For the past year, “The” Rick Wilson—a Republican consultant and columnist—has endlessly announced that Trump has peaked: It’s over, folks, he’s finished! Trump’s racist fanbase will soon retreat into their basements, to fap away while watching Akira on Blu-ray.
Needless to say, Rick’s jimmies have been rustled. He not only relishes a GOP defeat in November but looks forward to the “purge” that will follow:
The second reason Trump needs to fall hard in November is that the Party of Lincoln needs a complete, top-to-bottom reset — one that completely purges the Trumpkins who believe racial animus is a governing philosophy and that their ignorant and angry primal screams can ever build a Republican majority.
After a pretty decisive loss to Obama in 2012, the Republican Party produced an exhaustive, detailed post-mortem pointing the way forward, focused largely on how to better connect with the growing Latino vote.
None of the lessons were actually learned. All the recommendations about fixing the posture of the party have been treated as though they had been printed on toilet paper.
Interestingly, Rick uses the “reset” language, which I discussed in an earlier essay. I wrote,
Many in the RNC, no doubt, secretly want Trump to lose, as it would offer them the opportunity to say “we told so,” reset the rhetoric, and go back to the days of Dubya, Romney, and McCain.
Rick is not so secret.
But the bell’s already been rung, and it cannot be un-rung. Trump’s greatest accomplishment is not really any new policy initiative; it’s that he’s acted like a wrecking ball, smashing through the Republican and “conservative” facade. He’s revealed that implicit nationalism—and not “free markets” or “conservative values”—was always the foundation of Republican victories, and that the “conservative intellectual movement” (such as it is. . .) has been propped up by this same hidden support.
Whether Rick likes it or not, the GOP is the White Man’s Party, and has been so for a long time. Consistently 90 percent of votes casts for Republican presidential candidates are cast by “non-Hispanic White people.”
Since 1992, the Republican vote has been getting Whiter, by about 5 percent each cycle. In 2012, Mitt Romney secured just under 60 percent of the White vote, higher than any of George W. Bush’s totals.
Whites have voted as a bloc more intensely in the past, such as in 1984, when 66 percent voted for Reagan in his 49-state landslide. The potential for an election like this is at the heart of the so-called “Majority Strategy,” which has been most fervently advanced by Peter Brimelow and Steve Sailer, and ultimately derives from Sam Francis’s 2003 book, Ethno-Politics. Put simply, the Majority Strategy means expanding the White base—to upwards of 65 percent of the vote—as the most realistic path to victory.
Rick’s strategy is to engage in more “outreach” to minorities—and pretend the GOP hasn’t been making such appeals since the mid-‘80s, each year’s effort more embarrassing than the last.
Rick Wilson creepily cradles the future of the Republican Party.
The question people like Rick never ask is whether non-Whites actually want or like “conservatism,” and whether voting for Democrats is not a rational choice to increase their quotient of money and happiness, since the the Left is clearly more eager to give them stuff.[1]
Culturally and socially, why would minorities be attracted to the GOP at all? It is the party of gun-loving rednecks and snobby country-club WASPs. It reeks of Whiteness, and no self-respecting Black or Hispanic would want to be a part of it. Better to find a place among the Star Wars canteen of the DNC.
So Rick doesn’t ultimately want a “reset” at all. He dreams of a transformation. The GOP will become a multiracial party of globalism . . . but with guns! . . . and the Constitution! . . . and maybe no abortion or gay wedding cakes. . . He dreams that America’s first Afro-Caribbean President might bring back the Churchill bust.
Here are his solutions,
Both the conservative movement and the country need a vibrant center-right media culture that challenges the predicates of the left, educates America on our beliefs and fights for a national political culture centered on personal liberty, economic freedom and constitutional values.
Rick acts as if we haven’t had such a thing for the past 60 years. (Though I wonder if “vibrant” is not a code for something. . .) Since the founding of National Review in 1955, “conservatives” have built a billion-dollar empire, comprised of think-tanks, magazines, consultants, activist groups—all shouting essentially the same message.
They have achieved a certain hegemony in the Republican Party, and they have certainly been part of winning campaigns. But they have failed so utterly and so definitively in winning the culture and protecting the founding people of the country that one wonders what the point of it all was. Now winning national elections seems out of reach.
But Rick is not above issuing threats:
So when it's over, Trumpkins, remember: You're not purging us. We're purging you.
Does Rick really want to “purge” 14 million Trump voters? I doubt he is that bitter. Instead, this is a direct assault on the Alt Right, and is of the same character as Paul Ryan’s stumbling attempt to name the name:
This exchange is the most I have ever liked Paul Ryan. pic.twitter.com/7GaDlGvtO0
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) August 5, 2016
On one level, one might question why someone like Rick, who claims to be well connected, of the Speaker of the House is even talking about the Alt Right—a movement whose combined budget is, no doubt, less than what The Heritage Foundation spends on pocket Constitutions.
The Alt Right is damaging “conservatism.” We’re damaging them because we understand the real crisis, and we understand the real political and geopolitical fault lines of the 21st century.
The Rick Wilsons of the world can blame us for the fact that America is cracking up on identitarian lines . . . that official “conservatism” doesn’t work any more . . . and that much more radical solutions are necessary . . . but this is to blame and whip the messenger.
As for a purge, for most of my time as a journalist and activist, ignorance of our movement and ideas was the main obstacle. Now that we have been recognized, I expect more direct, explicit attacks to be issued from the official Right. So yes, there will be an attempted “purge.”
But we don’t live in 1962, that is, in an ideological and media bottleneck, a time when William F. Buckley could successfully purge the John Birch Society from official “conservatism” because they failed to support the Vietnam campaign.
Even if Rick was willing to exercise utter ruthlessness, where would a purge even begin? The fact is, as the Cucks strike back against us, we become more powerful than they could possibly imagine.
“The” Rick Wilson and his ilk ultimately know in this guts that “conservatism” has run its course, and that European identity politics is inevitable in an increasingly multiracial society. They also are secretly aware of their own personal inferiority, and that “conservatism” is already dead.
- Mitt Romney was more honest about this in his notorious “47 percent” comments in 2012; but even this formulation in wrong, in that Romney saw American voting patterns breaking down on tax-brackets, and not race and culture. ↩︎
