In Search of a Political Formula

The talk I gave two nights ago.

Presented at an event in Nashville, Tennessee on Friday 18th February 2022.

What is a ‘political formula’? The phrase was coined by Gaetano Mosca in his classic study The Ruling Class, first published in 1895. The political formula, or ‘principle of sovereignty’, is defined as the’ legal and moral basis, or principle, on which the power of the political class rests’.[i] The two chief examples Mosca provides are those political formulas that are based on supernatural beliefs, for example, the Divine Right of kings, and those based on the notion of popular sovereignty or ‘the will of the people’. However, these myths are not necessarily to be taken as cynical lies told by the rulers to hoodwink the masses but are necessary for the smooth operation of the whole society. Georges Sorel called them ‘myths’, Karl Manheim, and later the Marxist, Louis Althusser, called them ‘ideologies’.[ii] Indeed, Mosca recognises that a ‘moral unity’ between the rulers and the ruled can create almost miraculous situations in which they may overcome materially stronger external powers in war. Today we might think of the Vietnamese against the Americans, or the Afghani Taliban against the Americans. Mosca’s examples include the Spanish against the French in 1808 and various so-called barbarian groups, such as the Franks, against the Romans at the fall of their empire.[iii] However, it is not enough for the ruled majority alone to have this moral unity, they could show great courage but will still likely fail if they are not met by an equal moral unity in the ruling class. Mosca gives the example of the kingdom of Naples against the French in 1798-9 where the people were united, but they were betrayed by the pro-French sympathies of their ruling class: ‘Treason, therefore and, more than treason, the unending suspicion of treason, paralysed all resistance, disorganized the regular army … and diminished the effectiveness of a spontaneous popular resistance … which might have triumphed.’[iv] The inverse is also true: a ruling class who show moral unity will likely fail if the ruled do not share their convictions; again, we might think of American foreign escapades since World War 2.

            No ruling class can survive without an effective political formula. ‘Ruling classes may fail to adapt their formula to the changed demands of society; or ruling classes may renew themselves or be renewed. In the first case, failure to renew the formula may signal the end of the ruling class; in the second case, the formula might be retained (the British crown would be a good example).’[v] A new ruling class can arise out of the ‘people’ with a new political formula: ‘the ruled mass remain the hummus out of which grow leading groups.’[vi] Over the past twenty years or so, I believe that the ruling class has attempted to replace an old political formula – which was something like ‘We The People’ – with a new one which could be summed up as ‘Equality, Diversity and Inclusion’. The old political formula was a claim to be what was called ‘The Free World’ against the totalitarian tyranny of the Soviet Union and, beyond them, the hated fascists who were defeated in World War 2. The new political formula focuses on the idea of the rainbow nation, all the races of the world represented in every executive board room replete with fifty-seven genders and lashings of sodomy. The old political formula, even though it was built on lies, was relatively successful in corralling genuine patriotic sentiment from the ruled who were grateful for their ‘freedom’. The new political formula is widely unpopular and has virtually no purchase outside the ruling class in both their governing and non-governing forms, which is to say that the ruled essentially reject ‘equality, diversity and inclusion’ as a political formula. We have seen the problems this has been creating. No elite can rule for long if their political formula, the basis for their sovereignty, is not accepted by the ruled. When this happens, it is only a matter of time before a counter-elite will rise and displace them.

            We have all been part of a process in which the new counter elite will form. I have said that this will take decades rather than years, although events do appear to be accelerating. Because the current ruling regime is straightforwardly leftwing, anything that is truly dissident is called ‘rightwing’. People who end up rejecting the system and seeing the establishment right for what it is – fake opposition – end up where we are now called something like ‘dissident right’. But, because people end up here for myriad reasons, the so-called dissident right lacks any sort of conceptual or philosophical unity. There is constant in-fighting and charges of ‘purity spiralling’. But what is a ‘purity spiral’? Invariably, a purity spiral is simply when someone who wants to hold to one principle over others. At root, the problem is a fundamental disagreement over a single question: what should be the political formula? A political formula cannot brook an ‘and’. The Divine Right of kings says ‘Henry VIII and only Henry VIII is god’s representative on earth to rule over England’, it cannot be ‘Henry VIII and Thomas More’ or be ‘Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell’ – and of course these and almost every other lieutenant Henry had found out the hard way.

Greg Johnson wrote two articles about this on Counter Currents when the ‘Alt Right’ was falling apart in 2017 and 2018 called ‘Against Right-Wing Sectarianism’ and ‘Redefining the Mainstream’, which are now collected in Toward a New Nationalism.[vii] In it, he highlights the fact that, in 2015 and 2016, the Alt Right had been united behind a single political formula: ‘Stop the Great Replacement’. However, as it grew, Johnson laments the rise of what he calls ‘the add-on’. It will be necessary to quote him at length. As I do so, it is worth remembering that Johnson is an avowed white nationalist; therefore, everything he writes is through that lens. His goal is metapolitical, to shift the mentality of white people in the West to be racially aware and to organise in a manner that defends their ethnic interests:

To make… cooperation possible, we simply have to learn to work with people who share our views of white identity politics, but may not share our views on a whole range of other issues. And as our movement grows more successful in penetrating and changing the whole culture, it will eventually be the case that white identity politics might be the only thing that unites us.

Of course we will continue to have passionate opinions and disagreements on other topics. But we need to be willing to set these aside to work with others for the greater good of our race. That one simple trick is the key to ensuring the broadest possible cooperation and coordination among white advocates, creating a movement that is larger, more powerful, and more likely to be able to save our race.

By contrast, people who insist on combining White Nationalism with a list of Right-wing add-ons – who try to up-sell you a side dish of Orthodox Christianity, or Nordic paganism, or radical Traditionalism with your ethnoburger – who insist that these peripheral issues are essential to white preservationism, and who turn them into polarizing litmus tests and shibboleths, are guaranteed to create a smaller, weaker, dumber, poorer, and less effective – but more ‘pure’ – movement, when we need to go in precisely the opposite direction.

Such behavior is often dismissed as ‘purity spiraling.’ But purity is not a problem. The problem is failing to distinguish between what is essential and what is peripheral to white identity politics. We should keep our core principles pure. The mistake is to demand purity on marginal matters as well.[viii]

But at root the issue here is that the sellers of the side dishes, as Johnson puts it, are ultimately arguing for the primacy of the ‘add-on’, the real political formula being espoused is ‘Christ is king’ or ‘Return to Tradition’. From the point of view of the Christian, ‘Stop the Great Replacement’ is merely a side dish. People will be quick to point out that these things are not mutually exclusive, but realistically there can be no ‘and’; eventually Henry VIII will have the head of the ‘and’. Johnsons’s idea of the ‘big tent’ is actually just an assertion that ‘Stop the Great Replacement’ is the political formula and this is non-negotiable. So, with this said, I want to take some time to assess the predominant political formulas in turn.

America First

America First was mainstreamed by Donald Trump in his inaugural address as President in 2017. Since then, it has been more associated with Nick Fuentes and his ‘gropyer’ movement, which has been in the news of late since Louis Theroux featured them in a documentary.[ix] ‘America First’ is a very clear political formula. It cannot brook an ‘and’. For example, ‘America First’ – at least on the face of it – cannot accept ‘and Israel First’. Perhaps this is why it seems Trump himself has quietly dropped it. Can it be an effective political formula? I have two chief issues with it. First, it defends the very thing that is at the source of our troubles: the USA. To defend all things American might very easily end up being a defence of the materialist non-culture that has fallen like a miasma on the world. The USA from its inception was a proposition nation, built on a concept, with liberalism and democracy baked in from the get-go. Greg Johnson, among others, has argued that this is merely propaganda and based on a profound misunderstanding of American history that was perpetuated by Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address.[x] However, I am not convinced anyone can pretend the past 159 years of American history did not happen and what it means to be American today can scarcely be reconciled with what it meant to be American even thirty years ago, let alone 1776. It will no doubt be easier for me to say this, because I am not an American, but the USA is an irredeemably failed project and the sooner it is put out of its misery the better for its people and all the world. To try to save America now is like trying to save someone with late-stage terminal cancer. The idea of American patriotism should feel absurd today save for the coming of The American Caesar.

Second, ‘America First’ is open for redefinition. What does it mean to put ‘America First’? For Steve Bannon or Nick Fuentes, it might mean nationalist trade policies, for someone else it might mean adopting free market economics. If ‘diversity is our strength’, then ‘America First’ could mean putting ‘diversity first’. You may think such language games are silly, but our enemies do nothing but play such language games and now the political formula is corrupted and subverted already. As Carl Schmitt would ask, ‘who interprets’?[xi] I would not even put it past the GOP to try to argue that ‘to put America First, we need to put Israel First’, and other such tortured formulations – worse things have been done to the US Constitution over the years.

Stop the Great Replacement

On Millenniyule this year, Philosophicat caused waves by claiming that the stopping The Great Replacement is a lost cause, since there is no reversing the demographic timebomb that is set for both America and Europe. On current projections, she is undoubtedly correct, by 2060, the white population of the USA will be 36.4 percent.[xii] For this trend to reverse, there would not only need to be a total stop to mass immigration but also mass deportations – and not just the men, but the women and the children. It is not impossible if there is the political will to do this: if masses of people arrived against the wills of the host population, so too can they leave against theirs. But this would require a revolutionary change to the American system. Somehow Greg Johnson imagines it requires simply changing the hearts and minds of enough people and it will, over time and inevitably, become the Republican platform. I believe that the Republicans would sooner destroy the country and their own party than stand on an explicitly pro-white platform. Then again, in France, Eric Zemmour is explicitly standing on this platform. As reported by Breitbart just three days ago, he said ‘My Duty Was to Save France from the Great Replacement’ and that France Could be ‘Lebanon’ in five to ten years.[xiii]

            However, France is not the USA and can draw on over 1,500 years of history and military tradition for solidarity. Nationalism is baked into the French character in a way I do not see in the Americans. And, besides, the 246 years that the USA has existed is the blink of an eye in terms of civilizational history. Even in the face of explicit and daily anti-white hatred, the average white American is still very far from willing to confront the realities of race. It’s a conversation that white nationalists have been begging to have for decades, but even today – after BLM riots, after increasingly dehumanising anti-white rhetoric in mainstream television, advertising, films, and even sports – most white GOP-voting folk buy into the myth of Martin Luther King and pledge themselves to colour blindness. The least racially conscious people in America probably all wear MAGA hats. However, this could and would change quickly if circumstances become dire enough – but still I do not believe that the GOP would be willing to change with their voters because, ultimately, they answer to their donors, and let us just say other masters, rather than to voters. Anyone who cannot see this by 2022 has not been paying attention.

            Yet, there are at least two chief problems with the Great Replacement narrative of the original Alt Right as a political formula. First, it overly focused on party politics, which is to say whites voting for the GOP and minorities voting for the Democrats. This is a mistake in my view because there is no basic difference between the two parties as per standard Neo-Reactionary analysis or even White Nationalist analysis that pays attention to ethnic special interests at the elite level. Second, it is too concerned with the idea of demographic percentages. These are abstract numbers which do not motivate people. This is to say: so what if only 36.4% of Americans will be white by 2060? That is still 131 million white people. Realistically this does not make it the existential crisis that it may first appear, and I do not believe it is a sufficient motivator to action. There are estimated to be only 5.8 million Jewish Americans, for example, and yet no one in their tighter knit, better organised, and more openly ethnocentric community seems to be worried about them being ‘replaced’. In fact, there are only 15.2 million Jews in the world, and yet they seem extremely adept at playing the political game, advancing their interests, and surviving. Political power rests everywhere and always in the organised minority as against the passive masses. If the political formula of ‘Stop the Great Replacement’ were updated to something like ‘Support White Wellbeing’, tight organisation at a local level might work to facilitate such an end. On my Substack, I wrote an article about the de facto balkanisation of the USA.[xiv] Since multiculturalism is and can only ever be a disaster, this is the only future I see for America. Rather than pitching themselves to the doomed American project, it seems to me that white nationalists should rather be thinking in terms of which territories they’d hope to secure de facto, on the ground, rather than necessarily as a legal declaration of independence.

Christ is the King

Christianity is an excellent political formula for any empire or state that must unite disparate peoples. In theory, it unites people from different races, ethnicities and nationalities – even overcoming language barriers – while creating a new friend-enemy distinction between believers and heathens. However, that is when it is in power. Christianity is almost everywhere out of power and – despite being, on paper, the most successful religion in the world in terms of total believers – has become soft and malleable to the point where the clergy are making a mockery of the religion. I am not a Christian, but it pains me to see what is being done to the churches. The Pope is openly subversive. In this country, the Church of England is almost more woke than any university. I see low Protestant churches across the United States talking about ‘racial justice’. There are hundreds of reports of pastors fully advocating critical race theory, supporting BLM and even giving their congregations Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility to read.[xv] Paul Gottfried has discussed at length how white guilt narratives are simply repurposed and perverted Calvinism, in structure rather than in content.[xvi] Incidentally, this analysis was repeated almost wholesale by Curtis Yarvin.[xvii] Schmitt’s question, ‘who interprets?’, is again important. Churches in general have shown themselves completely incapable of withstanding subversion. If you understand power, it is simple: take the priest or pastor, take the church. What can the congregation do against this? What mechanisms are there to oust the woke priest who infests your church like a parasite? Thus, it would appear that ‘Christ is the King’ cannot help us much as a political formula at the present time.

            My view, as someone wedded to hard realist power analysis, is that unless the church is backed by the legal and material power to enforce its will, it will be toothless and remain the plaything of progressives. The idea of the separation of church and state was an early victory for liberalism. Why is Islam so powerful and Christianity so weak when Christianity has more believers around the world? Because Islam is backed by the sword both at state level and on the ground; believers are prepared to act in the name of their religion against transgressors. No one dared speak out in Europe after the Charlie Hebdo cartoon affair resulted in terrorist attacks, and those who did were punished. Yet, churches burned – across America, across Europe – Christians around the world watched Notre Dame Cathedral burn, and no sword was lifted. If this remains the case, Christianity is as good as useless as a political force. If Christians wish to smile and say, ‘Render unto Caesar’, ‘we are not for worldly things’ and so on, so be it, but do not be surprised if Caesar also stomps on your head. In the words of noted racist and bigot Morrisey:

And if you think peace

Is a common goal

That goes to show

How little you know

…

Love, peace and harmony?

Oh, very nice

Very nice

Very nice

Very nice

But maybe in the next world.[xviii]

Return to Tradition

This is the rallying call of reactionaries. I recently wrote a piece on Substack called ‘The Children of the Ashes’, I think it is worth quoting the opening passage here as it sums up an essential problem with this slogan as a political formula.

We are all children of the Ashes, victims of civilization in a death spiral, who have grown up in a world mostly lacking in moral and spiritual guidance and dominated by the reign of quantity. People on our side of things read René Guénon and Julius Evola, turn against materialism, find God and join a church, lament ‘degeneracy’, disdain modern technology, long for the Butlerian jihad after absorbing the teachings of Uncle Ted, and adopt the stance of Revolting against the Modern World. I am, however, a realist. I do not believe that any more than a handful of people will try to live off the grid. I do not believe that people will be able to make it through the miasma of modern life without taking on some taint of modernity. I also do not believe that the children of the Ashes can be ‘de-Ashed’ so to speak. This is Paradise Lost; you cannot recapture innocence once it is gone.[xix]

A time will come when Tradition returns, but it is not now, and our role is to help to usher in such conditions that they could. As I said in that article, quoting George Harrison:

Now the darkness only stays the night-time

In the morning it will fade away

Daylight is good at arriving at the right time

It’s not always going to be this grey

All things must pass

All things must pass away[xx]

As children of Winter, we cannot suddenly pretend to be the children of Spring. They may be our children or our children’s children, but they are not and cannot ever be us. This is not a blackpill, but just an awareness of where we are and who we are. What we are, what we can be and what we cannot be. We must accept our role in the great cycle of things. This does not mean we have no agency or no part to play, we have a role, but it is and always will be transitional. Spengler, Evola and so on understood this.[xxi]

I do not believe that attempting to embody a traditional life in the current conditions is practical and neither do I believe that anyone deep-down wants it. To Ride the Tiger in the Kali Yuga is simply to steel oneself to survive it in the hope that our successors will be able to reap the benefits of a Return to Tradition.[xxii]

Clear Them Out

Finally, it is no great secret that I favour ‘Clear Them Out’ as the political formula for the dissident right. By ‘Clear Them Out’, I mean nothing less than the total overthrow of the current system so that all its elements – governing and non-governing elites – are rendered powerless and can no longer operate. I do not simply mean the simple swapping of one government with another, I mean a root and branch purging of the current establishment and all its elements down to the woman who answers the phone at your local library. I envisage a time when collaboration with the current regime will be treated like collaboration with the Mid-Century Germans after the Nuremberg Trials. Why do I favour this political formula when I have been so critical of the others? I will provide three reasons. First, I believe this is the only political formula that everyone can broadly agree on, and which is inclusive enough to let in practically all dissidents while remaining radical enough to exclude milquetoasts. Second, this is the only formula that might realistically appeal to two spheres that are only dissident right adjacent which are the coalition that has built around anti-Covid restriction policies – having a massive real-world impact right now – and what I call the ‘kook-sphere’ of conspiracists and alien men. Where there is energy and will to overthrow globalist elites, we should harness it. Third, historically the political formula before a revolution is almost always ‘clear them out’ – usually framed as those fighting for liberty against oppressors. The positive program always comes after it. Indeed, any revolution is brought together by a coalition of disparate interests who momentarily unite in the common cause of overthrowing the current regime. And then, after the fact, the most tightly organised and ruthless faction seizes power for themselves. The closest and most obvious example was in Iran where socialists, intellectuals, peasants, clergy (known as mullahs) and bazarris (the small-business-owning class) all came together to overthrow the Shah as the military decided to stand down. It was only after this fact that the Islamic fundamentalists seized power and side-lined rivals. My view is that no set of elites could be worse for any of us than the current ones. If we end up with fundamentalist Christians, white nationalists, hardcore traditionalists, civic nationalists, or whatever else, the leadership could not get any more warped and perverted than the current lot. I would simply settle for even vaguely sensible leaders, let us say the Western equivalent of Vladimir Putin or even President Xi who, while terrible in many ways, at least act in the interests of their nations.

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[i] Gaetano Mosca, The Ruling Class, ed. Arthur Livingston, trans. Hannah D. Khan (1895; New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939), p. 70.

[ii] Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, trans. T.E. Hulme, ed. Jeremy Jennings (1908; Cambridge University Press, 1999); Karl Manheim, Ideology and Utopia (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1936); Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (1971; New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001).

[iii] Mosca, The Ruling Class, p. 109.

[iv] Ibid., p. 110.

[v] James H. Meisel, The Myth of the Ruling Class: Gaetano Mosca and the Elite (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1962), p. 17.

[vi] Ibid., 17.

[vii] See Greg Johnson, ‘Against Right-wing Sectarianism’, Counter Currents (4 August 2017): https://counter-currents.com/2017/08/against-right-wing-sectarianism/ and ‘Redefining the Mainstream’, Counter Currents (9 April 2018): https://counter-currents.com/2018/04/redefining-the-mainstream/, reprinted in Toward a New Nationalism (San Francisco, CA: Counter Currents, 2019), pp. 129-34, 135-43.

[viii] Johnson, ‘Redefining the Mainstream’, p. 138-9.

[ix] Louis Theroux’s Forbidden America, ‘Extreme and Online’ (London: BBC, 2022): https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0014khc.

[x] Greg Johnson, ‘What is American Nationalism?’, Counter Currents (20 March 2018): https://counter-currents.com/2018/03/what-is-american-nationalism/, reprinted in Toward a New Nationalism, pp. 40-5.

[xi] Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (1922; Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 15.

[xii] Jonathan Vespa, Lauren Medina, and David M. Armstrong, ‘Demographic Turning Points for the

United States: Population Projections for 2020 to 2060’, United States Census (February 2020): https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2020/demo/p25-1144.pdf, p. 8.

[xiii] Peter Caddle, ‘“My Duty Was to Save France from the Great Replacement” – Zemmour Says France Could be “Lebanon” in 5/10 Years’, Brietbart (15 February 2022): https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2022/02/15/my-duty-was-to-save-france-from-the-great-replacement-zemmour-says-france-could-be-lebanon-in-5-10-years/.

[xiv] Academic Agent, ‘On the Prospects of Balkanization’, The Forbidden Texts (17 June 2022):

On the Prospects of Balkanization

.

[xv] Monique Dunson, ‘Five Signs Your Church May Being Going Woke’, The Center for Biblical Unity (18 August 2020): https://www.centerforbiblicalunity.com/post/5-signs-your-church-may-be-going-woke.

[xvi] Paul E. Gottfried, Multiculturalism and The Politics of Guilt: Toward a Secular Theocracy (Columbia, MI: University of Missouri Press, 2002), pp. 42-56.

[xvii] Mencius Moldbug, Universalism: Postwar Progressivism as a Christian Sect’, Unqualified Reservations (17 July 2007): https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/07/universalism-postwar-progressivism-as/.

[xviii] The Smiths, ‘Death of a Disco Dancer’, Strangeways, Here We Come (London: Rough Trade Records, 1987): https://genius.com/The-smiths-death-of-a-disco-dancer-lyrics.

[xix] Academic Agent, ‘The Children of the Ashes: Making Peace with (Post-)Modernity’, The Forbidden Texts (12 February 2022):

The Children of the Ashes

.

[xx] George Harrison, ‘All Things Must Pass’, All Things Must Pass (London: EMI Studios, 1970): https://genius.com/George-harrison-all-things-must-pass-lyrics.

[xxi] Academic Agent, ‘The Children of the Ashes’.

[xxii] Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger, trans. Jocleyn Godwin and Constance Fontana (1961; Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2003).