Why Conservatives STILL Can’t Win

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French translation here [2], Spanish translation here [3]

Recently I re-read William Pierce’s classic 1971 essay “Why Conservatives Can’t Win.” Like Pierce, if forced to choose between liberals and conservatives, I would side with conservatives. Conservatives have the indispensable political realism necessary for the preservation of any civilization. Liberalism, I will grant, does attract the best brains, blood, and spirit of our race. But though liberal idealism and imagination may adorn the heights of our civilization, they are undermining its foundations.

If in the next national election, everybody who voted Republican dropped dead in the voting booth, the country would be finished. You can’t have a functioning society consisting of bureaucrats, academics, welfare parasites, Jews, coloreds, feminists, fruit juice drinkers, and assorted busybodies. But if every Democratic voter dropped dead, my own family would be more than decimated, but society would go on. It would definitely be more orderly and more prosperous, although it would also be drab and hideously uptight.

Aside from politics, in which I completely reject egalitarianism and multiculturalism, I am pretty much a liberal. But one cannot deny that White Nationalism today is a phenomenon of the right. If White Nationalism is to triumph, it will have to become the common sense of the whole political spectrum. But for the time being, we are rightists, and we have to make the best of it.

But although we are rightists, we are not conservatives. Conservatives share some of our values, but they don’t share all of them, and they certainly don’t share our goals. In fact, it is hard to speak of conservatives as goal-oriented at all. Conservatives are backwards-looking or fixated on legalism, procedure, and rights, but they do not have an image of a perfected society that is the proper goal of political activity. White Nationalists, like leftists, do have such a vision.

Conservative goals, such as they are, are confined to piecemeal resistance to the implementation of the grand designs of the left. As often as not, conservatives are just trying to hold on to the leftist programs of the past.

William F. Buckley’s description of conservatism as “Standing athwart the tracks of history yelling stop” pretty much captures this mentality, as unseemly as it is for a serious-minded individual. We White Nationalists, however, want to be in the engine of history, steering it toward our goal, and cheerfully pouring on the steam when the Buckleys of the world try to get in our way.

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You can buy Greg Johnson’s Toward a New Nationalism here [5].

The core of Pierce’s argument is that conservatives can’t win because they aren’t really trying. The left play for keeps. They have an overriding goal. They have a world to win. Conservatives are just trying to hold on to the 1950s or the 1980s. Conservatives may fight ferociously from time to time, but they are always playing defense. They think the election of a Nixon or a Reagan is a great victory, then lapse into complacency, only to awaken a few years later to find that the left has been on the march the whole time.

Other things being equal, the side that fights to win will defeat the side that fights for a draw. Fortune favors the bold, those who launch offenses, not those who merely play defense.

Conservatives also make a virtual cult out of being good sports, graceful losers, and ready compromisers.

Well, conservatives STILL can’t win. But neither can they learn, so they continue to promote their folly to new generations. Recently, two White Nationalist publications that once showed real promise have been lost to conservatism: Occidental Dissent and The Occidental Quarterly, which I edited for two and a half years, along with its sister publication, TOQ Online, which I created and edited for a year. I have already dealt with Occidental Dissent in “White Nationalism and the Political ‘Mainstream [6].’” Here I wish to deal with TOQ.

On November 6, 2010, John Gardner (“Yggdrasil”), the new publisher of TOQ, published “Why The Occidental Quarterly Exists [7]” in which he explains the aims of TOQ under his watch. This article contains sound advice to whites to become as independent as possible from the consumerist system and its values and to create mutual aid networks.

But when it comes to the political system, Gardner is still very much a conservative, a Republican even. He thinks that White Nationalists—a tiny, voiceless, despised, poorly funded, and poorly led movement—should aim at lobbying and “conditioning” Republicans to represent white interests. Gardner actually thinks that whites can vote and lobby and game ourselves out of this mess, as if our people have not been slated for slow and systematic genocide but are merely having a run of bad luck at the polls.

I think it is too early for White Nationalists to get involved in electoral politics and lobbying. We need to become a much bigger, richer, and more politically threatening group before we can make a difference in that realm. (And if we become powerful enough, we can dispense with electoral politics altogether.) But for any of that to happen, we need to invest our time, money, brains, and talent in community building and outreach. We need to win people over to our way of thinking, by packaging and delivering our message to every white group through every medium available. We need to build up our community so it has something more to offer prospective converts than ignominy and the company of the insane.

The John Gardner I knew was a race-wise, Jew-wise White Nationalist who believed in the goal of a white ethnostate. The Occidental Quarterly I knew was founded to be explicitly white and to deal explicitly with the Jewish question. But you would never know that from Gardner’s TOQ 2.0 agenda. The most he says about race is that white Americans are being demonized and discriminated against because of our “skin color.” (Which is the language of biological race deniers and minimizers.) And as for the Jewish question, all we get is this:

Effective political motivation demands an identifiable “them.”

Our competing racial groups have an identifiable “them” in their stereotype of the evil and undeserving White man.

We need our own identifiable “them” which is, of course, those who benefit from the current repression of Whites under the regime of “multiculturalism.”

Then the trick is to make the “them” apparent to our own people without inflaming and motivating our opponents.

We should not name “them” explicitly. Rather, we advance policies that directly thwart the extractions and benefits “they” get from “us,” thus generating the kind of policy-oriented anger that will motivate and unify “us.”

If this is taken seriously as TOQ policy, then every back issue of the journal will have to be pulped and reprinted, with references to Jews replaced by euphemisms like “liberals” and “cultural Marxists.” Furthermore, Kevin MacDonald now seems like an odd choice for Editor. And in the end, it will never work, because the SPLC will always be around to remind people of the truth about White Nationalists who scuttle crabwise toward the mainstream, begin speaking in riddles and euphemisms, and try to reinvent themselves as conservatives.

We  few who know the most important truth in the world—that organized Jewry (not “liberals,” not “cultural Marxists”) have set the white race (not “conservatives,” not “Christians,” not “Western Civilization”) on the path to extinction—have an absolute duty to get this message out and wake our people up. Because if we don’t do it, nobody else will. Those who know the truth but can’t shout it from the rooftops have the duty to support those who can spread the word.

Gardner’s claim that “the trick is to make the ‘them’ apparent to our own people without inflaming and motivating our opponents” is just a version of the old idea that we can “sneak up on the Jews” and catch them napping. But the enemy has millions of lidless, unsleeping eyes. And the idea that the enemy is not already inflamed and motivated and working against us at 99% capacity is laughable.

Gardner’s “trick” is not to name “them” but to support policies that negatively impact the interests of the enemy, so they rise from their slumbers and attack us, which will then motivate us to fight back.

Where to start?

(1) Aren’t the Jews attacking us enough already? And if decades of Jewish attacks have not motivated whites to unite and fight back, then why does Gardner think that ratcheting up the Jewish pressure will produce a different result this time?

Our people have suffered enough. The role of White Nationalists should be to explain who has been attacking us, and why, and how to fight back. That is the leadership our race needs.

(2) When and how are White Nationalists going to gain enough power to credibly threaten Jewish interests? How, exactly, is White Nationalism going to grow without first talking about race or Jewish power? If we don’t say anything to set us apart from conservatives, if we don’t act any more honest than system politicians, then why would we expect any growth? Gardner’s strategy for gaining political power begins: First, gain sufficient power to threaten the interests of the enemy. It doesn’t work that way.

(3) It is a tried and true method of political agitation to present a moderate petition to an arrogant power and hope that it is denied. There is nothing wrong with using this technique from time to time, when it is appropriate. But to depend on this technique alone—because one has adopted a policy of never speaking the enemy’s name—is an abdication of leadership. White Nationalists should be the primary educators and agitators of our people. Again, if we don’t argue our case, nobody else will.

(4) What exactly is the advantage to our people of being kept in the dark about our real enemies? The mainstream right has been doing that for decades, and what has that gotten us? Richard Nixon knew the score, but he spoke the truth only in private. In public, he made a foreign-born Jew Secretary of State and created Affirmative Action. The enemy operates under no such self-imposed handicaps.

(5) Gardner’s strategy is obviously based on the experience of the Tea Party [8], a piously color-blind, universalistic movement promoting fiscal conservatism and constitutional government which was nevertheless viciously attacked as “racist” by the left. These attacks have prompted ever-angrier denials of “racism” but not much more. Perhaps White Nationalists can reap some benefits from this polarization, but it is not a phenomenon that we need to imitate or encourage. It is doing quite well without us. Furthermore, leftist attacks on the Tea Party might move some people in our direction, but we will not move them any further unless we stay true to our own message rather than blending in with conservatives.

Pierce was right. Conservatism can’t win. It doesn’t really conserve anything. It is so politically inept and hapless that it seems almost designed to lose. If doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different result is a definition of insanity, it is also a good definition of conservatism.