Saturday, November 7, 2020

Advice for Americans: a Communique in the Course of a Coup

 



I. 


I should have put a qualifying sentence at the end of my last article, and that is: these are the reasons why Trump will win if the election is free and fair. As we now know, the election was not free and fair, and it was more befitting of a Third World country than the United States. Trump would have scored well above 300 electoral college votes if not for Democratic electoral fraud in four Democrat-controlled cities in the north (Milwaukee, Detroit, Philadelphia, Atlanta), and for all we know, he may have even won Nevada and Virginia were it not for possible fraud there as well. The American Left is at present executing a plan which it had laid down in advance of the election; it is following a coup scenario which was 'wargamed' as part of what is called the Transition Integrity Project. 


Now, some (only a minority, I am pleased to say) on the dissident Right contend that none of this matters, both Trump and Biden are the same, etc., etc. I am writing to persuade those who are undecided or who have fallen under the influence of the black-pillers and nay-sayers. I wish to impress upon the Americans in the dissident Right that there is a time for political activism, it is now. 


II. 


The American Far Right or nationalist Right or racialist Right (or whatever you want to call it) should want to save Trump's presidency. Why? 


The first argument is: it is in the self-interest of the dissident Right that the presidency be saved. For years leading up to the 2020 election, the Left has vowed to punish anyone who supported and voted for Trump. Now reports indicate that an incoming Biden administration will pursue this goal; it will hardly be interested in national reconciliation and harmony. 


At the moment, the Left is focusing all its attentions on Trump, his base and the Republican Party - it wants to depose Trump, demoralise his base and turn the Republican Party against Trump and populism - but sooner or later it will turn to the Far Right. White nationalists, race realists, 'neo-reactionaries', Neo-Nazis, et al., will be deplatformed and perhaps even fined and imprisoned. The Biden regime may not have control of the Senate or even the House, but it will have control of the Justice Department and a myriad of other institutions control of which goes to the candidate who won the election for the presidency. It goes without saying that Biden's handlers will insert socialists, Marxists, communists, etc., into every key position, and these newly appointed nominees will seek a bloody retribution against all 'white supremacists' and 'Nazis', real or imagined. Center-right conservatives ('normiecons') and colour-blind civic nationalists can be expected to be caught up in the coming conflagration. (Indeed, the first shots in the war against 'normiecons' have already been fired: dozens of Republican and conservatives were struck off YouTube weeks before the election). 


The bottom line is: the Left seeks to control everything, and like some amorphous blob monster out of a horror film, it never stops until it has devoured everything in its path. Before the election, the Left ran Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, YouTube, Amazon, Hollywood, popular culture (DC, Disney, Marvel, etc.), nearly all the national news TV networks and newspapers; now it wants the government. It never stops. And sooner or later, it will come for you. The Left will not allow you, a dissident Rightist and freethinker, to have your corner of the Internet; it will not leave you unmolested; so long as you exist, it will attempt to destroy you. 


The second reason wanting a Trump second term is: immigration. As Kevin MacDonald notes in an article on the election, the Biden regime will usher in a massive wave of non-white immigration. That, combined with electoral cheating of the sort we saw in the four pivotal Democratic-run cities, will ensure that no Republican will be elected to the presidency for the next few decades. Many of the Trump's critics on the Right chide him with abandoning his white working-class base, and they point to the drop in white electoral support as proof of this; but I ask them, how do you think the white working-class (let alone the white middle-class) will fare under Biden? As it is, Trump has brought legal and illegal immigration to record lows, and not all of this reduction is attributable to covid. Name one other head of state in the West, or at least the Anglosphere, who has done as much to restrict immigration as Trump (as they say on 4Chan, 'Pro-tip: you can't). 


The third reason is: Marxist gradualism. Biden may not get control of the Senate, or even the House. But history shows that while a president does not always get the tax cuts he wants, he always gets the tax hikes, and this is despite his party's not having control of the legislature. Taxes on the supply of capital and labour will lead to less of it, and Americans can expect a gradual economic decline under Biden, a decline which will at first make itself felt only at the margins. The decline will proceed bit by bit and the inadequacy of capitalism compared to socialism will 'proven' over a period of time. This is important. Biden's handlers know that they cannot introduce Marxism all at once - e.g., Biden will not write an executive order to nationalise, overnight, all the companies in the S&P 500 - so they will avail themselves of salami tactics. We are seeing these gradualist methods at work already, and these recall those used during the communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948


I do not want here to revisit the now-centuries old capitalism versus socialism debate; all I want is to ask the dissident Right to consider the politics of the matter. The fact is that millions of Americans, 'normies' all, will not stand for socialism; millions of Floridan Hispanic voters will not abide Biden. My question to you is, are you prepared to be outflanked from the Right by immigrant Cubans and Venezuelans? 


The fourth reason is: fairness. Democracy can be defined as a fair contest between two more or less evenly-matched opponents - something like a game of chess or soccer. MacDonald and other race realists have written volumes on how whites have produced high-trust societies, and while democracy has been adopted by many non-white nations since WWII, it was whites who invented it in its modern form and one could say that it was built upon white values. For democracy requires the following norms: a sense of fair play; the consent of the loser (which we have not seen from the Left since 2016); the abstention from the use of force and intimidation against one's political opponents (which again we have not seen from the Left since 2016)... All of this could be said to be white, and Anglo-Saxon. It is true that over the course of hundreds of years, British and American politicians seeking office have gone against these precepts and doing so, have won; but there has always been the awareness that these men broke the rules and thereby did a bad thing and put themselves outside the pale. Generations of whites have regarded electoral fraud not as business as usual, politics as usual, but as a deviation from norms. 


One should separate all this - the history of democracy in the West - from the question of its actual value. Hitler did not think much of democracy, but democracy, in the period of the Second Reich and even Weimar worked well enough - at least, in pre-WWII Germany, you can find little evidence of Chicago-style ballot-box stuffing, because Germans as a people are too scrupulous and honest for that. But the communist Left destroyed the democracy of the Second Reich and Weimar, because it knew, on an instinctive level at least, that it could not win a fair contest. In much the same way, Lenin abolished the Duma because the Bolsheviks did not win the elections held after the October Revolution. 


This brings us to America today. We can envisage the American election of 2020 as a chess match between a blue player and a red. The blue player, through an illegal move, checkmates his opponent. The red player brings this cheating to the attention of the referee. The blue player, defending his conduct, says that the illegal move should be overlooked as the red player is a disgrace to the game of chess, has brought it into disrepute, is a odious individual, etc. The referee is torn: on the one hand, the denunciations of the red player by the blue strike a sympathetic chord; on the other, rules are rules. At this point, everything depends on how the referee will act. Will he follow the rules, or will he look the other way? Will he follow his better or lesser angels? 


The consequences are tremendous if the referee chooses the latter course. MacDonald is not alone in predicting that the reputation and sanctity of democracy will be called into question, and that civil war may result. He writes, 'It’s going to be interesting... Perhaps too interesting'.


That 'interesting' civil war may come about simply because the Left, as Rush Limbaugh points out, not believe in following the rules - it believes that is for suckers. The smart people, the clever people, bend the rules and even cheat so as to win, because winning - by any means necessary - is the supreme value. (It is doubtful that the men who fixed the vote in Atlanta, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Detroit, will ever evince remorse for their crime once they emerge in years to come and brag about their role in toppling Trump in 2020). And this is all in keeping with Leninism. If you, like Lenin, put socialism on a pedestal, if you prize it before anything else, if you make it the core of your morality - then woe betide anything that gets in the way of socialism. All the Anglo-Saxon ideals of fair play, of decency, of free and fair contests, can be trampled upon. They are all 'bourgeois'. 


The stench of cheating will cling to Biden throughout his entire term. To the Left, that hardly matters - they won,  that is that, and now they have the mandate to fight against 'systemic racism'; but to the dissident Right, it should matter.


III.


To put aside for the moment the question of the worth of second Trump term , I shall look at the strengths and weaknesses of both the contestants - Trump and Biden. 


Biden has little free will of his own - he is the puppet of the amorphous Left. What is that Left in 2020? It is radical, it is Marxist, but it is not the same as sixty or seventy years ago. Then, the American Left consisted of the Communist Party of the USA (the CPUSA) and its splinter groups, some of which went over to Trotskyism, others to Maoism. The Far Left then was centralised, not diffuse, and it was small in number. Branches and cells met in dusty basements and belonged to a hierarchical and centralised organisation (a 'vanguard party') which was controlled by Moscow. Splinter groups did not receive their orders (or funding) from Moscow, but they did emulate the CPUSA's 'revolutionary vanguard' structure.


Now, in 2020, Marxism and leftism have broken with the 'old Left' model. They are diffuse and decentralised as a virus is; they are a virus inhabiting the minds of the public, not so much a mass movement as a mass psychosis. In it we can identify the following factions:


- Anarchists and Antifa;

- 'Woke' capital (or corporate Leninism, as I like to call it);

- Academic and cultural Marxism: Critical Race Theory, Gender Studies, Black Studies, post-Colonial Studies, Queer Studies, etc.;

- Social Justice Warriors (SJWs);

- Black Lives Matter (BLM);

- Remnants of the old Marxist organisations: the CPUSA (which still exists), the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the old Trotskyite groups, the survivors of the New Communist Movement (NCM) groups.


All of these tend to cross over and overlap. A 'woke capitalist' could be found on the board of a big tech or media company who declares himself to be simultaneously a Marxist (without knowing a thing about Marxist theory), a crusader for social justice, a supporter of BLM and Antifa. 


How does this leftism manifest itself politically? As we know, the Left has spread itself into every nook and cranny of civil society, from churches to the TV and film studios. It sees the Democratic Party as its own, and the Party serves as the focal point for the Left's operations. 


The Democratic Party - and the grand cause of getting Trump - allows the Left to build bridges to the Right. This is how the Left has built an alliance with the Never Trump conservatives, who were present at the Transitional Integrity's Project's 'wargaming' of the anti-Trump coup. (The Never Trumpers represent the faction of the Republican Party which was ousted after Trump's hostile takeover of the party in the years 2015 and 2016. This is the faction of the conservative movement which is attempting at present to persuade Trump to 'do the right thing' and concede the election and acknowledge that he lost 'fair and square'; it is also placing pressure on the Republicans to distance themselves from Trump and any 'conspiracy theories' which say that the Democrats cheated). 


The Left has made a puppet of Biden (and Harris), and it is Biden who suffers from the same shortcoming as the Left and the Never Trumpers: a lack of popular support. No-one voted for Biden, at least not in the numbers claimed in Wisconsin, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan. In a democracy, this lack of electoral support translates into illegitimacy. One can be a cynic about this, one can sneer, one can quote Stalin approvingly to the effect that 'It matters not who wins the votes, but who counts them'; but this illegitimacy is a black mark against Biden, at least in the eyes of a large section of the American people. 


In contrast, Trump has his base which is extends both inside and outside the Republican Party. In addition, he possess great strength and fortitude. Even his enemies admit that he is not the type to go down quietly. It is for this reason that I believe that Trump will not give up. Those who say he will, I think, are projecting themselves onto Trump: they imagine that if they were in his shoes, they would have crumbled right now (I know I certainly would have). They simply do not believe in him. They show all the signs of having been taken in by the media anti-Trump propaganda, which is part of the massive psychological warfare campaign against Trump and his followers. But we should remember that only a week ago, the polls - and the betting markets - made the forecast that Trump would lose to Biden in a landslide (and the Republicans in the Senate and House as well). As of now, the betting markets indicate that Biden will be president. But why should we believe them? 


It is of course in Trump's personal interest to fight to the bitter end. The Left has vowed to arrest, convict and imprison Trump for his 'crimes' while in office (and needless to say, if it cannot find evidence of any criminal wrong-doing, it will manufacture it) the moment he departs from the White House; and they have vowed to go after his family as well. Trump is fighting for not only his own preservation but his children's as well. In this, the Left have made a mistake. Sun Tzu counsels that one must avoid encircling one's enemy completely: one must give him an avenue of escape, otherwise he will fight all the more harder. The Left, which is always overreaching, has not heeded Sun Tzu on this point. 


Another reason why Trump will not concede is that he sees himself as the winner of the election of 2020. History and tradition show that he is right. Out of the 31 elections since 1892, the state of Ohio has only gone with the loser twice - to Dewey in 1944 and Nixon in 1960. And in 30 out of 31 of those elections, the candidate who won Ohio and Florida together went on to win the office of presidency (and that includes George W. Bush in the extremely tight election of 2000). Nixon in 1960 is the exception which proves the rule: Nixon won Ohio, Florida and California and lost the popular vote to Kennedy by a narrow margin.  Viewed in the light of this history, Trump won in 2020.


In my last article, I looked at Helmut Norpoth's model in depth. Were we to ask him why Trump did not win 362 electoral votes as his model predicted, Norpoth would shrug and say, 'Biden cheated'. And he would be right. The electorate knows it, Trump's voters know it, and for this reason Trump's base at this point will not allow him to concede. 


One must fight while one has breath. One cannot allow the American democratic system (and by extension, all democratic systems) to be destroyed by a few ballot-box stuffers in Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Georgia. It is a matter of principle. Rush Limbaugh understands this and has vowed to keep on fighting, and he is dying of lung cancer. 


IV. 


Many on the dissident Right have given up on a Trump second term: they were pessimistic a few weeks ago, believing that Biden would win in a landslide (mistakenly, as it turns out), and are even more pessimistic now, believing that Biden has pulled off his coup. What if they are correct, and Biden and the Left have won? What must we do to prepare for a future in which no Republican, or at least no immigration restrictionist, will ever win the presidency in our lifetimes? 


Firstly, we must remove ourselves from the conventional Internet platforms - YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, etc. - before we are removed. (YouTube is no good anyway: its content is being marred by excessive advertising). We can find alternative platforms such as BitChute, but these are being targeted by the Left as we speak. When it comes to these battles, the Left always wins. But the Left can only control HTTP, which is not all there is to the Internet; it cannot control the platforms which existed before HTTP. On these one can distribute all the content - written, audio, visual - one wants.


Secondly, as a corollary to the above, we must boycott as much of the mainstream media and entertainment, etc., as  much as we can. In selecting what YouTuber to watch, what newspaper to read, we must go by the following criteria: what is the content creator's attitude towards leftism and to the American coup of 2020? 


Thirdly, we must become accustomed to two words - electoral fraud - and repeat them as much as possible in any discussion in relation to the election of 2020. The Left always projects - it thought that Trump somehow cheated his way to power in 2016 (that was what the whole Russian collusion narrative was about) - and it always accuses others of what itself is doing. Now, in 2020, Biden is doing what Trump is supposed to have done in 2016. It is at this point I propose that we take a leaf out of the Left's book. Following its defeat in 2016, the Left used the tactic in all places and all times of denying the Trump administration any legitimacy. We on the Right should do the same with the Biden / Harris regime. 


Someone on the dissident Right may object to this on the grounds that they do not like Trump; but how many leftists in 2016 liked Clinton? The Left went after Trump and sought to drive him out of office, not because he 'cucked' to the Jews or African-Americans or Hispanics, but because of his immigration restrictionism and nativism; the Left abominated him because of his calling all Mexicans rapists, because of his Muslim ban, because of his proposed wall... As MacDonald notes in his article, the Left will seek to destroy any candidate who is immigration restrictionist (and, for that matter, who has cultivated a large electoral base among white people). 


MacDonald concludes his piece with some uncharacteristic musings on the fall of democracy and the rise of Caesarism, and here he sounds like Spengler. In the long term, perhaps, Spengler will be proven correct, but in the short term, we are left with democracy - at least for a little while longer - and circumstances behoove us to fight for it in America in the year 2020. 


In that struggle, we must not let our judgement be clouded by dark thoughts; we must not mistake pessimism for realism. Trump himself is reputedly a follower of Norman Vincent Peale, the self-help priest who believed that positive thoughts can bring about positive outcomes. In the vein of Trump (and Peale), I declare the future to be still open.


Tuesday, November 3, 2020

Why Trump will win the Captain America election

 


I. 


It is difficult for those on the Right to be dispassionate about the 2020 presidential election when they believe - and I do - that America stands on the verge of a communist takeover if Biden wins. But here I will strive to be impartial and 'objective', and I will not indulge in a polemic against Biden and the Democrats. For it is the case that those who hold strong political opinions, on either the Right or Left, can develop tunnel vision and over time can come to assume that the 'people' think exactly as they do, and it is then that their view has become blinkered, their judgment coloured. And the result is that they will make the wrong call as to who will or will not win an election. 


For it could be - contrary to the opinions of many on the Right - that the American electorate this time around wants socialism, Marxism, communism. Sometimes the electorate can make that decision. The great political pundit and supply-side publicist, Jude Wanniski, wrote that every election gives a choice between economic growth and economic security; between capitalism and socialism; between the (what he calls) the 'mommy' party, which favours security, and the 'daddy' party, which favours risk-taking. There is no reason why in 2020 voters can opt for security over growth, socialism over capitalism, as they did in 2008 and 2012; in other words, there is no reason why they would not vote for the Democratic Party. Biden - who believes that a 'dark winter' lies ahead - definitely prioritises economic security over growth, and the voters may choose him, even though they have been warned, by Biden's opponents on the Right, that his policies will snuff out America's economic recovery and that his cabinet will socialist, crypto-communist; voters may have the reaction, 'So what?' to all that, as they favour a strong social safety net over economic growth. And conservatives and anti-communists have a hard time understanding this preference. The conservatives' dislike of socialism and communism and their antipathy towards a particular left-wing candidate (Obama, Biden) obscures their view of what it is that the electorate wants and how the electorate will vote. 


So, without going into the politics of the matter, without taking on board ideological preconceptions, I will outline in a 'scientific' fashion why it is that Trump will be re-elected. 


II.


The first reason is that historical precedents usually determine American electoral outcomes. Trump, a Republican, is running for re-election, and if he is to lose, the Republicans will have lost the White House after one term for the first time since 1892, a prospect which is possible but highly unlikely. 


Secondly - and looking, as above, at the 2020 election from the viewpoint of history - incumbent presidents running for re-election tend to win a second term: see Clinton in 1996, Bush 45 in 2004, Obama in 2012. (In that vein, it should be noted that men who are running for the presidency and who come from the Senate tend to lose: see Mondale in 1984, Dole in 1996, McCain in 2008. It may be that Biden, another Senator, is to be added to the list). If we are to look back over a hundred year's worth of elections, we will see that the incumbent president has lost re-election only three times: Hoover in 1932, Carter in 1980, and Bush 43 in 1992. But Hoover and Bush 43 were both seeking a record fourth Republican term in the White House, and the incumbent party seeking a third or fourth has the odds stacked against it. (As well as losing re-election, Hoover and Bush 43 hold this in common: they both hiked taxes and caused a recession, and they both were punished by voters for doing so, Bush 43 being voted out exactly sixty years after Hoover's defeat). Here it is Carter that really stands out as the odd man out, the exception proving the rule. 


Third, in order to determine the winner, we should look to what the polls (and betting markets) say as to which candidate is leading in the bellwether state of Ohio. That state has gone with the winner for all the elections after 1892 (that year again), with the exception of two years - 1944 and 1960; Ohio has functioned as the bellwether in 29 out of 31 elections. Now, Trump was leading in the polls and in the betting markets in Ohio on the eve of the 2016 election, and he is leading now; so he may be about to win again. (Despite its track record, many pundits today do not believe that Ohio is a bellwether. For 2020, many pundits have already conceded it to Trump but opine that Biden can without it. Some of them go far as to say that Biden can lose Ohio and Florida and still win. (That in itself seems improbable, given that Florida has gone with the winner for every election after 1992)). 


Fourth, Helmut Norpoth's Primary Model predicts a big Trump win with 362 votes in the Electoral College to Biden's 176 - a real blow-out. (Norpoth's official paper on 2020, which at this point in time no-one but me seems to have read, can be found here). 


Norpoth's prediction rests upon two presuppositions. The first is that the incumbent party is favoured to win the election for a second term, but not a third or fourth. (An election after an incumbent's second term is what the Americans call a 'change' election: see 1960, 1968, 1976, 2000, 2008, 2016). The incumbent party can win a third term only if the size of its popular vote in the election for a second term exceeded that of the first; for example, the Republicans won a third term in 1988 because their share of the popular vote in 1984 had increased upon that of 1980. 


The second presupposition is that the vote in the primaries anticipates that in the general - and in one primary in particular, and that is New Hampshire. That primary serves as a pre-election election. The candidate  who wins big in New Hampshire cruises to victory in the general; the candidate who struggles, loses. For examples of candidates from the incumbent party struggling in New Hampshire and going on to lose the general, see Ford in 1976, Carter in 1980, Bush 43 in 1992, McCain in 2008, Clinton in 2016. For examples of candidates from the incumbent party seeking re-election and who won New Hampshire and then the general decisively, see Truman in 1948, Eisenhower in 1956, Johnson in 1964, Nixon in 1972, Reagan in 1984, Clinton in 1996, Bush 45 in 2004, Obama in 2012; in those instances, the incumbent faced no significant challengers in New Hampshire, and the election held there was a formality. 


For various reasons, the New Hampshire primary works better than any other in giving us an indication of the results in the general. But in recent years, Norpoth has factored in the results of the South Carolina primary, as South Carolina records the preferences of African-American voters (New Hampshire voters are mostly white). In the 'change' elections of 1992, 2000 and 2008, the opposition party candidate did poorly in New Hampshire and well in South Carolina before going on to win in the general. 


In 2016 - a 'change' election - Trump won easy victories in the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries, while Clinton lost in New Hampshire and won handily in South Carolina. In 2020, history repeated itself, with Biden standing in for Clinton; Biden was beaten by Sanders in New Hampshire but triumphed over Sanders in South Carolina thanks to black voters. As for the Republican primaries for 2020, Trump won a crushing victory in New Hampshire, and while he did not contest South Carolina - the primary for that state was not held - Norpoth assumes that Trump would have won easily. 


In keeping with his model, then, Norpoth forecasts a Trump win in 2020. 


III.


Does the Norpoth Primary Model stand up to scrutiny? The model considers all the elections from 1912 onwards (1912 is the year in which the two political parties first allowed votes in the primaries). Norpoth uses the Democratic Party share of the two-party popular vote as a constant. He does not predict that vote with great accuracy, as we see from the below table. All the same, we can ascertain from Norpoth's table that the rule is if the Democrat vote falls below 50%, the Democrats lose the election. It is this question - will the Democratic vote fall or rise above 50%? - that Norpoth answers correctly in 22 out of 24 elections. 





The model got it wrong for two elections: 1960 and 2000. Why? For 1960, the model predicts that the Democrat vote would fall well below 50%; in actual fact, Kennedy got 50.1% - an extremely tight win in what was one of the closest elections in American history. For 2000, another close election, Norpoth predicts a vote of 50.2% (a Democratic win) and the actual vote was 50.3%, which was extraordinarily close to Norpoth's prediction; but as we know, Gore narrowly lost in the Electoral College. 


Norpoth can be excused here, I think, because both of these 'change' elections were unusually tight and marred by allegations of irregularities in vote counting. It is only in 2016 that the model really falls down. Then, Norpoth predicted a big drop in the Democratic two-party vote, but in actual fact Clinton won the two-party and lost the College. 


Taking this into account, Norpoth has adjusted his model. He no longer predicts the Democratic vote, only the Democratic performance in the Electoral College. The rule this time is that if the number of Democratic votes fall below 270, the Democrats lose. As we see from below, Norpoth gets it right in 25 out of 27 elections; the two he got wrong were (again) 1960 and 2000. 





The actual Electoral College counts deviate wildly from Norpoth's predictions for the most part, as could be expected; but as we see from the table, he was well within the margin of error for 2012 and 2016. And he anticipated the count for 2016 with precision: he forecast 236 for Clinton and the actual number was 232. This suggests to me that the mathematics of his model are improving.


Assuming that Norpoth is right, then, if Trump is to win 362 Electoral College votes - or thereabouts - he needs to win not only all the states he won in 2016 but some additional states as well, and big ones at that; even Virginia, Minnesota, Nevada will not be sufficient. Trump's performance would need to match that of Reagan and Bush in the Republican landslides of the eighties - 1980, 1984, 1988. Is this possible? Norpoth says yes, as we fail to appreciate how unenthused Democrat voters were for Biden, who came in a distant third behind Sanders and Buttigieg in the New Hampshire primary (as for Harris, Biden's putative successor, she dropped out of the race before the voting began, and nationwide she won only 844 votes - as a write-in).


IV.


Now we have examined Norpoth's model in detail, we can move on to Wanniski's. 


Wanniski's classic The Way the World Works (1978) looks at why it is that the electorate will vote for a candidate who emphasises security over growth. Socialism, he argues, helps tide the electorate through a period of economic contraction, and he warns that if the electorate does not have the socialist escape route in a time of capitalist crisis, a civil war could result. Which is why he says that good socialism beats bad capitalism. 


Wanniski says that while the Right usually blames the Left for causing contractions - Trump, for example, is arguing that Biden's tax hikes would cause a recession, if not a depression - but usually these contractions are brought about by the Right or at least the political establishment. And this was true of American history at the time of writing (1978). Hoover, a Republican, had hiked tariffs and taxes and caused the Great Depression; Nixon, a Republican, had taken America off the gold standard and caused a global inflation. And after the disasters wrought by these two right-wing presidents, left-wing presidents were elected. The pattern is, the Right brings about a contraction and the Left cleans up the mess. The elections of 1992 and 2008 fit the Wanniski model in that regard. 


But the 2020 election breaks the mold. At the start of the year, the Trump bull market was powering ahead, and using the Wanniskian methods of analysis, we see that the Gold Dow (the Dow Jones divided by the price of an ounce of gold) had dropped off from its September 2018 highs and we see that the US dollar had lost value against gold; but we can say overall that Americans were enjoying prosperity in that period. The reason why the markets plummeted was because of the Corona lockdowns, and the lockdowns were engineered by the Left and the liberal political establishment - the responsibility for the economic calamity can be laid at the door of the Left. In WWII, the Allies waged a ferocious strategic bombing campaign against National Socialist Germany with the intention of a) wrecking the German economy, b) killing or at the least demoralising as many Germans as possible and c) persuading Germans to depose their democratically elected leader. In 2020, the liberal establishment has taken up Allied-style strategic warfare, but this time the war is not being waged against Germans but Americans. And it is no coincidence that the lockdowns have also helped further traditionally Marxist objectives. Marriage and the family unit have been put under pressure, as has organised religion; the authority of the state has been increased to an extraordinary degree; and mass unemployment and the downturn in business activity have forced millions to rely upon the state for their subsistence. All of this is unprecedented; Wanniski in his lifetime had never seen anything like it. Given all that, it makes sense to say that in all probability the American voter in 2020 will take revenge on the Left by hurting it in the worst way possible - through a vote for Trump. 


The changed circumstances explain why it is that the Trump platform of 2016 differs from that of 2020. Each election presents different issues to the electorate, and in keeping with this, Trump has changed his tactics. Trump no longer caters exclusively to a white working-class base. Instead, he is attempting to build a multi-ethnic coalition, one which cuts across race and class lines, and the coalition is to be thrown into battle against the radical Left; Trump is in effect forming an anti-communist alliance. Trump is portraying myself as a defender of the American way of life, much of his rhetoric evoking that of the multi-racialist, assimilationist and civic nationalist conservatism of the Cold War. (In some respects, the 2020 election repeats the 1948 election, in which communists infiltrated the Progressive Party and ran Henry A. Wallace - an unsuspecting communist dupe - as a third-party candidate; Wallace is Biden, Trump is Truman). 


While it is possible that Trump's civic nationalist and conservative gambit will not work - perhaps, this time around, Americans will choose Marxism - Wanniski gives a reason as to why Americans will not. 


In Wanniski's world view, the electorate understands economics better than any economist, and it is applied economics - fiscal and monetary policy - that decides almost every election. And what sort of economics does the electorate prefer? Supply-side, of course: for fiscal policy, the electorate wants low tariffs and taxes; for monetary, a gold standard and fixed exchange rates. Wanniski wrote a 2001 article 'Only Supply-side Republicans Win' in which he expounds his theory, here breezing through the history of over 20 presidential elections and using them as case studies to support his hypothesis. 


If we are to look at the 2016 and 2020 elections within Wanniski's framework, we see the following. In 2016, candidate Trump offered big cuts to income and corporate tax, his platform being the work of Larry Kudlow and Steve Moore, two disciples of Wanniski; Trump ran as a supply-sider. In contrast, Clinton wanted to hike taxes, especially taxes on capital gains - a policy which, in the supply-side economic model, would have caused a recession. American voters did not want to commit economic suicide and so voted for Trump. Four years later, we find that history is repeating itself. The Republican candidate is promising tax cuts; the Democratic, tax hikes. Biden is following Clinton's path, and in fact is going further than Clinton - his tax hikes will exceed hers. We can judge from this, then, which of the two candidates, Trump and Biden, is the more supply-side. But we must add this caveat. Neither candidate can be viewed as completely supply-side: Biden and Trump have both been silent on monetary policy - neither of them oppose the depreciation of the dollar - and Trump has not acted as a supply-sider when it comes to trade. But on tariffs, Trump's bark has been worse than his bite, and the tariff wall on trade with America has not reached the dizzying heights of that of the 1930s. In the last analysis, then, Trump is more supply-side than Biden, and so, according to Wanniski's model, Trump wins 2020. 


A stark contrast exists between Biden and Trump. But often, in American history,  neither candidate offers supply-side panaceas. In those cases, the electorate will go with the devil it knows or the candidate it feels will do the least amount of damage. In other elections, the electorate will find such little difference between the candidates so much so that it will have difficulty making up its mind (see 1960 and 2000). 


V.


Many observers detect a lack of enthusiasm for Biden but have difficulty in quantifying it; hence, they will resort to the counting of yard signs and crowd signs. Norpoth's system can quantify enthusiasm or the lack thereof, using the hard empirical evidence of votes tallied in the primaries, and so it gives us reassurance; it tells us that our impressions of the feebleness of Biden's campaign are not based merely on hunches or anecdotal evidence. 


Wanniski performs the same task. We use adjectives such as 'old', 'tired', 'gloomy' to describe Biden, 'vigorous', 'dynamic', 'optimistic' to describe Trump. A mere four years separates the two men in age, so what is that makes Trump seem so fresh and alive? Wanniski would say that it is Trump's economic platform, which aims at growth - one of the favourite words in the supply-side lexicon.


If Norpoth and Wanniski are right, a Trump victory is assured. As for the political implications of the victory - implications that will unfold over the next four years - that is a subject we will have to explore next time. 


Wednesday, October 14, 2020

The Aussies and the Nazis

 


 I. Introduction: The 'Axis' Australia First Movement

I have read the article The Dawn of Australian National Socialism and here I am offering some thoughts in response. 

Some call it 'National Socialism', Yockey calls it the 'Resurgence of Authority', I call it 'Neo-Nazism': all refer to the one and same thing. I do not like to use the term 'National Socialism' much, as it is hard to define, like so many political concepts (define for me, if you can, 'democracy' or 'liberalism' or even 'socialism'). One problem I have with the term is that 'National Socialism' can be applied to many socialisms: was Mao's communism 'National Socialism'? Stalin's? Perhaps the word 'Nazi' works better at distinguishing the German National Socialism from all the others, but the word 'Nazi' has now  in 2020 been destroyed through overuse and misuse. 

The Dawn article raises the question: can there be such a thing as an Australian 'Nazism'? Stephensen and the Australia First Movement (AFM) were not Nazis in the sense of being card-carrying members of the NSDAP; but then, neither were many of Hitler's collaborators - Degrelle, Tiso, Pavelić, Quisling, Szálasi, and others. Stephensen - and his letters, his essays in the Publicist, prove this - sympathised with the Nazis from 1937 onwards, and in an offhand manner, you could classify him and the entire AFM as Nazi sympathisers. But we do not know how far that sympathy would have extended. If we were to sketch out some alternative history fantasy - along the lines of Philip K. Dick's Man in the High Castle (1962) - in which the Germans invaded and occupied Australia, we could use it as a foundation for speculating as to whether or not Stephensen and the AFM, in these circumstances, would have crossed the line from sympathy to collaboration. Based on the evidence, I answer yes, Stephensen and AFM would have collaborated. 

More controversially, Stephensen and the AFM sympathised with the Japanese after the outbreak of the second Sino-Japanese war in 1937 and up to Pearl Harbour. Again, we must ask how far that sympathy would have extended. Suppose that, in 1942, there had been a Japanese invasion and occupation (something much more probable than a German): would Stephensen and the AFM collaborated? A strong possibility is that at least the Western Australian branch of AFM would have, which is why the Australian government rounded up the AFM and interned them in a concentration camp (along with other Nazi and Japanese sympathisers) for the remainder of the war. (Stephensen himself, before and after the beginning of his pro-Japanese phase in 1937, poured cold water on the notion of a Japanese invasion of Australia and mostly refused to discuss it; if he did touch upon it, he would use it in an argument for one of his favourite theses, that Australia could not rely for its defence upon Britain). 

Even though the AFM ceased to exist and Stephensen's political career came to an end nearly eighty years ago, the AFM / Publicist circle should be studied because they formed the mold for contemporary Australian Far Right activism. When I read about the AFM, I experience a shock of recognition: we modern activists tread along the roads which were laid down by the AFM in the late 1930s and early 1940s. (The AFM's fervently pro-Nazi and bilious anti-Semitic journal, the Publicist (1936-1942), could be compared to one long series of 4Chan 's**t-posts'). Everything the AFM did in the 1930s and 1940s bears on what came in the decades afterwards. Today's Australian Neo-Nazis are ideologically descended from Billy Miles, the activist who founded the Publicist. And he could be described as the grandfather of 20th century Australian nationalism; he coined, or at least helped promulgate, the slogan 'Australia First' as early as 1917. 

(I should note here that the AFM did not officially form until October 1941; before then, the AFM circle had been informally gathered around the Publicist. Throughout this article I use 'AFM' to refer to the Publicist circle before and after the AFM's founding). 

The older Miles played Socrates to Stephensen's Plato, and probably is the one who bears responsibility for steering Stephensen - and a generation of Australian nationalists - towards sympathising with National Socialist Germany and Imperial Japan. It is the AFM example that shows that nationalism for one's own country can co-exist with a sympathy for German National Socialism - and so do the examples of Degrelle, Pavelić, Tiso, Quisling, etc. (It should be noted that both Stephensen and Miles in the late 1930s had close contacts with German agents - real live breathing Nazis - in Australia's pre-war diplomatic underworld and Stephensen commingled with Japanese agents in this period as well). 

But: many of the partisan and resistance fighters in German-occupied Europe claimed to be 'nationalist' during the war, even if they were on the Left; Greek communists claimed to be fighting for the Greek national cause, French communists for the French, and so forth. It is possible that, after a Japanese occupation of Australia, a split could have emerged between the Australian nationalists who supported the Japanese and the Australian communists who opposed them (on supposedly 'patriotic' and 'nationalist' grounds). Who knows, the Australian communists could have taken up arms and waged a guerrilla war with help from the Americans and the Russians, and in this scenario, the most notorious Japanophiles of the AFM (Stephensen, Adela Pankhurst-Walsh and her husband Tom Walsh among them) could have been denounced as traitors and even targeted for assassination. For it could have been that after the Japanese invasion and occupation, the AFM could have taken the same line as the collaborators in German-occupied Europe: yes, patriots were right to resist the invasion, but after the country's defeat, they ought to pitch in and help the occupiers rebuild the country and 'renovate' its culture. 

This is an alternative history novel that almost writes itself. But in order to research it, one would need to examine the history of the collaboration with the Japanese in occupied Philippines, Thailand, French Indochina, the Dutch East Indies, Manchukuo, etc., as Australia is in Asia. 

On that note, until I came across the AFM, I had no idea that the Far Right in both Australia and America contained sympathisers with Imperial Japan. Yockey, in his account of the American Isolationist movement, portrays the American Far Right ('nationalists', he calls them) as being either hostile or indifferent to Imperial Japan. But the example of the great American author, Ralph Townsend, shows that this is not entirely correct. Townsend wrote the anti-Chinese classic Ways That Are Dark (1933), extracts from which often appear on 4Chan, and his career followed the same trajectory as that of the AFM activists who were interned. 

The pro-Japanese sympathies on the Far Right in America and Australia in the 1930s made sense geopolitically, as both Australia and America (at least the West Coast side of America) are Pacific nations and both regard China as a deadly enemy. In defence of their actions in light of what came after, Stephensen and Townsend in the 1930s were only following the adage that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. 

II. Predictions and the Führer Problem

This brings us to the subject of America and how political changes there today affect the prospects of 'Neo-Nazism'  in Europe and Australia. 

The circumstances of Trump's illness are shrouded in mystery. I am unable to ascertain whether or not Trump was ill or feigning illness as a publicity stunt; and if he was sick, was he sick with covid or something else? And what of the conspiracy theories - had he and the other Republicans been deliberately infected as part of what was an assassination attempt by the Left? But in the end, he will go on to win the election, and his victory will mark the beginning of the end of the lockdowns in America and Australia, as Australia (like most of the Western world) goes as America goes. This will free up the Far Right to start organising again (it is no coincidence that the activism of the Far Right in America has been suppressed by the lockdowns while that of the Far Left has been unimpeded). 

But a Trump victory does not rule out a civil war in America; one commentator has compared the 2020 presidential election to the 1860. The Left does not think of much of Biden, and so will be saddened, but not surprised, by a Trump victory, and evidently it is making plans to resume rioting, etc., the day after re-election. 

One result of Far Left malfeasance is that American 'normies', and even American conservatives, are beginning to rediscover anti-communism. The boundaries between the Center Right and Far Right are becoming subtly blurred. We in 2020 live in a landscape which differs completely from that of 2017, when the Center Right turned on the Far Right after Charlottesville. The conservatives - and not only in America - are catching up with the Far Right. But this was to expected; as Mike Enoch says, 'Everyone hates SJWs'. And the significance of this is that in 2021 the Center Right will be off the back of the Far Right, at least for a while. 

What of Europe? My prediction is that it will remain 'pozzed' for some time. Yockey, in Enemy of Europe (1953), blames the American occupation of Western Europe for Europe's general 'pozzedness'. But the trouble is that even if America were to let go of Europe - and even if the entire North American Continent to disappear into thin air tomorrow - the political, social and economic structures erected by the by the Anglo victors would remain. Germany, in particular, labours under a system which is not democracy but a parody of democracy, a system in which political parties dominate every aspect of political and social life. 

As to how Germany could be 'uncucked'... In the 1991 movie King Ralph, the entire British Royal Family dies in a freak accident, and a yokel from America (played by John Goodman) is discovered to be next in the line to throne; hilarity and hi-jinks ensue. For Germany to free itself, the entire elite of Germany - which must number in the tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands - would need to vanish in a similar freak accident. Next in line to the throne would be the German nationalist and Far Right formations - the AfD, the informant-riddled NPD, and assorted skinhead and Neo-Nazi groups. All of these are hardly a prepossessing bunch, but they are all Germany would have in terms of political leadership. 

The moral is that it is only internal collapse which can bring about the displacements which in turn lead to change. Historical observers ask why it was that France, in 1936, did nothing to stop Germany from remilitarising the Rhineland. The answer is that France at the time was experiencing a political and economic collapse. 

Now, we could hope for a similar implosion in Germany's 'democratic' order, but barring a miracle, that will not happen. The problem comes down to lack of leadership - charismatic leadership. The Nazi slogan goes, 'Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer'. If we are to look at Germany and Europe today, we must ask: where are the Führers? This is a singularly important question, as fascism subscribes to the great man theory of history. Fascism could be considered a system of neo-monarchy; the Duce or the Führer steps into where the King would be in a feudal or dynastic regime. The Volk, the people, constituted the infrastructure of National Socialist Germany; the Führer (and the rest of the NSDAP leadership) the superstructure. 

From that perspective, the Neo-Nazi movement resembles one of those royalist tendencies in Europe from hundreds of years ago which await the return of an exiled king or which get behind a pretender (or more accurately, a claimant) to a throne. Such 'royalist' political movements can survive and even prosper for a long time. The Peronist movement, for example, in Argentina waited nearly twenty years for the return of the exiled populist and quasi-fascist Juan Perón. Political tendencies such as the 'royalist' can prevail because concreteness can be located at their center: the tendency is bound up with a particular person. It is significant that Germany collapsed militarily one week after Hitler's death; Hitler, while he was alive, held the Third Reich together. In America, the Republican Party's relation to its leader has become like that of the NSDAP to its Führer, and so the question is being asked, what will the Republican Party do once Trump goes? 

Can a 'royalist' movement survive the death of its leader? The populist governor of Louisiana, Huey Long, founded a Share the Wealth movement during the Great Depression which attracted a significant number of Americans; after he was assassinated in 1935, the Share the Wealth clubs fell apart. Likewise, Maoism disappeared from China almost immediately after Mao's death in 1976. One could enumerate many such cases. (Trotskyism could be the exception to the rule, as Trotskyite parties have only multiplied after his assassination in 1940, but Trotkskyism claims to be only a continuation of Leninism - the Leninism supplanted by Stalinism). But that places Neo-Nazism in a position which is unique of all the ideologies in the world: it seeks to survive as a nostalgia movement designed to promote the wise policies of a deceased leader. Perhaps an ingenious political thinker could transform this liability into an asset. 

III. 'Not for Export'

Hitler said famously that 'National Socialism is no article for export'. This quotation has been used in arguments for the thesis that German National Socialism is restricted to Germany and consequently, the Anglo nations - America, England, Australia, New Zealand, Canada - have nothing to learn from Hitler's teachings. 

German National Socialism may be divided up into three periods: the Years of Struggle (1919 to 1932), the golden years in which Germany enjoyed a national revival and great foreign policy success without bloodshed (1933 to 1938), and finally the Third Reich years (1939 to 1945). As Carolyn Yeager points out, white nationalists - and the dissident Right - tend to lavish praise on the first two periods and heap scorn on the third. They take this dim view of the Third Reich years for reasons which I will not elaborate here. What is important to note is that intellectuals and scholars of the Far Right will pass over the Third Reich period in their researches. Mein Kampf gets the lion share of their attention, even though that book - crucial as it is to understanding the National Socialist Weltanschauung - was written by Hitler as a young man in the Years of Struggle; the main enemy in Mein Kampf is not the Jews, but the French. 

The Third Reich period ought to be studied the most, for in the last analysis it is this on which Hitler and the NSDAP will be judged. So, what resources do we use? For the purposes of a study of the political history - and not just the military history - of the Third Reich years, books published in the war and immediate post-war years provide the best store of knowledge, even if these are written by Germany's enemies (and virtually all of the books in English from that time are), as they are (surprisingly enough) relatively free of the bias of later years. None of the books from the war mention the Holocaust, and only a few of them mention the gas chambers; at the very most, they will make in passing allusions to an 'extermination' of the Jews, and even then they choose not to dwell on it, as they feel that they lack the evidence to verify the Jewish atrocity claims. (Most writers, even during the war, did not take the propaganda utterances of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) and the Polish government in exile all that seriously). The 1942 book, The New Order in Poland (1942) by Simon Segal (presumably a Jewish author) describes the hard lot of Jews and Poles under German occupation but gives us a reasonably fair and balanced account. One is almost tempted to call the work Holocaust Revisionist even though Revisionism had not come into being yet. 

The wartime accounts disprove the 'No article for export' thesis, as it becomes clear that Germany did a great deal of exporting National Socialism in the years 1939 to 1945. Millions of Europeans were mobilised - many, admittedly, against under duress - for the German war effort, such that Europe came to be a cross between a beehive and a foundry. To the modern reader, German-occupied Europe foreshadowed the European Union (but a different European Union to the one we know today). And indeed, in Albert Lauterbach's Economics in Uniform: Military Economy and Social Structure (1943), we find headings such as 'European Union - National Socialist Edition' and 'Continental "Socialism" on the German Model'. 

In principle, Lauterbach likes a European Union; in practice, he does not like it - if the Germans are the ones running it. 


I cannot claim, as others have done, to have uncovered the secret of the actual intentions or discussions of the Nazi rulers, and evidence from German sources on definite details of the proposed Nazi reorganization of Europe has been limited. However, unless the term Grossraumwirtschaft is used in an unusually narrow sense, it seems to make little difference which particular administrative technique of domination the Nazis proposed to use. They might or might not decide to admit local puppet governments, they might apply different methods of control to various regions, but their general policy was always directed toward a centrally planned management of all Europe's economic activities in the exclusive interest, as they saw it, of the German nation. 


In other words, in the event of a decisive German victory, the policy envisaged was clearly a militarized Grossraumwirtschaft within a comparatively self-sufficient European continent, controlled by National Socialist ideas, interests, and methods. The power and potentialities of such an economic and political unit were bound to be tremendous. 


It is the German influence, the German control, the German domination, which was resented the most. England fought two wars (and in the process destroyed itself) to prevent Germany from becoming the leading force on the Continent, and one of the main geopolitical objectives of England and America after the war was to prevent a German return to ascendancy. But inevitably, the Continent will fall into the German orbit - it is doing so already. Germany exerts a magnetic attraction even under its present hapless leadership. Books such as Lauterbach's give us a portent.

I began my political life as a pan-European, an advocate of European unity, of Imperium Europa - it was a vision inspired by Yockey, Thiriart and Mosley - and it was not until the 2010s that I came across the writings of Yeager and started to myself how it was how the structure of the new Imperium would work. Which European nation would do the heavy lifting? The question answers itself. We know which nation it is, and it is not Portugal nor Ireland nor Denmark nor Hungary, it is not even England nor France. And once I began to explore the matter, my writings began to meet with a frosty reception. Talk of European unity, pan-Europa, would induce warm fuzzy feelings, but I once I brought up the subject of Germany and the Germans, well, that only served to awaken latent hostility towards Germany that was always simmering below the surface. And this is related to one of the persistent themes in the wartime writings by Anglos, an objection to the National Socialist idea of the Herrenvolk. Anti-Nazi propagandists mistranslate Herrenvolk as 'Master Race' when it means something more like a 'People who are Gentlemen', and this mistranslation in itself is revealing. Hitler's Table Talk offends because Hitler here states crudely and bluntly that Germany could do a better job of running Ukraine and the tracts of German-occupied Russia than the Ukrainians and Russians themselves. And that really gets up the nose of the dissident Right movement. We on the Far Right can accept the idea of a qualitative differences between races but not nationalities. 

IV.  AFM and the Jews

A staple of German propaganda during the wars is: German rule will do good things for your country. In the chapter, 'The Occupied Countries and Fortress Europe' of German Radio Propaganda: Report on Home Broadcasts during the War (1944), we find: 

Countries conquered by the German army fulfil a threefold function in German propaganda: as occupied territories, they are reconstructed; as neutrals, their approval is quoted, as allies, they send troops. Reconstruction starts with the arrival of the German soldier, whom National Socialist propagandists describe as even more civilized and considerate than did propagandists of Imperial Germany Germany builds new schools in the protectorate, it repairs devastation in the Ukraine; the Dutch, Danes, and Slovaks enjoy the blessings of her protection, and the consolidation of France advances rapidly after her submission. The appreciative response of the conquered is regularly stressed, and whenever possible the German character of the conquered territories: Alsace is rescued and returns to the homeland. 


[From a German news broadcast:] Colmar, a German town in Alsace, with its Gothic St. Martin’s Cathedral, shows little sign of damage. This town has been wearing a strong French ‘make-up’ for the past twenty years, not at all in keeping with its German character . . . Life in Colmar is returning to normal.


The phrase ‘returning to normal,’ like the word ‘reconstruction,’ occurs frequently. In Norway, in Denmark, in Holland, life returns to normal in a very short time. But there is something more than normality in the German picture of reconstruction. Liege, which had been a very dirty city, was turned by the efficient Germans into an earthly paradise. The railroads which the French had neglected were thriving. And there was remarkable engineering in process to unite the north of Norway with the south. The German listener is regularly informed of every school that is re-opened in conquered Russia. On the German radio, conquered Europe becomes a region of flowers, gladness, and reconstruction. 


The Germans may have repaired infrastructure, true, but what of the cultural and racial domain? National Socialism is 'Not for export': if you were a Jew or Mason or Bolshevik in wartime Hungary or Norway or Greece or Holland or France or Italy, you could take comfort in the phrase; the Nazis would leave you unmolested because 'It can't happen here', that is to say, National Socialism is only for Germans, not for Hungarians or Danes. France is to be allowed to rot under Jewish or Communist or Masonic domination because Germans - being selfish - do not want to share the blessings of National Socialism with the French. 

But of course that was not true. 

While some conquered lands are always referred to as conquered, others, in propaganda, regain their neutrality. They achieve this status by adopting Germany’s enemies as their own. The first enemy they acknowledge is the Jew. The quisling governments, step by step, adopt National Socialist principles of anti-Jewish legislation.


The dissident Right today should take great interest in that legislation, study it, examine it. But an Australian nationalist can object that it was all European, specifically Continental European, and that European-style anti-Semitism would have found no foothold here in Australia. But, eighty years ago, an Australian Far Right political movement walked down the same road as the Continentals in regard to anti-Semitism, and that movement was the AFM. In the most succinct book on the AFM, The Puzzled Patriots: The Story of the Australia First Movement (1968), Bruce Muirden writes that in 1941: 

Stephensen also found a foe in Cyril Pearl, editor of the Sydney Sunday Telegraph, who had asked the government to act against the Publicist... Pearl said of the Publicist that 'month after month it churns out a stale mixture of rabid anti-British nationalism, Nazi-inspired, and anti-Semitism and windy Fascist pseudo-philosophy'. Stephensen's counterblast had in it a certain inevitability: 'We of the Publicist do not know whether or not the editor of the Sunday Telegraph is a Jew'. 


I think Pearl's characterisation of the Publicist is harsh but true. (Amusingly, Stephensen typically responded to  his opponents with a typical Far Right tactic which is still used today on 4Chan and other forums: he accused them of being Jewish). 

Muirden goes on to say of the Publicist contributors: 

Miles, Graham, Arnold and Stephensen were beyond question anti-Semitic, and their increasingly unpleasant attacks on Australian Jews constituted one of the least savoury and defensible aspects of Publicist and Australia First propaganda. When the flow of Jewish refugees from Europe increased from 1938, the Publicist became more offensive. Miles and Stephensen, who gradually became as adept as his master in Jew-baiting... 

 

 The Jewish refugee question in the 1930s obsessed the AFM circle. Publicist contributor William Hardy Wilson, an architect who lived in Melbourne, designed a concentration camp for the Jews which was to be situated in the Dandenong Ranges. (The name of this camp? Israelia). 


Stephensen's attitudes to Germany on the outbreak of war are interesting. Muirden recounts: 

Stephensen wrote in the delayed September Publicist that before the war he had done his best to create goodwill between Australia and Germany, 'not because I held a brief for the Germans, but because I thought Australians were being mentally weakened by the revengeful Jewish campaigns of anti-Hitler hate which for years has flooded our Australian news press. If we are to fight against Germany, let us at least fight for an Australian, not a Jewish, reason'. 


The last sentence at first appears to be an evasion until we think it over. Stephensen's drift is that Australia in 1939 had no reason to 'fight against Germany', and so, had not reason to go to war. This was in keeping with Stephensen's anti-war position throughout all his career; he fiercely objected to Australia's participation in British punitive expeditions in Sudan, China and South Africa and, it goes without saying, Australia's entrance into the war on the British side in WWI. 

V.  Priorities

I have dwelt on the AFM circle at length because I wish to make the point that German and Nazi-inspired politics did not drop into Australia from the heavens; it is not a utopia without a material basis; it is not a castle in the sky. The AFM, and Stephensen, eighty years ago provided us with a precedent. One can ask whether the AFM's politics are entirely appropriate to the present day. I answer no: I myself do not believe that Melbourne's Jews should be interned in a concentration camp in the Dandenongs. More important is the fact that politics of the Stephensen sort once existed in this country. In the same way, today's Southern nationalism - a uniquely American product, definitely not for export - is founded on historical practice. It once existed. Much of the dissident Right makes fun of the Americans because of their inability to organise at a national level, e.g., form a nationwide party capable of taking on the Democrats and the Republicans; but at one point, the Southerners formed their own ethnostate - the Confederacy - and printed their money, elected their own president, etc., and even after their crushing defeat in the Civil War they maintained a regime of segregation right up until sixty years ago. In Far Right politics, one must always be grounded in the historical, the actual. So, if you want to build a Hitler-centered and anti-Semitic movement here in Australia, look to the example of the AFM, whose leaders networked with NSDAP members in Melbourne and Sydney. One will arrive not at a 'Nazism with Australian characteristics' (to paraphrase Mao) but at the least a nationalist philosophy which could be considered to be Nazi-compatible, Nazi-adjacent, a philosophy that puts the AFM in the same sphere as Petain, Tiso, Quisling, Pavelić and others. 

No doubt, 'Nazi-adjacent' politics poses all sorts of difficulties. A biography of Quisling reveals that a tension - which manifested itself behind closed doors - existed between Quisling's Nasjonal Samling and Norway's German occupiers. The Germans demanded that Quisling's party be reorganised along German lines so as to make it more like the NSDAP; they attempted to reorganise Norway's labour organisations along German lines as well (and in doing so met great resistance). Overall, a tension existed between the Norwegian interests and that of German 'New Order' imposed upon Europe. Both Hitler and Quisling shared the same ideology - fascism - but shared the same ideology of nationalism as well, and it was their differing perceptions of the national interest of their respective countries that led to a clash. Similar complications would have emerged in Australia had the Axis won the war: the ideology of Stephensen and Miles would inevitably have clashed with that of the Germans, the Italians and the Japanese. 

But such is politics. In the end, when one evaluates a political system, one must do so by the criterion, how far did it go to meet my political priorities? A Marxist in the early years of the Soviet regime would have been perfectly indifferent to the famine, poverty, misery and deaths brought about by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. He would have justified it all on the the grounds that, in the USSR, for the first time in history capitalism had been abolished and a dictatorship of the proletariat introduced. Socialism trumps humanism in the Marxist's world-view. We could here make an analogy with an anti-Semite - an obsessive anti-Semite of the Stephensen or Miles sort - living in German-occupied Europe. Accounts of Europe in that period make it sound like an unpleasant place, to put it mildly: Europeans lived through great suffering, deprivation and misery - black markets, rationing, Allied blockades, Allied bombing, deportations, labour conscription, starvation... But the anti-Semite living in German-occupied Oslo or Athens, Budapest or Paris, could at least console himself with the thought that someone was finally doing something about the Jewish problem - and the Mason problem and the Marxist problem. The great French  nationalist thinker, Charles Maurras, loathed Germany and spent a great deal of his career attacking it, but he loathed Jewry more, and he criticised the Vichy 1940 anti-Jewish laws as being too soft. Maurras never had a good word to say about the Nazis, but I am sure that - when pressed - he would have admitted that the German occupation had its positive aspects. (Maurras resembled Miles in temperament to a great degree - both were irascible old men - with the main difference being that Miles was favourably inclined to the Germans). 

VI. The hero ideal

In politics, one has to balance negatives with positives, and today, Far Right politics is overly weighted to the negative. A thoroughly representative American website, which I shall not name here, is filled every day with posts which are obsessively anti-Semitic, which denounce Trump as being a pawn of the Jews, which denounce Christianity, which promulgate depressing, fatalistic conspiracy theories, and which feature stories detailing some really unsavoury subjects. The same site also puts up speeches by Nazis and articles on Holocaust Revisionism, but it does so apparently out of a sense of duty, that is, only because it is expected to do so. The site's owner is definitely not a 'Nazi', and is a scruffy, bearded American white nationalist type - he does not even deign to sport a 'fashy' haircut like Richard Spencer. In its defence, I will say that the site champions things which it regards as positive - homeopathic remedies, a simple, agrarian 'Volkisch' lifestyle, veganism, and so forth; but on the whole this is too little, too late, and the positive is outweighed by the negative. 

In contrast, the Southern nationalist emphasises the positive, and he has a hero ideal, an archetype which inspires him - the Southern Gentleman. 

Hunter Wallace's Occidental Dissent used to be Southern nationalist but then dropped it; now its comments section is filled with who are nihilists who do nothing but sneer, scorn and 'spew anti-Semitic bile' (as Abe Foxman would put it) as a means of demonstrating their supposed integrity. There is a point when rote 'Jews this, Jews that' rhetoric becomes obnoxious, and Occidental Dissent - and so many other white nationalist sites - reached it long ago. Fine, get rid of the Jews and the Zionists, but what do you have to put in their place? The answer is, nothing: hence, nihilism. 

If the Southern nationalist holds up the Southern Gentleman as his hero ideal, the German National Socialist holds up the German or Prussian soldier. This archetype - who debuted on the world political stage around the time of the Napoleonic Wars - evolved by 1939 into the one we are familiar with today through thousands of movies, novels, comic books, computer games... He is clean-shaven, has dueling scars, wears a monocle, wields a riding crop or baton or even a whip. Even though he is reviled by the rest of the world, the true German nationalist regards him as a hero, a positive rather than a negative. In German National Socialist ideology, he balances out anti-Semitism. Jewry, Masonry, Bolshevism, liberalism, feminism, national decadence, etc., are portrayed as obstacles which are preventing his rise. 

Whatever you can say of him and the Southern Gentleman, and there are many intellectual criticisms one can make of both, it must be conceded that they are a something, not a nothing. The choice becomes one of having an ideal or no ideal.

As a rejoinder to this, the materialist will point out the obvious: neither of the two archetypes exists today. The materialist will regard this as the final refutation, because to him, what is in front of him is all there is and all there ever will be - if he cannot see an idea (and it is the nature of an idea that it cannot be seen) when he looks out his window, he does not believe in that idea. The vast majority of nationalists and racialists today in the West, especially in the Anglosphere, hold to materialism, and so will pour scorn on the notion of a revival of the two archetypes. But the argument can be turned back on them. You can make the observation that the ethnic homogeneity enjoyed by Americans (for example) during the 1930s and 1940s does not exist, so by their logic, that homogeneity will never return - ever. A good many American white nationalists have apparently accepted this rather defeatist argument, which goes some way to explaining why so many of them seem to have given up. 

My advice to young 'National Socialists' is, make the German archetype your avatar, your totem. And form relationships with German nationalists (the 'based Kraut bros' in 4Chan parlance). In this you will be following the example of Miles and Stephensen. As David S. Bird writes in Nazi Dreamtime: Australian Enthusiasts for Hitler's Germany (2012): 

Miles ensured from this time onwards [1937] that his journal endorsed every aspect of German Nazism that came under its scrutiny in the belief that there was no conflict between national-socialism and 'Australianism'. He appeared to have no concern for public opinion other than brazenly to deny it and would go where even the appeasers feared to tread, endorsing Germany's claims for the return of colonies like New Guinea in September 1937. This was hardly 'Australia First', but it did elicit good wishes from Baroness von der Golz in Pommerania (sic) in December and an editorial acknowledgment: 'Your German leaders appear to us to be doing very well. May Germany prosper!'. 

Friday, July 31, 2020

A Trump Victory in 2020 and the Coming Left-Wing Retaliation




I. 

Unlike a good many on the Far Right, I am forecasting a Trump victory in November for reasons that I shall explain below. I think that the victory is a foregone conclusion; the only question is what it will mean for our side of politics. My prediction is that the Center and Far Right, not only in America but in the entire Western world, can expect massive retaliation from the Left in the event of a Trump victory, and my warning is that anyone on the Right will need to take shelter from the coming storm, as even if Trump is re-elected, he will be unable to arrest America's slide into left-wing chaos. 

II. 

Trump's victory, according to Helmut Norpoth's model, was preordained in February 2020. 

Once you assume that Norpoth's forecast is correct, then you dispense with the debates which are taking place on the Far Right - debates as to whether Trump deserves to be re-elected, and if so, why. (On that note, Trump is often castigated by the Far Right as a do-nothing president when it comes to restricting immigration, but in his defence, I venture that his record shows otherwise - see here). 

In Norpoth's model, an incumbent president will fail to win a second term if he struggles in the New Hampshire primary - as Ford did in 1976, Carter in 1980, Bush 43 in 1992. If the incumbent cruises through New Hampshire, then, as has been shown multiple times, he will be re-elected easily. As for the opposition candidate, in order to beat the incumbent he must do well in New Hampshire and South Carolina (a state which is significant in that it contains a large black population). This is Norpoth's 'primary model' in essence. 

How do the primaries of 2020 fit in with the model? Trump won New Hampshire easily (as he did in 2016) whereas Biden struggled (as Clinton did in 2016). And like Clinton, Biden lost to Sanders in New Hampshire and achieved a comeback in South Carolina. While Biden's victory in the latter ensured his winning the nomination, in Norpoth's model it will not ensure his winning the presidency. Bill Clinton in 1992 and Barack Obama in 2008 performed badly in New Hampshire and won convincingly in South Carolina, and victory in the latter state gave them the edge in the general, but only because the candidate from the incumbent party performed sub-optimally in New Hampshire. (It should also be taken into consideration that in both 1992 and 2008 the incumbent party was aiming at a third term, something which is difficult to achieve. Norpoth's model tells us that the incumbent party will win a third term if and only if it won by a greater margin in the election for its second term than in its first: e.g., the margin of Reagan's victory in 1984 eclipsed that of 1980 and was enough to guarantee a third Republican term). 

The one flaw in Norpoth's model is that it uses the Democratic popular vote as the basis for its predictions - given that the Democratic Party has been around for a while, the model relies upon the vote as a constant - and it predicted a fall in the Democratic vote in 2016. But, as we know, Clinton beat Trump in the popular vote, 48% to 46%. How Norpoth will explain this - when he publishes his academic paper (which will contain the mathematics) on the 2020 election - remains to be seen. 

Most polls at the moment show Trump losing to Biden, but Norpoth airily dismisses these: voters have not made up their minds yet and election campaigns do not commence formally until after the Republican and Democratic national conventions. The polls will tighten towards election day. (Norpoth, being a centrist, does not suspect left-wing malfeasance in the polls which forecast a crushing Biden victory). 

Norpoth's model accords with common sense. It is difficult, for an outside observer, to believe that Biden, an elderly recluse suffering from dementia and whose campaign platform has been written for him by Marxists, will win the election, and win in the landslide that the polls are predicting; likewise, it was difficult to believe that in 2016 the Democrats would win a third term when third terms are historically difficult to achieve. (The incumbent party lost the 'change elections' in 1960, 1968, 1976, 1992, 2000 and 2008). Those on the Left auguring a Biden victory ignore the fact that American presidential elections proceed in a rigid and deterministic manner which deviate little from the past. But the American Left suffers from an excess of what the Marxists call voluntarism, that is, the belief that political outcomes can be brought into being by sheer force of will. 

III. 

Assuming Trump has won, what does the future hold? 

America is heading in a European and German (20th century European and German, that is) direction. America is becoming Weimar and Trump, Hindenberg. And this brings us to the ideas of Carl Schmitt. 

Schmitt became involved in conservative politics in the dying days of Weimar. Contrary to popular belief, he did not want the Republic to be replaced by a dictatorship. Schmitt wanted to keep the Republic alive with Hindenberg as a unifying force standing above party, pluralism, parliamentary gridlock, negative majorities; to Schmitt, the office of the presidency embodied the 'substantive values' written in the Weimar Constitution (perhaps written between the lines) itself - values that were, like those of the American constitution, conservative and non-communist. Schmitt could be categorised as radical centrist. Hindenberg in Schmitt's model stands in the center, in the eye of the storm. 

Schmitt outlined this doctrine in the last of his Weimar books - The Guardian of the Constitution (1931) and Legality and Legitimacy (1932). These will serve as the foundational texts of Trump's second term, a term which in retrospect will only be understood in light of Schmitt's model. After 2020, Trump will undergo a metamorphosis from anti-establishment populist to revered (revered by conservatives) and venerable (Trump will be 78 by 2024) centrist who is a member of his own party (a party of one). He will be transformed into a lonely 'Guardian of the Constitution' defending the American constitutional order against extremists. 

The difference between Germany in the thirties and America  in the twenties lies in the fact that, in America today, no Hitler and no NSDAP are waiting in the wings to take over. As well as that, Marxism - in the form of Black Lives Matter, anti-racism, 'woke' capital - has won almost complete control. In the German revolution of 1918 to 1919, the communists split from the Social Democrats and went to war against them (as Hitler recounts in Mein Kampf); in American revolution of 2020, the communists have not split from the Center Left - they have seized control of it and purged it of any centrist and moderate elements. They have also made use of the institutions outside the legislature, mobilising most of the media, parts of the judiciary, and sections of the 'deep state' (the secret police, the spy agencies, even the armed forces) against Trump. And institutions such as the churches and sports bodies, which could have been expected to be a moderating or conservative force in American life,  have been cowed into submission and cannot resist: they have been vanquished, politically and morally. 

The American Far Right cannot, in these circumstances, act as the Brownshirts did and duke it out on the streets with the communists. As Identity Dixie writes in a July 7 article:

Mass Riots and Civil Unrest

These riots could easily be quelled. However, military personnel, police officers, and leftist organizations, particularly the news, are constantly on the lookout for rightwingers to show up to fight the leftist mobs, and in some cases Black Nationalist militias, so that the Left may have a scapegoat. These rightwing groups have consistently been a no-show, having learned their lessons from previous experiences in physical activism, and have been so viciously targeted that they really do not have a presence in American society anymore, not even as a boogeyman.

As a result, radical leftist terror groups and sympathizers have effectively ensured chaos in urban locales across the country with the most concentration being in the South. An armed black militia named NFAC marched through Stone Mountain, Georgia on July 4th, 2020, one of the largest contemporary marches of its kind, and the leader mockingly made note of the fact that no white militias have shown up in opposition.

The upshot is that the Left has won: 

The GOP continues to constantly stab its jaded constituency in the back with the most notable recent act of tyranny being the Mississippi flag decision. The GOP also endorses changing the names of military bases named in honor of Confederate officers, and a number have even proposed swapping Columbus Day with Juneteenth. There is no resistance to the Left anymore. As the previously mentioned Black militia leader stated, without understanding the deeper significance of it, the Right has no means of resisting the Left or any willingness to make a physical appearance in a protest. The Left has utterly crushed its resistance. The typical modus operandi is to allow rightwingers just barely enough to form groups and even publicly protest, which allows the news media to run wild with stories about white supremacists and racists behind every tree. That no longer exists. The Right does not really even exist on the internet anymore.

Things don’t look too bright for the future, fam.

IV. 

While the Far Left faces an uphill battle winning elections, it does hold enormous institutional power - power which has been acquired in what Selznick (in The Organizational Weapon: A Study of Bolshevik Strategy and Tactics (1952)) calls an 'unconstitutional', that is, an underhanded and deceitful, manner. Through coercion and infiltration, the Far Left has garnered massive influence in much of the sphere which is outside the parliamentary. Given that, a Trump victory will not lead to an ouster of the Left from the institutions. It will not, for instance, break the hold of the Left on Facebook, Twitter, Google, Amazon, and other 'woke' companies; it will not lead to a cessation of left-wing bullying and manipulation of institutions such as the churches and the sports bodies, the military and the police. The prospects, then, for the Far Right and even the Center Right regaining some measure of prominence in civil society look bleak. 

Recently Google mysteriously disappeared a number of Center and Far Right sites from its search results for a few hours and then mysteriously brought them back. Many conservatives were surprised to learn that they had been deplatformed along with Steve Sailer, Peter Brimelow, Hunter Wallace, Jared Taylor and other deplorables. But  the practice of censorship and deplatforming has been extended to the executive of the American state itself. Trump had one of his tweets pinned with a warning label from Twitter and his Twitch stream temporarily taken down. Can one imagine any media company doing that to Truman or  Kennedy or Nixon or Reagan? But the left-wing view is that Trump is an illegitimate president - he is not really head of state and he did not really win the 2016 election - and so he does not deserve the respect traditionally accorded to his office. 

Google's conduct portends the future, and in order to predict what will come after the 2020 election, we need to put ourselves in the shoes of Google and the other pillars of'woke' capital. Ask yourself: if you ran the Internet - and 'woke' capital runs large portions of the Internet, or at least, the World Wide Web (which is not the same as the Internet) - and you saw, to your shock and horror, that Trump had won re-election, what would you do? You would most likely enact vengeance against all those on the Far Right who helped Trump win; you would even consider punishing those on the Center Right. To that end, the deplatforming of the latter could be accomplished easily: the Twitter and Facebook accounts of Trump supporters could be removed, the channels of the remaining conservatives on YouTube taken down. As for the white nationalists and anti-Semites, they could receive the same treatment as the Daily Stormer in 2017 and 8Chan in 2019, and after being scourged from the World Wide Web, they will come to look at the 2000s as the golden age of Internet freedom - which it was. 

Can the Far Right survive under a regime of Chinese-style Internet censorship? White nationalists in the 1990s relied primarily on traditional media - newspapers, pamphlets, posters - for the dissemination of their ideas (William Pierce did have a cable TV show at one point, but the exception proves the rule). In the early 2000s, the white nationalist movement en masse shifted over to the World Wide Web, and it was there that I discovered Stormfront and the National Alliance. My politics would have stayed in a 'normie', centrist zone had the World Wide Web operated under the same regimen that existed in the aforementioned Google black-out period (when one could find articles by the SPLC and the ADL on white nationalist sites but not the sites themselves). The Left understands this and it now appreciates that, had it the foresight to stifle freedom on the World Wide Web in the 2000s, it could have strangled today's Far Right in its cradle. White nationalism, anti-Semitism, neo-Nazism, even Far Right populism could have been stopped dead in their tracks. 

Since 2016, the Left has been making up for lost time, and in this election year, the Left has redoubled its efforts and gone on a deplatforming blitz. Examples of this abound. In the space of 24 hours, broadcasts of a conference by a group of doctors called America's Frontline Doctors were taken down by Facebook, Google and Twitter despite getting millions of views, and Trump's son Donald Jr had his Twitter account suspended for linking to a video of the conference. To insult to injury, the organisation was dumped by its Internet host. Keeping in mind that this happened to a conservative group - the conference was organised by Tea Party Patriots, who are hardly white nationalist - it is not difficult to imagine that by this time next year any individual is even vaguely white nationalist or neo-Nazi or race realist or even Trump populist will be locked out of any Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Blogger, GMail, PayPal, Reddit, Patreon accounts and his site struck from the Google search engine results permanently. And even ownership of one's own site provides no defence, as the Daily Stormer, 8Chan and America's Frontline Doctors show. The result is that the Trump victory of 2020 will not matter, as the Right - both Center and Far - will have been set back twenty-five years. 

If one's site comes under direct attack, as 8Chan and the Daily Stormer did, one has no recourse but to fight (but such resistance necessitates the expenditure of a great deal of time and effort, and from an Internet-technical point of view, can be extremely difficult - as we can see from this article on the death and resurrection of 8Chan). One faces a similar choice if one is evicted from Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, PayPal, etc.: one can migrate to another platform or one can stand one's ground. VDare endorses the latter: 

Some people want Trump to leave Twitter and Facebook for Gab or Parler to send a message. My opinion: that won’t work. The tech tyrants probably want Trump and his supporters to leave. Preaching to the choir, he would interact with far fewer people, and worse still, leave the major platforms the domain of liberals.

Noble efforts they are, but Gab and Parler are right-wing ghettoes. Twitter, Facebook and the rest are the public forums of our era. The tech tyrants know that.

Ensuring Big Tech respects free speech is the First Amendment fight of our time. The tech tyrants have shown can literally shut down conservative ideas if something isn’t done. Trump cannot win an election if he and his supporters are silenced.

V.

When I wrote above that the right-wing movement will be put back twenty-five years after being kicked off the World Wide Web, I meant that literally: in 1995 or 1996 the Right did not have any significant presence on the World Wide Web, and neither did the Left. But politics did exist on the antecedents to the World Wide Web, and that is on Usenet, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), Gopher and the Bulletin Board System (BBS) - all of which continue survive today albeit in attenuated form. If the nationalist movement is pushed off the World Wide Web, it could return to the 'old' Internet, and if it does so, it cannot be deplatformed, as the 'old' Internet is not controlled by any single agency. 

At this point the 20th century-minded politician (perhaps a Hitler or Lenin) will interject and ask whatever was wrong with the old media - newspapers, handbills, pamphlets, posters, billboards, radio and TV. In this connection, the late Robert Faurrison mocked those who used the Internet and chided them for being seduced by an glittering, beautiful 'aquarium'. But Faurisson, an elderly man, did not see that the Internet had brought his ideas into millions of homes: before the Internet, one had to work extremely hard to obtain his writings and speeches. And this was true of any figure of interest on the Far Right. But the Faurrisons see the Internet as false, artificial, as something not part of 'activism' in the 'real world', and it is this line that forms part of the discourse in the movement for the past ten years - the line that there are too many activists on the Internet only, too many 'keyboard warriors'. The trouble with this thinking is that the distinction between the 'real world' and the 'Internet' is fast breaking down: was Don Trump Jr. doing 'activism' in the 'real world' by posting the video that got him suspended? And if Trump Jr. is not truly political, then who is? 

Trump Jr. will not no doubt follow VDare's recommendations and stand his ground and fight to stay on Twitter. But what should the movement do - should it stay and fight? VDare is concerned that, by migrating to alternative platforms, the movement will be consigning itself to a 'ghetto'; it will be cutting itself off from an audience of millions. But political propaganda aims at disseminating ideas and changing beliefs, and it is difficult to determine if these aims have been achieved by the use of social media. How many view counts on YouTube, Facebook, etc., translate into actual conversion rates: that is, what are the numbers of the viewers who have been converted to a Stefan Molyneux or Alex Jones? One cannot possibly answer with any certainty. Is it fair to say, then, that if one leaves Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc., and even the World Web altogether, that one isolating oneself from the masses? Or could it be that one would be merely sequestering oneself away from curious onlookers who would never have become that interested in the first place? Yes, if you are building a political base away from the World Wide Web (which, to repeat, is not the same as the Internet), you are in effect forming an elite club. But let us not deceive ourselves: Far Right politics, for the past seventy-five years, has been the province not of the many, but the few. 

VI. 

The current year will see escalating left-wing oppression and violence, which will occur side by side with a Trump victory. The latter will only inflame the Left further and motivate it to redouble its efforts to topple the Trump administration through subterfuge, demagoguery, and extra-parliamentary opposition (which will be obstruction and resistance escalating to civil disobedience and violence). 

Politics in a democratic society ought to proceed like a friendly competition: one could compare it, by way of analogy, to a soccer match between two teams - a blue and a red. But suppose, on the day of the match, the blue team announces to the red: 'We want to kill you and your families'. The essence and nature of the game would change: it would no longer be a competition but a war. The rules of the game would be dispensed with because one team no longer believes in them and what is more, no longer believes that the game should be a game - the game should be replaced by a fight ending only with the defeat and subjugation of one's opponent (Lenin tells us that the state is nothing more than an instrument for the suppression of one class by another). Democracy under such conditions dies. And as politics changes in its quality, so do the venerable institutions such as the press. The New York Times, in the hands of today's Left, is no longer a newspaper, it is a siege tower, an instrument of war. 

Once a society and its institutions undergo this transformation, there is no going back. The SJWs,  the Black Lives Matter racial bolsheviks, 'woke' capital, the old school Marxist-Leninists and the new school 'critical race theorists', will not suddenly see the error of their ways and moderate their behaviour accordingly. Historically, the Left has never been able to stop itself from driving off a cliff. And that is how we arrived at the Germany of 1933, the Spain of 1936, the Chile of 1973, and the Argentina of 1976. Democracy ended in those countries because of the Left, and while it was restored  in all of them (with the exception of Germany - Germany has not been a democracy since 1932), this was only after the Left had been annihilated in a series of exceptionally brutal and vicious civil wars which claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. 

All this makes the conduct of the anti-Trump and Never Trump conservatives all the more puzzling (these are the conservatives at The Dispatch, The Bulwark, Commentary and other places). They fail to see that it is not the man, but the system, that is under attack, and that it is under attack from the radical Left. American democracy is wilting under the assault; over time, will crumble, as it cannot weather these repeated blows - no political system is impervious to an onslaught of the kind America has endured since 2016. 

The coming decade will see the Latin Americanisation of US politics: the US politics of the twenties will follow the course of the Latin American politics of the Cold War. We already see a depreciating currency; populism; a militant Left; a breakdown of democratic institutions; an increased preponderance of the executive over the judiciary and legislature. 

In the long term, crisis presents opportunity for nationalists and racialists, but in the short term, my advice for them is: duck for cover.