It’s kinda amazing how much attention this debate over ‘alt right’ has gotten in the past week. This leads to two questions; what is the ‘alt right’, which I discuss here, and, on a related note, what does this mean for NRx? What should the ‘goal’ or ‘endgame’ of NRx be?
From Xenosystems What is the alt right?
None of this should be taken as a competition for recruits. The Alt-Right will get almost all of them — it’s bound to be huge. From the NRx perspective, the Alt-Right is to be appreciated for helping to clean us up. They’re most welcome to take whoever they can, especially if they shut the door on the way out.
I don’t think this question will ever be resolved to anyone’s full satisfaction, nor do I think cohesion is possible.
The ‘alt right’ is almost too diverse for cohesion, besides a shared rejection of democracy and other aspects of liberalism and modernity, as well as antipathy towards ‘mainstream’ conservatism. But that’s where the similarities end. Commercialism don’t always jive with populist/ethnocentric interests. Christian reactionaries and agnostics may butt heads. It’s kinda like the split between neoliberals and welfare liberals. Besides the ‘liberal’ nomenclature, they tend to have very different economic and foreign policy positions.
Somewhat related there is discussion of the ‘approach’ NRx should choose. From Xenosystems:
Specifically — as a political philosophy — NRx advocates the privatization of government. It makes a public case for that, in the abstract, but only for purposes of informational and theoretical optimization. It is not, ever, doing politics in public, but only thinking about it under conditions of minimal intelligence security. Concrete execution of political strategy occurs through private deals.
And from The Hestia Society:
We will buy out the key stakeholders with shares on our new system, and replace the whole thing. This sounds a bit audacious, but bear with us:
Our new system is a synthesis of modern business practice and historically successful political wisdom: The best we really can do about government is to find the most competent people we can, and put them absolutely in charge. If they care about us, that’s great, but even a totally selfish government wants to cultivate its people so that they pay better taxes, as long as it is secure and competent enough to think long term. It is hard to make such non-utopian truths palatable, but this is the most reliable path to a flourishing civilization.
There are a handful of approaches: incrementalism (the one I favor, by gradually retiring America’s inefficient democratic institutions), subversion (related to the first), starving the beast/collapse, or secession. Hestiasociety.org suggests buying out stakeholders, but this would assume NRx is in a financial position to do so, and or gains sufficient power to have upper-hand in bargaining, and that said companies oblige. This is pretty much socialism and many magnitudes worse than 2008 bank bailouts, and the consequences of shuttering or taking over these businesses could be grave: economic collapse and then hyperinflation (to finance the buyouts and then due to the collapse of reserve currency status). It sounds like Bernie Sanders on steroids. Another possibility is for productive people to peacefully ‘exit’ or secede, creating their own ‘utopia’, the plot of Atlas Shrugged, and endorsed by some in the Silicon Valley ‘techno libertarian’ scene. A second, but more abstract version version of ‘secession’, which is already underway, is through tax havens, inversions, and ‘global citizenship’ for the wealthy elite and multinational companies in order pay as little tax as possible.
Back to the discussion of the ‘alt right’, the split between white nationalists and NRx is also quite obvious, with the latter seeing themselves as more nuanced and enlightened and the former too ‘larpy’. Even with the post-2013 SJW decline, white nationalism still seems to have branding/public relations problem, and few want to be openly associated with it. The recent Muslim-perpetrated terrorist attacks, the post-2013 SJW backlash, as well as the backlash against the European refugee invasion, is helping to raise awareness to causes and views that are congruent to nationalism, and I think NRx serves as a ‘middle ground’ between overt white nationalism, which is too extreme or polarizing to have broad appeal beyond the internet, and the ineffectual ‘mainstream right’ on the opposite side.