There has been much talk about the alt-right recently, most of it utter nonsense. The Communist propaganda machine that is otherwise known as the Canadian media has been full of stories this past week about how “shocked” and “horrified” the residents of Hogtown, aka Toronto, have been at “racist” posters that appeared on telephone poles urging white people to join the alt-right. According to the CBC the police have said “they have yet to determine if the posters will be investigated as a hate crime.” Here is my advice to the boys in blue: why don’t you try sticking to your actual job of maintaining Her Majesty’s peace and investigating real crimes – murder, arson, rape, vandalism, robbery and the like – for once, instead of wasting the taxpayer’s money on people who have done nothing except hurt the feelings of spoiled rotten left-wing and liberal kooks and crybabies.
There appears to have been several versions of the poster but the one that I have seen most often in these stories has the heading “Hey, White Person” followed by several point form questions such as “Tired of political correctness?”, “Wondering why only white countries have to become multicultural?” and “Figured out that diversity only means ‘less white people’?”
The reason why so many people are putting on a big show of wringing their hands and wailing “woe is me” while condemning this poster as racist is that this allows them to avoid thinking about the questions raised by the poster. For these are questions that expose the contradictions in the doublethink so loved by the liberal left on matters of race and ethnicity.
Rush Limbaugh had the courage to point out that contradiction on his talk-show recently. In response to CNN’s Van Jones who had condemned Donald Trump’s victory in the recent US Presidential election as a “whitelash” Limbaugh asked why liberal Democrats, who encourage every other group in the United States to vote their self-interest and to do so monolithically as a block condemn white people for doing the same thing. Answering his own question he said:
I'll tell you what it is. What they are saying, what they are implying is that when white people vote their interests, it's racism. When any other group does, it's not racism, it's not sexism, there's no bigotry at all, but when white people do it, it's bigotry. Otherwise why have a problem with it? … It's in their minds, is my point, in the minds of the left, white people voting their self-interest is voting for racism. And that just offends the hell out of me.
Another way of saying this is that for the liberal left white people are the only group not allowed to have legitimate self-interests.
Unfortunately, far too many conservatives appear to think the same thing. It is for this reason that the alt-right was born. “Alt-right” is short, obviously, for “alternative right.” This was originally the name of a website that started up about six years ago, founded and edited by Richard Spencer, formerly the editor of Taki Theodoracopulos’ eponymous paleoconservative/libertarian e-zine and by Colin Liddell who co-edits the present incarnation of the website with Andy Nowicki. The idea behind the title was that there was a need for an alternative to the mainstream right, i.e., conservatism, that would speak truths about race and sex that conservatism was too afraid to speak and would not just be a mild echo of the left on these matters. The short version of the title caught on as the name of an online movement that utilizes various social media platforms to convey its message.
The alt-right received a great deal of media attention during the presidential campaign thanks to a speech Hillary Clinton gave in which she warned of the dangerous alt-right movement behind Donald Trump. It was clear from her speech that she didn’t have a clue what she was talking about but her attempts to foment fear over the alt-right generated some of the election’s unintentionally hilarious moments, such as when her campaign posted warnings about Pepe, the cartoon frog that for some reason unknown to me had been co-opted by the alt-right as a sort of mascot.
The connection between Donald Trump and the alt-right has been largely exaggerated, I suspect, although the two have the same set of enemies, and the sort of people freaking out about the alt-right are generally the same people freaking out about Trump’s victory. Sadly, this includes some traditionalist conservatives with whom I would more often than not agree. With some of what they have to say about the alt-right I would agree. The alt-right is populist and nationalist – and I have written at least five essays against populism and several others on why nationalism is a dangerous ideological substitute for true patriotism. Both are variations of Rousseau’s concept of the sovereignty of the people. This notion is the well from which every form of leftism from anarchism to Communism sprang, and those of us who are truly rightist, and believe in divine and royal sovereignty instead, look upon it with scorn. There are strong pagan and Nietzschean components of the alt-right and its message sometimes comes wrapped up in a great deal of crudity, vileness, and incivility. That having been said, my message to those conservatives dismayed at the rise of the alt-right and the Trump victory is a simple one:
If the mainstream right had been doing its job right there would never have been an alt-right.
Peter Hitchens, wrote a wonderful “I-told-you-so-column” for the Mail on Sunday the weekend after the election, directed at the liberal elites who ploughed on. He wrote:
With their mass immigration, their diversity and equality, their contempt for lifelong stable marriage, their refusal to punish crime, their mad, idealistic foreign wars, their indulgence of drugs, their scorn for patriotism, their schools and universities, turning out graduates with certificates that can barely read…their destruction of real jobs, promising a new globalised prosperity that never came.
As a result, Hitchens added, “millions have just had too much of this.”
As much as the liberal-left deserves Hitchens’ rebuke, so does the mainstream right. Indeed, they are far more worthy of this rebuke because, while we expect liberals to be liberals, conservatives are supposed to provide us with right-headed alternatives to the wrong-headed ideas of liberalism.
In our day and age, working and middle class white people have suffered economically and politically from the attempts to integrate the countries of the world into a global economy in which borders do not impede the movement of either capital or labour. They have seen good jobs disappear – exported to parts of the world where labour is much cheaper – with little to replace them except much lower paying service sector jobs. These jobs, however, are being taken by the large numbers of low-skilled, third world, immigrants who are being imported thanks to the same globalist forces. Worse, those who have achieved elite status in the globalist era – politicians and bureaucrats, academics, journalists, celebrities, etc. – have heaped insult upon injury, by treating these people with contempt – especially those who live in rural areas – and by dismissing and denouncing their every expression of dissatisfaction as “racism.”
In this globalist era, the liberal-left has built a support base for itself by forming a coalition of non-white racial and ethnic groups, non-Christian religious groups, feminists, and those of alternative sexuality and gender identity. The liberal-left tries to appeal to the self-interests of each of these groups, as mutually exclusive and contradictory as these often are are. It holds this fragile and volatile coalition of groups that often hate each other together with a narrative that tells them that what they have in common is that they have all been historically oppressed by white, Christian, heterosexual, males.
The mainstream right ought to have looked to the example of Benjamin Disraeli, the First Earl of Beaconsfield, who led the Conservative Party and served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom during the reign of Queen Victoria. Disraeli, observing the harsh effects that the enclosure of the medieval commons, industrialization, and the rise of Manchester liberalism had had on the poor and working classes, promoted programs aimed at alleviating their misery. Disraeli saw that the party which stood for the established church and the royal authority of the crown, and for long established tradition, law, and constitutional order needed to make the interests of the working classes its own in order to prevent them from becoming the forces of revolution, levelling, socialism, and anarchy. During this era of globalist liberalism, the traditionalist right should have similarly made itself the champion of the middle and working classes adversely affected by globalism and especially of the white, Christian, heterosexual males scapegoated by the left in a manner reminiscent of the way a particular ethnic group was scapegoated by the leftist who was dictator of Germany from 1933 to 1945. (1)
There have been those, such as Steve Sailer, Kevin Michael Grace here in Canada, and the late Sam Francis, who have advised the right to do just that, to translate the wisdom of Disraeli’s “one nation conservatism” into what has been dubbed the “Sailer Strategy”. Instead of heeding this advice, however, mainstream conservatives, whether of the Conservative Party in Canada and the UK, or the Republican Party in the United States, have denounced the advice as racist, lumped it together with the left’s appeal to their own support base as “identity politics”, and attempted to woo supporters away from the liberal-left coalition groups with rational arguments for low taxes, less government regulations, stricter law enforcement against violent crime, national security, and the superiority of private enterprise over capitalism. These efforts have seen little to no success.
This is why there is an alt-right.
The lesson to be learned from all of this is that if, like myself, you are a traditional rightist who dislikes and distrusts populism and nationalism, then you should not make it so that the victims of liberalism have no other means than populist nationalism to find redress for their grievances.
If, like many Christian traditionalists I have read, you are distressed that a vulgar man of low moral character has been catapulted into the most powerful position in the world by appealing to the interests of the white working and middle classes, then perhaps you should have spoken up for their interests yourselves.
If you find the crude but effective term that the alt-right has coined for pro-immigration, pro-free trade “conservatives” who condemn anti-immigration, anti-free trade whites as “racists” to be disgusting than you ought to do something about the treacherous impiety the term designates. If you do not like the signifier, do something about what it signifies.
At the risk of blowing my own horn, I can say that my own conscience is clear on these matters, at least. For as long as I have been writing, my essays have concentrated on arguing for the Tory principles that I have believed in all of my life – royalism and monarchy, Canada, her Loyalist history and heritage, the Westminster parliamentary system of government, institutional religion, our Common Law rights and freedoms – and against the moral, social, and cultural decline and decay of our society. At the same time, I have written in opposition to the kind of mass immigration that is radically changing the makeup of our country, against the antiracism that is merely a cloak for antiwhite bigotry, and against every kind of political correctness. Far too much is at stake with the latter set of issues – alt-right issues if you will – to allow them to become exclusively the property of radicals who may or may not care about the former set of principles.
(1) That’s right, Hitler was a leftist, not a leader of the “far right” as we often hear. He was a revolutionary who hated everything the right believed in and stood for – royalty, aristocracy, and the church. There was no liberalism in his leftism, but the movement he headed was a synthesis of two nineteenth century leftist movements – nationalism and socialism – and his animosity towards the Bolsheviks was that of a twin rival, not of a polar opposite.
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