Counter-Currents
1,337 words
Donald Trump departed the White House in the worst state imaginable. He was impeached a second time and a conviction could open the way to possible jail time. He’s banned or suspended from nearly every tech platform, leaving him unable to directly communicate with his followers. His bank purged his accounts, he lost numerous business connections, and he faces a tsunami of litigation.
One may conclude that The Donald is finally finished. He’s irrelevant and we must move on.
Many on our side want to ditch Trump as quickly as they can. Some even argue that Trump is the bane of our existence and we must be as fervently anti-Trump as MSNBC — but from the Right! It’s not clear why we should do this. The 75 million Americans who voted for Trump aren’t primed to hate their champion. There aren’t millions of people who loved Trump’s nationalist rhetoric but hated the man — those imaginary people voted for Trump. There isn’t an alternative figure or leader to rally around. The closest we have is Tucker Carlson, who is a television host, not a politician. He certainly has his utility, but he can’t necessarily replace Trump.
It makes far more sense to appeal to the Trump mythos than to shake our fist at it. The media’s image of Trump is permanently etched. He represents nationalism and the historic American people, regardless of whether he did a good job in office.
People greatly underestimate Trump’s enduring appeal. Eighty-seven percent of Republicans still approve of his job as president. Republican senators report their phones are ringing off the hook with Trump supporters telling them to kill impeachment. Many of these senators fear Trump-backed primary challengers. The Capitol protests are the source of Trump’s downfall, but the majority of Republicans weren’t bothered by the alleged “insurrection.” Many of the Republicans who were prepared to dump Trump after January 6 are now backing away from their betrayal. They know the party’s base loves Trump and will punish those who stab him while he’s down.
So where does that leave us? Is it possible to build a Trumpism without Trump?
In the near-term, probably not. Not within the Republican party, at least.
As said before, there is no figure with anywhere near Trump’s stature to fill his shoes. There were many who were eager to lead the party after Trump departed office, but the events of January 6 dashed their hopes. Josh Hawley hoped to make Trumpism respectable and shorn of its rough (i.e. “racist”) edges. Instead, his challenge to the election lumped him in with the disreputable elements of Trumpism. He can’t even host fundraisers in hotels anymore after the “insurrection.” Of course, a true national populist leader would roll with it and take it as a badge of honor that the system sees him as a dangerous enemy. He would proudly take the hits for his people and declare this is an attack on all of Middle America. The Yale-educated Hawley is not that man. He’s too stilted and contrived to fill Trump’s shoes.
You can buy Greg Johnson’s White Identity Politics here.
Ted Cruz and a few other Republicans also sought the same thing as Hawley, but they also can’t succeed. There simply is no politician like Trump. His populist bluster and celebrity charisma can’t be easily replicated.
In some ways, that leaves the GOP vulnerable to a cuck restoration. Without a clear leader, the America First faction is left without direction and an identity. The establishment also has the institutional apparatus on their side, giving them resources the Trumpists can’t call upon. The establishment also has clear leaders who can direct their actions and decide what they’re for. However, the establishment doesn’t have the base on its side. The base, as stated above, stands with Trump and hates the establishment. This sets the ground for a brutal civil war within the GOP.
But it appears the cuck restoration is not to be. Party leaders are no longer enthusiastic for impeachment and it’s expected Trump will avoid conviction. Dimwitted House Republicans who voted for impeachment now face censure and serious primary challenges. House Republican Caucus Chair Liz Cheney, daughter of Dick, looks to lose in 2022. Trumpist Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz held a sizable rally against her last week and polls show her in the gutter with Republican voters. This is all the result of a vote for impeachment. It’s likely that the nine other Republicans who voted for impeachment will not return after 2022.
Republican leaders are doing their best to appease Trump. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy flew down to Florida to emphasize his support for the former president and his agenda. Other skittish establishment Republicans are publicly announcing their admiration for the departed leader. This change prompted the Washington Times to declare that Trump is “still a titan” within the party. “I want to make sure that the Republican Party can grow and come back, and we’re going to need Trump and Trump needs us,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, an immigration booster and neocon, told the paper. “I think the best thing for us is to keep the Trump policy movement alive.” Even someone like Graham, who opposes everything Trump initially campaigned on, recognizes that Trumpism is very much alive.
Granted, it could also be a very bad sign that creatures like Graham still cling to Trump. But most of the party aligned against Trump are far worse than the ones who celebrate him. It’s doubtful Trump will back the hideous vestiges of the establishment if he sees them one and the same as Mitch McConnell. McConnell hates Trump and wants him excised from public life. That’s not going to happen, but the animosity between the two will hopefully last. The party needs a clear division between cucks and nationalists. The Trump-McConnell split can facilitate that.
A thing to note is that being anti-Trump and on the Right places you in the same category as McConnell, Cheney, and the Lincoln Project. There are no political figures who are based and anti-Trump. Instead, it’s all neocons and, in the case of the Lincoln Project, groomers. It’s not a crowd we should associate with, nor do they want our support.
The movement, for better or for worse, will always be associated with Trump. That doesn’t mean we should support all of his endeavors or even back another presidential run. (He probably won’t run again due to censorship, mounting litigation, and old age.) It’s more that we come to terms with Trump as an idea. He was the first politician in many years to put immigration at the forefront of the public discourse. He was the only Republican to not apologize for violating racial pieties. He resisted the war drive of the American Empire and tried to bring our manufacturing home. And no politician has more deeply angered our corrupt establishment than Trump. These things will matter more in history than the airstrikes on empty Syrian airfields and pardons of black rappers.
Whatever next nationalist force arises in American politics will trace its ancestry to Trump. The former president was not our savior; he was a wrecking ball that opened the way for our movement to grow. We probably won’t directly affect what happens in the GOP civil war but we can still take sides and cheer on the faction that advances nationalism.
Our immediate task is to stay the course and keep steadily spreading our ideas to more and more people. What Trump unleashed back in 2015 isn’t going away. As he said in his departing speeches, this is just the beginning.
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17 comments
My god, can you get over those “groomers” in the link to Lincoln project? How are those people not in jail or up to their knees in summonses for sexual harassment suits? It seems the only sanity is within the trump camp. It gives you an idea why they might hate trump so much, the kinds of activities he’s curtailing.
Trump can help with some near term strategic objectives:
Discipline the GOP in the primary by running MAGA types, relying on the movement to destroy any cucks that make it through to the general in the form of any third party. Pain in 2022 in order to have the second party our party by 2024.
Digital Separation, more specifically in capital heavy media such as TV and print.
Whether it is run by nationalists or by cucks, the con party is a fraud, because it pretends to be a governing faction in a two-party state and it is really the outer fringe of a one-party state.
Trump tried to be a nationalist, and got nowhere, because the press, bureaucracy and progs are the real government and he was a ceremonial archon. The MAGA blowhards who come after him will do less than he did, not more. As the Chinese say, “a chicken has been killed to scare the monkeys”, and its blood and guts will speak much louder than nationalist logic and rhetoric.
In all honesty, I hope the cucks win back control of the con party and suppress the nationalists. Maybe this will finally induce us “dissidents” to stop believing in democracy, voting for its political shopfront, cargo-culting its activist rituals, and peddling heretical variants of its political religion instead of actually waking people up. I would like to think that we could take this step ourselves, but given our collective willingness to indulge any amount of cope rather than face reality, it looks like the ball is in the establishment’s court.
Game over man, game over.
Seriously, I have tried to see the logic of your recent turn, but once I subtract what looks to be depression and paranoid ideation, there’s nothing there.
I can’t think of anything more depressing, or conducive to paranoia, than the belief that conservative politics offers a genuine path to victory. You have to watch the “good side” lose over and over, taking all the wrong paths and spurning all the right ones, its every victory temporary and Pyrrhic, its every loss permanent and disastrous, both leaders and followers sinking to new levels of apathy and cowardice by the day.
When you realise that democracy is just another dystopian leftist regime, and that the con party is its toy opposition, there is no depression at its constant failures (they are a feature, not a bug) – nor paranoia in the conviction that it is perpetually conning us (it is, but the conmen are no less conned than their victims, e.g. Trump).
As for the logic of destroying the con party, instead of reinvigorating it with nationalism, it is simply this: “when you strike a king, you must kill him.”
Mussolini and Hitler managed to kill the democratic “king” by voting and activism. But they relied on existing reactionary power-holders (e.g. the Weimar judiciary and politicians, the Italian king), which have been thoroughly purged in the West since 1945. When leftists have gained total power in a state, reaction must come from the inner party, or rather from power-holders at its centre who want to stop the revolution and restore order. This is the process that turned Communist China from the vanguard of revolution into an essentially fascist state.
The function of the con party in democracy is to make sure that this auto-coup never happens; to ensure that dissidents and counter-revolutionaries stay in plain sight, out of the inner party and at arm’s length from power, performing a kabuki show of resistance; and to make sure that the inner party always maintains its alliance of convenience with the non-whites, wimmin, and other empowered groups that it mobilises to win the ritual war of electoral politics.
And what is the role of the radical right? To endlessly grease the wheels of this fraud, by invigorating it with new ideologies? What if we just said…no?
Hopefully this gives you a better idea of the method in my madness.
No, you are just repeating your defeatist talking points.
Saying “no” means what? Doing nothing? We don’t change the world by doing nothing.
In your own words, “first do no harm”. When we act under the sway of delusions – especially in a system that lives and breathes on them – we change the world for the worse. So yes, the first type of action that I would recommend is non-action – or at least, ceasing to do what we are doing right now, i.e. carrying embalming fluid for con party zombies.
The second type of action is to popularise a mass exodus from democratic politics (the #NoVote movement). This would begin with the millions of Trump voters who are presently fuming over the con party’s betrayals, but as time goes on it would be very easy to extend it beyond this demographic. The position that voting is pointless, and all politicians can go to hell, is extremely hard to repress, stigmatise, co-opt, ghettoise, and divide against itself.
Yes, #NoVote would inflict more damage on the outer party than on the inner party, because the one depends on public support and the other depends on state power. But on the other hand, the core conservative voting demographic has real value to the state (they pay for it, maintain social cohesion, etc.), whereas the value of leftist votebanks and revolutionary scum depends on artificial electoral warfare. By derailing electoral politics, we could annihilate the value of their votes, like political Gamestonk in reverse.
The third type of action is intellectual work. We need a coherent theory of the democratic regime, a workable alternative, and an underground reactionary culture (this last is constantly being birthed by the alt-right, only to be poisoned by lies, cringe and propaganda whenever it goes back to trucking with conservatism). The major people involved would not be activists who write articles, but scholars who distribute samizdat, narrowing their scope to the only type of dissident activity that consistently does more good than harm.
The fourth type of action is to get hold of the central parts of the state. (I am talking core bureaucracy, army, police, inner party, etc. i.e. the parts that can be assured of living on in the event that the rest of the state is sacked by a reactionary coup.) This can be accomplished by a mixture of intellectual persuasion, inflitration, and letting the movement to Thermidor take its course. Obviously, inflitration is not a job for argumentative ideological purists. Just as the dissident scholars must renounce power to practice honesty, reactionary cells in the government would have to renounce honesty to seek power.
Do all of this, and there will be new ‘brahmin’ and ‘ksatriya’ classes in waiting, as well as a disillusioned populace that will not lift a finger for the regime beyond explicit duty. *Then* is the time for the sort of political action envisaged by the alt-right (for example, parties could be established to canvass the people on dissolving the regime). We would be doing mass political action as the Left does it, in support of an existing power structure, not as a cargo cult directed solely towards the people.
Maybe this is not enough action for you, or maybe not enough victory. But I find it more promising than what I take to be the alternative: voting in fake elections forever, and maintaining a humiliating unrequited courtship of the con party, in the hope that the deus ex machina of white awakening will finally descend on us.
I am fine with first do no harm.
I am fine with point three. It is what I call metapolitics.
I am fine with point four. Converting or replacing our existing elites is also part of metapolitics.
Point two — black-pilling people on democratic politics — strikes me as self-defeating and a form of emotional self-indulgence on your part. Speaking of “voting in fake elections forever, and maintaining a humiliating unrequited courtship of the con party” is not the language of sober analysis.
I think the real issue between us is that I believe in democracy, understood as popular sovereignty + enfranchisement of the many. I think we have everything to gain by demanding that the existing regimes actually become democratic, which is a form of legitimacy that they cannot afford to reject openly. The more our ruling elites are forced to lie, cheat, and steal to maintain power against the people, the greater the popular discontent we can mobilize against them. But we can’t win that game if we don’t play.
Trump is the Georges Boulanger of American fascism.
Lot of charisma, let’s his followers down and ultimately feet of clay. If he lives long, which I honestly doubt, every pretender will need a nod from him.
“Trump tried to be a nationalist”. Well he talked about it anyways. I’m not sure how hard he tried. When you fire all the actual nationalists and bring in your son-in-law to run the show, I wouldn’t exactly called that trying.
Trump barely tried to be a (civic) nationalist; meant well (albeit always thinking about himself first), but had no understanding of what he was doing; and made terrible personnel choices. But he still did some good for the country (vastly less than a Machiavellian hard man could have, tis true), and still received 74 million votes, of which at least 60 million would have been from whites. How can anyone be so blackpilled when you consider how dangerous a real (and really smart) nationalist could have been? Trump did not win because of his charisma, such as it is, but because of his America Firstism, which is an excellent entryist ideology for real nationalism. Moreover, even the establishment Wall Street Journal has admitted that Trump would likely have won absent Covid, and indeed could have won if only he’d moderated his own asinine and boorish behaviors, which used to make even an old Far Rightist like me cringe (I know several silly white women who voted for Biden simply because they disliked Trump personally).’
I agree the future is bleak. Certainly there is no hope for Taking Back America, understood as the 50 state Union. But 60 million white Trump voters, along with their minor children, comprises a sizable, and high quality, potential sovereign nation. Remember that, and what we’re fighting for (hint: it ain’t the US of A, the Dow Jones Index, or even the Constitution).
I love Trump for what he did: he talked shit right back. For once I didn’t have to listen to some weak turd apologize for standing up for our side. God bless him and keep him safe, but I am thinking his run is over. He let too many traitors near him, and I don’t really think that’s even his fault. But what I know for sure is no future leader of ours can make those mistakes.
And P.S. fuck fuck fuck Mike Pence, Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, and all who think they can give us the middle finger and get away with it. The truth is coming for you shits. Bonafide.
From William Kristol and National Review to Richard Spencer and Hunter Wallace, it’s hard to name any Anti-Trumpers on the “Right” who aren’t pieces of shit.
There was no transfer of power in 2016.
To the contrary. The power of the press, i.e. those of whom can afford to own one, now and forevermore have ZERO credibility, and it took someone like Trump to be just as in-your-face as they are to do it. Oh how the mighty hath fallen, and it couldn’t have happened to a bigger bunch of insufferable assholes. And for that alone, Trump has my undying gratitude, his becoming Israel’s bitch notwithstanding.
Trump blew his ONLY chance to save the Republic. The elections are now permanently compromised and ALL future national elections are meaningless. As President, Trump could have mobilized the National Guard and some 70 million armed Americans and DEMANDED a new election using ONLY paper ballots and NO voting machines. He could have required that ALL voters PROVE their eligibility and that ALL votes be counted under the scrutiny of representatives of EVERY political party that had candidates running.
Instead, he abandoned his supporters and ALLOWED the election to be stolen. Now, he wants to lead the controlled opposition. With leaders like him, we don’t need traitors.
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