Steve Sailer writes: … Continetti, like all respectable conservatives, hates the very idea of hierarchies. Look at how Continetti’s father-in-law, William Kristol, came up the hard way from the ground up without a privilege in the world, what with being the son of Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb, getting hired by Dan Quayle, and having Rupert Murdoch give him millions to start a magazine…
The next thing these pathetic freaks will be telling you is that men and women should ease off waging the War of the Genders against each other because they are happier when they are fraternizing with the enemy.
But that’s just sick…
It’s almost as if 25 years ago Sam Francis, Joe Sobran, and Pat Buchanan noticed the Cold War had ended and therefore it was time for some new ideas.
But real Americans know that the eternal enemy is the Czar…
Why don’t Americans just shut up and do as they are told? What’s with all this critical thinking lately?
…The little people in the conservative ranks must drop all this fringe, marginal nonsense about “hierarchies” and go back to obeying their betters, like in the good old days when Bill Buckley and Bill Kristol told them what they could think and who they could read, and they didn’t have the impudence to give the Bills any lip.
When the Bills had M.J. Sobran banned, conservatives let Joe go off and die in poverty.
Now that was respect!
What’s wrong with this country today? Why don’t commoners listen to their natural superiors anymore?
…Those bastards. Why isn’t there deference anymore toward the legitimate dynasties of Conservatism Inc., the Kristol-Continettis, the Podhoretzes? Why have people stopped reading Commentary? Just because the editor is an ill-tempered idiot shouldn’t stop conservatives from doing their duty and reading his bad magazine. Look, JPod is the editor of Commentary because he’s Norman Podhoretz’s son. Doesn’t that mean anything to you people anymore?
Not letting yourself be bullied by John Podhoretz is like voting for George Washington instead of submitting to King George III.
It’s un-American.
COMMENTS:
* I knew Weigel a bit when we were both teenagers. I liked him, he’s smart and honest in a friendly aspie-awkward way. It does not surprise me he’s basically the only MSM journalist who is willing to give an honest, non-shrieking description of the alt-right. How many others have even bothered once to note our opposition to all the Bush/Clinton/Obama stupid foreign wars?
I think everyone supporting Trump needs to make the point, wherever we can, that we believe in free speech and free exchange of ideas. Hillary Clinton in her speech did not engage with the ideas of the alt-right, she simply denounced it.
One of the things Hillary did was list various politically incorrect Breitbart headlines, and ascribe them to Trump. So what, Trump is responsible now for every word on a large multi-author website that one of his employees manages?
The Islamic/left coalition runs terror operations against those whose ideas it disagrees with. The Islamic end murders Theo Van Gough, the left end murders Pim Fortyn. What Hillary wants is for Steve Bannon not to lose to her in an exchange of ideas, but be silenced and run off any respectable job.
* I got the feeling that a lot of what Weigel said on Journolist was to fit in with the “cool kids” like Ezra. You could tell even five or so years ago that he was interested in Sailer and Alt Rightish ideas, even if he doesn’t agree with them. He is smarter than the average journo for sure.
* What’s the joke Murray Rothbard used to tell…there are only 12 neoconservatives in America, and 11 of them are syndicated columnists?
* Here is my list of top neo-conservatives, ranked in official order. Yes, they are hierarchical.
1. Dick Cheney – Official War Starter, Official Provider of Big Oil and Military Contractor Funding, Black Éminence grise
2. William Kristol – Chief of Staff, Chief of Ideological Enforcement Division (Hereditary Position, inherited from father Irving)
3. John Bolton – Chief Envoy to the Hard Right
3. Jeffrey Goldberg – Chief Envoy to Liberal Democrats
5. Robert Kagan – Chief of Kagans
6. John McCain – Official Senator
* Don’t know about the Kristol family situation, but it reminds me of David Brooks’ now-ex-wife. When he married her, she converted (from Baptist?) to Brooks’ Judaism, and, to mix metaphors, became more papal than the Pope, as the Germans put it. The full Monty of Orthodox observance, including mikvah baths (don’t know if it was the same DC synagogue where the rabbi turned out to be a peeping tom at the mikvah). Now that Brooks has kicked her to the curb, I have to wonder what her bearings are now.
Ezra Klein is I think the only straight Journolister to have *not* married a shiksa.
* I mean I’m all for equality before the law and a reasonable attempt to provide equality of opportunity.
This is the egalitarian idea that I can support. Of course the well known problem of inequality of outcomes will come to the fore. At that point it will break down because it is very difficult to divine whether the inequality of outcomes was not in some way tilted by inequality of opportunity. If you are HBD-woke then you know that we will have unequal outcomes, but that wokeness will not let you definitively understand or parse the equality of opportunity questions. The second part is that by knowing we will have unequal outcomes, regardless of whether we have starting equality, what if anything should we do to ameliorate the harsher conditions of the outcomes?
* Spencer seems to have been fairly effective at starting something. He’s been more successful at giving air to dissident (but true) ideas than any number of other young intellectuals who have gone to man the megaphone at NRO (an appropriately, tasteful and and conservatively down-sized megaphone, mind you). He’s been more effective at standing up for something that might actually be called “conservative” than, for example, Matthew Continetti.
* I don’t think that he really meant hierarchy in the sense that the left still believes that armies should not have ranks, orchestras should not have conductors, etc. – that was abandoned by pretty much everyone a long time ago (especially since the left, once it gained power, became even MORE hierarchical than the right).
Rather, he was trying to come up with a different word for “racist” and “sexist” since those words have pretty much been stripped of all meaning. So belief in “hierarchy” in his sense means opposition to the leftist meme that all humans have exactly same potential in every field of endeavor, or “anti-blank slatist”. You could say that there is a “hierarchy” of natural talent in sprinting, where West African Blacks stand at the top and Ashkenazi Jews rank near the bottom. Or, and this is where it gets dangerous, a hierarchy of talent in physics that runs the other way. Or a “sexual hierarchy” where men make better firefighters and masons than women due to upper body strength, etc. and women make better kindergarten teachers.
Now the “hierarchical” view has the advantage of actually conforming with reality, but humans often prefer fantasy to reality. If we could only believe in things that had a basis in reality, where would this leave religion? Now you could say that basing your entire political system on a religious belief that doesn’t correspond with reality is a really bad idea, but our society is not the first time this has been tried.
* “what if anything should we do to ameliorate the harsher conditions of the outcomes?”
Exactly what is already being done: handouts.
The bottom line is that a people who had not risen to a certain stage of civilization, dependent on selection pressures and technological momentum encountered only on the Eurasian landmass, were dragged into that stage by merchants. They cannot be brought up to speed for the simple fact that they have not been selected for the drives which eventuated in that civilization. They are absolute dead-weight by necessity.
Natural selection obtains or it doesn’t. If one is “HBD-woke”, one should bear well in mind that different groups means different drives, impulses, instincts, or whatever you wish to call it, from which a certain threshold of society proceeds given local conditions. The error isn’t Democratic policies; it’s assuming that there is a solution at all to the Völkerchaos other than waiting for it to collapse from the weight of its own unprecedented squandering of resources.
Note: I am not a fetishist of Western civilization. I believe it is absolutely doomed, obviously, and am much more at home among “lower” stages of society mocked by white nationalists. A people still scraping by in straw huts in the middle of some huge national preserve have it much better than we do, in my opinion. But they’re doomed too, of course.
* I can’t speak to the history of Richard Spencer, but he is much more articular and philosophically grounded than any other person I’ve read on the Alt Right (excluding Steve).
I enjoy reading/watching many of the articles on his website Radix.com.
Let’s cut him some slack… the guy has guts – he’s been banned in over a dozen countries for publicly speaking out for the Alt Right. I wish there were more people on the Alt Right like him.
* Of course, some of the basic themes of the alt-right or alt-* (though henceforth I’ll just use “alt-right” as the generic) movement have been kicked around, and to a good degree implemented, in previous decades and eras. Nationalism in many forms has flourished in the past, which presents many potential models.
But in fact the basic ideas of the alt-right have just begun to be worked through at this stage. There are indeed a great many incompatible approaches that have already been floated.
Among the approaches:
–Citizenism, as suggested by Steve
–Rejection of a “proposition nation” in favor of a nation built upon a specific culture
–Some form of “white nationalism” which recognizes the interests of whites as being appropriate to organize around and identify with
Even a moment’s reflection on these different approaches suggests vastly different principles and policies as outcomes.
Personally, I like the idea of citizenism. It has the most clarity, is minimally disruptive, seems most fair to all, and deals most directly with the facts on the ground in any given nation: if you’re a citizen, we all have to deal with you, and you have to deal with all of us.
* This is what intrigues me about Donald Trump. While I don’t see Trump identifying himself with Pat Buchanan, Sam Francis, Joe Sobran and others of the “alt-right” (I’ve always just heard them called “paleoconservatives” to distinguish them from the “neoconservatives” who made up this discussion), and certainly not Ron Paul, it is clear Trump’s opponents in the GOP identify them with him. And it is that which they object to about Donald Trump, not his overinflated ego, his narcissism, his childish name-calling, which have repulsed most of the nation. They are not afraid of Donald Trump, the TV personality, who is perfectly at home with them in the world of the Clintons, the Giulianis, the Christies, and the others of “New York values”. They are afraid of his ideological values or goals, or rather the goals with which he identifies himself in his pursuit of election, because Trump holds no ideological values.
And while Weigel is accurate in describing the origins of today’s current “anti-intervention”, “anti-government” movement in the 2007 opening of Ron Paul’s first Presidential campaign (the December “moneybomb” timed to coincide with the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, and hence the use of the term “Tea Party” to represent this movement), and the work of Buchanan and Sobran which laid the foundation and led people like me to Ron Paul, they are wrong to try to separate this movement from the likes of Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley. While Buckley separated himself from Sobran and Buchanan in the late 80′s and 90′s, particularly at the end of the Cold War (which he came to regret near the end of his life, in the midst of the neo-cons’ “Global War on Terror”) it was he, Reagan, and Barry Goldwater who represented everything which attracts the “alt-Right” today. It was their anti-leveling impulse, their opposition to “egalitarianism” which led all these men to oppose the Civil Rights Acts of the 60′s, not racism (and Buckley, for one, was always adamant in separating himself from the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, and the like), which bound us together in what were the formative years of my political worldview. In the perpetual struggle (at least since the French and American Revolutions) between the libertarian and the egalitarian we recognized the pendulum in America had swung too far to the latter. When asked to describe myself in College Republican circles I chose not “libertarian” but “anti-egalitarian”. We were supporters of the Cold War, zealous anti-Communists, because Communism was then the most powerful form taken by egalitarianism. Most of the political left in America then, the “pinkos”, the “fellow travelers”, the socialists, the anti-anti-Communists, the Communists in everything but name only, were avowed egalitarians. We knew they were the enemy.
Today, the Goldwater-Reagan Republican, the anti-Communist, the anti-egalitarian, knows that Russia ceased to be America’s enemy when Russia ceased to be Communist. If it is excessively authoritarian (and the U.S. government is today far more authoritarian – anti-libertarian – than it was in the 60′s), suppressive of “human rights” (many of which are egalitarian inventions), well, that is par for the course among the many anti-communist foreign governments we supported during the Cold War. If we no longer support these “right wing” regimes around the world, there is neither any reason for us to oppose them. It is not for America to reform the world to our liking (or, rather, the egalitarians’ liking). It is for Americans to perfect respect for and enforcement of Americans’ liberties in our own country, and hold our example up to the rest of the world. And then we protect ourselves from foreign incursions, invasions of spirit as well as of body. Nothing more.
If the issue in the Fall campaign is not whether Donald Trump, for all that he is and says, will win or lose, but rather, should the political movement which has succeeded to that of Goldwater, Buckley, Reagan, Buchanan, and Ron Paul lose, then the imperative for their followers is not only that Hillary Clinton must lose, but that Trump, loathsome and inconsistent as he is, must win.
* White Nationalism used to be called “Americanism” and was as American as Teddy Roosevelt and FDR, who both espoused it. Americanism celebrates American culture as mostly Anglo-Celtic, with a minor key of Africans, Hispanics, and Amerindians; with big dose of Catholic and Jewish immigrants offering variations on Anglo-Celtic themes.
White Identity is not a reaction to the failed Conservatives, but the increasingly stridently anti-White identity movements of Blacks, Hispanics, Asians etc. Don’t want White Identity, don’t make Whites a discriminated minority with every other racial group embracing Identity spoils politics aimed directly at Whites and White Men especially.
Hillary, Bill, Al Sharpton, Martin Luther King, all created White Identity.
If King wanted White support for AA he should have made sure poor Whites were in on the party. Not just Blacks/Hispanics.
* Having a safety net creates a “moral hazard” (this is the insurance term for the risk that you’ll burn your own building down to collect the insurance). Scandinavia is an extreme example but we see the same thing in the US. Scandinavians are hard working but have an elaborate safety net so that you can stay home if you are injured, elderly, caring for a newborn, etc. Part of the social compact of the locals is “I will work hard and contribute my share whenever I can, but if I can’t then the society will take care of me.” This is exactly the kind of arrangement that you speak about in your post – society as in effect a giant extended family.
Now you introduce into that society say Somalis, who have no Calvinist tradition of hard work or loyalty to anyone beside their immediate family. And for whom life on the dole in Stockholm is far richer than they could achieve working back home. The result is that they act as parasites on their host society. They are glad to be on the receiving end of the social compact but don’t buy into the giving end at all. And this is even before you take into account that due to lower levels of skill, education, IQ, etc. they are in no position to contribute much even if they wanted to, which they don’t.
So this is how you end up with Merkel’s Boner – she sees a million able bodied young men who will prop up the German social welfare system as it fills with the aged, but the reality is that these young men will take whatever they can get – free gropes on New Year’s Eve, free everything, but contribute little.
* Defining/arguing about a standard definition of alt-right is a silly exercise. It’s not a prescriptive ideology, it’s an attitude, a perspective that is an alternative to what’s pejoratively called Conservatism, Inc., and the GOPe. The iSteve formulation of opposition to “invade the world, invite the world” policies seems the connective tissue.
The rest is an attempt to pigeon-hole folks into categories that are not politically correct, as beyond reputable discussion by the use of ad hominem. It is the same exclusionary tactic deployed by the prog-left to command the language.
* In a “multicultural” society, there will almost certainly be groups who are a net plus, and those who are a net minus, from the standpoint of need of governmental services. How do nations cope with the expectations and potential resentments these disparities create, given that the disparities are effectively intractable? Obviously, the fewer disparities and the fewer number of those caught up in them, the better.
But nations are effectively, and at best, pretty much stuck with the demographics and disparities that already exist, even if cutting down on immigration will prevent their worsening. What kind of social system suits these situations? Is a more “socialistic” society the right solution for a homogeneous one, and a more “individualistic” society the right solution for one riddled with disparities?
This problem becomes especially poignant when one considers nations like South Africa. How can that nation ever be made to work, given the parties and numbers involved?
There are really deep and genuine problems here — problems all masked by the “egalitarian” dogma of our day, which assumes that these problems will just go away when the “racism” goes away.
If we had political and philosophical and social thinkers worthy of the name, these would be the issues they would attempt to address.
We have, instead, of course, blind, sermonizing, preening poseurs.
