Over the last year or so, corresponding with the rise of Donald Trump to the nomination of the Republican Party, there has been a lot of talk about what is the alt-right and what it means. This also corresponds with the term itself, alt-right, being transformed from the narrow white nationalism stuff of Richard Spencer, to a catch-all term for the growing number of people criticizing the orthodoxy from the Right. In fact, this thing they call the alt-right is no longer much about race and much more about culture, Western Culture.
Another way to think of it is to imagine a town with two social clubs, organized for the same purpose, but they disagree over the goals and how to go about it. Over time, one club has fallen into quarreling and regularly kicked out its best members. Many just quit out of frustration. The result is there are more that agree about what is wrong with the clubs than are in still the clubs. The reason the dissenters have a name is the people still doing the old social club racket gave the dissenters a name they thought was insulting.
Steve Sailer has a fun way of looking at it in his Taki column, comparing the alt-right to punk rock. That’s a good way of looking at, but within that column he quotes himself from the olden thymes, where he pointed out that jazz lost its audience because it became elitist and esoteric. That’s a good way of thinking about what is happening to Official Conservatism™ today. The people scribbling and thinking for the orthodoxy have become elitist and detached, consumed by esoteric hair splitting and purity tests.
A good example of this can be seen in this piece on National Review regarding Ann Coulter’s appearance on a Comedy Central roast of actor Rob Lowe. According to the news reports, it was a setup so the beta male comics could feel butch by calling Coulter a “cunt” over and over. A normal man would wonder why such a thing was permitted to happen, but not Christian Schneider. He is only concerned about the image of Official Conservatism™ as he thinks Coulter being pilloried makes his weird little identity cult look bad.
That’s Official Conservatism™. It is a bunch of men standing aside as men from the Left assault whomever happens to be to their Right. It is a movement that never moves. It remains relatively stationary, fixed to a spot just to the Right of the Progressives. When they are not refining the narrow differences they have with the Left, they are expanding the list of people to their Right that are no longer welcome in the club. Official Conservatism™ holds its audience in contempt, preferring to focus on itself and its peculiar aesthetic.
Sailer’s jazz reference works at another level. In the first half of the 20th century, jazz was the most popular form of music because it was fun and functioned as the soundtrack for the young and rebellious. By the time rock and roll came along, jazz was no longer fun. The kids looked at it as the music of their parent’s generation. That’s what’s happening with Official Conservatism™ now that the internet has opened the field to all sorts of new voices and ideas. Much of it may be crap or crazy, but it’s fun and rebellious.
There’s more to it, of course, but being new and fun is the energy that is making the alt-right work right now. The bigger issue is the fact that Buckley Conservatism has nothing to offer. An ideology that leads men to stand aside while thugs from the Left assault the institutions of society is not much use to people, who would like to preserve their culture. It’s hard to be inspired my a movement that thinks it is OK for men to call a woman a “cunt” on TV, just as long as it does not reflect poorly on their movement. Why would anyone sign up for that?
It’s why the threats from the geezers about purging the alt-right from Official Conservatism™ are met with roars of laughter and funny memes on twitter. If you are a young guy that thinks Progressivism is a cancer, what has Jonah Goldberg ever done for you? What has Hugh Hewitt ever done, beside collect a paycheck and lecture you to be quiet? The answer is nothing. When the bully boys of the Left come to put a beating on you, these two will be penning articles about how you tarnished the brand.
Skepticism, about attempts to define the alt-right, is wise as the people doing it have an agenda. Some are hoping to elevate their status as media personalities, while others are just hoping to tar members of the establishment, by associating them with something scary. The reality is it is just a new label for what Nick Land called the Dark Enlightenment. I’ve always found this map to be useful in understanding the wild and crazy world of alternative media on the internet. As you can see, there is a lot of overlap, but a great diversity in starting points.
The Right has always been a perspective from a number of starting points rooted in the human condition, biological reality. It has never been a fixed ideology and that is why Official Conservatism™ is dying off now. It was a long attempt to build a fence around the free range of thinking, to set borders and apply rules within it. It is why the Buckleyites look increasing like the Progressives they claim to oppose. In the end, ideologues all come to agree on the same thing – control.
Eric Hoffer said, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” Official Conservatism™ is well into the racket stage. The adherents, if they even believe in anything other than personal enrichment, defend the cause solely because it is where the money is at the movement. They are ideological Willie Suttons. They are “conservatives” because right now that’s where they can make money. When the time comes, they will move on to something else.
“Skepticism, about attempts to define the alt-right, is wise as the people doing it have an agenda.”
I’m sure you’ve noticed that the (((people))) most eager to define and dissect the alt-right have (((something))) in common. Just sayin’
(Really liking that my capcha has 88 in it, heh heh.)
I joined the alt-right 10 years ago when Allahpundit banned me from HotAir for mildly suggesting the British National Party wasn’t that bad, wasn’t Nazi, and was pretty good and certainly much better than Islamization. Some other guy – a Brit – got banned at the same time. We both wondered, what is Conservatism (TM) conservative of?
Nationalism is now just beginning to hit its stride as the elite are all cosmopolitan globalists and statists. Whether the states such as the UK, the United States, Germany, etc survive into the future doesn’t matter. What matters is the peoples and their cultures survive. The United States is a joke: Muslims granted the same citizenship which they use to vote away my freedoms as those in my family who have put their butts on the line for this country for over a century. It’s a joke. And I bet it’s worse across the Atlantic.
If there was a Dirt People Party, I would join it.
Hey! Just by saying that you belong to the dirt people party.
Trump has made a good start on creating one. Let the dirt people small business and solo practice lawyer types continue it!
Vote the Silly Party! No formal entrance requirements or registration required.
https://youtu.be/31FFTx6AKmU
Official Conservatism TM is also distinguished by the fact its participants are principally (exclusively?) those from the monied Elite who all attended the right schools (Ivies, Public Ivies and top-ranked private liberal arts colleges) and whose ideas of “tough labor” extends principally to burning the midnight oil to glean that special case for the senior partner’s brief or digging into the smallest detail on a financial statement for their consultant boss’s presentation to the Board of Directors! Nary a callus or scar from real works shows on their soft, pink hands or their soft, ego-driven intellects. Indeed, if they were attorneys engaged in prosecution, they started as US Attorneys, never having to deal with drunks, car thieves or street low-lifes.
Liberal thugs are the same type of person, maybe a tad brighter in turning the wicked phrase or clever pun, but soft all the same. A real man, with a background in real work and labor, would have casually wandered over to those lib-thug bullies and back-handed their sissy faces after the second “c*unt” demeaning Ms. Coulter, was issued. If fact, Colbert deserves a sharp blow to his supercilious, smirking puss on just principal alone!
Time to raise up the Dirt People types of businessmen and attorneys, the kind who attended State U. and who still attend college football games, sitting in the stands with their buddies, not in the suites and boxes with their bosses.
True “cons” sound like a bunch of Southern ladies, sitting around deciding when it’s appropriate to wear those summer whites. I have no use for their arrogance and hope they all lose their jobs to illegals. I was surprised at my own reaction to Ted Cruz calling me a “low information voter” for supporting Trump. I did suck it up and vote for the losers the last two elections. I expected them to vote for the party’s nominee this time out. But it turns out they are every bit as snobbish as the Lefties.Good riddance to the lot.
Many people have left the confines of the Republican party over the past few decades. I am one of those who had my fill after “W.” I voted for him hoping beyond hope for a better outcome than one offered by the likes of Gore “Mr. Internet” before he created Global Warming, or Lurch.
Then the likes of Mittens and McCain were completely worthless. I do not find the term “conservative” to be in disfavor. I do think that those who have left the confines of the RNC, find themselves labeled by the Right in an effort to maintain their place of import and credibility in the political space. Those who were “displaced or uninivited” as Z describes, do have certain attributes in common. But rather than listen to those dissenting voices, they were ignored and worse, marginalized and denigrated.
I liken it to discussions I would have with my mom about the Catholic Church. Heh, she disowned me the first time when I left the Catholic Church and was “Born Again,” baptized in a non-denominational Christian Church. Around the same time, many people were leaving the Catholic Church and finding the Bible and a more rewarding spiritual experience in non-denominational churches. But what the Catholic Church did is what a smart business would do. They did their market research and asked those leaving “Why are you leaving?” A big part of what they found out was the desire to learn more about the Bible than simple Gospel readings. Hence, the Catholic Church embarked on a program to introduce Bible Studies and more Scriptural content into the Mass and lives of the faithful. BTW, the second time she disowned me was when I voted Republican!
Back to the Republican Party. They didn’t give a shit. They had their gravy train. They had been co-opted by the progressive-lite mentality and crony capitalism and “to hell” with what those “hicks in the sticks” think they know what they want. We know what is good for them.”
Well, people voted with their wallets and with their feet. And in their own disrespectful way, started labelling this rabel rousing crowd what they thought was a term of derision. Except their cute joke backfired on them as the movement had real steel in it, the fire of an ideology drawn from the roots of the foundation of the country and it’s core principles. Scrape away all the BS and that is what the Alt-Right symbolizes to me. The desire to get back to basics, not in an old fashion way that is closed, moldy and stale, but alive, and breathing but built on truth of what is right for man to be free and what has worked for so many years. It is a basic formula that has been tweaked (manipulated) way too much and needs to be simplified to operate smoothly, cleanly, more efficiently and corruption free.
We are this era’s Jacobin Clubs. We know that things aren’t working with the system we have, and we have to try and build something better. We cannot do this if we are going to stand by and watch our comrades get torn apart by the left the way the “conservatives” have done. And for now we need anonymity.
Of course, when you talk about Western Culture you’re pretty much talking about Stuff White People Did so it can always be made to look like you’re pushing a racial agenda,
Race and culture aren’t neatly separable. Even if you’re purely a culturist instead of a racist or a combination, the Left and Official Conservatism will still call you racist. I don’t know why conservatives bother talking about this or that race’s culture when we’re really criticizing what that race does, which is the same as criticizing the race, ie, being “racist.”
Excellent article.
“Official Conservatism” as defined by NRO, and the John McCains / Paul Ryans, is to promise less government while delivering more. I figured it out early on in W’s first term and began filling my pre-paid RNC envelopes with nasty letters instead of checks. They stopped sending me those convenient envelopes pretty quickly.
The “Alt-Right” appears to be people who actually say what they mean and mean what they say.
Offer gets it right. Rather like my forebears who were original dissenting Puritans in England, came here, became the establishment, then converted to the “New Light” of the Second Awakening, then became establishment again, then took a detour to “pledge” Methodism, all movements must be refreshed ideologically. The Buckley guys served a purpose in the 50s and 60s and gave us Reagan. But that morphed into the Conservative-Pundit Complex that plagues us with fat, complacent think tank check takers clustered around Washington. Like religion, time to get back to basics. Faith, Grace and Scripture.
Your right about those evolutions.
I think, The Alt-Right is another critter entirely, in the sense it is open source, it is upstream of the real politics of party or establishment motives. I’m not saying those involved in your accounting where wrong in establishing and advocating their ideals or ideology, but in all cases, right to this second in time, they left out something that all politics of the day interestingly leave out, the dirt people.
Sure they give lip service to the dirt people, they patronize and gerrymander to them in some fashion or another, but the dirt people are still bottom of the heap.
What the Alt-Right is is the dirt people upstream of everything.
The Alt-Right is the epic component of human freedom, of total resistance. It is culture upstream of politics. It isn’t Alternate, it is Right. It is a zeitgeist and a gestalt. It isn’t a paradigm as such, because the Alt-Right already exists, before it was called the Alt-Right. Yet it represents a sea change in thinking and values because of a recognition of something that already naturally exists.
It is the system trying to balance the equation. The Alt-Right don’t care if you like it or not. It don’t care if it is existential to the status quo. Or not. The Alt-Right just is. It is provincial as provincial is. It is grass roots as grass roots gets. It is matter to anti matter. It is the culture of mind your own fucking business and I won’t! The Alt-Right is by it’s existence existential to everything anti west, anti white, anti tradition, anti liberty. You don’t join the Alt-Right, you are the Alt-Right, you is or you ain’t. It is not a movement, it just is. I doubt it can be ever defined, because it is open source insurgency by nature, it is flexible, it has no ideology, there is no narrative for it, nobody can explain it in entirety, it is the natural guerrilla to cultural marxism’s proxy war, to all its sects and forms. The Alt-Right is the nuclear strong force of cultural thermal dynamics. Nobody can fully explain it, it just is. You only have to accept it or not. You can only be Alt-Right or not, you can’t understand it, you can only live it, or not.
Do you get it?
That The Alternate Right drives so many bat shit crazy is proof it is Right. It is Alternate.
If it wasn’t inherently intrinsically right, legitimate human terrain, nobody would give it notice.
If there was one thing that provided an insight, or maybe exemplifies an important component into the true nature of what the Alt-Right is, is consent. That consent, a singular person use or withdrawal of their consent is the most powerful action of the human terrain. Consent is something that can only be given, it can not be taken, it can not be coerced, only the singular person can give it. But when people, their consent, are amorphous but coalesce into a plurality through natural preference and it becomes an unorganized cascade preference, it becomes a power unlike anything in the sphere of human activity. It doesn’t get any more grass roots than that.
I’d say it is the purview of the dirt people, and only the dirt people, nobody else can grok that.
Great Job Doug, the alt.right mindset is difficult to explain to the uninitiated, but you have come as close as anyone has. I do not think there are many uninitiated on this particular board the red pill and the black pill have been liberally distributed here.
Usenet was great, I wasted a good portion of my waking time there. AR and AFN mostly.
Well thanks A.T., it sure is difficult to define, I’m going by intuition and strictly personal perspective here.
There is something about motive power, and the moral audacity of having the awareness of your traditions and culture of freedom out in front of you that is driving the idea of Alt-Right. Whoo, that doesn’t get even close to what I would like to convey.
I’ll go way out on a limb here, because it is so important to convey.
The Alt-Right doesn’t give a damn what anybody thinks of it, how it is portrayed, propaganda and agitprop against it is completely ineffective, the Alt-Right doesn’t care, what the Alt-Right is, is cultural property, property as individual and self determining as the people who each make what the Alt-Right is. The Alt-Right is defiance, it is rebellion, it is gestalt of the so called “Traditional Right”.
William S. Lind coined the term Traditional Right, his masterpiece of courage and conviction, “Victoria”, has many elements of the Alt-Right within it. What Lind calls Retroculture.
Victoria is a great cautionary tale of rejection of cultural marxism and the return of dirt people values. I think if you are to grok the elements, if anyone can, of the Alt-Right, Lind’s tale provides some excellent insights.
– https://www.traditionalright.com/victoria/
But that is the thing about the Alt-Right, it is dangerous, very dangerous. It is like liberty, it is elemental. It is the honorable resistance. You can’t shock and awe the Alt-Right with false flag events, crisis as a means, narratives memes PC and whatnot are a laughing stock, SJW’s buffoons. It is immune to the rules of radicalism. The Fabians new what that self determination was about, how dangerous it was, it is why they set out to destroy what they saw in in the birth of liberty.
See, the Alt-Right isn’t a movement per say, it is movement, it is ground swell. It can’t be stopped by any politics, or the power of the state, it is a state on mind and of spirit, it is indomitable, that is why it is in part dangerous, the other side of the coin is it is akin to liberty kind of dangerous.
What is going on with the Alt-Right is it is going to find out real soon it is a plurality of Freemen so large it is going to blow our minds, it will change everything, it is a paradigm that will shake our world with it’s revelations.
To put it bluntly, the world to the Alt-Right is Because Fuck You Thats Why.
But it is that elemental-ness to it that is part of it’s character, as fodder wing below sublimely put it:
“I feel as though somehow the “Alt-Right” has finally caught up with me. It has been here for a long time and appears to be comprised of a lot of people who simply recognize the times we are in.”
That’s just it. Can you dig the motive potential, the audacity, the power of ones primal rights and dignity of self determination in it, how dangerous the Alt-Right is?
It is a singularly unique insurgency, it’s open source nature makes it an undeniable force.
Eric Frank Russel’s masterpiece ‘Then There Where None’ is a brilliant insight into the Alt-Right, it is timeless. http://www.abelard.org/e-f-russell.php
Thanks for the link. I haven’t read that story in years and I’ve always enjoyed EFR.
Well spoken, Doug. I feel as though somehow the “Alt-Right” has finally caught up with me. It has been here for a long time and appears to be comprised of a lot of people who simply recognize the times we are in.
“When the time comes, they will move on to something else.” I’ve been saying for some time that today’s blue-haired bicurious vegan slam poet is tomorrow’s obergruppenfuhrer. Those people build their identity on being the furthest out on the socially-acceptable “radical” fringe, which, in a few years — depending on how quickly the muzzies gin up their latest atrocity — will be the Alt-Right. I need to start adding “and her gauleiter will be a former Buckleyite,” since that’s where the cushy jobs are.
Since I just can’t be an ‘independent ‘ what do you suppose will become of us?
Will other parties spring up or should we purge the books and take the Republican Party?
There are more of us out here than anyone wants to admit.
I don’t think we’ll have much of a choice, comrade.
Indeed, innate religiosity is innate religiosity, expressed by militant exertion to attain the goals of the official belief system.
This belief system can be utterly self-destructive and evil, as now, or it can be good, for Western civilization, for the white race(s), for the common good.
White people have a tendency towards religion and religious feeling that other races don’t seem to have. I think it’s a really big part of what make us so dynamic, as opposed to, for example, the Chinese.
It’s not that the lefty liberal lunatics are inherently evil, it’s just that their motive desire has been warped to self-flagellation by a sick religion. Like they’re holding a pistol but for some reason the pistol is pointing back at their own head. The pistol isn’t the problem, we just need to make sure it’s pointed in the right direction.
People are followers, give them something virtuous to follow.