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.
