By Hunter Wallace for Occidental Dissent
Rod Dreher makes an interesting point.
TAC:
“The real power in this country, and in most countries, resides in institutions, and in the networks of elites that run them. The sociologist James Davison Hunter, in his 2010 book To Change The World, addressed his fellow Evangelicals, and told them that they are mistaken to believe that convincing the masses is the way to change the world. In most instances, you have to convert elites and their networks; change follows that. In other words, elites and their networks are the ones who lead the masses. …
In just about any mainstream institution you can think of, if you held woke beliefs, and weren’t shy about advertising that, not only would it not hurt your job application, but it would likely help it. If you held even mainstream conservative beliefs — not alt-right ones, but mainstream ones, such as being one of the 70+ million Americans who voted for Trump last fall — you had better know that you should make sure that is scrubbed from your online profile before you apply for a job at a university, a media outlet, or a corporation. …
This is what we face. There has, so far, been no meaningful political opposition to it. By “meaningful,” I mean politicians who are willing and capable of doing something about it. Don’t insult me by claiming Trump was that politician. Judge him by the results. If we on the Right put our trust in a champion shitposter, as opposed to political leaders who know how to get things done, we will keep getting our heads handed to us. And if we keep thinking that the problem is essentially political, as opposed to cultural and economic, we will make no progress. We will elect ineffective performers like Trump, while the doers on the Left continue to march through institutions and change them — and by changing institutions and networks, change America. …”
Unlike the Wokes, the Alt-Right was totally suppressed by Conservatism, Inc. and has zero institutional power on the Right in America. The movement has no real institutions, organizations or sources of funding. The hammer of state repression and corporate censorship came down on the Alt-Right, not the Wokes, because of the elite consensus that “antiracism” is good and “racism” is evil and supporting political correctness, modernism and cosmopolitanism are what makes a person good or bad.
Do you really need networks of elites embedded in institutions to have influence and power though? David French was installed in power as a vetted and respectable conservative elite in National Review and Time before taking up his current work at The Dispatch. Michael Gerson is a vetted and respectable conservative elite who was George W. Bush’s speechwriter and has a gig writing for The Washington Post.
Does anyone listen to David French or Michael Gerson though?
Is their influence on the Right receding or advancing in 2021? How about the Alt-Right? Does anyone under the age of 45 care what George Will has to say about anything?
Charlie Kirk is the vetted and respectable face of young conservatives:
Boss Baby has been banned from CPAC for anti-Semitism:
Who is really winning though? Kirk or Fuentes?
Are the vetted and respectable conservative elites gaining or losing influence? In spite of all the censorship and the proliferation of these new outfits like the “Digital Forensic Research Lab” and the “National Contagion Research Institute” which employ Wokes, the polls are clear that Trump voters are trending more toward people like Nick Fuentes than Charlie Kirk in their views over time.
Rod is more worried than I am about Woke elites being embedded in institutions. He thinks it will lead to something like the Soviet Union rather than hastening their downfall and galvanizing their opposition. Whether it is professional sports, video games, Hollywood movies, Big Tech, Corporate America, the DSA, science fiction, the mainstream media or national politics, Wokes have a talent for confusing, alienating, dividing and repulsing far more people than they attract to their brand of extremism. In the last year or so, they have become the Terror of the newsroom at the New York Times and their cultural toxicity has succeeded in alienating White people from “antiracism” and outright reversing the long term trend of the softening of White racial attitudes. Once Wokes are embedded in institutions, they tend to destroy their hosts and narrow their appeal like the Star Trek community or the Ghostbusters franchise.
How long will America put up with the Joke Police which has declared that the comedy industry is “a pipeline to far-right extremism” micromanaging their private conversations, demonizing them over their “white privilege” and policing their thoughts before they look to us for relief? As offensive as we might be sometimes to get our point across, we genuinely don’t care what other people think or believe.