New Right vs. Old Right

[1]3,019 words

Audio version here [2]

Translations: Estonian [3], French [4], German [5], Polish [6]Spanish [7]

What is “new” about the North American New Right, and how does it relate to the “Old Right”?

Before I can answer that, I need to clarify what the Old Right and the New Right have in common
and what differentiates them from today’s phony right: namely the present-day center-right parties and all forms of classical liberalism.

The true Right, in both its Old and New versions, is founded on the rejection of human equality as a fact and as a norm. The true right embraces the idea that mankind is and ought to be unequal, i.e., differentiated. Men are different from women. Adults are different from children. The wise are different from the foolish, the smart from the stupid, the strong from the weak, the beautiful from the ugly. We are differentiated by race, history, language, religion, nation, tribe, and culture. These differences matter, and because they matter, all of life is governed by real hierarchies of fact and value, not by the chimera of equality.

The true right rejects egalitarianism root and branch.

The true right has three species: traditional society, the Old Right, and the New Right.

Every traditional society known to man is inegalitarian. All forms of traditional society have been destroyed—or are in the process of being destroyed—by modern, egalitarian, mass society.

For our purposes, the Old Right means Fascism, National Socialism, and other national-populist movements, which are the pre-eminent attempts to restore traditional hierarchical social forms within the context of modernity. Fascism and National Socialism were not merely reactionary, rear-guard resistances to modern egalitarianism by partisans of corrupt hierarchies. They represented a genuinely revolutionary impetus to restore vital, archaic, hierarchical values within the context of modern science, technology, and mass society.

The New Right and the Old Right share the same goal: a society that is not just hierarchical but also organic, a body politic, a racially and culturally homogeneous people, a people that is one in blood and spirit, a people that is politically organized and sovereign and thus in control of its own destiny.

Our ideal is a hierarchical society free of exploitation and injustice because the sole justification of political inequality is the common good of the body politic, not the factional good of the ruling stratum.

So how does the New Right differ from Fascism and National Socialism? This is a vital question, because of the intense stigmas attached to these movements since the Second World War. The North American New Right, like the European New Right, is founded on the rejection of Fascist and National Socialist party politics, totalitarianism, terrorism, imperialism, and genocide.

The North American New Right is a new movement. We do not have any thinkers of the caliber of Alain de Benoist, Guillaume Faye, and many others. We are deeply indebted to the decades of work they have done. But since North American differs from Europe, our approach differs as well, in three important ways.

First, because of the blending of European stocks and breakdown of more compact European national identities in North America, we are forced to stress the deeper roots of common European identity, including racial identity.

Second, because of the leading role of the organized Jewish community in engineering the destruction of European peoples, and because the United States is the citadel of Jewish power in the world today, the North American New Right must deal straightforwardly with the Jewish Question.

Third, the North American New Right cultivates a much more frank and direct critical engagement with Fascism and National Socialism. The European New Right tends to focus on the fringes of the National Socialist and Fascist milieu, which has produced enormous intellectual dividends, particularly with the study of the Conservative Revolutionary movement. The North American New Right, however, takes full advantage of our First Amendment protections. But our willingness to go where there be dragons means that we need to clarify our precise relationship to the Old Right. Indeed, we should have done so a long time ago.

Again: The North American New Right is founded on the rejection of Fascist and National Socialist party politics, totalitarianism, terrorism, imperialism, and genocide.

We believe that racial and cultural diversity within the same society inevitably leads to hatred and violence, and that nationalism is the most practical way to ensure peace between peoples.

We believe that all peoples should have sovereign homelands where they can live according to their own lights, free from the interference of other peoples.

We believe that such a world can be achieved through gradual and humane programs of territorial partition and population transfer.

We believe that these aims can come about by changing people’s consciousness, i.e., by persuading enough people in positions of influence that everyone has a stake in ethnonationalism.

The promotion of political change through the transformation of consciousness and culture is what we call metapolitics.

Metapolitics refers to what must come before the foundation of a new political order. Metapolitics breaks down into two basic activities. First, there is education: articulating and communicating forms of white nationalism tailored to the interests and outlooks of the full array of white constituencies. This includes not just ivory tower theorizing but also artistic expression, topical cultural and political commentary, and the whole range of media by which they are communicated. Second, there is community organizing, meaning the cultivation of real-world communities that live according to our vision in the present and may serve as the seeds of a New Order to come.

The primary metapolitical project of the North American New Right is to challenge and replace the hegemony [8] of anti-white ideas throughout our culture and political system. The entire cultural and political mainstream—including every shade of the “respectable” political spectrum—treats white racial consciousness and white self-assertion as evil.

Our goal is to critique and destroy this consensus and make white racial consciousness and self-assertion hegemonic instead, so that no matter what political party wins office, white interests will be secured. Our goal is a pluralistic white society in which there is disagreement and debate about a whole range of issues. But white survival will not be among them.

There are systematic analogies between the Old Right and the Old Left, and between the New Right and the New Left.

The Old Right and Old Left had widely divergent aims, but shared common means: hierarchical, ideological political parties organized for both electioneering and armed struggle; one-party police states led by dictators; the elimination of opposition through censorship, imprisonment, terror, and outright murder, sometimes on a mind-boggling industrial scale.

Yes, in the case of classical National Socialism, revisionists argue that many of these atrocities are exaggerated or made up out of whole cloth. But revisionism about the Second World War is really beside the point, because the terroristic, imperialistic, genocidal impulse exists in National Socialism today. For instance, latter-day National Socialist William Pierce routinely pooh-poohed the Holocaust. But he was willing to countenance real terrorism, imperialism, and genocide on a scale that would dwarf anything in the 20th century. That spirit is what we reject.

Yes, there were degrees of totalitarianism. The Communist abolition of private property entailed a far greater disruption of and intrusion into private life than Fascism or National Socialism, which merely sought to harmonize private property and private enterprise with the common good whenever they conflicted. Fortunately, hard totalitarianism—even the softest version of hard totalitarianism—is neither desirable nor necessary to secure the existence of our people, so we reject it.

It is instructive to look at how the New Left has handled the mind-boggling, heart-rending, stomach-churning atrocities of the Old Left. The best New Leftists do not deny them. They do not minimize them. They do not pin their hopes on “Gulag revisionism” or rehabilitating the reputation of Pol Pot. They simply disown the atrocities. They step over them and keep moving toward their goals.

This is exactly what we propose to do. We are too busy resisting our own genocide to tie ourselves to defending the mistakes and excesses of the Old Right. They are simply not our problem. To borrow a phrase from Jonathan Bowden, “We’ve stepped over that. [9]” Our enemies keep throwing it down in our path, and we just keep stepping over it.

The New Left retained the values and ultimate goals of the Old Left. They also retained elements of their philosophical framework. They then set about spreading their ideas throughout the culture by means of propaganda and institutional subversion. And they won. Aside from Cuba and North Korea, orthodox Communism is dead. Capitalism seems everywhere triumphant. And yet in the realm of culture, leftist values are completely hegemonic. The left lost the Cold War, but they won the peace.

(Since in the West, both the Old and the New Left functioned primarily as a vehicle for Jewish ethnic interests, it would be more precise to say that Jewish values are hegemonic throughout the culture, even on the mainstream right.)

The New Left and New Right have widely divergent aims, but very similar means, namely the pursuit of political change through transforming ideas and culture, aiming at the establishment of intellectual and cultural hegemony.

The New Right rejects the totalitarianism, terrorism, imperialism, and genocide of the Old Right.

But we do not reject their political model: the ethnically and culturally homogeneous, hierarchically organized, organic society. We want a world in which every distinct people has such a homeland, including the Jews [10].

Nor do we reject the theoretical frameworks of Fascism and National Socialism, which today are more relevant and better-grounded in science and history than ever before.

Nor do we reject such figures as Hitler and Mussolini. Objectivity requires that we recognize their virtues as well as their flaws. We have much to learn from them. We will never repudiate awakened white people just to curry favor with the Bourgeoisie.

I have received some gentle ribbing about including Hitler and Mussolini among the birthdays we commemorate [11], as it smacks of the totalitarian cult of personality. But as an editor, I find that birthdays are ideal, regularly-occurring occasions to discuss important figures. They also produce spikes in search engine traffic, which we want to capture. Besides, we commemorate many birthdays, and it would be craven to discuss people like Ezra Pound or Knut Hamsun but ignore the people they were imprisoned for following. So we will keep commemorating their birthdays until, eventually, everybody does.

One of the main motives of the New Left’s move from politics to culture was disappointment with the proletariat, which was so effectively mobilized by Fascism and National Socialism, not to mention the centrist regimes of the Cold War era.

The New Left believed they represented the interests of the workers, but their approach was entirely elitist. They focused their attention on influencing the college-educated middle and professional classes, because these people have disproportionate influence on the rest of society, particularly through education, the media, and popular culture.

Likewise, the New Right represents the interests of all whites, but when it comes to social change, we need to adopt a resolutely elitist strategy. We need to recognize that, culturally and politically speaking, some whites matter more than others. History is not made by the masses. It is made out of the masses. It is made by elites molding the masses. Thus we need to direct our message to the educated, urban middle and professional classes and above.

There is no shortage of Old Right-style groups with populist messages targeting working class and rural constituencies. But we need to go beyond them if we are going to win.

Who I am speaking for here? When I say “we,” I am speaking for more than just myself, but not for all or even most of our writers or readers. There is no presumption that every author we publish approves of our agenda, in whole or in essence. (Indeed, many of them are dead.) Nor is there any presumption that any author agrees with any other author published here. Publication here does, however, imply that I, as the Editor-in-Chief, think that a given work advances our agenda directly or indirectly: directly, by articulating a viewpoint that I would endorse as true; indirectly, by helping us build an intellectually exciting movement.

And the North American New Right is an intellectual movement, not a fixed doctrine. The goals are fixed. The basic intellectual strategy is fixed. But everything else is in movement: usually toward our goals, but sometimes just whirling around the dance floor for the sheer joy of it (which, in a subtler way, also moves toward our goals).

There is a wide array of different and often incompatible intellectual traditions within the New Right. We have followers of the Traditionalism of Julius Evola and René Guénon as well as other thinkers who emphasize a metaphysics of eternal form. We have followers of non-Traditionalist, flux and history-oriented philosophers like Nietzsche, Spengler, and Heidegger. We have believers in decline and believers in Promethean progressivism. We have Darwinian biologists and scientific materialists squared off against metaphysical dualists. We have atheists, and we have representatives of all schools of religion, Christian and pagan, Eastern and Western.

We need this kind of diversity, because our goal is to foster versions of white nationalism that appeal to all existing white constituencies. We can speak to multitudes because we contain multitudes.

How does the North American New Right relate to Old Right-style groups in North America and around the globe? And how do we relate to various democratic nationalist parties in America and Europe?

Alex Kurtagic has recently argued [12] that democratic party politics can perform the metapolitical functions of education and community organizing, thus there is no fundamental contradiction between metapolitics and party politics. Of course political campaigning involves education and community organizing, but these are merely the byproducts of pursuing office. And that goal means that all educational and organizing efforts must be dominated by the election cycle and the political issues of the day.

That is fine, if one’s real goal is to win office. But outside of proportional representation systems, seeking office is pretty much futile. So if one’s real goal is education and organizing, then political campaigning is merely a distraction. So why not focus all one’s energy into educational and organizing efforts, and determine the agenda ourselves, rather than let electoral politics determine it for us?

Why not take all the money spent on purely political activities—voter registration drives, campaign travel, campaign literature—and channel it into education and organizing?

David Duke, for example, has been doing enormously important work with his writings, speeches, and videos. Most of that work would come to a stop if he were to make another futile and expensive run for office.

Intellectually, we need to draw a sharp, clear line between New Right metapolitics and all forms of nationalist party politics. We share the same broad aims, but we differ as to the best means of achieving them. We need to acknowledge these differences frankly, then divide our camp and pursue our common aims by the various paths that seem best to us.

I do not wish to spend time criticizing and attacking other sincere white advocates, competing for turf and followers or squabbling over dimes. In the end, the only valid argument for or against an approach is to look at its results. I want to win support by doing good work, not denigrating the work of others.

Even though one can draw a sharp intellectual line between New Right metapolitics and nationalist party politics, no wall separates us in the real world. The North American New Right is not a political party or a party-like intellectual sect. We are an informal network that can overlap and penetrate all social institutions, including parties. I maintain contacts with people all over the globe who are involved in various political parties. They know where I stand. Where we disagree, we agree to disagree.

[13]Speaking personally, however, I wish that a wall could be erected in some cases, for if there are only six degrees of social separation between me and Barack Obama, there are far fewer degrees of separation between me and the next Anders Behring Breivik. And, for me, that is just too close for comfort. I do not want anything to do with gun-toting armies of one. The only gun I want to own is made of porcelain.

You see, I really believe that what I am doing is right and important. Too right and too important to expose to the risk of grown men dressing up as Knights Templar or Stormtroopers and playing with real guns. I have nothing against guns or gun-owners as such. But the Old Right model attracts unstable, violence-prone people, which just makes our job harder.

But since I can’t build a movement—even a metapolitical movement—by being a hermit, the best I can do is draw clear intellectual lines of demarcation: again, the North American New Right is founded on the rejection of Fascist and National Socialist party politics, totalitarianism, terrorism, imperialism, and genocide.

(Breivik is a complex case, because he emerged from the Counter-Jihad movement, a Jewish-dominated false opposition to the Islamic colonization of Europe. But we still share his basic concerns and his goal of Europe for Europeans, even though we reject his actions and much of his analytical framework.)

Cynics have accused the New Left of being nothing but a dishonest marketing ploy. Of course, there is no point in trying to convince cynics, who know a priori that the truth is always more sordid than it seems. But the New Left actually delivered on its promises: Marxism without totalitarianism, without terror, without camps.

Of course we all know that the present regime is a form of soft totalitarianism which is enacting the genocide of the white race in slow motion. But the point is that this regime was not imposed upon our people through a violent revolution. They accepted it because of the transformation of their consciousness. They can be saved the same way.