also very interesting and instructive:
What does the Alt Right want?
Strong, high trust communities for our people: we reject immigration and favor homogeneous societies.
Protection from Third World outsourcing: We support tariffs designed to protect domestic industry.
Protection from the globalist elite: We reject Super-PACS and foreign elites purchasing elections.
Healthy relationships between men and women: We respect truthfulness regarding sexual differences.
Protection from globalist pollution: We support regulations designed to protect our natural heritage.
Protection of cultural diversity: We reject multiculturalism and favor separate cultures.
Protection from forced association: We reject being forced to betray our beliefs and support what we believe is degenerate.
Freedom of honest debates (i.e., history, race, sex): We reject political correctness and cultural Marxism.
Protection from international corporate oppression: We support nationalist economies with a focus on local industry and small business.
This could very easily be the, or a, or part of a program that emerges from the Alt Right. This program clearly emphasizes the globalist/nationalist antagonism. The final demand, for “protection from international corporate oppression” is the one, I think, that really includes all the rest—it is both vague and comprehensive. All the evils of today’s society could really be traced back to “international corporate oppression,” as is evident from the very odd insistence on “protection from globalist pollution”—is the implication that nationalist industries wouldn’t pollute (why not?), or that we simply prefer nationalist to globalist pollution? Again, we have the same question I raised in my previous post: who rules, or, in this case, who is doing all this? The measures proposed here would require an extraordinarily powerful and tightly organized state: indeed, we could reduce all of these demands to the single demand for a state powerful enough to serve as an intelligent filter between the rest of the world and the national territory. This would be a state an insignificant number of whose officials benefit from international corporate trade; a state that competently distinguishes between fair and beneficial trade, on the one hand, and harmful, “oppressive” trade on the other hand; a state strong enough to resist the pressures of all the other states in the world to open its borders and markets; a state strong enough to resist the importunities of the most power domestic economic actors, who would surely be pressing for access to global markets. In other words, a fairly absolutist state—even though this manifesto never uses the word “state,” government,” “power” or any equivalent. Now, such a state would clearly also be powerful enough to force you to associate with anyone it wants, or to mix cultures, or control immigration according to its own sense of the necessary. So, if we reformulate this manifesto as a demand for an absolutist state, can we include these other demands (for “healthy relationships between men and women,” for example)? I believe we can: the demand is then for a virtuous, absolutist state. “Virtuous” according to whom, or according to what standard, someone out there wants to say. Well, is it meaningful to speak of healthy relationships between men and women? It’s actually harder than it seems to answer that question in the negative, especially once we start to look at examples. It would be hard to find someone before whom it would be impossible to place a scenario about which they would have to say: “that’s not healthy.” At the very least, then, we can work our way back from the undisputedly awful to the somewhat better all the way back to the good, or “heathy.” It is very important for the forces of “political correctness” and “cultural Marxism” to prevent this discussion from being framed in this way, because once we are talking about the “good,” the momentum of the dialectic itself will lead us to see as good more or less what most normal people see as good. A virtuous state, then, is simply one that frames all of its discourse and decisions in terms of the attempt to find and protect what is good. So, we can articulate the more moral demands of the program (for high trust communities, for example) with those implying the need for a state more powerful than the most formidable coalition of competing power centers with access to that territory could be. A virtuous state, one interested in the good, would be empowered by more virtues—by more high trust communities, healthy relations between sexes, and so on. The point about pollution still leaves me puzzled, but it seems to me that a clear relation of complementarity between the Alt Right and Absolute Reaction can be posited: the latter points out that the desiderata of the former require the kind of sovereignty proposed by the latter, and encourage the former to draw the logical conclusions from that observation—one of those logical conclusions being the need for an attitude of deference toward the state, an attitude of delegating vengeance and the adjudication of disputes to the state, and the capacity to self-curtail resentments within the terms set by such a state.
