We should all be grateful to Donald J. Trump. For he saved us from the tedious inevitability of an electoral season.
He saved us from a year of Republican electioneering, featuring candidates seemingly chosen for their repulsive, annoying, or sleep-inducing qualities.
He saved us from another six months of “Hillary v Jeb,” and commentators pretending that it’s all so important and exciting . . . pretending that we’re not just watching two oligarchic families duke it out to see who’ll remain on top the longest before the coming election of President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho.
Against all of this stood Trump.
Donald Trump, of course, does not challenge the oligarchic nature of American politics and elite rule. In a way, Trump’s “self-funded” campaign has made a mockery of the democratic process.
In the minds of Trump haters, Trump has turned the presidency into the bauble of an eccentric, narcissistic billionaire . . . an asshole of wealth and privilege . . . a man who delights in demeaning women and appealing to the basest instincts of the “poorly educated”, whom he loves . . . a man who aims to transform the American Republic into a surreal, horrifying Wrestlemania . . . a gold-plated fascism, with torchlight parades for the Great Leader, female journalists burned at the steak . . . all the while an appeased Vladimir Putin marches his armies across Europe.
What’s most remarkable, perhaps, about the fever dream of all the Trump haters—which I’ve exaggerated, but only slightly—is its schizoid nature.
For months, we were told, by people from the mainstream Left and Right, Donald Trump is not real: he’s not serious . . . he’s about to drop out . . . his numbers are fake . . . the whole thing’s a vanity project . . . don’t be a sucker.
Then, we were told that Trump is, in fact, all too real: he became a screen upon which his haters projected all their nightmares: White nationalism . . . a resurgent Russia . . . fascism . . . a Big Man who doesn’t listen to the “experts,” “policy wonks” and “neocons” for his ideas, and who would probably dispense with such people if given the chance.
This schizoid reaction—that Trump isn’t real and all too real—is the reaction of someone repressing something, repressing a deep and dark truth.
Trump—the phenomenon, not just the man—has been a very long time coming. For something has been rotten in the state of America for a very long time.
And Trump haters are right about one thing: the phenomenon can only be understood as an expression of White Americans’ growing awareness of their demographic displacement . . . the erosion of their security, power, and influence . . . and the cutting off of their future.
In other words, the Trump phenomenon derives from what could be the called The Great Erasure: former White countries being transformed, humiliated, and ultimately invaded and raped. This is what is happening right now, and it might be the most important historical development of the last 500 years.
The System, you could say, is looking into that place where it dares not look. And it finds Trump there, staring back at it. When or how this phenomenon would arise, as well as who would lead it, nobody knew. But that it would come was inevitable.
A Crack in the System
Trump was the most powerful potential challenge to the status quo in my lifetime—the most powerful potential challenge to “The System,” and by that I don’t just mean the government. I mean the entire corporate and economic structure . . . the media, entertainment, and culture industries . . . hegemonic discourse . . . the way we talk and think and breathe and dream.
Perhaps the most dominating component of “The System” is not its bombs or bureaucrats or police or taxes but its Narrative and Paradigm.
The System is most powerful when it cuts off that something else, that dream of another world and the will to bring it into being. The System, in other words, presents itself as “inevitable,” as everything you could ever want. Far from being brutal or unfeeling, The System has “thought of everything”—it has even thought of the ways in which you will oppose The System.
If you’re a White man filled with angst at your declining income and foreclosed home . . . and the fact that you don’t know your children anymore . . . never fear! You can vote for the greasy televangelist from Texas, named Ted or Jeb or Dubya, and make the “The Constitution” and “freedom” a cozy substitute for your existence.
Or if you’re a young White liberal with 100k in student-loan debt . . . so big can’t even think about getting married and having kids . . . never fear! You can support Bernie (and settle for Hillary) and signal that you’re one of those cool, virtuous, post-White White people . . . one of those who, you know, will get a place at the table in the minority America of 2050 . . . pretty please . . .
The System is its own opposition, its own problem and solution, its own critique and its own redemption. The System endlessly satisfies us . . . and we are endlessly unhappy, always feeling empty. (Even leftists don’t really get what they want.)
The System is, in other words, inevitable.
But something else was always inevitable: Sooner or later, there was going to be a “crack in system” . . . a deep fracture . . . and this wound would not be inflicted on The System from an outside power. It would come from within.
This contradiction would eventually undermine The System . . . would make new things possible . . . things The System’s policemen and high priests were always guarding against and which they believed were no longer imaginable.
Trump was this contradiction . . . that thing that none of us could have predicted . . . but which now seems inevitable.
Some of us might have day-dreamed of some foreign intervention that would save us from The System—as if America might be invaded and liberated by Putin’s Red Army or Marion Le-Pen of Arc. Red Dawn, Part II: The Good Guys Win This Time!
But that would have been too easy.
The Contradiction of The System—the figure that brings about its breakdown—must be part of The System. He must be something vain, sometime absurd . . . a gambling and real-estate tycoon . . . and star of a “reality show.” He must be something real and unreal at the same time.
In The Current Year, the Contradiction could never be someone like Joan of Arc; it must be someone like Donald Trump.
For Trump isn’t just part of The System; he’s an undisputed maestro of the vulgar and stupid.
So much about Trump offends us, maybe even appalls us. But then we don’t get to choose. We don’t get to decide the way in which The System will crack and turn on itself. . . and we don’t get to choose which man will embody and bear something far bigger than himself, something far bigger than he recognizes.
Today, the word “Napoleon” has such a glow that it needs no qualifier, surname, or historical context. Napoleon embodies that upwards striving in our souls . . . that will, not merely to increase the glory of France, but to build a Grand Empire for all Europe. He’s a man who could only be expressed through a symphony.
But that’s now.
There’s no doubt that so many conservatives of his time viewed Napoleon as a “vulgar” Corsican . . . some military upstart . . . someone far too tainted by the times and The Revolution. Conservatives, no doubt, would have preferred an ancient King or priest or troubadour as their leader. But Napoleon was Napoleon; and only Napoleon could be Napoleon.
Trump might be, in his vulgar and stupid way, the Napoleon of The Current Year.
Trump might have “gone to the greatest schools,” but he never passed through The System’s cursus honorum, its “path of honor, to become a political leader: first, law school and low-level officialdom, then up the latter of media talking points, focus groups, ass-kissing, and selling one’s soul.
Trump never went through the gauntlet, which impresses the “right opinions” upon potential leaders and weeds out those who actually care about their people and civilization . . . or who are simply interesting.
The Republican and Democratic parties are tools of the American oligarchy, of Super Pacs and the donor class. Trump, on the other hand, led a populist movement not in spite of the fact that he’s an oligarch but because of it. Trump has, indeed turned oligarchy into a kind of populism.
Other candidates might talk about being the son of a mailman or bartender, and relish getting themselves photographed wearing plaid or eating a slice of pizza. Trump, on the other hand, has never hidden the fact that he’s rich guy (and that he’s the kind of man who eats pizza with a fork . . . which is weird).
But in this way, Trump is the only candidate who can legitimately say he could never be bought.
Trump has also been the most radically transparent candidate about the current political dispensation. Forget the idiotic demand that he release his back taxes. When Trump says that he “got along with lots of politicians,” he is effectively bragging that he bought them at auction. Such honesty is only offensive to those who are hopelessly delusional about the nature of American democracy, or who benefit by keeping the racket going.
In turn, Trump is a serious politician not in spite of the fact that he’s a narcissist and reality show star—but because of it.
Trump is not a celebrity like Tom Cruise or George Clooney or Elizabeth Tailer: distant, isolated, unapproachable, and strange.
Trump has, through the television set, been in people’s homes, eaten dinner with them, gone to bed with them, you could say, for three decades. He’s been a kind of friend to admire and envy, even a source of authority. He’s been a one-man “reality show”—a real person, who’s larger than life. This kind of power, whatever we might think of it, is its own political campaigns and “ground game.”
True Lies
Trump is the man who boasts that his opponents come to him on their hands and knees . . . while sweating profusely . . . the only women who can resist him are those menstruating through their eyeballs.
All of that is bullshit, of course—“truthful hyperbole.” But then to understand it as mere bullshit is to understand nothing.
“Public relations”—and postmodern “image production”—is, as Baudrillard observed, all about signs without references . . . words without meaning . . . sound and fury signifying nothing . . . bullshit within bullshit.
But Trump’s genius is to embed truth within his vulgar and stupid bullshit: deep truths, sometimes hard or harsh truths . . . dangerous truths.
One can see this, first and foremost, in his slogan “Make America Great Again”—the most memorable one-liner of the year.
Eight years ago, Barack Obama’s “Hope We Can Believe In” revealed, early on, the vacuous and entirely non-revolutionary nature of his presidency. In turn, Marco Rubio’s “A New American Century” is, quite literally, a name adopted from a neoconservative think-tank that planned the Iraq War.
On the surface, you could say that “Make America Great Again” is just a big patriotic foam-hand announcing “We’re #1!” On a deeper level, Turmp’s slogan implies directly that America is not great . . . that America power might be an illusion . . . that we’re coasting on the fumes of the 20th century . . . and that it’s time to rethink everything. Trump has thus, amazingly, brought a awareness of The Great Erasure and American Decline into public consciousness, in a way that we never could. In other words, “Make America Great Again” is a true lie, as opposed to the lying lies we’ve become inured to.
After September 11, George W. Bush had a real opportunity (maybe the last one) to re-found White America: he could have shut down immigration entirely, or at least immigration from non-European countries, and gotten away with it politically.
Instead, “Dubya-style” nationalism became the ultimate expression of patriotic bullshit. Let’s attach a flag to our SUVs, y’all . . . fight the Muslims by going shopping and taking out mortgages . . . Why question any of this? Why seriously examine the direction our civilization has taken—that would be letting the terrorists win!
The Dubya years represented the ultimate bullshit Clash of Civilizations: consumerism, democracy, and “human rights” will destroy the extremists . . . or seduce them into becoming the same passive nihilists we are!
Trump’s Wall, on the other hand—along with his demand to cease Muslim immigration—becomes something else entirely: it becomes existential . . . a declaration of difference . . . a symbol of our will to survive.
Trump, whether he knows it or not, is announcing the return of Grand Politics . . . politics on the greatest scale . . . politics as the struggle between races and civilizations.
And Trump’s so-called “Bromance” with Vladimir Putin is just as radical as The Wall, perhaps even more so.
The history of the 20th century has been a history of a long civil war, a Brothers War. Trump and Putin—this is the image of two of the three great blocks of the White Race—North America and Russia—finally reaching an understanding. It is a cancellation of the the 20th century. A sign of hope that Europeans can finally stop fighting each other, and losing the whole world in the process.
TRUMP—the name itself—is a true lie—something combining bullshit and greatness, something stupid and primal.
For Trump is a billionaire not just because of buildings and casinos but because of TRUMP, because of the brand and all that it implies. TRUMP isn’t associated with any one product or real-estate development or beauty pageant or mouth-watering steak. TRUMP is all of it and more. TRUMP is a thing in itself—intangible, inexpressible, invaluable. TRUMP represents that golden longing for success . . . for power . . . for winning . . . and for indulging in just enough decadence, sex, and arrogance. TRUMP represents that will to power . . . to be great . . . and to be something more than a man.
The Alt and the Right
Perhaps my least favorite opinion about Trump is that he is the “last chance” or the “last hope” of White America. There’s something reactionary and weak about getting excited about “last chances,” as it implies propping up something that deserves to die. Trump is powerful as something new, as a first stand of European identity politics.
Seven year ago, when I first started using this term “Alternative Right,” it was my own passionate plea for that something else— something outside The System and the thought-prison of “conservatism.”
The Alt Right was, at its beginning, a kind of “rebellion without a cause” or, you could say, conservatism for when there’s nothing to conserve.
And to be honest, I became a bit disenchanted with the term “Alt Right.” After a while, I wanted to get beyond Left and Right and assert European Identity—identitarianism—as the foundation and sine qua non of my ideology. I didn’t want to just be an “alternative.”
But “Alt Right” took on a life of its own, outside my control. And it’s much bigger than me or any single individual. (Ramzpaul mentioned to me that while he was abroad, he was approached by a Romanian fan in a bar, who announced to him, “Paul, Ramzpaul. Greetings! I am Alt Right shitlord.”)
“Alt Right” has taken a journey but remained remarkably true to my original conception. And it is all these Shitlords—with all their Trumpean vulgarity and “take no prisoners” attitude—who are doing much more than any establishment journalist to uncover what really matters in the world.
As I look back on it now, there seems to be a wonderful contradiction between the words “alternative” and “Right”: something new and frenetic and uncontrollable (“alternative”), and something old and traditional and eternal (“the Right”).
Our movement must itself be a contradiction: alternative Right . . . conservative revolution . . . radical traditionalist . . . archeo-futurist . . . anarcho-fascist. All of these seem to implicitly recognize that we might need to unleash a little chaos . . . some hashtags and dank memes . . . some Trumpean vulragiry . . . before we put society back together again. Trump is, in this way, an authentic hero of our movement.
He is expressing deep contradictions within The System . . . deep unrest among White people that has been boiling for decades . . . and has revealed the utter uselessness of self-styled “conservatives.”
Trump has done this, to an extent we shouldn’t underestimate, unknowingly. In Donald Trump’s brain, the Trump phenomenon probably is all about Donald Trump.
But for us, and the world, the Trump phenomenon is much bigger than the man. He is a vehicle, unwittingly, bringing forth ideas and emotions that are terrifying to The System.
In turn, we project on him our hopes and dreams. We Photoshop Trump, not as a casino magnate, but as what he could or should be—as a Roman . . . an imperial general . . . or great conqueror in some Dune-like archeo-future.
Not too long ago, the Brietbart writer Milo Yanisagreeklastname, spoke at a college and was, predictably, disrupted and harassed by Black Live Matters groupies. When the Whites in the crowd actually stood up and started to fight back, they chanted “Trump . . . Trump . . . TRUMP!”
This was not mere election-year cheerleading. For we must remember that before the Trump phenomenon, these White people had nothing to chant; they had no call or word that expressed their spirit and soul.
TRUMP has become a killing word. And Trump, maybe despite himself, has become the Napoleon of the Current Year.
But then let’s take a step back.
Over the past months, there have been many nonsensical calls by journalists for Trump to “distance” himself from “racism” and the phantom menace of the Ku Klux Klan. (Trump, being Trump, has mostly refused to cower to political correctness.)
But in a way, it’s more important for us to distance ourselves from Trump. (And I don’t just say that in the sense that identitarians are not really helping Trump much when we endorse him or wax enthusiastic about him.)
I say this in the sense that our movement should never be defined by one single man. We should never put all our eggs in one basket. For the revival of European identity must last much longer than the Trump phenomenon, longer than my life or that of anyone here.
Our movement is, on one hand, about Yesterday, about our ancestors and the bedrock of who we are. And on the other, our movement is about Tomorrow, and the Day After Tomorrow.
It is not about Today, for the Current Year belongs to the whores and politicians. Tomorrow belongs to us!
