From Jacobite magazine: Political Violence Is a Game the Right Can’t Win. As of 6/22/2017, the article has been shared over 7,000 times on Facebook and over a dozen times on Reddit, so obviously it struck a nerve with readers.
Of course, that’s not necessarily going to be the case. Political violence isn’t fun for the whole family: it’s long, and it’s ugly, and everybody suffers. And nobody ever thinks this when they have a Great Cause, but maybe, just maybe, your Great Cause won’t win. And then what? “It couldn’t be worse” is the sort of thing Turkish coup plotters say right before their attempt fails and leaves their bete noire in undisputed charge of writing the purge lists. When it comes to political violence, everybody imagines themselves piloting the helicopters; nobody imagines themselves clinging desperately to the skids.
But unlike the ‘left’, political violence has never been the ‘right’s’ game anyway. The right believes in violence in terms of self-defense, but not overthrowing the state or fundamentally changing the status quo, which is the right’s weakness, to some extent, because such submissiveness has allowed left for the past half century to take over and steer the national narrative, nearly unimpeded. After WW2, Communists fled Russia and Europe, embedding themselves in all areas of American life. Under the banner of opposing Nazism, they imposed far-left liberalism on society, and Americans obediently went along because no one wanted to be labeled as racist. The same was also observed in Germany, Italy and Japan, all of which swung from the far-right to the far-left. The left controls nearly every facet of American culture and society, save for free market capitalism and possibly the police and military. Even Trump, for all his campaign rhetoric, can’t do much because his hands are tied, not only by the left-wing courts but also by a useless yet obstinate Congress.
The author writes:
Look, righties have the guns, righties have police and they have the military..
But then says:
That’s pretty much what the Confederacy thought about the Yankees, and it didn’t exactly work out well for them. [….]
That’s because the North had a superior military, better economy, and more resources.
If the righties have the military, would it turn on itself? The logic doesn’t follow. The only way the lefties win is if it has control of the military and police, but private gun ownership helps the right. But obviously, having control of cultural institutions and the courts, than the military, has proven to be more fruitful for the left.
Right really needs is a Moldbug reset, or a restoration: a one-fell-swoop by which the government is fired and rebuilt. The idea is to build right-wing structures in anticipation of reality’s inevitable selecting-away of inefficient (left-wing) forms when they can no longer propagate themselves. Entropy will set in and, perhaps, a defining moment will emerge.
If righties going to build things, they need to look at how the lefties are doing it, because they’ve been working on it for forty years. To paraphrase Trotsky, you may not be interested in politics, but politics are interested in you — and you can learn a lot from the people who’ve been working them to their advantage.
Agree…that’s what sites such as Jacobite and Socialmatter are doing. Although websites cannot create a new government ex-nihilo, they can nudge the national dialogue in such a way that gradual reform becomes more likely, but also inspire policy makers to take heed (as we see with Bannon reading NRx material).
Lefties are excellent at protests, not because they pay seat-fillers, but because they’ve professionalized organizing them, as you’ll discover if you read any of their books. The protestors aren’t paid. The organizers are paid. The people who train the organizers and protestors are paid. Basically, the way the Lefty protest movement works is sort of like if the Koch brothers subsidized prepping and firearms classes.
A Google search reveals paid protests are a real ‘thing’. But I don’t think we (the right) need to adopt such tactics. Infiltration of institutions is always more effective than protests. Protests are noisy and visible but accomplish little (look how OWS failed). Subversion, although quiet, does far more.
By contrast, righty organizations have historically been slow to organize. When they do, right-wing activists tend to stay in their own lanes and not work together, share notes, or reach out to one another’s followers. Think about the mishmash of signs you typically see at a Lefty protest, and then try to remember the last time you saw, say, an RKBA sign at a pro-life rally. More unfortunately, when righties do become active, they tend to do something like start a blog. Or make a YouTube channel. Or write a magazine article. In short, they become street-corner evangelists. They tend not to do things in meatspace.
Lefties do the work in the real world. Guess who wins?
The author misses the bigger picture. Who wins? Not the protesters; the subversives do. Again, infiltration is more effective than protests or violence. Cultural Marxism was founded by the Frankfurt School, and although they never held a protest or political office, and few even know they exist, their influence is immense. Although the ‘right’ presently controls Congress and the presidency, the institutions themselves are still controlled by the cultural-Marxist left, thanks to the enduring legacy of the Frankfurt School and post-WW2 Communist infiltration. When Marx died only 12 people attended his funeral, yet he was arguably one of the most influential people of the 20th century despite not doing anything but writing some books.
Although there are three branches of government, there are five additional branches of society:
1. Schools (left-wing indoctrination public school curriculum)
2. Colleges (left-wing professors)
3. Media (TV, online, and print news by major media companies)
4. Culture (movies, TV shows, books)
5. National dialogue/discourse (blogs, public discussions, social media)
1, 2, and 4 are controlled by the left, with token opposition. Regarding #3, there is Fox News (which is almost useless anyway), Brietbart, Town Hall, Red State, Daily Caller, and Drudge. But #5 is the most promising. You can see how much influence the far-right and alt-right have had over the national dialogue over the past three years or so, which contributed to the post-2013 decline of ‘mainstream conservatism’–but also the post-2013 SJW backlash and the backlash against democracy, too. 4chan culture has gone from the fringes to the mainstream. Moldbug and Nick Land are almost household names by now, having both been mentioned in dozens of leading publications such as Vox, The Verge, National Review, Brietbart, New York Times, The Atlantic, and Quartz. Even Bannon himself, one of the most powerful persons in government, says he reads Dark Enlightenment material. Even the fact that Jacobite articles have been so successful, with articles often being shared hundreds or even thousands of times on social media, is evidence of this trend. Although political violence is a game the right can’t win, at the rate things are going, maybe it’s time to dust off those shovels come Restoration.