What do you offer?
Politics and metapolitics are not really about ideas or ideology. Only a handful of people are concerned with what Evola, Hegel, or Burke thought. These sorts are usually relegated to academia or to madly typing away on some internet blog hopping that someone will come across their scribbling and crown said writer the next great intellectual…oh. Mea culpa…
If I were to close my laptop, leave my house, walk into the local gas station and accost the first person I met and started to explain Evolian or Hegelian analysis, I would get a strange look or I might get the cops called on me again. Why? It might be because the average person cannot understand (or may never understand) Evola or Hegel (I still have no clue what Hegel is saying, if I am being honest). Or, and this is the much more likely reason, they simple do not care. Most people, no, the overwhelming majority of people, really do not give a shit who Evola was or what he has to say. They also do not care about your pet theorist or your favorite “ism”. Ideas are simply not a concern.
For the average person, there is one fundamental question for any politician, organization or movement: “what do you offer?” Satisfactory answers are of two kinds, either material benefits or some sense of meaning is being offered, and if neither are offered, the person will walk away. Can you make my life better? If you can, then I will vote for you, donate to your organization, or support your movement. Do not tell me that you will make my life better by talking my ear off about weird European intellectuals, I have kids to feed and a life to live.
So, what do you offer? What does the right (if there is a coherent use of it in America circa 2021) have to offer? Ideally, the right would offer both material benefits and a sense of meaning. Further, the material benefits and sense of meaning provided by the right, if the right is to win, must out-compete those offered by the left and the lukewarm left (GOP, “conservatives”, all the re-brands of neoconservatism that pretends not to be re-brands, etc).
The Left’s Offer
In 2021, the American left offers financial assistance to non-whites and will campaign, but never intends to implement, a raise in minimum wage, universal healthcare and student loan forgiveness. Material benefits, unless you are non-white, amount to carrots at the end of a stick. Once you vote Biden in, he will forget…okay, bad example. If you are offered a candidate who does not have dementia and campaigns on left economic policies, he will never speak of them again once you hand over your vote. There is very little for white Americans to gain materially from the left.
When it comes to a sense of meaning, the left offers two messages: if you are white, you can become a good person by hating yourself and your ancestors, if you are non-white, you are a good person because your ancestors were treated poorly. Meaning is derived from what is effectively a form of self-harm, and from profiting off of your ancestor’s suffering. For the white American, you will only have meaning so long as you mentally self-harm. Not a great deal.
The Lukewarm Left’s Offer
Classically, the GOP offers tax cuts as its material benefit. More than often, however, these tax cuts are primarily for their corporate donors and these donors have the strangely uniform tendency to have white Christian America. What is cut from taxes also tends to be welfare programs that benefit the white working class. When medicaid is cut, poor whites suffer. Blacks, Hispanics and other minorities are mostly unaffected because there is an infinite list of programs they qualify for by simply not being white. Only the GOP’s base is harmed by cutting medicaid to lower the tax rate of corporate millionaires who bankroll BLM. Thus, the GOP does a positive harm to its base every time it pretends to offer them material benefits.
As for a sense of meaning? There is a pretense of standing up for “American values”, usually against the boogeyman of “socialism”1, but upon examination these supposed defenders of The Red, White, and Blue are nothing more than the Washington Generals to the Boston Globe Trotters; they are meant to lose, intend to lose, and are only putting on a show. Theatrics are not even that high quality. Are we really to believe that a scared child asking not to be called racist and slapped is the defender of the American way of life? No. Only the pseudo-intellectuals of YAF and the Heritage Foundation, pretending to be the next William F. Buckley, get any sense of meaning out of this. Buckleyites feel that they are the intellectual aristocracy, when they merely cluck circuitous chatter, and they feel that they are better than fly over country folk because they know someone close to National Review, when they worth less than the toilet paper I wipe my ass with.
An Opportunity
Having looked at the left and the lukewarm left, it is clear that there is nothing of worth being offered to white Christians and that this provides an opportunity for a true right to step in. If the right is ever to take power, it must have a good answer to the fundamental question: “what do you offer?”
Remember, when the populace asks this fundamental question they do not want to hear some theory or about some weird European intellectual. They want to know how their lives will a) get materially better or b) become more meaningful.
What can the right offer materially? What does the average white Christian family want? Job stability, good schooling, and affordable housing are chief wants, and if the right can offer these to white Christian America then the right will win their hearts. Policy white papers are not my specialty, but at a later date (to be determined) I will be releasing a series of policy proposals in a prominent newspaper that will, God willing, provide the right something to offer materially. Until then, think to yourself what would improve people’s lives materially. Got it? Will it make people more or less dependent on the government? If the former, how could you get the same program but fall into the later? Finally, what kind of life would that benefit support? Is that the kind of life that should be supported? If not, what kind of life is good to live and how can that life be supported in you benefits proposal?
For a sense of meaning, the right can offer the following: you do not have to be ashamed to be American, you can, and should, be proud. Our forefathers came from England and Europe, bringing with them the legacies of Greece, Rome, Charlemagne’s Gaul, the Holy Roman Empire, the British Empire, and all of the intellectual and cultural achievements that came along with them. Each state in the union has its own unique character that is a mixture of its European heritage and the cultural climate of the new world. American identity is not some abstract “white identity”, an identity that is too broad to have a positive meaning2, and attempts by the right to form a collective white identity have failed. American identity is a very particular thing, and is a mixture of the old and new world. I would imagine that fostering a healthy, non-self-hating, American identity would take place at the state level to give proper attention to the differing regional cultures, but this is just a hunch.
To be American is to be part of a story and it is a story to be proud of. Offering the American narrative is one sense of meaning the right can offer. Everyone wants something to be proud of and a place to belong. We, the American right, can offer that.
I do not know what is the best thing for the right to offer, so I will be spitballing over the next little while, but I do know that until we stop trying to convince the masses that [insert your favorite intellectual] was right and start offering a) material benefits and b) a sense of meaning, the right will never take power in this land. We can talk about Evola, Hegel, Burke, or whoever else we want in our spare time, as I often do, but we cannot mistake this for anything else other than self-enrichment or pleasure reading.
Ignoring the percent of GDP that that the US Government already spends, and not asking if said spending does not already constitute socialism.
Opposed to the negative white identity, defined by what it is not (not black, not yellow, not Jewish, etc.)