What lies buried shall be unearthed, and who has been rendered oblivious shall be invited to remember. Working towards this is the main task imposed on us.
Tag: Alain de Benoist
This interview about Donald Trump, the question of identity, geopolitics, Islam, and other issues originally appeared in a French publication Europe Maxima. Richard was interviewed by Thierry Durolle.
This interview about Donald Trump, the question of identity, geopolitics, Islam, and other issues originally appeared in a French publication Europe Maxima. Richard was interviewed by Thierry Durolle.
Europe Maxima: First and foremost, thank you for answering my questions. To begin this interview, could you introduce yourself and the National Policy Institute to our readers?
Richard Spencer: The National Policy Institute is an independent non-profit think tank dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of people of European descent in the United States and around the world. I am the President and Director of The National Policy Institute and Washington Summit Publishers. I am also the founder and Editor of Radix Journal, RadixJournal.com, and a co-founder of the recently-launched AltRight.com.
Europe Maxima: You are considered by the media as a kind of showcase or spokesman of the now-famous Alt Right. We know that the Alt Right is more of a nebula of different tendencies rather than a homogeneous movement. Where do you fit in this Alt-Right nebula?
Richard Spencer: I coined the term “alternative Right” in 2008 in order to differentiate myself from the failures of mainstream American conservatism. I saw the latter as a purely reactive form, seeking to preserve the status quo as opposed to focusing on passing down key aspects of our ancestral traditions to future generations. I have been referred to as the intellectual vanguard of this movement.
Today, Alt Right is, indeed, an umbrella term to describe those seeking the way out of Liberal Postmodernity dominating the United States and Europe through various means: culturally, socially, politically. Alt Right’s current diversity is a natural state in its early stages of development, as we consolidate our message and improve our communication with likeminded counterparts outside the U.S.
Europe Maxima: Several protagonists of the Alt Right seem to be influenced by the French Nouvelle Droite and particularly by Guillaume Faye and Alain de Benoist. As far as you are concerned, you invited the latter in 2013 to talk about the identity question. What did you learn from the French Nouvelle Droite and do you believe that its influence is that important among Alt Righters?
Richard Spencer: The so-called French New Right has left a tremendous impact on the Alt Right, as have earlier renditions of the Right in continental Europe: from Friedrich Nietzsche to the Conservative Revolutionary thinkers in the interwar period. One of the reasons for this influence is the fact that continental Europe has a rich tradition of right-wing intellectuals as compared to the United States, which has, relative to its population, few. Apart from a number of notable exceptions, today, the Right in the U.S. comprises neoconservatives, libertarians, and paleoconservatives, who either fail to address key questions of identity or do not go far enough in doing so.
Europe Maxima: Except the Nouvelle Droite and some famous thinkers like Julius Evola and Oswald Spengler, we don’t really know American thinkers who influenced the Alt Right. Could you name a few?
Richard Spencer: Some of the notable thinkers of recent times in the U.S. include Sam Francis, Patrick Buchanan, Murray Rothbard, and Paul Gottfried. In various ways, these thinkers criticized Washington’s foreign policy of chaos led by neocons and liberal interventionists, questioned the decline of the West, and examined questions of identity.
Europe Maxima: The Lügenpresse depicts you as a neo-Nazi and a white supremacist whereas you consider yourself a race-realist. Does this mean you want a « nice white country » or that you would accept living in a multicultural country as long as there is no racial and cultural mixing between its communities?
Richard Spencer: I consider myself an Identitarian. I have also repeatedly stated that to move forward, we must discard all ideologies of the past.
Proponents of Liberalism (even those who self-describe as the mainstream Left) refer to anyone who opposes them by using emotionally-charged keywords, including “Nazi.” This shows the power of such keywords to shut down rational discussion, but also the fact that globalist elites and their supporters have been in a state of hysteria about the slow paradigm shift toward identity-focused populism since Brexit and, especially, since Trump’s election and inauguration.
If you look at recent violent protests during Trump’s inauguration or those in Berkeley, you will notice that those who have been attacked—both verbally and physically—are not only people like me, with bold and radical ideas, but also mainstream conservatives wearing red Trump hats. This means that our attackers do not differentiate between us. The explicit nature of this friend/enemy distinction is good: our opponents are hostile and even violent, which should convert more open-minded people to our message.
Europe Maxima: Is race, as a concept, more than simple biological materialism to you? What would be the answer of the spiritual vacuity and nihilism the post-modern white man is afflicted by?
Richard Spencer: I do not subscribe to pure biological determinism. I believe that one’s identity is a complex interplay of nature and nurture: from one’s DNA to cultural and social interactions, and, of course, geography—the sense of rootedness in one’s native landscape.
Our European counterparts must understand the uniqueness of American development: our society is hyper-racialized because our history on this continent involved slavery, various waves of immigration, mainly from Europe and, more recently, from other parts of the world, segregation, and so forth. Whereas some older dwindling immigrant communities such as the Irish certainly exist, the majority of Americans of European descent is not only ethnically mixed but also self-identifies as simply White. This is both their reality in terms of self-perception and in terms of being the Other—when they encounter members of other groups.
In some ways, this perception is similar to Americans of African, Hispanic, and other backgrounds. Yet whereas these minority groups are encouraged to embrace their respective group identities through their own institutions and encouragement by the state, such as Affirmative Action in education, Americans of European descent do not have such mechanisms. It is true that up until recently, White Americans held social and cultural hegemony and did not need their own organizations. This, however, has changed: the combination of demographics, immigration, and Kulturkampf has left many Americans of European descent with a keen sense of dispossession.
Europe Maxima: For a couple of years in France, some people like Laurent Ozon created the concept/neologism “Remigration.” “Remigration” is the return of non-white French people to their countries of origin in a peaceful way thanks to bi-lateral state concords, for example. Do you believe something similar could be achieved someday in the U.S.A.?
Richard Spencer: The Alt Right is in the initial stages of political development. We must use our time wisely rather than biting off more than we can chew in outlining currently unfulfillable political goals. That said, I believe that we, as a group, must act solely in our own interests. By definition, this would leave out those outside it. In theory, this could be achieved by various peaceful and voluntary means. So I am not excluding concepts like re-migration from the list of possibilities.
Europe Maxima: What is your opinion on Islam?
Richard Spencer: In the best circumstances, we could both live and let live.
Framing the question of immigration—or mass migration—to Europe and the U.S. along the lines of Islam is incorrect. Islam is practiced in very different regions around the world: Indonesian Muslims are distinct from those in Lebanon and those in Nigeria. Saudi Arabia practices horrific beheading, while Tatar Muslims in Russians are largely secular adherents to generic Russian-European culture. Thus, this question should not only be framed along the lines of religion but also along the lines of ethnicity, culture, and geography.
That said, with some exceptions of historic, indigenous minority communities, large-scale Islamic migration has no place in Europe. At the same time, Washington and its European allies must stop the ongoing chaos and destruction they have caused in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia creating a seemingly never-ending flow of war refugees and economic migrants, which includes serious criminal elements and even terrorists. It surprises me that when the question of refugees is discussed, virtually no one—not even the self-described Leftist antiwar activists—mentions that the best solution, after ceasing to aid the so-called “moderate rebels” and helping in the struggle against global terrorism, is resettlement of refugees and, perhaps, aid in rebuilding in their own ancestral lands, not in Europe or the U.S.
But then one wonders if it will ever be “live and let live” with Islam, and not “live and let die.”
I’ve generally turned up my nose at the “Islam debates” of the 2000s. On one side, liberals (including George W. Bush) claimed that Islam was a “religion of peace”; on the other side, conservative supporters of Bush and the War on Terror claimed that Islam was a maniacal religion bent on installing Sharia Law in Oklahoma—which is why we should engaged in endless wars for democracy in the Middle East.
Needless to say, both sides are wrong and misguided. But as much as I hate to admit it, because I opposed the Iraq War so vehemently, the conservative side does contain a kernel of truth. Islam—at its full flourishing (for instance, Wahhabi or Salafi Islam—Islam as a political ideology)—isn’t some peaceful denomination like Methodism or religion like Buddhism; Islam is a Black Flag. It is an expansive, domineering ideology, and one that is directed against Europe. In this way, Islam give non-Europeans a fighting spirit and integrates them into something much greater than themselves. Islam is a “civilization” in Huntington’s sense, and a grave danger for European peoples.
Europe Maxima: Racial and cultural tensions are growing more and more in both of our countries along with a general despondency, mistrust towards the political and media elite and the rise of populism. According to you is it because of an economical and social crisis, a political crisis, a crisis of identity, a crisis of Meaning or even everything all together?
Richard Spencer: Current crisis in the West has multiple causes—both immediate and deep-rooted. The former is obvious: the warfare-welfare state creates crises abroad, accepting the results of those crises—migrants and refugees—at home, while benefitting globalist elites with transnational capitalist interests. This perpetual cycle occurs against the backdrop of moral and cultural degeneration: from entertainment culture to suicidal “tolerance.” Even if it were possible in certain cases, refugees cannot be assimilated because there is no viable culture to assimilate them to. The results are horrific.
Yet many critics of our predicament simply want to turn back the clock to the time of three of four decades ago, when things seemed reasonably “okay,” without asking difficult—fundamental—questions. This is wrong. After all, it was that seemingly comfortable time that set us on the trajectory that led us to where we are now.
Others trace the decline of the West to the era of the Enlightenment that spawned ideologies of Modernity; others yet—to the origins of Christianity; while thinkers like Heidegger go as far back as ancient Greece and the framing of Being.
So this time around we must ask ourselves these difficult questions starting with, “Who are we?” and “What is our place in history?”
Europe Maxima: Do you believe the concepts of Left and Right are still valid?
Richard Spencer: On the one hand, the political spectrum that everyone is used to is largely outmoded. After the collapse of Communism, Liberalism became the only remaining ideology of Modernity with global aspirations, in which both the mainstream Left and Right represent two cosmetically different versions of the same fundamental trajectory. This is why, for instance, you see many Identitarians who would self-describe as Right with a keen interest in the environment and conservation, i.e. issues traditionally associated with leftist “greens,” or they subscribe to anti-interventionist foreign policy—another putatively “left-wing” cause.
At the same time, in a somewhat abstract, semantic sense we can speak of an eternal Left and Right, where the former is about horizontal movement, destruction of existent norms, decentralization, whereas the latter is about eternity, vertical movement, centralization, consolidation, creative spirit, and monumentality. These semantic forms are cyclical.
Europe Maxima: Donald Trump finally became President of the U.S. What do you expect from him in terms of domestic and foreign policy?
Richard Spencer: My expectation of Trump remains pragmatic and therefore modest. At best, he will face inward in order to attempt to solve a multitude of domestic problems, while adhering to Realpolitik in international relations. I do not expect him to dismantle NATO—despite the fact that this alliance is a Cold War relic—contrary to the paranoid theories of his opponents. But needless to say, the alliance needs to be radically rethought.
For me, Trump is more important as a symbol of the kind of energies he has unleashed instead of his actual policies. He, for instance, recently nominated an Anglo-Saxon Protestant, Neil Gorsuch, for the Supreme Court. In practice, Gorsuch’s decisions will likely adhere to examining Constitutional law. Symbolically, however he represents the founding stock of America as a nascent state, whereas none of the recent selections have been representative thereof. Similarly, Trump’s comments, ranging from those about a reasonable relationship with Russia to explicitly questioning immigration, have provided hope for a future paradigm shift.
Europe Maxima: As the name of our website suggests, we defend the greater Europe. What is your opinion on both Europe as a civilisation and as a (pseudo) political and economic structure names the European Union?
Richard Spencer: If you look at maps of, say, the Holy Roman Empire in the past and the European Union today, there will be quite a bit of an overlap. What this demonstrates is that there is a vast spiritual, geographic, and ethno-cultural entity that we could refer to as Greater Europe. Yet the form of this entity has been filled with different content throughout history. Today, the European Union is a symbol of all that is wrong: from its massive bureaucracy to its culturally destructive policies. What this means is that the form needs to be filled with correct content in line with true European identities and traditions.
I’ve expressed skepticism of “Brexit,” as well as all forms of ethnic nationalism, that is, nationalisms that view fellow Europeans as “The Other.” Whether we like it or not, the fault lines of the 21st century—and beyond—are racial and civilizational. We must address issues and crises on this level; in this sense, we must think and act racially. How exactly this Identitarian spirit would express itself in terms of political structures remains to be seen.
Western Civilization, the #TruConservatives tell us, consists of nothing more than classical liberalism. And American conservatism, insofar as we are offered a definition, is a vague belief in “limited government” and “the Constitution.” These are combined with “Judeo-Christian values,” said to be eternal but actually evolving at a stately pace a few years behind the leftist avant-garde. Knowledge is dangerous for any respectable conservative because if you explore the history of one of your heroes before 1965, you’ll find views on race and identity as bad as anything within that gross Alternative Right.
Western Civilization, the #TruConservatives tell us, consists of nothing more than classical liberalism. And American conservatism, insofar as we are offered a definition, is a vague belief in “limited government” and “the Constitution.” These are combined with “Judeo-Christian values,” said to be eternal but actually evolving at a stately pace a few years behind the leftist avant-garde. Knowledge is dangerous for any respectable conservative because if you explore the history of one of your heroes before 1965, you’ll find views on race and identity as bad as anything within that gross Alternative Right.
At the same time, even those on the far Right are often unwilling to identify as such. Instead, they (or we) are “beyond Left and Right” and part of some exciting new paradigm, even though we inevitably find ourselves falling back on those old labels from the French Revolution to describe the politics of today.
Do any of these labels matter anymore? And how can we examine an American conservative movement which constantly reinvents its own history and redefines its supposed “principles?”
The invaluable new book from Professor George Hawley, “Right Wing Critics of American Conservatism,” is an indispensable beginning to confronting these questions. Hawley first came to my attention with his research on voting patterns, demographics, and the impact of the immigration issue in elections. His book on the White Vote, that dominant and yet almost unexamined demographic in American elections, is a starting point for anyone interested in Identitarian politics because it provides the hard numbers behind the voting behavior of European-Americans. It also dispels many of the goofy myths propounded by GOP “strategists” entranced by visions of Detroit Republicans.
Hawley takes on a much broader topic here. In so doing, Hawley has to not only describe the history of the American conservative movement, but define what he means by “Left” and “Right.” Hawley easily dismantles classification schemes based on a person’s view of human nature or the old “individualism vs. collectivism” canard. Borrowing from Paul Gottfried, Hawley says, “The political left will be defined as containing all ideological movements that consider equality the highest political value.” In contrast, the Right is defined as: “[E]ncompassing all of those ideologies that, while not necessarily rejecting equality as a social good, do not rank at the top of the hierarchy of values. The right furthermore fights the left in all cases where the push for equality threatens some other value held in higher esteem.”
This largely fits with what I’ve argued in the past, that the Left “refers to those who hold equality as their highest value, whereas the [Right] refers to those who recognize hierarchy.” This System also avoids the trap that American conservatives are constantly stumbling into, where the Left is simply “anything I don’t like” and the Right is “whatever version of post-1965 Republican slogans won’t get me called racist.”
As Hawley notes, this means thinkers as diverse as Murray Rothbard, Wendell Berry, Pat Buchanan and Alain de Benoist can all be meaningfully characterized as on the “Right,” though they have little else in common. It also implies action – you are only on the Right if you are part of something which “fights the left.”
Though Hawley does not say this, this suggests there are many “Rights,” as each right wing movement has its vision of The Good, The Beautiful, and The True it will fight for. We can talk about the Islamic State or Polish nationalists as both being “right-wing,” even though they would gladly slaughter each other. Though every right wing movement will hold its own source of excellence or morality as supreme, in truth there are as many as there are peoples, faiths, and ideologies. The principle of hierarchy (and opposition to degeneracy, however defined) itself is the closest we can come to defining a singular, universal “Right.”
With this framework, we are able to do what “movement conservatives” can’t and see how “the conservative movement” wasn’t some primordial truth handed down from antiquity but an artificial conglomeration clumsily pieced together for temporary political needs. Hawley identifies the prewar “Old Right,” exemplified by figures such as Albert Jay Nock, H.L. Mencken, and others as libertarian, antiwar, and suspicious of egalitarianism, democracy, and Christian religious belief. In contrast, the postwar conservative movement pieced together by William F. Buckley Jr. was a creature of the Cold War, with a diverse group of thinkers lumped together to oppose international communism, even if this meant, in Buckley’s words, “[accepting] Big Government for the duration… [and] a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores.”
The ideological coherence (such as it is) of the conservative movement today is an effect, rather than a cause – the conservative movement was a tactical creation, something put together to oppose the Soviet threat. And the work of many of the key thinkers present at the beginning, men like Russell Kirk or Richard Weaver, has been all but ignored despite the occasional rhetorical tribute.
This is critical for the modern American Right because it implies a new crisis and could create a new realignment. It has now been almost two decades since the hammer and sickle fell and insofar as there is any wishful thinking about a global revolution led by Russia it’s one coming from the Right. Though there’s been a half-hearted attempt to substitute “Islamofascism” as a way to get the old band back together, we face utterly new challenges based on identity, not ideology. The brutal demographic realities behind the migration crisis could prove to be the key catalyst for a new movement.
Hawley tells the familiar story of the purges which have defined the American Right, a story many of you are already familiar with. The expulsion of the John Birch Society and Ayn Rand and the Objectivists both served as one-offs. However, the conservative movement’s determination to police itself over race is a continuing, and one suspects, never ending drama.
Hawley observes: “The question is why the conservative movement made this about-face on the issue of race. It is worth remembering that during the pivotal years of the civil rights movement the major voices of American conservatism – including Barry Goldwater and National Review – were openly against legislation such as the Civil Rights Act. Some of the most prominent early conservatives defended the social order of the antebellum south.” Hawley accurately characterizes the conservative acceptance of civil rights as a “surrender” and suggests the opposition to candidates such as David Duke was in many ways driven by “embarrassment.” Even National Review couldn’t find many problems in Duke’s platform, just that he used to be in the Klan.
Even after Duke faded, respectable conservatives are constantly forced to confront dissidents who become a little too vocal about racial realities. The purges of Peter Brimelow, Sam Francis, John Derbyshire, and Jason Richwine are all addressed.
Hawley also recognizes race may not be the only issue the conservative movement will retroactively interpret. He slyly observes, “It is not implausible to imagine that within a few decades the movement will try to disassociate itself from the anti-gay marriage stance it promoted during the Bush years, and perhaps even claim that acceptance of gay marriage represented a victory for conservatives.”
There’s also a great deal of attention given to a story paleoconservatives know well, but the younger Alt Right may have never heard of – the battle between Harry Jaffa and M.E. “Mel” Bradford. Hawley identifies Harry Jaffa, a student of Leo Strauss, as one of the first nominally conservative thinkers to argue “equality” itself was a conservative virtue. This is what allows conservatives today to argue with a straight face that Martin Luther King Jr. was actually a “true conservative,” even though, as Hawley accurately observes, conservatives all but unanimously opposed him while he was alive. Jaffa is thus fondly remembered at outlets like The Federalist for pushing the American Right in a pro-Lincoln direction with “all men are created equal” as the defining idea of the country. We might even call Jaffa the Founding Father of Cuckservatism.
Bradford, a Southerner, rejected Jaffa’s push to reinvent the likes of Abraham Lincoln as a conservative hero and instead attacked the “cult of equality.” Hawley writes: “Bradford was concerned with the issue of rhetoric, and he excoriated conservatives for allowing the left to define and redefine America’s most important political values. In order to remain respectability, conservatives have conceded key points to their ideological opponents.”
Plus ça change…
Bradford was famously prevented from securing a post at the National Endowment for the Humanities in the Reagan Administration, despite support from the President himself and Bradford’s hard work in the election campaign. Though Jaffa himself actually supported him, Bradford was vocally opposed by conservative commentators such as George Will (now a leading figure in the #NeverTrump movement) and was ultimately replaced with pudgy simpleton William Bennett. And these kinds of bureaucratic struggles have a huge impact. Egalitarianism and universalist posturing was boosted within the American Right, Bradford died in relative obscurity, Jaffa was lionized and Bennett gets more money to blow at the casinos. (Hopefully Trump got some of it.)
These kinds of struggles continue today. As this is written, protesters are storming the parliament in Baghdad, the latest episode of our more than decade long disaster in Mesopotamia. As Hawley notes, “The mainstream conservative movement was in nearly complete agreement with these policies [the invasion of Iraq].” Yet the “unpatriotic conservatives” who opposed it, were duly purged and were proven correct by the aftermath still struggle for access to the mainstream media and funding from major institutions. Meanwhile, William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer still scream at me from the telescreen every night about what great foreign policy experts they are.
Hawley profiles a number of castaways from different schools of thought, including localists, mainstream and radical libertarians, atheists, and paleoconservatives. Identitarians and white nationalists are also analyzed, though Hawley does feel the need to virtue signal against us, presumably to avoid suffering the fate of his subjects. Overall though, Hawley is fair and informative and his book serves as an excellent introduction to the various subcultures which have ultimately created what we call the Alt Right.
He also slips through some questions which suggest he’s at least confronting the arguments rather than just pathologizing them like some shitlib at The Daily Beast. “Why, for example, is Zionism generally considered an acceptable political position, but an individual who wanted to create a republic restricted to white Christians would be barred from mainstream debates?” he asks. Why indeed.
Hawley does make some mistakes, but much of this is simply a product of when the book was written, before the Emperor descended from the Golden Throne on the escalator at Trump Tower. A typo in which “Young Americans for Liberty” should have read “Young Americans for Freedom” is actually revealing of the focus, as Hawley devotes far more coverage to libertarian and anti-state activists than nationalists. As he argues in his conclusion, “Moderate and mainstream libertarianism is the right-wing ideology most likely to enjoy greater influence in the coming decades,” citing the triumph of figures like Justin Amash. Hawley also speculates about Rand Paul securing the GOP nomination. But all it took to destroy Paul was a New York real estate developer saying he was having a “hard time tonight,” suggesting the fabled “libertarian moment” was always a pipe dream.
Donald Trump is not even mentioned in the book. But of course, before the “Mexicans are rapists” speech, why would he be?
For many on the Alt Right, libertarianism is a kind of gateway drug, a safe way of attacking egalitarianism, the establishment conservative movement, and “the System” more broadly. Most are gradually redpilled. Eventually, you move on, unless you can find a way to be paid for being part of the “liberty movement.”
Hawley writes, “(M)any, perhaps most, of the energetic young activists on the right are decidedly libertarian in their views, and today’s young activists will eventually take on prominent leadership roles in the conservative movement’s leading institutions and within the GOP.” It is more accurate to say that many energetic young activists start as libertarians, but they don’t stay there. It’s questionable whether libertarianism can ever really be a movement for itself as opposed to either a phase in a person’s ideological progression. After all, groups like Students for Liberty now proudly proclaim they don’t care about freedom of association, because homosexual rights, and fighting nationalism is the most important thing. Meanwhile, many of the same people now fantasizing about building Trump Walls and eventually reclaiming Constantinople were screaming about using shiny rocks as currency only a few years ago.
Hawley quotes SFL’s cofounder Alexander McCobin as saying: “We know what’s up for debate, and so we also know what’s not. The justifications for and limits on intellectual property? Up for debate. Racism? Not up for debate.” But as Richard Spencer argued, libertarianism itself was a kind of mask on white identity for some time. That is being abandoned as we get closer to the real thing. Those libertarians who put egalitarianism first, like Cathy Reisenwitz, eventually just become SJW’s. The majority move in our direction.
Who, after all, has a greater impact these days – Students for Liberty, with its multimillion dollar budget, or The Daily Shoah?
Hawley deserves praise for providing a useful introduction for anyone who wants to familiarize themselves with Radical Traditionalism, the European New Right, or the Conservative Revolution without being completely overwhelmed with jargon and occultism. The chapters “Against Capitalism, Christianity and America” and “Voices of the Radical Right” are required reading for anyone on the Alt Right seeking to understand why American conservatism could never succeed. It’s also sobering reading for anyone who wants to understand the history of the pro-white movement. Richard Spencer and the saga of the First Identitarian Congress in Budapest are also outlined.
Still, one can’t help but wish Hawley had just waited a few more months to write this book. So many of the things he suggests as distant possibilities here are actually occurring. For example, Hawley writes, “If the mainstream conservative movement loses its status as the gatekeeper on the right, white nationalism may be among the greatest beneficiaries, though even in this case it will face serious challenges.” According to the hall monitors of the Beltway Right, that’s precisely what’s happening right now.
And ultimately, Hawley recognizes change, of some kind, is coming. He refers to the “calcified” nature of conservative thought, pointing out the rhetoric has not changed since Goldwater. “Only on the issue of race have we seen a dramatic change in the mainstream conservative movement since the 1960s, at least when it comes to public statements,” Hawley writes. Rhetorical blasts against “elites” have become so predictable and stale they no longer have any meaning. Conservatives are simply running out of things to say.
There are also broader historical patterns conservatives are confronting.
First, the Bush Administration “badly damaged the Republican Party’s brand,” and the legacy of that era is something the Beltway Right still seems utterly unwilling to confront. Hawley also brings up the scandals from the Bush years, including Duke Cunningham, Mark Foley, and Tom Delay. (The book was written too early for a reference to the nightmarish case of Dennis Hastert). Bush’s failure to reform Social Security showed conservatives are incapable of meddling with the welfare programs most Americans have grown to accept and rely upon. The Iraq War also fatally discredited the GOP’s perceived foreign policy expertise in the eyes of many Americans.
Second, organized religion is declining in America. The Religious Right is discredited and leaderless. Jerry Falwell is dead and so is D. James Kenned. Ted Haggard is disgraced after a gay prostitution scandal. Homosexual marriage is a reality nationwide. Open borders shill Russell Moore is busy trying to prove Nietzsche right by pushing for more nonwhite immigration. Though Hawley doesn’t go into this, it’s striking how the once powerful Religious Right has been reduced to trying to keep trannies out of bathrooms in the South. (And failing at it.)
Third, and most importantly, is the growing nonwhite population. Hawley argues even if the GOP utterly reversed its position on immigration to try to win Latinos and Asians, “nonwhites are considerably more progressive, on average than whites… even if immigration is completely removed from the table.” Hawley says unless the GOP can create a huge shift in the voting patterns of nonwhites (unlikely given their progressive attitudes) or win a larger share of the white vote, the Republican Party will be unable to credibly contest national elections.
And this is where the Alt Right comes in. This is a reality the conservative movement cannot assimilate. It is an existential threat. The GOP can’t appeal to minorities without entirely abandoning conservative policies. And it can’t appeal to whites as whites without abandoning its universalist pretensions and infantile sloganeering. Though Hawley doesn’t say it, this fact alone is why the American Right’s future lies in Identity. All other alternatives have been exhausted except slow death. And make no mistake – running out the clock while squeezing out a few more shekels is what passes for a strategy within Conservatism Inc.
Reading and studying what Professor Hawley has written is an important first step for all of us. With the rise of Trump, the explosion of interest in the Alt Right online, and the flood of recent mainstream media coverage, there’s a real sense momentum is on our side. Yet we should not be deceived. Dissident forces on the Right have risen in the past and reached levels of power and influence far exceeding what we have today. All have been crushed.
We must understand their ideas, their history, their successes and their mistakes so we can avoid their fate. We don’t want to just end up as footnotes in some future edition.
NPI—which includes The National Policy Institute, Washington Summit Publishers, and Radix—also needs your help to cover basic expenses for projects that will launch in the coming months. (I’ll discuss these below.)
But since it’s the turn of the year—a time for reflection—I don’t simply want to ask for money. I want to show the path we’re treading as an organization so that we can understand how all of our project are part of a larger vision.
The Christmas and New Year’s season is our favorite time of year. (That might sound trite, but it’s true.) We experience the return of family, rituals, and festivities. We also get the opportunity—which is quite rare today—to step back from the daily distractions and toil and honestly reflect on where we came from and where we’re going.
As I’m sure you know, Christmas and New Year’s also mark the season of fundraising campaigns. . . and by the time you read this, you have, no doubt, already been subjected to many.
NPI—which includes The National Policy Institute, Washington Summit Publishers, and Radix—also needs your help to cover basic expenses for projects that will launch in the coming months. (I’ll discuss these below.)
But since it’s the turn of the year—a time for reflection—I don’t simply want to ask for money. I want to show the path we’re treading as an organization so that we can understand how all of our project are part of a larger vision.
WHO ARE WE?
Before talking about what we did this past year, it’s useful to remind ourselves who we are, and of our fundamental mission. The National Policy Institute is dedicated to setting forth alternative political ideas, neither Left nor Right, which promote the flourishing of European-Americans, and Europeans around the world. Washington Summit Publishers produces literature on scientific understanding and, in particular, Human Biodiversity; and Radix seeks to establish a higher culture and revive distinctly Occidental ways of looking at the world. (Put most simply, politics, science, and culture; that is what NPI, WSP, and Radix are about.)
At NPI, we don’t believe in quick, easy fixes; that is, we don’t focus on a single issues or the next election or imagine that defeating this one bad bill or instituting this one good amendment would fundamentally alter our people’s and civilization’s destiny. Our task is as much about consciousness, understanding, culture, and awakening as it is about “politics” in the technical sense of the term.
At NPI, we don’t get caught up in the little stuff. We want to set big, meaningful goals for our movement—goals that might now seem “impossible,” even outlandish, but which will define our projects moving forward.
At the end of this essay (or by visiting this page), you can learn about becoming part of NPI, and about our basic membership program—The Sam Francis Circle (named after our co-founder).
What follows is a New Year’s reflection: an examination of what we’ve accomplished and where we’re headed.
PUBLIC RELATIONS
What did we do in 2013? Perhaps we should first look at what was done to us (!). It was impossible not to notice that in the past year mainstream media have been keen on “promoting” NPI, our projects, and yours truly. We were the subject of quite a few hit pieces; most prominently, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC warned her viewer against NPI and tried to use “the NPI menace” as a means of passing immigration reform, unsuccessfully. (I must admit, there was something surreal about seeing myself appear on the nightly news.) We also received press coverage by no less than the Washington Post, along with web outlets like Vice.com and The Daily Caller.
And then there was the curiously fawning profile of me in Salon. . .
We need to put these articles into perspective. Mainstream liberal media outlets have their own motivations for attacking us, and we shouldn’t fall into the trap of being defined by them and thinking that if they hate us, we must be doing something right! That’s not always true. For instance, I could definitely get another write-up by making a complete ass of myself, and we would recognize that this would harm NPI, our movement, and me.
But look closely at these various hit pieces. Amongst the vitriol, our attackers were unanimous in claiming that we are serious, even attractive; that we comprise the “next generation” of nationalism; and that we have influence among conservatives.
So let’s prove Rachel Maddow right!
This past year, we also took advantage of opportunities to present ourselves to the world on our own terms. This happened first in April, when I addressed Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance gathering, which was both an honor and thrill. There, I presented probably the most important piece I’ve written in some time, “Facing the Future as a Minority,” which argues that we must go beyond mainstream conservatism—beyond immigration and the hot-button issues we’re used to—and begin the struggle for a post-American Ethno-State on the American continent. This project is still in the stage of impossible, “utopian” ideals, but that’s where it has to start. Later in the fall, I also had the opportunity to travel to London and address the Traditional Britain Group, where I spoke on a similar topic.
And then in October, there was NPI’s 2013 National Conference, “After the Fall.” Put simply, this event put our organization on the map. First, there was the line-up of speakers, which included Alain de Benoist, a “founding father” of the postwar traditionalist Right. He spoke along with mainstays such as Tomislav Sunic, Alex Kurtagic, and Sam Dickson. We also featured new voices such as Jack Donovan, Roman Bernard, and a host of activists, publishers, and writers. And we did it all in Washington, DC—we turned the enemy territory against the enemy and made it our platform.
We need events like the National Leadership Conference for a number of reasons. They are rallying points and networking opportunity—perhaps their most important function is to facilitate introductions, friendship, and networking. They act as a means of communicating our messages to the world, and they demonstrate our resolve.
Looking ahead, I would like to announce three important things.
First, beginning in January, we will release all videos from the 2013 Conference—for free and on-demand.
Secondly, in the fall of 2014, NPI will be again host a gathering of a similar scale and importance as our 2013 event.
Thirdly, this spring, we’re going to try something new, edgy, and potentially rewarding for an event. I’ll be announcing details soon.
PUBLISHING
Now, let’s now turn to books. In September, we published The Newton Awards: A History of Genius in Science and Technology, by Michael Hart and Claire Parkinson (who’s a researcher at NASA). The Newton Awards is a quite readable history and, in its short life, it has already been sold to university libraries, bringing prestige to everything we do.
Also this winter, we published, under the Radix imprint, Survive—The Economic Collapse by Piero San Giorgio. Survive was a hit in Europe, where it first appeared, and was quite popular among “identitarian” groups. It is an analysis of the unsustainability of the credit-bubble, cheap-oil, endless-growth economy; it also offers a “practical guide” for building what Giorgio calls a “Sustainable Autonomous Base”—a self-reliant and resilient community. (In other words, you can learn how to live well in “interesting times.”) One quite positive thing about this book is that even though it’s about the end of the world as we know it, it’s never cranky; it’s written in an approachable and often humorous tone. This volume will appeal to a large community beyond our movement (including confused conservatives and leftists).
Our next volume is a real treasure—Reuben a novel by Tito Perdue. Reuben is both light-hearted and deeply serious, written in both a realistic and outrageous style. Tito tells the story of a man whose goal is nothing less than taking over the world, or at least “turning it around.” Without reading it yourself, it’s probably impossible for me to communicate just how funny and compelling it is.
Also, in the coming first quarter of 2014, we will release a second, revised edition of Richard Lynn’s classic Race Differences in Intelligence—which was, by the way, the first WSP volume I ever read—along with the second issue of Radix Journal.
Over the coming year, Radix will publish a study of Martin Heidegger by Alexandr Dugin as well as Raymond Wolters’s quite excellent book on education. And in late 2014, we have a surprise in store, a new book which is something of an archeological find . . . (I’ll say no more at this point.)
RadixJournal.com + NPIAmerica.org
NPI has also re-dedicated itself to having a strong web presence and being a place where we go, everyday, for analysis, culture, and commentary. NPI’s home website, NPIAmerica.org, was completely redesigned and now features regular blogging. Also, we launched RadixJournal.com, a complementary website to the print journal, which will involve some of the best writers in our movement. Roman Bernard has come on board to help me with all of these projects, especially the website. (I discussed our overall goals for Radix here.)
Put simply we’re doing a hell of a lot! And we need your help to keep getting better.
The best way of getting started with NPI is to join the Sam Francis Circle for only $50 per year. You get your choice of two book as well as access to our private social network, The Conspiracy, which is a discreet and secure forum for discussion (something that became a lot more relevant in 2013!).
And if you have the means, I would encourage you to make an even greater impact. We have created the Hyperborean Circle specifically for these donors who can make sustaining contributions to NPI.
Best wishes and Happy New Year!
RICHARD B. SPENCER
President and Director
Fill out my online form.
If you don’t want to join the Sam Francis Circle, but would still like to make a donation, you can do so below.
~Thanks!
Fill out my online form.
The National Policy Institute is classified as a Section 501 (c) (3) organization under the Internal Revenue Code. Individuals, foundations, corporations, and associations may support the educational and research work of NPI through tax-deductible gifts.
“The Right has been the great vanquished of history. It has virtually lost every struggle it has engaged in. The history of the last two centuries for the Right has been one of continuous defeat. Such a succession of failures suggests that the superiority of its adversaries is merely based on the Right’s own weaknesses.”
This article first appeared at AlternativeRight.com. It was translated from French into English by Roman Bernard, with edits by Colin Liddell. It is a selection from Alain de Benoist’s responses to an interview on the French Right that appeared in the quarterly review Éléments at the end of 2005 (#118).The failure of the mainstream Right is well-known, and often commented on. But the failure of the “real Right” is more difficult to deal with, as the men concerned (one thinks of Enoch Powell in Britain) were most of the time well-meaning, courageous men, yet they failed. Most of the references to French history were removed so as to make this text understandable to a Pan-Western audience. This text, thanks to a remarkable psychological analysis of the “right-wing mind,” is first and foremost a way for us to question our own way of thinking, thus making us more “fit and brisk” for the battle of ideas. It is the ideal complement to William Pierce’s “Why conservatives can’t win.”
***
The Right has never been fond of intellectuals. Little wonder then that the phrase “left-wing intellectual” has for a long time been a tautology. For many right-wing people, intellectuals are just unbearable. They visualize them sitting on a chaise longue, of course, and view them as “sanctimonious types” who sodomize flies, split hairs and publish books invariably described as “indigestible” and “boring.”
This idea is to be found in very different backgrounds. For libertarians, intellectuals are inevitably “disconnected from reality.” For activists, intellectuals quibble while we face a “state of emergency” demanding action.
I have heard things like this my entire life. Granted, there’s a positive side to this attitude. Right-wingers show a real concern for concrete facts, a genuine wariness of useless abstractions or pure intellect, a desire to assert the precedence of the soul over the spirit, of the organic over theoretical “dryness,” the hope (always disillusioned) to go back to a simpler life, etc.
The Right is more sensitive to human qualities than to intellectual capacities. It likes to admire more than to understand. It asks for examples more than for lessons. It likes style, gesture, and panache. And it is not wrong in doing so. A society entirely made up of intellectuals would be unbearable.
But the problem is that when this attitude is systematized, it leads to the avoidance of any doctrine, to the rejection of any work of the mind.
The intellectual can be defined as the person who tries to understand and make others understand. The Right, very often, doesn’t try to understand anymore. It ignores what the work of the mind can accomplish. The result is that right-wing culture has today almost entirely vanished. It only survives in restricted circles, marginal publishing houses, and newspapers that only rightists believe are actual newspapers. The ostracism that it has suffered is not the only factor in this.
One can only be struck by the way the Right lost the habit of intervening in intellectual debates. If one takes the hundred books that have been discussed the most over the last half-century, one realizes that the Right hasn’t published a single review of these. It doesn’t interest the Right or concern it. The Right is uninterested in any author outside its landmarks. It doesn’t discuss or refute any of them.
On the dialectic of modernity, the evolution of the social dimension, the forces behind mercantile logic, and symbolic Imaginary, the Right has nothing to say. Why wonder, then, that it has been unable to formulate a critique of technoscience, a theory of localism or of social connection, a philosophy of ecology, or an anthropology of its own? It is simply unable to do that anymore. There have always been hundreds of theoretical debates on the Left, some insignificant, others very deep. Who can cite one single intellectual debate that has marked the history of the Right in the last half a century? On the Right, as far as thought is concerned, it resembles the Tartar Steppes or a flat-lining encephalogram signal.
Most right-wing people substitute convictions for ideas. Ideas can of course engender convictions, and convictions stem from ideas, but the two terms are different. Convictions are things in which one believes and which, because they are the objects of a belief, cannot undergo any critical examination. Convictions are an existential substitute for faith. They help living without the need for one to question their logical structure, their value relative to various contexts, or their limitations. Right-wing people make it a point of honor to defend their convictions in the manner of bible study.
The Right likes answers more than questions, especially if these are pat answers that abnegate the need for a philosophical outlook, as one cannot philosophize when the answer is preconceived. The work of the mind requires the learning of one’s mistakes. The right-wing attitude is rather to avoid considering its mistakes, and thus it never tries to correct these so as to go further; hence the absence of self-criticism and debate. Self-criticism is seen as a weakness, a useless concession, if not a betrayal. Right-wing people flatter themselves that they “regret nothing,” including the errors they have made. Debate, because it implies a contradiction, an exchange of arguments, is generally seen as an aggression, as something that one does not do.
The right-wing man proceeds with enthusiasm or indignation, with admiration or disgust, but not with reflection. Instead he is reactive; hence his almost always emotional reaction to events. What is striking is his naïve, if not puerile way of reacting, of always contenting himself with the upper layer of things, with the news anecdote, of taking a narrow point of view on everything, without ever going deeply to the causes. When you show them the Moon, many right-wing people look at the finger. History then becomes incomprehensible — what on Earth is Providence doing? — even if right-wing people constantly refer to it. Hence simplistic conspiracy theories, which can lead to real lunacies, abound. Social problems are always explained by shady manipulations of an “invisible conspiracy,” a “dark alliance,” etc.
As the Right is very little interested in ideas, it tends to bring everything back to people. Right-wing political movements are first and foremost associated with their founders, and rarely survive them. Right-wing quarrels are chiefly quarrels of individuals, with basically the same gossip, and the same slanderous accusations. In the same way, its enemies are never systems or even genuine ideas, but human categories presented as scapegoats (Jews, “metics,” “bankers,” freemasons, foreigners, “Trotskyites,” immigrants, etc.). The Right has a hard time apprehending a system devoid of a subject: the systemic effects of the logic of Capital, the constraints of structure, the genesis of individualism, the vital importance of the environmental threats, the forces unleashed by technology, etc. The Right doesn’t understand that men have to be fought, not for what they are, but in so far as they embody and defend harmful systems of thought or values. By preferring to take it out on individuals, disliked for what they are, the Right veers towards xenophobia or something even worse.
T
he Right has been the great vanquished of history. It has virtually lost every struggle it has engaged in. The history of the last two centuries for the Right has been one of continuous defeat. Such a succession of failures suggests that the superiority of its adversaries is merely based on the Right’s own weaknesses.
In the beginning, what was the best that the Right had to offer? I would briefly say: an anti-individualist and anti-utilitarian system of thought, together with an ethic of honor, inherited from the Ancient Regime. Thus it was opposing head-on the ideology of the Enlightenment, whose driving forces were individualism, rationalism, self-evident individual interests, and the belief in progress. The values that the Right claimed were aristocratic and popular at the same time. Its historic mission was to fulfill the natural union of the aristocracy and the people against their common enemy: the bourgeoisie, whose class values were precisely legitimized by Enlightenment thought. But this union was fulfilled only during very brief periods.
For the Right, Man is naturally social. However, it never forged its own consistent theory to explain community or social connectedness. Nor did it seriously explore opposition to the ideal liberal types, the autonomous individual and the “social man.” It has never been able to formulate a genuinely alternative economic doctrine to the mercantile system, either.
Instead of supporting the workers’ movement and nascent socialism, which represented a healthy reaction against individualism that the Right was also criticizing, it all too often defended the most dreadful human exploitation and the most unjustifiable political inequalities. It sided with the wealthy, objectively participating in the class struggle of the bourgeoisie against the would-be “redistributors” and the “dangerous classes.”
There were exceptions, though rare ones. The Right’s theoreticians were more often led by their audience than leading it. Defending the nation, the Right rarely understood that the nation is above all else the people. It forgot the natural complementariness of aristocratic and popular values. When the workers’ right to an annual holiday break was passed into law, the Right railed against the “vacation culture.” It always preferred order to justice, without understanding that injustice is a supreme form of disorder, and that order itself is very often nothing but an established disorder.
The Right could have developed a philosophy of history founded on cultural diversity and the need to acknowledge its universal value, which would have led it to support the struggles in favor of autonomy and liberty in the Third World, whose peoples were prime victims of the ideology of progress. Instead of that, the Right ended up defending the colonialism that it had once condemned, while complaining about being colonized in turn.
The Right forgot that its only true enemy is Money. It should have considered everything opposing the system of money as its objective ally. Instead it gradually joined the other side. The Right was better equipped than any other force to reframe the anti-utilitarian values of generosity and selflessness, and to defend them. But, little by little, the Right acceded to the logic of interest and the defense of the market. At the same time, it fell in line with militarism and nationalism, which is nothing but collective individualism, something that the first counter-revolutionaries had condemned as such.
Nationalism led the Right to the metaphysics of subjectivity, this illness of the spirit, systematized by the Moderns. This estranged the Right from the notion of truth. It should have been the party of generosity, of “common decency [1],” of organic communities; but it all too often became the party of exclusion, of collective selfishness, and resentment. In short, the Right betrayed itself when it began accepting individualism, bourgeois lifestyles, the logic of money, and the model of the market.
Christian Socialism occasionally played a useful role, but it chiefly fell under paternalism. The social achievements of the “fascisms” were discredited by their authoritarianism, their militarism, and their aggressive nationalism. Corporatism led to nothing. Revolutionary syndicalism was killed by the “Fordist compromise,” which resulted in the integration of larger and larger parts of the working class into the bourgeois middle class. Most importantly, this kind of concern was never associated with a deep analysis of Capital. The condemnation of “Big Money” is insignificant when it refrains from analyzing the very nature of money and the anthropological impact of a generalized market system, with its reification of social relations and its effects of alienation.
As for the “Real Right,” it hasn’t ceased marginalizing itself and wasting away. More and more oblivious of its own past, all of its implicit system of thought can be summed up in a single phrase: “It was better before” — whether this “before” refers to the thirties, the Ancient Regime, the Renaissance, the Middle Ages or Ancient History.
This conviction, even when it is occasionally correct, nurtures an attitude that is either restorationist, which condemns it to failure, or purely nostalgic. In each case, the “Real Right” contents itself with opposing the real world with an idealized and fantasized past: the fantasy of the origin, the fantasy of a bygone age, and the irrepressible nostalgia of an original matrix revealing the incapacity to reach adulthood.
The aim is to try to conserve, preserve, slow, or hold back the course of events, with no clear consciousness of the inevitable historical sequence of events. The great hope is to reproduce the past, to go backward to the time when everything was so much better. But, as it is quite obviously impossible, the “Real Right” settles for an ethical attitude in order to make a statement. Politically, this “Real Right” has no more telos of its own to fulfill, as all its models belong to the past. It has reached a point where it doesn’t even know clearly the type of political regime that it would like to establish.
History becomes a shelter: idealized, reconstructed in a selective way, and more or less fantastical. History provides the reassuring feeling of having a stable “heritage,” of bearing significant examples that the Right can oppose to the horrors of present times. History is supposed to give “lessons,” although one never really knows what they are. The Right has not understood that History, which it reveres so much, can also be crippling. When Nietzsche says that “The future belongs to those with the longest memory,” what he means is that Modernity will be so overburdened by memory that it will become impotent. That’s why he calls for the “innocence” of a new beginning, which partly entails oblivion. People never have a greater hunger for history than when they are incapable of making it, and when history is happening without them or against them.
Hostile to innovation, the “Real Right” is unable to analyze the unseen situations of the future with its obsolete conceptual tools. It judges everything according to the world it once knew, which was familiar and thus reassuring, and confuses the end of this world with the end of the actual world. It faces the future with its eye in the rear-view mirror. The Right is unable to analyze historic events, to step back from the consequences and examine distant causes. It cannot establish the genealogy of the phenomena it deplores, nor detect the fault lines of post-modernity. It cannot understand anything in the current world any longer, the evolution of which it dismisses as an endless “decadence.”
The fact that it has constantly been vanquished often elicits a peculiar mix of meticulous irony, emphatic derision, bitterness, and con
niving snicker, so typical of the long reactionary lament. It also presents the mediocre apocalyptic motto “We are doomed!” With such a vision, we are always in “a state of emergency,” it’s always “one minute to midnight.” Before the “catastrophes” which face us, we are waiting for a “surge,” an “awakening.” The “silent majority”, the “real country” is being summoned. But all of this had already been said in 1895. During all this time, history has nevertheless kept going.
The most distinctive feature of the “Real Right” is a political and moral narcissism, founded on an immutable worldview, with two sides (us the good, them the evil), which is a simple projection of a fault line inside any of us. This dichotomy of “Us vs. the Others,” given as the explaining factor for everything, comes actually under this metaphysics of subjectivity that I have already mentioned, which legitimizes all forms of selfishness and exclusion. The Right talks a great deal about defending its “identity,” but it generally has a hard time defining this. Most of the time, its identity is about not being what it condemns. It is the existence of its enemies that defines the Right’s own existence, a negative existence, a contrario. The Right’s marginalization nurtures an obsidional mentality, which in turn sharpens its rejection of the Other. There’s something Cathar-like in this obsidionalism: the world is bad, let’s close the ranks of the “last square.” The titles of the Right’s bedside books are also telling: by the accursed, the heretics, the reprobates, the nostalgics, The Camp of the Saints; in short, the Last of the Mohicans. In a world of tribes, for which it has no sympathy, the “Real Right” is nothing more than a tribe of survivors, which lives in connivance and isolation. It has rites and passwords of its own, slogans and resentment, and every day sees itself being more and more isolated from an “outside” world that it rejects and demonizes, with no possibility of changing the course of events. What is left for it is to commemorate its own defeats, which it does with such perseverance that one is forced to wonder whether it secretly cherishes these defeats, as defeats are always more “heroic” than victories.
The Right has never prioritized the struggle against the system of money, which was its main enemy. First it fought against the Republic at a time when it had become obvious that a monarchy of divine right would never come back. After 1871, the Right devoted itself to the condemnation of the “Boches” (and even the “Judeo-Boches”), which led it, in the name of the “Sacred Union,” to legitimize the atrocious carnage of 1914-18, which engendered all the horrors of the 20th century. In the aftermath of the First World War, it committed itself to the fight against Communism and its “pagan savagery” (as Marshall Pétain expressed it). At the time of the Cold War, for fear of this same Communism, which it should have considered as a rival rather than as an enemy, the Right sided with the “free world,” thus giving its blessing to the American hegemony, the power of the bourgeoisie and the worldwide supremacy of predatory liberalism — as if the horrors of the Gulag justified the abominations of the mercantile system. This led the Right to support “Atlanticism,” to approve of the slaughter of the Vietnamese people, to show solidarity with the most pathetic dictatorships, from the Greek colonels and the Argentinean generals to Pinochet and his “Chicago Boys” [2], not to mention the torturers of Operation Condor, specializing in the assassinations of “subversivos” who were mostly only asking for more social justice. When the Soviet system collapsed, making globalization possible, immigrants providentially took over the statutory role of the “threat.” Conflating immigrants with Islam, then Islam with Islamism, eventually Islamism with terrorism, it now does that again with Islamophobia, a truly suicidal approach, and, what is more, absolutely inconsistent from a geopolitical perspective.
The “Real Right,” at the end of the day, is fundamentally unpolitical. The very essence of politics is foreign to it. In fact it confuses politics with ethics, the same way the Left conflates politics with morals. The Right believes that politics is a matter of honor, of courage, of sacrificial virtues, of heroism, that is to say, in the best case, of military qualities. It sees politics as the continuation of war by other means, which totally reverses Clausewitz’s aphorism. It doesn’t understand that politics is only an occupation, an art, something that aims to carefully define the best but not the ideal way of serving the common good — a good, by the way, that can’t simply be shared out. It doesn’t understand that politics is a way to arbitrate between contradictory aspirations stemming from human nature, to arbitrate between the needs of civic coexistence and the necessities of self-interest.
As for me, it has been more than a quarter of a century since I stopped considering myself belonging to any family of the Right, and since I stopped showing solidarity with it. There’s no mystery here: I have said it and written it many times. But for all that, I don’t consider that the Right is an uninteresting subject. Nor do I think that it is a despicable subject. When I criticize it — and I always hesitate before criticizing it, both because it is not fitting to shoot at such an easy target and because I don’t want to get involved with the mob — I am forced to generalize, and when one generalizes, one always risks being unfair. But I don’t ignore its merits. In the same way that its qualities have shortcomings, its shortcomings also have qualities. On many occasions, the Right was (and remains) admirable for its courage, its persistence, and its spirit of sacrifice. All these qualities, yet they have achieved such meager results!
I’ll add that I don’t recognize myself as belonging to any family of the current Left, which spares me the desire of wanting to be “admitted.” One can undoubtedly define me as a “left-wing right-winger,” or a man who has left-wing ideas and right-wing values. It allows me to agree equally well with left-wing men and with right-wing men every time they assert ideas that I consider fair. But, actually, I haven’t cared about labels for a long time.
I care all the less, since the Left-Right duo gets more and more ineffective as an analytic tool. What is the “right-wing position” on the American occupation of Iraq, and what is the “left-wing position?” There is simply none: on the Right as on the Left, this occupation has opponents and supporters. It is the same for all the problems of our times: European integration, geopolitics, ecology, the coming oil crisis, etc. The only thing that matters is what people think of a precise question, no matter how they position themselves (or refuse to) on the traditional political spectrum.
[1] In English in the original text
[2] In English in the original text
Generally speaking, the right-wing Baby Boomer is subject to the bourgeois dream, which has been known as the “American dream” since the end of the Second World War: a world of peace, trade, and boredom.
The Generational Problem in Nationalist Movements
The following was delivered as a speech at the second National Policy Institute’s conference, which was held at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, DC, on October 26th.
It is not always easy to tell the difference between destiny and randomness.
I discovered the “Alternative Right” three years ago, by a link posted on a Swiss blog. It was a perfect illustration of a famous line in Simon and Garfunkel’s song “Sound of Silence”: “The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls, and tenement halls.”
I was going through a period of questioning at that time. I had been working for a couple of years for the “conservative movement” in Paris and I couldn’t fail to notice that all my efforts had been invested in a cause that was not really mine, that had never really been mine actually.
Until that fateful day of July 2010, I had always centered my attention on France. My only knowledge of the other Western countries was through history books, movies, or touristic trips.
Regarding politics proper, I wasn’t much interested in what was going on outside France. Though I was involved with the Right, I had always been wary of the American Right. For me, being right-wing in America meant worshipping the Holy Scrap (also known as “the Constitution”), waving a stars and stripes flag in the garden of a generic white-picket-fenced house, and making boring, tired jokes about the French who “always surrender.” I had still not digested my dish of freedom fries.
Discovering the Alternative Right was an epiphany for me, as I think the discovery of the European New Right was for many Americans present in this room today. I’m thinking particularly of Richard Spencer and of John Morgan, the editor-in-chief of Arktos Media.
I discovered that though I wasn’t feeling at home in the French “conservative movement,” there were “people like me” on the Web, all over the Western world, who shared my hopes and concerns.
Ironically enough, I even discovered French authors thanks to American publications like AlternativeRight.com or Counter-Currents.com. Of course, the name “Alain de Benoist” was familiar to me, but he was not very popular, let alone read, in my corner of the Right.
Now, it seems that more and more Western people (White people as you say in America) are aware of the fact that what brings them together is much stronger than what divides them. And I’m not only talking about activists like us here. When this British soldier was beheaded in London by two African Muslims last Spring, I could see many manifestations of solidarity by average Western people. It’s something that would have been unthinkable a mere decade ago. As this example shows, reasons for this growing awareness among Western people are often negative ones: Westerners face the same danger of being displaced in their historic homelands.
There are positive reasons, too, the first of which being the fact that we are the heirs of a great civilization. But although it is important to focus on the positive more than on the negative, it’s about a problem that is remarkable but not often commented on that I want to talk today: the generational divide.
When I say that this problem is not often commented on, it is not quite true. Actually, the liberal narrative about generational relationships is that the Baby Boom generation, thanks to a courageous revolution, managed to put an end to an oppressive, reactionary, boring society.
There is some truth to that liberal narrative. But the generational divide applies differently to nationalist movements, and this is what I want to dedicate my attention to today.
More than a generational divide, there is, first off, a generational gap in right-wing movements. If the generation of my grand-parents (born between the two world wars) was rather conservative in the right sense of the word, the Baby Boom generation is, in my experience, much more liberal in its outlook, hence the lack of right-wing activists from this generation. This is what explains “gerontocracy,” i.e. government of the old, in many right-wing movements, especially in Europe.
Even self-defined right-wingers born during the Baby Boom are liberal in their views.
The most striking thing that I noticed, in France, Europe and America, was the inability of baby-boomers, even when they see themselves as dissidents, to completely break away from the institutions. The desire of recognition, the fear of social rejection ensure that the right-wing Baby Boomer gives legitimacy to the very institutions that are eager to destroy him.
For instance, right-wing Baby Boomers show a great deal of respect to Academia. They are very proud of their PhDs when they hold them, and when they don’t, they are all the prouder to mention that an author they publish does. They do this at a time when there are PhDs in Queer, Gender, Black, and even Chicano studies in America—and even doctoral students in the hard sciences have been through the PC gauntlet. Is it so important that we focus on degrees? Wouldn’t we be better advised to give as little legitimacy to university degrees as we can, given the circumstances?
This PhD Cult among right-wing Baby Boomers is related to their own rationalistic, scientistic delusions. Since conservatives are outmoded liberals — and many White nationalists are conservatives—they just want to conserve their people as it is, as if it were possible to save said people without becoming a new one in the process — they still believe in the Enlightenment myth that one would just have to show “the truth” to people to gain credibility and support. (And trying — in vain — to gain credibility from an Establishment that despises them is an important trait of right-wing Baby Boomers.)
But this idea that people would just have to know “the truth” to support the cause of saving Western civilization and the White race is fallacious. People have to be inspired rather than convinced, and they won’t be inspired by a set of bell curves, IQ tables, and cranial measurements. Furthermore, it reduces “the truth” to the only things that can be numbered and quantified. The problem with that idea is that our struggle is a qualitative one. We can’t “prove” that architecture has become ugly since the 20th century, for example. Yet it’s something that has to be said.
I mentioned the PhD Cult because it is one of the most obvious problems in right-wing intellectual circles. But this excessive respect of right-wing Baby Boomers is granted to institutions in general, chiefly to the State, the nation-state.
Since I was born in the 1980s, at a time when the main Western countries had already been “enriched” with mass immigration, I understand that it is easier for me to dissociate myself from my own nation-state.
Here, I’m reminded of an American friend I met in Paris a few weeks ago. He was born in the 1960s, and when I mentioned to him the idea of an Ethnostate, he chuckled: for him, up to 10 years ago, he had always considered he was already living in an Ethnostate: the United States.
And in day-to-day life, it remains common to hear people say “we” and “us” when they talk about the state. “We went to Iraq.” “Our troops are bringing democracy there.” “Syria’s chemical weapons threaten us.” I’m using silly examples here to make a point, but if you listen to people around you, you will inevitably notice that they keep saying — and thus thinking — that the state is them. That the state is the nation.
But it’s getting more and more necessary to get rid of this false consciousness. Since the end of the 18th century and the American and French revolutions, the nation-state has monopolized the way Westerners see themselves. This triumph is so complete that even multiculturalists use the nation-state as a comforting reference to impose their dogma to the West. In every Western country, you can hear the same mantra that “Our [national] identity is diversity.”
Some people in our movement suggest that we should likewise use the nation-state as a means to make people aware of our goals. The problem is that we can’t use the same tactic, for two reasons: first, we are obviously not in charge of the state. Second, a strict national consciousness leads to serious errors of interpretation. It is common in countries that used to have colonies and slaves to hear people say that our problems are rooted in colonization and slavery. In my homeland, the troubles with the Algerian community are thus attributed to French colonization and civil war there.
But Sweden, which never had any colony nor slaves, is facing similar, if not graver threats than Britain, America or France. We are not attacked for what our ancestors did, or allegedly did, but for what we are: White, Western people.
From my understanding, it is easier for my generation to see a brother or sister in another Westerner than it is for the former generation, which was born in the aftermath of the Second World War. In France, Front National is still anti-German, as well as it is anti-British and anti-American. But for the young generation, all these grudges are fading into irrelevance. A Briton might dislike the Germans or the French, wrongly or rightly, but those are unlikely to drug and pimp his daughters, behead a soldier in broad daylight, or burn the city down when a drug dealer is killed by the police.
In case you are wondering, I’m talking about things that actually happened in Britain in the last years.
Young Westerners know that they are more and more becoming one nation, the same way that other races, as Jared Taylor had noted in his book White Identity, are more and more seeing themselves as one people when they live in the West.
The right-wing Baby Boomer is not able to fully understand what is happening in other Western countries, since he relies solely on national, liberal media, unlike young right-wingers who get information via alternative, Pan-Western websites. The liberal media gives him a distorted image of reality. As he knows that mainstream journalists are liberal, he basically inverts their depictions of other “far right” movements in other Western countries to make his own opinion of them. Right-wingers, most often, only define themselves in opposition to the Left. What the Left likes, they hate. What the Left loathes, they love. It is thus easy to manipulate them into supporting a controlled opposition, given that their only justification to support is: “Since liberals hate it so much, it must be doing something right.” By this false standard, George W. Bush “was doing something right” when he made up the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to invade this country.
Generally speaking, the right-wing Baby Boomer is subject to the bourgeois dream, which has been known as the “American dream” since the end of the Second World War: a world of peace, trade, and boredom.
Right-wing Baby Boomers share the project of two American politicians (both born before the Baby Boom though), Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan, whose similarities are more important than their differences. Their common motto can best be summed up as “Leave us alone!”
Well, we of the New Guard don’t want to be “left alone.” We want to rule.
We want to rule not only because we want actual power to get ourselves out of the present situation, but because we know that the “leave us alone” idea, which was behind the White flight phenomenon, is precisely what has led us to our current dispossession. Baby Boomers wanted to be “left alone,” so they fled to even further suburbs, moving further and further away from their own responsibilities. It is this process, White flight, that guaranteed that the ongoing dispossession could go on without being too painful.
The “good news” is that it is becoming impossible to continue the White flight process. Rising housing costs, growing gas prices, the concentration of jobs in city centers are putting the bourgeois dream to an end. It is now almost impossible for a generation that can only wait tables after a masters degree to keep fleeing. Problems will have to be faced, and dealt with.
At this point, I realize that I might seem unfair to the previous generation, but keep in mind that Baby Boomers did what everyone else would have done if given the choice. This choice no longer exists. The quiet, suburban life has become impossible for the reasons mentioned before.
What is to be done, then? As of now, nobody—including myself, of course—has a genuine solution to offer. Many in our circles claim that it is “five to midnight,” but I would argue that it is “five past midnight.” Not because it is too late, but because it is too soon. A mere decade ago, many people in this room, including, again, the foolish 20-year-old liberal that I was, were not aware of what was going on. Our awakening is too recent to find political solutions to our current problems now. For politics as we would like it to be to become possible, we have to win the intellectual and cultural battles, which right-wing Baby Boomers have never really considered worth fighting. It is time we do so.
What we can thus do in the meantime is to get intellectually prepared as a movement (for the individual and practical aspects of this preparation, Piero San Giorgio and Jack Donovan are more competent than I am). The first task would be to get rid with intellectual debates dating back to the Cold War, with the false dichotomies between libertarianism and socialism, conservatism and progressivism, etc.
This necessity to go beyond these false dichotomies seems obvious to activists like us, but it is still in these terms that politics are debated today.
When I say that we have to go beyond Left and Right, I don’t mean that we have to reject both notions altogether—our ethno-national project obviously belongs on the Right—but the way they have been defined and falsely opposed for these past 70 years. The alternative is not between the kolkhoz and IKEA, the best reason for that being that the kolkhoz and IKEA are two sides of the same materialistic coin. We have to find a way out of here, a way forward and upward, and that implies rising above these irrelevant debates.
As a radical movement, we need to attract intelligent and educated young men, who are the future.
Crime statistics and differences of achievement between races are important, to be sure, but no snowboarding session on the bell curve will attract young men to us. We need to show them a way out, and thus to remind them of the need to gradually withdraw from the prevailing disorder, but we also have to show them a way into, and that is what the Old Guard has been unable to do so far.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not trying to bury the Old Guard, or even to dispute its achievements. We wouldn’t be here today if the Old Guard had not taken the first step in the past. But we can’t keep doing the same things for decades.
It is now clear why we want to found a new society; now comes the harder part: what we want and how we are going to achieve it.
The answer is not sure at this point. What is is that the powers of creation, not only of reaction, will have to be summoned.