In recent years I have paid less and less attention to what goes on in White Nationalism generally, or what is now known as the Alternative Right. Whether White Nationalism and the Alternative Right are the same thing, or different things, I cannot tell. Some people think that they are the same thing. Others deny it.
But why invent a new term at all? Are there really any new political orientations that have not been labeled?
No, of course not. A new label is invented to escape stereotyping. It’s the same reason that Blackwater Security keeps changing its name. Nobody wants to be called Racist or White Supremacist, because the mass-media always represent Racists and White Supremacists in a negative way. (Racism and White Supremacy, by the way, were not always universally considered derogatory terms.) Most people prefer to do things the easy way. So, rather than try to fight the stereotype, one chooses a new label.
I have never used the term Alternative Right to refer to myself, because I thought it was too vague. I have never been eager to participate in fads, which is how the use of that term appeared to me. Also, as a national-socialist, my position is a synthesis of what are normally regarded as left and right. To say that I am on the right would not be entirely accurate.
Most people are not going to know from the name just what the Alternative Right is. Because the term has no instantly clear meaning, its intended meaning is easily missed or distorted.
When Steve Bannon told a Jewish reporter for Mother Jones that Breitbart was a “platform for the Alt Right,” he offered a rather vague notion of what this might mean:
“Our definition of the alt-right is younger people who are anti-globalists, very nationalist, terribly anti-establishment.” [S. Posner, Mother Jones, 22 August 2016]
Mother Jones of course did not fail to inform readers of the term’s inextricable association with White Nationalism. Bannon has subsequently declared that Breitbart had “zero tolerance” for “racial and anti-Semitic” views.
Ann Coulter, on the other hand, has recently said that her idea of the Alt Right is: teenagers who discovered that it is fun to be called racist.
This is not at all the impression given by Richard Spencer’s panel of Alt Right luminaries — Peter Brimelow, Kevin MacDonald, Jared Taylor, et al. — at a press-conference on 19 November 2016. They are all uptight about being called racist. When a reporter asked if they were racist, instead of boldly saying, “Yes we are racists,” they objected to it. Jared Taylor said that the word racist was pejorative (obviously not having read René Binet’s Theory of Racism). So, it is clear that these luminaries, who are supposed to represent the Alt Right, are in fact less radical than the “teenagers” that Ann Coulter thinks really are the Alt Right.
When a reporter mentioned Andrew Anglin and The Daily Stormer, Peter Brimelow (a former employee of National Review) felt obliged to stipulate that Anglin was not a member of the Alt Right at all, but “a flat-out Neonazi,” meaning that there was some important difference between Anglin and the Alt Right.
This really puzzled me, because it is not at all clear, from a strictly political perspective, that these Alt Right luminaries share goals not shared by Andrew Anglin. The differences between MacDonald and Taylor alone are huge. MacDonald focuses entirely on Jews, while Taylor tries never to focus on Jews. If they are in one boat together, it is a broadly pro-White boat. It does not seem tenable to assert that they are in one movement together while Andrew Anglin is in a different one — if it is strictly a matter of politics.
It is obviously not a matter of politics. There are other reasons why they find the association with Anglin embarrassing. Basically he is running a sensationalist tabloid in the form of a blog, and he is catering to a young audience, and, perhaps most importantly, he does not avoid taboos that these respectable luminaries assiduously shun, starting with the very name of his blog. Just as these worthies fled from the word racism, they flee from that association. Pretending that there was a huge political gulf between “the Alt Right” and The Daily Stormer was a way of escaping this embarrassment. It is bourgeois respectability that is at stake here.
This is at the opposite extreme from Ann Coulter’s impression of what the Alt Right is.
I was dismayed to hear Spencer say that the Alt Right is interested in “the conservative revolution in Germany.” The “Revolutionary Conservatives” were a tiny political movement that had very little effect. Whatever useful ideas they produced were subsumed under National-Socialism. One of the better known Revolutionary Conservatives, Hermann Rauschning, became a traitor to his country. When people say that they are interested in the Revolutionary Conservatives, it tells me that they have some inhibition about showing an interest in National-Socialism, which was obviously a much more important movement. It is a way of maintaining distance from Hitler, which means that Richard Spencer is still under the influence of Holocaust–propaganda. Spencer’s professed admiration for the French New Right — he named Benoist, Faye, and Steuckers — likewise represents a retreat from taboo, because these men generally avoid discussing Jews. Bourgeois respectability, bourgeois inhibition, still at work.
It must have been like the Earth crumbling beneath them, therefore, when Tila Tequila and two young men at the conference were photographed giving a Roman salute. All those pains taken to avoid being called racist, and to avoid association with The Daily Stormer, only to have this happen. (It has since been determined that the two males photographed giving a Roman salute with Tila Tequila are Jews.)
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| This may vaguely resemble Ann Coulter’s idea of the Alt Right. |
If Richard Spencer and his friends are not even able to control the behavior of people attending NPI’s conferences, they are certainly not going to be able to control the use of the term Alt Right.
Ultimately, because there is no control over what “Alt Right” can mean and who calls himself “Alt Right,” the term will continue to be stretched and distorted until it becomes entirely useless, or even a liability for some who have conspicuously applied the term to themselves. That process surely accelerated recently, when the term acquired importance as the object of so much attention.
Now, Spencer’s National Policy Institute is a different matter. That is an organization. Its goals and membership can be defined by its leadership. Good luck to Richard Spencer on that. I just hope that NPI’s proposals will be as radical and thorough as our situation requires.