Luke Ford

Roman Dmowski writes: The 9/11 attacks found only two groups with a coherent explanation and proposed strategy: paleoconservatives, who suggested a limited punitive campaign coupled with immigration restriction, and the neoconservatives, who supported an ambitious and “idealist” campaign deliberately designed to destabilize the Middle East and usher in democratic change. The latter won out, but the Iraq War’s results proved lacklaster at first and eventually turned into an undeniable quagmire. Similar results transpired in Afghanistan. The disaster of Arab Democracy appeared in full flower in the Arab Spring, where relatively stable and friendly (or at least manageable) regimes became increasingly hostile, such as Egypt and Libya. And attacks in Boston, Fort Hood, San Bernardino, and Chattanooga were reminders of the importance of immigration restrictions, particularly of Muslims, to any effective containment of the Islamic extremist threat.

The failed campaigns of McCain and Romney also suggested something out of kilter about the Republican message. The prior emphasis on free market capitalism appeared increasingly tone death to the realities of globalization, where immigration and off-shoring rendered a great swath of the economy net losers, especially among the working class. The 2008 economic crisis rendered many once middle class people impoverished, and their own struggles were easily contrasted with the continuing big bonus culture of Wall Street, who obtained massive government assistance to keep their speculation going. Further, there are cultural factors: the decline of marriage and the increasingly Darwinian dating scene, the harsh suffocating effects of political correctness, perennial racial tensions exacerbated by Obama’s leftist message, and the realization among Baby Boomers, who did so well in the 80s and 90s, of their fragile economic position, coupled with the change in the texture of everyday life wrought by immigration and cultural leftism. These changes to the country have all conspired to bring about a strong feeling of dissatisfaction. The Republican Party’s continued embrace of neoconservative foreign policy also fell on increasingly deaf ears, made wise by the unfulfilled promise of the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns. Finally, the occasional pushes of the GOP’s establishment wing for immigration amnesty, first by Bush in 2005, and then later during the Obama years, added alienation to this dissatisfaction, and amnesty was for many the last straw.

The Alt Right emerged from a combination of these structural and intellectual factors. All of the changes above made core Republican voters–middle class whites–more nationalist in tone and orientation. At the same time, the declining intellectual integrity and influence of the Right’s flagship publications have left lacunae that have been filled from a combination of samizdat sources, ranging in quality, but all of which have been magnified in influence by the weakening power of gatekeepers. On Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and numerous blogs, wide-ranging “forbidden” ideas have gained currency, including the Mens’s Rights Movement, the nationalist views set forth in Richard Spencer’s Radix publication, the race realism of American Renaissance magazine, Steve Sailer, and Vdare, foreign policy skepticism, and anti-feminism. These heterodox ideas have been further amplified by internet-savvy, alienated, and undeniably mischievous young activists, who are also energetic and sharp, and have been behind such diverse phenomena as the “chalkening,” #gamergate, and #NROrevolt.

Ironically, the increasingly ideological and unrigorous laundry list of official “conservatism” propagated by National Review and the mainstream Republican Party, is less intellectual than ever. The often Catholic intellectual forbears of Reagan’s New Right views are now unread and forgotten for the most part, including by the Alt Right. Instead, we have ended up with the shrill John Podhoretz and unserious Jonah Goldberg, whose main influences appear to be pop culture, in which both are immersed. The new leadership, often Jewish, is frequently reflexively hostile to the ethno-nationalist strains of conservatism that existed even in the very recent past. Further, the devolution of National Review–which has purged such stalwarts as John Derbyshire and Peter Brimelow for their “politically incorrect” musings on race–is engaged in purges on explicitly liberal grounds.

The early National Review did not represent nearly as dramatic a break with the Old Right of H.L. Mencken, Robert Taft, and the American Mercury magazine. Just as the Cold War created a new phenomenon–Soviet sponsored aggressive international socialism– that supported abandoning the traditional isolationism of the Old Right, the new phenomena of globalization, mass immigration, and crony-capitalism collectively demand the revival of the national unit, as well as a privileged position for its core historical demographic (white people), as an adaptation to new circumstances.

Like the occasional New Right thinker such as Erik von Kuehnelt Leddihn, the Alt Right has a more continental and authoritarian view than the classically liberal free market views of the New Right. But even this distinction can be overstated. Reagan embraced the Chrysler bailout and pushed for increasing exports to Japan. Further, Reagan continued the Nixon realpolitik rapprochement with China to weaken our number one foreign policy threat, the Soviet Union. Reagan had the good sense to withdraw from Lebanon after the Beirut Barracks Bombing. No one thought, as many Republican leaders do today, that we were honor bound to stick around the Middle East for 15 years pursuing the impossible, as we have done in Iraq and Afghanistan. Further, our ties to Israel made sense when the Soviet Union went “all in” for Arab Nationalism after 1967, but have become less useful, and positively dangerous in certain cases, after the end of the Cold War.

The modern Republican Party’s “True Conservatism” is an ideologically rigid series of positions on taxes, trade, and foreign relations that proponents imagine, but do little to prove, is coextensive with the interests and flourishing of the American people. Indeed, in characters ranging from Rubio to Jeb to the annoying Kevin Williamson at National Review, we see passionate support for jobs-destroying trade policy and fomenting unnecessary conflict with Russia and Assad’s Syria. We also see a fever pitch of opposition to Trump, who has not signed on to this ossified political ideology, but whose patriotism and right-leanings are undeniable.

From Vox.com:

It also opens the door for a more sophisticated future candidate, one reared on alt-right arguments rather than stumbling into them the way Trump has. Such a candidate could effectively whip up an alt-right base of support, but potentially use it more intelligently and effectively than Trump. If this sounds fantastical, it’s worth remembering that open white supremacists like Strom Thurmond and James Eastland were serving in the US Senate 40, 30, even 20 years ago. Our current period without avowed white nationalists in power, backed by an organized constituency of the same, is the exception, not the norm.

“Trump is a flashlight. Trump shines a light on forgotten truths,” the neoreactionary Ryan Landry writes. “Trump shines a light on the fact that we truly have reached a point where a candidate who implicitly advocates for whites is considered dangerous and a cause for protest. … Those on the edge have known this anti-white mania is out there, but the protest-riot made it real for millions more.”

That’s exactly it. Neoreaction is on the edge, as is the alt-right as a whole, but Trump is not. Trump is decidedly mainstream. He’s scaring mainstream conservative outlets like National Review and Commentary. And like Gamergate before him, he suggests that the ideas of neoreaction and alt-rightism could potentially break through, and that candidates supported by alt-right elements have a bright future ahead of them.

From Vox.com:

Let’s start with the most theoretically minded, and probably most interesting, branch of the alt-right: the neoreactionaries.

In 2007, a writer with the pen name Mencius Moldbug (né Curtis Yarvin) started a blog called Unqualified Reservations. He proceeded to write essays that would inspire a whole movement of online political writers. The neoreactionaries drew inspiration from earlier paleoconservatives like Pat Buchanan and Joseph Sobran but with a tech-y twist. Moldbug, for one, is a veteran Bay Area programmer currently working on a startup he cofounded called Urbit.

And the core contention of Moldbug and the other NRx thinkers is one that’s been common in technolibertarian circles for a long time: Democracy is a failure.

“Democracy is — as most writers before the 19th century agreed — an ineffective and destructive system of government,” Moldbug writes. Moldbug doesn’t actually like the term “democracy.” He prefers “demotism,” or rule of the people, a label under which he sweeps modern-day developed democracies like the US or Western Europe but also the former Soviet bloc, Nazism, and fascism. “Universalist lawful democracy is the least demotist of demotisms, Demotism Lite if you will,” he writes. “Compared to Communism and Nazism, there’s much to be said for it. But this is a rather low bar.”

The purpose of government, in the view of neoreactionaries, isn’t to represent the will of the people. It’s to govern well, full stop. “From the perspective of its subjects, what counts is not who runs the government but what the government does,” Moldbug explains. “Good government is effective, lawful government. Bad government is ineffective, lawless government. How anyone reasonable could disagree with these statements is quite beyond me. And yet clearly almost everyone does.”

And democratic government, the neoreactionaries insist, is not effective, lawful government. Because the will of the people is arbitrary and varying, it cannot have the consistency of real. durable law, and it creates incentives for wasteful and, worse still, left-wing government. Moldbug started as an Austrian-school libertarian, and most neoreactionaries have general small-government sympathies and express a fear that democracy inevitably leads to ever greater taxation and redistribution, and otherwise encroaches on individual liberty.

“Democracy and ‘progressive democracy’ are synonymous, and indistinguishable from the expansion of the state,” Nick Land, the next most influential neoreactionary thinker after Moldbug, writes. “Since winning elections is overwhelmingly a matter of vote buying, and society’s informational organs (education and media) are no more resistant to bribery than the electorate, a thrifty politician is simply an incompetent politician, and the democratic variant of Darwinism quickly eliminates such misfits from the gene pool.” The result is a government that grows larger and larger.

Moldbug is even blunter: “Cthulhu may swim slowly. But he only swims left.”

This is a strain of thinking that more mainstream libertarians have expressed in greater and greater numbers of late. In 2007, George Mason economist Bryan Caplan argued in The Myth of the Rational Voter that democracy will inevitably lead to suboptimal economic policy because the general public is systematically biased against markets, increased productivity, and trade with foreigners. Peter Thiel, the libertarian billionaire who co-founded PayPal and Palantir and was the first outsider to invest in Facebook, declared in 2009, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

But while mainstream libertarians are outspoken about democracy’s deficiencies, they rarely propose an alternative. The neoreactionaries do: monarchy. Well, not monarchy specifically, but some kind of nondemocratic system with rule-driven succession. Moldbug likes to use the term “formalism,” or “neocameralism,” a reference to “cameralism,” the philosophy of government embraced by Frederick the Great of Prussia. Moldbug’s vision is corporatist, where instead of a nation belonging to a royal family, it belongs to corporation with shareholders to whom it is accountable. “To a neocameralist, a state is a business which owns a country,” he writes.

When asked who should lead it, Moldbug’s tech roots come through. “It’s easy to say ‘put Elon [Musk] in charge, he’ll figure it out,’ and he might well,” he tells me via email.

From Vox.com:

The leading actual neoreactionaries are not fans of Donald Trump. “Trump appears to have no ideology at all and very little historical/intellectual awareness of his context,” Moldbug — who now just goes by his birth name, Curtis Yarvin — writes in an email.

“I would love to see a CEO with a real track record of strategic execution in a large enterprise — an Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos — running against Trump. I don’t even think the ideology matters that much; once someone competent got in that office, and felt a real sense of both authority and responsibility, ideology would start to matter a lot less.”

Instead, the alt-right’s affiliation with Trump comes from another group that blended paleocon-ish ideas with internet culture. I speak, of course, of 4chan.

4chan is mostly still a forum for trolling and random nonsense. It was started to discuss anime, and insofar as it’s been political it’s been in a not strictly left-right way, and usually through the avenue of Anonymous, the activist group that split off from 4chan to do direct action. Protesting Scientology and leaking information on the Steubenville rapists are definitely political acts, but they’re not identifiably left-wing or right-wing.

But in recent years, a vocal right-wing contingent has popped up. As New York magazine’s Brian Feldman explains, part of this is an artifact of 4chan gaining popularity and its popular catchall board — /b/ — losing ground to alternatives, notably /pol/, or the “Politically Incorrect” chat board. “To the extent that there is a shared political ideology across /pol/, it’s a heavily ironic mix of garden-variety white supremacy and neo-reactionary movements,” Feldman writes.

“Most days,” the Daily Beast’s Jacob Siegel writes, “/pol/ resembles nothing so much as [white supremacist blog] The Daily Stormer with the signal to noise dial turned only slightly.” The Southern Poverty Law Center has taken notice, with fellow Keegan Hankes telling Siegel, “You can’t understate 4chan’s role. I constantly see 4chan being mentioned by the more Internet- and tech-savvy guys in the white nationalist movement. They’re getting their content from 4chan.”

Hankes has noticed this trend on Reddit as well, noting in a Gawker essay that “Reddit increasingly is providing a home for anti-black racists — and some of the most virulent and violent propaganda around.”

This has channeled into the Trump movement. Milo Yiannopoulos, the Breitbart writer and major Trump defender who’s perhaps the most vocal exponent of alt-rightism online, famously employs an army of interns, a lot of whom he says are “young 4chan guys.” In their own alt-right explainer, Yiannopoulos and co-author Allum Bokhari argue that /pol/’s alt-righters have embraced racism purely for shock value:

Just as the kids of the 60s shocked their parents with promiscuity, long hair and rock’n’roll, so too do the alt-right’s young meme brigades shock older generations with outrageous caricatures, from the Jewish “Shlomo Shekelburg” to “Remove Kebab,” an internet in-joke about the Bosnian genocide. Are they actually bigots? No more than death metal devotees in the 80s were actually Satanists. For them, it’s simply a means to fluster their grandparents … Young people perhaps aren’t primarily attracted to the alt-right because they’re instinctively drawn to its ideology: they’re drawn to it because it seems fresh, daring and funny, while the doctrines of their parents and grandparents seem unexciting, overly-controlling and overly-serious.

For good measure, they quote Moldbug/Yarvin: “If you spend 75 years building a pseudo-religion around anything – an ethnic group, a plaster saint, sexual chastity or the Flying Spaghetti Monster – don’t be surprised when clever 19-year-olds discover that insulting it is now the funniest fucking thing in the world. Because it is.”

This branch of the alt-right has also played an important role in the Gamergate movement, an ongoing effort to harass women in the video game industry until they shut up about equality and representation. Yiannopoulos, who before the controversy called gamers “pungent beta male bollock-scratchers and twelve-year-olds,” jumped on it as a cause with reactionary potential. “GamerGate is remarkable — and attracts the interest of people like me — because it represents perhaps the first time in the last decade or more that a significant incursion has been made in the culture wars against guilt-mongerers, nannies, authoritarians and far-Left agitators,” he wrote in late 2014.

The affinity between gamers and right politics makes sense. “It’s not hard to see why this ideology would catch-on with white male geeks,” Klint Finley writes in his excellent explainer on neoreaction. “It tells them that they are the natural rulers of the world, but that they are simultaneously being oppressed by a secret religious order. And the more media attention is paid to workplace inequality, gentrification and the wealth gap, the more their bias is confirmed.”

“While GamerGate started off as a very diverse, vocal opponent to what they saw was unethical journalism (before it was debunked), many of the anonymous /pol/ rightists would take advantage of its anti-left character by creating sock-puppets,” an anonymous 4channer and ex-Gamergater wrote last year. “Today it is hard to find a 4chan user that doesn’t have an attachment to far right politics.”

And this enthusiasm for far-right politics has bled into Trumpism. JaredTSwift, an alt-righter who got his start on 4chan, gushed to Motherboard’s Oliver Lee, “Trump was meme-able and entertaining, and something like a ban on Muslim immigration would never have been considered before him.”

r/The_Donald — the alt-right dominated home of Trump supporters on Reddit — wracked up 52 million pageviews in March, way more than the 35 million at r/SandersForPresident. The driving force behind the subreddit is CisWhiteMaelstrom, a user whose very name includes the kind of purposefully offensive trolling that defines the Channer alt-right. “Clicking through r/The_Donald is like walking into a rowdy clubhouse for (mostly) men who feel under siege from ‘political correctness,'” MSNBC’s Beny Sarlin reports. Scrolling through the Reddit page, one sees reference after reference to “cuckservatives,” an alt-right term of art which analogizes mainstream conservatives to cuckolded husbands.

From Vox.com:

The neoreactionaries are a distinctly ’00s and ’10s phenomenon, but they draw on the racialist and traditionalist arguments of a much older movement: paleoconservatism.

The term “paleoconservatism” is a retronym coined in the 1980s to characterize a brand of conservatism that was by then going extinct, a brand exemplified by Robert Taft, the Ohio senator and legendary isolationist who lost the 1952 Republican nomination to Dwight Eisenhower, and by Pat Buchanan in his 1992, 1996, and 2000 presidential runs.

Paleocons agree with mainstream conservatism on social issues — they tend to be stridently anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ rights, pro-school prayer, and disproportionately traditionalist Catholic — and on the evils of the welfare state, but part ways on international affairs, including immigration, trade, and warfare.

Paleocons are largely isolationist, warning America against foreign entanglements and dismissing neocon attempts at democracy promotion as hubristic and doomed to failure. They were overwhelmingly against the Iraq War, and tend to be heavily critical of Israel. They’re also more fervently nationalist than mainstream Republicans. That translates into a very negative view of immigration, both due to its perceived economic harm to Americans and because of the “damage” it does to American culture, and into more support for tariffs and trade protection.

But since Buchanan, the movement hasn’t had a loud national voice. After 9/11, paleocon isolationism became anathema among conservative intellectuals and politicians. Mainstream conservatives like George W. Bush and Marco Rubio embraced immigration reform that offered unauthorized immigrants citizenship. Free trade opposition within the GOP went extinct.

There are a number of reasons the paleocons lost ground, but a big one was that the movement had a huge racism problem. In particular, skepticism of foreign entanglements and of the alliance with Israel specifically would occasionally bleed into overt anti-Semitism.

The saga of Joseph Sobran is a case in point. A longtime columnist at National Review, he was fired by William F. Buckley in 1993 following years of open clashes about his attitude toward Israel and Jewish people in general. In 1991, Buckley had dedicated an entire issue of the magazine to a 40,000-word essay he wrote, “In Search of Anti-Semitism,” in which he condemned Buchanan (then challenging President George H.W. Bush in the GOP primaries) and his employee Sobran for anti-Jewish prejudice. Buckley had a point. Sobran really was a world-class anti-Semite, writing in one National Review column , “If Christians were sometimes hostile to Jews, that worked two ways. Some rabbinical authorities held that it was permissible to cheat and even kill Gentiles.”

After leaving NR, Sobran’s writing, in the words of fellow paleocon and American Conservative editor Scott McConnell, “deteriorated into the indefensible.” He started speaking at conferences organized by famed Holocaust denier David Irving and the denial group Institute for Historical Review, asking at the latter, “Why on earth is it ‘anti-Jewish’ to conclude from the evidence that the standard numbers of Jews murdered are inaccurate, or that the Hitler regime, bad as it was in many ways, was not, in fact, intent on racial extermination?”

He wasn’t alone. John Derbyshire, perhaps the last real paleocon left at National Review, was canned in 2012 after writing a piece addressed to children full of advice like, “Avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally,” “Stay out of heavily black neighborhoods,” and, “If planning a trip to a beach of amusement park at some date, find out whether it is likely to be swamped with blacks on that date.”

After that, Derbyshire started writing at VDARE, an anti-immigration white nationalist site named after Virginia Dare, the first white Christian born in British North America. The article that got him fired wasn’t actually posted at National Review but at Taki’s Magazine, an outlet run by millionaire paleocon Taki Theodoracopulos that was formerly edited by outspoken white supremacist Richard B. Spencer and has run articles by Theodoracopulos in support of the Greek neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn.

This has been the trend for paleoconservative writing in the past decade or two. It’s largely turned from mainstream conservative outfits to openly racist venues like VDARE, Taki’s, American Renaissance, and the Occidental Observer. Admirably, the American Conservative has held the line and resisted crossing over into open white nationalism, but they’re basically alone in that.

Meanwhile, Pat Buchanan, the paleocons’ great political hope, has more or less always been this openly bigoted. In 1990 he infamously insisted that 850,000 Jews couldn’t have died at Treblinka from diesel fumes. In 2007 he declared, “If you want to know ethnicity and power in the United States Senate, 13 members of the Senate are Jewish folks who are from 2 percent of the population. That is where real power is at.” In 2008, he wrote an entire book arguing that the Second World War was basically Britain’s fault and Hitler was largely blameless. So it’s no surprise that he, too, has been increasingly marginalized, losing his MSNBC position in 2012.

The neoreactionaries are not simply heirs to the paleoconservatives. The paleocons are ultimately more religious, and more loyal to the US Constitution and basic small-r republican ideals. But the neoreactionaries share with the paleocons a belief in tribalism and racial difference, and a deep sense that the mainstream is trying to crush them. Joseph Sobran didn’t use the term “Cathedral,” but he’d surely think it to blame for his marginalization.

COMMENTS ON RADIX:

* This represents the normalization of White Nationalism and the Alt-Right and hence its acceptance and eventual victory–and the elites are terrified.

The folks at Radix are doing the right thing. It’s working.