Salon: The Alt-Right Goes Anti-Capitalist

Salon has chimed in with a new article on the Alt-Right’s anti-capitalist turn:

“The alt-right is looking to expand its ranks, and prominent leaders of the notorious white supremacist movement apparently believe that leftists are an ideal target for their recruiting efforts. This is according to a recent article in the Nation by Donna Minkowitz, who last month attended a white supremacist conference in Maryland organized by Richard Spencer’s National Policy Institute. Minkowitz reports that leading members of the alt-right are currently strategizing how to appeal to leftists — white male leftists, that is — and their plan is fairly straightforward. …”

I wasn’t at the NPI conference and didn’t attend this strategy session. I was kind of surprised to learn that the NPI crowd was thinking along the same lines as the Nationalist Front. I’m sure it reflects the mounting disgust with corporate capitalism that everyone has been feeling for over a year now. Unlike the Left, White Nationalists have good reasons to resent corporate capitalism:

• White Nationalists suffer from systematic employment discrimination. In the name of promoting “diversity,” Corporate America discriminates against the White normie. Unlike mainstream liberals, White Nationalists are fired from their jobs for their political beliefs when their anonymity is compromised. The “institutional racism” allegedly suffered by non-Whites is imaginary because their race is an advantage for them under the liberal order.
• White Nationalists suffer from no-platforming by Corporate America. We’re banned and censored for our beliefs on the social media monopolies like Google/YouTube, Facebook, Reddit and Twitter. We’ve been banned by crowdfunding monopolies like PayPal, Patreon, GoFundMe. We’re been banned from Uber, Lyft, OkCupid, SoundCloud and countless other services.  Meanwhile, the CEOs of these companies like Tim Cook of Apple donate millions to the ADL and SPLC.
• White Nationalists suffer from systematic discrimination in public accommodations. We don’t even bother with private hotel chains because only government facilities won’t break contracts. In contrast, mainstream liberals can hold conferences anywhere they want.
• Corporate America lavishly funds the mainstream Left. Big business isn’t financing us. It is the other way around. They have the same priorities as Tim Cook and the Koch Brothers.
• Corporate America has always been the driving force behind globalism. The Wall Street Journal is a mouthpiece for open borders and free trade.
• Jews have benefited the most from corporate capitalism. They are the ones who have grown filthy rich under the present system. The top 1% are mostly Jews, not White Nationalists. Jews like Sheldon Adelson are so wealthy that they can buy our foreign policy. It goes without saying that we don’t have that kind of money. There is no such thing as white privilege.

In sum, we don’t have any reason to defend corporate capitalism. No one in the United States suffers more from these monopolies and their concentrated economic power than we do. Multinational corporations are enforcers of political correctness, not secret supporters of fascism. Whereas conservatives and libertarians are ideologically invested in corporate capitalism due to their roots in classical liberalism, the Alt-Right is not and descends from a very different rightwing tradition.

We supported President Trump for cultural and economic reasons. He was going to build the wall, restore law and order, ban Muslims and dismantle political correctness WHILE keeping us out of endless foreign wars and getting rid of our globalist immigration and trade policies. More than anything else, we hated mainstream conservatism and hoped the “nationalist-populist” Trump presidency would finally put an end to it. We wanted to move away from the rightwing liberal tradition.

Since Trumpism in practice has been revealed to be mainstream conservatism, we no longer have any reason to support the mainstream Right. The Republican Congress is pushing all the same conservative economic policies. It has spent the last year on healthcare, deregulation, bloating the military and tax cuts.  Next year, it wants to plunge into entitlement reform. There hasn’t been any change in our circumstances. We haven’t gotten anything in exchange for our support.

Conor Lynch goes on to make various stupid arguments:

“The alt-right’s “anti-capitalism,” then, is really just anti-Semitism wrapped up in an economic veil, devoid of any real critique of capitalism. Their economic turn is simply a means to further their movement and spread their racist ideology. …”

Southern Nationalists have a long tradition of rejecting capitalism. George Fitzhugh’s Sociology for the South, or, The Failure of Free Society and Cannibals All! or, Slaves Without Masters were a scathing attack on Northern capitalism in the antebellum era. The Southern Agrarians attacked Northern capitalism again in the 1930s. Neither focused on Jewish influence.

Capitalism isn’t a Jewish conspiracy. It simply has the effect of undermining social hierarchies, dissolving our culture and confusing our sense of identity. It is liberalism applied to economics. It creates an environment that enriches and empowers Jews by weakening the social fabric, relativizing our traditions and stripping “individuals” of their cultural identity in the name of abstractions.

Jews become market dominant minorities under capitalism and use their wealth to control politics and further poison our culture. This isn’t, however, a uniquely Jewish problem. It is a phenomena that has happened in other countries with different mixes of ethnic groups.

“Traditionally, anti-capitalism has been found predominantly on the left, while the right has historically defended the interests of big business (and other forms of hierarchy). …”

Tories have always criticized capitalism for undermining the social order.

“Alt-right fascists of today criticize capitalism for the same reasons: the materialism, the cultural liberalism (i.e., immigration, diversity, etc.), the lack of meaning and emptiness in the modern world. They do not, however, criticize capitalism as an economic system, nor do they examine the structural forces that lead to things like inequality and consumerism; instead they blame the “Jewish conspiracy,” along with other scapegoats (people of color, immigrants, foreigners) who are a party to the conspiracy against the white race. Thus, the fascist critique of capitalism is about as inane and incoherent as it is hateful and offensive.”

This isn’t true.

We do criticize capitalism as an economic system. Specifically, we criticize it for undermining the social order, corrupting our politics, empowering a hostile elite, invading the family sphere, destroying the workforce through global labor arbitage, poisoning our culture, exacerbating class divisions and bringing in millions of non-White immigrants who will never be assimilated and only exploited as aggrieved racial voting blocs. It is an economic system that by its nature is extremely destructive, culturally and economically, unless it is restrained by some other powerful countervailing force. Spiritually, it cuts people off from their social and religious roots and transforms them into lonely, wandering economic nomads who live in desolate commercial landscapes where they lack even the impulse to reproduce themselves or in the case of elevated mental illness and suicide levels to bother to continue living.

“As economic inequality continues to skyrocket around the world, only the left can offer a coherent and rational critique of capitalism. But the true test will be whether the left can offer a viable alternative to capitalism as well. …”

The Left used to criticize the “bourgeois decadence” caused by capitalism, but now celebrates it as the highest good of Western society. It also celebrates “diversity” whereas previously socialist countries accommodated ethnic division and promoted some traditional values.

By 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville had summed up the future of liberal democracies with capitalist economies. NEITHER the mainstream Right or Left has any solution to the problem. BOTH worship liberal democracy and are committed to the capitalist system which has brought us to this point:

“Among democratic nations new families are constantly springing up, others are constantly falling away, and all that remain change their condition; the woof of time is every instant broken and the track of generations effaced. Those who went before are soon forgotten; of those who will come after, no one has any idea: the interest of man is confined to those in close propinquity to himself. As each class gradually approaches others and mingles with them, its members become undifferentiated and lose their class identity for each other. Aristocracy had made a chain of all the members of the community, from the peasant to the king; democracy breaks that chain and severs every link of it.

As social conditions become more equal, the number of persons increases who, although they are neither rich nor powerful enough to exercise any great influence over their fellows, have nevertheless acquired or retained sufficient education and fortune to satisfy their own wants. They owe nothing to any man, they expect nothing from any man; they acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands.

Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.” …

“I think, then, that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything that ever before existed in the world; our contemporaries will find no prototype of it in their memories. I seek in vain for an expression that will accurately convey the whole of the idea I have formed of it; the old words despotism and tyranny are inappropriate: the thing itself is new, and since I cannot name, I must attempt to define it.

I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest; his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind. As for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but he does not see them; he touches them, but he does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.

Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?

Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things;it has predisposed men to endure them and often to look on them as benefits.

After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

I have always thought that servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind which I have just described might be combined more easily than is commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom, and that it might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the people.”

Note: We don’t have the solution to this yet either, but at least we see the problem.