One trend I see on the Dissident Right that annoys me to no end is purity spiraling. The purity spiral goes like this – find a solidly rightwing figure, but find some issue where he does break from Dissident Right orthodoxy, and then harp on it (to no end) and use it to claim that said figure is not the real deal and should be discarded. The end result, of course, is a Dissident Right reduced to zero and it is something that is sure to lead to failure. But more that that, more than the constant one-upmanship of increasingly extreme positions and one that often leads to fedposting, is that it ignores that everyone has a blind spot. Everyone has an issue where they went wrong. After all, we are human. Yes, I include myself here, even if I don’t know where my blind spots are (they would not be blind spots if I could identify them). To fully explore why the constant purity spiraling is a bad idea, I want to look at the careers of four men. They are all solidly rightwing men who have made a major impact on me; nevertheless, they do have one issue they are incorrect on. These men are Pat Buchanan, Joseph Sobran, Sam Francis, and E. Michael Jones.
Pat Buchanan, for all of his good qualities, has one major issue. He has never been able to psychologically break from the Republican Party. He has supported the Republican candidate in every election of his life, no matter how bad they were, with the one exception in 2000 when he ran for president on the Reform Party ticket. This includes 2004, when the Bush-lead GOP ran as far away from the three core components that made Buchananism a distinct force on the Right – immigration, trade, and war.
Joseph Sobran, too, is a hugely important figure on the Right. But, what is less known is how throughout most of his career he was largely indifferent to increased immigration from Hispanic countries, partly because he felt a connection with them due to his Catholicism, feeling that they would eventually assimilate as did the Irish and Italians. And, he continued to operate on this assumption until Pat Buchanan convinced him otherwise.
Sam Francis looms large over the development of the Dissident Right. But, he had one major flaw – he was at best dismissive of the importance of religion and was at times hostile to it. Much like Sobran’s own religiosity caused him to overlook how increased immigration from Latin America would change the U.S., Francis’s focus on the biological aspects of race caused him to overlook the spiritual health of the nation.
E. Michael Jones has become popular with many young people on the Dissident Right. He also, much like Sobran, ignores the importance of race. On a certain level, I agree with him in that I reject White Nationalism because “white” is not a nation (that does not mean I want Europe and Heritage America to become the Third World, either). While I still think it has some meaning, he thinks it is fundamentally an illusion and has said that if Africans were to move to Poland, learn Polish, and assimilate to Polish culture, he would consider them Polish.
Let me be clear – I disagree with all four of these men on these topics. I think the GOP has been a constant disaster for the Right. I think open borders is a catastrophe. I think the West ceases to be the West without Christianity. I think that Africans will never be Poles. But, we have no reason to dismiss any of these men as “cucks” or controlled opposition. Without the work these men laid down, especially Pat Buchanan, the Dissident Right would not exist today or exist in a radically different form. What’s more, each of these men did so at great personal cost.
Pat Buchanan was once a mainstay in the GOP and the go-to person to help the GOP connect with the Authentic Right. He worked for both Nixon and Reagan. But, because of his opposition to bad trade deals, stupid wars, and a destructive immigration policy, he became persona non grata. From the early 90s until the rise of Trump, the GOP did everything they could to distance themselves from him. Had he simply toed the party line, he would have likely gotten a cushy job with the Bush administration.
Joseph Sobran had his dream job, working at the National Review, and he looked set to take over for William F. Buckley. However, he would not stay silent about the Jewish influence on American foreign policy and lost everything as a result. Sobran is considered, even by his enemies on both the Left and False Right, to be a fantastic writer, but spent the last years of his life in absolute poverty and is today buried in a pauper’s grave. This is the fate of one of the best writers the 20th century conservative movement ever produced. Had he not talked about the “Greatest Ally,” he would have died a wealthy man, having ran NR for years.
Similar to Sobran, Sam Francis had a great job as a columnist, serving as a voice of the Authentic Right against a sea of leftists and moneymen who think they’re rightwingers because they read the Wall Street Journal. His views on race lead to his firing and he also died in poverty and in poor health, abandoned as an unrepentant bigot by almost all. Had he quoted Martin Luther King and called him a “true conservative,” he probably would have passed away in better material conditions. Remember that he died in 2005, the absolute nadir of the Authentic Right. He drew his last breath with no reasonable hope of seeing it ever rise again.
Though never as mainstream as the first three men listed here, E. Michael Jones was not nearly as fringe as he is today. The Slaughter of Cities did receive attention on the Right when it was first published and his Cardinal Krol and the Cultural Revolution was made with the backing and support of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. But, that all changed when he asked why we were being marched into a needless war in Iraq. That was enough to deny someone a seat in the mainstream Right in 2003, but the answer he came up with cost him even more credibility with the gatekeepers. Jones was always the least mainstream out of the men listed here, but he too would likely be published in mainstream sources rather than resorting to talking to anyone to get his message out.
My intention here is not to make excuses for any of these men or to just ignore the issues they are wrong on. Rather, I want to combat a particular tendency I see often in these circles that tries to be all or nothing. Pat Buchanan is wrong on the Republican Party. Joseph Sobran and E. Michael Jones are wrong on race. Sam Francis is wrong on religion. But, they are right on more, and that matters.
Never shy away from what you can learn from anyone. My thinking on Dixie, after all, was radically altered by the writings of Eugene Genovese during his Marxist phase. Even when he was wrong, he still provided value in my understanding of the fundamental distinctions between Dixie and Yankeeland. So can others provide that same value, and Buchanan, Sobran, Francis, and Jones all provide more than their fair share.
The problem is controlled opposition, that is why people “purity sprial”, which is a leftist term by the way. All of those men you mentioned played a part in it, they gave out cope like candy, ensuring nothing meaningful ever happened.
We don’t “purity sprial” (I really loathe that term) we are making sure that the people who would have a voice with our people are saying things that will actually lead somewhere, unlike the neo-cons of the last fifty years. Controlled opposition works thusly, agree on everything, except one thing and make sure that one thing changes. Then rinse and repeat, do that a few times and now you have Lady MAGA on stage next to Pat Buchanan, sitting under the Israeli flag lecturing Southerners on Christianity. Same for woke preachers, they copy you exactly, except for one thing, a few years later that one thing is a distant memory and in its place is evil, rinse and repeat. Subversion, Subversion, Subversion.
There is no such thing as “purity spiraling”, it was a term artificially introduced to make sure that no accountability takes place. I have been at this for a long time, so hear the words of a generation of young men who threw their lives away to give you this answer, only the Based survive, that means ideas as well as people. If you are not completely and totally grounded in the extreme of whatever it is you are doing, you WILL be subverted into oblivion. That “one thing” will be your death. That is the distilled wisdom of the youth of Western Civilization on this matter, it cost us a lot to learn it, I suggest you learn it too.
Our enemies work primarily through subversion, that allows for no wiggle room or blind spots. Either you mean what you say in its purest most based form, or don’t bother saying it. Your own ideas will be twisted from your grasp and used against you by your enemies. Its not “purity spiraling”, it is a fundamental survival trait of our people.
It must be based or it will fail, it is no coincidence that Stoicism is the only American contribution to philosophy, it basically states this, if its strong, it will survive. You must be based and you must demand it from those around you, or you will die, you will become a cuckseritive, wittlessly serving your enemy. Leftists did not lead us all to hell, Centerists did.
As for those blind spots that we all have, that is what your brothers are for.
I would like to make a comment about Samuel Francis. He wrote critically of conservatives who thought Christianity could provide philosophical and institutional resistance to liberalism. To him, they failed to see that Christianity had been the most transgressive force in history, and that its values of peace, equality, and justice must erode every traditional hierarchy. The “religious wrong,” as he called conservative Christians, operated under a “false consciousness.” Its theology diverted interest from real cultural problems and reconciled believers to their own dissolution. Modern Christianity was no friend of white Americans, Francis concluded. “Christianity today is the enemy of the West and the race that created it.”
Also, here is an interesting article by a lifelong student of Machiavelli, Michael Anton: “Machiavelli faced a challenge so startlingly similar to ours that it almost seems as if history does repeat itself. To put it as succinctly possible, he sought to liberate philosophy and politics—theory and practice—from a stultifying tradition and corrupt institutions. And then he did it. He recruited and trained a new army, defeated his enemy, promulgated new teaching, and conquered the world, or at least the West—with books (“the foreigner … was allowed to seize Italy with chalk”; Prince 12). We might therefore be able to learn something from him about our challenge and how to meet it.”
https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-art-of-spiritual-war/
How about forming an American Integralism, similar to Brazilian integralism a fascist and nationalist political movement? In its core is Anti-Ricist but virulent anti-Marxist. Integralism broadly believes that there should be “a fully integrated social and political order, based on converging patrimonial (inherited) political, cultural, religious, and national traditions of a particular state”
From Wiki
Integralism does not accept neoliberal capitalism or communism. It defends private property, the rescue of national culture, moralism, values nationalism, Christian moral values and Christian traditions, the principle of authority (and therefore the hierarchical structure of society), the fight against both communism and economic liberalism, and the defense of municipalism.
Just an idea.
Just an idea
“Pat Buchanan, for all of his good qualities, has one major issue. He has never been able to psychologically break from the Republican Party.”
A logical political avenue within the Soviet Union would have been for high-ranking officials to work their way up within their one party system. Likewise, Pat Buchanan fully understood they the USA is a two party dictatorship (as a side-note soon to be one party due to demographic trends), and in living within such a closed system the only political avenues lay within the two parties themselves. So in essence, Pat’s “major issue” was simply an honest understanding of the political realities of the modern USA.