Malice - New Right: A Journey to the Fringe of American Politics

And, indeed, what is the State anyway but organized banditry? What is taxation but theft on a gigantic, unchecked, scale? What is war but mass murder on a scale impossible by private police forces? What is conscription but mass enslavement? Can anyone envision a private police force getting away with a tiny fraction of what States get away with, and do habitually, year after year, century after century?

M URRAY R OTHBARD

I made it my goal to bring sanity and clarity to north Korea.

I traveled to the DPRK in 2012 partly for the purposes of doing research for my book Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il. At the time much of the press was focused on how suicidal and crazy the north Korean regime was. Through my work I sought to demonstrate how absurd this is. If they were suicidal they were very bad at it, having outlasted the rest of the communist dictatorships other than Cuba.

As for crazy? Sure they had their idiosyncrasies, such as their insistence that Korea is one nation, indivisible, with the south being a region under occupation by the U.S. imperialists (hence their usage of lowercase north Korea and south Korea, a convention I follow). To call something crazy is to confess that one doesnt understand it. By now, few are calling the DPRK crazy. There is an understanding that this most evil of countries works logically and coherently. Their depravity is moral, not psychological.

Being an anarchist, it is no surprise that I set my sights upon the worst government in the world. But being an anarchist also gained me entre into the New Right as it was developing, and I watched the same sort of dismissiveness to their ideas that Ive seen regarding north Korea (which is, incidentally, the most racist and homogenous nation on earth).

From concentration camps to leader-worship and an obsession with racial purity, north Korea shares much in common with Nazi Germany. But to equate Kim Jong Un with Hitler would not be very fruitful. So too is it inaccurate to dismiss an entire subculture as neo-Nazisespecially when they are having far more profound influence with our society than the Nazis ever did. Any attempt to reduce them to a single demographicthe troll in the basement or the white supremacist next dooris inaccurate.

Thomas Sowell once wrote, Nobody is equal to anybody. Even the same man is not equal to himself on different days. Jims Blog took this one step further and laid out the central thesis of the movement as:

The fundamental realization [] is that all men are not created equal, not individual men, nor the various groups and categories of men, nor are women equal to men, that these beliefs and others like them are religious beliefs, that society is just as religious as ever it was, with an official state religion of progressivism, but this is a new religion, an evil religion, and, if you are a Christian, a demonic religion.

If taken at face value, unequal can have the benign meaning of celebrating our differences. More often, however, it has been used in far more nefarious senses, ranging all the way to full-blown racism. Therefore, though terms like New Right and Alt-Right are used in various ways in various contexts, for the purposes of this book the New Right is defined as:

A loosely connected group of individuals united by their opposition to progressivism, which they perceive to be a thinly veiled fundamentalist religion dedicated to egalitarian principles and intent on totalitarian world domination via globalist hegemony.

This is a broad definition that encompasses several subgroups. The most well-known faction is the Alt-Right, which includes members of the New Right who perceive race (not racism) to be one of the most important sociopolitical issues if not the most important one. The Alt-Right isnt wholly composed of neo-Nazis, white nationalists, and white supremacists, but those groups do have significant representation within it.

In the 1940s, more white supremacists and white nationalists gave their lives fighting the Nazis than did urban male feminists. To say the Alt-Right and the Nazis are synonymousespecially when the press does socan have profoundly dangerous consequences. At the very least, an innocent media mistake or misrepresentation can be taken as proof that the press is lyingand from there it is fairly easy to convince the listener to write off the media entirely.

The question of what to do with the government once progressive hegemony is destroyed forever is where the New Right is perhaps at its weirdest. Racism and white nationalism can safely be described as reprehensible by todays standards, but the ideas are hardly unusual or unfamiliar. Whats unusual is finding people who advocate such principles openly. Though the Alt-Right is the faction that gets the most press, for reasons both obvious and obscure, its the other types that I personally find more intriguing. I once had dinner with another anarchist who had also been watching this movement come into being. So what are their actual answers? I asked him.

They want to restore the stewards, he told me.

This didnt seem particularly new or controversial. It sounded like typical Rudy Giuliani law-and-order Republicanism. So who would be these stewards?

Oh no no no no, he laughed. Not the stewards. The Stuarts. They want to restore the Stuart dynasty to reign over America. See, they think that we anarchists are crazy, utopian, and unrealistic. So the sane, realistic option is to bring back monarchy to the United States.

The New Right is not a geographically proximate movement. Its more frequently represented by that one kid in his town networked with his counterpart in another state or another country. As such, in a milieu thats relatively new and sort of a Wild West when it comes to ideology, all sorts of factions emerge as alternatives to the status quoincluding monarchism, though not a new king. No, only a descendent of the old one will do. Once one dismisses the mainstream or even marginal worldviews within a culture, something has to take their place. The New Right is of the fringe (and I say that as an anarchist), and the fringe is where both innovation and insanity lay. Sometimes, innovation seems like insanity because one hasnt encountered such concepts before and cant quite port them to ones own frame of reference. And sometimes theyre just genuinely batshit.

As the union leader Nicholas Klein said in 1914, First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you.

Cranks are a byproduct of free thought and a consequence of liberation from orthodoxies. In other words, it takes work to determine whether an ideology is insane or innovative or a mix. Even if the New Rights solutions were all incorrect, that wouldnt mean their criticisms were inaccurate as well.