Social Matter

I am not a white nationalist, but like Moldbug, I am not exactly allergic to the stuff. Unlike Moldbug, I am seeing white nationalism and Nazi imagery picking up steam in edgy trendsetting intellectual circles, and am worried that it might actually have a political future. Here I’ll explain what I think is happening and what the implications are.

When the USSR was going down, there was an obvious schelling point for what to do: surrender to the West and become a liberal democracy. It turned out to be badly executed and didn’t really do them much good, but everyone knew that that was the thing to do.

As our own society starts to feel a little rough around the edges, many people are looking for some alternative, but there is no big obvious schelling point. There is no West to surrender to, unless the East (Putin and China) continue to get better and more powerful in the next few decades.

Barring the possibility of some outside empire to surrender to, and assuming we do have a large sociological crisis, ideologies are going to be fighting for the pieces of the West. Islam, Radicalized Progressivism, and White nationalism seem to be the top contenders.

Islam is Osama’s “strong horse”, and is doing well in the west, and Radical Prog is Cthulu’s favorite, and good at feeding off unrest, but why White Nationalism?

A few things are becoming quite clear over the past few years: mainstream progressivism is thoroughly entrenched, and doesn’t want to tolerate any dissent. It is becoming quite insufferable and stodgy and thus increasingly unfashionable in certain corners of the intellectual landscape. Importantly, mainstream progressivism is now basically anti-white, anti-male, and anti-traditional.

Like it or not, smart civilization-building family men, most of whom are white, are now and for the forseeable future the rulers and creators and the only people whose (implicit) support is needed for something to happen. If they have dropped the ball and lost some of their power over the last 50 years, it is because they have been disorganized and their obvious paths to organization have been unfashionable. If they wake up as a collective, though, they will be formidable.

Whites in prison join neo-nazi gangs because it’s the obvious and only viable schelling point for an intimidating collective identity that whites can participate in to protect themselves and achieve belonging in a hostile environment. In that situation, that swastikas are unfashionable becomes a secondary concern.

As the rest of the world and progressivism becomes increasingly and more explicitly hostile to white men, the young ones especially start evaluating alternatives without the mainstream-fashion-goggles:

• Progressivism defines itself in opposition to Fascism/Nazism/White Nationalism and actively supports the narrative that Evil White Nationalism is the only alternative to progressivism. Thus White Nationalism gets legitimacy automatically to the extent that Progressivism becomes unfashionable or resented.
• Let’s face it, the WNs are right about some stuff that everyone else is actively and blatantly wrong about, and have a solid case for debate on things that everyone else considers open-and-shut. For example, the distributions of intelligence and criminality between human subpopulations, and the proper role of traditional patriarchal family as a piece of social technology.
• When you take the fashion goggles off, Nazism is arguably aesthetically superior to modern progressivism. Look at the symbols by which they define their visual identity: Swastikas, eagles, leather trenchcoats, rows of banners, futurist and art-deco architecture, and well-organized rallies have a certain glorious quality lacking in rainbows, hipsters, graffiti, “diverse” anti-racist imagery, brutalist and “sustainable” mud-brick architecture, and angry mobs with placards. This actually counts for a lot.
• White Nationalism, specifically National Socialism, is more or less a fully formed ideology that explicitly defines itself in response to progressive degeneracy, and is explicitly for the benefit of white families. For something so out of date, it is surprisingly well adapted to modern memetic selection pressures, besides the fact that it is fatally unfashionable.

That White Nationalism has quite a bit of evil baggage involving gassing various subpopulations, and no particular track-record of stable long-term beneficial rule is obviously the major problem here, but not at all a barrier to its adoption if white outgroup altruism breaks down and the fashions shift.

Of course that still looks like a rather improbable outcome; White Nationalism is still thoroughly outside the overton window in the mainstream. But these things can change quickly if there is a driving unrest, and WN has rapidly returned to the overton window and become quite fashionable in some circles.

Progressivism has got us in a hell of a pickle by leveraging so hard on WN being perceived as evil. Its claimed legitimacy is in large part because it is not WN and is the only alternative to WN. It plays this up more as people start to question it more, which is exactly the wrong idea. eg all dissent is “fascism”, “racism”, “bigotry”, “but that’s what Hitler said”, etc. As progressivism loses legitimacy among rebellious youth and trendsetting philosophers, we should be de-leveraging to make the implosion and the switch to some other system go smoothly and well for everybody, not doubling down and burning bridges and claiming that the only alternative to checking your privilege is gassing the Jews.

Thus the political project for those of us who are not either rabid progressives or White Nationalists, is to construct a viable alternative to progressivism that is sufficiently aesthetic, coherent, and actually functional, that smart family men, business leaders, edgy youth, and serious philosophers can jump ship without another holocaust or dark age.

Conservatism has been failing at this with its tail tucked between its legs for generations now. The problem is basically that conservatism concedes the frame too much (eg “liberty, equality, fraternity”), isn’t willing to defy leftist power-words like “racist” and “bigot”, has no real philosophical foundation, and refuses to co-opt or invent important meta-level intellectual tools like class analysis and evolutionary biology. Something born of Neoreaction, which does not have these failings, is likely the only serious non-evil contender.