize the toleration of both of these fascisms by elements of the power structure in their countries. Local police forces often sided with Mussolini’s squadristi, and Hitler’s Brownshirt toughs enjoyed lenient treatment by the conservative Weimar judiciary.
The third stage, and the final one as far as we are concerned, involves the “seizure of power” by which the fascist movement achieves unrestrained rule. But in order to achieve this, the fascist leaders must first be appointed into government by conservative elites, who typically wish to make use of their popular following in order to bolster their own legitimacy. The 1922 March on Rome was nearly thwarted by the Italian government—trains carrying the majority of Blackshirts were stopped by police, and the government possessed the military force to repulse the nine thousand who turned up at the gates of the city—but King Victor Emmanuel III, fearing the consequences of open bloodshed, declined to impose martial law and instead offered the prime ministry to Mussolini. After trying and failing to imitate this gambit in 1923, Hitler sought power through the political system instead, and was eventually appointed to the chancellorship by a conservative elite that had been ruling without a parliamentary majority and wished to return to popular rule. Had the intention been to lock him out at all costs, this could have been done, as the NSDAP’s large electoral support was beginning to drop off at the time.
In summary, successful fascist movements must cultivate not only the masses but also the vested interests of society. They must be encouraged, or at least tolerated, by an established ruling elite focused on the greater threat from leftist revolution. Eventually, they must make a bid for power, and find conservative patrons who are both willing to cooperate with them and obliged by their own crisis of legitimacy to do so. Where no such opportunities existed in the 1920s and 1930s, fascism got nowhere; and where it directly confronted conservative authoritarian regimes, it typically ended up being repressed as one more phenomenon of public disorder.
The fascist experience can teach us many things. It illustrates the importance, yet also the limitations, of metapolitical action. It tells us that anyone attempting to follow the route to power walked by the fascists must appeal to a vast array of classes and interests and must work with national sentiment instead of offending it, which rules out anyone who chooses to marginalize himself by waving the flag of a defeated foreign enemy. It also reminds intellectuals that the angry young men attracted to the Right, who often egg each other on into unwise patterns of behavior, are in fact indispensable to the cause—what matters is to put them to good use defending the people being bullied by the Left, instead of wasting them in pointless street parading or noxious infighting.
However, the most important thing that fascism teaches us is that it cannot be recreated in the present era. The ruling power structure was founded on fascism’s defeat and is watching out for its revival at every turn. The modern avatar of leftist revolution is not a military threat from beyond the frontier, but a political enemy ensconced in every official institution, and it is now the “antifa” and “SJWs” who enjoy judicial leniency and elite patronage. The managerial revolution in industry, and the abandonment of white proletarian interests in favor of foreign immigrants by the Left, has neutralized a great deal of the old opposition between Bolshevism and big business. Perhaps most importantly in the long run, the West is no longer made up of sovereign states based on the rights of a fighting citizenry but consists of the territories of a de facto US Empire that pursues its expansionist goals through manipulation and subversion. And while there are still “conservatives” in office, these are no longer the anti-liberal traditionalists who used that name before 1945, but right-liberal “loyal opposition” who pride themselves on keeping the real Right out of power.
Of the three stages of fascist pathbreaking, the only one available to us right now is metapolitics. Thanks to the internet, a true “free press,” the savagery and hypocrisy of the liberal oligarchy can be communicated every day to ever-increasing masses of people outside the official media structure. This can never induce the masses to rise up and replace that oligarchy of their own accord, but it can ensure that they become convinced of its illegitimacy and unwilling to react strongly against threats to its power. That is the first step from which all others must follow.
From Fourth to Second Generation Warfare
As regards political action, in a situation where previous roads to power have been closed to us, there is only one model that can offer any hope for success. This is the guerrilla war—or, more precisely, the Fourth Generation War (4GW) described by William S. Lind in his works On War and Fourth Generation War Handbook.
It goes without saying that I am not suggesting a physical war with the managerial state, and anyone who does so is either a fool or an enemy shill. But it should be clear to us by now that politics is war by other means, and that we are in the strategic position of “non-state actors,” prevented from fighting in the open against enemies who enjoy official backing. Non-state actors are no exception to everything that I have said about power and patronage, and the most effective ones are aided and financed by sympathetic states. However, we know that patronage is not required for the creation of a political guerrilla movement, as we ourselves have witnessed the creation of just such a movement out of absolutely nothing.
I am referring, of course, to the Alt Right, which in its original form showed a promising application of guerrilla methods to political warfare. As a diverse collection of autonomous Rightist groups operating under a loose brand name, it presented no single target for the enemy to attack. The movement had no single leader who could be vilified, co-opted, hyped up as the ‘big bad guy’ indispensable to all Hollywood narratives, or harassed and made to look stupid in public. In the absence of such a hate figure, it was Hillary Clinton and her official media backers who made themselves look ridiculous by declaring war on Pepe the Frog.
Online trolls associated with the Alt Right used Nazi imagery to publicly flout the speech restrictions imposed by the Left and transform the “Brown Menace”—the justification for every foreign imperial war and domestic repression campaign, treated with due reverence by Leftists and fake conservatives—into a big stupid joke. It is impossible to say whether the majority of those using this imagery were consciously doing so as a means to these ends, although expressions such as “Great Meme Wars” imply that this was actually the case. The point is that it was done by rank-and-filers sniping from the undergrowth of anonymity, and when the shrieking volunteer commissars wanted to hit back at Alt Right public figures, they found none who were foolish enough to present themselves as targets by endorsing Nazi imagery.
By extending its branding to milder strains of conservatism as well as ethnonationalists and reactionaries, the original Alt Right conformed to the 4GW principle of “hugging the civilians,” forcing the enemy to infuriate ordinary people by attacking them in order to get to the guerrillas. In the physical 4GWs of Iraq and Afghanistan, American forces sowed dragon’s teeth among the local populations every time they shot at a guerrilla fighter and hit an innocent bystander. In the political 4GW against the Left, the same effect was achieved when Clinton dismissed half the American electorate as “deplorables” in response to the rise of the Alt Right. When this sort of thing happens, and the guerrillas (Alt Right) shoot back while the client-rulers (cuckservatives) wring their hands, the loyalties of the people begin to shift in a new direction.
After finding an informal patron in Donald Trump, the Alt Right acquired the ability to go on the offensive. The election of Trump, which offered the chance to substitute a real conservative political class for the professional losers of the loyal opposition, should have been understood as the first step towards reopening a road to patronage that has been closed to the radical Right ever since the defeat of fascism. However, many Alt Righters in the US—who had been happy to castigate democracy as a rigged game during the years of Obama’s rule—treated this event not as the capture of a bridgehead but as the crowning victory of a war. They had Cast Their Votes, Thrown the Bastards Out, and Put Their Man into Office, and some of them really started to say things like “we are the establishment now.” They forgot the prudence learned by everybody who lives under a totalitarian regime, and blissfully reverted to the liberal faith of their hearts, discarding hard-won knowledge under the pretext of taking action.
This set the stage for the regression of the Alt Right into conventional tactics, or Second Generation War (2GW), the tactics of the state forces that tend to lose Fourth Generation wars despite massive superiority in money and muscle. This began with rank-and-filers shaming people for exercising basic prudence, but it was formalized by Richard Spencer’s Heilgate stunt in November 2016. Spencer, who had created the original Alternative Right website in 2010 and shut it down three years later,[2] almost certainly regretted publicly discarding the Alt Right brand just before it exploded in popularity. In the old Rockwellian tradition, he decided to raise his name by using Nazi symbolism to play the enemy media, forgetting that this strategy always entails being played right back. By sparking a media outcry and winning over the large audiences flocking to the increasingly Nazi-themed outlets of Andrew Anglin and Mike Enoch, Heilgate succeeded in its covert goal of presenting Spencer as the leader of the Alt Right.
However, the wider effect of the stunt upon the Alt Right was disastrous. It drove a wedge into the loose alliance between radicals and populists, negating the 4GW strategy of “hugging the citizens” and allowing the core of the movement to be isolated as a target. The Alt Right quickly reformed into a small alliance of edgy white nationalist groups revolving around Spencer, and promptly isolated itself further by declaring war on the “Alt-Liters” who had broken off to form the New Right. At the same time, a plan was unveiled to redefine the new Alt Right as a centralized coalition, commanded by an eponymous corporate entity under Spencer’s leadership. This threatened the organic unity of the original Alt Right, by making it harder for diverse groups to coexist within the same movement—and sure enough, ever since the change from “rhizome” to “tree” was made, the result has been a bitter fruit of obnoxious internal crusades against homosexuals, women, insufficiently edgy people, and other targets.
If the methods of the decentralized Alt Right can be compared to guerrilla warfare, centralization was equivalent to crawling out from the undergrowth and forming up as conventional battalions in the open field. And at Charlottesville, the Alt Right marched directly into one of the strongpoints of the enemy, with no plan other than to triumph by muscle and will. Although the men present showed great bravery against the antifa scum and politicized police sent against them, how could they have hoped to win against the weight of media, judicial, corporate and political power stacked against them? Needless to say, it is the failure of the Alt Right to keep up these costly frontal attacks has brought us to the present state of affairs, in which the enemy media demoralizes our people by gloating over the humiliation of the Spencers and Heimbachs they themselves elevated into place.
How, in retrospect, could things have been done differently? And how can things yet be done differently?
We have to admit that that the pre-Heilgate structure of the movement could not have survived forever, and certainly not outside of cyberspace. The fact that rank-and-filers in the Alt Right felt the need to out-edge each other in order to gain status is proof enough of the need for formal leadership and hierarchy. But if the contours of the original movement had been respected, the natural development would have been towards the creation of several real-life organizations within the overarching brand of the Alt Right, which would have tried out various approaches until one of them gained the strength and momentum to absorb the others.
Ideally, these organizations would have carried the guerrilla tactics of the online movement into real life: harrying the enemy and luring him into overplaying his hand against ordinary people, instead of isolating ourselves from those people and courting their hatred by signaling as a threat to social order. Instead of rushing to usurp the brand name of the entire movement, the leaders—again, ideally—would have been wise enough to maintain a degree of plausible deniability between real-life activity and online discourse, making it less likely that political action will backfire on metapolitical work by inviting corporate-antifa censorship.
Although spent political capital cannot be recovered, there is nothing stopping us from taking this course in the present day. Organizations like Identity Europa in the US (apparently modelled on Europe’s Generation Identity) are using political guerrilla tactics such as flash demos and leaflet bombing. Antifa, who feel vindicated by recent events, continue to push conservatives towards radicalization by violently harassing them.[3] The political bridgehead in the U.S. established by the Trump election is still intact, though much beleaguered, and the fight against impeachment may offer an issue around which the Rightist elements sundered by Heilgate can be reunited.
It may be that we shall have to discard the name of the original movement in order to recover its ethos. The centralized Alt Right exists mainly as an idea, which may serve to funnel donation money up to the handful of outlets that follow its rigid orthodoxy but exacts an intolerable price in strategic uselessness and internal friction. Distancing ourselves from the Alt Right brand name cannot make it go away—we are stuck with it for the foreseeable future—but it may dispel the illusion of unification and allow the decentralized substance of the movement to reassert itself. And if we should require another catch-all name that can be used for the purpose of “hugging the civilians,” there is always the New Right brand currently being used by civic nationalists, who would be powerless to prevent its repossession by ethnonationalists and reactionaries.
Perhaps the long-term success of our struggle will hinge upon future tectonic shifts in the Western power structure. However, at the very least, we can reject the patronage of the only power actor willing to support insane strategy and neo-Nazi stupidity: the enemy media. As Greg Johnson has observed, the media and certain Jewish organizations exert a great deal of control over the selection of leaders in the radical Right, simply by hyping up anyone who confirms their stereotypes as a serious threat and channeling credibility in his direction. It is no accident that the fifty-year-long cautionary tale of ‘WN 1.0’ began when George Rockwell thought he could manipulate the enemy media and resurrected itself for a second act when Richard Spencer fell into the same trap. The fact that both men were, in my estimation, generally sincere in their motives did not prevent the media from making use of their antics in order to discredit the wider movement.
The maxim no enemies to the Right can only hold true in the context of no alliances with the Left. This precludes courting the attention of the enemy media, just as it precludes selling our principles out to the Left and trying to win mainstream “respectability.” Those who want to lead this movement to victory have no serious choice other than to pursue steady, organic growth through meritorious action, and give the Fake News nothing but the savor of a door in the face.
Notes
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/19/the-Alt Right-is-in-decline-has-antifa-activism-worked
[2] https://affirmativeright.blogspot.com/2013/12/looking-back-forging-forward.html
[3] https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/910975/jacob-reed-mogg-queen-mary-university-london-protest-left-wing-activists
Source: https://affirmativeright.blogspot.com/2018/04/thoughts-on-state-of-right.html
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23 comments
The Alt Right seized the online initiative during the 2015-16 campaign and maintained it into the immediate aftermath of the Trump electoral victory. Various Alt Right players showed a mastery of online meme warfare as well as coming out of apparently nowhere to defy the norms of the System. But already there was a counterattack in the making, starting with the doxxing of various Alt Right figures in late 2016, and then the events following Charlottesville. In retrospect, the Alt Right ought to have changed tactics in early 2017, 4th Gen Warfare style, advancing along unexpected lines and letting the System’s counterattack hit thin air.
Of course, it is easy enough to say that now. It appeared for a brief period back then that the Alt Right could maintain the initiative.
What is needed for tomorrow is a greater sophistication in tactics and strategy, mastery of the “technical” factors of forming a movement.
The Left has all sorts of doctrinal material, such as Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals.” Leftists engage in serious discussions of organization, agitprop lines and front formation. Too often, Alt Right website commentary is dominated by “clever” remarks, personal invective and stale conspiracy theories (as I have noted previously). Granted, people need a place to blow off their frustrations, but after a while the ranting crowds out the serious activists. This has to change.
Some examples of what can be done:
* Discussions of available manuals on psychological warfare, networking/netwars, civil disobedience, legal defense and (especially) fundraising.
* Lessons learned from Charlottesville and other street events: what went wrong, what went right, and what can be done in the future.
* How to formulate memes; how to create satiric videos and songs; how to get your media to go viral.
* Attacking the contradictions of the System (e.g., they claim to be about tolerance, diversity and inclusion, but are intolerant of opposing viewpoints, promote ideological straitjacketing, and exclude any dissent from the egalitarian line).
* How to design effective posters and flyers, put them up clandestinely, and then turn them into First Amendment cases.
* Identity Europa style street theater by the numbers.
* Forming defense committees for Alt Righters in jail: where to send contributions, letters of support, public officials to be contacted.
* Forming fronts to bring in normies: webpages tailored for IT workers, students, gun rights folks, artists, attorneys, reporters, and other selected audiences. Show them why they should support the Alt Right, or at least question System narratives.
Consider how many top level IT personnel have lost their jobs because they did not tow the party line on the latest trendy leftist cause. Can they be recruited to create exclusive peer-to-peer technologies for the Alt Right?
Alliances: as the article points out, more normies are being alienated by the System’s repression. We have seen Trump supporters attacked by leftist violence at rallies; leftist mobs storm campuses where conservatives have tried to speak; and leftists calling for attacks against anyone with a MAGA hat. A lot of people have been impressed with Alt Right/Lite bands which have taken it to the streets to challenge leftist mobs at Berkeley and other places.
Other normie alienation comes from the general loss of faith in the mainstream (liberal establishment) media, as well as people who are fed up with “diversity” indoctrination and the capitulation of corporations like Starbucks(tm) to cheesy race hustlers.
…and…
Elite patronage: somewhere along the line there will be someone in power who will be pushed too far and will be open to supporting the Alt Right. It may be a politician, it may be a corporate CEO, it may be a university chancellor, it may be an alphabet agency satrap. This is especially so if the Left continues its campaign of harassing and assaulting public officials who support immigration law enforcement. Just such a high echelon personage may decide that backing the Alt Right would give them their own street muscle as well as an online cadre for meme warfare. And with that comes the legitimacy, lawyers and financial support for the Alt Right.
There is an opportunity to win over all these people. But to make that happen, there has to be an intelligent discussion of the technical factors to get them to take that Red Pill.
This is the kind of strategy which we should be working on. We need to employ the Leftists techniques against themselves, as well as those of the technical-oligarch elites.
Namely, we should employ agitprop in all its forms, adopt many of the rhetorical and theoretical techniques of critical-leftist academia (Noam Chomsky’s manufacture of consent springs to mind, in the wake of obvious media manipulation against us), and finally we need to employ a combination of technology and psychology that is at the cutting edge of marketing disciplines. I’m talking about artificial intelligence/data analysis which is able to preempt the mind of the person it is sending messages to. This will be the primary weapon in a 21st century information war.
Australians reading this excellent article should consider the historical relevance, or otherwise, of German National Socislism to our struggle.
As always, Dr Saleam offers some sensible thoughts..
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Pbe7IEHBC18
1788 not 1488.
.
Very good points on the principle of authority as opposed to “people’s power”, and long overdue. The Right loves to self-deceive on this point because it cannot imagine any way out other than through “the people” or as good old Pobedonostsev preferred to say “the mob”.
Not really convincing.
1) Maybe we “hit a wall”, but it has got some cracks
If “Alt-Right” includes European Identitarian movements, there are some important recent breakthroughs: the Merkel regime is under pressure, several EU countries are opposing immigration, Soros activity has been made illegal in Hungary and in Italy the Right is taking over. Even the Brits are now learning that Hyde-Park is not for those criticizing immigration.
2) Maybe green frogs are useful, but some form of provocation cannot be avoided
Very few can be learned from “The Fascist Path to Power”, because our context is completely different. Although it is true that they were ultimately brought into power by fearful conservatives, the fascists did not sit and wait for this to happen. Nor hiding themselves applying decentralized guerilla warfare. They used deliberate provocation, even when the success was far from clear.
By coincidence Cultural Wars arrived in my mail box the same day this article was published and had an unflattering article on the Altright. The accompanying photographs suggested the movement leaned to violence and the author incorrectly said that Heather was killed by the panicked driver of the car rather than a heart attack. Thankfully there was no mention of The North American New Right or its editors so my dignity is still secure.
Just move forward as decent people wrestling with the majesty, mystery and brevity of life within the limitations of our humanity (in other words, don’t be [a] Dick).
What actually killed the movement was showing up to the alt right press conference on 9/9/2016 asking for a blank check. People aren’t going to leap into the unknown; there has to be a plausible path and destination and even aftermath otherwise people will prefer the devil they know.
As an example, we have the upcoming summit between Trump and Putin. The Russians just built a bridge to Crimea over the open water. The Movement could be calling for a Northern Alliance (US, Canada, Russia, Britain, Ireland and Iceland and as many EU countries as we could pull away from that Den of Evil) connected by a bridge across the Bering Strait: a globe-trotting superhighway to eclipse China’s New Silk Road.
That is the cost of The Movement’s failed leaders. We have no voice AND nothing to say!
I agree this essay is very good… My only complaint and/or critique is the incessant “fear” of being called a Nazi. While I understand your point, that is the normies are scarred of such imagery, and associations; I feel it best not to attack it.
If you distance too much and are scarred of said ideas/imagery than you give it inadvertent legitimacy. People walk around with Communist regalia on all the time. I think a way to challenge this taboo of anything Nazi is to tactfully bring out subtle imagery of previous fascist movements. Of course tailor them to you country/audience of course.
At the very least do not confirm or deny any antipathy to said imagery/ideas. Otherwise this reversion and taboo can not be broken…
I agree with you that we should not play along with the Left by according taboo status to Nazi imagery, when Slavoj Žižek is quite happy to pose with Soviet propaganda posters of Comrade Stalin. And the idea of drumming self-declared Nazis and fascists out of the radical Right might be tempting at times, but it would eventually recreate the Cuck Conga of mutual backstabbing and leftward drift that renders mainstream conservatism so useless. As we can see in the present day, the Left gets to extend the ‘Nazi’ concept at its own convenience.
But I think it is possible to dissect optics disasters like Heilgate and isolate the element that does deserve to be drummed out of the Right, which is the act of making Faustian alliances with the enemy media: giving credibility to their smears so they will hype you into an artificial position of leadership. The Alt-Right is good at sniffing out ‘cucks’ (i.e. those who court the Left) and shaming them; what I am saying is that this needs to be extended into a general taboo against ‘courting the enemy’, a sort of omertà as regards the media and enemy organisations. People who are in bed with the press, or shamelessly signalling to them like whores in the hope of getting there, should not get to turn around and accuse honest people of “optics cucking” or “punching to the Right”.
Of course, this ends up putting Nazi and fascist imagery under a certain suspicion, because it is so often used for this purpose. But if you are sympathetic to the historical fascist movements, you should remember that the successful ones did not slavishly copy each others’ imagery. Nor did Hitler himself “respect the fallen of the last war” enough to resurrect the German imperial tricolour, although this had a lot more credibility in his own day than the Nazi flag has in ours. The provocative use of Nazi imagery comes from the strategy of George L. Rockwell, who devised it as a means of breaking through media blackouts, a rationale that has lost all its force now that Rightists have their own media. The only people who have got any (limited) success out of these shock tactics in the present day are anonymous trolls, and this is because they can neither bring down fire on their comrades nor be brought into the enemy media’s embrace.
I agree,
Thank you for your insightful essay and response.
Wonderful extended analysis, with many bright insights. Within this context, “uniting the right” efforts are a misfire from the word go. The Alt Right circa 2016 succeeded because it was so un-united and diffuse it didn’t provide a target for the Enemy to shoot at. From Hailgate through 2017, there were definable targets, and they got identified and attacked. Alt Right succeeded when it was a critical, counter-propaganda movement that kept the Enemy back-footed and confused.
I would quibble a bit about equating the rise of Mussolini to the story of early Fascism. Fascism at its heart was a set of anti-Bolshevist movements during the early post-WWI period. Early fascists were simply people who were wide-awake to that threat. (It still is a threat, of course, under other names and guises.) Fascism was reactive and counter-subversive, and had nothing to do with dictators or seizures of power; neither did it seek to set up a quasi-Bolshevism of the nationalist Right. That Musso did set himself up as a strongman was mere happenstance, a reflection of the political realities of his time and place. His situation was analogous to that of de Gaulle in the late 50s: he was asked to provide a centralized, stabilizing leadership in a country that wanted it, and was coming apart.
Lessons from the old South Africa.
“Online trolls associated with the Alt Right used Nazi imagery to publicly flout the speech restrictions imposed by the Left and transform the “Brown Menace”—the justification for every foreign imperial war and domestic repression campaign, treated with due reverence by Leftists and fake conservatives—into a big stupid joke.”
I remember the Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB) in South Africa. It was huge. Today they have faded away and operate in the background. Lots of working class people were part of this organisation. They had the triskele as their symbol. Inside South Africa ist was sold as meaning “777” (“God’s symbol” contrary to “666”, the Devil’s symbol). Outside South Africa the media had a ball of a time associating the AWB with the swastika. It begs the question why they choose the triskele. If they honestly believed it to mean “777” then they were not aware of how the setup of bigger international picture. That in my eyes is a fatal mistake.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrikaner_Weerstandsbeweging
When the Conservative Party (CP) under Dr. Andries Treurnicht appeared on the scene, they were immediately in the position the AWB could not ever dream to be over their many years of existence. They came into the position of ascending toward real political power by replacing the Progressive Federal Party (the Money Power) as the official opposition party. What the Conservative Party did with this opportunity, is a completely different matter. Many opportunities were played away.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_Party_(South_Africa)
I attended speeches done by the AWB and by the CP. Both spoke sense. The difference were in the supporters. The supporters interrupted by clapping their hands and stamped their feets and were a bit unruly and dressed casually. The CP supporters were a different class altogether. They were suited with ties, and kept quite during the speech.
The Alt-Right must take care not to become another AWB-type of movement. By that I do not mean that the AWB were bad. They were genuinely patriotic and the leader spoke a lot of thruths. But when push came to shove, the leadership did not deliver when it counted right at the end and that was the end of the AWB in the form it exited back then. They did not win on the propaganda front by their actions. The CP worked more subtle and this attracted more supporters.
Perhaps one must study the AWB and the CP in order to see if any lessons can be learned from their actions for the way forward. It will not fit hundred percent on the American and European situation, but it is something available from recent history where its members still are alive for questioning and advice.
If the Alt Right has ‘hit a wall’ it is only because of Richard Spenser’s very unwise presumption that he was ‘Mr Alt Right’. But probably of more importance was the triumph of Donald Trump inducing a collective sigh of relief among the White population. Most mildly conservative Whites have put their faith in Trump and are optimistic he will take action to at least alleviate the most egregious threats to their existence.
They are in for a disappointment. Trump at best is a weak rearguard action, when people realize this they will come back to us. In the meantime we must increase our work in education and communication.
Yep. The Alt-Right didn’t read enough Sun Tzu, and it paid.
Spencer’s only problem is that he brought the full weight of Jewish lawfare upon himself. If he wasn’t pinned down by lawfare he’d be on his college tour right now. But this conflict can’t be avoided. All of you who think that you can outsmart our lawfare opponents are flattering yourselves. It will target you too with the same ferocity when you put your head above the ramparts.
He did not shut the tour down because of lawsuits. He shut it down because of antifa. Beyond that, he has lost so much credibility that he cannot muster volunteers, donations, and sufficient audiences to sustain a college tour. But go ahead and blame “the system.”
“ever since the change from “rhizome” to “tree” was made, the result has been a bitter fruit of obnoxious internal crusades against homosexuals, women, insufficiently edgy people, and other targets.”
You say this, but on this website I believe another author attacked Tommy Robinson for his court stunt a month ago. I wonder if it was the particular tactic used by Robinson in that case or Robinson in general that was the problem.
I’m leaning towards TR being a useful component of the ‘democentric’ Alt Right, which has now floundered by, as you say, clarifying it’s leadership prematurely. In that case it would be fine to hail TR as an ally from time to time, but such moments as the court stunt were foolish, but I’m unable to tell whether that was helpful, as it did garner some publicity.
Robinson is a fraud. You might say he is “our fraud.” But that’s precisely why we must disown him.
I don’t buy into this idea that we screwed up all that much.
People naturally coalesce around presidential candidates, and once they are elected, the coalitions disperse. For example, during the presidential primary everybody hates the candidates opposing their favorite, but if one of them wins, then everybody gets behind that guy. Far more people voted for Trump in the general than in the primary. A lot of them disliked Trump initially but learned to like him when he faced off against Hillary.
People even warm up to losing candidates who they opposed. Ben Carson went from someone who wanted to stab his mother to someone worthy of a cabinet position. People are tactically cooperative when they need to be. “Alt-Right” was the catch-all term for the edgier part of the Trump coalition. Prior to the election, alt lite and alt right figures wouldn’t have associated with each other. The election coalition gave each of them kind of high which made them believe they were larger than they really were. Of course after the election they both had to come down from the high. This was bound to happen regardless of heilgate. Maybe heilgate made the dispersion worse, but not much worse. Once the election’s euphoria went away, everyone looked to their side and said “who the hell is this guy next to me?”
Charlottesville was terrible for PR. We can’t really blame its organizers though. The fact is that there was someone on our side who was autistic enough to mow people over with his car who didn’t attack him rather than bear ANTIFA’s assaults with fortitude. Sure, we can blame the sneaky Jewish mayor for seeming to have deliberately made both groups clash, but ultimately we should be able to withstand the evil tactics of our enemies. Because of that dumbass we failed.
There are also some goofy people that seem to delight in experiencing brachial erections and “see Kyle” in situations where their gesture can be taken out of its jocular context. They are not the majority of us. In fact they are a very small minority, but they certainly make us look bad.
However, Heilgate and Charlottesville are not nails in our coffin. The normie mind is fickle. They forget things quite easily. They have short time horizons. If they are destined to come to our side they’ll do so. They won’t allow an autist’s violent action or a few goofballs’ arm erections to get in the way.
I think we have to look at long-term, creeping trends rather than flashy news events. Demographic displacement makes more and more people angry every day. That is the ammunition for a revolution. It continues to build regardless of our leaders’ failings. We haven’t really lost anything. We’ve failed to capitalize on growing discontentment.
I think we are sort of back to where we were prior to the rise of Trump except that we have someone in the White House who is doing some good things or at least better things than his predecessor. We should be grateful that witch didn’t win.
I think our main problem of late is that we’re not putting out enough good content. I myself am part of this failing. We are also not calling for Trump to do things enough.
However there is a certain need for more people to step forward. There’s nothing like novelty to keep things going, and we are the same people. We were spoiled by a lot of good people coming out shortly before the election, and now not as many are doing so. Plus a lot of people who came out are losing gas. Red Ice Radio can only interview so many people before they kind of run out of key figures to interview. they need to continue to find ways to innovate. The shock jock motif of the Daily Shoah gets old when they’re not as giddy about doing it anymore because they’re no longer anonymous. They’ve also lost a lot of their appeal because they are doing too many shows and exchanging quality for quantity. That seems to be a general trend now: less quality and more quantity. People need to focus more on quality and not be so lazy. Only a small number of people can do stream-of-consciousness and get a lot of views: I would include Greg Johnson and Kevin McDonald as among them, but most people really should prepare for their monologues and dialogues. They need to put more effort into them. It’s better to deliver a few knockout punches than a hundred jabs.
I think we had a lot of really great people
rise to prominence over the past decade, and I think that when it’s time for millennials to speak out, they will be even more impressive — if that were possible. What is certain is that they will have a larger audience — not so much because they will be better but because the demand for their ideas will be greater.
Mass immigration inevitably causes unrest. It did so in the 1920s and is doing so today. We just have to be intelligent, honest, and witty enough to capitalize on it.
We have noble goals. We want to save a race of people from being swallowed by modernity. We have to find ways to get closer to making it happen.
Ted Sallis, who fancies himself a gadfly to the Dissident Right, has decided to alight on this article and take a few lazy stabs at it in ‘Fisking The State Of The Right’:
http://eginotes.blogspot.com/2018/07/fisking-state-of-right.html
I would be happy to fisk him right back on his own premises, but Ted – who habitually wallows in indignation over his banning from Counter-Currents – has padded the walls of his online cell against all rejoinders from his victims by neglecting to include a comments section, or indeed any means of contacting the author at all. “Hypocrisy”, “intolerance of criticism”, “unaccountability”…if this man ever manages to accurately criticise the movement he despises, it is only because he himself embodies the worst tendencies in it. But inbetween swinging, missing and punching himself in the face, he touches on parts of my article that may have been unclear or badly argued, so I think it worthwhile to respond to him here.
1) Ted assumes from the start that I am out to eviscerate Richard Spencer at the behest of Greg Johnson. But having presumed to accuse others of dishonesty, he was too sloppy even to check the bottom of the article and find that I originally wrote it months ago for ‘Affirmative Right’, without knowing that it would later find an audience at Counter-Currents. A fairer assessment would be that I did my best to carry out my stated intention – to describe broad tendencies with as little reference to personalities as possible – but found it impossible to explain the decline of the Alt-Right without mentioning the man who was at the centre of Heilgate, centralisation and Charlottesville. Aside from this, I do not have a personal grudge against Spencer, although Ted evidently has one against Greg Johnson.
2) He repeatedly upbraids me for insisting that fascist movements ‘must’ take power with the aid of established patrons. In case this much is unclear, I am basing this analysis on the initial stages of fascist development outlined by Paxton, whose own conclusions are based on an extensive study of the various fascist movements in history. These may be “historical precedents few in number” according to Ted, but they are all that we have as far as fascism is concerned.
3) Is Trump a patron, an “informal patron”, or not much of a patron at all? If this question is unclear in my article, it is just as unclear in reality: Trump was never much more than an old billionaire who wanted to be POTUS at any cost, and his willingness to patronise us as part of a wider strategy depended largely on the people influencing him. But it is clear enough that his administration could have offered us an opportunity to embed real Rightists into positions of power, and convert the Republican party into an explicit vehicle of nativist interests, had the Alt-Right not wasted its energy on street battles and done all it could to isolate itself from the Trumpist agenda.
4) I do not think I contradict myself in calling for decentralisation, yet anticipating that this will eventually end in the absorption of smaller groups by the most successful group. The idea is to let a hundred flowers bloom, not as an end in itself, but as a means of finding out which plant can bear fruit (i.e. which group can hit on the best approach). What may have been unclear in the article is that this selection absolutely must take place by objective merit, not by cynical alliances of convenience with the enemy media, which is only interested in raising up the incompetent. And if we need an illustration of why the Big Tent concept is a useful umbrella for a decentralised movement, we need only look at the rival ‘Sallis Model’ of groupuscle organisation, in which vastly more time is spent attacking others than doing positive work.
Ted does approve of large passages of my article, but the acclaim of a fool is often more painful than his criticism, and I feel the need to make clear that my critiques of the movement are not made in order to simply wallow in negative muck as he does. Given that the Left is in power and we are not, betting on the defeat of our forces by theirs is usually going to be a safe option; then all you have to do is dress up this safe, easy bet as a blanket condemnation on ideological, moral and strategic grounds, and you can pretend to the status of a scorned prophet even if you are just a stupid, bitter crank. But any serious attempt to move away from the negative elements in the movement must involve identifying the positive elements, and I am not afraid to say that I still have high hopes for these. At the very least, the demographic profile of the modern Dissident Right is relatively young, and many of the people in it still have time – although not too much time – to outgrow the self-destructive tendencies that brought down the Alt-Right.
Part ONE of THREE
(1) To understand why the Alt Right is failing, we can start by asking a simple question: how do most people in it envisage the victory of the movement? I would anticipate receiving three basic answers: 1) a mass white awakening provoked by anti-white depredations; 2) the rise of a reactionary post-Millennial youth wave; and 3) a collapse of modern Western civilization that will destroy the ruling power structure at a stroke.
(1) In reply, the term begs definition. What we have called “Alt-Right” is almost a fad, in practice, something that came with Richard Spencer, crystallized its definition with Richard Spencer, and, pretty much, went into a persistent vegetative state after Charlottesville.
What DOES seem to be developing is a shift in Consciousness formed by the rapidly developing mass of people who realize The System is explicitly opposed to their fulfilling a destiny of greatness. Indeed, it is actively opposed to their very survival.
(2) None of these scenarios correspond to reality. Anti-white depredations that would have seemed unimaginable a few decades ago have not provoked ordinary people into rebellion. “Generation Zyklon” might be fairly conservative, but they have little social and political power, and many cradles in the West have already been filled by the children of the imported neo-proletariat loyal to the Left. As for a civilizational collapse: even assuming that such a thing could happen, it would likely favor those who already possess disproportionate resources and entrenched power structures. The big winners of the Western Roman collapse were the barbarian invaders, the Christian Church, and (sometimes) the late Roman landholding elites who got to merge with the invaders; the bagaudae rebel groups in the provinces were simply suppressed by old and new rulers alike.
(2) In reply, the “ordinary people” are in soft, and, as yet, far too superficial “rebellion,” mostly by moving to safer environments, externally, Most acts of “rebellion” fail rather spectacularly, if they aren’t controlled opposition managed backfires designed to define, marginalize, and neutralize discontents, while provide the rationale for the well-planned Counter-Revolution to take place. Demographic trends are definitely against us, and various Collapsionist fantasies assume the rest of the world will hold still while we get our next act together. As a metatheme to this, let me repeat a statement I made years ago on this site: “If whatever is opposed to your taking power went away tomorrow, what would you do? Why aren’t you doing that now, if only to the extent you can?”
The painful truth is, most of us are not ready to accept the responsibility that would come with power. This is not due to cowardice. It is due, in good part, to us accepting the terms and definitions of our enemies uncritically. With that, they shape our thinking, and our selves.
No wonder we have such an abysmal abysmal track record.
(3) All of these Alt Right victory fantasies bear a common stamp of origin: they are liberal fantasies. This fact that should not surprise us in the least, given that liberalism enjoys near-complete intellectual hegemony in the West, and forms the common ideological bedrock of progressivism and post-1945 conservatism.
One of the fundamental pillars of liberalism is what we might call a democentric view of things. In this view, men are born free, then choose to enter into a “social contract” and set up a ruling authority in order to secure their interests. This implies not only that the ruling authority is the servant of the people, but that the initiative to drive history is in the hands of the people; those in power can only choose to fulfil or deny the popular will. Although the ruling elites may disregard their obligations and repress popular demands, this can only prove ineffective in the long run, as the will of the people “inevitably” takes the course of insurrection and restores the original social contract.
Contrast this with the anti-liberal view, which we can call cratocentric or “rule-centered.” In this view, all men are born into subjection (i.e., as children under the sway of parents); society arises from the expansion and agglomeration of families, as the cities of antiquity arose according to Fustel de Coulanges; and the authority of the ruler is no more dependent on popular consent than is the rule of a father over his children. The masses can assent to the commands of the ruling authority, or else negate them, but they do not and cannot take the initiative to change society. Repression by authority usually works as advertised, and where successful insurrections do take place, they do not spring from a spontaneous popular will but from the power schemes of a rival authority.
(3) In reply, democentrism sounds like a social contract among equals, while cratocentrism seems not so much “rule-centered,” as Ruler centered. I think it is a wrong to believe “the authority of the ruler is no more dependent on popular consent than is the rule of a father over his children.” Rather, the Ruler’s ability to effectively us his nominal authority comes from the popular consent of the governed in practice. As well, “the masses” do change society, daily, in their millions of individual transactions, both personal, spiritual, economic and politically.
And, at a certain critical mass, the New Elite – a meritorious Elite – looks aat the sum total of the effects of these transactions, and, for example, a meeting to modify the Articles of Confederation crystallizes the current Cultural Moment as a Constitutional Convention.
This New Elite is a concept we should address at greater length.
(4) Although democentric ideas may possess ideological hegemony over the modern West, cratocentric ones still possess their ancient hegemony over human nature. And when we critique democentrism from a cratocentric viewpoint, we understand that it is not really an expression of “anti-elitism,” but an ideological weapon to serve the long struggle of liberal elites against the traditional elites of the West. Democentrism is toxic to the legitimacy of an aristocracy, and hazardous to that of a monarchy; but it is a useful smokescreen for anonymous plutocrats, and a positive elixir of health for the managerial elites whose business it is to control society in the name of the people.
(4) In reply, the strict dichotomy only seems to exist on the margins, in inherently fragile societies. In practice, we could have democentric systems – democratic practices – in a greater, cratocentric structure, like, say, a Republic.
You have an excellent observation here. De facto, we have several overlapping Aristocracies going at once, with the newest aristocracies being the managerial elite.
(5) What does all of this have to do with the present state of the Alt Right? Well, let’s come to the point: the liberal managerial class ruling the West preserves its own legitimacy by using manipulation and patronage to construct a democratic facade for its own exercise of power. When it wants to destabilize a foreign government, it funds a color revolution, or encourages an internal rebellion. When it wants to impeach a renegade US President, and anticipates the need to disarm his conservative supporters, it comes up with a media-constructed assault on public opinion masquerading as a spontaneous protest by school shooting survivors. When it wants to strengthen that impeachment effort by getting hold of some juicy photos of brown children being shot dead by border guards, it whips up a caravan of illegal migrants to storm the US border. And so on.
(5) In reply, the “liberal managerial class” is using the facade of “Equality” to mask their own consolidation of power into higher, tighter and right hands. Their hands, and their heirs, to be precise. One difference between them and their nominal opposition: THEY are always proactive on all levels of conflict.
(6) As these examples suggest, this manipulation does not always succeed, at least not directly. But it has created a strong illusion of unlimited popular agency that infects even the self-described enemies of liberalism, fooling them into a false view of how power is achieved and exercised. The tactics pursued by the Alt Right since Heilgate can be compared to a cargo cult, in the sense that they rely on recreating the democentric facade of liberal movements. Protest marchers chanting racialist slogans are our Black Lives Matter, street brawlers are our antifa, and neo-Nazis are our trannies and homosexuals demanding public acceptance for their shocking private fetishes.
(6) In reply, Counter-Currents is THE place where we ruthlessly criticized and condemned the practices, of Movement Past, and failures, of Movement Past, and wondered why the practices seem all but chosen to support failure.
(7) Everything is in place—except, alas, for the decisive factor, which is the patronage and toleration of those in power. And needless to say, when these tactics fail, the defeated upstarts start to get depressed about the inability of their people to spontaneously defend their own interests. Liberalism is a potent drug indeed!
(7) In reply, self-selected ineffectiveness leads to self-selected impotence, and, as Bezmenov noted, demoralization. By accepting their Choices for your actions, they win with ridiculous ease. Repeated demoralization is a stronger drug than any mere ideology.
Part TWO of THREE
The Fascist Path to Power
(8) In light of this, it is worth taking a brief look at the ways in which the fascist movements of the early twentieth century achieved power. Many of those pushing liberal cargo-cult tactics in the Alt Right believe that they are imitating fascism, and they hold out hope for a “white awakening” because they know that Hitler and Mussolini rose to power on the back of popular movements. However, a closer look at the history of these movements refutes the popular myth of a fascist rise to power by pure mass revolution.
Robert O. Paxton’s Anatomy of Fascism is of great use here. It discusses not only the successful fascist movements in Italy and Germany, but also the unsuccessful ones elsewhere, and distinguishes all of these from conservative authoritarian regimes that did not rely on the same radical and populist methods. It also separates out the stages through which a fascist movement must cycle in order to assume power. The aid of established power is needed at several points on the way.
The first stage begins long before the fascist movement is founded, and consists of the social, intellectual and political developments that contribute to making it a possibility. As everyone knows, the Great War and the rise of Communism in Russia were the most important preconditions for the original fascist movements. Less often appreciated is the role of what we would now call “metapolitics”: a longer process of mental preparation going back decades, in which the failings of liberalism and democracy were exposed and the decline of Western civilization was discussed. This smoothed the way for the creation of fascist movements in the wake of the Great War, but it did not guarantee their success (for example, fascism did not take power in France, although the French had experienced the longest period of mental preparation for it).
(8) In reply, essentially, metapolitics defines the foundation of a range of possible foundations for the next stage of political practice, but can be subverted by forming political systems that do not match the state of affairs in which they are formed.
(9) The next stage begins once the fascist movement is founded and consists of a process by which it roots itself in the social and political system—or, alternatively, fails to do so. Initially, the fascist movement seeks to maximize its popular appeal by creating a loose and amorphous “antiparty,” which serves to attract all sorts of people who possess wildly divergent interests but are united by a vague discontent. Later, although the movement continues to rally the people, many of these early followers end up being pruned off as alliances are made with existing social and political interests. In Mussolini’s case, this was achieved when the squadristi in rural Italy made themselves an indispensable ally of the big landowners, who were being squeezed between the laissez-faire liberal state and the socialists agitating their workforce. In Germany, Hitler managed to attract small businessmen and a few large ones to his cause, although most of these stuck with traditional conservatives (and certainly did not bankroll the NSDAP to the extent claimed by the Left). It is important to emphasize the toleration of both of these fascisms by elements of the power structure in their countries. Local police forces often sided with Mussolini’s squadristi, and Hitler’s Brownshirt toughs enjoyed lenient treatment by the conservative Weimar judiciary.
(9) In reply: So, “the next stage” takes a fluid form of a sort of free-floating oppositional defiance into which many can see what they want to see, at the moment. As thus form crystallizes, then, conflict will develop from a range of dreams, and ambitions.
(10) The third stage, and the final one as far as we are concerned, involves the “seizure of power” by which the fascist movement achieves unrestrained rule. But in order to achieve this, the fascist leaders must first be appointed into government by conservative elites, who typically wish to make use of their popular following in order to bolster their own legitimacy. The 1922 March on Rome was nearly thwarted by the Italian government—trains carrying the majority of Blackshirts were stopped by police, and the government possessed the military force to repulse the nine thousand who turned up at the gates of the city—but King Victor Emmanuel III, fearing the consequences of open bloodshed, declined to impose martial law and instead offered the prime ministry to Mussolini. After trying and failing to imitate this gambit in 1923, Hitler sought power through the political system instead, and was eventually appointed to the chancellorship by a conservative elite that had been ruling without a parliamentary majority and wished to return to popular rule. Had the intention been to lock him out at all costs, this could have been done, as the NSDAP’s large electoral support was beginning to drop off at the time.
(10) In reply, it seems the democentric impulse is placed in service to the cratocentric impulse. Sounds familiar!
(11) In summary, successful fascist movements must cultivate not only the masses but also the vested interests of society. They must be encouraged, or at least tolerated, by an established ruling elite focused on the greater threat from leftist revolution. Eventually, they must make a bid for power, and find conservative patrons who are both willing to cooperate with them and obliged by their own crisis of legitimacy to do so. Where no such opportunities existed in the 1920s and 1930s, fascism got nowhere; and where it directly confronted conservative authoritarian regimes, it typically ended up being repressed as one more phenomenon of public disorder.
(11) In reply, possibly, the first fascist movements failed because they operated more out of an emotional response to their grievances, than a balanced, mature response based on intellectual analysis of the causes and effects leading to their situation, balanced by a focus on group morality.
(12) The fascist experience can teach us many things. It illustrates the importance, yet also the limitations, of metapolitical action. It tells us that anyone attempting to follow the route to power walked by the fascists must appeal to a vast array of classes and interests and must work with national sentiment instead of offending it, which rules out anyone who chooses to marginalize himself by waving the flag of a defeated foreign enemy. It also reminds intellectuals that the angry young men attracted to the Right, who often egg each other on into unwise patterns of behavior, are in fact indispensable to the cause—what matters is to put them to good use defending the people being bullied by the Left, instead of wasting them in pointless street parading or noxious infighting.
(12) In reply, who would chose to self-marginalize himself and his compatriots by wearing symbols associated with failure, but someone who has an absence of metapolitical focus. This assumes he is not simply a fool being used as a tool by others who wish to delegitimize the Movement activities they are participating in.
Who would adopt the forms of archaic social structures, and failed political moments? This is the worst of both worlds – old wine, and old bottles.
Is this by accident?
Whether or not it is by accident, this has been discussed, and criticized, at Counter-Currents.
(13) However, the most important thing that fascism teaches us is that it cannot be recreated in the present era. The ruling power structure was founded on fascism’s defeat and is watching out for its revival at every turn. The modern avatar of leftist revolution is not a military threat from beyond the frontier, but a political enemy ensconced in every official institution, and it is now the “antifa” and “SJWs” who enjoy judicial leniency and elite patronage. The managerial revolution in industry, and the abandonment of white proletarian interests in favor of foreign immigrants by the Left, has neutralized a great deal of the old opposition between Bolshevism and big business. Perhaps most importantly in the long run, the West is no longer made up of sovereign states based on the rights of a fighting citizenry but consists of the territories of a de facto US Empire that pursues its expansionist goals through manipulation and subversion. And while there are still “conservatives” in office, these are no longer the anti-liberal traditionalists who used that name before 1945, but right-liberal “loyal opposition” who pride themselves on keeping the real Right out of power.
(13) In reply, there’s a lot to unpack here, and this paragraph is probably deserving of its own post. I see a lot of identification errors. Fascism CAN be “recreated in the modern era,” in the guise of what Bertram Gross called “Friendly Fascism.” Your “modern avatar of leftist revolution” never was the military threat from beyond the borders. Read the political and revolutionary genius, Trotsky. Have we always been at war with Eastasia? Frankly, there was never much conflict between Bolshevism (Communism) and big business. Control went into the hands of the State, but the Party membership – the Party leadership, not the mere figureheads – knew that Big Business, The Colossus, was the wave of the economic future. As well, there was no such political cause as “conservatism.” It was simply a masterful manipulation scheme to create a synthetic “opposition” who consistently claimed moral victory in their consistent political failures.
(14) Of the three stages of fascist pathbreaking, the only one available to us right now is metapolitics. Thanks to the internet, a true “free press,” the savagery and hypocrisy of the liberal oligarchy can be communicated every day to ever-increasing masses of people outside the official media structure. This can never induce the masses to rise up and replace that oligarchy of their own accord, but it can ensure that they become convinced of its illegitimacy and unwilling to react strongly against threats to its power. That is the first step from which all others must follow.
(14) In reply, this is the first step, and it is the necessary precondition for a new foundation. That should be a major focus of our thinking going forward.
Part THREE of THREE
From Fourth to Second Generation Warfare
(15) As regards political action, in a situation where previous roads to power have been closed to us, there is only one model that can offer any hope for success. This is the guerrilla war—or, more precisely, the Fourth Generation War (4GW) described by William S. Lind in his works On War and Fourth Generation War Handbook.
It goes without saying that I am not suggesting a physical war with the managerial state, and anyone who does so is either a fool or an enemy shill. But it should be clear to us by now that politics is war by other means, and that we are in the strategic position of “non-state actors,” prevented from fighting in the open against enemies who enjoy official backing. Non-state actors are no exception to everything that I have said about power and patronage, and the most effective ones are aided and financed by sympathetic states. However, we know that patronage is not required for the creation of a political guerrilla movement, as we ourselves have witnessed the creation of just such a movement out of absolutely nothing.
I am referring, of course, to the Alt Right, which in its original form showed a promising application of guerrilla methods to political warfare. As a diverse collection of autonomous Rightist groups operating under a loose brand name, it presented no single target for the enemy to attack. The movement had no single leader who could be vilified, co-opted, hyped up as the ‘big bad guy’ indispensable to all Hollywood narratives, or harassed and made to look stupid in public. In the absence of such a hate figure, it was Hillary Clinton and her official media backers who made themselves look ridiculous by declaring war on Pepe the Frog.
Online trolls associated with the Alt Right used Nazi imagery to publicly flout the speech restrictions imposed by the Left and transform the “Brown Menace”—the justification for every foreign imperial war and domestic repression campaign, treated with due reverence by Leftists and fake conservatives—into a big stupid joke. It is impossible to say whether the majority of those using this imagery were consciously doing so as a means to these ends, although expressions such as “Great Meme Wars” imply that this was actually the case. The point is that it was done by rank-and-filers sniping from the undergrowth of anonymity, and when the shrieking volunteer commissars wanted to hit back at Alt Right public figures, they found none who were foolish enough to present themselves as targets by endorsing Nazi imagery.
By extending its branding to milder strains of conservatism as well as ethnonationalists and reactionaries, the original Alt Right conformed to the 4GW principle of “hugging the civilians,” forcing the enemy to infuriate ordinary people by attacking them in order to get to the guerrillas. In the physical 4GWs of Iraq and Afghanistan, American forces sowed dragon’s teeth among the local populations every time they shot at a guerrilla fighter and hit an innocent bystander. In the political 4GW against the Left, the same effect was achieved when Clinton dismissed half the American electorate as “deplorables” in response to the rise of the Alt Right. When this sort of thing happens, and the guerrillas (Alt Right) shoot back while the client-rulers (cuckservatives) wring their hands, the loyalties of the people begin to shift in a new direction.
After finding an informal patron in Donald Trump, the Alt Right acquired the ability to go on the offensive. The election of Trump, which offered the chance to substitute a real conservative political class for the professional losers of the loyal opposition, should have been understood as the first step towards reopening a road to patronage that has been closed to the radical Right ever since the defeat of fascism. However, many Alt Righters in the US—who had been happy to castigate democracy as a rigged game during the years of Obama’s rule—treated this event not as the capture of a bridgehead but as the crowning victory of a war. They had Cast Their Votes, Thrown the Bastards Out, and Put Their Man into Office, and some of them really started to say things like “we are the establishment now.” They forgot the prudence learned by everybody who lives under a totalitarian regime, and blissfully reverted to the liberal faith of their hearts, discarding hard-won knowledge under the pretext of taking action.
This set the stage for the regression of the Alt Right into conventional tactics, or Second Generation War (2GW), the tactics of the state forces that tend to lose Fourth Generation wars despite massive superiority in money and muscle. This began with rank-and-filers shaming people for exercising basic prudence, but it was formalized by Richard Spencer’s Heilgate stunt in November 2016. Spencer, who had created the original Alternative Right website in 2010 and shut it down three years later,[2] [4] almost certainly regretted publicly discarding the Alt Right brand just before it exploded in popularity. In the old Rockwellian tradition, he decided to raise his name by using Nazi symbolism to play the enemy media, forgetting that this strategy always entails being played right back. By sparking a media outcry and winning over the large audiences flocking to the increasingly Nazi-themed outlets of Andrew Anglin and Mike Enoch, Heilgate succeeded in its covert goal of presenting Spencer as the leader of the Alt Right.
However, the wider effect of the stunt upon the Alt Right was disastrous. It drove a wedge into the loose alliance between radicals and populists, negating the 4GW strategy of “hugging the citizens” and allowing the core of the movement to be isolated as a target. The Alt Right quickly reformed into a small alliance of edgy white nationalist groups revolving around Spencer, and promptly isolated itself further by declaring war on the “Alt-Liters” who had broken off to form the New Right. At the same time, a plan was unveiled to redefine the new Alt Right as a centralized coalition, commanded by an eponymous corporate entity under Spencer’s leadership. This threatened the organic unity of the original Alt Right, by making it harder for diverse groups to coexist within the same movement—and sure enough, ever since the change from “rhizome” to “tree” was made, the result has been a bitter fruit of obnoxious internal crusades against homosexuals, women, insufficiently edgy people, and other targets.
If the methods of the decentralized Alt Right can be compared to guerrilla warfare, centralization was equivalent to crawling out from the undergrowth and forming up as conventional battalions in the open field. And at Charlottesville, the Alt Right marched directly into one of the strongpoints of the enemy, with no plan other than to triumph by muscle and will. Although the men present showed great bravery against the antifa scum and politicized police sent against them, how could they have hoped to win against the weight of media, judicial, corporate and political power stacked against them? Needless to say, it is the failure of the Alt Right to keep up these costly frontal attacks has brought us to the present state of affairs, in which the enemy media demoralizes our people by gloating over the humiliation of the Spencers and Heimbachs they themselves elevated into place.
(15) In reply, this section is pretty much an article in its own right. How much of what you described is “by accident,” to borrow Lenin’s classic formulation?
Note, incidentally, that the corporate Alt-Right avoided doing the one thing they could have done, which is consciously developing what Harold Covington calls “political soldiers?” Of course, I had the same criticism of Pierce’s National Alliance; everything but politically effective. Come to think of it, in fact, quite the opposite.
(16) How, in retrospect, could things have been done differently? And how can things yet be done differently?
We have to admit that that the pre-Heilgate structure of the movement could not have survived forever, and certainly not outside of cyberspace. The fact that rank-and-filers in the Alt Right felt the need to out-edge each other in order to gain status is proof enough of the need for formal leadership and hierarchy. But if the contours of the original movement had been respected, the natural development would have been towards the creation of several real-life organizations within the overarching brand of the Alt Right, which would have tried out various approaches until one of them gained the strength and momentum to absorb the others.
Ideally, these organizations would have carried the guerrilla tactics of the online movement into real life: harrying the enemy and luring him into overplaying his hand against ordinary people, instead of isolating ourselves from those people and courting their hatred by signaling as a threat to social order. Instead of rushing to usurp the brand name of the entire movement, the leaders—again, ideally—would have been wise enough to maintain a degree of plausible deniability between real-life activity and online discourse, making it less likely that political action will backfire on metapolitical work by inviting corporate-antifa censorship.
Although spent political capital cannot be recovered, there is nothing stopping us from taking this course in the present day. Organizations like Identity Europa in the US (apparently modeled on Europe’s Generation Identity) are using political guerrilla tactics such as flash demos and leaflet bombing. Antifa, who feel vindicated by recent events, continue to push conservatives towards radicalization by violently harassing them.[3] [5] The political bridgehead in the U.S. established by the Trump election is still intact, though much beleaguered, and the fight against impeachment may offer an issue around which the Rightist elements sundered by Heilgate can be reunited.
(16) In reply, Identity Europa seems to be doing it right, developing from scratch with a fractal/rhizome model. There seems to be a high degree of intelligence and organization operating there. They seem to be ruthlessly meritocratic, accepting as members only those who are willing to analyze and accept the metapolitical foundations of their Movement, and the responsibility to develop themselves personally, and professionally, in an organization.
(17) It may be that we shall have to discard the name of the original movement in order to recover its ethos. The centralized Alt Right exists mainly as an idea, which may serve to funnel donation money up to the handful of outlets that follow its rigid orthodoxy but exacts an intolerable price in strategic uselessness and internal friction. Distancing ourselves from the Alt Right brand name cannot make it go away—we are stuck with it for the foreseeable future—but it may dispel the illusion of unification and allow the decentralized substance of the movement to reassert itself. And if we should require another catch-all name that can be used for the purpose of “hugging the civilians,” there is always the New Right brand currently being used by civic nationalists, who would be powerless to prevent its repossession by ethnonationalists and reactionaries.
(17) In reply, New Right is okay, for now. The Next Right – or, better, the New Americans, the New Traditionalists. New, and, above all, better – much damn better.
(18) Perhaps the long-term success of our struggle will hinge upon future tectonic shifts in the Western power structure. However, at the very least, we can reject the patronage of the only power actor willing to support insane strategy and neo-Nazi stupidity: the enemy media. As Greg Johnson has observed [6], the media and certain Jewish organizations exert a great deal of control over the selection of leaders in the radical Right, simply by hyping up anyone who confirms their stereotypes as a serious threat and channeling credibility in his direction. It is no accident that the fifty-year-long cautionary tale of ‘WN 1.0’ began when George Rockwell thought he could manipulate the enemy media and resurrected itself for a second act when Richard Spencer fell into the same trap. The fact that both men were, in my estimation, generally sincere in their motives did not prevent the media from making use of their antics in order to discredit the wider movement.
The maxim no enemies to the Right can only hold true in the context of no alliances with the Left. This precludes courting the attention of the enemy media, just as it precludes selling our principles out to the Left and trying to win mainstream “respectability.” Those who want to lead this movement to victory have no serious choice other than to pursue steady, organic growth through meritorious action, and give the Fake News nothing but the savor of a door in the face.
(18) In reply, Identity Europa as the tool for political means to the political end of the Northwest Republic, as part and parcel of the metapolitical project.
Everything WN 1.0 and 2.0 did wrong, Identity Europa seems to be doing right. So right that the Northwest Republic might come into being, one way or another, sooner than we might think.
This is the note I wish to leave you with: we have always dreamed too small, and used the wrong tools to begin to make our dreams a reality. Identity Europa, today, building to a framework that will allow the formation of the Northwest Republic, tomorrow, and our Mars Colony, the day after tomorrow.
Thanks for an excellent, thought-provoking analysis.
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