MAGA means Nationalism, not the Kali Yuga
On "Status," elitism and cuckoldry on the "Richard Hanania Right" (PART ONE)
(Part One of Two)
“Poles reckoned that there was a ‘morphology of Communism’ in that piggy-eyed, fat and flushed faces showed the results of complicated negotiations between power-wielders, left by their assistants to sort out common problems in false alcoholic concord.”
Norman Stone, The Atlantic and Its Enemies
“Thro' the shadow of the globe we sweep into the younger day;
Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.”
Alfred Tennyson, Locksley Hall
I wrote this in response to an annoying anti-Trump meme, but it ballooned into a two-parter clarifying the character of our current elite, and our position in relation to it.
“The smear alleges that Trump is a classless buffoon who has inundated a once-dignified party with morons and who is now promoting himself as a dangerous religious cult leader...”
Why, it’s the one thing populist pundits and inveterate internet racists can agree on these days.
Certain would-be dissidents foreground Trump’s more uncouth supporters, in extremis causing them to praise suave liberal elites as a bulwark against populist profligacy.
Flowing on from this first fallacy, dissidents react violently against the very people who vote for our candidates, and agree with us on 80% of the issues. Some even claim that the establishment represents a more “right-wing” tendency. Those who have fried their brains on elite-theory confuse the FORM that left-wing dominance assumes for its SUBSTANCE.
This misconception that Trump supporters are all boorish proles has hung over all political analysis since 2016, and plays into the hands of our enemies. A product of the E-Right’s reflexive contrarianism, it must be put to bed before election day. This premise must be non-negotiable if we are to make any progress:
Donald Trump is no more tasteless or left-wing than the establishments of both parties.
Despite the bawdy style of MAGA and her standard-bearers, Trump’s critiques of the establishment on trade, war and immigration were eminently rational and scientific, and we should never let people forget this. Their side represents reactionary obscurantism and sentimentality.
“To say that Trump was victorious because he promised to reverse stupid policies was not only insulting to the policymakers, it also suggested arduous future difficulties, those policies would now actually need to be reversed, this would be difficult, complicated, and most importantly, possibly racist.”
Instead of conducting a good-faith compromise after 2016, the establishment infantilized Trump’s supporters and ignored their legitimate concerns.
“The problem wasn’t that American policies were stupid and destructive, no, they were too good. Trump wasn’t a pragmatic nationalist, but an avatar for the losers against the cold-hearted neoliberal winners…
The implicit argument of everyone who says that Trump represents working class protest or “a middle finger to the elites” is that Trump’s supporters are degenerate cattle who don’t know how to do anything but low in pain at a world they don’t understand.”1
Academic Agent, a more benign offender, makes the strongest case for the “MAGA as Kali Yuga” thesis. He is operating in better faith than Richard Hanania or Richard Spencer, and retains an appropriate level of contempt for the left.
Like Scott Greer, AA overstates the Kali-Yuga quality of MAGA for comedic reasons. But this once useful, polemical check on populist vulgarity has morphed into a traitorous death-wish. As the meme makes for good engagement-bait on Elon-Twitter, it prospers, and none dare call it treason.
Wither the Liberal Elite?
Here are the battle lines as Parvini presents them:
“One side has strict hierarchy in which a small, unaccountable elite of technical experts and secular priests rule over numerous client groups whom they keep locked out of their gated communities. The client groups vote for them in numbers that would embarrass even the right-wing dictators of the twentieth century as their social superiors check their shareholdings and make them promises like ‘you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy.’”
Ethnic political machines stretch back through prehistory, the difference being that leftists obviously don’t see themselves as the “social superiors” of uppity blacks.
“They openly disdain the ‘democratic will of the people’ and see unregulated free markets as childish and outmoded. Instead, they argue that they know better and must steer the ship in the name of good governance.”
Most factions holding political power behave like this. Again, political realism is not unique to the modern left, and the right is hardly laissez-faire in practice.
“These people are committed to a view of the world that sees race and that selects for ethnic differences.”2
Liberals do “see race,” but in an anti-white way. Though older, more cynical Democrats might engage in the “bigotry of low expectations,” all still believe in mo money for dem programs. Left-wingers do not understand the reality of race to be a set of heritable characteristics transmitted through genetics or culture, but a colonial conspiracy to divide the masses, a social construction that must be actively corrected for.
The right wing view ought to be that:
“Race is politically important because its a basic human characteristic that is tethered to both identity and myriad inner psychological states that humans rely on in order to render judgments about who and what constitutes legitimate authority and what concepts, customs, habits, prejudices, and practices are accepted as inviolable and sacred and what ones are identified as profane and intolerable…
Only Liberals think that humans are simply "DNA". Bill Clinton and other fools made much of this in the 1990s in the course of fundraising stump speeches and the like - all humans share basically similar DNA, thus it is claimed that culture, loyalty, religion, identity, war/conflict is incorrect and superfluous. Its moronic to think in these terms.”3
Parvini continues…
“Counter-intuitively, although most of them are white, they ostensibly say that they are for selecting against whites, even as they openly keep client groups out of their 98% white neighbourhoods while comparing their political enemies to mid-Century Germans.”
The suburbanites suffering against Section 8 housing in their neighborhoods, or the benighted residents of American border states would beg to disagree. The liberal bigot who hides away in a compound is an antiquated cliché. On a long enough time horizon, the left’s project advances the rising tide of color, which eventually laps against their feet.
Unless one assumes that their policies are designed to fail, the left pursues and often satisfies the material demands made by ethnic minorities. It is altruistic “elite” whites who are voting against their own self interest on the basis of their moral delusions.
Excessive Elitism?
Gaetano Mosca never argued thatpolitical formulas, the legal and moral foundations for the power of elites, were “mere quackeries aptly invented to trick the masses into obedience…”
“They answer a real need in man’s social nature; and this need, so universally felt, of governing and knowing that one is governed not on the basis of mere material or intellectual force, but on the basis of a moral principle, has beyond any doubt a practical and real importance.”4
All political factions contain a mix of sycophants and true-believers, but the Left’s reckless pursuit of self-destructive initiatives shows that their idealists are in control. Left-wingers are not in principle pursuing power or societal progress, but enforcing an unscientific, egalitarian moral-system. The “liberal elite” are, to paraphrase Voltaire or Jerry Seinfeld, neither liberal nor elite.
You’ll notice Academic Agent’s article so far has described the tactical position of the “elites,” and derived from that some imaginary, complementary right-wing worldview. Because they rule, and champion some kind of hierarchy, however much it is inverted against the natural order, mustn’t they be based in some way?
This line of logic is precisely why elite theorists like James Burnham have been accused of worshipping power.
Diagnoses of the “Populist Delusion” were in vogue after Trump. The Neoreactionary explanation for how change happens was an essential corrective to the retard rallies of the alt-right era, and made a necessary discursive comeback after January 6th. But nowadays, the fetishization of “the elite” has gone too far.
As a good student of Burnham, AA suffers from the teacher’s supreme sin.
“Power worship blurs political judgement because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible. If the Japanese have conquered south Asia, then they will keep south Asia for ever, if the Germans have captured Tobruk, they will infallibly capture Cairo; if the Russians are in Berlin, it will not be long before they are in London: and so on…
In each case {Burnham obeys} the same instinct: the instinct to bow down before the conqueror of the moment, to accept the existing trend as irreversible. With this in mind one can criticise his theory in a broader way….
Such a world-picture fits in with the American tendency to admire size for its own sake and to feel that success constitutes justification, and it fits in with the all-prevailing anti-British sentiment…”
Burnham was right about the trends of his time, as most reactionaries are, but could not imagine reversing them. He credited the regime and our enemies with a perseverance they never really displayed, and ended up in their employ.
“It will be seen that at each point Burnham is predicting a continuation of the thing that is happening. Now the tendency to do this is not simply a bad habit, like inaccuracy or exaggeration, which one can correct by taking thought. It is a major mental disease, and its roots lie partly in cowardice and partly in the worship or power, which is not fully separable from cowardice.”5
A running gag on Academic Agent’s show is his reverence for Tony Blair, a generic third-way politician. Blair’s ideology was nothing special, a basic program of Clintonian triangulation. He successfully institutionalized his reforms, but that can be equally credited to Tory fecklessness.
The men who made New Labor, like most moderate leftists of the noughties, were intellectual mediocrities who succeeded off the back of a good relationship with the Deep State.
By 2016 the New Labor settlement was unraveling at the hands of Corbyn-Johnson. The revolt of the Little-Englanders failed for contingent reasons: the failure of leaders like Boris and Farage, overwhelmed by black-swan events like COVID. It was not because of the magical vitality of the ancien regime. If the Blairite settlement was so brilliant, it would not have been so fragile. As the success of George Galloway shows, it remains fragile yet.
Of course The Machiavellians, a literal CIA handbook, is of dubious value to dissidents attacking both the Conservative Movement and broader world-system that James Burnham helped to build. At the very least, read it questioning his conservative assumptions.
In attributing to our rulers a separateness and immortality that they do not possess, AA displays a profoundly non-western conception of political power. His are the instincts behind Oriental slavishness, powered by those status-seekers who assume current arrangements will be perpetual. The servile whimpering of those built for static societies, where we all love Big Brother.
My greatest analytical pet peeve is presentism, in both its left-wing and conservative guises, and its sister fallacy continuitarianism.
“A reductionist tendency to flatten out the peaks and valleys of historical experience, to average down its variety by collapsing it into a relentless stream of continuity, moving toward the present like a glacier. From the myopic perspective of the present, distant mountains are blurred into hillsides, rolling ineluctably toward us to produce what we are…
Constant change in the South had created a broad menu of usable pasts, Woodward argued, and this maximized the freedom of choice for present generations to shape the future. “I am not a determinist of any kind,” he said.”6
I chafe against the assumption that things have always been as they are now, and must always be. My position is alternatively reactionary and progressive — and always set against the stupid status quo.
I resent the lie that intellectuals and artists have always been egalitarians, that political elites tend towards a self-loathing cosmopolitanism, or that technological or political progress must go hand in hand with “modern” social maladies. Studying the foreign past and traveling the world cures you of these delusions.
All conservative appeals to historical cycles rooted in deterministic laws of nature project the past into an open future. Theirs is a perspective that is unscientific, and by definition ahistorical.
“The huge, invincible, everlasting slave empire of which Burnham appears to dream will not be established, or, if established, will not endure, because slavery is no longer a stable basis for human society.”7
Hidden here, though Orwell meant it very differently of course, is the credo of the Progressive Right.
Artificial hierarchies that elevate the undeserving should be challenged, and in the process of that challenge — yes — our enemies will react to us. You must not attach a moral valence to their ephemeral “status.”
The anti-democratic polemics popular on the internet should remain polemical and tactical — flowing on from your positive vision. Within academe, abstract attacks on direct democracy are completely kosher.
“Few educated people today believe in Democracy; ask anyone to choose between the total imposition of some other value, like a particular racial identity’s welfare or an economic programme, and respecting a democratic result as valuable in itself: all will give precedence to the former…
So bashing “Liberal Democracy” or “the American world order” is old hat and lame.”8
Opposing political processes in principle is stupid and unnecessary. I want referenda on the key issues of immigration, trade and war, where the people are more right-headed than the establishment.
British globalists denounced direct democracy and parliamentary sovereignty over the course of the Brexit drama, while their friends across the pond assailed anti-majoritarian American institutions like the Electoral College when Trump won. Reasserting democratic oversight over the civil service through a muscular parliament or presidency remains a key plank of populism in America and Britain.
I care more about your doctrine than your disposition. This is why the question of a “positive vision” is so important. It prevents you from admiring the powerful for their position alone.
That mindset is poisonous if rightists really want to win, and don’t want to spend the rest of their lives selling online courses to ghettoized, countercultural consumers.
This unproductive quietism is then paired with a self-defeating pessimism inherited from the polemical posture of older “right wingers.” The Alt-Right grimoire had too much conservative literature in it, saddling young frogs with all kinds of unpleasant mental handicaps. Confused nationalists identify with extinct aristocracies, or go down pointless theological rabbit holes. Instead of curing themselves of history, they wallow in it.
Furthermore, these conservative narratives, stressing historical continuity “produced, if only by insinuation, a spurious heritage for malefactors in the present….”
The French Revolutionaries were linked to Cromwell, to the Anabaptists and the Peasants Revolt by a coherence of methods: they wanted to change society according to rational principles. From thenceforth, all groups vaguely opposed to the status quo and sufficiently vehement in their methods to undermine it could claim descent from the French Revolution. 19th century communists, downwardly mobile aristocratic rebels, inchoate ethnic pogroms all made this claim terminating in the absurdity where our current ‘Left’ of geriatric rentiers and bearded gentlemen in dresses are described as a superhuman New Elite intent on making the world anew.”9
This is why confused urbanites identify themselves with General Sherman’s conquering armies. We must remember that the “Left” and “Right” are contingent categories, political constructs “serving adversarial purposes of vying for power, influence, budget-making, marketing, and careers, not least in struggles or rivalries between and among leftists {and} rightists.”10 Both sides have engaged in a grand “transvestiture” over the course of the last three centuries, inverting their historic attitudes towards capitalism, progress, relativism, universalism and other issues.
To ignore this is to swallow hook-line-and-sinker the Left’s eschatology:
“The most insidious element of Marx, is how he presents the French Revolution as the prelude to an ultimate, messianic point of salvation. Prophecy has allowed generations of hopeful leftists to penetrate the extreme dullness of Marx’s work, and if you were an onlooker in October 1917 you could be mistaken for believing he was something of an oracle. That the ‘bourgeois’ would give way to the proles has become a mainstream concept, and warped into many other forms; the woman over the man, the non-White over the White, etc.
This prevailing model is not only flatly wrong, but it has similarly tainted rightwing perspectives of the past. Many online ‘dissidents’ look towards the French Revolution as a mistake, a tragedy, and for many, the start of problems we face today. I disagree, would go as far as saying that the revolution was perfectly justified, and that the ‘dissidents’ of today are far more akin to the ‘Bourgeois’ of those days, just as our enemies closely mirror the degenerating Ancien Regime…
People like Moldbug are guilty of Whig history with reversed value judgements. His fallacy anticipates the mistakes of a generation of NRX newbies trained on his writing
Where progressives see a force for improvement inevitably leading to utopia, Moldbug sees a leviathan ‘swimming leftwards’. All that is changed is how change is perceived, from a positive to a negative…
Yarvin’s best writing was produced under Obama, and shaped by the court-historians of that era. They reframed American nationalism as a progressive, multicultural and millenarian project, and Yarvin took them at their word. Thankfully Trump’s victory provoked a wave of compelling books reading nativism back into the record of American history.
These new books give the lie to Julius Evola’s presentation of a perennially “negrified America” — essentially the 1619 project with reversed value judgements. The cold truth is that Evola wasn’t much of an authority on anything relevant for those of us with no time for Indo-Aryan esoterica. He wasn’t important for the development of Italian Fascism (see Mussolini’s Intellectuals), and knew nothing of America.
Dogmatic Evolaheads miss many positive trends in contemporary culture. Though young zoomers across the political spectrum still indulge in common wiggery, an increasing number are equally fascinated by Asian aesthetics, or ancient Aryan forms.
“I don’t blame Moldbug for thinking this way; even Spengler trusted in such a force. But let me tell you what this ‘geist’ is, The Will to Power. Progressive history regards the French Revolution as the point of a ball rolling that, one day, will culminate in wholesome socialism. All a ‘reactionary’ does is agree with tears in his eyes…”
“The issue for all of these interpretations of history, is that it ignores the most basic Darwinian reality of revolution for what is effectively occult nonsense. Julius Caesar was no leftist or progressive, he was an impoverished noble with inexhaustible intelligence, charisma, and self belief. Through the means of arms and rhetoric he became the champion of the New Men; a caste of brilliant plebeians incapable of inheriting the government of Rome due to the machinations of increasingly decadent patricians...”11
“The right vs left conflict historiographically calls on ‘right wingers’ to see themselves as the weaklings, losers, and unenlightened faction in any scenario. One that is overthrown by what the left perceive themselves to be the successors of: A band of strong, energetic and intelligent winners, who are bound to win in the end. Thinking like this is not only completely incorrect, but damaging to your political psyche. The ‘Left’ share none of the virtues of a revolutionary, whereas we do. The distinction between a left and right that can be genealogically traced back a thousand years, is fictitious crap. Reality has shown it has always been between the virtuous and the decrepit; the strong and the weak, the energetic and the exhausted, the sane and the mad, the cunning and the dimwitted, the revolutionary and the degenerative.”12
Trump is seen as a winner because he was the first right-winger since Franco (another “insurrectionist” to control the narrative. For all of its superficiality, Classical Liberal Youtube — and even the cheesy 1776 worship that anticipated it — provides you with a revolutionary self-conception. So does Caesar worship, which appeals to a lot of apolitical zoomers.
Do you REMEMBER high school Ancient History? Or before that, Zoomers showing their millennial babysitters FEMINISTS OWNED compilations on the family computer?
These children have grown up now, and are rapidly assuming leadership positions within right-wing franchises across the west. In these young men, I see an incipient counter-elite.
It is these sensitive young men that you should be comparing to our outgoing left-wing elite. Prolonged socialization with the “liberal elite” or the “radical left” disabuses you of the idea that they’re brilliant, cultured or radical. They are parochial, neurotic senile gangsters or retarded kids sabotaging a stolen and subverted civilization. Truly pipe-hitting Julien Sorel types frighten them.
When you break bread with these people, they’re not that scary at all. The same goes for the baby-boomers keeping movement conservatism alive.
Yes, the “elites” are actual people. With names, families and addresses! Unique childhood traumas, predictable media diets, and a shared pursuit of status, profits and small children! The anon is their opposite. A faceless emissary of pure reason, honed in the polemic cyclotron that is Twitter.
That said, Spencer, Hanania and RR have all spent time around the elite before they were respectively canceled, which confuses me. They each have an ideological stake in perpetuating the “status” delusion. It may be generational.
Successive left-wing generations increasingly imbibe in an unattractive vision of life, demanding more than they dole out in moral or material benefits. Have you ever had a beer with a girl who has “climate depression?” I have, and would not recommend the experience. You can’t imagine someone so histrionic, so utterly without an internal locus of control, ever winning the struggle for power.
Thomas777 is good on this point, because he grew up around the Cold War American foreign policy intelligentsia, and witnessed their decline firsthand. A strong regime doesn’t put up Biden. Conservatives are just addicted to despair because it relieves them from their responsibility for the state of affairs and their failure to take effective action.
I grew up amongst a similarly cosmopolitan set. To quote Bob Whitaker, they were…
“Utterly without the slightest trace of moral courage... I never saw anything complicated about them. I know these people, I was raised around these people. I saw the world that they produced. I saw their weakness, I never saw any strength from them. They claim that they were great fighters for freedom, side by side with Comrade Stalin. You can tell from the tone of my voice that I don't like these people. I watched them give everything away, I watched them destroy everything I cared about. So this is personal, as well as political.”13
I think my distaste for them stems from the fact that, for the most part, they were just normal, frightened people with a little bit more money. True aristocrats no longer exist.
Some are nerveless, some are ideologues, some are deeply squishy, and want to see the best in people. You can take advantage of that impulse.
“The educated liberal moderates of America want to be reconciled with the Revolutionary Meritocratic future in the same way they once wanted to be reconciled to Black America. You must offer them a hand of friendship. Stop talking about “the elites,” stop saying “these people are evil, they want you murdered and they think it's funny,” stop the VDARE James Kirkpatrick style of riling up your own base into a sense of catastrophe while frightening off normal people with your unhinged violent fan-fictions.
We have many things in common with well-educated liberal whites. They love Europe and France in particular. Point out to them that unapologetic cultural chauvinism and immigration restriction is tellement Français. They feel very insecure about patriotism and desperately want to be thought of as upstanding Americans, which is why they constantly try to gin up goofy astroturfed American boosterism like Matt Yglesias saying we can integrate the whole world because we’re America! They hate, hate, hate, middle eastern moral adventures and democracy promotion…
The first MAGA warrior who plays the suave diplomat to America’s frightened liberals will achieve outstanding success.”14
Our enemies are not black-hearted Nietzscheans, after all, but the priests and slaves he so virulently despised.
Déclassé Conservatives?
We now arrive at the meat of Parvini’s anti-MAGA argument:
“Over on the other side, we find the great unwashed plebian masses adorned in red caps and gawdy t-shirts, chanting simple slogans, and led around by the nose by a demagogue who does virtually nothing to reward their unwavering loyalty. They talk about such enlightenment themes as ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ and the true spirit of America being reflected in the fact that everyone is equal under the law regardless of race, colour, and creed. In this view, it is not that the American project is doomed to failure because of its inherently entropic egalitarian commitment to democracy, it is that evil elites have betrayed the true spirit of liberal democracy, which their more truly liberal and more truly democratic political movement will restore. USA! USA! USA! USA! These are the true inheritors of Martin Luther King Jr and the gains made by the Civil Rights Movement, not the evil racist elites who have become aristocratic and disconnected from what America is all about. These are the true inheritors of the Allied Powers of WW2 and Abraham Lincoln. Let’s go back to an America where everyone can prosper regardless of their background! Let’s go back to an America which truly judges people on the content of their character and not by the colour of their skin!”
What’s important to note is that conservative colorblindness and crudity predates Trump.
As for Trump’s social liberalism, I would harken back to John Mitchell’s advice for the press:
“Watch what we do, not what we say.”
Advancing social conservatism was not Trump’s priority, nor should it have been, but he was able to profitably co-operate with his traditionalist coalition partners. He may have waved the rainbow flag, campaigning as he was in a socially liberal country, but he banned transgender people from the military. Republicans who compromise on that issue inevitably hail from the anti-Trump wing of the party, small-time governors like Spencer Cox or Mike DeWine.
The harsh truth is that we have a lot of civilizational ground to reclaim before classical conservatism becomes viable again. John Doyle, friend of the blog and a Cigar Stream guest with unimpeachable traditionalist credentials, said it best in response to the Ye24 campaign, and the charge that Trump is too soft on the gays.
“This is disappointing but not exactly out of character. I've implied this before, but Trump is much more of a nationalist than he is a (social) conservative though of course the two are somewhat intertwined — nationalism is in itself socially conservative…
Nationalism is going to breed the conditions necessary for social conservatism, not the other way around. Yes, both are non-negotiable, but we have to accept the reality of our current voters who have been demoralized, psyoped, and generally intimidated out of retaining the views of their parents/grandparents. If simply running on being the most socially conservative or something worked, we'd have had President Huckabee or something by now. Trump is one of the few figures in recent history to run a serious nationalist campaign, and he's the first one to win on that platform.”
For all of its faults, The Republican Party is the lone force advancing right-wing legislation on crime, immigration and the rest of the social issues. Its electoral extinction has not led to a “based” alternative in one-party states like California.
Additionally, those who argue that the GOP can’t be changed ignore that it has been before. The original conservative movement went from a fringe literary community under Eisenhower to the ruling dispensation of the western world under Reagan. All that populists have yet to do is to locate our “revolutionary subjects” and their political economies suppressed by the system. We have already won the hearts and minds of young right-wingers.
Before Trump, you had the Gang of Eight, and the 2012 Republican Autopsy.
Trump’s shocking overperformance with Hispanics in 2020 proved that you could run a quasi-identitarian campaign while appealing to the material interests of approachable minority groups. The curious diversification of the conservative movement, even as it incorporates more elements of white identitarianism has been explored elsewhere in more detail.
Rest assured that the party is better on the issues now, thanks to Trump’s influence.
Conservative arguments for gay marriage and amnesty predate Trump by decades. Republicans who got the racial issue were purged decades before he came down the escalator. Those who were radicalized under Trump (present company included) often fail to appreciate how much worse the GOP was on every conceivable issue. Trump’s most cringe-worthy moments are moments of continuity with the “cuckservatism” of the past.
“The mainstream party message was that Trump won because he embodied aggressive working class bumptiousness, not for any specific policy proposals. The mainstream party thus inaugurated a new era of tastelessness and working class-pandering in the style of Sarah Palin, forgetting that Trump had built a cross-class coalition while speaking in a NYC urbanite patois and never taking off his expensive business suits… Trump did not create the tastelessnesss of the Republican party. The Republican party responded to the threat of Trump by intensifying a tastelessness which had always been present, and they did so in order to avoid having to reckon with Trump’s serious policy proposals and refutations of airy fairy postwar consensus pablum.”15
Trump, with his talk of illegals “poisoning the blood of the country,” and freshmen MAGA congressmen daring to suggest immigration moratoriums, has already moved us away from the colorblind rhetoric of the Bush years.
Let’s look at what the “true inheritors of Martin Luther King Jr and the gains made by the Civil Rights Movement” are saying about Saint Martin:
MAGA darlings Charlie Kirk, Jack Posobiec and Blake Neff16 sound like Jared Taylor today. Hell, even the Black Republicans are getting in on it!
North Carolina’s future governor, everyone.
The lone vanguard against making everything black and gay is MAGA, though it sometimes falls short.
You cannot rely on the rest of the Republican Party, let alone the left.
Ok, one more:
The sky is the limit.
Parvini continues:
“While writing The Prophets of Doom, it struck me several times, especially during the chapters on both Thomas Carlyle and Julius Evola, that Donald Trump and his MAGA movement are more truly liberal and truly democratic than their opponents.”
Firstly, certain classically liberal reforms would mark an improvement from our current postliberal epoch. Poppy Coburn defines English ordoliberalism as “a set of demands for parliamentary supremacy, media freedoms, the rule of law (and equality before it), freedom of association, and the abolition of feudal patronage networks.”17 All of these reforms would be a step in the right direction, in the British context.
Secondly, the survival of American conservatism entirely depends on the anti-democratic features of their constitution. Trump has lost the popular vote twice. “Normiecons” like Michael Knowles and Matt Walsh criticize democracy all the time.
“MAGA is probably the most genuinely non-racist, pro-black, pro-LGBT, ‘easy going’ and ‘true 90s liberal’ movement ever to exist (aside from, possibly, the British Tory party since Boris Johnson). ‘We have won our country back!’ cry a right-wing led exclusively by people like Kari Lake and Caitlyn Jenner as the black Zoomer in the MAGA hat posts a video of himself drinking Coca-Cola to a Libs of Tik-Tok video to 100k+ likes on twitter. This is really what MAGA is in its core essence…”
Trump has pivoted from the Platinum Plan to promising a death penalty for (predominantly black) drug dealers. Celebrity candidates like Kari Lake or Herschel Walker are exceptions to the rule of predominantly white and ultraconservative Trump staffers and MAGA representatives. Trump’s rhetorical shortfalls, in context, do not warrant an Ann-Coulter-style defection, given his legitimate achievements in the realms of trade policy, immigration restriction and disengagement from the Middle East.
Trump is right-wing enough, especially compared to Biden, that a protest vote for Robert Kennedy, an anti-vax 2004 liberal, is unwarranted and counterproductive. We now have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to flood the party with a mass of /ourguys/. If Trump is defeated it will be taken by the media as a referendum on OUR IDEAS, not the social liberalism that he shares with his adversaries. Look at the GOP debates. All of Trump’s worst traits are amplified in his enemies.18
“Don’t get me wrong, the elites are terrible, and you should hate them to the core. But let’s have a real think about what the other side stands for, who they are, what they want, and most importantly of all which civilisational spirit they represent. It may be that the takeover of sub-90 IQ right-wing populists is a ‘necessary’ stage in the cycle, maybe; it may be that, as the children of the ashes in deep winter, MAGA is the only form our protest can take, because we are incapable of anything else... In the end we may have to make do hoping for a higher class of manager because the alternative is even worse.”19
If you aren’t married to artificial hierarchies and reactionary posturing, meritocratic colorblindness is objectively superior to the establishment’s self-flagellating anti-whiteness.
Furthermore, stereotyping Trump supporters as useless white trash has always been the position of the uniparty establishment.
“The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.”20
The insipid “working-class party” meme pushed by glorified shock jocks like Steven Bannon plays into this losing frame.
As Scott Greer and Mystery Grove have pointed out, relying on Richard Hanania’s own research, Trump voters do not exclusively hail from trailer parks. They are predominantly Middle Class battlers with nationalist instincts.
“However much people may try to reframe the Trump movement, its animating spirit was the righteous anger of the downwardly-mobile middle class: Over-taxed, over-regulated, and culturally policed by people who contribute very little to society…
“If you look at January 6 arrestees, likely representative of the most die-hard Trump supporters, demographics that were greatly overrepresented included small business owners, skilled tradesmen, and even people with graduate degrees. More than half were white-collar workers. There were Olympic athletes and former Navy SEALs. Although these people are not the “elite” in America today, they would be in any normal country. These were the sort of driven and ambitious people who propelled the American nation forward for centuries…”21
American voters are mainly divided by their level of educational attainment or their cultural beliefs.
“A study conducted during the 2016 GOP primaries… found that favourability toward immigration restriction, anti-political correctness, and white identity were the strongest predictors for Trump support. Income and education were at the bottom of factors that predicted Trump support.”22
One of the alt-right’s critical errors was its elitist attitude towards Trump’s lumpen, Christian support base. They turned their noses up at the MAGAmoms and were left without allies when shit hit the fan.
Though the rot has spread inland, and the proliferation of MAGA negrophilia rankles, you must accept the basic fact that Trump supporters are more culturally Caucasian than the establishments of both parties. MAGA might be optically colorblind — one must be in a mass-democracy — but this is clearly superior to the alternative.
For people who purport to represent the interests of ordinary white people, much of the Dissident Right seem to dislike the ordinary white people who stand behind Trump. They have misremembered their Pat Buchanan.
“There were those workers at the James River Paper Mill, in Northern New Hampshire in a town called Groveton – tough, hearty men. None of them would say a word to me as I came down the line, shaking their hands one by one. They were under a threat of losing their jobs at Christmas. And as I moved down the line, one tough fellow about my age just looked up and said to me, “Save our jobs.” Then there was the legal secretary that I met at the Manchester airport on Christmas Day who came running up to me and said, “Mr. Buchanan, I’m going to vote for you.” And then she broke down weeping, and she said, “I’ve lost my job; I don’t have any money, and they’re going to take away my little girl. What am I going to do?”
My friends, these people are our people. They don’t read Adam Smith or Edmund Burke, but they come from the same schoolyards and the same playgrounds and towns as we come from. They share our beliefs and convictions, our hopes and our dreams. They are the conservatives of the heart.
They are our people. And we need to reconnect with them. We need to let them know we know how bad they’re hurting. They don’t expect miracles of us, but they need to know we care.”23
The sweet spot we are aiming for is a populism of empathy without pandering. Class collaboration is key! That was another genius insight of Jonathan Bowden’s which Richard Spencer has willfully forgotten.
“Bowden saw himself as a Modernist intellectual and, although I don't think he saw it like this, his achievement is similar to Ezra Pound and James Joyce in blending high and low culture. Bowden's achievement was to link the Eel pie of old London with Hans-Jurgen Syberberg. To create a space for a secular, cultural conservatism where preserving the Latin Mass or pie and mash shops existed on the same level as fighting the good fight on Immigration Reform. Bowdenism is, broadly, the philosophy that the entirety of the Western canon is interchangeable with being "right-wing"; therefore, BNP ultras and Wyndham Lewis existed on the same basic level of dignity; while Somalis in London were thus a thousand times worse for 'culture' than teenage pregnancy or swearing on TV.”24
MAGAmoms are right on the identity issues. They’re decent on foreign policy. They’re right on trade. If you think that the following picture is gross, then you are in the camp of the enemy.
In my opinion, excessive contempt for the boomers is a relic of the Iraq War era dissident right. Boomers too often delegate political decision-making to TV personalities. But with the right leadership, their sound morals and instincts lead them to the right positions.
Richard Spencer’s politics are, at this point, the contrarian defense of a hypothetical vanguard class, to spite the rest of the American Right. I don’t know enough to say whether he is acting in bad faith. At best, he looks down at his old audience. Forgetting that, in the words of friend of the blog Cal Crucis: “Kooks are the only thing that keeps the GOP from sliding into being an arm of the Chamber of Commerce.”
My only addendum would be that not all Trump supporters are kooks. Stephen Miller isn’t. Jeff Sessions wasn’t. And I will take a misguided kook over an actual traitor. Which is what “WASPy” republicans like Mitt Romney are.25 Before Trump, there was no institutional force preventing good-hearted Republicans from being rogered by a cavalcade of Lindsay Grahams.
This is the beauty of the Q-Boomer Gigachad. These people are our people. They are like the Birchers, vindicated decades later by the Venona Papers. Their hearts are in the right place.
“The sneering towards the ‘low status’ right-wingers makes me apoplectic. I’m shaking with anger as I type this. In town halls across the country, groups of local people are organising on the internet and taking direct action to bully evil local councillors while you write your thirtieth whinge-piece for ConHome about how ‘The Tories won’t Fight the Woke’. There is a genuine revolutionary vigour to their actions (which serve your interests) that you are trying (and failing) to dampen with arrogant sneering from your Tooting flatshares. Imagine if the Jacobins had taken this contemptuous stance towards the Sans-cullotes. Roux in le vieux Cordelier denouncing the disturbances at Revellion as ‘not a good look’…
Most on the right generally understand ULEZ is a gross overreach. Who is doing something about it?
The conspiracy theorists. The anti-vaxx ‘loons’. They are turning up to vile local ‘consultations’ and screaming abuse at the people stripping your liberty away. Right now, while you polish up that soon to be failed W4MP application, the ‘low status’ are fighting back. As they did with Lockdowns. As they did with the vaccines.
These are my people. The Twitter accounts with ‘Pissed off Small business owner’ in the bio. Living, breathing England. ‘Rugbyloon2005’. Who saw through the Covid Scam. They don’t care about Burke or ‘that sense of community’. The religious amongst them tend towards Christian fundamentalism, an apocalyptic worldview I find invigorating.
I am not interested in whether Klaus Schwab is a real puppet master; if people need semi-accurate scapegoats and metaphors to organise around in the service of fundamental liberties then so be it. The san-culottes believed many a ‘barmy’ conspiracy theory about the Ancien Régime. The Pacte de Famine held that the aristocrats were deliberately starving peasants. Whether or not such a pact did exist is irrelevant; it spurred on the revolutionary vigour which would eventually improve their living standards by guillotining the parasitic first and second estates. Conspiracy served to create narrative intent behind injustices which were difficult to articulate without characters.”26
You must play the hand that you have been dealt by history. That hand is Rum, Romanism and Rebellion, and it has been in the cards since Nixon traded in the WASPy northeast for the votes of the Sun-Belt27.
You need to get over your obsession with accruing “status” if you ever want to overturn the current order. Fuck “status.” It is a currency conferred upon you by your feudal superiors.
The Containment Question
We’ve established how conservatives find it difficult to visualize a final victory.
“We see this in the lazy, pseudo-Spenglerian determinism that says that the values of the contemporary west are the values inevitably adopted by all civilizations in decline, and that they will only end with the destruction and replacement of our own civilization. We see this in the use of the phrase “Successor Ideology,” which attributes an undeserving novelty and vigor to a belief system that has been hegemonic in the West since the Kennedy Administration at the very latest (when CIA men were engaging respectfully with the work of Frantz Fanon while undermining European colonial powers)…
It tends to breed in its adherents either a frantic apocalypticism or a certain slacker fatalism (the Salo Forum Nemets style “America a Bantu-Asian Imperium by 2045, British civil war between Sikhs and Hindus, LOLZ!, ugh, don’t you get it? Our beliefs will just never be High Status.”)
There’s a historical theory related but not necessarily stemming from this worldview which sees the end of the Cold War not as a victory for the Free World, but as the inauguration of a new and virile form of leftism.”28
Not only are they always on the defensive, but more conspiratorial reactionaries are quick to disown previous victories.
Why bother, if we win, it is because the Establishment allowed us to, and won’t let us push further.
I support this meme to the extent that it impels more radical activism, but not when it causes people to drop out of politics entirely.
The blackpill is another form of containment, and the elites clearly have a vested interest in convincing you to give up. Especially seeing as our idealist elites are not psychologically capable of “putting the woke away.”
The closest historical analogue is the culture-war détente of the 1990s, but the left was forced into a political compromise by a Republican Congress elected by, yes, normies “redpilled” on crime after the last few decades.
This is another major issue with identifying yourself as a reactionary. It is a fundamentally unattractive vision of life. You always disown actual right wing victories, which do exist in the 20th century, as conspiratorial exercises in containment rather than beachheads to progress from.
In the last 20 years, American Republicans have massively liberalized gun laws in states they control, and Australia’s recently implemented offshore processing regime remains a model for immigration-skeptics across the world.
These policy victories were promoted by a rival, “colorblind” faction within the elite. But they increasingly sympathize with our ideas.
As Elon’s transformation shows, “elites” and “normies” are “redpilled” via the same process.
Converting people among both groups is a necessary if insufficient precondition for meaningful political action. NomosEvents inverts the conventional political logic that more people agreeing with you is a good thing, giving you more options.
Narratives of defeat and despair, of positions lost long ago, always appeal to the conservative mind. But from another perspective we have always been dissident minorities, adrift within evil empires.
“It’s in our heritage, we’re Ulster Scots who can’t behave ourselves” - Thomas777
The main message of this article is that you shouldn’t get attached to hierarchies that do not materially benefit you, and that our enemies do not deserve your admiration.
Liberals love it when you pretend that they’re competent Machiavellians. They don’t feel that way. They’re worried about climate change, and a future Republican administration launching a new Operation Gladio to help our friends in Europe. They don’t even believe that they’re in power (when the voters agree with them on this point, you’re in trouble.)
This is why they love the Dark Brandon meme so much. It’s flattery.
Don’t waste your breath on Biden “rigging the Super Bowl,” and don’t then associate him with the most beloved pop star of our generation. Talk about the fact that he’s a senile pedophile, and that Kamala Harris is next in line when he dies.
— And she makes Dan Quayle look like Cicero.
“A vote for Trump is a vote for deportation, foreign policy realism, and more trade strategy. A vote against is a vote for four more years of the dead consensus and senile court politics...”29
If these are the battle lines on which you contest the next election, you win.
“Because liberals are always afraid; they’re always worried; they’re always thinking; they’re always gestating new notions of worry and anxiety; they’re deeply anal retentive, and one of the points of Right-wing politics is to terrify them, to prey upon their minds with the new monstrousness that is coming… It’s extremely amusing, and one should play upon their fears, which are very grotesque and quite real.”30
In other words, you must get back in touch with THE SPIRIT OF 2016:
You must never lose sight of the shitposter’s nihilistic irreverence. I used to be a libertarian. I feel different now, but I think I was always edgy, and haven’t changed massively since I became “political.” What this means is that the meme magic has never left us. Nothing the internet has known will ever leave it. Quickened by hints, we can know 2016 again, and MAKE IT NEW.31
This should put the frame-games of the last eight years into focus.
“Republicans do not want to be racist and they do not want to do economically risky things like impose tariffs. If Trump was elected to combat something nebulous like neoliberal atomization then this meant we could respond to his victory by making the Republicans a multi-racial working class party of wholesome Catholic Latinos living off family credits and promoting Family Values, which was coincidentally exactly the vision of Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio before the arrival of Trump…”32
Don’t you get it now?
Giving Spencerism the time of day entrenches what a mutual described as a “contrived fagologue where “vitalists” square off against “Christians” and “elite supremacists.” It is one pernicious component of a conspiracy to destroy the appeal of a youthful, scientific, politically-incorrect nationalist insurgency reveling in the jouissance of creative destruction.
Holly-rollers advance a post-liberal multiculturalism on the right. Left-wingers diligently copy the cope montages we mastered in 2016. Pay no attention to the looming competency crisis lapping at their heels.
Parvini’s doom-mongering conservatism and elitism only prepares you to bend over for a long defeat. In my next article, I will present a more positive self-conception for young nationalists.
We are living in another Bourbon Restoration. Do not give ammunition to your conservative enemies.
“Julien, erect upon his mighty rock, gazed at the sky, kindled to flame by an August sun. The grasshoppers were chirping in the patch of meadow beneath the rock; when they ceased everything around him was silence. Twenty leagues of country lay at his feet. From time to time a hawk, risen from the bare cliffs above his head, caught his eye as it wheeled silently in its vast circles. Julien’s eye followed mechanically the bird of prey. Its calm, powerful motion impressed him, he envied such strength, he envied such isolation.
It was the destiny of Napoleon, was it one day to be his own?”33
To be continued…
Thomas777’s Greatest Posts
Gaetano Mosca, The Ruling Class
George Orwell, Second Thoughts on James Burnham
Hugh Davis Graham, The Civil Rights Era
George Orwell, Second Thoughts on James Burnham
Martin J. Sklar, Creating the American Century
https://tunisbayclub.com/index.php?threads/dissident-history.2619/post-26505
This also links to a great paragraph on Punk Music that had to be cut for brevity.
Outside of politics, Moldbug also views the leviathan in culture. Some years ago, he argued that the Beatles were ‘leftwing’ of Bach, and that the Rolling Stones were themselves, ‘leftwing’ of the Beatles. This is interesting, but it further shows Curtis’ lack of understanding when it comes to revolution and change. The music industry is as darwinian as politics, and not the linear ‘swimming’ that Moldbug sees it as. The most obvious ‘revolution’ in music was Punk. Ask any aging boomer about music in the 70s, and they’ll tell you everyone listened to prog rock until 1977. By that year, rock had become filled with impressive, fiddly guitar playing and sophisticated sounds. The Sex Pistols thought that was really, really gay.
Loud, obnoxiously dressed and barely able to play their instruments, the Sex Pistols represented total freedom from nerdy guitar players, and Never Mind the Bollocks made prog rock the gayest music to listen to over night. Was Punk leftist? If it was, why were there so many racists and fascists in the bands and in the audience? Why was Joy Division named after a Nazi Rape Unit? Even today, leftists try to say Punk is incompatible with rightwingness, based on its revolutionary spirit alone - which is a sign of how deep progressivism has drilled into the minds of ordinary people.
Leftists demand to be seen as ‘revolutionary’. Every detail of modern leftism revolves around fighting a conservative bogeyman in a way that makes people feel like revolutionaries. The reason for this is simple; the natural legitimacy that comes with crushing your opponent expresses virtues of strength and instinctive superiority. Equally, everything that is revolutionary must be perceived as leftist, even when (such as with Punk) the reality speaks to something of the opposite.”
https://tunisbayclub.com/index.php?threads/dissident-history.2619/post-26506
https://www.bitchute.com/video/JUcnEWBeSYr2/
Like all those classic, racy Tucker monologues? Guess who wrote them?
https://thecritic.co.uk/the-post-liberal-trap/
For example, if American support for Israel is your non-negotiable issue, you should sit out the election. Biden represents the left-liberal flank of Jewish world opinion. He is a Zionist against Likud, because their hawkishness threatens to blow up the whole project.
Whether or not you think they killed his dad, RFK Jr is even more pro-Israel, challenging Biden from the “right” on the Iran Deal. In response to accusations of antisemitism, he did an ass-covering interview with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach. The tech-mogul yuppies behind his hoarseness are Zionists as well, a natural compliment for their “anti-woke” liberalism.
In search of capital for their campaigns, anti-Trump Republicans must go cap in hand to the Jewish lobby. Ron DeSantis, fresh from signing antisemitism ordinances into law, began his campaign with an alliance with Miriam Adelson and others.
Nikki “It has never that Israel needs America. It has always been that America needs Israel” Haley rose from irrelevance for her slavish defense of the Zionist entity at the UN.
I’ll stick to Trump’s Zionism without American boots on the ground, and the eventual disengagement floated by Vivek Ramaswamy, MAGA’s stalking-horse/policy laboratory.
Here is another interesting thread on the way forward.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160318182110/https://www.nationalreview.com/article/432876/donald-trump-white-working-class-dysfunction-real-opportunity-needed-not-trump/
https://revolver.news/2022/01/the-establishment-fails-to-grasp-trumpian-populism/
Pat Buchanan’s Kulturkampf Speech
Spencer’s man-crush on him merits further examination
See Kevin Phillips’s life’s work.
https://jonathanbowden.org/speeches/q-a-on-renewing-the-radical-right-why-bowden-was-not-a-conservative-and-other-topics/
Canto CXIII
Stendhal, The Red and the Black
Fantastic piece man, I eagerly await part two
Absolutely amazing. You have to be on this week’s ‘New Right Poast.’