Now some definitions according to me:
1) Dissident Right= All groups not represented by what is known as the mainstream Right. i.e. G.O.P, UK conservative Party, Australian Liberal party etc.
2) 1488= Supporters of the ideology of the Nazi party and its local variants.
3) NRx=NRx
4) Alt Right=?
Now, what I don't understand from the way the term seems to be used, is the Alt Right:
1) Alt Right = Dissident Right.
2) Alt Right = Dissident Right - NRx
3) Alt Right = Dissident Right - NRx - 1488
4) Alt Right = 1488 by another name?
From what I can see, in common usage amongst the Dissident Right, the term seems to be used interchangeably and without any specificity which I feel is a dangerous habit. As Ramsey Paul points out, with the increasing mainstream acceptance of the "Alt Right" there seems to be a concerted effort by the 1488 crowd to co-opt that moniker. In essence what the 1488 crowd are trying to do is associate themselves with the dissident right.
Cognitive misers--i.e. the average man--doesn't think in terms of concepts, rather, he "thinks" in terms of associations. And what matters for the hearts and minds of the proletariat is not what they think of you rather what they associate with you. It's a simple principle of advertising and that's why when they're trying to sell you a product the actors in the commercials are always attractive or agreeable. On the other hand when they're trying to diss a product, the users are always hopeless and unattractive.
Whether the Dissident Right likes it or not, the infusion of quasi Nazi imagery into Alt-Right websites is going to associate the Alt-Right with Nazism. Not by any logical act but simply by the fact of human biology. It's how our brains work. Advertising 101. Furthermore, the use by the 1488 crowd of dissident Right memes serves to further conflate the the distinction between the two.
Why the 1488 crowd wants to call itself the Alt-Right is up for speculation. I imagine a section of it wants to gain political legitimacy for its ideas by repackaging itself in a form that doesn't trigger previous associations with Nazism but if that's the case, it's doing a very bad job.
My personal view, and it appears to be Ramsey Paul's as well, is that the the role of the 1488 crowd is to discredit the dissident Right. (Note, when Ramsey uses Alt-Right he uses it in a way that excludes the 1488 crowd.) And I don't think that this is a conspiracy theory that's too hard to swallow.
There are some really, really nasty people in the NeoNazi groups which the authorities would be wise to monitor. But there is considerable documentary evidence that many of the groups themselves may actually be heavily influenced by law enforcement officials. Some reading:
Records show Feds used ultra-Right radio host for years.
Neo Nazi Rally was organised by FBI informant.
COINTELPRO
FBI Nazi Bikers Bust FBI Nazi Group
From the FBI's own website.
"Domestic right-wing terrorist groups often adhere to the principles of racial supremacy and embrace antigovernment, antiregulatory beliefs. Generally, extremist right-wing groups engage in activity that is protected by constitutional guarantees of free speech and assembly. Law enforcement becomes involved when the volatile talk of these groups transgresses into unlawful action.
On the national level, formal right-wing hate groups, such as the National Alliance, the World Church of the Creator (WCOTC) and the Aryan Nations, represent a continuing terrorist threat. Although efforts have been made by some extremist groups to reduce openly racist rhetoric in order to appeal to a broader segment of the population and to focus increased attention on antigovernment sentiment, racism-based hatred remains an integral component of these groups’ core orientations."Given the Leftward shift of society, and given the Government propensity to weaponise its agencies against its political rivals, and given that the current administration is very hostile to right wing views, it is highly probably that many of the extremist Alt-Right-- in the 1488 sense--are either complete nut-jobs or agents provocateurs. It's also quite probable that there are attempts afoot to discredit the Dissident Right by association with the 1488 crowd.
THEY NEED TO BE PURGED.
I think it's a rather sad state of affairs that they've even been able to gain admission and illustrates just how poor the state of Rightist thought is at the moment. (Another reason why the Left always wins). As I've said before, how can socialism for white people only be considered Right Wing?
The task ahead is to delineate what is Dissident Right and what it is not, and to walk the tight-rope between the Mainstream Right and the Nazi Party.
"Whether the Dissident Right likes it or not, the infusion of quasi Nazi imagery into Alt-Right websites is going to associate the Alt-Right with Nazism."
ReplyDeleteNot "going to" but "already has".
What Alt Right are you talking about that wasn't already full of Neo-nazi idiots and Jew conspiracy trolls on the first day? Hello? Did you ever read the comments sections?
I think that when Alt-Right is used by Ramzpaul and Nick B Steves it has different meaning to when it is used by the Radix crowd.
ReplyDeleteI may be wrong but here goes...
ReplyDeleteThis is why you can't have Western Civilization without Christendom. I know that there are secular people, etc. on our side, but hear me out.
Chesterton said that the only really practical people are idealists. Christendom as an idea has a place for all men, even unbelievers (as distinct from the Church), if they adhere to the social Christian schema. Contrary to common belief, Christendom was pretty radically tolerant for a high performing society WHEN you compare it to previous or competing societies. This is down pretty much to the extreme honoring of the individual conscience. Even all the wars against heretics usually only kicked off once said heretics put together an army and started raiding. Again, by comparison; we weren't perfect but we are the society that invented freedom of speech essentially.
Only the Christian schema has the intellectual infrastructure of ordered loves that values things correctly and proportionally. I can love my own tribe without wishing ill on another. I put economic freedom high on the list but believe in restricting it when it starts to infringe in practice on the rights of another (usury, importing practical slave labor, etc.). There is also a strong history of men respecting the Christendom idea who weren't actually believers themselves; they saw what worked for European peoples.
Libertarianism without God just doesn't have much glue, conservatism without Christianity has a dangerously high estimation of what men are actually capable of without God and socially liberal Christianity has to force itself into bizarre doctrinal aberrations to justify itself. Any attempt to create a "big tent" without the Christendom idea will fail by its very nature.
Hoyos ain't wrong.
ReplyDeleteOr to sum up his point: Every ideology needs guide rails. You can try any variation and version of them, but long experience and increasingly science prove that Christianity's guide rails are pretty elegant and effective.
Y'all have it backwards: That which needs "guide rails" is most specifically Christianity. Forgotten Auster already?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/008683.html
"The original teaching of Christianity as presented in the New Testament is about how to live in what Jesus called the kingdom of heaven. It is about the individual soul’s relation with God through Christ. It is not about the political organization of society. The New Testament simply assumes the existence of political society and goes on from there. Because Christianity is not, like orthodox Judaism and Islam, a complete recipe for this-worldly existence, Christians must “render unto Caesar,” i.e., render unto a non-Christian basis of authority. Christian society is thus more complex—more differentiated, to use Eric Voegelin’s term—than any other. It is multileveled, mediating between the pole of the Christian, spiritual realm and the pole of political and cultural existence in this world, which does not come from Christianity itself. If the society loses its this-worldly pole it will go out of existence. This is the reason why Christian society is the riskiest and most dangerous type of society, the most open to catastrophic derailment, such as the derailment brought by modern liberalism. Yet Christianity’s this-worldly “lack,” which makes Christian society so vulnerable in comparison to the religiously structured society of traditional Judaism and Islam, is also the thing that, by requiring Christian society to be multileveled in order to function in this world, makes it the fullest and truest articulation of the human soul, extending downward to the apeirontic depths (the many) and upward to transcendent spiritual truth (the One).
Historical Christianity included the Old Testament as part of its scripture. This was a non-Christian source that provided the sense of living in this world as a community of people under God, a sense that is not provided by the New Testament. Thus Protestants, including the people who created America, were able to build strong national societies because they based themselves heavily on the Old Testament with its powerful sense of a people under God.
The non-Christian source that supplements pure Christianity doesn’t have to be the Old Testament. It could be classical philosophy or Greco-Roman culture or Germanic barbarian nationhood or feudalism or English nationhood or the American way of life or any number of other sources. It could be the traditional Catholic Church, which provides a template for this-worldly society. The Roman church of course carries the traces of its days as the official religion of Rome, and the Catholic liturgy also has deep roots in the ancient Jewish temple service.
People who try to form their practical ethics on the basis of a pure Christian teaching inevitably go gnostic. Look at the evangelicals today who have turned into globalist open borders wackos. Look at how the Christian traditionalist writers at What’s Wrong with the World have articulated a single, pure, all-ruling moral ethos against “killing the innocent” that in certain circumstances, e.g., if enemy invaders included innocent hostages in their ranks, would require a “morally pure” people to allow their enemies to kill, defeat, and enslave them. Some morality!"
Hate to go all basic Protestant on you, but Christianity is an animating force (powered by a real Outside Agent) principally concerned with saving the soul on both an instant and ongoing basis.
Hitler association was, is, and will be inevitable for as long as the ruling powers fear Hitler the most. Possibly Communist associations will replace it after the left comes to power, but fretting hard and saying THE PURGES MUST BEGIN NOW shows a distinctly pedestrian understanding of how to actually accomplish this. (Hint: Banning all 1488ers immediately and publicly is not the most productive method for subverting them.)
Hoyos and Nate
ReplyDeleteI agree you can't have Western Civilisation without Christianity. That's why attempting to rebuild Western Civilisation without Christianity is gonna fail.
The Alt-Right is simply an umbrella term that I've never taken to be anything other than what you're now defining as the Dissident Right. I agree we should purge 1488ers. Unfortunately there's no walls or doors under the umbrella. That's why NRx has institutionalized. Other corners of the Alt-Right (like NPI, like Amren, like TRS (to some extent)) have institutionalized. But no one owns the Alt-Right, so no one can kick anyone out.
ReplyDeleteBut no one owns the Alt-Right, so no one can kick anyone out.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Nick.
I understand that there are no wall is the Dissident Right but a concerted effort at pushback needs to be made to clearly delineate "us" from "1488". It amazes me that everyone feels comfortable having them included in our broader sphere when their underlying ideology is socialism for white people. I mean, they're just a racist version of Bernie Sanders.
Now, there is no way in hell that anyone would call Bernie Sanders a man of the Right, but it does appear, to a disinterested observer, that membership of the Alt-Right seems solely dependent on "white love", no matter what your other politics are. But, as I don't need to mention to you, the other politics matters enormously Furthermore, by having "racial awareness" as the lowest common denominator of dissident Right membership you're pretty much making it as "core" issue of the Dissident Right.
They win.
It's telling that the 1488'ers have rebranded themselves as the Alt-Right at the same moment that the dissident right, NRx in particularly, is gaining legitimacy.Douthat's piece over the weekend is a case in point. The 1488'ers have languished in the lunatic fringe of political discourse and have achieved zero traction over the years. And rightly so. Their Nazi idolatry is repellent to anyone with the slightest degree of culture or Christian morality. Their ideology is political poison, and they know it. They're trying to gain legitimacy now that the dissident right has achieved some traction by engaging in conceptual conflation through rebranding.
The danger for NRx, by not keeping a far enough distance from them, is that it will be smeared by association, not just by the Left, who will smear us with the charge no matter what, but by sympathetic--though less intelligent--converts like Douthat who will find it difficult to distinguish the two. A clear fence needs to be maintained, not only to prevent ideological pollution, but also conflation of NRx with the lunatic fringe of politics. It's not enough that NRx become institutionalised it needs to push back.
I'm thinking the term 1488'ers is still a little misleading. Though we all seem to know who we're talking about, it's not really "Nazi-ism" that defines them. From what I see, it's a collection of bitter, crude, trollish type personalities that turn up and can't resist going into nig-kike mode, edginess-spirals, or even just stirring up petty in-group fighting.
ReplyDeleteAn actual purge of "these people" would require a better label than 1488r (since they have various ideologies if any), stricter comment-moderation (the defectives are like children and need to repeat the same thing for the 100th time) and better defined factions.
@Ducalion
ReplyDeleteI'm thinking the term 1488'ers is still a little misleading. Though we all seem to know who we're talking about, it's not really "Nazi-ism" that defines them.
Agree. Nazism is an expression of an underlying philosophical/cognitive phenomenon that is inherent in liberalism as well.
This is why we need to define what exactly is the the Right, NRx, etc and then push back on those trying to infiltrate.
@Dystopia Max.
ReplyDeleteApologies but your comment got stuck in the automatic spam folder. Should a comment not appear please let me know.
Firstly, who said that that there should be no recognition of worldly authority? It's a strawman argument.
People who try to form their practical ethics on the basis of a pure Christian teaching inevitably go gnostic.
Uhm. The What's Wrong with the World Crowd are theologically suspect. Specifically with your example of hostages, the traditional opinion runs contrary with what is preached in the blog.
As for banning 1488'ers, that not in anyone's power, but emphasising the distinction between NRx and them is.
Race is clearly the main front in the battle. This is not because the right is obsessed with race. Its because race is where leftist propaganda has been the most successful. The response from evangelical Christians has been "Oh yes, we agree white people are terrible. We'll adopt black children but please give us another 10 years to evolve on homosexuality." Frankly, its disgusting. I'd hate to see the alt-right take a similar cowardly position under the guise of principle.
ReplyDeleteNothing says "I unequivocally renounce the metapolitics of progressivism" as concisely as RTing a funny Hitler meme.
ReplyDelete@SmailsHat
ReplyDelete"I unequivocally renounce the metapolitics of progressivism" as concisely as RTing a funny Hitler meme.
Hitler considered himself a progressive.
This is not because the right is obsessed with race. Its because race is where leftist propaganda has been the most successful.
Sexual revolution?
Seems to me that anyone, like Buckley, who is arrogant enough to believe that he, and only he, can discern the truth and the only way to effectively oppose the totalitarian anti-white left, progressive, is himself a totalitarian and, very likely, a narcissist as well.
ReplyDeleteUnless one is actually the Messiah, and Buckley was not, and neither is the Social Pathologist I will venture to guess, who is that person to proclaim that they have such a monopoly on truth and virtue such that he should determine who is socially-acceptable enough, i.e. conformist, to be allowed to participate in one's little club of losers.
Because, as you note above, Buckley was a loser. Anyone from a modest background who ever heard the clown speak could have discerned that in two sentences. The man was a cretinous boot-licker of the Establishment who personified "controlled opposition."
Standing athwart history going to all the right cocktail parties, is that what you want, Social Pathologist?