GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

September 8, 2016

More Alt-Right Programming

Filed under: GA — adam @ 8:21 am

Here is what is meant to be a more minimal (7 point) program aimed at creating a “big tent” for the Alt-Right. Particularly worth pointing out here is a direct approach to the question of internal governance, avoided by other Alt-Right advocates of nationalism:

5) Freedom is a responsibility and not a right. The freedom of too many incompetent people to make too many bad decisions is harmful to society and constrains the freedom of virtuous and responsible people. There are externalities to most actions and when these are harmful to non-actors it is a kind of injustice. These need to campaigned against, or suppressed by force or the threat of force—the basis of the rule of law. A virtuous society is an ordered one that provides freedom from anarcho-tyranny.
6) If we must be a democratic society, the franchise should be limited. Universal democracy is a bad system. It gives power to the worst and shackles the fittest. It is a degenerative institution in which the weak and unproductive collaborate against the strong and sustainable.

Here, the insistence on human differences (points 1 and 4) is applied to the structure of the nation itself, with the logical consequence that democracy and liberal notions of rights are more explicitly rejected. I wonder how big the tent will be—Vox Day, whose 16 points we examined a few posts ago, showing his avoidance of any acknowledgement of hierarchy within the nation, has expressed agreement with all 7 points, so perhaps the rejection of liberalism and democracy is not that controversial on the Alt-Right. The recognition on the Alt-Right that much of what they want will require some kind of strongman or elitist rule demonstrates a more comprehensive awareness of the implications of their project than I, at least, have seen so far. At any rate, it is useful to see the Alt-Right take up the issue of the “regime,” and in a way that brings it somewhat closer to disciplinary absolutist reaction.

Points 2 and 3 are more familiar, but give us the opportunity to raise a couple of questions:

2) Our world is tribal. The struggle for survival which has produced all life on earth extends into biological human races, which both exist and matter to their members. Such conflict is neither immoral nor moral, but a condition we must engage with in order to develop any meaningful philosophy or ideology. It can be found on the streets, in the human resources department, at the ballot box, or in the trenches. Even something as trivial as the Oscars is fought over. Though it is currently politically incorrect to acknowledge that races and their national subdivisions exist and compete for resources, land, and influence over one another or over themselves, that does not mean the struggle has stopped. That one side has been cajoled into not struggling does not mean it is left alone.
3) Our tribe is being suppressed. The new left doctrine of racial struggle in favor of non-whites only, a product of decolonization and the defeat of nationalists by egalitarians after WWII, must be repudiated and Whites must be allowed to take their own side in their affairs.https://atlanticcenturion.wordpress.com/2015/05/26/foaming-at-the-mouth-with-signals/ that says Whites are not allowed to have collective interests and literally every other identity group can do so and ought to do so is unacceptable.

Point 3 is really the easier one to agree with—of course, the new white nationalism/racialism is just—what’s the right phrase?—the chickens of victimary politics coming home to roost. The stupidity of imagining that you can accuse whites constantly, for decades, of being an oppressor race, without whites beginning to think, at some point, well let’s act like one, then, is simply staggering. Point 2 raises more problems. First of all, why say the world is tribal and then go on to talk exclusively about race? Tribes are nothing like races: tribes are internally structured social relationships, with strict kinship rules and an ethos of retaliation to offenses or insults against what is really an extended family. Whatever the biological reality of race, no race has ever acted as a race, with internal hierarchies, authority structures, forms of obligation, legitimation of violence, all understood to rest on racial grounds. A white guy from Wisconsin, and another from Arkansas, are not in the same tribe, no matter how racially conscious they are. Indeed, once you try to use biological, racial categories to organize a large scale community, the whole system breaks down—what would count as ethically or politically relevant genetic distinctions within a race? Politically, races are reactions to co-existence of groups of differing origins within modern society. No one has ever organized a racial polity or even movement of any significance—considered as an attempt to politically liberate and organize the “Aryan” race, Hitler’s Reich would have to be considered a complete failure, as he ended up at war with, and defeated by, much of (and the much less racially self-conscious part of) the Aryan world. Tribes, however, can act very cohesively and coherently as collectives, so I assume that the slippage here between “tribe” and “race” is a political fantasy in which races can act as tribes. (Moreover, tribalism is awful model for politics, since tribes cannot free themselves from the addiction to violence—the founding act of civilization is the king imposing an end to the vendetta amongst the tribes he rules over.) The political structure discussed in points 5 and 6 will not have anything to do with tribe or race—the more fit will rule, but either they will simply rule in the common good, determined by the ruler, or they will rule in the name of the race. In the former case, there is no reason to assume that race will remain the primary organizing category; in the latter case, all the conflicts of a modern social order are re-introduced into and intensified within the closed racial order, since there will be differing views of the good of the race, and one of those views might very well involve culling the unfit. (It should also be noted that the zero-sum struggle for resources characteristic of tribalism as portrayed here is incompatible with the freedom and autonomy of all nations in Vox Day’s 16 points—you can’t recognize the autonomy of a nation sitting on resources you need.)

This brings us to the culminating point 7:

The final alt-right shit-test is whether or not someone agrees with the reality that Jewish elites are opposed to our entire program. It is the third rail for a reason. The hardest redpill to take is a suppository, the Jewish Question. (Here I highly recommend Dr. Kevin MacDonald’s http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/author/kmac/ if you don’t have the time preference for an entire series of books on the subject). The disproportionate influence of an elite Jewish minority in Western societies has been a net negative. Jews, who have a three thousand year history of regulating their communities to be as insular as possible among the nations whose territory they dwell in have a consistent pattern of promoting the interests of their own ethnoreligious minority at the expense of the majority nation. It is what they do and when they do it here it is bad news for us. When given the power they have now it results in degeneracy, the losing of one’s race. Even in Israel one will find Jews who are firmly dedicated to the destruction of their host’s borders and hold in contempt the idea of loyalty to their national kin. Who shrieks loudest at anti-immigration nativism? Who praises their own ethnocentrism as a virtue and shames others for having the same feeling? It is a pattern that crosses time and borders, and there is a war against noticing it. The staunchest social egalitarians, anti-nationalists and “anti-racists” are Jewish, inside and outside of Israel.

Jews sympathetic to the Alt-Right should certainly have no illusions about “joining” it (insofar as it has something like a “membership”). That’s fine—we can’t join Black Power, La Raza, the Catholic Church and lots of other things. And we’re not so easy to “join” ourselves. The “net effect” of Jews on their host nations can, of course, be debated—it will depend upon what you consider valuable and harmful. But more important than all this is what I see as a very fair and indisputable point: can anyone deny that Jewish elites are opposed, and must be opposed to the 6 points above and virtually any other articulation of the Alt-Right agenda? Can anyone deny the predominance of Jews in the pro-immigration and anti-racist movements, or o the Left more generally? Or that Jewish leftist activism is very often overtly presented as “Jewish,” i.e., as promoting specifically Jewish values and traditions (“Tikkun Olam, etc.)? Jewish influence and power, and the fantastically varied nature of the perceptions and assessments of that influence and power, is best understood as an effect of unsecure power. The decentralization and differentiation of powers through the Western world over the last half millennium has created the conditions under which groups, like Jews, with a specific vocation and capacities, specific internal organization, relation to the majority community, i.e., as a kind of prototypical middleman minority, are able and compelled to exercise power in all kinds of un and under-acknowledged, and therefore difficult to measure, ways. Restore sovereignty, and the Jewish Question is resolved. Of course, a restored sovereign might be hostile to the Jews, might see their removal as central to its own restoration; but a strong and effective sovereign is more likely to find uses for the Jews, while blocking their subversive tendencies. Since a restored sovereign would, by definition, eliminate the left, that in itself would remove the main vehicle of antagonistic Jewish influence, allowing Jews to contribute productively.

4 Comments »

  1. I’m curious why you say Jewish leaders *must* be opposed to the six points. Is this simply a recognition that Jews (outside Israel) are predominantly leftist or are you hinting at a larger point that until, and in no way before, sovereignty is restored, Jews cannot but be attracted to unsecured power? Religious and/or nationalist Jews would not, I think, find too much to argue over those points, and with assimilation and fertility declines among the leftists, Jewish leadership will soon have to redefine itself. And given that, for the time being, the antisemitic left is a bigger threat than the white right (the one threatens Israel and friends, the other threatens forced aliyah) is it impossible to imagine a Jewish defense of sovereignty, under the spell of arguments like yours making it possible to (((bracket))) all the unfriendliness on the alt-right? Not that many white nationalists will care, but the historical arguments will favour those who point out Jewish leftism, however prodigious, has been an assimilation to a utopian modernity that began first among the Christian nations.

    Comment by John — September 9, 2016 @ 1:39 pm

  2. Yes, very good questions. It’s Jewish “elites,” not “leaders,” and that makes a difference because there is an ambiguity in the phrase “Jewish elites” that I noticed but didn’t point out: does it mean the Jews among the elites? Elite Jews (which would be closest to “Jewish leaders”)? Or the elites, who are Jewish? With such ambiguities, I think a good approach is to include as much of all the meanings as possible–which would mean those in dominant positions within the Jewish communities who are disproportionately represented among the social elites. In other words, we’re talking about Wall St., Hollywood, the media, and the various “anti-racist” leftist groups (ACLU, ADL, SPLC, etc.). They will simply be enemies–their entire existence is tied up in the coalition of the fringes, aka the high-low alliance, aka globalism, etc. The point of singling out this category of unredeemables (and what I actually find generous, or at least promising in the formulation) is that it opens up the possibility for the kinds of Jews you mention and who are themselves done no favors by those “Jewish elites.” You actually have a right wing in power in Israel right now that is more “alt-rightist” than any party anywhere near power elsewhere.

    It is possible to hope for the space to engage in the kinds of arguments you mention–yes, the Jews in the West just jumped on the moving leftist car and pressed the accelerator to the floor; there’s much else to say. Will it be possible to say it? We’ll see–but the sooner Jews favorable to sovereignty, or at least consistently anti-anti-White, jettison the “elites,” the better the chances.

    Comment by adam — September 9, 2016 @ 2:01 pm

  3. Thanks, as always. I should have picked up on the ambiguity of ‘elites’. Anyway, it would seem reasonable to expect that much future success in STEM fields will come out of Israel and eventually this may mean not just startups bought out by American multinationals, but Israelis dominating new fields, like desalinisation. Then we will see if new kinds of Jewish, national and global, elites, unlike the Facebook/Google crowd, are possible.

    Comment by John — September 10, 2016 @ 2:05 pm

  4. Maybe the original Zionists had it right–not only can Jews only survive as Jews in Israel, but they will flourish there in ways they couldn’t have imagined otherwise.

    Comment by adam — September 10, 2016 @ 2:09 pm

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