One of Rod Dreher’s readers feels the irresistible pull of the Alt-Right:
I’m a white guy. I’m a well-educated intellectual who enjoys small arthouse movies, coffehouses and classic blues. If you didn’t know any better, you’d probably mistake me for a lefty urban hipster.
And yet. I find some of the alt-right stuff exerts a pull even on me. Even though I’m smart and informed enough to see through it. It’s seductive because I am not a person with any power or privilege, and yet I am constantly bombarded with messages telling me that I’m a cancer, I’m a problem, everything is my fault.
I am very lower middle class. I’ve never owned a new car, and do my own home repairs as much as I can to save money. I cut my own grass, wash my own dishes, buy my clothes from Walmart. I have no clue how I will ever be able to retire. But oh, brother, to hear the media tell it, I am just drowning in unearned power and privilege, and America will be a much brighter, more loving, more peaceful nation when I finally just keel over and die.
Trust me: After all that, some of the alt-right stuff feels like a warm, soothing bath. A “safe space,” if you will. I recoil from the uglier stuff, but some of it — the “hey, white guys are actually okay, you know! Be proud of yourself, white man!” stuff is really VERY seductive, and it is only with some intellectual effort that I can resist the pull. And yet I still follow this stuff, not really accepting it, but following it just because it’s one of the only places I can go where people are not always telling me I’m the seed of all evil in the world. If it’s a struggle for someone like me to resist the pull, I imagine it’s probably impossible for someone with less education or cultural exposure….
I’m sorry, but there are two alternatives here. You can push for some kind of universalist vision bringing everybody together, or you can have tribes. There’s not a third option. If you don’t want universalism, then you just have to accept that various forms of open white nationalism are eventually going to become a permanent feature of politics. You don’t have to LIKE it. But you have to accept it and learn to live with it — including the inevitable violence and strife that will flow from it.
This is why the Alt-Right Revolution is inevitable. Despite the propaganda in which the young man has been steeped for his entire life, despite being “smart” and “informed” and “well-educated”, which is to say “brainwashed” and “misinformed” and “maleducated”, truth and tribe attract him.
There are not two alternatives. Universalism is dead, because it only ever had appeal to a) white Anglo imperialists and b) Jewish globalists. Universalism can only hold lasting mass appeal in a homogeneous society where everyone is the same tribe; once the society becomes sufficiently heterogeneous, tribalism and identity politics will inevitably rise to the fore. This is the process we have witnessed in the post-1965 USA.
Indeed, even in the Jewish State of Israel, identity politics are rising to the fore; “identity” is the literal translation of the term “zehut”. But the USA is not a Jewish state, it is a white state, an Anglo-American state, and therefore some form of white American nationalism is as inevitable in the USA as Swedish nationalism and Russian nationalism and Catalonian nationalism and Jewish nationalism are inevitable in Sweden, Russia, Catalonia, and Israel. Identity is the only way a nation can preserve its values; to paraphrase the Zehut founder, a nation that loses its identity will eventually lose the sense of meaning for its existence as well as its legitimacy.
The Alt-Right is not a temptation, it is the answer for those who wish to save America from its loss of meaning, identity, and legitimacy. It is not the nationalism of the Alt-Right, but the civic nationalism of the Alt-Lite that is a mirage and a false ideal. Civic nationalism is no more true nationalism than social justice is true justice. And there is no reason for American men and women to resist the pull of the Alt-Right, because the Alt-Right is the only current political philosophy that is in harmony with science, history, reason, and current events.
Be sure to read the comments there. The speed with which the cucks and SJWs rush in to condemn men expressing even modest sympathies with their white identity is educational.