The Real Enemy: the Trumpian boomer conservative

I.

The Right in the West has become, since Trump’s election, the battleground between two opposing tendencies: the Atlanticists and the Eurasianists. In the latter group, we find Putin, Dugin, the Eurasianists, the National Bolshevists, the advocates of a new Red / Brown alliance – all of whom have been gaining ground steadily in the Right since the Maidan uprising in the Ukraine in 2014 and Putin’s subsequent invasion of eastern Ukraine and Crimea; in the former, the new wave of Trumpian immigration-restrictionist and civic nationalist conservatives, who came to prominence during Trump’s hostile takeover of the Republican Party and his ascension to the presidency.

For a time, it seemed that Putin would emerge as the leader of the Right, after ploughing in considerable resources into winning it (and the Left, but that is another story) over, and in the geopolitical arena, he faced little competition, given that the US had elected an intransigent, homosexual Marxist negro to the presidency for not one but two terms. But now Putin seems to have taken a step backwards when by all rights, he should be moving ahead.

In the past four years, Putin has annexed Crimea, has been unable to have been dislodged from eastern Ukraine, and has saved what is left over of the Syrian Arab Republic rump state (at the expense of Syria having been partitioned – Russia has to share Syria with Iran, Turkey, the Kurds and the US, and may, at the time of writing, have to accede to an Israeli concession in the border town of Quneitra). One would think that these victories translate into prestige, prominence, but this is not the case. The organisations and parties in the West that Putin has fostered, or gained influence in, have largely fallen into disarray. Trump, on the other hand, seems more interested in these than Putin is: he has been making inroads in the populist parties of the Far Right, once the exclusive preserve of Putin, and one indication of this is the controversy caused by the recent remarks by Grenell, the US ambassador to Germany. Trump, who makes no secret of his distaste for Merkel, is letting it be known that in the Trump administration, the immigration-restrictionist parties of Europe have a friend, and in 2018, is expanding in power and becoming the leader of the Right, not only in the US but in the West.

Perhaps the reason for Putin’s apparent decline is weariness. His regime – which is 18 years old – is showing signs of age, while Trump’s administration is only in its second year, and possesses all the reformist zeal and energy of the Reagan administration in its first term. Added to that is the fact that Trump has a better image than Putin, who is guilty, in the eyes of the Far Right, of a multitude of sins: Putin does not advocate nativism, immigration restrictionism, racialism; he takes the standard, orthodox Soviet view of National Socialism and WWII; he cultivates Israel, Netanyahu and Jewry. Putin has always lacked credibility among the more discerning and critical members of the Far Right for these reasons, whereas Trump presents an alluring alternative, not only to Duginism, but to white nationalism: he proves that one can be a civic nationalist, a conservative and a Zionist and at the same time a highly effective nativist and immigration restrictionist – and therein lies the danger. The white nationalists, along with the Duginists, are being outflanked by Trump. They stand in the middle ground between the Eurasianists and the Atlanticists, and as the fortunes of the Eurasianists decline, and the Atlanticists rise, they must either carve out a third position or join one of the two opposing sides.

Trump can draw followers from the Right – the Center and Far Right – because, at the moment, he is undertaking a great war against the Left, a war which is being waged for the control of key institutions in American life. The American State consists of the executive, judiciary and legislature: the Trumpian faction of the Republican party controls the executive, has only partial control of the legislature (which refuses to authorise release of funds to pay for his Mexican border wall) and the judiciary (which, in the lower courts, has attempted to stall some of his immigration restrictionist measures). As for what Trump calls the ‘Deep State’, institutions such as the armed force, the police, the secret police (the FBI), the public and education sectors: Trump has excellent relations with the police and the army, but faces resistance (Hillary Clinton’s ‘Resistance’) in the other institutions. This resistance extends to what may be called the Outer State - the entertainment industry, the media, the churches, the trade unions, the chambers of commerce - and in these we find ambiguous attitudes towards Trump at best. Big business likes Trump’s tax cuts and deregulation, but not his tariffs and not his nativism, and the rank and file of the trade unions firmly support Trump whereas the leadership does not, and as for the conservative media, even it is not completely won over to Trump, but is warming to him because of the aberrant behaviour of the Left.

The antics of the Left may serve to tighten, and not loosen, Trump’s grip on power. Political neutrality no longer exists in the US, and neither does moderation. The US Center Left has collapsed into the Far Left, a process which has started under Obama and has accelerated since the 2016 election campaign, and the resulting chaos and tumult has played into Trump’s hands and is well suited to his unique brand of divisive politics. In the November primaries, and in the 2020 election, Trump will run on a Nixonian ‘law and order’, anti-leftist platform, and will seek to persuade the American voter that the Democrat Party has been taken over by immoderate, left-wing fanatics – an easy task.

Trump – if he wins big – will only increase his standing within the Republican Party, and this will give him the freedom to enact more of his program. At present, the party forms an obstacle to the fulfilment of his most important election promises. Trump may have taken over the party in 2015-2016, and sidelined the dissident ‘Never Trump’, pro-business and pro-immigration faction, but he lacks good personnel, and has been forced to appoint liberal and pro-immigration conservatives, such as Kirstjen Nielsen, who, according to the Trumpian media, is attempting (alongside Chief of Staff John Kelly) to thwart Trump’s restrictionist policies from within. If Trump were truly the autocrat, the totalitarian, the media claims him to be, he would not be faced with this quandary. After all, extreme reproducibility and uniformity of views make up some of the distinguishing characteristics of a totalitarian organisation. L. Ron Hubbard found no shortage of followers who would carry out his orders to the last letter, and neither did Joseph P. Smith, the founder of Mormonism, and neither did Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Castro…

All the more reason, then, why we should reject Trump: he is not one of us – a ‘totalitarian’, a ‘fash’, a ‘Nazi’. But, at the same time, it must be said that Trump has done many good things for us. According to the Russian military writer Viktor Suvorov, Stalin viewed Hitler as an ‘icebreaker’ – some would cause chaos and disruption in the West and bring about war, thereby making Europe weak and vulnerable and open to Soviet domination. My argument here is that Trump essentially plays the same role. Trump should not be regarded as the enemy: the conservatives behind should. They stand the most to benefit from a triumph – no matter how temporary – over the Left and the Eurasianists, a victory which will be at our expense.

II.

Who do I mean by ‘conservative’? First among these number the big names, the opinion makers, of the conservative movement: the boomer conservatives. The list includes Rush Limbaugh, Kurt Schlichter, Victor Davis Hanson, Scott Johnson, Sean Hannity. They support Trump unreservedly and hold to immigration-restrictionist views. They are civic nationalists, American patriots and they put it about that liberals and Marxists, who believe in black nationalism and affirmative action quotas, are the ‘real racists’, and that true conservatism is colour-blind. And while the boomer conservatives do not belong to the (heavily Jewish) neoconservative faction of the conservative movement, they proffer philo-Semitic views and defend Israel to a ridiculous degree. (This side of their doctrine was exposed after the May massacre of Palestinians by Israel at the Gaza border. In one day, Israel shot more than 55 unarmed people dead like dogs. Had the American army shot dead 55 Mexican illegal immigrants at the US-Mexican border, or 55 Black Lives Matters protestors in Illinois, the uproar would have been immense, and such that the conservatives would have been forced to acknowledge that perhaps, this time, the US state had gone too far. But when it came to the massacre in Gaza, conservatives blithely dismissed the notion that it was anything out of the ordinary from a political, legal or moral perspective, and even insinuated that the Palestinian dead, all ‘terrorists’, deserved to be killed. The incident showed that the conservatives place little to no value on Arab life, and that old truism – one rule for Israel, another for the rest of the world – still holds).

It goes without saying that the conservatives disdain National Socialist Germany and take (unlike paleoconservative Pat Buchanan) the conventional view of the Second World War and the Holocaust to be absolutely, a 100% unassailably true. In this they follow Putin.

One should not labour under the misconception that these are men without virtue. Limbaugh says some excellent things on immigration, and has shown himself to be a shrewd and canny observer of US left-wing politics: he would not have survived for thirty years in radio, and become a fixture on the conservative scene, if he did not possess great insight. And these conservatives do form part of the political establishment – the protestations of Limbaugh and others not withstanding – and this gives them a tremendous advantage over the Richard Spencers, Hunter Wallaces, Mike Enochs, Matthew Heimbachs: they are more wired into reality. They form part of the state. And it could be argued, with some justification, that they deserve more respect than the Spencers and Anglins. The conservatives will point to the good work that they and their publications (such as Breitbart) do on immigration, and note that their journals and media outlets wield no small influence over the executive and the legislature, and not to mention the views of the ‘average American’. The conservatives, so the argument goes, are more realistic and effective than the white nationalists, Neo-Nazis, Alt Rightists and other fringe-dwellers.

Boomer conservativism is not confined to septuagenarian and sexagenarian Republicans – it carries over to the Far Right (or Alt Right) and its circumference. As right-wing aficionados of American popular culture know, the American entertainment industry has been infiltrated, to an astonishing degree, by ‘social justice warriors’, who have destroyed cultural institutions such as the Star Wars movie franchise and Marvel Comics. In politics, every action generates an opposite reaction, and ‘Cultural Marxism’ in contemporary pop culture has spawned a legion of YouTube commentators who fight against it and who have become politically powerful in their own right. These commentators more often than do not consider themselves to be conservative, let alone political: they see themselves as ordinary, every day Americans who are defending a beloved cultural heritage against a left-wing Kulturkampf. But, if one takes them seriously as political actors and examines their views, one sees an exact parallel between their ideology and that of the boomer conservatives. The same applies to the creed of other YouTube personalities such as Sargon of Akkad and Jordan B. Peterson, both of whom became a significant material force (as the Marxists themselves would put it) in a short period of time.

Past them, we come to the intermediate zone where the Center Right turns into the Far Right: the semi-respectable, nativist conservatives grouped around Peter Brimelow’s Vdare.Com. Here the Ann Coulters and Michelle Malkins rub shoulders with the black sheep of the conservative family, among them John Derbyshire (a British writer who was expelled from the National Review for writing a derogatory article against American negroes), Steve Sailer (an advocate of geneticist, ‘human biodiversity’ and race and IQ theories) and Pat Buchanan (a once-respectable paleoconservative and Republican presidential candidate who fell from grace). It is here that the conservative, who sees himself as a realist and who wants to keep his finger on the pulse of the conservative movement, pulls himself back from the brink, into safety – into the realm of Breitbart, Fox News, Red State, PJ Media and the Weekly Standard.

And what is the problem with this? The answer is that such conservative politics takes one away from the racialist and radical politics of a thinker such as Alfred Rosenberg.

III.

Rosenberg’s masterpiece The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930) shows up the lie that German National Socialism only concerned itself with the fate of Germans only, that it had no bearing on the white world at large. 

Here Rosenberg writes on America:

This points to the problem of America. In the United States the racial policy
will have world political effects, in exactly the same way as once the idea
of Democracy determined the life of almost all states.
 North America is the area in which freemasonic Human Rights were first
realized. Brother Washington became the archetype of this philosophy.
The American declaration of freedom was the model for the Rights of Man
of the Paris revolution. In order to further capitalism, the battlecry of
Rights of Man was heard, and the liberation of the Blacks was accomplished
in the southern states.

The Black question stands at the head of all questions of existence in the
United States of America. The American liberal is bound and determined
to force his ideas on America, for as a state, the antiquated Liberalism
thumps the dub of Freedom on all citizens even if it must be beaten in with
rubber truncheons. If the insane principle of the equality and equal rights
of all races and religions is one day finally surrendered, there is yet hope.
Then the necessary conclusions with regard to the Asiatics and Jews will
result of themselves.
 We can not tolerate a policy that permits Blacks to appropriate our
civilization, open stores, become lawyers, and organize themselves
politically. It is particularly in this respect that American legislation should
intrude, and, with clear aim, introduce a resettlement of the Blacks to
Africa.

After deprivation of political civil rights, they should begin a planned
expulsion, increasing year by year, of Blacks to central Africa. That would
be a beneficial enterprise in the long run because every Black could easily
be replaced by a white. The United States of America would become much
more uniform as a result. If all this does not occur, then the present day
12 million Blacks will, in a short time, number 50 million. As the troops
of Bolshevism they could deliver a decisive blow to white America.

How right he was! Here he is on American policy towards Asia. He simultaneously condemns Western imperialism in Asia and Asian immigration into the West:

A statesman who has only Nordic European and Nordic North American
interests in mind will support the battle cry which is directed against the
present European and American states: east Asia to the east Asians! Japan
and China must retain the possibility of at least allowing their peoples to
live. To forbid immigration to North America and Australia to the Yellow
races, but at the same time to wish to colonize or rule the far east, is a
Capitalist insanity.
 It is possible that the misused technology of the Whites still triumphs
today. It is possible that the Yellow man is pushed back, throttled. But
then he will necessarily turn his face in other directions and will follow
the tracks of Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, and Attila. Bismarck's words, "The
Yellow men will one day water their camels in the Rhine," may find
fulfillment.

The United States of America, according to the universal agreement of all
travelers, is the magnificent land of the future. It has the great task of
throwing aside all outworn ideas which date from before its foundation.
It can proceed with youthful strength to set up the new idea of the racial
state, such as some awakened Americans have already apprehended, like
Grant and Stoddard. They saw the necessity for the expulsion and
resettlement of the Blacks and the Yellow men, the handing over of east
Asiatic possessions to Japan, the working toward a Black colonization in
central Africa, and the resettlement of the Jews to a region where this entire
group can find a place.

Can Rosenberg’s vision be carried out, at this late hour? Of that we are unsure. What is certain is that Rosenberg’s ideas cannot be put into practice if we are forbidden to discuss or even contemplate them. The civic nationalist conservatives work to prevent either from happening.