From Reagan to Harris

One of the more interesting phenomena to emerge in this election cycle is to observe how many former Republicans are coming out for Harris. Harris is one of the most leftwing figures to emerge within mainstream politics in decades. There may be a temptation to compare her to George McGovern, but I find this comparison to be inappropriate. George McGovern was horrible on domestic issues. His support of busing is a large reason why Southerners voted against him so drastically. But, he looks like a rightwing dissident compared to Harris. He strongly opposed young men from Alabama and North Carolina being sent off to fight and die in a war on the other side of the world that had nothing to do with them. Even on domestic issues, he was far better. McGovern, a devout Methodist, considered abortion as a great evil. Though he was labeled as the candidate of “amnesty, acid, and abortion,” he thought abortion should be left up to the states, as per the Constitution, and picked not only one, but two pro-life vice president nominees. It is true that he, like many other Protestants of his era, was willing to make some compromise with the emerging pro-abortion movement, but this stands in stark contrast to the “shout your abortion” fanatics of today. If given the choice between McGovern and Harris, McGovern would be the better candidate.

Considering that Kamala’s track record, why are so many high-profile Republicans voting for Harris? To understand this, we have to review the intellectual pedigree of what has made up the bulk of the Republican establishment for the past several decades. First, we must go back to the first point I was willing to give McGovern – that to his credit he was willing to oppose the war machine. By contrast, Harris is far more hawkish, certainly more hawkish that Trump and even more so than Vance, and that is the key tenant of understanding the Harris Republican – they want war and now see the Democrats as the party that can give it to them. Trump and Vance may not be fully there, and they are both far too devoted to the protection of Israel. But what they both represent is a movement of Heritage America, and especially Southerners, away from what Murray Rothbard called the warfare state, rightly viewing it as costing them their sons for a pointless fight on the other side of the world, all in service to a regime that hates them and wants to see them dead.

This is why so many Harris Republicans come from a Reaganite tradition, and specifically its neo-conservative branch. Remember the neo-conservatives were ex-Trotskyite radicals who took on the appearance of a conservative following their disillusion with the Soviet Union. In 1930, they were convinced the Russian peasanty was the vehicle by which world revolution would be achieved. By 1970, it was clear this was not the case. They then made a shift in their focus – the faith they once placed in the Russian peasanty was not put on the American middle-class. It is important to remember here that their idea of what the revolution would look like took on a different form, going from classless communism to liberal democratic capitalism, but all the same, the entire world was to be transformed.

After marching the country into the Iraq War, it became clear that the world revolution would not happen. But instead of rejecting the concept of world revolution, ultimately rooted in the rejection of Logos, they instead made another shift. Rather than the Heritage American middle-class as the vehicle of world revolution, it was the “Coalition of the Ascendant” – a collection of racial minorities, sexual degenerates, and leftist White women, the group that now largely makes up the managerial elite. And instead of the promised utopia of liberal democratic capitalism, it would be a utopia of diversity. They did not give up on world revolution, but like any selfish leader, they blamed others rather than themselves for the fundamentally flawed crusades they embarked on.

All this leads up to what they think would be done to their failed revolutionary vehicle. That the USSR was bad goes without saying, but an important line of demarcation can be seen as to why the USSR is bad, or more specifically, the place of Russia in understanding the USSR. For the Authentic Right, Russia has little to do with why the USSR was terrible. The Russians were the victims of communism, and I have to remind no reader of Identity Dixie just how relatively minimal the Russian involvement was in the Russian Revolution. But for the Fake Right, now largely supporting Harris, the horrors of the Soviet Union were, at least, partially rooted in problems with the Russians themselves. This is why they ask why the party of Reagan is now supporting Russia – oblivious to the fact that Russia is no longer being run by a bunch of antichrists.

And this is why they hate Russians, and for that matter Heritage America, especially Southerners, so badly. They look at them and see a people who failed to bring their utopia into being. The punishment for this must be death. They are now backing what they hope to be the final revolutionary class in a war against the groups that previously held this honor. Their ideas are flawed on a fundamental level, so this too will fail, and they will turn on their new revolutionary class, the “Coalition of the Ascendant.” But this is likely decades away, in the meantime we must understand what we are facing. The Harris Republican is no accident, nor a creation of Trump’s vulgarity or incompetence. And, it has very little to do with January 6th. Instead, it is rooted in a decades’ long process that is now just coming into fruition.

The path from Reagan to Harris is a lot straighter than it initially looks.

Harmonica