Crisis and Opportunity

White advocates are the most despised minority in the world.  Throughout the post-West, “racist” is used as a slur by both conservatives and progressives.  Even loose affiliations with proscribed figures or organizations can doom a political career.  The vast majority of whites, out of fear, desire for conformity, or sincere conviction, believe that “racism” is a sin perhaps only rivaled by murder.  Racism may actually be worse, as even serial killer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer thought it was important that people knew he was no racist and didn’t choose his victims for that reason.  If it is suspected that you are a racist, family members, friends, and colleagues may shun or even attack you.  Even the most capable and effective of the few spokesmen for white advocacy are either smeared or ignored by the mainstream media.

Nonetheless, white advocates dominate political discourse in the United States today.  Almost every issue, movement, and political figure is analyzed not on its own terms, but as a possible indicator of white racial consciousness and explicit white political mobilization.

The most important development in contemporary politics is the growth of the “Tea Party” movement.  This is the name given to a loose affiliation of many independent groups unified around an agenda of opposition to President Obama’s economic policies, concern over the rapidly expanding federal debt, and anxiety over violations of the Constitution.  The problems with this movement from a white advocacy perspective are obvious.  The group is focused on narrow fiscal concerns, ruthlessly purges any hint of explicit racial consciousness, and is funded and resourced by the usual open borders corporate elites such as Dick Armey or the Koch brothers.  Many leading spokespeople of the movement, such as Glenn Beck, Ron Paul, and Sarah Palin, differ on critical issues such as foreign policy and immigration but are all united in their effusive reverence for Martin Luther King Jr. In responding to charges of racism, Tea Party leaders look for minorities to put behind the speakers’ podium rather than attacking or even just dismissing the charge itself.

Even admitting all that, it is impossible not to view the rise of the Tea Parties as a powerful example of implicit white racial consciousness.  Some white advocates read into the Tea Party movement a racial consciousness that they think already exists, but is merely submerged.  White advocate and webmaster of White News Now Jamie Kelso claimed “Every time I yelled ‘We want our country back!’, I am sure that 99% of the 99% White crowd that responded so enthusiastically to that chant UNDERSTOOD that the ‘we’ and the ‘our’ in ‘we want our country back!’ was (and is) our White people.”   Pat Buchanan noted in his July 22 syndicated column, “For the first time in our lifetimes outside the South, white racial consciousness has visibly begun to rise.”  Progressives, for their own reasons, share this interpretation and casually and gleefully link the Tea Party to “Klansman,” “white supremacy,” and of course, “white privilege.”

The most sophisticated and accurate comes from Christopher Hitchens.  Writing in Slate under the title of “White Fright,” Christopher Hitchens noticed the curiously apolitical and confused ideological nature of Glenn Beck’s recent “Restoring Honor” rally.  The only way to make sense of it, he concluded, was that,

“In a rather curious and confused way, some white people are starting almost to think like a minority, even like a persecuted one…  Concerns of this kind are not confined to the Tea Party belt. Late professors Arthur Schlesinger and Samuel Huntington both published books expressing misgivings about, respectively, multiculturalism and rapid demographic change. But these were phrased so carefully as almost to avoid starting the argument they flirted with. More recently, almost every European country has seen the emergence of populist parties that call upon nativism and give vent to the idea that the majority population now feels itself unwelcome in its own country. The ugliness of Islamic fundamentalism in particular has given energy and direction to such movements. It will be astonishing if the United States is not faced, in the very near future, with a similar phenomenon. Quite a lot will depend on what kind of politicians emerge to put themselves at the head of it. Saturday’s rally was quite largely confined to expressions of pathos and insecurity, voiced in a sickly and pious tone. The emotions that underlay it, however, may not be uttered that way indefinitely.”

To a certain extent, despite the best efforts of many Tea Party leaders to keep the movement focused on fiscal issues and put minorities and anti-racist conservatives in charge, the Tea Parties are beginning to touch on dangerous territory.  In Arizona, Tea Party groups are participating in rallies in defense of SB 1070, an aggressive measure designed to limit illegal immigration.  In New York City, tea party groups and leaders have been active participants in the movement against the mosque at Ground Zero.  In Tennessee, tea party groups have also taken the lead in opposing mosque construction.  The movement for fiscal conservatism is bleeding into cultural issues, and as battles over mosques, illegal immigration, and racial preferences become more prominent, this focus is only likely to increase.  There is a real chance that the movement could escape from the “safe” rhetoric about debt and taxes that it has been limited to thus far.

Implicit whiteness is perhaps stronger now than at any time in the last 25 years.  However, the barriers against explicit white racial consciousness are also stronger, and Tea Party leaders, if not all of their followers, gleefully participate in building those barriers.  The result is a nameless anxiety, a vague feeling, a shapeless zeitgeist of white anxiety that manifests itself in an active but incoherent opposition to Mexican imperialism, Islamic triumphalism, and other cultural slights against the “Real America.”

This presents an opportunity for white advocates – and a trap.  Mark Hackard, writing in Alternative Right, notes that the Open Society civic religion of the United States provides no grounds for such opposition.  The Tea Parties’ foray into cultural activism is already doomed to failure for this reason.  In contrast, white advocates are armed with the insights of human biodiversity, the metapolitics of the European New Right, the best traditions of American and European racialist thought, Southern conservatism, and Radical Traditionalism.  We have a diverse array of tools to provide both common sense arguments and more systematic critiques of the political and social system that the Tea Party constituency needs to destroy if they actually want to achieve their cultural goals and protect their economic and social status.  The problem is that this intellectual sophistication may make it difficult to identify with the symbols and communicate with the rhetoric that will resonate with the “real America.”

Saul Alinksy, in Rules for Radicals, cautions us that an activist can only communicate in terms of the experience of his audience.  A white nationalist who knows the system is irretrievably broken at best and hostile at worst confronts a formidable psychological barrier when trying to recruit Tea Party activists who are passionately dedicated to defending a cultural and political regime that seeks their own destruction.  It is tempting to simply dismiss such people as saps or fools.  Unfortunately, we have no choice but to at least try to engage.  Our numbers are too small and our forces too weak to write off any potential allies.  As Christopher Hitchens fears, and as I hope, white racial consciousness is on the cusp of becoming explicit, but only if we make it so.

Though implicit racial consciousness is rising, there is no evidence that a transition to explicit white advocacy will happen organically or automatically.  There is also a great danger that following a Republican victory in the mid-term elections of 2010 or the presidential election of 2012, the Tea Party Movement will be effortlessly funneled into Republican loyalism.  The transition will only happen if white advocates can make it happen, and time is critical.  This opportunity will pass.  Intellectually, there is the beginning of an alternative right that is capable of confronting and destroying the premises of the system that oppresses us.  We have to build on this foundation and create institutions that are capable of real political action.  This will require compromise, sacrifice, and innumerable defeats.  It will also require many white advocates to leave their comfort zones and engage with people that they may regard as mistaken or even immoral.  However, there is no other way forward.

Everyone is already talking about us.  Our opportunity is here.  Our people are already in the streets, waiting for us.  What do we do now?