Paul Gottfried joins Richard to discuss the 2010 HL Mencken Club conference and the prospect for forming a counter force on the right.

Registration can be completed online here. 

I’m more than a little surprised and baffled by Richard Spencer’s suggestion that those on the Alternative Right might form some kind of alliance with right wing elements in Israel. I’m quite certain that if he took some time to consider the issue more carefully he would find that such hopes are based on little more than specious arguments about “common interests” that don't exist and wishful thinking.

When talking about alliances, the first thing we must ask is whether the group you’re thinking about joining together with has anything to offer you and what the cost of calling them your friends may be. Spencer differentiates between American Leftist Jews, whom he sees as the enemy, and his potential partners among the far Right Likudites:

Your average eastern seaboard liberal Jew, who takes his marching orders from the New York Times and reads Phillip Roth in his spare time, will likely never want to have anything to do with the far Right -- even if his life depended on it. Bibi Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman are a different story…

Israelis might learn to prefer… an isolationist regime, which would give them a free hand, as opposed to the ever-meddling Democrats and Republicans.

For the sake of argument, let’s momentarily pretend that there will come a time when Israeli far Right decides that all they really want from the United States is to be left alone (!), instead of financed and protected from international censure. At the same time, they trust ethnically conscious whites to simply stay out of the Middle East. I suppose gaining the support of the most right wing 1 percent of the world's Jews would have a few benefits. On the other hand, Western traditionalists might instead seek an alliance with those who find Zionist excesses repulsive: that is Western Europeans, Eastern Europeans, Latin America, the world’s one billion Muslims, Leftist Jews and even China and North Korea (in other words, the rest of the planet). I don’t think Netanyahu’s support is worth it.

The United States, along with Britain, France, Russia and China, are the only countries with veto power on the UN Security Council. According to John Mearsheimer, "since 1982, the US has vetoed 32 Security Council resolutions critical of Israel, more than the total number of vetoes cast by all the other Security Council members." In other words, America spends more international political capital defending the Jewish state than the other four main UN powers use on all other issues combined. We must ask, when they have a country this slavishly devoted to them, why on earth would the Israeli Right risk throwing their support behind a new revolutionary movement that has to hold symposiums on whether or not they’re anti-Semitic and-best case scenario-in Spencer’s words “wouldn’t likely express strong opinions about who wins or who loses in various land disputes in the [Middle East]?" What more could we give them that they don’t already get from the United States and why would they prefer a neutral America to the present arrangement? Another consideration: what political sense does it make for us to ally with the only political movement on the planet less popular than authentic Western conservatism? Zionism is a sinking ship, both demographically and in its relations with the rest of the world. Their only friends are those that make up the American establishment, who just happen to be our main adversaries.

The suggestion that Likud might throw themselves into our arms because they fear “[the] next generation of Latino politicians will likely make Obama seem like Eisenhower,” in other words that they stay up at night worrying about a Mestizo march through the institutions, is completely risible. The Israel Lobby correctly understands that if it loses its power over the American government it’ll be because of opposition from American whites who've thrown off the shackles of political correctness or, even less likely, Leftist Jews, not a politically apathetic group with an IQ of 90 which will make up a third of the population in a few generations. 

It has been argued that conservative whites should at least back Israel in order to defend the idea of the ethno-state. The fact of the matter is one could support the Palestinians or Turks by the same reasoning. Beijing and Moscow seem capable of opposing the most blatant cases of Zionist expansion and aggression without having their ethno-nationalist regimes collapse under the weight of their own contradictions.  There's no reason that a conservative Western Europe or America wouldn't be able to do the same. 

There’s one final issue that needs mentioning, something I'm surprised nobody has brought up. It seems that some paleoconservatives and white nationalists have internalized the Left’s worst stereotypes about themselves. “We basically want the same thing as Zionists, so we can work with them.” I believe most WNs and traditionalists simply want to be left alone, not to seize some land in the third world, slaughter/expel the natives, and form an ethno-state there and then for the next 60 years continue living in a never ending state of war in order to expand in a sea of one billion hostile and aggressive Muslims in search of some all elusive “security,” all the while being financed and protected by foreign taxpayers and soldiers. Western Rightists shouldn’t be comparing themselves to Israelis, but pointing out how reasonable, humane and moderate their goals are compared to those of mainstream Zionists.  

Kevin DeAnna, Founder and Director of Youth for Western Civilization, joins Richard to discuss waging culture war on campus and more.

Tomislav Sunic makes an unlikely radio host; however, his weekly podcast, “The Sunic Journal,” is one the most important, and certainly the most rigorously intellectual, on the radical right. Many AltRighters have appeared on the show: Alex Kurtagic is a frequent guest; Keith Preston was on the other week to discuss National Anarchism, as well as his own personal political journey; Jack Donovan has been on to consider “The Man Question”; and Christian Kopff stopped by to speak with Tom about Evola and Tradition. (Tom was even nice enough to invite me on the show when AltRight first launched.)

Tom’s interview with the English philosopher and artist Jonathan Bowden was one of the most mesmerizing podcasts I’ve ever listened to! Bowden has the ability to speak in a fashion that’s fluid and immediately intelligible, but then also rich in nuance and reference, and ready-for-the-page. I considered making a transcript of Bowden’s extemporaneous remarks and posting them as an essay. (I’ve been immersing myself in Bowden’s oratory of late, and would also highly recommend everyone listen to his history of Marxism and the Frankfurt School.)

Anyway, I’ve been wanting to have Sunic on the AltRight podcast for a while and found our publication of Benoist’s “Monotheism vs. Polytheism” (which Tom translated) to be a splendid opportunity. Tom gives listeners a primer on the European New Right, and both of us examine further this school’s ambivalent relation towards European Christianity.

This past week I interviewed another philosopher, though this one hailing from a different tradition all together. Dr. David Yeagley, a psychologist, professor, blogger, composer, and enrolled member of the Comanche Tribe, came on AltRight Radio to discuss White Guilt -- from an American Indian perspective -- as well as how a man can be both a Comanche and an American patriot.

Both conversations are well worth your time.

Paul Gottfried's comments on my post on shrinks and hipsters raise several interesting points: is the social outlook found among the modish half-educated young an organic development or an intentional construction? Can we can do something about it and the broader stream of advanced liberalism of which it is part? And if something can be done, what's the key?

On the first point, there's no doubt a bit of a mixture but organic development seems more basic. Today's education is propagandistic but a system of propaganda can grow up organically. There's nothing radically autonomous about liberal theorists and propagandists. They function as part of a system that's evolved historically.

Paul's books have shown that major political traditions--liberalism, leftism, Christian activism--have all sunk into the same politically-correct mush. I've followed up with a book of my own claiming that the degeneration is a result of current understandings of knowledge and reality. If all that's even partly true, how can our situation at bottom be something that's constructed?

In any event, an emphasis on organic development helps avoid conspiracy theories and false optimism. If our present situation were simply a construction it could be dealt with by finding the bad guys who are doing the constructing and getting rid of them. That would be good if true, but our problems are too basic for that.

"Organic development" is another way of saying that a lot of things have grown up that are working together to promote advanced liberalism. That seems to be the case. It's conceivable that the bad guys continually win overwhelmingly because they're demonically powerful and clever, but more likely it's because the wind is blowing their way.

The point of my initial posting was that one notable version of advanced liberalism expresses a psychological type that is produced by the conditions of life today, in particular by the expectations and presuppositions that surround young people as they grow up.

To mention such influences isn't to claim they're the whole story. The (at least short-term) stability of the present situation shows that the hipster psychological type and its conditions and consequences are part of a package in which one part supports the others.

That package includes the people and institutions present-day trends make socially dominant. Those people and institutions naturally favor the trends and understandings that secure their position.

Hence the system of indoctrination that passes for education today. If liberalism makes you law school dean, you'll use your deanship to promote liberalism. And if hipsterdom destroys human ties and makes tradition inconceivable, the managerial state will be perfectly happy to promote hipsterdom.

Indoctrination is certainly part of how things work now, but it wouldn't turn people into self-satisfied true believers unless they were more than ready to accept the message offered. Nor would it be so consistent and pervasive if it didn't express a self-sustaining system of concepts, attitudes, and understandings that makes the message seem self-evidently correct.

On the question of what to do, it's worth noting that the "organic development" guy in the discussion (me) is more inclined to say something can be done than the "intentional construction" one. Even so, I wouldn't carry the point too far. No law, policy initiative, or corps of administrators is going to get us out of the hole we're in. We need a basic shift in outlook and how people carry on their lives.

Something so basic and comprehensive would amount to a religious conversion. If that's so, then "nothing can be done" does sound like a sensible comment. You can't just will a mass religious conversion, especially on the grounds it'll have political benefits.

On the other hand, it seems right to look for what's possible. Basic transformations do come about, and people can do things that further or retard them. So why not try to understand what's going on, what's needed for something better, and what we can to promote it? If political difficulties lead us to notice that some things are more basic than politics, then that's a good thing too and it can tell us something about what we should attend to.

What sort of transformation is needed is a big topic. Here are a few points that seem worth mentioning:

• Ideas have consequences, and the nature of man, the good, the world, moral obligation, and so on affects the public order. For that reason Christianity is prepolitical rather than apolitical as some of the comments suggest.
• In a totalitarian age even nonpolitical religion is political, because it challenges official doctrine by denying the ultimate significance and authority of the regime. That's why commies past and present have wanted to squash Christianity.
• That's also why the purely political is no longer politically serious. We can't challenge the status quo unless we emphasize what precedes politics.
• When you've got big problems that aren't going away, basic principles are more important than current manifestations. The Catholic Church formed the West, and I think it remains essential to the West, but like much else it hasn't been in great shape lately. A basic question is whether that's a matter of fundamental principle or of stupidities and corruptions that won't necessarily last--in other words, whether the essential points are still there that would enable a return to type.
• Another question, assuming (as some suggest) that today's basic understandings and institutional arrangements make radical secularity inevitable, is whether those things can sustain themselves or whether we're living on borrowed time and a basically different understanding of man and the world will be needed for social order to remain functional. If the latter is true (which is my view), then the serious political question is what that understanding will be.

While doing a Google search I ran into an abstract of a 2007 scholarly article by three French psychiatrists whose English title is "New society, new families: a new basic personality? From the neurotic to the narcissistic-hedonistic personality."

The basic thought is that changes in education, family structure, social attitudes, and so on have led to a new dominant personality type with specific pathologies that require a reorientation of psychiatric care:

This basic personality, which could be termed as "narcissistic-hedonistic", is characterized by few internalizations, a poorly efficient Superego, nearly no guilt feeling, a weakly socialized Ideal Self suggesting more the Ideal Self of the early childhood, and finally a difficulty in experiencing or testing oneself as a free subject. The resulting narcissistic fragility leads the subject to be more dependent on external objects, to be allergic to frustration, to find delay in the achievement of instinctive aims hard to take, to develop an exaggerated pursuit of perception and sensations. The relation to time is also affected through a privileged investment in the present and the shading off of historical time. These changes must lead to a different subjectivity stemming from a new basic personality. Disorders may stem from three axis of this new basic personality: dependency with attachment disorders, narcissistic fragility, and a high risk of depression; guilt-free "narcissistic perversion" with people, who use other people for their own and exclusive interest, without real empathy; "light" psychopathy, with people capable of social integration for shorts periods of time, with a lot of breaking off in love, friendship, and professional ties.

The account is jargony but the substance sounds familiar. The basic idea is that people aren't really getting socialized, so character and connections to other people disappear. Instead there's just impulse, self-indulgence, and flip-flopping between grandiosity and depression, tyranny and subservience, and no doubt other mindless polarities. Life becomes a matter of pure immediacy and groundless assertion of self, combined with insecurity and avoidance of issues.

Here's a video of Hans-Hermann Hoppe's opening address to the Property and Freedom Society regarding his "life on the right."

PFS 2010 - Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Welcoming Remarks. The PFS - After Five Years from Sean Gabb on Vimeo.

The great Sean Gabb is putting all of the lectures from Hans-Hermann Hoppe's 2010 Property and Freedom Society online, many of which I'll embed here at AltRight. First up is my lecture on "The Alternative Right in America." I need to learn to get rid of all those damn "uhms" from my presenting style (!), but I think AltRight readers will be very interested in what I have to say. 

PFS 2010 - Richard Spencer, The “Alternative Right” in America from Sean Gabb on Vimeo.

Two articles of interest to the Alternative Right. While Richard is trying to craft an intellectual movement of the disparate pieces of the disposessed Right, we should give some thoughts as to how the political sausage is made. While intellectualizing is important, the real strength of the movement is how  people live it internally. This Policy Review article on the Tea Party phenomenon points this out nicely. The Tea Party movement is the closest thing to a break in the neoconservative hegemony we have. It has virtually no intellectuals of note, no real new ideas; it is an attitude and a warning to the ruling elite. Intellectuals (I prefer to refer to them as "technocratic elites") think they're leading movements. The point I take away from this article: they may be running things, but they're not leading any movements. Furthermore, the article points out a dimension of how the present elite's social control works: social aspiration. If you're a middle class schlub in an office job who wants to think of himself as better than your fellows, how do you do it? Well, the same way the middle class has always done it -- by apeing the folkways of the social class immediately above them, in this case, the class consisting of technocratic professionals who run the place.

A governing elite that has a monopoly over the allocation of prestige has immense power over a culture. It can decide what ideas, thinkers, and movements merit attention, while it can also determine what ideas, thinkers, and movements should be dismissed with scorn and contempt — assuming that the elite even condescends to notice their existence. Needless to say, such a setup will lead to a high degree of intellectual cronyism, in which members of the “in” group mutually endorse and reinforce each others’ prestige; but like crony capitalism, this is standard operating procedure of all elites and should come as no surprise. Relying on the natural human desire to gravitate towards prestige, the intellectual elite has no need to resort to the ham-fisted methods of Orwell’s Big Brother.

What sparked the Tea Party revolt is mounting dissatisfaction at living in a society in which a small group has increasingly solidified its monopoly over the manufacture and distribution of opinion, deciding which ideas and policies should be looked upon favorably and which political candidates will be sympathetically reported. Even more, the Tea Party rebels bitterly resent the rigid censorship exercised by this elite over the limits of acceptable public discourse. Those who have the power to rule an opinion “out of order” do not need to take the trouble to refute it, or even examine it. They can simply make it go away.

It is the Tea Partiers’ indifference to the whole idea of intellectual respectability that renders them immune to the prestige pressure that molds and shapes the ideas and opinions of those who do care about being intellectually respectable. To put it another way, the Tea Partiers can escape the otherwise all-pervasive influence of our cultural elite because they are the people who Gramsci called marginalized outsiders.

The whole article is worth a read.

Coming at the problem from another direction is Fred Reed. Fred is acutely aware of social class, since he comes from what Christian Landers would call, "the wrong kind of white people." You know, like the Tea Partiers.

When I read columnists or listen to talking heads on the lobotomy box, they strike me as delusional. What are these decapitated crania prattling about? From what morgue did they escape? What country are they from? Certainly not the America I grew up in. I conclude that they suffer from Commentator’s Disease, which consists in the confluence of several disabilities, the first being high intelligence.  ...

The commentators don’t realize that not everybody is like them. Those with IQs of 140 and up (130 gets you into Mensa, I think) unconsciously believe that anything is possible. Denizens of this class know that if they decided to learn, say, classical Greek, they could. You get the book and go at it. It would take work, yes, and time, but the outcome would be certain. They don’t understand that the waitress has an IQ of 85 and can’t learn much of anything.

Fred is essentially pointing out the same thing: the loons in charge of the booby hatch we call America have very little real connection with the actual human beings who live here. While an Alternative Right should generate new ideas, and dust off some useful old ones, if we want to have some impact on the world, we need to connect with the people who live in it.

As part of the process of developing what might be called a “revolutionary Right” for North America, I have endorsed both anarchism and secession. Yet anarchism is merely a theory of the state (or against the state) and secession is simply a tactic. Anarchist theory per se has little to say about what kinds of communities might exist independently of an overarching state, and no one is going to endorse secession for its own sake without some wider end in sight. I suggested in a recent interview with Dr. Tomislav Sunic that anarchism, secession, and white nationalism have something of natural triangular relationship with each other. While I do, indeed, believe this to be the case, the question remains as to whether white nationalism is an adequate intellectual or strategic paradigm for the growing alternative right. I would maintain that it is not.

This is not to say that white nationalists do not raise many perfectly reasonable and legitimate issues. Such issues include affirmative action and other forms of “reverse discrimination,” mass immigration and immigration abuse, the high rates of violent crime in minority communities, the formal or informal forms of censorship associated with “political correctness,” state interference with associational liberties, anti-white bias in hate crimes reporting, the desire for cultural self-preservation, the double standards involved with the label of “racist,” the extra-legal actions by left-wing vigilantes against those with views on race that defy liberal orthodoxy, the suppression of scientific inquiry in the name of egalitarian ideology, the influence of foreign lobbies on U.S. foreign policy, and a good number of other things. Nor should we be interested in taking seriously the liberal dogma that any sort of expression of political and racial self-interest, or ethnic pride and celebration, by whites constitutes “hate” or “racism.” One can love one’s wife or mother without hating all other women. One can have a preference for one’s own family without feuding with other families. One can favor one’s own children without abusing or mistreating other children. So the issue is not whether white nationalism violates this or that liberal taboo, but whether white nationalism “alone and unaided” is the most effective way of addressing matters such as the aforementioned.

The first order of business is the identification of the enemy, and the enemy is clearly those who are currently in control of the institutions that rule us: the state, the corporate plutocracy, the banking cartel, the mass media, academia, the legal system, and others whom our fearless editor has with great perspicacity dubbed the “sociopathocracy.” Nowadays, even an ostensibly “conservative” institution such as the military has succumbed to political correctness. White nationalists and those who share their concerns are certainly under attack by these institutions, but so are plenty of other people. Consequently, a resistance movement that defines itself exclusively, or even primarily, under the banner of race will be unnecessarily self-limiting. Far better to incorporate the issues raised by white nationalists, immigration restrictionists, and others with related concerns into a wider paradigm that packages together the issues raised by parallel movements and overlapping interests who are under attack by the same institutional authorities. There is a nearly inexhaustible list of such tendencies, including advocates for fathers’ rights, men’s rights, family sovereignty, religious liberty, the right to bear arms and act in self-defense, anti-tax, pro-life, national sovereignty, property rights, cultural preservation, quality and freedom in education, local autonomy, and many other things. Additionally, there is the growing list of economic issues generated by the ongoing dispossession and eradication of the traditional middle class courtesy of our plutocratic overlords.

The label of “white nationalism” brings with it a good deal of baggage that is not easily discarded. What do most people think of when they hear the term “white nationalism”? Do they think of Jared Taylor, Peter Brimelow, and Steve Sailer or do they think of the KKK, David Duke, Tom Metzger, uniform fetishists, the Aryan Nations, and The Turner Diaries? If we must choose a label, would not something along the lines of “conservative revolution” be more appropriate? Such self-identification puts us squarely in the tradition of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Junger, Schmitt, Spengler, Pareto, Mosca, Michels, Evola, De Benoist, and Faye. Such a label allows us to group together a wide assortment of issues and movements under a common banner and against a common enemy. Beyond that, we need to consider the not insignificant number of minority, mixed race, or persons from mixed families that share many of our ideological and cultural concerns, or at least sympathize with many of our issues. Is it wise to push away an Elizabeth Wright, Paul Gottfried, Norman Finkelstein, David Yeagley, Carol Swain, Michael Hart, Michael Levin, Jesse Lee Peterson, Israel Shamir, or Mayer Schiller?

“Conservative Revolution” is conceptually broad enough to accommodate an array of anti-liberal forces within a framework of respect for natural hierarchies and particular attachments to family, community, religion, tribe, ethnicity, and other primary reference groups, and in a way that is compatible with traditional conservative and libertarian skepticism of “big government” and overly centralized power. On a horizontal level, it can accommodate tendencies ranging from fervent white nationalists to religious conservatives who are indifferent to race issues per se but oppose Cultural Marxist attacks on their faith and traditions to Jews and African-Americans who oppose mass immigration from the Third World. On a vertical level, it can include scholars of Machiavelli, Burke, and Nietzsche on the high end and conspiracy-mongers or Alex Jones fans on the low end. Such a framework also opens the door to wider acceptance by a threatened middle class that is rapidly sinking into the ranks of the lower proletariat and lumpen sectors. It is those sectors that will ultimately feed the numerical ranks of our movement, and in politics there is no victory without numbers.