By Hunter Wallace for Occidental Dissent
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my ideals.
In my ideal world, we would have a strong state and a competent government that would deliver collective goods like a fair economy, public health, a clean environment and secure national borders. More than anything else, this strong state would focus on putting an end to an age of permanent social revolution and would restore order, cohesion, continuity, stability, decency and normalcy to society.
As I thought about this, it occurred to me that my beliefs used to be almost completely mainstream. White Americans used to have a positive sense of racial and ethnic identity and a greater sense of community and feeling of continuity with the past. We used to accept the reality that there were natural differences between the races and the sexes. It used to be normal to honor the Confederate dead even for American presidents like Dwight Eisenhower who wasn’t slavishly devoted to Israel.
There was a time in this country when we did a lot of great things. We brought back the American bison from the brink of extinction. We saved the Redwoods and reforested the Great Smoky Mountains. We throttled immigration for decades to assimilate European immigrants. We busted the trusts and regulated the American economy. We taxed the wealthy, shackled the banks and eased the grotesque levels of income inequality that caused the Great Depression. We lifted destitute sharecroppers out of poverty and built the TVA which brought them electricity. We conquered infectious diseases like malaria, yellow fever, smallpox and polio. We built infrastructure on a massive scale that was envied all over the world. This country deported millions of illegal aliens twice under Hoover and Eisenhower. Even Hollywood for a time was expected to adhere to a minimum standard of decency in its movies.
By and large, this was all done before National Review was founded as the flagship of conservative liberalism in 1955 and before the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s mainstreamed a more libertarian ethos on the Left and Right. The late 20th century was a time of a great relaxation of cultural and economic norms compared to what had come a generation or two before. The conservative liberal and libertarian movements were founded in the mid-20th century to undo what by contemporary standards seems almost like a utopia. It seems incredible today that young people could once expect a rising standard of living and a normal middle class life in a country that hadn’t gone completely insane. Is it even possible that this country was once designed to be almost 90% White?
The history of the liberal Right has revealed it to be a total and complete disaster. It was moderates and an earlier generation of progressives who given the grim realities of their time had gone against the grain of liberalism to create a more stable and conservative social order than these people. These conservatives and libertarians reacted against it and created the neoliberal era that has existed since Ronald Reagan was president in which the answer to every problem is always more liberalism.
Is empowering the liberal Right ever going to bring about a society that will satisfy the natural conservatives who are their base? The answer is no. We know exactly what the liberal Right does with power as the continuity of their project across the last forty years has shown. It uses power to bring in more immigrants and to cut taxes and regulations that wealthy donors and business interests find annoying. It reshapes the federal judiciary to be more pro-business and friendlier to the wealthy. It does absolutely nothing at all – I repeat, zip – to reverse or even stall our cultural decline. The erasure of identity, the loss of cultural cohesion and the fragmentation of the public into an ungovernable, incoherent, atomized mass of consumers has accelerated while the liberal Right has been in power.
Forget even challenging the yoke of political correctness over our culture. The liberal Right goes along with that too and makes identity politics based appeals to blacks and homosexuals while policing and marginalizing anyone who violates these norms. It is completely opposed to our worldview. It glorifies selfishness, individualism and materialism as the foundation of its philosophy. It denies us any type of legitimate collective racial, ethnic or cultural identity. It does not value collective goods like public health, the environment or worker safety. It wants a weaker state in which Jewish oligarchs are wealthier and have more power and influence over society. There are no solutions to any of our major problems, particularly the loss of identity and ethnic and cultural cohesion, within its paradigm. Electing politicians who represent their beliefs like Ben Sasse or Mitt Romney does not in anyway advance our interests.
We have always stood outside the liberal Right. Instead of being an “Alt-Right” or “Dissident Right” and trying to change the fundamental values and beliefs of those people, which are extreme individualism and materialism and a complete lack of social concern, we should have the self awareness to realize that we are moderates, not conservatives, which is why we never fit in with them.