The Real Enemy: the Trumpian boomer conservative

I.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II.

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

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

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

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

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

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

III.

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

Here Rosenberg writes on America:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Return of the King: Tradition and the New Führers

In one of my recent articles, I wrote:

""The most glaring deficiency of both the 'skin' and 'patriot' movements is that, while both subscribe to fascist practice, if not fascist theory, both lack strong leaders, 'great men'. The NSDAP and the PNF were conceived as, among other things, a means of catapulting their respective leaders Hitler and Mussolini into power. The expectation of all the fascist movements of the time was that their leaders were prepared for, and sought, absolute political power - that they would not settle for being mere leaders of a cult (i.e., William Pierce) or a trend in popular music (i.e., Ian Stuart). We in the nationalist movement today lack men of action - the Hitlers, Mussolinis, Mosleys, Degrelles... I compare a fascism without a leader to an Islam without a Muhammad.

I've recently made a study of the constitutional and legal structures of the Third Reich and have come to the not-so-startling conclusion that German National Socialism, and fascism in general, sought to reinstitute a form of monarchy. To give some examples. In Hitler's Germany, soldiers and public servants (including judges) had to swear an oath of loyalty to the Führer: a common practice in monarchies but one which would seem absurd in our present-day liberal democratic setting (imagine one swearing a loyalty oath to Malcolm Turnbull or Daniel Andrews). Another example: German laws forbade 'defamation' of Hitler, the NSDAP and the party symbols - Germans could be thrown into jail for making fun of Hitler the way the left-wing media makes fun of Trump - and such laws resemble the lèse-majesté laws which are still in effect in certain monarchies (Thailand, for instance).

I call this practice - of making ordinary politicians into kings - 'neo-monarchism'. I believe it is more common than many liberals and egalitarians would like to admit. Look at Putin, who has more or less resurrected the Tsardom, and the Assads, who are a Syrian royal family who came to power through Ba'athism, which was a secular, nationalist, revolutionary, socialist and anti-monarchist movement. Further afield, North Korea presents an example of a country which, under a revolutionary, left-wing and egalitarian regime, has reverted to a type of Asian monarchy. And, in the West, we have Trump, who is referred to as the 'God Emperor', after the title of the Frank Herbert science-fiction novel God Emperor of Dune.

The use of the word 'God' in connection with 'Emperor' here is significant. Julius Evola, the great Italian theorist of fascism and neofascism, writes at length in books such as Revolt against the Modern World (1934) of what he calls 'Traditionalist' societies of the ancient world which were ruled by kings who were said to be divine and blessed with magical power. Jesus Christ, who was the Son of God, was crucified as the king of the Jews and was possessed of magical healing powers, could be said to be a Traditionalist king - or almost king - of this type. In Traditionalist doctrine, at the end of the world, a king-like figure will return after a long absence and bring back divine law - what Evola calls Tradition - and banish evil; Christ's Second Coming fits in with this myth.

You might think that modern-day secularism and scepticism has rendered the notion of the divinity of kings superfluous. But this isn't the case in communist regimes. Mao would hold ceremonies in which he would bless the planting of crops; his presence, like that of the emperors of China of old, was considered to be divine and magical enough to ensure a bountiful harvest. Kim Il-Sung, the founder of communist North Korea, copied Mao's cult of personality and now is spoken of in North Korean propaganda in terms reserved for a celestial deity. All this goes back to an interview Alexander Dugin gave many years ago in which he shrewdly observed that the communist regimes most of all tended to restore Tradition.

I will quote two long paragraphs from the chapter 'Regality' in Evola's Revolt- to illustrate what I mean by Tradition and divine kingship:

Every traditional civilisation is characterised by the presence of beings who, by virtue of their innate or acquired superiority over the human condition, embody with the temporal order the living and efficacious presence of a power that comes from above. One of these types of beings is the pontifex, according to the inner meaning of the word and according to the original value of the function that he exercised. Pontifex means 'builder of bridges' or of 'paths' (pons, in ancient times, also mean 'path') connecting the natural and supernatural dimensions. Moreover, the pontifex was traditionally identified with the king (rex). Servius, a late fourth-century commentator on Virgil's works, reports: 'The custom of our ancestors was that the king should also be pontifex and priest'. A saying of the Nordic tradition reads: 'May our leader be our bridge'. Thus, real monarchs were the steadfast personification of the life 'beyond ordinary life'. Beneficial spiritual influences used to radiate upon the world of mortal beings from the mere presence of such men, from their 'pontifical' mediation, from the power of the rites that were rendered efficacious by their power, and from the institutions of which they were the center. These influences permeated people's thoughts, intentions, and actions, ordering every aspect of their lives and constituting a fit foundation for luminous, spiritual realisations. These influences also made propitious the general conditions for prosperity, health, and 'good fortune'. 

In the world of Tradition the most important foundation of the authority and of the right (ius) of kings and chiefs, and the reason why they were obeyed, feared and venerated, was essentially their transcendent and nonhuman quality. This quality was not artificial, but a powerful reality to be feared. The more people acknowledged the ontological rank of what was prior and superior to the visible and temporal dimension, the more such beings were invested with a natural and absolute sovereign power. Traditional civilisations, unlike those of decadent and later times, completely ignored the merely political dimension of supreme authority as well as the idea that the roots of authority lay in mere strength, violence or natural and secular qualities such as intelligence, wisdom, physical courage, and a minute concern for the collective material well-being. The roots of authority, on the contrary, always had a metaphysical character. Likewise, the idea that the power to govern is conferred on the chief by those whom he rules and that his authority is the expression of the community and therefore subject to its decrees, was foreign to Tradition. It is Zeus who bestows the [Greek word] on kings of divine origin, whereby [Greek word] or 'law from above', is very different from what constitutes [Greek word], which is the political law of the community. The root of every temporal power was spiritual authority, which was almost a 'divine nature disguised in human form'. According to an Indo-European view, the ruler is not a 'mere mortal', but rather a 'great deity standing in the form of a man'. The Egyptian pharaoh was believed to be the manifestation of Ra or of Horus. The kings of Alba and of Rome were supposed to be the incarnations of Zeus; the Assyrian kings, of Baal; the Persian shahs, of the god of light. The Nordic-Germanic princes were believed to derive from the race of Tiuz, of Odin, and of the Aesir; and the Greek kings of the Doric-Achaen cycle were called [Greek word] or [Greek word] in reference to their divine origin. Beyond the variety of mythical and sacred expressions, the recurrent view of kingship is expressed in terms of an 'immanent transcendence' that is present and active in the world. The king - who was believed to be a sacred being and not a man - by virtue of his 'being', was already the center and the apex of the community. In him was also the supernatural strength that made his ritual actions efficacious. In these actions people could recognise the earthly counterpart of supernatural 'ruling', as well as the supernatural support of life in the world of Tradition. For this reason, kingship was the supreme form of government, and was believed to be in the natural order of things. It did not need physical strength to assert itself, and when it did, it was only sporadically. It imposed itself mainly and irresistibly through the spirit. In an ancient Indo-Aryan text it is written: 'The dignity of a god enjoys on earth is splendid, but hard to achieve for the weak. On he who sets his soul on this objective, is worthy to become a king'. The ruler appears as a 'follower of the discipline that is practiced by those who are gods among men'. 

Now, I think in the above, you can find a justification for the rule of a Hitler or Mussolini, or Mao or Kim Il-Sung: in the end, any apologetics for such men must come back to Tradition and arguments which are thousands of years old. Evola would dispute that North Korea or Hitler's Germany could be considered as Traditionalist: he was an opponent of communism and a critic of National Socialism. But Evola, I think, could not see what was staring him in the face: the link between Tradition and modern-day 'totalitarian' and absolutist regimes. Dugin, on the other hand, saw it.

So how does this tie back to the topic at the start of this essay - the need for a leader? William Pierce makes a distinction between 'Nazism' and 'Neo-Nazism':

Inevitably, every member who engages in public activity, so that he is recognized publicly as a member, will be asked, “Are you a Nazi?” or, “Are you a neo-Nazi?” just as the National Alliance is routinely described in the controlled news media as a “Nazi (or neo-Nazi) organization.” (For those who make the distinction, the difference between “Nazi” and “neo-Nazi” seems to be this: The former term refers only to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and its members. The latter term refers to organizations and people who draw their inspiration from the former, from the same sources as the former, but which are too young to have been directly associated with the former. Many people, of course, make no distinction between the two terms.)

Now, if you are 'taking inspiration' from the NSDAP, you need, most of all a leader, a Führer, who will, in the future 'Neo-Nazi' state will be given absolute power - a heavy responsibility. The legitimacy of such one-man rule can really, in the last analysis, only be argued for in Traditionalist terms.

The essential thing is that Traditionalism, in the modern age, must be disguised. In their collective subconscious, the millions of Asian peasants in Korea, China, Vietnam knew that communism didn't represent some new-fangled, Western, Jewish-German egalitarian doctrine but a return to the 'primordial spirituality' Evola talks about; the Maos and Kim Il-Sungs were repackaging Asian emperor-worship. Similarly we Westerners, we Europeans, must call upon the deeply-rooted, primordial Traditionalist myths of our own culture if we are to ever achieve a rule for new Führers.