Part 2: Are You One of Us?

Everyone’s a Critic

Millions are startled about how bad things have become and about how close to catastrophe we really might be. The perfidious clowns at CPAC and shameless GOP grifters are speaking persuasively to the great middle section of the bell curve on our side. For all the eye-rolls and easy critiques we can make about what they are peddling, we don’t give due credit to how elegantly simple they make it for people to sign-on to their pitch.

For us, it turns out it’s actually very difficult to express not just why the problems are the problems, but what specifically it is that needs to be restored (or razed) and do so in a way that will resonate.   

And, this is the punch line: The Right has never had a simple coherent and detailed ideology to unify and rally around.

Not merely political principles or a platform, not the conservative movement’s highly abstracted vague aspirational moral language and platitudes that are subject to wide interpretation (see Russell Kirk’s Ten Conservative Principles), but simple visceral language to capture the foundational beliefs about what it means to be human, living in a group, that values very specific things, and for which a member will fight like a beast to protect.

I Thought Ideologies Were Bad? 

That the Right lacks a complete ideology is a problem with terrible consequences. The absence is mostly the result of straw man arguments and bitter infighting within the post-WWII conservative movement. The Conservatives, Libertarians, Fusionists, Classical Liberals, Paleos, et al. have always been the dwarves in the stable from The Last Battle.

Regarding this line from the Identity Dixie “About” page: “We deny that nations are ideological constructs of intangible ideas such as liberty or capitalism.” 

Agreed in full because it depends, of course, how ideology is defined and with the operative word being “intangible.”

Few would object to the necessity of ideology as a broad and natural concept:

            •           A manner or the content of thinking characteristic of an individual, group, or culture;

            •           The integrated assertions, theories and aims that constitute a sociopolitical program; and

            •           A systematic body of concepts especially about human life or culture. 

In this sense, the United States doesn’t have a comprehensive ideological position that accounts for all social and economic interests. The United States doesn’t even meet the definition of having a broad ideological position. The closest you could come would be the vague Marxist explanation that America is arranged around capitalism and that everyone is free and equal.

The Right, however, is choking on broad generalized principles with tomes of interesting but imprecise intangible aspirations that continually wiggle away from direct application.

What the Right doesn’t have is a particular ideology that dares to be comprehensive. We have the capacity to do this and this scares the hell out of everyone, especially our enemies.

One of the great men of the 20th century had something to say about this. The conservative arch-liberal, monarchist, author and scholar, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, was a long-lived Austrian, who along with other prescient minds of his generation, warned that one of the greatest failures in the decades leading up to World War II (and continuing to this day), was the Right’s failure to state what it stood for in a compelling practical way for the masses to understand. The Left was excelling at this and duping millions unchallenged with a system that did, in fact, account for everything.

From Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s magnum opus, Leftism Revisited:

“American conservatives, while brilliant in their critique of modern ills—pseudo-liberalism, socialism, communism, Jacobin democracy, egalitarianism, permissiveness, egotism, pacifism, progressivism, and goodness knows what other aberrations—have not provided the United States or the rest of the world with an alternative, with a blueprint for the future, with a picture of the desirable shape of things to come that could engender a real enthusiasm among the young.

…Missing from the conservative argument is the hard fact that man is an ideological animal. Hayek said quite correctly that no society could ever exist without an ideology…ideology cannot be fought with non-ideology.

Pick any man at random, put him on a couch, and question him methodically. Soon the dim outline of an ideology will emerge, although its profile might be low, its contours barely distinguishable, its content contradictory.”

Kuehnelt-Leddihn was well aware of the challenge of crafting a genuine ideology as well as the responsibility of what it meant to attempt this.

Nevertheless, he and his cohort believed it to be an imperative because all the world is ideological with the greatest mortal threats coming not from broad wistful political platforms, but muscular and comprehensive systems. Again, “ideology cannot be fought with non-ideology.”

Is there just concern for ideological purity spirals and the other problems presented in the counter arguments from the more thoughtful thinkers like Eric Voegelin, Russell Kirk, and Christian Traditionalists? Does the smug insufferable academic wonk class like Daniel Larison have a point?

The essence of their collective warnings is that ideologies inevitably clash with Christianity and will become rigid “end justifies the means” regimes willing to use coercion and violence against others. Leftist ideologies do this. The emerging comprehensive leftist ideology that is being implemented in America, and globally, is evil and formidable and will do this.

But it begs the obvious: which tired and failed Christian-Right ideology are you referring to, gentleman?

With no examples to support the dogmatic position that ideology must remain anathema to the Right, and with precisely zero wins showing a nation that defeated an ideological foe foreign or domestic, it’s time we talk seriously and with urgency about what is, in fact, necessary to reach a vast population wanting to be led.

History and circumstances demand that our side provide an uncomplicated and detailed faith and reason based vision for the millions of our people sitting on their couches who are trying to live normal lives and who like the sentiment, but not the obligation, of what it means to be eternally vigilant. If we can’t sharpen their dim outline in a way that they can embrace and rally around, we deserve to be conquered by our inferiors. For a host of reasons, the South is most capable for making this happen and must lead the way.

It is the most primal and important question humans have always asked when encountering others: this is who we are, this is what we believe, and this is how we manage ourselves: are you one of us? 

Part Three, will look at examples of rightist ideological statements from the past and present.