“Right-wing activism” feels like a misnomer. It’s not an actual thing because the right-wing is not a friend to chaos or rabble-rousing. The right-wing supposedly exists to value tradition and maintain order. They are a reaction to the dissolution of identity, of order, of the essence of a nation. The minute “traditionalists” become violent and irreverent of power is the moment they lose. They become the easiest bad guy because they are making themselves clear agents of sedition. Furthermore, it is a waste of energy. If you’re pasting posters on poles and yelling from a megaphone thinly-veiled white nationalist platitudes, just with broad phrasing to avoid losing interest from potential sympathizers, then you’re probably wasting your time. What many right-wingers want is massive, elaborate, hastened change in the departments of social spending, immigration, free trade, and what is essentially modern state capitalism. These are issues to be rightfully vexed about, but the tools used to get the message across are broken. The modes for which the right-wing can achieve a win are simply not being used. I would argue, however, those modes aren’t even worth it.
We will start off with the finest example of modern right-wing “activism” which I get quite a honeypot vibe from, but is likely still populated by mostly well-intentioned young naïve college kids: Patriot Front. When you check out their “manifesto” section of their website, it’s about fifteen minutes of broad platitudes about restoring American Identity that has been destroyed by “internationalist migration.” Curiously enough, there is not one overt mention of America’s Christian founding. It seems that that isn’t worth mentioning when bringing up identity? They hint more so at the fact that identity isn’t these foreigners who disregard so-called American values. They’re entirely negativist. Other than this “manifesto” section being uncomfortably broad, it is still eloquently-written and gives across a basic understanding of what these guys want - fascism. Oh! Strawman! They mentioned nothing about fascism! Let’s go deeper.
Anytime you come across one of these LARPy right-wing activist movements, honeypot vibes or not, they never directly mention what they want. Why? Well, in my opinion, it’s because they know how batshit insane the steps are that would be to achieve what they want. Not to say that they are wrong - once again, there’s a lot of reasonable intentions coming from energized young college guys who likely have never worked a job, but whatever. It’s just if they went out and said, “We want to close all borders, make America’s economy reminiscent to a certain short-lived era in mid-20th century Europe, bar communication with most nations, and enact harsh punishments for pet issues of ours,” it wouldn’t look very good. Let’s be real, optics for the right are never going to be good because they are operating in a paradigm that is directly against anything they want to have happen. All the right-wing in power can do is moderate the amount of decay and erosion happening to the system, which is that even preferred? Personal preference, really. The quicker everything falls apart, the easier it is to ascertain power.
It is ultimately heavily-implied that what a lot of these right-wing movements want is something a bit more violent than they are willing to admit. It is true, if a right-winger calls for violence, they will get a rapping at the door from a couple MIB. However, since this is quite a well-understood phenomenon among the right, regardless of how effective three-letter agencies are at subverting and destroying their causes (I’d argue they aren’t as competent as they used to be), the right seems to take a more subversive attempt at subsuming power. I have yet to see this happen, and I have my doubts of it working in a big way for them, but I maintain that localism is where what they want can be achieved (which I’ll get to in a moment).
So they know overt violence is off the table, and they’re too afraid of actually admitting what they want because it is wholesale illiberal. Communists, on the other hand, can blabber all they want about revolution, overtly, because they are babbling about equality and workers’ rights. When it comes to the current paradigm, they’re literally all for it, as long as the trademarks and copyrights are in the hands of the “worker” (the state). Actually, to get off-topic for a moment, modern commies/socialists (yeah, literally same thing, sorry lol) have had to go so far off-base to retain rhetorical and polemical consistency that their very bread and butter, which is giving the worker his rightful hegemony, has collapsed. They now focus on race, which is inherently against the idea of a marxist revolution. There’s supposed to be no recognition of these things, and giving certain peoples favor over others. That is what they do, though, and if they ever somehow got what they wanted, it would look nothing like what ole’ Karl envisioned. Surprising, right? Anyway, right-wingers literally have no rhetorical or polemical ammunition because they just are simply against the entire system itself. The issue with a lot of the movements, “extreme” and “moderate” is they don’t understand that they are against the system. They are the revolutionaries. Which, for a lot of the right-wing pseudo-intellectual elite, revolution is off the table.
Alright. So, rhetorically they are extremely limited, in terms of action they have to stay very soft, and in terms of subversion, they are limited to localism. What’s a good ole’ boy got left in this rusty machine? There’s no way to let out our frustrations democratically or in terms of activism because the untenable views of anti-immigration (as in close the borders) and anti-free trade (as in, move manufacturing back to America) are off the table, and will continue to be, as they have been for nearly sixty years.
It is honestly quite laughable to still believe political action is the way forward. People who say they are “right-wing” or a “dissident” are stuck in a flawed modus operandi to achieve what they desire. They are inextricably connected to the ascending ray of progress and consumerism, so enjoying a dose of opinionated blogging and activism is apart of their ability to maintain that abstract line of progress for their thing. That’s the flaw in and of itself. Right-wing “activists” of all shapes and sizes are just not coming to terms with the fact that they don’t want power, but to let their joke of a “nation” collapse. The Patriot Front is right when they say that, “The America of modernity is little more than an economic zone in which the dollar is used.” That’s collapse. Why does this have to be explained? Well, it’s because people are too addicted to worldview that finds them committing the same crimes of timewasting that naked feminists and environmentalists commit. Likewise, the more cynical ones who know activism is a dead-end, yet still are addicted to rank punditry or “restoring America” in some form or fashion, whether through elaborate subversion or takeover, are smoking the same pack as the activists are (probably orange Pall Malls).
What is the way forward for those who want “change?” Well, if you are convinced politics and government is the way to go, then subversion of local city and state governments small and large are the way to do it. Imagine being able to assess property taxes so high that it scares away potential shitlibs from moving into your county and building an ugly POS modernist house. See what I mean? Use power in the most subtle ways to make these people so frustrated they run away because of your community’s senility. It’s essentially a bureaucratization of Sam Hyde’s “tell a story” advice. DMV lady is saying you brought the wrong form? Tell a fucking story. Get her so annoyed that she signs the paper, you pay a fee, and you’re out. This must be embodied in government and corporations (based HR guys when) if your “change” is to be made. Honestly, I’d like to see this happen, but it is also the longest game to play, and will never be overly successful. It’ll just be successful enough for y’all to mold the world in a way that favors better, non-sociopaths. Give people a good option, and they’ll take it.
No one will obtain power in an overt way in this world, nor especially America, because the systems economic and political are burdened with extreme complexity that are facing feedback issues, problems with resource and energy dispersion, and diminishing returns on investment in complexity. As I have explained with Lacy Hunt’s diminishing Marginal Revenue Product of Debt, collapsing Global GDP Per Capita, and the collapse of the collateral market in 2008, the economy cannot be saved. Likewise, the senility of Western governments is unsalvageable as well, and alternative lifestyles must be eked out that are separate from the collapse of this global economic empire.
This takes a monolithic change in how we communicate, how we perceive success, what we prioritize in our lives, because as it stands, well-intentioned traditionalists are wasting their time with so-called “power” and would do better investing their time in community construction, local government subversion, self-sustainability, and disengagement with the modern world, rather than attempting to re-dominate it and commit the same mistakes of the 20th Century.
“Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum.”
Kurt Vonnegut
Against Political Action
Excellent. Thank you.
The right wing cannot enact a robust policy agenda that would make America great again. They cannot not remember what made it great in the first place.
Excellent piece