Social Matter

Flesh and blood networking, face-to-face with handshakes and eye contact and everything, is obviously the gold standard of organized resistance. It’s meaningful, it’s immediate, it’s resilient in ways that networking via internet is not. The people who you know in real life could provide you support if the proverbial shit hit the proverbial fan tomorrow. The people you know over the world wide webs could not, no matter how much camaraderie you feel with them, no matter how well disposed toward you they might be. A little sobering, but true.

And yet digital networking has a lot to recommend it, especially if you’re of the same mind I am, and you want to oppose modernity (from its governance on down) proactively and at the largest scale feasible. The internet facilitates such large scale projects. It allows you to organize with a great deal of people, rather than simply prepping for the inevitable with a cadre of family and likeminded neighbors, stockpiling food and ammunition, drawing up plans for a remote compound in Montana, that sort of thing.

(No disrespect to the preppers here. It’s probably foolish to not do a fair bit of prepping. There’s wisdom in anticipating possible shocks and figuring out how to provide for your own through the tremors. But prepping at the individual level is much like gun ownership at the individual level: prudent and responsible and sane and no threat whatsoever to established order.)

One obstacle to mass organization online is that even we noble Crusaders on the right have our schisms. We have our infighting. I don’t think we’re the sack of rats that the left is, a coalition of incompatible interests groups, prone to clamor and cannibalism and Tumblresque fractalization into tinier and tinier identity groups. But some of our disagreements are substantive. Occasionally contentious. No denying that.

Another, and far more daunting, obstacle to mass organization online, though, falls under the general heading of atomization. That condition which is common to most Millennials is amplified online. Most of our discussants have to participate anonymously or pseudonymously. (Like yours truly. It may surprise you that my Christian namesake isn’t actually an infamous scalphunter.) This lends the proceedings an overall air of unreality. It makes us less certain. It’s hard to know how many of us there are, where we’re concentrated geographically, and the like. We don’t feel like part of a mass. For all you know, you could be living on the same street as another young conservative (or reactionary or traditionalist or whatever you want to call us) just chomping at the bit to do something. But you’d never know. You could work with one. But you wouldn’t be able to match their online nom de’ guerre with their nametag.

Rightists are less likely to take risks in these conditions. They’re less apt to stake out positions, create rally points, raise flags, etc. A simple reason being that breaking cover like that seems far more liable in the short term to draw enemy ordnance than friendly reinforcements. Witch hunts are an ever present threat. Folks actually do lose jobs, livelihoods, future career prospects. We’ve all seen it with our own eyes. So we hunker down.

It’s been pointed out elsewhere that decentralization—or some similar process of fragmentation, of Balkanization, of the devolvement of federal powers to more disparate sites—is key to almost every proposed program of the genuine right. And I think that’s true. Conservatives have long (and admittedly without too much to show for it) hammered “state’s rights.” Neoreactionaries stress “exit.” Identitarians of all stripes emphasize more organic, tribal bonds than the sort that jury rig the chimeras of modern nation states together. Even dyed-in-the-wool monarchists seem to think in terms of particular kingdoms and dynastic lines rather than simply installing a golden throne in the Oval Office. It’s common conceptual ground for all of us.

I would say, furthermore, that we could get a lot of mileage out of decentralization when it comes to the problem of creating some sort of more coherent network online. It answers the problem of infighting quite nicely, as we’ve just discussed. I mean obviously we can be adult about this and cooperate. There’s no need to reach perfect consensus across the board as long as we realize that we have shared goals in common and that after the dust has settled we’ll all shake hands and go our separate ways.

Decentralization also solves the second problem I mentioned above, though. Decentralization as a platform doesn’t actually require you to invite the pitchforks and torches to your den on the morass. On the contrary, it’s one of the rare reactionary positions that can be flawlessly articulated within a progressive frame—Overton Window approved! After all, there’s nothing particularly thoughtcriminal about denouncing the hypertrophic bureaucracy and dysfunction of DC. And there’s nothing particularly thoughtcriminal about suggesting that political decisions ought to be made closer to the people whom those decisions affect.

You hear progressives make almost that exact same argument in fact. When they complain about the mismatch between, for instance, a predominately white police department patrolling a predominately black populace, they’re already in our camp. They’re insisting that the people who do the governing ought to be closely related—geographically, existentially and otherwise—to the people being governed. That’s decentralization in a nutshell. I don’t see anyone losing their jobs for toeing that line.

I suppose ultimately this is all just brainstorming. And perhaps it’s not headed anywhere particularly profound. But I would like to put it out there, for consideration by savvier heads than mine, that the idea of decentralization is not simply a common theme running throughout a lot of rightist thought but a potential opportunity for more effective online organization as well. It’s something people could attach real names and locations to (and enjoy real immunity and real plausible deniability even as they do so). It’s a way to create solid network online, working towards a clear objective that benefits everyone involved. And such a network would serve as a way to facilitate real-life meetings as well, which generates some of that gold-standard value I started this post off talking about.