Cultural Marxist vs. Material Marxist, Part 1:
Here’s How Bernie Could Still Win!

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Last week, Counter-Currents published an article by Robert Hampton called “The Bernie Temptation [1],” where he made the case as to why nationalists should not support Bernie Sanders for president. I can’t find much to disagree with in his assessment.

Bernie has said some “based” things in the past about immigration, guns, and foreign policy, but as Mr. Hampton pointed out, he’s reversed his position on almost all of them. Even if we were to give Bernie the benefit of the doubt that his “based” statements represent his true beliefs, and he’s only hiding his power level now for political reasons, it’s worth noting that most of Bernie’s more “based” statements come from interviews, not campaign speeches or debate performances. In other words, they were never issues he is terribly passionate about. If you ask him, he’ll give you his opinion: “Yeah, open borders would be bad for the working class, and illegal immigration is bad for wages,” but he never introduced any legislation or made any serious campaign pledges to, you know, do anything about that. He’s first and foremost a “stick-it-to-the-rich” guy. If Bernie had to authorize a strike on Syria or hand out a million H1-Bs to get his corporate tax hike, I’m thinking he probably would.

[2]

You Can buy F. Roger Devlin’s Sexual Utopia in Power here [3]

Before I continue, let me give you my take on the Trump Question. Trump is not a white advocate. The problem, however, is that he is perceived as being one by a great many people — especially our enemies — and Trump has been an inspiration to populists all over the world. Trump is more than a man. He’s also a meme, a subculture, a rallying point, and a symbol of many different things to many different people. You have to take all this into account. A Trump defeat in November would be memed by our enemies as a victory over white identity and the Last Stand of Old America. Our enemies would be throwing us funeral parties. A Trump defeat would be profoundly demoralizing in ways that I don’t think anyone can comprehend right now.

You might say Trump winning would be a purely symbolic victory at best, and you may be right. But the fact remains: We are in a meme war, and symbols are important in meme warfare. Real meme warriors know that you have to be more than logical. You also have to be psychological.

Should Trump win re-election and play out his two terms, nationalists would be more likely to see Trump as a trial run and be eager to try again. The attitude would be: “We did it once, we can do it again, only better this time, because now we actually kind of know what we’re doing!” Should Trump lose, he’ll be remembered as a failed experiment. Come 2024, the attitude will be more “Why bother? If we can’t keep a milquetoast fake nationalist in power, what hope do we have of getting the real thing?”

Some think a Trump loss might “wake whites up” somehow, or make them angry. Who knows what might happen? Whites might also blackpill completely and retreat into drugs, video games, sportsball, and nihilistic consumerism — all of which are more enjoyable than hanging around wignats. These are times that try men’s souls, when the summer edgelord and the fair-weather fascist will, in the face of adversity, shrink from the service of their race. At the moment and under the circumstances, keeping morale up is all-important.

[4]

You can buy Greg Johnson’s The White Nationalist Manifesto here [5]

That said, the Bernie Sanders question is a lot more complex than whether we should support his campaign or not. Comparisons between Trump and Sanders have been made since 2015, as a sort of yin and yang of the populist explosion. Like Trump, Bernie Sanders is also a meme, subculture, rallying point, and symbol. This must be taken into account.

Few American politicians have a full-blown subculture surrounding them. Trump, Ron Paul, and Bernie Sanders are the only ones in recent memory. Fewer politicians have a subculture so infamously fanatical that their supporters have their own nickname: Bernie Bros. And then there are subcultures within the Bernie Bros, like the DSA and Dirtbag Left — and there even subcultures within that [6].

Endorsing Bernie Sanders for President, as some in the Dissident Right have done, is dumb. But I understand why someone, as a matter of strategy, would want to pull their punches with Bernie. Sanders has been a disruptive influence on the Left. Much like Trump forced the establishment to “drop their mask” and reveal their true form, Bernie seems to have a similar effect: The DNC has resorted to rigging primaries and making up absurd lies about Bernie secretly being an Andrew Dice Clay-style misogynist, all in an attempt to keep him from the nomination.

I don’t want Bernie to become president. I want him to do just well enough to cause maximum chaos among the Left.

When discussing Bernie Sanders and the Dissident Right, it’s not just about how we feel about Bernie Sanders, the Man, but also how we feel about Sanders, the movement, Sanders, the phenomenon, and Sanders’ legions of devoted followers. More on the last one later.

I expressed my thoughts on the Dirtbag Left/DSA/Bernie Bro phenomenon and the limitations of the materialist approach in a previous article entitled “Chapo Trap House Is Too White for Me (and I’m a White Supremacist) [7].” Read it. It’s good and I still stand by every word of it — even the typos and grammatical errors. The tl;dr is that class reductionist materialism as espoused by the Dirtbag Left is doomed to fail because it has little appeal to non-whites.

Now, there has been some polling data to suggest that Sanders’ support among blacks, especially black millennials, has grown considerably since 2016. I’ll believe it when I see it. There was a fluke poll back in November that suggested 35% of blacks approve of Trump. I’ll believe it when I see it. Bernie may, in fact, be popular with millennial blacks, but millennial blacks don’t vote — or at least not enough to matter. We’ll find out in South Carolina.

That said, at the time of writing, it looks like Sanders may actually pull it off this time. Sanders benefits from something Trump benefited from in 2016: a large field of establishment shills that no one loves, and no obvious heir apparent.

Joe Biden has become the Jeb Bush of this race; the establishment choice that nobody asked for. Some think Bloomberg is going to come in and just “buy the nomination,” but simply buying the nomination is a lot harder to do in the internet age where political battles happen increasingly online. Candidates need their supporters on social media, in the chat rooms, on the message boards, in the comments section, etc. The aforementioned Jeb! had a ton of money, but no base of support.

Under the circumstances, Bernie might only need a small percentage of POC to flip to get himself over the top. He’ll want their field to stay as large as possible, for as long as possible, so that by the time the official Not Bernie™ candidate emerges, he will have a big enough lead and too much momentum to catch up with.

He might need some lucky breaks to pull it off — but he just might do it.