Alt-erior motives

In recent weeks, particularly due to the election season, we’ve seen a growing attention to a certain, primarily online political presence, called the ‘alt-right’. These netizens have been gaining influence for quite some time, and not least because of the attention being paid to them now by the political candidates running for president. It seems somewhat relevant now to pay them a bit of heed, given their growing prominence.

Here’s the thing: I follow a handful of the ‘alt-right’ websites with some significant interest: in particular, The Unz Review (I was personally acquainted with one of the contributors when I worked as an English teacher in Luoyang) and Social Matter. Generally these sites are thoughtful, interesting and entertaining, even when they happen to be wrong – even spectacularly wrong. And there are certain things on which the alt-right and I find fairly significant agreement, at least in negative terms. I share with the alt-right a deep hostility to imperialism and wars waged in the far abroad for idealistic and ‘democratic’ reasons. In fact, I share with the alt-right a profound distrust of parliamentarian proceduralism itself (or at least, the ideological faith so many mainstream liberals put in it). Like the alt-rightists, I view globalism as doing as much harm as good to genuine human communities based on geography and tradition. Also like the alt-rightists, I don’t view immigration and ‘free trade’ as necessary, positive goods. And finally, the alt-rightists and I agree that culture, broadly stated, is ultimately more important than economics.

But, high among my political commitments, I am a realist. Realists recognise core interests as needful in any alliance. If there’s anything I’ve learnt from the past decade-and-a-half of political engagement, it’s that core interests need to be determined before committing to any kind of shared action. Otherwise, as our government has ably shown, in our pursuit of projecting our model of governance abroad and remaking the world in our image, we will ally ourselves with Islamic jihadists in Syria one day, and FEMEN in Poland the next; or we will ally ourselves with out-and-out fascists in the Ukraine and simultaneously with sycophantic native-informant neocon ‘activists’ like China’s Liu Xiaobo or Russia’s Garry Kasparov. Core interests presume at least a partial positive shared understanding of the common good; and if that shared understanding doesn’t exist, ultimately an alliance will lead to strategic errors and conflicts of interest, ultimately bringing more harm than good. So the question with regard to the alt-rightists is: what the hell are you for?

That question, it turns out, is somewhat difficult to answer. The online alt-right presence is expressed largely through memes and macros, and their expression is usually aimed not at anything substantive, but with an eye specifically to offending those they imagine are easily-offended. They are the equivalents of Marilyn Manson, Tucker Max and Howard Stern – which should give you some idea that they are ‘pop-cultural’ in orientation rather than either ‘high-cultural’ or ‘folk-cultural’. It becomes necessary, then, to look at the lacunae they leave; the residue of intellectual assumptions behind the memes. What is left on the alt-right at the end of the day, is a rancid mixture of free-speech absolutism, postmodernism and white identity politics – none of which I find particularly appealing on their own merits.

The free-speech absolutism of the alt-right, in fact, is one of the reasons I’ve taken to looking at tribal values on their own merits. The Teutonic tribes of yore, even as they were not yet fully Christianised, understood that speech had power, and as such they had the good sense to regulate it, albeit informally. It is no accident, and should come as no surprise to the students of ‘human biodiversity’, that the American cultures and subcultures which descend directly from northern European immigrants (Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish settlers who came to the Upper Midwest and Plains states, for example; or the northern English colonial, and later Russian and Polish, settlement in Pennsylvania) tend to be so ‘nice’ – and it has nothing at all to do with any ideological commitment to ‘political correctness’. It has much more to do with the fact that, historically, armed societies have been polite societies, and if you said something un-‘nice’ to another warrior or his kin in a tribal society, you ran the risk of sparking off a deadly blood-feud. It is actually only in the context of an overly-feminised, atomised, homogenised and deracinated culture that the sort of Internet-based incivility and free-speech absolutism which the alt-right represent stand a chance of becoming socially-acceptable.

The postmodernism and the identity politics on the alt-right, on the other hand, are all too common, and as clear as day to those with the wit to see them. When reading alt-right screeds on Breitbart or on Taki, it is fairly obvious that they have studied long and hard at the feet of the Frankfurters and the Poststructuralists, and are eager to join battle with their teachers using the selfsame weapons. They lament their victim status with all the eagerness and crocodile tears of a teenage Tumblrista; the only difference is that they take offence on behalf of a slighted white identity. As Tom Slater puts it, ‘they may take up arms against weepy identitarians, but they share the same, deadening sense of victimhood – just with another set of dreamt-up grievances attached’.

The postmodernism doesn’t stop there, though. Still creepier to my mind, drawn as I am to certain traditional values, is this interest I see on the alt-right for transhumanist fantasies and schemes to break and remake both human society and the human subject, in ways which would have utterly appalled the Old Right (who in general had a meet and proper appreciation for the small vices, the hypocrisies and especially the habitual inertia of the everyday, common man). Read that passage in Yiannopoulos’s piece linked in my first paragraph describing Eliezer Yudkowsky’s scheme for stripping away social inhibitions for the purpose of getting human beings to think like machines, and see if that doesn’t chill the blood. It’s the stuff of Dickian and Gibsonian nightmares, CS Lewis’s NICE writ large. It is, in point of fact, the one aspect of the alt-right which is with true justification linked to fascism. I can, of course, understand why such schemes have an appeal to certain classes and subcultures, primarily haute-bourgeois Silicon Valley desk jockeys and start-up investors. It is a truism that a class which has managed to convince itself of its own superior intellect will come to see itself as the rightful ruling class. But God save us all from any government run by such ‘experts’.

On the other hand, there are two versions of the alt-left that I have seen forming. One of them, sadly, joins the alt-right’s pathetic postmodernism and white identity politics to sexual hedonism and transhumanism. The result bears an uncanny resemblance to Eduard Limonov’s National-Bolshevik street theatrics: the worst attributes of the lifestyle-left combined with the worst of the alt right; a poseur’s version of being rebellious and ‘transgressive’ through breaking race and sex taboos alike, and offering the very worst dregs of 19^th-century futurist thought in their place. The other version, though, the banner of which has been taken up by the blog of ‘Lord Keynes’, is far more sensible, to say the least! It explicitly rejects the postmodernist and identitarian direction of the alt-right as well as the ‘regressive [SJW] left’, but it retains the realist, anti-imperialist, anti-globalist, post-liberal and modernity-sceptical (that is to say, High Tory-derived) aspects of alt-rightdom that I’m inclined to respect in the first place. I’d very much like to see more of the ‘alts’ drawn into this ambit.

At the end of the day, what we need is not an ‘alt-right’ given to the weaknesses of late-19^th and early-20^th-century radicals, and guided by postmodernist and transhumanist delusions. What we need instead, if you will forgive me the anachronistic English wordplay, is an ‘eld-right’ driven by the modestly-cosmopolitan, virtue-ethical and realist suppositions posited by the High Tories and those who followed in their footsteps.