Rhetoric in dissident-right circles tends to frame right-wing violence like this:
DEUS VULT!
Mainstream society frames right-wing violence like this:
One framing is based on fantasy – the other on reality.
The success or failure of a political movements depends on the balance of power of proponents and opponents.
This is inseparable from optics.
Successful movements court allies by looking good.
They exploit and exacerbate weaknesses in their opponents.
National Socialists in Weimar Germany were obsessed with avoiding associations with historical losers, to the extent that they created a new and bizarre flag to replace their nation’s banner.
They were obsessed with attacking unpopular groups and soliciting popular groups and individuals.
They offered a compelling value proposition to the entrenched elites in their country, who feared communist revolution.
They were led by decorated war heroes in a country with a strong martial focus.
They did not spring from the ground, they were not the inevitable result of a people’s instincts. That is magical thinking popular both on the far right, and on the left, for different reasons. One wants hope, the other a bogeyman. Neither use logic or reason.
When fortuitous events outside of their control weakened the incumbent powers, national socialists were ready to surge into that vacuum because of the strategic decisions they had made for many years before. It was not force majure, not some inevitable expression of human instinct that led to the result. It was strategy, balance of forces, and fortune.
The dissident right has enacted the precise inverse of this winning formula. It associates with the banner and language used by a disgraced, hated, defeated, and foreign empire. It attacks popular individuals and groups, while defending unpopular individuals and groups.
It has no value proposition for entrenched elites. Rather, it professes to desire their overthrow and dispossession. Unlike the left, it cannot hide behind the shield of seeking justice or equality. In its advocacy, it combines the most unsavory elements of the left with the most unsavory elements of the right.
THE VIRTUES OF THE DISSIDENT RIGHT
What, then, is the significance of the dissident right? Does it just amount to a foil for both ends of the political system to attack, to bolster their own position? No.
The dissident right offers honest and open discussion of political issues of race and class that can’t be found anywhere else. No-holds barred discussion attracts many intelligent and learned people who are interested in these subjects.
The dissident right offers certain insights into these issues that simply aren’t found anywhere else. Forbidden knowledge, ‘hatefacts’ that aren’t discussed anywhere else are discussed in the dissident right.
The dissident right offers absolution to whites accused of being morally tainted for their heritage and history.
The dissident right offers excitement and humor with its attacks on nonsensical positions held by elites and the mainstream, and with its unrepressed style.
If the dissident right is to have any success, it must either find a way to split the positives from the negatives, and have different groups go their different ways, or to minimize the negatives and maximize the positives. The current trajectory is towards complete failure.
