The dissident right (DR) certainly has an appeal to anyone who has watched the disintegration of American society and culture over the last sixty years (I am currently 62 years old). I found the DR critique of many of the United States current problems to be very insightful. In the end though, I think the proposed DR solutions to our problems will cause more problems than they solve.
I agree that Heritage Americans have been reviled and treated with a hatred that has surprised me. The question is: is that hatred solely an ethnic hatred? I would say that it isn’t. “White people” are strongly associated with being Christian. I don’t think that’s particularly true anymore but that is the stereotype and lefties love them some stereotypes. The BLM website at onetime listed both stable marriage between a man and a woman and deferred gratification as being examples of white privilege. No, those are examples of Christian morality. Of course ethnic differences are used as a wedge to fracture our society and it has been wildly effective.
Can different ethnicities live side by side peaceably? I don’t see why not in theory but in practice it may no longer be possible. The well has been poisoned and there may be no way back to what we were, the old culture looks to be gone. What is the DR solution then? After giving it a lot of thought I think the DR has settled on some type of ethnic caste system. One set of laws for thee and one for me. Anyone who believes in objective standards of right and wrong (that apply to all people) will find that to be a real problem. I know I do.
I would also like to ask: how should ethnicity be defined? Even in the founding of the United States the English weren’t as homogeneous as we’d like to imagine (see Albion’s Seed). Add in all the immigration that has already happened and can’t be reversed, it’s a hopeless mess. Lines will have to be drawn in the new system but no one will say how this will happen.
The thing that finally tore it for me is when Zman declared that there is no such thing as “rights.” Declaring rights to be an abstract concept that don’t actually exist, he dismissed them out of hand. If there is no such thing as individual rights then there is no such thing as personal liberty. Everyone nowadays seems to want to put a leash on me. Zman’s statement reminded me of a quote by communitarian Alasdair MacIntyre:
“From this it does not of course follow that there are no natural or human rights; it only follows that no one could have known that there were. And this at least raises certain questions. But we do not need to be distracted into answering them, for the truth is plain: there are no such rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and in unicorns.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory
I am not familiar with the work of Professor Özkırımlı but the title of his book seems to indicate that his is a “critical theory.” This country is dying from too much Hegelian theory, do we really need more?
I took Zman’s assertion that natural or individual rights do not exist as the affirmation that these concepts originate in Western Civilization, and are not universal. Throughout my military career traveling the globe, this resonated with me as our ideas are just that – ours. One would receive blank stares from Indonesian bush folks if you began to try and explain these. This is why the dilution of Western countries by mass immigration (invasion, really) puts these abstract conceptions of natural and individual rights at risk under our supposed Democracy. For example, look to the polls of Muslims in the… Read more »