For those of you out there who already know the ins and outs of the Right-Wing ecosystem this post won’t provide any new information except inasmuch as it provides my slant on it. For everybody else this may provide some insights into what the various groups believe and how they relate to each other.
Over the course of several years, my understanding of the relationship between the various components of the Right-Wing has become somewhat better. Back in 2016 the term Alt-Right was bandied about by the Media to describe almost anyone to the right of Jeb Bush and John McCain. And for Leftists that hasn’t changed. They use the term as a club to attack anyone who appears to be a threat to their political dominance. But for those on the Right there is plenty of confusion about the various groups and their defining ideologies. And that’s to be expected because actually most people aren’t really sure which group, they themselves belong to or if they even fit comfortably into one of the boxes that have simple labels. Terms like Dissident Right and White Nationalism sound strange and threatening to regular people who have always just heard labels like Democrat and Republican or Liberal and Conservative. But it is important to know who’s out there and what they believe and how they influence the larger community of people who don’t believe in the Left-Wing narrative.
As ever, the largest and the least self-aware component of the Non-Left-Wing are the NORMIES. They are regular schlubs who go to work and raise their kids and pay their taxes and think of themselves as regular Americans who aren’t ideological. They probably think that Mitt Romney must be pretty conservative because he’s a Mormon and because he said he was “extremely conservative” back when he was running for president in 2012. Basically, these folks are so busy trying to live their lives that they aren’t even aware that the country has drifted enormously to the left over the course of their adult lives. And when they do realize what has happened a lot of them are so apathetic that if asked whether it is even possible to reverse the changes that have taken place, they’d say no. Some of these people are unreachable. They are largely inert and the most you can hope for is that they’ll drift to the right if the country moves in that direction. But they are also the target group for recruitment by the next two groups.
Next up are the AWAKENED NORMIES. I fall into this class. These are the normies who looked up one day and realized that the country had been taken over by Anti-Americans with the willing participation of the establishment Republicans and that there existed a Rebellion that was actively resisting this Anti-American establishment. These are the people who jumped on board the Trump band wagon when it became clear that he was the only candidate who wouldn’t just give us more of the same Leftist result that we had been seeing from every politician after Ronald Reagan. Most of these awakened normies are civic nationalists who trusted in the tenets that were espoused in school and in the media when we were kids back a generation ago and thought that what needed to be done was return to the old ways of looking at things and everything else would straighten itself out. Now they realize that the only way to fight identity politics is with identity politics. It has been made painfully clear to us that we have been made the fall guys for the rest of America and the only way we are going to succeed is to level the playing field. We’ll have to stand up for our own rights because no one else, including our so-called representatives, is willing to.
Beyond the awakened are the RADICALIZED. There are several groups in this category. These folks have decided that the United States is broken and can’t be fixed. Among these folks are groups that describe themselves as Dissident Right, Alt-Right, White Nationalists and other things. Many of these folks espouse a belief called human biodiversity. According to this way of looking at things, racial differences in intelligence will preclude the United States from functioning as it has in the past once the fraction of the population descended from Europeans falls below some unspecified point. In addition, they feel that once political control no longer resides among the European descendants the identity politics practiced by the Democrat party will make life for the European descendants intolerable.
In general, these radicalized folks assume that trying to continue on in the old way is futile and what needs to be done first is bring the European descended population together into an identity group that can coordinate its efforts to protect its interests. Where these groups differ is what is seen by each as the end state of this strategy.
The Alt-Right and other White Nationalists envision some white ethno-state occupying some proportion of the present geographical territory of the United States alongside other successor states populated by the other ethnic groups.
The Dissident Right seems to contain more moderate individuals who envision the outcome involving various state governments adopting laws that diverge from the current Leftist trajectory. For instance, some of the more conservative southern states are already challenging the Roe v. Wade orthodoxy by passing abortion restrictions that eventually will be challenged by federal courts. What the Dissident Right foresees is the day when a state government will ignore the decision of a Federal or Supreme Court decision that it feels is intolerable. At that point the idea is that ignoring the Federal decision will trigger the beginning of a loosening of the United States. And in a way we are already seeing this. Federal law prohibits the ownership or use of marijuana. But several states have legalized it. And the example of Sanctuary Cities flouting the action of federal ICE enforcement is especially flagrant. With these precedents it becomes easier to imagine the federal government ignoring challenges from the Right at the state or regional level if they institute policies that are popular in those places.
What I’ve left out of this spectrum are groups like Neoconservatives, libertarians and establishment Republicans who have no interest in what I would call the normal social issues. None of these groups care a whit if progressives want to put three-year-olds in gender reassignment programs or allow post birth abortion as the law of the land. If any of these groups ever agree with the agenda of the actual Right-Wing it will be, as in the words of the fictional person disclaimer, “purely coincidental.”
As stated above I fall into the middle group. I’m in between the sleepwalkers and the bomb-throwers. I am aware of both and I am formulating here how I interact with each of them. First of all, the thing to know about the normies is they can’t teach you much. They’re like your younger siblings. You’ve been where they are now but they don’t know what you know. The ZMan (a bad thinker in the Dissident Right) makes the analogy of a river. Those who have crossed over know both sides but those who haven’t only know their side. Getting them to cross over is the challenge. Of course, his river leads to the Dissident Right. I’m just talking about what is needed to wake up the sleepwalkers. But it’s still a transition. It requires them to discover that something that they thought was true is false. For me it was learning that the Republican establishment was the controlled opposition. That in exchange for the perks of office they would put up a sham resistance to the Progressives but always lose. As has been often pointed out they are the Washington Generals of American politics. So that is the primary mission for the awakened; to rouse the sleepwalkers. Because in a democracy numbers are everything and the sleepwalkers are where the numbers are. So with the normies you look to open their eyes to something that will shock them out of their coma. Show them something like the “evolving” conservative opinion on illegal immigration. That should do it.
But what is our relationship with the radicalized groups? Well, it is varied. For those who are already foaming at the mouth and beating the drum for fire fights in the street I believe the correct stance is to keep your distance. As has been noted elsewhere, often the most extreme groups are really mostly FBI agents looking for fools to show themselves as madmen. But by the same token it’s not my job to police these groups. Let the Left own that. Punching right is a slippery slope.
For the less extreme groups it’s extremely useful to see what they have to say. Often much of what they believe is quite true and in fact these groups were the first to notice and figure out the tactics and goals of the Left and their stooges in the Republican establishment. Typically, with these groups it’s the conclusions they draw for how all this will end up that are the points of disagreement with the awakened civic nationalists. From my point of view, they’ve thrown the baby out with the bath water and have gone too far. So, reading their essays is usually a case of nodding in agreement for the first two thirds of the document and then grimacing when it gets to the bitter end. But reading that two thirds is very valuable. For instance, you don’t have to be hoping to divvy up the United States into bite sized chunks to realize that the way to address the anti-white rhetoric of the Progressives is to get these people being libeled to band together and use their clout to put a stop to these attacks. The Dissident Right is known for the motto “You’re not going to vote your way out of this.” But if you look at the fragmentation on the Left it isn’t far-fetched to imagine that coalitions can be built to make common cause against lots of Leftist policies that are extremely unpopular. More than anything it’s a matter of awareness of how gaslighting by the Left and their allies in the controlled opposition has been used to cow the normies over things like illegal immigration, job outsourcing and LGBTQ issues. When you stop assuming it’s a lost cause you have a chance to win.
So, my policy is to read the more moderate radicals and glean what they know but withhold judgement on their conclusions. After all, if they’re right then all that they say will come to pass. And knowing the why and how will leave me in a position to respond to the situation. But if the awakened population is able to assert themselves to the point where society returns to the normal behaviors that we expect in the United States then that would certainly be a better outcome in my opinion.
After all the fact that human beings are not identical individuals either in intelligence or any other characteristic is pretty obvious. And even if some groups differ markedly from others that is no reason to assume that they can’t each cooperate in a heterogeneous society. After all I’m no super genius but I can work with people who are both smarter and dumber than I am. From my experience what needs to stop is the Leftist practice of trying to blame every difference in outcomes on racism or sexism or any other -ism they care to invent. If a 4’ 11” woman can’t carry an eighty-pound pack of critical gear during the training exercises for the Navy Seals the solution isn’t to drop the requirement down to ten pounds so that she can qualify. That’s the madness that has gotten us here. But neither do I think that fixing this requires the balkanization of the United States. It requires some honesty, courage and the willingness to say no to the insane and their dishonest enablers.
So that’s the latest installment in my voyage through the stormy seas of non-Leftist thought. As ever, it’s confusing, aggravating and uncertain but without a doubt we’ve made significant progress in the last three years. More and more people know Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney work for the Progressives and Donald Trump saved them from a fate worse than death, Hillary. Long live the revolution and keep the faith baby.
