Yesterday, I shook off the hangover from the open bar at the Election Night party and read about our historic victory.  The conservative movement has heroically stopped Obama’s diabolical scheme to make America socialist, with John Boehner as our weepy Leonidas. Conservatism is flush with victory and all throughout the land, ambitious College Republicans, my fellow think-tankers, and unemployed scribblers are dreaming of staff jobs, committee assignments, and midnight tangos with the supple interns of Capitol Hill. The “beautiful losers” made excited references to 1994, seemingly blind to the reality that the “Republican Revolution” did nothing to stop the growth of government or reverse cultural decline and President Clinton cruised to victory two years later.  Nonetheless, young conservatives are cute when they are happy, and I tried to hold my tongue as wild proclamations were made around the office about the imminent end of Big Government.  

It was satisfying to see the Democrats go down to defeat, in the same way it was satisfying to watch Jon Stewart’s pained expression while reporting on President Bush’s re-election in 2004. Evil, or rather, the Evil Party, was justly punished. At the same time, let us be under no illusions about the Stupid Party.

It gives me no joy to say this, not even the contrarian Schadenfreude expressed by denizens of the Alternative Right when the conservative movement, yet again, fails to move. Despite years of disappointment and the cynicism that can only come from working in DC, there was something that suggested this year would be different. The Tea Party is not Astroturf -- it is remarkably decentralized, grassroots, and leaderless, and though corporate front groups like FreedomWorks claim to speak for it, the Tea Party’s feelings on immigration and Islam suggest that there is something more here than Republican strategists slapping a new label on a program of tax cuts for millionaires. With Tom Tancredo mounting a spirited third-party run, Sharron Angle actually speaking up in defense of actual Americans, and institutions like the New York Conservative Party openly defending White advocate Jim Russell, this actually seemed like more than politics as usual. 

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.

It is often amusing to observe the attempts of left-wing proponents of “immigrants’ rights” to depict themselves as noble defenders of the oppressed and downtrodden against tyrannical and exploitive elites. As is often the case with leftists, reality diverges sharply from their beliefs. There are few issues where elite opinion and the views of “the common people” are more in conflict than on the immigration issue, and “the people” come down firmly against open borders. One study on this question from 2002, and commissioned by no less than the Council on Foreign Relations, indicated that among others discrepancies between elite and popular opinion, 60 percent of the public regards the present level of immigration to be a "critical threat to the vital interests of the United States," compared to only 14 percent of the nation’s leadership, a 46 percentage point gap.” The study concluded that “even on such divisive issues as globalization or strengthening the United Nations, the public and the elite are much closer together than they are on immigration.” Of course, the first epithet to be thrown against advocates of immigration restriction is “racist.” Yet, the research shows that a majority of each of America’s largest minority groups likewise opposes open borders. Sixty-eight percent of African-Americans, fifty-seven percent of Asian-Americans, fifty-six percent of Hispanics, and fifty-percent of Jews agree that immigration rates are too high at present. Plenty of voices that are critical of mass immigration can be found among other minority ethnic groups as well.