Why the Right Can’t Unite

3,186 words

When George Orwell arrived in Aragon to fight against Franco in 1937, it wasn’t the poor state of the weaponry that worried him, and it wasn’t the enemy. As chronicled in Homage to Catalonia, he was more alarmed at the number of factional squabbles there were on his side. In-fighting in the face of the enemy similarly afflicts the political Right today, and the call to “unite the Right” is a forlorn cry in the wilderness.

See if you can spot the mistake in this statement; “We on the Right must refute the arguments of those on the Left”. It’s the word “We”, which assumes collective agreement and common purpose among the different factions on the Right. There is only a broad commonality of purpose among those on today’s political Right, and it is largely reactive. That is, it defines its positions by what it is not and therefore by what it opposes.

This may seem like a lack of political principle. By this token, to be of the Right is simply to define yourself by what you oppose rather than adherence to higher ideals both valid and worth living by in their own right. Surely, that is that old curse-word that pre-dated even “Racist!”: “Reactionary!”

But this is to make a very post-modern, a very woke mistake. One’s political position must be a reactive project. Why should it not? How could it not? From mild distaste to outright disgust, the human animal prides itself on not being that which it finds objectionable. The woke use of “othering” as pejorative is a bastardization and reification of a human response as automatic as breathing. The recognition of the other in all his difference and similarity is viewed by the Left as though it were something you do when you are in a white oppressor kind of mood rather than being what it is, a natural function of intersubjectivity. “Othering” is perfectly standard issue for homo sapiens. It helps them get along, or not. You recognize the other because it is in your interest to do so. You may have to help him, or be helped by him, or fear him, or wish for his comradeship. Which is just about where conservatism makes its entrance.

I’m English and so my starting-point for Right-wing politics is conservatism. Standard definitions feature traditional values, free enterprise, private ownership, and often an opposition to change. But “traditional values” are vague. Some tribes have traditional values which include hacking each other to death on a regular basis. Are they conservatives? Some hardcore Muslims want to take society back in time, just like old-school Tories. It’s just that they favor the seventh century rather than the 1950s and black-and-white telly.

I have seen conservatism compared with paleo-conservatism in the US, but British (and mostly English) conservatism has a particular cast all its own. The financial and governance stuff is fairly straightforward: low taxes, small government, competent authority. The conservative view of the nature of man is that of a being possessed of moral agency. The perpetrator of a crime, for example, is actuated by personal choice rather than a range of environmental concerns. He should then be punished for his poor choice as much as the resultant crime. Civic society, private property, the role of the family, a respect for the land (a genuine legacy of the landed classes’ once-monopolistic grasp on British politics), and traditional notions of honor, virtue, courage and other attributes are a selection of other bastions of conservatism, as least as I see it. These look like our “higher ideals” noted above, and not reactionary at all. But for at least one man, possibly the greatest English commentator on British conservatism in living memory, not being conservative was a result of precisely the same self-definition by a rejection of the other.

The late Sir Roger Scruton, a talented and urbane philosopher who brought his wisdom to bear on civic structure, describes his own early affiliation with the political Left, and its purely reactionary nature, in a 2003 essay for The New Criterion:

To be a conservative, I was told, was to be on the side of age against youth, the past against the future, authority against innovation, the ‘structures’ against spontaneity and life. It was enough to understand this, to recognize that one had no choice, as a free-thinking intellectual, save to reject conservatism.

This is partly an accurate summation of a pervasive intellectual mood in the 1960s, and partly a dire warning about that same mood today. Natural conservatives reject their spiritual homeland through peer pressure. Plus ça change. Scruton moves immediately to the events in Paris in May 1968, which he witnessed and which became his epiphany. By the end of a long essay, that Damascene moment has arrived:

Henceforth I understood conservatism not as a political creed only, but as a lasting vision of human society, one whose truth would always be hard to perceive, harder still to communicate, and hardest of all to act upon.

Scruton’s essay can’t be recommended highly enough for a grounded, historical grasp both of British – and particularly English – conservatism, as well as the reactions and rejections of toxic Leftist dogma that go to form that creed. From what I can guess and gather, some form of conservatism is the bedrock which ought to unite the Right, a common language all on that bank of the great divide may speak. So why doesn’t it? The short answer is that mere allegiance to “the Right” is just an indicator of political position, not a grid reference. Political beliefs on the Right are far more shaded than on the Left, although to say that the Right don’t indulge in intellectual lockstep as do the Left would not be altogether true. Not all on the Right are prepared to think the politically unthinkable.

Whereas in the decades before the boom of the 1960s one’s political beliefs and loyalties would have come from principle, now they are formed just as much by recognizing what one’s principles are not. It may not be possible entirely to convince yourself that you might lean toward the Right, but you know bloody well you are not going anywhere near the crazies on the Left. These are the floating voters whose behavior as the situation decays still further may be decisive. As the true nature of the authoritarian Left steadily emerges in the UK, there will be defections to reality on the part of many disenfranchised Leftists. Under the malevolent corporate socialism currently flogging Europe, a genuine political Right is essential right now, at this moment if not sooner. Europe is like the mythical Danish giant, Holger Danske, who after centuries of sleep awakes to defend the Danes. Europe is also waking, but, oh, so slowly.

The political Right is coalescing in the UK, but in European terms they have arrived at the party late. Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, Marine Le Pen in France, the AfD (Alternativ für Deutschland) in Germany, Vox in Spain, these parties and leaders are all far more established in their homelands than Reform UK and UKIP (who are also stressing an anti-woke campaign strategy, much to their credit). Austria’s Freedom Party – predictably referred to as “far Right” by the BBC – have just won a famous electoral victory as I write this. But a political shift of this magnitude is chess not checkers, and its glacial slowness since the first wave of mass migration crashed at the behest of Angela Merkel in 2015 is only now showing any signs of acceleration. But all of these rising factions still have their taboos, their conceptual no-go zones, of which the predominant territory is race.

There are lines in the sand even on that part of the beach inhabited by the Right, and race is the most uncrossable. It has been interesting to watch, or rather, listen to, the British Right-of-center media. This is basically GB News and Talk Radio, which has recently gone online only due to viewing-figure problems. They are beginning to mention the clear and present phenomenon of anti-whiteness – or “blancophobia” – in something other than hushed and apologetic tones. And so the concerns of white nationalists, separatists, supremacists and so on are hoving into view like a ship on the horizon. Does this mean the Right is suddenly uniting? It does not. Race is the deciding factor. We have been told for a long time we must “look at everything through the lens of race” and so we are. We first must make sure, however, we have the telescope the right way round. And we do see race everywhere, practically by mandate.

You can buy Greg Johnson’s New Right vs. Old Right here

Many parties in the UK make a point of their civic nationalism. The Blair government started it, as they did so much of the promotional apparatus used by the contemporary political class. And so political parties make much of their own internal diversity and assume that some kind of deep magic means that all is well in multicultural Britain, a sort of demographic version of Quod est superius est sicut quod inferius, or “as above, so below”. All the while political parties are more concerned about the quota of black and brown faces in their ranks, they are unlikely to pay too close attention to the communities of black and brown people in the real world, with all their dysfunction and cost, both financial and social, they incur for white tax-payers. Political parties are not communities. They are cabals formed of those who understand that the mechanics of self-advancement require the assistance of others. They get it. Black and brown people commit a disproportionate amount of crime compared to whites, for example, but that is not something for politicians to be overly concerned about. Their world is secure, and so the security of ordinary people is very much of secondary concern, or lower.

And our political beliefs are also conditioned by the type of society in which we wish to live. We have a sort of Platonic ideal in our heads and we seek to synchronize our political standpoint on various issues by how that ideal model directs us, like a compass needle pointing magnetic North. Crime is on the increase in London, but any increase in police presence is not to deter crime – as it once was – but confined to marches and demonstrations, and attending Pride parades. That’s glib but it’s not far from the truth. In the nearest town here in Costa Rica, there has been a problem recently with Venezuelan and Colombian drug gangs, presumably keeping their hand in on the way up to the El Dorado of the USA. As a result of this uptick in potentially very violent crime, there are more foot police on the streets. The cops here are armed and fit because the country has no standing army, and all the fit blokes become Fuerza Publica. Now, let me think. Which country would I rather live in, if I wanted to feel safe? And yet this is a country with a Leftist government and a Leftist history. Why this conservative attitude towards law, order, and citizen safety? Partly because there is none of the ideological clutter here that infests the UK. The police can just deploy men – always men – on the streets quickly because they don’t have to worry about diversity optics, or getting pronouns right, or whether there are enough lesbians on the force. They just do policing. They have conserved a civic tradition where the UK signally has not. This, then, is the problem infecting the West, and known as “woke”.

This is a crass word for a ruinous belief system, but we understand what we mean when we use the term. It works, like “Left” and “Right”, as Bowden’s intellectual shorthand. It can’t be stressed too highly how much of an affront “woke” is to conservatism. As part of a multi-pronged offensive, the whole woke program is guided by a desire to subvert norms, it is literally anti-conservative. That this is incredibly dangerous either has not occurred to its proponents – in which case we are in real trouble – or it has occurred to them and they are happy to ride that tiger. In that case, we (there’s that hopeful “we” again, that cry in the wilderness) are up against a formidable enemy because they are certainly not risk-averse.

Woke, then, is an agreed common target for the Right, be they Christian, dissident, white nationalist, small-c conservatives in the British suburbs or guys who love American History X but can’t watch the end because it’s too sad. Woke is also, of course, opposed by even moderate Muslims. You very much do not have to be a fire-breathing imam to oppose gender ideology in your children’s classroom. There is no drag-queen story hour in a madrassa. How are politicians handling this slippery bar of soap?

Lee Anderson is an interesting character. Winning a seat in Parliament with Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, he is shaping up to be the party’s “big beast”, the psychological lynchpin all parties should have, the two-fisted, don’t-suffer-fools-at-all-let-alone-gladly, Slugger O’Toole type of old-school conservative. He also has a way of identifying the concerns of the ordinary people – those pesky voters and tax-payers – and expressing them in simple and unadorned soundbites. “I remember a time”, he said in his bluff Northern accent during a speech at the party’s recent conference, “when our children went to school and were taught to read and write and become good citizens. They weren’t taught that they could change gender and listen to a six-foot-five drag queen read stories to them.”

But where will Anderson go with race, and where will he fear to tread? I shall watch his career with interest.

As for “media outreach”, as I believe the young people term it, your precise location on the grid of the Right will be plotted first before you get near the British Right. I have contacted a number of British Right-of-center organizations for interviews, review copies and so on, and with most of them we go through the same ritual. After their initial warm response to even a sniff of journalism, they have someone Google me. This person finds that I write for Counter Currents and The Occidental Observer. If they are media-savvy, they will know these titles and they are too rich for the blood of many on the Right. Reform UK, the Reclaim Party, Turning Point UK and The New Culture Forum have all done exactly what I have described. Like those old maps of the world which signposted uncharted waters with the warning, “There be monsters”, so too the infrastructure of the British Right has a map with people like me flagged up under the rubric, “There be race-realists”. Because that’s what this is all about.

Race realism sets apart this zone of the territory of the Right, and is why the Right can never unite. At present, both blacks and whites are actually getting a raw deal from the boosting of black identity politics. Whites have to put up with being told on an hourly basis of our own base vileness, as well as having our fallen state unfavorably compared with the magnificent new people of Wakanda, who are here in their finery to save history from the deleterious ravages of the white man. In terms of real history, blacks really just got in the way. But the new orthodoxies have rewritten that script. “Does the truth not suit us?”, thunders Solzhenitsyn. “Then away with the truth!” Now, blacks built Britain and whites are lucky to have a seat on the bus. But the fare for this is not noticing, and should you do so, you will never gain admittance to any notional “big tent” of the Right.

Whiteness is permitted but must not be the main theme of a keynote speech at a party-political conference, say. But none of this stops black males knifing one another to death. Nor do all the virtuous black people in advertising, or the recasting of traditionally white roles with blacks, or all the awards and plaudits and affirmative action freebies, nor do any of them make a difference to the utter dysfunction at the heart of black society. And this edict now has all the weight of authority, something the Left are very good at while abdicating responsibility, which they allocate to the Right.

Wikipedia has to be approached with caution, but if you seek a diagnosis for the disease of Leftism, it repays inspection. The first sentence of the entry on “far-right politics” shows the faulty belief system of the Left: “Far-right politics, or right-wing extremism, is a spectrum of political thought that tends to be radically conservative, ultra-nationalist, and authoritarian, often also including nativist tendencies.”

What is the Left’s obsession with authoritarianism? Is it just that there are a lot of women on the Left, and Ralph Fiennes looks just dandy as a Nazi? The Left themselves are authoritarian to the marrow, but this attribute always has to be attributed to the Right. Is this straightforward Freudian projection? All I do know is we probably need a lot more of it, but authority over our own tendencies and their apparent conflict. You cannot have team-work if no one agrees who is and is not on the team.

I don’t understand the intricacies of American football, but I do understand one key element of the game. Different players perform very different tasks on the field. One guy just hurls the ball, that’s what he does, hopefully to a team-mate, whose job is to catch it and progress to the line. Others are there simply to block opposition players, like armored doormen. One guy comes on just to kick field goals. Then he goes off again (probably at more of a trot if he just missed). That’s what he does and that’s all he does. It is unlikely that these various functionaries could swap positions and improve team performance. Until the Right understand the importance of very different functions and roles, the Left are going to finish every game with more points than “us”.

Personally, I think there is a collapse coming, and that will focus the attention a little. When the West finds out what it can and can’t afford, both fiscally and in terms of the ongoing damage done to white culture by non-whites, then those things won’t be budgeted for anymore. A lot of blacks are going to be out in the cold, wondering whether to convert to Islam now or perhaps tomorrow at the latest. A lot of whites are going to feel that talismanic quality that the globalists want everyone but them to feel; empowered. But for now, the race denialists are still the obstacle to a united Right. We will see how long their ideological omertà lasts when it comes to accepting the future in the increasingly near term. As I said to one of the political parties who treated me to post-Google radio silence after their initial warmth and schmooze; Sooner or later, you’re going to have to talk to people like me.