We are fortunate, on the Right, to finally be receiving some of the attention we deserve as even some committed Leftists wonder what comes next, since liberal democracy has gone the way of the USSR and any other large-scale human unity exercises in sabotaging its own source of vitality.
Up until now, most studies of the Right have been undertaken by Leftists. These generally do not understand the Right because they view all political beliefs through the filter of ideology, which is the domain of ideas about how humans should socially engineer civilization to fit humans and what humans wish were true about existence, rather than fit within external demands by reality (nature, logic, and the divine).
In contrast, the Right is expressly anti-ideological in that it is a realist philosophy, or one that measures success in terms of results and not human intentions, and seeks to balance that realism with a drive toward excellence and beauty, a measurement which is inherently aesthetic and not equally perceivable by all humans.
The Left, on the other hand, have only one big idea, egalitarianism, which states that humans are equal or should be equal and that this solves all of our problems. Based in Enlightenment™ thought, this notion essentially groups humans into a faceless mob of equals who then need a strong government to consolidate their will into action.
Having slipped into that mindset, Leftists assume that the rest of us have as well, but often do not take note of the fact that conservatives want an organic civilization comprised of culture and heritage instead of a formalized one comprised of rules and incentives. We are not universalists, who believe that all people are the same, but essentialists, who look at the inner values and abilities of each individual, and for that reason we think a one-size-fits-all factory assembly line type society is inhuman and ineffective.
Some try to break free and understand the Right, and the most recent attempt at doing so comes to us from Dianne Dentice, a professor who wrote a analysis of a recent book, Trouble on the far right: contemporary right-wing strategies and practices in Europe, to try to understand the change from postwar Right to movements like the New Right and by extension, Alt Right:
The authors focus on three levels of action that include intellectual work, street action, and party politics. They also offer a succinct definition of the New Right and its shift away from problems associated with National Socialism. The general ideology is still racist although shrouded in conservative revolutionary rhetoric along with coalitions of activists who are committed to gaining seats in German parliament.
Dentice correctly analyzes the nature of the New Right and notes the important shift away from National Socialism, but misunderstands the reasons why. What the Left sees as a change in tactics is in fact a clarification of the fundamental argument of the Right, and a return to its state before the 1930s modernized versions.
The book seems to be written around the topic of the postwar shift on the Right despite not understanding the reason why. What they see as “racist” is in fact preservation of the organic nation against the formalized State of the nation-state, and the shift in postwar conservatism away from National Socialism represents a desire to target modernity as a whole instead of trying to produce an ultra-modern but Right-wing system. The twentieth century shows us that anything tinged with modernism drifts Leftward, producing the type of ideological authoritarian states that National Socialism and Fascism degenerated into. That took them away from the Right and led to their failure.
Yet Trouble on the Far Right is also a reminder that politicians such as Marine Le Pen, Nick Griffin, and Geert Wilders have supporters and win votes in democratically held elections. The far-right both challenges and utilizes government and existing social institutions in furthering their political projects. In both cases, and adding to the challenges faced by political progressives, is the fact that right wing terrorists, anti-Semites, anti-Muslim activists, and homophobes are increasingly connected by social media outlets such as Facebook and platforms such as Stormfront. This can result in mobilization efforts that are difficult to control even though hate speech laws may be in effect.
Instead of viewing the far Right as some tribe of people who are born that way and committed to specific hatreds, the Left might open its lens aperture somewhat and see that Right-wingers are made, based on people who are born to be realists, or those who measure success or failure by results and focus on enhancing those, instead of people who want a substitute reality made of human desires, judgments, and feelings as is the post-Enlightenment™ norm.
We are not ideologues; we are like naturalists, those who observe nature and chronicle its patterns, then find a way to adapt to those that maximize the best — a judgment which is aesthetic and moral as much as logical, but made by our most sensitive and insightful instead of group decision or collective consensus — aspects of life itself, making everyone richer in experience and the comfort of having a stable, consistent society. We dislike change for its own sake, and favor that which has been honored by time for its ability to produce these best results or excellence.
Leftists view us as another variety of Leftist, except that in this view our ideology is anti-egalitarian instead of egalitarian. More accurately, we see no need for egalitarian, and like all paths away from the truth, we discard it as dangerous. Our first goal is to produce the best results and this is done by giving everyone a place in a hierarchy where they can use the skills they have without influencing things for which they do not have the skills to understand and make qualified judgments. This parallels the type of realist hierarchy with a drive toward excellence we see in the military, business, and even religious and academic authorities before they were compromised by the Left.
We also recognize that society works well when it aligns the interests of its members toward a singular purpose and standard of values, and that if it does not do this, it fragments into special interest groups pitted against one another. Diversity represents only the latest of these fragmentations, arising from the class warfare agenda of the Left which sees those of less wealth as being victims of those who have successfully achieved wealth, ignoring the genetic and moral differences between those two groups. We politely acknowledge that poorer people are dumber and more opportunistic, where wealthier people are more intelligent and more guided by principle including that of social order itself, namely that whatever is healthy — sane, stable, realistic — gives wealth by creating the conditions for wealth. It also provides existential and mental comfort through stability.
For this reason, we oppose diversity. We are not bigots in the classical sense, or those who hate, demonize, and scapegoat other groups. We oppose the inclusion of any other group because that inclusion itself damages our social order, and we are content to let them go their own way, much as our ancestors abandoned colonialism once they saw third world populations rising to the ability of self-determination. Our ideal is a win-win situation for everyone, but that requires that we are able to go our own way without other people showing up among us or existing among us. We want zero-diversity societies where benevolent xenophobia is the rule, mainly because we are Machiavellian/Nietzschean realists who recognize that the goal of every group is to conquer all other groups because only then is the group stable. By separating, we interrupt this process of consumption. We acknowledge that every group acts only in its self-interest alone, and that it is unreasonable for us to expect minorities to assimilate or work in any way that benefits us.
We oppose equality because it denies independence, which is another word for natural selection, or the ability for some to rise above others on the basis of their abilities manifested in action. Having better people rise benefits all of us and the organic whole of civilization, a mosaic formed where genetic heritage, culture, faith, and values overlap. A good leader benefits everyone and the civilization, but not everyone can be a good leader, which requires certain inborn traits in high degrees. We recognize that genetics determines more than education, first world childhoods, propaganda, and the like. People are — in the Calvinist argument — born who they are, or as William Blake said, “Some are Born to sweet delight / Some are Born to Endless Night.” This is a rejection of the Enlightenment™ idea that “man is the measure of all things” which implies an equality of judgment ability between all men, and an acceptance that there is an order larger than the individual, in layers of nature, logic, and the metaphysical for those who can perceive it.
Equality always takes from the higher and gives to the lower because one cannot raise the lower by an external force; only they can raise themselves, through inner moral goodness and intelligence which leads to assiduous self-application to adaptation. We realize that we have two options: either the best rule the rest, or the rest rule the best, and the last two centuries of experimentation with the latter have gone rather badly so we would like to throw that idea in the dustbin of history alongside Communism, Socialism, Fascism, and National Socialism. These are all failed experiments in making a republic — a society of laws and incentives, instead of organic leadership like aristocracy and rule by culture — function, and with them, we discard the notion of a republic entirely.
Anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim sentiment strike us as misunderstandings of the anti-diversity principle, which holds that a society needs unity and since the basis of behavior is genetic, only one genetic group can exist in a single civilization. We do not need to scapegoat others for mistakes we have made, such as The Enlightenment™ or democracy in Athens, but we need to go our own way alone in order to realize our potential.
What the Left sees as a change in tactics is in fact a clarification of our argument to ourselves about the nature of conservatism, which has been misunderstood because after centuries of post-Enlightenment™ trends toward individualism and its group manifestation, egalitarianism, our own thinkers have become confused about the nature of conservatism. We can summarize conservatism as realism plus a drive toward transcendental excellence, often expressed as the transcendentals, usually “the good, the beautiful, and the true” or some similar variant.
We are not racists so much as those who realize that anti-racism is genocide for us; we realize that Asiatic systems of government such as democracy lead to a stampede toward the lowest common denominator, which is an inversion of the classic ideal of the West, which is of promoting the best above the rest in thought and action. We see that eternal human wishful thinking (a social impulse, like peer pressure or bullying, when in the hands of group) like equality, pacifism, diversity, and pluralism is simply a refusal to choose a path for ourselves. We see that individuals vary and that the root of this is found in genetics, not just between races and ethnic groups but within races and ethnic groups, a type of human banding known as caste which generally reveals 90% as laborers who must be told what to do, 9% as artisans and warriors who must be shown a principle of what to do, and 1% leaders who can figure out what must be done. Within our own people, individuals have widely different intellectual, moral, and specialized abilities, and we seek to recognize individuality by placing each in a role where he or she can use those abilities without being tasked with questions above their station, or role in the social order. We also see that it would benefit us to have a financial system that keeps most money in the hands of aristocrats so that they keep it from being a method of ruthless competition. This keeps us away from financial systems that cause an addiction to growth and with it, an increase in instability and a revelation of the worst impulses of humanity.
We want to end the European diaspora, in which we have been trying to escape the decline of Western Civilization 3.0, which has followed Rome and Athens into the abyss. We acknowledge the truth of Oswald Spengler, who wrote that most great civilizations fail through internal decay, and that the Earth is littered with the remains of once-great civilizations who collapsed through class warfare.
We want an organic society, not a state or consumerist corporate bureaucracy. We desire that economic and politic systems serve the organic whole — that overlap of continuity with the past, futuristic ambitions, heritage, values, and culture as well as our people who fit within that rubric — instead of us serving those systems. In theory, they are a means to the end of the thriving of the organic unit, not the other way around, but in practice, all of these systems, because they are not united like an organic society comprised of institutions united in parallel around the central idea of civilization itself, tend to become self-serving and lead us to disaster like the various financial crashes and the fall of Communism in 1991. Nor does the civilization unit serve individuals in the facilitative manner of a consumer society, but individuals working together in parallel and unequal roles are able to achieve the continuity of civilization. We are parts of it as cells in a body, trees in a forest, or days in a year: united by its principle, acting independently, and furthering it as a living thing larger than ourselves.
For us to reify this vision on a continual basis requires that we go our own way and reinstall a bundle of traditions which work for us: aristocracy, caste, hierarchy, purpose, and a faith based in nature which can be expressed in any religion or philosophy. We have a unique view of life among all civilizations and it can only be preserved through separation, which in turn allows us to further refine it and approach new challenges with renewed strength, continuing our history of innovation from which all groups on Earth have benefited.
Finally, we recognize thymos or the need for significance and meaning to life. People want significance in exchange for the pain of death, and we can only have that through an end to the enlightenment me-first mentality that leads both to egalitarianism and rampant materialistic self-centeredness. Unity is our byword, and we recognize that through submission to an order above ourselves, we gain a greater wealth in intangibles such as stability, health, sanity, and the pursuit of existential significance, meaning, and purpose.
None of this translated into modernistic systems like the American or English constitutions, Communism, fascism, and National Socialism, so we have left them behind. While we recognize the truths of classical liberalism, it is part of the equation but not the whole, much as these other systems had part but not all of a realistic outlook. Nothing that exists now can address what we need, and we seek to avoid any kind of globally-connected system where strong coupling means that we all fall together when it collapses. Many smaller systems, working in parallel, allow for competition between ideas and then the adoption of those ideas by others, instead of what we have now where anyone who rises is swamped in those who seek to take advantage of that wealth but not change their thinking or behavior. Globalism has died alongside liberal democracy just as surely as Communism died in 1991 and National Socialism died in 1945. This is evolution, not progress.
The root of our ideas originates in something like what was advanced by the deep ecology movement, which is the awareness that laws and other after-the-fact incentives do not change us within, where if we change our attitudes and inclinations we can build a society around that culture and in doing so, bypass the behaviors that lead to the horrors of modernity including genocide, pollution, existential misery, ugly cities, ecocide, cubicle McJobs, broken families, violent inner cities, corruption, race riots, and consumerism. People are miserable in our modern time and this leads them to be selfish, destructive, and manipulative. When we restructure our society around the realistic and excellent, we step over this phase of insanity and can move on to better things, avoiding the unnecessarily destructive behaviors of the past in the process.
The above constitutes one version of a “big tent” of political ideas that are still unresolved and not fully defined as the Right engages in internal dialogue. At Amerika, we call this the Ult Right and give it four general pillars:
The Left will misunderstand the Right until the Left recognizes that we are not ideologues, and that the core of our belief is something like what is outlined above.
With that in mind, we can see how Dentice has hit on the core of a changing Right: looking to exceed the past, change itself, and through that, change not just tactics but fundamental behaviors so that it can be ready to inherit the future as liberal democracy winds down in a maelstrom of debt, disorder, and dysfunction. Her review of this book is worth reading and should serve as a platform for future study of the Right.
Tags: alt-right, dianne dentice, new right, rightism, ult right