Identity Politics and Civic Nationalism – Part 1
At the end of the first part of this post I said I’d look a little more closely at the specifics of the Dissident Right’s logic and compare it to my own way of looking at where we are.
First off let’s acknowledge something that we cannot afford to forget. The Dissident Right (or Alt-Right if you prefer) was the only group who both knew what was going wrong in this country and weren’t afraid to say it out loud. They recognized that the Left was in control of all the levers of power and the Establishment Republicans had no intention of changing the results of the Left’s program.
The Dissident Right explained exactly how the schools and colleges proselytized the children and how the Media, the Democrats, Big Business and the Courts twisted every part of society until nothing remains of the normal world of just a few years ago. And as proven, the Establishment Republicans use the anger this generates to get themselves re-elected. But once in office they can be depended on to never actually reverse any of this destruction and instead just talk about how dead set they are against whatever the next outrage is. And when that outrage becomes law they just move along to the next.
And the Dissident Right identified the fact that both Parties and Big Business were determined to use immigration, both legal and illegal, as a means to swamp out the votes of the citizens of the United States as a way to eliminate all resistance to their agenda. It was plain during the 2016 election that none of the Republicans, no matter how “conservative” he was, would say a word against illegal immigration for fear of being called a racist.
And the Dissident Right was the only group that supported Trump. Everyone else either said he was a joke or abhorred him for being a vulgarian.
So, as I said above, ignoring the Dissident Right means ignoring the only group that knew how we were losing the Country to the Left and how we could stop them from doing it. Clearly what they say has to be carefully considered.
But you might say, why not just jump on their band wagon? For me, that is a disturbing choice. The Dissident Right is comprised of people who believe that differences in race and even ethnicity prevent a heterogeneous state like the present United States from living in harmony. They believe that the future will be a fractious hodge-podge of identity groups that, led by the trouble-makers on the Left, will spend all their time pursuing imaginary grievances against the European Americans that they’ve been told are holding them back from being happy.
The Dissident Right points to affirmative action discrimination and the destruction of the family and the LGBTQ lawfare warriors and de-platforming of people on the right and say we are already there and that once we are a majority-minority-nation, things will only get much worse.
Accepting this hypothesis as true is not something I would do unless forced by irrefutable evidence. But having it espoused by people who have been right about things that the majority were wrong about means I have to find reasonable arguments for why the Dissident Right is mistaken in their conclusions.
Instead of going through a bunch of cases and subsets of categories I’ll sum up the problem we’re experiencing by saying that in the 1960s when the economy was very strong the leaders of the Democrat party saw that they no longer had an unbeatable coalition of disaffected voters like they had in the 1930s and 1940s. They decided to follow the Marxist playbook and weaken their enemies by sowing as much division as they could. They espoused abortion as a way to destroy the family and they sponsored all the grievance movements to further fracture the country. They infested the schools and steadily eroded intellectual life until even the sciences were politicized and distracted from their primary functions. And they enshrined massive immigration both legal and illegal.
But even when all this was going on it was still possible for a conservative leader like Ronald Reagan to rally the Right. And when that happened, the country was able to see itself as one people. It was only when we were led by people who believed in the propaganda of the Left that everything has fallen completely apart. Basically, since 1988 (thirty years) we have been living under the rule of the Left and their Globalist Echoes on the Fake Right. Bush Senior, Clinton, Bush Junior and Obama allowed every outrage of the Left to happen to us with either enthusiasm or feigned reluctance.
This track record is why I think that the Dissident Right may be mistaken in the irreversibility of the changes we are experiencing. In just two years President Trump has installed a whole generation of federal judges who will begin the process of reversing the damage done by the rogue judiciary. Without Justice Kennedy it’s possible that the SCOTUS will reverse the decisions that found a constitutional mandate for abortion and gay marriage and affirmative action. Those types of actions would change the world we live in. Once those injustices are addressed people would see the world much differently.
The final thing that I need to address is the Race Realism that the Dissident Right says will prevent the United States from existing in harmony. They claim that both differences in behavior and feelings of separateness will forever keep different races and ethnicities from living peacefully together. My experience with diversity is a product of growing up and living in New York City in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Believe me when I tell you that things were very far from harmonious in the “glorious mosaic” that existed in that era. There was a separate neighborhood every ten to fifteen blocks and mostly the ethnic and racial groups didn’t happily mingle or even interact. There were riots and even several large areas of the city burned down. Crime was rampant and the subways were very dangerous as were the parks and other empty areas. Of course, the Democrats were always stoking the unrest with grievance propaganda. But then I remember what happened when the city finally had had enough and elected a law and order Republican, Rudy Giuliani. It got better! And indeed, the people of all races and ethnicities felt more united and less angry when a sensible government started enforcing the law and holding everyone accountable.
I won’t claim that there aren’t differences between people. In fact, I’ll go one step further and says we’re all different from each other. Every family has a smarter kid and a tougher kid and a kid who doesn’t follow the rules. But if one kid does better in school you can’t hold him back to make the less smart kid feel better about himself. And as every parent knows, the best way to keep the peace in a family is to come up with reasonable rules and make sure that everyone follows them. It’s only when you see someone else getting away with something, you’re not allowed to that trouble begins.
So, this is getting overly long. My way of thinking about this is that if we can elect non-leftists who want to restore normalcy to the country, we can do it. Maybe it won’t happen. But just saying it’s impossible doesn’t appeal to me, at least not yet. President Trump has given me hope that it can be done. Let’s see if he can do it before we throw in the towel.