Will Liberal Exiles Rule the Right?

I would not go as far as to call it an ironclad law, but I have noticed a definite tendency for newcomers to eventually take over the political movements and parties they join, slowly driving out the original people. A great example of this was the transformation of the Democratic Party. From 1865 to 1932, the Democratic Part was the political party of the South. To a lesser extent, it was also the party for ethnic, White Catholics who opposed the Republican Party on account of their Puritan influence and the GOP’s reputation for coddling Big Business over the “working man.” Besides Southerners and ethnic Catholics, almost everyone else was a Republican in those days. Then the Great Depression hit, and since the GOP was blamed for it, the Democratic Party’s ranks swelled, bringing in far more voters than they had before. Among these were leftwing intellectuals and blacks. Though the old Dixian/Catholic wing and the new black/leftwing intellectual wing were able to have an uneasy co-existence for the next several years, eventually these new elements of the Democratic Party took more and more power. It would be almost unthinkable to Democrat in 1922, but today the Democratic Party supports a genocidal war against Dixie and advocates abortion on demand.

Another example of this is the transformation of the conservative movement at large. Traditionally, conservatives tended toward non-interventionism, though some were willing to make a temporary exception to fight global communism in the Cold War. Then the New Left of the 1960s emerged, and disturbed by its excesses, a number of former New Deal liberal hawks, supporters of the Vietnam War, moved to the Right and joined the ranks of the conservatives. These new conservatives, the neoconservatives, transformed the Right. No longer was the Right noninterventionist, with temporary exceptions being made to combat communism, now American was to transform the world. For a while, it worked. Paleoconservatives were pushed to the margins while the neocons ran almost every conservative institution and publication. The neocon hegemony was largely destroyed because the Iraq War went so incredibly poorly that it discredited neoconservatism almost entirely. 

Why all this matters is because the Right must look closely at the newly baptized “rightwingers.” In order to understand these newcomers, we must look at a civil war on the Left that heated up right after 9/11, though its ideological schism goes much further back. After 9/11, the Left split into two camps. One camp, champions of Enlightenment values, looked at radical Islam and saw a regressive movement that must be opposed at it was a threat to secularism, women’s rights, gay rights, and so forth. But there was another group, one that was more reflexively anti-Western and was willing to make excuses for radical Islam (as it was opposed to the West). I can’t stand either, the first faction only looks more tolerable because the second faction is now dominant and insane. Around 2015, the second faction decisively won, creating a new group of exiles that soon found themselves on the Right. It was also around this time when the Left dropped any pretext it cared about free speech and started openly supporting censorship, thus creating another set of exiles. The likes of Bill Maher, David Rubin, Glenn Greenwald, and John McWhorter are all examples of people who have been driven out of polite conversation by the new leftist regime. And, their ideas could become the paradigm that the mainstream Right operates under, unless the Dissident Right resists.

Let me say that I wish none of these men ill will. I certainly am glad they are standing up to the Left’s insanity when so many others of their ilk have decided that this is something they can live with. John McWhorter has done some good work. As a Bush and Obama era libertarian (now in recovery), I have long enjoyed Greenwald’s work on war and civil liberties. But, none of these men are conservatives or even rightwing. Bill Maher is a particularly odious example. I have no idea why he’s become the “go to guy,” at least on Fox News, to show how even liberals think liberals are crazy. He, in particular, has long been known for being vehemently anti-Christian and recently attacked Kyle Rittenhouse among others. None of these men will defend a uniquely Christian understanding of the West and are, to varying degrees, opposed to that understanding of the West. At most, they can defend the Enlightenment (not an entirely popular philosophical movement on the Right). They may be men of 1789, defenders of the legacy of the French Revolution, but more often they cannot even do that, opting instead to defend the world order of 1945. None of them are going to defend our Dixie.

But what they represent can become the mainstream Right if left unchecked – socially liberal and secular – only opposed to Islam because it’s sexist and homophobic. The Dissident Right cannot allow this to happen. For the Right to truly function, rather than just being the liberalism of 20 years earlier, it must ground itself in an explicitly Christian and Western understanding of the world. And not the West of the French Revolution, but the historic West, the Christian West. Otherwise, there is no grounding. This is particularly true for Dixie. Belief in an ordered universe that cannot be changed for the whims of experimentation has long been one of the defining features of the Southern mind. It is this understanding of the world, more than anything else, that has separated us from the Yankees, and for Dixie to survive as anything other than a zombie, bastardized version of itself, it must be preserved. Men like Bill Maher, Dave Rubin, John McWhorter, and Glenn Greenwald cannot and will not do that.

I understand we are in a serious culture war and war can make strange bedfellows. After all, Tsarist Russia found an ally in the Third French Republic when Germany became a threat to both. But the authentic Right, especially Dixian Nationalists, must be careful with these exiles. They have a fundamentally different understanding of the world than we do. Yes, people can change, but none of them will or have (on a fundamental level), the ongoing revolution just finally got too radical for them. They cannot be allowed to define what the Right is, or else we will have a similar disaster to what happened to the Democratic Party after the Great Depression and the conservative movement after the Vietnam War.

There is a long history of exiles from leftwing excess taking over the Right, but this is not inevitable, and we must fight to prevent this from happening again.

Harmonica